Crossed Rubicons: A Birthday Message For A Mentor

by Gabrielle Jones-Price

"Call on God, but row away from the rocks."

~ Hunter S. Thompson

Today is Michael C. Ruppert's birthday. Mike was my mentor for many years after the BP Oil Disaster led me to investigate the topic of energy. As a consequence, I became not only energy literate but this singular education crystallized with great force a spiritual knowing I'd always felt in my bones: the connection to everything and everyone on this planet. Wahe Guru.

Mike's professional dedication, from his work as an LAPD narcotics officer and throughout his career as an investigative journalist, taught me how to become a media analyst and a better writer. I'd always been a good researcher but Mike showed me how to recognize different patterns, pinpoint what data to keep and what to disregard. He called this 'separating the ice cream from the bullshit' -- in this country that has never been a small task. However, that task is getting smaller with the current media or rather, lack of a real one.

To err is human. Mistakes are always made. Mike often made them but always owned them, apologized for his mistakes and retracted, always doing his level best to help his readers learn the value of their own discernment. A teacher, but also a rare man of integrity, honesty, and duty. A good cop with a big heart.

Highly intelligent, Mike also had a wicked sense of humor, loved music and was a musician himself. Before his appearance in the critically-acclaimed documentary, Collapse, I'm sure he would have loved nothing more than to sing and play music and what any of us have ever wished for: to live a happy life and share that happiness with others. But sometimes we have a calling we simply can't ignore. Ultimately, it was Mike's sense of duty that called him to put his country, and all of us, before himself. What he'd come to see couldn't be 'unseen' and he wished desperately to teach others so they might act and ultimately prepare for what he saw coming; what he felt in his bones.

Mike was a seer and a visionary that I was honored to have met and known a short time in this life.

He forever changed mine. After I met him in December of 2012, we exchanged correspondence a few times and he gave me permission to share anything I desired from his publication, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. I realized a torch had been handed to me as an analyst and a journalist, an honor I could not have imagined after hearing of his work only two years before. That torch has been heavy and a lot of inner work followed. Since his passing, I often find I know the man better than the analyst. I'm not alone in missing him terribly. His friends are many down the rabbit hole. I am blessed to know some of those dearest to him.

We're all mad here. Alice knew the best people are mad. Remember what the dormouse said?

For better or worse, knowledge has a funny way of changing our lives because it changes us. Any wisdom worth knowing takes sacrifice and the courage to face the truth, which is often unpleasant. That's the inner work. He taught me to be courageous to that end. Even now, the skills I learned through him have synthesized beautifully with my recent studies in Jungian analysis and deep ecology.

Strangely, I remember no teacher before him that had as much impact on me but I have met the most amazing teachers on the path since we met. I'm forever grateful for his work, his integrity and his encouragement. He was a torch bearer, a liminal being in a darkening world. The torch isn't as heavy now. We were all once students seeking mentors, were we not?

And like Daniel Quinn's title character, Ishmael, we should expect more students will be coming. This we can predict with absolute certainty.


In Mike's honor, I ask those who knew him, loved him or followed his work [or even if you haven't] to now muster your courage and lift your torch. Speak out against injustice. Bear witness. Continue diligently to separate ice cream from bullshit. Simply trust your instincts, the brains you were given as well as your big hearts. He asked us each to be our own authority. We must speak with that authority now.

Mike told us that people in bunkers with beans aren't going to make it. He also taught us how to start building lifeboats. Now that many have, who are we to sit in them idly? Are we to laugh and point at the drowning? One thing I remember Mike stating clearly: he refused to utter the words, "I told you so."

Let's try to follow that example with the knowledge he gave to the best of our abilities.

Mike's legacy doesn't have to end with a radio program called The Lifeboat Hour. We can all continue to teach using our own experiences, our stories and, like Mike, be a lighthouse for others in the cruel storm.

Happy Birthday, Ruppert Bear a.k.a. Tracker of Truth || Sat nam, my friend.

Audio excerpts are coming soon!

TRC is run solely on donations from patrons via PayPal. If you enjoy TRC's work, please consider donating. Any amount is generous. Receipt will read The Road Home, Inc. Thank you!

How Do You Sell Soul To People Who Have Sold Their Souls?

submitted by Gabrielle Jones-Price

h/t to rap group Public Enemy for the title of this post. I was reminded of their album when I viewed this video and have since been listening to a LOT of soul, R&B and funk. America has become comfortably numb and awash in denial. At times, it takes hard-hitting music to wake us from psychic slumber, activating our body to move, dance and come alive. I'm diving deeper into personal studies with a focus on deep ecology to fill my cup. Music makes you fall in love with the world, and when that happens, you want to keep it and your fellow beings from being destroyed.

James Hillman was an American psychologist. He studied at, and then guided studies for, the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich.  He founded a movement toward archetypal psychology and retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut.

TRC is run solely on single donations from patrons via PayPal. Please consider donating. Any amount is generous. Receipt will read The Road Home, Inc. Thank you!

Alternative Facts, Crossroads in Communication, and Dreams

submitted by Gabrielle Jones-Price
by Douglas Thomas, Ph.D., LCSW, via Global Dream Initiative

Many of the people I work with as a therapist and teacher express alarm, distress, fear, and disbelief over the course of political events that have taken place recently in the United States as well as on the world stage. Often I find myself pulled into these same feelings as I equivocate over what to say, how to say it, and to whom, under what circumstances. What is of interest and concern is how fragmented and ineffective language itself has become. Perhaps ineffective is the wrong word, since often the words of a politician or pundit can have a considerable effect. Words can inflame passions and lead to rancorous venomous exchanges between people. Language itself devolves from conversations about ideas and issues into sarcastic quips and personal insults aimed at maligning and discrediting anyone with a different view. What I’m describing is a crisis in communication. According to the pundits, the post-truth era is upon us, in which terms like “fake news” and “alternative facts” coincide with a spike in sales of George Orwell’s 1984, according to a recent NPR report (January 23rd, 2017). It seems to me, the current breakdown in language and communication provides an opportunity for some psychological curiosity and a chance to remember the sustaining nurturance in our relationship with dreams.

In the ancient world, the mysteries of language and communication were under the power of the god Hermes. Best known as the messenger of the gods with his emblematic winged sandals, helmet, and caduceus, Hermes held a special place in the Greek pantheon as the only figure capable of traveling from the heights of Mount Olympus to the depths of the underworld in Hades. In addition to language and communication, he was also the patron saint of liars, thieves, commerce, and travel, four other areas of timely interest and convergence in 2017. In his relationship to travel, he was also known as the god of the crossroads. As a divine traveler who was acquainted with the complexities of communication between different realms, Hermes was known as a psychopomp, one that leads the souls from the world of the living to their eternal place in the underworld. In this regard, he had a special relationship with dreams.

The Homeric Hymn to Hermes (as cited in March, 1998) describes the god as “wily and charming, a thief, a cattle-rustler, a bringer of dreams, a spy by night, a watcher at the door” (p. 389). In the current stress and strain of a nation undergoing a profound transition in consciousness, awakening to new difficulties, facing challenges that often appear as an ethical call to declare what we stand for, it seems especially important to notice the mythic convergence we find between the images of communication, crossroads, and dreams. James Hillman (1979) gave particular attention to the relationship between dreams and the mythic underworld and to Hermes as the conduit that guides us into those nocturnal departures from the daily world of the living. What we find in dreams provides us with new perspectives, new insights, figures that re-present daytime worries in a different light. Sometimes we rediscover what we truly love or truly value, sometimes we find poison that paradoxically heals. In his brilliant essay, Apollo, Dream, Reality, Hillman (2007) cautions against the impulses of rationalism and literalism to reduce the meaning of the dream into a simple prescription we might employ to somehow better our daytime existence. He says, when we allow the dream to present itself just as it is, in its obscure and often baffling language speaking on its own behalf, then

Night has not yielded to daylight, and understanding now speaks with a darkened tongue: the devious occulted language of analogy, allusion and metaphor. Metaphor, says Vico, “confers sense and emotion on insensate objects,” so that every thing in the dream becomes a “miniature myth” (Vico’s definition of metaphor), full of analogous truths, restoring you, the dreamer to the underlying poetic imagination from which all mental life springs. (p. 332)

This mode of communication at the crossroads between that which is conscious and rational, and that other path which is baffling and obscure, is the privileged landscape of Hermes, the god of the crossroads. In sitting with “the underlying poetic imagination” of our dreams as living entities, perhaps Hermes will offer us some assistance at also learning how to sit with the confounding breakdown of our collective imagination and the modern crisis of communication. Perhaps this new era of post-truth and alternative facts doesn’t make sense precisely because it’s not supposed to make sense. Hermes traffics in ambiguity, trickery, and deception as well as communication.

The alchemists worshipped this same deity by his Roman name, christening him Mercurius Duplex. They understood the necessity of his twofold and twofaced nature. Hermes Pharmakon was another alchemical moniker, indicating his paradoxical powers to administer the poison that brings healing. The alchemical experiment couldn’t succeed without his blessing, although it was understood the god could deceive and confound just as easily as he could show favor on the opus. Stephen Aizenstat has said that when he is about to tend a dream, he routinely invokes Hermes to be with him. This is the type of invocation understood by the alchemists, submitting to the wiles of the divine messenger who can lead us to a place of understanding at the crossroads between the daytime language of reason and the nighttime language of dreams.

What I’m suggesting is not a simple prescription or an easily implemented solution. Rather, I’m suggesting that the underlying roots of the current crisis in communication find their way to a mythic archetypal source, which becomes familiar with the practice of conversing with the images of our dreams. For better or for worse, we are living in a hermetic age, and the way forward will be under the aegis of that charming cattle-rustler, the bringer of dreams, the one looking over us as we stand at the crossroads.


Reference List
Hillman, J. (1979). The dream and the underworld. New York: Harper & Row.
Hillman, J. (2007). Apollo, dream, reality. In Mythic figures (pp. 320-335). Putnam, Conn.: Spring.
March, J. (1998). Cassell’s dictionary of classical mythology. London, UK: Cassell.

TRC is run solely on donations from patrons via PayPal. If you enjoy TRC's work, please consider donating. Any amount is generous. Receipt will read The Road Home, Inc. Thank you!