For more than half a century, an unknown visitor has gone to Edgar Allan Poe’s grave in Baltimore on his birthday (Jan. 19th) every year to make a special toast, but for the past two years, the visitor has not come. There have been others in his place, but the curator of the Poe Museum knows they’re not the real one because they don’t make the secret sign. The last appearance of the midnight birthday visitor was in 2009, the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth, so perhaps the time had come to say goodbye to an old tradition, though it will certainly be missed.

I just blocked a particular organization from advertising on my Adsense account, knowing full well that it probably won’t work to remove these particular ads that keep showing. Apparently, according, to quite a few folks who have complained about this particular advertiser,  the advertiser spends a large sum to advertise in Adsense so even if individual sites block the ads, they still appear. Knowing a bot about the nature of this organization, and having no wish to have my Adsense account deleted due to complaints about the nature of my site’s content, I will be keeping a close eye on the adverts that appear - if they are still appearing in a few days, I will have to give serious consideration to alternate ad revenue sources for my sites.

Gestalt Prayer
I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.

-Fritz Perls

If you recognize the lines above readily, you are most likely at least 45 years old, and probably more.  Fritz Perl’s Gestalt Therapy, born out of the humanistic schools of psychotherapy, emphasized the process and content of the moment, aimed at developing mindfulness as a method for change. In an era where many movements were afoot to raise awareness, Perl’s Prayer became extremely popular, showing us the balance between the individual and the group. We understood easily that the combination of our resources was far greater than merely the sum of them individually.

Half a century or so later, we can see again a groundswell of consciousness-raising activities,perhaps most recently in the support for Julian Assange coming from extremely diverse groups worldwide. But it would be a huge mistake to try to lump all those groups together, even if their minds may seem to be all focused in one direction at the moment.

For example, if you take a look at the entity known as Anonymous (and I’m using the term entity because you really cannot describe Anonymous as a group), it becomes quickly apparent that their primary focus is not Assange and WikiLeaks at all, but rather the Church of Scientology. But they do have a real aversion to the suppression of information, so it’s easy to see why the WikiLeaks issues drew the attention of some Anonymous folks. Much as some of the news outlets would like to lump all of those who support WikiLeaks into one large group of nefarious activity, it just can’t be done. It’s not a group, it’s a consensus.

Over the next few weeks, I intend to add quite a bit of data to this site, mostly as a result of some research I am currently doing about cults in general and Scientology in particular, so there will be a lot of changes here. Though most of the information will relate to this new focus area, there willl still be items that just simply catch my eye and end up here as a result. Oooh, shiny objects….