The Alien as Muse
The Integratron in the California desert is a landmark of human ingenuity.. and NHI inspiration
6 minute read
We are not alone. This idea, with its sci-fi movie trailer overtones, is inherently human. We are not along because we necessarily connect with each other, create relationships, communities and societies. We are also not alone because we are guided by the Universe, Jesus, YHWH, Krishna, etc.
And of course there’s the thought that this phrase instantly evokes: aliens, E.T.s or non-human intelligence (NHI) as they’re now more commonly called, are ‘out there’ or perhaps even ‘over here,’ living among us. That’s a provocative thought. But perhaps a more instructive one is: what if NHI is a personification of ‘higher knowledge’ - the sort that we humans already possess - to the extent that we may require a totem or muse to help us access those additional powers?
Aliens in the desert
The genesis of the Integratron - an off-beat pilgrimage site in the desert (Landers, California to be exact) - seems to reside in the aforementioned grey areas (‘grey alien’ reference intended). As the story goes — and was told on air in a 1964 interview on a local Washington state TV station, KVOS — Lockheed aeronautical engineer George Van Tassel was at a small airport he operated in Big Rock, California on August 24, 1953 when he was awakened at 2 am by a human-looking man who appeared to be about 28 years old (but said he was well over 700).
This individual brought him to its spacecraft - emphasis on brought (not to be confused with alien abduction). There, Van Tassel met three other human-like beings - each about 5’6” tall. They shared with him a mathematical formula that could unlock the secrets of anti-gravity and promote human cell regeneration, immortality and, as the afterthought-to-end-all-afterthoughts: time travel. The equation was: F (frequency) =1/T (time). The man himself likened the encounter to the stuff of fantastical religious lore:
“This thing is very similar to a thing that happened in our biblical records where a lord presented Moses with a pattern to build a tabernacle. They came out of the sky. They handed him stone tablets. And this phenomenon… isn’t anything new.. It’s something that’s being continued in another time of crisis, when conditions affecting people on this planet are reaching a point where somebody has to take care of the situation.”
-George Van Tassel (1964)
But in every time of crisis, there’s the seed of opportunity.
After Van Tassel’s strange meeting (which he described on TV with the earthy sobriety of a captain on a commercial airliner, announcing cruising altitude and flight time) he set forth on a mission of mammoth proportions. He started building a hemispheric dome that would house the tech needed to generate 50,000 volts of electrostatic energy (to support the machine’s main function: regenerating human cells).
When Van Tassel died in 1978, some say under mysterious circumstances, he had completed the 33 -foot tall, 42 foot in diameter, two-storey casing, with its 16 equilateral bays - apparently made entirely of wood (at least the interior). But the machine as a whole was incomplete and could not deliver on its world-altering promises. So Van Tassel in a sense died with his song inside him.
Though his big plan was thwarted by his own mortality (or the Deep State, depending on your p.o.v.), the structure itself - a relatively modest-looking white dome that sits in the middle of an empty desert landscape - is open to the public. The site’s new owners host curious and often eccentric visitors (like me) for tours and related sound baths which take place on the second floor of the Integratron. Its name does sound a bit like a novel Church of Scientology instrument. But its design makes it a perfect location in which to experience total and complete sound resonance (it’s a far cry from time travel, but, hey, we’ll take it).
My Integratron experience
The Integratron is both a machine and a building - and, as one of our hosts for the sound bath session noted, it acts as an amplifier. As such, on the day of my sound bath, my group was warned about excessive snoring and coughing fits - which, should they get out of control - would be grounds for asking the offending party to leave.
It was actually easy to get lost in the singing bowl tones that were played for about an hour during our session. The sound waves seemed to shoot right through me. They reverberated in particular against my forehead. It wasn’t long before I had forgotten I even had a body and felt like I was floating. Eventually this prompted me to think about death, love, people I care about who are in the final parts of their journeys here on Earth. As an aside, my spouse was apparently doing some thinking too - about gym workouts, and how to exit the building should the all-wood structure catch fire (the dome, the singing bowls, the alien lore and the desert are not a winning combination for everyone).
Eventually, in the last third of the session, I went very deep. Seemingly random, fully formed images of landscapes started appearing in my mind’s eye. My soul recognized these settings, yet I had never visited them before. They felt, warm, and comforting in their total familiarity. This wasn’t an intellectual experience so my clumsy words may fail to accurately portray what took place. The images were, in essence, a sort of visual, visceral language.
Was this some sort of alien transmission? Or just a human being, finally relinquishing the man-made technology of word-based lanaguage and (re-)discovering my true ‘native tongue?’: the ‘language’ of presence. I believe words are part of the problem. If you accept the late Leonard Shlain’s position (in his book The Alphabet versus the Goddess), each time this ancient technology was adopted by a society at some point in history, the members of that society seemed to go through some sort of radical brain transformation, and not in a good way.
As we read each distinct letter in a sentence, or word within a paragraph, separation, distinction and apartness are encoded into our brains. We also limit how we can experience ‘the thing.’ The word or phrase becomes the experience and we move further away from something ineffable, experiential and holistic - yolked together like the sonorous sum of a musical composition.
In our modern and supposedly advanced civilization we, all too often, use words to control, limit and obfuscate. A term like ‘alien’ has such a distinct and unshakable meaning and implication. At its root, it’s the proverbial ‘other’. Through pop culture we have come to associate it with little green or grey beings, conspiracy theories and tinfoil hat-wearing kooks. Aliens live somewhere far away and they’ve crash landed on our planet to terrorize us in our beds at night and/or whisper the secrets of some advanced civilization in our ears. ‘NHI’ - a zeitgeist word - expands the notion of the alien and is an improvement but still fails to capture the essence of this ‘thing.’
Certainly some words or sounds can become containers for feeling and states of being. And when we use them intentionally and minimally, and through repetition, they can summon energies. This is the jurisdiction of mantras - a topic I’ll no doubt revisit in a future post.
In conclusion, we’ll probably never know whether the individuals George Van Tassel encountered were actually extraterrestrials. His description of them frankly made them sound like humans… perhaps visiting Earth in a time machine, but I digress into sci-fi-esque possibilities. Maybe when we become obsessed over establishing the truth of alient contact, we’re missing the point. A profoundly human curiosity and inner knowledge was ignited in Van Tassel — a long forgotten magnificence — that could perhaps only be coaxed out by the most unlikely of muses.
-SC