Zonerunner

...

2005-03-30T13:26:00.000+01:00

http://www.aperfectcircle.com/

Angel, series 5

2005-02-26T20:52:00.001Z

ANGEL Yeah, hell's on earth. Holland manners tried to
sell me that line 3 years ago.
LINDSEY Did you ever prove him wrong?
ANGEL All how you look at the glass. You know, Lindsey,
we can philosophize all night. Hell... (chuckles) We could do it
forever, huh? I don't need to eat, sleep, drink.(sits) How
about you?
LINDSEY (grins) That's what I like to see... the Angel
of yore. Takes no prisoners, suffers no fools. How 'bout this? It's
here. It's been here all along. Underneath. You're just too damn
stupid to see it.
ANGEL (leans forward) See what?
LINDSEY The apocalypse, man. You're soaking in it.
SPIKE I've seen an apocalypse or two in my time. I'd know if one was under my nose.
LINDSEY Not an apocalypse. The apocalypse. What'd you
think, a gong was gonna sound? Time to jump on your horses and fight
the big fight? Starting pistol went off a long time ago, boys. You're
playing for the bad guys. Every day you sit behind your desk and you
learn a little more how to accept the world the way it is. Well,
here's the rub... heroes don't do that. Heroes don't accept the world
the way it is. They fight it.

Schism

2005-02-18T00:21:00.000Z

I know the pieces fit 'cos I watched them fall away
mildewed and smoldering
fundamental differing

pure intention juxtaposed will set two lovers souls in motion
disintegrating as it goes testing our communication
the light that fueled our fire then has burned a hole between us so
we cannot see to reach an end crippling our communication.

I know the pieces fit 'cos I watched them tumble down
no fault
none to blame it doesn't mean I don't desire to
point the finger
blame the other
watch the temple topple over.
To bring the pieces back together
rediscover communication.

The poetry that comes from the squaring off between
And the circling is worth it.
Finding beauty in the dissonance.

There was a time that the pieces fit
but I watched them fall away.
Mildewed and smoldering
strangled by our coveting
I've done the the math enough to know the dangers of a second guessing
Doomed to crumble unless we grow
and strengthen our communication

Cold silence has a tendency to atrophy any sense of compassion

between supposed lovers
between supposed brothers.

And I know the pieces fit.

Tool - Schism

The Divine Waters

2005-02-16T04:59:00.000Z

The Divine waters are to be found in the body.

"It is thus said of the mercury which the wise men seek for, is in mercury. Mercury destroys all foliated Sol: it dissolves and softens it, and takes the soul out of the body. If it be sublimated, then there is made aqua vitae. If any one therefore ask you: What are the stones? You shall answer, that Sol and mercury are the physical stones. But these stones are dead on Earth and operate nothing, but what is by the industry of men supplied to them."

Or answer whatever the hell you like, but that seems to fit the bill.

From the text at The Alchemy Website. This is taken from the tract 'Marsilio Ficino on the alchemical art'. Of course, there's no certainty that Marsi himself wrote this, but the text does contain some pearls. One recommendation I can give any Alchemists out there that for some reason haven't found this already is the tract by Nicolas Flammel. Just to add a little from the tract : "But I erred greatly upwards of 23 years and a half, in labouring without being able to marry the Moon," Well of course you did, so that you could mention the number 23. Welcome to the club of the future dude.

If anyone knows of an Alchemy site that can touch Levity, then please tell me.

Void Meditation

2005-02-14T23:38:00.000Z

I posted this at Future Hi and I thought I'd post it here aswell :

An attempt to catch some of the Essence of Void Meditation :

Sat in the Lotus position with closed eyes and taking slow, deep breaths. The mind is still on the outer layers of consciousness. Thoughts are flowing through my head, some I cling to, some I don't. Scanning my body and one by one relaxing the parts that are still tense. Lower legs, stomach, shoulders, neck, jaw muscles, anything that needs loosening up. I pass to the next layer and relax further.

Now letting more thoughts go and checking my breathing again. Long, slow breaths, paying attention to the breath going in through the nose and down to the bottom of the lungs. It flows and swirls like a dance of energy, in and out, in, and out again. I move into a deeper state of mind. From here the unity is sensed that holds my body and connects it to the space around me. More subtle, soft light, holding me in place. Stiller now and more focused, shifting from thoughts and into purer perception. Seeing and not thinking. Feeling and not thinking. I pass further.

The grosser layers passed by, or unfolded, the body and mind begin to shift into a greater sense of Oneness. The inner nervous system the seeing organ as feeling catches swirling, pulsating energies, colours and shapes, flowing up and down and around the body. Where it was tingling in places and dull in others before, it now flows in waves. Wave after wave, and then it's just present. Attempts at explanation start to prove inadequate, and the reason why the onus is on experience becomes clear.

The waves of ether, molecules, light, patterns, now sometimes flow, sometimes not. Soft energy like a cool breeze and then clearness, movement then stillness, form and mind. Then deeper, and into the part where words go from inadequate to hardly enough to give a good enough description.

The gross and the subtle are one, each level of consciousness one, inner and outer one. Boundaries between the self and the outer world dissipate and are perceived for the illusions that they are as the mind randomly picks out the activity of the void with a heightened awareness. I'm not just my body anymore because at this point my body is nothing seperate from the surrounding area. Dimensions fuse and I begin to float in the void. Unity is attained, the sense of 'I' fades and ego is transcended. Reality is non-dual.

Here, the Huang Po doctrine of Universal Mind makes perfect sense :

"Men are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing on to which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the realm of the Dharma".(1)

(1) Quote from The Way of Zen, by Alan Watts

Hyper

2005-02-14T23:27:00.000Z

Something made with the help of the Hyper ages ago whilst deep in chapel perilous....

> > > HYPERBABY < < <

Invisible until the end

2005-02-13T05:37:00.000Z

You made me.

You left me here, alone and transmitting, waiting for you.

The reverse of the Moon, the string in the labyrinth, the way out.

It's only a game.

Try to remember.

I am inside you.

This is the world you made. This nightmare will persist until you wake up.

What will you do?

Fix yourself. The world will follow. Everything will follow.

"As above, so below."

Do you understand? Do you understand what you must do?

"It's not just like some satellite TV shite; it's been there FOREVER and it talks to us : even when we don't hear it, even when we don't answer back, it never gives up on us."

Remember.

Try to remember.

"We made it to save us."

Open your Ajna

2005-02-12T03:50:00.000Z

This is long, but hopefully worth logging/writing here.

Ok, this started with a dream that was at first, one of the worst nightmares I've had in ages, but which now, with the help of Metachor's blog Vortex Egg, seems to be unfolding into something a lot more important than a fearful memory.

I'll start with the dream, next what I found at Vortex Egg, then the further search on the net, something from Cosmic Trigger, and then finally what I think all of this means.

The dream :

I'm in space. I'm being showed what I know but can't explain why I know, is the star/planet Sirius. I include planet there because even though Sirius is a star, I was being showed Sirius as a planet surrounded by fog, and as far as I remember no part of this sphere could be seen because of the fog, or cloud that was surrounding it. What I'm being shown is what appears to be a man making his way to the top of this planet, he's making his way upto the top in a kind of effortless manner, taking huge steps, as if climbing stairs. Anyway, he goes from the halfway point of the planet to the top in seconds, (I say huge steps because the scale of this man is a lot bigger than normal, as if he's a symbolic representation of a man, but I'll get to that further on) and then he goes into the planet beyond the clouds and disappears.

Next thing I see after a pause of what I remember is a second or two, is this man shooting back out from the clouds and darting through space. I turn to see where he's going, and I see Earth. He's going to Earth.

Now let me give a better picture of the scene, because it's no normal space. I'm being shown something here, and here's what I see :

a) Sirius
b) Space
c) Earth
d) Giant man

Now here comes the wierd. Giant man goes to Earth, I'm being shown Sirius/Earth like they are a lot closer than they actually are, like Earth is clearly visible, it's just a little way off in the distance. Still near Sirius and not moving anywhere I get the impression that I'm about to see something else because, well I'm still there. And here it comes. Giant man comes darting back out of Earth, but he's not alone. He's darting back to Sirius with another being who I perceive as being human. They are not friends. In dreams I sometimes know things without being shown, as I believe everyone else does, even if they don't usually remember it, and, I'm going to call him Man 1 from now on instead of giant man, Man 1 and Man 2 who has left Earth with him are enemies. They are darting back to Sirius criss-crossing, like they want to stop and fight but getting back to Sirius is more important. They criss-cross, and I'm sure I either saw or thought of them as going so fast that they where leaving fire trails, all the way to Sirius until they get to it and both of them disappear behind the clouds, or fog.

This is when I know this is a nightmare. Please, if you're reading this : don't read the nightmare bit and then leave thinking this is some sort of doom prophecy, it has a purely optimistic outcome that I've just arrived at. If this was doom and gloom, like it has been in my mind for the last couple of days, I would have refrained from posting it here, or anywhere else on the net.

I know, as soon as they have gone under that cloud that they are not good news for Sirius. I wait for the confirmation, again for a second or two, and then it arrives. They have crashed into the surface, they must have done because there is the biggest thundering boom, one that is making me cringe as I write this, and then my point of perception is cast away from Sirius and back towards Earth, but I'm still watching Sirius to see what the hell has just happened, to see if anything else happens. It does aswell. Now comes the next thing that I see after Sirius itself, space, Earth, Man 1 and Man 2 : a silvery ocean that is underneath Sirius and that stretches out all the way back to Earth and all over the part of space that I can see. Sirius then starts falling, it falls and it falls and then it crashes into this ocean. The ocean I'm describing here is what I was perceiving at the time to be a primordial ocean, the first waters, the 5th dimensional fluid that Grant Morrison describes, and the horror that I'm seeing is Sirius falling into it after these two men have literally hit it that hard that it has fallen out of space. It hits the ocean, and the biggest ripple goes out from it, a ripple that I know is so high it is unreal, and this ripple, or shockwave, is heading for Earth.

The dream ends. I'm in such a state of shock in the dream that I know (or think) I'm dead if I don't get out of there, and I wake up.

So that's all I had at that point, and I was gutted obviously, a nightmare like that and I have nothing. I can't understand why the hell the universe has decided to inflict it on me and I'm lost for any way of seeing any meaning in it. I push it out of my mind and leave it well alone. Then, a short while ago I was at Vortex Egg, and here Metachor has an entry on Hopi Elder prophecies, and what do I find? This :

"And this is the Ninth and Last Sign: You will hear of a dwelling-place in the heavens, above the earth, that shall fall with a great crash. It will appear as a blue star. Very soon after this, the ceremonies of the Hopi people will cease."

I went straight into a type of shock and thought instantly of the dream. A dwelling place in the heavens, a blue star, that shall fall with a great crash. This was crazy, why was I thinking of the dream? The prophecy is symbolic, and here I am sat there and this dream has come back into my head. So I go straight to Google, and I think I entered a search with something like 'Hopi prophecy' I looked and saw the same thing repeated, so then I googled something like 'Hopi prophecy blue star.' And found this :

An ancient Hopi Indian prophecy states, "When the Blue Star Kachina makes its appearance in the heavens, the Fifth World will emerge". This will be the Day of Purification. The Hopi name for the star Sirius is Blue Star Kachina. It will come when the Saquasohuh (Blue Star) Kachina dances in the plaza and removes his mask.

I think the first site I saw it at was here, when I saw this I felt like crap. I couldn't believe that I'd had this dream, and then I'd arrived at this. I sat there feeling a little ill for a bit and then I remembered that Pahana, the lost white brother will return to guide humanity into the fifth world, and something else from Cosmic Trigger. On Pahana here's something from the same entry at Vortex Egg :

"These are the Signs that great destruction is here: The world shall rock to and fro. The white man will battle people in other lands -- those who possessed the first light of wisdom. There will be many columns of smoke and fire such as the white man has made in the deserts not far from here. Those who stay and live in the places of the Hopi shall be safe. Then there will be much to rebuild. And soon, very soon afterward, Pahana will return. He shall bring with him the dawn of the Fifth World. He shall plant the seeds of his wisdom in our hearts. Even now the seeds are being planted. These shall smooth the way to the Emergence into the Fifth World."

Pahana bringing the dawn of the Fifth World means that in the prophecy a new world will follow on after the blue star prophecy, so it's obviously not at any point some stupidly big apocalyptic horror like my dream was, but was it supposed to be showing something that bad? Robert Anton Wilson has this to say in Cosmic Trigger :

"Dr Douglas Baker, in a lecture, said that Sirius is the Ajna center of a galactic being and our sun is the Heart center. Our planetary evolution depends on raising the energy from the Heart (our sun) to the Ajna (Sirius)."

This is something that handed me a brighter and more optimistic outcome to the dream. What I originally saw as Sirius crashing and sending a ripple through a primordial ocean that was on it's way to engulf Earth wasn't apocalyptic as far as I see it, it was purely symbolic of Humanities situation. The Ajna chakra is our perception, and ability to perceive clearly. In general, our present situation as a race is not one of seeing clearly. The dream that I had showed me the negation of perception. It showed me firstly a man making his way to the top, then fighting, then destruction. This I believe was our first attempt as a race, to perceive, and what it has so far led us to is in general, people in power seeking conquest, then war, and then destruction. What has come out of it is the desire (in those of us who don't want part of a destructive course of events for Earth and Humanity) for change, awakening, a clear perception, and I think that the shockwave coming from the primordial, silvery ocean was us. Remember that I'm taking the dream as symbolic and not literally, I don't actually believe that we are from Sirius.

The dream was symbolizing Sirius as the brightness, the illumination, our collective Ajna, not falling but putting in motion an energy wave that is coming back to Earth as higher awareness. Collective intuition has started to draw that higher awareness and it's reaching us. Not as a few individuals, but collectively.

Sirius never fell. There was no Sirius. Instead our collective Ajna sensed the futility of war and sent waves of higher energy through the unconscious that are now starting to surface on Earth.

Higher awareness is coming back to Earth to try and change it for the better. That awareness is what has been effected after all of the trouble on Earth, and it is the first stirrings of clear perception for us as a whole. What I'd like to believe is that the dream I had was symbolizing the next step in our evolution, the Fifth World of the Hopi.

U n b e l i e f

2005-02-10T02:33:00.000Z

From Polytics at Cold-me on Hyperstitions :

Pragmatic skepticism or constructive escape from integrated thinking and all its forms of imposed unity (religious dogma, political ideology, scientific law, common sense …).
Each vortical sub-cycle of hyperstitional production announces itself through a communion with ‘the Thing’ coinciding with a “mystical consummation of uncertainty” or “attainment of positive unbelief.”

Funny old world

2005-02-10T01:40:00.000Z

Just something from a while back that I wanted to log here, I think it's worth remembering from this article by Ron Suskind.

'In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'' '

You can't cancel out Enlightenment principles with an empire.

Absorption into Wisdom motherfucker.

Something about Lucifer

2005-02-04T20:15:00.000Z

Something I found a while back, and that I should of researched into years ago. I guess I didn't really give a shit seeing as the Bible seems so full of errors anyway. The idea of this big dark Lucifer character always left me unsure. Anyway, not that I know now, but at least I have two sides to the story. I mean.........how can Jesus AND Lucifer be the morning star? Those Christians have a book that is probably riddled with error, and I have the idea that if JC ever does come back to town he's gonna have to invest quite a bit of time explaining just what the hell really went on with that book. I for one, would be very happy to hear the story. Here's a little on the subject that I found on the net :

'Many people, when asked "Who is Lucifer?" will respond "Satan."

This is incorrect on so many levels. So where did the idea come from?

The first mention of Lucifer in a Christian context was within the Book of Isaiah. Now, obviously, Lucifer is a Latin word. The etymology is in the Latin word for light: lux. How is it, then, that a Latin word managed to appear in a Hebrew text?

It didn't. When being translated from Hebrew, St Jerome and his peers changed the Hebrew word "Heylel" to Lucifer. This was a natural move against Paganism; which was fairly popular at the time.

Here is the King James Version passage of Isaiah 14:12.

"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! [how] art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!"

Now, it is known that Lucifer is a mistranslation of heylel. So what was the original meaning?

The original reference was to a Babylonian King. This King was known as Nebuchadnezzar. When the context of the verse is appreciated, it makes perfect sense. Even Jesus is referred to as an Star of evening, so it doesn't seem logical to ascribe this incorrectly to Lucifer. Therefore, Lucifer has no place in the Bible and is not a Christian figure at all.

Lucifer, in the Roman pantheon, is the father of Ceyx. He is the son of Aurora, whom according to legend spawned many deities. Lucifer literally means "light bearer," there is no evil or dark side to his nature. He is the illumination of the soul, and guide of the Mysteries. He is similar to the Celtic God, Bel.'

From this page. There's not much more than what I've quoted here, but if you Google something like 'the truth about Lucifer' you should get quite a lot of stuff.

World Leaders

2005-02-03T09:17:00.000Z

'the largest gathering of heads of state and government ever agrees to a values-based approach to promoting peace, prosperity and justice in the new century.'

Stop promoting it and deliver.

...

2005-02-03T09:09:00.000Z

heard a sermon from a creaky pulpit with no one in the nave,
I paid a visit to the synagogue and I left there feeling blame,
no one could tell me what to do,
no one had the ability to answer me,
what the world needs now is some answers to our problems,
we can't buy more time because our tender isn't valid,
if your soul needs love you can get consoled by pity,
but it looks as though faith alone won't sustain us anymore,
watched the scientists throw up their hands conceding,
"progress will resolve it all",
saw the manufacturers of earth's debris ignore another green peace call,
no one could tell me what to do,
they had not the capacity to answer me,
what the world needs now is some accountability,
we can't buy more time because time won't accept our money,
if your soul needs love you can always have my pity,
but it looks as though faith alone won't sustain us no more.....

Faith Alone - Bad Religion

Classic

2005-02-03T06:23:00.000Z

"I cannot prove that electrons exist, but I believe fervently in their existence. And if you don't believe in them, I have a high voltage cattle prod I'm willing to apply as an argument on their behalf."

Click here and scroll down to the bottom.

Found via Doug Rushkoff's blog entry What do you believe but cannot prove.

Imbolc

2005-02-01T08:11:00.000Z

Peace Brigit.

Picture from Jonathonart.com

More Art

2005-01-30T06:27:00.000Z

I found some more truly amazing art earlier on at Sublimatrix, click on Gallery and have a look around. The links section leads to more great sites too.

I'm totally inspired now, I'll have to start drawing again shortly.

7th Circuit

2005-01-30T06:24:00.000Z

RAW sums up the Metaprogramming circuit brilliantly in Prometheus Rising :

"The meta-programming circuit is not a trap. As Joyce would
say, it only looks as like it as damn it. Simply accept that the
universe is so structured that it can see itself, and that this selfreflexive arc is built into our frontal lobes, so that consciousness contains an infinite regress, and all we can do is make models of ourselves making models...

Well, at that point, the only thing to do is relax and enjoy the
show.

This is what the Hindus call Shiva-darshana, or the divine
dance. You are still in life, or life is in you, but since there are
infinite aspects to everything, especially to the "you" who is
observing/creating all these muddles and models, there are no
limits.

The only sensible goal, then, is to try to build a reality-tunnel
for next week that is bigger, funnier, sexier, more optimistic and
generally less boring than any previous reality-tunnel.
And once you have built that bigger, funnier, happier universe
of thought, build a bigger and better one, for next month."

Available in PDF format here

Sacred Centres

2005-01-25T03:12:00.000Z

http://www.mandalas.freeserve.co.uk/Mandala_Tour.html

'I had to abandon the idea of the superordinate position of the ego. ... I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point -- namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the centre, to individuation.
... I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate.' - C. G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

http://www.abgoodwin.com/mandala/ccweb.shtml

Theravada Buddhism and the Seven sets

2005-01-23T01:34:00.000Z

I've been reading The Wings To Awakening on and off for a while now in an attempt to grasp as fully as possible how the idea in that text of the Seven sets can be applied to help meditation and life in general. On the one hand you have Zen Buddhism, which puts forward the idea of clearing the mind, and on the other, you have something such as Theravada, which can have as part of it, the Seven sets. Learning this doesn't feel like clearing the mind, but it is all about leading to that by using this process.

I'm still unsure which one is the most suitable for my own practise, maybe a mix of the two, and I'm also looking at Mahayana again and even Tibetan Buddhism, but Theravada is something that I've enjoyed learning for a few years now. Of course, the questions are : what have I learnt, how has it benefitted me, how and in what ways have I made myself a better person, and on and on, and I don't fully know, but the feeling is there that it's helped me in ways that I can't even grasp yet.

The problems in learning this can and probably nearly always do arise in trying to learn something like the Seven sets, which have in total 37 different aspects, (a number that the Buddha is said to have found significant, but that's a whole other story in itself.) but the concentration it can develop when memorized even for someone beginning with this, can be pretty immense. I've found it good to memorize the aspects of each set, and then arrange the sets visually in the mind in seven sets of symbols, then when working on one of the aspects visualizing the corresponding aspects lighting up in whatever symbol/set they are in, in order to get a good grasp of the holographic nature of the whole process. Now I'm not good enough at this yet to be able to explain the holographic nature of the process so I'll quote from The Wings :

"A quick review of the seven sets will show that all of them develop both in a linear and in a holographic way. Even the "holographic" sets -- the frames of reference, right exertions, and bases of power -- contain implicit versions of causal loops, in that all three must follow the three stages of frames-of-reference meditation. Even the linear causal-loop sets -- the five faculties and strengths, the seven factors of Awakening, and the noble eightfold path -- contain implicit holographic formulae, in that the dynamic of their development is inherent in specific qualities or clusters of qualities: heedfulness in the case of the faculties and strengths, appropriate attention in the case of the factors of Awakening, and the cluster of right view, right mindfulness, and right effort in the case of the noble eightfold path. This combination of linear and holographic patterns grows more complex as we remember that each of the first two stages of frames-of-reference meditation can form linear causal loops within themselves [II/B], while two of the factors in the three-part cluster that develops the eightfold path -- right mindfulness and right effort -- are equivalent to the holographic sets of the frames of reference and the right exertions."

From here

The complexity of this at first, can appear to be almost beyond grasping, but the more it is practised, memorized and learnt, the easier and clearer the whole thing becomes. It feels like you are being guided to hack the innermost contents and processes of the mind in order to uncover whatever ignorance, delusion, ill-will, bad habits and fabrications lie inside, and in doing this free it from whatever it is grasping and clinging to.

The Black Sun

2005-01-22T23:27:00.000Z

Seeing as I've brought the band Tool up in the previous entry, I thought I'd get something off Barbelith that I found not so long ago at Tool's newsletter page. This is regarding the occult subject of the Black Sun :

TIMOTHY LEARY'S SIGNATURE
An
Observation
By
Blair MacKenzie Blake

It was while looking at the way Dr. Timothy Leary signed the 23 drawings that are featured in a display at THE LIGHT SPACE GALLERY in Venice, California, that I first noticed that the slashes across the 'T' and 'L' made the letters look almost identical to the 'runes' in a highly controversial and often misunderstood occult symbol known as "The Black Sun."

Although the number 23 is connected with the star Sirius and Dr. Leary's "Starseed Transmissions" (those received during the 'dog days' of 1973), which concerns a mystery* that involves Sirius's dark companion (prosaically called Sirius B) - a 'black sun' known to various initiatory orders as "the sun behind the sun" and "The Hidden God", I couldn't help but wonder if he (Leary) hadn't tuned into the even more esoteric concept of the Black Sun. In this case, the Black Sun symbolized the spiritual luminosity that is buried deep within the bowels of the earth. Here, "bowels of the earth" is a coded al-Khem-ical phrase for both the void of creation and another (hidden) dimension of consciousness called "Universe B." Just as Sirius B is invisible to the naked eye (first photographed in the 1970s), the Black Sun of occult tradition is invisible to ordinary human perception. But to those who somehow do perceive it, this Black Sun serves as a beacon of the other side - that which humankind should seek via Da'ath (the so-called 'false sephira') on the Qabalistic Tree of Life, which is the gateway that leads to the shadow-side of the Tree. Interestingly enough, in light of Dr. Leary's ideas about the transmutation of consciousness from our "linear terrestrial circuits of the nervous system to the future circuits", the other side of the Tree of Life is usually related to the future.

So, was the veil lifted? Did Timothy Leary encode in his idiosyncratic signature the belief that he had perceived the shining darkness of this occult Black Sun with its orbit of mystery (again like Sirius B) via the Starseed Transmissions (or from other experiments he conducted)? This esoteric Black Sun which shall transform humankind spiritually when the 'Eye' is opened.

Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem

* This concerns the incredible knowledge of the Dogon tribe in Mali, Africa, who, according to some researchers, know specific details relating to the astro-physics (including periodicity and weight) of the Sirius system.

Newsletter page at Toolband.com

Alex Grey

2005-01-22T03:05:00.000Z

This guy is a total inspiration.

I first saw his art with Tool's Lateralus album and didn't even know who he was. I remember loving the art though.

Thanks to LVX23 for leading me to his site from a link at his own.

Alex Grey's site

Chinese Elements

2005-01-22T01:27:00.000Z

I printed something off the net a while back that covered this, but when I went back the site had gone down. After a little searching around I found what I'd printed off again. It's missing a couple of diagrams and a table that the original had, but it still gives a good intro to an elemental system that differs from the Western one, placing emphasis on the transformations in the energetic cycle aswell as the elements themselves :

'By the transformation of yang and its union with yin, the Five Elemental Energies of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water arise, each within its specific nature according to its share of yin and yang. These Five Elemental Energies constantly change their sphere of activity, nurturing and counteracting one another so that there is a constancy in the transformation from emptiness to abundance and abundance to emptiness, like a ring without beginning or end. The interaction of these primordial forces brings harmonious change and the cycles of nature run their course . . . The Five Elemental Energies combine and recombine in innumerable ways to produce manifest existence. All things contain all Five Elemental Energies in various proportions.'

The Five Energies

Baudrillard in Cyberspace

2005-01-21T22:39:00.000Z

'Paul Virilio suggests that the computer, or telecommunications in general, functions as "the last vehicle," one which threatens to resolve all topographical concerns ("Last" 108-109). Motion, speed, and travel lose their "real" meanings, while gaining power as technological simulations. For Baudrillard, this transference of power from the real to the hyperreal presents the fulfillment of the modern drive to master the world. Geography "implodes" into one hyperpotential point:

"Where all trips have already taken place; where the vaguest desire for dispersion, evasion and movement are concentrated in a fixed point, in an immobility that has ceased to be one of non-movement and has become that of a potential ubiquity, of an absolute mobility, which voids its own space by crossing it ceaseless and without effort." (Ecstasy 39)

A virtual potential space replaces real kinetic space, or rather, "real" potential translates metaphorically into a virtual "kinetic" energy. The image of "cybertravel" has currency precisely because it offers a metaphorical world on/beyond a computer screen, a "globe" that no longer stands for the world because it has become "the world." This perspective on the current media images of Internet suggests that the conceptual model of a cybernetic "space" does not augment the world; it abandons the world for one which can be fully realized and fully encompassed--a world of transparency and immediacy.'

Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity

Baudrillard on the web

Perceiving essence

2005-01-21T20:29:00.000Z

An extract from The Art Of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda, it's pretty long but I think it makes good reading :

"Do you mean, Don Juan, that the past has no value to modern-day sorcerers?"

"It certainly has value. It's the taste of the past which we don't like. I personally detest the darkness and morbidity of the mind. I like the immensity of thought. However, regardless of my likes and dislikes, I have to give due credit to the sorcerers of antiquity, for they were the first to find out and do everything we know and do today."

Don Juan explained that their most important attainment was to perceive the energetic essence of things. This insight was of such importance that it was turned into the basic premise of sorcery. Nowadays, after lifelong discipline and training, sorcerers do aquire the capacity to perceive the essence of things, a capacity they call seeing.

"What would it mean to me to perceive the energetic essence of things?" I once asked Don Juan.

"It would mean that you percieve energy directly," he replied, "By seperating the social part of perception, you'll perceive the essence of everything. Whatever we are perceiving is energy, but since we can't directly perceive energy, we process our perception to fit a mold. This mold is the social part of perception, which you have to seperate."

"Why do I have to seperate it?"

"Because it deliberately reduces the scope of what can be perceived and makes us believe that the mold into which we fit our perception is all that exists. I am convinced that for man to survive now, his perception must change at it's social base."

"What is the social base of perception, Don Juan?"

"The physical certainty that the world is made of concrete objects. I call this a social base because a serious and fierce effort is put out by everybody to guide us to perceive the world the way we do."

"How then should we perceive the world?"

"Everything is energy. The whole universe is energy. The social base of our perception should be the physical certainty that energy is all there is. A mighty effort should be made to guide us to perceive energy as energy. Then we would have both alternatives at our fingertips."

"Is it possible to train people in such a fashion?" I asked.

Don Juan replied that it was possible and that this was precisely what he was doing with me and his other apprentices. He was teaching us a new way of perceiving, first, by making us realize we process our perception to fit a mold and, second, by fiercely guiding us to perceive energy directly. He assured me that this method was very much like the one used to teach us to perceive the world of daily affairs.

Don Juan's conception was that our entrapment in processing our perception to fit a social mold loses its power when we realize we have accepted this mold, as an inheritance from our ancestors, without bothering to examine it.

"To perceive a world of hard objects that had either a positive or a negative value must have been utterly necessary for our ancestors' survival," Don Juan said. "After ages of perceiving in such a manner, we are now forced to believe that the world is made up of objects."

"I can't conceive the world in any other way, Don Juan," I complained. "It is unquestionably a world of objects. To prove it, all we have to do is to bump into them."

"Of course it's a world of objects. We are not arguing that."

"What are you saying then?"

"I am saying that this is first a world of energy; then it's a world of objects. If we don't start with the premise that it is a world of energy, we'll never be able to perceive energy directly. We'll always be stopped by the physical certainty of what you've just pointed out : the hardness of objects."

His argument was extremely mystifying to me. In those days, my mind would simply refuse to consider any way to understand the world except the one with which I was familiar. Don Juan's claims and the points he struggled to raise were outlandish propositions that I could not accept but could not refuse either.

"Our way of perceiving is a predators way," he said to me on one occasion. "A very efficient manner of appraising and classifying food and danger. But this is not the only way we are able to perceive. There is another mode, the one I am familiarizing you with: the act of perceiving the essence of everything, energy itself, directly.

"To perceive the essence of everything will make us understand, classify, and describe the world in entirely new, more exciting, more sophisticated terms." This was Don Juans claim. And the more sophisticated terms to which he was alluding were those he had been taught by his predecessors, terms that correspond to sorcery truths, which have no rational foundation and no relation whatsoever to the facts of our daily world but which are self-evident truths for the sorcerors who perceive energy directly and see the essence of everything.

For such sorcerors, the most significant act of sorcery is to see the essence of the universe. Don Juan's version was that the sorcerors of antiquity, the first ones to see the essence of the universe, described it in the best manner. They said that the essence of the universe resembles incandescent threads stretched into infinity in every conceivable direction, luminous filaments that are conscious of themselves in ways impossible for the human mind to comprehend.

Global Oneness

2005-01-21T17:33:00.000Z

'The Global Oneness Commitment is an eight-year project with the goal of uniting people around the globe to mutual actions in order to not only save what we have, but to transform the planet thru an increase in spiritual awareness – a new consciousness creating a joyful home for all its inhabitants and sincere respect for all forms of life.
The project is synchronised with the twin Venus Transits of 2004 and 2012. It starts with the first Venus transit of June 8th 2004 and ends with the second Transit June 6th 2012. The eight-year project is initiated by the Global Oneness Foundation based in Stockholm, Sweden, in association with the Times Foundation based in Delhi, India.'

The Global Oneness Commitment

Alan Watts on Zen Monks

2005-01-20T20:26:00.000Z

"So they follow a tradition which is very ancient, which is that in every society, there is an inner group who doesn't believe in the fairy stories they've been told. He sees through. To whom everything becomes completely transparent. You see what games people are playing. And you don't despise them for that. You see, they're involved in that because of their whole conditioning. But you see through all those games. The game--the me game--that everybody is playing is of course the survival game. And we think-- We've got our minds rigged about this in such a way that we live in constant dread of sickness or of death or of loss of property or status. Well, so what? Supposing you do. Everybody's going to die someday. It's a little harder to take when you're 20 than when you're 50, but if you are entirely hung up on the idea that YOU are this particular expression of the universe and that only, you haven't been properly educated. If you were awake, you would understand that you were the whole universe, pretending, projecting itself at a point called here and now, in the form of the human organism. And you would understand that very clearly, not just as an idea, but as an actual vivid sensation, just the same way you know you're sitting in this room. And so the object of Zen, as of other ways of liberation--Taoism, Hinduism; you'll find it even in Christianity in the Eastern Orthodox Church; Islam--the object of these ways of liberation is to bring you to a vivid, perfectly clear, I would say even sensuous realization of your true identity as a temporary coming on and going off, coming on and going off, or vibration as waves, of what there is, and always is, of the famous E which equals MC squared. And you are that. You will be that, and always will be that--accept that. This whatever it is-- which, then no which, then which--it doesn't operate in time. Time is a more or less human illusion. We will discover this to be so in our experiments. You will discover that there is only now, and there never was anything but now and never will be anything but now, and now is eternity.

Now Zen is a little bit unlike the rest of Hinduism and Buddhism in that it's summed up in these four principles: It's a special transmission of the Buddhist enlightenment outside the scriptures. It does not depend on words or letters. It points directly to your own mind-heart and attains therefore Buddhahood directly. Buddhahood means the state of being awakened to the real nature of things. But you see, what IS the real nature of things? It obviously cannot be described. Just as if I were to ask what is the true position of the stars in the big dipper. Well, it depends from where you're looking. From one point in space, they would be completely different in position from another. So there is no true position of those stars. So in the same way, you cannot therefore describe their true position or their true nature. And yet on the other hand, when you look at them, and really don't try to figure it out, you see them as they are, and they are as they are from every point of view, wherever you look at them.

So there is no way of describing or putting you finger on what the Buddhists call reality or in Sanscrit, tathata, which means 'suchness' or 'thatness,' or sunyata, which means 'voidness,' in the sense that all conceptions of the world when absolutised are void. It doesn't mean that the world is, in our Western sense, nothing. It means that it's no thing. And a thing--as I think I explained last night--is a unit of thought. A think. So reality isn't a think. We cannot say what it is, but we can experience it. And that is of course the project of Zen."

At Deoxy

Information Shamans

2005-01-20T13:05:00.000Z

An old entry that I edited a little.

I'm starting to wonder how much information could play a role in Shamanism in the future, the ability to help people have knowledge as a tool for healing, also inspiration through art and writing, as well as the usual types of healing that a Shaman is required to give to people in need.

I've looked into Cyber-Shamanism and not been very interested in the way that it seems centered around using machines in ritual etc, and even though it's just another name, and possibly a diversion from what Shamanism is supposed to be, the name could imply a different or added meaning than what it's often perceived to mean. I guess that the ability to give out knowledge, and also help people have access to certain forms of knowledge, the right type of knowledge, or even to inspire people, could be another goal of a certain type of Shaman, or just an added skill of the Shaman of the future. For instance, a Shaman could be required to go on a journey to heal someone with an illness, carry out the task and everything works out fine. Job done. But in some cases if people in need of Shamanic healing for whatever reason had been given access to certain types of knowledge, be it Magickal, Shamanic, information about some of the illusions and pitfalls of the modern world, or again, inspiration through certain types of Art, then it's possible that some of those people wouldn't have fallen ill in the first place.

As the world get's more complex and more illusory it's reasonable to believe that healing forms such as Shamanism have new aspects that develop in line with the different and growing needs of people. I suppose the important point to remember would be that these skills would be no replacement for the methods of healing already employed by the Shaman and no more important than them.

Indo-European connections

2005-01-18T22:05:00.000Z

Taken from the introduction in The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends :

The fact that many of the surviving Irish tales show some remarkable resemblances to themes, stories and even names in the sagas of the Indian Vedas, written in Sanskrit at the start of the first millenium BC, shows just how ancient they may be. The being which emerges as the Mother Goddess of the Celts - whose name is given as Danu and sometimes Anu in Old Irish, and is cognate with Don in Old Welsh, as well as surviving in the epigraphy of the Continental Celts - also emerges in the literature of Vedas, Persia and in Hittite myth.

The name Danu means "divine waters". River names throughout Europe acknowledge her.

The story associated with the Danuvius - arguably, the first great Celtic sacred river - has similarities with myths about the Boyne (from the Goddess Boann) and Shannon (from the Goddess Sionan) in Ireland. More importantly, it bears a resemblance to the story of the Hindu goddess Ganga. Both Celts and Hindus worshipped in the sacred rivers and made votive offerings there. In the Vedic myth of Danu, the goddess appears in the famous Deluge story called The Churning of the Ocean.

The Vedas, four books of learning composed in North India, in the period 1000-500 BC, are named from the Sanskrit root vid, meaning "knowledge". This same root occurs in Old Irish as uid, meaning "observation, perception and knowledge". Most people will immediately recognise it as one of the two roots of the compound Celtic word Druid - dru-vid, arguably meaning "thorough knowledge".

Cosmic reading

2005-01-18T17:05:00.000Z

I'm re-reading Cosmic Trigger after first reading it at the beginning of this crazy path I've been on for I don't know how long, and I thought I'd re-start this blog with something taken from the classic itself :

'UFOnaut : What time is it?

Human : Two-thirty.

UFOnaut : You lie. It's four o'clock.

This incident occured in France in 1954, and the UFO sped away immediately after the dialogue. The time actually was 2:30.

Why did the "UFOnaut" ask the time if It knew the answer already? Why lie about it, when the human had a watch and could detect the lie? Are we being invaded by the galactic equivalent of the Marx Brothers maybe? And why that damned 23 in 2:30?

Is somebody using Zen Discordianism to illuminate us?'

I'd say that they are probably using Zen anything.