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Angels,
Aliens, and Altered States, or Do pay attention to the man behind the curtain Just like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, these days
we’re pulling back the curtain and discovering the whys and wherefores behind
the illusions of seeming reality. Whether
it’s cracking the DNA code or exploring the outer rings of Saturn, analyzing
multiple personality disorders or testing Feynman equations about time travel on
a sub-atomic level, science and technology keep giving us more hard evidence for
what myth, religion, and folklore have been saying for thousands of years. Recall our definition of
myths as “The stories we tell ourselves to explain the world around us and
within us.” As the world around
us becomes both more and less mysterious thanks to science, and our knowledge of
the world within us evolves in much the same way, we naturally come up with
stories to help make some sense of it all.
A few examples are The Sixth Sense, Contact, Time
Machine, and Run, Lola, Run. Though similar in that they
play with consensus reality, these stories differ from those which feature the
Magician ArchePath in that the heroes and heroines of illusion tales usually are
not the ones creating the illusion, but are rather at the mercy of the illusions
or the failures of illusion and then spend the bulk of the story learning how to
deal with what’s been thrust upon them. The
Magician, by contrast, consciously sets out to alter seeming reality. "Reality is merely an
illusion, albeit a very persistent one. " The supernatural and the unexplained are all the rage now,
from channeling spirit guides for personal growth to hiring retired military
psychic spies for corporate espionage. So
what is all this reality altering about? Alien abductions, angel visitations, remote viewing,
psychic phenomena, the New Age Movement, the resurgence of the Goddess religion,
crop circles, the anthropological fervor of cross-cultural experimentation from
sweat lodges to fire-walking, Pentecostal and ecstatic offshoots of mainstream
religions, glossolalia (speaking in tongues), visions of the Virgin
Mary... And then there was that tabloid photo of a shadowy outline
on a screen door: “Jesus Christ or Willie Nelson?
You decide.” You may think this is a relatively new thing spawned by our
fabulous advances in science and technology, or that perhaps it’s an atavistic
reaching for mystery and meaning in a world frenzied by globalism and commerce,
but there are many examples from history that this sort of thing’s been going
on for as long as humans have been around to tell their own stories.
And tell the stories they did. Most myths, almost by definition, have some supernatural
aspect to them. As we look at some examples recall that though some people
call other people’s religions myths, we classify myths as stories that are
conceptually (if not always factually) true.
It’s the resonance of those inherent conceptual truths that make myths
in any cultural system valuable and enduring. The Koran recounts Mohammed's mystical Night Journey from
Mecca to Jerusalem on a flying horse. The
Judeo-Christian Bible is replete with angel-alien encounters from Jacob's
wresting match (an early version of WWF) and Ezekiel's wheels within wheels to
the Virgin Mary’s visit from the angel announcing Jesus’ impending
appearance. And like Mohammed who
met his spiritual ancestors in Jerusalem, Jesus also “saw dead people” when
he met with Moses and Elijah. The Hindu and Buddhist religions are packed with myriad
otherworldly beings and events. In
the Vedic system, travel to other planets is often said to be an interpretation
of travel of one’s consciousness up and down the chakras, those
gatherings of nerves along the spinal column that connect to various endocrine
glands and thus states of emotion and their physiological effects. Most pantheistic and animist religions take out-of-body
experiences and locus genii (local spirits) for granted.
Even the hyper-rational Greeks and Romans had their local gods and
spirits. Recall in the “I,
Claudius” Masterpiece Theatre series from Robert Graves’ historical novels
that the Emperor’s family could be turned into gods by Senatorial decree. Sometimes it looks like we’re doing the same thing in
America except we deify celebrities and sports figures more than politicians.
“Man is certainly stark
mad: he cannot make a flea, yet he makes gods by the dozens.” --Montaigne, 16th
Century French essayist Buddhism seems to have one of the most realistic approaches
to all these altered states of being and generally speaking deems all perception
by our sensory organs as maya, or illusion.
Life is likened to a Potemkin village – all freshly painted false
fronts hiding the true state of affairs. Do
film schools still show that old film with its famous scene of the baby carriage
bouncing down the Odessa steps and paeaned in The Untouchables? Anyway, a state of bliss can be reached, Buddhists say, by
detaching from the illusions much as Neo is urged to detach from the
machine-generated illusions of the Matrix.
And yet, the illusions are so, well, so entertaining.
As we look at more stories premised on illusion, on angels,
aliens and altered states we’ll look towards some explanations to better
understand the phenomena and some information you might use to create or enhance
your own stories. ***** For the sake of exploring this broad genre let’s keep the
stories in these three categories: angels
and aliens, exploration of the inner world, and alternate states of reality such
as time travel and other dimensions. Needless
to say, some of these categories cross-fertilize each other and you’ll find
aliens in another dimension or meet angels on an inner journey. See how many
more story examples you can add in each category. Angels and aliens.
Wings of Desire, Michael, Star Trek(s), Heaven Can Wait, Men in Black,
Predator, Communion, Independence Day, Touched by an Angel, It’s a Wonderful
Life, Harvey. Unlike ordinary
items such as buildings and other humans, in real life not everybody can see
angels, aliens, elves and giant rabbits; this causes much distress on both sides
of the question. Yet sightings of
same are as old as human stories and there are many explanations for the
phenomenon. Spiritual systems, by definition, pre-suppose a reality
other than the three-dimensional one perceivable by our five senses. Science is
expanding our knowledge of arenas outside our senses; we now have instruments
that observe and measure sound and light far beyond human physiological
capacity. So perhaps people who
“see” things really are seeing something outside the boundaries of normal
human perception just as dogs hear and smell more than we do and insects see in
a different spectrum than we do. The ancient Wisdom teachings group this ability to see
other forms under the siddhi powers (ESP, telepathy, prescience and all
that) and say that they come from development of the solar plexus chakra
and are a natural stage in the raising of the kundalini energy up from
the root centre to the head centre. Aspirants
in those disciplines are admonished, however, not to get stuck in those
fascinating yet sometimes horrifying realms. It’s said that ancient
humans (not just remote tribal peoples but way way back in Atlantis and Mu) were
much more open to these other realms and had daily congress with spirits and
entities no longer visible to modern humans. Hence all our myths and stories about same.
Likewise, some systems see all life as cyclic and say that we’re
circling around to another spot on the wheel of life where modern humans can
again access these other realms of angels, devas, elementals and the
like. Theosophist Alice Bailey wrote in 1925 in “A Treatise on
Cosmic Fire” that "It is in the development of the etheric vision, which
is a capacity of the physical human eye, and not in clairvoyance that this
mutual apprehension (between kingdoms) will become possible.
With the coming in likewise of this (7th) ray (paradigm of
Spirit-Into-Matter) will arrive those who belong thereon, with a natural gift of
seeing etherically. Children will frequently be born who will see etherically as
easily as the average human being sees physically; as conditions of harmony
gradually evolve out of the present chaos, devas and human beings will
meet as friends." Just think
of the little girl in Poltergeist or the little boy in Sixth Sense.
One physiological explanation of alien abduction
experiences is sleep hypnosis and the tendency of the human mind to make sense
of what the brain picks up from the body. It
is in the nature of humans to apply meaning to our experiences and when
there’s no readily available explanation for a phenomenon we will often simply
fill in the blanks and then “know” what happened.
Magicians use this tendency all the time in sleight-of-hand and other
magical illusions. But sometimes
perhaps we simply do it to ourselves. So there are a couple of explanations you might work with
in your stories: the experiences are artifacts of the way our bodies and minds
process the input from the outside world; the experiences are actual encounters
with actual entities normally outside the realms of human perception. Director Wes Craven has a great supposition of how this
other world works in his film Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (that would be
“Nightmare on Elm Street 7”). He
posits that Freddy Kruger is the personification of an ancient evil that feeds
on the slaughter of innocents. It
has been held prisoner, contained in stories since the first Freddy movie but
once the stories stop being told, then the genie gets out of the bottle. In his film this concept precipitates the making of a sequel
to re-contain the evil Freddy. It’s
one of the best excuses for making yet another sequel I’ve ever come across. Inner world explorations.
Some examples here are Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Contact,
Vanilla Sky, Jacob’s Ladder, From Hell, Being John Malkovich, and Ally McBeal.
American Family and Providence use a dead mother as the
personification of the subconscious and serve a similar purpose as the classical
Greek chorus. Myths are full of journeys to the inner- and under- worlds,
from the Greek Ulysses and Trojan Aeneas to the Mesopotamian buddies Gilgamesh
and Enkidu. The Greek girls
Persephone and Eurydice were unceremoniously snatched into the underworld and
had to be rescued; the Hopis traversed from one world to another on their way to
this current reality; tribal shamans claim to journey to other worlds and bring
back wisdom to heal and guide their fellows.
A few years ago recovered memories were a big deal in
psychology and those about sexual child abuse became big deals in law courts.
Then as neurophysiology caught up with the social sciences via PET scans
and MRIs it was discovered that the memory of an imagined event is often
actually stronger than the memory of a real event. Many supposedly real events “recovered” during guided
hypnosis were shown to be just that, imaginary, much to the varied chagrin,
shame and relief of accusers and accused. A common manifestation of this inner world is the early
childhood invisible friend. Multiple
personality disorder, schizophrenia and other so-called mental illnesses might
be seen as inner explorations gone bad. Work
with archetypes and visualizations-for-success also deal with that inner world
where the imagination can create very real thought-forms and emotion-forms. The encounters and effects in the inner exploration aspects
of a story range from the benign (Contact where Jody Foster’s dad may
have embodied or been co-opted by an alien intelligence) and helpful (From
Hell where Johnny Depp’s opium-eating detective had revelatory visions) to
the horrifying (Tim Robbins’ end-of-life experiences in Jacob’s Ladder). If you’re doing an inner exploration story you’d do
well to research the latest in neurophysiology and consciousness studies.
My favourite quick-look source is the weekly Science News
magazine. [http://sciserv.org] For dramatic conflict you’d do well to have at least one
character on either side of the skeptic/believer divide and with various degrees
of open-mindedness. That way you
can explore possible explanations, lead your audience down red herring
sidetracks, and bring in more aspects of the situation to which your audience
may relate. After all, recognition
creates relationship, so you do want a mix of philosophies and actions in a
story like this. Alternate realities.
Monsters, Inc., Star Trek(s), The Truman Show, Sliding Doors, Run Lola
Run, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, Matrix, Sixth Sense, the current BBC
TV series Shades, Back to the Future(s), Time Machine, Somewhere in Time,
Slaughterhouse 5, The Emerald Forest and of course Altered States...
all deal with realities other than our regular three dimensions plus linear,
forward-moving time reality. Have you ever had a really strong deja vu?
Or a dream so real it seemed more real than your waking reality?
Or a premonition that came true? Have
you ever felt like you were slightly “off” from the rest of the world, or
that you weren’t quite living the right life?
Or perhaps you’ve been writing a screenplay or a story and your life
began to imitate your art? What’s
going on here? Though some of this may well fall under the inner
exploration and illusion category there are now even more possible explanations
for storytellers. One of the most fascinating theories to come out of science
in the last few years is String Theory, which posits that there are as many as
eleven dimensions, and hence universes, existing at once and that we are
conscious in but one of them. Story-tellers
and explorers might contend that we can slip from one dimension into another, be
it in sleep, through spiritual disciplines, under the influence of mind-altering
substances, or simply through a quirk of physics and a twist of the time-space
continuum. Certainly it often seems that some of us live in entirely
different worlds than the rest of us. Maybe
we really do. Maybe the slipstream
of reality just crisses and crosses and sometimes we’re in one universe and
sometimes in the other. Like when
you’ve been searching for that lost pen and then it turns up right where
you’ve been looking but you know it wasn’t there ten minutes ago... maybe
you’ve slipped dimensions. Or maybe pens time-travel.
We all know socks do, especially in dryers.
Regardless, it makes for fun story telling. Ah Love! couldst thou and I with Fate conspire So much of literature and story-telling is driven by our
desire to change reality: to make that person love us, to have chosen the
winning numbers, to have made it to the train on time, to have gone right
instead of left. So much of religion is about explaining away and offering
solace for the apparent inequities of life.
So much of myth – and of movies -- is about offering us alternatives to
our so-called reality in order that we might experience a thousand times a
thousand more lives and adventures and romances and failures and successes than
that Orientalist’s wheel of life could afford in real time.
It’s like a compression of karma, if you will.
And remember, science shows us that the memory of an imagined event can
be stronger than the memory of real events. If you’re doing an altered states story remember to put
in that emotional element of someone’s great desire for a different reality,
of some wrong that could be righted, some loss that could be restored. ***** Alright then, you’ve seen that though the outward
manifestations of these illusion stories may be quite different – angels and
aliens, inward exploration, and altered states – the explanations are often
similar. Speaking at a MYTHWORKS seminar, writer Laura Brennan
suggested that storytellers choose just one explanation and stick with it.
She also recommended using only one “gimme” per story, e.g. time
travel, invisibility, super strength, etc. If you are working on a story that may fall into one of
these categories, you could do well to see some of the movies listed in that
category, read up on some of the myths and legends and basically steep yourself
in that particular genre. You can
then tap into the power of that huge thought-form that lives, like archetypes,
in what Dr. Carl Jung called our “collective unconscious.”
And yet, since the story will be coming through your own distinctive
mind, emotions and set of experiences it can be most unique. As a mythmaker you get to create your story world how you
see fit. Fortunately, these days, you have not only the timeless
Mythic Tools at your disposal but also the fantastic advances in science and
technology. One of today’s most popular writers, Will Shakespeare,
tells us in Hamlet, “There are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, To which we might now add, “...or yet discovered by your
sciences. The more you as a story-teller know, the better your
stories of Angels, Aliens and Altered States will be since a better
understanding of how the world around us and within us works makes us better
able to relate and to create. So pull back the curtain of illusion, click your heels
together, and take us all on another fabulous journey to other realms and
realities. Make great myths! For
more information on this topic, see the seminar tapes “Angels and Aliens”
on the websites: http://Hollywoodnet.com/Mythworks/index.html and
at www.mythworks.net PAMELA JAYE SMITH is a consultant, speaker, writer and award-winning producer and director with over twenty years in the film industry on features, TV, commercials, music videos, documentaries and corporate films. MYTHWORKS is Pamela’s consultation and information service featuring Applied Mythology, Ancient Wisdom, New Science and the Proven Power-Tools of Creativity. Her story consultation clients include screenwriters, novelists, playwrights, non-fiction authors, directors, designers, actors and development executives. MYTHWORKS seminar and classes venues include UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, USC Film School, Walt Disney Animation, the U.S. Army, American Film Institute, Natl. Film Institute of Denmark, Pepperdine University, Intl. Vintners & Distillers NA, American Assoc. of University Women, ROTC classes, Foundation for the Junior Blind and various film festivals. She also consults with organizations on design, missions, teamwork, leadership, communication and stress management. MYTHWORKS recent events include workshops and panels at the Moondance Film Festival, Cinewomen's "21st Century Female Hero" series, the National Association of Broadcasters annual convention in Vegas, Cleveland Independent Film Festival and Conference, finals judge for the Hartley-Merrill International Screenwriting contest, finals judge and presenter at the Monterey County Film Commission's Screenwriting Competition, Northern California Writer's Association and the Hollywood Network's Screenwriting Conference. Pamela serves on a Boeing Space & Communications Think Tank on Science and Technology Education and recently completed an analysis and recommendations paper for the National Committee Against Youth Violence media campaign. She will be a presenter the upcoming StoryCon: World's 1st Conference on the Art, Science and Application of Story and the Casper College Literary Conference. Pamela appears on the new international TV series "Forbidden Secrets" as an expert in mythology. Two of Pamela’s novels are currently under consideration at a number of publishing houses. |
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