Just joshin’
My wife and I had a blast joshing around in Joshua Tree.
Last winter, my wife and I took a campervan trip to Joshua Tree National Park and had an absolute blast. I’d visited several years earlier for a day trip with my friend Ryan and loved the boulder scrambling and the park’s funky namesake flora, which reminds me of a saguaro crossed with a palm. We even summited Ryan Mountain — extra fun because I did it with Ryan inside a park that shares my name.
As much fun as Ryan and I had stomping around and playing name games, camping overnight elevated the Joshua Tree experience to a level that felt less like a vacation and more like a portal to another realm.
I hadn’t gone there chasing aliens, as I was unaware of the park’s UFO lore. Instead, I went to escape the frigid Minnesota winter and hike with my wife, including a challenging one where we visited three desert oases and staged clandestine nude photo shoots at two of them. My favorite pics from the impromptu sessions: my wife perched on a boulder smoking a joint, and me striking a half-decent Warrior Two while holding a strategically placed palm frond over my nether regions. Thankfully, no one reported us, and we escaped the park rangers’ wrath and made it back to our campsite by wintertime’s early dusk.
That night, we saw something in the cloudless, unpolluted sky that moved in ways no earthly thing is capable of. My wife saw it first and asked, “Can you see it too? Is it real?” I looked up, ready to dismiss it as a drone — even though drones are strictly prohibited in Joshua Tree and our campground was located deep inside the park — but the ethereal bundle of light energy moved with a geometry and speed no drone could match. We sensed its awareness of our presence and watched it trace patterns in the star-studded sky like a multidimensional Morse code too complex for me to decipher.
It didn’t feel alien in the Star Trek sense. It felt intimate — familiar — like an echo of the stuff that underlies everything.
With time and space between me and the moment, I’ve come to believe that what we communed with was pure consciousness.
Ancient Stoics — my spiritual exemplar Marcus Aurelius among them — referred to the unified field of pure consciousness as the logos. Others call it prana, Source, the quantum field, and God. Whatever you want to call it, it’s the foundational fabric that holds everything together. As physicist Max Planck succinctly summarized: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.”
As a great white shark’s evolutionary niche in nature is apex predation, so humans’ niche is consciousness. As sharks refined hunting to the max over eons, so we’re gradually refining the quality of our collective consciousness. We’re still, I’d argue, in the larval stage of a cosmic life cycle. But if we continue to evolve and max out consciousness like sharks maxed out predation, the logical conclusion is a fusion of human consciousness with the unified field — a form of spiritual maturity where we exist as pure consciousness.
Consciousness transcends time and space. We remember the past and envision the future because everything unfolds everywhere, all at once, in the timeless, eternal Now. Therefore, it follows that a fully mature consciousness from a future time and space could navigate any time and space, including the ones we’re currently sharing. Maybe some of the UFOs out there aren’t visitors from other planets at all but fully evolved versions of us — our future selves checking in on the unruly, cosmic teenagers.
The entity we saw in Joshua Tree felt like me because it was me: an evolved version of the species carrying the stuff that makes me, me. That is, an entity existing as pure consciousness would have access to a horde of ancestral consciousness, much like how the Kwisatz Haderach from Frank Herbert’s Dune series can access ancestors’ memories at will.
Have I ascended since our Joshua Tree experience? Far from it. But I’ve sharpened my awareness enough since then to decode the message behind that desert visit. Translated loosely: “Yo.” In Spanish, “¿Qué tal?” While the greeting transcended words, it felt simultaneously warm yet probing, the kind you give an old friend after a long separation when you’re not quite sure whether they recognize you.
When we recognize another as themselves, we recognize them in ourselves. From my perch, that’s our only real obligation in this thing called life. I tend to think that a future version of us was conducting a field study at Joshua Tree that night to evaluate the current state of our consciousness and determine if we’re properly equipped to carry out our cosmic duty.
Maybe it was a rogue drone after all, and someone was just joshing me. Or perhaps it was the Klingons on a reconnaissance mission.
But the vibe I get is closer to a loving parent dropping in on a college kid having a rough first semester to reassure them that things will work out and they’ll be okay.
