Washington L.O.W.F.I

Archive for April 13th, 2009

Petroglyphs at Goblin Valley State Park, UT. Could these be early images of "Mothman?"

I first met the eccentric, offbeat “super architect” Bill Bryant through a female artist I knew at the Univ. of Texas art school, whose father had been a military pilot. For a time, the woman was married to a Frenchman whose father had been in the Resistance. Bill and I attended their wedding in Le Havre during the raucous French Bicentennial and had lots of fun exploring cathedrals like Mt. Saint Michel (named after a birdman). The woman later married a man involved with the Texas Energy Commission, which led to her occasionally being employed by the Bush family. While Bill was not employed by the Bushes, he has designed several homes for upscale clients like film director Robert Rodriguez. In his first job in NYC, Bill designed a home that won the NY state “home of the year” award. During the filming of The Mothman’s Photographer, I met Bill on Lake Travis outside of Austin, TX, on the yacht of the aforementioned Frenchman, who was celebrating his 35^th birthday. During the party, I ran into several interesting characters with strange connections. After being temporarily put out of commission by the ingestion of extremely powerful hallucinogens, we were chided by a Texas cowboy in a suit who claimed to work for Red Adair, the father of modern oil-rig firefighting. Adair put out the famous oil-well fires during the Persian Gulf War. Curiously, another swinging guest at the party was associated with an investment firm linked to the 9/11 events. During filming, I discovered that Bill had once received a severe blow to the head, much like Ken Alton and my sister Loretta. This theme points to a possible correlation between head injuries and the ability to have visions and precognitions. Since I was unable to get much coherent footage in Austin, Bill was kind enough to come to Seattle. I interviewed him in Aug. 2003 at the haunted Northgate Mall, which happens to be the first modern mall in the U.S.

Bill Bryant (BB): I really hate to posit anything because I don’t have a desire to feel consistent or be consistent, on any basis whatsoever.

Andy Colvin (AC): That’s cool…

BB: I [enjoy] the freedom to be in the moment, with what’s going on now. All of my opportunities of glimpsing into the atemporal world came after long sabbaticals of allowing myself to just be at peace and at ease. I [had] the opportunity to have glimpses, but [I couldn’t] hold onto them. They really weren’t trauma-oriented; they were much more ease-oriented. I guess I went through [the traumas] in earlier parts of my life. I’m kind of a weaver. I like to weave fabrics, matrices of understanding, and participate in them. I kind of draw the needle, then take time to look back and see what’s being woven. But even that’s not too precious. I let that go, too, and see what arrives next. I think the thing that held me back in the past was always fear. Of what I don’t know… I used to build altars to anything I was afraid of. I would put on the altar some kind of effigy of whatever I was afraid of. I’ll have to show you my photographs of the Grand Mural. The Grand Mural is near Hanksville, Utah. It’s hard to get to now because they’re trying to protect it, but you have to walk about five hours in the [desert] heat, then you go way down in this canyon and walk along the riverbed. [It’s near] Goblin State Park.

AC: Any time you hear place names like “goblin” or “devil,” it generally means that there is a lot of paranormal activity there.

BB: You should see these petroglyphs. They’re not typical. They look more like…

AC: Spacemen?

BB: No, more like the Mothman… They’re really tall. They’re like two times the size of a normal human being, and they’re cut into the wall. I have great photographs of them… They’re really amazing. I’m serious about that. They’re awesome. I was the only person down there, besides a ranger who is there to protect them… They’re carved on a curve, looking down at you. They [seem to have the ability to] focus. You walk along as they’re focusing [on you].

AC: Sounds like those Jesus paintings… This might be a good time to discuss the place we are today, which is Northgate Mall in Seattle. Harriet Plumbrook telepathically dowsed this location recently. She looked it up on a map on the computer. But she couldn’t get a read on it. She’s come to the conclusion that electronic maps won’t work for dowsing or remote viewing, because the electronic signals screw up the process. She can only look at a paper map or nothing at all. Apparently, not looking at anything – just visualizing in your head – works better than looking at an electronic map.

BB: Digitizing doesn’t have that analog biorhythm to it. It’s just too flattened out. It is translated and [therefore] changes dimensions. I think that’s why it doesn’t work.

AC: That’s how I felt when I was working as a surveyor and we started making computer drawings, instead of ink drawings. It took all the fun out of it… Anyway, I just got an email from Harriet yesterday. I had sent her an email telling her that Ben Camp and I felt like Northgate Mall was a special spot. Jim Woodring said at one of his talks recently that he experienced a paranormal event here at the mall. He briefly saw a woman’s head shapeshift into a rotten vegetable. When I heard that, I contacted Harriet and asked her to give me her psychic impressions of the area. Even though I had not told her that we were drawn to the southeast corner of the mall, she said, “Well, it’s the southeast corner. There’s a big debate about something there. Perhaps a creek… Perhaps a park…. It might be a power spot.” So I did a little research and found that, sure enough, they’re fighting over this creek that runs underneath the mall. There’s been a lot of controversy ever since it was first paved over. The creek now runs through a conduit, and people are still upset about that. I contacted my friend with the Tulalip Indian tribe, and he said that they’re having the same issue up there with the mall near the reservation. They’ve paved over a sacred creek. He thinks that the same thing is probably going on here. It was most likely a sacred creek to the Indians, probably near a crossroads… Ancient crossroads were the places trading was done. Some malls have, purposely or not, been built at these spots…

In 2008, I discovered that the opening of the Northgate Mall was an historic event. It opened on April 21, 1950 and began a new trend whereby modern shopping malls with huge parking lots would take customers away from Main Street USA. Other interesting world events happened around the same time in 1950, such as the recognition of the People’s Republic of China as a state (Jan. 6th), Truman’s announcement of the program to develop the hydrogen bomb (Jan. 11th), Israel’s declaration of Jerusalem as its capital (Jan. 23rd), Sen. Joe McCarthy’s announcement of the names of 205 supposed Communists in front of a Republican Women’s Club in WV (Feb. 9th), the signing by the USSR and China of a “mutual defense” treaty (Feb. 15th), Russia’s start of the Korean War (June 25th), and the passage of the Internal Security Act limiting free speech in America (Sept. 23rd). Since all of the above events involved the manipulation of the Rockefellers, one has to wonder if they weren’t also behind the development of malls.

AC: Anyway, Bill, I thought this might be an appropriate place to bring you to discuss some of your paranormal sightings. Could you tell us about the one you had at Panther Creek on Mt. Rainier, where you saw a “shadow being” and experienced precognition?

BB: It was about five years ago on Mount Rainier, in Washington State. I’m not positive on the year, but I was at the end of a six-month sabbatical away from work in NYC. Mount Rainier has always been one of my favorite places to recreate, so I went to one of my favorite waterfalls [there. It is] kind of a hidden place that I’ve never seen anyone else at before. I had finished swimming and jumping off the cliffs into the cold water. I was feeling quite at peace, quite at ease… It was probably about the fifth time I had taken a sabbatical out of New York. I had left my apartment and was running out of money. I was quite ready to re-enter the workplace. I wanted to know where I should go and what I should do. I had a lot of options [to think about]. Anyways, late in the day, the sun started going down. I didn’t want to leave the waterfall, so I hung out. In that moment of peacefulness I asked, “What do I do?” And something inside of me said to look back at the hill. I turned back at the hill and adjacent to these very large old-growth old trees were shadow figures – dark figurines. [There were] several of them adjacent to trees. There was just an incredible sense of peace and well-being. [I got the message] “Go back to New York. You’re needed where love is needed – that’s where one goes.” Basically [it turned out that] someone I was very close to was dying, and [I needed] to go participate in his death. At first, I thought there were actually people standing there against the trees. I kept looking closer and closer. I walked up and looked around a little bit. The ones that I knew were adjacent to certain trees [would move about imperceptibly]. I’d look again and they wouldn’t be there. I’d look towards another set of trees and there they would be! Then, they were gone. I felt such a sense of peace, tranquility, and kind assurance. [I was given] a direction and an affirmation [about] returning to New York.

AC: When you first told me this story, you mentioned that you started having precognitions after that. If something bad was going to happen to somebody, you might get a feeling about it… Do you think it was connected with those beings at all?

BB: Yes, it really could be. That’s the only time I really felt that I was seeing something. But I’ve always relied heavily on a kind of precognition. The strongest [signals come] when I’ve finished a meditation or retreat. Or [they may come] in the middle of a meditation retreat. During Vapasana retreats, you psychically open up to [previously] hidden, intense, knotty blocks. I try to marry the inside with the outside, and rely heavily on my intuition and precognitions.

Bill’s experience on Mt. Rainier occurred where the first modern UFOs were seen. The first saucer witness, Kenneth Arnold, saw something that actually looked like today’s Stealth Bomber. He drew a picture of what he saw, and it looks almost exactly like the Horten “Flying Wing,” a plane manufactured in Germany in 1939.

AC: There was another paranormal event you mentioned, where everything had sort of disappeared and you entered a state of heightened consciousness…

BB: I was in upstate New York, in the Hudson River Valley. A good friend of mine owns a house up there on about 7 acres, adjacent to a wetlands and a gigantic power line that runs through the property. A very large underground gas pipeline cuts underneath the Hudson River there. It was a summer morning. I sat outside in the parking area with the cars and everything just disappeared. The house, the yard, everything just kind of disappeared… It all was just kind of “electric.” It was a really blissful, peaceful moment – a real, atemporal experience. [I was] outside of myself and outside of time. It wasn’t really a visual phenomenon. I tend to learn in episodes and chapters. In my younger years I was far more histrionic than now, I guess due to some of these experiences… It’s been an operational modality for me for many years since, just not getting uptight about things, walking through a really crowded room with a lot of noise and just being able to peacefully walk right through the middle of it all. I think experiences like this have helped a lot… Fairly close to that time, I lived in a loft in Soho, in NYC, where they filmed the movie Ghost. It had been filmed there maybe a year or so before I moved in. It was a Saturday morning. The only furniture I had was two chairs and a table. I sat down at the chair and kicked my feet up on the table, just to kind of relax a little bit before I went out. Again, the whole room just pretty much disappeared, and there was kind of a moving, migrating [double] helix [before me]. Bound upon this helix were different times in history, everything from Prehistoric times to the Roman Empire, the Crucifixion of Christ, Nazi Germany, and even personal aspects of my own life. They were all occurring simultaneously. If I wanted to go into a certain area and look into it, I could. Wherever my mind wanted to go, I could step into it and look. It was very fascinating but still there was this peacefulness, an easy air that lasted maybe ten, fifteen minutes. I really don’t know… When it was all said and done, I had such an amazing sense of gratitude, because it was a gift; it’s something that emanates out of all of us. We do have that ability to live atemporally whenever we wish. Over the course of several of these experiences, I’ve been able to glimpse into an alternative timescape that has made an impact on my life. [It] has afforded me the opportunity to be at peace with things, regardless of what’s going on. I don’t know that the world’s ever experienced a really peaceful, nonviolent time – an a-phenomenal world… Now, I’m not surprised by much. I really don’t have a profound need to encapsulate or label stuff. Whatever arises at [any given] moment, I try to greet with a little equanimity. I just enjoy life. I mean it’s so incredibly rare that you just try to enjoy it; to piece it together is not really my thing anymore. [It] has a lot to do with stepping into it. When you are fairly immediate, you’re not trying to rationalize or to understand anymore. There is this immediate understanding that shows up. There is a “now.” There is an amazing understanding in the Now. That brief little edge can allow you to slip over from the temporal to the atemporal: not of time. To be “consistent” requires dogmas, ideologies, and encapsulation – holding things and labeling things. I think that entails a lot of suffering and possibly a lot of ignorance.

AC: Just from hearing your story about the double helix, I wonder if you may have actually seen another version of the Mothman. The Garuda is often depicted as holding two spirals, or snakes. That image of the Garuda holding the two spiraling snakes has been translated into things like the American Medical Association symbol, the caduceus. The two “snakes” going around the staff represent the spinal column, and at the top of the staff are the Garuda wings, representing enlightenment and atemporality. Throughout history, the Garuda, or Guru-da, has been seen as this deific healer or “guru.” By intuitively using the mythological approach towards the healing process, where the caduceus “snake” bites one on the shoulder, UFO witness Ken Alton found himself spontaneously healing people by shamanically “taking on” their illnesses.

BB: You recently used a word that really stuck with me [as I was] wandering around in the Canadian Rockies last week. You [said] that we need to “honor” the skills, the understanding, the perceptions that we all have – that are unique to ourselves [yet] common to one another. I found that to be very profound. It really stayed with me, and I appreciate that. I’ll probably carry that word for a while as a little mantra, because I think it is necessary to be respectful. I don’t think human nature and humankind has changed that much. I think we are still as violent [as ever]. Someone once said that “all acts of ignorance are violent in nature.” I think that’s probably true… I’m glad you have the energy and desire to [make this documentary and] to weave a really beautiful fabric that has motion and movement to it. I’m kind of in the “observer” time of my life. Instead of trying to string things together, I think I now just notice [them]. Holographically, they all take place at the same time. Jesus used to say that we need to “marry” Heaven to Earth.  [We need to] be present here on this earth with all the phenomena that’s going on – all the [mental and physical] things taking place – in such an authentic way that there is no “self” doing it. Since all human consciousness is the same, when we make a change within our own lives, we are actually changing the consciousness of all of mankind.

AC: Harriet and I trade emails about the amazing coincidences, synchronicities, and precognitions that come up in our lives. The most recent one was about the Michigan crop circle. There is a crop circle in Michigan right now… But she dreamed about it 3 weeks ago, long before it happened. And Ken Alton and I recently had the same dream, about Bigfoot changing into a dog. That happened only last week.

BB: Synchronicity is always there, happening all the time. It’s just that our minds become so occupied with day-to-day reality that we really miss out on [synchronous] opportunities. [But] you can slow down the mind in the midst of all these things. That’s when the beauty and helping hand of synchronicity shows up… I think it just comes down to learning [to] slow down. That’s when it really gets to be fun and rich. Then the synchronicities are just something you laugh at. You just let them go, because it’s endless.

AC: Some synchronicities seem to be precognitions. I feel that precognition is one of the most important tools for the future of humanity, in terms of raising consciousness. If people realize that they can use it as a tool on a daily basis, it may change everything.

BB: [But to get there] people need to slow down. They have such agitated minds. They’re always feeding their senses. They listen to music, go to the movies, and pick up books [and magazines]. It just goes on and on and on. I was sitting in a park along Deception Pass yesterday morning… A guy walked up to me and goes, “Do you do meditation?” And I said, “Well, yes I do.” Then he proceeded to tell me the lamentations of his life. His wife was getting larger every day. She was totally addicted to consumption, whether it be food or possessions, and she was spending $4000-5000 a month on the credit cards. Things were just going to hell in a hand-basket. And I said, “Well, you know, you have a choice in this. You’re responsible for this, too. You need to find your part in this.” There are some simple things we need to get over [before we can receive precognitive gifts. The first one is to] cut the credit cards up. Our lives need to become [easier to contain]. You and I talked earlier about the chakras in the body and [how they relate to] healing. It’s not always a blockage or constriction [in the chakras that causes disease]. Sometimes [there’s a hole in the chakras, where leakage occurs]. We’re so diffused by our addictions, the things that we have to take to keep ourselves in an escape mode: caffeine, alcohol, and [bad] food [and drugs. It] all ends up down in the control center, in the colon. That diffuseness really prevents the coiling snakes – the ascending, descending snakes of kundalini – from moving up. It is blocked not by a denial, but by overdiffusion. Precognitions are valuable; I wouldn’t want to diminish them. I use precognition. I get little hints, little glimmers… Sometimes they come many times in a row. This makes me tune into a bigger migration, maybe on a larger wavelength in my life. I kind of go, “Hmm… Let’s stop for a while.” That’s usually when I’ll [stop] getting so busy and inundated with things. I’ll pull aside and try to get a glimpse of what’s coming my way. There are so many sensations that we, as human beings, can delve into and take full advantage of, but I think we have to be mindful of the things we use to distract ourselves. Most people don’t truly enjoy life – the richness of it all. I think that’s unfortunate.

AC: Any more examples of synchronous glimmers?

BB: I go to Costa Rica a lot. I stay with a friend of mine who runs a lodge there. His name is Phil. His parents live in Florida. I was coming back from the West Coast and something inside said, “Take the time; drop down into Big Bend.” I had been back down in Costa Rica maybe eight months prior to that. Someone had wrecked one of Phil’s motorcycles and he thought it had been me. He was [still] really upset. I really wanted to go back down to Costa Rica, but I knew that things just weren’t cool between us. I had tried to straighten it out, but it just didn’t seem to work… So at the last moment, I made a hard turn off the freeway and started heading down towards Big Bend National Park. The whole time I was thinking, “God, I need to take care of this [Phil] situation. This is just bugging me.” Normally I stop in at the ranger station and pay my permit [before] heading to the natural hot springs. This time, I just decided to skip paying for my permit, and drove straight to the hot springs. I had the whole place to myself. Then, an older couple showed up saying, “Oh, is this the hot springs?” I said, “Yes it is,” and they said, “Well, we didn’t bring our bathing suits. Do you mind if we get in in our underwear?” I said I didn’t care if they got in buck-naked. So they proceeded to strip down to their underwear and get in the hot springs. We started talking. I told them that I’d been traveling for a while in the States [and] down to Central America. They said, “Oh really? Where?” I said, “Well, I go to Costa Rica. I go down to a little town near Puerta Jimenez on the Oso Peninsula.” She goes, “Oh, that’s interesting. Our son…” and I immediately stopped before she said anything. I said, “Are you Phil’s mother?” And she goes, “Yes, I am.” I said, “This is just too bizarre, because I was just thinking about Phil the whole way down here driving to the park.” I said, “I am heading back from California,” and she goes, “we’re heading to California.” I began to tell them that something inside me had said, “Turn and go down to Big Bend.” [Amazingly] they had not [had any intention of] stopping in Big Bend, either. They were on their way to California but had decided [at the last moment to] stop in and see this place. They, too, opted not to pay the permit or check in, and to go straight to the hot tubs… We made it back to their campground. It turned out that I [was] camping next door to them, unbeknownst to either of us. We got into their RV and took a digital snapshot of the three of us, and emailed it to Phil in Costa Rica. So… It’s not just me getting [the precognitions]. Other people are getting them, too.

AC: Did that synchronicity help you patch things up with Phil?

BB: Yes, absolutely. It made us all laugh like crazy.

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“Synchronicity is noteworthy not only because of its improbability, but because of its apparent relationship to events taking place deep in the human psyche. The classic example of this is Jung’s ‘scarab story.’ Jung was treating a woman whose staunchly rational approach to life made it difficult for her to benefit from therapy. After some [synchronicities involving the scarab] the woman was so stunned that she tempered her excessive rationality, and from that point on her response to therapy improved. Jung encountered many such meaningful coincidences during his psychotherapeutic work, and noticed that they almost always accompanied periods of emotional intensity and transformation: fundamental changes in belief, sudden and new insights, death, births, even changes in profession. He also noticed that they tended to peak when the new realization or insight was just about to surface in a patient’s consciousness. As his ideas became more widely known, other therapists began reporting their own experiences with synchronicity… Because of their striking nature, Jung became convinced that such synchronicities were not chance occurrences, but were in fact related to the psychological processes of the individual who experienced them. Since he could not conceive how an occurrence deep in the psyche could cause an event or series of events in the physical world, he proposed that some new principle must be involved, an acausal connecting principle hitherto unknown to science – [what] some physicists [are now calling] a non-local quantum effect.

“[For instance, physicist] David Peat believes that synchronicities are not only real, but offer further evidence of the implicate order… The apparent separateness of consciousness and matter is an illusion, an artifact that occurs only after both have unfolded into the explicate world of objects and sequential time. If there is no division between mind and matter in the implicate, the ground from which all things spring, then it is not unusual to expect that reality might still be shot through with traces of this deep connectivity. Peat believes that synchronicities are therefore ‘flaws’ in the fabric of reality, momentary fissures that allow us a brief glimpse of the immense and unitary order underlying all of nature. Put another way, Peat thinks that synchronicities reveal the absence of division between the physical world and our inner psychological reality. Thus the relative scarcity of synchronous experiences in our lives shows not only the extent to which we have fragmented ourselves from the general field of consciousness, but also the degree to which we have sealed ourselves off from the infinite and dazzling potential of the deeper orders of mind and reality. According to Peat, when we experience a synchronicity…we are reaching past mind and matter, into creativity itself. This is an astounding notion. Virtually all of our common-sense prejudices about the world are based on the [shaky] premise that subjective and objective reality are very much separate… The implications are staggering.

“One implication is that objective reality is more like a dream than we have previously suspected… This does not mean that the material universe is an illusion, because both the implicate and the explicate play a role in creating reality. It simply means that we are like vortices in a river, unique but inseparable from the flow of nature… Such is the nature of the deep connectivity that exists between all things in a holographic universe… What then are UFOs and related phenomena? If [they] are merely psychic projections, how are we to explain the physical traces they leave behind? I propose that we are trying to hammer them into a picture of reality that is fundamentally incorrect. I suggest that UFOs are further evidence of this ultimate lack of division between psychological and physical worlds. They are indeed a product of the collective human psyche, but they are also quite real – something the human race has not learned to comprehend properly. A phenomenon that is neither subjective nor objective, but ‘omnijective…’ In a universe in which the consciousness of a physicist affects the reality of a subatomic particle, the attitude of a doctor affects whether or not a placebo works, and the mind of an experimenter affects the way a machine operates, we can no longer pretend that we are separate from that which we are studying. Instead of discovering particles, physicists may actually be creating them. As evidence [we may] cite a recently discovered subatomic particle called an anomalon, whose properties vary from lab to lab… An anomalon’s reality depends on who finds/creates it. In an omnijective universe…objectivity ceases to be possible.”

 -Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, pp. 78-81, 118, 297, 140