The Black Swans are Overhead

There's something in the air

[This article has a 10/10 Woo Rating]

At the start of this year I decided to leave finance so that I could explore leading edge topics with greater freedom. It’s going to be pretty funny if the topic with the highest woo rating ends up being the one with the most significant impact on the markets, economy and possibly everything else.

“When you’re one step ahead of the crowd you’re a genius. When you’re two steps ahead, you’re a crackpot.”

- Shlomo Riskin

People have been misusing Nassim Taleb’s term “black swan” since the moment he coined it. It doesn’t mean an unexpected or rare event like a bank run or flash crash. It means something that has literally never happened before. Because they are events without precedent, the person claiming that black swans exist in a world that has only ever seen white ones always sounds a little crazy.

Last month, my friend Jason Karp invited me to the SOL Symposium in San Francisco. SOL brings together experts from academia and government “to address the philosophical, policy, and scientific problems raised by the likely presence on the Earth of UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).” It wasn’t surprising that the attendees I spoke to seemed to take the existence of Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) as a given. But it was a little more surprising that this community seems so normal and scientifically-minded. In fact, I suspect part of the reason they tend to use the less familiar acronyms NHI and UAP is because of the crazy-haired associations with the older terms aliens and UFOs.

This is another reason I’ve always steered well clear of the whole topic. It can be reputationally damaging to even explore it in public. You need a really good reason to risk going full woo. So it was pretty unexpected that within a few weeks of SOL we’d be experiencing a global epidemic of mysterious drone sightings. The psychotic online mosh pit, particularly around the events just across the river in New Jersey, highlighted yet another reason I’ve never bothered to research the subject. It’s seemingly impossible to separate signal from noise in this space.

An unscientific poll of my X followers implies most people still overwhelmingly think the drones are U.S. domestic military tech rather than anything with a non-human origin.

Alarmed statements from within government, such as the Governors of both New York and New Jersey, indicate that something mysterious is going on, and that in itself has made this topic finally worthy of exploration.

A relatively uncontroversial take is that these drones (and previous UAP encounters)¹ are advanced technology concealed from the general public. Last week geopolitics and markets writer

Dr Pippa

Malmgren made an interesting observation (worth the paywall) on the possible black swan implications of an “unveiling” event.

Suppose you think people are mad about the United Health CEO? How mad are they going to be when they find out that a few people have been hoarding technologies that could have liberated humanity from many of their greatest problems? This all has to be handled very, very carefully. The drones are illuminating the problem at the bottom of the swamp. Their arrival reflects a newfound transparency set to launch us into an era of almost unimaginable innovation.

It’s certainly an interesting thought experiment. What would happen to the global economy (let alone the stock market) the day after a government admits it has access to limitless, clean “free energy”? What happens to extractive industries like fossil fuels and mining? What about tech companies? It would be a bumpy road to abundance.

Ultimately it’s a fascinating idea with limited immediate applications. I doubt anyone is seriously positioning their portfolio for alien disclosure. And that’s yet another reason I’ve never been that interested in this topic. It’s unclear how learning about aliens and UFOs is practically useful. There are too many rabbit holes, and too little time. My threshold for new topics to explore is “will learning this information improve my daily life?”

To my surprise, the NHI space has just provided me with something that more than meets that bar.

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Friends in High Places

One theory for why aliens might be showing up now is that they’re trying to prevent us from speedrunning extinction using our own technology. With nuclear brinksmanship, ever-accelerating progress around artificial intelligence and now quantum computing, that possibility would certainly pass the vibe check. But it also illustrates a much more interesting point: that technology is at best a facilitator and at worst a dangerous distraction from what should be the main event: the evolution of our collective consciousness.

I’ve recently found myself drawn to The Ra Material (The Law of One). This is more than a thousand pages allegedly channeled in 1981 from an advanced alien race (hence the 10/10 woo rating!). We can just pretend I’ve spent six paragraphs hedging myself about the fact that it’s probably an elaborate fraud. But one of the biggest changes in the way I live my life is I now respect the energetic pull of my own curiosity. Even if it leads me towards areas that seem nonlinear and non-logical. I certainly didn’t expect to spend thirty hours over Christmas reading a Q&A with a non-human intelligence.

Fully accepting that I may now just live in some kind of mystical echo chamber, the messages from Ra align with many disparate sources, especially the world’s great mystical traditions.² There was also a delightful little synchronicity; that the transmission on the day of my birth in 1981 was about my obsession: differences between the brain hemispheres. It’s a topic that’s barely present anywhere else in the books.

It’s impossible to summarise the material here, but there are a few big ideas that have really stuck in my mind.

In Ra’s cosmology, there are eight “densities” of existence. First density is elements like fire and water. Second density is plant and animal life. Humans are third density entities, which brings self-awareness and the ability to make conscious choices.³ We are currently experiencing a transition into fourth density, where entities evolve into a collective consciousness, with an emphasis on unconditional love. This transition involves an increasing awareness of our unified consciousness, of love as a powerful force and a confrontation with our own shadow.⁴

The sudden emergence of material like the Telepathy Tapes is yet another indication of the mainstreaming of this idea of collective consciousness guided by love.⁵ This is obviously a theme I’ve been tracking for years, but it now seems to be meaningfully accelerating. Yesterday the Telepathy Tapes leapfrogged Joe Rogan to become the #1 podcast in America, which makes it a potential “black swan” cultural event for perceptions around human potential.⁶ As a quick recap, the series claims that certain non-speaking autistic children are demonstrating psychic gifts, ranging from telepathy to precognition and mediumship. They also experience non-local and unity consciousness. In this week’s final episode the children illustrate the world they inhabit in their own words. One child, Anthony, describes how we are all evolving into “future humans.” This will bring us telepathic abilities, while making us “more intuitive, multidimensional and inter-dimensionally wired,” and will unfold over generations to come. Listen to this 30 second clip:

The most common rebuttal I hear to prophecies of the dawning of a New Age is that we’ve been anticipating it for millennia, let alone since the 60’s. That said, 40 years ago Ra’s estimate was that this transition could take somewhere between 100 to 700 years. Even though a startling number of people I’ve met recently are expecting a systemic event of some kind within the next two years, anything that’s going to take seven centuries to play out probably doesn’t count as a black swan.

So how is Ra’s message relevant right now? What could a non-human intelligence tell us that would change our behaviour?

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Welcome to Earth School

Where the Ra material has most positively influenced my daily life relates to the central theme of the text: the importance of free will. In the cosmic context, we spend a fleeting moment in third density. The purpose of third density’s emergence of self-awareness is it allows us to make conscious decisions. Our actions either polarize us towards the positive or negative. On one end is service-to-others: a love of not only the self, but of all other selves. At the other extreme is service-to-self: which seeks to control, manipulate and even enslave others for the sole benefit of the self.

Some of the most powerful passages of the text concern this dynamic. Ra’s description of the purpose of third density aligns very closely with the idea of “soul lessons” and our experience on Earth being a kind of school:

The incarnating entity which has become conscious of the incarnative process and thus programs its own experience may choose the amount of catalyst or, to phrase this differently, the number of lessons which it will undertake to experience and to learn from in one incarnation. This does not mean that all is predestined, but rather that there are invisible guidelines shaping events which will function according to this programming. Thus if one opportunity is missed, another will appear until the, shall we say, student of the life experience grasps that a lesson is being offered and undertakes to learn it.⁷

This passage reminded me of the framework from Dr. Brian Weiss’ book Many Lives Many Masters. This explored alleged contact with highly evolved, spiritual entities called “Masters” from patients under hypnosis. Dr.

Mona Sobhani, PhD

’s summary⁸ of the Masters’ message was eerily similar to Ra’s:

We have souls that incarnate on Earth to learn specific lessons through the events and relationships that make up a lifetime here. The point of learning the lessons is to evolve our souls and advance up through levels of spiritual being…

… The answer to everything and the lessons is (predictably) love.

One of my central takeaways from Mona’s episode in this year’s Accelerating Wisdom Series was that, if everything is ultimately made of consciousness, evolving your consciousness means everything. Our experience on Earth might be designed to achieve just that.

As woo as it probably seems, this “Earth School” worldview easily crosses the threshold of practicality because it has substantially improved my daily life. Part of the reason is straightforward. There are a considerable number of studies showing that belief in free will is linked to better mental health outcomes, including higher life satisfaction and emotional wellbeing.⁹ In contrast, belief in determinism (that we have no free will at all), leads to “to antisocial attitudes and behaviour, including increases in deceitfulness, aggressive behaviour, and selfishness, lower achievement levels, and an increased susceptibility to addiction.”¹⁰

The more controversial, but more valuable, implication is that reality is responsive to our actions. The beatings will continue until the lessons have been learned. Victim energy and growth energy both ask “why does this keep happening to me?” But only growth energy proactively looks for the answer to that question. More specifically, I regularly ask myself “what question has my life become?” How does any current cognitive dissonance, friction or “catalyst” reflect something I haven’t learned yet? What are the “invisible guidelines” of my life?

In the last few years of exploring more mystical ideas, my growing belief in a responsive reality has had the most meaningfully positive impact. And, if nothing else, it’s amusing to see the possibility appear yet again in a source as obscure as an alien transmission. The more recent service-to-self/service-to-others framework is something I’m trying to be more conscious of. Once you start to notice and respond to the lessons you enter into a dynamic dance with life. This fluidity sounds an awful lot like the sagelike wisdom that’s one of life’s most desirable outcomes, as Ra puts it:

The end result is that the catalyst is no longer needed. Thus this density is no longer needed. This is not indifference or objectivity but a finely tuned compassion and love which sees all things as love.

Don’t just take the word of a sixth density Venusian social memory complex called Ra. Try it yourself.

1. Take this description of the movements of the “Tic Tac” craft sighted by the U.S. Navy in the Nimitz incident: “Radar operators on the USS Princeton, part of the Nimitz carrier group, tracked the object accelerating from a standing position to traveling 60 miles in a minute—an astounding 3,600 miles an hour. According to manufacturer Boeing, the F/A 18 Super Hornet fighter jet typically currently reaches a maximum speed of Mach 1.6, or about 1,200 miles an hour.”

2. It specifically hits points from Kabbalah, Christianity, Taoism, Buddhism, Hermeticism, Sufism, Jungian psychology, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. The recent worldview overlaps that have been especially compelling to me personally: Mona Sobhani’s work on psi and reincarnation, The Telepathy Tapes, Christian mysticism, quantum physics and Chris Bache’s LSD experiments (see below). A recent podcast on Dr. Ian Stevenson’s reincarnation research was titled “One White Crow” as a reference to evidence for reincarnation being another potential black swan event for collective consciousness.

3. Beyond Third Density we have: Fourth Density (Love): Entities evolve into collective consciousness, emphasizing unconditional love. Fifth Density (Wisdom): Integration of love and wisdom through advanced understanding. Sixth Density (Unity): Balancing love and wisdom, approaching oneness with the Creator. Seventh Density (Gateway): Completion of the learning cycle, preparing for reemergence into the Infinite Creator. Eighth Density (Infinity): The octave of existence folds back into the Infinite Creator to begin anew.

4. Questioner: Does the fact that basic vibration that we experience now is green true color, or fourth density, account for the fact that there are many mental effects upon material objects that are now observable for the first time in a mass way, like the bending of metal by mind?

Ra: This is not only correct but we suggest you take this concept further and understand the great number of entities with the so-called mental diseases being due to the effect of this green-ray true color upon the mental configurations of those unready, mentally, to face the self for the first time.

5. For those who aren’t up to speed, the series claims that some non-speaking autistic children exhibit close to 100% accuracy on telepathic tests. Even more radically, as their interviews progressed, the researchers claimed that some children have a much more comprehensive range of psi abilities. These included non-local communication, precognition and mediumship. Assuming it proves to be true, it’s the most interesting podcast I’ve ever heard.

6. For me, another perfect anecdote was one of exponential technology’s biggest cheerleaders

Packy McCormick

’s excellent essay on his transition from tech-focus to consciousness focus: My experiences over the past month, including but certainly not limited to The Telepathy Tapes, have made me believe a few things:

1. That God is real, whether you call it God, Universal Consciousness, or something else.

2. That Consciousness is fundamental, and that we are all a part of it.

3. That the world is on the verge of waking up to this truth.

4. The world is becoming more magical again as it does.

7. Compare this to the vision of the universe taken from Chris Bache’s conclusions from 73 massive LSD trips over 20 years, that I wrote about here. “That the universe is the manifest body of a Divine Being of unimaginable intelligence, compassion, clarity, and power, that we are all aspects of this Being, never separated from it for a moment, that we are growing ever more aware of this connection, that physical reality emerges out of Light and returns to Light continuously, that Light is our essential nature and our destiny, that all life moves as One, that reincarnation is true, that there is a deep logic and significance to the circumstances of our lives, that evolution of the whole, that our awareness continues in an ocean of time and a sea of bliss when we die, that we are loved beyond measure and that humanity is driving towards an evolutionary breakthrough that will change us and life on this planet at the deepest level.”

8. Her book Proof of Spiritual Phenomena is fantastic. I wrote more about Soul Lessons here.

9. One such meta-analysis, conducted by Feldman and colleagues, systematically reviewed studies on this topic. Their findings indicate that stronger belief in free will is positively associated with pro-social behaviors, such as increased cooperation and helping behaviors, as well as greater adherence to social norms. ResearchGate Additionally, research by Baumeister and Monroe suggests that belief in free will is linked to better mental health outcomes, including higher life satisfaction and emotional well-being. SpringerLink

10. Source: McGilchrist, Iain . The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (pp. 1750-1751). Perspectiva Press. Kindle Edition.