What the Confirmation of BIgfoot Means
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Something very profound has happened. The existence of Sasquatch has been confirmed by a DNA study that appears to have been carried out at a high level of scientific competence. It isn't simply a matter of us having discovered a new species on the Earth. What has been discovered is an intelligent species that is living in a way that is precisely the opposite of the way we live. The potential for a whole new kind of relationship therefore exists, and for both species the chance of embarking on a new journey that is far richer than the ones we have thus far pursued.
We are as different as we can be. In fact, polar opposites. Sasquatch is here to be; Man is here to do. These are two opposite poles of consciousness, and if we can find balance, we can, each of us, find ourselves in a completely new way. This possibility has never existed before, not in all the long years that the two species have spent living on Earth together.
I've had a lifelong interest in the Yeti and Sasquatch. When I was a boy, an acquaintance of my parents, Tom Slick, led the first scientific expedition in search of the Himalayan Yeti. In 2001 his niece, my close friend
Catherine Nixon Cooke, retraced his steps. Because of my interest, I have done many interviews on Dreamland with Bigfoot researchers, and I have never doubted that something was out there. For example, Dreamland this week will cover Bigfoot Sounds and will mark my 7th show on the subject since 2007. (All of these shows are available in the Dreamland Archive. Search on Bigfoot and Sasquatch.)
According to the results of a
5 year DNA study that has been done by a team led by Dr. Melba S. Ketchum of DNA Diagnostics, Bigfoot indeed exists. This study used hair samples that had been gathered over the years by Sasquatch researchers, and has concluded that "while it has human DNA within its genome, there are also distinctly non-human, non-archaic hominin, and non-ape sequences."
This isn't just the DNA of a new species, it is extremely unusual DNA as it is a combination of our DNA with that of an unknown human species. According to DNA Diagnostics' press release, the new species emerged out of sexual contact between males of the unknown species and human females around 15,000 years ago.
It is worth remembering that Planet Earth was in a state of extraordinary chaos during that period, as the last ice age ended with violence that led to the extinction of many species and challenged the existence of the human species as never before or since in its history.
But I want to go beyond discussion of what might have been then and what Sasquatch might be like now, and explore why it is that this species has kept itself so expertly hidden from Homo Sapiens that it was, even among the people of Tibet and the Native American tribes, both highly skilled in the ways of the wilderness, more of a legend than a reality.
From earliest times and throughout our history, Sasquatch has made an extraordinary effort to stay hidden. Not a single skeleton has been found. Very little has been discovered of shelters or habitations or nests. There is only an equivocal photographic record. Few people have ever come face-to-face with Sasquatch, not in modern times and not at any time.
Obviously, Sasquatch is quite intelligent and quite skilled, and seeks--or sought--this concealment. I say 'sought,' because when you hear the sounds on Dreamland this week and learn of the circumstances under which they were recorded, you will conclude, as I did, that they were being made by something that wanted to be heard. Many of the recordings are thirty and more years old, so, if Sasquatch has been making an approach to us, it has been unfolding very slowly.
Perhaps they are intelligent enough to have realized that, with all of our searching and collection of samples, we were inevitably going to discover them, and have been taking steps that they hope will enable them to control their side of the experience, so that we will not, either out of willfulness or an excess of kindness, destroy them.
If they are so intelligent, it is worth asking why they have remained hidden. Of course they must be afraid of us, and the more intelligent they are, the more profound that fear must be. They would be foolish not to fear that some of us will go rushing off into the deep forests seeking the ultimate hunter's trophy.
They are not like us and were not meant to be like us. We are naked and must make our own shelter or die. Nature has clothed them in hair and given them, in their powerful senses, all that they need to thrive. We must make our technology. They are born with theirs.
In fact, they have remained even more primitive than we were fifteen thousand years ago. They are a pre-stone age species, still, in effect, living entirely off the physical assets that nature granted them. We have not been like that for a very long time. Fifteen thousand years ago, we were already working stone and using animal skins to cover ourselves. Gobekli Tepi dates from a time when Sasquatch was a new species, so we were already builders then. Thirty thousand years ago, we were creating art at a high skill level in the caves of France and Spain. Fifty thousand years ago, we were using fire and stone tools, and creating edges in flint.
The study results also show that males of an unknown human species mated with females of our species, which is how the new species was born. Implicit in this finding is the fact that the females of our species must have raised their offspring with the males of the other species. It seems likely, given the chaos of that era, that they were thrown together by necessity, and that, for whatever reason, their offspring were born to take a profoundly different path from that undertaken by genus homo, the species of their mothers. The mothers would not have been hair-covered. The babies were. They would have been clothed or they would have died. The babies did not need clothing. They would have required shelter and fire. The babies would have been like their fathers--they would have required nothing.
Sasquatch is. Man does. This does not mean that they are better or we are better. It only means that we are different. The aim of Sasquatch is to be together. The aim of Mankind is to do together, and thus to understand one another.
When Christ said, "regard the lilies of the field, neither do they reap, nor do they sow," he was speaking of an intentional surrender that is among the most difficult challenges that any searcher can face. Meister Eckhart amplified the meaning of his words when he said that surrender was to become "as a clear glass through which God can shine."
Sasquatch is still living in the state that we were in prior to the beginning of the long struggle to survive that our naked bodies imposed upon us.
In my book the Path, I discuss a way of consciousness that is revealed in the 22 cards of the Major Arcana of the Tarot of Marseilles. The cards are laid out in the shape of a Templar Cross, with the path of life spreading out in four directions from the center of the cross. Two directions, downward and leftward, lead to death, judgment, and being trapped on the wheel of life. The two other directions lead to love, compassion and freedom.
Looked at through the eyes of history, the entire enterprise of Homo Sapiens, from the moment we made our first flint to this moment, is a journey along the left-hand path, that leads down to death and destruction. It isn't our fault. If we'd had hair, nobody on Earth would be taking this path.
At the same time, therefore, there would be no great art, no soaring music, and none of the moments of love and discovery that fill our world every single hour of every single day--or the brutality, the injustice and the evil. Also, there would be no search, for unless you have lost the way, you have no reason to search for it.
While society is trapped on the left-hand path, the individual can choose differently, and take the right-hand path which leads upward and outward, and even, in the case of great mastery of life, enact the search suggested by the cards, in which the searcher finds balance between the two paths, and in that balance, transcendence. But, as a species, ours is a journey from war to war and calamity to calamity, that has left across the face of the planet vast ruins, Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and so many more. And at present, yet another civilization is coming to its climax--our own.
Through all of this time, Sasquatch has abided as part of nature, living inside the balance of the world. Above all things, this is what we have to learn from him--not that we should do it, but that it can be done and is being done.
There is a deeper lesson though, which is that there is no blame to be attached to either state. We are as nature made us, each species built as it was built, to express itself in life as it must.
Almost anything we do to Sasquatch now will carry him out of his long journey in balance with nature and into some version of the struggle in which we are ourselves trapped. Our merest touch is likely to unbalance him, causing him to repeat in his own unique way the same fall into knowledge that we have experienced, that is so eloquently recorded in the first chapter of Genesis.
Sasquatch does not know, not yet. Sasquatch abides. And now his fate rests in our hands. How will we treat him? Will we seek to preserve the presence of intelligence in innocence, or will we sweep him along with us into the storms of the left-hand path?
He waits. If we let him, he will wait forever and abide forever. Perhaps seeing him in that state, and letting him be, is for us the beginning of a new journey of relationship that will, in the end, enable the being of Sasquatch and the knowledge of Man, to join together in a new way, that will bring a vibrant new vision to both species.
