Awakening from Depression Photo and text © 2006 by Jonathan Zap (Sorry about the erratic formating, the computer gods seem to be insisting on it) Yesterday I received an email from my former college roommate who had just reread my September 2nd email entitled "Sadness beneath the Hype." He found much relevance to the sadness he was feeling in his own life and synchronistically I had just written a new image oracle card (image attached and text to follow) entitled "Awakening from Depression." The temporal proximity of these two events led me to believe this may be a subject of general interest. The former college room mate is a very wealthy physician with a good marriage and family life whom everyone ...

Path-Finding and Day-Mapping text and photo © Jonathan Zap 341 Jonathan path finding in Escalante Canyon, Utah This image relates to a very practical and grounded way to navigate your pathway through a chaotic world. I have a very poor natural sense of direction, and yet I was able to use ordinary map and compass skills to navigate myself, and a small group, through a maze of canyons with no marked paths (Escalante Canyon, Utah). The method is fairly simple, but profound in its proven effectiveness. You have a topographical map which you can orient to the visible landscape. You know that the map is not the territory, some features have changed, and some things may have been mapped wrong, but most things will correspond. You know the overall direction you want to go, and you use your compass to locate ...

One lifetime is only a limited amount of space. We have a rough idea of the temporal fencing that bounds it, and most of us are expecting to live less than another hundred years. That brings us to the single and double digits as we measure that temporal fence. Sometimes the remaining space is even less than the one or two digit number expected. People who believe that life is confined to a single lifetime may find this small fence depressing. Such people believe temporal fencing to be absolute, and they are bound to be depressed anyway. But many of us know that fences aren't that hard to get past, to get over; fences are leaky, rickety boundaries, and souls are going over and through them, in both directions, all the time. Fences are sometimes there for our benefit. They mark useful boundaries. Good fences ...

Austin Iredale brings meticulous attention to detail to his writing and editing.  One of the things that a superb editor like Austin seems to do is to catch all those areas of sloppy, undifferentiated word tissue that get missed in the lazy, intoxication of rough draft generation, the beer goggles of creative exuberance which blind you to the sagging flesh of distended sentences, and bring the cold light of morning, which might otherwise be years away from myopic overconfidence, into immediate and sharp relief. Rather than imposing his own notions, Austin helps to amplify, clarify and polish every document he edits.  A pleasure to work with, Austin is helping to make me a better writer.  Given the quality of his work, his fees are quite reasonable.  I highly recommend his services.  ----Jonathan Zap See his website: austiniredale.com Contact Austin: ...

Zap Trap By the Culture MCs This rap song dates back to the dawn of hip-hop and was written approximately 1982-3.   At the time I was the building security coordinator and dean of Samuel Gompers Vocational Technical High School in the South Bronx.  Many early hip hop artists and graffiti writers came from Gompers.  For example, the first scratching was done at Gompers by the pioneer DJ Grandmaster Flash who modified a turntable for that purpose in an electronics shop class.  I was the youngest and fittest of the three deans and spent most of the day patrolling the hallways.  The underlining was in the original text. Well I was chillin’ in the hall and I was late to class, Taking my time I had no ...

Have you ever felt that the world might be your dream, felt alienated, set apart from others, overwhelmed at times by your inner thought process? If you have, then you may find Dostoevsky and the Profound Egocentric, written when I was just nineteen years old, to be very relevant to your inner experience. My adult consciousness began with the writing of this paper, but it wasn’t until the following year, when I was twenty, that I connected the psychological state of profound egocentrism with an evolutionary model, and recognized its connection to the dawning of a new mode of consciousness and communication (see Archetypes of a New Evolution) . In The Path of the Numinous http://www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/10/the-path-of-the-numinous-living-and-working-with-the-creative-muse- I describe the origins of this paper as follows: When I was about fourteen years old I woke up in the middle of the night and some ...