Everybody please welcome Wellspring

[Atash Hagmahani]

We've been chatting offline for a while, before he registered.

Wellspring, it's been quiet lately, because a lot of us are busy planting (a few of us are farmers and have said "goodbye" for the season). But I think plenty of other folks are checking in from time to time.

 

[Gratefully]

Wellspring,  Welcome. As you have probably seen, we don't all agree on anything but that is OK. The more ideas floating around the better, as long as we remember (which we do here) that the person is more important than the way he expresses himself. Don't be afraid to speak up if you have something to say- were friendly here. Not looking for sensitive information, but tell us something about yourself. I'm a husband & father, member of the L.D.S. church, grew up on a farm, work in health care, and live in S.W. Florida. That kind of stuff.
                                      Grateful there is someone else who cares enough to look around us and go "Hmmm..."

[opsec]

Greetings Wellspring, nice to have new people on board. I'm a jack of all trades, master of none. I avail myself to you in your preparation efforts.

[Mike]

Welcome Wellspring!  I hope you enjoy the community of this board as much as I do.

Mike

[Wellspring]

Folks, thank you for the warm welcome.  I too am immersed in the garden with building new, raised beds in between planting.  Between my work and MY WORK (Diggin' in the Dirt and receiving Abundance), I find myself more and more disinterested in being Online.  However, a community of like-minded folks is always a welcome Retreat for lifting the Spirits.  If we are Dust from Dust, then what's the Big Rush!!!

I've been gardening since I can remember.  The last couple of years have found me growing more perennials and sharing them with others around the country and the world.  Atash and I met through his discovery of my offering of a California strain of Tree Collards.  It's a lot of time/work to ship them, but if anyone is overwhelmed with the thought of growing them, then give me a shout and I'll advise you on the process. 

I've been reading George Ure at <b>http://www.urbansurvival.com/blog/</b>  for the last six months which got me thinking about the "possible" approaching Perfect Storm.  Due to early childhood experiences, I've always been a survival-oriented person.  (Has a discussion/discourse occurred yet regarding the "idea" of survival?  What does it mean for each person and their family?  If it hasn't been explored in-depth, I'd like to start a thread as I find myself shifting along a continuum of more Zen-Go-with-the-Flow noFUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) attitude vs. one of "Better be ready for the 'crisis.'"  I said "possible approaching Perfect Storm" earlier because I want to believe all my/our focus on "Being Prepared" is/was just an interesting & enlightening chapter in our lives.  Is it really necessary to hold images in the mind of some "fantastic, aweful" future?  Would it not be simpler, easier, more relaxed to live from a more Pastoral, Primal/Indigenous kind-of Way?  What is the nature of living from a state of great equanimity?  Being in Suburbia, I know it's not as simple as saying "Walk the Practical Path" with "Mystical Feet" or "Be in the World, not Of the World!"  Oh, I'm jumping ahead of myself in already starting a dialog around the "nature of survival" and what it means to us.

My world-view has shifted dramatically and radically since my 93 year old mother moved in with us three years ago.  What are the Kubler-Ross five stages of how we deal with grief, anguish, tragedy?  I believe they apply to our process living with my mother. <b>Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.</b>  I told my wife today that my mother (as teacher) prepares us for staying calm and grounded in any crisis situation or when dealing with difficult folks.  Maybe I'm just searching for a view of the Great Picture.

A half Chambered Nautilus shell sits on my desk.  Tetrabranchiate Cephalopod!  What a lovely sound!  As the shell grows, its structure describes a mathematical curve called a Fibonacci Number.  If you haven't heard of Fractals, do a Net search for Fractal Images which grow from the Fibonacci mathematical sequence.  This Nautilus reminds me of the geometric formula known as the <b>The Golden Mean or The Golden Ratio.</b>  The spiral of the shell can be found throughout the human body and throughout nature.  A spiral galaxy and a drawing of the human ear express the same mathematics of creation.  That's awe-inspiring!

There is a fundamental ratio found over and over again in nature that seems to please human perceptions.  There are great theological and philosophical implications in the name <b>Divine Proportion</b> . . . ha . . . which brings us full-circle to the FundaMental question:  How does "being a survivalist" and "Divine Proportion" peacefully co-exisit?  Maybe Pythagoras (one of the great architects of proportional thinking) can answer that question for us.  He and his students always started serious letters (messages) with <b>"Health to You"</b> as a greeting most suitable for both body and soul, encompassing all human goods.  Without Health, in all it's permutations, (healthy boundaries, healthy lifestyle, healthy Giving to others, etc.) we easily succumb to the vices and toxic thinking of the Herd.  <b>Signpost</b>  Don't get too close to the Herd; it has a devious way of pulling you in.  And the last thing we want to do is find ourselves stuck in the middle of the herd with this sense of "no way out."  Reminds me of a great Rainer Maria Rilke poem:

It's possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.

I don't have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I sat here to type out a few words of introduction and found myself surfing that proverbial Wave to the Farthest Shore.
Thanks for listening.  May we find health through a sympathetic resonance.  As Timothy Leary once said:   <b>"Turn on, tune in, drop out"</b>
Most folks never got the true meaning of that statement.  The phrase is derived from this part of Leary's speech:

“Like every great religion of the past <b>we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and the worship of God.</b> These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present — turn on, tune in, drop out."  He further elaborates in his autobiography: 

"'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. <b>Become sensitive</b> to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. 'Tune in' meant <b>interact harmoniously</b> with the world around you - externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. 'Drop out' suggested an elective, selective, <b>graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments.</b> 'Drop Out' meant <b>self-reliance,</b> a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to <b>mobility, choice, and change.</b> Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity'."

Adieu my fellow Inquiring Minds~

Stay positive:  there still is Hope.

<b>"Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always To be Blest.
Alexander Pope"</b>

[Lady Lilya]

I'm a big lover of all things related to the Golden Ratio and of fractals. 

Fractals are bounded, yet infinite. 

On the Long Hair Community's forums, they talk about the 2 hair lengths that divide the body into the Golden Ratio.  One of those is called either "midback" or "bra strap length" (BSL) and the other is called "classical" and reaches just below the butt.  My hair used to be classical length.  But it wasn't intentional.  I just never bothered with cutting it, and it seemed to reach its terminal length there.  I cut it to BSL before really putting any thought into what I wanted from my hair, and now I am growing it again.  Since it is curly, even though it is 2 inches from my waist when pulled straight, it is just past my shoulders when curled up.  I am aiming for tailbone length because I think at that point it will reach BSL when curled up, and will divide me into the Golden Ratio.  So that's my hair goal.  The Golden Ratio.

[Atash Hagmahani]

Some of us have heard of George Ure and his urbansurvival website. I used to read it, but it got a bit bogged down.

His claim to fame in those days was that some of his associates had a web-crawler that tried to predict external events from Internet chatter.

I dunno if he still does, but he used to spend part of his year (probably summer) up here, and part in San Diego (probably winter).

Phi = limit(n->infinity) F(n)/F(n-1)
where F(0) = 1, F(1) = 1, F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2)

Phi is approximately 1.6180339
 

My world-view has shifted dramatically and radically since my 93 year old mother moved in with us three years ago.  What are the Kubler-Ross five stages of how we deal with grief, anguish, tragedy?  I believe they apply to our process living with my mother. <b>Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.</b>  I told my wife today that my mother (as teacher) prepares us for staying calm and grounded in any crisis situation or when dealing with difficult folks.  Maybe I'm just searching for a view of the Great Picture.

Please extend my congratulations and appreciation for your mother's impressive longevity. She has fought the good fight longer than most of us will, and still hasn't given up.

It's a lot of time/work to ship them

The Prussians were the first Europeans to adopt the potato. There was no resistance from their top-down system. But there was resistance elsewhere in Europe--it was a strange, foreign vegetable. Ask Lilya about vegetable xenophobia. 

So the king of France thought about this, and came up with the following solution:

He had his gardeners plant potatoes in a conspicuous field. He then posted guards to watch the potato fields all day. At the end of the day, the guards retired for the night, and were not replaced with a night crew.

Potatoes quickly spread throughout France.

“Like every great religion of the past <b>we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and the worship of God.</b> These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present — turn on, tune in, drop out."

For these purposes, Plilocybin mushrooms probably work better than Mr Leary's LSD (I am guessing from reports, not personal experience). The process is different than in meditation, in which you're going into a feedback loop over and over again, until you achieve the right brain state from the inside out rather than the outside in. Magic Mushrooms come at the risk of a "bad trip", which is not a risk of meditation. Try the meditation first.

There seems something odd about the concept of looking for something like Samadhi by taking a pill.  Analogous perhaps to trying to change your flat tire using meditation. It's a right-hand solution to a left-hand problem.

http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber/Wilber_IV.html

"One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn't dream about was this" (he waved his hand), "us, the modern world. 'You can only be independent of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take you safely to the end.' Well, we've now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. 'The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.' But there aren't any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?"
The character Mustafa Mond, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was worried that his brother and friends would try to create a Socialistic-Humanistic paradise that would be devoid of meaning. No worry, though, as Socialism and Humanism do not lead to "paradise". 

In fact I think one of our great problems is that our rulers tried.  Something about Hubris and Nemesis.

Samsara--the cycle of birth and death--can not be transcended. People used to die in their 50s and 60s, and now they survive into their 70s and 80s--and malinger hideously the last few years.

Go back to your church, your temple,
Your therapist, your drug dealer, your ashram.
There you may find a moments peace.
You found it there once.
Here is only emptiness for you.
You’ll find no food for your ego here.
What if your precious sense of self
Were to shrivel up and die?
Where would you be then?
What would happen?
Best not to risk it.
--Wayne Liquorman

I suspect that there is also the possibility of a "pre-trans fallacy". Which is to say that the happy-hippy zoned out on drugs is not wallowing in Existential Angst because he's at a level of development that precludes such a thing. My chickens don't get it either. Nor do amoebas get cancer.

The solution to Samsara is to be able to embrace it.

"Whoever has endeavored with some enigmatic longing, as I have, to think pessimism through to its depths and to liberate it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which it has finally presented itself to our century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer's philosophy; whoever has really, with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye, looked into, down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking-- beyond good and evil and no longer, like the Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality-- may just thereby, without really meaning to do so, have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world affirming human being who has not only come to terms with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo- not only to himself but to the whole play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but at the bottom to him who needs precisely this spectacle-- and who makes it necessary because again and again he needs himself-- and makes himself necessary-- What? And this wouldn't be-- circulus vitiosus deus?

The inner world and the outer world are two aspects of the same reality; one does not exist without the other. Spend too much time in Nirvana and you end up expiring in a gutter in the outer world. If they live past the point of usefulness, Hindu men may become "Sanyasin" to relieve their next of kin from the burden of caring for them. Suicide by renunciation.

Now, here is what most moderns do not understand:

Spend too much time in "the safety and comfort of our modern world", and both worlds come crashing down in the hell-on-earth that results from thinking you've transcended something like "divine law". This is the problem of modernity; the one that will bring our current civilization to a halt.

 

[dale6281]

Hello Wellspring- I am relatively new here too so I can't give much advice at this point. I can tell you there is a world of knowledge on these pages. So enjoy!

[Wellspring]

LL:  I like your correlation of hair length to the Golden Ratio.  I've been growing my hair out for the last year and it's shoulder length now.  I got tired of paying for a hair trim every couple of months. 

Atash:  Thanks for the interesting responses.  I'll come back later to engage in some Dialog. 
Suffice to say, I "resonate" with Terence McKenna's perspective of Psilocybin, amanita muscaria, Tabernanthe iboga from Central Africa, Ayuwaska from South America co-evolving with humans for a purpose:  to further the course of human evolution (conscious evolution?!).  Seems reasonable to assume that eating these plants in the hominid diet would have enhanced eyesight, sexual enjoyment, language ability, creative thinking.  Of course, I'm not promoting the use of any of these illegal substances.  Used in a ritual way with proper guidance, they can open the door to greater consciousness.  This ritual use can help to establish "reference points" of alternate ways of experiencing the world that can be integrated into Ordinary States of Consciousness. 

I also practice meditation in various forms and believe that BREATH is the Gateway to Right Action, Right Speech, Right Livelihood.  Conscious breathing brings us fully into the Present Moment which "alters our perception" of the world.  It's a matter of which mind we live from:  the Unconditioned or the Conditioned?  Who was it that once said something like "Waking Up begins the process of Unlearning all that we had previous learned (or were programmed to think/feel)?  Interesting to note that Shamans/Medicine Men universally do not distinguish Ordinary States of Consciousness from Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness.  They could be talking about how well the corn is growing one minute and the next discussing what or who they encountered during a healing journey.  Antonio Machado (great Spanish poet) once said:  "It's good to dream, but the best thing of all is 'Waking Up.'"
 
Here's a probe:  What if the general lack of psychedelic exploration (either via plants or via natural meditative/trance states) is leading Western society toward eventual collapse or destruction?  Ha, I think of the movie "Broadcast News" when the news guy says:  "Now go to your window and repeat after me: 'I'm Mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!'"  We could use another charismatic Mashall Mcluhan broadcasting "The medium IS the message. Turn off your TV folks!"

[Lady Lilya]

The people on the Long Hair Community forum often say that one reason in favor of growing your hair is to save money on haircuts and styling products.  I've never had REALLY short hair, so I don't have the experience of having to use gel or mousse or hairspray to shape my hair into something.  My hair is too curly to be flat and limp anyway, though. 

[oscar615]

Welcome Wellspring, glad to have you onboard.  Looking forward to your input.