-Alan Altany The Christian Sacred Absence, Ambiguity and Paradox
"This brings me to a final point, which, I hope will stimulate some debate. It that point at which, I believe science (as its is presently being practiced), and religion part company, or at least betray a different attitude towards knowledge and certainty. Religion is tolerant of mystery, of living with uncertainty and accepting doubt. Philosophers work in a long tradition, revising and illuminating perennial problems of truth, morals and conduct. Writers, artists and composers constantly add to, consolidate or transform their own traditions. Science however, particularly theoretical physics of the latter half of the twentieth century, has constantly been seeking closure. It wants to reach the most fundamental level, the ultimate equation, the "God" particle. Physics had created this final goal for itself and believes it to be an achievable end. The inability to reach such a hypothetical goal can therefore easily be viewed as a personal failure. It is true that ultimate level or explanation may indeed exist. Equally well it may not. It is entirely possible that, in a certain sense, physics could continue to dialogue with nature for the foreseeable future.'
-F David Peat
On the tangible surface of the skin of this many layered onion of ufology is our socio-cultural matrix and intangibly beneath it, are you and I, unseen in this context, and prone to the hundred fold variations of distorting signal noise, some of it arises intentionally, some is self projected deception and some of it, are the circumstantial folk tales that have disintegrated upon the examining table, signifying nothing, other than a profound sense of existential babble. From Steven Greer to Bob Lazar, the existential players upon the stage of a fluid reality, vie and bicker amongst themselves for who is the most knowledgably misinformed and deluded when compared to the others who peer into a void of meaning, value and purpose.
In the wake, or more appropriately, in the vacuum of the roaring silence left behind as an epitaph for ufology when science abdicated it's curiosity, in the face of the politics of the technological marketplace of commercial invention, not surprisingly, we find a defacto atmospheric ambivalence toward ufology.
This free falling state of common folk's interest is marked by the passing of obscuring clouds, whose conjuration by psychological operations is a dense matrix of secrecy, deceit and manipulation, inexorably imprinting its way across our obscured field of vision, reinforcing cultural self deception with an assured sleight of hand.
In the fading light of this rainy afternoon, we restlessly roam the open stalls of this intangible imprisonment within a vacuum in the hermetic bubble of the bustling midway that is book ended by the gaudy sideshows of ufological infotainment, cash at the ready in a quest to be voluntarily transfixed by our insatiable appetite for information...at this intersection of ufological communication and commerce.
The proud American traditions of commercial boosterism, hucksters and the inflated claims of advertising shtick, the closing of deals, and the self hypnotic zeal of Elmer Gantry, in a evangelical sales pitch for credit card numbers, are loudly center stage in the deafening din of this humid hothouse tent.
"But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care."
William Blake, Letter to Dr. Trusler
We slowly and discretely walk away from this blinding ritual, side stepping the jumble of props and debris behind the card table booths of this feeding frenzy, where the quiet respite under the protection of the night, wallows no invasive shill as an intermediary between ourselves and and our self entrapment within our induction into entangling ufological engigma, which in brooding hindsight we consider as perhaps one would a dusty reflecting mirror of much larger issues, that has been discarded among the sacred artifacts left in the ruins of an abandoned place of habitation
Perhaps if our sensate equations of reality require a calculation that takes into account a process of differentiation from a zero point, we see the oldest of humanities questions. And in the process of squaring this situation, perhaps if we substitute the conceptual paradox of a indescribable God, and by doing so we then substitute the symbological UFO as a key word in the following commentary and determine for ourselves how well this phenomenon that cojoins the tangible and intangible, fits the model of a reciprocal process.
Perhaps better yet, if we run a parallel program of consideration in the context of theoretical quantum physics into this ancient commentary, perhaps there is some glimmer beyond that of gilded lillies. Dr Jung and Wolfgang Pauli lean forward from their chairs.
Questioner: How do you know God?
Abu Asa'id al-Kharraz: By the fact that He is the coincidentia oppositorum. Corbin's commentary: . . . the entire universe of worlds is at once He and not-He (huwa la huwa). The God manifested in forms is at once Himself and other than Himself, for since He is manifested, He is the limited which has no limit, the visible which cannot be seen. This manifestation is neither perceptible nor verifiable by the sensory faculties; discursive reason rejects it. It is perceptible only by the Active Imagination (Hadrat al-Khayal...) at times when it dominates man's sense perceptions, in dreams or better still in the waking state (in the state characteristic of the gnostic when he departs from the consciousness of sensuous things). In short, a mystic perception (dhawq) is required. To perceive all forms as epiphanic forms (mazahir), that is, to perceive through the figures which they manifest and which are the eternal hexeities, that they are other than the Creator and nevertheless that they are He, is precisely to effect the encounter, the coincidence, between God's descent toward the creature and the creature's ascent toward the Creator. The "place" of this encounter is not outside the Creator-Creature totality, but is the area within it which corresponds specifically to the Active Imagination, in the manner of a bridge joining the two banks of a river. The crossing itself is essentially a hermeneutics of symbols, a method of understanding which transmutes sensory data and rational concepts into symbols (mazahir) by making them effect this crossing.
And so..in the stealth of this night, some faint shimmering objects trail across the demarcation of our horizon, among the stars and above the surface of our realm, effecting an encounter. We sadly make our way toward them as only to look back for a moment toward the crest of the hill to observe the carnival lights, the disjointed sounds of screams and laughter that intermittantly drift as echoes of impassioned confusion cross an Elysian field. Later, we return from our sojurn to observe the satellite trucks making their way home across the rutted roads as the diffused early light falls across the wafts of wisping smoke that waft from the grey embers of a conflaguration. Discarded gadgets and trinkets litter the ground. The abandoned tent poles snapped from their moorings have dropped their faded banners into the congealed mud. The circus has moved on. A smallish fellow with a large bag of rubbish
hails us and inquires as to what brought us us here.....I quietly mutter aloud to myself I wave back...." good question"....
