In 189,800 hours of our 569,400 hour life, one-third of our terrestrial span, we are dream toddlers. However august and accomplished we become in the solid, roughly sequential, daylight portion of our life adventure, we are untutored and gawky, if not helpless, in our dream experience. Dreaming happens to us. Our parents were ignorant of dream existence and its radical rules.

                                                  bush yam lorna fencer

Perhaps it was thought enough for the homo sapiens to master the obviously demanding rules and consequences of K1 day life. However, the haphazard approach to dream experience has had dread consequences. The next stage of the evolving creature, homoa jubilant, will need to learn at least the rudiments of dream will, dream action, dream manners, and especially dream humor, or we will not be admitted to the Wider Galactic Community.   more »

The first one who died, my father, I was numb. The second one who died, my first husband, I screamed. By the tenth big death before I was 29, I was pissed. Furious, not drunk. This Heaven-and-Hell folderol is a misleading way to talk about the Land of the Dead because though the Heaven-mongering Christians, who began as a simple religion of the powerless, have had the power, the press, and the propaganda for a lot of centuries, the AfterLife Truth is much more complex, and, luckily, a ton more fun.

                  andy goldsworthy nvm digital photo

I didn’t think when I was a child feeding the shiny newborn black-and-white Holstein calves their buckets of faintly pink milk that I would grow up to become an expert in death.    more »

Holoku, hulaku. Hulaku -- little dances, gestures of admiration for the way words play, effervesce, coalesce. A formal haiku of 5/7/5 syllables per line is a single drop of dew on a leaf.

                                                       miro

An holoku is less formal but no less earnest. It is not confined or refined by the number of syllables but by the dimensions of a notion, a small exploration. In your log or journal let an image or a notion drift into your mind like an exquisite small cloud. Listen to its story and write down the words. You’ll learn unexpected qualities or narratives about the object or notion. Lead Pb82 enjoys being moveable type and is imprisoned and tortured to be bullets. It never had occurred to me to listen to lead.    more »

Druids have always believed in an absolute democracy of knowledge – or more important of knowing. (Not so much the stuff, but the process.) The treasure, the golden, the untarnishable joy is knowing and sharing it with abandon and glee, with reverence, reverie, and revelry.

                                   neatorama .. franz88

I imagine it would be levitatingly fine to go to Paris, France. But not everyone gets to see the Seine. Yet they must not have lives of regret. The druid point is to be jolly and amazed wherever you are. Not some ‘positive thinking’ abstraction, but honed & honeyed perception. Besides, think of how well that’ll serve you if you get to Paris, France.    more »

I daresay we’ve illuminated enough more of our enchanting consciousness now to assay a foray druidesquely into a wider context, beyond the strictly personal. This may be a shock. After the unassailable trust we’ve been revealing & forging between you and the whole wide AllElse worlds, to, with that opened mind, leap d’artagnan-like into understanding our druid duty toward W.A.R. is a shock. Pero c’est la vie verdad. But that is actual life and its juggling. Why you’re learning to be an expert clown. Why we take so much Vitamin I.

                      after franz marc

What we have to figure out each of us is Meow MEOW, meow – meow is the mnemonic device for the Moral Equivalent Of War. An antidote to what A.Einstein in 1932 calls “the war menace”; “the dark places of human will and feeling”; to taking the “latent” hatred and destructive passion and raising it to “the power of a collective psychosis.”    more »

When you need a restorative spate of recreation, play with mnemonic(knee-mahn-ik)devices. A mnemonic device is some nifty trick so you can remember something. A lifetime later I still remember A Rat In Tom’s House Might Eat Tom’s Ice Cream as the mnemonic device whose first letters spell arithmetic. George Eaton’s Old Grandmother Rode A Pig Home Yesterday spells geography. Muy yum.

                                                     wayne thiebaud

The enduring quality of a mnemonic device speaks in miniature to the astonishing power of story to the human brain – we really prefer stories to crack or even chocolate.    more »

IF you're looking to give yourself or an other a darn nifty & handy present, consider the KitchenAid Immersion Blender KHB100. I was surfing and saw America's Test Kitchen rating immersion blenders and they said the $50 KitchenAid with the metal wand had it all compared to any at twice the price. (This is not the one with fifty attachments. This one immerses and blends. It doesn't whisk.) It has 9 speeds or somesuch tho.

    finch sock .. cardinalcorner

Then there's the finch sock!   more »

My dear friend Sherrard Grey now gallivanting in the FarStars was the one person I could go grokkingly in the woods with. Many folk are pleasant or even riveting to hang out with. But only Sherrard could walk two feet down the sylvan path and with me exclaim again, “Oh look at the scarlet hogwort leaf!”

                          euro parl eu

Most folk quail or dim at constant daffy “Oh, look!” Sherrard could take it. It was a giga-treat to have someone besides The Blue and one’s own Jolly Brain to share the stupendousness with. The stupendous shock and surprise.   more »

Art, fencing, and invention all shared a creative quality or posture that Max coaxed into your body's and psyche's muscle memory by merrily hollering or hissing "Au point" at you for an hour every instant your body and mind lost the perfect deft balance good fencing requires.

                                  warhol

Poised. Equally ready to pounce or to retreat. Not relaxed, but not tense. It is this deft state that Max cajoled and bullied his fencers into maintaining. Properly performed, it became nearly effortless.   more »

Fegg. F[aberge]egg. Fegg. Simple, splendid, extravagant, delicious, reverent, jeweled. Fegg. It is seeing and tasting that richness in the little world that is fegg. One of the Earth Decorator's most fegg is, of course, the hummingbird, an outrageous jeweled miniature envied on all planets of all stars. "Ah, Madame Deco," an offworld Designer would sigh, hardly concealing stark envy, "How did you do it!?"

                                         MoMA

Planet Designers are a good lot on the whole in spite of their universally being riddled with admiration twinned with envy. It's just that when you see something unbearably well done--the concept, the craft, the flash, the diligence, it haunts the heart with gratitude that it has been done--and envy that you didn't think of it first. Gratitude and applause minutely outweigh envy.    more »

Remind yourself to practice shapeshifting your attention. Pay attention to your attention. Truly ingest, imbibe, embrace, caress – grok! – what you do your pas de deux with in the along of your every day. Pas de leaves. Pas de cat. Pas de pieds. Leaf dance. Cat dance. Feet dance.

                                    faberge

Keenly recall that if you lived in a featureless vacuum or even drifted in the starstudded reaches of vasty space -- to be set down in the impossible Faberge Egg of our beloved planet would take your breath away in marveling. So practice marveling.   more »

Presently Terran Incarnates have no inherent rights under Galactik Law. Presently Terran Incarnates have no inherent rights under Galactik Law. Only recently have Incarnates developed sufficient consciousness to be considered Galactiks rather than merely humans, the galactik slang for clever pets.

                                     nasa jpl

The raging Question that divides the Galactik Council is where the line is drawn for full sentience privileges. Terrans have been considered spiritual chattel, and few of these Earthers are given more than minimal attention by their occasionally resident Ethereal or Noncarnate. Among the Sentient Rights Party, those rare earnest Ethereals who do bother to honor and tend their Terrans, there is an outcry against Incarnate abuse -- abuse of the human creature    more »

Gleek and Rat Tooth glanced at each other with that fierce wry which was the psychic wampum between them. Dr. Sal Iva was outlining the Milk Team’s upcoming billion year K1 Project. From the galactikally gigantic sweet home sea of hula-sloshing and mesmerizing holorealitys which formed and transformed with the lyric of thought, the Milk Team was damned determined to sculpt a K1 stable dimension. A place, the first place really, where things were not air in weather, did not mogrify at whim.

                                           hiawatha belt wampum

That this notion strained galactik credulity, was scoffed at and reviled is part of the Chronicle. Sea people greet the idea of a ‘solid’ sturdy, stable. K or Kinesthetic with the derision that sleek and gliding sea-bound fish later greeted the clunky and dread-fomenting idea of horribly and cruelly lurching around in thin air on dry land. How truly awful. What kind of loonland weirdoes would want to do that?   more »

A tidbit from my good-works starving lawyer friend of 43 years. There's a part of the CA code called 5150 which refers to a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hold for people who are "a danger to others ... including hearing voices telling them to kill other people."

                        harliban

Gods know Sicker Dick hears voices telling him to shock & awe 2000 bombsites in Iran. Sicker Dick is indisputably a danger to so many others.    more »

If we see consciousness vertically, a ladder to be climbed, we are falsely forced to see ourselves on the lower rungs staring up at the compassionate rump of the priest, guru, monk, shaman who precedes us to the heights.

                                                                            andy goldsworthy

"If, on the other hand, we rotate the axis of consciousness to be sideways, we can more correctly and coherently see the spectrum of our consciousness as including all the densities with no greater value implied. Just as in light, ultraviolet is not better than infrared, our less-dense experience is not better that our solid K1 experience, only different.    more »

Intra-realms study can strand you in twilight elfin grottos if you aren’t alert and grounded and re-grounded in K1. Just like the slippery delusion of Romance, the archetypal worlds can be damned seductive and dangerous.

                       flat earth woodcut unknown artist

Cleave to common sense and Keep your discernment. Then you can be enriched and enlivened. Huge quaffs of Irony-laced Humortinis are required. It is my belief and experience that conscious travel in Otro, in other realms, from Fantasy to Dream to Poesie is healthier and heartier than sly or slimy forays half-known. If you find yourself feeling off-balance or your physical vision blurring (a sign of too much trance work), back out into as much fascination with K1 AllElse as you can imbibe. There are reasons these matters have been kept occult for centuries. They aren’t without considerable danger. I am convinced that in the long run people are healthier dealing out loud with whispered matters and can take the elixirs of honey and of venom if trusted to Keep their darn feet – and head! -- on the ground. If, however, you go lurching off into LoonLand, you’ll just get all the nambypambys tuttutting and breathing fire about pagans and witches. Which is piffle of course, but stay smart as we begin our travels further afield.   more »

The Ords (who had shortened their name from Ordure) were odd ducks. Well, they weren’t really ducks, but they were damned peculiar. They worked for Lord Ord who was the Cosmic Keeper of the Odd, the Angels Too Fat To Dance on the Point of A Pin.

                                                 guillaume dargaud

His emblem was, proudly, a turkey buzzard in pink, rampant on a magenta field -- the colors of entrails as the Lesser Ords scoffed cheerfully. Vultures liked guts and gluck; rot was ripe to them. Suppuration was succulent. The more stinking the ooze, the more toothsome.   more »

"You mean you're finally going to tell us what it's like to be a ShapeShifter? Before we burn you at the stake? Now while the orange flames lick high waiting to eat you alive?"

                          terry pyles

"Yes," she said, "I will tell you now. ShapeShifters, seem, of course, monsters to the flat-minded. Being a ShapeShifter is like being a photographic negative, as if your skin, your flesh, were some magic emulsion upon which experience imprints, engraves itself. As if you were a soft, warm wax in which events impressed themselves like a seal. You are like some spy's 'multi-sense bug' which overhears oversmells, versees, overfeels, overtastes holds, records, keeps the vibrations of people's souls, of sentients' souls. And all is sentient. ShapeShifting is why you seem to know their deepest secrets. You do. Because to a rare degree, you *are* them.    more »

It is disconcerting to begin to accept least of all explore our gateau nature, our layer cake of multi-D and multi-T experiences. Multi-dimensional & multi-temporal. Most of us prefer the less vertigo of amnesia or what the Greeks call Lethe, the river of oblivion, of forgetfulness; or a half-live lethargy.

                                                wayne thiebaud

It is essential to always honor K1, our shared kinesthetically persistent layer of reality, and be able to move among suitable awarenesses with care and discernment (which is why drugs are so ugh for serious study. I don’t mean serious as in grim but as in concentrated/distilled.)   more »

Hallelujah

8/13

Karl Rove R.I.P

Rest In Pieces

   more »

“The study of meaning is more pertinent and poignant than the study of reality. The Eskimos, for instance, discriminate twenty-six words worth of snow variations or escapades of crystalline water. The Eskimo dialogue with snow is more complex in hues and shapes of meaning than ours, though the presenting reality through which you and I also scrunch is doubtless the same.”

                     alice munman

Bunga Low was the favorite daughter of the famous fin-de-siècle low-cost housing architects Pavi Lion and Ken Nel. In the new century Bunga was being interviewed for the cover story of Galactic Gazette, a fiercely progressive rag. Bunga was transfixed by the architecture of consciousness -- How do you get people to fling open their doors and windows to the zephyrs of awe?"   more »

You tell of “ . . . the great low moan of deep chthonic pain” which hunts, haunts, and taunts our beloved distance-defying molasses-slow deep lyric of whale song. Sicker Dick evokes an anti-whale song of the Malevolent, of the severely paranoid Bleak Hole where all hope is sucked in to die, after torture just short of organ failure.

                                                             hieronymus bosch

The best ult-irony (ultra, cult, exult) in the DickDoomeozoic Era came in the new L’il Bush show on Comedy Central where it’s established that SickerDick will randomly and frequently grab any passing bird, wring its head off, and, throwing his head back making the guttural signature cheney grunts, through the remaining long neck, gulpingly suck its blood and innards out as its forlorn body deflates.   more »

What part does art play in solving the quantum equations of the next human leap into a kinder destiny? .. Art is as important as air in this glory of attentions, your life. Art is the brandy of attentions, distilled, golden, intoxicating. Among Dr. Druid’s subversive and blatant goals is the inoculation of your heart with art, with the haunting, daunting necessity of art.

                anthony mccall

Art ain’t a luxury, for other people. I’m not saying artists cannot be belligerent morons who monger war and gigagreed, but 99% of art is a start away from being willing to do killing. Art can soak up & transmogrify the energies people otherwise insanely use to hate and to obliterate. .. As Lord Byron would have it, “We thus dilate our spirits to the size of what we contemplate.”    more »

Hmmm, I thought, Why not in some random periodicity, nimbly (imagine an sure-footed mountain goat on a steep hillside) improvise some commentarying on these 77 qualities of mischievous swift gladness, a non-creed, anti-creed, post-creed commentary? How droll and perhaps even glittering, sequined for all we know.

                                    paul klee

Since our babbling-brook stream of consciousness sometimes has the attention span of a firefly, relishes small delightful illuminations, this forty-day gig on a single quality ain’t on per se, but I thought I’d leave the timing in the legerdemains of the Greatest Deity Drolloa.    more »

So what do you want in a photonic scientist, psyentist, or knower? I would say that an affection for the abzurd is handy.

                                                       harry tjutuna

And especially useful is dear Keats’ Negative Capability: “ . . . which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason -- Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge . . . .”    more »

Remote viewing is a kind of teleportation, a visiting of a terrestrial place where your daybody is not. It is another way to practice making your attentions’ capacities more elastic and eclectic. Remote viewing is that variation, that facet of the out-of-body experience which doesn’t go gallivanting off around the galaxies, but rather to a Russian submarine harbor (a Cold War favorite) or to downtown Paris. Or your living room.

                                                      craig allan charles

The underlying point of all our exercises is to make your kaleidoscopic life experience more keen, more jolly, more exquisitely luminous and breathtaking – your birthright. You’ve heard of a lot of capacities as occult or ‘weird’ or mystic. None of these really. You just weren’t taught them in your usual school.    more »

Itshehimwe doesn’t have a sexual orientation per se. Itshehimwe has an inclusive lust, an encompassing tenderness. Itshehimwe covets the stark vast beauty and ache of the distance between the stars.

                                                             craig allan charles

The stoicism, the chaste patience of the desert rock outcroppings. The gorgeous violence of coupling horses. The strut, the rut. The sheer celebration and might of the oak tree’s offering its vast leafiness to the sapphire sky. The oak tree, master conjurer, turns dirt and water into bark, magnificence, elixir sap, and all those leaves.    more »

When I first found out, I didn’t want to be from another planet. It’s like finding out you’re adopted. It’s disorienting. Like after your first major earthquake, you never feel the same simple sureness again.

                                              miro

Obviously when people ask you where you’re from, you say, "The Eastern Shore of Maryland." Saying "I’m from Bylar, a planet of intricate beauty where all sentience is irrevocably lost" is not an ice-breaker in the earth-based social swirl.   more »

We've been practicing the scales of attentions and eclectics. We want to give you both techniques & tricks and the demonstrations of attentions being discovered.

                                        songlines prince of wales

I plan to share my experiences of the blossoming of the eclectic for me so you can get a sense of how these extraordinary experiences mysteriously and magically appear within the ‘ordinary’ day. I honor folk who spend decades in a cave devoted to exquisite experience, but my job and the druid way of life is to cajole and exhort you to the constant extraordinary within the daily life.   more »

Amethyst key. Ah Dreams. The octessential grok here, the amethyst key, is that for druid shamans (as often women as men) our day life, the dayreal, is just as much a dream as our remreal -- our sleeping dreams or other lucid visions.

                                                    emily kame kngwarreye

There’s this silly myth, by the way, that the druids disappeared. Nah, we just changed our camouflage, took a shift from our darling deep-rooted oaks to being titwhistles and unicorns, invisible in plain sight. More mobile. The true observer empathetically shapeshifts into everyeachthing s/he observes.   more »