The Master Puts Herself Last | Chapter 7 — Tao Te Ching

The Tao of Heaven is eternal,
and the earth is long enduring.
Why are they long enduring?
They do not live for themselves;
thus they are present for all beings.

The Master puts herself last;
And finds herself in the place of authority.
She detaches herself from all things;
Therefore she is united with all things.

She gives no thought to self.
She is perfectly fulfilled.

Text From:

Microsoft Word – Tao Te Ching – trans. by J.H.. McDonald

Ancient Wisdom | Modern Images & Music

First Archetypal Image

Note: Troubleshooting animation, check back later tonight for full feature!

Mother Earth Earth Cairn Face Woman Planet | geralt | Gerd Altmann  •  Freiburg/Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  •  #20

Second Archetypal Image

Lake Sea Colorful Background Colorful Wallpaper | geralt | Gerd Altmann  •  Freiburg/Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  •  #20

Third Archetypal Image

Sustainability Energy Globe Leaves Renewable Earth | geralt | Gerd Altmann  •  Freiburg/Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  •  #20

Fourth Archetypal Image

Meditation Watercolor Reflection Universe Person | geralt | Gerd Altmann  •  Freiburg/Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  •  #20

Fifth Archetypal Image

Particles Light Show Light Effects Light Rays | geralt | Gerd Altmann  •  Freiburg/Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  •  #20

Sixth Archetypal Image

Clouds Head Silhouette Ghost Heaven Light Soul | geralt | Gerd Altmann  •  Freiburg/Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  •  #20

Music for Archetypal Animation

Music: My Mother Told Me (In Old Norse) Colm R. McGuinness[1] My Mother Told Me (In Old Norse)    3:03

Check These Out | Moments of the Tao in Ordinary Life

Red Tide Green Mountains dovetails beautifully with this chapter of the Tao Te Ching…

Red Tide – Green Mountains | For Dad
32 views Premiered Jul 25, 2022
Today Is The Greatest | Middlebury Graduation Day
70 views Premiered Jun 4, 2022
Down By the Water at Dusk | Big Sky Series | Oct. 10, 2021
16 views Premiered Aug 24, 2022
Museum Day | June 2022
27 views Premiered Jul 6, 2022
Journey Through Time — Age of Man
110 views, Premiered Sep 20, 2021
Psyche (July 30, 2021)
63 views, Premiered Jul 30, 202

Previous Chapters of the Tao Te Ching

Chapter 6 | Tao Te Ching
Chapter 5 | Tao Te Ching
Chapter 4 | Tao Te Ching
Chapter 3 | Tao Te Ching
Chapter 2 | Tao Te Ching
Chapter 1 | Tao Te Ching

Unites All of Creation with Dust

Lesson from the Tao Te Ching

Microsoft Word – Tao Te Ching – trans. by J.H.. McDonald

Ancient Wisdom | Modern Images & Music

Chapter 4 | Tao Te Ching

The Tao is like an empty container:
it can never be emptied and can never be filled.
Infinitely deep, it is the source of all things.
It dulls the sharp, unties the knotted,
shades the lighted, and unites all of creation with dust.

It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it .
It is older than the concept of God.

Previous Chapters | Tao Te Ching

The blog is about Chapter 3 of the Tao Te Ching | Emptying Minds…Filling Bellies
The blog is about Chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching | Acting Without Doing Anything
The blog is about Chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching | What Is Your Source of Engery?
This blog is about Pratītyasamutpāda, which states that all dharmas (phenomena) arise in dependence upon other dharmas: “if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist” …

Relevant Topics & Events to the Tao\Now

Reproductive Coercion is an American Cornerstone

Slaves, J. J. Smith’s Plantation, South Carolina, 1862
The J. Paul Getty Museum / Wikimedia Commons )
Conservatives have long invoked the specter of the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott vs. Sandford in their fight against abortion rights, likening embryos and fetuses to slaves with no due process. Progressives now, too, are drawing parallels between the stripping of rights from people who may get pregnant and the infamous majority opinion penned by then-Chief Justice Roger Taney, who wrote, "a Black man has no rights which the white man was bound to respect." 
Missing from this historic analogy, however, are the experiences of Black women, whose enslavement and forced reproduction was fundamental to America's rise. We speak with Dr. Deborah Gray White, Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, about this not-so-distant history and the possibilities it holds for all American women. 

My take away: In the wake of Roe vs Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court, Deborah Gray White was watching the dystopian story the Handmaid’s Tale with her daughter who said, “Oh my God, we’re becoming this!” Deborah replied, “We already are this. America has used black and brown women as reproductive commodities since its founding. What’s changing is now white women are getting closer to becoming commodities again.”


Alok Vaid-Menon Defies Definition

Portrait of Alok Vaid-Menon
( Celeste Sloman ) | From The Take Away
Alok Vaid-Menon is a gender non-conforming writer and performer who grew up in Texas to Indian immigrant parents. They use their creativity and platform to explore themes of gender, race, trauma and belonging, advocating and bringing visibility to the trans community. We speak with Alok about their work and advocacy, and what they learned from their aunt, Urvashi Vaid, the beloved LGBTQ rights activist who spent more than a decade working for equality at the National LGBTQ Task Force.

My take away from this amazing interview: The gender non-conforming community is showing the world how to love during a time of great division, growing hate, tremendous suffering, and huge oceans of human anxiety.


The definition of a constitutional right

SAMUEL CORUM/AFP via Getty Images | From 1A
The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that established a constitutional right to abortion. The decision could lead to abortion bans in half of U.S. states.
In response, states like California are moving to amend their constitutions to include abortion rights. Now, citizens and lawmakers are thinking about what defines a constitutional right and how different interpretations of the constitutions affect those rights.
We talk about changing the Constitution and what comes next after the reversal of Roe.
This conversation is part of our Remaking America collaboration with six public radio stations around the country. Remaking America is funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

My take away: I loved listening to Olatunde Johnson, professor at Columbia University School of Law | The United States Constitution was made by a bunch of slave owning, patriarchal, misogynistic pale males. It is ludicrous to think we cannot update or change it as our society changes and grows. This is what overturning Roe vs Wade is about. This is what Jan. 6, 2021 is about. It is about a bunch of people who want to live 18th Century lives in the 21st Century.

Sources of Feature Image

Glass Containers Glass Empty Clean Transparent | ha11ok | Hungary  •  Member since Dec. 17, 2015

Rock Tower Top Tufa Rock Formations Erosion | Hans | Hans Braxmeier  •  Neu-Ulm/Deutschland  •  Member since Nov. 24, 20

Vine Tendril Embrace Green Noose Grapevine Knot | stevepb | Steve Buissinne  •  Age 73  •  Sedgefield/South Africa  •  Member since June 4, 2014

Light Architecture Shades Church Pillars Baroque | davidosta | David Osta  •  Age 44  •  Ansoain/España  •  Member since April 19, 2020

Ngc 2818 Planetary Nebula Constellation Pyxis | WikiImages | Deutsch  •  Member since Dec. 13, 2011

Shiva The Hindu God Shiva India Rishikesh | InspiredImages | UK  •  Member since Sept. 27, 2013

Music: Remixes, Vol. 2 | Various Artists [1] Wenkweur – Advanced Suite Remix    5:04 [2] Multidimensional Bong – Advanced Suite Remix    7:45

Hate Arises… Rainbows Become…

Pride Parade in DC

On June 11, 2022, the Washington, DC 2022 Capital Pride Parade began with full regalia and ceremony followed by rowdydow fun and celebration. This is the first of four videos from this day.

Into A Rainbow | Washington, DC Pride Parade 2022
10 views, Premiered Jun 13, 2022

For the video, I wrote this:

Today was like walking into a rainbow. After more than 2 years due to COVID, the WDC Pride Parade of 2022  took place in an embrace of joy and celebration. It was one big mass of human exuberant celebration. Such a different energy than the Trump rallies that twisted and deformed into the raging, dangerous mob of Jan. 6, 2021. 

I filmed one of the earlier Trump rallies, and I filmed one of the Black Lives Matter marches after the murder of George Floyd. The paranoia and double-standard of the Trump years faded to a distant unpleasant memory in the embrace of so many people celebrating differences, diversity, and inclusiveness. 

What kind of world do we want? 

Do we want one that is angry, overly righteous, mostly white men who want to control women's bodies and turn America into a desolate land of mediocrity and conformity? 

Or do we want one that celebrates diversity, lifts up inclusivity, and makes space for everyone to shine their truth and colors as they feel them? 

I choose the rainbow hands down over The Divine Republic of Gilead as depicted in Canadian author Margaret Atwood futuristic dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale that feels more and more possible each passing day, especially since the Trump years that made hate great again in America. 

Hate is not what makes us a great nation: Love is what makes us great and moments like this Parade are more important than ever, especially with the plotters of Jan. 6 still scheming how to turn America into a totalitarian state like Russia... 

I suppose so we could exterminate the world in a mutual annihilation of scapegoats because that is what cheap, cowardly, hate filled people do...blame everyone else for their problems and who they really are inside.

This is the inspiration for this blog: the idea of diversity and the mutual arising of opposite things in the world because on this same day, 31 members from the group Patriot Front were arrested in Idaho.

Pride Parade in Idaho

Thirty-one men, faces covered with masks and carrying baseball bats stood packed in the back of a U-Haul like illegal immigrants sneaking into the state. The truck was heading to the Pride Parade in the city of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Their purpose was to start a riot.

Police said the men came from at least 10 states. They are members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front, previously known as the white nationalist hate group Vanguard America. It rebranded itself after a neo-fascist was photographed holding their shield just before he ran his car into a crowd of people, killing Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, VA.

Interview with Mother of One of the Men Arrested

Earlier this week, a mother of one of the men arrested gave an interview with Sara Sidner.

She says her son’s hateful ideology sickens her after he was arrested with alleged Patriot Front group. She tells Sara that: “He’s trading Compromise for Hate, and this is not how I raised my son.” (Click underline text to see interview with Sara Sidner).

Report About Who Patriot Front Is

What we know about Patriot Front and its origins
132,051 views, Jun 14, 2022
From the video above: When "a little army" of men with shields and other riot gear was spotted near a Pride parade in Idaho on Saturday, authorities soon linked the men to a relatively new White nationalist group and charged them with conspiracy to riot. Most of the men arrested had logos on their hats "consistent with the Patriot Front group," and some had other clothing associated with the White supremacist group, Coeur d'Alene Police Chief Lee White said. CNN’s Sara Sidner reports

This Same Hate Perpetuates Racism & Wars

This is the same hate that fuels racism and perpetuates continuing inequalities and brutality against black and brown people in the United States. Slavery is barbaric, and so too is racism. Americans went to war and died over ending slavery in America. This war began on April 12, 1861 and lasted until April 9, 1865. In the end, more than 620,000 men were dead, roughly 2% of the U.S .population.

However, this is far less dead than the number of men, women, and children who died being transported from Africa to America, who died as slaves from violence and mistreatment, and who have died since emancipation due to the continuing violent beliefs and hate embraced by white supremacy.

Black Live Matter March

Black Lives Matter
111 views, Jun 8, 2020

Photos From Gettysburg National Military Park 

Emancipation Proclamation & Juneteeth

Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. It was the most ambitious push of General Robert E. Lee into the North. Each side fought fiercely. This battle turned out to be the turning point of the war. It is also the inspiration for President Abraham Lincoln’s immortal Gettysburg Address.

Word of the emancipation of enslaved African Americans finally reached Texas on June 19, 1865 where people were still being held as slaves. More than 150 years later, Juneteenth has finally been made a federal holiday commemorating and remembering the legacy of slavery and the emancipation of slaves in America. 

Yet, this horrible battle still rages in the hearts and minds of far too many white Americans still to this very day. Hate still has a home in America.

Photos From Gettysburg National Military Park 

One of Trump’s Rallies After Losing the 2020 Election

Cacophony — The Beautiful Humans of Earth
127 views, Premiered Nov 14, 2020

A Call To All Humans Who Value Freedom and Democracy

Help Ukraine | Calling All People Who Value Freedom in the World
44 views, Premiered Feb 27, 2022

This Arises… That Becomes

I finally came to understand the idea of This Arises… That Becomes… from a lecture Alan Watts gave.

Alan Watts – Interdependent origination
3,739 views, May 1, 2015

Pratītyasamutpāda

It is the basic principle of dependent origination as described by Buddha. In Buddhist doctrines, it is called Pratītyasamutpāda.

Pratītyasamutpāda consists of two terms:

Pratītya: "having depended."[26] The term appears in the Vedas and Upanishads[note 2] in the sense of "confirmation, dependence, acknowledge origin".[27][28] The Sanskrit root of the word is prati* whose forms appear more extensively in the Vedic literature, and it means "to go towards, go back, come back, to approach" with the connotation of "observe, learn, convince oneself of the truth of anything, be certain of, believe, give credence, recognize". In other contexts, a related term pratiti* means "going towards, approaching, insight into anything".[28]

Samutpāda: "arising",[26] "rise, production, origin"[29] In Vedic literature, it means "spring up together, arise, come to pass, occur, effect, form, produce, originate".[30]

Pratītyasamutpāda has been translated into English as dependent originationdependent arisinginterdependent co-arisingconditioned arising, and conditioned genesis.[31][16][note 3]

Jeffrey Hopkins notes that terms synonymous to pratītyasamutpāda are apekṣhasamutpāda and prāpyasamutpāda.[37]
 -- Wiki
Photos from DC Pride Parade — June 11, 2022
The term may also refer to the twelve nidānasPalidvādasanidānāni, Sanskrit: dvādaśanidānāni, from dvāvaśa ("twelve") + nidānāni (plural of "nidāna", "cause, motivation, link").[quote 2]Generally speaking, in the Mahayana tradition, pratityasamutpada (Sanskrit) is used to refer to the general principle of interdependent causation, whereas in the Theravada tradition, paticcasamuppāda (Pali) is used to refer to the twelve nidānas.
 -- Wiki
Dependent origination is a philosophically complex concept, subject to a large variety of explanations and interpretations. As the interpretations often involve specific aspects of dependent origination, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive to each other.
 -- Wiki

One interpretation (which I feel is closest to what Alan Watts refers to in his talk) regards this doctrine…

...as describing the arising of mental processes and the resultant notion of "I" and "mine" that leads to grasping and suffering.[8][9] Several modern western scholars argue that there are inconsistencies in the list of twelve links, and regard it to be a later synthesis of several older lists and elements, some of which can be traced to the Vedas.[9][10][11][12][13][5]
 -- Wiki

Rocks of Ignorance & Rainbow Flags

In other words, we only know inclusivity and love in comparison to callousness and hate. Like a river diverted by a rock–some water flows to the right, some flows to the left. The rock in the river is an idea, a symbol of reality, but it is not reality. Indeed, all words, all thoughts, all ideas are poor substitutes to what is really going on in life.

What should be noted is that both streams flowing around the rock are of the same river of being. They are only being briefly divided and diverted by a rock of thought that got lodged in the river of being.

Maybe, One Day

Another way of looking at this idea is that inclusivity and love are the polar opposites of callousness and hate. Although opposites, both qualities and ways of being in the world go together just as a magnet has a North and South pole. If you chop a magnet in half, there is still a North Pole and a South Pole because a magnet is one cohesive whole thing.

Since I choose to support rainbows and Pride Parades, I stand on this side of our polarized America. It is a conscious choice to flow in the stream of being that includes rainbows and diversity. And it means I am making a conscious choice to embrace all sorts of people and their differences as well as recognize how similar we are because deep, deep down I believe what Alan Watts says that we are the fabric of existence itself.

Maybe one day, we can let go of our rocks of ignorance that we cling to for security and comfort. By letting go, we can grow as a species. And if we grow, we might be able to really feel one day our oneness with each other and all life on this planet. When rocks of thought due appear in our river of being, we can better navigate the currents of division driving us apart and pushing the entire world to a tipping point that we may not recover from due to a mutual massacre of scape goats.

Maybe one day we will know we are all part of the stream of humanity no matter our skin color, sexual preference, our religious beliefs. It has always been this way. It is only when we cling to our rocks of thoughts and rocks of ignorance, which if we are constantly anxious, nervous, angry, and afraid–we are clinging to an idea, which is one of these rocks dividing us and causing so much suffering and pain in the world.

Let go and flow!

One Day | Yellowstone

One Day — Yellowstone
77 views, Jul 26, 2020

One Day Lyrics

Sometimes I lay under the moon
And thank God I’m breathin’
Then I pray, “Don’t take me soon
‘Cause I am here for a reason.”Sometimes in my tears I drown
But I never let it get me down
So when negativity surrounds
I know some day it’ll all turn around becauseAll my life I’ve been waitin’ for
I’ve been prayin’ for
For the people to say
That we don’t wanna fight no more
There’ll be no more war
And our children will playOne day, one day, one day, oh
One day, one day, one day, ohIt’s not about win or lose, ’cause we all lose
When they feed on the souls of the innocent
Blood-drenched pavement
Keep on movin’ though the waters stay ragin’In this maze
You can lose your way, your way
It might drive you crazy but
Don’t let it faze you, no way, no way!Sometimes in my tears I drown
But I never let it get me down
So when negativity surrounds
I know some day it’ll all turn around becauseAll my life I’ve been waitin’ for
I’ve been prayin’ for
For the people to say
That we don’t wanna fight no more
There’ll be no more war
And our children will playOne day, one day, one day, oh
One day, one day, one day, ohOne day this all will change, treat people the same
Stop with the violence, down with the hate
One day we’ll all be free, and proud to be
Under the same sun, singin’ songs of freedom likeWhy-ohh! (One day, one day) why-oh, oh, oh!
Why-ohh! (One day, one day) why-oh, oh, oh!All my life I’ve been waitin’ for
I’ve been prayin’ for
For the people to say
That we don’t wanna fight no more
There’ll be no more war
And our children will playOne day, one day, one day, oh
One day, one day, one day, oh

— Lyrics from One Day by Matisyahu

Sources for Feature Image

War Destruction Despair Fear Helplessness Sorrow | Alexas_Fotos | Alexa  •  Steh über den Dingen/und finde DEINEN Weg  •  Member since Jan. 6, 2015  •  #25

Plant Sprout Dicotyledon Life Growing Seedling | lanailic | English  •  Member since Feb. 6, 2014

Rainbow Beautiful Devon Nature Sun Sunset Sky | PublicDomainPictures | English  •  Member since Dec. 11, 2010

Family Love Rainbow Boy Child Chromatic Colorful | GDJ | Gordon Johnson  •  USA  •  Member since June 3, 2015  •  #2

A Few Other Things

Deeper Into A Rainbow | Second Video of DC Pride Parade

Deeper Into A Rainbow | June 11, 2022
4 views, Premiered 29 minutes ago

Music: Hot Foot (Groovy, Groovy) — Chico Mann [as featured on iPhone!] and Roof Down — Daniel Health [as featured on iPhone, music for the soul!]

Series: Have You Been Outside Today?

Photos/Videos/Editing: Me

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The intersection of gay rights, racism, and white supremacy continue intersecting through time. Will we ever grow up as a species to embrace and hold all of who we are as human beings? Or will we simply continue to label, divide, and conquer each other with hate and despair? See Hate Arises… Rainbows Become… to explore more on these ideas.

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For other blogs on being human, see:

What is Your Source of Energy – 5/2/22
Kindly Let Me Help You or You’ll Drown
Ukraine Letters | Four Letters to the World of Free Men and Women: Letter to the Ukrainian People; Letter to the Free World; Letter to Russian people; Letter to Americans

Walk Through Time | Gettysburg National Military Park

Walk Through Time | Gettysburg National Military Park | May 23, 2022

Music: Airtime — Justin Hori [as featured on iPhone, music that gets you moving!]

Series: Have You Been Outside Today?

Photos/videos/editing: Me

**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****

We stopped at Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania on our way up for our daughter’s graduation from Middlebury College in Vermont. It was late in the day, cloudy with a little drizzle–perfect weather to walk the roughly 6000 acres of historical pasture and woodlands where Union and Confederate soldiers met in General Robert E. Lee’s second and most ambitious invasion of the North.

It was the “High Water Mark of the Rebellion”, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, and the inspiration for President Abraham Lincoln’s immortal “Gettysburg Address”.

My husband found a monument dedicated to the 13th and 16th Vermont regiments. From their forward position, the nearly 1,500 men of these regiments poured devastating point-blank fire into the enemy ranks. They inflicted terrible casualties and ravaged the Confederate flank. The battle that was going in favor of the Confederate side began to slip. The Vermonters helped turn the tide of the battle and because of this win, turn the tide of the war itself. It would turn out that we were staying in a valley from where one of these regiments came from in Vermont.

Today, in 2022, it seems like the battle that took place on July 1, 1863, occurred so long ago and that the wounds inflicted from a country being torn apart by different ideas and ideals of how to live a good and just life would be long healed. The pictures of the wildflowers and wildlife are a testament to time and nature’s ability to regenerate.

However, the human heart and soul seems to still be torn and hurt. There are people alive today ready to do damage and tear apart America’s delicate democracy. There are people willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get more than they deserve or inflict their own will on the will of the people. Democracy isn’t easy. It requires compromise, and word that seems to have disappeared from American political and culture vocabulary. It does not require every share the exact same beliefs or values, but it does require tolerance and willingness to learn about the beliefs and values of people who are different from oneself. It requires curiosity and a basic agreement of facts and shared reality.

Will America be able to keep this fragile flower of self-governance in the face of a Republican Party that prefers to stick to loyal tests rather than truth, in the aftermath of Jan. 6, in the ongoing disenfranchisement and brutality to African Americans and any people with a darker skin tone, in the double standard that it is OK to regulate a woman’s body, but it is not alright to regulate guns?

  • Every day, on average, 316 people in America are shot in murders, assaults, suicides and suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention.” — Team ENOUGH
  • Guns have become the leading cause of death for American kids. early two-thirds of the 4,368 U.S. children up to age 19 who were killed by guns in 2020 were homicide victims, per the CDC. Motor vehicle crashes, formerly the leading cause of death for kids one and older, killed nearly 4,000 children.” — Axios

If you are upset by these statistics, by politics, by anything that gets you shouting at your TV or computer screen. It is time to get outside. If you find yourself getting enraged by a rainbow flag celebrating Pride Month or want to join the next raiding party of the Capitol, why not try going to a place like Gettysburg? Walk the park rather than drive. Let yourself sink into the blood-soaked earth where flowers now grow and birds once again sing. Talk to the park rangers, read about what happened, feel yourself being transported back to that time when the sound of gun fire and exploding canon balls rang continuously like a speeding train.

War is bloody. Conflict kills. There are other ways to solve conflict arising from diversity. We have one of those ways. It is called Democracy.

The people of Ukraine are fighting fiercely for this way of organizing society. They are showing us what it means and takes to defend freedom, liberty, and justice for all against a brutal, totalitarian regime; a regime that lies to its people, that exterminates anyone who becomes a threat to it, that concentrates wealth and power among a very few.

In America today, it seems we are choosing whether to stay a democracy, which means making room for tolerance and compromise again. Or will we choose to become a dictatorial regime (like Russia) where lies and distortions are used to whip up dissent and division so that truth, justice, and liberty for all becomes a distant dream.

Stay Human! Go outside today and hug another living being!

Acting Without Doing Anything

Lesson from the Tao Te Ching

Microsoft Word – Tao Te Ching – trans. by J.H.. McDonald

Ancient wisdom blended with modern images and music.

Chapter 2

When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created.
When people see things as good, evil is created.

First Stanza & Archetypal Animation

When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created… | Music: The Beauty in Ugly – Ugly Betty Version | Jason Mraz

Being and non-being produce each other. Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short define each other. High and low oppose each other. Fore and aft follow each other.

Second Stanza & Archetypal Animation

Being and non-being produce each other. Difficult and easy complement each other… | Music: High And Low by Andreas S. Möhle

Therefore the Master
can act without doing anything
and teach without saying a word.
Things come her way and she does not stop them; things leave and she lets them go.
She has without possessing,
and acts without any expectations.
When her work is done, she takes no credit.
That is why it will last forever.

Third Stanza & Archetypal Animation

Therefore the Master
can act without doing anything
and teach without saying a word…
| Music: The Giver | Livingston

For Chapter 1, see What Is Your Source of Energy?


Feature Archetypal Animation

Wall House Art Graffiti Elephant Decoration Home | RichardMc | Richard Mcall  •  Ireland/UK/Thailand  •  Member since Jan. 1, 2016

Rajasthan Camel Safari Trekking Evening Dusk | RichardMc | Richard Mcall  •  Ireland/UK/Thailand  •  Member since Jan. 1, 2016

Cobra Snake Reptile Basket Danger Serpent | RichardMc | Richard Mcall  •  Ireland/UK/Thailand  •  Member since Jan. 1, 2016

Art Painting Lady Woman Girl Head Shoulders | RichardMc | Richard Mcall  •  Ireland/UK/Thailand  •  Member since Jan. 1, 2016

Large Bronze Head Pietrasanta Plaza Italy | RichardMc | Richard Mcall  •  Ireland/UK/Thailand  •  Member since Jan. 1, 2016

Body Painting Makeup Cosplay Portrait Dark  | Vic_B | press 👍 and ⭐  •  Moscow/Россия  •  Member since Aug. 30, 2017  •  #12

Bulb Idea Fantasy Lighthouse Art Birds Beach | Vic_B | press 👍 and ⭐  •  Moscow/Россия  •  Member since Aug. 30, 2017  •  #12

Fantasy Space Stars Universe Starry Sky Galaxy | Willgard | Willgard Krause  •  Age 59  •  Lutherstadt Wittenberg/Deutschland  •  Member since Feb. 25, 2017  •  #449

Music: Time | Mr.Kitty | [15] Child of the Earth   


First Archetypal Animation

 Dandelion Seeds Dew Dewdrops Droplets Weed Plant | InspiredImages | UK  •  Member since Sept. 27, 2013

Art Portrait People Old Antique Retro Mirrors | SarahRichterArt | Sarah Richter  •  Deutsch  •  Member since Oct. 21, 2015

The Ugly Duchess Painting Portrait Quentin Metsys | Zephirx | Pascal  •  Age 23  •  Germany  •  Member since Dec. 17, 2020

Girl With A Pearl Earring Painting Portrait | Zephirx | Pascal  •  Age 23  •  Germany  •  Member since Dec. 17, 2020

Environmental Protection Environment The Atmosphere | Inactive account – ID 81349

Clown All-In-One Character Fun Evil Bad | isabellaquintana | Isabella Quintana  •  Cali/Colombia  •  Member since Sept. 22, 2014

Music: The Beauty in Ugly – Ugly Betty Version | Jason Mraz


Second Archetypal Animation

Woman Yoga Pose Wellness Well-Being Meditate | Pexels | English  •  Member since March 26, 2016

Star Child Star Children Angels Meditation Unity | PapaOsmosis | Anthony  •  United States  •  Member since Oct. 4, 2016

Maze Labyrinth Solution Lost Problem Challenge | qimono |Arek Socha  •  Stockholm/Sweden  •  Member since Jan. 27, 2016

 Giraffe Animal Mammal Tree Long-Legged Long-Necked | HowardWilks | English  •  Member since March 31, 2017

Danbo Nyangbo Figure Doll Gray-Scale Loneliness | IraEm | M K  •  Ch/Korea  •  Member since Feb. 3, 2014

Storm Sea Lightning Ship Adventure Ominous | ChadoNihi | Alexandr  •  Age 29  •  Cambridge/UK  •  Member since Dec. 8, 2014

 New York Sea City Skyline Buildings Cityscape | Pexels | English  •  Member since March 26, 2016


Music: High And Low by Andreas S. Möhle


Third Archetypal Animation

Hip Hop Dance Girl Woman Young Lifestyle Artistic | ArtTower | Brigitte Werner  •  Age 68  •  Canim Lake/Canada  •  Member since June 15, 2012  •  #72

Waters Move Flow Action People Rope Waterfall | Dieterich01 | Lothar Dieterich  •  Age 62  •  Germering/Deutschland  •  Member since June 26, 2016

Colorful Five Fingers Kid Fingers Playful Rating | yohoprashant | Prashant Sharma  •  Age 37  •  Bhaktapur/Nepal  •  Member since Feb. 22, 2018

Girl Cat Moon Wall Melancholy Sad Alone Romantic | Tumisu | Tumisu, please consider ☕ Thank you! 🤗  •  English  •  Member since Feb. 3, 2014

Child Girl Winter Snow Face Fairy Tale | Pezibear | Petra  •  Österreich  •  Member since Oct. 22, 2014  •  #82

Hand Gift Bouquet Love Congratulate Give Flowers | klimkin | svklimkin  •  Age 45  •  Moscow/Russia  •  Member since Aug. 13, 2015

Fantasy Galaxy Universe Stars Cosmos Night | JuliusH | Julius H.  •  Age 69  •  Niedersachsen/Deutschland 🇪🇺  •  Member since Dec. 4, 2016  •  #165

What Is Your Source of Energy?

Lessons from the Tao Te Ching

— Written by Lao-Tzu — trans. by J.H.. McDonald

Laozi and Mozi

The Tao Te Ching was written around 400 BCE by Laozi (also written as Lao Tzu). He is the founder of Taoism, which is one of the philosophies flourishing during the time in China known as the time of The Hundred Schools of Thought, which thrived from the 6th century BCE to 221 BCE.

According to Mozi, another of China’s great philosophers born c. 470 BCE and died to c. 391 BCE, the achievement of social goals necessitates the unity of thought and action by the people and their rulers. His political philosophy bears a resemblance to divine-rule monarchy: the population ought always to obey its leaders, as its leaders ought always follow the will of heaven.

He is the first major intellectual to rival Confucius, founding the school of Mohism during this period of The Hundred Schools of Thought. His teaching have been summed up into 10 theses that have since been extensively argued. His most famous these is that of:

Jian’ai: This is the injunction that one ought to be concerned for the welfare of people in a spirit of “impartial concern” (jian’ai) that does not make distinctions between self and other, associates and strangers, a doctrine often described more simplistically as “universal love.” -- Encyclopedia of Philosophy

It would not be long before how well the leaders of the people would (or could) follow the will of heaven would be tested.

The Rise of Strongmen and Ruthless Rulers

Qin Shi Huang is the second of the Ruthless Rulers I highlight in my book Sapience: The Moment is Now (not yet published, but soon).

He is the first of the feudal kings of China to conquer all of the Warring States in 221 BCE, which included six dynasties, to create the Qin Dynasty. These territories include most of what we consider modern China today. Upon doing this, he declared himself the first emperor of China and assumed a title implying he possessed divine powers. He begins his rule by persecuting monks and philosophers, which cumulates in the burning of the books and termination of the Hundred Schools of Thought.

Qin Shi Huang, portrait in 18th century album Lidai diwang xiang. Artist unknown.
"Beginning in 213 BCE, all classic works of the Hundred Schools of Thought — except those from Li Ssu's own school of philosophy known as legalism — were subject to book burning. "Qin Shi Huang burned the other histories out of fear that they undermined his legitimacy, and wrote his own history books. -- History of Information

It is a pattern that has repeated itself over and over and over again since the first Ruthless Ruler walked the Earth. The inability of the people to tolerate diverse groups of thoughts seems to lie at the heart of how and why Ruthless Rulers rise to power.

And yet walking alongside Ruthless Rulers are men and women of rich intellectual mastery and wisdom such as Mozi and Confucius, Plato and Aristotle, Laozi and Zhuangzi who are only a few of individuals who have delved deeply into the human psyche and wrestled with the unknowable.

More than any time in our collective history, we need so many more people to take the plunge and do the same. To wrestled with the monsters that live inside all of us. We need groups of people in greater numbers than ever before to contemplate, debate, mutter and muster greater understanding for the tremendous diversity of thoughts, ideas, and philosophies we are capable of conceiving and creating into reality using nothing more than our minds to imagine something different than nature would have previously allowed to exist. We must work and stretch our minds far beyond the simple ploys Strongmen use to generate arguments and embed slogans into minds meant to bend the into little boxes that are easy to control and use like disposable commodities.

This is what Strongmen do, as they endlessly dream of becoming the next great Ruthless Ruler.

We see it playing out again, right here, right now, in our own countries wherever they are as the tide of intolerance, bigotry, racism, nationalism, patriotism, partisanism sweep strongmen into powerful positions–Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Rodrigo Duterte, Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping, Putin, and formerly Trump.

They use righteous ideas and righteous talk like jack hammers that steadily chip away at the unity of thought and action Mozi talked about centuries ago as essential for collective good of all. When their speech doesn’t flame the right pit of emotion and opposition arises, they use violence (if they can get away with it) to silence those who don’t agree with them.

Images from the bottom to the top:


What Will We Do?

Will we let ourselves be torn to pieces by ideas and thoughts flung about by Strongmen and Ruthless Ruler? It always ends the same way. They reign with terror tearing down and destroying anything good and wholesome a country or group of people has managed to achieve, turning on those who turn against them, annihilating anyone or anything who dares to question them. They tell their followers they have been sent here on a divine mission, they have been sent by God, or indeed, they are God and everyone must bend down before them.

It is for this reason I will highlight parts of Laozi’s book written so many centuries earlier. A man who was believed by the people to be a god and worshipped, though I suspect Laozi would have tolerated this as a bit foolish…he knew he was a man with faults and foibles…that is what his teachings are about navigating the stream we call ourselves full of faults and foibles, wisdom and knowledge, danger and destruction. He advocated the middle way. His system of thinking would serve modern men and women well right now in the dangerous tides we ourselves have created and now must swim.

Here is his first chapter of his masterpiece of thinking animated with modern images and music from our time now.

Chapter 1 — Tao Te Ching

First Archetypal Animation & Stanza

The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name.

The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao… | Music: Tao of Healing Dean EvensonPond Reflecting Stars   

Second Archetypal Animation & Stanza

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of creation.

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of creation. | Music: The Other Side of Darkness — Guide Me Home (One Misstep)

Third Archetypal Animation & Stanza

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery. By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery. By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real. | Music: Freed From Desire Strange Fruits Music [1] Freed From Desire    2:24

Fourth Archetypal Animation & Stanza (also Feature Animation)

Yet mystery and reality emerge from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness born from darkness. The beginning of all understanding.

Yet mystery and reality emerge from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness born from darkness. The beginning of all understanding. | Music: Source of Energy | Clear Conscience[1] Source of Energy

Addition Relevant Resources

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.
The most certain way to succeed is always
to try just one more time
.” — Thomas A. Edison

Hernan Diaz’s anticipated novel ‘Trust’ probes the illusion of money — and the truth

Scott Simon talks with Hernan Diaz about his novel, “Trust.” It tells the story of a New York tycoon who takes advantage of the 1929 crash, and his attempts to rewrite and control his own story. In this interview, Diaz tells Scott that power is the ability to bend reality and shape what others perceive as real. Power imposes someone else’s reality onto others. Wealth and money (and the desire to get more money) does this to people. They burn with the desire to have more of that kind of power over others. Great fortunes create a reality in and of themselves that others are eager to have a part or piece of.

Images from: The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It; Trust by Hernan Diaz; Power Wealth Classics; Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World


What Leadership Looks Like | Ted Radio Hour

From workplaces to schools to national governments, leaders everywhere are being called on to solve complex problems with humility and bravery. This hour, we consider what it takes to be a leader.  Guests include executive coach Patrice Gordon, organizational psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, and educator Shabana Basij-Rasikh.

I found the first interview particularly compelling as the speaker relates our ancient programming to have strong men leading a tribe or clan. These were times when groups were small and all members knew the integrity of every other member and whether they could be trusted or not. However, as our small bands and groups of people surviving together against vast and overwhelming odds have grown into vast civilizations, the qualities of a good ruler have shifted tremendously.

A good ruler today does not act on gut instinct, as would have been the right thing to do 10,000 years ago. A good ruler today actually must go against gut instinct to grasp the greater complexities of our modern realities and make more calculated, incremental moves that benefits all members of the collective, even those who are against the leader. But as people electing who to rule us, we are still vastly informed by our own gut instincts and emotions choosing ruler who we feel we could have beer with rather than rulers who could stare down the missile silo of a narcissist idiot threatening to use nuclear weapons on the world.

Images from: What Leadership Looks Like | Ted Radio Hour; Trump may tweet better. But nobody rides an ICBM like Putin; Russia nuclear threat: Putin’s deadly underwater nuke which can devastate US targets; Russia warns that it will see any missile launched at its territory as a nuclear attack; Russia has ‘unstoppable’ supersonic nuclear missile that cannot be traced by Western defence systems, says Putin; Vladimir Putin’s 4,000mph nuke can reach Britain in 13 MINUTES – and it CANNOT be stopped

What lovely, reassuring smile Putin has on that last picture!


The New Gilded Age | Throughline

“The World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos, Switzerland, 2019 – an exclusive event where the world’s richest and most powerful people get together to solve the world’s problems. I was there when David Attenborough, you know, was showing his new film. The Garden of Eden is no more. Beautiful – you know, absolutely beautiful, stunning footage of how we’re wrecking the planet. And people were literally crying while they were seeing it. And I was thinking, but, guys, you arrived here in your private jets.”

Images from: File:World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2005a.jpg; World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020; ‘Garden of Eden is no more’, Sir David Attenborough tells Davos; Prince William turns interviewer in Davos appearance with Attenborough; Too much money is bad; May 23, 1937: The Death Of The Ultimate Oil Man; The First Battle for Oil in Norway: The Long Arm of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil; The Ultimate List of Corporate Philanthropy Benefits and How To Achieve Them; The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills; The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty; Were the Titans of the Gilded Age “Robber Barons” or “Entrepreneurial Industrialists”?; Gilded Age Blog; Up To a Point: Robber Barons Make Way For Robber Nerds; The Modern Robber Barons; Ludlow Massacre; On This Day April 20, 1914: Remembering the Ludlow Massacre; Ludlow Massacre: PBS;


Why Russia’s military appears to be struggling in Ukraine

Aired May 1, 2022 on Heard on  All Things Considered

Why does Russia's massive and powerful military force continue to struggle against a smaller, less well-equipped opponent? Journalist David Volodzko wrote about this in a recent piece in The Daily Beast titled "The Embarrassing Truth Behind Putin's War Failures." He says the Russians appear not to have internalized the lessons they could have learned during other conflicts, particularly the civil war in Syria, where Russia backed the government of dictator Bashar al-Assad. -- MICHEL MARTIN, HOST
The problem is, in April 2021, I believe, the company that makes the Azart and its owner, Leonid Reiman, who's the former minister of communications, came under investigation for fraud. They had evidently been using cheap Chinese parts. This led to a bunch of problems, including the batteries didn't really work that well. So they've had to switch instead, and they're largely using mobile phones and things of that nature. And this is just one example of how corruption has left Putin and his army out in the open, in a sense, and exposed. -- DAVID VOLODZKO
I think that we all have overestimated Russia's military capabilities. And, I would add, I think that Putin did, too. One point that I make in the piece is that Moscow recently purged 150 Federal Security Service agents, and they sent the head of the FSB's fifth service, which handles counterinsurgency ops in Ukraine, to Lefortovo Prison. Now, there's a couple different theories as to why, and I'm inclined to go with the official explanation on this one, which is that Beseda lied to the state and stole funds. -- DAVID VOLODZKO
So again, as with the radio communications issue, we see corruption coming back to bite Russia. And as a consequence of that, Putin may have gone in on bad intel, thinking that the Ukrainians were going to be waiting with flowers instead of Bandera smoothies - which is, you know, Ukraine's version of a Molotov cocktail - and going in with bad gear, thinking that he had the best and the latest. And so as much as we fell for this idea of Russia being much more powerful than they are, much more capable than they are, Putin fell for that himself. -- DAVID VOLODZKO

Ridley Road | Masterpiece Theater

`Ridley Road' is the story of the 62 Group, a collection of anti-fascists who stood up against the rising neo-Nazi movement in Britain after World War Two, based on Jo Bloom's book of the same name, released in 2014. In the summer of 1962, twenty-year-old Vivien Epstein, a Jewish hairdresser from Manchester, arrives in London following the death of her father. Alone in the world, she is looking for Jack Fox, a man she had a brief but intense love affair with some months before. Her search leads her into the fight against resurgent fascism in East London, where members of the Jewish community are taking to the streets, in and around Ridley Road. -- Google Knowledge Panel

Note: This is 1962 this movies is about; just 17 years after Nazi Germany almost successfully invaded England.

Images from: Ridley Road; Ridley Road review – fascism thriller resonates in our current dark age; What is Ridley Road About?; Ridley Road: Viewers are all doing the same thing after episode two of the BBC drama; Ridley Road reviewfascism thriller resonates in our current dark age

Archetypal Animations

First Archetypal Animation

Buddha Yoga Meditation Relax Welfare Buddhism | PatrizioYoga | Patrizio  •  Italia  •  Member since March 21, 2018

Fantasy Transcendence Composing Magic Gold | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #240

Matrix Communication Software Pc Virus Computer | geralt | Gerd Altmann  •  Freiburg/Deutschland  •  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  •  #13

Music: Tao of Healing Dean Evenson [1] Gentle Season    6:46 [2] Clouds on Mountain    7:30 [3] Pond Reflecting Stars    6:14


Second Archetypal Animation

Astronaut Astronomy Satellite Moon Future | PIRO4D | PIRO  •  Heidelberg/Deutschland  •  Member since June 7, 2016

Background Stationery Guestbook Heaven Moon Swans | pixel2013 | S. Hermann & F. Richter  •  Germany  •  Member since April 9, 2016

Woman Mother Nature The Excitement Creation Birth | Ka_Nia | Katarzyna Micińska  •  Age 42  •  Częstochowa/Polska  •  Member since Sept. 25, 2017

Fantasy Dark Gothic Goth Surreal Ethereal | darksouls1 | Enrique Meseguer  •  Age 49  •  Madrid/España  •  Member since March 9, 2016  •  #812

Music: The Other Side of Darkness36 [1] Take Me by the Hand    9:42[2] Spinning Around    5:11[3] To Start Again    4:28[4] Shelter  3:09[5] Ripples    3:57[6] Past Self    5:12 [7] Guide Me Home (One Misstep)    4:53


Third Archetypal Animation

Portrait Look Red Scarf Mystery Hidden Eyes | lanamorphose | pamela laporte  •  Age 36  •  limoges/france  •  Member since March 5, 2017

Fantasy Surreal Mask Wall Eye Mysticism Girl | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #240

War Ukraine Landscape Girl Emotion Destruction | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #240

Surreal Eye Fantasy Mysterious Halloween | blende12 | Gerhard G.  •  Deutschland  •  Member since March 25, 2014  •  #149

Dove Of Peace Flag Symbol World Peace Ukraine | blende12 | Gerhard G.  •  Deutschland  •  Member since March 25, 2014  •  #149

Music: Freed From Desire | Strange Fruits Music[1] Freed From Desire    2:24


Fourth Archetypal Animation & Feature Animation

Hands Water Wash Color Source Hand Background | drfuenteshernandez | Manuel Darío Fuentes Hernández  •  Age 27  •  Guantánamo/Cuba  •  Member since Jan. 19, 2018

Nature Source Fountain Water Reflection Trees | Antranias | Manfred Antranias Zimmer  •  Chiemgau/Germany  •  Member since Aug. 27, 2013

Alive Energy Divine Body-Mind Mind-Body Faith | johnhain | John Hain  •  Age 72  •  Carmel/United States  •  Member since July 24, 2014

Woman Waterfall Naked Landscape Mountain | Mysticsartdesign | Mystic Art Design  •  Deutsch  •  Member since July 3, 201

Library Heaven Birds Mystical Clouds Sun | Mysticsartdesign | Mystic Art Design  •  Deutsch  •  Member since July 3, 201

Music: Source of Energy | Clear Conscience[1] Source of Energy    2:30

If It Was My Last Day on Earth?

What would you do if this was your last day on Earth today?

Perhaps write a poem?

It is our perception of reality that determines so much of what we allow ourselves to accept or not accept, what we allow ourselves to believe or not believe, how much we allow ourselves to love or not to love.

Poems are wonderful transformers of perception.

Here are some poems about nature, Earth, and life that have been written at very different periods in time, and yet, there is something universal, something incredibly current, something worth paying attention to in each and every one of them, especially today.


A Minor Bird by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

I have wished a bird would fly away,

And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door

When it seemed as if I could bear no more..

The fault must partly have been in me.

The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong

In wanting to silence any song.

From 7 Poems To Read In Honor Of Earth Day, Bustle, By E. Ce Miller, April 14, 2016

“I have wished a bird would fly away… and not sing all day…” | Music: A Minor Bird by Victoria Darian

Ryokan (1758-1831)

When all thoughts
Are exhausted
I slip into the woods
And gather
A pile of shepherd’s purse.

From Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf:  Zen Poems of Ryokan, translated by John Stevens. Published by Shambala in Boston, 1996.


Basho (1644-1694)

Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die.


The bee emerging
from deep within the peony
departs reluctantly.


Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams.

From The Essential Basho, Translated by Sam Hamill.  Published by Shambala in Boston, 1999.

“Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die…”

Music: When Dragons Cry by Bo Johnson

Ikkyu (1394-1481)

My Hovel

The world before my eyes is wan and wasted, just like me.
The earth is decrepit, the sky stormy, all the grass withered.
No spring breeze even at this late date,
Just winter clouds swallowing up my tiny reed hut.

From Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu, translated by John Stevens. Published by Shambala in Boston, 1995.

The world before my eyes is wan and wasted, just like me… | Music: Time Travelers Coyote Oldman [4] The Fourth Dream    5:26

These Zen poems come from A Sampler of Zen Poetry. The author of this sampler says, “These are a few of my favorite poems by three of Japan’s greatest Zen monk-poets, Ikkyu (1394-1481), Basho (1644-1694), and Ryokan (1758-1831).”

They are indeed very beautiful and holy.


Today is Earth Day!

Go ahead, write a poem! Transcend space and time and perceptions of reality using nothing but your mind.

We never know when our last day on Earth will be.

Seize the moment, see more, feel your rightness in this moment, know you belong and you matter, right here, right now. You are it!

Feature Archetypal Animation

Fantasy Girl Rock Space Earth Moon Composing | Willgard | Willgard Krause  •  Age 58  •  Lutherstadt Wittenberg/Deutschland  •  Member since Feb. 25, 2017  •  #316

Space Galaxy Universe Sky Night Cosmos Star | gene1970 | English  •  Member since Dec. 10, 2017  •  #385

Eagle Girl Moon Mountains Fantasy Dream | gene1970 | English  •  Member since Dec. 10, 2017  •  #385

Astronaut Space Planets Astronomy Galaxy | gene1970 | English  •  Member since Dec. 10, 2017  •  #385

Earth Blue Planet Globe Gaia Planet People | spirit111 | beate bachmann  •  Age 59  •  berlin/germany  •  Member since April 6, 2017

Earth Universe Flammarion Science Spiritual | ChristianBodhi | Christian Bodhi  •  Santa Cruz De Tenerife, London/Spain and United Kingdom  •  Member since Aug. 19, 2018


First Archetypal Animation

Kerala India Manipulated Bird Nature | ambadysasi | Ambady Sasi  •  Age 28  •  Thodupuzha/India  •  Member since Nov. 15, 2017

Bird Singer Singing Chirp Tweet Chirrup Robin | Pfüderi | Age 30  •  Schweiz  •  Member since March 24, 2014  •  #810

Bird Songbird To Sing Spring Nature Park | jggrz | Jürgen  •  Age 66  •  Thüringen/Deutschland  •  Member since Feb. 10, 2018  •  #57

Bird Starling Crested Song Feathers Plumage | YK333 | Yadvendra Kumar  •  Age 62  •  Delhi/India  •  Member since July 11, 2021

King Medieval Celebration Man Handsome | Wadams | William Adams  •  Age 69  •  Manhattan/US  •  Member since April 20, 2015

Belgium Statue Knokke Beach Man On The Beach | pixel2013 | S. Hermann & F. Richter  •  Germany  •  Member since April 9, 2016

Music:

Music: A Minor Bird by Victoria Darian [1] A Minor Bird    5:08


Second Archetypal Animation

Canthigaster Cicada Fulgoromorpha Insect Trunk Long | Josch13 | Deutsch  •  Member since Aug. 17, 2013

Dragon Golden Dragon Statue Sculpture Art Artwork | Josch13 | Deutsch  •  Member since Aug. 17, 2013

Wild Bee Blossom Bloom Peony Close Up Yellow | jggrz | Jürgen  •  Age 66  •  Thüringen/Deutschland  •  Member since Feb. 10, 2018  •  #59

Mountain Field Sky Agriculture Nature Countryside | SwidaAlba | Leng Kangrui  •  Age 23  •  Beijing/China  •  Member since Feb. 13, 2018

Poppy Flower Nature Wild Flower Wild Flowers Field | Candiix | CANDICE CANDICE  •  Français  •  Member since Nov. 19, 2017

Warrior Fallen Combat Dead Injured Viking | Garyuk31 | Gary Chambers  •  Age 52  •  English  •  Member since Oct. 25, 2015

Carving Stone Rock Stone Carving Dragon China | PublicDomainPictures | English  •  Member since Dec. 11, 2010

Music: When Dragons Cry by Bo Johnson [1] When Dragons Cry    4:32


Third Archetypal Animation

Apocalypse Clouds End Time Atmospheric Mystical | Mysticsartdesign | Mystic Art Design  •  Deutsch  •  Member since July 3, 2014

Skin Eye Iris Blue Older Folds Wrinkled Skin Man | analogicus | Tom  •  Andernach/Deutschland  •  Member since Feb. 25, 2018  •  #144

Wood Statue Sculpture Statue Wooden | terimakasih0 | Dean Moriarty  •  Age 67  •  cardiff/United Kingdom  •  Member since Dec. 3, 2014

Thunderstorm Weather Storm Thunder Lighting Bolts | Inactive account – ID 12019

Nature Straw Hay Grass Field Wet How Come Swamp | EM80 | Deutsch  •  Member since March 13, 2015

Lakeside Reed Hut Timber Construction Piles | webentwicklerin | Gabriele Lässer  •  Österreich  •  Member since June 18, 2012

Mushrooms Moss Fungi Lichen Forest Nature | adege | Andreas  •  Age 65  •  Gelterkinden/Schweiz  •  Member since April 3, 2017  •  #128

Music: Time Travelers Coyote Oldman [1] Time Travelers    8:04[2] Dark Beauty    5:07[3] Peaceful Blue    4:09 [4] The Fourth Dream    5:26

The Peace of Wild Things

Please note Chrome works best for the Archetypal Animations in this post.

— By Wendell Berry

First Archetypal Animation & Stanza

When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s live may be,

When despair for the world grows…” | Music: Goodbye Then | Crippled Black Phoenix

Second Archetypal Animation & Stanza

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I go and lie down…” | Music: Wild Imagination | Kurt Vile

Third Archetypal Animation & Stanza

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

“I come into the peace of wild things…” | Music: The Peace Of Wild Things | Keith Kauspedas [1] Deep Echoing (Fox In The Snow)

Fourth Archetypal Animation & Stanza

I come into the presence of still water.

“I come into the presence of still water…” | Music: Watermark Enya | [9] River  

Fifth Archetypal Animation & Stanza

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

“I feel above me the day-blind stars…” | Music: Stars Night Mantra

Sixth Archetypal Animation & Stanza

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

“For a time I rest in the grace of the world,…” | Music: Peaceful Piano Musicals Cover Kid | La la Lu (From “Lady and the Tramp”)    

Reflections On Wendell Berry’s Poem to This Moment in Time

When the forces of man’s collective psyche gather into a maelstrom sending destructive vortexes this way and that into the world, it is hard not to feel as Wendell Berry begins his timeless poem:

...despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's live may be...

Putin blows his devil’s breath from high within his isolated, depressing Moscow tower. A devil’s wind that makes his warrior vortexes go this way and that. Everywhere they go, the leave behind trails of blood, of dead bodies and blown up buildings, trees, and earth. Up there in his tower of desolation, he bloats in his madness as he congratulates himself over and over again about how he is getting away with unleashing his Hell-scape fantasies, deathly desires, and foolish folly into the world.

If you are a person with normal capacity for human empathy and compassion, then it is impossible to turn away and ignore what is going on in Ukraine. And you must not turn away.

We all must witness this wicked madness straight on, just as the Ukrainians are meeting Putin’s little devils straight on. If we don’t want to become like Putin, we must feel this destruction deeply and furiously. And we must feel down deep into our bones all the other tragedies unfolding in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa, Central America, South America, in the heart of all major cities and super rick countries in this world.

If you do, this means you are still human.

Wendell Berry describes the monsters inside us all. And he also tells us how to quell them and to sink into the peace that passes all understanding.

I wonder when was the last time Putin went down to where the wood drakes gather? When did he last lay down on his back, belly exposed to the light, the air, the sun, the stars and breathe in the beauty of this world? When did he last see a heron eat a snake or ponder the peace of still water? When did he last look up into the night sky and wonder about how implausible any of us are here at all?

When did Putin cut himself off from his curiosity, his wonder, his inner grace and awareness that he is alive in a magnificent world with enough bounty for all, if only we would tap into our inner wild nature where the wild wisdom of life runs free with the knowledge there is bounty all, if only we take our fair share? When did Putin become a narcissist blob cut off from his body, his heart, and his humanity? When did he become a monster?

Seventh Archetypal Animation | When Grace Is Lost

“And then the sun went out bright…” | Music: Dark Bloom | Darkness | The Sun Went Out Bright    

Putin lost his inner grace long ago, and now, alone and cold in a forbidding world, he opens a gate for devils to tumble and fumble their way out into this beautiful world. They rape women, shoot children, bomb maternity hospitals, children’s hospitals, and recreation centers where 1,000 women and children huddle in the dark and cold hoping they might just stop their bombing. Instead, they are crushed under the rubble of another bomb.

I hate Putin. I hate Putin’s army of dead and dying souls. I wish the Free World would grow a stronger backbone and kill this man who has become a Dracula overseeing an army of Zombies. But, we are playing on the “civilized” game board, while Putin plays on the barbarian game board.

However, he won’t win. He might kill a Hell of a lot of people. He might even launch a nuclear bomb, but like so many Ruthless Rulers before him, he will crumble into the dust bin of life. Ruthless Rulers always do.

Oh yes, they might win for a time. And, they might press their smelly likeness onto other human beings, adding to the blob, but he will never win. His zombies will never rule over the multitude as he has promised.

Evil never wins! At least not for long…not as long as there is life to live. Not as long as wood drakes sail on lakes or great herons hunt and devour snakes. Not as long as a single human being wanders down to the waters edges and wonders why this whole thing exists at all. Ponders why we are here amongst the divine majesty of the trillion billion stars above.


Being Human by Being Connected to Each Other & the World

My friend Karen shared this poem with me. We both feel deep pain for suffering the of the people of Ukraine. We both feel helpless in the face of such evil, and yet, we live…and…in the face of such horror, in retaliation to the demonic evil unleashing death, destruction and horror on Earth, Ukrainians fight! They live!

And yes, they are dying by the hundreds of thousands because Putin is a coward and his army is ill-equipped and ill-prepared, indeed, they are unwilling to wage this war, expect for the beasts he’s imported in and the degenerate ones who glory in the gross and disgusting side of life…the ones who are too afraid to love or to know who and what they really are.

Ukrainians know the price of this evil, and they stand against it, and they are winning! They are winning because they remained connected to their humanity and grounded to this Earth–our home, our mother, our true nature. They show us, the Free World, each and every day how to fight for what is right and how to be better human beings!

Fight for the people of Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine!

Feature Archetypal Animation

Covid 19 Coronavirus Dystopia Dystopian | toyquests | Elliot Alderson  •  Age 35  •  Los Angeles/United States  •  Member since March 31, 2020

Male Wood Duck Duck Animal Wildlife Drake Pond | muskrat55 | Robin Arnold  •  Age 66  •  Port Clinton/United States  •  Member since June 9, 2017

 Iceland Arctic Fox Fox White White Fox Canine | Inactive account – ID 12019

Rest Relax Lie Comfortable Sleep Man Person | Hans | Hans Braxmeier  •  Neu-Ulm/Deutschland  •  Member since Nov. 24, 2010

Composing Woman Fantasy Face Beauty Mystical Root | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #391

Sunset Tree Water Silhouette Tree Silhouette Dusk | Cleverpix | Cindy Lever  •  Age 57  •  Melbourne/Australia  •  Member since May 4, 2016

Meadow Green Meadow Flower Meadow Grass Nature | spirit111 | beate bachmann  •  Age 59  •  berlin/germany  •  Member since April 6, 2017

Seljalandsfoss Waterfalls Iceland Falls Cliffs | Inactive account – ID 12019

Music: The Peace of Wild Things | Wendell Berry

The Peace of Wild ThingsWendell Berry


First Archetypal Animation

Man Portrait Homeless Poverty Male Poor | Leroy_Skalstad | Leroy Skalstad  •  Age 74  •  Milwaukee/uSA  •  Member since July 14, 2015

Mental Health Brain Thinking Tree Branches Disorder | Tumisu | Tumisu, please consider ☕ Thank you! 🤗  •  English  •  Member since Feb. 3, 2014

Lights Candle Man Old Fire Flame Candlelight | Skitterphoto | Rudy and Peter Skitterians  •  Groningen/The Netherlands  •  Member since July 5, 2014

Covid 19 Coronavirus Dystopia Dystopian | toyquests | Elliot Alderson  •  Age 35  •  Los Angeles/United States  •  Member since March 31, 2020

Music: Goodbye Then | Crippled Black Phoenix


Second Archetypal Animation

Rest Relax Lie Comfortable Sleep Man Person | Hans | Hans Braxmeier  •  Neu-Ulm/Deutschland  •  Member since Nov. 24, 2010

Male Wood Duck Waterfowl Bird Swimming Wildlife | JamesDeMers | Charlottesville/USA  •  Member since March 6, 2012

Male Wood Duck Duck Animal Wildlife Drake Pond | muskrat55 | Robin Arnold  •  Age 66  •  Port Clinton/United States  •  Member since June 9, 2017

Heron Snake Wader Bird Kill Ardeidae Prey | mkzsfoto | steven arnold  •  reunion  •  Member since Sept. 11, 2018

Music: Wild Imagination | Kurt Vile


Third Archetypal Animation

Fantasy Butterflies Mushrooms Forest Insects | Stergo | Игорь Левченко  •  Age 32  •  Владикавказ/Россия  •  Member since Jan. 2, 2017

Composing Woman Fantasy Face Beauty Mystical Root | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #391

Tree Lake Water Nature Landscape Forest | Leslin_Liu | Shanghai/China  •  Member since June 16, 2017

Fantasy Eyes Forest Branches Face Portrait | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #391

Fantasy Deer Mammal Forest Nature Outdoors Light | peter_pyw | Peter  •  KUALA LUMPUR/Malaysia  •  Member since July 19, 2016

Fantasy Forest Dog Monster Girl Snow Winter | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  •  Deutschland / Germany  •  Member since March 22, 2017  •  #391

Nature Outdoors Ants Forest Light Bulb Light | peter_pyw | Peter  •  KUALA LUMPUR/Malaysia  •  Member since July 19, 2016

Music: The Peace Of Wild Things | Keith Kauspedas [1] Deep Echoing (Fox In The Snow)    6:06


Fourth Archetypal Animation

Still Calm Tranquil Moon Sunset Sky Ocean Lake | WelshPixie | Delyth Williams  •  Age 41  •  Western Cape/South Africa  •  Member since Sept. 14, 2018

Cutter North Sea Port Shrimp Fishing Vessel | ArtTower | Brigitte Werner  •  Age 68  •  Canim Lake/Canada  •  Member since June 15, 2012  •  #89

Sunset Still Water Splash Water Reflection Liquid | truthseeker08 | 🆓 Use at your Ease 👌🏼  •  English  •  Member since April 18, 2016

Still Calm Tranquil Sunset Sky Ocean Lake Water | WelshPixie | Delyth Williams  •  Age 41  •  Western Cape/South Africa  •  Member since Sept. 14, 2018

 Nature Waters Lake Island Landscape Thunderstorm | jplenio | Joe  •  Munich/Deutschland  •  Member since Jan. 9, 2018  •  #295

Sunset Tree Water Silhouette Tree Silhouette Dusk | Cleverpix | Cindy Lever  •  Age 57  •  Melbourne/Australia  •  Member since May 4, 2016

Music: Watermark Enya | [9] River    3:12


Fifth Archetypal Animation

Wall Blind Alley Dead End Impasse Lockup Deadlock | ChadoNihi | Alexandr  •  Age 29  •  Cambridge/UK  •  Member since Dec. 8, 2014

Red Planet Moon Alien Arid Abiocoen Ancient | ChadoNihi | Alexandr  •  Age 29  •  Cambridge/UK  •  Member since Dec. 8, 2014

Stargate Heaven Gate Science Fiction Futuristic | spirit111 | beate bachmann  •  Age 59  •  berlin/germany  •  Member since April 6, 2017

Meadow Green Meadow Flower Meadow Grass Nature | spirit111 | beate bachmann  •  Age 59  •  berlin/germany  •  Member since April 6, 2017

Wormhole Time Travel Portal Vortex Space Warp | Genty | English  •  Member since May 20, 2016

Galaxy Fog Kosmus Universe Milky Way Night Sky | spirit111 | beate bachmann  •  Age 59  •  berlin/germany  •  Member since April 6, 2017

Music: Stars Night Mantra


Sixth Archetypal Animation

Mountains Smoke Portrait Girl Field Romantic | manhhongdldhv | Hong Manh  •  Age 32  •  Vinh/Việt Nam  •  Member since July 4, 2020

 Sunset Mountains Trees Silhouettes Conifers | Inactive account – ID 12019

Mountains Hills Sky Clouds Sunset Dusk Twilight | Inactive account – ID 12019

Iceland Aurora Borealis Northern Lights Beautiful | Inactive account – ID 12019

Kingfisher Bird Close Up Perched Perched Bird | Inactive account – ID 12019

 Iceland Arctic Fox Fox White White Fox Canine | Inactive account – ID 12019

Seljalandsfoss Waterfalls Iceland Falls Cliffs | Inactive account – ID 12019

Music: Peaceful Piano Musicals Cover Kid | La la Lu (From “Lady and the Tramp”)    


Seventh Archetypal Animation

Black Hole Art-Optical Black White Contrast | dric | Français  •  Member since Nov. 30, 2016

Colour Farbklex Embroidery Blob Drops | Bru-nO | Bruno /Germany  •  Age 47  •  Thank you for your Donation!/Please like your download!  •  Member since June 29, 2015  •  #255

Abstract Astral Astrology Astronomy Background | Buddy_Nath | A Owen  •  Age 39  •  United Kingdom  •  Member since Feb. 4, 2016

Music: Dark Bloom | Darkness | The Sun Went Out Bright    

Satan’s Sister & Santa Claus

Field of Souring Souls

Satan’s sister slithers through fields of drying, souring souls…

Satan’s Sister | Music: Dance with the DeadMoon Runner | Images: girl pyramid head; Pyramid head woman on the field; Lady Pyramid Head (Cassandra W); Sorceress/Witch

Sundering Sinners

Seeking sinners to pluck and pulverized into a poison…

Hel Feasts Tonight | Music: Al Bid-Aya — Jedi Mind Trick | Images: HEL goddess of by LeneMa7991; Morrigan, Goddess of Death; Hel- The Norse Goddess of Death; Morrighan – Celtic Goddess of Death; Delire- Goddess of the Fallen

Santa’s Spiked Glögg

That she uses to spike Santa’s holiday Glögg.

Santa’s Spiked Glögg | Music: Evil Christmas Carols (Panda Smash Presents). Sean Wesche. Album. 2006. | Images: Santa Claus Having a Christmas Drink (Free Photos); Dumbledore (The Ending Of Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince Explained); Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) suffers in excruciating pain (Division and Disloyalty: Ignoring Our Friends’ Wishes – and Our Own); Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, played by Richard Harris
 (Warner Brothers); Smashed Santa Claus (Too Much to Drink)

Archetypal Image Analysis

First Archetypal Image:

Is Satan’s sister good or bad?

Your answer is unique and utterly up to you based on your attitudes, beliefs, upbringing, and current circumstances. At first, as I searched for images of what Satan’s sister might look like, I had no idea of what I might be looking for.

I wondered whether she should look ugly like a wicked witch, gender neutral, or bewitchingly beautiful.

I stumbled upon Félicien Rops (a Belgian artists who lived between 1833 – 1898) finding his uncanny image of Satan. I found it on a poetry website and immediately thought–sure this could be what Satan’s sister looks like–sinister, sterile, and scary.

Satan Semant l’Ivraie’ – Félicien Rops (Belgian, 1833 – 1898) | National Gallery of Art

I felt I was definitely on the right track, but sought a clearer image. As I searched for one, I stumbled upon Pyramid Girl. I knew at once this was a better rendering of Satan’s sister. She is beguilingly beautiful and utterly alien at the same time–a spine-chilling duality exists about her.

Then, I found another Pyramid Head Woman in a field. This was the next line of my poem, which sealed the deal this was the image I was searching for.

Pyramid head woman on the field [1920 × 1080]

I have never encountered Pyramid Woman before, but obviously she is well-known by others and depicted as a victim and an invincible warrior. I felt this duality was another key aspect to be embodied by Satan’s sister. I found two more images embodying these qualities created by an artist at the Stan Winston School of Character Art. Here I learned her apron is made of human skin, very creepy indeed and a perfect outfit for Satan’s sister.

The last image used in the archetypal animation just grabbed me. I suppose it is all the gold and skeletons. Satan’s sister would certainly be involved in collecting the dead. She would also be a devilish seductress–beautiful and scary at once.

Sorceress, witch, art, skeleton, golden, stairs, yannick bouchard, woman, fantasy, mayan, girl, skull, HD wallpaper

So this is the process for how the first archetypal animation was created.

What does it mean?

That is something for you to fill in.

During his life, Carl Jung came to understand all human beings share common archetypal patterns of behavior and belief as demonstrated through customs, rituals, and myths. Certain recognizable psychological patterns and images appear over and over again between cultures and times. They live deep inside the psyche of all human beings and contain collective memories that pop into action when of specific circumstances and situations are encountered. They act much like instincts do, but archetypal patterns are more like instincts altered by consciousness.

Jung described archetypes as empty templates ready to be filled by the psychic forces triggered into action by external events. These invisible templates provide imprints of all the possibilities and consequences of choices and actions triggered by the situation.

The music for this archetypal image provides vital context and background like a fantastic fabric for space-time beings to experience things. This music is fabulous, providing texture, vibrance, and life to the image. It is Moon Runner by Dance With the Dead.

DANCE WITH THE DEAD — Moon Runner | 76,253 viewsMar 1, 2014

Second Archetypal Image:

Does she sunder souls for pleasure?

Again, the answer is up to you.

In creating this image, my search took me into the realm of mythic goddesses. It did not take long to understand many of the goddesses associated with death carry the blade of time with them. Death is inevitable as a mortal being and the goddesses associated with death embody this reality.

The Goddess Kali is the Divine Mother in Hinduism and known to be fierce and cause destruction of all evils, including ignorance. She is considered to be the master of death, time and change. When I found this image of Morrighan, my search focused in on the Celtic and Nordic goddesses of death.

Morrighan — Celtic Goddess of Death

“Morrighan is also known as Phantom queen or Morrigu. In Irish mythology, she is known as the Goddess of Death, who is associated with mainly war, battle, and death. She is also famous because of her foretelling death in the battle. Because of her association with war and battles, she is also known as a great warrior who determines which warriors walk off the battlefield.” — 21 Gods & Goddesses of Destruction, Death & Underworld

Hel is another goddess of death rising from the myths of the Nordic peoples.

Hel — The Norse Goddess of Death

“She is the ruler of the underworld and death. She is the daughter of Loki and Angrboda. Her appearance is pretty hard to explain, but it is half blue and half flesh-colored with some gloomy texture downside. She has a hall called Eljudnir, and it is a strong belief in Norse Mythology that it is the hall where mortals go who do not die in battle but of natural causes or sickness.” 21 Gods & Goddesses of Destruction, Death & Underworld

This is another compelling rendering of Hel drawn by LeneMa7991.

Germanic Gods: HEL goddess of death

And this is another depiction of Morrigan that I found on the website of The Druid Way.

The Irish Morrigan, Goddess of Death and Guardian of the Dead

Another goddess of death I found was Delire. She is not the goddess of Death in general, but instead the goddess of the Fallen, much like the valkyries of Norse mythology.

Delire | “You have served well soldier. It’s time to retire.”

Back to the Eastern Mind

The last element of the archetypal animation is the music, which circles us back to the eastern mind and the wisdom of the upanishads that are treatises on Brahman-knowledge, which is knowledge of Ultimate Hidden Reality. I chose the song Al Bid-Aya by Jedi Mind Tricks from their album The Bridge and the Abyss. It is haunting and beautiful and utterly perfect for this topic if you listen to their official video of this song.

Al Bid-Aya | 122,715 views, Jun 21, 2018

Third Archetypal Image:

Why is Santa’s Glögg spiked?

For the third archetypal image, I baffled myself with its own imagery. Why is Santa popping into this otherwise dark and haunting poem? And why is Satan’s sister spiking his holiday Glögg with the broken up bits of sinners?

Perhaps Santa is serving somewhat like a cosmic hero of goodness and good cheer. He has so much of it, he is able to consume dangerous amounts of collective sin down to the dregs on behalf of all of us to ease our misery and allow for a time of good cheer. This though made me think of Dumbledore who drank the poisoned water so Harry could destroy a ‘horcrux’–a thing of great evil that if not destroyed would led to the downfall of everyone they know and love.

This last archetypal animation is the most elusive to take accounting of for it veers straight into the Christmas season–a time when many people make a considerable effort to show a spirit of good cheer and collective good will. Why? Because it is a time when Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus; however, as an excellent Washington Post article points out, ‘Dec. 25 is not the date mentioned in the Bible as the day of Jesus’s birth; the Bible is actually silent on the day or the time of year  when Mary was said to have given birth to him in Bethlehem. The earliest Christians did not celebrate his birth.

This article further states the first celebration of Jesus’ birth took place ‘around 200 A.D. — to have taken place on Jan. 6. Why? Nobody knows, but it may have been the result of “a calculation based on an assumed date of crucifixion of April 6 coupled with the ancient belief that prophets died on the same day as their conception,” according to religionfacts.com.’

It was moved to December 25 to piggy back on pagan celebrations (such as “The Golden Bough”) that occurred during this time. Especially as practiced by the fierce and wild tribes of northern Europe–the Celtics, the Norses, and many other germanic tribes who celebrated the shortest day of the year, which signaled the return of light to their barren and frigid northern lands.

Good Olde St. Nick

Christmas underwent a further transformation with the elevation of St. Nicholas as a patron saint of Christmas. He was a real man, a Bishop, who lived in the fourth century in a place called Myra in Asia Minor (now called Turkey). He was known for helping the poor and giving secret gifts to people who needed it.

Image from the St. Nicholas Center | www.stnicholascenter.org | The Man Behind the Story of Father Christmas/Santa Claus

Christmas took another dramatic turn with the popularization of Santa Claus as the legendary man who encircles the world in one night flying in his sleigh to give good boys and girls around the world presents and delights. Holiday specials such as Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town, which showed the transformation of the real man St. Nicholas into the superhero Christmas giver of cheer and goodwill worldwide.

Santa Claus Is Coming!

It is a delightful Christmas story. One I watched every year as a child for Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without Frosty, Rudolph, and Santa Claus!

Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town — The Full Movie | 7,476,556 views

So what is up with this spiking Santa’s tea with the broken up bits of sinners, obviously people who were not on Santa’s Good List to get toys and presents at Christmas time.

Santa and Dumbledore

Is this image referring to the self-sacrificing ability of some individuals who are capable of far more good deeds than the rest of us to ease our burden for a time?

This idea reminded me of Dumbledore drinking the poison water so Harry could destroy another ‘horcrux’. Perhaps Santa and Dumbledore represent a certain type of individual, or better yet, these characters are archetypes of a powerful curative force that lives inside of us and allows a human being to endure pain and suffering, even unto death, for the good of others.

This seemed to be on the right trail and so the images I found included these.

Image from Freepik: Santa having a drink

This definitely could be Santa enjoying a holiday Glögg left out for him. Then, images of Dumbledore to establish the connection between the two.

Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, played by Richard Harris
 (Warner Brothers) | JK Rowling defends Dumbledore on Twitter: Seven things you might not know about the Hogwarts headmaster — A look beyond the half-moon glasses at the Harry Potter franchise’s most enigmatic character
Image BY SYDNEY BAUM HAINES/JUNE 15, 2021 10:05 PM EST | The Ending Of Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince Explained

The Purpose of the Poison

And of course Dumbledore drinking the poison, which turns out to be the most important image and article of everything explored here.

Image from: Division and Disloyalty: Ignoring Our Friends’ Wishes – and Our Own | Featured image: Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) suffers in excruciating pain in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) as he swallows the harmful potion he made himself drink. ‘This potion might paralyse me, might make me forget why I’m here, might cause me so much pain I beg for relief. You are not to indulge these requests. It’s your job, Harry, to make sure I keep on drinking this potion, even if you have to force it down my throat.’ Like Dumbledore, we make promises which we go on to contradict, creating fascinating ethical dilemmas for those around us. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

This article, Division and Disloyalty: Ignoring Our Friends’ Wishes — and Our Own that was written by James Clark Ross and published 21 April 2020, is what my psyche was trying to convey to me as I assembled the final animation for this very short and not very good poem. He writes:

We like to think of ourselves as unified agents. With apparent clarity, we take ownership of who we are and the decisions we make. But we are misled. Clarity assumes consensus; and, underneath ‘ourselves’, motivations divide us.

Of our conscious thoughts, we form beliefs which immediately retreat, dematerialise, or mutate beyond recognition into new tokens. Of our unconscious desires, feelings pass by and vanish, having never really existed. Who we are—what we believe and what we desire—is unstable, uncertain, and transient.

This is troubling. For how can we be sure that one part of ourselves persists through time? We can only claim who we are on unsteady ground.

More, are we in conflict? If we don’t coordinate our motivations with unity, disloyalty will always be within us: we will always be fighting ourselves.

Who will your friends side with?

Welcome to a lesson on division and disloyalty.

Division and Disloyalty: Ignoring Our Friends’ Wishes – and Our Own

by James Clark Ross, 21 April 2020

Who Are We Really?

Clark is getting at the division raging inside of ourselves. Jung also spoke of this inner divide saying:

The greatest sin is to be unconscious.”

— C.G. Jung quotes from Quotefancy.com

Our world is very complicated and most of us are taught to operate in it like very small, spoiled children. We are taught to not question the system but to go to work at nine, come home at 6, squeeze all the housework, time with children, spouse or friends into 4 or 5 hours, go to sleep, wake up and do it again. Why? So we can be good consumers for the system that we must depend upon to sustain us or else we can’t go on.

But should we really want to go on? Is our current system of a modern life really so great? Is it so glorious and so out-of-this-world that we are willing to commit to most of our adult life to being good and obedient consumers? Is that what we really want?

Alan Watts often posed this question, what do you really want? Do we really want to play the social games of who is the boss, who can have more and who should have less, going to work at places that are mind numbing and super boring only to get laid off when we get too old or its not convenient (Nomadland captures this reality brilliantly).

NOMADLAND | Official Trailer | Searchlight Pictures |7,704,318 viewsDec 14, 2020

What Do We Really Want?

For most of us living in modern Western societies, we wake up one day (at the far end of 50 something) and realize–my life has been a great big drag.

Dopedreamz & Alan Watts – Life’s A Drag ft. Ty and Nick Swan | 179 views, Jul 1, 2013
Happiness is NOT the Meaning of Life – Alan Watts | 1,183,376 views, Feb 27, 2018

If we ever wake up, we may realize we’ve been consuming and entertaining ourselves to death. Thus, the passed out Santa Clause by the fire place.

Image from People are leaving Santa milk over traditional sherry because he’s changed his ways

The final element of this archetypal animation, a musical piece with a diabolical edge –the Evil Christmas Carols.

Frosty’s Death March | 179 viewsOct 28, 2015

Nevertheless — Please Have A Very Happy Holidays However You Celebrate

And know it’s never too late…

A Christmas Carol 2009 Christmas Day Scene | 162,224 views, Jul 1, 2019

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti and the Buddha

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti | Just What is Reality

This show originally aired on Mar 24, 2017 on Snap Judgment. A description of it appears below. I have chosen to highlight this story here for two reasons: 1) schizophrenia runs in my family and because of this understanding another person’s experience of reality is essential, and 2) what is real anyways?

Western culture’s understanding of reality is severely (even fatally) lopsided. To successfully navigate the collective challenges our world faces in the coming decades (e.g., climate change, political upheavals, economic reversals and hardships, pandemic, water shortages, food insecurity due to climate change and unfair economic conditions, etc., etc.), we need to reconnect to our inner worlds, to who we really are deep, deep down beyond the fading illumination of our fragile ego’s consciousness rays of knowing.

Description of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: In 1959, psychiatrist Milton Rokeach brought together three schizophrenic men who believed they were Jesus Christ, hoping to cure them of their delusions. But over time, his methods became dangerously amoral.

Thanks to Richard Bonier and Ronald Hoppe for their help.  Additional thanks to Peter Shyppert as the voice of Milton Rokeach.

You can buy The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, Rokeach’s book, right here.

Producer: Stephanie Foo

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti and the Buddha | Animation by Genolve

The Map to the Disappeared | Just What is Truth

Before The Three Christs Of Ypsilanti aired on Snap Judgement, a tragic and compelling story about a mother’s quest to find her disappeared son aired. Glynn Washington introduced this story with a quote everyone likes to say when they are trying to one up someone else’s reality. The infamous quote is:

The truth! You can’t handle the truth!”

But no one remembers where this saying was first said. Glynn tells us where it was first said and that what was said after this notorious saying was said, the more important idea followed and this is what we have forgotten… what everyone has forgotten when we get into arguments over The Truth.

The Map to the Disappeared is essential listening if you are at all interested in understanding truth at the deepest levels of being.

Map to the Disappeared | JULY 22, 2021 | Artwork by Teo Ducot

God As Reality | Just Who Is God

Carol Anthony touches on the same relativeness to reality as the psychiatrist Milton Rokeach came to realize in his misguided experiment devised to cure the three schizophrenic men of their delusions that they were each Jesus Christ (The Three Christs of Ypsilanti ). In her book The Philosophy of the I Ching, Anthony writes:

"The entire business of the I Ching is to re-affirm our knowledge of God as the higher power, not only as a vague, intuitive knowledge, but as a conscious, practical, intimate, everyday knowledge. This means that we materialize the reality of God out of the mists of our unconscious into the full reality of consciousness. We may know intuitively that someone we love is unfaithful to us, but when this knowledge surfaces by evidence into consciousness, it produces such a shock that it is hard to understand the difference between these two sorts of knowing. We may know someone is dying of cancer for a long time, but the fact of their death produces an unexpectedly strong emotional response. How do we explain this? When the ego leads our personality, the conscious mind disbelieves what we intuitively know; moreover, the ego insists that conscious reality is the only reality--in this case it does not want to believe that death exists. When death, the objective fact happens, the conscious mind is unprepared, and the ego disappears in the ensuing shock. One's knowledge of God is similar. In the beginning of self-development, we know about God intuitively and theoretically; we may have occasionally experienced the higher power, but afterwards we gave rationalized the experience as some quirk of our imagination; soon, it seems it never happened at all. Our intuition of God, through this process has become dimmed. Through self-development, however, we come to experience the reality of God as an everyday fact of life. We experience God directly, not only in small ways, but in big ways, so that even the smallest errors of perception are swept away. This daily relating to the higher power gradually erases every particle of doubt." -- p. 60-61
And God said, “Let there be light.”

Tribute to Carl Jung | Just Who Are You

Drilling even deeper down on the relativeness of reality that we experience as human beings, Alan Watts beautifully illuminates just how profound relative reality is between human beings in his Tribute to Carl Jung, who had just died on June 6, 1961. Watts and Jung knew each other and were friends. Despite pursuing very different vocations, both men shared profound understandings of deeper truths hidden inside the heart and soul of all men and women, regardless of when in time they existed or where they existed in the world. These deeper, darker truths are a result of man becoming conscious in the sense that he knows when he is happy or sad enabling him to focus this self-reflective form of consciousness like a spot light or a laser to do things in the world and to take very focused, specific action to achieve narrowly focused goals.

In his tribute to Jung, Watts focuses on a speech Carl Jung gave to clergy men. While Carl Jung was not a pastor, his father had been, and so he knew the doctrines of the Christian faith and religion in a very cognizantconsciousheedfulmindfulsensible, and sentient way. In a gentle but enigmatic way, Jung challenges the pastors to think beyond the bible stories and Christian doctrines they preach about every day.

He invited the clergy men to step beyond the pale of their Christian beliefs and traditions and onto a new bridge of understanding he had helped to build in the Western world as one of the early pioneers of psychoanalysis (Freud) and analytic psychology (Jung). Carl Jung understood that Western mind needed this new science of psychology to understand things that the Eastern mind had understood for centuries.

Watts understood this too. This is why he focused on this speech Jung gave to the clergy men. Watts reads most of this speech in the video below and explains why it was probably the most important work Jung left behind for his fellow human beings. Watts understood how important it was (and continues to be) to challenge the percepts and premises upon which the modern Western world is based upon. The Western mind remains incredibly focused and fixated on its abilities to perceive, apprehend, learn, discover, and figure out how the outer world works, and this is a powerful ability that has enabled Western culture to gain dominance in the world and emboldened its belief that Western man was meant to reign supreme over all living beings and things. However, this is an exceedingly lopsided system of belief that will end in disaster for all living beings on Earth as the whole world stands on the precipice of existential threats capable of producing mass extinction events that could take out the human race forever.

Tribute to Carl Jung — 1961 — Alan Watts | 234,071 views | Premiered Aug 21, 2020

The Eastern mind holds the key to our global existential predicament. This is what Jung came to know through his work as a psychologist and was confirmed when he came to know Richard Wilhelm who was the West’s foremost translator of the I Ching. And this is what Alan Watts emphasized in countless lectures. And it is the meaning behind the title of this blog The Three Christs of Ypsilanti and the Buddha. We need each other to survive in the coming century that is going to require great outer knowledge of the world (which the Western mind has excelled) as well as require great inner knowledge of the world and human nature (which the Eastern mind has excelled).

The world today needs skilled consciousness astronauts just as much as it needs astronauts of the cosmos. The challenges inside (especially for the Western mind) are just as great, if not far greater and unpredictable as the challenges of exploring and understanding outer space.


Carl Jung Quotes | Just What Is Consciousness

“God is a force that acts inside you.” — Carl Jung

“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life…If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature…Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”  ― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition


“Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.” ― C.G. Jung


“The erotic instinct is something questionable, and will always be so whatever a future set of laws may have to say on the matter. It belongs, on the one hand, to the original animal nature of man, which will exist as long as man has an animal body. On the other hand, it is connected with the highest forms of the spirit. But it blooms only when the spirit and instinct are in true harmony. If one or the other aspect is missing, then an injury occurs, or at least there is a one-sided lack of balance which easily slips into the pathological. Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.” 
― C.G. Jung

The Great God Pan | Music: Album: Mythical by Dream Black; Song: Mythical

“…the mind that is collectively orientated is quite incapable of thinking and feeling in any other way than by projection.” ― C.G. Jung


Carl Jung never said: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” 
What Dr. Jung said in two separate and unrelated statements was: “Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.” ~Carl Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, P. 193



“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99. 


“It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself.” ~Carl Jung, CW11, Para 391


“Only that which acts upon me do I recognize as real and actual. But that which has no effect upon me might as well not exist.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 757.


“Here each of us must ask: ‘Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?'” — Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 564


“For when the soul vanished at death, it was not lost; in that other world it formed the living counter pole to the state of death in this world.” ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 493


“Behind a man’s actions there stands neither public opinion nor the moral code, but the personality of which he is still unconscious.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 390


When Nietzsche said “God is dead,” he uttered a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe. People were influenced by it not because he said so, but because it stated a widespread psychological fact. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 145.


Yet it [Nietzche’s “God is Dead”] has, for some ears, the same eerie sound as that ancient cry which came echoing over the sea to mark the end of the nature gods: “Great Pan is dead.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 145.


“All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his “oppositeness” has taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 664.


“It is quite right, therefore, that fear of God should be considered the beginning of all wisdom.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 664.


“Both are justified, the fear of God as well as the love of God.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 664.


“The East bases itself upon psychic reality, that is, upon the psyche as the main and unique condition of existence.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 770.


— All above quotes come from Carl Jung Depth Psychology,


“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long into the abyss, the_abyss_also_gazes_into_you“. — FriedrichNietzsche 03:33 (from Philo Calist on Facebook)

The Abyss | Music: The Abyss by DBMK — Paradise/Intro

Can you handle the truth of who you really are deep down far inside beyond the warm illuminating rays of ego consciousness? I know you can, but it does take work. Time to get to work.

The Story of How We Created the Sea of Misery & Misfortune

It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.” ― Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Storytelling Species: Makers & Players of Reality Bubbles

Part 2 in The Storytelling Species Series

The Sea of Misery: What Have We Done As Country…As A People?


In Part 1 of this blog series, I wrote: “As the global pandemic made its watery march around the world, I began to see stories shared by people I thought I knew that shocked me. Most barely clung to reality. Rather they floated in the air like blithe, colorful bubbles reflecting what was happening, but with a strange, surreal spin to it. Given the freakish, unearthly nature of these stories, most would pop upon encountering the first Blades of Reality growing out into the Sea of Being that we all live within and must comply to basic cause and effect realities. When this happens, then fate will run its course drawing momentum and energy from the psychic contents spilling out.”

While I wrote these words, a pro-Trump mob was descending on the Capitol of the United States. Thousands of people participated in the insurrection. It was a savage siege. One fatten up on lies and misinformation designed to trigger and incite the submerged psychic energies of the deep currents of White Supremacy that runs through our country. The President and his power-hungry cronies breathed new life into this diabolical narrative. They proved adept in using symbols and images to inspire and consolidate lots of fringe groups who are nursing their hate in chat rooms and shooting ranges. What Trump did is no small feat. He provided a center of gravity for all these fragmented groups to orbit around and synchronize their hate.

Image from The New York Times | Decoding the Far-Right Symbols at the Capitol Riot | By Matthew Rosenberg and Ainara Tiefenthäler | Jan. 13, 2021 — There were militia flags and banners of extremist groups, as well as absurd images of dinosaurs and comic book logos that belied the violence that was to unfold.

Once uniting all these discombobulated groups, Trump pulled them tighter into his circles of lies crafted to create even more mistrust, fear, and hate. His revolting bitterness fermented and grew even more toxic in groups such as QAnon (a disproven and discredited far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against U.S. president Donald Trump, who is fighting the cabal), Proud Boys (a group who refers to themselves as God’s warriors), the boogaloo movement (a loosely organized far-right, anti-government, and extremist political movement in the United States), the Three Percenters (re an American and Canadian militia movement & paramilitary group described as having right-libertarian and far-right ideology), and many more descended on the Capitol.

Warner Leger of the Anti-defamation League warns throughout 2021 there will continue to be flash points like we saw on the 6th

How Were Pro-Trump Extremists Able To Storm The U.S. Capitol? — January 07, 2021–Peter O’Dowd 

Image from Here & Now: Damage is seen inside the Capitol building early on Jan. 7, 2021, in Washington, D.C., after supporters of President Trump breeched security and entered the building during a session of Congress. (Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images)

Watchdog Group Warns Far-Right Extremists Feel Emboldened, View Capitol Mob As A ‘Watershed Moment’ — January 11, 2021 — Peter O’Dowd, Serena McMahon

Image from Here & Now: Security forces clash with President Trump’s extremist supporters after they breached the U.S. Capitol security in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

FBI Warns Of Extremist Violence Ahead Of Inauguration — January 14, 2021 — Former FBI special agent and domestic terrorism expert Michael German joins Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd to discuss security concerns following last week’s deadly breach of the U.S Capitol. “Law enforcement has so long turned its gaze away from these far-right groups, they don’t really know what’s going on.” “What shocks me that this has been a patterned for a number of years—Portland, OR and Michigan.”  “In this group, people were trained by the US military.”

Image from CNN: Terrifying scope of Capitol attack becoming clearer as Washington locks down for Biden’s inaugurationBarbed wire is installed on the top of a security fence surrounding the Capitol.

So irresistible was Trump’s Monkeyshine for the Mind, violent chatter continues although they are scrambling for platforms that will tolerate their hate. In short, Trump and his minions have turned Washington, DC into a war zone just before the inauguration of Biden and Harris.

Image from CNN: Terrifying scope of Capitol attack becoming clearer as Washington locks down for Biden’s inauguration Members of the National Guard stand outside the Capitol on January 14, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Alternative Realities

How do so many people get hoodwink into believing and then acting on an alternative reality

Image from CNN: Terrifying scope of Capitol attack becoming clearer as Washington locks down for Biden’s inauguration Jacob Chansley wore a horned headdress inside the Capitol.

With participants such as Jacob Chansley (who is known as the QAnon’s Shaman), I was very tempted to write the whole thing off as a dreadful and misguided fantasy.

But then, someone called my lived experience a fantasy. 

Mind Matters

Narratives, fantasy, and imagination have always served as powerful tools for humans to mold and shape reality in accordance to their deepest desires and benefit. When thousands of people storm the US Capitol with some willing to commit murder or die, there is something deadly real going on, even inside a fantasy story chock full of lies.


Narratives, Fantasy, Lies & The Rise of Western Civilization

Narratives, fantasy, and imagination are used by storytellers to create mind nets that are cast into the depths of the individual and collective human consciousness. They are especially effective in the unconscious realms of the human mind. Without myth, fantasy, or sacred symbols, human beings would probably sink back into the Sea of Unconsciousness from which we emerged long ago, becoming ignorant beings again who are guided by nothing more than animal instincts. The magical Alchemy of Mind that man can do is because he is conscious. It allows human beings to make their inner reality an outer reality. It is a power that has defined the Rise and Fall of great civilizations for time immemorial.

Lloyd’s Rise & Fall Playlist

Western Civilization evolved much like any other civilization, though it developed a distinct appetite for gobbling up other groups of people by conquering them. Throughout time, the winners of such conflicts are able to consolidate even more power and gain more resources (often more than they need) along with obtaining the right to write the history of how they came to be the superior human beings. Such historical narratives are not really about the past, but rather they are meant to set the Stage of Mind for the living members inside the group (aka Western Civilization) to inspire them to move forward together in a specific pattern. In the case of being a conquering people, the narrative is intended to inspire the belief that they are the glorious, chosen people bestowed with the manifest power to conquer and control other people. The sole purpose of this collective belief is to grow even stronger and to become even more powerful

Myth, fantasy, and fibs have always served as cornerstones for just about every group of people who have ever aspired to be something greater than they were. Indeed, myth, fantasy, and fibs have proved to be essential tools of the mind needed to consolidate the psychic energy of individuals who are needed to conduct the desired action. Civilizations are nothing more than a bunch of human actors performing in such a way necessary to build the desired empire (in other words, they are following the script and playing their roles). Such narratives are imbued with the numinous power of myth and legend. The greatest empires that have ever existed in Western Civilization have attained their greatness by drawing from this dark, mysterious, deep well that lives inside every human being. It is a well that extends all the way down to an inner sea, a collective sea, that is constantly flowing and constantly influencing human reality.

Lucy Worsley’s Royal Myths & Secrets | Queen Elizabeth I’s Speech at Tilbury | PBS — A myth that gave birth to a Western Super Power

Great storytellers know how to use narratives like nets cast into this inner sea, the Sea of Unconsciousness. They fish for forgotten fantasies, desires, and lost energies that are lying below the Threshold of Consciousness. This threshold is the demarcation line between animal instinct and human knowledge. The knowledge is that using the light of consciousness, man can see his primal instincts rising and can manipulate them before acting in the world. If unconscious content gets caught in the narrative net, then an individual is vulnerable to the numinosity of the narrative. The most dangerous narrative nets use myth, fantasies, and lies to manipulate and control the minds of the individuals who get caught inside the mind net. Individuals with unconscious content caught inside these nets can become part of the narrative–parroting out the lies, myths, and stories of the ones who are casting the net to control others. In effect, they grow the net, adding their individual psychic energy to the numinosity of the narrative. The bigger the narrative net grows and the more numinous it becomes, the more people are drawn and caught inside the net. Highly numinous narrative net grow a psychic gravitational field that attracts even more people to it.

When this happens an alternative reality bubble is born. 


Alternative Reality Bubbles

As long as an alternative reality bubble keeps growing, it tends to remain stable. But sometimes they veer too far from the stable, solid ground of reality. When this happens, such a bubble can pop suddenly and dramatically dropping all the mental constructs and numinous content back into the Sea of Unconsciousness. This can be a terrifying experience because suddenly all the ideas and beliefs that have been constructed around the ego to make oneself feel safe, important, and powerful are shattered. The first pieces of the ego’s outer protective shell to fall are from the false narrative that have been incorporated into the individual’s psyche–this is how an individual merges into a collective. It is a powerful feeling because they feel bigger and greater than they did as an individaul. Stripped from their shell, it can be an experience akin to being casted upon a great and endless sea without a boat to float upon. The boat in this case are the ideas and beliefs that make the individual feel they have a sense of purpose, feel secure, feel part of something bigger than himself, feel powerful.

Alone and without a Boat of Self to float upon, the Sea of Unconsciousness can invoke a primal fear (the kind our ancient ancestors probably felt just before being devoured by a more powerful beast). Such fear is dangerous, especially when felt by a living being that has attained consciousness for now they can manipulate this fear, warping it into an energy that is capable of dreadful, desperate, menacing action in the world. The most dangerous aspect of this state of being is that an individual often does not recognize the threat is rising from inside themself. Not recognizing this, they turn their murderous rage at anyone standing near. The ‘other‘ becomes the scapegoat—the cause of all the misfortune being suffered by the individual or the group. In the end, everyone suffers from this type of circular thinking and circular action architected by the creators of manipulative myths, fantasy, and lies. These stories are carefully crafted to siphon off some of an individual’s Field of Consciousness and submerge the rest. This is how an individual’s personal psychic energy is contributed to a collective fantasy or belief, thereby growing it. Narrative nets such as these often lead to conflict, bloodshed, and war. The only antidote to this mind disease is to grow one’s individual Field of Consciousness.


Apocalyptic Cults

You think I am exaggerating again, don’t you?

I understand your mistrust. I have come to understand through my own personal adversity how we have been taught to mistrust the deepest parts of who we are as human beings–the hidden parts, the invisible parts, the inner parts of ourselves. This is where our mythical, fantastical, divine and demonic parts of being human reside and live. This is why we need stories…why we are driven to tell and share stories. They help us understand who we are, where we are, what we are as a conscious living being existing in space and time. It is an awesome ability that comes with an implicit responsibility to self and other. We are responsible for each other’s realities and wellbeing.

Before you past judgement or read further, take a break and listen to this episode that aired on Snap Judgement on January 21, 2021. It is a deep dive into an apocalyptic cult that claimed the lives of 39 individuals in the late 90s.

Apocalyptic cults are not new. In fact, Snap Judgement’s host  Glynn Washington grew up in an apocalyptic cult. He recounts in this episode the day the 39 individuals were found dead with purple shrouds put over everyone expect the last 2 people to die…meaning they took their lives in waves over a long period of time. Washington remembers everyone in the bar where he was when the news broke stopping and watching in disbelief for a minute until shaking their heads and writing the whole thing off as fanatical individuals duped into death by a fantasy. Once writing out off the tragedy as a bunch of crazies, everyone went back to what they were doing. But not Washington. He knew how close he himself came to the same fate in apocalyptic cult he grew up in and he understood how close to this edge every human being exists.

This is a podcast well worth listening to. Washington says so poignantly, “Story is the closest way of touching someone else’s divine.” Without story, we are locked out of our own divinity…our own soul. We need stories. We need to tell our story. And, we need to hear other people’s stories. This is how we know what we know. This is how we create reality.

Heaven’s Gate – Spotlight — Snap Judgement

Description of episode:

In 1997, thirty-nine people took their own lives in an apparent mass suicide. The events captivated the media and had people across the planet asking the same question… ‘Why?’ 20 years later, those who lost loved ones and those who still believe – tell their story.

Snap Judgment presents a special spotlight on Heaven’s Gate. Find out the story behind the cult that changed the world.

Heaven’s Gate is produced by Stitcher in collaboration with Pineapple StreetMedia and is hosted by Snap’s very own Glynn Washington. You can listen to Heaven’s Gate wherever you get your pods. Go on… subscribe right now and listen to all the episodes!


The Sea of Unconsciousness

I cannot talk for someone else’s experience on the Sea of Unconsciousness. I can only talk about my own experience of finding myself on this endless, hopeless inner sea. I did not intend to write about the collective experience of being cast upon the Sea of Unconsciousness when I began this series, but the events of Jan 6, 2021 compelled me to mention how our collective narratives can infiltrate our minds, seep into our thoughts, and dictate our actions. Once inside the mind, they go to work creating alternative reality bubbles.

At first these narrative feel and seem like a Godsend, the answer to the hardships and difficulties being experienced. These manipulative narratives offer explanations and answers. These stories make an individual feel that they know something everyone else remains ignorant about and this makes a person feel powerful.

When you find yourself floating on the Sea of Unconsciousness because of bad luck and misfortune such a story is very appealing. But the story is made of the sugary content of lies and misinformation, it can be a very dangerous story to cling to. The question for the United States of America now is will we rise together as a united people determined to mend the rips, lacerations, and gashes that have been made in our collective fabric of life in a democracy? Or will we let our differences, fears, and mistrust (aka mislead instincts) let us tear us apart?

I do not know.

I can only tell you how I learned to pull my inner energy back inside myself so I could float and survive another day on this hopeless, miserable sea of misfortune. All of us end up here at one time or another because no one is spared from fate.

To me, fate is a coming together of one’s own unconsciousness with the unconsciousness of others in such a way that things previously believed to be safe and normal are no longer effective at keeping you and others safe. Normality gets flipped upside down. The arrival of COVID-19 is an example of such a time, but just about any reversal or set of misfortunes can pop one’s Reality Bubble. When this happens, you get dropped on the Sea of Unconsciousness, which can often feels like the Sea of Misery because nothing feels or works normally anymore. Depending on how much of one’s self is submerged below the Threshold of Consciousness determines how well you can navigate in the new reality and how fast you can build a new boat or better Reality Bubble.

Sea of Unconsciousness — Art by Bebe

I’ve been floating on this sea for some time. For me and my family, the growing currents of misfortune began in 2015 when my husband was targeted by cruel co-workers who were eyeing his small department’s budget for their own purposes. The fateful currents of misfortune continued in 2016 when I was targeted in a massive layoff made necessary due to an ill-conceived decision by the CEO to compete with a collaborating company. I was told I would lose my job 12 days before Christmas.

One Day — Yellowstone“This video is about our time in Yellowstone on this vacation, and the day fighting bison hit dad’s car.” This is when our fortunes changed, sweeping us away in a tide of misfortune that has not stopped yet, 5 years later.

The Fates of Misfortune double down on us in 2017.

As We Laughed At Our Misfortune | Dec 17, 2020 | Against the Tide – Topic

Perhaps the cruelest moment of misfortune was when the CEO of the low-paying job I had to take after being thrown overboard the corporate ship fired me for being with my dad as he struggled for his life in the ICU at the Mayo Clinic. He had experienced a massive heart attack. Against all odds, heroic first responders revived him. And then valiant efforts of doctors, nurses, and aids at the Mayo Clinic almost brought him all the way back. I’ve written about this and what happened before, so will not elaborate now.

Who We Are & He Walks With Me — Goodbye Dad | Posted: Aug 4, 2020

This is when I let go and fell into the Sea of Misfortune & Despair. I did not let go because my father died. I let go due to the cruelty of others…due to calculated callousness I had been experiencing before dad died, and then even more, after dad died.

Looking back, I can see how my father’s death acted like a lightning rod or the gunpowder of transformation that woke me (violently) to my role and responsibility to Bear Accurate Witness to my reality. It is something I have been doing my entire life, but did not realize it.

The Gun Powder of Transformation — July 4, 2018

In the System of Consciousness we are born into as citizens of modern Western culture, those born into privileged classes or strata of people are taught not to notice or see the inequalities, imbalances, polarities, and unfairness that are baked into the system. Things that determine what a person can do, where they can live, how far they can advance in their career–things that determine how well a person can survive inside the collective system of being in the world. This is not true of individuals who are forced to survive at the bottom of the system. They see the inequalities because not seeing them can mean the difference between life or death.

Our modern System of Consciousness has been constructed to steal the blessings and resources meant for everyone living inside the system and redirect it unto a few. Most of the civilizations that modern man exists inside is like the lottery–everyone buys into the belief that anyone can make to the very top if they just work hard enough and long enough. The truth is, which is the reality of the system, is that making it to the very top of the system is very rare. Most modern Western systems purposefully deprive people of what they need to live so that a few at the top who have made it can have a lot. It is really fun living at the very top because it means an individual can enjoy more than they need or deserve. This very system that has diverted the blessings meant for everyone, also blames the people from whom these blessings and resources have been stolen for their own misfortune. It is a cruel, inhuman system that refuses to see another person’s reality, especially if that person is perceived to exist below others existing in social strata above them.

Being white, I was born into a privileged class and taught not to notice the inequities existing all around me. However, being my father’s daughter, I was taught better than this. He showed me how to see them and how to hold all people as equal, beloved, and valuable. From an early age, my father taught me how to Bear Accurate Witness to my reality. It is something I would be punished for over and over again. And, I would learn there are many nuances existing inside the ‘superior’ class of people and that those who do not obey the silent rules and expectations of conformity would be throw into the Sea of Misery without a boat or any hope of rescue.


Scapegoats, Whipping Boys & Aunt Sally

Let me be perfectly clear: No one deserves misfortune. And, no one deserves fake sentimentality in place of true empathy, compassion, and help in the wake of the Maelstrom of Misfortune. No one asks for it, at least not consciously. And most people who are just trying to survive in our modern world have done nothing to deserve it. Rather, they are victims (scapegoats) of a system of consciousness we have evolved as humans to live inside. The one we live inside today is sick, lopsided, failing. It is a system that has engineered misfortune, injustice, tragedy, trauma, and grief to effect and impact some people more than others. Our modern system of consciousness channels blessings meant for everyone living inside the system onto a few.

Our systems are engineered to protect the few who are receiving blessing they don’t deserve. They are protected by automatic reactions that get triggered and expressed by the masses who reject any person who gets labeled as an oddball, an outsider, a freak or bad boy/girl…the wackadoodle weirdo who no one cares about.

These are deep subterranean psychological channels engineered by our system of consciousness that activate and trigger certain behaviors by the common man and woman living in the system. Most don’t even know they have been triggered by the system of consciousness they are living inside. It happens below the threshold of most people consciousness. Unaware of their unconscious reaction, they act in accordance with the expectations of the system that have been designed to maintain the imbalance of power.

When a person gets labeled as an outsider or eccentric oddity, the system gives the masses the permission to dismiss them, disengage from them (ignore them), and disenfranchise them from the benefits everyone else receives for following all the rules of the system without questioning them.

No one deserves to be a scapegoat, a whipping boy, an Aunt Sally (a game played in some parts of Britain in which players throw sticks or balls at a wooden dummy called Aunt Sally), the fall guy or girl for a wicked system. It is something that is done to them, so resources and blessings that should have naturally flow to everyone in the system is redirected only to a few who are living at the top of the system and holding the power and authority over everyone else under them. To heal this injustice, which is a disease of the collective soul, requires the entire system to stop blaming innocent people for the immoral, corrupt, black-hearted actions of those who hold power over others.

Aunt Sally — Wikipedia

When the blessings meant for everyone living inside a system are redirected unto a few, terrible consequences are inflicted on those from whom resources, benefits, and blessings have been diverted. The result is that perfectly innocent individuals suffer, more than they should, all for the good of a few greedy people. This is nothing less than the Theft of the Blessings meant for all living beings on planet Earth. It is an embezzlement conduct by a corrupted system of human being existing in a system of consciousness that has been engineered to steal the blessings meant from the masses and redirect them unto a few.

It is an imbalance engineered long, long ago.

It is dead wrong.

During the final days of the Trump Administration, we are seeing it play out in magnificent awfulness. While huge tax breaks were approved for the very rich and corporations by Republican Representatives and Senators two years earlier, the same individuals now reject raising the insufficient COVID relieve payment to individuals earning less than $70,000 from $600 to $2,000. The result of thefts like this is that the most vulnerable people suffer, especially the children as reported by PBS Newshour in this segment.

PBS NewsHour: The overwhelming impact of childhood trauma on Chicago’s West Side — Dec. 16, 2020

The Scapegoat & the Mainstream

So why does our system of consciousness, which defines all the manmade systems that we live and work within disenfranchise and scapegoat people? What exactly is a scapegoat anyhow?

A scapegoat is a goat sent into the wilderness after the Jewish chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people upon it (Lev. 16) [Definition from Oxford Languages]

Judeo Christian beliefs contribute much material to the ancient channels of consciousness that grew to keep earlier groups of men and women safe from harm. However, what causes harm has been interpreted in vastly different ways according to the needs and environments in which the small groups of tribes of men grew. These ancient channels that hold the beliefs that sustained these ancient cultures–beliefs such as a goat can symbolically hold the sins of the people and be sent into the dessert to die for their sins–continue to flow through the channels of consciousness that live in the minds of modern men and women existing within Western Civilization.

We even have a word for this: Mainstream.

The banks of the mainstream hold and maintain the most commonly held beliefs and conventional ways of being in the world. It is broad and shallow. The banks of the mainstream are mostly made out of foregone and often very primitive social and cultural taboos.

Tribute to Cider | Jan 1, 2020 | This is definitely about taboos…thank you Cider for showing me!

The Banks of the Mainstream & the Role of Taboos

Many Western Civilization’s taboos originate from ancient Greek and Roman cultures, which themselves absorbed and assimilated the cultural substrate of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Western Civilization that we recognize today was chiseled out in medieval Europe. Some of the most powerful sculpting tools was Medieval Christian religion and feudal society with its dispersed power-structures that concentrated power in kings and courts and evolved economic dynamism — see Western Civilization TimeMaps.

However, since Western Civilization is old and very big, it has absorbed many beliefs, ideas, and cultural/religious taboos from many other smaller civilizations and cultures it gobbled up in its domination of the world of men. All of it and everyone gets incorporated into the ever-growing Banks of Being, which is the template for how to fit into Western Civilization. When you flow between these banks, you are flowing in the Mainstream.

Resistance is Futile! | Jun 5, 2012

Every child born into Western Civilization or every individual assimilated into it by choice or by force is indoctrinated into its particular ways of being. Some conditioning is plain to see. It happens in schools, places of worship, the workplace. It is maintained by rules of a community, a state, a country. It is also transmitted seamlessly and invisibly from parent to child and through peer networks, flowing like water constantly moving from person to person. It contains all the hidden cultural biases, prejudices, partisanship, favoritism, and bigotry built in the system of civilization in which the person lives.

These invisible codes transmitted are the taboos that have been defined long, long ago. They include all the illicit, illegal, unutterable parts of a being human deemed prohibited by the group, the tribe, the civilization. Most people mistakenly believe if they do not utter or see these dreadful, awful, unmentionable things banned by the group, they do not exist, or at least can be caged and contained. This is dangerous myth.

Dana Williams – Fragile Ego (Official Music Video) – Dec 1, 2017 | See Lloyd’s Egos….Masks Playlist for more music videos on egos and masks | This is a playlist created by the Last DJ of Earth who is trying to save survivors of Earth after multiple global climate catastrophes that brings the world order of the 21st Century to its knees. He hacks Multinational satellites (the new overlords of Earth who rose from the ashes of the last century). Once inside, he broadcasts musical sermons from his massive playlists–the only surviving library of Earth’s musical memory. He works day and night to bring down Earth’s corporate overlords–the ones who only worship money and their own greed. Consciousness is the key. The Sapience Series tells this tale. Follow this blog for when Sapience: The Moment is Now, the first Book in this series, is available.

Taboos & Autonomous Unconscious Content

Cultural taboos are very fragile and easily broken because they are very old and worn out. People feel this, which makes individuals conceal and hide the darkest parts of self in the deepest recesses of the human mind. It makes people weak because it keeps them in the dark. They don’t grow their consciousness. The illuminated part of their mind. The part modern men call the ego. The result is that the vast majority of consciousness, remains hidden in the darkness of unconsciousness where it is ready to pounce on our puny illuminated minds directed only by the ego. Once captured, these dark parts of self can hijack the little ego.

When autonomous unconscious content hijacks the mind, a person may engage in actions extremely counter-productive to their personal wellbeing or the wellbeing of others. This is what the taboos were originally were trying to do: hold back dangerous autonomous unconscious content. But they are not working so good any more. They are breaking, fragmenting, collapsing. When they completely fall away, a huge wall of unconsciousness is going to fill the collective sphere of human existence found inside the human mind.

Dodo Falling into Vortex of Darkness | The Divine Dodo

As mentioned, long ago taboos were constructed to protect us from our inner darkness and potential to do harm to self or others. Every culture constructed taboos. And indeed, they worked and protected their members from possession of autonomous unconscious content existing inside every human being. Not all this unconscious content is bad. Indeed, a great deal of it is superior, magnificent elements of being human.

Most ancient tribes and civilizations understood this. But they also understood it took training to master the darker realms of mind. Each culture created taboos aligned with the collective needs of the group to help them survive most optimally within the environment they existed. Taboos took into account availability of resources needed to survive as a collective as well as forces of competition limiting these resources.

When a person steps outside his or her cultural boundaries, they often were punished, sometimes harshly. And some become a scapegoat for their tribe who pile on to this individual all the unconscious content the other members of the tribe does not want to accept or see about themselves. It is a shortcut that is extremely short-sighted in the long run for the wellbeing of the tribe or civilization.


The Boy Who Ate the Wrong Part of the Crocodile | 2019 | Art by Donna Alena Hrabcakova

All systems of human consciousness have evolved taboos to maintain order in the group. Taboos are simply shared customs prohibiting or forbidding discussion of or behavior deemed dangerous to the wellbeing of the group. Sometimes what is deemed dangerous drifts because it becomes taboos to maintain power by those holding power in a group. See The Boy Who Ate the Wrong Part of the Crocodile as an example of forbidden action. A taboo can also be associated with a particular person, a place, or thing.


Why Taboos Aren’t Working So Well for Modern Man

The problem for modern man is these banned behaviors and thoughts are really, really old. They have been maintained inside man’s mind for so long, their origins are mostly forgotten. During this time, they have become very rigid. Repairs have been attempted through religions and rules civilizations erected on the graves of the old ones and the old ways. But under the demands of modern Western civilization and rapid globalization, these repairs are cracking and fragmenting. Modern life is very complicated and human cooperation, understanding, and empathy are crumbling as they system grows even harsher and crueler in a futile effort to maintain control. All around the world, mankind stands at the brink of disaster–one coming from inside.

The Divine Dodo — In Maidjan | Image/gif by Bebe drawn for The Divine Dodo story

Collectively, mankind stands at the edge of a Primal Split existing inside the mind of every human being. It is a split that gives man consciousness, but the human race has been using its ability of consciousness to rejigger the flow of blessings and misfortune that are supposed to be distributed equally unto all living creatures of Earth, unto a few. This causes more misfortune to flow onto the masses. This lopsidedness has grown so powerful we are shattering all guardrails of the mind… it’s everyone for themselves… when this happens, we are very near the end.

The rearranging of blessings unto a few and misfortune unto the many has been going on for a long time. It has created an uncrossable abyss cutting the ordinary man and woman off from some the most powerful aspects of who they are as human beings. Cut off from their most powerful inner resources, the ordinary man and woman are deemed much easier to control. The people holding power use fear or rage or threat of further misfortune if they don’t behave. Basically, stay on your boat and follow the rules of your captain.

Most human beings living today have no choice but to shut themselves off from their power emanating from the darkest regions in their mind. Yes, there are fearful, even deadly, beasts there… but there are many, many aspects of being a sentient being that include spiritual, atman, ka, anima/animus–the inner being possessing transcendent knowledge. Every human being has both aspects hidden in the unlit parts of their mind. It is the birth right of every human being to claim more of their inner worlds–to grow their individual Field of Consciousness.

But rather, today, we are forced to shut down our natural impulse to grow our inner light. A soul that is not growing is shutting itself down, thereby shutting off life. To be an inner voyager is to walk a very narrow high wire between intensely uptight external systems one must fit into to live and the inner self longing to grow and know. I keep falling off the high wire. I always seem to break taboos. Here are some I’ve broken.


Family Taboos

At my father’s funeral, one of his cousins told me other members of his extended family clan had always looked down their noses at him, his brother, sister, and father. They had failed to be strong and sturdy enough probably. The tragedy began shortly after my father was born–probably exacerbated by unrecognized and untreated postpartum depression–but it led to a mental health breakdown that would result in the institutionalization of my grandmother. She had been born into a dominated cultural belief that no matter what: you got to tough it out mentality. Trauma was viewed as discipline and mental health issues were considered a sign of weakness. My grandmother retreated to her parents’ home where she did receive loving care and where my father and his siblings were being cared by his mother’s family. However, my grandfather felt humiliated that she had left him, leaving him an angry and broken man. And so it was that he and his twin brother (who probably suffered from an undiagnosed mental health disorder) schemed to get the children back into my grandfather’s custody. They began by stealing my father right out of his highchair while his grandmother hung the laundry…at least that is what my father remembers happening. He would sue for custody of my father’s older siblings, but this would take a year or so. He was deeply traumatized from this and his father was known to be overly harsh with his children. However, no one in his family confronted him or did much to help the children besides smalls acts of kindness here and there. His older brother would go on to suffer from schizophrenia. These formative years would leave an indelible mark on my father for his entire life. It haunted him in nightmares that made his scream and kick and fall out of bed two to three times a week. It was one of the reasons I moved him to comfort care in his final days because he got trapped in an endless delirium with these phantoms of long ago visiting him. I knew them well. I’ve grown up with them. I was marked with the taboo of bearing accurate witness to mental illness running in our family rather than pretending it was not there.

Image from Is Mental Health a Taboo? Why?

Friendship Taboos

As my series of misfortunes piled up in the past 5 years, the last group of people I saw on a regular basis began to distance themselves from me. I had become a radioactive Contagion of Misfortune, and I was being blamed for my own misfortune. I doubt they even knew that they were doing this, but getting invited in group activities, conversations, and outings grew more and more infrequent.

One of the most glaring exclusions occurred at the opening of the Star Wars: The Last Jedi movie. I had been invited to join my little gym group for the last several Star Wars movies–though reluctantly for I knew there was invisible resistance inside this circle of friends to even include me as one of the groups. But due to circumstances, we saw each other every single day and so probably the taboo of pretending to be a nice person all the time was more powerful than the one to exclude me because I did not quite fit in with their dominate interests and form. However, as my misfortunes piled up, the balance tipped and when this movie came out, no invitation was forthcoming.

I had just lost my job with a government contractor 12 days before Christmas and my husband had been pushed out of his just one year before. It was a very stressful time. So, my friends were steering clear of me. But I loved Star Wars and needed a distraction to my misfortune, so I selected one of the opening showings, got a seat by myself, and went by myself. I enjoyed it immensely. I didn’t feel alone because the characters feel so vital and alive in my psyche. I sat watching the credits until the lights came up. I was sitting in a row close to the screen. When I got up and made my way to the closest isle, coming down the steps almost colliding with me, were ‘my friends‘ who this time did not include me. It was awkward, very awkward. I find it hilarious now. But then it was quite painful because I understood I had been marked with the taboo of bearing accurate witness to my circumstances, which made my friends uncomfortable. I made them uncomfortable because I was experiencing misfortune and talked about it.

Image/Quote from How to Know If You Identify with the Taboo Teacher Archetype (And Why it’s an Amazing Archetype!)

Workplace Taboos

One of my first corporate jobs was working for a hospital that was conducting cutting edge research in treating AIDS and cancer. It was located on the West Coast but treated people all across the country and world. I was hired by a high-spirited, dynamic woman who was opening a new regional office in Washington, DC. I rose quickly through the ranks to Director of Development with my boss based on the West Coast. I loved the job and my co-workers (who except for the woman who hired me), I helped hire. We got a lot done, raised a lot of money, and had lots of fun being together. Not long after rising to Director, word was racing through the workplace grapevine that there was a tremendous power struggle going on at headquarters.

When I was first hired, there was a CEO and 4 or 5 Vice Presidents who oversaw various activities such as workplace giving programs, unions, special events, and so on. I worked under events planning and my boss was friendly and helpful. One by one, the VPs fell but we thought in DC my boss would remain because he was best friends with the VP making the power plays. We were wrong. He did him in too. At the next all staff meeting that doubled as the biggest gathering of volunteers from across the country, which always took place at the Beverly Hills Hilton, our new VP let us know the new rules. This was probably my 3rd all staff meeting and previously we were treated like adults who could conduct themselves appropriately and we did.

But this time was different. The new VP of everything was letting everyone know that he was the new boss in town. He lectured everyone the very first night that there would be no use of the pool, the exercise room, all employees were assigned set up and clean up shifts for the big thank you fundraiser of long-time volunteers. He made it known these were mandatory regardless of if there was anything to do or not. Having come from the East Coast to the West Coast, I was not hungry at the proper time and went for a run instead. I arrived at my assignment on time just to sit for 5 hours because everything was done. During this time, I grew famished and light-headed because I had not eaten breakfast or lunch.

My co-worker from Philadelphia told me to go get a sandwich and bring it back, she’d cover for me if anyone asked but she was sure no one would notice. So, I slipped out, went downstairs to the little cafe, and ordered a sandwich to go. While I waited, I chatted with a man eating a late lunch. I thought nothing of it until I felt a forceful tap on my shoulder. I turned around and was shocked. It was the VP of Everything. He had noticed I was gone. He forced my co-worker to tell him where I went. He had come to fetch me back. I had to go immediately. I could not even wait for my sandwich even though I said I was light-headed and needed protein. His response was tough luck. You had your lunch time. You didn’t eat. There are candy almonds on the tables. Eat those. It is pretty funny now. I was kind of scared then.

Fortunately, the man I had been talking to downstairs knew where the VP took me. He brought me my sandwich telling me that the whole thing was pretty unbelievable. I broke the taboo of being human and putting my own physical needs above the edicts of VP. Super controllers often try to imprint this taboo on everyone through loyalty pledges. They do this because they are making a power grab, so anyone willing to break their edicts becomes dangerous.

THE RAMBLINGS OF A FORMER DWP CIVIL SERVANT …

Facebook Taboos

Social media platforms are weird and very sugary environments. The idea that individuals all over the world who do not have any previous real life, face-to-face relationship of meaningful exchange can establish and maintain any kind of genuine human system is farcical. Facebook is a space that allows people to migrate to the most superficial extremities of who they have defined themselves as human being. Here, they marinate in the outermost cosmetic personas of themselves. But they do this at the expense of true knowledge of who they are as a complex being with good and bad qualities that must always be calculated and balanced in every moment, especially the liminal space where thought is manifested into words or deeds.

Because of the vast superficiality of this virtual space (i.e., a space lacking in thoroughness, depth of character, or serious thought) the worse parts of being human tend to rise inside of individuals where it quickly gains dominance and power over thought and actions, which attracts others of liked mind and superficial attitudes. It is a space that cultivates addictive personalities. People who crave the time and attention of others to such an extreme other people stop being human beings with whom they can have a real and genuine relationship but become food for their vainglorious superficial self.

Such environments tend to create vacuums of consciousness where one-sided, narcissistic thinking grows and thrives, lacking the normal brakes of reality that exists in the real, normal, drab, everyday life of being a human being who must cooperate and offer basic respect and decency to the people around them. I broke the taboo of being individual, being real, and sharing this with others pretending to be something else and ultimately, the taboo of being more complicated than the stick figure I had been made out to be by Fake Friends on Facebook.

You can read all about it in this post:

Facebook Folly: The Mistake & The Fake
In Response to Π & Jan 6, 2021

Taboo Breakers, Consciousness Warriors & the Inner War

While the folly recounted above was unfolding, my friend Reinhold from Germany (who recently deleted his account from Facebook) sent me the following e-mail. Since I am not very good at responding to messages and e-mail, he had no idea what was going on with me. And his messages are always a bit code-like, but this one really resonated with my moment. And it synched what was happening to me externally to my ancient wisdom inside me that helped me shape the structure of this blog. He said:

We are in a Historic Phase Transition… 
…like 1914
1932
1945
2001
2008
2020
and there is MORE to come!

…even…
…if there were any working solutions
WHO???
is able
even WILLING to attack it–
WHO…?????

EXODUS

No place in Taboo Land for any sacred person...

We are all sacred people, if only we could remember we were so.


Another case occurring in the nebulous realms of our collective virtual world is recounted here (Moulton/Comedy of Terrors) by Barry Kort. There are times when names and details need to be remembered and recounted so that how we get to a moment is understood. Below in Supplement Resources, I include Take No Prisoners about the AfterMath of WWII.


There is a poem Margaret Thatcher recites to the Queen in the fourth season of The Crown in the episode called ‘The Balmoral Test’? The poem is “No Enemies” by Scottish poet Charles Mackay, who lived from 1814 to 1889.

YOU have no enemies, you say?

Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;

He who has mingled in the fray

Of duty, that the brave endure,

Must have made foes! If you have none,

Small is the work that you have done.

You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,

You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,

You’ve never turned the wrong to right,

You’ve been a coward in the fight.”

Thatcher THE CROWN Enemies quote, Charles Mackay | The Crown Season 4, Gillian Anderson’s Thatcher

I call taboo breakers Consciousness Warriors.

Consciousness Warriors tend to break lots of taboos, but the war is an inner war. We need more Consciousness Warriors now than ever because modern life has grown more complicated than ever, and more unconscious than ever. Western Civilization has been herding humanity into the shallowest waters of consciousness for a long time, but now social media with its algorithms are doing this work at an unprecedented rate and level herding our collective psyche into long-standing rigid patterns designed to benefit a few.

See After Math: The Magical Calculus of Consciousness and Parrots of the Algorithms for more on how the modern our human psyche is held in ridge, well-defined patterns of behavior and conformity by algorithms.

AfterMath — The Magical Calculus of Consciousness

Coming Up Next

In subsequent blogs, I will cover:

Part 1: Individual StorytellingHow Being Outside Helped Me Observe Better Mind Stories that Helped Me Repair My Lost and Little Boat Cast Adrift on an Endless Sea of Unconsciousness

Part 2: Collective StorytellingThe Good, The Bad & The Ugly, especially Conspiracy Myths that Always Rise during Times of Great Change and Crisis

Part 3: Collective Reality — How to Mix Our Individual Stories with Collective Stories to Make a Better Shared Reality

We are a beautiful species with an extraordinary power: the power to tell stories. And the stories we tell create reality. What does your story tell?

Thank you for your time and attention.

Supplemental Resources

The culmination of Trumpism: MAGA riots at the Capitol

Eerie Theories: The Psychology Behind Conspiracy

Image from 1A aired 1/18/21: A man wearing a QAnon sweatshirt protests against US Capitol police officers as they try to stop supporters of US President Donald Trump from entering the Capitol in Washington, DC. SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

Description: Conspiracy theorists have enjoyed the Trump presidency. Wild false notions about the deaths of high-profile American figures and what was really going on behind closed doors in Washington and Hollywood took over certain sections of the internet.

But the link between online conspiracy theories and real-life behavior has clarified as conspiracy theorists like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) began running for elected office. And as President Trump, along with his associates and supporters, began questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election despite no evidence of fraud.

Find our conversation about how Qanon supporters hijacked #SaveTheChildren. 

It all came to a head when insurrectionists, who believed the president’s lie that the election had been stolen, stormed the Capitol building while Congress was certifying the electoral votes for the 2020 election.

Why are conspiracy theories so enticing? And how can we combat conspiratorial thinking?


How The Capitol Mob Compares To Black Lives Matter; Actor Wendell Pierce

Here & Now | January 18, 2021: Some on the right have compared the violence of the insurrection to last year’s Black Lives Matter protests. Historian Ashley Howard explains why the comparison doesn’t hold up to reality. And, “The Wire” star Wendell Pierce talks about the role of art in advancing social progress. That and more, in hour one of Here & Now’s Jan. 18, 2021, full broadcast. You can find more at hereandnow.org — and follow us on TwitterInstagram or join the conversation on Facebook.


Agency And Perseverance: Pastor Reflects On New Year’s Eve Watch Night Services

This interview is so inspiring. This is one way to hold onto more of our consciousness as human beings.

Description: “Host Michel Martin talks with Rev. William H. Lamar IV, pastor of Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C., about the message of his New Year’s Eve Watch Night service this year.” Three things he said that really resonated in me are:

  • “2020 didn’t do anything to us. Systemic racism and America’s refusal to treat human beings as human beings did it to us.”
  • “We too much rest and must remember if we become human doings without rest, we will not accomplish much. Rest is revolutionary.”
  • “The importance of the message of perseverance must be remembered because they have always come… they won’t stop coming… in the words of Sterling Brown, we too must keep coming with love… bending the world towards justice includes efforts, work, muscle… we can build better multicultural, multi religious communities where every one has a seat at the table…”

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough Discusses His New Book On President Harry Truman

NPR’s Scott Simon talks with MSNBC host Joe Scarborough about his book, Saving Freedom: Truman, the Cold War, and the Fight for Western Civilization. When Scott asks Joe if he will miss the ratings after Trump leaves the White House, Joe said absolutely not. It’s been exhausting and politics has been turned into a tribal sport. Thirty years ago, a liberal could sit down with a conservative and strike a deal and get things done. Today, it’s all about winning and it is killing our democracy.


Image from 1A: Stickers for voters after they have voted, sit on a table at a Cobb County voting location in Atlanta, Georgia.Megan Varner/Getty Images

What The Georgia Senate Runoff Results Mean For The Future Of The Senate

Description: “The stakes are sky-high in this week’s Georgia dual Senate runoff election. Rev. Raphael Warnock defeated Sen. Kelly Loeffler to become Georgia’s first-ever Black senator. The race between Jon Ossoff and Sen. David Perdue is still too close to call. Democrats are halfway to reaching their goal.

If Ossoff can pull off a win, control of the Senate and Congress will shift to the Democrats. If Perdue emerges victorious, control remains with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and the GOP.

Those outcomes, whichever comes to pass, will decide what goals the Biden administration can expect to accomplish. Reports indicate the president-elect’s team is optimistic for a victory given record voter turnout and Republican missteps on the campaign trail, but bracing for the consequences of defeat.

However, it might not be apparent who won for some time. Just like in November, there’s a chance that Americans won’t know which party is in control of the Senate for several days.

Plus, Congress still has important business ahead. Senators are due to meet on Wednesday as a part of a joint session of Congress to certify President-elect Biden’s victory. But some Republicans, including Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, say they will object. Although any allegation of voter fraud is completely unsubstantiated, these senators have called for a commission to investigate the 2020 election.

What will the results of the election mean for the Senate? And for the federal government as a whole?”

Guests:

Amanda BeckerWashington correspondent, The 19th

Andra Gillespie — Director, James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University; associate professor, political science

David Becker — Executive Director and Founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research; election law expert and contributor, CBS News


How Dolly Parton Lead Me to an Epiphany

Jad Abumrad is the creator of RadioLab. In this TedTalk he tells how Dolly Parton helped him understand the deeper currents operating inside people that activate during conflicts and how she found a way to unite people in a safe space even though her fans run the gamut of ideologies, beliefs, and ways of being in the world that recently have ended up in deadlock rigid conflict.


Image from Reveal’s Take No Prisoners episode I heard on Jan 2, 2021

Take No Prisoners | Jan 2, 2021

In December 1944, Frank Hartzell was a young soldier pressed into fierce fighting during the Battle of the Bulge. He was there battling Nazi soldiers for control of the Belgian town of Chenogne, and he was there afterward when dozens of unarmed German prisoners of war were gunned down in a field. 

Reporter Chris Harland-Dunaway travels to Belgium to tour Chenogne with Belgian historian Roger Marquet. Then he sits down with Bill Johnsen, a military historian and former dean of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to ask why the Patton Papers don’t accurately reflect Gen. George S. Patton’s diary entries about Chenogne. 

The massacre at Chenogne happened soon after the Malmedy massacre, during which Nazi troops killed unarmed American POWs. The German soldiers responsible were tried at Dachau, but the American soldiers who committed the massacre at Chenogne were never held accountable. Harland-Dunaway interviews Ben Ferencz, the last surviving lawyer from the Nuremberg Trials, about why the Americans escaped justice.

And finally, Harland-Dunaway returns to Hartzell to explain what he’s learned and to press Hartzell for a full accounting of his role that day in Chenogne.  

This episode was originally broadcast July 28, 2018.

Listening to this episode, after hearing Jad Abumrad‘s and his realization about the scared space between us is complicated and perhaps only a person with a high degree of empathy can truly begin to hold and honor all these complications was striking in comparison to this story and the heat of war. Here the scared space of possibility is collapsed into instinct, repetitive training, and orders. What a man or woman might have done differently in a moment if they had more time to consider their options is not an option during war or high stress conflict. During these times, people act and the winners control the narrative, which always only tells half the truth. This is a compelling listen.


UK Judge Blocks Extradition For Julian Assange. What’s Next For The Wikileaks Founder?

I found this 3 minutes very interesting. Assange’s mental state remind me of how bad mine became due to unrelenting circumstances beyond my control. Yes, Assange brought the fury of the US upon himself when he stole and dumped classified content onto the Internet. But then, I thought back to what I heard yesterday in Chris Harland-Dunaway‘s story about Chenogne, Belgian and the notes he found in General Patton’s personal diary expressing the hope this could be covered up and never revealed. The truth is, as one of the last living army man from this day tells Chris, both sides of a war are capable of committing terrible atrocities and crime. And, it is the winner to determines and controls the narrative (or those in power).


A Creature of Habit — Hidden Brain

I also listened to this yesterday, which influenced the connections I made between all the content I was listening to as I wrote this blog. This is an excellent piece about how we develop healthy habits and unhealthy habits. A lot of what determines a healthy habit vs an unhealthy habit is how much consciousness you bring to forming it (another way to view this is how much time and attention do you apply to developing a health habit). I would further argue that putting more time and attention into developing and maintaining healthy habits has an added benefit of growing one’s individual Field of Consciousness.


Image from FreshAir: Sean Gladwell/Getty Images

To ‘Keep Sharp’ This Year, Keep Learning, Advises Neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta — FreshAir

And this is another awesome listen for developing the inner flexibility and health you need to survive the Sea of Misery when you find yourself afloat upon it… as most people have found themselves upon as 2020 unfolded… and most of us continue to float upon as 2021 begins.

A few excerpts from this wonderful interview:

On why he recommends seven to nine hours of sleep at night for optimal brain health

The brain is not at rest the way people might imagine it to be when we’re sleeping. … There are several important things that are happening. … One is, that is the time when we really do consolidate memories. So, you’ve had all these interesting experiences throughout your day — people that you’ve met, conversations you’ve had, experiences you’ve had, whatever it may be. You have these things in part because you want to remember them and add them to your life narrative.

That process of actually putting them in the memory book, if you will … really happens at the time that you sleep. That’s the “consolidation of memory” sort of phase. Some of it is actually placing the memory. Some of it is moving memories from short-term to longer-term memory and those sorts of things. So you have to be able to sleep well in order to remember well. And you also have to be able to sleep well to in order to forget well, because you want to, in order to make that life narrative as cohesive as possible, you’re doing a lot of editing along the way. … A lot of that is happening while you sleep.

Another more recent finding about sleep is that there is a sort of rinse cycle that’s happening when you sleep — a rinse cycle that allows certain neurotrophic factors to bathe the brain, but also to remove certain waste as well from the basic metabolic processes that are happening. … So during sleep, it’s really this consolidation of memories, this removal of waste and this nourishing of the brain that takes place more efficiently than at any other time during the day.


On why multitasking doesn’t really work

The idea that you move from one task to another sounds great and very efficient. The issue was that they found you actually divert a fair amount of attention each time you do that. You may not notice it yourself, but when you start to objectively measure this with different types of brain scans, scans that are measuring the function of the brain or particular parts of the brain, at any given millisecond, you find that you actually expend quite a bit of energy just to switch from one task to another. So you think you’re doing both simultaneously, but you’re probably doing neither as well as you could be, and you’re probably going to take more time than if you just did them linearly in some way.

“Science cannot rescue us from ourselves if we don’t have the leadership.”

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

On how the unrelenting stress of the pandemic impacts the brain

It’s been really challenging. I think that there is a thing about stress and the brain that has long been documented. And the headline is that stress is not necessarily the enemy. In fact, we need a certain amount of stress. It’s what gets us out of bed in the morning, makes us perform well on tests, hopefully, all that sort of stuff. But it is that second adjective you used — unrelenting — that is really problematic here. We need these breaks from stress. You need that constant sort of ebb and flow, and that’s what’s missing. Again, you don’t want it to all be good all the time, but you need to have that sort of up and down to some extent. … The idea of eliminating stress … it is not attainable nor is it necessarily a good idea for the brain.


What The Pandemic Means For Communities, Togetherness

In this short segment, Here & Now‘s Peter O’Dowd speaks with Derek Thompson, about what these shifts mean for our lives and communities. Thompson is a staff writer at the Atlantic and he talks exactly about what I am writing about here — the fragmentation of reality. He says, “Community is where you show up again and again… however during this past year, we have not been able to show up in the places we normally did.” This is worth a listen.


David Attenborough Explains How Humans Jeopardize ‘A Perfect Planet’ For Life

Here & Now‘s Tonya Mosley speaks with Sir David Attenborough and executive producer Alastair Fothergill about their new five-part documentary series, “A Perfect Planet.”

Kilauea Volcano Eruption | A Perfect Planet | BBC Earth | Jan 2, 2021

The part I most love about this clip of A Perfect Planet occurs at about minute 1:24 when Attenborough says:

Volcanoes are certainly destructive but without these powerful underground forces there would be no breathable atmosphere, no oceans, no lands, no life. We can’t control volcanoes but they’re vital for all living things on planet earth…for you.

I will advance this as metaphor to the power of story, to possessing the power of consciousness, to know that we know as human beings. Just like volcanoes result from powerful subterranean forces that break through Earth’s crust and transform our planet, so too is consciousness which erupted through the shell of instinct and routine and birthed us–a species who can think, can know things, can tell stories about who we are and where we are going. So as it is with Earth and underground forces constantly at work shaping our planet making it the perfect place for life, so too it is with our minds with unconscious forces constantly at work shaping our shared reality.


I end all my Have You Been Outside Today videos with the following questions:

What will you do with your plot of consciousness today?

More importantly, what will your unconsciousness do with you today?

It’s Going To Rain Tomorrow | Oct 28, 2020

Previous Post: Part 1 of The Storytelling Species Series

The Storytelling Species: Makers & Players of Reality

Next Post: Part 3 of The Storytelling Species Series

Story of the Death of a Father

Supplemental and Resource Posts for the Storytelling Species Series

Rational vs Intuitive
In Response to Π & Jan. 6, 2021
Facebook Folly — The Mistake & The Fake
After Math — The Magical Calculus of Consciousness
Weaving Reality — So Many Humans, So Many Versions
Deniers, Liars & Alt Reality