Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (54 page)

When the cosmic expedition reaches Earth (about a hundred thousand years ago), its scientists are pleased to discover that the most intelligent creature on the planet is a type of man that we call Neanderthal (after the valley in Germany where his skull was later discovered).
Neanderthal is small, and prefers to live in caves.
He is known to eat his own kind—not for food, but because he thinks he takes on the vitality of his enemy.
He has strong family feelings, and takes care of old and infirm members of the tribe.
Above all, he worships the dead, whom he buries with elaborate ritual involving woven carpets of flowers.
And, because the red clay called ochre is the colour of blood (due to iron oxide), he holds it in the same high regard as we feel for gold.
In fact, he mines it from the ground—with appropriate rituals to propitiate the mountain gods—and later reseals it with more apologies to the gods.
But, although one variety of Neanderthal hunts with the bow and arrow, he is not deeply intelligent.
His lack of organisation is revealed in his cave dwellings, which are piled high with bones and other refuse.
His brain is large—far larger than modern man’s—probably because his social life is so rich and complex; but he cannot be said to use it much.

Sixty thousand years later, the Martians pay us another routine visit.
This time, things look much more promising.
The gentle, bumbling Neanderthal has been driven out by a newcomer who is more aggressive, and, in one vital respect, more intelligent.
This is our ancestor, Cro-Magnon man, whose emergence has been so swift that the space visitors wonder if some previous expedition has been experimenting with a little genetic engineering.

What is so fascinating about this new man is that he has taken the one vital step that makes him truly human, and discovered science.
Of course, we would not call it science, but ‘magic’, for his shamans play a vital role in his hunting activities: they make drawings of bison, deer and other animals on the walls of his caves, then perform a ritual which involves dressing up in a deer skin with antlers, and leading a ritual dance.
Oddly enough, this actually works, removing a great deal of the element of chance from hunting.
(Lethbridge would say that the shaman was simply locating the prey through some form of divination; but Cro-Magnon man undoubtedly believed he was drawing the prey into an ambush, and he may have been right.) This is why the Cro-Magnon population has increased in size, and why our ancestor has displaced the Neanderthals.

We can see that what was so important was that Cro-Magnon man had developed a new attitude to life.
Animals feel helpless and vulnerable, accepting their lot and making no effort to escape it.
They are not even capable of the thought of controlling the world around them.
But this new type of man believed that his shamans had miraculous powers, and could intercede directly with the gods.
The shamans—as we would expect—had become their tribal chieftains.
So Cro-Magnon man no longer had the sheeplike acceptance of his destiny that characterised Neanderthal.
He was beginning to develop the feeling that H.
G.
Wells caught in the phrase, ‘If you don’t like your life you can change it’.

This looks so promising that the visitors begin making more frequent checks, and even offer a little occasional instruction.
(The humans, of course, regard them as gods.) But when they return about seventeen thousand years ago, and discover that civilisation is beginning to flourish, they become aware of a new problem.
These simple people are not yet ready for civilisation.
And this is due to a law that might be called the Law of Complication, which states that success brings expansion, and expansion brings complication.
When that happens, life loses its spontaneity, and becomes an endless, exhausting struggle against complication.
The same problem would later cause the downfall of the Persian and the Roman Empires.

What has almost certainly happened is that their shamans have achieved such power that small tribes have been absorbed by large ones, and ‘civilisation’ (which means literally ‘citification’) has become inevitable.
But since it is still based on religion and magic, and its leaders are not ready for such full-scale expansion, the experiment is doomed to failure.
There is evidence to suggest that, in fact, it ended with a geological catastrophe which scattered the survivors all over the world—particularly to Egypt and South America.
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The next attempt at civilisation, beginning about twelve thousand years ago, is altogether more successful.
Man rediscovered agriculture, built cities, and developed writing.
Ancient Egypt was the most successful civilisation so far, and this was largely due to its obsession with religion, as well as to its fortunate geographical position, with mountains on three sides to defend it from enemies.
It was rather like an enormous village, whose ends are connected by the Nile, and its hierarchical structure, with the pharaoh regarded as a god, and the priests as its aristocracy, created the highest level of peace and prosperity humankind has ever known.

This could not last.
Even in 2000 BC, the modern world was moving too fast for a theocracy.

At some point in history, man became a ‘left brainer’—that is, the rational part of the brain became the dominant hemisphere, relegating the intuitive part to a supporting role.
Julian Jaynes, in his book
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
(1976), has suggested a fairly precise date—around 1250 BC.
Jaynes believes that, during the tremendous wars that convulsed the Middle East after 2000 BC, human beings were forced to acquire a new ruthlessness and efficiency in order to survive.
He believes that this ‘change of mind’ came about in Mesopotamia.
Kings up to this point were regarded as gods, and carvings show them sitting on a throne beside the god.
But a carving of 1250 BC shows the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurti kneeling in front of the
empty
throne of the god.
Man is suddenly trapped in the left brain, and has lost touch with the divine.
A cuneiform text of the period contains the lines:

One who has no god, as he walks along the street

Headache envelops him like a garment.

Jaynes may or may not be correct about when it happened.
I am inclined to suspect that left-brain awareness developed slowly and inevitably with the coming of the cities.
What matters is that it always produces the same effect.
When the logical brain operates without the backup of its intuitive companion, life loses its richness, and we become subject to irritability and tension.

But that brings a certain compensation.
Since the left brain’s purpose is to ‘cope’ with everyday life and ‘scan’ it for problems, the narrower left-brain awareness permits long periods of concentration on small things.
And concentration on small things is the foundation of science and technology.
In due course, these became the foundation of modern civilisation.

But left-brain awareness has one enormous drawback.
Being limited and obsessive, it narrows the range of consciousness.
When we are happy and relaxed (that is, in a ‘right-brain’ state), we have a sense of ‘meanings beyond’ the present moment.
When we are trapped in left-brain awareness, we lose all sense of ‘meanings beyond’.
We feel that this—the present moment—is all there is.

So our cosmic visitors would have noted that the human race has entered a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac, an evolutionary dead end.
Left-brain dominance would lead to technological achievement and the ‘conquest of nature’.
But it would also lead to a vague sense of frustration and dissatisfaction, since we know instinctively that technological achievement is not the real purpose of life.

Unfortunately, our blinkered left-brain awareness can see no other purpose.
Driven on by its own momentum, it has achieved immense technological development, and the problems that go with it—overpopulation, the endless proliferation of cities, and pollution of the environment.

But these are only the symptoms.
Our visitors would be able to understand the deep, underlying problem: that, when the left brain feels there is nothing to ‘scan’, it tends to sink into a kind of hypnosis.
We call it ‘boredom’, but it is more than that.
It is a kind of judgment on the universe, a feeling that no effort is worth making.

The odd thing is that, when we are galvanised by a sense of emergency, it suddenly becomes obvious that it is perfectly easy to concentrate our energies.
Hans Keller, the former head of BBC music, once described how, in prewar Germany, when he was in danger of being arrested and sent to a concentration camp, he prayed: ‘Oh God, let me get out of Germany, and I swear I’ll never be unhappy again’.
It seemed obvious that, once this crisis was behind him, he could be happy all the time.
And Graham Greene’s ‘whiskey priest’, in
The Power and the Glory,
suddenly recognises, as he stands before a firing squad, ‘how easy it would have been to be a saint’.
Dr.
Johnson went to the heart of the matter when he said, ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully’.

Why is it so hard to keep the mind concentrated, and to live up to our good resolutions?
The problem is the basically
mechanical
nature of left-brain consciousness.
We have a kind of robot servant who does things for us: we learn to type or drive a car, painfully and consciously, then our robot takes over, and does it far more quickly and efficiently.
Because man is the most complex creature on Earth, he is forced to rely on his robot far more than other animals.
The result is that, whenever he gets tired, the robot takes over.
For the modern city dweller, most of his everyday living is done by the robot.
This is why it takes an emergency to concentrate the mind ‘wonderfully’, and why we forget so quickly.

The problem of living with permanent low-pressure consciousness is that we forget what real consciousness is like.
We all experience it in flashes, perhaps in what Abraham Maslow calls ‘peak experiences’, when we are flooded with sudden delight, or on spring mornings, when everything seems marvellously real and alive.
But we then accept it as a kind of freak.
Low-pressure consciousness seems, on the whole, more ‘normal’.
The trouble is that low pressure tends to prolong itself, because it can see no reason to do otherwise.
When you are staring blankly in front of you, thoroughly bored and discouraged, you find it very difficult to see any reason to make an effort.
It seems easier just to sit and stare.
This is why the human race is marking time at its present stage of evolution.

Religion, on the other hand, has a tradition of high-pressure consciousness.
That is why yogis sit cross-legged, focusing and concentrating the attention.
That is why monks spend hours on their knees in prayer.
That is why ascetics devote their lives to meditation.
It gives them a glimpse of higher levels of
power
which make ordinary living seem futile by comparison.

Now it seems clear that our ‘alien’ visitors have long since risen beyond the stage of evolution in which humankind finds itself trapped.
Many contactees have received the impression that they are in the presence of a more highly developed form of life.
It also seems logical to assume that, at some stage, they went through the phase in which the human race now finds itself.
If we could begin to formulate some notion of how they managed to find their way beyond it, we might begin to see our own way out of the cul-de-sac.

The answer is, I believe, more straightforward than we might assume.
In fact, it is inherent in what has been said already.
The problem with left-brain consciousness is, quite simply, that it is inclined to
leak.
When we are driven by a deep sense of purpose, our energies become focused and concentrated.
When we try to spread our attention over a dozen complications, it loses pressure, and half the energy dribbles away.
Left-brain consciousness is like a leaky pump that seldom works at more than 50 percent efficiency.

We have all noticed how, when things begin to go wrong, we experience a sinking of the heart, which is actually a sinking of inner pressure.
When this happens, things begin to get worse because a kind of feedback loop sets in.
On the other hand, we have all experienced those times when everything seems to be going right, and we have a curious certainty that they will continue to go right.
It is as if we knew that the mind somehow controls what happens to us.