Expanding Our Picture of Reality

 

 Talk about fundamental reality may seem distant and abstract—in philosophy, it’s called ontology.  Butsuch questions have practical implications for how we understand ourselves, our values and beliefs. One of the key questions. What is fundamental to a human being, mind or body? The correct answer is important. 

Another big question is being asked today: Are we alone? Or are we being visited by intelligent, extraterrestrial beings?  In April, 2026, President Trump put his stamp on the Disclosure Act meant to release all UFO-related unredacted information to the inquisitive American public. 

So, two questions—what is basic, the mental or the physical, and: do we have company from outer space, nonhuman intelligent beings?

            The U.S. government has for eighty years striven to conceal the truth about UFOs, now called UAP, unidentified anomalous phenomena. Whistleblowers have revealed that American and other scientists have attempted to reverse engineer crashed space vehicles, in hopes of discovering the operating forces and mechanisms of the craft. Given that the pilots and their vehicles are most likely thousands or even millions of years older than us and therefore more evolved, I’m not optimistic about the reverse engineering.  I understand keeping it all a secret.  Since UFOs are global phenomena, we can be sure other countries are trying to learn what they can about UFO technology. Our government wants to keep the UFO secret in hopes of achieving techno-superiority over our rivals and enemies.

 But we have other things to learn from our alien visitors.  Hopefully, we might learn something about peace, harmony, love, justice, and so on.  To explore a more amicable perspective on alien encounters, read the books by the late American psychiatrist, John Mack, who had a genius for listening to people who had alien abduction experiences.

            How does the alien-human interaction connect with religion?  If ETs have been interacting with planet Earth and its inhabitants, the myths of religion may contain signs of ET influence and visitation, for example, Old Testament prophets, Catholic saints and Marian visions. The humanoid beings display powers over material reality that are shocking. The current alien superman doesn’t look like Clark Kent, but more like a thin dwarf with huge head and bulging eyes. There is also an uncanny connection to reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary.

I’m forced to ask a weird question. Is there an out of world technology engineering visionary experiences of the Virgin Mary? Have the various Fatima prodigies been products of an unknown UFO technology?  

Let’s look at the other big question dealing with ontology. When we think about it, we are a curious compound of mind and body, one visible, the other invisible.  A question comes up, which of these is fundamental, the ultimate cause?  Body or mind? And what is the relationship between the two contenders?

Some people (materialists) say that the brain (matter) is fundamental, our mental life a byproduct of our brain.  But nobody has ever been able to explain how the brain produces the  thing we know to be our consciousness; more likely, what the brain does is not create, but transmit, our mental life, like a radio transmits music, news, voices, words. The radio creates nothing; the voices, the music, the bad news are coming from elsewhere. So, our consciousness seems grounded in what’s been called cosmic consciousness.  (If you want to know what that feels like, read Leaves of Grass by the poet Walt Whitman.)

Our consciousness is fundamental, irreducible, and reveals our world to us continuously. The question is, what are the limits of our conscious world? Well, from an everyday embodied perspective, my conscious world is shaped by my bodily sensations, along with thoughts, feelings, desires, memories, imaginings, etc. My conscious world includes, to be accurate, my dreams, and more rarely, visions and various altered states. 

But something is missing.  And that brings us to the second item in the expansion of our ontological perspective. The world of consciousness we experience is the complement of our embodied life. The next step in ontological expansion is for consciousness to disentangle itself from physical existence. So, what happens to our consciousness when we die? Normally, we don’t know.  But now thanks to science, we may have a way to crack this perennial mystery.  

 Modern technology of resuscitation seems unwittingly to have set into motion a revolution in after-death research. We already have survival evidence from mediumship, apparitions, deathbed phenomena, hauntings, and so forth.  But thanks to the ability to bring people back to life who have died, we now have a reliable portal for gaining knowledge about the next world.  There is a swelling body of data based on the near-death experiences of people everywhere on the planet.  With no heart or lungs working, the brain functionally dead, people report having the most extraordinary experiences of their lives.

The person whose heart and respiration ceases suddenly finds himself out of his body, hovering above and observing his dead body as a team of nurses frantically try to resuscitate him. He observes his body without feelings of concern or partiality, and soon turns away and enters the various near-death events, meeting a guide or a god, meeting loved ones who had passed, witnessing his life in review, marked by empathy and self-knowledge. From the vast reportage of experiencers, it is clear that when a person dies, and the physics (heart) of life breaks down, the mental reality of life emerges into self-awareness.  The afterlife world is a non-stop out-of-body experience. That’s what the near-death phenomenon is telling us.

So, in sum, the twofold expansion in our picture of reality. First, we are interacting with nonhuman intelligences, highly evolved beings from somewhere in the universe; second, our mental life is rooted in a deep mental universe. When our body dies, we apparently enter a purely mental universe.   We are forcibly drawn out of 3-d space into the space of out-of-body existence. This we call the ‘next’ world.  

 My view is that there is a 3-D physical universe, dating from 3.7 billion years ago. But invisible and intersecting with the 3-D universe, is a psychospiritual universe. So, we are attuned to a physical and a mental universe.  Dying entails full transition into the mental universe. The picture of this mental universe is becoming clearer as the global input of near-death and related data increases.

I suspect that interest in ways of entering the mental universe without being literally near death will grow. Yogis, shamans, mystics, and saints have devised methods designed to induce entry into the spiritual universe.  What the data points to is no small thing, our world a scene of cosmic visitations and our world as a platform for entry into an afterlife existence.  Our view of reality is in the midst of a dramatic, twofold expansion.