Alternate Perceptions Magazine, January 2025
Wish Fulfillment, Bigfoot, and the Collective Psyche
by: Dennis Stamey
In our other books and articles, we discussed the collective psyche and cosmic consciousness in more or less evasive terms. Sometimes, we were admittedly confused, even interchanging the names. Let’s cut through the verbiage and the misunderstanding and try to clarify what we mean.
We believe, after all we’ve read about philosophy, metaphysics, and the paranormal that there are three layers of consciousness, consciousness being energy in its purest form. The first is cosmic consciousness or the cosmic mind, total awareness, the most purified energy, something that brought the natural world, from plants to galaxies, into creation with its thoughts. This cosmic mind could be akin to God but not in the Judaeo-Christian sense. It is more like Brahman as described in the Upanishads. As the Chandogya Upanishad, among the oldest Upanishadic texts, explained: This whole universe is Brahman. In tranquility, let one worship It, as Tajjalan (that from which he came forth, as that into which he will be dissolved, as that in which he breathes). Closely related to this is the Buddhist concept of nirvana.
The cosmic mind is also widely recognized in Greek philosophy. Aristotle wrote about the umoved mover "an immortal, unchanging being, ultimately responsible for all wholeness and orderliness in the sensible world.” Neoplantonism taught about "the One,” the source of the universe, that exists beyond being and non-being. Anaximader believed in the Apeiron, an infinite and eternal substance that is the origin of all things.
The second tier of consciousness is what we dub the collective psyche. In our writings, we identified this layer with the cosmic mind; however, we believe now that they are separate. The first person to theorize about the collective psyche was the Swedish psychoanalyst Carl Jung. By Jung’s definition, it is a universal library of human knowledge and transcendental wisdom that supposedly guides humankind. Everyone is connected to this storehouse of ancient sagacity beginning at birth and can access it through dreams or imagination rather than conscious effort since it is innate. As Jung explained, it contains “all of the knowledge and experiences that humans share as a species.” So what sort of knowledge or wisdom does the collective psyche contain? Jung said that it consists of “mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. He speculated that “the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.” Jung termed these motifs archetypes and his definition is obtuse. They are behavioral traits, universal patterns, and images that were probably established when humans were hunter/gatherers. Jung identified four major archetypes: the persona, the shadow, the anima or animus, and the self. The persona is the social mask we wear depending on the group or situation we find ourselves in, keeping our ego from seeming negative or out of place. For instance, if we’re at a party with refined people, we might try to act classy even though that’s not our nature. The self represents a person’s consciousness and unconsciousness as a whole. The anima is the feminine part of the psyche while the animus is the male part. The feminine side represents empathy, trust, intuition, and emotion while the masculine anima symbolizes logical thinking, problem-solving, and emotional stability. The shadow is the darker side of the psyche, representing wildness, chaos, and the unknown.
There are many other archetypes such as the ruler, the explorer, the rebel, the hero, the joker, or the wizard. Psychology buffs are constantly coming up with new ones, many of which are culturally based. We’ll talk more about the collective psyche and the shadow archetype later.
The last tier is personal consciousness. According to Jung, the personal psyche has three components: the ego, which represents the conscious mind; the personal unconscious, which contains memories, including those that have been suppressed; and the collective psyche, which we are all part of. If the cosmic mind has brought everything into existence with its thoughts, the individual mind has brought everything into the third-dimensional world into existence with its thoughts, everything in other words that is artificial. Consider that the chair or sofa you are sitting in while reading this was created by someone’s thoughts as was the room you are in, as well as the book or laptop you are holding.
Some mystics have even claimed that our consciousness can create new realities. Eastern mysticism has always spoken of visualization. Ritualized visualization first evolved from Vedic rituals and later became a central feature of Hinduism, the power of imagination being used to transform everyday reality.
In recent times, two teachers of visualization or wish fulfillment have gained notoriety. In The Circus of Illusions, we discussed Jose Silva, an electronics repairman from Laredo, Texas, who acquired an interest in psychology while serving in the US Signals Corps during World War II. He went on to develop what he called the Silva Mind Control program and was convinced it could help improve children’s IQs, concentration, and homework. He first tried out his experiments with friends and family before officially launching his program in the 1960s. The focus of the Silva Method is to use the alpha state of mind more consciously. Alpha waves are a medium-frequency pattern of brain activity associated with restful and meditative states. When an individual's body is at the alpha level, equivalent to a state of relaxing meditation, they can heal themselves because their immune system is strengthened. In addition, when a person is in the alpha state, they can overcome negative thoughts and behaviors, including drinking and smoking, and improve their memory, creativity, concentration, and intuition. Silva claimed that by using his program, his daughter’s grades not only enhanced but she became clairvoyant. His program has since been turned into the Mindvalley educational technology company.
The second teacher was the mystic Neville Goddard. His ideas more or less align with Silva’s; however, Goddard was more metaphysical in his approach. No institute dispenses his teachings and his proponents can be found scattered across social media, some adding their spin to his ideas. The core of Neville’s message is that we create our lives directly through our imagination and state of consciousness. We have been doing 24/7 since birth but without realizing it. But by manifesting consciously, we must assume we already have our desires and are living in that state, and by doing so, we shift reality to match them. Our imagination is thus the creative power through which we manifest. What we consistently imagine and emotionally feel to be true will be reflected to us as our physical reality or the 3D.
Goddard also believed that everything has already been created including every possible outcome to a situation. What we desire is already out there in the present. This is reminiscent of the multi-universe hypothesis which proposes that there may be multiple or even an infinite number of universes, including the universe we inhabit, that together comprise everything that exists.
Then too there’s the idea that everyone who crosses our path is someone we’ve manifested be they good or bad. If a person tries to do us harm, it is because they have been produced out of dark thoughts. They are real people but have simply been drawn into our existence. Thus life is a mirror. The goal is to our mental energy consciously and purposefully for a richer life.
Does the Silva Method or Goddard’s teachings work? Students of Mindvalley and the Goddard gurus attest to this. Many claim that they have manifested careers, money, relationships, healing, weight loss, and even changes in appearance. Some have reportedly become multi-millionaires.
Let’s get back to the collective psyche. This secondary tier of consciousness also manifests communally since we are attached to it but unfortunately what it manifests are not luxury cruises, beautiful soul mates, or millions in the bank but nightmares. That might be because in the aggregate we don’t have positive thoughts. Notice how the UFO aliens went from beautiful Space Brothers to ugly grey bulbous-headed freaks who are either hostile or indifferent, reflecting our souring view of the world.
When were in junior high, our science class got into a discussion about ghosts. The teacher mentioned that a few years before a bunch of people near Union, South Carolina, had seen a tall figure in white dart across the road and into the trees. We’ve searched the Internet for any stories concerning this apparition and all we could find were stories of a white spectral hound that haunts a five-mile section of the Old Buncombe Road which cuts through Sumter National For4est in Union County. Supposedly, the Hound of Goshen as it is known is the ghost of a dog belonging to a traveler who was unjustly accused of stealing and hanged. Now his pet supposedly roams the vicinity seeking revenge.
Was this tall apparition seen sometime in the early sixties the Hound of Goshen but in a different form, a manifestation of the collective psyche? The folks who saw this ghost were undoubtedly familiar with the spectral hound and in the back of their mind might have assumed it existed or that it possibly could exist.
The Ozark Howler is a terrifying critter of Ozark folklore. The first recorded sightings of the Howler date back to the 1950s; however, many families in that area claim that their ancestors encountered the creature long before that. By most accounts, the monster is the size of a bear, with a thick body, stocky legs, black shaggy hair, and two big horns jutting from its head. Some witnesses also say it has glowing red eyes, fangs, and a long tail. It's most noted for the loud sound it makes which is supposed to be the combination of a wolf’s howl and an elk’s bugle. Some people also say that its screams are like a woman in agony (which is also what a bobcat makes). While tales of the Howler have been bandied about for generations, it didn’t gain real attention until a local television station in Arkansas reported that they had received photographs of the creature from a viewer. The station contacted the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, who dismissed the photos as a hoax. But from 2015 to 2019 there was a spate of sightings. Did the publicity engendered by the photo create a temporary belief in this creature? Goddard had a lot to say about belief. To make your manifestations come true, you must make the subconscious believe them, telling yourself the same statements over and over. As he stated, “Assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled and observe the route that your attention follows.” By assuming the feeling, you engender positive emotions and these emotions align with “the vibrational frequency of your desires.” Another key is to feel gratitude for what you already have. Gratitude, Goddard explained, is a powerful emotion that can “ instantly raise your vibrational frequency and align you with the energy of .” Maybe if the bulk of humanity began giving off high-frequency vibes, we’d be seeing angelic beings.
In our writings, we theorized that everything, even emotions and consciousness, has its frequency. Beliefs, whether positive or negative, are emotions. This would ideally explain those areas that we call haunted zones where strange phenomena occur time and time again. Most of these zones, as we’ve noted, have legends about a murder or a deadly encounter taking place at a certain spot, and over time people think they see an apparition or hear strange noises there.
If there is a cosmic mind and a personal consciousness, why does there have to be a collective psyche? Maybe it acts as a buffer between the One and individual awareness and without it, we could easily access the infinite. That could be good and bad. We would live in a state of Nirvanic bliss, but at the same time, the world would be akin to a Zen monastery. There would be no strife, no progress, no joy, nothing, just blankness. We would essentially be perpetually stoned and not caring about anything. New Age advocates say that for the cosmic consciousness to be aware of itself it must experience suffering and happiness vicariously through the human species Maybe that’s the reason we are here, to feed the cosmic mind. Perhaps too, we are the only planet in the universe with intelligent life.
According to Goddard, the personal unconscious, which cannot reason, receives ideas and gives form and expression to them. The collective psyche, which also cannot think, more or less does this same except the ideas and forms are already inside it. We don’t have to feed it anything new. They are not the archetypes Jung envisioned. There might be symbols rolling around in the collective conscious that correlate with the Jungian concept of archetypes but they are likely nothing more than templates that had been implanted in our brains through the course of human development, blueprints helping us to better comprehend reality. In other words, they are instincts. Just like the traditional notion of archetypes, these ideas and forms of the collective consciousness are primordial. They were planted there probably back when humans were hunter/gatherers. In our earlier writings, we discussed in detail how any of the paranormal events we are now witnessing, including UFOs and cryptids, have roots in folklore even though they are presented to us in a modern facade that we can relate to. That’s one of the two inputs we give to the collective psyche (sometimes we call it the Trickster), our frame of reference. The other is our emotions, emotions of excitement, fear, or sadness, stark emotions that raise the vibrational frequency around us providing the Trickster with the energy to manifest these constructs. We define these constructs as simulated realities, realities imposed upon our reality and with temporary physicality, able to even impact the environment around them. The collective psyche is also likely the fount of urban myths. It may also be where we get a lot of our jokes, puns, and riddles. Some people, such as comedians, sit down and invent jokes. But what is odd is that most jokes come about without anyone inventing them.
John Keel was convinced that UFOs, monsters, ghosts, and hobgoblins, ultraterrestrials as he called them, fed on artificial power sources. Paranormal investigator Brent Raynes recounted that in March of 1983, he visited Tom Bearden, a retired Army Lieutenant. Colonel, at his home in Huntsville, Alabama. Bearden “was deep into strange inventions, quantum mechanics, scalar waves and whatnot.” Raynes recalls: “During the visit, he told us about how he was visiting a fellow weird science friend and inventor in Nashville who had been running two electrical generators for eight hours that created some sort of powerful field that for some reason knocked out the clocks in his house (including a grandfather pendulum clock), after which it took four days for the effects to wear off. That night on the way home Tom noted a large dark car behind him, with several peculiar dwarfish people that appeared who were peeping over the dash, from the nose up. After several miles, the car began to pass them, and with this man, his wife, and a friend all watching it vanished! At this point, the wife recalled how two weeks earlier she had a vivid dream about midget MIBs (she thought MIBs were nonsense) and in the dream, she told them to scram. When visiting the Nashville inventor, they talked about UFOs and MIBs, and so Tom told us he believed that their thoughts and the energies from the generators created a tulpa! Meanwhile, they learned later that while they were having the experience, a daughter in Huntsville was having an irrational seeming ‘fear’ about something ‘evil’ being in their driveway!” The MIB and dwarfish creatures are folkloric themes. The men in black seem to have a dual purpose, which we’ve discovered in our research, as not only suppressors of UFO evidence but presagers of doom.
On September 24, 2024, John Taylor (a pseudonym) went to the local dog park somewhere in England (the city is kept confidential) that evening so his pet could run free. The park was empty but after a few minutes, he noticed someone approaching. The stranger was a tall man wearing a long trenchcoat and something that looked like a hood over his head. The man sat down beside Taylor on the bench and nodded, but when Taylor tried to engage him in small talk, he wouldn’t answer. Suddenly, Taylor felt an overwhelming sense of dread. He also realized that he couldn’t move or speak. But the feeling of dread was soon replaced by a feeling of tranquility, what he described as “Zen” (some witnesses to UFOs and even cryptids describe a sense of peace or even oneness, He also heard a voice in his head telling him he was “okay.” He knew that it was coming from the stranger. Another voice said: “You will know what do to with the information I am giving you.” Taylor asked the stranger in his mind, since he couldn’t speak, what was coming. The stranger answered that it is of no consequence, but that it will be tomorrow. With that, the stranger got up and walked away where he joined two other men Taylor had not seen before. After they left, he noticed that wasn’t paralyzed anymore and he found his dog crouching behind the bench.
Since his encounter, Taylor claims that sometimes the feeling of dread returns, and his brain is flooded with strange images accompanied by the words “tungsten,” “ceramic,” and “failure.” He also senses that something important will happen in 2027 but he isn’t sure what. Taylor is convinced that the man gave him an ominous warning, but isn’t sure if it will affect him or the world. Taylor contacted Dr. Robert Young, the director of MUFON UK, who passed the story on to Albert S. Rosales, an expert on UFO humanoid cases. But neither are sure what the message implies. We do know that tungsten ceramic is a clear coat used on vehicles to protect the paint, a chemical compound that’s not particularly important. We guess that the stranger’s warning is so much nonsense, a pseudo-prophecy if you will.
On the evening of May 7, 1909, Edgerton Free watched a cylindrical object with two bright lights sail over his house near Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. It was about 60 feet above him and moving fast. The next morning, Free’s wife discovered a round ” Indian rubber bag in the field. The object had a long steel bar running through it and was stamped with the words Muller Fabrik Bremen imprinted on it. This is German for Muller Factory Bremen. We searched to learn if a Muller factory existed in Bremen that year but couldn’t find one. There were Muller factories in Brake at the time which handled seaport logistics for bulk and packaged goods. Within a week, police and the Coast Guard arrived to inspect the strange object which Free surmised had been dropped from the airship. They couldn’t ascertain what it was and Free locked it in his safe. The military eventually showed up, pronounced that the curio was a sea buoy used by the Royal Navy for target practice, and took it away. Two newspapers, the East Anglican Times and the Northern Daily Mail printed stories about the incident on May 18. But two days before the story became public, two men came to Free’s property that Sunday morning and spent several areas examining the spot where the round object had been found. Free told the Anglican Times: “The men hovered about my house persistently for five hours, that is until 7 o’clock in the evening.”
Free’s housemaid stepped outside on her way to church and the two men approached her and stood on either side. They spoke to her in a foreign language German perhaps? The maid became so frightened that she dashed back into the house and didn’t venture outside until the following day. A lot of MIB witnesses report being afraid of their visitors. Maybe it’s those low-level vibes they emit.
But why do they assume these two roles? In witchcraft lore, the enigmatic Man in Black, named for the black or dark clothes he wears, who is the Devil, presides over the witches' Sabbath. He initiates the witch converts into the ways of dark magic so they can practice it themselves. In modern times, traveling alone or in pairs or threes, this manifestation is the protector of arcane knowledge, UFO evidence in this instance, intimidating people so they won’t talk about their encounters or continue their research since they haven’t been initiated into the realm of the unseen. He also foretells the future since this was one of the powers he gave to the witches. Or so this is how the collective psyche presents them in their new guise. But not all paranormal events are mythological. The phantom snipers appeared in the early 1930s while the phantom slashers first manifested during the early 1800s usually in big cities. They were likely spawned from our angst about urban crime. The animal mutilators seem to have been first chronicled during the witch mania of the 1500s and had a rebirth during the 1970s. Sheep slayers have been around about that long and are now associated with mysterious black felines. All of these unexplained depredations could be a reflection of our fear of predators destroying our livestock (which is why wolves were eradicated).
Bigfoot, Sasquatch, or feral humans, which are all the same, might also not have ties to folklore. It’s plausible that they are akin to Jung’s shadow archetype which represents the dark side of a person’s personality and psyche. The shadow archetype is also often associated with wildness, chaos, mystery, and the unknown. As Jung wrote: "The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself.” In our dreams and imagination, the shadow archetype may also take on a human or animal form and has been associated with a creature such as a snake, a dragon, a monster, or a demon. If this is the case, then this is the only named archetype that the Trickster manifests. But that could be a premature assumption. Let’s quickly examine the legends of the wild men. Possibly the most ancient is the Slavic creature known as the Leshy which is described as a short hominid forest dweller with a large bushy beard and tail. The Leshy is believed to have originated from Neolithic cultures. Tales of similar wild men can be found throughout Eastern European and Russian mythology. One of the two main characters in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, is Enkidu, a savage raised by animals, the embodiment of the natural world and the opposite of the cultured and eloquent hero Gilgamesh. Near Eastern myths also talk about the lahmu or “the hairy one.” The Greeks and Romans had their sexually voracious fauns and centaurs (the Goatman). Stories about wild men are an integral part of European culture and sources from the 9th and 10th centuries. He is usually portrayed as gigantic, strong, hairy, cannibalistic (mostly eating children), and a hunter inhabiting remote parts of the forest.
Maybe Bigfoot and other half-animal half-human beasties people swear they see running through the forests in various parts of the world don’t represent a side of us we want to repress, our Mr. Hyde personality, but rather a part of us we need to become whole (Bigfoot, by the way, didn’t begin as an apish critter but as a ferocious-looking human with long hair and tattered clothes who was reported up until the 1940s, probably the last incident occurring in Nowata County Oklahoma in September of 1975). The more we draw away from our primal nature, the more the wild man intrudes into our existence. This balance is one of the themes in Gilgamesh. It’s also illustrated in a Star Trek episode from 1966 entitled “The Enemy Within” where a transporter malfunction causes Captain Kirk to split into two people, one good and the other evil. At the end of the episode, the good Kirk persuades his evil double that they need each other to survive, and will live on as parts of each other. It’s well-established that Bigfoot and other cryptids have become ubiquitous in recent years. Back in the late sixties, we only heard about Bigfoot sightings in Washington state and of course the Himalayas. Now, they’re all across North America as well as Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia.
The same goes with the increase in recent years of the so-called 411 cases where people mysteriously vanish in national and state parks, their remains often found miles from where they were last seen and in almost inaccessible areas (we detailed many instances in a chapter of our book The Circus of Illusions). A lot of these victims were also suffering from emotional or mental disorders, something David Paulides won’t tell you. Others are children, some with autism, or senior citizens. Perhaps being in an ambiguous mental state can make you a target. Are they being kidnapped by UFOs or Bigfoot as Paulides suggests? No, these disappearances are in our belief a paraphysical recreation of our primal fears of being lost in the wildlands.
So, why this abrupt explosion of weird events in the forest? As we wrote in The Halloween Planet: “The more we grow technical, the more we slide into a virtual reality prison because of computer games, smartphones, laptops, and the emerging AI, we completely lose connection with the real world and our natural selves. We are not people anymore, we are automatons of a stiffening technical society that is robbing us of our souls, of what makes us unique.” Our Dionysian side, our Enkidu, our Mr. Hyde, our evil Captain Kirk, is being subdued and we need it back to become fully integrated humans.
Now if our consciousness is attached not only to the collective psyche but ultimately the cosmic mind, what happens to us when we die? Since consciousness is energy and energy can’t be destroyed, it either returns to its source or maybe lingers for a bit before being absorbed (unless there is reincarnation), revisiting places it once knew. Maybe some ghosts (though not all) are spirits of the newly departed. One morning in June of 2024, we were shopping at a neighborhood Walmart when one of the supervisors walked by. This person, an older lady, had always been quick to speak, but this time she didn’t say anything, just kept smiling and looking straight ahead. When we went back to the store on Sunday, we learned, much to our consternation, that she had been dead for two weeks.
