Even in absurdity, sacrament. Even in hardship, holiness. Even in doubt, faith. Even in chaos, realization. Even in paradox, blessedness
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"Life expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage." ~Anain Nin
elders speak, we listen From Hopiland, a spiritual vortex for Native people, spiritual leaders Dan Evehema and Thomas Banyacya became the voice of the voiceless: the birds and animals. Warning of the impending apocalypse, they urged all people of good hearts to join them. Even in their last years, Evehema and Banyacya warned that material greed and ignoring spiritual truth results in climate change, and, ultimately, the destruction of the world. Hopi Snake Priest Evehema said the disease in the world today is greed, and the final insult for this country's aboriginal people is the loss of ceremonial land. "We are now faced with great problems, not only here but throughout the land. Ancient cultures are being annihilated. Our people's lands are being taken from them. Why is this happening? It is happening because many have given up or manipulated their original spiritual teachings. The way of life that the Great Spirit has given to all people of the world, whatever your original instructions, are not being honored. It is because of this great sickness called greed, which infects every land and country..." jaybird found this for you @ 20:44 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
The Dream Quest The dream quest is a continuous dream. This is not quite a recurring dream, where the exact same dream plays over again each night; instead here the dream picks up where it left off the night before, like a TV or radio serial. Each night’s dreams occur in the same world, with the same characters and follow a single arcing plotline that has consumed approximately 1/9th of my entire life. The world and characters are not static, but grew and changed as I interacted with them over the last sixteen years; I know a few of the characters better than I know some real people. My active decisions shaped the future outcomes of the plot. In tone the dream is like a fantasy adventure, centered on an epic battle between the forces of light and dark. jaybird found this for you @ 16:40 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
The Method of Science, The Aim of Religion [via orlin grabbe] Western occultism is rarely approached by scholars of Religious Studies except when it is anecdotally placed within the rubric of the New Age Movement, New Religious Movements, or Esoteric Studies. Depending upon the researcher, it is also synonymously attached to other, sometimes loaded labels like Satanism and Neo-Paganism. Available scholarship tends towards three basic approaches. The first is to ignore any notion of “modern” Western occultism and instead consider all “occultism” as a monolithic entity that has remained essentially the same and de-emphasizes the input from historical, social, economic or aesthetic factors. And where these factors are considered at all, Western occultism is reduced to a historically marginal reaction to a Christian hegemony. The second direction of academic study comes from the more emic perspective of the practitioners of modern Western occultism itself. A characteristic of this tradition is its text-driven, literature-intensive program. Despite this, the drawback to such an emic perspective is that there is little room for objectivity and when there is, criticism of the work will still fall back to the emic/etic argument that has become such a thorn in the side of Religious studies.
An alternative approach is one that is not taken by Esotericists or by Occultists. In this perspective, we distinguish a “modern” Western occultism, acknowledged as different from other occultisms, and not based on the emic self-proclamations of occultists or on the etic perspectives of theologians. This is a perspective that works precisely because it steps outside the emic/etic boundaries and sees a system; a text-based tradition, with abundant articulations of its own meaning and interpretation, and a systematic program to manage religious or esoteric information gleaned through an ever increasing corpus of primary texts. It is in these primary texts that we can meet on the bridge between the practitioner and the academic; these texts provide what could be seen as a momentary zone of negotiation. Because modern Western occultism is explicitly didactic and expository, information-oriented approaches are not only possible, but also quite germane. jaybird found this for you @ 12:27 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
heuristic compression There have been some long days this week, and the next two are no exception. By the time you read this, I'll be driving almost 200 miles to a meeting/training, coming back halfway to teach a class, and driving another 100 miles back home, arriving late into the night. Tomorrow is the real doozie... It's the book release party for "Rainbow Over Crossroads" and it's turning into quite the big to-do. That's very exciting, of course, but I'm not that good at self-marketing and selling people my words, which they apparently want very much to buy. I've got such great friends that are coming together to make this happen, with music, dance and performance, I'm really overwhelmed with the support. Things have been 'uniquely' busy, and I know I've skimped out on the personal side of bloggage lately, so just know the following things: 1) I'm doing much better I'll go into details later. For now, I've got a long way to go and a short time to get there... jaybird found this for you @ 07:56 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
spring's mystery A soft rain is falling outside the window. Drops of water glisten on the branches and twigs. Each drop, you see now, clings to a bud, magnifying the tiny crimson knots, which are the year's way of saying -- the spring returns. Leaves are being born. Blossoms exist already, inside their tiny shells. Life begins anew. The tree's job, with the rain's help, is to show it. Your job is to notice. If this were the first time you had ever seen living buds appear on a dead twig, you would know too little of the mystery. You would think -- aha, life is victorious over death. The hurt world is recovering. The wars are ending. Suffering is becoming passionate delight. All is well. But because you have seen this manifestation again and again, and because you know what else happens in the cycle of the year, your welcome of the spring return is complex. Relief is proper to this time of year, and so are the sensual joys of perception -- warmth on the skin, perfumes of the air, the sudden sight of robins, the illuminated world. Yet every such signal of rebirth comes with its own contradiction, which makes it all the more precious. This complexity of death and life together, stretched across a realm defined by the movement of planets and stars, is what you call time. Time is the cosmos. Time is your native country. Human beings have a built-in tendency to imagine life and death as opposite forces in conflict with one another. If, across the stretch of the year, life and death seem equal, each with its season of triumph, the human story is not so simple. jaybird found this for you @ 19:49 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
a human to the rescue of a fish 
jaybird found this for you @ 15:39 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
Unscientific Unamerican There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong. In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence. jaybird found this for you @ 11:36 in Silly People, Satire & Strange Behaviors | | permalink
past the turning point? The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure. The study contains what its authors call "a stark warning" for the entire world. The wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet, and to itself. "Human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted," it says. jaybird found this for you @ 07:35 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
universal love We seemed to have reached a spiritual brick wall in our secular ways of thinking and feeling. The ads don’t deliver, the politics don’t heal, and the science doesn’t connect. We know all too well the damage that organized religion can do, but we’re also beginning to understanding the destructiveness of our financial - corporate networks and the military-industrial complex that protect their interests. It’s not that there are no options - it’s that the marginalization of these options fuels a profound despair, along with a growing sense that we have passed beyond the point of no return. Ironically, this despair is likely to feed the addictions, violence, clinical depression, endless distraction, and retail therapy that is already ingrained in North American culture, encouraging further its monstrous consumption of resources and human potential. If there is some vast consciousness that dreamed this whole shebang into existence, one thing we embody from Him/Her/Whatever is a spark from the fire of creation: the power to choose, to imagine, and to dream new worlds into being. jaybird found this for you @ 19:44 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
emotional propaganda 
jaybird found this for you @ 15:35 in Art, Music, Theater & Film | | permalink
waging respect As the fight over Terri Schiavo's fate played out in court, gay and lesbian organizations watched quietly from the sidelines, aware that any outcome would speak to one of the key motivations in their quest for same-sex marriage: the right to make medical decisions for a partner. It's an issue faced regularly by same-sex couples, and the battle that Michael Schiavo waged with his in-laws as he sought to remove his wife's feeding tube only underscored their difficulties, said David Buckel of the New York-based gay rights group Lambda Legal. "It certainly resonates with us," said [the] director of marriage-related activities for Lambda Legal. "If folks look at this situation and see that a spouse is struggling to carry out the wishes of his loved one, imagine what folks face when they don't even have access to the spousal relationship because they can't get married." jaybird found this for you @ 11:26 in Gay, Lesbian, Queer & Free | | permalink
imagine this... ...Imagination helps us to make causal judgments about how things might have turned out differently. Historians also do this and so do we with respect to our own decisions. If something goes wrong in life, then we ask ourselves where we went wrong. The imagination allows us to engage in thinking about alternatives in this prosaic form. In making moral judgments we also think about alternatives. We look at something that has happened and we ask how it could have been done better or differently. And again we are exercising our imagination. And then a third domain is simply language comprehension. There is a great deal of work showing that when adults listen to a narrative they build in their mind's eye, so to speak, a mental image or a model of the situation that is being described and of the events that unfold. And it's that mental model that they retain over a long period of time rather than the particular words. The ability to construct such models in the imagination is, in my view, something that emerges from these very early capacities that children show to engage in pretend play and to think about a time and place that is removed from their current situation. So, depending on how you define the imagination, you can either see it as disappearing or waning during childhood or you can see it the way I do as persisting throughout life. jaybird found this for you @ 07:25 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Talbot: Spirituality and Science The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has laboured under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart some thing constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes. jaybird found this for you @ 19:54 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Fourteen wild ideas Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. There's a five percent chance I live in a "future" computer simulation as I write this. If we allowed complete freedom of contract, law could be privatized, to our common benefit. If even a few of us honestly sought truth, we would not disagree with each other. jaybird found this for you @ 15:47 in Cosmic Randomness Grab Bag | | permalink
"Crazy Enough to be True" "Given the right playbook,the thermal jostling of the atoms in a rock can be seen as the operation of a complex, self-aware mind.How strange. Common sense screams that people have minds and rocks don't. But interpretations are often ambiguous....We can see levers and springs in animal limbs, and beauty in the aurora: our "mind children" may be able to spot fully functioning intelligences in the complex chemical goings on of plants, the dynamics of interstellar clouds, or the reverberations of cosmic radiation. No particular interpretation is ruled out, but the space of all of them is exponentially larger than the size of individual ones, and we may never encounter more than an infinitesimal fraction. The rock-minds may be forever lost to us in the boggingly vast sea of chaotic rock-interpretations. Yet those rock minds make complete sense to themselves,and to them it is we who are lost in meaningless chaos. Our own nature, in fact, is defined by the tiny fraction of possible interpretations we can make, and the astronomical number we can't." jaybird found this for you @ 11:43 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Important Changes to Your Citizenship Agreement To help you understand the changes in the terms of your Agreement, We explain the most important changes in the Summary of New Terms below. The changes described will take effect for citizenship cycles beginning Jan. 20, 2005, and will apply to all existing and future balances on your account. jaybird found this for you @ 07:42 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
wallace stevens Among twenty snowy mountains, II I was of three minds, III The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. A man and a woman I do not know which to prefer, VI Icicles filled the long window VII O thin men of Haddam, VIII I know noble accents IX When the blackbird flew out of sight, X At the sight of blackbirds XI He rode over Connecticut XII The river is moving. XIII It was evening all afternoon. jaybird found this for you @ 19:31 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
creating starstuff Scientists... have made a breakthrough in manipulating the smallest single molecules and atoms by devising a new technique of molecular dissection which induces the "birth" of a daughter atom from the parent molecule. This breakthrough... is significant for two reasons - not only have University physicists developed a novel method of dissociation using two electrons, but they have also successfully achieved this experiment at room temperature. The new method... uses the tip of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM) to inject two electrons into the parent chlorobenzine molecule to induce a dissociation event - the first electron sets the molecule into vibration and the second electron breaks the bond between the parent molecule and daughter chlorine atom... "Through this experiment we are operating at the ultimate level of control over chemistry. We've instigated a rapid ejection of the chlorine daughter atom, as it shoots away from the parent molecule across the surface. It's fantastic to witness such a fundamental process under the microscope." jaybird found this for you @ 21:31 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
cuckoo for coconuts  Two tiny species of tropical octopus have demonstrated a remarkable disappearing trick. They adopt a two-armed 'walk' that frees up their remaining six limbs to camouflage them as they slink away from trouble. "When we noticed one was walking, I thought my gosh, this is amazing. It's the first underwater bipedal locomotion I know of..." Instead of its usual sprawling crawl, O. marginatus fled from divers by striding on two arms, with the rest of its arms wrapped around its body, giving it the appearance of a walking coconut... Looking like a coconut may help O. marginatus to go unseen... There is an abundance of coconuts on the sea floor in the area... jaybird found this for you @ 17:26 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
delivered right to your soul's doorstep Today's entry: The spirituality of wind... Wind is air in motion. Many ancient cultures believed that the wind was a form of divine spirit. Like spirit, the wind is invisible, but it is what animates. The magnifence of the wind resides within each of us. Wind isn't tangible yet it brings change with its breath. Sometimes these changes are barely perceivable. However, if you look carefully, you can see the wind - it is the swirl in a plume of smoke, it is the ripple across a lake, it is the lackadaisical sway in the branches. Recognize the small developments in yourself. You are growing all the time even when it seems like the wind is still. A breeze can quickly become a gale, and a storm can swiftly be diffused. So too are you affected by your environment, who you interact with, what you expose yourself to, what you choose to put in your body and your mind. You can choose experiences that will either fuel your spirit or move you off course. jaybird found this for you @ 13:21 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
manawa! Hawaiian is the only indigenous language in the United States that showed growth in the 2000 census... About 200,000 of Hawaii's 1.2 million people are of Native Hawaiian ancestry. Hawaiian is recognized, along with English, in the state Constitution as an official state language. Some lawmakers want to require that Hawaiian be used on government signs and in government documents, although two bills on the matter have stalled. The language already is spoken in the islands in a variety of ways. Ceremonies usually include a chant or prayer in Hawaiian, and Hawaiian music with lyrics in the native language are making people more aware. There even is a new Hawaiian music category for the Grammy Awards. jaybird found this for you @ 09:20 in Culture, People & Customs | | permalink
the undoing of america ...The old American republic is well and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we're in uncharted territory. We're governed by public relations. Very little information gets to the people, thanks to the corruption and/or ineptitude of the media. Just look at this bankruptcy thing that went through--everybody in debt to credit cards, which is apparently 90 percent of the country, is in deep trouble. So the people are uninformed about what's being done in their name. And that's really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat. jaybird found this for you @ 20:11 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
planetary abuse What... are future generations to think of the concept that individual members of a densely overpopulated species can claim unchallenged ownership of large sections of the earth, to nurture or destroy as they see fit? Considering the conflict between a finite planet and the infinite expansion of Homo Sapiens, does it make any more sense for people to be able to own pieces of the world than it does for people to own other people? If the concept of private ownership were followed to its logical extreme, it would be possible for one fabulously wealthy person, or corporation, to buy every acre of land on the surface of the earth, and to hold the rest of humanity hostage by withholding earthly resources. As ridiculous as that scenario might seem, today’s economic trends make it increasingly possible for the wealthy (largely in the form of corporations) to claim massive portions of the earth’s surface. Prevailing attitudes toward private property in land also make it increasingly practical for those corporations to claim all the natural resources they can monopolize from their holdings, and to extort more wealth from the rest of society with the resources that they hoard. jaybird found this for you @ 16:05 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
redemption song? 
"What's been with me for a while is that confusion about God's justice versus God's mercy," says Guirgis, the author of acclaimed Off-Broadway plays such as "Our Lady of 121st Street" and "Jesus Hopped the A Train." "As a kid I just didn't understand: if I could forgive someone, why couldn't God? As I got older, I just came to believe, or hope, that God's mercy and forgiveness should extend to everyone." Guirgis sets his play in a Purgatory courtroom presided over by a disgraced Civil War veteran. The case is argued by an obsequious prosecutor and an agnostic defense attorney who has won writs from both St. Peter and God himself to continue the appeal. At stake is the soul of the Bible's Benedict Arnold, who has been reduced to a catatonic state, unable or unwilling to communicate. "Judas" marshals a parade of witnesses, from Satan (played by Eric Bogosian) to Mary Magdalene, Mother Teresa, and Pontius Pilate, many of whom speak in the contemporary parlance of the urban street. The strongest defense of Judas (played by Sam Rockwell) comes from fellow disciple Simon the Zealot, who proffers the theory that Judas handed Jesus over to the chief priests in order "to throw Jesus into the deep end of the pool." By forcing Jesus' hand, the theory goes, he "would have to act," thus sparking a revolution against the cruel Roman occupation of the Jewish homeland. jaybird found this for you @ 12:02 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
art smuggler  From an article:
jaybird found this for you @ 07:52 in Art, Music, Theater & Film | | permalink
admission 2- the reckoning Just a quick late-night note to thank everyone for their support and to let it be known that I'm feeling much better... I just hit a pinnacle of sorts yesterday and the cap blew off. A fun "mental health day" with my best friend paired with quiet contemplation has helped immensely to repair the emotional damage from releasing so much pressure at once. Thank you for your kind words, emails, and especially for your presence, known or unknown. Onward and upward, my friends. jaybird found this for you @ 23:51 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
restoring balance  Introduction to Tibetan Medicine [thanks, plep] Tibetan medicine is one of the five major sciences, and it is called gSoba Rig-pa, the science of healing. It uses different kinds of ingredients such as herbs, trees, rocks, resins, soils, precious metals, saps etc. However, 95% of Tibetan medicine is based on herbs, and precious metals are used for the seven kinds of precious pill known as Rinchen rilpo. If the physician is able to make the right diagnosis and administer the right medicine, then Tibetan medicine is good for all kinds of illness. However, it has been particularly successful in its treatment of chronic diseases such as rheumatism, arthritis, ulcers, chronic digestive problems, asthma, hepatitis, eczema, liver problems, sinus problems, anxiety and problems connected with the nervous system. The basic theory of Tibetan medicine is to keep in balance the Nyipa sum - they are rLung (pronounced loong), mKhris-pa and Bad-kan. The long-term causative factors of Nyipa sum are the three poisons of desire, hatred and delusion which show how closely connected Tibetan medicine is with Buddhist philosophy. jaybird found this for you @ 21:54 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
forbidden regions Interpretations of quantum mechanics and the nature of reality [via orlin grabbe]Because the quantum theory is often presented in the spirit of the Copenhagen interpretation which emphasizes indeterminacy and probability, people sometimes overlook very simple facts regarding the wave properties of the electron. Note first that the interference pattern which is built up spot by spot is very determinate - so there is "statistical causality" at the quantum level, not just indeterminacy of the behaviour of theindividual system. The key question to ask is is why we get an interference pattern rather than some other pattern or no definite pattern at all (which one might expect if electrons were truly indeterminate in their behaviour). Classically we would expect just "two piles" of electrons behind the screen, rather than the observed interference fringes or "many piles" with regions of no electrons between them. It is just a basic experimental fact that we get an interference pattern which can be predicted with the mathematics of wave motion. The reasonable way to think about this is to say that there is a wave aspect associated with each electron and that this wave aspect is causally powerful in that it makes sure that the particle aspect of each individual electron obeys the interference pattern, never going to the "forbidden regions". jaybird found this for you @ 17:51 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
dream world After you read this paragraph your mind will remember that you are looking out for hints, triggers in your dreams that will fire up your brain and make you realise that:- one, you are dreaming and so will become lucid; and two, you want to visit the Lucid Crossroads. Look out for anything associated with the Crossroads, especially doors, the desert, the colours blue and red, mirrors, Persian carpets and materials like blue slate etc. A sign might be a physical door or a blue person, or it could be symbols on a signpost or painted on the floor, like the dreaming head that you can see on the Crossroads reception desk. Wha...? This warrants further investigation... jaybird found this for you @ 13:48 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | |
