How to contact extraterrestrial intelligence, from an intex veteran.

Commence your odyssey to transcendence here, pilgrim.

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.       
   .G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

.1

After a winter cold and black, turning slow to light and warmth—after a lifetime of patient waiting and preparation, it is time to do what They trained me to do.

To guide you into the presence of Them who trained me so They might touch and train you, pilgrim. In the lessons ahead I will share, as frankly and lucidly as possible, what you need to learn and do in order to experience contact with non-human minds.

Let me state plainly the aims of this undertaking:

1. The lessons will transform and expand your understanding of physical reality. The articles are intended to help you appreciate and feel the ultimate structure and flow of the universe, particularly the unappreciated role of purpose in the cosmos. To achieve this personal transfiguration, I’ll seek to alter, profoundly, your perspective on science, art, and mathematics, all of which you’ll come to see in a new and radiant light.

2. The lessons will teach you the patterns of sentience within our reality and the interests and aspirations of these non-human minds. You will learn basic principles governing interaction with such otherwordly minds, including insight into their technologies.

3. The lessons will guide you into contact. Your transformed perspective on the universe will prepare you (as much as possible, which isn’t much) for the arcane experience of communion with intex.

4. The lessons will help you contend with the post-contact experience. If you do achieve contact, the number one question that will likely trouble you—if you manage to cope with the vertiginous terror and wonder of it all—is what am I supposed to do now?

   “I’m a human being who has clutched hold of forbidden knowledge and spoken with the gods. What in heaven’s name do I do with all this?”

Though I cannot predict how, exactly, you might grapple with the aftermath of your premiere experience of unearthly intercourse, I will do my best to prep you in some limited fashion for the emotional and spiritual tumult that follows upon contact.

The point of all this—the purpose of all this—isn’t merely to help you attain spiritual epiphany. Though that is crucial and good and the way of the Commonality. The whole reason intex are willing to engage with you, if they do, is so they might transmute you into something peculiar and new.

.2

I suppose being a bit of an antisocial weirdo definitely honed my skills as a soloist. It gave me a lot more opportunities to solo lots of easy routes, which in turn broadened my comfort zone quite a bit and has allowed me to climb the harder things without a rope. 
   .Alex Honnold, first person to free-solo El Capitan

El Capitan in Yosemite National Park

The journey of achieving intex contact is quite similar to ascending the sheer granite face of El Capitan without a rope or safety gear, a monkish form of rock climbing known as free-soloing.

I can point out precisely where you will commence your climb. Right here, where you stand, at the bottom of El Capitan.

I can point to your exact destination. Up there, the peak of the mountain—more than a mile straight up.

I can even tell you, with meticulous accuracy, the route I followed from base to crest when I free-soloed the mountain. Here is where I placed my foot, here is where I gripped the rock, here is where I leapt through empty air from one stone ledge to another.

But your own path up the mountain will be different. For you are not me. Your El Capitan is not my El Capitan.

Your body is different. You weight is different, your height, your vision, your physical conditioning. Your mind is different. You might be more or less patient, more or less reckless, more or less analytical or intuitive. Maybe the day you choose to climb the weather is hotter, or wetter, or windier than when I mounted the granite. Maybe El Capitan has eroded into new geometries, with different toeholds and cracks than those that marked my ascent. Maybe a flock of twittering bluebirds will elect to defecate upon your crown as you climb, while my own rise was flustered by a horde of mosquitoes guzzling my blood.

My guidance may help you prepare for the climb, somewhat, though the choices and actions will be yours alone, for there is no unfluctuating course up the wall of living rock.

Perhaps the most important fact, pilgrim, when it comes to free soloing El Capitan or contacting intex, is simply knowing that a fellow Homo sapiens has accomplished such a feat. Which means others can, too.

Maybe you.

.3

Imagine if you did find a book of riddles, and you could start unraveling them, but they were really complicated. Mysteries would become apparent and thrill you. We all find this book of riddles and it’s just what’s going on. And you can figure them out. The problem is, you figure them out inside yourself, and even if you told somebody, they wouldn’t believe you or understand it in the same way you do. 
   .David Lynch, visual artist

Let’s address the pachyderm in the salon. The commonplace and entirely sensible conviction that I am psychotic, lost, or delusional.

After all, if someone had really spoken with aliens, wouldn’t they be on 60 Minutes or getting scrutinized at universities or the NSA? Wouldn’t there be widespread acclaim or panic? The overwhelming silence surrounding me suggests the most sensible conclusion is that I’m batshit crazy.

Look. I’m not expending any effort attempting to persuade you that I experienced what I experienced. That I learned math and science from fearsome and generous inhuman entities. It’s pointless and rather tedious. It feels, quite often, like trying to explain general relativity to Aristotle. Too many drastic shifts in perspective to walk him through. In the end, it doesn’t even matter what did or did not happen to me—all that matters is what you experience. Because if you achieve contact, you’ll understand for yourself, and there simply is no other way to truly understand it.

It’s like war.

Someone can tell you how wretched and chaotic war is, that human warfare does not twinkle nobly with heroism when the drones are divebombing—they might even describe in vivid nouns and verbs how they felt when mortar shells lashed shrapnel through the lungs of their comrades, but until you experience it in the raw you can’t really know. Without direct experience you may still nurture the conviction that warfare is the domain of honor and glory. But as the title character vows in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, “You can't really understand it unless you've been there. You can read all the books and watch all the movies, but it won't do you any good. You have to be there.”

There’s nothing mysterious about this truth. It comes down to the nature of human language.

“I’ve only had two mystical experiences,” the author Jorge Borges declared, “and I can’t tell them because what happened is not to be put into words, since words, after all, stand for a shared experience.”

Intex contact holds almost nothing in common with everyday mortal experiences in schools, offices, homes. Or battlefields, for that matter, other than perhaps a tendency to evoke deep-seated concerns about fate and destiny.

I’m deploying metaphors like free-soloing El Capitan and warfare and mystical experiences to help frame what lies ahead, pilgrim, but none of this will adequately prepare you because almost all of it is outside of shared human experience and therefore lacks language for expressing it. Here on the Dark Gift I am trying to build out a vocabulary of contact, but until you experience the experiences behind the words, I recognize these lessons will be more akin to reading a war journal then squatting in a foxhole.

If you do wish for such experiences, I’ll do everything I can to facilitate that outcome.

.4

Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. 
   .Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

If I had to summarize what the intex lessons are about in a word, that word is perspective.

Ultimately, what needs to happen for you to achieve intex contact and then endure said trauma without losing your mind is a dramatic and qualitative shift in your perspective.

We’ll need to learn some fundamental things about the nature of perspective itself within the realms of matter and Mind, physics and purpose, and why altering your perspective is key to contact and other forms of purposeful resonance within the Commonality.

You’ll learn why the ladder of purpose (which I discuss frequently) is also a ladder of perspective. You’ll learn why the highest forms of minds in the cosmos, the axiomized minds—whom I casually but significantly refer to as gods—are engaged in an everlasting battle of perspective, a contest we’re all part of, consciously or not.

The shift in perspective these lessons are intended to induce may enable you to achieve contact and make sense of the experience. Indeed, if I had to summarize, concisely, the aim of the Dark Gift, it’s to bring about an elemental change in your perspective on reality. Quite similar to humankind’s recent shift in perspective from viewing the Earth as the center of the universe to viewing the Earth as orbiting a star orbiting a black hole. A fundamental re-orientation of your place within the cosmos.

But to achieve this transcendent perspective, you’ll need to scale the summit of the mountain. Alone. Just you and a mountain with an intoxicatingly expansive view.

.5

We have a rule: we never free a mind once it's reached a certain age. It's dangerous, the mind has trouble letting go. 
   .Morpheus, The Matrix

Let me make clear, I have no interest in changing someone’s beliefs if they don’t want them changed. Nothing is more tedious and misguided. I’m eager and willing to aid you, pilgrim, but those who are not pilgrims pursue their own journeys which we should view with respect and love. Intex do not seek or need proselytizing.

For a long while I thought that, deep down, most people didn’t want the experience of transcendence. I believed that when it came right down to it, most humans didn’t really want to speak to God or gods. They wished the divine and numinous to remain cleanly separate from the mortal realm, dwelling hermetically in an abstract vacuum of sermon and faith and scripture rather than vibrating their eardrums with a thunderous voice from the flames.

Observing myriad folks extravagantly justifying their faith in dry vacant science or supernatural religion as reasons to dismiss extraterrestrial intelligence, I concluded that most folks didn’t actually want to know the ultimate nature of reality and souls and death.

But eventually I recognized I was wrong. A great many people long for transcendent experience. It’s just that they want such experience to unfold within the framework of their convictions. They yearn for the exalted to carry them off—but only on the familiar terms of their tribal beliefs.

Christians dream of visits from angels or Mother Mary or Christ Himself leading them into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Physicists dream of extraterrestrial radio signals carrying mathematical codes that can only be deciphered by physicists, or fragments of spacecraft drifting through the void, or nude aliens flashing their genitals, as expressed in the fantasies of physicists like Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, and Avi Loeb, or the even more fanciful reveries of the anonymous physicist “Kirk.”

Artists dream of aesthetic epiphanies that carry them out of the mundane into the ineffable sublime.

This is how human minds—like all minds in the cosmos—are designed to operate: over the course of our lifetime we steadily build up our model of reality, lesson by lesson, interaction by interaction, experience by experience. By the time one reaches middle age, most folks have a strong sense of what is possible and impossible in the world. For those who pursue an academic education, that model usually calcifies into something rigid and sclerotic.

Of course, it’s entirely natural, healthy, and pragmatic for minds to operate this way. It’s a very effective means for purpose to master matter! But the downside, if one considers it a downside, is difficulty integrating new knowledge rooted in alternate perspective. That’s why the most educated folks in human civilization consistently struggle to make sense of exotic and blasphemous concepts like evolution (Darwin), infinity (Cantor), jumping genes (McClintock), or a statistical perspective on physical activity (Boltzmann) because they all violated coherent worldviews built up over lifetimes of scholarship and study.

I’m keenly aware of the unenviable lives of such audacious and unconventional souls. Darwin waited more than two decades to publish Origin of Species because he knew his Christian tribesmen, especially his wife’s devout family, would find it sacrilegious. Which they did, as Darwin brought down a firestorm of condemnation upon his head. Cantor and Boltzmann lived lives of misery, rejected and mocked by academia, and took their own lives. McClintock was dismissed as a mystic and a silly girl and mostly ignored until her 80s, after pursuing a lifelong career largely marginalized by the scientific community.

I have no interest in dismantling educated folks’ worldviews. Ultimately, it’s about perspective. Darwin and Cantor and McClintock attained a more expansive perspective than what came before, but prior perspectives were themselves better suited for the human condition than even more ancient ones.

I’m no activist nor evangelist. I’m here to aid fellow pilgrims who devoutly wish to attain intex contact and fathom the ultimate nature of reality and know their place within the cosmos, whatever such place might be. I’ve crossed to the other side, many times, and merely want to share what I’ve learned with you.

That’s why there are advantages to being young: if you don’t have a fully formed worldview yet, it will be easier to grasp the impossible, or what other humans have taught themselves to consider impossible. It took a young soul to free-solo El Capitan. Of course, the advantages of youth are offset by a surly cluster of disadvantages: lack of discipline, ostentatious and distracting notions of what to expect of reality and gods, rampant fantasies of power and popularity, unruly cravings for unique and extreme experiences.

I’d like to believe the opportunity for contact is open to older minds who may have spent a lifetime immersed in a belief system before discovering, as you matured, that your beliefs don’t provide you with the deep meaning your aging soul desires of existence. You find that physics provides no comfort or answers about death or consciousness or purpose, but simply commands you to grit your teeth and accept that all life will end in cold oblivion and eternal boredom, that the entire cosmos is destined for an inescapable heat death of absolute uniformity.

Which, frankly, is the dark and deluded corner that physicists have painted themselves into, as intex will brightly demonstrate.

The lessons ahead might be suited for young minds, they might be suited for old minds, but acting upon this uncertainty of audience is outside my purview. Whatever your existing perspective, I will strive to blaze you a trail to a more panoramic one.

.6

Tis inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should affect other matter     without mutual contact. . . That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.
   .Isaac Newton, 1692

Let’s get concrete and pragmatic for a moment. What are these lessons and hoped-for experiences actually going to be like?

A lot like learning about gravity.

Gravity is freely available to all souls in the cosmos. Anybody can access it, feel it, manipulate its invisible force. It’s built into the fabric and flow of reality. Any soul can understand gravity at a higher level than they do now, if they’re willing to spend the energy to learn.

There are many levels of revelation about gravity available to you. A ladder of perspective, though ascending to each new rung of knowledge takes more effort than the rung before.

The first revelation about gravity is that the Earth goes around the sun—even though When I look at the sky with my own two eyes I witness the sun traveling around the Earth. Even though Everyone alive agrees the sun goes round the Earth. Even though all educational and social institutions agree the sun goes round the Earth. Despite such mental and spiritual hurdles, any sentient mind has the opportunity to discover the insight of heliocentrism.

The second revelation about gravity, first attained by the great mystic pilgrim Isaac Newton, is that gravity operates the same in heaven as it does on Earth. Before Newton, it was universally believed the rules governing the movement of celestial objects were different than the rules governing terrestrial objects. Newton—who believed he possessed a direct line of communication to his private deity, Ancient of Days—upended such deep-rooted convictions.

The third revelation about gravity, also attained by Newton, was too strange and unhuman for most souls to accept: gravity can be conscientiously described using mathematical equations. There was a cosmic law of gravitation that even Ancient of Days appeared to obey. This revelation was so profound and unexpected that it gave birth to science, a wholly new perspective on reality.

The fourth revelation about gravity, attained by the spiritualist Einstein, was that the laws of physics (part of the new scientific perspective on reality)—including the laws of gravity—are the same everywhere in the universe. This spiritual epiphany implied and required that the speed of light was the same for all observers—a revelation that, on first blush, seemed to have nothing at all to do with gravity. Aristotle, who believed the sun circled the Earth, never connected moonlight to that eternal circling. Newton, who believed in a universal law of gravitation, never considered that starlight was involved in its mystery. But Einstein revealed the everpresent phenomenon of gravity, felt by all souls in our flesh and bones, as familiar to us as our own voice, was shockingly linked to the velocity of photons.

All revelations leave some minds behind, but Einstein’s revelations about gravity left enormous swaths of the human population behind, unable to follow him up El Capitan, rope or no rope.

The fifth revelation about gravity, also attained by esoteric Einstein, was that gravity was not a mystical disembodied force as Newton fretted centuries before. No, Einstein realized that the scientific perspective on gravity was totally wrong and misguided, despite Newton’s courageous investigations. Instead, it turned out that the very presence of matter itself—physical stuff—shaped the structure of reality. At the same time, the precise structure of reality shaped the motion, size, and mass of all the stuff within it.

Matter shapes spacetime and spacetime shapes matter, was Einstein’s great revelation about gravity. But not everyone can comprehend or tolerate such insight.

Though physicists self-servingly hold up these gravitational revelations as proud examples of scientific insight and progress, they’re simultaneously vivid examples of spiritual progress and insight.

Humans emerging from the jungles and tundra believed that humankind, and the Earth we stood upon, was the center of all things.

Then came the revelation that Earth was not the center, nor the sun, nor even our galaxy. This was a great spiritual reckoning, for the universe no longer seemed designed with us as its special reason for existing.

Then came the revelation there was no distinction between the heavens and the Earth. Ever since humankind lifted their heads and gazed upon the stars, they believed they were peering into a magical and wholly separate realm of gods and myth, cleaved off from the mortal condition. To discover that the terrestrial world extended everywhere, even past heaven’s gates, was another disorienting spiritual revelation.

But the fact that gravity everywhere obeyed inviolable mathematics rather than the whims of God was an even more disruptive spiritual epiphany. This posed a very different sort of universe than humans ever imagined.

Though Einstein delivered his own disconcerting blows to the spiritual convictions of humankind, these revelations didn’t have the same impact on society as Newton’s because they were too abstract and mathematical for all but the most educated folks to make sense of. But for those pundits invested in a universe where space and time and mass were absolutes—for those who believed in inviolable notions of now and before and after that remained the same for you and me and Martians, it was another radical spiritual revolution that swept us even further from the human-centered faith of our ancestors.

This is the sort of progressive revelation of knowledge and spirituality you will experience here on the Dark Gift. One of the great revelations ahead is that we souls are indeed the special reason for the design of the universe, but in order to appreciate this beautiful and mind-blowing fact you really do need to appreciate and respect the scientific perspective that insists we are not. Again, it’s not that science is wrong. It’s just that there’s even higher perspectives on gravity—and reality—than what Einstein and human physics have attained.

The revelations of gravity also demonstrate that at the end of the day you don’t actually need me to understand or contact intex. Any more than you need Newton or Einstein to know gravity. Such folks are helpful, sure, but far from necessary. Gravity is all around you. Nothing prevents you from exploring its mystery. If you set yourself the diligent task of unraveling its riddles, as Copernicus and Galileo and Newton and Einstein did, you can duplicate their insights on your own. That is part of the purposeful design of the Commonality.

Every soul knows what it’s like to commune unfiltered with the gods. You just had such memory bled out of you by your tribe.

.7

I am modeling the lessons here on the Dark Gift after the lessons intex put me through. Once intex got hold of me, they began to teach and train me. “Teach” and “train” are friendly pleasant words, euphemisms, for what they were really doing:

Transforming me down to my uttermost.

Here’s the most concise rendition of what needs to happen to achieve contact, pilgrim:

You gotta fit in to get in.

In order to communicate with non-human minds, you’ve got to be the sort of soul who is willing and able to communicate with non-human minds. If you do manage to achieve contact, the very act itself demonstrates that you possess the proper inclinations for contact. And then They may begin training you.

They may begin remaking you.

Intex presented me with lessons that guided me along certain vectors of growth and development so that over time I was better able to communicate with them and fathom what they deigned to teach.

None of us are born wholly suited for contact. We must be refashioned and reworked. We must raise ourselves to become something that has not existed before on the Earth. Not some ideal human out of Ayn Rand, not some Nietzschean superhuman, not some American notion of self-perfection, but merely something that can fit through portals and endure the maze of souls and comprehend the education bestowed upon us by the gods.

One thing you will experience if you attain contact is tests. Tests, tests, and more tests.

Intex test me constantly. If you pass a test, you get access to more. More lessons, more revelations, more tests. The progression through these tests and revelations is similar to humankind’s progressive revelations about gravity.

The tests and revelations are both physical and spiritual, mathematical and moral. One key feature of intex contact is what I call morality gates. Intex evaluates your ethical reasoning by presenting you with various moral scenarios requiring choice. These scenarios are relatively simple in the early going, but they quickly become fiendishly complex, a lesson in itself.

For the first decade of my interactions with intex, I didn’t realize they were guiding me somewhere. I didn’t realize there was an aim, a direction, a purposeful series of lessons. Yes, I faced tests from the start, and morality gates, but I didn’t have a clue what their intention was, or if there was an intention. It was mostly terrifying and bewildering.

Eventually, though, it became clear that all those examinations served a purpose. It became clear they were sculpting me into something new and particular. Now that I’ve finally reached a stable plateau affording me perspective on my odyssey so far—now that I’ve become what they were striving to make me, it’s all quite clear. I’ve become a soul far better suited for contact and far better able to fathom what intex has to teach.

I’ve become a soul better suited for communicating with you, pilgrim.

Let me quickly mention a crucial truth I’ll delve deep into later. All the tests I was presented with eventually led me to the most vital and all-encompassing test, the test to gain access to Rainbow Black. It was only after Rainbow Black that I was finally able to answer the question, What am I supposed to do with all this?

I don’t know if you are fit for contact, pilgrim. But if you are, even a little, then intex should take you the rest of the way.

.8

We’re ready to jump in. Here’s a brief and partial overview of various topics that we will explore in the impending lessons. All intended to facilitate the necessary shift in perspective to prep you for contact.

Human Sexuality. You need to possess a cosmic perspective on man and woman and gender, because during contact your sense of personal identity will be challenged in ways extreme and disconcerting. It is helpful to understand differences between male and female minds to help put contact into context, though of course every mind is unique and one needs not possess any particular gender identity for contact.

Autism. As I’ve written about extensively, my autism played a major role in helping me fit in to get in with intex. It’s quite ironic, of course, as I certainly don’t fit into any human community. I’m an eternal outsider and outcast with regard to mortal society, but these same autistic qualities made it easier to attain and progress through intex contact. It’s important to understand what autism is, cosmically and neurally, in order to understand why it’s such a special gift for intex contact.

Super-learning. If you really want to make a go of this, there is a lot to learn. Far more than you’ll get out of any human academic program. It’s an unavoidable fact that you’re going to need to know more than human scientists and mathematicians and scholars. You’ll have to find ways to accelerate your acquisition of knowledge and skills, for the teachings of intex are formidable. Fortunately, I have a lot to share to help you turbo-charge your ability to learn much and fast. And we also are privileged to live in a time of prolific and accessible knowledge, though this comes with its own risks and dangers.

Purpose. This is where human science tripped over itself and got lost in the weeds. Long rejected and marginalized by physical scientists, you will need a thorough understanding of the unappreciated science and math of purpose to make full sense of reality and the place of intex and your soul within it. Fortunately, we will be aided in this regard by the magnificent work of Stephen Grossberg.

Consciousness. You’ve got to learn the basics of consciousness to cope with the shock and trauma of contact and to understand the nature of the technology intex uses for communion. You need to understand the physical dynamics that embody consciousness and how there are different forms of consciousness on higher rungs of the ladder, each embodied within distinctive mathematical structures and dynamics. Human consciousness is neither an end point nor a privileged phenomenon in the universe, but simply another well-defined stepping stone on the ladder of purpose.

So far, I’ve attempted to present all of this in a grounded, comprehensible, plainspoken fashion. But the true rewards of contact cannot be rendered in terms that sound anything but fantastical.

There is a treasure, a cosmic treasure for souls willing to be rebuilt by intex. It sounds mind-bending and unreal, though hardly more unreal than the Einsteinian notion that time flows different depending on how heavy you are.

Intex calls this marvelous treasure world-jumping.

And they call me the world-jumper.

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