Horn of Plenty

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When we study sacred geometry, we begin to see the world of form differently. We gradually begin to recognize how these seminal shapes and proportions repeat themselves over and over, in nature. We also look at symbols, religious and otherwise, with new eyes. I had one of those moments of realization this morning, when I glanced at a Happy Thanksgiving post, on a blog. An image of a cornucopia, overflowing with harvest bounty, topped the page. I haven't really thought much about cornucopias since I was in grade school, tracing my hand to make Thanksgiving turkeys, and looking at pictures of happy "Indians," with their pilgrim friends. It had never occurred to me how profound a form the cornucopia is.

This symbol of the abundance, for which we give thanks each November, traces to ancient Greek mythology.

The cornucopia is a symbol of food and abundance dating back to the 5th century BC, also referred to as horn of plenty, Horn of Amalthea, and harvest cone.

In Greek mythology, Amalthea was a goat who raised Zeus on her breast milk. When her horn was accidentally broken off by Zeus while playing together, this changed Amalthea into a unicorn with 17 whiskers. The god Zeus, in remorse, gave her back her horn. The horn then had supernatural powers which would give the person in possession of it whatever he or she wished for. This gave rise to the legend of the cornucopia. The original depictions were of the goat's horn filled with fruits and flowers: deities, especially Fortuna, was depicted with the horn of plenty. The cornucopia was also a symbol for a woman's fertility.

This magic horn, then, creates something out of nothing. It is a tool of manifestation. Like so many objects in mythical context, it is the geometrical form that is significant. Horns have a special place in myth and ritual, as objects of power, because their form is vortical. This vortex is derived from the golden mean spiral. According to sacred geometry, this is the very foundation of manifest creation.

Simply put, the Golden Mean Spiral is a doorway that weaves the ethereal and material dimensions together. In another context I would say that God left us one door of eternal mystery and exploration¾ the Golden Mean Spiral or the door of love.

The vortex unfurls from the void -- the vast potential of the unmanifest -- and animates creation itself.

In studying the Sacred Geometry of Creation, we first understand that creation takes place in what is known as "no time and space," and that it then enters into dimensionality through the intra-dimensional doorway known as the Golden Mean Spiral.

Why do we utilize Sacred Geometry? The purest answer is because it creates for us the frequencies of a controlled place of deep silence, the place of The Silent Watcher, that has no beginning or end. The Golden Mean is the doorway to this place known as "no time and space," where we can interact with Creation. It is the sacred doorway to the intuitive, the space to where we once again are God in action.

So, with our Thanksgiving horn of plenty, we are literally celebrating the divine mystery of creation itself. Through conscious interaction with these geometries and archetypes, we begin to reawaken to our true function as co-creators of the reality with inhabit.



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Mr. Deity Discovers that Eve is From Venus

The newest from Mr. Deity introduces the newly created Eve. (Adam is in post op, after losing a rib.) The deity and Larry rapidly discover the differences between female and male communication styles. Earlier we met Adam, (see below) and he is most definitely from Mars. Aah, fun with gender roles!

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A Christian Prayer for Obama

"Pray for Obama." At first glance it seems well meaning. After all, there were many such admonitions, from the Christian Right, to pray for President Bush. Prayer cards were even distributed to some deployed troops, committing them to pray for their Commander in Chief. Then we read the verse in question, Psalm 109:8. It isn't well meaning at all. And the Psalm gets worse from there. It is one of those dark passages in the Old Testament that belies idealized notions of Christanity as a religion of love and peace.

8. Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
9. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
10. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
11. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour.
12. Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.
13. Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
14. Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
15. Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

There is a very dark undercurrent to the Bible. Like most eruptions of the shadow, our first impulse is to split it off and deny it. As Diana Butler Bass explains on Beliefnet, Psalm 109 is a tough one for theologians to reconcile.

Psalm 109 belongs to a special category of the psalms known as "imprecatory" prayers--it is a lament in the form of petition to destroy one's enemies.  It is the personal prayer of an individual, someone who has been dealt an injustice by another--and usually more powerful--person.  The words of Psalm 109 are those of deep agony, the longings of a victim for retribution and justice.  This psalm is considered one of the most difficult of all the psalms--full of violent images of vengeance and death.   Many a biblical critic has struggled with its words--and not a few--including Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant theologians--recommend that it not be used in public worship, much less as a bumper-sticker political slogan.

I keep coming back to one of my favorite quotes from Joseph Campbell, who was no fan of the Bible, nor of Abrahamic religions, in general.

[The Bible is] the most over-advertised book in the world. It's very pretentious to claim it to be the word of God, or accept it as such and perpetuate this tribal mythology, justifying all kinds of violence to people who are not members of the tribe.

The thing I see about the Bible that's unfortunate is that it's a tribally circumscribed mythology. It deals with a certain people at a certain time. The Christians magnified it to include them. It then turns this society against all others, whereas the condition of the world today is that this particular society that's presented in the Bible isn't even the most important. This thing is like a dead weight. It's pulling us back because it belongs to an earlier period. We can't break loose and move into a modern theology.

One of the great promises of mythology is, with what social group do you identify? How about the planet? To say that the members of this particular social group are the elite of God's world is a good way to keep that group together, but look at the consequences! I think that what might be called the sanctified chauvinism of the Bible is one of the curses of the planet today.

For me, the poignancy of Campbell's observation has never been so stunningly clear. The use of this piece of scripture comes against the backdrop of a campaign to make Barack Obama an "other," a member of a foreign tribe, and not a "real American." Some continue to insist that he was born in Kenya, despite repeated verification of his Hawaii birth certificate. Some of this rhetoric is downright frightening, with ominous hints at potential violence. Former evangelical Frank Schaeffer explains the urgency of concern in this interview on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow." (A complete transcript of the show can be found here.)





It may well be that use of Psalm 109:8 was not intended to be read beyond that line, by people who simply wanted him out of office; not dead. There is enough ambiguity to grant plausible deniability.

Deborah Lauter, director of civil rights at the Anti-Defamation League agrees that the bumper sticker falls within acceptable political discourse.

For it to be considered hate speech, it “would advocate actual violence or cite scripture that was more clear in its message.”

But that doesn’t mean that it’s completely innocent.

“Are we concerned about real hostility towards [President Obama]? Absolutely,” says Ms. Lauter. “Is this a part of that movement? It may be, but in terms of this message itself, we would not criticize it.”

“The problem is you don’t know if people who are donning that message in a shirt or on a bumper sticker are fully aware of the quote or what follows. Obviously that message makes the ambiguity disappear. If they’re just referring to him being out of office, that’s one thing. If they’re referring to him being dead, that’s so offensive. It’s protected speech, but it’s clearly offensive.”

It is hard to miss the subtext, however, or to separate the one verse from its scriptural context. A good segment of the target demographic are fundamentalist Christians. They know the Bible far better than much of the populace.

The larger issue, which Campbell calls on us to consider, is how our core mythologies shape our culture. While this is not a theocracy, or a "Christian nation," there is no denying that the United States is underpinned by the Judeo-Christian beliefs that held sway at its inception. More to the point, we are still largely shaped by the rigid, Calvinist beliefs of our earliest settlers. This goes a long way to explaining the punitive, moral authority that permeates our social institutions, from our schools to our judicial system. The "Pray for Obama" campaign is a painful reminder of just how pressing this issue has become. Can we overcome the divisiveness, tribalism, and violence, inherent in our Judeo-Christian mythology?

Diane Butler Bass  turns to C.S. Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms for a viable answer; one which invites us to face the dark underbelly of these beliefs and bring them out into the light.

Lewis suspects that it may be best to leave such psalms alone. But then he says that we must face "facts squarely."

The hatred is there--festering, gloating, undisguised--and also we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves (p. 22).

Lewis refers to these psalms as horrible, devilish, cruel, hateful, and evil. He believes that Psalm 109--and the poetry of its kind in the psalter--should point us back to the evil we carry within and teach us each how to behave with goodness, humility, and love.

According then, to the venerable C.S. Lewis, a "Prayer for Obama" is really a prayer for ourselves to go beyond "festering, gloating, undisguised" hatred. "If the Divine does not call to make us better, it will make us very much worse," he reminded his readers, "Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst."

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Immortality and the Quest for Eternal Life

I only just became aware of author and internet broadcaster Sonia Barrett. Some of her ideas are very compelling and worthy of consideration. The following is from the blurb for her book The Holographic Canvas:

The Holographic Canvas explores many possibilities one of which raises the question [sic] "is Earth as we know it but a matrix or system of programs? Is death then a necessary process or is it simply part of the matrix program? Is it then possible that the concept of dying will cease to exist once humanity uncovers the deception?" Sonia Barrett proposes that human bodies are vehicles not yet turned on but designed to make molecular modifications according to the vibration of our consciousness. She takes us on a journey of our existence in a holographic world, as she states "a virtual game; an assortment of illusions strung together by the brain and the mind. It's an exploration of the illusion of a solid world generated by fluid movements against a canvas of energy, all of which is taking place against the backdrop of the void." Barrett concludes that the answers are all tied into the forgotten past and like the single cell of a plant our history is encoded in our cells, DNA and the air we breathe.

Much of this material is covered in the Red Ice Radio interview embedded above. Enjoy!

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Sharon Osbourne, Susan Boyle, and Facing Our Shadow

I have this theory that celebrity news stories pull our eyes away from news of far more important, world changing events, because celebrities are, at bottom, just people whose very human foibles we can we relate to. Despite all their money and fame, the vicissitudes of their relationships and their little human dramas reflect the best and the worst in all of us. I was reminded of this recently, when news broke of a very unfortunate incident involving Sharon Osbourne and a microphone. I have posted the video of Osbourne's interview on Sirius Radio above, but I warn you, gentle reader, that it is not for the faint of heart.

Osbourne, who is a judge on 'America's Got Talent,' slammed the 'Britain's Got Talent' superstar's looks on Sirius XM's 'The Opie & Anthony Show.' She says Boyle was "hit with the f***ing ugly stick"....as opposed to the surgeon's scalpel?

Here is a partial transcript of her expletive-laced tirade. You can watch the entire thing below.

"I like everybody to do well. Even somebody that looks like a slapped arse. God bless her. It's like, 'You go girl'. She does look like a hairy arsehole. She is a lovely lady. You just want to say 'god bless' and here's a Gillette razor."

In case you've been living in a cave and missed the high drama of Susan Boyle's emergence onto the world stage, here is a link to the video that launched a small town spinster to heady stardom. I still can't listen to her sing that song without bursting into big, wet, sloppy tears. Of course, much of her success at winning over a worldwide audience was the irony of a plain featured -- dare I say it, homely -- middle aged woman, with a voice like a bell. That an issue was to be made of her appearance was inevitable. Cue the junior high school behavior of Sharon Osbourne.

In reading the comments on Osbourne's cringeworthy performance on The Huffington Post, disapproval of her cattiness is nearly unanimous. News of her recent apology, has garned little more sympathy or forgiveness. She disgusted people. She disgusted me. Then a funny thing happened. I showed the video to my husband. He was also disgusted, but he generously caveated that she was probably seduced by the rapt attention of the two DJs who were cackling away and egging her on. He allowed that it was, to a small degree, mitigating. He got me to thinking.

One of the funny things about being in a radio soundbooth is that it is simultaneously very intimate and totally public. It is easy to forget, for moments at a time, that you are talking to more people than those with whom you are conversing; that there is a large invisible audience. Something similar happens on computer bulletin boards and blogs, where we talk to our friends, periodically oblivious to how visible those pixels are to anyone with an internet connection. Thinking of it in that way forced me to consider the dynamics playing in that soundbooth, and there is a very particular dynamic that occurs when a woman is the center of male attention.

So I began to consider the possiblity that Sharon Osbourne's behavior was somewhat understandable. Then something else happened. I heard myself talking... to my husband that is. I heard myself questioning how Osbourne could possibly be so damned lookist, when she owed her career to her role "dragging around that animated corpse of husband." And when I was done ripping into Sharon Osbourne, we turned on the Food Network hoping for "Iron Chef," but instead being tortured by a few minutes of "Dinner Impossible."

"Oh no! Why does that guy wear his hair like Ed Grimley?!" I heard myself say. It would seem that I am not, in fact, above a bit of cattiness.

Celebrities reflect the best and the worst of us. Everything does. Constantly. It cannot be otherwise because the world is our reflection. And it is always easier to point at someone else's shadow, especially when we only know them through our televisions and computers. Facing our own is much, much harder.

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Mr. Deity Tries to Understand the Trinity

I'm getting caught up on my Mr. Deity videos. The above is one of the funniest ever, as God and Jesse try to figure out how they're the same person... but aren't. My favorite episodes of this show are the one's with Jesse (aka, Jesus), in part because the guy who plays him is really hot. Ooh! Can I say that? Mmmmm... Sacrilicious!

And now a word on the new YouTube: It's awful. Everything that made YouTube videos the most smooth, flexible, customizable, videos on the web went to hell when the Google merger completed itself. The newer videos -- maybe because they allow for the possibility of high def (???) -- are really bandwidth and processor intensive. All I know is that they don't play smoothly on my machine. They stop and start, the video and audio tracking go out of sync... And no, I'm not trying to play them in high def. So, I've been very frustrated trying to get newer content, like the newest season of Mr. Deity. That is, until I discovered, while looking over the Mr. Deity site, that they are available for download on iTunes. Much better! So, if you're having trouble getting the above embed to play smoothly, I highly recommend opening iTunes and searching for Mr. Deity. The podcasts are free and they play really smoothly, at least for me.

I love this mug, by the way. And Christmas is around the corner... hint, hint.

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Buddhism Meets Psychology, Confusion Ensues

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A hat tip to Shonin Justin on Ordinary Extraordinary for his point to this interview on ABC. Shonin Justin writes:

"Meet a doctor who thinks you can better understand the self by destroying it"

After the confusion about 'annihilating the self' is cleared up this is a very interesting story.

I'm not a Buddhist, but I am experiencing ego death, so I can fully relate to the healing potential of what Dr. Mark Epstein tries valiantly to get across to the interviewer. But mostly, I've been finding myself staring at lotuses more than usual, and I needed an excuse to post a pretty one.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to embed the video, so follow the link.

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The Power of Grumpy Thought

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Perhaps Dorothy Parker and H.L. Mencken were onto something. It may be no accident that some of the most incisive wits of literary history were curmudgeons. New research overseen by Professor Joe Forgas points to a connection between grumpy mental states and sharper analytical skills.

The University of New South Wales researcher says a grumpy person can cope with more demanding situations than a happy one because of the way the brain "promotes information processing strategies".

. . .

Those in a bad mood outperformed those who were jolly - they made fewer mistakes and were better communicators.

Professor Forgas said: "Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world."

I may, at some point, tire of saying this, but psychological research keeps disproving the "power of positive thought" espoused in vehicles like The Secret. To every emotional state, there is a season...

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Time Monk Clif High on Pole Shift

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A little over a year ago, I wrote a series of entries on the Time Monks webbot project, and the accuracy of these forecasts. As I said then, what I was getting intuitively was pole shift, but there was little in the predictive linguistics of the Time Monks to validate that. Instead, I turned to the most recent information I could find from Drunvalo Melchizedek on the subject. What a difference a year makes. Recent material from Drunvalo, posted here and here, goes into more depth on pole shift and how it fits into the Mayan prophecies. Now comes a wealth of information from Time Monk Clif High on his near certainty that there will be a dramatic pole shift event tied to that 2012 date.

Clif has been making the rounds talking about his most recent report. There's lots of stuff to make us all very nervous on the collapsing economy, the potential "death of the dollar," and more, but what will probably be most chilling to people unfamiliar with this idea is the prospect of the magnetic poles reversing and solid land masses rolling around. His most in depth interview on the subject was the other evening on Rense Radio.





He has posted some supplemental material on Half Past Human to explain how he came to the conclusion that the data they've been collecting since 1997 points to pole shift, rather than some of the other interpretations they had posited. His analysis spans both the scientific theories and a range of prophetic material, from the Mayan Long Count Calendar to the ancient Vedic, Chinese, and Egyptian material.

Then there is the issue of the rapid, and oscillating climate changes here on earth, as well as the alterations of the climates on all the other planets in the solar system. And then there are the tremendous changes in the sun over this last decade. Which continue. Then there are the various huge levels of changes to the earth itself, such as the giant earthquakes, the resulting tsunami's, and other indications of major changes such as global glacial melt.

. . .

It is the sun spot cycle that concerns us humans, and other critters here on earth. The reason is that universe is composed of cycles within cycles within cycles at levels and complexity we may barely be able to perceive. These cycles include large cycles based on smaller cycles. One of these smaller cycles is our local sun spot cycle.

While our work at HPH has shown indications of a 'sun disease' since 1997, and this reference was to a 'disease of the sun' rather than a 'disease caused in earth life by the sun', within our data sets this language fell under the set of what we called "the big squeeze". This label was applied due to the many and repeated references to "magnetics gone wrong" in our data. It was our theory that the 'cause' for the 'big squeeze' was the alignment of the earth and the sun with the center of the Milky Way galaxy which is coincident with 2012. This necessitated the idea of new forms of energy from extra solar system sources in order to explain all the changes to the local planets and our sun. Such an understanding is wrong.

There is an understanding that provides for the current changes in the planets and the sun that does not require any external sources of energy. This understanding has to do with the totality of the sun spot cycles, and what causes them, and the larger cycles built upon them.

The upshot?

The impact of the magnetic discharge from the sun will overwhelm what is left of earth's protective magnetosphere and initiate both a pole and a crustal shift.

The page also has lots of pretty pictures and in depth info on the theoretical framework. Note that Clif is not a fan of the idea of a leap in consciousness accompanying this event, of the type Drunvalo predicts. For fairly obvious reasons, I prefer Drunvalo's take on the whole thing. I should add that while, again, I can't go into too much detail on this until I have more clarity and permission from my guides, what I have been shown is that we are going into a "time of magic." So, we shall see.

Additional Material:

I really enjoyed this video of Jay Weidner's take on the Time Monks webbot project.



This interview with Conscious Radio Network's Regina I found fascinating because Clif gets into more of the nuts and bolts of how his technology allows him to interpret the movement of the collective unconscious. As I discussed here, this is one of the most intriguing aspects of the webbot project for me. In his conversation with Regina, Clif validates my earlier perception that what he's able to observe by culling the archetypes in the linguistics is a very deep level of consciousness, far beyond the mental process. Here is Regina's written introduction to this fascinating podcast:

Sometimes, it's good to be aware of The Shape of Things to Come, even if it is from a report generated by a program that collates the language of our universal unconscious. Clif High (yes that is meamt to be with one 'f'), talks for over an hour with Regina about his background, his original purpose and current methodologies and what the data is revealing to him.

Still more recent interviews with the Time Monks are available on my YouTube Channel.

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