When in Rome

 

 

I started making this sync video back in January 2013 and finally got round to completing it last week.

I hit a couple of snags along the way which slowed things down, but in hindsight these snags appear to have been put there for good reason.  Sync reminds me that NOW is the perfect time to share this with friends.

Confirmation came via @Seallion thanks to his new Charlize Theron videos and Rose-tinted tweets.

I like how Jake started with the THORN (Charlize THeRON) and then moved on to the ROSE.

Thorn to Rose feels like a natural transition.

I came up with the name "When in Rome" back in January and only recently discovered that there's a movie which shares the same title.

Kristen Bell, seen above with Roses growing out of her name
will be playing a lead role in new Disney movie Frozen.

monster mouth anyone?!

She voices the main character Anna...or Rose-Anna.

Kristen also starred in this movie which combines the Rome/Frozen/Rose elements quite nicely.

In Roman Kristen plays a character named ISIS...or ICE-is.

Which brings us to the Ice-Man.....

 

.....who was kissed by a Rose.

In Spartan actor Val Kilmer is on the hunt for the president's kidnapped daughter who happens to be played by actress Kristen Bell.

Ice-Man inside the eye of Ice-is

Ice Man = Eyes Man

 ICE causes things to SINK/SYNC.

Jack and Rose covered in Frost.

 Jack and Rose.

If we follow this thread to the night sky then we find that Betelgeuse is a red supergiant located in Orion.

On a clear night Orion the Hunter can be seen wielding his celestial Bow so it makes sense that the supergiant Betelgeuse should also entrain with this particular weapon.

Some interpretations show Orion holding a Lion in place of a Bow, so from a sync perspective the Lion and Bow now merge into one.

Pray for the Hunter (Orion)

Let's go off on a different tangent by considering that:

A Rose = Arrows

The 'Bow' of a ship is the forward part of the hull, or the tip.

It's interesting then to find Michael Keaton (Beetlejuice/Betelgeuse) mirroring the scene from Titanic where Leo (resonating Lion) stands at the Bow holding a Rose.

...stands at the Bow holding Arrows.

So what is the Hunter aiming at?

The dog-star...or god-star...which is attributed to the Egyptian Isis...or Ice-is.

Now I started making my new When in Rome video at the beginning of 2013 so I had no idea that it's release would coincide with everything happening over in Syria.

The words Syria and Sirius sound similar to one another but the connection goes a little deeper than that.  Notice that Syria has a pair of pentagrams on its flag, the very same symbol which instigated this blog back in 2009.

For more on the Sirius/Twin Star connection check out Paw Prints & Pentagrams Part 1 and Part 2 

and maybe throw in some Lost Star of Myth and Time for good measure.

So what does Sirius have to tell us about the crIsis in Syria?

Well this post started off with Icy/Frozen overtones so temperature seems to be the key here.  If you've been watching the news then you'll have noticed that things were heating up with talk of air strikes.

Global Warming = Global Worming

And then all of a sudden, just as things were about to reach boiling point, it all seems have cooled off slightly, even though the battle against the rebels continues to rage on.

With Ice-is at the heart of the situation things will probably continue to cool until we reach breaking point in November (coinciding with the Disney's release of Frozen).

The cracks have already appeared on the surface...

 

...and it won't be long before everything Sinks/Syncs to a whole new level.

At the start of my new video Grant Morrison gives us a glimpse of the world through new eyes. When I first watched the interview a few years ago it really struck a chord in me.  Grants words rang with truth and his description of the Hyper-Entity, the 'Big Me' who creates all life and who we return to in death, reminded me that everything that happens, regardless of how good or bad it might appear on the surface, is all part of the master plan.

The 'Big Me' is the Sole/Soul of our planet and each step we take is perfectly aligned with earth/heart.

Like a hunter, the 'Big Me' lurks in the shadows of the subconscious
priming his Rain Bow...waiting for the opportunity to unleash a rose (arrows)

 Despite being everyone and everything the 'Big Me' is invisible to the naked I.
 Once we realize that everything is a reflection, we can reach through and find Peace. 

Shortly after completing 'When in Rome' it dawned on me that Jack Frost is one of the main characters in Grant Morrison's amazing comic series The Invisibles.

I crossed paths with The Invisibles a good few years ago and immediately fell in love with Grants unique style of story telling.  Reading a Grant Morrison comic is a bit like being on psychedelics without actually taking any drugs.

Although the conscious mind can struggle with his interwoven and convoluted plot points (mine certainly did) I think the resulting confusion helps him communicate directly with the core of the reader.  Confusion creates a gap in the subconscious and he uses this fertile space to plant his seeds.  Or magic beans.

It's kind of like he's working on a different frequency...or time zone.

The comic series follows a delinquent named Dane McGowan who gets recruited by a group of psychic misfits called The Invisibles.  He hooks up with a hobo named Tom O'Bedlam, smokes some blue mold found growing on a subway wall, and his Jack Frost initiation begins.

I like how Dane's first contact with Jack Frost, his spiritual totem or Daemon, has him highlighted by the number 17. 

This particular number pops up a couple of times in Grants series.

 

If you flip the number 17 you get the letters LI or Li.

Li refers to the underlying reason and order of nature.

Wiki:  The tao is a certain kind of order, and this kind of order is not quite what we call order when we arrange everything geometrically in boxes, or in rows. That is a very crude kind of order, but when you look at a plant it is perfectly obvious that the plant has order. We recognize at once that it is not a mess, but it is not symmetrical and it is not geometrical looking. The plant looks like a Chinese drawing, because they appreciated this kind of non-symmetrical order so much that it became an integral aspect of their painting. In the Chinese language this is called li, and the character for li means the markings in jade. It also means the grain in wood and the fiber in muscle. We could say, too, that clouds have li, marble has li, the human body has li.

We all recognize it, and the artist copies it whether he is a landscape painter, a portrait painter, an abstract painter, or a non-objective painter. They all are trying to express the essence of li. The interesting thing is, that although we all know what it is, there is no way of defining it. Because tao is the course, we can also call li the watercourse, and the patterns of li are also the patterns of flowing water.

We see those patterns of flow memorialized, as it were, as sculpture in the grain in wood, which is the flow of sap, in marble, in bones, in muscles. All these things are patterned according to the basic principles of flow. In the patterns of flowing water you will find all kind of motifs from Chinese art, immediately recognizable, including the S-curve in the circle of yang-yin. So li means then the order of flow, the wonderful dancing pattern of liquid, because Lao-tzu likens tao to water: The great tao flows everywhere, to the left and to the right, It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them.

Li is the watercourse, the order of flow.

Li is therefore an integral part of Li-fe.

Follow Li-fe back to the source and you arrive at the Big Bang.

Elsewhere in the series Grant depicts the Big Bang in terms of a swirling Cy-clone.

Cyclones and Clones and Clones and Clowns

Which brings us to another of Grant Morrisons creations - Aztek: The Ultimate Man.

Morrison was writing The Invisibles at the same time Aztek was released in 1996, so we would expect to see some kind of bleed through between the two.

AZTEK = KETZA

or QUETZA-coatl

Mayan God of Li-ght

Aztek's back story hints that his Mask (the source of his godly power) was once preserved in Ice.

In one of the issues he encounters a Roman centurion who calls himself The Lizard King.

In The Sync Book 2 I wrote about a vision I had while lying in bed one evening.  I saw myself being swallowed by a serpent and later discovered that this same imagery could be found on ancient Mayan pyramids and statues.  After a series of 'coincidences' I learned that the serpent from my vision had a name, Quetzalcoatl, and last year I decided to make a video about it - The Sync Serpent. 

I also did a few sketches to remind myself what it's like to be 'swallowed'.

The reason I mention this is because the image above is simply another way of re-imagining Grant Morrisons 'long trailing worm' thingy.

In the video interview Grant says to imagine yourself as the leading point of you (the head peering out of the snakes mouth) with a million different versions of you (clones) moving backwards through time (the serpents body).

The Serpent keeps us rooted in the Tree of Life and if you freeze frame it'd look something like this.

You could also imagine it in terms of a train snaking it's way through the NOW.

Or another way of visualizing it would be to think of yourself as a Ship.  You're standing at the very front of the vessel, at the bow, and all the stuff down in the cargo hold and all the stuff up on deck is everything you've accumulated during this life-time; your memories, your dreams, all the thoughts you've ever had and all the things you've ever said and done.  You're the captain of your own Ship - I'm King of the World - flowing from one moment to the next.

This concept can also take the shape of an Arrow. 

Everything started with the Big Bang (or Big Twang) and since that moment of conception we've all been traveling through space and time at the speed of flight.

 We represent the Arrow-head.
The wooden shaft connects us to the fletching (or feathered wings)
which helps determine the angle/angel of (f)light.

Robin's Hood is that of a Snakes.
It keeps our Bodhi/Body grounded in the Serpent/preSent moment while all this is going on.

Despite being frozen in time we continue to evolve and become WORM.

Better living through Clown-ing

See what you can dig up.

Worms? 

Grant Morrison's Aztek and The Invisibles proved to be a successful and opened a doorway for the likes of Batman R.I.P.

 Michael Keaton (Jack Frost) and Val Kilmer (Ice-Man) have both been The Dark Knight.

And whenever Batman appears on my sync-radar (which happened while making my new video) I tend to get sweaty palms and palpitations.

The reason being is that he represents the Dark Knight of the Soul...and the last time I went through one of those (back in 2010 I think) my whole world seemed to fall apart.  My thirteen year relationship came to an abrupt end and I found myself living back at my parents with no home, with limited access to my kids, while caught up in a whirlwind of depression/anger/frustration.

In hindsight, however, this proved to be the best thing that could have happened.  From Ground Zero the only way is up and sometimes a complete reboot is necessary when Ctrl-Alt-Delete just doesn't cut it anymore.

Just before my circumstances took a nose dive I came up with this video.  I like to think that my subconscious was preparing me for the Dark Knight which was looming on the horizon.

 The Dark Knight is about facing your inner-most fears and then moving beyond them.

Once you've recognized your fear you can make the ascent.



And then let it go.

To bring this back to recent worldly events we could say that Syria is currently going through a Dark Knight of the Sol.  You'd probably agree that there's some serious shit going on over there right now.

At the moment the Dark Knight (George Clone-y) only has eyes for Syria.

The big nations are threatening to crash down upon the underdog Syria if they don't comply with demands.  Syria has run out of options and now faces a brick wall with little chance of climbing over it.  When you hit a dead end like this the only way through is to Sink/Sync and hope for the best.

The previous 'Dark Knight of the Soul' began twelve years ago on September 11th 2001.

A global reboot was in order:

And we see here that the Dark Knight (playing a character named Harry Berg...as in Ice-Berg) was instigated by the 'Big Me'.

The nations are applying pressure to Syria and the whole thing has a strong whiff of 9/11 about it.  Syria could turn into another Iraq or Afghanistan but I think this time round we've learned a thing or two.

If everyone keeps their cool then we can pass through the crisis virtually unscathed.

I'm not saying it's all going to be rosie
but there's an opportunity here to learn from the past.
And wouldn't that be nice?

Hope you enjoyed the video and got something out of my mad ramblings.

                                                 What's in a name? that which we call a rose
                                                       By any other name would smell as sweet;
                                                       So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
                                                       Retain that dear perfection which he owes
                                                       Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
                                                       And for that name which is no part of thee
                                                       Take all myself.
                                                                                          ~William Shakespeare 

Much love

R

The Sync Serpent

Excerpt from my chapter in The Sync Book 2:

"I closed my eyes and relaxed.  After several minutes the fatigue began to subside and I was about to open my eyes when something changed.  My attention was drawn to the lower half of my body which felt as if it were being slowly stretched like a length of elastic.  It was as if everything from the waist down had been snagged on an invisible fish hook and was being gently pulled towards some unknown destination.  Despite feeling bewildered by this unexpected turn of events, at no point did the 'stretching' become uncomfortable.

While trying to locate the source of the unusual sensation a spot of light materialized in the center of my vision.  The light was faint at first, as though it were reaching me from across a great distance, but like the sun piercing it's way through a dense cloud, the light gradually grew brighter and more vivid.  Different colors began to flood the periphery of my vision, hues of blue and green, and I intuitively knew that the ball of light was somehow responsible for the stretching in my legs.  It was like I was being sucked towards it, caught in a gravitational pull that I had absolutely no control over.

I knew that I could end the experience by opening my eyes but managed to resist the temptation and simply observed.  When I think about what happened next I'm reminded of the way in which our sun releases a solar flare into outer space.  I watched as a tendril of light curled outwards from the point of origin and continued to expand in a clockwise direction, spiraling towards me in slow motion.

As the light flowed along its corkscrew trajectory, the spiral path becoming wider with each rotation, I was hit with the realization that I was in the presence of a serpent.  A serpent made of light.

As the worm-shaped body approached I became conscious of the fact that if it didn't stop soon it was going to collide with my head, which is exactly what happened next.   As the light moved into and through my skull I felt an overwhelming tingling or vibrating throughout my entire body. There was a momentary feeling of ecstasy as the serpent merged with me.  The tail then passed beyond the realm of my perception, out the back of my head I suppose, and disappeared.  The spiraling light faded away, the stretching in my lower body came to an abrupt stop, and my vision returned to the grey black smudge that one would usually see while lying in bed with their eyes closed.

I thought that the experience had reached it's conclusion, however it turned out that this was a two-parter.

I kept my eyes shut while trying to digest everything that had just transpired.  I'd never seen or felt anything like this before so my mind was reeling with questions.  This inner monologue was cut short when two parallel rows of zigzags suddenly appeared at the top and bottom of my peripheral vision.  As the zigzag patterns took on sharp definition I could see that they were being created by rows of small triangles, each aligned horizontally, and seemed to consist of the same greyish light that the serpent had been made of.

My mind tried to put these new visuals into a context that it could understand, so it occurred to me that the two rows of triangles represented teeth.  Several minutes earlier a snake had corkscrewed its way through my head so it seemed natural to associate the triangles with the teeth of a serpent.  In my minds eye I zoomed out, looked down at myself lying horizontal on the bed, and almost burst out laughing at the mental imagery I'd concocted.  There I was, completely swallowed, my face peering out the open mouth of a giant snake."

The Clock and the Cat

"Two things are aesthetically perfect in the world - the clock and the cat."

Émile-Auguste Chartier

I was channel surfing last week and landed on the climatic scene of Back to the Future where Doc Brown is trying to send Marty home.  As the lightning illuminates the Tower I noticed the presence of this large cat.

The following day I'm doing the house work and Hot Tub Time Machine comes on the TV.

 

I'm only half paying attention as I do my chores, but it get's to point where the group of guys arrive at the hotel which will become their portal to the past.  As they enter the hotel one of the characters says,

"This place stinks of cat piss"

My mind automatically connects Doc Browns cat statue atop the Clock Tower to the cat piss hotel, and I think "Sync!"

But what on earth do cats and time-travel have in common?  My mind is a blank.

The caretaker of the Hot Tub Time Machine is Chevy Chase. 

I look him up on the net and find Chevy Chase connected to the Clock Tower, the Hot Tub...and now the Dog.

I'm thinking Chevy Chase...Time Travel...Dog

What do Dogs Chase?

The Cat.

And now I'm curious.

So last night I find a dodgy copy of Looper and stream if off the net.

While watching Looper, probably my favorite movie this year, my thoughts wander to the series of Time Travel/Cat syncs from last week.

It's not long before the penny drops.

I had time-traveling Joseph Gordon-Levitt connected to the Cat so where did Bruce Willis fit into the pattern?

 

It turns out I'd already made a video to help answer my own question!

Paradise Kitty from Richard Arrowsmith on Vimeo.

Feeling like I'm on a roll I start thinking about other actors who syncs with these themes.

Bill Murray gets caught in a Loop in Groundhog Day and he's also voiced Garfield.

Mike Myers traveled back in time in Austin Power and he was of course...

There's more I can add to this but I've run out of time.  If I get a chance I'll do an update tomorrow.

Part 2:  Through the Looking Glass

Bill Murray and Mike Myers both have a strong 'Stripey' vibe going on in the images above.  Garfield is a striped cat and the Myers posters speak for themselves.

If we use this as a jumping off point then we can take these syncs into the realm of Aztec mythology.


Tezcatlipoca was the Mayan deity who embodied the energy of the Cat.

According to Wiki he is associated with a wide range of concepts, including the night sky, the night winds, hurricanes, the north, the earth, obsidian, enmity, discord, rulership, divination, temptation, jaguars, sorcery, beauty, war and strife.

TezCAT was often depicted with Stripes running horizontally across his face.

It's one of his defining features.


His name in the Nahuatl language is often translated as "Smoking Mirror".

Smoking

Mirror

Here we have Bill Murray emerging from the Smoke, with emphasis on the Stripes.

Tezcatlipoca is a deity associated with the North.


On a clock face North would be represented by the Midnight hour.

In the night sky you can find the North Star by following the Big Dipper, which looks like a Frying Pan.  This is one of the first things my dad taught me about the stars as a kid.  Look for the Pan in the sky and it'll point you towards the North Star.

So if we combine some of these elements, Tezcatlipoca the Smoking Mirror, the Pan which points North, and Midnight, we arrive at a 1970s group called Flash and the Pan.

I checked out the Midnight Man music video and found some strong Tezcatlipoca syncage going on inside.

 

 According to one source Tezcatlipoca was responsible for the creation of the Big Dipper, or Pan:

The Great Bear Constellation, or Ursa Major, is believed in Aztec tradition to be the single footprint of Tezcatlipoca. The Great Pole, or North Star, was considered a place sacred to the gods, and Tezcatlipoca, not being an entity of goodness, was unable to approach it, but hopped around the Pole Star on his single foot creating the Great Bear Constellation.

Tezcat points to the North Star which in turn points to the Center, or the Whole, so it makes sense that he should be a strong sync-attractor.  You can go as deep into his pattern as you like and you'll never reach the end...but that's beside the point.

For now let's follow the darn cat and see we it takes us.

Back in 2009 I kept seeing synchronicites involving the Cat and the Train so compiled all the syncs and put them intp a post called Keeping Track of the Cat.

Here's one of images I used which shows how the CAT associates with the Pyramid or Mountain.

The journey to the North Pole begins at Midnight.

Now I'm not going to take this post to oblivion, been there, done that, worn the T-shirt, but what I do want to touch on is the Cat's relationship with the North.

I live in the North of Scotland, as far North as you can get without getting your feet wet in the North Sea, and the vikings who landed here a long time ago decided to call the area Caithness, which means 'Land of the Cat's'.

The Cat syncs with the North, and the North syncs with Tezcatlipoca, and here we see the Midnight Man doing his best 'walking on water' impression.

If you're aligned with North you're technically 'walking on the water'.

Sean Bean played a character named Loki in the movie Far North.  Here we see him standing on ice aka walking on water.

Sean Bean (Loki) also starred in NORTH County alongside actress Charlize THERON, whose very name encodes the word NORTH.

Jake pointed out in Lometheus Rising that Charlize THERON/NORTH has the letters LOKI on her kitty cat T-Shirt:

Sean Bean, who syncs with Loki and now the Cat, was King of NORTH in the awesome TV show Game of THRONES.

In Thrones he lost his head, in a BIG way.

Here we see Sean Beans decapitated head mounted on a North pointing spike.  This is the Midnight Hour, or the Witching Hour, when everything aligns perfectly and our sacrifice grants us a much higher vantage point.  This is the moment we arrive at the Pole.  Or North Pole.

I'm not even going to get into the whole Bigfoot thing, it just get's too weird.  All we need to know is that it has something to do with the journey that our Sole/Soul makes up the K2 mountain, and we'll leave it at that.

Now usually a break is considered a BAD thing, especially if you're trying to reach the Summit and your leg suddenly gives way.

Which brings me back to the Aztec deity Tezcatlipoca, who only had one leg.  Apparently a giant fish swam away with his other one.

Not many people want their head on a spike, or their leg to break, but in this sync-context it's actually a good thing.  It's like breaking the old habits, or old cycles, or the chains that keep us from moving forward.


Sometimes the shackles need to come off and 2012 seems to be the perfect year for it.


Now what does any of this have to with Time-Travel I hear you ask.  That's how I got caught up in this loop in the first place so I'll try and round this off with one last sync.

Catman Bruce Willis and Elijah Me and my Cat Wood both starred in the movie North.

Bruce Willis time-travelled in Looper and 12 Monkeys while Elijah Wood started his career in this movie.  He's the young kid who watches Marty showing off his skills as a 'CRACK shot'.


Better go now.  Got a train to catch.  Funny how time McFlies when you're having fun.

Thanks for reading.

R