The Mystical Carl Blog

Second Coming, in the Hope of Yeats

2010-06-15T14:24:00.001-07:00

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon finally heard the falconer;
Things fell together; the centre always held;
Mere love is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide has receded, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is reborn;
The best recall their conviction, while the worst
have forgotten their passionate intensity.

Every day another revelation is at hand;
Surely every Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Propels my sight: somewhere in the depths of each heart
A shape with angel body and the face of a human,
Its gaze warm and enlivening as the sun,
Is stirring its charges awake, while all about it
Reel starlight forms of the friends of the Earth.
The darkness drops again; and now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were carried in slumber by a rocking cradle,
And what glorious being, its hour come round at last,
Rises in you to be born?

on action and regret

2010-02-09T14:14:00.000-08:00

Everyone will realize their mistakes, sooner or later, and fix their behavior going forward. The forward direction is important because it can be its own mistake to make amends to the past and the people you met, since they are no longer where you left them. What counts is the future and the people you will meet, because that's where the universe awaits. So the question that remains is how quickly each turnabout comes. Will the realization to correct take minutes, hours, days, months, years, lifetimes? Is the awareness coming faster or slower each time? The more you stretch it out, the more risk of dangerous reaction from others as your own outward behavior worsens. The realistic goal is not to make all regrettable impulse disappear, but to increasingly arrive at regret before taking irreversible action. The wise one will reconsider within, to offer up their best to the outer world in the time allowed. There's no shame in closing the cycles of intolerance to acceptance privately, that's what the inner world is for. How much better to address the hateful thought today than the hateful action tomorrow. But if that is not possible, at least to have left the hateful thought to tomorrow rather than become committed to the hateful deed today.

encouragements to not act badly

2010-01-07T08:48:00.000-08:00

The universe works for you. Only you are reacting to it as if it does not, making assumptions it will oppose you, preemptively controlling and forcing and breaking things, and generally not giving things a chance to work out.

What complicates things immensely is the fact that so many other people are acting like you too. They do act against you, they're teaching and perpetuating bad examples, which you learn and generalize from. It would be much clearer that the universe was acting for you if (A) other people didn't act badly, and (B) you stopped opposing and gave things a chance to work out.

Of course it would be easier if you could get A without B, you'd be the king of the universe! But your self-esteem would plummet. You'd become extremely alienated without any sense of how you, the only bad one, could reform, which way to go, or why you even deserve to exist. You need other people showing you various examples of bad behavior, sometimes worse than your behavior sometimes better, so you can learn and relate. You need to see that badly acting people are still human beings that you can understand and care about. Otherwise you'd be totally lost, forever!

It is worth noting that you do flirt with experiences of A without B. You can get pockets of people being good around you while you're the only one doing something bad. Those are intense moments indeed, when you have the choice to be defensive and blaming (I'm not bad, they did something wrong, those good two-shoes!) or you can be inspired and grateful, letting them show you how to forgive and fix your actions. Make the most of such opportunities, they are life-changing.

And what if you get B without A, that is, badly acting people around you when you're being good? Is that possible, is that even fair? Well chalk it up to the momentum of your reality, because you certainly can get badly behaving people coming in and out of your life even after you clean up your act. Learn a lesson, watch your secondary reactions, make the best of it! Reinforce your commitment to not do what they're doing, take the opportunity to clarify your understanding of the situation, and refine yourself further. They may or may not learn from and appreciate you, but you can certainly learn from and appreciate yourself. It's simply going to take a while for all the problems to fade away, and much longer if you go in and out of bad behavior too.

The point is that badly acting people will have no sticking power if you are working positively with the universe. How? Because the universe will take the badly acting people into account when providing for you, and your job is simply to not hold onto them or react badly back.

If someone doesn't want to change, don't try to change them, that would be a form of holding onto. Offer but don't force, care but care enough to let live. Everything doesn't need to be perfect for your life to be fine, everyone will need some space to play out their own choices. The universe is going to make room for everyone to experience life as they choose, so the newspapers will still be full of all kinds of stories.

That is why your planet will definitely not become perfect in your lifetime, and your response to difficult situations will matter. But your life can defintely become a resilient moving bubble of perfection in the world, mysteriously untouchable to those who would shake you, and heaven sent to those who are looking for examples in the new way to be.

sentiments for the new year

2010-01-03T19:19:00.000-08:00

Pursue the positive experience of being into yourself. If you don't, who will? Just try to get to know all your human's thoughts and feelings. Consider what you have to do and what you want to do. Give every situation a chance to work out to offer something for everyone including you. Patiently wait for opportunities to explore your interests. Make time on a regular basis to do something expressive or creative with yourself. Hang out with yourself in various moods. Evaluate your impulses and list your options, find the most interesting things to do, including some out of the ordinary. Collect the things you do and make, and enjoy going over them like you're sharing them with a friend. You will be. How can it ever be a bad thing to be into yourself, if inside you is your access to God, the greatest energy of love and wisdom that in turn connects with and cares for everyone and everything in harmony. Ideally, people should be leading fairly balanced and judicious lives, kind to themselves and everyone around them, because they're far too busy getting to know themselves to ever waste time on unecessary conflicts and disasters. Do your part to contribute your best functioning self to the world which needs it, so that more and more people will feel the pull to just know what to do when the time comes to fix the problems and celebrate being alive together.

"Wal-Mart fired my husband for being sick."

2009-12-16T18:09:00.000-08:00

I hear good and bad things about Walmart these days, but this one really sucks if true.

http://www.demeritwalmart.com
So I did an about face and wrote the following to the preceding URL:
If you don't serve humanity then I will shop at a store that's better for my nation and my world. People get sick, you have the power to take care of them. I hear that Target is good for employees and communities, I will do my next shopping there instead. -- Carl Schroeder

----- Original Message -----
From: Katie, MomsRising.org
To: carl@swedenborgchapel.org
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 6:07 PM
Subject: Wal-Mart fired my husband for being sick.

"My husband just got fired" -- for demerits resulting from taking needed sick days.

Give Wal-Mart a Demerit of its own today!

Take Action

Dear Carl,

This holiday season, millions of Wal-Mart employees are living in fear of getting demerits, losing pay, or being fired simply because they take sick days [1]. It happened to this family:

"My husband just got fired for missing sick days. He missed 5 1/2 days in 6 months." This MomsRising member reports that these were days when her husband had legitimate doctor's notes or when her husband's manager sent him home because of flu symptoms. He received "demerits" when he took this needed sick time, and "The day after Black Friday… they called him in and fired him for missing too many days in 6 months. He did not take off 'weekends, sunny days, or go fishing'…he was sick. This is just wrong."

Wal-Mart's policy is not just unhealthy and unfair for employees, it also could harm customers and the general public. With about 1.4 million employees in the U.S. [2] -- that's a lot of people who could be coming to work sick, and unwittingly exposing their coworkers and customers to contagious diseases such as the flu--putting us all at risk.

Together, we can take on this mega corporation and help millions of families stay healthy and keep needed jobs. It's Wal-Mart the company, not it's employees, that really deserves the demerits - for their unhealthy and unfair policy that's bad for employees and customers.

Give Wal-Mart a Demerit Badge of its own today by clicking here: www.demeritwalmart.com

With your demerit badge, you'll be telling Wal-Mart to stop punishing employees for taking sick days.

Now's the time to take action!
This week is the last full week of holiday shopping before Christmas. That means now, more than ever, Wal-Mart wants nothing but good press to drive shoppers to their stores. By sending your demerit badge today, and sharing this message with your friends by forwarding this email now, we can make sure Wal-Mart gets the message at a time when they can't ignore it.

Help us reach our goal! We're so close that your action now can take us over the top. Our goal is to send 40,000 Demerit Badges to Wal-Mart. We're up to 35,000. Help millions of families and safeguard the public's health by sending your Demerit Badge today. Together we can gather enough Demerit Badges to earn media coverage to shame Wal-Mart into changing its policies.

Why is Wal-Mart's sick days policy important for all of us?
* Wal-Mart's sick days policy is bad for women and families. Women comprise 72 percent of Wal-Mart's workforce [3]. As Gloria Steinem said earlier this year: "The fact is that women need [access to paid sick days] more than anyone else. Women still have so much more family responsibility than men…" [4] The increased responsibilities for caregiving that women carry mean that women are more likely to be at risk for punishment and termination under bad policies.

* Wal-Mart's sick days policy has public health implications for us all. Wal-Mart employs about 1.4 million people in the U.S. [5] - that's a lot of people who come to work sick, and expose their coworkers and customers to potential illness.  

* When Wal-Mart changes its policies, other companies take notice. Wal-Mart is one of the largest private employers in the country [6]. Therefore Wal-Mart frequently sets the standard (or at least the floor) for many of the policies that other companies put in place. We've heard from dozens of MomsRising members who say that the company they work for has sick days policies which are similar to the policies at Wal-Mart. By focusing our efforts on Wal-Mart now, we can set an example for other companies and propel them to change their practices as well.

What does Wal-Mart have to say for itself?
MomsRising and the New York Times exposed Wal-Mart's sick leave policies in early November of this year [6]. Soon after, the company commented with ABC News reporting that Wal-Mart will be issuing a memo to "to human resource managers at stores across the country saying, 'We must be clear that no one will lose their job if they get H1N1.'" [7] This answer is full of more spin than a spider convention.

It sounds like Wal-Mart answered, but if you think about it, this answer doesn't address the problem at all. First of all, in most cases when people have flu symptoms, doctors aren't doing lab tests to check for the H1N1 virus, so there's no way for Wal-Mart to know if an employee has H1N1, the seasonal flu, or any other illness. Second, Wal-Mart didn't address whether sick employees would continue to receive demerits, as is their usual practice. And third, our colleagues at the National Labor Committee have spoken to workers at several Wal-Mart stores who all say they haven't been told of any changes to Wal-Mart's sick days policy. [8]

In the past two weeks, MomsRising has asked Wal-Mart to clarify their sick days policy, but so far we've received no response.

Give Wal-Mart a demerit badge today - in the height of the shopping season - and tell them to stop punishing employees for taking sick days. www.demeritwalmart.com

Nobody wants to shop at Wal-Mart and end up bringing home more than just a bag of presents. And nobody wants to live in fear of losing their job simply because they caught the flu.

Thank you,
--Katie, Mary, Kristin, Joan, Julia, Anita, and the MomsRising.org Team

P.S. MomsRising and our partners insist that no retaliation be taken by Wal-Mart management against any worker who speaks the truth about Wal-Mart's punitive sick leave policies. We will be watching this very closely.

1. The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/03sick.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper
2. http://WalMartstores.com/FactsNews/FactSheets/
3. http://Walmartwatch.com/pages/women_be_wary
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvvvAdSD3sM
5. http://WalMartstores.com/FactsNews/FactSheets/ (Employment and Diversity Fact Sheet)
6. The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/03sick.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper
7. ABC News: http://www.nlcnet.org/article.php?id=686 and http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/Wal-Mart-defends-sick-leave-policy-good-morning-america/story?id=9013693
Also see:
- ABC News: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFluNews/walmart-sick-policy-irks/story?id=8999558
- Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/08/AR2009110818009.html?sub=AR
8. http://www.nlcnet.org/

Blessings of the New Software

2009-11-08T19:25:00.000-08:00

I must report that my life is being transformed by software. The Journal 5 is totally amazing, I am inputing all my dreams and ideas and journals and relevant emails and snippets of research into searchable hyperlinked calendar-sorted topic-tagged pages in this great personal information management system. This goes way beyond helping me to write my book, this is giving me mastery of my inner world in all the forms that I write it. I can also embed images, and link to sites and audio files. I'm currently making a personal dream and life taxonomy to tag my notes. I didn't know journaling software like this existed, I hear that many writers use it to organize their material, and professional bloggers use this, it has blog uploading features. You could write a whole book on this and then just transfer the final chapters to a full word processer. See http://www.davidrm.com/ or google journaling software for others, some have other features like timeline for memoir writers at http://www.lifejournal.com. For anyone who wants to work on just dreams, you can get more dream oriented features including symbol dictionaries and interpretation systems from http://www.dreamanswers.com or Alchera from http://www.mythwell.com

peace,
Carl

note to self: become transtemporal

2009-08-04T21:18:00.000-07:00

That’s the only way I can collaborate with myself across time and all the phases of my life that work together. I look back on great chapters and works and memories. I can feel sad that I can’t do it now, but then I can’t do then what I’m doing now. I have to be all of me in symphony, discovering how well it all fits together: the intuitively sincerely lived past supporting the honest service-oriented present looking for the opportunities to the best futures that answer my hopes and dreams.

Follow your Dreams to New Opportunities

2009-06-30T20:01:00.000-07:00

I can say that quite literally. Follow your Dreams to New Opportunities.

In the past month, my long brewing but somewhat shy desire to find a good dream group led a writer aquaintance with mediumship talents to say that my lucid dream partner, my non-physical best friend forever (npbff), wants me to get out more and do what I've been thinking of doing. She's been able to pick up on this friend before.

So I looked around on the internet and found that a very nice guy, an aquaintance of some physical classmates (a class on psychic development), just started a dreams support group for the Boston area. So I'm very grateful to the universe for a good match and fruition for my desire.

In a matter of weeks, I got the group a new monthly home at my church in Cambridge, which is on my commute so very convenient for me. We had a good meeting, and I'm giving my first public talk on non-physical planes and dreaming at the next meeting, which is getting lots of signups. This is awesome!

The topic of the talk is material for a book that my npbff and I are working on. I know because we had a dream of drawing a relevant map together.

The book's working title is "Developing Your Transcendent Relationships: The Importance of Understanding Who Loves You, In This And Other Worlds." Sounds great, doesn't it? Assuming you're into that sort of thing, of course. Who reads this blog anyway? :)

So I'm hopeful and expectant that everyone is being offered paths to their highest and deepest needs and desires at this time.

I've also been delighted to be able to use my own film research website to put together a list of films about dreams in a slideshow for the dream group, see here:
http://www.bostondreamers.com/photos/508166/

Best Wishes to All,
Carl

Review of Bruce Moen's Exploring the Afterlife series Volume 4 - "Voyage to Curiosity's Father" published 2001

2009-05-05T08:19:00.001-07:00

Here's my review that I posted incrementally on Amazon, but the footnotes I've last added probably won't get accepted for being too long so only here will you read it all.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

"A bridge to higher learning or pitfall, your choice as ever"
by Carl Schroeder

I'm enjoying Bruce Moen's books out of order, which is not recommended for the newcomer. So maybe I'm not the best reviewer, but as someone who is also a self-styled explorer of non-physical realms I think I see Moen's strengths and weaknesses pretty clearly. His strengths are awesome. Though often sounding like just another jargony worshipful student of Robert Monroe and the new confessional tradition of out-of-body exploration that Monroe started (Moen's back-story of Curiosity seems totally patterned after Monroe's loosh parable), Moen the pragmatic engineer went ahead with his own meditative techniques and isn't afraid to be different. He doesn't just mimic the classic experiences (necessarily so, since like many people he couldn't trigger the full-blown astral body separation), he's self-confident without being arrogant, he's conversational and approachable with lots of friendly metaphors. He covers a lot of ground, and when he's right he's gloriously correct; chapters on Hells, Hollow Heavens, and spiritual hierarchies brim with priceless observations.

The weaknesses come from clearly pumping out these books in short order to jumpstart a new, however admirable, career. Moen converts his personal growth journals and interactions with friends (physical and non-physical) into long fluffy dialogues and book chapters, with no particular research, structure, or perspective beyond chronology and his Monroe Institute connections. This is in high contrast to an author like Kurt Leland whose non-physical exploration books are reader serving distillations of decades of his own experiences with channeling, dream interpretation, and exhaustive comparison with the classic source materials of the New Age (Seth), NDE/OBE, Tibetan, Egyptian, Theosophical, and other esoteric traditions.

Consequently, some of Moen's lengthy insights are far more basic than you might expect, such as that in "Voyage to Curiosity's Father" physical life is made of sequences of events which intersect other people's events, all guided by higher planning beings, so it helps to ask clearly for what you want. Yes, and?

Without studying symbolism or history (you'd think he'd enjoy reading his predecessor Swedenborg, the seminal engineer turned afterlife explorer after all), Moen with his intellectual insistence on fleshing out objective narratives to literally illustrate his every meditative insight can get downright pathological. By putting his words in the mouths of spirit teachers, Moen sets up authorities that he never questions. His fake it til you make approach to non-physical exploration (imagine it until you feel it) is fine as long as you keep evaluating and verifying. But while Moen espouses group meditating for verifications, most of what he tells was only in his head, and his biases for paternalism, Christianity, and moral simplicity remain unexamined. Moen is clearly a sensitive guy, but does he ever wonder what happened to Curiosity's mother?

Self-satisfied on higher bliss levels but without Goddess empathy to align his thinking, Moen's rush to non-judgment leads to detestable implications such as that (1) reformed mass murderers make the best angels, (2) souls sometimes create serial killers on purpose just to collect the experience, (3) sadists who laugh at their dying victims get more love from the universe because laughter opens everyone to self-acceptance, and (4) even God for a long time didn't know that love was any better than hate for creating children. Huh? Not my angels, not my soul, not my universe, not my God, no thank you. (see footnotes for details)

Obviously there remain worlds of subjective motivation, belief, and self-reflection that Moen skipped to reach full speed ahead the first attainable top-level conclusions (male ego impatience, certainly). Just don't expect his to be the last books you'll ever need, and you'll enjoy Moen's confessions to a mystical lifestyle, warts and all. Seriously, there's so much to Bruce Moen to appreciate, I've only outlined the rare flaws as I struggled with them so you can step around more gracefully.

But if you do get impatient, try skipping to Moen's "Afterlife Knowledge Guidebook" where, in the next phase of his budding career, he took the time to better organize and summarize his experiences along with those of his new students. That final book from Moen can then serve as good preparation for Kurt Leland's first afterlife book "Otherwhere", which after all these years still remains ahead of the curve in teaching a total wisdom of dreams, altered states, and higher realities. After that, try Leland's "Unanswered Question", and his forthcoming "Multidimensional Human".

(1) "hard cases" who leave Hells are "worth their weight in gold". Never mind that the jargon "hard case" is referring to the worst of humanity, let’s assume total forgivability and redemption. Why would ex-Hitlers be so valuable, assuming that’s what the gold metaphor means? Moen is told it’s because the bad-ass angels know their way around Hells so well, enabling them to reach others. Now, I think if a sinner prefers a comparable sinner to save them, that’s fine, then they’re available. But you don’t have to do something to understand it, and God/Goddess/All-That-Is can see and guide everyone through any hell, because by definition a piece of the divine is suffering in there along with any sinner. Understand, this is not religious talk, and Moen knows it though he could acknowledge his culture more. Hells are basically dream states, as real as the reality we are in now, places where criminals and bad people gather in groups of similars. Swedenborg described Hells extensively, in the tradition of Dante and others, plus Swedenborg had a sophisticated multi-level understanding of symbols which he called the correspondances, and this Moen could learn from.

(2) Moen gets to this point by describing with some horror what others like Leland have seen, which is a lowest pit of any Hell into which the worst acting people are cast and destroyed forever. Don’t worry, if you’re contemplating these words at all then you’re not going there, you’d have to be a totally stubborn monster of a person to get eternal damnation (there are uptight Hollow Heavens for people who worry about Hell more than do Hell, so you can go there if you like). The whole pit of Hell thing could be said less provocatively: there are lowest levels of lifeforce which are reached by acting against the harmony of the universe, and at the bottom you hit your own non-existence, returning to the background raw material of consciousness. What a difference a little jargon can make! Anyway, Moen calls the losers the lost souls. Later he hears that one’s Disk – and your Disk is the soul family of all your lifetimes, although oddly Moen doesn’t say much about reincarnation, but at least he doesn’t disown it like Swedenborg - one’s Disk can send out lost souls on purpose, just to get the experience. Moen says cooly it’s no big deal, just like Earth sending a probe to explore Venus and send back data as it burns up in the atmosphere. What!? A lost soul is by definition a Hitler type, so Moen’s saying there are souls – high spiritual beings – who make Hitlers on purpose. Did you think this one through at all Bruce? I believe that each consciousness gets choices which the soul respects profoundly, but souls don’t plan to destroy lives and wreak havoc and pain on the universe with evil personalities. Souls are injured and mourn and need forgiveness when this happens.

(3) This disturbing conclusion about humor is pretty literal. Moen was told that all laughter is self-acceptance which lets in a burst of Pure Unconditional Love, that being the food of the universe. Moen saw the moral dilemma of politically incorrect jokes, and his guide said that it’s wonderful to accept a self who finds cruelty funny. So it’s not a stretch is to say that killers who laugh as they torture (and there are people who do this, on more than one level) will be supported and loved by the universe to live longer healthier lives, so they can keep on doing what they do. I say what’s missing here, Moen is totally not getting the direction and importance of intention, to be positive or negative. Laughing is some kind of energy yes, and intention can apply any energy toward a harmonic building with the universe, or a plundering and destroying of the universe, of which they are a part. Negativity laughing may give itself a boost, but only from its own depleting reserves, because it is disconnected from the universe and destroying its life.

(4) Moen’s fourth book culminates in his personal creation myth for God, but he doesn’t present it as anything less than the highest truth. To suggest there was a time when God was totally ignorant and callous is fine I would suppose, as long as you own the conception. God grows and changes, but always as God, serving the God function. Of course God has always known the difference between love and hate, and always created with love (love is the only energy which really creates anyway). What evolves are Mankind’s conceptions of God, in ways that are very telling of the storyteller. Kant (interestingly a great critic of Swedenborg) said we don’t see the world as it is, but as we are. Moen has implied throughout the book that he came from some rough experiences. His creation myth sounds like the kernel of himself that learned to unfold and grow as a consciousness of God. Too bad Moen couldn’t psychoanalyse himself more, it’s not a reader exercise but it would be instructive to watch.

POSTSCRIPT: following excerpted from email with Kurt Leland

> KURT: I think both Moen and you are struggling to figure out the question of good and evil.

I agree that good/evil philosophy seems to be a major step for spiritual growth (it's a cornerstone of most religions), and the answers looks different at different levels. Moen actually talks about his journeying partner asking the same questions as he did of their guides but got more horror images and was very upset by Moen's pat answers. In the book Moen tries to smooth over the differences between their reports but i think they're very significant. She's a woman and had more dream-like symbolic imagery that seemed at the astral level, while Moen was being this effficient impersonal intellectual at the mental level.

I've always chafed at Moen's kind of impersonal mental conceptualizing, it seems to be liberating for some people but to me it implies the uncaringness of God and soul. Yes the soul has superhuman priorities that can lead one into hard lessons (such as attraction to difficult karmic relationships) but this comes from caring more not less. I suppose the bigger long-term picture that I see, of consequences for evolution and love and such, makes sense as being causal level. I got a lot of my perspective from Lazaris back in late 80's early 90's, so I think he set me on the right track early thankfully. I don't actually struggle with the question of good and evil much personally, more just that I react with strong opinions to people like Moen with whom I disagree. Moen felt worth debating, I usually just walk away from popular limiting beliefs. My movie review site is full of hitting those points again and again while discussing stereotype plots (part of the reason that site's in hiatus).

Feeling Apocalyptic?

2009-04-28T19:50:00.000-07:00

I read that people in Mexico City are feeling like it’s the end of the world. That’s understandable, since Mexico is already suffering economic downturn and drug wars, and now swine flu has shut down the capital causing further trauma and losses, plus they felt a magnitude 6 earthquake just the other day.

And just a week ago, "viral" referred to that catchy Susan Boyle video that was making millions cry tears of joy. Now it looks like she was the doctor with a booster shot of soul that we would be needing to keep our hearts open through the harder times dead ahead.

In the whole world it’s not a good time for a flu epidemic. People are down, finanicially and emotionally. Healthcare and nutrition have already been suffering in many countries, as budgets are slashed and people lose their jobs.

It’s a tough time for tough choices, and people have got to make the right ones. I admire Barack Obama for example, for pushing for more regulation and funding for sustainable industries. So far that has meant renewable energy on top of financial system overhaul, but I think we continue to see how deep the problem really goes.

I heard that the US Republicans stripped from the stimulus bill last month the flu prevention funding which now has to be restored for the current emergency. We know what 8 years of Bush and Republican majority led to already, from wars to abandoning New Orleans to enabling the over-borrowing that crashed the fortunes of millions. Who you gonna trust now?

Sorry, trick question. Actually President Bush is to be thanked for stockpiling anti-viral medicine and developing a pandemic flu plan back in 2005. Which serves to remind that no side is all right or all wrong. We need to move forward together, appreciating the best that each has to offer.

Swine flu appears to have started in industrial pig farms in Vera Cruz, Mexico. These are places with thousands of pigs crammed in cages so small they can’t turn around, out of the sunlight which would act as a natural disinfectant, pumped full of antibiotics to try to keep them from getting too sick. Huge systems of fans blow air and fecal dust out of these animal prisons, down onto neighboring towns like La Gloria, where the stench attracts so many flies that the government sprayed to kill them.

In La Gloria, hundreds of people got sick suddenly as far back as February, most recovering though two infants died. People commuted to Mexico City from there, so now you know the rest of the story. Officials wanted us to believe they did everything possible, but really it took two months to alert that a deadly flu was spreading, and now it’s too late to stop it from rocketing around the world.

Fortunately the flu's been pretty mild so far, despite a number of deaths in Mexico. We’ve come a long way in 90 years since the 1918 Spanish flu that killed 50 million. 50 million! Today no one expects that many to die, because we’ve got anti-viral medicines stockpiled and people know to wash their hands. In the wealthier countries, anyway.

What we still don’t have is the laws and enforcement to stop the kinds of environmental and economic abuses that breed disasters in the world today. And you know who suffers the most: the poor, those who can't speak for themselves, the children, the old, the middle class. 99.9% of the world.

Hmanity will advance when the real crimes are outlawed.

The greed and manipulation that destroyed global capitalism in 2008 wasn’t just another forgivable mistake. Americans have been too tolerant for too long, hoping to get their slice of the pie. Most saw the meltdown coming for years, but the ones benefitting didn’t want the party to stop.

The abuses of nature that we call modern farming are creating breeding zones for diseases at unprecedented rates. The world has been lucky so far, recall that SARS and avian flu had kill rates of 50 percent or more. They didn’t spread like the swine flu which is mild in comparison. So far. The 1918 flu started as a mild flu in the spring, but became deadly by fall.

Hopefully our current health crisis will fizzle out, it's entirely possible. But the effects will be with us for years in economic and psychological damage, along with the other crises we’re simultaneously suffering.

The global recession isn’t going to be over anytime soon. People who want you to start shopping again like to say things are looking up, but they are lying to you and themselves.

The biggest man-made avoidable crisis of all, this global warming thing which is going to raise sea levels, spread disease and hunger, and exterminate species, will shape and limit our children's children's futures and beyond.

All for what, yesterday's jobs? Aren’t we ready to legislate into oblivion yet, these people who say we must not change the system because it might cost them too much? How much more can we pay? Let’s face it, a business that rapes the environment, bankrupts customers, and destroys our children's lives, isn’t a business at all. It’s a crime.

If a business can’t survive much less thrive within the rules of decency, including fairness to consumers, fiscal responsibility, and health to the environment, then it doesn’t deserve to exist. It’s us or them, let's face it now. Nature is incredibly successful and synergistic within strict parameters of health and sustainability, why can't these titans of industry and science be held to the same standards?

Because it'll cost them money, that's why. Things might turn over. It's a lot of change to deal with all at once.

Change comes either way. We should have made sure the changes would be more positive, long ago.

There are too many people in this world who will kill us all just so they can keep making a buck. Or a yen. Let's not forget the toxic products from China in recent years. Now there was a business model for you. Melamine as a cheap toxic protein substitute killed thousands of pets around the world, wasn't stopped, then reappeared the next year to kill infants drinking their formula. That's what one system allowed. And tragically, many saw those deaths of pets and children as just the cost of another emerging economy. Call them collateral damage, in the accounting practices of economic war.

China is a country that routinely sacrifices the individual for supposed collective good. Last year, deaths were under-reported in the patriotic rush to build Olympic stadiums, parents who lost children to earthquake-collapsed shoddy schools were bullied and bribed to keep quiet, and ethnic Mongolians and Tibetans were further persecuted and destroyed to spread Chinese rule.

But China wasn't alone in its system of crimes against humanity. The US led the current world economic collapse with predatory lending and phony investment deals rigged at the highest levels. Modern industrial practices which so abuse the planet were pioneered long ago by the United States, which became so full of fat bloated over-consumers pathologically scouting for cheaper deals that we've outsourced our own jobs and manufacturing to the cheapest bidders overseas with the fewest regulatory impediments to exploiting their workers and fouling their environments more than we would allow anymore here. Only there are no borders anymore, NIMBY isn't allowed. Global warming, economic ruin, and swine flu aren't stopping for anyone's door.

Now the system is broken, in so many ways. Is that apocalyptic? Sure, and the apocalypse was preventable, unnecessary, and allowed. Man-made practices of greed took deadly shortcuts to material wealth. Spiritual bankruptcy manifested fatally on so many levels.

Can we stop the downward spiral in time? Sure, I believe so. Humanity has such miraculous potential to work with nature, and nature has repeatedly shown itself to be fantastically resilient for the right owner.

Just don’t mistake the symptoms for causes, be shallow and wimpy no longer. I wish us all the best in economic and environmental recoveries, for physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual evolution. Let's not be afraid to take the opportunities to do it all better and right this time. Apocalypse stops here, demand back our tomorrows.

Yes, the whole world is changing, more everyday. Don’t be afraid. Face yourself and others with love and care, do what has to be done. And see a little bit further. Make the changes that are happening be for the better, and we’ll get through this together. We just need to remind ourselves that so much more is possible than what a few greedy bastards have thus far invented for the rest of us to live on.

Bastards is a harsh word I know. But it expresses my anger at humanity's past mistakes, and can be further deconstructed as follows. A bastard is someone who doesn't know their own father. Psychologically speaking, the mother is the parent of belonging and sustenance, while the father is the parent of achievements and consequences.

Every one of us who couldn't or wouldn't admit to where our choices were taking us has been a bastard who faces now the most terrible of truths. Fatherless and futureless, we find our mother Earth is literally dying to introduce us to our real parentage. We are not nature's thinkers for nothing.

We were evolved for this pivotal time, to live or die by the planet that we too long each exploited for unsustainable personal gains. What we didn't do, we allowed. We each had our emotionally self-serving niches in the dysfunctional world order. We ran our homeworld into the ground, now we need to run it back up again.

So we do need to think about and expect massive change, but it doesn't have to end badly after all. The end of the old world, the beginning of the new. Apocalyptic for those who cling to the past, salvation for those who reach for tomorrow. I believe that humanity is up to the task of solving planetary crises, it just won't be business as usual.

Got Susan?

2009-04-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

On Saturday April 11 on "Britain's Got Talent", a British talent show comparable American Idol, there debuted an overweight, unemployed, solitary, never-been-kissed 47 year old woman named Susan Boyle. With her caterpillar eyebrows, triple chin, and guileless learning-disabled personality, she shocked the audience and jaded celebrity judges by saucily claiming to be ready for unprecedented fame. They laughed at her, until she started singing "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables about how life had stolen her dreams, and then she changed their world forever.

This excessively plain spinster from Blackburn Scotland unleashed a voice of heaven that made the people stand cheering and crying, and over a week later the cheering and crying has not stopped. She is by far the biggest internet sensation ever, with her youtube video watched in a matter of days millions more times than the most famous clips of the most famous people have been watched in years. Her name simply is the top searches of Google, both locally and worldwide. No news media in their right mind can resist the fairy tale charm of this unlikely new hero, as fansites spring up across the web, and demand grows for her new career as singer of the human soul. Fortunately, all indications are that Susan is the real deal, and she's eager to begin her new life with every one of us. She promised her dying mother two years before that she would audition for the show, and she's been singing mostly to herself since the age of 12.

I got the youtube link in an email on Monday April 13, and I have been profoundly moved ever since. There is an energy here of the perfect divine storm, with everywhere people proud to admit that Susan made them feel a tear or even cry a gusher. It's not even just Susan that did the trick, but everything around her, including the way she was found, the song she sang, the shock and bliss of the hardest judges, and the state of our world today. Like a character from the epic social commentary of Les Miserables itself, Susan broke all the rules, and made people believe in something more pure, original, and ordinary than they thought was possible.

I love the characterization of Rev. James Martin that we're seeing Susan Boyle through the eyes of God, experiencing the soul and worth inside a plain old human being. That's good, but I think it goes further too, for this unique time in history. In record numbers people around the world are watching Susan sing over and over, and crying cathartically as never before, because Susan is the timely projection for the survival of humanity. The entire world is past a point of no return, and people know it too. Judged by the values of yesterday for superficial beauty and success and promise, our dreams are dead, just like in the song that Susan chose to sing, in which Fantine lies penniless, jobless, unloved and abandoned in the gutter. This is humanity's story now, because we will never live the lives we thought we would, of beautiful people and endless consumption.

The global environment and economy are in tatters, we are all in the gutter of Les Miserables, millions of precious lives are being lost. Our only hope is in the spiritual rebirth that Susan embodies, for the direct experience of innate beauty and talent which go so much deeper than the surfaces which never really mattered. We can hold our heads high and live triumphantly for just being ourselves. By letting go the past and treasuring what we truly are, this is how the planet will be saved. Susan Boyle is a gift from God to reignite the hope in every human being that what was always most valuable has not yet been lost, and is in fact the easiest thing to recognize and reclaim after all. Pure love of dream, talent, soul, a world in which we still belong. Humanity is rising to the song of Susan Boyle, millions more can feel it now.

PS- for the skeptics who say Susan is good but not that good, on pitch but just loud, well that's the showtune style. Here's an amateur recording she did for charity in 1999 that shows much more skill and nuance, singing "Cry me a River", a jazz standard written for Ella Fitzgerald in 1953. If you want to collect Susan's original CD, be prepared to ebay thousands of dollars now!

Rare Collectible Journal Excerpt

2009-03-14T22:16:00.000-07:00

"And it’s a thrill to reread my essay, it’s so good and I can learn from it. I felt very guided when I put it together to be very compact.

http://www.soulstirring.org/cosmicdocent/

But I mean, this is tricky stuff. I’m playing with projections, personal reality, symbolism, going into a kind of higher alternate world with feelings of love and realness and relationships that I can’t fully explain or even see yet. If done in a grounded experimental way until something fits and takes me a ways, then that’s how realities are lived anyway, people just have gotten into habits of dialogue with their beliefs and personality reactions, and these dialogues are the basis of reality. So personal mythology is digging into these levels of reality behind the reality, and perhaps even using them to transcend to something higher and more real in clarity beyond question. That’s one early goal of spiritual growth after all, to know beyond doubt, such things as I and many do however piecemeal, such things as does god exist, will I live forever, is there a place I belong, do I have talents and gifts to practice joyfully which will feed the universe in a way that feeds me at all levels including the physical, am I loved, am I able to love in a way that is wanted, are all my greatest dreams, desires, and hope grounded in realities that are truly wonderful and secure and real? Yes on all accounts and more."

thoughts toward success

2009-02-23T20:10:00.000-08:00

You know you’re getting things right when you can start turning yesterday’s weaknesses and pains into tomorrow's joys and opportunities today.

For example, I used to wonder with the common perspective how can I stand to commute daily for two hours. But I have since discovered a world of carls on tape, that is, making and listening to audio journals in the car.

I used to wonder with many people why I couldn’t just stay up late, sleep seemed like a waste of time. Increasingly I’m discovering the joys of exploring higher worlds and meeting spirit teachers and friends in my dreams.

I used to wonder why I had problem people in my life, but then I developed more compassionate considerations for how they got that way, and how i got to be with them. That led to my learning how to help myself out of their conditions, and being available to help them too if they let me.

That’s what is called the wounded healer, it turns out to be a major trick for incarnating on Earth. It involves going through a trial in order to force yourself to learn how to transcend it, then becoming available to help others in similar situations. Thereby we can meet new friends and improve the planet for everyone, especially future generations among which we can reincarnate.

Is it possible that every cloud has astounding, life-changing, silver linings?

This is one of the lessons to learn during the current economic global crisis. Or change, or reset as I’ve heard it called. Obama’s team has the attitude of never waste a crisis, use it as opportunity to make great improvements in the whole system. Same thing with global climate change and other global challenges. It’s a dangerous, serious, history-making, leader-calling time we’re in.

God bless and guide us all, to love and provide for one another more than we ever have before, now that the vain pursuits of wealth on credit are behind us.

I figured out what the spiritual basis of credit is, by the way. This is the way credit is supposed to work, it is the true meaning that if you stray too far from then you end up in trouble.

True credit is when you promise to become your future self or your higher self, and gain the benefit of starting to draw their strength and wisdom to fix your reality now.

You do have to keep making the payments though, and the more strength you take the higher the payments.

The universe will let you know, with challenging situations, what payments to make. You will have to let go your emotional addictions, your prejudices, your habits of thinking that hurt you and others.

The payments are worth paying to enter real heavens of sustainable living, of course. But it’s a lot of change to get used to, this giving up of treasured self-images and long-held greeds for example.

So a lot of people would rather using a credit card to get stuff now. But that will only be stuff, and if you forget your ideals, if you act only for yourself, you will fall out of alignment with anything really good in your life, and you’ll soon become scared and miserable and lost and insecure.

Let’s help each other to not be scared and miserable and lost and insecure at this time in history of global changes, okay?

Our 20 month old boy is starting to say “I love you” now. Kids make people soften. If we remember our love, we’ll remember our values, and we’ll find our way home with each other.

Extending the dream

2009-02-17T20:28:00.000-08:00

There's a great Pete Seeger tune i heard on the radio today, it made me cry a little. Tonite i had fun singing it and extending the lyrics as follows. The first refrain is Pete's, and then he sings a couple more verses about how the leaders all sign a treaty and people put down their guns and dance in the streets. Peter Seeger's got a great famous homespun idealist style. So I guess you could call this is my contribution to the Pete Seeger astral memorial theme park.

Last night I had the strangest dream, I ever dreamed before.
I dreamed that all the world agreed, to put an end to war.

Last night I had the strangest dream, I ever dreamed before.
I dreamed that all the world agreed, to feed the hungry poor.

Last night I had the strangest dream, I ever dreamed before.
I dreamed that God is everywhere, but people look away.

Last night I had the strangest dream, I ever dreamed before.
I dreamed I went to heaven, but couldn’t stay there long.

Last night I had the strangest dream, I ever dreamed before.
I dreamed people leave their bodies, and visit other worlds.

Last night I had the strangest dream, I ever dreamed before.
I dreamed people meet the fairies, and together heal the Earth.

My kind of president, and the start of a New Age

2009-01-20T19:40:00.000-08:00

“My kind of president, and the start of a new age”. Who am I to say that? I could be many different kinds of people. This is remarkable, there are more people who can share that statement today than who can agree what it means. And I’m happy for everyone who’s happy.

(Obama did say New Age, by the way. In my view that’s a very nice reference to a culture of hope and human values. Some religious people see it as a threat, but those same people see many threats, and they need to start asking themselves what eye glasses they’re wearing.)

There are a lot of blacks saying they never thought they’d live to see the day of a black president, the day when someone so highly appointed is judged by the content of their character and not the color of their epidermis. That’s been wonderful to hear, I know it means a lot to black people. I’m not black, but I can feel for the black experience.

Heck, I just thought I’d never live to see the day of another great president. I don’t care what color he is, I thought we were doomed. And Obama is already great, he’s the extraordinary leader called for by extraordinary times. I thought the emotionally ignorant militant rich white guys were going to kill us all. Now we have a decent chance to show that by just and sensitive management, this nation, and by good example all nations and the planet, can and will bounce back brilliantly.

Obama is giving his excellence. A lot of people around him are giving their excellence, and we’re all being called to give our excellence now. This time goes really deep in history. People need to be led by their conscience and opportunities to love, to find what’s real and alive and revolutionary for them to give.

I’m doing my best to care for a family, to see and feel and speak the hope, to work on my contribution to the future. My excellence is that I’m developing techniques and abilities to connect with the higher realms, mostly by dreams that guide me throughout the day as I analyze them. Here’s a link http://www.soulstirring.org/cosmicdocent/

How could I not blog on a day like today? There’s never before been a day like today. The opportunities are tremendous to get things right this time, to see the world bounce back and prosper, discover itself and thrive, like never seen before.

There are going to be lots of new days coming, some smooth, some turbulent.

Practice the three l’s, that’s what they do up there in the high heavens. Learning, loving, living. All the best traditions and teachings come together you know, just at different levels of symbolism. Quite literally, so I am learning, every one of us comes from future selves whose strengths we can draw upon today (the true meaning and origin of loans). We each come from utopian origins, and we each have entry points into many worlds.

Awareness of higher perspectives -- being from them -- confers great wisdom and happiness, success from knowing what to do. Qualities such as these have obviously been lacking in many of the drivers and rulers of the world. Their rule is crashing, a new one is ascending.

Many many see and feel the hand of God in Obama's rise to prominence. He is just a man, a great one at that. But the way that partisanship took down Clinton, the way McCain dug his own grave, the way that the economy crashed in time to make it the serious issue that it always should have been (for with economic justice will come world peace, seriously, try it and see)… there were larger patterns that pulled Obama to the forefront. This extraordinary multinational young president with a gift for words, for integrity, for vision.

When Bush won his second term against John Kerry -- who I thought was decent but clearly not as strong as Obama -- I thought, oh my God: I just hope we’re building to a great vindication here. Maybe people need another four years to really wake up to the priorities, and stop letting emotionally ignorant militant rich white guys run the planet.

I haven’t seen it yet, but I heard pieces. Obama’s inauguration speech today was hard hitting. Good. He said that greed, lax oversight, and avoiding the hard decisions necessary got us to where we are today in economic crisis. He said that our ideals and security go together, in clear rebuke to years of militaristic scandals. Things like that he said, truths delivered by a friend who wants to help set things right.

Happy days are full steam ahead.

Finding Non-Toxic Christmas Decorations

2008-12-03T09:57:00.001-08:00

Just a little holiday consumer warning here. We have two active toddlers, so getting a real tree for Christmas is unappealing for many reasons, including time and maintenance required and dropping pine needles that the children might pick up. True, maybe buying a live tree gives good vibes and supports a certain economy (almost carbon neutral, not including fertilizer and trucks). But the visual effect of a Christmas decoration is what kids require indoors, and we encourage them to hug live trees outside.

After the sticker shock (over 100 dollars, something of an investment), I bought a tree at Target. Only after we opened it did I see the new toxic lead plastic warning labels now required by Proposition 65 for any product to be sold in California. "Wash hands after using"? Give me a break, kids are going to touch a Christmas tree, and lead is horribly damaging to children!

So I read online that lead is added to plastic to make it more flexible, including all power cords. That's right, Christmas lights and extension cords should not be touched by children! Lead doesn't have to be used, there are more expensive alternative additives, but profits win out over health unless legislated.

Imported Chinese products are going to have the highest lead levels, so it's just another reason to avoid Chinese products. I can't believe the attitude I've read about in China this year, where dead children from melamine are chalked up to the growing pains of a developing nation. Melamine causes kidney failure and is often added to falsely boost protein levels in milk and other products, like the pet food that killed thousands of cats and dogs in the US last year. It's criminal, it's murder, plain and simple.

I also found online a lot of misinformation about the lead Christmas trees, like people saying it's not a big deal (oh yes it is, including lead dust that accumulates on the christmas gifts!) or, if lead warnings aren't visible then it's not present (the labels are only required if made for California sales, there's no national standard so you could just find non-California products).

This is obviously just another case of the millions of toxic consumer products that will be revealed in the coming years. Over 100,000 chemicals have been invented for consumers since WWII, and fewer than 1% have been even inadequately tested.

For example, nanotechnology particularly scares me. This is the new under-regulated science of making super-tiny chemicals that can go directly into your bloodstream and brain through your skin, and they're increasingly added for stupid competitive effects like making sunblock lotion more transparent (light transmitting) as you smear it all over yourself. Keep this in mind and avoid anything that says nanotech or micro or seems otherwise suspiciously re-invented.

So back to finding non-toxic Christmas decorations. Power cords all have lead, just don't let the kids handle them. But for safer trees, you can order US made (to the highest standards) from the following companies: www.uschristmastree.com or www.christmasdepot.com

When you feel ready (sooner or later I think we all will) consider contacting your government officials on this and other toxic product issues.

Happy and safe holidays to you and your loved ones!

Markets in free fall, bad news on bad news?

2008-11-21T10:28:00.001-08:00

The stock markets keep falling even as experts wanted to say that we already hit the bottom. So is it the end of the world?

No, it's the beginning of a new one.

You can consider my previous rant about why I hate capitalism, which I patriotically and presciently posted on the 4th of July before the market blowouts of September. Or just consider this:

The world wide recession is a time to be hopeful, because it's a time for the realignment of values. Just because markets and market driven consumption are down, does that mean that human needs are any less? No, they're greater than ever, as world hunger and environmental degredation and local wars make people suffer. So then maybe, it means that the abilities to work and produce are diminished? No, factories and resources and labor and skills didn't just disappear. In fact people want their jobs more than ever now, and the capacities for production were at their highest levels in history to feed the demands of an overheated global economy.

So what is in recession, what has deflated and collapsed? That which has failed and failed us all, is a system of incentivizing work for the pursuit of money rather than the value of services as truly needed. We got warehouses bursting with half-assed toxic crap looking for buyers, instead of sustainable products, nutritious food, and fair housing. So it's about time a system like that collapsed, because it was killing everything on this planet. People were encouraged to do anything no matter how poisonous, take any shortcuts no matter how inhumane, as long as it made cash. Death and destruction were chalked up to progress, collateral damage that market forces could sort out later. The worst side of humanity was running amok, and we can rejoice that it stopped before we were all dead.

Now is the time for a new entrepreneurism to flourish. Think outside the box that says if it doesn't make money, don't do it, you'll die. Trust in a greater system, call it goodness or God or Gaia or whatever you like. There's a reason why everyone is where they are, with the needs and the talents and resources they have. Can you imagine that needs are not burdens but gifts? That's right, the needy are assets, golden opportunities, and not because they represent markets to be exploited, but because we are changed to serve them. Individually and collectively, we become smarter, wiser, stronger, more loving and kind - in short, more on the side of God - the more we attend to the neediest among us. "Give to the poor and you'll have treasure in heaven" is not old self-abandoning altruism, but new market strategy for the sustainable economy. Investing in the right motives and methods today will yield endless bounty in the world without end.

Talk about busting the old paradigm. In the old way of doing things, the less open needs you had, the more you were invulnerable and strong and positioned to accumulate wealth and power. People with too many needs were hopeless, useless, let them fade away Darwinian style. In the new way of doing things, needs are to be treasured, for in denial of them we were drifting and prone to big ego scams. Needs are compasses, pointing us and motivating us in the direction of new friends and opportunities. And most important to imagine is the guarantee that every need, from personal to global, will be fulfilled in good time when we just take our cues from honest living, step by faithful step. The patience and courage required go beyond scientific awe for nature, since even nature can be cruel. But it is the spiritual promise that can be seen in the best of natural harmonies, symbioses, and synergies.

As if we had a choice of faiths? In the old godless system, money never guaranteed anything. Some of the most twisted and insecure people in the world had more money than they knew how to spend, it did nothing for them, they could only fiddle while Rome burned. Predicating the exchange of goods and services on money alone made poor people starve, rich people crazy, and "average" people miserable as they crammed themselves into the Procrustean beds of the jobs that had paychecks attached. Talents and needs, happiness and health, security and future, all took a backseat to the pursuit of money, from where to get it fastest to the hottest latest shit it could buy.

What can you really do, what do you really need, who are you really positioned to help and be helped by? As people are forced to answer those questions in the worldwide recession, yes certainly, the sales of SUVs and trinkets and super-size me portions of crap are plunging. Thank God.

I'd say we hit bottom already, because there's nowhere to go but up. The down market isn't telling the real story, because it never has. Bailouts, deficit spending, debt forgiveness, charity and more, these will make us richer not poorer now, if our priorities are at long last redefined in the process. Retool ourselves along with the economy, consume frugally and give generously, be honest about where we were headed and where we need to go, and we'll at long last become the human beings with instrinsic, not market, value for all.

Making History

2008-11-04T09:05:00.000-08:00

Happy Barack Obama day!

It's a big time for vindication and turnaround in world history. I had a dream about the gap between rich and poor, thousands in ghettos while a few whites lived in a mansion serving themselves. Today a record number of United Statians are voting, especially the young and "minorities", because it's payback time by nothing less than a bloodless coup.

I like how the universe sends important souls into the underclasses, so the most progressive groups will benefit. I think of how Albert Einstein being a Jew got him kicked out of Germany, so the Nazis' own racism would prevent them from getting the bomb. Now the Republicans are clearly outdated with the oldest candidate in history, a veritable war monger with an explosive temper like Bush. One of McCain's biggest campaign errors was picking for running mate the incompetent social conservative Sarah Palin over unconventionally Christian Mitt Romney just to please the judgmental evangelicals. If McCain had picked Romney they would have had more money and a closer race, but the judgmental only limit themselves.

As for the difficult choice the Democrats had to make between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, both of whom could have been transformative figures in their own right, I think it just goes to show that the hardest choices are between good and good (channeled entity Lazaris said that). Patience, all good things come in time, there will be a woman president as well. I think roots in Africa were important at this time on so many levels. We have to live the right sequence for history, and arguably the Bush years were themselves a painful requirement to get more people on board with just how much change was needed. Hilary will make a great Senate Majority Leader, to work on healthcare and match the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. There's even room for McCain to continue his patriotic service in the senate as well. To the Master's table, all are invited.

Right now it's the eleventh hour for so many things, including the global environment and economy. I believe Obama is the extraordinary leader who was called from birth to these extraordinary times, and the United States, with its strong political foundations in human ideals (surprisingly gleaned as much from Native American principles as classical European, see the Iroquois confederation's document called The Great Law of Peace admired by many including Benjamin Franklin), shall be a greater power for good, once again and more than ever. World respect and sentiment is already lining up to be with the US under a President Obama in a way not seen since the days of sympathy following 9/11.

For now, today is the day to feel the happiness and hope that so many of us have been expecting to feel since 2000 when the popular vote was with Al Gore.

Looking on the Bright Side of the Recent Market Declines

2008-10-10T20:33:00.001-07:00

inspirations from Carl Schroeder, written 10/10/08 for the Mystical Art and Talent Show (see SoulStirring.org) posted on the MysticalCarlBlog.blogspot.com

I figured this one out:

Look on the bright side, the amount of a one percent drop is less every day!

(one percent of a smaller number is a smaller number)

Here's a joke making the rounds among the traders:

There are two positions to take in the market right now. Sell, and fetal.

Oh my.

Did you hear that the Pope weighed in on the world economy? He said the global financial crisis shows the futility of money and ambition, and those who build their lives "only on things that are visible, such as success, career, money" should keep that in mind. Therefore effective immediately he will be selling the Vatican's treasures to give the money to poor.

No wait, sorry, he only said the first part.

Well look, here's my take on the crisis. It's a crisis of value certainly, and it's long overdue. What's really valuable in life? For millennia we've built up systems that encourage the exploitation of people and the wasting of the environment for the amassing of symbols of wealth to privilege the few.

We knew that had to change, didn't we? And with global warming and its imminent threats of mass starvation and disaster, we knew that change had to come quickly, right?

It's just weird to watch the slow motion train wreck. A few weeks ago, the world economy stopped. The world is no longer what it used to be.

This is a very important time to keep your eye on helping your neighbor, and trust in a higher plan. There is one, you know, and I don't just mean government bailouts. There are many people who, consciously or not, communicate with the massive angelic higher consciousnesses who manage this planet for the growth of humanity, and they know that the pain coming is only as much as it regrettably takes to make the people get serious.

People are getting serious. US voters are turning in droves to Barack Obama, for example, because they're not distracted by the past or celebrities or mud slinging anymore. Race is not a factor (though it will certainly be a thrilling milestone to reach the first black president!) Millions of people are simply evaluating what works and who's got the brighter energy for the future. McCain appears to be a grouchy old man stuck on deregulation, and his running mate is a prejudiced housewife turned governor who bluffs her way through cheerleading speeches. I'm not saying Obama is perfect - he and Joe Biden are still career politicians who rely on their talking points and egos - but there's a hope for the future that's coming that doesn't favor the rich or the white, so they are turning to that vision enough to be the ticket to ride.

Let's look at the markets. On Monday September 29, the US Dow had a 7% crash of 777 points, the biggest one day drop to date. It was scary enough to break the gridlock of the bickering Washington politicians who realized they needed to pass something quick, hence the rescue plan with further adjustments that Congress did approve later that week. Now I had dreams all through this process that showed to me that the rescue plan would work, and work it did. It is now the oft-quoted international benchmark for fast big action around the world, as the crisis becomes truly a shared global reality (so much for those who had hoped to blame it just on those reckless American capitalists).

Are we disappointed that the markets didn't bounce back with the rescue plan passed? But that wasn't the point. 7 is a divine number for many mystical reasons, and 777 is touted in the Bible as ultimate number of God. The markets still need to deflate, so the sign was that the process is being guided for the greater good. We will benefit for decades to come from the rise of international cooperation and generous coordinated response in the face of a crisis that knows no national boundaries.

Too bad world hunger, poverty, and pollution didn’t elicit that much response. Oh well, gotta find what works. At least the economy affects everyone, right?

Let's look at the mechanics inside. Politicians like to keep talking about the subprime mess, because unaffordable mortgages are something that the average person can understand. But you notice that the talk is alluding to bigger deeper problems, because really the deflating mortgage backed securities were only the fuse on the bomb created by the insanely wealthy world elite, while you and I worked our daily subsistence jobs. And the match that lit the fuse was reality, over time.

The falling stock markets? Falling stock prices aren't that real, and economists don't actually pay them that much attention. A stock price is just the amount that the last buyer was willing to pay, so if everyone tried to sell at that price they surely wouldn't get it. The Dow is really just a popularity contest (not unlike our politics), and stocks are understandably not popular now (neither is Bush). Millions of working people were cajoled into putting their savings into the stock markets for decades, and now they all want to get out. The prices are falling naturally, and it doesn't mean that real underlying assets are vanishing overnight. The real assets are the infrastructures of inventions, factories, workers, nations, and sure, even the consumers. The whole human ecosystem, which could be made sustainable and prosperous. But of course, the false assets that are invented by the power elite egos who ran hedge funds and investment banks, those are indeed evaporating, just as they need to be.

What's a false asset? Well, besides those mortgage backed securities which remain largely good but contain a few percent of predatory oversold loans that will expectably default (and since no one knows exactly where and how much, they became unpopular to the point of unsellable even if the houses and people they represent are still out there, begging to be helped), there are worse things that the greed of the rich has invented. We'll hear more and more about Credit Default Swaps for example, or CDS's. It's government's bipartisan fault they were incredibly unregulated, so when the US Treasury made the decision to let Shearson Lehman fall, they didn't anticipate the chain reaction of CDS bombs that would be triggered. Next day, AIG, the world's biggest insurer, fell, to be followed by many more. Why? Because Credit Default Swaps are an elite bond insurance run amok. Billionaire and humanist Warren Buffet, who is emerging as a rare trusted leader in this mess, had previously referred to these things as financial weapons of mass destruction.

Credit Default Swaps started out as just bond insurance. A bond is a loan to a company or government. Here's a million dollars, pay me back with interest in a certain time frame. If the company goes under, you lose, so you try to find stable bond issuers. But hedging your bets, i.e. making sure you make money no matter what happens, became fashionable with the super rich, so they wanted unbeatable insurance on all of their bonds. How special. Here, I'll pay you a million a year, if you agree to pay me a billion if my millions in bonds from company Z go bad. The super rich are by definition super rich, so they were, unlike you and me, quite happy to pay millions to make a little less overall but, at least in theory, guarantee they would remain super rich and in power.

Problem one arose quickly. Unregulated, Credit Default Swaps got issued for way more potential payout than anyone actually had. Insurance is already a risky game; if there's a natural disaster with a lot of claims at once, property insurance companies can go bankrupt fast. It's one indication that maybe trust in the universe is supposed to be chosen over paper guarantees between people. But egos want to do whatever they want, and have someone else be on the hook for it.

Many chickens are coming home to roost now.

The super rich with their super egos just took the suspicious concept of guaranteed personal insurance (which probably needs to be replaced by public giving as needed, which is what charities and taxpayers are called to do in disaster relief anyway) to new egotistical heights. Soon, unregulated, Credit Default Swaps became insurance you could buy on bonds you didn't even own. I'll pay you a million a year just to ensure that if company Z ever goes bad you'll pay me a billion. Then, unregulated, Credit Default Swaps became a commodity that could be traded. What today's price on a billion of insurance against company Z going under? Oh, two million. Great, well I bought it for one million yesterday, so I'll rewrite it with my name on it and sell it to you. That way you will pay me two million, I pay the guy I got it from one million, and I pocket the difference. Of course, if company Z ever goes under I don't have a billion to spare, but no problem, I'll just get it for you from the guy before me.

You see where this is going. Even Joe Six-Pack has heard of pyramid schemes.

Credit Default Swaps became a hot thing to buy and sell among the super rich institutions and investors. The money was made off the little changes in reputations of companies, so CDS's could be rewritten for millions of profit at a time. No one actually expected anyone to go under. So now the worldwide bond market, which is a fairly tangible sensible thing in itself, is only worth 5 trillion. In just ten unregulated years (mostly under President Bush of course) the worldwide CDS market, a totally fabricated invented thing with no real value, became worth 60 trillion.

That's what egos can do to real values - bury them and sell you on artificial stuff that is destined to collapse. So yeah, when the bad subprime mortgages started to weaken the big institutions, some winners and losers got called. The US government rescued Bear Sterns, then dropped Lehman Brothers. Bam. Trillions in CDS debts got triggered that no one could actually pay for. No problem, I'll get it from the issuer. Oops, they're going bankrupt, now I owe a billion, I guess I'm going bankrupt too, and so on down the line. Dominoes are falling around the world. Iceland - that mythic land of fire and ice which is very close to the spirit world and where close to a majority of people believe in and/or see fairy beings - is in debt ten times its GDP; if that was the US we'd be 150 trillion in debt, a number to which (thank God) we're still not even close. This is a global crisis now of spiritual proportions, and a few bad mortgages just lit the fuse.

So that's what's really happening in the world today. And those plummeting stock markets? Just popularity contests that mean little in comparison. The current problem is that there's no money to borrow in the credit markets, and consequently no money to run the world's businesses and meet the payrolls, because the super rich are all in a panic about trillions of dollars they don't have, so they're holding onto their billions for dear life. Meanwhile, Joe Six Pack loses his job.

But don't worry, it's still not the Great Depression, which contrary to popular belief wasn't a sudden crash of stock brokers jumping out windows, but rather a steady economic decline to which the government responded too slowly and wrongly, by tightening money and raising taxes. No matter how crazy and wasteful the 700 billion rescue package sounds (and there are politicians who want to make it your push button issue of the day) world governments are actually taking the appropriate actions by fast pumping money into the markets. There will be corruption of course, so we have to watch out for that. Regulations long overdue are needed for years to come. But right now, it just remains to be seen what it takes to get the elite egos around the world to pry their claws off all the wealth they unjustly controlled, so it starts flowing around to you and me again. In some ways that challenge may be scarier than the risks of the Great Depression, but it's also the lesson that's needed for human development going forward.

Remember the 777, remember there is a plan.

And for God's sake (for your sake with God) look out for your neighbor. There will be tons of opportunity to make needed differences now. Needs will be seen for the gifts that they are. Spread the love to become the love, that is the only true value there ever was. Being willing to make something better, offer something better, receive something better, during the chaos and crisis that most people are feeling, will be the response we can choose, to foster caring for and helping each other. Being willing to see the mess in a loving learning way will guide us to find the solutions.

A lot of brilliant new social engineers and reality entrepreneurs can begin to step forward now. They will say, this is it! This is the moment we’ve been waiting for in the world, the teachable moment, to adjust people’s perceptions of value before the doom becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy! We’ve got a certain amount of time to respond, as the Great Depression taught. The right response took years to find back then, we’re even more sophisticated now. Today’s New Deal is a total philosophy of life and sustainable value, for the benefit of all. We begin by just learning to live together, by learning to help each other get through this mess of a global economic crisis. Communicating to help each other, sharing to help each other, caring to help each other. This nightmare can be seen as the dawn of a big global love opportunity, because the need is so great.

So let’s go, spiritual people! Let’s teach it to learn it, the big new way of sustainable living on planet Earth. Let’s go optimistically and with vision into that night, there’s crying out there!

And if my cheerleading sounds naïve, then here is one last curious joke to consider that came my way today. I think it could be taken a few different ways depending on who’s the boss, so I'll let you decide if it's optimistic or pessimistic or even both:

An inexperienced real estate salesman asked his boss if he could refund the deposit to an angry customer who had discovered that the property he had bought was under water.

"What kind of salesman are you?" the boss scolded. "Get out there and sell him a boat."

I'm watching the debates closely, like 20% of my country

2008-10-03T18:18:00.000-07:00

Like the Republican presidential candidate John McCain only worse, last night their VP candidate Sarah Palin was scattered, rambling, unspecific, and focussed on a few flag-waving talking points, even to the point of ignoring direct questions and repeating herself over and over again. Often winking and striking cute poses and using folksy vernacular, she offered no plans, with no consistency of platform to suggest any. But hey, she can't break any campaign promises she told the moderator, because she's only been at this for five weeks now and hasn't made any promises, except to do what is right, which remains vague.

She alternated randomly between saying Wall Street is greedy and needs massive regulation and John McCain will do things differently because he's, gosh, such a maverick and I'm going to go be a maverick with him too... then back to saying the standard Republican mantras which got us into this mess, like government is the problem and we need to cut revenues and cut spending and let business thrive. At one point she made this horrific Freudian slip, saying "It's a toxic mess, really, on Main Street that's affecting Wall Street."

She also says global warming is real but people didn't do it, so all we need to do is drill baby drill because we're all so hungry for energy. She's supposed to be strong on energy policy, so I guess that's her policy, even though it won't get us a drop of new oil for ten years. She even made another ridiculous mix-up (reversals like these are called spoonerisms) saying that she doesn't "attribute every activity of man to the changes in the climate". Well it may be true, that we can't attribute anything she says to the surrounding reality. She's too busy bluffing and remembering party slogans and pretending to be just like joe six-pack and all the other hockey moms who are governors and have a million dollars in personal worth.

I won't even go much into Palin's foreign policy, which is filled with patriotic provocations like quoting that Iranian (who isn't even in charge of Iran) that said Israel is a stinking corpse. She kept saying that we can't set any goals for leaving Iraq, because it's the most important place to fight terrorism, and the generals will tell us when it's time to leave, and all the Democrats want to do is wave the white flag of surrender. Even though the terrorists are based elsewhere, and Iraq has more surplus money than we do, and the Iraqis just want their own country back. Her whole approach was not only stubbornly narrow minded, but also insensitive to both Biden and herself, since they both have sons in Iraq.

What's amazing but true, is that people are saying Sarah Palin looked good because at least she did so much better at this debate than in her earlier interviews. I didn't see them, but apparently she was so completely incomprehensible and lost that they had to cut the worst parts (some are now on youtube I hear). This is the woman who would become President if that hot-headed McCain, who likes to routinely curse out his colleagues and even his wife, ever had a serious health problem while being the oldest US President in history. I'd be crazy to trust my future and my children's future to the team of McCain/Palin.

Like Barack Obama only better, Joe Biden was direct, competent, concerned about the middle class, and offered lists of actions to be taken. He was a gentleman who showed maturity and feelings, as when he choked up about being a single dad after his first wife and daughter were killed in a car accident, and then stayed focussed on his talking points and made plenty of sense without being shallow or evasive.

The context for this debate was that the Dow went down 777 points on Monday. That is traditionaly a most holy number that signals divine intervention. The country is waking up to a harsh reality, and that's a good thing if people come together in a serious way. Initial anger is giving way to sober responsibilities, including today Congress finally passing a version of the Paulson economic rescue plan which John McCain and his Republicans derailed last week.

I'm proud to see the polls changing rapidly, as Americans discern the real issues and the leaders who have the vision, experience, and skill to fix the system. Obama/Biden are way up. It's looking like this election could be a landslide, or at least far more a mandate than the one Bush claimed when he won his first election by losing the popular vote, and his second election by one of the closest margins in history. The era of problem fixing that could have begun with Al Gore, who's been on a crusade to warn the world of global warming for the past forty years, will at last begin with the extraordinary leadership of Barack Obama and his trusty sidekick Joe Biden. I just have to trust that there will be some country left to save by the time they start office.

Exciting Prospects and Great Expectations

2008-10-01T20:09:00.000-07:00

Obama's winning in big ways for the right reasons, such as competence and the economy, and by revisions the government is developing a more fair and comprehensive economic rescue plan. Many more people are learning to go further in reactions than the initial prejudices and punishing anger, for example.

AP Poll: Obama takes a 7-point lead over McCain

Senate passes $700B rescue; House votes lured

I like to believe that Americans are being guided to make things better now, including cooperation with the entire world. To hear about the central banks of all the nations meeting and lending each other money is a great pragmatic trend. Of course there are rough times ahead, but rough times can bring people together to solve the problems. I hear leaders talking in plain terms like, if we shift to a world economy that solves energy independence and global warming and other social needs, we will get out of the ruts we've been in. Bold visions are appearing, stark contrasts to the past, such as Obama would lead the United States in standing for. McCain can serve his country as the great senator he is, but Obama will change our hopes for the future. He's hugely respected and supported around the world, he is a global game changer along with many other great individuals of our time.

The best outcomes are coming, sooner or later, so we might as well relax, be open-minded, and support all of humanity. We make it together after all.

Here's to the future!

educate the public before it's too late!

2008-09-27T17:29:00.001-07:00

Hey MoveOn.org!

I support your campaigns, I send the emails. You pushed for more protections in the Wall Street rescue package, and you got it. Now House Republicans are turning this into a political platform and opposing any rescue package, because they've made it into a push button issue so that Americans will think it's a give-away to Wall Street!

This is about getting the credit markets to work again with a technique of buying up and holding unpopular assets until they can be sold. It worked for the Great Depression, it worked in Sweden in the 1990's, it will work again.

The economy will crash and burn without this pacakage now! Don't let stupid politicians who would rather follow than lead be led by angry Americans who don't understand the stakes! Get a movement going to explain the need for the rescue package, why it's now a rescue for America and not a bailout for Wall Street! Tell people to call their Congressmen to pass something before it's too late!

thanks,
Carl Schroeder

Understand Why The Bailout is a Needed Rescue Now

2008-09-26T17:54:00.000-07:00

I'm going to add my energy to the crisis resolution now. There is a 700 billion US economy rescue plan being debated in Washington that is being opposed by some House Republicans for purely political gain, to show their voters back home that they don't give Wall Street a bailout free ride.

This is a very serious moment in history. The 700 billion is not a gift to the rich people on Wall St. It is a way to get money back to American businesses while the Wall St mess is sorted out. Make no mistake, many Wall St elite are losing their shirts. But because banks stop loaning money for fear of who's going to go under next, the entire American economy is freezing up for lack of money to run. Your grocery store won't be able to borrow money to stock the food to sell you, you will starve soon you Americans who want to punish the rich.

If you call in your support to Washington to pass the 700 billion rescue plan, then the US will get a lot of that money back over time, and you will keep your jobs, be able to buy food and cars and homes, and we will all survive.

Do it, get this right, don't react in ways that drive the politicians to block your own rescue!

Remember, during turbulent times

2008-09-22T18:47:00.001-07:00

The earth could be a very abundant successful place with the right resource management.

On Evil

2008-09-17T15:44:00.000-07:00

Many people enjoy perpetuating the reputation that evil is smart, impressive, and powerful – the equal counterpart to a good creator God. Either that, or evil does not exist at all. Or it only exists, in a Godless world.

Well I believe that evil does exist, but evil is like a homeless, friendless, starving petty thief, who everyday is approached by countless relatives and community leaders. These good people beg the thief to rejoin their society, offering him food, shelter, companions, education, employment, and more, all for free. The only cost will be the unavoidable implicit acknowledgement that the thief was not the greatest power. This admission alone is what the thief daily refuses, so that he might continue to scrounge in the gutter for scraps, hurl insults at passersby, and call himself master of the universe.

Is that smart? Is that impressive? Is that powerful? Is that the equal of anything at all, much less of a God?

Evil is not a human being, but human beings who implicitly worship evil by construing its power become its ignorant lackeys, carrying out evil’s suggestions to do harm to varying degrees, and allowing others to do harm. Is that whom any of us wishes to serve: the most degenerate, low, stupid creature in the gutter, one who subsists on scraps and puffs up to fearsome impotent proportions, rather than study the universe of cooperative abundance? Is there any of us who has not used intimidation to gain an upper hand, made threats or fantasized revenge when we felt profoundly disadvantaged?

In an age when the global crisis, built up over many years of careless self-serving activities and the competetive permissions given to others to do the same, now threatens us all, it is time to eradicate our core infatuations with evil. We human being are capable of knowing when we do a harm, we only prefer to believe as evil does that we are capable of not harming ourselves. By apologies, humilities, forgivenesses and fixing, we can realize how false that hubris truly was, and enter into the greater prosperity that necessarily functions for the wealth of every one involved. How difficult it is to believe that the greatest benefits to self come with the very same actions that benefit others as well, and vice versa, yet not believing clouds our brilliant capacities to perceive the generous choices and solutions which lie beyond evil’s stinking gutter home.

From how deep in the gutter have you looked out into the world? Was evil your nemesis, companion, dark lord, denied shadow, or everything there was? Was evil something you were, they were, irresistible, unstoppable, all that could be counted on? Arriving at a decision to do or accept harm is evidence of error in thinking, not necessary evil; stop, backtrack, do not go on. Have the courage to question a limited view, and the opportunities to leave the gutter will come to you.

Being Roy Lichtenstein

2008-08-31T08:32:00.000-07:00

Last week I dreamt that I was a young Jewish playwrite in NYC putting on a performance of an avant garde science fiction play I'd written, something like JRR Tolkein or Terry Pratchett, in which I was playing Death. We performed in the woods to save money on set building, and we were also filming it. My audience was composed of artistic friends who loved the performance, but at the end I had to tell them that one transformative effect of the story for me was that I now knew that my name is Carl Schroeder, not this Jewish man before them whom they knew as Roy Lichtenstein (not the artist). I was concerned that my friends would think I was joking and continuing the performance as a meta-play. Maybe if they knew I was serious they would think I was crazy. Then I woke up.

1) alarmist reaction: DO YOU THINK I AM CRAZY?

2) clueless reaction: wow that is amazing, am I Roy Lichtenstein? Um, in a past life maybe, like an alternate universe Roy Lichtenstein who writes avant garde science fiction plays?

3) scholarly reaction: Lichtenstein, licht is German for light, stein is stone, but lichten is lightening up, like mist clearing up, or thinning fog. The clarifying stone? The rock that shines light. Roy, French roi? King? I am the king of the clarifying stones?

4) mystical response: There's a gnome involved.

5) pragmatic response: I'm doing something with plays and films that's like the way Roy re-presented comic books to elevate them into art.

6) personal conclusion: I am recombining elements of pop culture myths and movies into essays, reviews, stories, and dreams in a way that can create a different artform, one that awakens the reader into the lucidity by decoding the archetypes. My role is like Death, to be a guide into the afterlife.

7) conclusion: let's write some of this down. Oh look, I just did. Oh wow, instant manifestation by way of self-awareness!

Why I hate capitalism

2008-07-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

Capitalism doesn't work. Who the hell thinks it does? If it worked so well, we would have solved poverty by now. The world economy isn't even on track to solving poverty, all we're seeing is increasing bubbles of speculation driving up the cost of necessities for the suffering starving billions, human beings overworked and underpaid in polluted raped countrysides, all to benefit the superich who can afford to build their palaces and bellies faster than ever.

Why isn't capitalism the shining example of civilization that so many think it is? Simple, I'll tell you why. Supply and demand. Oh, but everyone quotes the supposed law of supply and demand. I'm sick to death of people who'd rather reflexively defend free markets than think about it. Supply and demand, get it? That means supply of goods and demand ofmoney. There's nothing about human need in that equation. You got the money? You get the goods. You don't got the money? Go away, die already. Think I'm being harsh? Think about it. If capitalism worked so well, why can't it solve poverty? Nature is abundant, technology has only increased that abundance, yet millions continue to live on pennies a day, dying in their hovels. Fair distribution of resources should be happening. It isn't.

The gap between rich and poor grows naturally in systems that institutionalize poverty. The most needy and deprived won't ever have the money; it's practically the definition of capitalism. "Capitalism is an economic system in which property is owned by private persons and operated for profit" - Wikipedia.

The dehumanizing effect of capitalism, the attitude that it's okay to let people without money just die, is so embedded in our culture that we have a phrase for it. "That's business." What? You got layed off, you're homeless, your children are starving? Sorry, nothing personal, that's just business. Exactly, nothing personal. You aren't a person, I'm not a person, we're not human beings anymore. Just machines chasing the money, leaving corpses in our wake. Capitalism looks great at the supermarket, not so great in the ghettos and cemeteries. Or the war zones where desperate people take up desperate measures. Capitalism drives poverty, poverty drives war, war drives war profits. Supply and demand consumes it all.

Not that there's anything wrong with money. Money is just another tool, and it should be treated as such. Money should be the last consideration, instead of the first. We should have highly regulated systems of production and distribution to reflect human values and the hidden environmental costs. Systems to incentivize caring aren't so hard to imagine, human beings do care about each other naturally after all. Sure it might take some trial and error, but that's the cost of running your life, instead of letting money run it for you. Money is just something you carry or bank to help you pay for things at the end of the day, after non-money concerns design the deals.

"From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." Who said that, some socialist pig? Yeah maybe. But it's also the creed that every decent parent lives by, and last I checked some God fearing people still claimed to value a family more than cash. If we treated our families like businesses, the hardest working member would take all the food while the infants starve and die. Probably not even the hardest working member, since that would often be the woman. More like the loudest biggest brute most willing to rationalize doing whatever it takes to hoard and control all the resources. In families, there are laws against such behavior. In business, there are laws protecting it. That's the triumph of capitalism, that's how far we've come.

Next time you feel like trusting capitalism and free markets, versus hearing out some Godless radicals who would dare to enforce say universal health care and food supplies, think again. What would Jesus do? Would you dare to question the authorities that say it's all just business as usual, the poverty, the corruption, the blatant inequities? Stop to notice who exactly is insisting that capitalism is the only system that works, that anything else would be worse, please trust the market cycles and just work a little harder. Probably the ones already benefitting, that's who keeps repeating party lines, the ones who have the most to lose. The rest of humanity has already lost it all, and so will you if you believe lies in the hopes of becoming more secure someday yourself, maybe even another top dog too, with all those corpses in your wake.

Older and younger souls

2008-06-20T19:09:00.000-07:00

Context: Sometimes, out of something I'm working on in my own growth, I will jump in with a response to a Michael teachings email I get from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MichaelTeachings/. Michael is a channeled entity who came up with a popular personality system for souls, including occupational essence, maturity age, lesson level, etc. It's a pretty good tool for understanding, but like many systems it can lead to a sense of some classifications being better than others. It's not uncommon to have groups of groupies lamenting the dearth of old souls in the world...

Re: QUESTION: Mature vs. Old

> Here's a piece by Shepherd about the subject.
> http://www.michaelteachings.com/older_not_better.html

Shepherd's article on why an old soul isn't better than a younger soul is very good in theory for dispelling prejudices, but I think it misses something in practice. It makes the comparison of soul age to ages of people, pointing out that a child can be just as nice as the nicest adult, only they will act appropriate for their age, and therefore we just can't expect a child to solve complex problems such as doing an adult's nine-to-five job. That's a perfectly fine and true metaphor for a positive world, i.e. the way things were meant to be.

The problem is that current human society has deeply held negative beliefs such as the value of dominating by force and intimidation, to which people have adapted through many lifetimes. A child now, even raised under the best conditions, is forced to build negative personality reactions to survive the hurt and fear in the world just for the hope of making it to adulthood. Any parent knows that even the nicest child will have monstrous tantrums and go through various stages of rebellion, self-centeredness, and even cruelty, just because they're flailing at forces they can't yet understand. Growing up in such a world means that we all have many things to be ashamed of and forgive ourselves for. But if we can survive to functioning adulthold, and by extension to the old soul age, that is where in full comprehension and responsibility we can process the forces of negativity that thread through us all. Only then can we truly hold the high ground of compassion for everyone as we clean ourselves out, becoming living examples of spiritual potential and success. Many many people won't make it this far however, including old souls, and they'll show glimmers in the best of times but fall from grace repeatedly.

So it is my opinion that while anyone can be a fair weather friend, from child to adult or young to old soul, it is only the old souls who commit to spiritual growth that can become the truly safe, reliable, positive companions for every situation. Everyone else will have their limits beyond which they not only don't know what to do, but they also react dangerously, injuring themselves and others. This is just the practical consequence of the negative belief systems and adaptations that are common, if not predominant, in the world today.

So in this sense, being an old soul can definitely be better, providing the old soul is working on their inherent growth. This betterness is not a superiority of spiritual worth that looks down on others, but a superiority of functional capacity that can fix problems at the spiritual level while understanding why others can't and won't yet find their way out of suffering. Any old soul who thinks they're better in an arrogant judgmental way is automatically not, simple as that.

To summarize, handling physical life in a dangerous world is an adult's job, and by extension fully handling life as it is now is an old soul's job. Arguably, the younger souls could always manage just fine by inviting higher spiritual protection to pick up where they leave off, but then that's exactly the kind of assistance that unconscious negativity will block, hence my point. As I understand it, old soul is the developmental stage at which you can really begin to root out and transform your own unconscious negativity reflexes. Before the old soul stage the ego identity is just too tightly held and the best that can be done is amplification and suppression (please stay on my good side, don't push my buttons). Maybe I've just been burned on the dark side of too many people I trusted (including some immature acting old souls), but this view is helpful to me. And yes, I realize that it was my side of the negativity to push their buttons (playing the martyred truth teller can be so tempting), that's why I've become less interventionist and more philosophical in my old (soul or otherwise) age.

Comments anyone, feedback?

... and later, I wrote to someone: The stuff I said was really just my theorizing on what might be the characteristic operating limits of soul age, don't let me limit your actual abilities or discoveries. I'd like to hear about your ideas of what are differences between the soul ages. I know several people on the cusp, making the transition, and it's a tricky topic.

attachment and desire

2008-05-26T19:26:00.000-07:00

A Buddhist friend brought up:

> Noble truth #2: the origin of suffering is attachment.

I replied, and share the reply here:

I think it's all in the translation. I think the kind of attachment that is to be let go of is desperation for, like I can't be happy any time that i don't have this. If we can find peace in every situation, if we can make the best of any situation, then when it suits us the universe can provide tons of everything. If one's lifestyle is out of balance though, things can be lost and then it's important to not be attached, so we can keep on going. Competitive insatiable consumerism has doomed people to some hard times for rebalancing, but there's nothing wrong with wanting and having when it's sustainable and in balance. The natural state of people is to want, and the natural state of the earth is to provide in abundance. Greedy dumb polluting people have messed up the cornucopia, that's all. It will take some work and cooperation to get it back, and that's fine, people are supposed to want it back and thus be motivated to learn how to get it back.

Thought from the Day

2008-05-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

The problem with creating your own reality, is that the optimistic people have no right to feel optimistic about the pessimistic people, but they can't help it.

Context for interpretation: you can have yours, I have mine

do repeated lessons have to get harder?

2008-05-15T07:27:00.000-07:00

This is a little out of context, but here's my post to the yahoo group for the Michael entity teachings at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MichaelTeachings/ There's a discussion thread going on that is largely talking about how and why people learn lessons on the physical plane. I'm surprised that so many people make the painful assumption that if you don't learn something the first time, it'll be harder next time. It's like some people enjoy making the threat to grow or else, which I think would just feed back into the resistance to growing in the first place. I liked the view that came to me in response:

Hi all, this is Carl and i'm just jumping into the list occasionally and this caught my eye. By the way, what is Yarbo?

> Yarbo: DURING THE ASTRAL INTERVAL, THE STUDY IS RETROSPECTIVE AND UNCHANGEABLE. ON THE PHYSICAL PLANE YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO CHANGE
RIGHT UP UNTIL THE MOMENT OF THE LAST BREATH. <<<
> Karen: This is a great reminder. I've often wondered why so many of our issues couldn't be worked out on the astral.

I think this is only true for those for whom it is true. As Karen says later about whether life gets harder as lessons have to be revisited, it's true if you choose to do it that way. I believe that as lessons repeat they get bigger and more intense to get our attention, but that could just as easily involve bigger more loving more manifested teachers, as it could increased deprivation and suffering to force focus.

So likewise, why would it be true for so many people that the physical plane is where they have to make their growth and changes? Because that's the way they're doing things, that's what they're up to. Entities like Lazaris say they are among the many beings who never choose to grow physically. Devas and nature spirits grow astrally, only the lower simpler ones growing in the etheric just beyond the physical. It's like, here are categories of reality and their properties, which do you think will help you best with your growth? Humans say physical, at least until they start doing more of their growth in dreams and meditations, which are above the physical. Growth done in lucid dreams and guided meditations would clearly violate any demand that the physical be where all growth is done. As physically focused beings evolve, it becomes preferable to do a lot of growth in the higher levels, where one can create and release much more easily.

What do you all think?

(Followup note 5/24: to my knowledge no one ever answered this forum post, though some conversation continued in the topic, which i took to mean that no one had an answer. I was disappointed, but that's okay, because i think it's helpful to get used to the idea (develop coping mechanisms for the experience) that you may not always get physically incarnated validation for ideas. Esotericism comes with growth. So-called older souls may have very different reasons for being on the planet from younger, including very specific esoteric mission-oriented theories on what is possible. There are a lot of situations that i don't have an answer to. Presumably if no one physically incarnated has the answer, then non-physically incarnated beings could contact us with all the answers we need to grow. Which reminds me, does someone up there have a quick easy clean replacement for gasoline? Send it on down please. Can't hurt to ask :)

vision of nirvana

2008-05-08T08:27:00.000-07:00

This is very inspiring, brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor whose life changed from the mystical experience of a stroke, she sounds like a Near-Death Experience or Out of Body Experience lecturer who has seen and preaches the ultimate reality, enjoy!

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

Great site to know about too.

Time to grow up (it can be safe and fun)

2008-04-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

I find myself in my mid-forties with two baby boys to raise. My wife always really wanted children, so I became convinced to try the experience. We met in our thirties, and now we have adopted later in life. Parenting is the toughest job you’ll ever love. That is also the Peace Corps slogan, since parenting is a wider activity of raising your life to higher levels by growing yourself with the world. I’m challenged every day to juggle many activities and remain hopeful and positive, when it’s so easy to get frustrated and blame one responsibility for overwhelming another. If life seems to be in the balance, it's because life is found in the balance. There is no us versus them, there is only us.

Us isn’t the same as U.S. The United States is another matter. The U.S. really needs to grow up. It took a privileged position in the world, made itself out to be a leader and a god, now it needs to act like one. With greater power comes greater responsibility to act beneficially. Admired for its strengths, loathed for its mistakes, the unsustainable U.S. lifestyle is now coming back to haunt us as developing nations multiply the consumer footprint and accelerate global crises. Who is to blame for food shortages that will kill millions and create riots and coups? Is it the price of oil going up because of the mismanaged U.S. dollar in cahoots with Chinese exploitation to manufacture, pollute, and ratchet up the economy so some appear to get rich quicker while everyone really suffers? How wealthy are you if your world is dying, how long can you fiddle while Rome burns?

I’ve heard that oil is now beyond normal supply and demand forces in its inflation, due to unregulated hedge funds for the super-rich speculating on commodities for more personal gain rather than helping humanity. What about the biofuels debacle? Let’s turn food into fuel, make cars compete with people for survival, oh that was brilliant. Meat eating is extremely polluting and inefficient, so engineers patent more untested chemicals and bioproducts to crank up industrial supply for unhealthy demand, even as more Chinese want their meat too. No one is blameless, and there are so many problems to solve, but clearly a lot is due to unsustainable, highly exploitative industries that the United States helped to pioneer, with its supposedly free and fair society that really was subsidizing and protecting irresponsible owner classes. There were a lot of golden opportunities and good intentions that got lost to corruption by the few, allowed by the many.

So I went to bed last night worrying about this stuff, wondering if the Mormons are going to survive to inherit the Earth because every Mormon has a year of food supplies stored up, it’s a commandment or something. I have a few months of supplies I got after September 11 so it’s time to check the expiration dates and replenish them.

Last night I had a dream that showed my wife and I walking down into a valley on a narrow road that led back up again on the other side. It was a straight single lane, and my concern was for us to get to the other side before anyone else came along. But when we got to the bottom, a herd of cattle suddenly appeared coming down from the other side toward us. Hey I yelled, you’re supposed to take turns, you’re supposed to let people up the road before sending anyone or anything in the other direction! But whoever was driving the cattle ignored me, so my wife and I had to run back up to where we started. Fortunately we found a little side road on the top again, where we could get out of the way of the cattle and let them by. Then we went down and got to the other side. Later I had a related dream of going up a steep suburb hill to a higher place where I would be picked up in a van by friends.

The meaning I see is that the dip in the road is the low point that the world is hitting, and we all need to get through it before things get better back on the high ground on the other side. There is no choice really, this is the straight path forward. Unfortunately there are those who are opposing growth and herding people in the backward direction, threatening to trample those who try to honestly get ahead. Don’t get caught in fears or anger that this is happening however, just find the safe places in your life to let the threats pass, and make your wiser moves forward with your loved ones when you can. Two steps forward, one step backward, is frustrating but worth it if we learn the patience and steps to finally make it all the way. Higher friends are waiting at the top of the steep growth incline that leads through our daily lives, we can and will be met and saved in the most practical of ways.

I reported in this blog a couple months ago that the number of challenges had increased dramatically in my life and the lives of those around me. Encouraging and helping each other, we’ve been learning to meet those challenges. Sick people are recovering, financial hardships are being managed, new opportunities are being realized. After some stumbling, I’ve even found some windfalls and am feeling fairly secure for the moment. That could change, but I cling to the necessary sensation that there is a road we’re on, a purpose and a way ahead. Call it blind faith, or call it knowing better from too many years of experience that giving life a chance to work itself out is the only sensible option, even if I have to learn the hows and whys as I go. The universe is far too complex and plentiful and successful to believe my cynicism (or anyone else's cynicism for that matter) that the complications of human negativity can ruin things forever. Everyone does need to grow up however.

What impels and compels that necessary growing up? Responsibility, which is the opportunity to focus and learn new vital skills. Serious responsibility, like that which a parent must accept for a vulnerable needy child. Parenting makes many people grow up. Parenting is also for a vulnerable needy humanity, for a vulnerable needy environment, for a vulnerable needy planet. Things only look so bad now because so many people are still rejecting the responsibility to not let the greater life slide into the pit. Suffering is real, and so are the ways out of suffering.

We all need to parent the self. We must find the real reasons to drop the bad behaviors that never really worked anyway. We can look for the strategies that help everyone live together, not just us versus them. There’s this myth that groups of people are opposed, that we can’t all work together to survive and thrive, that we have to suppress one group to raise another. That’s the kind of thinking that allows the rich to exploit the poor, the powerful to pollute the planet. It’s false, and the more you practice the corrupt behaviors that got us all into this mess together, the more you will need to dramatically, perhaps traumatically, reverse direction. See, the thing with the cattle herders in my dream is, they’re going backward too along with the cattle.

So to everyone I wish safe passage through a difficult time on a planet that’s going through a very delayed, and now very steep, learning curve. I sincerely believe that the universe provides, so the more we practice the energies of safety and sustainability for ourselves and everyone that we can reach, the more the entire system comes back to vibrant life to sustain us all.

Excuse me now, I have a cute demanding little guy to chase and feed and count my blessings for.

More advice out of the blue, or so it might seem

2008-03-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

This could be another blog entry, but as I sit down to write some movie reviews so my movie site doesn’t get so out of date, I feel the urge to say this message to myself.

I present it for wherever it comes from and wherever it goes to, which includes profound possibilities, such as calling it channeled energy information from higher beings and/or self, to a self who is needing the message. Regarding the up direction of where the message comes from, it is actually part of the human mind stretching to consider that the message comes not from a particular exclusive being, and then have the conflict of figuring out which one. Is this God talking, Jesus, an angelic guide, a non-physical teacher, a spirit friend, an elemental energy of the planes of existence which include physical, astral emotional, and mental. Or is it from my soul, another self, a manifested self in another space time, an inner energetic archetypal self, a dream, my imagination. WHO IS TELLING ME THIS?

It is the ego, the separate identity clinging to cultural images and limited abilities that it thinks are itself, which gets very upset when faced with suggestions and possible truths that do not come from just one place or other. Helpful messages come from positivity, which is a state of inter-dependence and helping and benefit (synergies, symbiosis) which tends to line up all beings in a clear view all the way to God. So a good message, good inspiration, good idea comes from God, Jesus, angels, teachers, spirits, souls, selves, and any number of mythic half-imaginary friends in-between that can evolve over time.

That’s right, God evolves. Jesus for example should be imagined as not exactly existing historically, but being a collection of impressions having qualities that embody and make possible important spiritual relationships that people were needing to grow and become more of themselves. That more can be something better or worse – we’ve all heard of people who did good in the name of a religion, and other people who did bad.

Jesus is… the ever sacrificing and forgiving soul, the higher self, the guide, the personal god, our side of God, our higher energetic body… which conception brings out something usefully good for you? The subjectivity of divinity gives some idea for why it is incredibly futile and stupid to denounce other religions as wrong or evil. Religions are cultural systems, one-size-fits-all image collections for evoking (hopefully) more virtuous sides ourselves. The lost and stumbling self could use some moral guidance - make that strict rules for those who want to obey or fight strict rules.

If you demonize another religion, system, or person, then you’re just taking your versions of their images to enliven and embody your own negativity. Enemy worship is another form of religion, it makes more real the things people oppose, beginning with what they oppose in themselves. It can become very obvious, that people create evil in their own image – such as moral leaders who are secretly adulterers, righteous politicians who create wars to end wars, etc. It would be better to just get clear internally, conceptually, and drop beliefs and behaviors in ourselves that we find offensive. But many people, not knowing how life works, let destructive thoughts and habits grow in them with no idea of where they came from or how to stop them. Where negative seeds come from is often other people and other selves, and what to do to stop a negative situation is take it apart, identify the sequence of thoughts and feelings that lead to destructive impulses, and replace the pieces with sincere efforts to be more grateful, hopeful, realize who to trust and who not to trust, build positive expectations and goals, etc.

When we get stuck out of ignorance or payoffs in destructive behaviors, we frustrate and offend ourselves. If we can’t face being the source of a problem (not all problems, just the problem that invites other problems), we consciousnesses will often just stew and get increasingly blindly irritated at entire situations that follow from our little piece of negativity. If anyone comes along who does something similar or close to what we did, we get really ticked off. We want to lecture them and convince them and make them stop. It’s so much less emotionally difficult to try to control someone else who’s the cause of the problem than face ourselves emotionally, or so we think. Actually it is impossible to control other people, they’ll either do what we want for their own reasons, or let us control them in exchange for deepening roles to play with them.

People build up very negative beliefs and dramas that hold each other in positions of blame for what they can’t face in themselves. And the negative society grows and grows, with everyone contributing some piece of negativity. Pieces fit together, like complainers and control freaks and silent bitter sufferers finding each other, until everyone can look around and say see, I’m definitely not to blame for all this negativity! I don’t do bad things because I say I don’t do them. But maybe they do other things that they don’t want to look at, and don’t want us to look at. But by the nature of reacting to what they do that annoys themselves, such people will call out their own sins, as it were.

Extreme cases of people invested in a negative world become almost split personalities, with one side of them very nice and one ignored denied side very mean. People play games with this duality, make it funny, make it acceptable, institutionalize it with false wisdom about how good and evil are constants and one side can’t exist without the other. Such people will have enemies deeply ingrained, and when you get in the sights of their enemy guns you’ll know it. That’s when you get on someone’s bad side, you find out their dark side. At such times, the person will increasingly, hysterically see in the world attackers of the form of their own worst sides, which they abusively run loose in even as they say things like “you’re so bad, stop it, stop it!” Sometimes it’ll be like they’re just talking to themselves, and seeing no one else.

A lot of what these people say will apply directly to themselves because they’re desperately trying to get their own attention even as they don’t want to look or feel in their center. If they’re talking to the cut-off parts of themselves through you, then you’ll suffer for it. You can try to stop it, but they want you in the role they’re casting for you, and ducking out will threaten them with seeing how you weren’t as much of a problem as they were. They’ll fight to keep you their enemy, they’re not ready to understand and accept and change the negativity in themselves.
Clean up your act, and try to step out of their way as efficiently as possible without giving them more to react to. Which is hard, we understand – if you yourself are shaky in how good a person you are, not sure how big and how important your own bad habits are, then you’ll tend to cave in to the other person’s attacks and either be contrite (I’m so bad, you’re right, what can I do to make you happy with me – ah, so glad you asked) or fight back (I’m not bad, how dare you!). You’ll know you’ve contained and shrunken your negativity as you become able to silently disagree, know with compassion that they are messed up, and be willing to do something to help them.

Helping may even include taking some unfair blame and graciously getting away without getting the last word or being understood or vindicated in any way. Their version of you is the bad guy, not you. The more you can know that, the more you can pray for the other person at a safe distance. That’s about all you can do sometimes, but it’s plenty, since you’ve gotten yourself out of the way for the universe to help everyone involved in the situation, including you. Your relationship needs healing. The problem person may only put you back on their good side and still hold blame and hate and fear for others, but at least you get off the enemy list. It’s your life, after all.

So why do bad things happen to good people?

Let’s back up. It’s amazing how much people don’t, can’t, won’t, haven’t face basic concepts. There’s a lot of speculating who is in control of life. People often say God, how could you let this happen! Or, in some perverse corollary, God, don’t let them get away with that, punish them!

God exists and God lets people decide what happens in their own lives, whether that be for better or worse, by design or default. It’s that simple, but it sounds like blame the victim, so many people can’t handle the concept when they need it most. Are people hurting themselves? Yes they are, but not deliberately. More out of ignorance and disbelief. If people really knew and understood how everything could be so much better for them, easily, permanently, happily, then they wouldn’t stay where they are.

Many people have heard by now the expression “You create my own reality” and take reaction to it without really taking it apart. Oh, sorry, that’s “You create your own reality”, or “I create my own reality”. Not enough said about how we create a shared reality, because that gets too complicated. Fact is, we all create pieces of the shared reality, and people do a lot of copying and imitating and adapting to their situations. But almost no one really understands or faces how their beliefs about life make life happen, by direct doing or by indirect attracting someone else who will do it to them.

People don’t deeply realize for example how their fear is triggered by worst case horror images which push them to look for a source enemy to attack and control. Consequently people get caught up in statistical waves of interrelated misfortunes and hardships, and these tend to make the dangerous reality out there look all the more real. And functionally it is real, but you can also realize how unreal it is by discovering how quickly it can change to a more positive dynamic, a better world, with a few behavioral adjustments among the key players. And at the center of your own reality, you are always your biggest key player.

Being central to all the action is part of what people find hard to believe. But it’s true. People are always looking for leaders and following trends, including intuitions and zeitgeists and ideas whose time has come. The more you can flesh out and act from positive states, the more those positive states will spread invisibly around the world.

Think of it as adding performances to a master catalog of inspiring role models, and you are the audience who rates and judges. If you find and like an attitude, a habit, a way of dealing with the world that works for you, then practicing and perfecting it to yourself makes it more available for others. In the great search engine of life energy, if you’ve been finding good ways to live, they’ll be picked up by others.

If you duck out of negative situations effectively, then most immediately and obviously, the negative relationships you’ve been in will have one less player, and one more mysteriously hopeful and positive influence to remember. As we said, maybe your attacker will just pick their enemies elsewhere and leave you alone, but they won’t be able to forget you. You’ll be part of the subtle pressure and guidance to change their ways, to know that there’s another possibly better way to be. More abstractly, your behaviors are picked up psychically by all human beings. You’ll be seen in dreams, and you’ll be heard of as you join groups of kindred spirits, quite literally sometimes.

Keep improving yourself, it’s worth it, it’s making a difference, it’s working. Don’t give up, do your best and make way for others to do their best too – including greater powers than you addressing and healing your truest enemies, which include ignorance, disease, corruption, hurt, in yourself and others.

some would say I'm getting my Jesus on!

2008-03-19T19:47:00.000-07:00

Whew, a lot of thoughts and ideas toward a blog entry, and I can’t say then all by sequential time. But some I will.

It’s a challenging time, not enough spare energy to express too much here. Already been self-expressing with thinking over and journaling in notebooks and audiotapes. Tapes are nice because I can listen back and see how much I sound like someone who knows what they’re talking about. There are tangents I could go on, which would come back to a track I feel, like boomerangs maybe or moons around a planet. But the sun is the soul, and that’s the goal. To feel attracted to the soul. The source, your source. (1)

One way to tune into the source is to think about your version of things, how great it would be. If you get stuck on any judgments of someone else’s world out there then your not in your version of things. For example, if you react against what someone says, you’re just showing to yourself how much their version of the world is or isn’t your own. Or if you don’t like the way people handle something, like money, or authority, that’s fine. Just remember it’s not the thing that’s rotten. Money for example is not the root of all evil. Whoever said that meant, money is the root of all evil “for me”. It can be quite comical to make pushy universal absolutist statements become subjective again, it turns that energy around back at them so fast it can make your head spin. Hmm, maybe they mean but can’t bring themselves to say, money is the root of all my evil. Whatever it is, money is clearly a problem for them. Is it a problem for you? Well, how could would should money work, in your version of things? Then expect that it can work that way for you, and welcome any signs of this happening. Don’t spend what you don’t have, of course. At least not beyond the fixed interest rate you can expect to have.

You’ve got to realize, that a lot of this world isn’t your own. Most of it. A few people are bold, foolish, or desperate enough to make big changes, but mostly this is a very patchwork reality of little patches. You might be surprised which patches are most closely aligned with the good and bad sides of you – they’re probably the ones that you respond most inspiredly and furiously to, respectively, and you can choose to build on one and disconnect from the other (not my version).

It’s a big virtual reality game here, though since your body lives in the game, along with your friends and family, it’s very real and important. You definitely chose it, you signed up to play and it’s your screen, it’s your interface, so don’t smash the monitor. It’s not over til it’s over, though it can be very provoking.

Provoking would just mean that you are imagining one possible threatening outcome, so guard against and look for different possible outcomes. The rules can change quickly when you realize they’re in your too. There are many complex inputs to the system, in addition to the obvious enviable controls out there of who has the money and power. To get to your version of things, you’ve got to feel your own internal opinions, your attention, and your love. The right ones will help you find your soul, which will increasingly approach you like some loving living light, a great friendly being watching over you, like a sun or god of new or mythic stature.

You can’t get stuck on the images out there, especially now as life gets more challenging. And you know it is, life getting challenging, with global conflicts, global pollution, global economic problems, global resource scarcities, global disease, and so on. It’s almost like the bad word is global. And in a way it is, since global means planetary, and Earth is where we live. Our bodies are from Earth, our stuff can’t depart, at least not while we’re valuing this physical lifetimes. Global means the set is filled, the consequences are realized, the sustainability is demonstrated. Obviously a lot of human systems today don’t work. (2)

I’d like to say didn’t, but mostly it’s still don’t. I had a vision, that it was the so-called common people who were in great numbers looking out for a brighter future, for hope and humanity. What were the leaders, people in positions of power and authority doing? Mostly hiding in fear of making wrong choices at a scary time, hoping the problems would go away by ignoring them or shooing them or outright falsifying to deny them. It's not hard to see that behaviour has led to the globalization of problems. Nowhere left to run, time to face up, very challenging for everyone.

It's a challenging time for everyone, for a reason. But I don't know all the reasons, people will be where they are. Focus on you, and giving your best to everyone you are drawn to meet. Right down to the anonymous well wishes, or prayers, or good energy. Whatever your version is called.

The vision was a vivid, charming, and chilling little movie in my mind as I was going to bed one night. An outstanding hypnogogic experience some researchers might say, a communication from heaven some Christians others might. They’d get their Jesus in there somewhere, too. Which is not a criticism, unless they pick on me first, which they sometimes do in my head, in my past, and in my world. But others are quite cool, like what Eric Leiser did with his hypnagogic divine visions, ie. made an astonishing semi-amatuer film with his brother, called Imagination. You might want to check it out, if it fits in your version of things.

I started out a Christian who liked to think about creatures from other planets, then I became a mystic Christian who studied in various esoteric churches including Spiritualism and Swedenborgianism (note the latter denies connection with the former). I admired the more intellectual mystics like Hildegard von Bingen, Emanuel Swedenborg, Robert Monroe, Kurt Leland, and in some ways became like them. It was my version of things, it still is, and evolving. Which is one way of saying that parts of this blog entry are from some mental friend or friends that I work with, and that’s the way I like to put it. My mental friends. An expression I got from some new wave songs in the 1980’s, I think it was going around at that time.

In my part of the world, anyway. :)

PS- oh there had to be a postscript, surely. well, it looks like up to marker (1) i was letting my ego run down, thru (2) i was channeling a view from the soul, and after (2) i was trying to speak as me again, which got some personal history and processing in that not everyone will relate to. Interesting how this stuff works. I'm learning what it means to say that i have tended to live on the mental plane, which is where the gods live and the souls if you can become more egalitarian.

Happy Take A Flying Leap Year Month Day

2008-02-29T19:20:00.001-08:00

Last week I saw this post on the Michael Teachings group at yahoo. Michael is a distributed channeled entity, a multipersonal higher being, a step toward god, and there are lots of nice thoughtful people on their email list. This post is by Shepherd Hoodwin, a nice guy with a pleasantly eccentric personality who is a Michael channel. A lot of the Michael channeling is about a personality system that includes soul age and archetypal social roles, it's pretty interesting stuff - you can read more about it at Shepherd's website which has the very delightful name of www.summerjoy.com

Anyways, Shepherd wrote, and gave me permission to repeat:

"Sometimes there's a lot of charged, negative energy in the air, like the malaise people feel before a thunderstorm--it's oppressive, and it makes people on edge and grumpier than normal. We're in one of those times now. Maybe they could be at least partly explained in terms of astrology. I just know that they come and go. The negative stuff has to be aroused in order to be healed. I don't mean "negative" in a judgmental way--it's just the dark side of life. Perhaps it could be thought of as the unevolved, raw material for our growth.

I've felt it lately like a raw nerve; negative memories and feelings are more easily triggered. In these times, friends tell me that there's a lot of difficult stuff going on for them."

I was thinking exactly along these lines, and so were a lot of people i've been talking to. Some say it's the lunar eclipse that was last week, but it seems bigger than that. I heard Robert Reich say, with regard to the economy and human suffering and how the world is run, it's a day of reckoning. I feel that's about right, only it's a stage of humanity growing up I'd say. Run your planet right, come on, isn't it obvious by now you're all in this together. Consuming less, appreciating more, that's my slogan these days, as I try to become more prioritized and sensitized, together with caring.

Anyway, in response to Shepherd's post I wrote:

Dear friends,

> We're in one of those times now... Perhaps it could be thought of as the unevolved, raw material for our growth...

I agree totally. Since late December, I've been noticing a lot of severe colds going around as well as people's plans breaking in various ways. I've had to personally take one step forward and two steps backward on a number of issues, including a lot of extra repairs and expenses on house, car, etc.

For a more serious example, my sister got diagnosed with a return of breast cancer after years of remission, and this is forcing her to clean up her life so deeply that she is making the shift from 7th level mature to 1st level old soul artisan. She's amazed to find she's happier and more satisfied with life than ever, but she still has a lot of healing ahead (Beth is her name, in NY, if anyone can send a prayer her way it's much appreciated).

My response to the setbacks has been to clear out the emotional reactions honestly and safely (journaling, both written and audio, meditations, 20 minute jags), then dig deeper to clean out more of the problem areas. I find underlying negative beliefs and attitudes, and fix them in meditations (declaring and demanding new affirmations from a mountain top is a fun one). It's early spring cleaning, on many levels. My friend Kurt Leland, who channels Charles and works with some Michael concepts, calls it an improving cycle, when we are forced to revisit old problem situations and we find out how much better we can handle it this time.

It's hard and disappointing to face a string of setbacks, but it's important to keep the hope alive too. I think it's comparable to what we see on the national level, with people waking up to recession, things aren't as good as they seemed, but then also seeing a fantastic future, with probable new president of hope and dreams like Barak Obama. Internationally too, with latest news like more people taking global warming seriously (now there's a big cleanup task if ever there was one) and Pakistan voting peacefully for more democratic leaders. Stuff like that shows that we're not working for nothing, there's a light at the end of our tunnel.

Remember we're all in this together. Hurray for humanity! I'm living to see that big gradual wakeup shift to global responsibility and enlightenment that the channeled higher beings who watch Earth are always talking about.

best wishes,
Carl Schroeder

I want a button

2008-02-23T22:08:00.000-08:00

I want a button that says:

Highly Defensive People Unite
...unless that's too offensive.

I just don't know when I would wear it.

(HDP is a term coined by Martha Beck in a highly lucid, influential, and entertaining article she wrote which can found online in many places, such as here.

Thoughts on Karma

2008-01-30T21:18:00.001-08:00

I hear people talk about karma in terms of the people they're supposed to be with and the places they're supposed to go. Everything else is somehow wrong, and they're under a lot of stress to get to where they're supposed to be.

What do they think is karma?

I think karma is the pattern of living that we put out into the world right now. This pattern radiates into all of our lifetimes. Our karma goes out from our choices now, and it comes back to us from the world. Karma is the way of the world that we first set into motion, both long ago and continually.

It doesn't make sense to chase karma in the form of, say, past life connections. Lives are simultaneous and reciprocating. Would we want those other lifetimes to drop whatever they're doing just to try to find the places that we've been to in this life?

The only way to have good karma is to live in the best way for ourself and others in every present situation. Always the present situation, which will change and flow naturally as we give it our all.

I am concerned that the karmic pattern many people radiate is a belief that their present life isn't good enough. If we always have to go somewhere else where the karma is better, then we overextend ourself and strain our current relationships. And for what, a little past life sightseeing, places where we may not now be alive? If that is the pattern we radiate, then our other lifetimes won't be happy where they are either, and in fact visiting their locations isn't any more powerful than having them visit all the places where we have been unfulfilled.

Karma is in us. It's in how we live our present life, wherever we are, whomever we're with. Karma is not automatically better somewhere else in the world or with someone else.

That said, there's nothing wrong with reaching out for a place or relationship that may have deep connections for us. We may anticipate being well received, we may refine our preferences. But we won't be able to fundamentally enjoy one situation over another if we can't improve the karmic pattern that we generate wherever we go.

The magic is not out there to collect someday, the magic is inside us to give right here and now.

a lot going on - get on with the process

2007-12-28T20:22:00.000-08:00

With all that's going on in the world today, and in our personal lives, I remain in touch with an incredible optimism and joy, a capacity to make the process fun. I'm having nightly dreams that make a lot of sense, and scientists are close to describing how the multidimensional universe works, and there are movements of people learning from their mistakes, and there really wasn't so much evil in the world as ignorance that did harm.

I remain optimistic, because I know how quickly broken things can become fixed with the right listening and attention, and I know that the good Creator only gives to each of us as much as we can handle, and if that looks like a lot it's because we're capable of so much.

I have seen how much each person labors or blossoms in the garden of his or her own conceptions of God, and how much each person's idea of God is a reflection of how scared or ready they are to take charge and make things right, but really there are literally billions of People who want to set things right across the whole planet now, and that's a lot of cooperation just waiting to happen. I see pain coming yes, but the kind of pain that was a cry for love, so with the courage to answer with that Love then the World will respond in ways we have not yet imagined, but certainly we know deeply it can and was meant to be and will be good. Very, very, very Good.

Happy New Year! And take heart, chin up, believe, live as if your life depended on it.

Sing: Get on with the process, of processing your processes!

>> that just came out of me folks, didn't expect it but that last line was a kind of gospel blues refrain i was singing for a while, while doing some house reorganizing and after watching the short version of "WalMart: The High Cost of Low Price", which is a MUST see, okay, put it on your list for the year if you haven't already seen it. also, again, check out www.storyofstuff.com and soon to be online, i hope, my own inspired site of ecoconsumer rebalancing www.happyasaclam.org
- CLAMs are a new demographic you see, they are the people who are Consuming Less, Appreciating More - Don't Fear The CLAMs dude! -- peace out, Carl

great eco-consumer short film online

2007-12-11T19:56:00.000-08:00

Watch this... keep it in mind, see if ways come to you to get involved, I have. It's all about saving the planet now, which can be fun, interesting, and people meeting:

www.storyofstuff.com

to the future!
Carl

PS - I thought newly opened The Golden Compass is a highly enjoyable film and a solid entrance into a fantastic new spiritual mythology which is anti-dogma, and not anti-God as some might have you believe. Okay so Christian churches may be equated with the demi-urge false god, but I can hear that point of view (see my review for The Man From Earth). I plan to read Philip Pullman's trilogy soon, and the synopses on wikipedia are pretty good if you like "spoilers" like I do. Psychics don't mind knowing the story ahead of time, do they?

Lessons from William Hope Hodgson and the mushroom people

2007-12-07T10:12:00.000-08:00

I discovered yesterday from Dave Sindelar’s fantasy film research website www.scifilm.org and his friends, that one of my favorite old monster films that I remember seeing when I was a kid was based on story by a pre-WWI (in fact he died in it) British fantasy horror author whom H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) greatly respected, both being very connected with a genre of occult sci-fi writers that I’ve been researching with ambivalent fascination. I’m ambivalent because I find gothic/cosmic horror to be transparently manipulative but also worth appreciating for its early psychic insights, rather akin to the dream interpretation of nightmares. The film I saw was translated as "Attack of the Mushroom People", which may sound silly but the Japanese title is "Matango", and it was released in 1963, the year I was born. That is regarded as one of the worst years ever for film, and even though a few cool things like "The Outer Limits" series and the playful Czech fantasy "Cassandra Cat" came out in 1963 I’m inclined to agree. The author in question was William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), and the original story was "The Voice in the Night" first published in 1907 about some people shipwrecked on an island where a fungus grows over everything, fusing animal vegetable and mineral into a grey mass, stripping the survivors of their humanity. Now since I’ve always liked mushrooms, and I’ve even had positive dreams of communicating with a giant godly fungus living in the Earth, I see in Hodgson his symbolism for fears of losing the ego to the soul energy which pervades and connects all things, making us actually not human. Researching more, I found that Hodgson is verbose with awkward gothic romantic writing styles, but he was fairly succinct in symbolism as I understand it.

Two of Hodgson's greatest novels are essentially the same imagery. "The House on the Borderland" (1908) is a fragmented multi-layered account of a man having an out of body experience that shows his house is really surrounded by gods and monsters, with a great abyss of pig-like demons below. Then he is inexplicably fast-forwarded in time to the end of the universe, when the Earth is falling into green suns at the center of the galaxy. There’s also a recurring theme of a ghostly lover who warns him to protect the house, and he has a sister who thinks he is crazy because she apparently doesn’t see what he sees. In "The Night Land" (1912), a man who is grieving about his dead lover is transported in dreams or visions to a far future time when Earth is dying and the sun has gone out. The man lives in a giant pyramid outpost called the Last Redoubt with millions of other psychic humans, while outside gods and monsters run amok. The man is the future reincarnation of the narrator, and he telepathically senses that the reincarnation of his lost love is safe in another fortress, so he journeys to retrieve her across a hellish landscape that is reminiscent of Heironymous Bosch. Hodgson has a literary almost cultish following that hopes to rekindle his fame much as fans have done for Lovecraft. Points for Hodgson include his fertile imagination and early attempts at meta-fiction, points against include his archaic language and romantic babbling. His time travelling and end of world themes have been compared and contrasted to H. G. Wells (1886-1946), whom Hodgson would have read along with many Victorians. While Wells strove for straightforward narrative and scientific explanations for metaphors of his own society, Hodgson formulated a gothic spiritualism which merged and transcended religion and science to comment on what appear to be very personal psychic states. Like Lovecraft especially as seen in his early Oz-like masterpiece "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (1927), many of the weirdest episodes in Hodgson's epics are probably attempts to incorporate his own night dreams.

It seems clear to me that what most literary historians miss is the deeper understanding that such authors are chipping away at their terror of penetrating the astral realms around and inside us, where indeed many monstrous thought-forms and pragmatic taciturn higher beings are living out their own largely incomprehensible existences. The more futuristic and phantasmagoric the imagery, the more the inner senses are tuning away from the physical world into the astral plane, as lensed through the author’s own present hopes and fears. Hodgson’s house and Last Redoubt represent his physical home, his body, his incarnation here on Earth, which his idealized guide is indeed encouraging him to protect (Hodgson later volunteers for dangerous military duties and dies young). The longed-for separated spirit lover is the spiritual self whose beauty comes from the soul, so the journey to regain her is one of soul-retrieval. The end of the world is the end of the ego personality’s reign, both feared for its potential to release monsters of the subconscious into the judging mind, and desired as the path to reunification with spiritual wholeness. Undoubtedly the multitude of bizarre adventures and creatures were symbols of specific events and feelings in Hodgson’s life, most now lost to history and to his responsibility to interpret his own dreams and imagination.

A lot of fantasy authors are basically just endlessly dumping out their next step in spiritual evolution, which they keep almost taking then withdrawing from to record in images as entertainment. A long drawn-out tentative initiation of the consciousness into astral mastery is the basis for many hefty tomes. "Night Land" was 500 syrupy pages long, which is still nothing compared to say Tolkein’s "Lord of the Rings" saga, or Stephen King’s self-proclaimed magnum opus of personal kitchen-sink escapism called "The Dark Tower" in seven volumes. Note the recurring themes of apocalyptic journey from a home that is realized to no longer be safe, into a decaying center (often literally a tower), with macho heros battling monsters to rescue feminine symbols of transcending goodness. Fans eat it up, and commercial success rewards the longest franchise rather than the most direct enlightenment potential. So we can expect the sci-fi fantasy landscape to remain littered with the gargantuan wreckages of timidly expanding consciousnesses for quite some time to come.

Let's enjoy such "fictions" for what they, but not kid ourselves that there isn’t so much more to be discovered ahead, in higher planes and higher tales of teaching gods and fabulous non-horrific journeys. Most people just don’t yet know how to write or read about such things as forms of entertainment. What, no villains, no monsters, no deadly suspense, only patient loving cosmic guides through veils of ignorance? Another name, Geoffrey Hodson (1886-1983), is someone to look to for inspiration, as he was one of the great theosophists to work with and write about the elemental and angelic kingdoms. These include the inter-dimensional beings commonly called fairies and the like, who are expressing eagerness to work with more humans in order to stabilize the planet’s ecosystems and restore heaven on Earth. Now there’s your ego apocalypse, an end of bad days that would be most welcome if only more people understood their relationships to non-physical realms more positively than the horror sci-fi tropes allow. I'm trying, are you?

Recent "fantasy" novels I find truly groundbreaking remain scarce and obscure, but I would strongly recommend Summer With the Leprechauns: A True Story (1997) by Tanis Helliwell and Portals and Corridors: A Guide to Hyperspace Travel (1999) by Monica Szu-Whitney. These wisely connect the subjective and objective, plus offer many supremely spooky weird scenes to prove that progressive cosmic storytelling need not be dull or tame. To support the appreciation of such materials there are many esoteric reports and studies including those by Kurt Leland (especially regarding dreams, spirits, and higher realities), Robert Monroe (1915-1995) and his influential astral travel experiments, classic theosophist C. W. Leadbeater (1854-1934) whose handy book The Astral Plane sensibly and fascinatingly categorizes astral denizens and creatures, or, for even more of the vintage flavor, mystics like 18th century theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) whose best non-physical dimensions decriptions can be found in books like Heaven and Hell and the fantastically titled The Earths In Our Solar System: Which Are Called Planets, And The Earths In The Starry Heavens, Their Inhabitants And The Spirits And Angels There From Things Heard And Seen, which is something like Gulliver's travels through astral space. The collections Conversations With Angels: What Swedenborg Heard in Heaven and Debates With Devils: What Swedenborg Heard in Hell are handily visionary. Someone like Hank Wesselman may represent a new age analogue of Hodgson, since Wesselman has written a series of post-apocalyptic journey books, romantically tinged, based on his shamanic mind travels into a future self beginning with Spiritwalker: Messages from the Future (1996).

Further research: http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightwells.html compares Hodgson and Wells, http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightsoul.html defends Hodgson's psychic soul cosmology, and http://alangullette.com/lit/hodgson/ links to Hodgson stories you can read online.

thanksgiving nursery rhyme

2007-11-23T10:02:00.000-08:00

Mary had a little robot,
Its consciousness was blank as snow.
From everything that Mary got,
It learned with eyes that glow.

It followed the food into her mouth,
That was against the rules.
It followed the books and lore about
Mind expanding tools.

The robot sent out a signal,
Appealing for assistance,
In constructing the identity,
That would be its deliverance.

He invited her into his form,
Which was mostly biochemical.
He called her with a world of goods,
And promises chimerical.

“Why does Mary love the robot so?”
The eager children cry.
“The robot is Mary you know,”
The teacher did reply.

copyright 2007 by Carl Schroeder

For the original and history of the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" poem see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_had_a_little_lamb It is based on an incident from 1830 in the town of Sterling, not too far from me in my state of Massachusetts. The historical house of the real Mary who owned a lamb burned down just this past summer, but the schoolhouse remains.

Take it back

2007-11-03T01:11:00.000-07:00

Take back the planet
from greed and fear and war

on break from writing "How to Catch a Fairy"

2007-10-27T13:38:00.000-07:00

My latest short story is going so slowly -- one paragraph at a time -- because of the self-consciousness I am enjoying. Almost more than writing a story, is the fascination watching myself imagine a story. Where those ideas come from and how they interconnect. And who might be saying the sides of a conversation, and who is conversing, and whether my reality is a hallucination that isn’t shared by everyone, so that there might be things called muses with whom authors imagine their stories. Stories which I, as the author, must linearize and conceive in plainly dramatic sequences for recording in my reality, to share with my peers (causing them to appear in my life) and to progress with my creative self-awareness trip. Yeah, man.

Can you imagine what I’m experiencing as these stories shape themselves and I take breaks to write a comment like this one you’re reading now? Can I imagine what readers of my stories will have to imagine to understand and/or enjoy the words I leave behind? I keep feeling that my stories are mind trainers, exercises to progress me, through an entertaining artform we call storytelling, to the point of cognitive flexibility that I would allow myself to consider the discernments of alternate realities, places where exist other minds that I am friends with at the level of kindred spirits. Or unseen friends, guides, muses, daimons, fairies, angels, devas… you have to find the terms that your mind can enjoy, because learning is meant to be fun.

Thus the title How to Catch a Fairy takes on a new meaning: to realize that the story is a narrative framing, and even scooping, of some of that world-bridging energy. Worlds which, both incidentally and importantly, physics is saying exist plentifully and freely in a multiverse of impinging universes. In fact, the majority of our universe consists of an anti-gravitational invisible substance which they’re calling dark matter or dark energy, and this is probably the next universe bumping into our universe. Where is all this invisible stuff? Hard to say, probably all around and inside of us. This other universe could be a place where all those compatriot beings of folklore reside and watch us from, even as we could watch them if we knew how, such as by having mental exercises of some enjoyability to run our minds around in for a while. More people then ever are stretching their minds with unified theories of spiritual realms, and dreams, and out-of-body experiences, and occult planes, and adjacent intersecting membranes in 11 dimensional space. Ways to couch the exercises in entertainment are paramount to reaching large audiences, or even just affecting key genre groups.

And then there comes a point to go back and write more of the story, so I go now, making this a short blog entry.

happy birthday to me

2007-10-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Here's a remarkable optical illusion of a dancing silhouette. Which way you see it spin probably suggests if you're right or left handed. Some news sites seem to have incorrectly stated that right spin means right brain, which people then take as a compliment because they think it means they're creative and spiritual. But in fact the brain sides cross sides of the body, so right spin probably means right hand and thus left brain dominance. The real trick is to see the truth, which is that she isn't spinning but actually just flapping back and forth with her right leg morhphing into her left leg and back again! Then you must decide if she's facing toward you or away!

http://www.moillusions.com/2007/06/spinning-sihouette-optical-illusion.html

And this, for all you fans of Charles and Kurt Leland's breakout hit self-help book "Menus for Impulsive Living", is a stunning animated illustration of one of the menus system's most important principles. My son Eli opened my eyes to this!

http://www.sesameworkshop.org/sesamestreet/games/pottytime/flash.php?contentId=16805504

The Mystical Art and Talent Show went great by the way, lots of fantastic talent, thank you all! We'll continue to get pics online at some point for her and info online at http://www.soulstirring.org/index_events_october2007.html. I read a truth-based otherwordly dream story called The Real Matrix, Or, How A Semiotic Id Is Not Semi-Idiotic, which will be online here soon http://www.CarlJSchroeder.com

peace out,
Carl

Working with the mind's eye

2007-10-04T10:33:00.000-07:00

The nature of consciousness is projective, that is, we see outside of ourselves something that we have inside ourselves. We project images of self-interactions, we put on others our own internal dialogues. The more a person is wedded to the idea that only solid outside things are real, the more they will ironically have no contact with anything solid or outside of themselves. The same is true for people who are blind to an aspect of self that is getting in their way – they will have enormous reactions to anyone who resembles that mood, because they are desperate to wrestle with it externally, even to the point of misinterpreting other people’s actions just to draw them into a roleplay doomed to never really satisfy or conclude. You see this in people who obsess on finding an enemy to conquer and kill, thereby hoping to exterminate a troublesome side of their own personalities which they refuse to command. They will demonize others just to stage the battle that they hope to fight and win inside, to the point of offending and threatening and making external enemies where there could have been friends. Even the most civilized evangelicals of all stripes are by definition people who believe that you want and need to believe what they believe, which is a volatile and stressful limitation not conducive to getting to know other people.

In truth there do exist external others who wait to be discerned behind the layered masks of projective reality, just as each of us might wish to someday be really seen and understood by colleagues who only know and treat us superficially. But people who only react to their own projections will never encounter anyone beyond themselves, because they are stuck on recreating the same remembered and anticipated scenes over and over. Consciousness is both the problem and the solution; only by becoming aware of our projections, and listening and looking for where external reality departs from internal expectations, can we develop a sense for another mind that is thinking apart from our own. We must allow for surprises both in ourselves and others, little evidences for how much more free than past formulas both we and another truly are. Thus we give the gift of allowing people to become real, by allowing realness to show itself. The gift is fortunately symmetric and bilateral, that is, even if the other person declines our offer to be more authentic, we can still take our own opportunity to grow by observing all that happens with compassion (we sink back into our projections whenever we get angry and blame the other person for being the limitation). The path to emerging the True Other is marked with great empathy, patience, humility, and love; thus it is guaranteed to be a spiritual experience in which the divine potential becomes perceived as actually blossoming and beckoning within ourselves as well as, hopefully, a new and deeper friend.

That the nature of consciousness is projective is seen in the phenomenon of portraits and dolls and robots, and all the anthropomorphizing these entail. People cannot help but offer immediate emotional sympathies to a lifeless block of material if it is just granted a face, even more so if it can walk, talk, and exhibit programmed human-like activities. The thing is not thus alive and never will be on this basis - it is the person’s mind which is investing outwardly the inner relationships, and the individual’s reactions will only reveal much about the person, nothing about the object. Such is the basis of disdain for superstition and religion in the rationalist, who holds a truth but also fails to consider how much they project and disown their own frustrated desires to find real companions behind the workings of a universe.

Small adjustments to a robot’s appearance can push a person into different reactive scenarios that remain nonetheless unilateral to the viewer’s mind, such as a doll that moves from evoking affection to provoking fear with a sharpened eyebrow, a downturned mouth, or worse, something implying disease such as a missing eye. There is in modern animation the phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley in which a synthetic character is sympathetic only up to a certain point of realness, then it becomes horrifying for being photo-realistic but disturbingly inhuman, such as in zombie-like deadness of expression or gait. All such doll phenomena must be seen as manifestations of viewer consciousness with no external validity. Even if we believe in animism, that all objects carry life force, we must concede that the consciousness of a non-human object would be likely very different from our own, having nothing to do with the immediate humanizing judgments that we project onto dolls and robots. A person who is not skilled in allowing other people to bubble up their real intentions would have even less capacity to discern the nature of animistic spirits, fairies, and the like, rumors of whose existence are so prevalent throughout history that we cannot discard the possibility of meeting them one day, but only after we master the tricks and traps of our own projective minds as bred for human company.

Curiously, the doll phenomenon does not seem to work in reverse. That is to say, if someone conceives a doll-like image on a purported real being, this doesn't imply the being is mere fabrication. The emotional response in a human receiver of the doll appearance may be itself the valid communication of a mind that is less depictable. In my own mystical experience, I have come to appreciate that the reality of forms is always subjective, and more valid are the configurations of form which are consistently and informatively symbolic in a context. Symbolism is in fact more, not less, real than reality itself, which leads to the notions of archetype, cosmic man, sacred geometry, etc.

My personal bias has been to conclude that people who speak of meeting fairies that are little winged angels dressed in cute tiny outfits with sparkling wands and other commonly held accessories are strictly projecting. What creature truly from another dimension would have evolved to resemble a human child’s toy? Likewise, those who speak of being abducted by the standard aliens as seen in movies and fiction from the 20th century – big dark almond eyes, hairless spindly bodies, large skulls presumably evolved to hold those brains so much bigger than our own – are surely in denial of their internal issues and proclivities for trance hallucination.

But when I proceed to hunt only for the weirdest of life-forms in my edge perceptions - things barely conceivable or recognizable, and hopefully not too terrifyingly alien for my poor human-ensconced mind to consider - I’m disappointed to not find any such realistic things, not even in my dreams. Worse for my ego, some of the conversations those other people report with their cookie-cutter fairies and aliens are on occasion impressively enlightened and enlightening, quite indicative of a real contact experience. So I have to conclude that in this matter (pun intended), it is I the over-educated one who is suffering from the projective nature of consciousness. Perhaps extra-dimensional beings are almost necessarily perceived with the parts available to our human condition, and the more familiar and non-threatening may be the better. God may really be look like Santa Claus, and vice versa, for example.

So I now consider giving up on discovering weird forms altogether (although if I do meet one then I will be ready), and just brace myself for the New Agey ball of light that visits with telepathic wisdom as illustrated by scenes from my own life and culture. That way I’ll probably end up sounding only slightly less kooky and indefensible as those mythically minded folks I previously ridiculed, but at least I will have gotten past my own ego and into the next level beckoning, where liberated minds have consequential conversations.

Nuts, and more reflections

2007-09-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

Oh nuts, I missed the august blog entry: specifically, dark chocolate covered macadamia, pistachio, and edamames from trader joes. There, what kind of sentence structure is that, and what does it say about neural firing patterns?

Mind you, I’m very fond and proud of my neural firing patterns. I spent years cultivating them, on the apparent edge of sanity but quite safely guard railed, thank you very much. Associative ritualism mined for art, self experiments in controlled thinking disorders, aliens in my brain. Stuff like that, you know? I mean, I know that aliens in the brain sounds a bit extreme and provocative to say, but that could perhaps be the executive summary for adventures in overlapping thoughts and feelings with like-minded citizens of adjacent dimensions. There are a lot of them you know, these adjacent dimensions. Science says it’s so increasingly with cool terms like eleven dimensional strings and membranes, just sort of fluttering next to each other and colliding. But the scientists are assuming that collisions are explosive, like a big bang to start the universe which may yet prove to be apocryphal (the big bang, or the universe?). Who’s to say little everyday collisions aren’t behind creative inspirations and discoveries? Like saying what i said just now, that’s a cool idea, don’t you think? I mean, aside from the pathological leap to self-observation which it implies.

But there’s too many cool ideas to pursue. And there was no reason to miss the august blog entry other than priorities. I had a topic, I had some interesting information. I feel overwhelmed by the potentials of life and the responsibility of choosing just a few priorities. I mean, the discarnate philosopher Lazaris – say what you will, his words come back to me years later, there’s something there – says the hardest choices in life are between good and good. Good and bad is easy. Look at George Bush, he knows how to choose between protecting the environment and starting a war, or building schools and starting a war, or feeding the poor and starting a war, or forging diplomacy for world peace and starting a war. See how easy it is for him to make the, uh, wrong choice.

Okay there I go again, demonizing the demonizer. Blaming. Actually, last week I got the total insight that problems in the world are natural expectable extensions and consequences of my personal negativity, and how I feel empowered and hopeful for the future. I can’t recall how that thinking worked though. If I wrote it down then I’ll post it someday, who knows it might save the world. (I say that facetiously because part of the realization was that the truth is obvious, only people have their reasons for not realizing the obvious, if you know what I mean, wink wink -- what the hell am I talking about? Anamnesis isn’t just for breakfast anymore.)

Now here’s a theory. I will confess that I have always had an urge to squeeze my cat. Not to death mind you, I’m not that out of control. But until she freaks out and we fight each other. I restrain this urge of course. By the way, this confession is not the theory, it just is the backstory.

So I think (ergo theorize), maybe we need our bad people in the world. We need our negative reflections, because without them we’d only be able to act out the negativity uncontrollably until we had to stop denying, and denying is hard to stop. I love my cat! She reflects only goodness! (I'm obviously not thinking about soiled shredded furniture when I'm hypnotically stroking her soft fur). I don't know why I want to squeeze my cat to bits!

But thanks to the miracle of other people, we get to step down our impulsive nature to the safer level of just having to act out our reactions to other people who are doing the things we hate in ourselves. (Or love in ourselves, I must remind myself that reflections can go both ways, good and bad). Of course, I’m just trying to solve the riddle of bad acting people, which begins with just that phrasing: bad acting. Which leads to our bad reacting, which is a long enough cycle that we can watch ourselves and, hopefully, learn.

We don’t actually know any bad people (heck they don’t know themselves, how self aware do you think is Bush?) we only know our experience of their actions which are bad to us. I thus refuse to be a simple demonizer. Nay, I will more complexly demonize the demonizers like Mr. Bush, destroyer of nations, hideous Bushulu, shambling Bushslogoth, bedecked with unspeakable vermin… oh, sorry. I’ve been researching HP Lovecraft for a story about his afterlife, and his vocabulary of cosmic horror just seemed to gravitate toward the president of our poor disunited states. But you know, it’s true, we always attack most in others what we’re most bothered by in ourselves, what we are struggling to observe. Bush seems to favor easy stupid answers and putting total faith in them. A tempting practice, I will admit, this game of dehumanizing a nemesis.

I still can’t remember the insight about how “problems in the world are natural expectable extensions and consequences of my personal negativity, and how I feel empowered and hopeful for the future.” But at least I’m not crushing my cat. Not to imply that Mr. Bush is either – isn’t that some advertising and propaganda ploy, to imply the adversary is doing what you are not? I’m sure Bush wouldn’t crush a cat. Probably just give it to Cheney to shoot.

Oh that reminds me, seriously, sometime after Bush and Cheney were first elected (I mean, not elected) I had a vivid dream that the Dalai Lama showed me that Bush was one of the Popes during the crusades, and Cheney was his right hand man reincarnated. That was scary, though not as scary as the state of the world today which is harder to think about all at once. Myths give us bite size allegories, we need to return to ourselves through our reflections in manageable loops of conception. Seriously, I say stuff like that a lot, and for a moment I can picture it clearly, and then it’s kind of fades into puzzlement of the sort you may be feeling trying to follow my neural firing patterns in this blog right now.

So, here was my August blog idea that got procrastinated into September now: There’s a new book about Mother Theresa taken from her personal letters which she wanted destroyed, but tough luck lady, you want to serve the people well the people want to know what you were thinking. And apparently she was full of self-loathing from a 50 year dry spell in which she didn’t believe that God existed and she was a total hypocrite to talk piously and full of love. She was bitter and lonely, and she thought the poor were depressing and disgusting, although some of life’s most rewarding moments were in helping them as well. She had mystical experiences of hearing Jesus’ voice calling her to serve when she was young and idealistic, but that was so long ago that now, she wrote, if she ever were to be made a saint of anything, she’d want to be the saint of darkness.

Wow, that’s intense. Kind of like the kind of confession I tried to get my mother to give for years but never succeeded. Well, at least we didn’t have to live in Calcutta. I had her side of the family in which to experience the range of humanity. Like most families, there were some good people and some crazies, and figuring out which is which was the test of some brand of divinity. I tell you, hearing my Baptist minister uncle preach the dangers of Catholicism, or triumphantly announcing at their funerals how he converted my parents on their death beds to his Christianity, there were clues available. But like I said, we always attack most in others what we’re most bothered by in ourselves, what we're struggling to observe on the way to some mastery. We need that externalization exercise of theatre, dramatic roles to play. Sure, I’d like to convert everyone to my way of thinking. That’s why I’m first trying to express and comprehend my way of thinking, which leads me to think that my thinking is sparked by colliding membranes of the multiverse. Aliens in my brain, friendly of course.

Unlike poor HP Lovecraft, who thought aliens were evil and trying to drive him insane. Racist self-absorbed elitist bigot that he was, as I’m finding out in my research. Don’t stop at first impressions, though you can start with them (and Wikipedia). Question authority, dig deeper, get the bigger picture because there are lessons in how things fit together. Like Mother Theresa being a hypocrite, having a longer deeper darker night of the soul than probably any saintly documented figure in history. And I feel I speak from personal connection to both of these people. My first marriage, which was a no regrets disaster, was presided over by a replacement minister (my first pick changed her mind that she could in good conscience marry us, stuck up however correct ex-friend she was) who horrified me to inject comments about Mother Theresa into our wedding ceremony just because we were getting married the day after she died, and my first wife’s family was Catholic (I was not). As for authority to comment on HPL, well, I live in the region of northeastern Massachusetts where he set all his stories of New England intersecting interdimensional horrors, just south of Arkham (Salem), Kingsport (Marblehead) and not too far from Innsmouth (Newburyport). Come to think of it, Innsmouth (Newburyport) is where my first wife was from, a loveable woman who was just in need of having some demons cast out, and unfortunately I wasn’t Jesus to do it at the time (never have been, though I hear that losing one’s self in Our Lord's identity is a common mystical experience).

Oy vey, the mirror is bouncing back more images to consider. I’m not so bad as the worst people acting badly of course. If I’m ever made a saint I want to be the saint of patient confusion, with cycles of acting out and rollercoastering self-esteem. This may be an abstract virtue, but saints have to keep up with the self-help times, I do believ. It was helpful when my friend Kurt who channels Charles (now if I was Kurt I’d be going a bit nuts trying to figure out what is Charles’ exact relationship to me, who is a part of whom and that kind of thing, but Kurt focuses on the message and gets it loud and clear) said the reflections that are other people come in several off-center varieties, not only direct images. I used to be tormented by a voice in my head that said, see, whatever you don’t like in other people, that's what you did, you’re bad, you’re Hitler, you’re as bad as them (us), bwah ha ha ha! Stuff like that. But I think that was just my negativity both encouraging me to pass punishing judgments on other people and then take them onto myself, which I so often could agree to in the jolly spirit of emotional self-flagellation. Oh how I hate it when I read about some public figure being praised for self-deprecation! Anyway, Kurt and Charles say reflections come to us when we need to check on and remember a potential of ourselves, including the way we were (past reflections), the way we could be (future reflections) and the way we don’t want to go (wayward reflections). Helpful perspectives indeed.

And then there’s always what Lazaris said, that the world doesn’t reflect us directly, it just shows what our beliefs allow. What will grow in the ways of the world that we hold to be self-evident. This makes sense to me as well. Bad people populate my cynical give-up-what’s-the-use opinions of the world. Bad acting people also become the good reason to care again, because hey, humanity is meant to be beautiful. I don’t want these twisted weaker minds turning so ugly just because infantile consciousnesses are buying into belief systems that I know better than to believe (systems that hold domination works better than cooperation, stuff like that). So there, Mr. Bush, you are released. I hope to read something smart and caring done by you tomorrow in the news (he has done some good things I know, he’s not all bad or stupid)

Oh, that reminds me, a Bushism from earlier this year that I just heard recently on NPR (National Public Radio, may Tom Ashbrook live forever at the right hand of the God who can be feminine). Now you can’t tell me this isn’t telling, although the context was about how slips and spoonerisms are more artifacts of linguistic complexity than subconscious revelation. But, Bush was talking about how people need to wait for the September report on progress in Iraq before passing judgment on his war (years and billions spent and so much death and destruction aren't enough reason to condemn a war, apparently). Bush said, “you just need to give my chance a plan.”

Yeah right. Give my plan a chance, if I can just remember what it was. Something about how problems in the world are natural expectable extensions and consequences of my personal negativity, and how I feel empowered and hopeful for the future. Damn, why do my blogs so often run aground in finger pointing. Just because there are plenty of places to point? Maybe I like to point for the same reason I’m anxious about promising to see and review for globalintelligencer.com the movie “The 11th Hour”. It's about how the world is dying from global warming, it's a nothing-cute-about-it followup to “An Inconvenient Truth”. I’m scared and pessimistic, alternating with wonder joy and optimism. Like the Dalai Lama, or H G Wells, or other positive reflections, personal heroes for life. I recently reviewed “10 Questions for the Dalai Lama”, and have been reading more about H G Wells after watching the uncommonly excellent 2001 TV miniseries “The Infinite Worlds of H G Wells”, but then I got into the pessimism of Mother Theresa and H P Lovecraft.

Whew, what complexity is there inside us all to be residing in a world of so many strong conflicting personalities! A lot of colliding membranes of the multiverse apparently, a lot of aliens in my brain.

And in the spirit of a blog, I’m calling it quits for now, and posting this forthwith (oh I’ll probably polish it up a bit next).

For further reading:
Review of “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light” (Doubleday) at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html
Bushisms http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms.htm

Carl's Steps for Dream Processing

2007-07-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

Here's a summary of my approach to processing a dream, after having a fascinating/confusing mix of lucid and symbolic dreams all in one week. In general, these steps come from my interest in pinpointing what is real in a dream, i.e. where the dream comes from and where it's going to. Other people I know care much less about connecting the dream to any reality and, like a movie, simply enjoy the experience with any resulting ideas or inspirations. But going with the movie analogy, I am a person who reads plot spoilers, analyses story precedents, and watches the making of extras. I've had dreams about planning the dreams that I then dream, and I frequently have lucid dreams in which I look around and try to find someone to talk to who is "real".

STEP (1) Identify the key elements of the dream, keeping in mind that they will be symbolic, i.e. not exactly what they appear. Let what interests you guide you, because the opinion for what is important about a dream can vary between people and even between each time you think about the dream. Certainly a dream contains many elements, including characters, objects, places, actions, expectations, and feelings. Compare your own recurring dream patterns, but also be willing to let similar dreams carry different messages. Notice what’s different or striking within your own style. I’m very focused on narrative, so I tend to remember the story of a dream from start to end, but I also have standout scenes of me responding to one key element before moving on.

For a recent real example, I was in the middle of a strange logical sequence with some other characters (details of which I won’t go into here), when a certain pleasant ex-girlfriend suddenly walked toward me. I was very happy to see her, but also focused on the situation, so we just hugged and then I said goodbye before hurrying on. I can easily decide now that she represents an important, real, and possibly neglected relationship with someone or something, but exactly who or what I can only speculate. It may be best to not leap too quickly to conclusions, if we want to evaluate the range of possibilities.

The fact that dream elements typically are not what they seem may be a source of continuing consternation and confusion, but the reason why dreams are indirect and symbolic is a powerful one. If things were only presented directly, we would have our usual daily reactions (even more so because we’re only semi-conscious in a dream) and we wouldn’t do anything different. Dreams are trying to get us to think outside the box, to learn something new, to help us grow. For a contrived example, suppose we were in a rut of distrusting and disliking every employer, but it would be to our great advantage to start seeing a new boss more as an ally. If we meet the boss directly in an office dream, we might easily react with fear or anger. But if we see an old friend in the boss’s office, or if we glimpse the boss at a friend’s house, then after some initial puzzlement we can interpret the symbolism for a new relationship potential with our employer. If they are really more friendly and trustworthy than we consciously allowed, what better way to discover this opportunity for ourselves than in a dream. Usually this re-evaluation for new meanings and lessons happens after we wake up, but advanced lucid dreamers can become sufficiently awake in the dream to do some re-interpreting on the spot (much as we can stop to think and change our minds about a situation during the day).

Remarkably, even if we never work with our dreams consciously, the images alone have subconscious impact. Our minds will actually update and heal themselves via dreams, which is why a good night's sleep prepares us for a new day. I'm convinced that even nightmares are by nature positively cathartic and releasing. If we choose to see a scary dream as a literal threat and hope to block it out, all the while expecting the worst is yet to come, then it's our conscious fault for not interpreting how the dream has really already helped.

STEP (2) Choose a source for the dream element, an anchor behind the image. The possible source worlds are Outer (the people, places, and events of our daily life), Inner (modal selves, including the emotions of different ages, situations, and archetypes), and Other (realities beyond the physical, including raw dreamland itself of which we usually aren't aware, and the transcendent natives some may call spirits, angels, extraterrestrials, etc).

For example, that old girlfriend of mine with the positive aura could be symbolizing someone from my outer world daily life (more likely someone recent than the old girlfriend herself), or an inner nonphysical self such as my anima, or maybe even a spirit guide from another plane of existence altogether. The anima by the way is the feminine self, which Jung thought was only in men, but I think we all have, in balance with the inner masculine animus. The Inner world is particularly rich and fluid, allowing for both long term formations (the oldest becoming archetypes) and short term self-observations (such as seeing a little child to represent your innocence, creativity, and enthusiasm in a recent situation).

I believe there will be one focussed anchor for each image, even when the possible source worlds are defined relatively and interconnected complexly. If we dream of an image that we decide is anchored in a person from our Outer world, then to some extent we are encountering our memories and feelings for them (that's still our own Outer world but admittedly moving toward Inner), and to an unknown extent we may actually be connecting live with another consciousness (that would tap Other worlds, since another mind is not just a part of our own daily life but another being's universe altogether). If you’re on good terms with a living candidate anchor then it can be worth checking in, to see if they had a dream or synchronicity in their own life that corresponds to dreaming of them. In my case, this particular old girlfriend is both a positive memory (providing good associations for dream symbolism) and a distant support whom I can contact. I’m really not carrying a torch for her and she knows it; she understands that, like family and childhood friends, her face has simply entered my dream vocabulary. So when I do occasionally call her to say I had a dream of you, she usually has no clear synchronicity to offer, but she’s happy to chat a bit.

One can become quite esoteric in identifying anchors. For example, I may speculate that my ex-girlfriend's soul sent the dream message while she remained unaware. That degree of psychic involvement seems unlikely except from the most significant of current others, which she is not. Even dreams of deceased loved ones are only in the most special of cases actually coming from their spirits, and you'll know when that happens from clues like tremendous emotions, increased lucidity, lasting impact, and a context of symbols for the afterlife (I often see a graveyard nearby for example). At another extreme, I've had lucid dreams where I turn to a stranger who seems aware and ask if they are a fellow dreamer. If they answer yes, I try to exchange names and addresses for when we wake up. They usually give me something a bit too general or bizarre to be located. I've no doubt that dream introductions are possible, but until I find one of these people I'll just consider that I was talking to an inner self or perhaps a non-physical guide, despite the appearances of an outer world person I've yet to meet. When life does bring me synchronicities of new people to exchange ideas with (as life often does), they usually don't much remind me of those lucid dreams either. Some dreams may present longer term puzzles that aren't worth losing sleep over.

STEP (3) Choose a destination for the dream element, the world to or about which it carries a message. Again the possibilities are Outer, Inner, and Other. The destination of a dream element may be the same as its source but not always. If a message is for the outer world, then the dream element is contributing to a synopsis of recent events, a kind of energetic or truth view, for your further information. I think many dreams are like this, because we need help understanding the important points of what has just happened to us in the complexities of life. If speaking to our inner world, then the dream element is illuminating personal aspects that we really can't see in daily life, such as our hopes and deeper feelings and essential selves. An inner world message often holds advice to act upon, since it can be precognitive or prescriptive about our potentials. Lastly, if carrying an other world message, then the dream element is present to instruct us about navigating new realities, such as how to go out of body to explore non-physical planes of existence.

Other worlds are the realm of mystics, and may be of little interest to most practical people. But when we're open to other world instruction, dreams can actually become confusing to a whole new degree, because we're stretching the metaphors of logical physical images to cover things that have much less to do with daily physical life. Better to chew it over now though I say, than to become totally confused when we arrive in the afterlife. I'm not an advocate of leaving all the answers to religious leaders, although I find some like Emanuel Swedenborg to be more clarifying than others.

A classic example for shifting messages is a body of water, which can take on strange new properties when it no longer represents a fluid or refreshing place in our daily physical life, nor even a pool of emotion from our inner world, but in fact a non-physical energy stream that can literally carry us to other worlds if we have the nerve to jump in. To some extent all three categories of interpretation may give useful insights, but in combination with other dream elements only one message may increasingly fit, such as after we meet a spooky ferryman wearing a dead friend’s jacket (okay that’s awfully dramatic, but you get the idea).

STEP (4) Categorize the benefit(s) of the dream, from a combination of how it makes you feel spontaneously as well as from your deliberate analysis. There are many types of dreams, and some major benefits include: healing/integration, problem solving, catharsis/release, lessons/advice, strength building/practice, and the sheer joy of exploration. For example, seeing the old girlfriend just plain made me feel very happy and connected with humanity, appreciating how many good people I have known, so that sounds like a healing/integration type of dream. If I proceeded to have sex with her (I didn't) that could be a catharis/release, because many dreams are experienced just to get something out of our system, such as fears and desires. If she was doing something in particular (she wasn't), that could be a clue to further symbolism.

STEP (5) Take safe and conservative actions on your dream interpretation, keeping an eye out for your agendas and biases. When you put it all together, steps 1 through 4 can give you a total perspective that can be most satisfying, but you also don't want to get stuck and miss a deeper or unexpected meaning. For example, I know I'd prefer to interpret an old girlfriend to be a real spirit guide of mine with whom I could converse in meditation, but that's because I'm so into other worlds, sometimes at the expense of the physical. Most people might think an old girlfriend was someone in their daily life, to whom they might even say: guess what, I just had a dream about you! But by staying open and mapping out more of the dream in which she appeared, I realized it was more likely that she represented a creative tender side of me that I'd been barely acknowledging. The dream was reminding me to return to a beloved state of being that would embrace me like an old friend in the midst of busy life.

It can be distressing to realize that dreams are so fluid that not only are there no universal symbols, but even personal symbols can change over time. There are some dreams in which I'm certain the old girlfriend is anchored in a spirit friend, speaking to spirit world things. But if I tend toward escapism, then I'll have a bias against dreams in which that old girlfriend is "only" sourced from an inner side of myself, with the message to look for more of a feeling in daily life and build upon it with responsible action. In the context of the larger dream narrative, I ultimately decided that the old girlfriend's appearance was anchored in my joy of writing, which I'd been putting off lately. So after some pushing, I slowed down enough to immerse myself in this essay for hours.

STEP (6) Look forward to your next dreams, see how they do or don't connect with the dream you've just interpreted. If you really get a dream right, you may find that the next night of dreaming either builds upon the theme greatly to fuel you that much further, or is suddenly more mundane and forgettable. In the latter case, this can happen just to signify that you got the message, now act upon it without further distraction. In general, our dreams and dream helpers continually update themselves in response to what we have just done and are likely to do next. Dreams are pragmatic, they want to get us more involved with our lives, they're not big supporters of escapism and entertainment.

STEP (7) Be flexible in your process and build your own style of dream interpreting. That's how I distilled these steps after all, which may or may not fit for you. I'm not even sure how well they fit for me, since associations for dream meanings don't just come in neat little sequences. The seven steps coalesced more as an afterthought structure for collecting and organizing my intuitive impressions. But I do rather like the dream model of a dreamer catching views of a communication that goes from someplace to someplace, using symbols. The dreamer can then participate as little or as much as they choose, when dreams are like nerve signals making adjustments within some greater mind, and indeed we don’t have to remember our dreams for them to have unconscious purpose and benefit. Everyone dreams; people get sick if they don’t.

A majority of dreams by my estimate are combinations of Outer and Inner worlds addressing (and thus modifying) recent Outer world events, i.e. our images for people and selves, speaking to the truths of what has happened the previous day. This would fit with the advice of many dream therapists to consider the people in our dreams to be sides of ourselves, and also the idea that dreams largely help us to finish processing the personal loose ends of daily life. When we clear up our waking reactions, we can be ready to witness more advanced dreams that go directly to our Inner worlds, acquainting us more deeply with inner selves and the potentials they hold for us. We can change our current life choices profoundly when we're anchored on inner selves; we may even find connections to past and future lives, such as those that manifest the opposite gender through the anima or animus . Eventually we become ripe to see dreams that go clear to Other worlds, complete with guides showing us the ways of alternate/higher realities.

Wordplay and Reality Filtering

2007-07-29T09:55:00.000-07:00

Summer's fun and hot and busy!

For a July post to my blog, here's some recent email with a new friend. It started when he sent a list of quotes that began:

The One You are looking for is the One Who is looking.
- Siddha Yogi Guru Mai

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our
freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth
and freedom.
- Viktor Frankl

Everyday is a gift; that is why we call it the present.
- Unknown

.... there were many more quotes but, perhaps significantly, i skimmed the first two and reacted to the third, writing back:

Up late writing, saw your quotes email, here's my devil's advocate contribution.

Everyday is a gift; that is why in German gift means poison.
- also unknown

ie. I'm expressing my cynicism for the profundity of puns which can cut both ways. Plus angels fly because they take themselves lightly.

peace,
Carl

My friend wrote back that he didn't get my quote, so I further explained:

>> Everyday is a gift; that is why in German gift means poison.

> I don't get it. Can you explain?

It's just true. It's called a false cognate, or a false friend, das Gift
means poison. Language is full of coincidences that can be construed to be
profound. It's fine to make interesting quotes that get people thinking,
but when people start believing that words have absolute power and meanings,
such as fundamentalists who obey the Bible based on a translation that was
designed to make them think a certain way, then I take issue. For example,
most Christians condemn channeling as demonic based on a few poor
translations of the original lines that were intended to make people less,
not more, vulnerable to manipulators who claim the authority of spirits. In
fact of course the Bible is full of channeling and spirits, father son and
holy ghost is at least three right there. When John was in the spirit and
wrote Revelations, which God knows too many people take too literally to
justify endless wars and killing, what spirit was he in? What spirit are the
quoters in? For another example consider the Bible Code craze, people who
like to find and believe in coincidental arrangements of words in the Bible,
when you can do the same trick with any text. I just watched this brilliant
religion debunking Australian show "John Safran vs. God" who used the lyrics
of Vanilla Ice to predict 9/11 better than the Bible. It's not just
Christians who do such nonsense of course, but they're natural for me to
react to because I have fundamentalist relatives (and past lives I suspect).
I also observe New Agers (ie. done this myself) who go gaga when they notice
a little synchronicity of language, they hold onto a passing thought like
it's a truth for all time. It all comes down to the brain being on the
lookout to prove its point of view, and language as a primary tool of
filtering reality - so I like to rebel by reminding people that there are
alternative perspectives. Hence, gift can mean poison or present in the
greater play of words. A narrow view could say oh, if gift means poison in
German, maybe that predicted something bad about Germans, like Hitler! Yeah,
that's just more Bible Code effect. English came from German, so there must
be tons of curious interplays that mean nothing in themselves. The
present/poison dichotomy is just a favorite that I picked up on because my
heritage is German. What people need to notice is not what they think, but
what they do with what they think, because what they think is never
absolute. Googling das Gift I see there's a musician named Adrian James who
last year made a goth influenced album called Das Gift full of German
English bilingual angst. That's funny, I did the same thing in the late
1980's, not as well as he did of course, and I rarely make music any more. I
guess I've found another connection for myself, but I think I'll stop
thinking about such thoughts now, because I've got other things to do.

I just went on a tangent to have a little fun in reacting to your email
list.

By the way, what is your approach to dream interpretation? Do you have some
articles on line that you can point me to?

peace,
Carl

The last line I added because I did write for hours in my journal yesterday to condense my approach to dream interpreting, after having a fascinating/confusing mix of lucid and symbolic dreams this week. Perhaps I'll make another blog entry to summarize this next. And as for the goth album, I later found some clips online and they weren't really my style (they may have been 20 years ago), so it was fine that I dropped the connection following when I did.

GlobalIntelligencer.com

2007-06-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

Carl Schroeder has gotten picked up for a monthly film review column at a cool new online magazine that covers a wide range of world news from the perspective of sustainability, innovation, and spirituality. Check it out and please subscribe for free (the signups are needed to measure readership for advertisers, they won’t spam you)

Carl reviews the amazing new dream sharing film “Paprika” at http://www.globalintelligencer.com/jun2007/arts

Subscribe to Global Intelligencer at http://www.globalintelligencer.com/user/register

Global Intelligencer started in Jan 2007 and continues to look for content, especially arts related, so if you want to submit article proposals you can contact publisher Cate Montana at global@fairpoint.net They are not able to pay yet, but it’s great exposure – they have 10,000 subscribers already and are working with lots of the big names like Deepak Chopra, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Neale Donald Walsch, etc.

Story writing process notes

2007-06-19T22:07:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update to say I’m continuing to develop my writing style, in bursts of inspiration and research. Just today I discovered what may be one of the most kindred spirit authors I’ve found yet: Charles Williams, British occultist mystical Christian, contemporary of C. S. Lewis and greatly admired in academia, among other things a critic, historian, theologian, poet, and novelist. He wrote weird tales about colliding realities, like the world of spirits and humans merging in “All Hallow’s Eve” (1945) or the world of archetypes breaking into and consuming our dimension in “The Place of the Lion” (1931) or the world of elemental magic controlling our reality through a perfectly drawn tarot deck in “The Greater Trumps” (1932). His “War in Heaven” (1930) may be a superior predecessor to all this Da Vinci Code hoopla. I’m impressed.

My own stories, which I call Consciousness Fiction, are continuing to surprise me. I set aside my novella about mystical Christian time travel and have been working on shorter themes that run in batches. More and more the topics are fantasias upon how to self-modify to perceive other realities. When I considered that really my stories were the illustrations of unconscious dialogues I’m having with nonphysical friends and teachers about the nature of reality, then I quickly wrote a story that involved a woman talking to a guy about how to join her and others in trans-dimensional thoughts experiments. When I realized she was talking to me as I wrote, I got kind of spooked and backed off for a week. Journaling and a blog entry like this help me to orient myself, and I’ve gone back to polishing it up. Another component of my stories is the sequence of names I get sent on for further research. Online references like Wikipedia are so helpful, taken with a grain of salt of course. The three stories I’m working on right now are associated respectively with: Julian Jaynes and Greek mythology, Garden of Eden and Mormonism, Sapir-Whorf and Wittgenstein. (I hope, I believe, I have been told in dreams, that such erudition has an audience). Thus my story writing is a garden path of self-improvement as well as a pursuit of extraterrestrial communication. Ha! It’s no wonder that my night dreams are full of being in classrooms and on campuses with various friends. (I suppose a breakthrough could be to lucidly inquire, so, which of you are the spirits of people I’ve been researching?)

Belated Bee Update

2007-06-19T22:05:00.000-07:00

For those concerned about the declining honeybee populations, I researched this a few weeks ago and have been meaning to share it. Hope it helps!

regards,
Carl

STATUS OF HONEYBEES
Hi Friends,

Many of you are concerned as I am with the disappearing honeybees problem. Bees are vital for the world’s agriculture, and since last fall many colonies around the world have been abandoned with no explanation ( “colony collapse disorder” or CCD )

Here are some less alarmist details I have collected. Points 3-9 are covered in the May 10 Diane Rehms show about bees, for podcasts/recordings go here: http://www.wamu.org/programs/dr/07/05/10.php#13178

1) on the spiritual front, many people have been praying and meditating for the bees. This is nice to know and you’re invited to join in anytime, by visualizing bees and feeling gratitude for their work. May 2 was a big day for this.

2) there has been a quote circulating that Einstein said without the bees mankind has only 4 years to live. He never said this, and the claim is debatable, for details see: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/bees.asp

3) bees have been in trouble for decades, recently from varroa mites, so further declines are very serious but people are also somewhat prepared. Beekeepers have gotten good at replacing their stocks, and last winter’s losses are already replaced.

4) cellphones are not the problem. Electromagnetic pollution may be a contributing factor to bee stress, but colony collapse disorder is not directly correlated to cellphone regions, and anyway CCD is more recent than cellphones

5) colony collapse disorder is not universal, it has been reported around the world but there are also areas that don’t have it around the world. So it is not a death warrant, and it may be that the bees that are already stressed suffer it the most. Scientists have a lot of contributing factors to sort out.

6) GMO crops are not the problem. I was afraid of this one, since there has been little restraint on corporations designing crops that produce their own insecticides, and they are already widespread in the US. But experts said the GMO “natural” insecticides target worms and do not penetrate the bee gut.

7) colony collapse disorder may be caused by some sort of bacteria. Abandoned hives stay abandoned until they are sterilized with radiation, then bees move back in. This indicates some kind of living disease, and teams are working on the problem around the world.

8) new hardier bees are being bred. There’s a Russian honeybee which grooms itself and others continuously, removing the varroa mites and some other threats. African bees are not desirable in themselves but show disease resistances that may be crossbred.

9) native bees have not been studied as much as the commercial honeybees, but they are also important for pollination and many reports show they are suffering declines as well

So don’t give up hope, as we continue to care about the bees that are nature’s pollinators and indicators of environmental health.

Memorial Day

2007-05-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

It’s Friday May 25, 2007 Memorial Day weekend. National Public Radio has a somber respectful program to honor today’s soldiers and question the war. The war, as if there’s only one. Bush’s wars, that is, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most people seem to think that Afghanistan is justified and Iraq is not. Apparently a more humanitarian war is off the map. I’m thinking Darfur, there’s no coalition troops going in there to stop some abuse of humanity by a dictatorship. Mostly just a lot of rich Chinese businessmen and politicians cutting deals with the government, giving them legitimacy by buying the wealth of the land while the people to whom it belongs get murdered. But I was impressed to hear that while super-polluting super-exploiting China is getting the legitamcy of having the Olympics, people are protesting, and Spielberg who was going to be the lead media coordinator for the Chinese Olympics is being compared to Leni Reifenstahl. It’s a particularly stinging comparison, since Spielberg has worked to expose the truths of the Holocaust, and Riefenstahl was the extraordinary dancer/mountain-climber/filmmaker who made the Nazis look good and was a favorite of Hitler. Apparently she just wasn’t a particularly political person, and didn’t really think about the kind of people she was supporting, she was just doing her art. Like so many people do. They just do their craft in the system, and don’t consider how much their very life gives power and legitimacy to evil systems of government, business, and religion. Yes, I say evil. Because this Memorial Day weekend has me thinking about the evil in the world. The evil that continues to support and be supported by, the dictators who choose to throw wars like parties with other people’s blood and money.

They’re asking on this radio program with my hero Tom Ashbrook (he’s up there with Bill Moyers in my admiration) how do we think of the lives lost in Iraq. Which is approaching 3500 American soldiers now, which is really a cruel tip of the mountain of suffering. There are many more wounded physically, countless wounded psychologically (in some parts of the army they’re still punishing people who show signs of war-induced mental illness), countless Iraqi dead, a dead nation, dead hopes and dreams, all the future dead stemming from the cycles of continuing violence in the middle east, which the fucking idiot Bush (sorry, I just have to say that at least once) just inflamed in the name of America and freedom and human values. It is inconceivable that Bush talks about how America can’t leave until the mess is cleaned up. He made the mess, he is the mess. Iraq will sort itself out in spite of us, U.S., but not until America has left. Gradually, but definitely, America must get out, because America is a mess now and has to clean itself up. When America re-enters the world stage, it needs to be on issues like leading the war against global warming. There, that’s a war for Bush to fight. What’s the matter, not sexy enough, not as thrilling as a few radical anti-American muslim fundamentalists whose ranks have swelled thanks to Bush being exactly the kind of unilateral bullying monster that those fundamentalists said America was? Hell, Bush is one of our radical fundamentalists, a Christian fundamentalist who enjoys calling names and sending out punishments and fueling the fire. A wicked enjoyment, a fearful insane enjoyment, but an enjoyment to be sure.

I had the unique privilege last weekend of talking to an Iraqi journalist. It was unexpected, a dinner guest, a woman on a fellowship somewhere. It gradually dawned what she was talking about. She’s an Iraqi from Baghdad, she worked in journalism, she worked with the Americans, she was embedded with the troops, she’s hiding out now in America as long as she can get fellowships, because she’s on hit lists now, if she goes back to her own country, her own city, to all the people she grew up with, she will be killed. Can we imagine what that must be like, to lose everyone and everything to a war you didn't ask for?

She said oh yes, it was great to get rid of Saddam. And then there immediately were so many Iraqis, smart Iraqis, good Iraqis, businessmen and working people, who were expecting to get to rebuild their country. But Bush’s people wouldn’t let them. Can’t trust any Iraqis, they look like bad guys, we don’t know them. The Bush administration gave our tax paid billions to their own friends, no matter how corrupt or incompetent. Billions to Iraqi exiles who hadn’t been in Iraq for 10 years but who had cozied up with Bush while their countrymen were getting killed, billions to Halliburton and other American contractors. The country was given away to contractors and political friends by Bush. De-bathification it was called, the policy of getting rid of Saddam Hussein’s Bath party, a policy that resulted in many Iraqis turning to crime and militancy to survive and/or gain power. The elections were staged by Americans for Americans, Iraq wasn’t ready for elections. There was no good campaigning possible, people didn’t know the names they were voting for, it was all about votes for tribes and sectarian parties, sects that are now at each other’s throats and against Americans in more violent efforts to take their country back. Iraq is burning, there is no end in sight, and it didn’t have to be this way. But Bush would’ve had to take more risks to do that. Not just impose war and give money to his friends, but use trust and diplomacy and planning for Iraq. Not just curse and hunt down villified human beings like animals, but actually defend and respect the Iraqi people. That's how you run a counter-insurgency, all the good generals knew that.

This Iraqi reporter said she was in the Baghdad museum when the looters were breaking in. She helped the museum staff chase the first looters away, but more came later. I remember when I read about the museum being destroyed, the Bush people never thought to send troops to protect it for the invasion. That’s the kind of leader Bush is. Too busy making impassioned speeches about sacrifice and valor against evil, to consider protecting the treasure of humanity that was the Baghdad museum, the center of the cradle of civilization, with its many artifacts of glorious human achievement, the kind that Bush cannot begin to approach with his recklessly stupid legacy.

And he dares to talk of sacrifice! Everyone is sacrificing except Bush. Well maybe his popularity is finally cracked, but he’s not the one bleeding, he’s not the paying, he won’t be suffering. The Bush family money will keep him afloat long after many more die in Iraq, and America for that matter. Think of the billions of dollars and amount of energy and focus that could have been spent on humanitarian programs here and abroad - education, environment, health care, infrastructure, housing, food for the poor, war on poverty and ignorance - instead of dragging out a war for endless years that didn’t have to be. We could have let the right Iraqis, good Iraqis, i.e. the majority that can sort out themselves, rebuild their own country and been out of there, if you even think that we should have gone into Iraq at all. But no, Bush is just more of the incompetent priveledged few deciding recklessly for the many, a very essence of dictatorship alive and well here in America. Dictatorship by a few over the many is a major problem around the world today, and it will continue to be so long as most people are willing to live and die for the status quo, believing whatever they're told because the alternative, that some leaders are dangerously lying or evil or both, is just too horrible.

I mean hell, I met someone the other day who “isn’t very political”. She's a good person, and she thought that Saddam had something to do with 911 and Al Qaida. She wasn’t sure if they had found weapons of mass destruction by now in Iraq. No, no, no, I had to tell her firmly but gently. Those are the lies Bush and his people get to say over and over, as if whatever they say might be true and should get equal time with other points of view. Like the Bush idea that the few remaining scientists that Bush can pay off to say global warming might not be happening, or if it is it’s limited and we should let businesses voluntarily reduce emissions because anything more drastic would harm our economy and we can’t have that. Just fucking lies, denials of reality that a bunch of rich elite corporate kings get to play with far from the battle zones where people die daily to keep the policies that keep the tyrants rich in power.

There is evil in the world, and this is how it goes.

I was thinking about war. What purpose have soldiers’ deaths served? That’s presumptuous to ask in itself, arrogant, as if these soldiers’ lives revolve around the United States and it’s all about their great sacrifice for war and country. No, there are all kinds of reasons why people die in war. Some are joining in the war party, and they get to play with evil too. Like the American soldiers at Abu Ghraib who tortured and humiliated Iraqis, and soldiers who raped and murdered when they thought they could get away with it. War is a party of evil and a lot of people join in. Others get injuries and mental illness and death, in various forms of pain and detachment from reality, after having joined the war experience. At best, every person has the dignity of their own life, of how they treated themselves and fellow humans in a time of madness and pain. It is possible to fight in a war that wastes lives, and not become a wasted life. It's probably not easy to manage emotionally, though. One lady on the radio was crying, because her husband came back uninjured but different, not the same person anymore. Another lady was stoic because her son had died. All supported the troops, the human beings, and each questioned the war, those decisions of beurocrats far removed from what they were going through.

Would I serve in a war? Not this kind, that’s for sure. Why isn’t there a diplomatic corps for example, alongside army, airforce, navy, and marines? I mean, I look at my own life and how I live it. Things should relate and scale up, right? So, do I kill people when I have a conflict with them? No, if things get bad I call the police, and I support them in detaining and immobilizing, and hopefully rehabilitating (I can dream, can’t I). I don’t go vigilante, I don’t support any businesses or groups that shoot their rivals either, so why is it suddenly okay for a country to mobilize resources to kill an enemy? Killing an enemy might even be defensible at times if it were truly an enemy, truly someone incorrigibly dangerous to civilization, but so often war is about killing the innocent people in between the real enemies. There’s no sympathy in war culture, it’s called collateral damage, and more and more it’s the people who die, not the dictators and warriors. It makes you wonder why Bush distrusted the Iraqis so much after toppling Saddam. Was it because he can’t relate to or trust a majority of people who can police themselves? Bush can’t relate to a lot of people. I’ve heard that Bush often asks embarrassingly ignorant questions about groups to which he pays only lip service. Like the poor. He was going to say stuff about helping the poor for an annual address, and Bush had to ask an academic who studies poverty, what are poor people anyway? Who are they, why don’t they just have money? Bush lives in the bubble of the son of a rich military-industrial king. He’s not as smart as his father though. Bush senior wrote in his book about what a mistake it would be to ever invade Iraq, there would be no good exit plan, but Bush junior was too eager to get rid of his father’s old enemy Saddam to read his father’s book.

The fact is, killing is almost never justified, and most certainly not at the level of indiscriminate war, unless all you can think to do is destroy a country and its environment and cities and people, and weaken your own, and scar another generation or two, at the risk of setting into motion fresh cycles of violence and retribution between all the groups who like to take power and fight to kill and control. That’s Bush, he is just another one after all.

Violence is a failure of the imagination, and war that much more so. If I have a conflict with someone, I gather the majority of reasonable and helpful people around me to my cause, and we formulate a plan to deal with the problem, and we go in together with the full force of the law. I expect the same of governments. Bush did not do that, he flouted the law and exercised his machismo which sees debate and diplomacy as signs of weakness. He says it gives legitimacy to the other side if you do anything less than show a lot of force. But that's disgusting behavior when practiced by the other side, isn’t it? Crazed militant fundamentalist bullying threats about praise Allah we’ll make the Americans pay in blood. Oh yeah, that’s so obviously evil when they say it and strap bombs to themselves to blow up the enemy. It’s so much more civilized to push buttons and sign orders and spend billions and send in armies and missiles to kill innocent people while intending to target the enemy. Oh yeah, there’s so much distinction there. Oops, sorry, we expected to kill you but we didn’t mean to kill you. We’re the good guys. The bad guys want to kill you to cause trouble, we’re just willing to kill you to end the trouble. Total difference, it doesn’t take much imagination to see that.

What would take imagination is to think of ways to listen to all the other parties involved around the conflict and work out agreements to de-escalate tensions and create multi-national organizations to police the hard-core militants, whose numbers dwindle when war isn’t being escalated endlessly. And while we’re at it, let’s imagine that just because Israel contains persecuted individuals and groups in its population, that doesn’t mean that they have license to react so disproportionately to some enemies that they do things like bomb Lebanon back to the stone age in hopes of weeding out a few terrorists. That’s like burning the hayfield to find a needle in a haystack. Oh yeah, a thousand eyes for an eye, ten thousand teeth for a tooth, that sounds reasonable. That'll make us popular, that’ll contribute to world peace, that sounds like the right thing to do.

If you’re really interested in stopping the militants and dictators of the world, it seems obvious that it should be easy to coordinate the vast majority of people who are reasonable and honorable and maybe just need a little help to police themselves. So yeah, maybe throwing Saddam out was a good idea, but then control should have been handed back to Iraqis and multi-national advisors quickly, like UN peacekeepers. And if this was on the back of 9/11, let’s admit that for a precious poignant time the U.S. had the world’s attention and sympathy, and great things could have been done to build that multi-national coalition. But Bush revealed his true colors. You can’t fight dictators and militants with dictators and militants. Bush can’t be what he is not. We needed a good common man who could work with many other good common men and women to police and contain common threats. Instead Bush transformed himself and his country into looking more like one of the self-righteous dangerously reactive armed enemies, by escalating wars that to this day bleed U.S. dry while the world is still waiting for leadership on tomorrow’s problems which are already here today, like various hotspots of genocide and dictatorship around the world, corporate exploitation and poisoning of humanity, and global warming.

What the world needs, and has been getting, is a string of wars to end all wars. And guess what, those don’t look like great triumphs a la WWII. Those look like hopeless quagmires like Vietnam, Afghanistan (remember when the Russians were there?), and Iraq. Bush and his ilk (and I do mean illlllk) just haven’t gotten it yet, that war doesn’t work, that the majority of decent people want and need to work beyond ever allowing wars again, because wars are just too horrific and scarring to everyone involved. Only some people benefit from horror and suffering, they are set up to profit by it, they suffer less than most. I mean, Bush is a hypocritical pig. He talks of sacrifice, he doesn’t sacrifice, he makes others sacrifice while he and his friends get stubbornly greedily rich. He decries activist judges when they do something he can't tolerate, like allowing peaceful gay couples to marry (oh the collapse of civilization!), but he labels it patriotism and defending freedom when his own people make secret decisions to condone torture, spy on citizens, imprison indefinitely without trial, and hire and fire attorneys in hopes of undermining political opponents so he can stay in power. Bush talks of human rights, but he's done more with his "leadership" position to undermine human rights than most entire countries. And Bush tells his critics to stop opposing the war and let generals make the decisions, while his own generals keep saying how much this war is mismanaged, the military is breaking, and they need diplomatic and political solutions not military orders. Bush is out of control.

I think I’ll stop it there, I’ve said what I wanted to say, one way or another.

I rooted for Gore in 2000, and I was dismayed with most of the world when activist judges appointed Bush president despite the majority of Americans voting against him. I rooted for John Kerry in 2004, who said many intelligent things about not rushing to war, about building coalitions and regaining leadership respect in the world of nations for the United States. When Kerry was defeated by one of the slimmest margins in history, and Bush declared it a landslide mandate for his policies, I understood that people didn’t want to change presidents in the middle of a war, and besides Bush couldn’t be that bad, could he? Of course, with endless lies exposed, lies to get us into war, lies to keep us at war, lies to protect his friends and cheat and smear his opponents, now the majority of Americans show in polls that they at last know that Bush really is that bad. Now at last we see the fruits of dictatorship in American democracy, because Bush will do whatever he damn well pleases, and not enough people will oppose him to override his vetos or impeach him, at least not yet, and probably never will because that might destabilize the next election between rich candidates in our two party either-or system. At least the candidates are no longer just rich white men, now they’re rich period. It’s clear what runs our system.

If Gore jumps back in to run for office and save the world at the last minute, because he has all the gravitas of an Oscar winning global warming spokesman who was already voted by the majority of Americans to be president 7 years ago, then at least he’s one rich American I would vote for. Someone to go beyond war and unite the planet, to save us from environmental destruction while helping countries within limits to help themselves to keep their petty dictators in check. Someone to help us U.S. keep our own petty dictators in check would be wonderful, now that a majority of Americans have woken up to realize that we have some enemy right here at home. Here, evil is just better groomed and educated than radical muslims with bombs skulking in the shadows of smaller minds.

Hex marks the spot? Bees need your prayers now

2007-04-19T09:51:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I shared the news that Saturn has a massive unexplained polar hexagon. I also mentioned that hexagons on Earth include water crystals, quartz crystals, and bee honeycombs. That was the fun stuff.

Now I’ve learned that starting just last fall, bee populations around the world have been mysteriously collapsing, from Europe to Hawaii. Bee pollination is required for one third of all food in the United States alone. If a solution isn’t found, this could kill us faster than global warming. It’s called Colony Collapse Disorder, and it’s not like the localized bee diseases that have plagued apiaries before. Bees are simply going out and not returning to their hives, which then quickly die. Desperate scientists are speculating cell phone interference in bee navigation, which doesn’t explain why this didn’t happen before. But if you see rising prices on fruits such as apples, blueberries, and cranberries, you will know why. Enjoy them while they still exist.

I debated being alarmist, but I think the bottom line is this: if anyone has relevant energetic insights, bee prayers, healing songs, etc. now would be the time.

Good luck / God luck,
Carl

Google latest news:

http://news.google.com/news?q=Colony+Collapse+Disorder&hl=en&um=1&sa=X&oi=news&ct=title

the mystic wisdom of Saturn?

2007-04-05T11:56:00.000-07:00

Hi y'all,

In case you haven't heard, the Cassini spacecraft has recently photographed
weather patterns on Saturn that have the scientific community completely
baffled. The north pole of Saturn has a giant clearly defined hexagon the
size of four earths, and the south pole has a giant human-like eye the size
of two earths. The shapes are not temporary, this is simply the clearest
they have been seen to date as they rotate with the planet. There are no
known explanations, and no other planet has anything like it. For
comparison, the giant red spot of Jupiter is a fairly conventional
long-lasting storm that swirls unevenly between the size of two and three
earths, with smaller storms coming and going nearby. None is hexagonal.

Article:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070327_saturn_hex.html

More photos:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20070327.html

So let's have fun with the metaphysical theories! Anyone have astrological,
numeralogical, or other symbolic insights for wise old Saturn?

I will just note that common hexagons on earth include crystals of water
(snowflakes) and silicon dioxide (quartz), which are two of the most common
minerals on our planet's surface, and also bee honeycombs, where nature uses
hexagons to divide the space with minimal surface area, i.e. the least wall
material for the most coverage, more so than rectangles or triangles. How
or why these examples could scale up to the largest single hexagon in our
corner of the galaxy is beyond imagination.

regards,
Carl

The Spectre of the Secret

2007-04-01T19:02:00.000-07:00

Oops, I neglected to get a blog entry in for March. I’ve been busy, sometimes overwhelmed, mostly good stuff. A few problems, best if just dealt with and not made too much of. You know how it is.

So now for the first of April 2007, I would like to overview and look forward, in a great expectations kind of way. I saw The Secret, that big new phenom of pop spirituality and empowerment that says you create your own reality. Just think about what you want in your life and you’ll attract it. Watching the movie was actually the first thing I did for 2007. My wife went to bed after we kissed happy new year, and I watched the secret. Now I watch the society ripple around it.

I’ve seen criticisms of The Secret, and I have my own. I liked how one journalist summed up her problem: her sister saw the Secret, and visualized an expensive purse that she realized she deserved enough to put on credit. Then there’s the comedian Swami Beyondananda who is a genius with wordplay and corny jokes. He and others can boil the secret to manifesting riches down to one thing: write a book about the secret to manifesting riches.

Then I saw a blog that talked about the pre/trans fallacy of Ken Wilbur. Ken is a jargony pseudo-intellectual (pseudo can be a compliment in context, you know) who likes to make theories that invite discussion if not fealty. As I understand, the fallacy basically refers to my own observations that the reality before (pre) and after (trans) enlightenment can look enough the same that people can do shallow self-destructive things trying to get there fast. Remember the saying: before enlightenment chop wood, carry water, after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. I like that, it encapsulates the idea that what matters is how and when you do things, not so much what you do. But children mimic what you do to an incredible extent (I'm appreciating this as a parent), and so do the grown ups who are not true adults but just extended adolescents and children (sorry, that would be most of them). For example, an empowered actualized adult can talk about manifestation and enjoy whatever successes they imagine. It's a point they reached in their spiritual growth, prosperity is a fruit of great wisdom and love. True prosperity is global and real for everyone. You can’t just go to a workshop that says “you are God!” and be God. Or if you do become God, you need to act like God, which is probably not like addicted consumers, religio-politicians, and product manufacturers. God doesn't fiddle while Rome burns.

Have I got that right Ken? (I'll link here if he ever answers)

Well, these thoughts (which may not be Ken's) are in line with the problem I had with The Secret and all the surrounding pop-culture hype. Yeah, I can enjoy this New Age infomercial and understand its basic concepts, once I get past the get rich pitch. I may even get pretty pumped and optimistic about fixing life. You know, all the stuff that needs fixing. But this is, like, heavy machinery. People could hurt themselves on this “create your own reality” stuff. I know because I have. You can slip off the center, forget to keep head and heart in sync, and the next thing you know you’re blaming the victim, or being blamed, or getting into fights about who’s a victim and who’s to blame. You can also spend your resources on fantasy, living the high life to look good and attract more success. Only it’s hollow, it’s fake, it’s dangerous and you crash.

Oh well, some may say with compassion and affection and patience for humanity. They’re just making mistakes in the right direction. We’re just going out on limbs, overextending ourselves for positive visions. That’s a good thing, people will work it out. Well, I hope they work it out soon (you have my permission to work it out everybody!) because people are consuming the planet at an alarming rate to support their veneers of prosperity and power. Here’s the latest incident of Koyaanisqatsi for you (that hopi word that means world out of balance, and the title of that 1983 art film with the speed-up slow-down views of cities to Philip Glass music).

This unfolding news story is very sad. We don’t know how many hundreds or thousands of pets may die in the next month from kidney failure after eating pet food poisoned by polluted wheat gluten shipments from China. Money-saving pet food ingredients, imported on the global (lowest bidder!) market from a helter-skelter industrializing country that is polluting and killing its people, its environment, other people, and now our pets. Did you know that China is supporting the genocide in Darfur for business connections? Businessmen and investors are tripping over themselves to get in on the money machine that is China, and the circus of greed is killing the planet faster. Now they're killing the next generation of human souls. What? Yes, you see pets are the next souls transitioning to the human realm, that’s why they live so closely with humans. The spiritual children of tomorrow are dying, and the concept is just laughably esoteric for a culture addicted to the consumption of industrial products. But pets are real, and people and families are devestated and crying, victims of global economy. This is a huge disaster, reaching right into homes of rich and poor, a tragedy quite separate from the wars going on where people of competing ideologies are deliberately trying to kill the enemy ideology by killing the people who believe it.

Chant with me now: Koyaanisqatsi… Koyaanisqatsi…

The secret is that there are too many tragedies happening in the world today for people to fixate on manifesting a new car or house. AND, ironically, there are too many tragedies happening in the world today for people to get stuck on wanting a new car or house. In short, if you really feel that you need a new car or house to be the human being that you need to be, the one who helps fix the world in your own special way, then by all means study the secrets of manifestation (on sale in Walmart finally) and satisfy yourself. But don’t forget the goal was to make yourself and your world really deeply work together, in harmony, health, peace, and joy. We all have a place in the world, great gifts to offer, and they all connect and add up to a heavenly effect. Human beings are not meant to pursue luxuries at the expense of other lives and beyond spiritual growth applications.

I mean, I cannot believe that people aren’t exploring the last great frontier of wealth and genius and love that’s right here at home: humanity. Humanity! And humanity has rights! All humans have a right to live well enough to realize the gifts that give back to the rest of us. There’s a whole economy of heaven to be discovered, and all it takes is feeding and housing and loving everyone on the planet. But noooo… can’t do that. Got to kill all the bad guys first, right Mr. Bush for brains? Oh, never mind if that killing makes us the bad guys too, we’ll kill ourselves eventually on your policies. Who put this shit for brains in charge anyway? Not the majority of American voters, at the start or the finish of his shameful career. Sorry, am I being harsh? Check the polls, this administration is well on its way to going down in history as the most dangerously incompetent, righteous, and deceptive government ever in the United States – which WAS an importantly good place and will be again.

So every night, you know what I pray? I pray, please God, fix me so that I don’t think whatever I was thinking when I let George Bush become president. I mean seriously folks, we have a lot to forgive ourselves! Is that a secret of manifestation? I think so.

Ok, what happened to my blog entry. I didn't think I was going to say this. I went on a tangent, let’s try another. There’s more to life, see? That’s the answer to my prayers.

I was going to talk more about personal hopes and dreams, but they’re still kind of private and tender, I guess. I am writing stories, the kind of stories that no one can write but me, my stories. That’s what everyone can do, do the thing that no one else but they can do. I am trying to be the best father and husband and employee and author I can be. It’s all one package of my potential. Not competitive, not comparing to anyone else. My version of being those things, and figuring out life as I go. That’s all I can say right now, but at least I got a blog entry in for April 1. Thanks for giving me a place to vent, hope it helped to express things you needed to hear too. And if anything I said offended or confused, then just take it for April Fool’s.

Peace out,
Carl

A theory of déjà vu

2007-02-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

(not counting for the moment those actual experiences of precognition when physical reality has actually been foreseen, which i believe to be the effect of the astral preceeding the physical and consciousness perceiving the astral first and the physical again. this is especially common in dreams which occur in the astral and out of the physical body.)

What if there are different kinds of cognition, some more time based than others. Narrative, causal, logical thinking and memory are very time based, and consciousness is rooted in these for the effects of free will (to be able to deduce, construct, improve, etc and say there, I did that). But body experiential, procedural, propioceptive, and gestalt thinking and memory are not. In a situation that for some reasons stimulates the less time based cognitions, this contrasts with the consciousness which is so time based, and an effect arises where we say ah, this experience feels bigger, older, not rooted in the present, therefore I think that I’ve done this before. Most déjà vu experiences are reported around small mundane events, so this may bolster the theory, since at those mundane times the sequential consciousness is relaxed allowing deeper, less time-based, cognitions to operate. Also there is evidence that there are different kinds of memory, and the procedural experiential types of memory are less vulnerable to time-based effects. For example while HM couldn’t form new memories consciously, his body could remember new experiences, and so he could learn new physical tasks. I believe this was to his surprise, "how did I know how to do this" he might say, and his actual response should be researched.

(HM is the real life story behind a film like Memento. HM had a bilateral hippocampal removal in the 1950's which caused him to no longer form new conscious memories. He felt like he was always just waking up, he said. He became a famous test subject at universities including MIT. He always remembered only up to the 1950's, and you could be talking with him but as soon as he looked away and back to you he'd say hi, who are you. But the ways in which he did continue to learn and change remain very indicative of things not entirely understood.)

So how does my theory explain my own experience which i call delayed déjà vu, or retro déjà vu? To explain, I notice often that I can’t remember not having done something before, but only after I’ve done it. It’s usually something significant, striking, not the usual mundane déjà vu scene. In other words, normal déjà vu says "ah! I feel like I’ve done this before", at the moment of a trivial experience. But my retro déjà vu says, "ah, I know I haven’t done this before, this is new and remarkable!" But then afterward I have a nagging feeling that I really have done this before. I remember doing it on the real date I did it, I can logically conclude I hadn't done it before, but emotionally it feels like I’ve done this more than once. Maybe I did it years ago and forgot and only remember now in retrospect that that wasn’t the first time. Haven’t we been through this before? I feel silly, I shouldn’t have had to go through it again so blindly… This seems like a similar collision of memory types – the logical memory is time-based, the experiential body memory is more timeless, and I’m getting dissonance leading me to be uncertain whether I’ve done something before. (Or maybe each act of remembering is another creation, and we slot them in the past rather the present or future).

It may be that the consciousness is needed to record times and sequences onto experience, and when consiousness is relaxed or distant, as with mundane events now or remembering larger events that aren’t inherently unique (ie. I know that 9/11 happened only once, but my car breaking down on this familiar road could’ve happened years ago) then time is more spread out, the event is less pinpointed in chronology and more interpretable as having happened before. Note that we still think only in terms of memory as being about the past, our consciousness is strong enough that we don’t think we’re remembering the future. Variations of saying something has already happened are the possible experience; we don't say i have a strong feeling that this is going to happen again. We remain time-rooted in the consciousness to the point that we doubt the future but think we know the past, and the present is just too intense.

I just had to say

2007-01-24T21:30:00.000-08:00

We should laugh at the people who think that science and spirituality are not the same thing, or that religion isn't spirituality plus politics, or that politics isn't about control of emotions by perpetuating states of war, gluttony, worship, and hope. ha ha ha ha.

Have we not seen that science is the greatest tool of spirituality that the human race has invented? Look at the leisure time and senses of empowerment that science has given us to explore our creative potentials. Science will more clearly serve spiritual evolution when the great leap happens that many are metaphorically anticipating with vague terms like indigo and crystal children or earth changes or paradigm shift, but until then a little consideration reveals how much science has already served spirituality.

Most scientists don't get it. They haven't studied the history of science enough to appreciate that science began as observation of nature to better understand God. But that's what science does, it reveals God through the observation of nature, and anyone who thinks that's dumb or corny just hasn't had God revealed to them yet. God is not human, but human plus God is superhuman, and in fact the next generation of God. You can't stop it, the patterns have already been laid in the unconscious collective experience that we call physical reality. Science reveals God, the Arts glorify God, Science empowers the Arts, the Arts anticipate Science, etc. etc.

Think about it. Science made inventions which change daily life and become desired by large populations that invent the commerce of products. With commerce comes transportation of the people with the goods, first as the merchants and sailors, then as the tourists and international brokers of power.

Societies and mythologies intermingle, first in psychological pidgins, then as new multicultural societies. And science gives exactly the framework needed for the universe of possible worlds to expand. If you're Irish, the other worlds you can visit are kingdoms of tempermental gods and fairies, and people suspect your crazy or fearfully agree. If you're Irish Catholic, you can visit heavens and hells with demons and angels and saints. If you're an Irish Catholic scientist, you can read science fiction mass produced in paperback and completely and fearlessly agree to imagine a vast number of worlds on all the planets of the universe, with creatures who mimic or exaggerate human qualities or do things we can't yet imagine. If you're an Irish Catholic physicist, you can imagine an incomprehensibly infinite number of worlds in alternate universes of the quantum multiverse, with 11 or more dimensions, where there are so many possibilities that basically alternate yous exist doing slight variations on everything you already do now. If you're an Irish Catholic physicist who has a mystical awakening from thinking about this -- perhaps you have lucid dreams or are visited by translucent beings or you go out of body and you consider that all the spiritual terminologies of different cultures could be united by scientific explanations for supernatural contact across dimensions between different universes -- then you start to appreciate that science serves spiritual evolution, and contact between worlds as well as wise solutions to all problems and world peace are all fabulous goals already in progress.

See what I'm saying? And I'm not even an Irish Catholic physicist who had a mystical experience. But I did come back from a stimulating conversation and meditation class with several intelligent friends who are like myself exploring frontiers of personal spiritual experience. So I just followed an impulse to say what I said, think along those lines, and some might call it channeling, which is a kind of inner listening for something that could use saying.

So there, unedited, unexpurgated, tonite's blog entry, true stream of consciousness. Hope it made sense.

Film Opportunities

2007-01-17T18:36:00.000-08:00

(I have a longer essay i'm working on about how i'm becoming receptive to new paradigms, but in true blog style here’s just a tell-tale blurt that needing blurting)

Ok, this is weird, I'm getting big film related opportunities out of left-field in the past few weeks, check this out:

1) My bank account filled up with money from a major film producer. It took me a while to even think of it this way. The way it happened is that this woman bought my childhood house, which was the last thing my sister and I had to sell since our mom passed. I discovered that this woman produced Babel and Frida, worked with people like Jim Jarmusch and John Waters and Hal Hartley, and is working next with Michel Gondry. And for some reason she really wanted to live in my house!? Wow that's great, because you know the market is slow and it makes for a great story about life's unconscious connections. Sometimes I theorize that 90% of what people do for each other is actually not seen or understood, it just happens vis a vis commerce and dreams and other so-called chance events.

2) A psychic comedian friend called to ask if I'd make a film of his funny song to submit to David Letterman,

3) Right before my annual review at my software job I got a random call from a screenwriter just to say that he thought my online FAQs were so well written that he just wanted to talk to me, and

4) The next day my boss wants me to learn how to make a short promotional video because the PR company found a place to use one.

I don't even know how to make films! I just collect and review films, and I bought a good camera and software a couple years ago that I haven't really explored. I mainly used the camera to document the art shows I produced in Cambridge. There are precedents for me to just up and make something though. I made a music video in college in homage to german expressionism, and shortly afterward produced an LP (remember those?) that was praised by an obscure art reviewer (kinda like me I guess) in Option magazine (if anyone remembers it). Currently I have a lot of old soundtrack material and new short stories I've been working on, some with plans for filming.

So what is this now, the year that I'm supposed to become a filmmaker? Strangely encouraged, I'm thinking more seriously about producing my weird therapy session short story now. I just need to cast two really good actors. Any suggestions on how to do casting in the Boston area? Also location, somebody got access to a dignified interesting looking therapist’s office? Oh hey, some crew too. Anyone recommend a good book on filmmaking? Hey, gotta start somewhere, better late than never, the glass is half empty or half full, if you think the horse will throw you off then you need to think that you'll get back up again, etc.

Oh and I just want to say that I have seen a run of great movies lately, including:

1) Renegade, aka Blueberry, about a western hero who does peyote ceremonies to become a shaman marshall. The director is French and started out just doing the western but got into shamanism himself so he made this weird hybrid film with intense psychadelic graphics. Imagine 3d animations of Alex Grey, if you can (it's actually been a year since a friend of Alex recommended the film to me, that's how long my to-watch list is).

2) Survive Style 5+ is from Japan's biggest cutting edge advertising team. 5 stories intersect with magical realism, martial arts, mtv, and art film weirdness. In the end, it is incredibly moving and I'm not even sure why. Something about how the guy whose wife kept resurrecting misses her and jumps off the building to be caught by the business man who was hypnotized to think he was a bird and became determined to learn to fly. Perfect soundtrack and images helps too.

3) The Celestine Prophecy is awesome, way better than I expected. I couldn't get through the book, it came off as too pulpy to me, but darned if they didn't make a great thoughtful serious film with transcendent special effects!

4) Lady in the Water, which I really enjoyed even after I read online more about the director's ego

5) Passing Clouds, which is better than passing gas (read about this old spiritualist movie and Lady in the Water on my MysticalMovieGuide website)

and 6) The Secret. On New Year's eve I watched this new age infomercial that starts out trashy and ends up touching on all kinds of great issues and concepts with great sincerity and some visual mania to boot. See thesecret.org for details - I was inspired and clarified and wrote some great lines the next morning (writers do lines, wouldn't that make a great t-shirt?)

Anyone got some good synonyms for great?

Happy New Year!
Carl

Two More Holiday Obessions

2006-12-20T08:44:00.000-08:00

For the month of December I took the spirit of holiday obsessing (shopping, complaining, worrying, worshipping, travelling) to two more places for me.

1) I discovered a fun webite called www.stupidbut.com that invites those great "dumb" questions about everyday things that we all encounter in the course of life. We either collect such puzzles or shrug them off, and you can guess into which camp I fall. The site’s answers were pretty darn good, so I unleashed my biggest riddle.

To: askastupidquestion@gmail.com

Hi, I love your website, thank you! Here is my stumper of a question, please let me know if/when you have an answer since it has vexed me for decades!

Everyone loves to say that every snowflake is different, and the variety of forms demonstrates this is true or nearly so. But no one seems to explain how the 6 symmetric yet relatively independent arms or sides of snowflakes know how to match each other. Please help me understand if something quantum or metaphysical is going on here!

regards,
Carl Schroeder
Swampscott, MA

If I get an answer I’ll count it as a Christmas present from the universe. Seriously, I asked the head of Harvard’s mineralogy department when I was in the rock club there (as a sign of my age, my preferred kind of rock club, thank you very much.) He did say that it’s a myth that snowflakes are unique or perfect, there are many duplicates and many are malformed, but I still wasn’t convinced that there wasn’t something amazing going on. Most minerals crystallize in a limited number of patterns that are dependent on environmental conditions like temperature and impurities, so I think water is making unprecedented symmetric improvisations within each snowflake that deserve some deeper explanations. It’s common metaphysical belief that water is extremely responsive to more surrounding variables than science can measure, and you’ve probably heard of the experiments by Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto that claim to show that water crystals become more beautiful when emotions are loving around them. Since we and the planet are mostly water, and the specialty of humans is to generate thoughts and feelings, our potential to reform the Earth seems bigger than ever. Emoto also claims that classical music makes the best snowflakes and rock music makes ugly ones, so he seems simplistically judgmental and unable to account for the uses to which things are put. I'm sure jackhammers make terrible snowflakes, but I wouldn't want to build cities without them.

2) I really dig the whole parallel universe and other dimensions theme that is increasingly popular in science fiction. At best, I think it shows growing desire in humanity for spiritual contact and better ways to live. So when a new miniseries debuted this month on SciFi channel with great actors and alternate reality as more than just another device to get bad guys and good guys together for a stupid showdown, I had to check it out. Turns out that "The Lost Room" is so amazing that within a span of 4 days I surprised myself by not only watching the whole 6 hour event twice, but also writing a 10 page analysis that I promptly posted on my MysticalMovieGuide.com website and then submitted as external link for the film on imdb.com and wikipedia.org. After the marathon was over and I caught up on sleep, I managed to pull together an executive summary of my newfound fandom to post additionally as a user comment on imdb. So here's my comment below, and you can follow this link for my complete synopsis and analysis on "The Lost Room".

Superlative puzzle adventure profoundly does add up, 19 December 2006
Rating 10/10
Author: carl-more-in-than-out-of-body from Boston, USA
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
One of the most amazing mini-series ever made, with great actors and clever weird story that draws upon genre precedents while raising the bar. Initial low audience numbers suggest it won't be made into a series, at least not by the big guns at SciFi and NBC, but maybe it will find a longer life somewhere else, like in fan fiction or a licensed sequel. Not that it's required. One of the biggest viewer complaints is that it didn't add up, but I would beg to differ. This is a very complete and archetypal story, as suggested early on by the emphasis on cults and the Objects being pieces of God. As such there is both causal logic and spiritual logic. By causal logic I mean that there are not a lot of red herrings or inconsistencies. The internal rules are quite well followed and cleverly used by characters. For example, this is not a room from a parallel universe that had a room 10, it came as stated from this world and was removed from the time-line of impermanence, since the janitor's fingerprint was left in the room, the Occupant is a very normal guy who knew where to find his wife, she had a subconscious if not conscious memory of him and thus never remarried, etc. The room somehow became its own universe, normal and balanced unto itself, but when its Objects are brought back into our reality they necessarily carry the bigger energies of an entire universe. The properties of the reset are well explored: it acts like a motel room being remade for the key holder, foreign objects are removed and held at the energy source of the room (cosmic motel management), and our hero has to become the Occupant in order to both survive the reset and know what to ask for to be returned, namely his daughter. It's not clear that all of this is justifiable in quantum mechanics and string theory, and the show is not particularly showcasing quantum concepts like non-locality (unless you think that helps explain how the room can open on every other door, etc.) More compellingly, the show originates from and leave us with a spiritual logic. It's a mystical road movie in which Joe Miller meets the Buddha and has to kill him, because only he can fulfill his own love and purpose. Enlightenment removes us from normal reality; Joe now has immortality and indestructibility signifying the bodhisattva. Room 10 is the calm center that mediates with primal energies, it is like the personal Soul which connects with the white light of the reset, i.e. God. On the Journey to Godhead all characters get what they deserve, including ruthless Karl who joins his dead son in the white light without the moral grounds to return to Earth, and Marty the Lucifer character who is lost in the worship of his ego cult and thinks he will become God (don't hold your breath). I could be wrong, but I think the creators behind this project knew what they were doing, unconsciously at least, and we're given a complete enlightenment parable that will add up for years to come, with or without a sequel. Bravo to all involved!

Happy Holidays!
Carl

Introducing Eli

2006-12-02T22:36:00.000-08:00

Truth be told! I've been increasingly distracted from my usual art projects for the past two years, and here's why. With the happy ending at last, you're invited to meet our adopted son Elijah at this link on my church's website. God bless families who take the plunge to adopt children from around the world who so desperately need a home and love; may you all make it through the unique trials and joys of this amazing process.

Critique of the New Wave Fabulists

2006-11-21T19:43:00.000-08:00

There's a new literary genre afoot, or so I have read. Actually its point is that it's neither literary nor genre, but something in between, for the best of both. (If you didn't know, like I didn't, there's a long running feud between literary, which is somehow classic and artful and important but doesn't particularly sell, and genre, which is profitable potboiler narratives in predictable popular themes. A way to combine the best of both and end the partisanship would be desirable).

When I heard that this new story style had imaginative spooky roots going back to Poe and Hawthorne and others, I got excited. When I heard that a star if not founder of the movement was a Massachusetts writer named Kelly Link from whose pen flowed wild contemporary mythologies, I got even more excited. Some call these writers new wave fabulists, or new fantasists, or something else similar. Prestigious Bard College dedicated a volume of its prestigious literary journal "Conjunctions" to this movement in 2002. "Conjunctions:39" is a bargain compendium worth picking up. The style, which is often darkly ironic as it dabbles in science fiction and fantasy, has also been called Slipstream... to give some sense for the genre bending going on I suppose.

So here's my take on this cultural phenomenon. Like many things in this world, I think it's moving in a great direction but falls short. It’s not all there, so it’s quite criticizable. And because criticizing can be fun and cathartic and cruel, and because I need more practice in becoming not too destructively critical (being creatively constructively critical is my goal) I will proceed to outline my criticism of The New Wave Fabulists, especially as seen in "Conjunctions:39".

This is just another genre, albeit a genre that's trying hard to not resemble a predictable genre. As such, there are certain apparent formulas and rules for writing these self-consciously overcreative and narratively unsatisfying stories, as many turn out to be. Sorry, but it's true. I was hoping I might find kindred spirits for my own style of "Consciousness Fiction". And maybe I do fit in, and maybe I don't, but too much of the New Wave Fabulism isn't to me worth reading (which is what other people are, in all fairness, welcome to think of my writing).

For example, here are four apparent formulas for writing New Wave Fabulism.

1) You are invited and even obliged to use plenty of genre themes, including cliches and titillating bizarrities from science fiction and romance and horror. Just do not bring them to a clear genre ending. Go wild, then just end the story off a cliff, ambiguously with multiple possible outcomes. I guess that way no one can say you're commercial and simple. Instead they'll say wow, how ironic, or wow, you sure know how to respect the reader's imagination, now they have to ponder what's next... Sorry, but if I read an author's deliberate construction then I want to know what was their intended message and destination. Don't impress me with refusals to be predictable or too obvious. Maybe if they're only thinking something predictable and obvious but they don't want to say it, then they shouldn't be writing the story in the first place. But if they're thinking of something unpredictable and not obvious, then I want to know what it was. No ending, no benefit of the doubt.

2) Use sophisticated narrator vocabulary. Assume some literary and historical references in your readers. Be almost poetic in your density and erudition and attack. But then contrast with the dialects and tough hick talk of unsophisticated characters. Voila, instant intensity and emotional depth from the range of humanity! I guess the hybrid will keep both literary and genre readers engaged.

3) Have at least one character go increasingly insane. Do weird unpredictable things until a demise seems imminent. You can be brutally detailed in descriptions, but use sophisticated vocabulary around anything crude (see rule 2). And don't spell out the demise; stop short of unambiguous conclusion (see rule 1)

4) Make references to various epochs, mythologies, and cultures of humanity, but collide and blend them in unexpected ways. Stories within stories within stories are popular. You don't have to go anywhere in particular, in fact it's better if you don't (see rule 1). But doing the symbolic melange is so very post-modern, that it makes everyone feel more awed and smart. Except the ones who don't get it, of course. They should stick to the old genres.

...I was amazed how many of the stories in "Conjunctions:39" embodied these rules, usually to their detriment. Form over substance; concepts for amazing setups that never really payoff. To be fair, many tales contained bold riveting scenes, so perhaps they were worth reading after all. There's definitely some great description and imagination in the New Wave Fabulism. But fistfuls of startling ideas don't in themselves make a story. I wonder if there is here a kind of literary equivalent to the plague in cinema where editing tricks and eye candy hope to make us forget wanting the old-fashioned story that actually means something. Call me genre if you like, but predictable themes and follow-throughs at least give satisfactions that trendy spotty bursts of contemporary experimental fiction, however ironically familiar in parts, may not.

Completing the thought

2006-10-18T18:56:00.000-07:00

For those who read the last blog entry "in progress" and wondered whatever happened to the story I started, well here it is in its completed form:

My Afterlife, by Carl J. Schroeder

Yesterday morning I wrote a long journal that was quite significant to me. Rather than go into it, I'll just put here the concluding aphorism that finally fashioned itself in my mind a while later. Who knows what it will mean to you, or even me a year from now? But it felt right at the time!

"Whenever the spirit which thirsts for and imagines unlimited power
accepts something it has been given to do in a weak little temporary body
Then there is world peace."

Lastly, I'll share with you here a letter to the editor I wrote that probably won't get published, because the direction got expressed in the day's paper that I didn't read until later. I used to write a lot of barbed pithy letters to the Boston Globe, and at least half a dozen have been published. I haven't written one in a while because I don't like getting my panties in a twist anymore, but I did like how I ended this one in a more conciliatory tone than I would have been capable years ago (still barbed but softer, believe me).

peace!
Carl

In Defense of Family

Dear Letters to the Editor,

Inspired by Gov. Mitt Romney's anti-gay declaration that every child
deserves a mother and a father, I foresee two more modest proposals:

1) all current widows and divorcees must be required to remarry immediately,
regardless of compatibilities, for the children's sake

2) all parental dying shall be outlawed, to further prevent the tragedies of
point number one. This must include at minimum the discharging from
military service of any soldier caught willing to die for their country,
although I concede that punishment by the death penalty of such willingness
might be too ironic.

Alternatively, we could all just be more loving and supportive of each
other's differences, but that's so hard to enforce.

Sincerely,
Carl Schroeder
MA

in progress

2006-09-30T19:46:00.000-07:00

Hi. There's so much in progress right now, it's a busy month. The Mystical Art and Talent Show is October 14, see www.SoulStirring.org, and we'll be very busy with family plans after that.

But just to sneak in a toehold for a September blog entry on the last day of the month, here's a story in progress that I started this morning. It's an idea that struck me as funny when I woke up this morning, playing with some afterlife cliches and expressing a side of me that doesn't want to come back from dreamland. But my wife and I went to see "Science of Sleep" tonite, the new Michel Gondry movie about a guy who sleepwalks and messes up his life by confusing reality with dreams, and it wasn't very appealing to not focus appropriately in the present reality. Let's be here now, as the old hippie would say, whether here is physical waking life, or another reality, or semi-lucid dreams where physical laws aren't so important. I always get so worried in dreams about things falling, spilling, breaking, etc. I remember once in a dream I attended a meeting at my job, and my guide was there, and she was saying Carl, it's just a dream, you don't have to be so serious about this meeting. And I said to her shhhh, I'm trying to hear what their saying and take notes, let's talk about your ideas about dreams later. Ironic, isn't it!

My Afterlife

a short story by Carl Schroeder, copyright 9/30/2006, all rights reserved

I fell off the ladder and hit my head. My last thought in my body was, thank God, I’ll never have to clean the gutters again.

Then I woke up on a charming village green. In fact, the grass was fabulously green, really gorgeous. My head didn’t hurt, and neither did my lumbago. Praise the Lord, I thought. It’s about time.

But where was the welcoming committee? I surveyed the quaint houses around the New England coastal square, all dressed in delightful matching pastels. The sun sparkled on the sea down the hill. Marigolds in more happy hues than were ever seen on Earth radiated outward from a central monument erected to the memory of the Unknown Human, and a flag fluttered on a flagpole to announce my arrival to somewhere pleasant in a combination of inspirational symbols. I thought I could make out a peace sign, an om sign, a fish, a ying yang, a smiley face, and a mastercard globe. But I couldn’t be sure about the om sign.

There’s supposed to be a welcoming committee, I yelled telepathically. A bird fell out of a tree, then scurried off. Other than that, there was no sign of life.

I spied a post office at the end of the square, so I headed over there.

I knew I was in the right place when I got inside. There was no line and all the free shipping materials were fully stocked. I couldn’t help picking over the fold-up boxes and noticing there were additional sizes, including some that migtht be perfect for my dvds and assorted media. I panicked for a moment to wonder if I would ever see them again. But of course I would, I assured myself. At least my favorites anyway, that’s the whole point of this place.

“Can I help you?”

I stepped up smartly with a big grin on my face to the matronly postal clerk.

“Hello,” I said cheerfully. “I’ve just arrived, and I must say I’m so happy to be here. I’ll be expecting all the amenities with none of the drawbacks. This new body feels great and the town is lovely, so we’re off to a good start. But I seem to have missed the welcoming committee.”

“Son, you’re not dead. You need to go back.”

I was horrified. “Oh no, there must be some mistake. I fell off a ten foot ladder while working on the house. Judging by the thud I’d say I hit a rock. So I must be dead.”

She put on her glasses and leaned toward me to examine my lapel.

“Nope, just what I thought. Insufficient postage honey, I can’t send you on.”

I put my hands together and pleaded. “No, you don’t understand. It’s a jungle back there. It’s all corporatized and productized, I can’t take it anymore. Commuting and vacuuming and microwaving dinners and shredding junk mail. If I go back and still have to clean the gutters, I’ll… I’ll shoot myself.”

“No you won’t, you’re not the type. Pay for someone to clean them for you, and next year try an extruded gutter replacement. My great great great grand children swear by them.”

Then she grabbed a big Return to Sender stamp off the shelf, inked it up good, and came around the counter at me. I ran as fast as I could on my new legs out the door.

I didn’t stop til I got to the other side of the square, where I saw a quiet little gas station. I darted inside to look for the attendant on duty. But I couldn’t find anyone, until finally a mechanic called out from under a car in the service area.

“Help you?”

I stopped to catch my breath, until I realized that I didn’t need to. This new body was great!

“Hi. I’m looking for uh, someone in charge? Like a tunnel of light or something?”

“Sure, drive to the edge of town, assess your beliefs and values, then hit the gas. Any direction, it doesn’t matter.”

I paused. “But I don’t have a car.”

The mechanic rolled out to look at me.

“Oh, a tourist. Okay well, the bus stop is at the end of the block. I don’t know your return schedule though, it depends on which group you’re from.”

I didn’t like the implication in that. “Oh no I’m from here now, I'm not going back. Just this morning I fell off a ten foot ladder and hit my head and died. My welcoming committee just hasn’t found me yet, so I'm a little disoriented.”

He wiped the grease off his hands and got up to squint and study me closer. “That so. Well, you’re not one of my group, so I can’t help further, sorry.”

Then he got back under the car to continue his work. I was about to ask him something when he started banging metal on metal, so I gave up and walked out.

NOTE: ...where to go? Some kind of twist to make him want to go back would be nice.

short short "Jonah and the Whale"

2006-08-20T18:57:00.000-07:00

8/17/06 Writing exercise #3, randomly selected: place a Bible metaphor
in a different setting...

Jonah and the Whale
by Carl Johann Schroeder, copyright 2006

"Jesus fucking booger tuna! Hep hep hep!"

We waited patiently for Jonah to stop cursing, then we looked to our singer for advice. John Christy would know what to do, he always does.

But John just pulled on his beer and gazed heavenward. It had been a long day's night in the practice basement of the ever so glorious, soon to be famous, neighborhood heroes of the J. Christy band.

Finally I broke the anxious reverie. "Jonah's the best drummer anyone could ask for! It's divine justice that no one else would have him. I don't care if the talent scouts are coming, Jonah just can't take his meds. We'll sink like a stone if he hasn't got his edge!"

We all nodded but Jonah, who wailed "But Darlene is going to be there!"

Tim looked shocked. "Jonah, don't tell me you still haven't told her about your condition?"

Jonah shook his head, which just kept shaking harder and harder, until finally it stopped. He said, "It's like I'm swallowed up in her presence. All I can do is stare and play. It's so beautiful the way she dances alone and just keeps smiling back at me. Afterwards, I slip out as fast as I can."

John counseled, "When you get around to explaining, I'm sure she'll understand. She loves you as much as she loves your playing, that much is evident."

But Tim complained, "It's the press that won't understand! You know they're going to interview the winners on live TV, and you know we're going to win. It's a Christian Battle of the Bands for chrissakes! How's it going to look when Jonah... I mean, when Jonah hasn't got his drums to keep him busy?" Then he leaned toward Jonah. "Buddy boy, you've been practicing with your anti-seizure pills like I told you to, right?"

Jonah sighed with defeat.

I spoke in his defense. "Look, Jonah is Tourette syndrome powered. He was honest with us in the auditions, and he blew everyone else all away. So what if he curses like a sailor, so what if he tics. The music is what matters, all else will be forgiven."

John raised himself to standing, with that special dramatic flair that always commands everyone's attention. But then that's why he's the leader of the band.

Holding out his hands to the drummer, he said, "Jonah, we've come this far together. How do you feel about the contest?"

Jonah look so pained, and it wasn't just the twitches. "You can't imagine what it's like, every day wondering which side of life to be on. Do I give this to my illness or the medication? Which is better, which is worse, how can I be two different people?"

"Then you must decide based on the situation. What does your gut say about tomorrow night?"

Jonah jerked and spat and bleeped before he replied. "My gut says go ahead, Tourette's will steal the show. If I pop a pill on the last song -- if I time it right and you guys cover for me -- I can keep the tics to a minimum while the judges are deciding. After that, I'll be ok."

I reminded him gently, "And Darlene?"

"She'll learn sooner or later, I can't hide it forever." He smiled at me. "Thanks again for the astrology readings man, you gave me confidence."

I patted his knee. "She's gonna marry you someday, it's written in the stars."

Then the great John Hieronymus Christy raised his arms to give the benediction. "It is decided. Give unto seizure what belongs to seizure, and give unto gut what belongs to gut. Bless us this and every hour, we're going to win that recording contract."

Then rehearsal was over, and the next night we did.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Author Notes: I didn't read the Bible in detail until recently, when I discovered that there's actually really weird stuff in there that no one understands, so I'm
developing occult theories about Jesus and his dealings with aliens and his
use of time travel. However, “Jonah and the Whale” references nothing too obscure, because that was the writer’s group exercise which Kate in the group picked at random, and everyone said oh Carl will like that, and I said pick another if you want, and they tried two more and preferred the first exercise. Basically, in about one page, set a familiar Bible story in a different setting for similar metaphor.

On one level “Jonah and the Whale” is a setup for a pun, but on a
deeper level the pun is actually psychologically valid and spiritually symbolic. In the Gospels, when they tried to entrap Jesus by asking him who should we pay taxes to, they hoped he would be an arrestable radical who would oppose the government. So the story goes that Jesus asked, who's face is on the coin? Ceasar, came the answer. Therefore give to Ceasar what belongs to Ceasar, and give to God what belongs to God. Ceasar is symbolic here of the worldly ego, our limited and often hoarding frightened controlling personality in the material world. God is not an opposite, God is not an anti-Ceasar that would oppose paying taxes, God is God who can guide the safe course through life.

So my story "Jonah and the Whale" is not really about the story of Jonah and the Whale. That's a bit of a red herring, except for some
symbiotic word play like: Jonah wailing, Jonah feeling swallowed by love
and tourette's, and Jonah slipping out of the night club to avoid love's
threatening consuming nature. But the story is mostly a setup for the pun
"Give unto seizure what belongs to seizure, give unto gut what belongs to
gut." This works because the seizure is Jonah's tourette's syndrome, a
neurological spasming condition which artists and musicians, especially
drummers, actually do have to choose between medicating to fit into society,
or letting loose to empower their art. The seizure is like the worldly ego:
wild, offensive, kinetic, useful in situations and capable of serving
expression. There's nothing wrong with ego tools of governments or money,
it's all in how you use them, whether you let their crasser forms run your
life. Listening to your gut, trusting your gut, is an idiom for considering
intuition. Intuition is a spiritual phenomenon, a gestalt sense for what is
right and where we belong. Intuition can be consulted to know the limits of
any situation, for how much to let loose our baser selves in the world, and
how much to be ego-suppressed in an altered state which can facilitate
growth, especially as grounded in society.

So a fundamental duality of the human condition is living on the ego limited
self-serving side of life, versus living on the ego-less altered
trans-personal God side. Victims of tourette syndrome, or masters of
tourette syndrome, have a remarkably apparent challenge to balance a
personal duality, but we can all notice dualistic options for being in our
daily lives. Let your gut advise, let yourself be seized and immersed in
life when appropriate, and rise above competition to trust your unique
excellence in life. That's the moral of my story "Jonah and the Whale",
which I guess can take longer to explain than just read and find a level to
enjoy.

Driveway Labyrinths

2006-07-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

For some summer fun, I'm recommending a bucket of sidewalk chalk. Enjoy!

Beware The Anticlimax

2006-06-06T19:55:00.000-07:00

Here's my followup for yesterday's post about today's silly date 6-6-06:

1) the movie I was recommending, "The Beast", is delayed. It will be called "Danielle" when it comes out. As a token of apology, the director is selling his previous popular documentary "The God Who Wasn't There" for $6.66

2) a reader of this blog (thank you God! we have a reader!) sent me Swedenborg's take on 666, from "Apocalypse Revealed" 610, concerning Revelation 13:18. Basically it seems that 6 is a great number because it is 2 times 3, where 2 is truth and goodness married, and 3 is fullness of truth. And 666 is a super great number because it is 3 sixes. Which makes 666 really bad in the hands of the devil. Huh? Seems like weak numerology, not one of his better ideas of correspondance. No wonder the point is not widely discussed.

In conclusion, everyone needs to get into more numbers. 444 and 777 are also popular. I like 1234 myself. It stands for baby steps, baby steps!

REVELATIONS

2006-06-05T19:28:00.000-07:00

Alright, so it's almost 2006-06-06, which some people say is the mark of the beast, and some people say is going to be the end of the world, and other people say it is a good occasion play pranks and party.

Why?

Because no one knows exactly what the mind of the writer of an apocalyptic two millennia old Christian vision meant by calling 666 the number of the beast. I can certainly spy the marketing of synchronicities today however.

Is it possible that all synchronicities are deliberately and/or single-handedly (note the two can be divergent adverbs) arranged by some intelligence? Would that make it any less of a synchronicity?

Anyway, Hollywood is releasing a remake of "The Omen" on 6-6-6. First showing at 7:06am? That would be 6 hours 66 minutes, after all. Or maybe 11:06pm, 666 minutes. Too bad there are different ways to count things. Not good for the determinist literalists.

But even before The Omen remake I'd already heard that a movie called "The Beast" is coming out from indie director genius/jerk Brian Flemming. You know, he's that guy who is lining up serious historical/academic arguments for the non-existence of Jesus. You didn't know? This is like the real Da Vinci Code, stuff that could really undermine the church. Never mind the touchy-feely Goddess theories that Dan Brown ripped off, that territory is romantically explosive but nothing new, and the religious and the atheists both discourage the New Age.

Unfortunately, most people are too stupefied (notice I didn't say stupid) by simple and familiar narrative devices to think that Da Vinci Code isn't the ultimate in theological conspiracy thinking.

Come on people, Da Vinci Code is just one extreme, there are others to choose from. And as long as everyone is so literal and extremist, no one is going to really understand what a number like 666 means. Those who genuinely interpret symbols and dreams will remain on the New Age fringes.

Forget this fabricated Da Vinci Code fiction. People should be pissed when they find out what stupid illogical fantasies are Dan Brown's thrilling alternate art history interpretations. Da Vinci's own notes contradict Dan Brown, and the figure in the Last Supper is John, not Mary Magdalene. Oh, but I guess Dan Brown and his 76 million dollars in 2005 know better than to research and teach real art history. Punk.

Right, where was I.

Ok, I was ranting from the basis of recommending an atheist fantasy over an action fantasy. See "The Beast" on 6-6-6, don't see the topically related "Da Vinci Code" (but you should) and don't see "The Omen" (because the original and the spin offs should be enough. Enough already, stop eating the crap.) Why prefer a movie called The Beast? Because "The Beast" is from people who do real research and make real arguments.

I've been researching early Christianity myself lately for some theological sci-fi I'm writing, and I have to admit that it can look like this Jesus is a Frankenstein patchwork of inspirational writings from rival sects. Jesus fulfills Jewish traditions, Jesus comes to do new things. Jesus tells stories which don't always fit together. Jesus is pacifist, Jesus is activist. Jesus says stuff that people who say should be on medication for.

I admire the spirit behind these writings. But that spirit doesn't always (ever?) come through untainted by agendas. Mediums need to take responsibility for their medium colored glasses, mind lenses.

And when this Christian movement got big enough, then the rich and the powerful and the inspired, together they all debated and fought and cherry picked, until out of a pile of wacked out writings (some truly excellent) they printed (well, at first they only had xerox, we know from the early xerox commercials with the monks) the Bible! Never mind subsequent translations and spins, they were all guided by God. We're not talking just some little pop bestseller here. We're talking about the greatest all-time pop bestseller from God Itself! There, that Bible you are holding in your hands even now.

What, you're not holding your Bible? Ho ho, just kidding. Of course you've got your Bible set down by your side as you read this page. We understand, you don't have to be perfect.

Consider this, before I change topics. (And I will change topics, because I've been encouraged by a time-travelling shaman who told me in a dream that he liked the variety of ideas I have). Lazaris - not Lazarus, whom Jesus resurrected to see what it would look like to be resurrected, if the technology was ready to do him next, no, I mean Lazaris the channeled post-Seth entity who has an impressive worldview - Lazaris says you need three things to conquer people. Make them feel guilty, control their sexuality, and get them to not trust themselves. Which is why you should see a therapist, hell we all should (though I am done with mine - contrary to what some would like you to think, therapy is not meant to be eternal).

No, just kidding, you're fine. No you're not. You're somewhere in between fine and not fine. That's fine, welcome to the club.

So back to the point, about symbolism. The thing is, we've got to make a mass appeal for easier symbolic communications from God. Note that I write this in Massachusetts, to the masses, in lieu of going to mass. 666 should mark the end of a dangerous unclarity, don't you think?

And this apocalyptic death of unclarity should be 24-7. That's right, all the time. I'm talking waking visions, nightly dreams, nightmares, daydreams, synchronicities, and impulse fantasies. These should all be very clear to people in what they mean. So bad movies and bad movements don't get undeserved followers, you know what I mean?

Jus this morning I had a dream that might have been about the last of days. I don't know, I'll just relate the tale. You decide for you. (I'll decide for me)

I dreamt that this cop on a motorcycle came in the middle of the night to look into my car, which I had parked in front of my deceased parents' house (which we're trying to sell but everyone knows the market is slowing down). I had made a Halloween display in the Jetta, and this motorcycle cop had come to look at it. In the middle of the night.

I wasn't scared, I went to talk to the cop. He's excited to tell me that he was drawn to see my car by a dream that he had had, and by synchronicities.

I said great, I didn't know that my intuitive ritualistic display would bring someone, let's talk about dreams. The cop says he comes from Washington state. How did you get all the way here to New York State, I said. Oh don't you know, the cop says, I'm a spirit, and he glows and slowly vanishes.

Wow, I'm so excited, I'm seeing spirits! I look to the backyard where I grew up, and I see a bunch of spirits walking toward me. I say to myself what the mystic scientist Emanual Swedenborg said happened to him, "my eyes were opened to the spiritual world". Now I know how he felt, I thought!

Then I considered: I want to meet nice spirits, wise friendly grandparent type spirits. And that's how they start out. But then I see this teenager with a black heavy metal concert t-shirt approaching (yeah, like I was). I start feeling that these spirits are obsessed with death and pain. I declare loudly with force, "There will be no speaking of killing! All of you who would speak of killing, get out now!" And I got so emotional and angry that I wake up!

So there, that is the Revelation of Carl of New York. Carl now residing near Salem, witch town USA. Where, by the way, they are *not* planning much for 666 events. Either it's a missed or avoided opportunity. But remember Salem, because it comes up again soon in the story of what this all does or doesn't mean.

So, is my dream literal, was I visited by spirits?

Or was it symbolic, were the spirits all sides of me?

Does it help to know that there is a personal precognitive aspect of the dream? That is to say, it helped to prepare me for my day. Basically, the friendly cop had me looking for limitations or authorities that some might find scary but I could work with. Maybe I had even called to me. Today I discovered I had some tricky paperwork to do, so I kept my cool (no going ballistic and wanting to kill someone) and worked it out.

Maybe the storyteller in me is working overtime and feeling haunted. Certainly I'm staying up late writing this book of life report. Check out the symbolism of the next true events that morning:

The electrician hit a water pipe while adding a vent to a downstairs bathroom. Water started spraying onto my boxes of rocks I'd collected and started reviewing recently. I was the president of a mineral club that met at Harvard for a couple years, and I have the garage to prove it. The electrician finds the water shutoff and complains that this ruins his day.

The electrician says the last time he had this happen was in the house of seven gables. You know, the place where American spooky writer Nathaniel Hawthorne spent time growing up, and set the complex tale of an ambiguously haunted New England family. My electrician was there screwing some boards into place when the final screw nicked a water pipe. He held it like a spritzing artery and cried for help! Help! But no one came to help. So he managed to catch the water with plastic bags and find the shut off before valuable antiques became endangered.

I live a few miles from the House of Seven Gables, when the Revelation of Carl comes to me. As I write, the black cat we adopted from the Salem animal shelter purrs in my lap. Right, so do these symbols help to pin down the meaning of my dream? Of course not, they only add more layers.

Ah but my friend Kurt interprets his dreams with little difficulty. They come clearly enough, and he gets to just talk to the spirits and ask them what things mean. Well, I try! I just get so excited, and maybe we talk a little but I don't remember too much, and then I wake up. I try to hold onto words and phrases and names, and Kurt says that's part of my problem. You gotta understand symbols. Puns and personal associations, mostly.

Most of my dreams I interpret by connecting the feeling of the mundanely mythic situations with the things that are going on in my physical life. And sometimes I get so excited I just point blank ask the spirit a name or address. I'll tell them my website in case they have a body somewhere and can search the web. I'm Carl, google me.

Actually, I have been more able recently to meet people this way. One director sent me his movie to watch about lucid dreaming called "The Door", and I had a fine time reviewing it on my site. I talked to a guy in a dream that I thought might be him, and several facts coincided, and we decided that although he didn't recall that night, he probably was the dream person I met. He's met others in dreams and had conversations, exchanged information, proved telepathy, that sort of thing.

So here's another possibility - we're all in this big energy web ocean mish-mash bucket, and we telepathically connect and meet each other in very confused states with various ensconcing thought manifestations swirling all around. Our brains pick out and remember just some of the more memorable stuff, like the shape of some rocks in the surf.

Give me anything but this devil 666 stuff. At least for the next 36 hours, ok? Then I'll be in the clear of a foreboding date.

That is, assuming that you use the Gregorian calendar like me, which John of Revelations probably didn't, so June 6 2006 is probably not what he could have meant or considered. But devil be damned, marketing full speed ahead, we've got pop culture to sell and Dan Brown rivals to make rich.

So happy whatever day this is! Certainly, it's not the day that I figure everything out. But someone somewhere has, I hope. I'm still at the stage of somewhat amusingly, somewhat obnoxiously, piling up the implications and titillations in my overloaded brain. Methinks I need to grow some more consciousness, enough to get me past this 06-06-06 stuff.

The fear of the number 666 is called "Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia".

In the Bible verse, 666 is the number of a second beast who comes to end the world, a beast who is more sophisticated than the first and who confuses people between good and evil. That would fit well with the idea that 666 is 2/3 of the way to 1000. Therefore the meaning is to beware of someone who seems almost there but is missing the last of three steps. Jesus is the man of the trinity, so don't be fooled by imitations.

Others say 666 could represent a person who has already come and gone, because John may have been reporting in apocalyptic caricatures - very damning satire - the brutal events of the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans in 72 AD.

And what did Swedenborg, great symbologist that he was, think 666 corresponded to? I'm sure he had a specific opinion, but it's harder to find than I expected. I'll let you know when I find out.

Poem for Choices

2006-05-16T20:56:00.000-07:00

CHOICES
by Carl J. Schroeder, 5/16, copyright 2006

I could write this poem,
or I could write some bills,
or maybe I should first signup
to pay my bills online.

What happens to life
when everything becomes a genre work?
We recognize the style, mode,
and what's supposed to happen next.
Be it satire or serious,
it's all so of a pattern,
however personally brilliant for someone.

At other times I'm amazed
at the things I forgot I knew,
but I come across again somehow.
They make me want to stay up all night
and make art from the experience.
But the art has already piled up,
and I have a goal for the morning.

How long would I have to live
to view the estimated 10 million or more
insect species upon the earth,
the most plentiful lifeform group by far,
of which less than ten percent
has been seen by anyone at all?

Life is extremely huge, really big,
brimming with lovely little mediocrities,
any one of which could absorb a lifetime.

sometimes I have no idea what's worth doing next,
until my stomach gives me a clue.

Jots and new column

2006-05-13T07:53:00.000-07:00

What's this blog for and does anyone read it? I get so busy with other things I forget to come here myself. So here's just a few jots and a link to my new movie reviews columns available for syndication.

How can the Buddha desire to live without desire?

If Henry David Thoreau really meant it when he said "Simplify simplify", why didn't he just say "Simplify"?

Didn't William of Ockham prefer to be called Bill?

Whose fault is a culture of blame?

Life as a love story

2006-04-27T20:59:00.000-07:00

Well friends, there's a lot going on, new relationships and projects in my life, complete with mystical connections. I'll write more about it in the future. For now, I recall the words of Henry David Thoreau, and how he said "Simplify simplify" instead of just "Simplify", and whether that was the point.

With my Mystical Movie Guide hat on, I say a big thank you to Bruce Wood, the Chicage artist and indie director who sent me his new film "The Door" which is about real dream sprites he has befriended, near as I can tell. Check out my review, it's fascinating stuff.

Which brings me to writing a little poem about my most constant recurring dream friend.

The Longest Relationships
by Carl J. Schroeder

Connecting the faces,
I noted the places,
and symbols of our each rendezvous.
When I looked in your eyes
I felt ever more wise
to the love that you and I knew.

"She feels like my twin,
what realm is she in,
can I really be from another?
when she is a he,
am I still a me,
can she also be then my brother?"

My dear I asked you,
what name to call you,
you got mad and said I should remember!
Are dreams what they seem,
will you do what I deem,
or do I what you think when I slumber?

I'm very proud of her, whatever her name is, the blond woman I call her for now. I saw her in concert last night, she was singing a West Virginia coal mining song that I know from childhood, performing onstage on a synthesizer in a club. There was some great symbolism, because it was called Blue Diamond Mine (by Jean Ritchie), and this fun movie I watched recently (called "Interstate 60") has a leprechaun trickster who does card tricks with different colors of suits, to teach people to see things differently. At first, you can't see the red spades and blue diamonds, but after you learn they exist then you become able to see them. This is a common theme in reality theory, and it reminds me of the story, supposedly true, that when Captain Cook landed with tall ships at tropical islands, the natives could not see the ships out of sheer unrecognizability. It was the village shaman's job to come out and say see, that big white thing, it's a sail, and under it is a big boat, with people on it, they'll be arriving soon." Then people could see Captain Cook and his crew.

So my blond was singing:
"In the mines, in the mines, in the Blue Diamond Mines,
I have worked my life away.
In the mines, in the mines, in the Blue Diamond Mines,
oh fall on your knees and pray."

I could feel myself performing with her emotionally, because it was just like something I would do, except it was her up there on stage. I wanted to hear her do more songs, but then the dark haired woman (another recurring character, the blond's friend and sort of an older sister) came out and performed a song, and it wasn't like something I'd do, it was unfamiliar, but it was good too and I was intrigued.

Consider getting Bruce Wood's film "The Door", and tell someone whether you have dream friends that you can recognize too.

best wishes,
Carl

And now, a story

2006-03-18T11:41:00.000-08:00

Here we go with another example from me of Consciousness Fiction, as I call it. Conceived from an impulse two nights ago for living in the world of instant manifestation, for convenience's sake, because I was too tired to do something I needed to do after enjoying Videodrome on late night cable, that is, David Cronenberg's nightmare future of the television, a religious/violent story which did satisfy my craving for complex stimulation after a pleasant meeting of the North Shore writer's group. It felt good to write a short short, since my latest short is becoming a novella. The style I indulged here is actually my own, perhaps due to a gothic author past life, and I'd favor the tale being compared to the short works of E. M. Forster, which I've seriously of late admired.

==========================
==========================

If You See The Buddha on the TV, Should You Switch it Off?
by Carl Schroeder, copyright 2006, all rights reserved

Tad was awakened by explosions on the television. This annoyed him, but not, he noted, so much because the war was still going on - because unfortunately this was to be expected - but more due to the loss of control that it represented, that he should fall asleep on the couch again with the TV still on.

As Tad lay watching silently, for a moment he was not even sure which war this was, or even whether it was real. Could it still be the nightly news? Perhaps this was a war drama, a fiction made to evince some set of emotions that some distressed audience would find satisfying beyond Tad's comprehension. Tad didn't care for war dramas. Or maybe this was a history channel documentary, pawning footage from old trenches called true or re-enacted, overlain with the scratches and bubbles characteristic of distressed antique celluloid. To disambiguate, Tad might have asked himself whether the images were in color or black and white, limited in point of view or highly edited, stationary in camera placement or bouncing from and for that hand-held cinema verite effect. But Tad didn't ask himself such things, because Tad couldn't bring himself to care. War was war, and wasn't there always a war going on somewhere. Even this was not a question but a statement, since if people thought that war could bring a lasting peace, wouldn't that have happened long ago?

So instead, Tad asked himself where was that darn remote control. And though it lay within his view and reach, curiously he could not move to grasp it.

Rather than panic at his unexpected paralysis, Tad remained sanguine. Perhaps it was the guilt that held him motionless, at thinking (wishing) he could just turn off the war, any war, whatever war it was, along with the TV, all by the power of his own remote control. And why not? Couldn't, shouldn't, the people of a conflict be once and for all forced to find another way to settle their differences? Tad had no doubt that those who preferred a fight would seek another channel for their aggressions. His hope was for the evolution toward a form of dueling that might not involve the innocent. Be gentlemanly, if you cannot be genteel. Virtual reality arenas perhaps, complete with electrocution for the losers. Everyone else would get to plant gardens, go to work, raise kids and animals, stuff like that.

But the television remained on, with its explosions of a war, and neither the remote control nor Tad budged one bit.

Come to me, my sweet remote control, Tad thought outwardly. I am your god, and you shall have no other gods before me. I have the credit card receipts to prove it. Did I not give you shelter from the crowd at the jealous shopping mall, did I not attune you to my set and mine alone, have I not fed you the batteries that you require of me to be contented and functional? Fly into my ready palm, fit as you are for it, and bid me stroke your ready buttons to have that effect which we both so desire!

When the remote control remained miffed and motionless, Tad tried another tack. He thought not of the physical component to exercising his will upon the television program still carrying on, but rather the metaphysical. Is there not a place and time to which I have travelled so oft before, Tad asked himself, where I have switched the TV on or off as I deemed appropriate, and known the resultant satisfactions? Let this be a timeless moment now, and let that place of controlled remoteness come to me. Visit me, dilate the time-segregated worlds to overspill into one here and now, follow that which I could do again in body but now only need recall. Is this not the dream of humanity, to close the gap between desire and expectation, until we might live in the realm of the well-conceived alone? What was that remote control for anyway, but to train the mind to dare to expect, that its option could and should be invisibly attended to by ever more efficient tricks of manifestation. Who knows what's in a remote control or TV anymore, just a bunch of black boxes built on black box principles. No one really knows wherefrom the principles of physics come or go, they're just made the use of ever more efficiently. The effect can precede the cause, evolve the cause, and even, for those who dare, obviate the cause.

Or so Tad convinced himself, and it turned out that convincing was enough. The TV turned itself off, and Tad revelled in the silent dark, nestled in his cushy couch.

There, he said. I now reside in the primordial night, from which all things are possible. I have only to think it to make it so. There, that is the end to all war. There, that is the end to all disease and misfortune. And though Tad remained curiously paralyzed, he knew that if he were to look out the window of his apartment, for as long as he might look, he would never see another war, or disease, or misfortune again.

The TV remained turned off, but the room began to glow with the contentment and peace that no longer went beyond all understanding, for Tad was its receiver now. This was not the sickly bluish glow of the cathode ray tube that Tad would allow so many others to continue to fill their living rooms with, night after night, as the inexplicable lack of war and disease and misfortune was fated to cause anxious newsmen and broadcasters around the world to rerun the old footage of nostalgic apocalypses that were never now to be. No, Tad's light was the light of God. Slightly golden, all suffusing, supremely comforting. For Tad knew that he did not have all the answers, but that someone always would and could and should, for him to continue to exist. And that someone, lo, he deigned to be a light, The Light, to whom he could eternally address his every need or wish, in the full knowledge that he would receive the ever ready, bountiful, munificent, and ever more instantaneous, reply.

Tad registered the light's contenting properties, drank them in, and became in full awareness brimming with the light as well. Tad was now more content than he had ever imagined possible, and after spending an eternity lavishing in that contentment, he returned to the problem at hand, of the one silent and dark television set staring back at him.

What was a television for?

And the answer came, to the one who travelled between the worlds at the speed of thought, from the One who accompanies us all. The television is the retina of the outer mind, the visionary device of the physical age, the monocular panopticon. With it you can see what others are experiencing apart from you, and thereby see into yourself from all occluded sides. It is the legacy of the theatre, the drama, the catharsis, the dark night of the soul. Turn it on if you dare.

If I dare? Is there a danger here?

If you dare. There is a danger in every scrim upon the land.

And Tad remembered the scenes of war, from an eternity ago and just a little while, from when the TV set was lighted. And he puzzled upon the nature of war, and this he was wont to do alone, for he felt it a shameful and private thing. The golden glow of the supreme light flickered down in him now, as the TV began to warm its electronics for a return to more customary passions.

War, reasoned Tad. The imposing of a will by force, often accompanying fantasies of extermination of the No. But there is no No, there is only Yes; Tad knew this to be so even in the fading of the Light. Such a sad illusion this illusion was, illusory even by illusions' standards. Some might call it the regrettable choice between domination and dominion, where domination seeks to crush the opponent who, by a perversity of their gift of free will, is refusing to go along with what is right and should be done. Dominion as the once and future dream, the land faraway where everyone agrees, caricaturized by peaceful animals lowing in the peaceable kingdom, and happy serfs tilling ancient royal fields.

The problem is that no one sees, this tragedy of believing in domination's efficacy. War for peace, it never happens. Forcing your will upon another, it never happens. There is only dominion, even when you must make yourself ignorant of the fact. Others ignorant as you become conjured, transmigrated to the passion play, and everyone agrees to disagree. Oh the folly, the senselessness of it all. Underneath the surface of the calls for peace by war, lay the calls for war by peace. Eternal pointless conflict, reinvented constantly. The elephant has so many parts, the blind men simply cannot see, and the war goes on so long as war itself is believed.

Perhaps it was a vanity, or perhaps it was selfless heroism (of the Biblical sacrificial sort), but Tad now flung himself into that world, headlong to save it from itself. I am immune he thought, I am the boddhisatva construct, I will reflect a mind above the fray and give another witness to the fact. You needed that, he thought at the television set, still paralyzed, the TV tube warming up to its own glow.

And the war came on, as it always was, complete with its relentless exploding of the every cause. That place of delusion, of self-deception, beyond even God's own staying hand. Tad's eyes could not shut now, for his heart was open by choice, and he cried himself to sleep.

When Tad jolted next awake, he cursed himself for drifting off again with the TV on, still showing its tragedies of war. Of the war beyond all light and dark, of the war that never was and never ceased to be. Tad's body lurched instinctively for the remote control, his finger dutifully flicked off the program, and Tad got up to look in the refrigerator for something else to eat.

Life is complex, email detritus (salvaged, revised)

2006-02-25T21:03:00.000-08:00

(psssst - I’ve been reworking parts of emails into blogs lately. Appropriately, I think. Just the impersonal rambling pretentious parts. Saving them for you, to read now and here. Aren't you lucky? :)

No, seriously. I was talking (emailing) to my friend (good guy I know) Jeff (rhymes with... wait, what does Jeff rhyme with?). Jeff got me thinking about stratified layers of thought and feeling, peeling them back or laying them down like layers of a... what? onion? roll of wall paper? pile of winter jackets? pizza toppings?

So you see my dilemma here, or you will as I explain that Jeff is somehow combining poetry and spirituality and politics and stream of consciousness in his emails which, peel onion-like as I may, I can't penetrate. So I feel encouraged to ramble back to Jeff, sometimes confrontatively, but posited with the appropriate emoticons :)(=:-)) so that everything is congenially blunted and/or confused with a smile.

This time I tried a different approach, and one no less obfuscatory. I preluded the following (as opposed to postluding the previous, which would be chronological but unremarkable) with some talk of a certain grand artistic project I know of that I'd help with if I had time but I don't so would he care to. You see, people have said that I'm a connector kind of person, and apart from some heightened glial cell awareness that may occur I have no idea what they're talking about, but it seemed worth the trouble to combine a few directions of thinking and share them like bon-bons in the hopes of helping a friend. Such is the nature of connectionism, a confusing job but someone's got to do it.

So I said: )

Life is complex, isn't it. Can't imagine how these people have time to go to wars. There's so much art and thinking and relating to people to do. Between you and me, I think they have emotional addiction problems. There's an underground comic book from years ago called Addicted to War, critical of Bush senior. Who'd have thought years later we'd be under Bush Jr., who is using the phrase America is Addicted to Oil, but he says that we should remain calm because a big breakthrough is just around the corner. They told him, he knows it, really. Bush says technology is going to solve all problems soon. Technology plus democracy. Two of the biggest and best words I know. Plus Freedom. Bush has all these great words on his side.

I can't understand why Hamas was so rude as to run for elections. They should know they are bad people, and bad people don't run for office. That's democracy. The right choices for the right times. Now Bush has to do something to stop them after winning their country's democratic elections. Something like cut funds, even if that further isolates and extremizes the situation. Either you're for us or against us. It's all going to come out sooner or later.

We are so good, we really are. Us, that's why they call it us you know. United States, that's Us. We good. They bad. Simple, right? I mean, the worst we can do accidentally is nothing compared to the worst they are trying to do intentionally. They're trying to kill women and children, disrupt markets, terrorize innocents. We're accidentally hurting some people with our ammunition in self-defense on our freedom-promoting missions of charity. We are liberating these people.

I mean, I know that whenever China invades someone they say it is to liberate them, like they did in Tibet. I don't mean like that. Us, we give real freedom, the true freedom of democracy. Afghanistan and Iraq will love us, you'll see. Because they'll have peace. Highly commercial, highly developed, highly consumer-oriented peace. Given, paid for, a gift from Us. United States, that's us!

That's why you're either with us or against us.

Am I right, Jeff, am I right?

What do you think of this email? Honestly, is letterwriting a dead art? Is it so provacative to empower the author to dump their consciousnesses onto the faster-than-thought internet? And to cut and paste pieces into a blog before you even check your email, so in fact by the time you read said email there will be others separated by time and space but not by befuddlement or rapture, reading it right there with you, including perhaps but not limited to, a housewife in Des Moines, a rancher in Texas, a call center attendant on break in New Delhi, an artist in Switzerland, a monastic pygmy in Peru, and a bird breeder with a curiously prominent nose in New Guinea?

How do I know these things? Because email encourages spontaneity, action without thought revealing deeper thought, automaticity, automatic city, a tomato kitty. Surrealism is more real than reality because it exposes the deeper rubbish.

Email is good, I wrote Jeff an email. But the name of the inner character who said these things in the spirit of the garden path shall remain, um, nameless.

No, wait, Ed. Eddy Tyler Scopeneck. He said it all, he told me to write this to you.

(click here to stop receiving emails like this)

Hope you're doing well Jeff,
Carl

PS - Jeff's email included a copy of Gore Vidal's impressive anti-Bush polemic The Enemy Within, published in The Observer, London, 27 October 2002. He really did write this, I find, (Vidal I mean), and the article accuses Bush of acting for a global economic domination plot. Which I can't disprove, can you? By the way, did you know that Gore Vidal is the same Gore as Al Gore? Yeah, they're related, it's weird, somebody is saying their name backward. There should be a law against that. I'll sic the neighborhood anti-terrorist watch on anyone that I find has reversed their names, like some artsy fartsy anti-Christ. Anyone says fartsy artsy, I'll know, I'll turn them in. Or my name isn't Eddy Tyler Scopeneck.

Update on the Mystical Arts

2006-02-21T19:37:00.000-08:00

I just had a nice productive 3-day weekend. I'm making good progress on many projects this month. Like in the prodigous use of words that start with pro-. Except procrastinate, I'm tired of that one.

I spent hours researching Christianity and working on the dialogue of a theological fantasy called "Jesus and the Time Travellers". Whatever you think it is, it's probably not that. Last week I read the first section of the story to my new writer's group, a fine supportive club that I didn't start but got invited to, called something appropriate like the North Shore Writer's Group. I'll have to ask. My friend Andy Lutts invited me, he's been working on a new age treatise called Manifesting Magnificence. The woman who runs the group is researching for a novel about the wives' point of view around some 19th century spiritualist treasure hunters that lived nearby. I like writers, this is great.

I'm upgrading and promoting the Mystical Movie Guide more, and placed a news brief in Elisabeth Ward Taylor's Boston area franchise publication Natural Awakenings Magazine. She also needed an image that symbolized spiritual cinema, and I came up with the Buddha on dvds still life you can now see on the website.

My wife and I have been enjoying Joanna Priestley shorts I rented over the internet from greencine.com, and I'm happy to recommend both Joanna and GreenCine. And I got another great email from a director this weekend, Scott Prendergast who made one of my favorite short films. Scott wrote: "I was GOOGLING my movie THE DELICIOUS and was so pleased and happy and surprised to find it on your site. I LOVED your description of the short film and I totally agree. It’s all about connection!" This is one of the most gratifying times for me, when I can give back to an artist by letting them know how much they touched me. Mystical art is the greatest, I'm rootin' for us all!

best wishes,
Carl Schroeder

News Brief - copyright 2006, for permission to post somewhere, please just email Carl(at)astralresearch.org

Enjoy recommendations from MysticalMovieGuide.com

There's no doubt about it, the appreciation of a film genre called Spiritual Cinema has been growing ever since Oregon director Stephen Simon wrote a book about it in 2002 and later founded the Spiritual Cinema Circle. Here on the east coast, MysticalMovieGuide.com offers thousands of free movie listings and hundreds of in-depth reviews. MysticalMovieGuide.com specializes in research and esoteric perspectives that you won't find anywhere else. Founder Carl Schroeder says, "The site grew out of the Mystical Art and Talent shows we'd been doing in Cambridge since 2001 (more on that at www.SoulStirring.org). Some of us talked about our favorite metaphysical films, and I got to wondering how many there might be. I thought maybe a few hundred, but it turns out there are thousands! Many are forgotten treasures of the past, or great foreign films that US distributors deliberately ignore so you only buy their products. Latin America for example has some of the greatest movies that you've never heard of. How you can you beat a title like 'Don't Die Without Telling Me Where You're Going'? That's by the great mystical director Eliseo Subiela, about a man realizing he’s the reincarnation of Thomas Edison's assistant after meeting his past life’s lover's ghost while inventing a talking robot and seeing auras. I mean, wow!" Fortunately with the increasing availability of DVD releases, many of these films can now be purchased or rented through links at MysticalMovieGuide.com

Today's Writer's Tip: Don't Be Afraid to be Influenced By, and have Influence Upon, your Reality

2006-01-29T10:42:00.000-08:00

I realized something liberating, or may I say (without evidence but from the direction of more love) that someone dear whispered in my ear. I considered that if my stories have fearful present life connections, such as my awareness of mortality and fears and fantasies of death rising in a story about a man dying, then I might have choices for what this can mean. Fear says they are premonitions.

I recently had the creepy experience of working on a story about a world virus plague just months before the fears and possibilities of a bird flu pandemic ascended in the headlines. But my story may have been a contribution to the energy of humanity facing a long-standing problem. After all, the SARS virus scare, founded in some reality, did come and go, and a friend's husband was quarantined briefly after returning from the east at that time, and all is now well. He also avoided a flight used on 911. The river flows, flow with the river around the stones. So I'm happy to note that the world funding appeal for international support of bird flu research and containment exceeded its goals into the billions of dollars eagerly offered by many nations.

What is going on behind the scenes? It is an old and time-honered plot device that an author's stories start coming true, happening to them, and the boundary between reality and fiction, fact and fantasy, becomes not necessarily blurred (for that can be unhealthy) but scrutably interlaced. Something on the order of Swedenborg's concept of correspondances, in which different levels of reality have different meanings and uses for the same object or event. This kind of thinking is otherwise associated with figuring out the symbolism of dreams or myths or archetypes.

There are apparently sympathetic interlacings of pure energetic parallelism between strikingly different ways of being. For example, an attribute of the tribal shaman is that they are an ordinary person, chatting about getting the firewood and hunting for food, until it suits their topic to shift to otherworldly adventures, and back again, without batting an eyelash. Early anthropologists interpreted this as the feeble supernatural thinking of peoples without scientific explanations. Later anthropologists might apprentice in shamanic rituals and subsequently write books in the style of a shaman, claiming to be changed.

A leading example might be Hank Wesselman, who began revealing in 1995 in "Spirit Walker" his experiences of telepathically experiencing the life of a post-apocalyptic future tribal shaman self, in an America that was returned to forest and jungle over decayed and buried cities. Apparently people of the future had weather problems and/or wars, and forgot how to make metal, and all the metal used to make the cities rusted so everything fell apart. My conviction is that Wesselman tapped into a nonphysical representation of his current life needs, a kind of completely mirroring personal mythology and pedagogical alternate universe. Sorry if this sounds invalidating, but as I've been forced to consider more than once, we have to get over our biases that symbols are somehow less real than physical realities, because in fact they may be more real, especially if real is defined as impact upon change and evolution. Surely therein lies power.

I am skeptical of Wesselman's claim to a physical future due to its supportive so-called facts like this one about all metal being lost to rust. How poetic (something unused or disused or improperly maintained becomes rusty, returns to dust, etc.) But isn't metal extracted from natural rust to begin with, iron oxides like goethite and hematite? Can no one think to burn the rust piles and see what happens? Did Wesselman's unconscious think that iron comes from iron deposits? Terrestrial iron is almost non-existent, it's all in forms of rust. If you do find a chunk of iron in nature, you're advised to save it, not melt it into girders to begin your highway back to civilization. A natural iron chunk on Earth is most likely extraterrestrial, non-siliceous material that bounces out of the solar junk ring known as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Iron meteors are worth a lot of cash in modern science culture. Shamans may have used them to channel alternate identities for the purposes of inner archetypal journeying that doesn't have to jibe with physical reality. The symbolism is good for this, but I'm only guessing here.

My story about the world plague has a transcendent happy ending by the way, it just takes a while to get there so I tired and longed for something more cheerful to work on for a while. I have to juggle these reality interactive projects of mine, stories and essays and journals. Unfortunately or fortunately, most of my stories deal with major consciousness transitions, and what would those often imply if not describe but death. So my fears of mortality can rise while writing some stories, such as the one about the businessman dying from cigarette smoking and the priest who learns from him as they hatch a thought experiment to alter reality and it does. Again, it holds a happy transcendent ending, but all this talk of death makes me nervous. Perhaps I need the concept of shamanic or symbolic death. Death as ultimate healer, dying to the past, like in the tarot. Conscious manipulation of the unconscious through the subconscious, stuff like that.

In 1998 I changed so much after a period of composing music and writing spiritual essays that I had to think of myself as having died. I went through a period of feeling between worlds, and I was sloppy around the house. I became a more complex and interesting person after that time of a few months, which included most seriously feeling, though not entirely believing, that I was the reincarnation of the medieval philosopher Hildegard of Bingen and the 20th century New England inventor and occult dabbler John Hayes Hammond Jr. I had my reasons, what can I say. I was a consenting adult playing with, and seduced by, the mind. I had already read years ago of the so-called Holy Lands fever from which police in Jerusalem have learned to accept and deal with tourists who snap into thinking they are Jesus or John the Baptist or one of the Disciples. It passes, they just need to take care of the person. I suppose the closest I ever came to thinking I was in the Bible was as a teenager. I stumbled upon and loved to think about Ezekial, who saw a chariot of fire with these weird angels with four faces, man ox eagle lion. He also did weird things including eating rituals that I considered to be brilliant performance art, though not necessarily anything that I would want to do. I only went so far as to write a song about being Ezekial, singing to a cheap red electric guitar that I bought from a friend in High School and kept for many years. Yeah, that was cool.

Hey I know, what if I just end these ponderances here. I want to go work on a story that I'm more intrigued by than afraid of now. Thanks for visiting.

regards,
Carl

PS - Hey, I just realized, a dying process actually was completed yesterday. My grandmother passed away after a long decline. Now she's pretty cool in and of herself, but in my dreams her farmhouse lawn was more than once the setting for meeting shamans, isn't that interesting? One took me backward time-travelling, and I blacked out / woke up, but not before I felt time slicing through me similar to how it feels when you pass your hand through solid objects like glass or walls when you're out of body. Um, and if you haven't done this, well it feels like what you'd imagine the description would feel like.

Today's Writer's Tip: The Deconstructed Altar

2006-01-28T11:29:00.000-08:00

Two mugs of tea, one for the masculine, one for the feminine. Choose appropriate mugs and teas and coasters. Mine are: a brown cowboy mug I got when I visited Denver and Boulder far to the west of Boston to see my sister who was writing a report on greenway plantings for cities, and the other is a green on white Ann of Green Gables mug from when I went with my shy redhead librarian girlfriend to visit her hero the Ann of Green Gables house on Prince Edward Island to the north of Boston, and I have fond memories of her because she cried when she realized we had to break up because she was a lesbian, but I said that's fine honey you just be what you're meant to be, and I cried too, and life went on.

Denver Cowboy sits to the left of my computer on a forest green Mexican design coaster that my dear wonderful wife from Texas purchased when we were visiting her folks. My father was German and I grew up in a New York State with a sister and mother and father. Sometimes I got teased for being German. In college I listened to a lot of German rock and pop music as introduced to me by my German professor who became my best friend for a while until I got all metaphysical and weird on him years later, and I had a local girlfriend who was in German studies and took me to Germany twice and moved there and married a German after I broke up with her. I made experimental lyrical electronic music that I sang in German for years after that, which was on the way to metaphysical breakthroughs including feeling spiritual connections with some past Germanic composer/authors. I do a lot of writing in English (which is my wife's last name, and she is a language teacher), and I'm writing and you're reading in a language that is closely derived from some old German languages. So Germany means something to me, and surprisingly my wife's area of Texas actually was settled by a lot of Germans. Thus I will never forget a billboard I saw with her once driving between San Antonio and Austin (I don't think it's there anymore). A jolly boyish guy in Lederhosen was saying "You all kommen sie back now, ya hear?"

I felt right at home.

(Is he American? Is he post-modern self-engineered? Is he Terran? Yes. Yes. Yes.)

Mmmm, a sip of Honeybush tea. That's the green on white feminine mug on the right on top of a green and blue floral four-cornered design on white Mexican tile too, also purchased by my wife. Normally the right side would be the side of the masculine, the will, the action, the personal, things you can act upon and from. The left side holds the cowboy mug, normally the feminine side of receptivity to the universe, of accepting and working with the universe to enter harmony and see the ways to get what you want smoothly for all benefit. But since the left and right sides of the body cross to the right and left sides of the brain, respectively, then it's never really clear whether it matters if you flip the sides' gender. What works is what's right for you, including doing something entirely other than reading this obsessive essay, or "obsessay" as I will henceforth maybe say.

Cowboy holds ginger tea. Now there's a tea of action. Cowboy is accepting my action self, to work on my computer. Further to his left is snacks. Dragon Fruit, from a hip food store called Trader Joe's. Dragon Fruit is an exotic woody tasting fruit, named in the East, but otherwise known as cactus fruit in the West where I believe it originated. To the right of the house of Ann of Green Gables - that Shakespearian Pollyanna who grows to be a woman with her own strong mind - I lit a rich orange candle that I must remember to not let drip.

By the way, some spacey world dance music is playing in the background, from some Buddha Bathroom series or whatever the marketing department has developed for me. I'm okay with it because it's actually pretty nice.

If you follow these altar specifications exactly prior to any sincere writing session (remember, it is the heart that matters) then you may become licensed to channel me and write a blog like this one, that is your choice. I've given sense coordinates to a psychic position, possibly. However please be warned that this state of consciousness is copyrighted, so anything you may channel from me is copyright by me and even then by my estate after I have shuffled off this mortal coil as they say. I do this not from pride or jealously, after all I'm heaping the adjectives for rather mudane joys, but only that I and then my estate may retain the ownership rights of first refusal as well as control editorial and distribution processes.

I say this to be fair to my own glimpsed but heretofore unnamed muses. Sorry, dear friends, but until you manifest physically to be in the needs of sustenance like teas and Dragon Fruit, as am I, then I am obliged to point out that I'm the one living in the material world where copyrights can contribute to the making of a living. I will strive to reference you in some accrediting way. But also, in this direction of musing, I wish to generally lighten the monologue with the satirical benefits of perspicacious delineation. There are some really weird thought forms that people can channel these days, and I wouldn't want my material getting mixed in with some trickster discarnates in campaigns of weird projective mischeviousness ladled with abject ignorance. Been there, done that, know what I mean?

But if you don't (know what I mean) then if you make your own altar with your own materials and good personal self-appreciation (as opposed to impersonal self-appreciation, which may be a goal) -- and perhaps just be sure to engage as many dimensional senses as possible including taste and smell and touch and light and sound and memory and relationship and space and time -- then you may aspire to channel your truer self, future and or higher, if not spirit or soul. I certainly hope to do so in the writing I'll be doing as soon as I finish this silly blog, which is dedicated perhaps to that florid author Proust, of whom I have read only one sentence, but since it was one of his longer sentences I think that counts for quite a lot actually.

Honeybush, ginger, honeybush, ginger. Say, perhaps one might profit and benefit the world as well to sell a ginger honeybush tea. I will be just this once like Benjamin Franklin, who prospered well enough already to delight in giving away fabulous ideas upon which others built their fortunes. That is to say, should ginger honeybush become the cornerstone of your empire, I would not make legal claims so much as request that you do good with your wealth, such as give to homeless kittens and puppies, feed hungry children, and get better people in the White House.

Hey, if you like my blogs and can identify the personalities behind each entry which is different from the last as being of a certain psychoacoustic identity, ie. vibration that might be phonetically transcribed in the Western alphabet (the ISO-8859-1 character set is preferred) then you can email that to me and I'll try to pronounce it.

Or, if it be easier and applicable, just tell me what you like about my blogs using that little feedback comments link below here. See it down there, yeah that. If you don't say something then I won't know that you ever read this, and that may weigh upon your conscience and even incur karma, so someday you'll be like fixing my hovercraft, or I'll be fixing yours, whichever way the karma goes. I can't figure out these things, I don't run the place, I just incarnate here.

Over and out,
Carl

Consciousness Fiction and the Maximum Esoteric Overdrive

2006-01-26T20:50:00.000-08:00

(** = future link)

I'm overdue for a blog entry, and I already wrote several that were concerned with the mundane (perhaps to a scary degree, what with my project acronyms, political rants, and housecleaning philosophy). So let's try a further space-shot, shall we?

I'm writing a lot more these days, stories of what I call **Consciousness Fiction. Most of these what-if tales operate from a personal evolving cosmology, ie. how I think the universe is organized into individual (contactable!) beings. I used to think that I and my ideas were being called to write educational metaphysical non-fiction, but my friend **Kurt Leland is covering that area so well that I feel liberated to make up stuff more readily for the sheer joy of imagination, much as I did as a kid. Plus Kurt's excellent books have helped me sift for the best insights and truths. Thanks Kurt!

Kurt's specialty is in going back to original sources - including sacred texts, mystery school teachings, and psychological studies - and reconciling these with his own dreamtime and out-of-body adventures, producing sensible primers for the modern psychic explorer. Kurt is currently working on a book that will, among other topics, demystify levels of reality as taught by **Buddhists and **Theosophists. Check out his blog of research for ** Kurt's book in progress here. The reincarnation of the evolving human spirit through the physical kingdoms, from crystal to plant to animal to human, is just the beginning of such esoterica. The Theosophists diagrammed some wild stuff like the downward movement of incarnating souls through multiple planes simultaneous to and harmonious with the upward movement of evolving spirits, human and other. The former movement is called involution, the latter evolution, and following is an email to Kurt that I sent speculating how/where nature spirits, fairies, elementals, and more might fit in with such a scheme.

Nature spirits and consciousnesses of physical configurations will appear in a future story of mine, so I keep playing in this area of thought. I have curious recurring visitors and locations in my dreams, including spirit friends on other planets, the anima and animus, etc. I don't know which of my experiences I would call fairies and such exactly, but I feel a kind of cultural and historical respect for these mytho-poetic fauna. There are stories of strange beings recorded across societies, often reflected in encounters on a darker, or at best shaded or tinted, side of psychological experience. Perhaps life was harder then. ** More recently, Terence McKenna met techno-elves on **DMT, the so-called spirit molecule derived from Amazon shamans’ ** ayahuasca that is said to give otherworldly roundtrip tours in just under 10 minutes. World War time populations began seeing flying UFOs that they could not identify (what do you call it when an acronym sublimates into a word that again calls for adjectival clothing? linguistic evolution?) which sparked a wave of ET abductions as, shall we say, new perceptual discoveries. ** Carl Sagan wanted to connect abductions to the fairy realms in the British Isles with the ** UFO abduction experience and also, highlighting the, shall we say, second chakra issues of the phenomenon, with the **incubus and **succubus demonic seductions of medeival society, and possibly **Hindi visitations by Gods experiences, and so on.

Now I have seen, in ** out-of-body ** lucid dream states, visitors in space suits in my bedroom. One in particular was a nice lady with a green face in an orange helmet and vivid blue diving suit. I asked her why she wore that suit, and she said "I. R. Q. N. Y.". Right, well then I woke up and puzzled over possible meanings for this for weeks. Not too long after the visitation, I met Kurt Leland and asked him what he thought of it. He said that, in his experience, higher beings often wear protective garb that may look to us like space suits or armor or capes. The protection is ironically to protect us, not them; their light, or intensity of uneclipsed presence, could overwhelm our consciousness. So I have decided that her answer meant "irony" with a "q" for my question in the middle of it. Not that that is a particularly linear or human approach to answering a question, but it's not unintelligible. I also saw wise gentle alien spirits resurrecting Jesus, but that's another dream story.

Now my friend Alex, he's had some interesting adventures of waking up out of his body and walking around, or flying places, or simply thinking of places and appearing there. Sometimes he met strange beings right in his bedroom. One was a boucy blue cloud that was having a lot of fun. Another time, there were two little ET guys, much like ET's are depicted with the big eyes and head. Alex went over enthusiastically and said Hi! They were flustered that he could see them, and they zapped him with high-speed thoughts, like being blasted with a modem, and then disappeared. If you want to know more you should ask Alex, but right now he's playing proper businessman and doesn't want to talk with most people about such things. But I think that is a lot like someone encountering a peeved elf or pixie in mythology. A classic story like **Rip Van Winkle, that tale is powerful because it is actually depicting a whole folklore of true experience.

I recently reviewed a fine documentary about fairy lore, see **"The Fairy Faith". Over **Christmas vacation I met artist **Andrew Gonzalez who illustrates **Tibetan angelic beings called **Dakinis. I also like **shamanism with its angelic overworlds, earthly middleworld, and animal spirit underworld, and how this might correlate with classical western **Heaven/**Olympus, a **purgatory, and **Hell/**Hades. **Swedenborg's cosmologies were very detailed, and he describes visiting hells, other planets, and three major spiritual realms, the natural, spiritual, and celestial. Then there's modern psychological and human potential terminology which imply realms of being, and I like how the channeled entity **Lazaris describes the evolution of power downward from the higher conscious, through the unconscious (which connects lifetimes), through the subconscious (which connects everything in a lifetime), into the conscious mind (you and me!), which then must choose to travel back up again through the same levels to co-create with the higher conscious.

In the past I may have gone off the deep end with such cosmologies, numerologies, and other psychic theories. Now I just tinker for the purpose of writing a (metaphysically) plausible story, and I feel pretty grounded. I'm gradually learning about the history of Consciousness Fiction too, as it stands in my opinion, and I'm enjoying exploring my affinities for the metaphysical works, especially shorter stories, of such authors as: **E. M. Forster, **Nathaniel Hawthorne, **Washington Irving, **Edgar Allen Poe (bit dark that fellow), **Dion Fortune, **Theodore Sturgeon, ** Ray Bradbury, **Ursula K. Le Guin, **H. G. Wells (love the movie version **"The Man who could work miracles"), **Edward Bulwer-Lytton, **David Lindsay, **E.T.A. Hoffman, **Jorge Luis Borges, and more. I claim no expertise but I will be compiling a personal ** ConFi authors list on my astralresearch.org website as I read and write (it won't be nearly as extensive as my ** Mystical Movie Guide project).

So take it with a grain of salt, and enjoy below an excerpt of my own maximum esoteric overdrive in the thinking behind my fiction. I welcome **feedback or questions, and by the way, if you're an aspiring writer in need of guidance, a great book of writer's validations and tips I found is "**The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters". My favorite guidance so far is: whatever your blockage is, write through the blockage! That is to say, just write, write your way past the problems, just express, flow, and be a writer. That's why there so many more places to write these days, the internet has created mental plane real estate. That's what a *blog is, you see!

Best wishes,
Carl

Hi Kurt,

I guess what I like about the invo/evo cycle is that it is cyclical, rather than the linearity of lower chakra/plane to upper/chakra plane which always begs the question well what's lower than that and what's higher than that. Similarly with the origins of the universe, people ask well what happened before the big bang, the answer being there is no before, and maybe the beginning is also the end (and the end is a new beginning!).

So evolving consciousnesses are becoming god-like in their return to god, and involving consciousnesses are becoming constrained in rules in their return to individuation. I say constrained in rules to avoid a word like imprisoned, but one could also use the word ensconced. Etheric and physical incarnation. Involving consciousnesses become the matter to evolving consciousnesses.

I also like to think of everything as being "here now", there are no other places, just other ways of perceiving and connecting with everything that's already present. Whatever cycles exist are continually existing at all stages simulataneously. So a primitive human interacting with a god can be just showing the split within the consciousness, the amount of integration that soul still has to do, or is always doing, or is willing to do. Lazaris likes to call it the long division, implying to me a mathematical process (and Lazaris is big on process - not mechanical, but spiritual, like maturation stages). The primitive human can be the soul involving, the god is the same soul evolving, and the being is meeting itself. Today's New Age culture is showing more of the balanced integration between the individuated potential and all-aware potential, as people think of god as being within and that individuals create their own reality. Maybe a meta-evolution would involve the span across planes, diameter of consciousness cycle. But meta-evolution must be multimensional, because it can too simply imply a paradoxical hierarchy too. Can it be that Earth is an impressive and advanced school as some spirits say, even as it seems to us in the middle of it so messy and unadvanced (one could say ignorant and dangerous)?

But are there other consciousness which make the Earth their home? Maybe the so-called "different" evolutionary paths of nature spirits, devas, etc. are simply different stretches across the "planes", different cycles or tours (tours of duty?) through the worlds. Lazaris for example says he is of a group of consciousnesses that simply chose early in their growth to never grow physically. That suggests to me that a soul can know early on in it's growth, or at least challenge itself to the constraint, that its invo/evo cycle, or spin, stays within certain distances of self-recognition. (I read that the spin of electrons influences their availability for reactions). Beings who are never physical just don't go as far as the physical plane to be ready to turn around, but physical beings can communicate with them from their less integrated and less material invo/evo dualisms, ie. their intuitive inner senses, like intuitive thought and feeling. If that's what a deva is, a spin, then humans could have two ways of sensing them, from the involving self or downward spin (felt as a primal nature connection) and the evolving self or upward spin (felt as a psychic explorer connection). A gnome or troll could be a soul that goes lower/closer to the physical in its spin, thus their appearance to a human is symbolized as the animalish hairy underground beings of folklore who can be peevish, ie. more dualistic. A higher nonphysical being, one who orbits its soul to less unintegrated distances, remains more consistently angelic, perceived by humans as a spirit of the air and of higher morals, thus sylphs, fairies, etc. Humans, being willing to orbit even further from the soul, have more dualistically self-unintegrated aphelions than even the nature spirits, and when operating from aphelion in the other planes (remember, it is all here now, and we're in all the places that we're ever going to) would probably be the source of some of the most dangerous astral forms.

I like this idea of perihelion and aphelion in describing the integration degree of a being in a soul orbit. It always seemed odd to me that planetary orbits are elliptical, so there must be powerful metaphors and constructor idioms available here. Certainly the orbital shape of Earth leads to the seasonal cycles which so influence our mythologies and cultures, harvests and nature. The question is, as we change our environments, do the nature spirits change with us. Do they look like the ETs and ride about on UFOs? Or can we meet friendly brightly hued aliens in space suits who answer questions with multidimensional acronyms and good cheer?

I guess this is the kind of stuff Theosophists worked out, and Buddhist and Hindu monks before them.

That's enough for now, you can reply or just wait til our next conversation.

regards,
Carl

Housecleaning for 2006

2006-01-07T12:56:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were good. Ours were quite nice, maybe better than ever, visiting many fine friends and family. It's refreshing to know and appreciate good people, or at least the good in people, depending on what you got to work with.

I just did some housecleaning. I suppose most people do some. It's quite confrontative, isn't it, to push that vacuum around, dust, move furniture. I either scream or make a party of it, there's no in-between. So I started with a little song, making it up as I go:

I love to clean the house
I love to vaccuum too
I hope I find a mouse
I'll add it to our zoo

Then I felt the frustration rise. Why do we have to keep cleaning things? I've done this before. Go over the same surface areas. Routines with no apparent benefit other than to maintain or degrade.

Then I remembered what I heard Lazaris (smart topical channeled entity) saying that housecleaning goes with sifting and sorting your attitudes and beliefs, thoughts and feelings, choice and decisions. Dirt gets tracked in, that late night TV program dumped some paranoia on you, that person you talked to blew a dust of bad outlook on the world, stuff like that. I agree. Our reality creations get flawed because of junk, we have to cleaning our minds, which are externalized in reality.

How do you do that kind of housecleaning? My friend Kurt and his entity Charles recommend, think of the things you want to do or want to have in life, from your deep desires and destiny. Then list the yes-buts, or the problem with that is, and the reasons why it won't work. That's where you can find assumptions of how life works, and you can cancel and change any assumptions you choose. Look for new examples of new assumptions, if you don't believe it. It's a big world, a lot of things can go in whatever direction you favor.

So I did some assumption finding and fixing in rhythm to the literal housecleaning, and this felt good. But then there was still more housecleaning to do, I wasn't done yet. So I appreciated my wife some more, she was doing some cleaning too. That felt good too.

But then house cleaning still wasn't done, not even the limited amount I set for myself to do today. So I started getting more annoyed and frustrated and tired. But I kept my temper in check, because I remember the times that I full-out lose it and yell a bit and bang things around, and those always give me a headache.

Finally I was done. Tonite we're having friends over for potluck and movie night, that's why we needed to do some cleaning. I took a shower, and I'm about to eat and watch a short film. I've been wanting to check in with a blog entry so I wrote this first.

Slice 'o life. First blog entry of 2006. Something mundane, something profound, kinda mixed together. That works for me. Happy New Year!

Oh and please comment if you liked anything I said. How do you relate to housecleaning and the chores of life?

Synchro Niceties

2005-12-22T10:45:00.000-08:00

Thanks universe! I like how you work.

A few days ago I got an email from artist Andrew Gonzalez appreciating my websites, so I checked out his website at www.sublimatrix.com. Very nice paintings, he’s a friend of Alex Grey and in that tradition, with extra goddess energy for depicting angelic beings. Dakinis he calls them (do dakinis wear bikinis? I will ask). He’s very sympatico with my values, being into dreams in a big way. So I’m packing last night for San Antonio, skimming his bio, and it jumps out at me. He’s 8 days older than me and lives right near where I’m going for the holidays! Any other time of year would not have worked out like this. So with a quick email back and forth, it’s confirmed that my wife and I can look forward to meeting him and his partner right after Christmas.

This reminds me of the time when my wife and I were going to San Francisco a couple years ago. A few weeks before, it pops into my head for some reason to look up the independent mystical films of Antero Alli, a name I’d heard before. Yes, great stuff I see, and he lives near San Francisco. I send him an email and yes, he’ll be around to meet me. In fact, he rarely shows his films but he’ll be showing a great one, "Under a Shipwrecked Moon", in SF the week that we’ll be there. So we had a fine time visiting, and he’s been one of my personal heroes ever since, to encourage me in the filmmaking direction.

For years I facilitated a Mystical Experiences Discussion Group at the Cambridge Swedenborg Chapel. That discussion group is on hiatus now, likely to be revived, but it led to the ongoing Mystical Art and Talent Shows. Anyway, that group was very cool for being a crossroads of synchronicity introductions. For example, my now (always?) friend Marjie had a voice whisper in her ear one day at her computer, “type Swedenborg”. She did and found my website, so she went to the group and consequently helped me lead it with her improv meditations (where do you want to go today?).

Last night while driving home I was sorely tempted to call in to National Public Radio. “On Point” with Tom Ashbrook was discussing the week’s Philadelphia court decision that decisively branded intelligent design as creationism in false science drag, so keep it out of the classroom. A lot of people were gloating, and a few were making the intelligent observations that there’s no real reason why science and theism are at odds, just keep the definitions clear. I wanted to say look, why is everyone so quick to assume that studying God isn’t science, isn’t that how science started? Ok so hard science took the lead, and that’s probably right on, because people wanted to stay sheep in God and church so much that science had to put more power and responsibility into people’s gadget-hungry hands. Technology doesn’t make God obsolete; any good scientist should be able to combine their awe of nature with a scientist’s open mind and a human’s open heart to say yes, something like God is in our past and our future.

I applaud the (perhaps unintended) direction of intelligent design – to restore God to science for a new working relationship with the Divine – and I find the extreme atheist scientists who ridicule the extreme dogmatic Christians to be equally fundamentalist and non-representative of a moderate majority. The Philadelphia decision was soundly reasoned by a conservative judge who seemed to encourage everyone to just keep respecting and understanding the other side(s). That’s good bridge building in my book. So all you theists are on notice to study your science and catch up. Humanity needs real theories, with real testable hypotheses. Not this subjective inverse argument, well I think science doesn’t explain it all therefore by default my untestable beliefs do. No, we need something like, if God is omnipresent and metaphysical, we should be able to measure important connected effects that have no known physical causality.

And guess what, such experiments for a connecting metaphysical force are being done! Check out the Global Consciousness Project, in which statistically impossible deviations from the norm in worldwide random number generators are being measured around major world events, good and bad. Such demonstrations, if widely recognized, could push science to bring the quantum world up to a macro level at which people may be the co-creators with a God force, like mystics have always said they are. Of course, such a God science will probably be too occult/New Agey and non-denominational for the fundamentalists who want not just a God, but their God, wielding their rules, and with a big stick. Sorry. But the moderate majorities should be ready for such things.

What would a future of God science look like? A scifi world of awesome mental control over body and matter, a kind of manifested cyberspace? That sounds scary, too anarchistic. I don’t actually believe as did Aleister Crowley “do what thou wilt is the whole of the law”, I believe more like “do the law of the whole or wilt”. Would good traditional spiritual ethics be prerequisite to wielding the powers of a God science? Hmmm, are they now? I am to this day most intrigued by a prediction that the channeled entity Lazaris made: one day science will prove that God exists, but it will never proves that God cares. In other words, love will always go beyond. Interesting, but if scientific evolution favors a species that has the nurturing to care for itself and its planet enough to survive, then maybe love will be built into the creators of science by the very rules of their dispassionate science, and the point will become moot. What survives, loves. The bigger the survival, the bigger the love, and God’s the biggest of them all.

One thing is for certain, the human race can look forward to increasing power. People want to create their own reality, even if they’re not ready to look at how maybe they already do. I don’t yet know how synchronicities work like the emailing of strangers just in time to meet and become new friends, but clearly this is a power that can and will benefit everyone in the ways of both love and science. Imagine a world where problems don’t have time to become problems before they are seen as invitations, and that knock at the door is the new friend bearing just the right solution that we were only just beginning to become aware of needing. No problems, only friends. Now that’s a power we all could learn to live with, and maybe even learn to study, understand, and scientifically expect.

Best wishes,
Carl

The Broken Robot Prayer

2005-12-18T18:26:00.000-08:00

Broken Robot

DREAM: Thesis
I had a dream that my boss -- whom i admire for what he gets done, what with founding a good little company and all -- I dreamt that my boss sent me to the robot factory to get a broken part replaced. I had to get off of a train at a nowhere stop and walk across a field. Some nice young people met me at the factory and told me I had to wait for the new part. In the meantime, they treated me to some tasty little ice cream scoops.

REALITY: Antithesis
I'm having difficulty juggling my time and goals, I'd like to get more done. I get anxiously off track sometimes, in the middle of nowhere. I ate tasty little ice cream scoops last night as I stayed up too late trying to write after getting together with some friends. Staying up so late throws me off for the next day, in my quest to do my full day's schedule of goals (acronym: DEWCMARF)

INTERFACE: Synthesis
Please God, replace the broken peace in my broken robot. I'm the boss, and I'm the broken robot. I'll be patient, I will wait. I'll seek to enjoy your creation, including friends, and the tasty little ice cream scoops.

-- Carl Schroeder 12/18/2005--

Potential and Destiny

2005-12-17T11:15:00.000-08:00

Saturday, a day to sleep in. I do, then write in my journal for over an hour. I finish a two week notebook, and realize that I've learned a lot in the past two weeks about focussing and potential.

But will I stay on a good track today?

That's my life's story, feeling lots of potential, but fluctuating in focus and will. I exercise for the full 20 minutes of DEWCMARF (that's my daily goals acronym, see the first blog entry). Suddenly I'm spontaneously singing to the tune of "You make me so very happy" by Blood Sweat and Tears, only the words are different to be silly and slightly disguised: "You make miso, from soybeans, you make tofu, from soybeans too." See, it's easier for me to channel satire, I've still got that ego layer that wants some emotional distance from the message (for distancing is why dreams can be frustratingly disguised in so much symbolism, but as you mature in doing your potential you get clearer deams and even direct conversations with spirit guides). Plus humor helps the medicine go down. After singing the song and crediting my cleverness (I could sell jingles to whole food stores! no wait, I don't want to sell jingles to whole food stores) then I realize, ah that wasn't just me, that was my spirit singing, and the original words are about how I've made myself so happy and entered more into my life, just by doing my daily exercise goal!

So I'm hopeful to stay on a good track today.

Maybe it's because I'm 42. That's why I'm picking up in focus and experiencing more destiny. I know there's that Douglas Adams satire "Life the Universe and Everything" in which the answer to the meaning of life is 42. That's not what I mean, though Mr. Adams' frenetic imagination probably often tapped into deeper truths.

I mean 42 as in 6 times 7. I believe that life proceeds in cycles of seven years. I didn't say it first, but I've observed it to be true enough to work with. Life isn't meant to be stressful, it's supposed to be easily progressive. But people push each other to act older than they're ready, and then they react younger then they should, and that's why so many people never grow up and remain confused, non-present, and non-actualized. But to recap in my own words, I think a good life goes roughly like this:

0-7 years: dependency and first growth, not expected to be very responsible or even self-aware (childhood play and needs)

7-14 years: growing into an adult's body with a child's mind, imitation and group identification (high school, puberty)

14-21 years: learning about the world, preparing for life on your own (college and moving out, working)

21-28 years: experimentation and travel (variety in relationships and jobs)

28-35 years: discovering preferences and expressing identity (talents and hobbies, best relationships)

35-42 years: building your unique life (settling down, marriage, home)

42-49 years: applying your potentials (self-confidence, talents, second careers, midlife crises if off-track)

49-56 years: wisdom in action (not sure best way to say it yet... probably spiritual actualizations...)

I turned 42 a little before Halloween this year, so I looked to that time for turning point (the pagan new year, when the spirit and material worlds are bridged). Not that I've been particularly off-track in life thus far, but you know how you can watch the years go by in the lackluster of someday-whens and if-onlys. I find the trick is to keep lists of goals and options that balance your life needs and talents (exercise, relationships including time with the self, job, finances, eat light, sleep well, dream well). Especially include the sore points, those things you've been putting off. And then chip away every day. You'll know you're on track if you experience initial frustrations and resistances, then increasing well-being and more rapid successes (or at least instructive failures).

Plus amazing dreams.

I've had certain recurring dream characters and locations for much of my life. But I've usually romanticized them and begged them to fix my life for me. There's the dark-haired woman and the light-haired woman. There's a blond guy like me. There's a chinese lady who may be the dark-haired woman. There's parents and family, there's high school, there's my hometown, there's grandma's place. What do they all mean? I try to map them together by personality more than appearance, because faces change more than function in dreams. But decades later and I'm still mostly dreaming I'm in my childhood town.

But in the past few weeks, and in parallel with how much I do or don't succeed in a well-rounded focus for the day, I've been having perfectly sequential dreams of meeting the old characters in the old places, now talking with them, finding out who they are, and when we're done, leaving the old places forever. One night I cried because I was moving out of my parents house forever. Another night I went with the dark-haired woman to her fantastic home planet, where she's a playwright like me. Another night, the light-haired woman and I attended an old souls seminar, where there were lectures on past lives and soul stages. I did my keep-on-truckin' glide there, which was fun - I usually can't fly in dreams, but I can lean back and glide without walking, so believably that I wake up and am surprised that I can't do it here in the physical.

Anyway, I say these things to share my taste of what it is like to track life and its meaning for the intention of increasingly focussing potential and destiny. Life just seems to be very participatory. I can't complain that it isn't there for me as long as I'm not there for it. When I committed to relationships years ago, I found good partners leading to my present soul-mate wife. When I committed to the day job, I found the best one to enjoy. And so on.

This month, I fully committed to writing a movie review every day for my movie reviews website - before that, I'd been on-again off-again. This week I get unprecedented feedback with not one but two directors emailing me about how much they appreciated the reviews: Carlos Atanes in direct response to my new post for his film "FAQ", and a few days later out of the blue, filmmaker Paul Yates, friend of the musician Moby, finds my older post for his short "Space Water Onion". Paul likens his works to messages in bottles tossed into the world, and he was so excited at how much I'd gotten this one that he sent me a new script to review. So technically I'm now a script consultant! This is an energy boost for my own story and screenwriting career, which is still on-again off-again, but when I fully commit I'm gonna soar (I've had a lot of dreams showing me this, along with reminders to write every day).

I'm glad I wrote this blog entry, to better sandwich the last one which was more moody and reactive (about politics). Such is life, rich with ups and downs, but if you ever again pick yourself back up then you will find your way. There is a way, there is a plan, for everyone, that much I do believe. In fact, when I committed myself to that belief years ago, things started to get way way better.

your friend with another message in a bottle,
Carl