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: Finding Simple Religion

"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 and 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, alien 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 about it. 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

How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor is now available from Llewellyn Worldwide, and can be ordered online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available everywhere too – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!

A "Faith" storyboard scenario

How to Escape Fear, When 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, etc., etc.

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 our 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 increasingly in our society, if there's a chance that crops would fail, or if our water supply were threatened, arising fearful insecurities assure that we take action to prevent shortages, to shore up critical supplies and reserves. In these cases too, fear is an appropriate motivator born from the instinct to survive.

Luckily (for now) in our 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. So since we needn't worry much about eating, and we really needn't worry about being eaten, what exactly is fear in this society, and what is it really good for?

Fear is the imaginary projection of the ego into the future, as remorse and resentments are the ego's unwillingness to release our perceived losses of the past. There are a couple great acronyms for FEAR that I find useful: False Evidence Appears Real; and Forget Everything's All Right. Ninety-eight times out of a hundred (those are strictly my 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 on your life, buddy. The human ego is built to fret – unless you take some action to defuse it. Here's a proactive approach to do just that:

As usual, the solution always seems to begin with meditation. As the ego seeks to separate us from Source, meditation connects us, and disconnects fear. Karma is really the action of life – not the causality of life, as the victimized ego would define it. If you form your actions based on fearful expectations, you energize the ego's negative influence in your life. Your actions follow that negative intention, and you create a causal cycle of negativity. If on the other hand you're connected by meditation, and you recognize the imaginary nature of your fear, you'll notice that the real evidence of your life usually demonstrates that everything is actually all right. Then you won't energize that negative thinking, stop your fearful self-paralysis before it starts, and be empowered to take the necessary actions to assure your fears will never come to pass.

A simple example would be that when there's something that appears to threaten your health, say that you have an ache or pain that you worry about. As you enlarge those ego-fears without taking action, you really do compromise your health, when just calling for help could resolve the entire situation. There's appropriate fear there. You need to act. The same is true with relationships, if you feel there's a problem brewing, gather up the love in your heart, and start communicating in order to defuse any potential problems.

This works on a broader playing-field too. Let's say there's a politician who seems to be unconscious of our growing environmental realities, who wants to keep burning fossil fuel for energy, or further institutionalize the use of pesticides. The appropriate fear is for the health of the planet – the need for clean, renewable energy, and responsible stewardship of our food sources. You may want to take action and join the opposing political effort. And when you're talking about fear, don't put anything off too long. It always works best if you apply the proaction now – today. Any procrastination invites your fearful ego-imagination to run riot in your mind, and your life.

Show up and just do what you need to do today. If you're doing"the right thing," 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, when you relate to the world in a way that assures positive experiences, because your healthy spirit extends beyond your physical body. You'll have intuitive intelligence in your corner, 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 latest book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered direct on this page or online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!

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.

 How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available everywhere – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!

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

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

What's Going On Here? 3 Quotes 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 usually considered to be 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 really 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 do call it "science," seeing as it generally turns out to be wrong. We can only base our understanding on what seems to work or not work. Newtonian physics work 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 the 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.

It means that 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 terror. "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.

So, 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. A new consciousness that allows for this intuitive understanding of our world needs to be applied to create a 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."

Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!

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, Into the Light

"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 over 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 enough power to curl the FCC's hair.

There was a real variety of shows offered, many of which, thank God, side-stepped the standards of decent American programming. Wrestlers, sombrero westerns, bullfights, silly sexy skit shows. 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 dirty, 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 maché boulders like paper maché. 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.  Very 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 a separate reality, accompanying Marcello along the meridians of Rome, and deep into the passages of this attractive, anti-heroic, strangely familiar man's life. His 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 storytelling 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. A night in existential armor. It felt like the story of what I was going to become, and I would go on to live my own version of that story. In a way, a small part of me is 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 me to take you all the way out there to see one of those weird Italian movies?"

Mama mia!  Because in my life, in La Dolce Vita, I had discovered art, and art is living the life within you.

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

Rainer Maria Rilke

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!