Recycle THIS!

Kirkland is having their semiannual Reuse -Recycle-Conserve Event this weekend, and the flyer has new rules, which include the (federally mandated) need for every single battery to be individually wrapped in plastic or have both terminals covered in tape, and I kinda hit the roof with that one. I have a big coffee can full of AAA batteries that was dutifully waiting for the Recycling Event, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my time wrapping batteries as an unpaid Waste Management employee. It's almost as if they don't really WANT me to recycle.

It reminds me of the attempt of four star hotels to decrease their washing expenses by guilting their patrons into leaving their dirty sheets on the bed for an extra day or two - in order to save the planet. I'm sorry, but when I'm paying top dollar for a luxury hotel, one of the MAJOR luxuries is clean sheets every evening! I didn't notice a "saving the planet" refund on my bill. Funny how saving the planet only seems to benefit upstream in a Capitalist society.

Var had a Russian boyfriend back in the day, and Sergei related how soft drinks were vended in Russia: The machine supplied the drink, and the state supplied the glass. You picked up your glass, got your drink, and when you were done, you brought your glass back and washed it with state provided scrub brush and soap, and left it - sparkling clean for the next comrade. No muss, no fuss, no millions of plastic pop bottles choking the life out of the oceans.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in a place where I could trust my anonymous comrades to wash my glass, as if it were their own. What are the advantages of mutual trust to a biosphere? I wonder if She would tend to select for that attribute - and this is the real nutcracker: how might She give a competitive chance... to the noncompetitive?

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. --Matthew 5:5

NOTES:

That is one crazy 55 synch. See Goro for more pentagram craziness.

Fishers of Men

Jesus made his disciples "fishers of men", and when I see images like this, I remember that I was about 13 years old when I was caught. Never let me go.

Dead or Alive - Part 2

Fuzzy Nuts

Diving a bit deeper into Salvia Divorum Magazine, Issue No. 1, I discovered that the various authors use the word "entheogen" in a somewhat broader sense than the strict dictionary definition:

a chemical substance, typically of plant origin, that is ingested to produce a nonordinary state of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes.

The word is from Greek, literally 'becoming divine within' and though it was coined in the 1970's to mean the inebriants of shamans, it is used to mean ANY method, practiced or accidental, that causes a "nonordinary state of consciousness", AKA ego-death. The entheogen is seen as simply the catalyst of the Event, and that catalyst may or may not involve plants, chanting, rhythmic drumming, prayer, sex and even plain old emotional stress. So yes, Sally is a potential entheogen, but so is your overdrawn credit card.

SD No. 1 includes an excerpt from DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences (2001), by Rick Strassman. Strassman is a clinical psychologist who studied the controlled administering of DMT to subjects over a five year period. Among his many interesting findings, was that DMT is a naturally synthesized molecule, a chemical cousin to the neurotransmitter serotonin. It seems to be naturally generated during emotional stress - trauma.

Trauma induced bridge crossing

A ha!! Perhaps my own personal Jesus ego-death was the result of a glandular secretion of DMT, induced by emotional trauma? That's probably why we "hysterical/sensitive" types are always seeing crazy shit, because we get a bong hit of DMT every now and then, and boom! Aliens/angels appear! And I don't mean to belittle the experience, because I'm a believer, but what usually happens is that after the experience, it gets translated through the belief system of the visionary and/or, through those who wish to profit by the prophet.

According to Michael Hoffman, an entheogenic altered-state was fully integrated into ancient culture:

A common standard banqueting tradition with reclining at table while drinking ‘mixed wine’ ran across many seemingly disparate cultural practices (Smith 2003). ‘Mixed wine’ was the central, reliable means of accessing the intense mystic altered state throughout antiquity. Ancient ‘mixed wine’ specifically meant visionary-plant mixtures (Ruck 1978), such as Psilocybe mushroom wine. If Electric Kool-Aid in an Acid Test type of gathering were switched with ‘mixed wine’ in a Hellenistic symposium, neither party would notice much difference.

Considering the importance of initiation ritual in Masonic tradition, one wonders if this entheogenic tradition might survive even today, in the secret rituals of the Ivy League Fraternities. Stories of Skull & Bonesman pledge George W. Bush, masturbating in a casket come to mind. Ego-death, anyone? Thank you, sir, may I have another!?

In a way, ego-death is a lot like sex - Michael Hoffman, again:

Like the egoic cognitive structure, the transcendent mental model is an innate, pre-configured structure that is discovered and revealed, like the adolescent discovers the innate ability to climax. The ability to mystically climax is inbuilt, as is the mental model that is revealed, although the useful metaphors and systematic explanation that are necessary to retain the revealed mental structure must be a product of human effort.

In other words, the ability to orgasm (the "little death") is a "built in" feature of human consciousness, and so is the ability to ego-death (the "big death"). It's part of the plumbing. Like sex, ego-death is often misused and corrupted. And like sex, it is strictly forbidden/channeled by official religion, and also like sex, seems to be going on ALL THE TIME in the "catacombs".

Isn't it just... fascinating? (see Spock cock an eyebrow) A religious cult originally based on an entheogenic altered-state of ego-death has, over 2000 years, become the official outpost of ego-feeding paranoia! Anything and everything that might possibly lead to ego-death experience: rhythmic dancing, drugs, and most especially sex, is strictly Verboten. Actually, even THIS much splintered cult is showing signs of glacial movement - the more thoughtful are allowing homosexuality, which is basically... allowing sex for ecstasy's sake - G*d forbid! Is Dionysus taking back his church?

Dead or Alive

Much of what you read on Gosporn is an inquiry of sorts, looking for answers to an ecstatic "walk in the woods" experience in the Fall of 2004. The inquiry does tend to wander, but I always find myself circling back to that experience, because I really do divide my life into two parts now - the one before the walk, and the one after. BC and AD. I now call it an ego-death experience because that sounds less preachy than "anointed by the Holy Spirit", and less crazy than "alien abduction" experience. The experience has been a profound enigma to me, until I began looking into the Dionysus Mysteries, and finally the myst is beginning to clear.

Research into the Dionysus Mysteries led me to: The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death.

...a sense of being controlled by frozen block-universe determinism with a single, pre-existing, ever-existing future. Experiencing this model of control and time initially destabilizes self-control power, and amounts to the death of the self that was conceived of as an autonomous control-agent. Self-control stability is restored upon transforming one's mental model to take into account the dependence of personal control on a hidden, separate thought-source, such as Necessity or a divine level that transcends Necessity. --Michael Hoffman

This is perhaps the best essay on the nature of ecstatic religious experience that I have EVER read. He integrates early Christianity into the Roman and Gnostic cults of the day, which all strongly featured the concept of Initiation into a "Mystery". An initiation who's engine (Hoffman proposes) was the altered state brought forth by the ingestion of "spiced wine" - drink laden with entheogenic drugs. The cup that is very likely... the mythical Holy Grail.

Hoffman intuits that the great "mystery" was, in fact, a personal experience of frozen block-universe determinism, and that much of the Jesus (and Dionysus) mythos can be easily understood when this principle is applied. The journey of Jesus, from the last supper, through the garden of Gethsemane, and finally to the Cross, is metaphor for the Initiate's journey toward ego-death, and the triumphant finale - when the Ego is Born Again.

I was so taken with Hoffman's insight that I purchased the first issue of Salvia Divinorum Magazine, published in 2003. There are only three issues in print. Salvia Divinorum is an entheogenic plant native to Mexico - the Oaxaca region. I've visited the state (not the altered state!) more than once, and strangely, my closest near death experience was on a beach near Oaxaca, when I nearly drowned in a riptide. The beach was Playa de la Muerte - I have since learned to pay more attention to signs.

The cruciform entheogen called hojas de las Maria Pastora, or ska Maria Pastora (leaves of Mary the shepherdess) were used among the Mazatec in medico-religious practices, like the teonanacatl mushrooms and the ololiuhqui seeds (similar to Morning Glory).

SD Mag prints accounts of those who have smoke the herb and I found many of them to be extremely familiar - as if they were also there in the woods. Here's one:

"This is a composite of all my Salvia experiences... Hell, and sin, is truly a state of perceived separation from God, to use the quaint theological terms. I've been in Hell, and I've sinned. I was there, and so was God, looking through my eyes, though I didn't know it.

So getting older all the time, and feeling twinges of mortality and middle-age craziness, I was ready to see things a little bit differently.

Not having a budget that could support, or justify the broadening experience of extensive travel, I thought it would be a good idea to travel extensively in my own room. So in my room I sat and chewed the bitter Salvia leaves, and in short order all that I thought I was vanished, and in its place a strange, yet familiar, wild Being took over. This Being was I, and everyone, a vast organic entity.

This Being was (is) beyond words. Any words I use to describe the experience are totally inadequate, lifeless.

All I can do is submit to this Being, and acknowledge that it is real, and in charge of me, of everything. Some would call it God. Whatever it is, it's real, it's alive, and Salvia really brings it home. Home is this Being.

I've never been so happy, so relieved, to be nothing but a part of the flesh of this Being. Ah, the pleasures this Flesh! One Flesh, forever. Thank you, Salvia!"

Right on, bro! IMHO, ego-death is basically what happens when the personal Operating System crashes. It is a kind of built in "fail safe" of the brain. It's as if the ego just can't take any more, and it collapses into a primordial state of programming - a "reboot", so to speak. That reboot is a reconnection to the source of I Am - the all encompassing, all loving, all knowing Id, the Father, Abba, etc.

However, my own, personal Jesus ego-death wasn't due to "spiced wine" - or anything approaching an entheogen. But I do admit to being "under the influence" - of Jeff Fairhall - Seattle's magic mushroom tea sipping (hell, guzzling) shaman. Is it possible to have an ego-death experience without entheogens? Stay tuned for Part II, when we explore DMT - The Spirit Molecule.

If the Matrix Deletes Me

Some gay bloggers are concerned that Google may have begun deleting blogs with adult content. That already happened (temporarily) to Gosporn last month, and if they in their omnipotent wisdom decide to make it permanent, I just wanted to let all 9 of my followers Gno that you'll be able to go to http://gosporn.com to find out what ever happened.

Shiva Makes Pocket Change

Var and I went to the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival last weekend, but I was almost sorry we did after I found out that Kirkland also held a Concours d' Elegance at Carillon Point last weekend. Little did I know that a bona fide religious icon would be on display - or I would have braved the mob in an attempt to reverently touch it! That icon was a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL gull-wing. This is the famous "car with wings" - the precursor to the Back to the Future starg8!

The Mercedes had a futuristic aluminum skin, the Delorean was made of stainless steel, both were gull-wings, and Marty McFly was sent back to 1955! The Mercedes three pointed star has a more than passing resemblance to Dr. Brown's flux capacitor. As already noted in previous posts, the triple-pointed star resonates the Tripura - the rotating demonic citadels that Lord Shiva is destined to conquer with his/her triple pronged trident weapon. The cities, as well as their "doomsday" weapon, are both tri-radial, multi-dimensional concepts.

So I was a bit sad that I missed the 300SL, but later, as I emptied my pockets from the show, and found the one business card I gathered at the festival. It was from an old acquaintance of ours who now operates a CNC (computer controlled) milling machine in Port Townsend. His logo is a spinning tri-radial red spear motif - very Shiva-ish. As it turns out, most of his work lately comes from supporting the giant black trimaran that Oracle/BMW is using to challenge the Swiss in the America's Cup - see America's Cup for background. He cuts big carbon fiber parts for the boat. Carbon fiber is the engineering material that has replaced aluminum and stainless steel in all the hottest cars, boats, planes and military hardware - futuristic "skin". His dog is named Maya - I sh*t you not.

So I missed out on a chance to worship at a Tripura shrine, and instead I get Shiva slipping his carbon fiber trident INTO my pocket.

You Make My Dreams Come True

I've been humming this Hall & Oats classic all day - something about synco.... pation that just lifts my mood. Maybe Frankfurter knows.

From (500) Days of Summer. The boy is obviously packin' - Eros fountains his approval.

Love the blue motif, even the blue bird of happiness popping in for a visit. For some reason this sequence reminds me of Aladdin riding into Baghdad as Prince Ali, powered by the Blue Gene.

Getting My Attention

Note: this post is done in my personal synch journal style, which is simply a record of what I perceive as interesting or meaningful coincidences over time.

9/1/09: September has been taken over by yellow. On the first of the month it was everywhere. I walked Oliver the Oztralian terrier down to the lake and a handsome shirtless jogger goes by and nods at me (gasp!), wearing bright yellow shorts. Reminds me that I also had some bright yellow jogging shorts when I was in college. I thought they were pretty sexy. Anyway, he jogs by on the sidewalk and I watch his cute yellow butt bounce down the road, and coming my way were two bright yellow cars in a row, making a nice triple yellow synch.

Later, I saw a yellow Lotus Super 7 drive by (quite rare) and that synchs with the yellow Lotus Elite I saw with Var a few weeks ago, near the same spot. Var picked us up in the car and on the way home we were stuck in traffic and came to a stop near yellow diamond-shaped crosswalk signs - two of them, either side of the crosswalk. Cross walk, diamonds, twins... yellow. Hmmmm.

Later on, a neighbor was out mowing her lawn, wearing a bright yellow shirt printed with the same crosswalk guy.

9/2/09: Doing some boat research, and Cheers (the most famous proa in the world) was bright yellow. Today I was doing research into the Wharram Hitia 17 catamaran, Hitia means "sunrise". The particular Hitia (via Dilworth.org) I was looking at was painted blue with yellow accents.

9/3/09: Last night, Var came to bed and he started asking me about my joint aches and pains - the constant inflammation that I experience. It made me grumpy because I don't like dwelling on it, because it won't get better, I've already tried a million things. Anyway, he said that he thought Turmeric might be good for me... and later that night, I realized that turmeric is bright yellow. That night we had a good rain - the first in weeks, and also a short thunderstorm, so kind of "important", or something.

Today I was reading about Turmeric and it does seem to be a cure all for most of what ails me, inflammation being just one of them. It is an Indian herb, used for centuries in ritual and Ayervedic medicine. also associated with the elephant god Ganesh - and who should be featured on the Seattle Times front page that day but Ganesh (an elephant at Woodland Park Zoo) himself? (which reminds me of the day I met a guy hung like Ganesh at Woodland Park, but that's another story...)

9-6-09: Herodutus (H) starts a new super hero porn story with the hero named Falcon, and all done up in yellow? The black leather bands around his right thigh make him look like a bumblebee...

AAAAND... Jim was working on the deck today and it was raining really hard, and the gutter, (my nemesis) was clogged and pouring down right on Jim, so we were forced to clear it, which was really quite easy after all... Anyway, Var magically pulls out a yellow rain slicker from the closet for me - with the Helly-Hansen HH logo! He found it downstairs, must have been Brian's.

9/9/09: Listening to Beetles tonight, in honor of John Lennon and the number 9. Yellow submarines swim by, also Lucy in the sky with DIAMONDS. Not to mention the famous crosswalk shot in Abbey Road.

This sign was in a recent Admire post, along with lots of gold and yellow:

9/11/09: Var points me to a story about Lance Armstrong, and of course he's wearing the famous yellow jersey.

Sean Scott at Buffmuscles.com writes about "stalking" a cute guy at a store:

I actually got his phone number and his last name.... Then, as he left, the cashier looked at the receipt, which prints his name (from the club card number he used) and said, "Thank you, Mr. So-and-so." It's amazing what you can learn if you pay attention.

Also from Sean this week, a red head astride a yellow bike: He appears to be pointing up.

The Lotus Position is the famous pose of the Yogi, and yellow is the color of the SOLAR plexus chakra. I think I'll get more serious about my meditation practice.

Tanihwa

This week I'm reading a fun alien invasion space opera - Taniwha. "Taniwha" is a New Zealand Maori word for the monsters that inhabit their pre-European myths and legends. The story features a love affair between a hunky Russian Cosmonaut and an American Marine, as well as kinky alien reptilian sex with a Maori boy, so fun for the entire family!

One of the cooler parts of the story is when the reptilian Vanguard scientist explains inter-stellar travel to Earthlings. He draws a picture of two universes, a sphere within a sphere. Like this:

The outer sphere represents the universe we inhabit - "the Known World". The inner sphere is called "subspace", and when they wish to travel to distant planets, they rend a hole in the fabric of the Universe, submerge into subspace, travel a bit, and then surface in a new location. The travel only APPEARS to be faster than light because the subspace sphere is geometrically smaller in circumference than the outer universe sphere. Any movement below only appears to be faster than light to the denizens of the outer universe.

The reptilian Vanguard have a decidedly demonic appearance, and since demons are denizens of the underworld, It *finally* dawned on me that "subspace" = "subconscious"! (Yea, I know, I'm kinda slow) I had to laugh when I realized how often this concept is expressed in my favorite works of science fiction. From subspace traveling Borg to Captain Nemo's submarine, all my favorite monsters (wink) live just beneath the surface.

In actual fact, submarines travel much faster underwater than on the surface. Surface vessels create energy absorbing gravity waves that slow a ship down to a fraction of its true potential. Bigger engines just create a bigger hole in the water, not more speed. But dip just below the surface... and the burdened vessel becomes a freely swimming fish - a bird in flight. So perhaps this idea of "faster-than-light" speed in the subconscious realm has a certain merit. Perhaps 20,000 leagues under the sea is good for 60,000 leagues on the surface, maybe more?

Is there a "wave drag" law of consciousness? Are we somehow chained to a concept of "reality" that holds us back, like the gravity waves of a ship - the wave drag increasing exponentially with the effort applied? Perhaps that is the subconscious reason why I am strangely drawn to multihulls... vessels capable of escaping the inexorable wave drag law.

Esperanto Grrl has a recent rant about unscientific cranks which include proponents of "Hollow Earth Theory". This is the charming notion that the earth is actually hollow, with the inner sphere lit by an internal sun. It was an idea popularized in the 19th century, but one of the earliest proponents was Sir Edmund Halley, who published his theory about the hollow earth in 1692. My favorite spelunker of the era (Jules Verne) wrote Voyage au centre de la Terre (A Journey to the Interior of the Earth), which visualizes the interior populated by ancient flora and fauna, long extinct on the surface. The deeper our heroes venture beneath the mantle, the more primitive the life forms, with the adventurers traveling through the strata like geologists traveling through the great epochs of our past.

Perhaps Verne is presenting the Interior of the Earth as metaphor for the human subconscious... a descent into the consciousness of our ancient past - cambrian, pre-cambrian, etc. A consciousness that lies mostly buried, even now.

This is one of Jules' tales that didn't age very well, as the mounting scientific evidence against Hollow Earth Theory soon overcame the necessary "suspension of belief" that good myth-making requires. Interestingly, Hollow Earth Theory was brilliantly re-imagined by Arthur C. Clarke in Rendezvous With Rama. Rama is an enormous and extremely ancient spaceship that enters our solar system and is then explored by human astronauts. It is a hollow cylinder containing an inverted world, lit from within. Clarke named his underworld after an ancient deity (the seventh avatar of the Hindu God Vishnu), just as the author of Tanihwa named his. New Zealand (like Manhattan/Gotham City) was discovered and named by the Dutch (people of the Netherlands, Underworld). The Gods of Hades... ya gotta give them points for consistency.

When Pigs Fly

I have a fairly apocalyptic point of view concerning the course of human events. The seed was planted in church, and grew via frequent watering from any number of Hollywood disaster blockbusters, but it is the "real world" news that really gets me going. You really don't need to look very far to find serious existential threats to human civilization, many of them ironically caused by billions of our own individual actions, cumulatively added over time.

I guess that's why I'm drawn to the Book of Revelation, or in other words, John's Magical Mystery Mushroom Tour. And the part I'm most fascinated with is the appearance of the "firstfruits" - those legendary 144,000.

And I heard a sound from heaven like the roar of rushing waters and like a loud peal of thunder. The sound I heard was like that of harpists playing their harps. And they sang a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and the elders. No one could learn the song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth. These are those who did not defile themselves with women, for they kept themselves pure. They follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They were purchased from among men and offered as firstfruits to God and the Lamb. --Rev 14:2-4

Obviously, I'm not the only one. The 4400 television series posits that these fabled witnesses are UFO abductees, who when returned to earth exhibit paranormal abilities - the "new song". These abilities are enabled by a brain chemical called Promicin (promise within) for which the gov quickly moves to create an inhibitor, that also has unfortunate side-effects for the 44,000 - causing a fatal immune deficiency disease. Huh.

The Secret Sun has a recent post about the alien invasion meme, via Invasion - the 1997 TV miniseries based on the novel by Robin Cook. In a nutshell, aliens infect Luke Perry (of Beverly Hills 98210) with a virus that gives paranormal abilities, and the brave doctors battle the alien invasion via an "antibody". The anti-body of Christ consciousness?

I've tracked this alien invasion virus up one side and down the other, via films like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Andromeda Strain, 28 Days Later, Little Shop of Horrors, and now we have celebrated director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth, the Hobbit) release the first book of an intended trilogy joining the meme scream - The Strain. A vampire virus infects New York! Right on cue, David Barton opens a gay Goth gym in Manhattan!?

Meanwhile, in the real world, the gov takes unprecedented measures against H1N1 virus - a flue no more or less lethal than all the other flues we've seen over the years. If I wanted to focus the nation's attention on an economic "recovery", the LAST thing I'd do is beat the pandemic drum. So why now? It's not like there's some imminent alien INVASION or something...