Reclusland

Its worth sticking through to the end of the second.  “All and Everything and No Thing”.  So easily said…

Found these can’t-remember-where, but they are awesome.  All these and more available at this site.

Imagine that’s your consciousness,
raditating outwards
from the top of your head
to the bottom of your spine.

Putting aside my previous (and to be honest, ongoing)
obsession with magnetic fields as a metaphor,
I still feel there’s something important
about the two relationships depicted here.

And this is probably the more beautiful images I’ve seen recently.
It’s a depiction of a photon sphere,
which is essentially light from a star orbiting a black hole.

These makes me feel like those pictures of saints and angels must have made people feel in the “dark” ages…

Now, perhaps his definition of “meditation” is not all that exact (WTF Bill Gates?), but it’s his take on Zazen that I like here: the mind quiets down and we come into contact with reality as it is.

“The perceptual thresholds are levels where subtle or fast processes can be observed. Below the threshold the process is not observed, and above the threshold the process is observed. A tachistoscope or T-scope is an instrument that can present visual displays at rates of thousandths of a second. The T-scope has been used to determine what humans are capable of becoming aware of at the level prior to conscious attention. Brown’s experiments involved determining how slow objects needed to be flashed, before the subjects were able to perceive them as two separate events. The smallest gap of time between the two events an individual is capable of perceiving the change is that individual’s threshold. Just as IQ will vary among different people, perceptual thresholds vary. Scientists had concluded in 40 years of research before Brown’s work that a threshold for any particular person did not change in a lifetime.

However, Brown’s research produced a startling new finding. After 3-months of vipassana meditation his subjects had significantly lower perceptual thresholds. They were able to perceive much faster and subtler events than before the retreat. The changes were not small changes but big changes. Changes were frequently 100%,200%,500%. One friend of mine had an increase of 1,500%. The results of Brown’s researh give a scientific basis for understanding the results of meditation practice. By focusing the mind in a profound examination of the present moment, processes of the mind which were not accessible to normal consciousness become conscious. These processes are beyond the perceptual threshold of the normal person.”

From Bill Hamilton’s book “Saints and Psychopaths” (pgs 58~59)

(which is pretty much what I was trying to get at here)

“All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing.”

(via Ann Seeker)

We are told in our tradition that the Enlightened One taught his disciples using this word “zero,” and he said the zero condition is this perfect complete condition in which plus and minus are unifying with one another and then facing one another over and over again. Plus and minus unify and face, unify and face, but there is no will—it’s a totally will-less activity. Of course human beings have will, but this activity of plus and minus is will-less. The Enlightened One taught his disciples that the activity which forms the universe is always acting will-lessly, and even though it makes many universes and then contracts all of those universes down to the smallest point, there is always simply one singular, unique cosmos.

->

There are Four Changing Lines.
Read the Upper NON-changing Line
Hexagram Thirty-Six/Line Six:

Here the climax of the darkening is reached. The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must itself fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration.

(via I Ching Online, emphasis mine)

“Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is not really Void, but the realm of the real dharma.”

“It is said that someone who tries to meditate without a conceptual understanding of what he or she is doing is like a blind person trying to find the way in open country; such a person can only wander about, with no idea how to choose one direction over another.”

(from a, as far as I’m concerned, literally mindblowing article on Buddhism, psychology, and no-self)

“You know the best thing about Aeroplanes?  Apart from the peanuts in the little silver bags, I mean.  It’s looking out the windows at the clouds and thinking, maybe I could go walking in there.  Maybe its a special place where everything’s okay.  Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds, but it’s just cold and wet and empty, but when you look out of a plane it’s a special world…  and I like that.

- Delirium, from Sandman Volume VII (Chapter 3)

There’s some humbling news from the chemical world for anyone who has ever found themselves lost in a garden maze. A simple droplet of organic solvent can find its way through a complicated labyrinth with nothing more to go on than a slight pH difference.

Makes we wonder how much of our decision making is really just a more advanced form of chemistry and logic…

“The highest that a man can attain is to be able to do.” - Gurdjieff

“Bhikkhus, form is impermanent; that which is impermanent is suffering; that which is suffering is insubstantial (anatta); that which is insubstantial is not mine, I am not that, that is not my substance. Thus must this be viewed with perfect insight as it really is” (S. iii. 45).

(via Alex at OE)

Been in California visiting family for the long weekend, didn’t have time to think, let alone get any writing done.  But I did find this video, which is awesome.  It’s done mostly (if not entirely) by hand.  Enjoy:

PRESS + from benjamin ducroz on Vimeo.

I recently expressed an opinion in the comments on Avatar (which, as the post title implies, I haven’t seen yet) saying I wasn’t too excited about it, other than to see the special effects (I hear they’re groundbreaking, yes?).  After all, I saw Pocahontas when I was younger, so I wasn’t expecting anything all that new from the story line.

The basic stance most reviewers seem to have taken on it is that this a story about  “civilized” man reconnecting with the natural world.  The corporation/marines attempts at rape and pillage are foiled by one of their own who “went native”.  And yes, there is a racial/colonial subtext going on here as well, but really, just a more divisive take on the same idea.  Ran Prieur wrote up a pretty thorough debunking of the whole “White Messiah” aspect of the movie, which I suggest reading if you’re interested in exploring that aspect of it.  For the sake of the argument I’m making here though, I just want to focus on the soldiers representing a technological, rationalistic society and the Na’vi representing the natural world (or perhaps “representing being in touch with the natural world” is more precise).

This seems to be the main dichotomy of the movie, the core conflict with which Cameron engages the audience and attempts to get his message across.  Not a very complex message, it seems, and certainly one we’ve all come across before elsewhere.  After Titanic (and despite its success), Cameron was not a director I expected to really break any new mythological or memetic ground (whatever it we want to call the nourishment that a good story provides).

But then I remembered an article on a movie blog I read regularly, where Cameron was quoted as saying (in regards to Sigourney Weaver’s character):
“Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body, which again is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.”

Here, Cameron seems to be exploring a dichotomy that’s the exact opposite of the first.  If this is the metaphor being explored here, then the Na’vi become characters in a video game, and, supported by the massive special effects, their world becomes one of those virtual reality playgrounds we were all promised way back in the 90′s.  The marines are only downloading themselves into the Na’vi bodies and exploring the digital world, which makes their rather obvious callousness toward the Na’vi people more easily understood.

(plus, where have I heard the phrase “NAVI” before…?)

Granted, this metaphor does seem to break down when we consider that mining a virtual world for resources seems at first rather unreasonable.  However, there is one thing that such a highly developed model of reality could offer that would make this virtual reality metaphor more believable:  What they have is information, the information created by an entire virtual world made to run as a model of our own, and the need to go into that world in order to collect it while the program is running.

The more I thought about these two opposing metaphors, the more I realized that though each seems to explain the movie well enough, it does so to an unsatisfying degree.  It’s already in the top 5 films ever made (or whatever, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) and neither really seems to validate its popularity.  Movies don’t have this kind of effect on people unless there’s something really new at the heart of the story, a message that people didn’t know they needed to hear.

It wasn’t until I started overlapping these two metaphors that I really began to understand what I’ve come to think this movie is about (and why I want to go see it).  It is the equating of nature with a programmable environment.  And it is done in a metaphorical/mythological way that people can grasp on a subconscious level without needing to understand the specifics.  To be there to watch those two memes combine into one is something I do not want to miss.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying this is some sort of conspiracy enacted by Cameron (and/or some group of shadowy figures), rather that this could be seen as an important part of our global cultural story, something we had  a desperate need to to develop and digest at this point in our history.  Maybe if we can learn to stop seeing nature as an enemy, to befriend it, and to understand that we can control it and program it, we’ll stop needing to destroy it so much.  Cameron does much here to combat our instinctive pre-historic need to see nature as always “red of tooth and claw”, and I would guess that this is why the movie has proven to be so popular.  This, to my mind, makes it a story we all very much want and need to hear right now.

After all, as Marshall McLuhan said way back in 1970, the invention of the satellite “ends ‘Nature’ and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.” We’re just finally catching up to this now, and I want to be there to watch as it happens.  Who knows where this is going to lead to as it unfolds; I just hope we still have a chance to make use of what learn here.

We must learn how to “thing” without becoming “a thing” ourselves.

I am all of these things, yet they are not me…

Identification is a state. You must understand that many things you ascribe to things outside you are really in you. Take for instance fear. Fear is independent of things. If you are in a state of fear, you can be afraid of an ash-try….You are afraid, and then you choose what to be afraid of. This fact makes it possible to struggle with these things, because they are in you.

(via Ann Seeker)

Read an article on Futurismic that quoted a question from another article that really got me thinking.  I figured I’d throw it out to my readers here:

Why are we as a species so driven to find a definition for God?

The more I ask myself the question, the more I realize I can’t find an answer.  It’s kind of tripping me out.

Maybe this whole “Zen” thing is having more of an effect than I think…  ;)

Feel free to expound at whatever length you wish.  Any and all answers are welcome.

(links to larger version)

…each form and each individual—not just the beautiful ones—is a source of wonder, the only object in the flow of events that truly exists, or is at least perceptible.

Finally finished reading William Segal’s “A Voice at the Borders of Silence” and wanted to give a sort of “best of” here.  The book is an amazing piece of art, collecting essays, stories, letters, and interviews, and I highly recommend it.  For those who missed my earlier post, William Segal was a student of Gurdjieff, Oespensky, as well as Zen Buddhism.  He was close with D. T. Suzuki, and visited many Zen temples throughout Japan.  Hence my interest in him.  I would say he leans more toward Gurdjieff than he does toward Zen, but it’s nice to see how both traditions reflect off each other in one person’s mind.

From a conversation with Marvin Barrett, a brief explanation of his take on what it means to be a “Spiritual Master”:
“I think a true master doesn’t care  about anything other than persistently relating to this mysterious energy which is always present.  He doesn’t care whether a formal training exists and whether he has it or not.  He’s only concerned with his own relationship to the highest.  There’s a freedom and an openness about him that in turn generates an energy which touches others.”

From a conversation with Peter Brook and Michel de Salzmann (son of one of Gurdjieff’s main pupils, Madame Jeanne de Salzmann), on how to learn to relate to that energy:
“I think it’s very difficult taking into consideration the stresses of human existence in the 1990′s.  The difficulties which the average person faces make it almost impossible to develop the sensitivity and awareness necessary to relate to this principle that we’ve been speaking about.  That’s why I think there is still a great popularity of feeling for Zen Buddhism.  There was a specific training.  But that training involved going into a monastery and spending a specific period of time developing one’s capacity to be here.  Gurdjieff’s system takes into account that we are limited in our possibility for practice.  Listening to this glass clink is a practice.  The conversation, the body itself, the moment to moment awareness, however one is able to follow that.  And so over a period of time, one indirectly comes to have this capacity, comes to have this acute awareness.  I speak of it as if it is something you can put in your hand.  I don’t mean it that way.”

From an interview with Ken Burns (who it seems was a student of Mr. Segal’s) as found in “The Man in the Marketplace”:
KB: “How do you practice as you walk down a city street, what do you do?”

WCS: “One doesn’t do anything.  One just strives to be open to what’s around.  To be open.  That means your in touch with the breathing, in touch with the body, in touch with the influx of impressions.  Most of the time we don’t avail ourselves of the wonderful array of impressions which come in through the vision, through hearing, through sensing.  All this is here as if the good Lord made us to take in very fine foods beside the food we eat and the air we breathe.  But sometimes, if I am so much in myself I cover up this gift, I am closed and I don’t receive what is rightfully the human due.

And from a little later in the same interview:
“Because again, it comes down to the fact that within each individual human being, there is this spark of the divine.  But we have been trained to ignore it.  We don’t know how to be in touch with it, except in special moments.  Now, when one is in the marketplace, one realizes that behind all the haggling and behind the bargaining and the shouting and the fuss, it gives the possibility of seeing the sacred in every human being and in ever piece of fruit and every shouting merchant.  So instead of being drained of energy, one is left open to receive and, in turn, this communicates in a strange way.  If you’re calm and blissful in the marketplace, wherever you go you spread harmony.  It really does work for people.”

• In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck’s research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company’s reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. “To remain dominant in the future,” he told Forbes, “we need to dominate the central nervous system.” His plan hinged on the success of an experimental antidepressant codenamed MK-869.

• Behind the scenes, however, MK-869 was starting to unravel. True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or another inert substance given to groups of volunteers in clinical trials to gauge how much more effective the real drug is by comparison.

• In subsequent tests, MK-869 turned out to be no more effective than a placebo. In the jargon of the industry, the trials crossed the futility boundary. (the FUTILITY boundary?)

• From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent.

• It’s not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests.

• It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

• drugmakers are realizing they need to fully understand the mechanisms behind it so they can design trials that differentiate more clearly between the beneficial effects of their products and the body’s innate ability to heal itself.

• Assumption number one was that if a trial were managed correctly, a medication would perform as well or badly in a Phoenix hospital as in a Bangalore clinic. Potter discovered, however, that geographic location alone could determine whether a drug bested placebo or crossed the futility boundary.

• Convinced that what Lilly was facing was too complex for any one pharmaceutical house to unravel on its own, he came up with a plan to break down the firewalls between researchers across the industry, enabling them to share data in “pre-competitive space.”

• Potter’s ambitious plan for a collaborative approach to the problem eventually ran into its own futility boundary: No one would pay for it. And drug companies don’t share data, they hoard it.

• “The placebo effect was considered little more than a nuisance,” he recalls. “Drug companies, physicians, and clinicians were not interested in understanding its mechanisms. They were concerned only with figuring out whether their drugs worked better.”

• Part of the problem was that response to placebo was considered a psychological trait related to neurosis and gullibility rather than a physiological phenomenon that could be scrutinized in the lab and manipulated for therapeutic benefit.

• US scientists had found that a drug called naloxone blocks the pain-relieving power of placebo treatments. The brain produces its own analgesic compounds called opioids, released under conditions of stress, and naloxone blocks the action of these natural painkillers and their synthetic analogs.

• Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson’s patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol.

• Healthy volunteers feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost. Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests that because Alzheimer’s patients don’t get the benefits of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.

• Like any other internal network, the placebo response has limits. It can ease the discomfort of chemotherapy, but it won’t stop the growth of tumors. It also works in reverse to produce the placebo’s evil twin, the nocebo effect. For example, men taking a commonly prescribed prostate drug who were informed that the medication may cause sexual dysfunction were twice as likely to become impotent.

• “Expectations about pain and pain relief work in a similar way. Placebo treatments tap into this system and orchestrate the responses in your brain and body accordingly.” In other words, one way that placebo aids recovery is by hacking the mind’s ability to predict the future.

• In a study last year, Harvard Medical School researcher Ted Kaptchuk devised a clever strategy for testing his volunteers’ response to varying levels of therapeutic ritual.

• One group was simply put on a waiting list; researchers know that some patients get better just because they sign up for a trial. Another group received placebo treatment from a clinician who declined to engage in small talk. Volunteers in the third group got the same sham treatment from a clinician who asked them questions about symptoms, outlined the causes of IBS, and displayed optimism about their condition.

• Not surprisingly, the health of those in the third group improved most. In fact, just by participating in the trial, volunteers in this high-interaction group got as much relief as did people taking the two leading prescription drugs for IBS. And the benefits of their bogus treatment persisted for weeks afterward, contrary to the belief—widespread in the pharmaceutical industry—that the placebo response is short-lived.

• the geographic variations in trial outcome that Potter uncovered begin to make sense in light of discoveries that the placebo response is highly sensitive to cultural differences. Anthropologist Daniel Moerman found that Germans are high placebo reactors in trials of ulcer drugs but low in trials of drugs for hypertension—an undertreated condition in Germany, where many people pop pills for herzinsuffizienz, or low blood pressure.

• But why would the placebo effect seem to be getting stronger worldwide? Part of the answer may be found in the drug industry’s own success in marketing its products.

• “Before I routinely prescribed antidepressants, I would do more psychotherapy for mildly depressed patients,” says the veteran of hundreds of drug trials. “Today we would say I was trying to engage components of the placebo response—and those patients got better. To really do the best for your patients, you want the best placebo response plus the best drug response.”

Attainment does not come at the moment when we are making a conscious effort to attain, because at that time we have uddhacca-kukkucca, ‘distraction and worry’, but rather at the unexpected moment when we relax after an apparently fruitless effort.

(via here)

“The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and “consciousness” cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and “will” cannot evolve involuntarily. The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and “doing” cannot be the result of things which “happen.”

(via astroinquiry)

—>

There are Two Changing Lines.
An Old Yang for Line 1
An Old Yin for Line 2
The Old Yin prevails.

Six in the second place means:
Someone does indeed increase him;
Ten pairs of tortoises cannot oppose it.
Constant perseverance brings good fortune.
The king presents him before God.
Good fortune.

A man brings about real increase by producing in himself the conditions for it, that it, through receptivity to and love of the good. Thus the thing for which he strives comes of itself, with the inevitability of natural law. Where increase is thus in harmony with the highest laws of the universe, it cannot be prevented by any constellation of accidents. But everything depends on his not letting unexpected good fortune make him heedless; he must make it his own through inner strength an steadfastness. Then he acquires meaning before God and man, and can accomplish something for the good of the world.

via I Ching Online

The process of writing cannot be juggled with another occupation. The job of creating cannot be compartmentalized with certain hours devoted to one kind of creation and other hours set aside for still another. Writing is a demanding profession and a selfish one. And because it is selfish and demanding, because it is compulsive and exacting, I didn’t embrace it. I succumbed to it.

(via conorh))

• Thunderbird is an allegory; his conflicts with other forces in nature are then an attempt to allegorize relationships observed in the natural order, such as the changing of the weather. Like other Thunder Beings, he is essentially an attempt to represent the patterns of activity of a powerful, mysterious force in a way that can be understood simply and easily – sort of the way in which a weather map functions today.

• Because the Thunderbird in particular represented this mysterious dual aspect of nature, manifest through the primordial power of thunderstorms, it is not surprising that his representatives were the heyoka or sacred clowns, who displayed wisdom through seemingly foolhardy action. Western thinking has prevented us from seeing the reasons why Indians perceived this connection. Few anthropologists have sought to locate how Thunderbird may have been mythologically linked to Trickster.

• They describe the Thunderbird as a spiritual, not just physical, being. It is not seen as just a large, fearsome predatory bird that people tell stories about. Rather, it’s an integral part of Plains Indians religion and ritual. Only by ignoring this fact could we put our Western ethnocentric biases into effect, and reduce it to a zoological curiosity. The Thunderbird is much more than that; the Indian attitude toward it comes from more than just the mere fact that it is supposed to be really big.

• The heyoka were different in three primary ways from the other sorts of clowns. They were truly unpredictable, and could do the unexpected or tasteless even during the most solemn of occasions. Moreso than other clowns, they really seemed to be insane. Also, they were thought to be more inspired by trans-human supernatural forces (as individuals driven by spirits rather than group conventions), and to have a closer link to wakan or power than other clowns. And lastly, they kept their role for life – it was a sacred calling which could not be given up without performing an agonizing ritual of expiation. Not surprisingly, these unique differences were seen as the result of their having visions of Thunderbird, a unique and transforming experience.

• Black Elk: “When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm… you have noticed that truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping. When people are already in despair, maybe the laughing is better for them; and when they feel too good and are too sure of being safe, maybe the weeping face is better. And so I think this is what the heyoka ceremony is for … the dog had to be killed quickly and without making any scar, as lightning kills, for it is the power of lightning that heyokas have.”

• Today, of course, Western physicists describe the dual nature of electricity. An object can carry a positive or negative electric charge. The electron is simultaneously a wave and a particle. Electricity and magnetism are thought to be aspects of the same force, and as is well know with magnetism, it comes in polarities, with opposite poles (north and south) attracting.

• It was believed among the Lakota and other tribes that if you had a dream or vision of birds, you were destined to be a medicine man; but if you had a vision of Thunderbird, it was your destiny to become something else; heyoka, or sacred clown. Like Thunderbird, the heyoka were at once feared and held in reverence. They were supposed to startle easily at the first sound ofthunder or first sight of lightning. Thunderbird supposedly inspired the “contrariness” of the heyoka through his own contrary nature. He alternates strong winds with calm ones. While all things in nature move clockwise, Thunderbird is said to move counterclockwise. Thunderbird is said to have sharp teeth, but no mouth; sharp claws, but no limbs; huge wings, but no body.

• While clown societies were found throughout the Plains, the heyoka, or sacred clowns, were usually few in number, but were found in almost every clan. Heyoka were contraries, often speaking and walking backwards. They acted in ridiculous, obscene, and comical ways, especially during sacred ceremonies. They were thought to be fearless and painless, able to seize a piece of meat out of a pot of boiling water. They often dressed in a bizarre and ludicrous manner, wearing conical hats, red paint, a bladder over the head (to simulate baldness), and bark earrings. The heyoka was thought to usually carry various sacred items – a deer hoof rattle, a colored bow, a flute, or drum.

• Like the flash of lightning, the heyoka’s sudden outbursts and disturbances were thought to be the keys to enlightenment – much like the absurd acts of Zen masters in Japan.

• Part of the link between heyoka and Thunderbird comes from Iktomi, the Trickster figure. Iktomi is said to be heyoka because he has seen and talked with Thunderbird. Iktomi is the first-born son of Inyan (rock), and is said to speak with rocks and stones.

• Jung, following his lead, claims the Trickster as an archetypal part of the collective unconscious; and his “crazy wisdom” as emblematic of humankind’s earlier, undivided, unindividuated consciousness. Iktomi and other tricksters seem to be at the constant mercy of their desires; yet their blind luck always seems to protect them from the consequences of their missteps. He is dangerous primarily because he is so powerful, yet so rarely has the forethought or good judgment to use his power wisely.

• For the Plains Indians, thunder and lightning symbolized the vast, uncontrollable energy of nature. It’s not surprising, then, that the Thunderbird is connected with the strange, uncontrollable force of the Trickster figure, and his avatar, the heyoka.

• Clowns and contraries in Plains societies do not just come out once a year, however. They are permanent parts of the society, and are seen as continual reminders of the contingency and arbitrariness of the social order. Long before French theorists came on the scene, the heyoka was reminding his own people about the social construction of reality. By doing everything backwards, the heyoka in a way is carrying out a constant experiment in ethnomethodology, showing people how their own expectations limit their behavior. Like a good performance artist, the shocking behavior of the heyoka is supposed to confront people and make them reconsider what they may have arbitrarily accepted as normal.

• John (Fire) Lame Deer: “These Thunderbirds are part of the Great Spirit. Theirs is about the greatest power in the whole universe. It is the power of the hot and the cold clashing above the clouds. It is blue lightning from the sun. It is like atomic power. Thethunder power protects and destroys. It is good and bad; the great winged power. We draw the lightning as a forked zigzag, because lightning branches out into a good and bad part… In our Indian belief, the clown has a power which comes from thethunder beings, not from the animals or the Earth. He has more power than the atom bomb, he could blow off the dome of the Capitol. Being a clown gives you honor, but also shame. It brings you power, but you have to pay for it.”

(via jacksta @ deltafoxtrot)