Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 27: Just A Day in L.A., Part 1

I'd call it the heart of Los Angeles—if it has one—that narrow strip of the world that runs across from La Cienega to the Golden State Freeway, and down from the Hollywood Hills to Interstate 10. An odd golden rectangle of sorts, within which all things two-dimensional in nature are eventually bound to occur. In New York, you can feel the connection, as though you were a functioning part in some kind of or-ganism with everything happening at once right there from bottom to top, and vice-versa.

L.A. is more like a spread-out Venice—canals criss-crossing and wandering around the flatness, gondolas in rush hour gridlock. Life tends to run downhill there, and who's to say when anything will happen. It's all about a strange kind of dis-connection – a sunny, ungrounded alternative reality. The only things easily understood are those that are readily visible on the surface, it's just that sometimes life makes you look underneath. This was going to be a day like that.

I'd gotten a  call from Playboy Enterprises to do an illustration for the Playboy Jazz Festival, so I rolled over the Cahuenga Pass and on down to their old building in West Hollywood where at one time, I hear, Hugh Hefner actually lived up in the penthouse over-looking the glory days of "The Sunset Strip."

It was dim up in their offices, and sumptuous, like a prime rib res-taurant with a Tony Bennett soundtrack. No one seemed to be quite awake yet (it was just before noon at Playboy, after all) and so it fell upon a well-dressed underling to fetch me my assignment folder, and to direct me to my Art Director, who actually wasn't actually there. He was inexplicably working out of The Schindler House, an architectural landmark nearby.

I was drifting on a bit of that Vegas-like up-all-night atmosphere, riding the elevator back down alone, when it stopped on a floor and the actor Robert Vaughan got on with me. I felt a queer, sudden schoolboyish surge, because here he was, "Napoleon Solo, The Man From U.N.C.L.E."— one of my favorite childhood TV heroes—in close quarters on an elevator at Playboy—my favorite childhood magazine (when I could lay my hands on a copy.) What a funny world.

He looked at me furtively, then instantly back away with the pain of recognition, and then stepped right up to the elevator door and stood just inches from it, looking straight ahead, glancing sideways si-multaneously avoiding me and keeping track of me. Without speaking, he very clearly said: "Don't speak."

He had the classic look of a screen actor – a short guy with a big face, big features, and he appeared, upon observation, to be a nice enough guy if he'd given it a chance, but it didn't seem like he would, or could. It was as though he were afraid. Afraid of what, I don't know. Me? I certainly was no threat, smiling there like a stand-in. Maybe he saw me notice his platform shoes, which I'm very sorry to say I did.

Maybe he really wasn't the unassailable character he played on TV. Maybe he was really a very vulnerable guy, there with the hairspray and the lifts. I liked him, and was honored to be on the same elevator with him, but the moment the doors parted he quickly stepped out—like a racer out a gate—and there he went...The Man From U.N.C.L.E...The Magnificent Seven...safe again, at last.

I gurgled around the innercity suburb streets lined with fat palms and eucalyptus, like the jungle cruise at Disneyland, over Beverly and jogging on up Kings Road. It was a little hard to find the Schindler House at first, with it's back to the street like the best of those modern residential designs—Neutra, and the Eichler houses—like the house I lived in until I was eight. I gently pushed the door open and said hello into an empty room, when Rip Georges, the accomplished and respected designer and creative director poked his head in too. Why he was working there I never really knew, but he showed me around the classic modern residence, the home of the architect, elemental and open. It was like a mix of a cave and a beautiful japanese house, with every room facing the garden, and light angling in under the angled roof. Concrete walls like a Roman villa.

It felt a little bit like breathing to me, that house. A comfortable, anthropological aesthetic as close to the region's natural architecture as any would ever be. An intuition for not needing much that so many people had sought in those foothills—like my father, who'd tried for it in the houses I knew as a child, before he left the western world be-hind. It felt that familiar, and that empty.

We sat by a built-in desk and he gave me the low-down: They wanted a portrait of the Latin per-cussionist, Willie Bobo (famous for his cool version of the Jobim song,"Gingi"). Mr. Bobo had sadly died an early death just a few months before and the festival pro-gram would include a dedication to him, so perhaps it should be something colorful, something celebratory. The only problem was photographic reference. There wasn't any, and in those days, no internet images available at the push of a button; but they did have the address and phone number of Mr. Bobo's widow. She lived out in Highland Park, and she might have some photos I could borrow to work from. It was clearly part of my job to awkwardly call her, set up a meeting time, and get directions...

.......................continued in Part 2

see more of that architectural style here, at Atomic Splendor—a pretty cool blog

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!

Thank You For 20,000 Visitors!

IdeaRocket Animation: From Homebaked to Lift Off

I've recently joined up with Will Gadea's team as Art Director of the newly rebranded IdeaRocket Animation production house (formerly Homebaked Films), specializing in "explainers," animations that describe what a business is or how something works.

Visit the IdeaRocket website

Pretty soon, our new IdeaRocket explainer will be up, but in the meantime, here's a peek at the kind of work we're doing:

GlobalEnglish from Homebaked Films on Vimeo.

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 26: The Road to Chetumal; Entering the Underworld

The fat, brown old '75 Chrysler that they'd rent-a-wrecked next to the airport in Cancun hovered down the road across the peninsula, from Escarcega to Chetumal, sucking up the pale, gravelly length of it. The highway seemed to extrude endlessly from a vanishing point ahead, as though oozing from an ever-retreating pipe, pulling them towards the Carribean, the low jungle creeping in along each shoulder. They weren't at all lost, they just felt like it.

It was probably because it seemed such a long ride, this second leg of the three; out past Valladolid to Merida, down to Campeche and Champoton having been the first part; now from the western blue water side to the azure east coast and the border with Belize. All he heard was wind with all the windows rolled down (the old school air conditioning), and everyone was asleep it seemed, even Koko, though he may have been driving – he couldn't say for sure. The twilight colors of the zocalo in Merida seemed so long ago, and since that silly light show in Chichen Itza they'd been sent off into their alternate world of tourism alive in the Yucatan wild.

They'd all caught that strange fever, as though drinking from the first bottomless cenote had laid out a subterranean map to follow, from ruin to ruin searching out jaguars, ufos, and entrances to the underworld. They were all there, holes in the sky and the earth, they just had to find them. Intuitively, they knew the underworld stood in for their own interior landscapes, though as usual it was never dis-cussed. The lush but arid overgrowth invading every road and each moment of life on the surface betrayed those deceptions so typically found in "paradise" – a little like the appearances of their own exteriors, flowered and casual.

On either side of the highway they saw the occasional mud hut, but never any people. "There's a smart one!" Jean would say each time they passed a mottled, meatless pig by the road. It was an ongoing bit of sarcastic fun, in response to Koko having told her about an article he'd read that mentioned how truly intelligent pigs were. It got a laugh every time in those days, when they were all asleep and still mistaking sarcasm for humor.

Any hand-scrawled sign on a dirt turn-off promising a ruin or an entrance to the underworld de-manded a requisite exploration, observed overhead by invisibly vi-brating alien spacecraft and lan-guid jaguars in the underbrush.

No stone in that respect could be left unturned, and so he'd swung the old boat down a wide dirt path and followed it to where an elderly yucateco and a dirty little boy loosely held vigil over a small opening in the rocks. They paid a quarter U.S. each, the little boy attached a raw wire to a car battery, and bare, flickering bulbs lit the way down the slippery hole.

Timelessly, the descent into the semi-darkness leaves every pro-mise, every safety behind. They clamored in an unsteady procession down the long, constricted passage until it finally opened up into a vaulted cavern. A shaft of light poured in through a break in the cave ceiling, and as their vision balanced out, the crystalline water began to glow a deep blue-green. Guillermo and Jean watched as Grace and Koko stripped and ventured into the water, carefully at first as the jagged bottom looked like you could reach down and touch it, but once they got in they realized it was only the surreal clarity of the water that made it appear so. It was really six or eight feet deep.

As Koko floated out, he realized that the center of the cenote dropped down in a circular shaft of the densest blue, plunging down beneath them as though straight into the center of the earth, to the raw, unprotected heart of every experience he'd ever hid behind. Grace floated fearlessly out over the unfathomable depth like she was teasing it, like she was offering herself up to some ancient unknown. Exposing herself to some suppressed demiurge. The water was soft with minerals, and felt familiar and healing, amniotic, while at the same time it was like some kind of time machine, rearranging their elements sub-atomically, sending them on to a different, totally silent life.

When they finally reached Chetumal they'd expected hospitality, but instead were met with furtive looks and men with guns – an air of mistrust and danger brought on by recent slash and burn class warfare and forced resettlement of the local Maya. They kept right on going. The road led them straight into the shell encrusted entry arch of the Hotel Laguna Bacalar, an oddly angled moderne-esque building perched above "The Lagoon of Seven Blues." It was peculiarly unfinished and lightly occupied by a strange assortment of windblown travelers and semi-permanent guests in various states of inebriation. After a day or two of assiduously avoiding insanity, they headed north on their last leg.

In Tulum, they parked at the end of road on the bluff above the crazy virdant sea, and strolled into the ruins. A viejo walked briskly out of a small block house, buckling his pants. He was, of course, the toll taker – every ruin had one – and after collecting his quarter from each walked briskly back to his quarters, just a chair and fan visible through the doorless doorway.

Only sage old iguanas guarded the ruined structures, still practically livable. With it all to themselves, and after what seemed like years of turning inside-out in the dust and the jungle, the ancient stone beachfront felt like home. Like they'd never left, or lived anywhere else. Diving chamber to chamber in the crescent caves of Xcaret, where the freshwater collided with the sea, and the lagoon of Xel Ha, alone again as they always magically seemed to be, they were spirits trapped in blue-green amber, their invitation to stay and move into their underworld permanently interrupted by the first busload of tourists to ever see those sacred places.

It was time to go, to move the sky back into position, and to detach themselves from the endless subterranean waterways that wove the underworld of their lives together. Time to head back into the world above, where there was no risk of revealing the broken-open places they'd stumbled across.

About a thousand years after they'd arrived, they sat outside at Don Cafetos on the dusty main street of Tulum, had an excellent meal, and rolled the old chrysler past Playa del Carmen, past Cancun, past sleeping jaguars and blinking lizards, off the end of the flat peninsula, and on out right past ufos following alongside, clearly visible out the airplane windows.

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!

Codename: Kids Next Door, From the Extra Sooper Obscure Vault – Crazy Killin' Time

Codename: Kids Next Door was probably one of the last animated TV shows on the air that was designed on paper, old school style, with a bunch of us sitting around "The Design Pit," each with our cubby-holes and boards. The grind of creating a heavily designed show season after season can lead to some unusual ways to fill the few and far between breaks in the ever-steady stream of work. Oftentimes, just to keep the juices flowing, it leads to slightly irreverent sketching, mostly on Post-Its and on scraps of paper...which I just happened to run across some of, cleaning out a drawer in my flat-file (remember those? They were where you used to store files).

Here then are a few scenes, out-takes, and time-fillers from the Extra Sooper Obscure Vault – for real gluttons for KND punishment, and definitely not for the faint of heart...

I'll lead off with some legitimate work (well, sort of...), an evil baby-abductor, a thumbnail mega interplanetary sooper rocket, and a guaranteed nugget mining device, for scratching and clawing your way to treasures...

Our kindly boss, Mr.Tom Warbuton, tried his best to keep us happy by plying us with candy and sweets – there was a huge bin of it available 24-7; but sometimes, like here when one of our BG designers, Gideon Kendall came back after a couple days off, what he discovered upon his return wasn't all that pretty...

Working on comics often leads to coming up with a few of your own.

Here's a classic waste of time: Salmon Man, and his arch-nemesis The Grizzly (with his troublesome little sidekick, Racoon Kid).

This is just plain wrong, and someone should apologize for it! (Run out and find me someone...) It's probably some kind of heresy for an animation guy to boot...but it did happen long ago (before I got better). Allow me to apologize to Mr. Lucas...

Uh oh...

...I've saved the last (and practically the worst) for last and practically worst. It's this imagined depiction of what happened when our erstwhile Inker Extraordinaire, Sir Robert Smith, (aka, The Iguana) didn't make it in to work due to illness. Man, did we ever miss him. In fact, I still do!

As well as Tom Evans, John Allemand, Todd Myers, and Kevin Kobasic.

PS to all you moved to L.A., out there you've got coyotes, but here there's just crickets...........................................................XO RK

The Nice Way to Do the Holidays: Having Fun and Changing Your World

Summer, Winter.....................................................................................Happy Holidays!

"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, Itivuttaka Sutta

That's quite a precise break-down of the power of being nice, don't you think? I wonder how he knew? I tried it out myself at one time and I never looked back, so I'll pass it along to you as something of a challenge: The challenge to be as nice as you possibly can to everybody you meet. It's kind of a tall order, but not impossible, and can help quite a lot at this time of year – what with all the demands on your holiday cheer.

Of course The Buddha knew the difference between being religious and being spiritual – that it's a little like comparing apples to water. Going to church defines you as being a type of believer, while showing loving-kindness to everyone you meet gets right to the heart of the distinction, namely:

You're not what you believe, you're what you do.

Take this little challenge and try it yourself, from now through the holidays, and watch what happens! You'll suddenly find yourself a part of a slightly invisible conspiracy of kindness; of identification and compassion. Friends you never knew you had will show up ev-erywhere, and then disappear just as beautifully and mysteriously; leaving you with only the one requirement – to continue the chain of kindness.

First you'll be amazed, then you'll wonder, then you'll experiment more intentionally, then you might never go back. It's that powerfully amazing. It will change your world that much. You can't help but be grateful for the wonderful way people treat you when you show them unconditional loving-kindness, and you'll find you're happy all the time, because you have to have gratitude before you can be happy about anything.

How does it work so well (sixteen times better...)? Simply because being kind to others takes the focus off of who Your Ego ("Mr. Big Shot") thinks you are, and places it on someone else's well-being – which as it turns out is really yours too. And it's easy to show unconditional Love all the time, because Love is all unconditional already – it only becomes conditional when Ego begins demanding it. What a kvetch.

We all want Love and companionship. Compañero. We're all the same person, really. "No we're not!" your Ego says, "I'm not at all like Dick Cheney!" (–God Bless 'im). Well, I hope that's true, and you may have a bit of a point after all... should everyone get the same lovingly kind treatment, no matter what? Well, dammit, ideally yes they should (now that's "tough love"). But if that level of unconditionality is im-possible, then let's look for a rule of thumb to go by:

"Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked."

Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, 1.33

So three out of four ain't bad. Just don't pay no mind to Mr. Cheney. Better yet, see if you can find some Love in your heart for him, because that's how we're all evolving. We're all becoming more and more able to share in the medium of Love that actually lives under, around, and through us. It's the solution that staring us in the face all the time. Gratitude and compassion are the doors to realizing it in every moment; and when we're kind to everyone we meet, all the time, we're open to the force of evolution that's flooding our plane of existence. We're opening the gates to it ourselves – each one of us.

"Heaven arms with Compassion those whom it would not see destroyed"

The Tao te Ch'ing, 67

Kindness is a winning strategy. There's lots of people out there who've already known it all along, you know, those smarties who are always smiling. Compassion doesn't save them from physical destruction – it enables them to find spiritual realization. To remove the obstacles to Love, and so to really expand and grow and flow with Life. Ho ho ho!

Take my holiday challenge, won't you? Turn your frown upside down and look into the nicest mirror you've ever seen...You might never look back.

Happy Holidays!

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 25: Finding Grace at Art Center– Departure

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

Soren Kierkegaard

...continued

Could it be his Uncle Jimmy was right, and we're all born with everything already intact, like "acorns" waiting to open and unfold into whatever kind of tree we'll be? Maybe so, because from the first day at the new school, things began to happen like they do, like the whole progression had been charted out, and he was simply showing up to play his part.

There he sat in the student cafeteria with the rest of the new students at Art Center's Orientation Day, listening to the school's dour-faced administrator, Midge Quinelle, describe how difficult their course of art education would be. It seems the administration expected, in fact encouraged as high a rate of attrition as possible. Many students would find they didn't fit in at Art Center – that they "simply couldn't cut it," and so be it – it was a necessarily efficient means of dispensing with the undeserving. The flashing would have to be trimmed off the prime casting before they could buff it to a high luster, and stamp it's bottom as an Art Center product.

It didn't bother him much, he didn't intend to be drummed out or lost overboard, but it did seem an inauspicious way to launch their fresh-faced careers. He doubted that whether a student "deserved" to be at Art Center or not would have much bearing on whether their tuition check got cashed. At that time it seemed a strangely antagonistic, and somewhat chaotic place.

At the break, the new students and some faculty congregated out back, on the big patio terrace with a perpetually hazy view of Pasadena, munching on crudités, and sipping seltzer – that new kind that came in blue glass bottles. He stood above by the railing, watching the crowd of his mostly doomed schoolmates schmoozing, forming early friendships and allegiances; cozying up to the teachers and department heads. The upscale kids mixed easily as though their success had been guaranteed, because strangely enough it had been, due to the politics and pay-offs common to their class. Many of them already had jobs awaiting with top agencies and the like, which was as it should be – their's was the art of the pre-existing, not of the as-yet-to-be-discovered. Kids who'd got there by the seat of their pants milled about hungrily on the edges, as did the uneasy Asians, struggling with English as a Second Language.

He walked down and grabbed a blue bottle and a cocktail paper plate of cut carrots and cucumber, and something caught his eye. The crowd opened up as though they were moved out of the way stage left and right on rolling risers, and there, alone on a concrete bench, sat a beautiful girl, her face a little bit twisted by tears. Heroic codependence swelled up in his chest. He suddenly had a purpose greater than simply engaging in the self-serving chit-chat.

He went and sat with her and asked why she was crying, but she didn't know really, it was just nerves perhaps. He put a carrot up his nose and she laughed. It was dumb, but it worked. He told her about the funny house he lived in, and the bar-b-que joint down the street, Gus's, that had neon chickens and pigs running down the side of their sign – and a Chef Pig on the menu, serving himself on a platter. With what he imagined to be the proper measure of jaunty suggestiveness, he asked her if she "would like to join his pork club?" To which she replied, "That depends on how many members there are in it" – and that about did it. That's how they met and fell in love.

The school was difficult, not because of the course load, but because of the unusually unnecessary rigidity of the the people who ran it – mostly Mormons as it turned out – insecure people whose moral foundation is knowingly built on a premise so bereft of credibility that their justification of faith and purpose must be willfully shifted to something more substantial, like commercial acknowledgment, financial success, or the canonical Jesus. They seemed to be confused about what an art school should be. No human expression was permitted on the polished concrete walls. No risky or possibly "avant garde" projects ever needed to be encouraged. Illustration and Fine Art majors required no up-to-date equipment – that was for the product designers and ad people only.

He had some good teachers who helped him see new horizons; and others who taught him more of what he had already learned in his life up to that point; but little of the good or bad of it mattered much at all when viewed through love-struck eyes. Like always, school was what you brought to it.

The two became one of the first fast and happy couples at school, which was fine, because everyone could see how well-suited they were; and it didn't seem to effect their work badly at all. She saved him from his crazy hot dusty attic, and brought him to live with her in the cozy little apartment with a pool that her father had arranged for her. And so, as in those golden-tinged dreams of youthful love anew, they ventured down the pre-ordained path that led to ten years of adventure and marriage and travel and struggle and eventually, as is so often the case with stories of the sort, emotional disaster, heartbreak, and loss.

The lessons of the hard school were stored and utilized – the endurance and the hurt. Their lives pulled them apart by the very seams that were so obviously visible when they first met that day on the concrete bench. But this isn't the story of how Grace was lost. It is – like it might always turn out to be – the story of how Grace was found at Art Center.

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!

I've Been Dying to Find Out What I Am

...............................................................a little bit like a prisoner, you could say

When I was in my twenties I was in a single-car accident and suddenly found myself at the top of a telephone pole next to a street light, looking down at my lifeless body hanging out of a wrecked car. I spent almost an entire day in good company, transported somewhere other than here. 

In my thirties, as a result of an altogether inappropriate lifestyle, I again ended up on the ground with the life draining out of me. I was enveloped in a bright white cloud, and caringly shown pivotal scenes from my life to that point.

During both of these experiences I felt completely free, at ease, weightless, and utterly comfortable and serene...and I was me, only I don't remember having a body.

Then, when I was forty, a skinhead mistakenly unleashed his homophobic rage at me on a city street. I fought back, but was knocked unconscious from behind and stomped and kicked "to death" by his gang of fellow neo-nazis. Ouch. That time I went to a dark place, but struggled to stay there, wanting to find that peace and light again, only to be forced back into this life against my will – the sense was that I hadn't gotten it right yet. I think it was in order to tell you what I learned from these three "NDEs" so maybe you won't have to find out in the (painful) way I did...because you don't want to try this at home.

My will didn't account for much beyond this life. Will is a function of being human – the sense that we need something to happen a certain way; that we can make it happen for us; that we can control the outcome of things. Sometimes we can. We can set our goals and work towards them, and manifest our wishes for ourselves; but regardless of the intentions and outcome, I learned that everything we experience in this life is part of an unfathomable, largely imperceivable system that we may never quite know from this angle. I learned that I am a spiritual being having this physical experience in order to learn to transcend the limitations of this sensory world in order to evolve. I learned that this body really is an "avatara." We precipitate as these forms, into this field of energy, shaped by genes, thoughts, feelings, and actions...and unknowable karma.

Simply put, this life of physical materiality is our medium of spiritual evolution. We step in and out of these bodies as seamlessly and purposefully as walking through the rooms of a great mansion we've been invited to explore. It's "the nature of the beast" that we don't always know that purpose, and more literally that nature that pre-vents us from experiencing the true medium of our greater being, which is Love – except for in the little bits that blow us away.

Being human is our only way to discover it – to discover anything – but it's also our greatest obstacle because of all the contrariness and misinterpretation this human form insists on imposing on our spirits, and on this beautiful, living planet. It's the obstacle the Hindu call maya.

You probably couldn't help but notice by now that it isn't easy being human. The attractions of our sensory state can be so fun (thrills) and compelling (sex), and seductive (intellect); and our afflictions can seem so painful and unfair, and relentless in the course of what feels like such a long life – but then tomorrow little of any of it may scarcely register in our recollections. (We've likely just forgotten being born and dying before – that may be how really limited our body/mind vehicles are.) Then even those attractions that can lead us to such fantastic fulfillment and accomplishments can also lead straight to utter despair and willful, idiotic destruction. Just imagine having to drive a car that likes to crash, and often insists on it. Pretty crazy, right? This life can be like that.

Being sensory beings leads easily to a philosophy of life chiefly defined by the form we're in – a kind of spiritual "Catch-22" that is, pleasure as a philosophy to live by. Gratification of the will, of the body, of the ego. The chief drawbacks, aside from the previously mentioned destruction and despair created by unconsciously pursuing these gratifications, is that they just don't last very long; and that our means of recognizing what's actually happening (and what does last) is once again limited to another function of our form – our intellect, our thinking mind.

Unless a person has a spiritual experience brought about by the practice and exercise of wisdom, or, as in my case, they've had their sense of "reality" sufficiently smashed to pieces well enough to reveal the eternal intelligence that underlies and energizes everything around us, the tendency is to slip back into what our limited powers of observation and calculation will permit. And we'll be right about it.

You'll see lots of really smart people who simply can't realize the essential nature of this life, because they haven't had such an experience. Unless it's convincingly adapted to the true nature of it's purpose, the vessel will never really be able to carry any real, spiritual water (but it can come close). A big example is that scientific observation keeps insisting on "what it knows is fact," until spiritual evolution empowers a new level of observation. Then it will start insisting on that as "fact," through force of will. However, the truth is always a function of the spiritual – not the intellectual, so the intellect can never really know the truth. It's that human thing again.

"Blessed are those who have undergone ordeals. They have entered into Life."

The Gospel of Thomas, 58

Somethings are obviously very "wrong" with this form we're in (or I should say with this form I'm in). It's the way we're hemmed-in by our interpretations of sensory experience as being the only "real" thing, our intellects acceptance of ignorance, and our inability to perceive the mind-blowing evidence all around us. But then our senses are also our doors to The Divine, and allow us our opportunities to grow, to change for the better, and to realize the obvious intent for life on Earth, and of the magic around and within us.

I was plainly (and painfully) given these unusual peeks "behind the curtain," so to speak, and here's how they've informed my point of view: You can rarely change anyone – each of us is on a unique (and naturally similar) path of spiritual evolution, towards the same place. The only way to actually change things is to change yourself; to choose to (occasionally) detach from the limitations of the form and embrace the spiritual moment, and to go where it takes you as much as you can. That is what's is changing the world right now.

Thinking is just a focusable tool. It wasn't the same thing, in "the great beyond" – not as incessantly demanding. Not as linear. Much more comfortable, like good meditation, or the full and empty space at the end of a good laugh. The moment is plenty alive without it.

Death is just a part of life that comes quickly or slowly. It's quite nice and comfortable itself, but often a bummer to get to. Love is the true underlying medium of life, and our job is to remove the obstacles that separate us (and our planet) from that amazingly powerful constant. I know my job now is to try to overwhelm ignorance with Love (which is also tolerance, compassion, and service to others).

Just be careful of skinheads, crocodiles (yeesh), or thinking that you're right.

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!

Animation and BG Design: Many Ages, Many Stages

Animation and background design take you on a trip into a look and a place...

like the direction into Sheep's long ago drawers from The Big City (Cartoon Network)

...............................putting ideas into your head

What animation designs design for...

Into a tight line pop mall...

The "pencil" stage for a fun kids room...

.....to a (PBS Kids) high school (without all the kids)

...........................here's the finished line stage of...a stage.

....from a big, soft rough from a Disney thing...

...to finish, like I started, with a rough bridge back to when Sheep were still in the Big City...

Ah...Fall.....in New York City.

See more Animation Design by Robert Kopecky

On James Hillman: Au Revoir, and Hello to Uncle Jimmy.

Week before last, my uncle (by marriage) James Hillman – Jungian analyst, scholar and teacher, champion of the psyche, and "renegade" psychologist passed away into the world that comes after this, venturing into a dimension that I'm certain he's currently delighted to discover, given that he'd always dedicated himself to the most profound explorations of life [and death] with all the impetuousness and willingness to be amazed that was his nature. (I didn't know him all that well, but I knew that much for sure.)

I met him first six or seven years ago at a Hillman family reunion at his home in Connecticut with my then-fianceé-now-wife, his niece; again at his eightieth birthday; and then when he attended (...and boogied on down) at our wedding, with his wonderful wife, Margot McLean.

On our first meeting, I was in a formative part of a personal re-configuration, of sorts, doing lots of meditation and reading, but not knowing yet that I'd be called to set down my own personal explorations and discoveries, much less how to go about it. I'd cursorily examined some of his writing (The Soul's Code was in my then wife-to-be's bookshelf), and while he spoke so authoritatively of the same wilderness that I wanted to describe, I found myself more than a bit confounded.

Here was the voice of a true explorer into labyrinthine reaches I'd only just recently been opened to, but speaking in a language that I found nearly indecipherable. It was the language of an academician of the highest order, and as such seemed dense and elaborately logical to me, at the time. But I also saw that it was the welcome language of a Jungian mystic, a popular Gnostic, and a playful articulator. As it was very deep stuff, I began to recognize him as a sort of Jungian Jacques Cousteau of the psyche, diving into the imagery of mythic imaginings, bringing colorful, long lost archetypes to the surface and joyfully rubbing them clean for closer examination. That was his contagious joy of discovery.

He found me on the fringe of the family's reunion activities, perusing the books on his shelf and work table and asked,"Well, what do you think?" I answered that I thought it was a remarkable thing to undertake, "describing the indescribable." His eyes widened and looked straight into mine, "Describing the indescribable," he repeated, "...I suppose so." He smiled (he was always smiling), jumped up and ran off to his duties, to the happy ritual of organizing his family's past and present.

I never got the chance to have the conversation with him that I would have liked to have had—about ourselves, and our relation to all of it; about what I took to be his redefinitions of karma and reincarnation; his marvelous rejection of the intricacies of prescribed psychology, and his instead gleeful embrace of so many of the heroic and romantic idylls of mythology and lost civilization that I'd always wished I could define myself by, when I was a child...when I was that "acorn" growing toward what my life might ask me to become.

Here was a man (suddenly my uncle), who'd given to the entire world that rich and provocative opportunity for self-definition, who'd opened the trap door to that amazing underworld of fantastic self-configuration, embellished and defined by the shared timeless imagery of our psyches. He was a kind of wiry, jocular 80 year-old Heracles, pushing the glasses up on his nose, wrapping up his labors and splashing around like a kid in this gnostic reflecting pool we call Life on Earth. Wrestling with the demiurge was always that much fun for him.

All that had seemed so complex to me at first now winnows itself down to a very direct, playful formula for living... with me dressed in a toga, with a scuba mask, and maybe eagle feathers—and a sword, and a chariot (with Krishna driving, that would complete the picture). Anything to help describe me to my self—or vice-versa.

"It's important to ask yourself, "How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?" That may very well reveal what you are here for."

James Hillman

Enormous respect arose out of the realization that so many of the "amazing" discoveries I thought I was discovering for the very first time were merely simple, commonplace blips and bits of the contents of what his life's work contained. Just a couple out-of-the-way corners of his inexhaustible imagination. Ego jumped in, as usual, and told me "you'll never be that," but then that would be missing Uncle Jimmy's point, wouldn't it? You can be. You are now. We all are!

"Sooner or later something seems to call us on to a particular path...this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am."

James Hillman

It was, after all, his life's work, and whenever I saw him, he most definitely was not working, but instead was taking part in a kind of ongoing celebration of all of Life's moments with the same logical attention to detail – the significance of that very moment, the nuances of storytelling...and always the setting-up of a good joke. There was that Zen fun, the updated Laughing Buddha (with a Jewish twist), invoking the joy of the eternal moment.

"Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here."

James Hillman

Being a strong believer in the seamlessly continuous nature of life and death, and death and life, I'm looking forward in getting to know Uncle Jimmy better, and asking his help with my own awkward spelunking, in hopes I'll surface with some self-defining evidence from those "other worlds" that we've all inhabited, that focus themselves right here and now. Maybe I can joyfully rub the muck off of those bits and blips, and give them a good once over.

I've pulled together a few locations for you to explore James' life and ideas, and sincerely hope you do. The Wikipedia entry is pretty straight-up and does contain a bibliography. Of particular note are the two really wonderful interviews with Pythia Peay on HuffPo, and Scott London on his excellent site. The YouTube piece is great, but nothing I found really communicates just how funny he is...Enjoy! ...and thank you, Uncle Jimmy.

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 here. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available everywhere – but ask for them both at your local bookstore!