With the dream team of Christopher Nolan [the 'Dark Knight' series, 'Inception' + Zach Snyder ['300', 'Watchmen'], the answer from an energy arts perspective is a resounding YES!

Now, we must admit up front to a bias in our review: We love Zach Snyder. While most critics absolutely panned ‘Sucker Punch’, we found it to be a glorious hot mess that one of our friends aptly described as “delicious”. His visuals are just stunning, and his are the male adolescent fantasies I would have if I were a guy.

For us, ‘Man of Steel’ was amazing on many levels – from an energy perspective + otherwise:

• The first half-hour of the film tells the back story of Krypton + delves into the characters of Kal-El’s [Superman's] parents, the hierarchy of Krypton planetary rulers + General Zod with a depth we haven’t seen anywhere else. The world of Krypton that Snyder creates is beautiful, even if you’re not a fan of CGI universes.
• Some of Krypton’s energy tools are downright awesome! We can’t go into more detail without spoilers, but suffice it to say that from an energy arts perspective of reality, these energy tools actually already exist [not physically yet] + are just waiting for humanity to be able to discover + use them without destroying itself, the planet + the solar system.
• We learn that the S of the Superman suit isn’t what we all think it is [unless, maybe, you are an astute reader of the comics]. Since we haven’t read the comics – heresy, we know! – we’re not sure if the treatment of the S in this film comes from the comics or is part of the new origin story that Nolan + Synder have crafted.
• General Zod + the marvelous Michael Shannon playing him are fascinating characters + provide probably the most energy-relevant aspect of the film. We’ve written elsewhere about the 7 Energy Natures. Zod is the total embodiment of Nature 6. Nature 6 is about idealism [which tips into fanaticism on its dark side], devotion, loyalty, one-pointed focus in service of a cause. 6s in humanity are the soldiers + the priests. They are the activists who persist in a cause. The challenge with 6s is that they are great as long as they are focused on a progressive, positive cause. They are terrifying + destructive if devoted to a regressive or harmful cause. Both versions of the 6 are unstoppable. This proves the case with Zod + without giving away too much of the story, we can say that he is one of the best portraits of Energy Natures we’ve seen in film – neither good nor bad, but simply amoral + one-pointed in the unflagging serving of his purpose. General Zod is a warrior who is programmed solely to protect + serve Krypton, even if that includes committing genocide on other planets in service of the cause. Despite knowing this about him + seeing it in action, there is much that is admirable + even vulnerable in this Zod…if only he shifted a few degrees in a different direction. He’s a complicated character + that is rare to find in Hollywood’s brand of superhero movies.
• The story is of Kal-El, not Superman. Superman really doesn’t enter the picture + when it does, it’s pretty much a silly + meaningless construct created by a human misinterpretation of the supposed “S” on Kal-El’s suit. This story is of Kal-El, the man who is in this world of Earth, but not of it, and his struggle to determine who he will become. There’s a dark moment about which Superman purists are crying foul – apparently Christopher Nolan initially objected as well – but in the end it makes so much sense + explains so much about the Superman the comics created with his extreme dedication to harmlessness, that we think it was a brilliant + credible risk to take.
• This is one of the best depictions of the path of the energy-awake world server – or energy artist – that we’ve seen in recent film. It so accurately portrays the struggle all of us who aspire to be citizens of the world of energy + world servers go through so predictably in being of service to humanity while no longer living according to all of its norms, values, behaviors + habits. It portrays the vulnerability to self-doubt because we increasingly know how much we don’t know + the balancing act that as we discover + plug into more energy + power, we must become ever more harmless, eventually positively sacrificing our individual identity to the good of humanity. It shows how sometimes we are forced to do something seemingly “bad” for the greater good + how desperately hard + painful that choice is. It shows how perceived weakness is actually inordinate strength held in check because the world is not ready for it yet. We have personally experienced every one of these phenomena + all the people + enterprises we at Energy Arts Alliance work with are also experiencing these phenomena.

If you are energy awake + believe there is more to life than meets the eye, go see this film. You won’t find much of a better primer.

the crew @ eaa

Four times a year, there’s a Week of World Cooperation. This is a time for people who consider themselves world servers and citizens of the world of energy to gather together physically or in intention to cooperate in being of world service. This month’s Week of World Cooperation is June 21-28.

Keep your eye out here on this website over the coming week for ways to be involved…

It’s been a busy week for poetry – especially for haiku. Through the miracles of smart phones and social media, we stumbled upon two very cool poetry projects this week, both involving haiku [more on haiku and its energy significance below].

Poetry in space

For poetry lovers and poets, who can resist the headline, “Send Your Haiku to Mars! NASA Seeks Poets”?

It turns out NASA is sending a DVD to Mars. Three lucky poets will have their haiku messages included on the DVD, and even those whose haiku are not selected by popular public vote will at least have their names included on the DVD for all posterity. We really wish all these cool online projects that are popping up weren’t so focused on contests and winners and losers, which perpetuates an over-focus on self-interest, self-aggrandizement and competition, but we understand that voting is one of the surest ways these days to engage lots of people and make them click. We look forward to the day when society has outgrown that, but in the meantime…

NASA makes it very easy to submit a haiku online, except that it’s a little misleading because the title tab says “submit your message” rather than submit your haiku. To submit, you just need to be 18 or older and register your username and email address. Then just type your haiku in the message box, and NASA automatically generates a link to your personal haiku page so you can share it with all your friends [but we just discovered those pages won't be visible until July 15th when voting opens to the public]. 

Here’s the haiku we submitted: 

In darkness we seek -
red disc shimmers from the murk -
reflection of us?

We love that NASA is creating opportunities for science and poetry to collaborate, and we love its focus on citizens of the world. The entry guidelines read: “Anybody on planet Earth is welcome to participate!” Now that’s global thinking. For more information and to submit a haiku, go to http://lasp.colorado.edu/maven/goingtomars/.

Haiku goes hiking

Back home here on Earth, another fun project is sticking a little closer to the ground. 

In celebration of spring, a New England-based website called SectionHiker has offered up a haiku raffle for anyone in the world to win a pair of RailRiders hiking pants. [Thanks to The Product Poet(tm) Twitter feed for the heads-up on this raffle.]

In truly geeky glory, SectionHiker inspires the creation of spring haiku through a photo and story about skunk cabbage. It’s actually pretty neat: Aside from the more commonly known fact that skunk cabbage gets its name because it smells skunky and funky if you break one of its leaves, the more obscure and interesting trivia is that skunk cabbage generates its own heat through cellular respiration [which is how we humans do it] instead of converting energy through photosynthesis like most other plants. From an energy arts perspective, that must be a pretty evolved member of the plant kingdom!

Here’s the haiku we submitted:

Spring, you sprung on me!
Snuck up and sprung skunk cabbage,
Green pop old sock funk.

For more information and to submit a haiku, go to http://sectionhiker.com/haiku-raffle-win-a-pair-of-railriders-hiking-pants/.

What’s so special about haiku? An energy arts perspective

And now a brief note on haiku: We find it interesting and not very surprising that haiku is rising in popularity and visibility because there are energy reasons behind it.

According to the energy-based unified wisdom theory, starting in the year 2000, there was an acceleration in the opening of an “energy door” and major evolutionary transition. We’ve written elsewhere about all the Mayan calendar brouhaha regarding the end of the world actually being a recognition on the part of the Maya of the ending of a 26,000-year cycle and the beginning of a new one in December 2012. The acceleration in 2000 was part of this transition.

We are transitioning from a previous evolutionary impulse of abstraction, spiritual awakening, religious expansion and inward focus for the development of the faculties of love and sacrifice for personal gain to manifestation, spiritual practical application to address world problems and needs, religious contraction as part of its path to global unification across all religions and outward focus for the development of the faculties of wisdom, group consciousness and goodwill for global growth.

While the previous cycle was all about expansion and abstraction, this one is all about focused application of the previous cycle’s achieved illuminations to real-world challenges and opportunities. It’s about order, structure, calibration, efficiency and right economy.

Enter, the haiku!

Haiku is one of the most – if not THE most – structured, disciplined, economical poetic forms there is. It can have variations, and the original Japanese form is much more strict and complex than what is considered “haiku” today, particularly in the U.S.  At its most basic, it is a poem of just three lines in a 5-7-5 sound format [though in English, it has tended to adapt to a 5-7-5 syllable format as compared to the Japanese sound format]. Poet, Michael Dylan Welch, whose haiku is cited below, calls this practice of counting syllables rather than sounds in English an “urban myth.” In any case, the way most haiku in English end up being written these days is with 5 syllables in the first line, 7 syllables in the second lines and 5 syllables in the third line. In more sophisticated classical Japanese haiku, the form is supposed to relate to some seasonal theme or image, which may relate to nature or may relate to something like a holiday. And toughest of all, the poem is supposed to break in concept via a “cutting word” or by punctuation, creating a radical “U-turn” in topic somewhere in the haiku [although it is acceptable to have a one-part poem with no cut or U-turn, but never acceptable to have two cuts, which would make it a three-part poem and thus disrupt the harmony of energy created between two contrasting concepts created by just one cut]. We thank Michael Dylan Welch for his additional insights into the haiku form.

Here’s a good example by Michael Dylan Welch (1962- ) of the “U-turn” in subject and imagery, which is created by the ellipsis punctuation [...] at the end of the first line:

meteor shower…
a gentle wave
wets our sandals

In EAA’s presentation at 2012 TEDxSugarLand, “deus ex machina: evolution in 4 acts,” we created a haiku to capture the energy active stage of humanity’s universal shared ultimate expedition of evolution through energy. The rules and form above are why. In the energy active stage, we have already awakened to the world of energy, and we are learning how to wield energy actively, consciously and for good. We are learning the rules, and we are discovering that evolved energy artists recognize how valuable energy truly is in conferring access to greater fuel to be of greater service to the world if we are economical and conscientious in our use of energy – including an elegant economy of words, thoughts and actions.

Haiku is one of the most evolved, elegant and positively challenging ways to move the Law of Economy from theory into action on the ground and in daily life.

In truly amazing news, the Wall Street Journal - that bastion of non-conventional thinking [LOL] - reported on April 30th, 2013 that a New York City public elementary school has gone completely vegetarian.

Jaime Oliver’s well-intentioned-but-not-always-successful school cafeteria conversion efforts aside, it seems some kids in some regions are starting to voice their preferences through what may be surprising choices to some. [As people who have eaten totally plant-based foods for years, we are tickled pink.]

Public School 244 in Flushing, Queens apparently started offering some vegetarian options in the school lunch menu. What’s truly cool is that this school is made of 400 students in kindergarten through 3rd grade, so these are young’uns! And here’s the scoop as reported by WSJ: The school wanted to offer healthier food options, so they started offering the vegetarian choices three times a week. Then they upped it to four times a week. Then they went totally vegetarian.

According to the school’s principal, early on in the process of offering vegetarian choices, they noticed that the kids were going more for the vegetarian options on their own  [with recipes such as black bean and cheddar quesadillas with salsa and roasted potatoes], so the school “kept expanding the program to meet the demand.”

Back in 1994, one of EAA’s co-founders – while working as a futurist – gave a presentation, “Kids As Cutting-Edge Consumers,” in which she forecast that kids would become increasingly savvy, increasingly self-educated about social issues, increasingly environmentally- and socially-aware and increasingly influential in driving trends towards social progress and the social good through their buying preferences and through changes in parental behavior based on their kids’ preferences.

We’re glad to see it finally happening in 2013 in such an important area for humanity’s, the planet’s and the economy’s health as making more plant-based food choices more widely available in major public institutions such as schools. This will go a long way towards reducing and eventually eliminating altogether the social and familial stigmas of being vegetarian or vegan that persist today when all the health evidence is pointing to the longer, healthier lives of vegetarians and vegans. And it will help produce healthier kids who become healthier adults who cost less for the health care system, employers and governments. This is an example of the power of market demand at its most evolved. Go, kids! Go, New York Public Schools!

Here’s a link to the complete Wall Street Journal article: online.wsj.com/article/AP22c1364727da4ad89659e23c5bb917f1.html

Okay, we have to overlook the potentially nefarious undertow of early-age branding brainwashing by Google, but, hey, EAA benefits from using many Google technologies to bring the world of energy and energy arts to life, so we’re willing to do it for this cool project.

Google has a pretty neat annual project called “Doodle 4 Google,” a competition that gives K-12 school kids the opportunity to put on their artistic berets on and direct their talents towards redesigning the Google logo. One winning design is posted on the Google search page as one of the cool rotating Google Doodles we’ve all come to expect.

Each year, kids at schools are given a theme. [We saw at least one homeschooler finalist, so it seems the homeschooled are eligible as well.] This year’s is “My Best Day Ever.” The contest winner receives a $30,000 college scholarship, and their school wins a $50,000 technology grant.

To create further engagement, Google makes it easy for the general public to vote on their favorite entry from each grade grouping. This crowdsourced voting helps picks the winner.

While we don’t love the idea of contests in the arts – not always the best application of competition, we were amazed by the quality of the entries. We do wish it could be a group project and that all of the entries would be posted somewhere, but anyway… 

What was really amazing was that in our opinion the younger entries really more intriguing than even the older entries. We couldn’t really pick a favorite in the oldest category, but we had to double-check the ages in the youngest category because the quality seemed impossible for the age. Once we put our bugging-out, Wile E. Coyote cartoon eyes back into our heads, we marveled at the energy implications of all of this. We’ve known for quite some time that kids born after 2000 were going to be really different – much more energetically advanced. Between the Doodle 4 Google entries and the news that a New York public school has gone 100% vegetarian because the kids very gravitating to the vegetarian options when offered, the proof is starting to out.

Here are our favorite Google Doodles from each grade category:

Doodle 4 Google Favorite K-3 Drawing	Doodle 4 Google Favorite 4-5 Drawing
Doodle 4 Google 6-7 Drawing – our very favorite of all!	Doodle 4 Google Favorite 8-9 Drawing
Doodle 4 Google Favorite 10-12 Drawing	Pretty amazing youth talent!

This poem was created through the inspiration of Gunilla Klingberg’s Wheel of Everyday Life, which explores the artist’s fascination with everyday consumerism + forms of Eastern spirituality. A photo of the current installation at Rice University Art Gallery appears below.

Each time I write I poem, I do so with energy-awareness + with the intention of stimulating some new energy-awareness in the listener/participant/reading I am collaborating with each time the poem is experienced. This poem shares a very deep truth about the true significance of modern advertising + brands, which can seem so nefarious according to traditional interpretations, but which are in fact fulfilling a divine role + providing a divine training.

BRANDED

Branded -
is nothing sacred anymore?
In this day + age, it never was.

Wearing logos like bindis,
the seat of concealed wisdom,
but where is the wisdom?

I see only addiction.
A steeping in the form
the mandala is meant to liberate

To melt away the veil
– like glass –
standing between the real + unreal,
“outside” + “inside”.

But the unreal has come to dominate,
giving unnatural power to physical death,
lost as most humanity is in
– as Morpheus so rightly said –
“the desert of the real.”

Even so,
the illusion is unraveling.

I used to rail against my parents’
prohibitions against coke + mcdonald’s.

Caffeine made me crazy.
mcdonald’s was not gourmet.

Thank goodness for that refined taste
that seemed like snobbery
to child-me.

It saved me from the poison,
the addiction, the brand
of hypnosis.

Yet the mandala is designed to hypnotize.
Hypnotize through the eye’s devotion
to a gate to another world.

But that doesn’t work so much anymore.
The images are old.
To claim obsolescence of wisdom

is as heretical as the modern brands,
but it is a truth that
even truth grows stale.

Is there beauty in brands?
A scion of the wisdom says it is so –
says that brands + advertising
are the modern training in symbology,

the creation of a universal picture language
recognizable to all,
the forerunner outfitting in the over-scaling
of the walls of words + language
with telepathy,
transferring pictures mind-to-mind.

So in the profane,
we find the sacred after all.
And a Tibetan on a mountain
in the 1930s saw it coming…

Mandalas made of logos,
the god of the symbols,
temporarily grounded in the only
place humanity knows for now,

but previews of coming attractions
when all creative energy
is directed to the divine.

j-coby wayne | february 16, 2013

Have a sense of purpose, but aren’t quite sure how to translate that into action every day? Get a daily jumpstart with eaa’s energy arts action daily quote service…

There are a lot of quotes services out there, but how many of them give you an original prompting + thought-stimulating question each day to move your ideas + intentions into action backed by energy awareness. Anyone who is energy awake knows that energy follows thought + the eye directs the energy. So what you focus on + get absorbed into every day truly creates your reality. It might seem like a big challenge to move your purpose + vision into concrete action, but it doesn’t have to be. Get energized every day! Go to EAA’s Energy Currents page to sign up.

Here’s a sample of an energy arts action to spark you:

QUOTE

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.” – Aldous Huxley

ACTION QUESTION

What activity or activities make you truly happy? How will you make sure to do that activity today even if you think you don’t have the time?