Opionium

This one song by New Age musician Ayman has always been one of my favorites. Its name, Opionium, implies ecstasy, bliss, and spiritual heights. Ayman's imagery is part of the alchemy that he creates with his music, and it always includes doorways, paths and windows. This song in particular has always felt like a window into the spirit world.

Not knowing what the lyrics mean, or if they mean something (Ayman is very creative and this may be a conlang / an artificial language) does not hinder one from taking pleasure from listening to the song. It expands the imagination: one can attribute whatever meaning one wishes to attribute to it. I like to think of the song as a sacred hymn that celebrates the imaginal realm, and would probably categorize this as 'sacred space music', a term coined by New Age musician/alchemist Constance Demby.

Take a sip and have three visions on me and may they manifest quicker than you think. - Ayman

Please Boicot Cruelty

Oshun and gays

I found this article about a study done by the University of Padua, Italy, that found a link between gay men and the fertility of women in certain families, that is, the mothers and maternal aunts of gay men are likely to have more children than in the general population. The study capitalized on a previous study that showed that gay men tended to have more maternal uncles who were also gay.

The funny thing is the article appears in an anti-gay website that claims to 'uphold the right' to 'treat' people with unwanted homosexual inclinations. Since 1975 the APA removed homosexuality from its list of illnesses. In that sense, it is not 'treatable' because it's not a disease, it's a sexuality.

The study seems to indicate that homosexuality in men may be in part related to women's fertility and women's hormones. I think going forward the harder part will be to ask the RIGHT questions, and non-biased ones, maybe not so much what causes homosexuality but what evolutionary pressures may have led to the existence of homosexuality. The closest species to humans, bonobo chimps, are all bisexual and have more gay sex than straight, so this is probably much deeper than we even imagine and we can speak of a diminished homosexual trend in humanity versus our cousins!

But the point that I wanted to present is that women's fertility is the realm of Oshun (or Venus, the Goddess of Love in any of her names), as we all know, and we also know that Oshun loves her gay children. And so the cool thing about the study is that it legitimizes what millions of souls have intuited for millenia in all cultures: there is a very real, tangible, even ORGANIC relation between gays and the Goddess of fertility (Cybele in antiquity had gay priests, so did Inanna, so did Freya in Scandinavia, so does the Goddess have hijra followers in India, so does Erzulie in Haiti, the list goes on and on) ... in other words, science is apparently catching up with shamanism!

One of the definitions that Carl Jung, the father of psychoanalysis, gave to the archetypes of the collective unconscious, was 'inherited instinct'. It's interesting to note that the modern survivals of 'gay cults to fertility Goddesses' that still exist (Erzulie, Oshun) take place in religions of ancestral worship, especially considering the fact that gay people usually don't have children of our own. It's as if we're all today tapping into the same ancestral collective unconscious that gave birth to all those ancient cults.

Wiccan Rede

bide the wiccan law we must
in perfect love and perfect trust
live and let live
fairly take and fairly give
eight words the wiccan rede fulfill
an ye harm none do what ye will

On occassion of the Summer Solstice, for which more than 28,000 people gathered at Stonehenge yesterday, I want to take a moment to celebrate the Wiccan Rede, which encapsulates the ethical philosophy of the young and tolerant Pagan religion of Wicca.

The Rede includes a declaration which is the Wiccan equivalent of the ideals of non-violence which are so prevalent in Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism: the notion and religious doctrine that a person must not harm another living entity. The fine tradition of vegetarianism evolves out of this idea. In Wicca, the eight words that encompass the golden rule are "an ye harm none, do what ye will". Harm none is the exact equivalent of ahimsa, which in Sanskrit means literally no-harm.

"Fairly take and fairly give" is also quite interesting from my viewpoint. In my Spanish blog I wrote an article some time back where I explored the Christian notion that God is the God of the Living, and that this idea may be the foundation of an ecological interpretation of Christianity. Jesus did imagine the Creator enjoying the feeding of birds as a daily pasttime. This idea is essentially ecological. God is an environmentalist God.

"Fairly take and fairly give" is a natural Law that cannot be broken. That is, if we observe our breath, we can see that we are inhaling and exhaling: we take in and we give. We cannot escape the tides of our breath, lest we die. Death is another way in which we pay our takes to nature. It is said that there are two certainties in life: death and taxes. In reality, death is a form of tax that we have to pay as citizens of nature. We have to render unto the God/dess of the living hir taxes, just like we do to Caesar.

Free Hugs

Instead of "I love you," say "I am love"

"The common expression is 'I love you.' But instead of 'I love you,' it would be better to say, 'I am love — I am the embodiment of pure love.' Remove the I and you, and you will find that there is only love. It is as if love is imprisoned between the I and you. Remove the I and you, for they are unreal; they are self-imposed walls that don't exist. The gulf between I and you is the ego. When the ego is removed the distance disappears and the I and you also disappear. They merge to become one — and that is love. You lend the I and you their reality. Withdraw your support and they will disappear. Then you will realise, not that 'I love you,' but that 'I am that all-embracing love.'"

- Quote by Ammachi, the Hindu hugging saint

Queer Brains ARE Different

LONDON - Gay men and straight women share some characteristics in the area of the brain responsible for emotion, mood and anxiety, researchers said on Monday in a study highlighting the potential biological underpinning of sexuality.

“The observations cannot be easily attributed to perception or behavior,” the researchers from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute wrote. “Whether they may relate to processes laid down during the fetal or postnatal development is an open question.”

Brain scans of 90 volunteers showed that the brains of heterosexual men and homosexual women were slightly asymmetric with the right hemisphere slightly larger than the left, Ivanka Savic and Pers Lindstrom wrote. The brains of gay men and heterosexual women were not.

“These observations motivate more extensive investigations of larger study groups and prompt for a better understanding of the neurobiology of homosexuality,” they wrote.

- from an MSNBC article entitled Gay men, straight women have similar brains: New study points to possible biological source of sexual orientation

The nature of spiritual love

The above short video is a beautiful and transcendental example of how devotees share and meditate on the loving pasttimes of Srimati-Radharani and Lord Krishna, the embodiments of Supreme Extatic Love.

The kiss of the sun

This bit of information may be of practical use to some of my readers who like to think outside the box, so here goes: a Hare Krishna sister recently sent me an interesting video of devotees cooking with a sun cooker: a solar powered stove that can be used outdoors on sunny days to reduce dependency on conventional electricity. It uses free energy, generates no pollution, needs no wood, produces no smoke, and helps save the Earth. It may even add more vitamin D to our meals, since it derives its heat from the sun directly.

Sun cookers have been prominent in the relief efforts in Darfur, and efforts are being made to take solar ovens to impoverished parts of the world. Already, an entire village in India uses solar ovens, and there's even a video on youtube showing a home made solar oven that works in slighly higher than freezing temperatures.