Is there life out there?
That seems like a pretty good question to me. The answer, I suppose, might depend on
exactly what you mean by ‘out there.”
Are they walking across the strange landscapes of the extra-solar
planets we are now discovering by the hundreds or swimming the methane seas of
Titan?
Are there unrecognized intelligences right here amongst us,
sharing the earth? Do dolphins talk about their strange land based cousins and
laugh at our silly ways?
Or, maybe, there is another realm, close by, unknown and
unreachable to most. A place we can only
find in that strange in-between place that lives between what we see and what
we feel, a place that is not quite real and not quite imaginary, where
creativity and magic exist. Call it a
crossroads to mystical places almost always found entirely by chance.
Sir Thomas Moore called these places “Liminal Narrows” and
described them as the places in the world “that are neither here nor there,
neither up nor down, neither real nor imaginary. In these liminal narrows, a kind of life
takes place that is out of the ordinary, creative, and once in a while,
genuinely magical.”
Can it be these
places sit side-by-side with everyday reality, very close but hard to
find? Can they be populated with shadow creatures,
unknown and unknowable entities or persons such as ourselves? Again, I say almost certainly. I know because I encountered such an
intelligent creature very briefly in an altered state of consciousness, a place
anyone can reach if they know the way.
He (I am sure it was a he) was warm, beautiful and, for a brief instant
in time, my friend. I tell the tale in
chapter 12 of my book, Secret Warriors, Psychic Spies.
Intelligence exists all around us. We will find it “out there” if we only look
and if we realize they are not required to be us either in looks or thought
patterns or communication methods. If we open our minds to the possibility of
an infinite variety of intelligent life forms then, and only then, will we find
what we seek.
We are not alone.
