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 Curator 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 had a point- Faith didn't look as young as I wanted her to.

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 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—which at the time seemed 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 blow away like sand castles in time-lapse photography. We intuitively understand our quantum reality, the way it builds and deconstructs—packets of energy and information 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, and turn 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 as we go on, we learn that 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 put them into perspective. 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. What do those patterns mean, and where do they come from? Why are they always so familiar? You know you have built those forms out of potential energies, and going forward you know that you can bring anything into being by focusing your energies on it. That's "The Secret."

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. Life is the result of cause and effect. You have to do something because you have to learn that. Your life sets itself up with certain conditions, the luck of the draw and the seeds that you plant, 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