Archive for December, 2007

This holiday comic originally appeared in Jane and Jane Magazine, but I thought I’d post it here for those of you who might not have gotten a chance to see it in the magazine. Hope everyone is having a very happy holiday season. Cheers!

Metlife’s blimp crew invited all of us from the Schulz studio to come out and see the air ship in action today. This is the smaller of the blimps in their fleet named “Snoopy Two.”

Here’s the blimp docking. Notice there are several handlers on the ground who grab lines as if they are pulling in a boat to a dock.

Here’s me, geekin’ out in the cockpit. This small space holds four people. This air ship can do a top speed of around 55 mph, but they usually cruise at around 35 mph.

I talked Mandy, the pilot, into posing for this shot under the blimp.

I thought I’d post a few more photos and some interesting quotes…

Approaching Times Square, on foot

“What appears to be the established order of present day civilization is actually only the inert but spectacular momentum of a high velocity vehicle whose engine has already stopped functioning.” — Jose Arguelles, Earth Ascending

Poster sized ad for a communications company, Tokyo (I love this photo)

“In place of revolution, we witnessed a repetition of gestures and pseudo-rebellions that quickly revealed themselves to be marketing strategies.”

“In our society, the media functions as a collective nervous system or immune-response task force, inoculating the social body against any new pattern of incoming information that might threaten conventional values and biases.” — Daniel Pinchbeck, 2012

Mount Fuji, from the air, at twilight (photo by my seat mate, Justin)

Spectacular, isn’t it?

Prayers tied outside a temple in Kyoto. 

This post is going to be rather long… so for those of you not interested in theology, you might want to skip this one.

I spent last Sunday touring three shrines in Kyoto and felt oddly disconnected spiritually during the experience. There’s a trend in California, at least the part I’m in, toward Buddhism. It’s more of a “drift” than a trend, I suppose. The symbolism is everywhere… bumper stickers, dashboard ornaments, jewelry and it seems to permeate self-help language.  Christ, on the other hand, has been overrun by a cacophony of right wing political rhetoric and misguided factions of organized religion. So much so that liberal, modern thinking adults don’t believe the message Christ offered holds anything of meaning for them. I thought the trip to Kyoto might give me a glimpse of what Westerners are looking for in this embrace of Buddhism. I’ve been thinking that maybe part of the allure is that Eastern religions carry no “baggage” for us in the West. Where as confronting Christ and the Bible would mean having to deal with, and understand, the essential meaning of our own heritage.

I’ve been reading a book titled, “2012,” by Daniel Pinchbeck. The book is about, Quetzalcoatl, Shamanism, the Mayan calendar, quantum physics and is the last place I expected to find an argument for further examination of Christ’s message. I’ll share a few passages from the book:

“In recent years, “spirituality” has made a huge comeback among the wealthy elites of the modern-day West, but it generally has an exotically Eastern cast, avoiding Christ and the Bible altogether. While movements related to the New Age have hordes of devotees, many of these followers cherry-pick from esoteric traditions, choosing what best fits their lifestyle: models and their stockbroker boyfriends spend thousands of dollars to attend yoga and raw-food retreats, where they practice asanas and mantras in tropical locals. Silicon Valley executives decorate their vacation homes with Hindu statues and Tibetan thangkas. Architects incorporate a bit of feng shui into their designs… Millions meditate and chant, seeking relief from anxiety and some undefined feeling of unity with the cosmos. Best-selling gurus promise infinite “abundance” through following the “laws of spiritual success.” Words can be emptied of meaning through overuse, turning into their opposite. Our culture has conveniently amputated the concept of spirituality form the processes of life, using it to denote a vast range of commodifiable experiences, self-help movements and decorative ornaments. The figure of the sacrificed Christ represents an awkward antipode to contemporary trends, suggesting that the pursuit of meaningful spirituality requires a commitment to the collective that goes beyond the limits of what is comfortable or reasonable. Among contemporary yogis and post-modern mystics, alienation from the revolutionary figure of the biblical and Gnostic Christ may represent a necessary phase before we can return to the tradition, integrating it at a deeper level of understanding. Since we are removed form all spiritual dogma, we have the opportunity to explore our own heritage as if it were new and original.”

(Pinchbeck then talks about Carl Jung’s book, “Answer to Job.” The book of “Job” in the Bible representing a turning point in how the Jewish people’s perception of God evolved.)

“The Western god-image, Yahweh, represents “the archetype of the self,” containing benevolent as well as malevolent aspects. He is not only the “god of light” but also the “dark god” of punishment and retribution. “Yahweh is not split, but is an antimony – a totality of inner opposites – and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism,” Jung realized. Not only a benevolent helper, the god-image also represents the forces that oppose us, throwing obstacles in our path, surprising and humiliating us, inciting suffering to create intensified self-consciousness. God, as a psychic fact, reveals himself in our neuroses, our allergies, our failed love affairs. “God enters through the wounds,” he wrote.

Job realizes God’s inner antimony, and in the light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity.” Job’s insight into Yahweh’s divided nature compels the descent of the god-image into humanity, as a kind of dialectical compensation for the wrongs done to man. This drama culminates, in the New Testament, in the incarnation of the god-image in the human world, as the “good god,” Christ. Yet this long-awaited archetypal event did not complete the process of incarnation – the descent of the god-image into humanity – as Christ was not fully human, but the product of an immaculate conception. “Christ by his descent, conception, and birth is a hero and half-god in the classical sense,” wrote Jung.

Christ offers a messianic vision of fulfilled time, of immanence rather than transcendence, as in this passage from the Gospel of Thomas:

His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?” “It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, “look, here!” or “Look there!” Rather, the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.”

Such a perspective contradicts the future-orientation of our world, our obsession with progress, and our habitual awaiting for some ever-postponed fulfillment.

The receptivity of Christ’s audience to his impacted parables and statements was in itself miraculous – as much a miracle as any of his suspensions or transmutations of seeming physical laws. Like a new cybernetic code hacking the logic of a closed system. Christ’s parables break open ordinary sense to introduce paradoxes that subvert syntactical logic.

His radical teaching promotes personal revelation, with no priest class or hierarchical mediation. If the Gnostic lessons presented in Thomas were inscrutable to Christ’s listeners, it might be the case that they were specifically intended for a later age. It may be that we are the subjects with the capacity to understand, and it is to the advanced present-day consciousness that Christ directed his statements.

In all Christ’s words and deeds, it is as though he is taking the reality of the transcendent domain fully into consideration, and this accounts for his freedom – his liberation from the constraints of the ego – as well as the foreknowledge of fate. When Christ said, “You have to leave your father and mother to follow me, “ he was instructing people to awaken to self-consciousness of their own individuality. Individuation has to be achieved before the ego can be cast aside. It is only as a fully self-reflective individual consciousness that one can make the choice, out of free will, to reconcile with the Divine, through sacrifice, or supercession, of the ego

Christ exemplified such a sacrifice. Rather than some greeting-card savior, redeeming the sins of the churchgoing faithful through his torments, he provided a model for us, demonstrating the ego-free attitude and unstinting action required from us if we are willing to incarnate the self, and complete the apocalyptic process. Unfortunately, he did not “save our souls” through the crucifixion. Instead, he showed us the path – a template for selfless action that can be internalized, and followed if we make the free choice to evolve.”

So I’m still in Japan, meeting with lots of Peanuts licensees who produce everything Snoopy here on the island. One our partners, Universal Studios, hosted a meeting, and lunch, in Osaka. Unfortunately, my co-worker, Justin, mentioned the “G” word (that’s right, folks, GARFIELD) in a meeting that was supposed to be all about Snoopy…. so I had to take him out.

I arrived in Osaka last night around 3:00 a.m. California time and this morning headed over to Kyoto to visit 3 temples. It was a beautiful day and it was a treat to see Japanese Maples in vivid red surrounding the temples (although, not in this particular photo).

I was actually really stressed to make this trip because it’s bad timing in regards to volume 8 of Jane’s World… meaning, I still have several pages to finish (which I brought with me) but my co-workers, Justin and Jason, talked me into taking the day off to do some sight seeing. Many thanks to our friend Tomoko for keeping us from getting lost!

We took the train to Kyoto from Osaka… in the train stations there are plenty of vending machines but no orange soda’s to be found. (Jane would be so upset.) However, when we got off the train in Kyoto we found a Mr. Donut right next to a statue of Astro Boy. How often can you put Mr. Donut and Astro Boy in the same sentence?! I regret not taking a photo.