It's one of those first nice days in spring, a Friday afternoon in mid March when it feels like the weight of winter is finally lifted from off our backs. The world feels like a freer place. It is a familiar feeling - call it spring fever. I needed to get out of the four walls, some place where I could sit back and relax, while at the same time concentrate on the studying, writing or other creative work I need to do.
I would sit down at one place, and then I would feel like no, I needed to move to someplace else. At the moment I'm at a Caribou looking for that ideal seat, someplace I can sit down and focus on the writing I need to get done.
What has this got to do with topics like UFOs and close encounters, exploration, science, anything beyond the horizon? Well, it turns out, probably plenty. Restlessness and creativity are what drives us. On days like today, I look up into the deep blue of the sky - cloudless, clear and infinite. I feel the feeling that got me going into this stuff in the first place - what's beyond that blue? And in my own mind, I try to imagine, to reach out to whatever that might be. What is beyond that horizon? What awaits us far beyond the edge of the known?
In this month's CE4 Corner, I ask a lot of questions about where the close encounter phenomenon is headed. In it, I describe reading a lot of material on the possibility of star travel. This includes a new book by Mark Millis and Eric Davis, "The Frontiers of Propulsion Science". It is a compilation of articles edited by two of the foremost thinkers in the quest for star travel. If you begin to read it, I hope you like math, because it has a lot of it. However, it dramatizes to me how we are probably pretty close to star travel now. The engineer in me reawakens at the thought of possibly building something this advanced. It is just beyond the edge of the possible and so, just maybe if we push the envelope a little more, we might just find ourselves on the path out to the cosmos.
At the same time, I just signed up for a class in something I've been interested in for a long time. Totally opposite of the mathematics and computer programming that have occupied much of my time and awareness, it is a workshop on shamanism. Specifically, the class is "Introduction to Shamanism". It seems totally opposite of the engineering I have been pursuing, yet it is motivated by the same thing - curiosity and restlessness.
I have read a lot of Graham Hancock's work, heard lectures by Scott Wolter and others who are working the edge of the known. Scott Wolter, the producer of the TV series "America Unearthed," has been exploring many aspects of the hidden history North America. Hancock has explored some of our possible shamanic prehistory. I have followed both with wonder.
Each one of them answers the same drive - to reach beyond the horizon, to explore the edge of the known, to see what is beyond the blue of the sky on a nice spring day.
