Places that need to be scrubbed clean energetically

There are many, many haunted places in this world. Places where people have either died tragically, leaving behind the energetic footprint of their passing or those places which certain souls, for whatever reason, cannot let go.

Many people who have visited the old Jewish concentration camps have said of the air of sadness and tragedy which surrounds the place, an almost palpable dark grey energy that seems to have permeated the air and soil of the vicinity and contagiously touches anyone who visits.

Auschwitz depresses everyone who visits

Then there are other places, where extremely dangerous and potent occult and supernatural acts have taken place, creating a portal or gateway into the astral realms and pretty much inviting them in. That idea of opening up a closet and finding monsters from another dimension waiting to come into our reality as highlighted in that film “Monsters Inc.” was not made up by the writers of that film.

It’s an idea and a reality which has been around for a very long time. Native Americans, Siberian shamans, white wizards and prophets like Mikhael Aivanhov have warned against this sort of thing for centuries. It doesn’t help that writers like H.P Lovecraft, black magicians like Aleister Crowley and works like the Necronomicon took it a step further and literally gave the world the formulae, the rituals and the complete how-to in order to invite such entities into your life. The less said about them the better.

Henry Phillips Lovecraft

This posting is addressed to serious light workers and earth healers alike. It’s about those places which unfortunately, the portals are still open and need to be closed up, they need to be seriously cleaned out, completely, from top to bottom and front to back. Places, because of the powers which were unleashed there, continue to act as negative openings into the other realm and are astral psychic dumps. By no means is this a comprehensive list, there are thousands of these places the world over, this is just what came to me as the most pressing. In terms of how to clean up, here’s a good beginning.

Boleskine House, Loch Ness, Scotland

Jimmy Page in front of Boleskine House

Literally nestled near Loch Ness, Scotland, Boleskine House was personally chosen by Aleister Crowley as the perfect location to conduct black ritual. He lived here from 1899-1913 and specifically purchased it in order to perform a ritual found in “The Book of the Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin the Mage”. To perform it, Crowley says,

One must have a house where proper precautions against disturbance can be taken; this being arranged, there is really nothing to do but to aspire with increasing fervor and concentration, for six months, towards the obtaining of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.

In The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (Chapter 22), he continues:

The first essential is a house in a more or less secluded situation. There should be a door opening to the north from the room of which you make your oratory. Outside this door, you construct a terrace covered with fine river sand. This ends in a “lodge” where the spirits may congregate.

Later purchased by  rock guitarist and occult enthusiast, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page (a Crowley apologist who claims that Crowley was a “misunderstood genius”), Page has claimed that the house is haunted by a decapitated head, no doubt a relic which was probably used here in some ritual or other at some point.  It might also explain the influence which caused the death of both Robert Plant’s son, Karac, from a mysterious stomach flu and  John Bonham’s death. Page sold the house a few years ago and the house has been a residence and guesthouse over the years. Crowley’s followers and those who practice “Thelema” the occult arts attributed to Crowley, still come to the house in droves, much to the chagrin of the locals. Interestingly, some have also speculated that there maybe a relationship between Crowley, his screwed-up ritual and the Loch Ness monster:

From “Who Forted?”
“This kind of strangeness went on for years, leading believers of the mystical and the occult to believe that the house had become a sort of portal, the unfinished ceremony leaving an open gateway to worlds unknown, spreading the activity from beyond the confines of the house itself, and into the surrounding area. It was around this time in 1933 that the Loch Ness Monster began to rear it’s long, reptilian head.

Frederick William Holiday, one of the most well-publicized Loch Ness monster investigators, having published two books dedicated to the search for the creature, made an assessment in the 70′s that the monster acted itself much like a supernatural creature, leading him to re-think his stance on it’s origin. Instead, Holiday postulated that the creature’s apparent self-concealing phenomena was evidence that it could possibly be related to the aftermath of Crowley’s preternatural fuck up.

Strangely enough, the first recorded appearance of the Loch Ness Monster coincides with the beginning of the end of Crowley’s legacy.”

Clinton Road, West Milford, New Jersey
Thanks to “Weird NJ” magazine, which regularly highlights Clinton Road, this long, lonely 10 mile stretch running through the New Jersey Pine Barrens and isolated forests has achieved quite a notorious reputation over the years. A single blog post does no justice to the amount of material and personal testimonies related to this road. The Lenape tribes called the area around the Pine Barrens “Popuessing”, meaning “place of the dragon”. Swedish explorers later named it “Drake Kill”, “drake” being a Swedish word for dragon, and “kill” meaning channel or arm of the sea (river, stream, etc.).

Dubbed the “scariest road in America”.

Scores of people have sighted Satanists and Ku Klux Klan groups performing ritual in these woods over the years. A haunted bridge, phantom trucks, sightings of strange, unclassified creatures, the New Jersey Devil, a dumping ground for bodies by the Mob and Mafia, Clinton Road has some sort of story related to it. Practically everyone who has driven down this road, even in broad daylight, all cite the same thing: a deep feeling of foreboding which seems to increase with each passing second, to the point that many become terrified for no clear reason and automatically turn around and high-tail it out of there.

After looking at the area under Google Earth, it easy to see why crazy groups come here to perform bizarre rituals. There is absolutely nothing here, just miles and miles of uninterrupted forest. If you’re looking for secrecy, this place has loads of it. No doubt all those rituals over the years must have left a diabolical energetic footprint. People who have left their cars during the day to walk around, also cited another curious quality of this place: absolutely no sound. Not even normal forest sounds, like the chirping of birds or the hum of insects. Silence can have different qualities as well. Some silences are golden and rich and voluptuous, like lying on a hammock in the summer and dozing off under a tree or walking into a venerable library. Others have a disturbing, creepy quality about them, almost like an audio dead zone and the feeling that you’re being watched. Practically everyone who has traveled Clinton Road has experienced the latter.

Skinwalker Ranch, Ballard, Utah

Just about the only thing of Skinwalker ranch you’ll be able to see these days.

Just about everyone from Jeff Rense to Jordan Maxwell has at one point or another, brought up and discussed Skinwalker Ranch, a creepy-as-hell part of remote North-East Utah. Just name your topic: UFOs, glowing orbs, cryptozoology, Native American curses, Sasquatch, shape-shifters, mutilated animals, the disappearance of animals and people alike, the list of weird, unexplained and often terrifying phenomena here now lists itself in the hundreds.

According to Wikipedia: “In some Native American legends, a skin-walker is a person with the supernatural ability to turn into any animal he or she desires, though it is not necessary, most of them wear a pelt of the animal, to be able to transform. Similar lore can be found in cultures throughout the world and is often referred to as shapeshifting by anthropologists“

The ranch property has been declared as off-limits to tribal members because it lies in the path of the skinwalker. Even today, Utes refuse to set foot on what they see as accursed land. But the tribe doesn’t necessarily believe that the skinwalker lives on the ranch. Retired teacher and UFO researcher Junior Hicks says his friends in the Ute tribe believe the skinwalker presence in the Uinta Basin extends back at least 15 generations. The Utes, described by historians as a fierce and warlike people, were sometimes aligned with the Navajo against common enemies during the 1800′s. But the alliance didn’t last. When the Utes first acquired horses from the Spanish, they enthusiastically embraced the Spanish example by engaging in the slave trade. They reportedly abducted Navajo and other Indians and sold them in New Mexico slave markets. According to Hicks, the Utes believe the Navajo put a curse on their tribe in retribution for many perceived transgressions. And ever since that time, Hicks was told, the skinwalker has plagued the Ute people and anyone else who decides to live at Skinwalker Ranch.

The Land of Smoke and Mirrors

In the past few days, some Hollywood production team set up shop in my neighborhood for a film shoot. They’ve basically taken a traditionally blue-collar Irish and French Canadian neighborhood which is fast undergoing gentrification and have tried transforming it into Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York.

A local thrift shop is now “Bensonhurst Discount”

What normally is a pretty good Peruvian roast chicken place is now “Joe’s”

This place is normally a pet supplies store, notice the fake sign.

My French cheese shop is now a candy store

My favorite tea room is now a travel agency.

Covering the sign of a notary’s office with the American flag.

The new Little Italy.

I have to admit, walking along my usual route to the subway station has been an amusing exercise the past few days. Watching how storefronts are transformed with fake props and posters, the hum of frantic energy the production crew gives off, running from here to there with longs cables, the security team that was set up at night to watch over  the props and set so no one would take anything, the director loudly barking out directions. It takes a lot of work to create artifice and illusion and cover up reality, I thought to myself.

That got me thinking about the whole nature of illusion and the power fake images exert on our lives. Marketing, public relations, branding, propaganda, Hollywood films, commercials, all of it plays basically the same hand over and over again: create an image, an idea, a meme, anything which somehow undermines a person’s self-confidence or somehow hits an underlying insecurity and brainwash them into thinking that this new product, this new exercise, this line uttered by that movie star or this image will somehow take care of that insecurity. It’s making money at the expense of human dignity and a complete disregard for the personhood of individuals.

Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the asshole who created marketing and PR.

The Europeans always looked at film as an art form while the Americans always looked at it as a business. That might explain why I prefer watching old movies, foreign films and independently-made movies over contemporary Hollywood blockbusters. For example, I personally can’t stand Steven Spielberg movies. With their cliched characters, wooden dialogue and the grandiose and pompous John Williams musical compositions, practically every time the music starts, it’s the most obvious cue that now you’re supposed to get your tear ducts ready. On the other hand watching films by directors like John Sayles, Louis Malle, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Lars Von Trier have at times, left me elated after walking out of the cinema, with me thinking about the film for days afterwards. I remember watching Sayle’s film “Men with Guns” and feeling like I just stepped out of a lush dream, a deep meditation on war. More recently, Von Trier’s last movie, “Melancholia” left me speechless for days, particularly the impact of the last scene when viewed on a large movie screen.

Hollywood has always been known as the plastic and tinfoil dream machine, but real dreams can’t be manufactured and dictated. They come from a sacred place, somewhere deep within the human soul. Exploiting and hijacking that for a few dollars is just plain crude, vulgar and crass. Many of Hollywood’s “ideas” are informed by the cultural background of the large contingent of Eastern European Jews who founded Hollywood. Their ideas, their archetypal dreams have now been played over and over again to the point where they are now firmly embedded in the general culture and internalized by everyone else. That simply shouldn’t be.

I had my run-in with Hollywood too. When I went to LA to do the 11:11:11 ceremony at the Cross at Cahuenga, I stayed in downtown Hollywood, not far from the Graumann’s Chinese Theatre, where practically all film premieres take place.

Grauman’s Chinese Theater

The American Film Institute were showing a whole slew of movies there, so the barricades would go up every evening and the fans would line up for autographs and pictures while the stars walked the red carpet. Like some of you know, I had a huge crush on Micheal Fassbender so I thought it was more than a little coincidental that “Shame” was showing that night and Fassy would be there for the premiere.

Stunning on film, not so much in real life.

I waiting behind the barricade and watched the whole celebrity spectacle unfold before me. It was a pretty crisp evening and I was in jeans, a Smiths T-shirt, with a wool cardigan and I was still chilly. Two Scottish girls were there beside me and they were in full parkas. Then the starlets started coming out of their limos, wearing strapless and flimsy dresses. The 3 of us in line started commenting on how cold they must be. Some reporter asked one of the starlets what dress she was wearing and she replied with the name of some designer. The Scottish girls mentioned that they never heard of that name. I replied that it’s probably some celebrity fashion magazine like “In Style” asking the question and how these starlets are stupid for investing so much money on these dresses when it’ll go into the magazine this month and be completely forgotten about by next month’s issue. I think the starlet heard me say that because she gave me a dirty look afterwards.

The red carpet

Scratching his eyes

Fassy chatting with fans.

Up close.

Finally Fassy showed up. And…he was nowhere near as sexy in real life as I imagined him to be based on what I saw in the movies. In fact, he gave off a bit of sleazy and creepy vibe. Where was all that virility and smoldering sexuality that I saw in the films?  No where to be seen, that’s for sure. When he finally got to our spot in the line against the barricade, he looked at my T-shirt and flashed me a  grin. I felt repulsed.

One more illusion out the window.

Oh well.

Mother Nature is the best healer there is

This past weekend, a friend and I escaped Montreal and the NASCAR hordes descending upon it by fleeing to the mountains. Literally.

We camped out at a national park, hiking through pine forests,

Went wading in here after a 14 km hike – Rats Falls, Mont Tremblant National Park

kayaking along serene lakes,

Lac Provost – Mont Tremblant National Park

foraging for wild mushrooms which we added to our dinner,

Fresh wild Lobster Mushrooms sautéed in a skillet over a campfire can be enjoyed for free if you find them fresh in the wild. You don’t have to pay $14 per kilo to enjoy them.

spending the night chatting by a campfire while roasting marshmallows and sticking pieces of Toblerone chocolate into bananas and melting that over the fire.

If you’ve never roasted marshmallows over an open fire, you’re easily missing one of the simplest pleasures in life.

We lucked out and found a spot which even had its own little private beach by the lake.

Our spot.

We would fall asleep hearing loons singing on the lake, seeing the stars and the Milky Way above us and counting how many shooting stars we could each spot. The sleeps were deep and filled with vivid dreams. Mornings meant a fresh dip in the lake and drinking my morning tea while sitting on the beach and watching the sun rise over the mountains.

Lac Provost

We were greeted by rabbits, raccoons and could hear coyotes in the distance at night.

In truth, I loved it even if at night the temperature fell to 5 degree Centigrade in the middle of August. Standing alone and looking at the rounded hills, the endless forests, towering pine trees, the placid lakes and noisy streams I realized that THIS is the real world. All that other stuff of insurance policies, being part of a fake social scene, designer dresses and handbags, gym memberships, fraudulent elections, flat-screen TVs, celebrity reality TV shows and a forced and fake economic political and economic system are just that: fake and forced. Someone came up with these ideas somewhere along the line and have now imposed it on us, but when you go out into the wild, all that stuff is rendered meaningless and you’re finally allowed to just BE.

This is not an original thought. The father of civil disobedience,  Henry David Thoreau spent a year in a shack by Walden Pond to see if he could escape a life of “quiet desperation” as he called it.

Walden Pond, where Thoreau wrote his famous essays on civil disobedience which ended up influencing everyone from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. I came here 2 years ago and the water is freezing cold.

In more dramatic terms, Christopher McCandless went vagabonding through America and ended up dying in the wilds of Alaska (mostly because of his ineptitude) as shown in that excellent film “Into The Wild”.

Christopher McCandless beside the abandoned bus which he later died in, in the wilds of Alaska

Native tribes see the living spirit behind the trees, the animals, the water, the fresh air and the earth and give it due respect, realizing that we are only able to live because of these very same elements and that we are to live in respect and cooperation with them.

The Ancients knew it too, that we can only live because of the grace and power of Nature and natural forces. It’s not a coincidence that those early civilizations took the elements and transformed them into gods and goddesses.

Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, the gods of the sky, oceans and the underworld respectively

Chris Hedges wrote a fantastic article a few years ago at Truthdig, about how the natural world is a balm to confused, troubled and traumatized souls:

from “Freedom in the Grace of the World”

“The beauty and tranquility of the old-growth forests, the vistas that stretch for miles over unbroken treetops, the waterfalls and rivers, the severance from the noise and electronic hallucinations of modern existence, becomes, if you stay out long enough, a balm to wounds. It is in solitude, contemplation and a connection with nature that we transcend the frenzied and desperate existence imposed upon us by the distortions of a commodity culture….Nature always extracts justice. Defy nature and it obliterates the human species. The more we divorce ourselves from nature, the more we permit the natural world to be exploited and polluted by corporations for profit, the more estranged we become from the essence of life. Corporate systems, which grow our food and ship it across country in trucks, which drill deep into the ocean to extract diminishing fossil fuels and send container ships to bring us piles of electronics and cloths from China, have created fragile, unsustainable man-made infrastructures that will collapse. Corporations have, at the same time, destroyed sustainable local communities. We do not know how to grow our own food. We do not know how to make our own clothes. We are helpless appendages of the corporate state. We are fooled by virtual mirages into mistaking the busy, corporate hives of human activity and the salacious images and gossip that clog our minds as real. The natural world, the real world, on which our life depends, is walled off from view as it is systematically slaughtered. 

Year after year I returned to these forbidding peaks from conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. I brought with me the stench of death, the cries of the wounded, the bloated bodies on the side of the road, the fear, the paranoia, the alienation, the insomnia, the anger and the despair and threw it at these mountains. I strapped my pack on in the pounding rain at trailheads and drove myself, and later my son, up mountains. I rarely stopped. I go to the mountains to at once spend this fury and seek renewal, to be reminded of my tiny, insignificant place in the universe and to confront mystery.”

The mystical American poet, Wendell Berry wrote in  “The Peace of Wild Things”:

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 lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of  grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

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

The Lynchpins which could bring the House of Cards down

lynchpin - a central cohesive source of support and stability

I’ll be upfront, I think Julian Assange is one attractive hottie who actually has his brain and his heart in the right place.

Nice hair, cool turtle neck and a great leather jacket. Boy, you are working it!

His geeky background in mathematics and eventually, hacking is not uncommon among the computer set. But what I find interesting about him is that he used those skills to become quite a formidable  code breaker. By founding Wikileaks,  and allowing government and military personnel anonymously deposit sensitive information and documents, Assange has routinely outed the underbelly of power the world over, from Kenya to Pakistan and most importantly, the United States of America.

Glamazon: Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner, Hilary Clinton questioned her mental capacity in one Wikileaks diplomatic cables which went public

It was the courage and the conscience of Private Bradley Manning which led to Wikileaks getting their hands on that infamous video of an American Apache helicopter openly shooting and killing innocent civilians and injuring children. They were not “terrorists” as many American military hicks seem to automatically think of anyone with a darker complexion and with bit of facial hair and an Arabic sounding name. They were actually reporters from the Reuters News Agency. This video alone caused outrage the world over, including back at home and energized the anti-war movement.

The Emperor hates to be told that he has no clothes on.  If it’s actually proven that he has no clothes on, he will go ballistic.

Action by the United States was swift and sweeping. Bradley Manning has been wasting away in a military prison for nearly 2 years now, borderline tortured, kept naked in a freezing prison cell, forbidden to speak to anyone and in solitary confinement and until recently, under regular suicide watch. While his trial is still ongoing and under extreme secrecy, if he is found guilty of “aiding the enemy”, he faces the death penalty.

Assange, has always been a bit of a bad boy.  With his prematurely white hair, youthful face, sartorial style, intelligence, subversive line of work and bad ass attitude, Assange cuts a striking figure, it’s easy to see why the ladies are attracted to him (Hell, I’d date him if I could).

Dude wears a suit and scarf very well, methinks.

He had his way with a few ladies in Sweden, it was consensual sex, someone forgot the condom, two ladies found out that Julian had played both within a span of 3 or 4 days, some feelings got hurt, all hell broke loose. He was charged with rape.

Anna Ardin, one of Assange’s accusers, has recently started to backtrack

He was arrested in Britain and for 500 days had an electronic device attached to him to monitor all his activities. He went down to Occupy London a few times, he even got his own show on RT which included some fantastic interviews with people like the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali, Imran Khan and Slavoj Žižek . The British intelligentsia and journalists positively loathed him.

Assange was forced to take off his Anonymous mask at Occupy London

The British establishment are a very jealous and selfish lot.  Here was this brash Aussie who came in out of nowhere, was not a member of the old boys public school/Ox-bridge network  and got the scoop of a lifetime and made all of them look  like the insipid, spineless courtiers to power that they all are.

An apt representation of most British and American mainstream journalists

When the British courts found him guilty (and anyone with even a pea-brain can realize that all this had to do with American pressure and politicking) he was to be extradited to Sweden to face these trumped-up charges of rape. Of course, that’s just the excuse for the Americans to get their hands on him and put him in the same hole as Bradley Manning. Republican politicians have openly called for his execution. Assange took refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the one country which has offered him political asylum.  And now it looks like London’s Foreign Office  is looking to invoke a rare, and little known law to revoke the diplomatic status of Ecuador’s embassy to get Assange and it is causing quite the international diplomatic dogfight.

The story does not end here. Assange’s fate is the true wild card.

His is widely respected and even revered in the hacking community for some of his earlier code breaking work.  The majority of the truly inspired hackers in the world hang out at 4chang’s /b/ board and when Amazon, Mastercard, Visa and Paypal refused to process donations to Wikileaks anymore, it was these talented hackers who virtually brought their respective websites and operations to a complete standstill. Any harm to Assange is a call to arms to hackers the world over.

many of the hackers at Anonymous are completely behind Assange.

Julian is no fool. With his background in mathematics, probability and game theory, he came up with a Plan B, a Plan C all the way through to Z in case of his eventual imprisonment and even death (deliberate, accidental, staged, planned or otherwise). He has said that if even a single hair on his head is harmed, he will release the final code to over 100 000 hackers all over the world, a so-called Poison Pill file, the final code which will release even more secretive and damning information which Wikileaks has been sitting on and the information is apparently so explosive and so dangerous, that it,  in essence will be enough to bring down governments, military and multinational corporations. It will name names. It will point fingers directly. It will give incontestable proof.

Bye-bye house of cards

If that code goes out, the real shit will hit the fan and the whole house of cards will fall.  Which is why Assange to some degree is still alive; the CIA could have easily gotten rid of him a long time ago if they really wanted to.

Love him or hate him, Assange is the lynchpin to power the Elites wished never existed and who they wish they could do away with easily. Since neither is going to happen now, they are all now walking on eggshells and the world knows it.

Walking on eggshells can’t be a nice feeling, can it?

And that’s a good thing

Soulfoodness

Soul food:  cuisine consists of a selection of foods traditional for African Americans. It is closely related to the cuisine of the Southern United States. The descriptive terminology may have originated in the mid-1960s, when soul was a common definer used to describe African-American culture (for example, soul music).

Much has been written and discussed about the relationship between food, diet and spirituality. Hindus swear a vegetarian diet is the only way to go since it does not involve the karma of killing animals to live. The Westernized yoga set are largely the biggest proponents of veganism. Muslims swear that to eat anything pork-based means invoking the wrath of Allah and that includes meat of animals who kill with their paws or jaws (so no shark-fin soup for you!). Jews say the same thing with respect to Yahweh and how eating a cheeseburger is not kosher since you’re eating child and mother in one go (milk–> cheese +  meat). Even within the aforementioned groups, there still exists a lively and ongoing debate on the merits of these types of diets and the various rules and restrictions.

 

A non-no for Jews who keep kosher.

I’m not going to write about what is the best diet to advance your own spiritual aims, I think that discussion is up to each individual person, given their health needs, their geographic and environmental reality (how on Earth are the Inuit supposed to become vegans?), their upbringing and of course, income (it’s not a joke when “Whole Foods” is known as “Whole Paycheck”). Food politics, food economics and food security are topics in themselves and are very charged and contentious ones at that.

 

Instead, I’m going to write about eating food that is so good, so well prepared, so well-cultivated and so down right delicious, that even a bite transports you to another realm, much like nectar and ambrosia did for the Greek gods of yore. Much has been written and discussed about the use of some of our senses to induce spiritual experiences, either by the taking in of beautiful scenery, the listening of beautiful, inspired music, the touch and the warmth of an embrace of a loved one, but the other two senses of taste and smell have largely been under-represented.

 

Eating and the pleasures of taste as a spiritual experience has mostly figured in the works of fiction more so than in organized religion or spirituality. More often than not, most religions and spiritual groups focus on what you can’t eat versus how to enjoy food. I think of short stories and films where food and the joys of eating go beyond pleasure like “Babette’s Feast”, “Like Water for Chocolate” and films like “Tampopo”, “Big Night”, “Bottle Shock” and “Eat, Drink, Man , Woman”. 

 

I completely understand foodies in this regard. It’s not really about trying this new dish or looking for that rare ingredient or getting reservations at this exclusive restaurant. It’s about being on the lookout for that mouthful which suddenly makes you feel more alive and stops you dead in your tracks with a faraway look in your eye as you quietly enjoy the flavors dancing about your tongue. Suddenly, you feel grateful to be alive so that you can taste such goodness and appreciate the world more. It’s life affirming and not about the dreariness of counting calories and feeling smug because you just ingested a bag of kale chips instead of potato ones. In this respect, the yoga set drive me crazy. I don’t understand how throwing chia seeds and forgoing butter in cakes which turn out to be tasteless is supposed to give me enjoyment and make me happy.

 

I had several of these experiences including the first time I had a simple tomato in the Mediterranean and not the tasteless, woody ones we find in our North American supermarkets. Not even the garden grown varieties can do justice to that tomato I had at a Greek tavern, with nothing but a splash of lemon juice and a bit of salt. I felt like I was eating the first tomato placed on Earth, it was that fresh, that vivid, that real.

I’ve had the same experience with deep fried freshwater prawns in Bangladesh,

eating lychee, guavas, mangoes and papayas straight off the tree in my grandfather’s garden,

drinking freshly squeezed blood orange juice of oranges I picked a few minutes ago,

having the juices of white pomegranates sticking up my fingers as I try peeling them underneath the tree, 

 

allowing the morsels of perfectly grilled octopus melt in my mouth at a beach side grill,

stinking up my breath with cream of roasted garlic soup at a garlic festival in California

or tucking into sautéed wild mushrooms I foraged for in the local forests.

So for this one time, I’m going to hijack the term “soul food” from our African American brethren. It’s not about a certain cuisine, or a certain part of the world or even gluttony. It’s a way of experiencing a fundamental part of life and giving it due respect, mindfulness…and pleasure

The Lands of Witches, Warlocks, Spells and Sorcerers

As some of you might have surmised by now, I do carry an interest in the supernatural. I do think that there are benevolent and malevolent forces as work in this Uni-Verse, which exist alongside with us but we cannot quantify them yet (i.e see, touch, hear), only because the mathematics and physics for recording such entities is not quite there yet. Maybe in time we’ll get there. If we ever do, I’m willing to bet that it’ll be the Russians who do it first. They’re quite open-minded about scientifically researching these sorts of things.

Good vs. Evil, Ying & Yang

For whatever reason, there seems to be “centers” of such activity where people still practice the forbidden and black arts. I’ve never had a run-in with such persons nor do I wish to, but I have heard of stories among some of my friends. Stories of brides from these regions who marry into wealthy families in distant cities, never gets along with anyone in the new family, and one by one, people in the groom’s family mysteriously and suddenly die off and the bride is finally left with the house and all the money and then returns back to her people after the husband finally passes on.

Aleister Crowley was seriously into some dark stuff.

There are many places around the world where the country folk still speak in whispers of either fear or awe about certain individuals and their powers. I don’t know all of these places and I’m sure there are dozens of them in places like Africa and Haiti alone, which have strong traditions of vodou and Santeria. These places are usually rural in nature and the people are superstitious. Perhaps it has something to do with living closer to the elements and being less in contact with 16-lane freeways, shopping malls, Cheez Whiz, and psycho-therapists.

This will literally kill you spiritually and is an abomination of a different sort. Anyone who thinks cheese should be squeezed out of a bottle should be squeezed out of town.

Le Berry(or Berri), France

Berry sits in the heart of France

The legends around Berry go back to medieval France as early as 1275. We have all heard about the Spanish Inquisition but other parts of Europe were also subject to inquisition including France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. The trials of the inquisition led to some being banned from the area or worse yet – beheadings.

The Inquisition was a bad,bad time for women in particular.

The Inquisition was responsible for a witch-hunt which resulted from the torture of several accused witches, who in turn confessed the identities of other supposed witches… charging them guilty. The accused were then forced to walk down the street in clothing associated with heretics, where they were then burned alive. The Inquisition also had a habit of tricking people into other confessions by promising that if they co-operated, they would be set free. Many cases were built upon gossip and he said/she said. Accusations brought up by neighbors were sometimes enough to get you burned.

Château de Chabenet – Berry – France

The town of Berrichonne, has a famous witchcraft museum located on an ancient farm dating to the XIX century.
Witchcraft is part of everyday life in Berrichonne even now. Country witches still practice here though most of the magic seems to be of the healing, love potion variety and not the human sacrifice type, thankfully.

The real Iron Maiden – and Bruce Dickinson is no where in sight

Mayong, Assam – India

Assam, India – great tea to be found here as well

From time immemorial, the Mayong region of Assam has been famous for supernatural stories. It is said that people came here from far and wide to learn black magic and the villages and tribal communities in this area still deeply believe in this stuff. Much of it has to do with illiteracy but no doubt the history of the region still affects the people here.

In its heyday the magic of Mayong was feared world over so much so that the word magic became synonymous with Mayong, however no one knows exactly how magic entered this land. Ferdinand Ossendowski in his book, “Men, Beasts and Gods” relates that the Gypsies originally got their magic from the underground city of Shambala/Agartha and brought it up to the world but because they misused it, were kicked out. Was Assam their first stop?

An Indian – Lambadi woman

Although many ancient scriptures have described Mayong as the place of black magic and tantricism, it still doesn’t have a well documented history. Even now, the people of Mayong are followers of these folk beliefs. For solving their day-to-day problems they still depend on “magic” and their indigenous herbs. According to some stories centuries ago, it was believed that by reciting certain mantras, human beings were shape shifted into animals, some mantras turned bullets into nothing and others hypnotized tigers. Distance healing by cutting only a handful of plants while chanting some secret word, chanting mantras to attract the amorous attention of someone in particular, mantras to move immovable objects and mantras to actually fly were all part of the scene.

Some mantras apparently caused all sorts of interesting things to happen.

However today these feats are unheard of, for in order to achieve such a high level of ability one needs to go through a lot of patience, dedication, hard work, meditation, and study to practice magic. And of course many of these superstitious beliefs collapse under scientific scrutiny. You can still see some tricks which may make you do a double-take like fortune-telling via korris (sea shells) , palmistry, future prediction via a piece of broken glass. A few household at Rojamayong and Buramayong still posses some of the manuscripts and practice it in a lesser form. Even the few who may be practicing it are reluctant to reveal anything.

Some Assamese are supposed to be very good at palmistry.

Those old sorcerers never wrote anything down, the teachings of black magic passed orally from generation to generation. However, even up until a few years ago, human sacrifice was still happening among tribal peoples in the Brahmaputra valley region.
Here is an excellent article on why some of this so-called “black magic” needs to be eradicated. This one is pretty good too.

Hatay/Antakya/Iskenderun, Turkey

The Hatay region of Turkey

The history of the Hatay province is a rich but confused one. These days with the fighting going on in neighboring Syria, literally next door, it makes it a difficult place to visit and yet this is one region of Turkey I have yet to explore and am itching to do so with a fine-toothed comb.

The Antakya Museum has the second largest collection of ancient Roman mosaics in the world.

Practically anyone who was someone in history came marching through this area at some point or other, including the ancient Assyrians, Phoenicians, Romans, Greeks, Alexander the Great, St. Paul, St.Peter, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart, the Knights Templar, Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem, Ottoman Turks, the French, the British and Laurence of Arabia. With ancient churches, and ruins of temples, fortresses and castles littered about the countryside, this area is a true paradise to lovers of history and myth. Modern day Antakya sits on top of the ruins of ancient Antioch. Iskenderun is very close by to the ancient port city Alexandretta, established by guess who?

The exterior of one of the first churches in the world – The Grotto of St.Peter and Paul (yup, they both were here)

The region is known within Turkey for spells, hermits, sages and miracles. When I was living in Turkey, a few of my students from this area told me of a famous holy man, a “hoca” (ho-ja), I can’t remember his name and I’m not even sure if he is alive anymore but apparently he had only to look at your name on a piece of paper and it would be enough to ensure that neither snakes nor scorpions would ever bite you in your life. This area also seems to have a high concentration of children being born with immediate past-life memory. The Turkish form of black magic is called “Muska” and usually involves Arabic verses of the Koran written backwards and being left in secret or hidden in places to negatively affect certain people.

Bagras Castle – An old Knights Templar fortress

Personally, I’m of the persuasion that it’s best to leave things we don’t understand fully alone. While I am all for investigation and inquiry, there’s also the question of karma and blow back, which is why I think spell-casting is bad news in general. I don’t see anything wrong with praying or meditating and inviting for some insight on our own journeys but manipulating these forces, usually for selfish, self-centered ends, is normally a recipe for disaster.

In-Spiral-ed Living

I admit I am a weird bird, I know that.

Maybe it’s an eccentric Aquarian-thing, I don’t know. Even I admit this blog is a bit of an odd-ball spot discussing yoga, demonic possession, spiritual journeys of rock stars, white magick ritual and conspiracy theories. There is no dominant theme here, just sharing my observations and experiences from my own journey and the strange thoughts which come to me from time to time.

Here’s an example of a strange thought I had a few years ago: Why are all houses and rooms built as squares and rectangles? Why do houses have to look like boxes? Why not triangles and circles?

Taking boxes to the extreme – Montreal’s Habitat ’67

From Apartment Therapy – A-Frame houses are A-Ok in my book.

That got me thinking about other forms of housing, homes, alternative architecture and design….

Roger Dean

Do these pictures remind you of anything?

Floating Islands – Copyright Roger Dean 2012

Floating Islands -Copyright Roger Dean 2012

If some of you guessed “Avatar”, you’d be right. If others guessed the album covers from progressive rock bands “YES” and  “Asia” you’d be correct as well. “Avatar” director, James Cameron basically stole the ideas of the dragons and the floating islands straight from the works of British illustrator Roger Dean (Dean has filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers.) Dean is also the mastermind who did all the visionary artwork and album covers for “YES” and “Asia”.

Dean’s artwork is full of mythological-inspired creatures like dragons and sphinxes, as well as inspiring towering buildings and pyramids and fantasy-like landscapes – Copyright Roger Dean 2012

Copyright Roger Dean 2012

Little known fact: Roger Dean is also an accomplished architect and his eco-friendly, earth-bound homes must have also inspired Peter Jackson when he did the sets for Hobbittown for the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy.

Roger Dean designed home

Roger Dean designed home

Roger Dean designed home

From his website rogerdean.com:

He questioned dozens of children about what they liked or disliked about their beds and bedrooms. Again and again, when they spoke of discomfort they were referring not to the softness of the mattress but the “feel” of the room. They said they were afraid of spaces under the bed, where monsters might lurk, or shapes made by clothes hanging on the back doors or highly patterned wallpapers. When asked what they would like, the children described caves or tent-like structures. They wanted to be enclosed; hidden from view but able to see out. In other words, in order to feel comfortable they had to feel safe. In adults this primeval instinct to seek security is blurred by the sophistication of taste. But it is still apparent in the way we behave in our daily lives. When you go to a restaurant you tend to choose a table in a corner with your back to the wall, so you know what is happening around you and no one can approach unseen from behind….The key to Roger Dean’s architecture is this strategic control of space. To be comfortable in a house, it must make you feel at home. This led Dean to design his womb-like rooms

Dean’s buildings are eco-friendly, extremely strong and cost very little to make in comparison to “normal” houses and subdivisions. A 1 story four bedroom home takes six (6) hours to assemble. Labour costs for construction are about 40-50% less than conventional homes.

I find it extremely enlightening that an architect would think in such terms. Dean holds strong views on the role of his structures within the environment. “For example, I love timber but would use it very sparingly in a house, even if it came from a renewable source. All kinds of architectural groups are calling their buildings environmentally friendly, but there isn’t such a thing. You’ve hurt the environment by building on it. There is a concept in Feng Shui that we are spiritual gardeners.”

Round Homes
There are a whole slew of companies now that specialize in building round houses or dome homes. Mandala Homes, based in British Columbia, Canada is a specialist in dome home buildings as is South Carolina’s Deltech Homes.

An exterior of a Deltech home

Deltech home in the desert

Wouldn’t it be amazing doing yoga in a space like this? (Mandala Homes design)

Now, that’s a serious house – Mandala Homes

I don’t know why by this reminds me of the kind of home where Peter Seller’s would have a party back in the 1960′s -Mandala Homes interior

Deltech Homes claims their houses are hurricane resistant and extremely strong. They also say that round homes are energy efficient because “The aerodynamic shape of a circular home means air flows around it instead of exerting pressure on flat wall surfaces. That in turn means less infiltration of exterior air than in a conventional home.”

It’s true all these pictures are from their website and are showing extremely affluent homes. However, you don’t have to be wealthy to afford such a place of your own. Both companies offer smaller-scale plans and they offer other options as well if you, like me, have your heart set on a round home.

A one-bedroom Deltech round house.

Round Timber Round Homes

Simon Dale  made his house for less than $10 000 USD in Wales.  By himself.

Simon Dale made this home for his family, with no previous building experience and with less than $10 000 dollars

It really does go to show you that conventional thinking and conventional design are by definition limited. That there are other possibilities out there that end up being more earth-friendly, more aesthetically pleasing and more…fun.

A cob-bale house.

When I look at these rooms and homes, they look inviting and warm. The lack of corners means that energy moves in circles, which any spiritualist will tell you is the way the universe works as well.

Based on Buckminster Fuller’s designs

I had the privilege of staying in and visiting many round rooms and homes in Cappadocia, Turkey. Most of them were literally built right out of the earth and there are many, many cave hotels and homes there now. I can say first-hand that the energy of these types of homes and buildings is completely different. You feel safer, more “at-home”, more comfortable and more connected somehow.

My very first spiritual teacher was the force behind Hotel Gamirasu and it was her energy that made it what it is today.

A typical cave-hotel room.

All in a cave.

All of which to say, that it really does pay to think outside of the box sometimes  (you know I had to insert that somewhere ).