by Sean Esbjörn-Hargens PhD
Over the last 2.5 months Bruce Alderman has had six well-known figures within the Integral community post 30-120 min videos of themselves presenting their thoughts and ideas on UFOs and related forms of high strangeness. My previous update (Exo Studies Overview: The Dance of Integral Theory and UFOs) provides an overview of these talks. Now in the final installment of this series of integral perspectives on UFOs/ETs. Bruce has brought 5 of the individuals (i.e., myself, Stuart Davis, Chris Dierkes, Layman Pascal, and himself) together to engage 8 provocative questions that we all take turns responding too. Here are the questions:
- What experience have you had with UFOs or ET-related phenomena that you still feel you have the most to unpack or digest?
- How does integral theory contribute to the study of UFOs – what are its main elements that make a difference? How do UFOs/ETs contribute to integral…?
- Are the hard (craft, bodies, tech) and soft (vision, shamanic, psionic, spiritual) approaches really part of the same issue or two different phenomena?
- What is the role of cultivating multidimensional awareness/siddhis to see the subtle realms and ETs/EDs? What is the status of non-human intelligences encountered in ET/visionary experiences?
- What is your most reasonable feeling about UFOs and what is your least reasonable or most idiosyncratically personal feeling about UFOs?
- What one thing does the UFO community or the world need now/next to move our understanding (our ability to work with this phenomenon) forward?
- What art has most informed or resonated with your overall sense of this phenomenon?
- What most surprised or enchanted or seemed really useful in what someone else said here today?
The resulting conversation is quite exquisite in its depth, vulnerability, philosophical astuteness, and deep consideration of this topic. In many ways, this panel discussion models a new kind of integral dialogue exploring the frothy edge of what is known and not known. During and after the panel discussion I had a clear sense that something important just happened: some simple human-to-human-to-cosmos contact that opened me up – maybe all of us – to the sacred other.