40. Against the Current: A Return to Conscience

As I reach the end of this book and look back across more than a decade, I realise that the journey has returned me to questions I once thought I understood. I no longer see them with the same eyes.

For years, I searched for hidden truths and tried to understand the forces that kept them hidden. Eventually, a harder question took their place: once we have seen clearly, what does that knowledge require of us?

I was once called a “lightworker.” The word has acquired a different weight for me. Light, as I now understand it, is a discipline: remaining answerable to conscience when truth becomes inconvenient or dangerous. If awakening means anything to me now, it is the refusal to let fear decide what kind of person I become.

The years 2022 and 2023 were among the happiest of my life. The happiness was quiet and enduring, a sense that my life had finally begun to move in its own rhythm.

Soon after the pandemic restrictions lifted, I left my job and used the savings I had accumulated over the years to travel around the world. The decision looked simple from the outside. In truth, it required me to loosen my grip on the life I had been trained to value: security, professional identity, and the reassurance of a predictable and respectable path.

Over the next two years, I travelled through countries across five continents. I kept no rigid itinerary and felt little interest in collecting destinations. Some weeks I remained constantly on the move; in other places, I stayed long enough for the city to become more than scenery. When the road exhausted me, I returned to Australia, took on occasional legal work, rested, and saved for the next journey.

For the first time, work and freedom no longer seemed to demand that I choose between them. Each made room for the other. Life moved between discipline and openness, movement and return. I began to understand that freedom did not require abandoning responsibility. It required living in closer alignment with one’s inner measure.

On long train journeys through Europe, the landscape often drew me back into memory. I thought of the upheavals within China’s UFO circles, the unsettling accounts I had heard from speakers at Contact in the Desert, and the near-detective work within our contact-support group back in 2014 as we tried to determine who might be reporting to the authorities. I remembered the tense months before the first interstellar conference, when we moved carefully through fractured relationships and the pressure of the state, determined to make the gathering happen.

Earlier scenes returned as well: dividing books for translation, debating late into the night, arguing in group chats, then dissolving into jokes. Those years had been turbulent and alive. They carried idealism, ambition, confusion, and a kind of innocence that had not yet learned how easily belief could be exploited.

Looking back, I began to see the irony in the shape of my life. On paper, I had done a fairly convincing job of becoming predictable—leaving China, earning an education, qualifying as a lawyer, serving the community. The deeper current ran elsewhere. The decade I spent inside UFO and spiritual circles unsettled the foundations of my life and altered the person moving through it.

That path gave me friendship, loyalty, and moments of genuine courage. It also exposed me to betrayal, deliberate cruelty, and the force of state suppression. I learned how easily spiritual language could conceal vanity, dependency, or hunger for power. I also learned that sincerity could survive inside deeply compromised worlds.

The experience did not leave me with certainty. It left me with a more exacting conscience.

Over time, I came to understand awakening as something far more demanding than revelation. It does not lift us above the confusion of the world; it draws us more fully into it. The test is whether openness can survive without gullibility, and compassion without the surrender of judgment.

Perhaps that was the deeper journey beneath all the others. I had crossed continents and entered hidden worlds, and witnessed the strange convergence of belief, power, fear, and longing. Yet the real passage was inward: towards a life in which freedom, conscience, and responsibility could no longer be separated.

From the moment I saw a UFO in 2012, I felt I had stepped into my own Alice in Wonderland. The rules of reality loosened. The boundaries of the possible shifted, then shifted again. I moved through wonder, confusion, exhilaration, doubt, and, eventually, a more disciplined clarity.

Years later, I found myself returning, in some sense, to where I had begun. Outwardly, little seemed to have changed. Inwardly, the coordinates of my life had moved. The intervening years had altered the way I understood truth, power, belief, and my own responsibility within them.

One conclusion gradually became unavoidable: meaningful disclosure of the UFO phenomenon in China would require political transformation first. Under the present system, any disclosure can proceed only within limits set by the state.

The marginalisation of UFO and spiritual communities is often explained through poor evidence, credulity, and conspiracy thinking. Those weaknesses are real. They do not account for the full pattern. In China, any subject that challenges official control over information, knowledge, or the boundaries of permissible reality is also shaped by censorship, intimidation, and enforced silence.

The claims surrounding the Xiaoshan Airport incident remain disputed, and much of the available testimony cannot be independently verified. Yet the speed with which the subject was suppressed and stripped of legitimacy revealed something larger. Power depends upon controlling who may know, what may be investigated, and which possibilities are allowed to enter public consciousness.

If such information were ever permitted to circulate freely, its consequences would reach far beyond a marginal subculture. It would raise deeper questions: who defines reality, who benefits from secrecy, and what forms of human possibility have been withheld from public life.

I came to understand that disclosure is ultimately a moral question as much as a political one. It concerns our right to seek truth, our capacity to bear it, and the kind of civilisation we become when knowledge is treated as private property of the powerful.

Until the political conditions change, the subject will remain suspended at the edge of modern knowledge—dismissed before it can be tested. Perhaps this, too, is part of awakening: realising that the search for truth cannot be separated from the struggle over who is permitted to pursue it.

I eventually reached a conclusion I could no longer evade: full disclosure of the UFO phenomenon cannot come before meaningful political reform. The freedom to know depends upon the freedom to question power. Truth enters public life only when the structures built to contain it begin to loosen.

If the UFO community genuinely seeks disclosure, its work cannot remain confined to conferences, private groups, and internal debate. It must confront the political conditions that determine who controls knowledge and what the public is permitted to know. In that sense, disclosure belongs to the larger struggle for freedom.

Only when information ceases to be the possession of a ruling elite, and citizens are trusted to face reality for themselves, can sealed records enter public scrutiny. Claims of extraterrestrial contact, secret agreements, and withheld technologies remain beyond serious judgment while the evidence is inaccessible. Whatever gifts other civilisations may have offered—technological, intellectual, or spiritual—cannot serve humanity while they remain trapped within systems of secrecy and control.

At its deepest level, the UFO question tests how a society understands truth and the dignity of its people. It asks whether citizens have the right to know, and whether they are considered capable of bearing the moral weight of knowledge.

Disclosure, then, is more than the release of information. It is a measure of freedom, conscience, and the spiritual maturity of a civilisation.

Three Awakenings

My awakening did not arrive as a single revelation. Life forced it upon me in stages.

The first began when I entered the UFO world. My understanding of reality was shaken, though the deeper disturbance concerned truth itself. I began to notice who was granted authority, who was silenced, which facts were buried, and which falsehoods became ordinary through repetition. The experience opened my mind, then taught me to distrust the seductions of certainty.

The second awakening was political. It grew out of the conflicts I encountered within the Australian mutual-aid association and China’s UFO circles, followed by the pressure and public smears directed at me by the Chinese state. I also saw how political pressure exposed the moral disarray within the wider UFO world. At first, I understood these events as personal attacks. Over time, a larger pattern became visible: individual hostility could be amplified by institutions, and reputation could be turned into an instrument of control. What was meant to discredit me forced me to look beyond the accusation itself—at who authorised it, who benefited from it, and how power recruited ordinary people into its work.

The third awakening came through people with almost no power at all. I encountered small civic groups with limited resources, fragile networks, and little public recognition. They continued to help others, defend principles, and contribute where they could. Their work carried none of the grandeur often associated with spiritual awakening. It was practical, patient, and costly.

Watching them changed the question I had been asking. I had spent years wondering what had happened to me and why. I began to ask what my experiences now required of me. Remaining a witness or critic was no longer enough. I could also become a citizen—someone willing to accept a share of responsibility for the world she inhabited.

Taken together, these awakenings changed the direction of my life. The search for hidden truth had led me into questions of political power; those questions, in turn, became questions of conscience. Spiritual growth, I came to believe, is measured by the responsibilities we are willing to bear once illusion has fallen away.

I came to hope that China might one day sustain a strong civil society and a limited, accountable government: a country in which power answers to the people, freedom of thought is protected, and citizens are trusted to shape the story of their own lives. Such a future would require political change. It would also require an inward change—the recovery of judgment, courage, and the belief that each human being possesses a dignity no state has the right to grant or withdraw.

Who Are the Real Lightworkers?

My own awakening began under pressure. The intimidation and public smears directed at me by the Chinese authorities forced me to see how power isolates a person: first by distorting her motives, then by making others afraid to stand near her. Awakening, I learned, often begins when the protections of ordinary life fall away and one must decide what can no longer be unseen.

I wanted to understand how other marginalised groups survived within the same political order. What kept people working inside a system designed to exhaust, discredit, or silence them when their efforts brought little recognition and carried real danger?

The answer led me into the fragile world of grassroots civil society. Many of its pioneers worked with almost nothing—scant funding, too few volunteers, no institutional protection. They carried the ordinary burdens of earning a living while facing censorship, surveillance, harassment, and threats. A petition, a public statement, even an act of assistance could attract scrutiny. Persistence might cost them employment, housing, freedom, or years of their lives.

Still, they continued.

Their courage seldom announced itself. It appeared in the repetitive labour of conscience: documenting abuses, helping people abandoned by the system, or speaking when silence would have been safer. Their work was sustained by a moral discipline almost severe in its simplicity. Someone was suffering. Something had to be done.

Watching them altered my understanding of spiritual life. I had spent years among people who spoke of ascension, higher consciousness, cosmic missions, and service to the light. Yet here were people who claimed no elevated status and possessed no spiritual title. They stood in courtrooms, detention centres, cramped offices, borrowed rooms, and hostile streets. They worked without certainty that their efforts would succeed. Often, they knew they would pay a price.

Their example gave the word light a weight it had previously lacked. Light was the capacity to remain answerable to one’s conscience after fear had entered the room. It was responsibility carried without the reassurance of reward or protection. It survived through action.

Perhaps these were the true lightworkers: people who resisted the slow corrosion of human decency in places where decency itself had become dangerous. They were vulnerable, imperfect, and sometimes exhausted. Their value did not depend on sainthood. It lay in their refusal to abandon others simply because the world had made abandonment easier.

Their lives forced an uncomfortable question upon the UFO and spiritual circles I had known. How many people who called themselves lightworkers recognised that they also carried a more immediate identity—that of a citizen? How many had considered what citizenship requires: political judgment, moral courage, public responsibility, and a willingness to bear consequences beyond the safety of one’s chosen circle?

Spiritual identity can offer comfort, meaning, and belonging. It can also become a refuge from the demands of reality. Citizenship leaves less room for abstraction. It asks whether our beliefs survive the moment when another person’s dignity is violated and silence becomes the safer choice.

The people I encountered had already answered through their lives. They showed me that conscience becomes credible only when it enters the world.

Perhaps light begins at the moment responsibility becomes unavoidable.

Living in what Buddhist tradition calls the Dharma-ending age, I have come to regard the word lightworker with greater seriousness. Meditation, revelation, and spiritual conviction may shape an inner life. Their meaning is tested when we enter the world: when we give our time and strength to a community, accept responsibilities without prestige, and remain present when conscience carries a cost.

Participation always asks something of us. It may disturb the safety we have built. Yet retreating into visions of planetary ascension offers its own temptation—the belief that transformation will arrive from elsewhere, sparing us the burden of helping to bring it into being.

I have often imagined the moment anticipated across UFO and spiritual circles: Earth is liberated, our extraterrestrial family returns, and humanity stands before them. What account could we give of the years before that meeting? Could we say that, amid fear and repression, we entered public life, stood beside the vulnerable, and helped make our communities more humane? That when history required our presence, we gave it? Or would we remember the moments when safety mattered more than conscience?

The years recounted in this book have taught me that awakening must acquire weight in the world. If it never becomes responsibility or service, spiritual identity can turn into consolation and begin to feed upon itself. Light becomes credible when it changes how we live and whom we are willing to stand beside.

I want to close with words associated with the citizen journalist and human rights attorney Zhang Zhan:

“This country has nowhere left to retreat. I can only move against the current.”

I hear in that sentence a love of country stripped of ceremony: the decision to remain standing when every path of retreat has narrowed. In an age darkened by fear, confusion, and moral exhaustion, the prevailing current carries people towards silence, obedience, and the abandonment of one another.

To move against it is to keep faith with conscience—to remain answerable for the lives we touch and refuse to let fear carry the human soul away.