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Alternate Perceptions Magazine, March 2021


Within The Year

by: Edward Carlos





Edward Carlos and Brent Raynes’ wife Joan during a visit to IONA: Art Sanctuary

Within the year 2021, the government defense funding bill officially signed in December 2020 will surely bring about discussions about UFOs and perhaps, too, about close encounters from the wake of curiosity about the nature of these events and their influence on human consciousness. Because of a section of the Intelligence Authorization Act and the huge amount of funding, the Pentagon as reported is to offer non-classified information via the Office of Naval Intelligence the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation who must follow a directive of the Senate Intelligence Committee to expose information on UFOs and ETs.

Additionally, in 2021, curator of contemporary art in Southern California - Tyler Stallings is currently working on a feature-length documentary film about the relationship between my own history regarding close encounters and my artworks. The encountering acts as an imprimatur of the artistic process involving my lifetime’s creative work. The film’s tentative title is CARLOS: BEING OF LIGHT that has some relevance to the title of a chapter in former Harvard professor of psychiatry John E. Mack’s Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994). Stallings, Director of the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, Orange Coast College, has acted extensively as curator of related material including exhibits - “Are We Touched? Identities from Outer Space” (1997) and “Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas” (2017). Stallings has recently co-directed the documentary film, HOMETOWN PROUD.”

As background for his film on the effect of encounters on my artwork, Stallings asked about the “lessons” that I had previously mentioned that affirm a lifetime of contacts with close encounter-beings by which I confer a spiritual sense regarding their demeanor and intent. Encounters are complex; the means of communication levied are abstract, surreal, and complicated connoting a codification-system of sorts. They grasp our languages, but telepathy seems essential; pictograms suggest contact through both symbolism and direct experience as to what constitutes memory as an active modality. Communication is operative on multiple levels of consciousness and symbolism. Every nuance conveys information on several levers of how our comprehension manifests; their basic teaching is associative. I attempt elucidating such obverse information, briefly but lean toward the theoretical in my larger writings. The encounter imagery is aligned with dream imagery therefore confirming a code with multiple meanings both simultaneously and sequentially per each singular image or set of images.

The Stallings film offers references, too, to the intelligent encounter work of Mary Kerfoot who organized in 1995 for the Chicago Educational Program, National UFO Awareness Week, a Right To Know Conference at the Museum of Science and Industry, where I spoke about encounters and exhibited large drawings relevant to the subject of encountering supernal beings. This year, too, Brent Raynes editor of the fascinating on-line Alternate Perceptions - (link: apmagazine.info) publishes a thoughtful and provocative essay by Mary Kerfoot on pink cloud plasma, a response to Dr. Gregory Little’s plasma article in the June 2020 issue of Alternate Perceptions.

My artworks are not illustrations in the usual sense because I work in the manner of encounters by employing their teaching process employing metaphors that are metaphysical and telling thereby in nature. Encounters offer narratives as if a unified phenomenon of segments, dream-like, that infer a spiritual resonance sometimes akin to various religious practices in history. Some of these metaphors given to humans are experiential as if memories enacted out again from times past. This process of shifting episodes of different previous ages is aligned to current emanations – juxtaposed or as simultaneous layers of associated meanings. Various modes of depiction animate my artworks each with a somewhat similar connotation, at least intellectually as to content or meaning. Therefore, encounter practices might be viewed as background material for the manner of spiritual nuance when further experiencing an expansive agenda after basic phenomenal awareness of “flying saucers” becomes more apparent in our development. Terms change. Insights are instigations coming forth as a manner of teaching humans for our realizing the depth and resonance involved, an aim being an expansion as to empathy. I utilize words from the Judaic as in Old Testament’s haggadah - tellings, such as merkavah (chariot) and hayyot (holy, living beings) ascribed to prophet, Ezekiel (following the similar telling of prophet Enoch much earlier). The Kaballah mystical tradition of Merkavah as presented references the Book of Radiance, The Zohar: Pritzker Edition (English translation and commentary by Daniel C. Matt, and final volumes by Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker). These twelve volumes affirm my experiences with the hayyot or encounter-beings and their merkavah, stressing symbolic processes of consciousness during various levels of incarnation, significant to reincarnation and rites of secretion.





I respond to Stalling’s questioning about the hayyot’s “teaching” process; everything I have ever written or created as art is from the influence of the hayyot manifesting my urge to search for truth through the narrative and episodic metaphors of close encounters. I hope to avoid stereotyping the experience and am generally cautious about relating anecdotes therefore, as an initial telling although frequently necessary as introduction. Basically, within this lifetime of such experiences relegating visually-based, experiential, narratives that are learning events because their process encompasses aesthetic thought and creative actions of human existence in various fields of study.


Praying Mantis being from 1990 encounter?



Eyes of hayyot with helmet


The encounter beings are fully aware of our personal histories and utilize this knowledge from mentally engaging us from within our thought process of learning indicated by their presence, we together are thereby enacting what they intend. In my aging the manifesting has shifted from direct experiential engagements incorporating overlapping memories from earlier in this life but also from previous incarnations. The images are intertwined, such as our participating in close encounters when younger to, now, a different more abstract approach directed from a distance sometimes - an intuition-based thrust with a more direct philosophical rendering.

Their “teaching” process is essentially metaphorical operative through associations. I have written that their encounter language with us is metaphoric. Metaphors are expansive. Our memories, even of past lives, are interwoven with current situations. Episodes given are abstractly related. Between encounters seemingly as if sequential are gaps, but therein, too, are a layered commingling of events. Thus, I am encouraged to consider the theoretical patterns - dynamics of these encounters’ meanings over time, and involving previous lifetimes with growing awareness to evolving through the ages as to my awareness that nothing is conclusive. The energy is continuous. The hayyot are inclusive with us and the changing metaphors involved signify continuous change and expansion of awareness. We experience change but as if unaware basically; we live through the current range of possibilities. The universes as creation are constantly modifying.

The hayyot make their presence known somehow, however, with any method, part of their axiom of inclusion. Hayyot communication with us is essentially a teaching process, the concern being the soul. Through visually based metaphors our developing language provides enhancements, images, for understanding. Our languages reflect an ongoing development as a multi-dimensional codification that demonstrates the value of every single nuance. Each symbol has multiple additional symbolic levels, each of which contains a broadening pattern of change. The patterning, therein, involves an expansive multi-leveled enabling for us to determine various resonances that are interrelated meanings. With such, patterns arrive to our awareness that are akin to expansive materialization as to understanding their potential meaning. Each item or issue ultimately becomes a form, an image evolving to the consequence of immanent understandings, one being that the haunting, mystical, visionary-based narrations have consequences.

Despite difficulty in succinctly answering questions about these beings’ complex multi-leveled process of conferring information, I address this method as introduction to encounters because herein the imagery presented stems from my own childhood, a succinct place to begin such a process. Thus I retreat with my explanation to a lifetime’s earliest moments of my attempt to express being with the hayyot and how I perceived/conceived the orientation. To illustrate, as a preschool-child I drew, seemingly endlessly, images of rabbits standing upright on hind legs with heads in profile but with frontal black staring eyes. This image, drawn with strong outlines is an attribute typical of cultural artworks in initial years of an era (an era being 2,160 years). The repetition and simplicity of my “rabbits” imagery were male/female/child demarcated by size akin to human beings: a larger father and mother to my wee self, a reference to the larger and smaller of the encounters’ attendant beings. I confer the thought of rabbits’ ears as being antenna-like, even antler-like as in keeping with an early Celtic creator god of the forest and nature, Cernunnos. The simple rabbit image remains in my consciousness so pronounced that I need no prodding for recall such as hypnosis. The symbol represents nature and indicates that this imagery is our garden, evocative of myth, an archetype at a supernal level.

Now, as to how this became so entrenched in my consciousness, first was light sky-oriented that in my youth I associated with their presence through visitation, my first hayyot memory coming from an aura borealis, and later with lightning, and their reoccurrences affirming them as holy beings who were beneficial. After their “playing” with me, I simply drew the hayyot as rabbits because of their appearance; i.e., this pictorial presence as to my interpretation was from what little I knew as a child. My family raised light-colored and white rabbits that reminded me of my friendly, benevolent, visitors. Yet, such imagery, although prominent in my youth, carry a sundry list of meaningful possibilities, associatively. So herein I demonstrate an effect. This simple infusion of a word as an image, and vice versa exemplifies hayyot teaching principles leading to levels of enactment.

So, through the intervention of close encounters in my experiences, recently during the 2020 Coronavirus provocation I began four sets of large (8’x4’) drawings with brown and black china markers on luan wood panels. The content is mostly from mythological premises implicit to the idea of sacredness: Old Testament rabbis-patriarchs; New Testament apostles; plus, from our current era Freedom Testaments (representing the ongoing search regarding diversity, as an inclusion beyond all forms of slavery); and Species Testaments (natural beings as they are, i.e., other species who were symbolized in my own encounters). These four sets of forty plus portraits were initiated by early religious orientation and ancestral inheritance as to creating series of artworks referencing some sense of mystical consciousness in each stage of my artistic maturation development.

Hence, working on these portraits this past year I realize now that all along rabbi was significant as a symbolic development for my understanding although “hidden” in full disclosure all along in my childhood rabbit drawings. The later portraits are in the characteristic model of the early drawings announcing quietly my association with hayyot. Thereby, the Judaic Old Testament tribal patriarchs in my study became symbols (that included the Merkavah mystical tradition as represented in The Zohar) that were being conferred to my subconscious. My pursuit involved angelology, shamanism, androgyny (referring to the beings and to Adam and Eve), and subsequently, physically double-beings - part human and part other such as angels (human countenances with wings), mermaids (human-fish) as in an exhibit of mine in my mid-life titled Eros and the Mer, centaurs and satyrs (part human and part horse/part goats, et al), which led to comparative artworks on the theoretical merger of gods and man – Dionysus, and Jesus). Thus is the implication of multiplicity. Duality is but a symbol for multiplicity. I infer that such historically, theologically, mythical personages (as conferred from the past two eras (at least) to our own Aquarian era) are species of celestial presences; the long history of art enacts more specific “code symbols” through the fine arts/and/creative, fictional, and nonfictional centering our creativity from very young orientation pre-school years and relevant to the cultural manifestations through the ages. The symbol inherently covers all of our fields of study.

Interpretation is our initial response to the hayyot who enable an expanding our awareness as we interpret our exposures; this is their method of alerting us to grasp better the implications of our human endeavors. Their efforts with us (as in past eras with earlier incarnations) enables our empathy as we choose to further define the process. Empathy as a psychological, sociological, dynamic is entwined with conscience through the various levels of consciousness evoked. But, as forethought to this realization, we who are “encontrants” are being “told” that intelligence at any level of maturation has a goal. That goal is a means to intensify action through loving concern and our enthrallment, from individual to community to nation - to begin immediately to preserve and serve our mother Earth as our part in the universes that are indicative of our resonance with galaxy and cosmic orientation, shared with counterclockwise orbiting chronicles of large intent.

Each governance planetary-wise, manifested by the conduits of a mutual subatomic foundation, directional gravity, our breathing (in a photon watery matrix of air), and electromagnetism manifest as an expansion of our consciousness. As a young adult, a significant encounter in my early twenties, a flaming circular craft flying along side my old Chevy was rotating counter-clockwise in motion, while landing in the field beside which I had been driving. Bewildered, somehow that night on a three-mile drive I lost two hours, at least to initial memory and to initial amnesia. I made no connections to other previous secretive and mysterious encounters. Now my insights change that thought from confusion and impulse to values and actions more discerning.

The process of symbolization, thus, is a simple format (like my drawings of rabbits) indicative of a complex resonance that abides in every existing form present to what we conceive as reality. The hayyot work through us and with us to enable our empathic understanding that in turn leads to our concern for all species regardless of their origin. They recognize human potential, capability, and adaptability.

We become alert to multiple entanglements at all levels of existing as clarified by our sciences with insights about the subatomic levels of being, and intertwining through eventually understanding that all species contribute to the existence of being. We come to realize the meaning of the means displayed by every single contribution of every separate species. We realize the necessity of respecting all creatures their right to be.

We humans have been devastating to our precious garden, Earth. At levels of human domination (avarice, greed), by acquisition of tribal power by other humans persuasive to their minions must be examined. This aggressive lust for gold-plating our personal environments by the few, comparatively, is unworthy of human status. As long as slavery exists in any form of exploitation, our earth will be in danger – an encounter lesson for us all.


Here is a photograph of what Carlos calls "The Celestial Sky" which is comprised of thirteen 8' x 4' "star panels" placed on a serpentine path, which can be illuminated at night, one containing the recognizable facial images of Adam and Eve and the other panels displaying a zodiac house surrounded by large stars, a tribute to both Eridanus beneath the Orion constellation and the ouroboros ceiling of heaven.


I have been learning about creative development since birth because of close encounters. The hayyot with every single contact are teachers and guides who offer a means to expansion (the lessons are ongoing as to insight), but I/we must work at the understanding and meaningful acceptance of each nuance that comes forth in Creation. Hayyot contacts are admonitions to preserve, serve, and treasure that which exists and to act judiciously, even beyond our immediate perceptions and changing conceptions that everything is related. Hayyot appearances in our lives are intended to be motivational. With what unfolds during this year - 2021, we must strive to comprehend the importance of each nuance encounter. We might separately tell our stories but we must speak truth. February 16, 2021
IONA: Art Sanctuary
Sewanee, TN
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Thursday, March 28, 2024