We are MERMAIDS! (photos)

Spirit of Caitlin, Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Crystal Quintero (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly; Hellmuth Hecker; Timothyna Duncan (DailyMail.com, Jan. 18, 2017); Dr. Doreen Virtue

Real-life mermaids like Melissa Dawn and friends live out the dream (dailymail.co.uk).

My tail means a lot to me. "I sometimes joke that I wear a prosthetic because I was born with a terrible birth defect -- which is legs," the modern American mermaid Cyanea explains.

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Mermaid Melissa knows the life (dailymail)

Inside America's secret community of MERFOLK where men and women identify as part-human and part-fish -- and some give up their day jobs to could concentrate on this full-time.

• Caitlin Nielsen dreamed of being a mermaid from a young age and declared at kindergarten it was what she wanted to be when she grew up.
• In 2015 the biology graduate quit her job to focus full-time on following her dream.
• She is part of a growing community of people who identify as part-human, part-fish and call themselves merfolk.

When Caitlin Nielsen told her kindergarten teacher she wanted to be a mermaid when she grew up, the kids laughed at her.
 

Those who in a past life were mermaids (sea nymphs) sometimes have a hard time adjusting to life on land. Note the European folklore of the Silkies (Sealfolk) in Ireland, Iceland, and the area.

 

The real thing today -- what is it?

But now aged 32, Caitlin is living her dream: She is part of a "secret" American community of people in Seattle who identify as part-human, part-fish and call themselves merfolk.

 

Caitlin had long dreamed of being a mermaid and watching the Disney movie The Little Mermaid only excited her aspirations.

 

So in 2015 the biology graduate quit her job so she could focus full-time on her real ambition: being a full-time mermaid. [Suck it, grown up world of monkey-clad business apes in ties and shaved apes in sensible shoes!]

Under her mer name of "Cyanea," she earns a living running mermaid workshops and creates majestic silicone tails. But for her -- and many more of her kind -- it is more than a tail: It is part of her, and she refers to it as a "prosthetic limb." More + PHOTOS + VIDEO

Lana Del Rey: bi mermaid or tease?
A strange theme runs through Lana Del Rey's ecstatic song "Freak," which seems to have started in "Music to Watch Boys To" video

Mermaids were real
"Mermaids were real" Dr. Doreen Virtue, Ph.D. (AngelTherapy.com); Ashley Wells, Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly, updated, first published Nov. 20, 2012

Real-life mermaid inspired by Disney wears tail, holds breath (dailymail.co.uk)

(4AngelTherapy) Dr. Virtue, guitarist for Obsidian (with Mark Watson and Tatiana), and her friend Angela Hartfield are mermaids on an adventure to the Obsidian song "Find That Place." Ocean footage in Kona, Hawaii, Fiji. Editing by Jeff Leicher, Jack's Diving Locker, Kona, and Michael Allen.

Water-devi Doreen Virtue (angeltherapy.com)

If dogs are "man's best friend," dolphins are women's. And it's okay. According to geneticists and other scientists examining fossilized structures, dogs and dolphins evolved from one to the other.

They are both mammals breathing atmospheric air rather than strictly depending on air pulled from water through gills.

 

Aquatic Ape theorists may be onto something. There is a sutra with a strange echo of mermaid lore. The Buddha's chief male disciple Maha Moggallana, who was "foremost in psychic powers," mentioned mermaids [Middle Length Discourses, Bhikkhu Bodhi (trans.), MN 50.25]:
 

"In the middle of the ocean

There are mansions aeon-lasting,

Sapphire-shining, fiery-gleaming

With a clear translucent luster,

Where iridescent sea-nymphs dance

In complex, intricate rhythms."

(MN 50.25, Ven. Nanamoli/Bhikkhu Bodhi translation)

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There be dragon? (Evs in Nz)

Dr. Doreen Virtue dazzled millions by talking about the reality of mermaids on Coast to Coast. They really used to exist on Earth, the surface of which was 70% covered by water. The water was brought here. Our bodies are also 70% water.

Mer-persons (mer meaning mar, maritime, marine, "ocean") were once as common as dolphins. But they were killed off. They came to exist only as earthbound-devas, subtle light beings, fairies delighting in water. Seamen have been spotting them for millennia.
 

The mermaid archetype is powerful in our collective consciousness. We all recognize them. And many of us are drawn to them. Dr. Virtue makes becoming one possible with the help of modern technology and a variety of unifin/monofin models. More

A Sutra with Mermaids

Dhr. Seven (ed.) based on MN 50, Hellmuth Hecker's life of Venerable Maha Moggallana

Maritime lore: golden sea nymph or waterbound deva on Prince Frederick's barge (wiki)

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Mara even bothers enlightened disciples.

Soon after the final nirvana of Sariputra, the Buddha's chief male disciple "foremost in wisdom" (counterpart of the Buddhist nun Khema), Mara (the Buddhist Tempter figure, the Evil One, the personification of Death), did something strange.

He entered Maha Moggallana's belly and traveled into his bowels. Maha Moggallana was the Buddha's chief male disciple "foremost in magical powers" (counterpart of the Buddhist nun Uppalavana).

Mara could not make him possessed by entering his head because Mara had access only to the lowest chakra on the fully enlightened chief disciple. Maha Moggallana, however, quickly discerned what was happening and calmly told Mara to get out. Go away; you have been recognized.

Mara was perplexed and could not believe this, surprised he had been found out so soon. He thought, in his delusion, that even the Buddha would not have discerned his presence so quickly.

But even as these things occurred to Mara, Maha Moggallana read his thoughts and again ordered him out. Mara escaped from his hiding place through Maha Moggallana's mouth and stood at the meditation hut's door post.

Great Moggallana told him that he knew him not only from today but was aware of Mara's karmic past and his line of descent. In this way, Great Moggallana manifested three supernormal faculties: the divine or third eye, telepathy, and recollection of past lives.

 
It was only on this occasion, reported in the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Majjhima Nikaya 50), that Great Moggallana spoke of his recollection of his own distant past lives.

He began by declaring this in verse:

"In the middle of the ocean

There are mansions aeon-lasting,

Sapphire-shining, fiery-gleaming

With a clear translucent luster,

Where iridescent sea-nymphs dance

In complex, intricate rhythms."

 

Ariel and that funny little lobster guy in Disney Corporation's The Little Mermaid

 

Mermaid (killmydaynow.com)

The following is the gist of what he then told Mara the Evil One.

The first buddha appearing in this our "fortunate aeon" (bhadda-kalpa) with its five buddhas was the Buddha Kakusanda. He lived when the human lifespan was 40,000 years and when the first darkening of the Golden Age became evident because of a ruler's lack of concern and the occurrence of the first theft among people.

Because of that, the vital energy of humans was reduced to half. At that time, Great Moggallana was Mara, chief of demons, lord of the lower worlds, and his name was Mara Dusi or "Mara the Corrupter." He had a sister named Kali, whose son at that time was to become the Mara Namuci of our age.

Therefore, Great Moggallana's own nephew was now standing in front of him at the door post. While being the mara of that distant time, Great Moggallana had attacked a chief disciple of the previous Buddha by taking possession of a boy and making him throw a shard of pottery at the enlightened disciple's head so that it broke his skin and blood came forth.

When the Buddha Kakusandha saw this, he said: "Truly, Mara knows no moderation here" -- because even in diabolical actions there might be moderation.

Under the glance of the Perfectly Enlightened One, the astral body of Mara Dusi (Great Moggallana in that previous life) dissolved on the spot and reappeared in the deepest hell known as the "Waveless" or Avici.

Just a moment before he had been the overlord of all the hellish worlds, and now he himself was one of hell's victims. A moment before he had been the greatest torturer, and now he himself was undergoing one of those terrible torments.

Such is the rapid change in situations in the Wheel of Rebirth (samsara). For many thousands of years Mara Dusi/Great Moggallana had to suffer in the lowest hell as a natural consequence of his frivolity towards a saintly enlightened being.

Ten thousand years he had to spend alone in a hellish pool, with a human body and the head of a fish, just as Pieter Breughel painted such beings in his pictures of the hells.

Whenever two slowly penetrating lances of his torturers crossed in his heart, he would know that a thousand years of his torment had passed (MN 50).

 

After this encounter with Mara, which once more brought to his mind the terrors of samsara from which he now was free forever, fully enlightened Great Moggallana felt that the time of his last birth was running out.

Being fully enlightened, a Buddhist "saint," he saw no reason for making use of his ability to extend, by an act of will, his life span up to the end of this kalpa (Pali kappa, which really means "the normal lifespan" for the time rather than its usual meaning of "aeon").

So he calmly allowed impermanence to take its lawful course. As many great sages of the East and many arhats (enlightened beings, saints) following the Buddha did, he left behind a kind of autobiography in verses (gathas) that summarize how he, as a liberated one, had since becoming fully enlightened passed through all of the situations of his life unperturbed and unshaken.

Events that completely overwhelm others left him calm. These verses, found in the Psalms of the Brethren or Verses of the Elders (Theragatha) could be summed up by saying that none of samsara's upheavals appeared to him extraordinary, nor could anything disturb the equipoise of his enlightenment.

The disappointment (ill, woe, suffering, dukkha) of the world no longer touched him as he lived in a peace that transcended all of the pain, perplexity, and restlessness of existence: The verses begin with events of his life in the world:

• Wherever others craved for possessions, as a forest hermit he was content with an austere life of few wants (Theragatha 1146-1149).
• Once when a harlot tried to seduce him, he rejected her just as the Buddha had rejected Mara's daughters (Thag. 1150-1157).
• When his best friend Sariputra -- the Buddha's other chief male disciple -- had died, he was not agitated by sorrow as was Ananda, who had not yet become an arhat, but instead remained serene and unshaken, full of understanding and compassion (1158-1163).

Then the verses turn to events of a supernormal nature such as his shaking a monastery building with his toe (1164) and his undisturbed meditation in a mountain cleft in the midst of thunder and lightning (1167)... More