Wednesday 16 October 2013

a walk up the tor

Although somewhat of a cliche it is still true that when you walk up Glastonbury Tor barefoot and sit at the top to survey the scenery you connect with something very special, something very mystical that can get you back on track of what you need to be doing to fulfill your highest purposes....
We are lucky enough to have a view of the Tor from several rooms in our home and I never tire of the sight of this beautiful curve of land.



Monday 14 October 2013

raw chocolate kefir cheese cake

You need 300g kefir cream cheese and a batch of molten raw chocolate

Kefir Cream Cheese:
You can make kefir cream cheese  in two ways:
One is to pour kefir liquid into a muslin or nylon straining bag and hang over a container to catch the whey.  Leave for 24 hours and you have kefir cheese in the bag.  Alternatively leave kefir liquid in a kilner jar for a few days so that the creamy curds and clear whey separate out.  Then you can spoon the kefir cream off the top.  It works much better with the thick kefir you get from Jersey or Guernsey cows' milk.

Chocolate:
To make the chocolate you need the folloing ingredients:
110g cacao butter
50g cacao paste
3 Tbspns yacon syrup
pinch cayenne
pinch Celtic sea salt
4 Tbspns lucuma powder
1 Tbspn maca
1 tspn he shou wu
1 Tbspn strawberry powder
1 Tbspn fig powder
1 Tbspn purple corn
¼ tsp vanilla powder
¼ tsp blue green algae

Melt cacao paste and butter over hot water, add yacon and salt
Mix dry chocolate ingredients
Stir paste and butter mixture into dry ingredients

Making the Cheesecake:
Stir the molten chocolate into the cream cheese thoroughly and mould into cake shape.

Sunday 13 October 2013

ancient paths












Graham Robb, in his new book The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe
claims that 'Roman' roads were actually built by the Celts, also that the Druids created a sophisticated ancient society to rival the Romans.

Here are two reviews from The Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10367457/Roman-roads-were-actually-built-by-the-Celts-new-book-claims.html
By Hayley Dixon
The findings of Graham Robb, a biographer and historian, bring into question two millennia of thinking about Iron Age Britain and Europe and the stereotyped image of Celts as barbarous, superstitious tribes.
In reality the Druids, the Celt’s scientific and spiritual leaders, were some of the most intellectually advanced thinkers of their age, it is said, who developed the straight roads in the 4th Century BC, hundreds of years before the Italian army marched across the continent.
“They had their own road system on which the Romans later based theirs,” Mr Robb said, adding that the roads were built in Britain from around the 1st Century BC.
“It has often been wondered how the Romans managed to build the Fosse Way, which goes from Exeter to Lincoln. They must have known what the finishing point would be, but they didn’t conquer that part of Britain until decades later. How did they manage to do that if they didn’t follow the Celtic road?”
Mr Robb, former fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, first came up with the theory when he planned to cycle the Via Heraklea, an ancient route that runs a thousand miles in a straight line from the tip of the Iberian Peninsula to the Alps, and realised that it was plotted along the solstice lines through several Celtic settlements.

He mapped the positioning of hundreds of other towns and cities in France, Britain and Ireland and found that the Celt’s had organised them to mirror the paths of their Sun God, created a network straight of tracks following the solstice lines across swathes of the continent.
The Ancient Paths, released tomorrow, suggests that the Druids possessed map-making skills that historians believed were discovered centuries later and created the “earliest accurate map of the world”.
But their scientific and mathematical achievements have been long forgotten as there is no written evidence and their history has been replaced the stereotypes of them as wood-dwelling wildmen.
“Anything to do with the Celts and the Druids seems very implausible and that is why I spent five years on this, I thought it can’t be true, I have to disprove it,” Mr Robb said. “But they were a very advanced civilisation.
“There is an underlying sense that the civilisation that won must have been superior and that clearly isn’t the case.
“There is a lot of admiring what the Romans did, but they didn’t do it in a void, and it might be nice if there was a more nuanced view of the almighty Romans.”


and by Tim Martin:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10372050/The-Ancient-Paths-Discovering-the-Lost-Map-of-Celtic-Europe-review.html

'Important if true” was the phrase that the 19th-century writer and historian Alexander Kinglake wanted to see engraved above church doors. It rings loud in the ears as one reads the latest book by Graham Robb, a biographer and historian of distinction whose new work, if everything in it proves to be correct, will blow apart two millennia of thinking about Iron Age Britain and Europe and put several scientific discoveries back by centuries.
Rigorously field-tested by its sceptical author, who observes drily that “anyone who writes about Druids and mysteriously coordinated landscapes, or who claims to have located the intersections of the solar paths of Middle Earth in a particular field, street, railway station or cement quarry, must expect to be treated with superstition”, it presents extraordinary conclusions in a deeply persuasive and uncompromising manner. What surfaces from these elegant pages – if true – is nothing less than a wonder of the ancient world: the first solid evidence of Druidic science and its accomplishments and the earliest accurate map of a continent.
Robb begins his journey from a cottage in Oxfordshire, following up a handful of mysteries that had teasingly accrued as he assembled his Ondaatje Prize-winning travelogue The Discovery of France.
They had to do with the Heraklean Way, an ancient route that runs 1,000 miles in a straight line from the tip of the Iberian Peninsula to the Alps, and with several Celtic settlements called Mediolanum arranged at intervals along the route.
After examining satellite imaging (difficult for the private scholar even a decade ago) and making several more research trips, Robb bumped up against two extraordinary discoveries. First, the entire Via Heraklea runs as straight as an arrow along the angle of the rising and setting sun at the solstices. Second, plotting lines through the Celtic Mediolanum settlements results in lines that map on to sections of Roman road, which themselves point not to Roman towns but at Celtic oppida farther along.

Viewed in this light, the ancient texts of the Italian conquerors begin to reveal sidelong secrets about the people they supplanted. Piece by piece, there emerges a map of the ancient world constructed along precise celestial lines: a huge network of meridians and solar axes that served as the blueprint for the Celtic colonisation of Europe, dictated the placement of its settlements and places of worship, and was then almost wholly wiped from history. We are, to put it mildly, unused to thinking like this about the Celts, whose language is defunct and whose reputation was comprehensively rewritten by those who succeeded them.
Greek travellers from the sixth century BC onwards described a nation of sanguinary brutes and madmen who threw their babies in rivers, walked with their swords into the sea and roughly sodomised their guests. “It does not take an anthropologist to suspect,” Robb observes drily, “that what the travellers saw or heard about were baptismal rites, the ceremonial dedication of weapons to gods of the lower world, and the friendly custom of sharing one’s bed with a stranger.”
Later on, clean-shaven, toga-sporting Roman visitors to what they called Gallia Bracata and Gallia Comata – Trousered Gaul and Hairy Gaul respectively – were horrified by the inhabitants’ practical legwear and love of elaborate moustaches, and marvelled to hear them discoursing not in gnarly Gaulish but in perfect Greek.
As the Roman military machine rolled over Europe, depicting the Celt as a woods-dwelling wild man became not just a matter of Italian snobbery but one of propagandist utility. According to Robb, when the Romans arrived this side of the Alps, they found a country whose technical achievements were different from, but competitive with, their own.
Mapped and governed by a network of scholar-priests according to a template laid down in heaven, covered by a road network that afforded swift passage to fleets of uniquely advanced chariots (“nearly all the Latin words for wheeled vehicles”, Robb notes, “come from Gaulish”) and possessing astronomical and scientific knowledge that would take another millennium to surface again, Gaul remained a deeply enigmatic place to its military-minded conquerors. When Julius Caesar swept through, on a tide of warfare and genocide that would lead his countryman Pliny to accuse him of humani generis iniuria, “crimes against humanity”, much of its knowledge retreated to the greenwood, never to emerge.
Most significantly, suggests Robb, Caesar failed to work out the Druids. To most of us even now, the word conjures up the image of a white-robed seer with a sickle, an implausible hybrid of Getafix and Glastonbury hippie. (Robb suggests, following the design on a Gaulish cauldron, that they tended more towards a figure-hugging costume patterned like oak bark: much better for melting like smoke into the trees, a trait of Druid-led armies that Caesar vigorously deplored.) The Druidic curriculum took two decades to train up its initiates, but these men of science put nothing in writing. Like their wood-built houses, their secrets rotted with time. How could we hope to reconstruct them?
Remarkably, Robb has an answer to this, and it forms the centre of a book almost indecently stuffed with discoveries. One of the most consistently baffling things about Celtic temple sites to modern surveyors is their shape: warped rectangles that seem none the less to demonstrate a kind of systematic irregularity. Using painstakingly reconstructed elements of the Druidic education, which placed religious emphasis on mapping the patterns of the heavens on to the lower “Middle Earth” of our world, Robb comes up with an astonishing discovery: these irregular rectangles exactly match a method for constructing a geometrical ellipse, the image of the sun’s course in the heavens. Such a method was previously thought to be unknown in the West until the 1500s.
Other suggestions follow thick and fast, backed by a mixture of close reading, mathematical construction and scholarly detective work. Building on meridians and equinoctial lines, the Druids used their maps of the heavens to create a map that criss-crossed a continent, providing a plan of sufficient latitudinal and longitudinal accuracy to guide the Celtic diaspora as it pushed eastward across Europe.
The swirls and patterns in Celtic art turn out, Robb surmises, to be arranged along rigorous mathematical principles, and may even encode the navigational and cartographic secrets that the Druids so laboriously developed.
Robb manages his revelations with a showman’s skill, modestly conscious that his book is unfurling a map of Iron Age Europe and Britain that has been inaccessible for millennia. Every page produces new solutions to old mysteries, some of them so audacious that the reader may laugh aloud. Proposing a new location for Uxellodunum, the site of the Gauls’ final losing battle in France, is one thing; suggesting where to look for King Arthur’s court, or which lake to drag for Excalibur, is quite another. But both are here.
Amid such riches, readers of The Discovery of France – a glorious book that mixed notes from a modern cycling tour with a historical gazetteer of pre-unification France – may still be itching for the moment when the author gets back on his bike. Beautifully written though it is, The Ancient Paths can tend to dryness at times, but some of its best moments come when the author gets out into the field.
One example will suffice. Certain references in Caesar’s writing indicate that the Gauls operated a vocal telegraph, composed of strategically placed teams yodelling news overland to one another, which passed messages at a speed nearly equivalent to the first Chappe telegraph in the 18th century. To judge how this might have worked, Robb takes himself off to the oppidum above Aumance, near Clermont-Ferrand, where he reports on the car alarms and the whirr of traffic still audible across countryside four kilometres away.
He goes further. Aumance was one of around 75 places once known by the name Equoranda, a word with an unknown root that resembles the Greek and Gaulish for “sound-line” or “call-line”. All the Equoranda settlements Robb visits turn out to be on low ridges or shallow valleys, and would, he writes, “have made excellent listening posts”. Examined in this light, one word in Caesar’s account becomes fruitful: he observes that the Gauls “transmit the news by shouting across fields and regios”, a word that can be translated as “boundaries”. An ancient Persian technique for acoustic surveying, still current in the 19th-century south of France, involves three men calling to one another and plotting their position along the direction of the sound. Put the pieces together and you end up – or Robb does – with “the scattered remains of a magnificent network” that could have acted not just as a telegraph system but as a means to map the Druids’ boundaries on to the earth.
It’s a magnificent piece of historical conjecture, backed by a quizzical scholarly intellect and given a personal twist by experiment. So, for that matter, is
the whole thing. Robb describes in his introduction the secretive meetings with publishers in London and New York that kept a lid on the book’s research until publication, and watching its conclusions percolate through popular and academic history promises to be thrilling.
Reading it is already an electrifying and uncanny experience: there is something gloriously unmodern about seeing a whole new perspective on history so comprehensively birthed in a single book. If true, very important indeed.

Thursday 10 October 2013

kalis game

Gaming is the supreme metaphor for human behavior in Kali Yuga, especially in the last two centuries until its end in 2216 CE.  In the extreme condition of these times, any act or choice or venture that cannot be stated in terms of a game will not be either understood or mastered.
JLL

http://www.kalirising.org/2009/03/29/kalis-game-1/

Tuesday 8 October 2013

dreamed into life

Humanity was never created in a literal sense, for it is perpetually being dreamed into life. ~ John Lamb Lash (from the Gnostic teachings)

when words were like magic

...when words were like magic
the human mind had mysterious powers
a word spoken by chance might have strange consequences
it would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen...

Inuit poem

paradise on earth

Awake we maintain consciousness of heaven or paradise whilst living on Earth.

Sunday 6 October 2013

awake in the dream

The earth is undergoing a process of conscious dreaming in which humans also can awake simultaneously, one dreamer at a time, but preferably in pairs...

...how we dream together will be revealed to us...

The Gaian lucid dream is an eruption of the highest rapturous magic of the Divine Feminine into the human psyche, pouring through mind and body, all at once.

Sophia awakens, but still continues to dream with the planet earth realized as her vehicle of expression. "Gaia Awakening" signals the actualization of conscious dreaming through the instrument of her dreambody, this very earth. The progression of history toward a global or planetary status, uniquely achievable for human species, reveals her dream experiment refracted in human behavior, attitudes, and expectations, including the worst that can be imagined...
...At the same moment, humans who envision a correction of human deviance from the divine experiment awaken WITH her: conscious of being dreamed by a divine presence.

John Lamb Lash 

Thursday 3 October 2013

return to the brain of eden

In this interview Tony Wright tells us some startling stuff that can shine light of our current predicament as a species.  He explains how a natural biological diet including raw fruit paired with right hemisphere stimulating activities such as meditation, dance and traditional shamanic practices can take us, step by step, into an apparently new sense of self  but one which was known by the ancients; more functional, more connected and definitely happier, 'in a benign state of wonder and awe'.
Improved immune and digestive function are also on the menu, also a more balanced endocrine system, harmony, empathy  and also abilities that have been categorised as psychic, This is all part of our natural potential as humans.

The destiny of our species with its complex consciousness apparatus (including our brains)  is inevitably intertwined with the complexity of the forest biochemistry.  The sexual organs of the trees i.e. fruit is actually hormonally active in humans.  With the right steps we can improve the way our DNA is read to expand into our full genetic blueprint.

Tony's book 'Left in the Dark' is being republished next year as 'Return to the Brain of Eden: Restoring the Connection Between Neurochemistry and Consciousness'
His websites are
www.beyond-belief.org.uk and www.leftinthedark.org.uk where you will find more links which back up what he is saying.
There are also relevant links on www.foodforconsiousness.co.uk and http://foodforconsciousness.blogspot.co.uk/



During the interview we mention neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran.  Here Ramachandran documents how right brain stroke victims are generally unable to understand what has happened to them in terms of losing function in the left side of the body.  In contrast left hemisphere stroke victims do not have this problem.  This implies that the right hemisphere of the brain enables us to update our realities while the left hemisphere does not.

http://www.beyond-belief.org.uk/sites/beyond-belief.org.uk/files/Ramachandran.pdf

Wednesday 2 October 2013

rule of the kalikas

"Hold to your highest desire and surrender its attainment through the power of the Gaian Dakinis"

http://gaiaspora.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Nav-Briefing-87-The-Rule-of-the-Kalikas-22-Sep-2013.mp3

"what you cannot render unto yourself by control or wishing arising from the natural craving of your own desire is obtainable in the supernatural connection to the power of the Earth itself and the infernal dakini forces streaming from the Earth straight into your mind, heart and body and into every cell of your body every single moment that you live"
JLL

Tuesday 1 October 2013

wonders of kefir

Milk kefir is one the major staples of our diet.  There are many wonderful things about it.  Not least is that it enables us to benefit, with digestive ease, from the goodness in raw dairy milk, including the crucial fat soluble vitamins D and K2 and also various B vitamins which are otherwise difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities from a plant sourced diet.  In high latitude countries such as Britain it is not possible to obtain vitamin D from sunlight for about half of the year due to the low altitude of the sun. 

Kefir transforms the milk of another mammal, for example a cow, so that the ratios of the amino acids are more suitable for humans.  In particular in increases the amount of tryptophan which it is very easy to be deficient in and is the precursor to serotonin.  The kefir culture also breaks down difficult to digest casein proteins into peptides and lactose, which is  a problem for many, into lactic acid.  Kefir is  the most powerful probiotic substance we know of, actively repopulating the gut with friendly bacteria. 

If you make your kefir with the milk from traditional A2 type cows such as Jersey cows, then all the better. This milk does not release a particular beta-casomorphine called BCM 7 which is responsible for some milk intolerance.  Jersey milk also contains more cream therefore more fat soluble vitamins.(more below).

We integrate noni powder into some of our kefir meals.  The xeronine in noni helps the tryptophan get through the intestinal walls more effectively.

Demonstrating kefir at Dutch Raw Food Festival:



at our workshop:



addendum on A1 and A2 milk:

"All proteins are long chains of amino acids. Beta casein is a chain 229 amino acids in length. Cows who produce this protein in their milk with a proline at number 67 are called A2 cows, and are the older breeds of cows (e.g. Jerseys, Asian and African cows). But some 5,000 years ago, a mutation occurred in this proline amino acid, converting it to histidine. Cows that have this mutated beta casein are called A1 cows, and include breeds like Holstein.

Proline has a strong bond to a small protein called BCM 7, which helps keep it from getting into the milk, so that essentially no BCM 7 is found in the urine, blood or GI tract of old-fashioned A2 cows. On the other hand, histidine, the mutated protein, only weakly holds on to BCM 7, so it is liberated in the GI tract of animals and humans who drink A1 cow milk."
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/07/09/the-devil-in-the-milk.aspx