Big Brother

Namibia Day 3 - Run, Cheetah, Run

2012-01-30T12:26:00.006-05:00

- Further adventures with thehostellife.com -

Yesterday we arrived at the Cheetah Conservation Fund

Today we woke up early at the Cheetah Conservation Fund to get breakfast before heading to the 'Cheetah Run'. We weren't really sure what that term meant, but all of the staff at the CCF had a certain glimmer in their eye when they mentioned it to us. It turns out that this was to be one of those amazing, once in a lifetime experiences that really could not happen anywhere else in the world. Thank you Namibia.

The people at the CCF are world leading experts when it comes to cheetahs. They are quite often developing the standards of practice that those working with cheetahs internationally will reference and/or adopt. When it comes to the small percentage of cheetahs that the CCF houses in captivity it became quickly apparent to the staff that without exercise the cheetah's health would decline. Sound familiar? Seeing as no one has invented a cheetah treadmill or opened up Gold's Gym for cats it fell to them to create a stimulus that would arouse a cheetahs hunting instinct and get them running in a somewhat controlled manner. Considering that cheetahs run faster than any other animal with a top speed of over 70 miles/hr (110 km/hr) this wasn't quite as simple as throwing a tennis ball and asking them to fetch.

If you've ever seen dogs running at the track you might have noticed that there is a little mechanical bunny that races around the track ahead of them. The people at CCF developed a cable system that has a motor in the center. There is a series of pulleys which the cable runs around as it weaves its way throughout a field creating a 300 meter (1,000ft) course for them to run. They then attached a rag to the cable. Since cheetahs are natural born hunters the movement of the rag is enough to trigger their hunting instincts. The cheetahs see this rag and take off full sprint after it.

We were set up mere feet away from the cable waiting for these high speed balls of claw and fur to come racing towards us. At times we stood just past a pulley so that the cheetahs would come racing directly towards us turning after the rag in a cloud of dirt narrowly missing us as we stood still and trusting knowing full well that should their attention turn from the rag to our shirt the mood of the day would change rather quickly. Clearly we stayed as still as we could.

I got some of the most amazing photos I have ever taken. There is nothing quite like a cheetah being right in front of your face running at full speed. I don't think many get so close and walk around grinning the way we all were afterwards. Luckily these particular cheetahs are the most tame ones at CCF. After they were all tired out from running faster than most non-highway drivers they were tired, well fed and content to be approached. We got to pet the cheetahs and take a few pictures with them. A big thanks to the entire staff at the Cheetah Conservation Fund for their amazing hospitality. Dr. Laurie Marker's love for and vast knowledge of this amazing animal came through in every moment. We are truly blessed to have been able to spend this time with her and these animals.

After a very full morning we got back into our rental and on the road heading to TreeSleeper Camp in Tsintsabis roughly 162 miles (260 km) from the CCF. After letting me get my rally on speeding down the dirt road sliding through mud puddles Evan took back over driving on the left hand side of the road. 3.5 hours later we pulled up to the camp. We were greeted by Moses and shown to our campsite where we were to pitch tents that they provided and sleep up in a platform in the trees. The San are the local bush people in the region. Throughout the years they became experts at sleeping in trees in order to stay safe from lions, cheetahs and other predators. We get to experience this way of life first hand. Luckily these more modern campgrounds have electricity and hot water provided by solar power.

After we got our tents setup it was off to the communal fire pit to see some traditional San shamanic dance cermonies. Mehdy even got to dance with the men for one song dancing in a circle around the campfire till sweat dripped from his face. He just couldn't keep up with the San people who often dance late into the night celebrating an event in someones life.

After the dancing it was back to our tents and quickly to sleep. Another amazing day in this spectacular southern African country. I can't wait to see what tomorrow has in store for us.

Namibia Day 2 - Cheetah Meet and Greet

2012-01-19T16:46:00.005-05:00

Mehdy reached out recently. Since I am taking a 1 year sabbatical and can once again travel he invited me to come shoot another show with The Hostel Life. This time we went to Namibia. I arrived in NYC today to spend some time with my love before heading back to the mountain in North Carolina. My responsibilities on the show are photography and sound, but I also wrote a few blogs detailing what happened a few days. Here's my blog on Day2. You can read the original on The Hostel Life's official site: http://www.thehostellife.com/blog/item/226

THE HOSTEL LIFE: NAMIBIA - CHEETAH MEET AND GREET
By Devin Martin - Photography and Sound

Today we left the Cardboard Box Hostel in Windhoek in our rental truck and headed North towards The Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) outside Otjiwarango. It was about 163 miles (262km) door to door. The last 29 miles (47km) are a dirt road that ends right at the CCF's gate. We were heading to the CCF to meet up with Dr. Laurie Marker, arguably the world's leading expert on Cheetahs. There are roughly 10-12 thousand cheetahs left in the entire world. Namibia has 3-4,000, or one third, of the world's population. Dr. Marker, originally from the United States, moved to Namibia to study the cheetah. She is co-founder and director of the CCF. The Conservation Fund is mecca for studying cheetah behavior and helping modern people to live in peace with these amazing animals. The CCF is open to the public and also houses a number of interns and volunteers doing research.
Immediately upon our arrival we were rushed into the facility for feeding time. A few of the younger, rescued cheetahs that are not able to roam wild are fed meat in a bowl. Our first glimpse of these rather large cats was teeth out chomping on big hunks of meat. Their beauty and their power were immediately apparent. I couldn't wait to see them up close and without a fence between us. Luckily we wouldn't have to wait too long.

Dr. Marker greeted us at the feeding and gave us a quick tour of the facility. We got to see the veterinary clinic while surgery was being performed on a dog that got in the way of a warthog's tusk. The injury was worse than originally expected and they had to stay with the pup throughout the night, but she was doing much better come morning. We saw goats being milked (they make their own goat cheese on site), fed baby goats from a bottle, fed their little puppies bowls of puppy chow and marveled at the wild warthogs and other animals running around the property. If we had any doubts that yes, we are in Africa, they were dashed at the CCF.

After seeing the rest of the animals it was time to get in an open-air truck with our guide, Charles, and go visit the cheetahs out in the bush. We managed to track down five cheetahs. Our guide had a bag of meat that he uses to lure them closer to the truck and we got amazingly close. Some of the photos I got one would assume required a really long lens as the cheetahs face fills the entire frame. I was mostly using a 50mm lens (comparable to the human eye), they were just that close. These animals are considered 'retired'. They have spent a lot of time with people, but don't let that fool you, they are all wild animals. I can't keep track of the number of times my little house cat, Agape, has gotten feisty and drawn blood. Without the proper respect these animals could certainly do a lot of damage. Luckily they all seemed to be well fed and happy.

As late afternoon came we went on a game drive with Dr. Marker, Dr. Bruce Brewer and a few of the interns working at the facility. We drove out into the 20,000 acre bush looking for wild game. We saw Kudu, Warthogs, Springbok, Red HarteBeest, a number of birds and a very unexpected Aardwolf that the whole staff of CCF was excited to get a glimpse of. We were hoping for a leopard but haven't gotten lucky there yet. Hopefully when we head north to Etosha National Park we will see lions, leopards, and elephants. Personally, I can't wait to see another baboon. We saw one perched on a post along the road outside of the airport and haven't seen one since.
Tomorrow we start the day with a cheetah run. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it sounds like they will be exercising the cheetahs by prodding their hunting instincts and we will get to stand a few feet away as they come running by at full speed. Considering that they are the fastest animal on land this should be amazing to witness.

Check out Day 3 here

oração

2011-08-06T18:18:00.004-04:00

Portuguese
Oração

Meu amor essa é a última oração
Pra salvar seu coração
Coração não é tão simples quanto pensa
Nele cabe o que não cabe na dispensa

Cabe o meu amor!
Cabe em três vidas inteiras
Cabe em uma penteadeira
Cabe nós dois

Cabe até o meu amor
Essa é a última oração pra salvar seu coração
Coração não é tão simples quanto pensa
Nele cabe o que não cabe na dispensa

Cabe o meu amor!
Cabe em três vidas inteiras
Cabe em uma penteadeira
Cabe essa oração

English
Prayer

My love, this is the last prayer
To save your heart
The heart is not as simple as you think
It holds what what does not fit in the cupboard

It holds my love
It holds three life times
It holds a dresser
It holds both of us

It even holds my love
This is the last prayer to save your heart
The heart is not as simple as you think
It holds what does not fit in the cupboard

It holds my love
It holds three life times
It holds a dresser
It holds this prayer
http://lyricstranslate.com

Starcrossed

2011-06-28T11:33:00.007-04:00

Disclaimer: I have known Josie for most of my life. She is a phenomenal human being in many ways. So I may be biased here. None the less, when any friend hands you something they have created, there is always excitement mixed with the fear that you will hate it. More often than not I am underwhelmed by my friends attempts at greatness. Aren't we all? This is not the case with Starcrossed. I fucking loved it!

Starcrossed is exceptional. Recently published by Harper Teen it is the first book in a trilogy. It takes the Illiad, the epic Greek poem with Helen of Troy, the Trojan War, gods, demigods, love and destruction, and places it in a high school in modern day Nantucket. Josie described it to me as Romeo and Juliet meets the Iliad. There might be a touch of Twilight and Harry Potter in there as well.

It is an epic love story and a battle for the fate of humankind with the gods. It has super powers, timeless beauty; there is mystery and deceit both hidden and revealed around every corner. I started it on a flight and finished it the following day at 1:30am. I was totally hooked. My sister Aileen is mentioned (as a dead character). And I think one of the actual living characters takes a few notes from Aileen's chutzpah.

The story of how the book got written is equally amazing. Check out this video piece that tells the tale. Basically, her amazing husband Leon demanded that Josie stop working for a year and finally write a book. Over the course of that year they went into credit card debt, but stayed true to the goal of Josie finishing her book. With the book complete they were now staring at real financial uncertainty. But! Within weeks of Josie finishing the book and getting it to an agent she had a seven figure publishing deal! Everyone who read Starcrossed loved it. It is already published and becoming a best seller in multiple countries.

Check out this video that tells the story:

I loved reading it. I can't wait for part two of the trilogy to come out. And when do they start making the movies?!

Go buy a copy today.

Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma

2011-06-28T11:32:00.002-04:00

Seasoned

2011-05-30T08:27:00.002-04:00

Seasoned

I try to walk with an open heart
You tried to run with an open heart
Still we’ve become with an open heart

This, will end. This will end I want it anyways, anyways

Laid in the sun with an open heart
Burned I return with an open heart
Beheld we are one with an open heart

This, will hurt. This will hurt I want it anyways, anyways.

Oh, the seasons, turn so far today
So many reasons we should hide away
Oh, the seasoned, battered torn they lay
Oh, this feeling, climbs right in anyway

Hide in the One with the open heart
Cherished we become with an open heart
Still I’m undone by your open heart

This, will end. This will end I want it anyways, anyways

Ray Lamontagne - Jolene

2010-12-05T20:43:00.002-05:00

Breathing Exercises

2010-12-01T16:08:00.000-05:00

BREATHE poster by Matt Wiley

Meditation is the deepest pool of water. It goes on beyond ideas. To overstate its reach would be hard. But simple breathing exercises have had a bigger effect on my life thus far. While meditations dive into an infinite abyss in ever subtler and less physical ways, that first dip of my head under water that I felt by doing breathing exercises was a profoundly simple awakening to the control that I can choose to have over the experience I have of my body, my emotions and the thoughts in my mind.

Much of what happens in our bodies we are either unaware of or feel as if we are powerless to control. We each have an autonomic nervous system. This is the term we use to describe the control system for our bodies functions that generally happen beneath or outside of our conscious awareness and control. Heart rate, digestion, perspiration, salivation, arousal, our immune system and our breathing are controlled by processes that we are normally not aware of. By knowingly taking over a task that is normally controlled without our awareness such as breathing we are able exert conscious control over physiological functions that often times seem to be controlling us. Because of the way that all of the body’s functions are intertwined, by changing just our breathing we are able to have an effect on everything from our heart rate to our happiness.

Anyone who has ever felt anxious, angry, excited or sad should be familiar with a number of things that are happening in their body while feeling these emotions. One of these is the depth and rate of our breathing. For a simple example look at your breathing while you are calm. It will be deep, filling up much of your lungs and possibly causing your chest, stomach and or shoulders to expand. This breath will be slow as well as deep, potentially lasting more than a few seconds. What you are likely not directly aware of is the way that all of the bodies other autonomic functions are working in concert. When we are resting and stress free this is a synchronization that happens in the body that keeps us healthy, happy and alert.

The opposite is true when we worry or get nervous, angry or over excited. Then our breathing tends to become shallow and quick as our heart rate goes up and certain muscles in our body constrict. At these times our resources are diverted away from our digestive as well as immune systems and into our muscles in the early stages of a fight or flight adrenal response to stress. Even our higher reasoning in the foremost part our brain seems to lose resources. Studies show that students taking tests perform at a much lower level than would be expected if they experience nervousness or stress for exactly this reason. While the most evolved parts of our brain are correlated with performing the most complex reasoning tasks we are capable of, this ability to meta-analyze complex concepts from afar is understandably a far slower process than the rapid instinctive reactions that potentially dangerous situations require. Fight or flight reactions shut down complex reasoning and amplify our tendency to be reactive. When we see a rapidly approaching lion we don't stop and ponder the existential implications of life and death, we run. Fear facilitates the functioning of large muscle groups at the expense of the bodies other systems. This is great for physically threatening situations, not so great for the simple stresses of day to day life. Put another way, when we are anxious or nervous we are prone to getting sick, having digestive issues, muscle soreness and often make mistakes on things that we should have been thinking through more thoroughly.

When introduced to formal breathing techniques I began learning how to take control of my breathing in a measured and rhythmic way. While sitting in a calm, restful state I studied the symbiotic relationship between my thoughts, my mood, the activity and sensations in my body and the length and depth of my breathing. By controlling my breath I began to see quick and meaningful changes in both my physiology and the tone and volume of my conscious inner monologue. It became clear in a very short time just how many of the formerly automatic responses that my body would have to a given situation I could actually choose to control with purpose and direction. When we take the reins of our bodies functions by controlling breathing we get a chance to guide so many of the other processes that seem to be happening beyond our control. Most of this happens without any effort or awareness other than breath control. The associations built by slowing and deepening breath while in a resting state carry forward so that in stressful situations all one must do is change the rate and depth of breathing and within seconds a calm, resting state can be accessed based primarily on the way that our body associates states with breathing, but strengthened by the associations we build between feeling calm and breathing slowly each time that we practice this.

On a more subtle level, when I began working with my breathing I also began to have a deepening trust in the intuitive understandings that so often hang out a couple of notches on the volume knob below conscious chatter. In the process of learning to have more poise and be less reactive in everyday situations I found myself having a deepening trust in my own judgment and ability to act quickly in any situation without feeling the need to stop and ponder. With increased breathing exercises my everyday sense of readiness inches ever closer to what many refer to as a ‘flow’ state. This is the state of being that artists and athletes describe where it is almost as if times slows and the most appropriate actions are automatically taken without any conscious effort or hesitation. The calm that I am describing here should not be mistaken for detachment or lethargy. It is an incredibly alert and active stance that is simply free from worry, distraction and unhelpful mental chatter.

I don’t mean to say that I quiet my mind. Many talk about meditation, used here to mean simply focused attention, as stopping the mind from thinking. As I have written before, this is not exactly how I experience it. My mind goes quiet no more than hands go numb, ears fall deaf, or my tongue fails to taste when I stop focusing on it. It has helped me to think of the brain as a sensory organ that picks up on thought. You are not your brain. You are the one who is aware of it. In a moment of slowness between breathes I have the experience of turning my attention to my right ear and hearing the room. My eyes are closed, if I ask myself what I see I will look and realize that I see only black. If I then change my attention to my mind I become attuned to the many thoughts that churn through my waking head. But to rest in between….this is where the wise man prays.

What we learn is that from this resting place of experienced stillness comes the quickest, most precise and in tune movements we can make; but also the most relaxed and effortless. And in the waiting there is no wondering or stress. This is not a place of denial of the outside world. There is a finely tuned listening, an awareness of the environment, that only such centeredness can allow. When the normal tendency to fixate upon and amplify one specific sense, including that of thought, is relaxed we are free to witness the present moment with much greater clarity and joy. The actions that we take from this expanded place of consciousness include all of the functions of our previous awareness, but add an element of choice and a sense of empowerment that is otherwise so often missing.

And all from breathing exercises he says?

I do.

The line between focusing on breathing and deep meditation is a thin one. Many meditative traditions begin with purposeful breathing as a means to learn focus and control. This skill is then utilized for prayer, koan practice, mantra, chanting, or to focus on ‘nothing’. From breathing a practice can continue for a lifetime. But I would posit that this is daunting and largely unnecessary for the lay person. What I hope all children will be taught and I offer all adults should seek is to learn to take control of their breathing. The benefits are immense, the effort minimal and really, you are doing it already, so why not do it well?

Good News

2010-11-19T07:28:00.003-05:00

How do you feel about the state of the world today?

Do you have hope for the future? Are you enamored with the present? What kind of momentum are you aware of? Do you think that your awareness has any effect on what is happening in the world? How about in your life? How about your mood?

Years ago I swore to myself that I would take control of the information that enters my mind and the value that I assign to it. This means applying my own filters to the news and information that I ingest and purposely seeking out sources whose filters I respect to provide such information for me.

For much of my young life I was depressed. I felt crushed by the weight of the world and what I saw as my inability to have anything resembling a positive impact on it. Everywhere I looked I saw suffering and the tides appeared too great to stem. Eventually I began to consider the ways in which I create my experience of the world. It started to become clear that health and happiness can be a choice and that such a choice begins with attempting to cultivate hope and a sense of empowerment while disallowing myself to wallow in despair over things that I felt powerless about. The information that I allow into my mind feeds my thoughts. To state the obvious: My experience of the world is dependent entirely on what information I feed my senses. Depending on the 'news', certain ideas flourish while others wilt.

In my mind, what the situation calls for is careful selection of the views and actions that we want to cultivate. Yes, I think that it can be incredibly damaging to watch the evening news and feel that you are informed. For many this experience is crippling. To sit and witness tragic events which we have little or no control over is a powerful and potentially soul crushing experience. The world takes on a tragic hue when news is harvested through the lens of sensationalism and sound bites that much of modern media relies on to keep us watching. When seen in this light and without an understanding of the positive impact that you and others can have on the situation the experience can be paralyzing.

But the world is full of people doing amazing things.

And the people reporting on such things are many. Consciousness is evolving. The world changes daily. Cultivating an awareness of the way in which things continue to go right is a choice. In every moment we exercise an immense power when we direct our focus and channel our resources in one direction over another.

Think that smart people aren't doing good things for one another?
Ode is full of stories of succesful, intelligent optimism at work.

We don't need to know in advance what we will do with any of this information. The idea here is not that things are figured out in advance. What I attempt to do is to cultivate hope in my life; to allow room for faith to creep in. As I do so I notice that my thoughts start to be filled more with visions of what I can create and less with ruminations of what I hate. I am trying to use my words less to denounce that which I despise and more for spreading the things I want to see flourish. In doing so my actions begin to become slowly more aligned with my deepest values, and my experience of the world more of a celebration and less of a drowning.

At times I do feel that it is important to watch Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC etc. simply to understand what their focus is and how the world is being packaged and distributed by conventional news channels. But doing so for me is a very different experience than in my childhood when I simply watched and felt as if what I was seeing was the truth about the state of the world. Sure there is truth in everything that they show. I do not mean to deny this. But in this modern (post-modern...whatever) world, perspective is primary. The fact that we can now witness genocide on another continent is, believe it or not, an incredibly positive thing. We now stand poised to act in anyone's defense. These atrocities are not new to this age. I do not see them as a sign of a world gone wrong. And bearing witness to these events is the seed of future action to correct them. But by turning our cameras so heavily on the bad things that are distant we create the impression in ourselves that this is what the world is made of. Since we have more access to the happenings in the world than ever before it is as easier than ever to find violence. But the same is true for love!

Feel like spirituality got lost somewhere along the way?

Find out how people are co-creating more integrated approaches.

The amazing thing is that I live in a city of 8 million people that is incredibly safe and peaceful. In times past tribal feuds were the norm. Small groups of people would clash whenever they came near. In parts of the world where civilization has happened the quickest hundreds of millions of people now live in relative peace with our neighbors. This is an astounding fact by yesterdays standards. The fact that we can even worry about the well being of people in Africa says an immense amount about how far we have come. These United States have been filled with slavery and genocide and war and the subjugation of women and children in years not too far in our past. But we have grown immensely, and I do not think that these things will happen again. I see the same progress taking place in other places, though perhaps at a different pace. But allowing myself to see the world this way has been an effort.

The internet is a powerful tool for information sharing, but our options are daunting, so our choices must be full of a carefully chosen intent.

Worried about the state of the environment?

Find out about breakthroughs in the science of sustainability daily.

Where does your information come from?

This does not mean putting your fingers in your ears and skipping around singing 'la-la-la-la-la' and just hoping that somehow things work ok. This is about cultivating that which you want to see flourish in yourself and the world around you starting with the things that are simplest and closest. What does your mind hunger for? We are what we eat. I think that this includes our minds. The information that we choose to feed ourselves is transformed into the thoughts in our head, the words in our mouth and the actions that define our lives and the lives of those around us.

Yes, we need to witness the horrors that others perpetrate so that they can be stopped. The world is full of need and this need can manifest as violence and hate. But from my perspective these things are lessening as the years pass. I look out and I see a world where, even though there are places where this is not yet the norm, in general, there is less slavery than there has ever been in the past. Women have more rights in most of the world than they ever have in the past. Children are treated better in the world than they ever have been in the past. And the ability for people to communicate and share resources is growing exponentially. But before we can save the world, we must be sure that we are being careful with ourselves. This means nourishment and careful choosing of our experiences.

Having made these rather bold statements about how wonderful the world is, I also agree that we stand on a precipice. Our power as a species is huge. We have never before held such capacity for change. There is no guarantee that we will learn to use our technology as we must quickly enough. There is no guarantee that we will learn to hold one another and the this earth with the gentleness that is required for a sustainable and equitable path to be tread; one that verges away from many of the trodden patterns that consumerism has wrought. But I am hopeful. And when I choose to look in the right directions, I see many, many others who are hopeful as well. And they are doing amazing things; things that we would all be better off witnessing and learning from.

Of course, we will never control all of the information that we ingest. To attempt to do so would be crippling and isolating. What I am describing is more about recognizing the control that you already exert, and attempting to bring more consciousness into each decision. We give an idea power when we repeat it. The simple act of looking at an image creates a reverberation in our own body/mind that stimulates sympathetic frequencies with profound impact for the tone and timbre of the life we manifest. Let's choose to echo the actions of people we respect and admire. One way to start is simply seeking this information out by upgrading our daily news feed.

One piece of advice: It took me far too long to realize that it is not about what I don't watch (for me evening news) it is more about what I do watch. Much like with your diet, I would recommend focusing on what you should ingest and let this crowd out the things that you want to move away from. Simply focusing on removing the negative creates a vacuum, a negative space that will be filled by what your are familiar with. But to seek out good news is a gift you can give yourself daily. So why not allow a little optimism to creep in? It's out there if you are looking for it.

Does Conscious Capitalism = Integral Business?

2010-11-02T10:36:00.006-04:00

A while back I got engaged in a discussion on Conscious Capitalism on the Yahoo iNYCs forum. Russ Volckmann of the Integral Leadership Review was lurking in the background of that conversation and upon reading what I wrote asked me if I would be interested in writing an article for the October issue of the ILR. I was and I did.

My basic premise is that many in the Integral community, but also in spiritually awake communities at large, seem to have an allergy to for profit business. There is a shadow that lurks in many that leaves them expressing a sense of distrust with those who are running large corporations and also a hesitance to engage the world in a way that will earn them wealth. The population at large has a sense of non-profits as serving the social good and for profit companies as feeding off of society for selfish gain.

As I've mentioned before when talking about FLOW, if we are going to steer this ship of humanity towards mutual flourishing it seems obvious to me that large corporations are going to have to play a huge part. So, given the option of demonizing them or engaging their potential to heal the world, I choose to focus on the latter. In general, given the option to put energy into preventing what I don't want in the world versus putting my efforts into creating what I do want, I certainly try to spend most of my time generating positive movement.

Check out my article here:

http://www.integralleadershipreview.com/archives-2010/2010-10/1010martin.pdf

Integral Circumcision?

2010-10-26T15:50:00.007-04:00

Recently my friend Gilles and I took over responsibility for organizing the NYC Ken Wilber Meetup group. This is a group of people that have been getting together once or twice a month for the past 5-6 years to discuss an incredibly wide array of topics using Integral Theory as a lens. For the past 3-4 years this group has been run by Barbara Larisch. It was decided that she needed a break to focus on other things, so Gilles and I took the reins.

This is an amazing group of incredibly diverse people who are all surprisingly intellectually, emotionally and spiritually awake. The conversations are all over the map ranging from books written by Ken to politics, psychology, religion; I led a meetup recently on drugs and one a while back on money. We had one a few weeks ago on pathology. The next topic we will be tackling is circumcision. Read Gilles writeup below:

For our next Integral conversation, we choose to tackle a delicate topic—the survival of surgical ritualistic practices that involve cutting a piece of an infant’s or child’s body, such as the circumcision of (baby) boys and girls. Let’s see where the Integral approach leads us. From an Integral standpoint, circumcision is a fascinating study case. For different reasons, all symbolic (e.g., rites of passage to adulthood, reinforc...ement of gender differences, display of ethno-religious identity, and various combinations of the above), cultures as distant as the Egyptians and the Aborigines enforced practices which entailed ablation of the foreskin, sub-incision into the urethra, bleeding and/or tooth pulling for boys, clitoridectomy and/or labial reduction for girls, just to name a few. While these practices emerged in Purple and Red societies, some survived, if not flourished in some Blue cultures. This is typically the case of male circumcision among Jews and Muslims, and female circumcision in parts of the Islamic world. Surprisingly, both male and female circumcision reappeared in Victorian England, with a unconcealed goal: to hinder masturbation among youths and prevent the many disorders that allegedly ensued from it. While female circumcision was quickly abandoned, the practice of male circumcision spread in English speaking countries, particularly in the United States (with the help of the famous Dr. Kellogg). Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, studies in the US confirmed the numerous health advantages of circumcision on newborn males. Overall, medical studies are contradictory, and male circumcision is not recommended anywhere outside the US (in fact, since 1999, the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have stopped advocating this procedure). Today, male circumcision for medical and/or aesthetic reasons appears to be a distinctive feature of American society, apart from religious circumcision in Jewish and Muslim cultures.

Wikipedia lists male circumcision as “circumcision” but female circumcision as “female genital cutting/mutilation.” Western countries are unanimously outraged by the practices of female genital mutilation still enacted in some parts of the Muslim world. On the other hand, newborn male circumcision, despite an increasingly vocal anti-circumcision movement, remains widely accepted. Why? Interestingly, male circumcision—a medical routine or ritual practiced by integrally informed rabbis—has not yet been openly discussed by Integral thinkers.

How do integral thinkers hold circumcision in the grand scheme of the Integral framework? What is the sacred meaning, role, and value of this ritual at a Turquoise level of cultural development? At the same time, why is male circumcision accepted, if not praised, in Integral circles, while all other rituals of a similar nature (be they imposed on boys or girls) are deemed cruel and immoral? Why are some practices acceptable and others not? And most importantly, what are the cultural assumptions that determine our moral choices, be we for it or against it?

Why has cutting an infant’s body (without the infant’s consent obviously) for symbolic or (disputed) health reasons not been investigated Integrally? We think it’s about time. Let’s open up into a multi-textured, many flavored discourse. All points of view welcome. All perspectives honored. Discernment, authenticity, and tact are encouraged. Let us remember also that, from an Integral standpoint, problems (and solutions!) emerge from all four corners of the AQAL map, and that “transcend and include” is the only acceptable resolution. We invite you to join us in this discussion, which, without a doubt, promises to be passionate, heated at times, fascinating, and testing the very edge of our Integral consciousness.

The meetups are open to all. Head over to the site, sign-up, and come check one out.

The Music Parade

2010-09-20T13:38:00.014-04:00

One of the music projects currently in the works that you have not heard about is a collaboration with Robin Wachsberger. The working title is IO. We are writing some great material, but more about that in a later post. Robin introduced me to her friend and collaborator Plus Aziz recently (he goes by +Aziz). +Aziz is spearheading a project called The Music Parade. Also known as The World Music Parade, it is 'a Community Exploring world music through animation & comics'. The MP has a blog and a Twitter feed with more info. What I am working on specifically is an animation that +Aziz has written. It is the story of a young girl growing up in the GCC region and the changes she goes through, the way her culture shapes her worldview and how these things shift as she matures.

Aziz has a fairly large team of people working on the music and animation. Robin is one of the vocalists. The other day +Aziz and Robin came over to record some vocals with me. I am basically working as an audio engineer on this project. +Aziz also brought a guy named Amine. Amine is also singing on this project. The session went well and Amine has asked me to produce a demo of his original songs for him. More about that later as well. For now, check out some pics of The Music Parade here in my studio Williamsburg.

+Aziz

Robin

Amine Kouider

Integral Drugs - Just Say Yes?

2010-07-24T12:06:00.004-04:00

I will be leading a discussion on drugs at the next NYC Ken Wilber Meetup. We will be exploring drugs and drug use through the lens of Integral Philosophy. My writeup for the event is below. More details can be found here:

http://www.meetup.com/kenwilber-58/calendar/14118030/

What is a drug? Why do we break laws to obtain some, are medically prescribed others, minimally aware of yet others and in ways a bit scared of them all? From heavy handed states of overwhelm to routine daily doses that are meant to make us feel normal, we use drugs in more ways than we often acknowledge. Societal norms, social circle expectations, our own internal chemistry, physiology, mood swings, shadow, spirit; all of these things and many more must be addressed in order to look at drugs and drug use from an integral perspective. Join us as we explore our relationships with and ideas about drugs in an attempt to come to a more holistic embrace of drugs and the roles that they play in our lives, religions, evolution, relationships, jobs, morals and general sense of well being.

The truth is that drug use has been a part of human life for as long as we have information. The likelihood of this changing is very slim. Yet, like other constants such as sex, there exists both an intense draw and deep dark shadows. Many claim to have had great awakenings, insights and inspiration through drug use. Others seem to be attempting an escape from reality or to just subtly dull the experience. Some of our greatest art was created with drugs. Some of these artists died at the hands of the same drugs. For some drug use is a medical necessity that their body or society demands. Many drugs blend into the baseline of our days in an almost symbiotic relationship, filling gaps as they arise, supplementing the basic systems of our body/mind in a way that both enables and cripples us, at times without our conscious recognition of their presence.

What is an Integralite to do? Try everything? Avoid them at all costs? Begin drawing lines in the sand? How do we navigate the sea of choices and what are the potential costs and benefits of doing so? Join us for a guided conversational exploration of the many faces of drugs. Sobriety optional.

Angel With Two Backs

2010-06-25T23:40:00.001-04:00

Stuart Davis - Nothing In Between

2010-06-24T00:05:00.005-04:00

There is nothing in between us when we sleep
But every night the bliss begins to leak
Nothing in between us when we laugh
it's something that our head will never grasp

It's seen in between

There's nothing in between your joy and mine
It's all a lot of nectar on the vine
Joy is how my parents were entwined
and there's nothing in between their lives and mine

We've seen in between

There's nowhere to hide in the open Reality
Love is so wide, but there isn't a boundary
There is only one eye without any enemy

when you've seen in between

There's nothing in between our skin and light
There's nothing in between the wind and kite
There's nothing in between our lips and grace
There's nothing in between the tongue and taste

It's seen in between

(Refrain)

There is nothing in between you and me
Nothing in between blue and sea
Nothing in between us and love
Nothing in between wings and doves

(Refrain)

There is nothing
in between

Adam Scott Miller

2010-05-28T16:43:00.006-04:00

I first saw Adam's work a few years ago on Integral Naked (now Integral Life). He creates what some call 'Visionary Art'. Alex Grey is probably the most famous of this breed, his work having appeared on albums for artists such as David Byrne, Nirvana, Beastie Boys and TOOL.

Being a long time fan of Alex Grey and having even gotten the opportunity to play in his Chapel of Sacred Mirrors just before it left New York City I was instantly drawn to Adam's unique visions of that which normally goes unseen by the eyes of flesh. What visionary art attempts to communicate is that which the eye of the mind and the eye of spirit perceive. These painters just somehow manage to get these visions down on canvas.

Upon seeing Adams work for the first time I immediately went to his website and bought a few of his original paintings to hang in my loft for inspiration. What I attempt with music, specifically what David and I did with The Emergence, could in this context be called Visionary Music. We attempted to communicate Spirit and the struggles along the way to such a realization in sound. As soon as we had the CDs for this project I sent one off to Adam hoping only that this kindred spirit and fellow artist that I have immense respect for may enjoy the noise we make.

I have recently been exchanging messages with Adam on facebook (where you should become a fan of his work). He reached out to tell me how much he enjoyed the album and most recently to say that he just spent about 12 hours listening to our CD while working on the painting you see above. Needless to say the finished product is stunning and knowing that I played even a small part in inspiring the work that went into it is a beautiful fuel for my future creative efforts.

I hope to be collaborating with Adam some time in the not too distant future. His work has only been improving in the past few years and I can't wait to see his new pieces as they emerge. He was recently on the stage painting live with Shpongle and I'm sure things will only advance from here.

You can see more of Adam's work and purchase prints and originals from his website: http://www.corpuscallosum.cc/ do it

Who wants to buy me the original above???

Two Close for Comfort

2010-04-06T18:32:00.001-04:00

The Emergence - Two Close for Comfort

Two Close for Comfort

Stuck in the Middle

2010-03-26T22:37:00.006-04:00

The Emergence - Stuck in the Middle

Stuck in the Middle

Oh my God I am so sorry
These words will not stay
Simple one I can't believe you
Your eyes lead you astray

Hold your head, I gaze inside you
you breathe I bend like clay
Where there are two we are divided
Get too close I fade away

I've been stuck in the middle...

Hold my breath to keep this moment
Clench my fist, I can not pray
I try to run, to stay beside it
As my presence fades to grey

Letting go I drift in tide pools
as the Ocean pulls away
Flail my arms and spin in circles
Till the moon pulls you my way

I've been stuck in the middle...

I am beginning to discover

I yearn to be uncovered

I've been stuck in the middle...

I wanna love you, I don't wanna lose me

Without you I am only apart

by David Wesson and Devin Martin

The Hostel Life - Colombia

2010-03-16T15:44:00.006-04:00

After Panama City the audience voted that we head to Baranquilla, Colombia. This was the only real option in my mind as Baranquilla is said to have the 2nd biggest Carnival celebration after Rio De Janero, Brazil. That, combined with the fact that we ended up getting hooked up with press passes made this an amazing place to be.

A big part of Carnival is the parades. With press passes we got bussed to the route and then set loose on the parade route. We could literally walk down the middle of the street and the dancers would just work around us...or with us. Anthony and I ran around with Mehdy getting drunk and shooting video all day. I got some amazing photos. Check em out here. And check out the video below featuring The Emergence track To Die By These Kisses. (now available on iTunes)

After Baranquilla we went to the cute little beach front town called Santa Marta. This video is pretty mellow. It features a track of mine called 'drift' that I put out on the Gods Own Drunk CD a few years back. (also available on iTunes)

After Santa Marta we were off to Bucaramanga and then to San Gil and finally Bogota. San Gil is known for adventure sports. It's a really cool little city nestled in the mountains. Anthony was still sick for most of this shoot, so the video below I shot, directed and edited; with Anthony yelling keyboard shortcuts to me across the room. I now know Final Cut Pro!!! (somewhat)

First we went white water rafting. I jumped in a boat with three guides. Mehdy and some friends we met along the way jumped in another. We would go through the rapids ahead of them and then immediately direct the boat into some rocks on the side of the river. I would jump out of the boat, scramble up the boulders on the shoulder of the river and set up the camera to shoot Mehdy's boat as it came through the rapids. Crazy, hectic and way too much fun.

The next day we went para-sailing. If I had less to do I probably would have been scared out of my mind. As it was I remember getting all geared up in the para-sailing outfit as well as with the HD video camera and my still camera. Next thing I know I'm filming Mehdy's takeoff and then people are telling me to 'RUN!!' off of the cliff in front of me.....and then I was flying. The guides did a some swirling diving stunts and really showed us around. I had Mehdy hooked up with a wireless lavalier microphone and I was wearing a headset, so you can hear me screaming to him at one point and him talking back through his mic.

You'll also notice what appears to be Mehdy swearing a lot in this video. Mehdy doesn't really swear that much. He does have a problem with the word little though. It became Anthony's mission as director to stop him from saying this. Any time we were looking at anything impressive or of stature Mehdy would say it was little. At times Anthony would carry around a handful of rocks to throw or a stick to hit him with every time he said it. Without Anthony there I had too many other things to worry about. But when Mehdy described the massive cliff that we were about to run off of as little, I couldn't let it slide. So I bleeped out all of his little's in this video.

Check out more of the pictures and videos on Facebook and YouTube. All but two pieces of the music that you here in the 15 or so videos we released is written, performed and/or produced by me. Maria Mulata contributed one song for the San Gil video above and the percussion you hear under the la Brisa Loca hostel walk through is something I recorded during one of the parades in Baranquilla.

All in all this was a wonderful, stressful, beautiful, weird, sickening, inspiring, erotic jaunt.

I hope to do it again some time.

The Hostel Life - Panama City

2010-02-10T14:17:00.016-05:00

I flew from NYC to Tampa on February 1st for a couple of days of test shooting. I met Mehdy for the first time ever and got to see my old friend Anthony for the first time in far too many months. We got to see the T-shirt’s Owen is making for us for the first time and had Mehdy’s friend Echo model them for us. We shot, edited and scored episode 1 just in time to leave Tampa. On Wednesday we flew from Tampa to Panama and uploaded the video from the Orlando airport while on layover. We got to the hostel Mamallena some time after 3am. We spent two nights at Mamallena and then moved to the Luna’s Castle Hostel the next day for 5 nights.

Mamallena is low-key hostel with great staff, $1 beers and a hammock in the rec room. A great place to relax; perfect for how we arrived. Luna’s Castle is a different animal. Built on 4 levels of a mansion it has dorms and private rooms on the top level, a kitchen and common rooms on the 3rd level, a screening room, art gallery and other private rooms (massages!) on the 2^nd level and a courtyard and a great little bar called Relic on the bottom level. Relic was packed every night we were there with both locals and travelers.

I’m sitting here now trying to compile some of the moments that have resonated the most in the pasts week and, huge surprise, they revolve around music more often than not.

Standing overlooking the water between downtown Panama and Casco Viejo, shirt off, chanting Hebrew and the chorus to a song I wrote recently to clear my head.

Running around through Casco Viejo with Ben and Joe of BenandJoe.com talking about the film they are shooting on chupacabras, drinking coconut water straight from the coconut with one hand while shooting video with the other.

Sitting on the balcony at Hostel Luna's Castle playing one of the hostels guitars with a fisherman from Alaska and a view of the Panama City skyline

Sitting in the courtyard behind Luna Castle putting together episode 2 while drinking a Shandy (half beer, half ginger ale) with the the Spanish version of the Black Eyed Peas ‘I Got a Feelin’ blasting on repeat from behind the laundry hanging out in the ghetto next door.

Riding around in the backseat of hostel bartender Fanny’s car singing ‘Steal My Kisses’ with Anthony to test out his karaoke veritas idea before we unleash it on unsuspecting strangers.

A late night jam session with me on guitar and vocals and Dariusz on plastic trash bucket drum trying to get the room to sing ‘By The Rivers of Babylon’

Sitting in the living rooms of the hostel with a guitar singing songs almost not distracted by the fear of people hearing my voice

Some kids in the ghetto next to the hostel dancing to the band playing below and waving to me.

One night at the bar Relic in Luna's Castle they had an artist painting live. I took some time lapse photos of this that may surface later. Another night the surfer Rob Machado was there to promote the release of a movie called The Drifter and the president of Panama (who has some sort of residence across the street) showed up to hang out in the corner and drink some scotch. There were men with ear pieces and guns everywhere. Interesting mix with all of the surfers who showed up. Not bad for a hostel bar eh?

I ran to a local music shop and got new strings for one of the hostels guitars, but forget to get a replacement for the missing peg on the high E string. So I wittled one out of a stick.

After a bit of struggle and confusion as to what the vision for each video we were producing was we ended up putting out three from Panama City. One really focuses on Luna’s Castle, the next is a video diary of the cast/crew and the third lays out the decision that we are asking the audience to make to determine where we go to next.

Tension mounts amongst the crew.

The Hostel Life Trailer

2010-01-11T17:56:00.004-05:00

I hacked together two existing tracks and layed down a bassline and high hat on a new track en homage to The Roots song 'The Roots is Coming' then added some Don LaFontaine style voice over to score this trailer of Mehdy deciding to up and leave the day job. Main track features Candi on violin.

We're flying into Panama on Feb 3rd to start shooting the pilot season of The Hostel Life. Get on the website and sign up for email updates to get ready to vote on the details of what we will be doing. If your mom's not already a fan on Facebook steal her password and become one for her. She'll thank you later, I promise.

Bruce Lipton - Biology of Beliefs Video

2010-01-07T12:53:00.001-05:00

A while back I wrote about correlation vs. causation in regards to DNA and epigenetics after reading Bruce Lipton's book The Biology of Belief. Here is a guy who is not only talking about cutting edge science that challenges much of the general publics' understanding of how to achieve health and happiness, he is also a great teacher who can bring across complex subjects in simple terms.

Check out these great videos to hear a once non-spiritual, allopathic research doc expound upon how he logically came to understand:

Why energy is more important to healing (controlling biology) than molecules (ahem....big Pharma)

Why belief controls biology

How stress makes your body susceptible to disease, hinders digestion and makes you dumber

How male scientists confusing the brain and the gonads screws up our entire understanding of DNA and how life manifests

Why genetic mutations are NOT random

How parents beliefs select their children's genes

How your body is a community

How cells communicate

How belief can rewrite your genes

How we broadcast thoughts and a way that we are all connected non-locally

How scientific reductionism gets it wrong

Why we are not controlled by genes as much as we are controlled by our perception of the environment

and even why we are not actually just in our physical bodies

Eliot in Orbit

2010-01-05T13:41:00.001-05:00

Back in 2007 Tony and Kiki were both working for Bait & Tackle, an all in one, ad agency / production house up in Gloucester, MA. They are a great one stop shop for advertising needs.

Chad who runs Bait and Tackle decided to enter the 48 hour film festival. This is a film making competition where the entrants have 48 hours to make a film within certain parameters that they are given right at the start of the 48 hour period including a line of dialogue. In our case, "If you come up with something good let me know". Tony invited me up to Gloucester to play.

Chad's vision was ridiculously ambitious. We ended up having footage of the band Guster live on stage saying lines, an underwater camera shot, shots from two planes in flight, one over the Panama canal. We shot in two states in the US as well as in Panama, had stop-motion animation, fireballs, a green screen shot, dolly shots, sunset camera boom work, too many locations to remember as well as original music written and recorded during the 48 hour period.

I ended up being credited as Sound Engineer, Music Supervisor and co-producer on two of the original songs. I provided a couple of sound effects as well.

Way too much fun. I need to do this again.....though maybe a little less ambitiously.

Stop Motion Animation

2009-12-28T20:11:00.018-05:00

I'm always wishing I could score more video. Animation has always intrigued me, stop motion in particular (think Wallace and Gromit). I got my first hands on taste of creating stop motion working with Eric while volunteering at Camp Bright Feathers. For years I have been looking for artists to create the visuals for me, so I can focus on the sounds. Volunteers are still welcome, but I'm through just waiting.

I've had visitors staying with me 3 of the last 4 weekends. This long weekend I decided to hole up in the house and get creative.

I've got my new camera (Canon T1i) that I bought for a trip to India, but will now be using to photograph where ever in South America you all send us while traveling with The Hostel Life instead. I've got iStop Motion installed on my little mac mini (got this really cheap from the 2007 MacHeist)and I went to the store around the corner and got some clay. I also grabbed a little wire framed fisherman toy that my mother gave me a while back.

I'm studying Latin rhythms a bit to get ready to travel to South America with The Hostel Life. I taught myself how to play the Timbao rhythm on a djembe (don't have congas). I didn't record that though....not there yet. I grabbed some samples of a Samba rhythm and built off of that for the score. I, of course, threw a break beat over the samba to funk it up and then added some individual hits from a kit drum on top of that to give it some heft. Then I recorded some acoustic, electric, classical and bass guitar before layering pads and assorted bits with my new little Micron synth (It's a bit digital for my taste...I need to get my Virus fixed soon) and a few other soft synths.

What ended up on the video is a 30 second edit of the 2.5 minute track that emerged. The edit was taken at an early stage while the song was still fairly empty. The full track starts out fairly organic and beautiful then takes a sudden turn for the darker before it ends back on the samba groove.

The focus of this stop motion test was to learn about how to sync movement with sound. This is fairly easy to plan when the numbers are simple. If the music is 120 beats per minute and the video is shot at 10 frames per second then I know right away which frames will land on a down beat. The music here is at 115 bpm and the video was shot at 14 frames per second. This is not as simple or consistent. I'm figuring out tricks as I go. I did decide to upgrade to the 'Express' version of iStop Motion as this allows soundtracks to be imported and video to be imported for rotoscoping.

What we have here is a 33 second clip comprised of 468 frames made from 431 individual photographs taken while enjoying a glass of red wine (note the drip running down the side of the glass once it is empty).

I'm guessing it'll be 5 years or so before I'm making anything truly impressive to look at. Owen begs to differ pointing out how the mind links different arts such as music and sound. I'd agree, but things will go a lot faster once I get people like him on board to collaborate.

Here's the full track:

Devin Martin - Latin01
right click to download

I've Joined The Hostel Life

2009-12-27T12:29:00.013-05:00

I've just joined the cast/crew of The Hostel Life. As I mentioned before, I was scoring some promotional videos to help pitch the show to some networks. I had mentioned to Mehdy, the host of the show, over a few months of working together by phone that in order to write music I need inspiration, so at some point he would have to take me on one of his trips.

I was sitting in my apartment catching up with Benjamin and buying a plane ticket to India. The plan was to fly to Bangalore on Christmas to attend The Art of Living's Yes+ Winter Break meditation and service courses and then backpack around for a few weeks by myself hopefully meeting up with some family who would also be traveling in India at the time. I would fly out of Delhi returning to NYC on January 22nd. Literally as I was pushing the purchase button my phone rang. It was Mehdy. He told me that he was planning his next trip, the first real attempt at the show with networks watching. And he was putting together a new cast/crew. It's going to be a three person team. Mehdy is the host. Luke is the Director of Photography. They needed one more person; a sound guy, second camera, co-writer, editor, photographer, jack-of-all type...and I was his first choice. The travel details will be up to you (the audience), but it is looking like it will be to South America for 5 weeks.

"When do you leave" I asked

"January 22nd" he replied

Interesting right? This was on Monday December 14. I decided that I couldn't leave for over two months without some more prep-time and out of respect for my day job. So, I postponed my trip to India and will be heading where ever people send us with The Hostel Life. We meet up in Tampa on Feb 1st for a couple of days of test shooting and then we will be leaving the country. We're going to be moving fast and covering a lot of ground. We will each have a lot of responsibilities potentially both on and off camera.

The success of this thing is going to lie heavily on audience participation. This is truly intended as an interactive guide to traveling on a budget. There will be polls on the website and what the audience votes we do within the budget while showing you how. The idea is to show how you can have an amazing adventure while on vacation for $300-400/week. We're not talking about sitting in a little hut on the beach. We're talking about getting off the beaten path a bit and seeing the exotic as well as festivals, fairs, natural wonders, music, doing service in the community and meeting as many unique and interesting people as possible. I think I'm going to document the food that we find in each region as well.

We will be off the grid a fair amount, but are committed to finding the internet every few days and uploading video and other content to the site.

So PLEASE find The Hostel Life on Facebook and become a fan. The page just went up, but we already have over 2,000 fans. A lot of them are from India, which excites me. Maybe they'll vote the show there next. You can also sign up for email updates on the web site. You'll probably hear me petitioning for certain outcomes for the polls, so I may need your help steering the ship to interesting places. I never promised to be impartial.

Check out the photos page on the site. I've just put up some photos of my trip to Brazil.

Practically Ideal

2009-12-20T18:20:00.006-05:00

Logan recently reached out to ask me if he could use some of my music for his new podcast called Practically Ideal. Billed as a 'podcast for idealists who like to keep it practical' Logan Beaux and Bob Caswell speak from an intelligent and pragmatic Libertarian perspective. Quite often Libertarians espouse an idealistic, yet completely unrealistic view of how the world 'should be'. These guys keep the hope alive, but look deeply at both the limitations and confusions inherent in many ways this political ideology is often expressed. They offer us a nuanced exploration of how libertarian thinking and action does and does not fit into the lives of intelligent, compassionate, integrally informed and open minded individuals who like playing video games and watching TV as well as being political active; or at least informed.

I, for one, am interested in Libertarianism both for specific reasons related to smaller government, less war, increased liberties (LEGALIZE IT!!) and increased individual trust and responsibility. But, as much as you may or may not support one particular flavor of free market capitalism, who doesn't feel the need for a viable 3rd party in American politics?

Practically Ideal touches upon politics, technology and pop culture....and they play my music. And who doesn't want to hear The Emergence every chance they get?

You can find the podcast at their website: http://practicallyideal.com/ or on iTunes.

Check it out, it's definitely worth a listen.

Chunky Move - Mortal Engine

2009-12-13T01:00:00.003-05:00

Just got back from a night out in Brooklyn. Went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) to see Chunky Move's Mortal Engine. I could describe, but you should just watch:

Thanks to Kiersten for both turning me on to the performance and for coming with me to see the show.

Baraka

2009-11-15T12:33:00.013-05:00

People have been telling me to see this film for quite some time. I think Tony told me first and most often. Baraka is hard to describe. For some reason I was expecting something more music video than story and more psychedelic than linear. It's none of these things and all of them. I'm not going to pretend to be able to describe it in detail here. It needs to be watched and the less specific your expectations are the better I think. But I will try to give you an impression of what the experience was like for me.

If ever I had any doubt about just how weird and wonderful this world is in all of its diversity of manifestation, Baraka put that concern to rest. The cinematography is stunning. The music, the sounds amazing. The sequence of shots tells a story that words would have only muddled and confined.

At times I was reminded of Planet Earth simply because of a sense of awe that someone had managed to film what I was looking at and managed to do so in such an intensely beautiful and powerfully delicate way. Nothing seems contrived or rehearsed or even particularly concerned with the camera. The director Ron Fricke plays with time and scale exploring both the sacred and the mundane.

Through ritual, through design, through creating, moving, praying, working and intensely held stillness the scenes that are shown in this movie weave an image of intense differences at many levels, but left me with a sense of a far deeper and more universal common core. Through 152 locations in 24 countries nature is put on display in all of it's geographical, animal, human and technological forms. I was often left with a sense that there was something at work in all of these scenes, a common drive, a shared want or need, that seems to express itself in the most wonderfully weird and inexplicable ways depending on the environment.

I wasn't sure how much I would be in the mood for Baraka at home alone on this Sunday morning with a slight hang over and a lot on my mind. I anticipated a broken viewing with a lot of pausing and getting up to eat or sleep or play guitar. I was in state for most of it; transfixed by the unexpected and lulled by the sweetness of it all. Even in it's darkness the images are tender and full of life.

In case you can't tell. I highly recommend seeing this film. Find the biggest screen you can and don't be shy with the volume. And if you do see it or have seen it, please hit the comment button below and share a response. I'd love to hear your reactions.

Baraka was released in 1992. A sequel, Samsara, is scheduled for release in 2010. I can't wait to see this in the theater. And apparently in 2007 the original film from Baraka was rescanned in an extremely high end custom manner, the audio remastered, and the whole thing released on Blu-ray disc in what Roger Ebert described as "the finest video disc I have ever viewed or ever imagined." I think it may be time for me to update my DVD player.

The Hostel Life

2009-10-21T11:32:00.013-04:00

Owen Beckmann recently put me in touch with an old friend of his named Mehdy Ghannad. Mehdy is a world traveler who has mastered seeing the sites on the cheap and now wants to inspire and educate others to do the same. To that end he is pitching a TV show called The Hostel Life to a number of networks. It's basically a reality show that will follow him on his travels. He will be operating on a limited budget ($300 a week I believe) and the fun part is that there will be a website where the audience can interact with him and even choose where he will be going.

Mehdy has asked me to provide music for the clips, and hopefully for the show if it gets picked up. So check out the two vids I've got here and then head over to The Hostel Life on Facebook and become a fan. The more people show an interest the better the chances of this thing getting picked up. And who knows, I just might get to do some traveling around myself.

Emotional Eating - Integrative Nutrition Graduation

2009-07-27T20:01:00.025-04:00

I stumbled upon this image today. It seems fitting on this Monday after graduating from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) yesterday. I think this is a feeling that we have all experienced, though it is not always so clearly understood. Sometimes we don't recognize it as the absence of another and eat whatever is closest. Sometimes we recognize the loneliness and eat through it regardless, desperate for anything to make us feel full. I think at one time or another we all eat our way through a lack of love in our life. The key is not to punish ourselves, to swear up and down that it will never happen again and then to beat ourselves up when it does. I tend to think that awareness is curative. When it is allowed in on a deep enough level awareness in and of itself manifests change. Simply bringing our awareness to the many ways in which the way that we feel affects the way that we eat and the reciprocal ways that the things that we eat affect the way that we feel is a bold step towards a healthier and happier existence.

Being a holistic health counselor trained at IIN guarantees that one is bringing their awareness to these and many other ways in which food is an integral part of the complex web of our lives. Our relationships, our careers, exercise, spirituality, our environment, society, all of these things must be taken into account if we are to truly understand our cravings and how they can be sated. Rather than being a complication of the already hard to comprehend nutritional theories that we are bombarded with, I think that most who embrace these ideas experience a simplification. There is an immense freedom to be gained by jettisoning the usual confines of yo-yo weight loss and gain that accompanies other, less comprehensive and more prescriptive approaches to health. Once we take into account the many factors that are both in and out of our control we begin to see that it is not massive feats of will and grueling dedication that allows our health to flourish. It is not about attempting to fit our body into a particular mold, or eating within the confines of a particular diet that works for someone else. It is about addressing the situation with an embrace that is open enough to allow for all of the many factors that impact our sense of hunger and emptiness as well as recognizing the many, many ways that we can be full-filled.

"Ain't no sunshine when she's gone, it's not warm when she's away"

A deep breath leaves me feeling centered and grounded. Social awkwardness can leave me cold and jittery. A hug brings warmth and gratefulness into my heart. A paycheck can be empowering, a bill in the mail deflating. I could achieve all of the emotions above and so many more through food or it's absensce. Sometimes, when I don't recognize the emotions that my body is generating for what they are, I can confuse them with hunger and either deny myself or indulge in food as a means to try and control the situation. Times when I can simply pause and recognize what my body/mind/spirit are saying are the times when I can honor these emotions and choose to nurture myself appropriately. Of course, sometimes I'm just really fucking hungry.

I feel blessed to have studied with all of the amazing people in this program and am truly excited to now be sharing these tools with clients. If you are reading this I would love to work with you. If you are ready to feel powerful in your choices and are excited about the possibility of listening to and trusting what your body is saying to you than my program is aimed at you. It does not matter where you are at now (not even geographically, I am in NYC, but so far most of my clients I work with over the phone). Please check out my website and reach out for a free health history consultation. If you recognize that there is room for growth in your life, if you want to send increasing amounts of light into the areas of your life that have been in shadow too long, than let me offer the possibility that working with a health counselor is exactly the type of support that will empower you to live the life that you are capable of, but may have been denying yourself.

The Emergence - Please Rise 2

2009-07-13T19:09:00.032-04:00

In November I broke my pinky finger hanging temporary shades with wine. I put one foot up on the radiator and the other on the arm of a reclining chair. The chair tipped over of course, and I caught my fall on the top of the head rest of that chair creating a 'minimaly displaced fracture of the distal fifth phalanx'. When I looked down and saw the tip of my left pinky finger bent back a bit beyond a perfect 90 degrees I immediately grabbed it with my right hand and SNAPPED it back close to straight as I collapsed with a scream down to my knees. It didn't quite make it back into place. My pinky was still curved a little bit backwards at the tip. I sat there for half an hour bending my finger over the back of a spoon trying to get it to pop back into and stay straight; all the while thinking, "this is going to make recording the rest of my guitar parts really f*$k!@& difficult!" Eventually Amy convinced me to go to the E.R. to get it looked at. They looked at it, x-ray'd it, declared it broken, declined to snap it any straighter, put a $0.50 splint on it and told me to go the Drug Store down the street to get a better one. They also sent me to a hand specialist to get a custom splint made. Apparently hospitals don't specialize in splints. Everyone was amazingly nice to me, cut me deals, slowed down and were present with me (who has no health insurance) and honestly seemed concerned about my musical ambitions. I felt somehow blessed to live in this place.

My finger is still crooked............................ but I can play just fine :)

I made the page of 'Nine Fingered Tasks' above listing things that i could accomplish on the album while on the plane ride to London ten days later that only required nine of my fingers (no guitar). I did some pretty intense time correcting, granular editing, mixing, vocal comping and arrangement of parts. All in all, The album ended up taking about a year and a half, from deciding to start writing to CD in hand. Not too bad me thinks.

About a year and a half ago I showed up at David's house in Boston with a contract which we signed with each other stating that we would write and record a CD within a year and then give away 1,000 copies. This included us each writing a song a day for the first 30 days. I live in New York City, David lives in Boston. The plan was to make this a The Postal Service style project sending each other pieces of songs to work on, except instead of the mail we used ftp transfers, email attachments, shared google documents, flash cards, notebooks, skype video chatting and any other means available to communicate. We even got together in person at times to write and play.

Directly upon returning from that initial trip to Boston I found out that my entire building had been vacated. Basically, over 200 people, largely artists living and working in loft spaces we had built out, had been kicked out of our homes and work spaces by the department of buildings. So I found myself suddenly homeless, though my cat Agape was actually padlocked into my aparment. For the next 30 days, while staying with my sister, friends Amy and Logan and in hotels and while at my office I wrote, recorded and sent David a song a day......for well over 20 days. At some point it just became ridiculous (the laptop I was using for recording died). But the time was fruitful for both David and I. Many of the 19 tracks that made it onto the album came out of this time.

David and I met back in 2000. I was DJing at raves and clubs around New England and looking to get back into making my own music as opposed to just playing others. David was making noise in various bands and looking for a more spiritual project to engage. The first time we got together to play the very first thing we did was write a song. I said something to the extent of 'fuck playing covers, let's just write something' and then started strumming chords. David just started singing and within a short while we had written GA, which later appeared as a hidden track on the Hunger Dreams soundtrack. We wrote songs, scored theater, played shows, collaborated on the recording of another project and then went our separate ways for a while. I had moved to North Carolina, dug into my career a bit and recorded some bands on the side. David became a Jewish Studies teacher and later the director of a Jewish school, got married and had a daughter and played in a few musical projects of his own. This album represents us asking the question of whether or not music is still an integral part of our lives and our relationship. I think the answer is a resounding yes.

Over the last year and a half we worked with 25-30 songs exploring themes of love and spirit, of loss and despair, of transcendence and embrace, integration and dissolution; reaching a new level of collaboration between us. This manifested as an amazingly fluid writing process. We co-wrote both the music and the words on this album with an intense openness, vulnerability and clarity often times tearing each others work down only to get together and rebuild it. We recorded in Brooklyn and in Boston and finally had it mastered in Manhattan. We are now in the process of giving away 1,000 CD's. We invite you to find us on Facebook or on MySpace, become a fan or a friend and ask for your free album. You can find David in Boulder, CO this week and in the Boston area after that. I am in and around Brooklyn, NY. We would love to share this music with you. If you go to www.NoAffiliation.com and make a donation of $5 or more to cover shipping I we will send one to you.

This is project NA0018 from my label NoAffiliation. The CD is free, but we are accepting donations to help fund this and future projects.

Hunger Dreams

2009-07-02T23:53:00.011-04:00

A number of years back Anthony Schwartzman approached me to write a song or two for a theater piece he was working on for his theatre company Oblivion Productions. When all was said and done I had worked with him and David Wesson to write, record and perform the score for Hunger Dreams. David, who I had been collaborating with on our DaVerse project, worked with me and the cast as a vocal specialist extraordinaire. The cast sang and flew (sometimes simultaneously). Ed Fians banged on junkyard parts as our live percussionist. We performed Hunger Dreams at the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama (fucking amazing room) and at the Brooklyn Lyceum. What you see above is a trailer built from live footage of those performances that Tony put together and I scored in anticipation of the second coming of a story which has yet to be fully told. Some of the music is from the original score, some I wrote for the trailer. Something tells me that the journey is not yet complete.

The Emergence - Please Rise

2009-06-24T09:32:00.014-04:00

The debut album by my new music project The Emergence is about to be released!

This is a collaboration between David Wesson and I. David is a Boston based singer and an old friend.

Owen Beckmann of http://www.dwell-being.org/ has just handed in the final proofs of the artwork for the eco-wallets. They look amazing. You should definitely check out some of his other work. The man is a talent and you will be hearing more about him in the near future I am sure. The cover is above. Check out the inside of the album when you get one for a little surprise.

I have just given Sarah Register at The Lodge a few very minor notes on the CD reference that she gave me. She should be making these tweaks this week and then I will have the final mastered album in hand and ready to send out for duplication. Thanks again to Sarah and Heba. They have been a pleasure to work with. Sarah has the perfect combination of technical expertise and a truly musical ear that has really helped this album to sound as good as it can (considering that I mixed it ;).

Find The Emergence on Facebook or MySpace and become one of the first to become a fan or a friend. The sites just went up and will be getting filled out with details, photos and information on how to be one of the 1,000 people to receive a free copy of the new album once it is released. We will also begin posting music in the next week.

And go read Shantaram! (link to the right)

Green Business Competition Awards

2009-05-15T11:11:00.010-04:00

Last night I attended Green Spaces Green Business Competition awards at Borough Hall in Brooklyn. This competition looked to promote emerging green businesses in New York that have the ability to revolutionize their industry by working with our ecological resources while creating economic opportunities. 70 companies with revenue under $10 million entered this years competition. 5 were chosen to present their business to the panel of judges (and the audience) last night. 3 winners were then selected.

1st place: Gotham Greens

Bringing New Yorkers local, sustainable produce grown in the heart of NYC

Gotham Greens' premium quality, pesticide-free vegetables and herbs will be grown in sterile rooftop greenhouses using clean, renewable energy and captured rainwater.

This company is now building their first 12,000 sq ft rooftop hydroponic garden in NYC. This facility will grow over 30 tons of premium quality, pesticide free vegetables each year for the NYC retail and restaurant market. They will be delivering extremely high quality vegetables the same day that they are picked. We're not talking about genetically modified week old food shipped halfway around the world. We're talking about something picked in your 'back yard' and potentially eaten the same day. They have been running a test site floating out in the river for the past three years and the response has apparently been incredibly enthusiastic, due largely to taste.

The environmental impact is also not to be ignored. Hydroponic farming consumes far less water than traditional dirt farming, as the water is recirculated continuously. They will also be capturing and utilizing rain water. The facility also uses solar panels for most or all of the energy requirements. Any excess energy generated will be fed back into the grid. Nutritionally, these crops have the potential to be far more nutrient dense than traditional crops, the vast majority of which are being grown in soil that is severely depleted, lacking many of the minerals necessary for a truly healthful crop to be grown.

So we're talking local, organic high quality vegetables all year round. Their presentation was very impressive and everything from their business plan to logistical operations to distribution all intensely researched and ready for production.

2nd place: Environmentally Conscious Organization Inc.

Environmentally friendly pizza boxes! This company has designed, patented and significantly marketed an environmentally friendly pizza box alternative sourced entirely from recycled cardboard. With over 3 billion pizza’s being consumed in this country each year and 70% of those requiring a box that is usually made from 60% recycled material we're talking about a great deal of avoided waste. The utility designed into the box also enables it to easily fit into a recycling bin 8” in diameter or greater, eliminates the need for serving plates and aluminum foil or plastic wrap for storage. Check out the video here:

3rd place: DBA

DBA is a New York based product development company focused on aesthetics, technical innovations and ecologically effective principals. Their first product is an 'eco-pen'. This pen is made from 98% industrially compostable materials. They're basically made out of potatos. We use an astronomical number of disposable pens each year. Their pen is a beautiful option that utilizes a unique ink which, unlike other pens on the market, is not petrochemical based. It is an almost food grade alternative that represents the majority of the innovation in their design.

I was at this event thanks to Sarah Pace of The Rabbit Mafia who catered the event with all locally sourced kickass hors d’œuvres. Good stuff.

Community Acupuncture

2009-04-27T13:21:00.009-04:00

I just just got my first ever acupunture treatment from an old friend. Steve Kingsbury was my next door neighbor growing up. I've been friends with his son Brian since a few days after he was born (I was one at the time). Recently Brian was in NYC with his new band The Susan Constant playing a show at Arlene's Grocery. Great show. I recorded an album for Simple Discourse, the band that The Susan Constant grew out of, and Brian and I were in a band together in high school with Jason Rossman, the drummer for both bands . Over a beer before their set we talked about his fathers new business. Steve retired as a Bose exec and went back to school for accupuncture. He has sinced opened up his own practice, Ashland Community Acupuncture, right in downtown Ashland, MA.

I know a number of people who have gotten great results from acupuncture treatments. I have always been interested, but had never really had a reason to lay out $100+ other than curiosity. Here's where the community acupuncture model steps in. From Steve's site:

In our community acupuncture clinic the treatment room has four recliners arranged in a quiet, soothing space. Receiving treatment in a community setting has many benefits: it's easy for friends and family to come in for treatment together; many patients find it comforting; and a collective energy becomes established which actually makes individual treatments more powerful.

The real breakthrough in my mind is the sliding scale pricing:

Our fees are based on a sliding scale where you chose what to pay, anywhere from $15 to $35 per treatment. Research in the United States has shown that acupuncture is most effective when done frequently and regularly. Once a week is usually the minimum required to make progress, and twice weekly early in the treatment process can increase the success rate significantly. The goal of the sliding scale is to keep acupuncture affordable and allow you to come in often enough to get better and stay better.

And it works. I know because I went back a few days later for another treatment. And the second treatment in any week is only $10! This, to me, is the sign of a healer who truly wants to help people. Many acupunturists are hugely succesful treating far less patients for far more money. But here is a model which is designed to facilitate the individuals healing process.

One difference that I am aware of in this type of treatment is that you will largely be treated using the distal points as opposed to the local points. This means that most needles will be placed on your legs below your knees and on your arms below your elbows. These will address the flow of energy through the same meridians that would otherwise be treated, just not necessarily directly at the site of concern.

If you want to find a community acupuncture clinic near you: http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/clinics

What is a life well lived?

2009-03-31T17:37:00.017-04:00

I got a very interesting Birthday Party invitation the other day. Erik set out a Pingg invite that started with the following:

You are invited to join a remarkable group of friends, creatives, and critical thinkers for a Sunday afternoon birthday gathering. We will tackle the question: What is a well-lived life? ...What does it look like? How is it lived?

Not a bad idea for a birthday party right?

Erik is a friend I know from FLOW meetings. He has recently started a new venture called DoubleHappiness an offshoot of which is GoodMeet. Basically, Erik is a creative consultant who works with customers to create events that stir the pot, add ingredients and hopefully help to create new recipes. This includes ideation, problem solving, focus group facilitation, brainstorming, interactive events etc. Goodmeet is the meeting arm of this company which focuses on creating functional and enjoyable meetings of all kinds.

Erik's birthday played with the Open Space Technology format to facilitate a group of strangers and friends to come together and, with relatively little instruction, self organe a series of activities focused on a particular topic. In this case, What is a Life Well Lived???

Each of the 14 attendees was asked to come prepared to faciliate a session (or three); speech, workshop, panel, activity, debate, pretty much anything on topic and within the space and technology provided. We each wrote a title for our session(s) on a piece of paper and then stuck this paper somewhere on a time line for the day. We each then signed up for sessions that interested us. From that point we simply self organized, usually into two groups, and tackled a couple of sessions at a time. There was a discussion on Entrepreneurship as Personal Growth, a debate on whether or not we should institute a draft, a meditation on love and happiness, Psychochronometry: the effects of aging on the perception of time, coloring, cake decorating, Creative Consumption, something called Bip Bop Pow and the Theory of Interdependence and a bunch of others that I am forgetting and/or we did not get to. I posed the question 'Is There Danger?' and we spent a few minutes discussing what danger is, how it is different for each of us and ways in which some of us may enjoy or feel a need for it.

There was a card game designed to put us in touch with our core values and intentions that involved everyone in the group writing human values on a large piece of paper, then each of us picking 15 of these to put on individual cards. Then, through a few rounds of ranking and elimination we eventually ended up with 5 cards. We then flipped these cards over and wrote a little something on the back. Mine ended up somewhat poetically. And thanks to a kickass and completely FREE image manipulation program I just found called GIMP you can see the front and back below (corrected for legibility).

So, I won't say that we came up with an answer. But I will say that I think all involved enjoyed the exploration. We came together, many of us as strangers, and left significantly closer due to a well organized and incredibly free flowing 4 hours that were able to be exactly what we all wanted and needed them to. No more, no less. As the guidelines professed:

Whoever comes are the right people
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.
Whenever it starts is the right time.
When it is over, it is over.

I look forward to seeing what Erik will be up to in the future. I, unfortunately, missed last nights Live Arts Collaboration Salon organized by Allison, another B-Day attendee, where he and 4 other artists from different disciplines met to each give a 20 minute presentation of their work and process with the hope of creating collaboration, conversation and connection. Check out The Performance Project @ University Settlement for more info. This is something I'd actually love to do in the future (future meaning after The Emergence album has been released).

Integrative Nutrition

2009-03-05T14:39:00.008-05:00

I recently posted the following to the iNYCs forum, but the same applies to all who might be interested. Please feel free to reach out and ask questions or take me up on the free health history offer. It will take about an hour of your time.

I'll admit upfront that I have not read the new Integral Life Practice book, though I do have the original DVD kit and I have read much of Wilber's work.

Caveat aside.

Nutrition has always struck me as a gap in the Integral world.

I think that Joshua Rosenthal has stepped up to fill that void.

I am currently enrolled in his Institute for Integrative Nutrition and, after the first few weekends of class, thoroughly impressed with how integral his approach is. I highly recommend his book called, surprise, Integrative Nutrition. It is a thoroughly holistic approach to health, happiness and well being. One of the most basic ideas behind his work is the distinction between Primary Food and Secondary Food.

Primary Food = Career, Physical Activity, Relationships, Spirituality

Secondary Food = What you eat

I don't know if this strikes you as obvious or obtuse, but after years in the counseling world he noticed that there could be one group of people who ate absolute shit, yet thrived, and another who ate with a fervor that might be referred to as Orthorexia Nervosa, yet still struggled to feel good. The point was that nourishment does not only come from food, and in fact, secondary food can often have less of an effect on your health than primary food.

The Integrative Nutrition approach truly avoids dogma. It promotes bioindividuality, and prefers teaching how to think rather than what to think. It is incredibly free from prescription and embraces all diet types as true but partial. They go out of their way to give us two world leaders on two thoroughly contradictory dietary theories in the same weekend (Sally Fallon and Neal Barnard last weekend). This approach is more about empowering individuals to make a life time of choices (that will change over time) than it is about inviting another authority into your life who will pretend to know exactly what your body/mind needs. In breaking down the idea that someone else has it all figured out for you you free yourself to realize that your body has known all along, we just stopped listening.

The program is more about exposure to new ideas and experiences and developing an increased confidence and awareness of the body/mind/spirit than it is about adopting any one life style or diet. There are suggestions I will strongly advocate, but there is room for all paths along the way.

So, if anyone is looking for an integrally informed health counselor just let me know. I will be taking clients very soon and am currently offering free health history consultations to anyone who is interested in even considering.

For more information take a look at my new (and still under development) website at http://www.integratenutrition.com/

Covering Ground

2009-02-22T19:20:00.014-05:00

Brendon snapping a sunset beach photo.

My most recent Facebook update read: Devin 's week of airports looks like LGA->SYR->BUF->LGA->RDU->ILM->ATL->LGA for Security and Reiki.

I've been traveling a bit lately for work. I've been in Dallas and Austin, Syracuse and Buffalo; threats of Georgia and Boston that will probably manifest in the near future. I'm in transition from being the Operations Manager for the Northeast Region to becoming something like National Accounts Manager for Tutela. I've decided that managing others in this industry is just not something I enjoy very much. I think that because my nature is to work very independently I have a hard time relating to others need to be micromanaged. So I'm not gonna put myself through it anymore. So far I'm enjoying the new role quite a bit.

I flew in to Syracuse on Tuesday, took the guy in charge of the facility there out for lunch, then walked his site with him designing a CCTV system that will cover every inch of his data center with cameras. Then I rented a car and drove to Buffalo to walk a few sites there and then fly back to NYC.

I took Friday and Mon-Tue off to go to North Carolina to visit Antoinette and get Reiki attunements. Antoinette is a Reiki master (along with masseuse and midwife in training). I flew in to Raleigh Friday evening. Owen, who will be doing the artwork for The Emergence album, picked me up at the airport and we got to grab some food and hang out for a few hours. Great to see him again. Then Alan swung by to pick me up. I finally got to meet his beautiful fiance Shelby and hear all about their whirlwind meeting, falling in love and then engagement. Looks like Mr. Genser will be in Cali by March. Mazel Tov

'Daddy', Jenny, Antoinette and I. Reiki crew 2009!

Then I got dropped off at Antoinette's friend Jenny's house where we spent the weekend learning Reiki; level 1 on Saturday followed by Level 2 on Sunday. I never would have guessed 6 years ago when I met Antoinette going to her house for meditations that I would end up learning Reiki. She's done a great job of cracking my head open and creating space for wonder and awe over the unknown to creep in alongside the science bit by bit over the years. Love you to death Antoinette. I miss you. We can't go this long without seeing each other again.

I really need to get more of my loved ones together, living in one place at some point.

After reiki Antoinette and I drove out to her place in Wilmington. It was cold, but we got to see a sunset and a sunrise at the beach and spend some long overdue quality time together.

We walked around a lake looking for (and finding) some blue herons and taking pics with Brendon and his father. I also got an AMAZING 2 hour massage from Antoinette right before heading to the airport. She spent the entire time on my back and my neck. That was much needed. I was sore for a couple of days, but used the pain to get in touch with my body in places that I obviously had been neglecting. Getting back into my daily practice over the past 4-5 weeks has really been a blessing for this and many other reasons.

So it seems that this is part of how I find balance these days. I work in corporate environments installing massive, networked security systems and I then I go and learn the healing art of reiki with my more spiritually aligned friends. Surely my path is taking more interesting turns every day. I'll put something up soon about Nutrition classes and where this seems to be taking me.

For now all is well in Williamsburg, chillin at home with Agape.

Sunrise at Wrightsville beach.

We're Never Gonna Survive Unless.....

2009-01-12T19:42:00.013-05:00

As the album gathers musicians (see below) and production, Dave and I decided to spend our last few minutes in the 'studio' playing a few acoustic.

The Emergence - Crazy

I spent the week up in Boston for New Year's doing some recording and hanging with the Wesson's. Dave arranged for us to get into the Auditorium at the Rashi school in Newton, MA to run around like idiots making a bunch of noise. Dave recorded some new vocals.

Candice played some violin and sang.

Garo blessed us with his doumbek (he's the perfect kinda crazy).

Todd joined us to record some backing vocals and play some drums.

We spent New Year's at Sam's house with some beautiful people, even better food and Rock Band. We even had a little DaVerse reunion with Sam on cello, Candi on violin, me on guitar and Dave singing.

After that, I drove back to Brooklyn and had one hour to unload all my gear from my car and into my apartment, get my shit apart and back together enough to drive to the airport and spend the week in Dallas taking a class for work. I then came back Friday night and Saturday Tyler came over to record some banjo and Robb to record some bass. Then we went out to an art opening and the after party for a bit before retiring to Tyler's to make a little noise on an armadillo's back (Charango).

Now I have a mountain of editing to do and I couldn't be happier.

Still Emerging

2009-01-12T19:14:00.007-05:00

Well, that was pretty fuckin cool. About 30 of us got a (supposedly) 1 and a 1/2 hour tour which then turned into a 3 and a 1/2 hour tour of Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors by the man himself. We started with his first ever tour of his decades long self portrait project and then progressed into the chapel and then through the rest of his newer works. The questions never stopped coming and he seemed to be really into the conversation. So we all gratefully allowed it to take its course.

Afterwards Dave and I played a few songs in the gallery.
Just being there, making noise, for some truly wonderful people was some kind of wonderful.
Actually made the whole towed car fiasco that followed well worth it.

The Emergence at COSM

2008-12-02T19:49:00.007-05:00

Announcing a new Meetup for The NYC Ken Wilber Meetup Group!

What: Special Holiday Event @ CoSM w/ Alex Grey - Mon., 12/15

When: December 15, 2008 6:45 PM

Where: Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM)

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce that Alex Grey has generously offered to conduct a intimate, integrally informed tour of his gallery for iNYCs members, friends and family. Alex will cover such topics as: state experiences and art, subtle energy, and the use of psychedelics for spiritual exploration.

The tour will be followed by a brief Q & A with Alex.

After which “The Emergence”—iNYCs’ own Devin Martin and his friend David Wesson— will provide a participatory musical experience. Our evening will conclude with a holiday toast.

“David and I took on our current work as an experiment in integration,” Devin says. “The languages we use and the methods we engaged were hugely informed by and part of our Integral Life Practices.

“Recognizing that the road of duality, filled as it is with happiness, is necessarily also filled with all of its opposites, people such as Alex, who have ventured so fearlessly, like a shaman, into the limits of our own consciousness, with the intention of taking pictures and bringing them back for the rest of us, have been an inspiration and a guiding light.”

Check out Alex Grey on Integral Naked: http://in.integralinstitute.org/contributor.aspx?id=24
And his artwork also on IN here http://in.integralinstitute.org/avantgarde/art_alex10.shtml

As most of you know, CoSM is leaving Manhattan at the end of December. Alex and Allyson Grey will be creating a new chapel and retreat center about an hour north of NYC. So this may be our last chance to the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors as it stands today.

Special iNYCs fee for this event: $20.

*Registration Details*
Please arrive at 6:45pm so we can begin the tour promptly at 7pm!

Learn more here:
http://kenwilber.meetup.com/58/calendar/9275431

Editing

2008-12-02T09:53:00.010-05:00

In an iNYCs email thread recently Randi posted about 'Solitude, intrapersonal communicaiton, ego and being'. She described her time spent alone in a room editing video and asked others to share their experiences. Here is my response based on my experiences working on music in my studio (she suggested I throw it on here):

Randi

Making sound is all about communicating. Audio editing is part of the creative process for me. It is all about enticing the other and making the content accessible. Often times it is the most fruitful and adventurous part. It is often when I take artifacts that I have created and look at them as if I had never seen them before. It is a play of states and perspectives. It is an experiment in hearing anew over and over again. Often times it is a day spent romancing myself to arouse the muse. Sometimes there are day long stints of Alpha wave laser focus with little or no conscious thought. Sometimes it calls for drugs.

For me editing is in no way separate from writing and recording. All are happening at once. It is a fairly fluid process. Compared to you perhaps I am lucky in that the recording never necessarily has to stop. Sometimes I am working with a song that was written a good time before, other times there is nothing written and editing is the way my voice first takes form. I play with samples, with instruments, with friends, software and my mind. Sometimes it requires sitting in silence. Other times I get drunk and dance to what I've just done. All are part and parcel.

At times it is a collaborative effort with another musician and we can go from silence to song in a matter of hours. Other times something is written by myself and/or others and the process of getting to know the piece takes a year or more.

I'm currently planning on getting things organized and ready for some serious plane editing. I figure a flight to London is a great time to get some of the more tedious work (time correcting) done. Sometimes holding myself captive is the best way to force the focus.

My editing style is as destructive as possible. I prefer to commit to something as quickly as I can and move forward. This generates a sense of momentum and trust in what is happening and takes away a lot of the room for second guessing and redoing.

I use multiple programs that have different specialties. When I am stalled working in one I will move a song or parts of a song to the other. I bounce back and forth and am never sure till the end which one will produce the final product.

I consistently try muting or deleting the things that I have assumed are the core of the pieces to see what has been built around them and what is still relevant. What I am working on now is acoustic guitar and vocal driven electronic spiritual music. Everything is written with guitar and voice, but those original parts may or may not bare any resemblance to the finished product.

All of this is done as part of an expression of what the moments reveal as a communication to others. Of course none of this was part of the plan when I first picked up an instrument. But I have honed these skills for a reason. And I love it and it also drives me crazy at times. Right now I have no idea how I will get this project finished in anything resembling a timely manner. But I will. And I will be alone in a room for most of it. Feeling excited by and connected to others.

Election 2008 Survey

2008-10-15T22:01:00.010-04:00

A CIT from Camp Bright Feathers sent me a list of questions for a school project. I answered as quickly as possible, trying not to pause between reading the question and typing my answer.

Q - What is your current age, and where did your ancestors come from?
A - 30 – I’m a German, Russian, Austrian Jew

Q - Who is your current employer, and what do you do?
A - Northeast Operations Manager for Tutela

Q - What economic class would you consider yourself to be?
Upper Middle

Q - What is your current level of education?
A - Some College

Q - Do you have plans for any additional education? If so, where/how much?
A - I am becoming a Health Counselor in the first half of 2009 with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition

Q - If you could change one thing about the government, what would it be?
A - The lack of a viable third party

Q - What is the most pressing topic that should be addressed by the new president in his first 100 days in office?
A - Domestic Economy

Q - Do you feel that the government made the correct decision to bail out Wall Street? Why/why not?
A - No. I believe we are perpetuating a culture of debt and the longer we wait to let certains things crumble the more it will hurt

Q - Do you think that the government should take responsibility for housing, or should it be the individual’s own responsibility? Why/why not?
A - I think that the either or nature of this question misses the point. We are all responsible; lack of proper regulation, irresponsible lending practices, uneducated borrowing, inflated markets, general lack of financial education in the school systems etc.

Q - Would you approve of a new healthcare plan, even if it turns out to be as complicated as Hillary Clinton’s? Why/why not?
A - This question is vague. I think that it is a bad idea to simply subsidize the current system. The system must change first. Individuals must take a larger responsibility for their health care; (preventative maintenance, choosing treatment, seeing the costs directly). When this happens capitalism will do its part to cut costs and improve quality (look at consumer electronics, Moore’s law etc). If this is happening or part of the plan I think we can start looking at government support.

Q - What are your life goals?
A - Happines, family, health, wealth, lots of sex

Q - What do you think John McCain was thinking when he nominated Sarah Palin as his running mate?
A - Tits solve everything (thanks Aileen)

Q - What do you think Barak Obama was thinking when he nominated Joe Biden as his running mate?
A - I’m too young

Q - Would you trust the next president regardless of party affiliation? Why?
A - I’m transpartisan. I look at individuals accordingly

Q - If definitive proof is shown that terrorists are operating out of Pakistan, would you support the expansion of military operations to take care of it?
A - What terrorists? What kind of operations? What kind of expansion? What does ‘take care of it involve’?

Q - Do you approve of the ‘Iraqinization’ of the war in Iraq?
A - No idea what you’re talking about

Q - Do you support unconditionally meeting with countries that are known to dislike the United States in an effort to re-open diplomatic ties?
A - Depends who is meeting, when, where, why etc. Personally, I’d love to meet new people from foreign countries. The president can not be so informal with his appointments, though certain members of his/her staff can be.

Q - If you could ask both candidates one question each, what would they be?
A - Obama – Can I have a job?

Q – McCain
A - What age do you expect to live to?

Q - Does the tax policy of the United States need to be completely re-written?
A - Yes. Make it simpler

Q - Where would you like to see the United States in 20 years? What would you change?
A - I would like to see the United States in the exact same geographic region. Energy independent. Out of debt. Open trade with all nations. Economically not much better off than any other nation. A world leader in new technology, philanthropy and wildlife conservation.

Integral Education - Seattle - Whidbey Island

2008-08-09T12:24:00.009-04:00

I just returned from Whidbey Island, WA where I was attending the Integral Education Conference put on by Next Step Integral. About 60 people gathered from various spots on the globe to discuss education from an integral perspective. First I had to get there.

I got in to Seattle around 11:20am. David was supposed to meet me at the airport about an hour later flying in from Boston, but air travel sucks and he was delayed about 12 hours. Looks like I was on my own in the city.I went to Pikes Market where I may have seen some guys singing four part harmony in front of the first Starbucks, a bunch of hippy's, tourists, beggers and locals. I got a vegan chili dog at Cyber Dog Cafe. I went to see a matinee of Hancock, not bad, I like the twist, it's kinda sweet and Therone looks hot as hell. I didn't even realize she was in it. I bought the softest pair of jeans I have ever felt at Road apparel. They're made out of wood. Real nice salesman there has a daughter in Brooklyn. I asked him where I should hang out and he recommended a neighborhood called Belltown.

Since it was looking like David was not going to make it in time for our planned night out on the town I debated going to a Whole Foods to buy a bunch of enzymes I had been reading about on the plane and then heading back to the hotel, but decided to hit a bar on my lonesome for at least one beer to see what kind of trouble I could get into.

I sat down next to a construction worker named Rich. Great guy, and the perfect solution to my situation. Rich is the type of guy who will randomly buy a round of jello shots for the people in his vicinity and strikes up conversations with everyone. He lives in Belltown, and also seems to be a bit of a drinker. We started at Buddha Bar, moved to Rendezvous, then Alibi Room , then Sonya's . Many drunken hours full of conversation with a wide variety of locals later I took a cab back to the hotel where David was already asleep in bed.

The next morning we were on the ferry on heading over to Whidbey Island. It is a beautiful place and at this particular time it was full of amazing people.
We snuck away from the conference for a few hours to go to one of the state parks on the island and hike a few miles in a beautiful lush forest with an ancient cedar that is over 500 years old.

The conference was great. It was full of a rich mix of truly inspired individuals all eager to share their appreciation for the world with children and determined to get better at doing so every day. There were presentations and experiential exercises. We sang, danced, played frisbee and walked around a labyrinth. I met a great variety of educators young and old, each of whom taught me something about life.

David and I rented a guitar from a local music shop and got to play our new music for the first time in front of a couple of intimate groups of people in the beautiful sanctuary on site. A beautiful room with amazing sound. I'd love to record there some time.

No idea how this experience fits into my career goals, but I'm glad I went and would love the chance to return some time.

Why Destination

2008-07-14T18:03:00.001-04:00

Why Destination

I may have held you here before
dragged my feet
and bowed my head
as you looked around for more

I remember
I remember
and I will not leave

Why Destination

Walked around in circles

dragging nails I bruised your floor

screaming at the birds outside

staring wanton through the door

I followed you

and I followed through

but I let you drown

Why Destination

Why Destination

Winds blow through
like children run
and we might die today
I beg you please don't turn away

Why Destination

Why Destination
(we might die today)

Why Destination

FUCK GOD

2008-07-01T18:43:00.002-04:00

Fuck God

So dire
This desire
That I hide
Inside

Frustrating
my entire
Higher
Sense of pride

So demanding
Where you're standing
Mirror
In your eye

I'm unnerved
I've been served
As you just walk by.

Wanna take what's outside in
Wanna bleed it out again.

Wanna hold me in your arms

Want to make these pieces whole
I must draw you in again

Disaster Recovery

2008-06-29T20:07:00.018-04:00

Biometrics

Firewalls

Internet Protocol (IP) addresses

Subnet

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Virtual Private Network (VPN)

Gateway

Ping

Telnet

Arp

Structured Query Language (SQL) Database Administrator (DBA)

Distributed File System Replication

Domain Name System

Security Access Request Forms (SARF)

NetBios Name Resolution

Microsoft Terminal Services Client (MSTSC)

Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)

TCP/IP

Packets

Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN)

WINS Resolution (Windows Internet Naming Service)

Dynamic Host Resolution Protocol (DHCP) Reservation

Quality of Service (QOS) Management

Communications Interface Module (CIM)

Hosts File

Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID)

Regedit

Why do I have any familiarity with these things?

Amazing what we fill our heads with. I thought I opted out of the desk life for a blue collar job. Seems my career has morphed on me. Shit, I thought I had a day job, took me a while to even consider it a career. I used to spend my days filthy at construction sites, crawling under houses pulling cable, drilling concrete while standing on the very top of a ten foot ladder, hanging cameras, wiring card readers and control panels, contacting windows and doors, adjusting motion detector sensitivity, hanging intercoms and terminating cables on DVR's. Now I write a lot of emails, spend hours on the phone, go on sales calls, act as a consultant, oversee others and take people out to dinner. Some times I miss the simplicity of completing a task with my hands, my thinking mind shut off or absorbed with something finite, entering that flow state that being good at manual labor allows; drawing blood and feeling my muscles ache, knowing that the dirt is so ground into the lines in my hands that there is no way they will be clean today......and leaving it all behind when the work day is over.

I spent the week in Charlotte, NC coordinating the installation of a disaster recovery solution for a nationwide access control system for a Fortune 100 company. Funny how these things work out.

The weather was nice and their campus is rather beautiful in parts.

Why NYC Rocks

2008-06-23T09:48:00.002-04:00

I'm at this subway stop all the time. I've seen the flute player there before, but never with the cellist.

Sustainable Profits for Good?

2008-06-11T21:58:00.005-04:00

Last night I went to a fundraiser for the Global Exploration for Educators Organization (GEEO) (GEEO.org). GEEO is a great new non-profit that my Integral Geek-up friend Zach is the legal council for and also on the board of. GEEO's mission is to facilitate travel for educators. The idea is to break down the walls of isolation and ignorance that stand in the way of us (Americans) interacting compassionately with the rest of the world by exposing as many as poosible to the wonders of travel. This mean helping teachers to see the world, but also helping them to bring these experiences back to the classroom. They have presentations and lesson plans that they hand to teachers upon their return to the classroom that makes it as easy as possible for them to share their experiences (and hopefully their new found appreciation for travel) with their class. They really did a great job of making it clear just how many students a teacher can impact in their career and just what the ramifications of instilling a positive outlook on travel in them could mean for the world.

But they will not turn a profit.

They actually had us there to ask for donations (at a fundraiser! go figure). They made it quite clear that they expected the fund raising, grant writng, and other means of outside support to not only continue, but actually grow as the 'business' does.

Tonight I was at a FLOW (flowidealism.org) meeting. As I've said before. FLOW intends to help people engage in business in an effort to have a positive impact on the world. The idea here is to stop demonizing corporations, to stop making anyone the enemy, and to start creating a space for entrepreneurs to be do gooders; for making a living and making the world to go hand in hand.

Why do we assume that socially conscious endeavors should not turn a profit? Can't they at least be self sustaining?

Isn't there an amazing amount of waste, shame, and resentment in this fruitless shuffling of money between those endeavors which 'support' us and those which 'nurture' us. What's the difference? Why the artificial separation? It is artificial. There is no reason that I am aware of that the two must be fundamentally separate.

I realize that this is a bit of a foreign idea to many. The dominant economic paradigm does seem to dictate that cut throat behavior is the means to an end if your end is to include a profit. But why is that? Is this not merely a short-sighted and ultimately unsustainable perspective? I think the state of the world today makes it obvious that this is true. You can only reap more than you sow for short periods of time. It is in everyone's best interest(to be profitable and nurture others) to keep the ground fertile and healthy.

So what is the solution?

We must break down these barriers between sustainability in finances, sustainability of spirit and sustainability in nature(Triple Bottom Line). And not only do I think that this is possible and ultimately even required, people are already doing it. One of the tasks that decided to take on tonight as the NYC chapter of FLOW is to begin the documentation process of some of the stories of the people in our group who are already doing this.

Our group attracts amazing people with remarkable stories of looking at the world through compassionate eyes, recognizing need and moving forward with a profitable solution that does its best to benefit as many as possible at each step of the way in the business. No one has it perfect of course, but amazing strides are being made and it is quite clear that with each new endeavor there is a little less figuring out for everyone else.

I think that these ideas are already making their way through the consciousness of the populace at large. Hopefully we at FLOW will find ways to both speed up the process of making more people aware of these possibilities and also make it easier for those who are already undertaking such tasks.

Definitely more to come....

Origins of Music / Food Poisoning

2008-06-07T00:31:00.012-04:00

I was looking through a notebook trying to find a song I wrote a couple of years ago when I stumbled upon something else (quite a bit older), written in a very weird state. I had driven cross country, from Boston to San Diego with Kristine helping her move. We had been dating for a while and it was time for her to switch coasts. I welcomed the adventure and was happy to be of service to her in the move. Once we got her settled I spent a month bouncing around California visiting Josie in L.A., getting my dove tattoo started, back to San Diego for a bit, back to L.A. to get the tattoo finished and ended up in San Francisco visiting an old friend and my cousins Tara and Priya.

I spent a day walking around the city by myself just getting to know the place. It had been a whirlwind adventure of a trip so far and I was a bit beat up emotionally, physically, and also really fucking hungry. I hadn't eaten all day. I walked back to my cousins neighborhood and bought two slices of meat lovers pizza. They didn't last long. I then headed back to Priya's apartment where her roommate was hanging out. We went to some biker bar, sat outside, had a beer, then went home.

I remember remarking that I was tired or not feeling well, then laying down for a second. When I woke up and looked at my watch 12 hours had past. I stood up, said 'something doesn't feel right', stumbled to the couch and passed out again. When I woke up this time another twelve hours had passed. I was really confused; felt horrible and disoriented. I walked to the bathroom and threw up (very rare for me). I then walked back into the room I had been in, fell on the mattress that had been laid out on the floor for me and passed out. I woke up 12 hours later. 36 hours passed in all before I really came to. When I opened my eyes my head was on fire.

I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote the following; what I just found in my notebook. Some of these thoughts were new, foreign to me at the time. I know not from where they came. I've tried to type it as it was written.

At the times that books and math and friends and schooling and thoughts in general have been constraining or hurtful or just plain unsatisfying I have found much solace in music.

I have seen it as a means to understand, cope, express and relate many things that got lost between the words that I speak and the thoughts in my head. Or even between the thoughts in my head and the emotions, the feelings in my body.

At times music seems to rise out of the depths of me. It comes from somewhere I have never seen or heard of or in any factual sense even know to be absolute. But I have no doubt it exists, for I feel its presence. I am its presence. In many ways it is all that is me. All that manifests in my words and my actions and so much more that I yearn to be in touch with and share with others. Something that rings in the silence of the slowest deepest kiss, that screams in the blind frustrated rage of a fist thrown in desperation. Something intrinsic, something universal and divine. Something I know that I must find.

And so I look to music. Somehow basic and instinctual, yet capable of so much complexity and diversity. A universal bond. Something capable of stirring emotions and sparking desire. So often a way to remember. When there was a pervasive quality to a trip or a night or an event so often is is most commonly recalled by the music that decorated is peaks, that permeated even its silence.

Where does this music come from. Even assuming this deep unifying intangible factor in all of us, we can't assume that it is music itself that ___ us life.

We are sentient beings. Highly evolved products of billions of years simple, basic, thoughtless needs. Driven surely by instinct as much as any thought or desire. But at some point we developed these ideas, these words. At some point we became aware of our instincts, our needs. We began to formulate and postulate. We began to predict and to plan and to consciously attempt to understand what we need. And to understand our interpreted means to those ends as our wants, our desires. Something fueled by a need, but never a need in and of itself.

At the time of, or simply as a product of this consciousness we developed, we somehow began to create language. A tool. An amazingly powerful tool used to express, to relate, all of these thoughts and desires, discoveries and pains, not only to others, but also to ourselves.

What is all to often forgotten is how much we think using language. We dream using language, and obviously we talk with language. But it seems obvious to me that our minds encompass so much more than that which language is. There must be so much more that language does not yet allow us to express, or even to think about. Pure powerful emotions that seem to encompass so much more than simply fear or hate or desire or even love.

What happens to any very basic and necessary product of sentient life that is a part of us, as conscious beings, but which we can not consciously relate to through language. I project that these things are most prevalent in music. I think that music has helped us to fill the gaps that language has created as we made the jump from pure sentient instinct into consciously formulaic thought. I suggest that in many ways music is our most direct conscious manifestation of our most basic and important bodily functions. The rhythm so inherent in the beating of our heart, something which both regulates and reacts to all that we are, is quite possibly the most vital ingredient in the music that rises from us.

Perhaps when we smell a flower or feel the wind or see a sunset or taste sweet fruit or touch another it causes so much to happen within us that language could never express it all. Maybe the truly simple "natural" creatures can revel in the joy of nature without all of our human inventions and constructions due to the true sentience of their beings. Maybe this attempt to express and relate through language is so much of what makes us feel all of the spaces in our consciousness. And maybe music rose out of a need to fill these spaces.

Maybe music is in many ways our most direct connection to so much of our most neglected, but obviously important inner truths.

music is the bi-product of language

veg

2008-06-03T00:01:00.001-04:00

veg

Floating - Sensory Deprivation

2008-05-26T20:27:00.004-04:00

Nara and I went to Blue Light Floatation today to float for an hour in a sensory deprivation (float) tank. This is a large, bath tub like pool of water housed in a completely dark enclosure. The water is heated to skin temperature and has 1,000 pounds of epsom salt dissolved in it. The effect is that you float, free from touching anything other than the water, which, because of the temperature, is hard to distinguish from your skin. Your ears rest just below the water and the room is silent. It is pitch black, so there was literally no difference if my eyes were open or closed. There is nothing to smell other than a bit of ozone in the room and assuming my mouth is clean and closed, not much to taste either. They haven't come up with a way to deprive the idea sensing organ (brain) quite yet.

Upon entering this quite nice facility (actually owner Sam Zeiger's home) we were sat down and given a brief orientation to the facility and how to use it. Before entering the tank we showered and immediately upon exiting we showered again. Other than that, and how to turn off the light once in the tank, there wasn't much to learn. The tank is nice in that it has very high ceilings. From what I can tell most tanks require you to climb through a door into a box about 4 feet high. This was very spacious.

Once in the room with the tank I got naked, entered the tank and laid down.......and floated, for one hour. It is an interesting feeling to be free from the senses, to feel the body relax, or not relax, as it attempts to maintain tension or posture when it is so obviously not needed. Much of my time was spent feeling and hearing my body. I could hear/feel my heart beating in my ears. I followed my breath as it moved in through my mouth, down my throat and filled up different areas of my lungs; stomach, chest, back etc.

--------Edited per Nigel's comments to include what is below-----

The weird thing was about 10-15 minutes into the float I suddenly knew that Sam (owner/operator) knew Sylvia, the woman who ran the ayahuasca retreat in Brazil where Nara and I met. It wasn't an idea, or a hunch, it was a knowing. When I came out of the the tank (which was virtually sound proof I remind you) Nara said "Sam knows Sylvia!". I responded something along the lines of 'I know, where you guys talking about it about ten minutes after I went in?' They had been. It turns out that Sam's shelves were full of books about consciousness expansion and psychedelics. Nara had quickly gravitated towards a book about Sekhmet, an egyptian warrior goddess whose presences she had felt while in Brazil.

What is it about drug users noticing more synchronicity in life? Terrence McKenna talks about psychedelics (and marijuana's) ability to break down barriers that we have constructed in our mind. The idea being that we divide reality into neat little categories, subjects and objects, us and them, and assume that there is nothing arbitrary about these divisions. We assume that the dividing lines are 'real'. That they are absolute and that there is a need to then find connections between things. The truth may be closer to the mystic idea that all is one and any attempt to create connections assumes boundaries that are simply constructs of the perspective we choose to take on a given situation.

Sure the boundaries serve us, make the world easier to navigate and understand. I wouldn't be typing this to you without them. But should we allow room for the paradox that they also confine us? Confuse us?

Perhaps Rupert Sheldrake is on to something when he talks about morphic resonance and morphogentic fields and describes the brain as more of a radio than anything with it's own content or shows to transmit. He postulates that information, memory, exists in a field that our body/minds can attune themselves to and we are thus informed. This fits nicely with the Buddhist notion of the brain as another sensory organ, one that senses ideas. I mentioned a meditation experience earlier where I was able to take my awareness and tune, or not tune, into the brain and it's neurotic ramblings. Obviously (to me) awareness, consciousness, is something other than the thinking mind. It is something that is aware of the thinking mind. Is it so odd to think that there are other, more subtle means of transmitting information that consciousness is also aware of if/when we relax the artificial boundaries that we have created between what is a valid means of knowing and what is 'metaphysical nonsense'?

Or have I just done too many drugs?

If that explanation is more comfortable to you then by all means stay closed to other possibilities, but if you are aware of information entering your awareness through means other than rational understanding of the five senses, then perhaps we should start developing other senses as well. Do you know why you are attracted to someone? Why you fall in love? Their ideas? Pheromones? Scent? (is there a difference?) Is there some other transmission of information that happens here? You can explore quantum entanglement if that's your bent. I'd recommend mixing such things with some open minded explorations of your direct experience.

rant over.

Boston

2008-05-24T17:28:00.009-04:00

"buddha"

"Buuddha"

"BUDDHA"

"BUDDHA!"

I was in a dream at an Integral Salon and we were discussing the difference between rational understanding and 'knowing' when these cries of "Budhha" came crashing through and woke me up. Turns out it was Talia, at all of 21 months old, screaming from the other room. I asked Candi if I was hearing her right and she said, 'yeah, sometimes she says that'.

"Buddha"

I'm in Boston this weekend. I drove up with my sister and brother-in-law yesterday. I dropped them off and went to David and Candi's house to work on our music and hang out with their daughter Talia. Tonight I am going to see my parents in Ashland and then we are taking my mother out to the Top of the Hub for dinner to celebrate her retirement after over 25 years of teaching. I don't think she's done yet. She has much left to give in ESL (English as a Second Language)

The Emergence.

David and I have been writing songs and preparing to record them this summer. We are going into the studio next weekend to do a preliminary acoustic recording to help us hear what the full production versions of the songs may sound like and also to hand out to other musicians we are going to invite to play on it. Our working title for the project has been Witness (no more DaVerse), but it looks like we are going to end up calling ourselves The Emergence. Here is a list of songs that we are working on/considering for the album. Some of them are working titles.

Stuck in the Middle
It is I
Lullaby
Torn by the Highs
Wake the Dawn
I Before Abraham
Vapors
Crow
One Great Sea
Adonai
Japa
Lost in Place
To die by these Kisses
Cracklin Diamond
Day 136
dum dum beat
Pantry
Raise
Slate

FLOW w/ John Mackey

2008-05-22T16:12:00.003-04:00

This past Monday John Mackey came to our NYC FLOW meeting at Susan's home. A group of 15-20 of us sat down with John to discuss the state of conscious capitalism in the world and our potential to be the change we feel is needed.

For a while now I have been attending FLOW meetings (http://www.flowidealism.org). FLOW is a group that was started by John Mackey (CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods) and innovative educator Michael Strong. FLOW's goal is 'liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good'. The idea here, as I understand it, is that we are changing the world with our businesses. Often times business is seen as the enemy. I would call this a short sited and potentially disastrous stance to take. At the very least this view is partial. The FLOW perspectice recognizes the impact that business has on the world as a potential for good, all that is needed is a desire to increase the degree of consciousness in our actions. Small steps are better than no steps, and the number of steps that some have already taken is heartening to say the least.

At this meeting there was a woman who is a 'joyologist', her Buddhist monk turned Objectivist husband, Frankie, who is starting surf camps in third world countries, Adam, the ideation guru I spoke of earlier, Amy, a music therapist, Zak, co-founder of Kripali Organics (sold at Whole Foods), educators, Integral geeks, Keith our resident Futurist and a number of other brilliant and caring people. (I'm wondering what the hell I'm doing there too)

If we are going to turn this great ship around it seems apparent to me that those with power must have our best interests at heart and also that those with our best interests at heart should have some power. I see myself as part of the well intentioned who is trying to figure out his influence on this hunk of rock. Part of what I am looking for in FLOW is inspiration through example from the people I have mentioned above, especially John.

John is a surprisingly beautiful human being. He spoke often of the need for each of us to 'follow our heart song' and said that he is not special other than perhaps for the fact that he is good at seeing the beauty in others. He struck me as a deeply spiritual man who truly holds the worlds best interest in his heart and mind as often as possible. He spoke briefly about thost who criticize him (and Whole Foods) for not doing enough to save the world. He said that he some times feels as if he is out in the jungle, swinging a machete, creating a road one chop at a time when from behind someone comes driving up in their SUV with the AC blasting saying 'What? That's it? That's as far as the road goes?!" It reminded me of people beating up on Bono for his efforts. Sure, there's more to do and there are things that they do wrong, but what the hell am I doing? Why aren't people picking on me more?

John said at the end of the night that he would like to schedule his future trips to NYC around our FLOW meetings. He said quite clearly that he is not a leader of this movement (FLOW), he is a co-creator. He also made it quite clear at a number of times throughout the night that he had no interest in telling us how to create change in the world as FLOW. He seemed to have an unwavering confidence in us to be the change that any given situation calls for. I beginning to feel that way myself.

Hey Ya

2008-05-09T22:55:00.002-04:00

Ayahuasca 5

2008-04-22T18:09:00.007-04:00

Todays news changed everything.

If you make it all the way through this you may understand a little better.

I'm reeling in disbelief at the moment.

I imagine I will cry about it later.

This post was written in the preceding week

_______

Ceremony #3 – 130ml

Intention – Purpose

When I was living in Raleigh, North Carolina I became very close friends with Antoinette. Antoinette led a meditation group that I was a part of. She is a healer. She currently makes her living through massage and reiki, but is in the process of becoming a midwife. I spoke to her on the phone before leaving for Brazil and she offered to be available during the ceremonies if I wanted to reach out to her in some way. I said something stupid about how I’d tell her what she was wearing when I saw her. She said that if I wanted to meet up on an astral plane than that could be fun, but that she was hoping to meet up somewhere higher. I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by higher, but I agreed and left it at that. I then forgot about it and never told her exactly when the ceremonies would be.

This ceremony is the hardest to relate by far. It was an exceptionally personal manifestation of the transpersonal and is also just fucking weird. The back story is just personal, though not just my person. I will do my best to set up the experience without saying too much.

I fell in love when I was about 13. We were neighbors and used to sneak out of the house at night and look at the stars. She always had a boyfriend and I never told her how I felt. Many years of intermittent friendship and silence followed before our paths crossed in NYC. We spent beautiful, drunken nights kissing in the rain and declaring our love. We moved in together shortly there after. Less than a year later I asked her to move out to take care of herself. We maintained something long distance for a few months leading up to a party at a friends house.

Many young couples were there; many of them with their children. I knew that this was what I wanted, a family of my own, but the events of the evening showed me that she was not yet ready. I told her that I did not want to see her until she had three months of health (I'm being vague cause it's only partially my story).

Some months later it was new years, I was in Boston writing music with David and I needed to go pick up my cat, Agape, from her apartment. She calls me the night before and tells me that she is 4 months pregnant. It is not mine. We had not been together in about six. She looks pregnant when I see her.

We still talk a little and are friends. I will always love her in many ways, but our lives do not seem to be aligned. She is in a tough situation with the unplanned, but wonderful gift of pregnancy and I want to be supportive of her as a friend. That was about how far I had considered the situation and it was not my (conscious) intention to dig much deeper. I had my own selfish work to do. This ceremony was to be about my purpose.

I decided to attempt to keep my eyes closed this time. In the previous two ceremonies I very much decided to keep myself in the room. I kept my eyes open and called for all hallucinations to work with that which was already present. This time I invited any and all visions to come as they choose. I started this process by closing my eyes and attempting to envision a door directly in front of my third eye. This alone was very difficult to hold at first.

I did not work with any type of mantra or other words. If anything, this night I was attempting to access emptiness as a means of creation more than any other. Other than the door, I worked to free myself from any and all thoughts as they arose in my awareness. I began to cultivate a stillness as I sat in my meditative posture.

I laid down much quicker this night than the others; well before the one hour mark. This is where the discomfort began and it became extreme.

My ex-girlfriend came into my awareness. It became clear to me that I had not dealt with her impending baby. She was then about 7 ½ months pregnant. I am aware and at peace with this as a fact, but had not in any real way dealt with this new person as a person.

As I lay on my back it started to become clear that this is what I was doing. For some reason this unborn child was firmly planted in my awareness at this moment. To say I chose this wouldn't quite make sense. I started to feel a pull to curl up into a fetal position. As in meditation, I simply noticed this and then did my best to remain still with it as we had been instructed by Sylvia. When meditating I have often been informed that when impulses to act arise it is best to notice them and let them pass. If I am sitting on the cushion and I think ‘Oh shit, I need to call the vet!’ it is best to recognize this, create a space for this to be necessary, but to recognize that it does not have to happen now. If the thought arises again, then the same noticing, labeling, letting go is used. If the thought arises 4, 5, 6 times, then quite possibly you should get up off the mat and go call the fucking vet. Meditation is not to be used as an escape from our responsibilities to the world. If something is important, than by all means give it your attention. Much in this way it became important for me to curl up on my right side facing Cida, Nara's mother. What followed is quite difficult to explain and was amazingly hard to experience. I will do my best.

What I eventually began attempting to do was to bring her unborn child into the room with me. I can't explain why, but it seemed like something I needed to go through, something I was afraid to confront, or just something that was happening that I needed to be present with. The explanation that I am offering from here on in should sound impossible in many ways. What I experienced felt true and in many ways is always possible and happening, but it is the result of a either a vastly increased or strongly altered perception of reality. In many ways time, space and the boundaries of self/other become incredibly transparent. I experienced many things at once that it is my normal tendency to believe must exist separately. I'm not claiming some sort of power nor am I claiming to have lost touch with reality. I will simply explain my subjective experience as I experienced it. This is one form of truth, let's call it truthfulness.

I began by simply attempting to visualize or visually hold this unborn child in the room. She did not come easily. Luckily when she did come it was with the womb, as this might have otherwise been fairly messy. What I experienced in my attempts to hold her there was in many ways the process of becoming her. I must be clear that I was not interested in picturing her in my mind. I was attempting to share something much more profound with her. It felt as if she was reaching out to me in this moment and it was less of a choice and more of a realization that what I needed to do was share this moment with her. I needed to hold her here with me.

In my attempts to do so, in my attempts to be with her, despite the necessary ‘breaking of the rules’ of time and space that this implies, I was not able to only break the rules in the ways which might make this easy for me, they were simply disappearing all together.

What the hell am I talking about?

With each glimpse, with each moment of her entering my awareness came a flood of other information. In my attempts to be with her here and now the enormity of the ever present eternity that is now came rushing in. It was intensely painful, joyful, uncomfortable and overwhelming. I honestly felt that it was destroying me and that there was no way that I could do it myself, if it was possible at all. It felt like way to much information for me to handle. I was writhing on my mat, letting out gasps and sighing as I swallowed the enormity of so much truth. I felt shattered and alive, awake and overwhelmed. I was instantly experiencing her throughout many different, perhaps all moments in her life. I met new people, went different places at different times in her life. And in each and every moment I was feeling things, places and people through her….as her. This remained incredibly uncomfortable for quite some time. I can not accurately describe the sensations. There were far too many of them all at once.

At some point though it seemed to begin to be possible to be with her here and now. I wasn’t sure how, but something had changed. Later, when things had calmed and I was able to be more aware of some of my other senses I would realize that there was someone behind me, a warm mothering presence that was helping me to hold Addison here and now. Antoinette had come to help bring this child into my world. I didn't have to look, but I knew that she was there.

Part of an unborn child's experience, the most stable part at this moment, is being in the womb. This obviously involves an almost constant in and out of fluids; a feeding and dumping cycle that is incredibly fluid in the most literal of ways. With increasing doses of ayahuasca one thing that seems to be present for people is purging…..puke. I have theories about why this is, but haven’t had much direct experience to confirm/deny these theories with. I have a relatively solid stomach and other than the fleeting awareness of the possibility and the momentary sensations that accompany this I have not seriously considered doing so…until now. Something about sharing this experience, how ever real this was or seemed, made the possibility of purging incredibly real and present. I maintained, kept that part of my insides internal. But it was a very real sensation of being in such a vulnerable and formative state. And something else did come up.

What became apparent, through a wall of tears and sighs, of pain and smiling, deep breaths and long moments without any, was exactly what was happening here in this mess of time and space, as self and other were falling away. I was falling in love with my ex-girlfriends unborn child. It is a strange realization that I don’t expect to completely make sense to you. In many ways it does not matter if this child is a part of my day to day life or if I never actually meet her. I already love her. Always will. Perhaps always have…not really sure how that one works. I don’t mean this is any superficial or easy going sense. The implications of this were huge and difficult to digest; such a sense of what can be lost and what gained. I felt overwhelmed, grateful, scared and absolutely full of love. The impact of this realization is enormously powerful to me still.

In relation to my initial intent in this ceremony, to explore purpose, I now felt the weight of my creative potential in a whole new way. The enormity of creating a child carries a whole new weight. The question of what I am doing, right now, to make life easier for this and every other child in the world is present in a new way. The many ways that we are each connected (ultimately have never been apart to be connected) holds a bit more weight in my mind than it ever has before.

Many have long recognized that dreams contain symbols, metaphors, archetypes. Dreams allow us to not only see, but experience situations that in many ways can be symbolic of greater truths. What I experienced with this child was a connection to the unborn, to the life that is to come and also to the process of life as it is now coming, being, suffering and rejoicing. It was an intensely personal experience, but the implications of it were so far beyond me and her, my life and hers. The whole experience was simultaneously an individual realization of potency and smallness, of responsibility and of insignificance. It compels me to witness and to embrace, to provide for and to appreciate. I'm rambling on because words suck at relating such an experience. I think I'l

It would be mistaken to view my transpersonal interpretation of this personal experience as being a distancing from the personal aspect. It is intensely personal, all the more so because of the universal truths that it symbolizes.

_______

I just got off the phone with my ex-girlfriend.

The ceremony described above happened on the night of April 6th leading into the morning of April 7th.

At 3:27am on the morning of April 7th, while I was in the ceremony space, her child was born.
She was 10 weeks premature.
She died 4 days later.

I will never meet her.

.....now I'm crying

Pre/Trans Alcoholic?

2008-04-20T15:08:00.008-04:00

A couple of my friends recently told me that they have decided to drink alcohol again. Thanks for sharing you say? Well, both of these people are self professed alcoholics. The exciting thing, for me, is that I am comfortable fully supporting them.

I have had my issues with things such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) over the years and for a long time fought hard against many of its teachings. The fact that I am not an alcoholic and had not been close enough to one was an ignorance that created one part of my problem. The other ignorance, I believe, lies within the program.

AA takes an individual with an unhealthy relationship to alcohol and teaches them to self identify as an alcoholic. It is the way you introduce yourself in a meeting and is the diagnoses you are asked to accept. For far too many this alone is a huge step towards recovery. From varying degrees of denial that there is a problem, to varying degrees of acceptance that you can control the solution, AA has helped many to move towards a functional life of clarity and happiness. I now realize just how much of a gift this can be.

What I do still take issue with is the very primary idea in AA that someone who is an alcoholic will remain an alcoholic. There is a life sentence implicit in AA's labeling of an individual. Though you may well be able to have a healthy relationship with alcohol for the first time in your life by not drinking, you will never in your life be expected to get over this fixation. You are basically told that you have a treatable, but incurable disease and that you must live your entire life under alcohols control. Drink or not, you are taught that being an alcoholic will continue to define you as long as you live.

For most (if not all) alcoholics who have not self identified as such and then begun to control their drinking this sentence can be necessary. What I am writing here may actually make their life more difficult. Any hope of graduating from AA may allow them to see the very process of stopping drinking as a way to get back to drinking. AA makes it clear that this is not the goal, and I respect their need to do so. Drinking should never be the goal of someone addicted to alcohol.

But what about graduation? Is it not possible for someone to actually move on from this paradigm of disease/treatment, and the feeling of brokenness that is so implicit, to actually learn to have a healthy relationship with alcohol? This AA does not teach. Possibly should not. But some of my friends, after ten years of sobriety, have come to this conclusion on their own. And I am so fucking proud to here it.

They have spoken with many of the important people in their lives about this; opened themselves up to criticism and monitoring. They have sent out mass emails to other friends that they could not talk to individually. They are so obviously changed, with different motives, drives, desires, expectations and fears, that I for one have amazing faith in their decisions. They do not want to drink to hide anything. There is no pain, no fear in this decision. It shows an amazing courage. They are ready to celebrate life, to join the ranks of us 'normal' drinking idiots and to shed the baggage of limiting labels that they have so staunchly carried and helped others to carry, for so long.

In this pursuit I recognize the very hard path that they are beginning to walk and have offered one of my friends the following letter explaining how an Integral view of the situation might help her to understand, explain to, and coexist with all those in her life who are not in her place.

___

Our recent discussion led me to believe that you may appreciate hearing a little more about one of Ken's concepts. I know how much you love Mr. Wilber! He calls it the 'pre/trans fallacy'. It has to do with the idea I was talking about of people progressing from pre-conventional to conventional to post-conventional. The basic idea is that if you look at some of the ways that people develop over time you can recognize stages that they develop through. Bare with me, I know part of this is stating what is obvious to you. You can then look at the way that people respond to certain situations or questions and see that their actions or answers correlate quite clearly with their stage of development. The interesting thing is that some of their responses appear to be the same, even though they come from different levels and are for different reasons.

Let me illustrate one example (and remember that we're using broad strokes to establish orienting generalizations):

America's involvement in the Vietnam war was met with (at least) 3 different responses from college students of the time, two of which appear identical to someone without an understanding of developmental unfolding. Both the pre and the trans (or post)-conventional answers were 'Fuck you, I'm not fighting your war.' (protest) Conventional students enlisted.

Here's a concrete example [of the pre/trans fallacy] based on empirical research. During the Berkeley riots protesting the war in Vietnam, a team of researchers gave a representative sample of the students the Kohlberg test of moral development. ... What researchers found was that a small percentage of the students, something like 20%, were indeed operating from the post conventional stages (or "trans" conventional stages). That is their objections were based on universal principles of right and wrong, they were not based on any particular society's standards or on individual whim. On the other hand, the vast majority of the protesters - around 80% - were found to be preconventional, which means their moral reasoning was based on personal and rather selfish motives. ... And, as we would expect, there were almost no students at the conventional level, the level of "my country right or wrong" (since these students would not have seen any reason to protest in the first place). ... (from http://www.oregonvos.net/~jflory/new_age_thought.htm)

So, when it comes to morals the pre-conventional response is usually formed by a feeling of 'I do what I need to do for myself'. The conventional response is based on an understanding of rules, laws, religious standards and other conventions that allow people to coexist peacefully. The authority comes from a higher place. The response is some sort of 'I do what is right'. In a post conventional response both the individual and the society are taken into account and a case by case judgement can be made based on what will actually produce the greatest good for the greatest number. The response is more nuanced.

Similar tests have been used regarding abortion.

A person at a pre conventional level will say that abortion is acceptable, because it is their body and they can do whatever they want with it. Someone at a conventional level of moral development will state quite clearly that abortion is wrong because there are rules, laws, morals etc and because taking the life of another is immoral and unjustifiable. Someone at a post conventional level will take all of this into account and is most likely to come up with the answer that, at times, abortions are the best solution for everyone involved.

The pre/trans fallacy has to do with the fact that even though pre and trans reasoning look completely different, if one only looks at the end result, the answer, they can appear to be exactly the same. This creates all kinds of confusion in all different arenas (I'm just talking about moral development above).

I'm making a big deal of this because I think that you are about to walk a very difficult path and it seems to me that any understanding that you can hold of why it may very well be a healthy choice for you to drink, even though many of the people that you are surrounded by also want to drink for unhealthy reasons, is helpful. The point, of course, is not that drinking is right or wrong, but that most people who have problems with drinking are not able to accept the conventionally agreed upon guidelines that a society dictates. Many of them fail to even take their own health and well being into account in even a pre-conventional way, nevermind the well being of society and its conventions. So you are going to have to deal with people who not only won't agree with your choices but also may fundamentally not be able to understand how you can claim to be where you are.

The difficulty will be twofold. For those at a pre-conventional level your actions may seem a justification for their own. A horizontal solidarity in action can easily be confused for a vertical solidarity in reason. A dangerous line to walk. For those at a conventional level the distinction often looks as simple as conventional and non-conventional. It is very hard for us to fully understand the stages that we have not yet embodied. To them all non-conventional actions can appear the same. They will see you as having failed in sobriety. Those at the later edge of a conventional level may be truly inspired and moved by your actions. Some at each level will probably grasp what you are doing cognitively, but not be able to consistently manifest it in their own life. You will be just fine me thinks.

Ayahuasca 4

2008-04-18T01:52:00.008-04:00

Ceremony #2 – 100ml

Intention = Emptiness

Emptiness is none other than form. Form is none other than emptiness.

Why Dream?

Upon drinking the ayahuasca I again return to my mat to sit cross legged and focus on my intention while I wait for the effects of the drug to begin. After about 35-40 minutes I begin to feel the ayahuasca coursing through my body as an intense energy. This, once again, is the uncomfortable part. I am looking to die tonight. I am offering up all that I associate as me for the taking.

I am very familiar with the mystical ideas of emptiness and nondual realization. I have a rational understanding of these concepts and am well aware of the notion that this is an inherent knowledge that we all have. There is nothing to learn, nothing to be gained, only the confusion that we have a separate self that must be released. I am aware of this, and in many ways I feel as if any attempts to chase this are futile. None the less I am seeking an experience of emptiness, of oneness with no two. It is often said that such an experience can be painful. I want to be beaten over the head with the death of my ego. I am ready for agony and what ever discomfort that comes is a gift when it is to this end.

As I sit on my cushion and the ayahuasca begins to move throughout my body it comes in many ways. It is incredibly uncomfortable. I am crying, burping, farting, and I want to smile. I create a space for each of these things, witness them without indulging them and watch as they pass. I sense that I am becoming more intimately in tune with my subconscious mind and in some way this feels wrong. I am not usually awake to this. The urge to throw up strikes me as an attempt to correct this, to get it out of my system. I allow this urge to surface, feel it in my throat and my stomach, but do not indulge it. It too passes. Intense visualizations come to me, but I do not indulge these either. They are there and they are fine, but without my desire to get lost in my senses they too fall away. A strong urge to sleep accompanied by deep yawns follows. I notice this and it too passes. I will not sleep through this. Perhaps this too is my bodies attempt to disconnect my conscious awareness from my subconscious mind.

I feel someone come up behind me and wrap their arm around my neck and begin to choke me. This too is ok, and once it is accepted it passes.

At the one hour mark Sylvia walks around the room and checks in with each of us by simply looking at us and saying ‘one hour’. Shortly after this point I feel as if the initial discomfort is out of the way. I have sat with it and now I can lie down and await my death. I am ready, eager even for pain. I am offering my body as a sacrifice to the divine. It’s all quite melodramatic. I, of course, get what I need and not what I want.

What comes to me is a gentle, motherly pat on the shoulder and a wonderfully compassionate, somewhat mocking voice that says

“it’s ok.

You get it.

So what?”

It strikes me as funny, and I feel an immediate release of my grasping self. Yes, this is, and always has been true and I have always known that emptiness is none other than form. The ‘so what’ is immediately apparent to me as the vast creative potential that emptiness is. The realization is only as important as what I do with it. It is nothing unto itself, but it is also all of creation. That is what emptiness is to me, creative potential. I feel amazingly potent; ready for the world, and eager to contribute.

I fall in love with each piece of music that is played. Again I realize that what ever I do in life, music must be an integrated piece. Sylvia is playing wonderful tribal, electronic, chanting, percussive, shifting soundscapes. She plays ‘slate’, ‘pantry’, and ‘Entwine’, three pieces of mine that were made a few years ago in my studio with some friends. Hearing these in this state is amazing; a gift.

I have visions of filling the ceremony space with the people in my life and using ayahuasca and playing music as a therapeutic experience. I work out the whole situation in amazing detail with the boundaries that would be established, the rules of engagement for each musician and even what Sylvia and her partner Zoey’s roles will be as facilitators. They will still man the ipod with their music and probably some extended rhythm tracks that I have created for the occasion. They will fill silence as needed, interrupt noise as desired and provide a launching pad for exploration if desired. Each participant will choose an instrument before the ceremony and this will be their means of communication with the world. If someone does not want an instrument than they will simply say the words ‘I accept that my instrument is my voice.’ Each participant will make a commitment to their speech that says ‘I commit to not use a word unless I am to use it deeply or often’. The idea being that we not fill the space with anything other than pure sound. If someone truly needs to chant the word love 1,000 times than there will be a space for this, but the idea is to be non-verbal when possible.

Each person will be confined to their mat, as we are in Sylvia’s ceremony, and we will be discouraged from dancing or even looking at other participants. This idea being that if you wish to express your self you do your best to channel this through your instrument. There will have to be a mix of skilled and unskilled musicians. Ideally there would be far more unskilled. I am not interested in complexity or technique. I am interested in truth of expression. This requires intention, not technique, but having some skill in the room will help.

I would probably record the whole mess, with some players being mic’d individually and the room being miked as well. I would then be able to chop the whole thing up into many pieces and assemble songs pulling from these sounds. I would make this available on iTunes and to Sylvia to use during ceremonies. Perhaps the backing tracks that I gave to Sylvia would be used at times as our tempo’s would probably be locked to this anyways. I indulge this idea for a while bringing different friends and instruments into the room. Many of the people I love have roles to play here as well.

A little later I wrote an article called Hiding that I am now trying to get published. I wrote about 1400 words that evening as I lay on my mat. When I went to my computer the next morning it was mostly just a case of typing it out.

This emptiness that I am feels amazingly potent. The creative potential is unbounded. I spent a great deal of time lying on the mat feeling capable and ready; awake and eager, inspired and divinely alive. I am still feeling energized by this right now. It is not as if anything new was necessarily known, more that barriers previously believed to be in place have fallen away. Hell fucking yeah.

Meditation can now hold a much different space in my day (when I actually do it). It is no longer a yearning, a striving, a practice for something. It is more of a celebration, a repose, a rejuvenation. Where before I felt a constant need for something to happen, for the process to move forward, as if there was completion to be had somewhere in the future, now I am simply sitting and allowing myself to be energized and inspired by what I already am.

Dreaming took on a new meaning to me during this ceremony as well. If emptiness is the causal ground of all being, the ever present formless and also the place into which we dip in deep dreamless sleep; herein lies creativity. I would then see the waking, walking world as that of form, of the manifest. This is karma as it arises in all four quadrants. If we then look at the sleep cycle we will see that the dream world, the world where subtle energies play free, lies directly between waking and deep sleep, between form and formless for a reason. It is here that we play with possibilities. Dreams can be a testing ground, an opportunity to mix all that is already with all that can possibly ever be. For sure there will be form that arises when we are awake that we have seen in dreams, for we may have planned it or intuited it there. It is in dreams that we tap into and create that which can and will become manifest in the relative world of form. It is also where we assimilate and grapple with the days events. We metabolize our experiences and churn them back into the formless. For it is from here that all arises and is ever present.

In many ways ayahuasca feels like a way to witness, to bring waking awareness and therefore a different level of interaction or control to this process of play with subtle energies.

Ayahuasca 3

2008-04-16T15:02:00.002-04:00

Ceremony #1 – 60ml

Intention – Right livelihood.

How can I best use my gifts to be of service to others?

Part of Sylvia's intention for the first ceremony is to figure out the proper dose for each of us. To that end (and because I didn't take boost ups) this was my easiest experience. They got more interesting, more intense each time.

After drinking the oh so tasty beverage I return to my mat and sit in a meditative posture on the cushion. I keep my eyes open and maintain my presence in the room. I am calm and breathing deeply. I work with channeling my breath down through my chest, into my stomach, through my pelvis and then back up through my spine and out my head. At 40-45 minutes I begin to feel an intense energy moving throughout my system. It is looking for a place settle and its efforts are somewhat uncomfortable. I sit with it for 20-40 minutes and once I feel that it have been somewhat pacified I lie down on my back and relax surrendering to what may come.

In thinking of possible career paths one thing that I am dealing with is the power of corporations in this world. It seems clear to me that much of the movement that is happening, for better or worse, is being driven by companies. I do not in any way wish to support the demonization of commerce that so many seem so eager to scream about. I think that economics is a driving force in the world and I want to help those in power to cultivate a more conscious awareness of their actions so that they will feel compelled to make the most compassionate choices. An underlying faith in human decency is implicit in this desire. I blame ignorance, not evil and I recognize my ability to help others become increasingly conscious as one of my gifts and responsibilities to the world. To this end I have been attending FLOW (plug) NYC meetings recently. This is a group that works towards ‘liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good’.

One of my questions has been whether it makes the most sense to work directly with adults that are already in power, or if I could be more effective working with children who are still developing and will one day have more power. Obviously there is less inertia in children that must be combated, but also less ability to see the bigger pictures. There often seems to be more eagerness for transformation in kids, as this is inherent in growing up, but there is also a longer period of time between when the ideas will be understood, the consciousness awakened, and when they will be having a large scale impact on the world.

I have been trapped in this either or thinking for quite some time, attempting to figure out if I should be studying business or education. If I should be positioning myself in the corporate world or in schools and the questions of what type of infrastructure I should be considering creating has been wrestling with new schools or adult education/coaching centers.

The other powerful peace of my life that I have been consistently sidelining in this process has been music. I am currently working with David on not only developing curriculum for his Integral Judaism class, but also on writing an album that is reaching out to the world in an attempt to make the struggles and the joys that we experience day to day a little bit more of a shared experience. I have always had enormous respect for music’s ability to transcend boundaries of all kinds.

Another constant concern of mine has been creating community. There are many people in this world whom I have grown to love who I want and need to have around me on a consistent basis. Attempting to find ways in which we can both work and play together is difficult, but seems necessary to me. I want loved ones not only near, but involved in some of the ways in which I intend to nurture the world. They have much to give both to me and to those who I hope to be working with.

In this ceremony I had a vision of creating an ideation experience with Adam Henson. Adam works with large corporations to help them create ideas for new products, projects, campaigns, images etc. The vision that I spent much of the night cultivating was one of an experience that we could create for business leaders and their children. The idea would be to use music to connect these (probably mostly) men to their children and to the environment through sound, touch and food. The day might begin with a bit of a concert played by David and I and perhaps our band. This would simply be a chance for shared experience, for adults to be with their kids, to enjoy music together and hopefully to get a little bit excited about the energy that it contains.

Next we would begin to work with some of the mantra’s that we have been writing. This would be when we would get everyone involved. These are very simple and repetitive songs intended to induce a state experience. Each family (I think that the spouse, who perhaps is at often times at home with the children would not be with us) would be provided with instruments, hand drums and perhaps guitars or other melodic instruments, to play. They would now be encouraged to play along with the very simple and slow groove that we would be establishing on stage. My friend Amy, who is a music therapist and spends her time working with children helping them to express themselves through sound would be working the room with her staff. They would be encouraging everyone to get involved, to make sound however simple or complex. Those who have some training on an instrument would be welcome to show off, to share their skills with solos or other flourishes, but the main thrust would be parent and child communicating, connecting through music. I want each family to leave this event with a shared experience of the power of music to connect people physically, emotionally and spiritually. An experience and perhaps insight that will follow them home and be with them in the future each and every time that they hear music. We would send them home with CD’s and I expect that at least the children would be excited to play along again at home.

It must not be forgotten that the point of this experience is to free creative juices in powerful corporate executives, energies that will be used when creating new products for the world. We want these creative energies to be cultivated and also to be as aware as possible of their connection to the generations that are to follow.

I also envisioned my friend Antoinette to be on site with her staff. Antoinette is a healer. She works with massage, reiki and in many subtle ways to help people feel healthy and to free the energies that they may be trapping in their bodies. She is also in training to become a midwife. She is a goddess, feminine energy manifest in its most potent and nurturing form. I envisioned her to be the room in two ways. Explicitly she would be there as a healer. Should be making the rounds as a hands on and off healer, cultivating the exchange of energy within each participant, but also between parent and child. There is certainly much healing and much growth to be done on many levels between parent and child and making this both possible and enjoyable is one of her gifts.

Implicitly (for now) Antoinette works with the process of bringing new life into the world. I would not have her explain to the crowd where babies come from, but as the mother, as a goddess, it is her nature to cultivate the energy of nurturing embrace, of creative birth in each of us. It is this understanding that she would carry with her and share with others as she and her staff move throughout the room working as healers.

I envisioned working with some other friends to connect participants to the earth through eating and learning about raw, organic food and by bringing plants into the room or by going outside for a walk. Too many details to figure out now.

I also realized what the little girl on the plane on the way to Brazil may have been experiencing. She was on a plane with her mother and they were on their way to Uruguay to visit their family. Where was her father? In light of these thoughts and thinking about just how much she seemed to be attracted to me and eager to engage me. I am now thinking that she probably does not have her father in her life as much as she needs; perhaps not at all. I feel as if I was temporarily filling this role, even if only in a superficial and playful way. When it came time for us to watch our separate movies or to eventually go to sleep I probably did not communicate this to her in a useful way. The language barrier was one thing, but I am left wondering if I could have somehow helped her to get to sleep and if in doing so helped her to avoid feeling abandoned by me when I did my best to ignore so that I could try and sleep. It seemed then as if her lashing out with her feet and screams at me was an attempt to re-engage me. To draw me back into her world and out of my selfabsorbed sleep.

Often times we awaken too late for one thing, but it allows us to be more present to the next.

Ayahuasca 2

2008-04-15T20:22:00.003-04:00

Setup in Brazil

I arrived in the town of Itacaré in Bahia, Brazil at 2:30am. I met my roommate Jay, who oddly enough turned out to be a bit of an Integral geek and a Ken Wilber fan himself and went right to bed. When I woke up in the morning there were some people outside at the communal table on the porch of the building I was staying in.

The grounds are beautiful. Silvia has purchased 40 acres in the middle of the jungle and is transforming it into her own Shangri-la. There are cabins and paths, vegetable gardens and beautiful flowering shrubs and trees everywhere. There is a pond with a gazebo overlooking it where I got a massage from what may be the most beautiful woman I saw in Brazil. A 6 foot+ goddess with very little English who is apparently married to the surf instructor in town.

Itacaré is a cute little surfer town, the heart of which was a short drive from Silvia’s place. It occurred to me that much in the same way that the artists in cities such as New York are the bleeding edge of gentrification, the sentinels sent out to begin bringing money and white people into an area that many would otherwise consider undesirable. Surfers can often be the intrepid souls who make peace with the natives and encourage hotels, coffee shops, internet cafes and kitschy souvenir shops to open or begin speaking English and catering to foreigners.

Though I envisioned spending a good deal of time traveling around the area, Silvia’s land was so beautiful, peaceful and serene that I ended up spending most of my time there reading, hanging out with my new friends, ‘knitting on the dock of the bay’, reading, doing yoga and just being.

Surrounding the ayahuasca ceremonies Silvia engaged us in a couple of different therapeutic activities. We were taught different relaxation and meditation techniques. We worked with childhood regression techniques. We also were shown films on ayahuasca, shaman, healers, channels and a couple of more mainstream films. Silvia’s partner in all of this is Zoe 7. From their site:

Zoe Seven is an international lecturer, author, and cartographer of altered states of consciousness. He is the author of the books, Into The Void and Back From The Void – an on-going trilogy, which depicts his experiments fusing psychoactive plants and compounds together with computer-based neuro-technology devices (a.k.a "mind machines"). He has written for entheogen and neuro-technology related magazines including The AVS Journal, MAPS Bulletin, and the Entheogen Review, and has also been interviewed on radio and television programs.
http://www.zoe7.com/

Zoe gave a lecture with a power point slide presentation on much of his work and also armed us with images that can be used as visualization tools to promote healing energies during our ceremonies.

While there we ate a diet of locally grown organic food with no salt or sugar.

The ceremonies themselves took place inside of a building built specifically for this. The bottom floor is a dormitory which was flooded at the time and the top floor is where we did meditation, therapy and ceremonies. It is a large hexagonal (some number of sides, but almost round) room with a high open ceiling and lot of natural light.

The ceremonies, three in all, with a day of rest following each one, took place at night starting at 8 or 8:30. We all came to the center of the room with our cup of ayahuasca (it’s prepared as a drink) to state our intention and place it into the drink. We were each asked to state one intention for each ceremony. We then drank and returned to our mats. We were each given a mattress which were placed around the edge of the room. Mine was between Cida and Nara a mother and daughter whom I became extremely close to during my time there. It was very powerful being between them during ceremonies and I fell in love with them both within days of meeting them.

Silvia set up a few ground rules for the ceremony. We were asked to stay on our mats and to be as still as possible. We were not to speak to our neighbors unless spoken too. We each had a pillow and a blanket and a trash bag lined garbage can to vomit into. Silvia asked that we do our best not to vomit for the first hour. At the one hour mark she walked around the room and said ‘one hour’ to each of us. She then did this again at the two hour mark. At this time and for the next few hours we had the option to take a ‘boost up’ of more ayahuasca if desired. I didn’t want to be thinking about taking more during the experience, so I simply tried to get as much as they’d allow me down in the beginning.

Silvia played music throughout the ceremony and luckily she has great taste. It was beautiful and peaceful at times and challenging at others. At times she played nothing and we could hear the cacophony of wildlife outside; mostly frogs and crickets.

Ayahuasca 1

2008-04-12T19:46:00.014-04:00

BACKGROUND AND TRAVEL

This should be the most boring post of this group. I have far too much to write about this trip to do it in one post. So I am going to break it up into 6 as follows (click on the links to jump around):

Analysis and other Crap

Background

I met Walker at Amy and Eric’s wedding in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. They rented two large houses on the beach for a week and invited friends and family to come when they could; family in one house and friends in the other. Walker and I spent a lot of time talking raw food, consciousness and generally geeking out. A month or two later we were talking online like a couple of little school girls getting all excited about common interests and he suggested a trip to the Amazon to do ayahuasca. I, of course, agreed on the spot saying something to the effect of ‘let’s not talk about it, let’s just do it.’ Another month passed before Walker forwarded me an email from a friend recommending ayahuasca-healing.net as a resource. I agreed immediately that this was the place and decided to buy a ticket. We originally envisioned traveling to the jungle and then trying to find a shaman and convincing him/her to let us partake in a ceremony. The journey would have been the trip. Finding lodging, food, dealing with bugs, trying not to get killed etc would have required a lot of energy. At this place, which is run by a clinical psychologist named Silvia Polivoy, we would have cabins, bug nets, and a whole lot of locally grown organic food to eat. I was sold almost instantly.

I also assumed that we wouldn’t be dealing as much with the magical worldview of some primitive culture. This is important to me when it comes to the environment in which I will be unpacking and processing my experiences. We would instead be in a therapeutic setting with all activities being conducted in English. Big plus.

Arranging flights was eventful. Travelocity and TAM airlines make for a minimally communicative experience. I had to push pretty hard to get flights rearranged at one point when one of the legs of the flight that I was sold ceased to exist (but continued to be sold). It also became apparent early on that Walker was not going to have the monetary funds to make the journey. No problem, I’d go it alone.

I spent weeks before leaving preparing for this experience. I made a conscious decision to make this as transformative an experience as possible. I decided to be as vulnerable and to offer as much of myself to the experience as I could. In the spirit of this I did a lot of writing and worked with my ILP partner Amy with what I was coming up with. Without boring you with too many of the details I came up with six topics of exploration.

Career – How can I best use my gifts to serve the Kosmos - what is my purpose in life.

Relationship – Why don’t I have a family and how can I get one

Agape – I am skilled at engaging others with a challenging, transcendant masculine energy (eros). How can I become better at engaging others with an embracing, accepting, descendant feminine energy (agape)when this would be of greater help to them.

Six-Pack – I will be in the best shape of my life this year and the next.

Enlighten-up – Get enlightened and cultivate non-dual walking awareness and action.

Cognitive – What should I study? Do I need a teacher? School?

Armed with a decent amount of writing on each of these topics and ridiculous amounts of thought, much of it directed towards cultivating the most fulfilling career path possible (while struggling to engage my current career). I proceeded to get sick a couple of days before leaving.

Day 1 (and 2 (and the beginning of 3)) - Travel

Arrived at JFK at 6ish on Monday for a 7:40pm flight. I will be arriving in Bahia at 2:30am on Wednesday. It is currently 1:30pm on Tuesday and I have barely slept. I spent the majority of the 10 hour plane ride from NYC to San Paolo being kicked by a screaming, sleeping, 3 year old. I was kinda impressed too. We spent the first half of the flight as play buddies. I would try to read and she would unhinge my tray so it fell in my lap. We laughed for hours. Then it was time to sleep and someone was not having an easy time of it. She was in between me and her mother. She would lay her head in her mothers lap and her feet were by my side. Every once in a while for a few minutes at a time she would start thrashing, kicking her legs violently into my side, screaming and crying, all while still half asleep. That was fun.

When I got to San Paolo I had to get my luggage and then catch a shuttle bus to the other San Paolo airport. This was an hour and a half ride through traffic. I nodded off for a couple of minutes and woke up sweaty and confused. When we got to the airport I grabbed my bags, walked to the gate and was told that my plane was leaving in ten minutes and that I was too late. They sent me to another counter. These nice people told me that I could catch the same flight the next day. I said no, today. So they told me that I could catch a flight that leaves in about 10 hours…..at the airport I just came from. OK. It’ll cost you $100 dollars to change the ticket. NO, you booked this flight and told me I would have plenty of time to make the connection, this is your fault, you pay. OK. What they didn’t tell me was that I was actually going to have two flights. Instead of one 2 hour flight I am now waiting 10 hours to take 1 two hour flight and one 1 hour flight. I will arrive at Ilheus airport at 1am and then take a one hour taxi ride to the place I will be staying at. That fucking rocks.

I’m actually having a good time in the airport. I’ve met this dude named Kerem from Baltimore who is currently living on a little island off the coast of Brazil doing web design and producing music. Brazilian women seem to like us. I fucking suck at dialing international numbers. There are country codes, which aren’t needed when you are in the country, but are given to me as part of the number based on the assumption that I’m not ignorant. I am. There is also a 3 digit service provider number that must be dialed from the payphones in the airport that lets you choose your carrier. This is written clearly on the phone in Portuguese, which I don’t understand.

All in all I will have spent 32 hours traveling, assuming the rest of the trip goes as planned. This is slightly more than the 19 hours I expected based on my itinerary. Se la vi.

Purim

2008-03-14T22:25:00.003-04:00

I've been working with Mr. Wesson over the past couple of months helping him to develop curriculum for a class that he is teaching called Integral Judaism. He has a group of 14-15 yr olds that he is attempting to develop a truly fresh and inspirational view of Judaism with. I help him out a bit when it comes to having as comprehensive or integral approach as possible by using the concepts and tools that I am studying now. He is the Jewish Studies expert and not too shabby on the integral side himself.

Purim is a Jewish holiday that celebrates what most Jewish holidays celebrate; Jews not being slaughtered. This time it was a guy named Haman from the ancient Persian Empire who wanted to annihilate the Jews. They triumphed....or at least escaped, and so we celebrate.

David was telling me about one aspect of Purim that involves truly throwing off your shackles and really digging into the shadow elements of oneself. This can start with screaming and stomping during service, progress to drinking, dancing, sexing and pretty much anything else. He said that by many accounts 'what happens on Purim stays in Purim'. Part of the idea is simply to recognize the parts of the self that are suppressed or denied throughout the rest of the year, to get in touch with much that is taboo, not to indulge it, but to better understand it and to therefore be more in control of it.

We decided that it would be a great opportunity to explore shadow with the students (the parts of our psyche that usually lie in the dark, hidden from our view) and agreed that an experiential aspect was important. After seriously considering getting the kids drunk and encouraging them to explore their boundaries of right and wrong we decided that perhaps a discussion, followed by a meditation would be more appropriate.

Here is what I wrote, stream of conscious style and what Dave ended up using as a basic guideline in class. All questions in the discussion section can be discussed for any length of time and the meditation could be 5 minutes or 60 depending on how long you want to allow each line to marinate. Apparently the students enjoyed it. I really hope to be able to go in and teach a class soon.

Discussion

What is ok?
Are all actions acceptable?
Are all thoughts acceptable?

How does the setting and the company you keep affect the acceptability of your actions?

at home?
in class?
with friends?
in temple?
Do setting and company affect your thoughts?
Should you control your actions?
Should you control your thoughts?
Can you control a negative thought without first recognizing it and labeling it as such?
Can you control your actions if you deny your thoughts?
If a negative thought arises and you disown it, where does it go? (shadow)
what can happen if you re-own such a thought?
Who created that thought? (Integral perspective, see how it arises in all 4 quadrants)
4 quadrants of a thought. Each moment as two things, karma (in all 4 quadrants) + creativity
No matter what your environment, history, DNA, beliefs (karma) etc. you still have choice
What is involved in being good?
What are some things that you don't do?
How would you know not to do them if you did not think about them?
Does having these negative thoughts make you evil or even negative?
Most mythic religious traditions view evil as something that comes from outside of you. How does this empower or disempower you to do good?
If evil comes from without, how can you control it?
But if it arises from within?
What does it mean if you have indulged negative thoughts with negative actions in the past?
How does that affect this moment? The future?
Are those who have sinned dammed to continue to sin?

Experiential

Close your eyes
What are you thinking right now?
Is that good?
bad?
neutral?
How do you know?
What if I tell you to think of something evil?
Try it right now
now let your mind wander free
notice that you are not your thoughts
see how you can control your thoughts
send your mind to a negative place
can you think of something that you should not do?
something that society has told you is wrong
something that your friends think is wrong
something that your parents have forbid
something that you would never do
can you see yourself doing it?
does this mean that it is done?
does this change who you are or what you will do in the future?
does having felt this in your mind make you more or less likely to actually do this?
what value is there is in letting these thoughts arise on their own?
what harm is there in this?
what power can you wield by simply noticing thoughts?
can you then decide whether or not to act upon them?
can you also decide whether or not to indulge them in your mind?
is there a difference between allowing a thought to surface, simply noticing it, labeling it, and indulging it, feeding it?
might there be a line between healthy awareness and unhealthy indulgence that you should practice being aware of?
what are you thinking right now?
notice this thought
see if you have judged it
did you also judge yourself?
are you your thoughts?
if you are your thoughts, then who is judging them?
who is aware of your thoughts?
do your thoughts change?
are they fleeting?
is there something that is constant that is aware of your thoughts?

Choose a thought
create a vision of this room
right here
right now
Envision each and every person in this room sharing one thought
feel the resonance of this thought as it grows
realize your part in this thought, your contribution
feel the effects of each and every other persons awareness of this moment upon you
now focus on your breath
breath in
and now out
realize that each of you is doing the same
NOW DANCE!!!!! bitches!!!!! (play really loud music and giggle maniacally making them call into question everything you have just done and learning to ultimately trust no one but themselves, then pee on them)

Head Above Water

2008-02-10T15:29:00.003-05:00

It was a rough few months, and somehow, jumping back into the blog thing seemed daunting. I've talked so much about the homeless situation (which lasted a month) and the events that surrounded it, that I was just bored with it, but felt like i couldn't just completely gloss over them and post something that just happened. So I didn't write anything. I'm gonna attempt a condensed version of the past months so I can move on and start writing again, as exciting things are happening.

On Friday, October 17th 2007 I left my apartment early in the morning to drive up to Stamford, CT for work, and then to head straight to Boston to see the Wesson's for the weekend. While I was gone the DOB (Department of Buildings), the Red Cross, the police, the ASPCA and a goon squad kicked everyone who was living in my building out. The broke down doors and everyone was forced out on the street. They cited fire code violations as the reason, but many suspect that it was the fact that we were living in a building that is zoned for manufacturing. Converted lofts are a staple of NYC living, and the only way that many artists can live here. There is also a history of tenants fighting the city to stay in their places. A large group of photographers, painters, musicians, set builders, filmmakers etc. lost their work and living space with only a couple of hours to gather their belongings and get the fuck out. On top of that our landlord walked away with our security deposits; the very thing that people rely on to get a new apartment ($3600 in my case). So that sucked a bit. We got organized, had a press conference with a couple of political reps speaking on our behalf, had a fundraiser and have been consulting lawyers about possibly suing our landlord. All in all a great time.

That weekend I was actually going to Boston to see David so we could sign a contract with one another promising that we would write, record, and release an album within the next year. The first month was to be spent writing one song a day and sending them to each other online. Being homeless made this interesting. I wrote and recorded guitar parts in hotels, my Manhattan office, and in the brief moments I was allowed back into my old apartment. Part way through the month one of my laptops died (the one I had set up for mobile recording). I ended up making it through 20 days of songs before the lack of sleep and general ridiculous of my life wore me down. I also spent the first 3 weekends of homelessness taking 20 hours of classes a weekend out in Long Island to get my NY state low-voltage license. That sucked.

I was back in Boston visiting the Wesson's again over New Years. Dave and I pulled together 5 songs out of the writing experiment, got rejuvenated to continue writing and I got to see Dave and Candi's beautiful daughter Talia take her first ever steps! I picked up Agape from my ex-girlfriends and found out that she is pregnant.

I have now landed in a kick-ass apartment in Williamsburg (Brooklyn). I love it, Agape seems to love it too. I bought a TV and got cable and my first ever Mac. I have been without a TV for six years. We'll see how much of my life blood it sucks, how much less reading and conversing with visitors I do and whether or not I can keep it around. I just started my second class at Fielding Graduate University. It's Advanced Integral Theory. The geek quotient is rising. I love it. I went to Georgia for my company Christmas party. I've made a couple of trips to Austin for work recently. I'm off to Wilmington, NC next weekend to visit my good friend Antoinette and take Reiki level 1 and 2 classes with her. February 8th was my 30th birthday. My surprisingly thoughtful sister (what has she become?!?) threw a little surprise party for me at a local bar, which was awesome.

All in all I am settling in. I hate the winter once again. I need sun soon, and I'm sick of being single. Work is work. School is a welcome challenge, and it feels great to be playing the guitar again. More to come.

I'm Homeless / Hipsters Unite

2007-10-25T13:34:00.002-04:00

Press Advisory Contact: Brian Faucette

Phone #: 704-562-xxxx

October 25, 2007 Email: help1717troutman@gmail.com

Unfairly Evicted Tenants Fight Back

Press Conference and Rally Featuring Hundreds of Supporters and Tenants

Scheduled to Protest Surprise Eviction at 1717 Troutman

On Friday, October 26^th, hundreds of tenants of 1717 Troutman will join with supporters, friends, family, and community and housing advocates to show their unity in the face of their surprising eviction. Left homeless after vacate notices, tenants will join together to express their outrage at the situation and attempt to convey to City officials and the landlord the urgent need to find a permanent solution to the tenants problems. Leaders of the tenants will discuss the situation of the homeless residents, their lack of options on where they have to stay in the interim and long term, as well as the urgent need of working professionals for a place to live and work.

What: Press Conference and Rally to Find Permanent Solutions for 1717 Troutman Residents and Prevent Adding the Tenants to the Homeless Population of NYC.

Who: Brian Faucette, Claribel Jolie Pichardo, Mat Swajkos, Sean Raspet, and other Tenant Leaders, will be joined by hundreds of supports and tenants as well as invited community leaders, housing advocates, and elected officials.

When: Friday, October 26^th, at 10 A.M.

Where: Directly Outside the Vacated Premises of 1717 Troutman (located by the side streets of Cypress Avenue and Seneca Avenue. 2 blocks from the Jefferson stop on the L train)

###

The Big Three - The Good, The True, and The Beautiful

2007-10-10T17:38:00.001-04:00

Integral Studies - Lesson 2

One key aspect of Integral Theory is the 4 quadrants (shown below), often referred to as I, We, It and It's. These are four perspectives through which we can view the world. The idea is that all things arise in all 4 quadrants. The Upper Left (UL) quadrant is the interior of the individual the Lower Right is the exterior of the collective etc.

These 4 quadrants are often simplified into the Big 3 and correlate rather nicely with the tried and true philosophical ideas of the Good (we), the True (it), and the Beautiful (I). As it is only through each of these perspectives that we can know what is good (ethics, intersubjective), true (science, objective), and beautiful (art, subjective), it is important to remember that far too often we each tend to favor one perspective over the others and much suffering ensues.

Our assignment was to describe a memorable event in our lives using the language of each of these three major perspectives. Someone wrote about the birth of their child, and someone else lamented that they could not write about their own birth....so:

I opened my eyes and there they were, presumably the people who had been poking me and playing that awful music right in my ear every night. I know who she his, she feels like me. I think that we are the same. But these other men I’m not so sure about. One of them seems almost familiar, and now he his looking at me. He loves me. He is crying. Where the hell am I? It’s cold, I think someone just smacked my bottom, and suddenly the liquid that I’m breathing feels very thin and harsh. I’ve been screaming to go back, but no one seems to understand. They are passing me to her, laying me upon her chest. Here I feel at home again.

We knew that this was the most important day that we had experienced together as soon as the first contraction happened. There was a moan, the walls drew in, and suddenly we felt a rush of energy and anxiety course through our veins. Someone grabbed one of our hands and said that we needed to head to the hospital right away. We didn’t think that there was much too worry about, but we didn’t really have the energy to argue with him either. He is a sincere and caring man, and though he was not experiencing things quite as viscerally as we were, we knew that he shared our joy and concern for the import of this moment, and so we allowed him to lead us all to the car and drive straight away to the hospital.

It came out with a slurping sound and started wailing right away. It seems to have become proficient in the use of its levator palpebrae superioris muscles prior to seeing the light because it is blinking quite profusely. There seems to be blood and a number of other fluids coating the skin and what little hair covers its head as if the creature had just immerged victorious from battle or some other violent encounter. The umbilical chord was snipped like a piece of sausage and the placenta was bagged and rushed off to storage. The babies toes were counted, it’s face wiped off and it was placed gently on its mothers chest where the screams finally stopped and its heart rate slowed to a more restful pace.

It was interesting to talk from the we space of the mother-child union that is really a blurred line between self and other to begin with. Presumably the moments surrounding birth are when such a line is being drawn the most and yet also the most difficult to distinguish. The IT language felt cold and inappropriate for such an event, but no doubt was the most important for the overall health and well being of all involved. I don’t actually remember being born, so you’ll have to forgive my imagination creeping into the assignment, but from a completely subjective point of view who is to say that what I have described here is not a direct result of some sort of memory, or physical imprint from the actual birthing experience? Certainly not me.

Integral Studies - Lesson 1

2007-10-01T20:31:00.001-04:00

Since part of me reason for taking courses in Integral Theory is to be accepted into the cult and thus help spread the good word I am going to try sharing my responses to assignments on this here blog. I know that some of you are wondering what the hell I have gotten myself into while others have an inkling and are curious to know more. Some already know quite a bit and perhaps as this progresses you shall learn even more with me. Please feel free to question and criticize at al times.

We have short weekly assignments in the form of written responses to readings that we are doing during the week. We post these responses in our ‘classroom’ which is actually an online forum where we are also required to comment on one another’s responses. Already, simply pondering the possibility of this I feel more engaged with my classmates than I often did in the regular brick and mortar atmosphere of undergraduate work where I rarely knew what others work consisted of, never mind engaged it actively. This could be fun.

Lesson #1 is a practice lesson based on about 75 pages of introductory reading on Integral Theory.

Dig it:

In my attempts to help consciousness blossom in myself, and all of those I come in contact with, few things seem to allow room for as much hope as the integral model. By using five elements of the AQAL model (quadrants, levels, lines, states and types) I am able to approach and understand the intricacies of interaction that play out within, between and around us in ever more subtle and effective ways. With the Integral Operating system as a tool walls come down, bridges are built, and new tools emerge from the synthesis of once disparate fields.

When working with children simply recognizing the need for a young, preconventional child to learn what is expected of them in society and reach a conventional level of development can be enlightening for someone who tends towards postconventional thoughts and wishes to foster the same in said child. Understanding that stages or levels unfold sequentially and can not be skipped allows us to appreciate the steps along the way and nurture them as healthy and natural rather than scolding them as less than ideal.

It can also be eye opening to recognize the lines of development that individuals exceed in or struggle with. Having this ability allows one the ability to appreciate one child’s cognitive skills, while recognizing that she may need your help when dealing with the other children emotionally. At the same time another child may be the perfect, emotionally outreaching playmate for her, but be lacking in his kinesthetic or physical sense of self and need encouragement or shelter from those more physically able or aggressive.

God's Own Drunk - Wake the Dawn

2007-09-27T19:15:00.002-04:00

My friends David and Seth came to visit me when I was living in Charlotte, NC so that they could record an album for their band God's Own Drunk. We produced an album of 14 songs called Wake the Dawn.

David and Seth came with a bunch of songs that they had been playing with the band in Boston. The band is generally a four piece, but only the two of them could make it down for the week, so we had Dave on acoustic guitar, harmonica and lead vocals and Seth on lead and acoustic. They recorded the eleven songs that made it onto the album in this small time. This left me to fill in on bass, program drums and add what ever other bits of noise I saw fit after they had left. They also ended up including three of my instrumental pieces on the CD.

Some of the songs stayed quite pure and simple as they were written and recorded. Some Have Been Lost is one of these. It's also one of my favorites. Dave wrote this for dear friends for whom the world was both too much and not enough and who are no longer with us, as well as for the rest of us who are.

God's Own Drunk - Some Have Been Lost

Some of the songs on the album ended up a bit more rock or blues as the band usually plays them live. Clockmaker is one of these. Some became more esoteric and haunting like Rise Through the Ashes. These are songs of spirit and soul and the American hole and all of the crap that gets stuck inside.

Seasons Change left me feeling like the music that was recorded did not fit the vocals and the lyrics. So I threw out everything except for Dave's voice, and created a slightly dancy remix (or ReVerse as I call it; as Verse is my musical alter ego...or just ego).

If you are interested in hearing what an integrally informed lyricist comes up with, then I do not know of too many places to look. David is one of those places. His interest and knowledge in all things spiritual and integral has truly been blossoming in the years since the writing/recording of these songs, but I think that they can give you a glimpse of a burgeoning 2nd tier awareness and much of the grace, grit and harmonica spit that builds the foundation for such a leap.

God's Own Drunk - Seasons Change (ReVersed)

The album was release on my label NoAffiliation in 2005. Please be kind to the dilapidated website that was built around the same time. If what you're hearing strikes a chord and you'd like to hear more, than the album can be found on iTunes, CDBaby and probably a few other places as well.

Fast and Slow - The Master Cleanse

2007-09-21T17:45:00.001-04:00

It is time for me to take stock of my eating once again. I have felt the need for a cleanse coming on for a month or two, but have been finding excuses around every corner. Once a year, for the past four years, I have done Stanley Burrough's 'Master Cleanse' for ten days. I limit myself quite strictly to nothing other than the lemon juice, maple syrup (grade B), cayenne pepper and water drink that I have begun to call 'cajun lemonade' as well as laxative tea in the evening and water as desired. I have managed to find something in my schedule for the past couple of months that would make not eating (or drinking alcohol) for ten days a real pain in the ass socially and professionally, and I have caved to my baser desires each time.

Along the way I have been pushing myself farther and farther from the path of my ILP. I have been meditating less and less, working out less and less, doing yoga less and less, and drinking, over eating and eating crap more and more and more; culminating in the past week. I spent the past week in Stamford teaching a class on card access software. This means that I and one of my coworkers spent the week holed up in the Holiday Inn on the company tab. It also means that we felt obligated to entertain our customers who were in town to take the class. The food was wonderful. From a 3 person $600 dinner at Morton's with amazing steaks, wine etc. to a great wine and Italian food meal at Siena's Ristorante to copious amounts of beer at the hotel bar and numerous other locations throughout the city, I was full the entire time. This, of course, did not stop the consumption. Not until today.

Today I have not eaten a thing. Not even some cajun lemonade. I am still full. But I am excited to learn what hunger feels like once again. To experience the heightened sense of smell that comes with a cleansed palate and truly clear sinuses. I am excited to explore my desires to eat, teasing out the subtleties of boredom, nervousness, tension, stress, lust, exhaustion, loneliness, imbalance and many other things that I often confuse or mask with hunger. I am excited to feel the increased energy coursing through my body. Each time I have done this fast/cleanse I have found myself having an increase in my energy levels after the first couple of days. This probably sounds backwards, but has been an obvious result each time. I am well aware of the many ways in which I overeat, and of the many foods that, when eaten, seem to require more energy to process than they are providing during that processing, but I never realized the extent of energy required for digestion.

I recently read 'Enzymes: What the Experts Know' by Tom Bohager and was a little surprised to read him write that 'the act of digestion consumes as much as 80% of our daily energy'(p101) The interesting side is what this has to do with enzymes. This is one of the strongest arguments for a raw food diet that I am aware of. Digestion requires enzymes. "Enzymes are catalysts, substances that cause a chemical reaction to move faster. For example, air is a catalyst for fire...enzymes are the catalysts of biochemical reactions in living organisms"(p7) Most food, when 'alive' contains all of the necessary enzymes to digest said food. "I'm sure you've observed an apple going "bad" because it sat...too long. You didn't eat it, so it ate itself... The enzymes within that apple have become active in a digestive manner."(p14) So, food, in it's natural state contains enzymes......unless we heat it above 116 degrees (cook it). When you heat food it kills the enzymes in it. Some actually start dying at 106 degrees. But what happens when you eat something that does not contain enough enzymes to aid in its digestion in your body? Your body provides the necessary enzymes. This is one of the major roles of the bacteria in your body, they creates enzymes. The problem here is twofold. One, through ingestion of antibiotics, which kill all bacteria, good and bad, most of us are low on the good bacteria. Two, our body needs enzymes for a number of processes in the body other than digestion.

Digestion is priority number one in the body. Without it we starve and die. Number two is probably the immune system. So guess who gets robbed of enzymes when our food requires more digestive aid than we have available? I know that I started getting a bit sick this past week, and I was eating a lot of cooked food, especially meat. I was also under slept and often drunk, but the food I was eating was not necessarily allowing my bodies energies to compensate for other systems need for increased resources. I probably needed more enzymes. Getting good bacteria through probiotics is one option.

I have been making my own probiotic at home. Kombucha tea (seen fermenting here):
That's the mother floating on top. Isn't she pretty. I actually drink that stuff. It's alive and it helps me to stay that way....I think. Things such as yogurt and Kefir can be probiotics as well. I am also looking at Enzymedica, one of the companies recommended in Bohager's book, for enzyme therapy, and probably for probiotic digestive aids.

So,I will be giving my system a break for the next ten days, but I will also be doing a bit of experimentation. During my last fast I found myself really wanting to continue beyond the ten days. I felt wonderful and energetic, but Thanksgiving was impending, and I decided to use the 3-4 pre-Thanksgiving days I had available to ease my self into the feast. This time I intend to leave myself open to the possibility of continuing, in some capacity, beyond the alotted ten days. What I am really interested in is supplementing the cajun lemonade with some other things that I have been experimenting with. I find that taking a large quantity of something on an empty stomach can be the best way to get to know it and its effects on my body. So I may try out a few things such as kombucha tea, maca, camu camu, reishi, crystal manna or raw cacao 'on their own' as I have mostly been eating them in smoothies. Could be interesting.

Big Brother - First Time

2007-09-10T18:54:00.000-04:00

I met with my Little for the first time today (ok, I'm writing this a couple of weeks later and predating it). I drove to Stuart(Chuck)'s place on Malcolm X blvd, parked my car, and called upstairs to his mother. A brief encounter with a somewhat confused older woman in a wheelchair later (I'm not Bobby) and Stuart and I were on our way to the park near his house. I thought that it would be a good idea to walk around, check out his neighborhood, and see how he's livin.

We walked a few blocks to the park near his house and hung out on the jungle gym for a while. We mostly just talked, getting acquainted, and discussing his upcoming school activities. Stuart is a smart little ten year old and he really seems to enjoy learning in school. I'm loving this. He seems curious and eager.

At some point I became hungry and was really craving an apple. I asked Chuck if he knew of any place near by that might have fruit. He said he did. So we started walking. We went to six or seven local bodegga's, markets, and corner stores with absolutely no luck. A couple of them had a few banana's. There was no other fruit in site, and the local grocery is closed on Sunday's. So we hopped in the car and set out for fruit.

We ended up at Prospect Park in Park Slope. Stuart didn't seem to interested in the park at first, but then we saw the mammouth jungle gym and his face lit up a little bit. He immediately ran up onto the playground and before long I was chasing him around as he outsmarted and outran me time and time again. A little girl even invited herself to join in on the fun of running from and laughing at me attempting to catch up with two clever little kids.

After a while we decided to take a break and go check out where all of the balloon swords, hats, and belts were coming from. Let me just say that I never before realized how creepy clowns can be. Consider me convinced, children should not be left alone with clowns. Then all of the sudden Stuart walked off to a park bench across the way. There was a women sitting there with a little hand drawn sign advertising sketches for sail. Chuck immediately sat down and asked to be drawn playing basketball with a cell phone in his hand with a caption saying 'Nothing interupts my calls'. I ended up getting myself barefoot playing an acoustic guitar with 'Strummin' the blues away' written across the top.

Edumacation

2007-09-04T19:55:00.001-04:00

I just done been told that I be excepted to tha university of Fielding where they gonna learn me real good on the Integral stuff.

I have been accepted to Fielding Graduate University to earn a Certificate in Integral Studies, the credits from which can then be applied to the Concentration in Integral Studies in Fielding's Master's Program in Organization Management & Development.

So, basically, I'm a student again. It's online, so I avoid the much dreaded classroom, but I am still in school. Which seems a bit weird to me. But, I figure I spend enough time studying this stuff anyways, I might as well get credit for it.

Cuttyhunk Island

2007-09-04T12:12:00.001-04:00

Benjamin first invited me to come visit him on Cuttyhunk island a few years ago. I never made it until this past weekend. Cuttyhunk is a little island just northwest of Martha's Vineyard. There is a ferry from New Bedford, MA that takes you on a 45min ride to the island of Cuttyhunk.

Cuttyhunk is a cute, low-key, island full of old (inherited) homes and new (big $) summer houses. It has very few cars and quite a few golf carts, 4 wheelers, and moorings. I spent Friday night in one of the apartments in Benjamin's parents house and then spent Saturday and Sunday night with Sean at one of his parents homes.

The name of the day....every day....was consumption. We ate fresh caught tuna, lamb, beef kabobs, barbecued chicken, kielbasa, tuna BLT's with bacon on a Portuguese sweet roll, bacon-egg-cheese on a Portuguese sweet roll, cold cut sandwiches, eggs with sausage, onions, canadian bacon and cheese, pancakes with bananas and chocolate chips, fresh sea bass, grilled corn on the cob, shrimp poppers, fries, pizza and then we drank. Cragenmore 12 yr, mimosa's, box wine, cheap beer, good beer, Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap, rum and coke, vodka drink's, sparkling white wine mimosa things......and even a little water in the morning after coffee.

This is all on an island that sells no liquor and has one little market and a food cart. We hung out with Jono at the Avalon Inn (seen above drinking from the umbrella straw). I stood on top of a WWII bunker on the top of a hill that provides a 360 degree view of the ocean, Martha's Vineyard and Nashawena island . Went cruising with Ben to collect mooring fees from all of the sail and motor boats parked just off the island for the weekend. Took a cruise around the island with Sean in his parent's boat. Had a bonfire on the beach. Dug holes in the sand, played fetch with Diesel, and got a send off from the island as the ferry left on Monday. You can see Sean in the picture below getting ready to dive off the dock pointing down at his dog Diesel in an attempt to stop him from diving into the water when he does.
And when I got home there were people shooting a movie out on my roof deck.
Now I'm back at work. Well, at home, in my underwear, but working.....and blogging. The office seems a bit drab today.

Big Brother - Match Made

2007-08-29T17:32:00.000-04:00

I met my little on Monday. His name is Stuart. No, actually it's not, but the innocents name has been changed to protect the, uh, well, innocent. So I shall call him Stuart, or Chuck for short. Here's what I can tell you. He is 10 years old. He lives in Brooklyn. He has slightly less hair on his head than me. He lives with his mom, whom I also met, and spends a lot of time with his aunt. He's into computers and math and photographing celebrities. He would like me to teach him how to play the guitar (very cool) and he enjoys short walks in the park.

He seemed a bit shy, though this should probably be expected in an awkward situation such as this. First his mother showed up and said that Stuart was on his way with his aunt. Mrs. BBBS (director of BBBS) did the introduction thing and then stuck us in a tiny little office together for 10 minutes. The mom asked me why I was there, told me why she brought Chuck there, and we chatted about kids, exercise, South Carolina, and the Gross Domestic Product of Guam (one of these things was not really discussed). She is an intelligent career woman who seems to be doing a great job raising her child. Chuck just lacks a male in his life who can be a consistent caring, teaching presence. Bravo to his mom for reaching out. It takes a big heart (and dare I say an absence of big balls) to admit there are roles that others might fill better than you. I'm privileged to be tapped for such a role.

After Stu's mom and I chatted she left the room and Stuart came in. I basically asked him a whole bunch of questions, most of which he answered with short, shy sentences. I did see his face light up a little at the mention of a couple of things. One of these was riding the bus. Apparently Stuart is a bus pro. This is good, because I know nothing of the bus. I have never ridden it and I'm pretty sure I waste a fair amount of time because of this. Stuart has promised to teach me how to ride the bus. Coincidentally, he does not know how the subway works. I plan on figuring this out and teaching him. I think that there are letters and numbers involved; it's kinda like algebra.

So, we agreed to have our first outing on either Sept 8th or 9th. I think that we will go and hang out in the park in Brooklyn. Chuckie said that he likes the slides there.

I don't have Stu's picture, and if I did I would not put it up here, so here's another wedding photo booth card. This is actually me and 4 cousins.....somehow Tara and I got center stage and Meg, Priya and Suse got screwed.

Tears of Joy and Sorrow

2007-08-27T08:09:00.003-04:00

My sister Aileen got married yesterday. At her wedding she had a photo booth. Together we made faces.

Reilly sent me an email on Aug 1st with a last minute plea for me to help out at Camp Bright Feathers (CBF) as a CIT (Counselor in Training) facilitator. Reilly has been volunteering at this camp for something like 13 years, but was in Poland at the time and could not attend. I have been feeling like my work lacks meaning, and looking for ways to contribute more, this presented a great opportunity. CBF is a week long camp in New Jersey for children ages 6-13 who are affected by HIV. Some campers have HIV, some have family who do, or have lost someone close to them to it.

So that is where I spent the past week. I was at CBF from August 18-August 25th. I stayed in a cabin with 15-16 year old boys in a village with another cabin of 15-16 year old girls; all CIT's. They were former campers and new volunteers with ties to the camp.

We spent the week exploring what it means to be a role model for children and attempting to make sure that all of the campers had as much fun as possible despite the fact that it rained most of the time and almost all of the camps activities are usually outdoors. The camps intention is not to focus on HIV or sickness in any way. It actually provides the opposite for the kids. The camp tries to be one environment where this can fall back. Stopping for meds 2 or 3 times a day does not have to be explained, and when meeting new people the pressure of when to divulge certain information can be relaxed a bit.

Many campers seem perfectly healthy, a few have extensive scarring, some have cerebral palsy or some sort of developmental delay, most come from situations at home and in their community that I can only relate to through stories and imagination. The one thing that most all of them seem to have in common is an astounding degree of resilience and so many share a true passion for life. These are children who face hurdles at home and within their own bodies that I have never had to face. So many of the things that I have long taken for granted are a struggle or stretch that never reaches its goal. These are not Magic Johnson's children. Most come from the inner city in places like Philadelphia, PA and Camden, NJ. The camp is free for them and the staff is comprised mostly of volunteers. I met a lot of great people, many of whom came to camp years ago and have not stopped coming back. I intend to do the same.

I had to leave camp a bit early on Friday to get back to Manhattan for my sisters rehearsal dinner, followed by drinks, then woke up on Saturday, quick workout, went to pick up flowers for the wedding, dropped some of them off for the bridal party, then went to meet up with the groomsmen. Donned a tux, did the pictures outside in the park thing in 90+ degree weather, and then headed over to the Foundry in a stretch taxi limousine.

The wedding ceremony was great. My sister looked amazing. I love to see her looking so beautiful and happy and surrounded by so many who love her. Ralph's family is awesome. The room was full of friends and family, many of whom I had not seen in years. It was an intimate 110ish person affair. I can't describe how blessed I feel to have this as my foundation. The amount of opportunity and support that I have in my life is staggering. It was the realization of this that overwhelmed me.

I am the type of person who usually takes a great deal of alone time. I meditate, read, exercise, play music, sit and pick my nose, whatever. I had spent the entire week in a cabin in the woods with a campers and fellow counselors. In rushing home and jumping into the dinner, wedding, family, friends scene I never really allowed myself any time to process the week or transition back into the day to day city life. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and those around me for most of the night, but towards the end of the night I began to reach a point of overwhelm.

I went upstairs to the balcony overlooking the dance floor with a glass of water to catch my breath and take it all in. Sitting there by myself was the when the week finally caught up with me. Reilly had warned me that it would probably happen at some time during the week, perhaps after taking the campers to the infirmary for meds. The week at camp had been wonderful. I was surrounded by so much strength and resilience in the face of so many hardships that I could not imagine feeling down. I jumped into the camp life fully, resisting nothing, and trying to keep my heart as open as possible at all times. I practiced Tonglen while walking throughout the camp and was honored to have the opportunity to be invited into both the simple and difficult experiences of these strangers lives. It was only here, in the extravagance and familiarity of my own life, that the weight of it all could be felt.

Amy walked by and said "come downstairs and dance, it's your sisters wedding", but I had been choking back tears already and felt a bit guilty about bringing my overwhelm into the room. I declined, waited a moment, and then walked downstairs and out the front door into the streets of Long Island City. I made it half a block before the tears came, overcome with tears of joy and sorrow, I walked quite a few more before sitting down to catch my breath and let them stop.

I do not have the words for the weight that the past weak has held. I am so happy for the life that I have been given, and so grateful to be able to share my abundance with others. I am amazed at the energy and compassion that children who have know so much suffering can show towards one another. I am in awe of all of those who consistently give of themselves when faced with the lack of others. It seems as if facing difficulty in life has allowed many to truly care about others and recognize our interconnectivity far more than a life of carefree pleasure ever could have. I am continually thankful for the family and friends that life has presented me and recognize that the suffering that I have faced in life has helped make me who I am and added to my desire to reach out to others stumbling along their path. The opportunity to give is truly that, an opportunity. I hold no delusions of being anyones savior. I am simply honored to hold another's hand as they take a few steps forward. It's a shame that it's taken me so long too figure out the gift that service can be to both myself and others.

At camp we made a clay animation with some of the kids.

Home Birth

2007-08-05T22:21:00.001-04:00

Correlation vs. Causation - DNA and Epigenetics

2007-07-31T21:02:00.005-04:00

Correlation and Causation seem to me to be two of the most commonly confused terms in the modern world. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the reporting and interpretation of genetic research.

I got only 50 pages into 'The Biology of Belief' by Bruce H. Lipton and already was in love. It is rare that a scientists views of the world truly resonate with my own interpretations. I have long argued that DNA as a causative factor in our lives is a confused and partial truth. I occasionally read of studies that point at this, but far too often the opposite conclusion is drawn. 'My genes made me fat, caused my cancer, leave me crippled with ADD, depression, chronic fatigue, addiction, obesity, etc. and there is ultimately little that I can do.'

The fact that there is some truth in this does not mean that we are powerless, quite the opposite I think.

Lipton makes some very important points early on '...genes can not turn themselves on or off...genes are not "self-emergent". Something in the environment has to trigger gene activity.'. So our genes certainly speak of (often latent) potentials, but they alone can not be studied to tell us why we are as we are. (p26)

Later Lipton gives us the analogy of the belief that keys 'control' cars. If one were to study all cars that are moving (much as geneticists may study all people with cancer) in an attempt to determine causes of this 'movement' phenomenon they may well find that all moving cars contain keys. They may even go so far as to look and find no stationary cars containing keys. Does this mean that keys control cars or cause them to be moving? Obviously not, they are correlative, not causative. (p50) There are other environmental and interior factors at work here as well (driver, gas, battery charge etc). DNA (keys) may very well be the newest and most fundamental factor to receive sciences attention, but how is it that this leads us to ignore or belittle the myriad other factors at play? And more importantly, how useful is this towards empowering us to make positive change?

Mr. Lipton goes on to point out Darwin's late life realization: "the greatest error which I have committed has been not allowing sufficient weight to the direct action of the environments, I.e. Food, climate, etc., independently of natural selection."

"When a gene product is needed, a signal from its environment, not an emergent property of the gene itself, activates expression of that gene." - H. F. Nijhout (p52)

Lipton also points out that, while it holds a wealth of information and can rightly be considered a warehouse of potentials, DNA alone does not interact with the environment to determine our response to stimulus. "In the chromosome, the DNA forms the core, and the proteins cover the DNA like a sleeve. When the genes are covered, their information can not be "read".(p67) What causes the protein 'sleeve' to roll back and allow the DNA to express itself? Environmental signals. So, it would seem that in many ways the regulatory proteins surrounding our DNA are deciding which potentials we will express, and when, more than the DNA that is getting so much media attention these days. Lipton even points out that more often than not, in an attempt to get at and study DNA, the proteins surrounding it are removed and discarded. Is this because DNA houses all of the necessary information for the life that is me?

Consider that our bodies are made up of over 100,000 different proteins. "Conventional thought held that the body needed one gene to provide for each of the 100,000...Add to that 20,000 regulatory genes, which orchestrate the activity of the protein-encoding genes. Scientists concluded that the human genome would contain a minimum of 120,000 genes." (p62) But it turns out that they found closer to 25,000. The spineless, thousand-celled Caenorhabditis worm has 24,000. Obviously there is more at work here building each of us than just DNA.

Epigenetics - Control above genetics

Epigenetic research is now showing us that, not only is there a lot more to our complexity than DNA can account for, the whole process is a lot more fluid than previously believed. Epigeneticists are the scientists who keep the regulatory proteins and study them when breaking open a cells nucleus to get at its contents (DNA and regulatory proteins). These are the scientists who are teaching us that the holy grail of building life is not DNA-->RNA-->protein, but Environmental Signal<-->Regulatory Protein<-->DNA<-->RNA<-->Protein. Notice that the arrows actually go in both directions. 'DNA blueprints passed down through genes are not concrete at birth'. They change!!! They respond!

Yes, this does seem to imply that the outside world, and our interactions with it can actually rewrite our genetic code. Is this actually surprising? Does the idea of 'random mutation' followed by 'natural selection' really make more sense? What does the word random usually imply in a scientific context? It usually means 'we have no fucking clue what is happening, and are not going to admit any attempts to figure it out'. Thank god someone did.

In attempting to explain what I view to be one of our current limitations when attempting to understand what DNA, RNA, proteins etc. are and how they interact with the world I have come up with a train analogy:

Picture the human mind/body as a train. Let's say that science wants to know what's happening inside of the train in order to determine where that train will end up, and in what condition. So science decides that people control trains. Science then finds a way to capture a static image of the entire contents of the train, who is in it, what they are saying, what their plans are, etc. Science then spends a great deal of time studying the content of that one image and comparing its findings to similar snapshots of information gathered from other trains. What science can not yet honor is that the train is full of holes and its contents change over time. Windows and doors open and close both as the train stops and when it is in motion. The train made many stops before the image was captured and has made many more stops since the image was captured. Most likely it was making stops or had windows open while the image was being captured. And what is happening at these stops and through these openings? People are getting on and off, they are smelling the air outside, breathing its contents, hearings it's sounds. The environment around the train is permeating and changing the contents of the train and vice versa. The conversations that the passengers on a train are likely to have rest heavily on where the train is, who has entered, exited, and who is being mesmerized by the sights out the window. The train may have a schedule, and should environmental conditions be one particular way, it may even follow that schedule to the mili-second with no malfunctions or mishaps, but neither this schedule nor the people on the train at the time of the imaging are necessarily causative. They are correlates. And not one piece of this ever changing information can be looked at in a deterministic fashion if we really want to have a clue how that train is going to end up.

We currently have the capability to sequence the entire human genome (It's still really fucking expensive) and have done it quite a few times. I am not aware of any comparative studies that attempt to look at the human genome at birth, death, and at many intervals in between. I suspect that we will see differences. I do not believe that our genetic code is static or causative. We are a product of our genes, our proteins, our community, our society, and, as Mr. Lipton states clearly in other sections of the book, of our beliefs as well.

What is beautiful about all of this is that the idea that we need to dominate (survival of the fittest) or control others so that we can survive just doesn't make sense when it is precisely those others whom we rely on for all of the growth that we have ever made. It seems as if by nurturing our environment we are actually nurturing ourselves.

What is the impact of all this? Not that survival of the fittest is necessarily 100% wrong, but that it is certainly not the whole truth either. There may be more value in cooperation with our environment (others) than previously imagined. There's really no reason to feel trapped and scared, as if the environment is out to get you and you are ill prepared to meet it. We are being created by it. We are creating with it. We are perfectly in sync with it. The imaginary lines that we have drawn around ourselves, separating self from other, are melting every day.

Vulnerability

2007-07-20T19:37:00.000-04:00

LITTLE ME

Antoinette asked me recently why I said that one of the reasons for creating my blog was to make myself more vulnerable. My response was to tell her that I feel as if I was raised to think that I was 'special' and 'different' and that at some point I indulged these ideas too much and this was one of the beliefs that left me feeling isolated and alone in the world. I often times operated under the assumption that others could not possibly understand what it was that I was going through and how it was affecting me. My response to this was to never reach out to them at all. I denied myself the opportunity for success or failure in intimate relationships by never engaging people in ways that might feel too vulnerable.

So, I do feel as if I have made great changes in my life regarding my openness and my willingness and ability to share my internal world with others. And I have been amazed at the feeling of connectedness and community that this has brought into my life. So I have decided to test myself and see what things I still hold on to. And when I find such things, I hope to do my best to lay them bare. I am sure that there will be exceptions to this, but I wonder what good, if any, these exceptions can bring.

In the spirit of this, I offer you the following letter that I wrote to my mommy after a long car ride together full of wonderful conversation. You will be a little lost contextually, but I will offer [explanation] and you should feel free to comment or question. I've been getting all sorts of great feedback in email and on myspace, but few seem to want to comment in public.

I hope my mommy doesn't mind.

Hi mom,

I was thinking about what you said about your having a tendency to gravitate towards black and white thinking. I think that this is what has bothered me in the past about your views on my experiences with my chest surgery [ corrective for pectus excavatum] and how it related to my unhappiness. It has often seemed as if you could not understand my general disillusionment with what I saw as my options in life. You, understandably, probably saw this most clearly in my views of much of western medicine [complete distrust of doctors]. So you needed a reason. A reason is quite different than a comprehensive understanding.

My chest is, has been, and will be a factor in my life. I am good with this. I have learned much from it. It has been hard at times, but I love where I am now, and everything has been part of that. By no means should you read this as a glossing over of facts, think of it as contextualizing them.

For me the difficulties that I have had in the past have been much more complicated than one part of my body. My life lacked meaning, and, with the tools that you had given me [atheist family], I had no idea how to find this meaning. This is not something I blame you for. This is a defining characteristic of the modern world. I could ramble on about Realism, or Objectivism, or Reductionism, but the simple truth for me is that science is not enough, and I was raised to believe that the world is completely explainable through science. Interestingly enough, the true leaders at the cutting edges of science have always seemed to know its limitations. Most of our education only focuses on part of their work. Quantum Physics has now made it clear to everyone else just how confused we were to think that there is a simple black and white world out there that we can objectify. It all but directly calls us co-creators of reality.

I know that you have a strong faith in yourself. It seems that you do not have a hard time finding beauty in the world [my mother is an amazingly sweet, gentle and caring person]. I trust that your morals are so much higher than most. I know that there is meaning in life, whether we can understand it or not. I think that we all intuit such things. But being the curious monkey that I am has led me to seek a deeper appreciation of how these things evolve. Using science to trace the roots of beauty, morals, and meaning leads to giant metaphysical cliffs that most in the scientific community just back away from slowly as if nothing has happened. Science is far too black and white for this stuff. It has made it very clear to me that the explanations that I was given for such processes were drastically incomplete and in many ways in serious denial. I needed more than that.

The trust in subjective truths that spiritual traditions offer is such a complement. I inherited from you the idea that one view [science] was necessarily in contrast with the other [religion]. You did not create it, you merely passed it on. It was as if to believe in god meant a denial of science and/or personal responsibility for the world. Sure this is true for some, but the assumption that this is then true for all is a gross denial of fact and a serious over simplification. The world is not that black and white.

I believe that much of the depression that we now see in the world is a result of such an unnatural split that people feel forced to make in themselves.

There is a beauty in grey that is so much greater than the idea of self that is commonly accepted in our society; an idea which relies entirely on the black and white understandings that science provides. Spirituality and science are not in opposition. I think that the ideas of Self that I have stumbled upon are a bit more inclusive than those that modernity offers and it provides me with a few more tools with which to relate to reality.

I must say that I am grateful that I have been given the tools to undertake this journey. The pain I have felt has been a million opportunities. I regret none of it. We are all stumbling forward together.

Devin

Big Brother

Namibia Day 3 - Run, Cheetah, Run

Namibia Day 2 - Cheetah Meet and Greet

oração

Starcrossed

Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma

Seasoned

Ray Lamontagne - Jolene

Breathing Exercises

Good News

Does Conscious Capitalism = Integral Business?

Integral Circumcision?

The Music Parade

Integral Drugs - Just Say Yes?

Angel With Two Backs

Stuart Davis - Nothing In Between

There is nothing in between us when we sleepBut every night the bliss begins to leakNothing in between us when we laughit's something that our head will never grasp

when you've seen in betweenThere's nothing in between our skin and lightThere's nothing in between the wind and kiteThere's nothing in between our lips and graceThere's nothing in between the tongue and tasteIt's seen in between

(Refrain)There is nothing in between you and meNothing in between blue and seaNothing in between us and loveNothing in between wings and doves(Refrain)There is nothingin between

Adam Scott Miller

Two Close for Comfort

Stuck in the Middle

The Hostel Life - Colombia

The Hostel Life - Panama City

The Hostel Life Trailer

Bruce Lipton - Biology of Beliefs Video

Eliot in Orbit

Stop Motion Animation

I've Joined The Hostel Life

Practically Ideal

Chunky Move - Mortal Engine

Baraka

The Hostel Life

Emotional Eating - Integrative Nutrition Graduation

The Emergence - Please Rise 2

Hunger Dreams

The Emergence - Please Rise

Green Business Competition Awards

Bringing New Yorkers local, sustainable produce grown in the heart of NYC

Community Acupuncture

What is a life well lived?

Integrative Nutrition

Covering Ground

We're Never Gonna Survive Unless.....

Still Emerging

The Emergence at COSM

Editing

Election 2008 Survey

Integral Education - Seattle - Whidbey Island

Why Destination

FUCK GOD

Disaster Recovery

Why NYC Rocks

Sustainable Profits for Good?

Origins of Music / Food Poisoning

veg

Floating - Sensory Deprivation

Boston

FLOW w/ John Mackey

Hey Ya

Ayahuasca 5

Pre/Trans Alcoholic?

Ayahuasca 4

Ayahuasca 3

Ayahuasca 2

Ayahuasca 1

Purim

Head Above Water

I'm Homeless / Hipsters Unite

The Big Three - The Good, The True, and The Beautiful

Integral Studies - Lesson 1

God's Own Drunk - Wake the Dawn

Fast and Slow - The Master Cleanse

Big Brother - First Time

Edumacation

Cuttyhunk Island

Big Brother - Match Made

Tears of Joy and Sorrow

Home Birth

Correlation vs. Causation - DNA and Epigenetics

There is nothing in between us when we sleep
But every night the bliss begins to leak
Nothing in between us when we laugh
it's something that our head will never grasp

when you've seen in between

There's nothing in between our skin and light
There's nothing in between the wind and kite
There's nothing in between our lips and grace
There's nothing in between the tongue and taste

It's seen in between

(Refrain)

There is nothing in between you and me
Nothing in between blue and sea
Nothing in between us and love
Nothing in between wings and doves

(Refrain)

There is nothing
in between