The Wave Breathers

"The medicine man is a cloud walker. A wave breather.  In the end days her scent will intoxicate many human beings. They will have no creed but they will know the medicine. They will have no guide but they will know visions. They will bleed the sacred pipe smoke and dance the dances from before time knew days. These human beings will see with 400 eyes and dwell in many worlds as they manifest in this world."

Chief Ocean Wind

Creating Tzeddek

"The only way to have the slightest inkling of YAH is creating a society of Tzeddek, Justice, Righteousness, and Hesed, Lovingkindness. The way to that is by Doing TOV!

Yeshua, the Jewish teacher answered his Jewish disciples' question, "how do we achieve eternal life?", when I was hungry you gave me food, when I was naked you gave me clothes, when I was sick you cared for me, when I was in prison you visited me, if you do this to the least person, you do it to me. Jesus' salvation instructions, which are different from Paul's, come right out of the Torah. Those people who follow this teaching from Matthew 25 achieve eternal life."

Reb Leynor

The Mood Regulatory Function of Dreams

"Despite differences in terminology, all the contemporary theories of dreaming have a common thread — they all emphasize that dreams are not about prosaic themes, not about reading, writing, and arithmetic, but about emotion, or what psychologists refer to as affect. 

What is carried forward from waking hours into sleep are recent experiences that have an emotional component, often those that were negative in tone but not noticed at the time or not fully resolved. One proposed purpose of dreaming, of what dreaming accomplishes (known as the mood regulatory function of dreams theory) is that dreaming modulates disturbances in emotion, regulating those that are troublesome. My research, as well as that of other investigators in this country and abroad, supports this theory. Studies show that negative mood is down-regulated overnight. How this is accomplished has had less attention."

http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/08/13/the-twenty-four-hour-mind-rosalind-cartwright/

The 24 Hour Mind

"Instead of assuming, as Hobson does, that most dreams have fairly obvious connections to everyday life, Sumber guides dreamers in ferreting out interpretations that might not be readily apparent. “I encourage people to be their own analyst: ‘What do I think this dream means to me? Is this an “oatmeal” dream, or is it a big dream?’ ” 

He thinks thorough consideration of one’s own dreams can be life-changing because of the submerged truths they reveal. He himself has a fear of sharks, but a dream he had one night, in which he was sitting in a rowboat, watching fishermen chop off sharks’ fins and toss the dying animals back into the sea, helped him cope with that fear. Reflecting on the dream and its deeper meaning proved transformational, Sumber says. The sharks likely represented Jung’s universal “monster” dream theme, and his sadness at their plight led him to a place of unexpected empathy for his own dark side and that of others.

While disagreements like these persist, most dream theorists do agree on this point: Dreams often have a fundamentally emotional nature. The limbic system, which governs emotion, is highly engaged in dreamers—particularly the amygdala, which helps us process unpleasant or intense feelings like fear and aggression. “All the contemporary theories of dreaming,” writes sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright in The Twenty-Four Hour Mind, “emphasize that dreams are not about prosaic themes ... but about emotion.” 

Hobson acknowledges the importance of emotions to dreaming, as does Hartmann, who has suggested that the striking central images in post-9/11 dreams sprang from intense emotion. His study, he wrote, “supports the idea that the dream image is an emotionally guided construction or creation, not a replay of waking experience.”¹ 

This suggests the tantalizing possibility that common dream themes may reflect similarities in the human emotional experience—which persist despite variations in the external trappings of language and culture—and that the mental territory we all share is more vast and profound than that which separates us. Which is very Jungian indeed."

http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/why-you-keep-dreaming-about-being-naked

The 7 Psychological Functions of Art

"Why are some people drawn to minimalist architecture and others to Baroque? Why are some people excited by bare concrete walls and others by William Morris’s floral patterns? Our tastes will depend on what spectrum of our emotional make-up lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis. Every work of art is imbued with a particular psychological and moral atmosphere: a painting may be either serene or restless, courageous or careful, modest or confident, masculine or feminine, bourgeois or aristocratic, and our preferences for one kind over another reflect our varied psychological gaps. We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help return us to a viable mean. We call a work beautiful when it supplies the virtues we are missing, and we dismiss as ugly one that forces on us moods or motifs that we feel either threatened or already overwhelmed by. Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness."

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/25/art-as-therapy-alain-de-botton-john-armstrong/

Safed Lakota Visions

"As a young man I went up on a hill. In dreams I met strange beings of Safed. Ari and Ramak told me of worlds within worlds and the Sefirot. We smoked the peace pipe and spoke of Wakan Tanka who they knew by unspeakable names."

Chief Ocean Wind

Kabbalah 2: hide and seek with G-d

"This view is the Kabbalah's secret meaning of the union of the male and female principles. The male principle, symbolized by the line, is that which divides the unified one (female - circle) into conceptual dyads. Good and evil, dark and light, past and future -- these concepts do not really exist in the One. The feminine circle is always Now, always Here, always God Godding itself. Well, which is right? Is the feminine principle right that everything is One and that it is always Now? Or is the masculine principle right, that there are multiple objects in the universe, across temporal and spatial dimensions?

For the Kabbalists, both are right. Ordinary consciousness, in which 1+1 = 2, is right. Mystical consciousness, in which 1+1=1, is right. There is both two and one -- this is the higher mystery of union. It's the original fuzzy math."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-michaelson/an-introduction-to-kabbal_b_441069.html

"The ten sefirot -- the lenses which refract the Light of the Infinite into the colors and shapes of our own experience -- are a web of associations, symbolic references, and Divine potency. Each is like a node of meaning, bringing together hundreds, if not thousands, of literary, cultural, physical, emotional, historical, theological and magical concepts and, thus, demonstrating the interrelationship of them. When a Kabbalist hears the word "orchard," or "red," or "rainbow," he or she immediately associates it with the corresponding sefirah, and then with the dozens of other concepts which are likewise associated. Learning the sefirot is marinating the mind in a symbolic stew of Divine interrelation, and engenders a uniquely Kabbalistic mode of consciousness."

"Hochmah, meaning wisdom, is like a point: no dimension of its own, but the beginning point for dimensionality. From our perspective, hochmah is that "higher wisdom" that some systems call primordial Awareness. It is the first quality to proceed from Nothingness: that Being knows. This noetic quality of the universe -- that every leaf "knows" when to fall in the autumn, that every atom "knows" how to organize itself -- is, for the Kabbalists, the most refined quality of the manifested world. If you'd like to imagine the emanation of the sefirot in terms of the Big Bang, hochmah is the singularity with no size, but with the "laws of nature" already instantiated. There is nothing there, but there is the Divine Wisdom which organizes all of creation.

Binah, meaning understanding, is a kind of partner to Hochmah. The sefirot are often gendered (sometimes multi-gendered), and their interaction is often depicted as a series of erotic interchanges. In this case, hochmah is the male and Binah is female, the Divine womb, the generative principle of the rest of the universe. Binah gives birth to the sefirot, and thus to the world of manifestation itself. She is the concealed, hidden, supernal Divine mother. She is also the beginning of separation -- binah is related to the words for knowledge based upon distinctions. Binah is the ocean, the many-chambered palace (note the Jungian flavor to the symbolic associations here), and womb in which Hochmah sows the seed of creation. She is the ground of space and time -- not yet expanded, not yet contracted, but the principle of spatiality and temporality itself, ready to give birth to the world."

"Let's pause for just a moment to explore a few of the subtleties -- just the tip of the iceberg, really -- in these first three sefirot. First, notice that even at this highest, most abstract level, many of the themes of the Kabbalah are already in play. For those who expect only male god-language, and who suppose there is a hard and fast distinction between religion and sexuality -- well, surprise. The Kabbalah is rich in feminine goddess-language, even as it strives to integrate these different faces of the Divine within a monotheistic system. The Kabbalah is also rich in erotic metaphor -- if hochmah and binah seem surprisingly embodied, wait until we get to tiferet, yesod, and shechinah/malchut. Nor is eros merely metaphor -- it's not "like" sexual union, it is the essence of sexual union; it's what generativity and sexuality are ultimately about. Whether the union between masculine and feminine takes place between two people, or within one person, it is ultimately about the play of the Divine itself."