Thursday, September 27, 2012

In Loss, the Beauty Remains

These full moons - do they seem to come around before you're expecting? Are you having too much fun? I welcome the fullness, since I can't get enough of the 'revealing'. Yes, madness comes with the territory, and it's maybe even the major necessary element of revelation, in this age anyway. Mad dogs and psychopathic self-important morons in the noon day sun, on the world stage and in a neighborhood near you. And on every channel 24/7 for the foreseeable future.  Cartoons for the terminally deluded streaming from the UN.

It's all mitigated on an astonishing level too, by the beauty and sanity of Gaia's natural animal body and the empathic, loving unity within today's surviving sober tribes. At 7000 ft. we're getting the brilliant golden splashes of aspens, etc everywhere. At farmers markets and harvest celebrations the mood is commitment to keep on keepin on in anticipation of an even more brutal winter. We refuse to succumb to the programmed, engineered despair designed to capture our whole awareness. 

In my world, we are also being tasked with the celebration and memorial for the life of our great bhakta singer and drummer bro who last week took an early leave (6 years younger than me). It has shocked our drumming world around the planet. He and I have been guru-bhais on two levels, at least (Ud. Zakir Hussain), and collaborated many times, mutually inspiring the other to the max. I drummed for his daughter in dance classes and performances in the 90s, and worked for his wife's company for a few years since 2001. Those kinds of leavings tend to have various magical consequences following, and they are still going on. Not easy, but undeniably real. I guess it's a tribal thing, based on love of beauty and surrender. 

There's been some strange energies coming at me at various points recently, and especially strange since these have occurred while I have been in deep practice. Once, playing for many people last week at a retreat on the mountain with Sufi and Hindu singers, a large woman came on stage and was reaching for one of my drums in the middle of a piece. I said firmly "No!", and she launched into a tirade about how I didn't have any "love", or how "unloving", or something or other...hmmm. A few days later, while in the midst of a deep session in the temple, after our brother's passing, we were rocking it with the posse and a great Indian woman drummer from our sister-temple in India. Another psycho-queen grabbed an unused drum and started totally fucking the vibe up at a loud volume. I politely asked her to please lay out, and she also went ballistic and chaos ensued in the room. Later I had dirt thrown at me and more angry words outside. This will be dealt with, since we're in a lead-up to a big annual feast as well as the memorial, and I have been designated 'dictator' of the music and instruments by the staff and board (heh - they're finally waking up!), and there are 'security' personnel. I'm just not sure why I'm attracting this kind of shit. It comes with the territory as a performer, and it's happened occasionally over the years, so it's not new, but...why now? Full moon? A new level of dementedness reached in the Kali yug? My own Saturn square aspect? 
Maybe it's just a further revealing of the appalling ignorance of 'merkins toward anything to do with traditions and respect. Fuck if I know.

I thought I might write today about more of the political and religious weirdness happening around this season, but I guess I'm just not in the mood. John Lash has some interesting things to say lately (if you can take his weirdnesses), which includes what he calls "the great bulwark of the archontic religious lie: master race theory". Geez, I just have no use for 'religion' as it is understood and practiced by most people. And I'm just so tired of being sick and tired of talking about it. Heh, there's even a movie coming out based on the book Caesar's Messiah (trailer on YouTube). That should stir the pot some. Bring it on!

I'm praying for the Montana wolves, on whom open-season may start in 3 days, if lawsuits fail. Take a look at THIS ARTICLE on a couple who lived in a tent for 6 YEARS with the wolf tribe. Extraordinary photos and story. 

I did want to mention that I read something really wacked on a site (NIO) which I had previously included in my blog list. I wrote a note to Dr. Steve Best, the animal-lib author, lecturer and activist, and he told me he now considers NIO organization as completely insane, and has severed all ties. I agree with that assessment, and have removed my link. It is sad that all collectivities of humans, including those working for sentient-being liberation, somehow manage to mostly get infiltrated and taken over by the unhinged.

This is a little video project I put up yesterday. It is somewhat different from my usual, but have a look. As always, the sound quality is better with headphones or good speaker system. 
Das Avatar  



  

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

One Step At A Time

HAPPY GANESH CHATURTHI!!!!!

I am not looking for solutions to the crashed computer problem now. It is being handled. I will just have to push back projects for about a week more. At that time I hope to recover my data and continue online teaching and work soon after. In the meantime I'm typing on a loaner, can keep connected with friends, current on events and creative outputs of the many cyber-teachers and love tribe. Tending more to what's presented in front of me also.
I am deeply appreciative for the support, help, and advice of many readers and friends. This minor temporal, and temporary, inconvenience has already provided many lessons. There is more present-focused interaction with both humans and animals. An awareness of my own unhealthy self-programmed false 'need' to produce on an artificial schedule. There are other revelations to be shared at another time.

But I'll probably eventually resume ranting about the undeniably unacceptable, and the astonishingly beautiful examples of behaviors continuously presented by life in the Kali yuga. Hopefully the beauty will far outweigh the separating and isolating ugliness, as it actually tends to do in our private worlds. There is a lot of grace flowing to some of us even while we abhor the atrocities done to others. I don't know why that is, but I am bearing witness to it. I have no philosophical or spiritual 'box' to contain an answer or a cosmology to explain authoritatively what we are all experiencing with eyes wide open, but I revel in, and live for, the insights, compassion and sharing that gets activated and moved in this medium.

Love to all
-bholanath  
   ps - 19th September is Bom Shankar Bholenath Day (grin)

Monday, September 10, 2012

The Goddess and the Sixth Extinction

From his reading and research of the Gnostic/Telestai texts, John Lash (metahistory.org) puts forward the proposition that the goddess Sophia/Gaia attempted, as a divine experiment, to introduce or bring to manifestation the anthropos - archetype of man - nine times previous to this creation. Each of the nine cases resulted in self-destruction of the species, and possibly the planetary environment-matrix (including accompanying species) in which they were imbedded. 
Strangely [coincidence-theory!], this corresponds to the Hindu (Vaishnava) cosmology of 9 previous worlds threatened with (self/demonic)-destruction, and 'saved/preserved' by an entity called an 'avatar'. In both systems, our world is the 10th creation, and the Hindus await the coming Kalki avatar. The gnostic story is quite different, however.

Lash, of course, considers the Earth to be a living, conscious, sentient being - our Planetary Animal Mother, and is appalled at the predominant references in our contemporary languages to a 'dead rock floating in space'. My own direct experiences and studies tend to agree with that assessment. As far as both the Gnostic and Hindu stories go, I have to say, still, I don't know shit. But I'm open to these facets of our mysterious creation, being that humans know but a miniscule portion of the living world surrounding us, let alone the true history of this world. Vedic and aboriginal oral histories and natural sciences are about the best we got to go on, nevertheless.

I'm actually writing this because many will not check Lash's latest posts, or find them hard to follow (with all the digressions). They are HERE. And because he has posed a question, perhaps not for answering but for examination, which I find both interesting and possibly crucial. I will get back to that after a digression. 

An article published in the British Independent, titled Animal Extinction - The Greatest Threat to Mankind states the following: "We now understand that the majority of life on Earth has never been - and will never be - known to us. In a staggering forecast, [biologist Edward] Wilson predicts that our present course will lead to the extinction of half of all plant and animal species by 2100." 
"A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that seven in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming; and that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by almost everyone outside science." 
Oh, hey, it's probably just another one of those commie pinko Illuminati disinfo psy-ops, like anthropogenic climate change, overpopulation, vegetarianism, imagined chemtrails, imagined rapes, psychopathy, false memories, and the like...go back to choosing your favorite political party/candidate (and don't forget to vote). 
"All these disappearing species are part of a fragile membrane of organisms wrapped around the Earth so thinly, writes Wilson, that it 'cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered'. We owe everything to this membrane of life. Literally everything. The air we breathe. The food we eat. The materials of our homes, clothes, books, computers, medicines. Goods and services that we can't even imagine we'll someday need will come from species we have yet to identify....The living membrane we so recklessly destroy is existence itself."

As we daily read the wildlife/biodiversity blogs, we see who the politicians and 'outdoorsmen' are making war on, with every bit of determination as the blood-for-oil freaks. 
"...the big, scary animals that frightened us in childhood, and still do, are the fierce guardians of biodiversity. Without wolves, wolverines, grizzlies, black bears, mountain lions and jaguars, wild populations shift toward the herbivores, who proceed to eat plants into extinction, taking birds, bees, reptiles, amphibians and rodents with them. A tenet of ecology states that the world is green because carnivores eat herbivores. Yet the big carnivores continue to die out because we fear and hunt them and because they need more room than we preserve and connect. Male wolverines, for instance, can possess home ranges of 600 sq miles. Translated, Greater London would have room for only one."
Re: this "6th Great Extinction" - "an analysis published in Nature showed that it takes 10 million years before biological diversity even begins to approach what existed before a die-off". 
Factoids: The World Conservation Union's Red List is a database measuring the global status of Earth's 1.5 million scientifically named species.  Of the 40,168 species that the 10,000 scientists in the World Conservation Union have assessed, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, one in three amphibians, one in three conifers and other gymnosperms are at risk of extinction. The peril faced by other classes of organisms is less thoroughly analysed, but fully 40 per cent of the examined species of planet earth are in danger, including perhaps 51 per cent of reptiles, 52 per cent of insects, and 73 per cent of flowering plants.

I know that's unquestionably too much information, especially before turning in for the night (or before breakfast). But I have lately been reflecting deeply on two things. One, the depth of obliviousness of the nature of our human-animalness, and, two, how inconceivably different/other is each species (and, equally, each individual of a species). Even with all the new 'scientific' papers emerging about animal sentience and emotionality, we (as a species) are light years away from having a clue about the reality of the inner lives of 'the others'. They are like inhabitants of different planets to us at this point in time, and we have no agreed-upon facility or technology to communicate. The point of this that we are f**king ANIMALS, for f**ks sake! So, it could not possibly be that this has always been the case in our past. I know this by long-term observing of various wild and domestic animals, and their interactions both within and without their species. And I also trust the word of indigenous historians and griots.

Back to the Lash question/examination. The story goes that Sophia, with the 10th attempt, (unintentionally?) transformed into the material body of Gaia herself, which was a different feature this time around. In any case, the intention was to mitigate, or prevent, the self-destructive tendency of evil/Wetiko-disease to grow to predominate over the peace-loving, empathetic, natural-balancing qualities of the embodied anthropos - the humans. The way this was envisioned to work was to be through the intimate, conscious interactions with the other species. So Lash is asking for reflection on the question/idea of WHY this didn't come about. What went 'wrong'? I guess, in other words, what happened to effect the disconnect from the rest of the animal nations, and when, where? This, I think, is the essence of what Lash is calling the ongoing, necessary "divine correction" that we are called upon to participate in. How can we access that crucial piece which surely is in our DNA?

There are other discussions in those "navigator briefings", including what's termed "moral anarchy" - 'anarchy' being defined as 'without-Archons' - that made me grin. But that and other interesting subjects can be explored if one is interested on the website.

Here's maybe something relevant, and ridiculously cute:
Belarus Soldier and Squirrel       

Ok, while I'm doing 'cute', check this photo taken by one of Visible's readers -

Not sure if I posted this before. I think not, though I have posted other vids of Abida Parveen. This one is worth seeing, both for the exquisite music, but especially for the footage of the audience. They are Pakistani humans of all ages showing up in the hundreds to hear this magnificent spiritual music/poetry. They are another group we are supposed to hate and fear. See what you think. 
I Saw My Beloved in All I Saw    
The link has the lyrics in English.