Category Archives: society

Inner Alchemy: A Bridge Between Worlds

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At Waking Times, Chris Bourne offers insights on the role of inner alchemy in the integration of an emerging “new world” and new paradigms to the reality of day-to-day life. He describes how the tactile, empathic, diplomatic aspect of the soul, by “intuiting and feeling the flow of ‘rightness’ in any given situation, yet molding and blending it into this material world”, can enable one to acknowledge and honor the subjective truth of others without compromising one’s integrity.

Inner alchemy, as Bourne defines it, is driven by spiritual awakening and resultant realization that our current world is out of balance with nature and out of synch with the natural flow of the universe. This leads to a compulsion to ‘be the change’ and involves “expressing your truth in every moment, not just with words, but in every physical, emotional and mental action that you take.” In other words, “Right Action”: action which is aligned with the universal flow. Among the indicators of “rightness” of one’s actions, he lists the following:

  • They confront, challenge and break down the ego within you and within others with whom you’re engaged.
  • Actions in rightness ultimately lead to an inner sense of expandedness, connection and openness, once you’ve broken through any tightness or resistance to expressing your truth.
  • When aligned with the flow, you tend to observe supportive synchronicity as the universe clicks into place around you.
  • When you’re in “Rightness”, it just feels right. It’s like being in love. No one can tell you if you’re in love. There’s no logic to it. You just know.
  • A choice made in rightness will feel like destiny.

Bourne describes the process of realignment towards right action as not so much about making specific choices (though it can lead to right choices) but finding and expressing lost aspects of one’s true nature or soul. This is easier said than done because it often puts one at odds with “the matrix”, a powerful social construct which influences and manipulates everything within it through the establishment and enforcement of rules, norms and beliefs, control of resources and isolation from the natural flow of life.

The struggle to manifest truth (working in opposition to social and economic pressure from the matrix to prevent the success of such efforts) can be aided by what Bourne calls “soul ray harmonics”, or frequencies of consciousness. On one side of the spectrum are “catalysts”, which are harmonics to “shake things up”: to change, unravel, unwind and metamorphosize. On the other side are “empaths” which he defines as “souls who can absolutely and unconditionally accept life as it is without judging. They can witness and feel the truth at the core of all behaviour – no matter how distorted – and not need to change it. They are that energy that helps play out a distortion so that others ultimately want to change, all of their own accord.” Knowing where one is on the spectrum can help to clarify and become aware of the nature of one’s interactions and the impact they have on others (which is necessary for one’s personal evolution).

The specific type of harmonic that Bourne feels is most useful for our current situation is what he calls “Ray 4”: the inner diplomat which empathises and influences,  accepts unconditionally but also catalyses, also known as the ‘Bridge between Worlds’. To help become better attuned to this harmonic or frequency, he offers the following guidelines:

  • Firstly acknowledge that you’re here to influence and change the nature of reality. You’re not supposed to be cooped up in a box. Even if people around you react with projection towards you, fear and anger, recognise it is their own distortion they’re activating – otherwise they’d be able to calmly accept you as you are. As you realise this in your mind, feel a waterfall of flowing calmness descend around your expression of truth.
  • Secondly, in order to facilitate the greatest amount of positive change, there needs to be open doorways through the density of the field, that may touch something deep within another. In other words, whilst we stand our ground, we must recognise and honour the truth in another. Even if you notice their’s is a lower vibrational truth, it is still their truth and real to them. If you’re given to influence, you won’t get anywhere by riding roughshod over them.
  • Catalysing and therefore unwinding means first working to recognise the ‘ancient light’ at the core of a distortion. So all actions have begun with an authentic exploration of reality by the soul. It’s just that the ego then distorted the purity. So first work to find the truth at the core of their distortion and honour this with them. Then help them see the higher truth. If you’ve done it accurately, they’ll be on your side and much more open to change.
  • Recognize that the stream will always find different pathways back to the ocean. If you try one approach and it doesn’t work or if you then feel disconnected because you couldn’t fully honour the flow, work not to judge yourself for it. Benevolence doesn’t blame you! Instead keep softening into the place you are now at, pausing to reconnect again.
  • Compromise but don’t ever compromise the soul. Yes it may seem like an impossible paradox. But it is not. How can you make your truth the most understandable, the most reasonable, the most tactile, the most accessible and without any extra energy? If you can do this, you’ll find you don’t have to compromise your truth. Increasingly you’ll be accepted.
  • Don’t tell others what you know to be their truth (this can be a big button pusher!). Instead work to facilitate an increase in realisation by asking an empowering question. One that is open ended, one that causes them to explore and feel for themselves.
  • Accept that sometimes you will be in a minority of one. It does not make your truth untruth. Know and accept when it is time to stand your ground, come what May. This will always test your level of trust in the divine. So be it. Take it as an opportunity to evolve and grow.

Bourne follows this with a reminder to question whether one’s actions are driven by the soul or ego and concludes with an inspiring message:

Whether we fully know it or not, we’re living in two worlds at the moment. The higher paradigm is to be found infusing this lower world, working to transform it. Those who are already carrying the light, will frequently find it challenging. The old world values are so used to living in the shadows and fear the light. There’s a clinging to the easy-to-understand, in-the-box expediency and soft comfort. There’s a strong dependence on the crutch of old behaviours.

Despite this, there comes a point where you simply cannot compromise your soul a moment longer. You realise the illusion and that the only real purpose of life is the expression of you. In mastering the Ray 4 Diplomat – an interwoven aspect of your soul – it means you can still be living and breathing the higher realm, whilst acting in this one. It means you can stay in the truth.

In so doing, not only does your awakened life become more manageable, you become a powerful facilitator.
You become a bridge between the worlds.

Saturday Matinee: F for Fake

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Via Dangerous Minds:

If you’ve seen Orson Welles’ late period quasi-documentary F for Fake, then you know about the mysterious art forger Elmyr De Hory. In his freewheeling cinematic essay, Welles explored the funhouse mirror life of de Hory, who found that he had an uncanny knack for being able to paint counterfeits of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and Renoir’s work. After some of his fakes were sold to museums and wealthy collectors, suspicions were raised and his legal troubles—and a life spent moving from place to place to avoid the long arm of the law—began.

At the time Welles met up with Elmyr in the early 70s, he was living in Ibiza and had been the subject of Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time written by notorious “biographer” Clifford Irving, who himself figures prominently in the film. During the course of filming F for Fake, Irving (who was later portrayed by Richard Gere in The Hoax), was serendipitously revealed to have forged his own “autobiography” of Howard Hughes (not to mention Hughes’ signature). The resulting film, an essay on the authorship of “truth” in art, is a dazzling, intellectuality challenging masterpiece that can never quite decide if it’s a fake documentary about a fake painter of fake masterpieces who himself was the subject of a fake biographer… or what it is. (It’s no wonder that Robert Anton Wilson was such a fan of F for Fake, which figures prominently in his book, Cosmic Trigger II).

F or Fake also calls into question the nature of “genius”: If Elmyr’s forgeries were good enough to pass off as Picasso or Modigliani’s work, or even to hang in museums under the assumption that they were the work of these masters, wouldn’t Elmyr’s genius be of equal or even nearly equal value to theirs? (Worth noting that it was ego that got in the way of Elmyr’s scam at several points in his life: He was often left apoplectic at hearing how much crooked art dealers were making from his paintings!)

De Hory’s former bodyguard and driver, Mark Forgy, has kept Elmyr’s archive since his suicide in December 1976. In recent years Mr. Forgy has been trying to make more sense of Elmyr’s odd life. From the New York Times:

“I’m so far down the rabbit hole,” Ms. Marvin said in a recent phone interview, “I’m just not going to rest until I find out who this man is.”

A few weeks ago, she and Mr. Forgy traveled to western France and unrolled a dozen de Hory paintings that had been discovered in a farmhouse’s attic. In Budapest, they found birth records, dated 1906, for Elemer Albert Hoffmann, son of Adolf and Iren. No one knows when Elemer upgraded his name, or how he financed art studies in Munich and Paris before moving to New York in 1947.

He claimed that his father was a Roman Catholic and a diplomat, but the Budapest ledgers list Adolf as a Jewish merchant. The Nazis killed his entire family, Mr. de Hory said. But a cousin named Istvan Hont visited the artist’s villa on Ibiza, where Mr. Forgy was working at various times as a chauffeur, secretary and gardener. Mr. Hont, it turns out, was the forger’s brother.

Mr. Forgy knew that his boss copied masterpieces but did not much question their life on Ibiza, in which they kept company with celebrities like Marlene Dietrich and Ursula Andress. “I accepted the amazing with a nonchalance,” Mr. Forgy said in a recent phone interview. Mr. de Hory was the focus of Orson Welles’s 1974 documentary “F for Fake,” and Clifford Irving breathlessly titled his book “Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time.”

After Mr. de Hory’s suicide, Mr. Forgy returned to Minnesota. “I went into deep seclusion” working as a night watchman and house restorer, he said. He held onto the papers and paintings. “I have schlepped them around endlessly,” he said. “The walls here in the house look like the Pitti Palace in Florence.”

His wife, Alice Doll, encouraged him in recent years to examine the stacks of false passports, Hungarian correspondence and Swiss arrest reports. Ms. Marvin contacted him last year. She had helped organize a show about faked and stolen art at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington, including a portrait of a pensive brunette by Mr. de Hory imitating Modigliani.

The researchers are now raising money for the documentary, developing an exhibition for the Budapest Art Fair in November and preparing to interview a nonagenarian de Hory cousin in Germany. They also plan to send paintings for lab analysis. “We’re trying to create a forensics footprint of his work,” Ms. Marvin said.

They already know that Mr. de Hory tore blank pages out of old books for sketching paper and bought paintings at flea markets to scrape and recycle the canvases. His fakes have become collectibles. Last fall, at a Bonhams auction in England, a buyer paid more than $700 for a seascape of crowded sailboats, with a forged Raoul Dufy signature on the front and “Elmyr” on the back.

Elmyr website

Watch the full film on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/s?query=f%20for%20fake

Snowden’s Christmas Message to the World

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Yesterday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave an “Alternative Christmas Message” on Britain’s Channel 4 television. It was short and concise, yet more substantial and important than a typical State of the Union Address. Though he makes the connection to Orwell’s 1984 that many of us have already made, it’s still a message more people need to become aware of or be reminded of. It’s also a call to action that all freedom loving people can rally behind regardless of nationality and political ideology.

This is the full transcript followed by the unedited video:

Hi, and Merry Christmas. I’m honored to have the chance to speak with you and your family this year.

Recently, we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance, watching everything we do.

Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the book—microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us—are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go.

Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves—an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem, because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together, we can find a better balance. End mass surveillance. And remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.

For everyone out there listening, thank you, and Merry Christmas.

Christmas Grab Bag

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Alison Nastasi reports on some of the more interesting ways Christmas is observed in cultures around the world at Flavorwire.com: http://flavorwire.com/428646/strange-christmas-traditions-around-the-world/view-all/

At Truth Jihad, host Kevin Barrett interviews Ethan Indigo Smith about the Christmas Conspiracy:

A sampling of Smith’s provocative thoughts on Christmas can be found here: http://news-beacon-ireland.info/?p=15247

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Daily Kos recently did a post on the background of one of my favorite Christmas songs, “Christmas in the Trenches“, while a Fanpop.com article from last year delivered a devastating take-down of one of my least favorite Christmas songs, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?“.

Consolidation of media ownership + corporate propaganda = (rather unsettling) comedy gold:

The Onion looks back at It’s a Wonderful Life:

A hilarious but deeply cynical Rankin/Bass-style musical number (NSFW):

Hope you all have a happy Wednesday!

Mass Dolphin Deaths Linked to BP Oil Spill

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A study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology, produced the strongest evidence to date linking mass dolphin deaths in the Gulf of Mexico to petroleum hydrocarbon exposure and toxicity. The focus of the study, 29 dolphins from Barataria Bay (an area heavily oiled during the BP spill), were found to have lung disease, abnormally low levels of adrenal gland hormones, liver problems and other health effects which are rare but consistent with exposure to oil.

A quarter of the dolphin subjects were found to be significantly underweight, 48 percent were given a guarded prognosis, and 17 percent were in poor or grave condition, meaning they were expected to die soon. The study concludes that the health effects seen in the Barataria Bay dolphins are significant and likely will lead to reduced survival and ability to reproduce.

In an earlier NOAA study in 2011, preliminary research findings indicated oil and Corexit physically stressed Gulf dolphins to death by decreasing their immunity and making them more susceptible to diseases such as brucella and morbillivirus. Morbillivirus was found to be the cause of a majority of dolphin deaths in a recent die off pattern along the Eastern Seaboard throughout the year.

According to a New York Times piece from last Sunday, in the past year at least 1,000 bottlenose dolphin carcasses (eight times the historical average) washed up on beaches in New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. In Florida, 80 dolphins who live permanently in the state’s polluted Indian River Lagoon estuary have died while 233 were reported dead in the northern Gulf of Mexico this year.

While effects of the BP oil spill and corexit haven’t been ruled out as a factor in the East Coast dolphin deaths, research on some of the dead dolphins in the Florida estuary found high levels of mercury, fungal diseases, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, oral-genital tumors and emaciation, most likely a result of environmental pollution.

Police Teargas Family’s Vigil for Handcuffed Teen Shot in the Back of the Head

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Suspect Death

Besides being one of the saddest headlines I’ve seen in awhile, it says a lot about the current state of law enforcement in America. This is the full story behind it as reported by Jean Paul Zodeaux of Collapse.com:

A vigil for the deceased Jesus Huerta yesterday went from peace to pandemonium last night in Durham, North Carolina after police, who showed up in full riot gear tear gassed those at the vigil, including the family of the deceased, and arresting six people.

A month ago, in North Carolina, Jesus Huerta, a teen aged boy living in Durham, North Carolina allegedly committed suicide sitting in the back of a police cruiser, after being searched, with hands cuffed behind his back, shooting himself in the head. It is as implausible a story as one can think of. Of course, a good writer will take the implausible and make it look plausible. Too bad the Chief of Police, Jose Lopez in Durham doesn’t have any writers on hand. Instead, what Chief Lopez did was wait a few weeks, issue a statement that Jesus Huerta was found slumped over and dead in the back of a patrol car after the officer who was driving the vehicle heard what he thought to be a gunshot:

“Our department continues to investigate the origin of the weapon but can confirm that it was not a departmental weapon and no officer fired a weapon during this incident.”

Not only lacking good enough writers to make the implausible seem plausible, Chief Lopez also appears to lack any valid public relations department. At a press conference a week ago, presumably for the purposes of calming the public, Lopez only made matters worse by stating the investigation was seeking to find whether Huerta “shot himself’ on purpose or if it was accidental. Understandably, much of the public was interested in an investigation of the police involved. Instead they got Chief Lopez.

Crazy things can happen, this much is understood, and even if we’re are to accept the story that a teenage boy who was searched by a police officer before handcuffed and placed in the back seat of his patrol car wound up producing a gun missed in the search and shot himself, it would take a person disconnected with reality to think that the reaction to such a story would be one of quiet acceptance. Of course people are going to be suspicious of the story, particularly since Jesus Huerta is not the first person who has died while in the custody of Durham Police in the last five months.

On July 27th of this year, police responding to reports of a stabbing, and surrounding Jose Ocampo who was holding a knife and refused to drop it, shot him four times in the chest. Ocampo did not speak English and did not understand the commands being given him. Of course, no matter what language you speak, it should be common sense that when you are surrounded by police while holding a knife you drop it, but it was once common sense that shooting a man four times in the chest because he’s not relinquishing a knife sounds an awful lot like excessive force.

According to a friend of Ocampo’s who was on the scene, that Ocampo was attempting to give the knife to police:

“You know the part you use to cut? He put his hand on that part and gave the other end to police.”

Still, and in today’s environment, it should be expected that police will find such an thing as an excuse to open fire, but people are getting quite tired of what is to now be expected, and any police officer, and certainly a police chief should understand this, and instead of responding with defiance and more dubious tactics of force such as the full force in riot gear at a vigil for a teenager who was shot in the head while in handcuffs in the back seat of a Durham police patrol car.

Chief Lopez’ strategy of intimidation and his clear lack of compassion for the Huerta family only makes the Durham police come off as more suspicious. That is no way to sell the implausible story they’re attempting to sell the public. What Lopez should have done was accept responsibility for his part in the death of Jesus Huerta, which would be to admit that there is an obvious break down of procedure and put the whole police department on review. This is not what Lopez did, and increasingly, as more police departments expect a suspicious public to buy implausible stories, this is not what is getting done.