Apart from those who live in the generally agreed-upon consensus reality, most other people who have reached a slightly higher-level consciousness accept the existence of two worlds, beside the everyday one also the existence of mostly hidden, alien territories which they got a glimpse of through some extraordinary experience that shook up their previous beliefs. Now these subtle, ununderstood occurrences follow them like a shadow that they try to invite into their lives if seen as positive, or push away if the contrary is the case, preferring to be immerged into the so-called objective reality and the usual well-known lover-level, mostly emotional responses to it.

Luckily, we now have the increasingly spreading quantum concept of all possibility and nothing-is-strange-anymore premise. Whether what is going on is possible or not is no more a heavy question pursuing us in our solitude into which we retreat for not being able to share it with the others. Whether it is anxiety-provoking or uplifting, whether we feel privileged or victimized, it is always something huge and undeniable, a presence on the frontiers of the obvious, on the outskirts of the normal, but seemingly not concerning many people that we share our daily light with.

All Our Worlds

Being aware of how much there is out there that I don't understand makes me feel somewhat melancholy. There is so much of it that I cannot have the upper hand over, in contrast to our civilization's must number one, which is to control, keep everything in sight, explainable, answerable, solvable.

I am glad that in recent years we have come across so much information, theoretical and experiential, of what else reality might be. It is multilayer, flexible, moving, and changing. We are part of its fabric without totally realizing it, with our normal awareness only observing it from the outside, with little conscious access to its deeper, more interconnected layers where we would see the oneness of it all, and will be seen as what we really are, its consistent parts and co-creators.

So, what I was experiencing as a child was at that time a window to the unimaginable, yet existing, though not here. It was coming from somewhere else. Something was going on parallel with the usual everyday life, interrupting it periodically, something that I could not explain to myself or describe to the others, because there are no words for the strangeness of it and the confusion that it generates. In the books of Pierre Sabak we can read that at some time in the past, human vocabulary was deliberately reduced, with notions expressing the subtle nuances of perception and information processing eliminated, to gradually, by removing the tools for appropriate expression, take away also the human ability to experience a phenomenon for what it is, emotionally, intellectually and otherwise, and put it in a context that would enable its integration as something potentially possible and therefore acceptable.

When I was six years old, something began to occur and lasted, to my awareness, for about five years. A sudden dizziness, a feeling of paralysis creeping in, and then, after I don't know how much time, a return to normal state at the same place, with me still holding the chair, a tree or something which I had leaned against or taken hold of before, knowing what was coming and that it won't last. I knew it won't last but couldn't prevent it, regardless of how much I tried to focus on an object nearby, on a thought or something. Connected to this, or probably not, is the memory of me walking up a slope of a winding, brightly lit tunnel, moving forward with difficulty because something was pushing me back or pulling me back, trying to help myself with the spiral wires on the walls on both sides of the tunnel, only to realize that the wires were loose, after which they somehow melted in my hands and disappeared completely. The unusual thing about it all was a certain beige color filling the air around me, not seen but felt, which today I see as an important factor in the whole experience. Interestingly, when years later I was reading Michael Newton's books The Journey of the Souls and Destiny of Souls, a woman recalling her unusual memories also mentions something like ….'that constant presence of beige color'.

Sometimes, when I was playing outside, I was about six then, I am always about six then, I felt the wind coming and was very scared of something that looked like a whirlpool of transparent thick liquid circling above my head. I called my mom and wanted her to stay with me, because I was afraid that the wind would take me away. The wind can't take you away, she said, look, there are other children here and nobody is afraid of the wind. Yes, but the wind is after me!!!!!! I shouted. Then I probably followed my mom into the house. Or I probably didn't.

Much later, when, to my awareness, nothing had been going on for years, and I was already a student, my mother once said: sometimes they just took you away. The weird thing about it is that I didn't ask, for example, who took me, where did they take me, and why. She didn't give any further explanation and I never asked for one. And I wouldn't today. Right now, I am trying to remember why I wouldn't ask, but can't remember.

It is not that I think these were the ETs intervening in my life. I never saw any beings in the sense the contactees or the abductees describe their experiences. But what I am sure of is that this was an external force, an intelligence making me go through it all either to serve its own goals or, some would say, to 'educate' me. I hardly think so.

It is most unfortunate that there is no frame of reference for such events. We have only been taught about the lower levels of ordinary reality, mostly physical, mental and emotional, existing in this one and only world. A lonely situation: we can only vaguely describe what we think is going on, retrieving it from an unreliable memory, while at the same time the awareness of the force behind it permeates the whole area of our life, has consequences that sometimes manifest in disguised forms, and is omnipresent, over-powerful, uncontrollable, and silent; the silence containing traces of arrogance that one can indulge in if possessing the skills needed to remain unidentified.

While reading the book A Separate Reality and others by Carlos Castaneda, then the books by Osho, Jasmuheen, The Third Eye by Lobsang Rampa, it never occurred to me to connect their teachings with that additional component of my childhood.

Yet, when coming across the topics about a covert extraterrestrial presence on Earth, it almost instantaneously dawned on me that this might be the field where I should look for the missing piece. Not only related to the experiences described. The missing piece in the puzzle of our human condition.

The problem with these odd interferences, apparently from other worlds, is that they do not provide a level playing field. Why is it necessary to change the atmosphere, weaken and disorient a person, before an influence or activity, even if mind-opening and energizing, begins to be exerted. I do not want to be completely overwhelmed neither by the suspicious ambiguity of some of them on the one hand, nor by the grace and beauty of the higher dimensional contacts of a different nature that incite humbleness and gratitude for the teachings, understanding, compassion, patience etc. we are treated with. They both cause uneasiness by constantly reminding us of our imperfect, unadvanced stage of existence. Just open your heart to them, some would say. But I do not know to whom I will open my heart. We must, to the best of our abilities, practice discernment of how much intellectual and emotional openness towards the unknown we can afford to still remain safe and to preserve integrity.

What is our position vis-a-vis our conventional scientists? They do not like to listen to us, lay people, but we must have confidence as to what we ourselves perceive and experience. We live in the same fabric as them, but free from the inappropriate education that they were exposed to at their faculties, while we were not. So it might be that we have a more accurate intuitive understanding of what the reality around us consists of, despite its complexity. We were born into this complexity and are part of it, so we can probably fill the blank pages by knowing directly, by drawing information from our higher consciousness and the quantum environment in which only our unusual experiences and other such phenomena can take place.

The quantum physics premises are very much to our advantage. They say we are the co-creators of reality, which means that we can anticipate the various processes that are about to be set off and influence those already going on. Also the science should therefore be more inclusive, taking into more consideration the interactivity, cross relations, mutual influences taking place in the universe, thus preparing, as Giorgio Piacenza has said, a more inclusive cultural mind-set, underscoring the increasing interconnectedness of humanity generated through its own spontaneous growth, which subsequently requires a need to link disciplines, or better to say, all sources of knowledge and understanding, in an interdisciplinary way.

As an emerging holistic, integral civilization (G.P.), based on a consciousness already capable of merging philosophy and science into a new fabric allowing for a more subtle and changeable behavior of its consistent parts, we are creating convergences, and the apparent superficial chaos can no more prevent us from persistently looking for order, the perfect ratio, the magic number phi hidden among random dots on an eye-puzzle. Finding it will bring balance based on all-inclusiveness.

I have also had other unusual, but positive experiences in my life. When I was six, again, I had a piece of metal of unknown origin, which I always held with my both hands like a precious stone. It was silvery color, shining, heavy, about seven cm long, of a deltoid form, like a kite. Something about its shining surface, its form and unusual weight was filling me with joy, had a meaning. It was the missing piece making my life emotionally fulfilled, flawless and complete. It sometimes disappeared and after some time reappeared out of nowhere. Then I probably lost it. Or I probably didn't. While writing this I am trying to remember what there was about it that meant so much to me, but can't. I think I should try to relive the situations, not just remember them.

In altered states of awareness or afterwards, when recalling them, we often attribute meaning to objects or aspects of the experience that in normal states would be considered as trivialities of little significance or value.

I am often suddenly drawn to a certain place, a little round patch of forest in the middle of the fields in the outskirts of the city. I am driving there happily, talking to the sky which is looking down at me telling me it likes me! When in the forest, I become sleepy, the col ours are different and a slight tension is felt in the air bringing about attention, composure and expectation. It usually lasts for an hour with me walking around or sitting on a tree stump. Nothing concrete ever happens. Is there a meaning in my frequent short trips to that place? Do I just imagine it, is it only wishful thinking? Whatever it is, I feel I am in the right place at the right time, with a purpose.

During such short glimpses of a different reality, looking for a meaning and purpose to be articulated and concretized would be inappropriate. Nothing is concrete, everything is changing and fluid. No constants, only variables. Everything is much more alive than in usual reality, but ungraspable.

So, it is also not surprising if I suddenly notice that a star, one among the many in the night sky, again very much alive, is watching me from behind a cloud, one eye hidden, and then starts moving towards me, to gradually turn into a black plane flying silently at a low altitude over my head. When I call for the attention of the people on the other side of the country road, shouting at them to quickly look up in the sky and tell me what they see, they look at me in astonishment, not even bothering to look up. The more I insist, the stranger their looks are, until they eventually leave the place. Another reality imposing itself, but not for everybody to notice!

In the presence of an alien, unknown intelligence, people start behaving in bizarre ways. Their reactions change, there is a feeling in the air of something being different from normal, the change in frequencies affects people's mood, awakeness, perception – one person sees an ET craft while the other standing beside sees a helicopter - sometimes also bringing into play a combination of people that would otherwise never meet or engage in any kind of interaction.

When it comes to a definition of reality, prof. Steven Gimbel says that no subject is bigger than reality itself, but defining it in physics, biology, psychology and other fields is a task that needs frequent updates. To start with, the two most stable features from our human perspective, space and time, are fluid, and so is everything that falls into this paradigm.

The Slovenian cognitive scientist Urban Kordeš suggests that the world as we see it is a private construct of each individual person. We can only imagine how many worlds overlying the already inaccurate consensus reality we are dealing with!

Castaneda's teacher, sorcerer Don Juan also taught him that there is an inner dialogue that maintains the world in existence. We stop the inner dialogue and the world collapses. We are sorcerers; with an infinite number of possible worlds we succeed in isolating and preserving, usually to the end of our lives, the one and only shared world, by constructing a harmonized structure. We cannot verify whether the harmonization is correct, but we use our language in the way that we do not notice anything unusual, non-harmonized or non-connected.

Physicist Thomas Kuhn – we are attempting to understand something profoundly complex through a limited and prejudiced window of human experience, the subjective human lens, limited by human programming. A scientific truth can never be solely objective but includes the scientists' subjective perspectives founded on their conditioning and the resulting world view.

Philosopher and ethnobotanist Terence Mc Kenna – there is an invisible landscape of reality, the glimpse of which we get from time to time through extraterrestrial contact and a part of it, the shining alchemic brilliance of a flying saucer, is a symbol of human wholeness, of our collective yearning for totality.

We must clarify our relations to the unconscious to clarify these mysteries. With our access to higher dimensions the mysteries will become trivial, easily done. We must know that even a physical experience can be a projection of the human mind, and a psychic object can also be a physical object. The realm of the physical and of the psychic meet in a strange world of the never-never-land that we have yet to create the intellectual tools to explore.

The higher-dimensional contacts are turning us away from the rational towards the intuitive. They touch the heart and reach deep into the lives of people, confront them with information taken from forgotten incidents in their lives, transcend space and time for them, but address the individual, so we will never have a general theory of these higher realities.

For Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, who we are and what reality is is not a question. We must become free from any identity, from objectivization, and only accept pure consciousness that can not be conceptualized. What reality is transcends the phenomenal plane of manifestation.

Is then the urge to find out what reality is good for us or not? What does this search for truth do to us and to the global society? If we quote Whitley Strieber it goes like this: there are questions that we can't not answer, and we can't answer them either. We sit in a situation where we can't bear to be – and so we grow.