Using Yoginidra or Something Like It
Published on February 28th, 2010 @ 03:18:11 pm , using 1111 words, 106 views
After practicing Zen meditation and following the Middle Path to the best of my ability for over twenty years, circumstances prompted me to consider whether I'd misunderstood something basic about those old beliefs. I began to wonder whether the path of enlightenment was actually inclusive of something more than peaceful sitting and moral behaviour. Practices like the ones taught in Franz Bardon's detailed book of mystical instruction, Initiation into Hermetics
Possibly it's true that the other path really is separate, and the Middle Path doesn't include these other things at all, but it may also be true that everyone on the Middle Path eventually finds the Dragon Path, or the Warrior's road, depending on how you confront and experience these ancient truths. Many old cultures approach them with similar yet independent systems, and religious belief has been slathered over them like a cheap watercolor printed on a masterful oil painting. Dig below the surface of the old traditions and you find the same things.
Whatever actually is true, I've been on the Dragon Path for a number of years now and find it both exciting and rewarding, yielding the experiences I thought must be beyond my ability in the decades I practiced in the other fashion, laying the groundwork for these things that followed. I can't help recommending it to other people, even though these old methods are punctuated regularly with warnings about what can go wrong and how foolish undertaking these practices are if you don't have a qualified master to help you. Many mystical traditions believed that help was always available, no matter what your circumstances. All the curious followers of the Dragon needed to do was accept it and move forward. Books were respected as a way of accessing the knowledge of the past masters, though books were not seen as intellectual studies. Books were lessons. Books were things you did, not things you read.
PermalinkSeparating Fact from Fantasy
Published on January 30th, 2010 @ 07:53:09 pm , using 826 words, 199 views
Photo by Podknox
So many strange things happen to me that I'm mystified by people who make things up. The motivation behind creating a false story often has nothing to do with money or fame. Sometimes people just want attention and excitement and pretending a strange event happened is a way to get a taste of that. What happened recently concerning the dark pyramid UFO supposedly filmed over Moscow both at night and during a daytime flyby that lasted for hours, is a good example of a fraud that many people want to believe. Probably the motivation is internet fame, with some commercial interest behind that, although I'm not at all sure how getting hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube converts to cash, except for YouTube.
Fakes have become very good in recent years, no longer limited to blurry photographs and models suspended from wires. Good photo-shopped imagery is hard to distinguish from the real item, but in most cases it's still possible. When it isn't, other factors usually reveal the truth, as has happened with the Russian pyramid film. What struck me about the videos in the beginning was the lack of reaction in the Russian populace.
People continued about their business as though nothing was happening -- except for the film crew, who were busy filming the giant spacecraft rolling about in plain sight. That's a clear signal something is wrong with this picture, and it's something many other people noticed right away. Had this event been real, cell phones would have been aimed at the ship from all directions and snapshots would have flooded the internet. People love to take pictures and people love to talk. None of that happened. Now the rumors are building that in private over a hundred people have reported the sighting to Russian police. That may be true, since there probably are at least a hundred people in Moscow crazy enough to think they did see the pyramid, even if they didn't.
The Norway Spiral: Were We Told the Truth?
Published on December 14th, 2009 @ 12:06:03 pm , using 886 words, 365 views
Chronology:
In the predawn hours of December 10th, 2009, in the sky over Norway, a blue light rose. Apparently originating behind a distant mountain range, the light climbed into the dark sky and began to move in a tight circular pattern, generating a luminous spiral image that expanded in only seconds to cover a large portion of the sky.
A greenish blue beam of light then shot out of the center of the spiral, visible in a stable pattern for ten to twelve minutes. Towards the end of this exhibition the central light -- up until then the source of the radiating spiral pattern -- vanished. An expanding circular region of darkness quickly engulfed the huge glowing spiral. The greenish blue spiral beam gradually faded.
Though initially denying that a Russian missile was responsible for the light show, Russian authorities later attributed the cosmic display to the failed test of the Bulava missile, launched from a submarine in the White Sea. According to the later report, the missile failed in the third stage.
In world news reports the mystery was reported solved -- the explanation: a failed Russian missile launch.
Although I had been doing some remote viewing in that same general area of the world I didn't see this happen. In meditation I did try for an impression of the event and immediately concluded it was a laser created image. That answer satisfied me. The official answer that a Russian missile went crazy and eventually exploded didn't seem right. I got angry at the attitude of the Press, that we're supposed to accept a one-line statement as the truth without even asking any skeptical questions. I had plenty of questions.
The spiral we saw is supposed to be unburned fuel vented from the third stage engines of the missile. It's a cloud of combustible vapor. What would a cloud do? Clouds drift. Clouds break up and distort. Look at any contrail and you'll see that. The spiral doesn't fade with distance. The cloud would have to expand to form a widening spiral. The cloud only expands in length, not width. The shape is stable and the lines of the spiral are clean, even though every part of the cloud is in motion, expanding and rotating around the center.
But look back at some of the best photos and you'll see the cloud doing exactly what it ought to do, as a cloud. At the center the spiral actually is tight and defined, becoming amorphous and expansive at the outer edges. That's not what grabs your attention when you see the video. You see what's clearest and most unusual and the rest gets skipped. If you don't look for what makes sense, you don't remember it.
Why is the cloud illuminated? The fuel isn't burning. The cloud spiral supposedly is lit up by the morning sun, already above the horizon when viewed from that high altitude. But the entire formation is lit, including the greenish blue spiral that reaches back to the ground. That second beam or cloud formed after the spiral, appearing to emerge from it. Is that the correct sequence for a vapor trail?
The greenish spiral does have the right shape to be a missile exhaust trail. If the missile has two engines and spirals in flight, that shape is what we should see. This is burned fuel, not fuel vapor, so the color should be different. The illumination is still a puzzle, but the trail could be much higher up than it seems to be. Instead of ending at a relatively nearby mountain range, the trail extends nearly eight hundred miles to the White Sea. We only see the highest portion. The sun's still rising, so the cloud appears first, then the high portion of the vapor trail lights up gradually as sunlight sweeps across it, appearing to shoot a beam back to earth.
Why does the cloud vanish? When the missile stops adding vapor to the formation a rapidly expanding black area overtakes the entire spiral. Is that the fuel burning? If it is, why don't we see a flash as it burns? If it doesn't burn, why don't we continue to see the cloud? Why doesn't the green spiral vanish along with the rest of it?
If this is a cloud moving at high speed through thin and stable cold air, that expanding area of darkness is the space the cloud leaves behind. Nothing's burning, so there's no flash. The vapors move away, randomizing at the outer edges of the spiral, until nothing is left but a hazy amorphous glow. The exhaust trail, hanging at lower altitudes, lasts a little longer.
It looks like a mystery. Almost none of us have seen anything like this before, so we look for the strange parts and interpret what we see in unusual ways. Probably we'll never see anything like this again, because the detail and the definition of this event really are unusual. A unique chain of circumstances produced it. We probably couldn't do this one twice if we tried. But if you sort through the information and look at all of it, the mundane laws of physics shine through. It's still one of the coolest things we'll ever see.
Links:
Mystery Spiral Appears Over Norway
What Was the Norway Spiral?
Dark Pyramids
Published on December 5th, 2009 @ 12:52:58 pm , using 581 words, 98 views
The Lviv Outbreak of Ukraine Flu continues to fizzle. Though the internet story describes the pneumonic flu epidemic as continuing, and even spreading to neighboring nations, no photographic or other credible evidence has been presented to support any of that. The official news from Ukraine continues to report that the epidemic has eased and the crisis is past. I've seen nothing through remote exploration of the area which would indicate this is not true, but I find the region intriguing and I continue to poke around in it -- for fun.
This happened several nights ago and I haven't had time to post about it until now. I woke up standing in a small town late at night, very groggy as I usually am after traveling, with the feeling that there was something here I should see. So I looked around. The sky was very dark, no stars showing, and the moon was down. The street lights only partly blurred the skyline since I was quite a distance away from any well lit area, but I could clearly see streets and buildings which appeared to be residential. I wasn't looking for that, it was something else. So I looked around. When I looked up at the skyline I saw the peak of a mountain outlined against the sky, and the shape of it -- pyramidal -- gave me that feeling I was looking for: oh yeah, that's why I'm here.
An instant later I'm on top of the mountain, can't explain how because it's one of those things you learn and then it becomes instinctive. Used to be difficult, now it's not. Too dark to see much but I have the sense of two or three pyramids in the area altogether, not just this one. There's been some excavation on the slopes, old stone pavement exposed again, but most of the pyramid is a steep natural landscape of trees and fields. It reminds me of a mountain I used to dream about a lot during the 70's. I'd find myself at the bottom of it and I'd try to stay in the dream long enough to climb to the top. As much as I tried, I could never get there.
From some remote location I'm watching the mountain, seeing the silhouette of the peak, and I lean forward and bite off the top -- obviously only dreaming. It tastes like dirt with crunchy rocks in it but it has a texture like cake, very strange.
When I woke up from this I thought how strange it was to be dreaming of a pyramid when I'm trying to view Ukraine. Then I remembered reading a story about a pyramidal mountain in eastern Europe. A year or two ago, maybe, somebody thought it might be an old man-made structure buried by natural forces. I'd thought that was silly and highly unlikely to be true.
I looked it up. Looks much more like a pyramid to me, now that I've seen it up close, and I think I can take the story seriously now. My dream was very descriptive in some details -- the excavations look exactly like what I saw, and from a distance it does seem that somebody took a little bite off the peak.
Visocica, Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun, story at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4912040.stm
News from the Pyramids of Visoko, Bosnia -- Herzegovina at http://www.bosnianpyramids.org/index.php?lang=en
Playing with Tigers
Published on November 30th, 2009 @ 08:30:44 am , using 1039 words, 67 views
Another important dream, just a couple of nights ago. We are still doing our spiritual/mental/physical Three Wings routine, having skipped a couple of nights for the recent holiday and recovery from it. Taking a short break seems to help a bit, gives a person the chance to recover and adapt -- taking a break of a week starts the downward spiral.
So many things have been going well since we started this practice that we're very likely to keep it going. We're more productive at our work, which takes some of the stress off things -- nice for a change to feel like I'm meeting my obligations there. Our time off seems better spent. I don't have that feeling I frequently have that there is no time to do anything but solve problems, no time for simply sitting or just thinking. Physically we're both doing much better. Our running is improving and we're both feeling results from the stance training already, seeing that we're stronger and feeling different about ourselves. All of that is very positive.
What I've worried about is that this might bring too much of the unusual part of the old practice into the house. I think I mentioned the knocks on the bedroom wall and window we heard. That sort of thing can get out of control. Someday soon I'll put a story up on American Shaman about some things that happened in that way a few years ago. I wouldn't want a return to those days, when the house seemed like Grand Central Station at night.
XML Feeds