Why my coins are not hobo nickels:
Simply put, I have a fine-art approach to the coin carving, not a numismatic one. I don’t care much for hard-edge art and care even less for literalism and so-called “realism”, which isn’t anywhere close to realness. I use a free-form line, more drawing and sketching than the tightly repressed world of gravure you generally see, although there are more artists discovering coin engraving every day, and more artistic renderings are available.
Look on eBay to see many examples of recent hobo nickel art and other coin carvings.
The story of the hobo nickel arising out of the hobo jungles of the 1929-1939 Great Depression is simply that when you got hold of a spare nickel, you could carve it into a dollar’s worth of food and lodging. I like to use the same spirit in carving my coins as the hobos enjoyed in their day, meaning that I scratch at it — I don’t slice and cut the way a modern engraver would and should do. My approach is more “Paleo”, more basic, more street-wise and less technological, less dependent on civilization to maintain it.
Most hoboes used an ordinary 6-penny nail or a broken file to scratch their carvings into the nickel, and it’s those moves I’m trying to duplicate.
Remember, on a coin, you can’t add — you can only subtract, hence the designation of coin-carving as “reductive sculpture”, and DO keep in mind that it IS a piece of sculpture, albeit small; actually classifiable under the title “miniature reliefs”. Every time you make a wrong move, you lose more metal. At some point, it’s unrecoverable and you have to scrap the coin. With a gold coin, this can be quite expensive and painful, so it can’t be allowed to happen. You NEVER screw up a gold coin, period.
As a recognized art form, coin-carving has been around for a lot longer than the hobo nickel. I collect examples of ancient and medieval altered coins. Many were changed to fool someone into thinking it was a more valuable coin, and others were art pieces in miniature, executed simply for personal pleasure and amusement.
Some were just doodles into metal by bored craftspeople, much as a country person might choose to sit under a tree or by a cracker barrel or whisky barrel and whittle, while their opponent is making a checkers move decision.
Checkers seems to be coming up quite a lot these days, and I know that most of the folks in our Work Circle have not yet elected to try a game or two, and that’s understandable, in light of the fact that most folks have not yet ordered a checkers set.
It’s not your fault.
I haven’t gotten the graphics together on any of the new coinology stuff, and the photos for the ammies just now arrived in my computer, so I’m now embarking on a mission of documentation for both lines of work and effort.
Whittling is a delicate art, one that takes time and attention and patience and control of the hands and sharpening of the eye, seeing lumps and whirlpools where the wood has gnarled and grown in many directions.
Back in the 18th century, I taught wood carving near Nara, Japan. The monks were allowed to carve nuts and other carveable things, which could be traded for a variety of things, including support and shelter from a nobleman collector who wanted the carver to stick around and keep producing for him.
In the Sumerian and Babylonian cultures, we didn’t have metal coinage. Nobody at that time thought of using various metals to represent various levels of wealth. It was shells and beads and feathers and carvings — things that had a built-in scarcity and desirability factor that caused them to become trading tokens and eventually currency.
I watched all this happen over several dozen centuries, with some amusement. Money seems to be a powerful driving force, which in turn is driven by sex and mawwiage, which is itself driven by the DNA impulses, which humans call their “personality”.
The persona supplies all the drive and rationale necessary to carry out the primary commands of the DNA module, which is “eat, sleep, fight, run, reproduction, get drunk once in a while”.
There are a few minor subcommands, but that’s essentially the message of the DNA. The message of the spirit is quite different, which leads us to the coinology and amulets. Let’s just focus for the moment on the coinology aspect.
Think of what it would take to boil down the school teaching into a single “something”, such as an electron, or a photon, or a “particle”, whatever that means to you now.
You’d have to reduce and reduce and reduce the teaching, first into “sutras”, then into “catechisms”, and finally into a single phrase or word, in order to pass the information from this time-frame to another time-frame up the line, such as the 37th century, where I could really use a few previously planted coin stashes.
There’s a terrific market for any Civil War coins up here in the 37th century, and I did make an effort to stash a number of MS-70 Civil War Coins of all denominations in 12 different locations not too far away from the Ashram, so I could dig them up later, but with California gone, there’s nowhere else to look, so I’m enlisting the aid of others to store these coins in Time Vaults, so we can all have the benefit of those things here in your “future”, which is the Actual Present.
In-game time happens, too, don’t get me wrong. Your experience of time is perfectly correct. It’s linear and diodal, meaning that it only goes in one direction, with no back-EMF.
Oh, I guess I should explain; Civil War coins dating from 1859 through 1865 are one set of Civil War coins, but I use and collect coins of many different Civil Wars, of which there are plenty throughout history.
The Civil War coins I’m putting down for the future coin hunters of America are high-grade slabbed examples of pre-war coinage. Altered coins and exonumia tokens become the standard until the Chinese Morgan Dollar becomes the trade dollar of choice. There are already millions of the counterfeit Morgan Dollars here, so it’s easy to pick them up.
I have a few Morgans left, all of which I can speak for in terms of authenticity, but not of aesthetic. I prefer to use the Peace Dollar for the coin alteration into the skull mask.
So let’s talk about coins. What are the Quantum Mechanics of coinology, and what makes them work?
First of all, let’s handle that last question first. “What makes them work” is a question that has a new answer every semester, because the information keeps getting sharper and sharper, more and more revealing all the time, which is how it’s set up to run.
The planet is populated by many 37th century gamers, in the sense that each “player” is generated with its own sense of self-awareness, and then projected into the game as an Avatar of Flesh & Blood, meaning that it hurts to be alive, and that’s the basic method of convincing yourself that you’re alive and in a body, when in fact you are nothing but patterns of light and dark, sound and silence in the Voidness of the Void, but that’s not going to get the marketing done, and that’s what we’re here to do, so let’s look at the situation and see what we can make of it.
So what are the Quantum Mechanics?
It would be an oversimplification to say that the goal of the exercise is to load singular particle accumulations with DNA commands and pass them through Dimensional Bubbles to other domains, for the purpose of creating a network of activated Beings acting in accord on a single higher goal.
What is the goal?
To awaken those within the dream world who need and wish to be awakened. Nothing more is intended. The altered coins will work in this way:
Humans and other semi-intelligent life-forms have an electro-magnetic matrix into which only the proper key will fit and operate the unlocking mechanism.
Your Altered Coin is that key.
Your job? Find the lock to which that key fits, and transactionally pass the altered coin to the person who needs it. This may take a while.
Speaking of “taking a while”, I’ve decided to go ahead and list a variety of coins on eBay, in spite of the vicious and thoroughly experienced competition. It’s a mob scene on eBay these days, more sellers than buyers and more hysteria over the latest war or election news, which is always bad and getting noticeably worse, as you’d expect at this level of the game.
The coins that have, in my opinion, the most impact, are the ones featuring long-dead kings, queens, emperors, pharaohs, popes, prime ministers, presidents and saints. Everyone has a skull behind the face, and seeing AND SENSING the skull’s presence, the existence of the skeleton within the body, reveals that death is built into the bones.
Yet, to the Wise, the Ascended Masters and other Higher Beings, it’s clearly evident that far from signifying “death”, the skull and skeleton represent the Living Spirit, the Jewel within the Lotus.
When we become aware of the Living Spirit Within, we awaken. Simple as that.
There aren’t many “Awakening Machines”, but the Skull and Skeleton Coins can not only awaken the Being constantly and repeatedly and assuredly and predictably and most of all, reliably, but they awaken others around the Bearer.
Your job is to create more Bearers, each in a different universe. My altered coins are self-replicating when placed in alternate universes. They propagate themselves, but no matter where they appear, they must be marketed, and that’s where YOU come in.
Your job is to get more people to become Bearers.
World Peace can be achieved by creating a network of Peace on You Altered Dollar Bearers. How many would it take to bring about World Peace? A lot more than you have money to buy, and that’s why we’re not doing it.
There are other, more important reasons. I’m not the only one who collects 21st century Civil War tokens — I see Time Voyagers everywhere, stashing high-grade coins away for the future, when eBay will look like the child’s play of ignorant Neanderthals. Hmmm….don’t get me started.
So what exactly IS the message imbued in the so-called Death Coins? It’s partly the image, which is iconical, yet vague enough to pass through Inter-Dimensional Customs, meaning the information scrambling screens that surround ALL Higgs Fields.
We can’t have memory survive rebirth, can we? Yet, no information is lost, so we can’t erase it, but we CAN and DO scramble it, so the lifetimes don’t merge together, which can cause a lot of discomfort to the machine and gosh — we wouldn’t want that.
The hell we wouldn’t. That is in essence our job here on Planet Earth, to propagate the Message, and there’s no better way to do that than to boil the Message, the Teaching, down to one word or phrase, such as “Say Hello to the Jewel Inside the Lotus!”, meaning bow to the Inner Spirit residing invisibly within the organic form of the living thing before you.
In short, you’re not the only one here, pardner.
When you wake up, you wake up to that clear fact. Yes, you are The One and Only, but you are also The Many, and in particular, right now you happen to be Just Another One of the Many, and this is all to the good, because it makes you able to perform Essence Tasks as directed from Above.
One simple task would be to help propagate the Skull and Skeleton coins, which we call “Remembering Coins”, because they help you to remember that behind every face, every mask, every manifestation, there is a glowing Living Spirit, which we can represent as the skeleton and/or the skull.
Another simple task, perhaps a bit further down the line, would be to actually create the coins yourself and go out there and get them into the hands of others.
A task that might be more difficult would be to organize folks to market the coins that you produce, and a further effort could be achieved by teaching others to make and sell them.
Giving them away does not fulfill the quantum requirement of conservation of mass and energy. There must be an exchange, a mutual agreement and selection of fate rivers, expressed as a sale, with a buyer and a seller exchanging equal value items in barter, the highest form of trade, soon to be re-established as the norm among the surviving humans of Planet Earth.
I rather like that period of history, and might just build an extension to the already highly detailed level we quaintly call “the 21st century”, as if there were others ahead of it.
Someday we’ll dream up a way to make that happen, too. We always do.
There’s nothing quite as ironic as a human being who owns a mountain of gold and controls the lives of millions of subjects and has the best medical attention available at the time, and then he or she dies.
Golden crown on the head, bedecked with jewels and gemstones, velvet and taffeta everywhere, lavish spread at the wake, lots of friends show up in fancy gowns and tiaras, many announcements of famous and infamous people entering the ballroom and everywhere, couples are Waltzing Mathilda, and she’s doing everything Fred Astaire is doing, but backward and in heels.
These altered coins are ironic, but they are also mindful. They create the magical effect of MINDFULNESS, the awareness of the Buddha-Nature of all things.
Notice that I did not limit this effect to living creatures. Solidness and inertness are an illusion. Speed up the film, and you’ll see what I mean. Watching Andromeda crash into the Milky Way right now, even as we speak.
A powerful King with his skull partly showing, partly revealed, the skin peeled back just enough to see the jaw and grinning teeth.
Morbid?
I should hope to kiss a herring, it’s morbid. What the hell is wrong with morbidity? Death is nature’s way of saying “slow down”. Without death, you’d live in the same body forever, and those things should really be thrown away when they go past their expiration date.
Have you ever actually seen and talked with someone who is over 100 years old? I don’t care what level of medicine you’ve got available, that’s a world of pain that you need not endure.
Rebirth is guaranteed.
It’s NOT getting rebirthed in the same place that runs to the tricky side, so there’s another aspect to the skull and skeleton coins, which is to remind you that UNLESS YOU DO SOMETHING SPECIFIC ABOUT IT, THE ONLY RESULT OF YOUR LIFE IS DEATH.
That could be a sobering thought, if you could really entertain it.
A Walking Skeleton or Skull “SPIRIT COIN” can serve as a sort of alarm clock for the waking and evolving process, but it’s got even more uses than that.
For one thing, the ancient altered coin has a LOT going on there, not only the extreme passage of time, but the Uncertainty loaded into the coin’s surface by variations in the patina and encrustations.
This is good stuff, shamanically speaking, and it’s part of my job to introduce this spiritual technology and get it out there in actual use.
It’s not expensive to set up a dealership in Skeleton and Skull Coins, and it’s even cheaper if your coins come off your own workbench. I’d be happy to help you set up a production center and to acquire the right type of coins on which to work, because not all coins will do the same thing.
Some coins are naturally magic and need hardly any alteration to achieve their result, but others must be worked and reworked in order to see any benefit. I avoid those harder coins, because there are plenty of good ones out there. I generally get about one-third “Good Spirit” coins out of a bag of ancient bronze AEs and Follis AEs.
Gold coins are another creature altogether, and we will eventually work our way into that flow, both in the marketplace and in the Aesthetic of the Higher Realm, the so-called “God-World”, actually the highest of the lower worlds, if that makes sense.
You can launch yourself into the Stream of Spirit Coins at just about any level of participation, from a small wearable Spirit Coin at $35 all the way to a full line of Spirit Coins for the Professional Dimensional Voyager, which I hope for your sake is YOU.
Types of Spirit Coins that I make and offer to my students range widely:
- DREAMWALKER — Hand-Carved Half-Dollar in Silver Bezel — $125.
- BARDO BUCKS — Hand-Carved Morgan Dollar in Silver Real Rope Bezel — $125.
- PEACE on YOU — Peace Dollar set in Sterling Real Rope Bezel — $125.
- WASHINGTON SKULL — Silver Quarter in Silver Bezel — $125.
- MERCURY DIME — Hand-Carved in AU-57 Silver Dime — $125.
- ANCIENT BRONZE — Hand-Carved Ancient Bronze Coin — $125.
- $10 GOLD EAGLE — Hand-Carved, in 14k Bezel — $3,500.
- $5 GOLD HALF-EAGLE — Hand-Carved in 14k Bezel — $2250.
- $2 1/2 DOLLAR QUARTER EAGLE — Hand-Carved in 14k Bezel — $1850.
- $1 U.S. GOLD PIECE — Hand-Carved in 14k Bezel — $1250.
- ANCIENT GOLD COIN — prices will vary widely, from $3500-$9500 per coin.
- HANDMADE GOLD COIN — Carved into a heavy solid .999 fine gold disk — $3500.
- HIGH-GRADE GOLD COIN — Carved into a high-grade — $9500-$22,500.
Expensive? Not really, when you consider that you’re holding precious metals. If you were buying feathers or handbags, you’d be right to worry, because they can’t be used as money, but gold and silver can, at least at the moment, they can.
I don’t recommend the high-grade coin carving, and would try to dissuade you, but some folks will have it no other way, so I’ll try to minimize the damage by selecting a coin that is BEAUTIFUL on the backside, but has had an accident on the front of the coin, making it less valuable.
My carving would rectify that situation by creating a new image at and around where the damage had occurred, perhaps incorporating the damage into the design.
Keep in mind that I will not knowingly or deliberately damage a tradeable coin. I only work with coins whose only fate is meltdown.
In a way, I’m upcycling the coins that have traveled far down the path of numismatic catastrophic entropic collapse, meaning that the bronze coins are destined to become “filler” until better coins can be found to put into the collection folder, and the silver and gold coins will be melted down the minute the gold price goes over the price of the coin’s numismatic value, if any.
In the case of many gold coins, there are so damned many of them that the system is choked up with them, as well as billions and billions of Morgan Dollars, Peace Dollars and Walking Liberty Halves, because those are the coins that the cattle put away for that rainy day up ahead.
Actually, they’re for AFTER, but who’s counting?
It’s vitally important to consider the coinology actions quite apart from financial considerations, because there is absolutely no way to accurately predict the outcome.
Take it under advisement, that we may be creating a Black Hole of Altered Coins, and that Black Hole may well be in your closet or desk drawer. Once you get into The Flow, it’s not easy to get back out again, so beware before you commit.
Now that you’ve committed, you could probably BE committed.
Here’s the deal:
You decide the level of participation, and set a goal for yourself, but DO NOT DO THIS ALONE on your own. Get some guidance from a pro, meaning call in and we’ll talk.
If you have a small stash of coins or any tradeable items around the house and you don’t want them or are willing to sacrifice them for the project, you’re welcome to send me what you have, as long as you don’t actually need it, and I’ll convert it into carveable coins and send you the coins back to sell, barter, trade, but NOT TO GIVE.
You can sell them to others who may give them, but as a Propagator, you may not give thse away. I have a special assortment of GIFT SPIRIT COINS that you CAN give as gifts, so ASK, already!!!
I have a line of Trump Dollars ready for the 22nd century marketplace, but unfortunately, there is no one left alive to buy them.
Hey, that’s okay. You can help to stash away some gold for the future. Not for spending. Slime Molds EAT gold coins. Yum.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby