Friday, January 25, 2008

Barack Obama (Size Does Matter)

I received the photo on the left, along with the following message, in my email box a few days ago:



Senator Barack Obama, Governor Bill Richardson, Senator Hillary Clinton and Ruth Harkin stand during the national anthem.

Barack Hussein Obama's photo (that's his real name)......the article said he REFUSED TO NOT ONLY PUT HIS HAND ON HIS HEART DURING THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, BUT REFUSED TO SAY THE PLEDGE.....how in the hell can a man like this expect to be our next Commander-in-Chief????


A quick Google search turned up this page.

What strikes me most about the photo is the body language and proportions of the people arranged on the stage, not the scurillous suspicions raised in the message about Obama's fidelity to the country, a point I'll return to later.

First, let's deconstruct the elements that make up the photograph and see what we can discover.

Obama certainly appears to be the most relaxed of the four: shirt sleeves rolled below his elbows, fingers hooked together in front of his crotch, body centered, shoulders square, gaze focused. He is the tallest figure in the photo and stands in front of and just outside the frame of the American flag. He is firmly positioned at the forefront of the group.

Richardson, to me, looks like a deer caught in the glare of the headlights. His body is positioned in full frontal view of the camera, his head and torso surrounded by white stars against a blue background. From the camera's perspective, he appears half a head shorter than Obama. He's wearing blue jeans, cowboy boots, and an off-the-rack sports jacket. Despite the causual attire, he appears a bit uncomfortable to me. His mismatched clothing sends a discordant message, in contrast to Obama's better assembled, more collected look. Clothes may not make the man, but they can certainly help to define him.

Hillary is a shrunken figure, compared to the two male candidates, due to the camera angle. Her head is well below the level of Richardson's shoulder. The outward positioning of her body is similar to Richardson's, but her head is turned to the right. Unlike Richardson, the fingers of the hand placed over her heart are closed and her left arm is flat against the side of her body. Her outfit is fairly nondescript. She stands with her nose pressed against the blue square of stars that seems to rest on her right shoulder. She's the incongruous element at the center the composition, emphasizing the gross distortions in body size of each person in the shot.

Ruth Harkin is the least consequential person in the photo, and the most ill-at-ease. Her neck is bent, throwing her head out of alignment with her body. The flesh of her arms is exposed and her pants are too short to cover her bare ankles. The acute angle of her arm brings her right hand closer to her neck than her heart. She is clutching a paper in her left hand. She is the most isolated figure in the picture, analogous to the white chair on the far right--separate from the group and greatly diminished in size.

The photograph definitely casts Obama as a larger-than-life figure, standing a full half-head taller than Richardson. The flag, used as backdrop, proves to be an interesting measuring device that symbolically reveals the stature of the candidates.

The following video clip of the event offers an entirely different perspective from that of the photograph.




As far as the email comment goes, I think that anyone who can resist falling into the conventional postures most people automatically assume when in the public arena, would make an excellent commander-in-chief. I hope the next American president will be able to rise above national and partison interests and adopt a truly global perspective on world events. I think Obama has shown the greatest capacity to move in that direction.

Is there anyone in the field brave enough (or foolish enough, depending on your perspective) not to pledge allegience to God or to country? Such a gesture would be the kiss of death to any candidate. Obama is much too savvy for that.



Here is another email about Obama currently in circulation. Dirty politics, as usual.
The candidate who follows the dictates of his own conscience, who resists political posturing and pandering, wins my vote.

I'm intrigued by the symbolic content underlying the campaigns. I'm paying attention, trying to decode the deeper message, carried away on the powerful currents of this time cycle. It's all a matter of perspective:

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

The Oversoul as Saucer

(An excerpt from the talking book True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna.)

Read the complete text of chapters 20 and 21.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

UFO Spotted Over Stephenville, Texas

UFO Sighting
Stephenville, Texas
Jan. 15, 2008

Steve Allen reported seeing an object that was a mile long and half a mile wide: "People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it's the end of times. It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts."

View the full CBS News report.

CNN's coverage of the Stephenville, Texas U.F.O. sighting.


Additional eyewitness accounts.



Fox News -- Stephenville, Texas UFO Report - AP Footage


Wednesday, January 23, 2008

The Shift

Are you ready for an evolutionary leap? Can this be the moment? Watch the video and join the movement. Find out more about The Shift of the Ages.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Moral Courage

In the midst of the 2008 political campaign, Dennis Kucinich offers a path forward that merits widespread public attention. A Kucinich supporter explains what we are up against in America this election cycle, why Kucinich's message needs to be heard, and the reason she finds his example of moral courage so inspiring. She makes the point that "if we don't wake up and realize what's going on, the corporate media will decide who the next president will be." Listen to what else she has to say in this video.



In the following video, Dennis Kucinich draws a correlation between domestic violence and world peace based on his own life experience. If we recognize the cultural dynamics of war, we can do something to change the type of thinking that produces war.



Kucinich challenges us to not only imagine, but to create, a new world based on principles of peace and nonviolence by integrating these principles into our everyday lives.



Take a look at the latest weekly update (1/21/08) from the Kucinich campaign.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

TerranceMcKennaLand

I experimented with a new search engine named FileDonkey the other day, to see if I could unearth any new information posted online about McKenna.

TIMEWAVEZERO2012 is a Yahoo! group founded on March, 18, 2001 that consists of 1453 members. Read messages 253-256 to understand the reason for the club's formation and join the discussion.

TerranceMcKennaLand is perhaps the best resource if you're looking for total immersion. This site contains a large and well organized collection of video and audio files.

Watch the video clip Reality Hacking for McKenna's take on the primacy of language (encoded information) as the determinant of our reality.

Next week I will be traveling to Kauai for a week of exploration. I will try to keep in mind McKenna's sage advice: to push the weird edges of the phenomenal world.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Equine Assisted Psychotherapy


I just finished a three-day EAGALA training program held in Phoenix, Arizona on January 11-13. Attendees learned how to conduct an equine assisted psychotherapy session by participating in a variety of hands-on activities involving horses.

The therapy team is made up of three members: a horse, an equine specialist, and a mental health professional. The team assists a client or clients in addressing their emotional and behavioral issues by designing an activity that requires the clients to interact with one or more horses. The main job of the licensed therapist and the equine specialist is to carefully observe what happens during the session. The horse plays a pivitol role as a member of the therapy team by simply being a horse allowed to interact freely with the clients. Whatever surfaces during the session can be attributed to the physical presence of the horses as part of the group. The horse is the guide.

The photo shows the result of a role-playing activity called Extended Appendages. The participants, playing the roles of dysfunctional family members, attempt to harness one of two horses loose in a round pen. One of the fictional clients, a mother having difficulty communicating with her two teenage daughters, was chosen to be the "brain" who instructed the "two arms" (her estranged daughters) what to do.

Following the session, the clients "check in" with the therapists to process what went on, noting the ways in which the horses reacted to them. Using non-directive questioning techniques, the therapists state what they saw the horses doing and create metaphorical connections to the dynamic occuring within the family. In this way, the clients are confronted with their "issues" and challenged to discover their own solutions to the problems they are experiencing at home. As you might imagine, lots of personal "stuff" comes out during the session.

I will be blogging more about the shamanic connections to this type of work in subsequent posts.