A Journey Concludes

Another Begins

(Photo by Raul Petri on Unsplash)

There’s a moment when every journey becomes less about where you’ve been and more about where you’re headed, which is the point we’ve arrived at in The Light Beyond The Mountains.

After more than a year and a half of fortnightly chapter postings here on Substack, and with only two chapters to go (accurately speaking, one more chapter followed by the Epilogue), it’s time to look not just back, but, more importantly, forward.

This has never just been a straightforward column. It’s a conversation that to date has revolved around the chapters of a book. And, thanks to the dynamic and enthusiastic support of its many subscribers, one that has helped me to learn as much from the feedback I’ve received as I’m hoping subscribers have gleaned from the story itself.

This is the point at which I’d like to widen the aperture, because - now it can be told - the book’s denouement isn’t the end of the journey; instead, it marks the point at which we enter new terrain - or perhaps, more appropriately, a clearing in which the light of the book’s title takes on a subtly different hue.

To recap briefly, TLBTM begins with my 1992 encounter with a plasma-like object in the classified skies above Area 51 in Nevada - a mystery that’s reignited when the New York Times comes out with its seminal story in 2017 about the existence of a secret unit within the Pentagon - after years of official denial - dedicated to the study of UFOs.

What follows is a multi-layered, multi-decadal excavation that allows me to unearth a different facet of the mystery - all of them connected in some way - until the question that’s central to the initial narrative shifts from ‘What did I see?’ to ‘What does it mean?’

This question was catalysed by a second incident I relate in the book - a shared death experience between my wife and her dying mother. From this moment, the book becomes an exploration of the nature of reality - and circles concurrently around a theme that riffs off a 50-year-old idea - Jacques Vallée’s Control System Theory.

This idea - from arguably the world’s most influential explorer of the UFO enigma - posits that the phenomenon isn’t exclusively physical or even psychological, but informational. By which he means - and I fully concur - that UFOs form part of a symbolic feedback mechanism embedded within the structure of reality itself.

This suggests that the interface between us and the ‘other’ - whatever it is - might be modulating itself to push our awareness toward new thresholds of belief - or, if you like, new levels of consciousness. The question then morphs again. If this is the case, who is doing it and why? Where Vallée and I differ is it doesn’t appear to be all about so-called ‘non-human intelligence’, but something that’s at once simpler and more complicated.

Midway through The Light Beyond The Mountains, the inquiry converges on Prof. Donald Hoffman’s concept of ‘the interface’: a mutable veil between perception and reality, shaped not just by sensory input, but by consciousness itself. With this frame in place, the second half explores a series of layered revelations: Hoffman’s Interface Theory, Ingo Swann’s maps of the ‘psychic self’, Edgar Mitchell’s quantum holographic model of the universe, plasma physics, and the subtle feedback loops implied by reincarnation studies and the Monroe Institute’s Gateway Experience - a paper sponsored by the CIA in 1983 that outlined ways in which altered states of human perception were capable of transcending space and time; a paper that leaves little room for doubt that the aligned subjects of mind, reality and, yes, the UAP phenomenon, have long been of interest to the military-intelligence community, despite years of systematic, institutional denial.

Pursued to its core, Vallée’s Control System Theory doesn’t just hold true for metaphysical forces - the idea that non-human intelligences are playing with the architectures of our perception - it also points to manipulation of the interface by us.

Soon after the New York Times broke its UFO story, a document emerged - the so-called ‘AATIP Briefing Document’ - that openly refers to our ‘cognitive human interface’ as an emerging battlespace. What made it especially explosive was its request to escalate the DoD’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program - the UFO investigation unit unmasked by the NYT - into a Special Access Program, citing technologies so advanced that the U.S., it claimed, was potentially ‘incapable of defending itself’ against them.

Most striking was its assertion that ‘the science exists’ for adversaries to alter both physical and mental environments, penetrating not just facilities, but decision-making itself. In other words, Vallée’s informational model was no longer theoretical. Slide by slide, the document sketched a vision of warfare that extended beyond the physical into the cognitive and the metaphysical, describing capabilities that included psychotronic weapons, the manipulation of biological organisms, and disruptions to spacetime itself - phenomena that had long been associated with UAP encounters but had not until then been exposed as capabilities that would likely soon become a warform exploited by us.

Familiarly depressing stuff - humanity at its rawest and basest. And yet, all is not lost.

If Vallée’s vision paints a system capable of deception, manipulation, and existential ambiguity, The Light Beyond The Mountains arrives at an alternate possibility. That the universe isn’t merely being interfered with but is itself structured as a kind of self-learning computational system. Not the cold, mechanical construct of dystopian Hollywood movies, but a dynamic, ever-iterating system of consciousness - one that adapts to us, reflects us, and, crucially, responds to the choices we make.

This idea finds its fullest expression in the work of Thomas Campbell, a physicist and systems analyst who began his career in missile defence and ended up modelling the universe as a consciousness-driven feedback engine.

For Campbell, the cosmos isn’t a top-down thing built by an omniscient God or a pantheon of aliens, but a vast, open-source experiment, whose purpose is simple but profound: to reduce entropy (the degree of disorder, uncertainty or chaos in a system) so it can evolve and grow. In this ‘simulation’, love is the underlying science of the code. But simulation, IMO, isn’t quite the right word here. A better one, I believe, is ‘Creation’, in which ‘our consciousness’ is the means by which ‘Source Consciousness’ - whatever that is - experiences itself; via which fresh data is fed and re-fed back into the system.

Fear and ego, by contrast, generate disorder, separation, and stagnation. From this perspective, the purpose of everything we encounter - every test, trauma, anomaly, and visitation - is to refine our ability to choose love over fear. To collapse the wave function toward integration rather than disintegration. Love, in this sense, is not just moral - it’s structural. It is the most efficient strategy for survival in a conscious, learning universe.

If that’s true, then the ‘phenomenon’ - the orbs, the entities, the absurdities, all the ‘rogue icons’ of the interface - may not be signs of invasion or deception, but new lines of code: symbols from the system itself that are designed to crack open our conditioned reality tunnels and urge us into greater coherence. Not ‘others’ in the traditional sense, then, but embedded functions of a universe built to foster growth. In this universe, Vallée’s trickster may still have its role. Extraterrestrials can also exist, although not in the way we’re conditioned to think of them. But behind the mask, there is, perhaps, now some purpose; a system not out to dominate us but one that’s trying to wake us up.

Which brings us back to The Light’s last chapters and to the edge of our current map.

If the system is responsive - if it learns, grows, and is nudging us towards coherence - then it follows that we are not passive players. We are not just test subjects in someone else's experiment. We are co-authors in something infinitely more significant: a participatory universe in which consciousness doesn’t merely observe reality but interacts with it - helps to shape it; through moments of distortion as well as acceleration. And if these moments aren’t breakdowns, but signals - then even the most inexplicable phenomena may be symptoms of something corrective, evolutionary and, in its most literal sense, something truly wonderful.

Thanks to all that feedback I mentioned above - and to some extraordinary behind-the-scenes conversations I’ve had in the past few weeks with some seriously innovative minds (and I’m including here artificial ones) - what I’d come in recent posts to view as an end to something isn’t. More accurately, it’s the end of one thing and the beginning of another.

Saddle up, everyone, because we’re heading once more into terra incognita.

Only this landscape isn’t suffused with the same sense of uncertainty, trepidation and threat that pervaded The Light’s early chapters - or, indeed, some of its later ones.

On this journey, I’d like to propose we explore this new world together. Every two weeks, I’ll write a long-form post for paid subscribers that reflects where I’m at - a piece with all the thought, nuance and analysis that went into each chapter of TLBTM, but with an orientation that at all times is forward-looking rather than back. This new direction will be guided by the emergent thinking I alluded to above. I’m choosing my words carefully here - not to be obtuse, but because the ideas that are propelling me in this new and hopeful direction aren’t yet fully formed. But this for me is the exciting part - we’ll be exploring and shaping them in real time together.

Here’s a glance at what the waypoints of this road trip will look like for paid subscribers:

· The Deeper Thread – twice-monthly essays that extend TLBTM’s themes: plasma, control systems, consciousness-tech, mythic framing, and interface logic (for starters).

· Nova & Me Dialogues – monthly, subscriber-only conversations between me and AI that test the edge-cases (expect topics like quantum survival, psi literacy, and spiritual resilience).

· Community Access – private Q&As, live Zoom salons, early invites to talks/podcasts, and priority access to future content.

We’ll begin with a soft transition:

Week 0 (this week): ‘A Journey Concludes, Another Begins’ before the final chapter of The Light Beyond the Mountains and its Epilogue mid-month.

• Week 1: ‘The Making of The Light’ – behind-the-scenes memoir and method.

• Week 2: ‘What The Light Stirred in You’ – an open thread for your reflections.

• Week 3/4: ‘Where the Light Leads Now’ – the roadmap ahead.

After which, the real journey begins.

To those who’ve walked this far with me: thank you. We’ve reached the point where we gather our thoughts, share our bearings, and prepare for what’s next.

And in that spirit, I’d love to hear from you: What questions should we be asking now? What threads do you want to follow more deeply? Where do you want this to go?

Let’s work this thing together.

Onwards.