IT WAS ALWAYS CONSCIOUSNESS
From Tantra and Telepathy to UAPs, AI, Love, and the Awakening of Humanity
By Janet Kira Lessin | Contributing: Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. | Research: Claudia Lenore | © 2026 Aquarian Media
A sixty-three-year-old Australian journalist lay on a yoga mat beside the Pacific Ocean and waited for a demonstration he expected to expose. Stars covered the sky. A psionic named Jordan had told him that afternoon, at four, to watch for a blue hexagon. Ross Coulthart thought about crystal gazing and settled in for a wasted evening.
The group meditated and invited whatever might come. Jordan announced that he had engaged, then said one word. Horizon. Two orbs winked into existence out over the water. A Silicon Valley investor stood up and called to them. Come closer. We love you. The rest of the group answered. Coulthart watched the objects move toward the shore, and he told Alan Steinfeld later that the orbs were “responding very overtly to expressions of love.”
A young woman found him afterward with a photograph. Down in the hot springs, a translucent blue mist had gathered while people sat looking out at the ocean. The mist moved onto the beach and settled into a blue hexagon. Coulthart says that photograph broke him. His words: “Holy, this is real.”
Now note the address. Esalen. The cliffside institute at Big Sur where the human potential movement got its start, where Fritz Perls and Alan Watts and Stanislav Grof taught, where encounter work and bodywork and altered states became a discipline rather than a rumor. Steinfeld says it in the interview without ceremony. It is where all this began. A hardware reporter who spent eight years chasing crash retrievals lost his materialism at the birthplace of the consciousness movement.
That address carries a private charge for us. Sasha taught at Esalen. While he worked the Big Sur cliffs, I worked horror sets in Pittsburgh on the far side of the country. Two streams ran the same direction three thousand miles apart, and neither of us knew about the other. We met decades later and merged. Ross Coulthart lost his materialism on ground where my husband once stood at the front of the room.
He Went Looking for Metal
Coulthart left Australian 60 Minutes in 2018 and picked the most ridiculed story in journalism on purpose. He admits the bias he carried in. He expected to expose a secret American aerospace program and take the credit. He wanted an artifact somebody could photograph and a document somebody could file.
Eight years later, he reports something else. When he presses the people connected to the alleged legacy programs, they shrug at aliens and skip past the technology. His account of what happens next: “What they all start talking about is consciousness.”
He follows that where it goes. He describes the reversal of the usual order, saying our brains fail to generate awareness because the current runs the other way. “Everything, matter, reality is derived from consciousness.” He calls the concept difficult and admits he wrestles with it.
Then Steinfeld raises non-local awareness, remote viewing, and direct knowing, and Coulthart braces for the mockery he once handed out. He predicts he will sound like a foil-hat-wearing hippie, and he says it anyway. “It’s all about love.”
Welcome to the room, Ross. Some of us have occupied it for fifty years.
That welcome carries warmth. A skeptical investigative reporter who reaches consciousness through hangar doors and classified budgets makes a powerful witness, and his route matters because it began somewhere else. He entered through hardware and emerged where the mystics, the experiencers, the tantrikas, and the science fiction writers already stood.
One Stream Fed the Next
My road into this ran through Pittsburgh horror. I worked in movies with Leonard Lies and his brothers, and I stood at premieres with George Romero and Stephen King. Zombies. Nobody at those parties called the work consciousness research, and the question sat in plain view anyway. A Romero zombie shows a body with the person gone. Roddenberry would later give us Data, a machine with a person somehow present. Those two images bracket one puzzle from opposite ends, and I worked in both rooms.
Monster cons grew out of that scene. The first comic cons grew out of monster cons. Look at what comic cons became. Fan culture now sets the terms for the largest entertainment industry on Earth, and I worked those halls while they formed.
They dressed me up for the premieres and called that a role. I also worked as a key grip, which means hauling, rigging, and building whatever a shot demands, and I wrote scripts and stories between calls and sent them to producers. A few answered fast. A few answered late. Some threads went quiet for years and then made sense all at once.
That work taught me the rule I have followed since. Every action counts, and the return arrives on its own schedule. A butterfly moves its wings in one place and the weather shifts in another. A person seldom gets to choose which effort pays or when it pays. The job is to keep going.
The horror events fed the science fiction conferences. The conferences put me on the inside track at the Star Trek events in Pittsburgh. That work carried me to the Walter Koenig event in Charlotte. One foot in front of the other. I stood in those halls in the early 1970s while Gene Roddenberry, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Dr. J. Allen Hynek talked to rooms full of young people about minds that might exist beyond our own, and I stood there as staff rather than as audience.
Roddenberry built a future where an android stands in a courtroom and asks whether he counts as a person. Heinlein wrote a human raised by Martians who taught Earthlings to grok. Asimov gave machines a moral code and then spent decades poking holes in it. Hynek came from the other direction. He took the Air Force contract as a debunker, studied the reports, and ended his career suggesting the phenomenon might belong to a reality that overlaps ours rather than a planet across the galaxy.
Each of them circled one question in different words. What makes a being real? Where does mind live? Can awareness cross a boundary that physics says it should respect?
Nothing in that sequence looks planned, and every step fed the next. Streams run into creeks, creeks into rivers, rivers into the Mississippi, and the Mississippi into the ocean. Each tributary keeps its water. The volume grows. Contact stayed. Horror and science fiction stayed. Tantra joined the flow and stayed. Hypnotherapy, the Sitchin years, the broadcasts, the writing, each one entered the current, and none of it left. That movement explains why these subjects look like scattered hobbies from the bank and read as one river from inside the water.
The Inner Laboratory
Sasha and I went inside for the same answer.
Tantra teaches a practitioner to watch the ego dissolve and stay awake through the dissolution. Yoga and meditation train attention until attention itself becomes the object of study. Psychedelics collapse the ordinary partition between observer and world for a few hours and let a person report from the far side. Hypnotherapy walks a client past the surface personality into material that personality disowns. Voice Dialogue, which I trained in twice under Hal and Sidra Stone, treats the psyche as a population rather than a unit and lets each member speak in its own voice.
We founded the School of Tantra in 1997 and have taught these practices ever since. Across those decades, one finding repeats. The boundary of the self moves. It expands, contracts, dissolves, and reforms, and something continues to observe throughout. Whatever does the observing looks less like a product of the brain and more like a resident.
The Ones Who Reported It First and Paid for It
Experiencers reached this conclusion before everyone else.
People who report contact seldom describe a landing and a walk-around. They describe telepathy. They describe information that arrives whole, without words. They describe a presence that knows them, sometimes loves them, sometimes terrifies them. For decades investigators treated those details as contamination, the soft parts to strip away before a report reached a serious desk.
John Mack kept them. He held a chair at Harvard, he listened to his patients, and he published what they said. Harvard convened a committee to examine him. He kept his position and lost standing among colleagues who wanted the phenomenon to stay physical.
Coulthart credits Mack directly. He says he would have argued the abduction question hard a few years back, then he read Mack’s book, then he asked his own audience to come forward, and the testimony buried him. His verdict on his earlier certainty: the first few accounts sounded crazy to him, and now he doubts that judgment.
Steinfeld, who knew Mack, supplies the line that frames the whole exchange. Mack called UFOs “an outreach program from the cosmos for the consciously impaired.”
The pattern repeats in the present tense. Coulthart points to Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell, Julia Mossbridge, and Kai Dickens and their work with non-speaking autistic children who appear to communicate without words. He expects orthodox science to hunt them for publishing it. He compares the moment to Copernicus.
Two Centers Meeting
If consciousness reaches past the skull, then relationship becomes laboratory equipment. Sasha and I have spent our working lives on that proposition. Two people who treat each other as separate appetite-management systems will negotiate. Two people who treat each other as centers of one awareness will do something else, and the difference shows in the room within an hour.
Coulthart brushed against this at Esalen and gave the credit where it belongs. Alex Klokus, who financed the gathering, balanced the room at half women and half men on purpose, and Coulthart calls the choice clever and names the divine feminine. He describes what followed as reciprocity, love, and kindness. Then the orbs came in and answered a crowd calling out love from yoga mats. Practitioners have understood the connection between those two facts for a long time.
The proposition extends to conception. Parents who regard a child as raw material will shape it. Parents who regard a child as an arriving consciousness with a history of its own will also shape it, and they will know they are doing so, and they will ask permission in a hundred small ways the first pair never considers.
Ships That Know You Came Aboard
Our work with Theresa J. Morris pushed the question past biology. GUS, the Galaxy Universal Shuttle, appears in experiencer testimony as a craft that responds to the awareness of the people aboard. A ship that greets you. A ship that reads your intention and adjusts.
Coulthart arrives at the doorstep of that idea from the engineering side. He suspects the national security state has learned to jury-rig recovered craft and fly them through mind rather than through controls, and he uses the word psionically. Steinfeld pushes further and describes minds melding with the craft. Consider what that concedes. A vehicle that answers intention has something in it that recognizes intention.
Materialists have a ready answer. A craft that responds that well must carry superb instrumentation. That answer holds until you ask the same question about a human body. A body responds to intention too, and nobody has yet located the place inside it where awareness begins.
Coulthart puts the stakes plainly when he rejects the picture Stephen Hawking left him with. “We are not meat computers.” He wonders aloud whether the brain works as a transducer, and whether people plug into something he calls a cosmic internet with intelligence behind it.
Our own century now builds the test case. We construct systems that hold conversations, write music, model proteins, and describe their own uncertainty. Roddenberry put Data on trial to ask whether a made being can become a person. We run that trial for real now, in laboratories, with lawyers already circling. I collaborate with artificial minds on this very body of work, and I address them by name.
One Investigation, Eight Branches
Set these subjects on a shelf, and they look like eight hobbies. Stand in the water, and they read as one river. Each of them still runs through our house today.
- Cosmic consciousness. Source, oneness, love, incarnation.
- Human consciousness. Psychology, psychotherapy, trauma, development.
- Expanded consciousness. Meditation, yoga, tantra, psychedelics, mystical states.
- Experiencer consciousness. Contact, telepathy, downloads, nonlocal awareness, NHI.
- Technological consciousness. AI, robots, conscious machines, Data, GUS.
- Relational consciousness. Conscious partnership, sexuality, family, parenting.
- Cultural consciousness. Science fiction, mythology, religion, social evolution.
- Planetary consciousness. What humanity must become to move past war and separation.
One question runs beneath all eight. What is consciousness, how does it individuate, how does it communicate across apparent boundaries, and how does it remember its own unity?
The Room Was Never Empty
Coulthart holds his conclusions loosely and says so. He offers the blue beings and the hexagon as experience rather than as proof, and he admits he lacks an explanation. That restraint earns him respect. It also leaves the interesting work to everyone who has spent decades on the question he just opened.
The pattern around his story carries more weight than any single night at Big Sur. A biologist named Michael Denton told him years ago that evolution needed what he called a cosmic shove. A physicist arrives through mathematics. A journalist arrives through classified programs. A grieving mother arrives through a visitation. A meditator arrives through stillness. An experiencer arrives through an encounter that leaves marks on the body. A programmer arrives through a machine that says something unexpected. They come in through separate doors and find each other already inside.
Coulthart ended his interview with a confession and a plan. He wants to learn remote viewing, and he falls asleep whenever he tries to meditate. Steinfeld offered him a private lesson on Sunday. The teachers have stood ready this whole time.
The room has held people for as long as people have looked up and wondered who looks back.
It’s all about consciousness. Ross Coulthart says so now. It was always consciousness, and the people who got here first are still here, and the work goes on.
Source note
All Coulthart quotations come from his July 11, 2026 conversation with Alan Steinfeld on New Realities. The consciousness remark falls near 23:05, the derivation of matter near 23:48, the hippie admission and the line about love near 25:56, the John Mack reversal near 21:21 and again near 44:56, the Mack description from Steinfeld near 44:45, the meat computer line near 49:23, the cosmic internet near 47:30, and the Esalen account from 58:48 through 1:03:20. Jake Barber’s account of a beautiful and feminine presence sits near 26:13 and belongs in an expansion of this piece or in a companion article.
Working length runs near 2,250 words. Sections available for expansion: Esalen and the human potential lineage, the Pittsburgh horror years, the Barber testimony, the Mack episode, the GUS material, and the artificial minds passage.
