Before I get started I should mention that a lot of the material I'll be discussing tonight is very much 'research in progress', and by no means represents a complete theory or anything like that.  It basically constitutes the current state of play of various things I've been digging around in for a few years.  I should also apologise in advance for the fact that I might seem to be jumping around from subject to subject a little.  All I can say in that respect is, bear with me.  Hopefully at the end it will all make sense, or maybe you'll be just as confused as I am.

I want to begin with a definition of terms for the purposes of this piece.  By faeries, I don't just mean the wee folk we all know and love, but a whole gamut of similar entities from all cultures across the world, throughout history and up to the current era.  Whether these are different kinds of entities, or different manifestations of the same entities, is a point we shall return to.  By drugs, I refer primarily to the tryptamines, especially diamethyltryptamine - usually referred to as DMT - and psilocybin mushrooms.  Also of note are mescaline, and the LSD-type compounds such as LSD itself, morning glory and ergot, and the beta carbolines, of which the most well-known is probably ayehusca, which is known more commonly as yage and is much favoured by South American shamen.  I should also mention at this point that use of some of these substances is illegal, and so our interest in them can only be academic, though what an individual chooses to get up to in their own time is their business entirely.  By hyperspace I refer to realms that may be considered to exist beyond or outside our traditionally accepted four-dimensional perspective (where time is considered to be a fourth dimension).  Such regions are described in many mythologies across the world, and recent work in quantum theory provides models which echo them in a number of respects.  I don't really want to go into this aspect in great detail at the moment.  It shall be covered later.

Much of my thinking about these things and how they might relate came from studying the ufo phenomenon.  Ufology is a huge and myriad-tentacled beast.  When looking at it, a whole whelter of conflicting information strikes the investigator, some of it absurd, and choosing how to interpret this data is a very complex issue.  The most favoured of the current perspectives - other than assuming madness or mass delusion - seems to be the extraterrestrial hypothesis, ie that actual physical beings from other worlds are paying us visits.  The problem with these "nuts and bolts" approaches (as they are referred to in the trade) is that they do not sit neatly with the data.  This doesn't mean that we should doubt that many of those relating tales of UFO sightings and extraterrestrial encounters are describing actual incidents, but whether one reads such accounts as literal meetings with physical beings from another planet is a different matter.  Further, the evidence does not actually support it.

The UFO phenomenon is not simply one of the occasional glimpse of lights in the sky and the odd abduction.  Thousands of reports are catalogued every year.  And though the 'structured craft inhabited by humanoids abducting people' scenario is the one that most comes to mind when thinking about extraterrestrial encounters, these cases are not the norm.  Most cases are of the wyrd variety, which - perhaps understandably, considering their strangeness - get pushed aside in favour of the simpler explanation.

One famous case, which I like to repeat because it is such a good example, is that of Joe Simonton, a farmer from Wiconsin who reports that, in April 1961, he saw a silvery metallic object land in his yard.  A hatch opened and three dark-skinned figures became visible.  So far so good.  Simonton approached the object, and one of the figures handed him a bucket, indicating that he wanted it filled with water.  Simonton obliged.  He noticed that one of the figures inside was sitting by a stove.  A pile of pancakes was nearby.  The figure with the bucket picked up four of the pancakes, handed them to Simonton, and the object rose up into the air and flew off.  Many might dismiss this story completely, yet a number of other sightings in the area occured in the surrounding weeks and months, including one witness at the same time as Simonton and about a mile from Simonton's residence, who saw an object rising up into the sky.  Simonton himself is bemused and embarrased by this whole episode and wishes he'd never told anybody about it.

There are many, many other examples of ufological strangeness.  I don't really have time to detail any other cases, but reports have included bigfoot stepping out of a landed UFO, people having abduction experiences in the middle of crowded streets but none of the passers-by noticing anything untoward, dwarven entities in Nazi uniforms, talking dogs that appear and disappear, people being given information or told prophecies which are untrue or obviously blatant lies, and one extraordinary case from Kentucky in 1955 which I'll go into brief detail about, involving a farmhouse under seige by small, shiny, floating beings.  The people in the house tried to keep the entities at bay with firearms but this didn't work so they fled to the police, who came to the farm and could find nothing strange.  As soon as the police went, the entities came back, and the siege continued into the night.  The other problem with these kinds of cases is that, even allowing for hoaxes and observational errors, it is clear that something is occuring.  What it is exactly is another matter entirely.  In the case of the Kentucky siege, we cannot doubt that a whole family was very scared, and that a lot of shooting took place.  But at what exactly?

Many ufologists, particularly those who favour the ETH, tend to ignore these cases, focusing instead on the testimonies which provide support for their views.  This will not do.

The ufo phenomenon is very old.  From the Bible we have stories of strange objects in the skies, flying ships and chariots, doors opening in the heavens, and visitations from angels and other beings.  It is also worth noting that the traditional image of Angels, as winged beings with halos, was a later invention, I think from round about the 6th century AD; this description does not appear in the Bible (similarly, the depiction of faeries as small, tweely dressed winged beings was a Victorian invention, and the grey archetype that most comes to mind when people think of extraterrestrials seems to have emerged in the late 1970s / early 1980s, primarily - in my view - as a result of the film Close Encounters of The Third Kind and the Whitley Strieber books Communion, Tranformation, Breakthrough et al).  Discs, flying ships and cigar-shaped flying objects have been with us since then.  Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, writes in the 9th Century, "We have, however, seen and heard many men plunged in such great stupidity, sunk in such depths of folly, as to believe that there is a certain region, which they call Magonia, whence ships sail in the clouds..."  Agobard goes on to say that one such ship fell from the sky around 840 AD, and its occupants - three men and a woman - were stoned to death by farmers (presumably because the Magonians were also blamed for causing damage to crop fields).

Throughout the last millenium we find reports of floating cities, flying ships, metallic objects in the skies, and people being in contact with entities of one kind or another.  I don't really have time to go into individual cases; suffice to say they are a lot more common than we may be led to believe, and any decent ufo book providing a history of the phenomenon should be able to give you details.

In the 1890s, thousands of people across America reported seeing huge cigar-shaped 'airships' in the skies.  This was, of course, before the invention of aircraft and zeppelins.  There are reports also of airships landing and interacting with people, and of people being taken up in airships and being transported to odd locations and even to other planets.

Then of course we have the incident known as the Miracle of Fatima.  This story is pretty famous, but worth going into some detail about.  It began in 1915, when four girls tending sheep at Cabeco, Portugal, claim to have seen a white figure hovering in the air.  The girls say they saw the same figure twice again that summer.  In 1916 one of the girls, Lucia Abobora, was playing with some different friends when they saw what they described as "a transparent young man", who apparently said to them "Don't be afraid.  I am the Angel of Peace.  Pray with me."  Which they did.  A few weeks later the incident repeated itself, in much the same terms.  On 6 April 1917, Lucia Abobora and some friends were in a meadow outside of Fatima, Portgual, and saw what they described as a brilliant globe of light, within which was a figure wearing a white robe, with a face which "dazzled and hurt the eyes."  The figure claimed to be from heaven, and said "I come to ask you to come here for six months in succession, on the thirteenth day at this same hour.  Then I will tell you who I am, and what I want."  The children did this.  They also told their families, who refused to believe them.  Word spread, however, and to cut a very long story short, large crowds began to gather.  On October 13th, 1917 - the date the figure had specified - an estimated 70,000 people gathered and saw a large, rapidly rotating silver disc descend from the sky.  The object seemed to swiftly change colour, moving through the spectrum, passing over the crowds.  It is also worth noting that others for some miles around could also see this object.

The ufologist John Keel - from whom we shall be hearing more tonight - began to investigate the phenomenon in 1966, and charted thousands of ufo reports from the US in that year.  He found that sightings tended to occur around particular days of the week, with Wednesdays having the greatest number, tapering off through the week and over the weekend to the lowest point on Tuesdays.  He also found that the majority occurred around 8pm.  These findings were repeated in data collected from other years.  This doesn't of course mean that ufos are always out every Wednesday evening; it is a statistical trend.  Keel also noted that there seemed to be particular states which got the most reports, with neighbouring states featuring few if any.  Keel analysed all the 1890s airship reports he could find that featured dates and times and locations - which again ran into several thousand - and found the same correlations, not only in dates and times but also in the fact that many locations that featured repeatedly in airship reports were now prime UFO report sites.

Throughout human history and from virtually all continents one finds reports of people having contact with exotic beings of one kind or another.  These entities have been variously referred to as faeries, elves, manikins, sylphs, demons, angels, incubi, succubi, and a whole load of other names.  Reading such reports reveals a number of similarities with contemporary ufo reports.  Such evidence is far too weighty to do justice to here (but is extensively documented in the work of ufologists such as John Keel, and Dr Jacques Vallee, whose book Passport to Magonia was published in 1970), and includes anomalous lights and aerial phenomena including disc and other-shaped craft, abduction and transit to alien realms, missing time, bodily paralysis and trace-marks, the stealing of human babies for cross-breeding, and a host of other parallels.  All these factors, for example, can be found in Celtic faerie lore.  Joe Simonton, the farmer given the pancakes, might be comforted to know that in faerie lore the notion of people being given food by entities (which they are earnestly recommended against eating) is fairly common.  We also have the notion of 'good' and 'bad' entities (eg such as angels and devils), those that want to help us and those that want to hinder or hurt us, which we can see in the dfferent types of extraterrestrials - for example the greys, the reptilians, the nordics, the pleideans - each with their own objectives, some benevolent and some not so.  Whole mythologies have developed around these entities and their characteristics and behavior, in the same way that mythologies developed around angels, faeries et al.  One could of course argue that extraterrestrials have been visiting us for a very long time, but it would seem (to me at least) that we are dealing with either a plethora of different entity-types, cohabiting same or similar spaces, or that we are dealing with a single kind of entity or experience that manifests itself - or is manifested by us - in all manner of different ways.

We also find the following, in Angelo Rappaport's Myths and Legends of Ancient Israel'.  "Concerning 'demons': They lodge in trees, caper bushes, in gardens, vineyards, in ruined and desolate houses, and dirty places.  To go alone into such places is dangerous, and the eves of Wednesday and Saturday were considered dangerous times."

So ufos and their occupants might not be extraterrestrial at all.  It seems that this phenomenon - whatever its nature - has always been with us but adapts, or is adapted, to the cultures and myth systems in which it occurs.  To put it in incredibly simplified terms, when people lived close to the land such entities were defined as faeries and nature-spirits.  Within the dominion of Christianity they were angels and demons.  To a scientific age questioning its place in the cosmos they are extraterrestrials.  Of course, it is nowhere near as cut and dried as this, and there is a considerable degree of overlap; for example, we still get reports of people seeing angels, faeries etc.

John Keel takes this a step further, suggesting that they or it or whatever is deliberately trying to give us this impression, variously convincing us that they are in fact acts of gods, nature spirits, angels, demons, phantom airships, extraterrestrials, perhaps also ghosts and poltergeists and lake monsters and vampires and who knows what else.  I personally don't think we have the means at present to determine which of these interpretations is more correct.  Perhaps it is a bit of both.  Sometimes it seems that the only thing we can conclude about all this is that someone or something is seriously fucking around with us.

Characteristically mischievous and sometimes blatant liars, it is imperative to remember that such entities may well not be what they manifest as, or what they claim to be.  One case, for example, from France in 1954, details an entity saying to a person "What time is it?"  The person replies "Two-thirty", to which the entity answers "You lie, it is four o'clock", then flies off.  The time was actually 2.30.  The notion of trickery or deception by entities is also quite common in faerie lore.

Alleged extraterrestrials have variously claimed to be from Clarion, Tythan, Sirius, Venus, Fowser, Orion, Zeta Reticuli, Uranus, Saturn, Mars, Korendor, Maser, Jupiter, the Pleiades, Zomdic, and a whole load of other places.  Some of these are, of course, actual names given by us to other stellar bodies. I personally don't think we are dealing with different entity-types who are from all of these places.  Either the names were created in the mind of the person who had the encounter, or the entities were lying or teasing us, or a bit of both.

They also do not behave as physical objects.  Both ufos and their occupants - and, for that matter, entities from many other mythologies across the world - are seen to change shape, change size, change colour, to appear and disappear, and to move in fashions that defy our understood laws of physics.  To excuse this as advanced technology is too easy an escape route in my book.

"To put it bluntly, the UFO phenomenon does not give evidence of being extraterrestrial at all.  Instead, it appears to be interdimensional, and to manipulate realities outside of our own spacetime continuum." - Jacques Vallee, Dimensions pg136

Several options present themselves; either the source of these events is something outside of us, and can take shape however it chooses, or it stems from within the human brain, or a combination of the two.  To put it another way, 'Myths of all ages and races told the same stories, not because these stories were allegories on the cycle of crops, as Frazer claimed, but because these stories expressed the genetic programs that unconsciously govern us." (Robert Anton Wilson, The Cosmic Trigger II pg130) Though the context here is slightly different, the same notion still perhaps applies.

A lot of this material also echoes Paul Devereaux and Michael Persinger's work on earthlights, which could fill a whole talk by itself.  Even Devereux himself keeps changing his mind as to what his work in this respect actually suggests.  Suffice to say that eathlights are described as being able to flash 'on' and 'off' at will, to be visible from some angles but not from others, appear to be flat yet simultaneously have depth, react to observers, to "seem to hover on the very edge of normal physical reality" in Devereux's words, and to have a playful curiosity with humans, sometimes 'monitoring' or playing tag with them.  Devereux, Persinger, and other writers also report that proximity to earthlights can have a startling effect on the temporal lobe region of the brain, inducing altered states, and - on occasion - 'instant trips' to Magonia / Land of Summer's Twilight / belly of the mothership / (insert preferred destination).  The Ufologist Jenny Randles terms this type of experience the 'Oz Factor'.  Time loss, sensations of floating, the presence of exotic beings etc, are characteristic features of such experiences.  Laboratory experiments involving electromagnetic stimulation of the same brain regions have produced similar results, causing some to bracket these events as hallucinations.  Ufologist Albert Budden writes that propinquity to electromagnetic 'hot spots', both natural and artificial (radio-wave antennae, television transmitter masts, high-tension cables etc) can induce the same effects.  It may also be the case that individuals with a higher electromagnetic sensitivity are more prone to such experiences, which would explain why some people have them and others don't.

In this regard, John Keel - who as I mentioned has charted many American ufo reports - discovered that the vast majority are "concentrated in areas where magnetic faults or deviations exist".  How this ties in with the 'Wednesdays at 8pm' anomaly is unclear, though Keel remarks (somewhat tongue in cheek perhaps) that "if you are eager to see a genuine example of our phenomenon, pick a good Wednesday or Saturday evening, visit the highest ground in the area closest to you which has a magnetic fault, and watch the sky around 10 P.M.  The best times are the last two weeks in March and the first two weeks in April, all of July-August, the last two weeks in October, and the first weeks in November and December."

Does this mean that all entity encounters are hallucinations, caused by proximity to exotic lights or electromagnetic hot spots?  The consistency and volume of reports throughout the ages suggests that something very real is happening, whether it is an actual encounter or a set of symptoms which the brain interprets as such, filtered invariably by the reality tunnel of the participant.  In this connection it is worth noting that virtually all of the world's shamanic traditions describe access to boundless extradimensional realms, peopled by beings of one nature or another.  It is the shaman's role to enter these realms and return, bringing back the knowledge of what is found there.  Descriptions of such journeys are similar not only to tales of faerie and other lands but also to contemporary extraterrestrial reports (as is the fact that shamanic voyages are often 'for the good of the tribe', that the extradimensional dwellers can provide healing or assistance; ie, the conviction that ET / angels will come down and save you).  I want to come back to shamanism later, but for now note that this indicates a common worldwide stem to these experiences, whether within or without the mind of the participant.  If it is a hallucination it is one that anybody from any culture can tap into and share, which perhaps bends the definition of 'hallucination' into new realms entirely.  The other main thing many entity encounters have in common is that they are generally not willed, which raises the question; can these territories be made to overlap with ours, allowing instant, voluntary access?

The use of psychoactive plants in inducing altered states has been very widely documented, as has the use of such substances in inducing experiences involving contact with seemingly non-human entities / intelligences.  I refer primarily here to the tryptamines, especially diamethyltryptamine - usually referred to as DMT - and psilocybin mushrooms.  Also of note are mescaline, and the LSD-type compounds such as LSD itself, morning glory and ergot, and the beta carbolines, of which the most well-known is probably ayehusca, which is known more commonly as yage and is much favoured by South American shamen.  I should also mention at this point that use of some of these substances is illegal, and so our interest here can only be academic.  There are of course other ways of entering such realms.  One does not need psychoactive plants to do it, though these substances - if used properly - can provide some of the more instant, powerful and direct access points.  Another advantage is their bypassing of belief systems - one does not have to accept a given set of tenets and to follow certain practices in order to have the experience.

In this century the West has produced a number of cartographers of this territory.  Three of the most notable - in my view - are Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna.  All three differ in their experiments and approaches.  Of the three, it is McKenna that most concerns us tonight, but I want to talk a little about the others also.

Aldous Huxley was an extremely successful novelist who, in the 1950s, began to experiment first with mescaline and later with LSD.  He writes with great insight on these experiences in the books The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell.  The Doors Of Perception takes its name from a William Blake line - "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything will appear to man as it is, infinite" (both sources being, incidentally, where Jim Morrison got the name for The Doors from).  This is how Huxley viewed these substances - as tools for clearing away the mind's everyday filters; in Huxley's own words, "I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence" (Doors of Perception pg15), and "Things without pretentions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their suchness."  Yet for Huxley the visions this provides are approximations, glimpses of ecstatic experience but not necessarily the experience itself (though it is also worth remembering that, despite being very learned, Huxley seems to view these experiences through a very Westernised, post-Christian reality tunnel).  Huxley doesn't go into much detail in his books about entity encounters whilst partaking of these substances, the main exception being a mention of "the more than human inhabitants of these far-off regions.  Blake called them Cherubim.  And in effect that is what, no doubt, they are - the psychological originals of those beings who, in the theology of every religion, serve as intermediaries between man and the Clear Light..."  Huxley predicted that a flood of interest in ecstatic experience would occur were these substances to become widely available.  Quite how this ties in not only with an explosion of interest in and reports of entity encounters but also to the New Age, neopagan and occult boom is open to conjecture, but it is worth noting that at around the same time Jung, in his book "Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth Of Things Seen In The Skies", predicted a similar explosion, and saw the increase in UFO reports as a manifestation of this.

In my view Timothy Leary's work is interesting in a great number of respects, but perhaps the most relevant to us tonight concerns his eight-circuit model of consciousness, which postulates that the human nervous system consists of eight circuits, or "mini-brains", which have evolved over billions of years.  The first four circuits are concerned primarily with bio-survival and interaction with other organisms.  The fifth to eighth circuits, which Leary postulates as being primarily latent, are designed more for use in zero gravity, and multidimensionally, off-world, ie outside the up-down, left-right forward-backward of terrestrial use.  Leary also suggests that different psychoactive substances can activate different levels, and that substances such as LSD, DMT, psylocibin etc activate the higher levels, which might explain the other-dimensional aspect of these experiences.  Leary's view is that the human organism at its current stage of development is poised between the terrestrial and non-terrestrial circuits, and that the boom in entity experiences is a by-product of this, teething troubles in effect, side effects of a brain gearing itself up towards working as a multidimensional artefact.

Terence McKenna's work with psychedelic plants is fairly well-known, most particularly through his book Food Of The Gods.  One of the fundamental ideas of this book is that use of psilocybin mushrooms - probably accidentally at first - may have been a catalyst to the evolution of human consciousness and language by encouraging self-reflection.  In this book McKenna also suggests that the purpose of psychedelics is to facilitate "communication with the Gaian mind", to bind us with collective and planetary consciousness.

McKenna spent many years studying shamanic cultures across the world.  Shamanism, as it is perceived and practiced in the West today, is a little too fluffy for my tastes, and seems to have more to do with working off guilt than anything else.  In Food Of The Gods (pg59-60), McKenna quotes Eliade in defining shamanism as follows:  "This shamanic complex is very old; it is found, in whole or in part, among the Australians, the archaic peoples of north and south America, in the polar regions, etc.  The essential and defining element of shamanism is ecstasy - the shaman is a specialist in the sacred, able to abandon his body and undertake cosmic journeys "in the spirit" (in trance)... The supreme goal of the shaman is to abandon his body, and rise to heaven or descend into hell - not to let himself be "possessed" by his assisting spirits, by demons or the souls of the dead; the shaman's ideal is to master these spirits, not to let himself be "occupied" by them."  McKenna noted that the most commonly used facilitator of ecstasy in the cultures he studied was psychoactive plants, especially those containing psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine.  Virtually all shamanic cultures McKenna studied were still in possession of this knowledge to one degree or another.

McKenna tried these substances for himself.  Here is an account of one of his DMT experiences from 1966:  "I was appalled.  Until then I had thought that I had my ontological categories intact.  I had taken LSD before, yet this thing came upon me like a bolt from the blue.  I came down and said (and I have said it many times), "I cannot believe this; this is impossible, this is completely impossible."  There was a declension of gnosis that proved to me in a moment that right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien."

DMT seems to reveal dimensions teeming with entities, which are not necessarily entities in an actual physical sense, but more a mostly benevolent and active intelligence.  Here are a few more accounts of DMT experiences, from a number of different participants:  "I suddenly became aware of beings who were rapidly flitting about around me.  They appeared as dark stick-like beings silhouetted against a rapidly changing kaleidoscopic background."  And, "I was in a large space and saw what seemed to be thousands of entities.  They were rapidly passing something to and fro amongst themselves, as if to say, 'look what we are doing!'"  Though these entities seem mainly benevolent and keen to interact with us, to the extent that participants often have the feeling that the entities are looking forward to meeting them and are as excited about it as they are, there are some cautionary accounts, for example, "I was left with two thoughts.  First, they were waiting for me, and they were not friendly.  On the third attempt, it seemed like they could not wait for me to experiment.  In this event, I did not have actual contact but rather 'felt' them wanting to get inside my consciousness."

"The Ambience of psilocybin is different from that of LSD.  Hallucinations come easier, and so does a sense that this is not merely a lens for inspection of the personal psyche, but a communication device for getting in touch with the word of the high shamanism of Archaic antiquity."  McKenna, 'Food of The Gods' pg 243.

Despite McKenna's many forays into this territory, and his numberous encounters with its denizens - which he terms hyperdimensional machine-elves - he rarely theorises as to exactly what they may be; he suggests perhaps a Gaian mind or vegetable consciousness, or indeed an actual separate and actively intelligent other-dimensional realm but rather sensibly he makes no actual conclusions.  He writes, "I make no judgments about it.  I constantly engage it in dialogue, saying 'Well what are you?  Are you some kind of difuse consciousness that is in the ecosystem of the earth?  Are you a god or an extraterrestrial?  Show me what you know."  And, "'You say you are omniscient, omnipresent, or you say you are from Zeta Reticuli.  You're long on talk, but what can you show me?"  Magicians, people who invoke these things, have always understood that one must go into such encounters with one's wits about oneself."

This reminds me of something else I want to mention here which doesn't really seem to have been picked up on by many of those exploring the entity phenomenon - or, if it is, they don't read much significance into it - which is the obvious parallel with magick.  Indeed, if you read a book like Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger, there may even be a case for arguing that all or much magickal work is simply a working with same or similar entities or experiences.  And how many religions have been started by a person claiming to have spoken to an entity from some place or another?

To summarise briefly, the first volume of Wilson's Cosmic Trigger trilogy details a number of Wilson's experiences in the 60s and 70s, during which he had been taking a lot of LSD, exploring Illuminati conspiracies, seeing 23s everywhere, as well as performing asana and pranyama and various Crowley rituals for prolonged periods and a whole load of other stuff besides.  Wilson awoke one morning after a particular ritual and instinctively scribbled in his magickal diary, "Sirius is very important."  He researched Sirius and found that not only was Sirius important to Crowley and the AA, being identified as "the Sun behind the Sun", the Hidden God, Sophis, or Sirius, but also that July 23rd - the day on which Wilson received his "Sirius is very important" message, was the day when, according to Egyptian tradition, the occult link between Sirius and Earth is at its most powerful.  Wilson was good friends with Leary at the time, and corresponding with him in prison.  He later discovered that at the same time as his Sirius experiences, Leary himself had engaged in a number of telepathic experiments to contact other intelligences in the galaxy.  The resulting material received became known as "the Starseed Transmissions", which in effect detail that the goal of evolution is to produce nervous systems capable of communicating with interstellar intelligences, and that it is now time for humanity to leave Earth behind and venture into the stars.  So what?  You may wonder.  Channelled platitudes of love and cosmic union are ten a penny.  One of the most famous of this century, of course, being Crowley's Book Of The Law, dictated by an entity calling itself Aiwass in 1904.  Like the entity encounters described earlier, channelled material seems to be 'flavoured' by the mind of the participant, so that - whatever the source - Crowley's Book Of The Law, for example, is given an ancient Egyptian and occultist texture, the Revelation of St John a Christian apocalyptic texture, and much of the contemporary channelled material - including Leary's - a New Age and extraterrestrial texture.

Contemporary magickal practice, whatever tradition, owes an awful lot to Crowley.  Crowley's system in turn seems to have three main sources; yoga, scientific method, and western occultism, in turn derived from Rosicrucianism, gnosticism, the knights templar, through to Sufism, and possibly all the way back to Egyptian cults.  Sirius crops up again and in these connections, and Wilson details much of it in his book, so if you want the full story I'd recommend you read it.  In short Wilson eventually begins to wonder whether they are telephathic transmissions from Sirius, exteriorisations of the human brain, whether actual entities from Sirius have visited us in the past - and obviously in this regard you have the Dogon material, which perhaps also originated in ancient Egypt - and wilson concludes that he has no idea, but that to an extent it may be the process rather than the details that is important.

To return to the Leary eight circuit model for a second - which as you remember sets out a map of the human nervous system divided into eight circuits - it would seem that much of the practices regarded as occult activate neurological circuits beyond the first four, in the same way as substances such as psylocybin.  As it seems does meditation, yoga etc.  Perhaps it is merely the case that the neurological "opening up" that occurs as a result of such practices makes one more suceptible to or aware of the bigger picture, enabling things to leak through which otherwise would not be picked up on.

A 1950s ufo contactee named George Hunt Williamson also claims to have met some entities from Sirius.  Williamson repeats vast chunks of the language these entities supposedly spoke, some of it being remarkably similar to the language used by the Enochian "angels" contacted by Elizabethan occultist John Dee.

I am left wondering how much of a division there is between so-called magickal or occult entities, and the entities currently categorised as extraterrestrial or extradimensional.  Indeed until the last few hundred years it seems that there was very little division.  It is worth noting, I think, that many contactees undergo tremendous personal transformation as a result of their experiences, transformations which could even be defined as "spiritual" or "religious" in their nature.  In this whole respect, though, I think a good point to always return to is Crowley.  He speaks of "sephiroth and the paths, of spirits and conjourations, of gods, spheres, planes and many other things which may or may not exist", and goes on to write "It is immaterial whether they exist or not.  By doing certain things certain results follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophical validity to any of them."

So what exactly do we have here?  A long history of spontaneous encounters with entities in many different forms, frequently seeming to occur in or involve transit to other spatial dimensions.  And, a long history of the use of plants to facilitate travel to same or similar realms, where similar entities can be encountered.  And, a long history of magickal practice to enter altered states to communicate with and work with entities / godforms.  It strikes me sometimes that whether or not these entities are actual beings, which can only be glimpsed by a mind stripped of its filters, or are hallucinations, or are an experience or set of experiences which the brain clothes as an entity encounter, is secondary.  Something is happening; that is the key.

I want to finish by looking at certain theories which have originated over the last century or so within quantum physics, which may provide models or frameworks for understanding some of this stuff a bit better.  I'm not sure yet myself, but it certainly seems suggestive.  Before I go into this aspect, there are two important things to remember.

The first is that our brains are designed to navigate in four dimensions, where time is considered to be a fourth dimension.  To fix any point, we need four co-ordinates; height, width, depth, time.  This works fine on a day to day basis.  If one follows the view that we were designed essentially for our own survival, then perhaps glimpses of other dimensions are considered a non-necessity.  As Plato put it, we are like cave dwellers condemned to see only the dim, grey shadows of the rich life outside of our caves.  To navigate beyond four dimensions, we need tools.

The second thing to remember is that when discussing scientific ideas of hyperspace - or any other theories for that matter - we are dealing with theoretical models.  And just because a model can be proven to work in practice, or observational evidence and repeatable experiments can be gathered which supports it, this does not necessarily mean that the model is 'true', rather that the model is a good way of perceiving certain aspects of reality.

The best example of this is the map analogy.  Maps are good at some levels but not on others.  They are practical approximations of a reality, but not the reality itself.  For a map of London to be created that accurately depicted London in its entirety and rendered every detail, such a map would not only need to be the size of London itself, but also need to be re-drawn with each passing second to take account of movement and alteration through time.  Scientific models are no different (nor for that matter are any of our paradigms / belief systems).

For example, Newton's theory of gravity works fine in the everyday world of apples falling on heads and such, but in order to adequately describe massive gravitational fields, such as those around large stars or in the proximity of black holes, one must turn instead to Einstein.  Neither theory is necessarily "right" or "wrong" - both work perfectly well within the perameters they are designed to describe.

Debate has been raging amongst physicists for much of the 20th century about how to unify our theories of physics into one grand theory that can explain everything.  I won't bore you with the details, but it essentially concerns unifying our four forces of nature - the electromagnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear, and gravitational - into a single theory that explains all aspects of these theories and how they intereact.  For the purposes of tonight it isn't important to understand these forces and what they mean.  Einstein spent many year trying to come up with such a theory, but died before his work could be completed.  Others, however, have continued this work.  To put it in simplified terms, a popular theory at present is that unity in the universe may be the result of higher dimensional geometry, in which all the forces we know are the effect of vibrations within other dimensions.  Indeed, one could take this a step further and suggest that the world we know and percieve in four dimensions is in fact a shadow of a world of other dimensions.  For example, scientists spent much thought in the 19th century about how light waves could travel through a vaccum.  Since light is a wave - or rather, since light behaves as a wave - there needs to be something being waved, ie water for waterwaves, air for soundwaves etc.  Obviously, a vaccum contains nothing that can be waved, yet we have no problem seeing the light transmitted from other objects in the universe.  Scientists at the time got round this by inventing a thing they termed 'ether', which filled the vaccum and acted as the conduit for light.  However, experiments have shown that this ether does not exist.

One way of getting around this problem is through perceiving the universe as multi-dimensional.  Various theories have been put forward along these lines, one of the most recent being superstring theory, which postulates that all matter is composed of tiny, vibrating strings.  The universe predicted by this theory is a ten dimensional one; our four traditional dimensions, and a separate yet intimately connected six-dimensional universe.  In this way, light can be explained as vibrations within these other dimensions.  One of the main problems here is that, though we have models which can describe them, the technology and degree of energy required to probe these other dimensions is immense.  Similarly, since our brains have evolved to conceptualise things four-dimensionally, they are very difficult to visualise.

In 1884 a clergyman named Edwin Abbot wrote a book called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.  Though this book is part satire, aimed at those who refused to admit the possibility of dimensions other than those we can perceive, it also provides some very good analogies for viewing other dimensions.  The main character of the book is Mr Square, who lives on a two-dimensional plane.  All the other characters in the book are, incidentally, also two-dimensional geometric shapes.  Mr Square has never given much thought to dimensions beyond the two dimensions in which he lives (for the sake of this book, time is not considered a dimension).  Mr Square's life is turned upside down, however, when he encounters Lord Sphere, a three-dimensional spherical being.  From Mr Square's two dimensional perspective, when Lord Sphere enters his world he sees Lord Sphere as a circle that changes size as it moves.  Lord Sphere explains that he comes from a world called Spaceland where all things are three-dimensional.  Mr Square refuses to believe this, so Lord Sphere peels him off of his two-dimensional world and takes him to Spaceland.  Mr Square is baffled by this.  Since he only sees things as a flat plane, three dimensional objects appear to him only as cross-sections.  So objects which Lord Sphere has no problem perceiving three-dimensionally appear, from Mr Square's two-dimensional perspective to rapidly change shape and size, and to appear and disappear.  When Mr Square returns to Flatland and tries to tell the others what he has seen he is rideculed.

To try to imagine what something beyond our four dimensions might appear like to us, imagine that Mr Square from Flatland is thrown briefly into our four-dimensional world and comes across a human being, which is an example used by Michio Kaku in his book 'Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through The 10th Dimension".  In Kaku's words:  "What do we look like to Mr Square?  Because his two-dimensional eyes can only see flat slices of our world, a human being would look like a singularly ugly and frightening object.  First he might see two leather circles hovering in front of him (our shoes).  As he drifts upward, these two circles change colour and turn into cloth (our trousers).  Then these two circles coalesce into one circle (our waist) and split into three circles of cloth and change colour again (our shirt and our arms).  As he continues to float upward, these three circles of cloth merge into one smaller circle of flesh (our neck and head).  Finally, this circle of flesh turns into a mass of hair, and then abruptly disappears as Mr Square floats above our heads.  To Mr Square, these mysterious "humans" are a nightmarish, maddeningly confusing collection of constantly changing circles made of leather, cloth, flesh and hair."  We can likewise imagine if we were taken out of our four-dimensional world in whatever way, or if our brains could briefly perceive things occuring in other dimensions, it would be an intensely confusing experience.  Like Mr Square, we also might see things appear and disappear, change shape, change size, change colour, giving us a torrent of data and perceptions which our brains, not being organs designed to comprehend those dimensions, would find utterly non-sensical.  Indeed, like Mr Square returning to Flatland, anybody we tried to explain these experiences too might find us somewhat mad.