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July 26, 2024
He remembers Jacqueline’s teaching that the immense mantids can temporarily look through the eyes of the little mantis insects.
He knows, for example, that the word mantis is related to mantic, itself derived from the Greek mantikos, as “relating to divination,” as well as to mania, which comes from a Greek verb for “to be made mad.”
The mantis, it turns out, appears often in the history of religions, the history of art, and human culture more broadly. Indigenous folklore in the Americas and Africa is a particularly fruitful place to look.
the folklorist Ardy Sixkiller Clarke are about what Indigenous Peoples call the “star people,” which are described as “more like bugs than men” and as “big insects” with faces that are “half human, half insect,” and even as “mechanical bugs”
the present chapter).26 The praying mantis itself is a significant figure in southern African folklore, particularly within Namibian culture, where it functions as an omen or serves an oracular function and possesses a particular trickster nature.27 It also takes on the role of a benign god or deity associated with nourishment, ...
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known as the king of insects, is also central to the Chinese martial arts, or kung fu, which are derived from various imperial, military-monastic, Daoist, and Buddhist influences. Here, in this martial arts reference to the praying mantis, is what one insider ethnographer, Douglas Farrer, has called “the unleashing of hidden human potentials” and “the continual revelation of esoteric embodied knowledge through practice”—that is, anomalous forms of embodiment that continue to morph and evolve, that are never exhausted.
within a Chinese cosmology in which humans and animals move between levels of becoming and interchange their respective powers through the processes of reincarnation, and in which the vital force of the body is increased through cycles of extreme asceticism and mysticism,
Here, after all, we encounter the manifestation of “dark or hidden powers (um ging) of the body,” like the “death touch” (dim mak) of mantis practitioners, the telepathic ability to read the opponent, external force transmission, and the inexplicable ability to become very heavy.30 These are techniques du corps, technologies of the body, “inherent in our molecular animality but hidden by our molar [or molecular] human form.”
But it is probably the twentieth-century surrealist art movement that is the most immediate, and most significant, precedent for the mantis theme in the modern abduction experience. Ostensibly, this was because of the extraordinary interest the surrealist artists took in Freud and psychoanalysis and the unconscious relationships between eating, sexuality, and violence.
particular, the female mantis eating the head of the male after copulation was taken as a prime example of the vagina dentata, or the teethed vagina, that was said to be a common castration fantasy, or fear, of the human male within psychoanalytic circles at this time.
This entomological observation (female decapitation of the male after coitus), it turns out, was not unique to the mantis in the insect world, and it was also exaggerated, since the gruesome postcoital act is largely a function of captivity. But the associations between the insect, eroticism, and beheading nevertheless stuck. The anthropomorphic, or humanlike, form of the mantis also played a ma...
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Roger Caillois was one of the first commentators on the surrealist mantis in an important...
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André Breton and Paul Eluard were described as raising the insect. . . . Caillois’s discussion of contemporaries who were inspired as well as intrigued by the mantis climaxed with Salvador Dali.
Georges Bataille (Masson’s brother-in-law) in his highly influential Erotism: Death & Sensuality.34 Bataille’s argument is that the human is a “discontinuous” being and seeks a kind of mystical “continuity” with the cosmos in two ecstatic acts: death and orgasm.
Lennon states clearly that he was not dreaming), he had “this (egg-shaped) thing in my hands. They gave it to me.” Here is the fantastic in physical form: Coleridge’s dream-flower; Eliade’s materializing rose. Whatever it was, Lennon gave the object to Geller: “Keep it, it’s too weird for me. If it’s my ticket to another planet, I don’t want to go there.” Geller had the sense holding it that Lennon knew more than he was saying.38 Lennon was assassinated a few weeks later.
Stuart Davis, for example, reports that he has heard similar stories about “eggs” being presented to experiencers, often in childhood and without the slightest knowledge of the Lennon story. Indeed, after sharing his own story online, Davis “heard from Mantis entity experiencers who live all over the planet.”
I also wish everyone would read Kevin Booth’s chapter in Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution on the comedian’s psychedelic opening, which was actually a mushroomed ufological experience on a ranch near Fredericksburg, Texas (up in the Hill Country, not far from where I write these lines), on the Harmonic Convergence of 1987 no less. The planets had lined up, literally. So had the plants and the humans.
The UFO ship itself was shaped like a conch shell, with glowing beings inside.
Booth continues: “But the spaceship, that was the most important thing that ever happened to Bill. He saw the ‘source of light that exists in all of us.’”
but Bill wasn’t kidding when he talked about it from the stage. . . . Bill believed that he had direct communication with another intelligent life form that was trying to show him what the future could be like.”45 Note the theme of an evolutionary esotericism.
Here is the result of the Fredericksburg event, of what Hicks humorously describes as getting their third eye “squeegeed quite cleanly”: “I realized our true nature is spirit, not body, that we are eternal beings, and God’s love is unconditional. . . . In fact, the reality is we are one with God, and he loves us. Now if that isn’t a hazard to this country. . . . What’s gonna happen to the arms industry when we realize we’re all one?”
A friend of Booth and Hicks spoke of reading from the Bible and the Koran and brought along New Age crystals: “Oh my God. None of that matters. Let it go. Let it all go,” Hicks exclaimed.
We somehow need to move out of both reason and belief to orient ourselves here.
The last section opens with an obvious question: “Why would aliens appear in the context of ghosts and apparitions?” The couple offers an immediate and perfectly plausible answer: “Probably, because they are not aliens in the simple, conventional manner that is usually assumed. . . . Indeed, what if the visitors are the dead . . . disguised, perhaps, to avoid revealing their true identity to the living?”
I cannot also help but remember in this context one of my favorite lines from Whitley’s many books, this one about (or coming from) Anne, now deceased. Whitley describes Anne saying to him, “I’m not Anne anymore, I’m me. But I’ll always be Anne for you, Whitley.” In more metaphysical terms, she also told Whitley, “I am the part of me that’s part of you.”51 Whitley still wears their wedding ring.
Nicholas Collins points to one letter writer who describes the female mantis figure she saw as “wonderful,” leaving her feeling “so loved and cherished . . . that everything was harmonious and good.” This woman then relates the encounter to a more traditional Roman Catholic world, to “the Blessed Mother herself.”52 Believe it or not, this fusion of the extraterrestrial in and as the Marian apparition is not at all unusual.
Related to some Indigenous groups (this time in Latin America, mostly), the mantis and insectoid alien are perfectly obvious again in the contemporary psychedelic research and religious scenes, particularly around those altered states involving the intravenous injection or oral consumption of DMT (dimethyltryptamine), present in what is commonly known as ayahuasca in the Indigenous cultures of the Amazonian basin but also related to the psilocybin molecule, another tryptamine that occurs in magic mushrooms.
“DMT often induces experiences that belong to hard science fiction or space opera.”56 And, indeed, many such reports of DMT parallel strongly those of “alien abduction,” leading the researchers to suspect an endogenous release of the molecule in the brains and nervous systems of those in whom such encounters take place. Rick Strassman goes as far as to call DMT “the brain’s own psychedelic.”57 The molecule has been found in every mammal in which we have looked and in innumerable plant species. It is pretty much everywhere in the natural world and appears to play some central role not only in
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In a pattern that is familiar to the historian of comparative mystical literature, Rex made love to the insectoids as they ate him, with the thought that “they were manipulating [his] DNA, changing its structure.” Rex then found himself in “an infinite hive” where “there were insectlike intelligences everywhere, in a hypertechnological space. . . . It wasn’t at all humanoid. It wasn’t a bee, but it seemed like one. It was showing me around the hive. It was extremely friendly and I felt a warm, sensual energy radiating throughout the hive. It said to me that [that] this is where our future
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In short, specific molecules can turn the brain into a kind of door or receiver station.
According to the artist Amaringo Shuña, “They are not machines. . . . They are spirits, and come from other dimensions.”65 Hickman himself stresses the “psychic component of the evolutionary process,” as distinct from the physical or biological aspect, “which has gone quite far enough.”
I should finally add that “buzzing” and entomology have been associated with the flying saucer phenomenon at least since 1951 (there was no “UFO” yet). It was that year that Gerald Heard (an author who also wrote extensively of his own evolutionary esotericism and helped inspire the founding of the Esalen Institute) speculated that the crew of the flying saucers were not only highly evolved but also bee- or insect-like. Heard’s discussion of this insectoid theme is quite extensive, as is his use of the adjective “super” to capture something of what he is trying to say.68
I Know Why the Aliens Don’t Land. Why don’t they land? Because there are no aliens, not at least any that are ultimately different from us. “ALL is ALL,” as he puts it in so many places. As for the ego that wants to separate everything and delights in difference, it is little more than insecurity and fear, really a kind of existential terror wrapped into a psychological ball:
Here’s what you need to know right now. The ego is an unstable, insecure illusion. It sees itself as an individual and will do anything to protect that individuality. It takes a look around the room and sees what appears to be individuality. Other bodies with other thoughts and different skin colors and sexualities. It mistakes this for fragmentation. . . . Fear sets in, which naturally leads to aggression. . . . Fear is you. You are fear—you are that, every bit of it.”
Vaeni has a fairly distinct theory of religion. And it is not pretty. All the roads (of religion) do not lead to God. They cannot. All religions are human constructions and social functions, “thousands of years of crapola, friend.” Religion is basically us protecting ourselves from us.
What is worship? Worship is a great wall created to divide you from YOU. Words, rituals, rites. . . . That’s all trash, all means of denying our Whole Self. All is All. That necessarily includes the little self—the ego—and its traps, its illusions. This is why you can live ignorantly-ever-after in the shallow end and be every bit as worthwhile as those yucking it up in the deep: it’s all one ocean. . . . Don’t look to Mommy, Daddy, Priest, Jeremy, or Carl Sagan’s corpse. The kingdom is found within, not without. This is why the aliens don’t land.74 There you go.
Still, it is all one ocean: Universal Mind. There is no intellect in this universe or the next that can tell me anything about spirit—about my Original Face—that I do not already know NOW, should I awaken to it. Moreover, because this insight is by definition inner sight, there is nothing they could flat out tell me that would wake me up. . . . they don’t land because landing won’t make a bit of difference!75
Such “aliens” are “midwives birthing us out of our egos.”
Or better, “They want us to wake up out of our egos so we can join the sentience of the cosmos (or Kosmos, if you like). It’s not that they refuse to give us this, it’s that they can’t. All they can do is point it out in a way that bypasses ego. They can bypass it, but we have to transcend it.”
Bypassing the ego. That is a pretty good description of what is at work in the unbelievable beliefs of the abduction experience, the sci-fi visions born out of our own fears, projections, and warlike natures. There is no alien invasion. There is an attempt, largely a missed opportunity, to tell us that we are not, and that our violent nation-states and horrible histories are not really worth preserving—that those histories are there for mourning, not celebrating, that we need to go back to remember and redeem the past, not to deny, preserve, or conserve it.
In the third round of storytelling, we no longer believe the conscious tale or the unconscious one. Now we believe they are somehow us, perhaps an us visiting from the future. All three stories are still expressions of “our racist colonial conquests” for Vaeni. Hence the term “alien,” which is what “we also use to describe brown people who want to move to America from other countries we hate because FOX News told us to because they’re selling our racism to us.”82 The “Gray” (a displaced mixture of “black” and “white”) for Vaeni is another obvious racist trope.
They look like how we victimize. They look like enemies.”
and a full analysis whose conclusion is that we interpret these as violent terrifying abductions mostly because they are taking away our egoic sense of reality and showing us that the laws of physics are not really laws “but actually mere suggestions.”87 In truth, or in Truth, “you are a thought construct maneuvering in the world from a basic fear of annihilation.”
In another current, Vaeni will also deny that there are any such aliens and write eloquently of these visionary forms coming to us to teach the Truth with a capital T, the Truth of Timelessness appearing in time.93 This is why their thoughts are not our thoughts, why their lives are not our lives, why they play by entirely different rules. How could they not? They are coming into space and time from outside space and time. The result is a kind of overwhelming paradox. Here he is on the doubled truth, what I have called the Human as Two, or what Vaeni prefers to call a “multidimensional being”:
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As he has long suspected (originally inspired by Whitley Strieber, who has argued much the same), Vaeni thinks that we speak and imagine the aliens into existence. We let them in, as it were.
We are not living in a horror movie with the “aliens” as the monsters. These so-called aliens are showing up in the horror movie that we ourselves have made to get us out of our own stupid movie.
In his most revealing moments, Vaeni will speak even more directly and admit that he is coming from a place that most cannot—a place of doubleness or inclusion. “My understanding is different and is inclusive of yours, meaning that I can understand exactly what you’re saying and why you’re saying it. You on the other hand, are circumscribed to thinking I’m nuts or lying.”
Indeed, my dual-aspect monism—which denies any final distinction between the “mental” and the “material”—implies that these two domains cannot be separated, since they share a fundamental ground or superreality that is both and neither.
In short, I am suggesting a shared but largely unconscious experience-source hypothesis, what DeConick might call a “gnostic spirituality.” The different sets of cultural materials resonate so strongly because they are all based on the same kinds of human experiences, which themselves correlate very strongly with a shared neurobiology or human mind, which I understand in transmissive or filter terms, not in productive or epiphenomenal ones. In short, what we have here is a type of alien gnosis. Still, I am challenged by Stuart Davis, Jeremy Vaeni, and Karin Austin. I worry that the above
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When you let your “personal soul die,” then the only soul that remains is “the Universe”—and then you know ME. Kevin, May 20, 2022
