All posts by Thomas Spellman

Music

Show Yourself

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Do you see your self as a spirit warrior? I see being a spirit warrior, one who practices spiritual warfare, to be as much about burning away external energy vampires and cleansing internal parasites as it is about allowing some aspects of one’s self to die so that some aspects may live. I have been deepening in this perspective especially in the past month starting with intimate contact with a woman who sees her self as a Spirit Warrior, and then subsequently being amplified through listening to the lyrics over and over of Ayla Nereo’s song, Show Yourself, while remixing it. I interpret the words of the song to be spoken toward a masculine self identity that objectifies the feminine: “I do not show my skin for you, I show my self to know my self, and for the earth from which I came. I pray for you to do the same.” The chorus, “I release you,” seems relevant here. By releasing the negative masculine’s self identity from her scope of influence, she releases her self from its binding. Another line was particularly powerful for me, as I came into this remix process soon after being ill and feeling like I was allowing a less healthy aspect of my self to die, so that a more healthy aspect might live: “You can call her back to you, you can die, die, die, die, bye, bye, die, die, die.” I interpret this line to be telling the masculine self identity that in order to call back the powerful feminine who rejected him, he must allow the “negative,” objectifying aspect of his self identity to die.

This is my first remix, and was a last minute effort. I spent about 30 hours total on it across two days. I knew I would regret it if I passed up the opportunity to participate in Ayla’s remix contest, even though I have no expectation of having my track chosen. It was such a pleasure to listen so closely to the nuances of feeling in Ayla’s beautiful voice over and over, always fresh and inspiring. Thank you Ayla for putting your stems out to be remixed!

Vocals: Ayla Nereo
Guitars, Bass, Violin, Drum Design: Thomas Spellman

Poetry

Time is a fire we burn in

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Time is a fire we burn in, we breath it in, soak in it, push it out, work it with our hands, fingers, minds. It flows in streams between our temples, out through our pores, connecting all atoms in a dance of transmission, progression in sequence. Time is a pattern of vibration linking one state of being with another, and another, and another, ever forward, onward, even while shining in reverse. Light connects the forward and the backward in the sequence, lighting up the way, and showing where we’ve been. It’s a neutral party to the endless stepping forward of time, even an enabler, a translator from one state to another, brought on by the flow of heat from hot towards cool, steady state, thermal transfer. This is life, caught in an eddy between the lines in the motion of currents of hot magma, the molten rock of existence.

Other

Daniel is self-deceived

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You say you are self-deceived …. and so you are!
You say you are in danger … and so you are!
You say you are missing the point … and so you are!

If by these things you mean in the material world, well then yes this is true more or less for all of us …

But you quote Jesus saying that few find the gate to life. If you are implying this in the literal, material sense, then this is obviously false since everyone alive is already there, and doesn’t need a gate to find it. But instead, this is a spiritual, metaphorical saying, which has multiple meanings.

In one sense, by this He is making allusion to the divine infinite eternal unity present within all of existence. This singular “I AM” reverberating throughout all of the cosmos, within every atom, within every galaxy, within every heart, is the foundation and center of it all, and is the gateway through which one is able to arrive at a faint glimmer of an idea of God, Who is totally and completely beyond any conception.

But this is still a literal meaning, though a universal one, that anyone who reflects at all upon material reality easily discovers.

There is another metaphorical meaning that is the one more intended. He is primarily referring to Himself, to His Forerunners and to His Returns. The Prophet is the Gate to Life in as much as They open a passage way least seen and understood by the people of Their day. They bring a Medicine most needed and least wished-for. They bring a Truth most just and least appreciated, except by those who are favored by God. In this way, They are a Gate that few find, since few truly look.

Since you are speaking of a spiritual reality, your claim to be self-deceived, missing the point, and in danger are also spiritual realities. In this light, your basic inner self-identity is one of self-deceit and danger. Your core idea of your own self identity is one of “missing the point,” in other words, missing your own self. If you can’t trust your self within your self, how can anyone else trust you? If you are in danger within your self, how can anyone else feel safe with you? If you are missing the point of your own self, how can anyone else find and know you?

77 Jesus said, “I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”

50 Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where have you come from?’ say to them, ‘We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.’ If they say to you, ‘Is it you?’ say, ‘We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the evidence of your Father in you?’ say to them, ‘It is motion and rest.'”

My purpose in writing what I did was as an exploration of the unity that can be realized in the experience of “I am-ness” or “is-ness.” In as much as we all have this experience of “I am-ness” it can be a potent unifier, especially when we recognize this as a base level commonality between us. The experience of self existence itself is a great source of unity which crosses boundaries of religion, race, gender, nationality, age, wealth, experience, etc. It’s a universal. It’s the foundation upon which Jesus’ message of loving your neighbor as your self is based. Without this experience, the idea of God’s I Am-ness is quite impossible to comprehend.

3 Jesus said, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the (Father’s) imperial rule is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the (Father’s) imperial rule is inside you and outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.”

Jesus quotes are from:http://www.pbs.org/…/religion/maps/primary/gthomas.html

Poetry

Spring Desires Eternal

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I want to see you again.

What should I do about this?  What is this power you have to stir up this little vortex  of longing within me?  I am usually fairly content being alone, all one.  But today, there’s this extra pull, a void of sorts, saying, “Where is she?  Where is she?”  This voice is always here, but yesterday, it was ignorable, and I could go about my business, business as usual.  But today, this desire has sprung up, a fresh a seedling, sprouting its arms above the earth, out of the dirt along the path I walk daily.  Such a beauty, reaching for the sun with its outstretched green hands, and rooting its grey way into the soil.  This desire for life comes suddenly and redefines my experience of this present moment.  This desire for existence, for being.  This is my raison d’être, my reason for being, free.  This IS my being, this fire, this eternal flame.

I perceive this flame is strong in you, fueled by a constant pull of opposites, light of the south, dark of the north, and harmonized by the divine unity present in all of Reality.  This is the “chaos maker” that you try to control, to balance.  Not too much, but please not too little.  It feels so good to  let it spin, to unleash it upon the earth, upon the hearts of men, upon the eyes of all beings, even the stones beneath your feet, and the moon above your head.  This cosmic dipole embedded within your being, is your being, and must be felt to be believed, and then comes a knowing, deeper than any programmed belief can ever hope to achieve.  Feeling this being brings a knowledge of the deepest dark where only the slightest bit of light can reach, and only enough to know, “yes, this is it; this is the reason for being.  This IS being.”

When we gazed into each other’s eyes, what did you see?  After a little eternity, you suddenly looked into the fire, to your left.  Was that in response to a perception of me, a memory, or both, or some other reason to flee?  A penny for your thoughts.  What is the me of which you see?  Did you see through the clouds into the eternity?  Did you find that place where the who, the what, the why, the how, and the when all harmonize into one grand symphony? … and continuously sing, “aaahhh, yes! I am me!  I am free!  I am whom I wish to be!  I am here now!  I am!  I am!  I am!  Aaaaahhhhh, yaaaaaaaaa!”

I hope so.

So anyway, this is all my way of saying thank you for stirring me up!  If I had your number I would call you and say, “please please me and come out and play with me today.  It’s a beautiful day to play!”

Internet, Society, Technology

Our smart phones are crippled by service provider prisons

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I just watched a good talk by Alec Muffet about how our smart phones are amazing computers, but that we are being kept prisoners inside walled gardens by our mobile providers and prevented from having full internet connectivity.

You and Your Phone are Huge Threats to the Net #security #privacy #tor #dns 
“This is the talk I presented at Reading Geek Night 27 on Jan 10th; the theme was the power of mobile computing and of real networking, and of how NAT, IPv4, DNS, and the typical provision of network a…”

I keep thinking since I heard Eben Moglen talk about the #FreedomBox at an Internet Society conference in NY, that we need a #FreedomPhone movement.  A first step might be to support a mobile phone manufacturer that attempts to build a more open-friendly phone like the GeeksPhone

Another step would be to increase demand for the WiMAX (4G wireless broadband) open protocols in the phone (LTE is also 4G but is created by existing wireless providers) and start putting up these towers in communities, possibly with the option of acting as a roaming tower for existing phone providers that use WiMAX (Sprint here in the States). This could be done as a for-profit venture, getting smaller communities on 4G while at the same time enabling local community information freedom.  One selling point would be that a local community could communicate wirelessly with its self for free, or outside for a small nominal VOIP level rate like $0.01/minute.

The technology is converging on VOIP everywhere, which is just voice sent over internet data packets. I think existing voice providers is transforming to walled garden internet service providers (AOL style), which is also why they’re selling these amazing handheld computers that can’t act as standalone internet peers.  “Freedom” 4G (WiMAX / LTE) towers that would allow being a peer on the internet, and pressure put on the existing providers by the users would be steps in the right direction.

I think for pressure to be brought by users, there would need to be a compelling use case, “meme,” or app that would make users want it enough to bug their providers for it, or more likely, to ditch their “providers” for the Freedom alternative.  I’m not sure what this game changing meme might be for others, but for me it would be a personal social networking node (Diaspora) running on the phone, with private and secure P2P text, voice, and video,  including a legacy “phone number” for connecting to land lines, mobile phone prisoners, etc.  This phone would then sync to my FreedomBox at my home for keeping my data secure in case my phone is stolen or lost.  I could also use the home box for converting the VOIP to a legacy land line “phone call,” or a VOIP provider (like voip.ms) could be used for $0.01/minute.   In all these situations, the wireless and land services are just barebones internet providers, utilities essentially, whether by a corporation or a local community.

Money, Society

US Notes and Reforming the Money System

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This post is a response to a friend who suggested that JFK fought the Fed by printing US Notes:

My understanding is that US Notes were in circulation from 1862 until they were retired in 1971. There was a printing in 1963, but also in 1953 and 1928, in order to maintain the quantity already in circulation. There’s no evidence I’ve found that JFK directly attempted to increase the amount in circulation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Note)

As I understand it, and I have looked at the balance sheet of the Fed to verify it (http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/rptcongress/annual07/sec2/c3.htm#nl7), any interest that the Fed gets from the bonds backing the FRNs above its operating costs is returned to the Treasury. The main source of the compounding US Government debt is not from the Fed printing the notes, or even holding the bonds backing them. Rather it’s that the US Government is printing interest-bearing bonds to cover its operating costs and selling them on the open market to foreign and global banks, foreign central banks, used for reserves, etc. The responsibility lies with the US Government; it’s not a Fed problem. There is however the complicating factor that the Fed sets the interest rates.

In my opinion, just getting rid of the Fed doesn’t address the core problem, which is that the US Gov is using bonds to pay for its budget, and requiring interest bearing notes as banking reserves. The most intelligent reform I’ve seen is http://nesara.org/ which suggests and offers a bill that uses a basket of interest-free US Notes and some gold/silver as the backbone of the economy. It would also change lending laws to remove compound interest from loans, only allowing fees to cover the actual costs of lending. This would basically change the banking and finance system into a highly regulated public utility, which I think it should be.  This is “our” money system after all.

Society

Community

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In a conversation with a friend this morning, the topic of watching TV shows came up.  My friend felt a but bad about watching shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and Lost, feeling like it was wasting time that could be used for walking in the woods, or reading a book.  My response was that I think these TV shows serve the purpose of including us in the daily dramas of a community.  We desire to watch these shows when we’re desiring more of a sense of beng a part of a community, which includes all these little sub stories and character dramas that we get from TV shows.

This is similar to my view of films, which are our modern equivalent of the tribal oral story teller.  We evolved over countless ages with myths, legends, and stories, all told orally.  Today, we are missing that, and in its place, we have film.  Film offers us our creation myths, our social teachings, a sense of who we are within our society, role models, a guiding principles.

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Gamification talk at Google

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Gamification talk at Google.

The speaker makes a few very interesting points in this talk that I’d like to react to.  Perhaps he makes them somewhere else that it’d be easier to quote, but I need to get my thoughts written while they’re fresh in my mind.

One point was that introducing rewards to an existing behavior will “always” link that behavior to the rewards such that if the rewards are removed, the behavior will end or diminish to significantly less than it was before the gaming began.  One example given is that of United Airline’s 1 million miles frequent flyer club, at the time the highest rewards level.  When people got there, they started flying with different carriers because there was no incentive to continue with United.  United then added higher levels, to keep the “game” going.

My reaction is that maybe there’s another factor at work having to do with some reciprocal value the flyer is getting, along the lines of provenance … or history … but then again, above 1 million miles they would still have had the record of more miles, but were not interested in continuing to acquire them because there was no secondary “status bonus” to get more.

Another point was that in gamification, the biggest winner is the “house,” i.e. the casino.  One example was the X Prize given to the first private space mission.  The X Prize foundation got more free press than anyone else benefitted in the actual prize, and the winner was funded by a billionaire and would have achieved the goal without any contest.

A question this sparked for me is: what happens in a scenario where a game is actually multi-user generated and interwoven such that every player is potentially also a house?  In this situation, then, the winners are not only those who acquire the most bonuses, but also those whose bonuses are acquired most?  This is the closest analogy I can think of to the idea of the kind of inter-trading system that I’m developing.

This is also related to another concept like an internet protocol, and the users of the protocol.  The more people use it, the more successful the protocol is and the more likely people will use it for new projects.  This underscores the benefit in this case of the protocol being open source and public domain, so that the “house” is not siphoning away value from the users.

The second point about the biggest winner being the house relates to another question I have about gamification, which is the effect that the observer or house has on the flows that it’s gaming.  This is akin to the idea of the observer affecting the observed.  It’s not possible to measure a flow without to some degree affecting the flow.  It’ not possible to filter a flow without running the flow through the filter, which at the very least slows down the flow.

And here’s another speaker from a different perspective, talking about how much more effective intrinsic motivation is for a different kind of task,  such as right-brain thinking.  He labels the main drivers as Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.  He’s speaking mainly of the white collar skilled work force.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Money, Society

Cash is for SAPS

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Status, Access, Power, Stuff

It’s what customers really want, in that order. And this list is also prioritized by “most sticky” and “cheapest to fulfill”.

via Cash is for SAPS | Gamification Blog.

When I read the above, I had a nebulus queezy feeling arise in my stomach.  “Does it really boil down to that?”  Can our collective Id be defined by SAPS?  The article is explaining that in marketing a product to a customer, one needs to realize that those should be the priorities, rather than focusing too much on some kind of cash or “stuff”-based incentive.  I thought to my self that the SAPS model is to “stuff” what my intuition is telling me that my deeper, more universal priorities are to “status”.  Well, if that’s true, I asked my self, then what would I label my top driving motivations in life?  Off the top of my head I came up with: Beauty, Esteem, Excellence, Empathy, Enlightenment, or BEEEE…  That list could probably be shortened to Beauty and Empathy (BE.)

Ha, sounds kinda like hoky new agey spiritual BS, doesn’t it? It does even a bit to me, and yet those are the first labels that came to my mind for my top drivers.  Now, to clarify, the article is talking about priorities in the context of customers in relationship with a commercial marketer, whereas I’m talking about self in relation to Self.  There’s a big difference between these paradigms…. or is there?

In one sense the commercial context is rooted in an existing economic paradigm based on competition within a field of scarcity.  As we humans are creatures of Nature, we will vie with each other for scarce resources in order to survive and be as successful as possible, Naturally (*).  When there is excessive competition, the priorities of SAPS most definitely become uppermost.

As a contrast, people who live within indigenous cultures that have existed on this earth sustainably for countless ages have a very different set of drivers.  It’s difficult for me to define, being that I’m a member of modern society.  But based on a combination of my own intuition and reading about their world view, it seems to me that their drivers are more about caring for each other, having a sense of belonging to the tribe and the landl, having freedom to be as one needs to, and being surrounded with an abundant and nourishing environment that offers everything one needs to live.

On the face of it, the indigenous culture agenda seems like a very different set of priorities than the SAPS model, but ironically each of the 4 descriptions of that view can be interpreted fairly directly by one of status, access, power, and stuff.  However, there’s still a huge difference.  What is it?

To be continued …

* For some, this might not be a given, at least when worded like that, such as to people who view serving others and one’s community as being as much if not more important than serving one’s self.  Well, it can be easily argued that serving others is in fact better for one’s self, when it is collectively reciprocated in the form of the universal Golden Rule.