by Meade Layne

We have said repeatedly, to the sour distaste of some science-minded folk, that the phenomena of the Ether Ships can never be explained or understood on the basis of known laws and textbooks of the physical sciences. We have repeated that metaphysics, ‘occult’ science and philosophical concepts, must be introduced – because between metaphysics and science there is no dividing line except that drawn by ignorance or by arbitrary definition.

Metaphysics – when the term is properly used – consists of epistemology and ontology: the nature of the act of knowing, and the nature of substance and being. Surely science is concerned with knowledge and with the substance of the material world. And why should anyone suppose that metaphysics does not employ the experimental method and the operations of logic, as truly as do physics and biology?

Yet so profound is the distrust of metaphysics, with the public and in the world of scientism, and so stygian the ignorance of metaphysical and occult concepts, that no important publication or any scientist of distinction will support an explanation of the Ether Ships involving these factors.

And we shall have to admit at once, that the great (or once great) Orders – Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Qabalism, and their numerous derivatives, along with most of the esoteric thinking of the East – have been as silent on these manifestations as their Manus, their Masters, and their Buddhas of bronze. Yet right knowledge exists in the world and is not denied to us. Or rather, it exists and is denied to us, by ourselves.

It is denied to us by our culture, our racial history, our priest-craft and childish religionism, by our embryonic science, and by the Zeitgeist – the Time Spirit of the west, which in turn is our own distraught creation through a thousand and ten thousand years.

Thus, though the pieces of the world-puzzle are in our hands, they are useless unless we truly desire to put them together. If we throw them about contemptuously, saying: this is baseless guesswork – this is metaphysics – this is not factual and approved by science – this is fantasy and straight from Cloud-Cuckoo Land – this is a baseless vision and a dream… then indeed we shall never understand, even from Alpha to Beta of the mystery.

But all that I want to do here is to show how accessible and elementary these pieces of the puzzle are – the puzzle of the Ether Ships. But this cannot be done without having recourse to metaphysical and occult expressions. Those who pride themselves on being ultra-scientific, factual, hard-headed, skeptical and contemptuous of abstractions, should travel toward their world’s end only on their own circles of close-winding thoughts.

It has happened innumerable times, that in dealing with the mysteries of Nature we lay hold of unimportant matters and overlook the clues of real value. In relation to the Ether Ships, it has been in the minds of most of us that if the Discs or Saucers would land openly, invite everyone to come ‘for to see and for to admire’, explain to us a few marvels of propulsion and control – then all this dark mystery would vanish in the fair light of commonsense and acceptable science….

Now, it is known that the Discs have landed, have been touched, seen at close range, and left material traces behind them. They are, in these appearances, as real, as material, as natural as a plane or bird or balloon – fish, flesh, or fowl, or good red herring. And it is smugly inferred (since ‘a plane is a plane, a molecule is a molecule’, etc.) that a huge, solid Disc, earth-landed, is always just that; cannot change form and nature, dissolve and reappear, pass through other objects, other Discs, enter the sea or the hardness of earth and rock. This is too incredible even for devotees of science-fiction and explorers of the N-dimension…

Yet all these ‘impossible’ feats have been witnessed, are in fact daily and hourly performed. It is these which take the phenomena outside the purview of science and into the haunts of nightmare and superstition – worse yet, into the fog-bound ports of metaphysics. These things, these Discs, do not seem to have an identity, in size or shape or color or action. Yet it is these mutations, or rather the power to effect them, which must be reckoned with – by whoever seeks to understand. The solid, substantial, understandable Disc, along with the very human-like operators of it, seems nicely adapted to out ways of thought – but our ‘ways’ have not as yet taken us very far.*

A multitude of these ‘Flying Discs’ and other craft are, in fact, living things. They are as much alive as the Beings who operate them. More accurately, the Disc and its operator are a single entity. Let us see if this is understandable.

Attention control – self-estrangement – identification: These terms cover the approach to this subject. There is nothing especially mysterious about them. The experience they refer to is daily, hourly, and commonplace. And again: “You are where your consciousness is”. Consciousness is awareness, and awareness is attention. And attention is subject to the will (though practically in an imperfect degree). If you put ALL your attention, awareness, consciousness into (say) the next room – then, where are you? (To this there is obviously only one answer). If you put all your attention onto an acorn, a cube, a crystal, a stone, where are you? Estranged from your (former) self, you effect identification with something else (or so we call it). There is a measure of this process, every time you become absorbed, ‘carried away’ by interest, excitement, or fear. The transfer of the self is temporary, usually partial – but the principle involved is familiar – and it can be applied and extended indefinitely. These are commonplaces of occultism – as of daily experience also.

Common experience commits us to a dualism – to a subject who perceives and an object which is perceived. The process mentioned above overcomes this dualism for a time. If you concentrate sufficiently upon the acorn, you are no longer aware of your self as an observer, nor of the acorn as a separate object, but you are identified with it. You have acorn-consciousness – an acorn-self. And after your return to your former and normal consciousness, you realize that you do not feel diminished by becoming the acorn, or by losing your identity and your status as observer – but you feel, instead, a singular enlargement of life and knowledge and power. This “gain through loss” is a psychological fact of truly infinite importance.

To go into this a little deeper – how is this possible, that you and I can become “some thing else”. If the thing, the object, is really “else” or “other”, no such identification could take place. But if the two – the perceiving subject and the perceived object – are basically one in nature, no more to be separated than circle from its circumference – perhaps the problem becomes more thinkable.

Shall we say that both subject and object are posited as existents in an all-including energy-field – and so in that sense are the “same”?

Shall we phrase it by saying that the object is posited by the subject, or by the cosmic life functioning through or as the subject – and that the “thing-in-itself” is this energy-action?

If we analyze any object – this sheet of paper, for instance – we find that it is made up of ‘qualities’ – shape, size, weight, color, texture, etc. All of these qualities for us are sensations, experiences, modifications of consciousness. What is it that holds them together, so to speak? The mind-energy of us projects them into what we call time and space – so that we call them ‘external’ and ‘independent’. Then we become enslaved by our own creations, by this fictitious ‘external’ world.

Let us note that because it is fictitious, in this sense of being mind-projected, or at least ‘fictitious’ for us, or made by or through us – because it exists in consciousness and awareness, we can bring it into or out of existence by attention control, awareness control. For the same reason and by the same means we can modify the form and appearance of any object.

It is not meant, of course, that anyone can issue an order that will instantly convert a cat into a cabbage. But our own limitations do not affect the fact that there are and always have been individuals who can and do perform similar ‘miracles’. That is because the so-called external world is made of mind-stuff, and obeys the control of mind.

These propositions are basic and inherent in the Order of Things.

That thought is energic in character is supported by a great mass of evidence. One type of evidence is the effect of such ‘energy’ on the formation of microscopic crystals (experiments of Dr. Charles W. Littlefield). In the living organism (the human mind-body complex) it seems certain that every cell responds to mind action, on either the conscious or ‘sub-conscious’ level. It is probable that subatomic, i.e., etheric matter is instantly responsive. The forms assumed by it are mind-forms – mind-imposed as desired by the operating intelligence.

Now let me return briefly to the first two words as previously mentioned: “attention control and self-estrangement”. It should be obvious that the single expression, attention control, is a kind of summary of occult teaching and a clue to all human problems. “You are where your consciousness (attention) is” – therefore you effect the conquest of space, and of time also, since consciousness can ‘cross space’ timelessly. You control and eliminate all pain, whether physical or mental; for suppose you have, as we say, a pain ‘in’ the hand or foot, and can do for yourself what a hypnotist could. The pain-idea, the feeling, is of course a matter of consciousness, a modification of awareness. If that awareness is destroyed, if the attention is turned wholly away, then the pain ceases to exist. – “The mind has a body” – and can literally do what it chooses with it. Ideally, there is nothing within the range of experience which cannot be either attained or negated by the mind, the entity in action, the controlled awareness.

Incidentally, this one supreme and all-important power is never taught, never cultivated per se in all the educational processes of the west. Our idea of inculcating attention control is to give the victim his books, his lessons, tell him to apply himself, concentrate, understand and remember – or else! – or otherwise, with children and adolescents too, we turn their studies into games. That is because games hold natural interest – and interest is essential to the learning process and makes it painless. But the adolescent whose whole learning has been play-like, soon finds that life gives instruction differently – and that he has no real preparation for meeting its problems – whence ensues conflict, revolt, new and painful adaptations.

The learning process, which is attention control, cannot be largely predicated on natural and involuntary interest, which leaves the constructive will out of the picture entirely. The substitute for natural interest is controlled attention – power to hold the attention to anything interesting, or dull and hateful, pleasurable or painful – and also to exclude anything.

All the great occult disciplines have been built on such axioms, but in all the enormous literature of Western pedagogical theory and practice, there is next to nothing concerning the systematic development of attention control as a subject per se, which can be taught and learned and practiced, and is the single Aleph and the clue:

“Could one but find it, to the treasure house
And per adventure to the Master too”

Let us not lose sight of our main objective. We are trying to make plain how and why it is possible (and legitimate and necessary) to say: a multitude of the Ether Ships are living beings, chakras of life and power. The Entity thinks himself, wills himself, imagines himself into a certain ‘vehicle’, or ‘body’, or form of action and manifestation – and this sometimes, at certain vibratory rates, becomes perceptible to our senses. I have been trying to point out how easily this can be understood (in its basic principles) in terms of elementary psychology and metaphysics. Never, never will these phenomena be grasped by the Western mind, unless or until we are able to integrate physics with metaphysics, chemistry with occult chemistry. Science in the sense of technology is bogged and helpless. And the Explainers of the Discs are trumpeting their last resort – that these are interplanetary craft and visitors – strange to us, but really no more mysterious than our own planes and aviators. Interplanetary in a limited sense, some of them are – but no more than that can be said for such interpretation.

It is incredible that any race should be so willfully blind, so deluded with alleged and partial knowledge, so determined in ignorance, so deep in the hypnotic spell of wishful thinking. First of all the Ether Ships were lies, delusions, epidemic silliness, then (after some years) objects of disquietude and mystery; now we are told ‘the Air Force knows all, sees all, will tell all in good time.’ Soi-disant scientists X and Y assure us, ‘nothing but’ interplanetary craft – and with this the public may for a while (a little while) be half-satisfied. But the true issue is NOT whether any of these craft be interplanetary in nature. What is truly being weighed in the balance is the whole of our science, our philosophy, our religions, the fate of the race, the fate of the planet. The factors involved are many, and inevitably they include those of an occult or metaphysical nature – hence a priori unintelligible and unacceptable. One can say this, but it is best then to leave it – for how many years, how many thousands of pages would be required?

Well, the landed Discs, you say, are all of metal, harder than the hardest metals of earth. Well, so they are. There is etheric steel and etheric copper, and everything else that we have here – but prototypes of ours or better – our metals derive from theirs by conversion of rates and densities. There is no difficulty in creating visible forms from invisible ones, and these may even serve for mechanical flight when conditions suggest it – and also as a sop to the curiosity of ignorant Earthlings, who would never, never, never, believe such seeming nonsense as the true facts seem to be.

Now, the Etherian who thinks himself into a globe or Disc or flaming wheel, imparts to that form all the maneuverability (so to speak) of his own thought – and all the lightning speed of it. It takes no longer, please note, to think about the star Arcturus than about your fingertip. A thought-form is a thing, an object, truly existing in etheric matter. There are instruments in use, in the field of radiesthesia, that will delineate in space the presence of such “imagined” objects. There is evidence to show (an ancient contention of occult thought) that the density of an object can be increased by meditating upon it – and so too with the density of the human body. If you increase the density of any object above a definite limit, the object passes out of our range of perception – it becomes both invisible and intangible.

It is most probable – and to an Adept completely certain – that the so-called Ether Ships have always been coming and going all about us, in an infinite variety of shapes. They are thought-forms in etheric matter, or sub-atomic matter. They are truly alive in the same sense in which our bodies are alive – made by the mind and the life force of intelligent and purposeful entities. When they ‘materialize’ so that we can see them, that is a dematerialization from their point of view – a higher to a lower density. How do they look on their own planes? How does anything look when no one sees it?

Is there any reason why a thought-form (a form made of the ethers should not easily and instantly penetrate all lower densities – such as the sea, the earth, any and all earth objects? Would it be any more difficult, in principle, to create a ‘ship’, a thought-form, ten miles long, than a Disc ten feet in diameter?

For every reported landing or close sighting of the Disc-shaped objects, there have been hundreds, probably thousands of indescripts, or mutants, or indescribables, every imaginable shape, color, size, behavior, mutation under the eyes of the observer. There are reports of forms almost completely transparent, yet tangible – and of varying degrees of transparency. It is high time some of our smug theorists turned their attention to this matter of the INDESCRIPTS. One would think these had nothing to do with the people of the Discs at all – but they really constitute the most significant phase of the phenomena. They proclaim forms of matter and the mind-control of them, unknown to our science. And they write UPHARSIN on the walls of the man-made universe.

There are a good many people (though comparatively few) who can see Ether Ships which are invisible to others. There are also those who can see the auras, and gnomes and fairies and other nature spirits, and the countless forms of the “dead”. These are forms and degrees of clairvoyance, which should be among the accepted data of parapsychology. “Scientists” and “psychologists” who refer all such alleged faculties to the lunatic fringe, need ‘not an answer but an education’.

*Once again, our visitors come from many regions of space (the ethers) and their nature and motives vary widely; I am writing of the ‘Guardians’ – so far as we can pretend to separate them from other entities.

Article originally printed in 1954.