Kayfabe is a sacred pact. It is an agreement between performers and their audience that their play acting is to be seen as real.

It says: We will all suspend our disbelief so that the show and its actors can unveil dramatic twists and turns.

The agreement is necessary even when the action is as real as it gets. The Undertaker once chokeslammed Mick Foley’s Mankind off of a 30-foot cage onto a table covered in metal tacks.

“Good God, almighty; that killed him! As God as my witness, he is broken in half!” - Jim Ross

We can watch that and say that the show is pretend. Yet for Mick and the painkillers he’d need, it is very real. Anyone who saw him lying in pools of his own blood didn’t scoff and say: “That’s so fake!”

In the ring

In wrestling, the physicality is real. Embellished, yes, and still an exchange of painful force. But the characters, their key dance steps, the set, and the setting are all made up, and the story arcs have their outcomes pre-determined.

There is the good guy, the babyface who we all root for, destined for the title belt and the merchandising deals. Then there is the heel, our villain, the bad guy who makes us want to spit. And who is also in line for great merchandising deals.

“OHH YEAHH BROTHERRR!” - Macho Man Randy Savage, Heel of Legend

Steven Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day, begins with wrestling. Before we meet our central character, the audience witnesses two combatants battling around the square circle.

At one point, the audience becomes the camera. We see the action, SLAM, and we experience it as if we are the wrestler.

But in the context of a UFO disclosure story, why would the audience become the wrestler, the performer?

For what purpose does Spielberg change our perspective to the first person as the actors in the film look down at us?

This is a deliberate choice. The actors, or rather their characters, represent disclosure. They are the information. They are the truth. And in this film, the truth is that aliens are among us and influence our behaviour and development. But that’s not the truth that Spielberg is poking at.

It is instead a subtle confession from one of the more talented storytellers of our time. And it’s apt given this is his sixth film which uses extraterrestrials or the other as a narrative device.

Raking in the gold.

Kayfabe, the real disclosure

Mr. Spielberg put us in the ring because in life, we are the performers. We all pretend that the experience that we’re having is real. But many contemplative traditions suggest that beneath mundane consciousness, we are all secretly aware of the true nature of our reality.

What is our true nature? Is it that aliens sit in the background and subtly pull all of our strings? No, that is far too simple. It is something much more strange and fundamental to mind and life.

Jacques Vallée in his summary work Passport to Magonia frames the alien phenomenon as a persistent yet fluid blip within consensus reality.

“Hmm, which mask today?” - Nameless, Timeless Other

He considers that humanity may have been interacting with the same class of ‘other’ all along, while each age describes it using its own symbolic vocabulary:

“The symbolic display seen by the abductees is identical to the type of initiation ritual or astral voyage that is imbedded in the occult traditions of every culture…the structure of abduction stories is identical to that of occult initiation rituals…the UFO beings of today belong to the same class of manifestation as the occult entities that were described in centuries past” - Jacques Vallee

There’s always something on the edge of the periphery that wears many faces and observes, but does not belong within our consensus. First it was angels and faeries and pixies, then it became tall whites and grays; flying wheels became space-ships.

Yet to isolate and separate this other creates a paradox. To attempt to understand it, we must give up the game and remember the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Or we must commit to the bit and interpret it as alien and in a fashion appropriate for our collective era.

This is a road that can quickly take us to religion, with all of its stuffy formalities. But modern disclosure is far more interesting than typical religion. It’s more like dazzling science fiction with heavy yet subdued religious overtones.

There are endless mysteries, scares, crooked politics, technology and weapons and military and intrigue; shady black ops programs racing the Chinese and the Russians; all the hits.

It is the perfect new religion for the internet generation and an effective tool for both obscuring and probing the big questions. It’s a catchall for mundane strangeness, bursting with long-reaching threads and conspiracies.

It is a useful lens through which to try to understand our situation on this Earth, without being so disruptive as to threaten the hold of our ego and power structures. But there are other lenses for doing so, these of the more threatening variety.

Strong potions

When you dabble in something as potent as Ayahuasca, it can flip your understanding of reality… To say the least.

It’s all well and good until “reality” looks as such. By Pablo Amaringo

Among many profound effects, strong psychedelics illuminate mental structures that your mind uses to shape what is real and what is possible.

The post-experience feedback is very consistent:

“Oh my god I can’t believe that’s real.”

Somehow the transcendent experience feels more real than real.

It’s one thing to understand that you can experience another entity appearing before you, other dimensions, and timelessness. It’s an entirely different thing to experience it.

So we can add a third dimension to Jacques Vallée’s observation. The symbolic display of the phenomenon is shared across alien abductees, occult manifestations, and psychedelic experience. We can add a fourth too: the well-mapped, heavily populated divine landscapes revealed through contemplative Eastern traditions.

Are these one phenomenon, or several wearing similar clothes?

What about the grays, man?

But what about the little aliens? What about the encounters and the ships and the glowing lights and the sentient plasmas?

What of the mantid people and the tall whites and the short hairy things that crop up every now and then? What did those kids really see at that school in Brazil? What did they really find in Varginha?

“We won’t take your land, that’s the other tall white people.” By Barbara Barbatelli.

Are all these people lying? Did they really experience this? Are we really not alone?

No, they’re not lying, and yes, they did, in the same way that I have met plants, deities, and other composite abstractions, from the internet to sport, in the noetic realms of meditation and ceremonial Ayahuasca.

Experiencers see and meet aliens as an unfolding of their own reality. But to narrow this mystery into a simple contact story is to reduce it too much. These strange appearances offer no easy answers; every attempt at better answers opens onto a vastness beyond our wildest ideas.

The separation in our perceptions is itself an appearance: a way the one reality becomes many lives. This is more than the groovy we’re all one, man conception. To simply consider yourself an isolated human unit is to embrace the separation. It’s to get in the ring and play.

The truth is, we are alone in the absolute yet never alone. We’re a unity, a singular. And this human game gives us individual experience and all its depth of feeling and flavour. But deep down, we know. We’re but a drop within our own ocean.

This is a secret that Ram Dass and many other mystics and religious thinkers and writers over the years have revealed. It resonates most when seekers and experiencers come together.

“Though we have lived our life totally involved in the world, we know that we are of the spirit … But when you are in the world you know not of the world. You cannot see the forest for the trees.” – Ram Dass

We know we’re of the spirit. But yet we’ve all agreed to play in this game. We’ve agreed to the individual partitioning of our experience. We all adhere to kayfabe. And we have a long history of interacting with “alien” beings for collective pleasure and growth.

Nāga please

In our absolute unity, there are an impossible number of permutations of things that one can experience.

Buddhists have penetrated the mind to its deepest possible caverns and have found many life forms, innumerable beings, and innumerable world systems. It’s a basic tenet of their relative understanding of absolute reality. And their aim is to proliferate the Dharma, the teachings to get off the wheel, to all beings.

Take the Nāgas, an intelligent non-human race of beings that inhabits a reality overlapping ours. They are capable of interacting with humans, sometimes appear in altered form, and often associate with hidden knowledge, water, fertility, and spiritual power.

One such story from the Vinaya of Buddhist teachings includes a Nāga who desires to become a monk to attain enlightenment and freedom from suffering. He impersonates a human to receive teachings from the Buddha.

“The many forms of mental forces.”

The Buddha sees through his disguise. He says that to become a monk, he must first take birth as a human. To achieve this birth, the Nāga must first develop more virtue.

To this day, modern Theravāda Buddhist ordination ceremonies still include the question: “Are you a human being?”

From this perspective, whether you encounter these creatures, whether they can affect you, or whether they show up at your temple depends on your consent and the outcome of your creative capacities. It is a condition of your own birth and the collective ebb in which you abide. It is one of infinite events which can occur on the wheel of death and rebirth.

To consent is to form attachments and interests that contribute to the causes and conditions from which an event may arise: now, later in this life, or beyond it.

You might call them demons and you can successfully ward them off with prayer, power of mind and mantra. You might call them aliens, and you can ward them off with simple disbelief or the recollection of an even higher power.

But however we approach it, our mind is far beyond our brain and is the ultimate governor over our perceptions of the extraterrestrial, interdimensional, and everything in between.

This is the hardest form of disclosure. Yes, it is all true. And no, that does not mean what you might think it means. It’s all true within our own minds.

“The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao” - Lao Tzu

In your imagination

Whether psychedelic or phenomenal experiences happen within our imagination or not matters little when you’re feeling the experience. Like Mankind falling from the cage, we will feel it. If our mind is capable of such profound unveiling, then it is far more capable than we could ever dream. But if it’s imagined, how can it be real?

This is the wrong question. The question is whether we agree to it or not. It’s the other side of kayfabe. As more of us believe that these creatures are among us, more of them will be experienced. The party will only get bigger and stranger. Because the truth, the true reality, is more strange and all-encompassing than any thought system can possibly try to capture.

And this we already know; none of it can and will happen without our consent, our deliberate manifestation, whether we’re aware of that consent and action or not. Whether we will see this, embody this, experience this, or do this is determined by the unfolding of our individual hearts.

This is a process that happens over lifetimes. This is the bridge that Ufology folks and their ilk need to cross. It is unavoidable that to understand disclosure, you must consider the nature of death and dying, the impermanence of all things, and the transmigration of the causes and conditions that ushered in your birth and that persist beyond your death.

We are containers for a small spark of a void unfathomably alive and vast. Once you take that leap, disclosure is a relative, insignificant truth. And you already know that.

As the Hindus will tell you, life is a divine play: the Rāsa Līlā.