the Caldron BeHereNow

We are deeply indebted to Ram Dass, also known as Richard Alpert. We are indebted to him for his immense courage with psychedelics, for the deep wisdom and compassion that he brought back from his journeys to the East, and especially for his enlightening concept of being in the here and the now.

This place in The Caldron is dedicated both to Ram Dass and to being in the here and the now. Let's keep it flowing, folks. Keep sending in your submissions, and we will keep posting them just as soon as we receive them.

Is Comet 17P/Homes the "Blue Kachina?'

Are you acquainted with both the insight and significance of the Blue Sun that has made its appearance in our Solar System? This Blue Sun is sometimes referred to as the "Comet Holmes" and also the "Blue Kachina," which the Hopis prophesied would make its physical appearance heralding the transition from the 4th to 5th World. This prophecy also ties in with the Mayan 2012 prediction.

"Spectacular outbursting comet 17P/Holmes exploded in size and brightness on October 24. It continues to expand and is now the largest single object in the Solar system, being bigger than the Sun."

Comet 17P/Holmes shocked astronomers on Oct. 24, 2007, with a spectacular eruption. In less than 24 hours, the 17th magnitude comet brightened by a factor of nearly a million, becoming a naked-eye object in the evening sky. Look for a golden 2.5th magnitude fuzz ball in the constellation Perseus after sunset.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has probed the bright core of Comet 17P/Holmes, which, to the delight of sky watchers, mysteriously brightened by nearly a million-fold in a 24-hour period beginning Oct. 23, 2007. Astronomers used Hubble's powerful resolution to study Comet Holmes' core for clues about how the comet brightened. The orbiting observatory's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) monitored the comet for several days, snapping images on Oct. 29, Oct. 31, and Nov. 4. Hubble's crisp "eye" can see objects as small as 33 miles (54 kilometers) across, providing the sharpest view yet of the source of the spectacular brightening.

As outlined in the 1963 book Book of the Hopi by Frank Waters, unprecedented information has come forward. Waters had the phenomenal experience of living with the Hopi for nearly three years. He was giving information by highly positioned elders which had been kept a close secret within the Hopi community since the beginning of tribal ceremonies.

Here Frank Waters describes in his own words which outlines his unique exposure and depth of trust shared by Hopi elders:

"Work on the project (book) required nearly three years. Much of this time I lived on the reservation - with my research co-worker Oswald White Bear Fredericks. The discourses of our Hopi spokesmen were taken down in Hopi on a tape recorder by White Bear, who later translated them into English. All the Hopi spokesmen willingly and freely gave the information - none of them were paid informant fees in the manner customarily followed by professional researchers. This great cooperative effort could not have been obtained before, nor could it be obtained now; already some of the older spokesmen have died. Their traditions come to us by the dictate of fate we call fortuitous chance, at the time when we, as they, most need them."

It has been reported that certain elders have said most people will reject the sign of 'blue sun' and stay with the 'red sun'. Those who are more awakened will be drawn to the 'blue sun.' Reality will then split - the few who have divested themselves of the earthly drama (harmful patterns/relationships) will follow the 'blue sun' and end up on an Earth that is love based. The vast majority who are still fighting change and to remain with the 'known' instead of being open to 'unknown,' will stay with the 'red sun' and will find themselves stuck in old ways of thinking and would bring forth devastation and great harm to man and earth.
("Comet 17P/Holmes Bigger Than Sun" News Release - AP, CNN, ABC, REUTERS.)

NASA Claims Polar Shift Due In 2012

Solar System - Did you notice? In February 2001, the Sun did a magnetic polar shift. The next one is due again in 2012. NASA scientists who monitor the Sun say that our star's awesome magnetic field flipped 22 months ago, signaling the arrival of a solar maximum. But it wasn't so obvious to the average human.

The Sun's magnetic north pole, which was in the northern hemisphere just a few months ago, now points south. It's a topsy-turvy situation, but not an unexpected one. "This always happens around the time of solar maximum," says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "The magnetic poles exchange places at the peak of the sunspot cycle. In fact, it's a good indication that Solar Max is really here."

The Sun's magnetic poles will remain as they are now, with the north magnetic pole pointing through the Sun's southern hemisphere, until the year 2012 when they will reverse again. This transition happens, as far as we know, at the peak of every 11-year sunspot cycle - like clockwork.

Earth's magnetic field also flips, but with less regularity. Consecutive reversals are spaced 5 thousand years to 50 million years apart. The last reversal happened 740,000 years ago. Some researchers think our planet is overdue for another one, but nobody knows exactly when the next reversal might occur.

Although solar and terrestrial magnetic fields behave differently, they do have something in common: their shape. During solar minimum the Sun's field, like Earth's, resembles that of an iron bar magnet, with great closed loops near the equator and open field lines near the poles. Scientists call such a field a "dipole." The Sun's dipolar field is about as strong as a refrigerator magnet, or 50 gauss (a unit of magnetic intensity). Earth's magnetic field is 100 times weaker.

When solar maximum arrives and sunspots pepper the face of the Sun, our star's magnetic field begins to change. Sunspots are places where intense magnetic loops - hundreds of times stronger than the ambient dipole field - poke through the photosphere.

"Meridional flows on the Sun's surface carry magnetic fields from mid-latitude sunspots to the Sun's poles," explains Hathaway. "The poles end up flipping because these flows transport south-pointing magnetic flux to the north magnetic pole, and north-pointing flux to the south magnetic pole." The dipole field steadily weakens as oppositely-directed flux accumulates at the Sun's poles until, at the height of solar maximum, the magnetic poles change polarity and begin to grow in a new direction.

Hathaway noticed the latest polar reversal in a "magnetic butterfly diagram." Using data collected by astronomers at the U.S. National Solar Observatory on Kitt Peak, he plotted the Sun's average magnetic field, day by day, as a function of solar latitude and time from 1975 through the present. The result is a sort of strip chart recording that reveals evolving magnetic patterns on the Sun's surface. "We call it a butterfly diagram," he says, "because sunspots make a pattern in this plot that looks like the wings of a butterfly." In the butterfly diagram, pictured below, the Sun's polar fields appear as strips of uniform color near 90 degrees latitude. When the colors change (in this case from blue to yellow or vice versa) it means the polar fields have switched signs.

The ongoing changes are not confined to the space immediately around our star, Hathaway added. The Sun's magnetic field envelops the entire solar system in a bubble that scientists call the "heliosphere." The heliosphere extends 50 to 100 astronomical units (AU) beyond the orbit of Pluto. Inside it is the solar system - outside is interstellar space.

"Changes in the Sun's magnetic field are carried outward through the heliosphere by the solar wind," explains Steve Suess, another solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "It takes about a year for disturbances to propagate all the way from the Sun to the outer bounds of the heliosphere." Because the Sun rotates (once every 27 days) solar magnetic fields corkscrew outwards in the shape of an Archimedian spiral. Far above the poles the magnetic fields twist around like a child's Slinky toy.

Because of all the twists and turns, "the impact of the field reversal on the heliosphere is complicated," says Hathaway. Sunspots are sources of intense magnetic knots that spiral outwards even as the dipole field vanishes. The heliosphere doesn't simply wink out of existence when the poles flip - there are plenty of complex magnetic structures to fill the void.

Or so the theory goes.... Researchers have never seen the magnetic flip happen from the best possible point of view - that is, from the top down. But now, the unique Ulysses spacecraft may give scientists a reality check. Ulysses, an international joint venture of the European Space Agency and NASA, was launched in 1990 to observe the solar system from very high solar latitudes. Every six years the spacecraft flies 2.2 AU over the Sun's poles. No other probe travels so far above the orbital plane of the planets. "Ulysses just passed under the Sun's south pole," says Suess, a mission co-Investigator. "Now it will loop back and fly over the north pole in the fall."

"This is the most important part of our mission," he says. Ulysses last flew over the Sun's poles in 1994 and 1996, during solar minimum, and the craft made several important discoveries about cosmic rays, the solar wind, and more. "Now we get to see the Sun's poles during the other extreme: Solar Max. Our data will cover a complete solar cycle."
(Source: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast15feb_1.htm)

Fatal Attraction

The Earth could be about to turn upside down. The planet's magnetic field is showing signs of wanting to make a gigantic somersault, so that magnetic north heads towards Antarctica, and magnetic south goes north. Compasses will point the wrong way, and migrating birds, fish and turtles are going to be very confused.

Just when this will happen, how long it will take and what the consequences will be is difficult to fathom. What is not in doubt, though, is that it will happen. About every half a million years or so, the Earth's magnetic field flips upside down.

The story begins in 1600, when Sir William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth I, suggested that the Earth was a giant magnet. At the magnetic poles, a compass needle would stand up and point straight down into the Earth. And he was right, up to a point. The magnetic poles are where all the lines of force of Earth's magnetic field are drawn together. It does not coincide with the geographic poles, the axis on which the Earth spins, but it is close.

Yet the Earth is not a solid magnet. For one thing, its magnetic poles are constantly drifting around. At present, magnetic north is heading out of Canadian territory into the Arctic Ocean at about 10 miles per year. Also, a bar magnet quickly loses its power, yet the Earth's magnetic field has been around for billions of years, so something is regenerating it. This is why Einstein remarked that the origin of the Earth's magnetic field was one of the greatest mysteries of physics.

Today, we think that magnetic power comes from the Earth's hot outer shell of molten iron sloshing around a solid inner core. As this subterranean ocean of liquid metal slowly whirls around, it behaves like a dynamo generating electrical currents and magnetic fields. Just like the flickering light on a bicycle powered by a dynamo, the Earth's currents are a little erratic, and so the magnetic field at the surface of the Earth fluctuates.

We know the magnetic polarity goes topsy-turvy from rocks on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean. Along the middle of the Atlantic runs a gigantic crack from which lava oozes. As the lava solidifies into rock, it records the Earth's magnetic polarity at the time. These records show that we are due for another flip about now. But the Earth does not keep a regular rhythm, so no one could make a prediction based on past performance alone. There is, however, more convincing proof that we are heading for a tumble. Each time the magnetic field heads for a reversal, it grows weaker over several thousand years until it almost disappears. Then it switches and starts up again with renewed vigour. Magnetism trapped in ancient pottery shows that over the past 4,000 years, the magnetic field has weakened by more than 50%. This past century, the strength has dropped by 5%. At this rate, the field might disappear in the next few hundred or thousand years. Another warning sign of an imminent flip has come recently from satellite measurements of the Earth's magnetic field.

A team led by Gauthier Hulot, of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, has spotted patches of reversed magnetism concentrated in two places just underneath the Earth's outer mantle. In the largest patch, beneath the southern tip of Africa, the magnetic field is pointing towards the centre of the Earth, instead of outwards. The other patch is near the north pole.

Some experts have stuck their necks out to predict that we can expect the next reversal some time in the next 2,000 years. The process would probably then take anything between 100 and a few thousand years - not even a blink in the history of Earth. We can only guess what life would be like during that reversal. Anyone trying to navigate with a magnetic compass is going to have a tough time, but what is going to happen to all those birds, fish and other animals that migrate vast distances using their own internal magnetic compass? Will they have time to re-draw their magnetic maps and get new bearings?

Even more creatures such as bees and some bacteria use a sense of magnetism for finding their way around their local territories, for a north/south or up/down axis. The Earth's magnetic field also stretches several hundred miles into space and protects us from the sun's charged particles and cosmic rays by focusing them towards the poles. This is where they appear as the northern and southern lights as they excite gases in the atmosphere. As the magnetic poles migrate across the world, those night lights are going to light up some very strange places where they have never been seen before. During a field reversal, this protective magnetic shield is going to be weak and might even disappear for a century or more. That might drastically affect the weather. There is a growing body of evidence that the sun's highly charged particles batter the upper atmosphere so hard that some of the assault filters down into the atmosphere around us, influencing the wind, atmospheric pressure and temperature.

Without our magnetic shield, those solar particles might create havoc with the weather. That cosmic radiation blasting the Earth's surface could cause genetic mutations and cancers. Yet when paleontologists scoured the fossil records looking for signs of mass extinctions or bursts of evolution during previous magnetic field flips, they found nothing. Living organisms seem to have survived intact. But what will happen next time?
(The Guardian, Thursday July 4, 2002)

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