Having a great week, playing music (trying out my new amplifier!), visiting with relatives from California, making a beadwork gift-card for a friend who's sick, learning better how to deal with stress and uniify with my radiant and eternal Inner Being, instead of identifying with my illusion-bound human toddler-self!

What a gorgeous day! My life is so full, thanks to the serendipitous fact of having moved to the street music capital of the country, Cambridge, MA many years ago, and becoming a street performer. I love playing music in the street and subway (parks and plazas, too!), and I also love working as a street performance monitor for the Arts Council. This afternoon I monitored in Harvard Square for 6.5 hours, and then tonight I came back to the Square after dinner and played a couple hours of jazz. It was just a perfect day. I feel blessed by so much wonderful music and so many wonderful and talented friends.

More on the Golden Flower Technique and meditation in general: I remembered (after writing the most recent post) that the Golden Flower ('circulation of the Light') meditation of Lu Dongbin starts out with orienting one's visual focus on the tip of the nose, but once the breath is settled and calm, you revert to placing your consciousness and your focus on the point between your eyebrows. Voila!

Interesting development: I'm finding, to my surprise, that meditating with focus on the 3rd eye, combined with the 'hong so' mantra is much more effective for me (produces an almost instant calm and ability to filter out thoughts), compared to meditating with focus on the tip of the nose with eyes slightly open, as taught in 'the Golden Flower Technique,' etc.

Last week I found a treasure at a local secondhand store: a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi for $1. I first encountered this book back in the early '70s. I later read it again in the late '70s. I really love it. I usually let it disappear from my collection of reading material, and then a few years later I'll find another copy and read it again, so that I've probably re-read the book 10 times or more, and I'm sure I've bought copies of it 4 or 5 times over the years. It means all the more to me now because there's no longer a lot of spiritual reading material that resonates with me these days--- I'm more picky and (hopefully) discerning than I was when i was a kid.
Not every single thing in Yogananda's book is totally divine truth, to be sure (for instance, he revered Ramakrishna as a saint, who, it turns out, was a pedophile), but there is nevertheless the ring of veracity to it, and it casts bright ray of cosmic sunlight into our dark culture of materiality. Cults, fads, fashions and trends come and go, but truth never gets old or loses its appeal.

Someone asked me if I have any of my paintings on the blog. Here's one! This is one of my favorites. I think I painted it about 20 years ago. From time to time I'll post a few more. Half of my artwork is abstract, like this one, and the other half is sort of fantasy art like you'd find in a children's book or a Tarot card deck.

Bizarre! For some reason, 'Blogger' posted 5 copies of my artwork in addition to the original the other day. I don't feel like going to the trouble to try to redo the whole thing tonight, but I guess tomorrow I'll have to delete it and do it over. Strange mistake!

Had a great day-- played music in the subway for 2 hours this afternoon and then rushed off to do my sound monitoring gig from 5:30 till midnight. Not much going on, in terms of performers, because it had briefly rained, so a number of performers went home early. I had a chance to walk down near the river and meditate. Realized again today the massive importance of daily meditation, and why it is the foundation. If prayer is 'talking to God,' meditation is 'listening to God,' and more than that, it is merging with God and dying daily to your little human self and becoming One with the Divine within. Those who are successful at prayer-- great spiritual healers and spiritual masters who show some evidence of power over the elements of materiality and so forth-- are always people who have learned and chosen to live a consecrated life.