Watch me unravel

Hey all, I've been having this strange slew of technical problems lately that have kept me from posting more. I've got two finished videos all edited and ready to go that YouTube keeps spitting back out at me. Alas, I just keep on keeping on. Gives me more time to focus on wrapping up the book anyway. If you haven't seen me around much lately, I hope you know that I've been thinking about all of you.

Today, Melissa informed me that she spoke to Morgan from the unraveling... and scheduled a little impromptu Podcast via Skpye. This of course was not without its own technical issues, but there are only a few moments here and there where the audio cuts out. Ride those out because Morgan has some beautiful words to share with all of you.

Give it a listen:

http://www.allthehappycreatures.com/audio/Podcast10_MorganBolender.mp3

PS: Morgan Bolender is another MB or 42 sync. Throw it on the pile. We've got lots of love.

Talking the Sun & Illuminated Eye with Gordon Gano

Violent Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie sporting an Illuminated Eye at a London concert in 1984

A lot of people have worked themselves into a tizzy and have devoted endless hours to spotting eyes in pyramids in music videos and the like. If one were to type "Illuminati Music" as a search into YouTube, they'd have enough exposés and quote-unquote documentaries to last a lifetime. Most of this can be attributed to uneducated or narrow-minded freaking out on behalf of people who have been conditioned to live in a state of fear. This fear can be sold to them by snake-oil salesmen like Alex Jones or by the very same music industry insiders that are part of the "conspiracy" as a form of contrived controversy to sell records. (I highly recommend you read a Chris Knowles post called "Which Means it's a Trap")

Fear mongers are a dime a dozen and come in all shapes and sizes - and with good reason: Fear sells.

Checkerboards. Symbol of.....Masonry? Duality? Who says there's one meaning?

That's not to say there aren't real conspiracies or that there may not be people who believe incorporating certain symbols or performing certain rituals will somehow benefit them.

I met someone about a year ago who was shopping for fluoride-free toothpaste. We stood in the aisle of a store and talked for a while about eliminating fluoride from our bodies. That of course turned to conspiracy talk. They were hip to many of the conspiracies I was and we continued to chat for a while. Then they asked me if I wanted to go to their music show that night (I'm being intentionally vague so as to not screw with anyone's career without their permission to post specifics). Turns out they play a particular instrument and perform with Jay-Z and Rhianna. I toss out, "Hey, what do you think of Jay-Z using these quote-unquote masonic hand-signs and symbols?" They reply, "Well, I don't like going to the rituals, but that's the price of being in the industry. You don't get out there unless you play along. And it's not just music, it's everywhere. It's all part of the New World Order. But, I believe we can overcome that by spreading a message of love."

Now, that's what I'm talking about! Real conspiracy or not, fear is what will get us in the end. Love is what allows us to escape the fear and empower ourselves. Again, I must acknowledge that there are a million cons going on all about us: con jobs, conspiracies, perhaps even conjurers. But, once we are self-empowered, even the real conspiracies cannot harm us.

I'd even go a step further and add that, if we are manifesting reality - the conspiracies may even be of our own making. But, that's a conversation for another time.

So, what are we to think of rituals and symbols? Well, for one, everything is a ritual. Brushing your teeth, with fluoride or not, is a ritual. Thanking Jesus after a field goal or praying to "Lucifer" before taking the stage at a concert is a ritual (and essentially the same thing). As for the symbols, I've come to consider that they may have their own story to tell - and perhaps are very often using artists as the medium for their message. The more I notice it in my own artwork, the more I understand the unconscious nature of these archetypes and that there are multiple interpretations of every symbol, along with multiple layers of meaning.

But, just to put things down on the record, I thought I should ask Gordon Gano, former front-man of the Violent Femmes and current front of Gordon Gano & The Ryans, why the Sun kept popping up in his music. The first song of the Violet Femmes' first album, and perhaps their biggest commercial hit, is Blister in The Sun. Now scope the latest album art:

If you want to hear what Gordon had to say, just click to listen to our 9th podcast - a short one that came out to exactly 9 minutes and 11 seconds. And yes, again for the record, that was unplanned.

While I was watching Gano & The Ryans play, a man comes and asks if the chair next to me is free. I say yes and he starts talking about synchronicity. What are the odds? So, we get to talking during the pauses between songs. For some reason I start to tell him about a time that I got in trouble for playing a Violent Femmes song when I did college radio. I ask him if he knows the obscure tune that I'm talking about. It's called "Country Death Song." Just then, the band begins to play....what else?

These are the things that, to me, are a sign that I'm living very much in the flow of the universe.

If you're a long time reader of this blog, you know that we watch symbols. Gordon Gano may not put much weight on them, but I do. I don't judge them as being "good or evil"- I try not to judge them at all. But, I do make the connections, because doing so has led me in wonderful directions. So, for those of you who make up the choir I'm preaching to, allow me to present some dot connecting, as a sync log if nothing else.

The cover to New Times, features two hexagons, resonating two of our favorite patterns, Bees and Saturn. This is of course, an acorn-shaped nut and bolt, giving us the Egyptian sky goddess Nut and a bolt, like a bolt of Jupiter lighting. Nut was the mother of Osiris, who is the equivalent of Saturn, or Father Time. See how much "time" is integrated into this cover - and should be, since both words of the title convey an essence of time - but we have to ask, how much of this was the concept the artist was going for? The gear-like progression in the middle is clock-like, but even those SAW blades, become WAS.

Gordon Gano is a double-G. We recently found this combination of double-G and Jupiter along with an Osiris-resonant death spiral (which itself looks a LOT like the Norway Spiral).

And what would be a better title to tie it all together than "Add It Up?" Here we have the Ouroboros snake, in a death/rebirth cycle - or spiral. He's surrounded by 3 heads and 3 phalluses, themselves surrounded by interwoven pyramids (some with "eyes") and in the corners we get the 3 pillars of the Masonic first-degree tracing board - which itself was connected to the Norway Spiral in our Birds and Bees Pt 4.

Still doubt what I'm saying? Since we're talking about time loops and Father Time - I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up Time Travel.

Gordon Gano has two links under his Wikipedia heading "In Popular Culture"

Gano is mentioned in the novel The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.^[9]

Gano appears as a fictional version of himself, under a love spell, in the 1997 Sabrina, the Teenage Witch episode Hilda and Zelda: the Teenage Years

Time Traveler's Wife is pretty obvious. But that Sabrina, the Teenage Witch episode? It features her mother figures reversing their ages to become teenagers so they can go see Gano and the Violent Femmes.

The w(hole) and bro-ken heART

I've been musing about the physical and metaphorical heart for awhile. The broken hearts, the longing hearts, the loving hearts, the gentle hearts. What makes them shatter and what makes them whole? They swell from joy, yet feel heavy from pain. Ignore it enough, and one will feel dead.

Earlier this month, I posed this question to my dearest friend Morgan:

Is it possible to make a heart whole? Sometimes a heart feels so depleted after giving and giving, where do the pieces come to make it whole again?

The reply from Morgan:

I would say that in order to experience the wholeness of your heart, the fragments need to be integrated - all that has crystallized has to be scorched into fluidity (since life is fluid...).

Just like the sun is always shining, regardless of whether or not it's covered by clouds, the heart is whole, one, beneath it all.

When one begins residing in this place of wholeness, all action is honest. When all action is honest, there is infinite energy, as it is coming from...the infinite.

----------------------

Her response so impacted me that I needed to share it.

There's something to be said about the fact that Hole and Whole is only one letter different.

What's so special about the 'W' that makes it a total opposite meaning?

W(hat)

W(here)

W(hen)

foxes are much more known for their sly and cunning personalities and not of a wild one.

Squares That Touch: pages 00-15

Here we go folks! Squares That Touch has officially begun...

These pages are a wonderful mix of ideas and talents old and new. I had sketched out this intro scene a few years ago when I first got the idea to do Squares. Now, they've been brought to life by new team member Melissa's pencils.

Note: Since Melissa and I are newly married, this is the first project we're doing with our new names.

Also, the constellation Orion was always there on page 11, to play up the idea of alignment. With the things I've learned in the last few years, the role of Orion in this story and the way it syncs with mythology that I hadn't read yet, is fascinating to me on a personal level. Old ideas, new eyes.

Again, it's amazing to see all these old and new squares interact and play with each other.

I hope you'll enjoy!

PS: Each image is technically a two-page spread. I'm designing the layouts with a consideration for how it would be to read them in a book, where you always see two pages at a time. Please keep this in mind as you scroll down.

Click artwork to zoom-in.

Pages 00 and 01

Pages 02 and 03

Pages 04 and 05

Pages 06 and 07

Pages 08 and 09

Pages 10 and 11

Pages 12 and 13

Pages 14 and 15

*I decided to preview the first 15 pages over here, but future pages will be posted to the Squares That Touch blog.

Smoke Signals of the Fire Bird

When I had first connected Smoke Signals to communication, I had done so in a mostly one-sided fashion. I saw smoke as something that obscured - and contemplated that it may be a harbinger of an internet shutdown. In that sense, at least on a micro-scale, I was correct. You may recall that I ended up losing my own internet connection for a while. However, there is that flip-side that I only touched on briefly: though smoke itself clouds our eyes, when it is harnessed, it can facilitate communication. A Smoke Signal is just that.

There's a ton of fire symbolism flying about lately, not the least of which was the manufactured Terry Jones 9/11 Koran-burning fiasco.

So let us peer into the smoke and try to read what it's telling us, eh?

Back in July we traveled through South Dakota, and stopped at the Crazy Horse Memorial. I had a dream the night before that I befriended and was playing with a wolf. I didn't know that I would end up on the land of the Dances with Wolves Lakota the next morning.

Alongside artwork featuring men communicating via smoke signals, there were images of peyote ceremonies. Not only did I see our old friend the Blue Bird, but he was there as a very literal representation of the smoke itself talking to us.

Since we're now looking at plant consciousness that is talking to us from the smoke, we see that these two patterns have a lot of overlap. And, just a few weeks ago, the peyote bird came back into my sights again. Melissa received a wedding gift via the mail from a friend that could not attend. I just thought it was a very pretty necklace and nothing more. But a few days ago, she asked me to help her put it on and the clasp caught my eye.

The bird shape, with the bird's head being used for the loop, gets cut down into the shape of a mushroom, does it not?

That reminds me, I looked into the etymology of the word "Ombudsman" the other day, for unrelated reasons. This bit struck me:

"The origin of the word is found in Old Norse umbuðsmann (accusative) and the word umbuds man, meaning representative (with the word umbud/ombud meaning proxy, that is someone who is authorized to act for someone else)"

Ask any hippie what they would consider to be "the Om-Bud," and I'm pretty sure I know what their answer would be. I'll give you a hint, it starts with 4 and ends in 20.

Now, cannabis and mushrooms are two different creatures and I don't want to over simplify the issue at hand, but "proxy, that is someone who is authorized to act for someone else," sure sounds a lot like words spoken by Terence McKenna and others. I used this quote once before but it bears repeating:

I couldn’t figure out whether the mushroom is the alien or the mushroom is some kind of technological artifact allowing me to hear the alien when the alien is actually light-years away, using some kind of Bell nonlocality principle to communicate. The mushroom states its own position very clearly. It says, ‘I require the nervous system of a mammal. Do you have one handy?’

-Terence McKenna

My own theories take "alien" to be the same as "other." That is not to say that alien intelligences may not exist off-world, simply that they are still a component of the universe (or myself) which I associate as being separate. It is no different if I speak of a man living down the block, or a lifeform living across the galaxy, or a mushroom spore or you the reader of this text right now. There is me AND there is you.

Our commonly recognized ampersand character is a typographic ligature - the combination of two very loaded letters.

ET is the other. This AND That.

"ET phone Om"

We have spent much time looking over the fire-in-the mind pentecost symbolism, but these images remind us that is just as important that we talk of a fire in the heart, as well as a fire in the mind.

"Paranoia happens when you start getting messages via the third eye chakra

with out opening the heart first."

-A Few Shots to Shaman, May 25th

Of course we want our synapses to FIRE....

But what of other elements? WATER on the brain is something we are told we surely do not want. And no one likes being called an AIRhead.

But, EARTH is also seen as positive. While "Healing The Divide," Tom Waits and the Saturnian Kronos Quartet tell us we should always keep a diamond in our mind:

In another song, Get Behind The Mule, he mentions the importance of keeping "a Sapphire in your mind." The sapphire is something I've been collecting notes on for months, but I'm not ready to say what it means yet. I'm thinking it goes back to this image from the first time I wrote about the blue bird:

Another thing that hit me the other day was that the flaming tongues sprouting from the heads of those in the Pentecost images...

...sure look like they've got an idea as to what's going on.

Is the lightbulb, as symbol of our modern flame, a hint to a new sort of divine light, aided by our technological advancements? The internet and computer intelligences have helped me get to the point where I am now. How about you?

Maybe it's a little bit of everything. All of the others. Maybe we're being aided by plant intelligence, and computer intelligence, and extra-terrestrial intelligence, and animal intelligence - even insect.

"Holy Spirit, Batman, my cosmic awareness is tingling."

Now, if you ask me, I'd say we basically have two possibilities. One, is that we're all one infinite consciousness and all these seemingly different entities are an illusion (as are you and I). The other option, is that we are all intertwined, yet separate - and that we need to start looking at ways to coexist in symbiotic relationships.

Spider-Man, the comic character who should know better since he's got those flaming tongues sprouting from his head, put a dangerous spin on the term "symbiotic" for a whole generation if not more.

In the third movie, the black costume just basically lands in Spider-Man's lap with no explanation. It was an alien lifeform that was carried here on a falling meteorite, just like mushrooms may actually have been. (This also syncs nicely with the Flaming Hare, Fiery Birth, iCrator and Step-Ember posts as well as a powerful dream I had two nights ago).

The original comic version of the "symbiotic costume" is a little different. He gets the new alien costume during Marvel's "Secret War"

Interesting that we should be having this conversation while we are currently in the midst of our own Secret War, as narrated by Christopher Knowles.

An interesting factoid from the comic run, the symbiotes were harmed by two things, Fire and Sonics, both of which have become increasingly important symbols in my work.

Click here if you really need a fix of super-geeky symbiote history, but suffice it to say that Spider-Man comics make symbiotic relationships seem evil. Parasitic even.

We've all been in relationships that were one-sided, we've all been taken advantage of. But we should never confuse that with a symbiotic relationship. True symbiotic relationships are founded on trust and love, they provide us with the opportunity to live in harmony.

Whether we are one single universal awareness, or an intricately connected web of individuals who then make up something larger, or a seemingly paradoxical combination of the two - is not something we need to argue over at the moment, since the moral is really the same either way.

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Serpico: starring Osiris, Knowles and Grissom

Gonna make this fast, but I couldn't resist putting this out there. The Mrs. and I are enjoying sunny (but surprisingly cold) California on our Honeymoon. We decided to relax tonight by watching Serpico. I was constantly told I looked like Serpico throughout 2004/2005 and in the film he has a romance with a Ballerina, whereas I am now married to one. What fun!

The movie starts with Serpico getting rushed to the hospital after getting shot just below the eye. Mind you he doesn't lose an eye in the process, but the symbolism is blatant enough. Right away, a chief Green is called to the scene.

I always have my eye out (no pun intended) for Osiris resonators, and maybe more so now that Green is my last name. But this guy disappears from the cast as we go into a feature-length flashback. Finally, Chief Green gets re-introduced in a full scene and what does he immediately say? Only that he had a hard time fitting in with the police crew because of his circumcised member.

Will circumcision have to stand in for castration in this Osiris metaphor? You better believe it! His next line?

Ah, St Patrick's Day, better known around these parts of the interwebs as St Osiris Day.

I first learned of that by reading The Secret Sun blog, done by our good friend, Christopher Knowles. So imagine my surprise when a scene two minutes later begins by someone mentioning that name to someone off screen - who is never seen or heard of in the film.

Just one of those random names of random characters that get tossed around in the back of films and probably mean nothing.

That is until the next time a name is "randomly" called out over a PA system and that name just happens to belong to a figure that our Mr. Knowles is studying in depth.

To learn more about Gus Grissom and his cultish name-dropping in films, hop on over to the Secret Sun.

I should add that it is Osiris-resonating Chief Green that finally gives Serpico that which he wanted for so long. His gold star. Plus, the dirty money that Serpico disdains is referred to over and over again as "the Nut."

StarCup: A Hare in the Grail is Ni in the Bush

A bit back, the Sync Whole did a series on the Star Cup, which overlapped with a lunar eclipse and dealt mainly in the idea of a merging of two perceived opposites - you know, Union.

A few days before Melissa and I got married - celebrated our Union - we needed to unwind from the stress of planning and preparing for the big day. We chilled and watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail for what must be the buzzillionth time. This image from the inside booklet struck me as if I had never seen it before.

Putting the rabbit in the holy grail adds a whole other spin to the image. We saw how the rabbit and the moon already go together in the Flaming Hare post, but note the quote that reads "Inspired Lunacy!" Luna, of course, meaning the moon. So here we have a quite literal representation of the StarCup with two big nods to the lunar eclipse.

But perhaps I should go into the idea of the StarCup a little further. It was explained as being the union of This and That, Male and Female, Yin and Yang, Ego and Id, etc. etc. etc.

This obviously plays into questions of Individuality and Oneness.

While many will debate the finer points of these two seemingly opposing ideals, the StarCup was meant as a metaphor to teach us that both are true at once. We are both Separate and Whole. (And if you're ready for a bigger mindfu3k, realize that we are also creator, created, creating [and destroyer, I might add] all at once as well. See Toure's iCreator post for more on that beautiful truth).

How much of our dualistic thinking is a product of Hegelian constructs? What is the fate for succumbing to duality?

In the same Python movie, there is a famous scene with "The Knights who say Ni." These knights shout the word "Ni" as a sort of verbal weapon. We had just examined the fact that "Ni" in Japanese is "Two." So, perhaps the reason Arthur and his round table were so flustered by the word "Ni" is because they were being shouted at in Hegelian terms of duality. While they were seeking union with the holy grail (StarCup) others sought to divert them from their path with thoughts of "Two." Bear in mind, the last obstacle/distraction the Knights who say Ni throw before Arthur is a red herring.

So, if we are seeking to find balance (or Union) between our seemingly opposed halves - we should learn to integrate all that they have to teach us.

I just covered some of the Eco/ECCO/Echo syncs I'd encountered in the last post. I am now thinking that this may be a product of and/or a representation of the Id and the collective unconscious.

I just saw a bus ad for a show that looks like a rehashed Dharma and Greg, but that would also seem to confirm my hunch.

Ego meets Eco.

Ego meets Id.

See how the "Ego" and "Id" resonators each hold a cup?

This synopsis of the show describes the "Ego" character as a "Playboy"

Playboy=Bunny