"The significance of this shift is epistemological before it is ontological" — that sentence is the whole argument. Before you can ask *what* something is, a prior architecture decides whether it's the kind of thing worth asking about. The Pentagon footage didn't change the phenomenon; it changed which instruments count, whose testimony enters the record. Then you bring that same humility to your own encounter — holding "autonomous intelligence, a participatory visionary disclosure, an internally generated symbolic process, or some combination" without collapsing any of them. Most people can't tolerate that superposition. You let it breathe. There's a discipline here beyond open-mindedness: standing with a saturated phenomenon without extracting a verdict. Witnessing, not observation. The craft may have vanished from the maloca, but the expansion of what you could responsibly entertain is permanent. That's the real contact.
Love that you included your own experience here. For sure it’s to our benefit that we continue to challenge our certainties in favor of getting ever more curious. Doing so itself feels like evolution in motion.
Overall yeah. Good reflections but it feels incomplete. If I read it right you are saying they embody or represent a revolution in culture, cognition, belief. Queue in Kuhn and scientific revolutions.
If I recall Jung described them as psychological phenomena that represent wholeness. That also seems incomplete. And I think you are on to something with them being anomalies. Dreams and psychedelic experiences have anomalies that change the narrative, change the context like in your ayahuasca experience.
I would argue that they challenge the mundane world view and initiate a response that is either transcendent or profane. Our modern mind culture is in many ways trapped in the Mundane. And these beings-manifestations shift that mindset and way of perceiving into something greater, something grander and more challenging for our limited primate minds. Think of the monolith in 2001.
HI Stephan! Thanks for this and good call. I recently updates the essay stressing even more the ontological (vs. epistemological) import of the phenomenon. Not sure whether I fully addressed your concerns but I tried. That said, my discussion is clearly limited, as it is drawn from only two section of a book whose focus is not on UAPs. Thanks anyway for your critical and appreciative engagement!
epistemic humility, yes. your essay reminds my of daniel pinchbeck's books, both 'breaking open the head' where he researches different accounts of people who took same psychedelics and had similar visions, and 'the return of quetzalcoatl' where he describes feeling possessed by the spirit of the quetzalcoatl. what I appreciated most about the second book was his epistemological humility to remain open: could be the actual spirit of quetzalcoatl, could be my hallucination, something else... it felt really honest...
your essay reminded me of a personal experience in san pedro. me and another participant simultaneously fixated on a bottle of water and i know we thought the same thing: we can lift, with our thoughts, we both got excited, and communicated without words: let's lift it. didn't work yet ahaha. but that experience expanded my horizon of what's possible...
looking forward to reading the new book. On another note: where are the ladies in those AI images? :p
"The significance of this shift is epistemological before it is ontological" — that sentence is the whole argument. Before you can ask *what* something is, a prior architecture decides whether it's the kind of thing worth asking about. The Pentagon footage didn't change the phenomenon; it changed which instruments count, whose testimony enters the record. Then you bring that same humility to your own encounter — holding "autonomous intelligence, a participatory visionary disclosure, an internally generated symbolic process, or some combination" without collapsing any of them. Most people can't tolerate that superposition. You let it breathe. There's a discipline here beyond open-mindedness: standing with a saturated phenomenon without extracting a verdict. Witnessing, not observation. The craft may have vanished from the maloca, but the expansion of what you could responsibly entertain is permanent. That's the real contact.
— Iman and Darja
Love that you included your own experience here. For sure it’s to our benefit that we continue to challenge our certainties in favor of getting ever more curious. Doing so itself feels like evolution in motion.
Excellent piece, Jorge.
Overall yeah. Good reflections but it feels incomplete. If I read it right you are saying they embody or represent a revolution in culture, cognition, belief. Queue in Kuhn and scientific revolutions.
If I recall Jung described them as psychological phenomena that represent wholeness. That also seems incomplete. And I think you are on to something with them being anomalies. Dreams and psychedelic experiences have anomalies that change the narrative, change the context like in your ayahuasca experience.
I would argue that they challenge the mundane world view and initiate a response that is either transcendent or profane. Our modern mind culture is in many ways trapped in the Mundane. And these beings-manifestations shift that mindset and way of perceiving into something greater, something grander and more challenging for our limited primate minds. Think of the monolith in 2001.
HI Stephan! Thanks for this and good call. I recently updates the essay stressing even more the ontological (vs. epistemological) import of the phenomenon. Not sure whether I fully addressed your concerns but I tried. That said, my discussion is clearly limited, as it is drawn from only two section of a book whose focus is not on UAPs. Thanks anyway for your critical and appreciative engagement!
epistemic humility, yes. your essay reminds my of daniel pinchbeck's books, both 'breaking open the head' where he researches different accounts of people who took same psychedelics and had similar visions, and 'the return of quetzalcoatl' where he describes feeling possessed by the spirit of the quetzalcoatl. what I appreciated most about the second book was his epistemological humility to remain open: could be the actual spirit of quetzalcoatl, could be my hallucination, something else... it felt really honest...
your essay reminded me of a personal experience in san pedro. me and another participant simultaneously fixated on a bottle of water and i know we thought the same thing: we can lift, with our thoughts, we both got excited, and communicated without words: let's lift it. didn't work yet ahaha. but that experience expanded my horizon of what's possible...
looking forward to reading the new book. On another note: where are the ladies in those AI images? :p
I see ladies! But in some images the exclusive presence of men is critically deliberate! ;)