Not So Secret Histories of Egypt and the Universal Mind

Just finished reading, The Secret History of Ancient Egypt by Herbie Brennan (Berkley 2001), which, despite the title, is not a secret history of ancient Egypt.  Example:  he cites books, articles and research papers throughout the book – all of which would generally fall in the category of “Not-So-Secret-After-All-Is-It?”  But the advantage to all of his many citations is traceability – always appreciated.  He raises a number of theories about the technological knowledge of the ancient Egyptians:  the use of magnets, electricity and moving huge blocks of stones with sound waves, for example.  He also has sound reasoning for his belief that the civilization far pre-dates the earliest dates cited by traditional Egyptologists.  He also has a solid belief in the existence of that famous island that lay outside the Pillars of Hercules, and its role in the worldwide “deluge” myths and stories.

For me, the jury is mostly still out on Atlantis, although not for the same reasons others do.  I do believe Plato was re-telling a history that was told to him.  I’m always amazed when people talk about Plato’s intelligence, logic, and other admirable qualities, but then inexplicably decide he was nuts and completely off the mark when he discussed the history of Atlantis, told to him by Solon (I think), who got it from the Egyptians.  I also get completely disgusted at the seriously stupid, “Was Atlantis in a lake in Greece?” History Channel crap – you know the ones:  any time someone finds evidence of a local flood somewhere in the world, all of a sudden they’re claiming it was Atlantis.  Plato was a Greek.  Greeks had knowledge of the regional seas and oceans.  So did the Egyptians.  They knew where the Pillars of Hercules were.  What lay on the far side of the Pillars of Hercules?  Which are still there, by the way, if anyone wants to go look at pictures of them.  The Atlantic Ocean.  Not the Bay of India, or the Adriatic or the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

No, the shred of doubt comes from the sonar mapping of the Atlantic, which as yet hasn’t shown a drowned island at the bottom.  On the other hand, if the Atlantic was a muddy mess for centuries afterwards – as the stories claimed - perhaps the combination of earthquakes and volcanos erupting disintegrated the island as it broke up and sank.  Hard to say.  It would certainly explain a worldwide tsunami that flooded everyone off the shores, that’s for sure.  When you think about it, just the explosion of Krakatoa in the South Pacific was felt globally, in varying degrees.  I think they recorded a rise in ocean levels as far away as London.   And Krakatoa was just a small volcanic cone when it exploded.  Atlantis was a huge island mass that bridged western Europe, western Africa and the Americas. Some suspect that the volcanic Canary Islands off the coast of Spain are remnants of it, and they're still having eruptions and earthquakes - one catastrophic volcanic eruption in the Canaries would send a tsunami across the Atlantic right on top of me where I sit now, so let's hope it stays relatively quiet..

Stories of a great flood appear all over the globe, not just in isolated local areas, which would only make sense if you incorporate a long ago scenario of a huge island exploding in volcanic ash and massive earthquakes, disintegrating and sinking into one of the interconnected oceanic bodies of water ... the impact of that catastrophic event would have been global.  As I said, the jury is still most decidedly out on that one.  So there you go.

I’ve also been thinking about the “Universal Mind”.  Somewhere in this blog I mentioned starting a second book of sonnets inspired (in a negative sense) by John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”.  Meaning I found his point of view to be so annoying, I decided to block it out by replacement.  Differences being:  his is in blank verse, mine is not (obviously), and the major difference being he is (or was) John Milton and I’m not.  I mean not to denigrate his awesome talent as a poet; merely his point of view in that specific poem. 

In any event, the second book progresses by fizzles and starts ... sometimes it’s the best vehicle I have for collecting musings and thoughts.  So I was thinking about the Universal Mind.

I loved this painting of it – the artist is Todd Breitling, and I think you can even buy the painting.

What I loved about this painting is that it is one of the few attempted representations of the Universal Mind without a human being (head, head and body, face, hand) superimposed on it – as though human beings were the only beings with access to it.  So wrong.  I’m thinking that other beings on our own planet are far more skilled at accessing it than human beings are.  But that’s another gripe for another day.

The Universal Mind.  Here’s my question:  how do you differentiate between My Will/My Intent and the will and intent of the Universal Mind – are they always the same thing, or can I change my will and intent to something the Universal Mind didn’t intend for the holographic image which is what I see as myself?

I’m getting back to the “Think Positive!” mantra we always hear.  If I wasn’t thinking positively, was I still in alignment with the Universal Mind, and go into alignment only when my thinking changes from negative to positive?  Or were both negative and positive thinking aspects of the Universal Mind?  And who can answer these quandaries?

Off to run errands while I mull this over.

Thanksgiving ... an Overabundance of Earbuds ... and I Merge with a Rock

Ahhh ... a four-and-a-half day weekend … and this time I expect to get my living quarters at least minimally out of the state of packing chaos it’s in, right at the moment.  It seems so much easier to merely make it through the day if I don’t need to pick my way over and around boxes of things.   Arrendersi mai!  Or as they say elsewhere ... like in Italy ... "Never surrender!"

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com

/2011/11/24/marty-two-bulls-first-thanksgiving

Thanksgiving ... or as the original hosts call it, “No Generous Act of Hospitality Goes Unpunished Day” ... has arrived.

I must confess, over the years, as I’ve moved from one place to the other, I have never really had the opportunity to sort through all of my possessions and decide which ones were worth keeping.  Usually, packing is done at high speed, tossing things into boxes and crates for a frenetic one-day move with the promise that I’ll sort through things as I unpack – which of course I never do, so the collection just builds up.  This is the first time I have taken this long to pack things slowly and carefully.

It’s appalling how much stuff one accumulates without even being aware of it, sometimes duplicates and triplicates of things because you can’t find things when you need them, and end up buying them again.  There are also things I’d completely forgotten that I had, and this is the moment when you think, “I need to pay more attention to the things I accumulate.”  For example, somehow I had accumulated something like 20 separate ear buds ... which is all the more astonishing considering the fact that I never use ear buds – they end up hurting, because (supposedly) my ear canal is smaller than normal.  I always use the over the head “can” earphones – so why do I have 20 ear buds?

And yet, you don’t want to fill up landfills with ridiculous amounts of garbage, either.  I was browsing online for “creative things to do with ear buds”, until I realized that the items I know as Q-tips are now known as “ear buds”!   Ahh, the things you learn trying not to toss the “ear buds” that you stick in your ears to listen to music.  I didn’t want to devote too much time to craft researching so ... out they went.

I also seem to have more electrical cords, computer cords, phone cords, connective cords, printer cords, extension cords, all with various configurations of cord endings ... I’ve seen them called “female” endings and “male endings”, depending on whether they have the hole or the pin ... tucked away, out of use.  I have no idea what components each is meant to connect, and yet I still hesitate to toss them, merely out of a vague sense of “I might need it later.”  I have three plastic boxes filled with them.

As I toss things – lots of things – it really does make me feel somewhat “lighter”, less encumbered and less tied to things I don’t need and will never use.

Meanwhile, the cooking-baking-roasting-mashing extravaganza begins.  I treated myself to some brandy to make the morning more relaxing, and this is another happy circumstance of packing – I had put my parents’ cut glass collection that I remembered growing up with in a cabinet and (again) forgot to use them.  As I pulled them out to wrap in paper and put carefully into a “FRAGILE!  DROP THIS AT YOUR PERIL!” moving box, I have been washing the glasses and decided this was perfect for a morning brandy.  It’s not a brandy snifter (haven’t washed those yet), but it hasn’t detracted from the taste as far as I can tell.  Delicious.  One of the many uses I have devised for the enormous entry room is a home bar in one corner.  I have always wanted to have one of those.

(Completely irrelevant and irreverent observation:  has anyone noticed how much a muddler looks like a sex toy?)  (Yes, I know, you’ll never be able to drink a mojito again after that.  Sorry!)

I spent the day after the giving of thanks day in Seabrook, getting the place measured and picking out bathroom faucets, shower marble tiles, kitchen sinks and garbage disposals.  I will probably be actually moving sometime in January.  I was immediately attracted to two marble tiles that – in my mind’s eye – said “The Universe”.  I’ve never had a bathroom in these colors before; the sales lady thought I was nuts initially, but then came around the more she looked at them.  The shower will be in the marble on the left; the two vanities topped with the marble on the right.  The floor is a groutable linoleum that looks like white marble with soft black veins in it.  All of the fixtures are elegant oil-rubbed bronze.  Personally, I think it’s going to be the most awesome bathroom ever, but then, I tend to like drama.  Only problem:  all my towels are blue.  I think it’s time to buy a few new ones and use the blue towels at the beach.


But back to business.  Lunar phase today is Waning Crescent.  The current moon phase is from 2013-11-25 19:30 to 2013-12-03 00:22.  The moon is in the zodiac sign of Libra.  Coincidentally, Venus rules both Taurus and Libra.  And even more coincidentally, the astrological sign of Cancer is ruled by the Moon.  Three guesses who my all-time favorite tenor born under the sign of Cancer (June 24th) might be.

Second transference of consciousness attempt:  candle:  Shooting Star Scent Beads.  Incense:  Scented Garden – Ocean.  Object:  rock.  Gneiss, I think?  Black and white at any rate, and it reminded me the Fordham Gneiss, 1.1 billion years old, back home in New York.  The same black/grey and white particles in it in any event.  This effort was much more successful.  Time:  about 1:30-2 PM.  Now this rock had some history to it.  I acquired it about two years ago.  Might have even mentioned it when I did.  (Sunday, December 11 – wow, closer to the 2-year mark than I knew!)  This was the rock given to me by my favorite Dogwood (or, really, my only Dogwood) after she’d confiscated it from two idiot boys throwing it at squirrels and birds (luckily for the aforementioned, they missed).  She moved it into my path with the request that I pick it up and remove it from the area lest any more boys get stupid ideas.  I did, and I’ve had it ever since.

Hard to separate the sensations.  I felt we were moving back in time together, this rock and I.  I did get a brief glimpse of the rabbit incident, which offended not only the Dogwood, but apparently had disturbed the rock as well.  The reason was a little strange:  I went through such a powerful transformation event with this rock, way down deep in the earth, and I sensed that it felt party to an overwhelming sense of power; a vital part of the Earth’s transformation; and the power behind its creation was so overwhelming I couldn’t find a comparison.  But the sensation was something akin to, “I was made from forces of incredible power, and am offended that, now at earth’s surface, I was put to such a use!”  Actually, that’s more my interpretation of the sensation.  But I did hear roars and heavy objects cracking and exploding under incredible strain, all of which left me in awe of its creation and birth.  So, it envisioned itself as something born out of the earth’s power, that I should see as as an object of veneration – and not something out of a chapter from “Hey, Beavis, let’s find sometin’ to chuck at a squeerel.  Yuck, yuck!”

Day #27 on my Search for a Soul Mate

Has anyone noticed how appallingly pretentious poetry has become?  Pretentiously written, pretentiously reviewed, accessible only to the pretentious.  I hadn’t really paid all that much attention to poetry as a rule (like many people, I considered the art form ruined by the excessively pretentious) – and then I found this little gem, while researching Ivy for my Day Book:

MY WINDOW-IVY.

Over my window the ivy climbs,

Its roots are in homely jars;

But all the day it looks at the sun,

And at night looks out at the stars.

The dust of the room may dim its green,

But I call to the breezy air:

"Come in, come in, good friend of mine!

And make my window fair."

So the ivy thrives from morn to morn,

Its leaves all turned to the light;

And it gladdens my soul with its tender green,

And teaches me day and night.

What though my lot is in lowly place,

And my spirit behind the bars;

All the long day I may look at the sun,

And at night look out at the stars.

What though the dust of earth would dim,

There 's a glorious outer air

That will sweep through my soul if I let it in,

And make it fresh and fair.

Dear God! let me grow from day to day,

Clinging and sunny and bright!

Though planted in shade, Thy window is near,

And my leaves may turn to the light.

Mary Mapes Dodge

I loved the last line:  “and my leaves may turn to the light”.  Considering how often we lose out on poetry such as this – simple, touching - thanks to the snootily pretentious snobs among us, I was thinking of starting a “Real People Poetry Anthology”.  Anyone who has been previously published in a pretentious poetry anthology is barred from submitting anything to the anthology without issuing an apology to the 99% who are the REAL poetry people  (to steal a phrase from the Occupiers).  And yes, if you suspect I’m still holding a grudge against the University of Michigan Hopwood Award people for not even offering a simple thank you to the students who submit heart-felt poetry to them … you’re probably right.  Those Hopwood People really do need an “anti-pretentious spell” cast on them.  Really.

Written on Thanksgiving, 2011

7:30 A.M.  Turkey is in the oven.  Salad and relish in the serving dishes.  Giblets waiting for the gravy-making hour.  Stuffing waiting to go in the oven an hour ahead of time.  Pie is made and ready to go in the oven when the turkey is done.  I have something to be seriously grateful about.  The Lioness of Courage.  I ordered her a shrine.  Painted red, with flames.  [www.bethamine.com, in case anyone wants to see a nice affordable wall shrine.]  As I’m employed elsewhere, I can’t do the full Ancient Egyptian rites of temple service that the priests appointed by Ramses II would have conducted for her – that would take all day - but I can do the best I can.

Here in the United States, “Thanksgiving” can either be a day of thanks for all sorts of things, or a Day of Guilt and Atonement, considering the way westerners thanked the hosts who took pity on them for their stupidity in not preparing for a New England winter properly.  I know of at least two states that wisely decided to stop celebrating Columbus Day and instead celebrate Indigenous Peoples Awareness Day, or something to that effect.

I decided to move the injection time back an hour a day until I reach the evening medication hour – somewhere around 6-7 p.m – which is when my vacation ends and I’ll be going back to work.  I wanted to do it at night when I wasn’t worried about needing to leave for work.  Today will be the first day when I do it (inject myself with insulin) on my own.

Instead I discovered how easy it is for the Bayer pharmaceutical company to steal money out of the pockets of diabetics.  I got my test meter in 2005.  It used Ascensia Autodiscs (the test strips that are used to test my blood glucose).  Last time I bought autodiscs I bought quite a few boxes so that I wouldn’t have to buy them again for quite some time.  That “some time” just rolled around, so I went into CVS to buy some more.

WRONG!!!  Bayer had stopped making them.  I was told my meter was “too old” – five years is too old??!!?? – the University of Michigan Health Service gave me these things in 2005.  Too old??!!??  Only in the land of Greedy Shareholders and Criminal Management is it too old – had Bayer any conscience, they would have made these meters to last a lifetime.  Now they don’t even last five years, while still working perfectly. 

I now had to buy a new meter, new lancets and new testing strips.  The lancets were so weak they didn’t puncture anything.  The tester was so poorly designed it kept kicking out error messages.  The cost was astronomical.  I came home so angry I was prepared to go kick in Bayer’s front door and curse them and their greedy shareholders out, because, trust me when I tell you, the only reason they did this was to heist money out of the pockets of diabetics and put it into the pockets of shareholders.  (Note to all the idiots complaining about the OWS protestors?  1):  stop listening to Fox News because they are lying when they call protestors drug adicts and alcoholics.  Watch Global Revolution TV and see for yourself how desperately unethical ALL of the major news outlets are, and 2) Here’ a good reason why people are complaining.)  And of course I came home without the correct test strips and sat on my bed in tears, unable to test anything.