from OpenSETI Website

Soul Technology. Now there is a provocative juxtaposition of terms. The reader (that is, you) likely wants to know WHAT these two words are doing together like that, sharing the same period.

Before attempting to reply, I would like to place before you an article by Paul Davies (2003): ET and God - Could earthly religions survive the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe?.

Get it? God:Soul. E.T.:Technology.

Davies’ topic is grander than mine, which by comparison is a mere detail.

But Davies’ is somehow more acceptable, isn’t it? Why is this?

We will approach our subject on the level of myth, and that our modern world view is but one possible myth. People, I said...

...do not know that they have simply chosen their myth. They believe that they possess knowledge of their general cosmic situation, so far as is possible for anyone to obtain such knowledge, and that there is little point attempting to learn any more about it. People are also being taught, usually subliminally, about what is important and what is not. In fact, people’s beliefs about what is true and what is important are fed to them by society’s institutions. Thus people in their beliefs are vulnerable to manipulation at every level.

Society’s Common Approved Myth (The SCAM *) holds that there is, hypothetically, E.T., and that technology may be the means of contacting E.T. Meanwhile, for those who subscribe to this section of The SCAM, there is "God" from whom flows the Bible and all Good Things, and as a matter of fact, everything, including, inscrutably, bad things, and E.T. too. God, also inscrutably, chooses not to communicate via radio waves, although there may be an issue over Light. And that is His prerogative, being Creator, so there’s no point questioning it.

* The SCAM: Society’s Common Approved Myth.
Its scope is cosmic. Its level of detail? An exercise for the reader. But it is not necessarily a judgment of "everything you know". Note the qualifiers: common and approved.

To grasp The SCAM, one cultivates an attitude of skepticism. This is not a reference to the several "skeptics" organizations, which actually function as thought police, seeking to correct deviations from The SCAM.

It’s a pretty pickle. It’s totally outside the domain of Science, but since He created science, and us, who are we to question it? Although unscientific, it just IS.

He also neglected to mention much of anything about E.T. in His Bible. You’d think he might have, if He had created any E.T. But He didn’t. Is He telling us not to Go There?

Although science does not venture to discuss the existence of God, its creator, it nevertheless is acceptable to explore the relationship of E.T. and religion, which is about God, obviously, since Paul Davies does it and gets away with publishing his musings in The Atlantic Monthly. Davies notes that hypothetical E.T. coexists fairly well with God and His religions, but E.T. in the flesh, or whatever E.T. has, could pose a problem. Therefore he spends a good part of his article on the subject of astrobiology, which after all has a bearing on the likelihood that E.T. in the flesh will someday have to be faced.

That is the scientific side of the problem. Davies devotes the next part of his article to reviewing the familiar old theological issues: relative status of E.T. and man, multiple incarnations of Jesus Christ, could an alien be a Jew or a Muslim. These are the really important things to worry about if you subscribe to religion. And in this context he brings in the SETI Institute’s Jill Tarter with a truly heroic statement:

"God is our own invention. If we’re going to survive or turn into a long-lived technological civilization, organized religion needs to be outgrown."

That is a very brave thing for anyone to say in today’s world, and besides, it’s true.*

* Davies was quoting from Tarter’s article SETI and the Religions of Extraterrestrials, (2000), in which she applies the SETI scientific method to the subject of extraterrestrial religions. That is, she uses the Drake Equation, just this one time ("which in fact I hardly ever use"), along with her observations of Earth’s religions, to reach the following speculations:

"If and when we ever get a message, it’s going to be a missionary appeal to try to convert us all. And, on the other hand, if we get a message and it’s secular in nature, I think that says that they have no organized religion—that they’ve outgrown it."

Unfortunately Davies finds it to be naive. As he says, some sort of spirituality seems to be part of human nature, and Einstein had a "cosmic religious feeling" when contemplating the awesome majesty of the universe. Excuse me, but Tarter was speaking of God and organized religion. This, apparently, is spirituality for Davies.

The remainder of Davies’ article is concerned with the interface of science and religion - that is, evolution and Darwinism and that sort of thing. But we will leave Davies and his article at this point, because this page has other business to attend to, such as WHAT is "soul technology". Before leaving, we will just mention that the reason for bringing all this up about E.T. and God is to make the point that if it is acceptable to talk about God and SETI in the same breath, it should also be ok to discuss souls and technology.

But where do we begin, to say nothing of why should we bother?

We should bother because there are myths that raise the issue, and Open SETI tries not to rank myths. Although they haven’t made it into The SCAM, there are, for example, the psychopomps: spirits, gods, demons, or angels whose function is to escort newly-deceased souls to the afterlife. Please do check out that hyperlink, as you will be amazed to see how many mythologies had these.

So Open SETI is now inquiring into the afterlife. Very bizarre... or is it? No less than Carl Sagan (1997) suggested the same, when his character Ellie Arroway, the leading SETI scientist pursuing a provocative signal, encountered her own deceased father.

1) The souls

In a sense this needs no explanation. Souls are a feature of the religious part of The SCAM. They exist in one form or another in almost all mythologies, though not in our science myth. Invariant in all of the descriptions is the soul as a consciousness principle, separate from the body but inhabiting the body during life. In many belief systems, the soul can detach during the lifetime and travel. This occurs in our own culture and is called an out of body experience. Shamans can interact with souls, while themselves traveling in their soul body.

 

Since there are numerous instances of experience of souls, it is useful to consider them to be in some way "real". Furthermore, if there is any reality whatsoever to the soul, it could well be very real in E.T. cultures. SETI ignores this crucial possibility.

2) The psychopomps

These are beings that exist in the same "reality space" as souls do, and exert control over the souls. They also are encountered in our culture, often taking the form of "gray aliens". When encountered physically, they have a way to control the behavior and experience of the human. They also have the ability to take the human out of body. In other words, to conduct the human somewhere, as a soul.

3) The technology

Artifacts are reported. Psychopomps in all cultures are said to carry wand-like devices which, when held against a subject’s forehead, induce a paralysis of the body and a separation of the soul from it. However, aside from the specific instance of the wand-like artifact, the general ability to separate, guide, and to reconnect souls to the previous body, or connect them to different bodies, is a technology possessed by psychopomps and whatever larger group they represent.

War in Heaven and The Theocrats

Having introduced the major entities: souls, those who manipulate them, and the technology for doing so, we need to develop these concepts much further. This is as good a place as any to refer to the groundbreaking visionary work of Kyle Griffith, found in his book War in Heaven (1988).

As a physical framework, Griffith speaks of "astral matter" that has an atomic and subatomic particle structure resembling that of physical matter, but possessing much less mass than the physical counterpart. Although the mass ratios among the various astral subatomic particles is the same as that of the physical ones, all have much less absolute mass than physical electrons.

Astral subatomic particles have gravitational properties that resemble but do not interact with the gravitation of physical particles. Likewise there is astral energy that does not interact with physical systems.

There is however one very important exception to this general lack of interaction, and this actually is the basis of "the secret of life": Astral matter forms complex organic molecules just as physical matter does, and their respective chemical bonds have similar energy levels and photon frequencies associated with them. This allows for resonance and chemical bonding between physical and astral matter. It is the combined molecular system that exhibits the basic characteristics of "life", such as irritability and the ability to reproduce.

This is how astral matter and the soul, which is constructed of astral matter, become involved in the reduplication of DNA and many aspects of cell metabolism.

The bonding provides a pathway by which some of the cell’s metabolic energy can be converted into astral energy that feeds the soul, powering its various functions, and providing for regeneration of its astral matter, which is then used to perform cellular growth and repairs.

Death is caused by breaking the bonds between physical and astral matter.

The soul spoken of here is a primitive analog of the physical body. It is alive, but it is not sentient. It has a nervous system but not a mind. Griffith calls this the somatic soul. The "true" soul is the astral soul.

The astral soul is a body of astral matter linked to the somatic soul’s nervous system by the famous silver cord. This is structured like a segment of plant root with feeder roots at both ends, tapping into the two souls’ nervous systems.

Energy flowing from the body into the somatic soul and through the silver cord to the astral soul is the astral soul’s only truly efficient source of nourishment.

When the body dies, the somatic soul decomposes. The astral soul does not, but it loses its best source of energy.

A new somatic soul is created during the embryological development of every new human being.

Griffith provides a complicated discussion of various methods of reincarnation, involving ways in which the astral soul connects, and interactions with the mother’s astral soul. Although quite interesting, this is beyond the scope of our page.

What is important for us here is this: the astral soul (or spirit) normally receives its energy from the living physical body and must reincarnate within ten to fifty years in order to revitalize itself. If it does not accomplish this, it faces illness, insanity, and death.

However there are many drawbacks to reincarnation also: the chance of encountering hidden body flaws, poor earthly environments, birth traumas, and so forth.

Some spirits are unwilling to take these chances. They take a different, evil, and immoral path to replenishing themselves: cannibalism. They are able to use telepathic powers to "hypnotize" spirits who then allow them to attach their own silver cord to them, just as though they were the somatic soul of an infant. By this means they can draw out enough energy to sustain themselves, but the process destroys the other spirit.

In War in Heaven, the spirits that do this are termed Theocrats, probably because for long millennia the vehicle they have used to capture and destroy weaker spirits has been religion. The Theocrats obtain victims by posing as gods and persuading religious believers to come to them voluntarily after death thinking they are entering "eternal bliss in Heaven."

Readers who are wondering what this interesting discussion has to do with SETI, need only recall the opening paragraphs of this page. It is the SETI community itself that recognizes a need to confront concepts of "God" in their line of work. Indeed there is a need and we intend to help them to meet it.

We have reached the end of the page but the beginning of a vast topic.