As I continued to think about this idea, a new realization struck me: the free energy principle also offered a simple solution to one of the world's most puzzling questions — the Fermi paradox. Named after the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, the Fermi paradox refers to the contradiction between the high probability that aliens exist, and the lack of evidence for their existence. If there are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, plus hundreds of billions of galaxies in the visible universe, and potentially trillions of habitable Earth-like planets, then where are all the aliens?
I pictured New York City in my mind. People were flitting in and out of cafes, sipping lattes in Starbucks, shopping in Soho, yelling at people who walked too slowly on the footpath. All was well, and just as expected. The system was in relative homeostasis.
I then imagined a giant spacecraft descending from the heavens and hovering over the city. Everyone looked up at the sky and started screaming. A few peaceful aliens exited the spacecraft to say hello, but were shot at by the police. News crews filmed the alien encounter and broadcast the incontrovertible proof of extraterrestrial life around the globe. The human civilization collectively lost their shit and divulged into chaos; mayhem; pandemonium.
The free energy principle minimizes long-term chaotic surprise, thus allowing us to experience a fairly stable consensus reality that evolves at a pace we can handle. Our mutual expectation does not yet allow for contact with aliens, so finding incontrovertible proof of them currently represents an unparsimonious, low probability emergent pattern. Once human consciousness evolves, and we collectively overcome our perceived limitations, it's highly probable that we'll meet extraterrestrials one day.
I imagined our universe as a sandbox computer game, like Minecraft. As our consciousness evolved, more and more hidden aspects of the game were unlocked and able to be perceived. Aliens and interstellar travel were one such aspect. Psi abilities were another. Instead of controlling the computer game with keys and a mouse, we controlled it individually and collectively with our consciousness.
As I pondered this idea, another realization occurred to me: when aliens do make contact one day, the probability that they will be friendly and peaceful is approximately equal to one.
I visualized a graph with two lines. One line represented technological progress. The other represented our evolving state of consciousness; our understanding of our own humanity. I defined a higher state of consciousness as returning to the Truth of who we really are: infinite; whole; pure love; God.
Historically, our technology has evolved at a faster pace than our humanity has. We were clever enough to invent nuclear weapons capable of bringing about the total annihilation of our species, but not wise enough not to need them in the first place. As Einstein said, "It is harder to crack prejudice than an atom."
This entire period was characterized by a materialist paradigm that deluded us into thinking we are all separate, resources are scarce, and the universe is meaningless, cruel, and random. David Bohm articulated the incredible danger of this paradigm during his career.
Indeed, Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our society, such as crime, poverty and drug addiction, without addressing the problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings, Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn’t work, but may even lead to our extinction.
Michael Talbot
As long as our humanity continued evolving at a slower rate than our technology, there was a non-zero probability that the human race — or any extraterrestrial civilization, for that matter — would wipe itself out. The larger the gap between those two lines on the graph, the higher that probability became.
Materialism also has us believing that space and time are fundamentally real. Logically, we then assume that any alien civilization would have to travel through vast amounts of space to reach us, which could take thousands of light years. This would obviously require incredibly advanced technology. So advanced, that one might assume that any civilization possessing that technology had discovered the source code of the universe.
However, the source code of the universe tells us we are all one, the universe is abundant, space and time are illusions, and we are creating our own reality. Once a civilization discovers the universe's source code, their humanity would eventually evolve at more or less the same rate as their technology. They wouldn't be able to create advanced technology without at least acknowledging the role that higher states of consciousness play in manifesting the universe.
One could then logically argue that any alien civilization that was operating in a low, fear-based state of consciousness would not have the technology to reach us here on Earth, or would blow themselves up before they uncovered the universe's source code. And any aliens that did make it to Earth would be highly evolved and peaceful.
As my mind got lost in the fun implications of this idea, I was reminded of my second Akashic records reading with Cheryl. The first thing Cheryl blurted out when she met me was, "Err… Do you feel like you belong on planet Earth?" When I laughed and told her I'd always felt like a misfit here, she explained why: my soul wasn't from this planet.
What they’re showing me about the origin of your soul is that you took a little bit of a different path than a lot of people. A lot of times a soul will pick a home planet or home environment of some kind, and you didn’t do that. I would say the first… oh God, we’re talking about time that is so beyond linear time and it is so hard to put a linear quantity on it but… I don’t know… maybe the first ten, fifteen, twenty thousand years of who you are as a soul, if we were going to put it in linear time… which, they’re saying, in terms of the length of your soul is not all that long, but to us it sounds like a long time. You spent that time as pure light in different environments. You went as light to different locations. What’s it like to be light in a world of all light? What is it like to be light in a world of no light? What is it like to be light in an environment like ours where there’s physical bodies?
[...]
You've chosen to be here. I don't think you've been on Earth for a while. You've been to other places. You've chosen to be here now because you know that the shift in the planet that's happening is going to require the deepest understanding possible of what light is on all the different levels and essentially the idea of being a clearing house. It's almost like you're standing at the crossroads, answering questions for the travellers as they come by.
Her words made perfect sense now. Perhaps the "shift in the planet that's happening" was referencing the inflection point in my graph: the uncovering of the universe's source code, the development of true artificial general intelligence, and the quantum leaps in progress that would inevitably follow as a result.
