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Tag: Otherworld

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Tunnel In The Forest

A tunnel is a typical mythical image often seen in connection with the forest. The tunnel is also an icon for the gateway to the afterlife. In most near-death-experience the tunnel and the light are common elements of the visionary experience. The connection with the forest makes sense: “it is said the forest is a standard icon for the crossing in to the netherworld (in the hero’s journey)“.

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A tunnel has often a hypnotic energy. We cannot resist entering the tunnel. Even if the tunnel is dark we are drawn towards it. A tunnel often means change. When we leave the tunnel we enter a new world. Sometimes also things happen inside the tunnel, which change the person who entered the tunnel. Tunnels are also a typical motive in literature and folklore for magical events like time-travel: a person enters a tunnel and leaves after a short time, but much more time has passed outside the tunnel. And in some cases you never leave the tunnel. Or you enter the tunnel and when you leave you end up in a place far away.

The tunnel is in reality a gateway but its also another archetypical image for transformation. Tunnels can be metaphors for significant turning points in life. Crossing the tunnel is often connected with “Rebirth” or “Resurrection”, which is a theme in my movie project.

In that way the tunnel has a positive meaning. However can we sure if we stand in front of the tunnel? Reality close to the realm of the afterlife or the netherworld is full of deceptions. Sometimes it might be possible that the tunnel is a trap but it is hard to resist the temptation. The temptation is there because the tunnel experience seems such a common feature in visionary encounters. It’s something everybody knows.





In Near-Death-Experience the tunnel is like a standard, a fact, something which always happens. An interesting question would be if in a certain situations somebody could project the image of the tunnel into our consciousness in order to provoke an action or lure us into the realm of the otherworld.

For example in the famous story of Rip Van Winkle the protagonist is lured into a hollow which is actually a place of supernatural powers when wandering through the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains. He falls asleep and discovers shocking changes when he awakes. Furthermore when he returns its 20 years later. It’s not revealed if the hollow was really there and where Rip Van Winkle really was all the time in the short story. Sometimes a tunnel or some hole in the forest isn’t what it seems.

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Fire In The Air

“There are also times when, as happens to a land when the sea-dykes break, the invisible forces flow in upon us and swamp our lives” (Dion Fortune).

“Something is breaking through from another dimension into ours…” (The Forest Dark Screenplay)

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Fire is the element which means both creation and destruction and most of all transformation.

“The aim of magic is to steal the fire from the heaven” said the English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare.

If we see fire as a form of energy it is the kind of an extreme powerful force; it is an energy both inside and outside of the body.

When we say there is fire in the air it could mean not a literal fire, but – according to some sources – an otherworldly energy, which is more like an electric field in the first moment, then the air becomes more dense and hot until finally something breaks through.

These kind of super natural events happen in stories but are also mentioned in reports about strange encounters like in “Happy Camp”, California, in a series of UFO encounters.

The best way to understand the element of fire (and its meaning in the otherworld) is the myth of Prometheus.

Fire here means also wisdom. Fire is the light of knowledge. Prometheus brought it to mankind. That’s why Prometheus was punished by the Gods.

Furthermore there is a fire of creation. In Zoroastrianism the fire of creation is “a direct creation of God” and “the material universe coalesced from the fire or energy of creation.

Fire is also the transition between the spiritual and material creations”.

This could mean that the moment of transitions are dangerous because fire signals danger.

These ancient ideas could be an interesting alternative in understanding reports of contemporary contacts with the unknown; like the car driver which ended up in a strange illuminated mist,felt an unnaturally thick and hot air, lost consciousness and missed some time and later he could not remember what happened. In some of these encounters people later said they received sudden knowledge about the world which in normally unknown to mankind.

It’s also worth to think about what it means “to play with fire”. In my story somebody plays with the fire and faces unforeseen consequences.




 

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Paranormal Forest

Is a “paranormal forest” the same as a “haunted forest”? Isn’t that splitting hairs? Yes, but if we think about this further there is a slight distinction. Even if we believe in a “real haunted forest” the word haunted insinuates often a fictional element like the good old story. If we look what’s maybe paranormal about a forest we might get closer to some real phenomena. There are even many things yet to discover which sound fantastic but which are not necessarily supernatural. We are far away from knowing anything about nature and our forests.Over the last years scientists discovered more and more real wonders of nature in our forests. We already know that trees and plants can emit chemicals into the air which help them to communicate with other trees. They warn others about dangers for example. They’re also taking care of their offspring and their neighbors. On old beech tree controls the way his offspring grows up.
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But trees and other plants are also linked underground. In a BBC article, „Plants talk to each other using an internet of fungus“ we learn some fantastic insights about the „wood wide web“. It says, that „most of mushroom bodies are made up of a mass of thin threads, known as a mycelium. These threads act as a kind of underground internet, linking the roots of different plants. The mycelial connections help plants to exchange nutrients and information but even to commit „cyber crime“.

Trees help each other out. A German ranger, Peter Wohlleben, who wrote a book about „The secret life of trees“, showed a reporter the overgrown remnants of a tree which was cut a long time ago. He is still alive because he gets supported by the trees in his neighborhood.

There is not only friendliness among the trees in the forest. The wood wide web is also used by plants which produce a biological phenomenon called „Allelopathy“. “Allelopathy” means that an organism produces biochemicals which influence the growth, survival and reproduction of other organisms. Simplified there are hostile plants in nature which could send something like a „computer virus“ through the underground web of mycelial connections.

It’s well known that they can do this with some odors but „these fungal network make communication between plants, including those of different species faster and more efficient“, said Kathryn Morris, a chemical ecologist.

These are fascinating facts but that doesn’t make a forest „paranormal“.

It’s interesting that the idea that „all organisms are connected and that they can communicate collectively manage resources” occurred 2009 in James Cameron’s blockbuster „Avatar“ (BBC). In the movie lead character Dr. Grace Augustine says: Цhat we think we know – is that there’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora…

It seems, there is some truth to this. A lot of the mechanisms are still not understood. But if we take this further there are many possibilities which even link to some paranormal phenomena attributed to forests around the world.

Maybe certain smells and gases which are emitted by trees have an influence on animals and humans.

There is no evidence to this, but in some cases “lightheadedness” was reported in forests among other phenomena. What if there are biochemicals in the air which hasn’t been discovered yet?

And we know for example that so-called „magic mushrooms“ have tremendous hallucinogenic potential. Where does that potential come from?

If we think of the internet, the wood wide web could also work as a data storage.

Another question would be if plants and tree could form some sort of collective consciousness.

Some thoughts might be highly speculative, and we don’t know if we’ll discover any kind of wonders in the future but one thing is sure: the intelligent infrastructure of our forests is a striking argument to protect our forests and stop their destruction.

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Horror As A Quest For The Otherworld

Jonathan Black writes in his outstanding book, The Sacred History, “I look, too, at the work of the great storytellers of modern times, writers who can ask if there is a mystical dimension to our lives, if the world is shot through with meanings we did not put there, if we really are engaged in interaction with unembodied intelligence”.

Black writes, “In the age of scientific materialism this is perhaps the greatest philosophical question, and novelists, from Dostoyevsky and George Eliot to David Foster Wallace, have looked for mysterious patterns, mystic traces and otherworldly influences not in the epic lives of heroes, but in ordinary, everyday lives” (Sacred History, Preface).

In the best of all cases we find a deeper reality embedded in a novel or a movie. It’s something which cannot be forced by the writer. In some cases it seems the otherworld itself is the invisible guiding force giving the writer, artist or filmmaker hints from time to time.

And, maybe, through art, music, literature and movies something is communicated to the listener, the reader or the viewer. Is it possible that the writer is used as a “device”?

Asked where ideas come from David Lynch answered in an interview 2014 that ” “It comes, like, on a TV in your mind.”

And what is a TV? A TV is like a radio, a receiver connected with an antenna or in our days to the internet. It seems that our minds sometimes connect with the otherworld and receive important messages.

Of course its impossible to distinct between the works and fabrications of our own brain and these subtle guiding influences which happen only from time to time.

One little clue might be that it might be more images rather than complex thoughts which are transmitted directly into our consciousness.

However, identifying “mysterious pattern, mystic traces and otherwordly influences in our ordinary, everyday lives” is a demanding task.

Perhaps, the so-called-synchronistic-events come to mind as the book which opens on the right side or falls from the shelf. However we can’t say for sure what that means. “Otherworldy influence” seems to be executed usually more like a very weak current of electricity, which is difficult to measure.

The larger patterns of mysterious influence on our history is also a question of interpretation. Humans have a natural tendency to find some meaningful pattern everywhere which creates sometimes the weirdest conspiracy theories, and any interpretation should be done very carefully since we could easily deceive ourselves.

Nevertheless there are moments in life where we think it’s not a coincidence that we ended up in a certain situation or met somebody at a certain time which changed the course of our life. Even more, we might have seen a movie or read a novel which changed the course of our life. Is there a real otherworldly influence?

Yes, but I think  “mystic traces in everyday reality” might usually not appear as spectacular alien encounters but in the weirdness of our everyday reality itself.

Often, we watch out for strange apparitions but miss to see the obvious.

Today we’re not any longer “trained” to see strange things or mysterious turning points in history or in our lives.

In the old Greek tragedies or in Odysseus fateful journey divine intervention was responsible for many things. In our days we are on our own (officially).

But from time to time we feel different. Even very rational people often believe in astrology, which seems to work like a modern replacement for the interventions of the Elder Gods.

The artist however often wishes he could adjust the “TV set in the mind”, looking for different channels and get a better picture. It’s like seeing a strange light somewhere deep in the forest, and we wish to take a closer look.

Writing a (supernatural) story or developing a supernatural thriller is in some cases a quest for the otherworld or a kind of field research.  We have seen the mysterious light and hope a good story might reveal a bit more of it. We want to find some sense here, or find a sufficient reason or explanation for something which either happened in the real world or the sometimes weird and disturbing scenarios in our own imagination. Naturally here are many fears involved:

Disenfranchised from any idea of “interventions from the otherworld” any experience of an intrusion of the supernatural is experienced as horror, since we fear to lose control.

Since the rise of the epoch of science we have been told that we’re in control. We’re not allowed to lose control of our lives. If we lose control there will we punishment. And this is the moment where the horror begins.

Horror as a quest for the otherworld is therefore an attempt to do better, to understand the “mysterious traces in our ordinary lives ” and remember a way how to  deal with them.

Subsequently the best horror stories may frighten us because of their journey into darkness, but in the end they have also a healing quality as we have found a way to integrate the otherworld in our normal life.

 

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