Bigfoot Highway travels, Part 2

Things were getting weirder.

So weird, in fact, I put my foot on the break and pulled off to the side of the road. I took a deep breath. My vehicle made those sounds cars make when they are first turned off, similar to the noises of a settling house. “I don't think we were supposed to see that,” I said. “I really don't think we were supposed to see that.”

She didn't reply.

The road sliced through the forest, making it look like a canyon of trees. Before the incident that had caused me to pull over, we had listened to classic rock. Rolling Stones. Fleetwood Mac. Emily put her hand out the passenger side window, letting it ride the air waves in their crests and lulls. The air was cooler at this elevation, and smelled of vegetation and moving water. It was also eerily quiet. In the city, you hear things constantly, whether you realize it or not. The sirens in the distance. The sound of people talking as they pass your home. Dogs barking. Planes flying overhead. Amongst the thick Northwest forest, I felt the absence of noise almost like a tangible thing. It was like someone put plugs in my ears during a loud concert, it was a relief, but it was also disorientating. Like a warm wet blanket being thrown over my head.

Thoughts bubbled up in my mind, burst, and disappeared in an effervescence, a lazy mess of daydreams and tangents.

There were few people on this section of road. We would go 20 minutes without seeing a car in either direction. We were, in our minds at least, alone. I wish, thinking about it now, we would have stopped more to appreciate how alone we were. The Douglas fir were thickly packed, verdant with undergrowth and overgrowth. I couldn't imagine walking very far into them. It was, I imagine, perfect sasquatch habitat.

Past Brietenbush and almost into Detroit we stopped on the side of the road. I had glimpsed a waterfall below and we scuttled down the embankment. It was steep and we had to jump over a fallen tree to make our way down, but once we reached the bottom, we were speechless. It was beautiful. The water cascaded down into a dazzling blue broth. It was the color of ice. Emily smiled. Though it was so close to the road, it felt like we had discovered it. But that's what you get on the Oregon bigfoot highway: solitude. Emily walked along the edge of the frigid water and I found a nice place to rest my ass. Water scares me. You often can't see the bottom, and I like to avoid the possibility of falling in. The thought of drowning, of gulping as your lungs fill up with water. 

I leaned back and watched her. I was also worried she was going to fall in. I am not a good swimmer, and there would be nothing I could do but get my own self killed if an invisible current got a hold of her. She was beautiful as she leaned down to take pictures, going on her knees as she brought the phone forward. The air smelled of moving water. As I sat there, looking at the trees hugging the steep embankment on the other side of the river over Emily's shoulder, I thought. 

There is something to the idea that the outer world reflects the interior world. This also extends to our thought processes. When we are in the wood, we think a different way than we are out of it. Mark Booth, in his book The Secret History of the World, writes: “the deepest springs of our mental life are also the deepest springs of the physical world, because in the universe of the secret societies all chemistry is physco-chemistry, and the ways in which the physical content of the universe responds to the human psyche are described by deeper and more powerful laws than the laws of material science” (36). The reason I relate that to you is this: Bigfoot is real, and I can prove it.

He is us. He is not us. He existed before us and he didn't too. 

How can this be?

***

Booth continues on page 53: “...Let us try to imagine ourselves into the mind of someone about two and half thousand years ago, walking through woodland to a sacred grove or a temple such as Newgrange in Ireland, or Elusis in Greece…”

“To such a person the wood and everything in it was alive. Everything was watching him. Unseen spirits whispers in the movements of the trees. A breeze brushing against his cheek was the gesture of a god. If the buffeting of blocks of air in the sky created lightning, this was an outbreak of cosmic will – and maybe he walked a little faster. Perhaps he sheltered in a cave?”

“When ancient man ventured into a cave he had a strange sense of being inside his own skull, cut off in his own private mental space. If he climbed to the top of a hill, he felt his consciousness race to the horizon in every direction, out towards the edges of the cosmos – and he felt at one with it. At night he experienced the sky as the mind of the cosmos.”

Booth is relaying, quite more eloquently than I can, that in a “mind before matter” universe, the exterior world is literally like wandering through the mind of gods, and depending on where you are (be it a forest, a plain, or a cave), it affects that which possesses your consciousness. Your mind expands when on a hilltop. It shrinks down when you are indoors. What is a person's room but a reflection of their interior world? Cluttered with mystic books? Orderly with mathematical texts? A picture of a nuclear bomb going off? A drawing of a fox or wolf or dragon?

Booth continues: “When [the ancient man] walked along a woodland pathway he would have had a strong sense of following his destiny. Today many of us may wonder, How did I end up this life that seems to have little or nothing to do with me? Such a thought would have been inconceivable to someone in the ancient world, where everyone was conscious of his or her place in the cosmos.

“Everything that happened to him – even the sight of a mote in a sunbeam, the sound of the flight of a bee or the sight of a falling sparrow – was meant to happen. Everything spoke to him. Everything was a punishment, a reward, a warning or a premonition. If he saw an owl, for example, this wasn't just a symbol of the goddess, this was Athena. Part of her, a warning finger perhaps, was protruding into the physical world and into his own consciousness.”

What Mark Booth is describing is animism. <a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism”>Wikipedia</a> illustrates it as such, “Animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork and perhaps even words—as animated and alive.” How does this relate to bigfoot?

To the ancients, collective visions (ie Bigfoot, Point Pleasant's Mothman, BEK) were possible because ideas were more real than objects. “In this history,” he writes, “gods and spirits control the material world and exercise power over it” (59). Gods weren't just myths. They were ideas, ideas that existed not just outside us but inside us too. Consciousness was not the realm of the “I”, it had power centers represented by the different gods. Gods that could speak to multiple individuals at once, through multiple people at once, over years and even generations. “We will see, too, how sometimes disembodies beings break through, unbidden. Sometimes whole communities are possessed” (59). I like to think that this idea of collective vision continues to this day without most of us realizing it. Not only its chance to enrich our lives, but also its terrible danger.

Patrick Harpur calls these disembodied spirits 'daimons'. Daimons are spirits, angels, ufos, monsters, ghosts, dogmen, Black Eyed Kids, fairies, and they are, perhaps especially, gods. They represent images, ideas, archetypes, and they exist in the collective unconscious, both in the realm of Morpheus's dreams, but also outside of them, in the physical world, in Plato's Anima Mundi, “the soul of world”. They provide the “connection between gods and men” (Harpur 35) and if we ignore them, according to Plutarch, we “[break] the chain that unites the world to God” (Harpur 36).

One of these many 'spirits', these 'daimons', are the apemen that exist across the globe.

***

Bigfoot is the archetype of the wildman, in other words, he is an idea, an image of an ancient caveman-- he is hairy, lives in the forest, one with nature, a beast. He is a reflection of ourselves, or the way we perceive a more primitive human to look like. 

Patrick Harpur has a salient idea in his book “Daimonic Reality.” He writes “… like almost no other natural feature, a lake provides a ready-made metaphor, […] a symbol of the collective unconscious, and imaginative nexus where individual perception (or 'misperception') and collective myth meet. Regardless of the actual characteristics of the lake, it is transformed by the Imagination into a reflection of the unconscious itself, becoming a dark, impenetrable, bottomless kingdom that does not yield up its dead” (129). Again, our consciousness not only reflects the outside world, it literally becomes 'one' with it. As Harpur states earlier in the book, Carl Jung often compared the collective unconscious to an ocean, constantly in flux, a sea of images and archetypes rising and falling, moving forward and receding-- and consciousness “only a small island rising out of, and surrounded by, the vast unconscious fluidity” (14).

Harpur continues on about enclosed bodies of water: “[lake monsters] are seen now as contained in the lake, now as another manifestation of it. Rising like archetypal images toward the light of consciousness, they are glimpsed in an instant of amazement before sinking back in the depths, their wake sending ripples into the far reaches of our minds” (129). As Harpur writes, the perceived monsters we sometimes see lurking in lakes, at least as I choose to understand it, are actually analogous to our own hidden-away monsters—our ids, our cruxes, our habits we would not like to admit to ourselves, our violent tendencies, our reptilian brain.

As discussed earlier, forests are another imaginal mirror to our minds. Forests are inherently mysterious. They have no order as man would create. Vegetation – leaves, vines, wood – blocks the viewer's eyeline. It is, in literary tradition, the place where order, and man's laws, break down. It is the realm of the feminine, untamed, nourishing, dangerous. It is a representation of 'wholeness', where everything is clearly connected to everything else, where both dark and light are equally represented within its depths. It reminds one, at least on a spiritual level, that one is included in this web, that some day one will return to it and be reborn as something as else. 

It is also a mystery, a puzzle, a maze-- a neglected part of ourselves in a world ruled by Saturn, by the left brain, by man, by rules, by laws and boxes, by endless categories and hierarchies, as Harpur puts it, the temenos. The wood is where many fairy tales are set and many an adventurer has a sojourn through a dark, dangerous forest, perhaps because that inside this maze is a collective unconscious reflection, much like the lake monsters that Harpur described above. A bigfoot, half-man, half-beast, given birth by us as a tulpa, disappearing as quickly as breath on a mirror when he does show up.