Category Archives: Spirituality

The Path to Eternity

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By Mark Anthony Rockeymoore

Source: Sacred Space in Time

Thoughts are things. Energy that becomes words, then actions. Are your thoughts generally positive or negative? Your words, your actions? Do you see the positive in life more naturally, or the negative?

Given enough time and repeated attention, thoughts take on a life of their own. We become haunted by fears that take over our lives. Collective thoughts haunt the collective mind. Individual fears become our lives and collective fears become the world we live in.

Positive thoughts create a positive life, even in a world of negativity. Individually and collectively we each are responsible for the world we co-create. For our thoughts, words and actions. Starting the day concentrating on the good things in our lives we fundamentally alter the trajectory of our experience as perception determines words and actions.

The multiverse, the universe, the galaxy, the solar system and the world are all thoughts in the mind of God. And the same thing applies to our lives. We create them within this larger structure, based upon conditions unique to each of us. How we choose to perceive our lives, positively or negatively, determines the course of our paths and fundamentally alters our possibilities.

There is no greater purpose in life than to live consciously. To consider thoughts, words and actions carefully. To live according to your deepest purpose, aligned to the truths you have discovered during the course of your own experience. To hone thought to the point of utter clarity, to speak precisely, to act decisively.

Looking at your life right this moment, can you tell how far you are along that path? Does your answer to that question satisfy you? Do your regrets outweigh your joys? If they do, you know exactly what you must do. The only thing left then, is to determine how.

The answer arises with the question. Query yourself and commit yourself to living according to your deepest understanding. Regrets will then pass away with this shift in perception and the recognition that life’s lessons are ongoing and there is no final test, just continuous growth along the path to eternity.

Podcast Roundup

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9/7: On Expanding Minds, hosts Maja D’Aoust and Erik Davis have a conversation with Andy Sharp of English Heretic about death, Horror films, Hiroshima, psychogeography, and his latest release, The Underworld Service.

 
http://s50.podbean.com/pb/fd840a4721e38d3f25dd4ec01834d2c6/541340f7/data2/blogs18/276613/uploads/ExpandingMind_090714.mp3

9/8: R.U. Sirius joins hosts Chris Dancy and Klint Finley to discuss technology transhumanism, and the current social/political climate among other topics.

https://soundcloud.com/itsmweekly/pending-mindful-cyborgs-episode-37
 
9/9: Peter Null interviews Professor Andrew Kolin, a professor of political science at Hilbert College in Hamburg and Kevin Carson, researcher at the Center for a Stateless Society, on militarization of police, centralization of power, war and the military-industrial complex.


http://s53.podbean.com/pb/e788a26888199ef114360f06cc89f48c/541347f9/data1/blogs18/371244/uploads/ProgressiveCommentaryHour_090914.mp3

9/10: On the C-Realm, KMO and June Pulliam discuss and dissect the archetypes and cultural meaning of zombie apocalypse narratives.


http://c-realmpodcast.podOmatic.com/enclosure/2014-09-10T12_48_22-07_00.mp3

9/11: Christopher Knowles joins Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio to examine how Gnosticism connects to alternative cultures, politics and humanity’s existential crisis.


http://content.screencast.com/users/AeonByte/folders/AEON%20BYTE/media/7984ec1d-8363-4162-a034-0dabc54aef33/1.%20Gnosticism%20and%20Politics%20with%20Chris%20Knowles.mp3

9/12: On New World Next Week, James Corbett and James Evan Pilato report on 9/11 terror hysteria, Obama’s private CFR event with Sandy Berger (9/11 document thief) and the cryptocurrency/anti-surveillance potential of a new off-the-grid communications technology.

 
http://www.corbettreport.com/mp3/2014-09-11%20James%20Evan%20Pilato.mp3

8 Simple Steps to Forgive Even the Unforgivable

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Cats And Dogs Hugging

By Christina Sarich

Source: Yoga for the New World

Are you feeling resentment? Pain? Anguish? Perhaps even fury? It doesn’t matter if your emotions are directed at the general idiocy of a government that seems bought-out by an elitist class, or a close friend or family member. It doesn’t matter if you are raging at a complete stranger on the road, in a moment that dissipates fairly quickly, or if you are dealing with years of abuse or emotional torment. Forgiveness is a spiritual act that requires us to see things differently than we do now.

It doesn’t seem to be so when we are thinking of the wrong another has done to us, or the hurt they’ve so carelessly lavished, but forgiveness can free us from even the most unforgivable acts. Many of us hold onto our anger in hopes that this emotion will somehow anchor in some Universal Justice – as if our teeth gritting, and brow furrowing can somehow balance the teetering scales of righteousness in the world.

Sadly, the act or words of another that we keep running in our minds is like emotional cement, keeping us stuck and unable to move into peace. Our unforgiveness often doesn’t even affect the ‘other’ as much as it does us. There is a Tibetan Buddhist story about two monks who encounter each other many years after being released from prison where they had been horribly tortured by their captors. “Have you forgiven them?” asks the first. “I will never forgive them! Never!” replies the second. “Well, I guess they still have you in prison, don’t they?” the first says.

Many mistakenly believe that forgiveness somehow absolves another from their wrong-doing. That in forgiving, we helplessly accept, give up, surrender to defeat – that we are helpless. The exact opposite is true. When we face a terrible wrong, and look within to see how we can prevent the same incident from happening again, then we are truly on the correct spiritual path.

Dr. Fred Luskin is the Director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects. He has led the largest research project to date to study the effects of forgiveness on hurt individuals. He has dealt with people suffering from a huge range of things needing to be forgiven – from a romantic break up to the murder of a child. He believes that there are specific steps one can take to reduce the stress that comes with holding onto hurt, and make the progress of forgiveness as easy as possible. I tend to agree. Forgiveness usually takes a little time, but it needn’t consume your life for years. You can start with these eight steps to move your heart into the right place, and begin to forgive:

  1. We are often afraid to truly articulate just how much we have been wronged, but we must. In cases that are more obvious – such as losing a family member in a war-torn country to the hands of an unfeeling mercenary – it is easier to explain how angry and sad we are, but in other cases, such as with long-term familial abuse, we may have even come to think the behaviors we were subjected to were ‘normal,’ and only later do we realize how much pain and hurt we stuffed down over the years in order to function within our family unit. When that pain is realized, it is helpful to articulate it to a counselor or a few close friends. Keeping those emotions locked inside does not permit the process of forgiveness to begin.
  1. Forgiveness is a personal journey. You do it for yourself, not for the person you think needs to be forgiven, or anyone else. Once you make a commitment to do whatever it takes to let go of the pain and feel better – and do it for you, then forgiveness starts to become an easier endeavor. When you feel better about yourself, after all, you will find it more difficult to hold grudges against others. When needed practice self-care and self-love. If you are still involved with the person or people who you are trying to forgive, you can simply explain to them that you need time to care for yourself. If this is not appropriate due to the ongoing behavior of another, then simply practice uncompromising self-love and distance yourself from the other person until your feelings of anger and hatred dissipate. Reconciliation may be possible in the future.
  1. While reconciliation is at times possible, sometimes it just isn’t. If someone is emotionally unstable, and will likely continue to act in hurtful or harmful ways, we don’t need to be physically or emotionally near them to forgive them. What you’re after is internal peace. Forgiveness can be defined as the peace and understanding that comes from dropping the blame for whoever has hurt you – changing your never-ending story of grievance, and realizing that they were possibly playing a role in the grand play of life – called maya – to help you learn more about yourself. It doesn’t mean that murdering your child is right, or that stealing, cheating, emotional abuse, or other ‘wrongs’ are ‘right.’ It simply means that you choose to see that person’s pain as the impetus for their own actions, and not as a personal affront to you. Maya Angelou once said, “You can’t forgive without loving. And I don’t mean sentimentality. I don’t mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, ‘I forgive, I’m done with it.’” If someone has been narcissistic, selfish, hateful, or jealous, you can forgive them for your own peace of mind, and allow them to learn from the Universal lessons, which are surely coming their way, to help them forgive those who hurt them also. While you don’t have to reconcile with others who are not ready to do this spiritual work for themselves, you do have to reconcile your own emotions.
  1. Believe it or not your hurt is coming from what you feel now, not what happened ten minutes ago, an hour ago, days ago, or even ten years ago. That old adage about time healing all wounds is true, but this is because we tend to get caught in karmic cycles that cause us to mentally recycle pain instead of letting it go. In the book Karma and Reincarnation Transcending Your Past, Transforming Your Future, Elizabeth Clare Prophet and Patricia R. Spadaro explain that while “karma means accountability and payback, reincarnation is simply another word for opportunity.” Karmic retribution is not punishment, but the benevolent Universe’s way of allowing us free will. It does mean, however, that what we do unto others, will be done unto us, somehow, at some time, in some way. The Sioux holy man, Black Elk, has explained that even nature comes full circle, and Voltaire espoused the fact that “it is not more surprising to be born twice, than once; everything in nature is resurrection. The cycles of karma and reincarnation can help us to understand family patterns, community patterns, and even wider societal patterns that need undoing. When we stay stuck in thoughts of the pain another has caused us, we miss the opportunity of this incarnation. After talking about a hurt with another person, and expressing it fully, it is time to start letting it go, and looking at the patterns which we created it. This is the true gift of being ‘hurt’ be another – it is really a chance to see how we have hurt ourselves.

I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing . . . I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task that was given to me. ~ Carl Jung

  1. Stop your fight or flight response. When we start to ruminate about what another has done to us, our hypothalamus gets in gear, engaging both the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal-cortical system. When the effect of these two systems goes ‘online’ the fight or flight response begins – this means we are in moderate to full-blown fear mode. We are afraid this will happen to us again. We are feeling the incident as if it were happening right now, no matter now long ago it occurred. Our heart rates and blood pressure rise. We might even sweat a little. Our bodies are flooded with 30 different stress hormones and it can make ‘forgiving’ very difficult. By instead practicing a simple, calming mantra meditation, a few yoga asanas, yoga nidra, nadi shodhana, or going for a short walk outdoors, we can reverse this fight-or-flight response, and deal with the fear behind our pain from a more level emotional state.
  1. Give up your expectations of others – Dr. Luskin calls this ‘recognizing the unenforceable rules.’ In other words, you can’t expect to get from others, what they have no ability or desire to give you. While we can practice love without expectation, we also should be aware that others aren’t always capable of loving back. If your inner child is still bemoaning the inability of an emotionally shutdown father to be affectionate and caring, or you expect a selfish boss to behave differently, then you are setting yourself up for more pain, and often. Realize that what you seek from others – kindness, love, affection, support – will come from those willing and able to give it, and the more you offer it to yourself, the more likely these individuals will come into your orbit. Just let the others, who are not ready to act as evolved, be. No resentment – that’s just where they are at in their cycle or karma and reincarnation.
  1. Know that a life well lived is your best revenge – as long as you stay hurt and angry, you are feeding the ego of the person who felt the need to hurt you. You give that person power over you – you are still in ‘prison’ like the two monks said. Find personal power in the good things in your life. Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough are two of the leading American investigators of gratitude. They describe gratitude as personality strength—the ability to be keenly aware of the good things that happen to you and never take them for granted. Grateful individuals express their thanks and appreciation to others in a heartfelt way, not just to be polite. If you possess a high level of gratitude, you often feel an emotional sense of wonder, thankfulness and appreciation for life itself. Start a gratitude journal, or simply practice a few moments of quiet contemplation realizing all you do have now, instead of getting stuck on your hurt feelings. Counting your blessings is not only good for your health, but it helps to dissipate sadness, anger, and frustration.
  1. Change your ‘story’ – Instead of telling a story to yourself and others about how you were done wrong, decide to rewrite the script. You can, instead of being a victim, decide to use the experience as a way to heal others, and practice one of the most profound spiritual practices ever taught. Imagine the ripples that the pebbles of forgiveness could send out into the world. I give the example of a man named Robert Rule to explain exactly how profound changing your story can be:

“Gary Leon Ridgway is better known as the infamous Green River Killer. In 2003, he confessed to the murders of 48 women. In 2011, Ridgway was convicted of the murder of Rebecca Marrero, bringing the victim count up to 49. By his own confession, he may have murdered as many as 60 women. Ridgway especially despised prostitutes and targeted them for his killings. At Ridgway’s 2003 sentencing, the families of the victims had the opportunity to speak out and address Ridgway directly. Understandably, many were angry and lashed out at Ridgway for the unimaginable grief he had put them through. As Ridgway stonily listened to the family members express their grief and anger, one person came up and said something unexpected. When the time came for Robert Rule, the father of teenage victim Linda Jane Rule, to speak, Ridgway finally showed a glimpse of remorse. Rule’s words to Ridgway were: “Mr. Ridgway . . . there are people here that hate you. I’m not one of them. You’ve made it difficult to live up to what I believe, and that is what God says to do, and that’s to forgive. You are forgiven, sir.” These words brought Ridgway to tears.”

About the Author

Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny, Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and *See the Big Picture*. Her blog is Yoga for the New World . Her latest book is Pharma Sutra: Healing The Body And Mind Through The Art Of Yoga. Please reprint this article with attribution bio and all links in tact.

Into the black hole: an interview with comics author Grant Morrison

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‘Annihilator,’ antiheroes, and the creation of modern myths

By Adi Robertson

Source: The Verge

More than almost anyone, Grant Morrison has plumbed the weirdness that lies at the heart of comics. Since the 1980s, he’s helped redefine the superhero genre, producing surreal, fourth-wall-breaking titles like Animal Man and Doom Patrol, as well as popular iterations of Batman and Superman and the DC Universe-wide Final Crisis storyline. The Invisibles, one of his best-known works, slowly unfurled from a straightforward story about a team of countercultural rebels into a mind-bending deconstruction of reality itself. His nonfiction book Supergods analyzed superheroes as mythological archetypes that we create and rework to express the basic elements of being human.

Morrison’s career is too long to neatly summarize, but one of its central themes is the highly permeable boundary between fiction and reality. His upcoming six-issue series, Annihilator, is no exception. Drawn by artist Frazer Irving, it’s about a screenwriter named Ray Spass struggling to write a sci-fi blockbuster about a rebel named Max Nomax, who has been exiled to the penumbra of a black hole for committing “the ultimate crime.” Soon, he’s writing not for a studio but for Nomax himself, who is simultaneously a fictional character, the ur-template for Byronic antiheroes throughout history, and a real man who gives Ray seven days to write him a past.

Devil deals and black-hole prisons notwithstanding, Annihilator doesn’t have the otherworldly trippiness of some of Morrison’s best-known work. In some places, it’s a take that to Hollywood banality; in others, it’s an attempt to distill fictional characters down to their most basic essence. With the first issue out tomorrow, we talked to Morrison about myth-making, originality, and the dark undercurrents of modern fiction.

Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Annihilator feels less packed with surreality than some of the things that I remember you for. It seems more traditionally designed and plotted.

You’re absolutely right. It was deliberately designed to seem more like a Hollywood thing, and that’s why it was the perfect project for Legendary, who are a Hollywood movie studio. So when they came to me and we talked about doing comics with Bob Schreck and Thomas Tull, this was the idea I thought was most appropriate for Legendary, because it was about filmmaking, it was about Hollywood, it was about the movies. So yeah, I mean, it’s a lot more real than some of the stuff that I write. But also it, as you’ll see, it goes into pretty bizarre areas. But I find that the mundane and the fantastic are pretty closely linked anyway, so I kind of enjoy doing both.

Ray Spass reminds me a little of the Stephen King prototype, the down-and-out writer.

The thing about Ray is that he’s not entirely down and out, he obviously has a little bit of money because he buys quite a nice house at the beginning of the book. But I think morally he’s down and out, and creatively he’s down and out. But he was based very much on a bunch of different people that I actually met in Los Angeles and found quite fascinating. People who’d live and work in Los Angeles on a pretty regular basis. So I was kind of basing it on my observations of people in the town.

You’ve talked about how Annihilator is sort of all about Los Angeles.

Absolutely. As I’ve said, obviously you start to cover similar ground, but I find the place fascinating. I’ve got a house there, and I’ve spent a lot of time there and I have a lot of friends there, and while there’s a certain softness and glamor and glitter to Los Angeles, I think what’s really interesting is what’s underneath. It’s a very dark place, and it has connections to this strange occult stuff, the whole Church of Satan and Anton LaVey, which I’ve mentioned before, or the Jack Parsons Jet Lab connection, or the Manson family, of the Doors and the Snake and the underground caverns that they used to talk about. And I think it’s got a very strange undercurrent that I find quite fascinating, because it’s completely at odds with the way most people think of Hollywood, probably.

And it’s a town of devil deals, it’s a town of people selling their souls for fame or success or money, so I think it’s got a very strange atmosphere. I tried to capture that, with Frazer [Irvine’s] help, in Annihilator.

It’s an incredibly dark comic.

At the same time, hopefully what we tried to do with it was make it funny, because I think if you’re trying to confront the dark in that sense, I think it has to at least be leavened with humanity’s great gift, which is a sense of humor. So hopefully it’ll at least give you a few laughs as well.

There were a couple of bits that were really fantastic. I loved the “cure for death” page, because it totally captured something being fantastic and then going to the next page and saying, “Wow, that’s also really overwrought and dramatic. But still great.”

That was like, the period at the end of that sentence, which sounded so full of bravado, and then you turn the page and have the sense of everything as a vast, black hole that doesn’t go away.

How do you approach creating an archetype like Max Nomax, compared to just using an actual existing character? You’re reinterpreting both, but how do you deal with them differently?

I was trying to do Ray Spass as a contemporary screenwriter who’s working in Hollywood right now,

and right now, Hollywood, as you know, is pretty obsessed with superheroic characters or, as you see, pretty archetypal characters. It’s easy to understand what Batman represents, for instance. So I was, I wanted to show that he was doing that kind of movie, that he was trying to create a hero for the 21st century, in these fraught and fretful times we live in.

So then I got to thinking about characters like Batman, and Hamlet, and that kind of high-cheekboned, Byronic, antihero character that’s kind of haunted all of our literature and so many of our movies and books and TV shows, and it was really just about going back. Because ultimately I thought that all tracks back to Milton’s Satan to be honest. So I kind of was telling a story about a devil, through the medium of science fiction. And I think the character came to me through these different angles, and then I thought about the different portrayals of that character in popular culture, so we connected them to Fantomas, you know, the early 20th-century surrealist hero who was kind of a pulp fiction character, or to characters like Diabolik from the 1970s Italian comic books, or Criminale, who was another, a character who dressed in a skull suit and went around robbing people and shooting things.

They were very dark antiheroes, and I was kind of trying to track the lineage of those guys right back to the original, and build up Nomax from basically Milton’s Satan via lots of these other portrayals of the ultimate rebel antihero poet dissident character that we’ve been haunted by.

What’s the difference to you between something like this, an archetype of something classic, and just a cliche?

Who knows? I think it just depends on how you deploy them. Perhaps it can easily shift into cliché — I mean, as long as I don’t feel it’s a cliché, then I’m fine with it. But I think if other people start to see that, then yeah, obviously it becomes embarrassing. So hopefully Nomax won’t be a cliché. We’ve tried to give him a personality that’s pretty strong and pretty direct, and again quite funny; he’s got a certain take on things. So I think the only way to do it is to be aware of its origins, and kind of the ubiquity of these figures, but at the same time give them enough personality that… Max Nomax is very different from the other iterations of the dark man I’ve mentioned, so hopefully he has his own personality as well.

The female characters that I’ve seen so far tend to be love interests and prostitutes. I’m wondering if that’s something that’s going to change?

It’s actually about that; there’s a character who comes in in Issue 3 who’s really central to the entire thing, and it’s kind of about the attitude of men to women in Hollywood. Again it’s something that you’ll see unfold, but actually part of the story is about the way men treat women. About how the screen treats women.

How do you do that without just replicating it? How do you depict that without it just being another part of Hollywood — talking about how men treat women but just treating them the same way?

By making the character strong, and by giving her things to do, which aren’t necessarily the traditional things that happen in stories like these. And that’s honestly what it’s all about, as you’ll see, I think. The female character who enters this story is very important to how it plays out.

Do you think these themes and myths are all something that are already set, and we’re just going back to a monomyth? Or are we still developing new archetypes, and new myths, and new ideas?

I honestly.. from having observed it, I think we keep going back to what are basically six human default personalities. We have these different characters: there’s the comedian, there’s the lover, there’s the stern judge, there’s the critic… I think people have always developed gods and ideas like that around these basic default states of the actual human personality. I think it’s just part of how we’re made up. It’s almost like the periodic table of being human. And I think no matter how modern these characters look, I’m not entirely convinced…

I think certain things like the atom bomb created a new archetype, and we saw how that appeared in fiction, and in pop culture. So yeah, there’s probably the potential for new technologies and new ideas to create their own archetypes, but I honestly think the human personality hasn’t changed much over our entire span of time. I know I live in the 21st century, so I have no idea what people felt like in the 1300s!

But that’s kind of my take on it, right or wrong, I kind of think we do go back to the same well often, because I think these are the characteristics we recognize in ourselves and others as being kind of universal.

Are there types that you wish you’d been able to write so far that you haven’t? Or that you’re interested in?

I guess as a writer you’re often drawn to characters like Nomax the rebel, because a lot of writers like to self-imagine themselves as rebels against society when in fact most of the time we’re just part of society. I’ve kind of tried to write about characters that I felt at least some connection with, but I think through my life I’ve always written about people who are slightly at right angles to society, and maybe that’s just… maybe I need to write more about kings and queens and dukes.

You were talking about Annihilator and darkness and this being a place that we are culturally right now. Do you think there’s something that follows that, something that we’re going to be moving into?

It’s hard to say, because we seem to be very enamored by darkness. Things just keep coming out like True Detective, which came out earlier in the year and was really talking about darkness and nihilism, and that obviously was inspired by a lot of the same books I read when I was working on Annihilator. But that was a great show and it really seemed timely and important and modern. I think whether it’s created by the media — because really as we know, most people are living better lives now than they have at any time in history, most people are safer, especially in the Western world, the child mortality rate has gone down, the chance of dying has lessened — so we actually live in a much better world, but our entertainment seems really very interested in the dark areas of experience. It goes all the way from the zombies to the obsession with war and violence that we have. I don’t know if it’s just because we’re so comfortable we can afford to play with these things, or if there is just something wrong with humanity.

Besides True Detective, what are you looking at right now in terms of contemporary artists, authors, etc.?

Not an awful lot of stuff. I tend to just lock myself away and work. But again a lot of stuff kind of relates to what I’m doing. I picked up a book quite recently called Luminarium by Alex Shakar, an author, and it just seemed to be talking about the same stuff that I’m talking about in Annihilator. It’s all about the abyss at the center of our lives that we try to forget about and we make stories about and we orbit around. So I’m just… I’ve been reading a lot of that, and then nihilism, like Raymond Brassier, the nihilist philosopher, and Thomas Ligotti, because I really wanted to get down into the dark areas of human experience.

If it doesn’t sound too grandiose, what kind of stuff do you think people are going to be mining your work for, and everybody else’s work for, in 40 years? The way that we’re looking back at things from the mid-20th century and reinterpreting them?

I don’t know. I think honestly it will just be more Batman. I think a lot of us will be forgotten in 40 years. I really don’t expect — my work is talking about the world I’m in, with the people that I live in the world with right now, so I never think about the future. I honestly think I’ll be forgotten in two generations, and what will be there is Sherlock Holmes and all the stuff that we’re kind of fascinated with, unless people break out of their nervous fear of the future and start to innovate again. Right now it seems like everybody’d kind of rather look backwards than forwards, because forwards seems a bit scary.

Marcus Garvey (17 August 1887 – 10 June 1940)

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Many are familiar with Marcus Garvey through numerous references to him in Reggae music since he’s a prophet in the Rastafarian religion. However, those of us in the US who value civil rights should be particularly thankful for Garvey’s legacy, for his life and the ideas he promoted were an influence on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. among many others and the organization he founded, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, continues his work to this day. This biography is from the Marcus Garvey Foundation:

The Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born in St. Ann Bay in the parish of St. Ann on the north coast of the island of Jamaica on 17 August 1887. He described it like this, “I was born in the beautiful Parish of St. Ann, near the falls of the Roaring River. I grew up with nature and drank much of her inspiration.” He developed an interest in playing cricket early in life. Apprenticed to his godfather who was a printer, young Marcus early evinced an interest in the printed word. He read widely and was always anxious to discuss current events as well as history. At the age of eighteen he was already a foreman at P.J. Benjamin’s Printing Shop in Jamaica’s capital city of Kingston. He could be seen grounding with his brethren at Victoria Pier on Sunday nights. Garvey joined the printer’s trade union and gained a reputation as courageous, dedicated and highly concerned young leader. At the age of twenty-three he embarked upon a most significant journey that carried him to both Latin America and Europe. He found employment on the docks of London, Liverpool and Cardiff like many West Indians and Africans at the time.

Meeting Duse Mohammed Ali, an Egyptian editor and publisher of the African Times and Orient Review, made a lasting impression on Marcus Garvey. Duse Ali later became active in the UNIA and later a newspaper publisher in Nigeria. Five days after he returned to Kingston, Jamaica, Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a mass based organization designed to unite people of African ascent around the world. Those who joined Garvey in founding the UNIA shared with him an interest in working hard to overcome conditions of oppression. The organization’s motto is “One God, One Aim, One Destiny.” Seeking the advice and assistance of Booker T. Washington, a well-known leader in the Black world community and at the helm of Tuskegee Institute, Marcus Garvey arrived in the U.S.A. several months after Washington’s death. He traveled from city to city spreading the word of Pan African unity. On May 10, l916, he kicked off the lecture tour at St. Mark’s Roman Catholic Church Hall on 138th Street and reportedly visited 38 states in a year. The cities Garvey visited later were to become major sites of UNIA activity. From those formative years at Liberty Hall on West 138th Street, this mass movement engulfed the African world, increasing from a few to millions worldwide. It wasn’t long before the establishment of the Negro World, Negro Factories Corporation, grocery stores, markets, steamships, and steam laundry companies occurred. The launching of the Black Star Line in 1919 and the successful First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World in 1920 catapulted this organization on to the world stage. Between World Wars I and II the UNIA rose and declined, never to be rivaled by another black mass movement.

Currently, the UNIA lives not only in its present form, but also in the memories of so many around the world. It is clear that the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League served as the model and foundation for 20th century Pan African movements.

Travelers of the Soul

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By Mark Anthony Rockeymoore

Source: Sacred Space in Time

You never know who you’re going to meet.

Other Travelers, along the Way.

How you’re going to affect their lives, or how they will affect yours.

Lives intersect seemingly at random. The person at the grocery store, met eyes and a few pleasantries. The car passed coming out of the driveway, your chance meeting on a road resulting in a pause, a hesitation in their journey. Thousands and millions of souls encountered along your journey, our journey.

Paths crossing, interacting through space and time. The acquaintances and the folks at work, the close friends and family. Greater and lesser degrees of zero-point geometry, non-local interactions of the sacred and profane intermixed, building intricate networks of causality that spiral out in increasingly complex patterns of manifest destiny.

Choices. Mingling bio-energetic auras, the electromagnetic emissions of the heart, body-consciousness of sub-quantum, zero-point interactions, nodal emanations of undetectable energy creating complex relationships between individuals, groups and the greater matrix of our shared reality itself. Each moment, each decision resulting in further permutations, infinite and unknown.

It is no wonder that life is hard. Lifetimes of personality development shape our individual expression and we interact with others based upon who are are at any given moment. The social mask provides the gateway of understanding, of belonging and difference, while the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent observes dispassionately through eyes alight with the flames of forever.

Science shows us that steady-state heart resonation displays the most constant state of being as the body’s electromagnetic sheath pulsates with health, wellness and frequencies of peace, joy and happiness. The cacaphonic discord of pain and suffering shapes lives through unrelinquished stress, dwelling on the past, worrying about the future, leads to shortened lives and dis-harmonic states of being.

Cultivate peace of body. Quietude of mind.Those we encounter in our travels find peace in this resonation and conflict can be lessened, leading to more beneficial interactions with all whom we meet. Taming the passions – to those prepared for such a state of being – clarifies intention and action. Simplifying thought simplifies life.

Each moment carries a contest of its own. Through our interactions with others, we meet the challenges of personality and spiritual development. Through our own examination of our inner life we face our own personal demons and angels and choose which way to go. Whichever way that may be, may it express the truest expression of your heart.

Causality in the form of the divine manifest looks mundane. Looks like the daily grind. But it can feel like the pathway to Eternity if you see it that way. Each moment can be a revelation of self-discovery and growth, each interaction with other Travelers, each experience the crowning achievement of a lifetime, spiraling up into the future consciously aware and prepared for whatever comes next, present in the now moment and living according to your deepest held ideals and understandings about the world and your place in it.

These Are Gnostic Times

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Christopher Knowle’s “The Secret Sun” is a blog I’ve followed with great interest since there’s some overlap in our pop-culture tastes and philosophical views. However, he’s been noticeably absent for the past year. Chris recently posted an update sharing his personal struggles and current concerns on The Secret Sun:

It’s been nearly a year since I’ve posted here, having been overwhelmed by the two irreducible realities in my life; work and chronic pain. Many a plan and project has been sacrificed on the altar to these unrelenting gods. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve gotten started on a project only to have to back burner it when the need to pay the bills rears its head. 

These gods are like some Janus-faced thing; one a stern taskmaster that nonetheless allows me to maintain some semblance of a middle class American life, the other a wild beast that seems to serve no purpose at all but make everything in my life more difficult, more tiring, less enjoyable. I’ve learned that my particular condition is known as the “rabid dog” of chronic pain conditions among health care professionals, and that even fibromyalgia specialists (who are used to dealing with a vexing disorder) find themselves exasperated by it.

I recently discovered that even a floatation tank aggravates it. Any normal chronic pain condition would benefit from floating in a nice, warm epsom salt bath, but with me it just irritated all of the damaged nerve clusters (known as “trigger points”). So needless to say most of my surplus energy has been spoken for.

For my part, I think the local environment is the primary stressor with my condition (particularly the humidity, barometric pressure, static electricity and mold), which is all too appropriate for a diehard AstroGnostic. I’ve tried everything but it beats back everything you throw at it. Because I don’t belong here.

The problem is that I want my daughter to be able to take advantage of the outstanding public school system as her brothers did, since that experience allowed her oldest brother to graduate with highest honors from a major university this year and score a good paying job even before he was finished with school. The notion of self-sacrifice has taken a beating in the Selfie Decade, but as my grandpappy used to say, fuck that shit. Do the best for your children.

So this Janus-like lord that’s parked itself over my life like a permanent Saturn transit basically drove me to close up shop, for the very immediate and compelling reason that I very much didn’t want to die.

I hadn’t planned to make a book-length series out of the Secret Star Trek thing, it simply imposed itself upon based on a random detail in Star Trek into Darkness. But in addition to putting in 12 to 14 hour work days I found myself driven to capture this story as each new revelation came to light. It was insane. Obsessive-compulsive workaholic binge madness.

For sure a lot of it had been percolating in my unconscious for some time, but that weird tingling in my sinuses just wouldn’t leave me alone, that signal that drives me on to dig up hidden connections. But that’s not always the healthiest thing to do when your energies are required elsewhere.

What’s more, I have to say the response to the post didn’t feel commensurate to the information that was being revealed. This is very much a product of the new Internet reality, one I can’t exactly say I’m crazy about but one that needs to be adapted to nonetheless. I’ve come to understand that longform posts (like, say, this) are self-defeating in an age when more and more people are accessing the Internet through their phones.

Which goes to show you that the notion that evolution leads to things getting better is one of our culture’s most pernicious myths. 

 Nearly everything is getting demonstrably worse.

But it’s OK- I’m addressing a small core of people here intentionally. I don’t plan to be doing a lot of long-form blogging in the long run.

 My longterm plan is to reactivate The Secret Sun Radio Mystery Hour, which I had already planned to do before hardware problems made that an impossibility (ie., my computer got all messed up). 

I still haven’t fully solved those problems. I have a new computer but now we’ve been having a lot of problems with our current ISP and the router (if it’s not one thing…). But once those are addressed- hopefully by summer’s end- I hope to start up the Mystery Hour again. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a couple years now, but if you’ve gotten this far you’ll understand how events have conspired to keep me away from the microphone

With the onetime major alt.research podcast becoming something very much unrecognizable to those of us who were there in its early days, there seems to be an opening for something interesting to fill the vacancy. But I will only pursue this if I can do so with the highest level of professionalism I can muster. I have to admit that I got complacent with a few podcast appearances in the past, simply because I was too busy or preoccupied to prepare like should. I regret that and don’t intend to repeat that in the future.

I’m taking suggestions for hosting services. My experience with FraudBean was a nightmare.

 SPEAKING OF NIGHTMARES

I don’t think I need to go into too much detail as to how much worse things have gotten out there in the past year, how the world seems perched on the brink of a conflagration the likes of which it hasn’t seen in 70 years. 

 The past few days I was going through some old posts and it was depressing to see news stories of people’s expectations for Obama (that Peace Prize seems like the sickest joke imaginable now), and how they’ve been dashed.

The American Republic has given way to Empire, of that we can all agree. Liberals say nothing at all about it (well, besides mocking the Kulaks in flyover country) because they are hypnotized into believing they will be the courtiers in the new Imperial palace, but in reality the rugs are slowly being pulled from beneath them. By the time they notice it will be too late and they’ll all be out on the street.*

One of these rugs is publishing. Borders is gone and Barnes and Noble is in very serious trouble. Ebook sales are falling as well. The major publishers are fighting Amazon for the right to charge full price for Ebooks (which benefits neither authors nor consumers), a fight that may go down in history as their Waterloo.

I’m seeing this from the inside and can’t say more than it’s much worse than it looks from the outside. I haven’t published anything in 4 years because my experience with Secret History of Rock n’ Roll didn’t whet my appetite for another go-round. I simply can’t deal with the limitations imposed on my work by commercial publishing.

My work needs the tools of academic publishing- footnotes, bibliographies, indices, appendices- otherwise it’s too easy for skeptics to dismiss out of hand. I also need as much room as I need to put my points across. All of this is anathema to commercial publishers who are convinced their customer pool is made up of idiots. But I don’t. I think the people who are drawn to alternative points of view want as much data as you can give them.

My first book was self-published and I must say it was the only truly positive experience I’ve had in the two decades I’ve had my work in print. And with publishers expecting authors to do more and more of the promotional work, there’s really very little reason to continue with conventional publishing anymore.

So that is something else I wish to pursue in the future. I’ve got quite a few projects in various stages of development so finding compelling material won’t be a problem. Finding time might be, but that’s another story…

THE WORK

The Work (as in the Great Work) continues on. I’ll save that for a later post but all I can say for now is that it’s been rather stunning and has seriously fucked with my previously held beliefs in causality, agency and whatever hell else you want to throw in. And this is from a guy who’s been messing around with Synchronicity and the rest of it for decades now.

What is the point of it? The point seems to be to find strength to carry on with the work in a world seemingly hellbent on making miserable, mindless robots of us all. 

And that’s quite a point.

I’d like to say the bad guys will lose because good always triumphs but right now that’s a pretty hard prediction to make. But people like us have been here before, and maybe by looking at how they dealt with the Black Iron Prison we too can work up some coping strategies of our own.

32 years ago The Bad Brains wrote a song that declared “These are Coptic Times.” I don’t know if they really understood the meaning of the word, maybe they thought it just sounded heavy and Biblical. What these are are Gnostic times, there are no two ways about it.

These are the times prophesied by the Gnostics and the times most conducive to Gnostic thought. Not necessarily Alexandrian or Bogomil Gnostic thought- the genius of Gnostic thinking is its elasticity and adaptability. A Gnostic canon is an oxymoron.

I think in the days to come a new Gnostic thinking– one that has shaken off the dust and cobwebs of the library and the lecture hall– might be the difference between sanity and the Abyss.

There’s a strange symmetry of history as we stand on the brink of a new Cold War with Russia and China; the Gnostic Gospels unveiled themselves in 1945 at the dawn of the first Cold War, now a major diaspora of Gnostic peoples- Mandaeans, Ismailis, Yezidis, Druze- looms as Obama’s ISIS mad dogs run rampant through Mesopotamia and Syria.

Already many of these Gnostic people have sought refugee status, it will be fascinating if they break centuries of separation and seek to make connections in their new homes.

Scholar Harold Bloom saw Gnosticism as America’s native religion and perhaps the already waning atheist/nihilist phase is a necessary step in shaking off the last vestiges of Puritanism and evolving into a purer, more self-aware variety of Gnosis. One that has broken away from the stifling Medieval past.

2000 years ago Gnosticism and Christianity struggled for the hearts and minds of an Empire, but the world wasn’t yet ready for Gnosis and Gnosis wasn’t yet ready for the world. Then too the Empire’s cosmopolitans and sophisticates shunned all gods and mysteries, only to see their legacy wiped forever from the face of the earth. The same fate awaits their counterparts today. The question remains who will inherit the future?

 * Literally. Worse still, they may well be served up as scapegoats to the burgeoning far right, that is angrier than I’ve seen in my lifetime.

 

The Awakening – Clash of Civilizations

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By Zen Gardner

Source: ZenGardner.com

Despite the furious efforts of the world’s Machiavellian destroyers, humanity is waking up. We’re seeing significant progress in exposing the ongoing brutal Gaza extermination, the mass revelation of chemtrails and other neo-scientific incursions, the disastrous effects of EMFs of every source, GMO food manipulation, tectronic surveillance and monitoring, and the front and center clearly induced global war and the militarization of society.

We’re in the thick of it now.

Don’t let these events and seeming contests of ideology throw you. There’s nothing level about this playing field, and the mass narrative is strong propaganda. Don’t even listen to it. Rely on your heart and alternative sources. Their only weapon is our consent by yielding to their lies. Disinformation serves several purposes, the most insidious of which is to introduce doubt to your heartfelt conviction regarding the reality of what is obviously before you. Keeping the mass mind at bay is imperative to their program.

Why? If we woke up to the truth we’d stop our participation and/or rise up and overthrow them. And they know that.

Major Signs of Awakening

As mentioned above, there are many manifestations that the Truth is flooding in to human consciousness. What we collectively do with this information is one thing; what we individually do with it is the key. We either activate, or we don’t. The more who do, the greater the mass awakening. With or without the masses, the awakening is coming to pass anyway, come what may. That’s the wonderfully exciting reality. What the naysayers and foot draggers do with it is their business, and their demise if they choose wrongly to ignore what is more obvious by the minute.

That Israelis are sitting on a hill sipping drinks in their beach chairs cheering the slaughter of civilian Palestinians should send shivers up anyone’s spine. That a captive population is being mercilessly annihilated on any pretext should shock even the most hard of hearing soul. Yet the mainstream media pounds its narrative of who the poor defenseless “good guys” are versus the obvious genocide and territory grab by an invading army.

Why not? The US has been doing this for decades, as have the Israelis. The conditioning runs deep. Literally mindfucked Amerikans are cheering just as avidly as is a swath of other similarly infected Canadians and Europeans and other mentally and spiritually disturbed Zionists around the world. The rest of the world sees it for what it is. A targeted slaughter and annihilation of something that’s in the way of another globalist maneuver for psychopaths to get what they want. And when it comes to the rabid Zionists everyone stands back.  The puppet powers and similarly cowed populace don’t dare touch them. Zionist fingers are in every facet of today’s societal and governmental fabric. The world is afraid to confront them.

Yet the truth of this masqueraded massacre is for all to see. The onus is on humanity. And the alternative is becoming crystal clear.

Financial, Governmental and Mad Scientific Schemes are Increasingly Obvious

Besides the obviously engineered take down of the Middle East and now Ukraine, there are many other fronts this hurricane of Truth is eroding in the human psyche. The geoengineering of our climate, oceans and soil are also becoming painfully, for them, clear. As long as real information is available hungry souls will find it and be forced to process it.

We also clearly see the central banking system, the FED, and our manipulated financial structure being exposed. Sitting helplessly watching no longer becomes an option. Pulling out of their system is a given eventuality, and it’s happening, as it becomes more evident by the day that major governmental powers are run by bought-off crooks and stooges.

The geoengineering chemtrail scam, poisoning humanity from it’s skies for whatever pretense, is taking a serious beating as communication and committed activism exposing this global affront wears away the veneer of outright lies and denial of such an obvious phenomenon. Take a look at the recent results of  sincere, concerned determination to bring this issue to the forefront of public awareness:

Our EMF Bombardment

Another insidious attack on our health and freedom is the electromagnetic assault on humanity, all in the guise of convenience, “conservation” and safety of course. Never mind the horrific surveillance invasion of our planet, the very presence of so many electromagnetic rays from so many man-made sources permeating our existence is one of the greatest threats to us, altering our genetic and physical make up and even influencing our thoughts and inherent impulses.

Besides France banning wi-fi in schools and Russia’s cellphone for youngsters prohibition, here’s just one example of the growing backlash under way:

Brazilian Courts order lower electromagnetic pollution

The Brazilian Judiciary determined to reduce the level of electromagnetic pollution generated by power lines to standard adopted by Swiss law (1.0 microtesla).

Two associations of residents in São Paulo — the largest city of Brazil — proposed the action. The plaintiff has pleaded to not be exposed to electromagnetic fields incompatible with the human health.

The electromagnetic fields generated by power lines that cross these areas is 10 times greater than the level determined by the court. The judgment of the Court of State of São Paulo (Tribunal de Justiça de São Paulo) has determined that the concessionaire of electric power reduces the electromagnetic field generated by power lines that pass through these neighborhoods. (Source)

GMO Rejection

The public outcry against genetically modified foods and the resultant use of the killer chemical glysophate has been front and center for quite a while. While the Monsanto dynasty and its network of affiliate chemical and distribution companies and ongoing governmental bribes and planted personnel continues its campaign, the rise against such infected food tyranny has been proportionally greater.

You just don’t mess with conscious people’s health. Period. And there are more of us by the minute.

Russia, China and a host of other nations are refusing to import GMO products. That this is so front and center in the public mind, whatever their entrained reflexive minds tell them, highlights this issue. Even more so in Amerika, whether to have these tampered with foods even labelled is appearing at their ballot boxes is keeping this subject front and center.

That’s pretty tough to ignore, even for the most brain dead, Brave New World “Epsilon” cretin out there.

The awakened civilization rolls on.

The List Continues

If you need further encouragement, get involved. You’ll see signs of it everywhere. Major inroads of Truth are being made by the minute as these disgusting forces continue to attempt to forge their desired goal of a subservient, complacent and even happily servile work force. Damn them, and do it with gusto.

Don’t be deceived, it’s all a wicked charade. A ploy, a scam: a counterfeit civilization they’re trying to construct that true conscious humanity is dissolving by the hour.

Disconnect – disobey – and de-enlist. Break your unconscious and conscious agreements. The parasites will shrivel up and disappear.

The time is now. It’s ours for the taking. And receiving.

Much love always, keep on, Zen