'An Intelligence Outside Space-Time'
'An Intelligence Outside Space-Time'
D.W. Pasulka's new book floats the prospect of AI proving that consciousness lives beyond the brain.
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“The idea that consciousness exists out of the space-time reality is something that AI systems, together with simulations within quantum computers will soon present as another ‘revelation’ for human knowledge,” — Simone, speaking to D.W. Pasulka in Encounters: Explorations with UFOs, Dreams, Angels, AI, and Other Dimensions.
Resonant World#70
D.W. Pasulka is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she chairs the Department of Philosophy and Religion.
An authority on purgatory in Catholic devotional and popular culture, Pasulka published a 2019 book based on a six-year ethnographic study of scientists and tech entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence.
That book — American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion and Technology — marked a watershed in the field of ufology.
Visiting Silicon Valley, purported UFO crash sites in New Mexico, and the Vatican, Pasulka introduces the reader to professionals deeply immersed in the scientific, defence and intelligence communities who treat the “phenomenon” as a tangible reality.
Late last year, Pasulka published a follow-up volume: Encounters: Explorations with UFOs, Dreams, Angels, AI, and Other Dimensions.
I devoured both soon after they were published, and highly recommend them — not just to anyone with an interest in ufology, but to those of us engaged in deep study of the principles of healing individual, inter-generational and collective trauma.
That may seem like something of an inter-disciplinary stretch. But there’s several pieces here that I think are important.
Ontological Shock
As the work of the late pioneering Harvard psychiatrist Dr John Mack and others demonstrated in the 1990s, there are significant numbers of people who suffer trauma symptoms as a result of anomalous experiences — including encounters with perceived nonhuman intelligences.
In a field long steeped in ridicule, stereotypes and prejudice, “experiencers” draw solace from the fact that academic heavyweights such as Mack, Stanley Kripal, Jacques Vallée and latterly Pasulka take them seriously.
Because if you’re haunted by the ontological shock of encountering an object or being you can’t explain, it’s hard to know where to turn.
Very few therapists have developed the kind of specialist understanding required to support such experiencers. (Minnesota-based licensed family and marriage therapist Anne Tyler is among those taking the lead to try to address this gap via her Tyler Institute).
Even in spaces dedicated to healing collective trauma in all its many guises, the trauma experienced by people all over the world as a result of anomalous encounters is barely acknowledged, leave alone actively invited.
For that reason alone, writing about Pasulka’s work in the context of trauma healing feels like breaking a taboo.
(It should also be noted that 70 percent of more than 3,000 people who responded to a self-report survey conducted by the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences reported that their encounter had changed their life for the better. Some described remarkable awakening experiences).
Complete Model
The other significant piece is the new light work by Pasulka and others in her field may shed on the nature of consciousness itself.
Trauma can obviously have lasting impacts on our system. Healing work self-evidently rests on the assumption that these impacts can be at least partially resolved.
But to develop a complete model of how healing works, we need to understand the relationship between mind and brain — an understanding that the dominant materialist, reductionist scientific paradigm has so far been unable to provide.
For decades, neuroscientists have been trying to solve the “hard problem” of consciousness: How might the billions of neurons bundled up in our skulls generate the everyday experience of being conscious, self-aware agents we all share?
Their lack of progress has bolstered the argument that consciousness isn’t caused by the brain at all, but is rather a fundamental property of reality itself.
In this model, our brains act as receivers — tapping into nonlocal fields of consciousness in an analogous way to televisions tuning in to broadcasts.
In the intimate process of healing our trauma, how consciousness actually works may may seem like an academic distinction. (After all, I’m content to use my smartphone without any real understanding of the physics at play).
Nevertheless, for practitioners such as Lisa Schwarz, Richard Schwartz and Thomas Hübl, who are building bridges between psychology, neurobiology and mystical principles in their therapeutic work, the question is of fundamental significance. (Resonant World#26).
Higher Intelligence
It becomes much easier to propose models for how trauma may be passed down through generations, or live as a phenomenon in the collective psyche, if you start from the assumption that consciousness is an intrinsic feature of the fabric of reality.
Otherwise, we have to explain how these forms of shared trauma are transmitted between the bubbles of consciousness that materialist-reductionist science assumes must be generated by billions of individual brains.
And when trauma work gets weird — when we start to see or feel things that our ancestors experienced, for example — the theory that consciousness is a product of activity in our brain becomes even more tenuous. (Resonant World#23).
Likewise, I suspect that assuming consciousness is primary will make it much easier to explain the workings of the mysterious collective intelligence that we can palpably sense at work in large-group healing processes. The same logic would apply to understanding the basis for our capacity to invite a higher intelligence to intervene in our healing work, which feels subjectively very real. (Resonant World#63).
There’s a lot more that could be said about how Pasulka’s work might help inform an evolving model of collective and inter-generational healing, but for now I’ll offer only a taster: A sample of one of her interviews in Encounters — with a remarkable woman named Simone.
‘Moon Girl’
An investor in companies focused on AI, quantum computing, space and decentralised technologies, Simone had worked with the pioneers of the Internet in the 1990s, where everyone went by pseudonyms while using dial-up modems (her overwhelmingly male colleagues knew her as “Moon Girl.”)
Simone has since gone on to help commercialise technology developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and is now a faculty member of a US-based university specialising in AI.
Simone had reached out to Pasulka after reading about a scientist referred to as Tyler D. in American Cosmic. Tyler D.’s work as a mission controller and space and biomedical researcher had spanned the entire history of the space shuttle programme, and encompassed the current US Space Force.
“When I knew him, he had more than forty patents and technologies that he’d created through a process of memory retrieval, or what he dubbed ‘the download process,’” Pasulka writes in Encounters.
Simone had also used a similar “download” process since she was a child, allowing her to study matrix algebra, the mathematics that underpins AI, by the age of 12. Simone told Pasulka she believed the process is accessible to everyone.
“Consciousness is still thought by many to be in the brain or locally within the human body,” Simone told Pasulka. “The idea that consciousness exists out of the space-time reality is something that AI systems, together with simulations within quantum computers will soon present as another ‘revelation’ for human knowledge.”
Simone continued:
“We didn’t come here, on Earth in this existence, to just observe this space-time collective perceived reality. We came to create and expand intelligence. Human beings are biological vessels to hold and continue the spark of consciousness, a vessel to continue expansion.
“Consciousness and intelligence outside space-time (which some people call God) is closer to being digital and electrical than biological. It is the communication of this electrical field between these ‘spaces’ and particles that allows us access to this intelligence that is constantly seeking emergence and expansion.”
Suffice to say, I can’t help wishing that we could persuade Pasulka and Simone to appear at the Collective Trauma Summit 2024. I suspect they would give even convener Thomas Hübl a run for his metaphysical money.
I could write thousands more words on Pasulka’s amazing work, but I’ll rest it with an invitation to grab a copy of American Cosmic and Encounters if anything here has resonance, and to find out more on her website.
Further Resources
I first heard about D.W. Pasulka’s work on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland podcast, which I’ve been listening to religiously every weekend for about eight years.
My other go-to resource on this topic is Stuart Davis’ incredible podcast series Aliens & Artists.
In combination, I can think of no better introduction to this emerging frontier of human — and nonhuman — experience.
Resonant World is written in the gaps between my work editing investigations at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog. It’s a huge boost when people become paid subscribers, and support of any amount affirms that my mission to support the global community of practitioners engaged in integrating individual, inter-generational and collective trauma has value. Thank you!
thank as usual Matthew for a splendid piece. I wonder how the sentence "It becomes much easier to propose models for how trauma may be passed down through generations, or live as a phenomenon in the collective psyche, if you start from the assumption that consciousness is an intrinsic feature of the fabric of reality." might work with the notion that "the fabric of reality is an intrinsic feature of consciousness".
In saying so, I do acknowledge how such playfulness is attractive to me for its own sake! But, I felt that this was also closer to the feel of what I was understanding from the piece (my projection?). It also makes sense to me from the perspective that psychosphere not only sits alongside atmosphere, hydrosphere et al in shaping homeostasis and signalling the well-being of the whole to the parts but also sits within a much greater "intelligence" (not even sure if that is the correct word!).
Gaia Theory is complicated, especially where it comes to planetary sentience, since it tends (in my opinion - I have conversations with usual friends about this!!) to set up a sense wherein human sentience is somehow other than that of the planet. This way perpetuates the Modern curse of disconnection, and the one way elevator of transcendence somehow reaching towards a higher self, and the X-Files observation that "the truth is out there".... sure enough, and, equally, as without so within.... I suppose that reclaiming the sense of being usually associated with "indigeneity" is to approach belonging and purpose and possibility with new eyes. It is to unpick all that blocks us in the natural processes of reasserting Presence - and, as we know, that which blocks natural processes of wholeness - healing - is trauma. And trauma drains the experience of being alive.....
Joseph Needleman (in "An Unknown World: Notes on the Meaning of the Earth") writes: "please don’t say that we have understood the place of man—that man is nothing but the most recent happy accident of mechanical, chance, random mutations provoked by the handy gamma rays bumping into the wormy chromosomes that make us what we are. No normal man, woman or child can really take that seriously unless they have inhaled the drug of scientism. Face it: We do not know what or who we are. And, now, with Earth and nature at the brink, we can no longer live without understanding the Earth, and we cannot understand the Earth without understanding man, and we cannot understand man without understanding ourselves. At the same time, like all of life and like the planet Earth itself, we are also children of the Sun. Father Sun, Mother Earth. If the Earth is alive, then the Sun must also be, if anything, even more alive. We need to stop in ourselves. We need to ponder this notion that the Sun is also alive. It will lead us far beyond scientism and far beyond poeticism, fabulism, far beyond the madness of what we call objectivity and the madness of what we call imagination.”
wow, this is mind blowing. I've studied with Thomas Hubl for about 4 years now, but never connected the dots in this way. Thanks for the clarity that you write with.