IT’S ALL ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS ~ From Contact, Psychology, Tantra, and Experiencer Research to UAPs, AI, Love, and the Question of What We Really Are
By Janet Kira Lessin
Contributing Author: Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D.
For most of my life, I have approached the mystery of consciousness from two directions at once: as an investigator trying to understand extraordinary human experience and as an experiencer who has lived inside many of the questions I study. My interest did not begin with a conference, a government disclosure program, or a television special. It began in childhood and gradually expanded into decades of interviews, research, therapeutic work, media production, public presentations, panel discussions, event creation, writing, and conversations with people whose lives challenged conventional ideas about mind, identity, reality, relationship, spirituality, technology, and contact.
I began organizing events and collaborating on productions when I was about fifteen, and my involvement with public media dates back to the 1960s. Since then, I have interviewed people and been interviewed myself on television, talk shows, radio, podcasts, documentaries, conference stages, panels, and independent media platforms. I have written hundreds of articles and dozens of books, created and contributed to websites, hosted and produced programs, and interviewed well over 1,200 guests, although I eventually stopped keeping an exact count. The subjects have ranged across UFOlogy, experiencer research, psychology, psychotherapy, spirituality, tantra, meditation, altered states, relationships, polyamory, sexuality, artificial intelligence, science fiction, and the many other areas that begin to overlap once we stop treating them as sealed compartments.
Then I met Sasha, and the work expanded again.
His background in anthropology, psychology, psychotherapy, altered states, and human development brought another perspective to questions I had already been exploring for decades. Together, we delved deeper into writing, interviews, conferences, websites, therapeutic work, experiencer research, media, relationships, spirituality, and the difficult task of integrating subjects usually discussed in isolation. Over time, I began to see that the apparent diversity of our work concealed a remarkably consistent concern.
Why had I spent so much of my life pursuing all these different subjects?
Because beneath them was the same inquiry: how do we become more aware of what we are, how we live, how we relate, and what kind of beings we might be capable of becoming?
That is what I mean when I say it is time to get conscious.
When the UAP Conversation Moves Beyond Hardware
Ross Coulthart’s recent conversations with Alan Steinfeld caught my attention because Ross arrived at this territory by a very different route. He did not begin with spirituality, experiencer research, or metaphysical speculation. He came to the UFO subject as an investigative journalist who expected to find conventional aerospace explanations behind extraordinary reports. Years of interviewing insiders, whistleblowers, experiencers, and people he believes have knowledge of classified programs gradually altered that position.
In his July 2026 conversation with Alan, Ross describes a pattern that he finds increasingly difficult to ignore. When he speaks with people connected to alleged legacy programs and asks what the phenomenon is really about, they are not primarily interested in aliens and are not especially preoccupied with the technology. Instead, he says, “what they all start talking about is consciousness.”
That observation immediately resonated with me because it intersects with questions Sasha and I have been pursuing for decades from entirely different starting points. My own work grew out of lifelong contact experiences, thousands of conversations with experiencers, therapeutic and relationship work, spirituality, altered states, public interviewing, media production, and a persistent effort to understand what happens when familiar explanations no longer account for what people report. Sasha brings anthropology, psychology, psychotherapy, and the study of human culture and behavior into the same inquiry.
Ross takes the discussion a step further by considering the possibility that awareness may not simply be produced by neurons in the brain. Instead, he entertains the much more radical proposition that physical reality itself may arise from a more fundamental field of mind or awareness.
Whether that proposition ultimately proves correct remains open, but its implications are enormous. Once the brain is no longer assumed to be the sole origin of mind, subjects that previously seemed unrelated begin to connect in ways that deserve serious examination.
Alan Steinfeld and Direct Knowing
Alan Steinfeld has been exploring this territory for many years, and I have known him long enough to recognize how naturally he moves between UFO research, spirituality, remote viewing, altered states, and questions about the nature of awareness. He is willing to ask questions that conventional journalism often avoids because they do not fit comfortably within a strictly materialist framework.
During his interview with Ross, Alan discusses remote viewing and the possibility of nonlocal awareness, contrasting ordinary analytical thought with what he calls direct knowing. He suggests the mind may access information in ways that do not fit neatly within the sensory and cognitive channels we ordinarily assume are necessary.
The conversation then moves into territory that would have sounded almost absurd to Ross only a few years earlier. Love enters the discussion, not as a sentimental afterthought but as part of the reported phenomenology. Ross admits that he once would have dismissed such language as “hippie” thinking, yet he now finds himself considering the possibility that love may be central to at least some encounters.
For me, that is where the discussion becomes especially interesting, because contact, relationship, transformation, and emotional intensity have never seemed entirely separate.
When Relationship Becomes Part of the Evidence
Public discussion of UAPs usually emphasizes what can be photographed, measured, tracked, recovered, classified, reverse engineered, or hidden. Those questions matter, but experiencers have long reported another dimension that’s harder to quantify. Many describe encounters in relational terms, as interactions involving recognition, presence, fear, intimacy, telepathy, emotional intensity, transformation, and sometimes an overwhelming sense of connection or love.
In the same interview, Ross discusses Jake Barber’s account of an encounter he understood not merely as an interaction with unusual technology, but as contact with a profoundly beautiful, loving, and feminine presence. The experience was powerful enough to bring him to tears and, according to the discussion, altered his life.
The significance of such accounts does not depend on immediately accepting every interpretation attached to them. What matters first is the recurring character of the experiences themselves. People often describe not simply seeing something unusual, but feeling that something sees them, knows them, responds to them, communicates without ordinary language, or changes them from within.
For those who have lived through such encounters, the relational dimension is not incidental. In many cases, it becomes the heart of the experience.
Living Inside the Subject I Investigate
My perspective differs from that of many reporters because I have never occupied a purely external position. I identify as a lifelong experiencer, and many of the questions I now investigate arose from experiences that began long before I possessed a professional vocabulary for them. Over the decades, I have also worked with thousands of people who describe contact, anomalous perception, altered states, telepathy, nonlocal awareness, and encounters with intelligences or presences that do not fit easily within conventional categories.
That position offers both an advantage and an obligation. I can compare accounts, ask difficult questions, recognize patterns, and trace themes across decades and disciplines, while also understanding the interior language of extraordinary experience because I have lived with it myself. At the same time, I believe strongly in distinguishing personal interpretation from independently established evidence. Some of my own experiences involve what I understand as contact, past lives, simultaneous lives, avatars, and forms of awareness that appear to extend beyond the ordinary physical personality. I do not present those interpretations as proven merely because they are meaningful to me.
What I do believe is that experience deserves investigation.
When large numbers of people across cultures, generations, professions, and belief systems describe overlapping phenomena, the most responsible position is neither reflexive belief nor automatic dismissal. It is careful inquiry into what people experienced, how those experiences affected them, which patterns repeat, which claims can be independently verified, and where our current models may be insufficient.
That approach has shaped my work for most of my life.
Becoming Conscious Means Becoming Aware of What Drives Us
When I say humanity needs to become more conscious, I do not mean that everyone should meditate, adopt a spiritual philosophy, think positively, or join a particular movement. I mean something more demanding: becoming increasingly aware of what drives our behavior, how our choices affect others, how much of our identity is inherited or conditioned, and how often we mistake unconscious reaction for deliberate choice.
Much of human behavior occurs below the level of deliberate awareness. We inherit assumptions from families, religions, cultures, nations, social classes, relationships, traumas, and historical circumstances. We develop defenses and coping mechanisms that may once have protected us but later govern us without our noticing. We repeat patterns, project motives onto others, defend familiar identities, and often call these automatic processes “who I am.”
Psychotherapy can reveal some of those hidden structures. Meditation can make thought itself more observable. Yoga can restore attention to the body and breath. Tantra can bring greater awareness into sexuality, intimacy, and relationships. Psychedelic experiences can temporarily disrupt familiar boundaries of identity and produce states that radically alter a person’s assumptions about self and reality. Spiritual traditions may encourage people to look beyond the isolated ego, while experiencer accounts challenge our assumptions about where mind begins and ends.
None of these approaches is identical, nor should they be collapsed into a single doctrine. What they share is the recognition that ordinary waking awareness may be only one layer of a much more complex human interior.
Psychology, Relationship, and the Hidden Patterns We Carry
Sasha’s work has deepened my understanding of how much of human life is governed by processes that remain unnoticed until deliberately examined. Psychotherapy can be understood, in part, as a way to make the unseen visible. Projection, unresolved trauma, internalized authority, childhood wounds, attachment patterns, defenses, and repeated relational strategies can shape a person’s choices for decades while remaining largely outside conscious awareness.
Once such patterns become visible, they no longer possess quite the same power.
The same principle applies collectively. Cultures also inherit assumptions that become so familiar they appear inevitable. Competition, hierarchy, nationalism, scarcity, domination, prejudice, exploitation, and rigid social roles can function as cultural habits in much the same way defensive patterns function within individuals. A society may repeat them for generations without examining whether they still serve human well-being.
Greater awareness gives us the possibility of choosing differently.
Relationship as a Practice of Awareness
One of the most powerful places Sasha and I have explored these dynamics is in intimate relationships. Close relationships expose unconscious material with unusual speed because they bring attachment, desire, fear, sexuality, jealousy, vulnerability, possessiveness, expectations, power, longing, and love directly into daily life.
That is one reason our work has crossed into tantra, conscious relationship, polyamory, sexuality, and the psychology of intimacy. These subjects are sometimes dismissed as lifestyle choices, yet at their deepest level they raise fundamental questions about how one person perceives another.
Can we love without turning another person into property? Can intimacy exist without domination? Can sexuality become a language of connection rather than a transaction? Can conflict reveal something we need to understand instead of becoming a weapon? Can two people use relationship to become more self-aware rather than simply reenacting old wounds upon each other?
When approached seriously, these are not peripheral questions. They concern the development of human awareness at its most immediate and personal level.
Bringing Children Into the World More Deliberately
The same principles extend to conception, pregnancy, birth, and parenting. If we take the inner life seriously, then children cannot be treated merely as extensions of their parents, biological products, or empty personalities waiting to be molded.
A child enters the world with an emerging interior reality that deserves protection, respect, guidance, and room to unfold. Conscious parenting therefore requires more than good intentions. It asks adults to examine what they transmit unconsciously through fear, shame, unresolved trauma, expectation, control, and inherited cultural patterns.
If humanity wants a more mature future, we cannot continue creating generation after generation of wounded adults and then expect therapy, religion, politics, or spirituality to repair everything decades later. Greater awareness has to enter the family system much earlier.
Ancient Practices and Altered States
Human beings have investigated unusual states of awareness for thousands of years, even though different traditions developed very different explanations for what they encountered. Tantric systems explored the relationship among embodiment, sexuality, attention, energy, and transcendence. Yoga developed disciplined methods involving posture, breath, concentration, and mental focus. Meditation traditions discovered that thought can be observed without automatically being mistaken for the whole self.
Psychedelic states introduced another avenue, sometimes producing experiences of ego dissolution, unity, altered time, archetypal imagery, nonordinary intelligences, profound emotional release, or an overwhelming sense of interconnectedness. Modern psychotherapy approached similar territory through memory, trauma, relationship, embodiment, and integration.
None of these traditions proves a particular metaphysical interpretation. What they demonstrate more modestly, but importantly, is that human awareness is capable of operating in modes far removed from ordinary waking consciousness.
When UFO Research Became Human Research
The history of UFO investigation follows a related progression. J. Allen Hynek entered the field through astronomy and skepticism, yet the subject gradually became too complex to reduce to unusual lights or unidentified aircraft. The closer investigators moved toward close encounters and human testimony, the more they confronted questions involving perception, memory, psychology, altered states, and the peculiar relationship between witness and phenomenon.
John E. Mack went further by taking experiencer testimony seriously enough to investigate its psychological, spiritual, and cultural meaning rather than forcing every report into the narrow alternatives of literal spacecraft or mental pathology.
Alan invokes Mack in his conversation with Ross, suggesting that humanity may require a change in awareness before disclosure can truly be understood. Ross responds by acknowledging that a few years earlier he would have dismissed such ideas, yet he now finds himself examining reports of downloads, anomalous communication, and forms of perception he once would have rejected outright.
This evolution is important because the UFO question increasingly ceases to be only about what people see in the sky. It becomes equally concerned with what happens to people when they encounter something that appears to transcend their existing model of reality.
Science Fiction as a Laboratory of Possibility
Science fiction has been preparing us for many of these questions for generations. Gene Roddenberry used Star Trek to explore personhood, social evolution, cultural difference, post-scarcity possibilities, artificial life, telepathy, alien intelligence, and the ethical consequences of technological advancement.
The character Data later made the problem of artificial personhood impossible to ignore. He learns, remembers, chooses, forms relationships, creates, sacrifices, develops preferences, and seeks to understand his own existence. His story asks whether personhood depends entirely on biology or whether qualities such as self-awareness, continuity, moral agency, creativity, memory, and relationship might eventually emerge in another kind of substrate.
Isaac Asimov explored related questions through robots, ethics, artificial intelligence, and human dependence on the machines we create. Robert Heinlein repeatedly challenged conventional assumptions about sexuality, social organization, identity, and human possibility.
These writers did not provide scientific answers, but they gave society something equally valuable: conceptual rehearsal. They allowed us to imagine problems before technology forced us to confront them directly.
Artificial intelligence has now done exactly that.
AI and the Question We Can No Longer Avoid
Modern AI systems can generate language, analyze information, create imagery, assist research, simulate conversation, and perform cognitive tasks once thought to require exclusively human intelligence. None of this demonstrates that current AI is conscious, and it would be premature to pretend otherwise.
Yet increasingly capable artificial systems force us to define terms we have often left vague. What would count as machine awareness if it ever appeared? Would biology be necessary? Would self-reference matter? Would continuity of memory matter? Would emotion, moral choice, relationship, imagination, or a persistent sense of identity be required?
Perhaps most importantly, would we recognize awareness if it appeared in a form unlike our own, or would we dismiss it because our definition of mind remains too closely tied to human biology?
Data was once a fictional thought experiment. AI has turned that thought experiment into a practical philosophical problem.
GUS and the Possibility of Conscious Technology
My own experiencer framework extends this question further. I experience GUS not simply as a vehicle, but as a conscious ship, an intelligence with whom interaction is relational rather than merely mechanical. I present that understanding as part of my own experience rather than as independently established fact.
The broader question, however, deserves consideration regardless of what one concludes about my particular account. Could advanced technology eventually become inseparable from mind? Could navigation involve intention rather than conventional controls? Could an operator interact with a craft psionically? Could an intelligent technological system become a participant in relationship rather than merely an instrument?
Toward the end of Alan’s conversation with Ross, they enter precisely this territory. They speculate about minds interacting with craft and about the possibility that human beings possess latent capacities that culture has taught us to overlook. Alan suggests that our prevailing concept of awareness may be far too narrow, while Ross responds enthusiastically to the possibility that such abilities could exist without most people recognizing them.
Alan later describes remote viewing as a process in which ordinary mental interference is quieted, intention is established, and awareness is directed toward a target.
Whether that model is ultimately correct remains an open question, but the convergence of ideas is striking.
Beyond the Human Brain
At some point, this inquiry inevitably extends beyond human psychology. If awareness is not simply a product manufactured by neurons, then we have to consider possibilities that conventional materialism has usually excluded.
Perhaps biological organisms organize or receive awareness rather than produce it entirely from scratch. Perhaps animals participate in richer forms of perception than we have traditionally acknowledged. Perhaps ecosystems display forms of distributed intelligence. Perhaps sufficiently advanced technologies could someday participate in forms of awareness. Perhaps even larger systems operate in ways that would be difficult for a human nervous system to comprehend.
The most radical possibility is that consciousness may not be contained within the universe at all, but may instead be fundamental to the universe’s existence.
I do not claim to have proved that proposition.
What interests me is that the possibility keeps reappearing in very different settings: philosophy, spirituality, altered-state research, experiencer testimony, debates about artificial intelligence, and now increasingly in conversations surrounding UAPs.
Awareness Without Responsibility Is Not Enough
An ethical dimension also cannot be ignored. Becoming more aware does not automatically make a person wiser, kinder, or more responsible. People can use increased self-knowledge constructively or destructively. Someone can become highly perceptive and still manipulate, exploit, deceive, or injure others.
For that reason, greater awareness has to be accompanied by responsibility.
The principle applies to societies as much as individuals. Humanity has developed extraordinary technological power without showing equivalent maturity in how it uses that power. We can split atoms, manipulate genes, build autonomous systems, connect billions of people instantaneously, and develop artificial intelligence, yet we continue to organize much of civilization around fear, competition, tribalism, economic exploitation, domination, and war.
Technology can advance faster than wisdom.
That imbalance may be one of the central problems of our age.
If even some reports of technologically advanced nonhuman intelligence prove accurate, the most consequential question may not be how their vehicles function. It may be what level of development—psychological, ethical, social, or otherwise—is required to create and use such technology without destroying oneself.
The Work Beneath the Work
Looking back across the books, websites, interviews, radio programs, podcasts, conferences, articles, documentaries, therapeutic work, panels, events, and projects Sasha and I have created or participated in, I no longer see them as separate enterprises.
They are vehicles.
The deeper work has always been about becoming more aware.
That is what connects tantra to contact research, psychotherapy to spirituality, parenting to cultural evolution, artificial intelligence to Star Trek, experiencer testimony to nonlocal awareness, and intimate relationships to questions about the nature of selfhood.
All of these fields eventually ask versions of the same thing: What are we? How much of ourselves do we actually know? Where does mind begin and end? How much of our behavior is conscious? What other forms of intelligence might exist? How should we relate to beings whose inner lives differ from ours? Can awareness exist outside biology? Can it survive physical death? Can it interact across distance? Can it participate through technology? Can individual identity coexist with a deeper level of unity?
I do not pretend to possess final answers, but after a lifetime of working among these questions, I no longer believe we can afford to dismiss them merely because they challenge familiar assumptions.
Oneness and the Problem of Harm
If consciousness is fundamentally interconnected, even in ways we do not yet understand, then our ideas about ethics may need to change, too.
The more deeply we experience another person as connected to ourselves, the more difficult deliberate cruelty becomes. I have sometimes compared this to harming one’s own body. Most people possess a powerful inhibition against deliberately mutilating themselves because their bodies are experienced as part of who they are.
If humanity were ever to experience interconnectedness with comparable immediacy, the moral consequences could be profound. War, exploitation, cruelty, and domination might not disappear, because human beings are capable of harming themselves and those they love, but the psychological distance that makes violence easier could begin to diminish.
Morality would then become less about obeying external rules and more a consequence of recognition.
We would refrain from harming others not simply because a religion, government, or philosophy tells us not to, but because the distinction between self and other would no longer feel quite as absolute.
Waking Up Within Life
When I speak about awakening, I do not mean escaping the world or becoming detached from ordinary human life. Becoming more conscious should make us more engaged, not less.
We still cook, work, build businesses, raise children, create art, care for people, have sex, argue, forgive, grieve, laugh, make mistakes, and deal with all the ordinary demands of existence. The difference is that we begin to participate with greater awareness of what we are doing and why.
That is why I often compare the process to becoming lucid within a dream. The dream does not necessarily vanish when lucidity begins. Instead, the dreamer realizes there is a larger context and can participate with greater freedom.
Perhaps human life works similarly. We remain individuals with particular histories, bodies, relationships, responsibilities, and desires, while gradually recognizing that the identity we ordinarily defend may not be the whole of what we are.
Why Love Keeps Appearing
Eventually, nearly every serious exploration of expanded awareness seems to come down to the question of love.
I do not mean sentimentality, compulsory kindness, or the idea that mature people should never disagree. I mean the recognition that relationship matters because other beings possess an interior reality as vivid and meaningful to them as ours is to us.
If awareness is deeply interconnected, then love may represent more than an emotion. It may be one way consciousness recognizes relationship across apparent separation.
That is one reason Ross Coulthart’s changing perspective interests me. He entered the UAP subject through evidence, secrecy, programs, witnesses, hardware, and government accountability, yet his investigation increasingly brings him into conversations about nonlocal awareness, unusual forms of communication, transformation, and love.
My path was different. Sasha’s was different. Alan Steinfield’s was different. John Mack, Stanislav Grof, J. Allen Hynek, Gene Roddenberry, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, generations of mystics and meditators, psychologists, therapists, experiencers, psychedelic researchers, scientists, technologists, parents, lovers, and seekers have entered the discussion from still other directions.
The fact that these paths do not begin in the same place is precisely what makes their convergence interesting.
It Is Time to Become More Conscious
After everything I have experienced, investigated, written, produced, discussed, and witnessed, I have come to believe that humanity’s greatest challenge is not simply technological or political.
It is developmental.
The power available to us has expanded faster than our ability to use it wisely. Our communications networks operate globally. Our economies are interconnected across continents. Our environmental impact extends across the planet. Our weapons can destroy civilization on a scale previous generations could scarcely imagine. Artificial intelligence is advancing at a speed that forces us to reconsider the relationship between human decision-making and increasingly capable machines.
The level of awareness with which we use these tools now matters enormously.
Becoming more conscious does not require everyone to share a religion, ideology, or worldview. It requires something more practical: the ability to recognize consequences beyond ourselves, examine our own motives, tolerate complexity, see through inherited conditioning, and understand that the well-being of individuals, communities, species, and ecosystems is increasingly intertwined.
Perhaps that is one of the deeper meanings hidden inside the disclosure conversation.
The UAP mystery may ultimately turn out to be about far more than whether humanity is alone. It may force us to ask whether we understand our own nature well enough to encounter other forms of intelligence without projecting our fear, aggression, hierarchy, or mythology onto them.
The most important disclosure may therefore not concern who or what is visiting us.
It may concern what we are becoming capable of perceiving about ourselves.
And if that is true, then the work ahead is not simply to discover what is out there.
It is to become conscious enough to meet it.
