She is the Zohar: The material world Perceived as Splendor. She is Shekinah: That womanly Secret Inside things. She is Eve Hawah, Mother of Animals, Mother of Mankind, First to taste the marvelous Milk of Knowledge: Sweet, forbidden, mind-altering and addictive-- The world's first "controlled substance". She is Jezebel, Lilith, Magdalena, Sophia. She is Sarah, the wife of Abraham.
She is the Limitless Oil of Hanukkah. She is the Light of Lights, die Aufklärung. She is that bright Hydrogen fusion furnace On whose warmth all life on Earth is nursed. She is Dante's Love that moves the Sun and the Stars.
May Her Light illuminate your heart, mind and body. May Her Light illumine your work and your play That in your work and in your play Others might experience Her Glory.
Buffoons praise Her too Even more than the sober.
And would you raise your kids as weapons To defend their Father-and-Mother Land? Or, in the dangerous eyes of the stranger, Would you learn to recognize Her Glance? Or, in the dangerous eyes of the stranger, Would you dare to return your Beloved's Gaze?
In the middle '60s my social circle happened to intersect that of Ken Kesey, best-selling author, leader of the Merry Pranksters, Commodore of "Furthur", the Psychedelic Bus, and instigator of the infamous "Can You Pass the Acid Test?" experiments in psychedelic sociology. Kesey had been introduced to the effects of LSD by Dr Leo Hollister at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, getting dosed in the same building where poet Allen Ginsberg and physicist Heinz Pagels were similarly initiated into the psychedelic mysteries. Tom Wolfe has documented some of Kesey's pranks in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, one of the most informative books to come out of that decidedly experiential and anti-literary era. Another little appreciated literary record of those tumultuous times was Gypsy Joker biker William J Craddock's Be Not Contentwhich chronicles Craddock's mind-altered adventures in the precincts of San Jose, Boulder Creek and Big Sur. And who can forget the heart-warming tale of how spooks in the CIA, secretly testing biochemical Weapons of Mental Domination on our own people, inadvertently triggered the massive, colorful and wildly out-of-control Haight-Ashbury Effect?
During the Summer of Love Era, I lived in Los Trancos Woods, a rural outpost of Portola Valley, while Ken Kesey was holding court in nearby La Honda. We first met at a party in Palo Alto hosted by lovely Shirley Burlingame. Gathered in Shirley's living room, under the seductive spell of the usual intoxicants, drawn into a hushed, dark, candle-lit circle with other Seekers of Deep Reality, the Head Prankster Himself gifted me with the best piece of advice I've ever gotten from mortal man or woman.
"Shut up, Nick," Ken Kesey said. "Shut up and listen."
In the early Eighties while working on a book about reality, I met Randy Hamm and his wife Gypsy Flores who were living in a quaint trailer park called Leprechaun Woods just around the corner from the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot. Our families formed a close bond and Randy and I decided to collaborate on a project that would mix quantum physics and animation. This was in the days before computers, when every frame had to be drawn by hand and separately captured on film. And Randy Hamm was becoming a master of this now-archaic art.
Out of Randy's portfolio of original creations, which included many animated household objects (Randy had learned to draw fire from a retired Disney animator living in Santa Cruz.) and several weird animal and humanoid creatures spawned in Randy's fertile brain, I selected a rabbit character drawn hitch-hiking out of Las Vegas, and we named him "Benjamin Bunny". Randy, inspired by a picture of my eccentric physicist friend Saul-Paul Sirag, then created an Einstein-like character who we cast as Benjamin's mentor--the all-knowing "Professor" who speaks most of the lines in the film. Benjamin never talks; he just listens and reacts non-verbally. Such was Randy's skill that he was able with just a few ink lines to pull a lot of subtle emotions out of this simple-looking rabbit.
Our project was continually being interrupted because Randy, after graduating from UCSC, was being sought after to work on feature-length animation projects. His last movie project was as a senior animator for Plague Dogsbased on a novel by the author of Watership Down. One of my last memories of Randy was in my living room in Boulder Creek. Randy was on all fours on my carpet showing me how a dog walks. He had drawn this action hundreds of times and had the motions memorized. It was hilarious. For the sake of his art, Randy had actually learned how to walk like a dog.
Unfortunately for his friends and family, Randy died in an unusual climbing accident shortly after the completion of Plague Dogs.
For the sake of raising money for the completion of our film, Randy & I had cobbled together a kind of story board and sound track which we had turned into a slide show. We put on a few presentations in Santa Cruz to promote the project and I took it to Esalen to show participants in some of the quantum physics seminars led there by myself, by the real Saul-Paul Sirag and by physicist Heinz Pagels.
Recently, while searching for something else in my messy files, I ran across what remained of the Benjamin Bunny project and decided to post it on YouTube. This version of BBFR is dedicated to the memory of Randy Hamm and to everybody Randy touched and taught in his brief and colorful career.
"Once this all belonged to them."--Gabrielle Cianfrani
The San Lorenzo River flows down a deep, wet, thickly-wooded crease between two mountain ranges and enters the Pacific Ocean at the city of Santa Cruz near the Boardwalk's roller coasters. A hundred years ago the valley's redwood trees were clear cut to rebuild San Francisco after the Earthquake, leaving a string of small logging towns along the river--Boulder Creek being the most remote. Jabir's Quantum Tantric Ashram is located a few miles north of Boulder Creek on a dead end road with three other houses. Most of my neighbors are non-human and live across the road in a big area I call the Wild Zone.
Once you enter the Wild Zone, it is possible to hike with some difficulty all the way to the crest of the Santa Cruz range without crossing a paved road. The Zone is populated mainly by deer, coyote, raccoon, possum, skunk. squirrel and the occasional wild pig and mountain lion. I have never spotted a lion in the Zone but the wife of a nearby friend reports seeing one cross her driveway after a recent forest fire, possibly seeking a new home.
The highway that runs through the valley is a kill zone for wild animals and finding many of them on my walks I often pick them up from the side of the road and carry them into the Wild Zone so someone can dine on them far from traffic. Sometimes they are eaten in place, leaving just a few scraps of fur. More often they just disappear. Into the Zone I've carried many squirrels, a few raccoons and possums and someone's big white rabbit that escaped its cage and wandered onto the highway. My biggest catch was a yearling deer which I loaded into the back of my car and dragged into the Zone with a rope. It weighed about 50 pounds and was gone the next day. Probably an easy supper for a big cat and her kittens.
A few of the Zone's inhabitants come to visit me at night. Crafty raccoons and skunks have learned to open the cat door and finish off what Kitty didn't eat plus whatever I've forgotten to put away. The raccoons will flee when discovered but the skunks hold their ground until they are finished eating and will let me get quite close to them--almost nose to nose--if I move slowly and make soothing noises. This year there are two of them, both born this summer. They are visiting less and less frequently and I expect they will soon be gone, off to start their own families deeper inside the Zone.
Dear Abbie-- I am a male human being on Earth plane 7. My partner wants to be treated like a goddess. But so do all the others. Is there one goddess or many? And how can I honor them all? --Overwhelmed in Pasadena
Dear Overwhelmed-- The answer to the goddess/god dilemma faced by you and so many others confined to the Earth planes is contained in two psychedelic visions. Since along with these privileged experiences comes the conviction that you have been opened to a Deep Secret, to an Undeniable Truth of Nature, you understand that it would be spiritual hazardous not to base your post-vision life on these two psychedelic insights if at all possible.
Vision #1: Perception of the All-in-One. Behind the everyday veil of illusion you realize that your partner is Woman in all Her Guises: goddess, queen, perfect lover, sister, mother, childhood companion, lewd temptress too, man-eater, whore, black witch, angry Kali: devourer of worlds. Only the persuasive simplicity of the habitual illusion blinds you to the fact that She in all Her moods and costumes continually plays for your sake at the game of embodiment. In your relationship you both take turns imitating for each other all the male and female roles that crowd your imagination--images out of dreams, movies, childhood fairy tales--hiding (and seeking) behind the familiar masks that pulled you together when you met. The image of All-in-One supports the notion of deep spiritual monogamy: there is truly only one God/Goddess and He/She is now, was, and ever will be at your side. In the words of the immortal Fats Waller: "If that isn't love, it'll have to do, until the real thing comes along..."
Vision #2: Perception of the One-in-All. Beneath the shimmering surface of things, you suddenly realize that everything is alive, divine, and profoundly sexual. Every man and woman you meet yearns to be your lover. In his marvelous Song of Myself, poet Walt Whitman managed to put into words his glimpse of this unitary vision. Every flower, tree, stone, or drop of water is a divine essence that solicits your immediate erotic attention. Whst holds you back from the Universe's invitation to the dance? The image of One-in-All supports the notion of a spiritual promiscuity so shameless that it includes not only every living creature in its gooey embrace but the vegetable and mineral kingdoms as well. Goddess (God) is in everything and Goddess (God) is Love.
Reconciling these two psychedelic insights--each of them true without doubt on the deepest level of existence--is a real problem for finite creatures such as human beings, forgetful of your true natures, deeply taken in by the illusion of separateness. But, keeping both of these images in mind, try to do your very best. Follow your heart and take the consequences.. Goddess (God) bless you. --Abbie dearest
In this picture light from two lasers (red and green) is traveling from left to right while confined in a gradually tapering optical waveguide. As the waveguide narrows, the effective speed of light decreases until it reaches zero and then the light stops. This picture taken by Vera and Igor Smolyaninov and others at Towson University in Maryland shows the green light penetrating further than the red before stopping. If a blue laser had been used its light would have been trapped slightly further down the guide.
The trapped rainbow experiment is part of a larger program to manipulate light in sophisticated ways using "metamaterials" nanofabricated to produce exotic outcomes such as the ability to render an object invisible like the Romulan "cloaking device" in Star Trek. For more information about the Smolyaninovs' cloaking experiments see Those Damn Romulans and the 2Physics blog.
Metamaterials (MMs) are usually constructed by forming periodic structures whose periodicity is slightly smaller than the wavelength of the wave you are trying to control. Since the wavelength of microwaves is on the order of an inch, one can almost construct microwave metamaterials by assembling Lego blocks. Metamaterials that manipulate visible light, however, would have to be constructed of Lego blocks tens of thousands of times smaller.
The Smolyaninovs and their collaborators have cleverly bypassed the difficulty of fabricating metamaterials for visible light by demonstrating that a tapered optical waveguide already possesses some of the desirable qualities of MMs such as the ability to partially cloak small objects and to produce a "trapped rainbow" by slowing and stopping light. It is a big step from hiding tiny gold wires to cloaking whole star ships but a more practical near-term outcome from experiments such as these could be "super lenses" that produce higher resolution images than are possible with glass or, more likely, devices that coax light to perform unnatural acts no one has yet imagined.
MOONRISE And who has seen the moon, who has not seen Her rise from out the chamber of the deep, Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw Confession of delight upon the wave, Littering the waves with her own superscription Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us Spread out and known at last, and we are sure That beauty is a thing beyond the grave, That perfect, bright experience never falls To nothingness, and time will dim the moon Sooner than our full consummation here In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.
"He's a Capricorn. That means
Illuminated Blue Whale
In the middle '60s my social circle happened to intersect that of Ken Kesey, best-selling author, leader of the Merry Pranksters, Commodore of "Furthur", the Psychedelic Bus, and instigator of the infamous "Can You Pass the Acid Test?" experiments in psychedelic sociology. Kesey had been introduced to the effects of LSD by Dr Leo Hollister at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, getting dosed in the same building where poet Allen Ginsberg and physicist Heinz Pagels were similarly initiated into the psychedelic mysteries. Tom Wolfe has documented some of Kesey's pranks in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, one of the most informative books to come out of that decidedly experiential and anti-literary era. Another little appreciated literary record of those tumultuous times was Gypsy Joker biker William J Craddock's Be Not Content which chronicles Craddock's mind-altered adventures in the precincts of San Jose, Boulder Creek and Big Sur. And who can forget the heart-warming tale of how spooks in the CIA, secretly testing biochemical Weapons of Mental Domination on our own people, inadvertently triggered the massive, colorful and wildly out-of-control Haight-Ashbury Effect?
"Once this all belonged to them."--Gabrielle Cianfrani
photo by Reno DeCaro
In this picture light from two lasers (red and green) is traveling from left to right while confined in a gradually tapering optical waveguide. As the waveguide narrows, the effective speed of light decreases until it reaches zero and then the light stops. This picture taken by Vera and Igor Smolyaninov and others at Towson University in Maryland shows the green light penetrating further than the red before stopping. If a blue laser had been used its light would have been trapped slightly further down the guide.
Moon Mosaic from Astronomy Picture of the Day
