Shadow Work

February 2011: 

After a cost-free two-month extended family holiday, I was the most relaxed I had been since becoming mentally ill in 2007.  The day before returning home, playing together in ankle-deep water on the local beach for the last time, my wife, my soul mate since 1970, was torn off her feet when the local river shifted in its course and swept her away. Isn't it ironic?

I literally caught her by one hand as she was being sucked out to sea and struggled to drag her to safety.  I knew that if I lost my grip, she would be caught in the raging river and drown and that if I lost my footing we both would be taken far out to sea and drown together.  I can still feel the sand being sucked away from under my feet, and I can still feel my feet slipping.  Our adult children, watched helpless, just a few meters away, frozen in the moment!  Holy Shit!     

YES! I had a pile of holy shit in my pants when Susan and I arrived home!  You bet I did! A neurotransmitter tsunami overwhelmed fucking years of paralyzing drug induced, radio-active depression from my poor 60-year-old brain and suddenly: I flipped! 

Hey, Presto! BaBaZing! BaBaBoom!

Something was broken in me and despite over 40 years of meditation and decades of employment as a Jedi-Knight in workflow analysis, quality assurance, and continuous improvement I could find no solution.  I could think nothing through.  My mind had been stuck up to the axles in a once-in-a-lifetime drug-induced cognitive log jam, a becalmed moment of Baba Ram Das, that had stopped the flow of my Qi and unbalanced my Feather until the raging waters swept the sand of time away and I came up with 

PLAN B

Listening to conversations between Arjuna and Krishna, my higher and lower self, from the Sacred Verses of the Bhagavad Gita; I began to paint for the first time in my life plagiarizing drawings from the Ancient Secrets of the Flower of Life and the five Platonic Solids: different aspects of the same Buddha.

Platonic solid: any of the five geometric solids whose faces are all identical, regular polygons meeting at the same three-dimensional angles. Also known as the five regular polyhedral, they consist of the tetrahedron (the plank object), cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron.

In altered states, I shaded these sacred objects with musings on vibration and frequency while Hu-ing, the sound of the soul, under my breath breathing life into two-dimensional shadows aspiring to become 3D visions of the sound of Om, vibrating at the frequency of 432 Hz!  Pondering the Science of Cymatics, Morphogenetic Fields, Tesla and the increasing Schumann Resonance of the biosphere in which my species is embedded.

The morphogenetic field would provide a force that guided the development of an organism as it grew, making it take on a form similar to that of others in its species. DNA was not the source of structure itself, but rather a "receiver" that translated instructions in the field into physical form.

Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Icarus Lewis Carroll Flyby   - jest saying

Crazy or not I have decades of experience in GIS, Geographic Information Systems where I learned about the best efforts to collect spatial data as opposed to reality on the ground, where I learned about database technology, system administration, thin clients, VMWare, and Citrix.  I have worked in forestry, manufacturing, municipal and consulting environments, and in the early Spring of 2011, I found myself, suddenly lucid, at a pivotal moment in the history of our civilization when solar power was ramping up for the inevitable crossover in cost benefits with fossil fuels.

I thought about what the MAC Laptop of the day predicted regarding the costs of building and maintaining a large data center.

• Very Large Solid State Drives SSD

• High Capacity Lithium Batteries

• Low Power RISC processors

In 2011, swarms of low earth orbit satellites were in the future but everything else was already up in the air with satellite GIS tied to ground mapping in Woss, British Columbia where I worked with high-resolution images, and spatial forestry data.

Up the highway, just past nowhere, you'll see a sign that says Woss. I once considered an actual Russian rocket scientist for an Oracle database position, simply because I was working in the middle of nowhere, and he was in Siberia. In any case:

It was pretty clear that SSD's were going to get very large, that solar and lithium complemented the low power of RISC and that data centers were going to become cheaper to run.

But as I pondered the meaning of 42, I recalled seeing my first dinosaur skeleton a few years before the moon landing in a museum in Indianapolis Indiana and that reminded me that an solid-state object (SSO) the size of a city had wiped dinosaurs off the face of the planet and that, only 12,000 years ago, another SSO had raised the ocean 60 to 120 meters when it melted the North American Ice Cap and burned up half the planet. 

Isn't it weird that today; we have dinosaurs who want to blow up cities?
Icarus Industrial Complex Eisenhower Flyby

I also recalled what the Dean of Computer Science at Simon Fraser University said to me in 1980 after I told him about the H-89 computer I had just built in my spare time:

Personal Computers are a fad! 

So are the naked apes living on the third rock from the sun, nevertheless, in 2021, your watch has more computing power than the SFU Department of Computing had in 1980. Your shoelaces are smarter than the onboard computers that landed Neil "one small step" on the moon. 

I wrote down what I saw on the wall of the cave of shadows and by July I had 32 paintings and what I called Plan B: the flux capacitor.

But then, the bubble burst and paranoia raged through the dry tinder in my head and I threw away a lifetime of wealthy barber practice and all of my savings during a correction. After 6 years of mental illness on November 1st, 2011 age 60, I applied for CPP.  Simply broke, not even close to woke!

Two months later, in January my physical health collapsed.  That month, the first month of 2012, I received $555.50.  For a total of $6,666.00 for the year. WTF? What was going on?

 Five years of hell were going to pass before a patent expiry led to a change in medication and the answer began to appear.

We need to do something about the eggnog between our ears, the Rock of Ages as we race towards the black hole singularity of an uncontrollable social pandemic of mental illness.

PS: If you don’t write things down, then it never happened. I kept the original copy.

-- Icarus Xerox Flyby