As the Hindu guru Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj states in the spiritual classic I Am That:  “Get hold of the main thing:  That the world and the self are one and perfect.  Only your attitude is faulty and needs readjustment.”  A faulty attitude creates a faulty world – a world of insufficiency, in which human beings are reduced to the status of things.  It is a world of endless distractions, and “distractions from distraction,” where individuals feel like voids that need to be filled.  It is a world in which the present is devalued, and our hopes and dreams are projected on an empty future.

“(Martin) Heidegger notes that the origin of the word “technology” comes from the Greek word techne, and this word was applied not only to technology, but to art, and artistic technique as well.  'Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was also called techne.'  He found this to be a numinous correspondence, and considered that, in art, the 'saving power' capable of confronting the abyss of the technological enframing might be found.

If art contains a saving power, it is not in the atomized artworks produced by individual subjects, but in a deeper collective vision that sees the world as a work of art, one that is already, as (Sri) Nisargadatta (Maharaj) and (Terrence) McKenna suggest, perfect in its 'satisfying all-at-onceness'.'  Instead of envisioning an ultimately boring 'technological singularity,' we might be better served by considering an evolution of technique, of skillful means, aimed at this world, as it is now.  Technology might find its proper place in our lives if we experienced such a shift in perspective–in a society oriented around technique, we might find that we desired far less gadgetry.  We might start to prefer slowness to speed, subtlety and complexity to products aimed at standardized mind.  Rather than projecting the spiritual quest and the search for the good life onto futuristic A.I.s,  we could actually take the time to fulfill those goals, here and now, in the present company of our friends and lovers.

Part of the problem seems embedded in the basic concept of a concrescence or singularity, which compacts our possibilities rather than expands them.  The notion of a technological singularity reflects our culture's obsessive rationality, reducing qualitative aspects of being to quantifiable factors, and imposing abstract systems over complex variables.  Instead of a technological singularity, we might reorient our thinking toward a more desirable multiplicity of technique.  Technique is erotic in essence; it is what Glenn Gould or Thelonious Monk expresses through the piano–the interplay between learned skill and quantum improvisation that is the stuff of genius.  Technique embraces the now-ness of our living world; technology throws us into endless insatiation.”

“Yaweh is not split, but is an antimony – a totality of inner opposites – and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism,”  Jung realized.  Not only a benevolent helper, the god-image also represents the forces that oppose us, throwing obstacles in our path, surprising and humiliating us, inciting suffering to create intensified self-consciousness.  God, as a psychic fact, reveals himself in our neuroses, our allergies, our failed love affairs.  “God enters through the wound,” he wrote.

It is the difficult, but unavoidable, task of the modern individual to assimilate consciously all of the contents – from darkest degradation to profoundest purpose – contained in the psyche.

[Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas – shadow work]

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Prophecy might be based, not on haphazard fantasy, but on attunement to subtler levels of reality – on forms of awareness that the modern West forfeited, temporarily, in order to develop empirical and rationalist thought.  As Armin Geertz, an anthropologist of the Hopi culture, writes:  “Prophecy is not prediction, even though it purports to be.  Prophecy is a thread in the total fabric of meaning, in the total worldview.  In this way it can be seen as a way of life and being.”

"It is my thesis that the rapid development of technology and the destruction of the biosphere are material by-products of a psycho-spiritual process taking place on a planetary scale.  We have created this crisis to force our own accelerated transformation -- on an unconscious level, we have willed it into being.  Human consciousness, the sentient element of the Earth, is in the process of self-organizing to a more intensified state of being and knowing -- what the Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff called a "higher octave."  When the Hopi talk of a Fifth World, or the Aztecs anticipate a Sixth Sun, when St. John foresees the descent of the Heavenly City or New Jerusalem, they are describing the same thing:  a shift in the nature of consciousness."     

Writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, the German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin noted that modernity was causing an emptying-out of experience, as well as destroying the aura that had previously belonged to precious artworks and natural objects, giving them their unique presence.  “Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly.  More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed,” he wrote in his essay “The Storyteller.”  “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us:  the ability to exchange experiences.”

Modernity unleashed a succession of shock effects, changing the nature of perception, as well as the individual’s relationship to his own personal history.  “Experience has fallen in value.  And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.”  The old culture of contemplation gave way to the mass absorption in distractions.  The wise counsel embodied in the storyteller’s art was supplanted by the endless parade of statistics and information in the daily newspaper.  To enter the modern world, we forfeited our capacity for intimate exchanges requiring slowness and reciprocity and the play of the imagination.  “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return,” Benjamin wrote.  The value of perception and the meaning of personal history were degraded and denigrated to institute a mass society focused on abstractions, impelled by a “sense of the universal equality in all things.”

The visitors seem to be entities that sustain themselves from the negative emotions such as fear and anxiety, emanated by the human nervous system and energy body
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Chogyal Namkai Norbu writes in Dzogchen: The Self Perfected State:
Duality is the real root of our suffering and all our conflicts.  All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism.  When we discover our limitations we have to try and overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political, or social conviction may condition us.  We have to abandon such concepts as “enlightenment,” “the nature of the mind,” and so on, until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.
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Connected to our technological development, the Grays embody a malignant, supersensible element lurking beneath our fascination with mechanization, revealing the irrational basis of our constricted rationality.  They also have lessons to teach us.  As the critic Lewis Mumford noted, “Our capacity to go beyond the machine rests on our power to assimilate the machine.  Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm, we cannot go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly human.”  Like transhumanist zombies, the Grays embody the reductive perspective that sees everything – matter, genes, human souls – as resources to be used for purposes of control and domination.  In this way, the visitors serve as a warning, as well as an inoculation against a nightmarish fate we can recognize, and reject, in the time that remains to us.

Ian Stevenson … spent 40 years studying young children who spontaneously recall past lives, compiling data from over 2,600 case studies in his massive book, Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects.  He has found numerous incidences in which children recall specific details of their past life, and has documented, in some instances, startling physiological evidence – birthmarks and birth defects – that seem to carry over from their former existence.  In a number of cases, especially ones in which the past life ended in violent death, Stevenson has found, and photographed, highly unusual birthmarks on the children that perfectly match the placement of the mortal wounds that ended their remembered past life.
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The recollection usually commences at a very young age – between two and four – and ends within the next five years.  Stevenson has accompanied some of these children to meet the families, corroborating their specific memories.  “The birthmarks and birth defects in these cases do not lend themselves easily to explanations other than reincarnation,” he notes.  In the cases he has studied, the average period between death and rebirth is fifteen months.