They can see you only if you have given them permission to interact.  Your mass consciousness at this time has given them permission to seek out those with whom they have formed individual agreements.  If you are having contact, you must have agreed.  This can be a liberating idea if you allow it to be, because once you allow yourself to understand that you have chosen this experience, you thus place yourself on an equal level with them and the nature of your interactions with them will change.  You will no longer be a victim.  You will be an equal participant.  The quality of your interactions with them will change significantly.

You see, for humans the idea of agreement is that it is separate from existence.  This means the agreement is something that stands out from the flow of your life to prove to yourself that you can have a certain experience.  We perceive flow as agreements—reality as agreements.  The fact that we are here—that we are with you—is agreement.  You place cause before effect, however, cause actually equals effect.

Lyssa Royal Holt & Keith Priest. Visitors from Within: Extraterrestrial Encounters and Species Evolution  

This piece will be a rather speculative one—one in a series of what William Irwin Thompson called “mind jazz” (see my earlier piece on Hegelian philosophy and UFO studies as an example). As such this piece is by no means meant to be definitive or final but rather intends to open up some potentially creative lines of flight and further exploration.

In this piece I want to bring together two threads I’ve explored on the site, two threads that at first glance appear pretty removed from one another, and bring these two into creative ferment and friction with each other.

The first thread is the UFO Phenomenon which I’ve covered extensively via multiple angles on the site. For background on that topic there are pieces exploring the UFO abduction phenomenon, including claims of sexual trauma and alien-human hybridization; UFOS as expressions of the psychic state of consciousness; UFOs as potential harbingers of a future structure of consciousness; and Ufology as a domain of elite disinformation campaigns and psychological operations.

The other thread is the work of family and systems constellations, especially in relationship to trauma. This thread comes principally through pieces exploring the men’s rights activist and #metoo movements. The key thinker in this thread is Anngwyn St. Just whose work on trauma as a highly strange fractal replicating through time and space becomes the key to linking these two otherwise separated realms of experience and reflection (systems constellations and UFOs).

My contention is that by bringing a constellations/inter-generational trauma lens to bear on the UFO Phenomenon—especially but not exclusively the contactee dimension of the phenomenon—we could shed new light on these topics. This new light could offer new possibilities out of the polarized binaries of much Ufological literature.

In particular I want to use the family-systems constellations view to tackle one of the thorniest issues in the contactee & experiencer sub-community within Ufology: namely that of consent. By consent I mean the topic of whether one may be said to have consented (on some level) to experiences with The Visitors/Them/aliens or not. In the contactee world there are two strongly polarized camps, each taking one of the opposing responses to that question. This controversy is particularly the case with those who claim abduction-like experiences with the so-called Greys (aliens).

The question of whether individuals have on some soul level consented to being abducted is one of the most charged topics in all UFO contactee literature. Accusations of victim blaming abound. Some abductees argue that believing they consented to the experience is liberating. Other contactees and experiencers argue just as vociferously that believing one has previously consented on a soul level to an alien abduction is a psyop implanted into humans by demonic aliens in a case of cosmic Stockholm syndrome.

One camp argues that consent had to be freely given at a soul level prior to incarnation—which is an application of the 19th century school of Spiritualism to the UFO abduction phenomenon. I’ve covered Spiritualism in reference to pieces on channeling the dead as well as past life regression and raised some critical questions concerning aspects of that line of thought. Those same thoughts apply in this context.

One of those criticisms I’ve made concerning Spiritualism is that it has an overly individualistic views of souls—each soul being a wholly separated spiritual atom separate from all others. Spiritualism was a 19th century movement and therefore was unconsciously mimicking the default philosophical individualism of its time as if it were a spiritual reality for all times and places. Postmodern thought (covered elsewhere on the site here and here) takes much more seriously the nature of group influences, language construction, and social context. Family and systems constellations includes an even deeper understanding of the nature of group and ancestral fields and their traumatic replication across generations.

The second and opposing camp in contactee literature gives all agency to “The Other” (the alien). They argue that humans have not given consent and are basically at the mercy of demonic invading parasitic abusive aliens.

The first group can actually end up in victim blaming. Under the guise of high spiritual language this group can really deny the brutality of people’s traumatic encounters (aka spiritual bypassing). The second camp, on the surface, seems much more empathic towards abductees by not blaming them for the encounters via elaborate notions of pre-life souls contracts. But dig a bit deeper and this camp lacks any process for transformation. They can’t necessarily offer much in the way of practical tools for initiation and growth for those who've been harmed.

Both camps only see consent in light of an individualist, modernist philosophical lens and that’s the key flaw. There are other versions of consent—or at least other factors at play that are understood to constitute consent by other entities it would seem (see the quotation from The Visitors Within above). It’s precisely here that I believe family and systems constellations work can shed important light because constellations work has a much more nuanced, subtle, and multifaceted understanding of consent (including therefore violations of consent).

In the language of Limited Hangout, the constellations view helps bring a more weird naturalist and ontologically flooded perspective to some of these claims.

How is consent then understood within the context of family and systems constellation work—particularly in relationship to the vexed question of victims and victimizers?

I’ll approach this question from multiple angles. To begin with the family constellations view.

In family constellation work the phenomenological data that shows itself again and again—a kind of meta-principle or psychic law perhaps—is that when the work of an ancestor is unfinished in their lifetime, their descendants will tend to take that work on and believe it is their soul work, their karma to complete.

The idea behind this principle is that an unhealed wound is meant to “come back around” in the family storyline in order that this time it might actually be healed and made whole.

Take the example of a family where one member has been ostracized or abandoned (for whatever reason). Now there is a split off energy in the family system. This energy—this traumatic fractal as St. Just calls it—will play itself out in the next generation in an attempt to find its rest. As Bert Hellinger, one of the founders of constellation work would say, the ancestors bones rattle. In this example, they are rattling because of the abandonment and ostracism.

What unfortunately happens in most cases is that as this traumatic fractal replicates through time and space, the story line simply plays itself out over and over again. It doesn’t leading to healing but only to further pain and misery. The child who suffers abuse grows into the parent who abuses their child. The child of the alcoholic parents becomes the alcoholic parent to children who’ll themselves be highly susceptible to becoming alcoholic parents themselves.

The cycle of trauma and suffering can therefore continue through the lineage. Or as the Bible would put, the sins of the father (& mother) are visited unto the third and fourth generations.

The relevance of this data point vis a vis Ufology is the highly strange theme that the alien abduction and contactee/experiencer phenomenon tends to replicate through family, ancestral, and inter-generational lineages.

The recent powerful UFO documentary Witness to Another World offers a concrete example of the multi-generational contactee dynamic. The documentary follows the story of Juan Perez, an Argentinian gaucho who at a young age undergoes a shamanic initiatory-type encounter with entities from another world which catalyzes a profound shift and transformation in his consciousness, bringing forth precognitive and extraordinary healing capacities. This storyline reflects a theme articulated in the major study of contactees by the Edgar Mitchell Society FREE Research project.

As a result of his experiences, Juan becomes ostracized from his community and has to learn to deal with the soul shattering implications of his experience on his own. It’s a haunting, sorrowful, and yet moving film.

Spoiler Alert (skip ahead if you don’t want the surprise ruined)…

One of the most tragic and shocking parts of the documentary is when Juan’s mother reveals to the filmmaker that she went through the same experiences but refused to stand up for her son out of fear of ostracism. She had never shared that she had had essentially the same encounters as her son. As highly strange as Juan’s story is, the strangeness is only amplified by learning his mother went through basically the exact same thing…and then never told him about it! Juan suffers in isolation and loneliness. The experience is so taboo, so socially fraught that it fragments a son and his mother.

How is it that both a mother and her son had the same encounters when she had never spoken to her son about them? (Or to any other soul for that matter).

The work of family and systems constellations (via Anngwyyn St. Just) offers a potential response to this question.

Imagine—just as with Juan and his mother—a family system where at least one member encounters highly strange experiences of the otherworld in this life. There is now an energetic, a kind of trajectory, in the family system. How will this family system deal with the entry of highly strange mystical phenomenon into the system? Will it respond by silencing, making it taboo, and driving underground those experiences? Will the family system support and care for the one (or ones) who’ve had such encounters? Or will the family system succumb to societal pressure and label one of their own members as crazy or mentally ill and subsequently shun them? Or will the experiencers in the family be embraced and loved and kept in the family system?

In constellation work there’s an understanding that family groups have their own field of consciousness and energy. The family group field includes the individual fields of all the family’s members but also has its own (weirdly natural) group ontological status. The family group field has something like its own mind, emotions, will, desires, as well as agreements.

Typically those agreements—at least among and between humans—are based in some version of contractual relationally:

“I scratched your back so you have to scratch mine.”
“I raised you as my child so you owe my your loyalty and love.”

The family has scripts, has spoken and unspoken (but nevertheless very clearly communicated) lines and values. How a family speaks about money, emotionality, sex, death, losses and failures, or successes, all these and more form the children into a family narrative and worldview.

There are also family scripts around mystical and highly strange encounters.

Traditionally groups organized around survival needs. Groups organized principally around survival needs consequently emphasize a strongly contractual and conditional nature of love and giving. A scarcity mindset determines the values and ethos of most families and group fields. Examples include:

“Everyone must sacrifice themselves in this family so the family can survive.”
“The needs of the many outweigh the desires of the one.”
“Love is earned not given.”

As it pertains to the contactee/UFO phenomenon there’s an immediate problem or value clash because, as covered in previous pieces, whatever else the UFO phenomenon might be, it is the expression in real time of an over-unity or abundance-based physics and energy. (This dimension of the phenomenon by the way does not mean it’s inherently all love and light or automatically all good—rather simply that it is not based in survival or scarcity).

Having experiences that are outside the family’s worldview system create tension in the family system. Taking it a step further and actually consciously going against the family’s outlook, breaking those family belief systems, especially the taboo ones, can be extraordinarily painful and often leads to being marginalized or utterly rejected.

Unfinished or incomplete energies or experiences in one generation become familial karma. They become unexamined, unconscious agreements made in the group (family) constellation. Later generations, out of a sense of loyalty to the family system, will often take on unconsciously the unfinished work of their ancestors and feel a sense of duty or obligation to complete their karmas for them.

These karmas could include karmas with non-human intelligences or entities. As St. Just herself admits one of the most controversial insights of constellation work is that when there is traumatization the two parties are now inextricably in a strange, soul-level dance of transformation. That insight clashes with our politically correct cancel culture age. For this reason constellation work has been accused of victim blaming.

But the core of this insight is not victim blaming but rather a more honest recognition that group energies can—if not properly dealt with—override or undermine our individual sovereignty. The goal here is to use this information to help bring to completion incomplete “open loops” in the family system such that the later generations do not suffer the same fate. It’s an empowerment orientation meant to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma.

Here now we can begin to re-examine the data point of multi-generational UFO abduction-type experiences in family systems.

If an individual in a family has a UFO contact or abduction-like encounter, it is now inherently in the family field. That doesn’t meant everyone in the family will necessarily go through the same experience but it’s now been brought into the family/ancestral group field. How the individual as well as the family system deal with this encounter will have major repercussions on what is to come.

Imagine the family system creates a climate of shame and fear and the individual family member and experiencer gets silenced, leading to a life of severe negative repercussions: isolation, illness, unhealed trauma, etc. Imagine further that the UFO experiencer dies with this initiatory encounter left incomplete in their life. Now it’s an open traumatic loop in the family group field. A later member of the family—maybe a son or daughter or a niece, nephew, stepchild, grandchild—takes on the unfinished karma of the family system. They agree energetically (not in terms of formal conscious consent) to take on their ancestors burden to try to heal it.

In such a case, the group field has created a kind of “quasi-consent” or agreement to be potentially open to their own highly strange such encounters with the same entities, including potentially abduction-like experiences. Think Juan Perez and his mother. She didn’t complete her karma (whatever exactly that would have been) with these entities—whoever or whatever exactly we conceive of them to be—and a result the unfinished business was passed onto her son.

In an earlier piece I wrote about the importance of energetic sovereignty. Is there a contradiction here? In that piece I was describing sovereignty on the individual level but unfortunately without conscious work in the familial-ancestral field, the group energy can sometimes override individual sovereignty.

The subtle nuance that the family and systems constellations view brings to this subject is never really discussed in Ufology. Consent, at an energetic or soul level, is treated in a very simplistic manner—both by its advocates and critics. Consent is treated as a self-conscious, individualistic phenomenon. But what if the consent is unconscious and in the group field of which one is a member? Then what? This view could  potentially go a long way towards making sense of the very strange data of contactee encounters running through family lines.

It could also then potentially shed light on a constructive way forward. If the family constellations lens does bring greater clarity to this topic of multi-generational UFO encounters, what then are the implications?

In a constellation process a person (or object) stands in for one’s family members. In a group of participants a stranger could stand-in for one’s aunt, uncle, spouse, parent, child, great-great-grandmother, etc. The person will then, in essence, channel the energy of the person whose place they are standing in. They will start to reflect the emotional state, the mental and even spiritual outlook of the person they are representing. It is a highly strange process. Yet it works.

Even an object placed in a space designated as representing a specific person can also start to communicate the phenomenological data of that person’s experience (whether alive or deceased).

The facilitator helps the person whose constellation it is engage in dialogue and observation of the family (or systemic) patterns. The constellation shows some form of entanglement between various members or brokenness (e.g. ostracized family member) or silenced taboo (e.g. abuse or neglect). The constellation then finds a way to disentangle the dysfunctional geometry of the existing family structure and then finds a creative resolution and way forward. The participants move into different locations and assume different postures—which arise organically and naturally through the process—as a means of enacting that changed state in the group’s energy field.

One of the classic actions in a constellation that can effect such energetic transformation is when the person having the constellation done speaks across time and space to their ancestors and gives them back their responsibility for their own work, thus liberating the individual in the present moment.

In shamanic processes, there are ways to burn and abolish one’s own soul contracts and vows on an individual level. There are ways to seed the energy of liberation in the family field—or at least to consciously choose as a sovereign individual to not participate unconsciously in the family’s group contracts and vows. By handing back to the ancestor(s) their unfinished work, their souls are left responsible to choose to complete their own work and not foist it on their descendants.

The question to consider then is whether a family constellation could be done for family members who have UFO encounters and could one of the “voices” or spaces of information within the constellation be that of the alien/UFO entity?

In my earlier piece exploring trauma work in relationship to the alien abduction phenomenon the possibility was raised that as the (human) experiencer changes in relationship to the phenomenon the phenomenon itself may change. (That’s one of the core claims of Heg-alienism by the way). Might what appears to be abduction when in a shadow and unconscious form become something else when one has transformed through the process? A shamanic initiation perhaps? Or something else?

To return for a moment to St. Just’s point that at a soul level (not a legal or ethical level!) victim and victimizer are now in a dance with one another and the transformation of the one is intimately tied to the transformation of the other. Again that claim is made from reflections and observations from family & systems constellations. It’s a meta-pattern that occurs time and time again in constellations.

When it comes to the alien abduction phenomenon—if we treat it as a form of psychic abuse as is claimed by some within the abductee world—then it would fit directly into St. Just’s point. Namely that the victim (human) and victimizer (“alien”/grey, etc.) are now in an energetic dance. For the human they must learn to undergo the transformation of truly healing from such an event lest they leave an open wound in their own energy such they might themselves become a victimizer in a different context to another being.

As weird and wild as this may sound, this points to the potential need for a cosmic or high strange restorative justice process relative to the alien abduction phenomenon. It also raises the question of what is the nature of each side (human + “alien”) in this dynamic? Or said slightly differently, if they have karma with us and we have karma with them, what is the content and quality of those respective karmas?

The next piece in the series will explore that charged question.