The Archive of Stanley Messenger

Crop Circles as a Path from Space into Time

a two-part exposition of Stanley’s vision of crop circles

Paranormal events and phenomena, however much excitement and expectancy they may evoke, are always at the same time a source of unease. They are evidence that at some time a consensus view of the world we are in has drifted away from an essential element of its reality. Suddenly a corrective factor breaks through and reminds us that only up to a certain point will the real world permit us to perceive it awry.

The Old Testament is full of such corrections. From Moses on the mountain and Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego in the burning fiery furnace to the ascent of Elijah in a chariot of fire Jehovah never hesitated to cut through the perceptual world, and make nonsense of people’s normal view of it, if by doing so he could confront them with the stark frontier that separates reality from illusion.

What Judaism calls YHVH and the rest of us call the nature of reality is to some extent in terminal crisis at this time. The language and mind-set of scientific materialism is perhaps the hardest nut reality itself has ever had to crack. Just because of this the sledge-hammer blows of irrationality not only correct, they challenge the coherence of more and more people’s total reality sense. People can actually go crazy if they are unable to discount the inexplicable, assimilate it into a world of experience they can live with.

The first scientist to pay serious attention to the crop-circle phenomenon, Dr Terence Meaden, was obliged to concede that meteorological science could only account for a diminishing proportion of instances of the phenomenon, even when the theory of plasma vortices, refined to account for increasingly subtle forms, was brought to bear on them. Dr Meaden had no alternative but to relegate all other instances to the realm of man-made hoaxes. For the straight scientist no mental space exists between the frontiers of rationalism and artificial contrivance.

For several years the ‘croppie’ world as we called it was bogged down in fruitless polemics between the hoax-theorists and the others. The rest of the devotees seemed to divide themselves between an almost religious attention to what they thought of as ‘the Circlemakers’ on the one hand, and an extraordinarily wide and sometimes scholarly exploration of the academic world of symbolism on the other. Every possible language of signs and symbols was raked over for clues as to why particular artistic and geometrical forms occurred in the fields Often particular formal themes occurred again and again Some forms became associated with particular areas Some of these recurred only for a few years and were then replaced by others. Recurrent forms reinforced the intuitive conviction of many that some kind of language of communication was being deployed. The ‘circlemaker’ folk were often associated with the study of other paranormal events, in particular with the question of whether extra-terrestrial beings were now manifesting themselves in sense-perceptible form. They asked whether these ‘agriglyphic’ forms were attempts on the part of such beings to devise a universal language of communication to which we would ultimately be able to respond. (Our invention of the word ‘agriglyph’ seemed to reinforce the conviction that we were now engaged in a serious and important study!)

On the other hand it was clear that some of the symbolists were convinced that everything would finally be accounted for in the language of the human unconscious. For some years one enthusiast who was expert in a particular language of the ancient world regaled us in successive conferences with an ever more detailed analysis of correspondences of this kind.

Profound semantic and epistemological problems are clearly raised by all such questions, questions which range far beyond the terms of reference of the crop-circle phenomenon. itself. As we indicated above, a paranormal phenomenon challenges any consensus view of reality to its very roots. The strongest human feelings are aroused when people’s mind-sets are attacked in this way. We can summarise these consensus views in a simple way for there are several varieties of consensus current in our time, and it is the paranormal event itself which, by throwing a lateral light on these mind-sets, enables us to glimpse them from outside themselves.

(1) The cast-iron materialist-rationalist consensus

I have a clich� acronym for this position, APICHTID, in other words:- "A priori it can’t happen, therefore it doesn’t". There has to be some other explanation. Since the agriglyphic forms are to some extent comprehensible to the human mind, that mind is probably not very far away from their creation either. Okay, the simple hoax theory with boards, garden rollers and string has outworn itself for more than the most na�ve critics. But do base-line mechanics really mark the limits to human ingenuity? Here we enter the outlying frontiers of materialism. The following suggestions have till recently been the province of extreme conspiracy theory and still are for many people. But we need to consider them because the evidence for their truth has been steadily mounting, and it would be a mistake to ignore it. There is more than a suspicion that the so-called HAARP project in Alaska, for example, has already developed technologies for projecting mind-forms onto human-beings from a distance. If into human minds with their biological basis, why not into plant forms? At the other end of the scale we are dealing with activities of unparalleled evil. The work of Preston Nicholls and Peter Moon on the so-called Montauk projects on Long Island, N.Y., indicates that scientists, working in association also with ‘black’ magical energies, have perfected technologies for concentrating the energies of human fear. Specifically by using children in an advanced form of paedophilia they have turned fear into a force which can affect physical reality directly. Using these techniques, so Nicholls and Moon maintain, they have used dark forces to break through the limitations of linear time so as to affect present events from the future.

In anthroposophical terms, if these facts are correct we are speaking here of something which extends far beyond the limits of an advanced Ahrimanic creation. We have indeed reached the time forecast by Rudolf Steiner of a far darker, far more perilous position. This describes a world where the forces of fallen Asuras are being directly employed by people who must to some extent know exactly what they are doing.

Perhaps the most sinister aspect of the APICHTID position is that it is founded on what most people would regard as a simple, if na�ve, view of the world which has an almost childlike innocence about it. What we usually don’t realise is that the materialist view of the world is essentially extremely unsophisticated and innocent. But a simple, call-a-spade-a-spade, nuts-and-bolts view of reality proves to be terrifyingly vulnerable to the most horrific manipulation by human beings who are set on destroying spirit by fear. This is a brand of innocence which humanity simply can’t afford to embrace any longer.

It would be valuable at this point to look at Innocence through the eyes of William Blake, and compare what he says with the later development of this theme by Rudolf Steiner. Two hundred years ago Blake wrote his Songs of Innocence, Experience and Imagination. He made clear that Innocence is only truly viewed in terms of what it can become. Imagination is simply what Innocence can become after Experience. So there is in the last resort no such thing as lost Innocence, even though Blake knew that. there would come a time when, in his own words, "children would be born trembling". Even Innocence deliberately destroyed as Spirit with the aid of fallen Asuras reforms as Imagination in a realm beyond anything we can describe to ourselves as Spirit. If Asuras can destroy Spirit by fear then divine creation can by the sacrifice of substance heal and transcend this destroyed Spirit by Love. In terms of Steiner’s ‘Occult Science’, this amounts to the renewal of the sacrifice of the Thrones.

We need to complete this survey of the materialist position on the paranormal by comparing Blake’s revelation with that of Steiner. Blake’s categories of Innocence, Experience and Imagination are transcended by Steiner’s categories of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. In fact they form a series, one describing a descent into matter and the other its re-ascent into Spirit. Innocence is natural Will descending by way of the natural feeling of Experience in the Heart to the natural Mind of Imagination. With Imagination we cross the threshold from the natural to the supernatural. Now Imagination is supernatural Mind, fallen Innocence matured in thinking, and capable of rising into the supernatural feeling realm of Inspiration. Only so can it reach the level of that supernatural Will which Steiner calls Intuition, This is the path we must follow if we are to participate in the transformation of the almost unimaginable evils which are approaching in our time.

(2)The Psychological-Symbological Consensus.

Just as Freud declared to Jung that we had to base the whole psychological circus on sex because it was the only way to keep those damned occultists off our backs (my transliteration!), so Jung himself balked at the last ditch when it became clear to him that only a full spiritually scientific view of the world would suffice to account for the mysteries of human psychology. For both men in the last resort sheer credibility in a materialist world was the deciding issue, though Jung knew in a way Freud did not how much of truth was sacrificed in the process.

Here we come right back into the crop-circle problem at a second level. Essentially APICHTID says they are either a natural phenomenon with a naturalistic scientific explanation, or there is some dirty business going on, either a clever student rag, a cosmic hoax, or something more sinister with a conspiratorial cachet to it, part of a wider scheme to bedazzle and ultimately control the human mind on a grand scale. Once you step beyond the rationalist clich� (and you can do this without denying that it may hold part of the truth, though ultimately not an essential part), but once you step out there you are in a very difficult position if you also deny the existence of a further accessible reality beyond the physical.

In simple terms, if paranormal events and phenomena don’t exist sui generis as manifestations of a transcendent level of reality, (because there is no such thing), then either they are created by paranormal entities, whether ‘space-beings’ or circlemakers of some other kind yet to be explained, or we are obliged to consider whether they ‘stand for something’ other than themselves. What does ‘stand for something’ actually mean? What is a symbol? Why does symbolism play such a large part in the realm of psychology? This is not only a minefield of semantics, it is a quaking bog over which psychology perilously picks its way as it attempts to create firm ground in a realm for which a language certainly exists, but it is a language to which no world of reality apparently corresponds.

Angry psychologists may respond that this all tautological stuff. The world of language, they say, the world of symbology, is the real world which psychology describes, It has at least as much claim to reality as any other world one may construct out of sense-experience and the concepts one attaches thereto. The very question ‘What does a perceived phenomenon stand for?’ is itself tautological. It begs the question raised above. Symbolical reality is the only reality you are likely to get. "You haven’t read your Immanuel Kant", they pronounce. (No, and they haven’t read their ‘Philosophy of Freedom’, where Steiner deals with all this stuff, have they?). But they pursue their Kantian argument. The world of so-called ‘things in themselves’, Kant’s ‘ding an sich’, is forever inaccessible to the human mind. We read reality only in the form of language. The language of psychology is symbolism. Behind this stands Jung’s concept of the unconscious. If what we defer to as the unconscious were awake we might have paranormal perceptions instead of symbolical language. But it isn’t. Some people claim that this would be possible, but it is certainly not ours to command in a normal world, the one in which we as psychologists have to live and work.

So what are crop-circles, my dear psychological friends? Silence, and some throat-clearing, humming and hawing. But it is not the kind of question to floor them for long. Then someone tries "Well, of course, your use of the word paranormal is somewhat open to question. Human consciousness is a seamless whole, not separate from the world it supposes itself to perceive and conceptualise. Crop-circles show that there is evidently something lacking in the world humanity has created for itself in recent times. The unconscious is doing no more than its normal work by filling the gap. Nothing unusual in that By a somewhat more devious route we are doing nothing more unusual than we did by creating technology. We never know what the unconscious will dream up next, or what its hidden powers will prove to be."

"Then are crop circles illusions?". "No more than any other scenarios we externalise in consciousness". "But how does the unconscious do it?. "Well for that matter, how does it come up with anything? What is reality, anyway? We don’t have access to these things."

These are not unreasonable arguments for people who for whatever reasons refuse to take on board the idea that there other levels of reality than those accessible to sense-bound intelligence, but for whose perception we are able with understanding and effort to develop the necessary faculties. Psychology does not always deny that other levels of reality are possible, only that they are not normally accessible to consciousness. Meanwhile we have to exist in a world which at least passes for real even if we appear to construct most of it ourselves. Their picture of the unconscious seems to be like a sort of super computer trash-bin from which items we have mislaid over millennia can be picked out and manifested in symbolic form to account for anything our conscious selves cannot assimilate. But, reasonable or not, there always seems to be a kind of sophistry in the contortions of logic they resort to in order to avoid the simple extension of our universe into other accessible dimensions, something even a little specious.

Before we attempt to look at these things from the point of view of a spiritual science, there is a third consensus view which in some ways is more attractive and more difficult to transcend than the other two, though it has elements in common with them both. It is tempting to call this a religious consensus, but that is hardly fair to those whose conviction is that all wonders come from God. Indeed they do, but we are trying to identify by what route they do this. What we need to name is the mind-set which attributes everything, but especially paranormal things, to beings other than human who act from dimensions of reality which are unknown to us, though they may not remain so. In other words we are talking not about the universal divine but about non-human beings, whether gods, angels, little green men, devils even, whatever one’s personal imagination has so far taken on board. These are the inhabitants of a non-human world we picture more with the heart’s imagination than with analytic intelligence. But they spring from a real human need whose speculations go deep into the world of fairy-tale legend and myth. So we may call it:-

(3) The Mythological Consensus

The greatest problem human beings have in attempting to live sane lives in a world as perverse as the present one is to overcome our appalling obsession with THINGS, objects, what we tend to experience as almost the sole yardstick for reality beyond fantasy and dream. Younger and younger children have the most urgent hunger to know whether Father Christmas is real, not just daddy dressed up. Does the world of the imagination manifest physically in our real world, or does it not? Are there actual fairies at the bottom of the garden, or did I ‘imagine’ them? (Yes, you did, but the imagination is a creative force in you, not just a ‘receipt for deceit’). Materialism arises because paradoxically we don’t really see matter. What we see is THINGS, matter dressed up in forms derived principally from our power to fantasise. Matter itself isn’t THINGS, it is events, processes. When you look at a table you are looking at something happening not at a ‘ding an sich’

Paradoxically, when you see fairies, elementals like the one I once saw in a crop-circle, you are more likely to be seeing a true form, undistorted by fantasy, because there is no matter there to confuse you. A gnome is not an event, it is a frame of reference, like the ether-body of a plant, in association with which something can happen, a crop-circle, say. The gnome is not itself an event or it could not resonate with matter, substance, so that events like crop-circles occur. So gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders come nearest to what the ’croppie’ looks for as an immediate frame of reference for what mystifies him, and so he calls it a ‘circlemaker’. But, dear ’croppies’, they have not actually made anything! Because as Palden Jenkins so brilliantly described in our last summer conference in Glastonbury, there is not actually anything there! Only corn. Only wheat. Only barley. Just corn! How corny! Just corn, moved about in a mysterious way by an extremely powerful force. It is so powerful that if you arrive, preferably in the early morning, after a night in which one of these events has occurred, and you come upon it unexpectedly, and especially if you are the first human-being to see it, it can feel as if you have been kicked in the solar-plexus by a horse! You can feel sick! You can fall over! And there you stand, when you have recovered, and are quietly overcome by the most amazing grace and dignity and sheer power,--everyone creates their own poetry for the event -- and for a time you simply don’t believe it, because all it is is just modified wheat or barley, there’s nothing else there. But you could say the same of a great painting or a beautiful woman. ‘The eye of the beholder’. The power is in the event.

But there is a difference, which is what makes it a paranormal event: because in a great work of art or nature substance is moved into form. In crop-circles substance is moved out of the way of form to give space for it. The nearest parallel in art is sculpture. But even in sculpture wood stone or clay remains behind as a commentary on the inspired form when everything excessive has been cut away. In crop-circles literally nothing remains. Empty air, and stillness with the force of an earthquake, shimmers in morning sunlight, while the indifferent wheat around it waves in the breeze. The little being I talked with that morning, whose duty was simply to see that the corn itself was all right, and to boost its energies with a few extra ‘grapeshot.’ circles if it felt the corn was less robust than it needed to be if a major event was expected, played a rather minor role in the whole thing , and had a touching air of humility. It clearly knew that it was in the presence of a major event in nature, which I myself was not yet near to understanding.

Also, as I have said many times in talks, people are often so overwhelmed by the phenomenon that a greater wonder passes them by, the corn itself. We are too used to it. And we may well be, since in ancient times, when we as hunter gatherers -- moved over into our agricultural period, it was we ourselves, backed up by the very same elementals, now playing a more conscious but still humble role in other equally miraculous changes in the forms of the plant world -- it was we who brought into being this miraculous modification of simple grasses which could feed us for many millennia of what was then our future. One of the awesome features of this crop-circle period of our history is the growing suspicion that there is a darker side to the choice of those who took wheat and barley, viciously sprayed with noxious chemicals, and oil-seed rape, increasingly now genetically modified, as their arena of operations when it came to the necessity of speaking to mankind in a new language, much of it a language of solemn warning. For corn as we now know it is dying out. It is much nearer to the limits of what was possible many thousands of years ago, when we pushed the plants in the direction they then took for our benefit, than perhaps we can believe possible. Genetic engineering is a Luciferic throwback to what the gods of those times enabled us to do in a timely way.

In these comments we have almost reached the limits of the mythological consensus. When humanity doesn’t know what’s going on it creates new gods. Till the UFOs came we perhaps thought we were running out of new gods to create. Some psychologists might claim that UFOs were spawned out of the mythology of science-fiction, the unconscious up to its old tricks of ‘reifying’ what it can’t assimilate into its own nature. But there is a limit to how much we can stuff into that rag-bag of unassimilated trash. UFOs are more than the reifying flatulence of an unconscious which refuses to wake. There is actually something out there. It is something which is making hay of our ordinary perception of space and time.

END OF PART ONE

In the next article Stanley Messenger will carry this whole theme forward into synchronisation with what is due to happen to space and time, and how this accounts for the part we are playing, not only in the experience but in the creation of paranormal phenomena, including crop-circles.

The Archive of Stanley Messenger

Crop Circles as a Path from Space into Time

a two-part exposition of Stanley’s vision of crop circles

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