Exo-Existentialism: Excerpt from Contact 11

Message from the Pleiades, V. 1, 2nd Edition

A Spiritual Manifesto by Semjase

Translated & interpreted by Ted Denmark Ph.D.

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This moderately brief excerpt from Semjase, the extraordinary Pleiadian woman “exotic visitor,” dates from April 15, 1975 as a kind of distillation of her cultural off-planet teaching regarding human development, and an encapsulated reprise of her longer and highly distinctive spiritual discourse in the celebrated Contact 10 that had been presented to Billy Meier only a couple of weeks before. This short treatise has had a highly memorable impact on me as a very concise targeted statement about a fundamental personal and human psychological issue that I have reflected on intermittently ever since because it has also been one of my own main philosophical/ psychological interests and issues to have encountered for resolution.

This is about the status and circumstances of the belief system associated with intellectual materialism that has increasingly characterized the modern era—particularly the scientific and academic worlds with the religious world, too, implicated with many contemporary people attempting to understand what spiritual truth or insight means for a world formerly reliant on religion to deliver this understanding for them. But here we see a challenge to both the ideology of scientific materialism as well as true-believer religious dogma, both of which it is said, block passageways for seekers as well as hopeful bystanders, anticipating the advent of a more progressive awareness or just some more generic “consciousness change” in our still early New Age period.

Without further introduction then, I am pleased to present her carefully worded and nuanced manifesto that pinpoints the context of one of the most camouflaged situations that most of us, particularly with the added benefits of either higher education or a religious upbringing (maybe neither!) have faced in various ways, with or without full awareness of the offerings—and their implied ambitious assumptions—this coverage has included.

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Semjase– I want to continue on now with the spiritual lesson: that of making rapid spiritual progress as a noble artist.^[1]

The person of precious spirit and gentle character is full of love, knowledge, wisdom and high-mindedness⎯this person is aware of truth, poise, beauty and spiritual progression. Such lives are well-ordered, clarified and, above all, oriented to long term perspectives. The whole mind is generous and expresses beauty well and in an unpretentious way, full of spiritual dignity. An inner calm indicates a beauty that no artist is able to paint and no poet able to fully capture in words. This spiritual tranquility exercises an attractive force that not even the most harmonious music can express. Such an assurance has no equal, and this gathering momentum has no upper limit.

The wisdom of such a person is an ever-present light, illuminating the deepest darkness. It is not like the light of day that gives way to night. It is also not like a great human thinker who fails now and then, sometimes when he is most in need of understanding. He senses the enduring presence of eternity in all things even as the fragrance of the most beautiful rose or orchid in the world fades away and disappears into this timelessness. It is completely untrue that the human being is the measure of all things since the measure and master of all things is the spirit.

Human beings here [on Earth] are very complex creatures, with differing mannerisms that hide their actual personality from others. They may well identify with their coarse-material [physical] body to satisfy its needs and make peace with their conscious reasoning capacity or even feel unity with their real being, which is eternal and imperishable, or they may do both⎯but in any event they cannot have created themselves. All the vital purposes of ordinary life, however valuable they may be in their places, are yet not able in the long run to suppress the spiritual being from emerging⎯such blocking can cause great confusion to the personality.

In the spiritually unrealized human being the material intellect with all its limitations seizes and holds the high ground, thus slowing further spiritual development. The spiritual aspect of intellect has to be consciously developed because it is not sufficient to assume that intellect will move on to its higher forms by itself alone⎯the human material intellect operates in a closed loop, a vicious circle of limited possibilities.

The materialist intellect always remains stuck at a superficial level of awareness and is not able to penetrate and become identified with a deeper level of knowledge. When one individual desires to know another person, he must identify with this other person, and so when someone desires to deeply understand any particular matter, he must also identify at a deep level. The materialist intellect accepts only the witness of the material senses and their deduced conclusions—but refuses to acknowledge the deeper subjective impulses.

A deeper search discloses something more within that goes beyond what the common consciousness has to offer, something that is the origin of all thoughts, sensations and feelings⎯a finer, spiritual presence which will always be unsatisfied with material evidence by itself. This idea that the material state of the human being is not the final state of human life, that he possesses a deeper more piercing life within his life⎯a true self—an immortal spirit, a light which can never be extinguished by anything, has always occupied spiritual thinkers across the galaxies of all times. The great spiritual thinkers in all galaxies have always risen to the unified need to recognize the essential self that is the life of the physical body.

While the physical body pulses each moment with thoughts like waves in a storm that appear and disappear again, the essential being is never submerged; it nourishes everything without exception, even though it is basically different from all its thought contents, being pure spirit. It is the fundamental origin of all feeling of identity among all the numerous alternations of thought. It hosts and plays out every type of thought while remaining always in itself unchanged and eternally unchangeable at its position of scale within the Universe. It remains unchanged amidst all the manifold of galactic activities and events within the greater Universe.

The limited personality of the human being is only occasionally conscious of self; in between are large gaps of missing consciousness. But even when death occurs for the human being, there is a realization and recognition within that the spirit cannot itself die, for as a piece-part of the Creation, it is of eternal durability. On the external or objective side of reality nothing can touch the spiritual self.

This will exist for all times as the “life within the life” but cannot be witnessed at the material level because it is pure spiritual form, but there is no need for proof with evidence for a reasoning creature because the existence of spirit is its own evidence.

Only creatures living in spiritual poverty, need to demand evidence for the existence of spirit, as in their spiritual primitiveness they are not capable of recognizing the existence of spiritual facts and circumstances. The spiritual aspect itself is the fundamental substratum of each process of knowledge and understanding, enlivening each sensory organ and each ability in the range of urges for self-development and life maintenance. The spirit, this universal self, as a result of erroneous thinking, is misunderstood to be the empirical self or personality. When the human being breaks through the veils surrounding the self, which narrow and cover it, he at once⎯in physical body⎯reaches the destination of his existence.

The inner spiritual being, the life of the life, which is infinitely at ease and forthright, forms a trinity of transcendent reality: the awareness of knowledge, the wisdom of love, and the free expression of will.

The human being is not a purely biological phenomenon. Inside is a spiritually linked psychic organism of spiritual substance and form that is charged by the inherent potentiality of full creational force. A philosophical inquiry into the psyche of the human being calls out for awareness and knowledge of the reality of cosmic consciousness, the life force of Creation, as the basis for the life of the psyche. The human being must be understood not only from the biological and mental levels but also from the psychological and spiritual ones. All and everything the human being inherits and brings with him through ten thousand lives from out of the past; everything he has enjoyed, read, learned or experienced in this or any past life, remains as a hidden recording in his subconscious.

Why then does he not master the technique of concentration, and why does he not order his subconscious to reveal its contents in order for him to make full use of it to the best of his ability? The longing for all this knowledge and these abilities, for the experiences and the wisdom, lays deeply hidden in him. He has only to recognize and accept this truth, to acknowledge her and make use of her.

For this it is only necessary to struggle with his own particular tendencies for error and to acknowledge that the materialist intellect does not express the full capacity of the human being if it does not assist in some measure the spiritual intellect.

When this happens, and the human being recognizes the fullness of his spirit, then all the abilities, knowledge, wisdom, love and peace will arise and appear to great advantage for him. Knowledge, strength, force, wisdom, liberty and love are the creational inheritance of the Absolute; they are the natural birthright of every human being. He is a center of thought, strength, force, and influence towards all and everything. He maintains a physical form, but he is not merely a physical phenomenon. The body is only an instrument and a servant of the spirit—its dwelling place but not its prison. The body is the temple of spiritual splendor, the self-sustaining inner life, the creational self. The body is the castle of the spirit who directs its every move and is the origin of all its powers. So the human being may know, he breathes the touch of spirit and not only the bodily breath.

The human being begins to know his spirit only by meditation, by inner contemplation, by deepest submerging into the most silent closets of the spiritual self that allows him to see the mirror of inner life directly.

But he is not allowed to do it in the way and manner it is offered to people by the false religions because their “meditation” has no spiritual insight—only a fantasized release of imagined desires. Real meditation of spiritual intention requires an increasing understanding of one’s own nature and being while holding before one’s eyes both facts, the other being that of the existence of the eternal reality and the truth of the universal unity of all manifestation from the stars in the heavens down to the most elemental unit of substance, from nature to the life of spirit, which are altogether as one in creational balance. In his innermost essence each human being is a manifestation of The CREATION, and for that reason alone is it possible for everyone to become united with the infinite. The deliberation about these truths of the spiritual existence of the creational generates real knowledge of a positive nature. The direct gaze at truth dismisses all objections as of little value; the realization of truth clarifies everything and makes it self-explanatory down to the finest detail.

Life on Earth is not completely satisfying for the human being since it does not offer the full range of possibility; the most real is the opposite of the material. Material life serves only as a ladder to reach a higher level, the spiritual, which differs greatly. Material life is merely the field of action, offering situations and purposes to the human being to make connections with the spiritual aspect and ultimately the Creational. It is quite erroneous to confine the field of view of life to only physically manifested phenomena, allowing its value to be determined solely by measurable dimensions. How much life is enhanced depends on how much it is lifted by the innermost livingness of the being. The patterns of human relations are justified only insofar as they do not conflict with the eternal spiritual laws of nature. Neither social welfare nor national prosperity is possible by holding back in the shadows and neglecting the essential substance.

The core truth does not belong to any particular human being because truth makes sense of life within everything that exists. Only what can be shared universally is indivisible and of sufficient infinite range and complexity to satisfy a self-identifying existential being. This is the full extent of the summation and culmination of all aspirations and ideals in life.

In this integrated spiritual conception of life is rooted the ethical basis of social and domestic relations. Society as the summation of all its individuals, is destined to eventually penetrate the veils and walk into the empire of immortal existence of The Creation itself. Human relations mean nothing unless the associated achievements of daily living apply to the life of a spiritual being, a capacity which exists in the deep interior of all existing creatures⎯unless truth is absent.

If there is no quest for truth, love for the spiritual life becomes increasingly lost, and the inclination of the human being turns more towards intellectual materialism.

Altruistic love is the expression of visible harmony with unlimited life existing across the whole Universe. When a family, society or nation becomes internally divided, then no matter what the goal of the alliance may be, such a family, society or nation will never be able to achieve success. Even the smallest element must be integrated into the larger without any division. This truth must be held continuously before the eyes of the human being during the ordinary work of his day if his activities and his thinking are to be free from selfishness and in harmony with universal currents. Life is a lesson of the spirit for the spirit. Right relations of the family and right governance of country and society are a part of the universal destiny that has groomed the whole creature with laws of disciplined fairness.

Human life exists because The Creation exists, and his or her life must become as poised and perfect as The CREATION itself. The human being lives in the creational existence and floats on it. If we are lacking in spiritual affinity⎯for what it is worth to life⎯in exchange for the urge for a more simplified practical philosophy and psychology of life, this is the main reason for the life crises experienced by human beings in all their affairs. For a long time the self-destroying modern human being has made great efforts to find peace and liberty, but hitherto all his endeavors have blown away without bearing fruit. In lacking real knowledge and truth of a sound and reasonable way of life which would give him lasting inner poise and calm, he has identified himself with unnatural ideologies and to fleeting, dangerously harmful religious philosophies, which lead him into still greater spiritual poverty, keeping him away from his own actual life.

Natural human reason indeed defends itself against that, from squaring impossible religious dogma with the circle of essential truth, especially those dogmas that flourished so abundantly in historical times, while even now in the new Age of the Water Bearer a new breed of deceptive religious leaders hold sway; so at the present time the religious delusion is still too extensively diffused to defend against in greater measure. The erroneous religious philosophies with their monstrous confusions and delusional claims lower the inner force in the human being, which would otherwise maintain and assist him to bring his striving to more of a flourish in surpassing himself and eventually enable him to reach inner growth and peace, standing in right proportion to his outer achievements and circumstances.

In answer to a long-felt need among earth people for a more truthful system of beliefs, certain thinkers have come forward and become prominent by pretentiously attempting to reinterpret the unreal and dangerous religious dogmas of the past as suitable for modern thinking, to elaborate in this way a new philosophy and psychology of life for contemporary mankind. But these pretentious and unrealistic thinkers do not realize that in so doing they merely increase the religious delusion for the ignorant, by which they themselves are imprisoned and as a consequence can only think and act out a scenario that is unreal, superstitious, mad, spiritually poor … and even murderous. Out of hand one can conclude their chances of success are null.

But the New Age human being of the Water Bearer Era avoids this problem altogether when he lays the cornerstone for truth, beginning a completely new structure of philosophical and psychological values for a most fortunate, free and peaceful spiritual life in the future. A free spiritual life is based on the best of everything in the cultural and spiritual inheritance of Earth⎯the spiritual truth. When the Earthuman finally realizes and acknowledges this truth, he releases himself completely from all religions and their delusional fantasies and directs himself to the spiritual and creational laws; then he will have finally succeeded. Religion offers no advantage for the human being any longer and will lead only to the deepest darkness …

Truth alone is serviceable and offers real progress.

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The final lingering warning here draws an immediate focus on our current Century 21 era just over fifty years after this statement was recorded. If you know some of the still controversial hidden story of the major Pleiadian role in the origins of Christianity (that are revealed in the Message from the Pleaides books), you can feel the ring of sadness and disappointment with the historical outcome of the great Age of Belief in the western countries that mostly inherited the Biblical narrative as the religious branch of its cultural mainstream. So much comes to mind on this theme it is hard to know where to go next with it (like the reformed and/or fundamentalist Christian churches now moving so overwhelmingly into the rightist political column at the quarter century mark in search of affirmation of the fading religious vision). But let us again return to the more specific primary theme of our cited message regarding intellectual or scientific materialism in the New Age of the Water Bearer, even though Semjase’s statements about the attempted resurgence of older religious dicta is also key here.

So, the main theme for someone like myself who has navigated the straits of intellectual materialism as assumed and dispensed in the academic world, becoming deeply immersed in both philosophical and psychological studies that have attempted to focus on this most critical stage of human development called “formal operations” in the standard science lexicon, believed to be the final stage of human development in Piagetian cognitive theory, the task has been that of discovering what—if anything—naturally lies beyond the corridors of success in the abstract mentality of the scientific disciplines—or any other province of overweening mundane achievement, however successfully ascended and perhaps mastered. Indeed, what in Semjase’s context is spiritual truth and how do we even begin to think about it while making our survey for it?

Of course, the vaunted success of scientific enterprise has to be one of the main motivators of this unrelenting approach to understanding the fundamentals of life and the nature of reality. But has the scientific establishment of today, a couple of centuries after the Age of Enlightenment, become stuck and habituated to its own “bottoms up” strictures of the early period, having faced a “top down” religious or clerical stranglehold on authoritative knowledge and cultural control, now after so much has changed in the fundamental understanding of the nature of reality over these centuries? Let’s take a closer look at the fine point that Semjase is so piqued to make in the heart of her statement, which is an attempt to revision spirituality in the now increasingly post-modern era of the entrapment of so many otherwise brave (and noble?) souls enmeshed in the increasingly stilted and incomplete outlook of intellectual materialism or religious recidivism in our time. She makes the point better than anyone else I have yet encountered in this key statement from the excerpt cited above:

So, this is the province of the oft proclaimed “vicious circle” of established self-fulfilling, group-based, party-line conventional wisdom, a kind of left-over hall of mirrors that screens detection of the whirlpool in the river of life that naturally occurs at the height of “materialistic realism” that will hold us in that loop or vortex until we’ve finally had enough or acquire an insight or something similar that makes us realize that we are indeed stuck and desire to move on past this illusion of finality or completion as a result of our modest knowledge base.

Perhaps surprisingly, Semjase’s direct solution is a call for meditation practice …which is not unlike that of many if not most other spiritual teachers down the ages; however, only one mention in passing is ever made of the Buddha or teachings of eastern spiritual traditions, seen as marginal (by her evidently) for western cultures of mostly Pleiadian ancestry (Europe and the Middle East, including ancient India). Interestingly, her paraphrase for meditation—which is typically seen as a pointer to eastern religious practices—is the “technique of concentration,” and here we arrive at an issue worth pondering.

One of the most distressing conditions that modern people do often describe as lacking in their stressed lives is inability to concentrate. Concentration or mental focus is indeed a somewhat undervalued capacity of coherence with outcomes going far beyond academic success. It would appear to be an aspect of mental will that is enhanced by … practice—even in something as mundane as reading. The intricacies of more fine-grained distinctions in this pursuit of clarity on this point must be left to other more detailed contexts, but if meditation is off-putting for any reason, consider the value of really being able to concentrate and what may oppose it in your lifestyle … and where that may lead. Contemplation is the next stop and serene resting place on the life progression express:

Meditation is undoubtedly of great value, but I would also note that more than a clue to finding an exit from the logical rationalist’s monotonous hall of mirrors with its deceptive whirlpool—in spite of all its successes—perhaps even before discovering the more formal practice of meditation, is also sprinkled throughout the rest of her manifesto: mainly that of allowing the advanced intellect to blend itself with an artistic vision that opens a portal for the deeper levels of intuition to emerge—hence her open call for the “noble artist.” There is much worth saying about this confluence of balancing intellect and intuition for finding an exit from this kind of “Groundhog Day” loop of recycled life experiences until you get it right after repeated efforts of head banging.

There is also much to cite or recite about this subtle subject from traditional “esoteric studies” to help the rational intellect find its way into the greater realms of cosmic consciousness via various avenues of abstract pursuits, mind games (mathematics, music, writing, etc.), near death experiences, contactee experiences, to powerful and dramatic psychedelic experiences and many others, but Semjase’s emphasis not only on artistic experience as a way to rebalance the sometimes lonely incomplete intellect, but the striking undeniable moment of self-awareness that can suddenly emerge that “I am here …” (the Gurdjieff/ Ouspensky notion having been reissued by Ram Das with his mantra of “Be Here Now”). In some ways this also harks back to Descartes’ musings while coming to the (slightly amusing) conclusion that he is a “thinking thing,” perhaps also linking up with the indisputable conclusion that one did not create oneself in this vast landscape of non-ordinary experiences that are felt to be “numinous.”

This and similar locutions cited in the narratives of many mystical traditions leads to comparison of Semjase’s framing of this apotheosis of a kind of awareness of existence as a fundamental significator of spiritual awareness, which I’m here calling Exo-Existentialism. This is the spiritual awareness of the true “self-identifying existential being” that we all will eventually experience (in this life or the next)—and that it is not just “behavior” or our brain acting out an hallucination, however exalted and worthy of awe and admiration our brain and nervous systems are—this is self-discovery or soul awareness, depending on your level of metaphysical “buy in” going forward that can be your ticket out of the whirlpool … but only when you are ready (The Creation is not in a hurry but also does not reward laziness).

There are, of course, many other traditions worth mentioning, but here Semjase’s description of the awakening moment in psychological development when the automatically supportive growth process comes to an expected and fully natural diminution, after which one must now make a new kind of genuine conscious effort to break out of the boundaries that have already begun to be breached … we could also say—in also not expecting someone to do it for us—in order to become aware that there is not only a world that one is grounded in but a new luminous world of energies that are emanating from a place that is both within and above the current vantage point. The nature of the self or soul is like the winged butterfly that must first grow to the stage of the chrysalis before it can use its increasing strength to finally break out and realize its true nature is to be free and fly.

In going to the heart of this issue Semjase’s message is expressed in a strikingly new set of extended declarations and realizations that, while seeming and being confident in perhaps an even starkly otherworldly way, are also close to some of our own earthly bellwethers and beckonings, no matter how much we might have to dust off or buff up certain offerings of those who came before in earlier generations, arriving at this threshold, and who, after making preparations and sufficient efforts, have succeeded in making the upshift (and reported back on some of the terrain to headquarters in either scientific or mythopoetic discourse).

The assured certainty of our highly-esteemed dear lady cosmonaut is that eventually we will all arrive at this upgrade stage—guided and comforted by The Creation—and be motivated to maneuver for our own unique approach to reach the experiential lift-off … hopefully without waiting too long … or maybe after first trying all the other conceivable end runs before having caught the needed booster glimpse out the window of awakening to be reassured of the nature of our own exalted reality in both the light of day and the wonder of night from our own corner of the vast cosmos with all its apparent contradictions and initial paradoxes. At our position of the pivot point of the universe, let us then choose to emerge into the world of spiritual truth as a worthy being whose essence has become self-aware as a now existential exponent committed to spiritual truth … and then move on more confidently, taking one’s unique path where it naturally leads.

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This notion of “spiritual progress as a noble artist” in the opening paragraph is a little surprising since she is not particularly involved with artists in the ordinary sense. So, “noble artist” is a kind of poetic term with intended idealistic uplift that is used, probably in contradistinction to that of the “materialist intellectual,” whom she will be addressing as critically in need of more of this attitude in the main part of her spiritual manifesto. The portrait image of Semjase was perfected by ChatGPT from a sketch by Julie Loar with additional guidance from my extended instruction set. Apologies to anyone whose understanding of “existential” is limited to “life threatening” … there’s quite a lot of interesting recent, more cogent philosophical history on this …↑