Exo-Existentialism: Making Contact, Becoming Recursive

& Finding Spiritual Truth

Part 2 of Continuing Reflections on Contact 11

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

by Ted Denmark, Ph.D.

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Retrospective on Existentialism

There was a time in my early academic upbringing—now more than half a century ago—when newly-minted Existentialism seemed to offer a fascinating and, for someone at that stage, quite impressively honest response to the human condition of the preceding generations, as I was just beginning to encounter it during the early stirrings of what would soon become the now legendary Sixties. This awakening was not confined to philosophy alone. It arrived in tandem with the emergence of the European cinema as a cultural force—Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, the French New Wave directors, and in Italy both Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini—especially Fellini, whose La Dolce Vita and 8½ still resonate as a kind of visual counterpart to the philosophical mood of the time: elegant, disoriented, searching, and not quite sure what had just been lost.

At Rice University, where I studied philosophy, I found myself in what might be described as a highly leveraged academic environment—populated largely by science and engineering students who were, whether they recognized it or not, in need of a more expansive cultural grounding than the southwestern Texas plains had generally provided. I had arrived there myself as something of a hybrid: an Oklahoma farm boy, having grown up in Chicago, a student inclined towards mathematics and astronomy and also interested in writing, rockets and music, but initially headed towards, I imagined, electrical engineering, only to discover—after encountering the real mathematicians and engineers—that my trajectory was going to bend elsewhere.

The decisive influence came in the form of Luis Mackey, already something of a legend in the Philosophy Department. Mackey was difficult to categorize: green summer suit, Camel cigarette with its persistent ash, and a lecture style that was less verbal presentation than performance with distinctive attitudes and looks. Through him I encountered Kant and Kierkegaard—highly sophisticated and relatively obscure respectively at that time—alongside a personal lingering Augustinian theological frame that made for an unusual but compelling synthesis.

At the same time, I found myself reading Albert Camus (thanks to a well-timed suggestion from my young wife) and later Jean-Paul Sartre—along with other figures of that early postwar intellectual surge (like Heidegger, who simply puzzled me)—and gradually entered into a philosophical understanding that encountered, perhaps more directly than any other of its time, the unsettling realization that the traditional God-centered worldview of Europe had lost its persuasive force. Did this particularly matter to me? I was largely without family religious affiliation but was later to admire, travel, study and live in Europe for an academic year. Culturally, I was acutely aware that America was largely a creation of European expansionism. What had once been a stable architecture of meaning “across the pond” had been eroding for some time, but now it appeared to have collapsed altogether. In its place stood a stark and often disquieting kind of salvaged freedom … how would that impact the perhaps far more practical, indeed overly commercialized America? At the time, this nexus felt not only philosophically compelling, but historically inevitable—we had no idea how the Sixties were going to unfold (!), nor how quickly the cultural envelope might be pushed aside once some of those same constraints gave way here.

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Descartes’ “Thinking Thing”

Looking back now, it becomes clear why the roots of this development extend further back than the mid-20th century crisis. When René Descartes concluded in the early period of Enlightenment that he must be a res cogitans—a “thinking thing” that could doubt everything except its own nature—he established what became the working foundation for modern science: the officiating mind as the undisputed arbiter of inquiry, the inventor of analytic geometry and trigonometry.

This was, in context, both decisive and necessary. It broke free from the pervasive ecclesiastical authority of the time and grounded knowledge in direct cognition, giving rise to the scientific method and its empirical extensions. But it also introduced a subtle, and perhaps unavoidable, limitation. In identifying the self primarily with the thinking process—modulated by sensory experience but fundamentally anchored in mentality—the stage was set for a form of inquiry that would examine existence from within the framework of the thinking mind itself, without fully questioning whether that framework was complete, correctly ordered, or even sufficient. Both modern science and, later, Existentialism inherited this orientation, even as they refined and extended it in quite different ways.

A Philosophy Born from Rupture

Existentialism did not arise as an academic afterthought; it emerged from one of the most devastating periods in human history—the unprecedented catastrophe of the Second World War. Europe, long considered the cultural and intellectual center of the Western world, had descended into a scale of destruction that called into question not only its institutions, but the very assumptions about human nature and progress that had undergirded them. The war represented not merely a geopolitical collapse, but a psychological and spiritual rupture of enormous proportions.

From a broader vantage point available to us now, this period may also be seen as an inflection point in a much longer historical cycle. According to the Pleiadian perspective later conveyed by Semjase, the year 1937 marked the dramatic final transition out of the Piscean epoch into what she termed the Age of the Water Bearer (Age of Aquarius). Whether or not one accepts that framing as relevant, the decade from 1937 to 1947 clearly became a watershed in modern history. The old religious certainties had lost their authority, and the scientific worldview had not yet fully integrated its deeper implications. And the human being stood, perhaps for the first time on a global scale of awareness, in a condition of existential exposure—in the now ordinary sense of threat of one’s wellbeing.

Existentialism, in the other more elaborated philosophical sense, was a response to disillusionment, the collapse of inherited meaning and especially for religious believers, the all too apparent silence of the heavens. What it offered in return was a form of existential courage: meaning must be created, not received; the individual stands responsible for his or her own choices in a universe that offers no guarantees (Mackey would have added that laziness is not a virtue). And yet—even at that time—there was a sense that something—indeed, a lot that was essential and not yet known or knowable—remained unresolved.

The Unfinished Insight

Existentialism described the condition with remarkable clarity. It named anxiety, isolation, and the burden—and opportunity—of freedom. But it did not fully resolve the dilemma it so eloquently articulated. What it did not sufficiently account for was the possibility that the very instrument that had been elevated to exclusive sovereignty—the human intellect itself—might be operating within limits that cannot be transcended by rationality alone. So, the basis for both standard science and Existentialism sprang from a similar development cross-cutting from two different directions as dual bases for intellectual materialism as the continuing foundation as the modern/ post-modern philosophical lingua franca. Of course, one need not go far to find out the main reason for this.

In a corresponding way the difficulty in moving beyond intellectual materialism does not lie primarily in the strength of its philosophical arguments, but in the psychological function it serves. The materialist framework stabilizes identity, reduces uncertainty, and preserves a sense of control—three conditions upon which the modern ego structure depends. To move beyond it is not merely to adopt a new idea, but to undergo a subtle reorganization of the self—one that can feel, at least initially, like a loss rather than a gain. Under such conditions, the intellect tends to reinforce its own assumptions, not because they are necessarily complete, but because they are psychologically sufficient. The result is a system of thought that appears self-validating from within, even as it resists the possibility of a broader frame of reference. In this sense, intellectual materialism is not simply a mistaken philosophy—it is a psychologically successful adaptation that, as I hope we will be able to see, is only a plateau rather than a final state or condition.

The Closed Loop and the Whirlpool

Here, we arrive many years later now for me at a key formulation from the Semjase material cited earlier: that the human materialist intellect operates in a closed loop—a vicious circle of limited possibilities. This is not merely a criticism—it is a diagnosis. Much of modern thought—philosophical, scientific, and psychological—can or has become caught in what might be described as a cognitive whirlpool: a self-reinforcing system—a virtual hall of mirrors—in which the intellect examines reality through its own assumptions, validates itself through its own conclusions, and refines its models without fundamentally questioning the framework within which those models arose. This is not a failure of intelligence, to bring in a key term of mentality in current discourse. On the contrary, it is the result of highly refined intelligence operating within a closed system. Existentialism, for all its brilliance, remained largely within that system—what Sartre had characterized as a philosophical No Exit.

Recursion—the Turning Point

Also at the present time now, an unexpected parallel has emerged from an entirely different domain: the digital realm of computing. Enter the slightly mysterious phenomenon of Recursion, which in its simplest sense, is a process that refers back to itself—descending step by step until a fundamental condition is reached, and then building up or forward from that base. Curiously, this is almost exactly what René Descartes intuited in his method of radical doubt: strip away everything uncertain until something indubitable remains.

For Descartes, that fundamental condition was discovery of himself as a “thinking thing.” But there is another way to complete the downward sweep of recursion that may have occurred to him but appeared of secondary consequence. Rather than stopping at the “thinking thing” notion like Descartes, one might arrive at a yet more fundamental recognition—as Semjase points out: the human being, for all his vaunted self-assurance, cannot claim to have created himself. Thus, existence precedes thought (essence for Descartes), and this more fundamental condition requires an agency of creation to have initiated the mindful awareness to be recognized or intuited. From these base conditions, awareness can begin to build again on the upsweep of recursion—not only as a self-aware reasoning entity, but as having had conclusive proof there must have been beginning conditions—a creation—for reasoning to have begun.

In this sense, recursion becomes not just a technique for computational programming at the heart of the amazing AI breakthrough that is largely attributed to it, but a model for the amplification of awareness itself. The whirlpool, seen clearly for what its limitations are, becomes a dynamic third dimensional spiral building upon itself with a firm foundation—or perhaps two … The concept of Existence in mathematics, which is usually asserted as a precursor to a conceptual demonstration, is often considered a “special category”: unlike the usual reasoning procedures used in formulating proofs. This was probably also intuited by Descartes, and so it has become in the subsequent history of mathematics. This is our legacy as well now. However, for Semjase, existence is seen as the fundamental condition for the life of intelligent consciousness or awareness, hence our new reckoning of Pleiadian philosophical thought as Exo-Existentialism.

A Note on the “Seat of Intellect”

At this point, it becomes difficult to avoid an additional question—one that has been largely assumed rather than resolved within modern scientific psychology. If the intellect is operating within a closed loop, as described earlier, and if recursion provides both the mechanism of entrapment and the possibility of escape, then what exactly is the seat of this intellectual process? The prevailing assumption has long been that abstract reasoning—the so-called “formal operations” stage identified in developmental psychology—is a function located in the brain itself. But this assumption has begun, in recent years, to show signs of strain. The fitting analogy is that of the radio or television: the program is experienced via the device but is not the device itself and also not exactly in the device—even if the device in some complex way, creates it.

As a most notable example, the work of distinguished senior neurosurgeon, psychologist and indeed philosopher, Dr. Michael Egnor has drawn attention to a series of anomalous findings that sit somewhat uneasily within a strictly materialist framework. Cases of individuals functioning at surprisingly high intellectual levels despite severe reductions in cortical volume (or even completely missing!), along with the persistent inability of brain probing and imaging techniques to find locations of abstract thought as such—only their neural correlates—suggest that the relationship between brain and intellect may not be as straightforward as generally assumed in cognitive psychology. What appears increasingly plausible is that the brain may function less as the origin of intellect than as its instrument—necessary, certainly, but not sufficient to account for the full range of abstract reasoning that is the identity we all assume for ourselves. If this is the case, then the stage of intellectual development itself—far from representing the culmination of brain-based cognition—may instead be the first clear expression of something that exceeds it.

This introduces an interesting complication. For even if the intellect is not reducible to the brain, it nevertheless appears to identify itself as such. The thinking process, having achieved a high degree of autonomy and refinement, tends to assume that it is self-generated—that its operations are entirely contained within the material substrate with which it is most routinely and obviously associated, i.e. the brain.

In this sense, the “closed loop” may be understood not simply as a structural feature of thought, but as a misidentification at the base level of recursion. The intellect refers back to itself—but begins from an incomplete premise. And it is precisely here that the possibility of a different movement and outcome emerges. For, if the base condition is reconsidered—not “I think,” but “I exist, and I did not create myself”—then the recursive structure remains, but its direction changes. What had been a self-reinforcing loop becomes an open-ended expanding spiral.

From Thinking Thing to Participating Being

At some point in my own more recent reflections, it became clear why the stances of the inherited formulations, both Cartesian and Existentialist, were not sufficient as foundations for their conclusions—if for differing reasons.

“I think, therefore I am.”
“I exist in a world without inherent meaning.”

Both contain truth, but both are incomplete. What began to emerge was something more like:

“I am aware that I exist as a rational being … but with at least one necessary additional conclusion: I did not create myself.”

This upshift does not deny individuality or responsibility. Rather, it situates the self within a broader field of being—one that includes, but is not limited to, the operations of the thinking mind. It was in attempting to articulate this shift that I arrived—initially somewhat playfully—at the term: Exo-Existentialism—that leads to a clear and appropriate fundamental offering of Pleiadian philosophy: the necessary conclusion of the existence of not only the intelligent individual self but of a necessary but unknown Creator for the Creation we see before us (we have no reason to believe that we created it either—or that it is somehow an illusion—the maya of eastern philosophies, which of course can have many different subtle meanings as well).

The Upshift Spiral

If the condition described by Existentialism can be likened to a whirlpool—an inward-turning of thought recycling its contents coming back and around—then the transition described here may be seen as the emergence of an enhanced and more forceful mentality with a new level of assurance or certainty, resulting in an heightened energy state, like a spiral—almost the way a laser gets pumped up with energy before breaking through a reflective barrier and out into a coherent beam of light. Not as an escape from existence, but as a growth or reorientation of perspective from within, having gained sufficient momentum to pass through—or beyond—the hall of mirrors into what lies beyond.

Having understood this modified logic of the fundamental principles of reasoning, the key to recursion itself, as a way to interpret the dynamic of going deeper to find a condition that must be considered reliable and then emerging with a structure of verified implication or understanding, lies in what Semjase called a spiritual will to truth—not a mere belief becoming dogma, but a disciplined openness to recognizing and accepting our process of apprehending our actual nature beyond the confines of habitual perception.

For here, truth seeking is indeed the fundamental process we have in our lives and worlds, which is a significantly higher nature—since it created us—which we term a creational “spiritual existence” that springs from the nature of the realm that precedes the self-discovery of the rational intellect. Why this situation is not acknowledged in the sequence of natural development in psychological growth is perhaps the main enigma Semjase attempts to explain in her discourse affirming that truth seeking is the fundamental process of our nature, at whatever level of physical or metaphysical awareness we are operating in or on. It is also indicated that this is true of The Creation—our awareness is also closely related to It, but here Semjase indicates that, even for them, this is still more of a mystery than certain knowledge.

Semjase and her father Ptaah, Pleiadian stellar emissaries (ChatGPT visualization of Julie Loar sketches directed by author)

So, this movement does not require abandoning the intellect, but integrating it with other capacities of what it is appropriate to call “higher mind”—concentration, contemplation, intuition, and, as Semjase suggests in her introduction, the sensibility of the “noble artist.” In this integration, the intellect is no longer trapped within its own logical constructs based on reasoning only from logic or sensory experiences; it becomes a participant in a larger process, a reflective realization of awareness that there is more to existence that the physical aspect of brain, body and physical world—indeed, it is or we are the other aspect of The Creation itself, that of a mindfulness that transcends localized space-time identity.

Transcending the Closed Loop

Looking back now, it seems clear that Existentialism was a necessary phase in the development of modern human awareness, clearing away illusion, confronting the individual with responsibilities and demanding authenticity. But it did not—and perhaps could not—complete the journey. What is now becoming possible is not a rejection of Existentialism, but its continuation. A movement from:

Isolation → Participation
Absurdity → Recognition
Closed Loop → Upward Recursion Spiral

Descartes discovered that he was a thinking thing. Existentialism concluded that the thinking thing was alone. We may now be discovering that the nature of this “thinking thing,” in addition to not being self-originating, is not limited to logic or perception of causality and is therefore not self-contained … and is also not limited to the physicality of the brain. Rather, awareness may arrive at a more exalted understanding—that it exists as a created being capable of thinking, which naturally results in a commitment to truth—called by Semjase “spiritual truth”—which she declaims as a fundamental intuition that is confirmed by realizing that the thinking thing did not create itself. What once appeared as a final condition to those like Descartes may, in fact, have been only a preliminary understanding of what so-called “thinking” is—in itself. And beyond the whirlpool, there is another dynamic—one that leads not into a trapped emptiness, but into a more expansive awareness of what it means to exist as a more fulfilled being having a radical awareness of freedom, which is the essence of true spirituality.

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What follows from this shift—historically, technologically, and cosmically—is now beginning to unfold in a greater panorama … more about this in Part 3.