Evolutionary Metaphors

This is an intriguing study of how to make sense of UFOs starting from the 'new existentialism' and a specific book by Colin Wilson on the subject. Like Jung, the author sees the phenomenon as an archetypal challenge to our cultural limitations and explanations of consciousness, challenging, like synchronicity, a sharp distinction between inside and outside by developing the higher reaches of imagination. Interpretation is key, and we have to use metaphors in this respect to achieve what William James called a more enveloping point of view. The existentialist angle comes in with the discussion of perception, will and intentionality in terms of the development of consciousness and therefore of access to deeper layers of being and knowability where we discover our ultimate non-separation. As the author observes, Kant's noumenal is 'only unknowable to one half of our perceptual systems.' And since, Ouspensky points out, we are an image of the world, it is impossible to study a system of the universe without studying ourselves, and vice versa. We easily mistake our paradigms for reality itself, forgetting that they are culturally embedded representational structures. Anomalous phenomena in general demand a different set of assumptions, as is argued in the Galileo Report. As Plotinus said in the third century, 'we are within a reality that is also within us', expressed by Whitley Strieber that consciousness is not only in us, but that we are in consciousness and in bodies designed to filter out any vision of larger reality (Bergson referred to the brain as the organ of attention to life). In this sense, an evolutionary metaphor is one that expands our consciousness and therefore advances and even transforms our knowledge.