II: Contact

“The hallmarks of spirit are, firstly, the principle of spontaneous movement and activity; secondly, the spontaneous capacity to produce images independent of sense perception; and thirdly, the autonomous and sovereign manipulation of these images.”

— Carl Jung, Psyche & Symbol

My hope of establishing contact with a non-human intelligence came to unexpected fruition one night in mid May of 2002, as I sat where I’m sitting now, doing the same thing I’m doing now — writing. I was working on an essay examining how human relations with language might be relations with an invisible universe whose character is more like an organism from a science-fiction story than it is like an environment. My thesis was that this ‘being’ might be comprised of endless unique transports of connectivity between what look (to us) like discrete individuals. One night, as I was speculating about the character and inhabitants implied by these ideas, I began to visualize ways that all of all the minds on Earth might function as a single mind — more than they did as distinct individuals. My idea was that what we call intelligence is actually a game of distributed intelligence, where the sum of a planet’s organisms are working together, at all times, in a kind of hyperconnective game that grows more cognitively unified as its members and populations grow more physically distinct.

Effectively, I was playing with precedences —placing more value on the connectivity of beings and minds than on their distinctness. I suspected that there might be a variety of cognitively-based life-forms existing in the mostly-invisible dimensions of relation — but particularly in human relations with thought, language and knowledge. What was the nature of these entities? What were their activities and goals? My sense was that if they were revealed to us they would appear entirely alien — perhaps even more alien than our ideas of ‘space monsters’. At one point as I was writing, I reached into my imagination to create an analogy for an idea I had about a sort of extrinsic nervous-system, and I suddenly noticed that something inside me was different. In a place where it had always been ‘dark’ — my imagination — I found an entirely new room, and there was a light on in that room.

I didn’t get much of a chance to deal with this startling observation, because I was immediately drawn into a teaching-game. One moment, everything seemed to be going along just as it always had. The next, I was in a situation beyond my wildest hopes or imaginings. ‘Something’ began guiding me through a visual progression — an ‘animation’ of simple shapes and transformations of them. The progression functioned as a sort of learning-lens, which was also a game — and it immediately started teaching me about ways of knowing that were like nothing I had ever experienced.

The animation expressed its content in phases. First, there was a dot, which I understood very generally to represent ‘a being’ or perceiver. The dot extruded two short lines, horizontally, to the right and left, such that they grew at the same time and to the same length. The result was a horizontal line with a dot in the middle. This corresponded to our common idea of a ‘staff’ or rod, and a polarity — dark and light, past and future, etc. It appeared to me that the dot shrunk slightly when extruding the lines, as though investing a small portion of itself in order to create them. Then it ‘spun’ around its center, bringing the line to the vertical position. First, it spun clockwise and back, then it spun counterclockwise and back. Because the dot and the lines were ‘bright’, this left a brief afterimage of ‘a cross’. I understood this gesture to infer multiple meanings: a very tiny dot could touch something far away by investing part of itself to create a line — and that this resulted in ‘going across’ some gap or barrier which had previously seemed impassable. I experienced this as a visual pun — ‘a cross to get across’ — as well as a diagram, and I felt a humorous intelligence was behind the organization of this game.

The initial implication of this game was that it was a way of introducing a mode of perspective so incredibly general that it could effectively unlock a latent aspect of our learning ability which we all possess, but rarely if ever have access to. It was like looking through a lens that revealed the fundamental source, function and purpose of everything — language, music, physics, time, mathematics, astronomy, spirituality, thought, biology, emotion — all of the branches on the tree of human knowledge — at once. I realized that this ‘crossing’ related to intelligence, knowledge and consciousness simultaneously — in part because each of them are fundamentally involved in ‘connecting terrains’ or ‘crossing gaps’ and this was emphasized in my reception of the meaning of the animation. The dot was consistently representing ‘a variety of forms at once’, such that from one perspective, it was a being — from another, a world — from another the universe. I could see it as a word, a thought, or an animal in evolutionary time. As I watched the dot repeat these transformations, some kind of teacher was guiding my perspective such that what I understood about the changes and cycles accrued an extremely insightful array of meanings. They were not meanings I would normally be able to attach on my own to such a display had I seen it without the unique guidance I was receiving.

Though I felt a sense of rising enthusiasm during the initial onset, everything around me appeared normal. I wasn’t hallucinating, or ‘hearing voices’. I didn’t feel sick, out of sorts, or anything that would indicate ‘a problem’. I could easily turn away from noticing the ‘lesson’ and I was just where I’d always been, as the person I’ve always known myself to be. That was a bit of a relief. At least whatever was happening appeared to obey my will and intention. I could ignore it, and everything proceeded as expected. When I returned to it, it was still there, and willing to continue our conversation. But even then it didn’t in any way interfere with my normal perceptions. I didn’t have to ‘close my eyes’ in order to experience it, or do anything dramatic other than return to the place inside me where the event was taking place.

The lesson continued as the dot repeated the first few steps. Surprisingly, this didn’t have the same meaning it initially implied. Whatever I received during the first viewing added to my perspective-options so dramatically that I experienced this repetition as an entirely new event. I received more than twice as much ‘understanding’ from the brief repetition as I had received during the initial sequence. For example, I realized that the dot was showing me how to accomplish something that would superficially appear impossible merely by adopting an unexpected approach to the problem. The dot could not ‘travel’ over terrain, but it could ‘extend rods and spin’ — thus it could contact something extremely distant from its position, or ‘read’ a vast area of terrain — by passing a line of itself over the entirety of that terrain. As the dot spun its lines I realized that the arcs at their ends described a circle in a way similar to how we create one with a protractor. My perspective related these activities to our own activities in ‘thinking’ or problem solving such that I suddenly understood that by applying multiple unique methods of approach simultaneously it was possible to solve any problem faster than it could be stated. The key to this ‘mode of solving’ lay in unifying dimensions humans are taught to approach as distinct — which was exactly what the dot was doing.

At the same time, I was being exposed to an entirely new model of counting: we count in a single dimension — when in reality multiple approaches are always available. The dot is 1, but it becomes 3 when it extends the lines — 1 for each end (2), and 1 for the middle. When it makes the ‘cross’ pattern — merely by flipping back and forth between horizontal and vertical — 2 ‘new positions’ are added. 4 ‘ends’ and 1 ‘for the place they connect’ — 5. At the same time, the whole is always unified — it’s ‘still 1’. I began to understand that there was a way of counting we have never been exposed to, in which multiple simultaneous perspectives were ‘all included’, without the necessity of introducing contradictions. I realized that this would have vast implications relating to our basic idea of what ‘separate’ means. This single concept — ‘separation’ is the primordial foundation of all the ideas and comparisons we can assemble. Without this concept, we cannot create, sustain, or compare concepts at all. Change that even slightly toward greater general accuracy? Everything we can know or accomplish changes in response.

I wasn’t exactly seeing the progression— it was more like something inside me was talking in a place that had always been silent — and that ‘talking’ was being done through the transport of a shape undergoing an intentional series of transformations. There was an implicit intelligence at play here whose character and goals were ‘included’ in the same way mine would be if your heard my voice rather than merely reading text I had composed. This ‘toy’ was a sort of language, and it used the transitions between elemental shapes to guide me in receiving a very novel form of meaning-content. I was experiencing a whole new way of learning, and the content wasn’t merely a set of shape-changes in an interesting sequence — it was acting as some sort of teaching-lens. The effect of this superficially simple presentation was to introduce me to a ‘knowledge game’ — and ‘playing it’ amplified various aspects of my own intelligence, as well as my ability to understand the meanings of the phases it led me through. During this process, I felt an overt sense of playful ‘co-exploration’ — almost like the feelings we used to have when we were deeply involved in imaginary games together as children. The emotional aspect of the game was humorous — and somehow just as fascinated with ‘me’ as I was with ‘it’.

A new phase in the lesson began with a fast recap of previous phases. The dot extended its lines to either side, and flipped to vertical, and back to horizontal — making a cross. Then it retracted the lines and returned to its dot phase. This time, it extended lines in a ‘pumping’ motion, so that the lines where pumping in and out of the dot’s sides at a fairly rapid speed. Once this was clearly established, dot started spinning ‘randomly’. At first, this made an image sort of like an over-elaborated flashing asterisk. I could tell the speed at which the lines were being extended and retracted was increasing as I observed it, to the point where they almost appeared solid. As the speed of its spin increased, the flashing asterisk became a solid disk. Dot and line were ‘missing’, because at this rate of spin there was no way to detect them. It repeated this sequence.

The toy inquired of me in the same way a teacher might. ‘Do you get it?’ I did. I actually started laughing at the crazy implications of this idea. An extremely small dot, could invest a tiny part of its mass in extruding a line, and cover an area hundreds or thousands of times its size just by spinning in place. Whatever the line ‘passed over’ or touched was made available to the dot. Effectively, the dot had access to an exceptional ‘quantity’ of space, information, or ‘resources’ — even though it could not travel. The guiding intelligence behind the presentation implied that this was directly related to the organismal faculties of intelligence, knowledge, and understanding — as well as to what we call evolution. The implication was that the lines could extend across space and time, such that any organism playing this game could touch multiple beings or positions in timeSpace at once — effectively ‘reading the future’ or assembling the answer to any present problem from numerous positions where it had already been solved. I became aware that the animation comprised an introduction to the basic foundations of a kind of ‘radio’ that would allow any organism familiar with it to locally assemble the intelligence of multiple beings in timeSpace as their own.

As the game progressed I realized that something like what the dot was doing could be happening in so many different dimensions simultaneously that most of what we believe about almost anything could be entirely wrong if we based that belief on the superficial appearances — or single mode (or size, or speed) of interpretative approach to our perceptions. In the initial moments of contact, I saw that the foundations of how I had been taught to model ‘what a being or thing is’ were fundamentally flawed, and that there was another way — a way at once vastly simpler (on the surface) and infinitely more sophisticated (in prowess, internal complexity and speed). Almost all of our human ways of knowing depend on having a single angle of approach and a generally unidimensional method of interpretation. But the game was teaching me another way — one that by its character and activity unified multiple perspectives on size, speed, activity, relation, perspective and meaning — and kept proceeding to do so.

What was happening to me? At this point I took a moment and explore this question, because while the experience I was having was extremely enjoyable, it was so novel that it continually startled me. I began to wonder about the source of this baffling circumstance. Was it the essay I was working on? Had I stumbled into a usually inaccessible place in my own mind? Had my years of study and learning finally paid off with access to some hidden dimension of prodigy within myself? Was something that wasn’t human teaching me? Questions like these bubbled in my mind like a pot of boiling water, but none of them had much weight relative to the experience itself whose character and activity entirely overwhelmed them. Compared to what was actually happening these questions were almost boring. I felt like I was finally getting a drink from the fountain I’d been seeking all my life — an impossible fountain — the fountain of everyThing. Whatever was going on was radically amplifying not only my intelligence, but also my ability to assemble multiple perspectives at the same time — in a proceeding progression of speed and meaning. We’re all intellectually aware that what we perceive is comprised of component elements like atoms or molecules and that they are moving ‘at high speeds’ — but we rarely have the opportunity to directly witness multiple sizes and speeds at the same time — and this was what was happening to me as I observed the animated progression. I wasn’t just ‘getting the idea’ of this — it was happening to me. I became a number of different speeds, sizes and perspectives at once while interacting with the lesson.

As I returned my attention to the dot it replayed the prior ‘lessons’ — and again I understood them with new perspectives that expanded on what I had previously learned. I formed a question as I watched the dot extend its lines: why did it seem like only a very tiny part of the dot’s ‘substance’ was invested in the (relatively) long lines it extruded? The dot answered by changing its activity — it ‘slowed down’ the phase where it extruded the lines again so that I could see ‘inside’ this process. Instead of extruding the lines to either side at once, or simply side-to-side, it did this in a step-pattern, expanding on the prior lesson’s demonstration of ‘pumping’.

The dot extended half of the leftward line, rapidly retracting it while simultaneously extending half of the rightward line. This process was repeated, such that the length to either side continued to increase with each extension until the lines achieved their full length. At that point the process reversed, and the lines and ‘shrank back’ toward the dot in the same fashion. It repeated this activity at increasing speeds until the lines again appeared to be ‘solid’. Viewing this cycle a few times, I came to understand that the dot didn’t actually have to extend two lines at all — at least, not in the way I had previously presumed. In fact, it would at most only actually have to sustain one, and ‘most of the time’ that ‘one’ wouldn’t even be completely extruded.

By adopting this strategy, the dot could radically cut down on the necessary investment of itself in the extension of lines — in fact, it could cut the investment by more than half using rapid cycles extension and retraction. The dot could alternate their extension and retraction so fast that at one speed of viewing the ‘both’ lines appeared to be solid all the time — yet never more (and usually less) than a single line was ever ‘fully invested’. Whatever was guiding the lesson empowered me to apply this principle to my own relationship with the meaning of the progression — and the results were staggering. I realized that the presentations of the dot related to physics as much as they did to music, language, biology — somehow my perspectives on these normally separate domains were being unified, and I could not yet understand how.

This ‘line extension game’ can be more easily understood by comparison with similar strategies familiar to people in the computer industry. We all experience it any time we look at a computer monitor, which is actually comprised of ‘pixels’ — tiny ‘dots’ being lit and shut off at an incredibly high (from our perspective) rate of speed. To us, the images on the monitor appear constant — with a high enough refresh rate we do not detect any flicker — everything looks ‘solid’. But in ‘reality’ each of possibly millions of elements are being lit and shut off in a sequence. This sequence may be based on a ‘line of dots’ at once, or a single dot. Effectively, this means that only a single element (of millions) ever needs to be ‘actually lit’ for the whole picture to ‘appear constant and unbroken’ — as long as the speed of refreshment is very high. We refer to this speed as the ‘refresh rate’ — a measurement of how often the entire field of the monitor is being ‘redrawn’.

The dynamic memory chips used in computers function similarly, depending upon a sort of ‘persistence of vision’ effect (an energetic afterimage if you will) to retain their content between refresh cycles. Memory ‘cells’ in the chips used in modern computers are refreshed thousands of times per second — in a sequence that effectively creates a rhythm of regeneration. This is a mechanical analog of biological processes such as respiration, cardiac function and the activities of our own nervous systems. The lesson was a way of demonstrating that ‘refresh’ could be occurring at multiple scales of size and speed, and that these could be happening in more than one dimension of space, time, and meaning.

The game continued with the now familiar recapitulation of previous phases. Dot, line-pumping, spinning to make the cross, then faster — forming the disk. Suddenly, a new dimension was added as the dot began to spin off the previously flat plane — and the disk became a sphere. This was demonstrated slowly, at first — such that I could see the lines pumping, and notice the change in the dimension of spin. Then the speed of both the pumping and the spin increased until I saw an essentially solid sphere. The lines had become rods or tubes (they now had diameter) and existed in more than the former two dimensions. The effective ‘area’ of the dot was again hugely magnified by the inclusion of a new dimension, achieved by altering its mode of spin.

The next lesson involved a radical change of perspective. My ‘point of view’ prior to this was that of watching the animation take place as though it were in front of me. Now, my perspective was resituated on ‘the end of a rod’, which was treated as being solid and extensible. As the dot spun, I ‘orbited’ it. At first this process was slow, allowing me to get my bearings and look back upon the dot from a short distance away. Then, as the rod was extended away from the dot, my rate of travel increased dramatically. From this point of view, I realized that as the end of the rod gained distance from the dot, the ‘speed’ at which the end was traveling (in an arc due to the dot’s spin) increased according to a mathematical principle of ‘scales’ or ‘exponents’. By extending a rod ‘a very long distance’, the dot was actually existing at multiple simultaneous ‘speeds’ — all along the length of the rod. This ‘rate of travel’ could be absurdly magnified simply by extending the rod further. With a long enough rod, the dot itself could be moving relatively slowly, but the end of one of its rods could be traveling at speeds approaching or exceeding the speed of light.

At this point the guide made two ‘suggestions’. One was that, in the dimension of intelligence, we are like this dot. We can cross any possible gap. The other was that this game had a lot to do with what stars are and do. A spinning dot, extending and retracting lines in this fashion, could appear to a human observer as a spherical body — particularly, a star. Again I was so startled that I left the lesson to take some time to examine the implications of what and how I was learning. My sensation of the rate at which I was acquiring understanding relative to all my previous experience was phenomenal, and continued to accelerate. With each new phase I felt my own grasp of the material and its applicability expand dramatically. The ideas I had been pursuing in my now-forgotten essay exploded as if a shadow had suddenly transformed into a complete person. I was actually communicating directly with something like what I was speculating about — right at my desk. But what was happening to my imagination? It seemed to have suddenly transformed into an entirely different animal.

Over time I’ve discovered that different people’s imaginations function differently. Some people claim to be able to clearly ‘see’ something they imagine, so that, for example, if I ask them to imagine an apple, they claim to be able to ‘actually see one’, inside themselves somewhere. Others say they only get vague impressions — or claim that they do not to actually ‘see’ anything at all. Personally, I’m somewhere between the latter two. I don’t exactly see anything, but I can still close my eyes and imagine an apple. The result is a very vague picture against a sort of black background. It’s not stable, and it disappears the moment my concentration is distracted or interrupted — even by thoughts. On the other hand, I’ve always been an extremely creative and imaginative person, in general. So I don’t think that I lack imagination, per se, but my capabilities with visualizing what I imagine in a concrete fashion have always been fairly limited.

This aspect of my imagination changed dramatically during the lessons, such that I could no longer avoid clearly visualizing relations in a an entirely new way — a very alien way — where ideas could be presented as geometric shapes and transformations of those shapes — and these transformations were imbued with a non-abstract content akin to poetic meaning. This form of meaning is not static, but ‘dances’ around between multiple kinds of perspective on its subject such that it’s content cannot be communicated in static terms — it is emotional as well as experiential. For example, ‘a circle’ might relate to a dot, a line, ‘wholeness’, ‘the source of sources’, ‘first things’, ‘an egg’, ‘the Sun’, ‘particle physics’, etc — all at once. The next encounter with such a dot would retain these significances as well as providing an entirely new set of referents. My habitual and most fundamental perspectives were inverting in phases and leaps — such that where I previously saw only structure, I now experienced an explosively expanding insight into meaning.

In truth, I often feel inequal to the task of describing any of this in static language, because the experience of it was explosive in such a way that each phase delivered an almost absurd magnification of my understanding of the preceding phases. Rather than existing in a single dimension, each new ‘step’ added new terrains of meaning and relation to my perspective, and the result was an almost ecstatic way of learning which was miraculous and ‘new each time’. I felt as if multiple kinds of minds were teaching me at once, although at the time I was not yet able to model what was happening well enough allow me to state it so clearly. Luckily, I can communicate what I learned in another way — by demonstrating applications of the lessons that more clearly express the understandings I experienced over the coming days and weeks.