Paper Media: click thumb (where applicable) for full size image/.pdf files

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  Margaret's Magazine 1
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  Margaret's Magazine 2
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  Margaret's Magazine 3
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  Margaret's Magazine 4
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  Margaret's Magazine 5

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  Margaret's Magazine 6
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  Margaret's Magazine 7
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  Margaret's Magazine 8
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  Margaret's Magazine 9

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  News Anchor's
  UFO experience
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  My Favorite Martian
  Article by M. Wendt
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  Robert Urich
  Spirit Magazine
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  The Healers Magazine
  Entertainment Tonight
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  Magazine for Cleveland

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  Looking For Love
  Article by M. Wendt
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  Psychic World
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  Through the Eyes of a Skeptic
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  Margaret and Joel

Television and food!  What a winning, lethal cocktail that is unfortunately totally acceptable. If you don’t eat yourself into a coma, you watch yourself into one. TV is a mental carbohydrate, it makes you calm and listless, dulls your senses and promotes total acceptance. Watching TV is a bit like taking thorazine, a drug they administer to schizophrenics to level them out, to lobotomize their spirit. Same difference really – both inspire a heavy, lethargic waking trance.

Trance is the real enemy we need to fight, not each other. We move in and out of trances all day long, some of them by our choice, others externally created. Examples of daily trances are driving to work, walking the same route, eating, reading magazines, reading anything, watching movies, playing video games, unconscious language (Hi, how are you? Fine thanks, how are you?), advertising, billboards, the Internet, talking on the phone, music and it goes on.

And nothing is wrong with any of the above; as long as we are ‘awake’ in the experience.

Most people don’t even know they’re dead. Many are living a mere test pattern, which they refer to as their lives and they don’t even know it. The movie, Groundhog Day is an ice-cold bucket of reality, a true testament to the farmed human. We are in danger of becoming a nation of somnambulists, caught in a limbo, too numb to live, too numb to die.

Advertise now and paralyze free will tomorrow!! What a coup. Let us face it. It is a powerful and yet subtle way of controlling the herd. What if we are stomping out genius and new frontiers of consciousness by feeding the masses, farming what they think, feel and do through media induced trances. Through the device of over stimulus, we have desensitized our minds and our souls to the point of white noise – not really knowing, or experiencing what it is to be alive, to be awake. You mooch from one trance to the next believing it to be you – you grow into your hypnotic skin. Genes, memories, beliefs, values, the composite of the carbon copy human, ready to be fed the daily dross until the morbid arrival of the ultimate ad: death. “Do not go gentle into that good night” wailed Dylan Thomas. Thank God he is not alive today!

The psychologist, Ernest Rossi, defines trance as ‘ a condition wherein there is a reduction of the persons’ attention to a few inner realities: consciousness has been fixated and focused to a relatively narrow frame of attention rather than being diffused over a broad area.’

Trances are often a necessary means of surviving and negotiating the physical world. ‘They are like tunnels you walk through in order to maneuver and focus in the world.’ As children we utilize trance in an effective and healthy way. Deep trance phenomena and pseudo- orientation in time, are two devices (forms of fantasy) that children use to get through the day.  I have very clear memories of my fantasies as a child, in which I happily re-oriented myself to a time in the future when …I was a trapeze artist, flying through the clouds…until I realized that I had a morbid fear of heights and spandex (maybe it was just spandex!!)

Adults also use these devices to envision their futures in much brighter colors, deeper hues than the present permits. Daydreaming of winning the Nobel Peace prize, dating a supermodel, or never having to say you are sorry are all fine examples of fantasy – for most.

We continue to use pseudo- orientation in time to transport us forward to our dreams, wishes and desires. Some trances serve us and assist us well, and others strap us into a train going nowhere.

The difference that makes the difference is the knowledge, awareness and the free choice to enter in and out of trance.

The real danger is in the predictability of our existence, the patterns, and routines we accept as our lot, the norm. For it is these very patterns and routines, that form neural pathways in our brain and our nervous system helping to define who we are on one hand and limiting us on the other.

 What do you personally use to punctuate and define that you are alive and conscious on a daily basis?

The philosopher, Ken Wilber, one of the sexiest and most intelligent minds of this last century, promotes what he calls an ‘Integral life.’ He argues, in order to live a conscious life of value and purpose, it is necessary to commit to a daily practice wherein you attend to all levels of self – physical, nutritional, emotional, mental, and spiritual. In other words, exercise, eat nourishing food, share your feelings, read, and meditate. The last daily discipline he strongly suggests is ‘contribution.’ Give back to some one, some thing, some how today. ‘Taking’ is a national pastime and to give back forces us to register something or someone outside of our self.

What better time to try something new than at the beginning of the year!

We could make it a new sport… Think of a new and devious way each day to shatter the image you have of yourself. Take a different route to work, get out of bed a little earlier, wear something red instead of blue, go for a run if you always swim, watch the sunset instead of the TV, think or not think for half an hour, take up salsa lessons, play strip jack naked with your partner etc. etc.