Tag Archives: reality sandwich

Hollywood, Crop Circles, and Ayahuasca

Jonathan Talat Phillips, author of The Electric Jesus and co-founder of Reality Sandwich and Evolver (I hosted a series of crop circle webinars, and am about to do another series, for them), has written a review of Wanderlust, a movie that open today. It sets straight a world that is becoming ever more exposed to a life-altering substance: Ayahuasca: What Jennifer Aniston May Not Know About the ‘Spirit Vine’. Boy, does Hollywood get it wrong.

wanderlust.jpg

The way Wanderlust treats ayahuasca reminds me of how misrepresented the crop circles were in SIGNS. At first, circle lovers were infuriated – how dare they coopt our beautiful phenomenon?! But then, we realized it wasn’t a totally negative picture. SIGNS acquainted many people with the existence of the circle phenomenon, which is a first step to any dawning awareness. And, we were grateful the movie had the circles coming from aliens — despite how preposterously fictionalized a Hollywood sort of thing it was, at least they weren’t being ascribed to people. In the case of Wanderlust, ayahuasca has been mischaracterized as to how it works and what it does, but at least it’s been introduced to a mainstream audience without demonizing it. Two steps forward, one step back, on the road to the next reality.

PS: From the piece: “National Geographic adventurer Kira Salak wrote about how overcoming a ‘devil’ in an ayahuasca vision vanquished her life-long struggle with depression in what has become ‘the most popular article the magazine has ever published, bringing in 20 times more reader response mail than any previous article.’” See Inside Story, the post I put up in 2006 about that incredible report!

Charles Eisenstein, the New World Order, and THRIVE

After making a post that cited an Occupy Wall Street piece that Charles Eisenstein wrote, I went to another piece of his: “Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order.”

I got plugged into the kind of long read I usually skim, where not only did I read all of this, I read the many comments on this highly controversial food for thought article.

There is something this took out of the shadows of my consciousness and made clear to me. I’ve always cringed at the idea of some venal power elite that, as Charles says, “explains world events as resulting from the machinations of a powerful, dark cabal of secret organizations comprising the global elite: the banks, wealthy families like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, non-official organizations like the Bilderburg Council, organized crime, shadowy agencies within the government, secret societies like Skull and Bones and the Freemasons, and so on.” The UFO world, in which I often find myself, is full of such conspiratorial reasoning, which seems unreasonable to me.

I have not been able to think through or articulate my skeptical perspective until now, where Charles makes us look at the bigger picture that’s beyond a black and white polarization — a stance in reality in which we would be positioned to make the changes that we can’t make fighting our way out of paper bags.

Here are a few samples:

“In the war between good and evil, a great weapon of the forces of evil is the notion that there is a war between good and evil.”

“Rather than an evil Illuminati, could that power be money? Some say that a global elite controls humanity via the money system, but could it be that it is rather the money system that controls the global elite? I’m sure many of you have known the feeling of being enslaved to money. The wealthy are not exempt, and indeed, possessing more of it, are even more deeply enslaved to its logic. It is truly an ‘invisible hand,’ a force that ‘makes the world go ’round.’ Moreover, the end toward which money compels us is one of misery and ugliness: the destruction of nature and culture, community and health, and all that is beautiful on earth.”

“Can we overcome dualism, when our language is rife with it? Can we transcend separation, when our language assumes it in its very structure? By their very existence certain words limit us to thoughts that subtly serve the status quo. For example, when I when I say that reality isn’t what we think it is, by using the word ‘is’ I reinforce the very independently-existing reality that I am trying to deny. More generally, as a system of signs, language distances us from the reality it is supposed to represent, allowing us to more easily treat the world as other. Sometimes, during meditation or mystical experience, the veil of language lifts and the richness of the unmediated world is revealed, and along with it the depth of our thralldom.”

“The new story says that the abiding intuition that you have carried perhaps your whole life, and which drew you to conspiracism in the first place, is true. The world is governed by a secret power that holds us in bondage to no good end. But the conspirators are not others, they are we, you and I and everyone. A secret agenda of domination and control has existed in nearly everyone, and a world embodying that agenda has congealed around us, attracted to the dark, reptilian energies we have harbored.”

Thrive pattern

With the movie, THRIVE, having just exploded online, I wonder about reactions to it. (I was in a focus group a few months ago and helped them get their crop circle info right.) My Inbox has been overflowing with enthusiasts who had seen the trailer before the movie was available, and I wonder, after having seen the film, whether they would be equally enthusiastic.

The stranglehold of the money interests in our world is unarguable. But the film makes a huge leap in asserting that a New World Order is the intent of a powerful elite comprised of the likes of those entities that Charles mentions, in a conspiracy that wants to eliminate a majority of the population and destroy the solvency of the United States as they head us for a one world military dictatorship. A film that points fingers has to do the work of exposure and not just name call, and this movie doesn’t justify its accusations. Hopefully, it will engender conversation that considers the things that Charles wrote about, that helps us to become ever clearer about what is going on and what we can do about it.

I really like Elevate, the high minded auspice behind the push for THRIVE. Play It Forward is their new game, which will be utilized for other movies — maybe mine. I’d be interested to hear back about what people think about this gifting model. If you liked a socially conscious movie very much, would you put out money to send it to others?

A New Radio Gig + Crop Circles and OWS

Thanks to John Stephenson, who had me on his weekly radio show, Thresholds Into Other Realms, talking about crop circles, I’ll be doing a segment with him regularly. Outside the Box will be about contemporary occurrences or situations that don’t fit in ordinary reality. As I’m looking to expand my playing field to other things that make us rethink reality, “scratch our heads to open our minds” is the idea.

My introductory Outside the Box is the first half hour of part two from last week:
http://ufo-info.com/show/10162011

John is a sweetie. Here’s his email to me:

Here is the info I posted throughout the web, I talked you up everywhere  🙂

Also, once it airs it’s picked up on ITunes and about 100 different podcasting sites worldwide. Plus we are a featured show on The UFO Paranormal Radio Network, which also is worldwide.

Don’t miss this Sunday’s “Thresholds Into Other Realms.” We are very pleased to announce that the one and only Suzanne Taylor (the Crop Circle Queen) will be starting her new segment on our show this week! It’s called “Outside The Box” and it will cover all the wild, weird, unusual and downright strange news of the world.

Sundays 7:30 pm CST http://www.ufo-info.com

I added this line as a comment:

For those of you who don’t know Suzanne Taylor, here is a little link for you: http://imdb.com/name/nm0853220

Anybody who Likes What On Earth? on Facebook will see posts about future shows: http://Facebook.com/WhatOnEarth.

And for Netflix to carry it, we need more Netflix subscribers to ask for What On Earth? in their queues. Here’s the direct link for the request:  http://bit.ly/pbkqgG.

Footnote:

I am so moved by this extraordinary situation of OWS spreading throughout the world. Either the help crop circles can offer for opening people’s minds will be unnecessary, or perhaps it could be more useful than ever. This is a comment I just made on Reality Sandwich to Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough, by Charles Eisenstein, and the intelligent comments that followed it.

After all the smarts above me — and I bow to them – as a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of NYU I have smarts, too, about how crapped up we’ve made the world and about the incredible OWS movement. But how to get it to achieve any objectives? There’s the rub.

The forces of fundamental change are mysterious and elusive, all fitting into that old Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Antithesis is well along now, and how to shove it over to synthesis is the head scratcher. It could just emerge, like the Berlin wall coming down or the Soviet Union collapsing – somehow it “just happens” when the contradictions to the status quo get too great for the center to hold. Are we at that point? Who knows? But if there were anything to do to evoke the new crystallization wouldn’t that be wonderful? Of course. So here’s my offering.

If it were ascertained that the crop circle phenomenon is for real and that we are being visited by other intelligence, that could be the peaceful shock and awe that could do it for us. All of a sudden, all human beings would be in relation to an otherness – all of us in one curiosity, buzzing together to make sense of what is greater than we are. Buzzing together, we could rethink everything — a consummation devoutly to be wished for, as Willie the Shakes would have said.

No need to argue here about whether there is a mystery to the phenomenon, which no one can know for sure – am just advocating that attention be paid. There is data to be scrutinized, and making that inquiry could turn out to be a very very good thing to do.