happy bearthday James Wan!ess :)

Once upon a time, eye along with a few friends and contributors, put out a magazine called Open Doors. The second issue contained the below article with James Wanless.

Eye have transcribed it in toto, and as tribute to his bearthday today, April 22.

Winter 1991

from Third Reef to the Third Eye, straighten your spine & expand your mind. open doors, a Cooperative of Free Spirits & Independent Thinkers

from the watermen and waterwomen of the Water Planet, ambassadors unto the Aquarian Age. Open Doors, a magazine for gaiatlanteans of the California coastal community, & beyond

Third reef * James Wanless PhD

He is the naked Wild Man. He is at one with Seer and Devil’s Play. He has submerged the depths of his ocean with his Priestess. He has suffered Oppression and slayed Negativity as the Hierophant. He has come back from Death, transcended Logic, and Dullness endured, he has embraced Synergy. He is Illumination. And as a Surfer he is a Rejoicer, as Voyager, within Tarot.

He is James Wanless, symbolist and creator of Voyager, cosmorgasmic catalyst to your intuition and imagination, via the Tarot. “Carl Jung said: The symbol is the psychological mechanism that moves and transforms energy,” shares Wanless, currently a consultant on symbolism for the United Nations world family tree, a symbolic sculpture. “That’s why I use these visual symbols, because they move me, heroically, and that’s what turns me on.”

The man is of movement, “swiftly,” as he prefers. “If you do it swiftly, you do it intuitively,” says an inspired Wanless, recalling the word (swiftly) engraved in wood upon a monastery in Japan. He loves Zen art and the practice of meditation.

He believes in playing all the personas. And he has. He has crossed the Sahara, been locked in a tomb at an Egyptian burial site, he even spent a night in New York, in jail. He was professor of political science in Cairo and Beirut (always one step ahead of the war). After India and intent upon trekking Nepal, he contracted hepatitis in Katmandu. He was resigned to a month long meditation course at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery there. "I was cured of my hepatitis, and I was cured of my political scientist,“ he laughs. “From there on out, that was my spiritual opening, that was the doorway, the open door to higher and deeper consciousness.”

He learned how to surf in Kenya when he happened upon Crazy Eddie, a Harvard guy traveling Africa with two surfboards.

Wanless of course gleans the symbolic nature from surfing. “Do it on your feet,” he crows, “we have 20 percent more energy, more oxygen, when we’re on our feet.”

He speaks of balance and intuition. “When on our feet, on our toes, that’s when we can surf life most effectively, instead of paralysis by analysis, by thinking about it forever.”

Wanless “swiftly” finds another metaphor to his liking. “Whitewater chaos is an extraordinary metaphor – (the surfer) being comfortable within the chaos, the foam, and riding (breaking waves) and being one with (the wave) – letting go and surrendering,” marvels Wanless. “It’s a little madness to prevent the big madness.”

He calls the beach, “the ultimate healing place, a regenerative place.” Having grown up on beaches, he intuits, “the beach is where so many different elements come together, it is the alchemy, the cauldron of creativity.”

Ocean and waves (water), land and shore (earth), light and sun (fire), and wind and breeze (air) all come together at sand’s edge for him. “You’ve got creativity, new life, it’s the freest spot to be,” he beckons. “There is free creation of the Spirit there.”

He is shaman, shapeshifter. He has supreme appreciation for our natural world and yearns for a “return to naturalness.” He is encouraged by a, “religious revival, a planetary spiritual revival, which includes all the ideologies, includes all the ecologies and all the cultures.”

“The outstanding mandala of our time is the picture of earth in space,” he estimates, “and that gives us a sense of our oneness – a new spirituality – replacing the narrow religions that don’t heal, don’t unify, they (absolutely) divide.”

“We are moving toward holoarchy,” prophets Wanless, citing an example. “The men’s movement is a great opening for men, a great breakthrough in their sense of self, self discovery and self expression. Men have been pretty locked, in terms of their expression, emotionally and spiritually.”

“The next phase,” invites Wanless, “is the healing phase, communicate with women, the planet – the maturing of the men’s movement – from wo-man to hu-man, the human movement, combining of man and woman.”

Wanless cites no one in particular as would be savior, leading us to the promised land. It will be, “the unknown, the people we don’t know,” he ventures, “the gurus who are not gurus, the healers who are not (known as) healers, (seen) as teachers.”

“Those are the real heroes,” concludes Wanless, spelling out m-y-t-h: “Make-Yourself-the-Hero.”

Life Imitates Art

Just for fun we took the cards pictured and did a “reading” to reveal the “real” James Wanless.

The “Whole Self Mandala" showed his liberation as a hard fought freedom (Oppression/Emotional). He is of powerful mind (Hierophant/Mental), using intuition to supplant supposition (Negativity/Feminine). As firebrand he enlightens (Illumination/Relationships) others, but his zeal (Devil’s Play/Archetype) for life can be overplayed (Dullness/Physical). He is practical (Logic/Work) and resourceful (Synergy/Finance). He is happy (Rejoicer/Home) in Carmel, but a providing sage (Seer/Masculine) for those beyond. In sum, he plays hard, but has earned and learned it The beauty without comes from toil within, inherent to any master of a spiritual discipline (Voyager Tarot).

The remaining cards were read for where he’s at, his obstacle and resolution and an outcome. He the Surfer who must enter unto a Death-defying tube (ride), only to be spit out and reborn, and must summon his Priestess to his ocean depths to further expand his consciousness and learn even more of Compassion – yet another revival of the Creative Spirit.

“Non verbal communication. Morphogenic feel (Jesus in space ?), vibration, energetic (symbolic) deities. The lighter you are, the more power you have.”

“Spiritual living or full on living is a state of surrender to the universe. Let go and trust (in the white water), you are buoyant, instead of fighting, resisting and struggling (go with the flow).

DNA “While I was in Bolinas, the Voyager spacecraft was out there and that’s when I though about a mythology of the journey into the inner universe, with metaphors to correlate with the journey of the outer universe. The DNA molecule, like the rose (symbol of unfoldment and evolution into higher consciousness), represents that our whole outer world, everything that we create and manifest on the external world, is really a product from our inner world. We can create this outer universe by journey into the inner universe.”

Illumination, Oppression, Negativity. “Light is a coalition of colors. It is a rainbow and we cannot have an enlightened planet or live in the light – be delighted with our life – unless we live in the rainbow and appreciate all of the colors. Each one needs the other, or we don’t have light, we have the Dark Ages. Afrikans are so mellow…. I mean talk about going with the flow…. of course that’s why they’ve been totally imperialized, colonized, devastated and destroyed, is because they’re exceptionally peace loving people and very, very soft. When we think of negativity we think of the dark side, the shadow side, and black peoples are associated with that. They’ve been the most downtrodden, the most abused, yet as a result, they are the most heroic. I think many of our great, great heroes are coming and will continue to come from black people. I think in many ways the blacks are going to be the saviours of the planet.”

Hierophant. “Spiritual materialism: A lot of times we hold on to our spirituality the way we hold onto money, or the way we hold onto a lover. Particularly people who have gurus. It’s like, hey, I have a guru. I have a spirituality and that’s part of my wealth, how great am I. It’s part of ego building. Where are you with that ? It doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s more of the same, only you’ve chaged the names, but you’re playing the same game, it’s more of me, how great am I because I’m a spiritual being now. That’s kind of a first step. It’s like the men’s movement is a first step towards finding yourself, or finding spirit and feeling pretty inflated egotistically by that. But then the next step is letting all that go.

Well hell, spirit is zero, spirit is silent, it’s the silent center. It is something that cannot be spoken. The Buddha never spoke of nirvana and it’s not something that’s any big deal. Really.”

Devil’s Play. “I processed out a lot of the darkside of the Christian tradition, the devil and all of that. I saw it as not a very humanistic tradition. I’m all for the humanism, that we all have the greatness within us as natural human beings, and part of our naturalness is to get crazy and get wild and be in nature and celebrate our successes, and have sex. It is natural to the human expression. I find a lot of the traditional Christian stuff, is denying our human naturalness and our (humanity), and I felt it was important to honor who we really are, to get back to our nature.”

Priestess, Rejoicer. “The ocean is symbolic, since we don’t really know what’s underneath it, of our whole subconscious world, that which maybe we feel, but we don’t know. We can’t see it, we can’t really understand it. It’s deep, it’s dark, it’s invisible in a sense; but it exists. It represents that whole underworld, the collective unconscious, the subconscious, all the stuff that’s hidden within us and primarily dealing with feeling, because the ocean, like feeling, is wet. Whenever we’re sad, we cry, when women get turned on, they’re wet. When we get angry, our blood boils. When we’re afraid we contract, we freeze, our blood gets cold in a sense, when we’re afraid we pass water all of a sudden. Water is symbolic of our feelings. The ocean of emotion is our depth of feeling, especially our feelings we can’t quite articulate, can’t put into spoken word. The ocean is associated with the feminine, (your) sense of knowing and feeling and emoting – the movement of our feeling. Crashing waves are the surface awareness of our mind, while underneath, deep, primal forces of tides and currents are really moving our life. It’s surface emotion over an extraordinary stillness. You can’t see to the bottom of the ocean unless it’s still. You have to still the mind, the way you have to still the ocean, in order to see to the bottom (meditation).”

Logic, Synergy. “If you have a spiritual perspective on things, you’re basically transcending the language of logic, which is either/or, and therefore believing in both/and. You always see the yin and the yang – you’ve got to. And that’s where the Western scientific mind breaks down, because it’s either/or. It’s either going this way or it’s going that way. The spiritual consciousness says it’s doing both simultaneously. Therefore everything is happening all at once. Past, present and future are all united, contraction is united with expansion, material with spiritual. It’s all one. Now that drives you a bit crazy when you start thinking about that. But that’s why meditation or going into higher or altered states (helps transcend analysis)…. You go out there to surf, it’s an altered state, whereas all of a sudden you are one with the wave or the board, or with all of it. And it’s not something you can say, hey, I’m thinking about this and this is what’s going on. It’s a perceptual thing beyond the thinking mind. All of life is a hologram and each of us is a fractal. There is unity as well as plurality. There is a great state of independence, of synergy. We are all whole and part of the whole.”

Dullness. “Drugs are a really great opening, particularly cannabis. It’s the female plant (get rid of the male plant). You smoke the female flower and you take on a certain femaleness. To me that’s an automatic opening, it’s a letting go, shedding, revealing. A much greater state of openness and intimacy comes out of that. It’s a softer, more feminine expression of yourself. With hallucinogenic drugs you begin to open up to the universe and the world around you and you’re one with this universe (So why do you wear all those clothes ?). (However) it’s not really healthy in my opinion, for young people to take drugs. You have to find a sense of self and a sense of your own center before you know who you are, you may really never know who you are, and then you’re totally ineffective in the world. I really recommend them NOT early in life and taking them as a doorway of perception into different layers/levels of reality. That means not living on it or depending upon it to get through your day, because that’s abuse and that is addiction. And all of those drugs take their toll on you physically. The physical body is a temple to spirit. The body is a wire and the electricity (light) is not going to go through the wire unless the wire is clean. The danger of drugs is the dulling of the senses and of consciousness.

Surfer. “Surfers are like romantic knights (like motorcycle riders) from the Olde World. Here they are putting themselves out in perilous states and giving into the universe, surrendering, and then riding it (planetary pulse) like this wild horse and taming themselves and their emotions in the process. I see (surfing) as kind of a yoga, it’s very much of a spiritual pathway to a transcendence of the lower (chakras), or the thinking self to a higher and deeper self. Surfing is definitely a spiritual path – there’s no doubt about it. Surfers are very much (inspirational) to other people, because they are out there testing themselves in the wild. They hold out one of the last bastions of the wild man. They’re not depending on any motors, or (anything) very much artificial, they are absolutely in trust, in one, with nature. A surfer has to get centered with their emotions to leap on board and ride the wave. And if you’re crazy and wild out there on this torn up ocean, you can’t surf when it’s gnarly, when there’s too much emotion within you or the surf itself. It’s too chaotic. You have to tame all of that and center that in order to really ride the energy of nature. You surrender to the Mother, you let go. You go out there all fired up in the male energy and then the hypnotic rhythm and the movement, and the ups an downs of the swell, puts you in that altered state. You’re really in sync with the planetary vibration, the oceanic pulse.”

Seer. “I went down to Guatemala for a couple of weeks, and stayed a year. I met an incredible shaman, one of my greatest teachers, Hector. He had created his whole mythology and symbology through stone – sculpture pieces and stones in a big stone cathedral (his statement). From that came my own statement, prophecy, mythology. I decided to combine it (my symbology) with my love for Tarot. And that sowed the seed for the (Voyager) deck.

Compassion. “Love with wisdom. Extraordinary tolerance and patience. We are here as teachers to help people move up in consciousness.”

Death. “We have many lives within one life. Enough is enough. I see that I am living only as an extension of these awards (Phi Beta Kappa, Occidental Hall of Fame quarterback), that I am identifying myself according to my successes, and unfortunately that’s what many people do. At some point you say, hey wait a minute, these things are not me, I am this other person. Or I want to see who I really am outside of these trappings of success (PhD, fraternity president). And that’s why I just blew out. I went into Africa to get lost. I was totally anonymous, grew a beard, became nothing, in a sense – the lost years of Jesus – and the lost years of Jim (Wanless). It’s like going into total anonymity where there are no trappings to identify yourself and make yourself who you are, and like who you are. I was getting conscious of that, in a sense. When you leave it all, it’s like the death. It’s letting go. You go into the void, you go into zero, you go into the white water, you go into the chaos, you go into the anonymity, the pregnant void of nothing, and out of that comes something. And something is the new you. And that’s the rebirth in this lifetime, of the new you. That would be one of my major messages, that all of us can change and transform NOW, if we SEE that possibility.”

happy bearthday James Wan!ess

yes please * thank you so much * we love you so much !!

(the Fool's Journey :)