What is a Healing Mandala?

Selfie at Atlantis Central Zoo & Observatory, 2016.
Selfie at Atlantis Central Zoo & Observatory, Friday, July 8, 2016, 3:46 A.M.

Before I discuss the Healing Mandala, I’d like to point out that, if you’re planning on entering the spiritual game-field of metal embossing sigils, talismans, pendants, rings, pins, headbands, belts, bolo ties and pocket medallions, you will definitely appreciate knowing the following little factoid:

The 24k solid gold disk at 1.4 grams — which is the ideal weight for the small piece, to allow a reasonable retail price-point — when hammered out with a bit of body still left on it, won’t typically fit on the pin-vise without serious compensation and special mountings.

It’s a total pain in the bazonga to try to carve, even if you do manage somehow to put it into a metal harness, because the retaining pins will block your engraving tool and your fingers, making it nearly impossible to complete any cut into the top surface.

However, a 24k solid gold FOIL disk, which is rolled out, not hammered out, can be easily embossed without mounting on a vise — no vise needed for the foil, and the foil could well be an aluminum craft foil, or solid gold foil. Use your fingers to hold onto it.

Your embossing tool can be controlled with one hand, while the engraving tool simply can’t be. You need your other hand to stop the forward movement of the tool, and to guide it onto the target curve or line or gouge.

Funny thing is, once the gold foil or heavier gold slab is inside the bezel and the protective quartz-glass crystals are in place, you can’t tell whether it’s foil or a thicker beaten-out gold disk. Unless you take the locket apart, the foil gold and the heavier “token” weight gold disk, when viewed inside the locket, look exactly the same. Continue reading

Raving About the New Embossing Metals

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In the course of making several dozen Cornflower Mandalas yesterday, I happened upon a disk made of the embossing metal I’ve been using for decades, now, and duly made a Cornfield Mandala upon it and packed it into a dollar-sized cardboard “flip” coin holder, so-called because to look at the other side of a coin, you flip the flip over with an easy practiced move.

Boy, the key word there is surely “practiced”, and “practiced moves” is what metal embossing and coin-carving is all about, and that goes double for gem-setting and ring-making and painting and sculpting and video gaming and hopscotch and just about anything else you endeavor to do well.

The “right moves” is a Big Number in Buddhism, meaning that it’s important.

“Right Action” means making the right moves at the right time in the right place with the right intention, nice and smooth, making no sudden moves, no ripples in the Firmament or Force.

In short, “Right Action” is grace and movement in relating to the universe and other Beings, and is and was a big subject with Picasso, Matisse, Dali and Stravinski. Continue reading

For Your Convenience…

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“Country Road Along Canal, Amsterdam 1645” comes out differently every time.

I’ve given my sources for my metal embossing projects, so that you can bring your prices down, down, down, to the level where there’s some profit in it and it’s worth your while to devote time, energy and talent to the thing.

But what if you DON’T intend to quit the day job and sell your embossed metal artwork to thousands of satisfied customers??? What if you don’t intend to order and await shipments of industrial foil, huge cartons of coin-flips and enormous quantities of sales tags? For you, there is a VERY good answer.

I make kits that are attuned to specific projects. You get all the materials and supplies you need to make 21 finished disks mounted in “flip” coin-frames for sale — that’s one to wear in a bezel or carry as a pocket-pal or purse-pal in an acrylic capsule, if you decide to use those items.

ALL MY DESIGNS COME IN ONLY ONE SIZE, made especially for the dollar-sized disk & bezel. You can re-size them as you wish. You will do better by just sort of roughly and generally copying the lines rather than trying to trace them, but some folks won’t have it any other way, so for them, you’ll have to shrink the thing down on photoshop and print it out on a TRANSFER paper, I suppose.

If you work this system rightly, you’ll develop your own “iconographics” and get them into the metal form. The whole point here is to utilize “reductionism” in order to simplify the form, as Cangialosi would have said it. You can also understand the concept in the following Matisse-ian way:

“EXPRESS THE SUBJECT WITH THE FEWEST POSSIBLE LINES.” Continue reading

Metal Embossing Made Easy

Handmade by Local Artisan, only $3 bucks each, come and get it!!!
Handmade Metal Embossings by Local Artisan! Only $3 bucks apiece!!! Look Here!

“Hi, I need some cash fast, and I’m on the street selling these things for which I usually ask fifty bucks, but like I said, I need some cash, so I’m selling them for only $3 bucks apiece, metal ebmossings mounted in a coin flip, like you see here. Can you help me out? How many would you like?”

Metal Embossing? It’s cheap, and it’s a total cinch to make ’em, and a total cinch to sell ’em, when you know a few tricks of the trade. Metal embossing is a terrific way for a new artist of ANY age and persuasion to get out there with their artwork, and it’s a great way to get your art into multimedia without a lot of fuss and horrible expenses.

For an established artist, it’s a no-brainer. It puts your art into an affordable category for an original work of art. Usually it’ll be a signed and numbered multiple, which this isn’t. It’s a total original, and an established artist can ask the moon for these things.

Doubt it? Imagine what the price would be for a coin-sized embossed metal piece if you could PROVE that it was made and signed by Picasso? How about Rosenquist, or Lichtenstein, or Warhol, or Basquiat?

I think you get the picture. Continue reading

Is “The Cult of the Skull” Mainstream Enough for the Washington Post???

gorby at his sales desk, Andromeda Sector Shoppe
gorby at his sales desk, Andromeda Sector Shoppe

There are skulls everywhere, and skull novelty items and decorative devices abound in abundance, as it were. It’s not just skulls, of course. There are also full and partial skeletons, and very life-like plastic reproductions of incredibly grisly body parts and even full alien and human bodies.

It seems that on every block, there’s a body shop that specializes in skulls. Well, whom are weem to disagreem???

I thought and thought about a name for the thing, and “Cult of the Skull” seemed the most mainstream, the least offensive and the most likely to agree with current events and popular prejudices.

In short, I may have made a slight tactical error by choosing “Cult of the Skull” as a typical Earthian/Human mainstream marketing concept you might find anywhere on eBay, Amazon or G-G-Google and his goo-goo googly eyes.

You might not be anywhere near old enough for that to be funny. Continue reading

24k Truth

Gold is a product of a succession of stellar explosions and reformulations, yielding more and more complex atoms at each star reformation.

The 24k solid gold medallions are the most powerful CONTACT coins in the world. There is no metal exactly like gold, and gold is the key to opening and passing through dimensional portals.

Gold has “reach”. It “continues” in various dimensions, notably the Six Nirvanic Worlds, which cannot be reached with other metals. Gold is always gold. It never changes, and it has its own “constant”, which will someday be important to scientists. You can carve a simple visual “bumpy” message into PURE gold, and it can be read in the Higher Planes.

Gold Tokens can be made from scratch. They need not be altered coins and in fact, I don’t recommend altering gold coins at all. I work on a flat, hammered planchette or disk, fairly thin, at about 13mm in diameter, to fit into the 14k gold “U.S. $1 Gold Piece” Locket, which retails out at about $450-$650, depending on the artwork.

I wholesale those out at $112.50 apiece, which barely accommodates the cost of the metal and, in fact, at an art or crafts fair, I can make about $7,500 an hour just putting beads on strings and making someone’s name on a copper bracelet, but you couldn’t pay me enough to actually do that — I’m just making a point here about labor and art and what the art is worth.

I think the artwork that I engrave and etch into every single one of my little gold plaques is worth a whole lot more than fifty bucks, but I’m willing to let YOU take the profit. If you want to use some of your profit to assist the Sangha, it’s entirely up to you.

Those gold lockets should, and can, and DO, sell for hundreds of bucks, not because it’s gold, or because it’s magic or quantum, but because it’s a WORK OF ART by an actual working world-class listed American Official White House and IAJE Artist, not a mass-produced mechanical lump spat out of an all-too-common stamp-out machine somewhere overseas and off-shore, and I never said the word “China”. Continue reading

Death, Spirit, Remembering, Awakening, Enlightenment

Why my coins are not hobo nickels:

Simply put, I have a fine-art approach to the coin carving, not a numismatic one. I don’t care much for hard-edge art and care even less for literalism and so-called “realism”, which isn’t anywhere close to realness. I use a free-form line, more drawing and sketching than the tightly repressed world of gravure you generally see, although there are more artists discovering coin engraving every day, and more artistic renderings are available.

Look on eBay to see many examples of recent hobo nickel art and other coin carvings.

The story of the hobo nickel arising out of the hobo jungles of the 1929-1939 Great Depression is simply that when you got hold of a spare nickel, you could carve it into a dollar’s worth of food and lodging. I like to use the same spirit in carving my coins as the hobos enjoyed in their day, meaning that I scratch at it — I don’t slice and cut the way a modern engraver would and should do. My approach is more “Paleo”, more basic, more street-wise and less technological, less dependent on civilization to maintain it.

Most hoboes used an ordinary 6-penny nail or a broken file to scratch their carvings into the nickel, and it’s those moves I’m trying to duplicate. Continue reading

Atlantean-Society Membership Sigils

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Large Gold Pendant in .999 fine gold is only $3,500.00, so why not order two?

Okay, I’ve done the research, and here’s the breakdown as of Friday’s gold market — the prices listed for .925 solid Sterling Silver, 14 karat filled gold, 18k solid gold, and 24k solid gold are what I have to get paid to send them out. IT TAKES A WEEK TO GET THE GOLD.

14 KARAT FILLED GOLD:

  • EARRINGS — .22 gauge — $35.00/pair
  • PENDANT SMALL — .20 gauge — $35.00 each
  • PENDANT LARGE — .14 gauge — $99.00 each

.925 STERLING SILVER SOLID:

  • EARRINGS — .22 gauge — $35.00/pair
  • PENDANT SMALL — .20 gauge — $35.00 each
  • PENDANT LARGE — .14 gauge — $49.00 each
  • PENDANT X-LARGE — .12 gauge — $69.00 each

18 KARAT SOLID GOLD:

  • EARRINGS — .22 gauge — $69.95/pair
  • PENDANT SMALL — .20 gauge — $88.00 each

24 KARAT .999 FINE SOLID GOLD:

  • EARRINGS — .20 gauge — $1,250.00/pair
  • PENDANT SMALL — .20 gauge — $650 each
  • PENDANT LARGE — .14 gauge — $3,500.00 each

Those are the prices, based on what I have to pay to make them. As you know, I donate my time and skills to the project, so I don’t get paid for any of my time spent on making jewelry, which is my own choice, hoping the spirit of the thing will someday catch on. Continue reading

How Do I Set Up My Own Panning Party?

 

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Panning Party at Chasen’s Hotel & Goldmine in the Pocono Mountains, circa 1946.

HOW TO SET UP YOUR OWN PANNING PARTY

  1. Find a nonprofit that would be interested in having you raise money on their behalf with, specifically, a panning party.
  2. The minimum number of participants is one. Two people at $200 apiece, four people at $100 each, twenty people at $40 each, 200 people at $2 each for one Fat Pack, unless they buy additional paydirt Fat Packs, which you’d better have on hand. Most folks will pan three times before they give up in disgust — it’s then your job to show them how to succeed, and GIVE them a packet or two to try again. Don’t worry, you’ll find plenty of dumped gold flakes at the end of the day.
  3. Be prepared to spend $200 on the 200+ Fat Pack Paydirt, and if you expect more, you’ll need more mine runs of paydirt — it’s best not to be caught short on paydirt.
  4. You can charge anywhere from $2 a Fat Pack to $25 a Fat Pack for a chance to hit the nuggets — the charity for which you’re working will tell you what they would like. Myself, I’d charge two bucks and let everyone have a good time and relax with it.
  5. You can have a more expensive Fat Pack that yields bigger nuggets for the high rollers.
  6. You may wish to cater the event with finger-food, but be aware that panning is messy and needs cleanup before finger food or after.
  7. Use the PROSPERITY PATH PANNING PARTY PACKET to prepare your presentation, and mind your “p”s and “q”s.
  8. The presentation contains all you need to get started.
  9. You can show the DVD video or perform the demo yourself.
  10. Your first challenge will be to save BBs using the “ BB Panning Trainer Dirt Kit.
  11. The second challenge will be paydirt, paydirt, paydirt, with REAL GOLD in it, that you could easily lose over the side if you don’t pan precisely and correctly.
  12. You will need spill pans or troughs to catch the droppings, called “tailings”, which you’ll want to pan later on, so don’t dump it out onto the sidewalk.
  13. Your panning party will be a success, because even if NO ONE HITS, and with untouched paydirt, it IS possible, because you can have a panning contest with BBs or a draw by number or by ticket, or some of several other ways to find a “winner”.
  14. Your “winner” gets a PRIZE that I include, to give away to the winning panner, whether anyone finds gold nuggets or not.

Continue reading

Wear Your Ashram Healing Gold Now

 

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Have a Panning Party and collect gold for your Ashram Healing Gold Locket today and every day!!!

The Ashram Gold gleaned from the Ashram Sacred Soil by hand-panning at the Offertory Shrine or by Spiral Wheel of Karma can be mounted in a 14kgf or 14k simple or fancy locket of your choice, sized anywhere from a mini — about the size of a dime — all the way to a dollar-sized handmade real rope bezel, if you like and are willing to pay for it.

I have solid 14k gold lockets in all sizes and in many different styles, all of which come with a bail ring for your own gold chain. I do not sell gold chains — you can’t predict which ones customers will want, and nobody really wants to pay for gold chains these days, so you might consider a gold-filled chain or mounting your gold amulet on a beaded necklace.

The cost of an Ashram Gold Nugget Locket depends on the size, weight of the gold, plus the “coolness” of the nugget or nuggets in the locket. The very best Ashram Sacred Soil Healing Gold would be the gold that YOU glean from your daily panning practice. Continue reading