More Evidence of Cataclysm

Researchers have found new evidence that a massive comet or asteroid exploded over Canada about 12,000 years ago, setting off a global cataclysm and nearly extinguishing mankind. They have found microscopic diamonds in Ohio and Indiana that originated in Canada's diamond-bearing fields and were blown across the northern hemisphere by the force of the explosion. The implications of this are huge for our knowledge our planet and the history of its earliest civilizations, some of which may have been highly sophisticated and all of which were wiped out by the cataclysm.

Click here to read more in my blog Ancient Tides.

Friday Eclipse May Shed Light on Campaigns

Friday’s total solar eclipse is at 6:12 a.m. EDT, at the time of the New Moon, with some interesting astrological implications for the political scene. (See my post An Astrologically Troubled Election Day for an overview.)

Most of the astrological attention right now is on Barack Obama because of his August 4th birthday and corresponding birth chart.

North Carolina astrologer Lynn Hayes is among the astrologers making some prognostications on the eclipse’s impact on the U.S. political scene. This is from her blog, Astrological Musings:

This eclipse could bring out some interesting facets of the US presidential candidates, since it is exactly square to Uranus in McCain's chart and very close to a square to Neptune in Obama's chart. This is interesting because these are the two planets that cause the candidates the most trouble. Uranus (radical behavior) is square to McCain's Mars, the astrological dynamic that results in McCain's "maverick" status that he is trying so hard now to keep under wraps. Neptune (redemption and illusion) is square to Obama's Sun, and this is the chart factor that results in the adoration of Obama that some find so frightening. Perhaps during this eclipse period some of the real substance that underlies these factors may be revealed.

Teri Parsley Starnes of Minneapolis writes in her Stardance Astrology blog:

During an eclipse, light gives way to shadow suddenly and then returns just as quickly. Eclipses set us upon new pathways. They have the potential to be quite dramatic . . . Both candidates share planets at the same degree of Leo. Obama’s Sun is at 12 Leo and McCain’s Mars is also at 12 Leo. This month’s eclipse is at 9 Leo. I usually do not consider a 3 degree orb [the difference between 9 and 12] to be applicable to an eclipse transit, however there is too much coincidence here to ignore. Something is up. Both of these candidates are experiencing this eclipse . . . Something important is happening in our nation’s history and destiny with the candidacy of these two men. The current transit of Uranus in Pisces and Saturn in Virgo are poised to expose what this is.

British astrologer Deborah Houlding, in a column entitled Traditional Rules for Judging Eclipses, quotes this statement regarding those in the sign of Leo, such as Friday's eclipse: "Eclipses in Leo portend death or misfortune for royalty, nobility and 'persons of quality'; the ruination and destruction of ancient buildings, palaces and churches; division amongst the clergy, the besieging of towns, and a scarcity of horses and grain."

Moving Beyond Neanderthal

Shaman's mountaintop ritual in southern Siberia.

Meditation and shamanic ritual may have been a factor provoking the genetic change that, about 200,000 years ago, separated Neanderthal man from the modern human.

That’s a profound statement, if you stop and think about it. Anyone who reads this blog knows I deeply believe in the benefits of meditation – not necessarily spending hours sitting uncomfortably on a tiny cushion, rather a few minutes grabbed here and there from our hectic schedules to simply stop.

Stop and let your mind unwind. 

Doing it periodically throughout the day can change your life, or actually give your life back to you.

Anyway, back to the scientific proposition put forth by psychologist Matt J. Rossano in a recent issue of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal and written up on Smithsonian.com (click here for the article). 

“We have decent evidence that shamanistic rituals may go very deep into history, and that these rituals might have had positive psychological effects,” Rossano says.

Strengthening the Brain

Shamanic rituals – often involving groups sitting for hours or days at a time – strengthened parts of the Neanderthal brain. As the neural areas associated with attention and memory grew stronger, the brains of descendent generations were better able to hold information and to make connections such as we do with modern working memory. This led to the ability to comprehend complex symbolism, and presumably, a genetic change in the structure of the brain.

Symbolism became apparent by 50,000 years ago in cave paintings. “If you’re going to use symbols, you have to be able to think abstractly and hold one thing in mind while recognizing that the literal thing is not really its meaning,” Rossano says.

Even today, practicing meditation has measurable effects on our brains. Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar discovered in 2005 that the brains of meditators were generally more developed in certain parts, especially those pertaining to attention, according the Smithsonian article.

Let Go. Just let go.

Here's a 2-minute clip from a man I greatly admire. Peter Russell is a physicist and author of a handful of spiritually sound books. In this YouTube clip he talks about finding the Divine within ourselves. There are three or four other clips in this series, each of which is a gem of wisdom.

Excerpt: Hide and Seek and Stunned (from A Dowser's Diary)

I dreamed up an experiment to test my newfound dowsing ability in hopes of advancing it somehow. I’d been successful at getting my L-rods to tell me yes and no, at reacting to water on the basement floor and locating the water lines in our neighborhood. Then I got thinking about what Hamish Miller wrote about finding hidden objects and figured that would be a good next step. I’m still stunned over what happened.

To read the complete post in my A Dowser's Diary blog, please click here.

Patience: The Watchful Waiting

While as individuals we may still regard patience as a virtue, much of society is structured to ignore it, in fact to disdain it: Do it now! Don’t wait! He who lingers misses the big rewards; e.g., big paycheck, big house, big SUV.

In my recent re-reading of the American psychic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), I’ve been reminded of the extraordinary emphasis he put on patience. In his trance state where he channeled thousands of health readings, prophesies and instructions on spiritual guidance, he clearly put patience high on the list of necessary human qualities. In fact, he regarded it as part of a metaphysical triad, along with the dimensions of time and space.

This quote from one of his trance readings illustrates how highly he ranked patience:

Then begin now to sow the seeds of the spirit in your mental attitudes. And the first of these is patience. For in patience you possess your soul. In patience you become aware that the body is but a temple, but an outward appearance; that the mind and soul are that with which you dwell constantly.

With Time and Space

In his book The Essential Edgar Cayce, Mark Thurston, a longtime affiliate of the Association for Research and Enlightenment that Cayce founded, writes, “In Cayce’s scheme of an orderly universe, humans live in a three-dimensional state of consciousness. Time and space, two of the dimensions, are complemented by patience, allowing us to effectively meet the demands, paradoxes, and limitations imposed by time and space.”

That’s a complicated yet profound concept – that patience is what enables us to function in the time/space construct in which we physically exist. The wrinkle is that patience is also what allows us to perceive beyond time and space. Gina Cerminara noted this in her book Many Mansions: The Edgar Cayce Story on Reincarnation:

Patience is not merely a passive thing … It is a watchful waiting, a positive rather than a negative virtue. It is the attitude of a soul that knows time and space to be, in a sense, illusory restrictions. When consciousness becomes unfettered by time and space, then is patience made perfect.

Practicing Patience

There’s the type of patience we usually associate with the word – accepting or tolerating things, situations and people who disturb, disrupt or annoy us – but Cayce’s brand of patience makes larger demands, and bestows larger rewards.

With it, we look beyond the petty annoyances and contemplate our lives with a cosmic proportion, sensing how the spiritual reality intersects with the physical reality. We “understand the purposefulness” of time and space, while accepting that our spiritual existence transcends them.

Here’s how Thurston explains it:

Patience and tolerance force us to shift gears and to look at life in a new way, requiring that we go beyond appearances. In other words, our consciousness shifts and we see and feel things in a different way. When we’re patient, we have a new sense of time. When we’re tolerant, we see the behavior of other people in a way that leaves room for understanding and forgiveness. Neither quality makes much sense from a materialistic point of view; for example, the appearance we’re going to miss the boat if we don’t hurry up, or that people are going to get the best of us if we let them get away with it. But even though patience and tolerance don’t always seem very logical, they are qualities that awaken us to the realization that we are indeed souls. It’s that awareness that is so very key to our mission here on earth.

Well put.

Excerpt: Dowsing Around the Block (from A Dowser's Diary)

I was elated with having dowsed the water in my basement. More or less. It’s true that the water was in plain view, but the fact that my rods had signaled “yes” when my foot touched the water meant something. But deep down I wondered: “Was I cheating? Does this count?”

(From my A Dowser's Diary blog. For the complete post, click here.)

An Astrologically Troubled Election Day

Elections are prime fodder for astrologers, though the more skilled and conscientious of them tend toward caution in their prognostications. Pinning down specific “birth” locations and times is subjective and prone to error when it comes to creating the astrological charts.

Nevertheless, a number of notable astrologers were surprisingly accurate in their forecasts for the 2000 and 2004 elections, especially regarding the protracted, confusing and unscrupulous activities surrounding 2000’s presidential results.

That being said, Election Day 2008 is proving difficult and disturbing for many astrologers. As writer Barry Orr recently stated, “This year, something doesn’t seem right. No one feels good about the astrological conditions on election day, nor the conditions on inauguration day. There is a shadow looming over the charts.”

Alignment of Opposites

Part of the shadow is the Saturn-Uranus opposition. Those two astrologically influential planets will be exactly 180 degrees opposite one another at 8 a.m., Washington DC time, on election day, November 4. It’s a rare alignment, occurring every 45 years, and is marked by social upheaval and tinges of revolution as the rebellious aspects of Uranus tear into Saturn’s rigid conservatism. This particular instance is the first of five planetary oppositions that will end in July of 2010. The last Saturn-Uranus opposition was 1965-67, and some of you may be able to recall the amount of societal change embodied in those years.

Shadows Over Results

Adding to the discomfort are some of the 2008 election interpretations voiced by prominent astrologers in May at the United Astrology Congress in Denver. Most of them reportedly focused on the Saturn-Uranus opposition, Mercury moving into Scorpio, Mars and Neptune at 90-degree separation and some lesser influences.

One astrologer, Robert Hand, said the solar eclipse in two weeks, August 1, highlights the aspect of George Bush’s chart dealing with behind-the-scenes power structures. “The period of time at least a month before and after this date (August 1) should be watched carefully,” Orr writes. Such details are fueling the fears of conspiracy theorists who note that the Bush administration has quietly put laws into effect empowering Bush to postpone or cancel the election in the event of a “national emergency,” such as a terrorist attack. This in turn fuels the supposition that the Bush administration has laid the foundation for Bush serving a third term.

Another astrologer, Gary Christen, sees a dark-horse candidate emerging after an “unfortunate event” befalls either the nation or one of the candidates, resulting in one or more of the candidates leaving the race. Astrologer Jacob Scwartz, who accurately predicted much of the 2000 election turmoil, sees Democratic Senator Joseph Biden as the Democratic candidate for president. This is consistent with fears that Obama will be assassinated or that some tragedy will befall McCain, since neither of them emerge clearly when the election results are charted.

Cosmos and Psyche

Is it all nonsense? A couple of years ago I would have thought so. But reading the book Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas dramatically changed my regard for astrology. I heartily recommend his book to people even remotely curious about the patterns of history. Here’s what Tarnas wrote about the Saturn-Uranus opposition:

Historical periods in which Saturn and Uranus moved into dynamic aspect were marked by certain distinctive themes that were readily intelligible in terms of the archetypal principles associated with these two planets: the exacerbation of tensions between authority and rebellion, order and freedom, structure and change. Often the two archetypal principles combined and interpenetrated in contradictory ways: repressive revolution, erratically unpredictable authority, and so forth, as evident during the Terror in revolutionary France and the Cultural Revolution in communist China... Especially frequent with this cycle were crises and the sudden collapse of structures, crashes, and accidents, grim awakenings, and sudden breakdowns, whether political, economic, or psychological.

Just remember, this alignment occurs at 8 o’clock on the morning of Election Day.

Excerpt: Why I Started This Blog (from Ancient Tides)

It’s time to come clean. Here is my personal motivation for starting this “Ancient Tides” blog a couple of months ago. I read a book in late spring entitled Cataclysm!: Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C., authored by D.S. Allan and J.B. Delair. It sent my mind reeling with huge questions about how and what we are taught regarding the history of this planet.

(From my Ancient Tides blog. For the complete post, click here.)

Living Your Life

I was re-reading Gina Cerminara’s Many Mansions: The Edgar Cayce Story on Reincarnation a couple of nights ago and found, in startling brevity, her list of the core spiritual truths gleaned from 2,500 readings the famed psychic gave on the universe and man’s relation to it.

• God exists.
  
• Every soul is a portion of God.
  
• Life is purposeful.
  
• Life is continuous.
  
• All human life operates under the law of karma/reincarnation.
  
• Love fulfills that law.
  
• The will of man creates his destiny.
  
• The mind of man has formative power.
  
• The answer to all problems is within the self.

Based on these truths, she also summarized Cayce’s instructions on how to live one’s life.

• Realize first your relationship to the Creative Forces of the Universe, or God.
  
• Formulate your ideals and purposes in life.
  
• Strive to achieve those ideals.
  
• Be active.
  
• Be patient.
  
• Be joyous.
  
• Leave the results to God.
  
• Do not seek to evade any problem.
  
• Be a channel of good to other persons.
  

Excerpt: Background (from A Dowser's Diary)

In late April, right about the time I cracked my skull, I ordered Dowsing: A Journey Beyond Our Five Senses by Hamish Miller, from Amazon.com. I must have seen or heard or read something about dowsing, but for the life of me I cannot recall what it was that prompted me to place the order. Why dowsing? Why that book?

(From my Dowser's Diary blog. For the complete post, click here.)

A Declaration in Tatters

It’s the Fourth of July.

Independence Day.

As a lifelong student of American history, I consider this as one of the calendar’s great days. It celebrates the assembly of a group of profound thinkers who penned brilliant words that inspired a war that, five years later, turned a handful of Old World colonies into a vibrant new nation.

At the heart of the new nation were two philosophies: government by democracy, and economics by capitalism.

Today, in that nation, both democracy and capitalism are in serious trouble.

Democracy depends on an intelligent and informed electorate. If the voters are ignorant—unaware that much of what they are told about and by their government rests on lies and falsehoods—they cannot vote with the insight democracy demands. If their elected representatives do not represent them, but instead represent entities who have contributed heavily to electoral campaigns, then the very spirit of democracy is not served.

Today the nation is involved in a horrific and senseless war, and it was launched on lies. The nation is slaughtering innocent people, torturing many others and spying on its own citizens. Our news people—so vital to an informed electorate—are restrained from routinely exposing these wrongs by the huge corporations that employ them. We watch as “news” is trivialized into celebrity-watching and “reality TV” that has no basis in any reality we would want to be part of.

Capitalism is dependent on growth. We see our economic and governmental leaders interpreting it as “growth at any cost.” Countless people are purchasing countless things large and small without the money to do so. Citizens and government alike are so over-extended with credit that if our creditors were to call in the loans, citizens and government alike would be immediately and irreversibly bankrupt.

We cannot blame those founders who argued, compromised and finally reached agreement in Philadelphia in 1776. We have read their thoughts on the need for an informed electorate, for separation of church and state, for civil liberties, for personal privacy, for an honorable presence in the world. And our so-called leaders — politicians and corporations — have decided they know better. They have shredded the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and are doing great damage to the Constitution.

We have one hope.

This is election year.

We can try our best to identify the candidates who are closest in spirit, philosophy and integrity to those great men in Philadelphia and then vote for those candidates … and hope the voting machines aren’t rigged.

The Blind Man & the Cub ~ Aesop Fable #37

There was a blind man who was in the habit of identifying any animal that was placed in his hands by touching it. Once they gave him a wolf cub. Even after stroking the animal he was not sure of its identity, so he said, "I'm not sure whether it is the cub of a wolf or a fox or some similar creature. But I do know this is not the kind of animal that should accompany a flock of sheep!"

Moral: In the same way, bad people are revealed by their features.

I Ching #51 ~ The Arousing (Shock, Thunder)

Shock brings success.

Shock comes ~ oh, oh!

Laughing words ~ ha, ha!

The shock terrifies for a hundred miles,

And he does not let fall the sacrificial spoon and chalice.

The shock that comes from the manifestation of God within the depth of the earth makes man afraid, but this fear of God is good, for joy and merriment can follow upon it. When a man has learned within his heart what fear and trembling mean, he is safeguarded against any terror produced by outside influences. Let the thunder roll and spread terror a hundred miles around: he remains so composed and reverent in spirit that the sacrificial rite is not interrupted. This is the spirit that must animate leaders and rulers of men ~ a profound inner seriousness from which all outer terrors glance off harmlessly.

Welcoming the Summer Solstice

The megaliths of Stonehenge are aligned with the summer solstice sun, making England’s 5000-year-old monument a gathering place for celebrating the longest day of the year. In the photo above, revelers await the dawn amidst the floodlit stones. About 25,000 people gather at Stonehenge each summer solstice to celebrate the seasonal change.

For several solstice-related photos from National Geographic, click here. For a National Geographic article about the summer and winter solstices, click here.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Dunn

From the Tao Te Ching

The great Way is easy,
yet people prefer the side paths.
Be aware when things are out of balance.
Stay centered within the Tao.

When rich speculators prosper
while farmers lose their land;
when government officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
while the poor have nowhere to turn -- 
all this is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the Tao.

Meditation: Psychotherapy's Ancient New Tool

Psychotherapy is about one hundred years old. The practice of meditation goes back at least three thousand years. And now psychotherapists are saying meditation may be the best thing to happen to psychotherapy, ever.

Specifically, therapists are referring to “mindfulness meditation,” defined by Siddhartha Gautama around 500 B.C. as the key practice of Buddhism.

Since its inception with Sigmund Freud, psychotherapists have relied on patients’ words and then reframing patients’ thoughts to gain insight into the subconscious to alleviate despair, anxiety and many forms of mental illness. Psychotherapists today are discovering what Buddhists worldwide have known for millennia: Meditation bypasses the limitations of language and goes straight to the mind with remedial power.

That power resides mostly in letting things be. Not trying to change everything. Just see it for what it is.

Mindfulness avoids some of the complexities of Transcendental Meditation, which also has bushels of scientific studies to support its value. With mindfulness, you sit comfortably and, for ten minutes or more, you take note of bodily sensations and your breathing. As thoughts enter your mind, you let them pass without judgment. Always bring your attention back to the rhythm of your breathing as a focus.

Eventually you learn to gain control of your attention and reduce the usual brain chatter. Some therapists now say that getting a grip on your attention helps you face troubling thoughts, endure the pain or anger or sadness associated with them, and then let them pass.

The difference from conventional psychotherapy is in not trying to alter the thoughts or feelings – an action that can backfire with damaging results.

According to a recent New York Times article, the National Institute of Health is financing 50 studies testing mindfulness meditation for relieving stress, easing addictions, improving attention and easing despair.

“It’s a shift from having our mental health defined by the content of our thoughts,” said Steven Hayes, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, “to having it defined by our relationship to that content – and changing that relationship by sitting with, noticing and becoming disentangled from our definition of ourselves.”

I encourage your to read the entire Times article.

I encourage you to at least make an attempt to incorporate some form of meditation into your life. It’s not a major investment, though it is a commitment.

In fact, for the post below, I’m going to reprint one of my earliest Quantum Spirit posts, with its link to Peter Russell’s effective three-minute meditation.

Stop for a Minute or Three

(I'm reprinting this post - one of my earliest on Quantum Spirit - because of the simple effectiveness of Peter Russell's approach. Please try it.)

I'm a great believer in meditation. It's capable of accomplishing wondrous things in each of us if we'd just take a few moments to allow it to work. There are probably seven books on meditation on a shelf in my office and you can learn almost everything in any of them in the next three minutes.

Meditation can work on lofty spiritual planes or it can be the simple yet invisible cord that holds your life together. It can cure you of an impressive number of illnesses - mental and physical. I speak from experience.

3-MINUTE MEDITATION

But I've already said enough. Click on the link to Peter Russell's Three-Minute Meditation. He's an English physicist, consciousness researcher, lecturer, and author of a couple of my favorite books. He leads you through about two of minutes of calming instruction and then you can meditate for three or thirty minutes, your call. No need for special positions, special clothing or a special mantra.

You'll see how easy it is and how relaxing yet profound the experience can be, and now you can meditate whenever the desire arises. Thank you, Peter.

America the Anxious

Edvard Munch's 1896 painting entitled "Anxiety."

News Flash:

Anxiety disorder is now the number one mental-health problem in the world.

Update:

Anxiety disorder is disproportionately prevalent in the United States.

Today’s edition of Salon.com featured a searing column after my own heart, in which writer Meredith Maran lays out the situation regarding Americans’ susceptibililty to anxiety disorder. (See my April 16 post on antidepressants, “Knowing Too Little.”)

“Turns out that anxiety disorder -- a spectrum that includes panic, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress, phobias and the catch-all, generalized anxiety disorder -- is now the most prevalent mental health problem in the world,” Maran writes.

“Like Burger Kings and Botox clinics, AD (anxiety disorder) is disproportionately prevalent in the U.S. According to the most recent World Mental Health Survey, Americans are the most anxious humans on earth,” she goes on. “Forty million of us -- that's 28.8 percent -- suffer from the ailment that the National Institutes of Mental Health defines as ‘an excessive, irrational dread of everyday situations.”

By the way, I bring all this up to amplify my two most recent posts –- the one on the “New Survivalists” who, as you read this, are stocking their basements with still more canned goods, and yesterday's regarding the possibility that fear of apocalyptic cataclysm resides deep in our racial memory.

But racial memory or not, Americans seems to have a particular vulnerability to anxiety, as Maran notes in her article. “We're nine times more likely to be anxious than the Chinese laborers who assemble our children's toys, whose working and living conditions would make us run screaming for a Xanax IV. And 94.4 percent of Mexicans -- bone-crushing poverty and barbed-wire borders notwithstanding -- have never experienced a major episode of anxiety or depression. But move a Mexicano north of the border, according to a study in the December 2004 National Institutes of Health News, and his mental health will deteriorate faster than you can say ‘Campesinos sí, NAFTA no.’

Maran –- like you, like I -- wants to know why.

“I call on Patricia Pearson -- novelist, anxious person and author of A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine). The book is a genre-busting page turner: a portrait of Pearson's lifelong struggle with anxiety, melded with a journalistic investigation of what ails her, and me and us. ‘Mexicans have stronger family ties, deeper connections to their community, greater involvement in collective rituals through their churches and unions and schools,’ Pearson tells me. ‘And there's less onus on the individual in Mexico to achieve material success.’”

From there, Maran summarizes her own experiences with various therapies and, of course, antidepressants.

(To bring you up to speed, I believe certain antidepressants are valuable for certain people. They can be literal life savers. However, I shudder at the number of people I know who are on them because the medical/pharmaceutical industry treats antipressants as a panacea for almost any negative mood, many of which are natural to our lives as human beings.)

Okay, back to Maran. She and Pearson discuss antidepressants, which Maran refers to as “Pain Begone.”

She writes: “’Drugs can be helpful,’ Pearson allows. ‘But in my case they never resolved the underlying issues.’”

Bingo.

Blame Our Collective Memory

The Mayan Calendar, after many thousands of years of accuracy, is believed to come to an end on December 21, 2012. Speculation of apocalyptic events and cataclysm will doubtlessly escalate between now and the end date.

My previous post about the so-called New Survivalism reminds me that so much of our day-to-day experience is influenced by beliefs, recollections and emotions, even those that are extremely deep seated in the depths of our minds. We all know people who are natural optimists and other people who meet every new event and concept with fear and trepidation.

Reading about the growing number of mainstream Americans who see harbingers of apocalypse in global warming, the stock market, housing slumps and gas prices, I recall something Barbara Hand Clow wrote in her 2001 book Catastrophobia: The Truth Behind Earth Changes. Her premise - shared by a growing number of scientists - is that Earth suffered an enormous cataclysm in the Late Pleistocene era about 11,500 years ago. She believes the archetypal memory of that event lingers in our subconscious, and triggers apocalyptic fears in people when they learn about situations of potential catastrophic enormity, such as Y2K and the like.

Here's what she wrote:

"Many of us are inflicted with catastrophobia, an intense fear of catastrophies. This causes individuals and society to think of the future in terms of a coming potential disaster; thus, most people do not care for Earth and its inhabitants, which includes themselves and their families.

"Crippled by collective fear from the past earth changes - the racial memory of this geological paroxysm - our surface minds are filled with floating images of disaster, guilt and suffering. We project these painful thoughts out of our inner minds, which creates a coming apocalypse as a self-fulfilling prophey. However, it already happened! Because few people know this, our attention is riveted when preachers and New Age prophets make predictions that sound true because they resonate with these disassociated inner images."

Coming to grips with these deep-seated fears and racial memories will prove even more important in the next few years, as we approach 2012 and are certain to be reminded time and again that the final day on the ancient Mayan calendar is December 21, 2012, which CNN will undoubtedly say is the day YOU will probably DIE.

Anxieties Provoking "New Survivalism"

“There’s something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

Remember those lyrics from the old Buffalo Springfield hit For What It’s Worth? A few choruses later, they sang, “Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you’re always afraid …”

Perhaps that 1967 song should be the soundtrack for a current phenomenon labeled by the New York Times as “The New Survivalism.” It’s finding traction in middle-class America, where some people are beginning to stockpile food, gasoline and water. They’re turning their yards into vegetable gardens and installing photovoltaic electrical systems to survive “off the grid.” Some are reading up on how to dine on rats and dogs and learning how to dispose of bodies.

Purveyors of survival materials say today is the biggest surge in survivalist gear since the late 1970s when thousands of people headed to their basements or the mountains to await Armageddon. They say what’s happening today is much larger than the millennial Y2K scare.

Even a former global strategist for Morgan Stanley, Barton M. Biggs, writes in his new book Wealth, War and Wisdom, “We should assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure.”

Oil seems to be behind some of it. Some adherents of the “peak oil” theory contend the world has already reached maximum oil production and that the increasing demand will create shortages that will devastate industrialized society. Other people look at the worldwide credit situation and see how over-extension could bring economic collapse. Even the Hurricane Katrina disaster is seen by many to be a harbinger of things to come as our climate turns even harsher.

Books such as When All Hell Breaks Loose by Cody Lunkin and Holly Deyo’s Dare to Prepare! are selling alongside more mainstream volumes such as James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, all with individual twists on the same theme. Then there’s Cormac McCarthy’s mega book hit The Road with its terrifyingly bleak post-apocalyptic vision.

As is always the case in such times, each one of us will decide how much fear and how much faith we want to live with and then act accordingly.

(Photo at top from the new Nine-Inch Nails CD "Year Zero," with its hit "Survivalism.")

A Lesson of Oneness

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist whose stroke left her with abilities mystics have sought for millennia. She wants people to “step into the consciousness” of their brains’ right hemispheres and experience the phenomenal oneness that awaits us there.

Dr. Taylor is getting a lot of press these days due to release of her book My Stroke of Insight. Here’s a recent New York Times article. Here’s video from her recent appearance on Oprah, and here’s a video of her speech to the prestigious Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference.

Because of her work at Harvard’s brain research center, Dr. Taylor was well aware that the left half of our brains gives us logic, time, ego, analysis and other structural faculties. The right side gives us creativity, empathy and things of a more intuitive nature. In 1996, Dr. Taylor, at 37, suffered a stroke that incapacitated parts of her brain’s left hemisphere. She found she could experience the right brain without impediment.

“I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she writes. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.” She saw her body’s atoms and molecules blend with the space around her and realized the whole world and all of its creatures were parts of the same shimmering energy. “My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air.”

It took her eight years to recover, but the knowledge the stroke provided has remained. Her driving motivation these days is to make sure people know that they can choose to live more spiritual and peaceful lives with the help of their right brains.

Of particular interest to me is her message that organized religion is a far cry from the intensely beautiful spirituality she has experienced. The daughter of an Episcopal minister, she says, “Religion is just a story that the left brain tells the right brain.”

“Nirvana exists right now,” she says. “There’s no doubt that it’s a beautiful state and that we can get there.”

Replenishing the Miracle Dirt

Rev. Casimiro Roca in the sanctuary of the Santuario de Chimayo in northern New Mexico.


Legend has it that the dirt is holy and can cure whatever is wrong with you. Given the reputation of the small chapel in Chimayo, New Mexico, who can blame me a few years back as I looked around the room with its hundreds of discarded crutches hanging on the walls and knelt at the hole in ground? I scooped up some of the miracle dirt, ate a little bit and rubbed the rest on my hands and arms as if I were washing them.

I have no way of knowing how many ailments the reddish dirt has cured in me. Perhaps I am alive today because of it. Perhaps it was just dirt and did nothing. Whatever the case, the situation at the Santuario de Chimayo speaks volumes about miracles.

The New York Times recently revealed that visitors to the little chapel each year abscond with so much of the holy dirt that it must be regularly replenished. The visitors bring their own baggies or they purchase bags of “blessed dirt” in the chapel’s gift shop. They eat it, brew tea from it, make a muddy ointment from it or just rub it on their bodies to invoke its healing power.

“It’s not the dirt that makes the miracles!” an exasperated Rev. Casimiro Roca told the Times reporter. “I always tell people I have no faith in the dirt. I have faith in the Lord. But people can believe what they want.”

Father Roca, having spent 50 years at the chapel, pointed to a small nearby outbuilding. “I even have to buy clean dirt,” he said. He stores the dirt in the building until it’s time to replace the dirt in the hole inside the chapel.

This all got started on Good Friday in 1810 when a group of penitents practicing a secret ritual spotted a light shining upward from the valley below, in an area considered sacred by the Pueblo Indians. There they found a half-buried wooden crucifix and carried it off to the church in Santa Cruz, 10 miles away. But the next morning, the mysterious cross was back in its hole in the ground. Three times the cross was carried to Santa Cruz and three times it enigmatically returned to the original hole. The priest from Santa Cruz built a chapel around the hole and word spread that the dirt could heal the lame and the blind.

Now, each Good Friday several thousand pilgrims walk several miles in a procession to the Santuario de Chimayo, some carrying heavy crosses, some crawling eight or so miles on their knees. And throughout the rest of the year, thousands more visit the chapel known as the Lourdes of America.

I Ching #38 ~ Opposition

Opposition.

In small matters, good fortune.

When people live in opposition and estrangement, they cannot carry out a great undertaking in common. Their points of view diverge too widely. In such circumstances, one should above all not proceed brusquely, for that would only increase the existing opposition; instead, one should limit oneself to producing gradual effects in small matters. Here success can still be expected because the situation is such that the opposition does not preclude all agreement. 

In general, opposition appears as an obstruction, but when it represents polarity within a comprehensive whole, it has also its useful and important functions. The oppositions of heaven and earth, spirit and nature, man and woman, when reconciled bring about the creation and reproduction of life.

Saving the "Uncontacted"

Primitive tribesmen in red body paint use arrows to ward off the airplane.

They’re called “uncontacted” tribes and there are about 100 of them left in the world, more than half of them in the dense rainforests of Brazil and Peru. Today a group that fights for protection of the uncontacted tribes – Survival International – released striking photos taken from a plane flying over one of these remote villages.

You can clearly see a couple of tribesmen covered in red paint and pointing their bows and arrows upward at what must be one of the most frightening things they’ve ever seen.

“These pictures are further evidence that uncontacted tribes really do exist,” said Survival’s director, Stephen Corey. “The world needs to wake up to this and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they’ll soon be made extinct.”

The danger is extensive logging of the rainforest, driving the tribes from their homes and into territories where they often are killed or decimated by diseases.

“We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,” said Jose Carlos Dos Reis Meirelles Junior. “This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence.”

Some of the tribe's primitive housing near Brazil's border with Peru.

The Fox & Cock in a Tree ~ Aesop Fable #149

A dog and a rooster became friends and made a journey together. When night fell, they came to a place in the woods. The rooster took his seat up in the branches of a tree while the dog went to sleep in a hollow at the foot of the tree. The night passed and day dawned and the rooster crowed loudly, as roosters do. A fox heard the rooster and wanted to make a meal of him, so she ran up and stood at the foot of the tree and shouted to the rooster, “You are an excellent bird and so useful to people! Why don’t you come down and we’ll sing some songs together, delighting in one another’s company?” The rooster replied, “Go over to the foot of the tree, my dear, and tell the watchman to let you wait there for me.” When the fox went to announce herself, the dog suddenly leaped up and grabbed the fox and tore her to pieces, much to the rooster’s relief.

Moral: If you are wise, you take up arms to save yourself whenever you run into trouble.

Stonehenge Update: It was a 500-year burial site

Researchers conducting an important new dig at Stonehenge have concluded that the mysterious Neolithic site served as a burial ground from as early as 3000 B.C. and for the next 500 years. 

“Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B.C.,” according to Parker Pearson, the archaeology professor from the University of Sheffield who’s heading up the project. “It’s now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages.”

Previously, Stonehenge was thought to be a burial site for only about a century, but the new radiocarbon datings of cremated bones unearthed there indicate it was most likely the burial ground for generations of the area’s ruling family. The cremated remains of an estimated 240 people were buried at Stonehenge, which could amount to around 30 generations of the family.

This new information was released this week as part of the large Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project funded by The National Geographic Society. Details of the nearby dig at Durrington Walls is discussed in my May 3 blog post below. More details are in this article in today's Washington Post.

A First Glimpse of Polar Mars

Here’s one of the first images of the vast northern polar region of Mars, taken shortly after the landing Saturday of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander. The craft touched down on Mars at 4:53 p.m. Saturday in a spectacular, precision landing.

The approximate-color image shows a flat landscape with polygonal cracking, a pattern common to Martian high latitudes and seen frequently on Earth’s permafrost terrains. Scientists believe seasonal freezing and thawing of surface ice creates the pattern.

The Phoenix spacecraft is equipped with instruments capable of determining if life has existed on Mars, of learning more about the Martian climate and geology ~ all paving the way for human exploration of the planet. Scientists believe enormous supplies of water may exist beneath the polar surface of Mars, something they hope the Phoenix mission can verify.

The image below is an artist’s conception of Saturday’s landing of the Phoenix, with pulsed rocket engines controlling the final moments of descent. Click here for more NASA photos of the Phoenix mission.

Another musical interlude ~ A Patti Smith classic

For your listening pleasure, here's a recent yet classic Patti Smith performance of "Because the Night." She wrote the song in 1978 with Bruce Springsteen and it became her biggest hit. Appearing on her album Easter, it helped move her from hardcore punk rocker to a more mainstream artist.

Patti still exhibits the purity of expression, the poet's presence, and her uniquely gutsy persona after 30 years.

Enjoy.

From the Tao Te Ching

In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creatures flourish together,
content with the way they are,
endlessly repeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.

When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.

The Master views the parts with compassion,
because he understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn't glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged and common as stone.

The Fox & Goat at the Well ~ Aesop Fable #113

A fox had unwittingly fallen down a well and found herself trapped inside its high walls. Meanwhile, a thirsty goat had made his way to the same place and asked the fox whether the water was fresh and plentiful. The fox set about laying her trap. “Come down, my friend,” said the fox. “The water is so good that I cannot get enough of it myself!” The billy-goat lowered himself into the well, whereupon the little vixen leaped up on his back and emerged from the hole, leaving the goat stuck in the watery prison.

Moral: As soon as someone clever gets into trouble, he tries to find a way out at someone else’s expense.

Excavations Point to Expanded Stonehenge

Archaeologists keep learning more about Stonehenge and are shedding more light on the Neolithic religion that prompted construction of the mysterious 4,600-year-old monoliths.

Current excavation work is funded mostly by the National Geographic Society and performed under auspices of six British universities. The project began in 2003 and its current focus is excavation of the largest Neolithic village ever found in England. Known as Durrington Walls, the site is less than two miles from the well-known monoliths.

Recent digging has shown that Durrington Walls had earthen banks and ditches enclosing rings of huge wooden posts set in the same pattern as Stonehenge’s giant stones. This is leading archaeologists to believe Stonehenge and Durrington were closely connected and the builders of Stonehenge likely resided in the village at Durrington Walls.

So far, eight houses have been discovered and many more suspected to have existed in the area. Each house was built of woven sticks and crushed chalk, with a hard clay floor, central fireplace, and was only about 16 feet square. Excavators have unearthed messy debris everywhere inside the houses – broken pots, shattered jars and a litter of animal bones. Two houses on the west side of the village, however, separated from the others by a wood fence, are free of debris, leading some researchers to speculate they were shrines or something similar.

While Stonehenge is believed to have been a place of worship of an ancient solar cult because of the astronomical alignment of the giant stones, it’s now clear that even the roads of the period had similar purposes. A road paved with flint at Stonehenge lines up with the summer solstice sunrise. A similar road recently discovered at Durrington (shown at right in National Geographic photo) lines up with the sunset of the summer solstice. Conversely, the giant stones on Salisbury plain are aligned with the winter solstice sunset, while the wooden circle at Durrington lined up with sunrise of the same day.

Radiocarbon dating puts the Stonehenge site as being built between 2600 BC and 2400 BC, while Durrington Walls is from the same epoch, sometime between 2600 BC and 2500 BC.

“The evidence shows us these two monuments were complementary,” Dr. Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield recently told the New York Times. “Stonehenge was just half of a larger complex.”

Aleksei, Maria and Anastasia ... Rest in Peace

Every few years throughout my youth, some eccentric elderly Russian woman would claim she was Princess Anastasia, daughter of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra. And that as such, she was the sole surviving member of Russia’s last royal family and had eluded the Bolshevik firing squad that brutally slaughtered her family in 1918.

None turned out to be Anastasia, of course. But the very idea that one of the Romanov children had survived the executions in Yekateringburg remained one of the 20th century’s most tantalizing mysteries. This was because, for nearly 70 years, the remains of the bodies were either missing or inconclusively identified. Most of the conjecture centered on the Princess Anastasia and on her 13-year-old hemophiliac younger brother, Crown Prince Aleksei, royal heir to the throne.

Then, in 1991, the family’s supposed graves were unearthed in Yekateringburg and the remains reburied in St. Petersburg. At that time, the bones were identified as those of Nicholas, Alexandra and three of the couple’s children, including Anastasia.

No remains were found, however, for two of the children, Aleksei and another sister, Grand Duchess Maria.

Last summer, suspicious skeletal remains were found buried in a forest near Yekateringburg and were immediately submitted to laboratories in Russia and the United States for DNA testing, using the latest technology. The findings were announced this week.

“This has confirmed that indeed it is the children,” said Eduard Rossel, governor of the region where Yekateringburg is located. “We have now found the entire family.”

The announcement will no doubt come as a relief to Romanov descendents and historians, but skepticism could still erupt. When the Russian government, using then-new DNA testing procedures, announced in 1998 that the identities of the first batch of bones were conclusive, some  scientists disputed the validity of the DNA testing, saying it was flawed. Though this latest testing utilized state-of-the-art DNA technology, it’ll be interesting to see if the findings are similarly called into question.

It that should happen, the mystery will continue.

The Stuff of Nightmares

Time for a confession about an obsession. I am terrified of giant squid and have been since seeing the Disney film “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” when I was seven.

I suffered terrifying nightmares for weeks after seeing Kirk Douglas and James Mason battle the sea monster on the screen of my neighborhood theater. I could not sleep with the lights off because I was certain the horrid creature with its grotesque, beaked mouth was right outside the my bedroom windows, tentacles waving. 

The truth is, I have refused for fifty years to eat squid in any form. I cannot eat the stuff of my nightmares and, with this gesture, am paying homage to the terror suffered by that young boy in Michigan, living 600 miles from the nearest deep-sea creature.

(Photo at top is from the Disney movie, with a squid crushing one of Capt. Nemo's submarines. Scene at right shows James Mason as Nemo as the monster tries to destroy the Nautilus.)

This morning I read where marine scientists in New Zealand are thawing the corpse of the largest squid ever caught. They want to examine its anatomy, remove its stomach and beak and do DNA analysis. This particular monster weighs almost 1,100 pounds and is 26 feet long, although the species is known to reach nearly double that length. Technically, this one is a colossal squid, a breed even larger than the giant squid. Each of its two eyes is eleven inches across, making it the largest animal eye in the world.

The colossal squid’s usual habitat is more than a mile beneath of ocean’s surface, but fishermen netted this one in 2007 off the coast of Antarctica while it was dining on hooked toothfish. One scientist commented that if calamari rings were made from this squid’s suckers, each ring would be the size of a tractor tire.

To which I say, Let the nightmares begin!

The Panther & the Villagers ~ Aesop Fable #76

A panther foolishly happened to fall into a pit. The villagers saw her there and some of them attacked her with sticks and pelted her with stones. There were others who felt sorry for the creature since she seemed sure to die even though she had not done any harm, so they brought her bread to keep up her strength. Night fell and everyone went home, knowing they would find the panther dead when the next day dawned. However, as soon as she regained her strength, the panther escaped with a mighty leap and hurried home to her den. A few days later she descended upon the village, slaughtering the sheep and even killing the shepherds as she laid waste to everything around her. Even the people who had shown mercy to the beast began to fear what lay in store for them and they begged the panther to spare their lives. The panther said, “I am well aware of who pelted me with stones and who gave me bread, so put aside your fears. I have returned as an enemy only to those who wanted to hurt me.”

A More Acceptable Hypothesis

A few years ago I spent some time climbing through the ruins of a pueblo constructed by a branch of the Anasazi, a tribe at the heart of one of North America’s most persistent archaeological mysteries. I defy anyone to study the architecture of these dwellings perched high on canyon walls, to stand silently as the hot afternoon sun passes over the cool adobe and to not admire the ancient people who dwelt there.

The mystery concerns why the Anasazi left their Colorado pueblos 700 years ago and traveled into Arizona and New Mexico and set up home in far less hospitable surroundings. There has been speculation that this creative and peaceful people were nearly destroyed in their original habitat by drought that decimated their food supplies and made them warlike, to the extent that they turned to cannibalism and fled their homeland in a mad stampede.

That's why I was relieved recently to read an account of the latest archeological theories. Researchers now are describing a far more orderly Anasazi migration that may have been motivated, at least in part, by a new religion. Early Anasazi religion had involved multi-story “great houses” for worship – round, subterranean structures with study roofs – frequently only by priests and a select few others.

By the mid-13th Century, however, the places of worship were uncovered and resembled amphitheaters. Serving bowls became larger and seem to have been designed for ritual communion. Some researchers contemplate that the tribe experienced its equivalent of the Protestant reformation, that the journey southward was something like the Mormon journey west, and that evidence of this newer, more evangelical religion resulted in the Kachina rituals that survive today on Hopi and Zuni reservations.

I admit, the idea of a new, more open religion appeals to me much more than warfare and cannibalism as we come closer to solving the mystery of the Anasazi.

(Photo “Anasazi Sunbeam” by Ian Parker, 2005)

Holy Bible ~ Proverbs 12: 17-22

He who speaks truth declares righteousness,
But a false witness, deceit.
There is one who speaks like the piercings of a sword,
But the tongue of the wise promotes health.
The truthful lip shall be established forever,
But a lying tongue is but for a moment.
Deceit is in the heart of those who devise evil,
But counselors of peace have joy.
No grave trouble will overtake the righteous,
But the wicked shall be filled with evil.
Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord,
But those who deal truthfully are His delight.

Another musical interlude ~ Alessandra Celletti

I submit this one-minute video for your viewing pleasure.

It was filmed at a nighttime outdoor concert performed by Italian composer/pianist Alessandra Cellitti and is superb in its union of music and atmosphere. The evocative strains of Erik Satie's Gnossiences #4  ... her hair in the wind ... the peculiar shifts in lighting reminiscent of thunderstorms in the distance. Absolutely haunting.

I became acquainted with Alessandra Celletti some time ago via my MySpace page and learned we share some musical preferences. Today she's regarded as one of Europe's foremost interpreters of Satie's music and of the music the mystic G.I. Gurdjieff co-wrote with Thomas DeHartmann. She recently released two more CDs of her own compositions: The Golden Fly and Way Out. Several of her CDs recently became available on Amazon.com and iTunes. I wish her continued success. (To view her MySpace page, click here.)

Enjoy.

Knowing Too Little

As time goes on, the widespread use of antidepressants may come under more scrutiny, which I would personally welcome. I have too many friends taking them. Some days it feels like the people on “serotonin reuptake inhibitors” significantly outnumber those of us who chose to suffer our demons.

Antidepressants are now, in fact, the most widely prescribed drugs in the world.

I am not “against” antidepressants. There are people who desperately need them, both for their own well-being and the well-being of those around them. But I know of too many cases of pharmaceutical shopping – “if you won’t prescribe it, I’ll go to somebody who will” – in hopes of scoring this latest wonder drug. (Unless painkillers have now taken over the top slot on the drug shopping list.)

In a column in today’s New York Times, Dr. Richard Friedman, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, brought out two points about antidepressants that further unnerved me.

First, the fact that antidepressants – because they emerged during the 1980s – have not been subjected to long-term testing and nobody knows the effects of people using antidepressants for major portions of their lives. The longest maintenance study so far of one of these drugs, in this case Effexor, lasted two years “and showed the drug to be superior to a placebo in preventing relapses of depression.”

It’s true that Congress has reauthorized the Prescription Drug User Fee Act expanding the FDA’s drug surveillance. But that points to the second fact Dr. Friedman mentioned that’s scariest of all: The suppression of negative clinical information about antidepressants.

A study in January’s New England Journal of Medicine pointed out that of 74 clinical trials of a dozen antidepressants, 97 percent of the studies with positive findings got published. Only 12 percent of the studies with negative findings have ever been published.

Put simply, bad news about antidepressants seldom sees the light of day.

The Dancing Monkeys ~ Aesop Fable #352

It is said that the king of Egypt once taught some monkeys how dance the Pyrrhic dance. Since monkeys are creatures that readily imitate human behavior, they quickly learned their lessons and did the dance, dressed in purple robes and little masks. For a while everyone was impressed by the sight, until a more discerning member of the audience threw some nuts he had in his pocket into the midst of the dancers. When the moneys saw the nuts they forgot all about their performance. Instead of dancing, they started acting like monkeys again. They crushed their masks and ripped their robes, fighting each other for the nutmeats. The whole pattern of the dance was thrown into confusion, much to the audience’s amusement.