It doesn’t always seem like people are most observant when you’re out and strolling about. Today, though, I was out for only a half-hour span and it seemed different. People were awake and paying attention. Perhaps it was the sunny weather; perhaps it was the full moon last night; perhaps it was THE FUCKING FINDING OF ALIEN DNA $@$@(*#@#&!!

In any case. I took a walk-read and began Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray, which will no doubt be a very quick and easy read. I am excited, as most of the books I have been reading as of late are quite challenging, or if not, are not of the particular type I like exactly. This book matches exactly my desires and writing style, kind of, and also had some topics which overlapped with a conversation we had last night at the Swahili house. The conversation was one of half doom and gloom, of what will happen when science and spirituality meet, should they meet, where technology is taking us, etc. Details I forget.

Anyway, back to today. The walk-read led me to a small section of seating outside of the nearby elementary school. There were four benches in a circle, I believe, but one was situated just perfectly for the sun to be shining directly upon me. It was, of course, my choice of seat. I read one chapter and then settled down into a meditation, thinking that no one would really pass, or if they did, that they had better things to pay attention to — since they would likely be joggers or families, and such. That was generally the case, though I spied — through closed eyes — a force that stopped on the sidewalk ahead of me. I felt him to be a photographer, and in fact, two seconds after that a shutter clicked twice. I thought of opening my eyes, to in a sense scare him, as I was not so deep in meditation that I failed to notice his presence, but I decided against it. Continuing the vibration felt more desirable. A few minutes later, another group of guys passed by and were speaking of meditation class. From the distance from which they were talking about meditation, it seemed that they had already be speaking about that topic, though I can’t be sure. Soon thereafter, I finished meditating, opened my eyes, and looked directly onto a house porch to my left — for no particular reason — and saw a photographer there. I am unsure whether it is the same photographer, as he was not trained on me at this point and I had not heard a shutter click since the original two. The initial shutter I had heard was one I considered unmistakably from a film camera; this man held a digital camera.

I went to the supermarket and returned. On my way back, while I was reading and walking, two men on a porch caught a glimpse of my bookmark, and one made a mention about how it was a BART ticket. This statement sunk in too late, as I was already passing the next house and bushes had already blocked my view of the observer, but I marveled! I marveled at how people were actually awake, actually paying attention…! It seems rare, it seems rare. It seems rare?

Troy bought me a pair of headphones as a present; they are the same ones that he mixes in the studio with. They are apparently not amazing, but I have not possessed headphones for quite some time now, and it was very sweet of him to buy them for me, simply for desiring to buy me a present, and I imagine, because I am a poor ass motherfucker. He had been speaking some time now of dropping a present upon me such as these; I had not expected it to actually happen. He has a good chance of getting a new job tomorrow, and he just sold his van today for 1.7k. It’s less than expected or desired, but it’s something, anyway.

I feel like a bit of a butthead the past few days, and I’ll have to apologize to him tonight. I am going through some emotional weirdnesses, but I think they’re tapering off. I just don’t want to be shitty about them. Meow. Mrawr. I’m trying to regulate a lot of contrasts between mind and spirit, I guess, and trying to figure out what the optimal amount of time we should spend together is. Because I can spend lots of time, but I get bummed sometimes when that is the case because I feel I am neglecting myself; yet, at the same time, those are times I want, and the main question in my heart at those times is what IS actually best for us? It’s hard to tell.

At least DJ Doc is awesome? I dunno, shit. I think I am done with this post, and generally glad to be getting back into the swing of writing regularly and all that. Time to paint my nails. Oh, right, and I took out my lip ring. I guess I’m aimed to grow up, just a tiny bit, just a fraction. Maybe? I dunno. Time to check be in on my job interview again tomorrow. This week begins the madness, tons of shows, tons of stuff, tons of shows!!

We have an infestation of little fucking moth ass bitches. It is amazingly obnoxious. I just killed three in, I want to say, the past hour? Punch them in the face want! Nick’s girlfriend Sasha said they were boll weevils. They are not boll weevils. They are definitely moths, or at least something related to moths. Some definitely worm-babied on my rice; I ate it anyway cause I kinda don’t care because that shit gets boiled anyway It is annoying as shit, though!!

If I don’t get the job this week, I may go to Hong Kong next month for Joe’s wedding, with a stopover in either China or Korea. I’m unsure. I want to leave and do not. But I can’t let free trips out of sight, now can I? That would be downright foolish.

this is actually yesterday.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<< written yesterday (though edited today to some degree)

I decided earlier today to walk from Capitol Hill to University District – a three-and-a-half-mile escapade I have done a few times before, though never on the particular route I took today and never when I actually lived here. Peter spent the previous weekend in Portland, so I hitched a ride back up to Seattle with him on Super Bowl Sunday. It amuses me immensely that Super Bowl now creeps up so suddenly; I find out about its existence a few days before, and it always comes as a complete shock. Not that I was ever extremely gung-ho about it, but I can appreciate most sports – baseball being the only real exception – and do find it interesting to miss out on such a huge part of American culture now, when I had at least some sense of it before (that sense shaped as person who was throwing a Super Bowl party or even more than a handful of people attending a Super Bowl party). Now, I don’t even have a party to attend even if I wanted to (and I would rather want to) unless I went up to Seattle and asked my Seattle friends if they knew of one I could attend, I guess! Perhaps even more interesting than that, though, may be going to a bar and watching it, given the recent hobby of visiting the most random bars ever and the fact that I’ve never done that before but nacho-eating huddled around a television is probably more or less the same no matter where you are or who you’re with…

As I was saying, I walked to U-District and was certainly more or less over the walk by the time I got there. It was nice to retrace my steps to my old workplace at the Experimental Education Unit, though; over the course of one summer I walked to and from work daily and lost an exorbitant amount of weight doing so. I would be so sweaty by the time I got to work that it was the kind of sweat that soaked through parts of your shirt you didn’t want it to soak through.

Losing weight is no longer such an easy feat, even if I do walk for miles at a time. I know this because I do that. I am curious what the difference is; is it really as simple as metabolism and growing older? It may also be the fact that I eat way more now… pretty sure that is a truth. It’s a mystery.

I walked through the University of Washington campus to the University District post office, making a couple of pit stops along the way. The first was stopping near the fountain by the Architecture building. The last time I was in Seattle, Troy and I happened to be in the Suzzalo Library – a true beauty, with one hell of an amazing reading room I had never taken the liberty of using when I went to school there – when I ran into Tammy and we came across a series of posters describing a Cultural Fair they used to have on campus. The heart of it was around the Architecture building, and it looked fucking incredible. While doing research to find photos of this, I also just came across this awesome blog of University of Washington’s historical photos. This article tells more about it as well (written in 2009, it celebrates the 100-year anniversary of the event). Am I getting school-sick? Seattle-sick? It seems that I am, big time, and I guess it’s pretty appropriately timed considering some things I will mention later on in this post.

Back to where I was. Walking through the UW campus, there was just one lovely stone bench that wanted so badly to be sat upon, the sun just slightly having been introduced to a corner of it. I granted it my ass! And faced slightly east and sat cross-legged upon it, welcoming in the morning sun with eyes closed, long my favorite way to meditate. Something about the rays upon your eyelids and turning everything an equalizing red, while highlighting patterns of eye dust, really just feels cathartic and radiant. (I also vaguely remember someone telling me once that looking into the sun in that way gets rid of some cells you no longer need and ultimately makes your eyesight or something better. Who told me that, and is it true? Who knows.)

I distinctly remember one meditation session in the backyard of the 716 house in Greenlake when I still lived there. It dawns upon me now that I may not even have purposely been meditating, as I’m not sure it was a practice I did then; it was just an appealing thing to do. I remember opening my eyes for the first time after an extended session adoring the sun in that way, and the world was not the world as I had seen it before; it was tinted blue, or green, but all things were visualized as they were in comparison to the sun’s strength and color. This tinting gradually subsided, but it was powerful to me then, a type of inducement of hallucinogenic states through doing nearly nothing at all. Today, meditating in front of the fountain, I expected difficulty; I expected that those passing by would distract me, that I would get lost in their footsteps and chattering and not be able to focus, similar to what had happened to me the other night with the Shamanic Mysteries. For the most part, though, I meditated for perhaps twenty minutes and many passed by, but none were chattering, save for a man who burped right towards the end of my session. And because I was out in the open, for all to see, I figured that some were looking at me while passing and wondering what I was doing, while others were perhaps not at all curious. As distracting as those iterations on human reaction could have been, they were a minor aside, small notes considering what I was actually thinking. The meditation thoughts were more worthy, rising to the top while the other portions sank down. I was proud to have been influenced so little by the thoughts of them, more interested by the thoughts of them inside me. It was a self-back-patting moment, the non-barrier to meditative entry always a graceful and satisfying moment.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<< written today

I have been reading much of Henry Miller’s Tropic Of Capricorn, and quite pleased to say that after putting it down for months I am now nearing the end of it (note: my copy does not nearly look this awesome). This book was purchased by he, one named The Unmentionable Other, back in January 2011, and it was gifted to me by Rose when she headed off to the East Coast. He had left it at her house, and she knew not who better to give it to than me. But of course, the book’s existence was of eerie timing, similar to how Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea had been, and I can’t help but think that the silly Unmentionable has some sort of magical ability, akin to what I have developed, to manifest wishes desired into reality. But the difference seems to be that he wishes to manifest tragedy, imposed tragedy, inexplicable tragedy, where I desire for more peaceful, soulful, constructive things. I suppose our romance never would have worked. I suppose the place we are now is the perfect place – and I do not doubt this, have not doubted this, but it is always popping again as the type of reminder that might never die or dispose of itself, that pigeon-pecks seeds of reality. But more fitting, though, is that one sir Mr. Henry Miller writes like me, or more I write like him, though if you take the logic that he subscribes to of there being no time but only present – we both write like each other, quite mutually. But not always. The writing is mutual when I am feeling poetic and down in the dumps, when my internal monologue is strong and rambling and stream-of-consciousness rather than analytical and exacting. The writing is mutual when my roots are, as Miller says, rooted in the ground rather than in the brain – when the brain is in the heart rather than in the head. Of course, unlike Miller, I think I find value in both, whereas he seems to find value only in the one, in the heart-in-brain…

I am here, right now, in Albina Press in South Portland. I am playing catch-up on yesterday’s activities, as they are more of note than today’s. Yesterday, I was in Seattle, and after my morning meditation which I previously described, I happened by the set of lecture halls I previously had known so well – the ones which seated hundreds of people for General Ed courses, the ones which I fell asleep in innumerous times…

I passed by at 10:15am or so, and classes were just letting out. It had crossed my mind many times to visit one of these halls again, to barge in on a random class and let fate decide what I would learn that day as though I were some Freshman or Sophomore once again. But every time I return to Seattle, I never follow through with this plan because to actually plan the plan takes away from the magic of the plan. This particular morning, however, was ripe for my education! In I walked, decision made in a matter of seconds – straight into Kane 130, site of where I failed the hardest in college (Linguistics, Dinosaurs 101… I’m serious…)

I sat down, the same college awkwardness I had once known so well once again rearing its ugly head. Am I sitting in the right place? What if I’ve taken someone’s seat? What if I end up making conversation with a college student? Wait, what the hell! I’m almost 30! Shouldn’t I be over this shit?!!! But it seems not, as in this case, I am worried I might somehow be caught and that my imposter, education-gold-digging ways might be discovered, leading to ostracization – or probably not ostracization because I don’t think anyone would have that extreme an opinion – but misunderstanding, yes. Definitely misunderstanding.

To my chagrin, the class was a Communications class. I suppose in some way a Communications class should be something I’m interested in, considering I run a music and arts publication… but by god, there’s a reason I didn’t do Communications in Undergrad; it’s just not interesting to me in the same way that Sociology was! It’s similar to the lack of magic in planning on going to a random lecture class versus the magic of stumbling into one on a whim; deconstructing Communications not my jam. Making communications more my jam. And anyway, the concept we were initially presented with in this lecture – media bias and objectivity – were ones I learned about in high school Journalism class ad nauseum. Not to say that the information wasn’t valuable, but I was seriously hoping for some information about Linguistics or Dinosaurs (maybe to make up for my previous failures) or at least something I’m a little less knowledgeable in. C’est la vie, though, and the class was interesting in very particular ways, as it was a meta-commentary upon itself (which I will get into in a little bit here).

Some things have changed since I went to school at UW. For starters, laptops are now allowed, though only in the last five rows in this particular class! I suppose this comes as no surprise, but they were never commonplace when I went to University. But I just remember someone telling me recently that students don’t write real words anymore in class, and this is clearly a lie, I’ve now discovered through first-hand knowledge (though perhaps with younger generations this is indeed true).

At one point, the teacher, Randy Beam, put up one PowerPoint slide that asked the students whether M.I.A.’s flipping off people during the Super Bowl (see below) would “fall under the FCC’s definition of indecent content?” along with a multiple choice poll where 1 meant “Probably” and 2 meant “Probably Not”. All the students immediately reached into their backpack – a point of great confusion – and retrieved teeny tiny remote controls with which they punched in their answers! What! My mind was blown! What is this madness! Technology! Interaction! Teachers who actually employ participatory tactics in a class with hundreds of people and succeed?! This is remarkable!

In fact, the teacher did much back-and-forth with the large class, and students were surprisingly responsive. No question was met with complete silence, though I will say that most opinionated students were actually rather lacking in backbone. At one point, a series of cases were presented, and students were asked to decide whether they considered the cases to be news or not news. There were some quibbles amongst the class, wherein some considered The Daily Show news and some did not; some considered an opinion piece about supermarket purchases news, and some did not. A discussion ensued. Beam asked students how they arrived at the decisions that they did, and it was altogether too easy to back those students into corners! Come on, kids! If the professor saying something like, “Why isn’t [The Daily Show] news to you? Isn’t it from the World News Headquarters in New York?” – a clear joke – is enough to notably rattle your foundations, you’ve really got to think through your answers a little more! He in fact played Devil’s Advocate a lot, and almost every time the students gave up their original opinions and some even became confused about what their original opinions were. But I suppose they are still youth and the growth of backbone and well-thought-out opinions will come in time. Or not…!

My favorite response came from the individual who decided that celebrity gossip news (about the custody battle over Anna Nicole’s baby boy – or whatever, who cares) is news, despite the fact that it may not be particularly interesting to everyone. He said, “Just because news is esoteric doesn’t mean it’s not news. Some people wouldn’t consider sports news news.” This was perhaps the most profound and well-thought-out argument in the class. Kudos!

Though I left half-way through the lecture, during the conveniently-timed break (I really needed to leave then, and it would have been awkward if I had to leave mid-lecture!), the teacher hinted at what he would go on to discuss in the second half: how certain stories are picked over others, and why.

“It’s kind of chance [and idiosyncratic] what gets to be news,” he said, “because there is no standard definition of what is news and what is not.”

But the point of mega-meta-hilarity came from Beam’s earlier question. “Why isn’t anyone going to cover Com 201, unless I am doing something illegal?” he’d asked.

Exploding silent giggles to self! I was planning to cover Com 201 the whole time! And he wasn’t doing something illegal! But is this news? What is news? Is a blog post news? Is this too esoteric to be news? Is my opinion news? God, I don’t know anymore! I am reporting facts but my opinion is all over this thing! But isn’t that all news? Isn’t that the Daily Show? Isn’t that NBC and Fox News? Help me, Mr. Beam! What is news!!!!!!!!!?

EDIT >>>

Of course, I wrote the professor. His response: “This is a hoot — the irony of you “covering” a class about news when I was suggesting no one would ever consider it news. I just gotta talk about this tomorrow. Thanks for sending, Vivian. –RB”

These things are fun.

shamanic mysteries of egypt, part three. (1)

ugh just did it but did it at troy’s house and couldn’t get settled into it as nicely as i should have, i think. i am debating whether i should do it again. i think i should. i didn’t leave with so much. i will go through tonight’s after i do it again, but the only thing was that i had accidentally left a part of the last meditation onto the end of this one, and that it had asked me to search for an ancient memory. i tried but it seemed appropriate considering where i was. up until i was asked to search for a memory, the meditation had come to an end and i was just hanging out and sitting at the temple steps at saqqara and doing nothing much with anubis (i was asking him whether i should do it again, and he was like, well, if you’re hanging out i think it’s fine!). when that leftover section came up, though, i started falling away from the anubis conversation and was searching for some memory — similar to the one i had last time — but that disconnected me from where i was. i dunno. was left feeling kinda strange about the whole thing, and i think i should do it again just to fix it. i was starting to daze out though when something kinda scared the shit out of me and it was just like this mummy face, though it didn’t actually look like a mummy at all; it was just a face — vaguely — that really terrified me. i opened my eyes for a second (in real life, since i didn’t have my 100% black-out mindfold) and instantly closed them again and went calling for anubis to save me… and the image went away, but it freaked me out. also, of the four canopic jars i was left thinking very strongly that the one my heart was supposedly placed in was the one with duamutef, or the jackal-headed son of horus who was the guardian of the east. duamutef’s role was to protect the stomach of the deceased; he was protected by the goddess neith. (granted, i definitely thought it was anubis’ jar, and i did see the jar beforehand and probably just adhered to that particular one. not sure it means anything because i feel like this meditation was not really nearly as deep as the last couple have been >__>) one thing to mention, though, was that i definitely felt a “hollow” inside my body — as they claimed i would — but not until after my mummy scare. and anyway, it may have been just gas. anyway. gotta do it again, i think. not sure if that’s allowed, but it seems the better thing.

shamanic mysteries of egypt, part two.

OHHHHHHKAY. So part two of my crazy Egyptian meditation visionary book is about connecting with Nekhbet Mother Mut (pictured right), what they describe as the “Alchemist,” the deity that comes before the rest, the mother of all, and supposedly my “main guide” in my vision quest. In my book about Egyptian deities (the best intro book, seriously), she is a vulture, usually shown from side view, often shown in combination with or in relation to a snake.

I decided to edit the meditation this time to cut out unnecessary words and basically get to the meat of the thing, after learning that last time I got way too much caught up (concentration-wise) in the extra descriptive words I was saying that were in the original texts. This time, I also paired it all to Barn Owl’s Lost In The Glare record – at least, its first three songs. It matched up ridiculously well with the arc of the entire meditation, though I did not intend for that to happen whatsoever (with the exception of the last song, because I put that on there in its entirety as an entire song’s-length worth of meditation with no additional verbal guidance). Anyway. The arc:

Track one of the record, “Pale Star,” is super mellow and fit in perfectly with the introduction of the meditative session, which basically just called for you to breathe deeply and to get into the zone, and to focus on Anubis standing on the side of a cliff. You were to join him in watching a sunset. I decided to hold his hand in my vision haha. Not sure if he liked that or not, and I was wondering the whole time what kind of hands Anubis would have – would they be more jackal-like or more human-like? – so soon, I just grabbed onto his bicep instead. Which is kinda weird, too… and then I wondered about the bottom half of his outfit, which was some sort of golden skirt-type thing… was getting all pervy on Anubis, sorry!

At that point the meditation told you to let go of what you were thinking of and start preparing yourself to enter the actual meat of the meditation. It told you to step off of the cliff and then transform into a dove, which would enter a vortex…

Almost exactly timed with my entering the vortex came track two, “Turiya.” It was actually fun to glide through the vortex initially with this song playing because it becomes fairly intense, and I imagined myself as a dove, flying very confidently through this vortex, constantly arcing towards the right… but then the song got mega intense, and it got to a point where I felt like seriously my forehead or something was going to explode… everything just became super hard to control and I had to remind myself to breathe deeply to like, maintain control of my body or something. I don’t know how to explain it really; I have never felt anything like that that intensely. I mean, during the previous meditation session for this I had mentioned that it felt like it was hard for me to get back into my body at the end; in this case it was similar to that, only it felt just like my mind was going somewhere else and that if I wasn’t careful, it’d go off without my body following it or something. Anyway, the deep breaths helped, and what’s even better is the timing of the next track and next happening…

The next track, “Devotion I” is a super calm I guess salutary track to someone or something, and it felt so so so appropriate as this was when the journey through the vortex ended and I came face-to-face with Nekhbet Mother Mut and offered her an olive branch of peace, which she was to accept. She then talked to me (this is all in the dialogue from the book) about basically what she was there to do and that I was courageous for attempting this in the first place, and that I had the heart like that of the Fool in the tarot. Then there was a space left for “getting a message” from her, which in my mind, started off as basically her reassuring me that things would be fine, followed by me asking a LOT of ridiculous questions such as: “Is the serpent we’re going to ride on really white?” even though it was originally listed as silver. These are just the type of questions that sprung to mind, though – nothing profound whatsoever, and so I just kept apologizing for asking the dumbest shit, to which the answer seemed like a kind of maternal, “It’s fine,” plus a type of shrugging off, though not mean in any way, just the kind of shrugging off you would give a little kid who might be talking too much about things you’re bored by.

Moving on, this was when I intentionally placed the fourth track, “The Darkest Night Since 1683,” into the pre-recorded meditation reading. It was during this part where I was supposed to look into myself and Egypt and find a lost memory. A ton of random shit came to mind but the strongest things that reoccurred were: lion-headed god (female), Sphinx, Horus – in that order. I knew that Horus was a bird-headed god, but really didn’t know much more than that, other than whatever tangential information I had learned from reading about other gods. Then I was left with the idea of: Eye of Horus (which, in my head, after it came to mind, I mistook for the Eye of Ra / Re) and also, an Eye on the Sphinx??? I also got confused during this time because I had read that Thoth was born from Seth’s eyeball and though that maybe THAT was the Eye of Horus? (When really that has nothing to do with anything, I see now.) Also the line, “So many centuries” – or something similar – kept repeating again and again and again. And I got the very clear sense that a Sphinx – the Great Sphinx?? – is located atop some kind of giant slab of hieroglyphs extend like a vertical column, similar to an obelisk? Similar to the Easter Island “heads” and how they have bodies?? I remember thinking during the meditation that, what the fuck, this was surely an impossibility considering the amount of research that has probably gone into the Sphinx??? ANYWAY.

When I came to and finished this meditation, I was basically like, what the fuck, and went to the book that I had borrowed from the library. It yielded some information about what I had seen:

1) eye of the moon [found coincidentally after I was attempting to look up anything related to “eyes”… “eye of Horus” was not a real thing]
“[Horus as a] Sky God: This is the original form of Horus as ‘lord of the sky’ which preceded all others. The Eyptian word her from which the god’s name is derived means ‘the one on high’ or ‘the distant one’ in reference to the soaring flight of the hunting falcon (if not a reference to the solar aspect of the god). Mythologically, the god was imagined as a celestial falcon whose right eye was the sun and whose left eye the moon. The speckled feathers of his breast were probably the stars and his wings the sky – with their downsweep producing the winds. It was in this form that Horus was apparently worshipped at some of Egypt’s earliest sites such as Hierakonpolis and in which Horus assimilated a number of other local falcon gods.”

2) lion-headed deity (female): [found listed under seven or eight Sphinx-related pages in the index]
“The lion-headed goddess personifies the most common type of ‘hybrid’ or bimorphic deity in which the head of the animal is fused with an anthropomorphic body.” + “A lion-headed goddess is a lion-goddess in human form, while a royal sphinx, conversely, is a man who has assumed the form of a lion.”

3) Horus and The Great Sphinx [found as the last entry related to ‘sphinx’ – I was definitely beginning to think that there was no connection between Horus and sphinxes]
“[Horus as a] Sun god: As a natural outgrowth of his role as cosmic sky god Horus was also venerated more specifically as a solar god… The Pyramid Texts specifically refer to Horus in solar terms as ‘god of the east’ and he appeared in at least three forms in this guise. As Horakhty or ‘Horus of the two horizons’ Horus was the god of the rising and setting sun, but more particularly the god of the east and the sunrise, and in the Pyramid Texts the deceased king is said to be reborn in the eastern sky as Horakhty. Eventually, Horakhtys drawn into the sun cult of Heliopolis and fused with its solar god as Re-Horakhty. As behde or ‘he of [the] behdet’, Horus was the hawk-winged sun disk which seems to incorporate the idea of the passage of the sun through the sky. As Hor-em-akhet (Harmachis) or ‘Horus in the horizon’, Horus was visualized as a sun god in falcon or leonine form. By New Kingdom times, he Great Sphinx of Giza – originally a representation of the 4th-dynasty king Khafre – was interpreted as an image of Hor-em-akhet.

There is nothing else in this text related to Horus being a lion-related god at all. Totally fucking weird…

Maybe a point to note that I’m finding now after reading more about Horus:

Chapter 112 of the Book of the Dead tells how the Delta city of Pe (the historical Buto) was given to Horus as compensation for his eye which was injured by Seth, thus explaining this important centre of the god…

Well, since I’m already here, let’s look up the terms Book of the Dead (to see if there’s more about Chapter 112) , Pe, and Buto… noting that I don’t have internet at home right now, so I actually have to rely only on *gasp* this book that is right in front of me! (God I am glad I actually wasn’t lazy and picked this up from the library today…)

1) Book of the Dead [a shit ton of entries]
… too many entries for me to give a shit right now at 12:30am…

2) Buto [3 entries]
Nothing of particular interest.

3) Pe [0 entries]

Mystery ended adequately, at least for now. Not 100% pleased about not checking out all of the Book of the Dead stuff, but fuggiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. Sleep tym.

Anyway, glad I wrote this. Felt so fucking weird right after doing it. felt craaaaaaaaaazyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. Still feel a little crazy but it’s fine.

ADDENDUM… 01/31… @ 4:00pm
This morning, when I woke up, I was thinking about how “Horus on the horizon” and thinking that the sphinx is somehow associated with the sun. I don’t know if this is actually true. If this is actually true, it would make sense to think there’s another sphinx? Dedicated to the sun?

Anyway, some quick Googling about sphinxes and Horus… found some sort of articles:
- Was There a Second Great Sphinx at Giza?
- The Riddle Of The Second Sphinx

God this shit is weird. I honestly don’t know what to make of it, AT ALL. Is it my mind actually tapping into something? Is it just my mind? I mean I seriously don’t know that much about Egyptian mythology at all, or Egyptology… so some of the things that have been coming up are pretty bizarre.

Also, there are apparently (maybe?) passages under the Sphinx, which makes it possible? That there might be more carvings in the sides of the walls where the passageways are, no?
- The Saga Of The Sphinx
- The Egyptologist, The Sphinx, and the Cover-Up
- Robert M. Schoch’s Research On The Great Sphinx
- Known Sphinx Passages
- Uncovering Secrets of the Sphinx (a Smithsonian article worth taking a look at, and pretty recent, from February 2010)

Lehner spotted something perhaps even more remarkable. If you stand in the eastern niche during sunset at the March or September equinoxes, you see a dramatic astronomical event: the sun appears to sink into the shoulder of the Sphinx and, beyond that, into the south side of the Pyramid of Khafre on the horizon. “At the very same moment,” Lehner says, “the shadow of the Sphinx and the shadow of the pyramid, both symbols of the king, become merged silhouettes. The Sphinx itself, it seems, symbolized the pharaoh presenting offerings to the sun god in the court of the temple.” Hawass concurs, saying the Sphinx represents Khafre as Horus, the Egyptians’ revered royal falcon god, “who is giving offerings with his two paws to his father, Khufu, incarnated as the sun god, Ra, who rises and sets in that temple.”

Equally intriguing, Lehner discovered that when one stands near the Sphinx during the summer solstice, the sun appears to set midway between the silhouettes of the pyramids of Khafre and Khufu. The scene resembles the hieroglyph akhet, which can be translated as “horizon” but also symbolized the cycle of life and rebirth. “Even if coincidental, it is hard to imagine the Egyptians not seeing this ideogram,” Lehner wrote in the Archive of Oriental Research. “If somehow intentional, it ranks as an example of architectural illusionism on a grand, maybe the grandest, scale.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Uncovering-Secrets-of-the-Sphinx.html#ixzz1l5Mg9PDm

“According to the legend engraved on a pink granite slab between the Sphinx’s paws, the Egyptian prince Thutmose went hunting in the desert, grew tired and lay down in the shade of the Sphinx. In a dream, the statue, calling itself Horemakhet—or Horus-in-the-Horizon, the earliest known Egyptian name for the statue—addressed him. It complained about its ruined body and the encroaching sand. Horemakhet then offered Thutmose the throne in exchange for help.

Whether or not the prince actually had this dream is unknown. But when he became Pharaoh Thutmose IV, he helped introduce a Sphinx-worshiping cult to the New Kingdom (1550-1070 B.C.). Across Egypt, sphinxes appeared everywhere in sculptures, reliefs and paintings, often depicted as a potent symbol of royalty and the sacred power of the sun.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Uncovering-Secrets-of-the-Sphinx.html#ixzz1l5N1tjdu

I DON’T KNOWWWWW can’t really think about this.

No results for a third eye related to the Sphinx.

{002} vow of silence: shamanic mysteries of egypt begins.

jesus christ. i’m kind of a bit shaken up still. so i got the shamanic mysteries of egypt book, as i had previously mentioned, and now i feel like i left a part of myself somewhere. i don’t even know how to describe it. so, the first one is barely a visionary thing, as it is only an introduction. in it, one is given a really basic heart meditation to do, where you breathe in from the ground to your heart, then breathe in from the sky to your heart, then both at the same time…………………………………. anyway, that’s the beginning, and then the initial invocation involves you picturing yourself stepping over a cliff, and you turn into a dove flying above egypt, and meet — in passing — anubis and isis, who just tell you that you’re about to start your mission, basically. all that was fine. it was a little weird listening to my own voice, and my reading was a bit rushed, so it took me a second to get into it all. but then by the end, i had basically stopped listening to the shit i had recorded myself saying and then got into this trance where i was lord knows fuck where, but i went there REALLY all of a sudden, like teleportation (though in my head) and legitimately had a hard time getting “back” which really kind of freaked me out. i was wearing an all lights out blindfold that i had used and the “hard time getting back” was so freaky to me that i actually opened my eyes uncontrollably, only it didn’t make a difference because with the lights on blindfold it was still the same shade (that is, no shade). towards the end of it, when i was trying to get back, was the only time i really saw anything i didn’t expect to see. up until that point, i was being nice and easily guided, and suddenly, i found myself with a pretty still image of what i expected / knew to be osiris (though when i finished checking it after i came back to reality, i thought for a second it might be ptah, but i do think now it is definitely osiris, both in terms of his looks and because i remember thinking to myself right away that it was osiris). and then another person, who was more difficult to track down, but which i have narrowed to be — possibly — nefertari, though it could be isis (osiris’ wife), though pictures don’t seem to match isis.

Osiris, similar to how I saw him, though I had thought he was: a) blue; b) facing the other direction.

The lady — the more powerful presence — looked quite similar to these pictures of Nefertari. The sleeves, in particular, seem to be of note, as she seems to be the only Queen and only Goddess with an outfit like that, and I very distinctly remember it being “square” similar to this. But I don’t know what the significance is… she isn’t a god, but a Queen of Ramesses II.

Quick summary of Osiris, which is partially what serves to confuse me more… taken from Wikipedia…

Osiris ( /oʊˈsaɪərɨs/; Ancient Greek: Ὄσιρις, also Usiris; the Egyptian language name is variously transliterated Asar, Asari, Aser, Ausar, Ausir, Wesir, Usir, Usire or Ausare) is an Egyptian god, usually identified as the god of the afterlife, the underworld and the dead. He is classically depicted as a green-skinned man with a pharaoh’s beard, partially mummy-wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive crown with two large ostrich feathers at either side, and holding a symbolic crook and flail.
Osiris is at times considered the oldest son of the Earth god Geb,[1] and the sky goddess Nut, as well as being brother and husband of Isis, with Horus being considered his posthumously begotten son.[1] He is also associated with the epithet Khenti-Amentiu, which means “Foremost of the Westerners” — a reference to his kingship in the land of the dead.[2] As ruler of the dead, Osiris is also sometimes called “king of the living”, since the Ancient Egyptians considered the blessed dead “the living ones”.[3]
Osiris is first attested in the middle of the Fifth dynasty of Egypt, although it is likely that he is worshipped much earlier;[4] the term Khenti-Amentiu dates to at least the first dynasty, also as a pharaonic title. Most information we have on the myths of Osiris is derived from allusions contained in the Pyramid Texts at the end of the Fifth Dynasty, later New Kingdom source documents such as the Shabaka Stone and the Contending of Horus and Seth, and, much later, in narrative style from the writings of Greek authors including Plutarch[5] and Diodorus Siculus.[6]
Osiris is not only a merciful judge of the dead in the afterlife, but also the underworld agency that granted all life, including sprouting vegetation and the fertile flooding of the Nile River. He is described as the “Lord of love”,[7] “He Who is Permanently Benign and Youthful”[8] and the “Lord of Silence”.[9] The Kings of Egypt were associated with Osiris in death — as Osiris rose from the dead they would, in union with him, inherit eternal life through a process of imitative magic. By the New Kingdom all people, not just pharaohs, were believed to be associated with Osiris at death if they incurred the costs of the assimilation rituals.[10]
Through the hope of new life after death Osiris began to be associated with the cycles observed in nature, in particular vegetation and the annual flooding of the Nile, through his links with Orion and Sirius at the start of the new year.[8] Osiris was widely worshiped as Lord of the Dead until the suppression of the Egyptian religion during the Christian era.[11][12]

fuck, i am so confused. anyway, this is day two of my vow of silence. it’s 6:00pm and i’m listening to sechskies. i have messed up twice today, one time of which was when i said, “what the fuck” after doing my egypt meditation. the other time was when i woke up this morning and, i think, also said, “what the fuck” because my neck was killing me for the second day in a row and that shit usually never happens. glad to say i haven’t fucked up since, though, even considering i went out for quite a row. i got slightly confused earlier and thought that i had lost my cellphone at stumptown (had to write them a little note to ask, and also had a funny interaction with an old man who was sitting at the table i had been sitting at and thought i was looking for a wall outlet and pointed me in the other direction, but i couldn’t properly charade to him what i was doing so it was just a lot of funny gestures between the two of us and him probably thinking i was a dummy). but the phone wasn’t there, as it was wrapped up in my blankets at home, so whatever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i was thinking it was quite funny that i would lose my main source of communication while i was not speaking. it would have actually been kinda a fun experiment (fun/frustrating, i’m sure).

when troy and i first got to stumptown this morning, i had wanted to buy a flourless cookie (they are soooooo good at stumptown) and had pointed at it for troy to order it, and he was just like, “i was thinking of getting this,” and pointed to some other pastry, and very much not on purpose i let out this crazy squeal and the barista at stumptown definitely gave me the weirdest look and only half-addressed me for the rest of the conversation. ha. it was… interesting.

i was also saying this morning that danny was telling us yesterday that william burroughs or someone did a vow of silence for a year, and then when he started speaking again, just rattled off one super profound poem. i told troy that because there was so much going on in my head that i couldn’t say — i write stuff down sometimes, but when you’re on a walk, or with other people, writing takes too long and is ignored and inappropriate — that i bet when i talk again i’ll have some shit to say. i dunno. maybe. it’s funny because i have to give a speech a week after i stop being silent about redefine, and the future of it, and such. but yeah, after i had “said” this william burroughs thing to troy, he had just gotten to a part in thus spoke zarathustra where zarathustra had come out of a 7-day coma or something and was massively enlightened by the end of it. a funny coincidence, considering he probably read less than a dozen pages while i was sitting next to him (and also, this page occurred within ten minutes of my mentioning the william burroughs thing).

but yeah, other than that, just went grocery shopping today and shit, and no one was really any the wiser. i will report more about the rest of the day if there is anything to report… for dinner, i’m making this cambodian fried rice noodles with pickled carrot and daikon!! STOKED!!! also already made this chipotle salsa which was ooookay. tomorrow i’m going to try making some chipotle peanut butter cookies (or brownies?), vegan basil pesto, and chipotle banana bread. chipotle’s the ingredient of the moment; it can’t be helped…

wait, real funnily: osiris is the lord of love… and the lord of silence. haha!!

i do declare…

i might be done trying to understand human beings. it’s pretty much impossible, and doesn’t really get you anywhere anyway. may as well just take things as they come. i’ve been assuming all along that human beings are good and honorable in almost all ways. not a great thing to do. but the flipside is just as horrible.

so, i suppose. the assumption needs to come about naturally. i will not assume anyone will do anything! instead, i will hope that they will be willing to talk about their ridiculousnesses, because we’re all fucking ridiculous. this plan won’t work so well for the people who can’t talk about themselves at all, unfortunately, so we’ll see about those people… but for those willing to communicate, anyway…

the only filter we have with which we can try and figure out what people are about is our own. and our filters stem from our experiences, which are so different from everyone else’s… try as we may, we are only interpreting using what we know, and it’s sooooooo limited. i feel that i have lived a lot of life and observed a lot of people, yet the things that happen and people who exist and the behaviors they exhibit are so far beyond my predictability that it is ultimately pointless to even attempt such. so, if possible, i am going to quit it!!!!

also feels really awesome to leave my phone behind and just be freeeeeeeeeee. free to write and make art.

yesterday was a most interesting day. most of it is lived in moments in time and hard to describe in a way that is actually beneficial for recollection. however…

started off jolly go happy lucky woot woot feeling alright. went to sound grounds to work, as usual.

gina met up with me. we had a massive giggle fest about who knows what. lots of funny t-shirts and synchronicities surrounding us, in the form of a joseph campbell book, a jason webley t-shirt, nietzsche shirt, etc.

followed that up with a meditation session with cole and austin which got interrupted a couple times. which is a bummer. the first couple times i was going to really awesome visual headspace. the third time was like… what the fuck is going on? i have no idea what the fuck is going on. the last image in my head was of a key, and who knows. pointless, really, i have no idea…

hung out for a while and then abe picked me up. we were going to go to east bar downtown to do our newest social experiment in people-watching! unfortunately, east is closed on sunday and monday nights. instead we went to 21st street, since i had to meet blake near there, and we went to muu-muu’s (though apparently there are a ton of bars on that street we need to hit up, including one called gypsy’s which seems fairly incredible). twas pretty fucking interesting. will scan notes in later… but we had a jolly good time. i ordered one moroccan coffee drink and got fucking WASTED pretty much, i think because i didn’t eat dinner. it was actually kind of amusing… the waitress was an interesting one. she was really awesome and nice when we got there, and then we asked her ONE question about her job and then she took off her glasses (abe said that was when the transformation happened) and suddenly kind of became a raging bitch. so bizarre. not sure what happened. ultimately, though, she gave us a free drink {?} and it was way confusing. good times.

at 1:15am i met up with blake on his lunch break and we shot the shit at a subway, where there were tons of people passing out. and i was really drunk. it’s so weird that he goes there everyday on his lunch break because that place is trippy as fuckkk. i dunno though, talking about mathematics governing the universe in a subway? what’s not to like.

anyhoot.

people are way more unpredictable than i would have thought in terms of their sexual liberties. haha. and i am surprisingly tolerant conceptually of this. i may or may not be a swinger in my idealized brain. haha. damn you equal parts emotional brain and equal parts logic brain! i don’t know who i am ever! but i do know that man, i can pretty much handle all things — all quirks of humans, cut and dry — if they are presented up-front and in a real ass way. it’s whatever, beyond that. honesty is pretty much the only thing that really matters. i am not the only one who feels this way. why is it that not so many people actually practice such a motto?

driving around that whole night / day — but especially night — tripped me out immensely because i never drive around portland at nighttime and it just felt soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo strange. i don’t know what it was. i had an hour-long walk home. it was fairly amusing. storefront windows are fragging weird.

GOT SCHEMEZ, YO.

what a day is.

i recently had this thought — what troy described as a “fight club” kind of moment — what i would only describe as a moment of clarity — however simple it might seem on the surface (it barely sounds like a revelation when written — but my, it certainly feels like one). troy has been ever telling me that time is but a concept — that it is not real — and while my terrestrial mind would be hard-pressed to believe that it is 100% non-existent — there has been a phenomena with me lately where i am discovering the value of what we call “a day” — whereas before i was constantly blathering on about how there are not enough hours in a day, lately i have been discovering that time is eternal? at least much, much more malleable than i had once thought before. when i had this realization it was the feeling that time is simple to manage — that i can practically do everything i want to do all the time. seriously, there are occasional logistical difficulties — i can’t be everywhere all the time or make a car drive the same distance in less time — but i can accomplish so much, and without as much stress as i would have previously thought, ever. i have been hyper-aware of time this past week in new mexico — this mystical land — and this feeling is unshakeable.

ROSWELL -> SANTA FE.
(written in the car, 03/17/11)

april 20th, 2011.
this was all in the car, after i left carlsbad caverns in southern new mexico and drove (yes, i was writing while driving — there was no one on the roads, after all, and it was clear on both sides for miles) from roswell to santa fe.

when i first entered carlsbad caverns, i had run down the entrance to the caves — probably like half a mile — not taking my time, barely noticing anything, really… and just concentrating on the act of walking downhill, stopping occasionally here and there, as people do, to take photographs and not really see. and then, i reached the “big room” (see picture above, which i did not take). the “big room” is a giant room in which there are many, many formations, which are all astounding, and remarkably different. a quarter way through the big room, it finally fucking dawned on me. i am in a fucking cave. a HUGE cave. i’m in a fucking cave, and it’s millions of years old or some shit, i’m not even noticing it at all??????? how am i not noticing it at all??

from that moment, i took my time. and when i left, i stopped by a small trail, where native americans had previously been thought to reside, and i climbed atop a tiny hill. when i got to the top of the hill, i meditated. i had meditated the previous morning and great sand dunes national park, and let me tell you… a morning meditation session in nature is truly like nothing else.

i had a series of revelations upon that mountaintop. they all sound really dumb when written — as many revelations do — but when i was up there, feeling them, it was powerful.

the first had to do with time, as i wrote down later. the second i am not writing until presently…

the second lied primarily in my method of meditation. i was meditating, lost in my own thoughts, til the wind started blowing strongly, and i came half back to reality, in a sense. i was centered in that midpoint which i love so much — between wake and dream. there, i began to look to the wind as an indicator of when i would stop meditating. i had been doing it for a while, and somehow, a rule i had newly formed for myself involved meditating until the wind stopped. it didn’t stop for a long while, and i found myself fixated upon the point of it blowing. upon realizing this, i was a bit soured upon the idea — i was obviously not that deeply entrenched in my meditation — and it dawned on me that i was willing the wind to stop so i could stop. it was just a rule i had made for myself, as i do. but that desire reflected so much a desire i always see and mock in my parents. for example, whenever we go somewhere and the weather is great, they’ll thank god, or whenever we go to a restaurant and a good parking spot opens up, they’ll thank god. i found all of that rather ludicrous, yet i was doing the same thing — albeit in a non-verbal manner — but my thoughts were selfish, and human… i was begging that nature stop for ME, lil’ ol’ me!!, so i could finally cease meditating because of this stupid rule i had invented. how human, and how selfish of me!

realizing that was important, i think. it involved taking nature for granted, in a sense. i am not certain whether my attempts to remedy were laudable, but i attempted to, by thanking the moment, and the situation — simply acknowledging the fact that i am a silly human and that i had made this rule, and sorry nature, but now i will depart, by my own accord, because it was silly of me to expect you to stop for me. thank you nature, i must depart. and then i left, after giving thanks.

a mile a minute.

i am writing and speaking a mile a minute, so many thoughts crowding my brain. it’s impossible to prioritize what to do first. gotta try and find a way to quiet the inner voice. thus far, on the rare occasion that i have tried to remedy the chattering mind, meditation has worked. i’ll figure out later if this is a thing to stick to.

went to fubonn this morning with gina and rose and got. all. the. snacks. it was their first time there, and their minds were blown by the “asian”-ness. we then went to kenny’s noodle house (with pete) for some good ol’ fashioned hong kong noodlies. some good conversations throughout the course of the day, but finally we all went to watch “the illusionist” at the theatre and i was just feeling like i was watching a film rolling down a hallway, a bowling alley, and could not engage. brain elsewhere. like yesterday at the YU lecture. kind of the only thing that can engage me these days is direct conversation with human beings. all else is floaty.

well, alrighty, then.

well, funny day. sleep on sleep needed to determine next course of action. hey, i have a headache. i think i ate too much sugar. funny, it’s not even alcohol-related. ick. gotta wake up at like 8:30am. i should go to bed. yeah.

ps.

skeng.

pps.
whoa, really? i haven’t blogged in two days? weird. felt like i’d been writing daily. to summarize: i was bad. saw 7-minute 48-hour film festival movie michael and homies were working on, and it turned out pretty fucking amazing. went hiking at multnomah falls today. flaked on another friend cause i’m a punk and it was too cold to go river floating (of course, after i said i couldn’t go, the sun came out… fuck, i’m a bastard). roomie and cser hooked up. went to a meditation to live music thing with gina and it was alright, but guided meditation is hard for me to focus on (first time trying).

meditation update.

not much to say. nick is moving to hong kong on sunday, so there’s been some seeing of him to say goodbye action. tonight’s included a somewhat-birthday party for his roommate, johnny. all three of them are down with the meditations (and their house is kind of a place for it… a luddite household with no internet but lots of good vibes place for it). johnny decided against going to a bar and decided to have a small gathering (in fact, i was kind of out of place, as i think i was the only person who didn’t really know him) where everyone (like ten people) meditated in a room together. it was pretty cool. it was a half hour, which is tied for the longest i’ve done it (i think i did it in korea for the same-ish amount of time), but it flew by. afterwards, people kind of shared their experiences — i didn’t — but a lot of them were battling some pretty heavy internal demons and such. one included a lady whose mom had just died the previous month and whose father had died five years prior, and she basically said that she felt a “weight” all the time on herself, and that it really freaked her out to even think about meditation prior to doing it, because she thought that she wouldn’t be able to bear 30 minutes left alone to her own thoughts. it’s fascinating.

anyway. as for me, my experience was quite different. i didn’t really have much negative to focus on although the past day and a half has been a little bit tumultuously confusing. nothing i can’t handle, though, and nothing that can’t be fixed by just waiting around. i dunno.

the most notable thought i had from meditation tonight i will copy and paste from a conversation i’m having with alex. this was my experience:

yeah i had these interesting moments of somewhat clarity
where
i had my eyes closed the whole time
but i would get these like
breaths of wind
where i thought really clearly
and
the thoughts weren’t important
i don’t even know what they were about
inane shit
but the feeling
was that i was watching my own thoughts
from an outside point of view
i was the third party
watching my thoughts
but completely clearly
not really associated with any visuals but in an abstract way, it felt like my eyes were open (they weren’t) and that i could see clearly (not even sure i was seeing anything)

anyway, i’ve found that in group settings, i’m a pretty quiet person. i think i probably come off to a lot of people as really boring, or shy, or something. a lot of it is that i don’t really care to run my mouth that much. there’s a lot of things i could say, telling people my opinions about this and that, but there’s a lot of people, i feel, who act like they are experts and always need to mouth off their opinions. i don’t think i feel the need to do that all that often. i have really strong opinions about things frequently, but i tend to ignore them a lot of the time. i dunno. not ignore them, but just… i find that sometimes when i voice these opinions… that are constrasting… people just go quiet and have no way of arguing back or even having a discussion about stuff. i don’t want that. i want open dialogue. but it seems a lot of times people are bringing up completely silly points that are not founded in logic, and then i’ll bring in a piece of logic, and it’ll somehow destroy their whole argument and that’s that. and then it’s awkward because i feel like i’m arguing and shattering their argumentative dreams, but i’m just trying to bring some logic into the matter.

rant rant rant.
rant rant.
rant.