 have great intelligence, reasoning, problem solving skills, and worships the yukkuri-state religion; the state leader consults with the Council before doing anything. The Esai Clan has ruled Easey, with brief interruptions, since 2000. The microstate's sovereignty has been debated by the Japanese Government, with Easey becoming fully recognized by the United Nations on 2003 after a incident with the city of Hakodate that involved a ice cream truck, 10 yukkuri, the japanese military and a freeze ray. 

Despite Easey's independence and separate foreign policy, its defense is the responsibility of Japan. However, Easey does maintain two military units and a air force. Economic development was spurred in 2005 with the opening of the state's first tourist attraction, the Big Hill Park as well as a road connection to Hakodate and the rest of japan. Since then, Easey's warm climate, vast tunnel systems and its Council Headquarters have contributed to Easey's status as a tourist destination and recreation center for locals.In more recent years, Easey has become a major banking center and has sought to diversify its economy into the agriculture sector and underground construction industries. The state has no income tax, low business taxes and is well known for being a tax haven. In Easey, it is common for humans to pay yukkuri/taxes with bags of sugar, oranges, candy, or fruits due to Yukkuri viewing human money as useless tasteless numnums except in trade.

The religion of Easey is a yukkuri-based monotheistic religion based on the worship and teachings of the Good Easy Mister. Its adherents, known as Misterrism, believe that the Easy Mister is the Will of Nature/Gaia, whose coming as the Savior of Yukkuri and the Slayer of Not Nice Misters was prophesied in the "Good Book" – the textual basis for the "Old Good Book" in Misterrism – and chronicled in the "New Good Book". It is the state religion of the Easey Yukkuri Council, with about 11,987 followers as of 2021. Misterrism does not emphasize specific moral codes although it places a major conceptual focus on ensuring the conservation of nature, largely by using eco-friendly practices such as adapting green energy and enforcing strict green laws. Although yukkuri historians debate at what point it is suitable to refer to Misterrism as a true religion, it has been traced back to Easey's Independence period (12/11/1999). Misterrism formed around the outskirts of Hakodate, Japan when the 4 yukkuri clans discovered the hidden ruins of a massive underground temple known as The Altar (Now the Council's headquarters) and claimed to have seen visions of the Easy Mister, who told the 4 clans to settle and form a holy land for all yukkuri.

Easey is not part of the Oshima Subprefecture, but it participates in certain local policies, including voting and trade. Through its relationship with japan, Easey uses the Yen as its state currency, despite oranges and sugar being the de-facto currency; prior to this it used small shiny rocks. It is the host of the annual Yukkuri Olympics, a competition to see who can jump the highest on a trampoline. The center of urbanized Yukkuri and its strict no-abyuse laws, it is considered a safe heaven to yukkuri around Japan.

https://preview.redd.it/i5p6bhx1n6s61.png?width=700&amp;format=png&amp;auto=webp&amp;s=20d4070912ab7dd82d82b3f83c3a2b75152d6124

[Take it easy!](https://preview.redd.it/0bu14hx1n6s61.png?width=700&amp;format=png&amp;auto=webp&amp;s=172be4cc2257b539d02bba7ffc01ecc8f31def15)The dense overlay of the forms in the rain forest environment of Bowen Island makes painting an almost sculptural activity for me. In many of these works I have attempted a fusion of totemic figures with the landscape, which arises directly from the visceral process of mark making and automatism. This to me is what keeps painting relevant: that sense of discovery, one in which there is an interchange with forms unique to the forest enclosure I live in, one that creates a hybrid world of spirit and matter. See a slide show of “Out of The Woods” at the Evergreen Cultural Centre Gallery.On a recent Wednesday night, 15 of us gathered together at Lake Harriet Spiritual Center in conversation about dark matter and dark energy, led by a political science graduate. For 45 minutes the assortment of us – none of whom to my knowledge had any particular scientific career – learned in layman’s terms what we could about the mysterious force and energy that makes up 95 percent of the universe.
And then we sought to apply the comprehension of that to our lives.
There can be a “hippy-dippyness” to any discussion that has the word “consciousness” in it, when it’s not simply referring to neurons doing its dance inside our brain matter. For many of us, consciousness is a practical matter: coming out of dreamland or anesthesia, helping us remember childhood stories, giving us a particular angle on the upcoming election, storing away details like which streets to take without relying on Siri’s voice to guide us.
But consciousness, to those of us who have been meeting for a few years as part of an Institute of Noetic Sciences chapter group in Linden Hills, is more than what our brains help us think and perceive. It is also what we don’t perceive, due to the limitations of our brain, but might subtly be aware of.
An Invisible Essential Element
Edgar Mitchell was the sixth man to walk on the moon. On his way home, he felt an ecstatic moment of transcendence – he experienced the universe, in a matter of moments, as having an intelligence and purposefulness. It transformed his decades-long career as a hardcore scientist and led to his founding of IONS more than 40 years ago to explore what we don’t know about consciousness.
I had the pleasure of hearing from Edgar Mitchell, before his death earlier this year, about a website I was developing called ConnectedintheDeep.com – a sandbox for conversations I was having with brilliant scientists and philosophers about consciousness from a quantum to cosmic level. He was impressed with the website and wrote, “It seems you are seeing, reading about and working with all the important ideas that have emerged and are still emerging to help science and scientists understand that ‘awareness’ (the ground state for consciousness) is the third attribute in all of nature, along with matter and energy.”
Awareness. We can’t measure it, or see it in a magnification lens. It might be more of a cloud of invisible atoms that makes up 4% of the universe rather than a wave of energy or a particle of matter. But as we learned from avid learner Patrick King at the September IONS MN discussion circle in Linden Hills, there is an entire universe made up primarily of things we don’t understand.
Seeing Into the Dark
Image credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, from Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack,
Dark energy – which scientists have determined is roughly 70% of the universe – seems to be responsible for blowing up the space of space like a balloon. Dark matter – just as finite as visible matter is, but much more numerous – makes up 25% of the universe.
That means that 5% of the universe is made up of things we roughly know about: 4% are invisible atoms (think of it as the empty space in a window screen that keeps your hand from going through but lets air in), half of a percent is the helium and hydrogen that makes up our stars (yes, all of them combined are such a tiny fraction of the universe), and even smaller yet —.01% — is the rest of the visible matter that makes us and the paper or computer you are reading this on.
That makes us feel insignificant as a species, yes. In awe when we take the time to look into the sky. But that also means, individually and collectively, that we’re made out of the rarest materials in the universe.
And that’s why, for one night per month, our IONS merge together – outside the realm of kid activities and work responsibilities and retirement explorations – and we wonder what we might be capable of attaining from the perspective of the universe’s eye.
We humans are.01% of what our universe actually is. More of us are trying to look beyond what gets our attention in the light, to what might be hiding underneath.
The Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack book,”The View From the Center of the Universe,” was a foundation for Patrick’s exploration.
The next discussion in Linden Hills was October 26, 2016, when we explored the insights of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest who was ahead of his time in pondering the confluence of matter and spirit. Visit IONSMN.com for a synopsis, and future topics.
Tbf you don't necessarily have to be a prodigy or anything. Plenty of schools will pay you to attend with academics that are below the 90th percentile. Granted, these may not be