Intro to Star Myths (recorded 22 January 2021)

I've just published a new video entitled "Intro to Star Myths," which contains an edited version of a presentation I gave recently to a group who were mostly unfamiliar with my work.

Those who have seen many of my previous videos and podcast appearances will find many of the examples presented in this video to be familiar, but there are probably some additional connections you might not have heard me talk about previously.

This video was recorded on January 22, 2021.

I hope you will find it to be positive in some way, and please feel free to share it with others who might benefit from this introduction to the world's ancient system of celestial metaphor -- a system which connects us all . . .

Return visit to Lindsay Foreman's "Spirit Junkie" podcast: John the Baptist, the Devil, and the Higher Self

Thank you to Lindsay Foreman for inviting me back to her "Spirit Junkie" podcast for a return visit!

Welcome to new visitors arriving here for the first time after hearing about my work in this video or on Lindsay's Spiritual Pathways website (and of course, welcome back to returning friends).

Here is a link to the video from this latest visit, which was recorded on 17 January 2021: "John the Baptist, the Devil, and the Higher Self: Star Myths on the 'Spirit Junkie' podcast."

In my previous visit with Lindsay, she had suggested discussing the Biblical episode involving David and Goliath (in the so-called Old Testament) and the figure of John the Baptist (in the so-called New Testament). You can watch that previous conversation, entitled "Seeing Ourselves in the Stars," at this link.

During that visit, we did discuss David and Goliath but didn't have time to get to John the Baptist, so I promised to return to explore John the Baptist and related subjects. When inviting me back, Lindsay asked if we could discuss three subjects: John the Baptist, celestial aspects of the identity of the Devil as described in the Bible, and the recovery of the Self and healing of the alienation associated with trauma.

As I was preparing for this interview and putting together some visual aids to discuss those three subjects, I realized that the three topics are more related than I had at first perceived. I hope you will find the conversation to be beneficial to you in some way! 

Please feel free to share it with others who would find something positive in it, and also to give Lindsay some positive feedback for her work.

Previous posts dealing with some of the topics we touched on during this conversation include:

• "John the Baptist"

• "John the Baptist (Revisited)"

• "The Great Conjunction 2020"

• "Revelation 22 and the Egyptian Book of the Dead"

• "Introducing Myth and Trauma: Higher Self, Ancient Wisdom, and their Enemies"

• "The Self: the hidden treasure"

• "Important interviews with Dr. Richard Schwartz and Dr. Frank Anderson of Internal Family Systems Therapy"

Martin Luther King, Jr. born this day 15 January, 1929: Prophet who saw the "far deeper malady"

January 15 is the day on which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929.

He would go on to become one of the most powerful voices of all time against racism, oppression, violence, imperialism, and impoverishment.

Dr. King can rightly be described as a prophet in the fullest sense of the word, warning us in no uncertain terms of the consequences of deliberately continuing to violate the will of heaven, and advising us that until we face those violations head on and fix them, things will not get better but instead will get even worse.

Of course Dr. King is rightly remembered as a towering leader of Civil Rights, and that of course is an undeniable fact. But the fact that he very clearly and explicitly connected his struggle for Civil Rights and racial justice to the world-wide struggle against what he described as "old systems of exploitation and oppression" which enable "the privileges and the pleasures" and the "immense profits" which are enjoyed at the expense of constant wars of aggression and counter-revolution around the globe is all but forgotten today, especially by the controlled media which by its ongoing lies and dissimulation continues to support those systems of exploitation and those wars of aggression.

Even as the organs of the media and the government continue to give lip service to the memory of Dr. King each year on this day of his birth, they deliberately ignore his powerful and prophetic message on this crucial subject, a message which was at the very heart of the speech he gave on April 4th, 1967: one year to the day before he was brutally gunned down by criminal participants in an organized plot that included members of the very national security state which was perpetrating those wars of aggression and counter-revolution that Dr. King was opposing so powerfully in his oratory and with his life.

That speech was entitled "Beyond Vietnam," and you can hear the entire recording in the video file above or in the audio file here, and read the entire transcript online here.

Although Dr. King delivered that speech while the United States was embroiled in the hottest years of the Vietnam War, every word he says in his message rings as true today as on the day he spoke them, almost 54 years ago. In fact, every time he says the word "Vietnam" in that speech, the listener of today can imagine the names of other nations in which the United States now has military forces, either openly or clandestinely or towards the destruction of which the United States is sending weapons and fuel and other forms of military support: Afghanistan, and Syria, and Yemen, and Iraq, and the Ukraine, and countless others.

I would recommend that on this day of remembering the powerful life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it would be very fitting to listen to that entire message in "Beyond Vietnam," along with any of the other speeches and sermons of Dr. King which one can today find very easily on the web.

Here are some paragraphs excerpted from that moving address, which will be even more moving if listened to in the recording above, and to which we are called to listen today, because we have yet to address and truly face those violations against the divine order which Dr. King prophetically called to our attention so many decades ago, and until we do, we cannot hope to correct them:

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a Civil Rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, the black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O yes, I say it plain:

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath -- 

America will be!

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read, "Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

[. . .]

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. 

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality -- if we ignore this sobering reality -- we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of US military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. 

It is with such activity that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by ancient, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin -- we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. 

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West -- investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries -- and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Maya artwork provides powerful evidence of the Ancient World-Wide System

Above is a new video I've just published entitled "This Maya drinking vessel unlocks the mysteries of an Ancient World-Wide System of myth."

On display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, this Maya cup contains a "codex-style" scene featuring the god Chahk (also spelled Chaahk): god of rain, wind, thunder, lightning and storm, as well as of fertility and increase.

Thus far, scholars appear to have missed the fact that this scene is patterned upon the constellations of the heavens -- and indeed that it contains elements common to the mythologies of other cultures around the globe, and associated with gods of wind and thunder and rain, including Zeus of Ancient Greece, Indra of ancient India, Shango (also spelled Shango) of the Yoruba of Western Africa, and Thor of the Norse, among others.

The evidence is so strong in the artwork on this beautiful Maya drinking vessel that it could well be seen as the key which definitively establishes the existence of the ancient world-wide system of metaphor which connects the myths of cultures on every inhabited continent and island of our earth, including the stories and figures collected into what we call the Bible. They all share a common foundation of celestial metaphor and thus are in fact closely related -- much as they have (catastrophically) been used to divide us from one another.

Special thank-you and kudos to viewer Rick B, who left a comment on a previous video linking to a video discussing this Maya cup (here). 

Rick noticed "the bend of the Rain god's knees" and made the connection to other presentations I've given showing mythological figures associated with the constellation Hercules -- and I agree with Rick 100% that the god Chahk can be definitively shown to be associated with the constellation Hercules (as are so many other wind, rain and storm gods around the globe), not only by the bend of the knees but by many other compelling pieces of evidence included in the artwork on this Maya vessel, pieces of evidence that would be glaringly obvious to scholars, if they only understood the constellations and their connection to myths and sacred traditions.

Unfortunately, there is resistance to admitting that the myths of the world are operating upon a shared foundation of celestial metaphor -- because the existence of that world-wide system has profound implications for our understanding of ancient human history. In short, this evidence indicates that our conventional paradigm of ancient history is gravely flawed and in need of radical revision.

Check out this video exploring some of the most compelling evidence found in the Maya codex-style drinking vessel and its artwork, attributed to an artist known to scholars only by the modern designation of "the Metropolitan Master" -- evidence which shows beyond any doubt that the sacred traditions of the Maya are related to the sacred traditions of other cultures around the globe, and which shows beyond doubt that we are in fact all connected in some profound (but now forgotten) way.

And as you do, you might want to thank that unknown artist (the "Metropolitan Master") for creating this amazing artwork, which must rank among the most important in the world, because it so clearly demonstrates the existence of this system in the Americas, just as it can be demonstrated to be operating in the myths of ancient Sumer, and ancient Babylon, and ancient Assyria, and ancient Egypt, and ancient India, and ancient Greece, and the other cultures of Europe whose inherited sacred traditions were stamped out by literalist Christianity, and the mythology of the Norse, and of the cultures of Africa, and of Australia, and of ancient China and Japan, and of shamanic traditions in other parts of Asia, and of the cultures of Polynesia belonging to the islands stretching across the vast Pacific.

The Capitol Hill Fiasco 2021

I am continuously surprised that men and women believe whatever the corporate media tells them, even after we see beyond any doubt that they have been lying to us for over 50 years about the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, and about the events of September 11, 2001.

The supposed "storming of the capitol" that took place on January 06, 2021 does not make any sense on its face: there is simply no way a gaggle of "protestors" can burst into the Capitol Building unless they are deliberately allowed to do so. Footage shown during the event has all the appearances of drama: stage-acting (and not very convincing acting, either).

But what about the supposed fatal shooting of one so-called protestor? Let's take a look at the footage and see the very serious questions that footage raises. These questions are not being addressed at all by anyone in the corporate media or the government.

And yet despite these obviously suspicious facts, there is a heavy psychological resistance to admitting the possibility that the media (as well as the men and women occupying government office) are lying to your face. It is much less threatening to believe the media rather than our own eyes. But it causes internal displacement to do so.

Please watch my video, "The Capitol Hill Fiasco 2021," (and here is another location where you can find it) and consider these important questions. Thank you for watching. 

Important Note:

Only a few hours after posting this video, the friendly face of censorship arrived in the form of an email from google / youtube informing me that my video had been taken down for "content containing malicious harassment," along with a cartoon image of a referee blowing a whistle:

They also removed the video, along with the numerous positive comments provided by viewers from around the world, and for a time the blank screen where the video used to be stated that the video had been removed for violation of "harassment and cyberbullying."

As you can see from the content of their email, these overseers of what content may be allowed into the public have included the patronizing consolatory statement that: "We know that this might be disappointing, but it's important to us that YouTube is a safe place for all."

Please note that "disappointing" is not the correct word to describe what is going on here. 

This video provides analysis of an extremely important event which impacts everyone in the united states and indeed has interest for everyone in the world (since the behavior of the united states and its officials impacts men and women in many other nations). For google and the persons they describe as "our team" of reviewers to declare that this analysis "violates our Community Guidelines" and to take it upon themselves to censor it is unconscionable. 

I have since uploaded the video to another platform not controlled by google, and as you can see from the video there is no way to describe this video as harassing or bullying, and in fact the end of the video features a reference to Mahatma Gandhi and his strategy of non-violence.

In response to this censorship, I lodged a protest (youtube condescendingly terms it an "appeal"), which I have reproduced below (only 800 characters allowed):

Prior to being taken down, the video was seen by about 258 viewers, and had received about 43 "likes" and about 16 comments. Thank you to those who liked and commented and shared, prior to the censorship of this content in violation of the inalienable right, articulated in the Bill of Rights as the First Amendment but obviously belonging to all men and women everywhere, regardless of the despicable efforts of petty tyrants to curtail that right, to freedom of speech and the press. 

Note that misguided persons often rush in at this point to argue that "private corporations can do whatever they want: the First Amendment only restricts the federal government in the united states." 

That is untrue and mistaken. Google and youtube can only exist in their present form and business model through the use of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is a gift of nature (or a gift of the gods, as the ancients would see it), much like the rivers and ports and oceans and soil of the land. The electromagnetic spectrum is not a creation of any man or woman, any more than is the sea or the sunshine or the oil under the earth. It is properly understood to belong to the public domain, belonging to the people of the nation (those allowed to be born into that nation by the gods), and thus companies such as google / you tube are permitted to use that spectrum at the good pleasure of the people (that's why the government, which is supposed to represent the people, in a democracy, allocates spectrum and that is right and proper). 

Thus, google and you tube do not have any undisputed right to "do whatever they want" with the spectrum that is loaned to them by the people or by their representative government. It is very much akin to banks, who are tightly controlled by the government because as anyone who studies the matter will understand, banks are given a special privilege to issue money -- a privilege that is "loaned" to them by the government, because that power belongs only to the representatives of the people. If the banks abuse that privilege or violate their charter, it will be taken away. Google and you tube's charters should have been taken away a long time ago already, along with other abusers of the inalienable rights given to all men and women -- rights which it is the government's first duty to protect and preserve.

Update as of 11 January 2021:

My video has now been removed from Vimeo as well, as of this morning, after being on Vimeo for about two days.

See note received from Vimeo, below, informing me that the video “violates guidelines.”

This situation is becoming more and more disturbing, as there is clearly a centralized message of what may be said in the corporate news about the events of 06 January 2021, and now it is becoming very clear that there is a similar message of what may be said about it on major information sharing platforms.

I have uploaded the video to yet another hosting platform, which you should be able to see in the post above (embedded video plus URL link).

Happy New Year 2021: Received Ancient Wisdom vs Spiritual Junk Food!

Happy New Year to everyone! I was intending to publish this post in the morning but spent the day at the beach instead! 

Anyway, here is a short clip from the previously-published video of my conversation with Lindsay Foreman, a conversation you may have already heard in full, but which contains this short analogy (highlighted in the above clip) between: 

a) the replacement of traditional dietary practices with the "western modern diet" and 

b) the destruction of the world's ancient wisdom contained in the myths and sacred traditions given to every culture on our planet and their replacement with what amounts to "spiritual junk food" (because literalism necessarily externalizes the message and inverts key components of the ancient wisdom, thus robbing us of "essential nutrients" vital to our overall well-being, much as the western diet may keep us from being hungry while at the same time lacking certain essential vitamins necessary for our health).

I thought it was appropriate for New Year's because we often start the year with resolutions regarding what we eat, and I would certainly recommend checking out the arguments presented by Dr. Steven Lin (whose work I reference in my introduction of the above analogy) in his 2018 book The Dental Diet: The Surprising Link Between Your Teeth, Real Food, and Life-Changing Natural Health, in which Dr. Lin provides abundant evidence (following on the work of other doctors and dentists before him) which demonstrate that, in his words: 

traditional cultures [. . .] all seemed to have diets rich in fat-soluble vitamins. [. . .] A little known fat-soluble vitamin that works in conjunction with vitamins D and A, K2 helps the body to place mineral into bones and teeth. It's crucial in the process of jaw growth and is fundamental to mineral balance in organs throughout the body. [. . .] Traditional diets had, over centuries if not millennia, structured their diets around the very foods that had the nutrients I was looking for. 24 - 27.

The modern western diet, however, is typically deficient in those exact fat-soluble vitamins which traditional diets, no matter their latitude or climatic environment, were so careful to include. Those three important fat-soluble vitamins, discussed in detail in Dr. Lin's book, are vitamins A, D, and K2.

I would highly recommend considering the information in The Dental Diet, which provides a number of sources of these essential vitamins, and discusses what they do for us (and why our modern diet is typically lacking in them).

And I would suggest, without implying that Dr. Lin agrees with me or my assertions in any way, that the situation he is describing provides us with a powerful analogy for the loss of the ancient wisdom preserved in each cultures myths and traditional stories. 

Just as he finds that traditional cultures around the world seemed to have found ways to ensure that their diets included those essential fat-soluble vitamins in quantities sufficient to promote good health, while the western diet which replaced those traditional diets was dangerously deficient in the exact same essential fat-soluble vitamins, even so and in much the same way, every culture on our planet appears to have preserved a set of "original instructions" in the form of their ancient myths, scriptures, or sacred traditions (I am indebted to scholar and author Peter Kingsley for the term "original instructions," which I find to be an excellent description; for his use of that term, see his lecture series entitled The Elders, available on his website here, and see also my discussion in a 2015 blog post here).

Catastrophically, those original instructions in the form of the ancient wisdom preserved in the myths and sacred traditions have been deliberately overturned in one culture after another -- probably starting during the time of the Roman Empire and continuing through the march of literalist Christianity throughout the Mediterranean and then into the regions of western Europe and later northern Europe, and from there into other cultures and continents as well, usually accompanied by violence and exploitation.

While using ancient stories and texts, the literalist misinterpretation of these ancient stories robs them of their original meaning -- while at the same time arguing that their interpretation constitutes the only truth and that the sacred traditions of all other cultures are wrong and worthy of being ruthlessly eliminated. 

The tragic irony of that mistake is revealed when we see the overwhelming evidence which demonstrates that the very same ancient system of celestial metaphor forms the foundations for the ancient myths and sacred stories of virtually all the world's cultures, as well as for the stories and characters in the Bible. 

However, just as the modern western diet lacks sufficient sources of the vitally-important fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K2, the literalist misinterpretation of the ancient stories in the Bible strips out vital components of the intended message, with the end result being a system which, instead of having as a central feature the prevention of trauma, and the repair and resolution of trauma where and when it arises, actually promotes and inflicts trauma upon men and women.

As we look forward to a new year, I highly recommend looking into the role of the important vitamins A, D, and K2, and finding sources of those vitamins which are most amenable to whatever diet you choose to follow. And, on a wider level, I hope that we can work to address the terrible effects of malnourishment, certainly physical malnourishment around the world but also spiritual malnourishment caused by deficiency of the beneficial elements contained in the world's ancient wisdom given to every culture, which have been deliberately suppressed for centuries, but which are still present and waiting for us, in all of the ancient myths and stories (including those preserved in the Bible), if we turn to them and listen to them in the language that they are actually speaking, which is a metaphorical language, an esoteric language, and a celestial language.