Shake the Tree and the Rotten Fruit Fall First

Film producer Harvey Weinstein

I have watched this Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment”scandal” unfold the past few days and wasn’t quite sure how to tackle writing about it.

To those of you who may not know, Harvey Weinstein was and is (until last week), one of the most powerful and ruthless Hollywood moguls and film producers working in the world. The companies he founded with his brother Bob Weinstein, Miramax Films and the Weinstein Company have been responsible for producing some of the most seminal films of the past 20-25 years. Films like “Pulp Fiction”, “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “Trainspotting”, “Good Will Hunting”, practically the entire film catalogue of influential directors like Quentin Tarantino and put no-name generic actresses who literally came out of nowhere on the map and made them household names like Gwynnie-poo Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lawrence.

Gwynnie-poo, Hillary Clinton and Harvey Weinstein aka The 3 Amigos

His reach wasn’t just in Hollywood, but reached deeply into political circles as well. He is one of the biggest donors to the Democratic National Party, was a huge supporter of Hillary Clinton and one of their biggest fundraisers in “liberal” Hollywood. His reach was global. He was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the UK and was made a Chevalier (knight) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres  in France. His films have garnered over 300 Academy Award nominations over his life and dozens of wins.

British actress Romola Garai in “I Capture the Castle”, one of the more talented, intelligent but criminally under-rated and under-used actresses in her age group IMHO. Gee, I wonder why…

Well, it turns out that aside from being one of the most powerful men in film culture the world over he’s also one of the biggest pigs since he has a long and sordid history of sexually preying on vulnerable, and powerless women, which not only included aspiring actresses and models but also junior members of his company, journalists and just about any attractive female between the ages of 19 and 30 he encountered.

Renée Zellweger, WTF are you doing?

Look, I’m not even in the same country as Weinstein or work anywhere near the film industry but even I heard about the rumors swirling around him for years. It just took a wickedly good expose in the New York Times last Thursday to finally show the world what the film community has known for decades: Harvey Weinstein is a notorious lech who took full advantage of his place as a well-connected, wealthy, uber-power broker and deal maker to prey on women with far less power.

Follow any celebrity gossip site, and I’m talking about the better ones where insiders in the entertainment industry usually post blind items anonymously (like the comments section over at Celebitchy, Lainey Gossip, Blind Gossip and Pajiba) and the litany of Weinstein’s actions and the list of his partners-in-crime who covered his tracks (I’m talking to you Matt Damon and Russell Crowe) and well as talentless actresses who according to insider gossip allegedly and knowingly engaged with him on the casting couch so that they could advance their careers (Hey Gwynnie-poo, why haven’t you made a public statement since the scandal broke? Or you Blake Lively? Jennifer Lawrence? Sienna Miller? Jessica Alba? Gretchen Mol?)

Harvey Weinstein told Gwyneth Paltrow to do this S&M-inspired photo-shoot for “Talk” magazine back in 1999 even though it was incongruent with her then-blossoming career and image.

Only a handful of actresses and actors and other Hollywood insiders have since spoken up against Weinstein and in support of harassed victims like actresses Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan (Emma Thompson and Glenn Close, you rock!). The majority have remained silent and I find that to be the most telling thing about this whole story. Everyone is still afraid of Weinstein’s influence since he could literally make or break someone’s career. The thing you have to remember about abuse of any kind is that it can only operate and happen in dark, unlit corners where no one talks. Stay silent and you give an implicit green light and free pass to the abuser to continue what he or she has always done. In order to stop it, YOU HAVE TO SPEAK UP.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who knew what happened and looked the other way or who still have not spoken up, is an enabler and that unfortunately includes some directors, actors and actresses who have worked with Weinstein over the years and are very talented in their own right…and sadly some people whose work I used to at least admire.

Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes. The FOX News network is well-known for its misogyny and chauvinism. It came from the top.

In recent months we have seen some very, very powerful and wealthy men fall due to sexual misconduct and harassment. People like the founder of FOX News Roger Ailes, FOX News nutter host Bill O’Reilly, comedian and philanthropist Bill Cosby and now Harvey Weinstein. These are all men with vast amounts of power, wealth, powerful connections, access to political power, everything you and I will probably never have.

Yet, they fell. And if they can fall, anyone can.

Some journalists have pointed out that perhaps it has something to do with how interconnected we are now with social media, the internet and technology given that everyone has cameras and recorders on their phones now. How in the past, women who were victims, suffered in isolated silence. They were isolated from each other and had no way of reaching out to other victims. However as the Ailes, O’Reilly, Cosby and now Weinstein stories show, victimized women are coming out of the woodwork, they are sharing their stories with one another. That in turn has emboldened even more women to come out of the shadows and share what happened to them. It gets the snowball rolling.

This isn’t really just about sex. It’s about using sexual degradation and humiliation to sexually harass someone in order to exert power over them and then silence them. Something has shifted in the general culture. I don’t think its going to be as easy as it used to be in the past for men to get away with this kind of abuse of power over powerless women. It’s not just in the film industry. It’s in the work place, corporate world, university campuses, its mothers who have internalized patriarchal values and transmit that to their sons within the family, it is just about everywhere.

I have maintained since I began this blog about 5 and a half years ago that there is a shift of the ages which is underway, call it what you will, Age of Aquarius, end of the Kali Yuga, Truth Vibrations, moving into 5D etc. Two of the hallmarks of the incoming age is respect for the Divine Feminine (and that includes respecting women as conscious beings equal in power and worth to men) and the impossibility of wearing false masks. Work against those two basic precepts and you are asking for trouble and asking to be exposed. Go against this incoming tide and I’m afraid, you’re not going to make the cut.

Harvey didn’t get the memo, that’s for sure.

 

 

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Another One Bites the Dust

You have got to be kidding me…

So this might be old news to some of you, particularly those of you who keep a close watch on all things Indian (from India) but another “Godman” of India (i.e guru) has been exposed as the fraud that he is and was duly arrested. What is different in this case was that following his arrest, thousands of his followers went on a rioting rampage resulting in at least 30 dead.

Dude, get a professional waxer ASAP.

To those of you who did not hear of this story, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, the so-called Godman and spiritual leader of the Dera Sacha Sauda sect, was found guilty and convicted for raping two of his female followers. What happened afterwards was that about 200 000 of his followers in the northern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana then went crazy resulting in these deaths and thousands of arrests.

This is nothing new. I was in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts last week, an area largely known to be the summer haven for America’s Gilded Age billionaires. The robber barons, people like the Astors and the Westinghouses had their summer “cottages” there (if you can call 100+ room mansions a cottage). These days, it’s an uber-liberal, hipster heaven of mostly wealthy New Yorkers and Bostonians, full of art galleries, yoga studios, home bakeries, shabby-chic eateries, high-end outlet malls and retreat centers. The Kripalu Center is here and not all that long ago, their founder Amrit Desai was found guilty of conducting sexual affairs with some of his followers AFTER he had basically added celibacy to his teachings among his followers. (I wish this could be tattooed on some folks because they need the constant reminder: “Just because someone is brown or “exotic” does not automatically make them genuine teachers and worthy of your devotion.”).

It’s not just among Indian gurus and teachers. It has also been happening among American “pastors”. Joel Osteen, the plastic-looking senior pastor of the Houston-area megachurch. The Lakewood Church,  hid in his $10 million dollar home while refusing to open up his church to Hurricane Harvey flood victims until he was publicly shamed on social media and then had no choice except to open his doors to the down-trodden.

I’ve written before that fake gurus and teachers are increasingly going to be exposed during the Shift of the Ages. When you have an oncoming age where the primary energies are going to be rooted in truth, integrity, respect for the Feminine as an equal, respect for the natural world and real egalitarianism outside of meritocracy, race, culture, sexual orientation, tribalism and income bracket, then you can bet on the house that gurus and teachers who preach the opposite aren’t going to last very long and will be exposed for the frauds and shysters they really are.

Yeah, OK. Whatever Adi Da.

There’s something deeper to look at as well. These fake teachers and personalities wouldn’t go into this line of work in the first place if there weren’t specific trade-offs to be had, namely access to money, sex and power (and influence). I don’t see any evidence of authentic altruism and genuine personal empowerment. Instead, there is an implicit thread of co-dependency on the “teacher” or cult or “teaching”. I’m also afraid that as long as things like money, sex and power are the primary rewards, these kinds of assholes will continue to pop up regularly and it will be up to individuals like you and I to use our own judgement and discernment to sniff these fakes out.

Here’s a thought: What would a spiritual teacher or guide look like if the only reward is a planet of 7 billion+ enlightened, self-sufficient empowered individuals who don’t need a spiritual teacher or guide anymore? What kind of individuals would then be attracted to this line of work? What would they look like?

I’ll end with some lyrics from one of my favorite (yet criminally under-appreciated) alternative pop bands of all time, British band XTC and their song “King for A Day” which pretty much catches the general vibe of these gurus gone wild.

Everyone’s creeping up to the money god
Putting tongues where they didn’t ought to be
On stepping stones of human hearts and souls
Into the land of “nothing for free”

Well the way that we’re living
Is all take and no giving
There’s nothing to believe in
The loudest mouth will hail the new-found way
To be king for a day

Everyone’s licking up to the new King Pin
Trying to get way up with a smile
Sing for your supper boy and jump to a finger click
Ain’t my way of living in style

‘Cause the ladder gets longer
And ambition gets stronger
I can’t satisfy the hunger
That bad old moon has got you in its sway
To be king for a day

 

Building Walls, Building Bridges and Ghosts of the White House

The week we have all been dreading has finally arrived. The Orange Warthog takes office this Friday. Truthfully, I don’t think he’s all that smart in terms of decision-making. I don’t even think the guy knows his ass from his armpit about basic civics. I think it’s going to be another presidency like George W. Bush’s where the actual president does absolutely nothing but his coterie of Machiavellian advisors around him will run the show. I also think there’s something called the Deep State which will run the show. That’s the part of the government that no one really knows about, deeply embedded actors who make sure that things like the military-industrial complex, the intelligence community and business keep going no matter what. Piss off Deep State actors and they’ll get rid of you.

I’ve recently just finished watching all 12 episodes of  Oliver Stone’s “The Untold History of the United States” since it’s on Netflix (most of the episodes are on Youtube as well). If you have a couple of rainy Sundays in a row and nothing to do, it is definitely worth a watch. Just excellent documentary film-making and little known factoids about American history this past century which hardly any history class will teach you. In light of this series, I’m sure there is a Deep State at work. They are the exact same interests that kept Bernie Sanders out, will try to ensure that Bernie and the progressives do not take control of the Democratic Party and will either assassinate or impeach Trump if he goes too far. They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again. They killed JFK and they did it to an almost forgotten icon of American progressive thought, Henry A. Wallace.

Henry A. Wallace, 33rd Vice President of the US, should have been President.

I had no idea who Wallace was until I watched the series but after I did and did some more reading about him, I was floored.

Henry A. Wallace was President Roosevelt’s vice-president. A trained agro-economist from Iowa, his father was Secretary of the Department of Agriculture under President Calvin Coolidge’s cabinet. Wallace went on to come up with new varieties of blight-resistant corn and poultry and eventually run the same office as his father. Wallace saw what the Great Depression was doing to people in the country and was obsessed with farmers being able to produce food to feed everyone.  He saw to it that food prices deliberately stayed low. When FDR tapped him as to be his VP during his third administration at the height of World War II, Wallace was wildly popular all over the world. Fluent in Spanish, he was received as royalty in South America. As a child, one of the first African-American scientists, George Washington Carver, stayed with the family and befriended Wallace and taught him all about genetics in botany. After that he was a lifelong advocate of civil rights 40 years before it became a reality and had no time for racists or bigots since he knew racism was a form of ignorance. He hated colonialism and imperialism and felt that the people of Asia, Africa and South America deserved to chart their own future. He was for equal pay for women, a national health care system which covered everyone and supported unions. Even Josef Stalin had huge respect for the man. In fact Wallace was loved by just about everyone except Big Business and Winston Churchill.

The Conservative South hated Wallace because he refused to look at the black man as inferior and wanted to dialogue with the Russians instead of demonizing them. Business interests hated him because he was on the left. Wallace gained the hatred of Winston Churchill  when he gave his “Century of the Common Man” speech and decried imperialism, something which Churchill would not give up. One of Churchill’s non-negotiables for WWII was that the British Empire must continue and the trading and shipping routes from Britain’s colonies in Asia and Africa as well as oil from Persia had to be safeguarded and defended at all costs.

By Roosevelt’s third term, Wallace’s popularity was unprecedented among common folks and voters, but he was equally despised by Democratic Party bosses. When Roosevelt was up for election for an unheard of fourth term, DNC bosses manipulated the DNC convention so that a feeble, ill-experienced puppet like Harry Truman got the VP nomination instead and that Wallace was blocked out under the most extraordinary and blatant of circumstances. When FDR died a few weeks later, Truman became president and among other things, dropped the bomb on Japan when Japan was ready to surrender anyway. One of the biggest “What if’s?” of American history is what if Henry Wallace had become president instead? Maybe there would not have been an atom bomb, maybe no Cold War, civil rights may have happened sooner. We’ll never know. The establishment narrative has practically wiped him and his endeavors away from the history books.

Wallace in 1962, with his chickens.

There’s another side to the Henry Wallace story which fascinates me. He was a polymath with a myriad of interests, constantly solving problems and asking questions but the man was also mystically inclined. He had a deep and profound interest in religion and all forms of spirituality and mysticism with the ultimate question of mankind’s evolution, not unlike Sri Aurobindo and his writings on man’s ultimate destiny. He read up on Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Theosophy. Wallace was very good friends with Russian mystical painter Nicholas Roerich.

“Elijah the Prophet” by Nicholas Roerich

In fact it was Wallace who had sent Roerich to Central Asia and the Himalayas to look for resistant, hearty strains of grass to bring back and study for planting in arid areas in the US.  It was Wallace, under advice from Roerich, who convinced FDR to place the Seal of the Freemasons on the American dollar bill, the pyramid with the all-seeing eye. Wallace’s friendship with Roerich was ultimately used against him as well politically. Wallace died in 1965 but as recently as 2005, when his son died, it seems that the Wallace family tradition of looking after the land and pushing the boundaries of inquiry still continued.

When I look at what happened to Henry Wallace in 1944, I realize that what happened to Bernie Sanders in 2016 was just history repeating itself. Big Business and the Deep State would rather see a population starve itself to death, die from lack of medicine, drink poisoned water, shoot each other, become dumbed-down than lose even a single penny in profits.  The nation-state as we know it is a corporation and their job is to make money. They don’t give a shit about its citizens except knowing how productive they are so they can make money off of them. So it basically means it is up to us to look after ourselves and each other.(<–that’s why I have anarchist leanings).

Dude, do it!

For years, there have been stories circulating that the White House is haunted and houses several spirits and poltergeists. There have been sightings and encounters with Abraham Lincoln (Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands apparently fainted and a stark-naked Winston Churchill dropped his towel). A black cat apparition is usually seen before disaster and the last sighting was before President Kennedy was killed. Even Michelle Obama has gone on the record to say that she’s experienced something there. I don’t know if The Orange Warthog (TOW) will actually have an office there, which he works out of regularly, but it would seem Ivanka and her idiot husband Jared Kushner will. I only hope that the ghosts of past presidents haunt them or at the very least scare the living daylights out of them. That would be kind of great.

The wall separating Gaza.

A wall went up in Berlin and came down in 1989. TOW  wants to build a wall along Mexico, like Israel has along Gaza. FDR had Japanese-Americans rounded up and put into internment camps. TOW wants a registry of Muslims. The era of Walls is behind us, we should be building bridges instead. The earth  and the cosmos is pushing to go in one direction of Unity and these feeble-minded politicians are intent in going in the opposite direction of separation.  The cosmos will win out eventually.

The End of the New Age, what’s ahead and The Loss of an Angel

Now everybody’s talking about this new decade
Like you say the magic number
Then just say goodbye to
The stupid mistakes you made
Oh, my memory serves me far too well

Don’t you know that
The years will come and go
Some of us will change our lives
Some of us still have nothing to show
Nothing, baby
But memories

– “Waiting for That Day (You can’t Always Get what You Want)”
George Michael from “Listen Without Prejudice”

Well 2017 is here. My own feeling is that from an energetic point of view is that it will be a better year than 2016 (I mean short of nuclear war, could it really get worse?). It’s part of the transition years which will see old orders and old ways of doing things fade away and new models and ideas take root. Most of that is of course up to us individually which is why I can’t stress that emotionally getting yourself to a positive place first is of paramount importance. If we can project ourselves to that happy, magnanimous place first, on an individual level, it will have a ripple effect.

You absolutely cannot get a positive outcome to anything if you’re on a negative train. I’m not saying that people need to become Pollyanna-ish and unrealistic but rather when you do things or think things which make you feel better, stronger, more empowered, whether that is joining a political demonstration like the Women’s March which is happening on the day after Inauguration Day in DC, stop thinking thoughts which place you in a negative whirlpool of emotion, or cutting ties with people who no longer serve you or do you any good, you can’t help but feel better and that then opens other possibilities.

Bye-bye.

There is great article over at New Dawn magazine by Richard Smoley called “What Happened to the New Age? Sorting Truth from Nonsense” and it’s definitely worth a read. Basically what he’s saying is that the “truisms” of the New Age movement, even if partially true, are now outdated completely. A new mold needs to be created. Everything just feels old and stale. The time of reading about this stuff or buying “spiritual” paraphernalia is over. It’s now time for things to be anchoring in direct personal experience otherwise it’s meaningless.

Steve Judd and Carl Boudreau have both said that the energies of 2016 will continue for the first two months of 2017. After that, real change and real possibilities will start to come in and pick up speed for those who want it. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your own personal perspective and preference, 2017 is going to be a year where things will be in the ethers, so this is the time to start dreaming, strategizing and lining up your visions. The energy of 2018 will be much more grounded so that’s when you put your plans and dreams into concrete action. Plan wisely.

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Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou aka. George Michael (1963-2016)

I don’t know why but the death of George Michael left me ending 2016 in a somewhat saddened state. When someone’s music you grew up with dies, a part of you dies with them because of all the memories that music brings you. It defines certain periods and moments in your life. I never saw George Michael in concert, though I regret it now that I didn’t go. George Michael was one of those artists that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE liked at least one of his songs. His music reached out across different genres, styles and crowds. My Caribbean-Canadian and African friends all loved his dance music because he understood funk, R & B and the importance of a wicked groove. My friends who were into hard rock and heavy metal all liked the ‘Faith” album. All my gay friends adored him especially back in 1988 when we were all 15 year olds still stuck in secondary school in a socially claustrophobic suburb and “I Want Your Sex” suddenly landed on the radio and the video was rarely shown because it was so controversial. It was all so taboo and risqué at the time so naturally we went crazy.

I’ve been re-watching all his old videos, in some cases for the first time after 26 years and seeing some interviews for the first time ever and I think what Michael taps into (for me anyway) is that his music brings you right back to a certain time and place in your life. Really good music will do that for you. I was a kid when I first saw the video for “Bad Boys”. All the songs from “Make it Big” reminds me of all the those awful, insecure years as a pre-teen. The lyrics of “Waiting for That Day” brings me back to my first serious break-up and how its pointless to try to get someone back who isn’t good for you anyway. “Fastlove” came out right about when I graduated from university and still in love with someone there.

I think he was grossly misunderstood. The fact that since his death, it’s quickly emerging he was one of the biggest private philanthropists to various charities in Great Britain, particularly those charities related to helping out troubled children, nurses and the NHS and health care research particularly in the aftermath of his mother’s death due to ovarian cancer in 1997. That he regularly volunteered at a London-area homeless shelter anonymously. That his staggering philanthropy was completely private and anonymous is amazing especially in this day and age where any little thing is quickly picked up as news.

Michael even admitted in interviews that his creativity was directly related to his own spirituality and that he only produced 5 albums over a span of 25 years was the fact that he was gutted emotionally and spiritually especially when his Brazilian partner and soul mate, Anselmo Feleppa died of AIDS. Anselmo was the one who made Michael A) realize he was gay and not bisexual B) that it was real love which made him realize who he really was. Michael had barely finished grieving over Anselmo’s death when he then lost his mother Leslie. I don’t think he was ever the same again after that. The sugar-coated pop icon with the deep tan, frosted hair tips and giant white Katherine Hamnett T-shirts was gone.

I think what’s amazing that Michael, once he accepted he was gay, he was completely unapologetic about his sexuality and lifestyle. He wore himself completely on his sleeve. He was what people in the LGBTQ+ crowd call a “bad gay”. Talk to any London cabbie and they’ll probably be able to tell you about his nocturnal visits to London’s leather-boy gay bars and dungeons as well as his frequent visits to Hampstead Heath, a wooded park area in northern London which is well-known for gay cruising among the trees and bushes. One paparazzo tried following him into the Heath one night and Micheal, in his typical cheeky way asked, “Are you  gay? No? Well fuck off then.” Famous or not, there are not a lot of people in the world who are that honest and I have more respect for the person who is honest about themselves and doesn’t hide who they are even if they are a “bad gay” than the poser, fake New Ager, fake guru, fake priest etc. who is preaching “Love and Light”, loving thy neighbor and then acting like a cretinous douche bag when no one was looking.

There was of course the infamous  1998 incident in the public washroom in Beverly Hills where he was outed in a sting operation by a police officer for “lewd behavior”. Michael just took it in stride and used the incident to come “out” to the world at large. But then he turned it around and sent the classiest, funniest, giant “Fuck You” to the LAPD and homophobic jerks everywhere with the boom-cha-ka-wa-wa single and video of “Outside” extolling the virtues of outdoor sex for straight or LGBT couples alike. Dressed as a police officer, Micheal celebrates what happened in a public toilet which then becomes a disco.

Little-known fact but Michael was very political as well and had strong leftist sympathies. He absolutely hated the way Tony Blair acted as George Bush Jr’s lap dog in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He wrote “Shoot the Dog” and the video pretty much tells it all. Because of his public and vocal disapproval of the war, he also raised the ire of another right-wing nut, Rupert Murdoch who then saw to it that Michael was painted as a troubled, mentally unstable, drug-addled dirty gay man in all his newspapers and tabloids. At the time, Michael was attacked viciously for his stance but now in hindsight, he was right on the money.  (at 7:15 in the video, watch all 4 parts of the interview if you can. Fantastic) Name me one major mainstream pop music act in today’s music scene who is willing to take a stand like Michael did, say about Syria or what might happen if Trump starts off a war with whoever? Taylor Swift? Katy Perry? Justin Timberlake? Yeah right.

Micheal battled depression for most of his adult life and things like grief and dealing with fame compounded it. He also admitted he was extremely emotionally immature and stunted when he first became famous. I think that would explain his risky behavior, drug addiction and troubled life.  At the same time, I can’t help but get the sense of what a generous, big-hearted, intelligent, humble, grounded person he was, who was grateful for what he had but at the same time, scared and unsure of what to do.

Apparently he was very cognizant of the world politically and it affected him deeply how much people were suffering and used his money to help others. I don’t know if you know people like this in your own life, but there’s a certain type of decent person who gets terribly shy and embarrassed when they get caught doing something good or other people see them doing something good. So to avoid the embarrassment, they do everything secretly. I’m almost certain George Michael was like that just based on the stories which are coming out now. He was constantly making fun of himself in interviews. I don’t think he fully realized just how much joy his music bought to his fans and what his music meant to millions on an emotional level or how much of a gay icon he was and is.

One of my personal heroes is Queen guitarist Brian May. Michael of course did a blistering rendition of Queen’s “Somebody to Love” at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert which surviving members of Queen have gone on the record to say it was the best version they had ever seen. May tweeted this about Micheal’s death and I think he pretty much nailed it. “I don’t have the words. This year has cruelly taken so many fine people way too young. And George? That gentle boy? All that beautiful talent? Can’t begin to compute this. RIP George. Sing with Freddie. And the Angels.”

 

Magic in the Neighbourhood

The Brownie Castle, Granby, Quebec

I have mentioned a few times that I grew up in a particularly idyllic part of Canada, in Southern Quebec, an area known as the Eastern Townships, which straddles the border with Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. It is in the Appalachian panhandle, the oldest mountain range on planet Earth, which once upon a time, many ice ages ago, was 7 times higher than the Himalayas.

Lavender farm among the hills of the Eastern Townships.

Today they are mostly gentle, rounded hills, meandering rivers, sleepy villages established by the Loyalists (persons who were in the US but wanted to remain loyal subjects of the British Crown so left and came up to Canada), farms, vineyards producing iced apple cider wine and ski hills.
To me the Townships has always been home, not Montreal.

Lac Boivin, I learned how to ice-skate on this lake as a 4 year old, in the winter when it was frozen over.

More particularly I grew up in a town called Granby, a small town established by Scottish settlers. Much of the English-speaking population left the Townships in the late-1970s, early 1980s, when the separatist political party, the Parti Quebecois came into power. Today about 50 000 Anglos barely hold on while the area became more French due to draconian language laws (I’m not going to go into the whole Anglo vs French thing in Quebec but its a constant theme living in Quebec. You can read about it here if you want). Even so, if you ever get the chance to visit, the “STOP” signs are still in English. The wide boulevards, which mark English town-planning are still there. Drive around even more and there are little villages and hamlets with names like Mystic, Aberdeen, East Angus and Waterloo.

In Granby, I grew up practically on the doorstep of the mysterious Brownie Castle, a strange mansion with a hexagonal tower built by the Walt Disney of the Victorian age, Palmer Cox.

Palmer Cox, back in the day.

Funny how you can live somewhere for years and never really know the history and more particularly, the esoteric history of that place. I only found all this out in late August but Palmer Cox was a very well-known illustrator in the late 19th century, who grew up in tiny Granby and worked for years in places like New York City and San Francisco. His illustrations were in publications like The New Yorker and Harper’s. And then he created, The Brownies.

The Brownies were based on the stories he grew up with from his Scottish heritage, particularly his mother who was from the Highlands. In Scottish folklore, the Brownies were tiny spirits who helped people out in the home. You walk out of a room and come back 5 minutes later and suddenly the floors are mopped or the bed has been made mysteriously. Cox wrote many books about them which were a fantastic hit with kids the world over, not unlike the Harry Potter phenomena.

The Eastman Kodak company using the Brownies for an ad.

The Brownie images were used to promote dozens of products like soaps and shoe shine polish. In many ways, it was the precursor of what we see the Disney corporation do these days with their animated characters. Cox made millions from it, lived in Europe for years and then for some reason, decided to come back to sleepy little Granby to build the Brownie castle.

And with the Brownie Castle in the background, shortly after it was constructed.

The Brownie mansion sits in my old neighbourhood.

Across the street from the mansion is the oldest park in Granby, Victoria Park (named after the queen at the time) designed by Frederick Todd, who went on to design Canada’s Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City and… Fort Tyron Park in New York City (with Frederick Olmsted Jr.).

The stream heading off into the pool, Victoria Park 1945. It still pretty much looks the same.

I practically grew up in that park, walked through it everyday on my way to school, played with my friends among the rocks and streams and even as a kid, I felt there was something special there.

The Japanese Red Cedars, they can live for hundreds of years. Many temples and shrines in Japan have groves of these trees.

In the fountains, in the grove of ancient Japanese Red Cedars, in the ponds and the exposed giant granite rocks, a hallmark of Olmsted and Todd park design, which I found out in my recent NYC trip. Even now, whenever I return to visit, I always catch someone doing something spiritual there. I’ve seen people meditating, I’ve seen people doing Tai-Chi or yoga. I’m not the only one who can feel *something* is at work in that park. There’s some good mojo in that whole area.

Before going to New York, I went back to Granby to look at the Brownie Castle again (today, it is a private residence with three different apartments, I’m not sure the tenants even know or care about the significance of the building) and to visit Palmer Cox’s grave at the Cowie Street cemetery.

Plaque on Cox’s grave.

I couldn’t figure out why on Earth would Cox come back to tiny Granby after hitting the jackpot and living in glamorous places like NYC and Europe for decades to build a whimsical mansion in the middle of nowhere ? (The park and neighbourhood were developed decades after the mansion was built.)

Cox, was a Freemason, which also has its own set of esoteric teachings, much of it is a mish-mash of proto-ancient Egyptian and Hermetic teachings and rituals, so he was savvy to these things. Frederick Todd, another Scotsman, was also a Mason (in fact a guy I once knew who was thinking of becoming a Mason even told me that the layout of Parliament Hill is based on the layout of the inside of a Masonic Lodge).
It makes me wonder if Cox felt the energy of that area, the benevolent presence of something and felt compelled to return the favour?

David Icke, Obelisks and New York City

The healing garden of The Cloisters museum

Sorry Shifters, in getting this out to you so late, I got back from New York City a few days ago and needed some time to process the many things I saw and experienced there. Sit back, relax, make yourself a cup of tea because this will be a long one.

First off, like I had indicated in earlier posts, my primary reason for heading down to NYC was to see David Icke in the Grand Prospect Hall in Brooklyn. If you watch the video below, you’ll see me in the audience in the front row in a bright orange hoodie at 1:37 to 2:00

I already knew much of what Icke was saying since I’d watched dozens of his videos on Youtube over the years but what I found particularly interesting was maybe the last 3 hours of his 12 hour show (it started at 10am and he got off the stage at 10:15pm) , where he goes into what the end game of a micro-chipped population really means as well as what the ending of this Kali Yuga means coinciding with the Truth Vibrations as we head off into the next age. Great stuff. I met some lovely people in the audience as well and even got to chat with his son Gareth Icke who was really pleasant (and super-tall as is David’s other son, Jaime). The next day, I met up with a fellow blogger which was wonderful. I’m glad I went.

I’ve been to NYC many times before but they were usually short stays, a few days here or a couple of hours there between flights but this time I took a full week to really take in the city, its various neighbourhoods and investigate the spiritual hot-spots of probably the most concrete city on Earth.

Manhattan island’s various neighbourhoods

Much has already been written about haunted New York, the secret clubs, the creepy organizations based there and even some of the buildings which have sordid and storied pasts like The Dakota or the San Remo. Those are the creepy, bad places and most of them are located in either mid-town Manhattan (which is tourist central and probably the most psychically polluted part of the island) , the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side and of course down town where the Financial District and Wall Street is.

The twin-towered San Remo building as seen from Central Park. Tons of celebrities live there. Bono lives in and owns the top three floors of one tower and apparently Demi Moore has tried to sell her part of her tower for a reported $75 million dollars.

Walking around, you can’t help but feel the power, see the wealth and flat out energy of the city. You’ll feel it particularly as you walk along 5th Avenue, across the street from Central Park in what I call billionaire row and what the guidebooks call Museum Mile.

The Fifth Avenue apartments across the street from Central Park East. Everyone from Jackie Kennedy to Aristotle Onassis to the Rothschilds have lived here.

The apartments in that particular area house folks like the Rothschilds, mysterious neo-con billionaire Bruce Kovner and Michael Bloomberg. Walk further south and you hit the Plaza Hotel. I remember the flags out front used to be the American, Canadian, United Kingdom and maybe French flags. Now its China, India and Saudi Arabia which should tell you plenty about who is buying up real estate in NYC and who are the biggest spenders there.

The Plaza Hotel, across the street from Central Park South

Then you hit Rockefeller Centre, the famous statue of Atlas with the world on his back, the British Empire Building (huh? I thought that was long gone)  and then the uber-luxury stores and jewellery stores,  all the playthings of the incredibly rich. The further you get from the park, the denser, the crazier and busier everything gets.

The Titan god, Atlas holding the world up.

Truthfully, I didn’t pay very much attention to this part of Manhattan. From a spiritual point of view, if you want to experience and feel something pure and real, you have to head up to the northern reaches of Manhattan island, particularly around Morningside Heights and Fort Tyron/Fort George/Inwood.

The last time I was in NY, I had missed out in seeing the stained glass windows from Canterbury Cathedral in the UK at a special exhibition by the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts‘ “other” campus, called The Cloisters. The Cloisers is basically a recreated monastery which John D. Rockefeller had dismantled from other monasteries in France and Spain  and recreated brick by brick in Fort Tyron Park. It houses the Met’s collection of medieval and religious art.

I wanted to see the recreated healing herb gardens with 99 plants which the Emperor Charlemagne ordered planted for their medicinal properties, and look at the Unicorn Tapestries but what I wasn’t ready for was the details in the capitals of the columns. You have to remember all this was done by hand and its all in stone. Complicated scenes of demons and angels, tons of symbolism and vivid imagery.

Dozens of them at the Cloisters and each one is different

The second thing I wasn’t prepared for was Fort Tyron Park itself. Perched high on the northern end of Manhattan island, come at sunset and you’ll have amazing views of the Hudson River and the Palisades.

Yes, this is Manhattan island. And that’s New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson River.

I however was on a bit of reconnaissance mission to Fort Tyron Park. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.  (his father Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. designed Central Park and Montreal’s Mont Royal Park)  and Frederick Todd (with whom I have a strange connection to which I will write about in a forth-coming post) , this is by far the “cleanest” place on the island from an energetic point of view. The exposed granite rock and cliffs which have been incorporated into the park itself has a lot to do with it. More on granite later.

The other neighbourhood, Morningside Heights, in the north-west corner of Central Park, houses several places of note.

First you have, St. John the Divine Cathedral, which is supposedly the biggest Gothic cathedral in the world (and is still unfinished). When you walk inside, trust me, you’ll feel its size.

Named after St. John the Divine also known as John the Beloved, who wrote the Book of Revelations in the Bible.

Second, the wonderful W 111th Steet People’s Garden which if you walk around slowly, you’ll see some very interesting spiritual art and statues among its bushes and trees. I spent a delightful afternoon here, eating my lunch on a bench underneath the shadow of a gigantic oak tree with the soaring spires in front of me (if you want dessert and coffee or tea, don’t miss the fantastic Hungarian Pastry Shop across the street).

The show-stopper is no doubt the strange Peace Fountain. First of all it has no water, so it shouldn’t be called a fountain (but what do I know?). It depicts and angel and demon in the grip of a fight while the Sun, Moon and Cosmos looks on. Basically Good vs. Evil.

Very bizarre.

Another place of note in Morningside Heights is the Nicholas Roerich Museum. I’ve highlighted Roerich’s art work several times already,  he was a Russian mystic, based his paintings on the spiritual myths and realities of the lands he travelled which included  India, China, Tibet, Mongolia, Central Asia, Siberia and Russia and was one of the architects for the Treaty on the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historic Monuments in times of war and conflict. It is one thing to see his paintings in books and online but nothing can prepare you in seeing them up close and personal. They are VERY powerful. Roerich was very clued in.

Order of Rigden Jyepo, Nicholas Roerich 1933. I bought a magnet of this at the museum and its on my fridge now.

Alright. Granite.

The ancient Egyptians essentially built most of their monuments, temples, statues and sarcophagi  in granite. It is a rock which is VERY hard and given the arid climate of Egypt, does not wear down easily over time, even when exposed to the elements. I’ve read in some esoteric literature that granite also holds and amplifies energy.

Colossal granite head of Amenhotep III at the British Museum.

When I read “Swimming with the Whale” a book about the teachings of Cypriot mystic Daskalos, he said that the Egyptians had placed spells into the granite walls of the pyramid chambers themselves and when initiates stayed in these chambers during initiation trails and ceremonies, under the right conditions, certain spirits would come out to test them. They were not necessarily benevolent either. There was even an episode when Napoleon, during his invasion of Egypt, decided to stay in the chamber overnight, but something gave him such a fright that he fled very quickly afterwards and refused to talk about what had happened to him for the rest of his life. Dolores Cannon has said the same thing in some of her talks and readings. The modern Irish mystic and angelologist Lorna Byrne experienced the same thing in NYC City’s Met museum at the re-created Temple of Dendur.

The Temple of Dendur at the Met Museum

Lorna in fact said that the “neter”, the spirit of the Temple of Dendur came forward to her and told her it that it was very sad and wanted to go home. When I visited the Temple and walked through the Egyptian antiquities at the Met museum a few days later, saw all the sarcophagi, the graves of formers kings, queens, and noblemen have been dug up and placed under glass for ugly tourists with fat knees to gawk at, or ignore completely, things which had been buried for the dead for a reason, I just felt overwhelming sadness as well. Death isn’t something we should gawk at. It’s something private. The Museum’s position is that these things are brought out for us to learn from but I didn’t see a lot of learning. I saw lots of people taking silly selfies and not even reading the information placards beside each artefact. On a more conspiratorial note, I’m almost certain some of these artefacts are being used by American secret societies in ceremony and ritual since many members of these groups sits on the board of directors, regents etc. of the Museum.

The Egyptian obelisk and the Met Museum. The traiangular bit is the Robert Lehman Collection.

Walk behind the Met Museum and you see that the Robert Lehman Collection wing from certain angles, looks like a glass pyramid. (Another famous museum, Paris’s Louvre Museum also has a glass pyramid outside.) 100 feet away from this, in the back, you’ll encounter a 3000 year old Egyptian granite obelisk in near perfect condition  right in the middle of Central Park.

The New York obelisk before its recent clean-up.

When I got there, there was a meditation group sitting in a circle beside it and doing meditation and chanting. They left an hour later and I was left alone with it. The matching twin to NY’s obelisk sits in London near the Thames.

The obelisks in New York and London are actually a matching pair from Heliopolis, Egypt.

Another Egyptian obelisk stands in Paris, near the Place de la Concorde. Yet another Egyptian obelisk stands in Istanbul’s Hippodrome in the historical Sultanahmet district. There are 13 Egyptian obelisks in Rome alone. The Washington Monument in DC is also a giant obelisk not an Egyptian one, but a hallowed out structure. Cities which can’t get a real obelisk then try to create fake ones like the McGill Tower Building in Montreal.

And what is this supposed to be?

New York, London, Paris, Rome, Istanbul. Either currently or formerly imperial cities. Centers of power and finance.  All have Egyptian obelisks? I find that mighty strange. Many other folks have made the connection between obelisks and architecture and power already, particularly with respect to Freemasons. I’m not going to go into that. Rather, to go back to Icke’s work for a moment. he talks about this reality hack, this fake matrix by archons. If that is so, I’m almost positive these obelisks are “power pins” holding the thing down kind of like those pegs you use to drive into the ground to keep your tent in place.

Obelisks are the esoteric equivalent of these pegs.

No wonder the spirits of these monuments and temples are sad. They are being used.

The Dirty-Fingernails Syndrome

The Fab Five back in the day. (l-r, Roger Taylor, Nick Rhodes, Simon LeBon, Andy Taylor, John Taylor.

I make no secret of the fact that I was a teenage fan girl back in the 1980s during my teen years. One band which I absolutely loved but was too young to attend their concerts was The Fab Five, Duran Duran. Posters from “16” magazine, “Star Hits” or “BOP” literally covered my walls and in the days long before the internet, the only pipeline to information were these teen magazines, radio stations and the early days of MTV and MuchMusic..

Every month, I literally awaited with abated breath for this magazine….

Between the years of 1981-1985, Duran were at their height. Everything about them gave off so much unbelievable energy and excitement, most of it due to their rabid female fans, no doubt.

The jet set lifestyle,

Still from the “Rio” video in the middle of the Caribbean somewhere. Check out the Antony Price suits.

the exotic locations for their videos, (‘Save a prayer” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” were both filmed in Sri Lanka, “Rio” in the British Virgin islands)

Still from the “Save a Prayer” video at Gal Vihara in Sri Lanka.

5 attractive young men in uber- designer threads,

Mostly Antony Price duds again.

the catchy pop hooks, (Note: Videos for “Girls on Film” and “The Chauffeur” were specifically made for nightclubs and not television airplay because of their naughty content)

the super-model glamazon girlfriends in real life

Simon Lebon and British-Iranian model wife Yasmin LeBon.

And in their videos.

The chauffeur-dancer in the video is Perri Lister, Billy Idol’s long-time paramour.

It was a heady and infectious mix and it’s understandable why female teenage fans fell hook, line and sinker for them.

Don’t ask me why (because in hindsight, I still don’t get it) but I was insanely crazy about keyboardist Nick Rhodes.

Nick and Julie-Anne during their Art Deco wedding.

He was my favourite. I remember when word got out that he had married Iowa department store heiress and sometime-model Julie-Anne Friedman in an Art Deco  pink wedding at London’s Savoy Hotel, which also included pink flamingoes, pink food and bride and groom both wearing matching pink eye shadow, some Durannie in Toronto killed herself by jumping off a building. It was nuts, but it just goes to show you the kind of mania the band generated.

The boys these days.

You grow up, your tastes change, you leave behind your childhood pre-occupations and you get on with life. I lost interest in Duran Duran like many of their old fans. Duran’s popularity definitely started to wane after Live Aid in July 1985, when Simon LeBon basically sang off key. I read the autobiographies of former band mates Andy Taylor and John Taylor last year and you realize that the band were imploding anyway (and what a bunch of immature brats they were and are). They never recovered their popularity of the early 1980s despite numerous “comeback” attempts. I remember they came through Montreal for a show and record signing in 1995, long after their decline. I thought it would be kind of fun to try to meet them at the record signing anyway, just on a nostalgia factor.

The line-up had changed when I met them. It included former Missing Persons guitarist Warren Cuccurullo (second from right). He was then kicked out of the band because he went and did porn on the side.

There was an insane line-up at the record store, old Durannies mostly. I thought it was funny that many of these girls, now in their 20s and 30s were still acting like crazed teen fans. Anyway, the line moved quickly and I could see the table and the order down the table was Simon LeBon, John Taylor, Warren Cuccurullo and then finally Nick Rhodes. I wasn’t wearing anything provocative (unless you consider a saffron-coloured vest top over a long, black pencil skirt and heels “provocative”) and had absolutely NO inclination or interest to hook up with them whatsoever.

Is this “trippy”?

I just went because I was curious more than anything else. Finally it was my turn and I handed the magazine in my hand over to Simon to sign. He basically got up from his seat and leaned into my face and said that he loved my shirt colour and how it reminds him of “tripping”. He then coyly fingered my collar and was basically coming on to me. I asked him how his wife was. He got the point and sat back down and said “Oh, she’s fine” and started chatting up the girl behind me in line. Next was Warren and John. Warren, leans over to John and said out loud “She’s the prettiest one here today”. John looked up at me and said”By far”. I noticed that John had his shirt practically open to his navel and all I could see was a weak chest, pale skin and very long but sparse brown chest hair. He grabbed my magazine , signed it and then started looking through it. I got the feeling that he was expecting me to somehow react to their ‘compliment” but I was just grossed out and moved on to Nick.

Finally my old favourite, the one I used to argue over in the elementary school yard with other Durannie friends over who was the cutest Duran member. He took my magazine to sign when I immediately noticed how dirty his fingernails were. I don’t know why but whatever old, warm, fuzzy feelings I might have had as a former teen fan girl, literally just vanished in that instant. And they never, ever came back.

Um…like no.

I bring up this trivial incident because I don’t know if any of you had a similar experience whether it be a person you were once into, a spiritual teaching, a scene you were into, a past-time or hobby but you see or read something which just turns you off or rubs you the wrong way and no matter how hard you try, your old enthusiasm and interest can never come back after that.  I look at it as sign of growing up or an indication that you’ve changed.  The old perspective just doesn’t fit any more and you can’t force it to fit either. Either your vision has broadened or the old illusion has shattered. You’ve outgrown your toys.  How many relationships become stale partnerships with partners who either refuse to let go (“We have to think of the kids’) or are too afraid to (“Divorce is too expensive”)? How many people stay in dead-end jobs, which kill their spirits but hey, it’s a paycheck and it includes insurance? How many people stay on in hobbies and past times or specific social scenes which no longer serve them yet they have invested too much time and energy to ever walk away from it?

There’s a reason why polo is a hobby of the uber-rich.

The opposite is also true. Things or persons you dismissed or overlooked altogether once upon a time, now somehow “works”. There’s a fit. Spiritual grown is a strange, strange  phenomena.  A lot of it is very difficult but I think the easiest part is seeing through the illusion and identifying those things, people and places we have to let go. The hard part is actually doing it.

Rock and Redemption – Prince

Prince Rogers Nelson 1957-2016

“I said life is just a game
We’re all just the same”

– Controversy

I have to say that between the death of Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, David Bowie and now Prince, 2016 is shaping up to be the year the music died for some of us….

I’m still reeling from news of Prince’s death but for those of you who are interested, David Icke just posted a fantastic video explaining in detail what made Prince the magus of music that he was (Prince apparently was also into Icke’s books and work and invited him to his show and a meeting afterwards). And he was indeed a magus, albeit one decked out in purple velvet, assless chaps, lace, killer high heels and a bevy of biracial beauties like Apollonia, Vanity, Sheila E and Mayte Garcia surrounding him.

Prince and Vanity rocking the cover of Rolling Stone magazine

If you read some parts of esoteric literature, they say that the most gifted artists, whether they be musicians, scientists, writers, actors, sculptors, painters and dancers are usually those who are channeling something from a different dimension and bringing it into our awareness to understand and learn from and I believe it. All you have to do is really sit down and listen to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, look into Nikolai Tesla and his work, read the works of Rainier Maria Rilke, look at the acting work of thespian heavyweights like Sir John Gielgud, study the sculptural work of Michelangelo, examine the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti or Salvador Dali or look at the dancing of Gene Kelly and it becomes fairly obvious that the inspiration and talent is otherworldly. In my mind, Prince’s constant dedication, “tuning in”, connection and immersion to music and music alone, places him in that category.

I don’t care what anyone says, Prince had a fashion sense all his own and it worked. A classic case of the man wearing the clothes and not the clothes wearing the man. You need a massive personality and supreme confidence to be able to swing the kinds of threads Prince did.

Some people think Prince was weird. I don’t think so. Like Bowie, he lived on a completely different frequency, one that only he could understand and most dull human ruminants never will, not in a million years of evolution. So of course when you compare Prince to people like that, he’s far from “normal”.

You have to have a certain kind of swagger to pull this off.

If you either listen to or read the lyrics to most of his songs which he performed for himself or wrote for others, it’s very clear that Prince’s two main preoccupations were around spiritual angst ( like “Controversy”, “Let’s Go Crazy”) and of course sex (“Cream”, “Darling Nikki”, “Sexy MF”, “Nasty Girl”, “Sugar Walls” and my favorite, “A Love Bizarre”). In all honesty, I don’t think he was a sex pervert or a  musician with a dirty mind like some journalists have written about. No doubt about it: he enjoyed sex and truly loved the company of  women, not merely as sex objects and window dressing  but as women and all they are capable of doing. Just by going with his lyrics, never mind the provocative dancing, costumes and tongue-lashing on stage, women understood automatically that here was a guy who REALLY understood women. By every account, all his former lovers have nothing but praise about him and his gentlemanly treatment towards them. That instantly makes him a class act in my book.

In fact, given how sex-positive he was in his lyrics (“Darling Nikki” is about female masturbation. When Tipper Gore – Al’s wife – heard her daughter singing it, she went apeshit crazy and tried having his music censored), I’m almost certain that Prince understood that sex (when done right and with the right partner) , isn’t just a fun, hedonistic, pleasurable  thing to do, but could be a major gateway towards a profound spiritual experience capable of taking you outside of yourself completely, something which the Indian Tantrists having been saying for thousands of years already. He just tried to explain that publicly through his music.

Sexy MotherFucker indeed.

Spiritually, Prince was a Jehovah’s Witness (in theory) but given his sensual lifestyle, I don’t think he followed the teachings to the letter but just made it his own. He was definitely plugged in, he understood a conspiracy and a scam when he saw one. That was part of the reason why he turned his back on the record companies and their vulture-like darlings for a while. Like Ickey pointed out in his video, Prince followed David Icke’s work and openly discussed chemtrails on the Tavis Smiley Show in 2011.

I think because he was so aware of how negative psychic, subtle and energetic influences could wreak havoc on one’s creativity and in one’s own life, he was intensely private, very selective about who he spent time with and only surrounded himself with people he trusted and who wouldn’t hinder his creative output. History is rife with examples of artists and creative types settling with a spouse or partner who is either emotionally demanding, a psychic drain or just not on the same frequency and thus having their work and art suffer for it terribly (Actor David Niven and philosopher Bertrand Russell immediately come to mind). Prince understood that keenly and I think that’s why he was even more selective about his various muses and their rapid succession.

Prince with first wife, Mayte Garcia

What’s also amazing about Prince was that he had, by far  the most diverse and broad base of fans and listeners among most musicians today. The thing with many musicians is that many of them only appeal to a specific audience, like Led Zeppelin appealing mostly to those who like hard rock. Or R & B artists like Sly & the Family Stone and Earth, Wind and Fire appealing to a largely African-American audience. Not so with Prince. He had legions of fans around the world, across genres, cultures and languages. Even if he did play funk and jazz, he counted many hard rock musicians as admirers. Even if he did play the electric guitar like Jimi Hendrix, he still had a huge fan base among African-Americans. It was this kind of musical intersectionality which appealed to almost everyone in one form or another. That kind of universal appeal across a broad spectrum of tastes and genres is very rare and it takes a special kind of genius to pull it off with panache and class.

I first got into Prince when I first heard “Controversy” as an 8-year-old and dancing to it with my babysitter. Not long after, when he hit mainstream success all his biggest hits came on the airwaves and MTV in rapid succession during my tween and teen years. You know what I’m talking about, songs like “1999”, “Little Red Corvette”, and basically the entire soundtrack to the autobiographical film “Purple Rain” and his more funk-based work like “Cream”, “Kiss” and “Raspberry Beret”.

Of course this was his more accessible work but the truth of the matter is that he never stopped producing music. It was in his blood. There’s still a ton of music he’s never released publicly and never got airplay because it was either too experimental, jazzy or different. We’re talking thousands of hours worth of music here. I also saw him last year in concert here in Montreal and all I can say is that when you attend a Prince concert, it’s literally a joyful, non-stop all-night dance party involving thousands of people. It’s not just a show, it’s an experience.

I think Prince’s basic message is that you have to stay true to your gift and true to yourself, in whatever form that may be. You cannot compromise on your art to suit other people’s tastes and inclinations, that as an artist it is your sacred duty to remain as true to it as possible, to stick to your own vision. As long as you remain true to yourself, the work will speak for itself. It certainly has for Prince.

Truthfully, I’m not as upset about Prince’s death as I was about Bowie’s. When you have such rare, talented souls, you begin to understand that their presence among us is a blessing, a transient one, but a blessing nonetheless. There are some Facebook threads asking which star or galaxy he’s returned to. Some say the Pleiades,  others say Arcturus. I say who cares. He was here for a while, gifted us with his amazing music and talent and now he’s gone back home, where ever that is.  I’m sure he’s happy and jamming like crazy at whatever star he’s gone to.

Stay well, sweet Prince.

Blinded by the Light

He’s been looking now for a long time
It seems the more he looks  The less he wants to see

He turned to the West for a long time
He turned to the East Then he turned to the West again

If there’s a heaven above, in the meantime
If there’s a heaven above, let it be near
If there’s a heaven above, in the meantime
Then let it be near   Let it be near to me

We’ve been talking now for a long time
It seems the more we speak                                                                                          

The less we seem to say
If there’s a hell below In the meantime  Then let us shut up  Unless we want to pray

He saw everything real too clearly
So close that the bones would show
And to see everything so clearly
Isn’t always the best thing you know

– “If There’s a Heaven Above”, Love & Rockets (D.Ash, K. Haskins, D. Jay)

What is truly spiritual, like light, both attracts us and repels us at the same time.  – Flannery O’Conner

I used to have a pen-pal friend named Jimmy, from Muskogee, Oklahoma. I think I might have mentioned him in a previous blog post but Jim and I became friends in the early days of the internet. He had some rare bone disease which basically made him a quadriplegic and confined to a wheelchair. It was never romantic or anything like that, but we became fast friends because both of us had an interest in mysticism.

Jimmy was easily one of the most insightful persons I knew and very, very quick and perceptive to figure out and gauge people from the inside out.  Practically every assessment he ever made, turned out to be true. It was strange because you couldn’t find two more different people, Jim a disabled, white, male Southern Baptist from Oklahoma and a some-time Republican who was anti-abortion and deeply into his Bible and then you had me, a Bengali-Canadian Muslim female with anti-imperialist, anti-sexist anarchist inclinations. Still, despite our huge differences in opinion and background, we understood each other, and both of us saw that the more readily you leave behind labels and dogma and veer closer and closer to the spirit of things, the closer you get to the truth and essence of it, irrespective of what angle you’re coming from.

“The Outsiders” film, based on the book by S.E Hinton. (L-R, a very young Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, Matt Dillion, Ralph Macchio, C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe and Tom Cruise) Jimmy had friends who ran in the same circles as Hinton.

We often would talk about spiritual things, how much we hated the people and phoniness around us .  He schooled me on Southern writers like Flannery O’Conner and Reynolds Price and I schooled him on…well, lots of the stuff I write about here actually.  While I was living in Turkey, I found out six months after the fact, that he had been hit by a truck in Tulsa while turning a  corner in his wheelchair and died instantly. I was saddened but not surprised because he had told me several times over the phone that he had a presentiment, he knew he was going to die soon and it wasn’t the disease that would do it either. He also added that despite that knowledge, it was going to be OK and he was at peace with it. I miss him a lot.

Not Jimmy.

Jim was the one who pointed out that Flannery O’Conner quote to me, that things (and people and relationships) which are truly real and spiritual will attract us, like that cliché, like moths to the light. At the same time, they also repel us because on some level, perhaps an intuitive one, to really embrace the light also means complete and utter annihilation of the old self, old identity, old ideals etc. And it’s that suicidal aspect which terrifies us. Therein lies the paradox, we want to come closer to the light yet we’re also terrified of embracing the light and what it might mean in real terms, how much we have to give up in letting go of the old and killing ourselves and what we might have built up.At the heart of it, it’s the old faith vs fear argument. Do you have faith and let go, not really knowing if the gigantic rewards are there waiting for you or do you hold on because better the devil you know than the one you don’t?

I’m seeing this faith vs. fear idea being played out in the US elections as well. New York State holds its primaries tomorrow and I think it will determine if Senator Bernie Sanders can finally win the Democratic nomination. If he does get the nomination, he’ll basically walk into the White House. If he doesn’t pull off a hat trick  tomorrow, that nomination will swim further away from him unless of course California plays the king-maker.

Hillary and her Wall Street pimps

Hillary Clinton might have money, power, connections and a lock on older voters but it doesn’t change the fact that she (and her husband) are pure crass. The Sanders camp is nothing less than pure class. I can’t help but get the feeling that integrity politics has finally come back after a very long hiatus. Big time. The younger voters have a lot to do with it but I think everyone is just fed up of all those old lies and old stories.

I know I have a lot of readers in the NYC and Brooklyn area. Godspeed to every last one of you for tomorrow’s vote. All I’ve got to say is just remember that the fear of the light is actually much worse than the light itself.

Keep Your Eye on the Horizon

“You are alone in your bedroom, and surrounded by the four walls you are physically separate, set apart from the entire world. But by using thought you can go beyond the confines of this room and expand into an ever bigger space: first your home, then the town where your house is located. Then, become aware that your town is also part of a region, the region part of a country, the country part of a continent, and the continent part of the earth. Make a habit of doing this exercise. And the earth itself is part of the planets in the solar system. And in turn, the solar system is part of a galaxy, and this galaxy is a small part of the cosmos… So , it’s amazing – you’re alone in your bedroom, and at the same time you’re in the cosmos! 
And since you are a cosmic being, why limit yourself? You can open your soul by telling yourself that you have cosmic work to do. All you need to do is change your point of view and be aware that because you live in the universe you are connected to it.”
– Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

I bring up this spiritual exercise by Aivanhov because I’ve been plowed down by pneumonia this past week and forced to stay indoors and at home. It’s funny because I rarely fall ill and this is the first time I’ve had pneumonia in at least 20 years. It’s given me some time to catch up on reading and take note of a few developments happening around the world.

Really?

I think the biggest news is the discovery of a so-called Planet X, somewhere outside of Pluto’s orbit. Mind you, the guy who has trumpeted the discovery of this theoretical planet is the same fellow who demoted Pluto from being a planet to a planetoid. Already conspiracy-theory chat rooms are buzzing with talk about this Planet X being the planet Nibiru, the planet which ancient archaeologist Zachariah Sitchin wrote about in his books deciphering ancient Babylonian and Sumerian tablets and their respective mythologies about ancient aliens and fallen angels like the Nephilim.

From sciencemag.org

Personally, I’ll believe in a Planet X when I see it. I’m not saying that the discovery of other planets which share our same Sun system isn’t possible, but right now it’s too soon to say anything, I think. Some esoteric astrologers say a time will come when the astrological signs Virgo and Taurus will finally get their own planetary rulers (right now Virgo “shares” Mercury with Gemini and Taurus “shares” Venus with Libra). After all, it wasn’t such a long time ago that Neptune, Uranus and Pluto were discovered (and bestowed Pisces, Aquarius and Scorpio with their respective rulers) so there’s nothing to say that it’s not possible. Some writers have even suggested names for these 2 as-yet-undiscovered planets like Vulcan and Pan Horus.

Let’s say this Planet X/Nibiru is real. It would fall in line with prophecies about a new world emerging from the old, something from deep within the cosmos instigating a change whether we’re ready for it or not. Hindus already talk about the Kali Yuga and New Age writers like Dolores Cannon and Stuart Wilde have also written about a birth of a new world.

I don’t think it will be this easy….

If it does happen, I don’t think it’s going to be raining flowers or anything of the sort. In fact like natural childbirth, I think it’s going to be downright messy, noisy, disruptive and probably painful as hell, like pulling a turkey out of your right nostril.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys. I don’t think so.

Already, we’re seeing this as I write this with worldwide markets plunging (the Canadian dollar is at a 13 year low), food prices sky-rocketing, central banks trying to figure out interest rates, oil barrels prices bottoming out and jitters around the upcoming American elections with non-establishment candidates as current front-runners like Bernie Sanders and that Republican asshole with the comb-over.

Transitions are never easy. I’ve noticed that people who do well with change and who do manage to transition gracefully are usually those persons who don’t have a lot of vested interests in the old way of doing things and have no problems letting go and moving on. The ones who go in kicking and screaming are usually the stuck-in-the-mud, stubborn types who can’t accept change that’s happening around them but instead want to stay the same forever, and expect the world and the cosmos to change around them and leave them alone like some special island. Watch any video of a tsunami, hurricane, typhoon or flash flood and you know that’s not the way it works.

When Hurricane Sandy hit.

Since I’ve been ill, I’ve been listening to the radio a lot and how politicians here in Canada, particularly in Alberta (our version of Texas, cowboys, rednecks and oil) are going apeshit since the low cost of crude oil has made thousands of oil workers unemployed and how they are now pulling their hair and screaming that cities like Montreal does NOT want their Eastern pipeline running through the city because of the environmental risk it could become. Funny, how it’s the end of the world when Big Oil is in trouble yet when Big Oil was high on the hog they could give a rat’s ass about anybody else.

Bowie sang it.

In my mind, the pendulum has already swung and some types just don’t get it. And they never will. The old ways, whether its Big Oil, Big Businesses, Big Banks, bought-and-sold politicians, toxic industries, Old Boys Clubs (like Eton, Oxbridge, or the Ivy League and their secret societies), Elite Clubs (like Hollywood), they ALL missed their stop and the train is speeding along now. Of course we’re going to hear them complaining and griping but I say just ignore them, tune them out and keep a calm, steady eye on the horizon instead because something new is about to appear. Once you can make out the size and shape of it, if you’re smart, quick and flexible, you’ll know what to do.  Best to travel light.

Rock and Redemption – David Bowie

The Thin White Duke aka The Best Dressed Rock Star Ever

(Note: Some NSFW links included)

I was and truthfully, still am extremely hesitant about writing this blog post given that social media sites are awash with Bowie articles and tributes after his untimely, recent death and I really don’t want to add to the overblown nature of how the media and music poseurs (who never liked Bowie before but suddenly do now) have been reacting. So I’m going to try to keep this as simple as I can. Wish me luck.

Bowie in the famous Masayoshi Sukita pantsuit. Bowie had a love affair with avante-garde Japanese designers.

I’m going try to attempt to look at Bowie’s spiritual evolution in a nutshell (a real examination would be worthy of a PhD dissertation), the influence it had on others and then end with how he affected me and the indirect contact I had with him. I know there’s a lot of dirty laundry about him coming out now, but if anything it paints him as an extremely complicated individual and a reminder there really is no such thing as black and white when it comes to individual souls and personalities.

It would seem that from the very beginning, right with the midwife who delivered him, he was acknowledged as an old soul. This doesn’t surprise me in the least. If you look at his earlier work and his obsession with outer space, being an alien and the emphasis on stars, alienation, isolation, being an outsider and of being utterly alone and disassociated from humanity, I think deep down inside he knew he really wasn’t from here either.

Bowie as the Starman

First Nation’s people maintain that we originally came from the stars, recent theories on evolution and the origins of life seem to confirm it and I think Bowie knew it too in his heart and tried channeling it through his work. All you need to do is listen (or read the lyrics) to songs like “Starman”, “Life on Mars”, “Space Oddity”, “Ashes to Ashes”, “Moonage Daydream”, watch “The Man Who Fell to Earth” or even when he decided to tackle “Elephant Man” on Broadway. The clues and hints are all there if you look for them.

Bowie in all his Mephistopheles-like beauty in the Nicholas Roeg film, “The Man Who Fell To Earth”.

This very lengthy and thorough essay is probably the best thing you can read on Bowie’s interest in spiritual matters and the occult. It’s all there. Like lots of English rock stars from the hedonistic 1970s, Bowie was obsessed for a while with the works of Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune and her book “Psychic Self-Defense”, Fortune’s assertion that the Glastonbury area is intimately associated with the Arthurian legends, how he studied Hebrew Kabbalah and the Sephoric Tree of Life (and even inserted a lot of these ideas in his 10th album “Station to Station”).

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life in Jewish mysticism, with the different energy centers and expressions of God’s energy, the 10 Sephirot

This was at the height of his cocaine addiction in the 1970s, which fueled a cocaine-induced paranoia in many areas of his life, when he was going through all sorts of weird phases like his all-white diet (which consisted of drinking milk and snorting coke and eating a few peppers), when he had an exorcism performed on his LA swimming pool by a mysterious New York City white witch named Walli Elmlark, how he stopped performing live for a while because he was convinced someone from the audience was going to shoot him, how he feared flying and would take the Trans-Atlantic Queen Mary 2 ship liner instead of airplanes or the Concorde. Later in life, after he had cleaned up and gone sober, he took to Buddhist meditation, supported the Tibetan cause and married Muslim-Somali supermodel Iman Abdulmajid.

The supermodel and the rock star – and one of the best looking biracial couples in the world.

I even suspect he had a bit of the earth energy reader himself, meaning I think he picked up on ley lines and places on earth which had higher-than-normal frequencies. His taste in real estate shows that. In the 1980s, he fell in love with Bali, long before it became the obnoxious tourist hub it is today, when it still was considered a spiritual place to be. In fact he re-created a Balinese villa on the exclusive Caribbean island of Mustique.

Bowie in an Indonesian sarong, at his Balinese-inspired retreat on Mustique.

When Mustique became too much, he bought a place in the most mystical of all the Greek islands, Patmos, where the Cave of the Apocalypse is and admitted to the island’s charms. (I’ve been there and I can attest to it to). While he mostly lived in New York in the artistic (but now completely gentrified) Soho district, his favorite spot in NYC was Washington Square Park but to escape the summer heat, he also had a mountain retreat in hippy-dippy Woodstock, NY, site of the famous music festival.

Bowie in three versions of drag in the “Boys Keep Swinging” video. Bowie’s female muses which he based these personalities on included Marlene Dietrich, Katherine Hepburn, and Greta Garbo.

Much has been said and written about his sexual experimentation and quasi-bisexual lifestyle, how his gender-bending androgynous personas like Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane, helped many persons from the LGBTQ community to either come out, or accept their orientation or anyone accept their own personal weirdness.

Bowie as Ziggy Stardust

In my opinion, his basic message was that its OK to accept your own inner freak and be comfortable with your own weirdness and uniqueness as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone, you don’t need to justify it to anyone else. After all, there is no such thing as “normal” since normalcy is completely relative. Bowie however made it cool to be different and if you were someone who was different, whether because of your sexual orientation, your ethnicity, your race or even if your interests, tastes and preoccupations were different from everyone else in your cultural milieu. Somehow, Bowie and his music made you feel like someone really understood you and had your back and that it was all OK.

That meant a lot to me. My adolescence was spent in an annoying-as-fuck, socially claustrophobic, peer-pressured, cookie-cutter, affluent, white suburban ghetto of Montreal known as the West Island, where all the girls were generic, indistinguishable, white, blonde, dime-a-dozen idiots with names like “Kelly”, “Jennifer” or “Heather” who had identical clothes, hairstyles and opinions, all the guys were jocks who were into hockey or soccer, listened to Bon Jovi and all the supposedly cool kids hung out at the pool or park and “got wasted”. When you don’t fit that mold and couldn’t stand living in such a dead-end cultural cul-de-sac, Bowie was a Godsend and a sign that real life, real art and real music existed outside of those walls.

Bowie during his GQ phase – Bowie was the only man I know of who can pull off a pompadour and a yellow suit, and still managed to look amazing.

In my experience, it’s the people who corner themselves and their personalities into neat, square boxes, identical haircuts, identical suits and act out what being a conformist “normal” is supposed to look like who end up being the craziest, creepiest people in private – just look at Republicans and Conservatives.

It was also one of the worst-kept secrets Bowie spent A LOT of time hanging out in Montreal during the late 1980s and 1990s. He recorded his 1984 album “Tonight” up in Morin Heights, at Le Studio, about 70 km north of Montreal. He befriended Edouard Locke, creative director of Montreal’s legendary modern dance troupe, La La La Human Steps. Locke and principal dancer Louise Lacavalier were instrumental in choreographing Bowie’s 1990 “Sound +  Vision” world tour.

Bowie during the Sound + Vision tour

Bowie also liked hanging out in Montreal’s various underground music clubs, notably La Sala Rossa and Casa del Popolo where he first got wind of local musical heroes Arcade Fire which then led to the friendship and numerous collaborations between him and the band later on.

As for me, I came to Bowie indirectly. I was 10 years old when I first heard “Let’s Dance” and freaked out when I watched his naughty “China Girl” video where you could see him having sex on the beach. When I became a teen, all, and I mean ALL my favorite 1980s alternative bands cited Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Marc Bolan of T-Rex and Roxy Music as their primary influence. Everyone from Depeche Mode and The Cure to The Smiths to Def Leppard to Bauhaus worshipped Bowie.

David Bowie and Queen’s Freddie Mercury backstage during 1985’s Live Aid concert. (That’s Coco Schwab in between in the blue shirt. She NEVER left Bowie’s side and was literally his right hand person from the 1970s right to the end.)

I also had older cousins who had all his albums from the 1960s and 70s so it made me listen to his earlier stuff with a newer and deeper appreciation. While I was listening to “Hunky Dory”, The Berlin Trilogy or “Scary Monsters”, the suburban cretins in my high school were listening to Poison or Michael Bolton. (I’m also fairly certain Bowie, along with Rick Springfield,  Duran Duran in their heyday and The Professor from “Gilligan’s Island” , molded my preference for very tall, thin, chisel-featured, hyper-intelligent, intellectual but cultured, worldly men. Bonus: The fact that a stunning rock god like Bowie absolutely LOVED women of colour – yes!)

Bowie was in the short-lived band Tin Machine.

I saw Bowie twice in concert, first during the “Sound + Vision” tour and then when he came to Montreal as part of the group Tin Machine and I saw him play in a club instead of a stadium or arena. I almost met him once since I used to work as a very prominent rock radio station in Montreal while I was a university student. I was the morning receptionist and Bowie was coming in one afternoon after my shift. One of the stipulations by his manager and personal assistant, Corinne “Coco” Schwab,  was that there should be absolutely no one there, no fans, no extra staff, just a skeleton crew when Bowie came for his interview, which meant that I couldn’t hang around and wait. So I left some of my copies of his various album covers with the station manager to get autographed including a rare copy of his earlier work with his early bands, The Manish Boys and The Lower 3rd. He signed everything except the rare album because it turned out to be some kind of bootleg, which I honestly didn’t know at the time. Oh well.

David Bowie when he was still David Jones. I have a copy of this EP but Bowie wouldn’t sign it. I wonder if his fingerprints are still on it.

I’ve written this before but Aquarius IS the sign for androgyny and nonconformity and I do think on some level Bowie was a forerunner of the incoming Age of Aquarius when gender lines, gender issues and gender identity are going to get even more blurred than ever before. At the end of the day, we’re human, that’s what counts. We just need to treat each other as such. Bowie knew it too. He just used his art and his life to show it.

Rest in peace, Goblin King. Bowie in the Jim Henson film “Labyrinth”.

And if you ever doubt that Bowie wasn’t connected to something otherworldly, have a listen to this. It’s what he chose to be played during his wedding to Iman, a Bulgarian folk-song which sounds like angels could be behind it. He’s probably jamming with them now.

Godspeed David Robert Jones!

6 Ways We Can Re-Boot

A few random things have to go if we’re going to all go forward in any meaningful way.

1) Petro-dollars have to become a thing of the past. 

Go away.

Seriously. Because if petro-dollars go, that means annoying assholes like the Royal House of Saud will finally come down. Saudi Arabia only gets preferential treatment because it sells much-needed oil to Western democracies and that’s why it gets a seat on the UN Human Rights Council (what a fucking joke, the country with the highest amount of executions and beheadings, a royal family with literally thousands of members who act like douchebags where ever they go, keep women as sex slaves in their compounds and when women do protest, they get whipped.)

Carlos Latuff on Saudi’s seat on the UN Human Rights Council.

I could go on and on about why everybody hates Saudi Arabians, how they were virtually penniless Bedouins before the discovery of oil, how they could only make money from Hajj pilgrims before petro-dollars, how within progressive, educated Muslim circles, in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Bosnia, Albania, central Asia and Palestine, “Saudi” is a code word for a lecherous sex pervert, of how these same petro-dollars is funding Saudi Arabia to spread Wahhabism, a radical form of Islam which was once a marginal movement and only located in Saudi Arabia and now it’s being exported everywhere at the expense of pluralistic, more open-minded forms of Islam (i.e Asian Islam, European Islam, Central Asian Islam). No thank you. End petro-dollars and maybe the alternative, renewable sources of energy (and its associated economy) may finally have a chance as well as giving millions of Muslims a chance to re-examine and reform their religion in a more progressive direction without fear of any form of retribution from Saudi Wahhabi psychos.

2) The world needs to change its eating habits

If you’ve never read any of Michael Pollan’s books or watched his videos, take some time out to do so. I first read Pollan’s books about 10 years ago and since then, he’s been featured on just about every documentary that talks about the food industry, GMOs and anything related. Basically what Pollan is saying is that the disease epidemic we’ve finding ourselves in, especially around obesity and diabetes, have direct correlations to processed food. The amount of ready-made and/or fast food we buy and eat, convenience-food people stock up on in super-markets either because they’re too lazy or too ignorant to cook, all of it is taking its toll on us. Bottom line: Eat whatever you want as long as YOU make it from scratch. If it has ingredients your grand-parents or great-grandparents wouldn’t recognize, don’t eat it (i.e fruit roll ups, heavy processed foodstuffs, carbonated drinks etc.). Learn to enjoy cooking.

I quite frankly find it meditative to chop veggies, scour vintage and thrift shops and find amazing discontinued cookware brands or beautiful dinnerware and glassware which I can then put to use.

Luminarc of France once made these wine glasses specifically for Alsatian or Riesling wines. They have long been discontinued and you can only find them on ebay or thrift shops once in a while.

Food still has a way of bringing people together and creating a sense of community. Usually when I invite friends over to dinner, I try out recipes for my slow-cooker like African Peanut Stew, Beef Bourguignon, Punjabi Lamb Shanks or Butter Chicken. I come home from work, pick up a baguette for a roasted garlic spread,  a bottle of wine, fix up a salad  and you’re ready to entertain.

3) Make an effort and go along with the Global Awakening

David Icke has been saying in the past 10 years or so that the years 2016, 2017 and 2018 are the pivotal years which will determine the path planet Earth and humanity will take. Do we end up in a world which to paraphrase George Orwell, is a boot stamping on a human face forever, or one in which the citizenry and population are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and brimming over with awareness, emotional intelligence, freedom and personal empowerment and keep banksters, corporations and elected officials in their place. It’s your choice. It can happen at the ballot box, whether you check off names like “Bernie Sanders” or “Jeremy Corbyn”, or if you decide to join activist groups in your community to make energy providers more accountable and halt the deployment of smart meters, the spraying of chem-trails or becoming a gonzo journalist. Film everything weird happening around you, or record incriminating conversations even if it’s on your phone, upload it on the internet and let the world know how corrupt some elected officials and their henchmen are. You can do all that kind of stuff anonymously now. In that case, I’m a big fan of exposing assholes.

4) Be an anti-consumerist. 

Stop buying crap you don’t need just because you saw a TV commercial for it or because all your friends are buying it. Even stupid magazines like “Real Simple are full of it since they’re basically encouraging you to buy even more stuff.

Save your money and invest in having experiences instead. Renew your passport or apply for one if you never had one. Get out of your comfort zone and go to a country where no one speaks your language. Bonus: Many of these countries are super-cheap and your Western currency will take you further along. Sign up for classes which interest you (cooking, stain-glass making, making mosaics, knitting, beer-making etc.) instead of hanging out in bar or online dating sites like OK Stupid if you want to meet new, interesting quality folks. Go to speaking events or lectures of famous writers or activists if they show up in your neck of the woods.

From davidicke.com

For instance, Ickey is on some kind of world tour in 2016, I already bought my ticket for the New York City gig since I’m not sure he can make it to Canada. I’m also waiting for George Galloway, Norman Finkelstein, Robert Fisk, John Pilger and Seymour Hersch to show up in Montreal. Corporations are only powerful because of the money YOU give THEM. Stop giving them your dollars and falling for the hype and spin and they’re suddenly vulnerable. Look at McDonald’s, changing consumer tastes now mean that they’re practically on their knees.

5) We need to Re-Examine our Collective Past and Accept it and Come to Terms with it.

Gobelki Tepe is a bit of a time capsule since the entire site was deliberately buried and was therefore left untouched from later historical periods.

I have been a huge fan and supporter of the works of alternative history researcher Graham Hancock for years now. Graham’s latest “Magicians of the Gods” is quite the bombshell, if you don’t have time to read it or watch and listen to this 3 hour talk he recently gave on the Joe Rogan Show, here it is in a quick nutshell. The Earth has been subjected to cataclysm after cataclysm during its billions of years of history. Most of it is NOT recorded because it predates human life (i.e the meteor which hit the Yucatan peninsula millions of years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs).  With the discovery of pristine megalithic sites like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, it looks like our human civilization is much older than we thought. Hancock shows that the most recent meteorite hit it may have been as recently as 12 000 years ago, which would jive with stories about the Great Flood, the disappearance of Atlantis and Mu and many other “myths” and legends around the world. He also shows why North America was never the site of any “great” primary civilization like Egypt or Babylon or India or China, mostly because it was North America which got hit by these meteorites most often, and the very sudden and violent Earth changes, wiped out everything in its way, time after time. Whatever survivors there were, were lucky enough to live on afterwards.

This is not entirely correct.

I personally believe Hancock’s hypothesis is correct. If he is, all of human history needs to be rewritten and we’re going to have to accept that new narrative, even if it pisses off academia and the powers that be who want you to believe only their version of history.

6) Get Real with Yourself

I belong to the school of thought that sometimes you just have to get yourself out of your own way. There are way too many people who are walking around broken and unhealed in some way. That brokenness comes out in strange and unexpected ways, like anger, denial, projection, depression or even personality disorders like Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. There is no shame in admitting you might need some help along the way sometime. There are therapists out there now, that don’t prescribe meds that mess with your brain chemistry, that follow spiritual paths of their own and use mostly talking as a form of therapy. Shop around until you find the right one, just don’t take the first therapist which you cross paths with. I’m not talking about psycho-babble either. I’m talking about realizing certain patterns or certain types of people seem to be following you or are in your life constantly and putting an end to these unhealthy patterns once and for all. That realization comes from you and only you. Patterns like having friends who constantly back-stab you or finding yourself only getting the attention of members of the opposite sex who are already taken or always finding yourself in jobs with a boss who is psychologically abusive. The only common denominator is you. The outside world won’t ever change unless your inside world changes first. That’s a given.

I know a lot of people in the progressive and New Age community are leery of therapists and think that by just doing yoga, or becoming vegan, or constantly praying or having organite in the house, or “not having a problem” is enough or that they alone can solve their own problems without anyone’s help when they’re not even trained professionals themselves. It’s not and it won’t. Sometimes you need that extra pair of unbiased eyes and ears to help you get out of the forest.

December 2015 Astrology – Sowing and Germination

December 2015 is shaping up to look like a time of pivotal and profound decision-making. Both Carl Boudreau and Steve Judd are on the same page on this one.

Carl writes:
“I have discussed the world’s gradual emergence from a social, political and economic imbalance that massively favored the 1%. This imbalance was caused by a planetary arrangement that first went into effect in the early 1980s.  Roughly 30 years of this imbalance left the world’s social, economic and political systems in very serious need of reform….Progressive victories are no longer sporadic (i.e the rise of Bernie Sanders, the election of Jeremy Corbyn and Justin Trudeau). They no longer seem like flukes. Hope and the determination to bring change are quietly suffusing global collective consciousness. ..The astrological tables have turned. The economic and political tables appear to be turning also. Many of us want to hear that trickles of reform will soon combine into surging, torrents of reform. But the planets are telling us something different. They seem, rather, to be talking about long, slow, carefully thought out changes.
I know that many want to see a global surge – a rapid and sustained acceleration – of progressive reform. We want to see the collective consciousness lit brightly from within with a burning enthusiasm for sensible, realistic, practical, lasting, but above all, quick reform….The charts, then, are talking more about process than they are about substance, or content. The planets are saying that rather than a shared passion for reform, the people of the world will develop a shared passion for careful reasoning, guided by a will to heal, uplift and preserve, colored by a will to fairness and compassion. That is not the same thing as a unified global reform movement.”

Is the end near?

With climate-change talks happening in Paris as I write this, several newspapers declaring that it is the end of reality TV (Thank God!), McDonald’s, once a teflon-like corporate behemoth, is set to close almost 700 restaurants around the world and has been facing sliding sales the past few years due to changing consumer tastes, and Black Friday sales this past week at a record low, consumers are less interested in buying cheap, shitty stuff they don’t really need but are now wanting to spend their money on accruing experiences instead. It would seem that on a deeper, even subconscious level, there is an underground change which is germinating. In my mind that’s a sign, even a small, incremental one, of some emotional and spiritual maturity taking place. We’ll see if it catches on within the larger public and the masses.

The thing with changing directions towards something better is that there is an awful lot of hard work involved. The easiest thing on Earth is to stay where you are and keep doing what you’ve always done and NOT change your routine or habits. Personally, I think that’s the reason so many people are miserable, they simply don’t want to change their routine.

We all want to see things turn out for the best, we all want happiness, respect and love for ourselves and others, we all want to live on a planet which provides us with clean air to breath, clean water to drink, healthy food to nourish us, a roof over our heads to keep us safe and warm, we all want to find meaning in our lives and experiences. However despite what New Age potboiler, well-intentioned but misguided marketing non-profit campaigns and a market economy that wants to keep you in place as a mindless consumer and a powerless vessel for corporate and political entities, change only happens when every last one of us puts our shoulder to the wheel. You have to work your ass off if you want real change and not just hope that somebody else or some external factor will do it for you. It takes some gumption and guts. To paraphrase Sarah Harrison of Wikileaks, courage is contagious.

Legendary French film director Louis Malle did an epic 7-part documentary series on India called “Phantom India” back in 1968/9 which was aired on French TV and then eventually the BBC. In a lifetime of work which included the beloved “My Dinner with Andre” and “Atlantic City”, Malle considered “Phantom India” the pinnacle of his work. (All 7 parts are up on Youtube, just be sure to hit the CC button on the bottom of each video to get English subtitles since it is all in French.)
He ended the series in part 7 with the following words and a dramatic visual scene of men literally pushing a cartload of salt along railway tracks with the brute force of their own bodies. (from 49:09 in the video below.)

“In India we discovered with wonder, another way of being, another way of living and seeing the world that made us all feel nostalgic, like a secret forever lost. But we felt all along it was a world living on borrowed time. Here, where the population is greater than Africa and South America combined, modern life increasingly takes the form of man exploiting his fellow man.”

We still have some time to change Malle’s last words in the film. We still have some time to rediscover that lost secret. But not by much.

Short-cutting Reality

I was at an after-work event last night, specifically at an oyster bar, the kind of super-hip Old Montreal joint full of beautiful people who never seem to work but have lots of money, which operates as a supper club,  serves expensive dinners  until 11 pm and then all the tables are cleared and it becomes a super-exclusive hard-to-get-into-club. I don’t normally hang out at these kinds of establishments anymore, unlike in my late teens and early 20s when I was clubbing and hanging out at all-night raves or going to gay bars to listen to alternative and industrial EBM music  like Nitzer Ebb, 808 State and Meat Beat Manifesto and dance the night away with friends. I was only there because I’m actually an Elite reviewer on Yelp! and it was an event I was invited to join. And I love slurping on fresh, briny oysters.

When I eyed the crowd who were populating this place, it was largely middle-aged graying men, executives who work in the local gaming and tech industry and women in their early 20s in super-tight clothing and immobile, plastic cleavages, on a Wednesday night, no less. Pretty obvious what’s happening here. I don’t judge, I just sit back, relax and watch the comedy of manners which is about to take place. I look at it as a transactional, sexual marketplace. People put their goods out in display and other people place their bids, all with the aid of libations and snacks, agreements are reached and off they go. Some bids are too low, some goods are not up to par, it’s basically the same story with different actors. I doubt there’s any love here. I doubt that’s what they even want. There’s no feeling here, it’s just mechanical sex. Maybe one of these girls will end up with a sugar-daddy or one of these men will end up with a young trophy wife. Good for them if that’s what they want and get.

Work your wallet old boy! Work your ass off lady!

I’ve had this discussion now with several male friends who are in their late 30s and 40s, how their sexual partners these days, usually women in their 20s, how the sex basically feels “plastic” or “fake”. How hardcore porn, and given how ubiquitous it is, has basically made girls feel they have to perform like the girls in porn these days. Everything from anal bleaching, to Brazilian waxes, to clitoral enlargement or reduction, to plastic surgery on their inner labias (and apparently one of *THE* most painful plastic surgeries out there) and breasts just to get the “right look” to begin with. One of these friends told me that sex now feels like a show and that he feels like he’s not with a real person but a “plastic sex doll who knows how to moan properly, acts like there’s an invisible camera in the room which she is performing for and isn’t really paying any attention to me and there’s no real satisfaction in it. All you want to do is get her to leave as quickly as possible once it’s over” (<—- real quote).

How’s it going Lady? A fake life-sized Chinese sex doll.

Personally, I just have to shrug my shoulders. Like I wrote earlier, I think the whole thing is a giant comedy. I think people forget a real connection to another human being oftentimes takes a real investment of time and emotion, if you’re not willing to put it in, don’t expect to get much out of it.

 

It’s just falling into line within a larger pattern in the world where everything is being reduced into a culture of shortcuts. People want satisfying sex on a physical, emotional and physiological level, yet don’t want a relationship or even a friendship for that matter. They want a gourmet meal without the hours of preparation and knowing proper cooking techniques but they just want to pull it out of a microwave or buy it ready-made or have a catering company do their dinner party (as a foodie and someone who loves to cook, where’s the fun in that?).

Make THIS Beef Mac’n Cheese. I’ve actually received random marriage proposals at potluck dinner parties when I’ve made this in the past.

I see this in the workplace too. Kids graduate from university, have zero experience, zero professional acumen, zero life experience or street smarts yet expect to start off at $60 000/year just because that is what they feel they are worth. Unfortunately, it’s exactly these talkers who get into companies who schmooze the HR department and never do a shred of real work and ruin departments with their incompetence while they leap-frog to other opportunities.

Same thing in spirituality. We all know about the Sunday Christian or the Ramadan Muslim, people who act like jerks and idiots during the rest of the week or year, yet when Sunday or Ramadan comes around, suddenly because they showed up in church or they fasted, it’s absolved them of all their previous dumbfuckery. People read a New Age best-seller or two, decide to take up yoga or tarot cards and are now suddenly “spiritual” while they cheat on their spouses or lie to their friends.

 

They want instant wisdom and insight without ever having to go through those (usually painful) life experiences which could have afforded them that wisdom and insight. In short, people want the rewards without having to actually work for it.

Shortcuts and life-hacks are great when you’re trying to figure out a travel itinerary or how to organize your linen closet.  I highly doubt  that the same principles will hold when it comes to your emotional and spiritual (and sexual) reality.

Do your “job”, put the hours in and you’ll eventually get there. I’m not saying that miracles don’t happen like winning the lottery or meeting someone and knowing within 10 minutes that they will play an important part of your life, but generally slow and steady (and genuine, I’d add)  always wins the race.

Use your Voice (but back it up with serious chops)

The past few weeks, I’ve noticed some VERY prominent people have come under fire for speaking their truth. Honestly, it’s the last gaseous burps of a system which is running on empty if you ask me.

Aussie commentator and thinker, Max Igan was viciously attacked a few weeks ago after delivering a pro-Palestine speech at the 2015 Freedom Summits in Byron Bay, Australia on October 23rd. Max is probably one of the most passionate campaigners out there for a free Palestine and a very deep spiritual thinker and seriously, one of the nicest blokes you can talk to if you ever get the chance. He was attacked from behind while walking out of food shop, took several blows to the back of the head and 4 or 5 kicks to the torso and suffered some bruising and two cracked ribs. If anything, it has emboldened him even more. If you don’t already listen to his weekly podcasts or weekly vlogs on Youtube, you’re missing out on probably one of the wisest, clearest voices out there.

Tarantino, with another badass, Dr. Cornel West, at the demonstration

Then there is bad-boy filmmaker Quentin Tarantino who joined a demonstration against police brutality a few weeks ago and basically said it’s time to call a spade, a spade.  Now the Fraternal Order of Police Officers have threatened him with “a surprise”. A few police unions in the United States are calling for a boycott of his upcoming film “The Hateful Eight” but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of actual police organizations threatening a public figure with some kind of violence, implied or real.

Another actor, activist and Renaissance hunk, Viggo Mortensen called it in a recent interview with Democracy Now! that Tarantino was completely justified in his comments.  It would seem to me that cops publicly threatening someone for stating the obvious, is a sign that cops are more worried about their reputation, privilege and power and maintaining it than actually doing their job, which is protecting the public.

And then there is of course, uber-actor Benedict Cumberbatch. In recent weeks, during his 3-month sold-out run of “Hamlet” in London, he’s been collecting funds from the audience for the Syrian refugee crisis. They’ve collected something like   £150 000 British pounds just from audiences pockets after each show during the run of the play. He’s also expressed deep disappointment with UK Home Secretary Teresa May and wanting to discuss the situation with her directly. He even went so far as last week saying  “fuck the  politicians” on stage during curtain calls for their inertia on this issue. My understanding is that Ben has friends in activist circles, some of whom have been volunteering on the island of Lesbos where thousands of refugees have been showing up in their rubber dinghy boats almost daily now so he knows whats actually happening there.

(Ben, I flippin’ love you and I cannot *wait* to see you in Marvel Comics’ “Dr. Strange” next year when you finally get all mystical and spiritual on film. I know there must be a parallel universe in this multiverse we’re in, where we’ve been married off in a small hilltop Greek Orthodox chapel in Patmos, Greece, at a wedding officiated by Patmos resident, David Bowie, and Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore sings “Home” for us during a barefoot beach BBQ bonfire wedding reception. Where we have epic make-up sex after we fight, looking out over dark, gothic windswept cliffs in the middle of a rainy thunderstorm and just the 12-string symphonic break of Bauhaus’ “Mask” – 2:41 onwards – is playing in loop in the background somewhere. There. I Said It.)

Badass alternative researcher David Icke is doing a world tour during 2016-2017 and while I know he can’t come to Canada because of some shady legal influences at work which prevents him from presenting in this country, I’m still kicking myself for not going down to New York City back in 2008 the last time he was there. I’ll definitely go the NYC show this time, unless of course he and his team decide to do shows closer to Canada like Burlington, VT or even Boston for the Montreal crowd, Buffalo, NY for the Toronto crowd and Seattle, WA for Vancouver since these spots are all within driving distance. (David, if your people need help organizing something close to Montreal, let me know.)

All of these examples point out a system which is choking on its own hubris, which cannot tolerate dissenting views and goes after anyone and everyone who may have them, even persons with money and influence. There is something else quite curious about these examples. Had these things happened even 5 or 7 years ago, these persons would be black-listed, jailed and silenced and you would never hear from them again. Now, not so much. I think the millennials, the dying-off of baby boomers and their values, social media and the breath-taking speed with which information moves, now all have something to do with the popularity of hearing alternative voices and opinions.

I’ve written about the so-called Truth Vibrations in various posts extensively. What I am noticing is that persons, incidents or stories which have a grain of authenticity and genuineness are the ones which are going viral now, never mind what the source is. It’s that kernel of authenticity which is attracting people, despite what slick pollsters and marketers would like you to believe. If it resonates on an emotional level, then BOOM! off it goes and takes on a life of its own.

Deep down inside, people aren’t dumb. We all have an intuitive and emotional side which jives with the truth when we encounter it…and likewise we have a side which is automatically repelled when it encounters bullshit. I think people’s spiritual and emotional antennae are getting more fine-tuned but I also think people’s tolerance for bullshit is also evaporating. Rapidly.

The Honey-Trap and the Litmus Test

I have a good friend, who for the purposes of this blog post I will name Michael. Mike is a worldwide internet security expert, his specialty is spam and online fraud like those annoying Nigerian banking scams, but he works closely with law enforcement and a whole bunch of alphabet agencies around the world and their experts. Many of his friends in that sector also work with very dark matters as investigating online pedophile rings and human trafficking.

The Lobster Spaghetti at Joe Beef. You have to eat this once in your life to believe how good it is.

I see him maybe once every 6 months since typical two work weeks for him may involve a stop in Singapore then off to Paris for a meeting and then maybe Washington DC before coming home to Montreal. We became great buddies since we both love the same kind of music (he offered to fly me out to Edinburgh a few years ago just to attend a Roxy Music reunion concert), both of us own and love pugs and both of us enjoy hitting Montreal’s better dining spots (Global bad-assed foodie Anthony Bourdain has already visited most of them on his various shows, but if you’re wanting really good eats in Montreal, you can’t beat Joe Beef, Liverpool House, Nora Gray, Tuck Shop,  and Kazu).  Plus he’s a fantastic dinner companion and an amazing story-teller with lots of very insightful and very funny opinions. So when he calls last-minute, like he usually does, I make time and go.

Anna Chapman, was a notorious Russian spy and honey-trap who operated among the New York City jet set, posing as a real estate broker.

One thing Mike mentioned which struck me as very interesting was the concept of the honey-trap. If any of you have read John le Carré spy novels, you might be familiar with it. It’s basically a sting operation, which has been set-up to lure in a suspect for the purposes of getting information out of them or catching them in the very act. It is something law enforcement use quite often especially with online pedophile predators  but the funny thing about the honey-trap is that it also acts as a mental litmus test to see if even a suspected person even has the POTENTIAL to become a danger. Long story short, if they bite, they may bite more. If they don’t, probably not.

Afterwards, I thought about the idea of the honey-trap and the mental and personality litmus test a bit more an I think there are spiritual implications as well.

Man cannot live on bread alone… ( or all-you-can-eat buffets either for that matter)

Quite often we think of food as something we eat, something which nourishes us physically and sustains us and gives us life, a form of fuel. People quite often forget that there are other types of fuel as well, other types of “junk food” or poisoned food.

If this is the kind of junk you fill your mind up with, don’t expect to win a prize anytime soon…

It can be the books or publications you read (thought-provoking literature which expands your soul like the books of Victor Hugo and Gabriel Garcia Marquez or…. disposable monthly fashion magazines), the TV shows or films you watch (Andrei Tarkovsky films or…. Entertainment Tonight), the journalists you follow (John Pilger, Bill Moyers or… Geraldo Rivera), the websites you visit or the thinkers you respect (Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges or…Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins).

Do you honest-to-God think bringing your kids to Disney World and seeing these  plastic freaks will help ignite their imagination for the rest of their lives? It does nothing except make them lifelong consumers.

It’s also not what you digest intellectually which in turn sustains you intellectually, but it’s the company you keep, the people you hang out with, the places you visit, the things you decide to look at, the emotional and spiritual impressions you receive. They just don’t teach you this kind of stuff in school and unfortunately neither do parents, since most of them are also usually operating on an outdated operating system themselves. So what’s a person to do?

A few years ago, a Native Elder group called The Grandmothers posted something about the shift the Earth is undergoing. One of the most important lines in it was:

“Stay tuned to truth. Listen within and trust your body,” they said. “Your body knows a lie when it hears one. You will feel warm and open whenever you are in the presence of truth. And in the presence of untruth you will find yourself hardening and contracting. Many times in the past we have encouraged you to trust your body, and we remind you now of how important that is.” 

There’s some wisdom there. Good things, good people, good situations will make you feel positive, strong and empowered with a quiet certainty. Negative situations and people will make you feel afraid, disenfranchised and confused (and I’m including fear porn here as well). Watch what people DO and not what they SAY. Talk is way too cheap these days. See what happens when you offer friendship to someone who has acted cool towards you. Do they bite back, continue to stay cool or do they reciprocate? Do you feel lighthearted and inspired or down and depressed after talking to someone or watching a particular film? Has a certain interaction or incident left you feeling warm and open or rattled and nauseous? There’s a million and one examples I’m sure any of you could come up with.

Litmus tests are not just about picking up clues like in the photo below, but following up on them with real action.

MINIMAL, minimal sage dating advice from film-maker John Waters. (I would also add, don’t do the deed unless you’ve seen their song list or their music collection as well as their book collection FIRST)

 

The Power of Love

Tommie Smith (Gold), Peter Norman (Silver) , John Carlos (Bronze)

“While events are happening, we cannot know whether, in time, they will turn out to be fortunate or unfortunate for us. So many situations that people had thought fortunate have, in the end, been the cause of their undoing, while trials have proved, in the long-term, to be very beneficial! So we cannot judge happiness or misfortune at the time; we have to wait before we can decide.
So, when you are faced with a situation, pleasant or painful, make a habit of telling yourself that happiness could be waiting at the end of the road. Don’t waste your time complaining or rebelling; thank heaven instead.  In saying ‘thank you’, you free energies within you that will help you to face things. Yes, that is the power of saying ‘Thank you’: it tackles the obstacle as it arises, and when sadness, anger and discouragement are beginning to distill their poisons in you, it neutralizes them. What humans need most is to love and be loved, to give love and receive love. And the truth is that they have a greater need to love than to be loved. Yes, to love, because it is their love that makes them alive and inspires them to go forward. To love is the greatest source of blessings. This is why you must never prevent your heart from loving: love all of creation, all creatures, always seeking how best to express your love.”

– Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

The picture above is probably one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century, let alone in sports or within the Olympic movement. For those of you who do not know the back story, it is a photo of two African-American 200 meter sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos and Australian sprinter Peter Norman during their awards ceremony at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics doing the Black Power salute. Smith and Carlos were active members of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), an organization started by Berkeley sociology professor, Harry Edwards. 

Professor Harry Edwards, badass.

 

The OPHR wanted to bring attention to the fact that quite often, the racism of American society spilled over into sports and the Olympic movement itself. When accepting their medals, both Smith and Carlos went shoe-less to bring attention to the plight and poverty of most African-Americans. All three athletes donned the badge of the OPHR but what happened next seared itself into to collective memory of the world. Smith and Carlos then did the Black Power salute, black-gloved fists raised, heads down while the American anthem played. What started off in a stadium full of cheers and jubilation suddenly went deathly quiet. Nothing like this had ever happened in Olympic history, using the medals podium as a political platform. In a year that had seen the assassination of pivotal figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and violent student protests the world over, the political fallout was immediate.

Smith and Carlos were kicked out of Mexico City but came home to a hero’s welcome among the African-American community in the US. Both received death threats for years afterwards, were professionally blacklisted, suffered terribly, Carlos’ wife committed suicide. Neither could hold down steady jobs and suffered economically and mentally for years. In time, their images became rehabilitated and both became vocal civil rights activists and remain so today.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos accept the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage

 

The story of Peter Norman is less-known but no less dramatic. This past week, a post by blogger Riccardo Gazzaniga entitled, “The White Man in that Photo “ went viral and I’d urge anyone who is interested in issues related to anti-oppression, anti-racism and being an anti-oppression ally to read it. (There’s also a 2008 documentary about Peter Norman produced by his nephew, Matt Norman called “Salute” which I’m trying to track down a copy to watch, but no such luck yet.)

From the blog post: 

Norman was a white man from Australia, a country that had strict apartheid laws, almost as strict as South Africa. There was tension and protests in the streets of Australia following heavy restrictions on non-white immigration and discriminatory laws against aboriginal people, some of which consisted of forced adoptions of native children to white families.
The two Americans had asked Norman if he believed in human rights. Norman said he did. They asked him if he believed in God, and he, who had been in the Salvation Army, said he believed strongly in God. “We knew that what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat, and he said “I’ll stand with you” – remembers John Carlos – “I expected to see fear in Norman’s eyes, but instead we saw love.”...But then Norman did something else. “I believe in what you believe. Do you have another one of those for me ?” he asked pointing to the Olympic Project for Human Rights badge on the others’ chests. “That way I can show my support in your cause.” Smith admitted to being astonished, ruminating: “Who is this white Australian guy? He won his silver medal, can’t he just take it and that be enough!”… Four years later at the 1972 Summer Olympics that took place in Munich, Germany, Norman wasn’t part of the Australian sprinters team, despite having run qualifying times for the 200 meters thirteen times and the 100 meters five times. Norman left competitive athletics behind after this disappointment, continuing to run at the amateur level.

Peter Norman later in life, with his 1968 Silver medal.

Back in the change-resisting, whitewashed Australia he was treated like an outsider, his family outcasted, and work impossible to find. For a time he worked as a gym teacher, continuing to struggle against inequalities as a trade unionist and occasionally working in a butcher shop. An injury caused Norman to contract gangrene which led to issues with depression and alcoholism.
As John Carlos said, “If we were getting beat up, Peter was facing an entire country and suffering alone.” For years Norman had only one chance to save himself: he was invited to condemn his co-athletes, John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s gesture in exchange for a pardon from the system that ostracized him.
A pardon that would have allowed him to find a stable job through the Australian Olympic Committee and be part of the organization of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. Norman never gave in and never condemned the choice of the two Americans.

Smith, Norman and Carlos remained friends for the rest of their lives.

He was the greatest Australian sprinter in history and the holder of the 200 meter record, yet he wasn’t even invited to the Olympics in Sydney. …Norman died suddenly from a heart attack in 2006, without his country ever having apologized for their treatment of him….“Peter was a lone soldier. He consciously chose to be a sacrificial lamb in the name of human rights. There’s no one more than him that Australia should honor, recognize and appreciate” John Carlos said.
“He paid the price with his choice,” explained Tommie Smith, “It wasn’t just a simple gesture to help us, it was HIS fight. He was a white man, a white Australian man among two men of color, standing up in the moment of victory, all in the name of the same thing”.

There are many elements about this story which I find very compelling from a spiritual point of view. Like Aivanhov’s quote above, Smith, Carlos and Norman’s story really shows how you never really, truly know how things are going to turn out and really how if love is the motivation behind our actions, it can ultimately transform anything. That the rocks these three athletes shot into the pond that day, had ripple effects which we are still experiencing now. While all three endured suffering, economic hardship and mental anguish for decades, they refused to back down from their principles because it was the right thing to do. You just don’t see that granite-like integrity which Smith, Norman and Carlos displayed and lived through very often but more importantly, it is that very same integrity which continues to inspire us 47 years later, to keep pushing, to keep fighting for what is right because the struggle continues. The rage against the machine has not abated one bit, whether it is against race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious bigotry, poverty alleviation, environmental degradation, political occupation, or economic justice.

There’s a quote David Icke uses quite often in some of his presentations, by German Protestant pastor, Martin Niemoller:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.    

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

We’re all in it together, folks. Admittedly, there are not many examples people have these days for taking that kind of a principled stand. Everyone is so damn afraid of speaking up and putting their neck out on the line since everyone is obsessed with their own self-interest and selfish comfort so nothing gets done. Even harder now, I think with market forces, globalization and crazy politicians putting the squeeze on all of us, but I’d like to think that because souls like Smith, Carlos and Norman existed, there’s nothing to say souls like that have disappeared from this Earth.

San Jose State University has a statue honoring Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Peter Norman’s second place spot remains empty. It turns out that Norman did not want his likeness included in the statue because he said he wants visitors who visit that statue to stand in his place and feel what he felt that night.

That kids, is an example of someone who only wants to share his love.

Whales, Fjords, Blood Moons and Apocalypse Naught

The hamlet of Tadoussac, Quebec in the foreground and the Saguenay River fjord in the background

Fjords don’t only exist in Norway.

Quebec also has its share of them, albeit, not nearly as high, dramatic and jagged as the mountains of Norway. They start showing up along the North Shore of Quebec’s St.Laurence River, an area known for its remoteness, fjords, rugged natural beauty and whales.

The village of Tadoussac, with the oldest chapel in North America in the foreground.

The tiny village of Tadoussac is one such hot spot. With the oldest chapel in North America, one of the earliest settlements and a former trading post, Tadoussac is also one of the most active whale watching spots in the world.

Where Tadoussac is located

Beluga whales, minke whales, sperm whales, right whales and the biggest of them all, blue whales are regularly sighted here since it is a confluence of the St. Laurence (salty water)  and Saguenay (fresh water) rivers, giving the whales a safe and protected place to eat and get fat during the summer and fall, before they make the long migration to the Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of South America.

A French poster of all the whales found in the St. Laurence River basin

Aside from the whales, the energy here is off the charts. I think the Manicouagan meteor/crater and the island and lake it formed, the so-called “Eye of Quebec”, probably also have something to do with it.  Maybe that’s why such high-frequency animals like whales also like it here.

The Manicouagan meteor hit created this perfectly round lake and raised island, as seen from space.

I was there this past weekend and I found the timing of the chance to go very interesting since it coincided with last Sunday night’s Blood Moon/lunar eclipse (which some websites seemed to be going apeshit over) AND Pope Francis’ visit to the US.

A typical Zodiac boat.

My 11 month-old nephew was with us so we couldn’t take a Zodiac boat which would have afforded us a closer look at the whales, but rather we took a whale watching ferry-boat. Even then, we managed to see a whole pod of white beluga whales frolicking around us,

A pod of white beluga whales. They are a gregarious species and always show up in a group.

…and 4 minke whales came very close to the boat. One of them came out of the water practically 10 feet away from me, so close to the side of the boat that I was practically looking down directly into its blowhole.

A minke whale breaching

When you get this close to these giant, majestic beasts of nature in their natural habitat, a few thoughts immediately hit you: 1) We’re nothing but an existential speck of dust in the grand scheme of things 2) There are species of beings on this planet what are far older and wiser than we ever will be 3) Human beings, as we are now, act like  annoying, immature,  invasive pest species 4) The natural world can transform us and heal us if we let it and take the right attitude. 5) We still have so much to learn and improve on.

Pope Francis meeting the homeless in Washington, DC last week.

Truth and justice are like whales in many ways, you may not see them often, they hide in the depths, in secret places you and I will never experience, they are very shy creatures, they only come up for air and are seen here and there but when you do see them, they are gifts that leave an indelible mark on you forever after. They are immensely powerful beasts who don’t realize their own strength, where even a random flip of their fin or tail can inadvertently kill or harm.  Love them and they will love you right back and show themselves to you. They are creatures which have taken on a mythical and mystical status, the stuff of legends and folk tales, but just because you don’t always see them, doesn’t mean that they are not there, dreaming, singing, remembering and on occasion, surfacing.

The End-Posts Have Shifted

If you get talking to historians and political scientists, they usually say that politics works along the lines of the pendulum effect. One decade may mean a radical shift to the right: (i.e the 1980s with Margaret Thatcher in the UK,  Reagan and Bush Sr. in the US)

Reagan and Thatcher, two right-wing hawks

 followed by a decade of a shift to the left (Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK – only these guys really weren’t on the “left”, they were and are pro-business, neo-liberals who just aren’t as crazy as the right-wing alternatives)

Clinton and Blair, two peas in a pod of crooks

…followed by an extreme shift to the right again (Bush Jr and Blair/Brown) and to the “left” again (Obama, Cameron/Clegg) so the natural expectation would be that the pendulum is going to go right again.

New leader of the British Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn on his way to work in Parliament.

Only I don’t think that’s going to happen again.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past weekend, it’s hard not to notice that Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour Party leadership race with nearly 60% of the popular vote, when London bookies had him at 200:1 odds of ever winning.  Corbyn is an open social democrat, a vegetarian teetotaler, who is against the nuclear arms race and rides his bicycle to work, calls out fat-cat Conservative MPs,  and has called for Tony Blair to be tried as a war criminal for his participation in starting the war in Iraq (which he should be imho, along with Bush Jr., Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld) and has a pretty positive view on the world and on life.

It’s been kind of hilarious to watch the usual establishment-types trying to demonize Corbyn, and then have the blow-back hit them right back in the face. The public aren’t putting up with it. Even Alfred E Neuman lookalike and right-wing nutter Tony Abbott down in Australia  also got his just desserts this past weekend.

Alfred E. Neuman of MAD magazine fame

Ousted Aussie prime Minister and bona-fide idiot Tony Abbott

The thing with pendulums is that, the right-left-right-left-right-left dynamic only works as long as the two end-posts stay where they are….but move them and the pendulum’s dynamics change completely and I think that is what has happened here.

Soccer fans and clubs across Europe, particularly in Germany and especially F.C. St. Pauli, are extending a warm welcome and a helping hand to the thousands of refugees.

Observing this refugee crisis in Europe, the way the public have often stepped up to the plate in trying to welcome or accommodate refugees, in many cases going against official government policy like in Hungary, Corbyn’s insane popularity despite being “un-electable” (Labour received 15 000 new member applications in his first 24 hours alone mostly with young voters), how Bernie Sander’s popularity in the US has the Democratic party establishment already shaking in their boots, the sleeping giant of public and popular resistance, while not yet fully awake, is restlessly moving in his sleep.

The Democratic Party’s “Plan B” roster of candidates, the establishment want anyone but Bernie. (Clockwise from top left: Al Gore, Elizabeth Warren, John Kerry and Joe Biden) =  same old same old

If any of you have ever had to train a puppy or take it to obedience school, then you know that the more you try pulling on the lease, the more the puppy tries pulling the other way. The puppy isn’t trying to piss you off, it’s just trying to go where it wants to go.  Yet, many of these government leaders seem to think that the public, in this day and age, are like robotic puppies which will do as they say and I’m afraid that ship has sailed and it ain’t coming back.

Many hard-line government officials seem to think most of the public are not very intelligent and that is just not true. Look at any political leader, specifically those who came out of elite schools, privileged backgrounds, lots of letters behind their names from prestigious universities and so forth.

The infamous picture of Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club – The Members circa 1987 including British PM, David Cameron(#2) and current mayor of London, Boris Johnson (#8) . If you want to know the other numbers, check it here.

Hell, look at some of the profs teaching them and you’ll see a bunch of smart but spoiled brat kids, most of whom have personality disorders like Narcissistic Personality Disorder (usually Somatic or Cerebral Narcissists) or Borderline Personality Disorder. Little brats, who were probably obnoxious, entitled kids, usually come from extremely privileged backgrounds, who never did an honest day’s worth of hard work, never rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty with work , never had to work very hard for anything because it was always given to them, don’t have an ounce of genuine common sense among the lot of them, no real-world experience and zero street smarts or meaningful insight – the kind of kid in your class who was probably listening to The Osmond family, while everyone else was listening to David Bowie or Roxy Music, and yet, these are the same annoying brats who end up becoming professors, policy wonks and agenda setters who tell the rest of the world what to do and how to live, particularly people whose problems they don’t even have a clue about or know how to relate to in their day-to-day lives because they don’t fraternize with them.  I can’t wait for the day people like that go the way of the dinosaur.

David Cameron looking uncomfortable while visiting a refugee camp in Lebanon recently. The kid in the picture knows exactly what to do…

Alternative media, instantaneous information flows, all of it is working against them now, and they know it. So what will they do? Probably try to rein in public opinion in their favor with smear campaigns, scare tactics like they way they have already started against Corbyn and Sanders.

Max Igan put out a very powerful podcast last weekend about the refugee crisis in Europe. The gist of it, according to Max, is that these wars in the Middle East are orchestrated because the ultimate aim is to re-draw the maps of that region according to American and Israel interests, based on an influential  essay by Israeli academic Oded Yinon called ” A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” ( essay originally appeared in Hebrew in KIVUNIM (Directions), A Journal for Judaism and Zionism; Issue No, 14–Winter, 5742, February 1982, Editor: Yoram Beck. Editorial Committee: Eli Eyal, Yoram Beck, Amnon Hadari, Yohanan Manor, Elieser Schweid. Published by the Department of Publicity/The World Zionist Organization, Jerusalem.)

That these wars were meant to induce the refugee problem, they’ll let in the refugees for now, there will be a terrorist incident somewhere down the line, the refugees will get blamed and it will be an excuse to tighten national security and get rid of more of our personal rights and freedoms even more. I honest-to-God hope Max is wrong on this, I really do. I’d like to think people are more savvy than that, particularly younger people who have less loyalty to established parties and associations than their parents and grandparents did.

See, one of the pluses I see out of this refugee crisis, for example, is that some European politicians and the European public will now think twice when the US, Israel and the Saudis decide to go in and randomly start up another war in the Middle East. I don’t think the French, Germans, Italians and even the Brits will be as willing to sign up the next time around. I think they may even question the war rhetoric even more closely from now on.

From a spiritual point of view, I know many prophets and sages in the past have said that more and more enlightened leaders will be showing up in the next little while, advanced souls designated to help humanity change direction from the collision course its currently on. Again, something I hope is true but I’ll believe it when I see it in real terms.

It relies on a deep belief in reincarnation, which I don’t have a problem with. I do however, have a problem with the way reincarnation is interpreted at times.

Linda Goodman

Just to go off on a small tangent for a bit, the late American astrologer Linda Goodman once wrote about Lexigrams, a little-known but very insightful tool for deconstructing words and names. There are a few websites which go into Lexigramming in a deeper way but if you want to spend a pleasant afternoon by yourself in a café, grab a copy of her book “Star Signs”, a notepad and a pen and go Lexigramming. What’s odd about doing them, is that what you start coming up with is usually a reflection of what’s happening with YOU yourself on some level.

“1000 grammes” café and cake shop in Montreal’s Gay Village, one of my favorite places to read, think, work, people watch and generally just hang and be left alone.

So to go back to the point on reincarnation, sages and gurus and lots of New Age sites say that the whole point to reincarnation and for us to take on life time after time,  is that we are here to LEARN. Look at the word LEARN and you’ll also find EARN, LEAN and NEAL (kneel). I don’t think that’s why we’re here. I think we’re here to problem-SOLVE and EVOLVE and if you look at those words closely it also has the world LOVE within them.

Think about it.

Enlightened politics is nothing more that enlightened problem-solving.  In the meantime, all we can do is keep our blinders off and keep pushing those end-posts even more in whatever way we can individually.

”Gaslighting” Reality

As some of you know, I’m quite a film buff and especially enjoy watching old movies or indie movies from the festival circuit. It’s quite easy here in Montreal especially to catch up on films, given the kind of publicly funded resources we have.

Recently, I have been reading up on Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) because of some counseling work I’m helping out with. I was actually quite floored by several books and websites which categorically stated that many malignant narcissists and people with NPD often employ a tactic called “gaslighting”.

Charles Boyer (Gregory) and Ingrid Bergman (Paula)

The term was coined after the well-known 1944 classic film “Gaslight” with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. In the film Bergman, plays Paula, a former opera singer who saw the death of her opera-singing aunt by an unidentified jewel thief who had strangled her and then fled the scene. Traumatized by the event in London, Paula relocates to Italy as a teenager and undergoes opera training there to only fall in love and fall under the spell of her older Hungarian piano teacher, Gregory Anton, who it turns out, is none other that the murderous jewel thief himself. Assuming a new name, he gets into Paula’s good books, marries her and convinces her to move back into the old London house. His aim is of course to find the aunt’s priceless jewels which are hidden somewhere in the attic. Little by little, he starts to make Paula go crazy. Placing things in her purse when she’s not looking, removing paintings off the wall and then making her believe that she did it (when she did not), putting words in her mouth and generally isolating the woman socially from anyone and everyone else so he can carry his plans out uninterrupted and unsuspected.

The ultimate aim of gaslighting is of course make the intended person start to question their own sanity and sense of reality and it is a technique which not only narcissists, but people who emotionally or psychologically abuse others use regularly from their bag of tricks. The person becomes super vulnerable and then is open to suggestion for all sorts of things which they normally would never fall for.

Folks, I think to a certain degree, we’ve all been gaslighted.

I mean, to a certain degree we’ve all fallen for certain myths or stories, which served to undermine us as individuals and empowers who ever made up the story or the myth because it serves their purpose. Politicians, economists, business marketers are all to blame.  Do you really need Coca Cola to live? No, you need water.

Cassel Pink Diamond ring, .79 carats, you can have this for a mere $1.3 million dollars at M.S Rau Antiques in Louisiana

A small example would be the myth of the value of diamonds and the extravagant costs of engagement rings nowadays and what they symbolize. I always thought they were bit of a joke. I wasn’t wrong. The whole damn thing is a marketing myth perpetuated by the DeBeers Corporation. When celebrity magazines write stories about Jennifer Aniston’s ring and people being dumb enough to actually fall for it or care or reality TV bridezillas only talk about the ring for 20 minutes…well, all I see at that point is someone so caught up in an illusion that you probably can’t even have a decent, meaningful conversation about anything with them

I don’t think you should be going there, dude.

Another area I’m seeing gaslighting is the idea of the “happy long term marriage”, particularly those perpetuated by dishonest spouses.  I’m watching this Ashley Madison leak scandal literally with a wry smile on my face. While I feel bad for those persons whose names and emails were used in creating bogus profiles, I don’t have very much sympathy for those very real cheating husbands (95% of the users of Ashley Madison are male) who signed up for the service and now have proven paid accounts with their credit cards with Ashley Madison.

What the hackers who stole the Ashley Madison data had to say.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the 4chan/b/ board since the hackers there have been working with the leaked data and just waiting for the big, well-known names to start spilling out along with the non-famous ones like some neighbor on my street or former high school teacher.

Already there’s intense speculation about the kinds of powerful names we may find and some articles are going so far as saying that this leak will pull apart the fabric of society as we know it. 

Goddess Shakthi. In Hindu lore, she is the cause. She is also known as Maya, the supreme illusion. The world is itself an illusion. Nothing is forever. The only reality is the presence of Cosmic Intelligence within all beings, small, medium or large.

To that I say, good. It’s about time.

Prophecy, New Age writers  and even some religious texts say that the veil of deception and ignorance is thinning and will one day disappear completely. That there will come a day, where a person will not even be able to lie because that’s how clearly we’ll be able to see through each other. Some New Agers go so far as to say we will become crystalline beings but I don’t take that literally. It’s a symbolic interpretation of what’s to come. Hindus and Buddhists call this veil Maya, Theosophists call it the unveiling of Isis (the goddess, not the terrorist group, though that would be good too). I say the gaslighting has to stop. The myths have to stop. The stories have to stop. The lies have to stop.

Because to be perfectly frank with you, the ones who want to continue with the lies, I think, like the Ashley Madison story shows, are going to be exposed, one way or another. What’s great about not lying is that you never have to remember anything, You may not get ahead in business or in politics, but your mind and your heart stays clear and to me, that’s more than enough.

 

A Turn on The Path

When I wrote up last month’s post about the Whirled Rainbow Prophecy, I had no idea how that was going to be played out but lo and behold, same-sex marriage is now legally recognized across the United States and the Confederate flag has been pulled in several states. In one extraordinary week, diversity and inclusion got a huge win. A massive plus, in my books.

 

Unfortunately it never comes without a price. Eight black churches have been burned to the ground in the Southern US in the last two weeks and Confederate Flag apologists have been lamenting online how they feel they have been marginalized, how the bravery of Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War will now be forgotten. (Bullshit. If you want to feel what it’s like to be marginalized, imagine what it must have felt like to have a lynch mob hot on your heels to hang you up on a tree afterwards and no one there to help you and for no other reason than the color of your skin.) Opponents of same-sex marriage now think we’re all on some dangerous slippery slope towards a society which practices wide-spread polygamy. As if.

You’re kidding me, right? You’re going to tell me lots of women out there want to be a part of this??? Who wants to clean up all these diapers?

There seems to be a very interesting form of energy afoot now. I’m seeing it mostly in the States, but it is spilling over in other places as well.

First of all, I find it very amusing that the bigots are showing themselves up in the most spectacular way possible. King of the Douchebags, gazillionaire Donald Trump decided to throw his hat in for the 2016 Republican nomination for President. He then went on to insult the entire population of Mexico by calling Mexicans rapists and drug pushers and how he’s going to close the border and come down hard on illegal immigrants. The problem is that Hispanics and Latinos make up a huge part of the voting base in the US and are the largest minority group by far. But that’s OK. Mexico is solving the problem by making Donald Trump-inspired pinatas. Much more fun and effective than voodoo dolls if you ask me.

Where can I get a stick and join in the fun?

My favorite socialist in the US, the former mayor of Burlington, Bernie Sanders of Vermont is also running for President and is drawing rock-star crowds everywhere he goes.

If he gets in, it will be a miracle. But if he doesn’t get the Democratic nomination, I just hope he doesn’t just tell his voters to vote for Hillary because she’s just more of the same-old, same-old and by that I mean another mouthpiece for the interests of Wall Street.  She’s already said she’s going to bomb Iran if she gets in. I mean really? Who wants George W. Bush Part II ?

What Sander’s campaign is showing up is that many, many people seem to have woken up from the myth of the American Dream, saw the nightmare it became with shrinking pay checks, fewer jobs, a widening gap of income inequality and want to take their country back from the billionaires, industrialists and hedge-fund managers. And I say all the power to them if they can pull it off effectively and do what they say they will do.

July 1st is Canada Day and July 4th is Independence Day in the US. A lot of my friends and I decided not to celebrate Canada Day given what Canada Day really means, the conquest, genocide and flat-out robbery of a landmass from First Nation’s peoples in the name of the British and French Crowns which they are still unfortunately paying for. It’s not very difficult not to celebrate it especially in Quebec, since most separatist Québécois could care less about Canada Day or the British Crown and just use it as a moving day instead.

A common scene on the streets of Montreal every July 1st.

Not that it is any better in the United States.

Read the Declaration of Independence carefully and you’ll see what a bigoted document it really is, how Eurocentric the wording is and how they call First Nation’s people as outright “savages”.  Sorry, but that’s not kosher in my book. On a spiritual level, when you have that kind of wording in such a primary document in the setting up of your nation or state or company or whatever, whether it is the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or whatever, you’re basically weaving that energy of racism and bigotry into the consciousness of this new entity from the get-go…and all these centuries later it is still there. But people are slowly but surely questioning things. That’s at least hopeful.

Good for you Greece – I’m going to enjoy watching the domino effect out of this.

The Greeks have told the German and IMF banksters to fuck off by voting “NO” against austerity measures. I don’t think things are going to get easier for Greece anytime soon but I do think voting NO and deciding the road they want to choose for themselves is a step in the right direction. Self-determination is always empowering. Who cares if banksters are getting the jitters and the value of the Euro goes down? The European Union was a bad idea in the first place. Bigger isn’t always better and bloated bureaucracies full of technocrats telling other people how to lead their lives will always be a recipe for disaster. It happened in Rome, in happened to the Ottomans, it happened to the British and it will continue to happen until people learn to wise up and learn to mind their own business instead of financially coercing them.

Another person who is telling banksters and industrialists to shut the fuck up already is Pope Francis. The Pope’s latest encyclical is not just a call to arms against climate instability, he’s also pointing the (middle) finger directly at banks and corporations and CEOs and saying enough is enough, we need to put people before profits or else we are on the road to self-destruction, all of us.

What I find hilarious is how right-wing American Republicans and conservatives and climate change deniers are going apeshit over this Pope and what he says. I don’t want to go too deeply into the theology but their interpretation of the Bible is that Man is at the top of the pyramid and we’re meant to rape and pillage this Earth as much as we want to.

According to them, Jesus basically wants you to live in a McMansion in Texas, have five SUVs in your driveway, buy $15 000 purses for your wife and feed your kids as much Taco Bell as possible. The Pope has called for another interpretation, where Man is a custodian and guardian of Creation and by failing to protect Creation, we fail ourselves.  In many ways, what he and the Catholic Church are FINALLY saying is in line with what Aboriginal and Native teachings have said all along: We are a part of that Web of Life, destroy or hurt one part of that web, and it will eventually hurt us too.

And you’re going to tell me that humankind and their activities ISN’T having an adverse effect on life on this the planet. Go to hell.

The one theme I see emerging from all these examples is that there IS a change of consciousness happening. It’s right there under your noses in the mainstream, if you want to see it. It’s not some little story you can pick up from obscure conspiracy theory websites. The interesting thing is that once the genii is out of the bottle, it ain’t going back in. Like after seeing a picture, you can’t “unsee” it anymore. When masses and masses of people start talking and thinking about certain ideas or make a move towards a common ideal at the same time, like Muslims raising money to help rebuild the burned down African-American churches in the South for Ramadan or that fellow in Great Britain who decided to start an Indigogo crowdfunding campaign to help out Greece. People reaching out to others, past bureaucracies, past technocrats, past banksters, politicians and CEOs and for no other reason than to help others who might be in a bind and because it adds to the common good … well, it reminds me of that quote by French novelist Victor Hugo, “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” Things are far from perfect but I think, we may finally be on our way towards a slightly more empathetic civilization and one based on the ideas of global citizenship, not a local or national one. It’s about time, if you ask me.

The Devaluation of Truth

“Cosmic Intelligence has given us a will, so that we can make it the instrument of our higher nature by placing it at the service of a high ideal. The first step is to understand and apply some essential truths. Once you have understood an essential truth, use your will to put it into practice, in the knowledge that this is the only way to understand it fully. It is easy to state truths; anybody can go and find them in the works of a few sages and then repeat them parrot-fashion. By doing, so they may gain the respect of a few people blind enough not to see how ignorant and weak they really are. But deceiving the blind is not a very great achievement! In any case, there are others, who see things clearly and are not so easily fooled: the beings of light in the invisible world. In fact, it is these entities whose respect we must earn, and we will earn it by applying the truths the initiates and sages reveal to us. These truths are true weapons, and we will never find better ones for winning life’s battles. But we need an arm to be able to use them – that is, the will to put them into practice.”

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

Chomsky and David Barsamian

Years ago, I remember watching an interview with Professor Noam Chomsky with journalist David Barsamian. I can’t find the clip in question but the gist of it was that Chomsky was saying that most people in academia and research these days, professors, researchers, scientists, are in fact professional liars, they’re actually trained to be as such. At the time, I didn’t and couldn’t understand what he was saying given that the way academia works is that research papers are submitted for publication for respected journals and usually have to go through a rigorous process of peer-review and questioning, which is usually meant to flush out any inconsistencies prior to publication.

It is only recently I’ve come to understand  that truth has a relatively insignificant value in public intellectual life, in academic life, in literary life. Ideology matters much more. Personal comfort matters more. Careerism matters more.  As long as you can prove things in theory and on paper, you’re golden but never mind how those theories may play out in the real world or who it may hurt or what kind of havoc it can create it its wake once they are put into practice. Economists in particular  use a word, “externalities” in their models to account and justify some of these unforeseen damages but yet they do fuck-all about it just as long as they can get those additional letters behind their name, get a cushy job in academia or consulting and watch the numbers increase in their bank account and train other students to think and act like them, preferably using their own research and ideas to buffer up their own legacy.

This is really encapsulated in Julien Benda’s book, “The Treason of the Intellectuals”, which is based in this binary notion that there are two competing sets of values in the world: fame and fortune on the one side, truth and justice on the other side. The gist of Benda’s book is, the more committed you are to truth and justice, the less you’re going to see of fame and fortune and the more committed you are to fame and fortune, the less you will see of truth and justice.

Sometimes you will see those with fame and fortune try to pursue truth and justice to devastating effect and they end up being blacklisted like babe-alicious actor and activist Viggo Mortensen.

King Aragorn has become a silver fox. All this and a conscience too (Le sigh). Mortensen went on the Charlie Rose Show once with a T-shirt emblazoned with “No Blood for Oil” – afterwards, his mainstream Hollywood career stalled with the exception of working with visionary director David Cronenberg.

Other times, it just comes off as disingenuous, fake and trite like Princess Gwyneth Paltrow’s recent effort to feed her family on $29 a week on a food stamp challenge… and threw in the towel after 4 days. It would seem to me you’re better off pursuing truth and justice and in the course of doing so, you may end up with the fame and fortune later on…but there is no guarantee of that either.

Gwynnie-poo’s $29 haul which was supposed to feed her family for a week. Do you really need 7 limes?

I remember in the early 1990s, you could only get Chomsky books via special order from his publisher Black Rose Books at anarchist bookshops. Nowadays, there are whole shelves devoted to his titles in mainstream bookshops and people like Radiohead have his books on their tour buses. It’s been interesting to watch the pendulum shift.

Yeah, I get that “orange is the new black” but seriously, you should be wearing orange in a prison Hillary, not as a pantsuit.

I see this dichotomy now over, and over and over again in practically every sphere of modern-day life. Whether it is politicians with checkered pasts making bids for leadership like Hillary Clinton, shady but highly influential academics (and their lesser-known lackeys) with very specific agendas like White Anglo-Saxon financial and militaristic supremacy at all costs or yoga celebrities who are suddenly doing a 180 degree turn to be more “diversity-sensitive” when they themselves first perpetuated those very unattainable models of beauty and fitness and body image acceptance in the first place which now need to be dismantled completely in certain cases.

Not a lot of women will ever have a body and ability like this, with yoga or not.

(I’m talking to you Kathryn Budig – you don’t go from modeling toeSox butt-naked as a white, thin, super-bendy blonde California woman to suddenly being the champion of  “loving your body” and “diversity” for people who are anything but white, thin, super-bendy blonde and from California. That’s almost as bad as when Christopher Hitchens went from Noam Chomsky to George W. Bush  in the course of one day during 9-11. You only jump ship like that if you’re already looking for an “out” or if you’re an ideological opportunist to begin with and wanting to join a certain bandwagon because it is popular or lucrative.)

The astrological climate suggests that this is going to be a relatively calm, drama-free spring and summer. Usually when things are calm and easy, people usually get a bit lax and put their guards down. With all these upcoming elections in the US, Canada and the UK, in fact I would argue it might even be advisable to strengthen them up a bit. I think most politicians are full of rot anyway but I can’t shake this feeling that many of us are going to be asked in one form or another, in our own lives, what we personally stand for and value. Is it truth and justice (which will be the hard road) or the easier route of fame and fortune?

Your call, folks.

The New Radicals?

(Note: This post touches on a sensitive and insanely personal topic and I won’t be surprised if I lose some readers. No direct offense is intended in any way, shape or form to any group and for anyone who takes any offense, it is completely unintended so apologies in advance.  This is just intended to be food for thought and discussion.)

This has sort of been buzzing on my mind in recent weeks. XOJane and Salon have recently been putting out articles around asexuals (or “Aces” as they are known as within their own community) and demi-sexuals. One read-through in the comments sections both at the original site and at Facebook and it’s enough to see how vitriolic the reactions have been to these “newly designated” sexual orientations and why it bothers so many people

I think many people often forget that sexuality, like a lot of other things in life,  runs along a spectrum of being and strength and somehow think because they have urges and needs which run, at say 100 degrees, that everyone else automatically has the same urges and needs which also run at 100 degrees when in fact some people run at 5 degrees (and that’s their normal, and would probably veer towards asexuality) while others run at 175 degrees (and that’s *their* normal, and would probably veer towards hyper-sexuality). This could be equally applicable to heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals or transsexuals. Big deal, right?

All sorts of degrees in between.

Surprisingly, what it showed me more than anything else is that

1) There are way too many people in this world who automatically assume that everyone else on Earth want and need the exact same things and to the same degree as they do. Which just isn’t true.

2) For some reason, other people’s sexuality really seems to push people’s personal buttons. I’m talking serious projection of one’s own issues without even knowing anything about that other person.

Just going back to the topic of asexuals and demi-sexuals in general, I think on a spiritual level, there’s something very, very interesting going on here. Like I had written earlier, there’s a spectrum of being. Some Aces simply don’t feel ‘it”. I mean no urges to have sexual relations with anyone but they still want to feel loved by someone and prefer just cuddling , holding hands and talking and feel they can be close to someone by really understanding them on an emotional level. For them that’s true intimacy.

They aren’t traumatized or “damaged”, they don’t hate sex or people who want to have sex. They themselves just don’t feel the want or urge to be sexual.

Some Aces, who are demi-sexual on the other hand do have those urges to be sexual with someone but only under very strict and extremely particular conditions. You can place a picture of the most beautiful woman on Earth or the most handsome man in front of them and there is literally no reaction. Yet, they can only feel sexual if they have a deep emotional or spiritual bond with someone first and foremost. The culture of random sex, one-night stands and Tinder hook-ups just doesn’t work for them even if they tried and wanted to. The body just doesn’t respond to just anyone.

There’s some speculation that people with slight forms of autism and Asperger’s Syndrome seem to be more prone towards asexuality but that’s still on the speculative side of things for now. From a scientific point of view, we just don’t know and like Lady Gaga sings, maybe they’re just born that way and that’s that.

Spiritually, I think it’s a Uranian seed from tomorrow.

Child with progeria.

I remember reading Linda Goodman’s book “Star Signs” and in it she talked about the very rare, accelerated-aging disease, namely Progeria. Children who are literally born old and accelerate into old age as they grow up. They usually don’t live a very long time, and like senior citizens have a slew of similar health issues, like heart disease, cancer, liver spots etc.Yet despite their old appearance, they still act like children, full of smiles and innocence and they stay that way until the end of their short lives. In Goodman’s opinion, these are special souls who incarnated to symbolically show us that things like age and time are ultimately illusions, part of the greater illusion of Maya.

Likewise, I think what some asexuals (not all) are symbolically demonstrating is that there is a higher octave of love out there, one not based on physicality at all but rather on pure, true love, sympathy and understanding between connected souls, which in some ways can be deeper, more satisfying and more lasting than any earth-shattering, mind-numbing  orgasm can induce even under the best of conditions.  It’s an idea which can be hard to wrap your head around in a culture and world which is as soaked with instant gratification, random, unfeeling sex and internet pornography as ours is. But it’s still out there and it is possible.

On another note, I think religions and sects which enforce celibacy among their clergy, like the Catholic Church, lost the plot completely. I think in hindsight, had they understood different types of sexuality more, they should have only encouraged and accepted those persons who had very low to non-existent sex drives to begin with who had a true calling for a more contemplative and spiritual life to join their ranks. Instead they did it backwards and enforced something on persons who were incapable of deadening their own sex drives with truly horrific and disastrous results. The pedophile and sex scandals which have rocked various churches over the past 20 years only show that up more than anything else.

The Vatican made a huge, huge mistake with respect to understanding how the different types of human sexuality work and instead fell under dogma, never mid if it was unsuitable for some people.

Now before anyone decides to jump on me, I just want to say and make it very clear that I’m not saying that we all suddenly need to become asexual to understand love or that only Aces understand love and no one else does. All I’m saying is that there seems to be a different way of being which  is finally being explained properly and it might be worth looking at it to see what we can understand from it.

It’s just a thought.

The Ides of March a-cometh (but you can hop over them as well!) – March 2015 Astrology

The Death of Caesar (1798) by Vincenzo Camuccini

Carl Boudreau posted his thoughts on March 2015 yesterday over on FaceBook and it caused quite a tizzy among some readers who automatically jumped the gun and read it in the negative. But really, it’s not all bad. Read on.

————–

Seeming Cause for Grave Concern

There is an exact Uranus/Pluto square on March 16th. Uranus and Pluto will both be direct during the exact square. This strengthens and sharpens its explosive, disruptive potential.
The negative potential of this square is further aggravated by the effects of Mars conjunct Uranus and square Pluto. Both will be exact on the 11th, a few days before the Uranus/Pluto square on the 16th (New York Time). This powerful and harsh set of aspects suggests a sharp peak in abrasive rhetoric, repressive politics, confrontation, and, brutal and violent aggression. Realistically, we do have to expect some disturbing events in March. Political and economic pressures will come to a head. On the individual level, health and employment issues, domestic and legal issues will come to a head.
It seems to get even worse. There is a total solar eclipse on March 20th, the Vernal Equinox, and a total lunar eclipse on April 4th.
These eclipses can trigger long-pending disasters or release destructive pressure that has been building unnoticed in the background of structural integrity has been compromised over a period of time. That is why, for example, bridges suddenly collapse or pipes rupture….On the individual level, employment, health or domestic issues can reach crisis levels.

Protective Coloration
The Mars/Uranus conjunction and the Mars/Pluto square on the 11th will, indeed, make the last Uranus/Pluto square on the 16th seem worse than it is. Don’t be fooled….In reality, all it will do is set up those still committed to a dark and negative outcome for a fall as we head toward two total eclipses in a row.

The eclipses are not the universally, uniformly dark omens some might think. Eclipses can bring important issues to a head, ending costly debate and controversy. They can bring answers to longstanding questions and do all of the above in our favor. Eclipses can also remove unrealistic possibilities from consideration, leaving us to devote our energies to more realistic options.

Eclipses might not always resolve issues to our complete satisfaction. But by closing out old business, eclipses create fresh starting points, allowing us to move forward less heavily encumbered by the past.

The upcoming eclipses deepen the sense of uncertainty and foreboding surrounding these outcomes…… Going into March, we could be looking at defeat. Going into April, we could be looking at victory, or at least an agreeable compromise.

We are now moving into an energetic set up that favors the kind of inner changes and soul searching that can fundamentally change the social, economic and political dynamic.

Do not allow a few admittedly hard and potentially destructive aspects convince you to abandon hope or to drop your plans for the future.

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The Ides of March have historically been linked with the assassination of Julius Caesar which marked the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire. The former was participatory, elected and democratic (as much as it could be I guess, for the ancient world). The latter, fascistic, driven by ego and the cult of personality. In general, it heralded a time of uncertainty, change, confusion, unfettered expansionist imperialism and of course war. In many ways it does not sound all that different from the world we live in today.

I would also argue that there is absolutely nothing to say that there could be a “reverse” Ides of March, where the fascistic and unilateral can reverse itself to become pluralistic and participatory OR the seemingly fascistic and unilateral ends up benefitting us all.

Map of the proposed XL Key Pipeline.

A few examples automatically come to mind. President Obama recently vetoed the XL Keystone Pipeline project. Of course American Republicans and right-wing Albertans who are in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet (Harper is a native Albertan and has rewarded his lackey friends in the tar sands and oil businesses handsomely) who were pushing the XL Pipeline project to Washington lobbyists have gone apeshit. Meanwhile First Nation’s groups and environmentalists are rejoicing. No one, besides those in the oil industry wanted the XL pipeline project to happen. The people have spoken.

You can put this pipe, you-know-where, Mr. Harper!

Another thing, the FCC has deemed that the internet is staying free and open and that it is far too important for telecom companies (who are under the control of the NSA incidentally…) to privatize and look after it’s security. Net neutrality has won. Again the people have spoken.

Not gonna happen now, Baby!

What also needs to be pointed out is that these things also did not happen by themselves. Activists, bloggers, journalists, researchers, just basic concerned citizens have been working their asses off for years to make sure their concerns about these two topics have been heard. They didn’t stay at home or talk about it over dinner with a friend or two like some limousine liberals do. They did something, anything. Sometimes you can work yourself to your bone for years and have nothing to show for it and then one day, something shows up for all the effort you put in. The point being, the universe works as a pendulum and sometimes it works against you and at other times, in your favour. It’s up to you to read the ocean and decide which wave you’re going to surf.

The dark night of the soul which started for many, many people, myself included, back in 2008 due to a series of difficult astrological configurations which are setting off some very deep energies, far below the surface looks like it is coming to an end. All I can say is hang in there, keep holding on to the raft because the island is about to appear on the horizon. I’m personally in complete agreement with both Carl and Steve Judd (his global forecast is below) – this is a time to look after yourself.

Make sure everything is A-OK before the real change happens. Catch problems before they happen. Check the pipes and the plumbing in your home. Change the batteries in your home fire detector. Go for a lymphatic drainage massage. Get your annual medical check-up. Get your eyes checked. Book a few sessions of acupuncture. If you’re a lady, go for your annual gynecological exam. Get your teeth cleaned and checked up on. If there is a demonstration for an issue you are passionate about, just show up, sign a petition, whether it’s about stopping the installation of smart meters in your neighbourhood, stop the continued poaching of endangered rhinos for Vietnamese millionaires,  funding an animal shelter or rehabilitating stray dogs. Just pick something YOU care about.

Abby Martin of RT fame, has just ended her run at the wildly popular show she hosted “Breaking the Set”.  I suspect many guys liked watching her because let’s face it, she is pretty hot. I like her immensely because she is strong, smart, articulate and passionate and did a kick-ass job interviewing people and presenting her point of view on a host of “controversial” issues that the stupid mainstream media would never touch with a ten foot pole. If I were a journalist, she is exactly who I would like to be like.

Watch her closing video and pay close attention to her message.

It says it all.