"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for
the limits of the world."   -Arthur Schopenhauer

One of the most compelling parallels in these works
is the hyper-realism cinematically portrayed.  Each is
attempting to bring the viewer beyond the typical
voyeuristic experience. The filmmakers intent here
is to have a deep psychological impact on the audience.

DISTRICT 9 and THE 4TH KIND  both play with
our contemporary identifications regarding documentaries.   
Despite the POV bias of many of today’s documentarians,
a la’ Michael Moore, our cultural orientation to this
genre is:  “I am not watching a made-up fiction, but
somewhere this is actually happening.”  Seeing a doc
forces the viewer to consider the presentation as an
aspect of their everyday actual reality.  In these movies
therefore a kind of intimate relationship to the alien
experience is created. This speaks to us on a subconscious
level in helping to prepare us  emotionally for an actual
contact.

This is most certainly true for AVATAR.  
While still being a straight-forward narrative, its
3D special effects bring a level reality to this cinema-
graphic encounter, unlike anything seen before.  We are no longer watching the action out of a window
of a flat screen.  We are immersed with the
aliens in their strange world.

The NY Times reviewer of Avatar writes:  “In the past
even when seated third row center and occupying two
mental spaces, you understand that you and the movie
inhabit separate realms. Avatar,” in 3-D, by contrast,
blurs that edge, closing the space between you and the
screen even more.  You can get lost in a movie, or so it
seems, and melt into its world.”[i]  

In all 3 cases these artistic achievements produce a
strange visceral intimacy with the Other.  (A subject
to be pursued in next part of this series).   They tell us
that the possibilities of alien visitations are not out a
window in other realities, but are knocking at the door
of the world we inhabit day to day.  Perhaps something
in the rehearsing of form is preparing us to deal with a
face to face embrace one day (soon…).

 
But are we ready for public acknowledgement
of aliens and Contact?   
More than a challenge to religious dogmas that who
wish control our beliefs in higher beings –“contact”
as it has been called, will have to be faced on many fronts.
One is physically acknowledged, as discussed above,
as a sensorial integration (as in they are really here,
not imagined). That alone will change us in profound

ways. The other avenues to acceptance are: Intellectual,

social, intuitive and scientific.

Their science; their very being - will confront

everything we know to be real.  In Making Sense of

People: Coherence Mechanisms, Paul Thagard and

Ziva Kunda writes: “We propose that making sense
of people through information integration, explanation,
and analogy can all be understood in terms of cognitive
mechanisms for maximizing coherence." Above all it is
this cognitive threshold that we must cross in order to
embrace a greater reality.

Whitely Strieber speaking from his own real life

encounters says:   “The social circumstances that
will be associated with this question will be tremendously
powerful and corrosive, but also extraordinarily fertile.
They will change the human species in absolutely
fundamental ways, either driving us collectively mad
or transforming us in such a way that we can, at last,
begin to understand who and what we are and how we
relate to other life in the universe. [ii]

In our society the way to a greater truth is through an
intellectual acceptance.   We are a culture that conditions
people what to believe in - through their educational
institutions. Some may argue that all education is 
- is sociological conditioning.   With this conditioning
we can only see what we have been taught is real,

everything else is ignored or ridiculed as fabrication.   
This is not new this kind of thinking –Thucydides in 500 BC
said:  "When a man finds a conclusion agreeable,
he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it
disagreeable, he will bring against it all the  forces of
logic and reason."

History is about how ideas have changed over time.
But Western civilization is either at a breaking point
or on the  brink of transformation.  For instance:
The heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
started what historians call the "scientific revolution." 
This was based on experimentation and logic. By

upgrading the medieval view of the world with reason
it brought into question previously held truths and searched
for new answers.

Copernicus followed by the 17th and 18th centuries
Age of Reason saw a shift in collective thought from
religion to reason.  That change produced the industrials age

and our current technological progress.  Now with a better

understanding of energy fields and consciousness we
are in the midst of a similar qualitative shift that will

throw off the institutions of reason for a greater knowing

that includes an intuitive sense of who we are.

If we step out of our small mindedness we see we a

progression of realities.   Hans Beck’s Spiral Dynamics

and Ken Wilber's Integral philosophy  both  show that
the movement of memes in human society are progressive;
 going  from the self, to the family, to the tribe or community,
to the feudal  state authority (which go along with an
imperial domination),  to world unity.   Wilber feels that
with this integral perspective he has achieved “the theory
of everything” as he found of saying.  Yet when I confronted
Wilber at a New York talk about the possibility that
consciousness could exits beyond the earth, such an
idea was basically publicly ridiculed.

William James  said at the turn of the 20^th century:
"...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena
so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement
of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to
abuse those who bear witness for them."

In Making Sense of People: Coherence Mechanisms,
Paul Thagard and Ziva Kunda, say that:  “Central to
such leaps is a change of mindset, a widening of the
collective view to encompass these wider values and
options. Many society members will resist this
however, trying to remain with what is familiar,
and will do so even if the 'new era' ultimately prevails.”

Nevertheless by achieving the level of terrestrial
unity as a global village the next level looms ominously
on the event horizon:  “Becoming citizens of the Stars.”

When contact is finally made I agree with Strieber
when he says that: “We will begin what is the greatest
of all journeys for any species, which is the journey
into a real relationship with the cosmos. [iii]

We must realize we are galactic in nature and
our science is now more than ever before confirming that.
 We can see this if we look at the pattern of evolutionary
developed laid out by theoretical biologist Bruce Lipton
we see that the only natural extension for evolution is
towards embracing extra terrestrial life.

Lipton outlining his fractal theory says we go from the one,
the single unit to a group of units:   “According to this
pattern, when the cohesive functional unit like the single
cell “was complete in its evolution, its next phase was to
hook up with other cells to form a greater multi-cellular
organism.  When humans are complete in their evolution
as individuals [they ] form communities.  So when the
earth completes its evolution coming together as humanity,
with a single voice it will allow us to speak as a one. And
that will allow us to speak with other Ones.” [iv]

Dim lights

Emilie Conrad with Continuum and Nassim Harramein
with The Resonance Project, are two people that inform
us that we are already galactic beings with the spin and
movement of the galaxy embedded into our consciousness
and our fluid biology.  We must come to know that we are
just as much of the Milky Way as we are of the Earth; the
same as we are Americans not just New Yorkers.  It is a
matter of our orientation to a greater identity.

-Robert Muller, A Planet of Hope acknowledges: 
“By far the greatest contribution to peace an individual
can make is to become a global, universal, and cosmic being." 

Collective as a graduating class awakening to a larger
self we can see that this is more advantageous to our
overall survival; in activating our greater potential and
create a more compassionate way of sharing who we and
what we got with each other.   This greater identity is a
new kind of thinking that will bring unknown changes to
the masses and create new realities.

Part 4 to follow…