Surfing the Tao.com

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Moving to WordPress.org

More news on the blog front. I am in the midst of changing my domain, www.surfingthetao.com, to a WordPress site/blog. I'm still not sure if I'll keep this Blogspot or not - right now I have a lot of traffic here so I might continue posting here for awhile. If you are linked here or subscribed to this feed, consider switching over to www.surfingthetao.com. It's not pretty yet but I'm working on it!!

A Closer Look at the 2012 Phenomenon

Aloha all, here's a link to my interview with Occult of Personality.

Hawaiian Bees are Missing Too

Regarding my post yesterday on our neighborhood bees, I just spoke with my neighbor and got an update. Although the beehive in their yard is still buzzing away (behaving strangely, though, he said they are circling in unusual ways for some reason), they have 60 other hives up north on the island, and are confused as to why 20 of them are suddenly gone, just in the past couple of months. Nothing’s left, he said, no queen, nothing; just the cockroaches. He didn’t actually realize it was happening all over the world and I think he was a little stunned. He promises to talk to other island beekeepers to see if it’s happening to anyone else.

Scary.

Missing the Bees

I live in Hawaii in a relatively rural place so we are used to seeing things like wild turkeys wandering around our neighborhood. Yesterday a wild goat scampered across the street in front of my car to join its family on the other side. The Big Island has wild pigs, cattle, goats, horses, mongoose, parrots and even donkeys. (Not to digress, but Hawaii even has its own Bigfoot myths – two of my family members have personal stories about that.) In suburban neighborhoods it’s not unusual for people to keep chickens or goats; the best eggs I ever had were from a friend’s backyard. In fact the people across the street from us keep a goat as a lawnmower and have a beehive.

They’ve given us some honey before; it’s wonderful. I used to have a patch of mint that flowered and the bees just took over my garden. One time a few months ago they swarmed, coming right up our driveway next to our porch. We all ran inside, including the dogs, at a loss as to what might have upset them.

In the evenings lately I’ve noticed there is always one lone and angry bee buzzing around our porch light rather frantically, as if it’s bound and determined to go somewhere. With all the talk about the bees disappearing lately, I always hope it will find its way home.

The bee apocalypse is hot news right now – truly a sign of the times. So far no one is sure what’s going on - a virus, genetically modified crops, insecticides or maybe the effect of an increase in UV radiation which bees use to navigate. People are quoting Einstein as having said, "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

Next time I see my neighbor I will ask about the bees. It’s important to know if they are still around, and we would miss them very much indeed if they weren’t.

Blogging

A little off the subject for me today, but my brain is full of RSS feeds and tagging and widgets. Blogging is a rapidly growing and changing world! At least for my generation – hey, I grew up with Pong, I have a lot to learn! As a self-published author I’ve done most of my marketing online so I’m constantly searching for more places to put my stuff. Thanks to my smart and wonderful stepdaughters, I’ve entered the world of blogging and social networking sites. It’s been a great way to keep myself involved in the topics that interest me, and to find other like-minded people. Here’s to all the people that work hard coming up with new gadgets, designs and ideas. I look forward to more.

However this rapid advancement can also mean that you can do something on one site that you can’t do yet on another. Frustration at Blogger led me to Wordpress and I’m happy to find some things are easier there; on the other hand, since I’m not into CSS yet (hey, I can find HTML code now and know where to put it, that’s saying a lot for me!) I went back and decided I liked some of the things about Blogger too. Maybe I’ll just keep them both for awhile and see which one works out to be better. I’m still learning and I like the different options and people on all of them. But between my pages on Blogger, Wordpress, Myspace, Zaadz, Vox, Tribe; even experimented with Freewebs just because I could; and now there’s stuff like tag clouds, del.icio.us, Digg it, Technorati, Open ID, and the various feed readers – as a neophyte it can be difficult to absorb it all. But – also a lot of fun. Here’s to surfing, dudes!

2012 Hype?

USA Today recently published an article about the recent flurry of speculation surrounding December 21, 2012, which is the date the Mayan “Long Count” calendar is set to end. Many people believe it will be the ‘end of the world’, while others scoff at this notion. Some say it’s just the end of a cycle; others predict a change of consciousness, and see it as a positive change. Still others expect catastrophe. What’s interesting, notes USA Today, is that “Part of the 2012 mystique stems from the stars. On the winter solstice in 2012, the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years. This means that ‘whatever energy typically streams to Earth from the center of the Milky Way will indeed be disrupted on 12/21/12 at 11:11 p.m. Universal Time,’ Joseph writes.” (Note the 11:11…) There are so many books and TV specials being created around 2012 one can hardly keep track. Even Hollywood is getting into the action; director Michael Bay is planning a film called "2012: The War for Souls", based on Whitley Strieber’s book.

One of the chapters my book discusses the strange reoccurrence of a ‘destruction by fire’ in many belief systems – it’s mentioned in more than a dozen books of the Bible, as well as in the Koran, the Zand i Vohuman Yasht (Zoroastrian scripture), The Final Signs of Qiyaamah, the Norse Ragnarok, the Srimad Bhagavatam, the Ipuwer Papyrus, and by other Native American and medieval prophets. An asteroid? Polar shift? The return of the 10^th planet, Nibiru? Misuse of HAARP? Or maybe the eruption of a super volcano, or a massive solar flare? Could it have something to do with this coming alignment? It should be noted that other prophets set the date for the ‘apocalypse’ around 2018 or 2019. Still others, such as Nostradamus, give us a few more thousand years.

It is widely known, at least amongst conspiracy theorists, that the government has long had several survival plans in the case of world catastrophe – called Alternatives I, II and III, developed by the secretive Jason Society which was formed by President Eisenhower in 1957. Do they know something we don’t know? Or are they just being prepared for anything?

I have no answers; just a great interest and wonderment at the idea of it all. I’m also careful not to blindly follow the crowd; I prefer to test it against my own spirit, which has clearly alerted me to some coming monumental change – and yet not panicked me, either. Whether natural or man-made, things certainly seem to be setting up for a fall, if you just read the headlines these days. I won’t be surprised if the end really does come in 2012 – spiritually I’m prepared for that. But I won’t be too surprised if nothing happens at all: if we’re too hyped up for 2012 and nothing happens, it could be a classic case of boy crying wolf. Something even bigger could be on the horizon, and we wouldn’t pay attention anymore.

Operation Northwoods

Journalist James Bamford summarized Operation Northwoods in his April 24, 2001 book Body of Secrets thusly:

Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.^[11]

(From Wikipedia, where you can find lots more info and links on Operation Northwoods. )

Dolphins in the Navy

Since I live in Hawaii, news about dolphins always catches my eye. I’ve seen them many times here in the wild. Once I was alone meditating on the cliffs on the ocean at Honaunau, a sacred spot, when an entire pod swam up to the cliff shore directly underneath me. They looked up at me as if to say, hello, did you call? It was both exhilarating and eerie.

Last week I noticed the Navy released information about their program using dolphins and sea lions to patrol military bases. Trained Navy dolphins can drop a beacon if they detect a person in the water; they can also detect underwater mines. Dolphins were used for this in Iraq in 2003. They also patrolled the bay in San Diego during the Republican National Convention in 1996.

The U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program explains dolphins are useful for their echolocation, or biological sonar, which enables them to locate mines or other objects underwater. The Navy also lists a page of FAQs about their program, to explain questions such as why they use marine mammals (they also employ sea lions and whales), and whether they use them for offensive warfare. They claim they do not train them to attack, yet after Hurricane Katrina there were reports that three dozen U.S. military dolphins, which had been trained and fitted with toxic darts, had been washed away and were missing. They were supposedly accounted for soon after, and the Pentagon denied they were ever trained to attack. Perhaps the fear mongers and rumor mill at work; perhaps the truth is still secret.

The history of the use of marine mammals by the military can be found at PBS. Begun in 1960, the program was originally classified. Rumors still abound that dolphins were used to attack and kill enemy swimmers in Vietnam. By the 1990s, with the Cold War over, much (but not all) of the program was declassified and many of the dolphins were retired. Some still claim dolphins were used to attack and kill; many animal rights organizations object to their employment, and I found a petition online objecting to the Navy’s use of dolphins.

Many people believe dolphins are particularly special, beyond their incredible intelligence. I’ve seen many spiritual books and websites devoted to them. John Lilly was a scientist who was responsible for much of the early research involving dolphins and their means of communication, providing the basis for the movie “Day of the Dolphin” and the enactment of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. He also contributed to research involving psychology and human consciousness, including use of the isolation tank (forming the basis for the movie “Altered States”), and is often discussed alongside people like Aldous Huxley. His work was cited in an article by Steve Hammons, who also responded to the recent news about dolphins in the Navy. Hammons noted that the recently declassified information about Project Stargate includes a 1987 report called “A Remote Action Investigation with Marine Animals” regarding research conducted by SRI International into anomalous cognition. In other words, the Pentagon is looking into remote viewing, telepathy and other ESP phenomena relating to dolphins and our means to communicate with them.

The Perfect Wave

Some of you might already know a little about me and how my life changed so drastically nearly eight years ago. Since then I’ve seen the world, and the Universe, with new eyes and an awakened soul, now charged with pointing out the strange and impractical as I’d never seen them before.

My book, Surfing the Tao: A Revolution of Free Will was published nearly three years ago now; sometimes I’m asked if I will write another, but so far every time I’ve tried to start, that same strange book keeps coming out of me again – nearly word for word, no matter how long I’ve put it aside and refused to look at it.

That is despite the news and recent events I could probably add, and of course three more years of continued research which I am still compulsively driven towards. In the end, the point remains the same and the mission goes on as before. In that sense nothing has changed.

It is a slow but powerful mission; some days seem stagnant, others surge with answers and further possibilities. I sometimes wonder; should I be doing more? But the answer is always the same: it has a life of its own now, and must be allowed to grow at its own rate.

Something like learning to surf, then waiting for the perfect wave. It’ll come eventually.

UFO sighting makes news in Chicago

This past November airline personnel at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago reported sighting an unknown craft hovering in the area. The Chicago Tribune finally mentioned it on January 1, and then commented on it again the other day, after a flood of responses. I especially liked this one: "Hmm. Looks like we're being visited by advanced craft from other worlds, and not only is the U.S. government keen to cover up the details, so are many private corporations whose existence would be threatened by the free-energy technology that powers these vehicles." --Andrew Johnson, United Kingdom I always find it interesting when these things hit the mainstream news.