Charley: “Look, a lot of what I have to tell Dane is heavy. I’m trying to spread it out and not bombard him with it all at once. That’s all. It’s not because I’m…what you said…worried about him judging me.”

 

Diego: “Whatever lets you sleep at night, all I know is you may have trusted him with your body, but that’s all he’s got, ‘cuz you’ve given me everything else—thoughts, dreams, fears. You’ve always been able to talk to me. Deny it?”

 

Charley: *lifts her chin, meeting Diego’s eyes unflinchingly* “No, I don’t deny it, but that’ll come for me and Dane, too.”

 

Diego: “Doubtful. You talked to me right outta the gate, even though I scared you and you didn’t particularly like me. Instinctually you knew you could ‘cuz I wouldn’t judge, just like you know you can’t with him ‘cuz he will.”

 

Charley: *presses the heel of her hand to her forehead, suddenly looking weary* “Diego. Shut up. Please, just shut up.”

 

Diego: *smiles lopsidedly, face softening endearingly* “Fine. I’ll let you think over how right I am. I need a smoke anyway.”

 

Charley: *unable to resist, smiles in return, then scowls, angry with herself* “Molly said you quit.”

 

Diego: “Nearly. I’m down to one a week.”

 

Charley: “One pack a week? That is pretty good.”

 

Diego: “No, one cig a week.”

 

Charley: “Even better.”

 

Diego *stands up slowly, stretching languidly in the process* “Don’t worry, Bug. Cancer’s not on my agenda.”

 

Charley: “Uh, I don’t think cancer’s on anyone’s agenda… *drawls nastily* but just like you, it happens to good people all the time.”

 

Diego: *eyes crinkle* “I’ll be outside whenever Molly decides to grace us with her Moll-jestic majesty…” *strolls out the door, gait sinuous and predatory, pausing to lock the knob before shutting it with a soft ‘thud’*

 

Charley: *clutches a throw pillow to her chest, emotions flitting over her face like a slideshow on fast-forward*

 

Molly: *enters, stopping short when she sees the look on Charley’s face, speaks in a ruined voice softened by the lilt of Appalachia* “Charles? What’s he gone an’ said to you? You okay?” *hurries around the coffee table, reaching out to Charley*

 

Charley: *looks up at Molly, smiling wanly, as she signs and says* “You look nice, Molls.” *reverts back to hugging her pillow*

 

Fashion Credits

**Any doll enhancements (i.e. freckles, piercings, eye color changes) were done by me unless otherwise stated.**

 

Charley

Jeans: Mattel – Barbie Collectibles – Best Models: South Beach (I removed the front pockets.)

Top: Jakks Pacific – Hannah Montana

Sweater: IT – FR2 – Only Natural Fashion (I added the buttons and removed the pockets.)

Belt: Volks – Who’s That Girl? – Selfish

Sneakers: Sekiguchi Momoko – After School Dash!

Necklace & Bracelets: Me

 

Doll is a Morning Dew Giselle, transplanted to a Poppy body, re-rooted by the savvy-n-saucy valmaxi(!!!)

 

Molly

Dress: razldazl71 (Flickr.com)

Sweater: A dear friend. Thanks, Michelle!

Belt: Me

Platforms: Mattel – Barbie Collectibles – Peace & Love 70s Barbie

Ring: IT – Fashion Royalty

Necklaces & Earrings: Me

 

Doll is a She’s Not There Poppy Parker, eyes have been repainted by me, all other enhancements by me.

 

~Location Unknown....

 

This is the personal journal of doctor Jonathan Mengele Crane.

 

My research so far has gone along peacefully, though I believe that will be coming to a close very shortly. My supplier for subjects, Mr. Cobblepot, was recently incarcerated. Shame, I was prepared with my part of the deal, the antidote he craved so much. Now his health is in the hands of the inferior medical staff of Gotham General Hospital. So many memories I have with that place. All of them revolting. My studies so far have required human test subjects, all vagrants that society for the most part has forgotten. They had no purpose out there, so I give them one in here: to assist in the pursuit of knowledge towards the human mind and how it works regarding fear. I've centered my recent studies around the Three Forms of Fear, first analyzed and coined by Psychiatrist Dr. Anatida Williams in 1921. Such an interesting woman. I've centered various experiments towards her three forms of fear, which follow as seen:

 

Common: Fears every normal human being suffers, rather it be day-by-day fears such as bill anxiety, unemployment, property damage, to more extremes like losing loved ones to "unjustified" ways such as accidents or disease and such. One experiment centered around common fear was taking one of my subjects who was of....lower intelligence and of a manipulable mind, exposing him to a toxin that would amplify this fear, and giving them a list of difficult tasks with a strict deadline. The subject went completely insane hours later.

 

Instinctual: Fear triggered instantaneously, from events such as the popular "jumpscare" seen in most forms of horror-based media, or in a fight-or-flight response, or that critical moment right as you see some form of danger mere inches from you. For an experiment centered around instinctual fear, I exposed a subject to a toxin stimulating this fear and had them play a popular video game on a computer. The game was of the popular survival-horror genre, centered around exploring an insane asylum during a mass outbreak. Sounds familiar. This video game utilized the jumpscare frequently. The subject played through the game normally until the first encounter with a jumpscare. The subject died from a heart attack.

 

Tailored: Fears, rational or irrational, made for a specific person. Something one person may find terrifying but many others will merely write off as nothing due to prior traumas or perceptions. This one has been....difficult to experiment with, and a proper toxin hasn't been developed to fully stimulate it in a human mind, but I have found a mentally unbalanced subject who I must escort from room to room blindfolded for my own health due to an odd fear of door hinges. The subject's insane babble indicates childhood trauma.

 

Making the necessary toxins to stimulate these forms of fear has been difficult, and required extensive study of the human brain, as to reach the amygdala. It's difficult, what with the skull being one of the hardest bones in the body, but I luckily have the necessary tools to bypass this minor obstacle. I've currently gone through four subjects and have completed toxins to stimulate common and instinctual fears, with tailored in development. Daniel, my current subject, has sacrificed himself to continued the development. I admire people like him, willing to lay down his life in pursuit of greater knowledge. I can only hope my pursuit meets no delays, considering how far I've gone and how close I am.

I had a comment a couple of images back about how I knew that these were old "men". It's a good question. I don't know. Or maybe I should say that the use of the word men is not to associate a human gender to something that is not human, and is meant in a more generic fashion. I thought about titling this series as "old souls" instead of "men", but obviously I did not. Something about the sound and flow of the words. Even though I like the connotation of soul better than men, I like the way the latter reads better. I also thought about titling some of the images as old women and some as old men, but then I did not want to draw too much attention (or distract too much attention) toward the pursuit of trying to see the distinctions between one group and another by my audience.

 

Titling is a tricky business.

 

Of course, I could also fall back to no title at all, but chose not to do that either. It is usually my last resort. A title well chose can add so much to an image, it can set a mood and secure a certain frame of mind in your audience. Along those lines I even thought of titling all these images after various Greek and Roman mythologies, but tossed that out as too heavy-handed and ultimately not in the direction I wanted to go.

 

The current title works well enough, but is a work in progress. I myself am still feeling out just how to express what I mean about this series. Part of me is still trying to figure out just what the series means to me. On some instinctual level I know what it is, but the more rational and logical parts of my brain are struggling to grasp what those more reactionary parts are feeling.

 

If that makes sense.

 

Of course, you are also free to just look at the incredibly lush, dense and verdant forest scenes.

Originality, it is said, usually means coming from somewhere else. "Somewhere else" can be many places: another time, another culture, the other gender, despair, madness-- anywhere, except familiar here and everyday now. John Lennon has told of his first magical meeting with Yoko Ono, when he wandered into her one-woman show at the Indica Gallery in London on November 9, 1966, a pivotal date in the ferment remembered as the Nineteen Sixties, and was intrigued, as well as mystified, by what he saw. Invited by Ono to pay five shillings to hammer a nail into a piece of plain wood shown as artwork, Lennon made a counter-offer: "Well, I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." "That's when we really met," Lennon later recalled. "That's when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it, and, as they say in all the interviews we do, the rest is history."

 

All lovers know the moment when complicity leaps like an electric spark, but in their case, founded on what? Outwardly, the two had nothing in common. Lennon had come from the "genteel poverty" of a dysfunctional working-class family, via art school and sweaty teen-age dance hangouts in Liverpool, England, and Hamburg, Germany, to world fame and an honorable fortune as a rock-and-roll musician, composer, and role model for the first generation of Western youth to remember nothing of World War Two. Ono, seven years his senior, remembered all too well the apocalyptic end of Japan's Pacific War, the hunger and despair that had followed the defeat and enemy occupation which she had seen at first hand. But her own roots were in wealth and privilege: her mother Isoko came from the Yasuda banking family, and her father, Eisuke Ono, himself a banker by profession, descended from a long line of samurai warrior-scholars. Yoko had known little personal experience of deprivation, and had been educated among Japan's business and intellectual elite. Just the same, like had recognized like, at that mythic London meeting.

 

Why? The explanation lies half-buried under the decades of Japan's new prosperity. By 1966 Lennon, was emerging as one of the gurus of the disillusioned, questing mood called "The Sixties" in the West. Yoko Ono had been there, spiritually, long before. Something very like the mood of the Sixties first took shape in Tokyo in the late 1940's; Japan's confused, hungry years were the "somewhere else" Yoko Ono came from. Even then, and there, it was the amalgam, rather than any of its elements, that was really new. Radical pacifism and politicized feminism had both erupted in spiritually defeated Europe after the First World War, where they had found artistic voices in the instant arts of gesture and performance, made somewhat more durable by photographs, and in the perversely intellectual anti-intellectualism of Dada.

 

Bereft of social and political protest, however, Dada became just another style, and it was as an avant-garde style that Dada in the 1920's reached Japan, which had suffered next to nothing, and gained much, by the First World War. By the late 1940's, however, after the Second World War, Japan was in a state of despair even deeper and longer-lasting than Europe had known after the first war and by the mid-fifties Japanese art had found a similar expression, this time not as an imported style but with its own emotional authenticity. Japanese ingredients, notably the cerebral anti-intellectualism of Zen Buddhism, flavored a mixture which was original, distinctive, and more than the sum of its parts. Yoko Ono was the prophetess who, with the help of John Lennon, brought the amalgam to a West at long last ready to reconsider its own values. By different paths, Lennon and Western youth had arrived at a need, Ono at its fulfillment. More justifiably than most lovers, John and Yoko knew, in an instant of enlightenment at the Indica Gallery, that they were of one mind.

 

Ono's Upbringing

 

Ono's route to the rendezvous was the more devious of the two. She was born in Tokyo on February 18, 1932, the year Japan set up a puppet state in Manchuria, a long step towards the catastrophe of 1945. Two weeks earlier, her father had been transferred to San Francisco with the Yokohama Specie Bank, the financial arm of Japan's expanding empire. His wife and daughter soon followed, and Yoko from infancy heard both English and Japanese, the foundation of her subsequent bilingualism. In the spring of 1937 as Japan began full-scale war in China Yoko, her mother and younger brother Keisuke, born in December 1936, returned to Tokyo, where Yoko was enrolled in the kindergarten of the Peers' School, a Tokyo institution then open only to relatives of the Imperial family or of members of the House of Peers (her maternal grandfather, the banker Zenjiro Yasuda, had been ennobled in 1915). In 1940 Yoko's mother, fearing that all Japanese might be interned if Japan and the United States went to war and that she might not see him for many years, bravely rejoined her husband, by this time stationed in New York, taking her two children. The family sailed from San Francisco for the last time in the spring of 1941. At the time of Pearl Harbor Yoko's father was working in the Hanoi branch of his bank while Yoko was enrolled in a Christian primary school in Tokyo, run by one of the Mitsui family for Japanese children returned from abroad.

 

Takasumi Mitsui's school gave Yoko a safe and liberal refuge for most of the war. She continued studying in English and was listed as a primary school student well after her twelfth birthday, when most boys and girls her age became liable for war work, often risky. She was still living in Tokyo and being privately tutored in The Bible, Buddhism and the piano when a quarter of the city was burnt out in the great fire raid of March 9, 1945-- an inferno she survived in the Ono family bunker in the affluent

 

Azabu residential district, far from the incinerated downtown. Only then did her mother move her three children to a small farming village near the still fashionable Karuizawa mountain resort. The choice of refuge proved fortunate, as Yoko and her brother and sister, in the desperate days of the defeat and the collapse of the Japanese economy, were able to help their mother barter family treasures for food. One notable deal yielded sixty kilograms of life-sustaining rice for a German-made sewing machine. At the end of the war the family returned to Tokyo, where Yoko rejoined the re-opened Peers' School in April, 1946.

 

Founded in Tokyo in 1877, the Peers' School, like its rough equivalents Eton in England and Groton in the United States, has been more noted for social than for academic status. Its campus near the Imperial Palace survived the fire raids more or less intact, and its first post-war intake was like the pre-war ones. When the peerage was abolished in 1947 the school became theoretically open to anyone, including foreign exchange students (a classmate of the present Crown Prince Naruhito was the son of a plumber from Melbourne, Australia) but, like Tokyo itself, the Peers' School has since recovered much of its high-society glitter.

 

The view from the school windows, however, has changed beyond recognition. When Yoko and her classmates looked outside the school's high walls in the spring of 1946 they saw a city all but returned, as General Curtis E. LeMay Jr., U. S. Army Air Corps, had promised, to the Stone Age. Whole districts were sterile wastelands of twisted iron and blackened stones. People lived in holes clawed in the ground, roofed with stray sheets of metal. On every corner of what had once been shopping streets, famished men and women tried to sell trinkets, clothes, anything for food. Every train from the countryside brought farmers loaded with rice and vegetables for the black market. In makeshift bars in dank cellars, workers formed lines to gulp industrial alcohol. To sharpen the misery, smartly-turned-out, well-fed American soldiers tootled around the ruins in jeeps, driving on the side of the road they were accustomed to, the right-- the rare Japanese vehicle simply got out of the way. In a terminal degradation of Japanese martial values, American servicewomen smiled for souvenir snaps in rickshaws pulled by Japanese men still wearing the tattered remnants of military uniforms, eyes turned down in exhaustion, hunger and shame. Few would have recognized in this desolate scene the seedbed of a great and original flowering of art and cinema-- unless they had seen Berlin in 1919, or Moscow before Stalin.

 

Japan under occupation was a paradox; democracy imposed by a conqueror under the iron rule of General Douglas MacArthur, "the Macarto," more autocratic than any shogun had been for centuries. The occupation supposedly freed the Japanese press, but two weeks after it began, occupation censorship was imposed, and mention of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for instance, was blue-pencilled. The predictable result was to turn the atomic bombs into monstrous symbols of evil, beyond all rational discourse, in which shape they haunt Japanese and the rest of us to this day. Some accused Japanese war criminals were arrested and leisurely trials began; but Emperor Hirohito, who (as all but a handful of the Japanese elite believed) had directed Japan's war in person was free to visit the conqueror-- and the resulting photograph, of a stiffly correct Emperor and a showily casual general, was as ambiguous as the occasion. The trials were intended to show the Japanese their war crimes-- but the Soviet judge was from the nation that still held a half-million Japanese as war prisoners, many never to see homes and families again.

 

Most Tokyo residents, like those of any war-devastated city, were engrossed in the search for food and shelter. Even from an island of privilege like the Peers' School, the world outside no longer made sense. That America's war had been wholly just ("the justest war in history," U.S. propaganda claimed) and therefore Japan's totally unjust was by no means so clear to these puzzled young people as it was to the victors. Yes, there had been crimes and cruelties, on both sides, and who could strike the balance? And how could these crimes have been averted? The best answer seemed to be that war itself was to blame. Pacifism has been, for Japanese, the most enduring legacy of those years: "make love not war," the slogan of the Western sixties, well expresses the mood of Tokyo in 1946, as of starving Berlin in 1918. Right up to the present, PEACE (a brand of cigarette) and LOVE (with an arrow-pierced heart) are English words almost every Japanese knows.

 

Postwar Pacifism

 

More than a half-century on, any Japanese politician who suggests that Japan might one day go to war again is sure of an angry reaction. We have proof, from the Peers' School itself, that pacifism impacted with particular force on Yoko Ono's generation. Prince Akihito, now Emperor of Japan, returned there, as she did, in April 1946 from the same mountain refuge, the Karuizawa area, and saw the same fire-ravaged cityscape from its windows. The Crown Prince was tutored in English and world history by an American, Elizabeth Gray Vining, selected by Emperor Hirohito with full knowledge that her Quaker faith enjoins strict pacifism. Thirty-four years later, when Akihito acceded to the throne he swore to uphold the constitution, the first Japanese emperor ever to do so-- and to Japanese this can only mean Article Nine, renouncing war. One of the new Emperor Akihito's first official duties was to plant a tree in Nagasaki, whose mayor, Hitoshi Motoshima had not long before been shot and seriously injured by a right-wing fanatic after urging Japanese to reflect on their role in World War II, for which, said the mayor, Emperor Hirohito "shared responsibility." Meeting the mayor-- it could not have been by chance-- Hirohito's eldest son wished him a speedy recovery. Within the restraints of his office, Yoko's schoolmate could not have made his abiding pacifist views plainer.

 

Feminist agitation was more prominent in Japan's early post-war years than it has ever been since. Women were given the vote by the largely American-written 1946 constitution, and pressure from the new female members of parliament finally led in 1958 to the abolition of the licensed brothels, into which poor girls had been sold into debt slavery. The law making adultery a crime for wives but not for husbands was repealed in 1947. A few professions, notably teaching, introduced equal pay. However, the feminism that reverberated in the Japan of the post-war years was less ideological than situational, the feminism of hard times. War, especially in Japan, has been a hyper-masculine pursuit, with the homoeroticism found in all military societies.

 

The utter defeat of 1945 temporarily, perhaps permanently, discredited the warrior ethos. Strong, resourceful women like Yoko Ono's mother, who had kept homes and families afloat through eight years of war saw Japan's surrender as simply another man-made crisis to be somehow survived. Thousands of Japanese women, "pan pan girls," prostituted themselves to American soldiers, often for food for their families. Others hired out as the victors' maids, cooks and nannies. In close to a millennium, only one part of the English-speaking world has known such total defeat. Novelist Margaret Mitchell, in Scarlett O'Hara, imagined a strong woman's response to the shipwreck of Southern male pretensions very like the reaction of many Japanese women in 1945. In Woman is the Nigger of the World by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, we can hear, behind the offensive racial slur, the anger of a privileged girl at what her humbler sisters had once had to do, just for survival.

 

One of the first arts to revive in Japan was cinema, by which a mass audience could be reached for the price of a seat in a drafty hall. The great director Akira Kurosawa had a script in shape for his enigmatic Rashomon as early as 1947, although he took until 1950 to find finance and finish it. Its theme, the impossibility of arriving at reliable truth about any event by way of the self-serving distortions of witnesses and participants, was a plain parable of Japan's situation. The first voice to speak from within defeated Japan and be heard outside, Rashomon began the process, still incomplete, of explaining the pariah nation to a suspicious world. Kurosawa had added an important aside to the bleak vision of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who wrote the two stories on which it is partly based and suicided, at thirty-five, in 1927. Kurosawa's addition has the woodcutter, one of the witnesses whose version of the rape of a samurai's wife and the murder of her husband by a bandit cannot be trusted, adopt a baby abandoned by the ruined city gate which gives the film its name. Life, says the film, goes on, the human spirit rebounds, there is always hope. A quarter-century later, John Lennon was to climb a ladder at the Indica Gallery and through a magnifying glass read the one word Yoko One had written on the gallery's ceiling, YES. "At least" Lennon later recalled, "her message was positive."

 

Kurosawa apart (Rashomon won the gold cup at the 1950 Venice film festival and became an international hit) all that the outside world heard from Japan in the immediate post-war years came through the propaganda megaphone operated by the U.S. occupation. MacArthur's headquarters censored not only what the Japanese media reported in Japan, but what the corps of foreign correspondents stationed in Tokyo could send to their readers. The publication of John Hersey's searing Hiroshima (1946), the century's most influential piece of journalism, was only possible because Hersey wrote it in the offices of the New Yorker, far from the occupation's censors.

 

The year 1945 in fact marked the sharpest discontinuity between generations in all Japanese history, but few outside Japan could distinguish this reality from the claims of MacArthur's personal publicity machine-- and, as with all such breaks with the past, much continued unchanged, and a reverse current soon set in, guided by the same occupation authority. What many Japanese still remember as the years of post-war democracy all too soon ended. The role in the world assigned to Japan was changing. In 1949 the Soviets broke the U.S. nuclear monopoly, the Chinese Communist Party won its civil war, and the Korean War broke out in June, 1950. Already the occupation had begun its "reverse course." No longer an enemy to be punished and reformed, Japan became a potential ally to be courted for the threatened new world war with communism. Korean war spending, the opening of the huge U.S. market to Japanese products, the revival of Japan's wartime production system with its close ties between banks, bureaucrats and favored industrialists-- the celebrated "Japan Inc."-- got Japan back on the dual road to economic recovery and social counter-revolution.

 

Good times, however, are not necessarily propitious for the arts. By 1951, when Yoko Ono graduated from the Peers' School, the creative ferment of the postwar years was subsiding, as everyday Japan settled down to take advantage of the "reverse course" and its material payoffs. Feminism stalled, Japan's new pacifism was entangled in the alliance with the nuclear-armed U.S. Early in 1952 Yoko was accepted by the philosophy faculty of her school's associated Peers' University as its first female student of that most cerebral of disciplines, but after two semesters she dropped out. Approaching her twentieth birthday, her most impressionable years behind her, Ono rejoined her family in Scarsdale, New York, where her father was once again a banker. She enrolled in nearby Sarah Lawrence College, then strong in the visual arts (painter Bradley Walker Tomlin had taught abstract expressionism there). This led her to American avant-garde circles, where she experimented with painting, music, film and the various performance arts. By 1962 she was back in Tokyo, exhibiting with some success as a member of the Japanese artistic avant-garde, some of whom called themselves Neo-Dadaists, part of the Dada stylistic revival taking place world-wide.

 

The original Dada (from French baby-talk "dada," a rocking-horse, a word intended to be meaningless) had arisen first in sidelined, neutral Zurich during the First World War. By 1918 it had spread to Berlin, then to Paris and later to New York. Taking a hint from Marcel Duchamp, who had exhibited a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool as an artwork in 1913, the Dadaists hoped, by exhibiting themeless objects, to condemn the futility of war and to shock the bourgeoisie out of the materialism and complacency the artists believed had exacerbated its horrors. Dada attracted some attention in the European cities plunged into something like the despair of Tokyo in 1945, but by 1924 that war was receding, the bourgeoisie were again complacent, and the Dada movement, bereft of social concern, had retreated into style.

 

As Japan's America-oriented prosperity grew into the early 1960's, the Japanese neo-Dada movement became similarly fragmented and dispirited. Resistance to the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (ANPO), mostly from students, attracted some of its practitioners; as did opposition to the 1964 Olympics, seen by most Japanese as a milestone in Japan's revival; anti-materialism inspired such notable art as Genpei Akasegawa's Great Japan Zero-Yen Note, mocking the preoccupation of most of his compatriots. But the creative despair of the late 1940's was long gone. Via two failed marriages and a parting from her only daughter, Kyoko, claimed by her American ex-husband Anthony Cox, Yoko again left Japan eventually to find her way to a small London gallery specializing in the avant-garde, then beginning to find the wider audience it always does in times of social upheaval. It took the aristocratic Ono some time to discover what the untutored, instinctual Lennon really had to offer her-- the wide world, as an audience for her art.

 

Lennon's Trajectory

 

How had John Lennon reached his side of the mysteriously fated rendezvous at the Indica Gallery in 1966? Born in 1940, his adolescence, the 'fifties, was a time of self-satisfaction in the English-speaking world, of growing affluence, of endless war movies presenting the victors as supermen (but not yet as superwomen-- just as war had deflated the male values of Japanese, it inflated those of the Western winners, whose women were ejected from the jobs they had held while the men were away fighting, and theoretically went back to being full-time housewives and mothers).

 

Prosperity not known since the 1920's did little for adult women, but a great deal economically for adolescents, now called "teenagers," who commanded real wages and competitively bigger parental allowances in economies finally freed of unemployment. Teenage purchasing power made a new market for records, and the performers correspondingly rich-- none richer than the Fab Four from England, the Beatles.

 

The Beatles owed their huge success to a creative tension between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who wrote most of their songs-- Paul the syrupy and tuneful, John the tart realist. Advised by their astute manager, Brian Epstein, to present a wholesome image unthreatening to British parents, the Beatles were made Members of the Order of the British Empire (a medal usually given to civil servants like postmasters) in 1965, and they duly acquired wholesome girl friends and/or wives to suit. With a blonde English wife, Cynthia, and an infant son, Julian, Lennon later described feeling "trapped" in "a happily married state of boredom." Money had never been his main motivation-- rather, as wordsmith and intellectual of the partnership, he sought self-expression, meaning expressing the feelings of his contemporaries, the normal rebellion of any generation against the one before it, delayed for Lennon and those who thought like him by the huge (and not unjustified) self-satisfaction of their elders who had won the war, the peace and in their own minds, the game of life itself.

 

Aimless, shapeless discontent among young people who felt themselves overshadowed and marginalized by the war generation had already inspired James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Alan Ginsberg's Howl (1956), John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957). These one-offs by unknown outsiders, meaningless to mainstream adults, could be ignored-- whereas the Beatles were the Western establishment's own lovable young rascals, with teenage followers in just about every English-speaking home. All that remained to complete the radicalization of youth in the later 'sixties was a new war, a spectacular crisis calling for immediate public action.

 

I happened to be in Vietnam, covering the first big search-and-destroy operations by American regular troops, in the very same month that Yoko met John. War was again a front-page, news-dominating story. After an on-again, off-again courtship, Lennon left his wife and their posh stockbroker-belt country mansion and set up house with Yoko in a London flat. In 1968 they released Unfinished Music #1: Two Virgins, a collage of electronic sound recorded on their first night together, with a self-shot nude photograph of the couple on the cover. They married in March 1969, promising to stage many "happenings." The wedding was the first, followed by "Bed Peace" in an Amsterdam hotel, then the huge billboard in Times Square, New York: "WAR IS OVER-- if you want it." The two Lennons had become the emblematic leaders of a universal cultural revolution. Long matured, the preoccupations of Yoko Ono's vivid Tokyo adolescence had meshed with John Lennon's energies, and given his showy, empty life a sense of purpose, and her art a world audience. Like the o's in Yoko Ono, another train of political and artistic wheels had at last come full circle.

  

MURRAY SAYLE, an Australian writer long resident in Japan, contributed this account of the intellectual origins of Yoko Ono, in slightly different form, to the catalogue of the multimedia retrospective "YES YOKO ONO," which opened at the Japan Society Gallery, New York, on October 16, 2000. The exhibition, curated by Alexandra Munroe, director of the gallery, in consultation with Jon Hendricks, curator of the Yoko Ono archive, is scheduled to tour the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston; the List Center for Visual Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; and may travel to Asia.

Quadralectics Architecture - Marten Kuilman (2011).

quadralectics.wordpress.com/4-representation/4-2-function...

 

Fear as a psychological entity is something for the young, inexperienced adults facing the complexities of life and for the elderly and retired. In the latter case fear is often related to the end of their visible visibility period, known as death. Fear, as an instinctual emotion, is the most persistent and all-embracing of the four basic human emotions: fear, aggression, nurture and desire. The Greek word for fear is phobos, which points in a psychiatric context (phobia) to an intense and irrational situation, activity, things or persons. Emotional intensity is an important constituency of fear, which can be translated as a heightened visibility. The psychological entity of fear, as seen in a quadralectic context, is the emotion, which breaks loose shortly after a maximum approach (intensio) to one-self is experienced.

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The theme of anxiety and fear is closely related to the existentialism of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855). He placed in his book ‘The Concept of Anxiety’ (1844) the psychological entity of unfocused fear in an environment of sin, with a reference to Adam, who was forbidden to eat the apple (of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil). The prohibition implied a form of freedom, either to eat or not to eat. Kierkegaard drew the conclusion that Adam’s state of initial bliss was the result of ignorance, which ended with the predicament of losing his freedom when consuming the ‘knowledge of good and evil’. The result is a state of anxiety, and a lost innocence.

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The theme of ‘fear’ was taken up by the Belgian activist and philosopher Lieven de Cauter (Koolskamp, 1959). His network organization is called Oxumoron – meaning, in the right spelling as oxymoron, a trope uniting extremes or opposites. The name probably reflects the hidden oppositional mind of its creator. He described in his book (De CAUTER, 2004) a society (city), which was divided up to an individual level, following ideas from the Japanese architect Kisho Kurakawa (1934 – 2007).

 

The latter was a founding member of the Japanese Metabolism movement, aiming at sustainable architecture with flexible urban models for a rapidly changing society. Kurakawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower in the Ginza area of Tokyo brought the concept of an individual living space in 1972 into practice. Hundred and forty capsules (containers) were stacked at angles around two round central cores. The units are detachable and replaceable – but this method could probably not prevent its destruction in the near future to make way for new developments.

 

De Cauter’s ‘capsular society’ is proposed as the ultimate protection against fear. It offers a bleak scenario for the near future in which ‘daily life is becoming a kaleidoscope of incidents and accidents, catastrophes and cataclysms’ (VIRILIO, 2003). Other philosophers, like the Italian Giorgio Agamben (Rome, 1942), derive their symbolism from the idea of a (prisoners) camp, in which people are brought together in an undemocratic way and have lost all their human rights.

 

CAUTER, de, Lieven (2004). De capsulaire beschaving. Over de stad in het tijdperk van de angst. Nai uitgevers Rotterdam. ISBN 90-5662-406-7

 

VIRILIO, Paul (1997). Open Sky. Verso, London. ISBN 1-85984-880-X

 

– (2003). Unknown quantity. Thames and Hudson, London.

  

Show Must Go On

W x H (“): 70 x 60

Oil painting on Cotton (dock canvas)

Signed

Early Period

  

(1)Mechanism of Inspiration

  

From a title or period of painting’s execution it is believed that Jaisini was driven in its creation by an influence of a song with corresponding title and the death of its author and singer Freddie Mercury. The interpreting of emotions resulted and transferred by Jaisini in his painting is unexpected development of the theme of Show Must Go On painting rich in color combination, with dynamic composition, nerve and emotion urging to attempt read into it’s concept. At a first glace the picture’s space reminds of an outlandish or even sci-fi landscape with elements that may support the impression, a red sun against a silhouette that reminds a dinosaur. On the right upper side there is a depiction of what looks like a water tower. The color develops from the front ground’s almost black cobalt blue that changes gradually to the lighter value of blue enriched by additional colors and finally to fuse in a sun light spot in the upper left corner that holds a voluptuous female figure with bulging thighs. Her position is either gymnastic of erotic. Her figure is touched by some phallic finger and seems to carry little information except being a compositional space brake.

The figure’s configuration is light almost weightless as is she was a balloon navigating the space. In contrast to this image’s lightness there is another female figure, located below. Her image is independent but at the same time she delineates a right hand of a central man. This is a reclining female torso of intense transparent red color of stain-glass.

This color of transparent red is a highlighting color of the entire picture that is dominated by blue and yellow. The inclusion of such pure sound red fires up accents and add to Jaisini’s painting special power.

He is a great color master developing his composition with complimentary tonal highlights of pure colors and contrasting inclusions that always light up the paintings with additional dimension as multi faceted precious stone that casts color sparkles. His established rule is the inclusion of pure brisk color accents. To justify such pure and intense red in the predominately cobalt composition is a complex task Jaisini successfully accomplishes in SMGO.

The work as most paintings is painted in one go in detection of light and immediate lines that create the whole compositional swirl.

This mode of work in oil called a-la-prima painted without preliminary

sketch and sure is exhausting way of creation.

It will always remain puzzling how is it possible to paint monumental, finished version of a single painting without minimum preparation. In the interview Jaisini confirmed that it takes long time, months if not years to think about future painting. If he is not capable to construct a vision of his future work in his mind until this “vision” occurs, the artist is not ready to paint or if he would persist the result can’t satisfy the artist.

The notion of having direct influence of the music and events that inspired Jaisini to paint SMGO enter the analysis and to understand the immediate mechanics of Jaisini’s creativity is a challenging task.

What moves him in this particular work to bring out strange, unexplainable images to interpret the signer’s death and the musical tune and poetic meaning of the song with theatrical slogan that “show must go on”?

In the picture the central man is in the middle of composition and picture’s concept as a main figure. As in Forbidden Fruit same here the man’s figure is depicted in a rushing forward movement that could read symbolically and remain statuesque. Such duality of being dynamic and still at the same time is always found in the best works of art that can be looked at from different aesthetic points as Rodin’s Thinker, who seemed to be so lively but at a standstill.

In SMGO the central man’s body has an athletic anatomy but also a grotesque exaggerated body part that look like a blown out of proportions phallus, erected from the man’s lower body having no anatomical detailing.

The color serves to divide phallic element in two parts. It enters a figure of a bending down man of light yellow tone. The phallic part of a central man on the point of entering into the bending man’s backside becomes the painting’s red color inclusion with transparent effect of stain glass.

The central man seems to interact with the other in internal game that can be physical game of power. The central man opens his mouth in scream from the own pain that is caused to him by a double-jawed sward-fish who in turn enters his body from the back.

On the entering the swordfish’s nose is ultramarine and then red.

There is also an interesting image of a grieving profile that fills the space between the shark and reclining woman’s torso. The sward-fish is moving out of a dark space where scalaria fish of enlarged size demarcates the side of darkness and light.

Corrals in the front ground add more ambiguity to the space with the red color and rounded shaping.

In the right corner there is a third figure of a man who could fit the definition of submissiveness or weakness by the depiction.

Such personages are often found in Jaisini’s works where they find a place to contrast images of the masculine males.

To conclude the count in SMGO I should mention a profile with a grotesque dinosaur’s long bending neck. This profile is situated between spatial contrasts of almost black concave opening.

Inside the round enclosure of the neck the space is light but indicative of shaping by the reflexes of light.

The interest to understand the work, the birth of the above-described images and their relevance to the painting’s theme, why and how did they arrive in association with prime impulse of the artist, his favorite song and sorrow.

As a formulation of the artist’s reaction to the song he liked and death of its singer in the outcoming painting is most unusual. The painting’s formal quality is complete in its dynamical and color elaboration.

When you try to see the picture in its entirety you see a great contrast of spots, beautiful combination of colors enriched by unusual color choices.

The dynamic development of picture’s space divided endlessly to create vigorous effect of foliage washed by sunlight. The yellow color parts are offset by cold deep ultramarine and refined by bold inclusion of red.

Space of the painting can’t be defined as perspective.

As in most Gleitzeit works space is multi perspective with Cubist principle of space being observed from different angles but at the same time unified by Jaisini’s plastical line unlike cubism’s straight angles.

This painting has strong sense of spontaneity with little predictability of the images. The execution of the work holds perfectly an outburst of emotions into a formulation of unlikely response to the initial drive. Jaisini’s ability to work in a style of direct painting that is loaded with philosophical meaning is a unique gift. If abstract art is mathematical it is possible to formulate its principal’s production. In such works as of Jaisini the formula would be with all unknowns.

The artist expresses his deep understanding of social conflict in Show Must Go On uniting images of violence with concept of grief for the lost such as death of singer who inspired the artist to paint.

In this work Jaisini unites man’s violent act with the concept of “show must go on” that means aggression is a primary purveyor of rebellion and its revolutionary radicalism.

In SMGO the portrayal is of a cry that informs universe of raw demands of man desperate to know whom he is and where is he going.

The title of the song and painting is a dynamic addition to the concept.

The central man is shown vulnerable as the shark enters his body. It seems to freeze the effect of his outcry by physical threat. Jaisini reflects in this work the deep-seated fundamental concept. Men transform their fear of male violence into a metaphysical commitment to male aggression.

For Freud a criminal act-aggression and death, restrictions, and suppressed desire lay at the origins of human society. He establishes conflict between Eros and Thanatos as a primal, constant human condition.

Freud proclaims: “Every individual is virtually an enemy of civilization.”

Humans are unfit for civilization because their destructive urges are antagonistic to the fundamental demands of civilization.

The situation has become particularly dire in modern times, Freud argues for there are increasingly fewer outlets for these urges even as more and more restrictions are imposed. If during time of Surrealist art Andre Breton called the “crisis of consciousness” here is the “crisis of existence”.

The subject of absurdity and extinction of male purpose is not a gender-politicized theme in the Gleitzeit works of Jaisini.

It is an artistic questioning of the potential creativity that is hidden in every man but is restricted by rules and social responsibilities.

And still the artist calls for art to continue for show to go on even through death.

The portrayal of violence and victimization has the effect of the sacrificial ritual of ancient tradition that is echoed in the painting. Life will go on through death and sacrifice. There is recognition of life within death as well as death within life. In SMGO the concept of continuance is in the effort that could be described as violent, deviant, inherently shocking. The imagery of the picture focuses on the bonding between aged long that was and is necessary for creativity, agony and ecstasy, violence and sexuality, all inescapable and vitalizing forces of life emphasized in art tradition.

Struggle between instinct of life and instinct of destruction is the struggle that entire life essentially is about.

The picture seems to illustrate what was Freud’s view of the inclination to aggression to be an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man while civilization is a process in the service of Eros and death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction.

This struggle represents and portrays creation and life.

In SMGO Jaisini united the symbolic of fight with transgression of taboo subject of human rage having cruelty with social purpose to continue create.

 

There were a lot of 'cute' shots from this session, but I love the raw instinctual feel of this one and the sculptural tone. The baby's skin is like marble. A baby is only this tiny and truly helpless for a few days.

Creation is seen to have taken place, in Western kabbalistic and alchemical terms, in the following process.

 

The Divine mind of God, the Absolute, or in Hebrew the Ain Soph Aur (Limitless Light), through a series of expansions and contractions establishes the boundaries of Creation. The first world is the most subtle, and closest to the original state of non-existence, and is Atzilooth. This is called the world of Fire, because of the lively, undefined, and almost uncontrollable nature of fire. Next is Briah, or the World of Archetypes and forms as our human mind can grasp them. It is symbolized as the World of Air, and is the result of a barrier world that is formed by the creation of the next World, Yetzirah, or Water. This is the highly psychic and emotionally charged world immediately behind the veil of material existence, or Assiah. Also known as the World of Earth, because of the solid, concrete nature of material life.

 

The purpose of this scheme, is to show that creation occurs in increasingly dense levels of energy-matter, from the most subtle, or Fire, to the most dense, or Earth. Within this context of increasing density, there also arises a series of ten planes or levels of consciousness which combines with energy-matter, known as Sepheroth, or spheres of being. They occur in a pattern of: unity, reflection, polarity, reflection, polarity, unity, reflection, polarity, unity, and finally materialization. This basic idea of unity-polarity-and re-harmonizing, is the basis of kabbalistic and alchemical practices, and is derived from the observation of Nature.

 

Each World is a reflection to a denser or more subtle degree than the one before or after it. Each Sepheroth is a reflection, in part, of what proceeds or follows it. However, since each reflection is only partial, or slightly distorted, each Sphere takes on its own unique characteristics. Only the so-called “Middle Four Sphereoth” have the ability to harmonize or reflect in total all of the energies of creation, on some level.

 

This ‘zigzag’ of Creation is called the “Lightning Flash”. The return of energy from dense matter, back through the various stages, Sepheroth, and Worlds of Creation is known as the “Path of the Serpent” because of its reverse, or complimentary ‘zigzag’ nature back up this diagram called the Tree of Life.

 

For the alchemist, somewhere between the third and fourth level, or sphere of creation, energy takes on the characteristic that will allow for the formation of matter at some future state, or level ten. This energy is called Prima Materia, Chaos in the Bible, Spiritus Mundi (Spirit of the Earth), and others. Here, duality is made complete, and genuine polarity exists, as opposed to simply the potential, or idea, of polarity that had existed previously. Energy is divided into active and passive modes, with the active energy constituting the energies of life, and the passive one the energy of matter. In “The Golden Chain of Homer”, the active energy is called Niter and the passive energy is called Salt.

 

The energy of Life manifests in two forms, Fire and Air. While both are predominately active in nature, fire is the more active of the two, with Air being slightly passive because of the partial Water Element in its makeup. Potential Matter manifests its energy as Water and Earth. These Elements have nothing to do with the material bodies of the same name, and as such are capitalized and called “Elemental” to distinguish them from the earth we walk on, water we drink, air we breath, and fire we cook with. They are in fact, energetic states, each with their own unique characteristics, as well as each of the previously mentioned ten levels of consciousness within them. The Elements also have preferred ways of interacting with each other, to form the Three Principles of alchemy. There are in fact, forty different ways energy-matter-consciousness can manifest in our world.

 

The Three Essentials are the alchemical principles of Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt. Like the “Elements” these principle concepts are to be thought of a “Philosophical” and not literally as chemical elements or compounds. The Alchemical Sulphur, or Soul, of a thing predominates in the animating principles of energy (Fire) and intelligence (Air); Alchemical Salt, or the physical body of a thing, predominates in unconscious forces, psychic, and instinctual intelligence (Water) and solid matter (Earth); Alchemical Mercury, or general life force, predominates in intelligence (Air) and instinctual forces, and psychic energy (Water), as such it is the link, or bridge, between the higher forces of Sulphur and the lower body of matter.

 

In the mineral realm the dominant energy is that of Earth, a little Water, and very little Air or Fire. In the vegetable realm, the dominant energy is Water and Air, but little Fire and Earth. In the animal realm, the dominant force element is Fire, then Air, but little Earth. These qualities need to be understood as they have been defined for the following information to be of any use to the practicing, or aspiring, Hermeticist. For example, using the above definitions, we can say that the plant realm has an abundance of instinctual energy (Water) and intelligence, i.e. a specific function (Air), but little direct energy (Fire), as this is received passively from the sun; and little hard, physical, matter (Earth).

 

In the East as in the West, the idea of principle Elements and Philosophic Principles are expressed in more or less the same manner. This original undifferentiated energy from creation is often called in Indian philosophy, and modern occult, and New Age circles, as akasha, or Spirit. However, akasha, consists of two (2) aspects, one active as we have noted, Niter, and the other passive, Salt. The energies of Niter are also referred to as the force of Kundalini, or spiritual forces. In alchemy, this is the Secret Fire. To the Salt, belongs the force of Prana, or Vital Energy.

 

The function of the Vital energy is to maintain physical life forms and existence. It is completely instinctual and unconscious and is heavily influenced by cosmic cycles, astrological pulses, and other natural phenomena. The function of the Secret Fire is to increase in humanity, the only place where it is present, its sense of self, or “I”. At the lowest level or functioning, this is the ego, at its highest, it is Divinity incarnate, as both are two sides of the same coin. One is ‘self’ in relation to the physical world and others; the other is ‘self’ in relationship to all of Creation and as a co-creator.

 

In the vast majority of humanity, this Secret Fire, or liberating energy of self-consciousness, lies dormant, asleep at the base of the spine, coiled like a serpent. Only a small amount manages to escape, reaching a sepherothic level, or so-called chakra, thus creating a loci of consciousness for each person. If it reaches the top of the skull, and beyond, a spiritual awakening can occur, allowing for a descent and re-ascent of the energy, during which the psychic centers can be awakened allowing for the manifestation of psychic powers and related phenomena.

 

The Secret Fire ascends as a result of a temporary weakening of the Vital Energy in the physical body. This is why so many spiritual awakenings take place under great physical stress, times of illness, or near-death-experiences. When the Secret Fire will ascend through the various psychic-physical currents causing it to be enveloped in a sphere of luminous light.

 

The experiencing of the Secret Fire, as a result of the suppression of the physical body’s Vital Energy, can create a condition which manifests in various forms:

 

-Some perceive the bright light as an angel, their Higher Self, or “Holy Guardian Angel”, others as a spiritual teacher.

 

-Astral projection may result, along with perception of the immediate surroundings.

 

-Uncontrolled physical movements may also result, typical of so-called ‘kundalini phenomena’: shaking, rapid breathing, swinging of the torso, uncontrolled giddiness, and sitting straight upright in the Pharonic position.

 

After a period of time, the energy will descend, and return to the base of the spine.

 

The effects of this awakening will take some time for the consciousness of the individual to adjust to, and is not limited to the ‘non-physical’ realms. The physical body, although to a lesser degree, is also changed and improved in functioning, constituting a genuine “re-birth’ on several levels. However, it is up to the mind, or sense of “I”, of the individual, to cooperate with this influx of power if more permanent changes in consciousness are to be made.

 

As we can see, the concept of kundalini, or the Secret Fire, is linked to two polar concepts: that of the undifferentiated creative energy, and the second, as the seed of this energy locked on each cell of material creation, and focused in humanity at the base of the spine.

 

When this energy rises as a result of psychic experiences, and not because of physical weakness, it can cause the Vital Energy of the body to be concentrated on various areas of the body, creating physical and psychic disturbances. If the energy becomes concentrated in the head, it can create the illusion of a spiritual awakening, as well as the well known “hot and cold” flashes, or currents, up and down the spine. The effects of the Secret Fire however, and not its re-distributive effects on the Vital Energy, can create the following phenomena:

 

Intense pains suggestive of an illness

Crawling sensations of ants or small bugs over the skin, as well as a ‘jumping’ sensation of the energy

A feeling of crystal clear calmness and tranquillity, rise from center to center to the top of the head

Ascending in the famous ‘zigzag’ or Rising Serpent pattern

The energy can skip a center or two

The energy can reach the top of the head in a flash of light

The character attributes of both positive and negative are exaggerated and sexual power is increased.

If the energy rises to the top of the head, then it becomes possible to work directly on the Vital Energy within the body, and use it, as a means of enhancing the psychic experience and spiritual awakening.

 

In short, the psychic centers must first be awakened by the Secret Fire and purified, before the energy of the physical body, can be concentrated upon them.

 

Thus, our psychic exercises, and esoteric meditations are designed to prepare our minds, bodies, and consciousness for the liberation of the Secret Fire buried deep inside us. Through a progressive cleansing of the blood, nervous system, and endocrine glands, the ‘chains’ of the Vital Energy upon the Secret Fire are reduced and eliminated, allowing the ever present power and energy, a veritable pressure waiting to be released, to spring into action. Thus, the Serpent doesn’t really sleep, it is we who are asleep to its presence and potential blessing.

 

The Secret Fire and the Sepheroth

 

“So he drove out the man: and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the Tree of Life.” Genesis 3:24

 

The use of the “Tree of Life” has been both a blessing and a curse for modern esotericism. When understood, the “Tree” offers a complete and working model of Creation on both the microcosmic and macrocosmic scales. However, where many fail is on the personal level. The ability to apply the often very general information of the Tree to personal experiences of the initiate when they deal with physiological phenomena is profoundly lacking in modern esoteric circles. The reasons for this are several: First, many modern esotericists simply repeat what they have learned without experiencing whether or not it is true on a personal level; second, the language of kabbalah is multi-leveled, with the same word having several meanings, thus many who are using the words don’t know what they actually mean, or on what level it may be interpreted; thirdly, the diagram of the Tree is simply too neat and compartmentalized. Many kabbalists are unable to adapt to the fact that interior reality is much more flexible than the Tree allows when applied to the two dimensional page or illustration.

 

These problems are farther complicated by the idea of “One Tree” but “Four Worlds” making much meaningful, practical information nearly impossible to come by regarding the crises of spiritual awakening and so-called Kundalini phenomena as it relates to kabbalistic practices. When compared to the clear and explicit information available from Taoist and Tantrik sources, it is no wonder that so many Americans and Europeans prefer those systems to those more culturally and historically related.

 

To help resolve these problems in the transmission of knowledge, only information that has a relationship to experience of the author or others he has discussed this topic with will be included here. Theory will be stated as theory, and experience as experience. The meaning of common kabbalistic words will be defined, and redefined, to keep the communication clear and direct. An extensive use of confusing and somewhat irrelevant god-forms, references to mythology, and cosmology unconnected to the personal experience will be avoided.

 

Arousing the Sleeping Serpent

 

“Just as Moses lifted up the flaming serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that all who believe may have eternal life in him.” John 3:14-15

 

The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram is often the first ritual learned by aspiring magicians. Its function is to teach the basic mechanics of solitary ritual, and to give a basic technique whereby destructive energies maybe repelled or dispersed from the sphere of influence of the operator. The symbols used in the ritual are fundamental to other rituals of a more complex nature; however, to disregard the Lesser Ritual as somehow less effective is a mistake. A ritual, no matter how simple or complex is only as effective as the skill of its operator. Repeated use of the LRP is can be more effective than incompetent or irregular use of more sophisticated rites.

 

In total, there are approximately six fundamental rituals used in Western occultism reflecting an influence of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: 1) the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram 2) the Supreme Ritual of the Pentagram 3) the Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram 4) the Greater Ritual of the Hexagram and 5) the Rose+Cross Ritual. The use of The Flashing Sword appears to be irregular; however, it will also be considered along with its companion exercise or, The Rising Serpent.

 

Within these, the use of the Middle Pillar is optional, it is however, the Middle Pillar Exercise which does the most to purify the bodily energies, or Vital Energy, and make pathways for the release of the Secret Fire.

hermetic.com/stavish/essays/secret-fire.html

Part of the Tarot Garden by Niki de Saint Phalle, Tuscany, Italy

 

The Tarot Garden (Giardino Dei Tarocchi) is an exploration of the human condition whose medium is mosaic on a monumental scale. These almost impossibly brightly coloured combinations of buildings and sculpture reflect the metaphysical qualities represented by the 22 main tarot cards (the major arcana). They're not concerned with the fortune-telling uses of the cards, rather the elements of life's experience, personality and self-knowledge they refer to. Work on the garden began in 1979 and the main part of the work was carried out in the 1980s; it was officially opened to the public in May 1998. During construction Niki de Saint Phalle lived in the sphinx-like Empress, a mirror-glassed cavern with kitchen, bedroom and bathroom leading off.

 

There are 3 cards in this photo.

 

The High Priestess of intuitive feminine power (card no 3., on the left). This feminine intuition is one of the "keys" of wisdom. She represents the irrational unconscious with all its potential. Those who wish to explain events by reason or logic alone remain on the surface of things without the depth of instinctual vision and imagination.

 

The Magician (card no. 2., above the High Priestess), the great trickster, For me, the Magician is the card of God the creator of the universe. It is he that created the marvelous joke of our paradoxical world. It is the card of active intelligence. Pure light, pure energy, mischief and creation.

 

The Wheel of Fortune in the foreground, card no. 10.

 

Niki de Saint Phalle

Why you hidin' from some animatronic wolves, Maxine? Yer makin' a mountain outta'a mole hill!

Experiment: Five Days with No Shoes

  

Pre-Intro: Taking part in this experiment to go shoeless for five days should be beneficial in opening up some more understanding towards these emotions, and offer some more insight into ways to combat, strengthen and resolve various issues that need attention. ‘Travel’, (or simply ‘substantial change in environment’) does have psychologically therapeutic effects, and this being an important area of my work. I aim at doing more research into this by taking part in this experiment. This was an attempt to closely observe emotions in situations that I perceived myself as being ‘unusual’ from the crowd. It was an intentional encounter with the emotions similar to ‘fear’ and ‘shame’, and the ensuing study of how to restructure them into something better. It is to study and observe the mind while it was at work, from a self-imposed, hence more neutral, logical perspective. In this essay, I am going to look at how I did the experiment, what happened during it, and what the results of it were.

 

Goal: The difficulties involved in the concept of ‘setting yourself apart from the crowd’ tend to be amongst the biggest obstacles that many people face in their lives. These emotions and can be immensely complicated when people are trying to find their way in the world, resulting in situations that are hard for people to understand and manage. All people experience emotions such as ‘fear’ and ‘shame’ to differing extents and we will look at the two emotions in a bit more depth. For different individuals, the intensity of the emotions felt range on a broad spectrum from serving only as a minor barrier to personal-growth for some, but for others it can have more adverse effects that lead to various psychological and health issues. Emotions such as fear and shame can be combatted through confidence and courage building, but also depend on other factors. As emotions can be transferrable between individuals and between groups of people (i.e. cultures, societies etc.), the research needs to be environment-based too (i.e. this time being Thailand). Many individuals tend to feel strongly disempowered and imprisoned by these emotions and I aim to get a deeper and clearer understanding of these emotions and mental functions in relation to larger environmental/cultural influences. This is to continue to research and improve on our travel-based educational platform as a useful tool for our students and society.

  

The Beginning; The Story

 

I Am Getting My Socks Dirty!

For the past few days here in Bangkok, Thailand, I have been continuously going about daily life with no shoes on – mostly in white socks, and sometimes barefoot. During the first couple of days, I kept it slightly more low-key; like a timid cat checking out an unfamiliar environment, with just short ‘excursions’ to get food, or drinks, or to buy something at 7Eleven - all close to where I was staying. The area is known as Khaosan Road, a backpacker’s haven, where there are a couple of streets loaded with everything the weary or tempted tourist might want. There are bars, cafés, parks, temples, and plenty of people and street-side action to get distracted with at almost any time of the day and night. This infamous travelers’ hub tends to attract and retain a number of ‘unique’ travelers that easily intermingle amongst the more common-looking tourists, and it is commonplace to see rather endearing styles of fashion on display; tattoos, piercings, ‘rare’ hairstyles, and the occasional bare-footer. Although the ones sporting bare feet often tend to be hippies, drunk people, or locals that, by the looks of them, seem to be poorer or less of the sane type. I am in none of those categories, I hope. I’m just one of the normal people on the street, but I just ‘happened’ to be in my white socks. The area itself is a very familiar place to me, but the lack of shoes created a new headspace inside of me – such a change caused me to have to relearn the environment. It was an extremely uneasy thing to do and an extremely unusual feeling.

 

Why Do Such A Thing?

I’m doing this experiment for a number of reasons. A colleague and I are putting together a roughly twenty-minute video of the experiment with a short and simple discussion related to our work in the fields of travel-related education, psychology and therapy. This talk is mainly focused towards Chinese people (it is in Chinese) on the topic of pushing your psychological boundaries and acceptance of being different from the crowd. Understanding psychology cannot be done solely by observation or on paper, so getting to the core of many of the psychological and habitual issues needs to experienced first-hand. Many of our students (both teenage and particularly adults, including students’ parents) tend to often struggle with the acceptance of being different from the crowd and suffer from excuses that avoid the root of their difficulties. To us, as teachers, this psychological state needs to be pushed and prodded at for the sake of expanding our understanding of their experience. It is not that we are fearless or shameless as such – far from it - but we lead a traveling lifestyle in diverse environments where social and cultural constraints have less of an impact on our day-to-day choices and social encounters. So, I jumped right into this experiment and the ideas, observations and thoughts from the process will be shared in this essay. Who would guess that doing such things could open up a new world to me?

 

1.Why Does Our Sense of Self Have to Be So Strong?

Fear, nervousness and excitement tend to be confused by the brain as they all stimulate the same biological reactions, such as speeding up the heart rate. It is possible for the brain to confuse what it is actually experiencing. When an emotion of, perhaps, nervousness (activated by the brain telling you that you are different from the others) fear kicks in and the brain looks for things it perceives as ‘threats’. In my case, while being in socks in public, these ‘threats’ tended more likely to be people who might easily notice me; like people walking towards me or people sitting idly by that could possibly make some noticeable sort of remark. It would be these types of perceived ‘threats’ that I would find myself naturally trying to avoid eye contact with or maybe even subconsciously try to change my walking path to avoid ‘confrontation’. People that tended to be busy with their own affairs gave me no concerns at all. There also tended to be differences in perception between people you tend to associate more closely with; whether you know them or not, or would you ever see them again (i.e., the guesthouse staff that see you coming in and out each day without shoes on) - this tended to give me a stronger reaction. Similarly, stronger reactions were evoked from people I either genetically or culturally identified more with – i.e., different genders, ethnicities and age groups. These psychological reactions tended to be based on solely what people could possibly think of me and the strength of the reaction depended on these factors. It is not that I really minded, because walking in socks is far from the height of difficulty in this world, but I was observing my brain tending to be more active when it was trying to figure out my best ‘survival’ strategies in unfamiliar situations. Questions such as who would I most likely get approval from, who would mostly would stare or give me a negative reaction, who would I bring embarrassment to… these questions fill the brain as it is terrified of being ostracized by the group. Walking the streets in white socks could possibly be enough to make you a laughing stock. That is a terrifying feeling for a person. So, this is something that needed to be understood, looked at and conquered. I mean, it is my brain’s job to keep me safe and alive (and being part of the group is vital for survival), but it is my job to keep my brain in check!

 

During the next couple of days, I started venturing a bit further away from Khaosan Road as I began to feel less and less self-conscious. I then found myself at a Thammasat University having lunch by the river side. My socks tended to still be bright white on the tops, but had black footprints on the bottoms. Sometimes I started thinking that the dirtier they were the more natural it looked. I don’t know what to make of that – maybe it was more acceptance of the state of them. I enjoyed my time there. I walked back with an ice-coffee I bought from a street stall and sat in the park for a couple of hours pondering over the situation. My colleague and I had filmed a part of it to put into the video. The real importance comes down to not just the action of walking shoeless, but the following mental reflection over the what happened during the experience to make sure the brain understands what it is actually seeing and doing as it experiences and reacts to all this new stuff. This is all the brain’s doings, none of it is orchestrated by me. This goes for any situation in life really, but this process is often overlooked, as we move on to the next task ahead. Instead, I walked along the hot sticky street to a park further along the riverside where I laid down in a shady patch of grass under a massive twisted tropical tree and let everything sink in. The brain is automatically doing a lot of stuff I am not even aware of nor wanting to permit it to do, but it is more up to me to to understand that and learn to control what is going on instead. Skills like that should get me higher places than a good pair of sturdy hiking boots could ever. It seems going barefoot just may hold some magic.

 

2.Happily Hiding Behind Excuses

Oh, we humans know how to hide. While walking around the streets, into stores, happily soaking up the Bangkok atmosphere, I found myself hiding behind excuses for being shoeless. Despite my body (and bright white socks) being physically exposed for the world to see, but in my mind, I was aiming at quelling the inner dragon of self-consciousness. I thought I had more of a reason, for anyone who may look at me, to be shoeless in the late afternoon than the morning – maybe I had walked a long way and I had blisters, maybe my shoes broke, maybe I was hot? In the morning, by contrast, it just more looked like the guy couldn’t be bothered putting on his shoes. So, I went out in the morning too, not just using the heat as an excuse, or hiding behind the darkness of night. Having a small backpack with me was a good way to hide too. Could this guy be suffering from any of the above situations, and obviously his shoes are in his bag, the random passer-by would think. So, when I could, I would try go out empty-handed where possible. The only pity is I quite like to carry a small backpack with my camera for a bit of photography, and a bottle of water in it. I found taking off my glasses was another good way to not be able to see if people were staring or not, making me feel like I was more in my own world – listening to music could have the same effect. So, I kept the glasses on, and music off. I’d go with my coworker who was in bare feet, that felt more easier as there was the distraction of chatter and dialog about the experiment to hide behind. Going out alone would up the ante, put on a bit more stress, so I made sure to do this too. These are the tactics the brain employs to reason with myself as why to be shoeless. I mean what if someone asks where my shoes are, I could stumble and think of lies, but that won’t get anyone to paradise. All this led me to have to accept and address the root of the issue: “I am just the guy who is out in his socks”. No hiding. No denying. Dress the way you feel good, stand up straight, put yourself into a confident and open physical position, tell yourself ‘you are just the guy who wears his socks’. Be ready to give sincere eye-contact and engage in conversation with anyone you encounter and just walk on forward. What you tell yourself and how you behave decides the outcome and supporting the fundamental truth of the matter gets you where you need to be faster.

 

By the third day, after having had more and more physical practice of being out and about with no shoes on, plus having had plenty of mental exploration and conversation regarding the many aspects of the experience, things started to feel more natural. My mind was changing towards self-acceptance and encouragement towards such a lifestyle of endeavor, discovery and self-growth. By this time, I found myself hopping into a taxi one evening to go to MBK center shopping mall. I was originally planning to leave for India the day after, so I wanted to buy a couple of bits and pieces. I spent about two hours in the mall; the bottoms of my socks were rather dirty, but the whole time I was possibly even more relaxed than I would have been if I were in shoes. I am not really a fan of malls, but I found that I was more in a peaceful world of my own more so than a noisy mall of shoppers. I came back in a tuk-tuk and wandered back to my guesthouse through the busy bar district of Khaosan. It was if it were any normal day. To my surprise, I was relatively unaware of my lack of shoes.

  

3.Tackling the Bull in the Cage

It is the only way to address the issue and gain something true from your endeavors. If you carry yourself confidently, who can belittle you? If you accept the truth, who can deny it? The thing is, the world is like a mirror, if you don’t care, the world doesn’t care either. The world reflects back what is in your mind and in your heart. When I was subconsciously unaware of the fact I was in a busy shopping mall in my socks, to me, it seemed that the whole world was unaware of it. When I was stressed or uncomfortable, then it felt like the world was glaring at me. The subconscious mind brought out all sorts of perceived threats. The mind needs to be trained in order to live out the life you want to live. I have to admit, sometimes it felt weird having my coworker take photos of me while in socks in some public space somewhere with people all around, but you just have to tell yourself: “I accept everything that comes with this.” Maybe no one even saw, or maybe someone did see and probably forgot about it within three seconds. If they do remember it would be because they thought it was cool. Others are welcome to do whatever they want with their observations. But, remember, the noise is inside you.

 

By the fourth day, I had decided that I was too much invested into this project and to run off to India prematurely wouldn’t be the best choice. I wanted to continue a bit, and I wanted to put the video together (although it was my coworker who mainly took control of that part), and I wanted to write this down. Environment is utmost, and while I am still in this environment, I am more likely to order my ideas in a clearer way. I imagine the smell of curries and sounds of horns in the streets of Bangalore will take my mind away to other places. When you’re focused and enjoying something productive you should stride to stay in that state. Change (or disruption) to an environment is unsettling for a person, and I know this well as that is where my general main work’s focus lies – travel-related education, psychology and therapy. I happened to go to MBK once again, of course in my socks, and wandered the streets nearby and came back by public bus. Over the last day or two before leaving for India, I didn’t plan on any such sock-walks, didn’t aim for any such mental or physical stimulation, but instead, just a quiet calm mood to weather away the hot afternoons and get this writing done. But I realized by habit, I still went out in my socks for a morning coffee and 7eleven for bottles of water, and even out for dinner. It had become a new sort of comfort zone. No one likes the feeling of retraction, so maybe just now putting on shoes, feels a little like that. I actually really like who I am when I am out in my socks. I love the mental stimulation and feeling of freedom. Having seen the videos of myself out and about, I tend to think, under the circumstances, I looked rather confident and natural. I liked the way I looked and even more so, how I felt. The self-affirmation of something is almost more crucial than the actual activity itself.

 

4.Setting Things Straight

The truth is, walking around a city in a pair of white socks is not the epitome of difficulty in this world; to some it would be easy, and to others, mortifying. What is considered ‘difficult’ depends on you, and your previous experiences and interests. The thing is, when confronting your fear, or looking to expand you comfort zone, you need to not only delve directly into it, but you may also need to negotiate with yourself that much more difficult things exist. If you compare your difficulties to other things that are more difficult, then you reduce the size of your perceived burden. You may even need to actively seek out such things to confirm to yourself that they do indeed exist. Things are only small when compared with something bigger, just as the Earth is big if you travel by horse, but very tiny when observed from the moon. So, sometimes to aim at something you perceive as ‘big’ or ‘difficult’, then you may need to not only grind slowly and steadily in its direction, but also hack backwards at it to reduce the perceived size of it. There, that is something a bit more complicated to contemplate. Ha!

 

You may notice a theme here in that nowhere mentioned was any negative situations being mentioned. That is because during the five-day experiment, there were never any such occurrences. There are many nationalities around Khaosan, and never received a difficulty from anyone. I noticed people occasionally looked. I would also emphasize the word ‘looked’, and not ‘stared’. But on the contrary, I need to mention that no matter what you’re wearing or doing people do look. Yes, I noticed people occasionally still looked while I was wearing flip-flops. People have eyes after all, and they need to set their vision on something, so that’s forgivable. Maybe I just have nice (although hairy) legs? Ha-ha. But, maybe it is something more than that. Maybe it is something about the Thai people and the atmosphere they have created to be inclusive, tolerant and open-minded. To expand on this topic, I will need to keep up my white sock-walking activities across other parts of the world in order to work towards the core of such assumptions.

 

What Can Thai Attitude Offer The World?

However, the Thai people’s attitude towards life is rather healthy. It seems to be that if something does not harm anyone, then it is not really worth worrying about. That is a fair take on life. I noticed on the rare occasion when someone did not know what to make of me being in my socks, then substitute was a smile or laughter. That takes you back to the ‘world being a mirror’ philosophy; if you are self-conscious or flustered under a circumstance a laugh can be perceived as a snigger or an intrusion. When your soul and mind are calm, a laugh could be perceived as a friendly sign of acceptance or interest. It seems the Thais are slower in their reactions and judgements, allowing themselves sufficient time for a reasonable and proper response to ensue. I like the fact they are natural and thoughtful in their responses, something obviously passed down through their Buddhist faith. I would say, as a whole, I got a more neutral to positive reception anywhere I went in my socks. The interesting thing is, that is the same Thai reception I have received anywhere under almost any circumstance - with shoes on or off. But of course, there would be places you wouldn’t want to go in your socks, just as you wouldn’t swim in the sea or go to bed while wearing your shoes. Well, you can do that and why not if that is what you want - who are we to judge? But, it seems here in Thailand, if you are reasonable in your attitude and polite in your behavior, the Thais will treat you with the same respect. Hats off (or shoes off) to the Thais for that. We can all learn a lot from them.

 

Your Growth Is Your Gift To The World

It is also your own responsibility to work at expanding your comfort zone. There is not a single soul that does not want to become a bigger and better version of themselves. Explore and grow; that what souls do. It is your job to dig out what it needs and how to go about it. Sock-walking is just my own personal way, among others. But I also find it necessary that people take on such things. It is quite funny to know that all along during the beginning of the experiment, my brain was constantly doing all it could to help me avoid being ostracized by other humans. It was working to keep me surviving in optimal fashion. However, on the flipside, being the same as everyone does not necessarily get you anywhere at all. The ‘herd mentality’ is not lauded; it is not held in high regard. In fact, it is the opposite. I would believe that my getting out in my white socks is a rather positive thing in many people’s perceptions. I could see it and feel that at times. Maybe someone else just happened to think a little thought such as, ‘yeah, why not.’ Being a bit different reaffirms in others’ minds that possibilities exist. It is like the idea of recycling or reducing plastic use; you only really get the idea of when you are reminded of it, or see others taking part in it. My experiment probably does far better for the world that one would imagine.

 

My Unexpected Gains

I actually feel I have been through a type of therapy myself. I feel energetic. I had to make a quick phone call to an elderly neighbor in China, and she mentioned the change in my tone of voice. I was quite astonished when she said I sounded younger. My eyes feel bright. The flame in my soul feels steady. Making the video and seeing myself in it looking confident and actually liking the look of it, made me feel rather positive about myself. I feel mentally light. Maybe it’s because of Thailand itself and the abundance of sunshine. Maybe it is just because of finishing a two-week work project to Nepal with a group of my students. Maybe I am feeling a natural and positive shift towards a new segment of growth in my field. Or maybe I am feeling physically light, because having walked without shoes on, you begin to tread more lightly and carefully, and are more focused and intentional in your footsteps. Buddhist monks tend to go barefoot, as it seems to have a meditative effect, or maybe bare-footedness offers a boost of energy from the beneath the Earth; something like the opposite of soaking up vitamin D from the sun above. Maybe it was the psychological pushing and prodding of my internal world that met the instinctual need for physical stimulation of the body. Maybe it was sensual stimulation of the mind and feet; something we get too little of in the modern world. I think it was all of the above together that reenergized my body, and reinvigorated the mind and soul and I feel that I have given myself some psychological and perceptual reorganizing, something like a software upgrade. It feels something like coming out after a good Thai Massage.

 

An Experiment Resulting In The Restructuring the Subconscious View the World

However way, when you throw yourself into the deep end for an experiment in self-growth, it is not always easy and does take some courage and effort. And, so it should. Everything worthwhile always involves an element of difficulty. Why should one be rewarded without having put in any work anyway? Personally, I am very satisfied with this experiment and it has been an interesting, fun and valuable experience and I am sure I will enjoy the benefits of it for a long time to come. I will probably try to keep up with the occasional sock-walk when and where possible, and will aim at attempting the experiment again in other parts of the world. So, if next time you see a guy out in his white socks, it just might be me. Cheers! 

  

Note:

Yes, I got several pairs of socks dirty. They washed up well when hand washed in the shower. I got zero holes in them. I received zero cuts or injuries from being out shoeless during these five days.

  

When your child is born there is deep instinctual love.

When your child grows to adulthood and a deep respectful friendship is born, what name be that love? For me I name it Chi.

I cuddled up last night with some Coltrane, paper scraps and a bucket of glue, and loaded the results into my scanner for the internet people to see..

 

There was no major goal, or game plan in mind. Just spontaneous paper finds underfoot, scraps from previous days and instinctual combinations of words and images...

 

I mak...e stuff @ www.elus1v.com/

A Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) peers intently through dense undergrowth, its eye locked on the camera — or the intruder. Hidden within the brush, this protective parent keeps silent watch over its nearby nest. The moment captures the quiet tension of nesting season, when these otherwise calm birds become fiercely alert. A glimpse of the instinctual vigilance that defines wildlife in its most intimate moments.

“Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She carries stories, dreams, words and songs. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species.”

 

― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

 

© Cathrine Halsør

 

cathrinehalsor.blogspot.no/2013/11/wild-woman-comes-back....

I am Shang.

 

I am Flynn Rider.

 

I am Lumiere.

 

I am Prince Eric.

 

I am Nick from Zootopia.

 

Honestly, it can be tough to keep track of who I am these days.

 

My three year old daughter has taken to role playing her favorite Disney movies. This game is happening all the time from dawn until dusk. Non-stop. The movie switches two to three times per day, typically without warning. Sometimes you will get a "We are playing Mary Poppins, right?" just to keep you on track. And whatever you do, do not make the mistake of calling her by a character from a different movie, or god forbid, her actual real life name. I'm not even sure who I am right now as I type this. I think I am Kristoff from Frozen.

 

And just like we humans need to have an identity, so does a photograph. Sometimes, I lose track of that. I'll put too much in a photo. I want to bring the whole scene back home with me. I think that's instinctual, but with too much in the frame, the subject can get lost. It's better to keep it simple. With simplicity comes clarity of subject and message.

 

With this photo, though, I broke that rule. I have photographed the lily pads on this pond many times and when I saw the sunrise colors lighting up the sky, I knew they would look very nice interspersed between the lily pads. With the water glass-still, the lily pads appeared to be floating among the clouds. But I did worry that I ran the risk of leaving too much chaos in the scene. At a certain point, I think the chaos becomes texture or a pattern and then maybe it is a simple pattern as opposed to a messy muddled composition. It can be tough to find that balance. Regardless, it is a photo with a split personality. It is a photo of the lily pads. It is also a photo of the sky.

 

... and I am Michael from Mary Poppins.

Wolf is "man's best friend". Maybe this is because the wolf represents the kind of person man aspires to be:

- Loyal & trustworthy pack member

- Powerfully instinctual

- Adventurous path finder

_______________________

The world is made merely of small and simple pixels; let me show you.

Instinctual, unconditional, and forever

  

"We can slip in, two minutes. Just like that, piece of cake."

 

Edward Murr's aggravated countenance went unnoticed by the younger strategist at his side, straining at the leash. This was not the usual way. Waiting there in the damp, small hours of Fairfax's morning, Murr miserably contemplates whether or not to correct his partner. His own pause of uncertainty in his authority agitates him further.

 

"George," Murr posed to his accomplice, "do you believe Cathan would have sent you to do this task on your own?"

 

George considers, shifting his stance in the bushes that the pair was using for cover.

 

"He might have."

 

"He would not," Murr redresses. "Leading me to my next question: Do you think there is a reason why I'm the person on this crew that Cathan hasn't been inclined to lecture about, shall we say, a botched errand?"

 

George lets an indignant puff of air out from the back of his throat this time, but fails to suppress a smile, all the same. Murr raises a hand before the hothead can conjure a sarcastic riposte.

 

"No, I'll help you; I'm aware your power isn't cerebral. See, I've already taken my trial by fire. Cathan was there. When I work, the calls I make don't come from a place of needing to prove myself. Not anymore. Now if you're going to assume to tell me how to go about this operation in a way Cathan would approve of..."

 

It's George's turn to cut in. "You're going to have to share your best friend, Ed. Do you think there's a reason why he's extended his circle of trust beyond just you?"

 

Murr shrugs off the intentionally disparaging imitation. "Home invasions are sloppy. You can take my word for it. We get the kid on the way to or back from the school."

 

"There's still going to be cops crawling all over. We've been holding up in this town for too long."

 

"Kaleidoscope managed the patrols last night. So will we now."

 

"Right..." George sits back. "And the kid. If she knows nothing..."

 

"Then we throw her back, and the interrogation won't need to be... excessive. What kind of question is that?"

 

"Oh you misunderstand, Pops. I'm hoping she IS tied to this hero running around. Be a shame if Kalei or Chain Master were the only ones who had any fun, before we have to get serious for the big day."

 

At this, Murr is overcome with revulsion. "This is necessary. Not fun."

 

George just keeps his eyes on the Nash household. "You can call the shots on the mission, Ed. Do me a solid, though; don't tell me how much I can enjoy it."

  

***

  

Vicki vowed to herself for the tenth time that, if she made it out of (whatever this was) alive, she was never going to get anywhere she needed to be by running, ever again.

 

Even after all she had experienced in the past few hours, she was finding it difficult to accept what she had been told, and what she now held in her scratched hands. Frannie Nash-the mousy, wouldn't-harm-a-fly Frannie, of all people-was next on these creeps' hit-list? There was a whole community living in the old mines, helping a superhero? And this phone... this phone was going to solve her problems. Somehow.

 

"It's not a wireless, it... HAS a wire!" Vicki bemoans, still plodding along into town, grappling in annoyance with the clunky object and its blanket. It hadn't been hung up by its owner; the cord was simply a tangled mess, fastening the receiver to the body of the dial. "How does he expect me to use this piece of-"

 

Angrily holding the device to her ear to prove to herself its worthlessness, she detects, to her amazement, the white noise of functional electronics. She halts for an instant, before remembering the urgency behind her flight, and she resigns to making tracks towards Frannie's home, first, and pondering this bizarre phenomenon, second. But over the earpiece comes a diligent, somewhat droll voice:

 

"If you wish to assume a new identity, please, end your current call and redial."

 

"... What the shit," Vicki concedes in exasperation.

 

"If you are still in immediate peril, please, stay on the line."

 

Vicki continues navigating the streets, having, at long last, put Fairfax's more rural landscape behind her. She sees a lone jogger, but no stationed police officers. The lax security was nearly enough to make Vicki question whether she was being subjected to the glass woman's trickery again, but nothing else was sickeningly off-putting. She wasn't sure a policeman would be up to listening anyway, with the story she had to tell. Fairfax wasn't supposed to be quite this crazy.

 

Diverting to the precinct and chancing her troubles with the authorities was off the table, Vicki decided. Frannie could already be...

 

"My friend is about to be in danger! You're supposed to do... something. Whoever 'you' are."

 

"I am your Operator. Are you requesting assistance beyond your H-Dial's standard function?"

 

"I just got this thing today! I need serious help!"

 

Vicki all but plows straight into three pedestrians as she cuts past a hedge around a café corner. It's Glinda, Roger and Chris, wide-eyed, as equally ragged as she was.

 

Roger, having apparently caught her last exclamation, penetrates the awkward silence of the confrontation. "Well... I always told you as much."

 

Vicki's eye twitches absentmindedly, as she prepares to lambaste Roger's comedic timing to no end, only for Chris to also chime in.

 

"We just got back, thought we heard you yelling a street or two over. Vicki... We uh, well, you aren't going to believe this-"

 

"The boy in the park is a superhero and we almost got killed by a witch and a giant but there are people living in the silver mines and he told me to take a phone with me to save Frannie because they'll think she's in cahoots!" Vicki blurts out.

 

"Did... did you take drugs?!" Glinda asks, aghast at the prospect. "THAT's what you were doing instead of meeting us last-"

 

"THE PHONE. IS TALKING. Say 'Hi', phone!" Vicki's friends exchanged concerned glances as she hoists the machine towards them.

 

"If you are grievously injured, please, allow a friend or family member to hang up for you."

 

"There, crystal clear? Great, explain it to me," Vicki says dryly to the other astounded kids. She skips backward in the same direction she had been headed, calling out, "Frannie needs help, I'm going there. I'm starving, terrified, I kind of really really want you to come, and at the same time, not so much because I feel like this is definitely going to get freaky, sooo..."

 

"Vicki, w... oh come on!" Roger stumbles after her.

 

"Is this night ever going to end?" Glinda complains, following suit.

 

Chris cocks his head, bringing up the rear of the pack. "Did she say Frannie? You mean that... weird girl she knows who never comes over to our table during-"

 

"It's best to not go there, Chris," came Roger's interjection.

 

"She's not weird, Christopher; it's something you just... you don't need to know," Glinda summarizes.

 

"Why do girls keep all these things hidden and then still expect a guy to be perfectly mindful of the subject?" Chris asks, not condescendingly but earnestly.

 

"Why do boys assume they're going to have something worthwhile to say if they did hear the whole story?" Glinda counters.

 

Chris and Roger slow as Vicki and Glinda keep up the pace. The boys share a look. "Huh."

  

***

  

"She's... Ed, she's coming out. Back porch."

 

Murr spies the girl, tromping out the screen door. She seats herself despondently on rickety wooden steps, oblivious to the men's presence yards away.

 

"And early enough that there's not a potential witness in sight. Here I was thinking we were going to have to work for this," George spits, still tugging at his gloves as a force of habit.

 

Murr speaks softly. "Circle around now, I'll stay here. We corner her. In case she's faster than she looks."

 

"Sheesh, would you look at this kid. Sitting out here at the crack of dawn like some depressed old lady. Being kidnapped might be a marked improvement."

 

"NOW."

 

"Loosen up, 'Distortionex'. We're about to be Cathan's favorites."

  

***

  

Vicki and her pursuers arrive at one final hill's crest, serving as the border of Frannie's back yard. There are but a hand-full of aspens obstructing their view of the residence.

 

"... and so we just took off," Chris pants, recapping for Vicki his account of the beings in the cornfield. "The guy in the armor barely touched the monster and it-"

 

"Blew up," Glinda quivers. "Some of it did, anyway."

 

Vicki stops dead in her tracks, the other three piling up at her back. She turns around timidly, not at all like herself.

 

"I made up my mind. You guys should stay away, if those goons are here. Nick and I barely got away the first time."

 

"Vicki, just pause for five seconds and tell us what's going on! Weird stuff went down last night, for ALL of us, and I for one want to know if and how it connects," Roger implores. "What exactly are we doing here?"

 

"I hope I'm doing nothing here. I hope-" Vicki doesn't finish, suddenly dropping to the ground. In her hurry she slides on wet leaves beneath her shoes, yanking Chris down with her behind a tree, and shushes him. Roger and Glinda do the same without instruction. Just a short sprint below them sits Frannie, seemingly meditating in the still air, unaware of a man clothed and masked in blue, easing toward her around the north side of her home.

 

"Stay. Here," Vicki mouths. She throws away the dial's cloth.

 

"What's Frannie DOI-" Chris mutters not so quietly, prompting Roger to slap a hand over his face.

 

The man was thirty feet from Frannie.

 

Vicki holds the phone up once again. "Phone guy? I need that help now!"

 

"If you wish to assume a new identity, please, end your current call and redial."

 

The man was twenty feet away.

 

"We have to warn her!" Glinda objects. Roger and Chris both look to Vicki questioningly.

 

"I haven't used you yet, why do I need to redial?" Vicki demands.

 

Glinda pulls her hair. "Who cares?? Dial!"

 

Fifteen feet.

 

The speaker crackles like a fire. "Please redial for another hero. Your H-Dial is still in use."

 

"Nick," Vicki realizes. What was going to happen to Nick if she...

 

Ten feet.

 

Roger pounds the tree with his palm. "Do it or I will!"

 

Vicki slams the phone down in its cradle, then slings it back up to her ear. The dial is emanating heat now, and magenta strands of electricity dance across the cord.

 

"Dial 'H'," it offers Vicki.

 

"Dial!" Glinda repeats.

 

A body-length separates Frannie from the menace.

 

Vicki dials.

  

***

  

A concussive blast of light and sound sizzles out from the woods, ripping Edward Murr off his feet. George Schneider, too, is taken by surprise, and cannot reach Frannie in time to nab her, as he is unceremoniously lifted headfirst into a drain pipe. Frannie tumbles off the porch, skipping a heartbeat or two as she recovers and scans all about the property. She recognizes Glinda, and two other boys she knew were Vicki's friends, standing in a now-cleared ring of smoldering grass. They were shielding themselves from a fourth figure within the haze: A lean woman, wearing striking blue over all but her mouth and hair.

 

"Who-"

 

"The hell is that supposed to be?" Murr finishes, wiping mulch off his helmet.

 

The heroine steps forward, one hand curled to make a fist and the elbow down at her side.

 

"If you evildoers think you have the run of the town, you're in for a little surprise! THUMBELINA is here!" she belts out.

 

"Uh," Roger adds.

 

The woman snaps out of the moment, now appearing thoroughly bewildered by her own voice. "Why did I just say that? Why... am I THIS TALL?"

 

A dumbfounded Glinda stares, mouth agape. "Vicki?!"

 

Frannie bolts for the door back to her kitchen, but from her right, a gleaming, gold netting zips past her nose and adheres to the frame and knob. George takes aim again with an index finger, nursing a lump on his temple with his free hand. His expression is, to say the least, unamused.

 

Vicki/"Thumbelina", larger than life and overflowing with untapped power, springs forth to stop the would-be assailant. "You could use some micromanaging, you ugly WHAT AM I SAYING?!"

 

"Okay," Murr accepts, pointing his knuckles at the woman rushing his ally. The air between his fingers ripples.

 

"Watch out!" Roger hollers. "Red guy!"

 

Vicki spots the second man. Her new form shrinks reflexively, closing the last bit of distance to George in a flying leap, and letting Murr's beam attack carry on careening through the yard. It impacts a tree, instantaneously reducing it to a brownish puddle, as Vicki executes a kick to George's upper arm, driving him against the wooden slats of the house; even at a fraction of her original size, she seemed to have lost no velocity nor mass. Frannie sees the opening and takes off again, now towards the kids who are still up the hill, scarcely comprehending the circumstances.

 

"Help, Glinda!" is Frannie's cry.

 

Murr unleashes another blast, this one aimed at Frannie. She tackles the grass in time to avoid the open air she had just been occupying hardening; it crinkles and squeaks like a crushed water bottle. Vicki leaves a doubly battered George to now take on Murr, while Chris notes something amidst the pandemonium.

 

"The dial slid down there!" he informs his two friends, steeling himself to get closer to the action to retrieve it.

 

"There's also some dude liquefying TREES down there!" Roger reports, as though Chris had missed this.

 

"And a vegetable monster almost pulverized you last night. So let's not-"

 

"Nothin' doin', Chris!"

 

Roger grips Chris' sweater, but not so tightly that Chris couldn't break free if he wanted. That was just it; Chris, despite his words, truly could not make himself take one step nearer to the dial, Frannie, or the metahuman powers whizzing left and right. He saw himself again in the corn field, fixed in place there in the mud, at the mercy of a threat his friends had been able to overcome when the chips were down. But not him. The thought of it ate through Chris like acid.

 

"Let's all go! All at once!" Glinda urges. "Come on, Frannie is-"

 

"Almost mine," Murr tells himself, having completely cut Frannie off from the far hill with pillars of solid air. Vicki lunges at him at one-twentieth her normal height, but the man directs a wide ray of energy into her. A jet of boiling water surrounds her, and she is flung clear through the nearby tool shed. Just then, police sirens blare beyond the row of houses, and Murr stays his hand long enough for Frannie to regain her footing. She faces him, unable to keep a few tears from escaping.

 

"We just want some answers, kid. Don't make a whole production out of this."

 

"Hey!"

 

Glinda, Roger and Chris, shoulder to shoulder, bounded to the base of the hill. To Frannie, none of them come across as the spitting image of confidence. Even so, the trio standing there rigidly, appearing as though they weren't sure what to do with their arms, gave Frannie an unusually warm feeling. Roger then commences to pick up the H-Dial.

 

"You must be looking for this, jackoff," Roger deduces. He and his companions back away a few inches, at Murr's face twisting with both rage and desperation.

 

The sirens continue to close in. George begins to stir on the porch, swearing and clutching his side. Vicki somersaults out of the wreckage of the shed, scalded but determined as ever.

 

"Didn't your mother ever teach you to minimize damages?" she berates Murr. Vicki groans her own instinctual pun, then waves a hand behind herself. The shed reconstructs in a flurry, rakes and shovels settling back onto their hooks with absolute precision. "... I can do that?"

 

"Drop the phone," Murr commands.

 

"Just ICE 'EM ALREADY!" George screams, loosing a slew of gilded, silk strands at the gathered kids.

 

Vicki wills several blades of grass to enlarge, swatting the projectiles out of the air, before focusing on Murr. George does not cease the barrage, forcing Roger and the others to duck and dodge along a clothesline. The hanging shirts provide minimal protection, with one of the webs snaring Glinda's shoelaces and pant leg, dragging her down. Roger and Chris purposely fall to their knees to stop their momentum, and scramble back to Glinda. All three pull hopelessly at the bonds, as George zeroes in.

 

Wrenching both of Murr's forearms in the crook of one leg, Vicki flips into a handstand on just one arm. Murr roars in pain, struggling to grab his opponent. His outstretched fingers arc and sputter with transmutative properties, licking at Vicki's scorched suit. Her unoccupied hand points at George, intending to shrink him. Her concentration shatters when Murr succeeds in tapping her lower leg, and a chunk of boot, skin and muscle evaporates. Vicki yowls; distracted, the hex she had meant for George only influences his mask. The disguise, significantly scaled down, immediately constricts his face. George joins the other superpowered persons' cries with his own distressed caterwaul. He claws at the taut latex around his jaw and eyelids.

 

Glinda remains stuck in spite of her friends' efforts. The sirens have stopped now. Police are shouting from the street.

 

Murr rams Vicki into the dirt using a plated shoulder. Inches from grasping her neck, something conks into his reinforced helmet. Paper-thin fractures spread over the glass guard, and he trips, as tiny crystal particles begin to infiltrate his tear ducts. A baseball rolls to a stop at Vicki's heel. Murr can't see it, only the blurry outline of a pink windbreaker worn by Frannie Nash, who slowly straightens from her pitch. Not realizing the man is effectively blinded, she backs up, nearly tripping herself, closer to where Glinda lay on the turf.

 

"Agh... Golden Web?" Murr stutters in the direction he believes George to be. "Get us out... of here."

 

The police were close enough for their radios' scratchy commands to be heard. George finally acknowledges the ticking clock and, still hindered by his mask, crawls to Murr's voice. He links their arms, and fires a web up and over the rear hill's trees. The blonde man drools like a feral dog; his face is red both from its inhibited movement, as well as no small amount of humiliation.

 

"I'll have your heads, brats. You and your super-friends... ALL your heads, on pikes!"

 

The pair of villains catapult over the ground on Golden Web's rope, until they are out of sight. Roger dives for Vicki the moment their adversaries have disappeared. Frannie maintains her distance.

 

"Vicki?! Hey!"

 

Roger's hands hover tentatively over her leg wound. Her eyes are cloudy, but she breathes plainly. Having retained the Operator's advice, Vicki indicates with a bloodied finger for him to present the H-Dial.

 

"Han- ... Hang up."

 

Roger does so without hesitation. A smoky vacuum effect develops between the heroine and the device. Her voluminous hair and the blue of her costume drain into the funnel of strange energies, and with a slight gust, the artificial storm vanishes entirely. The real Vicki, with only the minor scrapes and bruises she had earned before using the dial, rests in the grass, alert and speechless.

 

Glinda bites her lip and watches the sides of the house anxiously. "Vicki... run with it!"

 

All five kids use the last seconds, before the police arrive, to mull over their options. They didn't require any more time than was available. Five kids, who had just found a way to turn the tides, who had known little else besides barriers, a time and a place for everything, and childhoods sifting away all too soon... were not going to surrender this gift.

 

The verdict is reached unanimously, with no more than four nods, and an apprehensive gulp from Frannie. Vicki splits off for the treeline, toting the H-Dial once again.

 

"More running," she remarks laboriously. "Stellar."

  

***

  

"Help! My friend needs help, she's stuck!"

 

Chris runs directly towards the band of policemen approaching from the left of Frannie's home, as Roger does the same to those on the right. If they can just keep the officers busy for a few seconds, Vicki could sneak away with-

 

"Hold your fire! Hold!"

 

"Please, she's over there."

 

"Okay, son, stay right here; we're going to check it out and help your friend," the first officer assures Chris.

 

The boy sees Roger trying to shepherd every cop to Glinda's spot in the yard, but Vicki is already gone without a trace, rendering the diversion unnecessary. Frannie races up her porch's steps. Two of the officers attempt to call her back until her mother emerges from the doorway onto the stoop. She clings to Frannie, ushering her inside. Chris wonders briefly if Mrs. Nash will ignore the cops altogether, but she turns to engage their questions, once she and her daughter are behind the screen door.

 

"I guess Glinda and Roger know best," Chris concludes for himself. "If Frannie's mom is some kind of recluse, that's not my business."

 

All in all, he knew things had played out very fortunately for him and the others. As for the sit-down with parents and explanations for reckless behavior that were sure to come, Chris was holding onto the hope that he could at least make it home, and catch them off guard with the news. Rather than...

 

"Son."

 

This time it wasn't the geniality of a policeman that had earned Chris the title.

 

"Hi Dad."

 

Detective Greg King looks back at the squad cars parked alongside the curb, and his own unmarked vehicle, roosting majestically in the center of the Nash's flower garden. Chris' father composes himself, hands pushing his jacket aside to rest on his waist, eyes fixated on the end of his tie. "Good thing I was in the neighborhood."

 

"Yup."

 

"Let's go home, Chris. Your mother needs to kill you."

from dictionary.com

 

noun

 

1. the act of fixing or the state of being fixed.

 

2. Chemistry.

a.reduction from a volatile or fluid to a stable or solid form.

b.the process of converting atmospheric nitrogen into a useful compound, as a nitrate fertilizer.

 

3. Photography. the process of rendering an image permanent by removal of light-sensitive silver halides.

 

4. Psychoanalysis. a partial arrest of emotional and instinctual development at an early point in life, due to a severe traumatic experience or an overwhelming gratification.

 

5. a preoccupation with one subject, issue, etc.; obsession:

All her life she had a fixation on stories of violent death.

the storm and i arrived here at pretty much the same time, sunset for what there was of it. and i remember being of (at least) two minds...

 

on one side, thinking i got to where i wanted to go, and i'm at the far end of nowhere, and will the rain f**k up my camera, and i'm not really wearing the right shoes for tramping about in this mud, and will anyone find me if i end up accidentally nosediving down these rocks..

 

on the other side, more instinctual than anything else, feeling like i'm at the end of the world, comfortably surrounded by water and rock, with the wind forcing the smell of the sea into me, and the continuation of the feeling that this is only the beginning..

 

sometimes it seems like these moments coincide with things happening to you, and around you, sometimes things you're not even aware of..but still everything's changed.. that's how this day ended..

 

this roll of film gave me a bit of a hard time in the developing tank, and i had to scan the negs differently, frames and all. and this one felt like it would lose something by eliminating the little corners that would usually go when it was cropped..so, for that and other reasons unknown, it stays as is...

Honey bee searching for that elusive last little bit of pollen and nectar.

Origins of the concept

The songs of, the native priests of Bamileke, believe that telepathic messages are sent directly from one solar plexus to another. According to the Bamileke, the KE, or etheric body, of one person sends out a “finger” or thread of aka substance to the solar plexus of another. This sticky substance connects the two like a “silver spider web.” Telepathic messages are sent out along these threads. After the instinctive, or “low,” self receives the message, it relays the information to the rational, or “middle,” self, where it “rises in the mind” like a memory. When repeated contact is made, these threads eventually become braided into an aka “cord,” which creates a strong telepathic bond between two people. Aka threads can be sent to strangers by means of a glance or a handshake.The African Bamileke communicate in a similar way., the Bamilleke of the Cameroon believe that all living creatures are connected by a stream of energy that extends from one belly button to another and named this song SI. The Bamileke use these horizontal “lines” like telephone wires to send and receive telepathic messages.

 

In experiments dating back to the nineteenth century, scientists have validated two types of telepathy: instinctual, or feeling-based, telepathy and mental, or mind-to-mind, telepathy. According to the Wisdom teachings, there is also another, higher type of telepathy called soul-to-soul, or spiritual, telepathy.

According to historians such as Roger Luckhurst and Janet Oppenheim the origin of the concept of telepathy in Western civilization can be tracked to the late 19th century and the formation of the Society for Psychical Research.As the physical sciences made significant advances, scientific concepts were applied to mental phenomena (e.g., animal magnetism), with the hope that this would help to understand paranormal phenomena. The modern concept of telepathy emerged in this context. Psychical researcher Eric Dingwall criticized SPR founding members Frederic W. H. Myers and William F. Barrett for trying to "prove" telepathy rather than objectively analyze whether or not it existed.

 

Thought reading

In the late 19th century, the magician and mentalist, Washington Irving Bishop would perform "thought reading" demonstrations. Bishop claimed no supernatural powers and ascribed his powers to muscular sensitivity (reading thoughts from unconscious bodily cues).[15] Bishop was investigated by a group of scientists including the editor of the British Medical Journal and the psychologist Francis Galton. Bishop performed several feats successfully such as correctly identifying a selected spot on a table and locating a hidden object. During the experiment Bishop required physical contact with a subject who knew the correct answer. He would hold the hand or wrist of the helper. The scientists concluded that Bishop was not a genuine telepath but using a highly trained skill to detect ideomotor movements.Our etheric bodies are part of an interactive sea of energy that connects us to everyone and everything in our world. It is through our etheric bodies that we both send and receive telepathic information. In this article, I will describe each type of telepathy in detail and show you just how universal these teachings are. I will also show you how our pioneering scientists are, once again, validating this ancient wisdom.

 

Another famous thought reader was the magician Stuart Cumberland. He was famous for performing blindfolded feats such as identifying a hidden object in a room that a person had picked out or asking someone to imagine a murder scene and then attempt to read the subject's thoughts and identify the victim and reenact the crime. Cumberland claimed to possess no genuine psychic ability and his thought reading performances could only be demonstrated by holding the hand of his subject to read their muscular movements. He came into dispute with psychical researchers associated with the Society for Psychical Research who were searching for genuine cases of telepathy. Cumberland argued that both telepathy and communication with the dead were impossible and that the mind of man cannot be read through telepathy, but only by muscle reading. Instinctual Telepathy

 

Instinctual telepathy is the lowest type of telepathy. We share this type of telepathy with the animal kingdom, and it is still a common mode of communication in indigenous cultures. Instinctual telepathy utilizes the area around the solar plexus, the center of instinct and emotion. In this type of telepathy, one person registers the feelings or needs of another at a distance. As you will see below, this teaching can be found in a wide variety of cultures, both ancient and modern. In every culture, the area around the solar plexus is key.

  

Case studies

 

Gilbert Murray conducted early telepathy experiments.

In the late 19th century the Creery Sisters (Mary, Alice, Maud, Kathleen, and Emily) were tested by the Society for Psychical Research and believed to have genuine psychic ability. However, during a later experiment they were caught utilizing signal codes and they confessed to fraud. George Albert Smith and Douglas Blackburn were claimed to be genuine psychics by the Society for Psychical Research but Blackburn confessed to fraud:

 

For nearly thirty years the telepathic experiments conducted by Mr. G. A. Smith and myself have been accepted and cited as the basic evidence of the truth of thought transference... ...the whole of those alleged experiments were bogus, and originated in the honest desire of two youths to show how easily men of scientific mind and training could be deceived when seeking for evidence in support of a theory they were wishful to establish.

 

Between 1916 and 1924, Gilbert Murray conducted 236 experiments into telepathy and reported 36% as successful, however, it was suggested that the results could be explained by hyperaesthesia as he could hear what was being said by the sender.[21][22][23][24][25] Psychologist Leonard T. Troland had carried out experiments in telepathy at Harvard University which were reported in 1917. The subjects produced below chance expectations.

 

Arthur Conan Doyle and W. T. Stead were duped into believing Julius and Agnes Zancig had genuine psychic powers. Both Doyle and Stead wrote the Zancigs performed telepathy. In 1924, Julius and Agnes Zancig confessed that their mind reading act was a trick and published the secret code and all the details of the trick method they had used under the title of Our Secrets!! in a London newspaper.

 

In 1924, Robert H. Gault of Northwestern University with Gardner Murphy conducted the first American radio test for telepathy. The results were entirely negative. One of their experiments involved the attempted thought transmission of a chosen number, out of 2010 replies none were correct.

 

In February 1927, with the co-operation of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), V. J. Woolley who was at the time the Research Officer for the SPR, arranged a telepathy experiment in which radio listeners were asked to take part. The experiment involved 'agents' thinking about five selected objects in an office at Tavistock Square, whilst listeners on the radio were asked to identify the objects from the BBC studio at Savoy Hill. 24, 659 answers were received. The results revealed no evidence for telepathy.

 

A famous experiment in telepathy was recorded by the American author Upton Sinclair in his book Mental Radio which documents Sinclair's test of psychic abilities of Mary Craig Sinclair, his second wife. She attempted to duplicate 290 pictures which were drawn by her husband. Sinclair claimed Mary successfully duplicated 65 of them, with 155 "partial successes" and 70 failures. However, these experiments were not conducted in a controlled scientific laboratory environment.[35] Science writer Martin Gardner suggested that the possibility of sensory leakage during the experiment had not been ruled out:

 

In the first place, an intuitive wife, who knows her husband intimately, may be able to guess with a fair degree of accuracy what he is likely to draw—particularly if the picture is related to some freshly recalled event the two experienced in common. At first, simple pictures like chairs and tables would likely predominate, but as these are exhausted, the field of choice narrows and pictures are more likely to be suggested by recent experiences. It is also possible that Sinclair may have given conversational hints during some of the tests—hints which in his strong will to believe, he would promptly forget about. Also, one must not rule out the possibility that in many tests, made across the width of a room, Mrs. Sinclair may have seen the wiggling of the top of a pencil, or arm movements, which would convey to her unconscious a rough notion of the drawing.In our culture, the term gut feeling is the most common way to explain our instinctive feelings about a person or situation. We say, “I trusted my gut in making that decision” or, “My gut told me not to trust this or that person.” This term has long been used in the business and law-enforcement communities. Businessmen use the term gut hunch to describe their instinctive reactions to an idea or proposal, while police detectives refer to their “blue sense” as a way to describe their gut feelings about a crime.

 

In 2004, parapsychologists Dean Radin and Marilyn Schlitz conducted an experiment at the Institute of Noetic Sciences with twenty-six couples to determine if the gut response of one person could be felt by another. One person, designated as the sender, was shown a series of images designed to evoke “positive, negative, calming, or neutral emotions.” In another room, the reaction of the receiver was monitored by electrodes placed on the heart, skin, and stomach muscles. The experimenters found that the stronger emotions—both positive and negative—did produce measurable responses in the receiver and concluded that the gut has a “belly brain” with a “perception intelligence” of its own.[5]

 

The existence of a belly brain has also been backed up by medical research. It was first documented by the nineteenth-century German neurologist Leopold Auerbach and later rediscovered by Dr. Michael Gershon, a professor at Columbia University who wrote a book in the 1990s called The Second Brain. This second brain is made up of billions of nerve cells in the digestive tract. Some medical researchers now believe that the belly brain may be the source of the unconscious gut reactions that are later communicated to the main brain.[6]

 

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, the author of two books on this subject, has done more than anyone to validate this type of telepathy scientifically. In The Sense of Being Stared At and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind, he summarizes his research on this subject. He also believes this type of telepathic communication to be instinctual, calling it part of our “evolutionary heritage, an aspect of our biological, animal nature.”[7]

 

Sheldrake and his associates have collected over five thousand case histories illustrating this type of telepathy. An additional twenty thousand people have participated in a variety of experimental tests— the most recent involving text and e-mail messages. While largely unconscious, this type of telepathic perception still plays an important role in modern life. Because it utilizes the center of emotion, instinctual telepathy depends on strong emotional bonds between two people. The most common examples are between parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers, and best friends. According to Sheldrake, the most striking examples of instinctive telepathy involve intense emotion—emergencies, death, or distress.[8]

 

In Ropes to God: Experiencing the Bushman Spiritual Universe, Keeney includes a Bushman’s description of this type of telepathy:

 

You cannot send a thought to another person without first being filled with heightened emotion. . . . In this state you mix your thought, message or directive with your intensified feeling and make the thought a pure feeling. It is concentrated in your belly where the intensity of your feeling escalates to a point where it can no longer be held. Then it is released along the line coming out of your belly and directed to another person’s belly. They immediately respond when you communicate in this way. It may seem like we send our thoughts, but we are actually sending our feelings. Not weak, arbitrary feelings, but intense, almost overwhelming feelings. . . . A thought, message or request is changed into a feeling. . . . The feeling is the carrier.[9]

In the late 1960s, Marcia Emery was driving in downtown Washington, DC, when her brakes suddenly failed. According to Marcia,

 

When I put my foot on the brake, it went right to the floor. The emergency brake didn’t work either. I had the choice of either crashing into the cars on the street or running into people on the sidewalk. I suddenly heard an inner voice say, “Make a quick right.” I turned into an alley and smashed into a wall between two men’s clothing stores, narrowly missing a pedestrian.

 

I survived with only scratches on my elbows and knees. My car was completely totaled—it crumpled like an accordion. On my way home, I decided not to tell my mother about the accident. I was planning to drive to Philadelphia to visit her in a few weeks and I didn’t want her to worry.

 

I was still shaking when I got home. As I walked through the door, the telephone rang. It was my mother and her first words were “How’s your car?” When I asked her how she knew, she said, “I don’t know; the words just came out of my mouth.”[10]

Sheldrake also collected stories of people who instantly knew that a loved one had died. While researching this chapter, I discovered that several of my friends have had this experience. One friend shared this story with me:

 

My mother died from endometrial cancer. When I got the call that the end was near, I flew from California to Wisconsin to say goodbye. I took a “red-eye” flight and fell asleep on the plane. When I woke up, tears were running down my cheeks and I knew, in that moment, that my mother had just died. When I got to Chicago to change planes, my brother was waiting at the airport. Before he could speak, I said, “I already know mom died.” I later saw that her death certificate recorded the exact time I woke up on that plane.

This kind of telepathy also operates in a more benign way with the people we are closest to. I had a birthday while working on this chapter. A few days before, while driving home from the library I was thinking about my interest in esoteric Christianity when the thought suddenly popped into my mind that I’d like to have a cross necklace. I thought of my one-year baby picture and the tiny gold cross I wore around my neck, a gift from my favorite uncle. A few days later, a cross necklace arrived in the mail—a birthday present from my sister. When I called to thank her, she said, “I don’t know why, but as soon as I saw that necklace, I just had to get it for you.”

  

Frederick Marion who was investigated by the Society for Psychical Research in the late 1930-1940s.

The Turner-Ownbey long distance telepathy experiment was discovered to contain flaws. May Frances Turner positioned herself in the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory whilst Sara Ownbey claimed to receive transmissions 250 miles away. For the experiment Turner would think of a symbol and write it down whilst Ownbey would write her guesses.The scores were highly successful and both records were supposed to be sent to J. B. Rhine; however, Ownbey sent them to Turner. Critics pointed out this invalidated the results as she could have simply written her own record to agree with the other. When the experiment was repeated and the records were sent to Rhine the scores dropped to average.

 

Another example is the experiment carried out by the author Harold Sherman with the explorer Hubert Wilkins who carried out their own experiment in telepathy for five and a half months starting in October 1937. This took place when Sherman was in New York and Wilkins was in the Arctic. The experiment consisted of Sherman and Wilkins at the end of each day to relax and visualise a mental image or "thought impression" of the events or thoughts they had experienced in the day and then to record those images and thoughts on paper in a diary. The results at the end when comparing Sherman's and Wilkins' diaries were claimed to be more than 60 percent.

 

The full results of the experiments were published in 1942 in a book by Sherman and Wilkins titled Thoughts Through Space. In the book both Sherman and Wilkins had written they believed they had demonstrated that it was possible to send and receive thought impressions from the mind of one person to another. The magician John Booth wrote the experiment was not an example of telepathy as a high percentage of misses had occurred. Booth wrote it was more likely that the "hits" were the result of "coincidence, law of averages, subconscious expectancy, logical inference or a plain lucky guess".A review of their book in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry cast doubt on their experiment noting "the study was published five years after it was conducted, arouses suspicion on the validity of the conclusions.

 

In 1948, on the BBC radio Maurice Fogel made the claim that he could demonstrate telepathy. This intrigued the journalist Arthur Helliwell who wanted to discover his methods. He found that Fogel's mind reading acts were all based on trickery, he relied on information about members of his audience before the show started. Helliwell exposed Fogel's methods in a newspaper article. Although Fogel managed to fool some people into believing he could perform genuine telepathy, the majority of his audience knew he was a showman.

 

In a series of experiments Samuel Soal and his assistant K. M. Goldney examined 160 subjects over 128,000 trials and obtained no evidence for the existence of telepathy. Soal tested Basil Shackleton and Gloria Stewart between 1941 and 1943 in over five hundred sittings and over twenty thousand guesses. Shackleton scored 2890 compared with a chance expectation of 2308 and Gloria scored 9410 compared with a chance level of 7420. It was later discovered the results had been tampered with. Gretl Albert who was present during many of the experiments said she had witnessed Soal altering the records during the sessions. Betty Marwick discovered Soal had not used the method of random selection of numbers as he had claimed. Marwick showed that there had been manipulation of the score sheets "all the experiments reported by Soal had thereby been discredited."

 

In 1979 the physicists John G. Taylor and Eduardo Balanovski wrote the only scientifically feasible explanation for telepathy could be electromagnetism (EM) involving EM fields. In a series of experiments the EM levels were many orders of magnitude lower than calculated and no paranormal effects were observed. Both Taylor and Balanovski wrote their results were a strong argument against the validity of telepathy.

 

Research in anomalistic psychology has discovered that in some cases telepathy can be explained by a covariation bias. In an experiment (Schienle et al. 1996) 22 believers and 20 skeptics were asked to judge the covariation between transmitted symbols and the corresponding feedback given by a receiver. According to the results the believers overestimated the number of successful transmissions whilst the skeptics made accurate hit judgments. The results from another telepathy experiment involving undergraduate college students (Rudski, 2002) were explained by hindsight and confirmation biases.

 

In parapsychology

Within the field of parapsychology, telepathy is considered to be a form of extrasensory perception (ESP) or anomalous cognition in which information is transferred through Psi. It is often categorized similarly to precognition and clairvoyance.[50] Experiments have been used to test for telepathic abilities. Among the most well known are the use of Zener cards and the Ganzfeld experiment.

 

Types

Parapsychology describes several forms of telepathy:

 

Latent telepathy, formerly known as "deferred telepathy",is described as the transfer of information, through Psi, with an observable time-lag between transmission and reception.

Retrocognitive,[failed verification] precognitive, and intuitive[failed verification] telepathy is described as being the transfer of information, through Psi, about the past, future or present state of an individual's mind to another individual.

Emotive telepathy, also known as remote influence or emotional transfer, is the process of transferring kinesthetic sensations through altered states.

Superconscious telepathy involves tapping into the superconscious to access the collective wisdom of the human species for knowledge

Zener Cards[edit]

Main article: Zener cards

 

Zener cards

Zener cards are marked with five distinctive symbols. When using them, one individual is designated the "sender" and another the "receiver". The sender selects a random card and visualize the symbol on it, while the receiver attempts to determine that symbol using Psi. Statistically, the receiver has a 20% chance of randomly guessing the correct symbol, so to demonstrate telepathy, they must repeatedly score a success rate that is significantly higher than 20%. If not conducted properly, this method can be vulnerable to sensory leakage and card counting.

 

J. B. Rhine's experiments with Zener cards were discredited due to the discovery that sensory leakage or cheating could account for all his results such as the subject being able to read the symbols from the back of the cards and being able to see and hear the experimenter to note subtle clues.Once Rhine took precautions in response to criticisms of his methods, he was unable to find any high-scoring subjects. Due to the methodological problems, parapsychologists no longer utilize card-guessing studies.

 

Dream telepathy

Parapsychological studies into dream telepathy were carried out at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York led by Stanley Krippner and Montague Ullman. They concluded the results from some of their experiments supported dream telepathy.However, the results have not been independently replicated. The psychologist James Alcock has written the dream telepathy experiments at Maimonides have failed to provide evidence for telepathy and "lack of replication is rampant."

 

The picture target experiments that were conducted by Krippner and Ullman were criticized by C. E. M. Hansel. According to Hansel there were weaknesses in the design of the experiments in the way in which the agent became aware of their target picture. Only the agent should have known the target and no other person until the judging of targets had been completed, however, an experimenter was with the agent when the target envelope was opened. Hansel also wrote there had been poor controls in the experiment as the main experimenter could communicate with the subject

 

An attempt to replicate the experiments that used picture targets was carried out by Edward Belvedere and David Foulkes. The finding was that neither the subject nor the judges matched the targets with dreams above chance level.Results from other experiments by Belvedere and Foulkes were also negative.

 

Ganzfeld experiment

When using the Ganzfeld experiment to test for telepathy, one individual is designated as the receiver and is placed inside a controlled environment where they are deprived of sensory input, and another person is designated as the sender and is placed in a separate location. The receiver is then required to receive information from the sender. The nature of the information may vary between experiments.

 

The Ganzfeld experiment studies that were examined by Ray Hyman and Charles Honorton had methodological problems that were well documented. Honorton reported only 36% of the studies used duplicate target sets of pictures to avoid handling cues. Hyman discovered flaws in all of the 42 Ganzfeld experiments and to access each experiment, he devised a set of 12 categories of flaws. Six of these concerned statistical defects, the other six covered procedural flaws such as inadequate documentation, randomization and security as well as possibilities of sensory leakage.Over half of the studies failed to safeguard against sensory leakage and all of the studies contained at least one of the 12 flaws. Because of the flaws, Honorton agreed with Hyman the 42 Ganzfeld studies could not support the claim for the existence of psi.

 

Possibilities of sensory leakage in the Ganzfeld experiments included the receivers hearing what was going on in the sender's room next door as the rooms were not soundproof and the sender's fingerprints to be visible on the target object for the receiver to see.

 

Hyman also reviewed the autoganzfeld experiments and discovered a pattern in the data that implied a visual cue may have taken place:

 

The most suspicious pattern was the fact that the hit rate for a given target increased with the frequency of occurrence of that target in the experiment. The hit rate for the targets that occurred only once was right at the chance expectation of 25%. For targets that appeared twice the hit rate crept up to 28%. For those that occurred three times it was 38%, and for those targets that occurred six or more times, the hit rate was 52%. Each time a videotape is played its quality can degrade. It is plausible then, that when a frequently used clip is the target for a given session, it may be physically distinguishable from the other three decoy clips that are presented to the subject for judging. Surprisingly, the parapsychological community has not taken this finding seriously. They still include the autoganzfeld series in their meta-analyses and treat it as convincing evidence for the reality of psi.

 

Hyman wrote the autoganzfeld experiments were flawed because they did not preclude the possibility of sensory leakage.In 2010, Lance Storm, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Lorenzo Di Risio analyzed 29 ganzfeld studies from 1997 to 2008. Of the 1,498 trials, 483 produced hits, corresponding to a hit rate of 32.2%. This hit rate is statistically significant with p < .001. Participants selected for personality traits and personal characteristics thought to be psi-conducive were found to perform significantly better than unselected participants in the ganzfeld condition. Hyman (2010) published a rebuttal to Storm et al. According to Hyman "reliance on meta-analysis as the sole basis for justifying the claim that an anomaly exists and that the evidence for it is consistent and replicable is fallacious. It distorts what scientists mean by confirmatory evidence." Hyman wrote the ganzfeld studies have not been independently replicated and have failed to produce evidence for telepathy. Storm et al. published a response to Hyman claiming the ganzfeld experimental design has proved to be consistent and reliable but parapsychology is a struggling discipline that has not received much attention so further research on the subject is necessary.Rouder et al. 2013 wrote that critical evaluation of Storm et al.'s meta-analysis reveals no evidence for telepathy, no plausible mechanism and omitted replication failures.

 

A 2016 paper examined questionable research practices in the ganzfeld experiments.

 

Twin telepathy

Twin telepathy is a belief that has been described as a myth in psychological literature. Psychologists Stephen Hupp and Jeremy Jewell have noted that all experiments on the subject have failed to provide any scientific evidence for telepathy between twins.According to Hupp and Jewell there are various behavioral and genetic factors that contribute to the twin telepathy myth "identical twins typically spend a lot of time together and are usually exposed to very similar environments. Thus, it's not at all surprising that they act in similar ways and are adept at anticipating and forecasting each other's reactions to events."

 

A 1993 study by Susan Blackmore investigated the claims of twin telepathy. In an experiment with six sets of twins one subject would act as the sender and the other the receiver. The sender was given selected objects, photographs or numbers and would attempt to psychically send the information to the receiver. The results from the experiment were negative, no evidence of telepathy was observed.

 

The skeptical investigator Benjamin Radford has noted that "Despite decades of research trying to prove telepathy, there is no credible scientific evidence that psychic powers exist, either in the general population or among twins specifically. The idea that two people who shared their mother's womb — or even who share the same DNA — have a mysterious mental connection is an intriguing one not borne out in science."

 

Scientific reception

A variety of tests have been performed to demonstrate telepathy, but there is no scientific evidence that the power exists. A panel commissioned by the United States National Research Council to study paranormal claims concluded that "despite a 130-year record of scientific research on such matters, our committee could find no scientific justification for the existence of phenomena such as extrasensory perception, mental telepathy or 'mind over matter' exercises... Evaluation of a large body of the best available evidence simply does not support the contention that these phenomena exist." The scientific community considers parapsychology a pseudoscience.There is no known mechanism for telepathy. Philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge has written that telepathy would contradict laws of science and the claim that "signals can be transmitted across space without fading with distance is inconsistent with physics".

 

Physicist John Taylor has written the experiments that have been claimed by parapsychologists to support evidence for the existence of telepathy are based on the use of shaky statistical analysis and poor design, and attempts to duplicate such experiments by the scientific community have failed. Taylor also wrote the arguments used by parapsychologists for the feasibility of such phenomena are based on distortions of theoretical physics as well as "complete ignorance" of relevant areas of physics.

 

Psychologist Stuart Sutherland wrote that cases of telepathy can be explained by people underestimating the probability of coincidences. According to Sutherland, "most stories about this phenomenon concern people who are close to one another - husband and wife or brother and sister. Since such people have much in common, it is highly probable that they will sometimes think the same thought at the same time." Graham Reed, a specialist in anomalistic psychology, noted that experiments into telepathy often involve the subject relaxing and reporting the 'messages' to consist of colored geometric shapes. Reed wrote that these are a common type of hypnagogic image and not evidence for telepathic communication.

 

Outside of parapsychology, telepathy is generally explained as the result of fraud, self-delusion and/or self-deception and not as a paranormal power. Psychological research has also revealed other explanations such as confirmation bias, expectancy bias, sensory leakage, subjective validation and wishful thinking.[94] Virtually all of the instances of more popular psychic phenomena, such as mediumship, can be attributed to non-paranormal techniques such as cold reading. Magicians such as Ian Rowland and Derren Brown have demonstrated techniques and results similar to those of popular psychics, without paranormal means. They have identified, described, and developed psychological techniques of cold reading and hot reading.

 

Psychiatry

The notion of telepathy is not dissimilar to two clinical concepts: delusions of thought insertion/removal. This similarity might explain how an individual might come to the conclusion that they were experiencing telepathy. Thought insertion/removal is a symptom of psychosis, particularly of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder or substance-induced psychosis. Psychiatric patients who experience this symptom falsely believe that some of their thoughts are not their own and that others (e.g., other people, aliens, demons or fallen angels, or conspiring intelligence agencies) are putting thoughts into their minds (thought insertion). Some patients feel as if thoughts are being taken out of their minds or deleted (thought removal). Along with other symptoms of psychosis, delusions of thought insertion may be reduced by antipsychotic medication. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists believe and empirical findings support the idea that people with schizotypy and schizotypal personality disorder are particularly likely to believe in telepathy.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepathy

New Discoveries: An Unspoken Inquiry

 

In the quiet sprawl of the open ground, where human stories often end in discard, a lost pacifier rests, a small enigma in the vast urban landscape. Unlike the usual parade of indifferent footsteps, this scene introduces a different form of engagement: the gentle, probing presence of local wildlife.

 

Captured in stark black and white, drawing focus to the texture of the ground and the delicate form of the pacifier, a curious snout emerges into the frame. It is the nose of a sniffing dog, drawn by an unfamiliar scent, a silent ambassador exploring the remnants of human life. There is no judgment here, no dismissal, only pure, instinctual curiosity as the animal investigates this alien object with a simple, profound inquiry.

 

This moment stands as a poignant contrast to the callous treading or indifferent sweeping often faced by these lost items. It highlights the unexpected encounters an abandoned object can have, finding a new, albeit temporary, observer in the natural world. The pacifier, momentarily, becomes an object of innocent fascination, its forgotten purpose replaced by the simple mystery it presents to a passing creature. It's a reminder that even the most trivial human discards can spark quiet moments of discovery in the unceasing theatre of urban life.

I thought this was a rather strange, but interesting scene along the Pride parade route. What was going on under the Pride flag, I have no idea. Whatever it was everyone was attentive and fixated on the performance.

 

Yes, I distorted the perspective I like that on some tableau-esque kind of scenes. It makes it seem long or deeper . . . etc.

 

If I could draw, I always liked the texture and look of those colored oil-sticks. I watched several people work in those and I like how a thumb or forefinger rubbed on the applied color can feather,, blend, create shade and other various techniques.

 

So I tried to duplicate the smudged effect, darker shadows, and an absence of sharply defined features. I also like to use boosted highlights for a number of visual reasons. One certainly is to call attention to them and their different positions, and add a bit of depth.

 

This is all more instinctual then any formal training. It's like some young fellow who was blowing smoke said, "You certainly know a lot about wine." Well, I don't. I really don't. No false modesty. So proceded to spin a yarn around the ritual of a tableside wine opening.

 

And I'm serious, this young meathead, leaned close so as not to drop a single one of my verbal pearls.

 

After the sacred Reading of the Label, , cork feeling, sniff 'n swirl and whatever else, I concluded with, "Then you come to the final test . . . You drink deeply and ask yourself, 'Does this swill taste good to me?'"😇

 

The look on his face was priceless, like he just found out there is no Santa Claus.

Mother and Baby Gorilla - Jacksonville Zoo

Theme to set the mood: www.youtube.com/watch?v=obBUZEKuAgM

 

Under the influence of the Bishop's Brew spiked potions, Essa takes a chance and asks Elliott (the human, not the human munching vampire) to dance. One thing leads to another...

 

Elliott Reid stared at her, his face soft, "..Worth it.." he repeated. In that moment, he decided to be courageous. He stopped moving and his eyes ran over her lips and almost instinctually he pulled her in closer to him. Slowly he closed the distance between them before pressing his lips to hers and holding it there. His chest rose and fell twice before he pulled back and looked down at her with a glimmer of hope in his eyes. There it was, his first kiss.

Essa Nazari closes her eyes at the kiss and she presses her face into his shoulder, Her cheeks...well her entire face from the roots of her hair all the way down into the collar of her shirt was red. She was as red as a ladybug that she was pretending to be. She tightens her grip on him, not pulling away, if anything tucking herself a bit closer.

Happy Mother's Day to all the Momma's out there!

Looking for fish... Just had to add one more of him... Adorable...

Chewy is a two-and-a-half year old male Golden Retriever that loves sticks, rocks and swimming. He finds a rock under the water and then dives to get it, coming ashore with his "prize". He shakes and rolls in the grass, and bounds back into the water to start playing all over again. He's waiting for the day when he actually "gets" one of those pesky fishes! LOL He is also a champion digger. At this young age he never gets tired. His owner (not me) bathes and combs him every day. Then he patiently waits for her to take him for his swim and playtime at sunset ~ South Florida ~ Florida Everglades U.S.A.

 

(one more photo of Chewy in the comments)

 

**********************************************************************************

The Golden Retriever is a large-sized breed of dog bred as gun dogs to retrieve shot waterfowl such as ducks and upland game birds during hunting & shooting parties, and were named 'retriever' because of their ability to retrieve shot game undamaged. Golden Retrievers have an instinctive love of water, and are easy to train to basic or advanced obedience standards. They are a long-coated breed, with a dense inner coat that provides them with adequate warmth in the outdoors, & an outer coat that lies flat against their bodies and repels water. Golden Retrievers are well suited to residency in suburban or country environments. Although they need substantial outdoor exercise, they should be housed in a fenced area because of their instinctual tendency to roam. They shed copiously, particularly at the change of seasons, and require fairly regular grooming.

 

The breed is a prominent participant in conformation shows for purebred dogs. The Golden Retrievers' intelligence makes them a versatile breed and allows them to fill a variety of roles – common ones being guide dog for the blind, hearing dog for the deaf, hunting dog, detection dog, and search and rescue participant. The breed's friendly, gentle temperament means it is unsuited to being a professional guard dog, but its temperament has also made it the third-most popular family dog breed (by registration) in the United States, the fifth-most popular in Australia, and the eighth-most popular in the United Kingdom. Golden Retrievers are rarely choosy eaters, but require ample exercise (of two or more hours a day). The breed is fond of play but also highly trainable.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Retriever

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everglades

An initiation ceremony in Papua New Guinea

Archetypes are innate universal pre-conscious psychic dispositions that form the substrate from which the basic themes of human life emerge. The archetypes are components of the collective unconscious and serve to organize, direct and inform human thought and behaviour. Archetypes hold control of the human life cycle.As we mature the archetypal plan unfolds through a programmed sequence which Jung called the stages of life. Each stage of life is mediated through a new set of archetypal imperatives which seek fulfillment in action. These may include being parented, initiation, courtship, marriage and preparation for death.

"The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif – representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern ... They are indeed an instinctive trend".[15] Thus, "the archetype of initiation is strongly activated to provide a meaningful transition ... with a 'rite of passage' from one stage of life to the next":[16][17] such stages may include being parented, initiation, courtship, marriage and preparation for death.In Jungian psychology, archetypes are highly developed elements of the collective unconscious. Being unconscious, the existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by examining behavior, images, art, myths, religions, or dreams. Carl Jung understood archetypes as universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct..They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior on interaction with the outside world.They are autonomous and hidden forms which are transformed once they enter consciousness and are given particular expression by individuals and their cultures.Strictly speaking, Jungian archetypes refer to unclear underlying forms or the archetypes-as-such from which emerge images and motifs such as the mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood among others. It is history, culture and personal context that shape these manifest representations thereby giving them their specific content. These images and motifs are more precisely called archetypal images. However it is common for the term archetype to be used interchangeably to refer to both archetypes-as-such and archetypal images.In Jungian psychology, archetypes are highly developed elements of the collective unconscious. Being unconscious, the existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by examining behavior, images, art, myths, religions, or dreams. Carl Jung understood archetypes as universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct. They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior on interaction with the outside world. They are autonomous and hidden forms which are transformed once they enter consciousness and are given particular expression by individuals and their cultures.Strictly speaking, Jungian archetypes refer to unclear underlying forms or the archetypes-as-such from which emerge images and motifs such as the mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood among others. It is history, culture and personal context that shape these manifest representations thereby giving them their specific content. These images and motifs are more precisely called archetypal images. However it is common for the term archetype to be used interchangeably to refer to both archetypes-as-such and archetypal images.The intuition that there was more to the psyche than individual experience possibly began in Jung's childhood. The very first dream he could remember was that of an underground phallic god. Later in life his research on psychotic patients in Burgholzli Hospital and his own self-analysis later supported his early intuition about the existence of universal psychic structures that underlie all human experience and behavior. Jung first referred to these as "primordial images" – a term he borrowed from Jacob Burckhardt. Later in 1917 Jung called them "dominants of the collective unconscious."It was not until 1919 that he first used the term "archetypes" in an essay titled "Instinct and the Unconscious". The first element in Greek `arche' signifies 'beginning, origin, cause, primal source principle', but it also signifies 'position of a leader, supreme rule and government' (in other words a kind of 'dominant'): the second element 'type' means 'blow and what is produced by a blow, the imprint of a coin ...form, image, prototype, model, order, and norm', ...in the figurative, modern sense, 'pattern underlying form, primordial form'.In later years Jung revised and broadened the concept of archetypes even further, conceiving of them as psycho-physical patterns existing in the universe, given specific expression by human consciousness and culture. Jung proposed that the archetype had a dual nature: it exists both in the psyche and in the world at large. He called this non-psychic aspect of the archetype the "psychoid" archetype.

 

Jung drew an analogy between the psyche and light on the electromagnetic spectrum. The center of the visible light spectrum (i.e., yellow) corresponds to consciousness, which grades into unconsciousnessness at the red and blue ends. Red corresponds to basic unconscious urges, and the invisible infra-red end of the spectrum corresponds to the influence of biological instinct, which merges with its chemical and physical conditions. The blue end of the spectrum represents spiritual ideas; and the archetypes, exerting their influence from beyond the visible, correspond to the invisible realm of ultra-violet. Jung suggested that not only do the archetypal structures govern the behavior of all living organisms, but that they were contiguous with structures controlling the behavior of inorganic matter as well.The archetype was not merely a psychic entity, but more fundamentally, a bridge to matter in general.[8] Jung used the term unus mundus to describe the unitary reality which he believed underlay all manifest phenomena. He conceived archetypes to be the mediators of the unus mundus, organizing not only ideas in the psyche, but also the fundamental principles of matter and energy in the physical world.It was this psychoid aspect of the archetype that so impressed Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Embracing Jung's concept, Pauli believed that the archetype provided a link between physical events and the mind of the scientist who studied them. In doing so he echoed the position adopted by German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Thus the archetypes which ordered our perceptions and ideas are themselves the product of an objective order which transcends both the human mind and the external world.opular and new-age utilizations have often condensed the concept of archetypes into an enumeration of archetypal figures such as the hero, the goddess, the wise man and so on. Such enumeration falls short of apprehending the fluid core concept. Strictly speaking, archetypal figures such as the hero, the goddess and the wise man are not archetypes, but archetypal images which have crystallized out of the archetypes-as-such: as Jung put it, "definite mythological images of motifs ... are nothing more than conscious representations; it would be absurd to assume that such variable representations could be inherited", as opposed to their deeper, instinctual sources – "the 'archaic remnants', which I call 'archetypes' or 'primordial images'".However, the precise relationships between images such as, for example, "the fish" and its archetype were not adequately explained by Jung. Here the image of the fish is not strictly speaking an archetype. The "archetype of the fish" points to the ubiquitous existence of an innate "fish archetype" which gives rise to the fish image. In clarifying the contentious statement that fish archetypes are universal, Anthony Stevens explains that the archetype-as-such is at once an innate predisposition to form such an image and a preparation to encounter and respond appropriately to the creature per se. This would explain the existence of snake and spider phobias, for example, in people living in urban environments where they have never encountered either creature.The confusion about the essential quality of archetypes can partly be attributed to Jung's own evolving ideas about them in his writings and his interchangeable use of the term "archetype" and "primordial image". Jung was also intent on retaining the raw and vital quality of archetypes as spontaneous outpourings of the unconscious and not to give their specific individual and cultural expressions a dry, rigorous, intellectually formulated meaning.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes

“The successful adept must be endowed with a knowledge of the material of the Great Work; also with faith, silence, purity of heart, and prayerfulness. After passing through the gate surmounted with the hieroglyph of philosophic mercury he traverses the seven angles of the citadel, representing the chief operations of the Great Work - calcination, dissolution, purification, introduction into the sealed Vase of Hermes, transference of the Vase to the Athanor [furnace], coagulation, putrefaction, ceration, multiplication and projection. And even upon reaching the Petra Philosophalis, he finds it is held in custody by a formidable dragon.”

 

Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, Heinrich Khunrath

Saturn is related to Mercury in alchemical text, and is given the same ambiguous sexuality, or androgyny, and named it ‘Mercurius senex’.In Tiphareth, the geometric symbol is the interlaced triangles of water and fire, or the Star of David. When expanded to connect the planetary sepheroth of the Tree (with Saturn being attributed to Daath), the Triangle of Water connects the spheres of Mars, Jupiter, and Luna. The Triangle of Fire connects Saturn, Venus, and Mercury.

Just as Ouroboros is cosmic energy (the serpent) limiting itself (Saturn), Venus is the creative cosmic force multiplying itself in life (its vegetative nature) as a prism splits the light of the sun. Mercury, like Saturn in many respects, is androgynous, and controls the fire of creation, directing it in the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone. Mercury holds the Caduceus, or winged staff with two serpents intertwined around it. The Wings represent sublimation, the serpents the basic forces of creation. There crossing over is the psychic centers, often given as seven in number, here representing the colors in the spectrum, plus white (Venus). Central to the diagram is Sol, which is the cosmic creative forces which unify, enliven, and harmonize creation, and which we can hope to contact. It is central, and directs and controls all of the other planets, psychic centers, or aspects of Cosmic energy.By contacting the fire of the Sun, we can open the fire of the other psychic centers (via Venus), and more easily direct the restrictive and enlightening energy of Saturn, through the powers of the Mind, or Mercury.To understand these multi-faceted aspects of the planets, particularly Venus and Mercury, it is important to have done the Pathworkings up to Tiphareth. While this is not required to perform the techniques later in this monograph, it is a help for an understanding of the theoretical part.However, we can begin to understand the relationship of the Spheres to each other by undertaking a series of meditations based on the following idea:Venus is the regenerating, sensual, active life force in its vegetative and unconscious manner. It responds to heat, light, and emotion. On the Path of the Decent, Venus splits the singular rays of the Sun into the many facets of the color spectrum, and as such, can lead us to a better understanding of the relationship between multiplicity and unity, the psychic centers and planets, and their unique natures. On the Path of Ascent, Venus re-unites the divergent energies, both planetary and personal (psychic centers) and harmonizes it into a singular force, although still multi-colored, until it returns to the Sun as pure light.

“This Stone rises in growing, greening things. Wherefore when the Green is reduced to its former nature, whereby things sprout and come forth in due time, it must be decocted and putrefied in the way of our secret art.” Splendor solis, Trismosin.The Stone is made through the greening of nature (Netzach) and it returning to its source (Tipahreth) by putrefaction (Death card of the path connecting them).Mercury gives form and meaning to the diverse energies made by the splitting actions of Venus, and re-unites them as fundamental forces, symbolized by the Caduceus. Mercury is Psychopomp, or Guide of the Soul, and directs the energies that Venus represents. Since both Venus and Mercury sit at the base of the Pillars of kabbalah, they access the material, astral, and mental realms, and can influence all three to some degree. On the Descent, Mercury creates form and structure, for the body, the mind, or the soul, and on the ascent, Mercury helps free us from the limitations of form, without forgetting its lessons.The serpent is primordial force or energy, fire and water being the principle two of creation, with air and earth following them. Because it shed it’s skin, it is seen as a symbol of regeneration and renewal. It is also dangerous, deadly, can be found often in ‘guardian’ roles near springs or water as well as deserts. When controlled or mastered, it is seen as mastering a powerful and deadly, yet regenerating force, basic to creation, or possibly from which creation came.

The Secret Fire is directly linked to the sexual, (i.e. principle and most basic creative forces) in humanity. Here, the relationship between ‘bliss’ ‘ecstasy’ and the erotic impulse can be clearly seen and experienced. The development of a host of ‘sexual yogas’ and ‘sex magic(k)’ practices bear this out to some degree. However, it is the sexual desire in humanity that acts as its basic drive and evolutionary force. It also suggests that the ability and need for mystical experience is biologically rooted. Only by ignoring the most basic of pleasures, sex, can we ignore the drive to ecstatic union on some level. The ‘little death’ or petite morte, is a forerunner of the ‘big death’ as we let go and experience divine oblivion.Sexual power, linked to our innate drive for mystical experiences, is also linked to human evolution, and some kind of predetermined point or state to which we are being directed.This is a significant point, in that almost all of modern Western societies psychological illnesses are focused around sexual repression and obsession.If the Secret Fire flows freely, or with greater strength than before, without the proper purification of the Vital Energy of the physical body, it is possible that it will result in what appears to be extreme physical, but more likely psychological, illness in the form of schizophrenia and psychosis, instead of psychic gifts, genius, and either transpersonal states, or simply altered states of consciousness.Wilhelm Reich, the father of Orgon Therapy states that the basis for all mental-emotional disturbances are anchored in the physical body, and that these anchors can be released through breathing techniques, somewhat similar to pranayamana. Since the body is the “Salt” of alchemy, and partially composed of accessible unconscious elements through its “Watery Element” all of our emotional and physical experiences become indelibly marked, associated, or stored in our physical body. If these blocks, or energy concentrations of emotional and physical trauma (composed of Vital Energy) are not removed before the Secret Fire begins to flow more intensely, the so-called negative side effects of ‘Kundalini phenomena’ will appear.

Abuse of drugs, alcohol, and sexual extremes only worsen the condition in that they inadvertently release the Secret Fire by weakening the physical body and its link to the astral, thereby damaging the etheric substructure, and create energy blocks in the end rather than diminish them, when the mind and body attempt to make repairs.A nervous system damaged by substance abuse makes a tricky vehicle for the clear, clean, and powerful expression of the Secret Fire. It is through our nervous system (under the domain of Yesod-Luna) that we engage both the physical world, as well as out interior world. It links the body (Malkooth) with the Mind-Intellect (Hod) as well as instinctual, creative, and sensual urges (Netzach). If it is damaged, our ability to relate fully, creatively, and productively to these psyhco-physical-spiritual parts of our self becomes endangered. If it is damaged, then our most direct and important link to our Holy Guardian Angel, and means of releasing the Secret Fire safely (via Tiphareth) is threatened in this incarnation.

“Listen, then while I make known the Grand Arcanum of this wonder-working Stone, which at the same time is not a stone, which exists in every man, and may be found in its own place at all times…. It is called a stone, not because it is like a stone, but only because by virtue of its fixed nature, it resists the action of fire as successfully as any stone….If we say that its nature is spiritual, it would be no more than the truth; if we describe it as corporeal, the expression would be equally correct; for it is subtle, penetrative, glorified, spiritual gold. It is the noblest of all created things…it is a spirit or quintessence.”

hermetic.com/stavish/essays/secret-fire.html

 

The American artist Mark Dion invests Fine Arts in Paris which he is invited in 2016. It offers a labyrinthine exhibition consisting of works from the heritage collection of fine arts, contemporary works and his own productions. The theme of the supernatural, they open to a reinterpretation of the collections and the historic site of Fine Arts.Extending the exhibition, two exceptional nocturnal journey in the Fine Arts in Paris will be offered during the night of the opening (Tuesday May 17) and as part of the Museum Night (Saturday 21 May).Since the 1990s, Mark Dion speaks regularly at the heart of cultural and scientific institutions such as museums and natural history museums which it involves typologies and scenic codes. In his speech to the Fine Arts, he will hold a series of works chosen for their report more or less allegorical in the supernatural.Extranatural, large immersive installation, will engage older pieces (drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures ...) and contemporary works, some produced by students and graduates of Fine Arts in Paris, which will result in an original narrative form close of the investigation.Chosen for their enigmatic power, and the power of suggestion, not reducible to a genus, the works assembled by Mark Dion is an opportunity to probe the report to the strange and the supernatural, which passes through art and creation: magic and alchemy, hybrid, and grotesque monsters, witches and sabbaths, unusual objects, morphological elements ...The issue of representation, that of anthropological works and their resonance, form the issues of the work of Mark Dion, whose scenography thwarts the traditional codes, sometimes diverting objects from their original meaning and function.The central device, the Palace of Fine Arts, each room corresponds to one of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire), will mingle including Dürer and Goya, and Kawanabe Goltzius and contemporary works by Jimmie Durham , Extra Lucid, Matt Mullican, morgane tschiember ...Both nocturnal journey to the heart of Beaux-Arts in Paris will allow visitors to discover surprising places, some of which opened for the first time to the public. From the room Melpomene, the course will provide access to lounges and hotel garden Chimay, library, collections, to the cellars of the Palace of studies.Extranatural result of a collaborative process of reflection and research, conducted in close collaboration with the curators of collections of Fine Arts. Particularly significant in the eyes of the artist, the historical continuity of the collection, closely linked to his vocation of transmitting artistic practices, echoes his visual approach and the fact archaeologist museum. The choice of institution and venues that will host this specific work, then makes sense.The works collected by Mark Dion invite the viewer to renew his experience of curiosity through 500 years of history.

www.beauxartsparis.com/fr/expositions/expositions-en-cours

Philadelphia 2007 Home Mr. Mio

Ego psychology is a school of psychoanalysis rooted in Sigmund Freud's structural id-ego-superego model of the mind.

 

An individual interacts with the external world as well as responds to internal forces. Many psychoanalysts use a theoretical construct called the ego to explain how that is done through various ego functions. Adherents of ego psychology focus on the ego's normal and pathological development, its management of libidinal and aggressive impulses, and its adaptation to reality.[1]

  

Contents

1History

1.1Early conceptions of the ego

1.2Freud's ego psychology

1.3Systematization

1.3.1Anna Freud

1.3.2Heinz Hartmann

1.3.3David Rapaport

1.3.4Other contributors

1.4Decline

2Contemporary

2.1Modern conflict theory

3Ego functions

4Conflict, defense and resistance analysis

5Cultural influences

6Criticisms

7See also

8References

9Further reading

History[edit]

Early conceptions of the ego[edit]

Sigmund Freud initially considered the ego to be a sense organ for perception of both external and internal stimuli. He thought of the ego as synonymous with consciousness and contrasted it with the repressed unconscious. In 1910, Freud emphasized the attention to detail when referencing psychoanalytical matters, while predicting his theory to become essential in regards to everyday tasks with the Swiss psychoanalyst, Oscar Pfister.[2] By 1911, he referenced ego instincts for the first time in Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning and contrasted them with sexual instincts: ego instincts responded to the reality principle while sexual instincts obeyed the pleasure principle. He also introduced attention and memory as ego functions.

 

Freud's ego psychology[edit]

Freud began to notice that not all unconscious phenomena could be attributed to the id; it appeared as if the ego had unconscious aspects as well. This posed a significant problem for his topographic theory, which he resolved in his monograph The Ego and the Id (1923).[3]

 

In what came to be called the structural theory, the ego was now a formal component of a three-way system that also included the id and superego. The ego was still organized around conscious perceptual capacities, yet it now had unconscious features responsible for repression and other defensive operations. Freud's ego at this stage was relatively passive and weak; he described it as the helpless rider on the id's horse, more or less obliged to go where the id wished to go.[4]

 

In Freud's 1926 monograph, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, he revised his theory of anxiety as well as delineated a more robust ego. Freud argued that instinctual drives (id), moral and value judgments (superego), and requirements of external reality all make demands upon an individual. The ego mediates among conflicting pressures and creates the best compromise. Instead of being passive and reactive to the id, the ego was now a formidable counterweight to it, responsible for regulating id impulses, as well as integrating an individual's functioning into a coherent whole. The modifications made by Freud in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety formed the basis of a psychoanalytic psychology interested in the nature and functions of the ego. This marked the transition of psychoanalysis from being primarily an id psychology, focused on the vicissitudes of the libidinal and aggressive drives as the determinants of both normal and psychopathological functioning, to a period in which the ego was accorded equal importance and was regarded as the prime shaper and modulator of behavior.[5]

 

Systematization[edit]

Following Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalysts most responsible for the development of ego psychology, and its systematization as a formal school of psychoanalytic thought, were Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and David Rapaport. Other important contributors included Ernst Kris, Rudolph Loewenstein, René Spitz, Margaret Mahler, Edith Jacobson, and Erik Erikson.

 

Anna Freud[edit]

Anna Freud focused her attention on the ego's unconscious, defensive operations and introduced many important theoretical and clinical considerations. In The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936), Anna Freud argued the ego was predisposed to supervise, regulate, and oppose the id through a variety of defenses. She described the defenses available to the ego, linked them to the stages of psychosexual development during which they originated, and identified various psychopathological compromise formations in which they were prominent. Clinically, Anna Freud emphasized that the psychoanalyst's attention should always be on the defensive functions of the ego, which could be observed in the manifest presentation of the patient's associations. The analyst needed to be attuned to the moment-by-moment process of what the patient talked about in order to identify, label, and explore defenses as they appeared. For Anna Freud, direct interpretation of repressed content was less important than understanding the ego's methods by which it kept things out of consciousness.[6] Her work provided a bridge between Freud's structural theory and ego psychology.[7]

 

Heinz Hartmann[edit]

Heinz Hartmann (1939/1958) believed the ego included innate capacities that facilitated an individual's ability to adapt to his or her environment. These included perception, attention, memory, concentration, motor coordination, and language. Under normal conditions, what Hartmann called an average expectable environment, these capacities developed into ego functions and had autonomy from the libidinal and aggressive drives; that is, they were not products of frustration and conflict, as Freud (1911) believed. Hartmann recognized, however, that conflicts were part of the human condition and certain ego functions may become conflicted by aggressive and libidinal impulses, as witnessed by conversion disorders (e.g., glove paralysis), speech impediments, eating disorders, and attention-deficit disorder.[5]

 

Through Hartmann's focus on ego functions, and how an individual adapts to his or her environment, he worked to create both a general psychology and a clinical instrument with which an analyst could evaluate an individual's functioning and formulate appropriate therapeutic interventions. Based on Hartmann's propositions, the task of the ego psychologist was to neutralize conflicted impulses and expand the conflict-free spheres of ego functions. By doing so, Hartmann believed psychoanalysis facilitated an individual's adaptation to his or her environment. Hartmann claimed, however, that his aim was to understand the mutual regulation of the ego and environment rather than to promote adjustment of the ego to the environment. Furthermore, an individual with a less-conflicted ego would be better able to actively respond to and shape, rather than passively react to, his or her environment.

 

Mitchell and Black (1995) wrote: "Hartmann powerfully affected the course of psychoanalysis, opening up a crucial investigation of the key processes and vicissitudes of normal development. Hartmann's contributions broadened the scope of psychoanalytic concerns, from psychopathology to general human development, from an isolated, self-contained treatment method to a sweeping intellectual discipline among other disciplines" (p. 35).

 

David Rapaport[edit]

David Rapaport played a prominent role in the development of ego psychology and his work likely represented its apex.[5] In Rapaport's influential monograph The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory (1960), he organized ego psychology into an integrated, systematic, and hierarchical theory capable of generating empirically testable hypotheses. According to Rapaport, psychoanalytic theory—as expressed through the principles of ego psychology—was a biologically based general psychology that could explain the entire range of human behavior.[8] For Rapaport, this endeavor was fully consistent with Freud's attempts to do the same (e.g., Freud's studies of dreams, jokes, and the "psychopathology of everyday life".)

 

Other contributors[edit]

While Hartmann was the principal architect ego psychology, he collaborated closely with Ernst Kris and Rudolph Loewenstein.[9]

 

Subsequent psychoanalysts interested in ego psychology emphasized the importance of early-childhood experiences and socio-cultural influences on ego development. René Spitz (1965), Margaret Mahler (1968), Edith Jacobson (1964), and Erik Erikson studied infant and child behavior and their observations were integrated into ego psychology. Their observational and empirical research described and explained early attachment issues, successful and faulty ego development, and psychological development through interpersonal interactions.

 

Spitz identified the importance of mother-infant nonverbal emotional reciprocity; Mahler refined the traditional psychosexual developmental phases by adding the separation-individuation process; and Jacobson emphasized how libidinal and aggressive impulses unfolded within the context of early relationships and environmental factors. Finally, Erik Erikson provided a bold reformulation of Freud's biologic, epigenetic psychosexual theory through his explorations of socio-cultural influences on ego development.[10] For Erikson, an individual was pushed by his or her own biological urges and pulled by socio-cultural forces.

 

Decline[edit]

In the United States, ego psychology was the predominant psychoanalytic approach from the 1940s through the 1960s. Initially, this was due to the influx of European psychoanalysts, including prominent ego psychologists like Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein, during and after World War II. These European analysts settled throughout the United States and trained the next generation of American psychoanalysts.

 

By the 1970s, several challenges to the philosophical, theoretical, and clinical tenets of ego psychology emerged. The most prominent of which were: a "rebellion" led by Rapaport's protégés (George Klein, Robert Holt, Roy Schafer, and Merton Gill); object relations theory; and self psychology.

 

Contemporary[edit]

Modern conflict theory[edit]

Charles Brenner (1982) attempted to revive ego psychology with a concise and incisive articulation of the fundamental focus of psychoanalysis: intrapsychic conflict and the resulting compromise formations. Over time, Brenner (2002) tried to develop a more clinically based theory, what came to be called “modern conflict theory.” He distanced himself from the formal components of the structural theory and its metapsychological assumptions, and focused entirely on compromise formations.

 

Ego functions[edit]

 

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Reality testing: The ego's capacity to distinguish what is occurring in one's own mind from what is occurring in the external world. It is perhaps the single most important ego function because negotiating with the outside world requires accurately perceiving and understanding stimuli. Reality testing is often subject to temporary, mild distortion or deterioration under stressful conditions. Such impairment can result in temporary delusions and hallucination and is generally selective, clustering along specific, psychodynamic lines. Chronic deficiencies suggest either psychotic or organic interference.[11]

Impulse control: The ability to manage aggressive and/or libidinal wishes without immediate discharge through behavior or symptoms. Problems with impulse control are common; for example: road rage; sexual promiscuity; excessive drug and alcohol use; and binge eating.

Affect regulation: The ability to modulate feelings without being overwhelmed.

Judgment: The capacity to act responsibly. This process includes identifying possible courses of action, anticipating and evaluating likely consequences, and making decisions as to what is appropriate in certain circumstances.

Object relations: The capacity for mutually satisfying relationship. The individual can perceive himself and others as whole objects with three dimensional qualities.

Thought processes: The ability to have logical, coherent, and abstract thoughts. In stressful situations, thought processes can become disorganized. The presence of chronic or severe problems in conceptual thinking is frequently associated with schizophrenia and manic episodes.

Defensive functioning: A defense is an unconscious attempt to protect the individual from some powerful, identity-threatening feeling. Initial defenses develop in infancy and involve the boundary between the self and the outer world; they are considered primitive defenses and include projection, denial, and splitting. As the child grows up, more sophisticated defenses that deal with internal boundaries such as those between ego and super ego or the id develop; these defenses include repression, regression, displacement, and reaction formation. All adults have, and use, primitive defenses, but most people also have more mature ways of coping with reality and anxiety.

Synthesis: The synthetic function is the ego's capacity to organize and unify other functions within the personality. It enables the individual to think, feel, and act in a coherent manner. It includes the capacity to integrate potentially contradictory experiences, ideas, and feelings; for example, a child loves his or her mother yet also has angry feelings toward her at times. The ability to synthesize these feelings is a pivotal developmental achievement.

Reality testing involves the individual's capacity to understand and accept both physical and social reality as it is consensually defined within a given culture or cultural subgroup. In large measure, the function hinges on the individual's capacity to distinguish between her own wishes or fears (internal reality) and events that occur in the real world (external reality). The ability to make distinctions that are consensually validated determines the ego's capacity to distinguish and mediate between personal expectations, on the one hand, and social expectations or laws of nature on the other. Individuals vary considerably in how they manage this function. When the function is seriously compromised, individuals may withdraw from contact with reality for extended periods of time. This degree of withdrawal is most frequently seen in psychotic conditions. Most times, however, the function is mildly or moderately compromised for a limited period of time, with far less drastic consequences' (Berzoff, 2011).

 

Judgment involves the capacity to reach “reasonable” conclusions about what is and what is not “appropriate” behavior. Typically, arriving at a “reasonable” conclusion involves the following steps: (1) correlating wishes, feeling states, and memories about prior life experiences with current circumstances; (2) evaluating current circumstances in the context of social expectations and laws of nature (e.g., it is not possible to transport oneself instantly out of an embarrassing situation, no matter how much one wishes to do so); and (3) drawing realistic conclusions about the likely consequences of different possible courses of action. As the definition suggests, judgment is closely related to reality testing, and the two functions are usually evaluated in tandem (Berzoff, 2011).

 

Modulating and controlling impulses is based on the capacity to hold sexual and aggressive feelings in check with out acting on them until the ego has evaluated whether they meet the individual's own moral standards and are acceptable in terms of social norms. Adequate functioning in this area depends on the individual's capacity to tolerate frustration, to delay gratification, and to tolerate anxiety without immediately acting to ameliorate it. Impulse control also depends on the ability to exercise appropriate judgment in situations where the individual is strongly motivated to seek relief from psychological tension and/or to pursue some pleasurable activity (sex, power, fame, money, etc.). Problems in modulation may involve either too little or too much control over impulses (Berzoff, 2011).

 

Modulation of affect The ego performs this function by preventing painful or unacceptable emotional reactions from entering conscious awareness, or by managing the expression of such feelings in ways that do not disrupt either emotional equilibrium or social relationships. To adequately perform this function, the ego constantly monitors the source, intensity, and direction of feeling states, as well as the people toward whom feelings will be directed. Monitoring determines whether such states will be acknowledged or expressed and, if so, in what form. The basic principle to remember in evaluating how well the ego manages this function is that affect modulation may be problematic because of too much or too little expression. As an integral part of the monitoring process, the ego evaluates the type of expression that is most congruent with established social norms. For example, in white American culture it is assumed that individuals will contain themselves and maintain a high level of personal/vocational functioning except in extremely traumatic situations such as death of a family member, very serious illness or terrible accident. This standard is not necessarily the norm in other cultures (Berzhoff, Flanagan, & Hertz, 2011).

 

Object relations involves the ability to form and maintain coherent representations of others and of the self. The concept refers not only to the people one interacts with in the external world but also to significant others who are remembered and represented within the mind. Adequate functioning implies the ability to maintain a basically positive view of the other, even when one feels disappointed, frustrated, or angered by the other's behavior. Disturbances in object relations may manifest themselves through an inability to fall in love, emotional coldness, lack of interest in or withdrawal from interactions with others, intense dependency, and/or an excessive need to control relationships (Berzhoff, Flanagan, & Hertz, 2011).

 

Self-esteem regulation involves the capacity to maintain a steady and reasonable level of positive self-regard in the face of distressing or frustrating external events. Painful affective states, including anxiety, depression, shame, and guilt, as well as exhilarating emotions such as triumph, glee, and ecstasy may also undermine self-esteem. Generally speaking, in dominant American culture a measured expression of both pain and pleasure is expressed; excess in either direction is a cause for concern. White Western culture tends to assume that individuals will maintain a consistent and steadily level of self-esteem, regardless of external events or internally generated feeling states (Berzhoff, Flanagan, & Hertz, 2011).

 

Mastery when conceptualized as an ego function, mastery reflects the epigenetic view that individuals achieve more advanced levels of ego organization by mastering successive developmental challenges. Each stage of psychosexual development (oral, anal, phallic, genital) presents a particular challenge that must be adequately addressed before the individual can move on to the next higher stage. By mastering stage-specific challenges, the ego gains strength in relations to the other structures fothe mind and thereby becomes more effective in organizing and synthesizing mental processes. Freud expressed this principle in his statement, “Where id was, shall ego be.” An undeveloped capacity for mastery can be seen, for example, in infants who have not been adequately nourished, stimulated, and protected during the first year of life, in the oral stage of development. When they enter the anal stage, such infants are not well prepared to learn socially acceptable behavior or to control the pleasure they derive from defecating at will. As a result, some of them will experience delays in achieving bowel control and will have difficulty in controlling temper tantrums, while others will sink into a passive, joyless compliance with parental demands that compromises their ability to explore, learn, and become physically competent. Conversely, infants who have been well gratified and adequately stimulated during the oral stage enter the anal stage feeling relatively secure and confident. For the most part, they cooperate in curbing their anal desires, and are eager to win parental approval for doing so. In addition, they are physically active, free to learn and eager to explore. As they gain confidence in their increasingly autonomous physical and mental abilities, they also learn to follow the rules their parents establish and, in doing so, with parental approval. As they master the specific tasks related to the anal stage, they are well prepared to move on to the next stage of development and the next set of challenges. When adults have problems with mastery, they usually enact them in derivative or symbolic ways (Berzhoff, Flanagan, & Hertz, 2011).

 

Conflict, defense and resistance analysis[edit]

According to Freud's structural theory, an individual's libidinal and aggressive impulses are continuously in conflict with his or her own conscience as well as with the limits imposed by reality. In certain circumstances, these conflicts may lead to neurotic symptoms. Thus, the goal of psychoanalytic treatment is to establish a balance between bodily needs, psychological wants, one's own conscience, and social constraints. Ego psychologists argue that the conflict is best addressed by the psychological agency that has the closest relationship to consciousness, unconsciousness, and reality: the ego.

 

The clinical technique most commonly associated with ego psychology is defense analysis. Through clarifying, confronting, and interpreting the typical defense mechanisms a patient uses, ego psychologists hope to help the patient gain control over these mechanisms.[12]

 

Cultural influences[edit]

The classical scholar E. R. Dodds used ego psychology as the framework for his influential study The Greeks and the Irrational (1951).[13]

The Sterbas relied on Hartmann's conflict-free sphere to help explain the contradictions they found in Beethoven's character in Beethoven and His Nephew (1954).[14]

Criticisms[edit]

Many[who?] authors have criticized Hartmann's conception of a conflict-free sphere of ego functioning as both incoherent and inconsistent with Freud's vision of psychoanalysis as a science of mental conflict. Freud believed that the ego itself takes shape as a result of the conflict between the id and the external world. The ego, therefore, is inherently a conflicting formation in the mind. To state, as Hartmann did, that the ego contains a conflict-free sphere may not be consistent with key propositions of Freud's structural theory.

 

Ego psychology, and 'Anna-Freudianism', were together seen by Kleinians as maintaining a conformist, adaptative version of psychoanalysis inconsistent with Freud's own views.[15] Hartmann claimed, however, that his aim was to understand the mutual regulation of the ego and environment rather than to promote adjustment of the ego to the environment. Furthermore, an individual with a less-conflicted ego would be better able to actively respond and shape, rather than passively react to, his or her environment.

 

Jacques Lacan was if anything still more opposed to ego psychology, using his concept of the Imaginary to stress the role of identifications in building up the ego in the first place.[16] Lacan saw in the "non-conflictual sphere...a down-at-heel mirage that had already been rejected as untenable by the most academic psychology of introspection'.[17] Ego psychologists responded by doubting whether Lacan's approach is ever applied to clinical work with real patients who have real illnesses, specific ego functions mediating those illnesses, and specific histories.[18]

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_psychology

Id, ego, and super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction our mental life is described. According to this model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.[1] The super-ego can stop one from doing certain things that one's id may want to do. - Wikipedia

 

Ghost Rider portrayed by Gavin Richter, ID portrayed by Shawn Richter.

You can check out more of their cosplay work on their facebook page at: www.facebook.com/cofphoto

Twitter: twitter.com/cofphoto

Or on his website at: www.caughtonfilmphoto.com/

It was very quiet in Newtown today for a Saturday morning and with the exceptional weather we have been having lately it wasn't what we expected. So after a little more than an hour of walking we decided to head back to the car and try our luck elsewhere. Of course as it always seems to happen, the minute you make the decision to leave, suitable strangers tend to appear all at once from nowhere. In fact, I met and shot 3 strangers all on one street corner in the space of 20 minutes.

 

Cate was my first for the day and my decision to stop and ask her to participate was instinctual and instantaneous, which for me, 99% of the time, yields the best results. I guess in hindsight it was her vulnerable & innocent look that drew me in but also how her baby blue eyes were accentuated by her hair being up and off her face. When I asked her she laughed with her friend that this was the second time that she had been asked for a street portrait. The last time was for Elle magazine (currently the largest International fashion magazine in the world) and I could easily understand why they would have picked her out in a crowd of faces.

 

Luckily for me she agreed and we moved to a bright red doorway which I hoped would provide a nice contrast and match her naturally red lips.

My wife held the reflector to maximise the light on her face and as I looked through the lens I could see how nervous Cate was so I took just a few quick frames. Afterwards we chatted and she mentioned that she was on her way to buy some socks and that she was quite tired from celebrating her 18th birthday the previous evening at her parents’ home.

Happy birthday Cate!

 

Thanks for being part of the 100 Strangers Project.

 

This picture is #216 in my 3rd round of The 100 Strangers Project.

You can see my 1st round of 100 Strangers photos here

Round 2 is here

Find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at the 100 Strangers Flickr Group page

 

“We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.”

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

 

I had an apprehension of shooting this subject and felt as though there was initially something wrong. What made me take is that I wanted to start a discussion about the feelings we (people in general) have towards those who are less-fortunate. I'm hoping the mood of this image helps demonstrate my concern and desire to talk about that which, instinctually, does not feel like it should happen in this world.

 

When I see less-fortunate people in the city, I am compelled to two actions -

 

* I have an involuntary desire to help, but am not sure of the avenues to do so through. Giving money on the spot as well as to organizations who help on a broader level leave me questioning if the effort I've gone forward with in the past has helped as much as it could. Sadly I cannot personally find an alternative.

 

* This frustration with the apathy others have with respect to these individuals. I'm not sure how or why this comes about in other people? Is it awkwardness, embarrassment, insensitivity caused by overexposure, fear or something else?

 

(Taken outside of the Porter Square Subway Station)

BEST seen in LARGE size.

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je8MXiwmNIk

  

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: "According to Freud, the history of man is the history of his repression. Culture constrains not only his societal but also his biological existence, not only parts of the human being but his instinctual structure itself. However, such constraint is the very precondition of progress. Left free to pursue their natural objectives, the basic instincts of man would be incompatible with all lasting association and preservation: they would destroy even where they unite. (...) The return of the repressed makes up the tabooed and subterranean history of civilization. And the exploration of this history reveals not only the secret of the individual but also that of civilization. Freud’s individual psychology is in its very essence social psychology. Repression is a historical phenomenon. The effective subjugation of the instincts to repressive controls is imposed not by nature but by man. The primal father, as the archetype of domination, initiates the chain reaction of enslavement, rebellion, and reinforced domination which marks the history of civilization." (H. MARCUSE)

www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civ...

 

THE REPTILIAN BRAIN: "The reptilian complex, also known as the R-complex or "reptilian brain", was the name MacLean gave to the basal ganglia, structures derived from the floor of the forebrain during development. The term derives from the fact that comparative neuroanatomists once believed that the forebrains of reptiles and birds were dominated by these structures. MacLean contended that the reptilian complex was responsible for species typical instinctual behaviors involved in aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXyp9p1UDPg

 

THE DEVIL: The 15th major arcanum of the TAROT decks. "Though many decks portray a stereotypical Satan figure for this card, it is more accurately represented by our bondage to material things rather than by any evil persona. It also indicates an obsession or addiction to fulfilling our own earthly base desires. Should the Devil represent a person, it will most likely be one of money and power, one who is persuasive, aggressive, and controlling.

In Jungian terms, he is The Shadow: all the repressed, unmentioned or unmentionable desires that lurk beneath."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_(Tarot_card)

  

Skin (LIZARD), hat (CHART MAN) and cravat (CHART MAN) created by CapCat Ragu and Meilo Minotaur

 

Eyes: Theoretical Afterthought

 

Second Life - Menagerie Island

Brown-headed Cowbirds show up at my feeders every once in a while. At first glance, they aren't the prettiest of birds, but when the sun hits on them just right they really look quite nice.

 

Their practice of laying their eggs in others birds nests only to have those unfortunate birds raise them as their own young makes the Cowbird an unwelcome visitor, even though I know this practice is instinctual and they can't help it.

The Great Work of Alchemy Is about the relationship between man and the cosmos. The creation of an immortal “body of light”, the integration of body, soul and spirit and the

conscious reunion with the unus mundus or the divine ground of being

 

An Emerging Concept of God or Spirit.. We participate in a Cosmic Consciousness or Intelligence which is co-inherent with every particle of our being and every particle of matter. God or Spirit or Divine Mind is not something transcendent to ourselves. We are co-inherent with it, at the very heart of It. Spirit, so long projected onto a transcendent Creator, remote from our world, is the quintessential consciousness which is awaiting discovery both in nature and ourselves. This is one of the great revelations of our time. We have the extraordinary responsibility of helping Spirit to become conscious in this material level of reality. All life is an alchemical process of birth, death and regeneration. Although the gradient for the increase of consciousness in

humanity is so slow and arduous, we are all participating in and contributing to a stupendous Cosmic Great Work. This is something the alchemists understood and was the foundation of all their work.Within Manifest Life is a Hidden Reality of the Highest Order The cosmos calls to us to become aware that we participate in its life, that everything is sacred and connected, that the cosmos has a soul and that we can learn how to communicate with that soul. There has always been a chain of teachers (known as the Golden Chain or catena d’oro) who have transmitted their knowledge and insight from generation to generation over thousands of years. Two great streams of alchemical knowledge, one flowing from Egypt and the other from Persia, Arabia and Islamic Spain, came together in Europe in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. There were some 4000 alchemists working in Europe between 1200 and 1650 and they created dozens of alchemical texts and images. Many kabbalists were alchemists and vice-versa. This image is a Kabbalistic one where two men are sharing a vision of the higher worlds. In the central circle are the zodiacal signs.What is the treasure that Western civilisation has ignored or overlooked? What

is the gold that is not the common gold? The Great work of Alchemy tells us that we have our source in the starry ground of the Cosmos, that we are literally star-life in every cell of our being. The whole of cosmic and planetary evolution is an alchemical process, an ongoing process of creation and transformation, of dissolution and regeneration. The Cosmos calls to us to be aware that we participate in its life, that everything is sacred and connected—one life, one source, one spirit. The Great Work of Alchemy refines the base metal of our understanding so that we – evolved from the fiery substance of the stars – can know ourselves as spirit. It heals the deep wound in the human soul that has come into being because of a sense of alienation, loneliness and separation from the divine. It tells us who we are and why we are here.

 

Mercurius in Sea of Being. Alchemy and Kabbalah kept alive the idea that spirit is present in nature.This is an image of Mercurius in the sea of the Soul with the words Filius Noster

– Our Son above it. The origin of Mercurius goes back to Hermes or the Egyptian Thoth, the guide to the underworld. But he also descends from the Green Man and the dying and resurrected gods of Bronze Age lunar mythology. Mercurius represents the other Son or Daughter, that lost aspect of spirit that is hidden in Nature. The teachers of the School of Chartres believed that the Liberal Art of Dialectica led to his sphere of influence. Many alchemical images portray Mercurius or Hermes with a caduceus and its entwined serpents which suggest a connection to the Kabbalah and the Indian tradition of Kundalini Yoga where two serpents are entwined around the central channel of the sushuma..The alchemists named Mercurius the living gold, the divine fire, the Lumen Naturae — the creative spirit hidden within matter, within all of Nature. However, and this is the Mystery Mercurius is the divine fire of the spirit as well as the subtle body of the soul. He or she (because he could often take a feminine form) is the primal matter that is to be transformed by spirit, the agent of transformation as well as the goal of the longed-for treasure — the philosophical gold, elixir or stone. What the alchemists are saying is that Mercurius is everything and everything is spirit viewed at different stages of its

own transformation.

Rainbow Bridge. Alchemy threw a rainbow bridge between matter and spirit, holding the

connection between the seen and the unseen, the Above and the Below So the alchemists said: “Whoever shall make the hidden manifest knoweth the whole work.”

So much of what they discovered is coming into consciousness now, at this time of humanity’s awakening.The alchemists saw the Nigredo or Separatio as the state of blind suffering and ignorance before the dawning of awareness. They also called this state the unio naturalis — meaning the state where we live from day to day, responding to events as they happen; where we believe we have control of our lives but are the victim of events, and the complexes, beliefs, archaic drives and instinctual habits which control us. In this state the spirit is not awake, not free, but is the prisoner or victim of all these things. To awaken from this state involves the separation of the conscious and unconscious aspects of the soul that have been bound together in a kind of incestuous union where the conscious mind or ego that has emerged from the matrix of nature, is still unconsciously bound to it. So the Nigredo is the phase of the ego’s dying and death as it gives up its illusion of freedom, supremacy, power and control and becomes aware of a

deeper dimension of the psyche which may come as a great shock to it. It also involves the encounter with the dragon or the primordial soul that I talked about in Day 3 on the Shadow. Making it conscious.Separatio involves conflict and suffering and bewilderment. The original sense

of the oneness of our being is split into two. Yet, paradoxically, this work of differentiation is the first stage of reuniting the conscious solar aspect of the psyche with the instinctual lunar aspect.

 

www.annebaring.com/images/Chartres_text_05.pdf

 

sculptor

www.danielhourde.com/biographie

Model: Alexis Koba | Location: Industry Soundlounge @ 4th Social maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Eclipse/64/225/2001

Symone sits and watches the yard with a mixture of contentment and curiosity. There is a sense of power that I get from her, something that I can't really explain. I think it comes across mostly as some instinctual confidence, like she knows that nothing in this place can hurt her. I know lots of people who pretend to be the same. I wish I could be a cat for a day...

I submit this horrific image for the purpose of venting my frustration and anger over what took place in my presence today that resulted in what you see in the photo, and for the purpose of sharing it with others who may be interested.

 

I do NOT consider this art in any way, simply a journalistic snapshot of an unfortunate event.

Click the '+ALL SIZES' button above the photo above to view it larger and in greater detail.

 

This is a sad situation that literally stumbled upon me while I watched my 3 and 5 year old daughters play on a playground near my home.

 

A car entered the nearly empty parking lot of the presbyterian church nearby my daughter's school. The playground I was on is on the church's large front lawn.

 

An older couple, 50's or older, man driving, parked and got out with this baby under age 2.

The man carrying the infant walked towards the playground but stumbled and fell down several concrete steps before he reached the playground.

 

Myself and another adult male also tending his daughters play immediately ran over to the elder man to help him up and check him and the baby for injuries.

 

As I approached him, he was sloppily returning to his feet and began to sway to and fro most noticably. With his back to me, and just as I began to ask "have you been drinking, sir?", I was nearly knocked down by the wave of alcohol odor!!!

 

I was OUTRAGED!!!

 

This pathetic drunk was driving around with an infant and has now severly injured the baby!!!

I was so taken aback by what was unfolding before me that some details are a blur in my memory. I believe it was the elder woman, who was wearing dark sunglasses with huge purple bruises protruding from beneath her frames atop her cheeks, that scooped up the baby, returned her to the car, and was anxious to flee.

 

I ran over to their car, reached in, and removed the keys from the ignition. This caused the couple to become agitated. The drunk man staggered over toward me with his open hand out as if to accept the keys which I did not intend to surrender. I shouted that this baby needs medical attention, but the drunk man just said "Who are you, the Police?" as he approached me closer and with a more intimidating and aggresive stance. I replied "No, but I will call them."

 

At this point the elder woman began pleading with me to return her keys, but I was unsure what exactly to do. I knew I was NOT going to allow them to drive away drunk!!!

It was obvious that the man was extremely intoxicated, but the bruised woman, I was unsure of. There was no phone around for a hundred yards or more and that would be at a strangers door of a nearby house or apartment.

 

David, the other adult on the playground, wasn't offering much in the way of a solution, except to suggest that the woman was probably okay to drive and that we should just let them leave to go treat the baby's wounds. It was obvious by the woman's sudden paranoid and excited behavior and by her statements that she was in fear of the Police and the consequences that would come with that. My primary concerns were for this injured baby and NOT what might happen to this old woman or her drunken companion in the way of legal consequence!

 

She begged me more to surrender her keys to her and stated that she didn't need any more trouble, that they have enough problems already, and that the baby's father is in prison and I think she said the mother is in rehab. Who knows if these people are even true relatives or legally permitted to be in custody of this child??? I was torn.

 

I thought to myself....

"Should I let them leave?

Should I give her the keys?

Will she drive to the hospital to have the baby seen?

Will they go home and drink more booze?

Will they crash the car and further harm the baby?

Will they go somewhere to hide from the Police?

Could the baby's wounds be just superficial scratches, or could there possibly be unapparent head trauma?

Will the baby be okay if they just take her home and clean her up?

Will the baby DIE later on if she is not seen and treated???

Did the baby fall beside the fallen drunk man, or did he fall ON TOP OF HER???"

 

I wanted to take the baby to the nearest hospital myself, but would they let me? Would I be committing the crime of kidnapping by ensuring that this baby got the medical attention it needed? One friend even advised me that I could be charged with a felony simply for reaching into their car and removing the keys!!! Given the circumstances, I feel certain that my intentions would have been clear and I can only hope that wouldn't happen to me. What about Citizen's Arrest?

 

I felt like, among us four adults, that I was the only sane and rational thinking one there, the only one expressing sincere concern and compassion, yet at the same time, I felt like I was causing the most trouble!

 

My two children were still playing on the playground at this point. I felt at a total loss as to what to do. I felt like that baby's life was in my hands! and if I let them drive away with her possibly being drunk also, then....I just feared the worst.

It must have been my instinctual parental drive that forced me to do what I could to protect that baby.

 

So, ultimately, and much against my better judgement, I surrendered her keys to her and then took photos of her license plate, of the baby, and of the old couple sitting in their car. Before she drove away, I asked her if the bruises around her eyes were from this old man beating her when he is drunk?

She became very defensive in her response and stated that no, she was bruised because she "ran into a cabinet". Her claim seemed unlikely at best.

 

I watched them drive away and immediately secured my kids into my car and drove 2 miles to the nearest police station to tell my story, to show the photos, and to have officers find the old couple to ensure that the baby was being properly treated.

 

This situation haunts me and makes me wish I had a cell-phone with me.

 

Later, as I looked over my photos, I realized that she did not properly secure the baby in it's car seat. Look at the photo. The straps that go up the chest should have a buckle or connector at armpit level connecting the two straps to help secure the baby in the seat. There is not one.

 

Two days have passed and I have not found out the results of the search for the couple and the baby.

The address associated with the vehicle's license plate was very nearby and in the immediate area.

I understand the Police were checking the residence as well as the nearby hospital.

 

UPDATE/REVISION: here is the [link] to the old couple responsible for this mess.

www.deviantart.com/view/6200196/

after clicking on the above link, click on the photo itself (of the old couple) to view it larger.

 

Did I do the right thing?

What would you have done?

The migratory journey of Griffon Vultures is fraught with challenges, as they navigate not only the vast expanse of the sea but also contend with relentless harassment from Yellow-legged Gulls and Peregrine Falcons along their route. These aerial predators pose a constant threat, swooping down to harass and intimidate the vultures in flight. Tragically, such confrontations can sometimes result in Griffon Vultures being forced down into the unforgiving waters below. Despite these adversities, Griffon Vultures persevere, driven by the instinctual call of migration and the promise of distant horizons.

Using Waterlogue app taken and edited on iPhone...

Me, myself and I asked ourselves why was I so sore today? It dawned on me that yesterday I’d cut front yard, pulled up a tray of ajuga, a pile of briars and weeds to the street for trash day.....then moved books, etc...... and fell into bed at 10pm instead of reading to midnight as I usually do. Wow, I hope I can get back outdoors tomorrow to move more plants....it will eliminate a ragged confusion of plants out of sync with my simple style. Low maintenance from now on!

 

I shall add something here, about Freud’s ego, id, and super-ego concepts, as written in Wikipedia......(I’ve always thought “me, myself, and I” were simpler ways of saying the same thing??):

 

The id, ego, and super-ego are the three distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche. The three agents are theoretical constructs that describe the activities and interactions of the mental life of a person. In the ego psychology model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual desires; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic agent that mediates, between the instinctual desires of the id and the critical super-ego;[1]

I'd have to agree with the notion that we as a species have an instinctual affinity for trees due to everything they provide us. I also think my affinity for them may exceed that instinct.

©PhotographyByMichiale. All images are copyright protected and cannot be used without my permission. please visit me on Facebook, too! www.facebook.com/photographybymichiale

The EGO Project by Laura Kimpton, Mike Garlington and Jonny Hirschmugl is made from sports trophies, religious iconography, cherubs, guns, skulls and other miscellaneous found objects.

 

Ego is a Latin word meaning "I", cognate with the Greek "Εγώ (Ego)" meaning "I", often used in English to mean the "self", "identity" or other related concepts.

 

Id, ego and super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described. According to this model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the ego is the organized, realistic part; and the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role.

 

The ego acts according to the reality principle; i.e. it seeks to please the id’s drive in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term rather than bringing grief.

 

... from wikipedia

.The Mana Spirits, also known as Elemental Spirits, are magical beings representative of the elements that make up the world. There are eight spirits in all:Salamander, the spirit of fire Undine, the spirit of water, Gnome, the spirit of earth, Jinn, the spirit of wind, Dryad, the spirit of wood,Luna, the spirit of the moon,Wisp, the spirit of light,Shade, the spirit of darkness.According to Seiken Densetsu 3, in her creation of the world, the Mana Goddess forged the Mana Sword and with it sealed the eight God-Beasts inside Mana Stones, which were then scattered across the world; the Elementals were charged with the duty of protecting the Stones. While each Elemental is a powerful spirit, being an embodiment has a drawback in that they can be physically harmed or limited, notably Jinn (Sylphid) in Seiken Densetsu 3 and Salamando in Secret of Mana. In the World History Encyclopedia featured in Legend of Mana, the Elementals are descended from the Mana Goddess, the embodiment of the creative and destructive forces of Mana, each being born from the light which formed the respective elements of Fa'Diel, the world of Mana.There is a basic system of opposing elemental pairs in the games before Legend of Mana: Undine (water) and Salamando (fire); Gnome (earth) and Sylphid/Jinn (wind); Lumina/Wisp (light) and Shade (darkness); Dryad (nature) and Luna (celestial). The system works differently in Legend of Mana, with the four Western Elements in a circular relationship: Undine overcomes Salamander, who overcomes Gnome, who overcomes Jinn, who overcomes Undine, thus launching the cycle over again; while Wisp and Shade are opposites, and Aura (gold/metal) becomes the new opposite to Dryad (wood) (see Elements).

mana.wikia.com/wiki/Mana_Spirit

www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/dreamsarchetypes.html

 

Imagine you are sitting in a theater, listening to a heroine sing longingly of her beloved. Suddenly the stage is invaded by two bands of acrobatic warriors. They tumble and twirl, cartwheel and somersault, flip this way and that. From the orchestra come sounds of cymbal, gong, and clapper to punctuate the action.

Dreams and myths are constellations of archetypal images. They are not free compositions by an artist who plans them for artistic or informational effects. Dreams and myths happen to human beings. The archetype speaks through us. It is a presence and a possibility of "significance." The ancients called them "gods" and "goddesses."What then is an archetype? Jung discovered that humans have a "preconscious psychic disposition that enables a (man) to react in a human manner." These potentials for creation are actualized when they enter consciousness as images. There is a very important distinction between the "unconscious, pre- existent disposition" and the "archetypal image." The archetype may emerge into consciousness in myriads of variations. To put it another way, there are a very few basic archetypes or patterns which exist at the unconscious level, but there are an infinite variety of specific images which point back to these few patterns. Since these potentials for significance are not under conscious control, we may tend to fear them and deny their existence through repression. This has been a marked tendency in Modern Man, the man created by the French Revolution, the man who seeks to lead a life that is totally rational and under conscious control. Where do the archetypes come from? In his earlier work, Jung tried to link the archetypes to heredity and regarded them as instinctual. We are born with these patterns which structure our imagination and make it distinctly human. Archetypes are thus very closely linked to our bodies. In his later work, Jung was convinced that the archetypes are psychoid, that is, "they shape matter (nature) as well as mind (psyche)" (Houston Smith, Forgotten Truth, 40). In other words, archetypes are elemental forces which play a vital role in the creation of the world and of the human mind itself. The ancients called them elemental spirits How do archetypes operate? Jung found the archetypal patterns and images in every culture and in every time period of human history. They behaved according to the same laws in all cases. He postulated the Universal Unconscious to account for this fact. We humans do not have separate, personal unconscious minds. We share a single Universal Unconscious. Mind is rooted in the Unconscious just as a tree is rooted in the ground. Imagine the Universal Unconscious as a cosmic computer. Our minds are subdirectories of the root directory. If we look in our personal "work areas," we find much material that is unique to our historical experience--could only have happened to us--but it is shaped according to universal patterns. If we humans have the courage to seek the source to which our "account" belongs, we begin to discover ever more impersonal and universal patterns. The directories of the cosmic computer to which we can gain access are filled with the myths of the human species. Modern man fancies that he has escaped the myths through his conscious repudiation of revealed religion in favor of a purely rational natural religion (read: Natural Science). But consider his theories of human origin. In the beginning, there was a Big Bang, a cosmic explosion. This is an image from which reason may begin to work, but it is not itself a rational statement. It is a mythical construct. Consider the theory of biological evolution. Man's ancestors emerge from the seas, and they in turn emerged from a cosmic soup of DNA. The majority of creation myths also begin with the same image of man emerging from primordial oceans. See Genesis 1 or the Babylonian creation epic. Consider the Modern tendency to call ourselves persons from the Latin persona. The term derives from the "mask" of Dionysus. Moderns are the wearers of masks! The reality is concealed in the darkness of mystery. This too is a mythical construct. Synchronicity Personality theorists have argued for many years about whether psychological processes function in terms of mechanism or teleology. Mechanism is the idea that things work in through cause and effect: One thing leads to another which leads to another, and so on, so that the past determines the present. Teleology is the idea that we are lead on by our ideas about a future state, by things like purposes, meanings, values, and so on. Mechanism is linked with determinism and with the natural sciences. Teleology is linked with free will and has become rather rare. It is still common among moral, legal, and religious philosophers, and, of course, among personality theorists. Among the people discussed in this book, Freudians and behaviorists tend to be mechanists, while the neo-Freudians, humanists, and existentialists tend to be teleologists. Jung believes that both play a part. But he adds a third alternative called synchronicity.

Synchronicity is the occurrence of two events that are not linked causally, nor linked teleologically, yet are meaningfully related. Once, a client was describing a dream involving a scarab beetle when, at that very instant, a very similar beetle flew into the window. Often, people dream about something, like the death of a loved one, and find the next morning that their loved one did, in fact, die at about that time. Sometimes people pick up he phone to call a friend, only to find that their friend is already on the line. Most psychologists would call these things coincidences, or try to show how they are more likely to occur than we think. Jung believed the were indications of how we are connected, with our fellow humans and with nature in general, through the collective unconscious. Jung was never clear about his own religious beliefs. But this unusual idea of synchronicity is easily explained by the Hindu view of reality. In the Hindu view, our individual egos are like islands in a sea: We look out at the world and each other and think we are separate entities. What we don't see is that we are connected to each other by means of the ocean floor beneath the waters. The outer world is called maya, meaning illusion, and is thought of as God's dream or God's dance. That is, God creates it, but it has no reality of its own. Our individual egos they call jivatman, which means individual souls. But they, too, are something of an illusion. We are all actually extensions of the one and only Atman, or God, who allows bits of himself to forget his identity, to become apparently separate and independent, to become us. But we never truly are separate. When we die, we wake up and realize who we were from the beginning: God. When we dream or meditate, we sink into our personal unconscious, coming closer and closer to our true selves, the collective unconscious. It is in states like this that we are especially open to "communications" from other egos. Synchronicity makes Jung's theory one of the rare ones that is not only compatible with parapsychological phenomena, but actually tries to explain them!

www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/dreamsarchetypes.html

 

On this day ghosts and other supernatural creatures come out from the Underworld and move among the living. Families prepare food and other offerings and place them on a shrine dedicated to deceased relatives.Mana You must understand that these archetypes are not really biological things, like Freud's instincts. They are more spiritual demands. For example, if you dreamt about long things, Freud might suggest these things represent the phallus and ultimately sex. But Jung might have a very different interpretation. Even dreaming quite specifically about a penis might not have much to do with some unfulfilled need for sex. It is curious that in primitive societies, phallic symbols do not usually refer to sex at all. They usually symbolize mana, or spiritual power. These symbols would be displayed on occasions when the spirits are being called upon to increase the yield of corn, or fish, or to heal someone. The connection between the penis and strength, between semen and seed, between fertilization and fertility are understood by most cultures.The concept of archetypes is central to Jungian psychology and myth analysis. However there are many different ways of looking at what exactly an archetype is (cf Heiddegger). Carol Pearson, in her book, Awakening The Heroes Within shows how five different individuals would view the idea of archetypes.A Shaman, or other seeker after spiritualism, will conceive of archetypes as gods and goddesses, encoded in the collective unconscious, whom are scorned at great risk. Academics and other rationalists, who are typically suspicious of anything that sounds mystic, may conceive of archetypes as controlling paradigms or metaphors, the invisible patterns in the mind that control how we experience the world.Scientists may see the process of identifying archetypes as similar to other scientific processes. Physicists learn about the smallest subatomic particles by studying the traces they leave; psychologists and other scholars study archetypes by examining their presence in art, literature, myth, and dream. Carl Jung recognized that the archetypical mages that recurred in his patients' dreams also could be found in the myths, legends, and art of ancient peoples, as well as in contemporary iterature, religion, and art. They know that they are archetypical becausethey leave the same traces over time and space. People who are committed to religious positions that emphasize one all-encompassing God, can distinguish the spiritual truth of monotheism from the pluralistic psychological truth of archetypes. The god we mean when we speak of "The One True God" is beyond the human capacity to envision and name. The archetypes are like different facets of that God, accessible to the psyche's capacity to imagine numinous reality. Thus these archetypes helpthe person connect to the Eternal; they make great mysteries more accessible by providing multiple images. This is evident in both the Catholic idea of the Trinity (The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost), and the Buddhist idea of one Buddha (which is then divisible into the 40, the 400, and the 4000 facets or aspects of that single deity, each with it's own name and story). Finally archetypes are the primal symbols of aspects of our own nature. By identifying with one of more archetypes we can identify our own nature. By portraying these archetypes, we portray ourselves. Thus we can use these archetypes as a spiritual guide to the discovery of selfhood. And what does an archetype mean to ? That's simple. Archetypes are symbols. In the Hermetic Tradition there is very little difference between the symbol and the thing it represents. This is explicit in the Law of Association. By manipulating the symbol it is therefore also possible to directly manipulate the thing. And because archetypes are symbols representing facets of ourselves they allow us to change ourselves. As within, so without. The macrocosm embodies the microcosm.So much for the content of the psyche. Now let's turn to the principles of its operation. Jung gives us three principles, beginning with the principle of opposites. Every wish immediately suggests its opposite. If I have a good thought, for example, I cannot help but have in me somewhere the opposite bad thought. In fact, it is a very basic point: In order to have a concept of good, you must have a concept of bad, just like you can't have up without down or black without white. This idea came home to me when I was about eleven. I occasionally tried to help poor innocent woodland creatures who had been hurt in some way -- often, I'm afraid, killing them in the process. Once I tried to nurse a baby robin back to health. But when I picked it up, I was so struck by how light it was that the thought came to me that I could easily crush it in my hand. Mind you, I didn't like the idea, but it was undeniably there.According to Jung, it is the opposition that creates the power (or libido) of the psyche. It is like the two poles of a battery, or the splitting of an atom. It is the contrast that gives energy, so that a strong contrast gives strong energy, and a weak contrast gives weak energy. The second principle is the principle of equivalence. The energy created from the opposition is "given" to both sides equally. So, when I held that baby bird in my hand, there was energy to go ahead and try to help it. But there is an equal amount of energy to go ahead and crush it. I tried to help the bird, so that energy went into the various behaviors involved in helping it. But what happens to the other energy? Well, that depends on your attitude towards the wish that you didn't fulfill. If you acknowledge it, face it, keep it available to the conscious mind, then the energy goes towards a general improvement of your psyche. You grow, in other words.

But if you pretend that you never had that evil wish, if you deny and suppress it, the energy will go towards the development of a complex. A complex is a pattern of suppressed thoughts and feelings that cluster -- constellate -- around a theme provided by some archetype. If you deny ever having thought about crushing the little bird, you might put that idea into the form offered by the shadow (your "dark side"). Or if a man denies his emotional side, his emotionality might find its way into the anima archetype. And so on. Here's where the problem comes: If you pretend all your life that you are only good, that you don't even have the capacity to lie and cheat and steal and kill, then all the times when you do good, that other side of you goes into a complex around the shadow. That complex will begin to develop a life of its own, and it will haunt you. You might find yourself having nightmares in which you go around stomping on little baby birds! If it goes on long enough, the complex may take over, may "possess" you, and you might wind up with a multiple personality. In the movie The Three Faces of Eve, Joanne Woodward portrayed a meek, mild woman who eventually discovered that she went out and partied like crazy on Saturday nights. She didn't smoke, but found cigarettes in her purse, didn't drink, but woke up with hangovers, didn't fool around, but found herself in sexy outfits. Although multiple personality is rare, it does tend to involve these kinds of black-and-white extremes. The final principle is the principle of entropy. This is the tendency for oppositions to come together, and so for energy to decrease, over a person's lifetime. Jung borrowed the idea from physics, where entropy refers to the tendency of all physical systems to "run down," that is, for all energy to become evenly distributed. If you have, for example, a heat source in one corner of the room, the whole room will eventually be heated.When we are young, the opposites will tend to be extreme, and so we tend to have lots of energy. For example, adolescents tend to exaggerate male-female differences, with boys trying hard to be macho and girls trying equally hard to be feminine. And so their sexual activity is invested with great amounts of energy! Plus, adolescents often swing from one extreme to another, being wild and crazy one minute and finding religion the next.As we get older, most of us come to be more comfortable with our different facets. We are a bit less naively idealistic and recognize that we are all mixtures of good and bad. We are less threatened by the opposite sex within us and become more androgynous. Even physically, in old age, men and women become more alike. This process of rising above our opposites, of seeing both sides of who we are, is called transcendence.

www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/dreamsarchetypes.html

 

The ego is the centre of consciousness. It is identity. It is 'I'. But it is not the totality of the psyche. Being the king of consciousness amounts to dominion over a small but important land surrounded by a wide world of terra incognita. The more aware the King is of lands beyond his domain the more secure he will be on his throne, but he must not be tempted to open the borders to it all. In Jungian theory the unconscious is far too vast to ever be made fully conscious, poking about in it is not without danger, yet ignoring it is also a mistake since it leads to a brittle fixedness which at best impedes growth, at worst can break when under the pressure of the 'threat' of change.So called "humanist spirit" relates to the thought and the viewpoint concerning man's mental life: the humanist spirit is linked with humanitarianism and is different from each other. Compared with animals, the author concluded: Tao (Dao) and Food, kindheartedness and living, righteousness and benefit, moral integration and feats of strength, principles and appetites and independent will, etc. all are human personality values. Simultaneously strong human social responsibility is also human social value. Human beings live in nature, mutually coordinate, and co-exist in harmony together with nature which is also the representation of man's natural

www.google.fr/search?q=ghosts+supernatural+creatures+Unde...