Tales: The Water's Fine - The Maya of Individuality

"Yeshua said: If you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

Logion 70, The Gospel of Thomas

This profound and timeless lesson by the Gnostic Master Yeshua speaks of ancient spiritual concepts, like The Kingdom of Heaven, The Tao, and Buddhist Karma, and in two little sentences underlines the whole of Modern Psychology as well: Freud, Jung, Adler, Maslow, and more. This is scripture that was left out of the New Testament, and largely purged from history by the Roman church.

For me, it inspires this first of three explorations into the Hindu concept of Maya, a term often defined as "The Illusion of Life," but is closer to delusion - the intellectual and emotional investment people make in various unreal surface "realities" or constructions in order to give their lives definition and purpose. I've heard it compared to living by looking at a map of your surroundings, rather than using your senses to experience them. It's the development of our sixth sense that enables our ability to perceive maya, and is the goal of Buddhism, Jnana Yoga, Gnosis, and Jungian Individuation.

Water has always stood for the mysterious depth of being, the unity of all things, the fluidity of spirit, the profundity of the unconscious. With that in mind, consider the New Testament metaphor of Jesus' "walking on the water," most often thought of literally, as something Jesus could actually do. He could, and so can you.

A Religious Literalist would attribute this ability to the human manifestation of an "All Powerful God" who can basically do whatever the heck He wants without regard for the physical laws of nature. An Agnostic Scientist, who needs a rational explanation for any magic trick, might suggest that Jesus was a Master of Quantum Reality, and commanded the mechanics necessary to engage a phase transformation of the water on a sub-atomic level, temporarily changing it's physical characteristics to support his weight.

Both of these explanations only serve to separate us from the Divine by making any kind of real identification with the experience impossible. Which way do you use to walk on water? Maybe Yeshua, the "Nazorean," Gnostic teacher had something else in mind.

Consider the water metaphorically standing for the depth of your personal experience; the formative moments, patterns of coping, and genetic predispositions that constitute your psyche, and provide the foundation for "who you are," determining your life actions and beliefs. The effects of those early experiences assert themselves in your conscious mind, often positively, when you remember a life lesson you've learned in the past, and make decisions based on that knowledge. Sometimes you might still behave irrationally, ignoring the lessons of your past and acting out on some destructive impulse, out of habit. You know you're acting irrationally, but the reason you have to do it is rooted in your subconscious mind - "...that which is within you," in our opening Yeshua quote.

When we don't know why we make certain life decisions, or harbor certain beliefs, it's time for some healthy self-examination, "If you bring forth that which is within you," especially if it manifests as self-sabotage. If it's a destructive script we're compelled to act out over and over. (People experience this a lot in bad relationships...) Then it's Karma, a place our past actions are bringing us to so we can learn the lesson and move ahead with our lives. In these cases, our Ego forms some unfortunate opinion about how to "protect ourselves," which becomes a kind of survival instinct run amok. Often it's about something "we must have," or something we have to cling to. But, if it's not Love, let it go. You're not protecting anything. There's nothing to protect. It's more likely, you're doing new damage based on old damage.

Time to dive in! to your conscious past. Jacques Cousteau around your memories, the circumstances and experiences that may have formed this instinctive need to repeat certain actions. Things arise from the depths to help you. Answers may have been staring you in the face all along.

Now comes the hard part about "walking on the water." Some destructive behaviors arise from deeper down, from your unconscious mind. These are based on experience that hasn't just been repressed subconsciously, but has been fully suppressed, deep in the watery reservoir of your psyche. Ancient fears. Shameful fears. The simplicity of being that you had as a child is stuck in the mud at the bottom by this stuff. You may never be able to fully "bring forth" these deep motivations, but you can become more aware of them. There are ways of bringing them into the light, where they might "save you," rather than stay within and "destroy you."

First, sit in meditation, where you learn to recognize the false internal voice of the neurotic Ego. It's easily recognizable: anything that's judgmental, comparative, or fearful...anything that's not Love. "Bring [that] forth..." You are not that. Disassociate yourself. I discussed this method in more detail back on 11/11, in "Tales: Through a Glass Darkly."

Next, realize there are seven billion people here, all going through very similar experiences. You are nothing so special, so important. Nothing is so special about your opinion. Individuality is something of a delusion that your Ego will cling to, even if it destroys you. There's nothing to hide, everyone knows who you are already.

If you believe it's especially difficult, especially inescapable, if it's just "who you are, and that's all there is to it," if you act fearfully, unconsciously - you'll sink into those depths and drown. "What you do not bring forth will destroy you." In Matthew (14:30), Peter takes a stab at walking on the water, but as soon as his fears take over, he sinks. Guess who saves him? The simplest interpretation of this is look to Christ to save you, but that might lead you to neglect the actions you need to take yourself.

There are lots of creatures who walk on the water all the time. They're insects. They're just being. Their "personal gravity" isn't great enough to break the surface tension of those dark waters, so they can simply skate across the surface, using all that underneath as support. We can do that too, when we know we're not that special, except for Love. That we have nothing to fear, nothing to protect. And we're not what we used to be. When we "bring forth that which is within you," we can use all that deep stuff as a foundation for just being what we are truly meant to be. "What you bring forth will save you."

And you can walk on the water too.

"Water finds it's power by seeking it's lowest point."

Zen saying

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 17: The Drive to the Next Life...

"The fundamental, simple, and great mystical realization is that by which you identify yourself with consciousness, rather than with the vehicle of consciousness. Your body is a vehicle of consciousness."

Joseph Campbell

Koko just couldn't pass it up any longer, that tiki torch cocktail lounge with it's glorious lacquered bamboo façade, so when Grace needed a ride to the airport to visit her aunt, he volunteered to drive her, knowing the trip home would take him right past the place - past it's flapping torch flames, and red chop suey script sign. The round trip would take him much farther away than he could've known. He parked her car, the one she loved, the one her father bought her, in the side lot, and ambled into the place as the sun was setting.

"Gee," he told the waitress, whose features are long since forgotten, "I've never had a Mai Tai." "Then let's fix that," she said, smiling. She always smiled at the first easy Mai Tai, and easy it was, bright orange hanging garden of fun in an imperial pint glass. The second was still fun too. But the third spelled trouble, and forgetting her face was just the start of it. She knew that sideways loss of recognition all too well, working at The Tiki Lounge, there in downtown Glendale. But Koko really had never had a Mai Tai -at least not an official one, and he could've sworn that he didn't feel a thing after the first, or even after the second. He never felt all that much anyway, so the third seemed like a reasonable experiment. He hadn't quite finished it when leaving seemed like a good idea too. The King Kong Club interior looked too flammable to last.

It was an easy drive. Weren't they all? A quick hop home- and just to be on the safe side, there were unexplored back streets that pointed in the right direction, and promised a cop-free ride. After all, it was always smartest to err for caution's sake.

Now it was dark, and there was a stubborn cassette acting up in his wife's car's tape player; and a funny, winding little suburban street, right where they should all be straight, and a little too much foot on the... BLANGG!! ...and the film broke.

"Pingk... pingk.. .pingk..." went the wrecked car, steam hissing out of the stove-in front end. From where Koko was, near the top of the telephone pole next to the streetlight, you could see everything real easy. Steam poured out and roiled up through the light against the dark sky, hot water running all out on the blacktop. Some other liquid, dark and glittery on the ground. That stuff. Sticky.

The Celica's front end was really bashed in, but the pole wasn't even crooked! And what was that down there below? Koko wondered...what is that I see hanging half way out the busted window down there? The windshield was busted too, like a tempered glass spider-web target. The steering wheel was whacked into a loopy shape, his motionless arm draped through it. Lights in the neighborhood snapped on, and Koko could hear their approaching voices..."It looks bad... somebody call the..."

There, twenty feet below, very badly busted face just in out of the light, was him. Me, thought Koko. It was Koko. But he was up here, safe and sound, it seemed, though he couldn't see his hands or body. Perhaps because his body was down there, a bloody broken mess, wearing a red drenched punk t-shirt and black jeans.

Koko stayed for a minute, silently hovering up high, next to the streetlight. It had been long enough now, until he realized that that wasn't him anymore. He wasn't alone- no, there was somebody safe just behind him, just out of sight, and they spoke to him, just not so's anyone could hear. They told him it was time to go, and so he reluctantly moved along, shepherded into the warm grey cotton night. From then on, he forgot, with only washed-out flashes coming back years later. A piece of effervescence. An inventory of some kind...

Koko came to, briefly, in another ambulance, being taken to the hospital where the University had their plastic surgery residency. Then he slipped back to that other place, where he wasn't him anymore, and stayed there for "twenty hours" or so. The girl had long gone back to waitress again at The Tiki Lounge by the time he finally woke up, for better or worse. He had a little different face. He had a whole different life, beyond this one it seemed. It's funny, to die; to know how easy it is. Like walking into another room. It was a knowledge that would play a part in changing him many years later, when he finally realized that he couldn't just live this body's life anymore.

And as for Grace, well she cried of course, for Koko, and the car. But from that point on, they never discussed it again. They would be split up for years by the time he really came back to life.

"If an earthquake opens the prison walls, do you think an escaping prisoner will complain of the damage done to the stone and marble work?"

Rumi

"Philosophy is really homesickness." Novalis

Mr. Floppy helps Faith escape the material, for a little while...

A couple of interesting quotes along the same lines as the last post: 

 "The true individual Self should be distinguished from it's distorted reflection, the ego.  The ego, the little self, which regards itself from others and the world, is a physical, vital and mental formation; it belongs to the transitory personality and dissolves with it."                                                                                 P. B. Saint-Hilaire

"When the overmind descends, the predominance of the centralising ego-sense is entirely subordinated, lost in largeness and finally abolished; a wide cosmic perception and feeling of a boundless universal self and movement replaces it...In this boundless largeness, not only the separate ego but all sense of individuality...may ...disappear...and this sense of the delight...is not confined to the person or the body but can be felt at all points in an unlimited consciousness of unity which pervades everything."                                                                                               Sri Aurobindo

      For many, particularly those whom life has broken open to the Divine, there's an ennui, a sadness to being in this form that I can only chalk up to the Ego's insistence that we are separate from each other, and all other forms of life on this planet, when it clearly is not the case.  It's a lot of work, fighting against those urges to constantly compare and judge, the need to claim some kind of dominance of individuality - like a mad explorer sticking their flag into the shore, and proclaiming the whole expanse of some vast unknown continent in the name of their personal country.             

     The alternative that's presented to us, a graceful middle-ground where we hear the prideful, cajoling voice of the Ego, but pay it no mind, allows us to easily turn that sentimental coin to it's other side, which though equally sentimental, is purely joyful, even in the "sad" parts.  A freedom that can't come from being attached to the ever-changing, only to the ever-unchanging. 

When you gotta design a silly, happy, friendly little robot...

Tales: Through a Glass Darkly...Ouch!

"The Meaning of Life is to embody compassion. Anyone can discover this. When you discover this and live it, you discover your truest nature and share its joy."

The Dalai Lama

This form our spirits assume, this changing body/mind we occupy on Earth from our birth to our death, is a miraculous combination of the magical quantum/electrochemical exchange of matter and energy, and equally amazing mechanics- the material "reality" of our flesh and bone bodies, bumping around this world. Our attitudes and beliefs; our genes and chromosomes; our focus and intention; our psyches and our Karma, shape the physical "realities" of our lives.

We intuitively know about this stuff, and more and more, Science is confirming the magical relationship between all these aspects of being; but it's confusing. How does the system work exactly -to bring our wants, our purpose into physical reality?

Confusing the issue are programs like The Secret, a difficult combination of the magic nature of intention and power of Love's creative force, and the occult power of Ego - man's will for self-enhancement through acquisition and "mastery" over Nature. The Dark Side. It's the difference between being naturally aligned with Source (Love, God), and open-heartedly receiving all that you require for peace and fulfillment (success); and separating from Source into your Ego Self - an entity that through force of will manipulates the energies of the world to achieve sensory rewards, which are elusive and momentary, because everything except Love is. Both you and your Ego Self want a nice girlfriend or boyfriend, but your Ego Self still won't be happy when it gets one.

We look through this prism of our perceptions - Through a Glass Darkly, to try to find the way to at-one-ment, the unification of purpose and lifestyle. But so much seems to stand in the way. Julian Schnabel's wonderful film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the book written by stroke victim Jean-Dominique Bauby, does a brilliant job of describing the obstructive quality of our bodily forms. The subtle yet powerfully destructive nature of the Ego Self. Bauby's story demonstrates the nature of what's really important, even without our self as a body.

Of course, the answer is Love; and the mechanism for attaining real success lies in our attitudes, beliefs, and actions: An uncompromising attitude of Love and compassion towards all (no matter how challenging that may be at the moment!); an unshakable understanding of the oneness, the interdependence of everything, and the belief that every expression of Nature is Divine and requires the proper care. Living these attitudes and beliefs will intuitively guide you in the right direction. Your actions will have a path to follow. Your purpose will become clear.

Meanwhile, going about that in these clunky and obscure "rides" we inhabit can be pretty challenging. Why is my hair falling out? We need to sit in meditation to touch the energizing light of Love, and sort through our psychic baggage objectively. If a piece of semi-conscious luggage pops up on your meditation screen, or rides your mind day-to-day, don't let it lay around -take care of it! Investigate, illuminate, resolve. That way, it won't be in the way when it comes time to help someone else. Compassion is the path to purpose. It's not just a tree hugger's dream, it's a Real Strategy for Success.

While you're trying this strategy out by being as compassionate as possible, don't forget the most important person, without whom no success can be attained... Yourself. It's the nature of the beast that our Ego Self (judgement, comparison) is hard on our True Self (Love, compassion), for being imperfect. For not measuring up. So before you go out to test this system, and every time you hear that critical voice within, forgive yourself. Have compassion for you. Get in touch with your inner nature. You're doing the best you can, especially for a spirit of light stuck in an imperfect form.

Associate with this inner, Spiritual self more and more, and less and less with your body, with it's aches and pains. With how you look. Less with your five senses and the momentary gratifications of this world. For example: Meat isn't worth the killing because it tastes good for a couple minutes.

Make an effort to relate to this world with your Sixth Sense, your magical, intuitive sense, which you can connect to through the practice of meditation; and the actions you're led to through Love and compassion for others will show you your path to all forms of real success. Even the tough parts (ouch!) of being here in this dang body will get easier to deal with. You still have to look through the glass, but it will seem a lot clearer.

"As is a man's meditation, so is his feeling of love;

As is his feeling of love, so is his gain;

and faith is the root of all."

Sri Ramakrishna

No Star Wars here, just junkyard flyers from Kids Next Door - stepladders, exercise bikes, and a nice big jet engine...

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 16: May the Force Get Started

"Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths."

                                                                                 Joseph Campbell

It was being San Francisco again.  A dense gray-blue watercolor sky bleeding down into the wet streets.  San Francisco was fine like that.  A little rainy and a little dreary.  It felt right, and smelled good when it rained, and the fresh Pacific flow scrubbed the town from edge to edge, so that when it rained the streets sparkled greaselessly, like no other town.  A second season as a ski bum, this time in Park City, hadn't panned out.  There'd been no snow that year, so no ski.  Just bum.  

I ended up back in the garlicky little beach town of Del Mar, California, drawing horse portraits and designing youth soccer logos, when out of the blue I got a call from an old friend whose uncle was hiring up in San Francisco.  We packed up and moved, first to Burlingame, by the airport, then to a Mondrian-inspired apartment on Potrero Hill.  My friend left after a few months, but I stayed on.  I had fallen in love with a city for the very first time.

 I was on my own, welding in a free-standing fireplace factory in Hunter's Point by day, surrounded by noxious fumes, surly illegals, and the odd furloughed worker from San Quentin.  By night, I made the rounds of particular nightspots.  I was still too young to drink legally, but Montana had taught me how to order up with the proper attitude, so it was never a problem, getting in, getting served.  Especially in North Beach, where I could catch Stan Getz at Keystone Corner, or last call at Gino and Carlo's, The Saloon, and of course, Specs' - the famous Adler Museum, with an optometrist's sign, tucked in an alley just under Pacific Street.  Before the city felt compelled to name that alley after William Saroyan.

The big, round table at Specs' was always lively just before closing, with guys named Gary and Larry, Leon the Cabbie, and John the Painter, some of whom were apparently quite famous.  Some decidedly weren't.  They were just the guys at last call for me.  I was, as usual, the youngest.  We traded quips and opinions; poetry and pontifications, until Specs hit the lights - and out we'd go into the fresh night air.  It seemed a little odd, living the high life low, or the low life high in San Francisco.  It always smelled so fresh and clean, even with the stinkiest stuff on your breath, or on your conscience.

I spent a lot of my free days there in North Beach too- picking up salamis at Molinaris; having coffee at Puccini or Trieste.  Sitting up on the riser at City Lights Bookstore, discovering Ginsburg like you're supposed to there.  I picked up my first Sam Shepard, and continued to devour Steinbeck and Vonnegut, the beta magical realism of Tortilla Flats and Breakfast of Champions sending me away south to Marquez and the South Americans.  I discovered some Czech roots, stumbling across Milan Kundera, and pouring over it in front of the bookstore's picture window, under the watchful gaze of Carol Doda's neon nipples that flashed kitty-corner at The Condor Club. 

Alone, and participating in such a seemingly common life, it never occurred to me back then that I was manufacturing any memories.  Just free-standing fireplaces.

That sparkly, dreary day though, a memory was making me.  I'd seen a tiny photo, like a postage stamp, in the Chronicle the day before.  It was a mysterious shiny black figure, wielding what appeared to be a neon sword.  There was a little announcement of this film screening up at the Coronet theater on Geary street, scheduled for noon.  I had nothing planned for that Sunday, so taking my youthful hangover to the movies sounded healing.

Driving by the theater, I passed a short line of wet attendees standing out front, movie-goers in the mist.  Mostly guys a little like me.  I joined the queue strung along the unprotected theater façade in the light rain; collar up, hands in my pockets, like everyone else.  No one said much, getting wet and feeling a little dumb...what is it?  I dunno...I heard it was...saw the picture in the paper...

They ushered us in, and I don't remember any fanfare or trailers - maybe just a brief announcement that they were screening a new film before it's release.  What I do remember is that first impression - an expository serial-like text scroll vanishing into space, followed by the interminable rumbling of a gigantic I didn't know what - a spacecraft(!) passing overhead as the film began, and the collective Whoah breathed out by the seventy or eighty soggy witnesses.  The theater had recently installed the new Dolby Stereo sound system, and the results were palpable.

When it was over, they ushered us back out.  I remember us all smiling and nodding to one another like a pack of stupefied nerds.  Exactly like that.  We were handed some flyers, or questionaires, something you bet I wish'd I'd kept but didn't think to.  I wasn't thinking of much, other than what I'd just witnessed.  A new, updated action genre.  Classic, even eternal themes.  Alec Guiness.  It was a really terrific movie - no question about it.  Especially coming from the American Graffitti guy.  

I doubt that any of us realized what we'd just witnessed, I sure didn't.  What it would mean to our world.  What it was to become to a culture of people who spend their lives staring at screens, wishing they could lead other lives.  I, and seventy or eighty damp Bay area compañeros, had born witness to George Lucas' first public screening of Star Wars. 

Bring Dogheads! into reality, and leave the world to the dogs!

Tales: The Real Rapture

"...our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world...as in being able to remake ourselves."

Mahatma Gandhi

We're a little like moss on a rock here on earth -a simple colony of life. In the same way that any collective life form experiences stress when the conditions for it's survival begin to change, our world is experiencing some stress. For all of us, as well as each of us, there's a need to adapt.

There's a flaw in our culture's perception of Darwinism. It's not about "Survival of the Fittest." It's about Survival of What Adapts in the Most Cooperative Way (see Dr. Bruce Lipton). What carries us through the tough times, with Love. It's an altogether different definition of fitness. It's a Spiritual Fitness.

The biggest, meanest guy may clobber everyone who disagrees with him, take all the food, and force himself on the prettiest women; but his karma (created by ego and fear) and the failure to evolve spiritually, will cause his destruction (sex specificity intended) -a genetic dead end. The richest guy may have the most secure, most isolated fortress, the largest vault of canned food, and the most guns and ammo; but his isolation and fearfulness will lead to spiritual atrophy, and the inward collapse of his world. Those attributes and characteristics that are associated with Power are dying out, as those associated with Ethics are on the rise. Life on earth is always adapting; the parts that don't, won't last.

Hard times stress the colony, challenging it, forcing it to change; and now we see the shape that change is taking. It's like breaking up bad pottery, and soaking it until it softens and becomes the clay that forms the basis of real life, in order to start over. People are coming together to re-configure their world on that basis -what's real and important in life; inspired by a sudden common awareness of what the management of Earth's abundance actually entails, and what the real consequences of continued unconscious exploitation will lead to.

A new cooperation is exploding into reality, based on the spiritual unification of humankind, facilitated by the internet, and manifested in an expanding sense of community. Expanding cooperatives, reuse and recycling, uncontested environmentalism, the election of Obama and the impetus for universal health care, local food production, the accelerating growth of animal rights awareness, vegetarianism, social support systems of all kinds, as well as the public momentum to institute these ethical concepts by means of regulation and legislation, is the shape of the change.

Extremists and fundamentalists, religious, financial, and militaristic, are dividing themselves off -defining their differences in preparation to be shed from the whole. They actually constitute just a small part of the world's total population. 2012 actually marks the end of their world. It will be a little messy, but it's happening. Do everything you can to help it along. If you open your heart, you'll intuitively know what that is. You'll know how to behave, how to shop, how to contribute, how to vote. You already do.

In a manner of speaking, "The Rapture" is actually taking place now amongst those who are awakening to this new consciousness, many of whom are experiencing hard times, and finding themselves and their neighbors falling through the same cracks in the system that allow spiritual evolution to enter. These are fractures in the false world of materialistic consumerism, and a dis-identification with a media that's destructive by design. The Christ Spirit that's returning isn't the bearded redhead in the paintings, it's the spirit of Ethics, Cooperation, Compassion, and Love.

Those who want it all, who think they have it all, who are trying to get as much as they can, and will do anything not to lose it; who want to keep things like they are, who suffer the delusion of their superiority and entitlement, who think they can will the truth to be what they want, are fast being Left Behind in a spiritual morass -a hell of their own. They won't remain here suffering while the blessed ascend to Heaven, they'll simply become redundant. Their hateful opinions will hold no sway. Their methods of fear-mongering will become ineffective. Your biggest job may be to help them catch up to the change with love and compassion.

Heaven will return on Earth as we stop poisoning it (because we must), restore natural balance, use free energy, distribute the earth's resources equitably, and evolve into our divine state of spiritual unification. The balance is returning as it must, and if you're part of that change, you needn't worry about the hard times. It matters what each and every one of us keeps in their heart, just be sure it's Love.

"Our present world is conditioned by our present mode of consciousness; only when that consciousness passes from its present dualistic mode...will the new creation appear, which is the external reality of which our world is a mirror."

Bede Griffiths

reminds me of the mountains...

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 15: A Big Sky Trailer

"A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves."

                                                                                  Proust

A loud crunch from outside woke me up - an alarm in the silent snow-world outside the trailer door.  I opened my eyes, but couldn't quite tell what the heck I was looking at through the breath-cloud above me.  It was... a blobby icicle directly overhead- a curious stalactite caused by the frozen condensation of my overnight breath.  The little trailer had become a walk-in freezer because apparently, someone had left the door open about a foot wide. The same someone let the propane for the heater run out, and left the VW stuck up to it's front doors in the snowbank out front.  The snow drifting in the door pointed like a white arrow to the perpetrator, who happened to be bundled up in my sleeping bag (in my clothes).   

There I was, there we were, hung-over and snowed-in, in a trailer park just off the road that led from the Gallatin Canyon to Big Sky, Montana.  Our answer to the call of the wild.  When the older brothers left San Diego and headed to the silver-mine ski town of Park City, Utah, we younger brothers felt we had to push it a little farther.  Park City in the seventies was too safe, too familiar, and we didn't feel like hanging around for the exploitation boom.  Already the fur and turquoise crowd from Scottsdale were making their way via Santa Fe, seeping up into the Wasatch, wandering Main Street licking their chops.  So my friend Jimmy and I shook our brothers' hands and set sail for Montana, where no kid from San Diego had ever gone before.  At least none that we knew of.  

It was a long, eventful trip.  That's a hazardous web of highways that crisscrosses the West out there from Wyoming to eastern Oregon, and down to the Arizona border.  Cowboy trucker's Bermuda Triangle.  Salt flats.  Black ice.  Nevada.  Endless long stretches of road.  Trickster spirits dancing past the car in the dark night.  You always felt lucky to get where you were going, so when we finally turned up the road to Big Sky, and beheld majestic Lone Peak topping the end of the valley like the Paramount logo, we knew we'd reached some level of teen-aged legend.  No San Diego boys had ever seen this, we thought.

 

We got jobs at Huntley Lodge, a brand-new resort built by Chet Huntley, half of the iconic NBC News anchor team.  We skied all day, and in the evenings waited tables at banquets, playing image-conscious conferees from Michigan or Minnesota one against the other for tips.  I also set-up and bussed at The Yellow Mule, the least appetizing name for a restaurant ever.  It was one of my jobs to build a fire in the huge dining room fireplace, and since I was always cold, and always a little angry back then, I built them big and hot.  Hot enough to render a couple four-tops unsitable.  The silver and glassware pinged and shimmered -too hot to touch.  The golden light of the fire waved like a mirage around the tables in front of the hearth.  Customers would start rubbing their thighs, and the back of their necks, and suddenly leap up clutching their napkins, back-pedaling away from the heat before they spontaneously combusted.  

That'd git my boss about as ding-dang teed-off as a cowboy restaurant manager can git.  And quite the cowboy he was, pointy-yoked shirts with pearly snap buttons, curly hats, and even scarves tied in such a way as to look a little too decorative for Montana.  His name:  GREG, was branded in the back of his tooled-leather belt.  He walked bow-legged on purpose.  

As it turned out, he was from San Diego, about two miles from where we'd grown up.

For some reason, a Montana State Trooper took us under his wing and set us up in the little trailer park down the road to Bozeman.  The crunch that awoke me that morning was that Trooper, delivering the bloody haunch of a road-kill deer by shoving it into the snow bank out front.  He left things there for us stuck in the snow, like Boo Radley and the hole in the tree.  State Troopers can lead lonely lives.  Later in the day after we'd warmed and sobered up, we butchered the venison in the trailer's little bath tub, being careful not to touch the fixtures because of the live electric current that ran through the plumbing.  A lot of things out there were not nice, or easy.  Like the girls.  Like the incessant bitter cold.  Like life.  It wasn't Park City.

There were rough hill-people from Karst Ranch, who lived off venison.  Laconic cowboys and ill-tempered truckers we drank with at a big log roadhouse bar called Buck's T-4, where we'd acquired our hangovers and lost our driving skills the night before.  Rosy, the classic veteran waitress I worked with at The Mule, came in late with her husband, the largest man in Montana, who with predictable western irony was nicknamed Tiny.  She was always laughing.  He  always seemed pissed.  A local asked us where we were from, and when we told him San Diego, he  spit in a cup and said, "Well, I won't hold it aginst ya..."  And he didn't. They appreciated that we weren't (quite) hippies, that we worked hard -and that we held our liquor well.  That was important up in that part of The Rockies.  To us too.  We knew when we went there that the legal drinking age in Montana was just nineteen, and I was almost the drinking age.  So we got by without incident.

But man, it was pee-freezin' cold that morning out in front of that trailer, looking up at the Spanish Peaks like a row of dog's teeth reflecting the rising sun against that blue, big sky.

A Sheep Shub...There's more art from Cartoon Network's Sheep in the Big City on the website. 

Tales: A Letter for You

Picture yourself as a large envelope, standing up, smooth and straight.  Your name is on the outside.  You're addressed, where you came from, and where you're supposed to be going to.  The stamp indicates your "value," your weight, and allows you to move through the system.  

Now gently reach with both hands and begin to separate the envelope at the top corner, above the center of your forehead, where your crown would be.  Carefully pull apart the sides of the envelope opening, moving down and pulling apart, looking out as thought you were peaking through curtains.  Open down to your collar, and wider out to your shoulders.

Spread wide open now at the level of your heart, like opening a great jacket, and pull the sides apart, as if to step through.  Now spread the envelope wide, wide open from bottom to top.

Inside is the great secret whirring energy axis of your inner life, welling out, crackling out, spinning out tentacles of light energy, shooting out stars across the room.  This is what we really are.  Open it up and expose your inner self to the world, and watch the interaction of your energy  with your surroundings.  Experience the relief of being real, of opening your true, inner self to the outside world.  You have nothing to fear (unless there's a crocodile nearby).

Life instantly becomes richer, easier, and more exciting when you open yourself to it this way; opening yourself to the discoveries inside, and allowing others to discover your true energies.  What you once thought needed to be protected, you will now see needs to be shared, to be recognized, to be celebrated.

It's not where the letter comes from, or the paper or pattern of the stationery.  It's not the name on it, or in any way what's written on the outside.  It's what's inside the envelope.  These bodies are personal, but arbitrary.  When you open your envelope, you'll discover that we are beings of spirit, light, and particles appearing and disappearing in space.  Invisibly interacting.  

If you don't open the envelope, you'll never know what's inside. 

 "The work of love is to open that window in the chest and look incessantly on the Beloved."

                                                                 Rumi

A Bunch of Sheep

A batch of stuff from Mo Willem's Sheep in the Big City.   

Tales: On a (Shooting) Star...

"You can't put your foot in the same river twice..."    Heraclitus

  

    While I'm here, let me say this about that.  Life doesn't seem fair in many respects.  Why do some people become movie stars while others are beset by tragedy and struggle?    Why are people born with disabilities, or contract terrible illnesses?  Why do young children die of incurable diseases?  

     Because each soul is receiving the precise instruction necessary for their personal evolution.  Fundamentally, every life is tragic at the level of mortality.  That's one of the reasons why we're here, to break through this form into the Eternal.  The tragedies or disabilities are more or less tragic or disabling dependent on the energy they're fed.  Some of the most grievous disadvantages are invisible from the outside.  Some movie stars are beset by terrible tragedies and struggles.  Some laborers are the most serene and contented people on the planet.  Some fashion models are suicidal.  Some paraplegics shine happiness like the sun.

    Have you ever noticed that small children succumbing to terminal illnesses often have the quality of a loving and benevolent teacher, perfect in their wisdom, as serene and knowing in their surrender to The Eternal as the wisest ascended master?  They are just what they appear to be.  By that point, they can only be exactly what they are.  They're only here briefly because they  have that one little thing left to do.  Maybe just to release fear one last time.  It's like they've come back to make sure they turned off the coffee.

    Be sad, experience feeling sad, let it's energy move through you until it passes and you come back.  Then stop energizing it and energize joy.  When the sun sets here, it's always rising somewhere else.  It's always there, we are turning to face it. 

"If you open yourself to the Tao, you are at one with the Tao and you can embody it completely.  If you open yourself to insight, you are at one with insight and you can use it completely.  If you open yourself to loss, you are at one with loss and you can accept it completely."

                                                              The Tao Te Ching, 23

Speaking of stars...Holly Hunter, Faye Dunaway, and Glenn Close from pre-PS days...

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 14: A Date With a Star...

  In the years as I was entering High School, my brother dated a beautiful young woman named Jane.  She was fresh-faced and true, and very, very intelligent.  They went to college together.  She supported him pecadillos and all, bearing witness to the craziness of our home with great grace and compassion, and for a while there I had a chance to know a balanced and loving person who lived in their own skin.  It may not sound like much, but at the time it seemed a rare thing to me.  Through her I learned a lesson about who we are at our beginnings, and who we can be.

    She came from a close-knit family, talented and a bit eccentric perhaps like our own, but right side up.  They were supportive of one another's eccentricities with obvious and enviable love (which is Source energy), while our own family lived an illusion of wellness.

    In the wake of my first break-up, Jane and my brother often encouraged me to date her younger sister, but to me she seemed much too young.  At seventeen, drugs and alcohol were all around me, all the time.  There'd been trauma at home, and within my peripheral family. Aside from that invisible resumé, I'd been working in the world of adults from an early age and I just felt old already.  In my finite teenage wisdom, I didn't see how an innocent 15-year-old girl could possibly have the necessary experience to match my worldly self-centeredness.

    I finally succumbed and picked up Jane's little sister for a date to Balboa Park in San Diego (seen as "Xanadu" in the opening of Citizen Kane).  [Since] I've learned that the thing that often offends you most about someone else is caused by the subconscious awareness of that same characteristic in yourself (thank you, Dr. Jung), it follows that I diagnosed Annette as suffering from a case of unconscious vanity.  She kept noticing herself in the reflection of store windows, which I couldn't help but notice when I was noticing myself.  She made me conscious of me.

    After touring the museum, we were sitting on a big park bench making very small talk when Annette suddenly pulled her feet under herself, and stood straight up next to me.  She threw her arms up over her head, rolling her wrists out to push her palms up, and agitating like some faerie Maytag, she loudly pronounced, "SOMEDAY I'M GOING TO BE A GREAT AND FAMOUS ACTRESS, AND EVERYONE WILL KNOW MY NAME!"

    I was casually chagrined.  I tapped her calf and suggested that she get down as people were looking.  And people were looking. They were smiling.  Her future fans were already noticing her.  Annette was molding the plastic life ahead of her in an altogether good-natured way, and I hadn't a clue what I was witnessing.  

    She starred in the high school drama club.  She went on to ACT in San Francisco.  She broke out in Stephen Frear's The Grifters and went on to become a great and famous Academy Award nominated actress.   Amongst other things to her credit in a very accomplished career, she married Warren Beatty and had a family of her own.  They're probably a little eccentric, and lovingly supportive of it. 

    I liked to joke that she settled for second best, but I was painting "funny" over my feelings- flummoxed and intimidated by someone so young who could create their Karma with such focused intention, when for so many years I just kept feeling, well clueless.  It makes me smile now -the beautiful accuracy of that park bench prophecy.  

    Some people are born with symphonies in place, ready to come out by five.  Others enter into young adulthood blossoming into their Karma.  Annette just knew.  Some people (ahem...) don't know what their purpose is until they've had to survive every other possibility, and like Sherlock Holmes, whatever else remains must be the truth.   

   Her older sister Jane went on to Johns Hopkins and became a Cardiologist, I think.  I think she knew too.

  "You have your paintbox and colors. 

         Paint paradise, and in you go."  

                                                                Nikos Kazantzakis

Everyone has unseen influences that make up who they are. Influences from inner and outer worlds, from other dimensions of being.  In Faith and Mr. Floppy, the kids all have "esoteric energies" that contribute to their personae -in the "real" world, and in magical dimensions.  Here's Gideon, Faith's sort-of boyfriend, and Topher, her step-brother, and their respective esoteric selves... 

Tales: Well Well, Another Metaphor...

"Don't they know who I think I am?"

                                                                   Koko

      A group of people stand looking down into a dry well.  They complain about their thirst, about their withering gardens.  One man, driven by desperation, at last steps up and climbs down into the well.  He begins to dig, at first resenting the work, but then finding an easy rhythm and satisfaction in the effort, until finally he removes that last obstructing bucket of dirt, and breaks through to the great aquafer that flows underneath and through everything.  That infuses and enlivens everything.  The well begins to fill again with cool water, and bending over, still digging to assure the steady flow of this renewed life, he sees his own reflection in the source.  He is this.  What he thought he was, who he thought he was  is only a reflection of this source.

     And when he climbs back out of the well and meets with the various responses of the others-- the heartfelt thanks, the casual acknowledgements, the proud dismissals;  he carries with him that source reflection, only vertically now, so that wherever he goes he's looking into that.  He sees his own reflection in the the faces of everyone that speaks to him.  Their eyes are his eyes.  Their fears and foibles and joys and realizations are his own.

     So our very own form can provide us with the entry to that new, relaxed, and naturally productive way of seeing the world.  Infused and enlivened by that flow.  We are all the same thing.  We all think the same thoughts and feel the same feelings.  And where we used to entertain those cruelties that defined us-- the harsh comparisons, snap judgments and righteous justifications, there now lives an easy sense of compassion- the door to source.  This sweet and sustaining flow of source that is available to everyone is absolutely free, and totally liberating.  It just takes a bit of humility, of "digging" - the honest self-examination that allows us to truly see ourselves.  To learn who we really are meant to be, as opposed to who we think we're supposed to be;  how did those psychic obstructions to source and purpose get put in place, and how do we remove them?

    The most critical facillitating aspect behind discovering this freedom, the metaphor of "going down into the well" in Yeshua's story, is finding your inner place of silence where you can gain the calm perspective on who you really are.  Your own personal well, where the deepest obstructions between you and your source are hidden.   

   "In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness."      

                                                   Mahatma Gandhi

 

     By finding the silence within ourselves, we can individually defuse the demanding inner voice that provides life's running commentary, and then perhaps we can collectively turn off the delusional egoic "reality" that drives our species in ruinous directions.  By becoming aware of it, we can strip away the obsessive "story of our life, our country, our people," etc.  -the delusional view of life that the Hindu call maya.  Christians misinterpret it as sin (in the original greek of the canons: amartia, meaning "to miss the mark").  Buddhists call it selfish craving.

    That silence resides in The Tao, The Brahman, The Kingdom of Heaven, in Emptiness, in Source Energy;  and in us - within and without us.  In that silence, in the absence of anything personal, that power lives.  Then we find it's all personal.  And we are all that person. 

    "The Kingdom is inside you, and it is outside you."

                                                Logion 3, The Gospel of Thomas

Happiness Redux

    When you were a kid, like in Kindergarten, did you have a snack in the afternoon, followed by naptime?  You rolled out your mat, the teacher turned out the lights, and you laid there...napping.  I used to lay there, wide awake, wondering are all the other kids just laying here wide awake in the middle of the afternoon like me?  It wasn't even dark at all.  Not even with the lights out.  And there were no pillows.  I used to lay there and wonder what's the point of this?  Why do adults make us do such dumb stuff?

    I wish I knew then what I know now. So I wanted to share some of that what by inviting you back to Tips for Happiness, #'s 1, 2, & 3.   

    I coulda found happiness back then, if I'd known these tips.  I'm sure they'll help you find some, and keep some...

A little piece of Word World scene design... 

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 13: Simon of the Marquesas, conclusion...

continued...

"A long time ago, I met a girl while I was fishing in the lagoon on the other side," he said as he waved over the ridge,  "and she had my child.  But back then I thought life was all about Simon, so I left the far lagoon and returned to the village."  He narrowed his eyes and looked out past the horizon.  "There I met another girl, and went to live with her.  She wanted things, so I went to work on the copra boats -there were many more of them back then.  I sailed all over and made money, and spent it all on life with the village woman."  He shook his head sadly, and then looked up into their eyes.

"One day I was fishing in the lagoon, and a shark swam up to my boat and began to talk to me.  He said: 'This is no way for you to live.  You will never be what you are meant to be living your life this way.  You must return to the far lagoon, to the girl you left.  She is there- I saw her the other day, with your child.  You must go back and live there, and take care of your family.'  But how can I take care of them, if I do not work the copra boats?  I asked him.  Il a me dît:  'You will fish in the far lagoon, and you will carve tiki to celebrate the gifts of a true life, and you will be able to take care of your family.'  Then he swam away."  Simon seemed to be telling the truth.

"So I left the village woman with all the things I had bought her, and returned to the girl in the far lagoon, and our child, and we had more children.  I took care of my family," he looked around the kids smiling, "and I still do...and these are children of those children's children!"  He laughed and showed the kids off, and they laughed too.

At that very moment, the Aranui's first horn bellowed out over the bay.  Koko asked "How much is the large tiki?" and I think Simon told him two hundred francs, which was only about thirty dollars then, but I don't think Koko had brought along any money at all.  They said their goodbyes, gave Simon a hug, and hurried back down the hill, but by the time they reached the shore, they knew.  The other tourists were already in the whaling boat.  Up to their thighs in the surf, Koko and Grace took up a collection.  The woman who'd won a lottery in Ohio lent them the two hundred francs, and they ran back up the valley together in case if they were left, they'd be stuck together for the month until the Aranui's return.

When they got back to Simon's shed, he was waiting for them.  The second horn sounded from the ship below.

"I knew that you would return."  He laughed. " This is your tiki.  You had to come back for it."  Koko picked up the heavy stone, and felt it's energy charge up his arms and fill his heart.  Grace felt it too, standing next to him.  They paid Simon, hugged him goodbye again, and Koko folded the tiki into his arms and headed back down the hill, Grace running out in front to hold the boat at the shore, if she could.

By the time they got back to the beach, the crew members were waving them in frantically.  The seas had picked up, and it was tough clamoring on board, and even tougher rowing out through the surf.  As they pulled up alongside the ship, the waves were pitching the small boat up and down eight or ten feet.  The crew always boarded the paying passengers first, and one of them snatched the tiki as two others hoisted Grace and Koko on board at  the top of a wave.  They looked back at a worried island woman and her new-born, still being pitched up and down in the boat alongside.  One of the rowers took the infant in one hand and raised the little one up overhead with the rising wave.  Then, in a magical moment as the wave reached it's peak, a brawny crewman reached down from the Aranui's  deck, and as securely and tenderly as you'd pick up a perfect peach, he took the baby with one hand and passed him to safety.  On the next violent wave up, he grabbed the mother by her outstretched arm, and as though she were as light as straw, lifted her straight up and on to the deck.  They handed her baby back to her as if such things took place every day, because here- of course, they did.

The crew, to a man incredible physical specimens, hoisted and stowed the whaler with easy dexterity.  One of them ran like a cat along the railing, despite the seas.  They were some of the most amazing fellows Grace and Koko had ever seen, and every night on the top patio deck, where the free passengers slept under the stars, they brought out their guitars, tiples, and spoons, and sang the most beautiful island melodies.

Koko thought of Simon, of his color-of-the-lagoon smiling eyes, as he tried to explain the bomb-shaped volcanic rock through customs.

      

It seemed then that being with Grace would always be, so at the time he failed to pay proper attention to Simon's story of responsibility in love.  Likewise, he failed to fully grasp the allegory of the empty materialism of the village woman, and true direction in the words of the shark-spirit, until many years later.  He never saw the stone again - Grace kept it when they parted.  But he never forgot it's weight, the stone carver's hut, the handing of the baby, or that enchanted night music under a million stars, rolling over the violet Pacific, the Southern Cross slowly laying over on it's side. 

 "Life can only be understood backwards, 

            but it must be lived forwards."

                                                                    Søren Kierkegaard

As long as the next post takes place in a tropical lagoon, here's the bottom rough color art for Duck's Pond in Word World, Season Two!

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 13: Simon of the Marquesas.

With the Aranui anchored about a hundred and fifty yards offshore the blue-green Pacific behind them, Grace and Koko trekked up the dry path overlooking the windward side of Nuku Hiva, one of the five Marquesas Islands the little copra freighter stopped at on it's thirty five day trip out of Papeété.  They could see the whaling boats carrying materials into shore, and ferrying passengers, local islanders, out to the ship so they could hitch a free ride to one of the other islands, or pay a little for a ride to the Tuamotus, Rangiroa, or back to Tahiti.

The two followed the even incline up out of the creek valley, up the side of the hill where the forest thinned out a bit.  The Aranui's "Social Director," a young Frenchman, had told them they might find tiki, his catch-all term for something of interest, up on the hill path, but warned them that with the first sounding of the ship's horn they had to hurry back, because the second horn meant au revoir  to all passengers left behind on the island.

It felt like they'd gone a little far, the other dozen or so paying passengers chose to stay below in the village, but something had a hold of them, leading them farther up the path.  At first there was just a little girl, about four or five, dirty in a simple cotton dress, pulling on her lower lip.  She turned and ran up the path to a small clearing, to a shed coming into view around the bend.  As they approached there was another dusty, barefoot boy the same age stepping out of the thatch-roofed shed.  He stood behind a crude, homemade table like a counter boy in a shop.  On the table was a small selection of stone carvings ranging in size from a few inches long to the largest, an elongated football-shaped stone about thirteen inches long and seven inches around, with a beautiful bas-relief of of a lizard, or a salamander carved out of the top half.

Through the doorway of the shed, they could see a worn wooden mallet and broken screwdrivers on the corner of a little table, and a man's weathered foot in the triangle of sunlight.  The man set his foot down on the dirt floor and stood, hitching up his shorts.  He stepped out the door of the shed and alongside the little boy.

"Vous ete ici!" he exclaimed in a certain kind of french that Koko could just make out.  He said it with that same open- armed lack of surprise that Grace and Koko had been met with so often in their past year of travel around the world.  Everywhere they went there were people, usually older local people, who seemed to recognize them- who greeted them like old friends.  Like they'd been awaiting their arrival.

"Vous venez pour votre Tiki." the man said, motioning to the table.  Koko reached out and shook his rough hand.  He was not too tall, a little bent, and very brown, wearing an open short-sleeved shirt.  His body was a twilight powerhouse, banded muscles wrapped around his frame, hands and feet splayed and lumpy.  His face was deeply creased.  His hair was a mass of pushed-back collar-length ringlets, shiny as though with coconut oil, mostly grey with satin black underneath.  He was old, but you couldn't tell how old.  His eyes shimmered a light blue-green, little versions of the lagoon that rose in him with the tide.

"Je suis Simon.  Je fait lés Tikis."  His speech was mellifluous and pidgeony as he swung his hand over the table.  Koko had a little trouble translating until he watched Simon's eyes, and then his ear began to hear perfectly.  

"These are some of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren," he said, rubbing the head of the little boy who hid behind his leg, motioning to the little girl who stood by the shed, pulling on her lower lip.  Koko and Grace couldn't seem to take their eyes off the one tiki, the salamander stone.  Koko touched it and tilted it up for a look.

"That is the very first creature.  It says something to you.  Every creature came from that."

" Dessous, tournéz..." Simon says, motioning as though to turn the tiki over.   Koko picked it up -it was heavier than he'd expected as he turned it.  There on the smooth oval underside, were the cut-in eyes and crescent toothed mouth of a shark.  "Aaahhhh..." said the two in unison.  Simon's eyes widened as he smiled.

"I'll tell you why the shark," said Simon.  "It spoke to me.  Il a dit a moi..."  Then he began to tell his story...

to be continued...

Czech it Out!

With a nod and a wink to my Bohemian heritage, a small tribute to a couple great Czech illustrators.  First up, Miroslav Sasek, whose wonderful This Is line of kids' books is being reissued..

...his work reminds one of his Romanian contemporary, Saul Steinberg...Next, the great Josef Lada.  His seminal illustrations for the Czech classic, The Good Soldier Svejk, written by Jaroslav Hasek, have been a huge inspiration to lots of graphic and ligne claire illustrators like one of my heros, Ever Meulen.  Here is the classic Svejk! 

I noticed the new season of Word World is on now, so I'll put up a few designs that are finally airing...

Here's a color comp for the Monkey's hut, 

and here's how complete the 3-D design plan has to be...
    

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 12

    "This is my simple religion.  There is no need for temples;  no need for complicated philosophy...our own heart is our temple;  the philosophy is kindness."

                                                                        The Dalai Lama

    It was no coincidence that the first time I became open to religious experience in my life was when I first fell in love.  (The medium of spiritual connection is Love)  She was a beautiful Mormon girl who lived about as close as you could in our spread-out canyon community.  I became interested in her religion.  And while I do believe the true search for religious meaning is a search to find love, to find connectedness, the truth is that I really wanted to impress the girl. 

    I'm sure that my parents probably intended for me to get the basic values that people often find attending a church, but their limited and unsatisfactory experiences with organized religion apparently didn't inspire them to pass along any kind of spirituality, or even dogma, to their kids.  My father had grown up a left-handed Catholic, which is to say persecuted and defiant.  He quit the church at his first opportunity.  My mother never went to church, and didn't have much to say about religion, except that it was probably a good thing for some people.  I recall her suggesting that it may be a good thing for me, but she wasn't sure which church I should go to.  She did offer to drive me to which ever one I picked out.

    I had my own spiritual inspirations of a sort from the stars and canyons- that sense of a native experience with the land, perhaps my Kickapoo blood arising.  My gung fu teacher had shown me a mysterious invisible force called ch'i, and given me some eastern wisdom, some western philosophy.  And then way back there had been those strange, other-worldly moments I'd felt in my early childhood accompanying my Czech grandmother to Catholic mass.  

    In those days, the mass was performed in Latin by elaborately-robed priests who kept their backs turned to you.  There was rich, gilded ornamentation lavished in the huge space with it's towering vaulted ceilings, huge oil paintings and tapestries.  Smoke clouds of burning incense and eerie chanting. It was almost spooky, and I was (as intended) transported into a strange, foreign dimension.  But all the hoopla only led me to believe that religion was something awesome and unattainable, and without any preparation or repetition, the Catholic faith could gain no purchase in my little boy's heart.  Even as a small child, I couldn't trust  a life-discipline based on guilt and mortification that weren't of my own creation.  Besides, something didn't sit right.  Why would I pray in a Roman church to the image of a guy being executed by Romans?

                                                      ...A Vonnegut, circa 1975.

    Reading had given me something of a set of beliefs by the time I reached puberty.  My library was pilfered from my college-aged brother and sister, and was rich in philosophical prose.  From my brother I copped Kafka, Sartre, and Mark Twain.  He could keep those Russians, they were just too intimidatingly thick.  From my sister I "borrowed" John Steinbeck, whose ghost I would later stalk (from King City to Monterrey);  Henry Miller, who wrote about sex!   And my teenage literary hero and default guru, Kurt Vonnegut,  whose funny and pointedly nonsensical morality plays made perfect sense in my tiny nation of one.  God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.  Years later, I'd go to see Vonnegut on stage with Art Buchwald and Lewis Lapham, discussing the betrayals of the second Bush administration.  He was beautifully wise and cranky, and full of love.  Within just a couple months, both he and Buchwald would shuffle off this mortal coil, and Lapham would retire from the editorship of Harper's, which for me was also akin to a small death in the family.

    I mixed all this heady literature up with the latest Marvel Comics, particularly The Mighty Thor, and The Sub Mariner, completely failing to equate the psychic sufferings of the Existentialists with my favorite quasi-mythic comic book idols.  Marvel Comics were existential, and I, as a mere visitor to this planet myself, could identify with all those displaced anti-protagonists completely.

    Adding to it all at just the right moment, my high school teacher assigned us the option of reading a book called Man's Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl.  I read it.  All my strident inner-dependence and resistance to embrace an absurd reality whose beauty could only be grasped in brief, unpredictable moments, suddenly dissolved in my young psyche in just such a moment.  I was just here.  It didn't have to make any sense.  I was a visitor whose chief occupation was making the most of a poorly-planned vacation on a beautiful, but messed-up planet.  I only had to do. To be.  So it goes.

"This world is a bridge.  Pass over it, but do not build your dwelling there."

                           'Isa,  (Jesus in Islam), from an inscription                                     at the mosque in Fatepuhr Sikri, India 

A "Faith" storyboard scenario

Tales: No Fear - False Evidence Appears Real

"It is always the false that makes you suffer...Abandon the false and you are free of pain;  truth makes happy;  truth liberates."

                                             Nisargadatta Maharaj 

I've been wanting to write about fear, but I was afraid to.  What if I wrote something foolish -what would people think?  Would I ever get acknowledgment and acceptance from the people I want to impress? What if someone with power over my life would read what I've written, judge me, and prevent me from reaching my rightful rewards?  I could be ruined.  Lose my home.  Let my family down.    

That paragraph describes a little of the neurotic nature of modern fear; the folly of the mind that leads to the construction of of imaginary threats.  The worries that can consume an intellect, usually brought on by the volatility of desires.  What will they think?  What if I don't get what i want?  What if I lose something important to me?

Fear is basically an instinct for self-preservation, and as such is perfectly necessary and useful- sometimes even critical.  Not all that long ago, we had to worry about being attacked by wild animals.  Bears or tigers or, God forbid, crocodiles.  Fear in those cases is entirely appropriate, though you don't see a lot of that sort of thing these days.  In the agrarian societies of some countries, or of our recent past, if there was a chance that crops would fail, or if the fresh water supply were threatened, arising fearful insecurities would assure that we'd take action to prevent shortages, to shore up critical supplies and reserves.  Likewise, in these cases, fear is an appropriate motivator born from the instinct to survive. 

 But in this society, we don't have many of those worries.  The only shortages of food we have in the world are artificially created by inequitable distribution.  In some countries (including our own), this leads to unnecessary hunger.  For most of us though, a simple phone call brings food right to our door, even if it's just pizza.  God bless pizza.  And as we needn't worry about eating, and we really needn't worry about being eaten, what exactly is fear in this society?

Fear is the imaginary projection of the ego into the future, as remorse and resentments are the ego's unwillingness to release supposed "losses" of the past.  There are a couple great acronyms for FEAR:  False Evidence Appears Real, and Forget Everything's All Right.  Ninety-eight times out of a hundred (you can check those numbers), what you fear never comes to pass unless you create it yourself.  But does all that evidence prevent the ego from creating the "worst case scenario?"  Not unless you take some action to defuse it.  Here is a proactive approach I'll call The Karma of Action.

As usual, it's meditation.  As the ego seeks to separate us from Source, meditation connects us, and disconnects fear.  Karma is so often really the action of life, not the causality of life, as the victimized ego would define and enforce it.  If you form your actions based on fearful ego expectations, you energize the ego's negative projections.  Your actions follow that negative intention, and you create a causal cycle of negativity in your life.  If on the other hand you're connected by meditation, and you recognize the imaginary nature of ego-fear, you'll notice that the evidence of your life confirms that everything is actually all right, and refuse to energize the ego's negative projections -stopping your fearful self-paralysis before it starts, and taking the necessary actions to assure your fears never come to pass.  Simple examples would be that if you treat people well first, they will usually reciprocate (...hello?);  or if you have a spot on your skin and neglect it, it can grow to be a real threat -when if you go to the doctor right away, they remove it, and the tests come back proving it was wise of you to make sure.  It works best if you apply this NOW - or just for today.  Any projection into the future invites fearful ego-imagination to have it's way.  

Show up and just do what you need to do today.  If you're doing right, you never need to worry what other people think.  This is karma in action - creating a positive cycle.  It will even effect the way you carry yourself, relating to the world in a way that assures positive experiences, because your healthy spirit extends beyond your physical body.  You'll have the intuition and confidence to face any situation, bringing me to the last of my favorite acronyms for FEAR:  Face Everything, Attain Relief.  Except, God forbid.....a crocodile.

"The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future...but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly."

                                                                      The Buddha

The high desert makes me think of Sam Shepard.  Here's a portrait of him from years ago, and years later I met him in Astor Place.  He'd always been a hero, and when I thanked him for everything, he said, "Not everything."  We have some history in common, in fact, in this painting he's wearing one of my old shirts...

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 11: Desert Flight

"Wherever you go, there you are."            Thomas á Kempis

The traveling started early.  Perhaps it was the expansiveness of the west that brought it on.  Or maybe just the desire to be somewhere else that living a young life kicked off it's tracks can bring about.  Having Mexico, an international border, right down the block added a bit to the scope of what seemed possible.  There were fronteras close by that could be crossed in minutes.  Horizons one could easily wrap one's life over in just a day or two's time.

 There was that inner expanse too.  The invitation to live a multiple life that in fits and starts led me to an identity that I'd rely on through several lives, and several deaths.  Back then, I didn't know where I was going in life, so I felt most at ease when I was going somewhere else.  The regular road trips with my brother from San Diego up into the high desert through the Owens Valley, up the "backside" of the Sierras through Lone Pine and Crowley Lake to the great blown-out crater that was Mammoth Mountain, soon became forays deeper and farther into the desert west.

In the evening after supper I'd take a deep breath and set off in my '59 Volkswagen Beetle, with it's oval rear window, cloth roll-top sunroof, furniture wheel accelerator, and foot-thrown reserve gas tank (no gauge), bound for Utah.  I felt like Lindbergh setting off across the Atlantic, and in that bare-bones can of a car with it's little airplane engine droning, sometimes it sounded and felt like I was flying at a thousand feet through the dark, thin air of the high desert. Sunroof open, stars shining in.  There'd be a stop in Vegas for coffee and a donut before pressing on to St. George, Utah, en route to the Wasatch Mountain range above Salt lake City.

Sometimes an eighteen-wheeler would come barreling by, nearly pushing the Beetle right off the shoulder with it's great whoosh of air -but once it passed, I could swing that little green bucket in behind the trucker, and she'd shudder and rise up off the ground as the big semi sucked her along in it's draft.  I covered a lot of road that way, attached to those big trucks like a remora attached to a shark.  They didn't care, the little car's weight was so insignificant, they couldn't even feel me hitching a ride... and I think they liked the company.  The feel of serving someone.  I'd get 50, 60 miles to the gallon being carried along like that, and never have to worry about anything in the road- especially in that green tin can where a collision with a wayward heffer would mean oblivion for cow and boy alike.

As my host trucker finally pulled off to a road stop, I'd honk him a pallid little VW honk, and wave like a fellow sea-captain veering off into the darkness of the open ocean.  And he'd always wave back, acknowledging my gratitude for the portage and protection.  In those days when there was so much nothing between Las Vegas and Salt Lake, just being out there going someplace in the same direction was enough to fashion a headlight camaraderie out in the lonely desert night, navigating by the stars and the glow of a town on the horizon.

And when I finally arrived, I'd always brought very little but my several selves along.  And maybe who I could be this time.  Until it was time again to be somewhere else.

Here's a recent Faith and Mr. Floppy action storyboard section I did for a trailer I'm working on...click to make it bigger.

A new, cuter Faith...at the insistence of Dominie Mahl, Art Director for Project Development at Curious Pictures.  With some good reason, Dom suggested that Faith needed to look younger, that she could pass for forty.  She was right, and it points out how important it is to work on a project with a variety of different people.  Each one brings fresh eyes, and can help knock the corners off your rolling project so that it can organically find it's final shape.

Tales: A Little Landscaping

"Everything...is made by mind.  If one speaks or acts with with a pure mind, happiness will follow..."                                                                                       Buddha,  The Dhammapada

    In the course of our time here as our path, like it or not, takes us towards what some call "self-realization," there is a leveling of the landscape of our life, so to speak, as we get more and more accustomed to simply being alive.  That which didn't kill us, didn't kill us.  When we look back at the past, the rough features of that daily existence  -at the time so difficult to maneuver-  the power of all those dramas we took part in, unconsciously diminish and the landscape over which our road has taken us seems to smooth out into a calm, even plain of being.  Of what was then.  Just as the future arises unpredictably out of nothingness, the past simply returns to the uncreated, only popping up occasionally like a whack-a-mole when we need to re-learn the same lessons we've forgotten.  The landmarks left standing behind us are just the ruins of those "great dramas" that shaped us, that changed us.  Their matter and mass blows away like buildings in time-lapse photography.  We intuitively understand our quantum reality, the way it builds and deconstructs- packets of energy that become real when they react with our consciousness, and one another.  Nothing is actually solid.  Ahead, the landscape likewise appears even and smooth-- except for potential obstacles arising that will only manifest themselves as difficult life-events if we invest them with too much of the wrong kind of energy, turning them into monuments to future drama, future suffering.  This includes the inevitable sorrows and losses of life. The death of a pet. The loss of a romance. A career disappointment.  The passing of a parent.   But now we can avoid a lot of the difficulty in those obstacles by approaching them a different way, maybe with love this time.  We can climb to the top of those monuments to past or potential dramas and own them.  We can energize their quanta with positivity.  

  Look out over the views behind and ahead of you, and notice that the landmarks left on the geography of your past are the same shape and made of the same stuff as those potential obstacles ahead.  Become a geographical detective. Find out what the patterns mean, where they come from.  You have built those forms out of potential energies.  And going forward know that you can bring anything into being. 

    Once you determine your patterns, you can build your life landscape based on the three great life factors:  Karma, Intention, and Ego.

    Karma is practically self-explanatory at this point, the average person's consciousness now being evolved enough to almost automatically understand that each soul labors towards it's inherent completion, and the cause and effect generated by one's life or lives determines what's needed to complete the lessons.  You have to do something because you have to learn that.  Your life sets you up with certain conditions, the luck of the draw, so to speak.  Life doesn't happen to you, it happens for you.  It's evidence of the spiritual evolution of our species that this formerly esoteric Eastern concept is now pretty well part of the global mainstream of thought.  What goes around gets around. 

    Intention refers to the fact that we live in that thoroughly plastic, quantum world, where whatever you set the focus of your intention on, and follow the event stream of your life diligently and with passion, you can manifest out of the potentially material field of being.  The trick is that you have to show up, keep trying, and believe.  There are greater powers at work than meet the eye, and they are quite capable of producing your wildest dream, just as you are quite capable of preventing it by your own resistance and negativity.  Which leads to the last of the three, Ego.

     Ego is simply the mechanism by which one remains fictitiously attached to the visible, superficial, material aspects of the world.  It fears the underlying change, which is life.  It's the false self that keeps you out of alignment with The Divine by convincing you that you're separate from it, often because you "don't deserve it," when you naturally deserve to manifest your dreams as much as anyone.  If you can put this Ego (judgment and comparison) aside, you'll immediately develop insight to being.  Using this insight, life will show you your karma; and then when you focus your intention on following your life, you can take short-cuts along your karma path simply because your soul is learning the lessons it requires for completion.  Jung called it Individuation.  Some of us tree-huggers call it finding yourself. 

"Samsara, the transmigration of life, takes place in one's mind.  Let one therefore keep the mind pure, for what a man thinks that he becomes."

                                                  Maitri Upanishad 6. 24

Here are the finishes to those sketches below (for PC World magazine, 08/09):  One about your boss checking you out online; the other about storage ("cloud") sites that disappear overnight, and take your files with them. 

Sue Pike (My Wife): Animal Talker!

For those who don't know, my beautiful wife is Sue Pike, The Animal Talker.  Not only does she help lots of people with her gift of Reiki, or by communicating with their animal partners, but she's also a radio star!     You can hear her every third Thursday on Eluv's Ultrasounds.  Click on this Ultrasounds Link to listen (9:15 PM EST), or to check the archived shows.  While you're there, check out Eluv's show every Thursday, or dig the rest of this excellent station's program schedule.

    Also, Sue recently did a full-length radio interview on a show called Talking Animals.  Click here to access the archive of her interview!

A Hug from Amma

                       "My religion is love."              Amma

Have you ever heard of Sri Mata Amritanandamayi?  She is better known to the world as Amma (mother), "The Hugging Saint."  Amma has given darshan, a deep loving hug, to more than twenty-seven million people!  During three days last week here at The Manhattan Center, Amma must've hugged another couple thousand.  In sessions that last 15 hours (or more) straight, Amma doesn't get up, or eat, or drink.  She just gives beautiful deep hugs.  Long hugs, longer hugs, one at a time, two at a time.  And to hug Amma is like hugging an ocean of love.  After so much hugging, she is built for hugging.  She is without a doubt the best hugger in human history.

It's difficult in our culture to give one's self over so completely to love -to make love itself the single overarching motivation for everything you do.  Some touch on it dedicating themselves to their families, but usually you have more important things to do that don't allow you to act solely out of love, right?  No, that's not really true.  It only seems that way.

At any and every moment, we have a simple choice between two directions in our lives: towards ego gratification in one form or another; or towards love, compassion, and the simple, practical path towards personal growth and contributing to life that the path toward love creates.  This choice appears in every aspect of our lives, from the smallest decision -like what to watch on TV, to the largest -like how to raise your kids, or how to care for an elderly parent.  If you put love in the center of every decision, your intuitive intelligence will kick in and direct you as clearly as if someone were speaking in your ear.  You'll stop gossiping.  Stop criticizing people and institutions, and instead know how to help improve things.  You'll intuitively know what to do in tough situations.  You will become a link in a chain of love, and experience the incredible strength, unity, and freedom that comes from making right decisions, from acting ethically.

   

  "We are all beads strung together on the same chain of love."                                                                                     Amma

  Life will begin to flow in a smooth, sure way that actually requires less effort to accomplish more.  Even unforeseen professional and financial solutions will show up for you right on time, because you will be supported and directed by love, which, as the great binding foundation of life, never "goes wrong."  You probably won't win the Powerball if you feel you've bought a ticket "with love," but ask, and you'll receive all that you need to be happy.

You'll likely still hear the voice of your ego goading or belittling you or others, making fearful declarations, like:  "You can't make a living by just loving!"  But you'll recognize that voice as an unfortunate tendency of our human form -a destructive over-identification with false promises about solutions based on acquiring things, or attaining the approval of others -solutions that are superficial and momentary.  Because everyone knows that for all of humankind, loving has always made the best lives, and will always have that power to do so.  In a practical sense, listening to love will cause you to show up for what's truly important in your life, to be in places where you'll find opportunity that you may have never been otherwise.  Joy will arise from all decisions based in love and service, and will wash away all your worries more and more as your new power develops.

Could it really be so simple that just the act of holding love in your heart as the focus of life can connect you, guide you, and provide for you?  All the great wisdom of humankind tell us it's true.  In The Bhagavad Gita,  Krishna says:  "...when one's faith is completely unified, they gain the object of their devotion.  In this way, every desire is fulfilled by me."  And the Bible puts it this way:  "As a man [person] thinketh in his heart, so is he."  So it sez-eth.

So, it just comes down to that choice -between fear or faith.  If there's a part of you that seems to enjoy living with fear, release that destructive hook and fearlessly choose the direction that love will clearly lead you in.  It's the best free life consultant there is.  My dear friend Anne put it this way:

"The love that you share is the only thing you need to know.  It is the green place from which all good things grow and spread into your life.  It's where the river of the Source is constantly carrying you, so that all your worries may disappear."  And this gem from Amma:                 "There has never been a guru who died of starvation."

Poo-pooing these beliefs as a "naîve, unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky fairy tales" is the attitude that has created every disastrous condition ever known.  Period.  And Amma says this:

"In the end, love is the only medicine that can heal the wounds of the world.  In this universe, it is love that binds everything together.  As this awareness dawns within us, all disharmony will cease." 

Next year, I hear they may have to move Amma's event to a much larger venue.  It's continually growing too big for one location after another.  They may have to hold it in Madison Square Garden.  Next could be Yankee Stadium, or maybe Central Park...it sure would be nice if the whole world could share a hug with Amma.

Here are some value roughs from a recent assignment for PC World magazine that demonstrate illustration process:

The opener is about prospective employers researching  an applicant's character online.

I like to give a few choices- the second article is about online storage (cloud) sites that go bust without telling you...

The finishes appear in this month's (August '09)

issue.  

Tales: Little Big Ego

"Ego specialness prevents you from authentic feelings of sacredness by creating an inner experience of fear."

Wayne Dyer

There are, generally speaking, two aspects, or types of ego that make a person so. One is a healthy, not particularly prominent ego that allows the true self to interact with material life in an easy, unfettered way. Things aren't so terribly important. One is rarely offended - tolerance and acceptance come naturally. This ego is beneficial because it provides a sound natural foundation while playing a relatively small active role in an individual's development. The healthy person finds it naturally easy to "stay out of their own way," permitting the flow of Source energy, which is Love, to grow the true self. This ego is grounded in Love.

The other ego is unhealthy. Over-important; over-complicated. The voice of the False Self. This self-important ego (naturally less-healthy) sometimes or often acts as the main interface with material life, pressing unfair and unnecessary demands and comparisons on an individual, becoming easily offended, lacking in tolerance and acceptance. It stifles the growth of the natural self by impeding, or totally cutting off, the flow of Source energy, which is love. In this way, we innocently become our own worst enemy. This ego is grounded in Fear.

Here is the essence of the metaphor of The Garden of Eden. The unhealthy ego knows everything, and always needs to be right. It makes a constant diet of "the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" (judgment and comparison). And when it serves as the sole intermediary to the universe, to the Source, the hapless natural self is banished from the garden, and simply being is never enough. One must become something other than their authentic, natural self, based on what they think others expect them to be.

On a larger scale, this unhealthy egoic thinking process is the mass default for Western culture, and increasingly with the export of American consumerism, for the rest of the world as well. The rapid expansion of this dangerously delusional unhealthy mass ego-- given a voice by round-the-clock media programming and driven by equally unconscious advertising, is the reason that we find the very survival of all species- the very ability of our planet to sustain life as we know it, suddenly in such precarious circumstances. This mass ego lives to "control" and exploit the earth in order to ameliorate a voracious need that can never be met. It lives by creating it's own "map" of reality, and only functioning by looking at that delusional "map," instead of paying attention to the actual geography and conditions of the world around us. The sooner we personally cut through the useless and destructive mass ego to the simple underlying truth, and become honest-- first with ourselves, and then with others, the sooner we'll see that no matter how big the problem, there is a spiritual solution. This honesty, the act of becoming aware, will allow you to recognize the manipulations constantly imposed on you by the destructive mass ego, and to dismiss them with kindness and compassion. With these simple realizations, we will become spiritual beings (which, of course, we already are), and the inevitable spiritual evolution of our species will finally become real.

Evidence of this spiritual evolution of humankind is all around us. More and more people all the time (maybe you) are able to simply see the real state of the world around us, and to say: "Wait a minute! This is crazy! We can't do this anymore." That's the window of opportunity. Climb through it and from that moment on, your intuitive intelligence will be activated and will direct you to behave in a whole new (responsible) way that will lead to your feeling of connectedness with all life, and a new sense of wholeness and happiness; to the healing of our mass psyche; and most importantly, to the preservation of all the threatened species of our animal brothers and sisters, and the healing and renewal of our planet's ecosystems.

"When Man ate of the fruit of the Tree, he discovered himself in the field of duality instead of the field of unity. As a result, he finds himself out, in exile." Joseph Campbell

"Unless the the human race realizes with a passion and reverence beyond thoughts or words it's inter-being with nature, it will destroy in it's greed the very environment it is itself sustained by."

Andrew Harvey

You wouldn't have seen this a hundred years ago...or would you?

Tales: What's Going On? 3 by Einstein

"There are two ways to live your life- one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle."

This remarkable quote by Albert Einstein addresses what is probably the most important question of life- is the universe and life as we know it a big random accident, or is there an underlying and energizing intelligence behind the formation of everything we see and know?  Could both be true?  The probable confluence of coincidental factors necessary for the spontaneous creation and continued existence of life on earth is infinitesimally small.  So what's going on here?

    The world has certainly been shaken lately, what with all this consciousness pouring into it- more now each day than in thousands of previous years.  The picture we have of "reality" (back when we were taught that everything was smaller balls orbiting bigger balls) is completely different than it was not all that long ago, so it's a bit difficult to have faith in conjecture, even if you call it "science," seeing as it has generally turned out to be wrong.  We can only base our understanding on what seems to work or not work.  Newtonian physics works up to a level that lowers a bit every day.  Einstein's relativity advanced the ball down the field, out the door, and right into a different stadium that had an additional dimension.  Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger made that a stadium in dynamic constant motion, waves in the field.  Now it seems, consciousness is being recognized as the creative, unifying factor in all our forms, bringing science into accord with what the mystic wisdom of he ages, from Hindu Vedas  to The Tao to Buddha's awakening to Gnostic scripture, has been telling us all along.

    In a few great books, like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, Lynne McTaggart's The Field, Greg Braden's The Divine Matrix, and Ernst Laszlo's Science and the Akashic Field,  we get a heads-up as to what our latest science tells us about just how "non-ordinary" reality really is.  Here's some of it, very simply put:  In one experiment, photons are placed in a vacuum.  DNA is introduced.  The photons arrange themselves around the organic material.  When the DNA is removed, the particles remain in the same configuration.  Matter is being arranged by organic in-form-ation.  In another experiment, genetic material is divided equally and separated by a great distance.  One sample is subjected to specific stimuli.  Both samples respond the exact same way simultaneously.  There exists a medium or means of communication through which information is transmitted instantaneously at any distance.  Psychic contact and remote viewing are constantly documented to take place with an accuracy that exceeds margins of error.  "Transpersonal consciousness" is documented to occur regularly.  Group meditation has a measurable influence on physical events on a large scale.  Have you ever thought of someone (had them "enter your heart"), and very shortly received a call or email from them, or "bumped into them" in some highly unlikely place?  It happens more often when you know it will.

    Medical and pharmacological science has a problem here too.  Many chemical treatments approved of by the FDA are effective with significantly less consistency than placebos.  It's not the substance that's effecting the condition, it's what we are thinking and feeling.  Non-local "remote" healing energy transmission, like reiki, can create measurable positive physical results.  This is not your grandmother's reality, unless she was an "indigenous" person or a mystic.

    What to do about our clinging to Newton like those who clung to edge of the flat earth?  Einstein again:

           "We can't solve problems using the same consciousness that created them."

If the thoughts and feelings, the consciousness and intentions that conceive and manifest a situation that goes awry are continually exercised, the situation will worsen.  We all see it happening. New consciousness that allows for this almost "magical" understanding of our world need only be applied to create a new reality based in the "miraculous" where everyone eats, energy is free and non-polluting, and people heal each other, themselves, and the planet's natural systems.  Unfortunately, we can't always communicate this to others (except through love and compassion) because though we all share the same consciousness in our thoughts, feelings, and experiences, we all have our own path, our karma of life action, that leads us to these realizations.  These processes can't be controlled willfully, they must be accepted willingly.  You don't breathe your breath, it breathes you.  You don't make your heart beat go, your heart beat makes you go.  Joseph Campbell said: "You don't live life, life lives you."  It can all change very quickly at the instant we realize we, and all the life on earth, are that one life being lived.  And finally Einstein again:

 "A human being is a part of a whole...limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest...a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison...Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in it's beauty."                                                            

Here's three takes on a cartoon brownstone façade...intimate, mid-range, and super HQ...

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 10: Ch'i Whiz

 "We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want."

                                                                     The Tao Te Ching, 11

      One day Tommy said he'd started taking "Khan Foo" lessons from some fellow out of his garage.  This was well before the kung fu craze started, though I'd seen Bruce Lee in his role as the high-kicking Kato in the ABC TV series, The Green Hornet, and I'd always loved samurais, sword fights, Knights of the Round Table, and the like, so I asked if I could tag along.  It began a  long relationship with the only true discipline that life had given me up to that point, aside from my paper route.  I started taking the lessons too, once a week, then twice, then as often as I could, learning first of all that it was Gung Fu, with a G.          

    My teacher had systematically cobbled together his own style based in the Wing Chun school of Gung Fu, named after the woman who invented it.  To that he'd added elements of Japanese Kenpo, and some of the ancient anthropomorphized animal styles that originated in China around 1000 CE,  popularly associated with the famous Shaolin Temple. 

    I ate this stuff up.  I truly loved it.  I was good at it, so it made me feel like somebody.  And I loved my Sifu, Barry, who was not at all Chinese (on the outside), but rather a first generation Scots-American, who at times gave lessons wearing his kilt.

    Barry seemed older than he was, in large part due to his all-encompassing intellect.  He was constantly searching out knowledge of all kinds, from literature to technology to the historical accomplishments of ancient cultures.  The politics of war.  The poetry of the romantics.   He quoted Byrnes and Emerson as well as Lao Tzu, Confucius, and the great samurai, Musashi Miyamoto, because for at least that part of his life, he was a martial artist of the highest order.  It was a mystery how he got that way, where he had learned what he knew,  but it didn't really matter.  I required no provenance, nor did anyone else who ever shared a sparring session with him.  His mastery was just a mysterious fact.  He was so good, and knew so many different styles, that it wasn't until years later that I realized he must have been channeling from myriad former incarnations lived in the martial pursuits.

    You would never know it to look at him.  His appearance wasn't classically impressive, though his straight and balanced carriage did suggest an evolved underlying discipline.  He seemed a bit paunchy and built close-to-the-ground, and had a round face, prominent teeth, a mustache, straight brown hair, and glasses.  But when he donned his gi, and tied a band across his forehead, his eyes narrowed and he assumed a remarkably asian appearance, for a Scotsman that is.

    Somehow he also knew about all things asian too - things it would seem only asians would know.  He used to take me to the San Diego Chinese Buddhist Temple to watch Hong Kong kung fu movies, so heavily subtitled with four or five dialects at the bottom of the screen that you could barely see the film itself.  The little auditorium was smoky, and full of Chinese men crammed together on metal folding chairs, cheering the crazy chop-socky action.  We were the only lo fan - white Americans there, years before any Chinese kung fu movie had cracked the American market.

   When Barry sparred, it was real magic.  He could only spar groups of opponents, no single person could avoid being completely defeated within seconds.  No group in fact, no matter how big, fared much better.  He would become a sort of human hydraulic tornado.  He dropped down close to the ground, eliminating any possible target, and began spinning smoothly and powerfully, like a scythe on a vertical axis, high and low, mowing through his attackers with an icy, expressionless calm, tossing bodies aside like spent tissues.  Then suddenly, he would just stop, as a dramatic punctuation, holding an opponent impossibly off balance, his claw-like curved fingers buried just beneath his victim's eye sockets;  the victim wild-eyed and paralyzed.  Then he would casually drop that opponent, as if to emphasize how hopeless it was to have even tried to fight him, and begin mowing through the group again, taking the legs out from under one, stopping his diamond-hard fist just bending another's nose.

    He possessed a power that gave me my first bit of understanding of the invisible energies that surround and enfold our material reality.  With the slightest shuffle, he could side-kick a heavy punching bag off it's hook and send it flying twenty feet.  From a half-inch away, he could generate enough power with a tiny push, to propel a large man three meters off his feet.  Once, as he stood in ma bo- the solid stance of a man on horseback, another student and I tried to push him off balance manning either side of a heavy-handled shovel, the handle crossing him at the navel.  We rhythmically pushed and bounced against his midsection until the handle just cracked and splintered.  He was absolutely immovable.  His expression was that of inscrutable focus.   

    This was my introduction to the power of ch'i, the flowing energetic force of the universe (what is called prana in Sanskrit), which courses through all things, and can be channeled through the body; focused and manifested as force, solidity, and resiliency.  One aspect of the divine unseen.

Happy Cool Father's Day

This spot from the NY Times Circuit Section days...in honor of the cool dads out there. 

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 9: Fellini in the Dark

     "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

                                                                           Soren Kierkegaard

    San Diego in the late Fifties and early Sixties could've been defined in a number of ways.  As a border town.  As a Navy town.  As beta suburbia.  Growing up I was saved, in part, from the delusional mindscape of nascent American TV by the more realistic attitudes and practices of our next-door neighbor to the south, Mexico.  Like the wonderfully defiant listening alternative provided to the U.S. southwest by "Border Radio," there were also TV stations just across the frontera that transmitted a whole different kind of programming (than what the 3 networks had to offer) right into our uptight family rooms with power that curled the FCC's hair.

    There were a real variety of shows offered, many of which, thank God, side-stepped the standards of decent American programming.  Wrestlers, sombrero westerns, bullfights.  For me, as a twelve-year-old, the most anticipated of these programs was, naturally, the most potentially corrupting.

    Late at night while the decent folk slept, XETV, Canal Seis en Tijuana, aired racey foreign movies.  Uncensored european, and especially Italian movies.  Some of which were especially Italian.  Those were the ones I liked best.  At six, I'd been caught in a closet with an early Playboy magazine and a flashlight, presumably looking for something that I was not going to find in those "filthy" yet wholesome pages.  

    On weekends, I was baby-sat by the sword-and-sandal triple-features at the local movie palace, or on Saturday mornings at home, right after the beauty of the Warner Brothers Cartoon block, I could tune into such amazing prepubescent psyche-shaping Technicolor extravaganzas as "Hercules Versus the Leopard Women," and watch the dubbed-into-english english-speaking Steve Reeves impose his well-oiled torso on a mysterious ancient sect of zippered-bodice amazons ( God bless you, Joseph E. Levine).  Steve made heroic pronouncements out-of-sync while holding plaster columns over head, or while tossing aside paper mache boulders like paper mache.  The Leopard Women were ultra-alluring in their panty hose of antiquity, their vibrant lips glistening; their majestic mascara-ed eyes flapping like teal-winged peacocks.  But this was nothing compared to the surreptitious promise of the middle-of-the-night movies, where the themes were decidedly more surrealistically adult.  Like the thrill of seeing the original brassiere machine gun deployed by the ravishing Ursula Andress in the pre-feminist Sci-Fi classic, "The Tenth Victim."  Or the barely night-gowned Barbara Steele wandering the darkened castle grounds, stirring up mayhem and pre-adolescent libidos in "Black Friday."

    You never know the package a life-lesson will come in.  Late one night, when everyone was asleep, my paper-route alarm clock went off on "low" at five minutes to two.  I crept upstairs and positioned myself no more than fourteen inches from the Zenith color TV, quietly popping on the tube to the promise of secret and forbidden content suggested by the night's listing of an especially Italian, decidedly adult film, La Dolce Vita.  Somewhere, I'd seen the poster image of an abundant Anita Ekberg dancing in a fountain.  The screen lit up with the double masks of Janus.  Then something completely unexpected happened.

    Yes, there were titillations.  There were situations that excited me that I didn't really understand.  But there was something else that I'd never felt before- an agitation and satisfaction of the most profound nature.  I sat, glued by the magnetic blue glow of the screen, and spent that whole evening immersed in that separate reality, accompanying Marcello along the meridians of Rome, and deep into a passage of a man's life.  The tentative and mysterious relationship to women.  The absurd humanity at the media event of the children witnessing The Virgin.  The sophisticated cocktail party at his urbane mentor's moderne flat (I wanted to be at that elevated cocktail party for years after that...).  The heartbreak of a "wild" night on the town with his fading father.  The collapse of his spirit in the shadow of a tawdry sexcapade.  It was story telling of a prophetic nature for me, for while I'd never grasped the metaphoric significance of St. George and the Dragon, or the Labors of Hercules, my boyhood tales, here at last was an attractively disaffected mythology that I could base my approaching adulthood on.  It felt like the story of what I was to be, and I would go on to live my own version of that story.  I'm still living it. 

    Three-and-a-half hours later, the sun rose over San Diego, as it arose on Marcello's Roma in the film.  I turned the TV off, and crept back downstairs, but Fellini's carnival collision of human motivations that I'd witnessed grew me up in a way that no superficial guidance from parents or teachers ever could.

    My mother didn't understand why suddenly at age twelve, I kept pestering her to drive me to the art house theaters out by the beach every time they showed a Fellini film.

    "Why would you want to go all the way out there to see one of those weird Italian movies?"

      Mama mia!  Because in La Dolce Vita,  I had discovered art, and art lives life with you.

"What we call fate does not come to us from outside:  it  goes forth from within us."

      Rainer Maria Rilke

Character Page!

Thanks to more terrific work by Michael Perkins at Setstatic, my website finally features a character design page in my animation dept.  Check it out to see more of the character work I've been posting lately.  From robots to dwarves to many-lettered "word pals" to Jonas-like teen dreams....I hope there's something for everyone.

Characters: Rescue Bear!

Rescue Bear is about a bunch of wanna-be cartoon stars, awaiting their big break while taking classes at "The Comic  Animal Cartoon Academy" (CACA).  Unfortunately, the most promising young talent falls prey to the professional and alimentary appetites of fellow student, Baron Von Sharkula.  Here's some of the slightly-flawed student hopefuls...click to enlarge.  

A Comic for MoCCA

I hesitate to post these old "SH&W" comics.  Even though I did so many of them, you know, we become different people than who we once were.  I'm now a tree-huggin' vegetarian.  I enjoy SH&W now as an exploration of anima and animus, the duality of the conscious and unconscious, the juxtaposition of the feminine awareness (Winky) to the masculine self-centeredness (Sh#thead), but at the time I was just complaining, really.  I came across this one housecleaning, it's from exactly 10 years ago and was meant to be in the next SH&W comic tentatively titled "The Big Change" (boy was it ever), but it was never published.  Now it has some interest because of it's unfortunate prescience...so here it is, dedicated to this weekend's Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival.  See you there!

Tales of the Koko Lion: Love In - Form - ation

 "The fact that the mass of a particle is equivalent to a certain amount of energy means that the particle...has to be conceived as a dynamic pattern, a process involving the energy which manifests itself as the particle's mass."

                                                                        Fritjof Capra

'Muhammed says, "God does not look at outward forms,

but at the love within your love."'

                                                                                        Rumi

    Here's a theory about seeing love in everything:  We can semi-consciously bring the real things in our life into being through intention, and the focus of our thoughts and actions to make them manifest.  I say semi-consciously because often our egos don't allow us to see the process as part of the larger system of consciousness constantly creating all around us.  Our ego insists that we're the sole engineer of our creations, regardless of the uncontrollable circumstances of life's synchronous events.  Lots of things just happen to us, but still we want to take credit.  Of course we are responsible for some of it, but often the degree to which our ego influences these otherwise spontaneous acts of creation is the same degree to which we, and the things we create, are separated from their positive potential - their Source energy, which is Love.

    In the way we can "see with our heart" vibrational energy that constitutes people and things, we can simply and directly observe to what degree the energy of ego and fear - the enforcement of will out-of-balance - influences those forms.  Here, nature is the benchmark.

    Everything comes from love;  like the beautiful wildflower growing through the crack in the  blacktop, those forms that are natural, spontaneous, and necessary can be easily discerned from what is unnecessary, damaging, and destructive.  Let's look at the simple examples of architecture, food, and then, each other:

    The forms of buildings have always been a direct indication of intent, of the amount of love expressed in their making.  We need shelter.  We need purposeful structures, and it's part of our

spontaneous creative nature to create them.  It's readily evident in the forms they take to what degree love has figured into their construction, in terms of quality and aesthetics, and so how beneficial they are.  Some buildings are cheap and dangerous.  Some display intimidation and institutionality- man's will.  Others offer qualities for people to live with and share.  Brick and wood structures, made by hand, crafted from nature's resilient renewables.  Buildings with terraces, alcoves, rooms of appropriate sizes for different uses, easily lit and heated or cooled.  These can be the rooms in the mansions of the human heart.  Buildings made of metal amalgams, glass, and plastic products, whose forms offer little or no logical use or comfort and are intended only to stand out as their own statement, or the statement of the designers and builders, are products of harmful and unnecessary ego- not of love's intention.  

    Food is a no-brainer.  Everyone knows that Love is a major ingredient in the best food.  The forms are pretty obvious.  Stick close to nature.  This doesn't mean that all prepared or packaged foods are loveless - there's a growing trend towards more natural content.  If a prepared food has a shelf-life beyond that of it's natural components, there is little love in it's intention.  It's only intended to nourish the bank account of it's producer.  Don't eat anything that appears to be the result of a killing; this includes all commercially farmed meat products.  And remember, there's always love in simple, carefully prepared food.  Everything has energy.  Food energizes you.

    Last, let's look at people.  With what the Hindu call "sakshi," that non-judgemental witnessing of life, we can see how much love has gone into the formation of a person from their bearing, expressions, and attitudes.  The obstructions to love that exist in their psyches are reflected in their exterior physical and psychological expressions.  Some people start out with lots of love, others have to find it later.  For those whose struggle evolves from not having enough love in their formation - vain, demanding, withdrawn, or other clearly fearful, damaged people, it is our job to see that they receive enough to help overcome it.  Our pets do this work constantly, providing love to open our hearts and bring us into balance with The Divine.

    Why is all this important?  Because at those moments that you are asking The Universe for direction, The Universe is showing you.  Follow the outward forms created by love in where you live and go, in what you eat and wear, in the art and entertainment you take in, and in who you are with and how you behave.  And don't worry about anything else.  Everything else will come.  Where there is a lack of love in the forms around you, supply it yourself, or if possible, get help supplying it.  It begins with each of us and where we are, what we are doing, and who we're with.  Remember, there's being in love, and, there's Love in being. 

Characters: Retro-lectrified!

Here's the last of these 60's-style characters.  It's Gramma, and of course, Gramma electrifried.  The spot was a little sarcastic, so all these characters have a bit of attitude.  You may have noticed, they also all appear to be pinching something, or someone...and they were- all were composited pinching the little boy's cheek.  I think Gramma pinched a livewire here.... Fortunately, this shocking effect only caused cartoon damage.

Characters: 60's Hip Aunt & Creepy "Uncle"

Retro-Characters

A 60's mom and little boy done for a "classic" looking animation that appeared in a Cartoon Network show (KND!); another entry in a little run of character designs leading up to posting a new Characters section on my site.

A typical moment with Faith and Mr. Floppy...

...and a look at the rough pencil/value preliminary drawing.  Click on them to get a closer look...

MoCCA's Coming...

In this week leading up to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art's 2009 Festival (June 6 & 7), I thought it would be fun to reach way back- in this case exactly 20 years- and post this corny old comic from Shithead's Book of Love, Sex, Pain, Commitment, etc., one of the five Shithead and Winky comics; it premiered at a book-signing at Buster's Newsstand, South of Market, San Francisco in the summer of 1989, thanks to "Buster," aka David Latimer, who also started The Nose magazine.  It's in color because I like the way some of the "Zip-a-tone" film shading turned yellow...remember Zip-a-tone?  If so, congratulations, you're still with us...You can see more old "SH & W" comix here.

Troubletown in the Big Apple

    Last night I had the rare and wonderful opportunity to take in a scintillating slide show by my old pal, Lloyd Dangle, Bay Area genius cartoonist/workin' man's pundit, and for twenty years the creator of the brilliant, scratchy box-strip, "Troubletown."  Lloyd wowed a small (the créme-de-la-créme) but fervent audience with slides of his terrific comics, historical (and hysterical) anecdotes, and samples of reader feedback (the stranger and scarier, the better).  For some unimaginable reason, Troubletown doesn't seem to be syndicated in NYC- a real loss, as it's a go-to must-read in numerous rags out west.  Lucky for us, we can check out his recent creations with this great Troubletown Cartoon Viewer. And don't let it stop you from ordering one or more of Lloyd's Troubletown compilations, like Troubletown Told You So, or Axis of Trouble; or from playing "Offendo" on the TT site, where you can create your own politically offensive comics!

    The show was at a place called "The Tank" on 45th at 9th, a performance space associated with Living Liberally, and definitely deserves support for their causes and great artists' policy.

    And if you ever have a chance to spend "An Evening with Lloyd Dangle," Do it!  I give the show 4 (out of a possible 5) golden tacos!

More C-H-A-R-A-C-T-E-R-S

Here are a couple of porcine characters, on the continued character thang

......and their hang-out, as a rough sketch, and a quick color version:

Tales of the Koko Lion: The Vibration of Cheese

  "Split a piece of wood; I am there.  Lift up a stone;  you will find me there."

                         Yeshua, Logion 77, The Gospel of Thomas

    The light energy that issues from the Source constantly penetrates and energizes all that we see.  Our selves, and everything that interacts with us in this form we're in now, are made of light and electromagnetic wave energy "precipitating" as matter, bound in energy fields in constant motion at a subatomic level, emanating from the "Zero Point Field."  Nothing new there, right?  If the rules were to suddenly change, we might fly apart in all directions, or plunge right through the floor.  Sometimes, I'm not sure what's holding me together.  Maybe pizza.  Or more likely, the cheese.  God bless cheese.

    This light of what Hindu and Christian scripture call "I AM" shines through everything, making everything perceivable within the limits of our vision.  Some physical forms are more transparent, more porous to the Source, dependent on their material structure, and particularly on the density of the intellectual thought form we use to define them.  An anvil's slow solidity speaks of it's purpose and symbolic nature.  Source doesn't pour out of it, it oozes through.  But it's there, in everything, whirring about in it's own sub-atomic composition, vibrating.  Our shared consciousness allows us to agree on the form of the anvil, and our co-creative powers; discovery, intention, focus (all thought-forms), and manifestation (creation), bring the anvil into being in it's appropriate form.  Some guys make anvils.  In cartoons, we agree to manifest anvils in order to drop them on cartoon characters heads, while in our conscious form reality, this has pretty disastrous consequences.  These are different density thought-forms.

   The formation of metals is a powerful example and metaphor, inevitably leading to alchemy.  The transmutation of form into Source. An example of this are words- marks with meanings we agree upon; and the forms they take.  Painted on a wall.  Carved in granite. These particular ideas here, as word-forms pressed on solid paper, could be bound as books and have a presence and solidity as such.  But words like these that appear digitally don't manifest themselves as solidly as those that are settled on paper.  Even "classic" literature realized digitally doesn't have the impact of the same thing on paper- it simply lacks dimensional solidity.  The bits of agitated information don't land on the cortex so much as they jitterbug through it.  That's why internet ideas are more contentious than those printed on paper, and why  paintings sit much easier than TV images.  (More on right/left brain later...)  Those forms turn to gold more easily. 

    In the same way, nature is always more permeable to source energy than man-made materials and environments.  Illuminative energy pores through nature's delicate membrane of being with much more ease than it does through buildings or other man-made objects. (Not only is this a fundamental reality of observational mystical wisdom, but living things actually emit a measurable amount of light.  Interference of these holographic waves is the basis for Magnetic Resonance Imaging [MRIs], and may account for flocks of birds and schools of fish moving simultaneously).  This is why it's important to spend time in nature; to bathe yourself in the source energy of The Divine that shines through the thin veneer of nature's form.

    This is also why some people seem to shine, while others seem dense and pallid.  Some people are composed of denser, slow-vibrational thought-matter, while warmer and livelier  people vibrate closer to the frequency of source energy.  Source is the source of higher attraction. This isn't an excuse to form subjective judgments- people in trouble may shine brightly (and vice-versa), based on their surface vibrational frequency at that particular moment.  You might "read" their true state through their shine, then see them later, now knowing something's amiss. Their shine has now diminished.  For example, drug and alcohol abuse can momentarily cause a false shine, that inevitably (and often permanently) fades.  Slower vibrational thought-forms can create lower attractions to the "like-minded" (similar thought-formed).

    And so, these perceptions are a function of your own state.  Life is a mirror.  How you are feeling- the frequency at which your thought-forms manifest the state of your senses, actually elicits your perceptions of the world.  You are constantly creating your own world.  Life doesn't happen to you, it happens for you!

    You can train your vision to bear witness to these differences simply by closing your eyes in meditation, and visually entering that place where all illumination emanates from.  It's right there; right inside.  When you return and open your eyes, you can actually see the illumination issuing out of people, through their faces usually, in varying degrees.  This will also help you to recognize the wonder of source energy (Love!) in everything, and the world will mirror that love for you.  Much of this lays at the heart of Buddhism, and is wonderfully taught currently by Eckhart Tolle.  

 

"Our present world is conditioned by our present mode of consciousness; only when that consciousness passes from its present dualistic mode...will the new creation appear, which is the external reality of which our world is a mirror."

                                                                   Bede Griffiths

"As you think, so you are."                   The Buddha

More Characters...from Faith & Mr. Floppy

In keeping with the character designs, here's a look at Faith and her dark alter-ego, Vera; as well as the roughs for good-guy Gideon, and the magical triplets, The Claires. 

Tales of the Koko Lion: Avocado Afternoon

    "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."

                                                                                William Blake

Tommy and I entered the avocado grove from the same dusty trail each time, leaving behind the sawgrass and sage, and enveloping ourselves in the cool, deep green of the only forest we knew.  The sprawling trees with their broad blue-green leaves blocked out most of the midday sun.  We'd left our dog partners, Rip and Jansen, back at the house.  We scrunched across the dried-leaf floor to a welcoming tree, stopped, and gave it a light shake.  The avocados were ready for picking, and would soon be stripped by the corporations who monopolized the local pickers, and gave the avocado ranchers, large and small, a take-it-or-leave-it deal.  For that reason, we felt entitled to harvest grocery bags full of avos to sell to neighbors for money for Mexican firecrackers, or to go the movies; maybe to seeThe Night of the Living Dead again.  After all, we were 12-year old boys.

    But today we had ambitions of a distinctly epicurean nature.  When we shook the tree lightly, a couple of perfectly ripe, pebbly and purplish Hass avocados fell to the ground with lusciously weighty thuds.  We took them up to the top of tree, and perched ourselves on the forks of the thin branches up in the broken sunlight.  We pulled out our folding knives and cut around the avos, down to the fat seeds, with a sweeping turn of the wrist.  We popped them open, revealing their gloriously satin green interiors, and tweeked the seeds out with the tips of our knives.  We reached into our back pockets, and pulled out the spoons we always carried into the groves with us.  Just as I was about to scoop up a bite, Tommy stopped me, sporting a mischevious look.  He reached into his front pocket, smiling broadly, and pulled out two of those little blue Morton's salt and pepper shakers.  We laughed, and spooned up our seasoned alligator pears with the relish of secret winners.

    One day out in the canyons, Tommy and I went into a huge patch of prickly pear cactus armed with machetes, and spent our repressed rage lopping and chopping our way through the tear-shaped leaves.  The slicing felt so meaty and tactile that it made my teeth stand on edge.  Looking back on the destruction we'd wrought, I felt purged, and deeply saddened, like I imagine one feels after surviving a desperate battle; only this time, no one fought back.  The oozing green leaves lay like tears piled on the ground.  I could hear the plants crying in my mind's ear.

    We continued the day in the same open vein as we switched to our rifles and sat under an old Bigleaf maple, shooting every bird that landed above us, until even the dogs became as palpably disgusted with us as we were with ourselves and withdrew, leaving us to that still soul-place where we could hear the cumulative cries of all the living consciousness we'd cut short that day arise inside our hearts.

    I don't know what effect that day had on Tommy, but aside from the odd mosquito or ant, I would never intentionally kill anything again.  

                                                                     

    "I am the true Self in the heart of every creature...the beginning, middle, and end of their existence."

                                                                       The Bhagavad Gita  10.20

Characters: The Lost Dwarves, Pt. 1

Now the truth can be told - there were more dwarves working back in that mine than made it onscreen...dwarves they didn't talk about; and these recently unearthed original development artworks prove it...this is the first group of characters who "weren't good enough" for the big-time - part of a celebration of these unsung heroes leading up to a new character section coming soon on my website.

One day, I hope to color these too...

Here are three more idyllic locations belonging to a sadly suspended project... 

Important Stuff!

Here's a nice spot to join in a cartoon meditation...one day I'll color it.

    April 22nd is Earth Day, so plan something earthy for Mom - a picnic, plant something, or join one of the 'official' activities planned for your area.

    Of really super special importance is Global Peace Meditation and Prayer Day, this coming May 17th, which will actually be May 16th from 10 PM EST to 12 midnite, if you want to join in this annual synchronized meditation for peace and consciousness.  What makes this so important is that it works!  Prior GPMP day meditations have been documented to have decreased global violence and increase global compassion( the "secret" force for good in the world).  Through Princeton University's Global Consciousness Project, data has been collected over a global network that indicates that the focused consciousness of a relatively small number (millions, in the case of GPMP Day, a few as 8 thousand in past experiments) of people taking part in this action has a real, measurable effect in the world.  Check the site to see the numbers.  It's evidence of the instant 'non-local' effect that quantum physics has shown us is operating in reality, and your chance to really make a difference.

    You can learn a whole lot more by reading Quantum Shift in the Global Brain, the truly amazing book by Ervin Laszlo, chancellor of GlobalShift University, and founder of The Club of Budapest.

Tales: Big Long Animal Talk

    "I am the true Self in the heart of every creature...the beginning, middle, and end of their existence."

                                                          The Bhagavad Gita  10.20

    When we approach The Milky Way galaxy from "deep space," it first appears as a distant luminous pinwheel.  As we get closer, it's clear that there's plenty of room to go around.  Turning our focus very specifically to one area along the outside edge, we find the collection of spherical bodies we call our solar system; and there, third from the star we call the Sun is the miniscule pinprick of blue that we call our Earth.  

    As we grow nearer, the features of Earth become more evident;  the continental land masses; the dwindling polar ice caps; the expanse of oceans and seas.  And there, at times just visible through the swirling marbleized cloud cover, is a bare, grey fuzz;  a scant five o'clock shadow that we call humankind.  It looks like a light fungus growing on the little terrestrial orb.

    When we objectively view lichen on a rock, or moss on a tree stump, do we engage on a microscopic level with each moss cell as an individual?  Of course not.  We just refer to it as "moss," giving no consideration to what traits moss consciousness may recognize as individual from cell to cell.  It's the remarkable arrogance of man (gender specificity intended) - the pride of ego - that insists that we, as humans, are somehow all separate from one another, and our source.  

    Across the continents, among the races, there is little or no difference between any of us from that viewpoint in space.  We all think, or have thought, more or less the exact same thoughts at one time or another.  We all continuously experience the same emotions, harbor the same fears, know the exact same joys and sufferings of one another on an intimate, interchangeable level.  Within certain tolerances, we are all subject to the same conditions created from within or from without.  Should the earth or atmosphere become inhospitable to us, without adapting to the changes, we shall all perish at about the same time, geologically speaking.

    In sharing this thing we call consciousness, we all share the singular expression of the creative source that takes place on this planet.  We share what we might call "the Consciousness of Earth."  Deep within us, we have a sense of the most basic elemental forces of the Earth;  the deepest cold of the icy subterranean.  The dense, smoldering pressure and heat of the innermost;  the heedless baking burn of the unabated sun.

     Deep within us, we know the natural experience of life, of the wild.  We feel the elements as any animal does, and like any animal we live the play of forces that govern our needs for sustenance, for regeneration, for love in the form of the mysterious power of creation.

    Look within yourself and you'll see that somewhere deep within, you understand the exhilarating speed of the cheetah, or the overwhelming seasonal sleepiness of the grizzly bear - especially on those days when it's tough to get out of bed.  Likewise you can identify with the fear a young calf feels when surrounded by the slaughterhouse cries of his family; or the panic of a yellowtail tuna or porpoise as the indiscriminate mile-long nets of a fishing trawler scoop up the contents of your entire world.

    It's not just humans that share the experience of this thin veneer of consciousness that tenderly wraps and energetically enlivens this planet, it's all life on earth.  Despite our differences, species to species, we are all one thing: the consciousness on this earth.

    "...my own true inner being actually exists in every living creature...[and] is the ground of that compassion upon which all true, that is to say, unselfish, virtue rests..."

                                                             Schopenhauer

    Animals simply live their being.  Their consciousness is joined with source purpose and intention, and so they attain a purity of experience within consciousness, through their senses, that humans seldom know.  They have developed senses which allow them to live in a much richer world infused by light and electromagnetic wave perception that connects them to the field of being, and so they are not burdened by elaborately convoluted thinking, as are humans.         

   Being ignorant,  and unwilling to experience or imagine the sublimely transcendent intelligence alive in the spirit/mind of a whale or an elephant, for example, the human ego denies all other creatures their true positions in the hierarchy of being, simply because it threatens human self-enhancement and self-importance.  Also because it suggests a fatal assumption of human intelligence;  that we have the "divine" right to kill animals for our own purpose -which is a conclusion based solely on delusion and ignorance.  Some indigenous peoples have naturally found the way through The Great Spirit  to respectably cycle the energies of hunted and farmed animals to meet their needs for sustenance, but this has little to do with our mass culture today.  And I wouldn't suggest that a hungry crocodile wouldn't eat me, if given the chance.  That's what he lives to do.  Not to accomplish.  Not to steward.  Not to choose.

    The fact is that the actual nutritional needs of the earth's entire population could be met in a much more healthful and efficient manner agriculturally, with a bare minimum of animal slaughter and consumption. (All the flavors, textures, and nutritional qualities that are supposedly exclusive to meat can be reproduced with vegetable substitutes)  In this way, wildlife populations would be brought back into balance, and humans could begin to exercise their divine dominion over the other occupants of the planet.                                                

    Unfortunately, the regressive human psyche has developed an appetite for something else:  the energy of fear.  The collective human ego manipulates and exploits it's animal relatives, feeding on the energy of fear generated by this exploitation.  Feeding on the bodies of our animal brothers and sisters while ignoring their actual place in the divine order of life, and, without properly honoring their sacrifice, failing to release their spirits with love, imbues people with a deep, negative energy of guilt and fear.

    In this way, the collective human ego, the singular most destructive force in all being, enforces the separation of human individuals from the divine source of being, which is the consciousness of the earth.  It also contributes to the build-up of the energy of fear at a cellular level in the bodies of meat-eaters that leads to the inability to perceive the spiritual on a personal and collective level, and provides those fear-triggers that are regularly exploited by unethical interests to elicit the ignorant and inhumane mass attitudes that so threaten all life on earth.  Simply put, it's why there are far more fist fights at barbecues than at vegan yoga retreats!    

    The time has arrived in the evolution of humankind, to stop the barbaric and wasteful subjugation, cannibalization, and vanity slaughter of all crawling, walking, flying, swimming, thinking and feeling sentient creatures, and instead, to seek their wisdom of simple harmonious being-ness.  And to stop and redirect the earth's energy and resources, squandered by this pointlessly egomaniacal vivocide, into an intuitively intelligent and sustainable (re: vegetarian) approach to being on earth, aligned with source energy, which is the consciousness of the earth.  Keep in mind that mankind is not the top of the chain of being in this system of consciousness, the Earth is.  As mankind continues to hasten the grievous imbalance of energies through the destruction of earth's natural systems and expressions of it's consciousness, the world will simply adjust to maintain it's harmony.  We're not talking about the end of the world.  The world will continue on, finding new ways to express divine consciousness, only Man will cease to exist.            

        

    "I do not see a delegation for the four-footed.  I see no seat for the eagles.  We forget and we consider ourselves superior, but we are after all a mere part of the Creation...The elements and the animals, and the birds, they live in a state of grace.  They are absolute, they can do no wrong.  It is only we, the two-leggeds, that can do this.  And when we do this to our brothers, then we do the worst in the eyes of the Creator."

                                Oren Lyons, to the United Nations  (1977) 

Tales of the Koko Lion: Rock Visitors

Here's the rock, and where the deer were... 

 "The little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe.  Both heaven and earth are contained in that space...for the whole universe dwells within our heart."

                                                             Chandogya Upanishad, 8.1

    One day, Koko was sitting on the rock in the river, chanting the sacred word OM.  It seemed a little corny, sure.  But it was working.  He said the word over and over, from his root and his heart and his throat.  His eyes were a little bit completely closed, though he was beginning to see things quite clearly, in a different way.  After a while, he felt a presence, and cracked his eyes slightly to look.  There, on the bank just across from the rock, were three young, curious deer -just five or six feet away.  The young leader looked like:  Is there room on the rock for me?  I'd like to step across.  There wasn't enough room on the rock, but in their hearts, there was all the space in a thousand universes.

    Have you ever heard of The Unified Field Theory?  Physicists have been working on it for a hundred years, at least.  But there's one major ingredient that they keep leaving out of their formulae:  Consciousness.  The deer, the river, even the breeze on Koko's face (even Koko), are drifting particles, realizing their material forms in and out of wave phases.  Some things just are, formed out of our shared consciousness.  Some things are just for you, formed from the energy of your heart, which is like a giant light-energy top, spinning in the middle of your being.  In fact you could say, it is you.

    Live from your heart.  Release all the expectations you have for the things you want.  You're getting everything you need already.  You don't have to go any where else to be where you want to be.  Or try this:  get on the bus, go across town, sit in a new cafe, open your heart, and be half way around the world,  in the most beautiful and romantic place you've ever wanted to be.  Covet what you already have.

    "The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless.  We do not know what they want.  We do not understand them.  We think that they are mad."

    I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad.

    "They say that they think with their heads," he replied.

    "Why of course.  What do you think with?"  I asked him in surprise.

    "We think here," he said, indicating his heart.

                            The Pueblo Indian, Ochwiay Biano                                                              (Mountain Lake) to Carl Jung, 

                                                    from  Memories, Dreams, Reflections 

       

    ""The heart is a sanctuary at the center of which there is a little space, wherein the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the eye...by which He sees all things, and through which we see Him."

                                                                               Black Elk

one of the very first color illos from the deep past...supposedly based on an actual occurrence.

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 8: Canyon times.

"Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus should we do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World."                                                                                              Black Elk  

    The sun was hot, and my moccasined feet stuck like monkey palms down on the broad granite boulder.  The big boulders were strewn around the chaparral covered hills, jumbled atop one another like they'd been cast out with some beautiful zen intention.  Golden tan no-tan.  Grasshoppers whirred their surreal, penetrating background buzz as Santa Ana winds blew the red-clay dust off the hilltop paths.  I and my dusty compadres occupied these canyons, laying just beyond the edge of San Diego, and stretching out to what seemed like forever.  Gray squirrels rhythmically chirped away in their boulder villages.  A lizard did push-ups on a rock.  The quails' call punctuated the humming stillness:  "kee KAW kaw... kee KAW kaw..."  This was where I would choose to live, if I could... and so I did.  From early childhood on, I'd disappear out the door, and across the street, on to the dusty oxide canyon trails and into the deceivingly welcoming wilderness there, to the best host a kid could have.  Later, when we moved farther out on the fringes, to the monolithic Mies Van der Rohe-inspired house that my father built, where the land surrounded us completely, all I needed to do was walk out the downstairs door next to my room, right into my scrub-brush sanctuary.  I could move free then, around the path-cut hills, out of the sightlines of the house's big windows.

    I had my rifle or my bow, and cut the knees of my jeans out, front and back, to allow the breeze to circulate; and there was always a cat or two out in the field with me.  Like Cathy, the tawny little tiger with one tooth, who retrieved like a hunting dog- bounding back over the low scrub with a lizard in her mouth.  Or Armando, the muscular white-chested tabby I'd raised on egg yolks and road work (he trotted alongside my paper route bike like the middle-weight he was).  Eventually, they would both fall prey to the coyotes' insidious gang-tactics- the heart-breakingly repetitive fate of all of my childhood cats who ventured into the canyons on their own.  The canyons seemed placid, but in truth, they buzzed and simmered with that kind of dusty menace.

    No one really seemed to see the beauty of the semi-arid wilderness back then.  It all appeared to the unconscious developers to be a lot of nothing but potential dollar signs, and everything but a few parcels were buried by bulldozers and covered with an unsustainable layer of suburbia.  But all things change.  Most of those developers are probably dead and gone on now.  All things come and go.  One day the canyons will reclaim it all-- when the water runs out, and the sun, the creosote, and the jackrabbits and horny-toads take it back.

    But for me in that evening of childhood, the big rocks stayed warm as the sun sunk.  Cathy would pull up a boulder nearby, her stripey arms outstretched in front of her, and we'd watch the dusk descending over the Pacific horizon, like the big cats do.  

The other day, I ran into an old acquaintance, the great painter and comics artist, Gary Panter , that I knew from the L.A. days I posted about last time.  Turns out, he lives just down the street here in Brooklyn.  Years ago, I bought this cool painting, Alpha Dragon, from him.  I suggest you head over to his site, and check out some of the great stuff offered there! 

   This 3-D Hed is one I did back then.  It had it's 5 minutes of fame on a wall in the movie "Slamdance." 

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 7

"Who looks outside, dreams.

     Who looks inside, awakens."

                                                                   Carl Jung 

    When you close your eyes, what do you see?  Most people would say that they don't see anything except darkness.  But you know that's not really true.  What you actually see when you close your eyes is an amazing dance of electrochemical color fields and particles, waving and surging up out of the "darkness."  You're seeing the effervescent energy that enlivens everything.  Here is "the ether," the Zero Point Energy that for some reason, the human mind wants to call "darkness."  It's from this rod-and-cone particle participation that our shared consciousness creates everything we see.  It's a view of the electric truth that powers these chemical robots we inhabit.  

    Must be that darn Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge we ate somewhere along the way that makes the ego-mind constantly strive to detach us from the reality of a world so obviously out-of-balance, and from an existence of inextricable interwoven-ness with every other human who's simultaneously experiencing many of the exact same thoughts, fears, and joys as you are.  The mind wants to separate us by constantly telling You that you're different and special.  And of course, you are.  Everyone is.  In that very sense, we are all one.

    Look at the reflections of the sun dancing off the surface of a lake, then close your eyes and look the same way at the performance of energy in the after-imaging inside your eyes.  Now look up a bit (eyes wide shut) toward the center of your forehead, towards your third eye, as we tree-huggers call it.  There you may very well find a wellspring of golden-white shimmer amongst the dancing energies.  It's the door to the source, and if you can stick your head in there a while, you'll come back refreshed and energized.  If you don't make it in the first time, try it again. You'll get there if you try.  Everybody does who tries (and always has), if they allow it.  You might recognize and enjoy this as a meditation.

    If you can, go to a gallery that has some Rothko paintings, stand in front of one and stare transfixed into the center of it.  The memory of lake reflections may very well kick you into a new understanding of art as a portal to the "unseen." 

  

    What do you hear when you listen to the voices in your head?  Do you just hear one strong and clear voice that is You?  Probably not.  You might hear an anxious or worried voice; an assertive, resolved voice; a poetic, natural voice.  Do you hear the calm voice of reason sometimes?  Next time you hear that voice, concentrate on it.  That's your intuitive connection to universal intelligence, what The Buddha, Stephen Hawking, or Deepak Chopra might call, "the mind of God."  Are all these voices tantamount to schizophrenia?  Sometimes.  There's not that much difference really.  It doesn't matter if they issue from the well of Jung's "collective unconscious,"  from the dark recesses of your own "personal" psyche, from your right or wrong functioning brain chemistry, or from extra-dimensional entities (spirit guides)- what's the difference, really?  You'll still know them by the fruit they bear.  This is where personal responsibility comes in.  If a thought suggests that you do harm to yourself or someone else, it's coming from a bad place and needs to be ignored.  It's not the real you, just a fear-based reflection of the world as the ego-mind needs to see it (or not see it).  Just ask for help from your "healthy psyche/well brain/angel spirit" voice, then sit still and listen for an answer.  If you don't hear one, be quieter.  

    This is an explanation for secular and agnostic (god bless 'em).  My personal truth is somewhere around here:  this is the voice of your ancestors, who walked on this very ground, and breathed this very air, and whose lives were no less important than yours for their passing, because you are living it now.  So pay attention, even if someone tells you you're crazy to listen to that voice in your head. You're crazy not to.  Your spirit guides are more authentic than any anchorperson... 

I'd done this sample zoo bg to give a purple elephant a place to dance, but the job ended before we got to him.  Thankfully, this fellow showed up a little later...

Tales of the Koko Lion: Animated Memories

    Many moons ago when I was 18, I sat on a planter in front of my sister's little hippy boutique, "Satin Rainbow,"  in the (then) sleepy seaside hippy hamlet of Del Mar, California, sketching in a pad just for fun, when a lovely blonde came by and took an interest in what I was drawing.  She got her father, a prominent California Designer/Art Director named Don McQuiston to come and look.  He asked me to do a group of drawings and bring them to his office the next week.  That was how I got started professionally.

    He hired me to do some drawings for textbooks he was designing, and sent me to a class at a local junior college that was being taught by an up-and-coming young illustrator named Everett Peck.  Everett and I became good friends, and during the course of his class, I assembled a portfolio of sorts.  Eventually, I submitted it to Art Center College, and was accepted.

    After my second term, I needed work badly, and Everett referred me to a fellow named Frank Terry, a very popular animation director who worked out of a studio in Venice, Calif.  I walked into his studio with my student portfolio under my arm, and met Frank, sketching at a long table across from a fellow named Ed Koren.  They were both very kind.  Being from out in the coyote canyons, I wasn't really familiar with The New Yorker magazine, or with the quirky, elegant cocktail party "hairy monsters" Mr. Koren created for the comics in that august publication.  They hired me to report to Duck Soup Produckions in Santa Monica, and go to work inking a pair of animated commercials that featured Mr. Koren's characters sipping Lancer's Rose.  I was about to get my first big lesson in animation.

    Inking any character for fluid animation is a challenge, but particularly those dang hairy monsters- each of them constructed of hundreds of wobbly dip-pen lines.  A certain amount of "crawl" was unavoidable, but the client hit the ceiling watching our first samples flutter and bristle like some kind of wild pen-and-ink mitosis.  After a while, I got the hang of it, creating a series of "anchor lines" that rode the action of Frank's rough animation sketches (I got to do the pencil clean-ups first, of course).  In the end, the crawl was kept to a minimum, and I had my first taste of that unique gratification that comes from seeing animation that you've contributed to up alive on the screen. 

    I quit school halfway, and for the next couple years I did backgrounds, in-betweens, and development art for Duck Soup, for the wonderfully creative Roger Chouinard, and his wise and funny partner, Duane Crowther.  I didn't know what UPA was at the time, and it took years for me to realize that Duane was one of the founders of that whole school of brilliantly influential, "Cartoon Modern," that so much of my work since has been based on.  I sat by an old-timer named Amby Paliwoda a lot, a veteran of Disney's Golden Age, who regaled me with stories of the Disney days, and his best buddy, Grim Natwick (a good friend of Duane's, as well).  I'm afraid I drove him a little crazy with my "left-wing" politics at the time.  He loved him some Ronald Reagan.  We worked with a great background artist named Toby Bluth, who's brother Don was just starting up a feature studio at the time.  And every once and a while, a remarkable artist and character, Cornelius Cole, came into work on projects, mostly Froot Loop commercials; but I recall staying late a couple nights to help Corny with his section of Heavy Metal-- a brilliant piece of "limited" animation that was eventually cut from the final picture, because it didn't "fit-in" with the rest of the anthology.  I understand there are versions of the film that have his section restored.

    Corny was a gas, not just because of his incredible talent, or his wonderfully kind nature, but also because he was a guy who generated great apocryphal stories, some of which I know were true.  He dressed kind of like Gilligan, only with a ragged "Panama" hat, and carried a big broken-handled vinyl suitcase full of hundreds of pencil-ends and blobby ball-points, that he'd dig through until he found just the right ones, then he blew up a big beach ball, and laid on top of it (to save wear-and-tear on his back), drawing genius stuff on the floor.  My favorite Corny story was that while he was working on all those Warner Bros. cartoonys (that hooked me cross-legged on the floor as a kid), he'd lost the forward gears in his transmission, and so drove in reverse from Coldwater Canyon to Burbank every day to work, mostly along the shoulder of the road.   Though I'm not sure if that one's true...

    Once, when I was doing b.g.s for a series of "Mrs. Smith's Pies" commercials, I had to lay out and paint views of Pottstown (home of Mrs. Smith) ablaze in fall colors.  I was from the Southern California outback.  I had never seen fall colors.  So I got a National Geographic for reference, and proceeded to paint everything yellow and orange.  Duane looked over my shoulder at my work-in-progress and wryly asked, "Have you ever heard of 'Impressionism'?"  Of course, I said yes, but I didn't know what he meant. 

    Corny is faculty at Cal Arts now, from what I understand.  Frank recently retired as head of the department there.  Duane passed away about ten years ago.  Roger is still at his studio, called simply Duck now.  I went on to many years of illustration, never looking back, or realizing how great all those people really were, until I got back into animation in 1999.  I was quite unconscious in those days.  I didn't get there because I'd been such a fan of it all, I was just doing my best to pay my rent. When I look back, I know how lucky I was, and though I still often find myself "between projects," I realize that in drawing for a living, how lucky I've always been.

2D design to 3D design

Designing for 3D requires a lot of architecture.  As you see here, not only for architectural locations, but also for the creation of characters.       It's necessary to be technically specific even when it comes to aspects of the character's "charm."  Notice how the "a" changed from the plan drawing to the color model, to enhance legibility.
  ...this 3/4 rear drawing is by the very talented Kevin Kobasic, who did the original turn-arounds of the cat character, as well as a lot of other characters on the show.

Here's my first take at 3D design, a couple years ago in a film I did for Herman Miller called "Purple," where fixtures came to life...

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 6: Great Uncle Cy Pt.2

continued...

 The shed room was was full of bad taxidermy and mysterious tools.  Old pictures and obscure signage.  Switches and bricks and rifles on a rack.  It was like a form of heaven to me, the crazy stuffed raccoons and antiquated firearms ranking well above angels' wings, harps, and cherubs.

    My eyes lit upon a fascinating device on the old wooden everything-table near me, as Cy lowered the needle on a spinning LP.  A shuffling western guitar started as I picked up the odd contraption to examine it.  It was about a foot long,  aluminum tube bent around like a folded infinity sign.  There were long, orangy rubber surgical tubes dangling off of it, meeting at a leather pouch gripped by a clothespin.  It was a super-powerful slingshot extraordinaire.  A "Wrist Rocket."  

    "I hear that train a-rollin', it's comin' 'round the bend..."  Cy snuck the volume up a little as he lifted his his great eyebrows and widened his eyes.  He gestured "quiet" with his finger over his pursed lips as he held the album up for me to see the picture of a handsome, dangerous man with black shiny hair looking down at me from the cover.  It was "Johnny Cash- Live at Folsom Prison."  Cy smiled broadly, his bottom teeth jutting out.

    "...Well, I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die."  Hoots and hollers from the audience of  inmates, as I slipped my slender arm through the slingshot loop and grasped the handle with my left hand, slightly pulling up the clothespin with my right.

    "There's ball bearins' in that, fer when them rabbits and dogs git in my bean patch, Bobby." Cy whispered.

    I gingerly tested the pull on the wrist-rocket, going deeper and deeper into the elastic potential as Cy tapped his foot and grinned.  I pulled it back hard to my cheek, and as Mr. Cash hollered "My name is SUE---HOW DO YOU DO?  NOW YOU'RE GONNA DIE!!" and Cy's eyes widened with glee, the clothespin released and the air was shattered by the whip-snapping surgical tubes, and splintering crunch and crash of ball-bearings violently ricocheting around the room!  Uncle Cy quick turned the music down, his eyes wide as saucers.  We traced the trajectory of the slingshot to where the ball-bearings had torn a large, ragged chunk from the heavy table leg just an inch or two from Cy's shin.  His startled eyes slowly scanned up from the damage, huge eyebrows aloft, and met mine.

    "Why Bobby!" he said, chin curled up to meet his nose," ...you damn near took my leg off!"

    The door flew open, and there stood Mildred red-faced, fists clenched.

    "Cyrus Fletcher!  What do you think you're doin'- fillin' that poor little boy's head with that prison-house pison!  You get outta there this minute!"

    "Why Mildred, we wuz just..."

    "Save yer excuses fer someone who don't know any better!  Now you come with me right this minute, Bobby!"  It was the most I'd ever heard her say at one time.  She stood resolute, pointing back down the hall, and I shuffled out past her, looking back to see Cy, sheepishly sliding the black record back into it's sleeve.  Our eyes met again, and we both looked at the damaged table leg, and then back in silent agreement.  He smiled a little because he knew that getting caught by Mildred had been worth it.  There could've been no better introduction to The Man in Black, Mr. Johnny Cash, who, to this day, rides with me wherever I go.

    "The ancient masters were profound and subtle.  Their wisdom was unfathomable.  There is no way to describe it:  all we can describe is their appearance."

The Tao Te Ching, 15

A Faith & Mr. Floppy production rough

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 6: Great Uncle Cy Pt.1

    Each summer, my mother would pile us into the white Impala station wagon, and head north to visit her sisters in L.A. and Oakland;  then proceed with us up the coast through Northern California and into Oregon, to her family's hometowns:  Grant's Pass, Coos Bay, Eugene, sometimes stopping to gather agates, or search for signs of Bigfoot.  In Coos Bay, we'd visit my wonderfully authentic (and eccentric) Uncle Cy, and his wife, Mildred.  

  As a teenager in Oregon, Cyrus Fletcher sported patent-leather hair, in the style of Rudolph Valentino and John Gilbert.  He'd split the legs of his denims up the side, and sew leather triangles into them to make his own vaquero-style boot jeans.  He jumped on his belt-driven motorcycle, made mostly of wood, and rode it from Oregon down the San Joaquin Valley to Hollywood, to become a moving-picture star in the days before "talkies."  He never became a star, though he was one of a "cast of thousands" in the original Ben-Hur, and went on to do a stint as chauffeur to a famous silent-film comedian, Ben Turpin, best known for his very crossed eyes.

    Cy and his wife, Mildred, seemed to have little in common, he being gregarious in the extreme, and she as stoic and taciturn as the old gal in "American Gothic."  They possessed one notably obvious complement that may have explained their long, successful marriage.  Cy had a remarkably entertaining underbite, and yin to his yang, Mildred had an overbite that could only be described as Simpsons-like.  In profile, if not from any other angle, they were a perfect fit.

    It wasn't just Cy's overbite that was entertaining.  He was an amazing natural storyteller.  When he entered "Critter-Callin'" competitions in local fairs, the tales he spun immediately before beginning his wooden whistle critter-call repetoire so delighted the crowds, that he became a sought-after Storyteller, engaged by oral history buffs from town to town, just to sit and tell his stories.  

    As a kid, I liked him because he was funny, and he had lots and lots of cool stuff.   Railroad sets, compound bows, "critter-callin'" whistles, dagguereotypes, and a very interesting record collection. (With an older brother and sister who were part of the Surf Explosion and English Invasion, a mom who loved Broadway show tunes and Sinatra, and my favorite themes from cartoon and cowboy TV shows, music had already become a big part of my young life.)

    In the evenings we would struggle through another of Mildred's afternoon-early and impossibly bland "suppertimes."  She was a cook in an elementary school cafeteria, and had made "creative" dishes that the kids would like.  For example, she put scoops of cottage cheese on slices of baloney, criss-crossed them with strips of individually-wrapped cheese slices, and baked them until the baloney edges curled up around the bubbling blob.  Ironically, she called them "Flying Saucers."  She served them with catsup and bread-and-butter pickles.    

    After supper, Cy gave me the secret up-and-down signal with his overgrown eyebrows that meant I was supposed to wait a bit, and then follow him, because he had something to show me that Mildred might not approve of.  He patted the arms of his easy chair, thrust out his lower jaw, raised his great eyebrows again and hoisted himself up, dawdling down the hallway towards his workshop.  I waited awhile, and innocently followed.  Cy cautiously peeked through the cracked door of his workshop, opened the door, and hurried me in.

    "We're gonna have to keep this quiet, Bobby.  Mildred'd have a tizzy if she caught on."  I greedily scanned the room, letting the amazing contents flood my little boy's eyes as Cy lifted the lid on his little record player, and reached into his wooden milk crate full of records.

                                                                             ...to be continued

Here's the direction that "Stone Temple Robot" from the earlier post finally went...crazy...

Signs of Shifting Times

    You may find yourself worrying, in the midst of all these difficulties, can things really change for the better?  Here's a few very recent signs of the shift that I picked up on last night's media:

•     On Countdown with Keith Olbermann, there were two powerful signs of cultural awareness.  The first case was Chris Hayes from The Nation discussing the fact that inside the beltway in D.C., the media is "hard-wired" to the The Right, and so continues to give equal time or better to Republican talking points that were rejected by a large majority in the last election. If you voted as most people did in the last election, and you watch network and cable news, you know this is true.  Last night was the first time I've ever heard that said aloud on network.  You will hear it pointed out more often.  Awareness precedes change, and exposure to the truth precedes awareness.  Besides, the election told the true story.
  
•     Also on that show was an interview with Janeane Garofalo where she talked about Rush Limbaugh, and those who follow him, in a very honest way- more accurately and candidly than I've ever heard expressed on major media.  In the last 1:20 of the interview in particular, she defines a form of spiritual sickness that affects a lot of people which she kindly refers to as "human frailty."  We're not hearing the word spiritual used quite yet, but it's contained there nonetheless.
•     President Obama, in the submission of his first budget to Congress, has created the standard that all costs will be honestly and accurately represented.  This indicates a major shift in the approach to the budgeting process that has never been attempted before.  Just the intent to institute this standard represents a huge shift towards ethics in our government.  Mr. Obama's election and principles represents this shift on an overall larger cultural scale, as you already know intuitively.
•    Something not so topical, but equally indicative that those on-line may have already considered, is the simple corporate motto of Google: "Don't Do Evil."  That the world's most influential corporation would aspire to that simple level of ethical behavior is truly remarkable, and indicates massive change in the direction our society is heading.  Imagine if our government and Wall Street adhered to that simple axiom.  In the future, they will have to.

     How can you contribute to this change, and elegantly support this colossal shift?  Simply know in your heart that these changes are coming.  Forgive the spiritually sick immediately, and be of service to one another.  If that sounds pretty easy, it's because it is.  All it takes to help the occult fear-grounded powerbase (dark) find the door, is to surround yourself with the conditions you want (light).  Gandhi said something like, "...be the change you seek."   In the meantime, check out the YouTube link called "Ian Lungold Lecture" in my site link column.  There are some great ideas about the change that's coming there.   Blessings!    

The last backyard rough... 

Tales: Tips for Happiness #3

3. Radical Surrender

This last of these three "Tips for Happiness" is aimed at those who really need it. Those who are going through the inevitable difficulties life dishes up to all of us at one time or another. You may not need these tips so much if you're already pretty happy, but "Radical Surrender" can be so effective for those suffering hard times, that it's an extraordinarily effective means for assuring continuing happiness as well. This is surrender not in the sense of resignation, of "giving up" in a pejorative sense, but of surrender as a strategy, as a way to deal with life on life's terms. Surrender in the sense of joining the winning side.

All through mythology and mysticism, in the quest for wholeness, there's the need to pass through "the darkest hour" to reach the place of light; of acceptance, self-love, and love and compassion for others. And that darkness will happen in every life, so resistance to it only energizes that period with more negativity. In recovery movements, there's the expression: "When you're going through Hell, keep going!" And: "Pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth." It may not be much consolation at a particularly painful time to try to realize it as a great opportunity for growth and learning. Indeed, it may be a pretty tall order to do so. But this is a first step towards learning to energize every event in your life, "good" and "bad," in a positive, growth-inducing way. After all, when you look back at the hardest times in your life, they're over, aren't they? And you are still here, and all the better for the experience. Surrendering to the broken-openness brought about by your suffering will allow healing energy in, so you can grow out through that break, like a wildflower growing through a crack in the pavement. You may wisely never want to go through something like that again, and because of the wisdom gained from the experience you've had, you may never have to. Of course, you can't do it alone, so it requires surrender in the sense of accepting the company and care of others as well.

"Yeshua said: Blessed are those who have undergone ordeals. They have entered into life."

Logion 58, The Gospel of Thomas

Then, even if (when) similar painful circumstances arise again, you can say (as crazy as it may sound): Here's a chance to learn something I will need to know for the future. This is not really going to be bad at all- in fact, it's going to be very rewarding. I need to be here. I need to learn this. In this way, you can bring a new consciousness to an old situation, and completely transform the nature of the experience from one of resistance and pain, to one of acceptance and growth.

For someone who's basically happy already, and only experiencing minor setbacks, practicing this type of strategic surrender will just support and strengthen the happiness you already have.

"When you put your boat in the river, go downstream."

Abraham (via Esther Phillips)

• I came across these doing some housecleaning...my very first dig experiment, 'edo tuffo," and my first 2 dig illos...circa '98
  

Tales: Tips for Happiness #2

2.  Radical Forgiveness

 

As best as you possibly can, at all times of your life, practice what I'll call "Radical Forgiveness," meaning that whenever anyone does anything to you that you perceive as (or that truly is) offensive or damaging to you-- from stepping in front of you on an escalator to stealing your wife;  stiffing you on a job, or sticking you with the check-- from "deeply disappointing you" to "ruining your life," forgive them as immediately and completely as possible.  

    Everyone is fighting the same battles, and many people are doing it with even more insane voices in their head than you have.  Become grateful immediately.  Many people are barely conscious in this life.  Their lives really might be fairly nightmarish.  They need acceptance and tolerance even more than most. 

    Also keep in mind that when someone is doing something that seems hurtful to you, they are actually hurting themselves.  Since we're all the same thing, they're just exercising a form of self-hatred.  You just happen to be in the line of fire.  The more you invest it with negative energy, the bigger and badder the experience will become for you, burdening you with unnecessary painful thoughts and residual emotions.  Take the experience as a lesson and opportunity to transcend the petty destructive and unconscious tendencies that human beings unwittingly indulge themselves in- usually in an effort to enhance themselves.  See it as an opportunity to deal with another's pain with compassion- the juice that facillitates life's natural ease and elegance.  Then you're in a place to help someone, and you suddenly might see that the person who "ruined your life," actually gave you the greatest gift you've ever received: self-awareness, self-love (the love of another), and compassion, which is freedom.

"The work of love is to open that window in the chest 

and to look incessantly on the Beloved.  You can do this.

Listen.  Make a way for yourself inside yourself.

Stop looking in the other way of looking.

You already have the precious mixture that will make you well.  Use it.

Old enemies will become friends.

Your beauty will be God's beauty."

                                                                             Rumi 

Here's the color comp on that stony golf hole...

Tales: Tips for Happiness #1

1.  Radical Kindness

    My first tip for happiness is also the easiest, and the most fun.  I call it "radical kindness," and it's just what it sounds like.  I'll present it to you as a challenge- give it a try for one, or even better, two days, and see if it doesn't completely transform your perception of life:  the amount of joy you get from life, the "magical" connections you experience, and the ease and comfort that you feel as you go about your day to day.  It's also exciting!

    Here's the challenge:  To every person that you encounter, in any and every circumstance you find yourself in during an entire day (or two), be as absolutely kind and loving to that person as you can possibly muster, without acting like a boob.  You can't be sarcastic or patronizing- that's thinly veiled aggression, not loving kindness.  You must be sincere.  Everyone knows how to be sincerely kind, or can make a good effort.  Negativity of any kind is resisting kindness, so don't go there at all.  Just look people in the eye (smile first with your eyes), smile sincerely (like you have a special secret to share), and be really friendly to them... and watch what happens!  Your world will come to life in a way you may never have experienced before.  Allies, compatriots, new friends that seem like they're very old friends will appear everywhere.  You'll get helped with special care, with insider's knowledge, with joy and camaraderie everywhere you go- sometimes when you'd least expect it.

    All you have to do is simply return the favor.  Be pleasant and polite, be magnanimous and generous, be tolerant and interested, be honest and real, and the world will activate effervescently in the most wonderful ways.  It's the single most effective way to completely transform your life for the better.  It will make your life much more fun, and much easier.  Open your heart, relax your will, and try this simple happiness challenge! 

       "None of the means employed to acquire religious merit...has a sixteenth part of the value of loving-kindness.  Loving-kindness, which is freedom of the heart, absorbs them all;  it glows, it shines, it blazes forth."

                                                                                                The Buddha

The stone temple golfer who didn't make the cut...

It starts out as this unusual golf hole.....and becomes this golf bot that plays you back... 

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 5. Intuition.

                          "Thinking is not going to do it."

                                                                Carolyn Myss

 

     Look at a time lapse film of a city sometime.  Seemingly permanent structures pile up and wear down like sandcastles.  So do we.  We pile up.  We wear down. 

     Aside from our senses, the two main aspects of our perception that remain functioning in a fairly constant way are our minds, which tells us what mushrooms are safe to eat, or what time we have to go to the dentist;  and our intuition-- our  inner "voice of reason" which is our true connection to source intelligence.  Our connection to the mind of the universe.  

     We never actually learn much from our own minds, we learn with them.  Our minds are tools, usually busily running through random options and possibilities, assigning classifications and priorities.  Working, wheedling, making associations, stacking them up and taking them apart.  We can memorize facts using that power of mental repetition- or call them up by flicking an associative switch at the right moment.  We can collect and categorize knowledge in the basket of our mind, but it's our intuition that confirms the truth of that knowledge, and can actually teach us that truth first.  Often, our intuition has to wait some time for our mind to catch up to it.  

    The mind can be like a leaf blower, noisily pushing up pieces of data, carrying them along in a measured swirl of sorts, keeping them aloft obsessively, or setting them back down behind us, right where we first saw them.  How many times have you come to a conclusion, only to realize that deep down you knew the truth of it already?  Yet you needed evidence to convince your mind it was true, even though you knew it all along.  And what do you say when that happens?  You say,  "I knew it all along."   

 That can be the moment in which you become aware of your intuitive self-- the part of you that witnesses your own (sometimes crazy) thinking.  in this sense, you are not the person who's doing the thinking.  You, your true self, is observing the person doing the thinking.     

     Here's the certainty:  Our bodies are impermanent (at best).  Our minds are tools- largely defensive and survival-oriented in nature, that operate by producing thoughts sequentially moment by moment.  Many of these thoughts are extraneous and unnecessary, even counter-productive.  They  can make us do great things.  Terrible things.  Crazy things.  Or all of the above, as is the case for most of us.  Many of the dumbest things I've ever done have been very well thought out.

     Our intuitions are our true connections to source intelligence, the truth we may eventually learn with our minds.  Nothing really great ever happens without intuitive knowledge.  That source knowledge is always available to us, immediately and eternally.  However, you can never know it by passing over it with your mind, like a leaf blower.  You have to practice allowing your intuition to be, to hear it without the noise, the mind interference.  Purposely enter into the eternal moment that we are always actually living in, where your intuition can be heard.  Forget about thinking.  Try to consciously allow your intuition to do the thinking for you.

    Learn to trust and identify with your calm, inner "voice of reason," what the Quakers call, "the still, small voice," as much as you possibly can.  Practice consciously living from that Source Intelligence, and watch the results.  This is best achieved through practicing meditation.

     Listen to the way this great early twentieth century swami describes it (particularly the last sentence):

    "Intuition has a fourfold power.  [1] A power of revelatory truth-seeing, [2] a power of inspiration or truth-hearing, [3] a power of truth-touch or immediate seizing of significance, which is akin to the ordinary nature of it's intervention in our mental intelligence, [4] a power of true and automatic discrimination of the...exact relation of truth to truth.  Intuition can therefore perform all the action of reason- including the function of logical intelligence...but by it's own superior process and with steps that do not fail or falter." 

                                                           

                                                              Sri Aurobindo

Faith & Mr. Floppy #2

A page from number 2...

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 4

   "Philosophy is really homesickness."                                           

                                                                           Novalis

    Have you ever seen the classic cartoon where an appropriately drunken stork delivers a baby to a family of the wrong species?  That was how I tended to feel a lot,  from my earliest memories on.  Unsure whether I'd been dropped off on the right planet.

    I began to adopt an identification with a set of heroes which I'll call "The Legion of the Separate."  Every one of them had experienced a profound sense of displacement.  An inability to accept their reality, and so forced to seek or become something other than what their surroundings would suggest to make of their lives.  They all had a need to exorcize the sense of a "False Self" that had been foisted upon them, and journey to the real persona that God, in his infinite wisdom, meant for them to discover.  I was down with that.  

    I loved explorers;  like Coronado, the first European to explore the American southwest, who set off looking for the lost city of gold, but instead discovered Kansas.  Captain Cook, who was symbolically eaten by Nature-men of Polynesia when he discovered the Paradise that he had been cruelly separated from by an Empire of delusional ego.  Marco Polo, whose travels presaged the western search for enlightenment in his quest to the Far East, only to be most famously falsely credited for bringing pasta back to Italy.  Of course, the Italians already had pasta.  They're Italian.  

    Also, all comic book superheroes;  generally victims of some personal tragedy, who'd been further separated from normalcy by their misunderstood and transcendent powers.  Compelled to suddenly appear dressed in multicolored tights (branding logos on their chests), save lives, and then disappear into a kind of hyper-anonymity.  I tried this out as a child in my sister's dance tights (sans superpowers), and quickly discovered how profoundly confusing it could be.         

     Let's not forget- Knights on romantically esoteric quests.  Gunslingers and samurais, who didn't want to have to kill anyone, but had gotten really good at it in case it was justified (it always was).  Demi- gods, and mythological heroes, especially those with impossible tasks to perform.  But by far, my favorite of all was Tarzan ... ahhh, Tarzan.

     

    It was a common evening, there in the backyard of the little house on Linfield Avenue, right up against the dusty edge of the canyon wilderness that was eastern San Diego in 1962.  I was six, sitting towards the top of the pepper tree, up with the young green leaves, and little vermillion berries.  I'd taken to climbing trees at an early age, because, naturally, I could not be reached there.  I was dressed ( or undressed, as it were) as my favorite hero from The Legion of the Separate.  A thin Mexican leather belt kept  my hand-towel loincloth in place.  A red rubber knife, the silver paint worn off the floppy blade, tucked into it at my side.  I was Tarzan.  Displaced and heroic King of the Jungle.  Master of the dark wilderness that fate had inexplicably delivered him into.  Rendered parentless at birth, living by strength and guile, I scanned the rooftops of the outpost suburban tract with the cool indifference of a Great Ape, methodically picking at my toes.  I was crosslegged in the upper branches.

    The screen door opened, and my mother walked out, slender and lovely, with her red hair and her brow bunched.  She stood beneath my tree, arms crossed, one foot pointed out just so, squinting up at the King of the Jungle.

    "I see you up there."  No answer.

    "Time to come down now, dinner's ready"

    "Tarzan no hungry."  My Tarzan had little to do with the transcendent hero created by E. R. Burroughs,  instead being unfortunately based on the movie character as portrayed by Johnny Weismuller, the famous swimmer.

    "Tarzan has to eat dinner.  You're already a pretty skinny Tarzan."

    "Tarzan no eat your dinner." I imagined feeding on bloody gazelle, I imagine.

    "Tarzan will especially no eat if his dinner gets cold."

    With that I shifted to a less visible position in the tree, redirecting my savage gaze to the sunset in the west, all silly bright pink and yellow, in the days before smog had reduced every dusk to sad shades of coppery grey.  The screen door shut behind her, and I was again, for the moment, stoically content in my treetop.  And then Tarzan got hungry.

Two cartoony backyards...

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 3

    "All beings