…Into the dialectic

Photo album at FB: Amazon to Andes

… descending over the Amazonas, vistas of jungle, thatched roof, thin pillars of smoke, winding muddy river through low cotton cloud…

we land,

dismounting steel, into a welcome wave of humid heat, across hot tarmac, through tin pot airport, 3 wheel moto-taxi driver hustle and away, tearing like madness itself through the chaos of another 3rd world tropical city! Reminds me of Bankok 20 years ago. But this is Iquitos – different time, different place. Feels good. Unrestrained life at the pace of ungoverned humanity – dirty, chaotic, colourful, unconscious, living in the moment. Squinting against hot road dust, a thrilling roller-coaster ride through traffic governed only by the laws of nature – a fluid dirty dance, family of 5 on a moped cutting in as we cut through another narrow opening and close the gap, ebb and flow, seething into the largest city on earth with no outside road access. And it is a shit hole. There are some ragged remnants of the bygone colonial rubber boom era, Spanish tile, fading façades of faux grandeur, but tropical decay reclaims such structure fast. Read More

No, not the kind of frog you might lick for it’s secretion of DMT (should you be so inclined.) That would be Bufo alvarius – the Colorado River toad. This is Phyllomedusa bicolor, an Amazonian rainforest treefrog,

And talk about right of passage – this little fucker took me down!
Sapo, or Kambo – frog “medicine” – or poison – is administered to boost ones mojo. Traditionally taken to hone hunting skills, keen the senses, boost immune and reset nervous system, or in other parlance – to realign the chakras, emphasis on the third – personal power, deep cleanse the body through purging for health and vitality, strength, passion and prosperity (success in hunt or business)…
OK, thought I, lets give it a try… Read More

Banisteropsis caapii

After swallowing a shot glass full of the somewhat wretched medicinal brew, with ceremonial reverence and a personal intention of what to work on for this ceremony, we sit upright in meditative postures, on mattress pads, in the darkness of the Maloka – a large circular palm thatched structure, open to the surrounding jungle sounds. 20 plus Pasajeros in the broad circle, and 6 Maestros at the center, we wait in the stillness of the night, mid the haunting and lyrical sounds of vibrant tropical forest.

Gene Sharp, Author of the influential Nonviolent Revolution Rulebook (more here) suggests that as people develop techniques for withholding consent peacefully, regimes will crumble. This must be true whether dictatorship or western “democratic” oligarchies. So don’t vote, it only encourages the bastards – arguably a privileged notion but democracy is a failed system as there is only one party in reality, the money party, with 2 lame factions in the case of  USA, 3 in the UK last time I looked. Read More

Yes, indeedy, one of the most subjective media by definition, but here in my humble view are some of the best of our generation, meeting the minimal criteria of being any or all of the following:

• fucking brilliant
• independent / non-formulaic / non-hollywood-puerile-shite
• sublime acting
• superb cinematography / lighting / sets
• numinous story / theme
• gorgeous score
• honest irreverent fun

Film is the medium of the mythos of our time – often deep and sublime but like all art, sometimes shallow, manipulative and pretentious. Nevertheless, it seems when synchronicity happens in the making of a film, like alchemy, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the individual talents that make up a production. And without further ado, here’s a few worthy of mention

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On his way back to Earth, having just walked on the moon, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced a radical transformation in perspective and thus consciousness. As he approached our planet from beyond it’s sphere of influence, “he was filled with an inner conviction as certain as any mathematical equation he’d ever solved. He knew that the beautiful blue world to which he was returning is part of a living system, harmonious and whole—and that we all participate, as he expressed it later, ‘in a universe of consciousness.’”

Namit Arora suggests that: Perceptions of culture, history, and identity are necessarily subjective and selective. There’s no impartial and omniscient chronicler of events, no ‘scientific’ history. Facts are one thing, their interpretation another.[1]

Accepting this idea, really screws things up however, as it implies everything learned in school and early adulthood, about oneself and the world, might have been through the skewed collective lens of a society that could not possibly see beyond it’s own ideological identity. Hence imperialism and the notion it is right to educate ourselves, and the people of lands we “influence” to fit our model (particularly if those lands happen to be rich in spice, oil, tantalum or any other resource that “feeds” us.) We know what’s best for them and we reign by virtue of superior technology. Thus only the technology and commensurate resource has changed since the earliest times. We continue to globally garner what we believe we have a right and a need for, not to mention the moral authority to impose over (human resources, land, mineral and water rights, along with incumbent environmental and human rights degradation – you know the story by now.)

You might ask who is this “we” you are talking about? Read More

So he rolls up our long ragged redwood road and
is doing a 7 point turn at the top of our driveway in a shiny
PG&E survey truck. They’d trimmed a schwag load of branches
around the power lines and left them in our turnaround several
weeks ago, so I walk straight out to the guy in my slippers and 4
day stubble, all lazer eyed ready to burn and he just looks up at
me from his fat truck seat and says with a jovial expression “You
really like your privacy don’t you” and wins me at once with his
quizzical disposition –
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Earth’s dynamic fluid systems – not to be underestimated

Deepwater

The Earth and all life functions as a continuously evolving, fluid, dynamic system that we barely begin to understand in it’s complexly interwoven entirety. Sucking out the oil and burning it off in a fashion marginally more evolved than the discovery of fire itself – e.g. the archaic combustion engine, proliferating to this day by the obtuse laws of corporate swaggery – is still just burning stuff based on nature’s de-structuring forces for near-sighted profit. This as distinct from the con-structive spiralic forces of natural growth systems and the plethora of quelled yet more visionary and progressive, life affirming technologies.

At what actual cost?

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Google Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin disparaging the commercialization of search engines said. “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They had a vision of allowing unfettered access to the sum of all human knowledge on line.

However Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt recently explained in an interview with Charlie Rose, “now we are an advertising company!” Today 99% of Google’s revenue comes from the ads it strews on websites across the internet. Google has become the internet’s largest and most determined info-polluter – effectively killing the dream of a commercial-free internet.

This should cause us to consider the long-term cultural consequences of relying on an advertising company to organize the world’s information. For the first time in human history, a single company both controls our access and corrupts that same information through advertising. Read More

Listen up!

Non resistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe. Through it, consciousness (spirit) is freed from its imprisonment in form. Inner nonresistance to form – whatever is or happens – is a denial of the absolute reality of form. Resistance makes the world and the things of the world appear more real, more solid, and more lasting than they are, including your own form identity, the ego. It endows the world and the ego with a heaviness and an absolute importance that makes you take yourself and the world very seriously. The play of form is then misperceived as a struggle for survival, and when that is your perception, it becomes your reality. Read More

An inspired remix: ‘We Are All Connected’
(ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye)

[youtube width=”600″ height=”420″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk[/youtube]

more at symphonyofscience.com
melodysheep apparently uses Reason 4.0 (instrumentals), Adobe Audition (audio editing), and Melodyne (auto-tuning), but the musicality, art and inspiration is all his own. Good stuff.

Love the melodramatic ending at the end of this piece (“addicted to nonsense”) – The tragi-comic drama of reality!! It’s interesting to me that, whilst the picture is bleaker than we might care to acknowledge in our waking lives, the end isn’t necessarily nigh! On the contrary. Radical change is nigh – and the saviour is YOU, baby! [Yes, yes – like, Neo – WAKE UP – You are the One] – Hello…

… What really matters in our lives—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke—doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains. We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency. There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism…

read the article

And, in case nobody told you yet…

thereisnospoon

… And each and every one of you is being taken for fools. You work for an election or two to put chosen leaders in place, and expect those leaders to work their “leadership” magic to ram reforms down the throats of the corporate sector, failing to understand just how fully the corporate sector holds the cards. It’s not the campaign contributions: it’s the persuasion money.

You’re looking for a savior. And like that Savior of biblical fame, s/he isn’t coming, as long as there are people like me out there. I personally won’t work for a company or organization that goes against my personal convictions. But 99% of us certainly will…

Go on! Read the rest of this perspective piece here.

as above, so below

(underlying cultural influence on the theme of Christmas and New Year)

winter solstice is considered the strongest of the four main power points of the year. 
The light returns…
masculine sun gains strength from this day till summer solstice (when sun begins to wane again.)

Now…
is when we might ritually let go in our bodies, minds, hearts and spirit of what we don’t want to carry into the new cycle of increase. 

Celebrate, release, renew!

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An elegant and eloquent short. I like it because it offers (to me) a clear and honest juxtaposition of two worlds (without newagism or sensationalism) and where my values and heart truly lie – with the soil under my feet, a feeling community, and a simplification from distractions by knowing where my deepest pleasures in life really lie…

Do not adjust your mind – it is reality that is malfunctioning –  RAW

After successfully returning from Black Rock City after the 7th (or 8th?) journey to that wild and glorious place, I find my neurons are just beginning to regroup and the synapses starting to fire in the correct order once more to fit consensus reality, after a fashion. But each time one’s perspective is broadened by some radical experience, it’s hard to squeeze the consciousness genie back in it’s bottle, …

What an extra-ordinary journey, every time, navigating the mayhem and outward hedonistic celebration, out beyond the decoy Man, to find the alchemical magic, right there beneath the fluttering veils, of love and human spirit, soaring to heights of creative and playful expression beyond the moral restraint and capacity of ordered society to contain.

Magic Theater, Entrance Not for Everybody *

It’s never easy, but always worth the arduous journey, of sweat and time and gas and dust and tears, just for that golden serendipitous moment or meeting out on the playa at dawn, when the alcoholic fools have fallen away, leaving dusty wayward warriors of morning light, and the veils of space and time are lifted, to reveal the true nature of humanity, as we are, all built for love.

And remarkably, each person’s experience is unique, by virtue of this self-generated vortex of human intention and intensity of desire, manifested in the high desert for one week of the year, this ephemeral city of light, like a potentized microcosm of the macrocosm, of our lives here on earth, we find what we are ready to see to the degree we are willing to show up in the moment. Meaning / random chaos, wilderness / high art, a place to grieve / cause for celebration, a bunch of lunatics / the greatest celebration of life on earth, harsh dust storms and desert heat / transcendent beauty, a place to feel threatened / embrace universal love – it’s all there,
as Blake suggested,

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour…