Contact, consciousness and the mixed messages

Pasulka says consciousness is an access point.

Hold on. That is a pretty big thing to drop into a conversation.

She presents the possibility as something broadly human, rather than an ability that makes a few experiencers uniquely special. It’s her interpretation of the accounts she studies, not an established explanation of how contact works. But that’s where my mind starts going toward the psionics conversation—the idea that abilities or experiences involving the mind might matter to the phenomenon.

Because if there’s anything to that, we may be looking for the connection in the wrong place.

We spend a lot of time asking what an object can do. How does it move? Where does it come from? How does somebody get close enough to study it? Then this possibility comes along where something about awareness itself might be involved in the encounter.

That changes the picture for me. The person wouldn’t just be standing there watching the extraordinary thing. They might somehow be part of the interaction.

And suddenly those old accounts Pasulka studies become interesting in another way. Maybe the religious language tells us how people understood an experience they had no other way to describe. Maybe the way they paid attention mattered too. That’s a possibility to investigate, not a reason to assume every account points to the same process.

What I find trippy is that we already have this thing—our own awareness—that we’re using to think about the mystery. Then somebody suggests it might also be where part of the mystery happens.

It’s like, wait, I came here asking about the objects. Now I have to wonder whether the observer belongs inside the question too?

Of course, we can misinterpret experiences. Expectation, memory and the way a story gets told all matter. I don’t think those considerations make the consciousness question boring. They make it harder to untangle, which is probably why I want to spend more time with it.

If an experience feels like information arrived from somewhere, how would we work out what happened? What would distinguish an unexpected insight from a message? And if something else were involved, what would let us say anything about it beyond how the encounter felt?

That last part matters because even if we figured out that there was a channel, we would still have to ask who—or what—was on the other end. Pasulka’s next caution takes the conversation straight into that problem.

This is where I start getting stuck on the contact stories.

Some accounts are framed as loving or spiritual. Others are frightening or just incredibly strange. People come away with different beings, different explanations and different ideas about what they were supposed to learn.

Are we actually looking at different things? Or are we looking at something that keeps showing up differently?

The comparison that comes to my mind is Chris Bledsoe’s UFO of God and Whitley Strieber’s Communion. Bledsoe presents a profoundly spiritual account of his encounters; Strieber describes close encounters whose nature remains a question for him. What do we make of those very different ways of describing contact? I want to hear where the accounts overlap—and where they really don’t.

Pasulka adds something here that makes the puzzle harder: the experience feeling extraordinary doesn’t mean the information associated with it turns out to be right. She discusses accounts of messages and promised discoveries, and says the apparent accuracy people attach to them can exceed what actually follows.

So now we have another layer. Even if a person sincerely experienced something, we haven’t established that they understood it—or that an apparent sender was telling them something reliable.

There’s a moment in Star Trek V where a figure claiming to be God wants a starship, and Kirk asks, “What does God need with a starship?”

That’s the kind of pause this makes me think about. You can be standing in front of something overwhelming and still notice that the request it’s making is a little odd. The appearance doesn’t do all the explaining for it.

But what if the mixed messages are part of what’s happening? That’s the control-system possibility my mind keeps coming back to: perhaps something influences how people understand reality without ever giving humanity one clear, shared account of itself.

I’m not assuming there is one thing running that process. Multiple kinds of experiences, different interpretations, or different intelligences would create other possibilities. But if there were a deliberate pattern, why keep it this ambiguous? Enough to alter people’s lives, not enough for everybody to agree on what happened. What would that accomplish?

And if there are multiple intelligences, why would we expect them to share an intention? We barely manage that ourselves. “Non-human” doesn’t tell us whether two encounters have the same source, any more than “human” tells us that two people are on the same side.

That’s what makes the simple version of disclosure feel incomplete to me. Even if tomorrow we got an answer to “is there something else?”, we could still be left asking what it wants, what it knows, and whether the story it tells us is the same story it tells somebody else.

Honestly, that is stranger to me than another question about how fast a craft can move. The object might be hard to understand. The relationship could be harder.