The Art of Psychological Travel: October 2014

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Appearing at LitQuake's Off the Richter Scale: Life Stories

I will be part of a memoirist panel on Saturday, October 11th in San Francisco, Off the Richter Scale: Life Stories at the LitQuake festival. MC-ed by Tamim Ansary, other authors include Eileen Cronin, Karen Lynch, and Gordon Young.

"Every life is made up of millions of stories. In this hour we hear from four memoirists who have mined stories in their lives to explore deeper themes of nostalgia, home, family, loss, acceptance, and spirituality."

Book Available Now

1st Place, Spirituality Category

--2014 Royal Dragonfly Awards

Finalist, Spirituality Category

--2015 International Book Awards

Finalist, Spirituality Category

--2015 Next Gen. Indie Book Awards

Finalist, Spiritual Category

--2014 Indie Excellence Awards

Honorable Mention

--2014 San Francisco Book Festival

Honorable Mention

--2014 Paris Book Festival

"Dynamic and thought-provoking"

--San Francisco Book Review

"Compelling throughout"

--BookReview.com

"Devotees of art and spiritual exploration will find much to contemplate in Interplay."

--ForeWord Clarion Reviews

"As a story of spiritual transition and transcendence, this is a book that will be of great interest to many people."

--BookIdeas.com

Blog Excerpts

Synchronistic Conditioning and an Emerging Portrait of Vitality

The regularization of my personality towards the seeking not only establishes a strong focus, but also develops a momentum in life's events that pushes me in the direction of my evolution. It is as if life itself becomes alive and, like a living organism, reacts to my proclivity, my will, my desire to learn. Daily events seem to follow an underlying order, one which is complex, highly intelligent and enigmatic.

That life seems to switch into gear when we concentrate on our personal development, that daily events begin to lose the quality of randomness and start taking on meaning, these observations lend credibility to the argument that our purpose here is to learn and to grow, that our reality has as its fundamental design a structure which facilitates our evolution. Read More

Living intuitively allows feelings, thoughts, and actions to surface from the deeper portions of one's psyche and this can be viewed as a form of temporary conditioning. "Synchronistic conditioning" is a term I use for the type of conditioning that increases one's awareness of synchronicities, illuminating life's hidden meanings. Read More

The Poetics of Bipolar Oscillation

One can visualize one's development on any specific subject as movement and oscillation within a Paisley pattern.

In the early stages of our development on a particular subject, we begin in the lower, wider portion of the Paisley pattern, where there is much room to oscillate. Experience, dreams, life's events that relate to the topic seem to shift randomly from one side of a polarity to another making life seem sporadic, without meaning, and confusing.

Over the course of our evolution, we develop understanding, bias, and focus. Thus, we move up the Paisley pattern to the narrower regions where the oscillations are less intense and experience surrounding the topic at hand begins to seem more orderly. Read More

I was seeing vision after vision of such intensity that they reminded me of a Hollywood trailer for an action movie. I was viewing oscillations between love and hate, kindness and cruelty, and so on. And when I was finally completely in a trance, the following words spilled into me like honey: "Go the way of the Buddha, brother". And I broke down and cried for the first time in many years. Nearly a minute or so went by and my need to shed tears ended as suddenly as it began. And only a split second after that, my phone began to ring.

It turned out to be the bank for my student loan and they were calling with the odd purpose of assuring me that my loan payments were perfectly on time! Now, how often does one get a call like that? Let us attempt to interpret this event as one does a dream and try to gleam the symbolism behind it. Read More

L I F E and Extreme Astronautics

Ecstasy is for me in the same family of experiences as alighting in unconditional love, of bathing in the white light, of brilliantly glowing with love-radiance. All these experiences come with an internal reordering of one's being, an unblocking of the energy centers, a smoothing out of the distortions due to the higher order of these energies. Read More

Whereas an ecstatic experience can help one grasp the concept of oneness on an intuitive level, it was the Hurricane Period which provided my conscious mind with the opportunity to witness all human beings as one, doing so by shifting my state of mind in ways that moved me psychologically closer to whichever person held my attention. Until then, I thought my own concept of oneness, which stemmed from my mystical experiences in college, had been partially developed as an influence from popular spiritual teachings. Read More

Those who have a deep appreciation of abstract art have the knowledge, even if it is only at the intuitive level, that a mere set of lines can produce an enlightening transformation in consciousness through witnessing and absorbing their specific configuration. Great works of art are of a higher order, and they help the viewer evolve by imprinting their special intelligence into one's psyche for possible integration. Read More

Spirituality and the Ego

My visions opened up to a point of clarity and I was asked a question that went something like this: "Would you rather continue developing a work-related ego or would you rather return to being an artist?" My obvious response was that I wanted to return to my art. And the vision said: "In three months, you will experience your downfall at work, after which you will enjoy a year and a half of artistic creativity."

In exactly three months after I had my vision, the hierarchical structure of my department at work shifted and, as a result, I was suddenly completely stripped of my power as a technical lead. Read More

My visions...were now full-blown. Whenever I failed to follow their instructions, I fell back into a hellish pit of turbulence, the oscillations now random, chaotic, and painful. Whenever I was able to pay close attention to my visions, I sped through insight after insight after insight, the oscillations taking the form of upward-rising spirals, possessing a poetic order, enigmatically intelligent. Read More

Black Holes and the Art of Transformation

Einstein's theory of relativity showed that space and time were part of one fabric, named spacetime, and that large bodies of mass warp spacetime. This warpage is responsible for the force of gravity. ...Black holes, though they might not possess any mass at all, cause massive warpage of spacetime that increases the closer one gets to the black hole's center, also called the "point of singularity".

I began to wonder whether one could construct a psychological model born out of an analogy to the spacetime fabric, let's call it "consciousness-time", and if so, whether or not similar laws would apply between the two. ...when we concentrate on a single idea or visualized image or state of being, are we creating a point of singularity in the consciousness-time fabric? Does the consciousness matrix get warped so that we experience a psychological form of gravity that begins to accelerate us psychologically to the point of our focus? Read More

One can graph a simple version of the warpage found near a black hole as the bottom half of an "X". And if it is true that white holes exist on the other side, you get a full "X". In the Ra Material, an "X" is described as a symbol of transformation. I've been hallucinating an "X" almost every time I close my eyes for the last ten years or so. Read More

The Art of Psychological Travel

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Appearing at LitQuake's Off the Richter Scale: Life Stories

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