While with these beings, we co-created a code for humans communicating with them. This was actually the birth of the CE-5 - Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind - initiative. We utilized not only sounds and light but also non-local consciousness and directed, coherent thought to communicate with extraterrestrial beings and their electronic devices. This was October of 1973, during the time of the Yom Kippur war.
It was clear to me that the ETs wanted humans to move beyond mutually assured destruction and into a peaceful civilization that could co-exist with space in harmony. Earth needed to find people to be ambassadors for this objective. And so, I offered to do this, and to help teach the same to our fellow humans. Nothing more, just that.
Then very suddenly I returned to a "regular" state of awareness and found myself back on the gravel road near the fire tower, a little further down the path from my previous spot, but still at the top of the ridge. I thought, "Oh, my God, how wonderful." The experience of oneness with them had a key message: the conscious mind we are awake with at this moment is the same as that of the Divine Being, and of all beings.
Erwin Schrodinger was absolutely correct when he said the total number of minds in the universe is one. There is one conscious mind, and we are It. So, there are only one people in the universe, and we are they. No 'alien' or human; just an unbroken, perfect, seamless conscious life in the universe, and we are all a part of it.
I'm reminded of a saying from the Sufi tradition: "Thinkest thyself a puny form when within thee the universe is folded?" It's a rhetorical question. We're not just this puny form. The entirety of the universe is folded within us. And that's really what I experienced with the ETs.
They know that the only chance for peace on Earth -- never mind the cosmos -- is for humans to understand there's no real difference amongst us. It doesn't matter how we look- consider the variety in physical appearances that exists on Earth alone! What really matters is that within us lives the same singular light of consciousness, infinite, eternal and always present, whether we're open to it or not at any given moment in time. It is the basis of our relationship with each other and with the uni- verse. This is enduring and eternal -- and that is what we experienced in its absolute, purest form. It was beyond beautiful. And there was absolutely nothing frightening about it.
It didn't matter that I was only 18. They didn't care about such things as age, race, family of origin, or wealth. They cared about the fact that I was pure- hearted enough to see the truth clearly and unattached to the materiality of this world. I could discern the universal aspect of teach- ings in various cultures that humans have learned through the ages, because truth is one and the same in any language. What we created together that day proved that humans can be, each of us, connected to each other and to the unbounded awareness of the universe, but also to these other civilizations, if we simply understand the fact that we're awake. If you are awake, reading this or hearing this right now, the awake-ness whereby you're hearing it is a singularity. And it isn't divid- ed. We divide it into our own egos and intellect, but in reality, the light of awareness is the same in every being, in every star. And the entire cos- mos is suffused in this same light of Being. There is this great Sun of awareness reflecting and refracting in everyone, yet still singular. So, if you return to that and if you experience it, none of these life forms seem far away or unusual-or alien - because they really are not.
So, it was on this occasion the CSETI concept of one universe, one people was conceived. There is really one people in the universe, and we are they. There is a single conscious being shining in all of us. It can never be divided, no matter how much we try. We may want to divide it, but it's always one. It's always a singularity, always perfect. The extraterrestrial beings that are here understand this, because they cannot travel through interstellar space without understanding non-locality. And understanding non-locality, necessitates a high level of knowledge and enlightenment.
In a real sense, then, the heart of compassion and the foundation of peace is found in the reality that we are all one. Without that experience, intellectualism is all that's left - and it never lasts. So, I came to realize at a rather young age that the world's problems are essentially spiritual, therefore the solutions must be spiritual as well. And so it has turned out to be.
I found myself back on the mountain under the beautiful, starry sky, only to experience another strange phenomenon. I was perhaps 100 yards further down the gravel road. As I started down the mountain, I found that with each step, I was in a state of near- weightlessness, as if walking on the moon!
My steps were actually leaps of 20 to 30 feet at once! It was more like floating than walking. There was a strange, magnetic, anti-gravitational effect around me, making me lighter. It wasn't a product of my imagination; my physical body was light.
I was just happy as a lark! Here I was, fresh from this experience on an ETV, and now bounding down the mountain, traveling in "boing, boing, boing" leaps across impossible distances with each step. It was incredibly blissful. As I got closer to town, the phenomenon faded, and my weight returned to normal.
Upon reaching the little town of Boone, it looked so deserted I thought there had been a nuclear war! I thought it was about 9 or 10 o'clock at night - everything should have been open. Remember, it's a little college town up in the North Carolina mountains. I thought to myself, "What in the world is going on? I wonder if the Yom Kippur War got out of control and there was a thermonuclear war and I'm the last to know?" A check of the time told me, it was nearly 1:00 A.M! My cosmic experience had lasted three or four hours!
After this amazing evening, I decided to practice all I had learned, taught and shared with the extraterrestrials. Every night before going to sleep, I would lie down and put myself in a meditative state. I would enter unbounded Awareness, then expand the sense of conscious mind around me, filling the room, knowing that it was omni-present. On the wings of that omnipresent sense of Awareness, I would expand upwards into space, seeing the stars and space, filled with the sense that it was awake. And I was one with that awake-ness, which placed me out there, in space.
Then I would send a thought like a beacon to the extraterrestrial beings, to announce my presence. In a somewhat childlike way, I'd say, "I don't know if you remember me, but my name is Steve. And here I am - let me show you where I am." So, I would do the protocol we developed for the CE-5 initiative:
In this higher state of consciousness I would turn it around, and instead of seeing outward into the vastness of space, look back - and show the ETs my location on earth.
I would show them the Milky Way Galaxy and then zoom in from there to our Solar System, with the sun and the Earth. Then I would zoom to the Earth and North America, further in to the eastern United States and the Appalachian Mountains. Then I would zoom in to show them my location in Boone, North Carolina; then to my exact spot in that building. And with that, I would fall asleep.
For months my experiences were really quite extraordinary. From October '73 onwards, there began an unprecedented wave of UFO sightings in those mountains. I did this as a way of beta-testing the system, to see if what we had co-created and agreed upon on the ship would actually work. Well, it did. There were newspaper
reports of forest rangers seeing these huge ships hovering over the mountains, down in Shining Rock Wilderness to the south, and over in the Linville Gorge area. . . here, there, and everywhere!
I continued to do this until one day, in the local paper, a story appeared about a guy driving nearby on a road outside Morganton, North Carolina. As ETVs travel, it was only seconds away from me. This boy, who looked a lot like me, was driving on that road, and the car suddenly stopped. There was a ship hovering by the road, with an ET at the boy's window! The driver was completely freaked out.