If Contact Occurs: the Return to the Long Home

Once again, there are rumors that some sort of official admission of an alien presence might take place. I don’t wish to speculate on that, but if it does happen, then there will be a greater possibility of open contact. Initially, all of the change is liable to be on our side of the equation, but, if it does lead to more open contact, two things will then pertain: first, the complexity of human experience will increase exponentially; second, over time, there will be a shift in the center of gravity of our consciousness, away from the physical and into energetic reality.

This is the fundamental movement that all life has been about. It is why life exists—in a sense, to at once die and to surpass death. Already, the greater part of mankind exists in this other state, but those of us in the physical don’t see it that way. Our consciousness is fixated on the physical world , and most of us, no matter what we may say to ourselves and others, sense that physical reality is the only reality.

Contact with our visitors very quickly breaks down this illusion. The filters by which we live are overwhelmed by new perceptions that are much richer and more persuasive than anything that the physical world can offer.

What happens in a society undergoing this type of change is extraordinarily complex. The conditional state that we call ‘the soul’ turns out to be much more vitally alive than the physical system upon which it appeared to depend. The new perspective that emerges makes the physical, which has previously seemed to be the only world, appear in a very different light. Another, more hallowed reality becomes the center of perception, and one’s journeys through physical life begin to be perceived in a more true manner, as a series of projects or explorations, and, in some cases, as addictive behavior.

Contact will unfold, in all likelihood, in the context of the collapse of the planet’s ability to support us. Many of us will be dying. There will be extraordinary fear and the chaos will be beyond anything we have ever known, and more appalling than one can presently imagine. Not only that, pleas to our visitors to save us are likely to be met with what will seem some very strange reactions, but not with the kind of help we will be pleading for them to give us.

The soul is not contained in the body, the body is contained in the soul. In fact, the body is an incident in the life of the soul, on which it is, for a few years, concentrating its attention.

Because they have already passed through the crisis of death and rebirth that we are entering, our visitors are only incidentally aware of what is unfolding in our physical lives, and they are not going to be communicating to any great degree with us on this level—not because they don’t consider our physical concerns important, but because we don’t. The more the species engages with its physical extinction, the less it will be concerned with what is unfolding in the physical world. This is exactly what happens with an individual who is dying. At first, there is denial. Most of us are in that state now. Then the possibility comes to be entertained that death may be at hand. Some of us are in that state now. Finally, death comes to be accepted and the onward experiences to be contemplated. A few of us are at this point now.

It is this last group to whom contact will make genuine sense. For the first group, it will seem impossibly strange and sinister. After an initial period of euphoria, things will begin to leak out about its dark side that will make it come to seem dangerous–which it is, because it is a harbinger of change more fundamental than any we have ever known.

Helpless terror will grip the planet, as our visitors come to seem like a danger worse than death itself, and we come to realize that we cannot defend ourselves against them in any way at all.

To the second group of people, this reaction will seem paradoxical. They will perceive the visitors as teachers in a school, and will wonder what all the fear is about.

The third group will begin to actually make the fundamental shift that is facing us all, and, even though they may still be persisting in the physical world, they will find their concerns with physical matters dropping away, as their attention is more and more involved with their own energetic reality, and they come at once to see what their involvement with the physical has actually been, which is a process of developing their energetic presence in the direction of ecstasy. But they will see themselves as having reached the end of that process, at least for themselves. Simultaneously, they will finally achieve genuine contact, in that they will understand not only the motive that brought our visitors here, but also their means of conveyance into our world. They will see that energetic consciousness also has a means to increase its ecstasy: it is by forgetting its own needs enough to find its compassion, and offer help to those coming behind.

There are many people already in this state, both among the living and among the dead, and there will be more. However, don’t assume that they all offer a benign and kindly hand. True compassion involves giving what is needed the most, and that can be, and often is, a terrific shock, especially to those who are addicted to the physical, or suffer in one way or another from diminished being. Thus, as contact evolves, it will bring extraordinary change and with it extraordinary suffering. But also freedom, in the end, of a kind that those of us engaged in physical life here and now can only very distantly recall.

In the bible, in the Book of Ecclesiastes, though, there is a passage written from vivid recall of this state. In fact, probably by somebody who was living in it at the time of the writing; a true master, thus—one who is alive and dead at the same time.

"Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets…"

The ‘long home’ referred to here is the soul itself. As I said, it is not contained in the body. The body is an incident in the soul. It is long, like a great serpent winding into the past, a serpent composed of memories and reflections, whose aim is to contain itself, in the end, in a single, transcendent moment that encompasses the whole of time, and is what of eternity this particular fragment that is you or me or all of us has made.

One can also get a flavor of it from the old song Auld Lang Syne, which speaks of "the old long time." Now, it’s just a sentimental old song, almost entirely stripped of its ancient power, but listened to with a conscious ear, it can still convey some sense of the way the soul feels, of the poignant immensity of being that is the truth behind and within each of us, to which we will in due time return.