Art, Faith, and The Koko Lion

Call it Sanity; Call it Being; Call it Bliss

2012-02-07T14:10:00.011-05:00

There's a jackhammer in the distance, outside my window. My darkened smartphone makes watery drip tones each time an e-mail wants me to look at it. I hear big trucks pulling up in front of the corner supermarket to unload shrink-wrapped palettes of canned black beans. There's an ambulance siren on the horizon, wending its way to King's County Hospital. The Q train downstairs is running on time.

I suppose that pipe in the street needed to be fixed. I was waiting for an e-mail (just not that one). I love those beans. I hope that person on their way to King's County will be alright. Later, I'll just miss the Q train into Manhattan...

Our world is a hugely complex, elaborately interconnected place, driven in a loosely syncopated way by needs and desires, options and inventions. If we allow it, it can feel like it's driven by our fears...but then those are inventions too. Look at it quietly, and what becomes obvious is the profound underlying effectiveness of our cooperative shared Being. The understanding and apprecia-tion of each other's lives, of our interconnectedness; of one ano-ther's common Reality.

With this simple, stripped-down worldview, it becomes ap-parent how well everything works when left to the sweat and intention of the great majority of humankind. Do you need any-thing? Is there something that I can help you with? More people all the time resonate with this simple impulse, whether they let it be their main source of motivation or not. Everywhere you go every-one is in some stage of realizing it.

As unique as we all are, we are all the same thing here in this place; and that awareness is steadily, and rather gracefully crystallizing our world now, without any big fuss. And it's only this growing presence of shared Being, the impetus of unifying con-sciousness, that can change so huge and complicated a mecha-nism as our collective life has become – and change it relatively quickly. Ironically, it starts at the very simplest, smallest level; at the level of each of our understandings.

"Without an inner change [humankind] can no longer cope with the gigantic development of the outer life."

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Predictably, corporate media will continue to insist that people identify with an obviously unsustainable system, even when people plainly know better. By limiting coverage of expanding global awareness, they suggest that even when we join forces to effect change (Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring) we're ineffective, and that it's more practical to maintain the unworkable status quo. If we each personally buy into those messages, they'll come true (but still won't be real). If we don't, and each personally choose a sane and reasonable path, we naturally return to our increasingly coop-erative state of shared Being; and merge into a real entity of immeasurable power and direction.

At that "small" level of personal understanding, we find and empower our true Reality, the authentic world rising up around us. As the delusional world of the conglomerates starts to come apart at the seams, and everything starts going wrong (like now), something very big is going right. The layer of misinformation we've been fed so long is dissolving on the surface of this rising awareness; the conscious, co-creative impulse that instant com-munication and sixth-sensory awareness has already been nour-ishing at a much deeper level.

We know we can't continue in this fossil-fuel based world, wasting half the food we produce, poisoning fresh water, funneling wealth and resources to a few tortured individuals. It simply won't last. It will have to change.

When the systems used to manage the anachronisms (crony capitalism, television, corrupt politics) break down, they only serve to starkly define the true nature of the problem – the destructive backwardness of a selfish minority; and to enhance and solidify the unification of conscious Being arising in the world. The barrage of "Citizen's United" media the U.S. is about to get will [painfully] demonstrate what I mean. After that, they might as well paint themselves bright red...)

Could it really be – that rising honesty and ethics will defuse the fearful urgencies of the corporate elite? What would happen if they were all suddenly brought back down to Earth (kicking and screaming)? Not much, really. We'd merge right back into that un-derlying force of cooperative Being that's growing so powerfully through our our selves, our communities, and our world. Nothing would erupt in total chaos. We wouldn't be at all lost without their leadership. The world would simply become a more cooperative place, whether they like it or not (and they won't); where we re-cognize unconscious entitlement as being incompatible with our authentic nature.

Honestly, isn't everything actually being dictated to us all on a much larger scale, by systems that we're only a relatively small part of? Something far greater than any of our changing institutions or desires. It's obviously not this horizontal materialistic delusion (what Hindus call maya), where we feel constantly coerced to reach outward for solutions – it's a multi-dimensional Reality that's available to everyone from the inside out; that each of us can realize by simply living one another's life, humbly and com-passionately. That's what being human is so good for.

Twenty years from now we could just as easily be using liberated Tesla designs, thorium reactors, tidal turbines, and solar energy. We could be conserving irreplaceable resources; eli-minating food waste; stewarding the environment and wildlife; making war obsolete (it already is...). We're capable of Being all that, and at that spiritual threshold – if we can keep our head above water – we probably will be.

If you think this is a magical impossibility, may I point out to you that we're all floating on a planet in outer space.

So call it sanity. Call it unified consciousness. Call it spiritual evolution. Call it Sat (Being), Chit (Awareness), Ananda (Bliss). Call it what you like – it's still just the same impulse that makes a wildflower grow and blossom, right up between the tracks of the Q train.

"Our present world is conditioned by our present mode of consciousness; only when that consciousness passes from its present dualistic mode...will the new creation appear, which is the external reality of which our world is a mirror."

Bede Griffiths

......................................................................read more about maya

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 27: Just A Day in L.A., Part 2

2012-02-03T15:12:00.013-05:00

.................................................................continued from Part One

Once you were out past Los Feliz, past Atwater, it was best to stay off that narrow little old Pasadena Freeway with it's non-existant on-ramps, and head right on up into Highland Park, if you could find your way. Out there on the other side of the Golden State Freeway, the roads trickle and spill uphill into the landscape you can see from Chavez Ravine, from the cheap seats at Dodger Stadium. This was really a lot like the canyonland I came from, the winding roads up to the little hilltops like where the Bobos' house sat, at the back of a circular driveway, on top of it's own little hill, near Mt. Washington. It was one of those white ranch-styles. White, glittery rock halfway up the sides to white painted frame and windows with white wooden blinds. White crushed rock in the planters. White trim and a black door, with a withered wreath on it, and a WELCOME mat.

I nervously rang the bell, and Mrs. Bobo nervously answered, holding her other hand like she had a lit cigarette in it. She was a small black woman, mid-sixties-ish, delicate, wearing large-framed glasses and dressed comfortably in slacks and a shirt, with a scarf tied around her hair, over her head. She asked me in and sat me in the white living room, white walls, white furniture, a cherry wood bowl full of large, white marble grapes. I felt like an interloper right away, like I had no right to be there.

There was a palpable energy of injury in the air, and she immediately began talking to me rather out of context it seemed, about things I didn't understand; things that I knew weren't any of my business. My God, I realized, this woman's husband has just died and she's in terrible pain. I tried to be as agreeable as I could be, sipping the coffee she'd offered me, and uncomfortably agreeing with her about everything she said.

She was making me look underneath you know, under the cover of her life, the thirty or forty years she'd spent married to a traveling latin jazz star. I wasn't at all ready for it, for the intimacy, for the exclusivity. She looked steady into my eyes and spoke like I knew just what she was talking about – like she was telling me something as familiar to me as it was to her. And then I began to believe that it was familiar, looking into that particular wound, and that this was a private disclosure meant only for the two of us and the com-mensurate spirits there in the room with us.

I uneasily assumed some of her injury as we shuffled through the box of photos, a box full of their life. She stopped to tell each of the stories accompanying the shiny, curling black and white photos and faded kodachromes, few of which would serve my actual purpose for being there. Blurry moments at sunny cafés. Hasty group shots at family occasions. Party goers mid-conversation. And then I realized, this was my purpose, to be present as she made her careful in-ventory, before she could put the box away.

I picked out a few photographs that might work, but not very well – my original intentions had been gently taken hostage by sharing the trauma of this stranger who sat before me, her hands quietly shaking. Now she seemed to be speaking in directions where I didn't belong, that I didn't understand, about how none of it was right, how all of it was such a shame, how a boy ought to respect his mother.

"He never showed her the proper respect...he never did!" She said, and I realized that it wasn't her dead husband she was talking about anymore, or was it? "She's my best friend, you know...we've been best friends for years," she said, "Mrs. Gaye...I was over there last night, you know. Lord, such a sad, sad thing. Such a shame for a boy to do that." Like I knew...

It was April 3rd, 1984, and I remembered that just two days before, Marvin Gaye's father, the elder Mr. Marvin Gaye, Sr., had shot and killed his son, the iconic soul singer whose voice had played such an important part of a lot of our lives, and whose "What's Going On?" album was the smooth, profound soundtrack of a country's wounded soul. Drugs and alcohol and ego were the drivers of this tragedy, like they were for so many. Mrs. Bobo and Mrs. Gaye were the very best of friends, and had been for years, and suddenly the true size and shape of that wound I'd been witnessing became clear to me... Can I Get a Witness?

"He should have shown her the proper respect," she said, as she led me back out to the door, and sent me back down the drive, back down the little road wrapping around the hill, spilling me out onto San Fernando Road, past the Eagle Rock turn, past Forest Lawn, and on up the valley towards home.

The portrait didn't come out all that well – it was sufficient, I suppose. Colorful and certainly accurate, but not one of my best. The program was printed, the festival happened, and finally one day I called to check Mrs. Bobo's address, to send back the pictures, and to see if she'd like the original painting I'd done, as a gift.

"That picture was the worst thing I ever saw," she said on the phone. "No thank you – I do not want it. It looked nothing at all like my Willie. Just send me back my pictures." So that's what I did.

It had really just been on account of one phone call, that day in L.A. Just a little ride to the edge of the box, and a peek underneath it's lid.

Animation Design Comes to Life – Actual Shots from Different Spots

2012-01-31T15:39:00.016-05:00

Here are shots from actual spots demonstrating how animation design fits content and brand; a variety of looks I've come up with for a variety of requirements – and shown in a variety of venues...

from online to on-the-air...

Design for an online animation, the kind I specialize in at

IdeaRocket Animation

The hand-drawn style supplies unfolding action to the storyline...

Designing an entire world

where every character

is built from it's own word,

for Word World, airing on

PBS Kids...where I created a lot of easily-read characters,

their legible locations, and lots of their well-spelled stuff.

An editorial look for a groovy trip back in history...

And an upcoming animation describing what animation can do...

...maybe we'll end up with a corner office!

See what I do with IdeaRocket,

And a lot more animation design of all kinds at my site.

Call on me for any kind of animation design solution,

particularly if it's perplexing, pop, or playful!

Check out my profile on LinkedIn

Codename: Kids Next Door - 2 x 4 Technology, Flying Vehicles!

2012-01-31T13:57:00.007-05:00

The KND needed lots of different vehicles built out of whatever I (and #2) could find out in the cartoon junk yard. A lot of them rolled, a lot of them sailed, and a whole lot of 'em – like these four here,

flew like crazy...

This was called "The TrailerChopper"

Here's "The BaitPlane"

...and "The CazhShip," cuz it was just so casual...

And of course they needed a "KndAirliner," for those special travel arrangements...

...color on these has been adjusted to meet original specifications.

2012: It's the End of the World As We Know It!

2012-01-25T23:01:00.019-05:00

"The Promised Land has nothing to do with real estate."

Joseph Campbell

Remember that poor old evangelist who promised his flock that the world would end last year? He had a lot riding on that prediction, so I couldn't help but feel a little sorry for him when it apparently didn't happen, like he said it would. It didn't happen like he said it would, but I wonder if it would make him feel any better if he knew that it did happen. In Dr. J.C. Calleman's interpretation of the Mayan calendar, the world (as we've known it) "ended" with the end of the Universal Underworld last October, 2011; cul-minating in a state of Trust (or Faith); and an Ethical Era. He was right about that too.

May I be the first to make the announcement right here right now? Despite whatever evidence to the contrary, The World, as we have known it, ended in 2011.

This crazy old world has seen the "end of time," and "the end of the world" so many times now, it seems like it'll never end, and it won't. Of course, it's never actually the end of the world. As George Carlin (the patron saint of cynical enlightenment) said: "It's not the end of the world, it's the end of people. The world will still be here." I expect that at this point of his own spiritual evolution, floating around in another dimension, Saint George knows that even that isn't true. Everything, including people, keeps going along just fine...at least right now.

What "The End of the World" has always been describing is a psycho-logical end; the re-framing of a new reality brought about by a singular coalescence of transcendent consciousness; a singularity after which old ways of thinking and doing are in a instant rendered obsolete – like what's happened around here in the last few years. It fits quite nicely into Calleman's Mayan theory, that at some point early last year the Earth be-gan to resonate with a level of consciousness that simultaneously informed it's occupants that a major change was taking place. Then Spring came early in the Mid East. The "occupiers" showed up. Fraudulent elections be-came unacceptably obvious. War became obsolete.

Everywhere you go now, people know that the Earth's endless potential is being mismanaged by a criminally unconscious minority (God bless 'em). It's global knowledge that great swaths of humanity are intensely wasteful, while even greater ones are subject to unnecessary deprivation. That our extreme economic disparities are selfishly foolish. The occupants in every small town know about the "elite class" of super-wealthy, extraordinarily fearful (suffering) people, who feel they need to control the world's re-sources and media, who put "Big Boxes" on the edge of every town. We can see their mess on TV everyday (God bless 'em), and increasingly we live in it, too. The real occupants are aware of what the miraculous potential of the Earth actually can be.

Naturally it's all happened before, when these literally medieval dis-parities bring us to a spiritual renaissance. It suddenly dawns on us that our need to identify ourselves with the insistent demands of materialism, like "your class," "what you deserve," and "how your way is right," is a form of destructive insanity, forcing us to live the totally inauthentic lives so many of us are all too familiar with. The death of that inauthentic self becomes inevitable. Nothing can ever be the same after that.

Everyone deserves to be who they are. Everyone deserves to be reborn into a fulfilling, authentic life – and they can be, but there almost always seems to be a kind of "Dark Age" first, where "faith is not always a well-lit place." I can't say exactly where we are, at the start of that dark age, in the middle, or towards the end of it, but I do know one thing for certain re-garding The End of the World:

Humanity is currently experiencing a mass metaphysical impulse to transcend the delusion of separateness. It's the collective death of an illusion, and it's spreading quickly. The resurrection is arising in Christians; the "Ethical Era" is settling upon the followers of the Mayan Calendar pro-phecy; it's the closing bell of the Kali Yuga to Hindus.

As a global entity, we all recognize the unfathomable mystery that everything comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, to a kind of ultimate ground of being that we're becoming aware of through quantum physics, cyber-consciousness, and verifiable sixth-sensory perception. We know that mysterious ground of being transcends this form we're in; that this "radiance of the eternal" penetrates everything and everybody, and in-tuitively informs a graceful and responsible way to live that's possible for everyone, and that everyone in this world deserves as their birthright.

That "radiance," that understanding we all share illuminates the dark place where we find trust in ourselves and each other – our Faith. That is the light we can shine now to penetrate our media, our destructive mass-ego, our "One Percent," to penetrate through back to the mystery. Now we can stand our ethical ground with an unassailable authority; the boundaries protecting humanity simply can no longer be contested; and if you stop for a moment, and just listen...you can own it.

The best and easiest way to make all this happen is to simply show up for life with this knowledge in our hearts, and try our best to live our authentic lives – where the inspiration for our actions comes from the inside, not the outside. That's a nice metaphysical impulse, isn't it?

It's even mystical...

Here's the good news: The world has ended. Welcome to the new world.

"It will not come by watching for it. No one will be saying, Look, here it is!

Or, Look, there it is! The Kingdom [of the Father] is spread out over the whole earth, and people do not see it."

Logion 113, The Gospel of Thomas

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 27: Just A Day in L.A., Part 1

2012-01-21T13:10:00.045-05:00

I'd call it the heart of Los Angeles – if it has one – that narrow strip of the world that runs across from La Cienega to the Golden State Freeway, and down from the Hollywood Hills to Interstate 10. An odd golden rectangle of sorts, within which all things two-dimensional in nature are eventually bound to occur. In New York, you can feel the connection, as though you were a functioning part in some kind of or-ganism with everything happening at once right there from bottom to top, and vice-versa.

L.A. is more like a spread-out Venice – canals criss-crossing and wandering around the flatness, gondolas in rush hour gridlock. Life tends to run downhill there, and who's to say when anything will happen. It's all about a strange kind of dis-connection – a sunny, ungrounded alternative reality. The only things easily understood are the things that are visible on the surface, it's just that sometimes, life makes you look underneath. This was going to be a day like that.

I'd gotten a rare call from Playboy Enterprises to do an illustration for the Playboy Jazz Festival, so I rolled over the Cahuenga Pass and on down to their old building in West Hollywood, where at one time, I hear, Hugh Hefner actually lived up in the penthouse, over-looking the glory days of "The Sunset Strip."

It was dim up in their offices, and sumptuous, like a prime rib res-taurant with a Tony Bennett soundtrack. No one seemed to be quite awake yet (it was just before noon at Playboy, after all) and so it fell upon a well-dressed underling to fetch me my assignment folder, and to direct me to my Art Director, who actually wasn't actually there. He was inexplicably working out of The Schindler House, an archi-tectural landmark nearby.

I was drifting on a bit of that Vegas-like up-all-night atmosphere, riding the elevator back down alone, when it stopped on a floor and the actor Robert Vaughan got on with me. I felt a queer, sudden schoolboyish surge, because here he was, "Napoleon Solo, The Man From U.N.C.L.E." – one of my favorite childhood TV heroes – in close quarters on an elevator at Playboy – my favorite childhood magazine (when I could lay my hands on a copy.) What a funny world.

He looked at me furtively, then instantly back away with the pain of recognition, and then stepped right up to the elevator door and stood just inches from it, looking straight ahead, glancing sideways si-multaneously avoiding me and keeping track of me. Without speaking, he very clearly said: "Don't speak."

He had the classic look of a screen actor – a short guy with a big face, big features, and he appeared, upon observation, to be a nice enough guy if he'd given it a chance, but it didn't seem like he would, or could. As though he were afraid. Afraid of what, I don't know. I certainly was no threat, smiling there like a stand-in. Maybe he saw me notice his platform shoes, which I'm very sorry to say I did.

Maybe he really wasn't the unassailable character he played on TV. Maybe he was really a very vulnerable guy, there with the hairspray and the lifts. I liked him, and was honored to be on the same elevator with him, but the moment the doors parted he quickly stepped out, like a racer out a gate, and there he went...The Man From U.N.C.L.E...The Magnificent Seven...safe again, at last.

I gurgled around the innercity suburb streets lined with fat palms and eucalyptus, like the jungle cruise at Disneyland, over Beverly and jogging on up Kings Road. It was a little hard to find the Schindler House at first, with it's back to the street like the best of those modern residential designs – Neutra, and the Eichler houses – like the house I lived in until I was eight. I gently pushed the door open and said hello into an empty room, when Rip Georges, the accomplished and respected designer and creative director poked his head in too. Why he was working there I never really knew, but he showed me around the classic modern residence, the home of the architect, elemental and open. It was like a mix of a cave and a beautiful japanese house, with every room facing the garden, and light angling in under the angled roof. Concrete walls like a Roman villa.

It felt a little bit like breathing to me, that house. A comfortable, anthropological aesthetic as close to the region's natural architecture as any would ever be. An intuition for not needing much that so many people had sought in those foothills – like my father, who'd tried for it in the houses I knew as a child, before he left the western world be-hind. It felt that familiar, and that empty.

We sat by a built-in desk and he gave me the low-down: They wanted a portrait of the Latin per-cussionist, Willie Bobo (famous for his cool version of the Jobim song,"Gingi"). Mr. Bobo had sadly died an early death just a few months before and the festival pro-gram would include a dedication to him, so perhaps it should be something colorful, something celebratory. The only problem was photographic reference. There wasn't any, and in those days, no internet images available at the push of a button; but they did have the address and phone number of Mr. Bobo's widow. She lived out in Highland Park, and she might have some photos I could borrow to work from. It was clearly part of my job to awkwardly call her, set up a meeting time, and get directions...

................................................................................continued in Part 2

see more of that architectural style here, at a pretty cool blog

Thank You For 20,000 Visitors!

2012-01-21T13:08:00.000-05:00

IdeaRocket Animation: From Homebaked to Lift Off

2012-01-17T10:18:00.011-05:00

I've recently joined up with Will Gadea's team as Art Director of the newly rebranded IdeaRocket Animation production house (formerly Homebaked Films), specializing in "explainers," animations that describe what a business is or how something works.

Visit the IdeaRocket website

Pretty soon, our new IdeaRocket explainer will be up, but in the meantime, here's a peek at the kind of work we're doing:

GlobalEnglish from Homebaked Films on Vimeo.

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 26: The Road to Chetumal; Entering the Underworld

2012-01-08T18:06:00.041-05:00

The fat, brown old '75 Chrysler that they'd rent-a-wrecked next to the airport in Cancun hovered down the road across the peninsula, from Escarcega to Chetumal, sucking up the pale, gravelly length of it. The highway seemed to extrude endlessly from a vanishing point ahead, as though oozing from an ever-retreating pipe, pulling them towards the Carribean, the low jungle creeping in along each shoulder. They weren't at all lost, they just felt like it.

It was probably because it seemed such a long ride, this second leg of the three; out past Valladolid to Merida, down to Campeche and Champoton having been the first part; now from the western blue water side to the azure east coast and the border with Belize. All he heard was wind with all the windows rolled down (the old school air conditioning), and everyone was asleep it seemed, even Koko, though he may have been driving – he couldn't say for sure. The twilight colors of the zocalo in Merida seemed so long ago, and since that silly light show in Chichen Itza they'd been sent off into their alternate world of tourism alive in the Yucatan wild.

They'd all caught that strange fever, as though drinking from the first bottomless cenote had laid out a subterranean map to follow, from ruin to ruin searching out jaguars, ufos, and entrances to the underworld. They were all there, holes in the sky and the earth, they just had to find them. Intuitively, they knew the underworld stood in for their own interior landscapes, though as usual it was never dis-cussed. The lush but arid overgrowth invading every road and each moment of life on the surface betrayed those deceptions so typically found in "paradise" – a little like the appearances of their own exteriors.

On either side of the highway they saw the occasional mud hut, but never any people. "There's a smart one!" Jean would say each time they passed a mottled, meatless pig by the road. It was an ongoing bit of sarcastic fun, in response to Koko having told her about an article he'd read that mentioned how truly intelligent pigs were. It got a laugh every time in those days, when they were all asleep and still mistaking sarcasm for humor.

Any hand-scrawled sign on a dirt turn-off promising a ruin or an entrance to the underworld de-manded a requisite exploration, observed overhead by invisibly vi-brating alien spacecraft and lan-guid jaguars in the underbrush.

No stone in that respect could be left unturned, and so he'd swung the old boat down a wide dirt path and followed it to where an elderly yucateco and a dirty little boy loosely held vigil over a small opening in the rocks. They paid a quarter U.S. each, the little boy attached a raw wire to a car battery, and bare, flickering bulbs lit the way down the slippery hole.

Timelessly, the descent into the semi-darkness leaves every pro-mise, every safety behind. They clamored in an unsteady proces-sion down the long, constricted passage until it finally opened up into a vaulted cavern. A shaft of light poured in through a break in the cave ceiling, and as their vision balanced out, the crystalline water began to glow a deep blue-green. Guillermo and Jean watched as Grace and Koko stripped and ventured into the water, carefully at first as the jagged bottom looked like you could reach down and touch it, but once they got in they realized it was only the surreal clarity of the water that made it appear so. It was really six or eight feet deep.

As Koko floated out, he realized that the center of the cenote dropped down in a circular shaft of the densest blue, plunging down beneath them as though straight into the center of the earth, to the raw, unprotected heart of every experience he'd ever hid behind. Grace floated fearlessly out over the unfathomable depth like she was teasing it, like she was offering herself up to some ancient unknown. Exposing herself to some suppressed demiurge. The water was soft with minerals, and felt familiar and healing, amniotic, while at the same time it was like some kind of time machine, rearranging their elements sub-atomically, sending them on to a dif-ferent, totally silent life.

When they finally reached Chetumal they'd expected hospitality, but instead were met with furtive looks and men with guns – an air of mistrust and danger brought on by recent slash and burn class warfare and forced resettlement of the local Maya. They kept right on going. The road led them straight into the shell encrusted entry arch of the Hotel Laguna Bacalar, an oddly angled moderne-esque building perched above "The Lagoon of Seven Blues." It was peculiarly unfinished and lightly occupied by a strange assortment of windblown travelers and semi-permanent guests in various states of inebriation. After a day or two of assiduously avoiding insanity, they headed north on their last leg.

In Tulum, they parked at the end of road on the bluff above the crazy virdant sea, and strolled into the ruins. A viejo walked briskly out of a small block house, buckling his pants. He was, of course, the toll taker – every ruin had one – and after collecting his quarter from each walked briskly back to his quarters, just a chair and fan visible through the doorless doorway.

Only sage old iguanas guarded the ruined structures, still practically livable. With it all to themselves, and after what seemed like years of turning inside-out in the dust and the jungle, the ancient stone beachfront felt like home. Like they'd never left, or lived anywhere else. Diving chamber to chamber in the crescent caves of Xcaret, where the freshwater collided with the sea, and the lagoon of Xel Ha, alone again as they always magically seemed to be, they were spirits trapped in blue-green amber, their invitation to stay and move into their underworld permanently interrupted by the first busload of tourists to ever see those sacred places.

It was time to go, to move the sky back into position, and to detach themselves from the endless subterranean waterways that wove the underworld of their lives together. Time to head back into the world above, where there was no risk of revealing the broken-open places they'd stumbled across.

About a thousand years after they'd arrived, they sat outside at Don Cafetos on the dusty main street of Tulum, had an excellent meal, and rolled the old chrysler past Playa del Carmen, past Cancun, past sleeping jaguars and blinking lizards, off the end of the flat peninsula, and on out right past ufos following alongside, clearly visible out the airplane windows.

Codename: Kids Next Door, From the Extra Sooper Obscure Vault – Crazy Killin' Time

2012-01-04T14:02:00.028-05:00

Codename: Kids Next Door was probably one of the last animated TV shows on the air that was designed on paper, old school style, with a bunch of us sitting around "The Design Pit," each with our cubby-holes and boards. The grind of creating a heavily designed show season after season can lead to some unusual ways to fill the few and far between breaks in the ever-steady stream of work. Oftentimes, just to keep the juices flowing, it leads to slightly irreverent sketching, mostly on Post-Its and on scraps of paper...which I just happened to run across some of, cleaning out a drawer in my flat-file (remember those? They were where you used to store files).

Here then are a few scenes, out-takes, and time-fillers from the Extra Sooper Obscure Vault – for real gluttons for KND punishment, and definitely not for the faint of heart...

I'll lead off with some legitimate work (well, sort of...), an evil baby-abductor, a thumbnail mega interplanetary sooper rocket, and a guaranteed nugget mining device, for scratching and clawing your way to treasures...

Our kindly boss, Mr.Tom Warbuton, tried his best to keep us happy by plying us with candy and sweets – there was a huge bin of it available 24-7; but sometimes, like here when one of our BG designers, Gideon Kendall came back after a couple days off, what he discovered upon his return wasn't all that pretty...

Working on comics often leads to coming up with a few of your own.

Here's a classic waste of time: Salmon Man, and his arch-nemesis The Grizzly (with his troublesome little sidekick, Racoon Kid).

This is just plain wrong, and someone should apologize for it! (Run out and find me someone...) It's probably some kind of heresy for an animation guy to boot...but it did happen long ago (before I got better). Allow me to apologize to Mr. Lucas...

Uh oh...

...I've saved the last (and practically the worst) for last and practically worst. It's this imagined depiction of what happened when our erstwhile Inker Extraordinaire, Sir Robert Smith, (aka, The Iguana) didn't make it in to work due to illness. Man, did we ever miss him. In fact, I still do!

As well as Tom Evans, John Allemand, Todd Myers, and Kevin Kobasic.

PS to all you moved to L.A., out there you've got coyotes, but here there's just crickets...........................................................XO RK

The Nice Way to Do the Holidays: Having Fun and Changing Your World

2011-12-18T14:45:00.014-05:00

Summer, Winter.....................................................................................Happy Holidays!

"None of the means employed to acquire religious merit...has a sixteenth part of the value of loving-kindness. Loving-kindness, which is freedom of the heart, absorbs them all; it glows, it shines, it blazes forth."

The Buddha, Itivuttaka Sutta

That's quite a precise break-down of the power of being nice, don't you think? I wonder how he knew? I tried it out myself at one time and I never looked back, so I'll pass it along to you as something of a challenge: The challenge to be as nice as you possibly can to everybody you meet. It's kind of a tall order, but not impossible, and can help quite a lot at this time of year – what with all the demands on your holiday cheer.

Of course The Buddha knew the difference between being religious and being spiritual – that it's a little like comparing apples to water. Going to church defines you as being a type of believer, while showing loving-kindness to everyone you meet gets right to the heart of the distinction, namely:

You're not what you believe, you're what you do.

Take this little challenge and try it yourself, from now through the holidays, and watch what happens! You'll suddenly find yourself a part of a slightly invisible conspiracy of kindness; of identification and compassion. Friends you never knew you had will show up ev-erywhere, and then disappear just as beautifully and mysteriously; leaving you with only the one requirement – to continue the chain of kindness.

First you'll be amazed, then you'll wonder, then you'll experiment more intentionally, then you might never go back. It's that powerfully amazing. It will change your world that much. You can't help but be grateful for the wonderful way people treat you when you show them unconditional loving-kindness, and you'll find you're happy all the time, because you have to have gratitude before you can be happy about anything.

How does it work so well (sixteen times better...)? Simply because being kind to others takes the focus off of who Your Ego ("Mr. Big Shot") thinks you are, and places it on someone else's well-being – which as it turns out is really yours too. And it's easy to show unconditional Love all the time, because Love is all unconditional already – it only becomes conditional when Ego begins demanding it. What a kvetch.

We all want Love and companionship. Compañero. We're all the same person, really. "No we're not!" your Ego says, "I'm not at all like Dick Cheney!" (–God Bless 'im). Well, I hope that's true, and you may have a bit of a point after all... should everyone get the same lovingly kind treatment, no matter what? Well, dammit, ideally yes they should (now that's "tough love"). But if that level of unconditionality is im-possible, then let's look for a rule of thumb to go by:

"Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked."

Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, 1.33

So three out of four ain't bad. Just don't pay no mind to Mr. Cheney. Better yet, see if you can find some Love in your heart for him, because that's how we're all evolving. We're all becoming more and more able to share in the medium of Love that actually lives under, around, and through us. It's the solution that staring us in the face all the time. Gratitude and compassion are the doors to realizing it in every moment; and when we're kind to everyone we meet, all the time, we're open to the force of evolution that's flooding our plane of existence. We're opening the gates to it ourselves – each one of us.

"Heaven arms with Compassion those whom it would not see destroyed"

The Tao te Ch'ing, 67

Kindness is a winning strategy. There's lots of people out there who've already known it all along, you know, those smarties who are always smiling. Compassion doesn't save them from physical destruction – it enables them to find spiritual realization. To remove the obstacles to Love, and so to really expand and grow and flow with Life. Ho ho ho!

Take my holiday challenge, won't you? Turn your frown upside down and look into the nicest mirror you've ever seen...You might never look back.

Happy Holidays!

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 25: Finding Grace at Art Center– Departure

2011-12-12T13:53:00.028-05:00

"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

Soren Kierkegaard

...continued

Could it be his Uncle Jimmy was right, and we're all born with everything already intact, like "acorns" waiting to open and unfold into whatever kind of tree we'll be? Maybe so, because from the first day at the new school, things began to happen like they do, like the whole progression had been charted out, and he was simply showing up to play his part.

There he sat in the student cafeteria with the rest of the new students at Art Center's Orientation Day, listening to the school's dour-faced administrator, Midge Quinelle, describe how difficult their course of art education would be. It seems the administration expected, in fact encouraged as high a rate of attrition as possible. Many students would find they didn't fit in at Art Center – that they "simply couldn't cut it," and so be it – it was a necessarily efficient means of dispensing with the undeserving. The flashing would have to be trimmed off the prime casting before they could buff it to a high luster, and stamp it's bottom as an Art Center product.

It didn't bother him much, he didn't intend to be drummed out or lost overboard, but it did seem an inauspicious way to launch their fresh-faced careers. He doubted that whether a student "deserved" to be at Art Center or not would have much bearing on whether their tuition check got cashed. At that time it seemed a strangely anta-gonistic, and somewhat chaotic place.

At the break, the new students and some faculty congregated out back, on the big patio terrace with a perpetually hazy view of Pasadena, munching on crudités, and sipping seltzer – that new kind that came in blue glass bottles. He stood above by the railing, watching the crowd of his mostly doomed schoolmates schmoozing, forming early friendships and allegiances; cozying up to the teachers and department heads. The upscale kids mixed easily as though their success had been guaranteed, because strangely enough it had been, due to the politics and pay-offs common to their class. Many of them already had jobs awaiting with top agencies and the like, which was as it should be – their's was the art of the pre-existing, not of the as-yet-to-be-discovered. Kids who'd got there by the seat of their pants milled about hungrily on the edges, as did the uneasy Asians, struggling with English as a Second Language.

He walked down and grabbed a blue bottle and a cocktail paper plate of cut carrots and cucumber, and something caught his eye. The crowd opened up as though they were moved out of the way stage left and right on rolling risers, and there, alone on a concrete bench, sat a beautiful girl, her face a little bit twisted by tears. Heroic co-dependence swelled up in his chest. He suddenly had a purpose greater than simply engaging in the self-serving chit-chat.

He went and sat with her and asked why she was crying, but she didn't know really, it was just nerves perhaps. He put a carrot up his nose and she laughed. It was dumb, but it worked. He told her about the funny house he lived in, and the bar-b-que joint down the street, Gus's, that had neon chickens and pigs running down the side of their sign – and a Chef Pig on the menu, serving himself on a platter. With what he imagined to be the proper measure of jaunty suggestiveness, he asked her if she "would like to join his pork club?" To which she replied, "That depends on how many members there are in it" – and that about did it. That's how they met and fell in love.

The school was difficult, not because of the course load, but because of the unusually unnecessary rigidity of the the people who ran it – mostly Mormons as it turned out – insecure people whose moral foundation is knowingly built on a premise so bereft of credibility that their justification of faith and purpose must be willfully shifted to something more substantial, like commercial acknowledgment, financial success, or the canonical Jesus. They seemed to be confused about what an art school should be. No human expression was permitted on the polished concrete walls. No risky or possibly "avant garde" projects ever needed to be encour-aged. Illustration and Fine Art majors required no up-to-date equip-ment – that was for the product designers and ad people only.

He had some good teachers who helped him see new horizons; and others who taught him more of what he had already learned in his life up to that point; but little of the good or bad of it mattered much at all when viewed through love-struck eyes. Like always, school was what you brought to it.

The two became one of the first fast and happy couples at school, which was fine, because everyone could see how well-suited they were; and it didn't seem to effect their work badly at all. She saved him from his crazy hot dusty attic, and brought him to live with her in the cozy little apartment with a pool that her father had arranged for her. And so, as in those golden-tinged dreams of youthful love anew, they ventured down the pre-ordained path that led to ten years of adventure and marriage and travel and struggle and eventually, as is so often the case with stories of the sort, emotional disaster, heart-break, and loss.

The lessons of the hard school were stored and utilized – the endurance and the hurt. Their lives pulled them apart by the seams that were so obviously visible when they first met that day on the concrete bench. But this isn't the story of how Grace was lost. It is – like it might always turn out to be – the story of how Grace was found at Art Center.

I've Been Dying to Find Out What I Am

2011-12-07T19:23:00.011-05:00

...............................................................a little bit like a prisoner, you could say

When I was in my twenties I was in a single-car accident and suddenly found myself at the top of a telephone pole next to a street light, looking down at my lifeless body hanging out of a wrecked car. I spent almost an entire day in good company, transported somewhere other than here.

In my thirties, as a result of an altogether inappropriate lifestyle, I again ended up on the ground with the life draining out of me. I was enveloped in a bright white cloud, and caringly shown pivotal scenes from my life to that point.

During both of these experiences I felt completely free, at ease, weightless, and utterly comfortable and serene...and I was me, only I don't remember having a body.

Then, when I was forty, a skinhead mistakenly unleashed his homophobic rage at me on a city street. I fought back, but was knocked unconscious from behind and stomped and kicked "to death" by his gang of fellow neo-nazis. Ouch. That time I went to a dark place, but struggled to stay there, wanting to find that peace and light again, only to be forced back into this life against my will – the sense was that I hadn't gotten it right yet. I think it was in order to tell you what I learned from these three "NDEs" so maybe you won't have to find out in the (painful) way I did...because you don't want to try this at home.

My will didn't account for much beyond this life. Will is a function of being human – the sense that we need something to happen a certain way; that we can make it happen for us; that we can control the outcome of things. Sometimes we can. We can set our goals and work towards them, and manifest our wishes for ourselves; but regardless of the intentions and outcome, I learned that everything we experience in this life is part of an unfathomable, largely imper-ceivable system that we may never quite know from this angle. I learned that I am a spiritual being having this physical experience in order to learn to transcend the limitations of this sensory world in order to evolve. I learned that this body really is an "avatara." We precipitate as these forms, into this field of energy, shaped by genes, thoughts, feelings, and actions...and unknowable karma.

That's why I was attracted to Evolver at first, I identify with the spirit inside it. This life of physical materiality is our medium of spiritual evolution. We step in and out of these bodies as seamlessly and purposefully as walking through the rooms of a great mansion we've been invited to explore. It's "the nature of the beast" that we don't always know that purpose, and more literally that nature that pre-vents us from experiencing the true medium of our greater being, which is Love – except for in the little bits that blow us away.

Being human is our only way to discover it – to discover anything – but it's also our greatest obstacle because of all the contrariness and misinterpretation this human form insists on imposing on our spirits, and on this beautiful, living planet. It's the obstacle the Hindu call maya.

You probably couldn't help but notice by now that it isn't easy being human. The attractions of our sensory state can be so fun (thrills) and compelling (sex), and seductive (intellect); and our afflic-tions can seem so painful and unfair, and relentless in the course of what feels like such a long life – but then tomorrow little of any of it may scarcely register in our recollections. (We've likely just forgotten being born and dying before – that may be how really limited our body/mind vehicles are.) Then even those attractions that can lead us to such fantastic fulfillment and accomplishments can also lead straight to utter despair and willful, idiotic destruction. Just imagine having to drive a car that likes to crash, and often insists on it. Pretty crazy, right?

Being sensory beings leads easily to a philosophy of life chiefly defined by the form we're in – a kind of spiritual "Catch-22" that is, pleasure as a philosophy to live by. Gratification of the will, of the body, of the ego. The chief drawbacks, aside from the previously mentioned destruction and despair created by unconsciously pursu-ing these gratifications, is that they just don't last very long; and that our means of recognizing what's actually happening (and what does last) is once again limited to another function of our form – our intellect, our thinking mind.

Unless a person has a spiritual experience brought about by the practice and exercise of wisdom, or, as in my case, they've had their sense of "reality" sufficiently smashed to pieces well enough to reveal the eternal intelligence that underlies and energizes everything around us, the tendency is to slip back into what our limited powers of observation and calculation will permit. And we'll be right about it.

You'll see lots of really smart people who simply can't realize the essential nature of this life, because they haven't had such an experience. Unless it's convincingly adapted to the true nature of it's purpose, the vessel will never really be able to carry any real, spiri-tual water (but it can come close). A big example is that scientific observation keeps insisting on "what it knows is fact," until spiritual evolution empowers a new level of observation. Then it will start in-sisting on that as "fact," through force of will. However, the truth is always a function of the spiritual – not the intellectual, so the intellect can never really know the truth. It's that human thing again.

"Blessed are those who have undergone ordeals. They have entered into Life."

The Gospel of Thomas, 58

Somethings are obviously very "wrong" with this form we;re in (or I should say with this form I'm in). It's the way we're hemmed-in by our interpretations of sensory experience as being the only "real" thing, our intellects acceptance of ignorance, and our inability to perceive the mind-blowing evidence all around us. But then our senses are also our doors to The Divine, and allow us our opportunities to grow, to change for the better, and to realize the obvious intent for life on Earth, and of the magic around and within us.

I was plainly (and painfully) given these unusual peeks "behind the curtain," so to speak, and here's how they've informed my point of view: You can rarely change anyone – each of us is on a unique (and naturally similar) path of spiritual evolution, towards the same place. The only way to actually change things is to change yourself; to choose to (occasionally) detach from the limitations of the form and embrace the spiritual moment, and to go where it takes you as much as you can. That is what's is changing the world right now.

Thinking is just a focusable tool. It wasn't the same thing, in "the great beyond" – not as incessantly demanding. Not as linear. Much more comfortable, like good meditation, or the full and empty space at the end of a good laugh. The moment is plenty alive without it.

Death is just a part of life that comes quickly or slowly. It's quite nice and comfortable itself, but often a bummer to get to. Love is the true underlying medium of life, and our job is to remove the obstacles that separate us (and our planet) from that amazingly powerful con-stant. I know my job now is to try to overwhelm ignorance with Love (which is also tolerance, compassion, and service to others).

Just be careful of skinheads, crocodiles (yeesh), or thinking that you're right.

Animation and BG Design: Many Ages, Many Stages

2011-11-17T11:23:00.037-05:00

Animation and background design take you on a trip into a look and a place...

like the direction into Sheep's long ago drawers from The Big City (Cartoon Network)

...............................putting ideas into your head

What animation designs design for...

Into a tight line pop mall...

The "pencil" stage for a fun kids room...

.....to a (PBS Kids) high school (without all the kids)

...........................here's the finished line stage of...a stage.

....from a big, soft rough from a Disney thing...

...to finish, like I started, with a rough bridge back to when Sheep were still in the Big City...

Ah...Fall.....in New York City.

See more Animation Design by Robert Kopecky

On James Hillman: Au Revoir, and Hello to Uncle Jimmy.

2011-11-09T18:46:00.008-05:00

Week before last, my uncle (by marriage) James Hillman – Jungian analyst, scholar and teacher, champion of the psyche, and "renegade" psychologist – passed away, into the world that comes after this, venturing into a dimension that I'm certain he's currently delighted to discover, given that he's always dedicated himself to the most profound explorations of life [and death] with all the impetuousness and constant willingness to be amazed that was his nature. (I didn't know him very well, but I know that much for sure.)

I met him first six or seven years ago at a Hillman family reunion at his home in Connecticut with my then-fianceé-now-wife, his niece; again at his eightieth birthday; and then when he attended (...and boogied on down) at our wedding, with his wife Margot McLean.

On our first meeting, I was in a formative part of a personal re-configuration, of sorts, doing lots of meditation and reading, but not knowing yet that I'd be called to set down my own personal explorations and dis-coveries, much less how to go about it. I'd cursorily examined some of his writing (The Soul's Code was in my then wife-to-be's bookshelf), and while he spoke so authoritatively of the same wilderness that I wanted to describe, I found myself more than a bit confounded.

Here was the voice of a true explorer into labyrinthine reaches I'd only just recently been opened to, but speaking in a language that I found nearly indecipherable. It was the language of an academician of the highest order, and as such seemed dense and elaborately logical to me, at the time. But I also saw that it was the welcome language of a Jungian mystic, a popular Gnostic, and a playful articulator; and, as it was very deep stuff, I began to recognize him as a sort of Jungian Jacques Cousteau of the psyche, diving into the imagery of mythic imaginings, bringing colorful, long lost archetypes to the surface and joyfully rubbing them clean for closer examination. That was his contagious joy of discovery.

He found me on the fringe of the family's reunion activities, perusing the books on his shelf and work table and asked,"Well, what do you think?" I answered that I thought it was a remarkable thing to undertake, "describing the indescribable." His eyes widened and looked straight into mine, "Describing the indescribable," he repeated, "...I suppose so." He smiled (he was always smiling), jumped up and ran off to his duties, to the happy ritual of organizing his family's past and present.

I never got the chance to have the conversation with him that I would have liked to have, about ourselves, and our relation to the whole; about what I took to be his redefinitions of karma and reincarnation; his marvelous rejection of the intricacies of prescribed psychology, and his instead gleeful embrace of so many of the heroic and romantic idylls of mythology and lost civilization that I'd always wished I could define myself by, when I was a child..when I was that "acorn" growing toward what my life might allow me, might ask me to become.

Here was a man (suddenly my uncle), who'd given to the entire world that rich and provocative opportunity for self-definition, who'd opened the trap door to that amazing underworld of fantastic self-configuration, em-bellished and defined by the shared timeless imagery of our psyches. He was a kind of wiry, jocular 80 year-old Heracles, pushing the glasses up on his nose, wrapping up his labors and splashing around like a kid in this gnostic puddle we call Life on Earth. Wrestling with the demiurge was al-ways that much fun for him.

All that had seemed so complex to me at first now winnows itself down to a very direct, playful formula for living... with me dressed in a toga, with a scuba mask, and maybe eagle feathers, and a sword, and a chariot (with Krishna driving, that would complete the picture). Anything to help describe my self.

"It's important to ask yourself, "How am I useful to others? What do peo-ple want from me?" That may very well reveal what you are here for."

James Hillman

Enormous respect arose out of the realization that so many of the "amazing" discoveries I thought I was discovering for the very first time, were merely simple, commonplace blips and bits of the contents of what his life's work contained. Just a couple out-of-the-way corners of his inex-haustible imagination. Ego jumped in, as usual, and told me "you'll never be that," but then that would be missing Uncle Jimmy's point, wouldn't it? You can be. You are now. We all are!

"Sooner or later something seems to call us on to a particular path...this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am."

James Hillman

It was, after all, his life's work, and whenever I saw him, he most definitely was not working, but instead was taking part in a kind of ongoing celebration of all of Life's moments with the same logical attention to detail – the significance of that very moment, the nuances of storytelling, and always the setting-up of a good joke. There was that Zen fun, the updated Laughing Buddha (with a Jewish twist), invoking the joy of the eternal moment.

"Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here."

James Hillman

Being a strong believer in the seamlessly continuous nature of life and death, and death and life, I'm looking forward in getting to know Uncle Jimmy better, and asking his help with my own awkward spelunking, in hopes I'll surface with some self-defining evidence from those "other worlds" that we've all inhabited, that focus themselves right here and now. Maybe I can joyfully rub the muck off of those bits and blips, and give them a good once over.

I've pulled together a few locations for you to explore James' life and ideas, and sincerely hope you do. The Wikipedia entry is pretty straight-up and does contain a bibliography. Of particular note are the two really wonderful interviews with Pythia Peay on HuffPo, and Scott London on his excellent site. The YouTube piece is great, but nothing I found really communicates just how funny he is...Enjoy! ...and thank you, Uncle Jimmy.

The Real Rapture, Pt.2: The Second Coming for Activists, Evolvers, and True Believers.

2011-10-31T11:57:00.010-04:00

...............................................................................Yeshua occupies Wall St.

For as long as human beings have been discovering the path to wholeness and connection within themselves, someone has wanted to put up signposts, detours and toll booths on it. You can't blame 'em for trying – the expansion of consciousness leading to self discovery and unification with our Source, and with all life on earth is ultimately humanity's most powerful motivation – with the co-opting of such powerful motivations coming in a close second.

Naturally, egoic institutions have always built right on top of that rare real estate, in order to claim ownership of the intention and direction to God, so to speak – and that's as it should be, I suppose. The richness of institutional allegory and myth renders The Divine accessible to the mass of people whose egos insist that only something external can deliver them to Heaven; the problem then becomes the insistence that one must take those symbolic imaginings literally.

In suggesting that a secular, consciousness-based "Rapture" of sorts is taking place at this very moment, vis-á-vis the Mayan calendar, Hopi prophecy, and of course, Christian eschatology, perhaps we can liberate our definitions, and our selves from the constraints of dogma, and consider the means of our present apocalyptic transformation, rather than all the myths that reflect it to us. You know – how we can really make it work.

Using "The Rapture" as metaphor suggests that I'll have to deconstruct Christianity a little, and I will give it a try; but in no way do I intend to belittle the power of the underlying source spirit. This exploration is intended for true believers, because there was definitely a there there, alright. Perhaps the teachings of an Essene Hebrew, I'll call him Yeshua, who might well have been strongly influenced by philosophies from Egypt, Greece, India, and points East that were available to dedicated seekers back then, especially in and around the Alexandria of two thousand years ago

It's very possible that this fellow's teachings and spirit were so powerful, that through their popularity they became a vessel for opportunistic redirection. The institutional dogma that arose around the early Christian model became far more elaborate than the apparent source – the codifying scripture carefully selected and recomposed by politically motivated elites (who could read and write, that is), well removed from the supposed actual incidents they describe, who aggressively plagiarized earlier popular allegorical folk narratives and mythology.

Some of these imaginings got so complex, they became almost crazy in fact – a case in point being the biblical Book of Revelation, a hugely idiosyncratic Christian prophecy whose incredibly rich symbolism is downright occult, and has nothing to do with the simple teachings supposedly responsible for it's genesis. Loaded with so much potential meaning, it's countless interpretations serve as the source of the most radical eschatological prophecy, as well as more missed predictions than the Mayan calendar can ever hope to provide us. Coincidentally, only a very serious guy on a throne in Rome (and legions of other experts) could untangle it's gravely portentous meaning concerning the End of the World and The Second Coming of Christ.

What's all this have to do with our "Rapture?" Sorry for all the back story – here comes the payoff: What if we don't need to wait for post-tribulations, for Armageddon or the seventh trumpet blowing? What if the prophecy was true, andThe Second Coming has already happened, in the general form of the compassionate consciousness that's streaming, unabated, into out present "Earth-plane," and in the specific form of the rediscovery of the amazingly modern teachings at the heart of the mythology?

Just how, and when (wake up true believers!) might this have happened? How has He "come back," without it making the news at six and eleven?

In 1945, in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, a shepherd seeking his flock (of course!) stumbled upon a big, clay jar in a cave that happened to contain a bunch of very old early Christian scripture – all the stuff that up to that point had not survived nineteen hundred years of purges and suppression, and guess what? In amongst it was an early gospel, The Gospel of Thomas, that had no narrative, no miracles or specific prophecies, but does contain teachings in a voice so clear and so modern, as to immediately inform, inspire, and direct our rising global consciousness, now. It's the return of a kind of ["quantum"] understanding that our present world is just beginning to learn and understand, like aspects of The Vedas, or Taoism.

For example (most of these start with the acknowledgment,'Yeshua said'):

"Whoever searches must continue to search until they find. When they find, they'll be disturbed; and being disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over All." Logion 2

When we finally begin to awaken through our expanding consciousness, we see a mess of sorts. What the egoic human is driven to is generally pretty chaotic. But then that awareness– our expanding consciousness, reveals an understandable order in that chaos; a forgivable kind of delusional thinking that can be overcome with identification and Love, and lead us to our spiritual evolution and reconfiguration of human progress.

"Recognize what is in front of you, and what is hidden from you will be revealed. There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed." Logion 5

We often learn (the hard way) that being honest is truly liberating. That getting our desires out of the way presents us with a fresh realism that can be reasonably dealt with. When we apply that awareness to the external world, to conditions and the intentions of others, we can see what the real obstacles to our successful evolution are, the veils are parted, so to speak. Why, we can even realize that the matter in front of us is actually comprised of coalescing energetic waves and particles responsive to consciousness, far too small to ever be seen by the naked eye (...sort of).

So, here's to the "new nakedness! "

"...When you make the two into one, when you make the inner like the outer, and the high like the low; when you make male and female into a single One...when you have eyes in your eyes, a hand in your hand, a foot in your foot, and an icon in your icon, then you will enter into the Kingdom." Logion 22

If we can honestly eliminate the difference between who we're supposed to be, and who we really are; merge that timeless Me that we always experience now with the external, ever-changing Me from yesterday and tomorrow; allow Love, and the intention for spiritual growth and union to determine our behavior, actions, and external appearance – so our insides are our outsides; eliminate the need to differentiate sexually, and blend aspects of femininity and masculinity into our own cooperative understanding; really compassionately see through appearances; actually be of service, rather than just intending to be; "walk the walk;" and come to an understanding of our shared source and intention for good and for Love and for growth – beyond definitions of "God," why then we'll all be living "in Heaven." Simple, right?

"...There is light within people of light, and they shine it upon the whole world. If they don't shine it, how dark it gets!" Logion 24

There's a real energy to positive energy. Love is transformational. Aim your Love like a lighthouse beam. "Be the change you want to see in the world," said Gandhi.

"One cannot capture the house of the strong except by tying their hands. Then everything can be overturned." Logion 35

We don't hurt anyone, right? We'll change things by being humans being, not by being humans doing – by peacefully obstructing the plainly delusional doings of the less compassionately conscious among us. When we shine a light on the destructive "business as usual," then we can begin to gently turn it over.

"When you bring forth that which is within you, then that will save you. If you do not, then that will kill you." Logion 70

How modern can you be? This saying seriously pre-dates every psychological and psychotherapeutic theory and movement of the last two centuries, including Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Adler, Jung, Maslow, Skinner, et al, trumping them with it's simplicity. And it obviously applies collectively too, indicating that we're all the same thing here. Why are we doing what we're doing? We need to turn that truth out in order to grow, to survive. It's a spiritual death we need to fear.

"I am the Light that shines on everyone. I am the All. The All came forth from within me, and the All came into me. Split the wood, and I am there. Turn over a stone, and you'll find me." Logion 77

In the self-same spirit at the heart of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam; Einstein and Quantum Theory – we are all one. God is in everything, we are all God. We are "The Son of Man;" the expression of this benevolent shared consciousness whose energy materializes into our being. This you can take to the bank.

"If you have money, do not lend it with interest, but give it to the one who'll never pay you back." Logion 95

Speaking of the bank, how's that for the bottom-line solution to all of our economic troubles? Exclusively no-interest lending forever, and absolute debt amnesty. What do you think our economy would do if we tried this? I mean, banks will be banks, but c'mon now... what exactly is accomplished by hoarding wealth and resources? Wealth has to flow from where it's needlessly accumulated to where it's needed. (Of course, you'll still owe me that twenty lent you...unless I don't need it!)

And finally:

"[They asked]...when will the Kingdom come?" Yeshua answered:

"It will not come by waiting for it...The Kingdom is already spread out over the whole earth, and people don't see it." Logion 113

Heaven is in our very midsts, and in our hearts. Our transformation can find definition in these, and other timeless teachings.

These translations come from the ancient Coptic interpretations of Jean-Yves LeLoup; and the Lambdin, Grenfell/Hunt, Layton version from The Sacred Text Archive (http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/thomas.htm); with a little of my own sh#t thrown in for good measure.

(http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/thomas.htm

The Architecture of Word World, Pt. 2: Things in 3-D

2011-10-13T15:57:00.014-04:00

Just for fun – a continuation of the "architecture" necessary to design for 3-D animation; in this case for PBS Kids "Word World," where not only do you have to use an architect's sensibilities to design buildings and locations, but also to design things...some that need to be built out of their own words (Word World is "Where Words Come Alive"), some that gratefully don't. Here the design takes on the quality of product design, or toy design (which it occasionally ends up being...)

Like these first two– it wouldn't really make sense to build something that read: "Automatic Cake Frosting Gun on Wheels," or "Valentine Making Machine;" nor would it ever be possible in the space allowed. Still, you have to start with an idea of the thing in all it's 3 dimensions:

This rough idea might demonstrate just what the thing can do...

Then from b/w plan, to color...
Things that need to be constructed out of the letters of their own word can be a little trickier. 'The Educators' have to make certain that legibility isn't going to be an issue (especially for the littlest viewers)... Here's the gray model, for revisions, before painting...

....................................and don't forget space for the action figures!

Powershifts, Protests, Compassionate Consciousness, and Spiritual Evolution: The Real Rapture, Pt.1

2011-10-12T15:44:00.017-04:00

We're a lot like moss on a rock, our humanity here on Earth – a simple, opportunistic colony of life, clinging to something alive that gives us Life. In the same way that any collective life form ex-periences stress when conditions for it's survival begin to change, our world is changing, and we're experiencing the stress. For all of us looking for solutions, wondering what to do, the answers are in front of us already in the simple intuitive need to adapt consciously – in that rapidly rising awareness that's showing us the way. The simple truth of things.

Our corporate culture has wrongly modeled itself on mis-construed Darwinism. It's not about "Survival of the Fittest," it's about survival of what adapts in the most cooperative way. The triumph of which ideas benefit the most people all the time, without putting the whole at risk. So we require only the simplest reliable human mechanisms to carry us through tough times, mechanisms like Love, Compassion, and Cooperation. Like the shared vision of what's really possible here on Earth that so many of us all around the world can plainly see.

It's an altogether different definition of success. A different definition of "fitness." A success based on the shared success of the human species. A fitness comprised of spiritual consciousness– the very kind that we can feel coalescing around and within us, right now.

The qualities and dogma associated with "Power" and "Science" are dangerously anachronistic in the face of what's humanly pos-sible, and what's humanly impossible. We simply can't successfully allow our present systems of commerce, governance, and resource management to continue on their present course, or continue to deny the physical changes affecting our planet, and expect anything but catastrophe, given that our reality is changing.

For example: Aspects of Capitalism work very well to achieve certain goals, but the bottom line is that it's a mechanism that now serves money, not humanity; Old Science is in denial of new science, and resembles a Flat Earth Society, of sorts. Our political system is too compromised by corrupt capitalists to be effective for the vast majority of people.

All of us, red and blue, know these truths. It's an awareness born of our human spiritual evolution, of our progression. So our institu-tions of Power are losing their power. They all resemble pyramid schemes, slash and burn, where the earliest in and out thumb their noses at all the rest. So now there are ethical, spiritually conscious barbarians at their gates, and of course, they are us.

Something has happened, is happening. Human Beings are percolating together, re-configuring our world on the basis of what's real and necessary for life, inspired by an awareness of what managing Earth's abundance actually entails; understanding what science is actually telling us; with a profound [and beautiful] kind of non-violent presence, that suddenly seems most practical. It's the inheritance of Gandhi's ahimsa. It is a rebirth of the human spirit, the awakenings of Heaven on Earth.

In an irreversible way, a kind of "Rapture" is actually taking place now amongst those awakened to this consciousness in the world. Many people are having hard times, falling through the cracks in "The Street" of Rome that allow spiritual evolution to enter – fractures in the falseness of materialistic consumerism, and science in denial. As patriotic humans, this consciousness inspires a profound dis-identification with the corrupt Media, Political, Scientific, and Legal structures that clearly only serve a small, ego-driven minority.

Lifting us up is a new evolutional cooperation, a reality based on the spiritual unification of humankind, facilitated by instantaneous global communication. A tsunami of racial and sexual tolerance; of unity and community; an understanding of our new scientific realities, including the urgent need for clean technology, and free, clean power; the impetus for universal human rights; reuse and recycling, invigorated environmentalism; local food production, animal awareness; social support systems of all kinds, and the public momentum to institute these ethical concepts by means of a truer form of democracy, arising everywhere.

It's all based on a simple, human mechanism we haven't seen enough of for a while, Humility. The kind that engenders real res-ponsibility. The Christ Spirit that has returned isn't the iconic bearded redhead with all the answers – it's this spirit of Ethics, Cooperation, Compassion, and Humility that is the answer; and the spirit of Love, for ourselves, each other, and our blessed Mother, Earth.

The real extremists – ironically "Conservatives," and the self-entitled religious, financial, and militaristic radicals, are dividing themselves off from the whole. Those who suffer the delusion of superiority and entitlement, who think they can will the world (even the weather) to be what they want, are being "Left Behind" in a spiritual morass – drunk on piety, greed, and "self-will run riot." They're not staying back while the blessed ascend to Heaven, they are living in a fearful hell already. That's why they're grasping, why they're consolidating. They actually constitute a very small part of the world's total population. They can be "saved," through Compas-sionate Consciousness.

All the scary storms and politics and economics we're witnessing are actually bringing us together, cementing the understanding of our changing world, connecting us to each other in the most important ways. They're terrible times, yes, but they break through the stupor of fearful apartness that so many people experience in their lives. They bring us to our true purpose, which is to love and help one another; and to appropriately manage the changing resources of the Earth, which are still and always boundless. In this way, Life is getting better, as it's getting worse!

In each of our lives, we've all experienced a little Heaven at one time or another. That's because Heaven is here. Heaven is here already, has always been here, and has always been meant to be here, right now.

The personal role we can all play is to reject willful ego, and recognize it in one another as the single most destructive disease of humanity– a spiritual disease that threatens to kill Mother Earth as we know her(...would you, red or blue, allow someone to kill your mother?).

The balance is returning – as it will and must, and if you intuitively want to be part of it, what really matters is showing up for the change (like supporting the protesters), and embracing it! Personally become part of the solution. What's important is what each and every one of us keeps in their heart, as long as it's the intention and power of Compassionate Consciousness.

"For so [humanity] moves towards the infinity of the Truth by the ex-perience of its variety; so [conscious-ness] helps to build, change, destroy what [has been] built, and prepares a new construction, in a word, to pro-gress, grow, enlarge in self-know-ledge and world-knowledge, and their works."

Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle

Occupying America – The American Dream Movement

2011-10-07T10:05:00.004-04:00

A loud shout out to everyone who made Foley Square the place to be. Please take part in this patriotic cause for compassionate consciousness...more to come...

http://occupywallst.org/

http://www.occupytogether.org/

A Special Message From Sue Pike, The Animal Talker®

2011-10-01T00:15:00.010-04:00

My Wife, Sue, is a wonderful healer – animal communicator, reiki master, spiritual guide; and she recently put out this urgent heads-up that I thought I'd better post for you guys...check it out (she's very connected!)

Hello All!

I've been getting to send everyone an email about messages I'm getting...so here we go!

The energy is moving very quickly right now. If you are working on something that you LOVE, keep on track – you will notice things developing quickly. Keep focused and clear about your intentions.

This is the time to make the changes you have been thinking about. Don't delay! Remove any fears or obstacles that may be blocking you from creating what you want in your life. This could mean a whole new career, starting a new business, new relationship, etc. It also could mean shifting something that you already are involved in, but need to change the dynamic of.

Universe, God/Goddess, Source, however you like to call it, wants you to be in your light, your power. Not an ego-based power, but [the power] of your authentic self.

What's important is to keep Love in your heart! Self-acceptance is the key, as well as forgiveness – for yourself and others.

If you're not sure what "you want to do," but know in your heart what you're doing isn't it, then maybe go to a career counselor, or someone who can assist you in this. [Make a change!]

If you are an "empath," remember that you can always ask your Guides. If you are feeling the energy swirling around, or heavy, or whatever....ask them to lift it from you, for relief from the weight of the world. This is very important, to keep balanced and happy.

I support all of you in whatever process you are going through right now. If you've been experiencing any type of personal turbulence, pay attention. What is it that you need to look at? Do you need to change something in your life? What's not working for you anymore? – It's time to release it. And, by the way, if you are, you are definitely NOT alone!

Please know that you are all light beings :)

Help each other. Help a friend. Help a stranger (but don't tell anyone you did). Be a listener.

Wishing you all a wonderful, joyful day.

I just want to reiterate that *energy is moving very quickly right now*, so keep focusing on what you desire, not what you don't. I feel VERY excited about this...

Love and Light,

Sue

Sue Pike
The Animal Talker®
http://www.myspace.com/suepike
http://animalchanneler.blogspot.com
Facebook Fan Page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sue-Pike-Animal-Communicator-Reiki-Master/122986468927

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 25: Finding Grace at Art Center– Arrival

2011-09-22T20:38:00.024-04:00

"The most important thing in life is showing up."
Woody Allen

Even though he was only twenty-one, the years seemed to weigh a little heavily on him. Disproportionately so. I suppose it was more a crisis of attitude than anything else, as he didn't think he'd witnessed any more trauma than normal (other than his childhood), or hadn't fairly well survived Life's most terrible tests so far...but then, what was merely terrible to him may have been ruinous to some, and he was pretty sure that he didn't know what normal was.

He just felt that he fit a bit obliquely into the world, and had a persistent, not totally uncommon sense of there being a transparent veil of sorts separating him from the happy, practical life of belonging-to that seemed to be other kids' birthrights. He'd read about that, that veil in the Existentialism he was drawn to when he was twelve, Camus and Sartre, Kafka...Marvel Comics; so was it simple suggestion, or acute and subtle injury that formed his youthful romantic alienation...and which is it with any disaffected kid?

The veil cast a decidedly purplish, or violet tint (on the blue side) to Life, like the childhood story he remembered about "Grandpa," who dropped his glasses into a bucket of purple paint, where "Purple fires were rising up...From a purple hill." In his case, the perception heightened an inescapable sense of exile, of being a visitor in an indifferent world, a feeling that many people experience, especially when they really are visiting someplace strange. Like tourists. It felt that real to him, like he was a tourist here, wherever here was.

All those dusty canyon years growing up, avoiding his unhappy parents; years floating along the foggy shoreline and chasing his future like trickster spirits through the west, and miles of Nevada. The years on the sales floor, pitching expensive toys to oversized kids; the grinding, clang, and molten sputter of the factory steel; the strange ways of "entitled" high society he'd witnessed–the whole envied class of people acting out like petulant teens–all of this enforced a sense of profoundly adult disillusionment, and when he'd intuitively sought the ground of Love, it too had turned over on him.

His Mormon girlfriend wrapped back into her relentless indoctrination; the impish, warm-hearted neighborhood girl he'd begun to date died of a rare blood disorder; and then the one most exciting "older" woman who'd seemed to secretly know Life's promise suddenly died too, at only thirty– without even telling him that she knew she was going to. Perhaps that's why she was so exciting. Perhaps that's what she secretly knew.

And then there were his own personal goblins growing up too, forming around and within him. It wasn't all their fault.

So, it was this state of vagabond disconnection that carried him into South Pasadena, with his sculpture-making money, a matching grant from his drowning father, and his beat-up VW. He'd wanted to go back to a school in New York City, a long ways away, but as a condition of his father's largesse, instead he had to apply to the very reputable Art Center College in Pasadena, and had been accepted.

The other students occupying the huge mission-style house he got into weren't "kids," and were all a good deal more flush than he was. They agreed to let him in despite all the bedrooms being taken, so that they could secretly reduce their rent by a hundred bucks each and pocket the difference without their paying parents knowledge. So he found himself moving up into the hot, sprawling mansion attic, unfinished, ducking through the pitched roof tilting in on every space, following the house below in all directions. He staked out his "living room," bedroom, and studio between the open raw lumber braces, and lived there with the dust and the spiders.

It seemed an appropriately strange space, and gladly kept him at a comfortable distance, and so different from the others, which was what he really wanted to be anyways.

Pulling up to Art Center in the multi-colored VW that he'd been piloting around the west like an old mail plane, with his disassembled drawing board and army green duffle bag, he felt himself like a used truck without a muffler, sticking out like that from the late-model student coupes, and various trophy cars. No one noticed...but then it turned out they did. He did not care...but then, of course, it turned out he did.

The Art Center he pulled up to wasn't the southland fixture he'd heard warmly remembered by chummy old pros, it was the new Art Center, a monolithic steel and glass bridge forced onto a rolling hillside with backhoes and cranes and Caterpillars, in the familiar chop-terrace fashion of California deve-lopment blight. The lauded architecture even seemed familiar, a re-hashing of all the Gropius and Van der Rohe his father had loved so much. There was something uncomfortably egoic about it that rubbed him the wrong way. He'd wanted to be in a vaguely stinky, trodden-in old school, with warmth and esprit de corps, but instead everything was cold and new –the kids' money, the hard, black painted steel, and all that polished cement.

He still didn't think he'd found the place where he might meet himself, but he was going to...in a way.

continued...

What's Love [Actually] Got to Do With It?

2011-09-19T23:26:00.005-04:00

Revisiting this very important message:

"My religion is Love." Amma

Have you ever heard of Amma (mother), "The Hugging Saint?" Amma has given her darshan – a deep loving hug, to about thirty million people! In sessions that last 12 to 18 hours straight, Amma doesn't get up, or eat, or drink. She just gives beautiful deep hugs. To hug Amma is like hugging an ocean of love. After so much hugging, she is built for hugging. She is without a doubt the best hugger in human history. She has given herself over completely to Love, and service, and, of course, hugging.

It's difficult in our modern culture to imagine giving one's self over so completely to Love – to make Love itself the single predominant motivation for everything you do. Some of us touch on it dedicating themselves to their families, or in service occupations, but usually most of us have more important things to do that don't allow us to act solely out of Love, right?

Nope – that's not really true. That's really short-selling the power and practicality of our deepest [re]source as a way to live.

At any and every moment, we have a simple choice between two directions in our lives: towards ego gratification in one form or another; or towards Love, compassion, and the practical path to growth and contributing to Life that choosing Love can create for us. We make this choice in every aspect of our lives, from the smallest decision – like what to watch on TV, or what to eat; to the largest – like how to raise your kids, or what (or who) to vote for.

As fantastic and impossible as it may sound, if you put Love in the center of every decision, when you rely completely on Love, your intuitive intelligence will kick in and direct you as clearly as if a very wise advisor were whispering right in your ear. You'll want to stop gossiping. You'll want to stop criticizing people and institutions, and instead, start getting ideas of how to directly improve things, now. You'll stop making selfish decisions. Your open-heartedness will allow you to intuitively know what to do in tough situations.

You will become a link in a chain of Love, and experience the incredible strength, unity, and freedom that comes from making right decisions, and from acting ethically.

"We are all beads strung together on the same chain of love." Amma

Life will begin to flow in a smooth, sure way that actually requires less effort to accomplish more. Even unforeseen professional and financial solutions will show up for you right on time, because you will be supported and directed by Love, which, as the great foundational power of creative Life, never goes wrong. Of course, you probably won't win the Powerball just because you feel you bought the ticket "with love," but just ask humbly, and you'll receive everything you need to be happy.

You'll likely still hear the voice of your ego goading or belittling you or others, making fearful warnings, like: "You can't make a living by just loving," but you'll recognize that voice as an unfortunate tendency of our human form – a delusional belief in false promises and solutions based on acquiring things, or gaining the approval of others – solutions that are superficial and momentary, and not really solutions at all. Everyone knows that for all of humankind, loving has always built the best lives, and will always have that power to do so.

In a practical sense, listening to Love will cause you to show up for what's truly important in your life, to be in places where you'll find opportunity that you may have never been otherwise. Joy will arise from all decisions based in Love and service, and will defuse your worries more and more as your new open-hearted presence develops.

Could it really be so simple that just the act of holding Love in your heart as the focus of your life can connect you, guide you, and provide for you? All the great wisdom of humankind tell us it's true. In The Bhagavad Gita, for example, Krishna says: "...when one's faith is completely unified, they gain the object of their devotion. In this way, every desire is fulfilled by me." And the Bible puts it this way: "As a man [person] thinketh in his heart, so is he." So it sez-eth.

The truth is that Love is the medium of all Life, as well as a profound personal power that can create a fail-safe template for living.

So, it just comes down to that choice you know – between fear or faith. If there's a part of you that seems to enjoy living with fear, release that destructive hook and fearlessly choose the direction that Love will clearly lead you in. It's not a big secret, really, just a very nice kind of common-sense...and the best free "life coach" there is. My dear friend Anne put it this way:

"The love that you share is the only thing you need to know. It is the green place from which all good things grow and spread into your life. It's where the river of the Source is constantly carrying you, so that all your worries may disappear."

Poo-pooing these beliefs as a "naîve, unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky fairy tales" is the attitude that has created every disastrous condition ever known. Embracing them creates the healing the world seeks...and Amma says this:

"In the end, love is the only medicine that can heal the wounds of the world. In this universe, it is love that binds everything together. As this awareness dawns within us, all disharmony will cease."

Next year, I hear they may have to move Amma's event here in NYC to a much larger venue. It's continually growing too big for one location after another. They may have to hold it in Madison Square Garden. Next could be Yankee Stadium, or maybe Central Park. It would be nice if the whole world could share a hug with Amma, and at the rate she's hugging, they probably will.

Take a visit to Amma's Site in the links column at left.

Codename: Kids Next Door - More Sooper Dangerous Weaponry

2011-09-13T12:25:00.007-04:00

Here's another group of dooper dangerous 2x4 tech weapons – these from the sooper obscure file! the "Clawzooka"

the "LunchBloxerr"

the "T-ball-aster"

the "TrikeAttack"

...enjoy – and be careful!

The 4 Signs (in progress...)

2011-09-01T07:53:00.010-04:00

Here's a process-piece that I ran across the other day, it's my animation, "The Four Signs of Manhood" in an early, no sound/no color version, for the animatiophiles out there. (Warning kids: it's rated TV-MA!)

If you'd like to see the way it turned out with sound and color, find it right here, from the animation section of my site...

What's Media "Hot," is Spiritually Not...(Thank You, Irene)

2011-08-30T11:30:00.025-04:00

"Stay calm. Share your bananas."

Koko, the sign-language gorilla

It seems to be getting easier to feel worse these days, more hopeless and alone, and though we are going through a bit of a rough patch, maybe it's because there are so many messages aimed at us, and even worse than that – maybe it's the messenger. This time, contrary to the old saying, perhaps we should "kill the mes-senger," since the messenger now seems to be very intentionally making matters worse.

A painfully good example of this is the way the media decided (writ large, but decided by just a few) to cover the recent hurricane, Irene. What if, instead of militaristic orchestrations of dread and destruction, satellite images of Irene had been accompanied by Leos Janacek's The Madonna of Frydek? What if, instead of barking out scenarios of doom, and inspiring cynical disappointment at "how bad it wasn't," our media public servants had calmly and rationally supplied a unifying strategy for getting through the worst of it together, and for rallying our resources to help the hardest hit? What a different world it could be with a little responsibility in high places...

It's great to have all these cool inputs, this instant digital access to everything, but remember, to the commercial and political media content providers, it's cool instant access right into your head. Our friendly, indispensable smartphones, laptops, and flat screens are very powerful psychic inseminators, loaded to implant deliberately designed anxiety-laden attitudes and beliefs into your mind, often at barely noticeable, even subconscious levels. Chief amongst these are the constant messages designed to make you feel hopeless, hapless, alone, and separated. Well, don't believe it!

I've worked in media for many years, and can tell you from experience that there are lots of little groups of people in media center offices making very intentionally, elaborately justified decisions directed towards making people feel a little bit less-than on a mass-cultural level. Unbelievably, they suppress anything that celebrates human achievement, unity, and the real power of spirituality in favor of the relentless imposition of materialism, need, and dread. There's an unconsciousness, stylishly clothed in a commercial imperative, that must insist that the world's going to hell, that people are hopelessly selfish, and that you in particular are not really successful. The point is to make you feel insecure, envious, a little desperate, and apathetic. When you succumb to that emotional agenda, you're more ready to accept less; to surrender your spiritual growth.

Luckily, it's easy to recognize this destructive strategy that pours from our screens and speakers. Just ask yourself: Does it inspire Fear? Does it propagate anxiety? If it does, media pundits refer to it as being "hot," or "really hot." A "hot" fashion, a "hot" topic, a "hot" personality. It's somehow better than you, and you have to catch up; it's something that you need to have or to know or to see; it's coming to get you, or coming to take something away from you. Even if it's "really cool," often the bottom line is that it actually works by inspiring fear, shame, hopelessness, or the need to surrender to a guilty, inevitable acquiescence. Media "hot" is spiritually not.

A handy biblical device that works well to point out anti-spiritual propaganda is PAGGLES – that's right, the good ol' Seven Deadly Sins! Pride, Anger, Greed, Gluttony, Lust, Envy, Sloth. Notice how these topics serve as the themes for about ninety percent of what is called "entertainment" or "news" in our popular media. Why? Because media decisions are made by a relatively small group of people who think it's in their interest to sit in little groups in media center offices and make decisions designed to make you feel desirous, less-than, hopeless, and separate.

Rise up. Rise above it. Be aware of it, laugh...and turn it off. Kill that messenger– never trust it again.

The people (maybe you know some) who make this media, or believe in it, need Love and compassion to help them return to the human race, which isn't really a race at all, as they might believe, but a cooperative. That low, slow, painful vibration of what's media "hot" isn't even warm by the principles of our rapidly evolving spiritual collective. Real warmth comes with a high hum – the vibration of Love, free from false fears and dark, selfish motives.

Now you can re-define "success" as seeking Love and Light, unity, responsibility, peace, and happiness; protecting Life; being of service; experiencing the vibration of expanding consciousness without worry or regret that you don't measure up in some way. You don't have to, just be truly present. Follow your intuition. Live well. Recognize the Eternal in everyone. That's being successful.

"It is always the false that makes you suffer...Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy; truth liberates."

Nisargadatta Maharaj

The Architecture of Word World, Pt. 1: Places in 3-D

2011-08-24T13:30:00.047-04:00

Here's a look at the architectural aspects of designing a complex 3-D animated world, like PBS Kids' Word World. In Word World, every "where" has to start somewhere, as in this sketch of even the lowliest crab shack, which in this case (like everything in Word World) had to be constructed from perfectly legible lower case letters.In Word World, every 3-D location had to be built, much like it would be in the real world. Following the visualizing sketch, there'd have to be an architectural plan, showing all the angles that the model builders need to make the new locale into a space where our 3-D actors can work...

Combined with the architectural drawing can be a detailed comprehensive color version.

Sometimes, we got away with a simpler black & white version, as with this lower case "dock," just using a plan view, placing it in the world, and showing it's panel in the storyboard...

The color comp follows the plan drawing, and places the location in the world, in it's appropriate seasonal surrounding...

With the external plan drawn up, the location in the 3-D world determined, the color figured out, etc., etc...the building and placement of the model takes place, not (as you can see) without a bit of back-and-forth. I ended up building a fence between the Schoolhouse and the train track, for safety of course!

The new School-house location needs an interior that has to be built separate from the exterior, because the interior acting space needs to be larger than the exterior plan will allow. We stay correctly related to the exterior by sticking to the proper proportions, at least...

Finally, there needs to be a very comprehensive color version, that tell the model painters pretty much exactly what we need. The look of the world itself shouldn't vary much from this full color "architectural" rendering...I got help with this Schoolhouse interior from the very talented Gideon Kendall.

Even the most atmospheric and organic locations must be created by this plan – with sketches, technical/architectural drawings, color comps, and finished color renderings, whether it's the Schoolhouse, or the bottom of the pond!

Tales: We Are All Plastic (In a Way...)

2011-08-19T08:18:00.019-04:00

....................................................................we're all a little bit plastic

Now and then (when we're not being particularly kind) we might refer to a person as being "plastic," meaning that they don't seem to be very authentic, or that they're overly concerned with surface ap-pearances. While we usually mean it in a mildly derisive way, it's really an entirely accurate description, not of just some people, but of everyone, and in fact, of every thing too. As an adjective, as a con-cise description, the whole world is plastic.

It's plenty easy to see in ourselves, these crazy viscous, cellular bodies we ride around in are always changing. Regenerating, re-arranging, building up, breaking down. Aging. Ripening. Come to think of it, I'm getting pretty ripe myself. I'm being rearranged in ways I never wanted, for example: I have slight "love handles" now – which is a sadly ironic handle in itself, considering how little love I actually have for them.

"As you think, so you are." The Buddha

The truth is, that like most physical conditions and material cir-cumstances; even life events, attitudes, and emotional states, I can change my state of being. Mold it – like plastic. Our acceptance of this concept is obvious in the language we commonly use, usually when we describe the potential in things: You can "make something of yourself," or "make a mess of your life." You can make a promise to get in shape (promises, promises). No one has much of a problem with this concept of malleability, based on our focus, our intention, our possibilities, and of course, our actions. But what if we take a closer look, beneath that superficial sense of plasticity?

Look at a time-lapse film of a big city the next chance you get, and you'll see a constant flux of matter coming into the picture, coming into being, and then going out of it. Buildings pile up and wear down like sandcastles. People flock and file by, suddenly accumulate, and then vanish, like raindrops evaporating in the sun. Those were important places. They were important people. Where does it all come from, where does it all go?

Past mystics called it the ether. Buddhists call it emptiness. A physicist might call it the quantum field. Whatever you call it, it is an ocean of invisible fluctuating energies from which and into which everything we see and know precipitates, takes form, and exists "here," at least for a little while until it returns back. I plan on doing that very thing myself.

"The fact that the mass of a particle is equivalent to a certain amount of energy means that the particle...has to be conceived as a dynamic pattern, a process involving the energy which manifests itself as the particle's mass."

Fritjof Capra

Before I really get personal with it, let's consider this plasticity on a geological time scale, like an archaeologist might. Over what seem to be great expanses of time in our perception, these energies manifest themselves in broad cultural movements, and massive re-arrangements of man-made stuff. A lot of people all suddenly seek and find the same solutions for their life needs, and they swarm, like those great, organic flocks of birds undulating through the sky. They get busy, like ants. The plastic surface of the planet evolves – waves of biospheric change spread, peeling over the Earth's surface, re-forming entire continents. For example, lots of people once lived in the green region that is now the Sahara Desert.

If we just allow our evolving consciousness to lift us to an adequate vantage point, where we can gain a perspective on this change, we can see ourselves not just as a part of it, but of even determining it through our participation. So our participation has direction, and creates our constantly shifting state of being. If we can manage this big mind, we can see the direction we want to be going collectively, and focus our own plasticity in accord. Now it's getting more personal.

Have you ever walked into a room or a space, and just not felt right? Or experienced a "weird" day, when you, and everyone you came in contact with all noticed something "off." What you're experiencing is a real perception that our expanding consciousness gives us – an awareness of those invisible fluctuating energies I'm talking about. Tuning in to these energies changes and informs all aspects of your personal life, and reconnects us to the world in a less self-centered way.

You might suddenly see that things aren't going great for anybody; or that someone isn't really being a jerk, they're suffering; or, most importantly, that you can contribute to changing that state of being in yourself and others, the plastic attitudes and direction, by exercising that awareness, adjusting your focus, aiming your in-tention, and taking the actions.

Have you ever had a flurry of synchronicitous events take place in your life? Coincidences that really couldn't be completely coincidental, usually guiding you towards positive connections, places you need to be, people you need to meet? Those situations are opportunities to join with this source dimension, the definition of faith as "the evidence of things unseen."

Coincidentally, when you become willing to allow your normally constrained perceptions to expand into that awareness of the constructive (and destructive) energies right under the surface of things, the actions you'll intuitively want to take will contribute to the spiritual evolution of all Life on Earth, and you'll become part of the collective conscious co-creation of a positive, abundant, sustainable future. You'll become part of our greater solution.

"When you make the two into One, you will be a Son of Man,

and when you say: Mountain move! It will move."

Logion 106, The Gospel of Thomas

All you need to recognize, to become fully aware of, is that the most powerful of all these underlying energies, and the one you want to enter into all your important decisions (and unimportant ones), is LOVE. Then swim in it, as the medium of your life.

"Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"

doesn't make any sense."

Rumi

Codename: Kids Next Door: More From the Sooper Obscure Files...Logos!

2011-08-15T12:48:00.020-04:00

There were always "other" organizations, kind of like the KND, but made up of hamsters, evil cats, Amish, whatever,
and they all needed logos...

Most of these were done in about an hour, just because that's how show production goes, and they weren't even done in Illustrator...

...they were inked (remember that?) by Sir Robert Smith, and colored by interns

– God bless interns (color slightly adjusted here...)

...then there were the holidays, and of course the KND needed to add a little cheer to the standard logo!

Amy Winehouse, Rupert Murdoch, And How 2012 Came Early

2011-08-08T16:35:00.016-04:00

Will 2012 finally begin the sudden shift in consciousness promised by some? If a profound new state of human consciousness is really right on top of us, why does it often seem that the social and cultural transformation we long for threatens to be just another failed "Rapture," only this time not for some misguided evangelical cult, but for all of us – the sanely, progressively, spiritually faithful. There's one very big reason not to fear this potential disappointment: What we're waiting for is already here. 2012 has come early.

It's in keeping with the limitations of human perception that it's not so easy for us to see the progress that we've collectively made already. It requires an objectivity that most of us have trouble gaining, constrained by our pernicious human Egos, and misdirected as we are by our corrupted media.

When I was a child, only a few decades back, there was practically no environmental awareness, no recycling programs. There was no energy conservation, no Endangered Species, no locavores, microloans, sustainability, no "repurposing," or green anything. Vegetarians were "hippie weirdos." People who opposed atomic power were crazy troublemakers. A poor African-American man from a broken home could never become President. Impossible. All of this is more than possible now. It is.

Practically unimaginable just twenty years ago, we now have the means to instantly connect our progressive spiritual consciousness globally, like a single entity.

Evidence of this shift is everywhere, even in the least likely of places – the popular media.

Amy Winehouse was an amazing talent, as anyone who saw her perform at her peak would agree, but she was seized and destroyed not by personal irrespon-sibility or a lack of will-power, but what we all know as a spiritual, physical, and mental disease that so many of us have witnessed and had touch our lives that even the media celebration of her sadly ironic hit, "Rehab," was uneasy, at best.

No one was surprised when she died, and only the least con-scious among us could enter into that state of comfortable denial that would have been commonplace just a few years ago. Even corporate media talking heads couldn't package it as usual. Advertisers couldn't bumper the story with beer ads. Even they intuitively knew better.

It was Ms. Winehouse's karma to make this message about the necessity of loving tolerance through her unfortunate life and sacrifice. In this sense, she's evidence of the end of media denial, the "self-immolating" start of a revolutionary consciousness of recovery; not unlike the burning martyr who launched the Egyptian revolution.

When Rupert Murdoch's "News of the World" collapsed under the weight of the oppressive soul corruption that drives his power, the fear-based tension keeping all those lies aloft was in an instant deflated, and collapsed into the shadow of the new era of Ethics and Compassion, already standing over it, sending it's irreversible message that the era of fearful, exploitative power has come to an end. The destructive delusion of it is as sadly transparent as the stories told by a bitter little man, answering to a Parliamentary panel. The Emperor has no clothes–they've been dissolved by the penetrating light of our "new" shared consciousness.

The oil spill, the earthquake and meltdown, the continuing unnecessary starvation in Africa, the financial collapses, the un-conscionable irresonsibility of corporate food production, the stupid-ity of fracking, the ridiculous political "good cop, bad cop" routine in Washington, the revolutionary bloodshed in the Middle East – these aren't news items to engage or enrage only "the left," they're issues of a global order, experienced tangibly, empathically, instanta-neously by the great majority of humans on the planet.

The forces tenaciously clinging to power in the face of this irreversible sea change see that "The Kingdom is already spread across the earth" (even when many of the faithful don't yet realize the enormity of the transformation already among us), and so they plot and consolidate, but too late – the genie of cooperative con-sciousness is out of the bottle. Their time is over. It's likely to be messy, the embedded power "elite" won't go easily or particularly quickly by the measure of a single lifetime, but that's okay as it is, profound change is always writ larger than just a generation. The bulk of the change has already happened.

So, if the new consciousness is really here already, what can we do to bring it into it's ascendency, to create the compassionate, intelligent stewardship that will "save the world?" We've got heroes: The Ernst Laszlos, and Arundhati Roys, and Johann Callemans, and Daniel Pinchbecks (thx Evolver!), and Amy Goodmans, and George Noorys and Julian Assanges, and Eckhart Tolles and Ammas. We've got eco-activists, and "hacktivists," demonstrators and the blogo-sphere. If you're one of those action-takers, God Bless You, but if not, here's what you can do to keep powering up what has already become far more powerful than you may realize:

Keep doing exactly what you've been doing, only a little moreso! Stay open-hearted, do service, stay connected, keep actively engaging your intuitive intelligence when it comes to important decisions. Heighten environmental responsibility. Take part in the process to the degree you're able, and vote. Teach tolerance. Have compassion, even for the less conscious among us. Love each other. Keep growing into your true spiritual potential personally, and we all will collectively. Each of us truly is all of us in this era of quantum consciousness.

Step up and assume the role of the enlightened majority present on our planet now; start living in the era of cooperative con-sciousness, using the intuitive intelligence that lives in everything, in everyday, in every life, "large" and "small." You needn't wait for our time to come. Our time is here already.

Bede Griffiths

Codename: Kids Next Door, From the Sooper Obscure Vault

2011-08-03T15:02:00.007-04:00

The last of the real strange Rainbow Monkeys...
Here's a soda-pop/champagnish sort of cycle thang that runs on carbonation, I'm sure...I'll be rolling out some more obscure vehicles soon!

Tales: Are You a Donut Too?

2011-07-26T15:14:00.017-04:00

Have you ever thought of yourself as a donut? Hmmm, not really...though there have been times when I wanted to eat enough of them to possibly become one myself. Becoming a donut, just for a little while, can be instructive, crazy as it may sound.

Here's how it works: A donut is a mix of elements that generally takes one of a few different, but similar forms. It comes into this structural being through a difficult transformational process. In this case, frying. It's constituted of fairly predictable ingredients, surrounded by The Universe, and features a small space in it's middle that contains another little piece of The Universe. A hole. "Nothing," surrounded by donut.

The ingredients can work delightfully well together, or they can become quite unpleasant, so the effect can be at times utterly delicious, and at other times, nauseatingly self-destructive.

If you look at the diagram above, you'll see how we're a bit like donuts ourselves. Our outsides, where the glazing is, is our physical interface to the world – our sensory selves. Sticky and delicious. Sticky and unpleasant (collecting stuff). Everything we feel and sense; hot, cold, pleasure, pain; arising unexpected waves of intense sensation, torporous states of inexplicable numbness; bitter and sweet; an erupting giggle, or a fit of uncontrollable sobbing, some coming from without, some coming from within.

Our sensory selves are our human covering. Our senses. The feelings that arise and dissolve; the physical joys of being human, and the source of our unimagined pain. It's very seductive, even addicting at times, all of it. It can also all be rather relentlessly brutal as well, on occasion; though by itself, it's not completely who we are.

The inner ingredients of our personal donut consist, in part, of thoughts of who we think we are, and how we see ourselves in relation to the surrounding Universe: What I look like, what I do, how much money I have, whether I'm a "success" or a "failure," whether I'm happy or not. It's "the stuff our dreams are made of," because an awful lot of it just simply isn't real – it only seems that way to us, maybe not to anyone else.

It's hard to be objective about this part of ourselves, even though this is the Ego part that tends to make us feel so separate and unique; and every single one of us is unique, despite the truth that our donut is made from the exact same ingredients as everyone else, arranged in slightly different ways, and is always changing. Sure, we're unique – all in the very same way. Our Egos make it hard to see how alike we are.

If we identify ourselves with this "separate," ever-changing, often imaginary self-portrait, filled with inaccurate judgments and comparisons about ourselves and others, the result can be painfully over-indulgent, and lead to tremendous discomfort –"dis-ease."

Did you know that the rich, handsome, successful actor Cary Grant was really a donut? He was heard talking to someone, confessing his profound insecurities, and when the man said, "you don't have anything to worry about, you're Cary Grant!" The actor replied, "I wish I were."

"To identify consciousness with that which merely reflects consciousness – this is egoism."

Patanjali, Yoga Sutras, II. 6.

Our Ego keeps wanting us to somehow control The Universe, not to just be a part of it, and in doing so, demands the constant judgments, inventories, and evaluations that further separate and disconnect us from that truth that lies right in our very center, in that eternally grace-filled and easy space that also surrounds us – our true birthright.

In the diagram, I've made that "hole" in our middle heart-shaped because that's where The Universe, Grace, "God" lives in us, and how it is connected to us. That's who we really are.

Since that's where our Universal Consciousness, our "God Consciousness" lives, when we can unify that true space within with that unifying space that's all around us, we'll become both "hole," and whole. Our donut, and all the misperceptions of "who we really are supposed to be" begin to dissolve, and life becomes much easier and more comfortable as we become the Grace that we're truly meant to live within.

Besides, we don't really want to be a donut...maybe just the "whole" in the middle.

Thanks for the inspiration to Eric Jiaju Lee.

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 24: The Western Ridge, JayBird, and the Cuyamaca Run

2011-07-21T16:49:00.036-04:00

It was a morning like a lot of other San Diego mornings, when I first met Jay on the canyon ridge that was the western border of my hunting territory. Sunny. A little cool. A morning dove cooing that I "allowed to live," playing God like hunters do. It wasn't hot enough to start to simmer yet, for the dust to rise, or for the grasshoppers to begin their endless buzzing.

I'd gone a little farther out that way west, further than usual, but still it was turf I regarded as mine, so when I saw some strange big kid likewise carrying a rifle, it raised my hackles a little. Some poacher, no doubt. Then I guess I saw something I recognized. I knew there must've been some interior purpose weaving those oxide red trails together as we sized each other from a ways off – we were both doing the same thing in the same place together, both of us alone. I rightly guessed my west slightly overlapped his east, the ridge having been, up to that point, our natural divider.

We started walking together, about fifteen or twenty feet apart, like hunters do, through the sumac and black sage, the slender wild oat would've flecked our socks with foxtails, if we'd either of us worn any. We traded shots, and impressed each another with the similarity of our styles; and with very little said, discovered how much alike we were.

Each of us had come from houses that were hard on the inside, and each of us were the youngest child – but that was enough of that. As kids, we sublimated that turmoil in our lives with much greater economy than we muster as adults. Our canyon stoicism balanced and calmed the subtle sense of in-justice we held under, that had been inculcated by irresponsible adults, and inspired our joint belief that there had to be a right way of doing things. In the canyon that morning we silently agreed there was, and we would bring that back with us, into the rest of our world.

It was in those calculated approaches where we really met point for point, right down the line, planning along the same logic, or improvising with uncanny coincidence at every turn, meeting up in the same unusual places with a kind of precise tribal karma, like reunited platoon-mates on a "need-to-know" mission. The Mexican excursions, double-dates, crashing parties, a psycho-genic exploration of Mount Cuyamaca – all the events unfurled as though planned in a slightly different dimension. One where we knew how to get away with everything.

By no design of our own, we ended up working together in that crazy little ski-shop across the street from one of San Diego's last neon-façade drive-ins, down on Sports Arena Boulevard. We connived, and conspired, and ate all the good jerky, and sold a lot of ski shit. Why, he was even dating the first girl I'd ever fought over, at age five, in the sandbox at Kindergarten. The beautiful Marylou, all grown up.

That particular Cuyamaca day I mentioned the sun was sky-high and raging, and as we reached that state ourselves, Jay suddenly dropped it and took off running full-speed down the side of the mountain, bounding hell-bent through the sumac, over the saltbrush, yucca, and fountain grass, boulder-to-boulder at a flat downhill dead-run. I lost my shirt following, and by the time I'd recovered it and wheeled away back down the mountain his trail was only a light luminescent whisper, a turbulence in the ether, barely perceivable, but still easy for me to follow. Like in our lives, despite all the options, we couldn't have found any other path.

The trail ended in the shade of a wea-thered fir tree, where a young buck had lost his antlers. Jay stood there holding them, panting, his mouth open huge, twice the size of nor-mal, his arms, much longer than they should have been. He'd truly reverted to a Paleolithic state, covered only with dense hair in place of his clothes. At that same moment, he told me later, I'd become "a reptile"– kind of a snap-ping desert tortoise-man. Psychogenic sub-stances are funny that way. Very elemental.

Like it was always to be for the both of us, we had to go to those ex-tremes to lose ourselves from the world of structure, and to find ourselves, our true selves, even for just a few moments there in the wilderness.

...and there never seemed to be any consequences until those we finally caught up to.

Years later, the paths would unravel, spin off, and lead us each with the same urgency in very different directions; but in that canyon dimension where our spirits met [and still inhabit], the morning sun stays low out on that western ridge. A little further out that way than usual.

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"

doesn't make any sense.

Rumi

Tales: The (Spiritual) Three Musketeers

2011-07-11T12:29:00.012-04:00

Kindness, Tolerance, and Acceptance are kind of like the Three Musketeers of spiritual protection. Don't ask me which one's Porthos or Athos or Aramis, but suffice to say, you are probably D'Artagnan in that mix (as you'd like to join them). There isn't an assault by any evil Robespierre that these three can't out-maneuver and overcome. There's no army of worries or fears that together (with you joining in), they can't defeat.

"My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."

The Dalai Lama

Kindness is probably the most readily accessible and the easiest to summon up, since we all know we're capable of it spontaneously. As an action, it's the most actively proactive - because we can always simply use it all the time. When we're as kind as we can possibly be to everyone we meet, without being at all patronizing, we energize our lives and the lives we touch with a positivity that's absolutely transformative. Kindness flows into people and situations like a calming, lubricating emollient, yet just below that smooth surface it packs a real punch - the underlying positive power to support a soul or a situation with unshakeable solidity. Just ask the Mahatma, as Kindness is the proactive expansion of the Hindu concept of ahimsa (absolute nonvio-lence) that he based his revolution of human consciousness on.

Try it, apply it, give it a test-drive for at least a couple of days, and watch, the way it changes your life, dramatically improving it so much that you never would have believed it could be so easy...and fun. You'll discover that there's a secret world, a conspiracy of kindly like-mindedness constantly at work in the world, right under your nose.

Tolerance is identification. The destruction of separateness. Tolerance is Compassion.

If you just give it a little thought, you can easily see how most of our difficulties, personally and culturally, are self created, coming about as the result of feeling that we're separate and somehow special or different from everyone else, when naturally nothing could be further from the truth. To paraphrase what I believe is the single wisest thing Ronald Reagan ever said: If the Earth were under attack by aliens from another planet, how long do you think it would take us to get over all our differences?

That's easy to answer, don't you agree? Every uncomfortable difference would disappear almost immediately, as we would unite to protect our beautiful home. When we look at the Earth and all it's inhabitants in that context, we see the foolishness in considering ourselves different from one another at all. Everyone is literally in (or on) the same blue boat, going about the exact same business of being, with the same thoughts, fears,and joys determined by our slightly different sensory identifications and experiences.

Our planet is under attack by an inhuman invader called fear, the sick army of the collective Ego that takes the form of elitism, exploitation, greed, and prejudice. Humans doing, not humans being.

"Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself."

Robert G. Ingersoll

Acceptance is the toughest to come by, often seeming to make the least sense in light of the basic injustices of Life; and that's true, some things just aren't fair, or right, but nonetheless, they still simply are. So Acceptance requires a sort of vigilance, of continuously turning it over. Simply put, it's open-heartedness, just allowing life to be as it is, as it always will be, and looking hard in it for what's Love, and what isn't. In that sense, there's never anything attacking us personally, just Life on Life's terms, and and an ongoing challenge to find the Love flowing around and through us, lying just beneath that noisy surface artifice of willful human ego. Acceptance is a kind of surrender, as a strategy. Joining the energy and power of the underlying Love.

Kindness and Tolerance are evidence of this underlying power, and keys to personally harnessing it. And Acceptance, well, simply put, there just is no problem in Life that can't be resolved by Acceptance. With all that in mind, the unacceptable becomes obvious.

En guard, mon frere!

What's An Animation Designer to Do?

2011-07-06T11:30:00.038-04:00

...with very little time, very little money, and a request for a "New Yorker Magazine" look with limited color, and a nice lightly "boiling" line. First off, we needed some quick characters (a lead, and 5 or 6 others) that we could follow through history from caveman to philosopher to peacenik to conferee...

Too bad it wasn't "her"story...

........................................................................don't forget the kids!

the backgrounds

There's always a bunch of odds and ends and special shots to figure out...

...............................................to the amphitheater in ancient Greece

....................the "Peace Rally" background (here's to Peace Rallies!)

We had a request for a "limited color look," which is a gift on a tight schedule and budget...

.......................and of course, the viewer's site interface invitation.

And right up to the present day, it all worked out very well...and fast...and not expensive. Thanks to Will at Homebaked Films.

Congratulations on Our Rainbow Connection!

2011-06-27T08:56:00.025-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Love thy neighbor as thyself."

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

Judging our brothers and sisters, and their choices and expressions in Life, is always simply a form of unnecessarily harsh self-punishment. Now it can be released at the same time as our stridently illogical "Laws of Nature" deconstruct them-selves, revealed and overturned by compassionate conscious-ness. Then that same intuitive intelligence and reason is freed up too, and allowed to demonstrate where the boundaries really need to be. Where boundaries make sense for everyone.

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

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

A Course in Miracles, 24.I.6

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

2011-06-20T12:41:00.024-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thought requires consciousness; Consciousness does not require thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither of them even wanted to think about it.

"What have you gained from meditation?"

"Nothing at all."

"Then what good is it?"

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

The Buddha

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

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

2011-06-14T14:29:00.033-04:00

A full-on hellacious meleé is what you would call it.

That'd probably be a pretty fair description. It was about a thousand screaming kids, 98%of them boys from the ages of six to twelve, packed into the indescribable moderne-ity of the old State Theater on El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego, somewhere back around 1962. It was like that every Saturday, at the weekly triple-feature matineé. Kids' moms dropped them off, like mine did, watched the ticket being purchased, thirty-five cents back then, waited for us to go in, and drove off in their classic Chevys, Fords, and Plymouths, that weren't classic, then. Every mom had one, and had some place to go in it.

I would stop at the Snack bar and get a red-striped tagboard box of popcorn, fifteen cents, and a Nesbitt's orange for a quarter. For seventy-five cents, my mom could leave me there for almost six hours. A teenager with a challenged complexion, in a dark blue, gold-trimmed uniform pushed the doors open for me, and revealed that insanity within. In those days, they sat you, pointing out your seat with their flashlight, and as soon as they chased some other kid back up the aisle, you got up and moved to where you really wanted to sit. I liked to sit slightly up from the middle, down the right-hand aisle.

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

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

The show started up with an animated snack bar bumper, and a "smoking and crying baby booth in the rear" card, right before the golden Warner Bro-thers frame bounced the screen into life, and the kidmob, at least for a little while, calmed down to watch the cartoons. About half way through the mus-cleman marathon, the kids would get restless, and started taking the place apart at the seams, starting with the inevitable winging of the flattened popcorn boxes, with their wick-edly unpredictable tra-jectories, and ending up in an all-out pandemonium that necessitated the turning on the house lights, and the theater manager's stern announcements from the stage. Any unruly or destructive children would be ejected from the theater. The kids could care less, but everyone quieted down so the lights could go back off, the movies could start back up, and the insanity could build again to another fine state of perfect hellaciousness, starting the whole process all over again.

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

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

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

Mom always showed up a little later than she was going to, loaded me up, asked how the movie was. We drove home, mostly quiet, and I just wondered, Where is my chariot...and where is Sylva Koscina right now?

Tales: of Passion, Light & Dark

2011-06-07T11:34:00.030-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that's a higher plane of passion!

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

Picasso

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

Thanks for More Than 10,000 Visitors!

2011-06-07T11:33:00.000-04:00

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

2011-06-02T09:50:00.003-04:00

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

Tales: Finding the Middle; Connecting Pt. 1

2011-05-17T14:17:00.015-04:00

Doing a lot of juggling?.................................................................................................

In just about every spiritual practice ever known, there comes a time when we need to develop a kind of ideal focus, a contact with our guiding higher power, whether it's Love, or Nature, or The Universe, or The Divine Feminine - our personal understanding of God, simply put. It's generally a prayerful or meditative time, but wouldn't it be nice if it were available to us as an easily accessible feature, a tool for day-to-day life on-the-go? In the next couple Tales, I'll present some ways we might make it work without a lot of sage-burning, "spiritual" hub-bub. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just that there isn't always the time, or the sage.

Of course, a focus implies a center, a place of concentration right in the middle of our daily perceptions, a handy spot for turning a devotional ideal into a default setting, where it might serve as a safe place for our thoughts to return to in those moments of temporary turmoil, when something messes with our sense of well-being. Having that focus, that resonant, ideal direction handy can pop us out of the stressful conditions of judgement, comparison, and pressure that make us feel trapped sometimes. Fear can really be a selfish motivation when you think of it in that light. Having a device that easily centers us in our higher self can instantly free us up.

In Buddhism, it's called "The Middle Path," [re-tooled for our culture it's] an approach to life that's right in between a tough, self-judgmental path to "proper behavior" whose harshness makes real humility impossible, and an over-justified "self-worship" of sorts, whose pious materialism is too elevated for our own good. In other words, either we are too hard on ourselves and everyone else; or we've always got it right, know a little more, and deserve better (and are hard on everyone else). Both ends of that scale, "I never get it right," and "No one else ever gets it right," are outposts of the Ego, and home to their own kinds of selfishness, and neither are actually where most of us live, most of the time.

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

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

When we find ourselves in a situation where we want to react, which means we're likely to act out on one of our personality flaws, like "I'm not going to pay that much," or "This guy doesn't know what he's talking about," listen to the bell ring! See the red flag! Here's your chance to find your center of focus. You have a choice right at that moment to "act out." Don't do it. It's the old "count to three," and say: Thanks very much, I'm not going there today. That takes care of the low end, now for the high side - create an ideal goal, like, what would the ideal Dad do right now? Or, how would Mahatma Gandhi treat this guy? Set the bar high enough so that reaching for it will pull you out of your funky tendencies (The Funky Tendencies - I loved their first album).

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

Good Karma isn't the result of a single moment, it's the accumulation of a lot of 'em, like you get each time you reset yourself to Compassion. Just like that, you'll see that "ideal place" is found easily and gracefully right in the middle of your self, right around the area of your heart. You wouldn't think Good Karma was a song by The Funky Tendencies...

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

Meister Eckhart

Tales: The Trinity Withinity; Connecting Part 2

2011-05-07T22:48:00.021-04:00

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

Spiritually, we see "The Trinity" all over the place, with [the Christian] Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; or The Buddha (Unified Consciousness), The Dharma (the way, or path),and The Sangha (the community). In Hinduism, there are several versions of it, in one example as deities: Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver), and Shiva (destroyer); or in the examples that put our personal self in the order: Brahmin (the All), Atman (the personal All, or soul), Asmita (the ego, or "I am this"); also called The Transcendent, The Universal, and The Individual (by Sri Aurobindo); which also fairly closely correlates as Sat (Being), Chit (Awareness), and Ananda (Bliss). That last little ol' part is always you, or me, and our selves, the "separate" gross, material aspect; and the experience through our human senses, including our bodies, our minds, and especially, our Egos.

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

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

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

Rabbi Rami Shapiro, on The Pirke Avot

When we talk about that top billing, with "The Father," of course we're talking about God, The Creator, Omniscience, the Source of Everything, all being. Personified, this can be The Big Guy With the Beard; The Divine Mother; Brahma, etc. Conceptually, it's The Source, The Transcendent Unified Consciousness, The Universe, or Brahmin. It's That which we know is the power responsible for all being, That we want to get to know better (but often have a hard time doing it); under whose protection and care it would always be nice to live. What's really in charge, like it or not. Einstein has a great quote about it:

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

Is God friendly? Since Life is quite plastic, and it's really up to you and the attitude you bring to your experience of Life, then why not? Have a friendly attitude. It's especially easy if we see The Father, Brahma, The Transcendent, The Universe, as the divine, over-arching power and expression of Love.

The biggest problem often comes in finding a comfortable, practical connection to that omniscient source, a two-way street that helps us experience the loving, supportive nature of The Universe. That's where the second of our three parts comes in. With the Christian trinity, it's maybe a little out of order, or a combination, because while the path to God, the dharma for Christians is often through Jesus, we also are Jesus, as he was (as far as we really know) just a person like us. So we too are all "The Son of Man." The physical manifestation of God on Earth. Our intermediary might be better described by "The Holy Ghost," that Angel on our shoulder; our Spirit Guide; the Atman (in Hinduism); the way, or dharma (in Buddhism), that we receive in meditation or contemplation. That buffering medium through which we find a real attachment to, and inclusion in "The Almighty."

The Quakers refer to it as: "The still,small voice," also known as our "voice of reason." It's intuition. Thinking without the intellect. Thinking from the heart. It comes from the place that's accessible to everyone, the place Yeshua talked about when he said:

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

Logion 3, The Gospel of Thomas

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

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

When we consider it from an agnostic's point of view, in terms of brain science, we could correlate the activity of our Right Brain to the actions of our angels. It's in the right side of our brains, where what might be called parallel processing takes place, where we realize "holistic thought," that is, an understanding of "one-ness" and being. It's our connection to Source, our link to God Consciousness, Buddha Mind, The Transcendent. This short talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, author of A Stroke of Insight describes it very well. Our Left Brain is us - the day-to-day serial processing that encompasses and dictates our standard egoic consciousness. Demanding, organizing, judging and comparing. It's definitely the hardest part of "being me."

But what if I'm not just me, but the "Son of Man" too! Then here, in this body is where I can try to experience bliss, where I can learn, intuitively, to be myself, and know what it's like to be an expression of Source, an antenna for sensory collection, and a blossoming flower. You've really got to be a human being to experience Christ-ing, moksha, nirvana, or Unified Consciousness.

It just requires a little effort to work on a better connection...

.........................................................................does this look familiar?