Category: THE FOREST DARK LOGBOOK

 There are many gates to the Otherworld and it is not only the question if men can enter the other side but also what could come through the gates from the other side and intrude into our world.

The idea of keeping a watch and try to protect us from whatever is lurking deep in the forest is a very old one.

One of the most fascinating aspects in HBO’s outstanding series “Games Of Thrones” (Fire and Ice) is the concept of the “Night’s ‘Watch, “a military order which holds and guards the wall” (wikipedia). The order consists of black clothed men who swore an oath and have no normal life. On their wall of ice high up in the North they protect the kingdoms from something, which is outside. We imagine demons and we learn soon about the zombie-like white walkers outside.

This sounds like a great concept maybe loosely inspired by the great real walls in human history, the Hadrian’s Wall and of course the Chinese Wall. We could easily imagine everyday life, (Roman) civilization and safety on one side of the wall and outside the land of the unknown. Therefore the idea of the “Night’s Watch” has an archetypical quality because through history we are familiar with the concept: a wall separating civilisation on one side and terra incognita on the other side.

I believe this could also be a great metaphor in a different sense:

We don’t build any walls in our days and more. And we don’t have a “Night’s Watch”, which would protect us from whatever is roaming the forests and the mountains. But most of all we have abandoned the idea of a terra incognita.

However, maybe we have build other walls in our very rational world where there are no longer any dragons. It’s really astonishing how many people can live a whole life without ever question their idea of reality. The walls in these days are in our heads. But is somebody out there, standing on top of the wall and keeping watch, what’s going on outside?

There are always a few people who feel a strong need to probe the unknown. We know the dedicated writers, filmmakers, artists and researchers who teach us that we might have forgotten that there is another world not far from here.

There are people who make big sacrifices and seem to play a certain part in the great cosmic game. Writers of the supernatural like Algernoon Blackwood and H.P. Lovecraft which in their best stories, like “The Willows”, give us the creeping feeling that they have seen something out there which is very real. Then there are the men like Charles Fort who documented the endless accounts of the unexplainable in his famous “Book Of The Damned” and desperately tried to find some sense in the endless manifestations of a daemonic reality.

Aren’t they the real “Night’s Watch, the men who seem to have a strange relationship to whatever is outside the wall? There is something “otherworldly” about them, it’s like they came too close to some kind of radiation from the other side. In reality they are often outsiders because in our days our protection wall is simply to forget what we don’t know or what we don’t want to know. Any word of a terra incognita might endanger the status quo of our so-rational capitalistic world order. But part of the job of this real “Night’s Watch” is to remind us from time to time, that we live our lives on a tiny island in the midst of the “black seas of infinity” and that we should “watch the skies”.  The job isn’t easy since there are always people around us who defend the status quo of pure ignorance. The agents of darkness are already here for a long time and keep trying to transform humans in soulless robots.

It’s springtime. The sun is shining, temperatures rising and the birds are singing. It’s a good time for a walk in the woods. There are still not so many people out there. The bright sun light gives a different impression rather than later in the year, when the leaves grow and a wonderful green roof offers its shadow on a hot day.

The forest is a mysterious place when it’s getting dark. That’s what we usually think. However there are other stories. I remember the legend of the Greek God Pan who is roaming the woods around noon. It is said that his unseen presence aroused feelings of panic in men passing through the remote, lonely places of the wilds.

So, if we feel a sudden panic attack in the loneliness of a forest even it is in the middle of the day it might be not only because in some places you can still get lost even in our days of GPS navigation.  Sometimes, it seems, it might be a kind of atmosphere at a certain place, undetected by most of the people but felt by those who are still  have a sense of awe.

http://youtu.be/RyDpffuo9UE

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“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age” (Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu).

This statement of Howard Phillip Lovecraft in his novel “The Call of Cthulhu”, which was written in 1926, sets the unusual tone of this influential piece in literature. The fragmentary style of the following narrative could maybe described as pseudo-documentary as if the story was based on fact. If you want you can say the honorable Lovecraft invented “mockumentary” style decades before it became a trend in the so-called “found-coverage-movies” many years later. However the important aspect is the feeling that it sounds like as something here is ‘remembered’, which isn’t just pure fiction. There must be something which sounds true to readers, how else could we explain the huge reception of Lovecraft’s novels.

Sometimes, the truth is not out there, it may rest already inside us as the collective memory about eons long gone by when not men but something else, something unimaginable, ruled this world.

But what about Lovecraft’s prophecy? The preamble of “Call Of Cthulhu” sounds like a serious warning. If only we could put together the pieces of the puzzle and would see what’s really going on we might become crazy immediately, he says.  In other words: We don’t know what will happen if we overcome the protection mechanism, which I have also described in Aldous Huxley’s reduction filter.

Huge efforts have been made to understand our universe, for example the CERN accelerator in Switzerland unravels the tiniest secrets of matter and space telescopes like “Planck” paint the image of the universe.

However we haven’t been able to put together the pieces of the puzzle so far. Furthermore the final revelation might not come by looking through the microscope.  It might come when we begin to remember and putting together our scientific discoveries with all the other insights mankind collected over thousands of years. We do not know what will happen then. It might be the invention of the worldwideweb, which could finally help to put all the pieces together, and we can’t say if this will lead to a new age of enlightenment or another “dark age”. There are no guarantees since with all the knowledge we have gathered till today we don’t seem to feel more “safe”.

Maybe some people already know the truth.  Lovecraft also recites Algernoon Blackwood, another great master of the supernatural, in “The Call of Cthulhu” who says that poetry and legend alone have caught a “flying memory”:

“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival… a survival of a hugely remote period when… consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity… forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds..”. – Algernon Blackwood

This is also what The Forest Dark Feature Film Project is about: the hidden truth, which we can only catch in glimpses and the truth we fear.

When I posted about “You can’t see the forest for the trees” in a sense that we often cannot see what’s really going on, one thought or better an image immediately popped up: from a bird’s eyes perspective we would see the whole forest.

This seems also to be true on a much larger scale. Obviously ancient philosopher Socrates did know about a cure for our longing to see more as the pieces of the puzzle: “Humanity must rise above the Earth to the top of the atmosphere and beyond. For only then will we understand the world in which we live”.

In the 20th century mankind did rise above the top of the atmosphere and beyond. And the opposite of “you can’t see the forest for the tree” happened. Man in space experienced the so-called “Overview effect”, a term created 1987 by Frank White.

In February 2013 British filmmakers released a wonderful short film also titled “Overview Effect” on vimeo, which contains a wonderful encapsulation of the overview experience narrated through several interviews with astronauts and philosophers.

A short definition of the overview effect is that “a cognitive shift in awareness by some astronauts and cosmonauts, often while viewing the earth from orbit or from lunar surface” (wikipedia). It is added that “third-hand observers of these individuals may also report a noticeable difference in attitude”.

So far the overview effect is referring primarily to the experience of viewing earth from “the top of the atmosphere and beyond”. However there is more about this: Linking the overview-experience strongly to spiritual and transpersonal experience, Frank White writes in his book “Overview effect” that “a liberal number of astronauts and cosmonauts have been transformed spiritually by their flights. Traveling in space they experience an overview effect, a sense of awe, majesty and wonder, accompanied by a sense of connection with God and oneness with all humanity”.

This raises some very interesting questions: do we need to go to space to have this experience (as far as I know you have to safe up for some time and tickets are very limited)? Furthermore, if this sounds so familiar with other life-changing fundamental experiences in human history, think for example St. Augustine, are there other overview-effects, which can be experienced also on Earth? It is interesting that the feeling of “all-oneness” is a very old concept. We know this from many religions and psychologist Siegmund Freud detected a so-called “Oceanic feeling”. It is also iremarkable that the experience was anticipated in Soviet Science-fiction during the Fifties and Sixties in novels by Martynow and the Strugaztki-brothers (you can find information about this in a German book “Die Spur des Sputnik) long before this aspect of the overview-effect was mentioned by real astronauts.

Certainly the experience of seeing earth from outside is unique, and it is a great message the astronauts brought back from space. They want to teach us to care better about our “spaceship earth” since part of the experience is also about the fragility of earth and that this planet is in danger.

However there seem to be two problems lasting with the overview-effect: First of all why can’t we experience that overview effect with all the modern hi-tech photography done in space now for example in a 3D movie theatre by ourselves? It seems that there is much more going on as we can see at first sight. Like any experience of the otherworld it can not be completely recorded.

And another well-known fundamental problem occurs: the space-travellers can’t really share their experience. This is the same old problem as with shamanic experience and all people who had any kind of transpersonal experience. On one side the experience is too complex to be expressed easily, and on the other side they are not the same any more, they are one step ahead like a computer when he received a very big update. Think of prophets or people who had life-changing experiences: the literature is full of odd people, people who were not the same any longer and telling sometimes stories which to  us simply appear weird. And their experiences doesn’t always make sense to the rest of the world. Therefore the experience is often transformed into something which we already know.

It seems not so easy to escape from  the forest “that you can’t see for the trees”. At least for those people who can’t rise above the earth to the top of the atmosphere and beyond. Only if we find new ways of communicating these (transpersonal) experience we will all see more of the pieces of the puzzle.