Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in imperialdragon's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, November 13th, 2005
4:41 pm	feeling better sun is out. several rounds of baby food, generid pudding, iced tea ala snapple, and coca cola down under my belt. tomorrow I will try chicken noodle soup and more OJ and coca cola. Had some visions. After this you can have anything that you want. and Sorry had to put you through this. Vision of a prison transforming you into a buss. Was the fastest way to make you learn. Don't worry you'll have Amy to look after you now. Who the hell is Amy?!?!? (42 Comments |Comment on this)
10:16 am	still ill on a completely liquid and semi-solid diet. pop, OJ, baby fuid, apple juice, pudding, etc. not an ordinary illness, reaaction from a successful but partial backlashed transition of power. out of commission for next few days. on the mend however, lowest point of crisis passed. had a gauntlet sprung on me. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 12th, 2005
7:47 pm	True Aescetism Most people think aescetism is about depriving yourself or punishing yourself because of things you like. If you do that, especially if you abandon a destiny to pursue a "social ideal" of self-deprivation, then you are likely to create wraiths. Sometimes true aescetism involves increasing pleasing stimuli. Let me explain. Let us assume for a moment that expanding and sharpening and developing awareness and perception are the roots of all sentience and enlightenment and hence higher power. Therefore if a stimuli increases your awareness then shouldn't that be part of the aescetic path? But be careful, here a lot of self-indulgent thinking kicks in. I've only met three magicians in my long acquiantanceship with many magicians whom I can say that drugs helped them at all, and they all had to deal with the usual shit that comes with drugs. True aescetism is about cutting down on the background noise and optimizing stimuli for maximal awareness. Because of the chaotic nature of life this is specific to the case of the individual. For instance, me helping people makes me more aware of the miraculous so often my destiny has framed "learning lessons" by presenting people with problems for me to help. It feels natural for me to help them, when I help them I notice things I wouldn't when I was just being selfish, and it translates into greater miraculous learning. On the other hand, me making money for me is a distractor from the miraculous and hence why my work life is often at odds with my progress. However working often creates the tension and general social situation in which I find others to help so it's not a matter of quiting all work and living off using magic to scam others or to trade miracles for $. Similarly people think oh aescetic means vegan. Not at all. If your throughts do better sometimes on fruits, then at those times eat fruit. If your thoughts are more clear with fish, eat fish regularly. If your thoughts are more clear on a red meat diet then eat red meat. True aescetism is being willing to adapt one's daily social and personal habits to maximize awareness of the world. It's actually quite rare for an individual person to have maximized perceptions when they are lonely because they're in the middle of nowhere, constantly distracted by thoughts of McDonalds because they're on a diet of raw vegatables, and miserable because they have no money whatsover so they constantly have to be thinking of the necessities of life rather than their immediate surroundings. This was one of Sidhartha's great insights, the so-called middle way of moderation. People have lost the true meaning, which is more obvious when you read the original myth. Extreme deprivations are unnecessary, the real question is can you give up what you find personally distracting and serving your own egotistical melodrama? If you can, then you're an true aescetic. However this is a truly personal thing, only a very advanced or experienced person can catch out someone else clinging to their ego stimulators rather than letting go. If freedom is the law, you have to be careful about self-responsibility. And this is what is so hard about ascetism, not the extremes you have to go to, but the honesty and will to become aware of self-distracting daily habits and the will to forgo them. That's the real hell of ascetism, honesty and everyday willpower. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
5:58 am	Oops Looks like I got the wrong guy: Iraqi Baathist leader dies The highest ranking leader still at-large from Saddam Hussein's regime has died, a Baathist Web site reported Saturday. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan met with Iraqi leaders to call for reconciliation ahead of upcoming elections. The Web site run by former top Baath Party members said Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri died Friday, corroborating an earlier e-mail announcing the death that could not be independently confirmed. ''In the pure land of Iraq, the soul of comrade Izzat Ibrahim returned to God on Friday at dawn,'' the Web site statement said. It described al-Douri as the ''field commander of the heroic resistance'' and was signed by the Baath party's ''political media and publishing office.'' The statement appeared Saturday on a Web site believed run by Salah al-Mukhtar, Iraq's ambassador to India before the collapse of the regime in April 2003 and former head of the External Information Department in Iraq. Hmmm I think I was a bit rusty and loose with my language and mental focus. Will have to try again. I'm not surprised it took about a week. When you're sucking life out of a stranger a long distance away usually they weaken and soon after expire. It's more dramatic if you have a specific target and they're near or engaged in personal interaction with you. I'm more focused on improving my aim. This target generally qualifies in my wording but I'll have to tighten it up since I want the religious groups on the Shiite side working with the various groups, SCIRI, Badir Brigade etc. that are allied with Iran. Days before announcing his death, the Web site issued a statement from Ibrahim himself in which he outlined the new "political and strategic programme of the Iraqi resistance", urging insurgents to attack U.S. forces in Iraq. "Many mistakes happened during the Baath ruling but the party -- God willing -- will work on fixing them as soon as possible," he said in the statement. "We have started building a (united) resistance front which will include all the nationalist and Islamic resistance groups working in the field," it said. Looks like I just scored a periphial hit with a former Baathist with sympathies and ties to working with Shiite groups. Not a violation of the wording but clearly not the intent I wanted even though my focus wasn't clearer. Perhaps I'll have to work up a list of names. The Iraqi and Shiite leader qualifier must have been insufficiently broad and it went after him. In addition he was a sufi and may have been an active magician. If he had put all the groups under his personal umbrella of protection, fairly formidable to have eluded US capture, then he may have directly challenged the "spectral" attack on the leadership of the alliance. The defense in that case was fatal to him, not surprisingly. And no I am not sorry that I got him: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/al-douri.htm Well I wouldn't be sorry anyway, having that conscience defiency thing, but even if I had one I doubt I would be sorry much. Except that I missed. I guess that explains the omen I recieved about a death regarding mistaken identity the other day. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 11th, 2005
9:20 am	Weariness I think I'm going to take a break from posting today. Last night I went on my brief shopping trip at the local mart and I ran into an employee there. He's a guy I chat with over many months and we know each other. He asked what I was doing there that late at night again and before I could answer he said you look tired like usual. Worrying a lot he said. I was a little taken a back. Did I look that run down? No bags under my eyes but I guess I am a little weary. I had this dream last night, in the dream I was just a little peon worker in a corporation. They stuck me way in the back corner with the black guys. I was talking to them and I told them that they treated me like I was half white and half black. I'm sure that if there's anyone black reading this post that will be immediately offensive, but I don't intend it that way. It was just what I was talking about in the dream. So I was talking about as far as jobs go they tended to treat me like I was half black and half white, and that girls tended to treat me the same. As far as dating me they seemed to treat me like I was white but when it came time to take me home to visit the parents then I was black. Again, offensive I'm sure, but that was the dream. In the dream I collected up my things from my desk and just walked out. Then something strange happened. It was like a light came out from me and went straight up in a beam. Then it spread out to the sides like it was the illumination of a great doorway. Then just like that I was President of the company where I worked at. It was like power and authority and office just flew to me. It was crazy. It was like I just took one step and was this nobody and the very next step everybody turned to me and I was the boss. However there was a problem. One of the guys I'd bumped aside from my stratospheric shooting straight to the top was pissed at me but I couldn't prove it. He asked me down to a production line to try to kill me, but I had to play along because I couldn't get him to trip up and say anything I could prove was wrong. So there was ironically walking into a trap because I had to play along to draw him out. Then I had another dream after that. This dream was of a carriage, rather like that old fashioned style like out of faerie tales or Harry Potter. Only this one was made of moonlight and swampfire and willowisp glow and elrditch electricity like ball lightning and ghostlight. It crackled and it was racing by. It was a horseles and driverless carriage but it was coming for me. It'd missed me on the first try but it was coming back for me for sure. I don't know what these dreams mean. Something good, something bad, something bad avoided, couldn't tell you. That strange ghostlight and cold lightning carriage was coming awfully fast like it was being drawn by invisible horses at a breakneck gallop and the whole thing was jolting and jumping from flying along so fast it hardly touched the ground. One conclusion is that something magical is gonna happen and relatively soon. Another suggestion is that the dream wanted me to remember humility, to remember even when I was on top who was for me when I was down and who didn't have the time of day for me. It's a good lesson. I don't expect too much outer change from this change even though the first dream had some outer symbols. The second dream was a little scary because the carriage coming for me was wild magic, pure untamed magic dangerous and yet beautiful beyond compare. Other than that I am tired. I am a little weary. So I'm gonna take the day off. Maybe that's the cosmos's way of telling me I need a little break before the next step. I'm not surprised, there's been a lot of stuff, processing, working on issues, omens and powers falling into place, whatnot that I haven't been talking about. Be good to take a little breather and remember I'm not inexhaustible. Have a good day, hope each of you makes progress with your own miracles and I hope to hear some feedback too. Get back to you this weekend. (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 10th, 2005
9:45 pm	Why Jerks Must Live MSNBC reports a small victory in the fight for intelligent life on earth: Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting “intelligent design” and warned them Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck. Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and founder of the influential conservative Christian Broadcasting Network and Christian Coalition, has a long record of similar apocalyptic warnings and provocative statements. Last summer, he hit the headlines by calling for the assassination of leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, one of President Bush’s most vocal international critics. “I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected him from your city,” Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, “The 700 Club.” “And don’t wonder why he hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for his help because he might not be there,” he said. The 700 Club claims a daily audience of around 1 million. It is also broadcast around the world, translated into more than 70 languages. (People for the American Way provided a video file of the 700 Club statement.) In voting Tuesday, all eight school board members up for re-election in Dover, Pa., lost their seats after trying to introduce “intelligent design” to high-school science students as an alternative to the theory of evolution. Adherents of intelligent design argue that certain forms in nature are so complex that they are best seen as the handiwork of a designer rather than the result of natural selection. Opponents say it is the latest attempt by conservatives to introduce religion into the school science curriculum. The Dover case sparked a trial in federal court that gained nationwide attention after the school board was sued by parents backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The board ordered schools to read students a short statement in biology classes informing them that the theory of evolution is not established fact and that gaps exist in it. The statement mentioned intelligent design as an alternate theory and referred students to a book that explained the theory further. A decision in the case is expected before the end of the year. In 1998, Robertson warned the city of Orlando, Fla., that it risked hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist bombs after it allowed homosexual organizations to put up rainbow flags in support of sexual diversity. While this guy is repulsive the more that he runs his mouth the better. First of all it really dilutes the credibility of those who argue that intelligent design has nothing to do with religion. If it has nothing to with religion why is Pat Robertson up in arms screaming about God's wrath? Second such continued ranting is the best innoculation against theocracy. People who were hot to get religion involved in public affairs are realizing their tide has crested. Other people who were willing to ignore or tolerate this are gradually becoming disillusioned or alarmed. People have a civil right to be religious crackpots and the first ammendment right to alienate everyone in society from belieivng them. This is democracy at work. Power to the people! *chuckle* Also there's the issue of self-interest and magnamity in victory. Everyone has a purpose in life, and if Pat Robert's destiny is to help America realize why religious despotism is not in its self interest then far be it for me to interfere in his God appointed fate. The problem is that a lot of people whan the whammy and the ability to deliver smack-down in God's name for their own personal crusades. The problem is that they really aren't interested in the work and worry of really carrying the world on their shoulders. Fortunately the very prejudiced nature of their minds keeps them from obtaining any true miraculous powers. It was always a snark fest to watch Pat Robertson praying on tv for miracles. Of course local politics doesn't always solve the problem. The first time the Kansas school boards were a bit early and after they pushed anti-evolution stuff the voters dumped them. However Kansas wasn't done with anti-Darwinian rhetoric. The budding theocrats got a second bite at the apple and got relected and are making trouble again. They've messed with the school board standards for teaching again. However I am confident that they've missed their moment. In a sense America had it too easy, and that was what caused this modern disease of unrealism. It was my favortism that bred this completely delusory fanatacism. Of course muslim cultures bred this sort of fanatacism also but for the most part the most dangerous brands were created by a similar process. Because of oil profits they didn't have to change their culture to modernize. This produced a cultural mentality incapable of adapting to changing internal and external needs or challenges. Their side said it was Allah when it was oil and America said it was God or imperialism and military might when it was really me. Spoiled is what they are. Well within about one or two decades I will ensure that changes currently in motion will fully bloom so as to ensure that the rug of oil-money is pulled out from under all the muslim economies and that the easy profits of Western civilization are ended as well. Remember both Osama bin Ladin and George W. Bush are mediocre not very bright individuals born into families with a lot of oil money and took their religious lessons just a little too personally. This lowering and rebalancing of living standards ought to produce a lot of discomfort around and a lot of chastened humbled people who find that fanatacism doesn't work so well if you don't have a lot of easy money flowing around. The idea that God is running every little thing around here is a little laughable. I'm not sure God is that nice. Certainly there is this entanglement and destiny process, but that does have a failure is possible option. Destiny gives you a lot of chances to fix mistakes but in the end you will get stuck with an Easter Island type systemic collapse and failure if you don't listen. Sometimes the long process of the decline and collapse tricks people into thinking that they can get away with cheating destiny. For some reason people thinking they can cheat destiny but they can't cheat causality. The strange thing is that destiny is stronger than causality. Causality is afterall a convenience but destiny keeps on trying to work things out even if they've been frustrated in one alternative. I've beat causality plenty of times, but destiny has a long memory and I've never found a way to cheat that sucker. In fact that's what I used to call "magick". I didn't call it magick, or wonder working, or thaumaturgy. My private name for it shared with those closest to me was "cheating". That was the code word. We were gonna cheat causality again and every time I told them that code-word that was the code-word to bust out the bad-ass music and go to town cheating the universe. You can get ahead cheating causality. But destiny you can't, which is why when I began working on that level I stopped calling magick cheating. For me the resilience of destiny was something profound, something I respected. If God is interested in saving this mudball then it's because he sent people destined to do it. That's a mystery. Behind this spontaneous emergence of complexity sometimes you just don't know. I mean what happens if the in the deep mystery of the universe I'm here to help out because I was sent? However such speculation is kind of useless. Because certainly I don't get any breaks from it. It's more useful to think of myself as a spontaneous emergent entity created through the agency of a destiny. Because life is hard and destiny just gives you a way to work it not a guarentee of success. If I had my druthers I'd be atheistic. On the other hand I've seen way too much to be either a theist or an agnostic. Too much strange things falling into place not to get spooked a little and to be as ignorant as to call myself agnostic. Too much cruelty and hardship to easily believe in a simple answer like a God. Too much of the miraculous and wonderous to go with atheism. I figure it's something personal in the end. Some people will look at the crazy shit going on and they'll think there's got to be a God. Some people will look at how hard it is trying to get done the right thing, and they'll say how can a God want that? Shit I'm going to go asleep again and struggle with even more omens dumped on me. Another horoscope about dinner and sustenance. An omen where I open up this page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2005/11/09/PH2005110902538.html?nav=hcmodule And then I get at the same time a doorbell ring that sends me to my front door. A false alarm, pizza delivery for an apartment across the hall. Still I get the message. Coincidence. Ding Dong. Dinner for delivery, company for dinner. Something is gonna show up at my front door, just like the stray cat from the dream two nights ago. Yes, like at least 50% of the male species I have the hots for Eva Longoria, adulterous little bitch that Gabriel is that Eva plays anyway. What is going to show up on my front door? A servant? A woman? A "free lunch"? A job? All of the above? You can logically slice this omen as many ways as you want and it won't get you closer to the truth. It could be a job because that is actually what I've been requesting real bad, a job that pays more than I have now. Could be a woman servant who is gonna support me. Could be an old flame who wants to rekindle a romance. No freaking clue. Could even be just free cable service so that I can watch Desperate Housewives. Logically predicting even a simple step forward is almost impossible I've found. Just gotta go with it and see what happens. I just hope that with all these omens raining down on me that it won't take too much longer. That's the part I hate the most, not the not-knowing but the waiting. Whatever it is I'm sure that I can find some use for it, so I'm hoping for gentleness but I'm also hoping for an end to waiting. I'm gonna run out and get some milk and cereal and some carbonated flavored water that's on sale. Gnite. One last note. Gabriel is the name of the character Eva Longoria playes. So this could even be a veiled reference to a Muslim showing up at my door since Gabriel is the patron angel of muslims. Far-fetched I know but that's my point. You never know. The fact is that my life is complex enough to justify something like that happening, so the fact that I am complex enough to think about it means little. The greater possibilities I can comprehend is nullified by the increased complexity of that which they must comprehend. In the end, it leaves me with the irritating truth that I can easily discern the futures of others lives by reading their less complex choices but am still puzzled by my own. An interesting paradox. (Comment on this)
7:50 pm	Reflections So that is why I don't recommend dying generally, because living is hard enough and death all too easy to find. People think sometimes they got death figured out but when death is on the loose you can't ever quite tell who the grim reaper is about to take. Death is no tame dog to be put on a leash, death is something wild and free. If there is a merit in death that is it, that it is no respecter of prestige or belief or society. Death helps make the world whole by removing that which has its time done and that is the second tenative virtue of death. However death is wild and free and it is a mistake to think it works for you or me. Of course I'm personifying death a little but systems entropy is even more unpredictable than normal chaos. Even the death of nuclei, the production of which is radioactive decay, is something not well understood or easily tameable. From such comes the atom bomb which Oppenheimer said "I am Death, the Destroyer of worlds!". Also what is not often discussed is that with the first atom bomb tests strange phenomena happened. Purple glowing clouds, the blind were made to see, yea ... the long time blind were made to see. People and scientists want you to believe that the nuclear weapon is the epitome of the predictability of technology but the truth is that practically every time we've detonated a nuclear warhead we've learned something strange and not quite predictable even going back to the beginning. Situations that involve death and dying, there is a mystery there, even there a chaos reveals itself. Little strange things tend to happen when people die, and not real predictably. The infamous 21 grams is just one example. When you push a situation toward death and dying something sacred happens, and you can't tell for sure how the situation will react or if it'll destabilize even if you are very careful and have done it many times before. This is another reason for respecting death. You know the great braves and chiefs of the Amerindian peoples were never defeated in battle and captured. Geronimo gave himself and the Apaches up, and if he hadn't the US Army and Calvary would have never been able to find him even with their tame native scouts. Same thing for the other greats. Sometimes the Amerindian peoples were slaughtered at Wounded Knee or given blankets with Small pox or walked to death on the Trail of Tears or betrayed by treaties but their great warriors and chiefs could not be destroyed by war only by treachery or getting so worn down they gave up hope. People think the West was won by white people defending themselves or the US military. That's a misreading of the evidence of history. No what happened is that the great adepts and shamans of the Amerindian peoples were outnumbered, outgunned, and still they were not defeated except by an inner truth. The truth is that while they had a few great warriors or shamans who could avoid even many bullets aimed at them, most of the warriors were not that strong. So outnumbered and outgunned these few Exceptional warriors and shamans could only slow down the logistically relentless advance of the white man and only so long as individually they did not give up or running the span of their time pass away. The second truth is that they were trapped by their culture. This is the culture that spawned them, but also gave them the prohibitions that prevented them from banding together, from adopting forbidden methods that would have given them victory, that prevented enough of the everyday warriors to learn enough of the great gifts of the spirit to make a formidable army of them. The late attempts such as the Great Ghost dance were traps, poisoned by the white man's consciousness a half-breed led them to destruction by attempting to convince them that a watered down sorcery could make even the most unimaginative brave capable of dodging bullets like only greatest of them could. They were of course crushed. Daughter_of_storms asked me many times why I did not acknowledge my brethern for she had met some of the dragon_blooded like me but elsewhere. Eventually I told her the truth, the truth of the schism between me and my own kind. Like the noble Amerindians the rest of the old ones cling to the old ways. Not only does this I believe limit their own achievements it threatens the destruction of the world. They cling to the forms of the past, while accepting that if they cling to these traditions that they will have abdicated their duty to preserve the world itself. I was convinced that the drive of my own destiny was so unrelenting and so implacable that it meant abandoning even the most sacred and taboo of the ancient ways of the old ones. Therefore between me and the other dragonkin there would always be a gulf or an abyss of division. They could not accept me and I could not accept them. Somewhere in the past of Easter Island there was someone, at least one person, who was given a choice, a choice between clinging to the ways of the past and between finding a new way. At various points that choice would have differed. In the end it might have been as simple as steal enough wood to make big enough canoes to flee somewhere else which was not doomed. Sometimes when depression takes us deep down into a dark place and we feel that we are trapped, sometimes that is because the answer our destiny wants us to look at is something that breaks radically with the past. Sometimes it requires a readjustment of cultural norms and sometimes it simply shatters them. This is not to justify every revolt or rebellion against the norm, for only those both butressed by the absolute necessity for change and the legitimacy of results produced by a break with the past succeed. However in the case of Easter Island and the Amerindian cultural collapse and I feel in my own case facing the collapse of global civilization that desperate times called for desperate measures. This is a risky thing, for there is good reason generally in past prohibitions, risks and costs that must be accounted for. Certainly I made many mistakes but I felt that if I kept with the old ways humanity and my own future would be doomed. Many had tried the old ways and all had failed. All had failed. If there was to be a future the first step in seizing that future would be an act of transgression, and act of the betrayal of the ways of the past. That is what eventually led to me here, to this moment where I am discussing a perspective and an approach to the ars mirabilis that is a huge break with the past. From one point of view it betrays nothing of the true substance of the path. From another point of view it betrays every social assumption about how it should be approached, who it should be reserved for, how it should be taught. You've heard of the prohibitions of Kaballah right? You're supposed to be married, over forty, and a devout scholar - and a man of course. I'm not here to knock Kaballah because as far as that goes it's a relatively liberal and modern approach among the traditional sorcerous paths. It's also one of the paths more inclined toward ars mirabilis rather than traditional sorcery in that it promotes sacred insights over profane rote-based applications. The requirements used to be even more relaxed but you ended up with a lot of heresies and self-proclaimed messiahs that didn't quite live up to their press. The Sacred Magic of Abramelin is slightly more liberal but it still suggests you being married or chaste and discourages women from learning it. They got rid of the age requirement which as I pointed out wasn't always there anyway and some of the most gifted kabbalists were doing it at beneath that age. Western occult modernist subcultures of course completely got rid of the age and gender requirements but that didn't particularly help. The problem is that the very approach and format of the traditional sorcerories were what made them inaccessible. In medieval Europe when everything cool was in greek or latin or arabic because that's the last good stuff that survived the thousand years of the dark ages all the respectable sorcerors wrote up their stuff in greek or latin or arabic as well. Of course Albert Magnus probably the greatest magician of that age of Europe completely rubbished all that nonsense but all the second raters were in for it. Of course Albert Magnus wasn't very accessibly either. His quotes went along the lines that a magician is born and not made, which isn't very helpful as far as learning magic went. However over a dozen years ago when I was painstakingly translating events from Albert Magnus's life his spontaneous, everyday, and miraculous approach toward magic was probably my first textual source on ars mirabilis in ancient sources though as usual I didn't comprehend what I had on my hands at all. This was rather like me holding a copy of Schopenhauer's book in my hand and reading it over and being completely clueless as to what it meant, at the time. Albert Magnus's life and times were probably the oldest and ironically first encounter I had with the secrets of the ars mirabilis outside of the Apocrophya of the life and times of Jesus of Nazerath and the examination of the lives of the old testament miracle-working prophets. Of course now it's all obvious in hindsight, but at the time I thought it was an impossible task. No the answers were all out in the open, what was missing was the right frame of mind to understand the clues that had been given. (Comment on this)
7:06 pm	Chaos of the Abyss CNN reports on a suicidal "death cult": (CNN) -- Suzanne Gonzales seemed to have everything going for her. A bubbly 19-year-old with loving parents and good friends, she was also a strong student and earned a science scholarship for college. But everything changed one spring day two years ago, when Suzanne's parents, Mike and Mary Gonzales, received the following e-mail. "Dear Mom, Dad, and Jennifer, I will make this short as I know. It will be hard to deal with. If you haven't heard by now, I've passed away," the e-mail read. Alone in a Florida hotel room, just miles from her college apartment, Suzanne methodically prepared and swallowed a lethal cocktail of potassium cyanide, lay down on the bed and died. In doing so, she joined the roughly 4,000 people between the ages of 15 and 24 who commit suicide each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Suicide is now the third leading cause of death among young people, the CDC reports. But Suzanne's case has an unusual twist. She frequented an Internet newsgroup called called ASH, short for Alt.Suicide.Holiday. Members of this news group trade advice on how to commit suicide, using code words like 'transitioning' and 'exiting' and 'catching the bus.' Suzanne found this group nine weeks before she died, posting nearly one hundred messages detailing her plans. "My chosen method is potassium cyanide....I've stopped eating so my tummy will be nice and acidic," one of Suzanne's posts read. Suzanne's father claims the newsgroup gave her everything she needed to kill herself. "The knowledge, the tools, their psychological encouragement. ... She was led to her death," Mike Gonzales said. Newsgroups like ASH work something like an online bulletin board. Anyone with a computer and some basic Internet knowledge can gain free access to thousands of messages about suicide. And they can post their own messages. An archived section of the site called "The Methods File" contains a list of recipes, recommendations and tips on the best and worst ways to commit suicide. Suzanne's dad believes one of those messages taught her how to illegally obtain and use cyanide to end her life. And he was horrified to learn that an older ASH member who goes by the alias "River" may have helped her. "Suzy had me proof-read her notes and we went over all the details of her exit, just to be safe," reads one ASH message from "River." But "River" disputes his role in Suzanne's death. "No one in ASH encourages anyone else to commit suicide. ASH is pro-choice," he wrote in an e-mail to CNN. "Geo" is another ASH member. He was the same age as Suzanne when he joined the group last year and thinks suicide groups like ASH actually keep people from committing suicide. In fact, "Geo" credits ASH with saving his life. "If it weren't for it, I think the chances of me having committing suicide would have been greater," he said. "Having a place where you can write those thoughts, get them out of your head. It can be very therapeutic." But Suzanne's dad thinks otherwise. "That's not pro-choice," Mike Gonzales said of the site. "That's brainwashing. And they are not being held responsible." If indeed this girl did have everything to live for "bubbly 19-year-old with loving parents and good friends, she was also a strong student and earned a science scholarship for college" why did she commit suicide? Well if you click the link, you can tell she was kind of homley and plain as a girl. Beyond just the issue of boys and dating where looks count a lot, social cliques and girls often are even crueler to each other than boys are to homely girls. So this girl probably felt shut out, unable to socially develop relationships, etc. The bereaved parents probably felt helpless, loving their daughter but unable to give her sufficient meaning and happiness to continue carrying on short of drastic plastic surgery and cosmetic body-shaping. This is one of the reasons why I'm not into the "spiritual death" thing. As far as matters go, I've had extremely transforming experiences. Experiences that left me not just acting different but looking different, as in like a brother of my former self rather than a continuation. My own mother looked at me and asked me if I was her son. As far as "rebirth" goes I've done better than your average death-cult junky. The problem is that I never wanted to call it "rebirth" because I believe it's a cheap metaphor. I've been down and out, and I've felt the temptation to law down and die, and I've always chosen to live. When I've been down, and I've been down plenty of times with serious troubles and near-brushes with death, the most important thing I've discovered is that desire to live. The ability to go on when it just seems you can't go on anymore. I want to live, and that's why I don't accept cheap death metaphors. Because I've seen the real thing, I've dragged people back from the other side of the real thing, and trust me this whole "personality rebirth" thing has got nothing on real death. I laugh at anyone who calls death their friend. Death ain't the friend of nobody. Death is like falling through black ice into the coldest water that you can imagine and getting sucked under by a tow-current. That's what death feels like for a metaphor. If you even want to try to have a chance of beating you got to muster up every bit of strength possible in you to keep on going because when death is near even that is a struggle. If you lay down and relax and have a nice time and spits you back out alive, that wasn't death. Death reminds you that life is a constant fragile attempt to keep from lapsing into entropy. I've known death many a time from many a perspective like I said and it still alarms me and it ought to alarm anybody and if it doesn't you've just fooled yourself. So there are real dangers to depression. Giving in, suiciding, hurting others, abandoning that which you love, shutting the world out and falling into deep dark oblivion, these are all dangers. This girl faced some of those dangers and she lost. However this society does not know how to deal with depression. Deep down in that dark place is a beauty that can't compare. That's why your mind forces you down into that deep dark place. Let's face it, this girl was intelligent enough to realize that whatever her gifts that nothing would be able to change the life that she would lead because of her homely appearance. I used to be troubled by those thoughts as well because I used to consider myself pretty homely. Not ugly, just so average looking as to be unremarkable. So I know how that kind of thinking goes. However the strange thing about depression is that it forces innovation and creativity. Once you're in that deep dark place in your head you kind of give up a little and drift. That is the moment that if you can keep on being aware that you can suddenly find something inside of yourself. Something that can't change necessarily what sent you into the depression but can give you something as wonderful and life-affirming and satisfying as what you thought you lost. That's what people need help finding, their own inner box of supernatural beauty. For me the solution was somewhat literalistic. I simply became more handsome, not super handsome, but enough so that girls I liked would come up and talk to me on their own. I certainly didn't expect to find that deep down there, but I had studied and practiced biological influence and miracles of such for a long time. Once I found the key to own inner truth it just sort of unconsciously shifted on its own without planning. Musculature and body fat ratios shifted, caloric consumption and liquid allocations shifted, nervous signals resculpted the flesh and muscules in the face to a slightly more appeasing configuration, skin tone and scent shifted to be more attractive, each individual change was subtle but the overall impact was pleasing. It was depression that gave me that. But you got to be strong enough to hang in there and you got to be smart enough to see the opportunity when you bump into it after you've felt abandoned and that you've tried your best and still failed. Nor you necessarily have to have miraculous biological influence to resculpt yourself. With that ability I can resculpt others bodies and health, but for a one time "ugly duckling transformation" practically everyone has the capacity to increase their appearance significantly if only they can find the secret to their own happiness inside of them. Not that life is a walk in the park. My realization was that maybe I could never have what my destiny had led me toward wanting more than anything in the world. At that moment I had a choice, to take it by force claiming that by destiny it should be mine. Or I could accept the cruel blow of destiny that would make me desire something and then forever remove any legitimate means of acquiring it. This tormented me for years. However I chose to accept the loss, even though it would give me sorrow for the rest of my life. For some reason this choice ended up in the depths of my self-pity and spiritual agony made me more handsome in literal and outward terms. It was not what I desired, and perhaps I will never have that, but it changed my life for the better even though for a long time I could not comprehend such cruelty. Even the pain made me more attractive to women. A girl told me once that she could see in my eyes that I had suffered and that this is something that many girls probably could detect and would intrigue them. Strange indeed are the workings of destiny. (Comment on this)
4:57 pm	Complexity vs. Speed You ever hear of the principle of the diminishing return? It appears in many places such as calculus and the principle of marrginal utility in economics. Sometimes being more complex in my default consciousness is helpful in that it speeds up tasks. Sometimes it slows tasks down however because it has greater requirements. For instance I have a strong logical gift. However that very logical gift got in the way of my learning for many years. On the other hand I have a complex mind capable of perceiving and juggling many omens at once. Yet because of this my present progress is slow. In the last week I've had omens relating to: love, money, sex, servants, job-issues, syria, death, beauty, Nick, scruff, Dan, ayrkain, mom, casablanca, etc. And they all might be entangled and connected in various ways. This is pretty dizzying and disorienting even for me. So Scruff asks isn't there a girl with money and a potential arranged marriage out there? And I say yes, and some of the dreams might be about that. And some of the dreams seem to be pointing away from that. It might be that is the right path for me. It might be that another path is right. It might be that these two paths could merge in a way I cannot at this time anticipate logically. Which all adds up to mean my progress even though I have a hyper-logical mind to assist me and even though I have enhanced perceptions to spot many omens is not that much faster if indeed not slower in practice than yours Dan or yours Scruff. There are no short cuts in life and at the holistic level everything has a pro and a con effectively as well. The uniqueness of your destiny is not dependent upon what you were gifted with but how you play the hand of cards you were dealt. This is I believe the enduring legacy of the parable called Forest Gump. Now in practice I loathed that story. However if I loathed it I must admit that part of my loathing is in part because of the recognition that for all my gifts I was unable to find a better answer to life's issues. It is humbling to know that my greatest successes have not come from how I consider myself superior but when I accepted the universality of certain truths of sentient existence. I have tried to present examples from my own life for concrete comparisons but usually I am simplifying things. However I think that is fair because the parts I'm glossed over are usually the parts that were canceled out by my superior faculties. So what if I sorted out a few hundred divinations before making a single one time decision in an example but didn't mention that? My superior faculties rendered making those hundreds of divinations no more or no less than a person conventionally worrying. Therefore I have tried to mention my own advantages insofar as they were not canceled out by the increased complexity of my own personal issues. This is after all not a case study in how I make decisions. I doubt there are any even highly gifted persons who could afford the information processing I dedicate to making decisions. Some of my rational decision making processes regularly exceed the computational complexity and success rates of the biggest super-computer clusters in the world though they do not operate by the same principles. However for the most part it's a wash when I'm being honest. It doesn't make life easier to live or help me understand better how to be happy or help me understand how to make things come out right in the end. Not that it isn't good for some things, but those aren't the kinds of things you have to worry about. So yay my advanced mental faculties can help me destroy my enemies. Great. Wouldn't it be better like you and Dan to have fewer or less powerful enemies? A wash I tell you, most of the time a complete wash. (Comment on this)
4:12 pm	Chaos of Destiny Why is logical action so futile? Logical action is not futile, locally. The key is to understand that logical action is local, and it is only global futilely. Let me give you an example. http://www.primitivism.com/easter-island.htm I'm sure they had their own logical reasons for depleting their environment, but it didn't take into account even obvious global consequences even when "globla" meant an island whose perimeter you could walk around in a few days time. When you take into account something as big as the world, what is the right choice? Global warming and global resource depletion are "obvious" dangers. You can see them any time you look at the local price of gas or worry about the weather. Our societies and hierarchies however are having a quite difficult time adjusting and adapting, so what is the right choice? For instance, the new plague or the avian influenza that is to come is it a good thing or a bad thing? Is it going to destabilize countries by killing hundreds of millions of people world wide? My dreams seem to indicate that this will happen in one alternate future. Or will is it going to buy time for the whole world by massively decreasing the number of people consuming scarce resources? My understanding is that the survivors would simply increase rates of consumption afterwards since the extractive capacity would not be destroyed. I could be wrong however. In matters like these, holistic or global in extent logic is useless. Logic is useless because among other reasons it is simply not written yet, there are choices yet to be made and these choices are indeterminate as well as interdependent and therefore it is not merely difficult but impossible to determine what the final configuration of events is to react against. So how am I going to make this decision? Well I don't know about you but I'm going to make this decision because I've been informed by omen that my brother and/or family might not survive if I don't combat it the plague. This may seem a hopelessly blind way to decide how the world's fate is going to turn out but as it turns out there is none better. The world works not because it is fair or just or perfect but because of a certain level of competence and by competence I mean a certain minimal level of compliance with destiny. Strange but true. This is especially true when things were going wrong. For instance I fulfilled my destiny to take two students at once and achieve a new horizon of my own power precisely by accepting destiny. I had worked for and with Nick for many years. It was very disturbing to choose to walk away. However that faith of being true to myself, of refusing Nick's invitations to strike him down for his own pettiness by engaging in my own pettiness I triumphed. I triumphed not because of some greatness of mine but because of the humility to accept destiny. I'm sure if I had struck Nick down in a petty manner for defying me it would have changed the interaction between me, scruff, and Dan. There is a saying repeated again and again in different writings in different ways. What truly belongs to you cannot be taken away. So do not try to force matters. This doesn't mean that there aren't such things as revenge, justice, or hatred but if it is meant to be it will fall into your lap to decide. Everything in this world mighty or small works by a principle of entanglement and complexity. In case you’re still not catching on, the women’s bodies reacted as if they were receiving the drug, as if they were the ones being treated. So a drug they didn’t even take affected their bodies. “Her physiology is linked to him,” Goldstein says. “Men share problems with women, and the solutions … It totally intrigues me. I can change someone’s physiology without treating them. It’s the wildest thing!” In fact, the better a man’s response to the drug, the better her response to him. There’s a concept in the world of physics called “entanglement.” It refers to the weird fact that subatomic particles have “partners” — other subatomic particles — with which they can be entangled, sometimes over great distances. If a physicist tinkers with one particle, the change affects the other particle. Strange but true. I find Goldstein’s study a strong indicator that humans can be entangled, that the romantic ideal extolled by poets and Dr. Phil exists in real life. We really do change when we fall in love. We become a unit, at least sexually. “There are no other physiologic abilities of men and women that are shared, and that is what is so fascinating about these data,” Goldstein says. Of course this is a little moralizing. Nature after all does not preclude entanglements that result in love-triangles and so the concept that "marriage" is foreordained is silly. Likewise falling out of love is a natural process as well as falling into love, so even if "partnership" is created by nature so then is divorce. However the point is that it by these connections that we live and by thes connections that we fall. This is why I've achieved newfound levels of peace and contentment. It is true that there are still difficult decisions to be made. For instance the United States is preparing to attack Syria. If it does this, it will mean the downfall of Bush. However I have been warned in various dreams not to push too hard. The simple reason why is that if Syria falls then we will be unable to pressure Iran to not obtain nuclear weapons. Once they attain nuclear weapons they can attack us with impunity from massive retailiation. If they do attack us we will be forced to retreat from Iraq in a precipitious manner or attack back conventionally. In addition if Assad falls the Kurds in Syria will join the Kurds in Iraq which will set off a civil war in Turkey because the Kurds there will want to secede. To prempt this Turkey may try to conquer northern Iraq. There is no one single step more easily avoidable or that will be more likely to result in setting Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, and possibly Jordan and Saudi-Arabia on fire and eventually contribute toward toward a nuclear weapon used on America than removing Assad leader of Syria. I have seen this, not just by logic but in dream after dream and in omens. So knowing this I have of course taken actions to try to head this off at the pass. But I cannot push too hard because that very pressure may jolt the Bush Administration into asking. Yet how do I know that this is not supposed to be? How do I know this does not prevent an even worse future? Logically I don't. I just have to be patient, work within the constraints, and only act forcefully and openly if destiny prompts me. Easter Island is a tempting case to try to apply socioeconomic determinism, which is what the article above suggests. However it is not true. In that story, glossed over in the lost details is the story of at least one person who did not act in compliance with their destiny. Probably more than one person. The world is not saved by great heroic action or by powerful miracles, though each plays their part. The world is saved when at least one person is true to their destiny because this is what holds the fabric of life together. GWB may seem to be a loose cannon and he is but I have to remind myself that the only reason why he obtained office was that I struggled and defied by own destiny. Fixing the situation is not a matter of glorification for myself, but in bringing myself back into harmony with destiny. In studies of disasters and man-made catastrophes study after study has pointed out that it is usually not intentional madness that brings about catastrophic systemic failure. It is that redundant system after redundancy, one safeguard after another, one mistaken communication after another, one person making a mistake after another the minute everyday connections that make things work are negated and then everything falls apart. On the other hand, bad things don't happen because at one of those branching points one person does just what they are supposed to do. Not something extraordinary, but something ordinary. That is the way the universe in a connectionist view of things works. One person doing just what they are supposed to do at the right time at the right place can stop most disasters. It is not always one person of course. Sometimes it takes a coincidence of several people to act to stop something, but the principle is quite similar. On the other hand, disasters do happen so how can we explain this? We explain this by a well understood phenomena in criminal justice. This is if you are one person who comes along and sees something wrong happening you are more likely to act. If you are in a group of people or the situation is amorphous and ill-defined it is less likely any single person will take responsibility. There are well documented cases of people being attacked in public and none of the witnesses interfering. In a more generalized fashion, in society if we believe it is someone else's job to take care of the matter we ourselves are less likely to act. When in a society no one acts or an insufficient number of crucially placed persons then things go bad. I didn't stop Bush all by myself, but by opposing him even though at the time my abilities were not adequate two things happened. One is that I found a way to become more powerful for next time. The other is that as Bush has weakened others who were afraid to take him on later found the opportunism or courage to face him. Bush is not defeated yet but he is on the retreat, as are all his major allies including Blair. I didn't do that all by myself, though I had a finger in the pie for quite a few of the schemes, but even though nobody else could see it the fact that I opposed him slowed Bush down and weakened him. Then others jumped on the opportunity to strike back at him. And I won't say it was all me even from my point of view. There were people who were kind to me. People who even though they didn't understand helped me out here and there as they could. Sometimes people who were just a bit more patient and tolerant with me making up my mind because they sensed I was preoccupied with something else. People just doing what they could in a very everyday sense and that allowed me to turn around and put the screws on Mr. Bush. Some of them even voted for him, which goes to prove that it is not by our intentional and logical actions but our holistic existence that we forge the future. (Comment on this)
1:41 pm	Why post this contemplation? Because it is relevant to a greater issue. The issue is if we have certain psychological processes such as depression why do they take so long to resolve? The answer always is inner resolution of issues. For instance in a depression before you can resolved a certain crucial branching or choice you may have to get toughened up to face some fear, etc. So the depression kicks you back into a cycle where you must repeatedly face some underlying issue until you find a way to resolve it or creatively get around it. The same way with my work-dillema. The nature of the mind is such that it only accepts "authenticity". I could simply say "yes" or "no" and it wouldn't mean anything. Inside there is a struggle about which course of action to take, a debate over pros and cons. Until that is resolved, it is futile to pretend I have either embraced the option or discarded it. You may be insincere with others but you cannot lie to yourself in the end. People try to fool themselves all the time to try to get out of the inner debate about what they really want. Is it a wonder that most people then become confused about what they want? And if you are confused about what you want, can you really make things fall into place normally, sorcerously, or miraculously and have it go well? Inner conflict and confusion like depression seem to be bad things. How can not knowing what you really want be a good thing? However what is worse is not knowing what you want but pretending even to yourself that you do. Sometimes people get stuck in a rut, they cannot seem to make up their minds. In these cases it is almost always the case that their confusion or inner conflict is kicking them back to a prerequisite issue. This is made blatantly clear if you perform a miracle but deep down are unsure. A lack of confidence will manifest in the miracule creating a situation that get's kicked back to a previous situation. Often in cases of "stubborn" or "resistant" miracles upon examination this is the case. For instance, I ask for paying work and the dreams kick me back to questions of servitude and mastery. You can't cheat destiny. I have to resolve this situation before I can move on. If I tried to push for a physical manifestation, it would resolve itself as a botched or uncontrolled miraculous output with the major inner tensions forming the polar divergences within the miracle. Trust me I've tried pushing an issue for outer resolution before the inner resolution is done and it can get ugly. Instead of feeling torn between alternatives imagine reality getting torn between alternatives. Now sometimes, once in a while, an outside crisis can emerge that temporarily takes the place of first priority. However this is only a temporary escape typically. Unless you happen to resolve your inner quandry during the temporary reprioritization you will get booted right back to facing the issue. If issues are taking a long time to resolve it is because typically an antecedant issue is not being resolved. In my current case, I have to admit it is because I don't like facing that deep down inside I like the idea of being someone's master. There is a hunger there that I am afraid of and horrified of. Yet without having fully faced it I cannot finally reject it and subliminate it into something else or embrace it. Right now I don't want to face the fact that deep down inside of my modern, egalitarian, and progressively libertarian self is a deep dark hunger that yearns for a retinue of servants. Not a terribly large one but nonetheless the desire is there. Some men fulfill this fantasy or desire by marrying their secretaries and to my chagrin I've dreamt of that too. The real question which I have not yet faced yet is this a wraith or is this a part of my character? If it is a part of my character, it is of my destiny, and I must accept it and move on trying to find a way to fulfill it while being honest and fair to others. If it is a wraith caused by earlier privation or trauma I must find the root of the yearning and address it. Until I do one or the other I will not be free to move on. Questions of what we want often devolve to questions of who we are. The order of the the questioning in Bablyon Five, one of my favored former TV series, is this: Who are you? What do you want? Do you have anything worth living for? This is a good series of questions to reflect back upon when struggling with questions of destiny. The feeling that one is living a life worth living is based upon an inner satisfaction that one is pursuing what one truly wants. What one truly wants is a question answered by addressing and resolving issues of who exactly you are and whether or not something is destined or conversely the result of some adandonment or deviation from destiny? The tools by which you answer these questions are the same as that which you have used before. To test yourself. To allow yourself to be tested by new experiences of consciousness as you explore yourself. To open yourself to perceive omens. To engage in activites expressing yourself. To seek to produce the miraculous so that you can see your own heart in the shapes of what you conjure to fall together of its own accord. To be willing to face one's inner dilemmas and to regard confusion, inner strife, or indeed depression as helpful mental states that attempt to guide you toward deep neglected inner issues and offer powerful problem-solving and innovative approach assistance. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
1:12 pm	Contemplations of labor Well if I admit it to myself deep down inside even as the dream of the queen with the lacquered super-long fingernails indicated I have no particular desire for menial or hands-on-labor. I am not even particularly thrilled about teaching again, not because I don't love teaching but because I hate being at the mercy of unpredictable and capricious employment decisions on a semester by semester basis. Happily would I teach again if say put on a yearly basis with at least three months notice if the contract is not renewed. On the other hand I have other talents, healing and otherwise which objectively I am far beyond confident that I can perform sufficiently at in order to derive pay. The only problem is that I don't know how to really charge people for these matters. Oh I've hunted criminals for some time on and off. I do have a predatory instinct and the challenge of finding 'my lawful prey' helps satisfy it in a socially benign manner. I then usually just anonmyously tip the police using a few coincidences and drop it in their lap. I am generally only attracted to cold cases because I feel what point is there in chasing cases where detectives have hot leads? However I have never charged for it and don't have the slightest clue about how to get started. Another option is to take servants. By servants I mean indebting certain of those whom I help or who come to me with requests. This is somewhat different than charging since the task involved is usually a life and then sometimes a life and then some. Ethically if I've saved a life I really don't have any qualms about taking a servant or several to see to my needs, but the difficulty lies in that a good servant is hard to find. Psychologically the profile isn't exactly common. It took me a while to adjust myself to the concept of being someone's "master" which was very hard for my egalitarian upbringing to swallow, but if I am saving someone's life plus some then I don't mind. I want to make absolutely clear that by "servants" I do NOT mean anybody here. This is a separate and particular arrangement. Save the life of a person or their family in exchange for old fashioned "ownership" rights about one step up from slavery if that negotiated openly and directly on a case by case basis. Not exactly the standard of enlightened progressive society that I once aspired to but basically what the dragon is pushing on me. Furthermore my arguments with myself on this regard have to do with the nature of chance and falling together and coincidences. My argument is that if this is the path that I am meant to take, then why doesn't something fall into place so as to make it easy? The reply is that psychologically I am undergoing changes to prepare myself. My argument back, is that I'm sicked and tired of waiting and so why doesn't it happen now? The argument of the dragon is that the other dreams have come true haven't they? Be patient. And so on and so forth. To the dragon's credit the vast majority of what it has shown me in visions, etc. has in fact come to pass and the rest is at least showing signs of "pending transition" with dreams and omens which in the past on other topics have successfully presaged eventual if slow success. For instance last night the dream was of the king and queen after my request again for paying work, and then the night before that I dreamt of a stray orange tabby cat that leaped a large canyon and came bouncing over to me and jumped up in my arms. Taking in a "stray cat" is one of the metaphors for taking in a servant. Also previous dreams of me inheriting a plantation. Plantations are notoroiusly worked by servants or slaves. Ironic. Of course Thomas Jefferson had his slaves even until the very end but I hardly considered myself to be on that track. Perhaps the psychological struggle is what is making this all very difficult for me to accept. Last night in a separate dream I dreamt of two horses, one saddled and ready to mount and one wild and free. They were jumping and leaping and chasing each other around. Sometimes they collided and sometimes they bit at each other. In my heart there is a great struggle. On one hand I know that to devote myself exclusively to being an elite if that is my fate then I must accept some kind of help and better a help that I felt I had paid for by saving a life or two than service taken for a lesser price. On the other hand, my upbringing revolts against the idea of servitude and slavery. It is easy to say "accept destiny" but what if destiny shows you an image again and again of what you have been conditioned to regard as abhorrent? I have dreamt of recieving a notice of property in the mail from a mailman and simply signing and accepting it. I have also had other dreams that indicated that this property is in fact human. There is no easy answer. If I refuse this, then the dragon will drop things in my lap that I will have to run off and take care. Such an unpredictable schedule would make even consulting work highly tenuous as a possible career. Consultants typically work more hours than salaried. Their supposed freelance nature consumed by having to find work to do without a specific employer to bankroll them. Writing isn't bad but again until you make the bigtime and often after that writing is a consuming career. If it seriously expects me to take off for a few months at a time then this is a quite logical solution. On the other hand, if I do do this for the rest of my life there will be questions about my character and behavior even if I am the kindest of masters. No easy choices I am afraid. Which is why I'm still struggling with the issue. (Comment on this)
12:37 pm	A Cacophony of Dreams I had a dream a while back. In this dream, I drove forward in a strange vehicle patched together of many parts from other vehicles. It looked like a vehicle made from multiple other vehicles, very Frankenstienian. In this vehicle I drove up to a giant with a crown who has made up of red hot sizzling metal. I struggled with him but in the process my vehicle was badly damaged so I retreated. I retreated into the mountains (many of my dreams now show me in the mountains) where I sat down and crossed my legs. There I meditated. As I meditated strange crackling green electricity began sparking and arcing around me. Down below the glowing red hot metallitic giant/tyrant came upon a man. This man was glowing brilliant white-blue like a comet flashing across the sky. The red hot giant who bore the crown picked up the glowing white-blue comet man and broke his back upon the giant's knee. This was terrible but I did not act. I waited and waited until I myself was ready despite the provocation. Then I stood up and came down from the mountain and then I kicked that giant's butt. The tyrant defeated was not destroyed and he fled overseas, where I began preparations to follow him. As much as I have desired to stop some of the bad things happening overseas, this dream showed me I have to fix things at home first. Furthermore it showed me that as much as I would have liked to defeated tyranny through my hybrid scientific and technological approach that ultimately while my ordinary writings can help me realize what course to pursue they cannot give me the strength to complete them. The solutions to the future are not difficult to grasp. It is the transformative will to smoothly implement the changes in society and to adopt them willingly that is lacking. Every technological advance needed to "save" the future and get mankind off of fossil fuels is here already, and the trump card fusion I already know the answer to but it cannot be implemented until the rest of the system has been transformed lest it reinforce already current bad patterns. Yet I must wait, I must wait until through brute force the enemies of liberty reveal themselves through seizing power by force. Only then revealed to all and brought out into the open can I play my own trump card. The world has only glimpsed a portion of the miracles I can deploy, from earthquake to hurricanes to mental influence to military organization to massive sandstorms to freak blizzards to the ability to pass unnoticed to lightning that can catch and throw planes from the sky to thoughts that can roam and set fires spontaneously at a distance unsupervised to being able to communicate with animals. It is my duty to await the proper time and develop these talents until the day they are needed. In the meantime, I have my own issues to struggle with. Last night I dreamt of being a king and dressed like an Elizabethan king and I was this time instead of preparing myself I was preparing someone else. I was helping them train and dress as swordsmen in armor and sorcerors or sorceroresses. Then my wife the queen came into view. She had the face of Jodie Foster and she wore the dress of Elizabeth the great. Her hands had long uncut lacquered fingernails, the oriental symbol of those who do no labor or work with their hands. She talked and gave orders and I helped buckle on armor and gave training hints. That was my answer to my request for work. Why is it refusing my request to help me get paying work? I think it is because it is trying to edge me, force me into living by magic. This is something I have been long able to do but long reluctant. My resistance was and is based on the idea I absorbed that every man should work for his income. However a long standing argument between me and the dragon, here shown as the queen motiff, is that it believes I ought to live by magic. By living by magic I mean the following. Yes I can alter "chance" events so as to win prizes and lotteries. Yes I can solve ancient riddles and maps and find lost treasures. Yes I can find missing persons and therefore collect rewards and bounties. Yes I can "read minds" or rather intentions of will and therefore negotiate and oversee negotiations. There are other means as well. However I have been trying to find a normal job or to find a talent like my interest in writing I can convert to money. The dragon wishes me to accept living by magic in some manner. This is the thrust of our present ... I shall not call it argument but present negotiation. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
12:01 am	Political Resolution So how did I resolve my quandry about political futility? I did so in three manners. First in becoming depressed regarding human obstinancy I eventually realized I could turn their glamour back on them. Certain principles are held true by each nation. For instance in the United States there is the principle of being true to the Constitution. In truth the United States has drifted far away from its original Constitution in many respects all the while swearing to be true to it. At first the gap of understanding was so great as to depress me, because even intelligent and educated persons did not perceive it. However after an appropriate depression I realize that I was looking at it the wrong. Because they all swore loyalty to the Constitution I could make suggestions based upon ideas that would restore the Constitution. This would immediately capture their loyalty. On the other hand, the lack of their own understanding of the Constitution would prevent them from contesting my ideas. In truth, even given strict adherence to the original Constitution there were many different possible formulations that could be employed. The very fact that none of them were thinking of this however, gave my ideas a certain compelling inevitability. My frustration was the result of a blind-spot. Once exposed this freed me to act. I had wanted change and Constitutionally consistent change. As long as I went to different persons asking for them to make this change for me I was frustrated. However the blindspot was that I was implicitly excluding myself. If I saw the truth of the matter and if the issues were that compelling why not articulate them myself? And that is a question of destiny and its acceptance. This so called frustration and resulting depression had ultimately arisen artificially from a rejection of my own destiny. My destiny had enabled and predisposed me in this historical moment to be the actor of influence to motivate such change and that was the reason why I saw it so clearly. However in attempting to artificially move my life in another direction because of short term gain considerations I had rejected that destiny inadvertantly and caused my own frustration. Secondly I realized that I was clinging to an illusion. It was my grand illusion that I could be normal and no different than the ordinary people around me. It was always a fiction of course because I felt free to ignore it act on the side when it was inconvenient. As a part of that self-imposed fiction I imagined myself governed and bound by the same rules of political and electoral and cultural process that bind the normal citizen and voter. It created immense suffering both for myself and for the citizens of the world as I attempted to work from the "bottom-up". After a while I began taking on more and more responsibilities and felt more and more resentful of the mismanagement that occured with impunity by world leaders. After a while I became depressed and to an extent indisposed and there was a crisis of confidence in my ability to continue living in this manner. However upon reflection I realized that once again my dilemma was artificial. It started when I realized that I could punish or chastise or bring to account world leaders in a manner that both internal mechanisms or international means. After doing that for a time, realizing that the only counterweight to abuse of political office in the most powerful nations were not laws or courts or armies or even common sense but myself I realized that I was already defacto ruler of the world. My frustration was in a sense completely illusory. For the sake of legitimacy and popular content I chose then to continue working for the most part within the old customs and internal mechanisms. However behind the scenes I made the deals, I enforced them, I chose winners and losers, I decided who lived or died, and I arranged for the chastisement and slow exquisite ruin step by step of those arrogant world rulers who had flaunted my determination of what was best. It was not a perfect relationship. Like a vassal to a feudal lord, they could misbehaive and if they did so I could see they were replaced by someone more compliant while an example was made of them. Not a perfect arrangement but one that has given me much peace of mind. For instance I could not prevent or perhaps more accurately did not rouse myself to prevent a hardliner populist but naive politician to become President of Iran. The moment he became too much of a threat, it was child's play to incite a little paranoia among his own camp in Parliment and now they have rejected thrice his cabinet nominations and he has become quickly seen as a naive lame duck. In a similar manner I cannot control free will in the Tory party elections but I engineered a distraction to save the candidacy of the candidate I favored (Cameron) and used a little misdirection and suggestion to cause some political gaffes by his opponent the former front runner Davis. It was in a similar manner to this that I sat down and did the impossible, working through all the combinatoric possibilities of different ministerial seats in the last general election in Britain to shave off Labor's lead in Parliment and subtley orchestrated enough internal party dissension to cause Tony Blair to lose his first Parlimentary vote despite the fact that just this past monday he wowed and produced what they called a bravura performance winning over his own MPs. Likewise in the States there was the Kaine vs. Kilgore contest I gave the victory to the Democrat Kaine. By giving the victory I do not mean here capitalizing on weakness. I for instance did not have anything to do with the loss of Arnold "The Governator"'s proposals on the ballot. He shot himself in the foot on that one, why should I expend my power when his defeat was already practically assured? But in the Virginia election the polls going in were close and in a State where just last year Bush won it on ten points Bush came and campaigned for Kilgore directly. Still I have a six point margin of victory to Kaine the Democratic candidate. So while I have no interest in backing losers, I am interefering not to ensure already confident victories but to go head to head against the strength of opponents. I still have much to learn, but what started as arm-twisting of the Turkish parliment to stop the invasion of Iraq through the northern route successfully became a bright idea ... hey why don't I switch to just muscling politicians and the law behind the scenes anyway instead of complaining about bad and unaccountible abuses? I was shown this in a dream, of waiting and waiting until an Emperor came to me... that was several years ago. I did not understand it, but I waited. Earlier this year I dreamt of escaping from a cave (and hence depression) and being given a fish on the beach and then walking down the beach and sitting as an emperor on a throne surrounded on all four sides by servants. I did not believe it but the answer my own psyche had given me in the depths of my depression was to simply accept a role as a ruler over rulers because while I did not comprehend it the ability to do so was already within my grasp and therefore my depression stemmed from a failure of imagination to grasp my own ability to end my own frustration over certain political events. For a while there I could not hardly pull out a Tarot deck without the emperor card falling out square in front of me. And by a while I mean months and years. How I puzzled over it, but in the end for all my speculation it was obvious. I needed to accept the imperial instinct within me. When I realized all of this, I realized I ought to call myself an imperial dragon because I do not feel as if I am truly a ruler over men but I do accept the notion that I can at times exert imperial-like influence and therefore the symbol of an imperial dragon is fitting because it designates an influence on mankind's government outside of the usual political order through subtle influences. And this I might add did not end all the problems of the world. It was merely a beginning, a new platform for me to move my agenda of a better more self-sufficient and more mature mankind. The important thing is that having accepted my destiny and having come to peace with it I can quietly do this work without any resentment or depression. However late in my life at least things have finally become as they should be, and it doesn't take much effort to engineer these changes, and if I have other issues to pursue then it is what I always desired anyway which is non-intrusive enough for me to also tackle fully the concerns of the normal life. When I went to sleep last night and when I go to sleep tonight my sleep was troubled by my concerns and they will be troubled by my concerns again but these concerns will not be of the world any more. There is still much more to be concerned about the world and much work left to do, but I am already smoothly doing my part, and so there is nothing more for me personally to worry about for the most part right? So I get to save my mental energy for other issues important to me. It is indeed a peaceful easy feeling. I am doing my part and therefore I should have a peaceful and carefree frame of mind. Leave work at the office I've always heard, and so now I can. When I tried to deny this responsibility, then it worried and obsessed me. Now that I've accepted it, it's become not a burden but a mere minor chore easily dispatched. Ironic? Such is the paradox of destiny. We attempt to evade it and it consumes our lives, we accept it and it becomes a mere perfunctory task that leaves us the free time we actually sought by evading destiny. I think this mistake is made by myself and others because we tend to view destiny in the same paradigm as social duty, and social duty is quite time consuming which is why people make such tasks duties because otherwise few would agree to complete them. But destiny is not like duty at all. On the contrary, agreeing and cooperating with it makes it infinitely agreeable. It is not as if there are no hard tasks associated with it but these are in general surprisingly pleasant, scheduled better than I could have hoped for, and shockingly dispatched with ease for the most part. This is the greatest illusion that people like myself originally mistake about destiny. If destiny is something you were born to do, why shouldn't it be easy? Is that not the nature of that which we seek? We seek that which is natural, spontaneous, and falls into place of its own accord. Likewise when we agree to our destiny it becomes easier and easier, because it is ourselves that is doing the falling naturally into place of our own accords. This interestingly is reflected in the myths. Those who follow destiny not only accomplish miraculous tasks but accomplish them with increasing ease. This is contrary to our and previously my own imagination of how tasks should be accomplished. Should not great tasks be accomplished with great difficulty? So I too thought. So for many years I wasted my time laboring to find a difficult hard to grasp answer. All along it was simplicity itself, and I had been making everything too hard. I had a dream like this. In this dream I was charged with helping grow up many children who were unruly and unmanageable. However in the dream, it was nothing I said or any belief I held or any program I implemented but me simply being myself that quieted them and made them kind and endearingly cooperative. Then I was supposed to help them find what they were to do. They had great imagination and one dressed up as a firefighter and I saw a girl dressed as the statue of liberty. Once again I gathered them around and once again I focused not on dividing them by categories and functions but embraced each child for what they already quintessentially were. Sometimes there is a sentiment that we must accomplish some task yet in the future. Sometimes the drive to do urges us to try again from time to time. If there is a gap between what we can presently accomplish and the drive of what we are to accomplish one day then we must simply accept that it is not yet our time. In accepting it is not yet our time we then must turn and work with what we are, with our destinies, and work with developing the narrative of our lives out of spontaneous events that emerge from the complexity around us. If that instinct of what we must yet accomplish is correct, then we will get there at some point. Once there was a young kung fu student who left his family and begged to be taken as a student by an old Shaolin monk who lived by a river. So the old Shaolin set the young student to doing chores and his only teaching was to have the student fill up the water buckets from the river and empty them into this large cauldron. Then the old Shaolin would have the young student strike the water in the cauldron over and over again until he splashed the water all out and then had him fill up the cauldron from the river with buckets and start all over again. After a year of this the old Shaolin master released his young student to return home to celebrate the Lunar New Year with his family. When the young monk came home of course all his relatives asked him what he had learned and to demonstrate it for them because they were quite eager and interested to know. At first the young monk put them off with excuses or mysterious sounding words. However one night at dinner, when asked again he lost his temper in frustration and said that all the old man has taught me is this! So he brought his palm down on the dinner table in one short swift motion just like he had practiced for a year. The heavy wooden table more like log trestles like our outside picnic tables immediately shattered into many pieces from that single blow and everyone was silent as they were amazed. They were greatly impressed by the teachings of the Shaolin. This is one of the old stories of the kung fu legends of the orient. The interesting thing is that it isn't a metaphor. I tried it out and it works, it teaches you the "lost" secret of the soft-strike. The lesson is that there are no short cuts but if you apply yourself and let yourself be aware of your becoming and your interaction with the world that you can learn to accomplish great things. You can even accomplish things you think are impossible one bucketful of river water at a time. Now just think, this is merely sorcery i.e. repetition. What could you do with a spontaneous miracle? I have made the earth itself shake, the whole earth. That is the essence of what we seek here. You are at the beginning. Do not despair. Even as I could not even concieve of myself disposing of the fate of world leaders in an imperial manner but grew into it so too your impossible dreams if they are of your destiny will come true in their own time. The only thing that furthers is to become more spontanoues and more aware of the potential for the miraculous in every moment and then one moment at a time you will get there. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 9th, 2005
4:11 pm	Prozac nation So let us examine briefly the concept of anti-depressants. Notoriously Tom Cruise bashed anti-depressants with Matt Lauer and had a public spat with Brooke Shields and post-partum depression. First of all, post-partum depression is a serious problem. Sometimes it is something out of controls. However many of these depressions have roots in unacknowledged disatisfactions. Maybe having a kid wasn't the solution that the woman thought it would be. Maybe her husband didn't love her like she thought he would. There's a reason why about half of marriages end in divorce in America. The reason is that the people are not mature or ready to handle the practical problems of marriage and more importantly realize that maybe they made a mistake. People decieve to get into relationships. This is common. Divorce is often a result of realizing that hey this isn't all I thought it would be. Post-partum depression is like that except that you're stuck. The woman has just given birth to a child tying her fate to this man, whom she may have realized that she just made a terrible mistake in her life. Well that would depress me too. Anti-depressants therefore are helpful for people who have gotten stuck in situations where they feel they just can't get out of their "lives of quiet desperation". The man who realizes he married the wrong wife and feels alienated from his kids but can't stop working at the job he hates because otherwise everything would fall apart well that guy put him on anti-depressants. The same for the woman who just screwed up her life by having a child with the wrong man, not because she was forced but because she had the wrong idea of where to find love and happiness. Put her an anti-depressants as well so she just don't freak out and ruin her own life and her child's life. However these situations of compassion aside, there is something somewhat sinister about a "prozac nation". If great art or great innovation or great music (like the "blues") comes from suffering through depression, then under the guise of kindness are we trapping people in bad situations by not letting them get depressed? Maybe you're supposed to be depressed. If you don't know why, maybe that depression more often than not is trying to get you realize something you've not been paying attention to. If you do know why but feel stuck or trapped, maybe your depression is trying to point you toward a different way of handling it. Maybe depression is a good thing as long as it doesn't destroy you. Maybe what is needed is a way of helping people not be destroyed by their depressions so that they can work through their issues. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
2:51 pm	A Chaos of Psychiatry All in all all of my experiences in "telepathy" (which doesn't exist per se, just a collection of various miracles and sorceries in a loosely related category which a lay person would mistake for a single category, much like "love" is mistaken as a single universal emotion but in truth every love is a unique thing sometimes for the uglier and sometimes for the better) taught me that while I could learn many cool and occasionally useful trivia from science that the mind was not organized like how psychologists thought it was. Oh sure, if you talk about short-term memory it's true that the average person has 6-9 items in their short term memory. My number is seven. I regularly have seven short term memory slots that I can readily handle. Yet this fact is not very inspiring, or insightful. Because in the back of my head I have dozens of different processing tracks and can make that seven bit short term memory scale produce octaves (which are a repeat seven unit of musical scaling) and produce a symphony of complexities or handle a symphony with all its simultaneous diverse instruments simultaneously. These are however two parts of the brain that "aren't supposed" to be connected - music which is capable of processing or handling immense complexity using a simple seven tone repeating octave scale and short term memory. To me it is like I am listening or deciphering symphonies all day long. The same thing about my most recent riff on depression. With a family history of depression and being depressed clinically for extended portions of my life, like several years at a time, I've come to the realization that depression is probably the most healthy emotion you can possibly have. Think of it. Life is unfair. Life sucks. However the brain has an inbuilt mechanism for not only forcing you to face that life sucks, but to helping you find practical solutions to it. I am awed by depression. It has such a stature that if I did not acknowledge emergent spontaneous complexity I would say it is a gift from God to mankind. Every good thing in my life at this point has come out of a depression. And it isn't just me. As I was investigating depression over the years, I learned a lot. For instance humor I learned was mostly a product of timing and cognitive dissonance or incongruity. Science and logic told me that. However it didn't tell me how to be funny. It was true but trivial, like noting men liked sex. True but doesn't help you get laid if you're a man. So I spent some time listening to video footage of various comics talking about their work. What I learned is that humor comes from depression. This is why some of the best comics look pretty funky or weird. Not a whole lot of pretty and beautiful comics that are very successful. Even Bob Hope with his nose kinda looked stranged. Why was this? Well it turns out that humor comes from depression. These strange looking people had intelligence and a desire for social acceptance. So they became depressed. Out of their depression came innovation and ingenuity in social expression. This became humor. Humor is created often by ugly people looking for a way to please others so that they can get acceptance and attention. That's why a lot of beautiful people don't have as good a sense of humor, they can get by on their looks alone. This is also why "ugly ducklings" often have the best of both worlds. They grow up feeling awkward so they get a sense of humor, then they start looking pretty but their body image is set already so they don't think they're pretty so they don't get a swelled head. The end result is a funny gorgeous looking person who isn't vain. However the process of producing such an "ugly duckling to swan" transformation is tough psychologically. And there is something else going on that you should notice. Somehow this children's fairy tale about "the ugly duckling" can tell you more about humor, vanity, and how they operate in people than years of formal study of narcissism. Not that science is wrong, just often trivial. The same goes for other means of expression. Do you know where good art comes from? Depression. Depression, genius, and great art have often been linked. Picasso was an incredibly ugly little man. He was also a misogynistic woman-beater who was a womanizer. But women still flocked to him, and beautiful women. Why/ His intensity and his creativity. He became a genius in that case to support his ego and his rages were often about his temporary struggles with depression before new breakthroughs. The power of Picasso is simple as was his genius in art. He could expression emotion in his paintings without using true to life forms. Sometimes people look at picasso and they don't understand why his cubist paintings were so great. Well do you enjoy Looney toons? Do you enjoy political satire? Do you enjoy cartoon strips? How often do the images in their look photo-realistic? Mostly they are distorted purposely, to increase emotional, social, and aesthetic communication. However there was a great gap between high art and cartoons, etc. Picasso could draw portraits beautifully. But that had already been done. His great genius was in being able to express the principle of cariacture into communicating emotions at a sufficiently high level of skill that it could be accepted into high art. When you look at Picasso's painting and you say, well that doesn't look like anything then you are failing a Turing Test. Just as the power of Van Gogh's impressionism was not to convey image but to convey texture and color so too Picasso's work in cubist cariacture was to convey complex emotional and social truths without them being reducible to simple symbolic logic reductionisms. One of the most moving paintings of massacre and the injustice of war is one of Picasso's cubist paintings of a town's destruction. Other more realistic painters managed to capture a scene or two of injustice in their paintings but Picasso was able to paint in one picture the tragedy of an entire town convincingly. Speaking of Van Gogh that guy as pretty depressed too. And here in is the danger. Van Gogh killed himself just before he became successful. Well he had plenty of reason to be depressed. His brother was supporting him completely. He was spurned by the woman he loved. He'd lost an ear cutting it off and sending it to her. He slept with a prostitute and got a veneral disease. His work was unrecognized. Yet if he could have survived the last depression he would have had money, honor, recognition, the means to cure his illness, and women aplenty. Depression is like a gift from the gods but also like all such gifts a double edged or dangerous to use gift. Great humor, great love, great truth, great success, great problem solving, great art all come from depression. Depression and despondency comes from a disatisfaction or failure for the straightforward or "full frontal assault" on life's problems to work. Jung used to write that the way is not back but through, and one of his clients wrote about her falling into a pit and then her seeing Jung who promptly eagerly pushed her farther in. I have dreamt many times of falling through ice or from a ship into water and sinking deep down into the depths and then a harsh voice asks me, ask magic to help you! At first I was angry but only much later I realized it was trying to help me. It was saying the only place I could find the magic was deep down there when I felt like I was holding my breath and on the verge of drowning and the surface seemed impossibly far away. Let me tell you the story of Pandora. She was made to be the first wife of man. However she was told never to go into a cave and open a box. Being curious she did. She went down there and opened a box. Out from the box came all the horrors and evils of the world. So she slammed it shut. However a voice from inside the box begged to be let out. So she did, trembling. The last thing left in the box was hope, and so that is how hope came to live in the world - released from a box of horrors in a deep dark cave. That cave is a literal reading for the word "depression" which means after all a low spot or pushed down area. If you can face the horrors of depression deep down inside as the very last thing you will find is the new hope you need to keep on going. Let me tell you a tale of Psyche the wife of Cupid who is also named Eros or love. Psyche had never seen her husband Cupid, because he always came to her in the dark of night. So egged on by her sisters she one night lit a lamp and beheld a beautiful man-youth with wings as the true form of Eros. Amazed Psyche leaned down to kiss Eros but she slipped and spilled her hot oil on him and burned him terribly. Waking up he shouted for his mother and his mother Venus or Aprodhite swept him up to heaven. After this Psyche which is the greek word for soul or mind wandered in desolation alone and yes depressed. One version of the story ends there. The other version of the story has her eventually coming to Mount Olympus and begging Venus for a chance to win back Eros. Venus had healed her son but did not want him hurt again, so she set some terrible tests for Psyche. Venus punished Psyche and set her tests and one by one Psyche passed them all. Eventually Psyche succeeded in the last test by going down into the terrifying abyss of the underworld and passing the guardian Cerebrus by bribing him she found there a box filled with supernatural beauty and Psyche ascending gave the box to Venus who opened it and used it to restore Eros to his former glory and the couple was reunited by a decree of the gods. In the bottom of the abyss of depression is a box of supernatural beauty, the symbol of the humor, the ingenuity, the genius, the artistic innovation, the "window" that is opened when a "door closes" but it is hidden in the bottom of an abyss of disappointment and depression. So what do these images of tests and guardians mean? In a depression there are temptations. Temptations to abandon people who love you. Temptations to strike out. Temptations to commit suicide and to perform self-destructive acts. Temptations to succumb to olivion and give in and lay down and shut the world out. If you can pass through all of these and just accept your position, can accept your failure, and just be aware then something odd happens. At the bottom of that depression you open your eyes to your surroundings and stop trying to force things and then seemingly by accident or coincidence through just paying attention you find a god, or an answer unlooked for, or a different way of looking at things that makes you whole again and moreover let's you overcome the obstacle you got stuck at previously but not through brute force but through figuring a different way to tackle the problem or reach the end goal. Then it's like a light is turned on in the darkness, it is like being released from a prison, it is hard to describe how difficulties dissolve so easily. Murphy's law of depressions, the great breakthrough you are looking for is lying unsuspected at the bottom of the deepest darkest depression you can't seem to get out of. (Comment on this)
1:58 pm	The Chaos of Depression Like you say Nick's avoidance of destiny results in his health problems, mine manifests in foul moods and depression. And I've got a decade or so of knowingly sublimating destiny impulses to make up for! I have an idea of what (at least part of) the problem might be, the good news being that some omens helped lead me to the realization (or more precisely that I noticed them), and the bad news being that it's the same damn problem yet again! Just like the way I challenged your characterization of people in New Orleans, I've always had an excuse for myself that I would do wonderful things to change the world just as soon as I could do magic, that the security I'd need when I went up against "the system" would come from being able to do impossible miracles. When you said that you change as soon as you start to walk this path, you were right. I think that now, my spirit is pushing me to fix things faster than my ability to do the magic is keeping up. So while I feel like the higher facets of myself are growing, I feel less secure and safe, and as you know, that breaks all the Maslow's hierarchy of needs rules. Like trying to build a pyramid upside down. Of course, there are things I can do that won't make me a fugitive, but the specific thing that pushed me this time was an omen I got from a book I bought. It had quotes from Henry David Thoreau in it, and although the topic was about nature and not politics, when I saw the quotes the message I got was "You're a fucking hypocrite! How can you say you admire Thoreau when you just signed a check to pay your taxes and support a war you hate?" Which is a good question, but doesn't answer my anxieties about avoiding audit or the other bigger problems that can come from not paying taxes after having a paper trail history of having done so. It is true, magic as a remote application of causal force does not solve all your problems. However the more general principle of evolving through incorporated spontaeous emergence and responding with creativity of thought and action does solve problems. Part of the difficulty in our lives comes as a tension between the two. Sometimes you do need a miracle to bail you out or advance an agenda. Sometimes you just need to figure it out the old fashioned way because a miracle won't really change what is wrong underneath. When I started out I want you to know that I fiercely opposed the idea of being down and out and simply accepting a "cop out". I did not want to accept a choice that merely was me learning to accept what I thought I could not change. So I let myself become depressed for several years. I refused to admit defeat and I refused to accept what I considered anything that even smacked of accepting that I should accept some screw up or screw off of destiny. Why should I accept the injustice done to me by destiny? So I drifted, working on my projects and ideas, but settled slowly in month after month and year after year of blacker and blacker and more hopeless depression after more hopeless depression after failure after failure. These were not failures of method in the sense that I got no results. They were failures of satisfaction as I could never seem to get results that pleased me and justified by original aims. It seemed destiny was my enemy and the harder I pursued it the more it mocked and punished me. However I was stubborn and so I perservered. And I resolved to be unbending and uncompromising in seeking the objectives of my goals. I let the black depression weigh on me and close the light from my eyes but I continued working in the darkness. I refused to give up even though failure beset me everywhere. Then somewhere in the deep pitch black isolation of my depression I realized that I had let myself shut down. I realized that I had stopped really engaging with the world, ceased even being aware of it. So I opened up my eyes again. At first nothing was different, but I had reached such a stage of despair that I could watch with equanimity. I merely watched without hope. It was frankly one of the best ideas I ever had had. Then a strange series of things happened. The ideas I had been working on for so many years tediously, I realized that a small reorganization could make them all fit together. It was that time that I finally began to understand what I had been seeking after so long in magick. I allowed myself to see Nick clearly, and I realized he would never change and I let go. It was a depressing moment, but because I did not let myself close myself from the world I saw your writing Scruff challenging me and I saw the ridiculous fearful looking image of the animal next to you and without even really considering it offered to share my knowledge with you. The next thing I knew Dan had invited himself in and I being rather still hopeless from my perspective of his past silliness let myself respond to him. The next thing you know you both started reacting favorably to my suggestions and the new presentation I was making up as I was going along and I finally realized the dream that I had recieved so many years ago as a crucial step in my own destiny. On my other writing and political efforts, after opposing the Bush Administration which I put into power semi-accidentally for many years and seeing the exposure of all the flaws and the short comings of the American people I had become seriously depressed. It was not just with the Republicans but with the stupid fratricidal internal politics of the Democrats and the cluelessness of the socalled independents as well. I pretty much gave up. As I was floating there in my despondency however I let myself look around and suddenly I began putting together clues I had been ignoring. In that moment I began realizing the necessary banking policies, the constitutional changes, the social changes that needed to be made if we were to survive in something more than a dark age. I was granted insight into the highest levels of economics and the dyanmics of sociopolitics and I became sure that what I was envisioning was not just the best choice but the only choice to avoid a dark age or to end one and so were as inevitable in some form as the railroad and gunpowder were inevitable given a certain set of conditions and competitive pressure. Likewise when I allowed myself to become deeply depressed and despondent and simply let myself pay attention I began making small changes in my diet and lifestyle which were not logical at all and suddenly after a time I just started noticing that women, and women attractive to me, were going out of their way to talk to me. Then the same happened in my work, I became deeply depressed with what I had been doing and I let myself be depressed and suddenly for the first time in my life I had an innovative and creative gestalt that led me to the genesis of a new compelling fiction idea and a greater understanding of story telling in general. This led to omens and to feedback which ever since have been consolidating and elaborating on my newfound interest and skills in fiction and creative writing. In short, what I discovered is that depression is your friend. What you think is important, frustration in that area makes you despondent. So you drift and eventually settle in some deeply dark location. However if you rouse yourself to simply pay attention, you find that your depression has brought you to some place special. It is because there is something there behind you or in your periphial vision that when you thought you were paying attention to what you thought was so important you were neglecting something else. Then if you pay attention you suddenly realize that your fixation on what you thought was important was blinding you to another alternative, another way to get around the problem. The reason why we stay in depression is that our minds are trying to force us to face the futility of a full frontal assault. However when we let go and let ourselves simply float in the darkness of our mood we drift to a mental perspective and vantage which allows us to see another way to get around the problem. As soon as we let go of our fixation on what we think the solution ought to be and simply pay attention, simply don't let the despondency shut us down, then it's like a light goes on. In the darkness, there is a sadness and in the sadness you learn to give up and when you learn to give up without giving in then you open your mind and you can see a way to get around the difficulty. It's like the old saying, when God closes a door he opens a window. Depression is sitting in front of that door until we accept the futility that we are just not going to get through directly. Then we have a few choices. We can do something self-destructive. We can lash out. Or we can just open our eyes. If we open our eyes we can see there is an alternative way of approaching things that dissolves the conundrum. It is satisfying. It is so satisfying it is like a light switch being flipped on in the darkness. In a very short period of time all your fear and frustration and sadness becomes dissolved into a clarity of perception and a peace and an acceptance. Poof, depression gone. Just like that. Sometimes magic is simply getting up and facing in the right direction and moving forward. In this case it is the insight to know that there is a difference between being depressed over the values you want to pursue and the fixation on the solution path which you thought was the way to do things. Once you realize there is a satisfying and organic and alternative way to fulfill your values your depression at the failed solution dissolves. The problem is that people are not allowed or told that grieving is natural in modern culture. If you are depressed too long, psychiatrists just give you a pill. They don't ask, okay what is important to you? And then simply let you grieve and express your greviences. And then when that steam runs out they don't ask, so if the door is closed is there another way to look at the problem? This is not giving in. Giving up and giving in are two different things. The former says I have failed. The later says I have not just failed I have given up trying anything. If you are not broken by your experiences, then often you can change your mind not to accept futility but to realize "there is more than one way to skin a cat". This transformative insight and problem solving is short circuited if we do not accept the fullness and meaningfulness of depression as an authentic and normal state of mind. If I had not failed and I had not become depressed and I had not chosen to not give in even though I gave up on specific solution types then I would have never found out the right answer in the end. Depression is our mind's way of saying something is failed, sit back until you get perspective and then you will see another way to get around the issue. (Comment on this)
1:10 pm	Political Chaos In my own opinion there is nothing so much useless as the political and the revolutionary. Remember Dostoevsky wrote, everybody wants to change the world, but nobody thinks about changing himself. There are have been many revolutions and revolutions upon revolutions and really what did they change? Changes happened, but was it because of revolution? As the Russians have a saying, meet the new boss he's the same as the old boss. Is Putin that much different from a Czar? Tell me Paris and France just burned every night for two weeks rioting over economic and employment issues. These are scenes that Dickens and Hugo could have recognized. Matters have changed but it was not because of Revolution. When Corday sacrificed herself to "stop" Marat, she stopped nothing and one man's death did not stop the Reign of Terror at all. It was very romantic and it was noble, and it meant nothing. When Napoleon died only at the last did he grasp it. He said, that at the end he realized that the people of France had wanted him to be their George Washington. The American adventure got off to a rough start as well. First there was the articles of the Confederacy and then the Constitution of 1787 the issues of slavery always troubled the Union always simmering just underneath its surface and distorted the very expansion of the nation. If you want you can view political writings at the location of www dot bopnews dot com and search under the author "oldman". However there is a brilliant man who writes there separate from this, one of the editors. Yet he too is doomed by nemesis. The reason why is simple. He is an editor, composes music, is a successful business world person but when challenged in comments he is rude and more than rude he bans people arbitrarily from the sight. He writes of love of liberty and democracy and free speech but he cannot act with transparency and I have been forced to question his actions several times. Now if a man like this were to achieve his dream, and every time he has come near to great political power he has lost his presence of mind and become factionalized and driven old friend away, if he were to achieve his dream of power and great influence it would destroy him. To be fair sometimes when I have discretely or publicly questioned him he has rescinded his acts, but if a man such as this cannot act with nobility and consistentcy being the editor of a web-page publication then how could he be trusted in matters of office? And this is not to condemn him, for the officials elected of often even less stable categories. Just as Arnold was politically destroyed by his own hubris and nemesis alienating others and over-reaching in California. Remember Lord Acton's warning, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is for this reason I have suffered terror, testing whether I would strike I would hold my hand from striking under terrible provocation. Political and social consciousness is noble and it is deadly. People turning on one another, backstabbing each other, betraying old friends for new prestige, in fear of others conspiring against you, conspiring for power with others, the temptations of lying and hypocrisy, the temptations of radicalisms and ideology and money. Frankly if you are not very well prepared you will be blown off course and destroyed. There are no short cuts. Until you have faced the temptation of ugliness in your own heart in a local election, how can you bear the pressure of the stakes for a metropolitan or state election? And whether or not you lose or win the election you will lose the thread of destiny in your own heart if you chose wrongly. Can you learn to see the machinations of betrayal in the pauses of someone's voice, can you learn to apply policies that were not what you thought were right but what you found to work? If this is your future, you will find your way. But be warned, the words of authors are often in politics as in magic self-congratulatory lies. There is no more honesty in Adam Smith, Ricardo, Rousseau, Thoreau, then there is in you. Rousseau after all spawned Robespierre the terror of France and the guillotine. Jefferson himself in private ranted of the need to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants. There is good in these men and there are also the seeds of their own self-destruction. Self-destruction they avoided by good luck and by restraining themselves to destiny, to only attempting what they had built themselves up gradually to be able to handle. Some of their most earnest desires if established outright would have destroyed them, and their regret at not having achieved more in their lives was often a false sentiment for if they had tried more than they were able they would have brought themselves down. When we study magic we see the clumsiness and opaqueness of antinquated metaphysical ideas and we puzzle over them and if through insight we grasp the heart of what they were working for we can see how their own prejudices kept from achieving their own goals. It is no different in politics. The vast majority of ideas are logical shit. Those that are logical, most of them will never work. Of those which will work in any manner, the ones implemented are almost always the unenlightened and crude ones. There are no short cuts in life and there is no substitution for the development of consciousness step by step strange tangential turning by strange tangential turning like a maze or a labyrinth. Not all your feelings are good. Remember when I sat in the resteraunt my eye first fell upon the shepard's pie. This was what I eventually ordered. It was just right for my budget, just right for my apetite, and just right for my diet. It was completely natural. Yet before I ordered it I logically considered all the other entrees on the menu. I wanted in some cases the larger dishes which I could not have finished. Sometimes I wanted the smaller dishes because they sounded good, but they would have left me hungry. In the end I was forced to admit my logical reasoning could come up with no better choice than my first impression and so chose that in the end and discovered what an excellent choice it was subjectively. However I was lucky. All my years in training in logic and reason and familiarity with food choices and at least I came up with no worse a choice than what the moment inspired me to. It is humbling but the logical consciousness in the great scheme of things is limited to small tasks like reading the menu and making the order and providing the means to communicate for the dinner conversation. That was all symbolic logic was good for in that situation. But at least I was not misled, at least I did not let my reason persuade me to make a worse choice! Let me contrast my old boss. When we were driving there he suggested the pub where we then ate, but he complained that the food there had disappointed him on several occasions. This is an experienced man of great mathematical training and experience with fine food and eating. Well I replied to him we could eat there if he wanted, but if he had several disappointing experiences I suggested we go elsewhere. He said that well at least he could enjoy the lamb stew. Then when we were at the resteraunt he ordered a bowl of chowder and I suppose that was satisfactory. Then he ordered his lamb stew and he complained through the dinner that they had clearly changed the recipe so it was less tasty now. I commiserated with him. He then stopped the waitress and asked how much smoked salmon was on their smoked salmon pizza and she replied with a gesture and some words that later proved completely misleading. So he ordered his smoked salmon pizza and when it came to him he complained to the waitress that the bits of smoked-salmon were almost unrecognizably tiny flakes. She simply shrugged. So he ended up spending all that money on a completely disatisfying meal and all his experience and logical skills in communication and elsewise would not help him. Furthermore it is not merely a matter of ordering out when dining. Previously he had wanted to buy a Honda so I let him test drive mine. Then I suggested that he test drive a new V-6 2006 model, so I showed him where the Honda dealer was. Once there he had a good time test driving their new cars, but I noticed that the dealer salesman was pressuring him for a purchase and so though he was falling for it I suggested we move on. My old boss had almost become convinced to take a purchase of one of the local cars even though he had a brother willing to factory order one for him and the dealer salesman could not offer him the options he wanted on the car. I had to convince my old boss, who is picky and would have regretted his choice, not to be talked into an impulsive buy through the smooth talking and conveniently biased logic of the dealer salesman who I caught out a few times not mentioning alternatives to my old boss. One of them was that the dealer refused to admit there were any alternatives at all to the cars on the lot. I pointed out that did not Honda produce a luxury line? Upon this he admitted that there indeed was the Accura line that was slightly more expensive but similar but with more options. The reason why the dealer salesman had not mentioned them is that they did not sell Accura's on that dealer lot and therefore he would have missed out on a sale! Logic even when it does work is often slanted conveniently toward the interests of the speaker, and as rubric logic often leads men to walk off ledges unsuspecting because their logic neglected some crucial factor. Furthermore the activities of the trans-symbolic consciousness are often mercilessly ruthless and Darwinian. Have you ever investigated the politics of high school? It get's worse than that as people get older! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
4:19 am	Not so nice omens I just got up after having a bad dream, one about something in bad waters off a reef and stumbling away from the waters and fearing this strange appendage stretching out after the rear right hand flank of my body. I woke up then then just about jumped out of bed when a blanket brushed up against the back right side of my kidney region by my ribcage. Jeez that was awful. That on top of a swarming group of undead heads and arms falling toward my back and one of them grabbing me on the side back there. Then I woke up and got online and was wondering why on earth was going on when I immediately ran into this news article for a TV show: Here we are three weeks later - and indeed, someone is going to die on tonight's "Lost." That the ABC promotions department alerted viewers to that plot twist last month was meant to create excitement for the episode, which is the first "Lost" during the November ratings sweeps period. But among a certain segment of frenzied fans, the information was not new at all. From its debut, in September 2004, "Lost" has inspired a devoted base of followers who pore over every episode searching for answers to the show's many mysteries... That bodes ill for keeping future deaths a secret. "Lost," with its large cast and ominous premise, will continue to eliminate characters as the series progresses. Mr. Cuse said, "We do feel like to make the life-and-death stakes on the show really play, we do need to kill characters periodically." And the hard-core fans can be a bloodthirsty lot. Mr. Lindelof said, "Already on the boards now that it's out there that we're killing a character, they want to know: who's next?" It was an article about a popular TV show not being able to keep secret the name of a character who is about to die. So namely once again my peace and quiet is being disturbed by premonitions of someone about to die. Unlike previously I have done everything possible to prevent this death from every conceivable angle that I could possibly interpret the omens. If there was something more I could do to prevent this death I would. Waking up with this kind of knowledge isn't fun and all I can say is I hope it is who I think it is or it's going to get even uglier for me having to deal with this. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 8th, 2005
11:13 pm	Nemesis: Truth Stranger Than Fiction You literally can't make this kind of stuff up. I've been following this case ever since the original incident. Nov 8, 2005 — By Eileen Nimm HAYWARD, Wisconsin (Reuters) - A Hmong immigrant convicted of killing six hunters was sentenced on Tuesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole. "These were six horrific crimes," Sawyer County Judge Norman Yackel told the same courtroom where a jury found Chia Soua Vang, 37, guilty in September. Vang opened fire last November after being confronted by deer hunters who threatened him for trespassing on private land near Rice Lake in Wisconsin's North Woods. Vang chased down some unarmed victims and shot them in the back. Vang, who emigrated from his native Laos as a child and joined Minnesota's large Hmong ethnic group, was given six life sentences and will never be paroled, the judge said. "Mr. Vang has a history of anger, violent anti-social conduct and his low moral character shows that he is unable to be rehabilitated," Yackel said. "The method he used to kill his victims was unspeakable and brutal. He even executed them when they were crying out for help," he added. Vang first lied to investigators about who did the shooting, then claimed he was fired at first as he tried to leave and shot those who tried to flee because he thought they were going for their guns. One of the victims was Jessica Willers, whose fianc?raig Schuh told the courtroom the couple had planned a July wedding and had bought a house together. "We had hope for a future that was taken away," Schuh said. Vang, appearing much less animated than his shouted trial testimony, said: "My life is over. But all of you out there still have your life and I hope everyone learns something from this tragedy, to live in peace with one another." Vang, a truck driver who won respect in his St. Paul community for taking on the role of a shaman, told psychologists before his trial that an evil shaman had entered his head. He also related visions of running other drivers off the road. The murders underlined frictions between native hunters and the Hmong, who were avid hunters in their Southeast Asian homeland and were enlisted by the United States to fight the Vietnamese during the war. "I hope this doesn't turn into a racial issue," said Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, who helped prosecute the case. "I hope that life will get back to normal in the North Woods." Incidents like these are one reason why there are a lot of classical warnings about getting involved with magick. There is some basis for the caution. If you are a normal person a lot of your energy goes into preventing your neurosis from getting out of control and becoming wraiths. I am not suggesting here the there was not an enemy shaman involved. There might well be but the point is that the enemy shaman could not have exploited the otherwise non-homocidal anger combined with hunting skills that this man possessed unless there was an internal flaw already that could be so readily exploited. It is my sense though that this wasn't a bad man that it took relatively little to set him off because he was wound tight ... a mere illusion of an attack in a mind unprepared to discern truth from glamour - another turing test - and you can incite such an incident easily. Earlier testimony established without a doubt that the other hunters, about eight of them, confronted this man on their property. Everyone agrees that the other hunters were perhaps assertive in their demeanour toward the unsuspecting trespasser and quite possibly confrontational. After that everyone agrees the encounter spiraled out of control though we are unable to determine if as the defendent asserted that he retreated and was shot at first (possibly a warning or harassing shot) or if he simply went bezerk feeling insulted after the initial encounter. What no one is discussing is how one guy outnumbered by eight to one defeated his armed opponents without getting wounded and killing six of them. I'm not justifying his actions, merely noting that even in the horror of it all there was an efficacy there that was unusual. The point is that the gains in ability, we could call this Aspect here, have to be balanced by psychological development and maturation or at the very least an instability that creates a vulnerability to outside influence much less a conceivable internal collapse can occur. The outward dangers of magical training in the images of stories whether embodied... *Hmmm strange, just as I was getting a little freaked out thinking about how close I've come in my own tests to losing it a howling howling wind just picked up and started blowing around the curtains seriously even though the window was just open a crack. That's never happened before under any circumstances. This was some wind, as I calmed myself down though it seems to have backed off to merely a howling wind. Must remember this state of mind and associate it with sudden wind pickup. Also remember a similar heavy wind sudden pickup at the graveyard a few visits back when I let myself feel a bit of the spookiness of the place. Freaked out = pump up the wind factor? Must continue investigating this.* ... are really reflective of the inner struggles and trials dealing with long term imbalances and growth challenges within the unconscious spectrum of the psyche. (Comment on this)