Entering the Dream ~via the Crop Circle Portal~

Don’t Go Back to Sleep

Puerta de Hayu Marca-- Gate of the Gods-- in the Stone Forest, Puno, Titicaca, Peru

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
Don’t go back to sleep, Rumi (1207-1273)

July is High Summer. Time to appreciate earthly gifts. This is brought into sharp focus if one has been through the wringer, as the human race has since early March this year.

So far 2011 has been no ordinary year. There have been revelations and revealings in the way Society conducts business and the Earth has moved for many — literally and metaphorically. Heads of world organizations have rolled and words like ‘transparency’ and ‘integrity’ have surfaced in political speeches and media news. Earth tremors, flash floods, famine and raging wildfires have contributed to more human anguish, but world charitable associations announce greater generosity of giving than ever before.

Becoming Star-wise

Milky Way: 'We are Stardust; we are golden and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden' Joni Mitchell 1969.
Milky Way composite photo 2011, courtesy APOD

More ephemeral than most: Sun crop motif, June 28th, at Allington, Devizes, Wiltshire, cut same day by the farmer,
photo courtesy Dion Steenbergen

Earlier, in the June crop circles, designs seemed to indicate a new twist to the cosmic tale — directing devotees to look heavenward — with planetary alignments reflected in the corn, along with solstitial renderings of meandering comets and other cosmic bodies, inner solar system orbits and a succession of surprise visitors from the void.

Crop circle at Allington (2), also June 28th, repeats a solar-orbiting theme

Two crop circles at Allington Devizes appeared to react to human intervention. After the first sun motif (Allington [1], above, June 28) was unceremoniously cut, another appeared in a neighboring field that same afternoon — at Allington [2], left.

Circlemakers are nothing if not persistent.

These celestial motifs served to bring to the notice of the less-observant croppie that much is changing in our Universe, with a lot of it being witnessed in our skies in this and coming months.

2010 launch: space shuttle Endeavor from Cape Canaveral to 185 miles, prolonged photo exposure by James Vernacotola

Even the less-aware city-dweller realized (via tv/internet) that there is more to last Friday’s final launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis than dollars. Atlantis docked last night at the International Space Station. ISS is becoming a reality: a means of global cooperation and understanding. It also signals our level of commitment to stepping off into Space.

Hubble images, the process of measuring comets, scanning distant stars, monitoring our own Sun — 3D and 360º — and other such esoteric descriptive metaphors have entered the language.

Instead of ‘street-wise’, we are becoming star-wise.

Then July changed the tune.

At Honey Street, a little south of the Wiltshire crop circle “hub”, Alton Barnes, a small crop glyph — like a body launching into orbit — had materialized overnight in a field outside the Barge Inn on June 26th. One week later, two more designs appeared: an apparently unfinished ‘sword’ motif in the same field; and another — coded script between two circular terminals of exquisitely-laid wheat — 100 yards south of the second formation. See my immediately previous blog and Youngbloodblog for details.

Honey Street July 4th unfinished Swords message: potential yet to be fulfilled

Swords, in Tarot interpretation, rule the unseen realm of air. Their symbolism deals with matters of the intangible: thought and mind. Many scholars also consider Swords to represent challenges or difficulties. But challenges which will be overcome — sliced through with scimitar-like precision.

Just as many schools of thought would recognize a challenge as an opportunity, Tarot Swords represent a window into the realm of intangibles — the imagination. Looking at the ‘unfinished’ crop circle at Honey Street laid out overnight July 4th, (Four of Swords), the Tarot interpretation suggests: ‘the card of solitude and the need to experience time apart from others to gather one’s thoughts and feelings before entering the fray.’ The calm before the storm.

There has certainly been a lot of fray. And it seems there will be more.

On the surface, the suit of Swords represents:

Five of Swords: formation completed July 6th; achievement, Phoenix-like at the tip of its touch

The Mind
Perception
Observation
Self-Image
Ego

Its often starkly-depicted imagery is used in some Tarot designs to indicate the intense importance of the Mind. Do not mess with the realm of Mind: it is serious business. Do not approach Mind lightly. It is one of the most powerful, incredible devices in the Universe.

In Tarot as well as in real life, the mind, although a wondrous tool if used rightly, can also hold potential for sinister mutilation of self and others.

Two days later, the Four of Swords formation was ‘completed’: became Five.

Five of Swords signifies something overwhelmingly more exposed: Open dishonor, sacrificing integrity in the face of public scrutiny and acting in self-interest, indulging in power-plays; experiencing defeat by some of the greatest challenges we face in this highly-competitive world.

It is not insignificant that over the July 4th weekend world attention was focused (in the US) on the commemoration of a 1776 event which ousted the British and (in Britain) on the scandal of international business dealings of a newspaper empire which were less than ethical and had American investors exiting in droves.

Milk Hill Celtic knot phase two July 8th, 2011: the infinite triangle; without beginning or end

By contrast, the following weekend, after the appearance of a double-phase (July 6th and 8th) Celtic Triskele at favored Milk Hill itself — a Trinity knot symbolizes perpetuity and faith in the infinite: a celebration of endless cycles of time, human ingenuity and beauty– world attention was focused on Prince William and Kate. Darlings of world media, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge completed a whirlwind tour of Canada, and arrived in southern California to be greeted by a stunned Hollywood (not easily stunned), going on to star as royal guests at a massive charity BAFTA black-tie Saturday night event on July 9th. The breezy and beautiful young couple’s arrival in the City of the Angels provided an exercise in human leveling: allowing the world to see glitz and glamor through a different set of eyes.

Triskele: Celtic Trinity knot symbolizing the power of the feminine, returning to balance after extreme acts in an opposite direction

Milk Hill is not only the world’s most desirable (crop-circle-decorated, eco-friendly) location, but it happens to be the highest point in Wiltshire, at 968ft. That makes it almost a mountain! Its undulating outline is also home to the Alton Barnes White Horse (c. 1812) carved in chalk and lovingly maintained by the Wiltshire Crop Circle Study Group.

During one single intervening week — between crop circle phases 1 & 2 Honey Street Swords Suite (July 4 & 6) and 1 & 2 Milk Hill Trinity Knot (July 6 & 8), a whole world changed.

Suddenly, instead of a sound-asleep Great British news public reading tabloid media which pandered to its so-called ‘hunger for grime and crime’, ethics, dignity and a sense of honorable balance stepped on to the stage and wiped one of the main players off the boards. Integrity followed as multi-million dollar advertizing contracts were cancelled with its media umbrella ownership, and some of earth’s Meek (the divine feminine; believers in truth, kindness and gentle ways) felt a little giddy as they came up for air in a new atmosphere.

The White Horse of Milk Hill might well be seen as the milk white charger bearing the archetypal knight-in-shining-armor to the rescue of Humanity. Or, in Electric-Universe-speak:

The Milk-white Avenging Angel —Plasma Universe-style — bringing a message from the Milky Way

The Celtic gods –alongside archetypes from other ancient cultures– were smiling on the human race for a brief glimpse in time and sending their support in crop circle language for their avid interpreters to spread the word.

The Peruvian Portal
The opening image of this blog post features an enigmatic doorway carved into volcanic rock in the Stone Forest — a unique area of petrified shapes: people, spirits, gods, cities in stone — 35km from Puno, Peru. The local people [los Indios], descendants of the Inca, believe it to be a star portal or stargate through which one may travel — at certain times — to experience immortality. The doorway measures precisely seven metres high and seven metres wide, with a central aperture in the lower doorway just 2m high. In 1996 a local mountain guide rediscovered the doorway after it had been lost to modern eyes for 1500 years. He was overcome by its presence. He said: “It was like a revelation from God…”

Golden disc: key of the gods of the Seven Rays -- opens the Peruvian portal

“I have dreamed of such a construction repeatedly over the years, but in the dream the path to the door was paved with pink marble, and with pink marble statues lining either side of the path. In the dream, I also saw that the smaller door was open and there was a brilliant blue light coming from what looked like a shimmering tunnel within.”
Jose Luis Delgado Mamani

Inca legend describes it as the ‘gateway to the Land of the gods’ and that their greatest heroes in earliest times were chosen to walk through the portal to join their gods in a life of immortality. That, when the Spanish conquistadores arrived and began looting the Inca empire, Aramu Muru—also written Amaru Meru—a shaman/priest of the Incan temple of the Seven Rays, secretly escaped with the sacred Inca golden disc — the ‘Key of the Gods of the Seven Rays’ — and hid in the mountains of Hayu Marca. When he came upon the Portal, watched by its sacred shaman-protectors, he offered them the Key. The golden disc opened the portal for him to walk through.

There is a small disc-shaped aperture at the side of the human-scale opening which is said to be where the key might be placed if it is ever rediscovered. The Inca portal legend concludes with the prophecy that the stargate will one day open to ‘many times larger than its actual size… and allow the gods to return in their “sun ships”…’

Inca sun ships… Wiltshire crop circles calling on the sacred imagery of the Celts, avenging swords, the essence of Tarot divination, suggesting the power of the Mind and Imagination…

We are capable of dreaming our own future… if we choose to wake up, invoke mastery, practise self-discipline, and ask help from Nature — the gentle energy of Mother Earth. She is, after all, our genetic archetype: the divine Feminine in all her guises, our parent in the bewildering vastness of the Cosmos.

“…(if we sell you our land), you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where Man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers. The earth is our Mother. What befalls the Earth befalls all the sons of the earth”
Chief Seattle to the American Government, 1854

This euphoric glimpse into Dreamtime may not last. The bad guys might still find other devious ways to control the populace… But for a few brief days in early July, we woke up. There was a buzz on the internet, on Twitter and on Facebook, that maybe there is a Heaven after all. And… more encouraging…that maybe we’re still capable — in our Imagination’s Dreamtime — of getting there.
©2011 Marian Youngblood

The Plasma Universe: our Electric Connection

Gods wielding Thunderbolts: not imaginary mythological tales but formative Earth's memory of her violent past

Plasma braids:
“Thunderbolt that steers the Universe”
Heraclitus, 5th Century B.C.

Our galaxy is not void.

For years we were taught traditional theory of our Universe as ‘space’, a vacuum, inert, orderly with few surprises. It was forever expanding outward from a point of primeval Big Bang, controlled and geared by gravity (the weakest celestial force), full of black holes, with anomalous behavior in comets, meteorites and exploding galaxies explained as the work of anti-matter, ‘dark’ matter or, as in nuclear physics, attributed to ‘unknown’ factors such as quarks, charm, CERN‘s conjectural Higgs-Boson particle or the existence of the ‘weak force’, anti-gravity or String Theory’s multiple dimensions. While physicists had trouble proving their theories (many of the ‘forces’ and particles were hypothetical and had theoreticians predicting ‘mass-less’ entities and the ‘graviton’) they are now swinging to a view of the operation of the Universe via another mode of Being:

As electrically-charged plasma.

Plasma is looked upon as the ‘fourth state of matter’, different from solid, liquid, gas. And as plasma is almost exclusively electromagnetic –a cluster of ionized particles– electrical theory is being unwrapped from the closet and given another airing.

NASA, JPL, CERN and the Los Alamos National Laboratory all give explanations for their switch from traditional space theory to a more generally accepted (and more familiar electromagnetically-driven) plasma physics, whose founding father, Swedish Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén (1908-1995) coined the phrase ‘Plasma Universe’. Originally trained as an electrical power engineer, he researched and taught many years in the field. His plasma theories describe behavior of aurorae, Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts, effect of magnetic storms on Earth’s magnetic field, magnetic and electric fields in cosmic plasmas, the terrestrial magnetosphere and dynamics of plasmas within our galaxy.

Because of its unique behavior, (unlike solids, liquids, gas) plasma is seen as the dominant form of matter in the universe. It has been called the ‘fundamental state of matter.’

When a material is heated from solid to liquid to gas phase, and then even hotter, it starts to become ionized, i.e. one or more electrons of an atom become liberated. Plasma is essentially a collection of ionized particles and while in its simplest form it behaves according to basic electromagnetic laws, at its most complex it continues to astonish specialists in its ability to self-organize into cells with different electrical characteristics.

Plasma comes in many forms, all electromagnetically active

Plasmas are not routinely encountered on the Earth’s surface. Natural plasmas, however, do form lightning and aurora, with the cool, man-made version most commonly seen in fluorescent light bulbs. Solar corona and solar flares are good examples of hot plasma. Earth’s magnetosphere contains plasma generated by particles of solar wind interacting with Earth’s own electromagnetic field, liberating ions into the Ionosphere (upper atmosphere).

Aurora borealis, Aurora australis

Aurora on Jupiter, photo courtesy John T Clarke (U.Mich)

Aurora borealis/australis is the result of charged solar wind particles clashing with and becoming trapped within the Van Allen radiation belts, where they hit the ionosphere and fluoresce. Every planet with a magnetic field generates its own plasma, like that around Jupiter and its moon Io. Beyond the solar system, in interstellar space, ions and electrons proliferate everywhere.

Fire in the Sky
A plasma discharge (spontaneous flash of light) is familiar to students of electromagnetism. To our ancestors, however, who must have witnessed many such plasma discharges in the ancient skies and recorded these (frightening) occurrences, they were seen as battles of the gods, sky heroes and god-kings clashing with sky monsters, serpents, ‘smoke-stars’, fire-dragons which, against apparently insuperable odds, they succeeded in overcoming.

As comets enter the inner solar system, a plasma tail often develops (in addition to a non-charged tail of dust), like Shoemaker-Levy 9 (1993-4) and Hale-Bopp (1995, 1997). NASA’s most famous comet-rendezvous program, Deep Impact, confirmed cometary composition (‘dirty snowball’ plus ionized particle tails) in its hit on comet Tempel 1 in July 2005 and flyby of comet Hartley 2 November last year.

Several ancient cultures name fearful comets as ‘smoking stars’ and lightning, with its thunderbolt — often in the shape of axe, jagged staff or flashing sword — was seen as the divine weapon of gods and king-heroes wielded against ‘fiery dragons’ curled inside the earth (volcanoes?) which threatened the populace.

Castor and Pollux —Alpha and Beta Geminorum, the ‘heavenly’ or ‘thunder’ twins — were revered by the Aztec as the first ‘fire sticks’, from which Mankind learned to drill fire. And, interestingly, when the Peruvian Indians became Christian, they chose to call one of those twins Santiago because their missionaries taught them that Christ named James (Santiago) and John the ‘Sons of Thunder’.

In Mesopotamia 4,500 years earlier (4000 BC), Gemini* served as pointers to mark the beginning of the new year by setting with the first new moon of spring, just as Egyptian astronomy’s pointer Dog star Sirius, Sothis signaled annual flooding of the Nile. Classical Greece called them the Dioscuri, the ‘thunder boys’, sons of Zeus.

In the opinion of seminal scholar of world mythology Prof. J. Rendel Harris:

‘Great commentators of the Christian church had missed the meaning. In demythologizing the Bible, they threw out vast sections of primitive culture’s connection to the stars.’ (Boanerges 1913)

Authors Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend of (IMHO) one of the greatest compilations of world mythology, (Hamlet’s Mill 1969, 1977, 2002) call the Bible ‘that most unscientific of records.’

Viewing cosmology in an electromagnetic context, the Mill of the title begins to make sudden sense of millennia of myth. Hamlet is a translation of Finnish/Norse/Icelandic proto-hero Amlodhi whose staff (Yggdrasil, ‘world tree’) spun the mill of the maelstrom, the whirlpool of the cosmos, the vortex, axis mundi — the Earth’s magnetic polar shaft. The Finnish quern/mill Sampo (vault of heaven, from Sanskrit skambha, pillar, pole, axis) ground out Mankind’s deep origins: it was this mill which created ocean, earth, Man. In good times it ground out ‘peace and plenty’, in bad times, salt. And, according to the Finns whose mythology is alive in recitation, it grinds still. It lingers in Vedic tradition in a hymn —Atharva Veda— to the world pillar (skambha):

A great monster in the midst of creation strode in penance on the back of the sea. In it are set what gods there are, like branches of a tree roundabout the trunk. AV 10.7.38

From such fragments of antiquity embedded in folk memory indicating a preoccupation with earth’s magnetic axis, it is tempting to believe that a polar shift, such as predicted by some for our ‘End Times’, may have occurred at least once before.

There seem to have been other cosmic cataclysmic occurrences.

Heliospheric current generates its own electromagnetic field

In an electromagnetic context within interstellar space, plasma spontaneously generates filaments which, like magnetic poles, attract each other at long distances and repel each other at short range. These filaments often braid themselves into ‘ropes’ that act like power transmission lines through space, with virtually unlimited scope in the distances and speeds they can travel.

Following precise magnetic field lines, these braids and ropes are known as Birkeland currents, after Norwegian explorer and physicist Kristian Birkeland who predicted them in 1903 after years of study of aurora in the Arctic.

Space plasma moving through a magnetic field generates its own electric current, and conducts electricity better than metals. Professor Emeritus of the Swedish Alfvén Laboratory, Carl-Gunne Fälthammar wrote (1986):

“A reason why Birkeland currents are particularly interesting is that, in the plasma forced to carry them, they cause a number of physical processes to occur (waves, instabilities, fine structure formation). These in turn lead to consequences such as accelerated charged particles, both positive and negative, and element separation (like preferential ejection of oxygen ions). Both classes of phenomena should be of general astrophysical interest far beyond that of understanding the space environment of our own Earth.”

In the medium of space, strong radial magnetic fields can make a plasma pinch like the hourglass-shaped Ant nebula, left, produce characteristic filaments like the plasma ball (top), and particle beams, as in its dense plasma center.

Filaments leave a magnetic field signature that is recognizable in the observable universe. Astronomers have been aware of these electromagnetic fields, but have historically paid them little attention.

At a most basic level, magnetic fields are produced only by electricity. So with new eyes we observe our Universe as electrically charged, electrically based and electrically-operated.

If stories transmitted through myth in all ancient cultures are taken as genuine records of visual phenomena –plasma bursts in the heavens– we begin to see formative earth peoples experiencing life on a volatile planet among cataclysmic prehistoric events happening in their skies. Our recent past, by comparison, has been a peaceful one. We can imagine how such events must have instilled fear, but faith and belief that their leaders (god-kings in ancient Egypt, China, Babylon) could and did overcome such monsters is not in our makeup. By ignoring the heavens, we have become complacent: we are no longer skywatchers. Because our history relates few cosmic incidents, we are lulled into ignoring our unique connection to our star, its orbiting companions, the Milky Way galaxy which drives us and the great space of infinity beyond.

Yet this is a running theme through all primitive earth culture, myth and art. And while science is beginning to access the bigger picture, we may be seeing a greater whole just in time: as the predicted solar maximum (increased sunspot activity, below) has the potential to return us to such tempestuous celestial activity as our ancestors experienced. Fire in our skies… perhaps eliciting earth’s (volcanic) response…

Astronomers and astrophysicists are beginning to accept that every energetic object in the universe has a plasma associated with it. Plasmas are detected by trace electromagnetic radiation (light, x-rays, radio waves), or in some cases, by the interaction of their ions and electrons with other objects.

Scientists think solar wind has been turned sideways by pressure from interstellar wind from distant stars

Distilling plasma theory down to its simplest form, and with great leaps in astronomical technology (space vehicles like Cassini and Voyager, telescopes like Hubble and SOHO), we can view and photograph from earth beautiful plasma nebulae which, excited by light from nearby stars, display precisely the same formations and explosive patterns seen in electromagnetism produced in the laboratory. It is also synchronous that Voyager is only now hurtling toward interstellar space approximately 10.8 billion miles (17.4 billion kilometers) from the sun on the outer edge of the solar system. Voyager 1 has crossed into an area of deep space where the velocity of hot ionized gas, (plasma) emanating directly outward from the sun as solar wind has slowed to zero.

Voyager 2 confirmed the existence of Van Allen radiation belts surrounding Uranus and Neptune.

As with Earth, the outer planets are affected by solar storms, but Earth’s proximity to her star (93 million miles, 1AU) makes her more susceptible.

Van Allen radiation belts surround Earth's magnetosphere

Energetic particle fluxes (radiation) can increase and decrease dramatically as a consequence of geomagnetic storms, themselves triggered by magnetic field and plasma disturbances produced by the Sun. We moved out of an unusually extended solar minimum last year. It may be in our interest to be (cautiously) more aware of the possibility of increasing solar disturbances during this next eleven-year cycle which will crown at solar maximum, thought to occur 2012.

While solar disruption on the scale of 1859’s Carrington Event may not happen, with our present dependence on electronic media for almost all human activity, we would be wise to have backup systems available, should such a CME-derived blackout occur.

Nobody in living memory knows what to do should a pole reversal occur. Angelic assistance is preferable.

Westbury crop circle July 2010 'Van Allen radiation belts'?

As we know (or rather, as some of us on this weblog community are following), 2009/2010 crop circle seasons were significant in their display of designs and consciousness-triggers alerting us to astrophysical phenomena and Earth’s fragility in its electromagnetic cocoon. Solar flares, plasma ejections (coronal mass ejections, CMEs), sunspot activity have all featured in Wiltshire wheatfields and are on the increase –see blog entries February through October 2010— alongside dimensional and spiritual instruction to prepare us for what may be around the corner.

Earth’s Mythological Past
Meantime, interdisciplinary researchers have not been idle. Given such a wealth of new information from astronomers, mythologists (following the trail begun by Hamlet’s Mill authors) have been working alongside scientists to make sense of thousands of years of transmitted lore, art, ancestral wisdom and belief which attest to hugely violent episodes in our planet’s past related to the heavens. Mythological and cultural archetypes worldwide share language, symbols and a timeframe which suggest a less-than-tranquil formative period in Earth’s evolution than the one traditionally held by astronomers.

Under the umbrella of the Thunderbolts Project of Portland, OR, scientists, authors, mythologists and historians led by Wallace Thornhill, David Talbott and electrical engineer Prof. Donald E. Scott, are cooperating with plasma physicist Dr. Anthony Peratt to interpret petroglyph symbolism used by almost every ancient civilization to depict mythological heroes and events. Peratt has for 30 years run a laboratory using computer-generated electrical activity to predict plasma bursts in celestial forms. Together they are finding remarkable resonance between plasma forms in the lab, those produced in the cosmos, and the rock art of ancient man who drew what he saw in the sky.

On a spiritual and cosmic level, an ‘electric Universe’ — via our planetary umbilical cord to our star; its energetic tie to Galactic Center and through it the galaxy’s electromagnetic relationship with all other galaxies and the most distant stars — can be viewed as a purposeful whole, held together by plasma ropes, braids of light and power transmission lines which do indeed transmit information.

We are only just learning the language of the stars.

*According to pre-Hellenic myth, the Age of Gemini (approx 6000 BC) was considered the ‘Golden Age’, Saturnia regna when Saturn/Kronos ruled. Following the Precession of the Equinoxes, each celestial Age lasts around 2200 years. More detail on successive ages here. In Mongolian myth the Age of Gemini signaled a time when ‘heaven and earth separated’ and fire was born. In other words, before the ecliptic and celestial equator fell apart (and the equinoxes started to precess), there was no fire. It was ‘given by heaven’ in the Golden Age of the Twins. 8000 years on, we entered the Age of Aquarius on February 14, 2009.