Palyne

I just had this totally left-field “AHA!” moment realization.

Many know Reich, who is most famous for his ‘Orgone’ energy stuff I suppose, though he was also quite brilliant as an analyst.

His book ‘The Nature of the Orgasm’ is very interesting. Take off the sexual component we assign to that for a minute. Basically he suggests that if you study the world, every single thing has ‘cycles’. It builds up, and builds up, energetically, until it reaches some crescendo, peaks, and then falls back down again. From ocean tides to herd populations, there is pretty much nothing I can think of in our world, from microscopic biology to macroscopic sociology, where this pattern does not exist.

Timewave Zero is the McKenna brothers’ mathematic computer modeling of their projected “novelty” (’change’) for the human race/earth/whatever (sorry to be unclear but I didn’t read the whole book and that was eons ago). Basically, based on their models, they projected that the “degree of novelty” was going to get more and more exponentially extreme, until at the very end it pretty much went off the charts into a sort of maximum. Curiously, their timeframe for this was something like December 21, 2012, at 5:59:59 AM (and some sub-seconds). (I forget what timezone that is. Zulu maybe? Buy the book.)

Now many people might recognize that as the infamous “Year of Ending” of the Mayan calendar.

I just realized: it’s an orgasm. It’s a cycle. TIME has the SAME cycles that everything else does.

I know that’s a very weird thought. But then I’m kinda weird.

PJ

P.S. This hit me just between pondering whether CFPARAM would validate form input data for team-based tasking better than dynamic IF statements or in-form javascript, and wondering whether just putting in my default datetime value (12/21/2012 5:59:59 AM) would suffice and if they screw it up, just making it easy to edit. Who says that programming is not a tool of insight? ;-)

I’ve been thinking lately about my curious behavior. Sometimes, I astound even myself, and wonder how it is I can be so old and still occasionally feel like I have no idea what subconscious motives are making me operate.

In this case, it’s the Antisocial Blues as I call them.

Now, when I moved here to nowhere Oklahoma, I was working 100+ hrs/wk doing programming and related project management. I never left the house except to get fast food (almost my only food) or go to the bank (where the tellers very clearly considered me a drug dealer, given their behavior, because of the large sums of checks/cash I dealt with then. As if I wouldn’t have been skinnier had drugs been an issue, haha). Even office supplies were delivered. As a result, I very seldom encountered other people.

I did meet parents of other kids on occasion, first at daycare and then at school as my kid got older, and at soccor. I always rather hoped to find someone I could bond to, someone who could be a friend, especially as my working hours relaxed slightly, and I got rather tired of having nobody to talk to but a small child and too many cats. But I have so little in common with what seems to be most all the people in my region, that aside from human biology, we share so little we could be aliens to each other. Read the rest of this entry »

If life is but a dream, as the sages say, then everything around us reflects us in some way.

And if the universe is holographic, as the sages and some physicists now suggest, then every reflected item or issue on one level, is probably present in myriad others.

It’s not merely as above, so below; it’s also as within, so without; and as here, so there; and every other possible permutation.

Most of the best advice in both practical and metaphysical terms, starts there.

While I wouldn’t take this to the extreme–I’m not obsessing over the deeper meaning in a hangnail–I do think that observing ‘the patterns of our reality’, so to speak, can be enlightening. It’s like an intro-spective activity using the extro-spective canvas. (Yes. I just made that word up.)

I’m the analogy-queen; I can see nearly anything as a dream-symbol, and correlate it to other things in my mind, heart, spirit, or other facets of experience. It doesn’t really matter how objectively valid this might be, as I figure anything from ’subconscious intuition’ to ‘God/guides’ can use this process to help me a little from the inside, even were it nothing more than my colorful imagination.

*

Today I started to make dinner (taco salad: kid-approved). I couldn’t help but notice, as I searched for something, that yet again my pitiful old fridge was so overstuffed it was ridiculous. Welcome to lowcarb, where nearly everything is perishable!

This is its normal state, mind you. I sometimes think I compost more food than I eat, mostly because stuff gets buried very easily, unseen, and then gets out of date, or replaced because I think I’m out of it. But as inflation around me seems to make the cost of eating, driving, and heating/cooling my house a lot harder than it used to be, the waste of that becomes a bigger deal.

So, like a cat that stops mid-step to lick a foot in desperate need apparently, I stopped in the middle of making dinner and cleaned out the fridge. REALLY well.

In the back of every shelf, and in the door, were innumerable jars and bottles of stuff. Pickles, pickled stuff, dressings, sauces, jams, you name it. Most of them probably date from a long time ago; although I clean the fridge now and then I usually don’t bug that kind of thing, thinking it’s still probably good. Most of them are also high-carb. I got rid of all of them like that.

I found a number of things important to me — a whole chicken, two long tubes of ground sausage, several cheeses — that were outdated or seriously molded and made me really mad at myself for forgetting they were in there and letting them get buried before I used them. (I thought I’d put the chicken in my chest freezer in the garage.) I got rid of everything outdated.

I nearly threw out a tub of yogurt that smelled like sour cream, despite only expiring two days ago, until I realized it WAS sour cream. I swear, I’m like I Love Lucy in the kitchen!

I had five, 13-gallon trash bags filled with stuff when I was done. I honestly cannot believe there was that much stuff. That’s not totally filled, mind you. I just made them as heavy as they could be without splitting; a couple were only half-full, as jars of stuff are heavy. By the time I was done, there was almost nothing left in my fridge. But what was left was well organized and in-date and low-carb.

I recently cleaned out and organized my freezer too (it’s a side-by-side), so I felt pretty good about this being done.

I closed the fridge, sat back on a folding chair I’d been using for the job, and considered my kitchen.

*

I have incredibly little counter space. Not counting one fairly unusable (because it’s sorta unreachable) corner, I have about 2′, ~5′, 2′ (three separate counter areas). These have to hold my canisters and other things that sit on counters, coffeepot, all my non-refrigerated bottles of stuff (vinegar, etc.), dish drainer, and dirty dishes (I don’t have a dishwasher), and so on. So by the time we’re talking about useable counter space, there isn’t much. There’s enough to make a meal just fine, except if I don’t clean everything up really well, or I take up a couple feet with dishes needing washed, the next meal has no place to do anything. I mourn this regularly.

Idly looking around, I realized (I knew this, but suddenly realized this in a new way somehow), that I have, count them, three substantial, nice looking sets of clear canisters. (Lovely cubic thick glass ones, spherical lucite ones, and plastic lock&locks.) Every counter in my kitchen is missing the back 8″ as a result.

I considered them anew. Most their contents date from–I am not kidding–the year 2000. Think it might be time to get rid of that stuff eh! If I haven’t used it by now, I’m definitely not going to be using it anytime soon–and being 8 years old, I don’t think I want to use it, airtight canisters or not.

I considered various strategies to consolidate anything useful from the newer l&l’s and spice shelf into the prettiest glass ones, use the l&l’s for leftover/ freezer storage, and do something elsewhere with the lucite ones. This one step alone would buy me several feet of 8″ back-of-counter space freed up.

Then I considered that on the small counter next to the fridge, half of the 2′ space is taken up with bottles of stuff — oils, soy sauce, vinegar, etc. It took me awhile to get the niggling in the back of my head up to the front, where it pointed out that (a) I haven’t used more than a few of these bottles in at least two years, (b) nearly everything there is either highcarb, bad for me (like veg oils), or possibly should have been refrigerated anyway, and (c) was another perfect example, like my fridge, of (1) good stuff getting lost in the shuffle, and (2) me using valuable space in my life to store crap I don’t use, don’t want, and don’t care about. This would free up not only the other foot of that counter, but that newly combined space would be a space big enough to actually work in for something like a mixing bowl or chopping mat.

I thought, so really, here I am sorta chronically sad about how pitiful my situation with counter space is, and yet, there is a solution in several areas, and it’s really my own fault the situation IS what it IS: if I simply arranged things differently, the situation would be a whole lot better.

It was sort of disconcerting to think I’ve been bitching about having no counter space for years, and yet, I seem to have pointedly made the problem worse. And somehow, didn’t notice.

Like I sort-of-observed, but didn’t become “fully” aware of in a deep way, my obesity for so long.

In an upper cupboard on the second shelf I have glasses I can barely reach. Over on another cupboard the second shelf is filled with pyrex baking pans that somehow didn’t make it over to the hanging pot rack shelf and take up space I wish I had for other stuff. And the most reachable lower-top cupboard is filled with cups–most of them too small to be useful, typical coffee cups, most of them cheap and cheesy, mismatched stuff I’m not even sure where I got. Why can’t I just buy a 6-set of nice, good-sized mugs? Why have a cupboard totally over-filled with ugly crap that’s too small?

As my boyfriend pointed out, based on organizing his own kitchen, having tons of cheap dishes does little but crowd the good ones and allow you to make such a mess of your kitchen before you have to break down and clean it that it becomes monumental.

Under the first tiny counter there is a ‘corner’ cupboard. I don’t drop & kneel as easily as the average person, so I only use the front; it’s hard to see let alone reach anything farther back. It was looking kinda frenzied. There’s probably 150 cheap storage-container lids there… and no containers. My weekly housekeeping help seems to throw them away, unless pixies are stealing them in the night. I’ve told her she can do that if something is really gross. Apparently many things fit this description. Given my refrigerator, I realize she probably has a point.

I looked closer into the murky depths and realized I have 3 nested metal mixing bowls in there. I forgot those even existed! And I really could have used them recently. It occurred to me all the crappy stuff I can’t use is front and center, and useful things are out of sight, out of mind.

I wondered if that was some analogy to my life. Like how all the trivial crap takes up my daily time, while the fairly important stuff, like prayer, meditation, music, writing, working out, etc. get shoved to the back of my life and forgotten in the shuffle.

*

I looked at this white wall-unit (bookshelf) I have in the kitchen. It’s the most handy, accessible thing in the whole little square kitchen. It’s filled with (white) appliances. Which, when organized, looks kinda neat. But as I eyed it critically, it occurred to me nearly everything on it I almost never use. A couple I’ve never used, like the ice cream maker and extra bowl, or the belgian waffle iron. The yogurt maker I used twice. The dehydrator, never yet though I hope so still. The big popcorn maker I can’t use now that I’m LC but don’t want to get rid of (yet).

I looked closer and saw that the MP3/CD/Radio I’ve been looking for going on two months now, was actually stacked/ buried underneath a regular-sized waffle iron on the bottom shelf. And as I sat there looking at it with “new” eyes, I realized that while things I need (like glasses) are hard to reach, stuff I almost never use sits in the most prime real estate of the room.

Again, I surrounded myself with what I didn’t need, while pushing what I did need back to inconvenience.

The impact of my whole kitchen hit me. I thought: It hasn’t changed much in two years. Why am I just now noticing that it is not structured to support me?

I saw that in some respects, this is an analogy to what I was just blogging about: I have seen it, I have been consciously aware of it, but as my boyfriend pointed out, I hadn’t “seen the forest for the trees”: the larger pattern and its import hadn’t hit me until just now.

*

He and I were talking about something the other night and this really fits into it. Sometimes, it’s like each individual little thing seems like no big deal. Inconveniences with my coffeemaker and my knife block and other things, I just deal with, because they are such trivia, so what. Tons of things. But none are important. None are a big deal.

And yet when you combine all those trivia into one situation, you get this BIG situational pattern that is amazing and eventually, when you realize the scope of it, you have to admit it’s untenable: you can’t stand it anymore. You realize the situation is now “ridiculous” and “overwhelming” and frankly dysfunctional and things have got to change.

Things that are fine one trivia at a time, are not fine en masse.

*

They say frogs won’t notice they’re boiling if the water gets hot gradually. Things pile up gradually. Inconveniences multiply gradually. Weird shit stuffed in cupboards and under things breeds and multiplies until it’s frankly astounding how much STUFF you can find in every imaginable area. Because it happens gradually. You see it, but it doesn’t sink it. Then one day you see the whole pattern and it does.

Why do we let it go? It’s not just ‘things’, it’s ’situations’. How many times have I seen a situation a friend is in and thought, “I would never put up with that.” Whether it’s the behavior of a spouse or boss or child, or whatever. But you know, they probably didn’t start putting up with that. First it was just one little thing. Then another. Until it snowballed into a ridiculous and even dysfunctional situation. But it boiled my friend by surprise because the increase was gradual. I’ve had my share of boilings myself, of course.

If we had more here-now focus, more sense of self, would we be more inclined to nip inconveniences in the bud, rather than just deal with it?

And while I’m at it, what kind of logic is, “It’s ok, it won’t kill me.” WTF? So what if it won’t kill you, neither will arsenic in small doses, does that justify any given thing being tolerated?!

Kinda reminds me of that digitally animated movie A Bug’s Life. The grasshoppers at a bar are joking about, what kind of harm can one crazy disgruntled ant do? And their leader, Hopper, says something like, You’re right, and he tossed a seed in the air as if it represented an ant, what harm can an ant be? And laughed with them–and then angrily yanked open this chute and utterly buries them in these seeds. He says the issue with ants is numbers, which makes it a serious issue indeed, even if their comparative size/strength individually is not.

His point: if you don’t deal with the single issues as they arise, someday you’ll have an army of issues to deal with all at once, and that’ll be a lot harder to deal with.

Well in a way this perfectly describes “clutter” and “inconvenience” (and other things — from relationships to kitchens to fat cells to whatever). We let any number of minor things and inconveniences bug us because it seems like more trouble to stress on solving it than just to accept that it won’t kill us.

(Yes, I know I’m using the bad guy in an animated film for my philosophy, but stay with me here. I grew up on Disney, I can cry over cartoon movies and commercials, and I even liked the Bee Gees. I am not ashamed.)

• I feel that keeping all the highcarb stuff represents the things I hold onto that I not only don’t really want but know will harm me, but cling to solely because I have something invested in them.
• I feel that spaces stuffed with outdated food and bowl-less lids and such represents things I have ignored that are missing or going bad in my life.
• I feel that prime in-my-face spaces stuffed with things I don’t much use, while the things I need are nearly out of reach, represents some problem with priorities and attention, like filling my life with such busy-ness that I forget to pray or sleep enough, as one of innumerable examples.

What if, like the mystics say, we actually look at our surroundings as extensions of ourselves?

What if we actually expect that everything we have we should love, and if we don’t love it (figuratively speaking here), we should give it away, not keep it prisoner in an environment where it is not utilized or respected? This goes for situations, not just things.

*

As for the sheer amount of stuff around me:

Sometimes I feel like every single item/object in a room is taking some tiny little piece of my attention just by existing in proximity.

When I’m in very minimalist rooms with a sense of space, I tend to be more creative, more relaxed, and feel rather like more (a larger %) of my “awareness of inner self” is available, since it is not busy with my external surroundings, and not numbed and distracted by the sheer quantity of them.

And every item that is messy, out of place, uninteresting, unwanted, broken, mismatched, etc. seems to add just a little bit of darkness to the mix.

There’s a reason magazine ads show large open rooms with lots of light and space. It feels good, psychologically.

So I live in a small dark box some bad architect in the 1950s designed to build cheap. I can deal. But nearly everything I have to gripe about inside my house is something that I can change, and more importantly, something that often, I’ve made far worse than it was to begin with, or ignored for years, or seriously failed to make even the smallest intelligent decision to resolve.

Apparently the real problem wasn’t my dim and boxy little house, it was me.

And it’s not that I suddenly have a problem. It’s that I had a problem paying attention to the little things when they began eons ago, and went into denial of the big things when they finally manifested quite some time ago, until I just “woke up” one day recently and said, “Hold up here! I’ve had an unfinished painting job and no cupboard doors for years now! WTF is wrong with me? That’s ridiculous! Solve that right now!”

*

So tonight I did the fridge. Tomorrow I’m doing the canisters and the bottles on the counter. By Friday I should have more counter space and convenience than I’ve ever had here in eight years.

The important thing is this: It was always there. The opportunity and option was always present. It is merely my lack of attention, intention, whatever, that kept me from observing it, seizing it, and doing something about it.

Every problem I thought of while looking around my kitchen, I realized there was a solution for. All I’ve seen for years is a kitchen of problems. All I saw tonight was a kitchen filled with answers, and potential too long ignored and badly managed by me.

Maybe that’s a lot of my life, too. My health, body/mind/spirit, has no problem for which it does not also have at least one solution. The question is, will I look for it properly, with the open mind to find it? Will I recognize the need to bother looking in the first place? Will I put forth the effort to make it work once I see?

I have a great kitchen, really, despite how bad off it is now and how much I’ve complained about it — and I have a great body, really, despite the same general situation. Both are over-stuffed, disorganized, unfinished and badly treated. But they have great potential, and if I treat things well and regularly make an effort, both might turn out to be better than I ever dared hope for.

*

Some people use church, ancient philosophers, or psychotherapists for analysis. Tonight, I used my kitchen. Make use of the tools at hand. :-)

PJ

I was thinking just a bit ago, while driving my kid to school, about where I have felt that feeling before. The one in the meditation and in the dream both. The one where there is much info under the surface, you don’t and even can’t know it consciously, but you have to trust that your subconscious can handle it, and you have to hold your conscious intent in such a way as to make that happen.

It’s an odd contradiction of sorts. You can’t look at it directly consciously; none of it is clear enough, and focusing on any one thing would make it impossible, it would mess it up. Kind of like how when you’re doing something fast and complicated, physically, sometimes you have to NOT focus-in or you will screw it up; you have to let that semi-autonomous part of your brain, the one that manages the amazing physics of catching a ball when juggling 5 of them, to operate. In a way you are UN-focusing on any-single-thing consciously, while holding the intent that the lower-level of your brain is going to be able to catch any number of unknown things SUBconsciously, and at the same time you have to hold this sort of “optimistic, positive expectation and belief that it could be ok, this could work.”

I think this relates to probabilities and creating reality. So often we don’t really know WHAT it is we are trying to accomplish; if we did, we would be trying to force only a single outcome which is vastly less probable; what we really NEED, is the ability of the part of ourself that CAN manage all that confusing mess of probabilities, to reach down in there, sift out the ones that are decently probable and good and one way or another (no matter how indirectly or surprisingly) will bring about the desired end result.

But with the conscious mind, if we are focused on any specific thing, that is what our intention follows. So we can’t focus on any one thing during this. But we do have to focus on the base intent (the positive expectation and how the lower-level is sorting probabilities) in order to “force” the process to occur.

So it really IS like those magic-eye pictures:
1 – You deliberately are staring at it (paying attention), but
2 – You are creating a blur-point and not focusing on it, and
3 – You accept that your brain is going to work out the hidden pattern, then
4 – The pattern starts becoming conscious, and you give it time to flesh out, then
5 – You can finally shift your single-focus to the newly-exposed pattern, and actually SEE the ‘hidden picture’ which now, to your focus at least is “fully manifested”.

Hmmmnnn.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies, “The Zero Effect” by Jake Kasdan (starring Bill Pullman, who I really like):

Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you’re sure to find some of them.

– Daryl Zero

PJ

So for a week I was intensively writing… I’ll get back to that shortly, soon as I get off work. It’s typical paranormal fiction. Were creatures and so on. And then the last three days I watched some TV shows on amazon unbox — three episodes of “New Amsterdam,” about a soldier in the 1700s made semi-immortal by a native cure, and half a dozen episodes each last night and the night before of “Moonlight,” about a young (90) vampire with O The Drama angst and his (of course) hot human sidekick. This is about ten days–well, nights and weekends–of being almost entirely obsessed with creatures that do not exist.

We assume.

It occurs to me that humans, despite that I’m one of them so I wish I were more optimistic about the lot, are unusually oblivious to the world around them. I’ve forgotten–and watched people forget–uncomfortable experiences within seconds. I’ve had experiences in full-on “3D and Dolby Sound” that I wrote off as either imagination or ‘a dream’ instantly because they didn’t seem to fit into The World According To Consensus Reality. I’ve disbelieved accounts from people I would trust to tell me anything with truth, simply because I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. I’ve watched people with lots of psychic experience be unable to accept someone else’s because it was a little different. Our minds are Samsonite.

I met a man in person once who was a christian mystic. Unlike the image that brings to mind, of some gentle monk-like fellow, he was pretty different. He was as hard core metaphysical as anyone comes. I don’t know how he made those puzzle pieces fit with christianity without running into contradiction in a few pretty major places, but apparently he did. He told me stories, later, of “interactions” let’s just call them, with people he considered variant forms of witches and evil. Normally I would have tried not to laugh, but somehow coming from this guy, it seemed completely probable while he was telling it. He certainly had some kind of light in his eyes and intense energy. As a woman, this did little but lead me to a long list of pointedly unchristian ideas about what to do with him. Alas, he moved out of my reality too soon, leaving only the anomaly of my inability to remember his name, which was weird then and weird now.

There’s a TV show I’ve watched on unbox called “Supernatural” which reminds me very slightly of his stories, except the show has a lot of over-violence and horror-gore by my standards; I always regret money spent on it, despite I love the actors and think the premise is good. The show is surreally missing the most important, central point of a true hunter: a relationship with God. Nobody seems to notice the guys on the TV show have the spiritual depth of Doritos. They never pray. They just go around killing people. But it’s “all for the good of man” of course.

I can see why the producers would fear the spiritual angle but really, why hunt spiritual entities if you aren’t spiritual? If only good and evil were always as black and white as the show makes it seem, rather than infinite shades of blended grey, like some tabby cat of the soul. Stomping out evil always seems easier when you can project it on some specific ‘thing’ and before you know it, 13 million people are dead allegedly “for the good of man,” I suppose. And the heroes do an awful lot of selling their soul to a demon in order to save the life of someone else; as if a true belief in God would see death as so horrible, and as if any true hunter would go consorting with demons for anything at all. It promotes the mythology that they would keep their word, to start with, probably the most dangerous concept on the show.

I once met someone online who told me their father was a vampire hunter. I don’t know if that’s really so. He seemed a nice enough guy, a bit out there for me, but then again, I’ve always had the problem that my inner life is more out there than half the extremes, but my outer life is in here with logic and practicality. It looks good on the surface (”All that, yet she’s still sane!”), but probably only tears me up in the middle where those opposite parts of me can’t seem to mesh. But I digress. I was going to say, this leads me back to the idea I started this post with:

How much around us, do we not see?

UFOs and ‘their inhabitants’ have been reported since pretty much forever. From every corner of the earth. From multiple witnesses. From impeccable witnesses. Hell, one UFO sighting resulted in like a million people, over a dozen video tapes and of course much camera evidence for which we’re supposed to conclude ‘mass hallucination’. Because you know, camcorders hallucinate too. Despite you’d have to go into John Lilly lalaland of Vitamin K and the Stainless Steel Entities to try and make any case for that, this is apparently the conclusion of Reasonable Men(tm).

Allegedly 10% of the population is homosexual. (So to steal the joke about insanity, think of 9 friends; if it isn’t them, it’s you.) And yet, unless you’re in California or Germany/Sweden it is highly unlikely that more than the tiniest fractional percentage of those are known to all around them in that respect. If we can’t even deal with what’s around us in perfectly ordinary ways like that, how do we expect to see “supernatural creatures”, from the fae to the were to the undead to aliens to whatever else fiction writers hypothesize about, even if it does exist? They’d surely have strenuous measures in place to prevent and deal with exposure, and possibly talents that helped maintain the mystery.

I mean think about it. Allegedly, the reason ‘werewolves’ came into our cultural mythos is because they would freak out and kill people and they looked like, well, a werewolf. But if in reality they looked more like an ordinary wolf, and if management of the subculture was better so people were not being turned and freaking out daily, if they were capable of not killing, or even not turning, and of killing animals instead, and so forth — these are the nouveau-fictions that modern writers insert to make the creatures into reasonable and sexy characters rather than monsters — then there might not be any reason for people to notice them. Add a little mafia-style damage control, and basic human resistance to and denial of anything that frightens them anyway, and it’s done.

There might be zero evidence for such things being real. I have not seen any. Ever. I’ve experienced things that give me opinions about a lot of other stuff, but zero about “alternative creatures”, outside of the distinctly paranormal fae-type accounts (and not the kinder-gentler ones either) of a few friends. But my original “argument” with myself, that “it couldn’t be real or we would know about it by now,” is fundamentally flawed. That’s the were variant of the “why aren’t UFOs on the White House lawn” argument.

Reality itself seems a lot less… consistent and objective, the more I view and the older I get. Why do viewers I’ve observed task everything from known-fiction to aliens, but nobody tasks something like vampires and werewolves? I’m simply curious is all, as to why both legend and fiction are so often tasked (out of protocol obviously, for fun) but these, I’ve never seen done. I know it’s far out–so are aliens, entities, Adam and Eve, and even “StarGate’s Biggest Secret”, all of which are not that unusual as targets in the field already. There’s no less feedback on the worlds of fae or were than on anything else esoteric. Just fewer cultural constructs to support how people think about it.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 25 August 2005

He says the 500 mile walk across Europe was too easy. Of course, he’s only 73, and as he explained, he overtrained a bit with the daily gym and weekend hikes. Yeah . . . that happens to me all the time.

A White Russian; child of the generation of escape. An observer once said that meeting Alexander made him suddenly aware that he was from the lineage of nobility: tall and graceful, with a ‘class’ and honor that imprints anybody with half a wit. Born in France, schooled around Europe, as a teen he left to Argentina when his mother agreed to marry a man there. While he and his mother were on the ship crossing the sea, the man died, leaving them to land with nothing and nobody in a strange country. He lived there 14 years. Got a college degree in journalism. “Played football (soccer) and chased women,” is what he says of his youth. Eventually, he immigrated to the USA, with essentially nothing. His wife once told me that he’d walked miles each way to work hellishly hard for pittance on the longshoreman docks of New York.

It’s hard to imagine. When I met him, he was entrepreneur of a tiny company: a perfect idea ahead of its very imperfectly-timed market. Before that he’d been CEO of a successful publishing corp. (college textbooks for math and statistics, Duxbury). A white collar executive in the San Francisco area; a long way from the longshoreman life. He sold his firm to a larger company eventually, which in turn sold to a bigger fish. Not a bureaucrat, being a number didn’t appeal to him at all, though.

He believed internet and “interactive” education was the wave of the future, and hiring his favorite statistics author to help develop “online education” he left to try it out. It was early 1990’s when his idea began; the mid-90’s before it began in the physical. It was late 1999 when Dr. Jessica Utts, the Managing Editor, sent me an email. Many years prior, I’d laboriously HTML’d some papers for her, which in 1996 had to use teeeny little graphics for every special character and they were statistics research papers no less. I did it for free when I was temporarily very poor, in exchange for getting the article, one of the most worthwhile scientific reviews of remote viewing in print. She asked me if I’d help, I was in a good space to do so, and so by Christmas, I was buried in thousands of FrontPage coded frameset files, every page and nav with its own unique javascript. (There is a special hell awaiting their former webmaster for my suffering, if life is fair at all.)

Alex handed me autonomy and left me to finish and open his company alone — on Y2K. He was going to be in Cambodia. He’d waited all his life to take some vacations, wasn’t getting any younger, had planned it long in advance, and wasn’t going to put it off merely because after years of work, he was opening his computer-based company on the most frightening computer day of all time.

I suppose at a certain age, hindsight gives you foresight, too. I worked through Christmas, the world didn’t melt down, and Alex came home and sent me a huge pot of flowers and some postcards from the far side of the world.

I’ve grown up a lot the last 5 years. Much of it is thanks to him, who helped reparent me in the ways of patience, a quality I’d not been much exposed to. He put up with the worst of me and encouraged the best. He tried without success to tame my emails into mere novelettes. Like my previous most-favorite boss, the incorrigible Dan McGee (last I heard he’d founded a firm called Oregon Rain), he knows creativity and brains when he sees them, knows competence when he finds it, and never had even a shred of the “you don’t have a formal degree” attitude. They both totally overworked me, yet gave me sincere respect and positive encouragement, and treated me far better than they treated themselves. I’d probably have happily worked to the grave for either of them.

Last year Alex sold the online statistics course (the CMS tech of which I built in SQL/CFML) to the company he’d founded and led all those years before. He worked hard to do it in a way that would keep me employed. That nearly fell through, but I managed to slide into a job which has turned out to be an incredibly good thing.

But damn. I sure do miss Alex.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 23 August 2005

If I aged as fast as I live I’d be a mummy, not a mommy. I wish that meant I have an exciting life. Not quite. I’m thinking tonight how weird it is that my primary communications are in an IM box. My job and a good percentage of my personal life interests (or at least, my masochistic desire to share my real interests with the world via web), are virtual. All of which has resulted in my sense of time being completely scr–er, skewed.

If my job or my kids’ school are not specifically “requiring and reminding” about the day, date, week, or even month, I am oblivious. Has it been 3 hours or 12? Was that 2 days ago or 2 weeks ago? How would I know? I am beginning to think that the sense of “time” we have is based on nothing more than a “practiced, acculturated subconscious metronome” constantly re-set and re-wound by exposure to the larger clock of culture and environment ticking around us.

When younger I used to have a difficult time remembering if a memory was real or was from a dream. Most people think this means real vs. not-real. To me it means, ‘reality A’ vs. ‘realities B-through-infinite’, which feel the same as this one while in them, but have to be tagged like a museum curiosity for reference when we return ‘home’ to ‘here’, lest we forget that this reality doesn’t share certain things. Or as I sometimes say, I don’t share a reality with others, I share an apparent agreement about reality with others. I can have whatever reality I do without complaint from others, as long as I appear to share an agreement about what ‘reality’ contains, or what can be perceived. Which is really not much different than “acting normal” in a new social situation or when mildly stoned. If one’s mental database of ‘not-this-reality’ tagging is up to date, it is seldom a problem interacting with the world and keeping track of it.

Keeping track of time is harder though. I can pick up ideas I dropped and utterly forgot–they ceased to exist for me–for weeks, even months, and the lack of continuity doesn’t matter. I have wondered if programming is partly to blame for that: one must hold everything in the head simultaneously, as everything impacts everything else, like playing chess… 8 moves in advance. And so the attention required for whatever one is doing that moment is absolute. The house is burning down? Someone had better break my line-of-sight to the code, or I may sit obliviously through it until my screen melts. But when I drop the attention, it is gone. Like a dream you forget, whatever-it-was just vanished from my reality. It’s hard to be responsible with this kind of selective attention; “out of sight, out of mind” becomes so literal that little besides alarms and notes can compensate.

I wouldn’t have made the computer connection except for a book my step-grandmother bought me. I could swear it was called TIME WARS but I can find no trace of it. Late 80’s or early 90’s. The book was based on research the authors had did into the ‘time perception’ of computer programmers. It was extremely distorted and odd, the way they could drop something (say, a conversation in the lunch line at work) in the middle of it, and pick it up 10 days later like no time had passed at all. Many other things I don’t recall. I didn’t do programming then so it was only of peripheral interest, mostly because of my interest in hypnosis at the time and subjective time perception.

I find, though, that nobody understands what I mean by “living on internet time” except other people who, like me, spend a good 70%+ of their waking hours on the internet. The very concept that time is so distorted seems surreal to everybody else I guess. Like the state of my reality and what I am paying attention to acknowledging the existence of at any given moment, I just try to fake the time-thing. With the Outlook Exchange scheduling combo that my job makes me use, I am finally starting to seem “in sync” with everybody else. Finally, Microsoft is good for something.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 21 August 2005.

Who’d be stupid enough to trust the CIA? I’m a conservative patriot and even I’m not that dense. The release of nearly 100,000 pages of “STAR GATE” program files is just another example of why. (They’ll all be available soon at www.dojopsi.info.) The joke’s on us, as usual.

This is the unimportant dregs of nearly 20 years, of a selected (read: “already known, so why not admit to them”) number of projects, which the CIA compiled under one umbrella they call The STAR GATE program. This so anybody looking for stuff under any project name will find only “stargate” stuff and not stuff that might have been in other projects we don’t know about and they aren’t admitting to if they exist. The records are the equivalent of all the crap you would throw away if you were condensing your files into what mattered. I can’t count how many are literally blank. Or have nothing worth seeing. Sessions with no feedback. Stuff that actually will mislead people clueless about who was involved in the viewing in the program, when, and what really went on, and more.

So, Daz has been the diehard going through all this stuff looking for things of interest. There is not a helluva lot. Ironically one of the most interesting things was a session McMoneagle did at TMI, on some Mars Anomalies RV’d–it wasn’t even done in the unit, someone essentially had to steal it and put it IN the unit records in order for it to be there. (Well that’s ok really given the sessions didn’t belong to Skip Atwater either, but he put them on his website and in his book.) And let’s not start on all the BS that went on while the unit was in progress anyway; but certainly, 20 years after the fact, releasing a very creative compilation of unimportant crap that accounts for perhaps 5%, and making it seem like you did the world a big favor — what nonsense.

It’s sad people were naive enough to think the CIA would do anything to clarify rather than to obscurate (my word. Obscurify, maybe?) the situation. It’s sad to see them disappointed but worse when they think they can actually conclude anything based on this stuff.

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 18 August 2005

“I know Kung Fu.” That line from The Matrix is now almost a cultural funny. I was thinking of it recently when rerererereading one of Ingo Swann’s articles. Apparently I am the only person who reads them, though I bet his web stats say otherwise; whenever I mention something in one of them, his fans, trainees etc. all seem rather oblivious. Either they didn’t read it or didn’t get it or didn’t find it as worth remembering as I did.

The man is quite brilliant you know. Sometimes the reading is work though. Much seems tedious, a repetitive essay you must wade through and genuinely pay attention to, because then once he has set the foundation, he is going to say something that clicks in your head and I might find myself thinking, That is so true, terrific to realize it, I never thought about it like that before. I realize I might not have “grokked it” had I not gone through the first part of the article, so I make the effort to do so. Articulating this stuff is so damnably difficult, anybody who can pull it off deserves an award.

Anyway so in one section I grabbed as a quote he said,

“It increasingly became understood that the neurological networks throughout the whole bio-body itself also process information. And since the 1970s it has become understood that certain kinds of information are processed at the cellular level throughout the surface and internal organs of the bio-body.”

Psychic functioning certainly does seem to involve the body in more ways than I can count. I have often thought about my health and body and how they may affect my viewing. Would dehydration (some say much of our culture is chronically dehydrated to the cellular level) matter to what could get fluidly communicated within oneself? Well the quote makes me wonder–starting this off with what I often do, that is, “If mass is vibrating energy and energy is a sort of sentient-information” (I realize those are considered two diff things, but not by me), “then are the cells of my liver as involved with my experience as the cells of brain? Does my left elbow feel annoyance?”

Biogram Theory would suggest yes. The implications for RV are interesting though. I have a big interest in psychological “integration” strategies concerning conscious psychic functioning (or what he calls “controlled” remote viewing, which I consider more a process description than the methodology-for-sale most know by that term) so it makes me wonder if even archetype meditations on say, how your liver or small intestine feel about a given thing (RV, or your new job, or whatever) would be interesting. I’m going to have to try a few of those and see.

I can’t articulate 99% of what I want to talk about. That will probably make this blog post longer, rather than shorter, knowing me.

Imagine a plant, like a bulb flower or a vegetable bush. It ‘fruits’ based on an inherent time-setting defined by “the nature of it”. Every plant has its own, varying time setting. The details of the specific lineage of that category of that plant makes it vary, and of course, even in a group of identical plants, there is some variance.

These settings are like “defaults”. But they aren’t hard laws. You can actually affect the fruiting cycle of plants, make it a bit slower or faster, depending on the conditions it lives in. (According to some, it can depend even on psi rapport, but we’ll leave that one for another day.)

I’ve talked with a couple people who said they psychically tuned into trees. Both of them said the most astounding thing was how “slow” the tree was thinking. As if it were just… on a different time-scale than we are. As if perhaps reality moved more slowly for them. I imagine that butterflies, with their short life spans, might perceive things much “faster” than we do somehow. Maybe they live an entire lifetime-worth in their 3-14 day (depending on breed) lives. In other words, maybe the lifespan and ‘timing’ is not merely about how long they biologically live, but also relates to the speed at which they perceive reality — or, “information”.

Think about humans. We reach ‘maturity’ based on an inherent time-setting defined by “the nature of what we are”. (i.e., humans, not snakes or whales.) There are smaller cycles within our overall life span for various unfoldings. We vary not only based on our species, but potentially based on our unique breed (genetics), and just like plants, also based on the conditions that we have lived within.

Everything has its own time for maturing, fruiting, expressing, dying.

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
as the song goes.

We have our own speed for “perceiving reality” (information), as well. This is a general range for our species, but varies within that range by person.

Mass, according to physics, is really just vibrating energy. The speed of the vibration determines the ‘density’ that it will appear ‘compared to our own’. When things vibrate more quickly than us, they may appear to be less solid, like water, then like gas, then like the spectrum of heat-sound-light. If it vibrates beyond the range of our biological perception tools, it passes into the infrared, and X-ray, zones. When things vibrate more slowly than us, they may appear to be more solid, like a tree, then hard as stone, then hard as metal, even hard as diamond. Of course, this is only measured by our own vibration rate: how we “relate to” other things. If our ‘attention’ is at the vibrational rate for gaseous materials, maybe to us, that is real and solid and ‘reality’.

So it is possible (reaching, here) that an incredibly slow-vibrating life form might live so slowly we cannot perceive them as alive. We may perceive them as giant boulders or something. It could take a million years for that lifeform to change from one state to another, into something we can’t imagine or understand, but our species is only exposed to things for about a century, or even with history, only a few centuries that we can hold together in good cultural cohesion (understanding).

It is possible there are lifeforms that live so quickly we cannot measure them. Or that in a physics sense, vibrate too quickly to even be in the visual scale for us. Maybe we could only hear them, for the entire 12.5 seconds of what to them is a long life.

Now, time doesn’t exist. Nor does space. I believe this, although if I believed it even more I’d be a better viewer.

How can vibration, which is a linear time-based thing, exist?

But “perception” does. Consciousness. How, who knows, but it must, since we’re thinking about it.

I’ve heard that we can have a dream that seems like it lasts for days, in the space of a few seconds. That implies that perception is not bound by time.

I believe that information is energy; that like space/time, they are essentially the same thing from a different perspective.

Our biological bodies, like the plant and the butterfly, are energy-constructs that by their nature vibrate within a certain rate. Possibly as part of that, we also perceive information within a certain rate. This is not about what energy-information is ‘inherent inside us’. ALL of it is inherent inside us. It is about how long it takes us to fork it out of ourselves, to “unfurl it” within ourselves.

To bring it from the seed of potential, to the fruition of our understanding.

Its own cycle of life.

What if information has its own time-setting? Or what if our own “relationship” to various energy/ information has certain defaults in that respect?

The other day, I suddenly perceived information as if it were a thing. As if it were a ball of layered energy like an onion, that would simply “blossom” (from seemingly nothing) inside us like a spontaneously growing energy-flower. Except, not a ball, of course… just everywhere and nowhere, since there is no space. ;-)

I had the sense that of the conglomerate of information that makes up any remote viewing target, that different elements of that information have their own time. By that I mean that whether it is the information-energy of ‘that thing’ or of ‘us’ or of ‘the relationship’ (on some level, those may not even be different things, but I won’t go there!), perhaps the “seed to maturity” cycle is different for different collections of information, just like it is different for everything else we know about.

As if information exists at different human-perceptual rates depending on… something; its nature.

I’m explaining it all terribly, of course.

The really trippy part was this: I really ’sensed’ in that moment that when I am exposed to “a target” in remote viewing, there is information I get ‘right then’ (I think of it that way), but there is information that is not going to “reach maturity inside me” — be understood properly — like waves of it, or blooms of it, at various other speeds. 8 hours, a couple weeks, a few months, whatever.

Thinking of information as a ‘thing’ was hard enough, but thinking of information having to “incubate inside me until it reaches a maturity where I will perceive it clearly” was kind of a trip too.

Since I don’t believe in time and space, I’m not sure how any of this makes sense. I find it all completely confusing.

But fascinating. Because I felt it inside me like I do spontaneous dowsing, like literally I could sense my body and its relationship with information and how information just ‘had its own time in me’–although that is more likely my perceptual time than the info’s… but who knows?

This makes me wonder if perhaps doing a session, walking away, and doing another a week later, two months later, prior to feedback mind you, might result in some interesting other-data that we wouldn’t see were they just separate sessions each with feedback. Could there be some kind of “information incubation period”?

More importantly, I think that humans can force this to change by Will. I think if we recognize this, that we can specifically “intend” within ourselves to speed up that fruition process, to make all the information available to us “right now.” Perhaps some people are instinctively and unconsciously better at this than others.

.

This post is going to be really politically incorrect in the obesity world, I can see that coming already. This is just an honest thought; I may be wrong. It’s just an idea, the associations of which seem so strong to me I have to mention them.

***

A long time ago, I spent several years obsessively studying hypnosis, as well as some related fields (Neuro-Linguistic Programming or ‘NLP’, graphoanalysis & graphotherapeutics or ‘handwriting analysis’, cult psychology, etc.).

One of the most fascinating, I mean mind-bending, ass-kicking, that-is-freakin AMAZING things of all that study was the subject of “post-hypnotic commands.”

Let me give you an example. Say that under hypnosis you tell a subject that when the clock strikes 8:12pm, they are going to suddenly stand up from their chair, hop on their left foot three times, take off their right shoe, pound it on a table a couple times, run out the door and yell into the hall “Hey everyone! I’m a chicken!” and then come back and put their shoe on, and sit down like nothing happened. I’m making this up but it’s a fair example, though complex. You also tell them they aren’t going to remember being told to do this.

If the hypnosis goes well, all of this happens exactly as planned.

Now here’s the part that still fries my brain to this day:

Ask the subject why they did that. And they will intellectually rationalize up a reason on the spot. You see, they had a rock in their shoe, and they were just kidding around to wake up this boring quiet office space, and…

Consciously, they would ARGUE to SUPPORT their rationalized-invented reasons because they totally believe them. Anything they can project or associate as a ‘reason’ for their behavior, they likely will, and they BELIEVE it. As far as they were concerned, it was a decision, and they made it.

This still blows my mind.

(I should add I’m in the top 1-2% of hypnotically suggestible subjects myself. Anybody unfamiliar with this who thinks that only weak or stupid people are suggestible is ignoring billions in annual marketing money that proves otherwise.)

Here is the question that has got to come to mind:

“How much of our lives are motivated by subconscious impulses that we simply do without thought, and if we need to come up with a reason, we consciously rationalize something to explain it?”

?

There is something that has been bugging me about stuff I’ve been reading in the weight-loss world, mostly lowcarb is what I read but sometimes other stuff. Let me put it together so you see how I’m coming to this point.

1. Research from a variety of sources is clearly suggesting and even saying that eating is actually driven even at the *cellular* level, definitely at the subconscious level. It isn’t about ‘willpower’; it isn’t ‘merely psychology’. See my past posts from this summer such as ‘The Skinny on Being Fat‘ for several great quotes from a leading researcher on that subject (and a few other posts around that time for other quotes).

2. Research is also suggesting that when people exercise, they generally eat to compensate for it naturally, and worse they often eat more calories (or food types they respond badly to like carbs for example) than they burned off, so aside from weight lifting building muscle, the whole concept that doing aerobics is gonna make you skinnier is pretty much bunk. So I consider that kind of exercise, though healthy for ‘conditioning’ reasons, kind of moot when it comes to weight loss.

3. Research is showing that some people at the same weight, can eat less calories and maintain that weight as someone else the same weight. So far I don’t think it’s clear whether this is across the board or only people-who-lost-weight compared to people who were already that size. But it does make the point that people at the same measure do not USE the same measure and hence need different intake.

4. Jonny Bowden talked about how when people at his old health club were put on the machine that measures, physiologically, exactly how many calories are being burned during exercise, the readings were radically different depending on the person. This ties into #3 actually; people simply use different quantities of energy to do things, and hence need different quantities of energy on food intake.

Two people of the same size eating the same things and exercising the same way, could result 5 years later in one person being fat and the other not. And of course, once all those extra or larger fat cells exist, there are other internal body side effects generated by that alone, to continually add complication.

So what I am getting to here is that the body in order to be what we consider healthy has to be SELF REGULATING because there is no way for us to measure exactly what each person needs. We can ‘try’ but as the above demonstrates, we really don’t know anything exactly, and if you add in the variable responses to different foods, you come up with a pretty unique situation for every individual.

Well, it should be self-regulating. Apparently something has gone wrong with that regulation mechanism. (Or it’s a reality creation issue, ala Jane Roberts/Seth, and it’s working fine, but our core ‘belief systems’ are screwed.) But since nobody knows how to deal with that invisible, hypothesized “self-regulation mechanism” for weight, we look to what we can SEE and try to figure it out.

(It reminds me of the thyroid thing. The pituitary gland manages other glands including the thyroid. When the thyroid screws up, it would be reasonable to look to the pituitary for the problem, just like in business you don’t yell at the guy on the line for production issues, you look to management. But we really don’t know jack about the pituitary, so medical science is totally unhelpful on that subject. So, they address the thyroid directly, even though its misbehavior is possibly (at least in some cases) a symptom of something we don’t understand, not a root cause.)

OK, so now follow me here:

A) eating is driven at the cellular or at least subconscious level.

B) our whole culture intuitively believes it’s about psychology/willpower.

C) hypnosis easily proves that people will invent a conscious “reason why” they do something even if it’s motivated at the subconscious level. Hence our culture at large and individually is likely deluded on this point.

So I propose that,

D) individuals who “emotionally eat” may actually be masking the whole process. By this I mean that they are driven to eat for physiological reasons but they are “grafting on” genuine (real) emotional issues as the “driving reason” why they feel they should and/or did eat. Rationally coming up with something to explain a behavior motivated at fundamental levels that actually have nothing to do with the surface psychology.

I think this is important, if it has any potential truth at all, for a few reasons.

1. I don’t think psychology alone can successfully treat this problem if this is the case. If the person actually resolved the emotional issues but still had the subconscious, body-driven eating drive, they would simply put something else in the reasoning list, or the caloric intake might shift its form (more even and not so binge oriented) but still amount to the same net result. Alternatively, they might actually subconsciously lower metabolism to get the same end result.

Believing that a person has emotional issues, and they eat when they’re emotional, so if they get therapy surely they’ll lose weight, there may be some truth to this, but if my theory is correct, it’s not going to solve the problem, because the root of the cause was not psychology to begin with.

2. The attempt to project obesity as a “mental condition” because in many people it is associated with a “compulsive eating” behavior, becomes more ridiculous in this light, because in reality, ANY personal issue an individual may have is likely to be “grafted on as a rationalized explanation” for why they eat badly.

An attempt to understand and treat obesity makes knowing the cause critical, and if we are looking at the eating as a cause when in fact the eating may be a *symptom* of the self-regulating body, then we wouldn’t even be looking in the right place.

3. If we really want to understand and treat the problem of being driven to eat too much or driven to eat the wrong foods, then we need to look at that issue squarely and, since if we wait for science funding that genuinely helps us we’ll likely all be dead, laymen need to do their OWN experimenting to see what works for them.

?

Some people recognize that they can eat 40 carbs a day no problem. Unless more than 25 are vegetables, in which case they actually find they are more prone to eat (or at least want) more carbs the NEXT day. (Eating them in eggs/cheese might not do that. Or vice-versa.)

Some people can eat whatever but if they eat more than about 8 carbs in sugar alcohols, the next day or two they’re more likely to want sweeter and slightly carbier things. Or just more food, period.

I think it would be good if more people actually tracked how they FELT on a given day as far as eating–for those who plan food and don’t deviate. The consistency of food may mask what one’s body was actually trying to drive them toward. There may be certain offbeat correlations that are common, such as one food invoking more ‘need to eat’ than another.

Everybody who tracks their food intake knows that sometimes you want sweeter things and sometimes you just want more food and so on. We respond as if all of this stuff is the will of God or some whim of nature. It’ll be lightly cloudy today, ok, as if we have nothing to do with it at all.

But I suspect that if researchers are right and eating really is motivated as low as the cellular level, that the stimulus-response ameoba-level issue is involved here, and what we DO eat — and what we DON’T eat — is probably a great part of WHY our body responds demanding more food, or sweeter food, or whatever. Not all of it, but maybe some.

What if for zillions of human years carbs were temporary but over a certain number indicated a certain food available in bulk, and the body got used to eating as much as possible and storing it while it existed, a great opportunity. Maybe the body reacts to a certain number of carbs, or carbs from a given kind of nutrient, based on something offbeat like that. This is a wild idea, I’m merely saying we don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like much attention is being paid to that, either.

If the body is genuinely driving eating, I’m not saying that ‘willpower’ doesn’t matter; most people can do all kinds of things their body is unhappy about in the name of discipline. But I suspect that the ability to override your body’s request with willpower, is rather like pain tolerance — quite different for each person.

(There may actually even BE a form of pain at the cellular level that is unconscious but still affects us, in fact.)

(I personally wonder if applied hypnosis for days could create any change in the metabolic burning rate of a person–it is not conscious driven, but might be influenceable anyway.)

I’m using too many words which always means I’m having a hard time getting my own head well around an idea.

But one of the points I’m going for is that I think the entire edifice of “EMOTIONAL EATING” that is such a big thing in the diet world may be inherently fallacious.

I think people may be just applying conscious stuff to their subconscious drive to eat and believing that association, when it’s a psychological artifact, not reality.

(It’s even possible that the drive to eat could help create ongoing emotional problems — or any other condition that gets a person to eat, including decisions about daily life stuff that affects the food around us or our habits — in order to ensure its own maintenance. That’s how complicated this could be.)

Just a thought for the day.

I have been on vacation for some time, and offline to LC for awhile before that. I’ve really missed my blogging and I hope y’all are doing well.

Recently, I fell in love.

This wasn’t nearly such a big deal until I finally met my internet/phone obsession, and spent some serious quality time with him in a remote cabin in the foothills of the Ozarks, and some at home where he and my child fell in like with each other pretty quickly. That shifted it out of being one of those “Yes I totally love him but then again we haven’t met so you can’t be 100% sure of course” and into, “Why did my house never feel empty until he left it?”

Something happened that has had a fairly radical effect on my self image and how I think about everything, including my eating plan, exercise, goals in life, etc. And that is:

Someone fell in love with me.

I don’t mean to be a complete nerd, but somehow, the effects in me of feeling genuinely loved by someone are nothing short of astounding. It is as if for the first time, instead of seeing myself through the eyes of the only adults around me, family who are either apathetic or highly critical, I am seeing myself through the eyes of someone who genuinely loves and cares about me. Someone who expects good things from me, who assumes the best of my intentions and outcomes, and who totally expects me to be treated well — including by myself.

For the first time, I’m stopping in the middle of a day (or night) and asking myself: why am I doing this? Why am I not sleeping when I need to, pushing and pushing myself? Why am I not eating when I know I need to? Why am I sitting around when there are things I would like to accomplish? Why am I letting my bad behavior toward myself, that has become automatic and unconscious, run my life? Don’t I deserve better than this?

In a burst of new enthusiasm (never let it be said that finally getting great sex for the first time in your life, let alone after not having any at all for ten years, isn’t a great motivator!), when I got back from vacation, I worked out a daily schedule. You know, the sort totally impossible to keep without a drill sargeant and a stopwatch, but the kind that sounds really good on paper.

Last night I was pondering my interesting results with it so far. Which is kind of like, “I’m completely ignoring it, but intending to get to it Real Soon Now.” And I had this typical, automatic thought, “I’m screwing up, and I’ll never be getting healthier if I don’t do X daily, and …” and I suddenly realized: you know, that isn’t the point.

The point of eating well is not so you get skinnier or stronger. The point of practicing your arts is not so you get better at them. The point of doing these things is the love of doing them. Every moment of life is precious, not because we can take a photo of it, not because of what it means to our future, but because of the life-experience in-the-moment, RIGHT NOW.

I should eat well because eating well is its own reward, in the moment. I should practice my arts because doing so means that I am living the kind of quality in time that make life an enjoyable thing for me. The action of an art, whether it is music or sketching or psi work or a physical discipline, makes those moments of our life different than if we had spent them sitting still, washing dishes, doing taxes, or whatever. Every minute of our day compiles to the end result, and the net result of our days is what makes our habits, our character and even our destiny.

But the living of a day isn’t for the destiny, any more than eating low-carb is for some dreamed-of body of the future. Any more than loving others is for promise of heaven or fear of hell: one should ‘be good’ because being good is its own reward. The living of each moment is a quality opportunity. Not an obligation. Not just something to schedule or plan. Not just something to fill the time. An OPPORTUNITY to live, for that moment, to truly live–in a way that makes us feel fulfilled.

Live well, and the goals take care of themselves.

No matter what goals one may have (and goals are good), the PRACTICE, the in-the-moment, living-it, has to be focused on the appreciation of the moment. The quality of the moment, and of the end result, depend on that “Zen” ability to truly live in the moment.

In other words, if I base my today on my future, only strict and constant self discipline can get me there. But if I base today on my love of today and living well in it, I not only enjoy my day a lot more, but the future brings itself to me–and possibly with better results than I would otherwise have had.

I realized that planning to spend an hour a day with my little girl isn’t something I do because I must and because when it’s over I can send her to bed without making her feel neglected. It’s for the joy of it. Of course! But for some reason I hadn’t applied that understanding to everything else in my life. Like eating well, lifting weights, etc.

This brings me back to why I began this blog in the first place. Not because I wanted to lose weight, not because I’m a lowcarb evangelist, not because I needed another blog. But because I was delighted with how wonderful good food could be, how fun and creative it could be to work out new options for it, how exciting it could be to explore a new avenue in my life.

As a matter of course, things like goals and plans and charts and schedules and more eventually dominate most blogs including mine. But as a matter of inspiration, this blog was born because I loved the moments: the moments of discovering new stuff, of creating more new stuff, of cooking something I knew was good for me, of eating something that tasted great AND was good for me. As a side-effect, all that was good for my health and my future.

The point of a mirror is not to show us how we look to ourselves. It is show us how we look to OTHER people. When we look in a mirror and we project all our own fears and doubts and angers upon it, when people around us have contributed their own as well, it’s ‘through a lens darkly’ at best. But when the mirror changes, when it truly shows you how someone else perceives you, and they think you are smart and lovely and creative and kind and overflowing with potential for good things, that’s a different reflection altogether.

Suddenly I don’t feel so much like, “I gotta do X so someday I won’t see this horrible reflection!”

I feel more like, “Hey, that’s a reflection of me, a nice person worth treating well. I should do X because it would feel good and I deserve that. How nice it would be to be nice to me. It’s nice to be alive.”

Every morning I say, “God, thank you for my life.”

Maybe all along I should have been reminding myself that the life wasn’t just a schedule of obligations which, if I had discipline, would eventually get me to some happier, skinnier, healthier place where then I could allow myself … something, I’m not sure what. Am I waiting to be happy? Am I placing some barely-defined assumption of happiness on some hopefully thinner future ‘when I deserve it’?

Maybe I should have been reminding myself that every moment of life is a gift, an honor, and an opportunity. Not for ‘the future’ but for THAT moment.

Love is the true motivator. Not fear of bad things, not greed for good things, but genuine love, whether for self, God or others.

I know. Only I could get cosmic about a magazine ad.

The great thing about digital cameras is that you can point and click any time, multiple times till you get it right, and transfer those files to the web, to friends’ cell phones, etc. Almost perfect.

The only thing is, you gotta go home or somewhere else, plug it in, transfer the image, then you have to be plugged into a printer, and then you have to have all the ink cartridges and the right kind of paper and so on, in order to print the photo.

I have too many cats, so floating fur and dust (and dander; how they love sitting on anything, in direct proportion to the likelihood doing so will destroy it) tends to wipe out affordable printers fast. I can clean them, sure, but the always-insufficient feeder-rollers give up far too soon, in a very efficient means of designed obsolescence.

Kinda makes me long for the days of Polaroid snapshots. Polaroid thought so too:

The perfect camera for live-feedback photos for the record, though it’s probably going to change technology on a far greater scale than that of course.

What’s innovative about this isn’t just that somehow they got a printer into something the size of a phone. It’s that their partnership with ZINK (for “Zero Ink”) is focusing on the paper. Their PR puts it this way:

Dye crystals are embedded in the ZINK paper and are activated by heat from a ZINK printer. The crystals then colorize, producing high quality, long-lasting, durable, and affordable images.

In other words, instead of putting something on the paper, it simply uses paper where every pixel of it contains the innate ability/probability to be any color, and then the ‘printer’ (so-called) using heat for communication, tells every pixel of the paper what color to become.

How cool.

I totally grok this as a metaphor for the holographic universe, and every person containing such inside them.

***

So there’s a psychic analogy here. My mental model about how viewing works is a bit different than the standard I guess… too much Jane Roberts as Seth I suppose. To me it’s not only “As above, so below” but for viewing, it’s “As outside, so inside”.

In this analogy, you could consider the old 1970’s “Signal Line Theory” to be akin to the ordinary printer technology. The assumption is that there is information over there (aka ‘the matrix’), which uses ink to move it over here (to the viewer) to the paper.

But in my viewing model, it’s nearly the opposite. To me it’s more like the session scan process is finding the components inside me, and bringing out the unique quality of all of them within me. I usually use the analogy of a color-blind test. Imagine the viewer as “the whole circle.” The dots inside are all the aspects of them. These are all ‘information’, which is “reflected in their outer reality, but sourced from inside.”

Say the target was the number 29, or 70, for this image. The viewer would “look inside themselves,” and would “find that pattern”.

(The inside and the outside are not actually separate, in my model, but perceptually we definitely experience them as if they were.)

I guess another way of putting this might be, “The Matrix is YOU. The Truth Is In Here.”

I often think that technology, especially computers, are man’s attempt to project what is within him into external reality so he can better understand himself. This one works pretty well for that also.

I was rereading this blog entry from firedocs, though it originated at the old dojo blueblog and just got stored on FD when I closed djb:
TRUTH http://blog.firedocs.com/arch/121

I feel, lately, like I need to return to this at least a little. Like I need to ground, shut up, find my center, and reconnect–so I can again better recognize–the “feel of truth”.

Psychically, before I was into psychic work (and so, alas, didn’t do anything useful or deliberate with it), I went through a couple stages of this. I could “feel” truth so clearly, as if it were a quality that something inside my body recognized, that even in reading a letter, article or book, I believed I was “aware” of where a different person had inserted a word, where the author had revised a phrase, where someone else had done so, and that was just the feel of the content.

Below that, I also believed I could feel the “degree of truth” (I called it “the red thread of truth,” but I have no idea or memory now of why I called it that) running through it. I think most people at least sometimes have this experience, of reading something and feeling like, “I feel in my gut there is something to this. I don’t know what part of it might have truth in it, but something is here.”

I can’t think of anything more fundamental for people involved in shamanic, psychic or spiritual work than this “awareness”. The previous dream in that blog entry explained why; basically, that only when we really paid attention to the ‘feel of truth’ did we start to become aware of it (and its lack) in other things we encounter.

The problem is that the more I focus on “utter integrity” the less I want to talk.

Which is really inconvenient in the modern world.

(See the book “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz. Though written VERY simply for the mass public, it is a nice little book for the basics used by magickians, sorcerors, and those advanced in other fields such as martial arts or metaphysics, though every tradition has its own approaches to it and words for it.)

(I edited this a few times ’cause I kept remembering stuff. That’s the thing about the “experiential” bit–it can contain so MUCH info by the time you write it down that you lose it. This is one reason for writing ‘during’ RV — although I think that is overdone sometimes — but the act of writing tends to interfere with experience at times so it’s always a bit iffy on the decision.)

Was doing a tandem with a friend tonight.

The focus goes well, anchoring and feeling ‘in the center’. I’ve been getting all lovey with IG more than usual lately so I attribute it to that.

The archetype arrives and he is a very serious looking, tough, wiry, asian man of middle age. I have a visual flash of a big inset circular shape with something high in the middle. I say my spiel to him about the plans and take his hands. I ask what he has for me. He reaches to a pendant of some symbol I don’t recognize and he yanks on the cord and it comes off in his hand, except somehow he ‘yanked it out of his chest’ too as an overlay to that, and he tied it behind my neck. I look at IG. “Don’t let me forget to take this off when we’re done,” I say, remembering an old experience where the blonde-man-me of The Four realized that “chains equals prisoner” and a commitment of sorts when that symbol-experience happens.

I don’t know what to give him, and ask myself what energy feels right, and it’s some combination of “stalker” and “awareness” of a rather dark kind, ninja-like. I put the energy ball in his solar plexus which seems made for it and I ask IG to weave us. He weaves us, and the merge feels physically weird. Very slightly like the old over-merge with the target of McQueen felt, but not nearly as strong. I’m kind of impressed.

So we begin, and I focus. Before I can ask for anything I keep repeatedly seeing the face of this specific asian man, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen him in real life but he seems pretty clear and repetitive. “Is this someone you know?” I ask the target, and it disappears. I ask the target if he wants me to lead first, him, or both. He decides he wants to see what it’s like. So: Target Lead.

“Tell me something about the target.” I get nothing.

Then a “scary man,” I can’t describe it more than that, appeared and held out his hand to me. I took it, and allowed him to ‘pull me into it’ and now I’m elevated as if I am kneeling on some kind of roof. It’s outside, in a hot dry environment, with an insanely blue sky above. There are stone structures all around me, but not like euro-stone, more like the tan-brown-red arabic or asian stone which is literally part of cliffs and rocks and things, like stuff carved into cliffs and caves. I have a couple of flashes of overlay of curving shapes I associate with artistic architecture such as the Moors.

“Tell me something important about the target.” I have the sense that “the target takes me more seriously now.” As if the archetype somehow respected me more. I have a flash of a caucasian man with tousled shoulder length hair, middle aged, handsome, who grins at me just a little and disappears. I wonder if that is like the target translating approval into terms he feels I would best relate to.

I see a shape like a round circle or wheel, and near one side is an area that draws my focus. The shape is turning or spinning, in motion but my focus stays with that one part of it.

“Tell me something ELSE important about the target.” A very odd sense like a heavy stone pyramid, the very stepped sort (not like egypt but like south America), but it is literally “on the shoulders of” a man, very heavy, as if “the man is carrying the weight/energy of the pyramid” somehow, like a symbol. I don’t know what it means.

Then I see something, like the whole land itself was ball-shaped and turning, and something ’shoots up into the air’ from the ground, in a sequence, at the same time that impacts from something come in from the outside as if someone were shooting at it. Very dynamic motion, turning, but hard to ‘get’.

I re-center myself in THE target, reminding myself it’s about the current target, which I will shortly have feedback on, etc.

“What matters MOST about the target?”

I am standing at the end of a rectangular walkway of stone. Each side has a high side of stone. It’s outdoors, blue sky, with a door at the end. I stand there for a minute, then feel that if I want the info, I must pursue it. I dash down the stone ground and grab the big handle on a wooden door set into the big stone (cliff-like) wall. The door doesn’t open. I throw my shoulder against it hard and imagine forcing it open, and it opens, and I rush in and slam the door behind me.

It’s pitch black. Then a ‘flare’ of light arrives to illuminate only one thing, an old man who appears to be in a room but I can see nothing else. Then he morphs into a different old man. Then into something I can’t make out. Then a few other things. “I get it,” I say. “The old man is not the point apparently.” Just then I had a sense of ‘red and white stripes’ although I didn’t see anything, and then some kind of turning, flying weapon came out from the darkness and hit him, and then something else happened, and he looked bizarre for a moment, and then his body fell.

But as his body fell, a part of him seemed to “rip out of the inside of him” and remained, which looked different I might add, like a different person, and turned to look at me. “Um, target, dude you’re with me right? I’m safe right? IG? I’m safe, right??” I said, suddenly feeling more than a little nervous.

The man motioned with his head to follow him and I did, and then found myself in a boat with a few other people, floating, one fellow in back with a pole, inside a cave it felt like, like deep inside some area, with overlays of like disney’s old pirate of the caribbean theme ride but spookier.

I faced forward and waited. “How long will this take? I have the feeling I’m running out of time,” I said aloud to whichever of the ‘figures’ I thought might be the old man. A man in front, who looked nothing like anyone so far except the archetype itself, looked back at me and said shortly, “It takes the time it takes.”

I shut up, and then considered that this time might be more about my acceptance than anything real, so I imagined that I was fully ok with and one with all this and it was ok to be done, and sure enough, I promptly found we were being helped out of the shallow boat and onto a stone ledge.

A young girl (late teens) appeared to me as if to lead me somewhere. She flashed into a statue of something, like some ancient architectural find of art that has much greater significance than what we assign it, and then back again. A couple of times. As if it was part of who she was somehow. I walked behind her, and it suddenly occurred to me –

– is all of this total fantasy? Yes, I know that often the archetype has NOTHING to do with the target–that’s the norm in fact. I know that often the “archetypal experience” of doing sessions like this is about 9 out of 10 parts of the experience, only 1 being anything resembling session data. I know this is experimental, and I know the point of this is actually more about the archetype work than the session data. And I know that it’s an opportunity for my mind and soul to work with me on stuff which may be several levels removed from whatever I’m doing on the surface.

But, that doesn’t change the fact that I feel pretty moronic. All the sudden I feel as if the target is something simple, mundane, even kinda dumb, and here I am having this major ‘experience’ related to it. I wonder if the experience is just bored fantasy on another level. The girl turns back to me briefly, and I have the feeling that she is thinking at me something that equates to me being slightly shallow and really having no-freaking-idea what’s really going on here which is much bigger than my little practice RV session. That sobers me up a little bit.

I also have the sense that being wrong is sort of not the point in this world; it’s a “wax on, wax off” or “bigger picture” situation where my “learning to trust and allow and understand this interior kind of experience” means a great deal more than some surface-point of data for this particular practice session. I feel an inner dilemma already, about the competition between the archmed and the RV, of course.

But just then my tandem buddy called because my time was up. Wow! 30 minutes just flew by. I never even had the chance to do MY-lead viewing led alone the mutual let alone wrap it up.

Well so it’s time to go get feedback. I’m afraid to look. I’ll go through it seriously with IG and my woven archetype though. I think part of this process requires that, no matter what.

***

The feedback: The big wall of niagara falls. Nothing but cliff-wall and water in this photo.

I have no idea what any of it means. I suppose I should have finished the meditation!

***

So to wrap things up I went back into the meditation where I left off. I was intending to “imagine” myself in the situation where I left, officially thank everyone and imagine IG pulling me out of it and that would be that. I never — never, except the semi-recent session on Ganymede — have any ‘relationship’ with the target after feedback as far as new-data/experience goes. This is because I’m very logical in some respects and one reason I so admire RV is “the total blinding with feedback”: I don’t want to know ANYTHING about the target; and, once I have feedback, as far as I’m concerned it’s over, period, anything after that is just sheer imagination I am sure, so that is that.

But when I imagined myself back there, the young woman seemed quite present as she had before, and walked ahead of me so I followed, through what seemed to be interior caves, and then finally through one area that led into a huge, really huge and deep, sort of cavern. Very irregularly shaped though. She motioned for me to walk down to this one area and sit down so I could look over it all, and I did so.

Looking down, I thought: wait, why can I see it so well? Caverns that feel this “interior” should be dark, yes? There were literally lights, like artificial lights, all around parts of the bottom in the distance, and even a sense of people down there, which I hadn’t consciously noticed because that’s just such a normal thing in my world (people and lights). But then I thought, wait a minute. I have SEEN feedback. I KNOW that the target is only a waterfall. OK granted, that IS on a major cliff of sorts. But… how does this relate? Is this just on the way to some other info?

The young woman appeared next to me and roughly translated, thought at me, “No, this is what I was leading you to. This is what you were to see.” I hesitated. I didn’t want to be unkind, but… “But the target is a waterfall,” I said gently. “I’m a little bit confused about how this relates.” She looks at me for a moment silently, and then cocks her head, giving me an overlay of like a bird and then like a bird-statuette, and says (basically), “You said you truly wanted to know the archetype of this target. You really wanted to know all about it, experience it, no matter what. That is a much larger thing than the focus of your picture.”

I thought about that for awhile. Perhaps, in that case, I have my answer regarding RV and archetypes; perhaps archmeds aren’t appropriate done in this way for the process, unless the point of the process is the “experience and inner knowing” as opposed to “data that makes it to the paper,” which is the point of RV.

I suddenly feel such adoration for the young woman. I feel as if this is partly mine and partly the larger target’s, which I am still woven with. “You are so beautiful,” I tell her. “You are fascinating and I want to know you more. Please, would you mind if I tasked myself on you-as-archetype at some point to get to know you better? You are so graceful and lovely and deep-in-soul.” She nearly blushed, in some conceptual way, and nodded agreement. Then she disappeared.

I had the sudden flashback of a previous session from at least a couple years ago. It had been on a cave. After the session and feedback I fell asleep and had such a powerful dream, in which the cave itself was sort of sentient, in a way difficult to describe. It had gold in it, which “grew” into it (I did not know gold did this, sort of, until I mentioned the session publicly and someone responded about that). In the dream there was this native american man, who appeared to be a very, very powerful sort of shamanic fellow, who was somehow bonded to the cave, as if he and the caves of that area were sort-of-one.

Anyway I am getting off topic, but I suddenly made the connection that this is why I had the sense of the young woman, and of the artifact and so on: that she is some ancient native spirit that is somehow bonded with that, and so is one of the “identities” likely to be encountered when psychically working with what seems to us to be merely a ‘location’ or ‘landscape feature’. I recalled that in the boat I had some “overlays” I didn’t really notice at the time that might tie into all this, I need a little more time for all of it to integrate. Like of secret caves behind waterfalls for example and whole worlds of nature hidden from view. Subtle.

I wondered about the giant cavern. It seemed natural and yet also “being built-out by man” artificially. I wondered if, like I’ve sensed more than once “underneath” the USA, there is… “development” of this, currently or in the future. I decided that if I am going to take this seriously, then I have to call the session a complete miss and accept the data as “psychic and symbolic and not on-focus” because if I use an RV model for this, the entire experiential aspect of my process becomes “irrelevant, distracting and wrong.”

Maybe it is the age-old question I often say RV comes down to: “Which is to be Master?” What is more important to me, RV that accurately describes surface physicals and a few concepts/emotions of a very narrow space/time focus, or “truly knowing a larger and deeper understanding” of something in my universe? Because they do not seem entirely compatible. It seems rather like it comes down to one or the other.

But I will continue the archetype work, because I feel it is good for me, interesting, and because I hope that eventually, a better “inner relationship with” lots of things, might result in better surface-data for RV when I need it.

***

One thing I didn’t write or say on purpose initially. When I was wrapping up this archmed I realized that I had been gently running the fingers of both my hands down my face, front and sides, sometimes hair or body, for a few minutes. I mean from the minute I tuned back into it apparently I was, but I didn’t realize it until I was ready to de-weave.

I realized that was odd and had the sense of a Helen Keller target in the Viewer Studios (TKR at the Dojo Psi) where she is running her fingers over the face of a president, Truman maybe?, to get the feel of what he looked like. I felt that the target, let me capitalize that as an identity, the Target, wanted to know more of me, wanted to know what I looked like.

I remembered suddenly that when this first began I had that sense of a physical merge-effect, not the “rush” of a true archetype merge but the “energetically squished-crowded-inside feeling” of a joining, similar but very, very light in comparison, to the one with the McQueen target. I hadn’t had any other oddities through the session but I realized that this certainly qualified as one. Now that this has happened twice, I actually think I will recognize the feeling in the future. It really is a sense that I can only call “spiritual squishing” as if being pressed upon when something else is joining the same space and there’s not much room.

I had to wonder, if I ‘allowed’ myself to ‘project out and upward’ like trance channels talk about, would I be channeling?? I don’t really want to do that frankly. I have enough identity issues already thanks very much.

I tried to find it a picture of me. I went to Psi-Notes to grab a link I sent someone of a pic of me and my kid from a year ago but I was logged in under a different identity so I didn’t have it available. I finally sighed, and told the target inside me, I’m sorry, right now I don’t have a picture or a mirror, but I will try to visualize myself as clearly as I can for you. I worked on doing this. I felt it was somehow most ‘aware’ of the ’sense’ that I had some native american genetics. “Some,” I agreed.

I had the feeling, much as I had with Ganymede, that somehow if I said things out loud or physically saw them or felt them, that the information would come across more clearly to the target.

This is yet again I’ve felt that the target was viewing ME when all was said and done, that the session process done the archetype way was essentially a shared channel of sorts, a two-way empathy.

***

I feel a great dilemma now over the archetype vs. RV aspect. You know, I have these arguments in my head all the time, and I play both points of view. I am just as fierce about maintaining the simple, objective-data, controlled-protocol, match the feedback aspect of RV as I was a dozen years ago when I began this. I am SO grateful that RV took psychic functioning out of the morass of BS that it’s been drowning in since the dawn of time. I feel it’s incredibly important that a very clean focus be kept on that.

That’s one reason these meditations are on this blog, and not on Red Cairo Firedocs — although a few have made it to firedocs, like the Ganymede session, and I’ve considered pulling it at least a hundred times just because I feel like anything more than “just the facts ma’am” doesn’t belong in any public example of “what-is-RV”.

Archetype meditations are not RV. I’m mixing these for a long list of reasons starting with curiosity, and the driving sense plus experience that outside objective reality is actually determined by internal energetic relationships.

When all was over I said to IG, “I would have liked to have written down the info that it was a waterfall. I’m grateful for the experience. I know that what we are doing is NOT just simple-target-data but what is good for me AND the target, what helps us both evolve, etc. etc. — I know that. But at some point before it was over, I would have liked to have gotten the data I went in there for, because you know, that’s the point of RV to begin with. I know I stopped too soon, but psychically and subconsciously I knew what time I had. For that matter, why couldn’t I just have known, right up front, that it was a waterfall?”

IG didn’t say this clearly, but the ‘feeling’ I got was something like this:

Information flows like a river. Every time you consciously absorb awareness of something, you slightly change the course of that river, and you change the “probability set” of what information is likely to come to you next. (I guess this fits in with data-sequence theories, ‘venting’ aol, etc. in RV.) I had the feeling if I had known it was a waterfall right off, that somehow this would have changed me internally and I wouldn’t have been able or likely to have the experience that I did, instead.

I accepted this, telling IG thanks, but it does not resolve my dilemma with myself about “groovy internal experiences” vs. “writing down the basic info” and which-is-to-be-master in my life.

For now, I don’t have much time to view, and everything I do is experimental. But at some point that is likely to change and I may have to make a decision.

Maybe I could come up with another archetype approach that is less, um, impactive and creative. You know, I’ve had some good sessions using this same technique. Normal data collection, this model works fine. It’s just that sometimes it seems like the experiential aspect overwhelms the data, which either becomes ‘trivial’ (even when it is there and accurate) or becomes ignored. So I can’t say it’s the approach, maybe it’s just me; methods both succeed and fail, every method, for every person, after all.

I guess it would be silly to expect my first real approach to be “the answer” to anything except how to ask a slightly better version of the question. Real science is exploration and there’s often lots of trials before something workable with measurable results (let alone consistency) comes about. Probably the same for this.

This began as the 8 Random Things About Me blog-tag. Special thanks to Online Christian, Regina Wilshire, Breadless Mrs. B and Diet Pepsi Girl (?blogless?) overlapping the same tag, it is now the Buncha Random Things About Me.

Hmmmmmmmmmmn…..

1. I love red coats, red shoes, and red cars. At this moment, I have none of them.
2. I loathe nearly all politics and politicians. I am closest to libertarian but not that either. I am however fanatically a believer in all the stuff they indoctrinated us with when we were 6 about what America stood for. My biggest political gripe is that it doesn’t reflect reality. I want my first-grade version of America back dammit.
3. My boyfriend lives on the Hawai’ian island of Maui. Somehow, I have managed to not yet visit him. Someone please slap some sense into me.
4. I’ve been devoted to Archangel Michael for nearly 20 years. It’s difficult to explain but a powerful driving force in my life.
5. I once spent nearly a year training formally in hypnosis and NLP. I am in the top 1-2% of hypnotically suggestible subjects.
6. When I was 5 I had a stuffed-something I called ‘black baby’. My parents left it by accident when we drove off from California and moved–by way of Oregon and New Mexico–to Oklahoma. I’m still mad.
7. According to informal family poll, I am at least 14 different nationalities. The native american part isn’t on the rolls so they aren’t even 100% certain what tribe it is. Cherokee, they guess.
8. I named my daughter Rykah. I started with Rayka, the name of a pretty girl in a ‘Lethal Weapon’ movie. But she died, and I didn’t want to name my kid after some movie character that got murdered, so I changed it. My daughter’s middle name, Nadine, is after my grandmother. Grandma’s name is Norma Nadine, so of course, everybody knows her as Susie.

1. When I was 10 I was constantly in trouble at school for unreadable writing. I got pneumonia and nearly died. When I came back to school my handwriting had changed radically and I won the class award.
2. I’ve worked on computers nearly all my life, and am on them the majority of my waking life, but I never, ever play video games.
3. When I was 19, I accidentally turned my hair a screaming magenta which literally glowed with a halo under the lights at my workplace. The looks of shock from a couple office girls I didn’t like, were so rewarding I pretended I’d done it on purpose and didn’t dye it back for months.
4. I once had a sort of spiritual experience with a spider “deva” and now am nice to them even though it took me 3 months at age 18 to condition myself out of a genuine phobia of the things.
5. I once took a ten year vow of celibacy. I broke it three months early to get married.
6. I’ve been deeply involved in a very practical approach to conscious psychic work for a dozen years now. 99.99% of anything you ever hear about that subject is bogus: wishful thinking, actual fraud, marketing, confusion, etc. The .01% left over is not woo-woo, it’s not evil, and it’s not imaginary or stupid. It is however, astounding.
7. I used to want to name a son Dennan, and have sometimes used that as a net alias.
8. I look horrible in black and mustard. I look amazing in deep rust.

OK I found even twice times 8 exhausting for some reason, so I am stopping there! Tomorrow when I get off work I will go find some victims other bloggers to tag. ;-)

Any time I stop doing something I’ve been doing deliberately for awhile, I tell myself, “I’ll revert to my better habits in a day or so.” You know that feeling?

Then time goes by, and more time goes by, and eventually I realize I am completely off the wagon, and don’t particularly feel like getting back on it. So there.

And then eventually I realize that I actually kind of miss the wagon, miss feeling better, miss feeling like I’m accomplishing something, miss feeling like there is hope. I find myself mourning the loss. I find I want to get my act together.

And so then finally I actually DO it, I’m back on the wagon, I’m happy to be there, and I have a fresh enthusiasm that I obviously lacked previously around the time I hopped off. I might add that I stopped my 12 week cycle 1 week and 6.5 lbs short of my goal. I mean that’s just stupid. It’s been basically six weeks I’ve been ‘off the wagon’ and eating high-carb and not much exercising.

So today, I find myself looking at this straight-up cliff that seems somewhere between impossible, ridiculous, and unfair.

“Didn’t I already climb that cliff?” I ask myself. “I could swear I recognize how few handholds there are in that stretch, and how hard it was going up that place over there.”

“Why, yes,” says my Conscience. “As a matter of fact PJ, you DID climb that very cliff once already. Possibly twice. But then you went off the wagon, see. So those very same pounds of cliff will have to be traversed yet again. So there.”

Actually, to be honest, I’m astounded that I am only 21 lbs heavier six weeks later. I believe the majority of that is probably water/glycol-weight and likely to come off in the first couple weeks of a solid induction, taking me back to where I was when I left off. We will see.

Around July 25 is when I basically lost interest in everything that related to “me” which happened to include my food, weight, exercise, etc. Of course just around that time, the governor was out declaring my county a disaster area, the ‘walking park’ was like 30 feet underwater from the flooding, but that is no excuse for not lifting weights or eating right.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve had a lot of time to think about the stuff I blogged on a few months ago, the “fat politics” stuff. I am going to be taking my weight and the whole “weight loss” angle off the face of this blog. It is not a ’secret’ and my info can be found at my lowcarb journal, or a link I’ll put on an ‘about’ page to my weight tracking spreadsheet. But I do believe that lowcarb should be about health, and if a person is to be appreciated or congratulated for how they eat or exercise or whatever, it should be first and foremost because they are making a genuine effort toward health and happiness.

For me, that means losing weight, simply because I am not comfortable weighing what I do. I feel much better than when I weighed over 100 lbs more, I’ll give you that. But I suspect that if I continue reducing that, I’ll be better able to do fun things like karate and rollerskating again eventually, and I would really like to do that.

I don’t want the lowcarb focus to be “weight loss.” First because “fat, not weight” is much more important to focus on. Second, because lowcarb is a health regime. If a person were underweight, they would gain weight on a sufficient protein lowcarb eating plan! So it isn’t about a ‘diet’ to ‘lose weight’. It’s about improving your life via health. For me this means I lose weight. Others might gain it. Many others might not change that much, but might feel better, feel stronger, increase muscle to fat ratio.

What matters is that lowcarb is cool. The food is great, the recipes are often droolably divine, the health improvements are awesome, and the people are the greatest collection of supernice humans I’ve met in ANY field online (and I’ve known quite a few). So my blog will be changing ever-so-slightly over the next week, to shift that emphasis toward health and away from weight-loss. Just so ya know, it doesn’t mean that I am not continuing on a journey that includes that pretty front and center. It just means that lowcarb is a larger-vision that deserves a better context than the one I’ve been giving it.

But I am back on the wagon here.

Stupid freakin cliff. Now I have to climb it AGAIN.

I’m a queen. Of Denial, that is. Re-reading blogs I haven’t touched in what seems months, I came across all kinds of major experiences and insights that moved me and seemed to change me.

But apparently they didn’t, because I had completely forgotten about them.

How is it that one day, I can love Ganymede (see Ganymede on Firedocs blog) so much that I feel sure I will be changed by that experience, yet a short time later it is as if the entire experience never happened?

It’s like I consistently ignore or forget all the most important psychic, spiritual and metaphysical experiences that I have.

Meanwhile, sometimes people tell me that they wish, hope for, crave those kinds of experiences, they work diligently at RV over the long term. After brief periods of viewing again I get amazing experiences and then promptly walk away from it for awhile more. To onlookers I must seem the height of spiritual sloth and lack of discipline and consistency.

It reminds me of playing guitar in high school. My friends and I would want to do a new song, or be working on our own stuff. A few weeks later, having practiced diligently daily, they had improved. I had barely practiced at all, yet had improved a lot more. It used to genuinely make them mad at me. It just wasn’t fair.

I kind of feel like that dynamic is a little bit in play in terms of metaphysics as well. I constantly get to the point of truly moving and worthwhile experience and instantly throw it away, abandon the practice, and forget the whole thing.

I suck.

Royally.
.

I often hear people refer to their “relationship with food.” Lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about that subject.

My relationship with food often verges on nun-like: as in, close to “none”. I have to force myself to eat most of the time just to be sure I eat at least once or twice a day, and since my eating plan demands 5-6 eating times a day, that’s really a problem. I have a truly successful day about a couple days a month.

I’m half convinced that severe obesity of the sort caused by starvation-response and then later finally eating, is some kind of half-anorexia, an eating disorder with opposite body-result but from a similar cause.

In the rare event that I start eating a lot more food, a lot more often, weight starts falling off me. So far, that’s pretty well trackable. And the only time I make a point to eat is when I’m lowcarb. Though this last cycle, I’m doing pretty badly with this, and I’m guessing my lack of much weight loss relates to that.

It’s almost like an inverse of the theory that if you are generous with giving away money you will attract more to yourself in some metaphysical way: when I’m generous with eating, fat falls off me, rather similar to how drinking a lot of water will get rid of water weight.

Now, bodybuilding coaches say this is the way it is: that if you eat protein regularly, and don’t over-calorie, fat should reduce. They are all pretty clear that if you don’t eat regularly, especially if you’re eating too few calories, you’ll reduce metabolism and end up gaining fat even on that small amount of calories. They emphasize heavily that if you want to save calories, don’t skip the food, increase the exercise instead. I’m inspired that this is a no-brainer for so many, and I sure wish I’d known all this nearly 20 years ago. But, ok, I know now.

So why the hell is it so hard for me? I know now. So? Why not just do it?

***

Today I had 2.5 eggs and 2oz soyrizo at 8:30am. I was supposed to eat again at 11:30am. Instead I didn’t make myself until like 3:30pm, even though I knew I was supposed to and had time. Nothing except the knowing my best friend would be disappointed in me if I didn’t make some effort finally moved me.

And then, putting together something to eat, I was putting pork and green chili stuff in a little bowl for nuking, and wondering how little I could get away with and still get protein; is this at least 4oz of meat, I wondered? I think so, ok, that’s plenty. As I put the container back in the fridge, I thought, how weird is this? Most people want to eat as much as they can, yet I’m the opposite.

I weigh a ton. My body should be screaming for 4,000 calories a day according to Official Theory. I have plenty of days I’m lucky to get 800 calories if that, and I shouldn’t admit that because my friends are going to beat up on me for my own good now, but I’m really having a problem eating enough to lose weight, as bizarre as that must sound. I can force myself to eat an avocado at noon and feel like that’s just fine for the day.

But that’s not fine. There is something wrong with that. On some level, my intellectual brain can see that this is just not… normal.

I just don’t have any appetite. And even when I do have an appetite, I don’t really “feel like” eating. I can feel that it is some kind of psychological thing at base, because it has that same subtle feeling that I have about situations and people that I don’t feel like having anything to do with. This is subtle. I don’t think I would be aware of this if I wasn’t really paying attention and trying to understand.

If someone drops food in front of me, and I don’t dislike it, I’ll eat it. In fact, if anything I have almost no internal measure of sanity on that count: whether they could give me 3 bites or 3 meals worth, if it’s sitting there and I like the taste of it, I’ll contentedly eat it without any body-recognition of what is appropriate; my body doesn’t say, “You need more calories,” or, “You’ve had enough.” It doesn’t say, “You need steak instead of chocolate” or whatever either. The first time we made chili verde, which was low-carb, I ate 4oz servings of it for like 32 meals in a row. How many people could do that, let alone would voluntarily do so? Because food means almost nothing to me. If I’m ok with the taste, and it’s in front of me, then fine, I’ll eat it, who cares.

My body really doesn’t have anything to say about food at all, except, “I’m not eating it if I don’t like the taste of it.” There’s been times I’ve been feeling like I was starving, and surrounded by food, but if I didn’t “feel like” eating what was available, I’d just walk away hungry.

***

I’m starting to think maybe it is a dissociative effect. I don’t seem to have a direct associative-connect between the sense of hunger or fullness, and the subject of food. It’s almost like they have little to do with each other.

So, for the last 15 years or so, I ate when it was convenient, if something I liked the taste of (read: carbs or sugar) was easy and fast. If it would take 45 minutes to cook I wouldn’t eat. Why should I? If I was hungry I wanted it now, and if I was willing to wait that long for my food then I wasn’t hungry enough to bother eating. It’s a hilarious and pitiful kind of food-laziness that resulted in an entire diet of fast food and occasionally pasta or pizza.

I’d have been fat on that diet anyway, it’s just that the seldom-eating, carb sensitivity, food sensitivities, stress and sleep deprivation and extreme sedentary lifestyle and so on aggravated the issue by a couple hundred extra pounds. If I didn’t have those issues, I’d still be struggling with my weight I think, it just would have much lower than it did.

***

But now I know. I know what it takes to lose weight. I know what caused the gain and what will help heal my metabolism. I have the power, for the first time in my life, to truly control my body and my life and my future.

So why is it SO HARD? Why does it take immense self discipline just to take 10 bites of something I like the taste of? I had food prepared ahead of time today. All I had to do was drop a couple things in a bowl and nuke it for 60 seconds. How hard is that? Yet it took guilt and love to finally move me enough to do it — 4 hours late.

I would seriously think I need therapy for this, but the only eating disorder I know of that comes close to this is anorexia, and I suspect if I walked into a therapist’s office and told them, at this size, that I thought I was half-anorexic, that they’d just laugh and think I was in some bizarre kind of denial.

I can’t afford therapy anyway. I might make up a self-hypnosis regimen but I’m not sure how to focus that. I’m not certain what core problem is sponsoring this ‘behavior issue’ with the food. I don’t lack money, or time, or food, or knowledge. I don’t lack a desire to lose fat as far as I know. I have a positive attitude about all this. And I like food — I love yummy things!

But I’m just off work here today, it’s nearly dinner time, and I’ve managed to ingest about 800 or so calories so far today, and that was with major effort. How much time do I really have to ‘make up for’ that and get a sufficient amount of protein and nutrition in my day? I find myself sitting here most nights thinking, “I shouldn’t eat more than 40g protein at a time, but I need 3+ more meals today to get my protein in… well if I stay up till 2am maybe…”

I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself. I wish I could sit in on another body for awhile so I could come kick my butt in aggravation.

***

I don’t tend to be real open about ‘allowing vulnerability’ with other people, as a general rule. Is this my “food and love” issue? If I were more a touchy-feely sort that fell in love monthly, instead of a nearly nun-like semi-loner, would I have these eating issues?

I guess I’ll never know. I just wonder if they are related. Maybe a self-hypnosis regimen working on the opening-to-love issue would have some food side-effect if so.

The other day I felt as if I were suddenly dealing with 101 internal demons of emotion, loose and flowing about my mood like ‘free radicals’ of the mind. It wasn’t time for PMS, yet the “turbulence inside me” was severe.

It occurred to me that maybe I was underestimating the effect of doing something that causes the fat cells to empty.

Fat cells store toxins. Which can be internally generated biochemicals that simply did not fully vent as necessary — which sums up most emotion in today’s high stress world. Biogram Theory suggests we store biochemical under the myelin sheath of the nerves, and that could also be affected by changes in fat cells in a given area.

Every fat cell that empties into the bloodstream is reading aloud, inside us, a tiny chapter of a story to us, a story of who we were at the moment we stored that fat.

And who might that be? What emotion might that come with? And what if we lose not just one fat cell at a time, but a whole avalanche of them once in awhile?

Emotion inside the body is biochemical. If we can’t vent it, we store it. Storing emotion in fat, if this indirectly is so, suggests that we might not really be ridding ourselves of it, but merely burying it, till the time we finally use those fat cells… and the ghosts of our emotion come back to haunt us, processing “through” us to be vented, as they should have been in the first place.

After thinking of it that way, I spent the night feeling as if a thousand little elements of me over the last 20 years were weaving through me, like energy motes looking for a doorway out, one denied them for who knows how long. In retrospect I think I should have dived into the turbulence and cried if possible, to help ‘vent’ some of that. Instead, by the time I finally decided to meditate on it, it knocked me out (nothing like sleep=denial) and woke up yesterday in a ‘flatline’ mode of no emotion whatever, not even normal amounts, which is just as much its own issue.

I go into ‘flatline’ and barely eat, breathe, or live: this is my own dysfunction. Some people go into the turbulence and binge themselves sick. Some people go into the turbulence and starve themselves sick. Maintaining balance of food and behavior while losing weight might in fact be more of a challenge than doing so while not losing weight. I haven’t heard this addressed anywhere before. Probably because there’s little if any research on it.

I suspect in some people, this variance in biochemical probably has an even greater effect on their mood. As if while they are working on the new person they want to be, elements of that old person are quite literally flowing through them in the present, sparking or carrying the same emotions that made them gain the fat in the first place.

Who is our fat? Are we ready not just to ‘deal with the fat’, but to ‘deal with’ the emotion it carries, and the toxins that cause current-emotional responses?

Is it losing a part of ourselves… literally? As literally as cleaning out a house is losing all the things we give away and throw away? Is part of the resistance to this change because our overall body/psychology know that it is literally a “loss”?

My grandmother believed in karma. I mean in the very literal balance of the universe kind of way. She believed if you stole a nickel, you would pay that nickel back most certainly. In a sort of funny way this almost struck me like an emotional version of her take on karma: like we cannot get away with denying ourselves, our feelings; that sooner or later, unless the storage contributes to killing us, we are going to have to deal with those feelings; what we don’t vent one day, we will face again when we lose the fat that biochemical stored itself in.

It also makes me wonder if, just like people vary radically in how much insulin they produce, maybe emotional biochemical quantity varies that much too. And if so, if maybe some people ‘need’ to store more fat in order to ‘deal with’ that biochemical that the person is not willing or able to process, than others.

It does sort of give a new way of looking at the idea of Reich’s fat as ‘Body Armor’ theory, yes? That one is not merely protecting themselves from the world; but that the fat storage is quite literally physical protection, via biochemical storage in fat cells rather than having it flow through the body and be experienced and hence vented.

[edited to add: D reminded me, Reich's theory is about muscle tension (stress); it's work based on his theory since then that suggests that fat is a form of body armor.]

I’ve been reading online the last couple weeks. A lot about weight, obesity, and things like that. And one of the more interesting, if distressing, things is reading peoples’ comments about some articles, posts, etc.

It got me to thinking back to pretty much everyone I know, all the times I’ve eaten in public with others, etc. And what I want to know is this: who watches the skinny?

I’ve seen people eat enough food for two full days of meals at dinner and not blink, and then eat dessert on top of it. I’ve dined with people who ate so much starch/sugar in their meal it’s amazing they didn’t pass out on the floor an hour later from the blood sugar drop. I’ve sometimes hung out with people who noshed on junk morning, noon and night, partied and drank, and considered ice cream a food group.

And most of these people had a completely unreasonable, and inaccurate, “pride” in themselves for not being fat. Like the majority of people commenting on the internet, they really believed that fat people were doing something they weren’t, something unreasonable and probably shocking, which got them into that situation.

It never occurs to people that maybe skinny people eat like hell too. That some of the biggest junk food addicts and sweet tooth fanatics are skinny people.

If merely eating badly made people fat, I suspect the population of morbidly obese people would be 3x what it is now. It’s obvious that eating badly makes SOME people fat. But not others. This is a no-brainer, I admit.

So where does the open prejudice against the obese come from? Is it society’s last -ISM? People aren’t allowed to openly despise others for being a given race or a given religion anymore, but it’s perfectly ok — in fact, all experts and the media at large agrees — that despising and mocking people who are fat is perfectly ok. And the entire basis of this is: they ate themselves into it.

Yes… that’s true, although not necessarily because they ate donuts constantly; there are other ways to “eat yourself fat,” including eating a lot of carbs when you’re insulin resistant, eating foods you have body intolerances for, not eating often enough, and other non-food issues that contribute. Usually it’s a combination of things.

(I think one reason lowcarb works so well for so many, is because by default, nearly by accident, it tends to wipe out food people commonly are sensitive to, such as gluten-foods and milk.)

But from my observation, half the skinny people I know have eaten themselves into what would be 300 lbs if their bodies worked like some other peoples’ bodies.

Yes, I know quite a few people who are thin and who eat well and exercise and certainly “deserve” to be thin. But I also know a lot of people, by far the majority, who eat just as badly as any fat person I’ve known.

They eat junk, and lots of it, when upset. They eat junk, and lots of it, for every imaginable holiday, party, or special event. They eat deep fried burritos off the lunch truck and donuts at the office for breakfast and too much for dinner. But you know what?

Nobody stares at them. Nobody looks at their plate in restaurants, as if to assure themselves that if it contains anything but dry carrot sticks, “No wonder that person is so fat.” Nobody watches them shop like it’s the court’s incriminating eyewitness evidence for their figure.

Because they aren’t fat. So nobody cares how they eat.

I think a lot of people who get fat, do get that way through sheer junk eating, but ironically, a lot of them do it after eating that way for many years with no result. And then one day, after a lifetime of carb overdose, their body starts getting insulin resistant. And the pounds start packing on. And the more fat cells, the bigger the metabolic problem, so it starts to become exponential. And then, yes, they too are fat. But for a good portion of their life, they ate that way and weren’t.

It would make more sense if so many thin people, many of whom I’ve known and who certainly eat worse than I ever did if gluttony is any measure, didn’t feel such arrogant pride about how they are NOT fat and other people ARE and so they have an “opinion” about those other people. Don’t look, Ethyl! Can you imagine what that woman had to do to weigh THAT MUCH?!

And in public places, I see people watching me. It’s not just paranoia; I used to be thin, I gained weight very rapidly while immersed in work and school, and when I surfaced, the difference in peoples’ reaction to me was mindblowing. I know it’s not just my projection, people really do “react” — literally taken aback by my size, quickly followed by the culturally-indoctrinated response of sheer disgust, aversion, or embarrassment. Much like I told my child, “Don’t stare at the man with the missing arm, it’s rude!”, that rule seems to hold for many people on looking at overly fat people. It’s a horrible disfigurement; it qualifies for the “look away” response. But most people don’t look away — they just look.

They watch my shopping basket. They watch my restaurant dinner plate. They watch me with that look on their faces, often, as if they can’t imagine what truly bizarre sinful behavior I had to indulge in; surely, it’s nothing they’ve ever done, or that nobody they know has ever done.

If they were watching the skinny, they’d know better.

Many of the people I read online (such as in forums) are really, really concerned about what their scale says each day. More than concerned. Some folks if not actually bound and gagged would be weighing themselves by the hour. Hoping for a better number. Despairing if it doesn’t show up. The more someone weighs themselves, the more they seem to be psychologically affected by it (which is logical, as the degree of their psychological stress about the subject is probably what determines how often they weigh themselves).

Now if we were talking about what the scale said in general, like for a few days running, this would make sense to me. They are working toward better health and fitness, so obviously, being able to see they lost or gained weight matters.

But every day? Twice a day? More??

The body is a great part fluid, which is pretty heavy. And the exact percentage and quantity of that fluid varies, with many factors involved. Some of these factors are well known: The fewer carbohydrates you eat, the less your body will retain water. The more sodium you ingest, the more your body will retain water. The more water you drink, the less your body will retain water. When my Monthly Mess is about to arrive, the body in its need to dilute and rinse out the womb, collects massive water in the tissues to be sure it has it available.

There are 4,982 other reasons for “fluctuation of fluidic levels in the body,” of course. They are all secret. Only 3 people know them, and they would have to shoot you if they told you.

Now given this situation, and given that our food and liquid intake varies a little, the body and external temperature varies, the precise amount of exercise varies, the hormonal levels (of both men and women) vary, and with most scales, even the way you stand on it might make it vary, it seems to me the general lesson here is something like:

It varies.

I understand the need for feedback. If one isn’t observing results, re-evaluating strategy, and implementing change when needed, then it isn’t much of a plan.

But at some point you gotta ask yourself, is my monitoring serving a purpose of correction and/or inspiration? Or is it causing me more angst in the long run, with the constant variations?

I think psychology plays a great role in weight loss and change of fitness level. Weighing is supposed to be a realistic feedback and, hopefully, at least occasional inspiration. I have seen people who are actually losing weight, consistently week by week, who literally spend at least half of their days per week stressed and worried and guilty because so often the number had gone up slightly instead of down. Well when the overall trend is good, but a good number of daily weighings make ya feel bad, then the psychology is now more harm than help. I call the scale obsession the “Faint-by-Number” plan.

I see people in the forums saying things like, I ate this and that and today I’m two pounds heavier! So I guess food X is bad for me! — er, well you know, maybe, maybe not. Might have had more sodium. Might be an intolerance issue. Might be one of a zillion other even unrelated factors. If it was 7500 calories in the middle of the night then ok, it might have made you fatter. But otherwise, small weight fluctuations are going to happen just like mood fluctuations do: they are both about the balance of the body, which is not a static thing in one place, but a dynamic process constantly re-re-adjusting to homeostasis. I also see the opposite effect: Well I ate birthday cake last night and I’m down half a pound this morning so it’s fine! Heh. Well, you know… the longer-term numbers, and whether carb cravings knock someone off plan, will tell.

I’m not saying the Faint-by-Number approach is inherently wrong; some people really need that constant feedback. I’m just saying that I observe it is demoralizing when weight loss that is not rapid is approached that way, as their comments indicate.

o0o

For those who would really like to weigh EVERY SINGLE DAY I thought this might help. You can download free here in Excel format a simple spreadsheet that will not only let you track your weight, but will give you a 3-day, 7-day and 10-day “average” of your weighings. This is an idea I got from someone else I cannot recall the name of now (sorry). It allows you to see the “trend” of the weight change, not just the daily numbers. Also there is a page that automatically gives you a little graph of your weight as well. There are only a few tiny instructions, to set the date and graph for your unique numbers, they’re on the sheets and easy.

Folks who already have spreadsheets, or are tracking their weight in a free online place like fitday.com won’t need this, but for those to whom spreadsheets are greek, it might be helpful. Click on the pic below to download the spreadsheet file, save it to your hard drive, and then open it in Excel. If you don’t have that program, try Open Office, an awesome office product that has the equivalent of all MS’s stuff, FREE, and will open Excel (as well as Word docs, Powerpoints, etc.) just fine.

Click on the pic below to download the xls file. Save it to your disk (remember where!) and open it in a spreadsheet program.

Now look at the averaged columns. Note that on the (fake) date 6/3 our (fake) person gained half a pound. But the 3 day average shows 0.1 lb lost since the last measure; the 7 day average shows .3 lbs lost since then; and the 10 day average shows 0.6 lbs lost.

So on days when you feel like freaking out because your weight is higher, consider the larger “trend.” Look at how the numbers move in the averaged columns. Much less “wiggle factor” than the day to day weights. When the 3 day, 7 day, especially 10 day, averages are moving, then you really know that it’s more than a variation or fluke, you’re not just guessing. If the larger averages aren’t growing much, relax a little. It MIGHT just be the normal variations of the body. :-)

The lowcarb internet world is amazing.

You know, I’ve been on the internet since 1993, pretty much full time plus, not counting that from 1995 till present my job (on TOP of my other time on it) has been internet based. I am as world-weary street-wise a net punk as they come. I can hang in playgrounds that would send most people screaming into the night. Nothing phases me at this point; nothing shocks me.

But the lowcarb internet world has surprised the hell outta me.

I swear, I have never — NEVER, in all these years — encountered a community of people who were, across the board, so GOOD to others, so encouraging, so sharing.

I’ve been in projects that I personally paid thousands and worked years to support and had maybe 12 people out of thousands even bother to be kind let alone say thanks. And yet, in the lowcarb world, the minor effort of my journal and this blog and whatever I might post on lowcarber.org has brought more kind, positive, personal response from people, via email or my lowcarber.org journal or this blog, than I have seen in any other field online in 14 years combined.

People I would have zero in common with outside of “food choice” have shown me more kindness and humanity than plenty of ‘online buddies’ I’ve known for a decade. I don’t mean my buddies are bad to me! I just mean that people in lowcarb are often exceptional. They go above and beyond. I feel like I have met more people worth making friends, “real friends,” thanks to lowcarb than any other source of people.

Despite the debates and social politics on the forums, still you find huge numbers of people being warm and compassionate and supportive on the journals than I’ve ever seen in one place before. I’ve seen support forums. Even for food. But lowcarb seems different. Could it be that unlike other eating plans, lowcarbers may have existing issues with food or emotions or life, but they are not starving and miserable at least, like most lowfat lowcalorie plans? I don’t know what it is. I just marvel at it regularly.

My email address is thedivinelowcarb at gmail dot com by the way. I just realized today that I didn’t have it anywhere on this blog. I guess that would explain why I get so many messages through my lowcarber.org account even though it’s about this blog.

I’ve gotten half a dozen private messages and several on my LC journal, in response to my ‘Hideous Truth’ post. Several of the private messages told me some of their own stories. It’s really amazing what deeply wounding, mortifying things people have to suffer when seriously obese, and the amount of sheer grim determination to get through it they have. I am starting to think that really overweight people may be some of the strongest people around. I think if you plucked the average thin person off the street and gave them the kind of issues the severely obese have, they’d go postal, or show up in ER within a day.

That lowcarb not only seems to congregate so many good people, but seems to be an avenue for genuinely improving (and even saving) their lives, is truly inspiring.

It all started when I (don’t faint) ate Pizza on Saturday night. Note the capital: pizza is a holiday for me. I love pizza more than any other food on earth except quality milk chocolate. Of course, chocolate does not make me swell up (gluten response), get asthma and other issues, like 5-10 lbs overnight weight gain (one assumes ‘water’). Pizza does. But I love it. Damn it.

And had I not been overcarbing just a tad the few days prior I would never have made that decision — I would have eaten just toppings, or made something at home — but carb-sins are cumulative and they are not forgiven by your body until you have some time and water to put them behind you. A few extra carbs often won’t hurt you (as long as you’re not in induction), but a few carbs a few days in a row will start seducing your appetite and taste buds in subtle, insidious ways.

Somebody’s knockin; should I let him in?
Lord it’s the devil, would you look at him?
I’d heard about him, but I never dreamed
He’d have blue eyes and blue jeans
– Terry Gibbs (who is blind)

I backslid right past the greasy thick pan crust all the way into two cups of Southern Comfort eggnog. Amazing how hard you can hit something when moving backward.

By the time I was well into Sunday, I had almost every “carb-life” symptom that I lost when I went low carb, all the way down to exhaustion, short of breath, and aching feet. By the time it was Sunday evening, I was just laughing about it. It was like some guilty conscience on my part was totally exaggerating every effect just so I could be a real drama queen about it!

But it got me thinking.

I used to ALWAYS feel that way.

Before low carb de-possessed me of all the foods it turns out I’ve been mildly allergic to all my life and never knew it.

Before low carb made me drop the massive water that the body held to process the carbs my “normal” eating habits involved.

Before low carb made me pay attention to protein and carb loads so I wouldn’t all but pass out from the blood sugar drop awhile after eating.

o0o

So, on a seemingly separate subject, my personal life continues to be a real dilemma. I suppose it is perfectly normal for people to live in misery and non-relationships with their spouses for whole lifetimes, with not much more than whining to their girlfriends or buddies about it. But I am learning the stark reality of what obesity has really done with the last 15 years of my life.

I haven’t lived the life of “quiet desperation” — thanks to severe obesity, I’ve lived the life of “quiet exhaustion.”

Like: I won’t notice if you won’t work for a living, if you’ll carry in the groceries, because I’m so exhausted after shopping I want to cry. Most people would have to run a marathon and starve for 3 days to be as exhausted as one walmart visit can make someone who weighs over 400lbs. But don’t let it show. Smile at the neighbors. Don’t hobble on the aching feet. Try to stay up with the kid, who being a kid will smell your weakness and push her advantage when she knows you haven’t the energy to argue.

Like: I won’t mind that we don’t have a relationship and haven’t for 11 of 12 years because at least my kid has a dad. Sort of. Even if you don’t contribute to the family. Even if you don’t pay any real attention to the kid. Even if despite a weekly maid you make the living environment a cluttered pig sty I’m too exhausted to clean, and too busy working anyway, and so just live in the unhappiness of not wanting even to eat (let alone cook) because the place grosses me out. Men are pigs. Not all men. But definitely this one.

Like: I won’t expect more from my life. My parents make it clear that at my weight I should almost be grateful that some useless SOB is willing to leech off me as an intentionally underemployed roommate who at this point occupies 50%+ of the space in a house of three people. Doesn’t drive so I get to be taxi service on moments off work, or even give up my lunch hour to be taxi. Doesn’t work so never, ever, ever leaves. I crave solitude to the degree of envying the indian monks in their caves. I haven’t the energy to even think about doing anything besides “surviving another day” anyway, so what difference does a detail like “a relationship” make?

Now that Low Carb has given me some of “me” back, by clearing my mind and energizing my body and giving me hope for my future, I find that my perspective on life, and what I deserve in life, is changing.

You can see where this is going already can’t you.

o0o

So in thinking about these two subjects together, it occurred to me that when you think about it, eating foods that are wrong for you is rather like a dysfunctional relationship.

You are really drawn to it. You think you really enjoy it at first. Then you pay the price for it… and it just goes ON and ON.

We are the CEOs of our bodies, and of our lives. It is up to us to make executive decisions that are the most productive and healthy for the corporal entity. It doesn’t matter if it is food, hobby, or relationships: it’s all the same question: what is good for me? What contributes to my present and my future?

Until one day you say, I refuse to be cowed by guilt over whether or not certain foods “should” be okay to eat. I don’t give a damn if whole-grain bread and corn “should” be healthy. It is not some kind of moral judgement day — it is just about how I feel when I interact with that. Maybe there isn’t even a good or bad, and that kind of thinking distracts us from the real point of it all: that we must measure our lives by “what works for us,” and if we are unable to recognize when something is an abysmal failure for us and get it out of our lives, then who should?

We are the CEOs of our bodies, and of our lives. It is up to us to make executive decisions that are the most productive and healthy for the corporal entity. It doesn’t matter if it is food, hobby, or relationships: it’s all the same question: what is good for me? What contributes to my present and my future?

o0o

I was reading this woman’s journal and she says, “I’ve dated a little recently, and…” and I look at her profile.

She weighs 385 pounds.

I’ve been bred to a world of performers (in music), where if you weren’t perfect by hollywood or at least rock&roll standards, you were pond scum. Women over 30lbs overweight were The Untouchables. Men would date a skanky disease-ridden bleached groupie before they would date a truly beautiful and intelligent woman who “needed to lose a little weight.” And that’s a LITTLE weight, mind you. Not hundreds of pounds. Obviously, my upbringing has severely skewed my beliefs about women, appearance, and myself. I hadn’t really thought about that much before now.

But suddenly I am realizing that it is true. My beliefs about myself have been totally distorted. And maybe that is part of why I have continued to live in a relationship that has no respect or positive contribution to me whatsoever.

I don’t know that I want to have a full time relationship with anybody right now. Hell, I’ve been married a dozen years and I haven’t had even a part-time relationship for the last 11. I’m used to being alone emotionally and overcrowded physically. I don’t mind it, I tell myself. But then I realize that not all women feel hideous when they are fat. Maybe they feel really fat, maybe they feel badly about it, but probably not to the degree I always have. I didn’t just have a complex about it. I literally dismissed myself from the entire gene and social pool as a “given” and just didn’t think about it again. Some women question themselves or their worthiness and come up short. I dismissed mine as even being worth questioning a long time ago.

Low carb has become therapy.

I know this is a little heavier than most my blog posts, no pun intended. But that is what I’m feeling today.

o0o

Meanwhile back at the… small tract home in Oklahoma, I splurged and bought myself a christmas gift: tea. Seriously!

I bought two nice ceramic mugs with infusers, and several kinds of tea (Earl Grey, Chai, and some samplers). I have a little chinese-style altar table in my room (I have a room of my own, and though it’s the smallest in the house, it’s my sanctuary). There is no reason why I couldn’t make a habit of getting up a bit early, making some hot tea, and then just sitting and meditating, praying or whatever for awhile.

Before I gotta get the kid up, and repeatedly harrass her until she is ready for school. Before I gotta get the husband up, because his interminable eBay boxes are coming in for delivery in our warehouse-slash-living room. Before I have to work, with the like 150 emails per day I’m getting lately so I can’t even stay afloat let alone catch up.

Just some hot tea… and eyes closed… and a little time for me.

So I can think about how my life is changing from the life of Quiet Exhaustion, to the life of Cautious But Growing Optimism.

So I can think about how “if only I had the energy to do XYZ and felt good, I would–” oh… wait! It turns out, I DO!

I feel as if I am re-sculpting my life, and not just my body.

I don’t know what next week will bring. First things first. It’s tea time.

Been on trains, planes and automobiles. Nearly home now. In a few hours I get up and catch a plane for home.

I like the train, with a couple exceptions; in general, it’s neat. Below is what I was blogging earlier, but couldn’t get online to post until now.

o0o

just after dark, 3rd December 2006, somewhere in Illinois

I am nearly alone in the dark. A few minutes ago it was light, and the train was rocking and rolling along, and everything seemed normal. Then all the lights went off, and in a sudden eerie silence, we slid to a stop.

Not a planned stop. It’s dark outside, yet somehow the trees are recognizeably black-on-black as figures in the night. A very odd, muted wailing-whine has begun, two strands of anti-harmony that made the other few people in my small train car giggle nervously. They say now that the power has gone out and the engineers are working to restore it. The world outside seems like a lonely planet, with not even a moon to reflect on the featureless snow.

My novel is no fun in the dark, so I turned on my computer to blog.

I’m feeling a bit entranced today, maybe following on my attempt to seriously meditate last night in my sleeper car. Today I feel as if I am a halfling, caught between two worlds. One world is Mundania, as Piers called it, where all things are logical, the ‘real’ world as we pretend to know it so we’ll feel better thinking reality is really that small. The other world is something else, something filled with shapes and shadows, with astronomically improbable convenience of circumstance showing up just on time and then receding into the unmanifest like that is normal. It feels as if there are vague but living energies reaching right into my body, yet somehow a few steps toward the astral part of it, tugging on me, calling like a destiny I recognize as part of me but can’t seem to remember its name.

All day today, thinking about returning to my ‘normal’ life at home, it has felt like something in a dream. I have the oddest sense, as if all of reality is a total illusion, a game that we are all playing, supporting each others’ delusions, psychically arranging to only meet or talk about the points of reality we think we have in common for the most part. It feels as if there are two very distinct worlds: one on the surface, that we think is the normal one, but is actually an interesting veneer, woven like a group dream out of the strings of time. The other, the ‘real’ world, a vastly deeper, infinitely more complex world, is what is really ‘real’, but which the liliputians on the surface of my reality dismiss as dream and fantasy. I try not to pay too much attention to it. I don’t want the Lilliputians to know just how different I am from most of them. I don’t want them to know I am not a character on their safe surface world. My deeper roots only frighten people. My adulthood is a testament to my dedicated attempt to learn how–and successfully–convince the people around me that we share an agreement about reality.

I felt the pull today. I haven’t felt that since… 1993-5, my Bewilderness phase. I felt the pull of “coincidence I can count on.” It was pitch black. “Give me light while I type the password,” I thought, only to instantly have a light from some engineer outside flash in my window on my keyboard. The moment I finished typing it was past. Are those precognition… the arrangement of the present to fit the impending… or? I wasn’t surprised somehow. I have been talking with my body today. My beautiful friend. My earth elemental that has been so unrecognized and unthanked most of my life. It is indeed the ultimate Warder: the strength that carries me, defends me, anchors me in this world. My body has been my best friend lately. Ever since I nearly poisoned it by taking that medicine I was allergic to… I have been suddenly more aware of it, aware that maybe I am a selfish shallow brat not to have realized that my body has its own destiny, its own life, its own joy in living, and my ignoring it and abuse of it is so unfair. Body and I have become much closer the last day or so in particular.

Today I’m distracted. I want to know truth. Back in that bewilderness era, I knew it. I could feel it, because it was so strongly inside me that I could recognize the distortions, distractions, confusions and evasions that stripped truth of its natural beauty. Nobody would believe. It doesn’t matter. I could feel ‘the red thread of truth’ as I called it, in what people said, in anything I read. I could separate truth from intent, another subtlety. It occurs to me to wonder why it is that the moment I launched into remote viewing well over a decade ago, the massive conscious psi that I had accepted as simply novel and inexplicable, actually went away almost entirely. It is as if a person who dreamed throughout their entire daily experience, suddenly was told, “Look here, how fascinating–you can dream when you sleep!”–and suddenly, something about the mental model of that, caused dreams to cease except during sleep.

Did it wake my ego left brain up to protect me? How did I go from being impossibly psychic as thoroughly as I breathed, to studying psi yet having almost none of it manifest anymore, except in occasional dreams or experiences?

I think… I think that is what I need to make a decision about. It is my focus, as the Narrator made clear to me years ago. You get what you focus upon, as Seth said. I always do. I am always intense. But I let my focus get distracted and diffused and join the drama-queen of surface reality. I’ve used “doing” things to cloak awareness of “being”.

Until now, I haven’t felt like I had the energy to live the degree of self-integrity that I maintained in those years, that allowed me that kind of awareness. The effort to maintain awareness of every thought, to pull back from every tempting daydream, and from all the small sarcasms of daily life, was huge. It was a bliss of awareness, with the exhilaration of courage, and the unbelievable exhaustion of constant internal change. I was so happy, and yet, I recognized the sheer amount of work that it took to hold that state of mind, state of being, state of grace, was so much more work than most anybody would be willing to invest.

I miss that, for the first time in a long time.

[later]

So, as usual the power was out in our train car. Nobody woke us to tell us we were at the kansas city train station. I woke up just in time to see the lights, realize where we were, get my stuff and get out the door before the train drove off with me to somewhere else.

The Kansas City “Union Station” is apparently the biggest in the country except New York. I feel about it rather like I do the Atlanta airport. On one hand, you have to admit that it’s gigantic and it’s got tons of stuff and so on. On the other hand, if you make the mistake of feeling like the important thing is getting on a train or a plane, then your feelings maybe different. In Atlanta, even with trams and moving sidewalks the place is so huge you need to wear running shoes and just ship your luggage UPS to your destination instead. At the KC union station, once you finally get around the big area with the little train and all the shops and diners and such, and get yourself into where the actual train ticket counter etc. is, once you have done everything and there’s nothing more to do than get on or off a train, THEN you get to go outside, in like -2F degree weather, and walk about a city block down this sidewalk, and then this lonnnnnnng flight of steps (there is an elevator fortunately), and then down this lonnnng sidewalk beside the train. Should your nose fall off from the freezing cold prior to that, there is nobody to help you. Train cars, like hotel rooms, are always the farthest possible distance they can be from wherever you start. It’s like some kind of cosmic law. I found myself blessing myself for having shipped my luggage home, all but my personal laptop and a small carryon. It was still hard work!

I was waiting to see if my kid or my friend came online. After insisting I couldn’t leave her, the kid has disappeared for half an hour now. My friend is probably working or busy or something. I should go take a shower but I’m freezing here. I think I’ll see if the radiator in this cheap motel room is capable of anything more interesting than what I feel. At this rate I’m going to put my coat and scarves back on and just sleep in my clothes.

Meanwhile… being away from home, although not a huge thing as I worked during it, was at least ‘away from home’ which was a nice break. If I could just get enough sleep now, to feel human and strong, I can begin the priority shift I came to while away.

Must sleep now.

I’m a big fan of actor John Cusak. Of his sister Joan, as well. My other favorite actors are Bruce Willis, Brian Dennehy, Nicolas Cage, Chow Yun Fat, Tim Robbins, and I know I’m forgetting a couple… and some who’ve passed on, like Raul Julia and River Phoenix. Anyway after planning to see it for like five years I finally got around tonight to seeing John’s movie “High Fidelity.” His character was slightly similar, but rather more seedy, than the one he plays in “Must Love Dogs”, a more recent movie.

He realizes at this one point that he’s never really made a commitment (to the woman he loves). That he always had one foot out just in case. And that because he was never really fully committed to her, he didn’t really focus on the positive potential of the future, either, but just sort of lived day to day.

Jack Black is a helluva singer. I hadn’t realized.

It made me think about that for a little while. About how our plans and dreams for our future come in two categories: idle fantasies, that we engage in for the pleasure; and creative construction, because what we’re daydreaming about is something we have committed to.

So it really comes down to committment. If you don’t have your oars in, you’re not going anywhere except with the stream.

I think I need to decide exactly what I want and don’t want in life and make a commitment to it.

I used to be ambitious. I wish I knew what the hell happened to that.

Day after tomorrow I leave for home. For some reason that really depresses me. I mean you would think that getting home, my own bed, my own car, would be great. I miss my kid, I miss my cats. I joke that I’m on vacation but I have worked full time plus done a lot of tkr and other related stuff so in reality I have not had a lot of time here.

I just realized a few things today. Like:

* what is wrong with me? both IG and Nero have given me specific exercises to do dating back to January (for IG). It’s been like a year and I still haven’t done them. With ambition like this, it’s a wonder I’m not still a slug.

Wait.

Never mind.

* what is wrong with me? I keep making these halfhearted “someday I will make a real commitment” sort of wishes related to RV. When am I going to tell enough of the world to stuff it that I can view every day? I said once that any avoidance of RV for more than 48 hours that does not involve an NDE is denial.

(How can it be denial if I admit it? My brain hurts.)

* what is wrong with me? I’ve spent two weeks near the largest natural mineral hot springs in the country and haven’t managed to go there once. I can’t believe it. In reality I spent a small fortune, four DAYS in transit RT, all so I could do very little less than I do at home, except I didn’t have the taxi-mom duties. Sigh.

It’s like all the ambition I once had, all the intensity, and commitment, has faded into some wish-I-could-nap, chronically sleep deprived, kinder-gentler lack of concern. It’s gross!

Well, so… what’s wrong with me. I have work overdue and I’m blogging. I am supertired and I’m not sleeping. I need to meditate and pray and instead I’m typing. I was thinking the other day that I don’t really need to worry about remote influence, not that I ever did of course, but it seems to me I’m far more dangerous to myself than anybody else is.

I left my ambition on a distant shore, I guess. Now, I just feel like… I’m treading water.
.

Today I was looking at a friend’s photo collection and stopped in amazement. There was this photo that in one part of it, looked exactly like I recall from a dream I had years ago. It was a place with columns, and a squared pool, and shallow steps leading in, and in the moonlight. I’d forgotten the dream for years.

In the dream, the pool was both a pool and a place of baptism. But a man of evil was living among us and he had a tendency to take people out there late at night and drown them. We would find their bodies in the morning and nobody knew the killer, but I suspected. Unfortunately, one night, he managed to kill me. But I had the last laugh. I came back, a ghost, I refused to leave, until I got through to the others that the evil was him, and they did away with him.

We watched The Mummy II later. In one scene in this place I can’t remember the name of, there were all these huge round columns. It totally reminded me of this amazing dream I once had where I was in the middle of something that looked and felt just like that but the columns were like cohesive water (like the special effects in that movie ‘the abyss’) and when I would put my hand on one, gold light would spark where I touched it and shoot up from my fingers inside it and ‘rebound’ all over as it went up and then went across this really high ceiling, as if the entire enormous structure were made of that material.

Then there was this other scene that was so much like another dream I had, this one back in ‘94, that I was stunned. In the dream I was standing in formation with a group of people in the sands of egypt, and this big 50 foot tall gold egyptian statue-man who was like our leader in some way rose up from the sand in front of us, pointed his finger at the far side of our group, and this huge blackness like a liquid shadow spread over the sand and crept upon us, coating us, we leaned away but could not move for some reason. Somehow it made a permanent change in the person and was visible and yet… it was not visible, too. Later in the dream the group and I were discussing what we should do now that we had this effect. The effects were things like, it made us need to live during the night instead of day, and it made us want to eat fruit, and I had this strong correlation in the dream of bats that sleep upside down, eat fruit, and come out at night. We talked about maybe trying to sleep in trees quietly but I said no, it’ll never work, people will see us and freak out and shoot us.

When I woke up I was disturbed by the ‘darkness’ symbol in the really vivid dream, and the dreams I had with the big gold egyptian guys (and the sphinx, which was quite diff in the dreams–way bigger on top, diff looking, had a mate somewhere far away, and was sentient, a long-term “watcher” designed for that role by unusually tall thin people) were always unusually… “powerful” as dreams go, with an odd degree of ‘tangibility’ to them.

Anyway. I just thought it odd that today I would see three highly unique things each of which totally sparked memory of a different dream all from many years ago.
.

Tonight I watched this really depressing movie called ‘The Constant Gardener’. A tale of third world country and endless big corporation evil white man injustice. In other words — it’s just another day. ‘White men are the antichrist’ as some murderer once said before his death sentence was carried out. Sigh. As if all men aren’t equal in capacity for harm to others (and self).

There are so many subjects I have studied, from a little to a lot, in my life. The three most demoralizing subjects I ever looked into were the AMA (American Medical Association), the issue of child immunizations in the USA, and Mad Cow syndrome. These being topics I wish I could surgically extract from my mind for my peace of mind. As Joachim Phoenix said in 8mm, “there are some things you can’t un-see.” I can’t change it; it’s too horrible, more than most can imagine; so I don’t want to know.

We were talking after the movie about issues of the world, and the effect it has on a person when you start believing that ‘everyone’ is corrupt and that every government is evil incarnate and the world is just a bad place. In most, including me, initially it generates rage, a desire to fight it, to “do something.” In me, after that point, I realize what cannot be done, and work to let go of it, since negativity within me does me far more damage than most anything outside of me. In many people, though, they can’t let go. It just “eats away” at them from the inside.

I can only conclude that it is my duty to be of warm heart and good intent and to HAVE FAITH, solely because that is what the world most needs and most lacks.

It is easy to be hard. It’s easy to be cynical, to be cold. That’s the copout, the easy way, the ‘default setting’ of anybody living in the real world… eventually.

*

When I was 18, I was more cynical, cold and deadly than the average assassin. I hadn’t had any strong emotion in years. I was studying martial arts and firearms because I wanted to be sure that if anybody had the folly to beat up on me again, now that I was finally old enough to be free, that they would die for the error. I was borderline sociopathic, maybe a little more than borderline but as I had not ‘acted out’ any poor behavior (yet), I was still free.

As one of my survival skills, I had many ‘layers’ of intelligence that I no longer have, that I let go of when I let go of the self-protective stuff that created them. But at the time, I was smart enough to know my problems. I knew how bad off I was, and looked for the only tool that seemed strong enough (and free enough) to help me.

And I healed myself. It took years. It took more self hypnosis and conscious-dreaming meditations than I care to remember. I broke through and was able to have emotions again; I laughed maniacally and cried hysterically back and forth, separated by fits of sleeping deeply, for a week when it happened, and was bubbly inside and prone to tears over anything for a couple of years.

My life, which had been a black hole of memory, came back to me in fragments, assembled in a spider web that conveniently makes me ‘feel like’ I remember my life up to age 18 when most of it I probably don’t.

You are what you make yourself. I have a depth of ‘nice’ I couldn’t even conceptualize then; faith, and hope, and a warmth totally absent from me then. I’m a human because I decide what I will be. Not an amoeba; not stimulus-response only, although that often happens initially; but a conscious decision of what I want to be in this world.

*

Cynicism is the black tarnish that comes on the coin of experience. It cannot be avoided in the intake. One has to deliberately rub it off and refuse to let that cancer of the soul, that killer of hope, take up any residence inside.

I believe there is an ongoing energy best called ’spiritual warfare’ that relates to this as well. It is amazing the world’s in as good a shape as it is, considering some of the ‘awareness’ I’ve had of the darker elements of spirit — and its evangelistic crusade to sway humanity toward a vibration that is more lucrative for other species.

Emily Saliers of The Indigo Girls has some lyrics in a song I like that relate to this:

i’ve seen kingdoms blow like ashes in the winds of change
but the power of truth is the fuel for the flame
so the darker the ages get
there’s a stronger beacon yet
let it be me
(this is not a fighting song)
let it be me
(not a wrong for a wrong)
let it be me
if the world is night
shine my life like a light

Archangel Michael gave me ‘faith’, years ago, when I prayed for it regularly. It was a gift without measure. I don’t have as much anymore, or I don’t pay attention to it as often, that is my own doing. But when I really close my eyes, and center, and ask myself, what do I want to be inside? What is my self-definition? I feel it again.

I have a couple of posts on the dojoblue blog (which is not going to exist much longer I think) that fit here:

Constructing Faith, a blogpost about Archangel Michael, in part; and

Truth, about a dream (with nuns, no less!) and thoughts I was having following it.

In a world of cretins and creeps, thugs and thieves, there are still many beautiful people and things in our world. There are people who do not define themselves based on what is on the outside of their world, but based on what is inside them, instead. They don’t let the hard reality of the dark side of humanity pollute their self-definition.

I will not be just a ‘reactor’. I refuse to be a “moral casualty” of the side-effects of the nightly news. I will be warm, and love at every opportunity, and generous, and as virtuous as I can manage in the circumstance of my life.

There used to be a saying, ‘You are what you eat.’

I think it should be, ‘You are how you love.’