DLM # 165 Before You Die, You Must Blossom 🪷
I cannot recommend this Audible lecture enough. It is brimming with wisdom for those who have the ears to hear. Pandit Rajmani Tikunait is my favorite new sage. I feel so lucky and blessed that so much wisdom is available to us. Yet how many of us allow this wisdom to penetrate into our depths? A worthy question, indeed.
DLM # 164 "Kill The Head"
In Jim Jarmusch’s amazing zombie film, The Dead Don’t Die, there are only three types of people who escape zombification. Everyone else, despite all their coolness or good intentions, snuff it. See if you can spot them when you watch the film, for there is a very serious lesson in it.
Identifying with the body/mind as “me” is like identifying with your car as “me,” like thinking that you are the steering wheel or the ignition key 🤣. The body/mind is a vehicle for consciousness, a tool, not the thing itself.
DLM # 163 From Fantasy To Fruition (Or, Know Thyself and Thy Dosha!)
From fantasy to fruition in under one week, not bad! New art with typewritten poems, etc. coming soon (as soon as the ink ribbons arrive!). Until then, here are this week’s reflections.
For music, I’m really into Radiohead’s Kid A this week. Did you know it’s about the Bhagavad Gita? Kid A is a reference to Arjuna. Give it a whirl on your walk or while you draw or garden.
DLM # 162 Wanting To Not want
For this week’s musical delicacy, please listen to Nick Cave and the Badseed’s album, Boatman’s Call.
These are the first four pages of the new Big Book, which I will start working in again in the coming weeks and months until all the pages are filled. I actually have many sketchbooks, but these ones are a little more deliberate. Plus, I have countless dreams and active imagination sessions from the last several years that will probably find their way into this book and the ones that come after it. In fact, I may teach a class on creating books like these in the future.
DLM # 161 A New "Religion" of Freedom and Peace
A little recap today about what the Disco Liberation Movement is all about.
For our musical engagement, here’s what I suggest: please go out and buy the Sunday paper and bring it home. Then, light a candle and listen to Leonard Cohen’s album Ten New Songs while you use a pair of scissors to cut out words from the newspaper. Cut out words that catch your eye and pile them up until you have a bunch of them. Then, start pasting the words onto a clean sheet of paper but before you do, kiss the piece of paper and hold it to your heart for ten seconds. Now, compose a poem or piece of writing using the words you cut out from the Sunday paper. See if you can especially work towards using negative and fearful words used by the paper to manipulate the minds of the masses, and turn them instead to words of love and peace and harmony. This is how we can use religious rituals to rescue our words.
DLM # 160 Conditioning & The Interpretation of Reality
Sorry for the weird truncated ending to today’s sermon, everyone. Had an urgent errand pop up suddenly. Until next week!
DLM # 159 The Sovereign Psyche (Or Why Texting Sucks)
Here is a video that clearly shows why we are dying, psychologically. Why our souls are dying even as we make sure to take down all other living beings with us. If I waggle my finger in everyone’s face this week, it’s because our babyish ways are irresponsible, we need to grow up, stat.
For this week’s music, I’ve decided to start offering musical assignments. Please download Beethoven’s final symphony onto your phone, then go out into the woods with headphones, or or the desert, or the river, somewhere away from humans and the digital world. While you listen to the symphony, collect leaves, rocks, twigs, whatever winks at you, and then build a mandala on the ground. Make a square, then put a circle in the middle of it. Then embellish and decorate it in any way you like. Say a prayer for the soul of the world, the anima mundi. This process will take a bit over an hour. Then make a pact that you will do something beautiful and non-digital like this every week come hell or high water. Don’t take a picture of your mandala. Don’t upload it to social media or text it to anyone. Let it be a secret ritual of between you and the cosmos, mixed together in silent and loving solitude.
DLM # 158 Asleep At The Wheel 🌀
So excited to share this week’s sermon and music with you all. After a very long and cold winter, the weather is finally turning warm around here and it’s a glorious Sunday morning. No matter what is happening in your world, or in the world in general, there can be some joy in sitting in the sun and breathing deeply.
DLM # 157 Inherited Cosmic Disharmonies & Amor Fati
New music coming next week, for now, please enjoy a longer-than-usual sermon about magic, alchemy, and astrology.
And here is a bit more about amor fati.
DLM # 156 The Infinite Second
Many cheers to you and yours!
DLM # 155 Adventures on the Wheel of Samsara ☸️
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers, and Jai Ma!! Victory to the Mother!
And happy four years of attempting to spread wisdom and light into the world!
After listening to the sermon, you may object that it’s important to be “in the world” to help alleviate suffering. I agree, of course, we must all do what we can. But what I am suggesting is that there is something even more important than that: training yourself and your mind to such a degree that you are no longer unconsciously contributing to the cyclical regeneration of suffering in the first place. If with one hand we clean, and with the other, we are creating a mess, then the cycle just goes on ad infinitum. At some point, we must stop creating the mess in the first place and we can only achieve this with a highly trained and refined mind.
DLM #154 The Samadhi of the Intergalactic Mushroom 🍄
DLM # 153 Sermo Dormeo (The Return of the Light) 🌟
Welcome back to the DLM weekly sermons. It’s great to be with you again.
Happy Winter Solstice and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
DLM # 152 Moonday Sermons
I like the word thalassic. For music this week, look up Tom Moulton’s remixes of the Philadelphia Classics and listen to all of them, then slowly, slowly, get really into Tom Moulton.
DLM # 151 Solar Cycles of Death & Rebirth 🌀🔥
It takes a lot of heart, man. That’s all I can say.
DLM # 150 Mindfullness or Singlemindedness?
It’s an important question we don’t ask ourselves enough. Should we be full of mind or should we be focused?
The external world is unreliable, it will not avail us, especially when we are using an untrained monkey mind to interact with it. Training is the only answer, the only pathway to liberation which begins within, inside our own minds, the scariest and most dogmatic place of all!
DLM # 149 Untitled Sermon
DLM # 148 Slowness and Consciousness
I hope you enjoy today’s sermon. In honor of its theme, we’re listening to Manuel Göttsching’s E2E4—an hour-long song that gives new meaning to slowing down.
DLM # 147 The Flashing Water
May your week be filled with expansive consciousness opportunities. Whenever possible, we can try to foster harmony. Christmas Humphreys writes that karma is “nature’s retribution for lost harmony.” I love this definition so much. It’s worth keeping it in mind when we think, speak, or act.
Which is more important? Being right or being in harmony with the tao?