Encounters with UFOs and Extraterrestrials.
Phenomenology of the spirit.
José Delgado González. Junguian oriented psychotherapist.
During the
meeting I had in September 2018 with the Jungian therapist Raúl Ortega in
Huelva we dealt with a central theme for every Jungian: what we could call the
phenomenology of the self. We were talking about encounters with unidentified
flying objects and their supposed crew members, that is, with
extraterrestrials.
We take as a
starting point and reference the experience of a UFO encounter with
extraterrestrial beings that a 12-year-old boy had. The person who had this
encounter was Juan Perez. At present Juan is approximately 52 years old. But at
the age of 12 he had an encounter that produced such a shock that it took about
40 years for his consciousness to assimilate. And that experience transformed
his life radically. I told Raul that I had seen a documentary film entitled
"Witness of another world" at the Princess Cinemas in Madrid, which
dealt precisely with the case of Juan Perez, and that I found it extraordinary.
In this
documentary, the director Alan Stivelman goes to the town where the contacted
Juan Perez lives, in Argentina, to talk to him about the experience he had and
the repercussions it had on his life. The first thing that caught my attention
was that Juan, at the age of 52, had not yet assimilated that numinous event.
When he talked about what had happened to him 40 years ago, his voice was still
trembling and he found it difficult to put into words what he was feeling. He
would burst into tears and when asked if he would have preferred not to have
had that experience, he would answer with a resounding affirmation. The
experience of that extraordinary event transformed his life into that of a
hermit who lived alone and far from the world, feeling a terrible heaviness
because of that experience, which seemed to have sunk him. Juan, in the
documentary, affirmed that, after the UFO encounter, his life had changed
profoundly and he had been having premonitory dreams ever since. He felt
different and the people around him thought he was a stranger, a fool. However,
in the documentary we see how important it is to help a person who has had such
an experience to assimilate it and to bring him out of isolation, helping him
to understand that there are other people who have also had a similar
experience. At the same time, the documentary shows us that it is essential for
the person to be integrated into a community that understands the meaning of
that extraordinary experience.
This
documentary and its extraordinary content helped Raul and me to start a
conversation about what we could call the phenomenology of the spirit.
One of the
criticisms we made of the conclusion reached by the director of the documentary
was that for Alan that experience lived by John could be explained through an
inner experience transferred to the outer reality, that is, through a
projection. Basically, this is the tonic of most Jungian psychologists, who
explain the experience of the numinous through the mechanism of projection of
the contents of the collective unconscious. However, Jacques Vallée explained
it in a different way, speaking of other worlds or other dimensions, alluding
to quantum physics. The latter explanation is, in our opinion, much more in
line with the reality of the phenomenon. Although I, in most of my
writings, speak of the projection of the contents of the collective unconscious
into manifest reality, and thus make an immanent explanation, I am aware, as is
Raul, that experiences such as Juan's cannot be explained solely through
subjective experiences. The spirit of depth and the archetypes constitutive of
that spirit cannot be understood solely from the point of view of a subjective
psychology, but allude above all to a dimension or a world that lies beyond the
boundaries of the subjective. It is what we could call the Kingdom of God or
Plato's world of perfect ideas. And this world is an objective world, a metaphysical
reality, which can manifest itself, as indeed it does, in this material
reality, but which does not belong to this reality, but transcends it.
In the psyche
this metaphysical reality can also manifest itself in the form of dreams, for
example. Such dreams belong to a different category than personal dreams.
Hence, as we see in the documentary through the wise old man of the Guarani
tribe, they are called true dreams, or great dreams. In these dreams the Real
manifests itself, that is to say, those spiritual powers that are part of the
spirit of the depth as different attributes of God. It happens in a similar way
to when a meditation is performed, such as active imagination. However, not in
all cases in which an active imagination is performed, the contents of the
collective unconscious are summoned. Sometimes, as happens with dreams of a
personal nature, the images refer to subjective aspects that have nothing to do
with the authentic archetypal images in which the self-manifests itself to
man's consciousness. We could express it concisely as follows: in the deepest
immanence (the psyche) the absolutely transcendent (it is spirit of the depth)
becomes present.
For this
reason, in most encounters with UFOs, they have a material dimension and not
only a symbolic one. At this point Raul and I were reflecting on the enormous
difference between the reality of the spirit and the realm of intellectual
abstraction. For many intellectuals, and also for many Jungians, both realities
or dimensions tend to be identified. However, for us there is a quantitative
and qualitative difference between the realm of intellectual abstraction, where
the option of the symbol and the reflection around the symbolic would fit, on
the one hand, and the world of the Real understood as the realm of the divine
that has a metaphysical character. The latter world can become present in this
immanent reality, as happened to John in his UFO experience. Such an experience
can perfectly well be understood as an experience of God. Not as a projection
of unconscious contents in objective reality, but as a manifestation of the
Real in this phenomenal world.
After this
reflection on the reality of God and the transcendent world of the Real, Raul
brought up the images drawn by one of his patients after having had a UFO
contact that he experienced with his father and mother and that he had sensed
several hours before it happened, warning his surprised parents. Again, we were
reflecting on the world of the Real, and how in his patient it had manifested
itself in this material world.
At that
moment I remembered a dream I had around the year 2000 in which I had a UFO
contact and in which I was able to talk to the extraterrestrial crew members of
a circular craft with a technology far superior to the human one. A dream that
left me very surprised and touched and that I still remember in detail. That
dream can be understood as one of those great dreams or true dreams because of
its archetypal character. It expressed in effect the experience with the world
of the Real, that is, with the archetype of the self that had manifested itself
to me in that dream in one of the most critical moments of my life. Once again,
in the deepest immanence of the soul, the absolutely transcendent manifested
itself.
As Jung made
clear in his writings, not only in those concerning UFOs, but also in many
others around the visionary experiences on mandalas, it is not strange that
this type of events is occurring on a scale that transcends the boundaries of
any specialty. They have become a quasi-popular phenomenon. What we observe in
the profession of psychotherapists is that these phenomena of apparitions and
visionary experiences of symbols of totality usually occur in extremely
critical moments; many times, they compensate, with symbolic images of unity,
totality and divinity, psychic processes of extreme instability and inner
chaos. Moments in which psychic and physical health are in danger of
disintegrating. For this reason, as Jung expressed it at the time, we believe
that the extension of the UFO phenomenon among the world population, and the
fact that the number of documents on contacted is increasing, represent an
indicative sign, and at the same time a necessary compensation, to the
deplorable psychic state to which Western civilization has arrived as a
consequence of the death of God, of the degradation of the Christ Symbol as a
sign of an eclipse of God.
In another
article we saw how narcissism has become the apocalyptic plague of the
postmodern world. In fact, the involution towards a materialistic and immanent
vision is so terrible that we fear an "evolution" from a narcissistic
culture, in which we are already living, to a psychopathic culture; and the
success of series about teenage vampires and the living dead (zombies) are a
good reflection of such a situation. This psychopathic tendency of Western
civilization can be understood as the expression of the hypertrophy of the
function of extraverted thinking in the spirit of the age, which begins in the
age of Enlightenment, continues with Modernity and culminates in post-modernity,
with the excessive development of Biotechnology, transhumanist Philosophy and
the development of Artificial Intelligence, to give a few examples. Our era has
become satanic as a consequence of the Promethean development of reason. It is
not surprising, therefore, that the function of sentiment emerges from the
darkness of the unconscious, that is, from the shadow, trying to make its way
through collective phenomena such as the spread of feminism or communist
collectivism.
The
individualistic, cold and calculating dominance of scientific thought is
compensated from the unconscious through the constellation of the archetype of
the goddess. The dominant of the epoch is symbolized by the expired king, by Saturn
or the senex, who is defeated and renovated by the puer aeternus.
Therefore,
Raul and I do not agree with expressions like "there are other worlds, but
they are in this one". ¡No! For us, there are other worlds, yes, but they
are not in this one, but they can manifest in this one, although they belong to
other planes of reality. We repeat, the authentically real, which is
transcendent, can manifest in the immanent plane, but it is not immanent.
Another of
the conclusions we reached was that all material reality, that everything
immanent, is supported, sustained and depends on the transcendent reality, on
what is authentically Real; in short, on what we can call Mystery. When the
veil that hides reality is torn, then the truly Real becomes present, which is
the Mystery, or what we call in Analytical Psychology, the self.
As we can see
in the documentary about the contacted John, the experience with the world of
archetypes can provoke in the consciousness of the person two possible effects:
A) a
deflation of consciousness, as happened to our contacted Juan.
B) an
inflation of the consciousness, as happened, for example, to OSHO and, in
general, to a great part of the people who have had some experience with the
supernatural.
In the case
of the deflation of the consciousness what happens is, as Juan's testimony
shows us, that the consciousness feels crushed and devalued before the numinous
experience of the Real.
In the case
of inflation of consciousness what happens is just the opposite: that the
consciousness is inflated and, for a time, the person contacted may believe
himself to be a messenger of God. Believing that his destiny is superior to
that of the rest of mortals, or more important, and despising or undervaluing
the destiny and the path of others. In Christianity, for example, we can see
this effect in Jesus himself when he has his first experiences with the Father
and, especially, in the moments when he is tempted by the devil in the desert.
Joan of Arc also suffered an inflation at certain moments of her life,
misinterpreting the visionary experiences she had, something that also happens
in moments of inflation (although not only in those moments).
In any case,
such effects can be considered unavoidable or usual and are, in fact, signs
that the person has had an authentic experience with the numinous. However,
given that these are secondary effects of the experience with the transcendent,
it is very important to work in therapy (and/or self-knowledge) in order to
bring the experience on track and assimilate it into the consciousness with a
view to the manifestation of the contents of the collective unconscious in the
life of the person contacted.
Of course,
experiences of this nature, which, although not common, have occurred to
certain people throughout human history, as the documentary on John
exemplifies, call into question any assertion about psychological work prior to
any spiritual experience. To begin with, such an experience happens against the
will of the contacted, being in fact summoned by the depth (by the archetype of
the self), not by conscious intention and desires. Furthermore, such an
experience has extraordinary repercussions in the life of the individual. And
finally, such experiences, once assimilated by the consciousness, allow the
contacted to know what his or her true vocation is and the community of people
to which he or she belongs. This is precisely what I tried to develop in two of
my novel essays: At the End of the Tunnel and The Brotherhood of the
Initiates. In the first novel I tell the
story of an initiate (contacted) in the present time and, in the second, his
inclusion in a heterogeneous community of gnostics.
From a
psychological and/or therapeutic point of view, the experience of the numinous
is traumatic to say the least and, of course, terrible and ominous (fascinating
and tremendous, in Rudolf Otto's terms). However, it is the only experience
that, for certain people, is healing. Here we should therefore differentiate
between "small psychotherapy" or "false psychotherapy",
which deals with the symptoms of mental disorders, and "great
psychotherapy" or "true psychotherapy", which consists precisely
of the experience that Juan had at the age of 12 and which, 40 years later, his
consciousness was able to assimilate, leading him to the manifestation of his
true vocation in the heart of a Guarani community.
In the light
of all these reflections, it is appropriate to bring up, because of its
presence in the film, the archetype of the hermit. When this archetype is
constellated in the psyche, it pushes the consciousness to withdraw from the
world, for the sake of the development of personality number 2, or the
development of the inner man. An example of this can be found in Jung himself
when he withdrew to the tower of Bollingen. In fact, once the extraverted
journey into the world has been made, the movement is towards the ascetic life.
This
reflection leads us to reflect on the importance of people understanding what
their authentic vocation is: thus, for example, if the monk is the archetype
present in the psyche of a woman, as an image of the animus, she should know
that her path will probably lead her along the dry path of the convent, or a
substitute for it. This is, of course, an uncommon path in our days, since the
erotic experience through the body and marital relations, much more common in
the experience of Eros in women, would not be part of the nun's path. Thus,
fecundation would not come through the body, through erotic relations with a
man, through the experience of motherhood and family life, but through her
consecration to the spirit, which from above can fecundate her.
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