NOOZINE

LACC - 1967

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:30:34 -1000

The stars were conspiring to drop a sub-vortex of hipness down on Los Angeles in the fall of 1967, specifically on the City College east of Hollywood. The main shaft of this psychedelic storm had blown a hole in the web of reality the year before in the Bay Area where every step you took in Haight-Ashbury seemed like a new rabbit hole opening up underfoot. But the gentle hippies and playful freaks had morphed into something terrifying to behold when that twisted genius Augustus Stanley Owsley the Third started flooding the streets with his benzedrine laced White Lightening LSD. Gone was Purple Haze and the season of the witch by the end of the Summer of Love. Speed and heroin rushed in and took hold like a nightmare Jonestown and now all that the straights and gawkers in their air-conditioned tourist buses could see were the dregs of the children of America hustling for a fix and calling home for air-fare.

I’d fled the looming college scene in Boston, not to mention police surveillance, and left behind academic scholarships for a free ride to the west coast in early spring of ’66. Another kind of education ensued on the streets of Berkley and Hollywood, plus points in between on the hitchhikers paradise HWY 1, which wriggled along the leading edge of westward consciousness expansion, the California coast. One evening, perched on a cliff south of Big Sur, meditating high above the Pacific shore, the sun had left me stranded following its arc of descent into another world. So I decided to give this college thing a try.

Destiny unfolded at LACC, suspended there on Vermont Avenue somewhere between USC downtown and UCLA out on the westside. Registration per class was cheaper than its corresponding used textbook you could get at the funky bookstore across the street, flanked by a head shop to the left and a taco stand on the right at the corner of Normal Avenue, where, two blocks east, I had an apartment. The “campus” was laid out like some Forbidden City with buildings surrounding the “Quad” green zone in the middle with the great gate, nondescript as a hole in the wall, facing east, open to the rising sun. This place was jumping with every shade of skin tone possible, political activists, teachers more interested in people than tenure, hot liberated women, and music, music, music.

It was here at LACC (I only lasted a semester and a half) that I met fellow travelers of all persuasions dancing the spiral path. The brightest burning among us seemed to flame out before the apocryphal age of 30 and most of the rest bought the suburbia pill or the jesus wine. Me? I caught the Buddha-bug at a brightly lit meeting house just off the Sunset Strip. But I’m getting ahead of the story here.

Three guys from LACC I hung around with were American Indian lads my age from the Morongo Indian Reservation 100 miles east of L.A. up on the high desert at the foothills of the San Bernadino Mountains. They grew up in the days long before casino money came to Morongo, in the kind of beat-down poverty that would make South Central L.A. look like upward mobility.

They used to laugh at me when I told them how I had some Indian blood, and they’d get downright derisive about hippies with their beads and feathers and talk of the great spirit. They just wanted off the reservation before suicide and glue sniffing became viable options compared to alcohol and jail. “Yeah, it’s hip to be Indian. Why don’t you come live with us out on the Res? You can go on a vision quest, talk to a coyote.” They were just getting interested in AIM, (the American Indian Movement was there on campus, right alongside Brown Power, La Raza, the Black Panthers, and the Nation of Islam) and put up with my rambling about the Iroquois Confederation, but they were mostly interested in chicks and smoking my fine Michoacan Green.

One day I read them a short article I’d found in National Geographic analyzing the complexity of the Aztec Calendar, listing alleged predictions, etc. But mostly the article was about its end date sometime in the 21st century (it’s not the same date as the Mayan calendar 12/21/2012). The article speculated whether the Aztecs were predicting the end of the world. For the first time I heard these three talk among themselves in their native tongue, back and forth for about five minutes. “What’s up fellas?” I asked.

“Gonna be the end of your world.” my friend said. “Red man gonna be back on top.”

The three of them were staring at me, not smiling. They exchanged a few more words, then started chuckling. “Don’t worry. You’ll be alright. We’ll give you a blood test.” At that we all burst into uncontrollable pot induced, roll on the floor, full belly laughter.

Their words stuck in my memory for all these years. After decades of study of indigenous cultures, shamanic practices, myths, comparative world views, and the fullness of Mayan cosmology due to the intense interest in their famous calendar, I’m beginning to get an idea of what my friends meant. At first I thought they’d been spending too much time with brothers-in-arms over at the A.I.M. secret headquarters south of the college just off Vermont Avenue. Or perhaps they were talking about a revival of the ill fated Ghost Dance, a messianic, peaceful, ritual-based movement that spread among tribes from Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) to the northern plains and southwest deserts in the closing years of the 19th century. Wovoka, its charismatic founder, was a seer and medicine man who instructed his followers to dance and sing and bath for five days at a stretch and that, “You must not fight. Do no harm to anyone. Do right always.” He had been assured by God in a daytime dream on the “day the sun died”, (probably the total eclipse of January 1, 1889), that this was the way to reconciliation and coexistence with the white man. The Sioux even adopted a “Ghost Shirt” to protect them from the bullets of the white man, but the shirt, the dance, the songs of joy were not enough one cold day on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek two years later.

I’m sure now that these three guys were implying something much more sublime, a wisdom passed between generations only a people conquered or enslaved can know; there is a deeper truth than what is apparent in the world. All else may be destroyed and assimilated, but a spiritual essence survives like a reduction over a cooking flame into a potent, highly charged rue, one whose flavor permeates the melting pot of America.

One such essence which survived the holocaust of conquest is the Mayan creation myth in a manuscript, the Popul Vuh, inscribed a generation later. In one part of this epic, the Hero Twins, sons of the deposed One Hunahpu who raised the World Tree, journey to the underworld to beat the Lords of Xibalbe at their own game. Through the many trials they hope for a chance to shoot with their blowguns the interloper, the false ruler Seven Macaw, and restore the severed head of their father to its rightful place in the World Tree so that it may rise again. At a crucial turning point of the story, the heroes must leap into the sacrificial fire and be consumed to restore the natural cycle of death, regeneration and birth in order that a new world age be established.

This is the underlying story of the Mayan Calendar end date of December 21, 2012. But, it is this entire era, not that single day, that is being referred to; an era when the dominant culture’s power comes from its love of power. This is endemic in a world out of balance, Koyaanisqatsi, as the Hopi say. The World Tree is to be raised again by what may be called the Perennial Philosophy preserved by some indigenous cultures, espoused by Buddhism and hinted at by Quantum Theory. Sacrificial fires roar and invite us to join the cycle of rejuvenation.

Curtis McCosco © 2010

2012 Beat

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:00:35 -1000

The 2012 “End Date” phenomenon is a gathering storm, picking up superstitions and biblical scale mania like a midwest twister. Even the “Intelligent Design” folks are scratching out shelter in a “purposeful universe” allegedly affirmed by the Mayan Calendar. What started out as a quaint “New Age” trend in the ‘80s with Jose Arguelles and his Harmonic Convergence, has blossomed into, well . . . a major motion picture replete with computer generated disasters and a happy ending for our hero. The most common refrain I hear among the chronically spiritual set is “SOMETHING’S happening”, which makes me want to break out in harmonic response, “what it is ain’t exactly clear”.

We moderns now look back to the ancient Maya, who brought us this prickly date with destiny, for clarity. In the west we like things written in stone, which is a good thing since our 16th century Jesuit brethren burned everything and everyone in Mayaland that wasn’t stone, or precious metal or a candidate for soul saving and slavery. And even then only one stone carving has been found with the end date of December 21, 2012. That would be the Tortuguero Monument #6, all that remains of a T shaped structure erected around 670 AD in present day Tabasco, Mexico.

The story of the discoveries and scholarship involved in reconstructing the 5,125 year Maya Long Count Calendar, which spans the years between August 11, 3114 BC and December 21, 2012 AD, is one of the great true adventures of the modern world. (A terrific book on the subject is John Major Jenkins‘ The 2012 Story, which I’ll be reviewing soon.) Yet we’re left with the task to discern what this mysterious calendar with a definite last day (more precisely, the transition date to a new calendar round) means to us in our everyday lives. Or is this another flash in the kaleidoscopic spectacle of illusion, a subliminal cut in the MTV video of the 21st century that only hints at meaning because probing the depths of meaning is far too time consuming?

It is difficult for us in the atomized west to appreciate how the Mayan calendar was, and is, intertwined with their cosmology, creation myth, divination, world view and quotidian routine. Our western calendar demarcating the passage of days, change of seasons, maybe the tides, holidays and little else compares poorly to the depth and richness of its Mayan counterpart. Contrary to popular belief, the Maya were not obsessed with time, though the accuracy of their various calendars (they had at least 17) would be unrivaled until the 20th century. The Maya, like all Native American peoples had no word or concept like our abstract time. Their’s was an earth based system to calendarize the rhythms of the cosmos, to discern the natural sequences of life, man and the world.

The Maya, and all native people of the Americas, recognize a rhythm to their inner lives which is played out within greater rhythmic structures of the land, sky, waters and fellow creatures. Even larger rhythmic patterns involve the sun and moon, planets, stars and, most importantly, the Milky Way Galaxy. The Long Count Calendar is one fifth of the grand precessional cycle of 25,625 years, the length of time for the slow wobble of the earth’s axis to return to pointing at the same the same spot in space. This eccentric axial spin, combined with the earth’s solar orbit, produces the seasons and the sun’s apparent movement, gradual change of the sunset/sunrise location on the horizon against the backdrop of the Milky Way. In the year 2012, on the winter solstice, December 21, the dawn sun will rise precisely aligned with the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. This is why the Maya designate the date as the transition from the end of the fourth age, or world, in the precessional cycle to the fifth age–world–sun.

The Maya are not alone observing each winter solstice as a time of death, rebirth and renewal. The longest night on December 21 marks the beginning of gradually increasing light and is noted for spiritual and physical renewal in virtually every culture’s religious history, no doubt harking back to the earliest stirrings of human consciousness. What makes the winter solstice of 2012 so powerful is the synchronicity of the annual event with two events of galactic proportions; the 26,000 year precessional return of the winter solstice sun to the sign of sagittarius (where the galactic center appears in our sky) ; and the conjunction of the sun with the galactic center on the dawn horizon. The latter event occurs because the solar system is now in the midst of an approximately 40 year phase in which the sun is crossing the the ecliptic plane, the equator, of our mother galaxy, the Milky Way. The scale of this movement is so huge, the galaxy unimaginably large, that it is estimated this occurs every 63 million years (one revolution of the sun around the galactic center taking about 240 million years).

These calculations are a challenge for the most sophisticated computers, telescopes and space probes available today. The galactic center was more or less “accidentally” discovered by modern science in 1932, and determined to be a black hole in 1937. Archeo-astronomers estimate the Long Count, popularly known as the Mayan Calendar, utilizing the dark center of the Milky Way as its focal point, was first devised around 2,500 years ago in the proto-Mayan civilization known as Izapa. Not only did these ancient Mayan wizards discern the position of the galactic center and use it in their astronomy, they referred to it as, Xibalbe Be, the Dark Void and Womb of the Galactic Mother. Also, in order to mathematically/astronomically determine that there would be an alignment of the earth, sun and galactic center on the winter solstice, December 21, 2012, two and a half millennia hence, they would have to know the precise length of the solar year to within .4 seconds, less than half a second.

So they didn’t figure this out with math, or by any linear, kinetic, scientific method that would survive a peer review journal. This intellectual achievement is an order of magnitude more puzzling than the popular “how did the ancients carve and move those giant stone blocks” conundrum.

Is it the end of the world? Not if you think of “this world” as merely the third rock from the sun. But, if your world revolves around investment portfolios, derivatives, and credit default swaps, the world that supports your principles and bottom line has already collapsed.

Better questions are how rapid is the change from this “world” to the next? And what is the next “world”.

Stay tuned to NOOZINE and find out.

Or I shoot your freakin’ economy.

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:03:36 -1000

White collar criminals are so decorous in their language of bailout, leverage and asset acquisition. Criminals in the movies at least use language we can understand like extortion, loan sharking and cooking the books. So when a new sheriff comes to town it’s a good idea to learn what language he speaks and who his friends are, where he can put his boots up on the table and to whom he has to say, “yes sir”. Our new sheriff Obama speaks with language recognizable to a broad spectrum of Americans, but he has been corrected. During the campaign (remember those lost years as you were distracted nightly by the horse race?) Obama was taken to the woodshed for his entirely correct observation that when times are tough folks cling to their guns and religion.

During his inaugural address, Obama was inspiring in his clarity of the hard road ahead, inspiring in the manner of a prophet leading his people into the desert guided by hope and the joys of austerity. Minus a few oblique zingers toward the arch criminal sitting behind him on the platform raised above the multitudes spread upon the mall of the city of our governance, there was no language of indictment. Ya gotta wonder, if “we the people” brought him to this dance, who gets to bring him home?

“Follow the money”, says Donald Sutherland in the Hollywood blandishment of the career making news story broken by a pair of adorable Washington Post reporters. You don’t have to follow too far to find the faces of the money that brought Obama to Washington. They stand beside him now at various podiums. Hard to miss them, they’re wearing the suits with especially deep pockets, and shallow smiles. (Don’t miss the gold lamé pantsuit at State.) And their bosses want to get the vigorish on time. Let the principle ride forever, but you gotta pay the gravy, according to the Tony Soprano school of economics.

Now Obama has to sell this proposition to the cash cow that is his constituency. Pay off the bankers (through the shell corporations that were once banks and investment houses too big to fail) and see if there’s a little left on the side to fix some potholes and buy another dose of penicillin. Otherwise these extra starch suits are gonna pitch an economic firebomb through the plate glass storefront of the American Dream Store.

So no talk of jail time because it’s all legal and that’s all that counts. It’s right here in the paper slurry oozing out of congress, written in language so obtuse even the authors can’t decipher it without a coupla cocktails at a Georgetown bar. Besides, it’s much better to pay cash to these white guys and sign over Eminent Domain to the Orientals, Near and Far.

Plays better on TV.

by Curtis McCosco

Obama and the middle passage

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 05:40:06 -1000

middle passage
noun historical
the sea journey undertaken by slave ships from West Africa to the West Indies.

There has been no honeymoon for Obama, just the biggest one night party in the nation’s history, then right to work. There has not even been the traditional 100 day grace period to let him get used to the waters. Impressively, he seems to be just fine with that; his rhythm is strong, his directives unambiguous, like a man who has an end-game in mind. Hope is the word most indelibly associated with him, not optimism, which is a weak word steeped in delusion-in-spite-of-the-evidence. Hope draws its power from spirit rooted deep in the earth and embraces the possibility of failure, but not its inevitability.

His staffing decisions I find almost universally unnerving, drawing from membership rolls of the clubs that have conspired injudiciously to steal the best and trash the rest of America. And yet, when I see and hear the man speak of the tasks ahead I am awakened to power I know I have in me, but have desponded of my country’s capacity to find collectively. Much ink is spilled regarding national (and international) recovery. The term is used narrowly as though we’re in a twelve step program after eight years of the Binger In Chief. But W is a symptom (people do die of symptoms) and more importantly a reflection of the wounded psyche of everyone who chooses to call themselves an American. Thinking more broadly, Barack Obama is looming larger as a healer of a greater malaise from deep within that wound, using the very toxins and pain, the deflected personalities and catalytic agents who bear the propensities and the almost demonic knowledge found only in the necrotic belly of the beast. Can he turn these “insiders” to the task of undoing the intricate instruments of greed and power they and their ilk once manipulated to their own gain? Perhaps so because like all healers, he too is wounded and may possess the strength of character to wield the power of all our wounds, inflicters and inflicted, to project a passageway through the wounding.

In his inaugural speech and subsequent addresses he has not shied away from the dire prognosis, instead assuring us that with collective effort and sacrifice we have a chance, more than a chance. We the People are being asked to follow his lead and peer directly into the gaping maw of the national wound, especially the twin demons of America’s foundational sins; race/slavery and the genocide of first peoples for the expansion of empire. Only a black man can do this because what lies ahead is akin to a second Middle Passage and he is keenly sensitive to the genetic memory of that crime and the process of acculturation necessary to survive in a strange new world. Though not a descendant of slaves, as is his wife, Obama sees a face in the mirror that would be denied entrance not two generations ago to a humble lunch counter. This time, the human race finds itself in the hold of a dark prison ship of its own making with hope our only sustenance and the collective wound our birth canal through which we must pass. Standing athwart the evolution of consciousness necessary to make this passage is a collective anachronism of belief, a stunted world view and system of dominion that revels in deceptive dualist symbolism and murders its healers as a religious rite.

Purity of Land, Purity of Spirit

My 1995 documentary “Emergence of Spirit” has a scene of an Ojibway elder explaining the significance of the Sacred Hoop with its four colors; red, yellow, black, white. “See”, said the old Pow-Wow master, “we knew about the four races of humans thousands of years before the white man got here”. Today the land of the red people is host to all races; the veritable melting-pot, or more appropriately, stew-pot. The rich and variegated melange that is America today derives its base bouquet, it’s irresistible flavor from a spiritually charged rue reduced from the broken cultures of American Indians. The earth vibrating under the great expanse of America is ineluctably attuned to the pulse of the hearts of its original inhabitants. Within the songs, legends, dance, science, healing teachings, rituals and myths are keys to universal truths, ways of being known to indigenous peoples everywhere. Remember, we all have indigenous ancestors no matter where we’re from who danced on the land of their ancestors and told stories around a fire that preserved the cohesiveness of the group through the power of myth. For these ancients, song singing teachers became mythic figures, archetypes, as real as the listeners themselves, perhaps more so because what they taught brought expansion of awareness with each telling. Threads of these traditional ways are still very much alive and more vital to our existence than ever.

Obama’s youthful formative years were lived in Hawaii when the ancient ways, the native tongue, the hula and chants and Huna code were all experiencing a renaissance that continues flourishing to this day. The Hawaiian people, though brutally oppressed and forbidden to speak their language for many generations, did not experience the almost total physical and cultural devastation suffered by the American Indian. There was much in the way of preserved tradition to spark the curious mind of the bright student.Young Barack grew up hearing the melodious double and triple entendre language of the Hawaiian natives because it is ubiquitous in the islands, even in metropolitan Honolulu. He also experienced the spirit of Aloha that permeates every aspect of the culture as surely as concepts of, say, freedom and democracy pervade in America’s psyche. Aloha represents an almost ineffable attitude of natural benevolence toward another, a heartfelt courtesy and joy in another’s well being. The word has correlates in other preserved Indian languages such as the Algonquin “ondinonk”, a natural pulse of benevolence from the heart. In a very real sense, these concepts are fundamental to all social interaction, law and custom in their respective societies. Barack was marinating in rich juices of Aloha as he formed his self identity and found his place in the world.

Thus Obama’s vision of America is informed by visceral experience of the other side of “manifest destiny”, one of those faux creation myths we all; white, black, red and yellow, learned in grade school history class about the birth of our nation. Great transformation needs roots in fundamental truths and is driven by evolution of consciousness, otherwise it descends into dissolution and savagery. These truths are carried from person to person, culture to culture and generation to generation by powerful abiding myths, not fantasy as we find in movies or adult children’s books, but stories told as healing rites of passage where the speaker willingly becomes the myth in order that we all may embrace the wounds in our natural minds and enter the dynamic process of healing. Only We can heal Our wounds by awakening our true creation myths, our native guiding lights along a path that cannot be walked alone. Our projected wounding is reflected on the surface of the moon rising over a ravaged city, drawing a collective grieving carried by the harmonics of world praising from hearts syncopated by feet on the earth. The primal needs of this chorus move the archetype to act, thus a true leader is a product of social imperative following the lyric of an ancient song into a new world.

by Curtis McCosco

Techno Slaves

Wed, 4 Feb 2009 16:13:47 -1000

My wife’s computer has been in full rebellion of late, defying even the interventions of the wizards at Apple. Unfortunately, unlike most travails of modern life - republican intransigence in congress, think tanks, Ann Coulter - I’m having difficulty applying my carefully crafted Buddhist non-attachment to computer problems. These gizmos are supposed to make life easier not turn me into a vein popping maniac. I learned many years ago, when the video editing software Final Cut was first released, to not leave any blunt objects or loaded firearms near the computer while I was struggling to master the twin beasts of new computer and non-linear editing.

And mastering is what it takes. Make these machine slaves obey. Punch those keys harder. Marshall McLuhan showed us that tools and media are extensions of ourselves, that our desire to go further, run faster, remember better is the impetus for technological progress. I’ll go a little deeper in that our history as “civilized” humans is a history of getting first someone else then something else to do the work. Get more work done, have more leisure time, just press the start button or crack the whip. Remember those kitchens-of-the-future claims where mom in high heels cooks a 5 course meal and cleans up without so much as mussing her sprayed hair? Well how’d that work out? Now mom’s at her 2nd job and Dad & the kids just finished chinese takeout.

Our overgrown dependancy on technology is an extension of the “peculiar institution”, and slavery is an extension of a Buddhist concept personified as Mara, King Devil of the 6th Heaven, the desire to dominate other beings by tempting or seducing them. The flip side is the desire to be tempted and seduced, to be dominated. This interplay of dominator and dominated can never be separated completely into victim and aggressor when viewed as a karmic gestalt. The suffering of the slave is a powerful seductive intoxicant for the wielder of the lash and a destroyer of his humanity even as all that would be great and noble in the slave is being broken. Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia argued that slavery had an “unhappy influence on the manners of our people”. Dear Thomas also expressed some disquietude over the fate of all slaves, but not enough to free his own.

But computers and cars and phones are essential to live in our society, you cry, not to mention my Playstation and AutoSuck. We need machines to grow the food, broadcast the news, keep the troops safe to kill another day. I want my MTV.

When a dedicated band of 12 men in 18th century England toured the countryside rallying people to the cause of abolition of slavery, the most difficult argument to counter was an economic one; how can the nation survive without cheap labor? Surely the empire would collapse without its far flung colonies of peasants working the fields and digging the ore. But slavery was abolished, principally on moral grounds, and the empire gradually faded until the 20th century when Britain was faced with the choice of restoring the glories of empire or honoring its status as a democratic republic. They chose republic and America chose empire.

In Mayan cosmology there have been a succession of “worlds” each destroyed by a different means; fire, water, giant jaguars, etc. One of the worlds, upon its encroaching doom, saw all the tools, weapons and household goods like pots and pans rebel. Soon the farm and game animals joined the tools in attacking their former masters. Is our world approaching its doom? Certainly automobiles are rebelling, exacting a pernicious vengeance by spewing clouds of highly poisonous carbon monoxide into our lungs and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Mechanized food production is pummeling us with heart attack burgers, cell phones are frying our brains, TVs and computer screens are sucking the eyeballs out of our heads and even holy cows are getting the mad disease.

How much material progress and growth can we stand before there is an irreversible planetary backlash that has the biosphere subside into quiescence and start all over with highly radiated earth and water? The answer lies in evolution of consciousness, broadening the circle of compassion to include beings we create. After all, they are extensions of ourselves, made from the same mother earth as our own bodies, imbued with intent that reflects our own. That is beginning to occur, but is the timing going to be right? Within an individual life we go through the stages of birth, growth, maturity and death. As a species we’ve birthed, grown . . . and now seem stuck in the growth stage. Politicians, business news pundits and economists are constantly talking about growth, growth as a sign of health. But ask a doctor what a growth means. Lately there is more talk and action about sustainability, and that’s an early sign of impending maturity. What initiatory rite of passage will launch us as a race into the next world?

Is it the technology of our creativity that is destroying us, or is it the desire to dominate and be dominated? Outward manifestations are reflective of inner conditions, so by disarming the forces of Mara by recognizing them as illusory, we can dismantle the interplay between master and slave and develop mutually affirming relationships not only with our human partners, but with our creations as well.

Now I’m going to call Apple and try to be civil.