Given the variety of life-forms on this planet, any aliens may be truly exotic and unimaginable to us. Here’s one attempt at alien aliens based on an old sci-fi story.
We pass on knowledge through things like books and talking. Suppose there were aliens that had a much more direct and immediate means, so that any group formed a collective consciousness. (If you’re worried about the physics, they wouldn’t need to be telepathic but could have something more akin to natural built-in wireless transceivers.
)
We already have a mild form of this as consensus elements of our culture, and some universal signals, such as the “hair flip.” Ideas are often viral, as is mob mentality, feelings sometimes spreading literally as wildfire.
As for books and talking, they are very poor transmitters of culture. The actual fine points of culture are transmitted by example and imitation. A very good explication of this process and why our Western “culture” is in trouble can be found in the just late Jane Jacobs’ book
Dark Age Coming. We might also remember the extraordinary values of mentorship and apprenticeship here. It’s well known that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice at a skill to be truly competent, unless one is truly gifted. Even then such practice is necessary to sustain the gift, especially if it is one of insight or realization.
Each individual would then reflect the knowledge and consciousness of the entire group. When groups meet up, the collective consciences would merge. Or an individual could travel to another group, get a download, then go back to their original group to update it.
Ditto to this, and many stories have been written in short and long form about cultures where this is endemic. They are often portrayed as a menace to human society because our methods are not only slower, but we have a fierce feeling of individual independence and territoriality. In fact, it has been said that the rise of civilization has been the battle against the tendencies of testosterone.
An individual’s death might then be more like an inconvenience than a loss to be mourned. Sin may be viewed as a collective sin, because an individual that worked against the group’s interest may be seen as a defective component rather than a free agent. The collective may think of God as the sum total of all consciousness ever, from which they are temporarily separated until death, when they joyfully join and augment it.
One root meaning of “sin” is to “miss the point.” This is where moral judgements and simple prioritization of consequences tend to clash. Morality is essentially the convention surrounding individual and group survival, whether that is physical, mental, economic, or spiritual. Some conventions clash relative to the immediacy and perspectives relative to what constitutes survival relative to local, and now global conditions in kinds and degrees. Some few even think in terms of Universals independent of faith systems limited by non teleological closed canons.
We might think of the dynamic you describe this way: “awareness” is the force of the totality of Consciousness impinging on an instance of identifying with a form and its perspective within a given set of dimensions. So when discorporation occurs, that particular strand of attention is withdrawn to its Origin over time to “no time.” This can be experienced before “death” as an instance or state of beatific vision or satori. There are libraries of material on this, as well as stories.
That identification in humans is expressed as subject/object awareness which is reflexive, as distinct from instinctive non-reflexive awareness in animals, plants, minerals, and particles. At the energy end of that spectrum, awareness is the nature of behavior as conforming to laws, which makes the paired particle phenomenon very interesting indeed.
All of this is really far-fetched given that there may not be any aliens out there anyway. But which of our ideas of Divinity might we share with these aliens? Or, put it another way, would God create this kind of alien race in the first place? Or yet another way, would they necessarily not be created in the image of God?
It is only far fetched if one hasn’t gone beyond the ordinary subject/object state of the vast majority of humans. It is “beyond the mind,” or past the mirror of reflexive awareness that the resolution of religion and science lies, or truths, actually
When we find aliens, and they have sentience, that sentience stems from the same Source as ours. They will have the same structure of expression: “Consciousness it the Light to the awareness of ideas and thoughts. You are Conscious Awareness primarily, and only secondarily the citizen of a nation” or a planet. That is the Image and Likeness of God: The self reflexive state of awareness of Consciousness as being fundamental. The
Feeling associated with that is Soul. It can be called something else, but we do not wish to scare the horses, which by the way have for ages been the symbol for the mind. How well can you ride yours?
Or is it yet wild, roaming the plains, untethered?
