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  • Is There a Leaf Blowing in Nebraska?

    Video shot last fall. Obviously I was listening to the Smiths on my Ipod at the time. Oh the joke is, the dogs will bark at anything, even if a leaf blows in Nebraska.

  • A New Poem: The Cross

    The river flows uphill.
    It isn’t magic.
    Magic is when it flows downhill.

    The arrow of time is pierced
    by eternity

    The man hanging is
    the soul
    awakened.

    The milk girl is dancing
    The “Cotten-Eyed Joe”
    on the gym floor of the mind
    underneath which the oceans of the Cosmos
    Splash applause and awake our Suns.
    On the head of a pin, spinning,
    she offers distance
    heaven’s wooden bowl.

    Living is easy.

    And the Lady of our feet
    washes the expression
    of how things shalt be
    from the Skull’s dead head
    with the Water of Life.

    Below the willowed valley’s flowery eyes
    see without looking
    reach without moving
    teach without speaking,
    and love without thinking.

    Every time one of its olive branches whispers
    the secret of secrets into the Mediterranean breeze,
    a new life is born of virgin birth,
    transcendently, through the middle of the true cross,
    the heart.

    ©2009 Stephen Pickering

  • Brand New Josh Rouse Song Never Heard Before “Cotton-Eye Joe”

    Twitter’s newest ad platform:

    Here’s a brand new Josh Rouse song, coming on his new album (don’t know the title) called “Cotton-Eye Joe”

    [wpaudio url=”http://www.stephenpickering.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Cotten-Eyed-Joe-2.mp3″ text=”Josh Rouse – Cotton-Eye Joe” dl=”0″]
    Link to Download: Right Click and select ‘Save As’

    UPDATE: 6-23-09 This MP3 is fine quality now. All I had to do is open the whole podcast into Audacity and then edit out everything but this song. DUH!!!!!!!

    I apologize for the poor sound quality. I recorded it on Audacity from his latest podcast, and it only gave me the choice to record from “internal microphone” instead of straight from the soundcard, so there’s a lot of hiss and tinny sound from a computer mic. I thought Audacity gave you the option of recording from the soundcard? And for that matter why doesn’t Garage Band?

    OK, this is a “boot-leg” so if Josh or any of his management don’t like it, they can just notify me and I’ll take it down, but I thought it was so great! I’m definitely buying the album, as I have all of his, and I hope everyone else does too! Much luck, Josh!
     

     

  • Want to Travel Through Space and Time? Don’t Collapse Your Wave Function!

    Technology is like stealing fire from the Gods, that’s one interpretation of the fire theft metaphor you see in mythology, most notably the Prometheus story, but it never satisfies because it is piecemeal, and the second we observe it, it freezes, its wave function collapses. So the more we get, the more we want, and the void is never filled. Part of the symbolism of the Cross is that the horizontal bar represents the divide between the conscious and unconscious, logic and emotion, and they have inversely proportional relationships. The more “Leviathans” that Logic destroys, the Dragon of the Ego grows and further suppresses the unconscious energies, spontaneity.

    But an important step in the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” developed at the turn of the 20th century with the discovery of Relativity, Hubble’s observations of an expanding Universe, and Quantum Mechanics. Overthrowing “determinism,” the prevailing theory at the turn of the century, these discoveries and their validation gave birth to most of the “magical” things in our lives today: radio, TV, computers, the internet, and on and on, all wonders of the mysterious Planck Length world making themselves known, felt, and realized in our “macro” conscious world of everyday living. This is one way that the horizontal cross and its barrier starts to be dissolved.

    But also, ironically, the sense of Science being the great Antithesis of Religion, also was cut through like a lightening bolt from Zeus or Indra. In fact, beginning with Special Relativity and up to this day, the more Science digs and discovers, the more Mystery it finds. We find that Science is actually coming to the aide of Religion, at least religion in the since of Metaphysics and Mysticism, although even to this day this sense doesn’t not have much mindshare. Mostly because of the institutionalizing of the arts and sciences and their systems which produce “walled gardens” that can’t nourish each other. I talked about this a little bit in another article, “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters.”

    It’s important to realize that without a wave function you couldn’t be reading this message, PC’s couldn’t exist, the internet couldn’t exist, because its all based on the ability of the electron to exist simultaneaously at every point in space. Fortunately we can’t “observe” an electron, so its wave function doesn’t collapse, and our Micro Processors still compute, and our emails go through. Even more fortunate still for our bodies’ sake, or it would collapse. The electron cloud keeps all of our bodies’ trillions of molecules that are constantly colliding, stable. The electron cloud is based on the electron’s ablity to be in an infinite number of points around the nucleus, simultaneously. Fortunately, someone wishing to do us harm has not the sensory organs to observe our electrons and collapse their wave function!

    Every object, including your body has a wave function. In fact the probability of the wave function's statistic looks exactly like you, your actual wave function, which is real, seeps into space and actually occupies the entire Universe. That is until you or someone else observes you. Then your wave function collapses, and you become frozen in space in time at the point they or you observe you. Want to travel or be in an infinite number of places simultaneouly like a God? Don't collapse your wave function! How do we do that? I don't know!!!!! But I have a few ideas. (Of course having an idea, itself, especially attached to the idea of myself having it, is automatically collapsing my wave function!) Until we get the engineering prowess, which will be at least thousands if not millions of years, to build Star Trek like devices, we are going to have to look at the Mystical route. I can't stop my neighbor from observing me. I can't stop even my dogs or cat from observing me, but if I were alone in a room, could I stop ME from observing ME? It seems to me (even saying "me" collapses my wave function) that observing myself, either in a mirror, or looking at parts of my body is very analogous, if not the same thing, to Ego. I. Look at your hand. The whole Universe is behind it, and when you look at it, it "freezes" it as separate from that Universe. MY HAND. Not the Universe's. It seems there would be one easy solution for not observing yourself: Close your eyes. But even when your eyes are closed, your other senses are involved with observing YOU, your sense of touch, smell, sound and even without those, your mind has only images of yourself as you have seen yourself for years, since you were born. That's a very ingrained image, one that perhaps gives birth to the Ego itself, and then once born, the Ego's needs, desires, and fears, propels one's body towards actions that keep it (the Ego) fed. This lock is not easily broken. Years upon years of habit are like mounds of soil and a rusty padlock in an indistinguishable field, on top of the treasure chest that is your Authentic Self (Self in the Eastern tradition as distinguished from Ego). The practice of Meditation and Yoga (re-linking, ie 're-ligio' to source or unseparation consciouness) are the only two practices I've encountered that show, perhaps, a way or solution to stop observing yourself and collapsing your wave function. Actually its been a long time since I've engaged these practices, so maybe I am writing this post to remind myself of their value and not the World. But the successful moments, even if fleeting, that I have had with these practices were very freeing in the sense that the gap between thought was achieved and these frozen architectures of the mind, these complexes as Jung would say, that have been years of memories in the making, seem to collapse in an instant. Can the simple act of meditation and yoga keep my Wave function alive and have me or you traveling to any point in the Universe (and perhaps time) instaneously, while at the same time keep one part of you, grounded, here on Earth, keeping your day job, keeping the bills paid? I don't know, but the feeling just occurred to me now, reading Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos and coming across a passage about Quantum Mechanics:
    "To resolve the discrepency between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function magically "collapses," and the electron falls into a definite state-that is, after looking at the tree, we see that it is truly standing. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. Observation is vital to existence. After we look at the electron, its wave function collapses, so the electron is now in a definite state and there is no more need for wave functions." - page 152 "Before an observation is made, an object exists in all possible states simultaneously. To determine which state the object is in, we have to make an observation, which "collapses" the wave function, and the object goes into a definite state. The act of observation destroys the wave function, and the object now assumes a definite reality. The wave function has served its purpose: it has given us the precise probability of finding the object in that particular state." - page 153
    If I'm thinking of Eastern philosophy, the "Third Eye" represented as the red dot on the forehead of many Indians, is a symbol of observing without collapsing the wave function. "Seeing the infinite" as Blake would say. So before I walked into my bathroom and see my cat reclining on the chair, was he really on Mars and every other place in the Universe for that matter? Yes, according to Quantum Mechanics, which though is still just a theory, is the most successful scientific theory of all time and is responsible for the microchip and this Mac I'm writing on. So one must take pause. So if you want to travel through space and time, don't collapse your wave function! And one of the ironies is in order not to collapse it, you have to stop wanting not to collapse it! How else do you do it? I don't exactly know. My path might be different from yours and everyone else's. The Authurian Romances tell us "Each adventurer entered the forest in a different place and made his own path which had never been made before. To follow another's would have been a disgrace." So no one knows exactly, but mythologies give us hidden clues. The rest we have to find for ourself, and in our own way. What are your thoughts on this topic? Am I on to something, am I completely wrong, or somewhere in between? Love to have a conversation with you about it. Related Posts: 

  • Fear = Holding to Your Ego

    Above   are the figures of Angyou and Ungyou, which stand as gate guardians outside Japanese Buddhist temples. They look pretty scary don’t they? What they are, are symbols of one’s own fear, which if held onto keeps one’s psychologically out of the “Temple” which is the symbol of peace, joy, exuberance, beauty where the Buddha (your authentic self) sits under the tree of Immortal Life. One can choose to live life on “This Side of Paradise” or that. Fear is exactly attachment to your ego. In order to break this lock, one must dissolve the attachment. There are many practices to do this. I’ll talk about this more in future posts.

    “That is a symbol of your own fear and holding to your ego which is what’s keeping you out of the Garden where the Buddha sits under the Tree (of Immortal Life) and his right hand says, “Don’t be afraid of those guys, come through”

    “A transcendent energy consciousness informs the whole world and informs you.”

    “The Hero is the one who responds to the call to adventure.”

    “There’s something about the integrity of a life, and the world moves in and helps.” – Joseph Campbell

    By the way, I think a good definition of Ego is the feeling, the sense of yourself being separate from others, from the world around you, from which you were born.


  • The #1 Skill Needed to Become a Successful Blogger

    THE ABILITY TO HIT THE PUBLISH BUTTON. That's actually not a joke. That's what Lockhart Steele, one of the most successful bloggers in the world just said on This Week in Startups #3. This ties in perfectly (oh there's that dreadful word again) with the last post about the importance of getting it out there and killing the desire for perfectionism. You know what I just realized? Perfectionism is the Eastern equivalent to the 1st Chakra, the lowest one, and the European Mythological equivalent of the "Dragon", the one who is just hoarding everything of value, but not doing anything with it. Unwilling to let it go. It's the Serpent Monster in the Indian Indra story, wrapping itself around the world and blocking out the waters of life. Big Media has been a Serpent around the Public's neck for the last 50 years. Of course driven by greed. But the thunderbolt of technology has destroyed it. Yeah! Let's celebrate by pushing the "Publish" button.

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