Lace Masks And Ethics

People can get lost in their own sophistication. Have you ever noticed that there are people who will launch themselves into a dissertation on mathematics, or god in relation to mathematics(!), or advanced physics, or some other thing full of special obscure terms and terminologies that no one else in particular really has much firm grasp of – if indeed anyone does at all...

And they do so with verve, mainly because they feel the thrill of having discovered that they have what passes for them as intelligence. And of course intelligence has had such a great reputation in the past in society generally so it's no wonder they feel a thrill.

I suppose intelligence for these people must seem like some kind of a new toy.

I intend to bring the word 'ethical' - believe it or not - into my argument here. The governing spirit of things that are done – the ethos – in our modern times, could easily be simply erraticism. And so, those entangled in their own webs of complicated ideas and who really are simpletons on every other level – can't tie their own shoelaces and so on – may be acting quite ethically, in laying claim to the present-day high ground of the human intellect. : ) They are presenting a true depiction of their ethos!

From where I stand, today there's just too much – too many foolish and thoughtless iterations of someone else's original ideas or innovations – and none of it shows the formal consistency that a genuine form of ethics would donate to a validly intelligent human endeavour.

But one has to be careful to distinguish between outward style as deliberate studied design of a human facade or mask, as opposed to the purely opto-graphical capturing of human form as an aesthetical appreciation. This is the difference between the work of Helmut Newton and say – Ellen von Unwerth (who created the photograph to the right). I don't personally believe Newton wanted to show an appreciation of the human form, as much as he desired to explore an intellectual juxtapositioning of human things but involving the human form and this of course comes across almost always as erotic and sexual style. Von Unwerth, on the other hand, I would say explores a simple direct aesthetic appreciation of the human form as her main photographical subject matter without too much extra symbolic meaning. Her work often appears decadent but why this should be so in the sense of style escapes me. Maybe the human form is decadent!

People who know me know I have a great interest in design – industrial design, commercial design, also design in personal style as typified by the well-known stylists: Panté, Lagerfeld, Armani, and so on.

The intellectual ethics of style – once you disregard the current ADHD-afflicted, erratic mindset – goes like this:

A theme must be consistently carried through across the whole of the subject matter. The lace face-mask is mirrored by the lace-covered high-heeled shoes. This implied intellectual vision of style shows the fabric (lace) as translucent, confidential, ornate yet honest. It reminds us also of the Tao – black and obscure or impenetrable in part and clear and penetrable in another part. The surface and the internal. The front and the rear. Et cetera. It recalls to us the Hermetic Code: 'As above so below.' What we cannot see will be as one with what we can see.

Beneath the skirt we will expect the underwear to be black Chantilly lace, oui? And so too must the wearer themselves also be translucent, confidential, ornate yet honest. This is the meaning of personal ethics in relationships. Of course this is just one example of something where style is consistently expressed. I am not sure that people today quite so deliberately intend to express themselves as definitely as the image example I have just suggested, but the effect is that a personal inner haphazardness still comes across. We cannot escape the meaning of what we look like. Whether we like it or not. Some people think they are being very clever by employing complex facades and calling it style – but old hands see through them very easily.

And Kippers For Breakfast

This week I've been staying at a golf course resort. The course itself was designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., whom many regard as the world's all-time best golf course architect.

I haven't played golf in recent years myself although at one time I was a good player. I was taught as a teenager by a knowledgeable old Scot and frankly I loved the game and eventually just couldn't abide the great swelling tide of new players who turned up around the late Eighties along with the Japanese money of that era and its interest in brightly-coloured criss-crossed plus-fours and all things Anglo-American.

But every cloud has a silver lining.

The money that swirls around the golfing world nowadays has meant that the hotels attached to most of the top-grade courses lack for nothing.

The standard of service, quality of food, solidity of everything you touched – were all reasons to be extremely cheerful, if not indeed quite joyous, given the miserable day and age in which we live right now. (It's just a stock photo of fruit on the right there - the fruit at the hotel was light years better. I'll take my own pics next time!)

And I take it kippers for breakfast is rather normal for golf resort hotels... It wouldn't be too normal in most Australian households in high summer though let me tell you!

When was the last time I observed as fine an array and selection of fruit, for example, at the breakfast bar? Nope. Can't think of an 'ever before.' And as a good friend of mine noted yesterday, if John says so then it must pretty damned good because he's seen it all before and been there when it was something special. I had to smile when I saw him raise his eyes at my explanation of the extraordinarily high quality of the food.

I guess there may also be some effect coming from the China market commodity boom going on in Australia – particularly in Western Australia - right now...

Frankly I like the prospects for investing in Australia again right now and I haven't felt that way for, what, um, maybe thirty years...?

Let me tell you this much about money: it's pretty dumb stuff. When it's really around in huge chunks it just goes everywhere and anything can make you a profit. It's around in Australia right now. And I don't think its going away any time soon either. People who know me know that in fact most of my money is in South Africa and London, but I still have a few things here in Australia that I never thought would do too much. Wrong!!!!! Just shows ya, don't it; eggs in different baskets and all that.

All the best,

Calvin J. Bear

The Spirit Of Education

I am not an educator. I am an entrepreneur and businessman. My father, on the other hand, who came from a very wealthy family in shipping, tea and banana and pineapple plantations, and eventually oil – was an educator. He gave up the family business to teach english, which he ended up doing for forty years after World War II until he retired.

He claimed the two best writers in the english language were Arthur Quiller-Couch and Joseph Conrad. And he said Conrad demonstrated that people who did not have english as the mother tongue often wrote the language better than native english speakers because they actually tried to follow the rules of grammar. Conrad of course, was not English.

My own view of why my father gave up what was and would have been an incredibly lucrative life, in order to teach people who were pretty impoverished after the war, was very probably due to the life-changing experience the war itself had on him.

Personally I cannot teach and generally I will not try either. People who want to learn and know they need to learn – as may have been true of those who had missed the normal years of senior schooling, but had survived the war – are vastly different from people of the modern era who know everything, have eveything, and are usually seeking only greater access to ever greater material wealth.

The power of real education can certainly gain you material wealth. But the point of it is not that.

Virginia Woolf is a classic case in question. She was born rich, and both vastly more naturally intelligent, as well as stunningly well-educated – but she had no degree and never attended any university. An avant garde personality living in the wrong time, and dying tragically.

(Pic is Tilda Swinton as Woolf's 'Orlando.')

Being educated DOES NOT necessarily mean having a degree. I know it is widely held that being held up to the scrutiny of academic peers, and testing oneself against a benchmark of peer-rated excellence is the philosophy behind the honour and desirability of the modern university education.

And there is also an idea that the best educations develop leaders in various fields. Including, certainly, in professional fields.

At the same time though, happiness itself, for the wise individual, cannot be counterfeited under great swathes of money only... Happiness for a human can only come from the deepest understanding of a very large number and variety of things, including, of oneself as well as of others – and sometimes, nay, I would say often, in order to arrive at such understanding, it is necessary to abandon the mercantile altogether, and what even appears to the less wise, the immediately practical as well, and devote all attention to the important. And what is important? The human spirit is important. The character of a person is important – meaning, as my father would say, it isn't what you look like but the content of your character that counts. It is not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game, as the saying goes. It seems platitudinous but I maintain it to be true.

In order to follow the path of real education, one must hold still against a strong tide. One must discover what is worth fighting for, really worth fighting for; it's about values and having them. So many great and wise people have gone before you, and they have left their writings, and their words and their works. When your heart strings are moved by the legacies of those certain particular human beings who have gone before you, then you have found educators to follow.

And when all others have fallen away, and that paragon leads loftily ever upward even to the very highest reaches, the most difficult of places, the most unhuman and absurd and humanly despised of intellectual concepts, may you still be there, following that star in its own brightest divine firmament against the black and ignorant void of the rest of empty space, the place to which all the merely finite must be consigned eventually. And then you will be happy indeed with your position in the Universe. Knowing more than the merely mortal. And as the Platonists say, befriending the gods themselves.

Meditative Trance Consciousness

I like to throw a few things around on this blog that might go to worthy people who are here because they like and follow ideas and do not suffer the ADD that 'the mass mind' apparently suffers from. I'll take the risk, frankly, that the ideas won't be going too far from this fairly limited circle, which is in the hundreds, not the thousands I should add. And I'll further gamble that those who are well-connected or business-oriented who stop by here are capable of filtering what I write so that whatever large scale use they might make of something 'exposed too early' will be unlikely to harm anyone.

And so with those words of preparation let me mention the name of Tomas Prevenslik.

In connection to breakthroughs that Prevenslik came up with, I want to underscore that brain neurophysics – and not just neurophysiology – involves tremendously complex science that is way beyond the scope of this blogspot to indulge too deeply in here. At the same time, one can say this much readily enough: the popular terminology used by New Age ideas often obscures valuable scientific technical understandings that we do have about various experiences that people talk about involving trance states, and conscious awareness, and seemingly unusual capacities.

Accepted theories of mind and memory raise questions about where or even how certain trance state experiences are recorded in the brain, and for reasons of facility I am forced to simply assert here that one will find that many in-trance experiences cannot be 'remembered' when back in a conscious state. And that is because popular 'techniques' are not as advanced as science actually allows the potential for them to be.

You can chant a money mantra, for example, all you like and very probably you will make yourself go into a type of sleep during which you will perceive things only to not be able to retain those perceptions when you 'awaken' again.

Prevenslik – and a few others who are also in the avant garde of brain science research – will tell you that wine 'experts' are quite wrong in what they say about what they experience and also quite wrong in claiming to detect certain perfumes and odours and flavours the way they have developed this whole virtually completely commercial tradition now about it. More likely, they are creating a trance state from discrete micro-electronic arrangements of molecules and perceiving connections inside neuron networks in their own brains, and not perceiving things directly from odour molecules at all. Gasp.

Yes of course I have amazing high scientific research and literature that you can access with lots of money, but I know most of you are not going to do that. You might though, want to contact me if you are an executive in charge of marketing wine for a very large corporation. Short of that I am certainly not going to reveal all, that's for sure. But I don't make my email address a secret: it's interdeq@iinet.net.au

I will say this: if you take any old money mantra and chant away at it, it might stand a better chance of 'working' if you can recall what you experienced while you were in the part of the routine in which you were semi-conscious, or even 'unconscious.' What the brain perceives in these states when 'prepared' to think on a certain subject is very important. Money is fast, unobtainable, fascinating (I quote Arturo Perez Reverta). To perceive where it is flowing one must be able to perceive also, and without critical prejudice, that which is fast, unobtainable, fascinating. That is the meaning of one type of real 'money mantra' that puts your brain into a directed type of trance condition where you can 'see' these things.

Year Of The Dragon - Ice, Water, Power, Money

Money, is like water. Without enough water, things die; without enough money things also die.

If you watch modern business, financial institutions, people, politicians -, they all have this habit of trying to cling onto money by stopping its movement and turning it into a fixed form. And if you extend the first metaphor, what they are attempting to do is 'freeze the water into ice.' Which takes some considerable energy.

And that is why the world is in the place it is in right now.

Leaving aside for the moment all the academic economic questions about whether or not it is possible to perpetually increase the Money Supply, at a more fundamental level we are simply dealing with a kind of desperation and a grasping for something that is not that clearly understood, in the vain hope and belief that by 'clinging onto it' you will somehow 'have' what is quite ephemeral when in a given stationary position. Money is fluid and mobile. The flow – and not just the flow, but the system of flow – is what's important.

The people who are genuinely rich are those who have the power to move money around – not people who possess 'iced' money. If the world has gotten itself into a position where so much of the previous flows have been turned into ice, as it were, the only money mantra worth talking about is one that can melt that ice that is under the hand of whoever is keeping it under their hand.

Of course, the beauty of money itself, is that outside of a refrigerated atmosphere, it does have the tendency to melt virtually all by itself.

I can confidently tell you, that heading into this Chinese New Year of the Dragon (beginning 23 January, 2012) there is a genie fire being lit under all that ice that governments, politicians, 'technocrats,' and nominally 'financial' institutions, are trying to clutch to themselves for dear life – and it will all melt away and slip right through their fingers. Into the system of pipes that clever people have devised and positioned to channel it.

Last pic is an Omani Frankincense burner...

The Sultan of Oman buys 40% of his entire country's annual production of Frankincense - which is regarded by experts as the best in the world - and he burns it 24 hours a day throughout the year in a huge burner open to the sky. Quite extravagant and exotic. 

Calvin J. Bear

The Sage and Oracle of OMSF

Sex Mantra

I want to tell you about something called a 'sarangi.' It's a musical instrument from India.

The sarangi has a much more ancient origin and mysterious past, than is commonly understood. Modern popular beliefs even in India today are stilted on account of the effects of the intrusion of several waves of invaders in history who went on to occupy and militarily and politically dominate the peoples within those states of the Subcontinent where the sarangi was played.

Although numbers of players can get a tune out of the instrument, the definitive way in which it is designed to actually be played, is known to only a very rare few.

Perhaps a tiny handful of old Sikh knowledgeable individuals might remain who could relate the truth about the sarangi, and then again it is doubtful that much of the modern generation care to grasp these stories in the face of the current era's iPad invader.

Commonly, even among literate middle classes who ought to know better, the sarangi is somewhat of a taboo instrument on the basis that it has a history presumed to be traced in the brothels or at least the sex priestess sub-culture temples on the edges of the Great Indian Thar Desert in Rajasthan.

In all cases it is an 'underground' musical instrument – a feature of an 'underground' and hidden, secret culture.

As you all know, the Garden of Eden is encircled by a wall of heat and flame and fierce angels with fiery swords barring the way to mortals... So not many people get into there anymore.

However... Let me get on with my story.

Sarangi means 'one hundred colours.' A mantra is some configuration of sounds, not necessarily verbally intelligible, which have 'atomic' sound elements in them and which are the keys to various transformational powers in the material universe. And they can get you into the Garden of Eden...

The great Maharaja Jai Sing II (1688 - 1743) commissioned buildings which gathered together and housed 'celestial' technical developments along with their formulae – or principles – which went along with the instruments to allow the actual functioning of those instruments for some purpose. But the point of it all is lost today even somewhat on the many recognized scholars writing about this endeavour which is known as the 'Janta Mantar.' They tend to concentrate on what appear to be astrological purposes for the structures and formulae written on them.

Jai Sing and his architect knew that the only thing the human being can do on this earth down through succeeding generations of Mankind, is improve on the physical instrumentation; for all the fundamental principles are already known (according to the Vedas) – which is why the formulae are written down on the outsides of the structures. There is simply nothing at all being 'discovered' at CERN that is not already written down and explained by the ancient Vedantas. Vibration of the precursor quantum particle of standard matter is the foundation of the entire physical universe and this is detailed in the Naad Vedas. Even the much-vaunted aspect of chirality which people think is 'new' is dealt with there.

There is a special type of 'guru' who is of a rather occult nature in Rajasthani culture – this is the Naad Brahma master of one hundred colours. This person understands such a vast range of nuanced vibrations (of sound), that they are really able to implement a fundamental atomic sound arrangement that will legendarily 'open doorways into heaven.'

At this point I shall recommend that you look up a video clip on Youtube under the title of 'Sindhi Music Sarangi' which is a short 2.16 minute piece played by a young Langa master called Sikander Khan. (His name means Alexander the Great King btw...) This example will appropriately show how the sarangi is played in the hands of a genuine cult caste mantrik. The techniques of playing are highly confusing to a non-adept and include striking the strings with the same fingers that also at times press down, vibrato and glissande to get the bowed notes, in note patterns that contrast to the vibration of hidden sympathetic strings inside the three sound boxes.

One must realise that to properly meditate on the sarangi music in question, it is vital to remove outside interruptions of all kinds, or at least as much as is possible.

The playing of sarangi (one hundred colours), especially in this particular piece, is not, as is captioned in the video clip, merely 'a set of patterns,' but is in fact a mantra arrangement carried out by a sacred and perfected instrument that guarantees the activated results of the mantra for the person hearing it, where a problematic, untrained human voice alone cannot give that guarantee. This however is not a money mantra (which is often what people want to hear) being rendered in the video clip, it is a sex mantra.

And yet, the comparison of a money mantra, to a sex mantra, can unveil aspects of how mantrams are expected to work generally: like the sympathetic strings resonating within the sound boxes of the musical instrument, harmonic vibrations set off effects at spatial distance, and consequently at time differentials, from the precise moment energies were formed into their specific deliberate 'template' pattern in their musical mantra formulation.

Unlike money mantrams, sex mantrams transform subtle feelings, thoughts, sounds, impressions, memories and visions and are able to do so almost immediately – whereas money mantrams act on grosser material elements and take longer to 'manifest.' A sex mantra can make an almost immediate connection on what in the West is called a spiritual plane, and even a person's actual 'consciousness presence' may be evoked in a sex mantra. A deva - though not an ordinary human being – can materialize their subtle physical presence through evocation by the mantra meditation of an adept.

Most of what you will read on the web listed as being or claiming to be 'mantrams,' even on Wikipedia, consists of devotional prayers only and not actual mantrams. A mantra is an unintelligible sound as far as human speech or words are concerned and therefore not able to be translated as 'hail this god' or 'peace/love/whatever,' as is the case with almost everything you will read which claims to be about a mantra, or claims to actually be a mantra.

Real mantras or mantrams are possessed only by great individuals and passed on only to those chosen by them. However certain great scribes throughout history have also been able to more widely disseminate true indications of these things.

In future articles I must outline some techniques to bring the meditative trance condition nearer to the fully-conscious normal sensatory state, otherwise a lot of the experience of mantra practice can be lost to the current memory and held only in the subconscious.

'Guru' Calvin J. Bear I

The Instrument And The Formula

“...The young scholar stumbles his way along and unsuspecting, falls into the deva maze. Unseen hands support him as, in a daze, he wanders further and deeper within. Wild and unknown flora reclaim their territory and overhead, the Monsoon thunders and heavy tropical rain crashes down in a deluge everywhere in the outside world.”

Having from a very early age encountered great masters in different fields and quickly having realised that they were nothing at all like the simplistic public facades and images presented that were mostly the ways they were known to the majority of the public – it is now not something I find all that unusual for me personally, that is, to accept an uncommon juxtaposition of certain things otherwise taken for granted, as I am about to expound on for you here now.

(Pic: Iggy Pop performing Johhny O'Keefe's 'Wild One.')

It is a fact, that on the two separate occasions I attended lectures given by Johnny O'Keefe (a globally-influential rock and roll star of the Fifties and Sixties) it was he, in fact, who introduced names such as Truman Capote and Frederick Matthias Alexander to me. He spoke of those people in connection with a movement centered in California - which included followers such as Aldous Huxley - that taught various techniques and ideas enabling artists and performers to project themselves to a large audience. He never stressed personal self-expression that much, rather, his claim was that it was all a question of using physical energy and connecting that energy up through the crowd via rhythm and music. I clearly recall him saying that his American agent, Lee Gordon, challenged him to build his (eventual) famous audience high energy level, initially from a few hundred working class people, tired and worn out from a long week, and unlikely naturally to have anything left to give to 'audience participation' of any positive nature. It is worth some passing note that a Prime Minister of Australia – Paul Keating – was also a music performers' agent in the same Balmain streets at one time slightly later on...

A relative of Johnny O'Keefe's, Andrew O'Keefe, is today a very successful and well-known Australian television and media personality who sometimes is called upon to relate what his impression of the great 'JOK' is or was. And he is retiring in the way he speaks of him and understandably for modern audiences underscores the 'fast life' aspect that is also one of the downsides of the particular kind of fame that JOK had.

If you look at a Youtube video clip of JOK performing something like 'Shout' and observe the girls and women screaming and the incredibly intense performance from O'Keefe, whichever way you look at it, it is hardly something highly intellectual. Mistake. O'Keefe was an erudite, highly-intelligent, and very self-analytical person whose performances were all strictly 'by design.' He knew what he was doing. There would be very few people alive in the world today who actually knew back then or know even now that about Johnny O'Keefe. To inspire cycnical, sceptical, tired, working people to give up so much energy is a scientific feat of no small proportion.

There is so much available on every subject today via the internet, but to me it seems not merely 'only' commentary, but mostly superficial coverage passed off on many occasions as 'the actual essence of the thing itself.'

In the next upload, I intend to render an example of something I learned from other musical masters, this time from India and the Far East, and something quite esoteric and also rather ancient. It will not be just commentary, but a practical functioning exercise and understanding of a 'mantra' or 'magical' formula. Well let's not say magical, but rather, mysterious. And, it will produce an effect. I don't think I can explain adequately via a website everything Johnny O'Keefe explained in person about the real and actual mechanisms behind engaging a large rock and roll audience, but I think I will be able to communicate more tangibly the nature of the next subject, which exposes and juxtaposes the genuine underlying hidden aspects of what is generally only superficially known, even to the mass audiences of the actual culture and location from which it comes – that is, specifically in terms of location at least, from Rajasthan, in North India.