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| The way of the mirror? |
What is it with Pop Culture and Aliens?
here is the post about Bruce Lee and the two-way mirror analogy of Jeff's that I mentioned I would follow up with a future post.
Reading Whitley Strieber's new book co-authored with Jeff Kripal I was amused by an incident recalled in a bookstore when Whitley's book 'Communion' had just hit the bookstores in the 80s and a guy by the name of Bruce Lee allegedly witnessed two aliens/visitors flicking through a copy of 'Communion' and critiquing it, saying which parts of the book Whitley had got right, or wrong in the telling of his story about "the visitors".
"... in Transformation, he describes how, after the publication of Communion, Wm. Morrow & Co. editor Bruce Lee, encountered two apparently alien beings, clumsily disguised in human clothing, who came into his bookstore.
The beings picked up a copy of Strieber's book, made a comment about how Strieber had got some things wrong, gave Lee a fierce stare, and left."
Through a Fractured Glass, Darkly (Part One): The Facts in the Strange Case of Whitley Strieber
I couldn't help thinking of the late martial artist Bruce Lee when I read this story, and not without good reason, as Bruce Lee was also stalked by "visitors", although he would describe them like nightmares.
"Dragon" the Movie, 1993, Brandon's Death and Precognition???
I've written a few posts myself on the strange encounters of Bruce Lee's "visitors" and how he thought that they were after him and his son Brandon (who died in a freak accident while filming the movie 'The Crow').
Bruce spoke about a 4th dimensional demon who had been following him all his life until his tragic death.
"In his 1996 book ‘Bruce Lee; Fighting Spirit’ Bruce Thomas includes a chapter called ‘The Shadow’ which includes statements made by Bruce’s family and friends telling of his battles with a black shadowy figure in his sleep which held him down – a typical symptom of sleep paralysis.
He had premonitions that he would die at half his father's age of 64 (which he did at 32).
In fact, he died just three and a half months prior to his father's death."
"Strangely enough, the set of "Dragon" was nearly as problem-plagued as
"The Crow" production.
During shooting, Jason Scott Lee, who plays (but is not related to) Bruce Lee, lost his grandmother; co-star Lauren Holly lost her 14-year-old brother in a fire, and Cohen had a heart attack.
Says the director, "Two weeks before shooting began,
"... in Transformation, he describes how, after the publication of Communion, Wm. Morrow & Co. editor Bruce Lee, encountered two apparently alien beings, clumsily disguised in human clothing, who came into his bookstore.
The beings picked up a copy of Strieber's book, made a comment about how Strieber had got some things wrong, gave Lee a fierce stare, and left."
Through a Fractured Glass, Darkly (Part One): The Facts in the Strange Case of Whitley Strieber
I couldn't help thinking of the late martial artist Bruce Lee when I read this story, and not without good reason, as Bruce Lee was also stalked by "visitors", although he would describe them like nightmares.
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| The "visitor" showing Bruce Lee his grave in the movie Dragon |
I've written a few posts myself on the strange encounters of Bruce Lee's "visitors" and how he thought that they were after him and his son Brandon (who died in a freak accident while filming the movie 'The Crow').
Bruce spoke about a 4th dimensional demon who had been following him all his life until his tragic death.
"In his 1996 book ‘Bruce Lee; Fighting Spirit’ Bruce Thomas includes a chapter called ‘The Shadow’ which includes statements made by Bruce’s family and friends telling of his battles with a black shadowy figure in his sleep which held him down – a typical symptom of sleep paralysis.
He described to friends and family about having battled in his
sleep with a ‘black shadow’ which he said held him down for several
minutes and the effort of fighting it left him drenched in sweat.
Lee was supposedly haunted by personal demons as well. He had premonitions that he would die at half his father's age of 64 (which he did at 32).
In fact, he died just three and a half months prior to his father's death."
During shooting, Jason Scott Lee, who plays (but is not related to) Bruce Lee, lost his grandmother; co-star Lauren Holly lost her 14-year-old brother in a fire, and Cohen had a heart attack.
Says the director, "Two weeks before shooting began,
Roberta Chow, who
is the daughter of Raymond Chow, the man who produced several of Bruce's
movies, asked me, `Are you aware of the curse of Bruce Lee? Everybody
who has ever tried to make a film about Bruce has had some kind of
horrible catastrophe happen to them. My father was trying to make a
biopic but the director got killed in a car crash.' But I still don't
believe in the curse. If anything gave me that heart attack, it was
`Bird on a Wire' or
`The Witches of Eastwick.' ""
Bruce Lee's Demons Haunt Filming of `Dragon'
I was surprised that Jeff Kripal didn't pick up on the two men named Bruce Lee and put 2 and 2 together to tell of Bruce and Brandon's deaths and the premonition Bruce Lee had.
Dramatic Rise, Tragic End
"Throughout his life, Lee had been obsessed by fears of his early death, and some believed that the brilliant young star had some sort of bizarre "curse" on him.
According to legend and rumor, when Lee bought a house in Hong Kong shortly before his death, he incurred the wrath of the neighborhood's resident demons.
The curse is said to last for three generations.
Tragically, the notion of a curse gained eerie credence on June 18, 1993-a month and two days before the 20th anniversary of Lee's death-when Brandon Lee died under equally strange circumstances.
While filming a scene for the movie The Crow, he was shot by a gun that supposedly contained blanks but in fact had a live round lodged in its chamber.
Like his father, Brandon Lee was on the verge of stardom."
#5. The Curse of the Dragon
"Linda Lee approved the making of a movie about Bruce Lee's life entitled Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Throughout the movie, Bruce battles a metaphorical demon that haunts his family, but during a final confrontation, the monster loses interest in fighting Bruce and instead goes after his son Brandon.
OK, you say, it's kind of tasteless that they would actually make a movie that included Brandon's real-life tragic death (and to blame it on a demon, no less), but what's so spooky about it? Well, that's the thing: Brandon was still alive and well when they shot the movie. The whole "Lee family demon is coming for Brandon next" was written and shot before he had his freak accident.
In fact, Brandon's death happened less than two months before the release of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. The filmmakers dedicated the movie to him, and when asked about the bizarre coincidence director Rob Cohen commented: "I believe in some forms of higher power, like Fate and sometimes, I'm embarrassed to say it, God." Yes, it's so much more comforting to believe in a god who carries out elaborate murder vendettas against random families."
I've even written about how the graphic novel 'The Crow' was written so James O'Barr could vent and express his anger of a drunk driver killing his girlfriend in this post in the red link below -
The Crow: Examining the Dark Side of Life
I even wrote about The Crow re-boot and whether it would be cursed, too -
Crow Re-make? Will It Be Cursed Too?
And then the guy who was rewriting the script, Nick Cave lost his son in a cliff fall.
That song above of Nick Cave's 'The Weeping Song' is a song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds appearing on their 1990 album The Good Son.
Bruce Lee's Demons Haunt Filming of `Dragon'
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| Twin monoliths?! |
Dramatic Rise, Tragic End
"Throughout his life, Lee had been obsessed by fears of his early death, and some believed that the brilliant young star had some sort of bizarre "curse" on him.
According to legend and rumor, when Lee bought a house in Hong Kong shortly before his death, he incurred the wrath of the neighborhood's resident demons.
The curse is said to last for three generations.
Tragically, the notion of a curse gained eerie credence on June 18, 1993-a month and two days before the 20th anniversary of Lee's death-when Brandon Lee died under equally strange circumstances.
While filming a scene for the movie The Crow, he was shot by a gun that supposedly contained blanks but in fact had a live round lodged in its chamber.
Like his father, Brandon Lee was on the verge of stardom."
"Linda Lee approved the making of a movie about Bruce Lee's life entitled Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Throughout the movie, Bruce battles a metaphorical demon that haunts his family, but during a final confrontation, the monster loses interest in fighting Bruce and instead goes after his son Brandon.
OK, you say, it's kind of tasteless that they would actually make a movie that included Brandon's real-life tragic death (and to blame it on a demon, no less), but what's so spooky about it? Well, that's the thing: Brandon was still alive and well when they shot the movie. The whole "Lee family demon is coming for Brandon next" was written and shot before he had his freak accident.
In fact, Brandon's death happened less than two months before the release of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. The filmmakers dedicated the movie to him, and when asked about the bizarre coincidence director Rob Cohen commented: "I believe in some forms of higher power, like Fate and sometimes, I'm embarrassed to say it, God." Yes, it's so much more comforting to believe in a god who carries out elaborate murder vendettas against random families."
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Authors of the Impossible? |
The Crow: Examining the Dark Side of Life
I even wrote about The Crow re-boot and whether it would be cursed, too -
Crow Re-make? Will It Be Cursed Too?
And then the guy who was rewriting the script, Nick Cave lost his son in a cliff fall.
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| Nick Cave |
In the book 'The Super Natural' Jeff proposes the analogy of the two-way mirror based on Whitley's quote, "... the enigmatic presence of the human mind winks back from the dark."
Jeff then goes on to write on page 115 of 'The Super Natural' , "In terms of my previous chapter, we might think of the imagination as the mode of human knowing that intuits the unknowable "what is"and turns it into the knowable "what appears" so that a primate can make some sense out of that which it's sensory system was not previously evolved to know or see, not at least on any regular, practical basis."
Kind of reminds me of Kubrick's monolith out of '2001: A Space Odyssey' and the apes trying to make sense out of it.
In fact, the cover of 'The Super Natural' reminds me of the monolith with an owl eye peering out from it.
You might even say a movie screen with an owl eye peering out from it?-)
Plato's CAVE?
In an e-mail to Jeff on page 281 of 'The Super Natural' Whitley writes,
"before these experiences started in my life, I used to think of us as being inside Plato's cave.
However, I have come to understand that we aren't inside the cave at all, but rather, we ARE the cave. And all of those shadows and all of that damned light cannot put Humpty-Dumpty together again."
Jeff writes earlier in the same book,"When the individual goes further and comes to recognize that these interpretations are both reflections of something real and human creations, that one is being interpreted as one interprets, being seen as one sees, then we call this paradoxical practice "hermeneutics"."
Jeff then mentions Whitley's forward in Jacques Vallee's book 'Dimensions: A Casebook for Alien Contact', "And yet I myself have faced physical beings.
The context of my own experience, with extensive witness by others, makes it clear that the phenomenon can emerge as an entirely real, physical presence that is quite capable of manipulating it's environment.
The next moment, though it can evaporate into thin air, leaving not a trace of what was a moment before an immense and overwhelmingly real presence."
I personally think that 9/11 was an inside job by the Empire to start an oil war, but there was a lot of other weirdness in play around this event also.
I think Jake Kotze was right in a way by referring to this event as a star-gate event, because it seems to have some weird kind of undercurrent surrounding and emanating from that day, planned or otherwise.
Not that Whitley was referring to the 9/11 events in that forward to Jacques book, but I couldn't help but see an analogy of 9/11 and the still weird manipulations (by who, or what is the question) that went on that day for one of the biggest crimes of the century ... even though there is still a long way to go in this century.
"... it can evaporate into thin air, leaving not a trace of what was a moment before an immense and overwhelmingly real presence."
I also thought that on a synchromystic level The Year of the Dragon ended on January 23rd, 2001 and 9/11/2001 would fall within the Year of the Snake.
2001 was the Year of the Metal Snake, too.
UFOs?-)
Seems to be a lot of debate surrounding the two planes that hit the towers that year.
Kind of puts them into the Unidentified Flying Object category in a way, don't you think?
Not that I'm saying that spaceships crashed into the towers, but to this day no real story makes sense, especially the official one, so those "planes" are one of the biggest UFO mysteries still, I think.
Jeff then writes in 'The Super Natural' that , "he even dropped one of those amazing one-liners about the visitor experience."
"I have even thought that it may simply be what the force of evolution looks like when it acts upon conscious creatures."
Jeff then writes,
"What is the imagination?
Is it simply a spinner of fantasies?
Or can it also become a "window"of revealed truths from some other deeper part of the soul or world?
Or better yet, like some secret two-way mirror in a modern day police station, is the imagination both, depending on whether one is looking at or through its reflecting surface, that is, depending on which side of it one is standing?
Can one stand on both sides?"
I have to say that I only brought the two-way mirror analogy of Jeff's up so I could mirror the two Bruce Lee's supernatural stories to show how tricksterish the "real" world is when it comes to names and coincidences and that there is more to the "mirror" than we can imagine.
And I emphasize, "more than WE can imagine".
I think that there are way more puzzle pieces on the table here than any mirror analogy is going to solve when it comes to interdimentional, or any other visitors for that matter.
It would be nice if it were that fairy-tale simple ... but I imagine it's not ... pun intended.
I'll keep hunting.
There is another famous pop cultural mirror image I do want to write about in a later post when I reflect on the words of page 237 of 'The Super Natural' , of all pages;-)
The Irony of Page 237 of Whitley Strieber's New Book
Whitley writes on page 282 of 'The Super Natural',
"The human mind is a myth-maker.
We do this because we need mirrors, and our myths are these mirrors.
We need them to understand ourselves and to find meaning in the way we relate to the world around us."
Kind of reminds me of Kubrick's monolith out of '2001: A Space Odyssey' and the apes trying to make sense out of it.
In fact, the cover of 'The Super Natural' reminds me of the monolith with an owl eye peering out from it.
Plato's CAVE?
In an e-mail to Jeff on page 281 of 'The Super Natural' Whitley writes,
"before these experiences started in my life, I used to think of us as being inside Plato's cave.
However, I have come to understand that we aren't inside the cave at all, but rather, we ARE the cave. And all of those shadows and all of that damned light cannot put Humpty-Dumpty together again."
Jeff writes earlier in the same book,"When the individual goes further and comes to recognize that these interpretations are both reflections of something real and human creations, that one is being interpreted as one interprets, being seen as one sees, then we call this paradoxical practice "hermeneutics"."
The context of my own experience, with extensive witness by others, makes it clear that the phenomenon can emerge as an entirely real, physical presence that is quite capable of manipulating it's environment.
The next moment, though it can evaporate into thin air, leaving not a trace of what was a moment before an immense and overwhelmingly real presence."
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| Monolith? Millenium Hotel 2001? |
I think Jake Kotze was right in a way by referring to this event as a star-gate event, because it seems to have some weird kind of undercurrent surrounding and emanating from that day, planned or otherwise.
"... it can evaporate into thin air, leaving not a trace of what was a moment before an immense and overwhelmingly real presence."
UFOs?-)
Seems to be a lot of debate surrounding the two planes that hit the towers that year.
Kind of puts them into the Unidentified Flying Object category in a way, don't you think?
Not that I'm saying that spaceships crashed into the towers, but to this day no real story makes sense, especially the official one, so those "planes" are one of the biggest UFO mysteries still, I think.
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| ? |
"I have even thought that it may simply be what the force of evolution looks like when it acts upon conscious creatures."
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Tribute to Bruce Lee by tonio48 |
"What is the imagination?
Is it simply a spinner of fantasies?
Or can it also become a "window"of revealed truths from some other deeper part of the soul or world?
Or better yet, like some secret two-way mirror in a modern day police station, is the imagination both, depending on whether one is looking at or through its reflecting surface, that is, depending on which side of it one is standing?
Can one stand on both sides?"
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| Both? |
And I emphasize, "more than WE can imagine".
It would be nice if it were that fairy-tale simple ... but I imagine it's not ... pun intended.
I'll keep hunting.
Whitley writes on page 282 of 'The Super Natural',
"The human mind is a myth-maker.
We do this because we need mirrors, and our myths are these mirrors.
We need them to understand ourselves and to find meaning in the way we relate to the world around us."
I've enjoyed all of Strieber's books, but The Super Natural is particularly fascinating. Great sequence of synchros here, Daz!
ReplyDeleteThe Super Natural is definitely worth reading...and I still have a few chapters left to read yet, but Jeff and Whitley are asking the right questions to try and make sense of not just the "visitor" phenomena, but life in general.
ReplyDeleteHaving read Kripals, Mutants and Mystics, maybe I can slog thru Strieber's latest tome. Daz, this post is what synchromystics live for. Well done! Respectfully, Dennis
ReplyDeleteThanks Dennis.
ReplyDeleteI recommend 'The Super Natural' to anyone who has an interest in the mystical, or even mundane areas of life, or for anyone who likes to think deep, even if they're not into the aliens/visitors of Whitley's.
Kripal's books are quite fascinating to read and I really like the subject matter he is pursuing.