I’ve been studying Reiki under two local Reiki masters here, and it’s been good so far. I’ll write more about it once I’ve progressed farther. I’ve completed my Level I and some friends and I begin Level II in a couple weeks. I’ll be studying straight through the year until the Master class.
The teachers aren’t your traditional New Age fruits. They’re more like existential yogis, but the Reiki they practise is phenomenal. As an added bonus, they begin sessions with a Kirlian camera. Now, don’t read too much into these. But interesting to see the results as I progress through sessions with them and my own studies.
The image (click image for larger size) is mirrored, so the pinky finger is associated with your connection to one’s intuition, the ring finger with one’s emotional state, middle finger with one’s physical state, and index finger with one’s mental state.
The first row of finger tips is captured as they have you in your normal state, then they ask you to embody happiness, then frustration, and then to feel as if you’re the most comfortable state with yourself as possible. They capture these four sets onto one film and voilà!
The broken lines represent a lack of connection or awareness of that aspect of your being. Beyond language and labels, just being. And as the rings grow in brightness, I believe they come to represent one’s comfort with just being a part of existence — letting the whole of the life experience wash over oneself.
I went today, and as you can see from the bottom-right image, my way of living is beginning to more wholly encompass all facets of being. It was a good session and the past year’s been good.
Might be worth looking into for those unaware of Reiki. As Saul Williams says in his song "Raised to Be Lowered":
To find the balance between all you sense and all you see To find the patience and the strength it takes to let it be To stand amongst the crowd and have the strength to hold your own To throw away the pen and pad and simply be the poem To rise above hatred to love through seeming contradiction To seldom take a side and learn to compliment the friction.
Some of this stuff has been floating around the Internet over the past few days, but Cabinet of Wonders ties it all together:
The English-language term “Scientology” originated neither with Hubbard nor Nordenholz, but with philologist Allen Upward, who coined the term in 1907 to ridicule pseudoscientific theories.
Possibly more interestingly, is the history of the E-Meter . It was invented by chiropractor and sci-fi author Volney Mathison, based on his study of lie detectors. Mark Pilkington looked at this aspect in an article he wrote for the Guardian.
From the people who brought you occulture comes the latest, greatest issue of Key64. Since it’s relaunch this year, Key64 has brought you some of the most thought-provoking and controversial names in contemporary occultism, counterculture and fringe thought. Names like Padre Engo, Steven Grasso, and Thirty Seven. Key64 ends its first year with a bang, bringing you something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.
Fresh from headlining esoZone: Designer Reality Expo, Boston’s most famous visionary artist Paul Laffoley explores some spooky synchronicities engulfing everything from Antonio Gaudi, the Rockefeller family, and the World Trade Centers. With his trademark homespun style, Paul puts his analytical precision and dry wit on the biggest psychic detective case of the 20th century- who killed heroic modernism?
No stranger to stirring up controversy, the Church of Satan’s Reverend Jack Malebranche is back at it again. This time he turns in a Nietzschean exploration of power, laying bare the egoic pretensions of the contemporary American middle class. With all the fury of a Spartan warrior, Rev. Malebranche evokes the best qualities of Anton LaVey’s hilarious honesty and a bare knuckle street brawl. Sure to be an instant classic.
The man behind the epic Laffoley Archive, Michael Coleman sounds off on the weirder memes from quantum theory and their consequences for contemporary esotericism. Ditch your Cartesian-Newtonian presuppositions and move into the 20th Century as Michael takes you on an odyssey through the multiverse. Fans of weird hard science take note.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
Nick Pell magnanimously shares the wisdom he’s gleaned on cult leaders. Don’t leave home without reading this!
Klint Finley eulogizes the risen master Lady Jaye and asks some pressing questions about the Broken Sex project.
Lillian Grace interviews Oliviero Toscani, magus of the world of advertising who has turned commercial enterprise into transgresive art.
Lupa brings magic out of the old and musty and into the vibrant and contemporary with her culinary adventures.
Edward Wilson explains retro-active magic for those of us still scratching our heads. Then he joins forces with world famous time traveler Wes Unruh to introduce you to the talismatic text.
Kelly Kennedy gives careful, detailed attention to a subject of much interest to contemporary occultists- building a literary pantheon.
Ikpir introduces Key64’s readers to the dark arts of black radionics and sonic manipulation.
Doctor Invisible reports from his Tesseract at the farthest reaches of the chronoverse.
I was trying to articulate some thoughts on these very concepts earlier this year. However, I didn’t do nearly as poignant job as the Casaleggio Associati. What I find interesting is how this renders our interest in the occult. If everyone is going to have access to the things we sometimes struggle to grasp in our studies these days. Perhaps we should just work diligently to make sure the road is paved for the revolution as predicted by this video (and the likes of others, just check out Ray Kurzweil or any number of Boing Boing posts).
It sounds like something you dreamed up in the basement with your stoner friends in high school. (In fact, you may actually have done so.) But transcranial direct current stimulation is the hottest thing to hit the improvisational health management scene since acupuncture. A growing body of evidence suggests that sticking a battery onto your head could hack into your brain’s operating system and make life generally more worth living. Think of it as Norton Utilities for the mind.
That’s not an oversimplification of the process. tDCS is literally that simple. The total cost of a treatment is less than $5 of parts from Radio Shack and a sponge. No prescription needed. No needles, no pills, no insurance companies, no weird hormonal fluctuations, no commercials saying “I’m glad [drug of choice] has a low risk of sexual side effects!”
This looks like a good program of study - basically a condensed version of Hyatt’s “energized meditation” (itself based on Reichian therapy). I’d recommend doing this in tandum with some streneous excercise (doing this every day along with marial arts seems ideal, but I haven’t tried it).
Nearly every tradition agrees that mastery over the body and mind precede effective spiritual development and advanced will-working. However even the most committed occultists have trouble sitting down for regular daily meditation. While intellectually magic!ians recognize the benefits of such mundane work few seem to understand the rich benefits and absolute necessity of daily body-mind work. The work is often seen as boring or lacking in purpose and worth. It is clearly time to provide fresh insights on the most basic of esoteric techniques, to demystify them and in the process make the benefits offered by basic meditation more accessible.
The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who “speak in tongues” reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.
The images, appearing in the current issue of the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, pinpoint the most active areas of the brain. The images are the first of their kind taken during this spoken religious practice, which has roots in the Old and New Testaments and in charismatic churches established in the United States around the turn of the 19th century. The women in the study were healthy, active churchgoers.
“The amazing thing was how the images supported people’s interpretation of what was happening,” said Dr. Andrew B. Newberg, leader of the study team, which included Donna Morgan, Nancy Wintering and Mark Waldman. “The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them,” he said.
I’ve been really hard on Chris lately, over at Frequency 23 and his blog. He was nice enough to say a few nice words about me, so I think I should return the favor. He does a lot of really interesting work, including lots of work on the Key 23 Hyperwiki and the Borderland Science. I linked to this podcast when it first came out, but if you haven’t listened to it yet he’s got some great stuff to say on this podcast interview.
But, since we’re completely paranoid here at Mozy, we not only used 448 bit encryption, but we also go the extra mile and carefully secure our data disks with aluminum foil, which approximates a Faraday cage. This protects them from electromagnetic radiation as well as potential telekinetic security breaches.
Circuit-bending is an electronic art which implements creative audio short-circuiting. This renegade path of electrons represents a catalytic force capable of exploding new experimental musical forms forward at a velocity previously unknown. Anyone at all can do it; no prior knowledge of electronics is needed. The technique is, without a doubt, the easiest electronic audio design process in existence.
Everyone’s favorite heretical Scientologist Channel Null drops some knowledge about NLP demonology:
Having generated some buzz with the previous piece on employing NLP demonology to get wealthy, I figure it’s time to revisit the process a little. In the initial installment, we focused almost entirely on the disciplining of those untoward thought-forms that redirect our mental processing power away from a more united, substantial goals. Browbeating and asserting authority over the rogue memeplexes inside your skull most certainly will accomplish that; the act, however, of entering an environment just to torture a poor, misguided neurosis into submission won’t happen without leaving some scars. Not only is smacking these things around all the time just ugly, it forces the practitioner into a dominator top-space that, while interesting to explore, can generate a sort of obsession that might take weeks to work out and will undoubtedly cause some trouble; never mind the extent to which the male dominator role gets overplayed in our society.
The Church of Scientology, the religion for which actor Tom Cruise crusades, will attempt to spread its �Ignite Your Potential� message into auto racing through sponsorship of a race car in one of NASCAR�s lowest levels.
Kenton Gray, a 35-year-old Californian, will attempt to make the field for a late model race Saturday night at Irwindale (Calif.) Speedway. His No. 27 Ford Taurus will be sponsored by Bridge Publications, which publishes Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard�s bestseller �Dianetics.�
The hood of the car will say �Dianetics� on it, along with a volcano to mimic the book cover.
Details of the sponsorship agreement were sketchy Wednesday.
EsoTech makes its aim not only better magic!al hardware but also powerful means of customizing the software built into a magic!al machine. At the heart of EsoTech is the development of new technologies for magic!. It is easy enough to view objects like the Dream Machine, the Wishing Machine or the Time Machine as so many metaphorical whimsies, its another to actually grok their application … These items all epitomize the spirit of EsoTech. They build on the basic aims and techniques of magic! (meditation, unity of desire and time control) while exploring them thru unconventional, creative and downright bizarre means. If yr contribution to EsoTech doesn�t make people wonder if yr a bit mad, you aren�t doing it right.
Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.
Or do they just want us to believe they’re not effective in preventing mind control? Is MIT part of the conpiracy?
