I can't post the retrospective itself within Gaia, because there is no html edit tab in the new entry page.

Dear Friends:

I have prepared an art retrospective for you. I made it an orphan page on my web site, meaning I didn't link to it from the rest of the site yet, but I may soon.

http://jadgallery.liveonpurpose.info/prsnl/prtrt/selfportrait.html

I've been practicing fine art drawing since I was a teenager, and I used my own mirror image to practice with for so many years. I've now scanned in all the self portraits I could find, prepared the images for the web, and presented them in a Picasa slide show linked in from my own web art gallery site.

I'm not sure why NOW was the time to do this project, but I felt its time had come.

I like these ads on Gaia for "Women on the edge of evolution." When I was attending Big Mind, Ken Wilbur made a presentation or two. One of his catchphrases was "you are on the leading frothy edge of evolution..."

(cross posted from Facebook Note)

I awoke well today (Friday) for the first time in a week, since I was struck with fever. But what an interesting feeling to finally think clearly. This was no ordinary moment of clear thinking. An entire vision for the future fell into place and things that stumped me in the past were finally no longer obstacles. I'm just writing this as a note to myself so I don't forget. 

Back in design school in 2000 I took a goals class and they had us do a vision board for our perfect day. Now, my vision board was quite something because I didn't put a job in there. My perfect day would consist of morning yoga followed by music lessons, lunch at a healthy cafeteria, time for exercise, time for learning or doing some designing/art. I figured it must have been a Saturday vision because I had no clue how that would ever come true. 

This morning I saw it, and all the pieces fell into place. I spent 2008 writing my ebook which I've basically discarded. It was all about the kind of diet that supports a healthy mental function. Turns out that the standard American diet is the antithesis to a healthy diet meant for mental support. And there was my dilemma; how would normal Americans living within society manage to completely revolutionize their eating habits while living in the world that addicted them to white flour, white sugar, and empty carbs full of excitotoxins? The only solution I could see was to create an intentional community centered around food choices. Very hippie and utopian at best, and I discarded this idea too. 

But now I think it could be something big. I think it could work because I also think that there are enough people in America about to lose it all because of their failing health, or their children's ADD, or because they're in foreclosure. This year I've learned of Bernie Glassman's Zen work with building a zen community based on a bakery. I know ashrams and self sustaining communities have gift shops or restaurants as a means of revenue. I've been learning slowly about running a business by helping run our family's guttering business.

So what I see is a big plot of land, donated by an investor, where we could teach people to build their own self sustaining dwellings (usually of rammed earth or recycled tires/bottles) and we could build a little community with a school for children where they won't be bombarded with temptations to eat empty meaningless food-like things. This community could be a combo of an adult learning center (participants pay to learn nutrition basics and eco building basics: they come and go) and a self sustaining live-in community of people who are committed to a better life eating the food God designed for them and lessening their footprint on the Earth. Big influence from Maximized Living Christian chiropractic group. Influences from retreats featured in film Generation Rx and Food Matters. In the movies, I saw people sick with chronic diseases like diabetes and coronary heart disease go to a clinic where their healthy food was given to them; and their bodies resolved the diseases after detoxifying and fortifying with real vitamins and nutrients. I am only guessing that these sick people have to be pretty rich to be able to afford to go to this clinic. What if daily life was that good and you could actually make your living in a healthy environment?

Revenue structure: continued education for nutrition and for eco conscious dwelling instruction (earthships), possible ganoderma farming (learned from Denver Green Fest), gift shop, educational books, possible educational tv channel for preschoolers. Art center for creating and selling art. Evening live music retreats. I suppose since I envision the entire community coming together to eat in a cafeteria like at college or at a retreat, we could also run a restaurant for paying customers to get a taste of real healthy eating. 

This was my vision this morning. It happened within the first hour of arising. It sure feels like a purpose. What a tough thing to start! Where to begin but with research into existing self sustaining communities to see what their stumbling blocks were.

It should be accessible to anyone who has just lost it all, not just rich people. But still, in communities like this there are usually extensive interview processes to review prospective live-in helpers. I could imagine going into a tent community of people who just lost their homes and asking if they'd like to help build their next one in exchange for changing their entire lifestyle to a healthy one. Would people be reluctant or excited?

I don't even know where or when to begin. I couldn't even hope to cover it all. I guess I'll start from now, instead of from the workshop last week. Serendipitously, I began a new level of Holosync this week as I work through issues that came up for me during Big Mind. This has made insights and dreams very vivid.

Here is a "vision" explanation of something revealed to me through the knowledge gained from Genpo Roshi. It's my visualization but his teaching about owned and disowned voices.

Visualize the clothesline stretched tightly. On it are hundreds of clothespins, but instead of the pincing side hanging downward, visualise them with the pincers resting on one of two thin wires two inches above either side of  the clothesline. They can rest to the left or to the right because of the support the thin wires give.

On every clothespin is written a pair of seeming opposite character traits. The left side has one half of the pair, and the right side has the other half. For instance, on one side of a clothespin, write "self" and on the other write "no self." Can you be associated with all aspects of the self at the same time as denying your Self? In this reality, you are usually vibrating with either "self" or "no-self" one at a time, not both at the same time. You can use "jealousy" and "appreciation" as a pair, or "anger" and "calmness" as a pair. Anyway, there are hundreds. The one that got an emotional response out of me was "caring" and "not caring".

So, from a birds' eye view of this clothesline, you can see which aspect a personality is "owning" at the moment. Flipped to the left, the side of the clothespin you can read says "caring." But flip it to the right and you can read "not-caring". The one you can read is totally owned and acknowledged by you, and the one you can't read may or may not be disowned by you.

Look down the clothesline at the hundreds of attributes that make up your personality. Every unique human has a different set of clothespin arrangements. It reminds me of when I learned of the DNA set CCCAGACAGCCCAGGAC and so on.

If I have a realization that causes me to understand that I've been disowning my Self and living through others, that will cause this clothespin to flip sides, and often a whole set of dozens of other attributes will flip over as well.

I wish that decoding someone's personality were this simple. But often, the clothesline is in a terrible tangle. This means it's more difficult to have a realization that can flip the clothespins to show a different side.

But there is a cleaner way than trying to untangle the clothesline that's been stored in a box in the basement for decades.

When you do the Big Mind process with a facilitator, you can understand that since this is a dualistic world, our game of "black and white" usually dictates that you be one thing or another at any given time, very clear cut. You either care or you don't care. You're either jealous or you can appreciate things with an open heart.

The triangular shape of the clothespin gives a clue that there is another way. Sometimes all you can see is one side that your finger grabs or another. But flip the entire clothesline-stretched-taught arrangement over (forgetting gravity for a moment) and then you can see that the head which grabs the clothesline can control which attribute gets used at any given moment. Genpo Roshi calls the tip of the triangle the Apex and if you can speak to the Apex part of yourself, you realize you can choose and control which aspect of the pair will be used.

For instance, Genpo Roshi had our group speak to our  "Fundamentalist" voice. We talked of tradition and the fact that either it keeps valuable spiritual information alive in a culture or it overwhelms and kills that spiritual knowledge. Using the point of view of the apex, one can clearly choose whether to use a tradition or not based on whether it will serve its purpose.

All this comes alive when you realize what disowning a voice actually does to a personality. We talked about the disowned fundamentalist. We discovered that if you disown that voice within you, then when you look out into the world, all you see is &*(% fundamentalists and you hate them. They annoy you to pieces. You can't understand why seemingly everybody you meet is a fundamentalist. You haven't acknowledged that part of yourself yet. It works this way for any aspect of yourself you haven't yet owned and acknowledged.

Women, do you recognise this one: "I'm not an angry person. I don't understand why anyone would call me angry. I get along with everybody and I never get angry."

That was me in my twenties. I had disowned my anger.

Then my anger morphed into tears. I was depressed during my teen years and my early twenties. But I never got angry. I couldn't acknowledge anger living within me. So, aspects that we disown try to get out in sneaky underhanded ways.

I don't have to live that way. I can now acknowledge that anger is an emotion I feel, and I have learned to tell whether I'm angry or depressed. I've got lots of work to do still! I had so many emotional moments at Big Mind just through listening to other people work out their issues. This is my year of transformation. I'm working on it!

I am considering attending  Vast Sky/Big Mind conference this weekend, and I'm so excited! This conference will allow me to meet in person Bill Harris, Genpo Roshi, Ken Wilbur, and Bernie Glassman.

The same week I started Holosync, I had a dream of meeting Bill Harris in person. We were talking on the phone to each other, but then he walked into the same convenience store I was already in and I saw him. The overall feeling was that he is genuine, not a scheister, and truly wants to help evolve as many people as possible with his Holosync program. This dream is the foundation for enough trust in the company Centerpointe to be an affiliate and I started Live on Purpose web site because of my trust in Holosync.

Of course, Ken Wilbur is a major influential mind behind the original Zaadz, bought by Gaia.

Genpo Roshi and Bill Harris have been presenting together for perhaps a year, but I don't really know how long. Roshi's Big Mind process is said to change lives for the better. I believe it involves interviewing all the various parts of your mind to see what roles they play in your psyche, and possibly reorganizing their pecking order.

I see I need to secure a babysitter for two days to allow me to attend! Shouldn't be too hard!

Tonight I saw Generation Rx, produced by Kevin Miller, hosted by my chiropractor in a graciously-lent auditorium at the local community college. Over twenty people signed up at his office to promise to come to the movie night. That's why he sought out a larger room to show it in than his office can provide.

I was ten minutes late and I was the first to show up. After another ten minutes, another of his patients arrived. He decided to show the movie anyway.

I've got some background knowledge about the subject matter of the movie. I wrote Sad for No Reason and put in a special section on why folks shouldn't depend on SSRIs to manage depression, and especially why children and teens shouldn't use this class of drugs.

This movie made all the research I'd done in the past year come alive. As a good documentary should, it enraged me, it saddened me, and I fought the tears of anger and grief.

Some notes:
Medicating children for profit is contrary to the Hippocratic oath.

How ironic that we make a false claim about biochemical imbalances and then the drugs we use to treat it actually give patients biochemical imbalances.

You won't be able to believe the fraud perpetrated on the American public if you're already a science believer.

Pharmaceutical companies saw children as an untapped market. They were simply a commercial enterprise.

8 of 13 of school shooters were taking psychiatric prescriptions.

In this society, mentoring takes a back seat to medicine.

ADD was coined in 1970. Having this new diagnosis allowed drugmakers to experience a rise in sales of Ritalin, which has been around since the '50s.

There was a 6-fold increase in the prescription of Ritalin between 1990 and 1994.

The profession keeps changing the diagnosis of ADHD. Doctors can't even accurately describe the symptomology of ADHD because medical boards keep changing it.

Psycho-stimulants (like Ritalin) cause brain atrophy. That's where your brain shrinks and acts like it's dieing.

There is no proof that Ritalin improves lives of children.

My favorite phrase from the narrator: "the shifting sands of adulterated science"

1 in 19 American children are on Ritalin. It's as potent as cocaine, and as addictive.

There was a second section on Prozac, fluoxitine. This is the part that really got me mad! Sometimes I wonder why drugmakers like Eli Lilly even make a trial before FDA approval of a drug. The results of the trial were so bad, they were swept under the rug and ignored and the drug was passed anyway. There were thousands of suicides during this trial of Prozac, and double that number of serious negative side effects.

The corruption was pinpointed to a regulatory group called DSM. Of the 170 DSM panel members, 56% have at least one financial tie to the pharmaceutical industry. This was uncovered in a book called "Science in the Private Interest."

It should be well known that the people who evaluate the safety of our drugs should be completely separate from those who manufacture it. But this is not the case. There is an abused loophole that allows parties with a vested interest a spot on the regulatory committies.

"They're robbing children of their souls!"

In Response to Gaia team's Friday Five:

1) What have you seen today that is beautiful?
Gold tinged clouds with an orange sky during the sunset.

2) Who in your life is beautiful inside and out?
All life is beautiful.

3) What part(s) of nature do you find beautiful?
I find respite in the mountains and old growth forests.

4) Is there a piece of music or song(s) you think are beautiful?
you're beautiful

5) What color(s) are most beautiful to you?
I like blues and purples. I'm wearing a mauv-y purple today.
Pink in the sky is beautiful, and so is orange in the sky and blue in the sky and a white sky and a dark grey sky...

So, how do we conclude that even the crusty, polluted, corrupted places of earth and man are beautiful? Because it's all part of the divine plan. The plan that everything is just as it is supposed to be right now. Perhaps the corruption exists to shine the light on those dedicated enough to uncover it. Perhaps the pollution exists to give chances to people; chances to clean, care, dedicate, shine, and educate. I really don't know why all of it exists, but at least I rest with the knowledge that I'm where I'm supposed to be.

It's time to Fire the Grid for a second time. The first time was summer of 2007. What this means is that for one hour at the dedicated day and time, meditate or do something that brings you joy. It's a worldwide meditation event. Find the time to participate in your own timezone at the following site.

JULY 28 2009. It's a workday, try to schedule around FTG.

from: http://www.firethegrid.com/eng09/FTGII.htm
“The grid is well lit, meaning that there are more humans awake and aware than ever before in the history of our time here on earth. It means we have many conduits working at their maximum level to facilitate great change. It means that we no longer have to live in the world that was but can create the world we choose. It means there are enough of us willing and ready to assist in global change. We know what was created from nothing in FTG. We see how many of us there actually are. People from all over the world are ready, together.
It is important that each and every one of you who reads these words understands that you are not alone; not alone in your desire for a better world, not alone as one who desires more of their earthly experiences, not alone in your desire for all humans to experience joy, love, comfort and peace and not alone in this energy field that surrounds the planet. We collectively make up that energy field, our energy as well as the energy of the planet. Our contribution has been very weak but this FTG event has changed all that. There are enough of us to charge every positive thought possible. Each one of these thoughts will then be inserted into the energy of the planet. Then we collectively nurture these thoughts and ideas.”

Cross posted from my featured member thread on Gaia Networking.

I am grateful for my father. He's a molecular spectroscopist. He's quiet, soft spoken, intelligent, and caring. I told him about my upcoming trip to the big chat and mentioned it might be about how to be happy. He quipped,
“Happy? I know the secret to being happy.”
“What's the secret?”
“Take spectra.”
That's his job and he loves it. To take spectra means to use lasers to inspect a molecule enough to identify its various atom components. You find out what colors are absorbed and reflected and somehow can tell what atoms are there.

He went on, “I've taken spectra all my life and I'm always happy.”

Ode to my dad! He had a shirt and passed it on to me when I was a teenager. It said, “Spectroscopists do it with frequency and intensity. The Coblenz Society.”

He makes googoo faces to newborns through to toddlers in the grocery store. He quacks like a duck to them. He walks the golf course every day, not to play golf, but to walk his dog and collect stray lost golf balls. He has a collection of thousands of color sorted golf balls stored in five gallon buckets in his garage. If he ever gets his own business going, it could be called, "Bob's Balls." He re-sells the balls to the golfers in his community. It brings him joy to search for golf balls through the tall grass and shallow streams. 

Thanks, Dad, for everything you are. I love you.