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29 Nov 2003 @ 16:38, by craiglang. Spirituality
These are the dark days of November in the northern hemisphere. the days grow ever shorter as the winter solstice approaches. A cold wind bites from the north, often laden with flakes of ice and snow. It is a time of starkness, a time of gray. And there is the sense at this time of year, that life is at its most tenuous.
At this time of year, too, I find that healing is often the strongest. There is both the need for healing, and the calling up of the reservoir of inner strength that helps bring healing where it is needed. It is that inner resource that only comes when we "let go, let God". And in light of this, I often wonder about the state of things around me. Why are we so divided? Why is there so much acrimony - in the world at large, and even within our closer knit communities.
At this time of year, during healing work, or just while talking with neighbors, I notice confrontation, advocacy and resistance. It is a polarity between dark and light, progression and reaction, right and left, male and female, yin and yang. And in all of this, what seems to get lost is love. Repeatedly, I am reminded of the teachings of my teacher in the eastern tradition, which inspires the comments to follow.
On more than one occasion, I have noted people saying something like: "I get it, why can't [so-and-so] see it, too?" The idea that the person has is usually an extremely good one. It is generally a new idea, and with any new idea comes change - some form of transition (albeit, probably a very needed one). With advocacy of change comes resistance. Resistance brings counter-resistance: pushing and pushing back. Polarity deepens, and the issue becomes like two sides of a teeter-totter, both sides in opposition, yet also in balance. The harder we fight, the more energy we give to the opposition. Like a bar magnet, or like opposite charges, we attract the very forces we oppose.
How can we move beyond the gridlock? How do we get off the teeter-totter? How do yin and the yang combine to yield harmony?
A lot of ideas come up, but often what I am taught is that we are approaching the time for transcendence, the time when "the lion lies down with the lamb." This is the time when compassion for the souls of those opposed to you becomes more important than the reason for that opposition. When the two sides can combine views to reach a higher view, emergence has occurred.
Most often used seems to be the chakra metaphor. In this model, the biggest struggle in the present day, at least as I understand it, seems to be between the third and fourth chakra life-modes. The third chakra represents the ego-based, service to self world of the corporate cubicle. This is the world of business-success-oriented activity. It is the world of money, and it is also probably the world of military aggression. It is often associated with the west, but I suspsect that it is in most/all societies, at the present time. Growth at the expense of the Earth, self at the expense of others, etc... And so, the imperitive is to transition to at least a fourth-chakra level of awareness.
I am taught that, in the eastern tradition, The fourth chakra life-mode is generally one of service, a life of the heart. Volunteering and pacifism - both are powerful and noble ideals, and clearly superior to greed and service-to-self of the lower centers. Yet they are still ideals, and in advocating them, we generate opposition. Anti-war is still "anti", and such a noble progressivism implies that there is a regressive darker-side that it opposes. Struggle energizes the opposition, and the two sides of the teeter-totter balance out once again.
So, how can we transcend this? What is above the fourth chakra world? Perhaps the most immediate answer is "the fifth chakra world". In the eastern tradition, the fifth chakra is one of devotion, communication and life purpose. It is the life-mode in which we see transcendence of the polarity of struggle by the understanding that comes from God. It does not follow logic, but only love. It is not the love that comes from one's own heart, but that which comes from a greater heart. It is not service from one's self, but from a higher power through one's self.
Above all else, I am told, it is allowing one's self to see that the other side is human, too. And it is an incredibly difficult thing to do, especially in this time of economic, political and religious division. Yet it is at this time when understanding and harmony become the most important. Now, it is all the more imperative that the "lion lie down with the lamb".
In the words of the teacher who told me these words, this will be the time when enemies become friends, swoards become plowshares and war becomes peace. It is then that we will see the emergence. Then and only then will we (all of us) have won.
Beyond the fifth center, of course are the sixth and seventh - and presumably their corresponding life-modes will one day be realized. But for now, the struggle is to save ourselves and our world, and in the process, to come to know and love ourselves. It requires a devotion to a higher power and a compassion of and for all of us on the pale blue dot we call Earth.
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29 Nov 2003 @ 12:36, by sharie. Ideas, Creativity
Love flows from the soul of all humankind,
like a babbling stream rushing by
madly dashing past sticks and stones
and broken bones
But your love?
Your love is like the Ocean
in all its Depths and Heights,
in all its Blue and Turquoise and Whites,
in its Deepest Darkest Stormy Depths,
its Trembling of Thunder
and Glorious Splendor of Lightning
and Heavenly Sunsets.
Your love is like the Mist and the Rain,
the Clouds of Pink and Violet,
the radiance of the glaciers
in the coolness of the sea,
the soft sweetness of snowflakes,
and the warmth of the beach.
There is no other world.
Your Love is the Very Air I Breathe,
every Smile I See,
all the Songs I Sing,
and each Sensation I Feel.
And when I sense you pushing me away...
how do I survive that murderous pain?
I survive and stay alive
because all the beauty and glory of your precious life,
all your joy and laughter,
the majesty of your eyes,
and the sadness your cries,
echoes through my mind,
bringing me back to life.
I die and resurrect a million times
in your world of love,
feeling my eternal life
in every whisper of your voice,
in all the thoughts of your mind,
and in the glorious light of your immortal life.
Your soul is my heaven
and because of you
I am forever the sunlight
shining on the mountain peaks,
the waters dancing on the rocks,
the wind happily nudging the ocean waves.
I am the whole of the universe,
all the emptiness,
and all the brilliance of all the stars.
Every twinkling eye reflects the light
of those babbling streams racing to meet you.
And I come know to myself as all the shining smiles
and all those crying eyes,
and I want to be with you too.
You are the light of my world
and I will live forever and love wherever you are.
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 28 Nov 2003 @ 19:34, by magical_melody. Preparedness, Self-Reliance
I continue to receive messages from the Earth consistently now, and she wishes I share this message with you at this time. Having developed as a clear and strong channel for many years now, I trust that this guidance has merit for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to discern. If it does not resonate as truth for you, so be it! Just walk on by appreciating the many varieties of stones and pearls that lie along the path of life.
Blessings to you and yours, Alana Tobin
Photo of Cape Reinga in the far north of New Zealand taken this past January. Note the line out from the tip of land where the Pacific Ocean meets the Tasman Sea (Aoteroa the land of the Double Sea in the stories of the Waitaha)
Like Land’s End in Britain, this ultimate extremity of our dramatic landscape holds great historic and spiritual significance. The venerated pohutukawa is the Reinga, “the place of leaping” in Maori mythology, where the spirits of the dead leap off the headland and climb down the roots of the 800 year old tree, and descend into the underworld to return to their traditional homeland of Hawaiiki. More >
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 28 Nov 2003 @ 16:58, by tsebastian. Spirituality
"The only full and authentic purification is that which turns a man completely inside out, so that he no longer has a self to defend, no longer an intimate heritage to protect against inroads and dilapidations. The full maturity of the spiritual life cannot be reached unless we first pass through the dread, anguish, trouble, and fear that necessarily accompany the inner crisis of "spiritual death" in which we finally abandon our attachment to our exterior self and surrender completely to Christ." (Thomas Merton) More >
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 28 Nov 2003 @ 14:44, by mre. Shared Purpose
The voice of humanity network will be implemented first as the "annotated web", that is, as a community created stigmergic overlay of the web. The AntWeb is entered through portal pages, one portal page for each participating web community. Having entered through the portal, every link traversed by the membership is logged as the members browse the web. Facilities will be available to rate web pages and to add notes and keywords as members browse along. The links followed and the ratings given will be used to mark links as popular or unpopular for the others who might visit the same site – provided they have entered through the same portal, of course. The notes will likewise be accessible to those who come by later, and the keywords can be used in a lookup facility on the portal page to jump straight to items that are "funny" or "curious" or "delightful" etc. It should be fun. (See the MetaWeb Article for a previous take on the Annotated Web concept.) For example, take the Blogger’s Parliament... More >
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 28 Nov 2003 @ 13:19, by spells. Government, Public Sector
Bring Iraq to a democracy and in the mean time take the pseudo democracy away that we have here. Well since there is no Truth, only your truth and my truth, I suppose that this will also go with little said and nothing done. After all, with the Truth behind all life completely ignored and only what humans "want" to believe and perceive all that matters, why even bother discussing this further. Go on, ignore this post, go to work, paint your pictures, "channel" your so called high beings....after all image is all that matters. Who cares what we do to the rest of the world and what will become of the human species because of our arrogance and denial of Truth.
By the way....my way of saying Happy Thanksgiving....Happy day in which we act proud of how we stole the land and everything else from the Native Americans who were here first. Oh but that doesn't matter....let's cook our turkeys and praise the Great American Way.
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The “war on terror” and American democracy—some ominous warnings
By Patrick Martin
27 November 2003
Three commentaries published recently in the US media, all by well-connected observers of the US military, have suggested that a major new terrorist attack within the United States could disrupt the 2004 elections and even result in military intervention on the streets of America as well as the suspension of the Constitution.
On Friday, November 21, the right-wing web news service Newsmax.com published an account of the interview given by General Tommy Franks to the lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado.
Franks said that a terrorist attack employing a weapon of mass destruction and causing mass casualties, either in the United States or against an ally, would likely result in replacing the American Constitution with a military government.
As the commander of CentCom, Franks led US forces in the conquest of Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq earlier this year, before retiring during the summer. In his magazine interview, he outlined this scenario:
“It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world—it may be in the United States of America—that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.”
Frank remains a fervent supporter of the Bush administration, describing Bush as “a very thoughtful man,” and declaring, “Probably we’ll think of him in years to come as an American hero.”
But according to Franks, it may be under the administration of this “hero” that “the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.”
The retired general placed the responsibility for this possible turn to dictatorship on “our population,” and was silent on what role the military leadership or the Bush administration would play in its establishment. The American media has apparently failed to ask him anything about it since.
Terrorism and the 2004 election
The same theme was touched on in the Outlook section of the Washington Post, the main daily newspaper in the US capital, in a column published Sunday, November 23, under the headline “Terrorist Logic: Disrupt the 2004 Election.”
The author was David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a major Washington think tank.
Rothkopf outlines the possibility of a terrorist campaign of suicide bombings during next fall’s election campaign that leads to a full-scale military mobilization. “History suggests that striking during major elections is an effective tool for terrorist groups,” he writes.
As a representative of the Democratic wing of the ruling elite, Rothkopf is clearly concerned that such an event would profit the Bush administration. He cites examples such as the Israeli elections in 1996, when suicide bombings contributed to the victory of right-wing Likud candidate Binyamin Netanyahu, and the 2000 Russian elections, won by Vladimir Putin after a series of bombings in Moscow and other cities—attributed to Chechen terrorists but widely believed to have been carried out or at least permitted by Putin’s KGB.
Rothkopf notes the politically symbiotic relationship between the terrorists and the hard-liners: “Hard-liners strike back more broadly, making it easier for terrorists as they attempt to justify their causes and their methods.” He could have added that the terrorists are a godsend for the hard-liners, providing a pretext for dictatorial methods.
More important than his argument—essentially restating the Democratic appeal for a more coordinated international approach to terrorism—is what Rothkopf reveals about the expectations in official Washington and corporate America. At one point he notes: “Recently, I co-chaired a meeting hosted by CNBC of more than 200 senior business and government executives, many of whom are specialists in security and terrorism related issues. Almost three-quarters of them said it was likely the United States would see a major terrorist strike before the end of 2004. A similar number predicted that the assault would be greater than those of 9/11 and might well involve weapons of mass destruction. It was the sense of the group that such an attack was likely to generate additional support for President Bush.”
This is a remarkable assertion. Rothkopf describes this elite audience as “serious people, not prone to hysteria or panic—military officers, policymakers, scientists, researchers and others who have studied such issues for a long time.” The vast majority of them, he says, believe that a terrorist attack worse than September 11—that is, killing thousands or even tens of thousands of Americans—will take place in the course of the 2004 election campaign, and that this attack will benefit the political fortunes of George W. Bush.
Military action inside the US
The role of the military in domestic policing was the subject of a column published November 23, written by William Arkin, a well-connected military analyst for the Los Angeles Times.
It was Arkin who last year revealed the Bush administration’s decision to revise US military strategy to target seven countries—Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, China and Russia—for possible nuclear attack.
The column was headlined, “Mission Creep Hits Home, American armed forces are assuming major new domestic policing and surveillance roles.” It examines the role of the Pentagon’s Northern Command, the newly established center for controlling all US armed forces within the continental US, Canada and Alaska, and includes an interview with its commander, Air Force General Ralph E. Eberhart.
According to Arkin, the Northern Command has defined three categories of operations, with increasing levels of activity: temporary, emergency and extraordinary. He writes: “It is only in the case of ‘extraordinary’ domestic operations that the unique capabilities of the Defense Department are deployed. These include not just such things as air patrols to shoot down hijacked planes or the defusing of bombs and other explosives, but also bringing in intelligence collectors, special operators and even full combat troops.”
Arkin reveals that the Northern Command is “already working under the far-reaching authority that goes with ‘extraordinary operations.’” This includes the activation of a series of intelligence-gathering operations directed against the American people. These include:
* A decision by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to expand the mission of the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), established last year to protect “critical infrastructure,” authorizing it to maintain “a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense.”
* The assigning of military special agents to 56 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force operations at FBI field offices, investigating potential threats to the military in local communities inside the United States.
* The decision by Eberhart to transform Joint Task Force Six, a drug-enforcement unit of 160 soldiers at Ft. Bliss, Texas, into a counterterrorism force called Interagency Task Force North. Congress originally authorized joint Task Force Six in 1996, in the first exception to the Posse Comitatus Law, which bars the US military from assuming domestic police functions.
* The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, another little-known body, is gathering an “urban data inventory” combining unclassified and classified data on 133 cities, as well as US border crossings and seaports, to create a national “spatial data infrastructure.” This information, which Arkin describes as “down to the house level,” could be used either for surveillance or military targeting.
According to Arkin, the CIFA has been given a domestic “data mining” mission as well: “figuring out a way to process massive sets of public records, intercepted communications, credit card accounts, etc., to find ‘actionable intelligence.’” This amounts to reviving in another form the Total Information Awareness program, headed by Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame, which was supposedly shut down earlier this year by Congress after a public outcry.
Arkin concludes: “Outside the view of most of the public, the government is daily expanding military operations into areas of local government and law enforcement that historically have been off-limits. And it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that those charged with assembling ‘actionable intelligence’ will slowly start combining databases of known terrorists with seemingly innocuous lists of contributors to charities or causes, that membership lists for activist organizations will be folded in, that names and personal data of anti-globalization protesters will be run through the ‘data mine.’ After all, the mission of Northern Command and other Pentagon agencies is to identify groups and individuals who could potentially pose threats to Defense Department and civilian installations.”
Here, then, is a glimpse of the real state of affairs in the United States on the eve of the 2004 election year. Ruling circles widely anticipate a massive terrorist strike that would boost the flagging political standing of the Bush administration or even lead to a suspension of the elections and the establishment of military rule. The US military is actively preparing for this possibility by readying troops for use in domestic policing and by assembling a database of likely political opponents.
The obvious question is: given the expected consequences, is it not in the political interests of the Bush administration or sections of the military/intelligence apparatus to engineer such a terrorist attack? Or at least to insure that it takes place, by looking the other way, on the model of September 11? More >
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 27 Nov 2003 @ 15:37, by tlangfield. Recreation, Fun
For burnt offerings, preheat to 700 deg C... More >
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11 Oct 2003 @ 21:06, by nemue. Death & Dying
My Father chose to leave this world on Friday October 10. His passing was swift and my pain is great because I was not with him. I did not have the chance to hold his hand, to help him on his way. To tell him that I loved and respected him. To comfort and tell him not to be afraid. To tell him that I regret not making the effort to spend more time with him when he was here. He was not alone and for that, I am grateful but I was not there. Perhaps it was fitting that it was his son who spent the last few hours and minutes of my Father's earthly life, with him.
On the world stage, his name was known but the legacy he leaves is greater than any world leader. His gift was one that no money can buy; that no world leader can give it was the gift of a generous man to his family. It was his belief and his encouragement that enabled to us to lead our lives with courage and the belief that we could be and do what ever we set our minds to achieve. He taught his children and his grandchildren to respect nature and the earth to read and to appreciate music and life. In many ways, he had a hard life especially as a child. Many people hurt him but he left this world forgiving them and making peace with those whom had caused him pain. In his way, he understood the lessons that he was here to learn and therefore he left this world in peace. In this respect he was wiser than most.
He said to me recently that he believed he was a failure. I was shocked when he said this for in his mind he was measuring success in material terms. Anyone with the right circumstance can be a leader in business and such but it takes a special man to influence others to be different. On the material side, he gave anything he had to others. Some abused this taking advantage but he did not see this side of others, all he saw was that someone needed help and if he could, he gave it. I tried to explain to him that he was successful in more ways than he could know. In his influence on us - in how we have always believed in ourselves. In the encouragement that he gave us and me in particular to be different. I know that at times he thought that I was a shingle short with some of my beliefs, but he listened nevertheless. He supported me regardless of what he thought and I know that he respected my stance on many issues.
Last, but not least he was man of honour and commitment. If he made a promise, he kept it. He loved his family, his wife, his children his grandchild and his bothers and his sister. The world is sadder place for his leaving but his legacy lives on. More >
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 4 Jun 2003 @ 17:05, by quidnovi. Visual Arts, Graphics
Mamoru Oshii's "Avalon" opens the gate to the future of cinema. And that is no mere hyperbole. The nuances and rhythms of the near-future world created here are captivating to the point of transfixion…there is a mystery…an intricate puzzle…and as Ash [the main character] delves deeper and deeper into this world of not only an illegal and highly compulsive game, but also of her own reality, the more questions arise. More >
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4 Jun 2003 @ 11:12, by waalstraat. Activism
Are You an Orthodox Jew Ray Pow? How Much of Your Family were exterminated because of their religion Ray. I lost 80% of my Aunt's and Uncles and 1st cousins over 40 people, most of them children in the holocust Ray Pow...how about reading this excerpt from my novel "I Do Art, I Do Life, Life does Me!" Ray Pow...Oh by the way a few of the cousins I have left are orthodox Jews. When they by accident use a knife meant for dairy dishes on meat or vice versa in order to spiritually sanitize it they immerse it in earth and say special prayers over it...I respect their practices but does that mean we should all follow suit because very religious sincere orthodox Jews do that and advocated it....
HERE IS THE PERTINENT EXCERPT FROM MY NOVEL.... More >
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