Contact in the Desert 2017 - A Cultural Ethnography - Pt 2 "Fear & Loathing"
Joshua Tree, California is approximately 875 miles due West of Roswell, New Mexico. It is 300 miles due South of the highly classified Air Force facility, infamously known as: Area 51. The alleged events and subsequent notoriety of these two sites have almost single-handedly formed and informed modern American UFOlogy. The chronicled lore of these two sites were foundational... their broad acceptance in modern Pop culture were what made an event like Contact in the Desert 2017 possible.
Joshua Tree is also 175 due miles South of Las Vegas, Nevada. Not long ago, the infamy of “Sin City” was added to, by a very different chronicle of a wild, psychedelic, drug-fueled nature. This chronicle of High Weirdness was titled: “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream” written by the founder of Gonzo Journalism, Hunter S Thompson.
Are the events surrounding Contact in the Desert 2017, in some way synchronously linked to the events chronicled in “Fear & Loathing?” We shall see, dear reader… we shall see. Consider this…
As you recall from part one of this Ethnography… in the late spring of 2017 my attorney and personal Guru, the charismatic Agent 87 & I traveled to the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Forest, and set up a tekgnostic outpost/vending booth… booth #23… at the fifth annual Contact in the Desert. Over the course of the event, we met and networked with an amazing assortment of conference attendees. We conversed with crypto currency aficionados, new-age media marketers, cosmically connected world travelers, Bay Area rave-scene kingpins and old-school zine publishers.
The divergent thought streams present at Contact 2017, soon coalesced into an EPIC weekend of exploration of Consciousness. Although we were warmly received by most of the event-goers, we fielded some rather strange and discombobulated lines of questioning, from a few. Apparently, and to some, the idea of Tek-Gnostics was indeed quite unsettling. Over the weekend, a pattern emerged in the odd reactions of these few.
The Tek-Gnostics “branding” at Contact 2017 included our logo... the Orphic Egg, superimposed over a psychedelic moon, with a surrounding tek infused, indigo aura. The overt symbolism of this design indicates a blend of contemporary information technology with the ancient mysteries. Accompanying our logo was the legend:
“Intelligence Engineering - Psychonautics - Consciousness Hacking.”
It soon became clear that there were some at Contact 2017 who had concerns, even feared… that “intelligence engineering” was somehow akin to mind control. Perhaps the connotation was of social engineering, NLP, eugenics or some such concern. This echoed a native, dark undercurrent of fear and suspicion within the broader UFO community. This fear (& loathing) takes the form of a variety of tales of conspiracy: Operation Paperclip, Mk-Ultra, Chem-trails, Black Ops (& men in black), the governmental cover-up of the existence of extra-terrestrials, breakaway civilizations… etc.
Now a very compelling, inspirational motivation within the UFO community is what is known as “Disclosure.” This description is from the Wikipedia group-mind: “In the early 2000s, the concept of “disclosure” became increasingly popular in the UFO conspiracy community: that the government had suppressed information on alien contact and full disclosure was needed, and was pursued by activist lobbying groups.” Steven M. Greer, one of the presenters at Contact 2017 has championed this thought-stream since 1993, when he founded the Disclosure Project.
I am not a huge fan of disclosure, as it implies mediation, if not subjugation of the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligences, to governmental agencies. I am not saying that government entities don’t “know things” …rather, I intuit that the demand of a citizenry upon any government for disclosure implies compliance to an authority (and assumed competency) that governments simply do not possess. Beyond the unsavory implication of conspiracy, it is not clear that any governmental body would possess the expertise and wisdom to be an intermediary to extra-terrestrial entities.
Universe is a strange & wondrous place... and extra-terrestrial contact likely involves forays into extra-dimensional and/or psychedelic realms. Arguably, past government involvement in psychedelia demonstrates a lack of discerning expertise in this field (more on the extra-dimensional and/or psychedelic aspects, in a future installment of this Ethnography).
So there was this small contingent of event-goers who were unsettled by Tek-Gnostics. Those from this contingent who perused our book offering: The Tek-Gnostics Heresies also took issue with the notion of Technological Singularity, mentioned on the back cover. Here was a related, fear-driven undercurrent, illuminating our collective angst over an uncertain future. This angst was brilliantly represented in the TV series: the X-files “Fight the Future” myth-arc.
In part one of this series, we touched upon the New Age flavor of Contact 2017. Within the community was a robust Ascension Movement representation. After interacting with event-goers and attending such presentations as Laura Eisenhower’s “The Necessity of these Times” a clear conspiratorial distrust of the Technological Singularity and the rise of Artificial Intelligence was evident. With the ascension movement, came the conspiracy of human ascension vs AI assimilation.
Simply put, the concept suggests that the worldly powers that be… the worldly Archons and their globalist minions… are in their last gasps of power. They desperately cling to their remaining influence, as the new paradigm ascends. Within the ascension movement scenario, singularity, AI, and transhumanism are considered a ploy or trap to lure humanity. Any embrace of a man/machine merger would be a Borg-like assimilation, controlled by the globalist Archons.
The ascension movement opposes such, in favor on an organic rise in consciousness and vibration, where humanity enjoys a renaissance of spirit, in alliance with the rise of the Great Mother… the Gaian energies that are poised to supplant the failing, patriarchal paradigm. Any embrace of Archonic technologies, while alluring to some, prolong the Archon’s hold on power.
With the ultimate triumph of Gaian energies and the new paradigm, comes the resultant Breakaway Civilization conspiracy. This conspiratorial mythology is rooted in the actions of Post WWII Nazis, fleeing Europe and taking their secret technologies with them. The Nazi Rat-lines trail to South America and Antarctica, where secret Nazi bases facilitate the scientific development of off-world capabilities. Other developed countries, such as the US, Great Britain and China, following the Nazi lead, develop their own secret space programs.
Thus the theory goes… there have developed, separately or in tandem, a whole off-the-books civilization secretly propagated by the powers that be, poised to break away from planet Earth.
You see men sailing on their ego trips
Blast off on their spaceships
Million miles from reality
No care for you, no care for me
-from “So Much Trouble In The World” by Bob Marley
As the New Earth blossoms, those rascally Archons and their minions need a place to go. Secret bases on the dark side of the Moon or on Mars, or somewhere… anywhere off-world, appear to be their option of choice. Opposite a New Earth vision, this scenario carries with it an expected environmental depletion and/or catastrophe. Such is the dark vision of Archonology.
Such conspiratorial angst… be it over Disclosure, Artificial Intelligence or Breakaway Civilizations, are understandable fears in a world where, what was once considered the wildest of conspiracy theories of the 20th century, proved to be all-too-true in the 21st century. What was once science fiction of the last century has become dystopian fact, in our Brave Noö World.
Did we find a definitive link between Hunter S Thompson's book and Contact 2017? Well... not exactly. However, the dark fear mongering, the negative Fear & Loathing mind-set need not prevail.
It up to each of us to develop our own mythologies, moving forward. As we have indicated before, we need to keep all our options open. We choose the cup half full. Technologies, like philosophies, are tools… artifacts of innovation. Moving into an uncertain future where AI will apparently play a major role, the human ambition must be to provide a stewardship for Earth and a stewardship of AI. This is the Intelligence Amplified path. This is the preferred mythology of Tek-Gnostics.
We also foresee and support the rise of Gaia. We choose a mythology of Human/Planet partnership. We include our energies in and toward a New Earth Paradigm. After all, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have or want a ticket aboard any break-away spaceship. I am happy to lend a hand right here aboard Spaceship Earth.
In our next installment of Contact in the Desert 2017 - A Cultural Ethnography, we will proceed further down the proverbial rabbit hole, in search of the fascinating community and mythology surrounding modern UFOlogy. Don't touch that dial, intrepid reader!
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