Remembering the Eternal:
Plato's View of "Education" in Anomalous Experiences
by Michael E. Zimmerman, Ph.D.

People describing the alien encounter experience often say that they receive information of some sort, as if they were being educated about complex topics that may seem crystal clear during the experience, but that may become cloudy or may even seem trivial afterward. The topics are frequently momentous, such as impending environmental calamity, whether brought about by human behavior or by some other cause, perhaps unknown.

Author Whitley Strieber described a mysterious "secret school" that he attended as a boy, a school reportedly operated by beings whom he associates with his encounters (The Secret School, 1989). Strieber's account and those of other experiencers are in some ways consistent with findings of folklorists and cultural anthropologists, according to whom people over the centuries have reported being taken to strange places by non-human beings, some of whom reveal delightful or disturbing aspects of previously unknown dimensions of reality. How are we to understand the "educational" aspect of the alien encounter experience?

In many accounts of the phenomenon, it is suggested that the "education" of experiencers goes beyond formal training or technical information received on board ostensibly alien crafts. Many authors have noted the self-understanding and personal identities of some experiencers are forever changed by discovering that they are somehow related to the aliens. Like individuals undergoing shamanistic initiation and near-death experience, experiencers sometimes recall previous lives and dimensions of existence that were forgotten when they were born as human beings. A number of years ago, psychologist Edith Fiore was one of the first to describe cases in which experiencers reported remembering that their "true" identity was not human, but rather alien (Encounters, 1989).

Plato on Reincarnation

The notion that education involves a kind of recollection of forgotten truths was postulated by Plato, the central figure in Western philosophy. Plato adhered to a doctrine of reincarnation, according to which the human soul (psyche) moves to a new body upon the death of the body previously occupied by the soul. Like other people from pre-modern cultures, he took for granted that the universe has planes that transcend the sensory or material plane. In his dialogue Phaedo, Plato describes the eternal soul, imprisoned in the perishable body, as yearning to return to its origin.

Suffering amnesia upon being born into a new body, the soul cannot easily recollect its divine origin, but instead becomes fascinated with sensory and sensual phenomena in a way that attaches the soul ever more to the body. Plato suggested that philosophy involved the process of recollecting what the soul knew before birth and a concomitant process of lessening one's attachment to the body.

As evidence that the soul involves a relationship with the eternal domain, Plato notes that we have knowledge of truths, for example in geometry, that can never be perfectly instantiated in the material world. In his dialogue Meno, Plato has Socrates show that a completely uneducated slave boy can come up with a proof for a problem in geometry. How is this possible? Because the slave boy "recollected" what he had known before being born, when his soul dwelled in close proximity to the eternal patterns or forms of which material phenomena are but imperfect replicas.

Education: Drawing Out What We Already Know

Our verb "to educate" is derived from the Latin educare, which is related to educere, to lead or to draw out. In other words, education involves the process of drawing out what we somehow already know. Can the alien encounter experience be understood as such a process of "education"?

There are intriguing parallels between Plato's account of recollection and the account offered by some abductees of their own experiences, particularly in regard to the notion that experiencers "choose" to be born as humans.

Although many experiencers at first fear and even loathe their captors, some experiencers eventually establish a different, more positive, and even a loving relationship with them. Such experiencers conclude that they themselves originally "chose" not only to incarnate as a human being who would forget his or her original identity at birth, but also to be taken by the beings with whom the human experiencers are in some sense intimately related.

Many of the experiencers with whom psychiatrist John Mack and PEER clinical director Roberta Colasanti have worked undergo a kind of spiritual growth or transformation in the process of learning about their alien identity. Such transformation may not be limited to the experiencers themselves, Mack suggests, but may have broader implications for the whole of humankind, which is now in the process of learning what the experiencers themselves have discovered. A basic shift in our comprehension of human origins, identity, and future would call into question the belief systems that legitimate social and political institutions of all kinds.

If experiencers are the vanguard of a transformational process that will alter humanity's understanding of its origins and destiny, we may well understand why "official" society so strongly resists even mentioning the alien encounter phenomenon, much less attempting to apprehend what its implications might be for humankind.

Although Plato offers no account of alien abduction, he concludes his famous work, the Republic, with a lengthy description of the near-death experience of a noted Greek warrior, Er, who awakened on his own (fortunately unlit) funeral pyre, 12 days after his supposed death, and told a remarkable tale of the realm in which souls dwell before being reborn. Er described how souls were taken before Lacheles, one of the three Fates, who spoke to the souls through an interpreter in the following way:

Souls of a day, here shall begin a new round of earthly life, to end in death. No guardian spirit will cast lots for you, but you shall choose your own destiny. Let him to whom the first lot falls choose first a life to which he will be bound of necessity. But Virtue owns no master: as a man honors or dishonors her, so shall he have more of her or less. The blame is his who chooses; Heaven is blameless. (Translation by F. Cornford, Oxford Press, 1970)

Obviously, this experience was a life-changing one for Er, who in his near-death condition encountered what others ordinarily forget in the birth process. Some experiencers seem to view the "aliens" as interpreters of far higher powers, as intermediaries who attempt to help us recollect our true origins so that we may live differently in the time that we are incarnated. In the process of recollecting our true identity, we may also choose to align ourselves with a destiny that would otherwise go unfulfilled. Instead of continuing to degrade the planet because humans are gripped by greed, aversion, and delusion, humankind may instead evolve in a way that makes possible more constructive relations among humans and between humankind and the biosphere.

Of course, there are many confusing and obscure aspects of the alien encounter experience, including aspects that do not seem to fit into this interpretation. We must not discount the possibility that the alien others engage in complex acts of deception designed to conceal aims that have little or nothing to do with human transformation. Nevertheless, courageous experiencers and people who have taken their accounts seriously do us a favor by sharing with us the possibility that individuals are encountering beings from another plane of reality, a plane to which humankind is somehow related and to which we may return. Recognition of our relation to higher planes, however, is not an excuse for otherworldly flights from responsibility, but instead demands a greater commitment to exhibiting compassion for all life on the blue-green planet.



Michael E. Zimmerman,Ph.D., is chair and professor of philosophy at Tulane University, and is clinical professor in the department of psychiatry at Tulane School of Medicine. He has written two books on Heidegger: Eclipse of Self (1981), and Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity (1990). Most recently, he has written Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Post-modernity (1994). He is chair of the advisory board of PEER, a project of the Center for Psychology & Social Change.