An astronomer has calculated that there are 70 sextillion stars in the universe. That?s a seven followed by 22 zeros. It looks like this: 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That?s SIX stars for every grain of sand on earth. And that?s just the visible, known universe. It does not include parallel universes, which scientists are increasingly convinced exist as coherent physical structures all around us. Nor does it include the greater amount of matter in our own universe, which is dark matter that so far can only be measured indirectly.

This unimaginable vastness, in other words, is only a small part of the whole picture. But, even so, the immensity of it is completely beyond comprehension.

So, one has to ask the question that begs to be asked: why is it so quiet here? Why aren?t the skies teeming with messages? Why don?t aliens swarm our streets on a routine basis?

Now, it?s easy to say that we don?t hear anybody broadcasting because were listening in the wrong way or we?re isolated because the aliens find us troubling, or this or that reason.

But there is a huge problem with all this. It?s probability theory. When you are dealing with numbers this massive, you are in a realm of probability where essentially everything that can happen will happen. All aliens might not be propagating intelligent signals through the universe in a way that we can detect, but some will. All aliens may not like us, but some will.

In view of this staggering number of stars, it is not only inevitable that somebody is propagating signals that we can detect, but that many billions of planets probably are, or should be. Understand, to a number like 70 sextillion, a billion represents extreme rarity. A billion of any one thing in that context is statistically detectable, but only just.

But if a billion planets are sending out random television signals from local broadcasts, and have been doing so over, say, the relatively tiny timespan of the past ten million years, the odds are that at least a few million of those transmissions, originating within ten million light years of earth, would be noticeable to us, even if they weren?t intentionally sent in our direction.

It shouldn?t even take a SETI program to find them. We should have found them by accident, just in the course of ordinary receiving activities intended for our own purposes.

But they aren?t there. And instead of aliens routinely coming and going, we are in the strange situation of being haunted. Because we are haunted, that?s the only way to describe the whole UFO/alien phenomenon. It even has a ghostly quality to it: the aliens, if that?s what they are, steal near us like ghosts or hobgoblins, UFOs flit about but never land or resolve the question of their existence by, say, hovering low over a large city for a few hours, and the mystery continues.

Whatever is going on here, it is not as it should be. It almost looks as if somebody has our world caught in a kind of bubble of isolation. We?re fenced in. I am haunted, in thinking this, by the notion that our world might be a sort of enclosure or pen, in which we are artificially isolated for reasons that we are not being told. The reason is simple: because of the enormity of the universe, every cosmological explanation of our isolation begs the question.

Of course, there is another possibility, which is the most disturbing of them all. It is that we may be virtually alone. I say virtually and not absolutely, because we probably cannot be absolutely alone, because then the same issues of probability arise that make it inevitable that, if intelligent creatures persist after they come into being, then we would almost certainly be aware at least of their signal debris.

There are quite a few artifacts on this planet that suggest the possibility that it has been visited from time to time by aliens. In fact, not too many scientists would dispute that possibility. Michael Cremo, William Corliss and others have collected evidence of possible past technological debris, and certainly world mythology suggests an alien presence here around the time our present historical era begin.

But where did they go? Why, if they were here, are the gone? Perhaps it?s because they?re dead. Maybe intelligent life is not only sparse in the universe, but also an intrinsically short-lived phenomenon. I had the Astronomer Royal, author of Our Final Hour on Dreamland on July 5, and he explained that there was a high likelihood that mankind would be facing extinction within the next fifty years.

And indeed, the extinction rate is now so high worldwide that species are presently disappearing at about the same rate they did during the climax of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Things are not yet quite as bad, but they?re going in that direction.

If we go extinct before the end of another hundred thousand years, let alone just fifty, then our time on earth will have been so tiny that we will join what might be a vast graveyard of intelligent species whose existences were so brief that they made too slight an imprint on the universe to be detectable.

It?s easy to say, oh, the universe is just so huge and the number of intelligent species is so small that our chances of detecting them is in itself too small to measure. But that begs the question. A small number of us have possessed technology for only a few years, and we?re already contemplating trips to the stars.

It seems as if aliens came here in the past, left some physical and possibly some cultural debris, and then did not return. If the descriptions of their lives that appear in the Vedas are correct, it isn?t surprising. We were a sideshow in a fearsome interstellar war, to hear the Vedic bards sing. And now we come to a summer of crop circles that can no longer be explained away except by the insane. I refer to the ones in Wisconsin that were observed appearing by a witness and openly studied by the Air Force, and to the one in the UK that is held together by some sort of gluing process that has yet to be even slightly understood.

These intricate patterns may be natural effects, but if so, then they suggest that nature itself possesses a consciousness of sorts?meaning that our whole idea of life may be wrong, let alone our definition of what comprises an intelligent species. The circles have pointed to August 11-12 as an important date, for reasons that I discussed in my last journal entry. Is this some aspect of the intelligence of the earth, if such a thing exists, engaged in active intervention? If so, then maybe we?ll be able to see some event take place on those days that would confirm the validity of the communication.

Personally, I would be very surprised if that happened. We?ll see if the full moon of August 12 brings any sort of unusual event.

As I have been saying in the meditation sessions that I have been posting, meditation is a way of actually expanding the body to include much more sensation, even sensation of subtle bodies and the opening of the third eye. (Click on Listen Now on the upper right hand side of the homepage to listen. You will find the latest in the series at the bottom of the list of programs in the Windows Media Player that spawns when you click the link. The first two are available as downloads in the subscriber section.)

I live with this routinely. I have a open third eye, and I?ve seen all sorts of worlds in it. Their appearance is too spontaneous and detailed for me to believe that they are hallucinations. On the contrary, I think that this form of communication is quite real. And this gets me to where I have been going from the beginning of this journal: why it really is that we see so little evidence of an alien presence in the universe, and why we are being haunted by a quixotic, acute and elusive intelligence that seemed devoted to the idea that it must not reveal itself.

The truth probably is that intelligent species pass through the level we?re now in very quickly, perhaps in as little as a hundred or so years. Mind leaps beyond technology so fast that it doesn?t even leave a footprint in that particular sandpile. TV signals are virtually nonexistent in the universe because they?re so incredibly rare, not because conscious species are rare, but because television and radio and cars and computers and all the other physical objects that attempt to fulfill the potentials dreamed up by the imagination only last as long as it takes a given intelligent species to discover a better way.

That?s what I think the truth is. And I also think that we are indeed fenced off from the rest of the universe, and will remain so until we?ve passed through this phase. We?re unable to leave earth for the same reason that a baby is unable to leave his playpen. And it?s sink or swim. Everything is a test. If Sir Martin is right and we die here, then we die here alone. But if he?s wrong and we manage to somehow against all odds take wing, then we will ascend in hosts of joyous angels.

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