If there was some conscious dimension outside ours, looking in, wouldn't it be far more efficient to simply stay outside our own enforced belief systems and perceptual abilities, so that even if we did notice them, it would be quickly isolated from and ignored by the larger population?

If anything, we tend to be fairly suspicious of much of what we hear and our authority figures seem to do their best to sustain a general level of ignorance.

Logically then the first step would be figure out what we could explore on our own, not assume reliable news of it would come across the media.

For instance, have you ever experienced "floaters?" Those spots in the vision that are dismissed as optical defects?

Personally I realized they were other's conscious bubbles impeding onto my own, long before I heard others refer to them.

When I was a child, I remember laying on the porch, watching this ant, when it stopped and this tiny cone of awareness started waving around with its antennae.

Since then the ability to sense others consciousness, which functions as an interface between their bodies and environment, has only grown and evolved.

Driving is when it's most apparent, as people are invariably focused outside their bodies, while not being particularally self conscious.

While this might seem a bit woowoo, consider the concept of time. As these mobile organisms, our experience is a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate. That interface at work.

So we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future, but the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

So time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Energy is conserved, because it is the present, creating time, so it goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

Consciousness also goes past to future while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form go future to past. Though it's the gut and heart processing the energy, while the nervous system sorts the forms.

Physics assumes there is some foundational matter to reality, but that is a logical consequence of our being these tactile creatures with a focused attention, generally a property of predators, but swinging from trees will also focus one's attention. So our thought process is reductionist and object oriented, as opposed to prey animals, that are more spatially attentive.

Consider that waves have two tendencies, either synchronization, which is centripetal, or harmonization, which is centrifugal.

The effects being nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, particles and fields.

Between black holes and black body radiation.

Remember that gravity is a centripetal effect and quasars, which are giant lasers, shoot out the poles of black holes. Lasers being synchronized lightwaves.

Also all that excess gravity being synchronization throughout the various spectrums of energy. Mass being an effect, rather than source of this centripetalism.

So, assuming you have been willing to read this far, where would we look for, say, "extended" consciousness?

They wouldn't care about our notions of materialism.

Nor would they adher to notions of complexity as progress. Complexity is only part of the cycle. Think chickens and eggs.

Consider that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. Monotheism is largely a monolithic political construct. Remember that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures and the Romans adopted Christianity as the Empire solidified and remnants of the Republic were being erased. Any mass religion is fundamentally political in nature, for obvious reasons.

So these conscious entities would be looking and seeping through the cracks and peripheral vision of our blinkered world, the voices we try to ignore, not standing in front of the train and saying "Here I am!"

Some of them are angels. Some of them are not.

Like any political situation, you learn to balance the effects and relationships, but only barely understand what is happening.