A wonderful winter moment... :-)

Spent the evening trying to change a tire on the shoulder of a side street just off of Hwy 252. Not the way I had envisioned spending the evening. it's amazing how everything has a tendency go wrong in the worst possible way when it's ten below.

Really late, I was driving home from work - well after dark. The temp was a cool and refreshing 10 below, I think. I had just been feeling really good about having gotten a problem fixed with my storefront - so that now hypnosis-storefront.com was working again - (but that's another story). And that's when i heard my left front tire go bang - followed by thump thump thump.....

I limped off the freeway and onto a sidestreet, then onto a side-sidestreet. I found a roadside, just off the Main Street (80th Ave, off of Humboldt Ave N) that looked out of the way enough. Turned out that just about everybody else had the same idea. I think I had about ten cars behind me as I slowed down and looked for a spot to pull to the side.

I pulled off in front of a house there and was about to get out of the car. It turned out that the place I had pulled off was actually pretty heavily travelled. And that was going around a curve so I was quite a bit less visible than I had hoped. I wasn't going to find anything better so I just hoped I wouldn't get hit as I got out to change my tire. Lots of blue language could be heard as I got my fill of dark and 10 below. It's amazing how these things never seem to happen in the warm and the light.

I got the crap out of the back end of my wagon - all that stuff that had seemed so useful at some time in the past - and excavated the spare tire, jack, etc. I started winching away and felt the front lift up just fine. It quickly got to where I could start to remove the wheel. And that was when I discovered that my lug nuts wouldn't budge. 

I found the lug nuts solidly frozen in place. They weren't going to move, not with the tire wrench I had, no way jose. 

I didn't want to screw around with this so as soon as I realized that this wasn't going to be a simple tire change (are things like that ever simple?), I got on the phone with AAA emergency. After about twenty minutes of listening to beautiful music (in the ten below), the operator/dispatcher came on. I told her my situation and she said a truck would be there - sometime in the next two hours. 

Since my car was up on my jack, it wasn't a good idea for me to get back into it - so I was starting to get reeeeealy cold. 

Then I called Gwyn. At that time I was shivering and beginning to feel really chilled. Just as I was doing that, another person pulled over to help, an electrical contractor, probably on his way home from a job. He asked if he could help and I said that if I could just get in and warm up for a few moments I'd be OK.

A short time later, Gwyn got there with a better flashlight and a cup of warm soup (bless her heart). It looked like I'd be OK, so she went back home and the guy in the electrical truck headed on his way - with many thanks from me. My car was running just fine. So once i got the car back down off the tire jack, I just sat in there and waited for help to show up. 

AAA was actually there pretty quickly. The guy managed to get the lug nuts off and the tire changed in only a couple of minutes - what would have taken me over an hour in the 10 below. I'm amazed as how someone who knows what the hell they're doing, and has tools with the horsepower to do it, can get something like that done in moments. Me, it would have taken - well, I don't want to think about it... :-)

The spare was one of those "balloons" that is only good for about 50 miles or so - at 50 or less miles per hour. And at that, the spare tire looked low. So I drove a few blocks (on the freeway at about 50 MPH with my flashers going) to the Holiday station on 85th and 252. 

Guess what. Their air pump wasn't working. 

I asked the guy there if there was another gas station around. He said he had no idea. He lived in south Minneapolis.
Great...

He thought there was one several miles away on Humboldt (the one a couple of blocks from my house, it turns out). So I just limped home with a low spare and my real tire blown out - or something like that.

So tomorrow morning, instead of going to work, it will be time to go get a tire fixed or replaced. More fun in the twenty below - more wonderful winter moments.

The Hypnotic Horizon

Draft of the second article in my series on creating a new reality using the New Horizon process. I'm always interested in what people think. Feel free to comment...

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"If you build it they will come"
"We create our own reality"
"Intention brings action"
We've heard these and many similar sayings lots of times before. They are the core of many new-age workshops, self-help books and self-improvement programs. Sometimes the process works, but more often it doesn't. And when it doesn't we ask why? Why did the Universe fail us?

Do dreams fulfill themselves, as some gurus say, or do we need to actually need to take logical, concrete steps to turn those dreams into a new reality? The big debate rages - if you want it, will it just happen? If you put that intention out to the Universe, announcing that you intend to have a new Porsche in your driveway, will it somehow manifest there, especially if you use deep meditation, the right psychic powers, etc? Or do you need to do tangible things to bring that new sports car into existence?

To some extent, we do indeed create our own reality. The book "The Secret" develops these ideas in detail. Yet the idea also has come under tremendous criticism.  In my observations from working with clients, I have found that dreams really do come true, but they take one hell of a lot of work to do so. I think we've all done something like this, to some degree - anyone reading this article has probably at least thought about it. How can we create a world, make it feel real, and observe the details of it as if it were today's reality?

A diffuse, nebulous dream is almost as bad as no dream at all. To achieve your dream, you need to define what that dream is, envision it and then commit to it. Is your entire being aligned with that dream, or are you divided in some way, part of you wanting it, and part of you wanting a different (perhaps opposing) result? If you are fully aligned with that dream, then how are you going to make it come true? Are there obstacles in the way - sometimes very large obstacles, even seeming impossibilities?

In an earlier article, Journey to the Horizon, we explored a way to create a future reality and then map out a roadmap to that reality. We imagined that the reality was far away (the farther the better), conceptually beyond the horizon. Then we explored ways to characterize that reality - what makes that new world tick, what makes it real? We also looked at the "impossibilities" of that world, what makes that world out of reach at the moment. We suggested that these impossibilities were really just paths, problem statements that defined the path(s) we had to travel. We then identified the steps along that path, focusing on the first one with the intention to follow up regularly to track the effort.

In laying out this idea, I used the methodology known as the Horizon Mission Methodology or more currently called the New Horizon process, developed by NASA in the mid 1990s.
The methodology identifies five steps:

1) dream the future world - creatively identify the new world over the horizon and begin to think of it as a reality.

2) Imagine being in that reality and describe the future reality in more detail

3) Identify the salient elements of that future reality, what makes it superior and what made it seem impossible in the "present" time. These impossibilities become paths from the present to the future.

4) Determine what the paths are in greater detail. What steps need to happen to travel that path from the present-day world to the new-horizon world?

5) Identify the first step along that path. What will you do to start and how will you do it. How will you know you have completed it?

This methodology is a wonderfully structured way of developing advanced technology, road maps to fundamental change in business, and other far reaching changes in life. So how could we make this work in the daily world of the hypnotherapy client, the person wanting to heal an issue, to change their life and improve their personal wellness?

Returning to that "create your own reality" theme with which we began, doesn't each of us have a dream? Each of us wants something, maybe big, maybe small. For each of us, there is something over the horizon, and if/when you have that potential future, you have the opportunity to create a new horizon world. So how do we begin?

In hypnotherapy, I invite the client to relive times when things went well, when they were confident and when they felt strong and in control of life. I then invite them to imagine a time beyond the present - maybe a few months or a year out, when they have achieved at least some of their goal. This sets a future reality which they can then work to manifest. Thus, the ability to build future worlds is already well defined. Once the vision is in your subconscious mind, it will drive your actions toward making that vision a reality.

When doing more advanced hypnosis work for spiritual development, I often extend this concept with guided visualization, past-life, inter-life or future-life work. I often begin in the same way, but this time, we go much farther out - reaching into the far future, perhaps even into another lifetime. We again build, experience and make that world a reality. Thus, we already understand how to build future worlds, including those far beyond what we experience today.

This brings us the tools for step 1 - going into the future horizon world.
In hypnosis, we can easily do creative visualization, future progression, and so forth. So after going into hypnotic trance, we can begin our hypnotic progression - imagine we are going into the future. We can envision this desired world in increasing detail.

What is life like in that future time? How does it feel to live in this world beyond the horizon? Like any hypnotic regression or progression, we can develop the scenario - are you inside or outside? Is it light or dark? Are you working or resting? What do you observe as you first become aware of this new place and time?

Developing the world further, in the same manner as if we were doing a karmic or past-life regression, we can further experience this horizon world. We can establish the emotions, the feelings, the spiritual truths in this new reality. What are the themes of events, the currents of meaning in this world. What is it about this new world that brought you here? What is going on here? What are you doing? What are your relationships? and so on...

Now we are ready for step 2 - developing the future world in more detail. [Bear in mind that these steps don't have to be entirely in sequence. We can always go back to earlier steps in the process, filling in or altering details as needed.]

Now, while in deep trance, let's look more closely at some of the scenarios in this horizon world. What are you doing at work? What are your surroundings? Who is with you, or are you alone? How are you interacting with other people in this world? What are events in this time and place and how are you interacting with them? What is good about this scenario and what are you seeking to improve?

Moving through a few scenarios, we can understand more and more about the details of this future world. What makes it tick and how do you fit into it? And ultimately, what is it about this world that is so important that you are creating it as a new reality?

In step 3, we look at the details of this world, the important elements.
In deep trance once more (maybe the same session, or maybe a different set of trance-work), allow yourself to see and experience the changes. What are some of the impossibilities you saw earlier? Looking back on the path, see how you got into your future world. What were the steps you needed to take? What did you do to overcome obstacles. Looking back toward the present as if you were looking at history, imagine you have solved those problems.

Steps 4 and 5 are much more logical, much more at the cognitive level. Here you can imagine the path in greater detail, observing it and identifying the steps you took to follow it. While still in trance, perhaps you can imagine yourself walking backwards along that path, observing each obstacle from the future of it having been surmounted already. Looks a lot easier from that side, doesn't it?

As you move back toward the present, observe the obstacles, the steps needed, until you get back to the present day. Now you are back in the present, perhaps seeing the work to be done in a creative new way.

At this point, our trance-work may be done. From this point on, we begin planning, a much more left-brained activity. Yet even the concrete, left-brained activity can be done with a new creative insight. What can you imagine having done? repeating that future vision, what did you do first? second? and so on.

For each step, imagining it is now done, how did you know?  And how did accomplishing these steps make you feel? Perhaps you can see yourself achieving the result. How will you know when you have completed it? Perhaps by seeing it from this new perspective, you can undertake the step(s) with ever increasing confidence.

So after our hypnosis work, I wonder - what is the first thing you will do? Will you make a change? Begin a new project? Finish a project? Take that next step along the path to the future? And how will you stay on track? How will you keep yourself on that track to your horizon world? Perhaps this is the time for a success coach or other mentor, partner or companion to be of help. As time progresses, you will want to revisit these steps, redoing the trance-work and refreshing your vision - keeping your eyes on the prize.

Eventually, you may find that one by one, the "impossibilities" begin to fall away. Maybe the horizon world is a now at hand, or maybe it is just a little bit closer. Either way, you can find yourself making progress - step by step along the path to the hypnotic horizon.

Journey to the Horizon

This is a draft of my article on the New Horizon methodology of turning "constructive daydreaming" into a new reality. I am playing with this and at some point I'd like to put together a workshop on it. Let's see how many of us can actually create their new reality beyond the horizon.

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Journey to the Horizon

A new look at an old idea about an entirely new world.

©2014 by Craig R. Lang, MS CHt

Late in the evening, at the end of a long day, I often curl up on the couch of my rec room, a cup of herbal tea in one hand and the TV remote in the other. The TV in the rec room usually toggles between the Science channel and the History channel, and on this evening, the Science channel won. The show playing was "We Are Not Alone", a documentary on extraterrestrial life, the planet hunters and other areas at the leading edge of astrobiology.

Then, during commercials, I toggled back to the History channel, which was showing the latest episode of Ancient Aliens. Each show tickled my imagination in its own, very different way. But over the course of that hour, I realized that what each had in common was that feeling of reaching beyond - somehow peering over the horizon into that world beyond what we can physically experience at this instant.

Each day, we are surrounded by the daily challenges of life. For some of us, there are tremendous rewards and life is good. For others of us the desire to change is powerful. Somehow the fit between self and life isn't quite there. Whether or not you are comfortable with where you are now, most of us have a dream of some sort. Maybe it's a small change - buying that cabin up north, taking a Caribbean cruise, or whatever your goal might be. But what if you could look even beyond that?

What if you could dream the impossible dream? If you could completely remake your life, your work, your home, how you play and who you are with, what would you do? What if you could reach beyond the horizon to a world beyond what you know today? Would you want to?

If not, great. This article is not for you. But if you do, I would like to introduce you to a new approach, something to guide you toward your dream, one step at a time.

This new approach is really nothing new at all. It is based upon a process described nearly twenty years ago, called the New Horizon Methodology. It was developed in the mid 1990s at NASA (called the Horizon Mission Methodology or HMM) as a technique to explore and develop new ideas for traveling to the stars (predictably, that has great appeal to someone like me), and other leaps forward in space travel and technology. Subsequently, the HMM was adapted to business, career and life planning, and relabeled the New Horizon process.

For me, the idea of reaching beyond the horizon always has tremendous appeal, and so I decided to explore this process further. Envisioning a world of the future, it is easily followed to develop that vision in detail, and then to envision ways to reach it from the present day. Yet that last step is the challenge - and this is where HMM most excels.

The New Horizon process is nicely described in the seminal 1998 paper by John L. Anderson of NASA, entitled "On Creating New Horizons." This describes multiple steps to reach beyond the world of today and envision the world of tomorrow - and how to make that world happen.

Einstein is quoted as saying "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." To go beyond what is possible today, we need to transcend the ways of today. We need to move beyond today's ways of thinking, to change paradigms - our implicit models and assumptions about the world that provide the lens through which we interpret reality. So the first step in the New Horizon process is exactly that - we move beyond the known. Allowing our minds to move beyond what we know today, we take a mental journey beyond the horizon.

Forgetting any limiting factors, beliefs or fears, let your imagination roam. What would your life be like if you could fully achieve your dream? Moving beyond what seems possible today, what would that desired world be like? What would you want to see, feel, experience in this world beyond the horizon? Allow your mind to wander and let that "impossible" world form within your mind, as we begin the first step of the process

Step 1) Envision your mind-blowing future

Allow your mind to wander to that time beyond your present horizon. Imagine that you have achieved that impossible dream. Let this world be something that is beyond your present paradigm. Include in it some of the "impossibilities" that confront you today. Imagine you have fully transformed to a world where these are possible and have indeed been done. Let your thinking shift to that new way, that new paradigm beyond the horizon.

Let your horizon vision form in your mind. Focus on your emotions, intuition, spirit. What is your dream? What is your passion, your purpose? What are you doing? Where are you doing it? What is motivating you to do what you are doing? What emotions arise within you as you move through time within this new world? Finally, what aspects of this new horizon world are so appealing that you came to this place/time?

Let this vision gel in your mind until you can almost feel it, letting it become a momentary "reality" for you. When you can feel this future reality, however "Impossible" it might be, you are ready for step two.

Step 2) Define the horizon vision in detail

Here we move from the emotional/spiritual and conceptual level to one of more definition. Looking at life in your new horizon world, allow the vision to resolve into more detail – building that future reality. What makes your new world tick? What do you do for work, for play? Where do you live?

Imagine yourself at a few places/times within your new world. Where do you work, live, play? Are you indoors or outdoors? Is your work or play physical, mental, emotional, spiritual or a combination of these? Do you travel or remain in one place? What do you work with? What is your work or play-place like?

Perhaps you can also imagine who you might share this world with. What are your relationships here/now in this new world? Who do you work with, play with, live with? How does your work, play, home and/or family time inter-relate?

Finally, let's imagine the degree of abundance and/or resources in your new world. What does your life look like financially and how does your work and/or play relate to this? Are you comfortable with life or are you seeking something? What about this horizon world makes it ideal for you?

When you have developed your vision in detail, sensing, feeling and understanding more about the details, then you are ready for the next step.

 

Step 3) Elements of the Horizon

In this third step, we examine the horizon world in increasing detail. We look at the most extraordinary elements, the "impossibilities" of this new world and identify what they are. What elements are the most novel and breakthrough? What do you do now that you didn’t do before? What about them seemed impossible and what made them seem impossible?

Note whatever is important about these challenges. These "impossibilities" are the fundamental changes, the paths that lead from the old "present day" world, to the new horizon world. When you have identified these, you are ready for step four.

Step 4) Path(s) to the horizon

In step four, we look back along the path(s) that carried us from the old present-day world into the new world of the horizon. Looking back from your horizon world, observe the most important paths that brought you to your horizon world. What were the changes that you made along the path? How were they impossible and what did you do to turn those impossibilities into possibilities, then into accomplishments. Which paths were the most important?

On each path, what obstacles did you need to overcome? What impossibilities did you need to turn into possibilities? What changes did you need to make to yourself, your life? What new capabilities, skills or lessons did you need to acquire? What tools/materials/resources did you need to acquire? What aspects of your old life did you need to leave behind?

When you have found some of these, you can ask what steps you took along the path(s) to get to your new world? This leads us to the fifth and final step of the process, identifying the steps along the path and how to achieve them.

Step 5) First steps on the path

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" and so it is on the way to our new horizon world. So in the final step, we return to the present and look at the paths we have identified in the previous step.

Which of these paths is the most important? How does the path begin? What do you need to do to begin that first step? What do you need to learn, understand, research, discover about the step(s) you have identified? What changes do you need to make? What accomplishments do you need to achieve? What can and/or will you do today to begin the process?

From the final step, you will want to determine objectives and action items to begin the process. What is the next thing you will do? What will be the expected result? How long will it take? And finally, how will you know when you are done?

Now that you have identified some concrete first steps you can do to travel down that path to your horizon world, you need to keep yourself on that path.

Follow-up Steps)

Another quote, this one from the great American philosopher Yogi Berra says that "if you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else." These words of wisdom warn us – once we have the road in sight, we need to stay on track.

To keep yourself on task, it is best to have another person, perhaps a partner, coach, teacher, mentor, etc. Working with that other person, set a time to review your progress. What are the results? Have you achieved what you planned to achieve? What needs to change about your objective? What additional resources are needed? What is the next objective? Does the objective match with the overall path? Is the overall path still the same, or does it need to change?

Don't worry if you don't get one of the steps done completely before moving on to the next step. This entire process can be repeated and revisited at any time. However, it is best to keep some discipline behind it - it is easy to get stuck at a wayside along that path - or to get onto another path altogether that leads somewhere else. Over time, you can imagine your path moving beyond the known, toward the horizon and then, one day traveling beyond the edge, into your new world.

I invite you to try out this process, letting it guide you into the dream. And if you, like me, want to one day travel to the stars, well, we will have to take quite a few more steps on our Journey to the Horizon.

Back to the basics?

Sometimes when getting deep into the thick of things, you just need to stop, ask yourself where you are and where you're going. You need to step back, catch your breath and take stock of the situation. For me, the last few days have been like that. A rigorous schedule of clients, with some of their issues being rather challenging, sudden, unexpected death in the family, along with a few other bumps in the road of life - it feels like for the last month, the Universe  has piled it on.

In addition, I have been reading several books on ET contact, disclosure and other topics in the field of UFO studies, many of which have severely challenged my own discernment. In the process, I've heard stories of fantastic coverups and conspiracies and extensive plots by huge but shadowy organizations. Much of this material has been less than believable, to say the least and all of it h to raise a lot of very deep, existential questions in my mind.
 - What is really going on?
 - How much of this is real?
 - What do we actually know?

I think each of us has to ask ourselves these questions at some point in life. For me, they have been constant companions for many years. But they emerged full force into my mind last night as I was watching some new documentaries on the Science channel.

After a rather hectic week, with some rather unexpected travel - a funeral for my cousin, which was totally unexpected - I was catching my breath. I settled back with a cup of herbal tea and turned on the Science channel. The topic of the evening was one that was dear to my heart, the search for ET life and ET intelligence.

I'm a SETI junkie from day one. I was a little kid when Frank Drake and Carl Sagan began the effort with project Ozma, back in 1961. I came of age when the WOW signal occurred. Later, when business took me to Silicon Valley, a few years ago, I attended SETI Institute meetings there, as much as I possibly could, and they were fascinating. And now we have the planet hunters - this is the first hint that ET life could be real, and that science is finally recognizing it.

My saying this might sound really surprising, since I've been a UFO researcher for nearly 20 years. For most of that time, I've been researching close encounters, contacts and alien abductions. It's been a fascinating ride, and I'm forever awestruck by the deep level of mystery the phenomenon brings to us. But in a lot of the work I have done and in a number of ways, my own discernment has prevented me from accepting much of the phenomenon as a basic scientific reality.

While we have a deep, fundamental mystery in the UFO and CE4 phenomenon, I believe we really know very little about it. There are endless paradoxes, ambiguities and systems of belief inherent in the phenomenon. Yet solid understanding of who and what the visitors are, where they come from and why they are here, continues to elude us. Even evidence of their very existence remains tantalizingly elusive.

Then we have the wild allegations: Reptilian shape shifting aliens are secretly dominating world history. Human-like nearly-angelic beings from the Pleiades are here to bring us unconditional love. A massive government coverup is keeping the truth from us as a secret world cabal is spraying chemicals in our skies, for whatever reason. And the list goes on.

While I certainly can't tell you that any of these are false, I can also tell you that they are legion. They are amorphous and most of all, they are unprovable. Going too deep into them is like walking into a hall of mirrors, where the truth is hidden behind an endless maze of false doorways and reflections of one's own views. And sometimes we just have to step back and say ENOUGH!

Sometimes we need to go back to basics. Get rid of everything, wipe the slate clean and start from scratch with questions like:
 - What do we know?
 - What are some of the cases in our own case files that we know are true unknowns?
 - What are the most solid physical evidence cases we've investigated?
 - What are some clearly anomalous cases in the literature?
 - What tells us the phenomenon is truly unexplained?

In short, it means getting back to basics. It means re-examining my own original motivation -- the fascination with the unknown. And in our present day, one of the biggest unknowns is the sky. What's out there? When you look up at the stars, who might be looking back? And as I was watching the Science channel last night, that was what returned to me - the basics.

After returning to the solid foundation - this is what we know - we can begin to review a few more of the sighting and encounter investigations in our case files. Keeping the discernment filter in place, we can once again build the picture of what might have happened. Once again, we can start to wrap myself around some of the amazing events people have described. Once again, we can begin to travel the pathways of the unexplained.

As we look at possibilities of contact with whoever may be out there, we need to always keep the question in mind - what is real and what is wishful thinking? What is supported by evidence, what is anecdotal, sparse and circumstantial, and what has more solid data and physical evidence behind it? And sometimes, when the noise gets too loud, the theories get too many and the conspiracies get too rampant, we need to once again go TILT, and say ENOUGH. We need to wipe the slate clean once more and start over.

Some times we just need to reboot, and once again get back to basics.

A few more guns? How do we cope with superior alien technology?

In Richard Dolan's books and lectures [particularly his book, After Disclosure], I have heard him advance the idea of a separate civilization forming - one behind the curtain of secrecy. I find this idea fascinating, even if I tend to remain a bit discerning about any specific source or leak from behind the curtain of secrecy. Yet If any of these anonymous sources are to be believed, the implications are truly profound. They imply that we have far more advanced technology at humanity's disposal than most of us have even imagined.

While secrecy itself makes me angry, the prospect that we might actually have some of the elements of technology similar to that of the visitors actually brings me a form of optimism. It means we have an effort to achieve military and technological parity with the uninvited guests in our skies. Perhaps we may even be on the road to asserting human authority over Earth by developing capabilities equivalent to the visitors.

This road is a risky one to travel. If we are indeed embarking on such a road, then does it mean we're considering tweaking the nose of the big boys? If so, we need to be prepared for what the big boys do in response. It raises some intriguing possibilities - and a whole lot of concerns for the rest of we humans...

During high school and college history classes, I studied quite a bit the history of many civilizations on Earth who came in contact with western society. The Native Americans and the Chinese, to name a few, found themselves at a military disadvantage when facing a technological superior western military. The result - the European conquest of North America, the fall of the Aztec and Inca empires, and the disintegration of the Chinese empire.

Each indigenous civilization found themselves at a disadvantage. Yet a great debate among historians, and very likely within the civilizations themselves, was, what was that disadvantage? Was it purely military, or was it a weakness in the society itself?

In China, in the late 1800's and early 1900's, the debate raged. Some within the Chinese imperial government argued that by strengthening the army and navy, they could defeat the western imperialists. What was needed was a purely military solution - maybe some more advanced tactics, technology, etc. Perhaps all they needed were a few more guns.

Others, on the other hand, argued that at its core, they needed to fundamentally restructure society, itself. Perhaps weaknesses in the way the society was built made them vulnerable to the outside. If so, then perhaps it was a weakness that no amount of augmented military would overcome. Perhaps ineffective leadership and a collapsing infrastructure made military victory impossible. Far more than a few more guns, perhaps the entire society needed to be rebuilt.

The result was the rise of Sunyat Sen, formation of  Kuomintang, and the attempts to form a western government. At the same time, another western philosophy took hold, that of Marxism, Mao and the communist movement. Far from a few more guns, the ultimate result was indeed, a fundamental restructuring of society, for better or for worse. Now, once again, China is rising as a global power, eclipsing the USA in economic and military strength and playing our own game of geopolitical ambition.

In the Americas, military conquest also resulted in a near-total remake of many of the indigenous societies. In this case, destruction was nearly total and the remake was vast. Today, we see an indigenous movement rising, with a very different focus from the life originally envisioned.

Militarily, in the case of the Native Americans, unless they had united early in the history of European conquest, they could never have repelled the invasion. The fundamental political and social structure of tribal North America would never have permitted this unity. Conquest by a unified technological enemy was the result and a few more guns would hardly have helped. The same could be said for nearly any other indigenous society that came to grief at the hands of the west.

So, what does this imply for humanity's relationship with the visitors? Is our relationship to the visitors analogous to that of the indigenous societies worldwide in the face of western colonization? Is human sovereignty over Earth in peril? According to Marshall Vian Summers, this is exactly the case. Similarly, Dr. David Jacobs builds the case that the alien abduction phenomenon is dedicated to somehow replacing or assimilating humanity - a kind of stealth conquest.

On a more immediate level, any interaction between the military and the visitors has shown that in the event of hostilities, humans wouldn't stand a chance. The visitors have far superior technology to anything humanity has. The Air Force "dogfights" of the 1950s with UFOs, and similar accounts from the Soviet Union, show that UFOs can far outfly anything humanity can put in the sky. UFO incursions over military bases have demonstrated that the visitors can pretty much do as they please, with little challenge from us.

We are lucky that the visitors are not overtly hostile. If they do bear us ill intent, it must be in a much more subtle way. Still, it is the job of any nation's military to assert that nation's sovereignty over its territory. Similarly, at a global level, we can imagine aggregate human military(ies) tasked with doing the same thing - maintaining human sovereignty over Earth. In the face of superior visitor technology, this would seem a hopeless task. Thus I can imagine one approach would probably be to try and achieve some degree of technological parity with the visitors.

In one view, perhaps we can develop "a few more guns" to help us face the visitors.
An approach to retaining sovereignty over Earth might be to match - or even exceed - the military ability of the visitors. Thus, we can imagine an urgent effort to develop the technology needed to police our own planet. If we are to somehow face down our visitors from the stars we will need a tremendous leap forward. In a way, we can think of this as an extreme case of "a few more guns."

Yet humanity is hardly united. We are largely a feudal world, broken up into countless nation states with different (often opposing) agendas. We humans pledge ourselves to individual nations, rather than to the world of humanity. Thus, any national effort to develop advanced technology would be seen by potential opponents as threatening. Given the political state of the world in the 20th and 21st centuries, we can probably understand the need for secrecy.

In addition, if as Marshall Summers and David Jacobs claim, we are already deeply infiltrated, it would be even more necessary to maintain secrecy. The last ones we would want to know about our effort would be our potential opponents, the visitors.

Thus, behind the curtain, we can imagine a crash development effort going on, trying to develop (very) advanced flight, star travel, telepathic communication, inter-dimensional shift capabilities, non-local technologies, and the list goes on. If what many disclosure advocates claim is true, we may already be well on the way to achieving much of this capability. Yet it would be hidden behind a deep curtain of secrecy - a civilization behind the curtain.

In a scenario of world disunity, are we any different from the diverse and non-unified tribes of North America facing the European onslaught? Furthermore, our focus is largely technological, rather than spiritual. Our society is focused in a 3D, materialistic paradigm. While we are in this mindset, will we ever be able to understand what makes the visitors tick?

Will we ever be able to do what they do unless we begin to think the way they think?Would our society as it is structured now, ever be able to cope with full contact with the visitors? Or do we risk ending up the same way as indigenous cultures at the hands of European imperialists? Like the indigenous cultures, as time progresses, perhaps we need to fully restructure society. Perhaps we need to fully change the way we think, to fully reorganize the way our world is built.

I just finished reading the book "The Akashic Age" by Irwin Laszlo, which talks about this very phenomenon. It looks at the Occupy movement, the various grassroots movements within 21st Century society, etc. It looks at life as we move from 2012 into the world of 2030 and builds the case that we are undergoing that very change.

In The Cosmic Bridge, we also examine the idea of spiritual emergence. I build on the ideas of Barbara Marx Hubbard, that we are in the process of a breakthrough in human consciousness. In my article, The Indigo Hypothesis, I propose that as part of the close encounter phenomenon, the family lines of experiencers are somehow injected with characteristics conducive to further emergence.

Perhaps rather than coming as invaders, a visitor agenda might be to prevent the very thing we most worry about, the disintegration of the lower-technology civilization on contact with the higher technology one. Perhaps the visitors recognize the change we need to make. If they are indeed a more benevolent society, perhaps they - or some faction within their society - wish to bring the necessary changes within our world before full contact occurs.

Yet I suspect that in the human world, hidden behind a veil of secrecy, frenzied technological work goes on. And in a way, perhaps we need both spiritual development and technological development. Yet ultimately we can wonder, are the two compatible? Or are they based upon mutually exclusive philosophies?

Like the indigenous societies of the 18th and 19th centuries facing the Western juggernaut, perhaps we need to fully remake ourselves. Or instead, like some of the more conservative advocates in those societies maintained, perhaps we need a only to boost our military strength? Maybe all we need are "a few more guns."