• BLOG

    Tribes for the Future, A Pagan Perspective

    April 11, 2023 - By 

    A Pagan perspective, an opportunity for creating an evolving society through a tribal level of organization. 

    Pagan social circles search for a sense of community.  

    The problem is that our social context has been without tribes for 2000 or more years. 

    Tribes have been destroyed in the past 2000 years or more. 

    Outlook and Methodology 

    There is a yearning for community and social structure in human beings.   
    It would develop organically for successful social groups. These social groups in history came and went organically and revolved around tribal structures. 
     
    This paper will describe the destruction of tribal structures over the past 2000 years or more; and, the social acceptance of social structures that deny organic development and social competence, in lieu of autocratic and defined organizational structures under some conservative power control. This will describe the psycho-social dependency of known experiences as opposed to reifying and reconstruction of more workable structures of the past or the ability to evolve a social structure more satisfying to a diverse group of peoples. 

    There is nothing unique among groups of people reaching out for independence, away from stultifying dominion of city state, national dominance that oppresses people. The inefficiency and lack of resources where human dignity is lost while elites and autocrats of various descriptions garner resources and riches to the detriment of the lowest rungs of society. The seeds for social collapse re-occur only to recreate the same lack of responsive relationships in a stratified society. People lose empathy and identity to all strata of society. 

    What occurs after social isolation and disenfranchisement, with an attempt to organize socially, is a reversion to similar social behaviors and supporting other autocratic structures with cognitive dissonance not seeing it being like the social structure they have left. 

    I will demonstrate this by describing social trends due to changes in society through history. The decades of depravation of social instruction where new behaviors that are even detrimental are adopted. 
     
    I will describe from articles describing state dependent behavior and learning where there is addictive behavior refusing to adopt new behaviors, even where there is evidence of needed change. Cognitive dissonance, neuroticism, and cultural reinforcement denies positive changes from both internal and external sources. 

    I will use Edward T. Hall’s model from “The Silent Language” for defining societal education with terms of informal, formal, and technical methods. 
     
    Lastly, I will posit what can be used to counteract this lack of tribal behavior, and a few additional behaviors to expand the diversity needed for future models of human behavior. 

    Tribes have a few common elements for long standing viability. A sustainable food source, division of labor, and social constructs that made for social mobility, and learning opportunities to and for each division of labor whether it is technical, formal, or informal adoption of technical or social skills.1  These educational opportunities come from family, social orders of labor division, clan or familial history, religious instruction, or societal organizations that reflect archetypical identities within a tribal structure. 

    When food sources shift, either in availability or in geography successful tribal migration depend on adaptation of leaders, societal stories, religious stories of previous generations successful adoption of other behaviors, along with stories that reflect that change or adoption of new stories to encourage the evolution and or adoption of different survival strategies.  

    Historical destruction of tribes. 

    Tribal expansion into city states can be traced back to Sumeria. Tribal behavior that had division of labor for grain, fishing, farming, creation of textiles, pottery took one additional step. The building, use of and maintenance of irrigation canals. The initial stories of a local god of fish, fresh water, irrigation, and canals was Enki or later known as Ea.  

    The last major inundations from the last ice age forced peoples from Mesopotamian delta upstream, fused tribes with a tribal characteristic with a priesthood to manage dams, canals, and irrigation projects. This required astrological, meteorological knowledge, and reactionary force to manage a city state infrastructure. It was a dominant societal force that kept functioning as an evolving city state that still had tribal divisions of labor. Writing, bureaucracy, and the development of educated elites that required technical knowledge, and social stories to reinforce the necessity of a state organization. This was the evolution of Eridu from 5300Bc to 3500BC. This lasted until the rising power of Uruk. War and fighting which created a military elite, with close ties to administration and religious storytelling, created stories of transfer of power from Eridu to Uruk, with the story of Inanna, stealing the objects of power, mes, from Enki. City States became administrative areas under the administration of the growing empire of Uruk. This pattern has changed little in the past 5,500 years. Egypt Followed suit with the first Dynasty of Menes, and similar patterns of ruling city states in India as far back as Eridu. 

    State religions and power elites formed stories that supplanted tribal stories, sinified or usurped the local stories into a framework supporting an overarching story of the state powers. Governers were replacing city state leaders or tribal leaders. Local stories were erased, division of labor was controlled by administration elites far from the indigenous locales. 

    This was the first step of erasing local autonomy of tribes and villages by nation state administrations and religious overarching narratives. The center of powers shifting in Egypt made modified cosmological histories, based on the location of ruling dynasties. Old gods were adopted and woven into new narratives. Old dynasties of Min, Thebes, Hermopolis and Sais had functionally different pantheons. 
     
    In Mesopotamia, Sumerian Eridu was replaced by Uruk culture which was Sumerian and mixture of mountain peoples. Administration and war conquering other city states became a norm. Then there was the Akkadians, Assyrians, which had different tribal and societal identities but stepped into the cultural and administrative structures that existed. Babylonian culture evolved cosmology and administrative practices and expanded the empire. Outlying tribes were captured, enslaved, but became vassal states with religious autonomy. The administrative functions of the nation state became more coherent regardless of religious identities from other cultures but also from within as the rise of Zoroastrianism, and the interplay of the Semitic beliefs from Canaan that had a mixture of tribal beliefs with the ever-evolving state religious cosmology from Akadia, between 1800 and 800 BCE. Religion was being used to help define ethnicities that vied for political power in an ever growing complex of vying ideologies, and power struggles from 1200 BCE. The climate change, and shift from the end of bronze age to the iron age, with collapsing city states, organization of sea people warlords, warring factions amalgamated, along with anti-outsider polemics in religious stories, scriptures, and historical writings of surviving nation states. Single monotheistic religions were used to supplant henotheistic or polytheistic beliefs of confederations of city states, into the Empire. Zorastrianism influenced platonic philosophy and the monotheistic creations  from with an enslaved Hebrew population, while Egypt’s Ankenaton was similarly focusing on a supreme God of LIght, like Ahura Mazda.  

    Religious Stories once used to codify a culture, and its evolution through people, became a tool to codify authority of administrative authority. 

    Tribal organizations started to disappear. The twelve tribes of Israel as Hebrews disappeared after the release of Hebrew slaves back to Judea with the Old Testament. They became Jewish People, not tribes of Israel.   
     
    Egypt had various Henotheistic centers for the various pantheons evolved in variations. But it was incorporated into royal and priestcraft administrations. A theory as to why Egypt retained some regional religious autonomy with a crafted overarching updated cosmology may be due to its’ use of writing that is image based and support of Goddess image representation. 2 
     
    Greek control of Egypt and the Levant, followed by Roman control in the region, was based on administrative control regardless of leader’s bloodlines, civil machinations for claiming control and power. 
     
    Demonstrated by Edward Gibbons the survival of the Roman or Orthodox church from the Eastern then to the Roman Catholic church, was due to bureaucracy. The extermination of other Christian sects  3 where Christian eunuchs directed Pro-consuls how to find these churches and had patrimony to take care of widows, orphans, sick and indigent, was done with bureaucratic efficiency. 

    The Roman Diocese of the Church helped create a cultural glue, where tribes were once destroyed and managed by Roman Governors and protectorates, replaced by Monarchies and Vassal states. Where the Church went and destroyed the indigenous cultures. Where Monarchies took control, all leadership, management, and internal cultural capabilities of tribes were replaced. Feudal bans prevented serfs and commoners from processing the food that they created, insuring levied taxes. This also kept agriculture, manufacturing, and administration strictly in the hands of the feudal overlords disconnected from the people they ruled. 
     
    This model, regardless of the Dark Age, Medieval Age, Enlightenment or Industrial Revolution, expansion of Power and Church, hand in Hand, destroyed every tribe it has encountered.  

    Villages, Cities and Church, held the remnants of Tribe, by having focus around family and village cultural heritages. Feudal Bans, and control of artisans, land and all resources, local culture was reduced to religious Church whitewash of all customs, and history was supplanted with divine right of nobles. There was no developed leadership that cared for the people of the village, for their needs and the reality they dealt with. 
     
    Industrial revolution aggregated the working poor into less than serf positions. Rent of housing, control of food, shops and sources of work, the Church was the only outlet left which justified the existence that they had.   
     
    The Gutenberg Press democratized the bible for those who were literate. And made it affordable for others to write, or present other viewpoints, beliefs, and practices. Schisms in church and religion were just useful wedges for power elites to manipulate. Whether they believed in one sect or the other. 

    Calvinists presaged the fundamentalist mentality where administrative power structures were weak, the descending spiral where religion used fear and hate. Calvinist destroyed villages, killed most of the women as witches, leaving the men for an army for this ever-nihilistic plague that eventually burned itself out. The embers still exist today. What was left was the seeds of capital controlled by a growing merchant class aligned with most of the nobles that managed the rest. 
     

    The experiment of the United States of America democracy observed by de Tocqueville, Villages with one of two churches, had at least an educated churchman and a doctor. They at least had an investment in the town where they were elected to represent government. 
     

    Corporate moneyed interests in burgeoning cities reverted to fiefdoms controlling administrative politicians. This was one factor for the destruction of the model that de Tocqueville saw. The second was the schisms that kept coming out of Europe. The schism that plagues the country more so was postmillennialism beliefs, where only after a rapture, versus premillennialism. Baptist and Methodist itinerant preachers saturated the rural US. The rabid proselytizing and othering aspects that followed on from the various sects, like the pilgrims, coming to the Americas for their believed perfections. This further separated people in villages, towns, even beyond the mainstream religions.  
     
    The Civil War, tore families and regions apart. Slavery was one of the large issues. At the same time, it was for corporate control of agriculture, I.e., Cotton, and textile manufacturing, among other things. Second, the wage slaves of the indebted working poor, virtual slaves, to mining, and industrial towns, which  controlled rent, food access, and everything else for the sustaining of life. 
    Education was focused and built around having a rudimentarily trained workforce.  
     
    Unionization, and liberal politics, came into being chafing against the abusive powers. Businesses controlled the government and used federal troops to quell any uprisings for civil treatment. While these revolutionary and anti-establishment ideologies exist through to today, they tend to be used to leveraging groups of people against each other and leveraging administrative control from competing industrial interests controlled by the elites. 
     
    The Depression, literally ripped multi-generational families into nuclear units. Any long-term wisdom of villages, educated, or elders in community became part of history. The informal intelligence and wisdom from multi-generational and landed peoples was lost. Psychology was developing, but at that time had no awareness of this wisdom. World War II created a culture based on squads, platoons, and industrial trade cliques. Unions helped but in time were destroyed also, bit by bit. Social navigation and upward mobility appear to exist, but only from one isolated clique to another. Like being assigned to one platoon from one unit to another. Social grooming and isolated socialization with connections to other cliques became the societal norms. Fraternal organizations that developed to help fill the gap for charities that churches now failing for the widows and orphans became more for social networking. Unions, fraternal organizations, and progressive political movements become the enemy of corporations and their owners. Cities that dealt with outcasts from the villages that chaffed at supporting the widowed, orphaned, poor, sick and indigent were necessary for controlling criminality and making it safe and stable for the corporations that used workers in it. The problem became too big for churches to support the disenfranchised. The working communities did not have the resources, and corporations so disconnected from people, in general, would do as little as possible.  
     
    People today are the most isolated they have ever been. Ersatz social media, and the comfort of echo chambers are addictive and keep people isolated with less and less social connections. So isolated that the social competence of a large, diversified society, being so diminished, can be easily manipulated. 
     
    Early in the U.S. the idea of rugged individualism was held as the ideal. Now, we take service industries and consumerism for granted, which focus on immediate gratification, which leaves us even more with isolated rugged individualism. It was also a precursor to rationalized self-interest. Successful groups of people isolating themselves from the disenfranchised and easily dismiss them from rationalized viewpoints. 

    Where are individuals in the current cultural context left to reach back over 2000 years to rebuild egalitarian satisfying societal relationships that embrace diversity in tribes? We have had 2000 years of increasing social, familial, and cultural isolation. The seeds of that de-evolution started 3000 years earlier. 
     
    The 60’s provided an impetus toward counterculture with commune ideals. They focused on personality, ideology, and no practical methodologies. The “Farm” evolved to have core industry, a group of leaders based on core competencies, and has not gone further from there. But it did evolve to survive where many such communes imploded. 

    The counter-revolution is anti-government in a libertarian way. It is anti-leader and anti-hierarchy. Understandably this is an aversion to all the abuses evident in everyday life and society. An Aversion an emotional reaction, justified by rationalized viewpoints did not survive.    70’s feminist movements eschewed all of it. Demanded that decisions would be by consensus. The only leaders were emotional leaders, who did not have full leadership skills and did not have a conscious idea on how to cultivate succession. These were not necessarily conscious processes. . 
     
    Pagan circles and small groups, whether they attract those of belief, aversion to society, or congregate as a group of disenfranchised people. The last straw for most created cliques, whether it is small social circles, counter-cultural supportive religious beliefs, is the disenfranchisement from cliques and social mobility. The human mind that cannot tolerate the irrationality of their social context, and abuse by it will eventually create their own social context. The family we create versus the one that disowns us.  

    Cliques, and society that is bereft of broad social wisdom, intelligence, and diverse capabilities, like any other weakened animal or ecosystem, becomes susceptible to parasites. Sociopathology, narcissism and other pathological behaviors do not have any natural defenses against them. They must be relearned by the abused, over, and over again. The lack of understanding from the unabused have no conscious awareness of these dynamics are routinely used to reinforce the social constructs, that are leveraged against the disenfranchised. Co-dependency where people know no other way of existing, and enablers reinforcing the victimology, further isolates individuals. However, these individuals label their disenfranchisement, they look for the comfort of some sort of community.   
     
    Emotional leadership often comes from people who are sociopaths. They can emotionally and psychologically manipulate small groups who have been victims. The narcissism and sociopathology of disenfranchised groups are inept compared to what exists in cliques. The Victims become more isolated, and groups dissolve after there is no one left to uphold the group, or when the enablers are turned against each other. This process has its own diminishing returns. This reinforces anti-group, anti-leader, and anti-social attitudes and beliefs of individuals. Too often the emotional leaders in consensus groups, or those contrarians effect a destruction of the group out sociopathological behaviors. Counter-dependents who recognize and stand up against the victimizers are painted as abusers and pushed out of the group. The capable individuals are socially stigmatized where they cannot help the individuals or the group. This leaves the ingrained social malignancies to continue 
     

    Conferences and gatherings of pagans, however, reinforce for a brief time for many people a sense of community, family, and a togetherness we all need as human beings. 
     
    Pagan groups that survive have some familiar characteristics. A core group of leaders that people have confidence and take for granted, the events and environments they support. This is a feeling and evidence-based response to situations that provide for the individual’s sense of well-being, belief and perspectives that support that. Core structures built for this service can be handed down to successors. IF and only if the successors are of the same mind and desires as the originators. Where they happen to be sociopaths waiting in the wings, the structure and belief of the organization sustains it for a while, until the inevitable, nihilism of parasitic behavior destroys the coherence of the organization. 

    The idea of pagan community is as limited as our perception, awareness, and individual capability of conceiving one, as compared to the fully isolated way of things are in our culture. Modern culture has no societies, only contrived abstract social constructs to force people into. 

    Europeans have a sense of family, and social integration. It is informal technology, and they can only react to the American general ineptness without technical or formal technical way of addressing it. Americans are left uninformed and kept at a distance. I have discussed some of this with acquaintances from Arab and Islamic cultures.   They require a long time, a decade at a minimum, to see if you have a social investment. Americans lack the social aptitude and commitment to develop long term invested relationships. Americans come and go, oblivious as to why they cannot ham fist their way through negotiations.  (The non-halal metaphor seems apt. And will be left in with this explanation.) We will not be trusted. Social isolation creates selfish and ego centric people. Social constructs are just tools for leverage, instead of a thriving social or tribal identity that is beyond self. 

    Pagans as groups of disenfranchised people, along with all western culture, suffer from Dunning-Kruger effect. We do not know that we do not know how to be in a context that has not truly existed for 2000 years. We take on cognitive-dissonance, and are willing to justify negative behaviors and patterns, because we take for granted the coherent patterns in the culture that we can rely on, good, bad, or indifferent. We become addicted to patterns that are familiar to us because it does not upset our emotional and metabolic patterns where we can function effectively. We use state dependent behavior to use cognitive dissonance to remain in the patterns we exist in. 

    State dependent behavior is a description of why and how addicts revert back to addictive behaviors. The metabolic crutch reflects back into the mind. It is an emotional and metabolic stability, where memory and faculties are easily accessed. I.e., when we are sick, our emotions and metabolism is off, we get irritable because we cannot fuction as well as we are used to. Our memories and functional faculties and abilities are hard to hang on to. Here is where spiritual development helps people break out of that metabolically controlled paradigm, becoming flexible we evolve our ego and sense of self with spiritual identity or doing the internal cognitive therapy, through ritualistic practices to carry forward our memories and capabilities into new modes of being, information, and cultural contexts. 

    Why does a Pagan spiritual context have an advantage to fix this lack of social construct, and why a tribe? 

    Spirituality encourages, as some say, a breaking of the ego. It is the embracing of discomfort, to be reborn into a new initiated state. This creates a flexible ego, to accept, adapt and incorporate new ways of thinking, and behaving. Many individuals in groups are breaking their cycles of victimology, embracing healthier coping mechanisms, and evolving a self they are comfortable with. The groups and individuals that reinforce these negative societal patterns disintegrate. Organic growth happens when there is informal training of leadership for the type of personalities and group dynamics that they have.  

    The process of embracing discomfort consciously allows people to become aware and adopt new behaviors. The process is anything but simple. In the western dominant culture of privilege, the ability to think, remember and function outside of their emotion norms of comfort is limited. In other cultures, emotion is allowed, enjoyed, and seen as a sign of authenticity.  

    After five decades of anti-disestablishmentarianism that includes patriarchy, church dogma and stultifying cultural norms, the pendulum is swinging in the other direction. This author is also against toxic patriarchal practices, irrational religious dogmas, corporatism or corporate socialism, and isolationist, jingoistic, bigoted cultures.  This author is also against hierarchical disconnectedness from all levels with its cliquish isolated detachment from its surrounding reality. Pagan individuals are looking for community and having a burgeoning growth of secular adherents who are looking for more social connection. 

    There have been attempts to codify and create a more unified pagan community. A lot of it is the autonomy that small groups have and practice beliefs in their own way. There is hard won, authority and leadership in a small group that, so earned, refuse to relinquish.   
     
    One success this author has heard of is in Asheville, NC. There was an attempt to grow a large group only to find that they could not worship together but decided they in diverse groups can work together. 
     
    This mirrors surviving indigenous cultures in the Americas and Africa. There is warp and woof of diverse societies and clans. Societies of various divisions of labor, diverse religious societal practices, clan mothers, each earn their own leadership skills in each group. They have their leaders work in a council or in concert with leaders in the community. Leaders are developed only from within the tribe. Gifted children who have leadership skills, who embrace the reality of each of the societies, clans, and group, learn to massage people to work together to solve problems, issues, and long-term plans.   
     
    This informal leadership development of internally invested and caring individuals, concerned of having people work together instead of dictated to have survived 1000’s of years. Split of tribes on the fringe of indigenous nations, either must relearn these behaviors or they disintegrate into the voids of time.  
     
    Several things are needed to create a tribe today. First you must have a large enough group of diverse people who are willing to work together. Second, we must have healthy and stable psychologists and social workers to help on mental health of individuals and well versed in conflict resolution. That process must be open enough for groups to learn. This helps build cultural awareness. It needs to be recorded as a technical skill and for stories to help teach the community at large. This requires social education for each other and especially our youths. 
    Cultural or societal groups must evolve as their own, but they must trust someone in that group to represent them. The young need to be aware of these adult processes, to be observed by leaders to encourage their leadership potential. Weed out sociopaths but encourage the caring of others but generate charisma where others look to natural leaders for queues, not answers or dictation. 
     
    There needs to be trust in weeding out sociopaths. Communication with others so behaviors can be seen, understood, and identified. Not allowing people to become isolated. There must be a way to make the sociopaths leave. Granted even after it is determined to try to rehabilitate the individual has failed. 

    Other Hurdles to Tribal Formation 

    Locality and economic relevance given the surrounding culture, available land, valued skills, and proximity to enhance cultural intimacy and inculcation. 
     
    There needs to be a critical mass of events, people, and situations to get a genesis of a tribe. Urban disaffected isolation, and suburban physical isolation are two psycho-social mindsets that need to be treated. Land use laws of city and county planners, if needed, need to be addressed. The complex society with a widespread division of labor, a focus on relevant capabilities must be addressed.   
    The “Farm” a commune born out of the 60’s developed a core economic relevance by creating Geiger counters, and organically finding leaders that are relevant to their society, after the dissolution of charisma and philosophy gives way to objective realities. 
     
    Cheap rural land is harder to come by. Too few people are agrarian minded even if their beliefs embrace nature. Social meetings in tribal centers would be centered around cultural rituals, games, and early America the one or at most two churches, and the socials between them.  
     
    It will take more planning. For example, some suburbs are open to mixed development. Given a good development plan suburban developments surround a golf course, swimming pools and or tennis courts, with community pavilions. The communities have elected leaders or managed by land management groups.   
    Many pagans work in information technology and there are technology centers. What if there was a mixed community that had tight town homes, with shared facilities for salon style offices, ritual space, shared wood, metal, and automotive shops? There would be wood, metal, and automotive groups. Office group, or whatever relevant skills sets that are valuable in an area. Use a homeowners association fee to pay for a family to farm the outlying grounds around the homes. Food shared in a pantry, or even make a local kitchen or support people who make food for children, busy workers, etc…  

    The critical mass to make this happen is either groups of people who work toward long term goals as a tribe, or someone with a large nest egg to invest in the locale that draws the groups to it. Trust and commitment become the biggest hurdles.  

    First is to identify the problem. Hopefully in these few short pages, the depth of ignorance has been brought to light. Second, develop a desire for a much better existence not only for us, but as a model for the rest of society. Most important, not only do we need to heal ourselves, but we must work on healing our relationships with each other in a larger society. Granted a distrust in groups have been vocally adamant since the 60’s, and a distrust of leadership as there has been a destruction of tribes. Once we had tribal communities with leaders who have and understand the intimate relationship between themselves and their community, but also take that intelligence and wisdom to broader communities, states and hopefully the nation. Our religions, and the magic we practice if we use it to isolate ourselves only will exacerbate the problem. It used to be tribes and their religions were there to support, serve, and build the community and its members. If we embrace isolation, we see the outcome of this functional nihilism. If we embrace diversity, we will embrace others, thereby growing and evolving. 

    Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville 

    The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain 

    Childhood and Society by Erik H. Erikson 

    Examples of How You Can Use State-Dependent Learning | Psychology Today https://fherehab.com/learning/difference-beahvioral-drug-addiction 

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experience-engineering/202111/examples-how-you-can-use-state-dependent-learning

    Behavioral Addiction vs. Drug Addiction – What’s the Difference? (fherehab.com) 

    The Difference Between a Behavioral Addiction and a Drug Addiction

    State-dependent behavior and alternative behavioral strategies in brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) fry – PMC (nih.gov) 

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5102978/

    The Creation of a Compulsion (emdrtherapyvolusia.com) 

    https://emdrtherapyvolusia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Feeling-State_Addiction_Protocol.pdf

    Types of Addiction and How They’re Treated (healthline.com) 

    https://www.healthline.com/health/types-of-addiction#chemical

    Drugs, Brains, and Behavior: The Science of Addiction: Drugs and the Brain | NIDA (nih.gov) 

    https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction/drugs-brain

    Co-Dependency | Mental Health America (mhanational.org) 

    https://www.mhanational.org/co-dependency

  • BLOG

    What role does surrender play in your practice

    March 27, 2023 - By 

    What role does surrender play in your practice, if at all? If you are a magic user, where is the balance between accepting the will of the Divine and asserting your own will?

    What is your relationship with the Divine and Reality? Is it a relationship of submission? Are you friends with a much more powerful being? Or are you their tool? What of your power and your agency, and what does that deity think about that? In a religion where one chooses to be submissive to a deity, and accept the fate and reality of life by that faith, that is your last of act of will. Or are you looking for an excuse for not making decisions or taking ownership of your life, your decisions and the consequences?

    What is up with all the questions? That is part of my practice. Free will, implies an active and engaged consciousness. Taking a knee to survive is not the same as rolling on your back and say do as you will even my death. Deities, good, bad and indifferent each have a personality, agendas, and where do you fit in that?

    I had accepted the boon of one God. It was trials and ordeals for 32 years. No negotiations, no consensual interactions, it is what it was. Would I ever do that again, never. And I hope I am not that stupid the next life and hope that there is a support system for me then. Surrender, as in wanting to die, no not enough. Death is only temporary. Oblivion is forever. My soul like many others are adamantine, not a god nor the universe can hurt it. Only ourselves. Was that surrender nope. It was a will, yet the universe showed me the truth of it. Accept truth and reality is always a magical act. It is a spiritual and evolutionary act. So that is what I choose.

    My will inspite of a god wanting to destroy me. My will inspite of another god wanting to manipulate me. The answer is no. Living according to the project path, true or no, prevarication or no, with honest relationship with me, no.

    Will I work with a deity? Certainly, as long as, they are honest and forthright with what they want and need, and if it works for me as well. How many will do that? The only beings who are not gods but cultural ancestors, are about as honest and forthright with what they need to work with you for whatever X is. Yet you own it the decison and repercussions. That is magic.

    Magic always require an understanding of what it takes to achieve the goal. Do you rely on gods for your magic? Great, is it an honest interaction? You do magic without gods? Great, what is your relationship to the world around you as you are altering it? It is all about honest relationship with everything. Can you do magic without a fully disclosed of the hows and whys? With deities that happens often, as often as you buy a product today with out knowing the ethics and sourcing of materials and labor. Did you surrender your attention and responsibility so that you can take for granted that exchange? Many do. AT what cost? Is it free will or is it a surrendering to the Zietgiest of reality, Sitting quietly on the wheel of Samsara, being the plaything of Maya, et all?

    Magic is a tool and process, as much as, filling up your gas tank, honing your art, or construction or whatever work life craft you have. To get better you discipline yourself to the techniques and practices, is not a surrender. Acting through what comes naturally is taking for granted all that you have done, to be that competent, as it is any relationship, active or passive with human, place, deity or things. Magic doesn’t have to be a spiritual act. For many they think it is, when it is a religious act. Taking for granted your behaviors is surrendering your awareness and spirituality. Many do it without thinking, context or pretext. I won’t.

    Even great Yogis warn even with all the siddhis, one should still pursue that spiritual development, enlightenment to an ever higher state. Even Gods are trapped on the wheel of Samsara. I choose not to be trapped.

    No surrender for me. Now learning that the human body, memory, faculties and ego are a temporary construct is it surrendering it, or more to the point it is a fact of temporary physical existence. It is my disciplines, temperament and relationship to the truth that gets imprinted on my soul. Seeing and accepting the truth as it is, is not a surrender. It is the starting place of having an honest relationship with what is so you can make choices of what will be. Be it your will or the will of the world around you. You have to play to make any change whatsoever. No will, accepting the will of everything else, is that surrendering to fate, or the actions of others and the gods. So many people do so even those who do magic, because they are not in full control of the mind, emotion and body, the very tool that we use interact with reality, which can be programmed by everything except your self. Feeling good about our ego’s acceptance of playing the programmed beliefs, may feel like free will, but it isn’t. They fight to keep that programming. The ego is not you but one acts like a slave to keep it alive as long as possible even without personal control of programming it for ones own spiritual benefits.

    I may be buffeted by the storm, but I choose to steer, how much sail to loose and catch what wind. I choose the shore and havens I sail to. I refuse to be flotsam and jetsum, they carry no cargo. I do. I carry my future, the keys to other’s freedom and empowerment, the means to improve my boat, which is just a tool. I will be friends with sea and wind, in all of its faces. I will not lay down and surrender to its whims. And yet it will remember me, and embrace me, when I return.

    Waxed poetical in the last here. I hope it makes sense.
    Archonstone

  • BLOG

    Is God A good word?

    September 21, 2022 - By 

    God is a convenient term within Monotheistic culture, pragma and praxis. What it does is neuter relationships with divine beings that exist in polytheistic pantheons and peoples relationship with these personal or tribal gods.

    One term, to encompass all others, usurping all into one platonic ideal, binding it to a manipulatable religion, dismissing all others to recognize one and only one term, “God”.

    “Bill, tell us how you really feel!” Let’s not.

    Zoroastrianism created the concept of one primordial fire god of wisdom, and emanated powers, to replace the polytheistic beliefs of his culture, and was adopted, used and incorporated into Abrahamic beliefs. Greek philosophers visited these centers of philosophy in Persia/Iran, and brought back the seeds of idealism and platonic thinking. The concepts of Marduk usurping all the old god names, to replace the old ways. It was a way to centralize religious authority who venerated henotheistic beliefs of state or regional gods.

    Vedanta, philosophically, non-dualism takes monotheism to its logical extent. It is practical and esoterically, logically and even experientially useful. It also allows the individuation of people, devis, asuras and all other beings. It doesn’t deny or demeans every other entity that exists.

    The use of simplistic words as a giant gloss over many perceptions, apprehensions of even a bigger swath of humanities genuine relationship with divine, makes it susceptable to manipulation of those in power. * Looking around at todays societies and religions*.

    At the same time the very tool destroying is used to reach out to give people an idea of universality that we can all agree on. Subtle and seductive, a convenient way to bypass any critical thinking, personal investment and analysis. Without that thinking and analysis people fight over beliefs presented by the authorities over a non-thinking masses.

    El, the title for Canaanite supreme god is not a name. Elnyion and many other biblical titles are just that titles. Many usurping god names of a polytheistic hebrew history. Old god names denied to be uttered but replaced by the singular title attributed to one and one only being. Study the history and El’s children were allowed to conveniently kill themselves. Apocalyptic Judiasm, after the temple’s final fall, and now a henotheistic god is upgraded to a universal monotheistic monolithic being? Who is playing whom?

    1200 years later Kabbalah is formed to break this monolithic thing into a structure and create an angelic order of reality that people can relate to. People meaning those who are willing to be mystics. After 200 – 300 years we have the Kabbalah that we know today. So, beings are expected to fit this structure. People are expected to order their experience by this structure. Apprehension is defined by this structure. Is it a real relationship or is it a corporate or militaristic protocol? Is there a near infinite way to use the structure to frame mystical experiences? Yes and no. It is a complex structure to frame human experiences. the structure makes it finite.

    God becomes ineffable, because there are a billion bunny holes of misdirection, structured to give a satisfying reference for individual existence.

    Or God becomes so undefinable that there is no interest nor capabilities for people to wish to interact with the divine, and lead by those who define who and what god is.

    If it serves to make people get along and work with each other, great. I have yet to see that fruit. If it serves people to explore themselves and get beyond themselves, great! But do not take all of it for granted.

    It is like calling myself pagan. It is a convenient label, but in no way, shape or form does it even begin to convey who, and what I am much less how I interact with the cosmos.

  • BLOG

    What is the HGA and the Abyss

    November 16, 2019 - By 

    The Abyss has nothing to do with hell, and yet you can find hell in it.

    I was asked what the HGA is and what the Abyss is.

    I will start with an overview, which doesn’t say much for me, but the description of the Abyss and one’s travel through it, may reflect better back on this poor description.

    The HGA by Golden Dawn, Crowley or Abramelin standards can mean different things to those who go to the point of experiencing it. It is at a point where one gives up there ego, there spiritual ego, and embrace the framework that is one’s highest self, where one can receive gnosis from the universe or the divine. Whether self is one’s Self as their own soul’s POV, or the soul that they have vis-a-vis a deity. Your experiences and YMMV, depending on your prep work, tradition, capacity and more prepwork, and what honest relationship you have with whatever you for your focus of the all is. That is it.
    What does it mean, for a Thelemite (a.k.a. via Crowley) it is the manifestation of conversation with that aspect of yourself and exercising your will, regardless of the nature of that relationship described above. Others it is to bathe in the Gnosis of their preferred deity, for good, bad, ill or indifferent. And in the end, one can only make sense of it in the living life based on all of the experiences, disciplines, faculties and exposure to every concept, symbol and framework you have the capacity to work with at any given moment. The living experience makes that difficult, the energy tends to burn out the mind and body. Others of us learn to work with spirit bodies/bodies of light, astral, essence or tulpas, thought forms or created own egregores or god forms. Those who practice the shamanic, Bon or other multi-aspecting sets of self to do that, can do it all the time. The body, emotion and mind is just an imperfect interface. While living it is a useful tool, to frame sets of experience into the spirit world also.

    The Abyss is a spiritual dynamic, but the wording is every bit important to understand the full import of its meaning.

    The first veil to pass is Paroketh. This is getting over your primary ego. The physical mental and emotional state that one is comfortable in saying to their physical self, “this is I”. The I is just a matter of saying this is where I consciously know my best self and as it functions. This is wholly dependent on having a steady metabolism or metabolic pattern, with a stable pattern of emotions, that the person can access there memory, and process it and their experiences. When one does a system check this all works, that is I. This is what one passes through to get to Tipareth or starts the pass to the center of the tree of life.

    Once past Paroketh, the body, mind and emotions are just tools to frame all sorts of experiences, First all the varied emotional, metabolic changes, that can be identified in a 1000 different spiritual practices. The key spiritual practices is being quiet, meditate and see all the passings of these variations of self, and make sure they are coherent, connected, and identify the energetic realities to the core spiritual self of spirit and soul. Once this frame work is built, it is all again, just a tool. Those who form a spiritual ego, takes one or several of these patterns, even crafted of their own, saying this is it and this is I, is bound to the ego yet at a higher form. Most spiritual seekers get stuck there. So many spiritual entities are altogether comfortable in influencing a person to get to be one or the other patterns that ultimately support the ego and power of those beings. Be it gods, demons, angels, or other divine beings, beings on other planes, with or without, overworlds or underworlds. The support of a structure of a set of egos become an egregore. It gets powerful and work to prevent people to get through the Abyss. The AByss is everywhere and nowhere. Just like any other spiritual dynamic of the planets of planes, of the aethers, they are all their own dynamics.
    Some of these dynamics supposedly are designed to help step people through a frame work of experiences so they can develop a direct gnosis or understanding of either self, god or the universe. One has to let go of all of that programming to experience the world or the universe as it is. Too often beings often at higher levels give people gnosis to sway their dynamic in the universe. And the patterns, all of them that one has experienced, is the only tools our spirit or soul has to work out what happened to themselves. The first part of dealing with other ego’s and knowing them for what they are is knowing ones own thoroughly at whatever level. And like any sets of relationships, you have to work out who is true, telling the truth, and what are lying if not directly, but giving details in such a way for you to draw and act on the wrong conclusions , just like any evil sociopath.

    The spirit vehicle and ones own personal soul, if you are lucky enough to have built one, will carry the spiritual dynamic one has built with an honest relationships they have had in the world/universe consistently. Otherwise you become fodder for the beings in the top of the food chain.

    The choice to develop one’s self to evolve and grow versus accepting patterns that seem all gee whiz wonderful, which doesn’t teach how to create or develop them, nor the experiences to take you the next steps, is a serious choice. The acceptance of the knowledge of wisdom of solomon of god, is an affect that one can take on like a mantle or coat. How to make the coat of many colors and to do many other things, one has to choose develop themselves and evolve. The gift is a curse of relying on the gift, and not learning how to create the power all by yourself.

    The Abyss is thousands times more terrifying than letting go of the Ego, which for most people totally horrifying. You are letting go of all that you are, or all the connections that you are so you can experience all that is not you as best you can and as honestly as you can. This is a lot of work. It is the great work.
    In Zen you only understand something perfectly if you can forget it completely. By doing so you are totally in the being of self. Or, whatever object you are focused on in forgetting.
    It isn’t so much forgetting, but letting go of who you are to fully experience what you are not. But it is that state of being all of who you are and forgetting about yourself, can you experience the gnosis of whatever you are trying to contact (intent) This dynamic for the lack of a better way to describe it is the Knowledge and conversation with your HGA.

    Hell is your attachments to a dynamic. Whether it is an ancestor realm that is a mix of overworld and underworld with a back drop of the physical world. Or your dynamic to an underworld of a divine being and its pattern in the overworld and underworld. This is a very specific thing architected by a divine being, its minions and the people who follow it. Even with that belief peoples spirits work through their attachments. Christianity, grace is supposed to help a person separate attachments to the underworld off. For most people they just hang out in a plane until these aspects separate all on their own.
    A person with integrity with their spirit and soul and have exercised relationships with spirit, and the other planes build in the intelligence to traverse these realms according to their will. Others it is all depends on the nature of the attachments they have and their egos.

    The literature about being lost in the Abyss, people get stuck with their spiritual egos, and they remain stuck in the Abyss that is everywhere keeping them in the pattern they themselves have doomed themselves too. Whether it is egos, attaching themselves to lies or untruths that they have accepted, all of which prevents one from going further. Traversing the Abyss isn’t a one time thing. But the first time is the hardest. Failing that, the destruction of their core spirit and soul becomes accelerated. Ideally they loose enough of that destructive ego, to start over again, something other than what you were before.

  • BLOG

    Opinion and Discussion, with all the toxic inbetween

    November 21, 2018 - By 

    What  a tormented world, where we are between self expression,  facts and firm beliefs being dragged into a quagmire of toxic interactions.    How do we manage this unending  stream of uncivil discourse?     It isn’t simple but I will break it down.    It relies on discipline, self awareness and boundaries.

    The first two are the hardest, discipline and self awareness.    Self awareness perhaps the hardest of the two.    I can  and usually do go on about meditation,  sorting ones minds and emotions, and choosing actions, thoughts and emotions, I won’t here.  This takes years of discipline and practice.    Discipline which is equally important, the willingness to reflect, self audit each and every reaction, and hone actions and reactions with conscious and deliberate forethought and planning.   Discipline is about decisions and creating a habit.      This is where most people lapse into addictions what they believe about themselves, and don’t do the continuous work to improve.     One must get past that, one has to have tools to make decisions from.


    Boundaries whether they are external landmarks or internal checks and balances,  the limits have to be defined.   Our capabilities have to be assessed and honestly know ones limits.

    Magnum Force Poster

    Harry Callahan: A man’s GOT to know his limitations.

    This is where it gets difficult.       I have been accused of coming to a verbal knife fight with a gatling gun.     I  may have had the last word, and shut the conversation to the stand still.    But the cases where I did this I never convinced anyone.  And I am sure I didn’t make any new friends.    

    A discussion or civil discourse is when two sides talk about facts, where they got them, mull over their value, experiences, identify each other’s concerns and if an action is needed how to go about taking an action, and backing it out or altering it as it goes.    This doesn’t happen very often except maybe at some jobs, and the boss, supervisor or leader, has a final say of the direction to be taken.   Too often the leader has to quell arguments and opinions.  They decide the action, their position and authority is accepted and the world keeps on working, usually.

    Any step further  goes down.    Not unlike  from the movie the Mummy.

    Image result for mummy movie scenes

    Arguments,  may use experiences, anecdotes, similes, metaphors  and yet like a discussion a solid answer isn’t really known.     Experiences from a certain set of circumstances may have more weight than others, it is how we handle this information.  As soon as opinion comes to play all hopes of civil discourse disappears into the gaping void.  And like any good intention, it paves the road to hell.  

    Logical discussions  are based on a common set of language, a common set of facts, and usually an equal understanding what those facts mean.     A logical argument starts with a set of priories.   A set of assumptions that all parties understand  that they are working with.   A good philosophical debate, will worry over most meanings of words, what they mean, and the assumptions or priories that one is working with.     Logically, based on what those assumptions are or are not,  the pros and cons can be of an idea can be discussed.

    Opinions are based on personal assumptions.  The assertion of opinions are set out  as assumptions.      When people get back to these assumptions, regardless of the discussion, those assumptions if taken personally, the discussion ends.       Personal based beliefs or assumptions, that are part of an opinion are not up for debate.  End of story.  Beliefs are not necessarily rational.               I believe a table is blue, other people see it as a table and is blue, I don’t believe it any more, I know, and I know they know.     As soon as I say I believe in a fact,   the fact  becomes part  of a questionable experience.     That fact is held onto with emotional investment, from experience.     The belief someone uses has an equal or strong amount of emotion invested in it.      There are stories, similes, metaphors  and illogical leaps of  assignment of emotions to something portrayed similar to an idea or a supposition.    A strongly held belief, that underlies someone’s opinion, makes that opinion off limits for discussion.   One may want to engage you with their opinion, but it is not for a discussion but for proselytization.    They want support for their belief.      This is were discussion should end.  

    We don’t set the boundary to end the discussion.  We don’t realize that the discussion is over.    Whether it is facts, beliefs, sound logic or emotionally linked rationale,  people get drawn into all the toxic slugfest of what the  Greek philosophers called Sophistry.  

    How do we tell when the discussion is over. 

    Liberally taken from online Dictionary.   Techniques of rhetoric are examples.

    Bombast is when high-sounding language with little meaning is used to impress people.

    Hyperbole is when exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally are made.

    Simile  is used when a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid (e.g., as brave as a lion, crazy like a fox ).

    Exhortation is an address or communication emphatically urging someone to do something.

    Straw man argument is an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent’s real argument.

    False equivalence is a logical fallacy in which two completely opposing arguments appear to be logically equivalent when in fact they are not. This fallacy is categorized as a fallacy of inconsistency.

    Up to this point, one can start looking at the method of arguments.    Identify that the opinions and rationalizations are opinions and  hard held beliefs.     Recognize it, say so, and let it go.         The stinging thing can be said about how you feel and think about the sources of these arguments.   This does not win friends.                When it is based on societal imprinting  and hard held emotionally charged opinions, these feelings make sense to them.  The ideas are strung together  with emotionally charged feelings about each point of the argument.  The lapses of logic  and connection are glossed over with the emotions of what feels right and what makes sense.    

    There is no way one can wedge sense, ones own emotions, or  logic into these beliefs.    The addiction to this whole pattern of belief and rationalization go to the core of the person’s and sadly a large section of society beliefs in who they are.  The moment you make them uncomfortable, with facts, and your own feelings (and they will be dismissed) because they can’t feel like themselves, the emotional shift does not square with their feelings, and their ability to think doesn’t fit either.    The whole thought process is usually hijacked with propaganda, a culturally contrived sense of right and wrong with a series of connected feelings with facts  and lies that are loosely connected.  The belief is based on what feels right.    The loss of identity and a sense of self, will be fought back aggressively.  

    Sadly it has become ingrained into the American psyche as a cultural norm to also use abusive techniques.    This is a boundary that needs to be set as a hard limit.    The perpetrators will not change.  This is the nature of  parasites and that of sociopaths, narcissists and psychopaths.         The boundary between believers and abusers  is getting murkier than ever.

    Ad hominen  is an argument or reaction directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.

    Gaslighting    is when one manipulates someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.

    Sealioning (also spelled sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment which consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility ( Poland, Bailey (November 2016). Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 144–145. ISBN978-1-61234-766-0.)

    There are the more abusive patterns than just  Gas-lighting etc.   https://thoughtcatalog.com/shahida-arabi/2016/06/20-diversion-tactics-highly-manipulative-narcissists-sociopaths-and-psychopaths-use-to-silence-you/

    and  https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/10-popular-techniques-used-by-manipulators-and-how-to-fight-them.html

    In the above articles, they start using the concept of triangulation.    This is were they develop co-dependents and enablers to further abuse their victims.                And victims band together  to survive this also.  Then it becomes this toxic us or them mindset.   Which is true.   And  the abusers will use projection,  to make them look like the victim.

    This brings us to the point where we develop ethnocentrism. A convenient way to  set social boundaries without calling it bigotry.     The Bigotry is based on the abusive non-inclusive  type of behavior, or the outright abusive proselytizing. 

    The sad fact of the matter, is when the abused as co-dependents stop being enablers, or continue being victims, they learn to be abusers themselves or counter-dependents.     https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201404/signs-counter-dependency     or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterdependency  for more information.   It can be  self protective measure, or becomes its own  toxic condition with others.  

    There are techniques on dealing with all of this.    This information is all about definitions on how you can set boundaries.     Once you understand it and choose to change your behavior, based on those boundaries, it is your choice on whether or not you get out of  toxic  communications of opinions, beliefs or propaganda.        My go to method is to leave the argument, distance myself from the people,  and if called for  call out the issues listed above.   I am not attacking, just their method of  verbal assault.   Because it is definitely not a discussion nor will it be civil discourse.        Too often when it gets toxic, the abusers has their co-dependents attacking you.    Out of sight out of mind, and  those that will need healing and help after they too become victims, won’t have the thought of you contaminated.     It is tough, to just walk away from letting insanity, lies and deceit fester.     The only thing it will do is damage you.    In workplace situations, do what you can, play the games  in the articles, and usually get yourself out of there and be appreciated somewhere else.  And get out before you become the same as the victimizers.    That is hard to do.  

    There is a personal acquaintance that I am developing a friendship with.   The issue of  the Honduran asylum seekers were brought up.     The association of these refugees were made to like an army, an invasion force, and people coming into one’s personal home and taking everything.   I tested those assumptions.  They were all knocked down.    The political facts, the false equivalences were presented and were summarily dismissed.  Then I was asked for more arguments, that is sea-lioning.     I said so, and the opinions and assumptions are based on external propaganda that was inciting hate and fear.    I  didn’t mean to, but, I dismissed them being  his own personal hard felt beliefs  and opinions.    I truthfully gave my opinion of the sources of those assumptions.    But I also drew a line and exited the argument.     Also I said anything I say or do in regards to that discussion would only excite that fear and anger that those  arguments, rationale of those hard held opinions.      Fear and Hate are unquenchable fires, the only thing one can do is not feed them.

    This has taken me literally decades to develop the discipline, and practice along with the self awareness, to not allow myself to get drawn into an unwinnable conversation.   It wasn’t a discussion or an argument.   My choice of ending that discourse on my part was hard, but in my own defense necessary.    Don’t attack the speaker, attack the method,  the lack of of facts, or the source of them, and get the hell out.   The testing of their assumptions, feelings and opinions will be personal enough and will make the person feel attacked.      Assumptions, feelings and opinions that a person doesn’t  check for validity, it reflects what they feel and take for granted about themselves.         Seeing and hearing that, don’t attack them, you call them beliefs and opinions you don’t share, and get the hell out of the conversation.             

    Hopefully with boundaries and discipline with self awareness,  the toxic rhetoric  avoided, you will change or define how you will discuss things with people.    If by setting an example, and boundaries,  this will at least for you improve what acceptable conversations would be.     This is a perfect example of not falling into a level beneath you.  Why, you set boundaries, and with self discipline and self awareness, you set boundaries for your self and bar that must be met when dealing with you.       It  has over the years helped me stave off a lot of people playing these mind games on me, wittingly or not.                

    Today is so difficult to have civil and meaningful discourse and discussions, that presages the fall of a great society, into isolated squabblers that others can manipulate.    It is my hope the readers of this will endeavor to set examples in our society, so we can start the journey toward healing ourselves and our society.

  • BLOG

    Silence, this little book eat it up, you can’t hear this.

    July 24, 2018 - By 

    Communication, its lack, and miscommunication, plague people who won’t learn to be uncomfortable.

    One of the hardest things for people learning the witches triangle is silence.

    Then there is cast not pearls to swine.

    And in many cases, all the words in the world will never help someone to understand something when they don’t have a common frame of reference.

    Spiritual societies, initiatory traditions, and coming of age type of rituals, are designed to impart what is ineffable.   But once  experienced, the brotherhood now has a common frame of reference where the nuances of each other’s experiences can be understood.

    People have a need to be accepted by others, and too often when they speak they parrot back their cultural programming, expecting to hear it from everyone around them.     This indicates whether or not you are part of that group.

    Some people have a need to be right.  They can be all sorts of wrong, but the identity of self with their world view  is so strong, their ego can’t handle any other information, facts or ways of looking at things.

    This is an addiction.

    An excellent article came out a while ago describing addiction  as an addiction to a perception of self.    Granted  chemical addiction is horrible, mind altering, and a detriment to a person’s health.      If a person gets  free of the effects of the drug, the physical addiction, they still have a psychological addiction.     Why is that?    The metabolism that a person has had as an addict, they have learned how to function as a functional addict, accessing memories and behavioral faculties.     Without the chemical crutch, the metabolism  necessary to achieve  the state of mind where all of one’s memories and faculties isn’t available.     This is an addiction to one’s sense of self.    Behavioral addiction of expecting to light up a cigarette or smoke on queue from situations, is a matter of breaking habits.     But the metabolism  and feelings, where one is at their peak efficiency of being themselves is off.            In other words, people’s proficiencies are at a peak with their metabolism establish by drugs of choice.

    This feeling and self assessment of how we function is a consciousness of and the feelings of knowing and being comfortable with who you are.  This makes them feel comfortable.   Not being yourself, you are not comfortable.   This theory of addiction to self, with chemical addictions is called state dependent behavior.  Our behaviors are based on the metabolic dependent state where we know and control our behaviors.   Our behaviors confirm a comfort of what we are use to.  This is ego, and the support of that ego is Maya.

    So how does “State Dependent Behavior” affect the average person.           People have 7 – 12 standard sets of emotions, give or take.   Each emotional state is like an operating system where they access memories and their faculties/programming.       Each emotion is its own operating system.    People may share memories between these operating systems or metabolic states that represent in person a feeling.             Memories may have been shared, and faculties and reasoning may be shared  between these metabolisms, if a person is coherent.     Incoherent people, may have inconsistent emotions, memories and faculties from one emotional state to another.     Either way they are addicted to their sense and awareness of  the flow of feelings and information, in a comfort of who they are regardless of what they are feeling.    Consciousness is less about awareness it is about the feeling of connectedness  of the various aspects of self, throughout any of their accepted emotions.              People can be addicted to being miserable.   They are comfortable with who they are and can function in that state.     They are addicted to their state dependent behaviors.    This is ego and its support is Maya.    Chemical addicts, have a chemical that just skews this emotional baseline.  It is still the same.

    It is this idea of self, ego, and sense of comfort of knowing who one is by the feelings and reaction to information and the world around them,  is an addiction.      There are  people who more adaptable to being uncomfortable and embracing the feelings of others through empathy, relearning to access memories and faculties from a different metabolism.

    Case in point, I am a member of Toastmasters.   One of our member’s project she chose was what to do about about bullying.          I have been bullied a lot in school, and in many ways since.   I being a white male, don’t look like I should be at the receiving end of bullying.   If you work in America, you experienced varying degrees of it.     I spoke about it, and have very well thought out views on what to do, what steps needed to change the culture, etc. and responding to people whose responses were to much like victim blaming, and rape culture mentality.   I was emotional.     From every member from a disenfranchised  group, they liked what I had to say, and enjoyed the passion or emotions I brought to speaking.         The white male  conservative, told me flat out I needed to calm down, that I was being too emotional.

    Social Privilege expects to be comfortable.    In this case it was a white conservative male.   A previous democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean in celebrating a victory made a guttural  “Arrrr”.    Subsequent primaries he was canned, panned and turned out for being outwardly emotional.               Many studies in the United States, leaders were people that people could feel emotionally safe.               In this past election of 45, it was someone played  on reflecting the emotions, of a segment of society, where they could feel themselves reflected in this now president.    Two edges of the same sword, taking advantage of people’s own addiction to the comfort of themselves.

    I have always been the odd man out.  I was too smart as a child,  too big, too active, too intellectual.   I was a child.  I was not listened to.   Whether I was being bullied, telling the truth, or just trying to explain  the bullying I was receiving.   I couldn’t be related to.  I made people uncomfortable.   It was easier to not believe me.        I got older,  my opinions and views didn’t matter because I was a white male,   not a father, not old enough, not from this clique, this group or banter sports, cars or sexual exploits.   I did not fit and no matter what I said, how I said it, I didn’t fit.   I made people uncomfortable.    Fortunately in IT  being odd, and intelligent I had a better purchase on this playing field.    However, I was not, testosterone poisoned emotional misfit, where most relearn their social queues in a stunted brain, in a more juvenile construct of society, where I had to learn to suck up to the chief troglodyte of any other group.         A repeated rendition of the same level of institutional abuse in a new venue.

    What I found out sadly disenfranchised groups of people, if deprived of social conditioning in their teen years,  develop it in their disenfranchised niche, and repeat the same high school level of unsophisticated control and manipulation.   Along with the learned behaviors of sociopaths and narcissists that they have been victimised from.

    Victims who work toward being empowered, get  to be victims again or trusted sycophants and enablers.    The new abusers learn to be experts at their new social venue.             And some of the  repeat victims learn to fight back.

    Those who fight abuse, end up reflecting some of the characteristics of abusers.   There is a fine line where victims either learn to stay victims, become abusers themselves or “counter-dependents”      Counter-dependence was  described in another psychological journal.  People fight not to be victims, and standing up for victims, have traits that  look like the unsophisticated abusers of the past.     So they are dismissed and victimized yet again at whole new level.

    Silence and retreat is left for those who won’t fit in the template of society, abuser or victim.   Silence and retreat, is left for those who learn to be uncomfortable and learn to hold on to truth regardless of the situation.  They certainly were never accepted to be part of a cultural milieu to reinforce  comfortable rationalizations, true or not, of ways of being, thinking and information fit for that groups survival.         In other words, truth isn’t necessary.  As long as the  information used between the group that created the effecting controls of reality to keep them alive, truth is irrelevant.  Another scientific study showing people use information fit for survival.

    I am a pagan,  in the late 70’s and 80’s, being a white male was an anathema for all those who were fighting the male patriarchy.     Not that I was, I fit the symbols and handles.   30 years later, I got to a ecumenical convention for pagans, the experiences spiritually and studies I have had,  there was a consensus amongst the elders of many traditions, I was elder in my own right.  These were special interfaith pagan elders, most of them.

    A convention I was at last month, again, reinforced that I need to be silent and retreat.     I see warm loving people who are all about love, light and liberty.    Their approach is to educate, love and share to bridge the gaps in groups and in humanity.        I don’t have that this implicit or explicit viewpoint.  It works to degrees where people want to grow and change.     If any of what I wrote above has impressed on you, and made painfully aware to me, a vast majority of people are unwilling and incapable of changing.  They will fight to retain their comfort, their privileged positions.    The level of empathy only extends to those closer to them than anyone outside of their comfort level.             Even disenfranchised people, people who are liberal empathic, loving and caring, they can’t see how I can be hard, speak hard and want people to survive the evils that exist and are yet to come.

    One third of the United States voted for, and maintain an affiliation with people who hate.   They choose philosophies that are devoid of empathy for any living being or people other than themselves and their own.   They have betrayed the constitution, their faiths in Christianity, and lock step with the goose stepping fascist of this country and pre World War II Germany.      I lived in an exit community in the suburbs.   People fighting to get out of the ghettos, and those through  their unfitness for society or bad luck were falling back into ghettos.      My neighborhood had 2 drug gangs based on age, and prostitute house mismanaged by the neighborhood girls all who were under 18.    I survived them and their parents who were sociopaths, addicts and narcissists.    I can recognize these type of people in all sectors of society.   I work very hard not to be a victim.

    The one thing I know for sure, sociopaths and psychopaths, don’t have empathy.   They never apologize and they never can change.   The only time they apologize is when they see a threat of pain, discomfort or death.  Then it is a convenient lie to get to the next game.          They can only be managed by a constant threat of pain, or death.       This is a cold hard fact that makes everyone uncomfortable.       People can’t imagine that is true, and the abusers will go out of their way to get enablers  to act against anyone who tells the truth and can see them for what they are.

    Now people may be victimized by these individuals on rare occasions.    Rape culture, sealioning, gas lighting, perpetuates a victimology.      For others, it is so outside of their comfort level to recognize this evil in other people.           It is easier to believe the liar and abuser than the victim.

    I went to a pagan gathering.  I tried to explain that the growing threat in our country of embolden sociopaths, that we need to be prepared.   Love and light, and you are out and don’t fit.   My language is too hard.   And,  “who hurt you”.    Now at first, I thought that this is a legitimate thing to think of that  a person has been so unlucky to be in the minds of being so hard and adamant.      Okay, this is true.   But I don’t deny, education, love, empathy and any means and methods to make bridges and establish communication between people.   The Pagan communities are just starting to do this more than ever.    The past 30 – 40 years, ego, and control of ones own empowerment, dealing all of the low level abusers, and cleaning them out of the community,  there is this light, love and sense of maturity.     Good, they have earned it.

    Silence and retreat.      “Who Hurt You”, not only  made plain I was on the outside again, it presented me as a damaged person to the group and made what ever truth or value I had to offer null and void.                Next verse same as the first.  Silence and retreat.

    My teacher called me a “white hat”.    Everyone else was shopkeepers.      We aren’t in the old west, and it isn’t evident to these good folk of the town, what it takes to protect them from the “black hats”.      They may invite a white hat to dinner, but they will never be part of their social group or invited to play pinochle.      A White Hat has to love these shopkeepers and what they stand for.  But what shopkeepers see is  someone harder, faster and meaner than the black hats, no matter how kind and caring they are in town.

    The West African stories of the Oriesha and Loa from Ile’ Ifa or Voodou, don’t speak to this.    All of the Oriesha and Loa fit the village except one or three.    Ile’ Ifa or Voodou is a religion and its magic is supernatural dealing with these venerate ancestors and the supreme being Oludumare.            The one who doesn’t fit is Ochossi.  Ochossi is called the king of the witches.  Witches are hated, they don’t venerate or work with the Loa or Oriesha.   Their magic deals with power,  the dead and power of the land.     Usually they act selfishly because they are on the fringe of society.    The African beliefs encouraged community, working with each other, in their beliefs, divination systems and stories.     It took Abrahamic religions to destroy that.

    All of the Oriesha and Loa have “roads”  lessons to be learned or paths, that reflect in their adherents lives who have the influence or head of the Loa or Oriesha.    The one Exception is Ochossi.  His roads are hidden.      He is respected by the old King Obatala or Damballah.  But he is still not part of the village unless called upon to serve justice.  He is part of the woods, and his other function is to find new places for new villages.

    There comes a time when the old villages die or get murdered  or the people destroy themselves.    Ochossi helps them build that new village.  Obatala is the new king for a short time and put to pasture.

    He has experiences and insights that the village people will not and can not hear.  They have no common frame of reference.   The religion, and the Oriesha and Loa fit in the standard sets of emotions and experience expected out of a community and a culture.    They make things comfortable.         Ochossi  isn’t allowed to feel comfortable.    Thanks for having me as fifth wheel, I’ll go back to the woods, again.  Silence and retreat.

    There is one story that is hidden, that I learned.       It is a side story for when the world was new, and the souls of the dead were wandering around,  It was getting to be noisy and unhealthy for the living and the Oriesha and Loa.     Yemaya  the mother of the Loa and Oriesha was tasked of managing the souls.  They are said to become  fish.  In other stories the fish went to the horizon and became stars, and returned to the earth to be reincarnated.         The Sub-Saharan pre-Sumerian script that has elements going all the way across Asia the symbol for fish and star were very similar.   It shows up in Egyptian cosmology and motifs.           For this to happen, the Oriesha and Loa had to accept the touch of Iku or Death.                Here is the hidden story,  Ochossi chose to touch death or Iku himself.            Ode was a hunter who had no name who loved Yemaya in some stories that bore the Oriesha.    Ochossi was an ode, a hunter.  His son, Er-Inle was a hunter and fisherman.   Oshun didn’t keep her son, when Chango was around.     Ode knew old magic, and old truth.  He was one with the forest and the trees.    Where did Iroko come from?  Who did he learn what he taught Orunmila/Orunla?    Ochossi had his magics.    Er-Inle learned the ancient magics of Yemaya, and his tongue was cut out.  He went to live in the swamp, a place for outcasts, with another Snake Oriesha/Loa Abata.

    They can not teach people the truth, the magics, or their insights.  They have carried it from lifetime to lifetime.    Iku was an old old friend.  Embracing Iku, they would find themselves as themselves in the next lifetime, under new circumstances.             It is the hunter that helps build the new village, establishes its justice, and protects it from the bad influences.   He is a leader for a very short while.    He returns to the home that loves him and embraces him, the universe.  He can travel back and forth from Obatala and Oludumare.  Elegua knows of his travels, but hasn’t lived his experiences.

    I can not speak the truth that people are not ready to learn to live with.     We have to be there to build what is no more.  Repair what no one thinks to fix.  To work old and ancient magics that none are prepared to deal with.   Self Sacrifice and embrace Iku, to make it work.    The story of Aslan in Narnia, he knew of the deeper magic, that the ice queen didn’t.  Self sacrifice brought him back to life.

    This is why the roads are hidden.  Not because they can’t be learned or experienced.  It is because most people even spiritual ones are not prepared to do the sacrifices of the self to learn this path of ordeals and trials.

    I freely chose this.   Silence and retreat, is not my nature, but it is required, when you are not accepted in the village, even though you love the people and are willing to fight the evils that they can’t conceive of.

    John here is this little book, eat it up, tarry till I come.     Occasionally a rogue star will pulls stars to a new constellation.    Heaven and Earth shall roll away, and a new Heaven and Earth shall unfold.  Many mysteries.  Each ineffable.   Spoken and unheard are true nevertheless.

    There will come a time  where people will have to trust people who traversed hells and survived it versus the people who drag people into a hell and leave them there.

    How to know yourself and preparation of managing of being uncomfortable.

    How to develop skills to deal with being uncomfortable. 

    Side note:   The apocalypse,  when will it come?  It will come as a thief in the night.

    This biblical sidebar exemplifies the blindness and absolute complicitness of this age, the people of the United States, it’s Christians who pray and actively work toward the nihilism of the end of times.  They have brought it upon themselves and are the very evil agents that have engendered it through their nascience.

    Ancient numerology, Greek and Hebrew, do not reveal it.   It is only revealed in modern numerology, that  same number of the Sun 666.     The beast is known as 666, is a thief in the night, a FOX.     F = 6, O = 6 + 9 (remove the nines), and X = 6 + 9 + 9 (remove the nines) is 666.    The whore of Babylon is known by the same number  her name is Alec.  ALEC;  (A = 1) + (E = 5) = 6; (L = 3) + (C = 3) = 6.     Modern numerology of a name takes the vowels and consonants separately.       Together it adds up to a 3.   Where is the last 6?   ALEC    is short for American Legislative Exchange Council which reduces to a 33  or a 6.     Blind and complicit in its creation.

    The Sun whose number is 666 was a metaphor for the Golden Emperor Constantine.  The off gold 45 and love of gold, is but a servant.

    Not speaking for the OTO and being a Thelemite,  Babalon vs Babylon, and Baphomet are not of this biblical currents and metaphors.    Like the yin yang symbol there is always a seed of the opposite embedded in a time and a place.   Will it flower fully, only to those who keep the secret.  What secret,  ones that are published openly.   Again the truth is there.   Psalms 82  …. know ye not ye are gods….       and in the NT, you can become brothers and sisters of Christ.   Not his children, but full siblings.  There is no part of me that is not of the Gods.

    I love this country, I served as a Marine, I do not love the government.  The constitution was flawed and had the opportunity to be amended to fulfill its charter for Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.     Rome died.  Various iterations of France’s revolutions died.  Monarchies come and go. Greece who created the first Democratic experiment, died.    Evolution comes with growing pains.   And the old must give way to the new.  The Brave and the Free will hold on to what this country was meant to be, while the rest, abandon Life, Love and Liberty, who are traitors and will succumb to their nihilism.    May the Brave and the Free who hold sacred, Life, Love and Liberty survive to restore a people to a land to do what is right and good.

    As a spiritual person, I don’t believe, I pursue to know.      I do have one irrational belief.  I believe in the inherent goodness of mankind.    Sometimes I am justified in this belief, other times I am severely disappointed.    This belief is not what one  expects to exist, it is a belief as a prayer and internal work of Love to desire it to exist.            In this hard exterior, is Love.  That appears to be hidden and unseen except by those who share in the path and the work.      The proof shall be in the work and its success.

    Life, Love and Truth in harmony begets integrity.   That is one half of the seed.

     

     

     

  • BLOG

    A good man

    January 22, 2017 - By 

    A good man.

    When society has lost family or the family is dysfunctional and there is no wisdom nor models to be successful, at what the past generations done, and can see the changes in the future. When there is no community, but neighbors and family scrambling after every last dime, then spend it to entertain themselves, because there is no future, no other sense but the gratifying of the self, there is no man or woman or child that knows good. When people who steal, cajole, trick and lie into being comfortable and buy the hangers on that keep him company, believing money can buy loyalty, and then enjoy when they fall due to hubris and mistakes. There is no hero to be supported, to learn from, to survive in spite of it all.

    Integrity is when a man knows himself and the world as it is and should be and lives it. Then that is not just another male of the species, that is a Man. If a woman does the same and has integrity she is a woman. We are a social species. The success of our children, our future, and others depends on each other. When we can not identify with baker, the mother, the mechanic, the grocer, the doctor or the warrior, we don’t value them, nor ourselves. And honest good man and woman, recognize that they are not islands, they are part of a community. And it is that community that existed once, exists or even harder must exist in the future, is what one lives and dies for, for in it, do we not add to our soul, and to the collective memory and a spirit of the people.

    And only in a community that supports each other can any of us survive. A good man or woman who is undervalued and underappreciated, there is no support or good found towards anyone in the community. The following of celebrities is a thing it is empty and hollow as hollow as they are. Otherwise they tear each other down. The mob ruled by parasites neither are people, they have with the lack of integrity stealing the spirit of others have carved their souls to nothing and are but the living dead. Integrity builds the soul, with or without a community, it comes from an honest relationship if not in community and kindred, but at least with the universe, that knows the truth of these individuals.

    An honorable man keeps their honor shiny, it is the onus of obligation to oneself, their past and the future, it is the same root word to shine or to meet and obligation in Japan known as “on”, and it means to shine one’s sword. Honor, onus, on, my sword, my soul, integrity to shine for the past, the present and the future. This whether appreciated or not, to at least if nothing else, a caretaker of my soul, working for my childrens future, a community that I can reincarnate in, so may it be.

  • BLOG

    Find that Spark in Darkness

    January 22, 2017 - By 

    Lo, in the darkness, with no love, light, support, nor a single shred where the world would acknowledge my existence.

    Shrouded by that which could not love, nor pity, nor do what is right.

    There when in the pain of the desire of oblivion, not just death, I embraced, there was darkness. And then my soul, from right, frith, and will, with its integrity, the universe showed me who or what I am. The universe and nor that which enshadowed me, could grant me my wish. I exist, and the universe nor the gods can touch me. And in that, I saw my immortality.

    In that anyone with integrity adds to this flame of adamantium. Where those live the lie, faithless, feckless and desiring of no communion with others except their own pleasure extinguish their precious self, one sliver of a time. I weep not for them, nor do I take joy in watching the walking dead.

    I weep for those whose life was extinguished before they could fulfill their potential.

    Find your light guard it and enshrine it with your integrity, it will shine in the light, even if its obscured ephemeral willowisps of time.

    Shine throughout time.

  • BLOG - Uncategorized

    Principles of Immortality

    December 28, 2016 - By 

    PEOPLE EMBRACING CHANGE

    Mind, Body and Emotion in balance generates Spirit. Truth, Life, Love, in Harmony generates Integrity. Spirit and Integrity creates Soul. This is how we grow at all levels.

    princimmortal

    These are principles that I have espoused for well over a decade.

    What does this all mean?  Let me put this in context of a quote and questions put forth by , Ted  Nation.

    “‘Bind nothing!  Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt.’ Liber AL 1:22   (Aleister Crowley)”

    “How do you value your self?  How about others?  Is any man truly greater than another, or lesser?  Is it the choices we make that give us value?  Do we have value? How do you quantify that value?”

    Let me start with the principles, expand on it and then apply it.

    Most Yoga schools teach a triangle of mind, body and spirit.   And in it they teach detachment from ego and the world.     This a two dimensional approach.    Emotion enervates the body, creates state dependent behaviors, processes that harness the mind and the body to function and to action.    Actions may or may not create attachments to the world and to our own way of doing things.  Taking for granted  a set of behaviors, and beliefs and attachments to our selves  in a point of time.    Once done, we have rendered ourselves an artifact.  We are decaying as soon as we hold ourselves to a yardstick that which is also an artifact in time.    It is the relationship with others and other things.  Can we afford to disconnect ourselves from anything.  Can we afford to attach ourselves to anything.   It is the process of relationships to everything.

    Take a diamond, without a gem cutter  it’s value is much less as a raw stone.    How much value is a gem cutter, when he can turn  raw stones into something of value.  The art of a gem cutter, how much value is that, when it can be spread to other gem cutters?     And who profits from all this?     And what of all the gem cutters, when there are no more gems to cut?           What are the gem’s relationship to the gem cutter or the art?    It is a dynamic, but a finite closed loop.   It may exist through time, and be valued amongst gem cutters and those who profit from them, but in the end, when there is no more.  And people value the gems more than any of the people ever  involved with them, down to the miners.   

    Can the art of gem cutting be applied to other arts?  Can the disciplines applied  to that art be applied to other arts?  If so you have a living thing.  Not an artifact with a birth, life and death of a singular thing, process or dynamic, but a process that extends through time, and past artifact’s existences.    Processes useful to swim  amongst artifacts of time and existence.

    The spirit or essence of a thing, is based on the balance of mind, body and emotion.   The better equal lengths of the base makes the area.  In balance, a volume of essence and spirit are created.      Spirit without a container, form or structure, dissolves back into its constituent parts, with its form and function an artifact in time.

    Life by itself is into a relationship with only one thing, is an artifact.   Its value with other artifacts of existence lost in the dissolution and desolation of time and chaos.   Life without it, we have nothing.    Love, without it everything is meaningless.  Truth, the crucible by which all things are tested.  Judgment in the harshest or kindest degree, depends on our honest relationship with everything.   Life, Love and Truth in Harmony begets Integrity.  These three principles  must be in harmonious dynamic and equilibrium.      This is to say, One must have an absolutely honest relationship with everything, your self, the world and if not the whole Universe.   This generates Integrity, honesty with one’s self, the world and the Universe.    This is a relationship, a process, an art  of relationships, holding the truth of each sacred.   Would not the Universe, hold sacred the Truth of you?   

    tetrahedron2This simple tetrahedron,  if  body, mind and emotion  is in balance creates spirit.  It is the essence the blue print, of the person, the processes, and relationships not only with itself but the whole world.                  The complex dynamic tetrahedron of Life, Love and Truth, creates Integrity.  It is the discipline of the process and honest relationship with itself and the world that keeps its structure intact.     Together   Integrity and Spirit makes the Soul.   

    rotating_merkabah

    How do you value your Self?  How honest are you? How much effort do you put into your own being and the creation and maintenance of your Soul?    If you are looking for a yard stick to measure yourself against,  the yardstick is an artifact in relationship to other artifacts.    The question is how does the World value you.  How does it hold you sacred, whether it knows it or not?     If your soul continues to have an honest relationship with the world, and holds the spirit and essence of all that truth, actions and processes,  how are you not immortal?

    Is it the choices we make that give us value?  Yes and no.   A choice is not the action.    An action and  the honest relationship of all things, of that action is what makes the value.

    Do we have value?  Again by what yardstick?     My family, work,  and community,  have I contributed to the arbitrary value of the yardstick of material goods to each?     Or, have I added to the essence and spirit of each to exist beyond its concept of self?   How can  unconscious things, places, people and entities value us, by what yardstick?     What is immortal about each, and what is an artifact of time giving form, substance and topology of the reality, and what is the process of it and  its relationship to all of its constituent parts?  

    Quantify the yardstick and the ephemeral value of artifacts of existence.     What power and presence does it hold on us or give a platform and ocean of artifacts to swim in?   How well do we swim in it, or how well poorly we float like flotsam?  

    All I can say to the idea of quantifying value, is how do you qualify it?    Am I  an artifact or an immortal process?  Am I an artifact forgotten for the new shiny, or do I have an honest relationship with the immortal Universe, and do we hold each other sacred?

    As a man, “Is any man truly greater than another, or lesser?”, by the yardstick yes.   As that part of us that is an artifact of existence, no.     

    Ronald Glasser’s  rules of power (some of them):

    •    ” All things are equal to another”.
    •    ” There are exceptions to every rule, including this one” (See above)  

    This axiom is a spiritual teaching re-framed in many ways, to help develop detachment and equanimity  interacting with the world.  It is about having an honest relationship with everything.

    The truth of each person and being  is exactly the same.   Our honest relationship with each does not have to be the same.

    Paraphrased from “Fiddler on the Roof”:    “Rabbi, is there even a blessing for the Czar?”     “Yes, yes, there is a blessing for everything and every one.   May God bless the Czar, and keep him very, very, very far from us!”   

    That is an honest relationship, with self, community and the world demonstrated right there.       An honest relationship with things that are bad for us is to keep them very, very far from us.  Bind the artifacts, not us to them.          

    The Aleister Crowley quote is another re-framing of the Hindu Yoga teaching of detachment.   We are in a sea awash with a world of artifacts, and we interacting with them  we need not to be attached to them.   We only need to be honest with our interaction with them.    A yardstick is only good enough to paddle  through a sea of artifacts, no more no less.   And each class of artifacts yardsticks of every sort can be used and be useful.  Those values are an artifact of a class.  Our choice and action about those valuations depend on how we value our relationship to yourself and others.  

    When we are immortal, we are part of the Universe, and it with us. There is no differentiation except our own attachment to our own soul.  Valued and held sacredly only as we have done so with the Universe.    And in that reflection of the universe we too are held, sacred and immortal.

    sriyantra%20blue_resize

    Sri Yantra of MahaKali or MahaDurga

    The principles and schematic,  and its resemblance to the Merkabah or the Star of Metatron is no accident.   In each practice and concept  and contemplation of each of these principles in each plane can be its own genius.    Thereby not only are these principles of immortality, they too are principals of immortality owned by the soul housed within.  All  other concepts and usages of the Merkabah tradition, if true (many new age confabulations are not) should work well in concert with these principles.

    Old videos of this lecture:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OYldcK0r8c

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skdj8nK9kDA

  • BLOG

    Safety Pin, Paper Clip, Power and Privilege

    November 23, 2016 - By 

    safety-pin-trump-brexit

    If necessary in front of you.

    And yes this may get me killed.

    Or I could be a white privileged, slacktivist that only cares about personal guilt  about this cultural farce, that has been going deadly earnest.

    Racism has been deadly since the beginning of this country.  From  slavery to  incarceration, whether it is about cheap labor, drug wars or simple hatred for people of color POC, or pure greed  with genocide and theft  of the lands of the Native Americans.

    No matter what I do, I will always be suspect of privilege and have enjoyed some aspect of privilege.  I am  not female, a POC,  LGBT, or any other target of bigotry, or am I?   I am a white male, large and now middle aged.

    The safety pin or paper clip had supposedly been used to identify resistance to Nazi Germany and support of Jews  or any other minorities oppressed by them.  In England and the US,  anti-immigration sentiments essentially insured millions died.    The Safety Pin instead of the Paper Clip in Britain is being used to support immigrants and muslims post the Brexit vote to leave the EU European Union.  Britain’s rise of conservatism has been hand in hand from Margaret Thatcher with Ronald Reagan and all their successors.

    The USA incarcerated  120,000 Japanese, and the USA lost 420,000 men and women.

    Putin’s interest in Trump as a fascist is simple.  Trump is an isolationist, as are other republicans and they will destabilize NATO.   Trump will gain more leverage in the EU.   Russia lost over 26 Million people to Nazi Germany and WWII.   Thirteen percent of the population gone.   They will have no problem convincing their public and the EU to take the USA to task and wipe us off the face of the map. States will exist in their state’s rights as a divided third world bombed out dystopian hells.

    The Genocide of Native of Americans either directly or by disease over these centuries is horrible at a level that is unconscionable  and is still being exercised today. Corporation agents employed at various government agencies insure a sanctioned theft and abuse to this day.

    The reasons why Trump got elected   is sadly due to a prosperity theology along with fundamentalist dogma in rural white America, people that have never been exposed to anyone beyond their narrow white world.  This has been used in politics and  extremely conservative religious right groups for over three decades, with an extreme  use of conservative propaganda.  They are racist and they don’t believe anyone else deserves human rights or dignity.

    Over most of the last century the two party system was ostensibly bought and sold by the corporations and elite rich.    There was a while in the past 30 years  the elite were comfortable just purchasing one side,  the republicans, with a little support to be thrown to the democrats.    Hillary was an example of the old time  political cronyism and corruption bought and paid for by Wall Street.

    People are sick of it all.   In the election Bernie and Trump were seen as getting rid of the status quo politics with the libertarian party waiting in the wings to take over the bought and paid for  position of the republicans as they disintegrate.  The powerful elite have plans with in plans and contingencies.

    So, here we are.  Nazis Fascist America.    Either well meaning reactionaries who voted for Trump  Gaslight themselves or they are in part with most of the FOX news and republicans trying to Gaslight the rest of us saying they are not  Anti-LGBT, Misogynist, Racist, against Muslims, immigrants or any other minority.  If they deny it now, it is only from Sea Lioning , race baiting,  or a profound engrained  disassociative disorder that is psychotic.

    There is only one set of winners this election, the rich and powerful that either directly or indirectly own the premium stock of of the largest corporations in the world.  Common stock has been made to be sucker’s game where we invest in it only to have them drain the value of it and rob us yet another way.   How the  powerful elite has institutionalized wage and debt slaves is another long article that I may  or may not write.   The fact is the south who fought to keep slavery  lost to the north that insured all immigrants  would be wage and debt slaves in a rigged system.  The support of the current Republican party, as a way for the south to rise again, has only enslaved  all the white people as well, but also to be the cracker enforcers,  of this power structure.    The midwest rural  people who fought to carve out land, stolen from the Native Americans, to develop their own wealth have lost it to banks.   This has been manipulated for the past 50 years with the Farm Bill Subsidizing small farms only to eventually get rid of the programs to bankrupt the farmers and have these properties and farming opportunities go to the large agribusinesses.  The Agriculture department, along with the Bureau of Indian Affairs,  Bureau of Land Management, Food Drug Administration, and Department of Natural Resources have been peopled, implanted with corporate agents of Agribusinesses (Monsanto, et al), Oil, Timber, Mining corporations, to insure the theft, or orderly acquisition,  is all legal and neatly tied up.       Now along with the Native Americans, Farmers and Ranchers are being affected also.    Yet the White Farmers and Ranchers want to blame minorities and the Government as outlined by the media, as a liberal black president.

    Only now, as it is with the Emperor of the Star Wars, “Now your training to the dark side will be complete”.

    The whole use of  exhortation and other apologetic rhetoric  styles, along with best neurolinguistics  used in media,  editorial talk shows and Fox news for 30 years have people programmed.    The use of Prosperity Gospel in the fundamentalist churches along with the Dominionist movements to turn the US into a theocracy, has created that perfect storm of belief, to ignore all truths and self awareness, seems to finish us off.

    The power of monied resources,  propaganda, and religious  entrainment to belief  has turned  half of  America into useful tools.   Beyond the  obvious abusive sociopathology, they are in turn taught to blame everyone and everything else except themselves, creating narcissists that can’t and won’t ever deal with the truth of themselves.

    We are all in a very bad place.  One thing I learned about narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths, they will not and can not change.     They only respond to pain and the power to execute pain, or the fear of pain of death.     The only cure is death.   They however believe that anybody who opposes them are not human and that is the first step of rendering us as targets.  As targets we are no longer human.  Conscience, common sense or basic human decency are not even in the picture and can’t be brought up to be questioned unless you too will be labeled as another non-human target.

    The Safety Pin,  I have heard two arguments against it.   First,  Alt-Right people are or might use it to lure people into confrontations.   Anything that helps someone abuse it, misuse it and make people afraid of anything that may help them.    It furthers abusive isolationist strategies.  Second,  there are good intentioned white people who feel guilty they haven’t done anything of substance to help so they are showing  an outward symbol that in essence means not a damn thing.  What have your really done?   In essence most of them will say nothing, or conflate a bunch of BS that they can not see as being absolutely useless and inconsequential.

    Many gave up on the idea.

    I will use it as an opportunity to get to know me.  I have no guilt, I am more than simply aware that I might as well put a yellow star on me and say “Ich bin ein Juden!”     Don’t start a fight to test me.   Know me and need me,  I will be there.

    So get to know me.

    Beyond being an older white male, and there is privilege with that.   It ends there.

    Anyone that claims they are an ally, get to know them.  Let them get to know you.  Being white is  a big hindrance to developing this trust.  Being male is another big hindrance.     Living as a male in Upstate New York and the NorthEast during the 70’s where radical feminism was in full flight, I was another damn patriarchal male.

    Get to know me.

    As an intellectual in an anti-intellectual america, I am a target.  I am not relatable.   I graduated out of Colonie Central High School, in 1975.  I was 16 years old.     The suburbs between Albany and Schenectady NY, was poor.   The working lower middle class and mobile poor lived in these post WWII and Post Korean War  Saltbox  Bungalows.  This is where the middle class losing ground met the up and coming out of the slums of the city.   My neighborhood although white, was the urban type of redneck, that was called the “Greasers, Motorheads and with a liberal sprinkling of Stoners”.   There was a sprinkling of the “Preppies” but mostly they were in the other school districts.

    The principal  worked with the local authorities  to give bad recommendations about the students, even if they were well placed academically or financially to go to college.  They were highly recommended for the draft into the Vietnam War.  In 1974 many of these students who had  older brothers that died in Vietnam held a riot  at 100 days (till the end of school) with a smoke bomb  the size of a coffee can to evacuate the school.  They carried the principal’s car up to the top of a hill, upside down and trashed it.

    My neighborhood, had two drug gangs separated by age.   We had  a whorehouse where the local girls from 12 – 17 worked it.   That business was shut down because they didn’t pay the rent of the house they rented. The lack of police,  the use of the locals,  and the lack of any common sense on the worth of what they were doing, speaks volumes of the dysfunction there.    At 14 years old I am walking down the street and I get stopped by the police and threatened with my life. Being polite, hands on my head and not moving may have saved me. The parents  protected their little monsters, and the police were way past fed up. The parents were abusive, manipulative, sociopaths.  If not they were alcoholics or addicted to valium or the gamut of legal drugs of the day. I was big so I was a challenge and a target, by police, parents and the gangs.

    I went to church as a social outlet and to escape the dysfunctional home.    It was the only free time I got beyond being the good compliant daughter that mother wanted and never had.  I was the namesake of my Uncle Bill who she dearly loved and expected me to be an adult, do adult responsibilities with no authority, no support and to be treated as a complete idiot child.   Psychotic double bind there.  I was  the obstacle to her career.  I was unwanted and nothing I ever did would ever be good enough.  She had a long term affair with a married man, who was probably the best influence in my life, while he was a political hack that insured my brother knew how to verbally manipulate people as one of the best classed sociopaths I know of.  I was “shark baited” to my mother constantly, for a string of verbal and physical abuse, for  and by him and my mom both.  Church was where all the hypocritical kids went to, to get their free love, sex, and partying while God and Jesus forgave them.  I was pondering the insanity of life, why God put me where I was feeling like a complete alien.  I was in The  Twilight Zone where an individual was put on display with creatures that were clearly not like him, but look liked them as a scientific study.  When you read the bible through and start asking questions,  now I become a target  by those who just want me to believe.

    If you are empathic, telepathic sometimes and have experienced a bunch of paranormal experiences, fundamentalist churches are not your friends.

    Without the finances and falling through all the social programs and into the cracks of society, “so-called” easy student money  for the late 70’s didn’t exist for me.    A simple 1040 form from a parent starts the whole financial  world of being a student, even being poor. Had I stole the form as my brother did, or declared emancipation from my mother that could’ve changed things for me.  I had no one who would throw me that clue. The counselors at the school were there for a paycheck and viewed all the kids as hoodlums or worse.   I asked for help or for someone to talk to my mother.  I was told to go away, or they would call security and the police.  And, don’t bother them again.

    I was beat up every other day for several years until I turned 12.   I  grew to be 5’10” tall 180 lbs., took up wrestling in school and studied martial arts on my own.   After a few last fights with gangs and their leaders,  I was left alone.   Except once where a local goon was attempting to go back to school, but mostly it was to intimidate me.   I was blessed with a bunch of kids jumping on the guy who 4-6 inches taller and outweighed me by another 100 lbs. and probably  19 yo when I was 15.  I was ready to go to jail and do my best to kill him in school. This goon went straight after me with out all the highschool drama.  It was serious business to him.   I knew nothing less and I would be hounded day in day out, eventually have a whole gang of bigger monsters in the older gang, that were more violent.

    I worked odd jobs,  painting, mowing, raking leaves, fixing plumbing.  What allowance I had was taken away from me, and I bought my own clothes, gym clothes, school books and if I wanted, my own school lunches.  I was a target for the scam artists and thieves  from the school, neighborhood kids and the adults.  I learned the deep nuanced skills of  sociopaths,  psychopaths  and this social pathological way of dysfunctional thinking.

    Needless to say trying to go to college in 1975, with no money, parental support, or not being a ward of the state,  although I was courted by some of the best schools in the nation, including RPI, Stanford, etc.  those administrative hurdles might have been the Grand Canyon, ask me to jump it with a kite.  I was given the ultimatum to work and pay rent,  go to college or go into the service.   There was glut of 18 year olds, and the jobs wanted 2 years experience even for McDonald’s and Burger King, preferably with degrees in business.    17+ colleges in a very small population for the Tri-City Area, made getting a job Impossible.

    Two days after my 17th birthday, I joined the Marines with  someone I knew in Scouts.   He bailed in boot camp.  Believe it or not Bootcamp was better than my home life.  Marine Corp Boot camp, better than my home life. 1975-79 was directly after the Vietnam War, and still being spit on and named a “baby killer”, did nothing for me socially.   I was manipulated and got involved, unknown to me, with  a DC prostitute that was recently freed from prison, to use me to get her kids back.   A whole new level of sociopath to learn and survive from.   Before I met this  woman I was in Camp Barret  OCS Field training school for Midshipmen freshly minted lieutenants.  I was coming home on the camp bus from the Main Base’s Enlisted Mans Club.   I was enjoying the one privilege of being an underage serviceman, to enjoy drinking alcohol.   On that bus I was the only white man.   I was stomped on for over a half an hour while the bus driver pulled over to allow my fellow marines to continue beating on me and  to stomp on me more.  I am made of stern stuff.  I wasn’t hurt bad. They got to the camp and I went to the on-duty Sergeant of the guard, while this one big dude was still beating on me, I asked for assistance.    Three weeks later  I got pulled up in front of the camp’s CO for an inquiry of me being a racist, saying I used the word “jigaboo”.     I never heard the word before in my life.   I did call them chicken, because they wouldn’t let me up to fight them. I asked for the Provost Marshall  ” a defending attorney in the military justice system” .     I was being set up to be a scape goat.  What I found out was that 6 months before I got to the base there was a race riot.  Six months before that 3 fellow Marines were shot dead because they were black and an opportunity of a target by what appeared to be another marine driving on to base and shooting them with a shot gun.

    I  did not choose to hate women.  I did not choose to hate black people.  I chose to understand.

    In these intervening years I was stuck with a worthless GI Bill that could not help afford a college that was meant to educate someone.  Community colleges were looked at by professors as an extension of high schools by privileged brats.   What I was, was apparently worse.  I have suffered more outright hate, abuse, and dirty under handed dealings by white people,   banks, landlords, bosses, you name it.

    I worked as a typist for a college where I was one of 3 men of an office of over 70 women.    I was not male enough because of the job.  I wasn’t  a person of respect because I was part of the evil patriarchy.  No matter how hard I worked I wasn’t good enough for even as an employee for most of them.  I don’t hate women.   I learned office politics, and the reality of NY clique behaviors and how pathological they are.  If you don’t fit in any one of them, you will never get a chance to  migrate in the ageist, cliquish extremely small jingoistic groups that existed in the Tri-City area.

    I got  to work for the State of NY.    Their affirmative action was in full swing and whatever you scored on your civil service tests even a 102, 2 points added as a veteran, would not get you a job or promotion.    I learned about nepotism, grooming of favorites and the low  brow cliquish  good ole boys or girls clubs, and was always put on the outside.  I watched people as they lost their retirements from NAFTA agreements and treaties sending their mill town jobs from the Mohawk and Hudson River companies overseas.   They hated minorities,  not the corporations.  They hated foreigners and not the politics that played them.  I watched  Carter be set up by the CIA Director to have the American students in  Iran rescue be sabotaged.  I watched  the tax reforms advantage the rich and  the “invest in America” of Bush Sr. to have his son execute fleece  all of America by crashing the stock market as people tried to have anything to retire with 16 years later.

    All of what I said was true, and was forgotten and it came to pass, and being solidly ignored because I am young, not positioned in society correctly, no degree, no support, with a only a couple of weird friends, only to be constantly dismissed, abused and used by women, employers, bosses, and acquaintances pretending to be friends.

    And still I am privileged, as a white male.  Were I  female, minority or gay, it would have been much much harder.  At the same time my social education was excellent.  Because I learned from it, searched for the answers out of love and not hate.  I want to help and fix this mess, and I needed to understand it.

    I am 58 years old.   I have tried to donate to Equal Rights,  Planned Parenthood,  and other organizations.   Unfortunately I watched as these organizations put up people for a vote that had no common sense and common ground beyond the one issues.

    My family  supported the Liberal party.   My Grandfather helped with the Worker’s party.   Railroad workers were worked around the clock and dying at the switch and controls for train engines and Eugene Debs was trying to keep girls from being chained into sweatshops and dying from fires if they were allowed to use fire escapes.  It was being infiltrated by the  Communists and he helped with Socialist party which became infected with Communists, and  helped break it.   He helped with the creation of the Liberal party that was pro-union and very anti-communist. They worked for the 12 hour a day manifesto.  This got the Railroad socialized by the government for the planned war for WWI.  Post WWII  they worked for the 8 hour day as we know it.

    My grandfather, father and older brother went down south to help sign up black voters, and push for the Equal Rights Amendment.  The family pushed for issues so that they would be dealt with by whoever won the elections. They each ran for various elected offices and failed.

    My great grandfather and his brother fought for the Union in the Civil war.  And to the anger of the Confederate Sons,  they were part of Sherman’s scorch and burn campaign.

    This is not enough to cover the sins of our family.  My great great grand aunt took the slaves our family had south and sold them. This is after NY outlawed slavery.

    I have stood up for women, minorities, the handicapped,  the mentally disabled, and the LGBT people,  for the financial freedom  and liberties we all as human beings deserve.

    I found that nothing short of  a bullet will cure these narcissistic sociopaths that are parasites or enablers of parasites in our country.

    I am working with a core group of friends to create a church, a tribe, that focuses on leadership, community values, and supporting family and diversity.     We can garner absolutely no interest whatsoever.   We need leaders, healers, and skilled people to build a new society.   We need groups of people to help heal and build the society when it all blows up and goes to hell in a handbasket.   Like anything, it seems likely I am destined only to clean up the messes that others have left behind and be abused for it, not to be trusted to help make any of it better, to prepare for anything better.

    I am 58 years old, fell into the cracks of society, and eke along.  I need to get my last two kids into college or work.  They are good kids.  That may be the only successful thing I have ever done.  Their mom helped.  I am watching me being shuffled out of work and out of skills to work here in the near future.  I have no success, no retirement, bills and nothing of value except for some books.

    I don’t care if you don’t believe me.  I don’t care if you think I am one of the damned oppressive white patriarchy.  I don’t care if you hate me.

    I will stand up for you.  I will stand in front of you and if need be take a bullet or the abuse.   I have gotten pretty used to doing that.  If the safety pin  is like a gold star and  be considered SJW “Social Justice Warrior” and I get shot by one of the Alt-Right, so be it.  If it keeps you safe and gives you time to flee, so be it.   If you want me to obstruct traffic, no.  That will be on you.  That is your choice to do that.   I understand why that may be something to do. I believe in public safety. I don’t believe in giving any of these rat bastard Nazis an excuse to mow people down. I  will be armed,  I will fight back.

    Our country has taken a significant step to becoming a Fascist corporate Oligarchy.  The rich will be out of the country hiding all the ill gotten gains through this while our country kills each other.  I can’t afford to escape.  I can’t afford to leave.  There are good people in this country. If I can be part of the resistance against a Nazi America, so be it.

    Know this:

    • I will be going dark about all these things and beliefs on Facebook.  Facebook is owned by conservative right people.
    • I will start deleting my old posts and hiding them from the public and eventually my friends.
    • There are conservative acquaintances that have acted in accordance with the abusive narcissistic parasitic behaviors  they have been programmed with. When they come with guns and brown shirts, I will be pointed at.
    • If you question if I will support you, do question me and others.  You can not be too  careful.
    • It will be getting worse.
    • When it does, I will do what a fat old man can, and it will be much worse than obstructing traffic.
    • I would rather be in a place to create a better world, better people, and be there to put a world back together that is worth living.  Like any other hoped for dreams, that too will likely be destroyed.
    • I will pray for a better world.  I will do magic.  I will struggle mind, body, spirit and soul, to make things right.
    • or die trying.

    I must be satisfied with love I have received for being who I am.

    I want to finish a book on magic.   The wage slave I am I must study to be accredited for something that will keep me employed.

    If not that then.  If the Gods deny me, they can’t destroy me.   I have survived, this scouring chaos of existence.  I have integrity.  I will struggle to keep my last scrap of dignity and yours.

    This is dark, this is pessimistic, but not negative.    I cannot help what the pragmatic reality actually is.  I pray for our country and all good people to survive.  I have faith there are good people out there and they are worth preserving.

    Let me know you are trying too.  We need allies, friends, and witnesses if it is our last breath.

    If we fall into the abyss, I will hold onto my light and pray you find a way out.