Philip Glass - Koyaanisqatsi

Balance

KOYAANISQATSI

ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life
in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating.
5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.

Fred

CBC Books - The Book Club - The great CBC romance novel challenge comes to an end

CBC Books - The Book Club - The great CBC romance novel challenge comes to an end

What a month it has been. We laughed and cried. We explored books covering sex, love and romance. We learned what it takes to write a romance novel. All month, Gia and Lachlan were never far from my thoughts. I found myself pondering what they were doing and how they were feeling. I became a romance writer.

Through my blood, sweat and tears, I learned some valuable lessons, for both writing and life.

I am not ending the month with a solid manuscript worthy of submission. In some people's eyes, this may mean I failed. But I learned what it takes to write a romance novel that can move beyond the realm of my imagination and into the hearts and minds of readers.

And it takes a lot.

1) You need to have passion

Without passion, you'll never be able to translate the fire inside you to the pages in hand. Romance novels work because the characters are filled with so much emotion that they can't help but fiercely fall in love, fight, break up and, ultimately, make up.

You also need to have passion for your characters and your story. If you don't care about your characters as much as you do your children, their story will become mangled, inconsistent and filled with about as much heat as a lukewarm bath.

2) You need to have a plan

Romance readers do have certain expectations: vibrant characters, compelling scenes and moments of crisis. But as the author, you're also the mapmaker and the guide. In order for your story to work, you can't just sit down and start typing. You need to think about whether what you want to do with your characters is not only realistic, but compelling enough to keep your readers engaged. (You could start typing if you want to. But every time I did, I typed myself into a corner and had to backtrack. I found this creatively frustrating and demoralizing. Having an outline helped me keep focus and avoided a lot of frustration.)

3) You need to have respect

Romance occasionally (and possibly unfairly) gets a bad rap. But those who like it, like it a lot. Those who like it are smart and savvy and they want stories that keep up with their intellect and carnal desires. If you don't respect the genre or the reader, your story won't be smart or original or worth their time. Know your audience, know your genre and know that you'll need to work harder than you ever imagined to be worthy of their attention.

4) You need to have humility

Putting my romance novel, A Chemical Reaction (yes, I chose a title!), out there for everyone to read was terrifying. What if people didn't like it? What if they actually read it? But by acknowledging it was a work in progress and accepting the criticism of others, I know the story and my writing became stronger. So thank you, everyone who took the time to submit a comment, send me an email or simply read what I wrote. I'm a better writer because of it.

5) You need to have creativity

With so many romance novels coming out every month, it's hard to stand out while still fitting in. If you're going for the Harlequin series-style romance, you need to give readers what they want, but still leave them wanting more. As a writer, you have a choice: make your story the best your chosen sub-genre has ever seen or reinvent the tried and true so your reader keeps turning the pages.

With that in mind, here are the final few chapters of my romance novel. Please offer your editorial suggestions in the comments below. I can't wait to see what you think! Harlequin, I may submit this manuscript after all. After I rewrite everything.

Associate producer Erin Balser is ready to give the NASCAR series at Harlequin a try now. Fast cars and fast women...what could be better?

Independent Artists - Viradical - Hologram: Holographic Buddha Network - R6XX : For Psychonauts and Curious Minds

Independent Artists - Viradical - Hologram: Holographic Buddha Network - R6XX : For Psychonauts and Curious Minds: "PRODUCT INFORMATION
This lenticular hologram was created for maximum visual effect by the masters of holography at Laser Guided Visions.

This hologram is 5'x7' and the patterns change just like the animated image when the hologram is moved from side to side.

Dreaming

 Carlos Castenada‘s seminal work, “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.” This wonderful book opened my mind to a new view of the universe.

 Carlos Castaneda,The art of dreaming. ... keep a dream diary 

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Jungian school of dream analysis, read Carl Jung  Man and his symbols, whose chief principle is that every person who appears in your dream is actually an aspect of your own self and the dream actions and scenarios reflect how you are acting in your life at the present time.

For example, I may dream of a sexy woman flirting with me and this would reflect some element of my feminine energy and own behaviour in the day or days which lead up to the dream.

 waking naturally without an alarm, exploring the lucid state, recapitulating the different dreams of a night and analysing them thoroughly.

...ready to hear what their unconscious has puzzlingly communicated to them and how most compassionately to break it to them.

Dreaming  has four stages, which reflects the four stages of REM most people experience in a healthy nights sleep. So on waking you may recall four distinct dreams, sometimes they blend into each other, but usually there are four separate dream episodes.

...............................................................................

Shamanism sang its sacred song to me by way of  Peru experience:  Ayahuasca rituals.

Ayahuascan Shamans use ayahuasca for healing purposes. 

A visionary state is produced but the real learning comes afterwards, through dreams. where the spirit of Ayahuasca teaches the Shaman how to heal a particular illness. 

The healing is transmitted through a song the spirit teaches the healer in a dream. These songs are called icaro and the more icaro a shaman knows the more powerful a healer the Shaman.

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holo

This lenticular hologram was created for maximum visual effect by the masters of holography at Laser Guided Visions.

This hologram is 5"x7" and the patterns change just like the animated image when the hologram is moved from side to side.

Blue Flower

Chinese Dragon Brown

http://thekungfucafe.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Chinese-Dragon-chinese-dragon-1920x1200.jpg

thekungfucafe.com

Chinese Dragon

http://thekungfucafe.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Chinese-Dragon-chinese-dragon-1920x1200.jpg

thekungfucafe.com

Billie Holiday and Lester Young: Fine and Mellow

http://www.jungian.ca/resources/jung-quotes/  Victoria analyst John Betts

Quotes by C.G. Jung from the Collected Works

(published by Bollingen Press)

About Art……

“Non-objective art draws its contents essentially from “inside.” This “inside” cannot correspond to consciousness, since consciousness contains images of objects as they are generally seen, and whose appearance must therefore necessarily conform to general expectations…. Behind consciousness there lies not the absolute void but the unconscious psyche, which affects consciousness from behind and from inside, just as much as the outer world affects it from in front and from outside.” (CW15 § 206)

“As this “inside” is invisible and cannot be imagined, even though it can affect consciousness in the most pronounced manner, I induce those of my patients who suffer mainly from the effects of this “inside” to set them down in pictorial form as best they can. The aim of this method of expression is to make the unconscious contents accessible and so bring them closer to the patient’s understanding. The therapeutic effect of this is to prevent a dangerous splitting-off of the unconscious processes from consciousness. In contrast to objective or “conscious” representations, all pictorial representations of processes and effects in the psychic background are symbolic. They point, in a rough and approximate way, to a meaning that for the time being is unknown. “ (CW15 § 207)

“Although my patients occasionally produce artistically beautiful things that might very well be shown in modern “art” exhibitions, I nevertheless treat them as completely worthless when judged by the canons of real art. As a matter of fact, it is essential that they should be considered worthless, otherwise my patients might imagine themselves to be artists, and the whole point of the exercise would be missed. It is not a question of art at all-or rather, it should not be a question of art – but of something more and other than mere art, namely the living effect upon the patient himself. The meaning of individual life, whose importance from the social standpoint is negligible, stands here at its highest, and for its sake the patient struggles to give form, however crude and childish, to the inexpressible.” (CW16, § 104)

About the Unconscious….

” The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. it only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of the personality, the anxious division of the day-time and night-time sides of the psyche, cease with progressive assimilation.” (CW16, § 329)

“Freud’s original idea of the unconscious was that it was a sort of receptacle or storehouse for repressed material, infantile wishes, and the like. But the unconscious is far more than that: it is the basis and precondition of all consciousness. It represents the unconscious functioning of the psyche in general. It is psychic life before, during, and after consciousness. And inasmuch as the newborn child is presented with a ready-made, highly developed brain which owes its differentiation to the accretions of untold centuries of ancestral life, the unconscious psyche must consist of inherited instincts, functions, and forms that are peculiar to the ancestral psyche. This collective heritage is by no means made up of inherited ideas, but rather of the possibilities of such ideas-in other words, of a priori categories of possible functioning. Such an inheritance could be called instinct, using the word in its original sense. But it is not quite so simple. On the contrary, it is a most intricate web of what I have called archetypal conditions. This implies the probability that a man will behave much as his ancestors behaved, right back to Methuselah. Thus the unconscious is seen as the collective predisposition to extreme conservatism, a guarantee, almost, that nothing new wi1l ever happen.” (CW16, § 61)

About the Collective Unconscious….

“Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war, to take but one example. Mankind is powerless against mankind, and the gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate. Today we call the gods “factors,” which comes from facere, ‘to make: The makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre. It is so in great things as in small. In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the “factors” themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors. To know this is decidedly unpleasant, for nothing is more disillusioning than the discovery of our own inadequacy. It can even give rise to primitive panic, because, instead of being believed in, the anxiously guarded supremacy of consciousness which is in truth one of the secrets of human success-is questioned in the most dangerous way. But since ignorance is no guarantee of security, and in fact only makes our insecurity still worse, it is probably better despite our fear to know where the danger lies. To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem. At any rate we then know that the greatest danger threatening us comes from the unpredictability of the psyche’s reactions. Discerning persons have realized for some time that external historical conditions, of whatever kind, are only occasions, jumping-off grounds, for the real dangers that threaten our lives. These are the present politico-social delusional systems. We should not regard them causally, as necessary consequences of external conditions, but as decisions precipitated by the collective unconscious.” (CW9i, §49)