Fiery Time Travel

Our Ancestors Slept Twice a Night

Articles about the old habit of sleeping twice a night were put out by Bodvar Bjarke on Facebook so I read it, but fb is “too small” for a long reflection upon it so I write it here:

Here are his links:
http://disinfo.com/2013/08/how-our-ancestors-used-to-sleep-twice-a-night-and-highlighting-the-problem-of-present-shock/ 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

These articles say that 8 hour sleeping is a modern invention. 

We used to sleep in two shorter periods, over a longer range of night. This range was about 12 hours long, and began with a sleep of three to four hours, wakefulness of two to three hours, then sleep again until morning.

The wise scholars speculate about the reason for sleeping twice a night and say that people used these hours for having sex, having a coffee, making some prayers or reading or so...
Maybe the writers and the artists in Paris were thinking in this way in 1700, but mainstream did not drink coffee in their homes and they could not read.

It feels like a lot of guessing and it just talks about ”having some fun in a spare time”. OK, but why did they have this spare time in the night/morning.
If we had this habit for millions of years out of biological reasons or just for some thousands of years from having  formed a habit or maybe in just some cultures is maybe not possible to find out.
So the door is open for more speculations.

The time 2:30 in the night is a time when it is extra easy to wake up, I have also noticed that.

I have also noticed that we have the ability to know what time it is. The animals also know this, they can repeat the same behavior at the same time every day.
If I eat a piece of chocolate I will automatically suddenly start thinking about chocolate at the same time the next day. The thought just pops up. The brain is very clever in learning a new thing – it just has to be touching the system of the neurotransmitters.
And if you keep a habit a long time it will get stronger and influence even more and finally it will produce effects and a changing on the genes.
Keep a habit for thousands of years and your children will be born with such a tendency.

So, why only sleep four hours when the whole night is dark? Is there any good practical reason for developing such a habit?

We don´t know? Or...?

First we can think about the length of the dark night. Near the equatorial line the night is mostly around 12 hours and it can be difficult to sleep for 12 hours so you will have to invent something to be able to be awake in the darkness so why not do something fun or useful?



In Sweden we have in winter a night that can be 17 hours (or more) and it is not possible to sleep so much.
If I go to bed at 9 pm I also wake up at 2 or 3 am and it is impossible to fall asleep again. If I go up and I do something I will get tired and fall asleep again after some hours.

So why not just  be up the whole evening till midnight and then sleep 8 hours till morning comes?
 Isn´t that easier? As we do today! It is an easy option so why did they not do so?

Well, actually there is a good way of finding out and it is to live in the same way. Then you will discover things that you never thought about before.
All those modern scientists that speculate about the old sleeping habit may never have experienced the old fashioned life in winter in a house without electricity.

If you, just for a short period, live in this way you will see that life becomes so much more easy to handle if you never sleep more than four hours at a time.

Why not? Well, try to think about it first and see what idea you find!

The problem with darkness does not exist in summer when the sun is up all the time, so we can think about winter when there is a real duality between light and darkness.
Imagine that you find yourself in this old way of living! You are in an old house.

The experiment requires that you have not brought any modern tools, so you do not have any flashlight with battery and you do not have a lighter and no lightning fuel and no paper and the house does not have any modern isolation. There is absolutely no electricity.

It can be very cold in the night, in Sweden it was sometimes more than -40C and at new moon it is totally dark! You cannot see anything.
Great! You are now back in the 1500 or so.

To be able to live in the house you must have a stove with a fire and to make the fire in the old way you have flint, fire-steel and some fluffy material, which can easily catch fire. If you do not have that you are dead.

So... now is the first day and you have made your fire in the stove and the fire has been burning the whole day and you feel that everything is working well.
Ha! That was easy! So you think!
In the evening you just leave the fire and you fall asleep.

And... ?

Early in the morning you wake up because you have to pee, just as you are used to do at home (in modern time) where you have a bathroom and lamps everywhere in an oil-heated house.

But now, here in your “ancient time”, you find that the house is so ice-cold that you can hardly get out of the bed. The clothes that you have put beside the bed are so cold that you cannot take them on. First you will have to keep them close to your body in the bed to make them warm.
Having got some clothes on, you will find that you cannot move because it is totally black. You do not see anything at all so to be able to go up you must light some kind of "grease-candle" (?) but in this darkness you cannot find your fire-steel.

You wait till the sun comes up and you put new woods into the stove and start the job with your flint and steel. It takes a while to get a small fire burning and after a while the fire goes out again. 

You start all over again and the same thing happens again.

Why?

As you just left the stove in the evening the damper has been open the whole night and the air has been blowing in through the walls and windows (everywhere) and then out through the chimney and this has made the house extra super-cold.
It has also made the stove quite cold and it is difficult to make a fire in a cold stove when the circulation of air has slowed down too much.

The smoke fills the room and the fire goes out. Again and again.
In this very cold place you now have to be working with your flint and steel for quite a time and then there is a risk that you will finish all the fluffy material that you had, which would be quite dangerous because you can probably not so easily get any new.

People usually do not end up in this situation because today we have flashlights, candles, matches, lighters and if any problem arises there is also a telephone, a car and a shop.

In ancient times people did not end up in this situation because they knew how to handle this kind of life.

After a week in this old house you will also know!

There are two ways of making this situation better.

One is to let the fire go out totally in the evening and then you close the damper. This will prevent the air from blowing through the house the whole night making it ice-cold.
It will also prevent the stove from getting too cold. So now it is easier to make a new fire in the morning, but you will still have to be sitting there with your flint and steel.
You can not easily go up in the night unless you have big windows and the full moon is shining.
You will still get the problem of making a new fire every morning and then also wasting your fire-making material. So it is not the best way.

What you can do to get away from all these problems is to let the fire burn all the night!

Before you go to bed you set the damper on low to prevent the fire from burning to quickly.
After four hours you go up and you put some more woods on the small glowing coals that are still hot. After 30 minutes they will catch fire by themselves.
In this way the fire will burn constantly and there will not be any trouble with a dark night and an ice cold black morning.
As long as there is any glow left you can quickly light a grease-candle on it so you can go up in the dark night if you want to. You just have to know the way to the stove!

You never have to go through the trouble of making a new fire with your flint and fire-steel in the darkness. And there is no risk of using to much of the fluffy fire-material, which was maybe quite precious in the old times.

And... just imagine that something unexpected happens in the night, something that you have to deal with at once. The possibility always exists! Then you cannot be sitting there with your fire-making tools for half an hour before you can move.

I would think that it has been important to keep the fire constantly alive, because it makes life much, much more easy. So it is not so strange that people were sleeping just four hours, which is the time for a fire to burn down. It was practical to do it this way!

Then we have the symbolism.

The stove with the fire was the center of the house, it was the heart of the house.
It was the spirit of the house and the stove with the smoke going up to heaven could be seen as a channel to god.
It was the altar where the holy fire had to be constantly burning.

Your heart should keep you alive also during the night so for the heart there is no sleeping time.
The house should be alive also during the night and there should be no sleeping time for the fire of the house.  As long as the holy fire is burning the house is alive and protected.
A house that has a fire burning has a spirit - in the same way as you can be in your body as long as the heart is keeping it´s metabolism alive.

The worshiping of the fire and the Fire God is found in many ancient cultures.

Wikipedia:
The earliest known traces of controlled fire were found at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel and dated to an age of 790,000 years and religious or animist notions connected to fire must be assumed to reach back to such early pre-Homo sapiens times.   

In Vedic disciplines of Hinduism, fire is a central element in the Yajna ceremony, with Agni, "fire", playing the role as mediator between the worshipper and the other gods. 

In the Vaishnav branch of Hinduism, Agni or Fire is considered the tongue of the Supreme Lord Narayana
Fire worship in Graeco-Roman tradition had two separate forms: fire of the hearth and fire of the forge.
Hearth worship was maintained in Rome by the Vestal Virgins, who served the goddess Vesta, protector of the home, who had a sacred flame as the symbol of her presence in the city
Celtic mythology had Belenus associated with fire.
In Slavic mythology, Svarog was the spirit of fire. 
                                                                                     End of quotations from Wikipedia

On the Red Indian Medicine Wheel fire and spirit have the same place.

The Church prescribes that at least one lamp should continually burn before thetabernacle (Rit. Rom. iv, 6)  http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01354b.htm 

A sanctuary lamp, altar lamp, everlasting light, or eternal flame is a light that shines before the altar of sanctuaries in many denominations of Jewish and Christian places of worship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_lamp   

A special lamp must burn night and day before the tabernacle in which the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, to indicate and honour the presence of Christ'
http://jloughnan.tripod.com/whylamps.htm 

Many different religions but the same idea behind them. 

The concept of the living spirit or god represented by the holy fire.

Sanctuary: the Sacred Space around the altar and tabernacle 

There was a “sanctuary” also in a normal house and that was the space around the stove.

I asked Lucia from Russia about the fact that all the Russian laquer boxes are red on the inside. She said that the red color was symbolic of the fire and the “God´s Angle”, the space by the stove.

Then I looked again at these boxes and I saw that they all were like small symbolic stoves, red inside and black on the outside. they are also similar to icons.
The pictures that are painted on them are the spirits that you can see also among the red flames in a real iron stove. If you just use your imagination.

We lost our connection to spirit 

when we lost our connection to fire.

It is not strange that a practical habit forms a tradition that all people follow. The tradition is in the same time religion.
And then it is not strange that this tradition gets into our genes and then it influences us also when the practical need for it is gone. And then, slowly, we change again into something else.

It is not difficult to see the similarity between the stove and the black PC with the bright screen, which works in the same way as your brain and the old ceremonies and concepts in various religions:

The old magicians said:
You get what you focus on!

Today´s technicians say:
You get what you clic on!

SNOW FALLING on Google+

When I was, some weeks ago, learning how to make animated gifs  it was so difficult to make a good snowfall and it took such a long time.

I was thinking that I wanted to have a perfect moving snowfall ”already made” that I could place on new animated gifs.

But how would that be done? Maybe other people can make such a thing? Maybe I can invent it in some way? But for a little thing like the two bears it would have to be 45 different transparent layers with snow and they would have to be placed upon 45 other pictures in the right order.

I gave up and I thought that there are maybe other things to do in this world than to be focused on how to make snowfall on a moving gif. It seemed to require too much effort and it was hard for the eyes and maybe I was using the wrong method.

On December 5 the first snow was falling here and yesterday, on December 8, it was quite a thick layer of snow. The big machines, the scrapers, have now taken it away from the roads.
Some snow is still falling.

While I was making all my experiments with my snow-gifs I constantly told Karsten about it and I sent him all my experiments. (He is living in Copenhagen, but we know each other because he has a old house here in the forest).
During the last weeks I have sent him so many falling-snow-pictures that he must by now be quite tired of digital snowfalls.

Yesterday evening I talked with him on Skype and he sent me a photo that he had made of some brown flowers in the snow.

It was a good picture, but ”the thing” was that the photo was covered by a very nice and soft moving snowfall. It looked good! I would never be able to make it in such a nice way!

http://g2karsten.blogspot.se/2013/12/sne-korn.html

I know that he cannot make a moving gif because he has never even tried, so I thought that now he had suddenly got the idea and learned how to make it. Or maybe he had found some program that could make good snow?

-How did you do that, I asked him.

-I didn´t do anything, he answered.

-Hey! Come on! You got a normal jpg turned into a moving gif with a nice snowfall without doing anything???

-Yes!

-No!

-Yes!!!

-No!!! You must have done something!!!

-No Google+ did it.

-And you did not clic on anything???

-No!

-OK How come? Why? Do you get snowfall on ALL your pictures now?

-No. Google can recognize a picture with snow and if you put a snow-picture on Google+ this picture will automatically be turned into a moving gif with snow falling.

-Really? How long have you known that?

- It happened now, so it seems to be something new.

I googled on it and I found information that said that Google+  now has got something new: they can turn your photos into moving gifs by putting snowfall on them or by making them glimmer. This service seems to have started on May 15 this year.

I was then trying it, but I could not understand how to do it.
I managed to get snow only on one picture and two other pictures also started to move in other ways. I could not choose a photo. Google+ insisted in using 3 photos (that it picked out from different albums) and nothing else.
Not even a new photo with snow would work.

Karsten said that this is something that is so new that probably they have not yet made it work properly. In time they will fix the problems and make it easier to use.

But... I think that half a year would be enough to find out how to create an easy way to use it.
No, wait... here i see that "Twinkle" and "Snow" are their new effects.

http://www.hngn.com/articles/18914/20131206/google-introduces-two-new-auto-awesome-features-make-photos-more.htm

 I could download the gif from Google+, so here it is.

Actually it never snows from a bright blue sky.

But... it looks good anyway.

I had wished for an automatic snowfall to put on pictures and suddenly it was just there!

Amazing!

But I think that people would prefer to handle the effects by themselves, by using some easy clic-function, instead of just automatically getting snows and twinkles on a lot of photos.

TWO BEARS

When I had finished the memoriam about SwiftDeer I continued with the new project that I had started some weeks earlier: to make good looking animated gifs.

I had made a moose that was standing in the forest looking at a Christmas tree. It is snowing on this gif but it was very difficult to get the snow right. I did not really like it this way and I thought that I would have to make several layers with snow-flakes that are falling in a steady pace with different speed.

With music:

Now I wanted to know how to make the falling snow in a nice way. The snow is made on transparent layers but I needed a winter picture to put in the background.
I searched among my pictures and the best one was a winter landscape with a brown bear walking in the snow.

Brown bears are usually sleeping in winter, but I had made this one to my friend Mona some years ago just because she wanted such a picture to illustrate a story that she had written down.

 That seemed to be a good picture to use for my experiment so put it into the GIMP together with some layers to make the snow on.

When all the pictures were made it took me six hours just to move the snow layers and place them on 45 different pictures. It required a lot of concentration and it was a bit hard for the eyes.

As this is a ”moving picture” I thought it would be a little bit boring to have a bear just standing still. So I made a copy of the bear and with this I now had a new bear that could move around in a way that the picture became a little bit more fun to look at.
I just let the bear walk by because it was the easiest way to move him.

Some days earlier I had made the moose in the snow and I had been thinking that a moose goes well together with SwiftDeer (Lightning Strikes) because it is the ”Keeper of Thunder and Lightning”.
I have many pictures of mooses because earlier I made them on hand-painted postcards.
I have many cards with a surprised moose staring at a Christmas tree so it was easy to take one of them and turn it into a moving gif.

When I had been working half the day with the bear-gif I thought about all those strange synchronicities that usually come here and there.
I was thinking that I would not be surprised if also this picture had some symbolic meaning but I could not see any. A bear in the snow? Or, two of them.  So what? It was not even Batty because he is supposed to be only one bear.

But then... Two Bears? Sounds familiar...
Two Bears!!!! But that is Tom Wilson, it is don Genaro! I had not been thinking about that. My intent had absolutely not been to make any kind of symbol because I only wanted to train on making falling snow on a moving gif.

In the following night I woke up by a sound. It was like the sound of a drilling machine. I had ear plugs but I could still hear it. I tried to ignore it, but it stopped and came back, stopped and came back over and over again just as a drilling machine usually does. Or an alarm clock.

To me it was night because I was in the middle of a dream, but in reality it was very early on a Sunday morning, which is a time when people never use drilling machines.

I went up to see what it was about and... It was the printer!!!

When I came to it the sounds stopped but the lamps were on. It was as if it had received a fax but there is no telephone connected to it so that was not possible. The laptop was off. The writer has never done this before.
Of course it is still possible that it should make this noise once in a while, but I had never heard it do so.

I got quite awake from this irritation and could not easily go to sleep again. Then I slept till half past eleven.

Later in the day I went up to the table where the printer is because I should charge a mobile phone there. When I came up to the printer the lamps went on again. I had not touched it!

Later I told someone about it, but he had not seen the picture of Tom Wilson so I sent it to him.
Doing that I immediately saw that I had spelled his name wrong. I had written Rwo Bears instead of Two Bears. I had to change that!!!
Then I discovered that there was one more spelling mistake under this picture. I changed it.

Then we were joking about this and we said that maybe it had been Tom Wilson who did not like to have his name spelled in the wrong way.
The printer had called me twice and there had also been two spelling mistakes.

”Maybe it was just Tom Two Bears who walked by”.
Yes, why not?
That was a funny story.

Then, yesterday, I got a film about bears on facebook, on the starting list.
It was about a bear in China who killed her cub and then committed suicide  to save both her child and herself from the cruelties of the Chinese torture they were exposed to.
I do not want to re-write this horrible story. Here is the link:
http://livefreelivenatural.com/mother-bear-kills-her-cub-and-then-herself/

I could not fall asleep. I was thinking: ”Why cannot God save these bears” when I got an answer that said that we, the people on earth, we are the hands of god here. We can also act with our mind, with our intent and focus and then we become small parts of god, like small cells in a big body.

I concentrated on these bears in China and I visualized these cages braking into pieces.
But... sorry, bears....I cannot do anything....
I cannot say that I believed that it would be possible for me to save bears in China just by thinking about it, no matter what people say about maditation and mind power.

Maybe I could ask someone else?

I told my friend Mona and I asked her if she could maybe make a ceremony or a drum journey (or so) to ”send something” to help these bears in China. Because she is quite clever in these things and I am not.

First she said that she did not want to see the pictures of the bears, but she could make a drum journey about it anyway.
I said that the picture just showed a bear that looked as if it was asleep so it was not so horrible to look at. And maybe it would be good to look at it to get a connection with it.

She looked at it but then she sounded as if she had got a chock from it anyway. She exclaimed  (in a mail): ”Oh, MY GOD! How horrible!!! I will make a drum journey!”

Mona´s story

When I had seen this I decided to make a drum journey to see what I could do and if I could focus my mind on it.

First I asked my dog Tordön to assist.
The day before I had made a little ceremony with her and an old Thor´s Hammer that I had found in a drawer. Now I took this hammer and I hanged it in a ribbon around her neck and I asked about blessings from Thor and God and other helping spirits.

Now I got a strong feeling of her being in connection with an energy or spirit  that could be of use for nature and especially against animal abuse and such cruelties.

Then, quite immediately, in my ”inner corner of sight” there was an enormously  big brown bear!
Either she was the bear that had killed herself or she was a ”leader bear” in another dimension.
Later I got a sensation that this bear was ”having a mission.”

Then I saw a man from a native people and he had a big bear skin (fur) over his head and his body. He was dancing and he was strongly stamping on the ground to evoke ”earth power”.
It was to take the energy of anger and to channel it to the areas around these bears to create an effect  on them and also on people who want to help them.
I felt something that could be called “anger of justice” going from the drum sound to my body and through it. That is a force that can also influence the nerves and create sudden movements of my body.
I knew that energies had started to move now, in the direction of the bears.

I got a strong feeling that I should continue to focus on helping animals in my ceremonies.
Then the color red was coming up to me from the inner of the earth.

End of Mona´s story

When I had finished this writing I went into my sleeping room to do the bed.
Then I noticed that I have two bears on the bed. Of course I knew it, but I had not thought about it until now.

Yes, I know that if I now see two bears everywhere it is called “selectiv perception”, but anyway.... I don´t have any other things on my bed and they have been there for years out of no reason at all. I got one of them from my son.
So that counts as one more synchronicity!

TWO BEARS

Part 2

Now I got a new mail from Mona and she wrote that she had focused on those bears again and “this time it was really strong”.

Mona´s story continues.

First came the mother bear that had killed her cub and she was a giant brown bear filled with power and goodness and now I knew that she was the bear that had come during the other drum journey.

Now she kind of “grew into me” and then she held me with such a strong feeling of love that I started to cry. The power of love was so strong and it expanded and embraced also those other bears in China so the difference in space disappeared.

Then I saw her child and I saw that they are now working on this from their dimension. She is not at all just a common mother bear.

And then came the dancers!

The dancer with the bear fur was there together with many other dancers from native tribes  and they all danced with a furious anger and power. They were tramping, jumping and stamping with intense energy to make the energy move to the bears.

I almost felt as if I was there and I experienced a powerful but holy anger and wrath which should now be connected to that place and if there are any people who want to help the bears they can draw upon this energy to make an action possible.

There was also an explosive energy directed towards the people who torture these bears.  They will have to answer to God for this and they will have a heavy karma to deal with.

Now I got an extra boost of energy and suddenly I was at the place together with these native dancers and now we were dancing and stamping outside of the building as if we wanted to shake the house into pieces and also shake apart the whole foundation for this business.
It was a mighty experience and a holy moment!

Then I saw something that looked like angels´ wings and they were sweaping over all these cages bringing love and bless.

Now I asked for the energy of Christ to intervene  and then I could see “Christ spirits” being present and they were similar to angels .

I now made a cross of light containing the Christ energy and I went into the building where I used this cross to illuminate the whole place with the purpose of putting an end to the darkness of evil.

May God help! So I thought while I was walking around with the cross spreading it´s light everywhere.

But I was also walking with sadness.

There were helpers from different levels and the whole place was vibrating from holy anger, light and power.

May the holy gods watch over and influence the outcome of this!

End of Mona´s story.

PS
The name of Mona´s dog is Tordön, which means Thor´s Roaring. When Tordön was newborn she got the name Bless by the owner of her mother. Her brother got the name Lightning.