It Begins In Africa...The Greatest Journey.

Everybody loves a good story, and when it is finished, this will be the greatest one ever told...It begins in Africa with a group of hunter-gatherers, perhaps just a few hundred strong. It ends some 200,000 years later with their six and a half billion descendants spread across the Earth, living in peach or at war, believing in a thousand different deities or none at all, their faces aglow in the light of campfires and computer screens...

Perhaps the most wonderful of the stories hidden in our genes is that, when unraveled, the tangled knot of our global genetic diversity today leads us all back to a recent yesterday, together in AFRICA!

That is what makes me so proud of being an African...In South Africa there is a Philosophy called UBUNTU; where my brother is my Brother no matter what! Equality! Compassion!

Butcher boys...

How keep dark
and pattern that all man suffers
off - at the wall, at where the hat
comes out of the marrow & yawns -
how keep head up the scream
& up the burial where the pattern is born -
how the leagues washing their hearts
& wrung dry only to sponge back up - men
smooching mirrors - blades honing -
tongue & eyelash of Sweet Thing
staggering the shape by the door in the baggy shaddow -
how keep dark back?

Or should one bullet forth, sleek clothed or naked - pierce
each entity - eachclock - sharpened by art
or wine - how
enter the needle, the cloth -
how take the patter any man suffers
and lose nothing when you
rip it off.

Sculptural work by SA artist Jane Alexander...portraying the dark patterns that lurk behind human gilded loams & painted clay...

The " OLD WORLD"... My Home.

There exists still the " old world". Follow the stream into the marshes, into the mountains, into the desert. The East is what they call it, or the Third World, or the Undeveloped Countries, or the Backward countries - and it covers continents still where the bedouin in timeless white garments walk his camel through the sandstorm, happy as ever to live amid sun-bright desolation. In the rice paddies, in the fields of India, in the marshes of Iraq, in the villages the world over, men and woman stoop to gather the crop as they have since the dawn of time. Disease is rampant in the jungles; in the marshes; in the deep pockets of vast cities or in the wilderness where the peasants, the workers, the fellaheen, still live as they always have.

Hunger. There is plenty and there is hunger. There is food thrown away in the streets of New York and there are those starving in Africa on television programs. IT IS A MATTER OF DISTRIBUTION!

Indeed, that there is so much organization amid all this change that is the Modern Mystery - that so much could happen and that so much can remain the same...

The Art of Living Foundation

Very little is more
worth our time
than understanding
the talent of Substance.

Altered State of Consciousness...

Dreams and visions, together with trance and possesion, belong to a category of experiences that psychologists call ' altered state of consciousness'. Such states of consciousness refer to experiences of which one is aware, but which differ from the ordinary, for example, where a person meditates or is under hypnosis or under the influence of drugs, or in the case of extra-sensory perception...The degree of consciousness in such cases varies, so that dreams and possession form two extreme states, while visions and trance are between the two extremes. DREAMS<- VISIONS - TRANCE -> POSSESSION. The importance of these experiences for my anthropological study of religion is that such states are often ascribed to the influence of the supernatural forces or beings. Moreover, different people interpret these states in terms of their particular cultural context... if you have had an ultered state of consciousness, please give me a discription of the events & all the symbolism of theses events. it will be greatly appreciated...