Category: Synchronistic Stories

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The Northman

The Northman really resonated with me. And I know, I’m one year behind its debut. I am often behind the wave of popular culture tending to wait for a time that feels right to me to engage in the drama or story being presented–be it through movie, book, or song.

Often when I do this, the timing coalesces with my own creative work and the act of watching a drama or reading a story feds my inner world. I think creative works no matter what time, place, or culture have always served to feed our inner beings and to strengthen the invisible realms we all inhabit because we are sentient, self-aware living beings.

Circle of Sacred Creation

When we watch, read, or listen to any act of creation, we complete the circle of the sacred act of creating. This sacred circle of creating is something humans do that empowers us to master and control the world in ways no other living beings have done on Earth.

Throughout most of human history this sacred circle of creativity was revered and highly valued for every group of humans struggling to survive understood the transformative power of symbols. They understood how symbols can awaken and transform human consciousness. They knew the power of collective human endeavor, and they could feel how collective cultural symbols galvanized collective will.

However, this process of creative completion has been dreadfully downgraded in our Modern Age. We have cheapen it by slapping monetary values onto creative workd determined by arbitrary values such as how much money a movie made on its opening weekend.

This is true of books and songs too, while paintings and sculptures still get a pass tending to gain monetary value over time rather than lose it. However, collective judgements are made on these works too. Judgements that determine which works of art get displayed in museums or galleries as worthy of the public’s attention. Judgements that are often heavily laced with biases such as race, social status, gender identity, religious identity, or any other label we want to throw on people.

Monetary value of creative works tends to act like a rating system or popularity contest. It is a sign of our time. A time when hard-working, ordinary men and women are stressed, over worked, under paid, in constant fear of losing their jobs, and 10,000 other things all modern people must pay attention to survive in a modern civilized society. So it is no wonder people need distractions to silence a restless inner feeling that something is terribly amiss, awry, unsatisfactory, adrift, and completely out of order in our lives.

Since we don’t have time to wonder why we feel this way, we try to distract ourselves from this unpleasant feeling or any unpleasant feeling we may have in the course of living our overly sped up lives in our overly complicated societies.

In search of the next fix, the next distraction, most modern people don’t have the time or energy to complete the creative circle by digesting what they have experienced. The creative thing is reduced to its most superficial qualities and forgotten as the hungry collective searches for the next big blockbuster thing.

Synchronistic Perfection

So, I missed the crashing wave of The Northman that debuted in 2022. It is a Nordic tale about Prince Amleth who witnesses his father’s murder by his uncle Fjölnir who lusts for the throne and his mother. It sounds like Hamlet or even the Lion King, but this story is much older than both. This story is the cradle from with Hamlet and the Lion King emerged.

Young Prince Amleth narrowly escapes his own death and is forced to flee his Icelandic homeland. The story fast-forwards 20 years to a grown Amleth who is a warrior of a Viking Raiding party making its way up a river to raid a Rus settlement. These are other Vikings who settled in the area that we now call Russia. In fact, Russia comes from Rus.

But the timing for me watching it just shy of the United State’s 4th of July holiday weekend, is a matter of synchronistic perfection. This July 4th weekend marks 5 years since I had a chance to save my father, who was also a Northman.

I had an intense feeling around this time 5 years ago that I should hop on a plane and go see dad. I did not because my husband had just left to go deal with his narcissistic mom playing her narcissistic games with her children. Our daughter had just graduated from high school and I didn’t want to leave her alone her last summer home before going to college.

By this time 5 years ago, I had submitted two huge government proposals for a small religious-based non-profit that had previously not had the where-with-all to write or submit government proposals. In less than one year, I had submitted 3 big government proposals and countless other foundation and local government proposals for them. I had not taken any time off since being hired and had accumulated 89 hours of unpaid time I had worked above and beyond the measly 40 hours per week I was paid.

The only catch is my father wouldn’t make it to September 2018 because he would have a massive heart attack later in July. First responders would revive him after 15 minutes of resuscitation efforts and he would be flown to the Mayo Clinic where he would survive 10 more days before dying.

The day after his heart attack, I was by his side and would not leave it until he died. Indeed, I had to make the call to remove lifesaving support and I would be with him when he died. And he had almost made a full recovery, only to not make it.

I won’t retell the tale here. I fully account this terrible time here:

https://www.sapience2112.com/celestial-tendencies-a-daughters-journey-after-a-fathers-death/
Celestial Tendencies

I would be fired by the CEO of this religious organized where I worked for being with my father when he died. This moment marks a downward spiral I barely survived.

Sláine

When dad died, I was working on the backstory for one of the 7 Warrior-Priestesses that are part of an epic novel I have been writing since 2012.

My story is not published yet, but this did not stop me from working my story’s timeline forward and backwards. Sláine is a young orphan girl raised by nuns living in Ireland during the mid-800s—a time when the Vikings were plundering and raiding much of Europe and beyond alongside the growing strength and influence of the Catholic church.

In fact, I as reading my new work to dad when he died. I had a vision earlier that morning that I should read to him my story and tell him that it was a sled pulling him across to the other side where his mother and brother and other loved ones were waiting for him.

I told him that he could leave any time and that I would read for as long as he needed. I didn’t think he would die that day. But he did. He departed just after I finished the chapter about Easter.

https://www.sapience2112.com/slaine-the-4th-warrior-priestess/
Sláine — The 4th Warrior-Priestess

The Northman & the Nordic Legends

I had been doing tons of research on life in the 800s C.E., especially Nordic life. So seeing The Northman’s time stamp of A.D. 895 definitely caught my attention and it felt eerily similar to what I had been dreaming into my own story of Sláine and what happened to her when Viking raiders came to her convent in the early 800s.

Since I am rushing to watch as many DVDs as Netflix can send me before they stop sending DVDs in the mail, I happen to watch the cut scenes and interviews with Robert Eggers (writer-director), Alexander Skarsgård (actor who plays the grown Amleth, and others involved in the making of The Northman who included historians and museum specialists.

I was struck by how much time and care they took to recreate the known details of Nordic life and culture during this time. The Northman is as much a historical accounting of European history as it is a creative act of entertainment. It does not reduce Nordic raiders to savage brutes but rather gives critical cultural context to why they did the things they did and how it fit into their collective culture beliefs and worldview.

Indeed, if you are paying attention, the people and civilizations depicted from this time are incredibly violent. It is a time of Viking history dominated by male violence, greed, and revenge. No wonder Viking warriors wished to be killed in battle because if they did not die there, they were sure to be picked off by one of their own like what happened to Amleth’s father.

Mashables writes about The Northmen:

"...the friction between man and beast, and the beast within...how you're trying to hold onto your civility and your humanity but the animal comes out,” says Skarsgård. "Some of them it just explodes out of the body, and that reminded me a lot of that transformation, that scene in which Amleth sheds his humanity and becomes Bjǫrnúlfr (or 'bear-wolf'). The beast comes out and he doesn't try to fight it but actually lets it out, which was quite a trip."
Of course, this level of unleashing the beast comes with some uncomfortable modern associations, and The Northman is, in a sense, an examination of Viking men (among weirdly pristine women), and masculinity. Price has written at length on Viking masculinity, noting in an article(opens in a new tab), "Beyond the stereotype, there is a cold truth to Viking male violence. At the height of the 9th-century raids, Viking armies shattered the political structures of western Europe: the loss in blood and treasure was immense, thousands were violated and enslaved. There were parallels at home, too, not just in the form of civil warfare between rival petty-kingdoms, but also in domestic violence...Today there are those who tend to glorify the Vikings in their male, militaristic incarnation, but this is a mistake; they were no heroes, at all."
"The thing is that they do terrible things and they are seen to do terrible things, and that's important," Price tells Mashable of The Northman. "Robert and I talked about this a lot. I personally really don't want anybody to come out of that scene and want to be a Viking." 

    -- Robert Eggers film. In an age of Viking myth overload, the film doubles down on the details. By Shannon Connellan for Mashable on April 20, 2022

This is such an important point that cannot be emphasized enough. But the problem today is that we DO want to BE like them.

The Heinous Crime Modernity Refuses to Admit

In our rush to become a civilized, modern world, humanity has committed the most heinous act of violence of them all. It is more heinous than Vikings Berzerkers ever committed in their altered states of animal consciousness.

Image from: Mashables | How accurate is ‘The Northman’ to Viking history? Well, it’s a Robert Eggers film.
In an age of Viking myth overload, the film doubles down on the details.
Alexander Skarsgård stars as Amleth. Credit: Aidan Monaghan

Western Civilization is particularly guilty of this crime, but all modern civilizations suffer from this transgression. It is a point of view that has steadily invaded and infected pretty much every human being trying to survive in the modern world.

Alan Watts says it best:

And indeed, there is a point of view which occurs in certain forms of paranoia, where people don’t seem to be real. They are mechanisms, and you can think that out quite intensely with a good deal of intelligence. After all, if you start from a good old Darwinian or Freudian basis, and see that man is a material machine, and that the consciousness of man is simply a very involved and complicated form of chemistry, and that’s what it is, you see? Well, then these awful mechanical things, these Frankensteins that everybody is, they come around and they say, “Well, I’m alive. I’m a human being. I have a heart, I love, I hate, I have problems, I feel.” And you feel like saying, “Come off it! You’re just a monster, and you put on this civilized act because, really, you’re just a set  of teeth on the end of a tube, and got a ganglion behind those teeth which you call your brain or your alleged mind.” -- WEB AS MUTUALITY | Out of Your Mind Series | Library of Consciousness
And this thing is really, basically, there for two purposes: one, to be cunning enough to get something to eat, to put down the tube, and the other—you know what—Mr. Freud’s libido. And everything else, you see, can be construed as an elaborate, subtle way of pretending that that’s not really what you want to do. But you do, but you put on a great show. Now some people, according to this view, get mixed up. They so repress that what they really want to do is to eat and to screw, that they get involved in higher things that are the masks for these activities, and think that  that’s the real purpose of life. And then they become what’s called neurotic, because they get involved in being pure camouflage. So that’s what’s called escaping from the facts: not looking at life, not looking at reality correctly.  -- WEB AS MUTUALITY | Out of Your Mind Series | Library of Consciousness

This Modern point of view permeates the Modern Mind and provides cover for plausible deniability of who we really are as human beings.

Cartoon from: County Auditor Speaks Out Part VIII Plausible Deniability?
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We are the creators of Heaven and Hell. We choose what each and every day that we live and breathe what we are going to bring into this world or not allow to grow. And we, the Good People of Earth, have developed the capacity and power to annihilate ourselves and all life on Earth.

We are the Devil and we are the Almighty God himself, but we pretend and play at being Poor Little Old Me!

Alan Watts – Poor Little Me

This way of being in the world has been long in the making. It is the rippling effect of thinking too much, of ripping the world into opposites and colliding into our self-made polarized ideas and beliefs over and over and over again.

The Universe as a dumb thing that must be dominated and controlled (the mindset destroying Earth Now) is a counter reaction from the overbearing influence of religiosity, which really took root and grew into a Titanic force in the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent and EuroAsia that have been jostling for survival and supremacy for more than 5,000 years.

In all this jostle, civilizations found religions provided a powerful galvanizing glue that held together the power and authority of a king or an emperor. A ruler could imbue legitimacy to his rule not only through laws and armies, but through the Gods themselves. This was a powerful way to bind together burgeoning cultures and civilizations that were growing larger and larger.

The problem all rulers face as their kingdoms grew bigger and bigger was how to keep everyone on the same page. Every intelligent ruler understood that if the people of his or her kingdom began to crack and fracture into opposing fractions, his/her power and authority would eventually fall victim to the fracturing and fragmentation of the civilization, unless unity could be restored.

But with the advent of highly successfully civilizations, it was getting harder and harder to get everyone to hold the mold and stay on the same page as group. Rulers use many devices to hold the mold of their societies and civilizations, but by far one of the most effective is Collective Beliefs, especially spiritual and religious beliefs.

But, in the early days of civilizations there were so many Gods and Goddess one could pay homage to, and if a ruler selected one to honor above another, he/she would inevitably alienate an important group of people needed to keep the unanimity of the kingdom or civilization and alienation can rapidly lead to loosing control of one’s power, authority, and supremacy.

I write about this in great detail and depth in Book 1 of Sapience Series (look for it 4/24/24), but long story short, it was really convenient for the ancient rulers of pre-Christian civilizations to winnow down the Gods to just ONE. The first ruler to do this is Akhenaten who got rid of all the other ancient Egyptian Gods and Goddesses claiming that Aten is the one and only God, all others are blasphemous, and that he was the one and only chosen son of Aten, represented by the solar disc of the sun.

This was a powerful claim that pissed a lot of people off way back then. When Akhenaten and his beautiful queen Nefertiti died, probably due to plague, the people and the priests abandoned his brand new city built by children appropriated by his kingdom and did everything possible to wipe his memory from Egypts memory.

But the one God would return again and again through the Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are the biggest ones with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam dominating the modern world. But there are others including Baha’i Faith, Rastafari Movement, Sikhism, Vodou, Eckankar, and Tenrikyo.

One God unifies all the people of a kingdom or an empire under one king or empire under one celestial and holy authority and this is a powerful thing.

In the story I write, I explore the collision and confluence of polytheistic and monotheistic beliefs in great detail, and when I get to Sláine, I explore the collision between the violent Viking Berzerkers and passive Catholic Priests. It is a colossal clash of opposites that will send shock waves through the centuries.

Indeed, we are still reverberating from this collision, perhaps most especially today.

Christianity Eventually Subdues the Viking Beast

The Catholic priests do suffer for centuries. They are killed, enslaved, and their riches taken by the Vikings for several centuries, but eventually Christianity tames and subdues the Viking beast.

This period of time of Nordic history is beautifully written about by Sigrid Undset in her three part series entitled Kristin Lavransdatter: The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby, and The Cross.

Image 1: Albertus Magnus Institute | 7 lesson course about KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER: 

This course will focus on the novel "Kristin Lavransdatter", in three volumes 1920-1922, by the Norwegian Catholic writer Sigrid Undset. We will read the novel with reference to Undset's life and other work. "Kristin" is one of the greatest Catholic novels yet written, and it's popularity reignited after its second translation into English by Tiina Nunnally whose edition we will be reading. It's strongly recommended students read as much of the novel ahead of time as they can. The trilogy has nine parts, three per volume, that we will be treating in eight classroom settings. The Nunnally translation is available both in paperback and Kindle.

Image 2: The Flying Inn: blog posted by Rick Davis:

In pursuit of my interest in all things relating to the history of Northern Europe, and on my wife’s strong recommendation, I read Kristin Lavransdatter, a trilogy of books written by the Norwegian author and Nobel laureate, Sigrid Undset. Comprised of The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby, and The Cross, Kristin Lavransdatter is an unusual work of literature. It looks back on the medieval period without the romanticism of many fantasy authors while also avoiding the stark ugliness which characterize many modern “realistic” portrayals of the Middle Ages. In other words, while being a firmly modern writer, she comfortably and capably depicts the time period as it was in accurate detail without feeling the need to push an agenda on the medievals in her portrayal.

If you have not read these stories, I highly recommend them. They honestly portray the positive and negative consequences of this transformation of Nordic culture from mysterious, mythical, pagan beliefs into modern Christian sensibilities and beliefs.

Now my father was a Lutheran minister as was his father and my other grandfather and many of my uncles. Both sides of my family are devout Christian Norwegians. And both sides have done many things that have brought comfort to others who are suffering.

But there is a price for all this goodness. And the price is cutting oneself in half. To be a good Christian, I would be taught early on that I must identify everything bad in me and suppress it. Even better is deny the existence of the beast inside me… the Devil… the very fiend that ancient Vikings clearly knew lived inside of them and called upon to conduct their violent conquests.

And this is a very dangerous thing to do… because if you aren’t the Devil or the dangerous beast… then someone else has to be it because the world is both Good and Bad. Alan Watts calls this duplicity in man’s mind out too.

“Superior virtue is not conscious of itself as virtue, therefore it is virtue. Inferior virtue is conscious of itself as virtue, therefore it is not virtue, it is hooked on being virtuous.”

Alan Watts, Swimming Headless
Alan Watts – The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions

“Inferior virtue can’t let go of virtue, thus not virtue.” — Alan Watts

Watts often says that wars conducted for purely selfish reasons are merciful wars because the raiders want to enjoy the goods of the people they are invading. They want to take their treasures and enjoy their women, and because of this they will not destroy everything.

But wars conducted in the Name of God, or even worse, wars waged by men who claim to be chosen by God and therefore they are waging a righteous war, or even more worse than this, men who believe themselves to a God and they are bringing in a superior, better world, these kind of wars are the most brutal, most merciless, most destructive wars ever conducted by mankind.

When you hear someone invoking the Name of God to legitimize an idea, a cause, a belief, a political party… you should run!

These people are not doing this thing or touting that belief in the Name of God! They are doing this for their own personal Power and Glory!!! They are doing it to get inside your mind! And once inside, the will control you like a hungry Monster!

There have been many monsters like this since the dawning of our gleaming, golden modern age! Monstrous, modern men who have engage in the the most gruesome, heinous Virtue Wars.

All of them have conducted in the name of some God–be it the Holy God Almighty or the God of Ideas (man’s petty, polarizing ideas that they believe will bring glory to the nation, which is really double speak for Power and Glory to themselves). Virtue wars are the bloodiest, most violent, most merciless, most catastrophic wars ever conceived and conducted by mankind.

Each generation of men seems to breed a more hideous monster, and there have been many: Adolf Hitler (Germany 1934-1945), Joseph Stalin (USSR 1924-1953, Idi Amin (Uganda 1971-19790, Pol Pot (Cambodia 1975-1979), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya 1969-2011), Saddam Hussein (Iraq 1979-2003), Benito Mussolini (Italy 1926-1943), and the list goes on and on… to reign terror, destruction, and death on scales never before achieved by one man or one brutal bunch of people.

Top 10 Ruthless Dictators by Watchmojo

In some ways, the Vikings were simply more honest about their violence. Today, we glorify their violence while pretending to be Modern, civilized, virtuous beings who know how to make the world a better place.

In fact, they are the only ones who know and they will kill you if you don’t believe them!

This is the world we live in now.

My Dad Was A Northman Too

My dad was a Northman too. He was a civilized one…a man of the cloth…but he had suffered early in life…and he doubted his faith greatly throughout his life, especially as he bore witness to the monstrous things man was doing to his fellow man.

He knew he could not correct the malfunctioning mentally leading to our great destruction as a species, but he did what he could with what he had wherever he was. And he remembered his roots. He knew he was capable of good deeds and bad deeds. Because of this he did not shame and blame others. And because of this, he could truly be with people and comfort them at their times of greatest need and suffering.

Feature Archetypal Animation

Image from: Robert Eggers film. In an age of Viking myth overload, the film doubles down on the details. By Shannon Connellan for Mashable on April 20, 2022

Image from: Robert Eggers film. In an age of Viking myth overload, the film doubles down on the details. By Shannon Connellan for Mashable on April 20, 2022

The other images were made with AI Image Maker on Genolve.

Music: Viking Music: Rurik : Pawl D Beats [1] Viking Music: Rurik    3:10

Second Archetypal Animation

All images made using Midjourney AI Generated Images on Genolve

Music: Run Boy Run by Snake City

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Sun & Moon Beings

I have been contemplating the shape of civilizations at different points in time in the 5,000 years since humans, spontaneously (everywhere, all at once) and voluntarily, began to organized themselves into civilizations.

The oldest civilization we know to arise is Sumer, but there is intriguing clues around the world that humans were moving in this direction for a long time such as Göbekli Tepe, which was discovered in the mid-1990s in Turkey. This is an ancient temple predating the emergence of Summer by 7,000 years.

Göbekli Tepe built 6000 years before Stonehenge | Image from Green Prophet
Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological wonder,” says Prof. Gopher. “Built by Neolithic communities 11,500 to 11,000 years ago, it features enormous, round stone structures and monumental stone pillars up to 5.5 meters high. Since there is no evidence of farming or animal domestication at the time, the site is believed to have been built by hunter-gatherers. However, its architectural complexity is highly unusual for them.”
Discovered by German archaeologist Dr. Klaus Schmidt in 1994, Göbekli Tepe has since been the subject of hot archaeological debate. But while these, and other early Neolithic remains, have been intensively studied, the issue of architectural planning during these periods and its cultural ramifications have not. -- Posted on May 20, 2020 by Karin Kloosterman in Archeology

How civilizations self-organize and hold themselves together has become an obsession with me as I finish the first book in my series called Sapience. Right now I am putting the final touches on a section where a Grandmother is telling her Granddaughter how the world ended up they way it does in my not so distant future on Earth–a planet forever changed by man’s inability to course correct and change direction. A collective choice that will led humanity and all life on Earth over the Climate Cliff!

As I searched for the model of mind that held the shape of Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Chinese civilizations, I stumbled upon this documentary that absolutely fascinated me. It enchanted me mostly because ever since I started keeping journals for the story I am writing, I have been drawing the shapes depicted in Drunvalo’s documentary of the Flower of Life. I had no idea what I was drawing, but I knew it was important for the story and just keep drawing the shapes that were shaping my story.

Drunvalo Melchizedek Flower Of Life Full Documentary Sacred Geometry Meaning

Do Your OWN Thinking…

…And Stay Opened Minded as You Do YOUR OWN Research on Nifty Ideas that Captivate Your Attention! Flexibility of Mind is especially important when you are attracted to highly seductive, fascinating, enchanting, alluring, and interesting ideas! Throughout human history of having a mind to think up ideas, these sort of ideas have always been the Most Dangerous kind of Ideas!!!

I have never taken anyone or anything presented to me at face value. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt when I first met them and trust what they are telling me, but when I find out they are using their words to manipulate, deceive, or control me–WATCH OUT!

And, I will find out because I tend to feel deception and manipulations in others and I have always been curious about the world. When I encounter something new on my own or presented to me by someone else, I seem to have more questions and want to find out the archaeology of the idea or beliefs being presented.

Perhaps I am old fashion, but I want to learn more about a NEW Idea (especially a highly attractive one) before I incorporate them into my belief system.

So this is what I was doing about Drunvalo’s documentary about the Flower of Life when I stumbled upon Jordan Pearce who I believe created or helped to create this documentary.

Sun and Moon Beings

In looking into who Jordan Pearce is, I encountered a shock, which is the spark for this blog.

The Flower of Life documentary is full of images that also shocked me as I have been drawing many of these shapes and images in my notebook ever since I started keeping notes on my story in 2013. The first shape I started drawing is infinity.

Sapience Notebook | 2013-2014

It would evolve dramatically leading to these shapes:

The Divine Dodo Mini Series

After watching the full documentary and making my own doodling and drawings of it, I began to envision a circle with yellow, orange, and red flames on one side and blue and white and purple flames on the other side in my mind.

I was considering how to draw it when I came across one of Jordan Pearce’s blogs and there in his blog was the image I was seeing in my mind!

Image from: Empaths vs. HSP (The Dynamics of Vibrational War)

Recognizing this was the image I was seeing in my head, I drew by my own hand adding some elements that made it feel more as I saw it in my head. I had not seen the faces in my image, nor did I connect it with the sun and moon, but I felt this was right. This was what my knowing was trying to tell me.

My drawing of the drawing above

And so this is what gave me the idea for the feature animated archetypal animation for this blog, which I have titled: Sun & Moon Beings. And they are living beings. This is energy that courses through every living being on earth. It is part of the Life Force that human beings began to become conscious of and represent through art, architecture, and language for thousands of years.

It is this energy that creates the foundation of every civilization that has existed or will exist on Earth. It is how we interpret this energy that will determine our fate as a species on Earth. It is the energetic form of Yin and Yang experienced by every living being on Earth that has ever lived on Earth as night and day.

Cloak of Doubt

Given the synchronicity of this image, I knew Jordan Pearce’s blog was important for something I needed to understand or pay attention to. It felt linked to the time when I pulled the Cloak of Doubt over my head and plunged into an inner abyss from which I almost did not come back.

Cloak of Doubt | Letting Others Trick You into Not Believing in Yourself

I talked about the perils of the Cloak of Doubt in my previous blog where I pick apart the rantings of a person I had counted on as a friend during this time. I admired his way of thinking and ability to string words together to create compelling and alluring ideas… but I would come to realize how hollow, empty, and full of hubris his words were during my time of deafening sorrow, despair, and deep grief.

I would come to understand that he and all the FAKE people I had met on FAKEBOOK at a time of in my life when everything was not going my way; a time when my husband would lose his job, I would lose two jobs back to back, I would come to understand the brutality reality of my mother-in-law’s narcissism and brother-in-law’s psychopathy (terrible human mental afflictions that have plagued humanity ever since humans could think and these afflictions were ripping my family apart during this horrible time), and I would lose my father, which sent me into the abyss.

Functional Hierarchies

Nearly, five years this personal disaster and mass abandonment of FAKE friends on Facebook and in real life, I have slowly been reckoning with this time in my life. Part of this reckoning is to make an accounting of the people in my life then who made me doubt myself as I spiraled into probably the darkest time of my life.

As I emerge on the other side of this dark period, I can see how I let these people dupe me and allowed them to let me doubt myself. I can see how I did this by admiring them but not doing my due diligence to dig deeper into the hollow ideas they were touting. They were shiny, happy ideas that I guess I needed at that time because I thought they might keep me afloat as everything around me disintegrated and turned into the Sea of Sorrow where I was cast adrift on a rickety raft.

I was drawing this sea like crazy at this time and sharing them in post such as this one:

The Sea is Within Us

These “friends” would nod their heads like bobble dolls, but they really didn’t care. And the further I spun into despair, the more distant and inhuman they grew. This is because, I realize now, I was just easy food for them.

I was a vulnerable person attracted to their ideas or art or weird philosophies and I did not have the inner power to doubt them, instead I doubted myself… and way too many of them liked this! In fact, they actively encouraged me to doubt myself because it keep me as a captive audience and loyal follower.

I cut them off as I spun deeper into despair. Something inside me kicked into survival mode. And dad’s death dramatically showed me how FAKE and inhospitable these people really were. It was very painful, but I let them go and now I realize they were channelling dangerous and dying ideas full of hubris and arrogance that only an ignorant human being can achieve.

They are ignorant because they cling to ideas they have spent way too much time thinking about. They are attached to these ideas as if they were part of their body, perhaps replacing their heart. They are so attached to their ideas they cannot let go of them no matter how catastrophic the final destination of these ideas might turn out to be.

Mansplaining Functional Hierarchies

Titantic-Titan

Strangely, as the publication date of this blog dawns near, the world is completely absorbed in the hunt for 5 explores onboard the Titan–a tiny, experimental submarine that was heading down to see the Titanic.

We all found out yesterday that the 5 did not survive. The experimental sub touted to be a game changer in deep sea exploration imploded during its descent to the Titanic.

These are just a few of the pictures flooding news outlets around the world ever since the Titian went missing on Sunday in its dive to see the Titanic. Our collective imagination is captivated because this tragedy eerily parallels the very same disaster that led to sinking of the unsinkable Titanic on April 14, 1912.

Odd fact: The Wife of the Missing Sub’s Pilot Is Related to a Couple Who Died on the ‘Titanic’

This just in, July 5, 2023:

LEAKED Titan Sub Transcript Shows Crew In Battle For Lives | Jeff Ostroff reviews the leaked Titan Sub Transcript which the internet is debating the authenticity of, to see if this scenario is real, and whether the crew spent 20 minutes fighting for their lives with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush at the helm, only to have the OceanGate Titan submarine implode before it could resurface.
Crushed, Burned or Toothpaste? Surgeon Explains What Happened To Crew OceanGate TITAN Sub Implosion | Dr. Chris Raynor | Not Your Everyday Ortho | In this explainer video, orthopedic surgeon reacts to the Titan submarine disaster and theorizes about what happens to the people onboard when their submersible catastrophically imploded. #titan #submersible #implosion

James Cameron Reflections the Titanic & the Titan

I feel “Titanic” director James Cameron summarizes what we have learned about the fate of the 5 explores on the Titan brilliantly in an interview with Anderson Cooper yesterday when the world found out the tiny sub imploded 1 hour and 45 minutes into its descent sending parts of it debris field resting 1600 feet from Titanic’s famous bow.

Cameron said:

“I think there’s a great, almost surreal irony here, which is Titanic sank because the captain took it full steam into an ice field at night, on a moonless night with very poor visibility after he had been repeatedly warned,” Cameron told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Thursday.

He added that while he thinks it’s important to remember that history, “here’s a case starkly, today, where the collective, we didn’t remember the lesson of Titanic — these guys at OceanGate didn’t.”

“I just think it’s heartbreaking that it was so preventable.” 

“Titanic” director James Cameron sees similarities with submersible tragedy and famous shipwreck

James Cameron made his own submarine to complete a record-breaking solo dive to 35,787 feet to the deepest point on Earth. His 12-ton vessel is known as the Deepsea Challenger, so he knows a thing or two about submersibles and how to survive the inhospitable, alien space of the deep, deep, black sea.

Natural History Museum

He told Anderson the composite material used to build Titan was simply the wrong material to use for deep sea diving vessels, everyone knew it and the deep sea diving community was really concerned about the decision to use it to make Titan. However, the idea was highly attractive and it worked for a while, but if you have to build in sensors to tell you that your hull is beginning to crack, well, that is problem because you can’t really do anything about it when you are almost 2 miles below the sea.

Cameroon said that Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, was brilliant, brave, and a true explorer, but he got caught by the same hubris that sunk the Titanic down 111 years ago.

Cameroon says using the carbon fiber cylindrical hull was fundamentally wrong. In another interview reported on by NPR, Cameroon says:

"I think it was unconscionable that this group did not go through that rigorous process," he told CNN.
He told the BBC he believed they hadn't done so because "they knew they wouldn't pass."
OceanGate said in a 2019 blog post that the certification process only assessed the vessels themselves — not operational safety, which it took seriously. It also said regulation was preventing innovation, echoing comments Rush told Smithsonian Magazine that same year.
Cameron said he personally never believed in the sort of carbon fiber cylindrical hull that the company used, telling Reuters it was a "horrible idea" that "just sounded bad on its face." 
Pressure hulls should be made out of contiguous material like steel, titanium, ceramic or acrylic, he explained, in order to do modeling and finite element analysis to "understand the number of cycles that it can take." That's not the case with a composite material, like carbon fiber, made of two different materials blended together.
"And so we all knew that the danger was delamination and progressive failure over time with microscopic water ingress and ... what they call cycling fatigue," he added. "And we knew if the sub passed its pressure test it wasn't gonna fail on its first dive ... but it's going to fail over time, which is insidious. You don't get that with steel or titanium."

-- NPR Interview

This trait for pomposity is an innate quality of being a conscious living being. One could say it is the price of being conscious.

If a person chooses not to be self-aware, he or she cuts off an important inner guidance system. If a person does not recognize and counteract their personal form of pomposity with modesty and humility, they will veer off course heading for the deepest, darkest, most dangerous inner waters, which they happily ignore in empty proclamations of how great they are or how bold and innovative their flimsy IDEAS are.

This tendency to believe oneself to be the best, most important person in the world will balloon inside the fragile ego expressing itself in endless iterations of self-importance, magniloquence, grandiosity, vanity, self-conceit, and dare I say Narcissism. If you allow these ideas free range, they will replicate inside your mind, making you more and more lopsided, more insane, more dangerous and more destructive every day. If you leave your lopsided ideas unopposed, and only YOU can oppose them and course correct, your BAD ideas will turn you into a machine, this is the best case scenario! Most people keep sinking and descend to the depths of MONSTER, this is basically a Self-Implosion Model of being a conscious living being in the world.

Pomposity, vanity, narcissism are very contagious mental viruses–let’s call them the Hubris Viruses. They and other variants infect virtually the entire Modern World… this being the Modern Mindset based purely on thinking. Most people have no idea they are infected and go about their daily lives feeding their increasingly lopsided ideas that grow more and more extreme and polarized and infecting others with their BAD IDEAS.

This is what my FAKE friend did to me as I entered a very dangerous time of personal crisis. And this is what men like Putin are doing to the entire world. Putin used his Hubris Virus to manipulate and gain the reigns of power in Russia. Now, this shitty, insane man and his shitty, insane supporters are putting the entire world in danger due to his brutal invasion of Ukraine that enters its month 17… and if WE (THE FREE WORLD) don’t STOP his Shitty Version of Russia form fulfilling at its predetermined destination, which is HELL, TOGETHER… it is going to get worse and worse and worse.

Putin and his insanity ducks will never STOP. They will deploy nuclear weapons or conduct nuclear sabotage at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

From February 2023 Blog Marking One Year Since Crazy Russian Czar Putin Invaded Ukraine

No one will be safe!

Alan Watts On Inner Voyages

Dangerous hubris and intellectual arrogance will kill our world, if not by nuclear war, then by climate disasters, other wars, or the AI apocalypse.

This is a time when humanity not only needs bold and courageous explorers of the physical world, but we also need them for the invisible world too. This is the world inside each and every human being’s mind.

Alan Watts talks beautifully about why we need to pay attention to our inner spaces NOW more than ever before in this video. He says near the end of this lecture that Inner Dives can be just as dangerous as making a deep sea decent or taking an excursion outside the protective atmosphere of Earth,

Alan Watts: Drugs: Turning the Head or Turning On – Being in the Way Ep. 7 – Hosted by Mark Watts
Can you get mysticism in a bottle? Alan Watts explores the drug question, in this psychedelically infused episode of Being in the Way. This series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit https://Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts. Mysticism in a Bottle // The Smell of Burnt Almonds (0:00) Psychedelics, Mystical Experiences, & Western Culture (28:18) Psychedelics as Instruments // Set & Setting (45:35) Morality & Legislation // Policing, Preaching, & Hypocrisy (49:25) “Lo and behold, I had what I simply could not deny being an experience of cosmic consciousness, the sense of complete fundamental total unity forever-and-ever with the whole universe. And not only that, but that what this thing was fundamentally—despite every thing and every kind of appearance in ordinary life to the contrary—that the energy behind the world was ecstatic bliss and love.” – Alan Watts

Highly Sensitive People, Empathy, and Arrogance

But I digress! Let’s get back to Jordan Pearce and why I found his blog so helpful.

It is probably not so much that I was dealing with HSP or transcended individuals during my dangerous descent into myself, but I was dealing with individuals who were weaving highly attractive webs made out of hollow and dying ideas because they were too caught up in their own hubris.

When a person becomes so attached to their own ideas, they become blind to the needs of others and fail to see the humanity in the people who they preach to night and day. It turns out such people need us (the vulnerable ones going through a hard time) than we need them. That is because they have hollowed themselves out inside and must consume other people’s time and attention to feel alive. This is a dangerous type of human being because they can disguise themselves in all sorts of attractive personas.

This is what I fell into… cockeyed people touting crooked and corrupted ideas. But they would never admit it. Rather, they would blame others for their errors in thought… thinking was becoming increasingly insane and inhumane.

Empaths vs. HSP (The Dynamics of Vibrational War)
“If an empath allows the HSP’s fear of lower vibrations to be internalized within, we agree to the HSP’s story (lower vibrations = I’m unsafe). This is a profoundly damaging belief for an empath to have, as it causes deep internal conflict about the very essence of what we are. By nature, we cannot reject our emotional experience without making ourselves sick or blocking Life Force.”

After reading Jordan Pearce’s blog above, I made the following comment.

This is so helpful!! I had to look up what HSP is…"A highly sensitive person (HSP) is someone who has an increased sensitivity to stimulation and information…" I had no idea such a person existed! WOW! I have just finished watching all of Drunvalo Melchizedek Flower Of Life Full Documentary Sacred Geometry Meaning, which has you mentioned in the transcript. So I looked you up, wanting to find out just who is Jordan Pearce?
I would not have been ready to view or understand this documentary when it was first posted in 2014. At that time, I was getting lost, very lost. I was beginning a descent... a  REALLY, REALLY deep descent…one from which I almost did not return.
I took notes all the way through this documentary because I have been drawing the egg of life, the seed of life, the tree of life, the flower ever since about 2015 as my descent increased speed. I had NO IDEA what I was drawing… and no one I knew did either.
Then, in 2016, the dive began… and I REALLY started drawing this stuff… and after reading this; I think I willingly aligned myself with a lot of Righteous HSP while I am pretty I am an Empath… and when my fall came… boy did they make me feel like shit and they abandoned me to my doom. It felt horrible because while I aligned with their way of thinking, I was there friend, but when I had to access my inner warrior and get swallowed by my inner dragon… they made me doubt myself more than ever. Doubt is the Dark Force of Destruction… this I know for sure now.
I was meant to find this blog because the image you have above the the sun and moon women I was seeing in my head after finishing the documentary. I was trying to figure out how I could draw this when I looked you up and found this blog. That is what I was seeing! I never knew about you… I have never been to your site before… but I was seeing this image and I think was led here to learn something about what I passed through because I have so much anger and rage about what happened and how I was abandoned… however, I also I drew the Cloak of Doubt over my own head. I aligned myself with these people so I would stand absolutely alone when the time came… and all along I knew I needed to make this passage utterly alone and it was dangerous and some how I survived.
Thank you for your work!

What I realized in his blog, is that people are going to want to shame and blame you for things they cannot reckoned with inside themselves. You do not need to be their punching bag, victim, or target for their bad ideas.

Walk away, unless… you need to done the Cloak of Doubt to begin your deep dive. These are dangerous journeys. Not everyone makes it back… but there treasures buried deep inside every individual alive on this planet right now.

Flower of Life

Another synchronicity experienced today occurred during a trip to the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, VA. This is a place that once made weapons of mass destruction but now provides spaces for artists to create, collaborate, and sell their work.

I have never been inside the Torpedo Factory! It took our daughter visiting to get us there today. And because I watched this documentary, I recognized the Tree of Life and Flower of Life. The artist is Sermin Ciddi, a renowned Turkish artist skilled in the modern miniature painting of the highly specialized arts of the Ottoman and Turkish culture.

Artists, musicians, writers are our deep divers of Self and Other. We need the arts more than ever in our fast pace, consumer-based, status obsessed, overly achieving, overly hectic and complicated Modern World.

We need to understand symbols and symbology more than any time every before in human history because if we don’t… we are going to implode or explode from our over exuberant and arrogant ways of being in the world… ways that depend on putting other people down so you can be up (Functional Hierarchies)… ways that ignore the facts like icebergs in the sea: Never Mind That the Titanic’s Captain Shouts! Full Steam Ahead! or the will of the people: King Trump!

Note the words painted into this picture: “I want to make the sun and moon rise and set!”

So here we are full circle back to the Sun and Moon Beings!

Feature Archetypal Animation Images

Image from: Moon Vs Sun: Who Will Win?

Image from: EMPATHS VS. HSP (THE DYNAMICS OF VIBRATIONAL WAR)

Image from: The Difference between the Sun  and the Moon in Astrology

Image from: Is your Sun & Moon Relationship giving you Peace or Tension?

Image from: RS Arts | April 24, 2019  · 

Sun and moon combo #mandala art#Moon Sun Conjunction# Moon has a friendly relationship with Sun but their energies are vastly different. One is hot and fiery while the other is calm and compassionate.#When their energies combine in trine or 10th house or in their own signs (Cancer, Leo and Aries), their effect is mostly positive#RS arts

Image from: Psychedelic Moon And Sun Tapestries With Hanging Accessories Included

Music: Space and Time (Deluxe Edition) | The Bad Dreamers | [1] Space and Time    1:53

Space and Time (Deluxe Edition) | The Bad Dreamers

[1] Space and Time    1:53

Posted on

Good, Like Water

And Water Like Gold

Tao Te Ching — Chapter 8 |

Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Man… and Woman 😉

Ancient Wisdom | Sapience

The supreme good is like water,
which benefits all of creation
without trying to compete with it.
It gathers in unpopular places.
Thus it is like the Tao.

The location makes the dwelling good.
Depth of understanding makes the mind good.
A kind heart makes the giving good.
Integrity makes the government good.
Accomplishments make your labors good.
Proper timing makes a decision good.

Only when there is no competition
will we all live in peace.

Sapience Sense | Where Does It Come From

In this chapter of the Tao Te Ching (Chapter 8), Laozi talks about how supreme good is like water.

So, just what is supreme good? Isn’t is our ability as human beings to know that we know… to know that we feel something… to know that we can do good in the world or we can do bad?

This is consciousness, right?

So how do we choose Good over Bad?

Is it entirely an individual choice: Good vs Bad?

Or, is there a collective responsibility hidden in this choice? A collective basin, deep reservoir upon which we all must draw from and upon which we all depend for our sentient sense… for our sentient life.

Song | Sapience | Synchronicity

The song I found for the feature archetypal animation is sublime! There is something very synchronistic going on with this song and this chapter in the Tao Te Ching. But, I can’t quite pin it down.

Can you?

Verse 1 and 2 seem to get close to what/why I feel a synchronistic blending going on… a mixing of ancient wisdom with modern day experiences and feelings (I’ve copied the lyrics to this song below).

How often does competition and trouble arise in our lives from not being understood or being left behind by the group. How often do we simply need others to see who we are for what we are… all of what we are (the good parts & bad parts)?

When we don’t feel seen, heard, or understood… isn’t there a part deep inside of us that wants to fight to be seen, heard, and understood? We need it like water, like air. We need the attention of others, the sense of belonging, the feeling of unconditional love to live… it feeds us deep down inside the part of ourselves that is sentient… the invisible part inside of everyone that feels, perceives… that knows that it’s alive!

"And they had gold like water"
"They wanted to fight"

Maybe the gold like water is consciousness… the sublime boundaries of personal and collective consciousness.

Gold like water = consciousness, knowledge, knowing, kinship, culture, protection, safety…

You tell me what you think is the resonance here?

Images for Feature Archetypal Animation

Marguerite Leucanthemum Composites Asteraceae | geralt | Gerd Altmann  •  Freiburg/Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  •  #35

Flower Blossoms White Rough Meadow Marguerite | Hans | Hans  •  Deutschland  •  Member since Nov. 24, 2010

Hd Wallpaper Nature Wallpaper Drop Splash Water | qimono | Arek Socha  •  Stockholm/Sweden  •  Member since Jan. 27, 2016

 Earth Moon Flower Daisy Blue Water Droplet | DigiPD | Digital Photo and Design DigiPD.com  •  United States  •  Member since Sept. 27, 2013

Light Bulb Sea Turtle Digital Art Ocean Beach | DigiPD | Digital Photo and Design DigiPD.com  •  United States  •  Member since Sept. 27, 2013

Ocean Girl Walking Atlantic Mediterranean Cliff | DigiPD | Digital Photo and Design DigiPD.com  •  United States  •  Member since Sept. 27, 2013

 Loveourplanet Earth Peaceful Journey Travel | Jordan_Singh | Ajay kumar Singh  •  Age 35  •  Mumbai/India  •  Member since Jan. 23, 2017

Music: Gold Like Water | Constant Smiles | [1] Gold Like Water – Radio Edit    2:52

Gold Like Water — Radio Edit

[Verse 1]
Your voice always calms me down
I can’t explain it somehow
I need you to see who I am
And now that I’m here with you
I can accept what I’ve been through
To watch over the voices

[Chorus]
Oh-oh, Mary
And they had gold like water
They wanted to fight
And they had gold like water
They wanted to fight

[Verse 2]
And everyone you meet is someone you couldn’t leave behind
And now they’re getting close to the people that you know
And you’re still scared that they won’t believe you as much as you do

[Chorus]
Oh-oh, Mary
And thеy had gold like water
They wantеd to fight
And they had gold like water
They wanted to fight

[Breakdown]
They’re waiting for you
They’re waiting for you

[Chorus]
And they had gold like water
They wanted to fight
And they had gold like water
They wanted to fight

[Outro]
Oh-oh, Mary

Lyrics from Genius

Go out and hug someone today! Tell them you love them! And get outside in the warm embrace of our collective loving Mother Earth!

Resting In the Good Hands of Mother — A Love Story | Earth Alive Series
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The Grief of Rage

I wrote this piece about one year ago. Being brutalized (physically, psychologically, or spiritually) by someone who holds power over you takes unbelievable amounts of inner strength, courage, and perseverance. Feeling rage is never wrong. However, choosing how to express rage can cross social, cultural, and moral boundaries that exist for very good reasons.

I believe rage is something building up all over the world for many reasons such as being bullied by popular kids at school, bullied by a boss at work, bullied by governmental systems designed to enforce huge inequalities baked deep into its operating systems long ago, or bullied by another country who seek to control a people or a place through violence carried out with impunity.

It doesn’t matter where or how superior power is used to control another human being such use of force is humiliating and is meant to put someone else down. A person on the receiving end of this sort of abuse is suppose to feel fear, sadness, anger, and rage. It is part of the abuse. It is a form of social torture.

If you find yourself in a place of rage, you are right to feel it. Do not try to suppress your rage or run from it. Turn around and face it dead on. Only this way can you choose how to express this rage. It is energy. It has to flow. It will flow whether you are conscious of it or not.

How a persons deals with how rage flow depends on many factors such as family, culture, social groups, emotional maturity, personality, mental health, social structure, and so many other factors. But it is only with conscious awareness that you can capture your rage and choose a better path of action versus a more destructive path.

Rage is going to flow consciously or unconsciously. You begin to heal and regain your strength and dignity when you are conscious of your rage, when you feel your rage, when you own your rage. By doing this, you can use your rage to get to a better place like a sailor who uses the wind to get to where he wants to be rather than letting the wind blow you somewhere you don’t want to be.

Note: Rage can be manufactured, especially in these times. Let’s call this Fake Rage. It is artificially induced into people’s minds by other people seeking to manipulate public sentiment for their own purposes. This is not the kind of rage I am referring to in this blog.

Sacrifice to the Squirrel Gods

Sacrifice to the Squirrel Gods | Channeling Rage | Deborah Wunderman
Deborah Wunderman (61 subscribers) — Please like and subscribe to my YouTube because I blog there too 😉
95 views • Premiered Nov 29, 2021
Music: High Noon — Patrick Warren [as featured in iMovie for iPhones, music that gets you ready for What’s coming next!]

Thanksgiving… what a wonderful time to get together with family and friends and share our collective blessings, and oh how precious, after a year and a half of not being able to get together due to a global pandemic!

But, Thanksgiving, oh how aggravating, antagonizing, and infuriating it can be to get together with precisely the people who know how to get under your skin. The one’s who know how to rip off the fragile psychological Band-Aid you’ve managed to put over the bubbling hot well of pain, torment, and psychological abuse inflicted on you by people who are supposed to love and support you (friends or family), but instead they get their kicks inflicting emotional pain and psychological torture at your expense.

Since inflicting pain and torture back on them is not the karmic path you want to take, nor may you have the opportunity to tell them just how horrible and monstrous they have become as defectively amoral human beings… something like June was finally able to do when she confronted Serena Waterford in her prison cell in Season 4, Episode 7 of the Handmaid’s Tale. The part where she screams in her face ‘Do You Understand Me’:

The Handmaids Tale Season 4 Episode 7 — June and Serena ‘Do You Understand Me’ | Television Fanatic
Television Fanatic (3.9K subscribers) | 525,282 views May 26, 2021 |

If you don’t have this outlet to express your anger and rage at their moral deficiencies and extremely flawed character traits that are hurting you, then try a sacrifice to the squirrel gods!

t’s what our ancestors used to do long, long ago. We think it’s kind of silly and not what a modern person should be doing… but this is another ploy by your tormentors to keep you feeling horrible. They don’t want you to find your voice, your power.

You can’t let go of your rage any more than you can hold onto it.

The only thing you can do is to try to remove the inner obstructions that are hanging you up as you try to navigate through this blistering inner torrent that is moving through you like a river of rage searing its way through your soul.

That is what sacrifices where for long, long ago. They were never for some god sitting up on high making judgements over us all. They were for us… to help us navigate inner rivers of rage so that we do not become the monsters who are tormenting us and causing so much destruction not only in our lives but the shared reality of everyone.

So make a sacrifice…use your creativity to make your voodoo doll, your effigy of your tormentors. Project all their dangerous energies and damaged soul into your talisman and set it out as an offering to any animal spirit you choose–it could be ravens, wolves, or squirrels.

It is so satisfying…and when you feel this satisfaction inside, you have removed an impediment to your rage because it needs to flow, it’s part of your power and you need all parts of your power…the good, the bad, and the ugly… to heal and grow into the individual you want (and know) you are, which is not a monster like your tormentors but a healer and conscious decision maker of your destiny.

Evolving Rage

One year later, my rage has not gone away but it has evolved. Margret Atwood is a genesis in capturing the evolution of rage… the kind I’m talking about above. Season 5, episode 10 is absolutely awesome and Billie Eilish’s song dead on! Go Margret, go June, go Serena! Maybe there is hope!

Serena and June Train Scene | The Handmaid’s Tale S5E10 Ending | Samet Turgut
Samet Turgut (1.31K subscribers) | Serena and June Train Scene | Video Clip: The Handmaid’s Tale S5E10 Ending Music: Billie Eilish – bury a friend The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 finale ending

Feature Archetypal Animation

Love Rage Grief Hatred Escape Soap Bubble Tree | LN_Photoart | Lars Nissen  •  Vogt/Deutschland  •  Member since June 19, 2016

Eye Iris City Skyscraper Screen Background | LN_Photoart | Lars Nissen  •  Vogt/Deutschland  •  Member since June 19, 2016

Pregnant Child War Escape Historical Maternity | Mysticsartdesign | Mystic Art Design  •  Deutsch  •  Member since July 3, 2014

Skeletons Atomic Bomb Nuclear Weapons Explosion | geralt | Gerd Altmann  •  Freiburg/Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  •  #25

Annoy Cells Stars Dendrites Sepia Excitement Brain | geralt | Gerd Altmann  •  Freiburg/Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  •  #25

Music: sad / rage | Squiddy | [1] don’t lie to me    2:30
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Free to Choose

“The past reflects eternally between two mirrors -the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say.” 
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

In the second episode of Shantaram, available on AppleTV, Lin steps out of his friend Prabaker’s tent in one of Bombay’s sprawling slums. He looks around at all the people in the bustling slum who are looking at him and wonders if they are afraid of him and hate him. He knows he doesn’t belong there, but fate has put him there.

Thinking to himself, he says something like this: “It is what people know about themselves that make them afraid of you.“

In A World…

I rewound and watch this moment again. I was not expecting a nugget of wisdom in this drama. But, there it was…something real, something true, something very pertinent to the world we live in now. Today, no matter where you live, we live in a world….

…where MAGA Republicans think all Democrats are evil beings who drink the blood of children. This belief makes liberals and Democrats not really human. If they aren’t really human, then that makes it all right to kill them, all of them.

“Oh? You don’t believe me?”

Listen to this man right here. He’s the man with the littlest Wiennie of them all. The man in the middle touting hate, lies, deception, stories of separation, fear, and division. He’s Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon Swears Revenge On His Democratic Enemies After Being Sentenced To Prison — Politicus Media; 10.2K subscribers

This little man, Trump’s Rasputin, knows that a democracy divided is easy to control. And he wants to control everything. Look at his beady eyes and scrubby stubble. He’s a tormented man doing everything to create confusion, chaos, and destruction so he can rise as a Christ for a world of sinners. If you have not seen CNN’s special report Divided We Fall, it is time to watch it.

CNN SPECIAL REPORT: STEVE BANNON, DIVIDED WE FALL Reported by Drew Griffin

“Oh — you don’t trust CNN?“

“You say it’s the radical left touting Joe Biden’s radical agenda…and before that it was Hillary….and before that it was Obama…and before and before…”

How far back should we go with the blame game and ‘I don’t trust you‘ contest? To Adam and Eve? Is it really that nasty little snake who started it all?

If you’re playing this game, you have already swallowed the Red Pill, and it’s working its toxic poison deep inside of you. It’s a poison that makes you deeply afraid of others and deeply afraid of your own shadow. And, you probably should be deeply afraid of your own shadow.

That is what Lin is aware of while standing alone in the slum of Bombay. That sneaky shadow that lives inside all of us casting its evil intensions and desires onto everyone else, except for you.

If you are playing this game, you have joined the ranks of people who violently participate in the denial of diversity. You do this to legitimize your own violent fear of anyone who doesn’t walk like you, talk like you, look like you, act like you, or think like you. You secretly believe and harbor a wish to bring into being a world that obeys and worships you.

The dirty little secret is hidden deep inside of you is a greedy, little, bloodthirsty thing who rages and whines about inflicting pain and suffering onto others. You want to do this so that you can enjoy your comforts and privileges. You need to do this because how would you know you are enjoying comforts and privileges unless others are suffering?

When you get called out on your racism, homophobia, antisemitism, and racism, you rage. You rage against the radical liberals who are merely pointing out your evil shadow. But, you don’t want to see the evil inside of you. So you build a wall. It’s a really tall wall that is made from the seething anger and rage boiling inside of you. If anyone gets too near, it burns like a living fire.

‘God damn it!’ if anyone is going to penetrate you inner wall and see that howling, wounded, frighten, greedy thing that lives inside of you.

That thing…. that scoundrel, that fiend, rascal, rogue, fraudster, trickster, beast, son of a bitch, deviant thing, loser, weirdo, cry baby, stupid brutal bastard, and bully. But guess what? So am I, and so is everyone else you know. We all have this evil thing living inside of us.

It never goes away. It bubbles and boils and burns inside us all. It pursues and terrorizes us in our dreams. Lin says, “A dream is when a wish and fear come together. A nightmare is when they are the same thing.”

Remaining ignorant of your evil being merely locks it inside of you where it is hidden behind the carefully constructed idea of yourself (your persona: the role you play in your community and for your family). It is your personal internal prison cell behind the giant wall that you built to conceal your evil being. You built the wall so well, most of the time you can’t even see your evil being locked inside your mental prison cell with you.

This thing inside of you is relentless and torments you night and day. In an act of utter desperation, you spew it out onto others and shout in a voice dripping with rage and fury:

“There! There is the boogeyman!

There is the Devil!

There is the Evil Thing that must be annihilated!”

Or, if the other person (the boogeyman) was once part of your exclusive club of people who know the Truth and what is really going on, you might shout:

“Hang Mike Pence!!”

In a world where Putin calls the people of Ukraine Nazis. Never mind he is the one acting like the Nazi. He is the one full of hate. He is the one who has driven out close to a million Russian men because they don’t want to fight in his barbaric, poorly equipped, and pretty bad army. He is losing. So he resorts to lies and double downs on stupid while waging his limp, impotent Nuclear Weiner.

Do not be fooled by Putin’s weak, victim-based, impotent hysterics! He is exactly the type of man who would push the button.

In a world where Iran’s Moral Police beat up and kill young women simply for wearing their hijab too loosely. But it is themselves they are really policing. They are afraid that if they see a single strand of hair sticking out from a hijab, their Limp Weak Weiner will grow. And if this happens, they are afraid they’ll lose control and turn into the Devils they know themselves to really be deep, deep down inside. This corrupt and bankrupt regime has already killed 272 young people and beaten and/or tortured 1,110 others.

In each world outlined above, each man’s rigid, inflexible thinking and bullshit is camouflage for the shitty little men they really are. They lust after power and cluster together helping each other hold onto power and control in their stinking palaces riddled with long, long corridors of terror.

Maps of Hate

This is what the corruption is and this is what it does to human beings. It is a kind of moral bankruptcy. It takes root inside individuals who find each other and clump together in groups that try to take control in order to enforce their style and way of thinking. If they do get control, they quickly create systems that exclude diversity and impose their way of doing things in brutal ways meant to terrorize everyone else into compliance. When a government becomes populated by such individuals, it turns into a structural system of terror bent on brutalizing anyone who is not exactly like them.

There are three main mappable categories of this deadly psychic virus: Dictators, Terror Groups, and Hate Groups. But the corruption lives inside everyone and is readily expressed in every day transactions. You see it in families, in workplaces, in schools, between friends and lovers. It thrives in ignorance and lack of self-awareness. It particularly loves to reside inside narcissists!

Dictators of the World

Current World Dictators
This is a comprehensive, up-to-date list of the world's current dictators and authoritarian regimes. In 2022, there are 57 dictatorships in the world. We define a dictator as the ruler of a land rated “Not Free” by the Freedom House in their annual survey of freedom. See the interactive map and photos below or click to visit the current dictators category.

Of course, the dictators of the world will point to all the yellow areas of this map and claim, “There! There is the evil capitalists who are draining the world of resources and polluting our planet!”

They are not entirely wrong, expect they think in black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. They split the world into opposite halves. Then, they step inside the Good Bubble, created entirely inside their mind and spew out their pent-up boiling hate, vengeance, and destructive tendencies on everyone else. They never take responsibility for themselves. They are the consummate victim, and always the hero in their narcissistic story. And so, it is in this way that we (the human race) will split the planet into two unreconcilable halves and all die together in a seething puddle of hate.

Terror Groups

One step behind dictators and authoritarian rulers of the world are terror groups such as Boko Haram, ISIS, and Taliban (which actually managed to retake control of Afghanistan bumping them back up to the dictator map above). The map below shows terror groups around the world and provides a list of largest terrorist groups worldwide.

These are groups of people who twist words and religions to bolster their brutal causes. They are mostly stateless centers of terror who are trying to grab some land and people who they can crush and ruin.

2021 Global Terrorism Index
Overall Terrorism Index Score: GTI is a composite measure made up of four indicators: incidents, fatalities, injuries and property damage. To measure the impact of terrorism, a five year weighted average is applied.

Hate Groups

One step behind terror groups are hate groups. Rather than centering their brutal activities in one spot or country, hate groups operate like a distributed network that hock, sell, and propagate hate. It is easier than ever to breed hate with the advent of the Internet and people who live their lives online.

Hate groups traffick outrage and outlandish accusations designed to divide the world into Us and Them, into people you can trust and people you can’t trust. Hate groups are insidious and invade peoples minds like a drug. Once you become addicted to hate, it is an addiction that is harder to kick than heroin. It is a poison to your mind that is more destructive than Meth. Hate literally changes the neural pathways of your brain.

The following images are from Jigsaw, an incredible website that helps you visualize hate.

Red Pilling: Signalling allegiance to a group or ideology often becomes an all-consuming project for extremists. Even once an extremist has been formally admitted into a group or online forum of extremists, formers described the need to prove themselves as “down for the cause” or “white enough” by committing more and more time and energy. This performance of dedication often escalates in a competitive fashion, resulting in hate speech and violence.
Red Pilling: The rise of informal white supremacist communities online over the last 20 years has made it easier to find, join, and become radicalized into white supremacist groups. Whereas groups in the past might have recruited at white power rock shows or amenable bars, online radicalization no longer requires this investment of in-person time and physical vetting. Today a person can spend hours online moving through increasingly radical content and discussion forums. The immersive nature of these online forums and communities can create a “new normal” that contradicts offline social norms28. This also means younger children and teens, who could not be recruited at bars or white power concerts in the past, can more easily join white supremacist groups at impressionable ages. One former interviewed had entered a white supremacist forum at age 13 and, drawn to the provocative memes and secretive chat forums, had adopted national socialist beliefs by 15. By 18, he was part of a neo-Nazi terrorist organization proscribed in the UK.
Formal and informal extremist groups often coexist online, playing complementary roles
White supremacy is a globally networked movement

Another excellent mapping project is the Hate-Map using real time data of hate events to create a map that shows hotspots and how hate is growing worldwide.

Interactive Hate Map | You need to go to the site embedded in the Hate Map, but as you zoom into an area, the number of incidences increases in the the places that appear white in the map above this one. 
The Hate Map is populated with data submitted both by our internal researchers, the public and our network of volunteers. This data largely stems from publicly available news-sources and consolidations of information from other public data-sets and records. Existing records are however often limited in scope and fail to give a comprehensive picture of the global activities of the far right ranging from spread of propaganda and low-level activities through major terrorist incidents.
All data in the Hate Map is verified and quality controlled by internal researchers who are experts on far right extremism and experienced in the field of open source intelligence (OSINT) building on public sources and providing verifiable documentation before it is made available in our public-facing database and dashboard. Our researchers take great care to verify sources where there might exist any doubt. Links to external sources are provided for all our database entries in order to ensure that the public further can verify any incident independently.
Our dataset is cross referenced against the work of other institutions and organizations mapping the far right in order to ensure as comprehensive a picture of the global situation of the far right as possible, in keeping with the highest academic standards.
The Hate Map is a living document and both recent and historic events are added and verified on a daily basis. -- The Hate-Map

The Playbook

Regardless of if you are a dictator; an authoritarian ruler; a leader or member of a terror group; a leader or member of a hate group; a narcissistic boss, sibling, friend, or parent, you play from the same dirty handbook. That book repeats one mantra over and over, which is to inflict as much pain, terror, and suffering on your enemy (which is anyone who does not agree with you) while constantly claiming to be the victim. And if you can’t win that way, then you have the right to destroy everything.

This attitude, belief system, behavior is all a big cover up of who you really are. It is a smoke screen and distraction because deep, deep down inside yourself you feel inferior, impotent, dithering, confused, frighten, and like a limp Weiner. That’s why you run around the world hurting everyone else. If you can’t have it your way, then you want to be the first to destroy it!

Looking at these map, it is pretty clear we are not doing very well as species. No wonder we are not paying attention to Climate Change. Perhaps we won’t need to after all. The way things are going we will blow ourselves up before nature cleans us off the surface of the planet with climate disasters that are only getting bigger and more deadlier by the year… and this trend is only going bigger and badder not the other way.

Perhaps we all better stop, take a deep breathe, and listen to the Whale Songs again. The ones Vermont biologist Roger Payne captured and brought to us in the 1970s!

Songs Of The Humpback Whale – by Dr. Roger Payne
Gordon Snyder; 494 subscribers

Yetzer Harah

I realized this thing Lin said in the second episode of Shantaram is part of the puzzle of the Yetzer Harah.

I first heard about the Yetzer Harah while listening to Alan Watts lectures who describes it like this:

So, in Hebrew theology incidentally. That there is a thing called the yetzer harah. And in the beginning of time when God created Adam he implanted in him the yetzer hara and the yetzer hara means that wayward spirit. He put something funny in man so that man would be a little odd and it was a result of the yetzer hara that Adam was tempted by Eve who was tempted by the serpent to eat that famous fruit. And, but the Hebrew believes that everything that God created is good. Including the Yetzer Hara. Because if it hadn’t been for the yetzer hara, there would have nothing ever happened. Everybody would have obeyed God and God would have said well this is kind of a bore. 

Now that you see, you can’t you can’t just get up to someone and say disobey me, because if they do there are varying you. See that’s a double bind. Say to somebody disobey me but God is much more subtle than that. He didn’t tell Adam to disobey he told him to obey. 

But suddenly he put this yetzer hara thing in like that so that, God would say well I’m not responsible. For this thing’s going to happen on its own because what everybody wants is something to happen on its own. And everybody wants that. 

Because you see, this sensation of being you. This curious lonely center of awkward sensitivity, subject to the most peculiar feelings and pains and anxieties and all that sort of thing all that. Is an essential prerequisite for feeling something else. These two experiences go together. -- 2.4.9 Way Beyond Seeking Part 2; Alan Watts Organization

In short, the Yetzer Harah is why we do evil things, why we fear people we don’t know, why we wage wars, why we cheat each other… pretty much why we are living in the mess we made of the world today.

Shantaram tells the story of how Lin made a mess of his life (surely guided by his inner Yetzer Harah that tempted him into making a lot of bad choices that landed him in prison). Then, Lin makes a courageous choice, escapes from prison, and gets a second chance to live his life, which he is messing up again–gosh darn it!

I’m only on episode 2…so Lin is probably going to embark on different mistakes. And I bet he is going to grow from these mistakes because Lin demonstrates the capacity to reflect on his new situation and past mistakes, which pushing open the door of the prison cell inside your head, just a little bit, but if you look…there is vast and beautiful field of wisdom beyond your prison cell behind your wall of ignorance.

Is wisdom perhaps the reason God implanted the Yetzer Harah into man at the very beginning?

I suppose we will never know because clearly we are going to kill each other long before we can collectively learn how to embrace diversity and celebrate life in all its many facets and ways of being in the world.

Images For Archetypal Animations

Feature Archetypal Animation

Cucuy: The Boogeyman
Free Evil Fiend Art Prints and Artworks
Alice In Wonderland Clip Alice Falls Into a Rabbit Hole 2010 HD
Shop Alice Falling Down The Rabbit Hole Designs in Fabric
White rabbit runs and falls into a hole

Music: Down the Rabbit Hole: Emma Wallace [1] Rabbit Hole    2:02

Second Archetypal Animation

I was searching for exactly what Lin said to himself when he woke up the first morning in his friends tent in the Bombay slum. I could not find it, but I found a lot of other great quotes from Gregory David Roberts who is the author of Shantarm. So, I have sprinkled these in between the credits of where I found the images for this animation.

Shantaram TV Review

“Civilisation, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.” 
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.” ― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love; the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing; the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on.” 
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“The past reflects eternally between two mirrors -the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say.” 
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

Charlie Hunnam And Shubham Saraf Tell Us About How The Spirit Of Chaos (And One Drunken Night) Fueled ‘Shantaram’

“While I was chained to a wall and being tortured, I realized, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.” ~ Gregory David Roberts

“The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,’ he said. ‘It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men – it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone – the noblest man alive or the most wicked – has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.” ~ Gregory David Roberts

“It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.” ~ Gregory David Roberts

Charlie Hunnam Fell In Love With India While Working On ‘Shantaram’ But Also Fell Severely Ill!

“There’s a truth deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I’m telling it to you now.” ~ Gregory David Roberts

“Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever.” ~ Gregory David Roberts

“Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.” ~ Gregory David Roberts

Shantaram
Roberts, Gregory David
Shantaram
Inde. Bombay ou Mumbai, il faut choisir son 

Music: Shantaram (Chapter Four)Various Artists [1] Aeternum    9:16 [2] Inner Fire – Yuriy from Russia Remix    9:15

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UFOs No…But Unexplained Inner Phenomena, Yes!

Who doesn’t like UFOs?!

Think Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (2/8) Movie CLIP – Chasing the UFOs (1977) HD
261,453 views, Oct 7, 2012

Or ET:

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (2/10) Movie CLIP – Getting Drunk (1982) HD
4,391,816 views, May 27, 2011

But Are They Real?

David Kestenbaum of This American Life says: U-F-No!

Not long ago, in an extremely rare moment of bipartisan unity, Republicans and Democrats came together to discuss UFOs, now called unexplained aerial phenomena or UAPs by the military. It is the first Congressional meeting on the topic since 1969.

Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray, left, and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie speak Tuesday during a House Intelligence, Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee hearing on “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” on Capitol Hill in Washington. Alex Brandon/AP — Image from NPR Report on Congress UFO Hearing

David listened into the hearing along with Mick West.

Mick West is a British science writer, skeptical investigator, and retired video game programmer. He is the creator of the websites Contrail Science and Metabunk, and he investigates and debunks pseudoscientific claims and conspiracy theories such as chemtrails and UFOs. Wikipedia

This short episode of This American Life is a curation of their discussion of the Congressional Hearing while they listened to military officials present a report to Congress that includes about 400 incidents, which is up from 143 assessed in a report released about a year ago.

Mick explained a lot of the unexplained aerial phenomena as camera artifacts such as these:

Scott W. Bray, the deputy director of Naval intelligence, told lawmakers there is no evidence of aliens, and they still haven’t uncovered anything “nonterrestrial in origin,” although there remain incidents they can’t explain.

That Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Real

Despite lacking physical evidence that proves the reality of UFOs (other than other explanations such as camera artifacts, mylar balloons, and contrails) that does not mean there isn’t something very real going on. Indeed, this unexplained phenomena is as old as man’s ability to articulate his experiences to others. What makes humans extraordinary on this planet is our shared ability to perceive and share physical reality through words, symbols, and ideas. Human beings also share the ability to perceive and make sense of inner realities. Indeed, mankind’s most spectacular ideas and inventions originate from this inner dimension of being.

Carl Jung is best known for his theories of the human subconscious and the idea he termed the Collective Unconscious. Through his practice as a psychiatrist, he came to believe humanity shares a subconscious mind that stores the memories of all human beings, dead and alive, that are available to us through images, visions, dreams, and other phenomena humans experience, especially at times of stress, trauma, life and death.

The notion of collective consciousness was put forward by Carl Gustav Jung (Image: Lightspring/Shutterstock) — Image from: Carl Jung and the Concept of Collective Consciousness

Jung wrote a book about UFO and paranormal phenomenon. Here are two summaries of this book:

While Jung is known mainly for his theories on the nature of the unconscious mind, he did have an interest in the paranormal. In this essay, Jung applies his analytical skills to the UFO phenomenon. Rather than assuming that the modern prevalence of UFO sightings are due to extraterrestrial craft, Jung reserves judgment on their origin & connects UFOs with archetypal imagery, concluding that they have become a "living myth." This essay is intriguing in its methodology & implications as to the nature of UFOs & their relation to the human psyche. -- GoodReads: Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
In the threatening situation of the world today, when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake, the projection-creating fantasy soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets.... Even people who would never have thought that a religious problem could be a serious matter that concerned them personally are beginning to ask themselves fundamental questions. Under these circumstances it would not be at all surprising if those sections of the community who ask themselves nothing were visited by `visions,' by a widespread myth seriously believed in by some and rejected as absurd by others.--C. G. Jung, in Flying Saucers Jung's primary concern in Flying Saucers is not with the reality or unreality of UFOs but with their psychic aspect. Rather than speculate about their possible nature and extraterrestrial origin as alleged spacecraft, he asks what it may signify that these phenomena, whether real or imagined, are seen in such numbers just at a time when humankind is menaced as never before in history. The UFOs represent, in Jung's phrase, a modern myth. -- GoogleBooks Summary

Jung maintained throughout his life that man’s inner life, dreams, images, visions is real and carries a reality, a gravity that can be felt in our lives each and every day.

Sources for Images Above: Myth CraftsCarl Jung and UFOs: Ancient Alien Art – Myth Crafts; Brill[PDF] Judaism and the UFO; with Emphasis on the Vision of Ezekiel; Cambridge University PressTrauma, flying saucers and the art of Ionel Talpazan | Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences | Cambridge Core; Saatchi ArtUFO 0361, 2019, mixed media on canvas, 40x50cm Painting by Marc Jung | Saatchi Art; GoodreadsOwlseyes (O’Porto, Portugal)’s review of Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies; Princeton University PressFlying Saucers | Princeton University Press

Reality Is Strange | We Need Inner Astronauts Now More Than Ever

Perhaps we need more inner astronauts willing and able to go where no man has gone before, equipped with abilities to chart our inner space, just as we do our outer space. Indeed, inner space may be far vaster than the universe, which may be a little phenomena of this vast inner space that we do not understand very much at all.

In a time of so much crisis, we need to learn how to better articulate inner weather and dangerous patterns just as we have learned to watch and predict weather patterns and identify dangerous patterns such as Hurricane Ian.

There have been many dangerous and horrible natural disasters this year, including devastating floods in Pakistan, acute heat waves and historically lower water levels in rivers throughout Europe, and increasingly bigger and deadlier fires worldwide (see 2022 International Wildfires: As of Sept. 8, the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) estimates that within European Union countries, between 2 million acres and 2.1 million acres have burned).

There is also dangerous and deadly inner weather that is sweeping the world. It travels on currents of propaganda, misinformation, lies, and conspiracy myths. Hurricane Putin is meaning the entire world with his threats of nukes, sabotaging his own pipeline (a play he used to get into power when he had apartment buildings blown up and blamed it on Chechen separatists), and the death, destruction, and torture of Ukrainians. His maniacal invasion of Ukraine rides on his strangle hold on power in Russia allowing him to infect and propagate a collective homicidal psychosis among his people. His and other strong arm actors in our world are distracting us and contributing to our collective failure to mitigate climate change while we still can.

Can you tell which pictures that are Putin’s hurricane of devastation and death and which are Ian?

Images above from: Sky NewsUkraine war: Images taken by Sky News team reveal devastating aftermath of war | World News | Sky News; Tampa Bay TimesAbsolute devastation’: Hurricane Ian decimates Fort Myers Beach; ABC NewsWhat’s the cost of damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure amid Russia’s invasion? – ABC NewsVisit; The Sun DailyRescue efforts continue as Florida takes stock of Hurricane Ian devastation; BBCUkraine war: Images reveal scale of destruction in Mariupol – BBC News; The News-PressAerial video shows devastation on Fort Myers Beach after Hurricane IanWatch… on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022; USNews.comRussian Carnage, Destruction Revealed in Newly Liberated Ukrainian Territory; southernminn.comIan lashes South Carolina as Florida surveys devastation | State | southernminn.com; University of Nevada, RenoUkraine, horror of the past, terror to the future | University of Nevada, Ren; Charisma NewsSharks in the Streets, Houses Floating Away as Ian Leaves Mass Devastation — Charisma NewsVisit; Common DreamsCivilians ‘Paying the Highest Price’ for ‘Utter Devastation’ of Ukraine: UN Official; Independent.ieIn pictures: Hurricane Ian causes devastation as it swamps parts of Florida – Independent.ie

Charting A New Future

I think Future Islands nailed the idea of unidentified phenomena, either being external or internal, in their beautiful song Like the Moon:

Future Islands – Like the Moon
6,667,533 views

Without better abilities to navigate our inner spaces, we will probably destroy our planet and ourselves right along with it.

First Archetypal Image

Child Road Spaceship Photomontage Ufo Kid Girl | warppppp5 | Waschi Washborne  •  Age 60  •  Essen/Germany  •  Member since Dec. 15, 2020

Second Archetypal Image

Ufo Abduction Fantasy Bicycle Child Baby Alien | 0fjd125gk87 | Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 3, 2013

Third Archetypal Image

Fantasy Landscape Spaceship Ufo Hover | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #274

Fourth Archetypal Image

Wald Nature Frau Flower Photomontage | warppppp5 | Waschi Washborne  •  Age 60  •  Essen/Germany  •  Member since Dec. 15, 2020

Fifth Archetypal Image

Water Drops Waterdrop Liquid Jumping Up Drop | Inactive account – ID 4924546

Sixth Archetypal Image

Ballet Water Drop Frau Ballerina Liquid | warppppp5 | Waschi Washborne  •  Age 60  •  Essen/Germany  •  Member since Dec. 15, 2020

Seventh Archetypal Image

Earth Ufo World Globe Landscape Country Template | pixel2013 | S. Hermann / F. Richter  •  Germany  •  Member since April 9, 2016

Music for Archetypal Animation:

Uncharted History | Sound Effects Zone

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Vagina Obscura & Other Shameful Mysteries

The Shameful Vagina

Several days ago, I heard Rachel E. Gross interviewed on the The Takeaway about her new book “Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage.” Melissa Harris-Perry, the host, introduces Rachel saying:

Rachel's new book looks at the historical dis, miss, and lack of information about the bodies of people with vaginas, which includes women, trans men, intersex people, and non-binary people. In the introduction to her book, Rachel describes conversations she had with multiple scientists who tried to explain why we understand so much less about female anatomy and vaginas compared to male anatomy and penises.

Interesting things Rachel says about vaginas:

"When pressed, he and others acknowledged that this discrepancy at its heart is due to sexism within science and who is actually doing the investigating. For most of history, women, especially women of color, trans women, and women who are sexual minorities have been excluded from the supposedly universal endeavor. As I reported this book, it became clear to me that the two problems were inseparable. The marginalization of women's bodies from science is largely due to the marginalization of women from science."
"A huge theme in this book is that you only see what you expect to see and you can't see what you aren't looking for. That mostly comes up when we're talking about these older, usually male anatomists who are looking at female bodies and expecting to see something. They expected the female body to be reproductive, to be mostly about the uterus. To not really have that big a capacity for pleasure or for active dynamic processes going on."
"What they illustrated was very passive, a hole or a cave. The word vagina actually means a sheath, which suggests that its main role is to house a penis, which it is not. There definitely is a reimagining going on by a lot of new scientists and you can see that in the art throughout the book. Every chapter opens with an illustration that really looks at these organs in a new way. Usually, one that is active, dynamic, and resilient."
"Unfortunately, the idea of shame has really impacted the way that science, medicine, and people with this anatomy have viewed the "female body." There's a really strong pattern going back to Hippocrates of anatomists really insisting on naming these body parts after shame, especially the clitoris and the vulva. Hippocrates called all the genitals the shame parts, essentially, but that continued. Every time a French anatomist would, ''discover" the clitoris, he would name it the shame part."
"Even today you have words like Scham Lippin in German, which means the shame lips and refers to the labia. You have pudendum, which is an anatomical term that's hopefully being phased out, but it means the parts for which you should be ashamed. Again, it refers to only the vulva. Shame has really attached itself to the female genitals in particular, and that has affected the way science is done. There is a hesitancy of looking directly at this part of the body. There is a tendency to associate it with danger, sexuality in a negative light, the threat of pregnancy and STDs and disease."
"It's really blocked us from looking at the incredibly unexpected and expansive things that this system is doing. The ovaries are producing hormones that support body-wide health from bone health to heart health, to brain health. The uterus is one of the most regenerative organs in the body, and when it's not pregnant, just going through monthly menstruation, it's ushering stem cells and immune cells to heal this wound painlessly, it's creating new blood vessels and it's doing this every month on cue, and it probably has a lot to teach us about regenerative medicine in general but having looked at these organs with themes like shame and only reproduction in mind has really narrowed the view."

The female body has long been shamed by modern civilizations and many religions for centuries. Rachel says it has been colonized with the same imperial brutality inflicted on native peoples and the land worldwide. I think this is shameful: Man’s capacity to inflict brutality upon his fellow human beings and all life.

The Shame of Being a Sexual Being

Around the same time, I heard The TakeAway, I also listened to a lecture by Alan Watts about Repressed Sex. I never know where Synchronistic Stories are going to lead me, but this one seemed important.

Alan Watts artfully captures our confusion and shame around sex. Above is the video with his lecture and below is a transcript of it if you prefer to read. I’ll let you make your own connections, if you’re interested.

Transcript from video with time markings:

0:08 min Because naturally when you love someone 0:10 very much indeed in the enthusiasm and 0:13 ardor of youth you say things that are 0:18 hardly logical or rational you stand up 0:24 before an altar and you say my darling 0:25 my sweetheart my perfect pet I adore you 0:28 so much that I will live with you 0:30 forever and ever until death do us part 0:32 and that’s the way you feel at the time 0:36 in rather similar mood ancient peoples 0:40 would hail their kings and say O king 0:42 live forever obviously this was not 0:45 literally meant they were just wishing 0:48 him a long life but to live forever no 0:50 sir no mortal does that so the trouble 0:56 was you see that when certain kinds of 0:59 extravagant poetic expressions got in 1:04 the hands of people like Agustin and 1:06 Tertullian who were rather influenced by 1:10 Roman literalness they wrote it into the 1:13 law books and so this amazing situation 1:19 came about but we still have not fully 1:22 explored the subtlety of it let us 1:27 consider certain periods when this 1:31 attitude of PrudeISM towards sexuality 1:34 was in us in an ascendancy nearest to 1:38 our times is the bourgeois revolution 1:42 you might call it in Victorian England 1:45 and the United States we all say 1:48 Victorian as an adjective to indicate 1:51 grundyISM extreme monogamy a definite 1:59 disgust for all things sexual and yet 2:04 when we really go into the history of 2:07 the Victorian period we find that it was 2:10 an extremely luscious 2:12 EPOC one has only to look at the 2:17 lushness the victorian furniture he 2:20 realized that chairs are disguised women 2:26 that the way even piano legs are shaped 2:30 when this kind of thing is throughout 2:33 Victorian art forms and the conduct of 2:37 the British aristocracy during that 2:39 period record description people like 2:45 Freud and Havelaar Kellis made certain 2:49 mistake yeah they said about the church 2:57 and about religion in general that it 2:59 was nothing but a form of sublimated sex 3:04 they said these people for curious 3:06 reasons suppressed sex and therefore it 3:09 becomes a very powerful force for them 3:14 you must remember of course that they 3:16 worked on a hydraulic analogy of human 3:18 psychology that they liken it all to a 3:21 river if you dammed it up that would 3:23 burst it down he doesn’t actually follow 3:26 that human psychology is hydraulic but 3:29 this is the metaphor they used now they 3:31 said the church has repressed sex but 3:34 actually if you look at its symbolism it 3:37 is nothing but an expression of sex 3:40 everything is reduced to libido as the 3:43 fundamental reality and the church 3:49 replied “It’s nothing of the kind we deny 3:52 this we think that this reduction of 3:55 everything for sex is just a way of 3:57 attacking holy things and on the 4:01 contrary we would say that people who 4:03 are fascinated with sex and make it 4:05 their God are replete are repressing 4:06 religion 4:11 now the problem in this debate everybody 4:13 missed the boat the church should have 4:18 been in a position to say to Freud well 4:20 of course 4:21 thank you very much ah yes indeed our 4:25 symbolism is sexual, the steeples on our 4:28 churches the vesicle shaped windows and 4:36 of suffer addict shields on which we put 4:39 images of the crucifix or the Virgin 4:42 Mother of God these are all quite 4:45 plainly sexual, but you see the sexual 4:49 biology in its term reveals the 4:53 mysteries of the universe; sex is not 4:56 mere sex sex is a holy thing and is one 5:04 of the most marvelous revelations of the 5:06 divine but imagine the church just 5:11 couldn’t say that if you look at Tibetan 5:16 Buddhist iconography they’re images or 5:20 you look in Hindu temples you will find 5:23 things that Europeans and Americans have 5:27 never been able to understand here are 5:30 images of Buddhas and of the gods 5:33 engaged in amazing diversions with their 5:37 female counterparts and everybody thinks 5:40 it needs a kind of dirty sculptures now 5:43 they are nothing of the kind they are 5:47 saying to the people who look at them 5:51 the play of man and woman is on that 5:57 level on the level of biology a 6:00 reflection of the fundamental play of 6:02 the cosmos the play of the positive and 6:06 negative principles of the light and the 6:08 dark of the mental and the material they 6:13 all play together and 6:17 the function of sexual play is not 6:22 merely the survival and utilitarian 6:24 function of reproducing the species as 6:27 it is among animals to a very large 6:29 extent what peculiarly distinguishes 6:33 human sexuality is that it brings the 6:38 partners closer and closer to each other 6:42 in an intense state of United feeling in 6:46 other words it is a sacrament the output 6:48 and visible sign of an inward and 6:50 spiritual grace bringing about love and 6:54 so if that is peculiar to human beings 6:58 it is perfect nonsense to degrade human 7:02 sexuality by saying it should only be 7:04 carried on in the way that the animals 7:06 do theirs because they have not yet as 7:11 it were evolved to the place where sex 7:13 is the sacramental expression of man and 7:19 woman’s love and this love in that sense 7:23 is a kind of enthusiasm which means a 7:27 being possessed by the Divine falling in 7:32 love although considered by practical 7:35 people to be a sort of madness is 7:38 actually the same sort of thing as the 7:40 mystical vision a grace and in its light 7:48 we see people in their divine aspect 7:54 when as the song says every little 7:57 breeze 7:58 whispers Louise there is a sort of 8:02 extraordinary state of mystical 8:05 intoxication in which the ideal woman 8:10 has become the goddess which is from one 8:17 point of view what every woman is if you 8:20 see her with the scales of your eyes and 8:24 likewise every man 8:28 seen with the scales of her eyes so what 8:38 happened then 8:38 as a result of this historical situation 8:40 was mutual name-calling between the 8:45 proponents of religion and the 8:47 proponents of scientific naturalism such 8:51 as Freud and Havelock Ellis and in our 8:57 own times Albert Ellis and people of 9:02 that kind they’ve never got together 9:06 because they’ve never understood 9:10 neither the church nor the opponents of 9:13 the church have clearly understood that 9:15 the secret or unconscious motivation of 9:18: sexual repression is to make it all the 9:20: more interesting and on the other side 9:26: it has not been clearly understood that 9:28: the sexual biology and all that goes 9:38: with it is a figuring forth on the level 9:47: of biology of what the whole universe is 9:50: about ecstatic clay so as a result there 10:04: has been a kind of compromise 10:07: today in ecclesiastical circles sex is 10:11: being damned with faint praise people 10:18: are saying after all yes sex was made by 10:20: God and we should remember the Jewish 10:22: point of view and it is perhaps for 10:27 something more than reproduction to 10:29 bring about the cementing of the 10:31 marriage ties between husband and wife 10:33 but 10:37 still in practice it remains the 10:42 frightening taboo on the other hand the 10:50 opposition to Christian prudery goes 10:54 overboard and always moves in the 11:00 direction of total license you see 11:04 what’s going on as a contest between the 11:06 people who want the skirts pulled down 11:08 to the floor the people want them pulled 11:10 up to the neck and you you know you’ve 11:14 got to draw the line somewhere but the 11:17 play between these forces is where are 11:19 we going to draw it well that’s very 11:21 exciting provide neither side wins 11:24 I mean imagine what it would be like if 11:28 the libertarians won and they took over 11:31 the church so that on Wednesday evenings 11:34 the young Presbyterian group would meet 11:37 for prayer through sex every child would 11:45 go to the school physician for a course 11:47 in hygienics and they would have 11:49 classes and that have plastic models and 11:51 all the children would do it in class 11:52 very clean hygienic circumstances all 11:56 sprayed with rubbing alcohol it’ll be 11:58 fun imagine how boring it would all 12:00 become so you see the people who say no 12:05 modesty is important have something 12:07 right about but they mustn’t be allowed 12:10 to get away with it but they mustn’t be 12:13 obliterated see life works that way 12:17 let’s take an entirely different analogy 12:19 let’s take a given biological group a 12:22 species we’ll call a it has a natural 12:26 enemy B now one day a gets furious at 12:31 the natural enemy B and says let’s 12:33 obliterate it and they gather their 12:35 forces and they knock out their natural 12:36 enemy well suddenly after a while they 12:41 begin to get weak they get over 12:43 populated there’s nobody around to eat 12:45 up their surplus creatures and they 12:47 don’t have to keep their muscles tensed 12:49 against 12:50 any enemy and they begin to fall apart 12:52 because they destroyed their enemy what 12:55 they should do is cultivate the enemy 12:57 that’s the real meaning of love your 12:58 enemy there is such a thing as a beloved 13:01 enemy and if you don’t have a beloved 13:07 enemy in other words if the Flies and 13:10 the spiders don’t go together you’re 13:12 going to be too many spiders or too many 13:13 flies and these balances are keep the 13:17 course of nature going well it’s exactly 13:19 the same thing as between the Libertarians 13:21 and the Prudes they need each other and 13:25 you should thank if you’ve got a prudish 13:28 father and mother you should be very 13:31 grateful to them for having made sex so 13:33 interesting 13:41 so don’t defy them completely don’t go 13:43 around campus with placards bearing 13:45 four-letter words because that’s going 13:50 to spoil the show that every generation 13:53 must react to the one before you see to 13:56 keep this tension going and it is by 14:00 this tension this play of the opposites 14:03 that we have the love that makes the 14:05 world go round.

The Shame of Being a Conscious Being

Primal Split | Music: You Are Not My Mother
The Ultimate Fantasy Playlist, Various Artists
[1] Mad Head Voices    2:35

The third synchronistic thread I encountered is the Primal Split. This is the moment an infant becomes aware that he or she is a separate being from the mother. This is the beginning of a complicated cascade of emotions and conflicts that spark the awakening of ego-consciousness and symbolic thought, if the infant makes it to the other side of this split. If the infant navigates this crossing successfully, there is a moment of shame that must to be dealt with on the journey in becoming a fully conscious being.

I was doing research on the Primal Split for the book I am writing and realized its connection to Rachel E. Gross’ book and Alan Watts’ lecture. I also discovered this amazing performance art exhibit about the Primal Split created by Oya Damla.

Following is background on Melanie Klien and Oya Damla along with a fascinating theory of knowledge that is very much related to the Primal Split, shame, and how we come to know who and what we know as human beings. Again, I’ll let you make your own connections.

Melanie Klien & The Primal Split

Melanie Klein was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existential anxiety in infancy catalyzed the formation of the unconscious, resulting in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad idealizations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences; the quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distresses a person experiences later in life.[1] -- Wiki

Child analysis[edit]

While Freud's ideas concerning children mostly came from working with adult patients, Klein was innovative in working directly with children, often as young as two years old. Klein saw children's play as their primary mode of emotional communication. While observing children as they played with toys such as dolls, animals, plasticine or pencils and paper, Klein documented their activities and interactions. She then attempted to interpret the unconscious meaning behind their play. Following Freud, she emphasized the significant role that parental figures played in the child's fantasy life and concluded that the timing of Freud's Oedipus complex was incorrect. Contradicting Freud, she proposed that the superego was present from birth.
After exploring ultra-aggressive fantasies of hate, envy, and greed in very young and disturbed children, Melanie Klein proposed a model of the human psyche that linked significant oscillations of state, with the postulated Eros or Thanatos pulsations. She named the state of the mind in which the sustaining principle of life dominates the depressive position. A depressive position is the understanding that good and evil things are one. The fears and worries about the fate of the people destroyed in the child's fantasy are all in the latter. The child tries to repair his mother through phantasm and behavior therapy, overcoming his depression and anxiety. He employs phantasies representing love and restoration to restore the others he destroyed. Morality is based on the standpoint of depression. Klein named it the depressive position because the efforts to restore the integrity of the damaged object are accompanied by depression and despair. After all, the child doubts whether it can fix everything it hurts. Many consider this to be her most significant contribution to psychoanalytic philosophy. She later developed her ideas about an earlier developmental psychological state corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of life, which she called the paranoid-schizoid position.[6] Klein coined the term "paranoid-schizoid defense" to emphasize how the child's worries manifest as persecution fantasies and how he defends himself against persecution by separating. The paranoid-schizoid position develops at birth is a common psychotic condition.
Klein's insistence on regarding aggression as an important force in its own right when analyzing children brought her into conflict with Freud's daughter Anna Freud, who was one of the other prominent child psychotherapists in continental Europe but who moved to London in 1938 where Klein had been working for several years. Many controversies arose from this conflict, and these are often referred to as the controversial discussions. Battles were played out between the two sides, each presenting scientific papers, working out their respective positions and where they differed, during war-time Britain. A compromise was eventually reached whereby three distinct training groups were formed within the British Psychoanalytical Society, with Anna Freud's influence remaining largely predominant in the US. -- Wiki

Oya Damla‘s Performance of the Primal Split

Check out Oya’s website for more about her beautiful interpretation of the moment of the Primal Split. The images of the Second Archetypal Animation come from photos she shares of this performance. She also shares original sound track for this performance. To hear this, you need to go to her site. It is well worth your time if this topic interests you.

Oya Damla‘s Performance of the Primal Split | See her website!

Sex, Kids, and The Theory of O

With the birth of consciousness, humans enter a new realm of being. In this realm, knowledge and truth are incredibly important because they help us navigation through the world of symbols, which we use to navigate through our lives. Truth and knowledge especially matter in the corrosive vat of anti-truth and anti-knowledge. Our modern age is full of false prophets touting false truths and false knowledge, in short, they are full of shit and hocking lots of lies to enrich themselves or to exert control over other peoples minds.

I write about truth and knowledge in my story and encountered one of the most fascinating theories of how humans come to obtain knowledge or lose it. It is Bion’s Theory of O. Here is a bit of his theory. It is complicated. I’ll let you make your own connections if it interests you.

BION’S “TRANSFORMATION IN ‘O’

BION’S EPISTEMOLOGICAL ODYSSEY INTO THE “DEEP AND FORMLESS INFINITE”

by James S. Grotstein

INTRODUCTION

"Bion, who was to become the awesome explorer of the "deep and formless infinite" of the psyche, first immersed himself in the theories of Freud and Klein and then gradually developed a revolutionary metapsychological metatheory for psychoanalysis. Bion incurred the criticism of his colleagues by daring to investigate faith, spirituality, religion, mysticism, metaphysics, and fetal mental life. His concepts of transformations in L(ove), H(ate), and K(nowledge), as well as ofintuitionistic and subjective science[Transformations in "0" (Ultimate Truth, Absolute Reality)], constitute an objective and numinous psychoanalytic epistemology."
"Bion was preoccupied with the concept of ultimate reality and absolute truth and reoriented psychoanalytic metapsychology into a theory ofthinkingandmeta-thinking aboutemotions. He distinguished the "thoughts-without-a-thinker" from the mind that had to develop in order to think them. I believe that his concept of"intuitionistic thinking"also presumes the presence of a more profound aspect of that mind: Not only did a mind develop to harvest the "thoughts without a thinker," but another aspect of the mind had to originate these "unthought thoughts." I believe that Bion came to a realization that true "thinking" ("dream work alpha" along the dimensions of "L, H, and K") is an unconscious -- if notpreconscious -- act and that what we normally term "thinking" (application of the ordinate and abscissa of the "Grid") is really"after-thinking."
"By realigning psychoanalysis with metaphysics and ontology (existentialism), Bion perforated the mystique of ontic "objectivity" implicit to logical-positivistic, deterministic science and revealed its own unsuspected mythology--itsabsolute dependence on sense data. Applying his concept ofreversible perspective,he found myths, both collective and personal, to be themselves "scientific deductive systems" in their own right (Bion, 1992). Mostly, Bion founded a new mystical science of psychoanalysis, a numinous discipline based on theabandonment of memory, desire, and understanding. To Bion, mysticism is "seeing things as they truly are -- without disguise" (personal communication). He was preoccupied with the question of how we know what we know."
"In this contribution I emphasize my understanding of Bion as theintuitionistic epistemologist, the"emotional mathematician"(Bion, 1965), the "mystical scientist" (Bion, 1970), the intrepid voyager into the deep and formless infinite, "O." I suggest that a "Transcendent Position" is implied by Bion's conception of "O," the latter of which overarches"nameless dread," beta elements, the "thing-in-themselves," the noumenon, "absolute truth," "ultimate reality," and "reverence and awe." -- From BION'S "TRANSFORMATION IN 'O' by James S. Grotstein

Trump Endorsed QAnon Because He’s Stuck:

Trump Embrassing QAnon

On the other side of O is Q. That little mark on the right side of Q is the sign of the corruption of thought and descent into lies. It is the sign of anti-truth, propaganda, and infantile rage.

It is the sign that a person is stuck in the paranoid-schizoid position. These individuals have split the world into the Good Mother (all that is good) and the Bad Mother (all that is bad), and they have stepped into the good bubble and seek to destroy all that is bad failing to realize it is all one, everything is connected. The Good Mother and Bad Mother are the same Mother. The Good Reality and Bad Reality are the same Reality. Destroy one and you destroy All. This is indeed a shameful place humanity has allowed itself to fall into basically because we are afraid of who we really are.

See Juliette Kayyem‘s story in The Atlantic. Trump is an outsized purveyor of propaganda and lies. So is Putin. We will pay with our precious world if humanity continues to close its eyes to the danger these liars and the threat they pose to everyone and existence itself. For the human beings who buy their lies and false truths, they give up their individuality to become part of a psychological monster bent on destroying the Bad Mother…never understanding that the Good Mother and Bad Mother are One.

"For a man who believes in nothing, has no coherent ideology or value system except his own continuing relevance, obsesses over conspiracies, and subsists on grievance and anger, Donald Trump took a long time to fully embrace QAnon. For some time, the former president has been flirting with the cult—which believes, among other preposterous things, that Democrats are part of a global child-sex-trafficking ring that Trump will ultimately defeat. But lately, that courtship has turned into a consummated marriage, as Trump incorporated QAnon tropes into an Ohio rally and started spreading them on his social-media service.  -- About the author: Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for homeland security under President Barack Obama, is the faculty chair of the homeland-security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters." -- The Atlantic by  Juliette Kayyem

Trump never found his mother. He never reconciled the Good Mother with the Bad Mother. He is permanently stuck in the paranoid-schizoid position. He is a permanent infant; a raging toddler, and so too is any one who paints the world in absolutes, in black and white , in this and only this is good: everyone else is bad. We will end the world if we remain hostages to such infantile men such as Trump and Putin. Any human being stuck in the authoritarian position is playing the Confidence Man game, which is a ruse for being a permanent paranoid infant. These are mad men leading us collectively straight to Hell.

Trump and his infantile, paranoid comrades are shameful.

The End of Shame

Burying A Queen | Queen Elizabeth II

The final synchronistic thread that struck me is the death and burial of Queen Elizabeth II. Death is definitely the end of shame. It is the end of a journey through life. It is the end of that person’s story, of what that person came to understand, to know, to feel, to treasure or despise, to love, to cherish, to hate, and how they reconciled differences and conflicts. How we navigate our lives, everything we come to know and loves, comes to an inevitable end with death.

Alan Watts is absolutely right, the church is full of symbolism about sex. The steeples and naves of Christian churches are ripe with human sexuality, which is the most awesome act of creativity we are capable of as living beings. And so it is in death we end our journey through life and we are returned the womb, the tomb, from which we came.

This is what I wrote in reflecting about the death of Queen Elizabeth II. 

For anyone who has lost a loved one, the ceremony of the burial of Queen Elizabeth II was poignant and full of rich symbolism and pageantry.  There are many who mourn her passing, and there are many who say the time for royals is over.  But, we as the people of Earth have never needed the symbolic role that Queen Elizabeth II played for more than 70 years more urgently. 
We are crumbling under the weight of modern inconveniences, complexities, and confusion.  We are losing our inner rudder, our collective moral compass. When we as the people of Earth can no longer unite under a common cause, let suppose this is the continuation of a habitual planet conducive for life, then we will simply rip apart the fabric of society necessary to met the challenges of this century.
Queen Elizabeth II played a role. She knew she was a symbol of stability, of hope, of continuity and the ability of her people to endure the tough times as well as enjoy the good times. Lacking such role models, symbols of strength, virtue, and compassion, it is easy to fall prey to our own thoughts of competition, revenge, vengeance, hate.  No, she was not perfect, no human being is or ever will be and much was left undone in the wake of British imperialism. But, she showed a path, a better way, and we the Good People of Earth should take heed.
There are terrible problems ahead of us. Nuclear destruction has never been closer with the savage craze of Putin. This is such a man capable of pushing the button, so is Trump. And if nuclear war doesn't get us, then the global food crisis Putin has unleashed with his vengeful war will kill millions beyond the hundreds of thousands he has already killed with his insane war. And, he is creating the ultimate distraction preventing the world at the very moment it has a chance to mitigate the worst effects of Climate Change. There is only 8 years left.  We are the people who will leave this great task left undone, so the future of life on Earth certainly hangs on the thinnest thread yet.
It is truly a time to take stock and act as we have never done collectively as a species before.

Feature Archetypal Animation:

Images for First Archetypal Animation:

Gross was asked to sketch out some basic ideas for each chapter for the illustrator, Armando Veve, who did opening chapter illustrations for each chapter. “The result was very fun, and developing the final illustrations was super collaborative,” Gross says. Rachel Gross — The Open Notebook

Image: Armando Veve via W. W. Norton & Company —

Image: Rachel Gross Portait by Monique Jacques — Open Notebook

Contessa 39.5” Wide Velvet Wingback Chair

Church Steeple Spire Charleston South Carolina | marygasaway | Mary Gasaway  •  Age 63  •  Fletcher/United States  •  Member since April 26, 2014

Church Religion Architecture Christianity | Inactive account – ID 652234

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Music for First Archetypal Animation:

WATTSWAVE VI: The Web of Life 2 | Akira The Don | [17] She Loves Me    6:02

Second Archetypal Animation

Images for Second Archetypal Animation

Image from Oya Damla‘s Performance of the Primal Split
Image from Oya Damla‘s Performance of the Primal Split
Image from Oya Damla‘s Performance of the Primal Split
Image from Oya Damla‘s Performance of the Primal Split
Image from Oya Damla‘s Performance of the Primal Split
Image from Oya Damla‘s Performance of the Primal Split

Be sure to visit Oya Damla‘s website and listen to her original music for this provoking art she has made about the Primal Split.

Music for Second Archetypal Animation:

You Are Not My Mother
The Ultimate Fantasy PlaylistVarious Artists
[1] Mad Head Voices    2:35
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Moonlight Shaken from a Crane’s Bill

Note to viewers on iPhone, animations don’t load well on Safari…sorry for the inconvenience this causes.
Chrome on computers handle graphics pretty well.

Time for a Zen poem by Dogen about the art of living in the Now.

First Stanza

To what shall
       I liken the world?

First Archetypal Animation

To what shall I liken the world? | Music: Distant Worlds | Purrple Cat | Lunar Eclipse

Second Stanza

Moonlight, reflected
       In dewdrops.

Second Archetypal Animation

Moonlight reflected in dewdrops… | Music: Dew Drops On Spider Webs | Verne Langdon

Third Stanza

       Shaken from a crane’s bill.

Third Archetypal Animation

Shaken from a crane’s bill… | Music: Twisted & Shaken | Oscar Hollis

                    –    Dogen, 1200 – 1253
The Zen Poetry of Dogen
                         Translated by Steven Heine

The Eternal Now

Alan Watts refers to Dogen quite often in his lectures. I know so very little about Zen or Dogen, but I want to learn more.

A synchronicity as I was thinking about this blog, a Watts lecture, the book I am writing, and this poem t occurred on Wednesday, February 17, on 1A: Going back to the ’90s with Chuck Klosterman who says:

“What I mean by that is that it’s the last ten-year calendar span that seems to have immutable values, and immutable old fashions, and immutable ideas that make it seem separate from the period that it came previously. I think we are now more in a period of perpetual now where the difference between 2009 and 2019 seems almost impossible to perceive outside of discussions about politics.”

Watts talks about the eternal Now, which Dogen taught about as well centuries earlier, and yet today living and acting in the Now is harder than ever before. To describe how to do this to anyone tethered to modern Western man’s linear view of time and progress, teachings that have made us compulsive creatures ever seeking the big reward and perfection we were taught we should obtain, if we work hard enough for it, only to get towards the end of life and it never ever quite showing up.

Space-Time Isn’t Straight

And another fantastic synchronicity to the theme of this blog is from The Takeaway (NPR) and the interview with Physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Expands How We Look at the Cosmos and her new book Black.Queer.Rising that talks about the work she’s done to rethink our understanding of the cosmos and make space for more Black, queer people in STEM!

In the interview she talks about how amazing it is that we are even here since most of the universe is made out of something invisible, light goes right through it, scientists call it Dark Matter, which has taken on an entirely different sphere of meaning for many black people. She also says, “Space-time isn’t straight…” and so does Watts in many of his leturces from the 1960s. He too echoes how amazing it is that we are here. My book also explores these ideas.

Feature Archetypal Animation

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Music: [15] Chants of Native Earth    3:11 | Shamanic Moon – Native American Drums for RelaxationNative Classical Sounds

First Archetypal Animation

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Fractal Digital Art Computer Graphics Abstract | Inactive account – ID 189748

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Music: Distant Worlds | Purrple Cat | Lunar Eclipse

Second Archetypal Animation

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Music: Dew Drops On Spider Webs | Verne Langdon

Third Archetypal Animation

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Music: Twisted & Shaken | Oscar Hollis

Check out my Big Sky Series all about how nature grounds, nourishes, and sustains us during the most stressful times.

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Blood & Bringing Into Being a Kinder, Better World

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I was working on my story while listening to NPR, as is my habit. I remember perking up and paying attention when This American Life introduced the subject of this episode: Bloody Feelings — Stories about the Power of Blood. The stories were not at all what I was expecting from the title.

Bloody Feeling — Stories about the Power of Blood | This American Life

Act 1 was about Adele who she described herself as “the worst phlebotomist in the whole hospital.” She was a physical therapist until the Coronavirus gripped the country. With all her physical therapy sessions cancelled, she was not needed there. But what the hospital really needed was more people to do blood draws. I loved her story.

Act 2 is about the discovery of 30 century-old postcards written in old Yiddish by a distant family member challenges David Kestenbaum’s ideas about the unimportance of blood ties.

Act 3 is about a Shakespeare theater production that involved a lot of blood that was a little too real for the audience and what befell everyone.

Act 4 is about fibroids and a uterus that gets turned into a play titled: There’s No ‘Us’ in Uterus. Oh, Wait…

Act 5 is about a broken heart… no, not a love sick broken heart… a heart that required open heart surgery.

Walk In The Woods

While I enjoyed these stories, I wasn’t bowled over by them as other stories I’ve heard, although the color red stuck in my mind. I finished what I was doing and got my pup ready to go for a trot. This is our pandemic routine. Pumper loves our trots, especially when we see other dogs! I am pretty sure that she thinks all dogs exist on Earth to play with her. She plays well with all dogs no matter their size or temperament, adapting herself to whoever she mets for an instant playdate.

So, when we caught sight of big dog ahead of us, it was Pumper’s mission to catch up with them. They were walking fast, but Pumper was pulling me faster. Eventually, we caught up and found out the big dog was a Great Pyrenees–-Poodle mix– a Pyrepoo! It was the first one we’d ever met, and it was only 7 months old but already twice as big as Pumpernickel (now 15 months). I was admiring all the similarities between the two dogs who got along splendidly together. The owner of the Pyrepoo just told me how the Great Pyrenees were guard dogs of a flock not herders. And I just told her my dog was a Pyrepitt (she’s actually many more dogs mixed in but the Great Pyreness and Pitt Bull are the most dominate) when a Pitt Bull came upon us.

The guy walking the Pitt looked a bit anxious, but neither I nor the owner of the Pyrepoo took alarm. As he passed us with the Pitt on a super short leash, the Pyrepoo pup went over to say hello. This is common doggie custom to greet all new incoming dogs with a sniff. But no sooner had the pup approached the Pitt to sniff when he yelped in pain. The Pitt had bite him and would not let go. Both owners tried desperately to pry the Pitt’s jaws open. Pumper and I stood stunned and helpless watching what was happening before us.

Finally, the Pitt released its grip and Pyrepoo pulled back to a safe distance. I was relieved to see his nose was not the part bitten, but blood dripped from his lower lip. There was also blood in the Pitt’s mouth, and blood on the hands of both owners. It turned out the man was helping his sister with her dog and apparently didn’t know the Pitt’s temperament. The whole thing was terrible. I helped flag down a Kleenex for the owner of the Pyrepoo, then they were off to the vet get stitches. I felt so bad because had we not stopped them to say hello, they would have missed the Pitt Bull.

The synchronicity of the moment was duly noted. I have learned to pay attention to such moments when I recognize them. There is usually more going on that needs to be understood, but I had no idea what. Ruminating on blood was something I did not do, really at all… perhaps due to cultural programming.

Brooklyn Center — Then & Now

The next day, another terrible synchronicity occurred when Daunte Wright was fatally shot in Brooklyn Center, MN during a ‘routine’ traffic stop. The shooting occurred hardly more than 10 miles from where George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis. And it happened right in the middle of the trial of Chauvin, which had just completed its second week of heart wrenching testimony about George Floyd’s final moments, his life, and lost potential and presence in the lives of all who loved him. It was painful to absorb. And then, another young black man lost his life at the hands of a police officer in Minnesota.

What to Know About the Trial of Derek Chauvin | NYT: Last Updated April 16, 2021, 12:31 p.m. ET

Police fatally shoot man, 20, in suburban Minneapolis, sparking protests | Washington Post: April 12, 2021 at 3:52 a.m. EDT

These deaths hit close to home because I grew up in North Minneapolis. I know where George Floyd died and where Daunte Wright was shot. I could walk to Brooklyn Center from where I lived. I often went to the old Brookdale Mall in Brooklyn Center because that’s where you went with your friends in high school (well, maybe that’s where the nerdy kids went). It was a place we could go to feel young and free.

I remember meeting my girlfriends at Rocky Rococos, then walking around the Brookdale Mall. We mostly just walked and talked, dreaming about our futures. None of us had much money to spend, but every once in a while, one of us would buy something special there. I remember hunting for prom dresses there with my friends and buying one even though I didn’t have a date and did not go to my high school prom. But I wanted a picture in a prom dress…lol. Looking back at these moments, they were times we were pretending to be all grown up, and the Brookdale Mall was the perfect backdrop to step into our fantasy lives.

Back in its day, the Brookdale Mall was part of cutting edge suburban social architecture being one of 5 malls opening around downtown Minneapolis to provide the perfect place to go for suburban housewives and families who needed ordinary household supplies, furniture, school supplies and clothes–whatever was needed for a suburban household. They were knows as the Dales and included Brookdale (Brooklyn Center), Rosedale (Roseville), Ridgedale (Minnetonka), and Southdale (Edina). Brookdale first opened in 1962 and grew in stages. A lovely blog called Abandoned Retail recounts the rise and fall of the Dales surrounding Minneapolis, specifically the Brookdale Mall.

When I was growing up, I never considered the privilege my white skin afforded me as I walked around places like the Brookdale Mall or drove to it myself after getting my driver’s license. I never thought about how the dreams I entertained or how the gallivants with my friends at the mall were carefully packaged in specific ways designed to make us believe we each had a chance to become Cinderella and to find our Prince Charming.

The Old Brookdale Mall that used to be in Brooklyn Center, MN — Where Your Dreams Could Come Ture

From the Strib’s archives: A trip back in time to Brookdale | StarTribune:  MARCH 13, 2015 — 7:49AM

It would take decades before I realized how fatal the childhood fairytale fantasies I reveled in were. How they obscured brutal realities embedded throughout American society, inherited from its long history of slavery and institutionalized racism. Places like the old Brookdale Mall sold the white suburban fantasy to white Americans, but it was an artificial, super sugary coating trying to cover up the cruel realities faced by black and brown people every single day.

I have never feared for my life being pulled over for a traffic violation. I never felt watched by workers at stores who worried I might steal something. I know now my friends and I got get out of jail free cards simply for being white. This was not so for my friends and classmates who were brown and black who were losing their lives for making the very same mistakes I had made.

Policing & Justice in the United States of America

How Policing Works in the Suburbs | 1A | WAMU

Image from 1A (WAMU) | A woman holds up a portrait of George Floyd as people gather outside the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Description of this episode: Last summer, millions across the country took to the streets to protest police violence. Now, against the backdrop of the trial of Derek Chauvin, criticism of the criminal justice system in America is once again under scrutiny. Recent shootings of Black men by police officers in the suburbs, including in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, have attracted new attention to the changing demographics of the suburbs and the tactics police use there. 

We recommend this thread from researcher Will Stancil, who is one of our guests for this conversation:

From 1A | WAMU | April 19, 2021

And conditions are often different for people in wealthy, white suburbs. From a piece called “The Case For Defunding Police Is In Our Affluent White Suburbs” in Mel Magazine:

Homicides, robberies, rapes and other violent crimes happen disproportionately in poor minority communities. Crime rates have been falling across the country for the last 30 years — it’s statistically the safest era to be an American. But Black and brown people, especially those in inner-city communities, are victimized by crime that’s practically unseen in whiter, more affluent suburbs.
Those suburbs aren’t safe and clean and orderly because they’re white and wealthy. White, wealthy suburbs are safe because they benefit from two world-shifting factors: 1) the police harass less and solve more serious crimes; and 2) there’s significant funding for municipal and social services, whether that’s schools or health-care facilities or simply park space.

How are police and local officials responding to changing demographics in the suburbs? Have police been able to answer calls for justice from local residents?

We’re talking about how policing works in the suburbs.

Chicago Police Killing of Adam Toledo Brings Police Violence Against Latinos Back in Focus | The Takeaway | WNYCStudios |

Image from The Takeaway | WNYCStudios | April 19, 2021

Description of this story: What happened to the 13-year-old at the hands of police draws national reaction after police release footage showing Toledo had his hands up before he was gunned down.

Throughline: Policing in America

Image I made for Throughline’s Powerful Podcast on Policing in America
Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. As the trial of Derek Chauvin plays out, it's a truth and a trauma many people in the US and around the world are again witnessing first hand. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries. This week, the origins of policing in the United States and how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system.

Ayanna Pressley Reintroduces Bill To Address Disproportionate Punishment Of Black Girls In Schools

Image from Here and Now | WBUR | April 19, 2021 — Rep. Ayanna Pressley (Tom Williams-Pool/Getty Images)

Description: Black girls are suspended six to seven times more than white girls in schools across the U.S. Now, Rep. Ayanna Pressley is reintroducing a bill that aims to disrupt the school-to-confinement pipeline.

Here & Now’s Tonya Mosley speaks with Rep. Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, about the bill to address the disproportionate punishment of girls of color in schools.

This segment aired on April 19, 2021.

State Rep. John Thompson Pushes For Police Reform In Minnesota

Image from Here and Now | WBUR | State Rep. John Thompson Pushes For Police Reform In Minnesota | April 19, 2021

Description: Minnesota state Rep. John Thompson was an activist who joined the legislature in 2020 hoping to be more effective in the push for police reform and accountability.

He reflects on how impactful it’s been so far and how his community is grappling with this moment.

This segment aired on April 19, 2021.

The Future of Policing in America | The Takeaway | Series of Five Stories

Images from The Takeaway series on Policing in America

Description: Recently, The Takeaway convened five of those voices, across law enforcement, advocacy, and academia, and asked them to come together to talk about the way forward. What is the future of policing in America? In our ongoing coverage, we tackle what’s broken in today’s system and what it would take to fix it.

April 20, 2021 — Today Was A Monumental Day, But We Are Not Done

PBS NewsHour full episode, Apr. 20, 2021 | Derek Chauvin Guilty on All Counts

Wow — I did not expect this verdict today. What a relief. It is one step in the right direction towards justice, but there is still a long ways to go and a lot of work to do to transform as a people, a society, a nation that values the lives of all its people–black, white, Asian, indigenous, immigrant, religious, non-religious–whoever you are, you belong in a society that treats everyone with dignity and respect and justice.

Black Lives Matter | Filmed June 2020 on Black Lives Plaza in Washington, DC
Today Was A Moonwalk Day | April 20, 2021 | I shot these pictures just before the verdict was announced in the trial for justice for George Floyd today. This is dedicated to George Floyd and his family and loved ones.
Mother of Grief — Remembering 2020 | Excerpt about the Impact of Coronavirus and Racism in America | Mother of Grief video is a journey through art and music remembering some of the events that reshaped our shared reality over the past year spanning roughly Feb. 2020 to Feb. 2021.

In this excerpt, the base video credits go to The Power of Street Art Under COVID (aired on PBS 7/7/20) — https://www.pbs.org/video/the-power-of-street-art-under-covid-tg7su0/ Photos from the Black Lives Matter march were taken by me during a march in Washington, DC in June 2020 seeking justice for George Floyd and so many more black and brown people killed by police in the United States.

This clips ends with a little girl dancing on the Black Lives Matter mural painted on the WDC street leading to the White House with a street musician singing justice, justice. Yesterday, George Floyd’s family got justice with guilty verdicts handed down to the police officer who murder him on May 25, 2020.

To read more about the full length video (Mother of Grief — Remembering 2020), go to: https://www.sapience2112.com/2021/03/20/mother-of-grief-remembering-2020/

We Are a Nation of Beautiful People and Each & Every One Is Precious, If We Could Just Learn to See

The United States of America is at another inflection point; a time of reckoning of cultural precepts obscured and hidden through false politeness and talk of freedom for all, but with harden attitudes and deep brutality and injustices baked into our systems, our stories, and our brains. To change deeply ingrained attitudes, actions, and behavior, they need to be made visible. Even when they are made visible, they need to be reckoned with honestly by each individual in which they exist.

Perhaps that is why my attention got drawn to blood and its brutalities just before another police officer killed another precious soul in my hometown. Just the word blood conjures up violent, brutal images. But it also heralds new life (though any mother will tell you labor is hard and painful work). To do the work necessary to transform collective reality requires lots of individuals doing the hard work of self-development. A good place to begin is how we are programmed by our culture. For a modern man or woman, this gets complicated fast because modern society frequently requires belonging to lots of groups with each possessing its own unique culture that exerts an influence an individual’s mind space. This is important because it is here in this invisible space of mind where our values, beliefs, and attitudes are formed. These then inform our actions in the world, which create our collective reality.

Honor Culture

Shankar Vedantam explored recently how culture and the cultural narratives we carry around inside of us influences our individual attitudes and actions in a podcast called Made of Honor. He introduces this episode saying, “Stories help us make sense of the world, and can even help us to heal from trauma. They also shape our cultural narratives, for better and for worse.” His guest speaker, Ryan Brown, begins with a story from his childhood where he finds himself along with his boyhood friends flying down a dark country road with no headlights on, no seatbelts, no helmets. The car was driven by a friend but appeal to him to go slower only goaded him to go faster. It was a moment Ryan believed he and his friends would die. It was also a moment that led Ryan to become a psychologist at Rice University in Texas.

Ryan Brown now understands why his fried refused to slow down nor apologize later for his reckless behavior. His friend was following a cultural script based on honor culture. “Honor cultures are societies that put the defensive reputation [of the group] at the center of social life and make that defense one of the highest priorities people have.” It is a culture that encourage excessive risk-taking behavior to show how brave and tough a person is, especially males in the culture. Doing so is a way to build and solidify one’s reputation in the society. In an Honor Culture, if your honor is threatened, you never back down, especially as a man, then you can only double-down and never show an ounce of weakness.

Ryan tells how his ancestry traces back to Southern Scotland that is steeped in the values and beliefs of Honor Culture. Residue of Honor Culture have been brought over from Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, and many other immigrant groups that had these beliefs. These attitudes and values took root and grew strong in the Southern colonies, even when the United States had not been born yet. And they continued to flourish when the Southern colonies transformed into the Southern states, and then they pushed West.

Ryan says (12:39): “And so if you think about westerns, if you think about Western movies or Western history, there are always rough and tumble guys with names that sounded kind of Scottish, a McTavish McDonald, McDougal, Graham, et cetera. And that’s not an accident. So even today, even though most people in the us in the South, I don’t think of themselves as byproducts of Scottish history. You can still see this cultural residue in some fairly powerful patterns of, of social life, that social scientists, many others, including myself, have documented over the last 20 years.”

Over the past 20 years, Ryan and his colleagues have documented a strong connection between Honor Culture and Military Valor. This is a positive trait of this culture but there is a dark side too because honor cultures can get trapped in endless cycle of violence where retribution for dishonor is followed by retribution upon retribution of escalating violence. Honor cultures are found all over the world in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and also found in black and brown communities in the U.S. Honor culture is particularly prevalent in states like Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas. The names of towns and businesses even reflect honor culture such as a little country town in Texas called Cut and Shoot. But, naming places is only one small example of how honor culture shapes the lives of millions of people.

Honor cultures tend to take the stance: “That’s not my people. That’s not my family. That’s not my community.” Such a mental stances discourages individuals to reflect on situations that arise that end in conflict, even violence, and these cultures do not cultivate empathy, kindness, and compassion. These qualities are considered signs of weakness. If you lose your honor in an Honor Culture, you lose your value, your standing, your reputation and never get it back. Honor cultures tend to have a veneer of extreme politeness, but violence bubbles below and can break out at the slightest perceived slight. For instance, a simple insult in an honor culture can rapidly escalate into a violence.

Gender roles tend to be highly rigid as well in Honor Cultures with Ryan saying (29:59), “If you’re a real man in an honor culture, then that means you’ve built a reputation as someone who’s strong, tough, brave, loyal, and utterly intolerant of disrespect. If you’re a woman in an honor culture and your considered a good woman and honorable woman, that means that you’ve lived up to the social standards that say you should be loyal to family, especially loyal to your husband and sexually pure.“

In a complicated country such as the US, honor cultures have effects on how politics play out (47:55) “And what to spend a few minutes talking about the role of honor culture in politics. You’re a list of States where there is a strong honor. Culture include South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee and States that don’t include Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Hawaii, and Minnesota. It’s hard not to see a division there between, you know, a prototypical red States and prototypical blue States, Republican States and democratic States, right?“

April Sometimes Brings More Than Showers

A Partial List of Mass Shootings in the United States in 2021 — The shootings never stopped during the coronavirus pandemic, they just became less public, researchers say. | The New York Times — April 16, 2021

Honor Culture explains a lot, but it’s not the only influence shaping individual attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. There are many factors shaping who we are as individuals. Circumstances such as social status, economic status, rural or urban dweller, religious community all exert tremendous influences on individuals. To be a modern human living in a highly technological society requires belonging to many systems and groups that all have unique cultures all exerting expectations and limitations on individuals. In short, modern humans live in very complicated worlds, made so by us. Although living in groups has proven to be an undeniably successful strategy to survive, there is a price and there is a dark side. The eruption of violence seems to be a deadly cost of living in huge groups.

As I did research for this blog, I came across an article about how April 14 to April 20 is historically a Bad Week for violent or disastrous events to occur. I will not speculate why bad things seem to cycle in patterns or occur in series, but here is a partial accounting of this week through time:

  • April 19, 1995: Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in downtown Oklahoma City on
  • April 19, 1993: a 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX ended in a devastating fire that killed more than 50 people, including children
  • April 20, 1999: the Columbine shooting occurred that left 12 students dead and 21 injured happened
  • April 16, 2007: the Virginia Tech shooting killed 32 people and wounded 17 others
  • April 14, 1912: the Titanic sank
  • April 18, 1906: the most deadly earthquake in U.S, history hit San Francisco.

To see more of the dreadful events that occurred during this week, see the article by AFRO: April 14 to April 20: An Historically Bad ‘Week That Was’ (4/19/13)

In the Aftermath of Violence & Disasters

Regardless of the type of violence or disaster, the aftermath is trauma, which leaves deep, lasting scars on the inside of people.

Grieving Parents Share Pain of Losing Daughter in Mass Shooting | WYC Studios | April 19, 2021

Image from The Takeaway | WNYCStudios | April 19, 2021

Description of story: Sandy and Lonnie Phillips lost their daughter Jessica Redfield Ghawi during the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. 

How Gun Violence Affects American Children | 1A | WAMU | April 14, 2021

Playground Image from 1A (WAMU) | How Gun Violence Affects American Children | April 14, 2021 | John Woodrow Cox’s new book is “Children Under Fire: An American Crisis.”Scott Olson/Getty Images

Regardless of whether violence is because of honor culture, racism, or the growing disease gripping the United States of America of mass shooting, it leaves a on survivors too. One group, impacted more than most, is hardly ever heard. Millions of children around the country are affected by gun violence every year. Whether it’s sitting through safety and violence prevention programs in school, losing a friend or loved one, or being a victim themselves, this brand of cruelty has an effect on the young.

1A talks with author John Woodrow Cox who shares powerful stories from young victims–and looks at what their experience can tell us about preventing further harm, both physical and mental.

Healing After Chauvin Murder Conviction: Is It Possible? | Here and Now | WBUR | April 21, 2021

Image of London Williams bursting into tears on April 20, 2021, in Washington, after hearing that former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd from Here & Now (Jacquelyn Martin/AP) | Other Photos I took or from NPR podcast series on White Lies

Here & Now talked to racial trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem in this interview. He brought up something terribly important in the wake of the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin in George Floyd’s death almost one year ago. Menakem says what Chauvin did was not only traumatic but meant to inflict terror in the community as well. He says (which has been said by many others as well in the past 24 hours) that “— guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter — is not justice, but rather accountability. It took uninterrupted, uncut video evidence to prove what people of color have been saying for decades about the police.” He said, “This particular video, compared to other taped incidents of police violence against Black Americans, represented white body supremacy so clearly that people could not dismiss it anymore. [But] still, there are significant swaths of people who don’t believe there are innocent Black and Brown people who are profiled and unfairly targeted by police.“

I know such people. I know what Menakem says is true about white people in particular.

Menakem further states that “there’s pain in not being believed, and also trauma from racialized gaslighting — a form of psychological manipulation that white bodies in the U.S. have done to Black, Brown and Indigenous people for centuries.“

I’ve experienced gaslighting, and I know people who still suffer from the pain and trauma of being gaslighted by people they depended on who gaslighted them instead of took care of and nurtured them. Mencken is right to point this out. It is tremendously painful and highly effective at tearing apart the fabric that sustains us all. A gaslighter is a person who makes other people feel like they are the one who is going crazy. They are insidious, crafty, deceitful people.

Gaslight (1944) – You Think I’m Insane Scene (5/8) | Movieclips | “You Think I’m Insane“: After becoming hysterical at a friend’s house Paula (Ingrid Bergman), Gregory (Charles Boyer) shares his frustrations with her.

“If a white body says something and then a body of culture says something else, what ends up happening is that the white body is always given the benefit of the doubt,” Menakem says. “So throughout the trial and verdict, people of color held onto hope for accountability on one hand while on the other hand, knew “white bodies will never admit that this system is feral.”

It is feral. The United States of America has a completely lopsided, feral system. And because of all the sugar coated, fluffy fantasies white kids get fed in their youth combined with being instilled with you’ve got to be somebody, white people are left with very little inner resources to see and deal with the truth. It is much easier to pretend not to see how brutal, how feral, how sick our culture really is.

Healing is possible, Menakem assures. He ends saying we need to start by turning towards each other and seeing other other rather than away from each other. This is powerful advice.

Lots of Human Beings, Lots of Disasters

Human beings seem particularly prone to creating circumstances that end in disaster:

Mother of Grief — What We Loss in 2020

You get the idea. Now, how do we get out of cycles of violence and disaster (mostly human made)? How do we recover and get to a place where something better can take root and grow?

Spirit Blood

Alongside Our Red Blood Cells is Another Kind of Blood — Consciousness — It Allows Us to Synthesize & Decide How To Use It

Something else flows alongside the red blood cells in our bodies. It is not something that is visible, but it can be felt. This invisible substance (or perhaps force) is essential to sustain our inner spaces and to maintain a healthy state of mind. Each and every human being is born with this invisible force flowing through them just like blood flows through them. Because we are human, we are aware of this force and this awareness allows us to channel it and to alter instinctual responses and urges before acting on them. Human beings can suppress instinctual responses. They can amplify them, and they can transform them into something else entirely. Carl Jung called this ability consciousness, or perhaps it is spirit blood.

It is through our choices and how we alter instinctual responses before acting on them that our collective reality is created. Eastern traditions, religions, and philosophies call this power Karma, which is simply the recognition that every action creates a reaction, a consequence.

This all ascends quickly into the realm of spiritual and metaphysic concerns, which is a realm most often regulated to religions to grapple with the nebulous inner spaces where thoughts, attitudes, and bias materialize into action.

I was raised Lutheran, but during the time of my father’s death, I found my childhood religion negated the realities of powerful synchronicities that occurred and inner experiences my father and I experienced during the 10 days he lived beyond the moment he should have died. I have written about his previously, so will not do so again here.

Father | Celestial Tendencies

Instead, I would like to highlight something that my friend Ali Raza Saleem posted, which caught my eye during the time my attention was focused on blood. My friend is a neuroscientist and scholar of Jung and posted the following:

Qalb (Faculty of Heart) and Lataif e Sitta

The faculty of heart (Qalb) is the faculty of the Spirit, not the biological pumping heart when we refer Qalb in terms of spirituality. The nerves associated with heart are primarily concerned with pumping of the heart, conveying signals to muscles, as well as sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system to control the pace of heart beat.

Faculty of Heart, spiritually speaking, isn’t tied strictly to ’emotional aspects’. Brain has designated centers for emotional perception and the affects are mediated through signals to the body including changing contraction and pace of the heart, bodily sensations, fight or flight mechanisms etc.

Faculty of Heart is the faculty of immaterial Rooh (Spirit) that along with other faculties (lataif) ‘feels’ Love, Suffering of the other Soul, Compassion, Benevolence, Bliss, Tranquility (itmenaan), Gratitude, Spiritual longing and Joy of Union with Beloved, Divine Beauty and Majesty etc, and blocked by Greed, Anger, Arrogance, Bukhl (stinginess), Hasad (Jealousy), Bughaz (spitefulness), malice, malevolence etc stemming from unpurified Lower Nafs (Ego). The emotions resulting from gratification or failure of gratification of lower Nafs (Ego) are also more of bodily/’brainy’ in nature. But in a loose sense, speaking poetically, heart can be said as preceptor of emotions in general as their ‘Affect’ is ‘felt’ at the heart.

The immaterial lataif including Qalb (heart) have specific locations on the body (metaphysically superimposed on various organs like heart as in the case of Qalb) as described in Lataif e Sitta, where the virtues associated with them are experienced spiritually.

He further sent me this graphic.

From Ali Raza Saleem | The Productive Muslim Company

And he explained:

For a Sufi his body is in service (submission) to Divine Will helping him fullfil the tasks for nourishment of the Spirit/Soul. 

The terms in this diagram maybe used in different meanings compared to the ones used in Psychology like the term Self here have meanings different to what we use in Psychology. This article further explains the model and the meaning of terms used in this diagram.

I know so little about Muslim teachings and wisdom, but I find everything Ali Raza Saleem shared extremely helpful in understanding the workings of the Invisible Self. These are the parts not visible to others unless we share them through words or actions. I have also been reading The Philosophy of the I Ching by Carol Anthony and have found her writing also very illuminating about the Invisible Self. Beginning on page 35, she writes:

“People who can hear within are called psychic, but, in truth, we all have this ability; it is simply suppressed in most of us. Through inner listening we can also become aware of other people’s conscious thoughts. Our superior self listens and looks, but does not speak. What we receive from the inner world that we perceive and know as intuition comes from inside and apart from ourselves, just as what we see of the outer world is outside and apart from ourselves. What we hear within comes from the teacher, the same Sage who speaks through the I Ching. It knows the way and comes to help. We can only hear it when we maintain emptiness, innocence, and receptivity. When we jump to conclusions because of fear and impatience, we can’t hear the quiet suggestions of the Sage within.“

“When we say a thing ‘comes totally out of the blue,’ this is an intuitive ways of saying that we are helped by the Sage. We say ‘out of the blue,’ because our words have the clarity of the sky and come from nowhere. What we say is what needs to be said and is perfectly appropriate. Innocence and emptiness make it possible; we are noticeably free of emotional attachment and our words come in the vernacular of the moment; everyone understands and agrees. when this happens we are always a bit surprised. The fact is, we are not in possession of such moments, although we make them happen through being in a complementary relationship with the Creative Power. This we can do only through cultivating our superior man within.“

This makes me thinks how each of us is a living work of art constantly in progress and transformation. As living works of art, we are both artist and the art. We choose the colors, patterns, subject, and background–and by so doing, we live them, we feel them, we see them, we know them. The canvas is our mind. And we develop our art of being by listening and learning how to regain our innocence and inner emptiness that allows us to be open and receptive to every moment we met. This is how we can transform ourselves, and by doing so, transform the world.

Inner Sage — Spirit Blood — Nourish Your Beingness in the World

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Anxiety & The Bigger, Better Offer

Yesterday, I was corresponding with a friend about our mutual experience of anxiety and depression. We were talking about what was working and what was not working. As I was crafting a reply, this aired on 1A: Why Willing Yourself To Be Less Anxious Doesn’t Work — And What Actually Helps Instead

Image from 1A: Anxiety can be really hard to manage. What does research say about how to help? Paul Kane/Getty Images

The timing was uncanny. Indeed, it was synchronistic. So, I paid attention. And, I took notes. I will share some of the take aways I gleamed for this important show. If you have been struggling with anxiety and depression, especially this year, this show is well worth a listen.

1A Description:

Between the uncertainties of getting a COVID-19 vaccine, going back to the office and staying connected with one another, it’s no wonder anxiety is on the rise. 

As the pandemic recently reached its one-year anniversary, about a third of U.S. adults say they have experienced sleeplessness or anxiety in the last week, according to the Pew Research Center.

We’re talking with Dr. Judson Brewer, a neuroscientist and associate professor at Brown University about the science behind our anxious feelings and explains why common fixes, like simply willing yourself to be okay, don’t work. His new book is Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind.  

What’s causing us to feel anxious these days? And how can we treat it?

My Notes:

Dr. Judson Brewer discusses how worry and curiosity are binary functions in the brain. When the brain engages in worry, it cannot engage in curiosity. Worrying makes us feel smaller and contracted while curiosity makes us feel bigger and expansive. Both have evolutionary origins and functions. The problem is how complicated our modern lives have become tricking our brains and causing destructive habits and patterns to develop and become entrenched in the brain.

Dr. Brewer talked about the part of the brain that gets engaged when a person worries. It is an older part of the brain known as the cingulate cortex. This is a critical part of the limbic system and involves a group of interconnected brain structures involved in emotions along with processing emotional destress of pain. It helps us survive.

The Cingulate Cortex

I found this image of the part of the brain that gets engage when we worry while I listened.

Image from BrainFacts.org | This interactive brain model is powered by the Wellcome Trust and developed by Matt Wimsatt and Jack Simpson; reviewed by  John Morrison, Patrick Hof, and Edward Lein.
Structure descriptions were written by Levi Gadye and Alexis Wnuk and Jane Roskams. [Go to this website and try out the very cool interactive model!]

Dr. Brewer discusses how the Cingulate Cortex is a much older structure of the brain, making it very powerful in establishing behaviors and patterns in our life. The parts of our brain that get engaged when we become curious are more complex and they also activate and engage the Prefrontal Cortex, which is the newest part of our brains and the weakest.

The Prefrontal Cortex & the Role of Curiosity to Our Wellbeing and Mental Health

Image from BrainFacts.org | The Source of Curiosity | Author Hannah Zuckerman | Published7 Aug 2019

Why is the sky blue? Staring up at the big, wide space above their heads, children often ask a variation of this question to an adult. Although the answers may seem clear enough, we’re not always satisfied with what we get. Why we know, or why we care to know about the world around or inside of us is due to a distinct desire: curiosity.

Curiosity motivates us to understand the world, our communities, our bodies, and our brains. Click on the targets in the image to explore how curiosity inspires us to investigate the mechanisms of our daily life.

Dr. Brewer explained how we can strengthen this part of our brain and ability through mindfulness training. Meditation is one part of a bigger circle of learning how to be more mindful in our bodies, especially when we begin to feel to collapsing feeling of worry and anxiety.

Everyone learns habits that get encoded in the brain through the Cingulate Cortex and other lower brain structures. Everyone also has the ability to bring awareness to their situation, both internal (e.g., are you worrying, feeling anxious, feeling fearful) and external (e.g., what triggered this inner feeling [the present], where did this feeling originate from [the past], how valid is this feeling now and moving forward in your life [the future]).

The 3 Gears of Changing Your Brain

Once you bring awareness to your situation, you can begin to remap your responses to them. You can rewire your brain! Dr. Brewer outlined 3 gears to work through that include:

Gear 1: Mapping Habit Loops

Ask yourself what the behavior you are engaging in (e.g., going on social media, over eating, compulsively cleaning, compulsively shopping, binging Netflix, taking mind altering drugs) attempting to help you do. Often these repetitive behaviors are attempting to help you overpower intense, uncomfortable feelings of anxiety, worry, and fear that have become ingrained in patterned repetitive behavior that does not do a good job of calming these feelings. The trigger is less important than the behavior you slip into to calm the rising anxiety and worry. Bringing your awareness to map you habit loops is the first step, the first gear to get yourself out of it.

Gear 2: Mindfulness

This is where you use your ability of awareness to get curious about your behavior: “Hmmm… what am I getting from worrying?” So you realize by becoming curious about your behavior of planning a trip to the airport 20 times isn’t doing anything to keep yourself and your family safe. This insight give you a space to do something different. You can also use mindfulness to practice retrospective reflection as well because sometimes the compulsive behavior is so powerful it is impossible to avert it until you strengthen this other part of your brain: curiosity, mindfulness, and awareness.

Gear 3: The Bigger, Better Offer

This is where you offer your brain a better offer to deal with a situation that triggers anxiety, worry, or fear. Dr. Brewer talks about how we become habituated to compulsive attempts to reduce our anxiety (e.g., ‘Oh, I feel anxious, I am going to look at puppies on the Internet’, soon the brain becomes habituated to puppies and needs a stronger stimulus, so now you need to find puppies and kitten together; then the brain become habituated to puppies and kittens, so now you need to find puppies, kittens, and baby chicks… and so it goes on and on… a compulsive addictive behavior has been established). What the brain does not become habituated to is curiosity! This is the key to get out of the loop.

They were running out of time at this point in the program, so go to Dr. Jud Brewer’s website to learn more:

Image from Dr. Jud | We all struggle with something… Anxiety. Emotional Eating. Smoking. Shopping. Self-judgement. Anger. Bad habits. Whatever your struggle, change is possible.

Have a Great Day! And remember, you are the master of your Ship of Self — go forth and explore new inner territory inside your mind and by doing so, repattern your brain.