A lot of us (myself included) have spent a much time looking up to the heavens and waiting for the extraterrestrial object, maybe watching a movie or TV series on UFO’s, reading books on UAP phenomenon. I’ve wished for contact, hoped for rescue, both for myself and for humanity, by a superintelligent, overly wise big brother/big sister. Something outside myself, outside the ordinary, to save me from me. I longed to break the tedium of my ordinary world, because I’m afraid to step outside of that circle myself. I crave rescue from my ordinary, consensus reality, and yet I’m afraid of the special world that I’d have to step into. I want someone, something, to do it for me.

Sometimes, it’s not about ET’s appearing on the White House lawn, coming to save the planet. It may be about miracles. Mother Mary, make the sun spin and dance in the sky. The mundane isn’t miraculous enough, with 200 tone of metal flying through the skies and trees the length of football fields piercing the low ceilings of coastal fog.  I want prophetic dreams, visions of the future. My own future, and the world’s, too. Baba Venga, pray tell, when will the world end? Are you drawn to seances, hauntings, a psychic connection? The paranormal? Anything but the normal?

I find myself reading accounts of NDE’s – Near Death Experiences – and of LRE’s – Life Review Events. I wonder myself what the afterlife will be like. In the meantime, I step over this life right before me. If I’m not living here and now, how will an afterlife lived there and then be any different? I dive into my dreams, especially the lucid ones, looking for prophetic meaning there. In the meantime, I avoid my waking world in favor of the dreamtime. What can dreams teach me that awakening lacks?

All of these experiences are what the visionary physicist, Fred Alan Wolf, called the imaginal realm. He believed that perhaps these experiences, without proving or disproving their veracity, point to a deeper, more substantial and everlasting reality. They stand for other things. Carl Jung described them in a similar vein.

Yet I think there’s something escapist in my desire to explore these unconventional experiences. I’m trying to avoid my ordinary world. I’m denying the here and now, which is the only place and time in all of spacetime in which I can access and experience peace.

There is something in the mundane and the profane which is profound, if I can learn to sit with it. Sit inside and just let it be what it is, what it’s supposed to be, not what I think it should be. The whole problem with ordinary reality isn’t in the reality itself. It’s in the fact that I’m almost always trying to change or improve it. I get in its way with my mind and my thoughts and judgments about it. One reason alcohol and drugs work so well is that they extricate me from my agendas about how the ordinary world should look, who should be populating it, how they should look, and what they should and shouldn’t do. But of course, that stops working. Almost every attempt at happiness is a manipulation to mediate my consensus reality, to control it, change it or improve it, rather than just let it be what it is. These attempts to escape the ordinary are almost never here, almost never now. They look to the future. I’ll be happy when… That’s the formula.

If you took a Medieval surf and suddenly placed them in a terminal at O’Hare International Airport, they’d be astounded by the miraculous, yet soon, they’d become habituated to it. If an extraterrestrial ship the size of Manhattan floated above a football stadium in the middle of the Superbowl, we’d be blown away. Yet soon, we’d lose interest. So the trick isn’t to seek greater and greater sensations, but to see the miraculous in the way the sunlight filters through the oak brush in a forest. Send ships to the stars, yes; but realize that the work is in our seeing. It’s to see the extra in the ordinary. That’s what meditation is.

I used to trip on LSD. And one of the reasons I liked it, no, the reason I loved it, was because it allowed me to experience the most mundane things as infinitely absorbing, endlessly interesting; everything from a 4 a.m. infomercial to the palm of my hand. But I can’t live life on LSD. It’s a lazy way to meditate. It’s a shortcut to the extraordinary, and shortcuts have consequences.

The intention is correct. Yet it’s the means I choose that determine whether I’ll suffer consequences. My job on this planet is to find unimproved ways to enjoy and experience the present moment, and to see that in its everyday-ness, a bump in the sidewalk is as profound as a mountaintop.

© 2025 by Michael C. Just