I’m always amused by UFO investigators and compilers of data who will tell you, Well the first things we did is we got rid of all the stories told by anybody who was intoxicated on anything. It seems to me that move has probably absolutely precluded any possibility of understanding what is going on!

          You see, culture is something that we wear like clothes, and we’re very much at ease with culture – our mind is very much at ease with culture, and we gather the language of a given culture around us. Culture is the mind unperturbed.

          When a shaman or an ecstatic visionary goes into the wilderness and through ordeal, or yogic practice, or breath control, or the taking of a psychoactive substance, perturbs the mind, then we see what the mind is naked, undressed from the clothing of language and convention. That’s why I have made this point over and over again: there cannot, there will not, be a serious discussion of the origin of UFOs, or for that matter of the nature of consciousness itself, until we leave the utterly culture-bound, provincial and hick-like attitude that science has foisted on us about perturbing the mind. Without the use of psychoactive substances, I think solving the UFO dilemma is going to be as thankless a task as attempting to understand the nature of the universe without availing yourself of the use of a telescope!  It is simply tying our hands behind our backs. 

          Now, there is a third possibility, which is the one that is the more commonly entertained notion, which is simply that we are being observed by intelligent life-forms that evolved somewhere else in the galaxy. They have quarantined our planet to keep us from being agitated by their presence, and they will eventually reveal themselves.

          I find this an extremely odious notion – especially the part about how much chaos there will be if the truth is ever revealed. This is nothing more than the reassertion of masculine paternalism: its right to keep secrets from the rest of us, its belief that there is a privileged all-male class of people who can be let in on what’s really going on, and the rest of us, poor dears, have to be shielded from these tremendously shocking facts. I discussed this once with an entity, and it said to me, "Well, you know, we’ve disguised ourselves an extraterrestrial invasion, so as not to alarm people with what’s really going on!"

          We’re getting close to the end, folks.

          There is a fourth possibility, which I mention only in the interest of thoroughness, which is that these entities and their vehicles are not spacecraft at all, but are in some sense timecraft,  and that the tremendous sense of empathy with these quite physically unusual beings, may arise out of the fact that we are looking into the faces of our great-great-great-grandchildren, who may be emanating back through time, carrying the message – a message – about some sort of future event or situation that lies many centuries downstream from us, but that is of such import that, from that point, agents are moving backward (and possibly forward) through time, spreading the news of some kind of mode shift. 

          This doesn’t seem to me to be impossible. However, based on my own experience, which is what I think this thing really comes down to – because what we have in the UFO issue is an official position supported by scientists, whether they be neanderthal right-wingers or doctrinaire Marxists or whatever, a conspiracy of consensus against the personal experiences of individual human beings, who are told, “Well what you are saying happened to you can’t have happened, you are insane, you are mentally ill, you are mistaken.” So what we really have here is a political issue: which do you believe—your perceptions, memories and expectations, aided by your intellect, or some kind of utterly abstract, official, doctrinaire, sexist philosophy laid on from above?

          Really what the saucers do, if you accept their presence, is they empower us: they empower us to see science for the shell game that it is, [and] to see the past four hundred years of Western culture for the pathetic narrowing of the spectrum of allowable phenomena that it is, to the point where people think that if you can’t bang on something with a hammer, it isn’t real - which to me is just wild talk.  I can’t even imagine where that kind of thing is coming from!

          I’ll just leave you with this final thought.  In lieu of the repression, and it is a repression, throughout this century, of legitimately available ways of exploring the modalities of consciousness - and by that, I mean psychoactive compounds - the repression of those compounds and their use by science, has created a neurotic energy dynamic in the mass psyche. And the mass psyche has begun to hallucinate, because the destiny of human beings is to live in the Imagination, in the hands of the Goddess. And wherever that thrust is impeded, psychopathy will result - there will be neurosis, there will be psychic epidemics, there will be confusion. 

          I believe that until we form a resolution to conduct an unfettered and mature exploration of the human psychology, using all the tools available to us, that the skies of earth will continue to be haunted by flying saucers. They will continue to be haunted by flying saucers and their denizens, because they are symbols of our infantilism, of our sense of loss, of our incompleteness. And we can heal that breach by simply recognizing that the true mystery lies within us. The true mystery is in the mind, and its historical promise is the transformation of our society through the abandonment of reason, as it has been narrowly defined by this extremely solar, masculine, paternalistic, materialistic legacy that we are the victims of.

          Well, I could talk for a long time, but I think that’s it in a nutshell. Thank you. Thank you.