About Atheism

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder
than one closed by belief.
Garry Spence

My favorite atheist is without any hesitation Richard Dawkins. A delightful fellow, eventhough I find him a little too dogmatic for my taste. I always take "religious" people with a grain of salt, no matter what side of the argument they come from. I may not completely agree with him but I do sense that he is somehow necessary and he does capture a certain zeitgeist of the times we live in. He can be considered a balancer so to speak, a much needed voice, an antithesis to the wide spread religious fundamentalisms of the world.

Having said this, I believe that atheism calibrates at the same level and quality of energy as most religions. Religious people believe in a transcendant deity, atheists believe in reason. But reason (as most religions) has never provided humans with any relevant moral or philosophical certainty, at least none that I know of, or none that we can actually use to solve our many problems of the soul. You know, it has been proven that alcoholics and adddicts of all kinds can hardly change their destructive lifestyles without espousing some kind of believe in a higher power. These people genuinely turn their lives around and start living constructive lives when they start believing in a power that is beyond their own human abilities. An atheist may argue, "what about intellectual integrity?". An alcoholic will probably reply: "you can shove your intellectual integrity up your rectum. I will take anything that will stop me from waking up in the mornings in a puddle of my own urine and can allow me to get my life back on track."

Humans often exhibit heartless cynicism and will trade compassion for "being right" any time. What atheists are really doing is react to the morass of religious ignorance with an equally muddy and confusing position that offers no healing value to society. Atheists like most religious people are just in love with their own thoughts. If Mr. Christopher Hitchins can do without the beautiful muslim poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi, I can't. I Mr. Richard Dawkins can do without the soul lifting gospel singing and trance inducing ragas and kirtans, I can't. If this guys can do without magic, I can't.

When torn between two mountains of despair
Pierce the valley and from the snake of the desert beware

About Conspiracy Theories and 9/11

We are haunted by Scylla
We are caught in Charybdis
Our ship is sinking in our deep, bloody wounds
But Orpheus went to the underworld
And brought with him a song
The song of humanity's true redemption
That eternal harmony
That will dampen the call of the sirens
and fill our sails with wind to take us home

Do governements hold that ends justify the means and have hidden agendas and lie to their peoples? All the time. Does the general public exercise good judgement and critical thinking when dealing with matters of national and political interest? Almost never. Is the political elite in America using the goulish myth of terrorism as a tool for social cohesion and to provide an enemy image to society to keep it united around a particular ideology, which is what we call neo-conservatism? That is quite obvious. Humans may be intelligent as individuals, but as crowds they display the characteristics of dumb cattle, that can be easily stirred in "convenient" directions by a skillful mass manipulator.

After all this 9/11 confusion I couldn't help ask myself this question: If we can't know the truth about what happened in 9/11, just 6 years ago, where we had live coverage, eye witnesses, cameras from all angles, reporters from all major media outlets, how can we know the truth about any fact of our present and past history. People in power lie to consolidate power and keep living the good life, and people subject to that power swallow those lies to simply stay alive.

Does Everything Have Meaning?

Words and language confuse us
For they are not the essence that moves us
Expressions and appearance disprove
The love that flows in your soul's groove
As you give in to my gaze's sway
Barriers melt and drop away
In you, mysterious passions that enslave and bind
You'll feel the urge to seek and find

Yes but only in the sense that everything mirrors and resonates a deeper, more substantive reality that is rooted in an interconnected web of forms and fields. An experience or a ‘thing' has meaning when it is not by itself, disconnected from the rest or reality. On a fundamental level everything may be a metaphor, or using physicists' terms a Fourier Transform, an interference pattern reflecting a more mysterious and hidden order.

When humans seek meaning, or happiness or what-have-you, they are usually looking for the "it". I have bad news for everyone, there is no such a thing as the "it": there is only "the more" or "the less". On this side of the cosmos there is nothing but defficiencies and excesses. There are things that have more of something and things that have less of something.

Let the people follow their joy and bliss
Let the people taste divinity
For we are not really after meaning but a kiss
Let them feel the rapture of living
A life that for a long time was amiss

Meaning -and the soul - are by definition "difficient" or negative (and that is why humans will continue seeking for the soul and never find it because it is beyond the reach of the conscious mind and that is what ""negative" means, ) as opposed to the physical world which is "excessive" or positive. The big bang may not have been an explosion but was instead a collision between a positively charged mysterious entity and another which was negatively charged, exactly like with clouds or people. The outcome of this galactic "intercourse" is what we have come to know as life. The visible world are the male babies because they have something extra: the cosmic swinging dick. The invisible world are the little girls because they have something missing, the above mentioned swinging dick. As you see the universe is a chauvinistic pig, and to be able to graduate into the visible and material dimension you have to brandish a little prick, you need to have male qualities. So in a certain sense everything that is visible is male and everything that is male is going to need some ying for his yang. When we seek for meaning what we are really doing is looking for a date, we are looking to get laid. We are yearning to inseminate, with thought, the abysmal womb of an "unknowable" parallel universe hoping that one day ... poetry will be born.

What Is Autopoiesis?

Autopoiesis is Greek for self-making or self-creation. Self-creation is a unique property of non-linear, self contained networks and structures that arise from seemingly nowhere but fulfill a particular and unique function. In these pages you are going to see me write of the universe, of mother earth, of the cosmos, of the planets, the stars, of god etc... as if they were conscious, individuated, personified entities, which in fact they are. I am what you would call a "full circle" animist...

I have traveled the world and explored
I contemplated human nature and deplored
Science crowned and soul all but ignored
But the Lord of the dawn his spirit poured
After nine hells seven heavens restored
I saw, then held the plow and let down the sword

I got here not because of simple-mindedness or superstition but because I paid my dues and did my homework. If we fully understood how systems works, how organizing principles emerge from complex processes and how patterns coalesce with other patterns to form intelligent wholes, we would probably understand better what life is and how it came about. The earth, the universe, the stars may no be considered organisms in themselves, but they are systems and living, intelligent, self-creating systems for that matter. If we understood for example that the earth is a living system in whose ecology we, humans, another living system, are an integral and very important part, we would act more responsibly towards the environment. We can't see the forest for the trees and that is our greatest sorrow. We focus on the small puny details and fail to see the whole picture and that is at the root to all our predicaments. Until humans quit being content with just swimming at the surface of their shallow existence and start casting their fishing nets into the dark, deep oceanic waters of the unconscious they will never have a clue about what it is all about.

Why Do We Laugh?

Laughter is a form of sex. So is eating, smoking and many other seemingly innocent human activities. As in sex, laughter involves a gathering of tension and unresolved issues and a subsequent release and resolution. You may have never thought of comedians and joksters as "partners in love", but that is exactly what they are. With their skillfully crafter material they attempt to tickle your emotional G-spot and when they succeed you explode in those uncontrollable "orgasmic" gigglings and bubblings that we call laughter.

About Fear And Courage

It was fear that filled your altars with charms
But you still left the safety of your groves and farms
Defied unknown oceans with only creaky ships and strong arms

People are courageous either because they overcome fear or because they are biologically incapable of fear. We take for granted that all people feel fear when they are threatened. It is not always the case. Some people are bold because of a glitch in the endocrine system. The hormone that is needed to sense fear is abscent and that is a disadvantage (in theory) because fear is there for a reason: survival. Individuals who are physiologically incapable of fear either end up dead at a very young age or they become very wealthy and very accomplished sociely, and this is for abvious reasons. But the rest of us do feel fear when we find ourselves in a dangerous situation, we may sweat blood, puke our guts out, but we exhibit courage when we gather our scattered wits and still do what needs to be done, even at the risk of our own lives.

What Is Love?

Why do I look for your beautiful face
If you were in me all along
Why do I want to kiss you
If my lips are made of the same clay as yours
Why do I always thirst for your tender presence
If your essence already fills my being
Why do I hunger to know your secrets
If your soul was weaved from the same thread as mine
Is my love for you a passion misplaced?
When the prophet points to the stars
The fool, him, stares at the finger
Inspired by Rumi

The love we humans yearn for, which is eternal love, true love or love that has no opposite and is not dual, exists only as an individual experience of transcendance and cannot be communicated or shared. Manifest love (the love we humans have available to share with others) is dual, which means that no matter who you are or what you do, that kind of love will always contain the seed of hate woven in its fabric. It is the inevitable game of polarities. Once something crosses the barrier from spirit to the manifest realm of matter it looses its essence and splits into two poles, negative (non manifest, potential) and positive (manifest, actual). The more you want one, the more you get of the other. It is quantum physics at its best. This is the reason why most human endeavors go awry: we seek love and we reject hate, we seek wealth and we reject poverty, we seek happiness and we reject sorrow and so on. We need to stop rejecting the parts of us that we don't like. What we really need to do is "accept" both the good and the bad as manifestations of form and natural fluctuation in the universe, because they are in fact two faces of the same coin, two poles of the same magnet. Try cutting one side of a magnet and you would still get a positive and a negative pole no matter how many times and how small you cut it. And now your question should be how can we go around that? If we can't have the bright side without the dark one and if God is ok with evil and hate and calamities and so on, what are we to do if we want a peaceful life, a " "good", decent and reasonable society? You know the universe is wonderful and very powerful, but so are we and sometimes, occasionally, our interests seem to go on opposite directions. In that case we need to outwit it and act very smart... actually the universe is very glad when we do, trust me. We are going to need three things: Ritual, art and above all, moderation.

Ritual: If we allow those dark archetypes of the psyche to manifest themselves in positive and constructive ways rather than negative and destructive ones (like what is happening with gangs in most American inner cities) and do it thru ritual and art expression we would have much "saner" communities. Use ritual in your love making...

Para celebrar este encuentro de almas
Y dar termine a una larga soledad
Puse candelas para alumbrar tu rostro angelical
En el trasfondo una música callada
Para acompañar esta comunión sonora
Con una cena que deleita y enamora
Inspired by Antonio Gala

...in your eating, in your drinking, in your spirituality, in your work, in your interactions with others. Our rituals are not meant to be elaborate or contrived like the ones we see in our churches and temples. Ritual is nothing else but the acknowledgment of god in oneself and in the other. It is a deep awareness of the sanctity of the people we meet, the food we eat, the homes we dwell in, the places where we work and so on. And ritual must always stem from love and good and wholesome intentions and must be expressed outwardly thru language or other symbolic enactments.

Say it to her with the right voice
Say it to her with the right words
You will expel her demons
You will unlock her heavens
You will still her storms
You will extinguish her fires
You will warm her heart
You will dissipate her doubts
You will reconcile her past and her present
You will bring her home

Art: Thru art we can sublimate some of our darker human aspects and traslate them into beautiful objects, sounds and sights. This manner of expression transforms those who produce it as well as those that are expose to it bringing them closer to their true "nature and source" and awakening them to that part of themselves that was never born and will never die.

Moderation: means very simply be reasonable and count your blessings. Act intelligently and let your decisions be the kind that promote efficiency, frugality, contentment, sustainability and wellbeing. What we have today in the world is an absolute disaster. Our modern culture and economy are monuments to idiocy and lack of insight. We rely on politicians to solve our problems not realizing that those same problems are the very reason why they exist and if they ever fixed anything they would work themselves out of the job and who wants thaaat.... Let me ask you a question: How can anyone solve crime in our streets, or pollution in our air, or cancer in our bodies if the "health" of our economy depends on their existence? How can you experience wholeness if your individual health and wellbeing goes against the "health and wellbeing" of mighty Wall Street. Something has gone terribly wrong...

Are we dazzled by the glitter of the gold
Did we loose respect for the ancient and old
Can't we hear but the crinkle of money
Build mansions in the land of milk and honey
T il our pride and vain desires restrain
Tomorrow holds nothing but much distress and bloody pain

And don't speak to me of public opinion which must have gone private because we see none, particularly here in America. Our dependence on fossil fuels and rampant population growth are sustainable no more. You just have to look at the chart of the population of the earth for the last 2000 years and you will realize immediately that we are due for a serious population crash -that means billions of individuals dying , all in a very short period of time, for reason of epidemics, natural disasters, wars or such- and believe me you do not want to be there when it happens. Mother earth has been around for a long long time and she is very smart, she knows what to do with bad experiments, and that is exactly what humans are, the skunk works of the cosmos, a cancerous tumor on the skin of this beautiful, vibrant planet. If we don't change and quick, she will shake us off like irritating fleas and she will restart with better designed creatures. That is exactly what she did with the dinasaurs anyhow. And when we go we are not going to be missed, and the earth will most likely fleurish because of our absence.

Sorry I went off on a tangent there, I had to get it out of my system. So back to the subject.

To summarize, eternal love, true happiness, true abundance, true joy are all phenomena of transcendance and by definition will not manifest in the three dimentional world in all their original essence and quality. All we get is an imperfect and broken version. So now you know, if you are looking for eternal love in the outside world give it up, you are not going to see it down here. All those good things promised by the gods across history and traditions, are all found inside you. God is everywhere but he somehow prefers to cozy-up in your little heart. Your body is the seat of the kingdom and the chest of the treasure so go ahead, dive in and have the trip of your life. You may not be able to bring us gifts from those heavenly voyages but you will surely become a better human being because of the "experience" and that i a very very good thing indeed.

Well, now I really feel guilty, truly a party pooper, and should not leave this page without giving some hope to all of you, hopeless romantics out there. I may sound like I am contradicting myself but that is OK, it is impossible to tell the TRUTH without contradicting ouneself because as I menioned before, life is by nature paradoxical. True love may be impossible but GREAT love isn't. We usually get involved with the wrong people because very simply we do not stop and ask QUALITY QUESTIONS about that relationship and we do that because either we are desperate (biological time clock, social and peer pressures or what have you) or because of deep psychological and physical need. Great love and romance is only possible when there is no INNER STRUGGLE. You can have a deep "couple" life only if you have a deep "alone" life. Now comes the disclaimer: the risk of being excessively cautious in matters of love is that you may become filled with indecision and may never venture into a relationship and risk ending up and old bachelor or spinster. So it is your decision:

Do you want a full life with its
passion and aggravation
Can you ride the rollercoaster of
ecstasy and damnation
Or would you rather wait for heaven's
blessing and confirmation
And always have
sugar and adoration

As i said, you can experience a great loving relationship down here, yes, on planet earth, despite all the limitations imposed upon you by the sheer nature of things if... if... you accept people, you love them, for who they are and do not try to change them or impose your set of values on them, because they also have they own precious set of values. Respect their time, their bodies and their space. Do not confuse intimacy with over-familiarity. Do not subordinate their dreams to yours because what makes your dreams better that anybody elese's. Love is not infatuation because infatuation removes your powers and gives them to the object of your desire and that is a no no: what you need is more power not less. In addition if you put someone on a pedestal, you will eventually want to burn them at the stake, it is just a universal principle. "Sweet pie" in her mouth will soon become "piece of shit" from her ass, it is just a matter of time. Love is not a fantasy because fantasies are like alcohol binges, the bigger the binge the more severe the resulting hangover. Love is not looking for one to complement you because if you do you will be only getting a half a person and that half full of a hunk that swept you off your feet will soon become a half empty shell-of-big-bellied-couch-potato-sport-watching-son-of-a-bitch-slob-jerk of a man. You need to find fullness within yourself first and then go out and find someone to love who has done the same. Love is the most powerful where there is attention but not smothering, union but not meshing, intimacy but not over-familiariy, sensuality but not physical neediness, independence but not aloofness, respect but not subordination, cooperation but not power struggle, support but not codependency and so on. If you are lucky enought to find someone like that, well babe, you have hit the jackpot... and don't forget to ask if she has a sister because I need a date...

About Lost Love

Nothing will sweeten my wine,
not honey nor cinnammon nor clover
Precious time lost
I may never recover
But the dark clouds of vile and bitterness
above me will not hover
May you find greener pastures
and a better lover
Human compassion
a multitude of sin will cover
My sails will never fold, across the world oceans
a wandering rover
And like the old proverbial mariner,
always singing and seldom sober
Yearning to find dear lost friends
and precious treasures to discover
Until the true beloved returns
and the insanity is over

The Swan Song Of The Profligate Man

I plowed the land and swam the river
And didn’t cede to life a sliver
But now the slightest breeze makes me shiver
And because I skinned too many cats and ate much beaver
I run out of arrows in my quiver
Barman, another glass, ye sweet libation giver
I will drink til I achieve cirrhosis of the liver

About Chakras

Dive deep in your meditation
Find your center and transcend all cogitation
Loose the ego and receive illumination

We have three main vital systems in our human body: the circulatory, the nervous and the endocrine systems. Oriental cultures found in their great wisdom that as with the blood circulatory system with its veins and arteries, exists a parallell pipe layout for vital energies with its own network of channels and connections. Isn't that wonderful how we complement each other: western science specializes on what is visible and oriental mysticism on what is invisible. The chakras are hubs, the nervous system's equivalent of the heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, bladder etc.... The seven chakras (root, navel, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye and crown) are the representation of the celestial spheres (the seven visible planets - moon, sun, mercury, venus, mars, jupiter, saturn - which in turn symbolize the seven fundamental energies of the cosmos) in our bodies. Remember that we are fractals of the cosmos: as above so below, same pattern different scale. The chakras are also analogous to the seven manifest colors of sunlight (red, orange, yellow, green. cyan, blue and violet), the seven endocrine glands of the body (pineal, pituitary, thyroid, thymus, adrenal, pancreas, ovary/testis), the seven vowels of the alphabet (a, e, i, eu, o, ou, u - pronounced in French), the seven notes of the musical scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti or C-D-E-F-G-A-B.) When our chakras are "played" correctly they can produce tremendous beauty and harmony in our lives. When they are not, it is all cacophony and disease.

The same principles apply for planets as they do for chakras particularly when circular orbiting and alignments are concerned. The energies of the chakras do not flow in a straight line fashion but in a spiral, cicular way instead. So those of you who have been meditating and visualizing that infamous bright light coming straight from the crown of your head to the bottom of your feet (or vice versa) may be doing it wrong. You should instead see it as a vortex of bright energy (symbolically represented in tradition by the coiled kundalini serpent) starting from your heart chakra and going around the other chakras. So you start with the heart, then go up to the throat, then down to the solar plexus, then up to the third eye, then down to the navel, then up to the crown and down to the root chakra and back again to the heart. You can also amplify the effect of your meditation by sounding the 5 sacred vowels (a, e, ee, o, ou) while doing this. Each chakra vibrates to a particular vowel. This will help align your chakras and as you may already know, with planets as with chakras, there is tremendous energy release when alignments occur (called also "harmony"). You may want to spend some time and investigate this matter farther. It is a fascinating subject.

What Does Meditation Do?

The main purpose of meditation is to correct your perception and consequently heal your body and restore your soveign powers . The reason we are sick, stressed and stupid is because our perceptions are distorted. Science and religion have somehow unwittingly led us to believe that we are victims of fate. In one case it is genes and the other it is a whimsical deity of one kind or another. When you start meditating you renounce to your role as a hapless victime and you become the indisputed leader of your existence. You are taking responsibility for your own destiny.

How does meditation change your perception? Your perceptions, your beliefs can change your biology for good or ill. As a matter of fact your beliefs can alter your genes. What meditation does is allowing you to come to an inner place of the soul that is devoid of the daily negative chatter and thus reduce or remove your stresses and your fears. You cannot have an accurate reading of your environment if you are continuously in a fight-or-flight mode. Stress and fear compromise our immune system and are the culprits behind most of our predicaments. The final purpose of meditation is to help you get rid of stress and fear and replace then with... love... and I am not talking about that fuzzy sensation you feel when you are horny. This Love is absolute positive energy and it is what you are made of. And when that love is restored in its fullness, then you will find health, joy and vitality. I could feed you a whole book on meditation but I will let you digest on this morsel for now.

About Yin And Yang

Ying and yang is not only about duality. The ying and yang principle is actually a trinity: The white section (yang) represents the positive forces of creation (Brahma). The black section (ying) represents the negative forces of creation (Shiva). And then you have the circle that includes them both (Vishnu). These are the univeral principles of creation, preservation and destruction. Creation without preservation is chaos and creation without destruction is pointless. Always remember that positive and negative are not meant in the moral sense of good and bad, but I am referring to opposing electromagnetic polarities. The small black dot within the white section and the small white dot within the black section symbolize the inherent duality in all that is manifest. Anything " good" has the seed of "evil" in it and vice versa. All manifest phenomena have their opposite woven in their fabric as a potential force. You cannot run away from this fundamental principle no matter how upsetting.

What Is The Meaning Of Trinity?

All cosmic forces and emanations emerge from trinities -bundles- and then manifest as individualities. Take for example the rays of the sun. Radiation leaves the firy ball in the sky as an inert bundle of energy (made of the positive principle which is radiation, the negative principle which is gravitation, and a third principle that tighs these two both together like in hair tresses) that does not begin to have effect until it touches the atmosphere (and our bodies) where that trinitarian balance is broken down and the different components or polarities are then manifest in their separate individuality. That is how we sense heat. We could not sense the warmth of the sun if we just got that radiation in its original state, it had to be broken down. This is a universal principle and if you understood this you would pretty much understand everything in the universe... or almost everything.

As a matter of fact, the biblical holy trinity may be speaking of this other holy trinity : Electricity (the father, Brahma, Osiris, the manifest, the light, the positive pole), Magnetism (the son, Vishnu, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Horus, the resolution, the attractor, the reconciliator). Gravity (the holy spirit, Shiva, Isis, the potential energy, the negative pole). When Einstein spoke of the curvature of space, that curvature doen't happen exactly in space but in another parallel, hidden dimension. That curvature is the trough (point of emergence) and our manifest world is the crest of the ondulating wave of consciousness.

The holy trinitiy also refers to the 3 states of the sun: Rising sun, sun at noon and setting sun which symbolise birth/childhood, adulthood and senility/death. The Egyptians for example, noticed that during winter when the sun goes farther south, it reaches a point where it doesn't go any souther and doesn't move for 3 days and them moves back up again to the northern hemispehere. There is tremendous symbolism in this observation: The cold winter represents death (Christ dying on the cross), Christ in the tomb represent the 3 days of stillness, and his resurrection represents the sun moving back up again north.

About Salvation

I laid down my vanity and pride
My true nature I never belied
With those who suffered I cried
I fought for those who were denied
I never succumbed when I was tried
Arrogance and injustice I always defied
And when between truth and lie I was to decide
I smiled, kissed the rope and died

Did you know that there is practically no word for sin in many ancient cultures: neither the Egyptians, nor the Greek, not even the Jews had a word for it. Sin in its modern connotation is relatively a new concept. Salvation, has come to mean cleansing onself from an inherent evil nature by reciting a sacred script, or by submitting to a specific ritual or by performing any number of ceremonial activities. There is nothing wrong with ritual and symbolic enactements of a true spiritual experience. However when ritual and ceremony are devoid of substance, and when symbols and images have completely lost their true and original meaning, either thru deliberate manipulation by the elite, or sheer complacency by the populace, then "salvation" will inevitably become a bone of contention instead of a point of spiritual convergence. I am saved and you are not, I am holy and you are not, I am a Christian and you are a heathen, I am a Muslim and you are a Kafir, I am a Jew and you are gentile, and so on. We get stuck in the symbolism and imagery and we somehow miss to dig deeper. When you live at the surface of things, you can't help but fall in the trap of polarities and the more you want salvation, the more you empower damnation.. Just look at the Evangelical churches, the more they preach against sin the more sin they get, even within their own congregations. That is just quantum physics:when you apply energy to one pole of an equation, the other opposite pole automatically, instantaneously, immediately, gets the same energy, with the same power and intensity. Transcendance, synthesis, resolution, my friend, is what all this spirit business is about. It is not your "doing" that saves you , it is your "being". Read on.

Redemption is not in your action
but in your rest
Goodness is in your renunciation
and not in your zest
Salvation is living in grace
and not in doing your best
True victory is in your being
and not in the beating of your chest

Why Diets Don't Work?

Diets are good for the people and companies that peddle the myriad of weight loss products that litter the marketplace, but are good for nobody else. Diets do no work for the same reasons as mentioned in the above topic ("What is Salvation?"). You seek a desired state -being fit, loosing fat, etc...- while rejecting its opposite. Also, diets deal mainly with the symptome which is weight gain, when in fact, the solution is in dealing with the cause of over-eating and lack of attention to the health and beauty of ones own body. The real cause as we may all know is dissociation, desintegration of the body and soul connection and the consequent unhealthy tendency to self-destruct: Skinny people take it out on others while fat people take it in on themselves. If you need to loose weight you need to get healthy. I do not care what you think but if you are overweight you are not healthy, unless you are a bear and need a coat of blubber to take you thru the harsh winter. I am not judging you, I am actually doing worst, I am trying to kick your ass and expecting to be thanked. You need to get in shape by first understanding the energies of your soul and how they manifest in your body. You will need to learn to become aware of your body and its true needs by engaging in a regular meditation and breathing routine and by building a disciplined nutrition and exercise system.

Your body is all you have, you derelict snubber
Diets are for the disingenuous lubber
If you need to get rid of your blubber
Remove the scum off your soul with a heavy scrubber
And get on your feet running on the treadmill rubber

About Suicide Bombers

You do not need to strap an actual explosive belt around your waist to be a suicide bomber. Did you ever blow on the face of somebody in uncontrollable rage and caused irreperable damage to yourself or others? All of us do, all the time. The poor kids you hear about on TV blowing themselves to bits is just an extreme manifestation of the same principle: Time doesn't put our emotions to sleep, it cooks them instead, like in a pressure cooker. The passing of time cooks your unresolved energies to the point where the pressure becomes unsustainable and you convenienly... explode. Energies that arise thru human interaction need to be resolved thru artful communication and fairness: you speak to others as to gods -your equals- and you give each one his due. The lack of these 2 absolutely vital components is at the root of most of our conflicts, individual and national.

Does God Play Dice With The Universe?

Yes, but he owns the joint. As with a casino, he makes sure the odds are stacked in his favor. The house always wins.

WHAT IS SPIRIT?

A spirit is negative energy. Negative not in the sense of bad or evil but negative in the electric sense, like in negative and positive pole of a circuit. Negative energy is potential energy. Energy that is there but is not manifest yet and is actively seeking manifestation. Like an atom that is missing an electron and is out there looking for other atoms that have some to spare. A good example of negative energy is a vacuum. A vacuum is not empty espace, very far from that. It is a virtual reality and energy which exists in another mysterious parallel dimension until the time when it emerges in the visible realm as a manifest form or emotion. Gravity is also an example of negative energy. In the same way as the vacuum, gravity operates from another mysterious and hidden dimension. The positive manifestation of gravity is another form of energy called levity, which is as real and present but rarely mentioned.

Negative energy pulls in, positive energy pushes out. Negative energy sucks in, positive energy propels out. Negative energy attracts to the center, positive energy projects to the outside. Negative energy is the trough, positive energy is the crest. When you experience fear for example, that is negative energy. the natural reaction to fear is either to flee or to fight. Fleeing and fighting are positive energies. However, if you freeze (like what happens for example when children are abused at home or women are assaulted or raped or when you become a vicitim of a any other traumatic event) that negative energy has failed to manifest (is aborted). It fails to manifest but only for that particular time. Repressed emotional energies that are not resolved immediately will inevitably be pressure cooked by time and will manifest eventually as a gushing spout of unmitigated anger or as irrational and exagerated reactions to seemingly banal inputs.

Negative energy will always seek to manifest one way or another. if not in a healthy and natural way, it will manifest in ways that will compromise the integrity of our souls and the smooth running of our lives. When a negative energy manifests itself in wholesome ways it is called holy spirit or angel. On the other hand, when a negative energy manifests in destructive ways it is called evil spirit or demon.

What Is The Body?

The body is above all, the supreme manifestation of spirit. Contrary to what you have probably been taught, body is more important than mind, in the same manner that what is manifest is more important that what is potential, and action is more important than talk. Everything that really matters lies within your body. Everything outside of it is just a mere projection: your romances and your dramas, your tears and your laughters, your ignorance and your genius, your gods and your demons, your heroes and your enemies, your liberators and your tyrants, your religions and your rebellions, are all representations of internal toxicities and repressions, nothing less, nothing more. These are all manifest surrogate channels that we use to exorcise the torment of our unbearable internal chaos. We seek the order without, in the physical world, when we fail to find the order within our own disheveled selves.

Why pundits with knowledge arcane
Can’t fathom and can’t explain
Why the world is so insane
With its superachievers on the fast lane
Its hustlers after fortune and material gain
The incessant highs that we strive to attain
The gadgets that we made for our happiness in vain
And the environments that we created but can’t sustain
Should I tell you of a very old refrain
of our soul and its millennial stain
That to avoid the real source of our misery and bane
We created artifacts for the management of our pain

In brief, our bodies are in essence tranducers of energy. They generate -or receive-energies that they in turn translate into manifest forms-such as culture, architecture, tools, technolgical gadgets and so on- and emotions- such as care and aggression, euphoria and depression, soulfulness and materialism, health and sickness and so on. Will write more on the subject of the body later on.

What Is The Soul?

Refer to previous topic "What is Spirit?".
What we call soul may be made of very tiny, dumb mechanisms that when given enough time and when they reach a certain mass or number become somehow intelligent and seem to have a design and a purpose. Think of an insect colony –an ant colony for example- which is made of many apparently completely dumb individuals, but as a whole, the colony seems to have an incredible intelligence and organization.

I have a very interesting observation: why is it that groups made of dumb individuals. like the above mentioned ants, display incredible intelligence, while groups made of intelligent individuals, like humans for example, exhibit the wit of a woolly ruminant quadruped? Let me know if you know the answer.

What Is Life Anyways?

Life started most probably as a "ripple" produced by sound frequencies caused by who knows what... a big bang, a galactic orgasm, a cosmic fart... Yes, that is it, it all started with a heavenly orgy followed by a bean and cauliflower diner. Seriously, I believe life -biological life as well as the energy and the feeling- can be construed as the resistance (as in electric resistance) which manifest itself as a “glow” created by the interplay of two universal opposite extreme forces such as for example the infinite and the finite, life and death, haves and have-nots, love and hate, fear and hope, particle and wave, good and evil, poor and wealthy, restraint and excess, free and slave, revelation and mystery, spiritual and material, art and commerce, introvert and extrovert, hostile and peacemaker, and so on and so forth. The more polarized the forces, the more 'life' you get. Look for example as societies such as Brazil and the United States . They surely have tremendous social problems -read extreme polarization of social, cultural and economic forces - but everyone agrees they are exciting places to live in (well to a certain point, some areas in Brazil and the US have really gone out of control). Now look at lets say Switzerland or Sweden . Beautiful, very clean, very wealthy, very egalitarian countries, but lets face it and with all due respect, they don't capture anybodies' imagination.

About Creation And Creativity

Did you notice that nature has a much easier time creating something that uncreating it. Creativity is well overstated. Lets take the example of a particular bird whose diet is mainly worms. Then something happens in the bird's environment and worms disappear and only nuts are available. Nature will have absolutely not problem providing the bird with a harder beak to break the shells. The principle at work is possibly as follows: The need for a harder beak emerges (the correct word may be immerges) as negative energy or mold (like when we make a plastic object) on the membrane that separates this dimension from the other one- that is god's drawing board and foundry. This cosmic mold will inevitably be filled with positive matter and "cast" in the manifest realm as a beak or what have you. This process is not reversible. Nature doesn't know how to go back from there once for example the harder beaks are no more needed when nuts disappear and worms reappear. This particular characteristic of nature has tremendous and ominous repercutions on us humans. Just look at our own human habits, our "glorious" institutions and our societies in general. A powerful consciousness is needed to create matter but a much, much more powerful one, one of another kind and nature, is needed to uncreate it. I will let you chew on this one for a while.

Why Do We Have Extremes?

Why do we have extreme poverty? Why do we have out-of-control crime and drug addiction? Why is there so much pointlessness and consequently so much depression? Why do we have cancers in our bodies and psychosis in our minds.? Why are humans so egotistic and self-involved? Why is there so much unkindness and cruelty? My answer: Something in the universe is desperately clamoring for attention and we are not paying it that much needed attention. And you thought you were the only one with needs. As long as we don't pay attention to the " needs" of the universe we will continue to suffer and that is a shame, because our redemption is right there in front of our noses. We have been blaming the gods for not listening to our prayers. But have we been listening to theirs?

Your calamities and diseases,
your lacks and your messes
Are God's prayers to you,
tis the way he expresses
Do you want to live happy
and minimize your stresses?
Open your ears and wait
for the Lord's largesses

One thing needs to be said though. Man is born wounded and goes thru live dragging festering soars of the psyche that go back for generations, even from the origins of minkind. Refer to "About Emotional Pain". This "woundedness" has disassociated us from the multidimentional world in which we are implanted and reduced us to a mere shell of what we really are. We have replaced the rich reality and essence of nature for a world of outward appearances, symbols, images, status, money, numbers that we conveniently cook to generate the maximum amount of material profit with absolutely no regards nor sensitivity for the environment, where, in final instance, we live and have our being. These self-destructive forces stem from drives that dwell deep within the unconscious. This unhealthy detachment is our defense mechanism against the pain of a wound perpetrated by a poisoned arrow shot by an archer of our old and forgotten past. We may build skyscrapers that reach to the sky and rockets that fly to the moon but our souls remain earth bound and shackled with chains of our own making. The human true self is not interested in profit, nor material wealth, nor enslavement of others, nor murder, nor war, nor racism nor any other "evil" thing. All these calamities are a result of our long exile and separation from the original source of our being. Healing we need and healing we will get when we wake up.

What Is Intuition?

Intuition happens when we capture information with our whole bodies instead than with our five senses only. In other words, the body (and not only our eyes and ears) becomes an antenna and the unconscious (or subconscious) is actively involved. Our environment and the people around us broadcast an infinite number of signals and cues of which we capture only a small fraction. This fractional perception is usually exacerbated by a limited visual and auditory focal interest and a poor personal, family and social conditionning and training. Normally, we only process and grasp information that fits with our pre-existing frame of reference and we discard everything that isn't and language (including that of the body) has a lot to do with it. Intuition is getting as much truth of your environment -and the people you deal with- as possible by transcending our ingrained mental filters and taking in as much of the raw data we are exposed to as possible. We are intuitive when we succeed in translating this data into actionable outputs. In this particular sense intuition becomes the sublimation of experience. As a matter of fact, we call someone intuitive when he or she responds to a situation or challenge with an extraodinary accuracy without the involvement of a conscious thought process. There is no effective intuition without training and experience. But it does not necessarily have to be your own experience. it can be inherited from your family, ethnic group or your species. You cannot be an extraodinary sportsman, musician, businessman or scientist without intuition. Any learned skill involves the participation of many body parts and the brain. When we practice and train what we really do is tell the the brain what our intent is and have it capture enough information about the processes in a particular activity to allow it to work out the necessary mathematics and geometry within the matrix of time and space and eventually improve on the skill and have all steps happen automatically without the involvement of thought. The unconscious takes over and that is what we have come to know as noetic insight. Any good musician will tell you that when they play their best music they do not think about the position of their fingers and what note comes next. If they had to think about every discrete movement involved in the making of music they would go mad and good music would be impossible. The magic that the brain does with what it learns is what gives us extraodinary feats of human genius (there would be no Einstein's theory of relativity without intuition) . Intuition is truly our mathematical minds creating wholeness from separate, disconnected ideas, events and movements.

What Is A Quantum Leap?

A quantum leap is what the brain does, for example, when it takes those above mentioned disconnected events and brings forth a reality that is greater that the sum of its parts. A quantum leap happens when a particular observed state is not expected and doesn't exactly follow a regular, linear progression from a previous state. There is a missing link so to speak. A simple ANSWER to the question of what is a quantum leap is... quantum leap is NATURAL MAGIC. I do not know about all of you rational, square cartesian thinkers but as for me, magic is alive and well in the world as it has always been.

Now the real question is: what causes quantum leaps to happen in the first place. What is the mysterious, original, primordial force behind our reality's quantic bouncing. My very personal take is that that force is intention, human or otherwise, is the drive behind the magic of the universe. This intention is not any kind of intention but it is one that has a special connection to the soul. It is not intention driven by fear or lust or greed but it is intention that stems from the immutable center of ones own being, the intuitive self. How does praying for example work? the answer is: coherent, focused, wholesome intent is what nudges the rock down the hill of every extraodinary and creative process in the universe and creativity, novelty, newness is what quantum leaps are all about.

Now another question, how does intention produce quantum leaps? By placing an attractor in the future, a magnetic drawing force so to speak. Our current history is not just the product of momentum generated by the past (the alpha point), but we are also drawn by and from the future (the omega point). When we plan or visualize or pray, we are just placing attractor markers in the future and then letting them do the magic.

One other point that may help us understand quantum leaps better. It has to do with the circular nature of time. In reality time is not exactly circular. It is seen as a circle only when viewed from a frontal perspective. The oroborus, the mythical egyptian serpent, represented by a circular snake eating its tail, is not exactly eating its tail. I saw this in a dream once: I saw the serpent but as curious as I am, I wanted to see it from above looking down, and what I saw was that when the tail reached the mouth of the snake it moved up a notch and continued coiling in an infinite spiral loop, into smaller and smaller circles til the end of the tail was lost in the dark expanse of the cosmos, like a votex. But how does this explain quantum leaps? The imagery of the serpent is important in many cultures and mythologies. It usually represents renewal and transformation (the serpent sheds its skin and generates new one), knowledge (the serpent senses fear and the purpose of all knowledge is awareness and conquest of fear), health (the serpent crawl on his belly and makes direct contact with the earth and taking complete advantage of her energies) and time (the serpent moves along by ondulating and waving his body and time also moves in oscilating waves of consciousness). The serpent has never been a symbol of evil except in the Western tradition. Thisis what I think is the significance of the oroborus: The head of the serpent is symbolic of primordial beginnings, the initiation of every living process under the sun. The body of the snake stands for that living process making its way in time and space. When the body of the serpent reaches its mouth that means that the process has matured and has made full circle, in other words it is time for graduation. This promotion will always happen at higher level and never on the same groove. That is the reason I said that the serpent did not exactly eat its tail. If it ate its tail, that would have meant that we are contemplating a vicious circle and the universe is not in the business of vicious circles, humans are. That move from one lower layer of consciousness to a higher one is what we usually call "quantum leaps". Have you ever wondered why some human groups seem to have no difficulty progressing from one cultural state to a higher, improved one, while other groups appear like stuck in the muck of a viscuous dispensation. The answer, the first group has many individuals with open minds and that operate on the principle of an ever expanding vortex of energy and knowledge, while the second group has an insufficient number of those open minded creatures and thus became "the snake that truly ate its tail".

What Is The Past?

The past is everything that is within you.

What Is The Future?

The future is everything that will come out of you.

About The End Of Time

It all started with Eve and Adoom
They strolled around Eden in birth costoom
When they ate off the tree, God went kaboom
Jehovah was his name, Elohim his nom de ploom
He called Moses who answered why me a baboom
The Lord said if not you then whoom
To Bethlehem came Joseph looking for a room
Jesus spoke of new ways, of the hills he made a classroom
The Romans, with rage he made fuoom
They killed him, but he arose to his father's throne assoom
The middle ages were all darkness and gloom
Witches casting spells and flying on a broom
The goddess was back and the worship of the moom
Later Luther challenged the pope's boardroom
The truth about god's grace he did exhoom
When Descartes said" I think therefore I oom"
He caused science to florish and art to bloom
Einstein came and Newton shook in the toom
It is wave, it is particle, it is both I presoom
Then piping mobs to impending doom
In the horizon a bright mushroom
Threshing souls and hell fire it's chaff consoom
Man wished he was back in his mother's woom
But in the clouds came the bridegroom
And for a little while, hope will loom
After that, our calamities resoom

Humans are an integral component of "time". As a matter of fact, time may actually be a construct of the brain (read below "About Autism"). If time ends we end and vice versa. In the same manner as the above mentioned Oroborous, time flows in spiral waves of events and phenomena. When one wave of conscousness makes full circle it doesn't continue on the same groove (as in a vicious circle) but it is nudged up to a higher level at the point we call "quantum leap" and continues its vortex-like procession to the infinite . At this particular junction, time doesn't end, but its quality does change, as well as the quality (and some time the nature and appearance) of the intelligent life forms that make it.

Many believe that the next "junction point" will take place around december 21 or 23 of 2012. The date was arrived at by studying astrophysics, geology, ancient prophecies, the Chinese I Ching, and the Mayan calendar. They all seem to strangely converge at that particular point in history. The Mayan calendar for example ends exactly in 2012. It is believed that In this date the wave of time will go flat like a sound that fizzled, and that the electromagnetic field of the earth will diminish to such a degree that the planet will reverse polarities (north pole will become south pole and vice versa) and the frequency of change in culture, society and technology will be dizzying and impossible for the current human to assimilate.

Nobody is exactly sure what the eventual reversal of polarities consequences will be, but my concern more than any thing else, is that this will not detere some shoddy individuals from wanting to make a buck by stirring the pot of human fears and wipping the froth of our insecurities and create a panic where panic is the last thing you need particularly if something ominous were actually to happen. End of time or no end of time, we are surely due for a good "house cleaning". If humans don''t change the "end of time" will come with the poles' reversal or without them.

Big bangs will be swallowed by black holes
South will be north and north will be south
Men will become women and women will become men
Good will be bad and bad will be good
Right will be wrong and wrong will be right
The world will be full of a liars and moles
Those who once were angels will become trolls
Oceans will spill and become knolls
Fish will die and three legs will grow to tadpoles
Dry land will shake and be filled with sinkholes
God have mercy on our souls
For this will be our state at the reversal of the poles

What Is Consciousness?

Time is the cause of your confusion and sorrow
Time is why you die and why you fear tomorrow

The brightest phycisits and philosophers in the world are still pondering this question but no one seems to get an intellectual handle on the subject. My take is that there may not be a singular, individual consciousness. What we call 'my" consciousness may just be a mirroring, a reflection (most often distorted) or a natural reflex or reaction to what I would call the consciousness of the age, and this age may have a lot to do with the stars or signs of the zodiac (refer to "About Astrology"). When Jesus speaks for example of this age, he is probably referring to the age of Piscis (about 2000 years of human history) , the two fishes, and when he mentions the age to come he is probably referring to the age of Aquarius: "And he said unto them, behold, when ye are entered into the city, there shall a man meet you, bearing a pitcher of water; follow him in the house where he entereth in" Luke 12:10. Sections of the zodiac are sometime called "houses" and Aquarius is usually represented by a man bearing a jar of water. I may be stretching this out a little bit but it may be significant. Those of you who have been taught since childhood that astrology and the zodiac are evil, and I was one of them, I will beg you, do not close up on me now and continue reading. I am asking for nothing else but humility and compassion for a possibly very misguided soul, mine, that seeks nothing else but find the naked truth.

Einstein once said that we do not grow the food we eat, nor weave the clothes we wear, nor build the houses we live in, nor invent the culture where we happen to be evolving. Everything we have or do has been handed to us, one way or the other. The same for consciousness. This consciousness is determined by the time or era where it arises. In other words, consciousness is the "quality" component of time. We normally tend to think of time as the continuous flow of discrete moments in space but we only start to understand what consciousness is when we stop thinking of it as a clock and we instead think of it as an apple, a flower or a human being. Something that has a shape, a flavor, a color, a taste... a personality. Your consciousness is the personality of the time you happen to live in - or variations thereof. Now, does this mean that we as individuals are passive and our fate is completely determined by this "mother consciousness". We should never forget that reality is paradoxical, we are influenced totally and we totally influence. It goes both ways, with the same intensity and power.

By the way, did you ever hear about Einstein's famous equation E=MC2. Most people think that it only attempts to explain the realtionship between energy and matter which it does very well, but I have another theory. You see the "C" in the formula, everybody thinks it stands for the speed of light (c for constant speed of light equaling approximately 186,282.397 miles/second) but in reality it may very well stand for "Consciousness". Energy is a function of Mass and Consciousness. Why is C squared? A square is a rectangle that has right angles and parallel sides. It just means that you need very little "mass" to get a lot of "energy" if you have a "square", right kind of "consciousness", one that walks parallel, that resonates with the specific quality of present t ime and space. E=MC2 is consciousness made into a mathematical equation and could also be written like this: C -> E--> M--> C --> E--> M--> C-->E ... From consciousness energy emerges and from energy matter emerges and from matter consciousness emerges and from consciousness energy emerges and so at infinitum. It is the creative (and destructive) cycle unfolding in manifest reality as a chain process. It is the black holes and big bangs dancing on the infinite rink of the cosmos. This is the tango of our unfathomable existence. Do you need to explain why people's mental and belief makeup influences their lives, health and wealth in astounding way? the answer is, E=MC2.

One more observation. Consciousness may equal the speed of light at the subatomic level (where chemical reactions happen in ether or a vacuum) but I do not think it is so at all levels of creation (like when chemical reactions happen in air and water, in our bodies for example). In this case energy may be a function of the speed of sound instead of the speed of light. I am just giving you something to think about.

Thus the concept of consciousness is intimately linked to the concept of time. Another word for it is paradigm. if you study history, every so many years one consciousness fades and another different one (usually of a higher level but not necessarily) takes its place. Usually, when you hear people talking about consciousness a lot like what we are witnessing these days, that means that we are sensing the birth pangs of a new consciousness about to come down the cosmic birth canal. I will expand later on this subject but if you want to know more about consciousness you need to study civilizations that didn't have a quantitative, linear calendar such as the Gregorian Western one but study instead the Vedic and Mayan calendars which are qualitative and circular. It is truly a fascinating subject.

Before I leave this subject of Consciousness I need to mention a fact that in my opinion is important and that we all need to be aware of. May be it will give hope to some of you. The consequence of changing or evolving consciousnesses is that there is not a clear cut moment when one disapears and the other arises. There is always an overlap. Remember that those individuals who resonate with that particular "quality of time" will be empowered (with intellectual clout and money) and those who are not (those reflecting a new paradigm of thingking about existence) will be desinfranchized (credentials will be refused and money will be withheld). That means that if this current consciousness calls for competitiveness and profit seeking and you do not adhere to that particular frame of mind, you will suffer. You will suffer in your career, you will suffer in your personal life and you will suffer financially. However, you are a precursor of a novel worldview and you are absolutely necessary. If it is of any consolation, you are a martyr on the holy path to a better human race (the whole human race). In most cases, these special creatures are "chosen" then swept in this powerful torrent of universl flux and practically have no choice.

What Is Consciousness Made of?

Raining shapes and numbers from the sky
I contemplated Archimedes dancing with Pi
Then jumping from a tub and eureka cry
He found order in what was awry
And brought infinity nigh
Til a Roman dagger ended his ply
When to a soldier’s whim he didn’t comply
That is how knowledge of ages die

Letters and numbers. Consciousness, this quality of time, is made of language and mathematics. Letters and numbers are not inert human inventions, they are living creatures in their own right. They are wave and they are particle, all at the same time. They have shape, sound, texture and color and every letter and number has its own particular personality and energy. They are our bridge to the domain of the unfathomable. More on the magic of language and mathematics later.

What Is The Mind?

Angels or monsters of years forlorn
I saw the long procession
Of those who praise and those who scorn

Futile attempts at permanence
In our feverish busyings
We take a jab at relevance

We were born in solitude
And in solitude we will die
No matter our position or latitude

And do trees make a sound when they fall
If no one is there to hear
Is holiness emptiness or it is all a bunch of bull

Then why blame those who revel in fairy tales and fantasy
When we spend our days
Exploring the utter limits of pleasure and ecstasy

In the midst of many conundrums and daily grind
We try to make sense of it all and comprehend
The inscrutable mystery of the mind

What Is The Unconscious?

If the conscious is a function of time, the unconscious is our experience of timelessness. Within the unconscious or subconscious, the energies of the body roam free of the limitation and boundaries imposed by the three dimentional reality. There are many layers to the unconscious. One that deals particularly with our personal experience, another with our family and group experience, another with our collective human experience, another layer deals with the earth or gaia, and still another that reaches into the cosmic and galactic realm. The deeper you dive into the unconscious, the more universal and timeless your experience (this is the Atlantis the ancients spoke about and the reason why civilizations such as the Maya and the Egyptian seem to draw their knowledge from the same source, this is the source my friend, the Akachic record database of the ages). The unconscious is our collective main server and the quintescential time machine. You can invoke the past and see the future as well as touch the present in ways that are unique and novel. This is the key to most states we call "altered states of consciousness".

About altered States Of Consciousness

"God sleeps in the rock
Dreams in the plant
Stirs in the animal
And awakens in man"
-- Benelarabi

Also called holotropic (Greek for moving towards the whole) states of consciousness. It is impossible to understand most human religious and spiritual experiences (and for that matter all events that involve extraodinary feats of mental or physical human accomplishments) without grasping the importance of altered states of consciousness. When God let us loose on the earth he made sure he left a little tiny door for whenever we wanted to come back to the parental home for a visit. And because he didn't want us to bother knocking and to come right in, he left the "keys" right there in our brains.

Rich or poor, heavy or slender
All was needed is candor
But you wished the morsel was kinder
Because it tore your guts asunder
Tis the price for a glimpse at a world yonder
It is the land of dream and wonder
Few will arrive and fewer will stand its splendor
Self and ego you will be called to surrender
And all your former certainties to tender
Then your mind will be given wings to wander
To behold landscapes of beauty beyond ponder
Run with the jaguar and fly with the condor
Meet luminous beings in their merry bender
Your soiled soul in their joyful light will launder
Tis the only true balm, of your many wounds a mender

The human pineal gland in the brain produces a substance called dimethyltryptamine (I call it god's key to the gate of heaven), also known as DMT. When DMT is activated in our bodies (this substance is usually inhibited by our digestive enzymes and the reason why extended periods of fasting can have the same effect as taking a psychedelic substance) it produces states of an ethereal, other-worldly quality where the surrounding environment with its objects and beings are enhanced in their texture, color and feel. Our heads hit the sideral vault and our feet touch the ground of all being. Our minds compress to the size of the atom and then expand to encompass the whole of the cosmos. Our skin can't contain our spirit anymore so we roam like disembodied entities, fusing with everything around us. We see reality for what it really is, maleable and fluid. The animal parts deeply encoded in the crystals of our DNA are awakened from their long evolutionary lethargy: the serpent, the jaguar, the scorpion and many crawling ants are all welcomed guests in this wild procession. In the same manner luminous beings join the party and delight us with lively and wise conversation. Truly our senses are amplified in supernatural ways and the individual is opened up to a realm of feeling and knowing that is not ordinary. The contents of our soul are poured like consecrated wine into the chalice of an unrehearsed eucharist. The ego is shed like an old rug and an overwhelming sense of love, unity and oneness with all existence floods our being.

The shamans of practically every indigenous culture in the world have developed techniques to reach these states, that is, to activate DMT in our bodies by using music, dance and natural sacred plants like Ayahuasca, Peyote, Ibogain, Soma, Mescaline and mashrooms of all kinds. For the shaman these trancic states are necessary to bring true knowledge, true vision and true healing from the "source" of it all which is the heart of the gods. This makes sense because if you really want to heal someone who would you ask? A doctor whose science is only a few hundred years old and whose medicine has only been around for a few dozen years or would you ask the one that made that being and whose medicine is eons old, thus tried and proven. I personally believe that modern medecine is usefull but only in cases of traumatic physical situations like when you brake a leg or your need your teeth fixed but when it comes to chronic deseases of the body and the mind we need a shaman. Any classical doctor will tell you that he has absolutely no clue what is the cause of your desease but he will wax excedently confident when it comes time for the prescription.

To summarize, altered states of consciousness are not about stupor like what happens with opium, nor recreation like with Ecstasy. As a matter of fact and any one who has gone thru a shamanic initiation knows deeply in his gut (literally) that it is no picnic and is a true ordeal where your body and mind are pushed to their limit and where death and resurrection go from being just an intellectual, symbolic concept in the brain to a veritable experience of dying to an old self and coming back into the world as a new transformed being.

Also, Altered statess of consciousness are not about numbing our minds and escaping from our dreary lives like with cocaine and morphine, or alcohol which add absolutely nothing of value to our human growth but come into our lives like deceptive lovers, promissing much sugar but delivering only crap. The shamanic experience is about tapping into a new kind of "school" of knowing, a new kind of awareness of existence that is healing, liberating and empowering. No wonder the pharmaceutical companies, the politicians and the religious bureaucrats don't want to hear about it. You know, we are being sold stories about wonderful people who went thru these extraodinary experiences in the past and at the same time, every imaginable effort is made to keep those accounts at the level of mere anecdotal narrative on paper. They encourage you to "believe" but God forbid if you should ever "experience". Yes, what about taking those experiences of our prophets and saints and actually making them our own personal experiences? The life of a saint is not an easy one with its renounciation and suffering, but it is the only one that really matters. If that happened, you would become dangerous: priests won't be needed anymore because you will be "buying direct" and our current economy will have to change because your favorite "shopping" is done in realms where money has no currency.

I will accept the magi's treasure in the crib
As well as the crown of thorns and the spear in the rib
I will take the scorn of neighbor and sib
But rather give me death than a life that is glib

What About Ecstatic Spiritual Experiences?

Speaking in tongues, or what is known as Glossollalia is a very intriguing phenomenon, experienced particularly by adepts of what we call Ecstatic Religions such as Christian Pentecostalism and Muslim Sufism among many others ( I personally know many people who do not adhere to any particular religous group but who do regularly use 'speaking in tongues' as a tool for deep tuning and meditation). It is a much beguiled and misunderstood spiritual experience, particularly by those who adhere to more strict, dogmatic and inflexible religious groups. To make the story short, speaking in tongues, in its true and genuine manifestations (this implies that there are many other manifestations that are purely a product of group, cultural and doctrinal conditioning), happens when a person is able, thru prayer and meditation, to dive thru the deeper layers of human consciousness (actually it is unconsciousness) and reaches that level where all is unity, the hub where all the spikes converge, the point where stillness and movement meet, where all is essence, where thought is gotten rid of, when life is gotten straight from the source, and where language ceases to be that structured, intelligible tool for communication and becomes a metaphor, a manifestation of the real nature of life, which is oneness. That seemingly uncomprehensible jibberish is in reality the primordial language of the unified field of the cosmos. This is the kind of thing that you need to experience with your whole body rather than just understand with your brain.

This experience of oneness happens when a person gets rid of his or her frames of reference and perceives reality as is, without cultural, intellectual, or even personal conditionings. You basically get reality as God made it, pure, raw and unprocessed. This purity is incredibly overwhelming to the body and why all those who reach this state become inebriated, dance uncontrollably and start speaking in strange languages.

The Slain in the Spirit Experience: In Hindu tradition it is called Shaktipat and was made popular by guru Muktananda in the 70's and 80's. Here in the west we know it as "slain in the spirit" or "fall by the power" of God. It was made very popular in the United States by Evangelists such as Kathryn Kuhlman and Benny Hinn. Slain in the spirit is what some Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians call when an evangelist or pastor lays hands on someone knocking them down to the ground without apparent forcefulness. I have to begin saying that there are genuine instances where people become overwhelmed by a particularly deep spiritual experience and they do fall, and shake and exhibit all kinds of "strange:" behaviours like shrieking, convulsing, crawling on the ground, trance dancing, howling, etc... However, I do have my reserves when it comes to what I see normally in Christian television, particularly here in the United States. I have seen people that were truly slain in the spirit, but what I see on TV is not it, by far. I personally would never try to dismiss the “Knocked by the Power of God” experience as just a bizarre phenomena or as a mere result of mass hysteria (which in some instance it is) but the fact is that normal people are impressionable and can easily be induced thru suggestion by a skillful mass manipulator into all kinds of weird behavior and believe me that is not really that hard- remember that people tend to want to conform and if they see someone falling by the “power of the spirit” and if that is considered a good thing by the majority, they will want to fall and will fall when laid hands on. Otherwise “there is something wrong with them” –by the way, the same thing applies to psychics: most people are just too nice and would hate make the guy look bad so they just let themselves be lead on. These does not mean that these experience -slain in the spirit- is inconsequential, to the contrary, people seem to undergo psychic and physical changes, sometimes healings, complete personal transformations or even epiphanies. Never dismiss something as inconsequential just because it does not square with your personal assessment of the facts. You should always include the infinite power of human intention in your equation. And this is the reason I never put down anyone who has such a believe but I just warn them to be attentive and not let themselves be taken advantage of by so called miracle workers who are just after their money and could care less about their personal or spiritual well being.

About Channeling

Channeling is what a medium does. He lends his body to a spiritual entity which supposedely, intends to communicate with the living. The medium becomes the mouthpiece for the disembodied being, or at least that is the claim. I am personally very sceptical about all this channeling business, or at least in the way it is portayed: as an actual, clear, unambiguous communication from a desimbodied, usually much wiser being. Even our illustrious Carl Jung, one of the great fathers of psychanalysis, said he had a "fling" with a certain Philemon, a being not from this world.

Do I believe that there are sources of knowledge that are beyond just those available to our six senses? Yes. Do I believe that those sources have names like Ramtha, or Philemon or what have you? Maybe. The question we should be asking is what is the true nature of human imagination. And by imagination I do not mean the stuff of fabricated tales but the reality that lies behind the veil of what is manifest, the unconscious dream, the other-worldly hallucination. Who are those beings that inhabit our hallucinations? Where do they come from and what do they want.

Another important point is that the barrier that separates the world of the spirits from the world of the imagination is not that clear cut. You can go from one to the other and you won't notice the difference. You see the conundrum we find ourselves in: Our only gate to the world of the spirit is our imagination (whatever that is ) but how can you, in all candor, trust human imagination to relate what it sees in complete truthfulness. Everyone knows how easy it is to go from actual, hard reality to making something up even in our waking life, can you imagine what happens when we start dealing with the very ethereal and fluid material that comes from the sky. This doesn't in any way invalidate the reality of the so called spiritual experience, not at all, I myself am a "frequent flier". However, when I hear someone stating inequivocably that he or she is channeling a wise entity from the past I can tell you right there, and I have rarely been wrong, that individual is either writing a book, planning to write one, or is making a living conducting seminars.

You know, you cannot build a constituency (and a living) based on uncertainties but unfortunately, the world of the spirit is nothing but uncertainties. I have absolutely no problem with people trying to make a living but why deceive oneself and others. The world of the spirit is fuzzy. If someone comes to you telling you that he knows anything for sure, he is either a fool or just trying to make a buck. What I want you to remember from this is that reality (whatever that is) is wierder that you can ever think and channeling may in fact be happening to all of us and in ways that we may not even suspect, but for goodness sake, always keep a healthy dose of scepticism when you deal with these matters.

About Cancer

I am not a doctor but I have a hunch: tumors must be produced in the body all the time but our same body has a built-in capacity of getting rid of them before they reach a size that can threaten the system. In other words our bodies must be producing a toxin that kills tumors before they become malignant.

Now, when this defense mechanism is compromised either because of bad nutrition habits or excessive exposure to petroleum chemicals (more than 10000 of them manufactured since 1934 and found practically in every product we use or consume), that naturally produced defense substance is rendered ineffective and cancer takes over. My personal opinion and I reinterate, very personal opinion is that the antidote against cancer is not chemotheraphy or medication (which by the way are derived from the same petrochemical compounds that caused the desease in the first place). Modern medecine has absolutely no interest in curing cancer.

Did you know that there are more people making their living out of cancer that there are people suffering from it. Would you rely on a system that has a vested interest in keeping you sick (and I am not talking about individual doctors, bless their soul, who I am sure are doing their best to fix us) . So if you are suffering from cancer or want to prevent getting to that point, take responsibility for your own health, be your own healer, be you own shaman, change your diet, exercise regularly, avoid toxic products, eat wholesome organic raw foods, drink a lot of good water (fortified water), nurture your natural intuition with breathing and meditation routines, listen to harmonic music and sounds, explore trance dancing to reconnect with your body. In one word, reclaim your inner powers and your sovereign right to a healthy existence. Amen.

About Water

Water is the most vital and at the same time the second most mysterious substance in the universe. the first most mysterious element is light (and I also supect that these two, light and water are very intimately related, both being different manifestations of the same primordial principle or vibration with the sun as the main source).

If we understood the nature and powers of water we could solve most of our human ills. It is not a coincidence that the earth is made of 2/3 water and 1/3 dry land. The same proportion is found in the human body, 1/3 tissue and 2/3 water. The universe must also have the same composition, 1/3 solid matter and 2/3 ether (ether by the way may be another state of water: water is gas, liquid, solid and ether -maybe also light) 1/3 and 2/3 are what I call sacred proportions and are very significant to the geometry and composition of everything that is manifest (by the way all three pyramid complexes, the Egyptian, the Meso-American and the Far Eastern, are all located at the 30 degrees latitude north, which means 1/3 of the way up from the equator to the north pole... and the Biblical Jesus started his ministry when he was 30 years old. Coincidence?).

Water is not only a necessary element for the creation and maintenance of life but it is also a form of energy, a positive form of energy (while oil and petroleum is a negative form of energy-water is transparent/white which symbolizes positivity while oil is black symbolizing negativity and the reason for the social and geopolitical mess we have on our hands). My take is that in our next stage of consciousness the nature of water will be understood, particularly how it relates do DNA: I somehow believe that DNA -particuarly the water crystals in the DNA molecule- and not just our brain is the seat of universal knowledge, memory, consciousness, in one word THE MIND. I also forsee water being used as an energy souce, to power both our bodies and our cars. Well my revelation ends here. Will write more later about the love story of hydrogen and oxygen, its significance and influence in our world.

What Is The Key To A Life Of Power?

1- Sound, Structure and Source
Power flows best thru harmonious sounds, beautiful forms and wholesome intentions. You will live a life of power and meaningfulness if you pay close attention to sound (language, music etc...) , structure (dwellings, decor, landscapes, orientation, geometry and objects of all kinds) and intent (positive, constructive intentions). These three are off-shoots of the Truth with capital T and a truthful person is the most powerful kind of individual there is. The Truth, as I understand it, is not only about the moral quality of veracity and sincerity but something much more involved: if something is true, by definition, you can track it back to its source. Not so for a lie which stands alone and has no source. Lies have no legs because they have no source and source is where you get your powers. Truth is powerful because it is connected to the source. Source is another word for God.

2- Gaia, Galaxies and Gents
We get our energy from the earth below (the electromagnetic field of gaia), the cosmos above (the electromagnetic energies of the stars) and the people around us (transpersonal psychic exchange and reinforcement). If you learn to tap fully into these three sources and make them your own internal energies, there is no limit to what you can accomplish. More heavy duty stuff coming on later. We'll squeeze the Chi for all its worth. Hope you are ready.

How Do You Become The Best In Your Field?

When you reach that point when you cease being the DOER and become the DONE. If you are an musician, from a player you become the played. If you are a dancer you become the danced. If you are a painter you become the brush, if you are an actor you become the character and so on. You need to let the energies and personality of that particular art or skill possess you and dethrone your human self and take over. For that you need dedication, focus, practice, the will to push yourself to the limit of your physical and mental capacity and most of all, you need a curious, trained and centered soul ..

You want to be extraodinary,
to rise and beat the odds
So let the eternal breath breathe you
and your being move by the hand of the gods

About Astrology

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades,
or loose the bands of Orion?
Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth (the zodiac) in his season?
--God speaking to Job (Job Ch 38 Verse 31, 32)

Let me first say that astrology started as astronomy, or the science that sought to understand the order of the cosmos. Astronomy is the body while astrology is the soul. Astronomy is the prose and astrology is the poetry. Astronomy is the facts, astrology is the magic. While astronomy speaks to the intellect, astrology speaks directly to the heart.

Now the question is , how does astrology affect us? The human body is a fractal of the cosmos. By fractal I mean same pattern different scale. What is above, same below, and atoms that make our bodies were manufactured in some stellar furnace in some faraway galaxy. We are made of star stuff. As you can see, our connection to the stars is quite obvious.

The number of sections in the zodiac and the symbols that compose it is significant and meaningful. the only question is in what way. I personally believe that most accounts in human mythology and religion refer to stellar phenomena and astrology is key in understanding the true nature and history of mankind. As a matter of fact there is a theory floating out there stating that the Bible and other religous accounts are nothing else than a retelling of a very old story that goes back tens of thousands of years and whose main protagonists are not the Jews, but the stars and the constellations.

When you hear for example about golden calfs (Taurus), fisher of men (Piscis), lamb of God (Aries), duality of man -animal and man- (Sagittarius), duality of man - man and god-(Gimini), the lion of Judah (Leo), Baptism in water (Aquarius), resurrection and transformation (Scorpio), the virgin birth (Virgo), judgment day (Libra), birth and manifestation (Cancer), death and renunciation (Capricorn), they are referring to the the zodiac. Apparently ancient peoples had a much different eye for the stars than we have today. It seems like the closer man is to his origins the more he knows about the heavens as if reminiscing of a homeland he just left. When I read about Mayan and Egyptian astrology I can't help sense a kind of nostalgia, a yearning to return to the source of once own being, like when we happen to be in a foreign land and we long for the music and melodies of the natal country. Astrology is surely an art that is all but lost and it is a shame.

The horoscope you read about in the newspapers is not it. I know that some of you live by it but the fact that it is effective in your live doesn't mean that it is "real". Have you ever heard of the principle of self-fulfilling prophecy? The best think the hoscope teaches, and that is no small feat, is that when a human is given a vision of a future, genuine or contrived, he becomes endowed with a clarity of vision and a new energy that is life affirming and transforming. I have studied astrology for many years but i still don't seem to get a clear grasp on its underpinnings.

I have the suspicion that the significance of astrology may lie on the fact that the date of our birth and the position of the planets (themselves symbols of particular energies and dimensions) at that particular date have some strange relationship. I know for a fact that the period just before our birth -or prenatal period - and the period just after our birth -postnatal period is key in the formation of our personalities and temparament, particularly if trauma (we are going from aquatic creatures to terrestereal ones for goodness sake, i can't think of a worst trauma) or complications were involved during gestation or delivery.

There is also the idea that each planet and constellation of our solar system has particular attributes or temparaments, a spirit or personality so to speak. If the position of particular planets or constellations happens to align with the time of our birth, then we have an affinity (the principle of quantic resonance) and our lives will be affected by that particular celestial pattern because different patterns mean different energies or frequencies. Not only that, but each time that alignment reoccurs in our livetimes, a memory of that primordial trauma of our prenatal or postnatal period gets reenacted unless dealt with and resolved thru soulwork, therapy or such. This is just a wild idea and I have absolutely no proof or research backing this theory.

About Sacred Geometry

Of all the sciences I know, I consider sacred geometry the queen of them all. It is the most fascinating, the most powerful, the most illuminating body of knowledge ever revealed to man. Did you know what freemasons and secret societies, throughout history, were so fiercly guarding from the uninitiated and the religious inquisitors? And why they wielded so much power, both spiritual, political and financial in human affairs? It was sacred geometry, the power of numbers and the importance of primordial geometric forms in the creation and architecture of the universe. I don't feel I should go any farther here as most of you may be completely unprepared for what was coming. I will let you do your own research.

About The Mystery Of The Pyramids

Let me first mention that speciifc architectural forms and structures are vehicles of particular kinds of consciousness. Forms that exhibit a structural order that follows unique universal rules of geometry and proportion, become tranducers of cosmic energy. The pyramids are not inert piles of stones but they emanate a very special type of energy that is intelligent and purposeful . The earth may be using the pyramids as some new age healers use crystals.

We have looked at the Egyptians as holders of a very advanced knowledge and technology that was since lost. We are still scratching our heads trying to figure out how were ancient peoples able to haul 50 tonne blocks of stones and place them that high with that precision. I personally believe that the key to solving the mystery of how the pyramids were built lies in the three powers i mentioned above and their interaction. The Egyptians understood how the power of the earth (the electromagnetic forces of gravity and levity -that is were we get the word levitation...wink wink.), the power of the stars (the effective energy releases caused by positions and alignments of the heavenly bodies and their effect on human bodies and structures) and the power of the human psyche to be infuenced and influence both of these.

This should make sense because if it wasn't a particular technology, then it must have been the possibility that those humans were somehow able to influence gravity/levity -thru the power of intention- or that the gravitational pull of the earth on the objects that inhabit it was different during a certain period of the earth's history going from weaker to stronger (this is also a possible reason for the disappearance of all massive terrestrial animals like the dinosaurs), in other words, objects were lighter than they are today. Another crazy thing you learned in this book: the mystery of the pyramids and the disappearance of the dinosaurs may be related.

In summary, The Egyptians didn't build the pyramids alone: the earth and the stars gave a hand...

Great endeavors of man's conception
May be a freak of nature or rare exception
Or have we just fallen prey to a great deception
When the universe itches for a manifest expression
the earth and the stars move for that dream's inception

About UFOs and Aliens

One thing I am very sure of, the ET phenomena is relevant to the age we live in. Aliens may be the modern equivalent of fairies, angels, lepricauns, gnomes, demons and so on. These beings are often dismissed as products of a disturbed, overexcited imagination. I beg to differ. Those of you whose options are either "it is real " or "it is a bullshit" need to wake up and add another option "what the joojoomaomao do I know" and keep an open mind. Just remember that our senses capture but a small fraction of the whole available spectrum of frequencies in the universe. May be and I say may be , the people who speak of personal experiences of encounters with extraterrestreals or of outright UFO abductions, are operating at a completely differenct frequency from the rest of us and that their "antennas" are tuned in to realities or dimensions that are not readily perceivable by the rest of us.

There is no doubt that there is a lot of hocus pocus surrounding this subject but those of us who have taken a "hike in the fluid landscapes of the psyche" know for a fact that NOT ALL those who say that they have seen flying saucers are insane. I did mention previously DMT as instrumental in our altered states of consciousness. A few people, i am guessing about 0.5 to 1% of the population, overproduce DMT in their bodies and are subject to its effect without the help of mind altering substances. I do not want to sound like a reductionist that believes that everything is brain chemistry. What I am trying to say instead is that our brains are receivers (and transmitters) of signals, information and knowledge and that some substances present in our bodies and outside of it in nature, can play the role of a catalyst. Paraphrasing Graham Hancock. they help turn our brain's tuning knob from channel "natural" to channel "supernatural".

About The Afterlife

If my premise is correct and the physical body is the supreme manifestion of spirit, then an afterlife is relevant only if it manifests in another, preferably more evolved and refined physical expression, or what we normally call reincarnation. An afterlife of anything less than that is undesirable :)

My opinion is that we would know more about the possiblity of an afterlife (and a beforelife for that matter) with certainty if we understood the relationship between consciousness and matter which we know very little about. Does the individual consciousness survive the demise of the physical body or does its peculiar quality -what makes you you- desintegrate with our fleshy wrappings. I am not suprised no one has come back from the other side to tell us about it: they go once thru this valley of sorrows and they ain't gonna look back.

I also think that if is this individual consciousness remained after physical death, it will surely be in the form of negative, dark energy caused by unresolved or problematic issues during one's lifetime. The same as with our own personal emotional traumas who come to haunt us regularly and are not subject to time and space. People who have dealt with their issues and balanced their energies while on earth may not need an afterlife.

Why do I say this? Let's face it, you can be infatuated with you little precious self all you want, but like the great Joseph Campbell used to say, the main purpose of dying is for that individual drop of water called "you" to fall into the ocean of creation and be one with it. It has to loose its identity and fuse with the ONE. An afterlife of "you" may actually be a bad thing. And you thought the afterlife was a graduation. It is not. So if you are a skunk and you know you are a skunk, you better get your house in order for there is accountability after all. Believe me, life, afterlife, beforelife... it is all problematic and true bliss is not found in any of these...

Do our souls go on after our earthly procession
Or is just silly myths and infantile obsession
I say, the keys of heaven are in your own hands' possession
For bliss is neither a death nor life expression

About Art

The first humans used art for a completely different purpose from the one we see today which is mainly entertainment. Music for example was used mainly for healing and transmission of magic knowledge, and visual arts like painting or sculpting were used mainly for prophecy or to propiciate a desired future. Ancient people knew then what modern doctors (sound and energy therapy) and motivational speakers (the power of visualization and imagery) are just discovering today.

Having said this, there are many aspects to art:

- Art is that thing that happens when you strike a "happy" chord in the one who experiences it.

- Art is universal and timeless: Picasso for example embodied a form of expression that tells a story and interprets life in ways that are deeply relevant to people everywhere, any time.

- Art is also culturally relevant and has a temporal dimension: Picasso's style of painting reflected the mood and makeup of his generation: sober and complex. Art in this sense is a differentiator and a gauge of our cultural and social evolution: humans have gone from simple drawings of animals in caves to Picasso's " Guernica ".

- Art has mysterious origins: art may not originate only in the individual mind of the artist, but it may also be emerging from what I call the collective dream field or the pool of general "distilled" experiences and feelings of the groups we are a part of and the whole of humanity for that matter.

- Art is beauty: the concept of art is also very intricately linked to the concept of beauty. What is beauty? Beauty has to do with harmony, symmetry, proportions and the relative combination of shapes, lights, shades, and colors (and I would also include smells) and how they are perceived by the brain. Believe it or not beauty has more to do with mathematics and chemistry than with taste or conventions. The brain is a computational machine and it happens that some combinations of elements are preferred to others. Some ratios are happier than others: for example the size of the nose relative to the rest of the face, or the distance between eyes and the length of the lip line and so forth. A good rule of thumb is that a combination of patterns or shapes are perceived as beautiful when the smaller is to the larger as the larger is to the whole. I may expand some more on this in a later update. If this is new for you and you would like to further dig into this concept, study the golden ratio (1.618 or 0.618) and the Fibonacci series and how the growth process happens in nature. Harmonious proportions in a painting or human face for example will resonate positively in the observer and effect a change in his or her hormonal make up causing mild or extreme euphoria depending on the subject and circumstances. looking at an ugly painting or human face does the opposite, causes dissonance and the secretion of unhappy hormones that consequently will cause depression, mild or extreme depending on the subject and circumstances... of course.

- Art is a status symbol: why are my nicely framed paintings rubbish and a scribble on a napkin by Picasso is worth Millions? There are quite a few factors that influence the value of art: Picasso for example was acknowledged by his peers as a wizard in his domain. So he had the authority and the "brand" name to extract a huge price for his work. Sometimes perceived authority and a recognized brand name are even more important, in the eyes of the general public, than the quality of the work itself - remember reality is flexible and people are easily manipulated and tend to go where the long lines are. Another very important factor in determining the value of artistic work is what the elite or the wealthier classes in society think is valuable art. Art becomes then a status symbol, a tool to differentiate between those who “have class” and those who "are crass".

-Art is useless. You can rarely find usefulness and beauty in the same element. When we characterize something as beautiful, we also imply that that something is absolutely useless. Painting and Poetry for example had a use in the pass: they had a mnemonic purpose. Painting helped reproduce the likeness of people and objects, and poetry with its rhyme and structure helped us remember and transmit knowledge. Today, we have photography and sound recorders. Technically, painting and poetry have outlived their usefulness but humans don't seem to care. Painting and poetry are alive and well.