Tag Archives: alchemy

Make your community a better place ?

If you could do one thing to make your community a better place what would you do?

via J.T. @ https://www.facebook.com/jerome516/posts/1082094282191807

This is a great question Jerome, thanks for sharing it and your thoughts.
I would prioritize healthy, equitable agroforests through urban and rural landscapes. Trees that can help meet people’s basic needs (fiber, fuel, food, farmaceuticals, fun, +), in public parks and sidewalk green spaces, in yards, serving as bountiful fences, and texturing our agricultural landscapes, diets, and cultures. Acts of restoration, relinquishment, and resilience which ripple mass reforestation and good health.

Much love to the trees that have been with our northern climate ancestors who I’d hope to see in my area: hazelnuts, birches, maples, honeyberries, chestnuts, acorns, hickories, walnuts and pecans and that whole fam, elderberries, willows, spruces, and so many more.


More specifically, if it needs to be one single thing: cultivate a cooperatively-owned tree crop processing facility that can be used in the community and potentially as a regional hub, to help people meet their basic needs using trees. Areas of primary interest would be:

  • food (for biocultural restoration),
  • fuel (to heal fossil fuel addiction), and
  • fiber (to build resilience in the face of social environmental, and economic disturbances).

Interested in this also? Let’s talk and collaborate, let’s walk and exacerbate our own nuttiness, let’s squawck and walk the talk and elaborate on a way to initiate … do great or forsake. People ate acorns for millennia before they ate candy corns. Let’s make it happen.


Album playlist: Nate – Make It Happen

Visions of Love, Gardening with Theurgy: An Imaginative Practice to Empower Plants

Plants are people that participate in our world in wondrous, mutualistic ways. Plants serve as the foundation of our human lives, in so many ways, grown by Solar rays of a very high Source. Plants bridge us and the Sun. How can we serve plants? A mystical practice, known as a type of theurgy, is one way to empower plants to give greater gifts as they go forth in life, using the power of human mind to imagine and visualize colors and light.

Definitions of theurgy tend to be vaguely described, as hints of it seep out from the mysticism of various traditions. Definitions often include compelling or querying supernatural beings and deities. I offer this definition based on my learnings and experiences on alchemy:

Theurgy is the mental animating of matter, so to bring out more of matter’s inherent qualities and potential capacities, without imposing a state or process on the matter that is not in harmony with its nature and natural laws of cause and effect [1].

There could be a lot to unpack here, but I will leave that to your own inner and outer inquiries. I raise this work to share an ecological application of it. Based in imagination, it is the use of visualization and color to enliven objects with their vital three-part nature.

Continue reading →

Breathing Exercises for Wellness

Breathing is an essential element of health. The following breathing practices improve body, emotion, and mind. Practice a little bit regularly, and stay grounded.

Full Breaths

Full breathing:
Breathe easy, be content.

Inhale slowly and fully by letting your chest rise, then your solar plexus, then expand your belly (pull your diaphragm down) to pull air deep into your lungs. Air will fill all the way down to around your naval all the way up to your throat.

Exhale slowly and completely by relaxing. Let your diaphragm relax and rise naturally, your lungs will release air. To remove stagnant air and exhale completely, compress your abdomen gently at the natural end of your exhale so that you force out any remaining air you have (be gentle so to not disturb your insides, you are doing this to help refresh them not stress them).

Four-Fold Breathing

Some call this square breathing, 4×4 breaths, four-way breathing, grounding breaths.

Begin by exhaling completely.
Inhale as described in the full breathing comment. As you do count to 4. This count should be comfortable for you, it is not 4 seconds, it is just breaking up the natural time it takes for you to inhale fully into 4 sections. 1, 2, 3, 4 at your pace. Whatever the pace is, keep this same pace throughout this exercise.

Hold your breath in for the same pace count 1, 2, 3, 4.

Exhale as described in the full breathing comment. 1, 2, 3, 4.

Hold your exhale out for the same pace count 1, 2, 3, 4.

Repeat this process 4 complete times with your awareness following the breath and the count. This will help you with energy.

Basic Qi’gong Form for Four-Fold Breathing

Mindful body movements can be added to this ‘4 square breathing’ as in Daoist qi’gong exercise.

Begin in basic qi’gong posture. You can learn simple and comfortable qi’gong forms in videos or local instruction. Legs shoulder width apart, knees slightly bent, feet straight forward or slightly angled. Relax and practice good posture, as if a golden string runs from your tailbone up through the back of your head and out the top of your head to support you.

Inhale as you bring your arms from resting position up to shoulder-height with relaxed full arm length outward. As you raise your arms, also raise your body by straightening your legs, but keep your knees at least slightly bent at all times.

Hold breath in as you gently drag your hands close to your chest (near where your chest and shoulders meet), letting your arms calmly fold at elbows to do so. Try to keep your hands at a constant elevation – comfortable shoulder height – as you draw them near.

Exhale as you smoothly lower your hands from near your chest to near your hips, keeping hands near your body (~1″ in front of you). Let your body ease into gravity, bending your knees as you sink into a slight squat.

Hold breath out as you move your hands forward, near hip-height, until your arms are in a relaxed full extension.

As you begin the next cycle with an inhale, raise your arms in front of you to shoulder-height as in the beginning. Continue with four fold breath and hand motion, slightly straightening upward with inhales and squatting downward with exhales.

Complete the practice with an exhale that presses your attention and qi into the ‘lower cauldron‘, storing energy in one’s center of gravity, at the location three-finger-widths below one’s belly button and within mid-way between front and back. Relax as you release that exhale and continue relaxed, down-to-Earth breathing. Feel gravity and peace, and give thanks to all practitioners of all time in service to all.

Daoist Microcosmic Orbit diagram
Continue reading →

cr0 – Sword and Bowl (Lyrics & Instrumental, Rendition Not Recorded)

@16:56 begins intended instrumental for lyrics below, rhymes drop with beat drop @17:12
 samurai funk
semper fi punk
open wide trunk
dag nabbit go'n grab it
go'n stab it with the sword o' separation
meditation, divide two parts to start
finding the heart, third waypoint hark
there they point: two poles to a whole
two souls and a bowl
pythagorian therians has me seein' medians
dan tien meridians
fission vision endearing 'em

yea, gettin' outta my funk
pull a sword outta my trunk and behold it
thine self, known it
all along, we ample strong when we together
O, different for the better
opposites coincide, open yer eyes wide
breathe, so you ain't blue in the face
union, in pace with nature's trace

(read:)

peace
Equilateral triangle with annotation, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle#/media/File:Regular_polygon_3_annotated.svg

Philo on The Name: Panpsychism and Panentheism

Philo was a Jewish philosopher living in Hellenistic Alexandria, Egypt, of the Roman Empire around 20 BCE to 50 CE. He thought of “Logos” [1] along the lines of Plato’s “theory of Ideas” or “theory of Forms” [2]. These are related to panpsychism [3] and the role of archetypes in that consciousness context. For more on that subject, see the post All is Mind.

Philo identified the metaphysical “Logos” with HaShem [4] (an ineffable name of G-d, Hebrew for “the Name”, Tree of Life). Following these connections is one clue connecting the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with a metaphysics of panpsychism and mystical Jewish panentheism [5].

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo#Logos
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo#Knowledge_of_Greek_and_Hebrew
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panentheism

Image via https://update.gci.org/2017/10/primer-on-panentheism/

Thanks to the Source. A little more info about Philo:

“Philo visited the Second Temple in Jerusalem at least once in his lifetime.[10] Philo would have been a contemporary of Jesus and his Apostles. Philo along with his brothers received a thorough education. They were educated in the Hellenistic culture of Alexandria and Roman culture, to a degree in Ancient Egyptian culture and particularly in the traditions of Judaism, in the study of Jewish traditional literature and in Greek philosophy.”

via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo#Life

שמע ישראל Receiving Home: A Simple Qabbalah of Shema Yisrael

A beautiful bit of wisdom along with a very meaningful tapestry.

The prayer on the bottom of the tapestry is the most essential Jewish prayer, the Shema:

Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohanu, Adonai Echad

It has great significance in many layers and is especially sacred written in the Hebrew alephbet. The prayer can translate directly to:

Hear Israel, "G-d" is "our Lord", "G-d" is the one

The Hebrew word for “G-d” as used in the Shema has deep meaning and is associated with the allso profound Tree of Life, as shown in the above tapestry.

One mystical interpretation is:

Hear, inner spiritual 'Home': The ALL is (All) our world, The ALL is One.

A brief but potent reminder about a metaphysics of panentheistic panpsychism – two words with much to unpack, put less academically as: One Love אהבה אחת

שלום שלום שלום

Alchemical Importance of Empathy

Empathy has many vital effects. It is a basis for compassion. It is critical for forgiveness and healing. This post focuses on the importance of empathy in alchemical works, in the context of a metaphysics of panpsychism and panentheism.

Solve et coagula.
I am an individual, separate and isolated in my perception from other minds.
I am part of a whole, minds intertwined such that my experience is a particle that emerges from and toward a woven collective (not only of humanity, of All) consciousness.

In separating, empathy is import for individuation. Especially in these days of information overload, interconnectivity, and FOMO, the ability to empathize with one another enables oneself to better delineate one’s own self-actualization. Bombarded with information I may want to go this way or that way; with the ability to empathize with those who go this way or that way, I can better navigate those branches of reality and recognize ‘my way’ efficiently.

In coagulating, empathy is important for wholiness.

. . . work in progress . . .