there are a shit ton of things i should be doing, none of which are this.

i’m listening to… snowman’s absence.

yesterday, gina and i went to get a soul guide reading from this local lady in town. you can see her website here, and we got an intuitive reading and a flower essence consultation. she describes these services with the following words:

Intuitive Reading
I offer myself as a channel for spirit to those who seek a deeper understanding of themselves, and who desire to develop trust in their own wisdom and connection to spirit. People seek consultation with their guides for a many reasons, such as for help in decision-making; questions of life purpose; cultivation of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health; healing issues of lack; and deeper understanding of love and relationships.

Flower Essence Consultation
Flower essences are a subtle, yet profound, energetic medicine that helps to support the deep transformational work of personal growth. I use the essences to address the spiritual and emotional realms, which then vibrate outwards to affect the physical and mental realms. Flower essences are not contraindicated for any medical condition or drug, and are safe to use with infants, children, adults, elders, and pets.

is this shit a buncha bullshit? well, a year ago i might’ve said yes, but i would have been open to it. now i am more apt to believe it, though i will assert that i maintain a healthy dose of skepticism. regardless, though — whether she talked to my spirit guide or not, i gained helpful things from the session. and either she is a hella banging psychologist or she is just psychic, which is also in that whole world of just fine and dandy.

firstly, though, some pics.

[1] (right) costume i made for intuitive navigation way back when. bedsheet. lucy did the MOST amazing dance while wearing this costume. speaking of, i need to do laundry today… woke up into a nosebleed and have to do that shit. god, i hate doing laundry. shawn told me that i was the person that did the least laundry ever. what can i say, i’s filthy. but anyway. i might bring this to burning man next year… ha!

[2] (below) me, sitting in this coffee shop i am at, with the flower essence that was prescribed to me. therefore, i will begin with the flower essence and its elements. i will begin by saying that shayne told me, “i cannot even impress upon you how rare this is.” evidently, she checks in with your guide and gets the recipe from (in my case) him, and he prescribed me a bunch of gems, for grounding purposes. most people don’t get much grounding materials, i guess. and it’s also interesting because before i went into it, i was mentioning to troy that i was very curious what flower essences i would get because floral things frequently, frequently make me nauseous — especially lavender. i’d never mentioned it to her, though. below are some meanings… of, firstly, lavender, which i was not prescribed, and secondly, all the other things that i was prescribed.

LAVENDER

Positive qualities:
Spiritual sensitivity, highly refined awareness.
Patterns of imbalance:
Nervousness, overstimulation of spiritual forces which depletes the physical body.

The Lavender flower essence helps those souls who are highly absorbent or spiritual influences. They tend to be very awake and quite mentally active, with a strong attraction to spiritual practices and various forms of meditation. However, they often absorb far more energy than can actually be processed through the body.

“High-strung” and “wound-up” are words typically used to describe such personalities. They especially suffer from afflictions to the head, such as headaches or vision problems, and neck and shoulder tension. They are quite often plagued by insomnia or other nervous maladies.

Lavender first works to sedate and soothe such persons; at a deeper level, it teaches one how to moderate and regulate one’s spiritual-psychic energy. In this way the soul learns to use its highly sensitive capacities in balance with the physical needs of the body.

maybe that makes me sick because i am soooooo not plagued by insomnia and am soooooo not high-strung… now for the things IN my bottle.

GUARDIAN (FLOWER)

Guardian helps you create a powerful force-field of protection in your aura and environment. It contains Covellite, Devil’s Club, Round-Leaf Orchid, Stone Circle, White Violet, and Yarrow. These essences enable you to claim your energetic space, maintain your grounding, and feel the protection of strong, healthy boundaries. Guardian also contains the essential oils of Hyacinth, Litsea Cubaba, Tangerine, Lime and Melissa. These oils enhance the protective and grounding qualities of the essences and add uplifting notes of joy and playfulness. This spray is especially useful for those of us who are highly sensitive. We often feel our sensitivity is a curse instead of a blessing because we don’t know how to keep the energies in our environment from penetrating and depleting us. Guardian reminds us that we are the source of our own protection. It connects us with our inner light and helps us radiate this powerful energy outward into our surroundings. This helps us stay open and sensitive, while feeling sealed and protected.

PYRITE (GEM/CRYSTAL)

Energises the lower chakras, promoting grounding. Helps one to see the reality of a difficult situation. Uplifting & emotionally balancing.

HERKIMER DIAMOND (GEM/CRYSTAL)

Powerful cleanser for the subtle bodies and energetic structure. Opens higher chakras promoting clarity of perspective & development psychic gifts. Stimulates connection and the ability to be in harmony.

RUBY (GEM/CRYSTAL)

Ruby has a profound impact on the heart chakra and helps the development of spiritual balance and divine love.
Emotional/mental – Ruby is universally applicable for all emotional issues related to the heart chakra. It provides illumination into areas of procrastination within the personality and stimulates the development of self-confidence, decisiveness, negotiation & leadership skills as well as the development of unconditional love. This essence will promote a greater degree of stability and balance within the personality, which will stimulate a desire for forward movement and spiritual growth.
Energetic level – The energy of Ruby impacts the heart chakra, heart meridian and heart chakra nadis. It also aligns the mental and spiritual bodies, which stimulates spiritual inspiration and divine love.

LAPIS LAZULI (GEM/CRYSTAL)

Emotional/mental – Lapis Lazuli helps those who have shy, introverted or retiring personalities through its ability to stimulate spiritual & personal self-expression. It also promotes the release of buried emotions and hidden fears.
Energetic level – Lapis Lazuli has a major impact on the throat chakra and the energetic blueprint associated with this chakra point. It aligns the etheric, mental & spiritual bodies and strengthens all the meridians. Lapis Lazuli is also a very potent cleanser of unwanted energies from the energetic blueprint.

ANGELICA (FLOWER)

Positive qualities:
Feeling protection and guidance from spiritual beings, especially at threshold experiences such as birth and death.
Patterns of imbalance: Feeling cut off, bereft of spiritual guidance and protection.

Angelica flower essence – The modern human soul suffers in a way which is unique and tragic, for it must face profound spiritual isolation and separation through living in a materialistically dense and technologically abstract culture. The Angelica flower essence addresses the soul’s experience of compression and restriction by quickening the thinking and perception processes.

The soul becomes more able to perceive and discriminate its connection to the subtle sheaths surrounding the physical world. Angelica flower essence especially encourages the individual to develop a relationship with the spiritual world, transforming an overly abstract or intellectual viewpoint into a genuine feeling for spiritual presence and spiritual beings. This awareness is particularly enhanced for that group of spiritual beings who immediately border the human kingdom: the angels.

Through a living relationship with the angelic realm, the human soul receives guardianship and guidance in daily affairs, and protection at times of crisis or during threshold experiences. This feeling of being protected and cared for is of enormous importance to the inner life, giving the soul great strength and courage for its work in transforming and healing the world.

Angelica flower essence is broadly indicated for many flower essence formulas and is particularly important at threshold times such as birth, death, festival celebrations, or other major life passages.

flower essence descriptions are from this book and website and the rest are from this website.

the herkimer diamond (different from diamond), guardian, and angelica were the things that stuck out in my mind the most when she was describing them. she mentioned that the herkimer diamond was to help with opening the third eye, the guardian with opening oneself up spiritually while still protecting oneself, and the angelica was a hollow-stalked plant that facilitated direct contact with the spirits.

so. man. i dunno. that shit sounds crazy but then the stuff she told me was kind of even more maddening. and it very much covered things i have been thinking in just this past week.

the session began with her and i just shooting some shit and i felt totally kind of anxious and unsettled for some reason. it was weird. gina’s description that she had passed onto me of “native american lesbian” kept sticking out in my mind and it was super annoying and i couldn’t figure out why that description wouldn’t let itself go. thank god that we soon did a meditation… a heart meditation… and she told me to envision breathing in gold to my heart and then breathing out the negative things. i pictured gold swirlies being breathed in, black swirlies being sent out. helps to visualize. definitely calmed down a bit.

before the session, she had asked me to bring a form that i’d filled out. in it it asked what issues i wanted to work on, but i didn’t have any particular issues to work on as i feel like i am generally pretty “good” in life right now… i just said that this was a big year, spiritually and mission-speaking, and that i wanted to know what i should focus on. she asked me what it meant that it was a big spiritual year, and i basically just ran down everything from being bummed out in the beginning of january to a love spell in february to a succession of “lovers” that then turned me onto writing, a new mission for redefine, and finally, love. she asked me what it meant to me to be “spiritual,” and i just said a sense of connectedness, and the idea that what you think or intend are very much things that you can make happen. kind of a weird answer, the second part, but that’s what came to mind.

she also told us beforehand that there would be a purging session afterwards, if necessary, where i would get a chance to speak about everything that had been told to me. and she told me i could do whatever while the session was going on, but i didn’t really end up moving from the same spot anyway, so enthralled i was.

she took a moment to call my guide, but he came in a matter of seconds. i guess he was readily available (and gina’s was apparently already there before they started, and shayne said she had to ignore her for a while while they were chatting about things).

so dude appeared to HER, and the whole time, she was looking off in the corner of the room so that she could see the vision. from his description, he probably looks something like this dude (these are pictures of lao tzu, and it’s actually REALLY interesting because i have been weirdly directed towards taoism in the recent past). i actually had wanted to ask at the end, during question-asking time, if dudercopter was chinese, but i didn’t. but i mean seriously. the dude had purposely set himself up in a “scene” that he wanted me to see. again, i wasn’t seeing the scene directly; shayne was translating the scene TO me from what SHE saw.

the scene was this: he was an old man — “so old,” shayne made sure to say, and that he had a really long and thin beard. i don’t believe she saad what color. i also feel like he might have had long hair but i also think that may have been an assumption i made. in any case, she definitely mentioned that his robe was REALLY soft, and that it was a grey or periwinkle color (seriously, lao tzu pics, wtf!). she said he was holding a giant stick, and that he was stirring a pool of water. the water was not that wide across, but it was REALLY deep (shawn told me later that evening that that was “dangerous,” which seems true hahahah).

okay, so funny, there was that visual, which stayed hilariously in my head and definitely made me giggle when it was first thrown down.

oh man there’s so much to write and it’s hard to keep track of it all in one go. bits and pieces keep flooding back to me randomly throughout the course of the day but i will try to make some bullet points… everything stated below in parts one and three is what he, my spirit guide, said to me, about me. there are some of my thoughts inserted in-between, but they are clearly denoted.

PART ONE: THEORY
- i am an “old” spiritual soul.
- i see a lot of things before other people do.
- he mentions weariness, and this ties into how i was feeling last week after the redefine site was put up. i was basically thinking that it — everything i was doing — was completely pointless because it is not reciprocated. the basic idea of the whole thing was that i need to get grounded. i need to get a deeper sense of myself so that i will have a firm foundation on which to grow these ideas that i have.
- my greatest ability is to be able to sit back and let things happen as they are and then cut in when the moment is right.
- that i should not only look forwards but look backwards… and not just inwards, but backwards. and not just personal backwards, but historical backwards.
- lots of calling me a visionary. which is, i mean, totally awesome… and that i’m very good at executing ideas and visions. definitely got the sense that a lot of my ideas are not necessarily my OWN ideas, but that they were visions that i am simply carrying out.
- i am a force for “positive change”, with regards to meeting where the “collective unconscious” wants to go. seriously, those words were used.
- that i affect a lot of people, or inspire people to do small things.

PART TWO: PRACTICE
- so the whole time the list of theoretical things about me was going on, in my mind i was like, “where is the practical advice???” and of course it went there, and was phrased in a way i would phrase myself, as in, “so what can i do about this?” there were two “solutions”:
- meditation. “three times a week” or whatever i decide… he didn’t say meditation in specific, but said “sit,” which is interesting, since that is a buddhist term… but yeah. just pre-slotted times for sitting, and that i should envision myself growing roots into the ground while i do it (i did that last night and it was like an endless root tunnel going downwards… just one stalk… was interesting). i think it was with regards to this that it was stated very clearly that this was advice for me, and ONLY for me. it might’ve been something else, though, but i think it was with regards to this.
- looking into my ancestral past. i fucking knew this was coming the whole time which is totally crazy too, and it is something that has really, really been on my mind (no hints towards that at ALL when i was talking to shayne). said that i have a very, very, old spiritual family, outside of my immediate family, and that i should look into it to get a more solid foundation. because having that knowledge will give me the ease to know that it’s not just me, but that it’s something i have known for a long time. i mean honestly… it’s weird. i’ve been thinking about this stuff a LOT because i feel like the way i react to things is fairly “learned.” like… i just naturally am super taoist, and it’s truly without trying. it’s just the way i am. and it has no doubt been trained to some degree but it’s also just… a thing. has always been a thing. so i dunno if there’s taoism or buddhism or something in my past… i’d wager that there probably was just because of like, the fact that i’m chinese, but yeah. it’s curious. i’m working on figuring out how i can figure that out.
- solutions for family, because i had mentioned beforehand that i felt like family was the one part in my life that i felt not that amazing about, and that i had taken it upon myself to kind of change them and try to make them more positive people. the advice was… after i did the sitting, i would get a more solid sense of self, and that that would make it so that whatever negativity they threw my way would no longer matter because i was so rooted in myself. and that being rooted in oneself allows for the expansion of one’s compassion, and that i would grow more compassionate because of it, so that the compassion would actually take me to another level where things that they would do and say would be beyond me, basically. that is f a s c i n a t i n g and definitely the best advice ever, and things i have considered doing, but so good to have it given as kind of a directive so i actually have more incentive to do it.
- it was also noted that i should not pay attention to the immediate family who are stuck in decision-making through “fear,” because they are not my true spiritual heritage, essentially, and that there is more to be found in my spiritual lineage.

PART THREE: REFLECTION
- time for questions. says that i should ask anything because that’s what he’s there for. one of the questions i asked was how to balance a sense of ego versus a sense of doing things because i felt like i should do them because i’m in a position of power to do them. i zoned out partway during the response, unfortunately, but the part that did stick with me was the idea that, you are not better than anyone else. you are just doing these things because that’s your soul’s desire, and other people don’t have the same path of desire. i also really wanted to ask some joking question but didn’t for some reason. also asked about my spiritual family, and what that meant exactly, and what their role was. i forget the response.
- i am on the right path.
- “love is good.” but make sure you can ask for what you want. which is totally interesting because that is definitely the only problem, really. and that i make sure that we grow together spiritually as opposed to separately. with a stress on spiritually.
- dude wants me to contact him directly, which from the sounds of it is super rare. he basically said, “i want you to know that you can talk to me anytime.” supposedly i should just, when sitting, try to ask questions and not try too hard, and if the answers come, then they come and i’ll have known they come from him, and if not, i just didn’t do it that time. which is um, interesting, and super taoist… seriously though, everything that has been coming up lately in life is the most taoist ever, including recent classes doing tai chi and the whole approach to that…
- he explained the “scene” he put himself in as the last thing. the water he was stirring described my unconscious, which he was stirring up so that i would notice it.

anyway, i think that’s enough for now.

huxley.

ejected from my brain this morning in the twenty or so minutes after i woke up. i woke up before any alarm went off today, these words streaming in my mind. it was as though i could not NOT put them down, and for the next half hour of alarm clock-snoozing and cuddling, i was pretty much trying to NOT think about that but failed greatly, instead drafting out the outline of it mid-sleep, subconscious functions a-tickin’. last night gina gave a lecture at praxis talking about how friedrich neitzsche and michael jackson are similar (hehehehehe), and she had previously suggested that i give a praxis lecture about aldous huxley — my main squeeze and ram jam as of late. perhaps not a bad idea, perhaps. in any case, this is the beginning of -something- whether it be the talk i potentially wanna give at research club, the change to redefine’s new mission statement after the website goes up, or perhaps a praxis lecture! it remains to be seen but this is a draft and i’m not even gonna re-read it again right now because i’m on my way up to seattle. so that’s that. also, over the course of the next couple weeks, i have to write up some art installation proposals and pitch them to gabe because i have sooooooooo many art show / installation ideas — they’re pretty much never-ending — and i just need an excuse to do them all. i actually usually write them down in a flash (thanks subconscious), just like the essay below, and pretty much never think about them again until i have reason to. man, i totally live in my subconscious… no wonder i can’t remember jack shit in waking life…

anyway, here goes. hopefully this crap makes sense.

oh yeah, and i am also reading cosmic trigger that troy gave me finally. robert anton wilson’s book. it definitely makes me want to finish mine (which is almost done — just going through my second round of personal proofing). but yeah. it’s funny how books show up in your life when you want them to, if you’re looking for the signs. last night i was talking to paul, and he’d mentioned that he had just finished some book about a priest whose daughter died and as a result started becoming super interested in the occult… and he went to the library later on and just randomly saw a book which really caught his eye — about bringing dream life into waking life — and that the dream book turned out to be written by the wife of the priest dude. crazy, right? crazy. anyway, since i just realized that this post went into the “subconscious” category i created recently, i also just created a “synchronicities” category! wOo! i am wholly frOo-frOo!

and oh yeah, my interview with gardens & villa totally rules…

>>>

When you work in the web industry, you sometimes take for granted the web’s ability to bridge gaps. I don’t think anyone can argue that the benefits of the internet for everyone in the world are many, but it is my opinion that, more than anything, the main benefits lies in these personal links. These links provide, on a basic level, comfort for anyone with leanings toward the esoteric, as they begin to feel that they are not alone in their rare preferences. In fact, in some cases, the presence of the internet may even make one begin to lose sight of the fact that their rare niche interests are, in fact, extremely niche, simply because one can find such a solid community in it. On a more profound level, though, the internet inspires collaboration between like-minded and not-like-minded individuals. The collaborative potential in this is immense, and although it seems maybe obvious when one says it aloud, it is, in fact, in practice, not particularly practiced at all.
These ideas come to mind through a series of events, and upon that series of events have arisen points I would like to focus on. The first begins with my music and art publication, called REDEFINE. I began it seven years ago in Seattle. It was a printed quarterly rag initially, with the goal of promoting talented independent bands that other publications weren’t covering. At the time, that was an important thing because major labels were still of humongous influence and importance. From the very beginning, an extremely juvenile worldview that because what I was doing was so unique – and it quite was at the time – that I did not need to collaborate that much with my peers; they were my competition, not my friends.

Less than five years after I started the publication, it became obvious that the whole industry had changed immensely. While major labels still wield power over certain genres of music, their slice of the pie has gotten much smaller; the amount of music disseminated by independent labels is much, much more prevalent, and particularly prevalent in the styles of music I am interested in. The esoteric is no longer as esoteric as it once was. As a result, many a music magazine and music blog cropped up, and what had previously been REDEFINE’s tagline – “Fighting The Independent Fight” – was no longer as convincing of a tagline, except to those who were still hideously stuck in the past and feeling pity for themselves – because just about everyone was now fighting the independent fight.

This led me to re-assess my publication’s entire mission, as difficult as self-criticism is – particularly for a project that lies near and dear to your heart, which you have been working on for nearly a decade. But it is when I decided to open up my eyes to the collaborative potential offered by the internet that, firstly, I learned to become more satisfied with my product, and secondly, learned to further that project. While some amount of healthy competition is nice, it is also not the only thing that is valuable; cross-promotion between like-minded individuals and non-like-minded individuals is vital to an organization’s growth in this day and age. Particularly because there are so many individuals pursuing interesting ideas and it has become difficult to push your innovative idea into the forefront, if you are a content creator.

Now onto my second point. A couple months ago, I was reading “Ends And Means” by Aldous Huxley. His book “The Doors Of Perception” had originally changed my life and opened up my eyes to a whole subculture of individuals, but it was really when I read “Ends And Means” that Huxley became solidified as one of my heroes, and perhaps my number one hero. “Ends And Means” Is a sociopolitical book in which Huxley details his solution for world peace. Huxley, part-spiritual and part-logical, describes himself as a “rational idealist” – which, as far as I can tell, is a term he coined – and means an individual who is excessively positive and believes in hope for mankind as a whole, yet understands that it must be achieved through small steps and extremely rational means. It’s that simple. “Ends And Means” is a book that changed my life, yet I realized one day when another individual on Tumblr messaged me exclusively because I was reading that particular book, that it is a book that is, firstly, out-of-print, and secondly, hardly read by anyone at all. It’s shocking to me, really, considering the solutions that are laid out in that book. I could write an entire curriculum on that book alone – and, in fact, the only other person on Tumblr reading the book, a third individual, has had the similar idea himself – but there is one central idea I have taken away from “Ends And Means” that has since changed my worldview which I would like to share. That idea is this: “Our discussion of the nature of explanation brings us to the conclusion that causation in human affairs is multiple — in other words, that any given event has many causes. Hence it follows that there can be no single sovereign cure for the diseases of the body politic. The remedy for social disorder must be sought simultaneously in many different fields.”

As obvious as all enlightening points seem when stated aloud, they are not always put into practice. I believe this point is not put into practice enough, and furthermore, is not acknowledged enough. The Occupy Wall St. movement has certainly made that obvious. Everyone is complaining that there is no one central goal, that there is no one central solution – and that is because there isn’t. Causation in human affairs is multiple. There are a myriad of reasons people are currently dissatisfied, and, as a result, a myriad of solutions. The remedy for social order indeed must be sought simultaneously in many different fields. But if that is the case, why is everyone looking for answers in the same place? Why is everyone looking for other people to save them when they could each be pitching in to save us all from ourselves? What little things can we do in our lives to save us from the problems we see in society?

This is where cross-disciplinary collaboration becomes an important thing. Another quote I stumbled upon earlier this year which also changed my life was one from Benoit Mandlebrot, the discoverer of the fractal. He said, “The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.” And maybe it is a bit vain that, indeed, he was talking about himself – as he was a mathematician who discovered something that affected the fields of biology, physics, and ecology – but I think there is great weight in what he has said. This importance has been heavily obvious in the realm of translation, or perhaps in comparative religion, but there is not enough of this work being done in other fields. I have taken it upon myself to disseminate to others what I think is extremely important knowledge in the 21st century, and I would like to list a number of individuals who are “nomads-by-choice” who have profoundly altered fields of study they are involved with.

Some include:
[Physics dude who linked wave and particle]

In my own personal life, I have eternally been trying to balance the two main parts of me – the Sociologist and the Music Editor. It is with this new attitude of cross-disciplinary collaboration that it really dawned on me that having a music magazine, especially in this day and age, does not at all discount the possibility of stroking the back of me, the Sociologist. And while since 2005 I had always leaned towards doing articles with a social bent – such as features on a tour called the Take Action Tour which gives all proceeds to suicide prevention hotlines – it was a feature that had since fallen by the wayside and been replaced with more traditional music coverage. Now, thanks to Huxley and Mandlebrot, I’ve come to realize that not only can I work with other music blogs to help prop one another up, so to speak – but I can make positive social change through the outlet of a music publication. And it is perhaps here that the most change can be sought, because there is such a low barrier to entry, and many people approach music appreciation in such a visceral way. For most, it is only later that the intellectual components come into play.