The Year of the Snake

Symbology makes our lives rich with meaning. We can live without it, but the world becomes gray and mundane without symbolism enrichening our everyday lives. So, it is the Chinese year of the snake. Let’s unwrap the symbology of this powerful animal to illuminate what it means to us individually and collectively.  

The snake’s brain is the same as the deep interior of a human brain, where all our impulses, feelings, and intuition are generated. Snake thinking is a sense of knowing or urge we don’t understand with our rational thought.

In our personal lives, this year will be a good time to acknowledge something you have avoided, or else it will bite you. This year will either be easy or rough, depending on your rapport with yourself. Those who have listened to their deepest calling will be in their flow. It will be as smooth and joyful as a snake in the sun. But if you are repressing your desires or not able to articulate them, your year will be like an anxious snake, striking out at shadows, feeling out of sorts, until you come to terms with your true nature. The calling may not be what you think. It is not drinking, smoking or fucking; it’s the development or expression that you really need.

On a global or national level, this snake energy is embodied in the current crazy administration we have. We have not been true to the whole, but rather shoving what we don’t like away. Now, the national cobra uncoils and bares its teeth. The subculture of hate, racism, capitalist gluttony, and white-bread thinking that has always been here is now completely out in the open. It’s been embedded as institutional bias – the I’m-not-racist-or-sexist-but-I’m-not-giving -you-this-raise-or- loan kind of existence that we have had forever. The snake has emerged and is in full view. This is a time of reconning and clarity, the only way to deal with the subterranean snake. When we accept our deepest urges, they stop biting us in the ass.

My friends of color say that subconscious racism is much harder to deal with than the in-your-face racism because subconscious racism is denied. It’s gas-lighting racism. I’m not racist; it’s just you.

So now we have a clear view of the problem on the national level. This is national healing. It is the deeper meaning of snake; the venom is also the anti-venom. Those who thought that having a KKK millionaire as a leader was a good idea will eventually see that it is not. Therein lies the healing of our country because as long as white male dominance is considered a good thing, it will continue to be acted out in every small town in America, persisting like snakes in the grass - no matter who we have for president.  

My inner snake hissed in my ear that we need to let this cosmic play (because it is an archetypal drama) have its day. Let it unfold as it will. Evil always burns itself out because it’s based on a lie. The amount of lies this administration is teetering on is like the emperor having no clothes with a maxed-out credit card.

In this world war between capitalism and democracy, we are called to hold the fibers of our community together while the battle for truth ensues at the top. And if you listen to your snake brain, it will lead you to your highest potential. Perhaps our highest potential is (in this time of cruelty) being kind, open, and compassionate, which is not as easy or simple as it sounds. As a hippy, keeping the ideals of freedom, peace, and love within my network is my contribution to the truth.

In the end of this cycle, when degradation leads those who voted for the situation to have a true realization - then the snake will shed its skin. In the meantime, it will be very uncomfortable, so keeping our families and our communities intact as the national threads are torn and stretched is our duty to our country and our ideals. Listen for your call, be willing to look deeply into yourself, be clear on what is yours to do or what is not yours to do, and keep our inner snake senses keen.

Living in a dystopian sci-fi

This life has become very surreal. It feels like the beginning of a novel – An omen of a planetary alignment spreads across the night sky, as the Dick-tator takes office with his cronies of greedy billionaires aiming to suck the system dry.  This is the opening of my novel – or am I living this?  

T-rump taking his presidential oath on Martin Luther King Day, along with the death of Jimmy Carter, just made the symbolism even more dystopian. Carter was one of the few presidents who cared and put his heart and soul into bettering the world. The Re-pug-blicans hated him. My first inkling that history wasn’t unbiased reporting was in my high school history book. When we got to Jimmy and Reagan years, it said Carter was terrible and didn’t do anything, didn’t even free the hostages, but Reagan was sooo wonderful because he got the hostages released. The hostages were released the day Reagan was inaugurated. He hadn’t done anything. As I remember, the Reagan years were horrible; history is a fantasy.

Even the music was bad.

Ugg Journey.

My real concern is the breakthroughs in science – anti-gravity, energy generated by nothing, and AI. It’s wonderful, but not if used for the wrong reason. My friend is working on nano-chip technology that can be inserted into the brain. She is intending it to be used to help with dementia. But I’m thinking, Oh no, don’t let microscoff get a hold of this. The book Feed is all about teenagers with microchips in their brains and how they can’t live without the endless rain of stimulation from the feed.

We have shown ourselves to be humancentric in our developments, making the world nicer for humanity but terrible for the rest of life. What happens when we have infinite energy or can fly around, or can insert nano-chips in our brains? Will we conduct ourselves with humility and grace, refraining from using this power when it is destructive – It looks like not.

Everyone is all about AI, even though we have seen Terminator and Matrix. What we don’t realize is the environmental impact of AI. It’ very costly in energy and water. An example - to have ChatGPT write an email is the same amount of energy as driving a two-ton truck half a mile. It’s no mistake that microscoff is the backer of trying to restart the nuclear power plant, 8-mile island, that melted down in the 1990s. Also, the only nuclear plant in California was slated to be shut down but now, plans have changed. Coal plants in West Virginia were supposed to be decommissioned but are now kept running. AI is a hungry beast.

Then there is the huge amount of infrastructure for computers - 26.5 MILLION feet of warehouses are used to create AI, and we haven’t even begun. It is calculated that to make the capacity of the human brain, it will take a computer the size of Texas and eight stories high. I guess it depends on whose brain we're talking about, but regardless, the techies are planning on paving the world for their AI creatures. And here is the really freaky thought - what happens when AI watches The Matrix? How stupid can humanity be? Make the machines that can learn and show it the dystopian sci-fi of how to make us into batteries.

Is this the Twilight Zone?

For some, this horror story will dissipate when the Democrats take the house in two years. For me, it’s a bigger issue of our humanity. Are we capable of holding power in a good way? Enrico Fermi, the father of the nuclear age who helped develop nuclear fission, was vocal about the responsible use of power and was against the making of the atomic bomb. He made the power, but did he stop it?

It is like Frankenstein’s fanatic obsession with the power to create life – it became his downfall. Scientists are screaming about AI and global warming. We’re listening, but, like Frankenstein, we are compelled by the power of creation.

We are trapped in the storyline of the movie Don’t Look Up. We know it’s coming, yet we can’t unite, control our curiosity and think logically. Instead, we hand the keys of our government over to the greedy and cruel.

There is a dark, Russian fantasy called The Ghost Drum with a line that stuck in my mind like a prophecy - He named himself Czar, and the people let him do it.

For every person on this planet, the question will be - the red pill or the blue pill? The problem is that half have taken the red while half have taken the blue. Were just not in the same reality.

Science says-Time for Change

The New year tends to be a hopeful time; a time of looking forward. With the liberal agenda nowhere in sight in the political front, it is difficult to see hopefulness. But just because the politics are bad doesn’t mean that positive change isn’t afoot.

In science there are exciting new discoveries that will create another wave of technology, making what we have now seem like toys. It’s not just the technology, it’s the understanding of our universe that is exciting for those of us who are into groking the big picture.

A man named Nassim Haramein is a modern-day hippy Einstein. People often disregard him because he is so hippy. But the dude is putting together mathematics that is unifying some of the major disjointed theories of quantum and universal field theories.

He has come up with equations that solve how all the major forces in the universe are related. The forces are gravity, electromagnetic force, the strong force, which keeps the nucleus of atoms together, and weak force which creates radioactive decay.

He’s solved Dark Matter paradox. When calculating the total energy-mass of the universe needed to have an expanding universe and not one that is collapsing in on itself, scientists found the number comes up short. We see the universe is indeed expanding, so they made up a thing called Dark Matter to fill in the equation. No one has seen nor detected it. We just assume it is somewhere to make the equation work. But Nassim came up with the theory that space is not empty. That the empty space has a presence, a small, infinitesimal mass. But the volume of space is so vast that the mass of space actually solves the Dark Matter paradox.

This all is esoteric, but he has created solutions for many holes in our understanding. Like Einstein’s elegant equations of E-MC2 where mass equals energy, Nassime Haramein simplifies the complex into an understandable unified theory.

It is difficult to paraphrase his work. You must listen to his lectures to really get what he is talking about. Many people disregard him because he doesn’t stay inside a box. He is open, he swears, he dabbles in everything in science from geometry, gravity, quantum, space, and biology. He also is not afraid to mix history, religion, and social commentary into his lectures. His first breakthrough in the geometry of space came to him while he was living in a van, staring at pictures of geometric shapes and crop circles. He doesn’t hide the fact that he is cooky. He revels in it and is also deeply spiritual in his quest for knowledge. This makes people brush him off - usually, people who are rigid and have never taken the time to listen to him.

Here is a few of his talks. It is heady stuff. You can’t be high while watching this. It takes all your brain cells to follow him, and it helps to have a little conceptual understanding of quantum physics.

In this New Year contemplation, put in the idea that there is always something around the corner we never expected.

simple yet fun