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For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly.
I’m packed and ready to take off.
To be a little more specific, I’ll be around the southern part of Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, a part of the forest that’s been described to me as “Tolkienesque”.
An even more radical set of questions arises from the visions of some Western and Northern ayahuasqueros, particularly those steeped in evolutionary and ecological biology. Why do so many plants carry psychoactive tryptamines and other chemicals that are capable of producing profound consciousness-transforming perceptions in human beings, opening them up to the deepest mysteries of life and death? On one level this confirms the basic unity of all life on Earth, the oneness of the molecular genetic code. But the usual Darwinian assumption is that nothing evolves by chance -- natural selection works to favor those structures and capabilities that are adaptive in some way. So how is it adaptive for plants to produce alkaloids that seemingly serve no other particular function, and yet provide profound healing or insight in the human?
National Communication Systems list of “Hacking Sites”
(When it comes to hacking sites on the web, it really depends on your perspective as to who's a good guy and who's not. Just because someone has exploits on their site, it doesn't mean they're evil, but they're probably not saints either. Anyway, some hats are blacker than others; these are mostly various shades of gray and will hopefully give you a feel for what's going on in the hacking underground. Some may contain offensive content. Proceed at your own risk!) * 2600 * Antioffline * attrition.org * Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) * CyberArmy * Damage Inc. * DEF CON * Deleacroix AOD * Ghettohackers * Hacker Emergency Response Team (HERT) * Hack in the Box * Hackology * Hack Shock * Happy Hack * Higher Learning * Hackers Without Attitude (HWA) * Insecure.Org * Lady Sharrows Playground * Megasecurity.org * Mixter Security (Team Void) * Nomad Mobile Research Centre * Rain.Forest.Puppy * Sudden Discharge * TESO * w00w00 Security Development
Change how you see and you change how you feel. Change how you feel and you change your experience of the world.
One of the most exciting aspects of Hawkeen Training is NightWalking, a technique used to bring about heightened states of consciousness through vision.
Research into the technique began with trying to understand what it was that caused athletes to experience “flow” or “peak experience”, the ability to “see the whole court.”
John Brodie, who was quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers some 25 years ago, has talked enthusiastically and knowledgeably about flow, perhaps encouraged by his friend, Michael Murphy, founder of Esalen Institute. He once recalled how in the midst of a game his level of play would suddenly jump to a higher plane. Though huge lineman crashed in on him, he was in perfect control as he calmly stepped back, set up, and threw. Brodie described how the football appeared to travel on a "wire of will" that connected him to his receiver, usually the peerless Gene Washington. He claimed that he had seen defensive backs cut in front of Washington to intercept the ball, but it had hopped over their fingertips and into the pass catcher's hands. It seemed inevitable that the play be completed.
It was soon discovered that the same technique was used in swordsmanship.
In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman of 16th century Japan, implies that he fought his greatest duels with his eyes crossed, and goes into considerable detail about developing and using this strange ability. He writes somewhat mysteriously about a state he entered while so engaged. He also refers to the two types of sight which he calls Ken and Kan. Ken registers the movements of surface phenomena; it's the observation of superficial appearance. Kan is the examination of the essence of things, seeing through or into. For Musashi, Ken is seeing with the eyes, Kan is seeing with the mind, a difference paralleling that between style and substance. He gives instructions for developing Kan sight: "It is important to observe both sides without moving the eyes. It is no good trying to learn this kind of thing in great haste. Always be watchful in this manner and under no circumstances alter your point of concentration."
Moreover, it is utilized by Tibetan Lung-gom-pas (spiritual walkers).
The walker must neither speak, nor look from side to side. He must keep his eyes fixed on a single distant object and never allow his attention to be attracted by anything else. When the trance has been reached, though normal consciousness is for the greater part suppressed, it remains sufficiently alive to keep the man aware of the obstacles in his way, and mindful of his direction and goal. Any clear night is deemed good for the training of beginners, but strong starlight is especially favorable. One is often advised to keep the eyes fixed on a particular star. This appears connected with hypnotic effects, and we have been told that among novices who train themselves in that way, some stop walking when "their" star sinks below the skyline or rises above their head. Others, on the contrary, do not notice its disappearance because by the time that the star has passed out of sight, they have formed a subjective image of it which remains fixed before them. Some initiates in the secret lore also assert that, as a result of long years of practice, after he has travelled over a certain distance, the feet of the lung-gom-pa no longer touch the ground, and that he glides on the air with an extreme celerity.
Not to be outdone, it is also utilized by Apache stalkers (they called it Owl Vision).
NightWalking is based upon these basic aspects of vision:
- Cones have a one-to-one correlation with nerve fibers while many rods may connect a single nerve fiber. - Cones are sensitive to color while rods primarily register the intensity of light. - Rods are much more sensitive to light than cones. - Rods are much more sensitive to the detection of movement than cones. - The cones and rods are parts of separate neurological systems and are processed separately. In fact, there is much speculation on just where information from these two systems intersects in the brain.
The idea is, you have two separate vision systems: central (cones) and peripheral (rods). By focusing your eyes on a fixed point in front of you and not moving them, you can, in effect, shut down your central vision system. Though it may seem that by doing this you’re actually hindering your senses, it’s proposed that by “seeing with your mind”, you are able to see more, yet with fewer distractions. Doing this while walking, one is able to see and manuever around all obstacles – without even thinking about it. In the dark, your cones are rarely used at all. Thus, walking at night extends the separation between rods and cones. NightWalking.
Not only were we learning to travel freely in the dark; it was becoming apparent that this capability connected us more directly to a nonconscious part of our brains that seems devoted to our safety and general security. Far from being a storehouse of fear, we found the nonconscious--or at least the aspect of it that is accessed through the state of peripheral awareness--to be a trustworthy protector that not only leads us around rocks, away from cliffs and back to the truck, but perhaps also serves as a guide to some natural state, to some most basic part of ourselves. In the peripheral state we felt comfortable, alert, relaxed, open, happy and very alive. Feelings of fear, anger, worry, doubt, and lust seem antithetical to the state, as if the neural wiring, whatever it is, for these such strong emotions, is bypassed. Benign accurately describes the feeling of NightWalking.
By switching to peripheral vision, all other senses switch to peripheral as well, bringing about a state of peripheral awareness. As described by Tony Hiss:
We can experience any place because we've all received, as part of the structure of our attention, a mechanism that drinks in whatever it can from our surroundings. This underlying awareness--we call it simultaneous perception--seems to operate continuously, at least during waking hours, even when our concentration seems altogether engrossed in something else entirely. While normal waking consciousness works to simplify perception, allowing us to act quickly and flexibly by helping us remain seemingly oblivious to almost everything except the task in front of us, simultaneous perception is more like an extra, or a sixth, sense: it broadens and diffuses the beam of attention evenhandedly across all the senses so we can take in whatever is around us--which means sensations of touch and balance, for instance, in addition to all sights, sounds, and smells. Anytime we make conscious use of simultaneous perception, we can add on to our thinking. "One sees both close up and for miles, with the focus equal everywhere," as art critic Robert Hughes has said of landscape drawings by nineteenth-century German Romantic painters. With the help of this extra sense, the familiar hard-and-fast boundary between ourselves and our surroundings seems softened, expanding our sense of the space occupied by "here" and the time taken up by "now," and uncovering normally ignored patterns of relationships that make us part of larger groups and events. It's simultaneous perception that allows any of us a direct sense of continuing membership in our communities, and our regions, and the fellowship of all living creatures . . . .
“The whole secret to mastering peripheral awareness is keeping one’s visual attention independent from focused vision.”
NightWalking successfully brings one from water to air, bringing about a “pronounced calm”.
Walking while relying on peripheral vision requires that the conscious mind trust the nonconscious, and this inter-mind trust might be the essence of relaxation itself.
Perhaps unbeknownst to us, this is a state we all enter at some point. I often find myself “zoning out” in order to concentrate. Though my vision is no longer focused, I feel my sense elevated in this non-ordinary state of reality.
(All the following information was gathered from the extended birthday decoder. Try it out on your own.)
As I’ve mentioned previously, on the Dreamspace calendar, your birthday decodes to a Galactic Code. The code consists of three parts: a color, a tone, and a seal.
Mine happens to be Red Self-Existing Skywalker.
There are 20 seals on the calendar. Skywalker is the 13th. (It also has a little mantra that goes along with it: “Explores. Space.”) In so-called Galactic Notation, the number 13 is written with two bars, one on top of the other, and 3 dots in a line on top of that. Based on the number of dots in the number of your seal, you’re assigned an Earth Family, consisting of the other seals that have the same number of dots. I’m part of the three-dot family, which includes 3, 8, 13, and 18.
Self-existing is the 4th tone (4 dots in a line), of a possible 13 for each seal. (In Dreamspace, anything consisting of 13 is called a wavespell.)
Based on all this, you’re able to decode a 52 Year Destiny Castle, which is too complicated for me to attempt to explain here.
Your Galactic Code also comes with 5 kins – five different seals that relate to you. A destiny kin (“basis of life destiny” - mine is Skywalker), an analog kin (“like-minded power” - mine is World-Bridger), an antipode kin (“challenge power” - mine is Night), an occult kin (“hidden power of 7, the unexpected” - mine is Star), and a guide kin (“fifth force outcome power” - mine is Moon).
A poem is also created for you, based on your code. For Red Self-Existing Skywalker, I’m given:
I Define in order to Explore Measuring Wakefullness I seal the Output of Space With the Self-Existing tone of Form I am guided by the power of Universal Water
The week after next is my spring break. I’ve through countless plans in the past couple months, but I think I’ve finally settled on this:
I’ll leave Saturday morning, the 18th, get on I-5, and pull into Eugene, OR at about 5, where I’ll spend the night with Wade at the University of Oregon. Sunday morning I’ll take off from there, head over to Highway 101 and drive down the coast to Redwood National Park (probably the area around Crescent City, CA). Depending on the timing, I may spend Sunday night in the forest or just in the car on the side of the road. The rest of the week, till Thursday, I’ll backpack around the Redwoods and explore. Thursday I’ll head back up 101 and spend the night in the sand dunes on the Oregon coast. Friday I’ll continue up the coast, probably till somewhere around Ocean Shores, WA, where I’ll cut east to Olympia, WA, get back on I-5 and head home.
Of course, this is all tentative, and will probably change. 101 may end up being too slow going on the return journey, I may run out of food in the Redwoods, or gas money somewhere along the line.
Vavrek and I were trying to get together at some point during the trip, but that didn’t work out.
If anybody resides along my path, let me know. Perhaps we can get together.
There’s been some strange weather all along the west coast the past couple weeks. Snow, hail, thunder storms, and a tornado. Not the best time to go backpacking, especially without a tent, but what the hell. (I do have a poncho, which I’ve figured out how to turn into a shelter.)
Someone’s gotta do it.
