>> The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
>> Identity Thief
>> Gangster Squad
>> Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away
>> Lincoln
>> Zero Dark Thirty
>> Hitchcock
>> The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
>> Hyde Park on Hudson
>> Safety Not Guaranteed

Opening 5.10.13
>> The Great Gatsby (PG-13) [trailer]
>> Peeples (PG-13) [trailer]
>> Aftershock (Limited) (R) [trailer]
>> And Now a Word From Our Sponsor (Limited) (NR) [trailer]
>> Erased (Limited) (R) [trailer]
>> Sightseers (Limited) (NR) [trailer]
>> Venus and Serena (Limited) (PG-13) [trailer]

Coming To DVD/Blu-Ray 5.7.13
>> Safe Haven (2013) [buy]
>> Fringe: The Complete Fifth Season [buy]
>> Jack Reacher [buy]
>> Mama [buy]
>> Superman: Unbound [buy]

Las Vegas: Satan Vacations Here
by Victoria Alexander
October 20, 2008

Jeff McBride’s 4 Day Magical Celebration, Tonya & Burt Rutan, Shining Path Back in Peru, Magic At The Edge, The International Alchemy Conference, JJ Semple and Awakening Kundalini, Kundalini Master Rev. June Burke, Men Who Stare At Goats Begins Filming, and more...

Fall Fest Harvest Homecoming. Magician and alchemist Jeff McBride’s Fall Fest Harvest Homecoming is being held Thursday, October 23rd through Sunday, October 26th, 2008. Four days and nights of Mystery, Magic, Music and Fire! And it’s free! Sign up for this astonishing celebration at http://www.vegasvortex.com.

On Thursday October 23rd, Jeff McBride is inviting everyone for a community potluck Harvest Feast of Friends at his home, the McBride House of Mystery, at 7pm. Please RSVP to Jeff at 702-450-0021 or sign up at registrar@vegasvortex.com.

Friday evening, October 24th, begins at the Sound Traxx show room at Palace Station, to see Jeff McBride: Magic At The Edge show followed by The Witches and Wizard’s Ball. Doors open at 7pm. Jeff has special two for one tickets to his show and entrance to the Ball will be free with your ticket stub! There will be a special midnight ritual. Creative and festive costumes and masks are encouraged. There will be a $10 donation accepted at the door.

Saturday, October 25th from Dusk til Sunrise. The celebrants will gather at the Goddess Temple in Cactus Springs, forty minutes away from Las Vegas. http://www.sekhmettemple.com/drivingpage.htm. The evening will commence with the Desert Moon Circle opening ritual, a ceremony of honoring the shifting seasons of the year and honoring the intentions for the rest of the night's magick. After the ceremony, celebrants will go straight on to the all-night sacred fire circle, drumming, dancing and singing up the sun.

Bonedance is an Alchemical Firecircle Ritual, of drumming, dance, voice and sound honoring the ancestors with a special Samhain ceremony. Together the participants will turn the Great Wheel.

Sunday evening, October 26th, starting at 7pm, everyone will gather at Jeff’s House of Mystery, for an enchanted evening of Community Relaxation and Re-Integration.

Tonya & Burt Rutan. Last week we spent the evening with our dear friends Tonya and Burt Rutan at their Star Trek suite at Planet Hollywood. Burt, an avid golfer, was here as one of the celebrity players in the 1st Annual Kevin Sorbo Celebrity Golf Tournament held at the Dragon Ridge Country Club. The “Hero In You Can Help” celebrity golf tournament benefited A World Fit For Kids! (WFIT), a nonprofit charity. WFIT provides after-school physical activity and youth development programs for children and teens. http://www.worldfitforkids.org/

Tonya is a talented journalist and writer. Burt is an aerospace engineer who was named by Time Magazine as one of the "100 Most Influential People of the World" (April 18, 2005)! It is an honor and accomplishment Burt richly deserves.

Burt is responsible for SpaceShipOne, which became the first privately built, flown, and funded craft to reach space in June of 2004. The project team was honored with the 2004 Collier Trophy, awarded by the National Aeronautic Association for "greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America."(Group photo: from left of actor Brad Dourif, John Alexander, Burt Rutan and Jack Houck in 1998 at a PK Party held at the Rutan’s pyramid house; Tonya with 2 of their fluffy traveling companions. The cat is mine.)

Jeff McBride’s “Magic at the Edge” at The Palace Station. At the performance of Magic at the Edge that we attended, there were no less than six professional magicians in the audience. Steve Wyrick, who headlines his own illusions show at Planet Hollywood, was with a group of friends. At times, magician Lance Burton drops by. Every night in a videotaped interview, Burton lends credibility to McBride’s master skills. He talks about their early professional competition that pushed both artists to ever greater accomplishments.

Those arriving early were treated to personal attention and a chance to participate with McBride in mystifying close-up card tricks. The affable showman relies on skill, rather than big illusions to enthrall the audience.

True to McBride’s advice to aspiring magicians, magic up-front is adroitly performed. McBride is credited in the Guinness Book of Records in three categories, most notably for having the fastest hands in the business. The show is a sensation of colorful shamanic imagery. McBride’s signature act involves masks transitioning in logic-defying ways. Acquired by McBride, a modern shaman, on many trips around the world, they portend his deeper quest for real magic and understanding of eternal transformations. This part of the show symbolically represents the essence of human interactions: changing, hiding, deflecting, reflecting, and transmitting.

Intimacy with the audience is a key factor in McBride’s show. McBride demonstrates his virtuosity of the magician’s art form by knowing his audience and connecting with each and every one of them. Indeed, McBride is a master of ceremony. It is a show you will not want to miss.

Performances of Magic at the Edge are held at the Sound Trax Showroom, a 175 seat entertainment venue and lounge every Wednesday through Monday at 7:30 PM. Tickets are $49.00 plus tax. For tickets call (702) 547-5300 or go to: http://www.stationcasinos.com. The show is followed by Wonderground. Entry to Wonderground is $10 at the door. Patrons showing up in magical costumes before 10:30 get in at half price, and those who have attended McBride’s “Magic at the Edge” earlier in the evening can get in without paying any additional cover fee by showing their ticket stub from the earlier show.

Men Who Stare At Goats Begins Filming. Since we met “Goats” writer Jon Ronson and know all the people he wrote about, here is an update. Our friend Jim Channon (photo below taken at our home), creator of the First Earth Battalion, (http://www.jimchannon.com) is the film’s technical advisor.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, and Jeff Bridges are joining George Clooney (pictured in character) under Grant Heslov's direction. The film is based on Jon Ronson's book and follows his investigation into the secret wing of the U.S. military, the First Earth Battalion, a paranormal research unit created in 1978. Its goal was to create "Warrior Monks," supersoldiers who could do all sorts of things like walk through walls, become invisible, read minds, and kill creatures by staring at them long enough. One soldier in Ronson's book claims he killed a hamster and a goat doing just that.

The movie adaptation has changed things considerably from the book. It is now set in Iraq (where some of the supersoldiers have been reportedly deployed), and McGregor will be playing a stand-in for Ronson named Bob Wilton. He's desperate for a story, and stumbles upon the craziest one of a lifetime when he meets Lyn Cassady, played by Clooney, who claims to be a secret psychic soldier, reactivated after 9/11. As they travel through Iraq, investigating the story, they meet Bill Django, played by Bridges, who is the founder of the program and Cassady's mentor. Spacey will play Larry Hooper, another former psychic who is running a prison camp in Iraq.

According to the Wikipedia, The First Earth Battalion was proposed by Jim Channon, an American soldier who had seen service in Vietnam, for his idea of a new U.S. military to be organized along New Age lines. Such a battalion was never formed.

Jim is a fascinating, colorful person.

Referencing The Men Who Stare at Goats by journalist Jon Ronson, Wikipedia notes: “Channon spent time in the seventies with many of the people credited with starting the New Age movement and subsequently wrote an operations manual for a First Earth Battalion. Rather than using bullets and munitions, Channon envisaged that this new force would attempt to conquer the hearts and minds of the enemy using positive vibrations, carrying lambs symbolic of peace and employing unconventional but non-lethal weapons to subdue others. Lethal force was to be a last resort. Members would practice meditation, use yogic cat stretches and primal screams to attain battle-readiness, and use shiatsu as battlefield first aid.

Some ideas proposed in the writings of Channon later found their way into military procedures for psychological warfare. Ronson specifically cites the First Earth Battalion manual's proposal to use music to effect "psychic mind-change" as one. However, the American military has adopted loud sound as a psychological weapon, not to win hearts and minds.”

Kundalini Awakening. The International Alchemy Conference, held at the Palace Station, was fantastic! In the coming weeks I will be highlighting a few of the speakers. This is absolutely the most important Conference I have been to in the U.S. all year. Let’s hope Dennis William Hauck, the organizer (his workshop was on Spiritual Alchemy) will have the next International Alchemy Conference once again in Las Vegas.

JJ Semple, author of Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time and The Backward-Flowing Method: The Secret of Life and Death, spoke at the Conference on Sunday. His talk was called Activating the Life Force. JJ uses a special meditation called the Golden Flower Meditation or GFM to raise Kundalini in a safe, permanent fashion. According to JJ, GFM effectively transforms the practitioner’s body, improving health and extending one’s lifespan. It also cures all illnesses.

Golden Flower Meditation awakens Kundalini and ignites the Life Force energy that revitalizes the entire nervous system. In turn, this starts an autonomic self-healing process. Thanks to GFM, all disorders related to neural damage and nervous are susceptible to self-treatment.

Someone asked JJ how old he was. I never take nutritional or psychic advice from people who are obese, or health tips from people who look contagious. JJ is living proof to his claim that awakening Kundalini improves health and extends one’s life. He answered he was 70 years old.

Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time is Semple’s memoir about his 1973 Kundalini awakening and is a how-to book. Semple’s books can be purchased from and his itinerary checked at Life Force Books http://www.lifeforcebooks.com. JJ’s next "appearance" is at the Humboldt Holistic Fair on Saturday, October 25th in Eureka, California.

The Golden Flower Meditation is an ancient method of Taoist alchemy and is one of the most powerful methods available for personal change. It’s a method Semple rediscovered over thirty years ago through trial and error experimentation with the text The Secret of the Golden Flower.

My copy of The Secret of the Golden Flower was brought when I was a teenager! Its time to re-read it and get to work on re-awakening Kundalini. A Kundalini master raised mine in New York City in the 1980s.

I considered Rev. June K. Burke my teacher and friend since I would see her every time she taught in Manhattan. Rev. Burke had the astonishing ability to EFFORTLESSLY raise Kundalini from the Muladhara chakra in anyone. I experienced it. I saw her do it to others. Rev. Burke was born and raised in La Grangeville, New York. June was a medium and Master of Kundalini Yoga. Rev. Burke’s teacher was a seraphim angel, Julian. Seraphim are the highest-ranking angels in the celestial hierarchy. They worked together for over 35 years. http://www.julianteachings.com/

Julian says: “I am a seraph of the order of seraphim, that which you would call "angelic force." From the beginning of time, I have been a bridge between two worlds. I have never been in a physical body other than borrowed ones. In our varying energy patterns, angelic forces are given assignments, which they carry forth in the universe. My assignment has been to be a teacher of truth, a deliverer of God's messages, and a deliverer of mankind through his own potential. Thus, from the beginning of time, I have been a bridge between the unseen world and the seen. I have watched cultures be born, come to fruition, and die. It is my job to try to know and understand the culture, and the vernacular of that culture, in order to help man to better his potential.”

After a near death experience while in her thirties, Julian made himself known to June. Although June departed the earthly plane (there was no one like her!) in February 2005, the teachings of Julian still continue.

If you would like to contact me about this column, or be included on my private distribution list for a weekly reminder, just email me at Masauu@aol.com.

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