30. After the Storm: What the Heart Revealed

A political storm does more than damage a reputation. It changes the light around people.

Once association with me carried a cost, relationships I had taken for granted began to reveal their hidden terms. Some people disappeared; others drew closer for reasons I did not immediately understand. A few remained quietly kind when kindness offered them nothing in return.

What stayed with me after the danger had passed was not simply who had stood beside me. It was the harder question the storm had exposed: what do we become when fear, ambition, loyalty and conscience are placed under pressure?

I had spent years among people who spoke of awakening and higher consciousness. After the storm, those words carried a different weight. I began to see awakening as something tested in conduct, and discernment as the willingness to see others—and myself—more clearly.

Political storms rarely reveal their full force when they first break. In the opening shock, people reach for safety. They delete contacts, leave groups, fall silent, and behave as though they have never known you. In China, this reflex is almost a second language. People learn early to hear danger in a change of tone and to step away from a name before it becomes radioactive.

I understood the first retreat. Fear has its own logic where association can carry a cost. The harder reckoning came later, when fear settled into calculation. Fair-weather friends quietly removed me from their contact lists once I became a liability rather than an asset on their social balance sheets. A few lingered only to see what contacts, information, or access might still be extracted from the wreckage. Others, when it was least safe, sent warnings or messages of support they had no obligation to send.

Those small gestures mattered more than I knew. In the darkest period, a private message saying, “Take care. I am still with you,” could keep something in me from closing completely.

The storm placed me before a mirror lit too brightly. It exposed what ordinary manners had concealed: fear, calculation, loyalty, envy and, now and then, grace. These qualities rarely appeared in pure form. A frightened person could remain decent. Someone who had seemed warm could become evasive the moment loyalty acquired a price.

I had long assumed that the spiritual and UFO communities might stand a little apart from such weakness because of the ideals they professed. Our conversations were full of love and light, awakening, cosmic family, higher consciousness and service to humanity. I took those words seriously because I took the search behind them seriously. I still do.

Yet language is not character. It may express a genuine aspiration or provide shelter from self-knowledge. A person can speak beautifully about love while quietly measuring what others can provide. Shared interests do not guarantee shared values, and spiritual vocabulary offers no exemption from vanity, cowardice or appetite.

The political attack threatened my reputation, safety, and place in public life. It also changed the emotional weather around me. I began to notice who could still speak in a human voice, who used concern to gather information, and who stayed silent without joining the cruelty. I tried to preserve those distinctions. Fear and caution were real; neither was automatically malice.

What changed in me was discernment. I had mistaken enthusiasm for sincerity and proximity for friendship. The public story concerned ideology, censorship and the Party’s effort to police the boundaries of thought. Beneath it, another record was being written: how people behaved once association with me became costly.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Of all the people who unsettled me after the storm, Wong was the hardest to read. He moved easily through the Association and appeared to know everyone who mattered. Some people said he had ties to Russia; others hinted at access to official resources. I never established how much of this was true. What I knew was that he carried himself like a man accustomed to entering rooms where ordinary people would be left waiting outside.

During the crisis, he appeared firmly aligned with Mr X, as I had privately begun calling Director Snake. After I resigned, someone sent me screenshots from the Association’s WeChat group. Wong was denouncing me there with moral certainty, as though appointed to protect the public from me. The attack had the quality of a performance: visible enough to signal loyalty, and sharp enough to please its intended audience.

Not long afterwards, he contacted me privately. “Shao, don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “I’m actually on your side. Even if you leave the Association, we’re still friends.”

The sudden intimacy disturbed me more than the public denunciation. He changed positions without leaving a seam, as though each room came with its own dress code for loyalty. Then he lowered his voice and told me, with deliberate mystery, that he had already “looked into” Liu Boyang.

What followed sounded less like gossip than a demonstration of reach. Wong claimed that Liu Boyang had entered an obscure university programme through family connections. He repeated remarks allegedly made by former classmates about Liu Boyang’s radical speech and behaviour, described a bookstore confrontation in which Liu Boyang had publicly denounced a book whose views he disliked, and said that Liu Boyang’s doctoral supervisor in China had once expressed frustration to him about Liu Boyang’s conduct.

I could verify none of it. What unsettled me was Wong’s ease. He handled scattered, private fragments of another person’s life as though they belonged to a file resting on his desk.

I asked how he had contacted Liu Boyang’s supervisor, obtained comments from former classmates, and accessed details of his academic record. He gave no direct answer. Instead, he remained vague, almost amused, as though the question itself were naïve. Whether he truly had access to unusual channels or was cultivating that impression, I could not tell. Based on his claims, he seemed familiar with channels of information beyond the reach of most people and treated private material with a casualness I found chilling.

By then, I could no longer see him as an ordinary UFO enthusiast. He drew close, made himself useful, and gathered information. Once he had assessed what the group could offer, his loyalties seemed capable of shifting without warning.

I had seen a version of this pattern in 2014 within the Australian ET Contactees Support Group, where ambiguity and insinuation helped turn a community under pressure against itself. Suspicion needs little encouragement once trust begins to fracture.

I cannot prove that Wong submitted reports behind the scenes or helped set any official process in motion, and I will not convert suspicion into fact. His behaviour did force me to reconsider the apparently spontaneous shifts of loyalty around me. What looked like private grudges and personality clashes might also have been shaped by a more deliberate game.

After that, I kept my distance. Some people announce danger by attacking you. Others announce it by smiling too quickly afterwards.

Borrowed Credibility

The conference interpreter offered a clearer example of another kind of opportunism. During the event, he was eager to be involved. He volunteered as an interpreter, moved easily among the foreign guests, exchanged contacts, and spoke enthusiastically about the future of the UFO community. He urged us to hold the next conference in his city and offered to help arrange it. I took his enthusiasm at face value.

When the political climate turned, so did he. After I was publicly smeared and the Interstellar Civilisation Conference came under attack, his voice became cold and faintly amused, “I really don’t understand what you people are doing with all this alien stuff,” he said with slight contempt. “It’s childish. I have to go and teach a happiness class now.”

The line was almost too perfect. Only weeks earlier, he had wanted a place in the community’s future. Now he positioned himself above it. I heard a small note of satisfaction, although humiliation can sharpen the ear. Either way, the conversation made one fact clear: even ordinary courtesy had become too expensive.

Years later, after the immediate political pressure had eased, he returned to the material he had dismissed. On Zhihu (a Chinese website), he presented himself as an interpreter at the first Interstellar Civilisation Conference and an early participant in consciousness research. Someone sent me the post and asked whether he had really interpreted at our event.

He had. That was what made the self-portrait so unsettling.

He now wrote about extraterrestrial contact and consciousness studies as though they had long been fields of serious dedication. He invoked contacts I had introduced, including Rey Hernandez and researchers associated with the Consciousness and Contact Research Institute, some at Ivy League institutions. A few emails and an unfinished translation assignment had become the scaffolding for a much larger self-portrait. His résumé, apparently, had undergone a consciousness expansion of its own.

With Rey’s name and the prestige of the researchers attached, borrowed credibility could be made to look convincing. It gave him an authority he had never earned.

By then, anger had given way to tired amusement. Liu described the pattern more cleanly than I could. “This interpreter treats the UFO community like a stock,” he said. “He buys when it rises and sells when it falls. He only trades short term.”

Rey’s response was brief. When he learned that the interpreter had been invoking his name and the CCRI to enhance his own standing, he shook his head. “I barely know him,” he said. “I asked him to translate my book, and he did not finish a single chapter.” With that sentence, much of the man’s carefully constructed importance fell away. It was an unusually efficient form of peer review.

His conduct clarified a pattern I had been slow to recognise. Spiritual language could coexist comfortably with the old appetite for access, status, and advantage. The vocabulary had changed; the hunger beneath it had not.

By then, distance itself had become a form of discernment. Goodness revealed itself more quietly—in people who refused to profit from another’s ruin or remained humane when withdrawal would have been safer, and who could receive help without later punishing the one who had offered it.

Familiar Spectators

The more intimate wound came from people I had once helped. Some had sought introductions or resources within the UFO and spiritual communities; others had turned to me during periods of emotional or spiritual distress. I helped when I could and expected little in return.

Perhaps I had been naïve enough to assume that people who spoke often of “love and light” might carry some of it into ordinary relationships. I learned that spiritual vocabulary is easier to acquire than spiritual character.

When the smear campaign began, several people withdrew. A few joined the criticism. Fear explained some of this; in that political climate, association itself could carry consequences. But fear did not explain everything.

Later I encountered a Chinese expression that might be translated as “the hostility of the helped.” I would not make a theory of it, but the phrase stayed with me. Receiving help means being seen at a vulnerable moment. For some, that memory can become uncomfortable. Gratitude may acquire a trace of shame, and resentment can follow.

The later fall of someone who once helped you may then bring a quiet relief. The old imbalance disappears; the debt becomes easier to forget.

Yet the reaction extended beyond those I had helped.

By then I was moderately well known in the community and had organised two UFO conferences. Before the controversy, few acquaintances showed much interest in my private life. Negative coverage corrected that remarkably quickly.

People asked around and passed stories from one conversation to another. Details shifted until some rumours barely resembled the accusations that had started them.

There is something compelling about the fall of someone we know. An acquaintance has already entered the private arithmetic by which we measure our own lives. When that person falls, the calculation changes. Their loss can make our own position feel strangely safer.

What troubled me most was how quickly the political context disappeared. Some people knew the coverage had emerged amid broader pressure, yet before long the story had been reduced to something simpler: a scandal about someone they knew.

That experience altered my view of communities devoted to “awakening.” Spiritual ideas may point toward an ideal, but character is revealed more quietly, in how we treat people when kindness becomes inconvenient.

Since then, when I hear a scandal, I try to ask one question before joining the conversation: How much of what I think I know is actually true?

That restraint has come to seem less like politeness than moral discipline.

The Record Above

Later, in another altered state of consciousness, I felt myself aboard a spaceship. The period surrounding the conference returned with unusual clarity: the accusations, private messages, alliances rearranged overnight, and small acts of courage that had reached me without witnesses. Older memories surfaced beside them—the UFO community at its most generous and most vain, genuine searching entangled with calculation. From that vantage, nothing seemed to disappear merely because it had gone unspoken.

 My star family communicated without sound. Their voices seemed to arise directly within me. “We know what you have endured,” they said calmly. “We know what others have done to you. We see the thoughts they conceal, the motives they disguise, and the calculations behind their actions.”

I asked, with more impatience than grace, “Then why don’t you do something?”

Their answer came slowly. “We have. How else would the conference have survived the dangers surrounding it? You do not see everything that happens behind the scenes. For now, our work is to observe what human beings choose when fear, ambition and self-interest are present.”

This was not the answer I wanted. I wanted intervention, preferably with a clear settlement of accounts. Their reply nevertheless gave form to something I had felt throughout the crisis: the visible story was never the whole story.

They told me that I would be vindicated in time, and that society might one day view the work the volunteers and I had undertaken with greater generosity. Public opinion could be swift and cruel; history, they suggested, moved at another pace.

Then they spoke of a record.

Every action, they said, leaves a trace, along with the intention beneath it. A motive may remain hidden from others, and partly hidden from the person who carries it, yet it still shapes the life from which it comes. I did not understand this as a heavenly scorecard. It felt closer to the moral form a person accumulates through repeated choices, especially when fear, vanity, loyalty or self-interest is at stake.

Those who wished to carry greater responsibility—or to call themselves lightworkers—would have to live up to the consciousness and ethical standards they claimed.

A tarot reader I knew, who also identified as a starseed, later described a similar message from the beings she regarded as her star family:

“Do not try to be clever. We know what you are thinking. There is no such thing as a private thought. We see how you conduct yourself on Earth, including what you keep hidden beneath the surface.”

Within that worldview, privacy acquired another dimension. Polished language declared intentions and spiritual credentials settled very little. The deeper question concerned conduct: what did a person choose when there was no audience to reward the choice?

I drew a breath and asked the question still burning inside me.

“I had anticipated the political attack, at least to some degree. What I could not understand was the conduct of those who called themselves starseeds or lightworkers. They spoke endlessly of love, light and higher consciousness, yet some had behaved with less decency than people I had known in the corporate world. On what grounds could they claim such identities? They said they had come to Earth to help humanity, yet their so-called assistance had only compounded the harm.”

The words came out edged with anger, accusation and bitter irony.

A brief silence followed. Then came the reply. “You have also received help. Begin with yourself. Those who have acted poorly will meet the consequences of their actions. Their path is not yours to manage.”

I asked about particular people anyway. I had names and wanted answers. Each time, the response was the same: “Begin with yourself.”

At the time, I found this consoling and maddening in equal measure. I wanted a cosmic report on everyone who had hurt me, preferably with footnotes. They had no interest in turning cosmic oversight into a celestial gossip service.

They showed me a series of images that I understood as possible developments in China’s future rather than a fixed timetable: intensifying geopolitical tension, tsunamis and catastrophic floods, widespread blackouts, social unrest, and upheavals large enough to sweep ordinary lives into their current. Some images suggested that hardship might turn people inward, forcing a reconsideration of the values by which they had lived and, for some, opening a more spiritual understanding of life.

They told me that amid such upheaval, a group of genuine lightworkers would emerge to help those in need. “They will be severely tested,” they said. “They will endure many trials, yet they will persevere. Through their conduct, they must prove that their integrity and actions are worthy of the identity they have claimed.”

Before the experience faded, they gave me one final, simple message: “A greater reckoning will come. Hold steady.”

After the storm, I stopped asking who could speak most persuasively about light. I watched what people did when kindness cost them, when loyalty threatened their safety, and when no one around them was watching. Whatever a lightworker may be, the name is earned there—in the difficult freedom of choosing decency when darkness offers an easier bargain.