History
History of WingMakers.com
by Mark Hempel, Web Manager
The First Letter
WingMakers.com was launched November 1998. Its components came to me in an overnight package. I had not solicited it, in fact, when I opened it up, I had no idea what was inside. I found an envelope with a typewritten letter and a small case of CDs. The letter was very specific:
“We would like to hire you to produce a website called WingMakers.com. We will need you to acquire the URL and design the website according to the general sitemap we have attached to this letter. We would like to launch this site as soon as you are able to produce it—preferably before November 1, 1998. The enclosed CDs are divided into four categories: Text, Music, Art, and Future. The Future disc is to be held for publication at a later date (red label). The site map will correlate to the content of the other discs, which contain blue labels.”
It was a long letter—four pages. It was signed Sarah. There was an email address that was included and a check for payment. That was my initial experience of what has become known as the WingMakers Materials.
After some degree of internal debate (I was very busy at the time), I did decide to produce the website. There were several emails between Sarah and me, which helped me understand more about the goals of the website, but because of time constraints, I didn’t take the time to study or read the materials, although I did spend an hour or two admiring the artwork. The art I could understand. It was the thing that, in a way, inspired me to take on the project.
I launched the site November 23, 1998. It was late in the evening, and I still remember seeing my email inbox begin to fill. Slowly at first, but by the end of the first week, I had hundreds of emails, and they came from every imaginable angle: Ministers, NASA employees, engineers, spiritual students, university personnel and everywhere in between. That was when I decided I better read these materials and find out what people were asking me about. Subjects like remote viewing, ascension plans, black projects, ET reverse-engineering, cosmology, etc. I knew something was up.
I spent several days, focused on reading. I still have my original notes, hand-written on the dot- matrix printouts. Some were quite humorous. To be honest, very little of the material made sense to me at that time. I was not a spiritual student or even a seeker. I was a workaholic. I was married with young children, and very, very busy. It required too much of me… at least the philosophical material and the Neruda interviews.
Over the years I acquired a degree of fluency with the materials, and yet I can still say that I don’t understand them completely. They have many layers of meaning, and as James wrote in the Collected Works of the WingMakers Vol. 1:
“Everyone must ultimately say to themselves, ‘I don’t know, but I will contemplate the possibilities.’ It is in the contemplation that we feel our way to Oneness, and likewise, it is in our lack of contemplation that we slide back to separation and ego identity.”
The Early Years
I guess the contemplation of the WingMakers Materials is more important than understanding them fully. For me, as I started to see the correspondence between James and some of the enthusiastic learners who reached out to him, I came to realize that this was more about being a practitioner than a believer or knowledge-seeker.
From 1998 to 2001, the WingMakers.com website sat on the Internet without any promotion or method to really connect with anyone. James was still a complete unknown. Not even his name was released. Then in 2001, the first product was released called First Source. It was a multimedia CD-ROM that included many of the materials I had initially been sent, plus 60 minutes of music. The First Source disc was something of a catalyst for WingMakers since it was the first time James expressed himself in terms of both the music and his identity.
I was asked in late 2000 to update the WingMakers website, mostly driven, I think, by the release of the First Source disc. I updated the look and feel of the site, added the ability to order a product: First Source, and added some updated content.
In 2003, when I was asked to launch the Lyricus.org website, I began to see the larger picture of how the WingMakers Materials were an aspect of a much bigger plan: the plan known as The Grand Portal—the scientific, irrefutable discovery of the human soul. All of these materials were part of this larger objective, which was to convey the human soul to humanity as a state of experience, not simply a belief. This was what Lyricus did. It was like a special ops team that incarnates on a planet to seed this objective within humanity once it had achieved a global communication network.
The Lyricus website explains it this way:
“WingMakers is part of the mythological expression of Lyricus that typically accompanies its first external expression within a species. It is the “calling card,” announcing its initial approach as it treads softly among the species to which it serves.”
The Ultimate Objective
The treading softly part is what is meant by introducing a concept as potent as The Grand Portal by an anonymous man who quietly builds profound websites and writes books, composes music, and paints canvases of striking symbolism.
Imagine it for a moment—a repeatable method to demonstrate the existence of the human soul that lives within each of us, that unifies us, that brings a new meaning to our lives. This is quite different from what some see as technology becoming an integral aspect of the human being (eugenics, transhumanism, bioengineering, etc.). The Grand Portal is not about the integration of technology with the human instrument in order to build smarter, stronger, disease-resistant humans who live long lives. It’s about the integration of the soul consciousness within the human instrument, and the irrefutable proof that regardless of which faith we believe in, our ethnicity, our culture, our genetics, our social standing, that every one of us has the same core, and at this core, we’re connected.
James, in his own words, writes:
“The Collected Works of the WingMakers Volumes I & II is a constellation of materials that sprawl across the websites I have created over the years, and while they may seem quite comprehensive, I assure you that they are only the forerunners of a larger plan known within these materials as The Grand Portal. The Grand Portal is the convergence of science and spirit, of human and soul, of individual and species, and how humanity will discover its soul and connection to spirit through a scientific understanding—not merely as a religious, or spiritual article of faith.
“This irrefutable scientific discovery of the human soul will dramatically impact on human culture, science, technology, and religion. Many people have wondered how the discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization could impact on our society. How it would change our worldviews, religions and even our governance. I suspect few of these people have deliberated on the similar notion of what would happen if science could prove the existence of the human soul, and more importantly, enable its discovery for the individual. What impact would this have on our global society?”
In 2005-2006, James began to release a series of new e-papers that were focused on a more down-to-earth path of living from the heart. It was about being a practitioner of what he called the Six Heart Virtues: appreciation, compassion, forgiveness, humility, understanding and valor. For me, this was when I realized that the framework of the WingMakers Materials was not simply knowledge-based, it was action-based. You see, I never saw an organization being formed. Most spiritual frameworks I was familiar with had organizations to achieve something, to take some action, to be a cause for good.
The Long Path
If there was one thing missing for me in the WingMakers Materials, it was this. James was anonymous; there was no organization, no real cause other than the distant Grand Portal discovery, which, as fate would have it, would take place well after I died. With the issuance of these new e-papers, I began to see a way to bring all of this into behaviors. It was a method of living that made a lot of sense to me, and more importantly, it worked. We are, after all, first and foremost, energetic beings. Our energy is a mixture of many things, but the heart and mind are the primary conductors of our energy, which ultimately shows up in our behaviors.
James refers to this as behavioral intelligence. More recently in a phone interview I had with him in April 2013, he spoke of the “long path.”
“Most people want to get rewarded quickly. They want to see results quickly. They want to win accolades fast, now more than ever before, because technology delivers answers quickly with a voice command to Siri or a mouse click on Google. Solutions… now! The faster the solution the more the ego is gratified. The quick solution, however, doesn’t bring a real sense of wisdom or inner competence—there’s a hollowness to it… a fabrication. To secure that sense of wisdom, you have to be willing to persist and be committed to the long path, where you’re the conductor of the symphonic emotions created by your deeper heart and higher mind.
“The long path is not for those who’re bound to the needs of the ego, because it’s the ego that craves quick mastery, quick results… and the actual benefit of those quick results to others is not the concern or objective. It’s the rewards of vanity and glamour, in their various manifestations, that truly motivate the ego.”
I think James is right. I’ve seen this with my own eyes. Our culture creators try to seduce us to want things fast and to want a lot of things (serial acquisition), and the prevailing social model is one of glamour and affluence. Behavioral intelligence is not a quick path of believe this or believe that, it is rather a path of action that requires us to conduct ourselves as expressions of the virtuous heart.
The Blending of Heart and Mind
In 2006 I did another update to the WingMakers.com website and upgraded the look and feel of user interface, added more content and began to work on the EventTemples.com website. This new website heralded a new branch in the Lyricus/WingMakers Materials. It was less to do with cosmology and the big questions of life and the afterlife, and more to do with the very personal realm of how the individual can build a love-centered life.
EventTemples is an experiential site where people can come together and share a frequency or heart perspective with the universe. James wrote: “Our hearts are the key to navigating the unknown.” I think EventTemples is part of that navigation, but on a more collective scale.
After launching EventTemples in 2007, the next website launch was SovereignIntegral.com. As James explained it, this was more of a “rough sketch” of what was to come. I think he wanted to release a placeholder in terms of content.
In early 2008, the Hakomi CDs began to get released, corresponding with the release of the e-papers on EventTemples. 2008 was also the year when James had a layover in Minneapolis and spent his layover in my home, where I managed to record an interview. This was in early April, and the interviews were later released in both audio and text-based transcripts. These interviews were really the first opportunity people had to hear James and get a sense of his personality.
The Spiritual Novels
The next website was SpiritState.com. This was a very ambitious undertaking and required me to bring on expertise I didn’t possess. James had specified a variety of feature sets that didn’t exist on the web, so we had to really think outside the box and develop new functionality. SpiritState was launched in later 2011 with The Dohrman Prophecy and The Ancient Arrow Project as its first books. The Dohrman Prophecy was James’ new spiritual novel, and marked a turning point in his content development. It was as if the spiritual novel was the new format he wanted to use to reach new audiences, and SpiritState and Planetwork Press (James’ publisher) were the platform to make these new books available.
The novel Quantusum followed a year later. Quantusum is a novel very different from The Dohrman Prophecy—possibly James’ most spiritual complex and challenging, and a very powerful read. I was getting a lot of email from readers that they hoped there would be a sequel to The Dohrman Prophecy, and the way the novel ended, it seemed ripe for a sequel, but James veered to Quantusum, and then requests to get a sequel for Quantusum began to come in. The Weather Composer came next in two volumes. It was again a bit of a shift from James’ previous novels in the sense it was a dystopian setting and involved religious connections from both Christian and Muslim roots, and it was decidedly more of an action-paced read.
Consolidation of Content
The current WingMakers.com website is James’ attempt to gather all of the content into one place. To give it a central location so people can browse all of it under one roof. I think he felt it was time for what he calls the “in-breath,” to bring the work together. Perhaps this is related to what his publisher is doing with the Collected Works of the WingMakers Volume I and II. Now, there is a print and web compilation. Take your time with this work. It’s not only a long path, it is the slow, deliberate walk of a bird watcher.
