Congratulations on Our Rainbow Connection!

......................a rainbow in Word World must always be legible!

The singular purpose of Life is to transcend (but not abandon) our senses, and to live and think on the level of spirit; then we gain the self-awareness to recognize and remove the obstacles between ourselves and Love.

Congratulations! to all our brothers and sisters who have finally won their battles to make it legal for same-sex couples to get married. It's been a long time coming, and I suspect it's an issue of simple compassion that has been around for a much longer time than we think. We've always all had these little differences, it just depends on the consciousness we use to notice them.

Extending the rights of marriage to gays, lesbians, and transgendered people, as it has historically been to differing religions and races, is literally a real "no-brainer" – but it's always been an issue with those people whose thinking is dictated by fear. Folks who sing the praises of personal freedom, yet insist on playing God by denying the simplest of human unions to others whose little differences aren't identical to their own. In other words, what those people have always needed is less brain, more heart.

Nonetheless, this small breakthrough is still more evidence for the expansion of compassionate consciousness into the world – the spiritual growth of our earth-bound collective – that indicates the (albeit stubborn) relinquishment of that fearful minority's harsh judgement to the over-arching power of Love and shared enlightened consciousness.

It has always been those zealous dogmatists, forever seeking compensatory control and self-enhancement, who've led the way into that particular darkness – blindly following the delusional intelligence that in our past has been responsible for such ingeniously misguided evangelical inventions as thumb-screws, "The Iron Maiden," and the Rack, as well as the bans on gay and interracial marriage. God Bless Them. They're helping us identify with how difficult it can be to accept our differences. We have to show gentle tolerance, and try to be an example of how it really works.

Shall we toss out those resultant stigmas as we throw out their dogmas as well? None of our earthly brothers and sisters need bear any brand of separation – nothing that marks them as being anything other than "Children of God" and the expression of shared humanity—of Love—that we all are actually here to learn to be. That's our ticket to real freedom.

Like it or not (and I do), even with the most stubbornly prideful, egoically deluded of us, our inner and outer obstacle-walls to Love come tumbling down, and what's simply humane, just, and divinely blessed inevitably overcomes even the staunchest advocates of self-hatred. It's a spiritual evolution that we're taking part in, and evolution can't reverse itself unless a species is extinguished (which might seem like an option at this particular point), an outcome that's very unlikely in light of our growing enlightenment.

What's more likely is that we are learning to Love each other – differences and all – and are inevitably overcoming the petty greed and intolerance that threatens us, and this beautiful Earth, as we know it.

"Love thy neighbor as thyself."

Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:39

For the lucky, ever-increasing number of us for whom that Christian dictum has always been a simple function of karma (likewise a "no-brainer"), that beatitudinal expression has always worked in both of the directions that it was intended to. Outward, and inward, which is where it all really starts—with ourselves. Treating our fellow human beings well is an easy enough principle to understand, but how about loving Thyself with the same kind of unconditional compassion?

As we are all essentially the same player in on this stage, judging our brothers and sisters, and their choices and expressions in Life, is always simply a form of unnecessarily harsh self-punishment. Now it can be released at the same time as our stridently illogical and intolerant  traditional "Laws of Nature" deconstruct themselves, revealed and overturned by compassionate consciousness. Only then can intuitive intelligence and reason be freed up, and allowed to demonstrate where our boundaries really need to be. Where boundaries make sense for everyone – boundaries against needless destruction and gross inequality. Boundaries like those defining the need to save all the life of our precious Earth.

What do you say we finally let ourselves off the hook (along with all the rest of God's creatures), and instead of identifying ourselves with life's painful obstacles to happiness and fulfillment, finally accept our true potential as channels and stewards of the Divine Spirit of Love?

"Would it be possible for you to hate your brother if you were like him? Could you attack him if you realize your journey with him, to a goal that is the same?"

A Course in Miracles, 24.I.6

Read about this and much more in the new book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor is due out early 2018, from Llewellyn Worldwide can be pre-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!

Tales: Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! Finding Your "Right" Brain.

......................................you see, meditation is not boring!

It's easy to see how someone might think that sitting in meditation would be a terribly boring thing to do, sitting there, doing nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Trying to think of not thinking. Of course, that thought (like most of them) couldn't be farther from the truth.

When we just sit at first and try not to think, we naturally fail, and so we start thinking of all sorts of things. Everything comes up. Everything. Like: What your father said to you twenty-five years ago. The money your Ex still owes you. That guy who was on Oprah. When will the landlord finally fix that leak upstairs? Things in the Mid East will never get better. Is there an asteroid heading directly for Earth? What are we having for breakfast?
 

That's one of the really great things about just sitting in meditation, thinking about nothing is an endlessly interesting and entertaining thought show, and we have the best seat in the house.

All these different crazy kinds of thoughts occur in a serial fashion, that is, one after the other after the other. One leads haphazardly to the next, sometimes connected by the barest thread that only makes sense right at the moment it connects. A few more turns of the wheel down that road, and you can't even remember how you got there, or why. Because there is no why.

How you got there is simply caused by the incessantly demanding nature of your "thinking organ," your brain, which like some kind of wild, prehistoric shark, insists on relentless movement, the continuous exercise of thought, that overlying process that we often confuse for ourselves. Descartes was a little off on that one, "I think, therefore I am." We are, whether we think – or not.

Thought requires consciousness; Consciousness does not require thought.

"Serial" thought, the kind most of us often find ourselves and our identities tied to, is an apparent function of our Left Brain, the left hemisphere of our thinking organ, which is our serial processor. It's job is to process, process, process in that con-tinuous shark-like motion, joining one thing to the next, relating each significant fact (or not so significant lie) to another. Often, the best we can manage is to discipline our mind to think things that we want to think about. Like to focus our thinking on problems that need solving, say building a bridge, creating a Unified Theory of Everything, or figuring out how to get the TV remote to work. As long as it's something we want to think about – hopefully something productive, or creative, or at least painless.

The simplest form of this discipline is the common self-request, I don't even want to think about it.

When we sit, all we're really trying to do at first is to witness this serial inner monologue, try to wear it down a bit, until it gives in. Or best of all, to side-step it completely. That's the best way to put it, because it describes what the (very appropriately named) Right Side of our brains are doing while all that exhausting thinking is going on. It's functioning concurrently as a parallel processor, connecting everything to everything, simultaneously. Processing our entire sensory experience holistically, with a kind of quantum perception, which for the most part appreciates Life. It's the part of our brain power that gets short shrift because of the sequentially demanding nature of contemporary life, but you're using it every time you find love, beauty, melody, serenity, and joy.

As we sit longer, we try to engage our Right Brain experience, and to live in it for as long as possible. When, in this state, we're collecting beauty, creative energy, and Love in our hearts, suddenly, your serial thoughts no longer have all that urgency. Life can be experienced in a more realistic way when we are in this way less realistic, because we recognize that the moment is always fine, as it is, not full of demanding or threatening "realities." Nothing really needs to happen right at the moment, unless the doorbell rings, your butt is getting wet, or the kitchen is on fire.

This escape from serial thinking, to the Right Side of our brain is a much more pleasant state of affairs, when we can experience a presence for life that's only possible when we give the crazy person in our heads the day off.

In the popular myths of religion, this is the same experience that was reached by Buddha, when Mara the Tempter assaulted him with all the allures and fears of the world (see illust. above); or by Jesus, when he was in the wilderness, and Satan offered to make him the King of Everything.

Neither of them even wanted to think about it.

"What have you gained from meditation?"

"Nothing at all."

"Then what good is it?"

"Let me tell you what I lost through meditation: sickness, anger, depression, insecurity, the burden of old age, the fear of death. That is the good of meditation, which leads to nirvana."

The Buddha

Visit other postings about meditation. And check this talk by Jill Bolte Taylor!


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! 

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 23: The Saturday Matineé

A full-on hellacious meleé is what you could call it, and you'd be right.

That would be a very fair description. There would be about a thousand screaming kids, 98% of them boys from the ages of six to twelve, packed into the indescribable moderneity of the old State Theater on El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego, somewhere back around 1962. It was like that every Saturday, at the weekly triple-feature matineé. All the kids' moms dropped them off, like mine did, watched for us to purchase our tickets – thirty-five cents back then – waited for us to go in, and then rumbled off in their classic Chevys, Fords, and Plymouths, that weren't even classics back then. Every mom had one, and apparently, some place to go in it.

I would stop at the snack bar and get a red-striped tagboard box of popcorn for fifteen cents, and a Nesbitt's orange for a quarter. For seventy-five cents, my mom could drop me at the theater for almost six hours. A teenaged "usher" (often with a challenged complexion), wearing a very official dark blue, gold-trimmed uniform would push the lobby doors open into the main theater, and reveal the utter insanity within. In those days, they took you to the seat they chose for you, pointing it out with their flashlight, but once they chased some other kid back up the aisle, you got up and moved to where you really wanted to sit. I liked to sit slightly up from the middle, down the right-hand aisle.

If you looked past the teeming kid mass – the flailing arms, kids standing on the seats, kids crying for their moms, kids running full speed down the aisles pursued by the harried teen ushers – you'd behold the intense decorative splendor of the stately State Theater interior, whose tropical Botticellian paisley flourishes fluoresced slightly when the lights went down.

They were the strangest mass baby-sitting spectacles ever, those Saturday matineés, made possible by Warner Brothers cartoons and Italian sword and sandal spectaculars, stacked up in technicolor trinities like: The Thief of Baghdad, with Steve Reeves; Duel of the Titans, with Reeves and Gordon Scott; and Mole Men Versus The Son of Hercules, with Mark Forest. Or: Son of Spartacus, with Steve Reeves; Son of Hercules, with Ed Fury; and the classic Hercules Unchained, with Steve Reeves and the beautiful Sylva Koscina.

The show started up with an animated snack bar bumper, and a card offering the "smoking and crying baby booth in the rear," just before the golden Warner Brothers frame bounced the screen into life, and the kid-mob, at least for a little while, calmed down to watch the cartoons. About half way through the muscleman marathon, the kids would get restless and started taking the place apart at the seams, starting with the inevitable winging of the flattened popcorn boxes with their wickedly unpredictable trajectories, and ending up in an all-out pandemonium that necessitated the turning on of the house lights and the theater manager walking up on the stage to sternly announce: Any unruly or destructive children would be ejected from the theater. The kids could care less, but everyone quieted down so the lights could go back off, the movies could start back up, and the insanity could build again to another fine state of perfectly frenzied hellaciousness, launching the whole cycle all over again.

The last two or three hours were always ragged like that, the over-taxed theater staff shouldering the Herculean task of containing a thousand agitated boy-children, all ready to break their slave's chains, and slay the Minotaur. I didn't take part in the antics much, I was too deeply immersed in the incongruously lip-synched world of quasi-myth, rife with nascent formative sexual stereotypes, and the enhanced and simplified life onscreen, complete with it's clear and predictable moral resolutions. Why wasn't my life more like that? It confused me, I'm sure (like everything did), and I just wanted to be Steve Reeves in my jaunty dress-toga, there by the statuary-lined reflecting pool, saying my sad, heroic goodbye to the beautiful Sylva Koscina. Why would I ever leave her? Oh yes...slaying the minotaur always took priority – in place of any real, committed relationship...it's not easy being a hero.

The show let out late in the still heat of the afternoon, and all the moms idled up in their massive Impala or Fairlane or Country Squire wagons to collect their kids as they poured out onto the too-hot, too-bright sidewalk. I walked myself the five or six blocks over to Adams Avenue, to my Grandma Minnie's apartment, the little place of her own my Dad had set her up in. She was worried there, waiting for me to show up, questioning her daughter's judgement – a poor little boy walking all that ways alone.

She made me "supper," usually some canned corn beef hash, or succotash and fried baloney, a piece of white bread warmed in the bacon grease she kept in a coffee can by the stove. I pretended to eat, or hid it when she wasn't looking, waiting for the reward at the end of the sad little pioneer-style meal, and she never failed me. After I'd pushed the meager little meal around my plate long enough, she'd make me a piece of bread with her famous peach and pear jam on it — still the best jam I've ever eaten.

Mom always showed up a little later than she was supposed to (I never knew from where), picked me up and asked how the movie was. We drove home, mostly quiet, and I just wondered, where is my chariot...and where, oh where is my Sylva Koscina right now?

Tales: of Passion, Light & Dark

....................................................................................Rafael

You'll often hear it said that you must have passion for the important things in your life, and this is true of course, but it depends on what kind of passion. Passion energizes a state of action that can lift us to a higher plane of conscious being, or one that can raise our lowest expressions to a level of destructive dominance. It's a kind of moving emotional fulcrum that can make great things possible, but, when shifted, can also create a terrible self-serving momentum. This second state of passion is re-sponsible for what Christians call "sin," what Buddhists call "selfish cravings," what a 12-Stepper calls "instincts run amok," and what is often in a court of law referred to as "crimes of passion."

On the personal and world stages, this kind of passion drives so much of all the craziness around us that you could almost call it "life," or "history." It's the kind of passion that's often driving the goal of "doing what's right for the common good,"  but for whose common good? If there are winners and losers, it's probably not the kind of passion that invokes the interests of love and reason, but a passion that's fueled by ego-inspired ambition and fear. There are easy ways to tell the difference: How do others really honestly feel about it? And, what remains in the aftermath?

There is Love, and there is Hate. There's day and night, and "good" and "bad" - each burns as hot, each is equivalent to the other. Each is part of what is, so it needs to find a balance. The evidence of a passion that entails com-passion (as in com-municate, com-munity, or .com), shows the rewards that Love brings: equality, tolerance, abundance, responsibility, balance. The evidence of passion driven by ambition and fear is all around us, justified by the dictum "as long as you have passion for what you're doing." No one is surprised that madmen are quite passionate, and at the heighth of passion, any one of us is capable of throwing their life, and the lives of others, horribly out of balance. Collectively, it has happened to the world.

It's at that very personal level, when we're really honest about our motivations, that we can experience the real potential and effects of our passions. Is it just about what I want? How will it effect others? If the answer supports and encourages others, and celebrates a shared accomplishment of sorts, then it's a passion that's com-passion. If not, the momentum may take you into some dangerous ego territory, and make it difficult to get back.

Not to pick on Picasso, but...he was a very passionate guy, full of passion for his art and the women in his life. You could call that a good thing, if it's only the production of his art that matters, but a spirtually growing person knows that it often isn't what one is most famous for that's really most important in their lives. So what did he leave in his aftermath? Thousands of ephemeric artworks, many truly beautiful, many that are contested, and absurdly over-valued; a memorable chain of painfully destructive relationships, created by passionate self-centeredness; a history of emotional distance from his children; an obsessive need to project his virility and machismo.

I only invoke Picasso as an example of the "success" of passion as a justification for "passionate inspiration." I love a lot of his work (Moulin de la Galette, Portrait of Stravinsky), but truthfully (in my opinion) much of it is a redundant effort to capture an aesthetic that can be seen in more successful forms everyday, on the walls of any pre-school.

Now that's a higher plane of passion!

"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

Picasso

..................anonymous pre-schooler

Thanks for More Than 10,000 Visitors!

Codename: Kids Next Door, From the Sooper Obscure Files: Rainbow Monkeys!

Over the six seasons of Codename: Kids Next Door, I designed a lot of Rainbow Monkeys, almost enough to create a real toy line...but it would be a real strange toy line! Many of the variations called for old, odd, or esoteric RBMs. So, here's a collection of elderly RBMS for the true KND fans out there!

Finding Your Comfortable Middle – and Not Losing It

Doing a lot of juggling?

    In just about every spiritual practice ever known, there comes a time when one needs to develop a kind of ideal focus or contact with a guiding Higher Power; whether it's Love, or Nature, The Universe, or The Divine Feminine – our personal understanding of God, simply put. It's generally a quiet time, a meditative time...but wouldn't it be nice if it were available to us anytime, as an easy tool for day-to-day life on-the-go? Here are some ways we might make it work without any sage-burning "spiritual" hub-bub—not that there's anything wrong with that, just that there isn't always the time...or the sage.

Focus implies a center – a place of concentration right in the middle of our daily agitations; a safe place for our thoughts to return to in those moments of temporary turmoil, especially when life is messing with our sense of well-being. Having that place, that grounding center available can free us from those stressful conditions of judgement, comparison, and pressure that make us feel trapped sometimes. That discomfort can get us stuck in ourselves, having a device that easily centers us in our higher self can instantly free us up.

In Buddhism it's called "The Middle Path," and re-tooled for the demands of our culture it's an approach to life that lives inbetween a self-judgmental path to "perfection"– whose harshness makes real humility impossible, and an over-justified "self-worship" of sorts – whose entitled materialism is too elevated for our own good. In other words, either we are too hard on ourselves and everyone else; or we're self-centeredly "always right," know more than the other guy, and deserve better. Both ends of that scale: "I never get it right" and "I'm the only one who got it right," are outposts of the Ego, and each home to their own kinds of self-centeredness. Neither are actually where most of us live, most of the time.

There's a good way to play those ends against each other, and find a livable center to focus on where we're not constantly seeking redemption, or searching for some unobtainable ideal. A focus that's in a more comfortable, convenient location for most of us because it just requires us to look at one of our favorite central topics, ourselves:

We've all got our flaws, our little defects, and as we move along through life, like it or not, they become more and more obvious. They're not all that harmful, unless they harm others or prevent us from being all that we can really be. I can be stingy. I like to be right all the time. Those are a couple of mine, I'm afraid – but at least I'm aware of them, and that's where this trick has to start, there's the point where you can pick up this handy "centering tool:"

When we find ourselves in a situation where we want to react – which means we're likely to act out on one of our personality flaws like "I'm not going to pay that much" or "This guy doesn't know what he's talking about" – listen to the bell ring! See the red flag! Here's your chance to practice restraint, and find your center ground. You have a choice right at that moment to "act out" or not – but don't do it. Instead, do the old "count to three," and say: Thanks very much, I'm not going there right now. 

 That takes care of the low end, now for the high side – create an ideal goal, like what would the ideal Dad do right now? Or how would Mahatma Gandhi treat this guy? Set the bar high enough so that just reaching for it will pull you out of your funky tendencies (The Funky Tendencies - I loved their first album).

If you're anything like me, you'll find yourself focused in the moment, where you inevitably have a chance to stumble across a little Compassion...and bingo! – there's your center. Then if you set your goal high up around unconditional Love, forgiveness, and service to others – you know, really high – then even when you don't quite reach it, you and everyone around you will be much better off anyways. Right in there you can find an easy grounded center that you can make your new default.

Good Karma isn't the result of a single moment, it's the accumulation of a lot of balanced, easy moments, like you get each time you default yourself to restraint and Compassion. Just like that, you'll see that "ideal place" is found gracefully and gratefully right in the middle of your self – right around the area of your heart. 

 You may never have thought that Good Karma was really a centering song by The Funky Tendencies...

"As long as I am this or that, or have this or that, I am not all things and I have not all things...[when you] neither are nor have either this or that; then you are omnipresent and, being neither this nor that, are all things."

Meister Eckhart

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 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 it at your local bookstore!

The Trinity Withinity – Connecting Our Three Main Parts

Have you ever noticed how lots of things have three parts? Like a top, a bottom, and a middle. Or The Three Musketeers. Or Goldilocks? I mean The Three Bears...Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear.

Spiritually we see "Trinities" all over the place, like the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; or The Buddha (Unified Consciousness), The Dharma (the way, or path), and The Sangha (the community). In Hinduism, there are a few versions of it – as deities: Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver), and Shiva (destroyer); or in categories ranging from the greater Self to the personal self, as Brahman (the All), Atman (the soul), and Asmita (the ego, or "I am this"). Sri Aurobindo called them The Transcendent, The Universal, and The Individual; all of which correlates as Sat (the greater Being), Chit (the vehicle of Awareness), and Ananda (the way to personal Bliss). That last, littlest part is always you, or me, and this experience we have through our human senses—our bodies, our minds, and all too often, our Egos.

In a more scientific sense these three aspects of our relationship to everything can be related to Consciousness (the sensory universe), the Right Brain (parallel processing, or quantum reality), and the Left Brain (serial processing, empirical or egoic reality).

I also think it works pretty well in terms of The Marx Brothers: Groucho (the mind of The Divine), Chico (the link to The Divine), and Harpo (the unconscious expression of the Divine).

"The common name for God used by the sages is HaMakom, "the place." God is the place of the world, the field in which all things arise and return."

Rabbi Rami Shapiro, on The Pirke Avot

When we talk about that top billing as "The Father," of course we're talking about God – The Creator, Omniscience, the Source of Every-thing, all being. Personified, this can be The Big Bearded Guy; Divine Mother; Brahma, etc., and conceptually, it's The Source, Transcendent Unified Consciousness, The Universe, or Brahman – the benevolent power that we know is the responsible for all being. It's a power that we'd like to get to know better (but often have a hard time doing it), under whose protection and care it would always be nice to live. It's the power of the Universe, like it or not. Einstein has a great quote about it:

"The most important decision we have to make is whether we believe in a friendly universe, or in a hostile universe."

Is God friendly? Well, since Life is quite plastic, then it's really up to you and the attitude you bring to Life – so why not? If you have a friendly attitude, you tend to have a friendly God, and vice-versa. It's especially easy if we see The Father/The Transcendent/The Universe, as the overarching power and expression of Love. As Dr. Wayne Dyer used to say: "The way you look at the universe is the way the universe looks at you."

Our biggest problem often comes in finding a comfortable, practical connection to that Source – a two-way street that helps us experience a loving, supportive Universe. That's where the second of our three parts comes in.

With the Christian trinity, while the path to God (the dharma for Buddhists and Hindus) is often proclaimed to be through Jesus, our true intermediary might be better described by "The Holy Ghost" – you know, that Angel on our shoulder; our Spirit Guide or soul connection whose guidance we receive through prayer, and in meditation or contemplation. It's the buffering shepherd through which we find our connection to what Native Americans call "The Great Spirit."

The Quakers refer to it as: "The still,small voice," also known as our "voice of reason." It comes to us as intuition – intelligent thinking without intellect. Thinking from the heart. It arises from a place that's accessible to everyone, the place Yeshua (the Gnostic Jesus) talked about when he said:

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

Logion 3, The Gospel of Thomas

That universal awareness comes when we forget about "who we're supposed to be" in this world of matter (that doesn't really matter); when we quietly and humbly pray for the answer to a hard question (we ask), and then meditate to clear our minds (we get the answer). In short, it's still and always Love.

As a Near-Death survivor, I can tell you that this information could actually be coming to us directly by way of our Angels or Spirit Guides, whispering in our ear from another dimension; but if you don't believe in that and you can still hear them, well, what difference does it make? It's almost always through the process of prayer, meditation, and reflection that we can find this guiding voice, "The Holy Spirit," that affirms the Love and the natural benevolence that Life and the Universe really holds for us.

If we consider it agnostically, with a layman's sense of neuroscience, we could correlate the activity of our Right Brain to the actions of our angels. It occurs in the right hemisphere of our brains (where what might be called parallel processing takes place) when we realize holistic thought, and experience an understanding of "one-ness" and Being. That's our connection to Source, our link to God Consciousness, Buddha Mind, The Transcendent. This short talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, author of A Stroke of Insight describes it brilliantly. Our Left Brain is where we can get stuck in the material world – the day-to-day serial processing that dictates our rigid Ego-based consciousness. All that exhausting demanding, organizing, judging and comparing is definitely the hardest part of "being me."

But what if I'm not just me, but also the "Son of Man" too! Then right here in this body is where I can try to experience bliss, where I can learn, intuitively, to be authentically my self – our Self. To know what it's like to be the unique expression of Source that I Am – an antenna for sensory collection...a blossoming flower. You've got to really be a human being to experience Christ-ing, moksha, nirvana, samadhi, Heaven, or Unified Consciousness.

All it takes is a little work to make a better connection...

That's us, up from the Earth; The Holy Ghost, down from Heaven; and all alive in Divine Consciousness 

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!

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 22: Sculpture Time, and An Early Departure

Like Billy Pilgrim, Koko had become unstuck in time.

The skills he'd picked up in the chilly little factory in South San Francisco, welding and flame-cutting, had led him into a rather unusual set of circumstances. Everyday, he drove up Van Ness from the warehouse studio of Albert Nelligan, south of market (before it was "Soma"), to go back to work on the huge skeletal steel sculpture housed in Pier 2 at Fort Mason. He and Sven would open all the western rolling doors, and let the wind flying past the Golden Gate blow the clouds of tight, acrid steel smoke out through the other side. It was cold, but close to the furry sputter of the MIG welder, in a shower of sparks, with his coveralls, leather sleeves, smoldering gloves, and the incessant whining, grinding wheels GREEEEEEEning through his ear protectors, bits of slag popping off his face shield, chunks of molten-edged quarter-inch stock bouncing off his steel-toes, he didn't really notice.

He remembered when he picked up the phone, when Kathleen called him, and he was back in Del Mar again, walking up the hill with her from the little adobe house, past the train station. She was elfin, you could say, slender, slight, languid but pointed, with her straight red hair and the greenest eyes. He felt she'd never been on the level with him. Why had she held back so long? Why was she still holding back? He chalked it up to the age difference–her hesitance for the future. Then she'd coyly sent him north, like she was sending him away to camp.

Now she called to tell him about her ex-boyfriend, the sculptor from Milwaukee, to ask if he wanted out of the factory, so he could try on the glamorous world of Fine Art and high living. She could fix it. Then, suddenly, he was back on the pier, with that ocean wind blowing up his pant leg.

Nelligan was a long, ruddy-faced fellow, with high, tight jeans, and an incongruous cowboy hat. They understandably hadn't hit it off too well, he and the kid being sent to him by his ex-girlfriend, but he gave Koko a job anyway. It was a favor to Kate, as he called her.

 Months passed, there in the cold old pier building the Army had just opened up. There were still old boxes of Army stuff tucked in corners, probably all Top Secret in its day. The fabrication went slowly, just Sven and Koko and a boozy helper or two. Sometimes crazy Roger, the ex-navy engineer, would come in and fix things, but Albert was always out, chasing tail and trying to talk the upper crust out of it's money. Between whatever curious antics he was mixed up in, and Roger's model building, he somehow kept enough money coming in to keep the whole iffy undertaking afloat. It was supposed to culminate in an unveiling out on the bay, spectacularly employing a weather balloon flotilla to gently lift panels from Christo's Running Fence up and off the thirty foot tall sculpture. You had to hand it to Nelligan, he always succeeded in thinking on a grand scale.

About three nights a week it was party time at the warehouse; the hot tub, the fire-man's pole, target practice with a brushed steel Smith & Wesson, a giant neon index finger, twitching up and down, pointing at Nelligan's big brass bed, tearing down the stacked-up wall of champagne cases, a classic cast of ingenues and hangers-on ingenueing and hanging on.

After work (he could have showered with a magnet in place of a bar of soap) Koko spent most of his free time baby-sitting Jean Goldberg, an heiress with a nose jones and a crush on Nelligan, who needed her connections, but no part of her otherwise, so the job fell to Koko to escort her evenings at L'Etoile, secure her patronage, and pilot her fat little MGB GT around Pacific Heights, chasing the next "place to be," wherever that was. He was a twenty year old kid, and he already felt tired.

Then he was out on the water, on the barge that day of the unveiling, the same stiff wind from the west blowing the giant balloons sideways. They all wore the same thing, silly chrome work helmets, and custom-screened tee shirts. Sven climbed up to the top of the massive piece, caught the folding knife Koko tossed him, and cut down the giant fabric panels, revealing the huge, wonky sculpture they'd all given a couple years of their lives to.

The TV news teams lost interest and moved on when the sloppy spectacle hadn't come off as planned, leaving only the little crew and their followers to celebrate the fact that the whole thing hadn't ended up on the bottom of the bay. It was an ignominious unveiling for the happy twelve-ton toy, which sadly, it seemed, no one really wanted.

Suddenly he was much older, in a room alone, and it rose up to him on the internet, weeds growing underneath it, it's cartoon colors covered with whitewash.

Koko'd had enough, took his under-the-table cash, loaded the VW with everything he had in his life, and headed off to art school in Pasadena. Then he watched years zip by, like looking out the window of a time machine. Like watching years tumble by in a dryer. Grace went by, and Pamela, and he was at the tennis match in Forest Hills, being introduced to an "important" woman in front of them, and it was Jean – the crazy heiress who turned around and nearly spit when she saw him. She'd changed her name by marrying a Brazilian polo player, and had done a little something to her face, too. She pretended to barely know him, looking at him like...don't you dare...

It seemed like he'd barely settled into school in Pasadena, but then it must've been longer than he thought. Almost like everything in an entire life had just gone by. He called Kathleen, to tell her about the sculpture ending, that he was coming back to the beach to see her, but her phone had been disconnected. When Koko returned, and right away asked after her, a friend looked startled and said, "How long have you been gone?" 

Suddenly he could see Kathleen's sad, pretty face drifting south, smiling a bit, the dull sparkle...that wistful resignation. It wasn't hesitance. It had never been her hesitance. In an instant he was with her again, just for that last second it took to realize. She'd never told him about the brain cancer that had been in remission, that was her story before they met. She hadn't wanted to upset him when it came burrowing back. "...didn't anyone call you?" His friend asked.

She was only thirty years old, and she always would be, and suddenly Koko was back here again, much, much older than that.

"We are close to waking up when we dream that we are dreaming."

Novalis

The book, "How To Survive Life (and Death)," is available from Conari Press, or at all major booksellers––but ask for it from your local bookshop.

Postcards

...probably every illustrator has a box (or boxes) of old promo postcards floating around, stacks of ephemera destined for the landfill, but momentarily taking up closet space. Here are some of mine, from newer (pay no attention to AOL addresses...), some older, some practically prehistoric...

Two very early postcard promos for Heaven, Brad Benedict's groundbreaking 70's diner/store in LA...this rocker was my 2nd published illo for "L.A. Weekly"

for the Paramount Hotel

...this one, from when the ol' timers sat around in internet cafes
..."We Unite to Create Decadent Western Art." Now they're designing animation too!

for "In L.A." magazine originally

oops...if you want some of these, I have plenty I could still stamp n' send...