Advice for December 2012 … and beyond

Advice for December 2012 … and beyond.

         (from David Tresemer)

I am frequently asked, “What’s the truth of December 21? Will the prophecies come true????” Here’s my advice about how to work with that time:

On 21-22 December (with an increasingly popular precursor on 12 December), the spiritual world will be there as always, caressing the human and physical world. Astrologically, there is nothing special about these days. There was a true event in the heavens that is having major impacts – the eclipse of the Sun by Venus in June, and I wrote a book about that event and its consequences: The Venus Eclipse of the Sun 2012. The effect of that rare event will be with us, as ripples, for years to come.

However, something will happen on those December dates. There will be a powerful upwelling – a surge, an earthquake – of human fantasy and hope, dreams and illusions. When the special things promised don't happen, the buildup will be followed by a collapse, and a depression. 

Therefore, the first order of importance on that day is to protect yourself from the illusions of the mob – the crowd, as a crowd at a soccer or football game, or a wild political rally. Being in the center of that frenzy can be very disorienting – difficult to keep your sense of balance. You may feel a huge swell of energy, a kind of inebriating joy, a whoosh of light. The irony here is that all those are actual indicators of a true experience of spiritual uplift. However, a crowd can create such phenomena without being able to sustain them. You can have a taste of what might come with diligent inner work.

Or it might be used as a mask for a cynically premeditated tragedy by those in power – because people expect it, or will explain it as Mayan sorcery.

You can imagine riding out on the edge of this mass appeal to meet true spiritual beings, as you might ride a mighty wave on a surfboard. That might be useful, though it is difficult to keep your balance at the edge of a wave that big.

         The function of prophecy is to motivate the will-power of human beings to meet the predicted waves – to apply themselves, to improve, to grow. The spiritual worlds will not do this for us – would you do all the homework of a child in school? You might perhaps help with the homework, but you wouldn’t take away the experience of learning from the child.

Very important is to be ready to pick up the pieces of others' disappointments after the wave passes. And to ask them (and yourself), “What am I really seeking? What am I yearning for? Do my fantasies take me away from this good earth, this great feminine being of love? Do my fantasies take me away from the pains of my life – my ‘homework’ – from which I’m meant to learn and grow?”

We grow every day, we learn to love. We let love rise up from our inside. The heart swells. Every day we have a new opportunity to learn to love. It sometimes sounds schmaltzy, this love word, but it is the most serious task of joy that we have before us.

Mondragon Part V

Notes on a visit to the Mondragon worker-owner cooperative system, by David and Lila Tresemer, September 2012 (www.MountainSeas.com.au and www.DavidandLilaTresemer.com), PART V

Now for some observations outside of the congratulations for their successful economic model. We would like to speak about spiritual forces. David asked one of the managers, “As your movement was begun by a Catholic priest (Arizmendiarriete), did the success of this movement bring people to the Church?” Answer: “Yes, though many belonged to the Church already. But that has ended. Now only the elderly attend Church, except for funerals, when other people come. Now half of the weddings are in the Church, and half are ‘social.’” “Social” meant outside the Church in a public setting, where the focus is on …#2 in our list at the beginning of these notes. Mondragon has changed the old Biblical polarity “you can’t serve two masters, and must choose between God (spirit) and Mammon (money).” That comes from Gospel of Matthew Chapter 6, verse 24. The polarity has become Labor (humanity) versus Money.

After this visit to Mondragon and this conversation, I view this now as a three-some:

1. LABOR – Humanity – what we do with our time, our energy, our work, and our attention. The highest value here is freedom of expression. Work is meant to benefit and enhance a sane world.

2. MONEY– as capital. If you watch money closely, you realize that it functions as an a-moral force. It simply seeks places to grow, no matter what the method – organic food and weapons are only differentiated by their ability to make more money. The characterization in the Bible of money as expressing a negative spirit – Mammon – becomes clearer when you spend time at gatherings of investors, as David occasionally does. The values there are on clearing away all regulations that have been put into place in order to protect Humanity, in order for Money to grow more freely. You can understand these conferences as servants of money. The hyper-rich think that they control money, and occasionally realize that they are the servants to money. Mondragon realizes this and insists that “money is not the master – it is the tool.” The way they do this is through cooperatives, that is, the Labor factor above.

3. SPIRIT. When you begin to understand that there is a spirit of humanity and that there is a spirit of money, you look for the greater spiritual force behind the context for all of this. Call it Gaia, or call it Mother Mary, or call it The Virgin, or call it Jesus, or call it any number of things – and then ask what are the values of that Greater Picture, that includes the earth (#4 in our original list). Don’t settle for claims of spiritual prominence by holy wars, which are demonic spirits working with money to suppress Humanity.

We realized the importance of spirit near the end of our visit when we suddenly “woke up,” so to speak, from participation in the tour – hearing speakers, taking tours of buildings and factories, talking with people, etc. – to seeing our surroundings. A key piece came from one of the translators, who said, “People from Mondragon can easily work in China or Brazil for three months or more, if they see it as temporary. However, if you ask them to move their home from one Basque valley across the hills into another Basque valley, it is quite difficult for them to do.” Aha – we looked around us and could easily sense what we had missed before – the power of an angelic presence, what some people recognize as Spirit of Place, or the archangel who acts as the Folk Soul – and especially powerful here. When you see that the cooperative movement arises to ensure the connection of people with their community and PLACE, and you realize that the angel (or archangel) or that PLACE assists in the cooperative initiatives, you get a very different sense of how exportable this idea might be. For creating a successful cooperative is not just about applying a step-wise installation manual. It requires great clarity about the support you’re getting from your community, your geographical place, and your archangel.

Even if you can’t “see” archangels, you can sense these presences. We tested the waters with our group for conversation about this sort of thing and found soon that this was not territory in which others had much experience. Or they were shy, an unfortunate by-product of the monopoly that extreme religion has created on talk about Spirit.

I also wondered about congruency. Here are people working for years, building up a good retirement fund, and then there’s that last day that they leave the factory. Several people mentioned that they don’t look back. But if they were building or creating something congruent to their culture that they’re protecting, then you would find the elders hanging around the centers of production, just because they had a passion for it. It seems that the elders don’t come back to visit the factories for washing machines. Then I wondered, “Are washing machines congruent with any culture? In fact, aren’t they actually congruent with every culture – in that everyone in a ‘developed country’ uses washing machines? Or… is there a way that they could become more congruent?” These are outstanding questions at the end of our journey.

Rudolf Steiner recommended a three-fold social organization that included:

THINKING – the sphere of culture and ideas, where the key word is freedom of expression, and the currency streams from ideas.

FEELING – the social or middle sphere of political rights, what Mondragon has cultivated in the ownership by workers of their production, and their rights in voting in their cooperatives. The key word here is equality, and the currency streams from the heart.

WILLING – the economic sphere where the key word is brotherhood/sisterhood, working together for the common good. The currency can be money, though more truthfully the currency is human energy employed in work towards a goal.

Mondragon has been very successful, though imperfectly as they admit, in realizing a balance of these three.

As we watch the imbalances in the several models that we presented, in the primacy of OWNERS in Part I and the primacy of MONEY in this Part V, we see that this experiment in human organization has much to recommend it, and we wish it great success – both in the valleys of the Basque country and the other places in the world where it’s being tried.

End of notes from our trip.

Mondragon Notes Part IV

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Notes on a visit to the Mondragon worker-owner cooperative system, by David and Lila Tresemer, September 2012 (www.MountainSeas.com.au and www.DavidandLilaTresemer.com), PART IV

We were a bit surprised when we attended the university to discover how little they understood about history, culture and context. Mondragon may face the challenge of being too isolated from world affairs and awareness of global concerns outside their own geography. One of the members of our visiting group said that the first response to this system in the United States would be, “Oh, that’s just Marxist,” with the subtext that it’s communist and will take away your rights and make your life more miserable. Actually, in Mondragon the high value on freedom underpins the whole system – freedom from the whims of overpaid executives at big companies. However, we understood how this knee-jerk reaction of “Marxist!” would occur.

So we asked a student, “How do you respond to criticism that this system of cooperatives is Marxist?”

The student looked puzzled, “Who?”

“Karl Marx,” we said, “social theorist of the 19^th century?”

Blank look.

We asked further, “Do they teach about Karl Marx or the philosophy of the relation of labor and capital?” The student shook her head, “Sorry, I haven’t heard of him, and no they don’t.”

Unbelieving that these students hadn’t been prepared to respond to the criticism of “Marxist!,” we asked three more students. Same thing. They had never heard of him - or any of the other philosophers who have wrestled with these experiments of social organization. They simply thought that the worker-owner cooperative ideology stood on its own.

We realize that one’s philosophy of work has to be governed by your sense of “where is this leading?” It seems that the western ideal pictures a rise to the high echelons of the corporate world, bonuses of stock options and baskets of money – then a private jet, a gated mansion in a gated community likely in the Caribbean, with staff who are not uppity because they come from a poor neighborhood and can easily be replaced. The ideal and goal of Mondragon is to ensure a vibrant and healthy community of human beings putting their efforts into work that provides their families with an adequate income while producing a product useful to other people in the world.

The question: “Is it possible to have a people-focused structure that can be competitive and resilient?” Mondragon answers, “Yes!”

Tours of interested people are now coming from all over the world. Because, no matter what the reactions are – “Marxist!” or “Hidden Capitalist!” – this system creates jobs, maintains jobs, and solidifies whole communities.

We may have gotten some of our facts incorrect, and there are plenty of other facts to learn about their systems. Several managers repeated, “This isn’t paradise, and we’re not perfect,” same words, which suggests that the central group devised this response to criticism. What they have is not paradise, but very hopeful.

More in the last part, Part V.

Mondragon Part III

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Notes on a visit to the Mondragon worker-owner cooperative system, by David and Lila Tresemer, September 2012 (www.MountainSeas.com.au and www.DavidandLilaTresemer.com), PART III

Management at Mondragon has the job of figuring out what the world marketplace is doing. Fagor, their big factory, makes clothes washing machines (and other things) in big factories with lots of moving parts and expensive equipment. Our guide said that, “In ten years, all of these kinds of things will be made in Africa and Asia. It’s our job to figure out what will be needed in the future, and begin retooling our factories now.” He said that it requires a 500,000 Euro investment to create one job in a foundry. That’s 50 million Euros for 100 jobs. It requires a 200,000 Euro investment to create one service job (without so much expensive equipment). When you look at how an investment might be made redundant in a short time period, you hesitate to make that investment!

To repeat, tensions exist in competition with other manufacturers.  The Mondragon cooperatives are islands of cooperation in a sea of world-wide competition.

The system of governance in the cooperative gives more power to the individual.  Thus there is an expectation that the individual is educated about the company, and motivated for best interests of the company rather than solely for their personal welfare.

As a result, during these times they have been known to vote to take salary cuts of up to 12%, keeping everyone employed, as that is the highest value.

Brief history of their founding: In the 1930’s the Basque valleys could not be reached easily as the roads were poor. The Basque language was unlike Spanish or French. The Spanish government cut them off from many services. Poverty was rampant. A Catholic priest assigned to them, Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta – sometimes called Arizmendi (Ah-rees-MEN-dee) for short – determined to assist their development. He began with five people who shared his values, and began a school to train them in technical matters. Soon after they began constructing clothes washing machines and electrical heaters. It took years to form other cooperatives, start their own bank, etc. – the long slow growth curve that begins horizontal and now has gone near vertical.

Arizmendiarrieta means oak (ariz), mountain (mendi), place of stones (arrieta). He put in years of hard work to organize the people in the Basque country, beginning in Assarte (Mondragon), Spain. Some quips from him: “To democratize power, we must socialize knowledge.” Thus shows his emphasis on education that continues to this day. “The ideas you don’t put into practice are only reflections.” Thus his emphasis on actions. “Your savings or your suitcase.” – meaning either put your money into the new bank that they were starting, or leave town.

Values are generally different: They value the best interest of the Whole, rather than promote the supremacy of the individual. They take care of each other, and help find employment for another coop member if his or her job becomes redundant. 

Cooperative of cooperatives (120 of them altogether): Once in that group, they consider their main task is to keep all employed. They move people around as market conditions change.

Some details:

·      In Spain you must employ handicapped people for 2.5% of your workforce or give 2.5% of your profits to funds that support the handicapped. Mondragon has chosen the first, and they are happy at how this has made their companies more diverse and interesting, and responsive to the communities in which they live.

·      Unemployment in Spain 40% (or higher). Unemployment in the cooperatives 0%.

·      Taxes on companies in Basque country: 28.6% of profit. However, if you are a coop and you have a 10% Education Fund and at least a 20% Reserve Fund (Mondragon averages 45% for the Reserve Fund) and at least 80% of your workers are members of the coop, your taxes to Spain are 10%.

·      The bank, Caja Laboral, spends 40.60 Euros to get 100 Euros in profit, compared to the usual expenditure of 50 Euros. Their delinquency rate is 5% (vs. other banks 9%). They have 1.2 million clients.

·      They have a rule for change: 25% of their products should be new every four years.

To become a member, it costs $15000 euros, plus 3-year (or is it one? – my notes are not clear on this point) trial period of provisional membership (the worker is paid during this time)—to be sure there is alignment all around. They currently have 84,000 members in the Basque region and 15,000 throughout other parts of Spain and the world.

Some problems in our view:

·      They don’t address their own food production for their area. Their businesses are primarily for export, such as clothes washing machines to go all over the world.

·      The factories are big, metallic and lonely (not really different from anywhere else).

·      They currently focus on manufacturing as their business (washing machines, solar panels, …) which puts them at the mercy of international markets where the rules are quite different, e.g., low wages in Asia. 

In many places in the world, workers don’t want to share in the risk of the enterprise. Coops aren’t for everyone. But they do provide a model for cooperation at its best in regards to a community taking care of their own. The ideal of a group of people pooling their time, energy, money, and ideas to make something work is terrific. It contrasts with people who say, “Just give me a job. I don’t care what I do. If I don’t like it, I can drop out and get welfare.”

Coops aren’t the total answer, but they go a long way towards improving the situation for workers.

More in the next Part IV.

Mondragon Part II

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Notes on a visit to the Mondragon worker-owner cooperative system, by David and Lila Tresemer, September 2012 (www.MountainSeas.com.au and www.DavidandLilaTresemer.com), PART II

A 600-person committee oversees the entirety of the 120 cooperatives. If business is failing in one sector of their businesses, instead of laying off workers from those cooperatives, they strive to find employment for those workers in cooperatives in other sectors that are doing all right. The entire 100,000-person workforce is looking after itself by ensuring employment for everyone. Imagine those meetings of 600 people trying to manage their 100,000 members effectively. Prior to the Global Financial Crisis and its second wave that is now very hard on Spain, it was much easier. Since 2008 and especially in recent years, it has been very challenging. Yet they’ve succeeded, and their unemployment is 0% whereas Spain’s is 40%+.

Here are some of the details. Of a company’s profits (gross income minus cost of materials of production, cost of labor, cost of overhead, and taxes), 10% goes to an Education Fund, 45% goes to a Reserve Fund (replacement and upgrade of buildings and equipment), and 45% goes to the workers. That last 45% doesn’t go directly to workers but to a Capitalization Fund (basically a large pool of money that the company then invests) that is held in trust by the company. The company pays the worker 7.5% annual interest on the worker’s accumulated share of the Capitalization Fund. When the worker retires or leaves, the worker’s share of the Capitalization Fund is paid out completely to the worker.

So how do you become a member of a cooperative? It takes three years probation, an investment entry fee of 15000 Euros (as of today about 20000 US$), and an approval vote of all your coworkers. Once you’re in, you’re part of the system of cooperatives and are ensured employment until you retire. You can be voted out but that is very rare.

To realize this system, they had to create their own bank. You can go to a bank as a group of equal-worker-owners, and pull together collateral from everyone to satisfy the bank that it can risk loaning you money to buy equipment to realize your idea. But it’s easier if the bank was begun by the Mondragon system, as they understand more readily. The bank gives a special interest rate to cooperatives.

Furthermore, they have developed some amazing support systems for their efforts:

·      Finance – that bank, Cajo Laboral, is the second largest bank in Spain

·      Education. They started a university (see below the story of how it began), and this gives them a steady stream of trained workers and inventors/designers, as well as research facilities for some of their inventions

·      R & D – Research and Development. Some cooperatives are dedicated to R & D. Companies on average pay more than the usual for R & D – typical for industry being 5%, and Mondragon’s average 9%.

·      Social Welfare. They have a very good pension plan and health care plan. The latter includes preventive health care, meaning attention to nutrition and exercise – so there is a nod in the direction that we were hoping to see, though not at the level we had hoped. In this should be put the social welfare of others, as there are various projects of technical assistance to other countries that the cooperatives fund. They are aware of the studies that show that trust is good for your health. Inequity and distrust are bad for your health.

Now for some observations so far. The cooperative system can be looked at as a means to preserve worker power in a region where the workers were severely repressed in the Franco years. Now they have fought back with a comprehensive system that supports their community. You have to see Mondragon from this point of view. It is a mountainous area where the valleys are filled with six-story apartment buildings that house the Basques, speaking their unusual language whose origins are not understood. This can be viewed as a mechanism to protect a community, in this case, several beautiful valleys linked by a common cultural heritage. Inside the system, it looks like a great invention to support the community. Outside the system, it looks like another set of companies who are competing in the global marketplace – against the low wages of Chinese workers, against the government subsidies here and there, against rip-offs and copiers of R&D’s good ideas, etc. The Mondragon cooperatives sub-contract to other companies that exploit their workers (low pay, no benefits, the throw-away-worker mentality) in China and South America. Thus from the outside they appear to play the capitalist game, which the apologists view as necessary to keep that cash flow from outside to inside, into the cooperative system.

More story in Part III.

Mondragon Part I

Notes on a visit to the Mondragon worker-owner cooperative system, by David & Lila Tresemer, September 2012 (www.MountainSeas.com.au and www.DavidAndLilaTresemer.com), PART I

These notes are intended as helpful for those considering alternate forms of shaping social initiatives in the world – how people work together to make something.

First off, credit is due to Georgia Kelly, leader of the Praxis Peace Institute in Sonoma, for putting together several groups of people to tour the facilities in Mondragon, Spain. We were on her fifth tour with 16 other people. She has done more than anyone to introduce the Mondragon principles and techniques to the West.

The question is: How can people come together to create a viable business that cares for the quadruple bottom line of a venture. These items are NOT in order of preference as they are all important.

1.     1. The success of the venture that awards those who set up the venture (the inventors/designers/entrepreneurs, who become the owners and stockholders) – OWNERS

2.     2. The care of the lives of the people who work there to make the products or services that go into the world (the workers) – WORKERS

3.     3. The care of the customer so that they receive something of high quality and safety – CUSTOMERS

4.     4. The care for the environment from which materials are taken to make the products and services, and to which materials are returned when the product has been used up (and also when there is waste in the process of manufacturing) – ENIVRONMENT

In our naiveté, Lila and I had assumed that forward thinking people would include all of those considerations, including others:

·      * good health through regular exercise such as yoga or morning eurythmy or Tai Chi

·      * an emphasis on participatory sports rather than on spectator sports

·     *  health through attention to nutrition including an emphasis on organic food free of pesticides and GMOs

·     *  a sense of the spiritual connections to the abundant earth and heavens that supports all of our activities

·      * gratitude for life expressed through ceremonies of the seasons

·      * and so on.

·      * One more: an ideal pictured by Rudolf Steiner about central Europe in the 19^th century – workers who at night practice the violin and join together in little ensembles for the sheer joy of music.

None of these are part of the Mondragon system or the culture of the area. These enlightened positions are as rare as elsewhere, with a bit more in the health area that we discuss further below. Indeed, the quadruple bottom line is not operative in ways that one can find elsewhere. The place where Mondragon puts its entire attention is on #2, and on smoothing the age-old tension between #1 and #2. Yes, they pay attention to #3, as any company desiring longevity would do, and to #4, as many companies do, but it’s not at the top of their list. They succeed in not valuing only #1 which is tearing the USA apart. They succeed in supporting actual human beings who do the work - #2. Well done for that.

In regular capitalist ventures, the emphasis has come to be more and more on profit, even at the cost of longevity of the initiative. The managers are made into owners through bonuses of stock options (the privilege to buy a stock at a specified low price) awarded to them by the Board of Directors (made up of high-level managers of other companies). Their efforts are to raise the price of the stock through whatever means available, often at the expense of #2, #3, and #4. Then they “exercise the option,” buying low and instantly selling high. At the largest corporations, the Chief Executive Officers earn in income many hundreds of times more than the lowest-paid line-workers. The salaries and the bonuses of cash and stock options have been gutting companies. The workers have been laid off and, as the experts say, “these jobs are not coming back.”

Consider a very different model. The 120 Mondragon cooperatives in several different business areas employ approximately 100,000 people. Each cooperative is run by a committee made of the workers. As they all stand to gain or lose by the decisions of the committee, the workers – whether management or line-workers – vote in the best interest of all. One person one vote. Managers make no more than 6 times what the line-worker makes.

And here is the unusual aspect of their model. Their highest goal in the above list of the quadruple bottom line is #2. Their job is to maintain employment for all of their members. Even if the company votes to take a pay cut across the board – workers and managers alike.

More story, and increasing details, in Part II.

Christ-Sophia - who or what are they?

Lila and David are offering a workshop:

Christ-Sophia Creation Myth, August 24, Friday, 5:30 PM to August 26, Sunday, 2:30 PM. Description and explanation below. To sign up, or for more information, contact Lila at LilaPlays - AT - gmail.com. $320 includes five meals and two nights accommodation.

Christ-Sophia Creation Myth
Lila and David are offering a sleep-over – an Exploration – from August 24 to 26 to create a short-term residential community with this theme. The title begs certain questions:
• Who or what is Christ?
• Who or what is Sophia?
• What is creation?
• What is myth?
Because of the many misunderstandings about these terms, we’d like to speak briefly about what they mean. We’ll start at the end and work backwards.
• What is myth?
The notion of myth has gotten a bad reputation lately as something visioned, something promised, yet false. According to the modern view, it’s an illusion. However, we see myth working in a different plane – it’s something that never happened, but is happening all the time. We will explore this conundrum more closely in our Exploration.
• What is creation?
“Where you are going” requires an understanding of “where you came from.” What is your origin? And the bigger question: Where do people originate? Where does the world originate?
• Who or what is Sophia?
Greek for feminine wisdom, we will explore the being and reality of Sophia. For this, our location surrounded by Nature at MorningStar house will be very helpful.
• Who or what is Christ?
For most people this is the most challenging term. Christianity, especially fundamentalist Christianity, has claimed exclusive privilege to answer this question. We disagree. To us, Christ cannot be defined so easily, and cannot be confined to a historical story (of Jesus) nor to quotes from the Christian Bible. More accessibly, Christ means light, and love – and we will work together in our Exploration to rediscover the meanings of those words too. This Exploration has nothing to do with convincing you of a particular dogma about Christ, but rather of re-opening routes of genuine personal experience to that being.
Our methods include living together because we will find that in the small actions of life await abundant opportunities to experience the Christ-Sophia Creation. We will read and enact aspects of the Gnostic Creation Story; we will create together direct experience (i.e.‘gnostic’) in Nature, with the Being of Sophia, and with the StarFire energy of Christos.  The key to this Time is that each of us creates the Seed of Anthropos (the Possible Human) through the balanced communion of Christ-Sophia within.

Venus Eclipse Video ~ How to Harness these Beautiful Energies!

Please Share This Video ~ and Enjoy this Venus Transit / Eclipse!

Meeting the Venus Eclipse of the Sun

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Meeting the Venus Eclipse of the Sun

There are ways to meet the opportunities of this event, methods that are valuable all the time, but especially now. I have written about this in my Venus Eclipse book, but here I give a summary. If it’s too brief, go to the book. The summary of the summary comes in step #5 below.

1.     All of our pictures of the world are powered by energy. Giordano Bruno termed these “erotic phantasms.” Eros – passion, desire, Venus! – motivate and energize phantasms – pictures of this-is-the-way-it-is, dreams, visualizations, ideas....

2.     Eros/Venus will be stimulated and made turbulent by the eclipse on June 5/6 (the exact time is less important as we are in this rare celestial event – by anticipation – right now, and will be for some months.) That restless eros will seek new images to empower.

3.     Marketers, especially of technological gadgets, have used and will use this undirected eros. Going-with-the-flow on your part accepts that the world will be imagined by corporate marketers.

4.     You can use that energy too by creating pictures of the ideal for yourself and for the world – not vague woo-woo pictures but rather very specific and detailed pictures of anything that arouses your interest.

5.     For example, with the situation at Fukushima still teetering on the edge of its largest explosion, you could imagine a that the explosion does not happen, that heroic scientists work out how to remove the fuels to a safe place, and that all species develop a capacity to learn from and transform radioactivity. In terms of the mythic images in the VenusEclipse book, this means envisioning the taming of the divine fire-bird to subdue its expressions on the earth.

6.     If you cannot go to new pictures – if the world as it you perceive it holds you in its thrall, then you can focus on that picture of how-things-are each night before sleeping. Look closely at the details, and hold it in your mind, for just a few minutes. Spiritual beings will take it up through the night and in the morning (or in a few days) you will have an insight about how to penetrate even the most difficult problems.

7.     In any case, take this opportunity to cultivate your relationship to ideals. Those imaginations will focus your desire – the restless eros of this time – in ways that will be healthy for you and for everyone else.

A good time to play Bach
A personal report on house concert near Hobart by Gotthard Killian on cello for a Bach cello suite and Danae Killian for Bach’s Goldberg Variations:
I was buoyed up by joy in many places, finding the complexities like tiny hallways down which I wandered – by force of the music and, of course, choosing to follow that force. So many notes and phrases were unexpected, taking me into new places that I had not forseen. This live music was most exhilarating. What remains with me are not notes or tones – there were too many of them – but rather intervals, no, more accurately the feeling of intervals, and of certain places along the route where I knew that I was being led not to the obvious but to the new. Afterwards, Danae mentioned to me that Bach cannot be seen as a child of his time, being even more modern than today, and I could see in this music why she would say this. I found out also that she plays the Goldberg variations every morning upon waking! When at the very end of the Goldberg variations, Gotthard joined with his cello, it gave a most touching picture of conversation, and it helped to pull me back from the hallways in the cosmos – it must have been the Saturn sphere – indeed, the Saturn of the concert lay exactly square to the Neptune at Bach’s death, and the Saturn at Bach’s death lay exactly square to the Neptune of the concert, showing a similarity of outer planets reaching into the Saturn sphere. Bach’s Death-Mercury was exactly opposite to the place of Mercury in the heavens at the concert, indicating a line of communication open to portray what Bach intended in his life. Overseeing all was the location of Jupiter at Bach’s death, in the middle of the Ram, exactly overhead, at the same location as the Sun at the Resurrection. From this we note themes, and opportunities, for a transmission through composer and through musician of spiritual realities.

Evolving relations to the stars.
I am finishing a new look for a new website on star wisdom. That is very exciting. It always takes far longer to do these things.... We've been at it two years.... And during that time everything has gotten better.
The newest is Tea with Your Mentor. I will explain that in a few days.
This post was merely to say that I've been working very hard, and we have something coming soon that will be a pleasure to everyone!

Mind-Body-Spirit Festival

I thought you might be interested in a recent experience that we’ve had: We decided to promote our new book, One-Two-ONE, and the DVD, Couple’s Illumination, both about relationships, by taking a tiny booth (7 feet by 7 feet) at a large public trade fair — huge showroom, ceilings 40 feet high, 120 booths, a special room with 50 psychics at 50 square tables (with a chair for the client – the line formed quickly each morning to sign up for these readings of all sorts), clairvoyants with microphones on one of three stages, purveyors of fine chocolate, aura jewelry, exercise equipment, etc., all sorts of loosely connected things and services, also Scientology and aura photographs! Over four days, 17,000+ people came through. It was exhausting and fascinating to watch all the different kinds of people. We put up a sign that said “Free Brief Relationship Tune-Up,” and had dozens of people come in for this little exercise (“In Whose Name”) from our book – totally fun, and we think very useful to many. We met some great people, and in the end, we don’t think we’ll ever do that again. Our two back-ups got sick, so we were there all day every day. We might help out with such a venture in the future, but not do it all day every day. We gave two talks on two different stages, well attended, and that felt positive.
On another note, we are singing a lot – in a 40-person come-one-come-all choir that sings some simple stuff (Beatles, even Cole Porter) as well as some complicated four-part pieces, also in a nine-person a capella group with much more complicated material, and Lila and I are singing together duets with our music teacher. So we sing to the mountain, who is our tutor for this life-stage.
Lila is writing as am I, one of the means whereby we open to the creativity flowing so freely here.

Why Ceremony? (part 1)

By David Tresemer, Ph.D.

Why ceremony? The StarHouse offers many ceremonies throughout the year. Why attend a ceremony? Who benefits? How? I’ll give my answer now, and then explain. The answer is, for the individual: Ceremony can make you a much better person, much more awake, much stronger and more resilient, and more ready for the unexpected acts of heroism—large and small—that life demands of you.

I present my reasons for this answer in the form of very personal notes and observations gleaned over time.

Neuroplasticity

You have in your nervous system something like a hundred billion neurons, each with many connections to other neurons. Every encounter you have through your brain’s agents—those extensions of your nervous system called your senses—causes new connections to be made and old connections to be pruned away. Every sensory moment results in thousands of neuronal adjustments and many millions of chemical alterations. Yet this describes only the hardware part of your brain. The software extends beyond the brain and its agents to other places, and even to other times, in ways that are known vaguely to many people. Some people have trained these capacities for extended sensing.

Changes in your nervous system—increasing complexity, developing new capacities, such as clairvoyance and wisdom—continues until the moment of your death. You are never the same as yesterday, you are never “all grown-up” in the past tense. You are never “there” or “arrived” or “finished” or “retired,” but rather always engaged with the growth of your neurological complexity. A rule of thumb, “You grow until your last breath,” reminds you of your responsibility for that growth.

All the siddhis, or powers, of the yogis are possible. As the psychic explorer, Robert Munroe, once told me about extra-ordinary abilities, “If one person can accomplish something, then it’s possible; if two people can accomplish it, then it’s teachable. After that, the many.”

One can ask, “Why would I wish to do those things—fly across the room, know what someone is going to do tomorrow, lift a thousand pounds?” It’s good to ask these questions, because over time, your brain will accommodate by wiring you for the capacities that you routinely emphasize: That’s neuroplasticity. The genie of your brain, when the lamp is found and rubbed, offers you what you wish. Thus, right from the beginning, you have to ask yourself, “Why? What do I wish for? What is the purpose of existence?”

Purpose

You may not be able to answer the question of purpose of the ceremony or the questions from which it stems, “What is my purpose, what is my destiny, and what is the specific deed I’m supposed to accomplish in this lifetime?” Most people have little idea about the purpose of their lives beyond some vague general ideas that they get from church—“be good”—or from popular culture—“get rich.”

You can approach a sense of purpose by understanding your intention for attending a ceremony.

The Most Common Intentions

When people attend a wedding, I observe that they don’t know what to do with themselves. They don’t know what to expect or to intend for their experience, and very few understand that the ceremony relies on their quality of attendance to make the wedding sparkle. In speaking with people, many seem to concentrate on the party and drinks afterwards, or seeing old friends. Some emphasize the words of the vows, some the kiss at the end of the vows, and some the entire spectacle of The Dress and The Flowers. In a wedding, people feel obliged to be present, to witness what occurred, to say they had been there. Beyond that, the intentions are many and varied. Thus the common intentions, especially for familiar ceremonies, are confused.

When people come to a lesser familiar ceremony, for example, an equinox ceremony at StarHouse, I have observed that they come because they want something from the ceremony for themselves, a big step from the diversity of reasons to attend a wedding. Not only do they want something, they want something big, very big, some big flash of an experience that would make it worthwhile to have come to such an event. This is a fine goal, and tends to make for more wakeful people. However, there are some pitfalls with this demand that, in order to understand, we have to put a few more pieces in place.

Getting your Intentions Straight

Though people often feel that a ceremony is there to carry them, with its music and decoration and movement and words, actually the ceremony depends on the witnesses for its success. All witnesses are participants. No one hides in a seat or pew or in the bushes. The quality of the preparation of the participants shows in the feeling of the ceremony. As one actress I worked with summarized in a talk-back to the audience after a performance, “If you want a good play, be a good audience.” You can begin by making some choices. This may seem to lead afield from the question of why ceremony, but come along for the ride.
Choice #1: Observe beliefs that cripple you. This includes general attitudes—“Bad people lurk around every corner.”—and specific beliefs—“Anyone wearing red must be promiscuous.”—and judgments about the present gathering—“These people are all stupid.”

Beliefs that cripple you also include entire systems of thought. For example, Darwinism has led many to believe that human beings resulted from chance mutations that had different survival rates in an aggressively hostile world, and that humans slowly developed from monkeys (more accurately the ancestors of present day monkeys), who came from little mammals, who came from amphibians, who came from smaller organisms, on down to pond scum. Darwinism leaves one with the feeling that this all took place by random—and thus meaningless—events on a minor planet in a minor solar system in a less-than-average galaxy in an infinity of galaxies, thus diminishing each human being to laughable insignificance. There is much to recommend the theories of Darwinism in its explanation of how some kinds of change occur. However, there is quite enough evidence in the scientific world, and heaps of experience in our psychic worlds, to show that Darwinism is a belief system, a bearer of Truth in a small area of inquiry, but beyond that one of several belief systems from which one can choose.

When you observe what you actually believe and hold to be true, you can come in for some surprises. Many people discover, for example, that they don’t like their own body. How useful is that?!

Bringing the inventory of beliefs to the surface to be recognized can lead to the spontaneous shedding of old beliefs that disempower you and mechanize the world.

Some beliefs will need more attention. Then you can go to Choice #2.

Choice #2: Choose love; do not choose hate.
An empiricist—one who watches consequences of actions and beliefs that spawn those actions—has no difficulty in seeing that hate leads nowhere. At some point you will have the experience that love truly does compose the stuff of the universe, and then you will know that hate is an aberration, not really even a separate choice. This paragraph summarizes years of work on my part, and is not meant to suggest quick adoption.

So how do you deal with hate in yourself? A sage once told me, “Attachment leads to detachment.” That is, don’t try to grapple with the unwanted hatreds so you can shove them out the door. Don’t try to repress them, and stuff them into a corner. Rather refocus your attention on what you’d like to create. Affirm your interest, your love, your passion. You will notice that the unwanted beliefs, which exist only apparently, will diminish and disappear.

Once you choose love, not hate, your participation in a ceremony changes. Rather than sitting back, arms crossed, waiting to be touched by energy, with the suspicious attitude of “prove it to me,” you begin to add to the situation. A lecturer can spot those people who glow with energy rather than suck energy. The emanators understand Insight #3 from James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy, that emanating is easy, as it comes from the abundance of love, the free energy of the universe. Emanation improves the lecturer’s delivery and thus the experience for oneself, and for everyone.

These steps seem so simple. Why would society make them difficult? Many reasons, the chief one being that there is money in it. If you think that your life is random and meaningless, that most people are out to get you, and that the best you can do is choose the lesser of two evils, then you might choose to desperately seek release, “escape” (the catchword for all vacation resorts), pleasure, and comfort. There is big money in the provision of pleasure and comfort.

Choice #3: Give Divinity a chance.
Perhaps you feel that Divinity is simply superstition, beliefs fitting for the poor and ignorant. Your repetition of this belief that Divinity is superstition wires your nervous system so that you do not notice the wonder of creation that you may have enjoyed as a child. You can reason yourself through this dilemma, perhaps following the steps of others who have traveled the path of open-mindedness. Let’s follow these steps quickly: A true scientist, one who knows the world through measurements of the senses’ experience, can come to realize that the capabilities of the nervous system cannot be explained by Darwinian “natural selection.” That may progress to the question, “How does it all work?,” leading to an openness in the observer. Then an experience or series of experiences can arise that affirm the interconnection of consciousness with an immense intelligence, far vaster than human capability, yet discernible by the human being. Then one realizes the obviousness of creative intelligence, what some call God, though the term “God” may be too overburdened with meaning from those who abuse the sense of wonder in service of their own agendas. Try “Organic Light” (proposed by John Lash in Not in His Image) or Shining Light (the meaning of the Sanskrit root of the word Divinity) or Great Intelligence. The notion of a personal god, one who speaks to you in your language, can trap you—into delusions of grandeur when you make up something wonderful or into a sense of abandonment when you experience silence. Simply open to experience of the grandeur of creation.

From there, you can build up your capacities of insight and intuition to find a pathway of communication, or communion, with Divinity, not a chatty conversation but rather a sense of inter-merged interaction. You become not a separate entity from the whole, but realize that your thoughts and flashes of vision, your deepest feelings of joy and compassion, and your deeds in the world, are embedded in a spiritual world too. Again, this is the fruit of many years of experience.

Choice #4: Ask about your purpose. The preliminary choices begin you on the path to finding your true intention and eventually your purpose. You can ask about purpose, though don’t expect an answer in words—perhaps in pictures or inner knowings. The best result of asking about purpose is to open up any situation from its tiny niche of time and space. You are always interested in the larger picture, the antecedents of the actions and feelings of this moment from the distant past, and the consequences into the distant future.

(More in part 2 coming)

Avatar and Quality of Relationship

The movie Avatar has demonstrated its popularity by its grand income. Thus many have discussed it. Some praise its point of view, some warn against its philosophy. I have not yet seen the most important point to me, which is not content. "The medium is the message." Beyond whether or not pantheism is a good idea, or whether an indigenous society has been properly portrayed, or whether this is an attack on the US military or on all military thinking, or how the term Avatar has been inappropriately taken from something quite wonderful (a person who has come from heaven in full consciousness to assist humanity's evolution), or whether the biology is accurate -- beyond all of these, I have to note how this film has, more than any other, stuck with me. Hands of technology have entered into me more deeply than before (large screen, High Definition, 3-D, surround sound, subliminal input both through vision and sound) and it has been more difficult to reawaken into this world.

The "Avatar Depression" has been described, with many people expressing despair that "this world" is not as good as "that world," and that they wish to be in "that world," even to the point of suicidal thoughts to disconnect from "this world."
I too feel a lingering ache in my body for "that world," as if I had seen Spirit-Land and long to return there. Even in the movie, at the end the "takers" (they are us) are banished back to their dying world where they have "killed the mother." Deep down, they and we long to return....

The worthy themes of the content -- the beauty, the message of the existence and activity of the divine feminine, the loyalty to each other, to community, to the divine feminine... -- are actually secondary to the medium which has worked its way down into me very deeply. (Even the previews of the next HD, 3-D movie, an intrusive fantasy of the perverse and disturbed experiences of Alice in Wonderland, with no justification of redeeming qualities in its content, have stayed with me.)

Discussions of points in the content of this film are interesting -- whether it has done more work than the Copenhagen climate gathering to alert people to the environment, etc. -- but those concerns are the sugar-coating of a bitter pill of technological intrusion into our psyches. As long as I remain in the fantasy of the film, I remain drugged and unable to connect with the values apparently portrayed there -- relationship with another human being, with community, with the earth, and with the beauty and power of Sophia, the divine feminine wisdom underlying all of creation -- values that are portrayed but paradoxically made more remote by the medium of the film itself.

It has required more attention than usual for disengaging from fantasy and re-engaging with "this world," finding the inherent magic of "this world." One must quite seriously utilize antidotes to the medium of the film -- time in Nature, and not five minutes but hours. "Time in Nature" while remembering scenes from the movie requires many hours for Nature to have effect. "Time in Nature" where you look closely at the sand, the bark, the petal, the trailing wisp of cloud -- smell everything, taste everything, hear everything. Note the quality of the light (and note how it differs from the light in the movie theatre). Offer yourself to gardening or to a house plant, and tend its living-ness, even ask it to work with your healing. Gaze into the eyes of your beloved, stroke each other's arms, rub each other's back. Again, not just for five minutes with any of this, but with concerted effort to re-orient yourself to the wonders of "this world," "this body," "this lover," "this soul."

I have observed a young man design two seconds of animated movement of a dinosaur in a video game. He said it took him ten hours to get those two seconds right.He showed me the complicated grids hidden beneath the final image. Most importantly I saw his devotion to the computer screen, and observed a flow of his life energy into the screen. Where does that energy go? Does it work as nutrition for some being? Is it expressed into the world every time that video dinosaur makes that particular movement? When I saw the credits for Avatar, the hundreds of technical people who poured their being into their computers, I realized that this is what the anthropologist Leslie White would call an energy-capturing device ... but to what end? When millions of people watch this film, and merge with it, and enter into it, they are pouring their own precious attention energy into it. Where does that go? These are questions that (with Willie Bento and Robert Schiappacasse) I ask in Signs in the Heavens: A Message for Our Time. And the antidote, beyond what I've shared above, comes in the newly released One-Two-ONE: A Guidebook to Conscious Partnerships, Weddings, and Rededication Ceremonies, written with my wonderful real-life "this world" beautiful Lila Sophia.

These issues are not side issues, not something to be heaped over with new content in order to obscure the old images. The message is not in the content, but in the medium -- how someone else's psyche has gotten so deeply into mine. Marshall McLuhan called radio a "warm" medium as it required so much participation on the part of the listener to participate in imagining what the speakers and the scenes described look like. He termed television a "cool" medium because you've been given so much that your imagination is not engaged. This has now come to a new level of "coolness" and you are not warmed by it. If you feel yourself, it may be agitated after such a movie, yet cold.

I highly recommend that you rivet your attention to the real, the growing living warm plant and animal and sky, the beautiful, the good, the here, the now, for these are where your soul speaks to you. Find a piece of earth -- and it need not be glorious, as in a thousand-foot tall tree -- stand there and find the communion that your life offers right now. Find its inherent sacred character and let your heart be filled with the abundance-to-flowing-over of the actual world.