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A Message from Father Christmas

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages! This is the big white man with the long white beard, and the red jacket; the one who knows whether you are awake or asleep, who knows whether you’ve been good or bad, the one with all the Hoh, Hoh, Hoh’s!  

I’m the one who comes to your home in the night, the one you leave offerings for, milk of the holy cow, and sweet, tasty, morsels of cookie manna from ovens.  You know what I like, and you aim to please me so that I shall reward you in the hereafter-coming year.  That’s right, I’m Santa Clause, most people call me Santa, but just try moving that n to the end.  You can see my Santa Claws.  With just the move of that one letter, my letters transform into the name of that oft disparaged nemesis of the being who’s birth I come to remind you to celebrate!  Satan?  No, I’m Father Christmas.  But you won’t find me in the Bible, nor will you find me in the North Pole. 

Your parents, at some point, will probably fill you in on the fact that I’m not real, if you don’t figure it out for yourself.  But it’s pretty amazing, considering how many pictures there are of me everywhere, or simply how many car commercials I show up in, that so many adults seem to know that I’m not real.  

Well, they tell you I’m not real, but so many of you still leave me milk and cookies, so many of you bring your children to sit in my lap.  What are you trying to do to yourselves?  

Are you trying to train yourselves to believe in a white bearded being who flies through the clouds, surrounded by cherubs, I mean elves, and judges your actions and either punishes you with coal or no presents, or rewards you with stuff? 

I’m just curious.  This is a pretty incredible cultural phenomenon, in case you haven’t noticed.  Just listen to all the Christmas music on the radio, see all those Jesus stories on TV, look at the big Christmas tree in Washington D.C., how about CNN, FOX News, and other news outlets, showing one Christmas related story after another?  Christmas is a Christian Holiday, in case you didn’t know.  Have you noted my remarkable resemblance to Jesus’s father, as depicted by Michelangelo, one of the first images of God in a simple Google search for God? 
Weird, right? 

Now go shopping, I command thee.   

    

 

It's Not the End of the World

         Since Dec. 21st, 2012, is upon us, and since I can’t seem to get away from advertisements for End of the World celebrations in Aspen, I must speak up and defend my consciousness from this assault.  I’m sorry to be the bearer of good news, but I must inform you, despite your highest nihilistic hopes, it’s NOT the end of the world.  Belly Up, our little local music venue, is having an “End of the World Party.”  There are lots of “End of the World” parties on this day of “planetary alignment.”  There are rumors of a “cosmic shift,” or a “radical transformation.” But rumors of some predicted Mayan apocalypse are an insult to our archeological and anthropological education.  The mainstream seems to be missing the information boat, the one carrying the facts, rather than the imaginings.   

         One fact is, the Mayan’s don’t have an apocalyptic cosmology.  We do.  The Mayan astrologers and priests, who created this calendar that we have interpreted as heralding the end of the world on the equivalent day in our own calendar, Dec. 21st, 2012, did not see the end of this particular period of time as being the End Times, but just the beginning of a new B’ak’tun.  A B’ak’tun, it turns out, is approximately 394 of our years long.  20 B’ak’tun’s make a Piktun.  In the equivalent of our calendar year, October, 13th, 4772, (two thousand seven hundred and sixty years from now) 20 B’ak’tun’s will have passed, and the Mayan calendar will go to the next Piktun.  Hopefully we will have reset our own calendar by then, and will have based our new calendar’s start date on something more hopeful than the supposed birth of a nice young man who got crucified for nothing more than speaking his mind.  Either way, you can discern, from these few simple facts, that the Mayans did not plan for the world to end this Friday.   This is not the end of the Mayan calendar, it is the end of one particular measurement tool within the Mayan calendar, and the beginning of another.  

       We have taken a tiny sliver of out-of-context information about an ancient Mesoamerican belief system and filtered it through our conditioned western lens.  As Sandra Noble, director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, stated: “For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle.”  That Dec., 21st, 2012, heralds a doomsday scenario or a cosmic shift, she calls, “a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.”  Unfortunately ideas have power, and our psychology as humans is not so impermeable as to be unaffected by these types of false beliefs.  

         These beliefs, which continue to bombard our consciousness with the idea that a deity is counting the days till “He” comes down and ends everything around us, and either punishes or rewards us individually, for eternity, depending (like Santa Clause) upon whether we’ve been naughty or nice, are not helping us create a better world.  Since our minds have been conditioned for centuries with this idea about the coming apocalypse, about the end times and a judgment day, the collective consciousness of the so called “civilized world” is littered with this thinking.  When another story comes along that fits nicely into this widespread narrative, it is very difficult for even “free thinkers” to tell the true from the false.   

           Every time one of us talks about the coming “cosmic shift,” or the “transformation,” or “the End of the World,” we are actually reinforcing a narrative, which paradoxically serves to prohibit the very “cosmic shift” or “transformation” that we are hoping for.  When we are dealing with an unsustainable economic system, climate change, deforestation, nuclear weapons, nationalism, religious divisions, and other perpetuated ways of thinking that create violence and oppression, it seems normal that humans would hope for a transformation of their thinking that would liberate them from this problematic reality.  But the belief in some external change-maker keeps us psychologically limited, whether consciously or unconsciously, from actually creating the change we hope for.  Will belief in an externally created utopia help motivate us to make real changes which might create a more utopian world?  Or if the end is coming, then what is the point in making the changes we see as necessary around us?  Beliefs in a coming end, or transformation, create a paralyzing layer in our consciousness hindering us from making changes that might help us begin to build a better world.  Next time somebody tells you the end is coming, try telling them that, no, it’s not.  Have a very Merry It’s Not the End of the World Party.

The Facts of Life

Seriously, isn't it about Tebow Time?

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Mitt Romney on Beliefs

A Dog Sand and Beach

Begining with a haiku? Sure.

Reflections on blue
Green water of Pacific
A dog, sand, and beach

Why start with a haiku? To calm the not calm maybe. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you are a nut. I just had another breakup, maybe the most abrupt and dramatic of my career. I'm left with questions about my sabatoging of my own relationships. The mind can be a terrible device for calamity creation. My own mind, which has its positive characteristics, seems a bit too good at picking out what is wrong with any given situation, and then focusing on it. This mental twist may be good for sociological study, but it is not beneficial for cultivating relationships. Aloha.

How about a green recession? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

More Perspective

Airport Update

Gracious me! It's been a long time brothers and sisters. I'm at the Denver Airport, sitting at the Woody Creek Bakery and Cafe, another seemingly Aspen Valley spun business expanding into the exosphere. I'm sweating profusely. Miles, a young Army reservist who was sitting on the plane next to me on the Aspen to Denver flight, was telling me how, because he only cares about enjoying life (we only have one after all), he likes to drink and smoke and get crazy, and I was saying, for the same, only one life, reason, I'm sober. He asked me if I drink coffee. I responded in the affirmative. He told me that he had me cold, I'm not sober. My sweat glands don't seem to think i'm sober either. Between my ADD medication and a serious caffein habit, young Miles may have my number. Relativity may be a flawed theory, but in this case, I'm going to plead it. At least i'm relatively sober. Compared to getting stoned from morning till night, and getting nearly drunk every day by sundown, this caffeination may be some sort of dangerous super sobriety. I'm agitatingly aware of my feelings of agitation. This is no drunkenness, but I'm still avoiding my study of the prophets with this blogpost. So ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters both Gonzo and greedhead, I wish you all safe travels. Aloha.

Goose Wrangler

Off Facebook

Wow, I just deactivated my Facebook account. What a trip. I've been on that damn site for what, going on 4 years now, 5, years, 6 years? I can't be sure. It was getting out of control. I needed a break. I have a strange feeling that I just unplugged, and while I've posted infrequently to good old Soft Landings and Sober Gonzo, I feel like I'd be better served putting my energies outside my Academic and theological endeavors into my own work. Facebook is like some kind of energy sucking vortex. I'm tired of telling 800 people what i'm doing all the time. At least nobody reads this blog. I'll start telling you folks what I'm doing all the time. Right now, I'm listening to Warren Zevon, "Empty Hearted Town," writing a paper for my Master of Divinity senior seminar. Life is strange my dear song-birds. I love you. The Grouse, the old love Jenn, her birthday passed a few days ago. It's a mystery. The universe unfolding as it does, infinitely blossoming like a flower that never dies; and here we are in the midst of it my dear friends. Conscious witnesses to the present moment. Creators of the future, prisoners of the past; at any moment we can break free. Our habitual thoughts are all that are holding us back. It's time to rocket ourselves into liberation. It's time to plant the seeds of a new reality for our descendants, for our human family here on earth. It's time to bury the lie that we are separate, and build something beautiful from the decaying nutriments. Imagine what our children are capable of if we stop teaching them that they are selfish, fallen creatures, and instead teach them that they are glorious creators, vessels of infinite consciousness, social creatures who care more about the greater good than they do about their individual selves. What messes have we been making as a result of the rotten messages we've been getting? New ideas. Freedom from the Known. What's possible? It's up to you.

Happy Birthday Bob Marley and Mr. Goose Wrangler

Groundhog Day

Well, it's Groundhog day, again.
Sludge.

Thousands of Years of a Perpetuated Lie

Seeing the stars' reflection on the lake by night,
The swan is disappointed,
mistaking them for lotus shoots.
So, even seeing a real lotus shoot by day,
he will not eat it.
When once deceived by a liar,
one will doubt even the truthful

-attributed to Nagarjuna by Tarthang Tulku

Aloha Whispers of the Ghost Faced Bandit

Things to do. GoogleNews.
Work to be done. Facebook.
3 papers, 2 overdue, got to get to work. History Channel.
Fox News.
CNN.
Another Republican debate,
In the Idiot village called America,
With a big violent claw gripping helicopters, spaceships, and a nuclear arsenal,
unmanned drones manned by conscious-less politicians and corporations.
Welcome to the TV show yellowjumpsuits.
We care.
We are human.
We are one family.
We want to leave a healthy world for our grandchildren.
We want to unite the peoples of planet earth and manifest a sustainable reality.
We may be cynical.
We may be insane.
Is there any other rational reaction to insanity?
Look around.
Telescopes peering back 13.7 billion years.
Trying to figure it out.
We can't even figure out the present
and we're telling ourselves that the end is coming
6.7 billion years in the future.
What does that even mean?
Can we even just address our own short lifetimes?
Our impermanence?
Have we been trained by a couple thousand years of an unhealthy religious belief system
that has taught us to expect that the unreal will somehow become real.
that our mortal bodies,
these socially constructed selves
will somehow live forever
somewhere else
or in some alternative present?
Existence as we experience it.
With our claws.
Life feeds on death.
Decay and resurrection.
Some days you eat.
Some days you get ate.
Come on lunatic asylum.
WAKE UP!!
It's not so difficult.
We've been trained to be asleep.
Been trained to think that the way things are,
the miracle of existence itself
is something to fear.
is a punishment for some act of our ancestors some time in the distant past.
Adam and Eve.
They made a mistake.
So we die.
Sorry folks.
That's a lie.
We made it up.
You can call it a story.
But in our present world of literalism.
Numbers.
Math.
Science.
It's a story that's not true.
It's not helping us create a more beneficial reality for all our brothers and sisters.
For our descendants.
It's a lie.
Life is a miracle.
Death is not a punishment, unless we are executing it.
It's the price of life.
Fox News.
CNN.
History.
Swallowed by the lie.
Spitting itself up.
Over and
Over.
Again.
What about the present?
NOW.
Freedom.
This is all there is.
What else is there
Outside the mind?

Colbert Super PAC Rocks!!

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I Need.

Did you hear about this scufuffle outside the Apple store in Beijing? You want to talk about the end of communism? Wow, here is another nail in the coffin. This is a success story of consumerism if I've ever seen one. People were rioting for bread in France before the revolution there. They were hungry and they'd had enough, and they said, "we're not going to take it any more!" Fast forward a few hundred years into present day Beijing, a city that just a few decades ago was far from friendly to the capitalist machine. People in parts of Africa, or American Appalachia, or even far west of China, might be starving, but these chubby faced consumers in BeiJing are hungry alright, hungry for the most up-to-date version of the I-Pod. They want an expensive consumer telephone, they want to add a letter to their I-Phone 4. They want to make it a 4--- "S". They probably have a working cell phone, but they want the coolest, newest, me me me, I I I-Phone. Welcome to consumer marketing at a pinnacle of its success. These people have been made to feel like they need this stuff so badly that they are acting like a starving, angry, mob. Do you long for a Tiananman square without billboards of psychological make-you-want-things-you-don't-need magic? You probably already have a phone, but you are ready to riot because you are pissed off that you can't purchase this item so desperately low on the Maslows hierarchy of needs, right now, right when you want it, now. You are Beijing? Wow. The disease has spread and with enthusiastic power. Was it someone's goal to turn the people of the earth into thoughtless greedheads? More, more, more. Yep. We are eating the Apple all right, and we're feeding it to China, and we're not stopping there.

Who do you say i am?

The Messiah? Hah.
I am who you say I am.
See, you are the storytellers.
You tell the story.
You make the meaning.
You are the conscious creators.
You are the meaning makers.
This mortal man sitting on the balcony
worshipping the sun on his face
isn't the One,
even though he and the Father are One.
The Spirit of the valley is Female, never dying,
The Dark Mystery,
The Receptive Principle,
The Empty Space within and without the entire Universe
you've created with your mind.
This is it.
What's that?
Nothing,
outside Everything;
Make it what it is;
Tell a nice story MindHead;
Let it be so.

What are you doing in my tent?

Haven't written much
Early Winter 2012
Hardly a Haiku

Infinite Symbols
Bubbling up from the mind
Flying through the sky

Royal Tenenbaums
On the Television set
Life is too fast now