by Gerry Zeitlin
from
OpenSETI Website
Spanish version
Soul Technology. Now there is a provocative juxtaposition
of terms. The reader (that is, you) likely wants to know WHAT
these two words are doing together like that, sharing the same
period.
Before attempting to reply, I would like to place before you an
article by Paul Davies (2003):
ET and God
- Could earthly religions survive the discovery of life elsewhere in
the universe?.
Get it? God: Soul.
E.T.: Technology.
Davies’ topic is grander than mine, which by
comparison is a mere detail.
But Davies’ is somehow more
acceptable, isn’t it? Why is this?
We will approach our subject on the level of myth, and that our
modern world view is but one possible myth. People, I said...
...do not know that they have simply
chosen their myth. They believe that they possess knowledge of
their general cosmic situation, so far as is possible for anyone
to obtain such knowledge, and that there is little point
attempting to learn any more about it.
People are also being
taught, usually subliminally, about what is important and what
is not. In fact, people’s beliefs about what is true and what is
important are fed to them by society’s institutions. Thus people
in their beliefs are vulnerable to manipulation at every
level.
Society’s Common Approved Myth
(The SCAM *)
holds that there is, hypothetically, E.T., and that technology may
be the means of contacting E.T.
*
The SCAM: Society’s Common Approved Myth.
Its scope is cosmic. Its level of detail? An exercise for the
reader. But it is not necessarily a judgment of "everything you
know". Note the qualifiers: common and approved.
To grasp The SCAM, one cultivates an attitude of skepticism.
This is not a reference to the several "skeptics" organizations,
which actually function as thought police, seeking to correct
deviations from The SCAM.
Meanwhile, for those who subscribe
to this section of The SCAM, there is "God" from whom
flows
the Bible and all Good
Things, and as a matter of fact, everything, including,
inscrutably, bad things, and E.T. too. God, also inscrutably,
chooses not to communicate via radio waves, although there may be an
issue over Light.
And that is His prerogative, being Creator, so
there’s no point questioning it.
It’s a pretty pickle. It’s totally outside the domain of Science,
but since He created science, and us, who are we to question
it? Although unscientific, it just IS.
He also neglected to mention much of anything about E.T. in His
Bible. You’d think he might have, if He had created any E.T.
But He didn’t. Is He telling us not to Go There?
Although science does not venture to discuss the existence of God,
its creator, it nevertheless is acceptable to explore the
relationship of E.T. and religion, which is about God,
obviously, since Paul Davies does it and gets away with
publishing his musings in
The Atlantic Monthly. Davies
notes that hypothetical E.T. coexists fairly well with God
and his religions, but E.T. in the flesh, or whatever E.T.
has, could pose a problem.
Therefore he spends a good part of his
article on the subject of astrobiology, which after all has a
bearing on the likelihood that E.T. in the flesh will someday
have to be faced.
That is the scientific side of the problem. Davies devotes
the next part of his article to reviewing the familiar old
theological issues: relative status of E.T. and man, multiple
incarnations of Jesus Christ, could an alien be a Jew or a
Muslim. These are the really important things to worry about if you
subscribe to religion.
And in this context he brings in the SETI
Institute’s Jill Tarter with a truly heroic statement:
"God is our own invention.
If we’re going to survive or turn into a long-lived
technological civilization, organized religion needs to be
outgrown."
That is a very brave thing for anyone to
say in today’s world, and besides, it’s true.*
*
Davies was quoting from Tarter’s
article
SETI and the Religions of Extraterrestrials, (2000),
in which she applies the SETI scientific method to the
subject of extraterrestrial religions. That is, she uses the
Drake Equation, just this one time ("which in fact I hardly
ever use"), along with her observations of Earth’s
religions, to reach the following speculations:
"If and when
we ever get a message, it’s going to be a missionary appeal
to try to convert us all. And, on the other hand, if we get
a message and it’s secular in nature, I think that says that
they have no organized religion—that they’ve outgrown it."
Unfortunately Davies finds it to
be naive.
As he says, some sort of spirituality seems to be part of
human nature, and Einstein had a "cosmic religious feeling" when
contemplating the awesome majesty of the universe. Excuse me, but
Tarter was speaking of God and organized religion.
This, apparently, is spirituality for Davies.
The remainder of Davies’ article is concerned with the interface of
science and religion - that is, evolution and
Darwinism and that
sort of thing.
But we will leave Davies and his article at
this point, because this page has other business to attend to, such
as WHAT is "soul technology". Before leaving, we will just
mention that the reason for bringing all this up about E.T. and
God is to make the point that if it is acceptable to talk about
God and SETI in the same breath, it should also be ok to
discuss souls and technology.
But where do we begin, to say nothing of why should we bother?
We should bother because there are myths that raise the issue, and
Open SETI tries not to rank myths. Although they haven’t made
it into The SCAM, there are, for example, the
psychopomps: spirits, gods,
demons, or angels whose function is to escort newly-deceased souls
to the afterlife. Please do check out that hyperlink, as you will be
amazed to see how many mythologies had these.
So Open SETI is now inquiring into the afterlife. Very bizarre... or
is it?
No less than
Carl Sagan (1997) suggested the same,
when his character Ellie Arroway, the leading SETI scientist
pursuing a provocative signal, encountered her own deceased father.
1) The souls
In a sense this needs no
explanation. Souls are a feature of the religious part
of The SCAM.
They exist in one form or another in almost all
mythologies, though not in our science myth. Invariant in all of
the descriptions is the soul as a consciousness principle,
separate from the body but inhabiting the body during life. In
many belief systems, the soul can detach during the lifetime and
travel. This occurs in our own culture and is called an
out
of body experience.
Shamans can interact with
souls, while themselves traveling in their soul body.
Since there are numerous instances
of experience of souls, it is useful to consider them to be in
some way "real". Furthermore, if there is any reality whatsoever
to the soul, it could well be very real in E.T. cultures. SETI
ignores this crucial possibility.
2) The psychopomps
These are beings that exist in the
same "reality space" as souls do, and exert control over the
souls.
They also are encountered in our culture, often taking
the form of "gray aliens". When encountered physically,
they have a way to control the behavior and experience of
the human. They also have the ability to take the human out of
body.
In other words, to conduct the human somewhere, as a
soul.
3) The technology
Artifacts are reported.
Psychopomps in all cultures are said to carry wand-like
devices which, when held against a subject’s forehead,
induce a paralysis of the body and a separation of the soul from
it.
However, aside from the specific instance of the
wand-like artifact, the general ability to separate,
guide, and to reconnect souls to the
previous body, or connect them to different bodies, is a
technology possessed by psychopomps and whatever
larger group they represent.
War in Heaven and The
Theocrats
Having introduced the major entities: souls, those who
manipulate them, and the technology for doing so, we need
to develop these concepts much further.
This is as good a place as
any to refer to the groundbreaking visionary work of Kyle
Griffith, found in his book
War in Heaven (1988).
As a physical framework, Griffith speaks of "astral matter"
that has an atomic and subatomic particle structure resembling that
of physical matter, but possessing much less mass than the physical
counterpart. Although the mass ratios among the various astral
subatomic particles is the same as that of the physical ones, all
have much less absolute mass than physical electrons.
Astral subatomic particles have gravitational properties that
resemble but do not interact with the gravitation of physical
particles. Likewise there is astral energy that does not interact
with physical systems.
There is however one very important exception to this general
lack of interaction, and this actually is the basis of "the
secret of life":
Astral matter forms complex organic
molecules just as physical matter does, and their respective
chemical bonds have similar energy levels and photon frequencies
associated with them.
This allows for resonance and chemical bonding
between physical and astral matter. It is the combined molecular
system that exhibits the basic characteristics of "life", such as
irritability and the ability to reproduce.
This is how astral matter and the soul, which is
constructed of astral matter, become involved in the
reduplication of DNA and many aspects of cell metabolism.
The bonding provides a pathway by which some of the cell’s metabolic
energy can be converted into astral energy that feeds the soul,
powering its various functions, and providing for regeneration of
its astral matter, which is then used to perform cellular growth and
repairs.
Death is caused by breaking the bonds between physical and
astral matter.
The soul spoken of here is a primitive analog of the physical body.
It is alive, but it is not sentient. It has a nervous system but not
a mind. Griffith calls this the somatic soul. The "true"
soul is the astral soul.
The astral soul is a body of astral matter linked to the
somatic soul’s nervous system by the famous silver cord. This
is structured like a segment of plant root with feeder roots at both
ends, tapping into the two souls’ nervous systems.
Energy flowing from the body into the somatic soul and
through the silver cord to the astral soul is the astral
soul’s only truly efficient source of nourishment.
When the body dies, the somatic soul decomposes. The
astral soul does not, but it loses its best source of energy.
A new somatic soul is created during the embryological development
of every new human being.
Griffith provides a complicated discussion of various
methods of reincarnation, involving ways in which the astral
soul connects, and interactions with the mother’s astral soul.
Although quite interesting, this is beyond the scope of our page.
What is important for us here is this: the astral soul (or
spirit) normally receives its energy from the living physical
body and must reincarnate within ten to fifty years in order
to revitalize itself. If it does not accomplish this, it faces
illness, insanity, and death.
However there are many drawbacks to reincarnation also:
-
the
chance of encountering hidden body flaws
-
poor earthly environments
-
birth traumas, and so forth...
Some spirits are unwilling to take these chances. They take a
different, evil, and immoral path to replenishing themselves:
cannibalism.
They are able to use telepathic powers to
"hypnotize" spirits who then allow them to attach their own silver
cord to them, just as though they were the somatic soul of an
infant. By this means they can draw out enough energy to sustain
themselves, but the process destroys the other spirit.
In
War in Heaven, the spirits that do this are termed
Theocrats, probably because for long millennia the vehicle they
have used to capture and destroy weaker spirits has been
religion.
The Theocrats obtain victims by posing as gods and
persuading religious believers to come to them voluntarily after
death thinking they are entering "eternal bliss in Heaven."
Readers who are wondering what this interesting discussion has to do
with SETI, need only recall the opening paragraphs of this
page. It is the SETI community itself that recognizes a need to
confront concepts of "God" in their line of work. Indeed
there is a need and we intend to help them to meet it.
We have reached the end of the page but the beginning of a vast
topic.
You can continue now with
Gnosticism, Archons/Greys - The
Controller Agenda...
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