KARMA

I feel I need to step back a little here instead of just vomiting what comes out of me onto my keyboard and then pressing publish....although thats how i like it to come out, I'd kind of like to make these things a little more user friendly. It is important when picking a path to keep it simple and keep your eyes on the road, yet always have your heart and third eye open, ready to feel when you need to take another road that presents itself on your path.
The one thing that everybody seems to go on about is karma. In my experience, most people have this extremely confused. Lets have a proper look at karma by looking at the underlying factors that create it.....and the reason why people use the term "good karma and bad karma".
This is a back pedal here to understand why people have this idea. Depending on your belief system, the mental, moral and social structure which you abide by and base all your actions and reactions around, will depend on how you react to karma. To begin with, your structure is purely relative. Meaning, any action or reaction, will only ever seem right or wrong to you, based on your beliefs. Your beliefs or things you hold as true and merely an idea....they are not absolute, and therefore have no real substance or concrete reality.
Karma is the reaction to any given action. it is neither good nor bad. Only a spin off  from action. nothing more, nothing less. "Good karma", is when the reaction is desirable to your idea of how you think things should go.....Once again, it is good when it checks off with your beliefs in a desired way. "Bad karma", is when the reaction to the action doesnt go your way....Still, its checked off with your ideals of good and bad.
The moral majority may agree with you on your good karma/bad karma theory because they probably hold the same or similar beleif systems to you. This in no way makes any of you right.
If you judge someone based on your beliefs, you are instantly claiming that they are wrong and you are right.
Everyone has been fed a different bullshit sandwhich their whole lives from the people around them......So no one is right, no one is wrong....in a relative sense...because thats all they know to be true. But everyone has needed that particular set of beliefs for some greater reason. And everyone, regardless of their beliefs, have been given that set of rules to see through and transcend.
Ultimately, the minute we believe something, we close off to the infinate possibilities available to us.
The universe will always give you what you desire....but it may not be what you want. It may not be what suits your idealistic idea of how you want your life to run.....smooth and pot hole free.
Every pot hole is a karmic reflection of the shit you need to look at within yourself and see through and let go.
It sounds kinda easy, but this is a process of undoing yourself, and ultimately it means the death of everything you held true and sacred. And that can be pretty damn painful.
If we dont begin to recognise these lessons and deal with them as they rise, each one piles ontop of the next until you WILL break down and be forced to deal with the whole lot at once...And believe me, that is a very unpleasant experience to go through.
The flip side of it though is to see through everything, and the gift of FEELING what is the right way to go, not trying to think it based on a pile of beliefs that are incorrect.
Karma just is. It doesnt attack people. It doesnt have emotion. It doesnt give a shit if you heed it or not. It is simply the law of nature that can be used as a tool to help you see through your false ideals about yourself, others, and life. Nothing more, nothing less.

the position of power!!!
to all you tattoo artists out there......here is a little insight into what i believe many of you have been chosen for......we do not have a normal "job".......we deal with people everyday...more than many other professions.....we enter into their energy field and they enter into ours. its no mistake each individual client comes to you.....most of you have generally got a back problem or some pain in your body that is impossible to get rid of....it either localises in an area or it moves around, but its always there.....partly and foremostly, we assume its because we are hunched over working for long hours.....maybe this is partly the problem.....
through time i have explored the energy centres within the body, whether they be your chakras or meridians...or some point where energy is stored....lets get one thing straight first...we are electrical beings, scientifically proven to be made of energy...undeniable. your back pain is generally lower....we are vessels to either soak up energy and or to push energy out. consider how a client feels when they are being tattooed....anxiety, fear, pain....all this is lower nature animal or primal feeling. these primal feelings are projected from the lower energy centres. without the proper awareness and ability to take on that energy and rid your system of it through some kind of grounding technique, it will be taken on and stored in your system....generally the lower centres...hence the back pain or fears etc that are not yours and are surprising to you when you discover them. grounding is not new and its not hard....an hour barefoot for the day after work......grounding mats, or conscious ability to release energy are extremely important to remain pure and not take on others "stuff".
the position of power that you hold is the ability to reverse this action to a degree.....if you are taking on their energy, it is impossible for them to not receive yours. you have the ability to push energy back into those you touch. it is extremely important, in my opinion, that we develop a consciousness that is realised and pure...and push that energy back into the client...not only calming them, but potentially awakening their energy centres and causing a purge and a more enlightened state of being.
the tattoo is a collaborative process between artist and client......energetically we come together and we bring out something they have within and leave it on their skin......the more open the client, the better the piece....you know the ones that fight you and how that ends up....the ones that feel you and let go get the gold. the tattoo isn't the addiction that they come back for....its the energy they receive from you.....or the mesh of their energy and yours together.
i can't stress the importance of educating yourself and enlightening yourself to see the truth of being...of living pure! its this that you will transfer.....eventually they will feel it and the ball will start to roll, with or without you seeing the progress of that individual. occasionally you will have one that will feel compelled to open up to you and the discussion, or the process of undoing begins.
as a collective, with the right intent, we possibly can educate, help transform and create change amongst society......even if you touch one person and help to liberate them....or be liberated by them! then none of it is in vain.
i feel strongly that the time has come...and has been snowballing for sometime,....that there is a shift of consciousness coming.....the end of an outdated way of being....a suppressed, harshly controlled, consumer driven and condoned matrix that has become so false and obvious it is starting to crack. people everywhere are waking up to it.......many of us have created our karma within this system...through living beyond our means or creating a lifestyle that is completely unnessecary only to fill that void of not being enough...but its not hard to undo......karma is simply a reaction to an action.....eg. i got a loan to buy shit i didn't need, now i am bound to work my ass off like a blind bee in order to pay for this shit.....and the sacrifice is living free and in the now....because we are anxious now that if we don't sacrifice our true way of being...we will lose our car, our house, our boat our toys...the things that now define who we are...the things we believed would fill that void.
the truth is, accepting that life ultimately has no purpose....there is no trophy at the end...there is no pot of gold.....will fill that void instantly and you will see life reveal itself before your eyes and enjoy it for the game that it is in the moment.....with no worries about all the other shit we complicate it with....
if we do this, then those who feed us the idea we need to consume, which mind you, is what keeps them in control of you, will inevitably fall and life will take its natural order......

This was a great endcap to my Australian tattooing trip, on the last day of Rites of Passage, on my good friend Gregos. It symbolizes the jaded concepts and oppressive constructs of the world obscuring the jewel of enlightenment and peace inside every person--and the ability of each of us to transcend the ego trap with the blossoming of true knowledge. I consider this a companion piece to the book and flower tattoo featured elsewhere in my tattoo gallery.....Nick Baxter


with the permission of nick to use his art on my blog, i thought i would share this tattoo that nick did on me last year....it sums up in basic terms what i see as our beginning....that which we are fed, blinds and misguides us....and our potential to transcend and bloom with awareness and an expanded consciousness......
it seems like a horrible and difficult existence....and thats often not far from the truth...it would have been a hell of a lot nicer to stay pure as we were in birth.....the truth is, we wouldn't understand the beauty of what we have and the purity within without first first living and ultimately understanding and seeing through the falseness of the darkness we were fed.......yin and yang, dark and light, etc....one can't exist without the other....its impossible to understand that which we perceive as good, without first understanding and living the bad.

under the surface.....click.

society.....click

a friend of mine commented jokingly about me starting a cult...hahahaha....truth be known the whole cult thing has been coming up with me a lot lately.......we live in a society based on rules we follow blindly and morals we accept as either good or bad...right or wrong....etc.....we believe something, no matter what we assume. where do your morals and rules you follow come from? where does that box of rights and wrongs you judge people by in your mind come from? they come from religion......the most overwhelmingly huge cult on the planet....so big it dictates your life and has done the whole time..so big that it is not even seen because everyone is in it....fed its rules upto your eyeballs since the day you were born by your parents and peers until it was just the norm......all you atheists are going.."bullshit! i'm not religious!" hahahaha....maybe you don't believe in god....but you follow the rules set out to control you thousands of years ago anyways......and they keep getting tighter.......everyone can feel it......and its only a matter of time before we all turn.
violence or anger isn't the answer either....nor lowering ourselves to physical rebellion....all the answers are within...sitting quietly like a pure unmolested diamond waiting for you to sweep the pile of bullshit clean off it and see it for what it is.....pure anarchy.....not in the sense we assume anarchy to be....but anarchy is freedom born of understanding and truth. once you hit that diamond nothing will seem right or wrong....except the obvious exception of purposely harming another for your own gain or impeding their path. proper action will be born of energetic feeling first...intuition....and from the moment.....aaaannnnddd you'll probably look a little skitzo and contradictory.....but the nature of energy is to move and change based on its surroundings and needs....therefore it can change in a split second....if you are following that, it may seem chaotic, but actions will be pure and everything and everyone will get just what they need.......baring in mind, what you need isn't always what you want....the lessons and emotions that hurt are the ones that are on their way out and they have to go.....so let go.....

so what is it that inspires or has inspired so many people through the ages to write a book or share their beliefs, philosphies, or interpretations of "the great thinkers" own writings....or their own? sometimes i guess it is to cash in on a particular global consciousness at a given time…or the fact that humans in general are made to feel lesser than particular individuals made famous by the media or society and thus feel the need to fill their "inadequate" minds and spiritual voids with the day to day garbage of some false hero in order to take the pain of facing their own mundane existence. its always  easier to tear someone else's flaws apart in order to make your own feel less pronounced. we see it everyday…we tear it and indulge in it everyday. and ultimately go about our lives fooling ourselves that "we are just fine, its everyone else who is fucked up!" and then each day rolls into the next……and we trick ourselves again, just to get by....numb just enough to our own trickery to get us to bed time and sleep it off before it surfaces. 

even this, that i am writing, will probably be scoffed at by the masses….because i'm a "nobody" ………. if some great artist, musician or scholar were to write these words…well people might actually ponder them and take something from it.

So what IS my reason for even bothering to write anything, that probably no one will give a shit about or just simply judge me on?

i guess its the same reason anyone at some point of years of searching and tearing everything apart in search of that "holy grail" to fill that ever present void that something is always missing, sits down to share what they have come to realise.

rather than spewing it out on Facebook or something where people are forced to see me purge....anyone interested now can have the choice to read my rants and see why and where it comes from.