The Forest Dark – Page 28 – The Forest Dark Com Project

2014/12/222018/05/07

Entering The Gate

A gate is usually a building but we could also imagine many other forms of gates. Gates to the Otherworld might exist on another plane. The idea of a wormhole as portrayed in science fiction seems also to be a gate, which allows you to reach a distant planet or galaxy without loosing time and which presents more a concept rather than a literal gate. Gates exist between different countries or between different dimensions. Sometimes a gate is made for protection. In many stories a gate only opens when the hero passes the test.
We are walking through many gates in our lives. Perhaps a gate can also be a certain moment in time. Winter Solstice in some sense is a form of a gate itself. Every year again we enter this gate, and it’s the darkest time of the year. We don’t see much, and things are lurking in the dark…

The time between the winter solstice and New Year’s Eve is a time of transition. A lot of people believe that the veil between our world and the Otherworld becomes thin for some time. It’s often a time when old fears come up and we become intimidated.

In some stories there are dragons and other dangers waiting in the dark before the hero reaches the gate. In a metaphorical sense this applies also to many other circumstances. We need to pass through the gate if we want to see the light again. We hope for a safe journey, but if we see winter solstice symbolically as a gate, which opens up to a new beginning, this gate is a dark gate. It challenges us and it does test us in many ways before we see the light again. The gate of darkness might lead you also into your own darker side if you are not aware. If the veil between our world and the other world becomes thin not only well-meaning entities but also darker forces can open this gate from the other side and will have a stronger influence upon us. Many old rituals teach us that if we want to keep the darker forces away we need to become for some time a demon ourselves and even to dance with the demons. The biggest danger is always to neglect their existence. Maybe the dark gates, which exist in various forms, are supposed to check our weaknesses before we’re allowed to see the light again.

2014/11/102015/02/05

If You Go Down In The Woods Today

“If you go down to the woods today, You’re sure of a big surprise. If you go down to the woods today, You’d better go in disguise’, if you go down…” No, this is not a song about cute teddy bears. It’s about those beings, which are there at certain times. The woods have been terra incognita for thousands of years, and many of the mythical inhabitants seem to be alive at least in the collective consciousness; weird animals, big-foot and, of course, aliens. However sometimes the sightings sound more like a strange and weird encounter rather than a scary one, which makes you think you wouldn’t wonder if somebody would even report teddybears in the middle of the woods.

One of the modern haunted forests of our days seems to be Rendlesam Forest in the UK. It became famous for its UFO-Sighting on 26. December 1980 which involved a security patrol of the nearby NATO-Base Woodsbridge. The servicemen reported a strange glowing object with coloured lights. “The animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy” according to a memo by the deputy base commander Lt Col Charles I. Hall, who investigated the case. One of the servicemen, Sgt. Jim Penniston, while undergoing regression hypnosis in 1994, subsequently claimed that the “craft” he encountered had come from our future, and was occupied by time travellers, not extraterrestrials (source: Wikipedia). Later on, Hall and the servicemen returned to the site and found burn marks, broken trees and three impressions or depressions in a triangular pattern. During the investigation a flashing light was reported (which could stem by a light-house some miles away) and starlights. The brightest of them “seemed to beam down a stream of light from time to time”.

The Rendlesham Forest events became one of the key-events in contemporary UFO-mythology and triggered conspiracy theories as reactions similar to religious wonders (believers return to the place regularly like pilgrims to a sanctuary).

The story of the servicemen sounds a bit too stereotypical, a bit too much cliche. However considering the number of people involved as witnesses it’s very unlikely that it was a hoax by some good-old-boys-company. Something must have happened there. There was something in the woods, which didn’t make sense (or somebody was indeed there). Even if the investigation may have found explanations for some of the events there is an element here which isn’t easily understood – not so much the physical traces but the deep impression the event posed upon the servicemen.

Maybe, if we go down into the woods alone we experience sometimes hallucinations like in sensory deprivation experiments but here it was a group which reported the event. The point about the Ufo and the time-travellers is that the reports sound more like an interpretation of the event rather then a description of what really happened. It’a s bit what you would already expect what will happen if somebody tells you about a strange light in the sky. It’s predictable. The reports bear also strong similarities with the encounters with fairies and demons in medieval times. The strong similarity of Ufo-sightings with fairy encounters was described by Jacques Vallees who compared it with the “secret commonwealth”.

Even there are no real primal forests left the woods are still the place which can keep a secret. It looks like we share this planet with some sort of intelligent beings we don’t know a lot about. In our technical world we only accept what can be proved in a scientific way, but in certain places in the woods there must be a backdoor and there, from time to time, they slip back into our minds. We can’t see what we don’t understand (or we only want to see what makes some sense too us) but as the log lady in Twin Peaks said “the owls are not what they seem”. If we could see what they really are it might be too frightening to us, we may loose our wits as we know from certain fairy encounters. It reminds us of Greek philosopher Proclus who said:

“In all initiations and Mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and sometimes indeed an unfigured Light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this Light is figured according to human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape. Some of the figures are not gods and excite alarm”.

So, be sure of a really big surprise if you go down into the woods at certain times…

2014/09/302019/02/16

Meeting The Great Old Ones

The forest has always been seen as a place of encounter, encounter with nature, with the gods, with yourself. Coming back to the idea of archetypes, the forest is a place to encounter something which is very old and which also have been known for a very long time.

Our ancestors believed that the trees where the seats of the gods, thus we find often remainders of pagan worship in the woods.

The elder gods might have been gone for long as many of the sacred places but from time to time you can find places and things in the forest, which indeed have some sort of “archetypical quality”. To me it’s happen a lot when I see a very old tree. There aren’t many left, but some of them still exist, which are more than 1000 years old.

Some trees are the oldest living creatures on earth. In Italy there are olive trees, which are older than 3000 years. Imagine what stories they would tell, if they could talk (some believe it’s possible to talk to trees, so don’t be surprised if they answer).

Encountering these giants they leave a deep impression. They are awesome. And a bit scary in certain moments.

It’s like when you look sometimes in the faces of old people and think I have seen this face somewhere before. There is something very impressive about them, they are both very old but they still seem very powerful.

Let imagination play, and you will get some ideas what they might represent. They resembling more than just a tree, sometimes it feels like there is a very old energy stored up here.

Like the elder gods they seem to have a complex character, these oak trees. They represent strength, they might be protective, for example if they offer shelter inside a cave in their trunk, but they can also frightening, intimidating.

It’s indeed like meeting someone who has been here long before man arrived on Earth. Maybe they will be still there when man has left the Earth, and the forest is alone again with whatever lives deep inside.

2014/09/112018/05/07

The Forest Dark As Archetype

The Forest is often seen as a symbol of the unconscious. It’s used as a metaphor for entering the unknown: “In the middle of our walk of life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost”.
Dante, The Divine Comedy

Transformation is usually part of the story. The hero enters the forest and discovers something about himself. Luke Skywalker meets his father in the forest. Often the hero is tested. Sometimes he doesn’t survive the confrontation with the unknown.

This is a very common interpretation for many stories, particularly fantasy. Indeed it seems that nearly every movie or novel like the Lord Of The Rings fits into this pattern.

Isn’t it a bit too easy to say that even the old stories about the forest deal with an encounter with the unconsciousness? If we could not come up with simple rational explanations we say it’s all psychological.

These interpretations are certainly true to a large extend of fiction and some other creative productions since the forest got established as kind of a metaphor for a long time. Writers might introduce the forest as symbol for the unconscious even purposely, since the reader already knows about the metaphorical meaning of the forest.

But, aren’t we thinking in circles? Because the forest is used very often as a symbol it doesn’t mean necessarily that it works the same way every time. There are endless real forests in this world and not everything is related to man. And because some movies and stories repeat the same concept with the same meaning again and again we can’t say that the forest is a symbol in general for encounters with the unknown self and that even if you enter the forest in the real world you meet your own unconscious. No. There are different stories here and perhaps another truth.

It’s indeed a bit narcisstisic if we interpret anything in the outer world as part of our own inner psyche. What if the forest has a life of its own? The forest might have some sort of deeper meaning but it isn’t necessarily related to man.

The Forest Dark is sometimes said to be an archetype.

It’s incredibly difficult to come up with a proper definition for archetypes, a term which is used very often, but often people mean very different things when they speak of an archetype. C.G. Jung had a very specific idea about archetypes and wrote a book about it. But even with studying the huge volume of Jungian readings it’s not easy to explain what an archetype exactly is.

There is an interesting aspect here, when we not only think of archetypical images of so-called living agencies, which have a living on its own in the human psyche. There is one interpretation of archetype which resembles Plato’s idea of the eternal “forms” – something which cannot seen in itself but is expressed in many variations (there are endless variations of tables but only one basic idea what a table is).

According to Plato the forms or the archetypes exist in an intelligible realm. “In the Phaedrus the Forms are in a ‘place beyond heaven’ and in the Republic the sensible world is contrasted with the intelligible world in the famous allegory of the cave…Socrates postulated a world of ideal Forms, which he admitted were impossible to know” (Wikipedia).

In other words the archetypes or the forms exist in the Otherworld. Our world is a corruption of the real world. What we are seeing are shadows of the real thing.

If we translate the example of the table we might say that there are endless variations of forests but there is only one ideal forest, which is not part of our own world. We cannot see it in itself but we can develop a sensibility for the “Forms”, we might feel them and artists can create images of its various aspects. We long for the ideal image, maybe the luminescent forest in Avatar was in some way an artistic expression for our deepest wishes.

Like with many other things we are in danger of losing the idea of the forest as more as we cultivate the last resorts of this planet and industrialize the forest. That’s maybe why we are drawn sometimes to the wilderness, we want to remember what we have lost (why do we travel so much, looking for the perfect landscape and never become satisfied?).

It’s not necessary to reinterpret the idea of the forest as a symbol of the unconscious, but remember one thing: if you are deep in a Forest Dark and you can’t see much because it’s a moonless night your reaction is usually not a journey to the inner self. Instead your senses get sharpened. Survival instinct awakes. You want to know who else is there when you hear the many noises between the trees. You calculate how far you away from civilization, and you ask when you have taken the wrong path.

That’s maybe the important aspect here: the forest is also a symbol or an archetype with both positive aspects since you find beauty (and sometimes something to eat) but also troubling aspects as a zone where we don’t know what’s really going on. Maybe this is the important aspect of the archetype – the forest is the place where we can get lost, but not only in the depths of the own psyche but in a sense that we become aware that we don’t know a lot, that our very idea of reality could be shattered any time. We don’t see the forest for the trees. However, rather than becoming repressed or even depressed the Forest Dark as archetype makes us active in a way of becoming alert, and in the end we learn that we need to explore if we want to survive.

In some sense things could be seen the other way around: the forest is not so much part of your inner psyche but it can be something which enters your life from the outside – by walking through the forests of our world we get in touch from time to time with agencies, which exist in another realm but radiate their energies from their world into our own, even into our deepest self. We become aware of creations which belong to another plane of existence.

And sometimes it means not literally walking into the forest to get into a situation where we don’t see the forest for the trees. Like Dante Alighieri said there are moments in life where we found ourselves in a maze and have lost directions. It may be a result of our own decisions but not necessarily.

I have to admit that I am not an exception from the rule, and if I create a scary story set in the woods enounters with inner demons or some dark stuff from the unconscious is always a promising path. However even with this concept we should not rule out intrusion from the outside – think of astronaut Bowman’s treacherous reality in 2001 with a virtual world set up by aliens. If there is somebody out there who knows our deepest self, what if he could create these encounters with the darkest sides of the unconscious?