Our very own TDG admin Turner Young (responsible for the Friday news briefs...and yes, I do hold him responsible) has more talents than he broadcasts here - in the bright light of day he has also been known to write and direct film projects. 'Action Auto' is a new web-series that he wrote, shot, directed and edited with 3 friends, "about the worst used car salesmen on the worst used car lot in the worst part of Los Angeles and their desperate attempts to sell a car".

Here's the trailer for the series (consider yourself warned - NSFW language and sex jokes!!), or you can view a larger version direct at YouTube:

Great production values, it's all very professional...where's Turner Young and his camera when Bigfoot and UFOs come knocking?!

I've noted before about some television synchronicities (or just plain coincidences) that have occurred. Last night another one: I switched on the TV and 'The Big Bang Theory' was on. I pointed out that one of the characters looked like Johnny Galecki/'David' from the Roseanne sitcom, and that I hadn't seen him in anything else for at least 10 years. After the show finished, we decided to watch Will Smith's superhero movie 'Hancock' - in which Johnny Galecki makes an appearance. Nothing for 10 or more years, and then twice in the space of an hour. Coincidence, or glitch in the matrix?

Isn't it nice that people like John Bolton just lost their influence. Yes, it's a tough old world out there, and governments all over the world can be plain devious and nasty. But it's time to figure out how to move past brinkmanship...because we're at a stage now that when someone moves past the edge, it's not a small thing. Countries can now be wiped out.

If any Americans think that John Bolton is on the money, pretend he's a Chinese or Iranian diplomat, and reverse the names of the countries. It's a good way of seeing what the rest of the world has seen for the past 8 years.

At risk of sounding like I have a Phil Plait obsession, I had a bit of a laugh when reading this comment on his blog:

As a skeptic, I hesitate to use some words when describing such things, but it’s hard to avoid the use of the word "magical". Of course it isn’t really magical: it’s the natural world at work, with millions of years of time and many of the more vicious red-in-tooth-and-claw aspects invisible to us.

I have this vision of skeptics surrounding the Bad Astronomer, getting ready to pounce and pin him down for a skeptical intervention, because he said the word "magical".

My personal opinion is that when you get to the stage that you're adding caveats whenever you say the word "magical", it's time to chill a little and ask if you're going a little overboard with the whole "I'm a critical thinker" performance. It's lesson #1 in why the general public largely perceive 'skeptics' as anal retentive geeks intent on making the world dull and unexciting.

I've been picking up my guitars again lately, after ignoring them for quite a while. I set up a mic into Garageband to noodle around, here's part of the result:

http://dailygrail.com/share/ComfortablyN...

The complete song is a bit of a mess. Three guitar tracks plus a semi-acoustic bass track, all laid down in one take each without tuning them up. Throw 3 kids into the mix (you can hear the occasional squeal...those aren't pick slides folks!) and it's not exactly an ideal recording. This bit's not too bad though (for a one taker!).

Fun to do some tracking again though (I used to have an old 4-track back in the cassette days, and did an audio engineering course). Hope you enjoy it - of course, nowhere near the class of the masterful David Gilmour (this is how it's done). But it was good to have some fun with guitars again, instead of worrying about ET disclosure and rabid skeptics barking in my ear...

I'm kinda confused by the American political system. You guys have this thing of 8 year maximums for presidency. But then you vote Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, and now perhaps Clinton (and then Clinton again?). Perhaps it's time to scrap the 8 years...you might even want to look at re-instituting some sort of monarchy and royal family too.
;)

Couple of odd synchronicities happened to me this past week, which I thought might be worth posting. I'm currently editing an old 'classic' alternative-topic book for reprinting via Daily Grail Publishing, and had spent the night reading through a chapter about David Lewis-Williams and his theories connecting rock art and shamanism. Upon finishing the chapter, I left my office area and went to switch on the television for a bit of 'chill-out' time. As the TV came on, I was presented by a man discussing rock art..."nice synchronicity", I thought to myself. Then he started talking about shamanism connected to this rock art. Then the narrator points out that the guy talking is David Lewis-Williams. I was pretty much able to narrate the rest of the documentary, as it was almost a carbon copy of the chapter I had just edited!

A couple of days later, I watched (not for the first time) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Upon switching off the DVD after the movie finished, the TV was on a music channel and playing "Lucas with the Lid Off". The interesting part is that this video clip was directed by Michel Gondry, who directed Eternal Sunshine.

Granted, the latter isn't as impressive as the former, but both made me sit up and pay attention. And while both are well within the bounds of chance happenings, it's worth noting that I had never seen David Lewis Williams on television before.

Update: One more TV synchronicity!

Just posted this on Graham Hancock's message board, as part of my Author of the Month stint:

--------------

In modern western culture, we are brought up with the assumption that everything 'material' is real, and everything else is not. However, the writings of Henri Corbin dispute this position, in which he argues for a difference between the 'imaginary' and the 'imaginal':

The choice of these two words was imposed upon me some time ago, because it was impossible for me, in what I had to translate or say, to be satisfied with the word 'imaginary'...we cannot prevent the term 'imaginary', in current usage that is not deliberate, from being equivalent to signifying unreal, something that is and remains outside of being and existence - in brief, something 'utopian'. I was absolutely obliged to find another term because, for many years, I have been by vocation and profession an interpreter of Arabic and Persian texts, the purposes of which I would certainly have betrayed if I had been entirely and simply content - even with every possible precaution - with the term 'imaginary'. I was absolutely obliged to find another term if I did not want to mislead the Western reader...

In other words, if we usually speak of the 'imaginary' as the unreal, the utopian, this must contain the symptom of something. In contrast to this something, we may examine briefly together the order of reality that I designate as 'mundus imaginalis', and what our theosophers in Islam designate as the "eight climate".

Corbin then goes on to cite some examples from the Persian and Arabic literature, and many sound very much like the common examples of border experiences (as mentioned in my essay). For instance:

At the beginning of the tale that Sohravardi entitles "The Crimson Archangel", the captive, who has just escaped the surveillance of his jailers, that is, has temporarily left the world of sensory experience, finds himself in the desert in the presence of a being whom he asks, since he sees in him all the charms of adolescence, "O Youth! where do you come from?" He receives this reply: "What? I am the first-born of the children of the Creator [in gnostic terms, the 'Protoktistos', the First-Created] and you call me a youth?" There, in this origin, is the mystery of the crimson color that clothes his appearance: that of a being of pure Light whose splendor the sensory world reduces to the crimson of twilight. "I come from beyond the mountain of Qaf... It is there that you were yourself at the beginning, and it is there that you will return when you are finally rid of your bonds."

A couple of interesting points - often, apparitions of angelic beings, in various cultures, say that the 'angel' is youthful in appearance. This includes many 'Virgin Mary' apparitions. Secondly, the notion of being 'clothed in colour' is reminiscent of magically evoked beings, e.g. the Enochian angels. Lastly, the final statement certainly suggests that this imaginal/angelic land is one and the same as the 'afterlife'.
(Incidentally, in terms of the topic of my own essay, I find the title of another story quite evocative: "The Rustling of Gabriel's Wings".)

Corbin again:

Neither the tales of Sohravardi, nor the tales which in the Shi'ite tradition tell us of reaching the "land of the Hidden Imam," are imaginary, unreal, or allegorical, precisely because the eighth climate or the "land of No-where" is not what we commonly call a 'utopia'. It is certainly a world that remains beyond the empirical verification of our sciences. Otherwise, anyone could find access to it and evidence for it. It is a supersensory world, insofar as it is not perceptible except by the imaginative perception, and insofar as the events that occur in it cannot be experienced except by the imaginative or imaginant consciousness...

...the world into which our witnesses have penetrated...is a perfectly 'real' world, more evident even and more coherent, in its own reality, than the 'real' empirical world perceived by the senses. Its witnesses were afterward perfectly conscious that they had been "elsewhere"; they are not schizophrenics. It is a matter of a world that is hidden in the act itself of sensory perception...

Corbin's words are explanatory in regards to the visions which occur under sensory deprivation ("a world hidden in the act itself of sensory perception"), and also echo comments about the mental state of so-called "alien abductees" ("they are not schizophrenics").

John Mack embraced Corbin's views, and spoke at length on the ontological status of the material vs the imaginal. In his essay "Intrusions from the Subtle Realms", Mack had this to say:

"The Western world view, what Tulane philosopher Michael Zimmerman calls anthromorphic humanism, has reduced reality largely to the manifest or physical world and puts the human mind or the human being at the top of the cosmic intellectual heirarchy, eliminating not only God but virtually all spirit from the cosmos. The phenomena that really shake up that world view are those that seem to cross over from the unseen world and manifest in the physical world.

Mack also quotes Margaret Mead:

"People still ask each other, 'Do you believe in UFOs?' I think this is a silly question, born of confusion. Belief has to do with matters of faith. It has nothing to do with the kind of knowledge that is based on scientific inquiry...When we want to understand something strange, something previously unknown, we have to begin with an entirely different set of questions. What is it? How does it work? Are there recurrent regularities?"

My essay is an attempt at helping to catalogue these "recurrent regularities".

My article in Darklore Volume 1 - as many of you would know - was on the topic of the common sounds heard during border experiences/altered states ("Her Sweet Murmur" - you can read it online at the Darklore website as a free PDF download). Author Michael Prescott emailed me to point another historical instance of the 'sounds' of altered states. It is mentioned in the writing of Peter Kingsley, discussing techniques of the ancient Greeks for reaching altered states:

-------------------

"4 The Sound of Silence

There’s one simple detail in Parmenides’ account of his journey to the underworld that’s so easy to miss. During the whole of his journey there’s no mention at all of any noise — apart from one single sound. That’s the sound the chariot makes as the daughters of the Sun draw him along: ‘the sound of a pipe’. . .

After Parmenides mentions the sound of the pipe he uses the same word again to explain how the huge doors spin open, rotating in hollow tubes or ‘pipes’. This use of the word is extraordinary. It’s the only time in the whole Greek language that it’s ever applied to doors or parts of doors, and scholars have pointed out that Parmenides must have chosen it for a particular reason: not simply to describe what the doors look like but also to give a sense of the sound they make. On his journey everything that moves has to do with the sound or the appearance of pipes. (DPW 126–127)

The word for ‘pipe’ that Parmenides keeps using is syrinx. It had a very particular spread of meanings. Syrinx was the name either for a musical instrument or for the part of an instrument that makes a piping, whistling sound — the sound called syrigmos. But there’s one aspect of these words that you have to bear in mind: for Greeks this sound of piping and whistling was also the sound of the hissing made by snakes.

It would be so simple to dismiss as totally insignificant the fact that this piping, whistling, hissing noise is the only sound Parmenides associates with his journey to another world — except for one small matter. Ancient Greek accounts of incubation repeatedly mention certain signs that mark the point of entry into another world: into another state of awareness that’s neither waking nor sleep. One of the signs is that you become aware of a rapid spinning movement. Another is that you hear the powerful vibration produced by a piping, whistling, hissing sound.

In India exactly the same signs are described as the prelude to entering samādhi, the state beyond sleep and waking. And they’re directly related to the process known as the awakening of kundalinī — of the ‘serpent power’ that’s the basic energy in all creation but that’s almost completely asleep in human beings. When it starts waking up it makes a hissing sound.

The parallels between standard Indian accounts of the process and Parmenides’ account of his journey are obvious enough; specialists in Indian traditions have written about them and discussed them. But what hasn’t been noticed is that the particular sound mentioned by Parmenides also happens to be the sound made by a hissing snake..."

(PDF here)
----------------

As I've mentioned previously, once you know the connection, you start seeing it everywhere...

For Australian readers, Jan Kounen's 'shamanic western' Blueberry is on SBS tonight at 10.15pm. I posted an article about Kounen this week here on TDG, and you view his documentary about ayahuasca shamanism, Other Worlds, here on TDG.