African Shamanic Staffs

..Tibra & Mtwalu..

New Photo Pieces

Here are a few photo pieces I've been working on recently:


This one's title is "Sometimes Spiderwebs Are Tree Branches When You Get Closer."





The title of this one is "Planetary Greeting."



*disclaimer- photoshop was only used for touch ups

Three Cheers for Escher!!

This guy is amazing. What genius placement. I really feel like I'm looking into his head.

PFX-54

Here, friends, is a short story. I'm not usually a short-story man, I mostly spin poetics, so please forgive my intentional lack of adhesion to prose-ology.


the man had an 800 pound silverback gorilla on his. . . back. and a dog at his feet that was always cold because the damn gorilla used all the electricity. and so it went, monotonously each day stretching out like a scroll of a to-do list as long as an interstate highway. if it wasn't for the gory, greusome, chopping up and maiming of small animals that he did with a large machette on saturdays and sundays in a large field of dead grass just over the hill from the traintracks, his life would feel completely meaningless. the flies were a whole other matter entirely.

being that his father kept, in the backyard, a compost heap of all of his mistakes ever since he could remember, when he finally moved into his own place, he figured he would do the same. he had become comfortably numb, an orangutang, wit dulled to a spoon- too big for the bowl.

his actual power was only matched by his fear of his true power, which he met one warm, foggy night while he was driving to his parents' house, alone. the fog was so heavy that he slowed down and turned on his low beams, creeping through the thick fog. just at that moment an ominous, menacing, ghoulish shadowy form lurched out from a blindspot that had been created by the limited nature of his feeble, man-made headlights and the utter charcoal blackness surrounding the area not lit by these incompetent lights causing him to explode in a fiery burst of shock that split seconds into trillions of tiny shards and wracked his body with such a fierce terror that the instant after it was felt he began to repress it. tires screeched, mouth contorted, eyes bulged. and as the thick, rolling fog momentarily cleared, the heinous beast came into view: a young deer, slightly startled, but clear-eyed, it jumped back into the night, a silent little gallop.

TechnoLogic. Move it, make it, chop it, break it, cut it, shape it....

“I think technology has its own agenda. The question I am asking myself is what does technology want? If technology is a child, a teenager even, it would really help to know what teenagers want, in general. What are the innate urges, the inherent bias, the internal drives of this system we call technology? Once we know what technology wants, we don’t have to surrender to all of these wants, anymore than you surrender to any and all adolescent urges; but you can’t buck them all either. WILL these things technology wants happen? I believe they want to happen. What we know of technology is that it wants to get smaller (Moore’s Law), it wants to get faster (Kurzweil’s Law), and my guess is that technology wants to do whatever humans do (Kelly’s Law). We humans find tremendous value in other creatures, and increasingly in other minds. I see no reason why robots would not find humans just as valuable.” -Kevin Kelly

If this interests you, then you would probably enjoy the whole conversation:

http://integrallife.com/editorial/humanity-i-and-great-google-sky

Word up.

Adding the Golden Spiral to an AQAL/Spiral Dynamics Map

Alright, here's a fun little experiment of art and spiritual/developmental science that I have put together. I have been studying the AQAL framework - a sort of map which integrates All Quadrants & All Levels, and also All Lines, States, and Types of development - put forth by Ken Wilber, for the last few years. If it sounds a little overbearing, well, it's just a map, it's not the territory. I may go into more detail in later posts if I feel like it, or people are interested, but for now, if you'd like a little overview I suggest http://www.integralwiki.net/index.php?title=AQAL. Also, I have been studying Spiral Dynamics, which is a system of organizing decades of psychological research, and was created by Don Beck as an extension of the developmental work of Clare Graves. This image up and to the right ................................................--------------------^

shows how Spiral Dynamics can be woven in with the AQAL framework to create a biopsychosocial illustration of the qualities of different stages of development. I suggest http://spiraldynamics.net/index.shtml and also the book Boomeritis, by Ken Wilber for more information on the Spiral Dynamics Intergral. This interwoven map is the one that has been of the most use for me.

As an artist, student of science, and student of geometry, I have also been fascinated with the Golden Spiral (aka the Golden Ratio) for some time. Here is my Golden Spiral (in turquoise) that I traced.---------------->
What inspired me to trace this Golden Spiral were the two straight lines that intersect at the origin of the spiral. It somehow reminded me of the AQAL map and so....

As a visual and creative exercise, I've overlayed

the Golden Spiral onto the AQAL/Spiral Dynamics map, and it's pretty fascinating, synchronistic and amazing how these 3 images fit together. What's cool is, if you look at the rectangles that

are formed by the dimensions of the continuing arc, starting at the center with the smallest, it takes 5 rectangles to get to the Archaic realm, and it hits the map right on the archaic level 1 number; then only one completed rectangle later we are at the Magic realm, hitting the ethnic tribes level 2 number on the dot; the very next rectangle charts right between levels 3 and 4, a jump that lands between the Power Gods/Egocentric realm (3) and the Mythic realm (4); continuing on to the next rectangle we are, again, right between two levels, the Scientific/Rational/Modern realm (5) and the Pluralistic/Postmodern realm (6); the next rectangle is a quantum leap type growth through Pluralistic/Postmodern, Integral (7), and Holistic (8), in fact, this rectangle ends at the outermost edge of the map, it ends at the place where a 9th realm would be... and so we are approximately at the end of our charted territory; but there is one more rectangle on this illustration: the area that this completed rectangle covers represents the space of about five and a half levels, essentially, the last two rectangles cover more space than the whole of the AQALSD map. My theory about this is that we, humans, are in tune with a sort of learning curve of evolution that we can "steer" into ever-more alignment with. It is ever steepening (if that is a made up word, it means: getting steeper). I think that each level, or realm, is circular because you exist in them going round and round like the Earth round the Sun, gathering experience. As you move up through the levels, you need to spend less and less "time" in them in order to realize them. Just to realize them, not necessarily to instantly fully realize them, though that did just happen somewhere out there, but more to be able to recognize them and tune in with them more and more quickly and easily the next time, which makes the next level that much more likely to be recognized, and the next, and the next, and then I believe the spiral comes in again by plotting out the path of someone/thing moving "too fast," if you aren't prepared for the levels and the speed at which it's moving you may spin out and have to return to a lower orbit, which is probably right where you should be if that happens, but if not, you keep riding the learning curve of evolution to higher-in-quality, wider-in-scope-and-embrace states of consciousness. And we are obviously a large influence on everything on the entire planet and our actions are tuning in the rest of the Earth with this growth. I think that each rectangle represents a sort of biological psychological spiritual piece of acrchitecture. Maybe they represent a certain amount of time/space ratio, and the smaller ones are denser amounts of time with less space, and the bigger rectangles contain less time, and there is more and more space. I'm up for ideas, I'm inspired.

May All Be Blessed by Visions in Tune with Infinity.