Thanksgiving is the truly American holiday, celebrating the romantic history of arrival in the New World and cooperation with its inhabitants. For a Native American, the story is a much less happy one -- yet PNS commentator Jacqueline Keeler finds some occasion for hope. Keeler, a member of the Dineh (Navaho) Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux works with the American Indian Child Resource Center in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in Winds of Change, an American Indian journal.
I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving. This may surprise those people who wonder what Native Americans think of this official U.S. celebration of the survival of early arrivals in a European invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30 million native people. Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims. When I was six, my mother, a woman of the Dineh nation, told my sister and me not to sing "Land of the Pilgrim's pride" in "America the Beautiful." Our people, she said, had been here much longer and taken much better care of the land. We were to sing "Land of the Indian's pride" instead.
I was proud to sing the new lyrics in school, but I sang softly. It was enough for me to know the difference. At six, I felt I had learned something very important. As a child of a Native American family, you are part of a very select group of survivors, and I learned that my family possessed some "inside" knowledge of what really happened when those poor tired masses came to our homes. When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, they were poor and hungry -- half of them died within a few months from disease and hunger. When Squanto, a Wampanoag man, found them, they were in a pitiful state. He spoke English, having traveled to Europe, and took pity on them. Their English crops had failed. The native people fed them through the winter and taught them how to grow their food. These were not merely "friendly Indians." They had already experienced European slave traders raiding their villages for a hundred years or so, and they were wary -- but it was their way to give freely to those who had nothing. Among many of our peoples, showing that you can give without holding back is the way to earn respect. Among the Dakota, my father's people, they say, when asked to give, "Are we not Dakota and alive?" It was believed that by giving there would be enough for all -- the exact opposite of the system we live in
To the Pilgrims, and most English and European peoples, the Wampanoags were heathens, and of the Devil. They saw Squanto not as an equal but as an instrument of their God to help his chosen people, themselves.
Since that initial sharing, Native American food has spread around the world. Nearly 70 percent of all crops grown today were originally cultivated by Native American peoples. I sometimes wonder what they ate in Europe before they met us. Spaghetti without tomatoes? Meat and potatoes without potatoes? And at the "first Thanksgiving" the Wampanoags provided most of the food -- and signed a treaty granting Pilgrims the right to the land at Plymouth, the real reason for the first Thanksgiving. What did the Europeans give in return? Within 20 years European disease and treachery had decimated the Wampanoags. Most diseases then came from animals that Europeans had domesticated. Cowpox from cows led to smallpox, one of the great killers of our people, spread through gifts of blankets used by infected Europeans. Some estimate that diseases accounted for a death toll reaching 90 percent in some Native American communities.
By 1623, Mather the elder, a Pilgrim leader, was giving thanks to his God for destroying the heathen savages to make way "for a better growth," meaning his people. In stories told by the Dakota people, an evil person always keeps his or her heart in a secret place separate from the body. The hero must find that secret place and destroy the heart in order to stop the evil. I see, in the "First Thanksgiving" story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism. Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused. Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle. And the healing can begin.
Jake has been talking about JCs and the moon. The Moon was my focal point last year, and now this obsession can be see for what it was:
However, the work has still not been completed. Although the monster has been overcome, and the imprisoned soul freed, the hero still has the difficult return ahead. He or she must find the way out and should not lose the way in the labyrinth of the underworld. Insidious dangers lurk on this return route and become traps for great failed heros (191-192).
The Moon card is frequently misunderstood today because we primarily connect the moon with romantic images. But here it means darkness, night, and the deep exploration of the inner spaces [emphasis mine] (195).
As long as the hero is fascinated by the light side of his anima, the star woman, he will also remain enslaved to her dark aspect. This dark aspect has pushed itself in front of the sun here as the moon. Only when the hero recognizes that the actual goal, the sun (as a symbols[sic] of the self), lies behind this darkness, can he escape from the labyrinth, or the enchanted woods (197).
In the myths of many peoples, including the Upanishads of India, the moon is considered the gateway to the heavenly world. To the same extent that goal lies behind Saturn's threshold, the most enriching and delightful experiences that can be achieved lie behind the fear. This is why Saturnian rituals, such as fasting, silence, and aloneness, belong to all religions as the the transitional rituals that help the human being cross this threshold. . . The task here is to not lose heart, not to become discouraged by the darkness, but to follow the longing and sincerely take the path of fear with courage and trust in order to reach what is authentic behind it (199-200).
The journey through the night, diving into the depths of the unconscious, has led the hero to an enormous expansion of consciousness. The danger of losing everything at the last moment through a greedy maneuver by the ego, through betrayal of megalomania, is great (202).
In the context of these symbolic assignments, the cycle of a single lunar month has been compared, by analogy, to the term of a human lifetime, with the fifteenth night, which is of the moon become full, equated with the human adult's thirty-fifth year (in the reckoning of three-score and ten as the human norm). On that very special evening there is a moment when the rising moon, having just emerged on the horizon, is directly faced across the world, from the opposite horizon, by the setting sun. Certain months of the year and the two, at this perfectly balanced moment, are of equal light and the same size. By analogy, the confrontation has been likened to that in the midmoment of a lifetime when the light of consciousness reflected in the mind may be recognized, either suddenly or gradually, as identical with that typified metaphorically as of the sun. Whereupon, if the witness is prepared, there ensues a transfer of self-identification from the temporal, reflecting body to the sunlike, eviternal source, and one then knows oneself as consubstantial with what is of no time or place but universal and beyond death, yet incarnate in all beings everywhere and forever; so that as we again may read in the Upanishad: tat tvam asi, "though art that."
This is the realization connoted in the metaphor of the Virgin Birth, when in the mind and heart the ideal is conceived of a life lived, not for the primary economic and biological ends of survival, progeny, prosperity, and a little fun, but to a metaphysical end, intending values transcendent of historical survival (59).
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. The Surrealist painter Magritte commented on this always-present gap between words and seeing in a painting called The Key of Dreams.
The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe (7-8). . .
Today we see art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.
This difference can be illustrated in terms of what was thought of perspective. The convention of perspective, which is unique to European art and which was first established in the early Renaissance, centres everything on the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a lighthouse --only instead of light travelling outwards, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.
According to the convention of perspective there is no visual reciprocity. There is no need for God to situate himself in relation to others: he is himself the situation. The inherent contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
After the invention of the camera this contradiction gradually became apparent (16-17).
. . . Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world. The camera -- and more particularly the movie camera -- demonstrated that there was no centre.
from John Berger's: Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books, London: 1972.
I recently had to back a friend down off the wall. He was addicted to reality. I think I actually said something to the effect that one can find more "reality" in fiction--that fiction is more real than reality, and that it would be beneficial to stop watching news and start watching movies or reading literature.
Because of the dualistic nature of our "reality" and because some films are able to contain the entire macrocosm of life, our entire reality on film, i.e. Tron, Dark City, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Lost, I don't believe our world is all that "real". It is a construct with one story that we see resonating in everything.
The Big Bang? That is what my wife and I did to create life. The singularity was the ovum into which my "comet" collided brining it life.These things fused, became Isis, from one many. The one cell became an entire universe. The first cell is is. It is life, but inside my wife it was "the other". It was a parasite feeding on her. It was alien. To observe this new life was like traveling to "outer space". The equipment used to hear this alien life-form tickled one in a sci-fi sort of way. The images reminded one of shifting galaxies in space. Hopefully this "other" will be wanted and loved. One of the most insane things we do as a species is creating unwanted, unloved life. We are lazy, selfish and insane. (maya/dukkha/sin)
Where else is the "other" manifested? In the past "the other" was female, non-English (Irish, Jewish, etc.), black, Mexican, Middle Eastern(-they still very much are other), but who are these others who have recently shown their power in their choice in a new President resulting in what could be a whole new order? Something that still blows my mind, but is obviously true, is that normal America does not understand (thus condone) homosexuality. And we fear that which we don't understand. You are "the other" Michael! You are the alien that is invading our world.
I've only been "the other" a few times, and it was a usually situation I could control. There was a few places in Seattle that I could go to and be the minority, but when I wanted to leave and come back to the majority culture, I could. At a class at Seattle Central Community College, I had to eat crow for an hour a day for a quarter. The instructor held "me" (white, anglo-saxon, protestant-heritage, heterosexual) up and showed the class my privilege. I didn't think I was privileged. I didn't have any money and was working two jobs, but I was, and received all kinds of cultural benefits that I didn't acknowledge.
What I'm saying here folks, is that the best model to understand our "reality" is Literature. We are living in a construct, and "the writer" employs metaphor. The "aliens" is a concept loaded with meaning. I'm being "invaded" right now! This is the theme in my life. The things I'm reading though have to do with the brain, the mind, the self, and consciousness. Yet, the fiction I'm choosing is filled with "aliens." (What would Freud say about the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters? Is this film about literal aliens, or a man who has an affair and leaves his family?)
It really wasn't my intention to have quite so much introduction here, but oh well. I wanted to share Eckhart Tolle's take on "space" as one more response to "the aliens."
The inspiration for the title of this book came from a Bible prophecy that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history. It occurs in both the Old and the New Testament and speaks of the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of "a new heaven and a new earth." We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning of the word, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus. Earth, on the other hand, is the outer manifestation in form, which is always a reflection of the inner. Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are intrinsically connected. "A new heaven" is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and "a new earth" is its reflection in the physical realm. Since human life and human consciousness are intrinsically one with the life of the planet, as the old consciousness dissolves, there bound to be synchronistic geographic and climatic natural upheavals in many parts of the planet, some of which we are witnessing now (23).
After I spent a day thinking about literal aliens--and it really challenged me--I laid in the tub and read Joseph Campbell. He is kinda my saviour or my Obi-Wan. He rescued me from crazy town the last time, and I was in deep! If one is able to demystify the mysterious, it is difficult for "it" to be sinister. Does one automatically fear that which they don't understand? Are the symbols really sinister? What really is casting the shadow that we are perceiving as a monster? A mouse? A devil? A God?
I'll quote a bit from the book that helped me to get over my fear of the unknown, the mysterious, the sinister looking conspiracy shit that is everywhere:
In other words, it then occurred to me [JC witnessing Apollo 11 moon landing] that outer space is within us inasmuch as the laws of space are within us; outer and inner space are the same. We know, furthermore that we have actually been born from space, since it was out of primordial space that the galaxy took form, of which our life-giving sun is a member. And this earth, of whose material we are made, is a flying satellite of that sun. We are, in fact, productions of this earth. We are, as it were, its organs. Our eyes are the eyes of this earth; our knowledge is the earth's knowledge. And the earth, as we now know, is a production of space (28).
Obviously, if anything of value is to be made of them at all (and I submit that the elementary original idea must have been something of this kind), where those bodies went [Jesus, Mary and Elijah's physical ascensions to heaven] was not into outer space, but into inner space. That is to say, what is connoted by such metaphorical voyages is the possibility of a return of the mind in spirit, while still incarnate, to full knowledge of that transcendent source out of which the mystery of a given life arises into this field of time and back into which it in time dissolves. It is an old, old story in mythology: of the Alpha and Omega that is the ground of all being, to be realized as the beginning and end of this life. The imagery is necessarily physical and thus apparently of outer space. The inherent connotation is always, however, psychological and metaphysical, which is to say, of inner space (31).
There is an important little volume by the Nebraskan poet John Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, in which the prophetic boyhood vision is recounted of an old Sioux medicine man, Keeper of the Sacred Pipe of his people, who at one point declared that in imagination he had seen himself standing on the central mountain of the world, which in his view, of course, was nowhere near Jerusalem, but Harney Peak, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. And while there, "I was seeing in a sacred manner," he said, "the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all things as they must live together, like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father (33)."
Thus from the humanity of an awakened inner eye and consciousness, a vision released from the limitations of its local, tribal horizon might open to the world and even to transcendence. For, as Black Elk remarked to Neihardt when telling of this vision beheld from Hareny Peak, South Dakota, as center of the world: "But anywhere is the center of the world (34)."
Some notion of the whole, profoundly conceived, macro-micro-cosmic import of such courtly mimes my be gained from a consideration of the mathematics of the mythological and actual cycles of the calendars to which such rites were attached. For example, in the Hindu sacred epics and puranas (popular tellings of ancient lore), the number of years reckoned to the present cycle of time, the so-called Kali Yuga, is 432,000; the number reckoned to the "great cycle" (mahayuga) within which this yuga falls being 4,320,000. But then reading one day in the Icelandic Eddas, I discovered that in Othin's (Wotan's) warrior hall, Valhaoll, there were 540 doors, through each of which on the "Day of the Wolf" (that is to say, at the end of the present cycle of time), there would pass 800 divine warriors to engage the anit-gods in a battle of mutual annihilation. 800 x 540 = 432,000. And so I asked myself how it might ever have come to pass that in tenth-to-thirteenth century Iceland the same number of years were reckoned to the present cycle of time as in India (35).
The "Day of the Wolf"! Wow. Mutual annihilation. 432. And to whom do you think JC equates that number?
The mystery of the night sky, those enigmatic passages of slowly by steadily moving lights among the fixed stars, had delivered the revelation, when charted mathematically, of a cosmic order, and in response, from the depths of the human imagination, a reciprocal recognition had been evoked. A vast concept took form of the universe as a living being in the likeness of a great mother, within whose womb all the worlds, both of life and of death, had their existence. And the human body is in miniature a duplicate of that macrocosmic form. So that throughout the whole an occult harmony prevails, which it is the function of a mythology and relevant rites to make known. . . And so, indeed, in our modern Western world, when a doctor takes a patient's pulse, if the the beat is sixty a minute (432,000 in twelve hours), it is the pulse of a conditioned athlete in accord at once with his own nature and with the rhythm of the universe: the function of medicine, like that of mythology and ritual, being to keep mankind in accord with the natural order (38-39).
Meanwhile, certain spiritually significant changes have occurred in the psychophysical environment of our species. The first, of course, followed the publication, AD 1543, of Copernicus' "Six Books On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs" (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI), when the sun displace the earth at the center of God's universe; so that, wheras our eyes see the sun rise daily in the east, hang high in the heavens at noon, and go down in glory in the west, what our brains now know is nothing of the kind. With that fateful publication, the recognized idea of the earth in relation to outer space became forever separated from the daily experience of the same. An intellectual concept had refuted and displaced the nevertheless persistent sensory precept. The heliocenteric universe has never been translated into a mythology. Science and religion have therewith gone apart. And that is the case to the present hour, with the problem even compounded by our present recognition of the inconceivable magnitude of this galaxy of stars, of which our life-giving sun is a peripheral member, circling with its satellites in this single galaxy among millions within a space of incredible distances, having no fixed form or end (43).
"For all the animate and inanimate objects in this world, O Indra, are transitory, like dream. The gods on high, the mute trees and stones, are but apparitions in the fantasy. Good and evil attaching to a person are as perishable as bubbles. In the cycles of time they alternate. The wise are attached to neither (50)."
--the good guise and the bad guise? Interesting!
All the quotes from Joseph Campbell came from the chapter "Cosmology and the Mythic Imagination" from his work:
What I do is probably illegal as hell, but I think you should get this book. There is a great bit in it demystifying the symbols on the dollar bill. That little bit was enough to get me down off the conspiracy ledge a year ago. Maybe sometime I'll copy that here. If you are interested, find this book at you local library. Maybe the symbols on the dollar bill aren't evil. Maybe we just don't understand the transcendent idea that is pictured there. What I'm talking about is on page 126 of my version,
Who are the Others? And must they inherently be evil? Does Lost completely describe our predicament here on our island? I think if we were go through the mirror we would find that the others are really our shadow self that we must face, but they are so alien. . .
I think I need to talk about the "Good Guise" and the "Bad Guise".
To get there though, I need to think about the idea of The Goddess. Joseph Campbell was pretty enamored of The Goddess. My summation of his conclusions of the esoteric beliefs of various peoples is that the universe is her womb. She is the everything. He speaks very highly of her.
Recent posts at The Secret Sun and Gosporn have taken me back to "Crazy Town". Part of Life is Death, but how do we usually Celebrate?
So I saw The Da Vinci Code. It was Dan Brown's supposition that The Goddess had been subjugated by "the bad guys". In his order, the Templars = good, and The Catholic church = bad. Maybe this was the beginning of my descent into "Crazy Town". OK, bad and good. Easy enough, right? Well, no. You start poking around and eventually it seems that "the bad guys" are all on the same team. Who are the bad guys? The Church? Illuminati? The Templars? Skull and Bones? Freemasons? Republicans? Democrats? The whole U.S. Government? Just the FED? The UN?
And what exactly is the plan of "The bad guys"? One world government? Total control? Did you know that Joseph Campbell wanted a one world government as well? Because, if everyone is part of the in-group, mindless oppression becomes more difficult.
Consider our Capitol: Washington D.C.--District of Columbia.
District of Columbia (abbr.: DC or D.C.)
a federal district of the U.S., coextensive with the city of Washington, on the Potomac River with boundaries on the states of Virginia and Maryland.
district |ˈdistrikt|
noun (abbr.: distr.)
an area of a country or city, esp. one regarded as a distinct unit because of a particular characteristic : an elegant shopping district.
• a region defined for an administrative purpose : the city school district.
• ( the District) the District of Columbia; Washington, DC.
Columba |kəˈləmbə| Astronomy
a small and faint southern constellation (the Dove), near Canis Major. It is sometimes said to represent the dove that Noah sent out from the Ark.
• [as genitive ] ( Columbae |-bē|) used with a preceding letter or numeral to designate a star in this constellation : the star Beta Columbae.
ORIGIN Latin.
The Dove in Christianity is the spirit, the soul. And so, is our National Capitol a distinct region of spirit?
One of the interesting bits I picked up somewhere, probably from The Tarot and the Journey of the Hero is the idea of our world's dualism and our desire to identify with one extreme as "better". Republicans right now are "the bad guise". However, was that always the case? Is light "better" than dark? That might be a pretty stupid question to begin with. I don't know. Our current spilt is seen in Red vs. Blue. Which one are you?
Notice the V's on Sark? Do those stand for Venus? Is The Goddess OK with this warrior culture, or is this part of her subjugation? Here is some of Sark's dialog. It is pretty standard "Crazy Town", One World Government, New World Order stuff (and it is the Republicans doing it?):
Sark: [paces back and forth on the deck of his carrier as he addresses his new recruits] Greetings. The Master Control Program has chosen you to serve your system on the Game Grid. Those of you who continue to profess a belief in the Users will receive the standard substandard training that will result in your eventual elmination. Those of you who renounce this superstitious and hysterical belief will be eligible to join the Warrior Elite of the MCP. Each of you will be given an identity disc.
[Displays his own disc to the crowd]
Sark: Whatever you do or whatever you learn will be imprinted on this disc. If you lose your disc or fail to follow commands, you will be subject to immediate de-resolution. That will be all.
Can we fight "the bad guise"? Sure it seemed that the neo-cons were trying to instigate the fourth reich, but were they really? I mean, Bush is the devil? I hear this so often. He wants souls and feeds upon suffering? So then Obama is obviously one of "the good guise" The Republicans (all of them?) are the dogs of war, the wolves, but then who do they serve?
G'mork: If you come any closer, I will rip you to shreds.
G'mork: Foolish boy. Don't you know anything about Fantasia? It's the world of human fantasy. Every part, every creature of it, is a piece of the dreams and hopes of mankind. Therefore, it has no boundaries.
G'mork: I am the servant of the power behind the Nothing. I was sent to kill the only one who could have stopped the Nothing. I lost him in the Swamps of Sadness. His name... was Atreyu.
[the ground shakes again and Atreyu is knocked down. He grabs a knife shaped piece of broken stone and stands up, ready to fight]
Atreyu: If we're about to die anyway, I'd rather die fighting! Come for me, G'mork! *I* am Atreyu!
Control is the big issue. What is the object of the game? To be a winner, people must loose, correct? How can you spot a winner? We are addicted to form, to material, to MONEY--To EGO! So part of the "the plan" of the "the bad guise" is to own and control everything, and they, the masons, the illuminati, the cabal of bankers, have been implementing their plan over the course of how many years? Thousands? Really?!!! But, they have almost absolute control and unlimited power because they own everything, and are the government, and. . .
No. And here was my "Crazy Town" road block. Because the conspiracy eventually becomes all encompassing, going back not hundreds, but thousands of years. I have problems swallowing this, and subsequently fearing of their evil designs. Follow though, there are people who want power and will do anything to get it. And there are some pretty strange things under heaven on earth, but as far as the all-encompassing conspiracy, I can't buy it. It is almost, like the group of conspiracy believers have taken their faith from an all powerful, vengeful God, and placed it in an all powerful, vengeful conspiracy. But how does one explain strange phenomena? The synchroncities? Coincidences? You know all the X-files?
Either, a). God is a Fucker, or b). the conspiracy does actually have god-like powers to influence and control every aspect of the media but has an unbelievable delay of gratification along with a glacial rate of implementation, or, or what? c). Aliens. Do we make the jump to space? No, I can't do it. The illuminati witches are calling to their Alien overlords to return to earth? Why did they leave? Actually a large portion of this post is in response to questions posed at The Secret Sun. It was the piece of sand in my soft under-meat that I'm trying to deal with:
So ask yourself- why are we bombarded with all of this ancient symbolism all of the time- in films, on TV, in advertising? Why is there this vast network of secret societies that pick and groom the best and the brightest among us to get us all to dance to their tune? What is the New World Order really all about? What's the point of any of it?
Now ask yourself this- what could be that secret that people would be willing to die for? How about this: human beings were engineered somehow through whatever science we are only now beginning to understand, by beings who left the planet and will come back one day to take control once again. And maybe- just maybe- they are still in contact with a few of us and have been working behind the scenes to prepare their return. That sounds a bit more urgent than some spiritual or mystical ruminations, no?
What if all this symbolism we're seeing is all part of some ceremony, some strange ritual meant to summon these beings back to Earth? Or even freakier, what if it's a kind of "Welcome Home" party?
It's hard to believe, it sounds crazy to some people. You don't have to believe it. But what if they do?
It's funny- we accept that baseball players have all sorts of strange, superstitious rituals they perform before a game or before they go to bat. We've got thousands of years of rituals before wars, before a ship is launched or before a new leader is seated. We know that a strange new death cult has appeared among drug runners in Mexico. We have a whole host of religious traditions with billions of adherents in which people beg and cajole gods and angels who travel back and forth from the heavens (read: outer space) and act pretty much the way the gods in the ancient myths of Sumer and Egypt did.
So what's so hard to grasp about politicians in a governmental system created by Freemasons- the spiritual descendants of a priesthood dedicated to bringing the gods back to Earth- doing the same thing? Especially when the stakes are so much higher?
I don't really have an answer to this. There could very well be aliens. I can't deny this. It is a big universe. Why did they leave though? I just watched Escape to Witch Mountain. It was about two little kids trying to get back home, to Sirius! Yes, they were aliens, but they didn't know this until they became old enough to understand their star-map. Should we read this movie literally, or is it an Eckhat-Tolle-type flowering of consciousness? Could it be both? When will we be old enough to understand our star-map? I don't know if the literal aliens will siriusly arrive in the third act in a crystal ship and take me to the moon. It could happen. We might become bees that are trained to make them honey, but maybe we already are bees making them honey.
This doesn't explain the all-encompassing synchroncity that The Secret Sun mentions prior to his alien theory. Jung's collective unconscious does a better job of addressing this. The artists are tapped into the source and bringing our collective dreams to us in film, books, TV, in art, music, etc.
Sometimes we accuse a person with a negative mental attitude of creating their own darkness. We say that the crisisses in their lives are trying to tell them something; are trying to wake them up.
But to return to my original focus, who is this Goddess? If she is the universe, can she be subjugated? Now we definitely live in a patriarchal society with dominant, male Gods. That's subjugation, but does she stand for anything? Love? War? Does she have a symbol?
The pentagram has long been associated with the planet Venus, and the worship of the goddess Venus, or her equivalent. It is also associated with the Roman word lucifer, which was a term used for Venus as the Morning Star, associated with the bringer of light and knowledge. It is most likely to have originated from the observations of prehistoric astronomers.[3] When viewed from Earth, successive inferior conjunctions of Venus plot a nearly perfect pentagram shape around the zodiac every eight years.~from wikipedia.
This is a natural symbol, though, right? The Goddess stuff could be baggage?
I found a fairly interesting piece about "The Pentagram" by Jenifer Emick at about.com. (I have no idea about their illuminati leanings nor the state of their "guise". My questions isn't with the symbol, but with the idea of the Goddess. I suppose that I just figured out my question. Is the Goddess a fucker? Maybe I should rephrase that because of the gender. Well how about I show you the people who adorn themselves with her symbol?
If you read all of Christopher's post at The Secret Sun, you noticed that he equates the star in the above poster with Sirius. So, Sirius is bad = war/hate, and The Goddess is good = peace/love?
I don't think so. The Goddess is the all. Yin and Yang. Positive and Negative. Love and Hate. Peace and War. Is she God and the Devil? Yet we can't understand the totality and must interpret her in opposites because this is our perception of the world, perhaps?
But Jung's collective unconscious isn't a very warm blanket at night. This is why it is called crazy town. I found a couple of videos. I don't normally or necessarily agree with all, part or any of the videos that I embed. I find them thought provoking and post them. These are thought provoking to be sure, to be sure, but I don't know what I believe, and that is why I'm always on the lookout for the truth.
Chew of this coincidence before my looney tunes:
STAR GAZER
Episode # 06-52 / 1516th Show
To Be Aired : Monday 12/25/2006 through Sunday 12/31/2006
"Celebrate New Year's Eve Again With
The New Year's Eve Star"
Horkheimer: Greetings, greetings fellow star gazers. Every year I encourage you to celebrate New Year's Eve the cosmic way because if you happen to go outside at the stroke of midnight every New Year's Eve you will see something very special which I like to call the New Year's Eve star. Let me show you.
O.K. We've got our skies set up for 8 p.m. your local time this Sunday December 31st New Year's Eve facing due south. And first like all good astronomers let's draw an imaginary line from the due south horizon straight up to the zenith point overhead and then down the other side of the sky to the horizon due north. This line is called the meridian and it divides the eastern half of the sky from the western half. Now as our Earth slowly and endlessly rotates from west to east we are treated nightly to the grandest optical illusion in nature that of watching the stars appear to rise in the east, slowly travel across the sky all night long and eventually set in the west. And if you watch the stars every single night you will eventually deduce that the highest point any star reaches above the horizon in its nightly journey is when it is on the meridian.
Now this is very important to telescope users because the higher a sky object is above the horizon the better its telescopic image will be. So several years ago when I was researching which planets would be high up off the horizon for viewing that New Year's Eve I stumbled across something which to me was and still is an amazing coincidence, something which I had never read about in any astronomy book. That coincidence is that no matter where you happen to be on New Year's Eve, Sirius the brightest star we can see will slowly climb up the southeastern sky hour after hour and at midnight will reach its highest point almost on the meridian. Think of it, the brightest star visible from our planet reaches its highest point above the horizon at midnight every New Year's Eve.
How wonderful, how poetic. Almost like a cosmic reminder that this most brilliant of stellar lights is welcoming in and shining on the New Year giving us all hope for a bright new beginning. And even better if you happen to miss it on New Year's Eve because it's too cold or cloudy out, don't fret because Sirius will be in almost the same spot at midnight each night for the first week of the New Year. And think about this as you gaze up at Sirius this New Year's Eve. While our Sun is a million mile wide, relatively cool, yellow star Sirius is a much hotter almost twice as wide white star. And it's very close cosmically speaking, only 8 1/2 light years away which means that when we look at Sirius this New Year's Eve we will actually be seeing the light that left it 8 1/2 years ago in June of 1998. So step outside at midnight this Sunday night and make your New Year's Eve bright with cosmic light. Happy New Year and keep looking up!
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