why occult "works" then boomerangs

I know someone has a question regarding why occult work seems to work, and then suddenly and repeatedly falls apart along the exact same lines as the original formulation.

Not in a mood for heavy blogging, so here's the gist. When someone does occult activity they lay down tracks, and the more they use the tracks the heavier a path they leave. Suppose they think they fulfilled their original objective. It's not like they can "pick up the tracks" of the path they had laid. The path of their spelling, or other occult activities (astrology, anagrams, numbers, cards, etc) remains because they made it happen. It's not like they can undo history like it never happened, as they obviously did those occult things to achieve a presumed result. Once the result is obtained (or as more usual, is a total fail), the spiritual and activity path remains as they have left footprints.

At this point the "wages of sin is death" kicks in along the pathway that was laid down. Occult work is sinful and evil because it places a pathway in place and presumes someone's right to oppress another person (or "self bless") where that right belongs to God alone. So the footsteps remain of the original occult activity. Punishment, either deliberate delivered via God by his angels, or natural (consequences of very bad decision making) then follows the same footsteps that person had laid down.

Let me use an easy example. Let's say someone put a spell down, or did occult work, against someone using the number five. Let's say it was done through numerology (where they whammy some person using presumed "5" power) or it was done through anagram or other "word" power (using the letters F, I, V, E, as in "fie to V" or something like that to whammy someone with a V or whatever). Working or not, valid or bogus, the occult work drew a line that involves the number 5 or the letters F, I, V and E. God and his creation nature will respond and follow that path back to the person, their supporters, and/or even those who benefit from other parallel bad deeds (not necessarily part of the whammy 5 group).

A natural backlash example would be if the person uses 5 for magic/occult and then is blind to some real life danger that involves 5, since they are thinking only of magic and not real world. So they get run over by a truck on route 5 or something because they fall into an unconscious neglect of their normal real life caution since they think they "control 5." So without even realizing it they drive along route 5 and ignore normal safety protocol.

A God backlash example is he allows his angels to confound the occult maker by opposing them via the same pathways they had laid down. So angels will throw, with God's permission, a boomerang, so to speak, along the 5 or the F,I,V,E footsteps, and that boomerang will often hit something that at some point is in service to or allied with or a beneficiary of the person who had performed the occult in the first place.

So the bottom line answer is that when someone does an occult deed the footprints never disappear since the act, successful or bogus, was real and a part of actual history. It is thus opened not only the one way original sense of the whammy or whatever, but not only back along the path to the originator, but also creates tributaries (like a river) along similar streams. So a 5 whammy by person A against person B can well create 5 whammy paths to C, D, E and so forth because energy will settle into similar channels of connectivity. Duh.

That is why all occult activity is forbidden by God and never can be considered "good," ever.

Hygiene & chores update (3)

I don't have a cell phone or Blackberry etc (no money, bankruptcy, plus I don't use them all that much), so I waited till I returned to the boarding house for this update via my laptop computer!

Got in the car and after carefully waiting for traffic to clear, drove to the gas station.
Out of the $10 I have left I purchased $4.41 of petrol. Why 4.41? So glad you asked.

Cult people follow the "belief" based on "numerology" (all sinful occult activities) that the number 4 is "bad luck." So I wanted to hand them some nice bad luck (not the petrol station people but the freaks with the nosy eyes). In the USA 4/1 is "April Fools Day" so I gave them an "April fool" sign of bad luck sent from me (as I had to pay money and thus I am sending this number outward to them) of a LOT of FOUR to them as APRIL FOOL! God of course will decide how this all settles out.

I then drove to the mall. I had brought along in a plastic cup some Coca Cola from my home 32 oz bottle, to save money, and bought the cheapest slice of pizza (plain, only $2 including tax).

I sat for a while in the "courtyard" of the mall but because it looks like after the Apocalypse (many closed stores, few shoppers) I did not stay doing my cross stitch long.

I endured two "scenarios" where each time (once on the way and once back) a truck pulls to the side of the road before me, and then a car "accidentally" pulls out of the parking lot behind the truck into my path. Since I've gotten realllllllly good at expecting these things I saw in advance and avoided via anticipatory lane changes.

Also saw some obligatory license plates with (using cult number talk) the usual lovely references to poo, sex in that area, incest, abuse, etc. It's like those old "Burma Shave" signs, kind of rolling advertisements for tech despair of damnation.

So I returned around 1:11 and am here updating my list. Expect to pee at some point soon (sorry, no poo so far, but I'm OK with that). Also need to iron two items for B and also prepare some dinner out of the very few groceries around here, probably rice and some left over chicken.

Have a grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat day, and I'll be sure to update if I get any pee or poo news!!!!

(Sorry, no Bible study. The people have "voted" and this is what they prefer.)

understanding Jesus: numbers not important

I've been meaning to blog about this since Sunday when the scripture I will reference was discussed in Sunday school. Here are the scriptures describing the two separate occasions when Jesus fed thousands of people by miraculously multiplying a tiny amount of food.

Mark 6:39-44

And he ordered them to make all the people recline in groups on the green grass. And they reclined in groups of hundreds and of fifties. And he took the five loaves and the two fishes and, looking up to heaven, blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and the two fishes he divided among them all. And all ate and were satisfied; and they gathered up what was left over, twelve baskets full of fragments, besides what was left over of the fishes. Now those who had eaten were five thousand men.

Mark 8:1-9

In those days when again there was a great crowd, and they had nothing to eat, he called his disciples together and said to them, "I have compassion on the crowd, for behold, they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat; and if I send them away to their homes fasting, they will faint on the way for some of them have come from a distance." And his disciples answered him, "How will anyone be able to satisfy these with bread, here in the desert? He asked them, "How many loaves have you?" And they said, "Seven."

And he bade the crowd recline on the ground. Then taking the seven loaves, he gave thanks, broke them and gave them to his disciples to distribute; and they set them before the crowd. And they had a few little fishes; and he blessed them, and ordered them to be distributed. And they ate and were satisfied; and they took up what was left of the fragments, seven baskets. Now those who had eaten were about four thousand. And he dismissed them.

---

Alright, there are so many things that one should discuss and understand about these two miracles, but I have found that a very common error in approach to understanding these miracles derails most of the modern discussion of these events away from their core spiritual and literal meanings. Sure enough, right after reading one of these passages our Sunday school teacher (who I really like, so this is no criticism) almost immediately fell into the derailment by reading what all these highly educated commentators have said about these miracles: *I'm rolling my eyes* .... "the symbolism of the number of loaves and fishes".....*I'm rolling my eyes again, as I can't even repeat this without being frustrated, argh*

He then starts to repeat what "they" (the wonderful commentators) have "analyzed" about the "meaning" of how many loaves and fishes they were, and what holy numbers they symbolized, blah blah blah. I interrupted him right there and said something like, "I know all the commentators discuss it but they are wrong: there is absolutely no symbolism in either of these miracles by Jesus." I briefly stated why and here I will explain it to you.

First of all, let's discuss why people get so easily misled into missing the events and then worthy analysis of the miracles' greater meanings (not "symbolisms" as a greater meaning is different than "symbolism.") One cannot discuss a greater meaning of these events without first agreeing on the facts. So that is what Mark and the other gospel writers set forth when they wrote about Jesus: first the facts, then what Jesus actually did, and then any greater meaning (John's Gospel tends to include more of that kind of thought), including any explanation of how/why that Jesus provided. There are two reasons modern people are so easily mislead into discussing ridiculous things like the "meaning" and "symbolism" of "how many" loaves and fishes were used by Jesus. First of all, people today do not understand why such trivial data is supplied, unless it has a "deep" and "heavy" "symbolic" "meaning." That is because they no longer understand that detailing such small items (which happens throughout the Bible) is what people were taught to do, back when only oral history and verbal contracts existed, which is to "bear witness." I include the label here "witness" where I have previously explained this.

So what modern people think is either a trivial point (who cares if it was five loaves) or a big heavy "symbolism" (ooooh, it must have been "five" for "a reason," yeah, a "mystical reason..." followed by profound and eerie music and nods of agreement by the scholars who are paid and make names for being so smart) the reason it was recorded down to the number of loaves and fishes is that.... that is what actually happened, and the people of those times were all taught by their families and teachers to be scrupulously accurate in bearing witness to great events. It's part of the accuracy record, to them, and that is the automatic mindset.

One reason it is important to be accurate is so that readers (or those who hear the Gospel verbally) understand exactly how big or small an event just took place. Look at the two extremes in an analogy. If Jesus fed 5000 people with let's say 1000 loaves, that would not be such a huge miracle, would it? On the other hand, if Jesus fed people with no loaves, making the loaves out of thin air, it would be a huge miracle (but not more huge than what actually happened.) What, you say... why is that? Why would in theory no loaves be equally as miraculous as feeding from five loaves? Remember the Exodus, when Moses asked God to feed the people and manna fell from the skies. The Jewish people would all have been VERY mindful of that seminal miracle in their faith history, when God provided the bread of manna out of nothing, as it rained down from the sky. They thus would have viewed Jesus as having done the same thing, mediating between the hungry people and God, who provides for them out of nothing. So anyone alive during that time who carried witness either verbally or in writing would have routinely recorded how many loaves and fishes because it allowed the listener or the reader to put what happened in the proper context with the facts.

The second reason modern people, including supposedly smart scholars, fall into the trap of putting numinous and irrelevant meaning on the number of loaves and fishes is, well, there is no subtle way to put it, they are a bit weak in their faith. Either consciously but (to give them the benefit of the doubt) unconsciously, they tend to think that the number is important because it is contrived. I'm not saying they full out think this is a made up story, but there is always the temptation to disbelieve something so incredible, always nibbling and gnawing in the back of the mind. So these commentators figure, "Well, just in case this actually did not happen, we can still derive a 'greater spiritual lesson' by 'analyzing the meaning' of what the 'authors' (not God) did 'present.'" You see what I mean? When there is even a five percent of doubt of the literal accuracy of the Gospel in one's mind, no matter what a believer and a "scholar" you are, your understanding of the plain words will be mislead and warped. Previous generations could discuss "meaning" and "symbolism," sure, but they did so on the firm basis of 100 percent believing the facts of the miracles: that is the sad difference between then and these smarty pants modern times.

So how did I bring an abrupt halt to that line of thought? I will explain it to you now and offer it to you as a faith and reasoning case study. I said something like this. Well, if the numbers are so "symbolic" and "mean something else," does that mean that if only four loaves were there instead of five, Jesus would have hit his forehead and said, "Darn! Now I can't do the miracle! It's the wrong symbolic number of loaves!" Or if they had loaves but no fishes, would Jesus have said, "Wish I could help, but it's just not the right holy symbolic numbers of ingredients." Ha ha ha, yes, my readers, I did see a few fellow Sunday school members narrow their eyes at me ha ha when I said that ha. But they have to see in parody, sometimes, how silly they are being (or how easily misled). I mean, this is deadly serious: Jesus Christ, born of God by the Holy Spirit overshadowing the Blessed Virgin Mary, healed, performed miracles, and conquered death, resurrecting after being crucified and ascending into heaven. The facts are mighty just as they are, I mean, duh. The facts don't have to also be "symbolic" of like lucky numbers or something. The way to detox from such thinking (that there is some "formula" or "bigger meaning" to the small facts, the insignificant number of the loaves and fishes) is to test the theory that the number of each item is instrumental to the miracle taking place. That is what I did, by making the people answer, "Well, if those numbers are so symbolic, does that mean Jesus could or would do the miracle only if a certain number of the items were there?"

Would Jesus "not be able" to do the miraculous feeding if there wasn't the "holy symbolic" number of items? Of course not. Jesus could do it with zero loaves or 1000 loaves.

Would Jesus refuse to feed the hungry people because there isn't the "right number of 'holy symbolic' items there?" Imagine that, Jesus saying: "Oh oh, there is supposed to be five loaves because that's a really holy important number, and you have only four loaves, so sorry, I'm not going to do the miracles and you have to walk home hungry, hope you don't hit your head on a rock while you are faint with having followed me for days." Obviously not, and I included the passage where Jesus states his concern for the health of people who had been fasting for so long already (and that is the motivation for the miracle, not to demonstrate his power and authority).

You see, that is what people ought to be gleaning from their personal reading of the Bible, the facts, the context, Jesus' words and explanations, and the Gospel writers words and explanations. Young people who use computers, you know WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). The Bible must be read and understood that way, that what you see is what you get, and also "it is what it is." Jesus was followed by many people, on two different occasions, to remote areas for several days where there was no fresh food to gain after what people had brought with them had run out. Out of concern for them Jesus takes whatever is found and turns that through his miraculous God given ability into much food for the multitude. All that is documented so that the listeners and readers of these events comprehend how big and precise a miracle this was, so that they get it even though they were not there.

The key to the miracles is that Jesus demonstrated he can make do with what people provided. If it was no loaves or many loaves or, as in the reality, just a very few loaves, Jesus can and did work with whatever people had.

That, then, is the larger meanings of these miraculous events because yes, sure, there are the events and then there is the larger meaning to glean from it, but it's not "magic" or "holy" "numbers" kind of meanings. I can write more about them some other time as I really want to keep this confined to the case study of understanding how to avoid the pitfall of missing the really important facts and points of a Biblical event by derailing on something unimportant and thus not seeing the outline of what one should indeed contemplate. So here is in closing just a list of how to mindfully approach the "bigger and greater meaning" of the miraculous events.

1. Notice the circumstances and think about them. People obviously were so committed to hearing what Jesus said that thousands followed him into barren areas with no thought of their food or water.

2. Notice Jesus' motivation for the miracles, which is simple plain love and humanity for their plight, after showing such commitment and attention to him. This is far away from the nagging scribes and Pharisees, so Jesus is not performing these miracles in order to demonstrate his God given authority. It is plain and simple loving need.

3. Notice that Jesus uses whatever is available, for he has the might of God with him, and lots of bread and fishes or no bread and fishes, God can do anything.

4. Notice that Jesus gives thanks and don't slide over that thinking that is like saying grace before food, for it is not a pre-meal prayer of thanksgiving to God. Jesus is thanking God for the ability to perform what, only through God, he is about to do, which is feed the people. Jesus is thus both on his own thanking God for what is about to occur, but also giving the people a role modeling of how always to be so whenever one uses one's God given abilities, to be thankful first and foremost to God.

5. Notice that Jesus gives the food to the disciples to distribute. Of course some of that is logistics, as many hands can distribute the food faster. But the greater meaning is that Jesus is a) preparing the disciples and the people for the time when they can do some of this themselves, for remember all the Apostles and original disciples became able to perform miracles and b) that the word of God needs to be carried and spread by everyone, not just, as we would say today, the "guru." Jesus is always modest and that was a sincere modesty because he never for a second of his life forgot that everything he was able to do was directly from God the Father. Thus Jesus did not have to "showboat" and hand out the food himself so people would be grateful to him and impressed by him.... Jesus always demonstrated that a) all power and glory go to God alone and b) his disciples were extensions of him and Jesus did not always need to be "the one." Remember that Jesus himself did not baptize, but his disciples baptized their followers. Jesus was always showing how the faith community was to come together and function, as it would have to when he was no longer there.

6. Notice that they record what fragments remain. This is part of what I explained about the witnessing to the facts of what happened. It is also OK and valid to ponder the greater meaning that even after Jesus through God provides all that is needed, there is even more leftover. God's grace is always more than expectations and there is always more than the bare minimum of human needs.

I hope you have found this helpful! Do not be afraid to discover that even wise experts, in these modern times in particular, miss the forest through the trees. (That's an old saying, for those of you who are English second language or may not have heard it, meaning that some people are so obsessed with details that they notice one or two trees without ever realizing those one or two trees are accompanied by many trees in a forest all around them.) Glomming onto an imaginary importance of how many loaves is like missing the entire event because your mind is hijacked into thinking it's all about those loaves "conveying" a "numeric" "message" "from God," and thus you don't get points 1-6 at all as you look just at that diversion.

*Sigh* Like I said, much of this comes from lack of understanding the simpler times when people really did just write down the facts without an agenda.

Oh, that makes me realize something I can add quickly here, which is "spotting agenda." Here is a quick example that merits a huge amount of writing elsewhere.

OK, you've seen Jesus, and his Apostles, and all the events that took place. Maybe you are a distant relative of one of the disciples. The focus would be entirely on documenting exactly what happened. No one would have an agenda (except, as we saw, the Jews and Romans who put Jesus to death, for they covered up that he resurrected by bribing the guards and spreading the story that his body was removed and "hidden.") So the Gospels and the Epistles (the letters) of the New Testament are all agenda free because people in a really verbal and oral culture were attempting to get precisely in writing exactly what happened. What happened was so detailed and astonishing that for brevity much is left out that is repetitive. By that I mean that for example Jesus performed thousands of individual miracles, but the means to write down details of every one of them would have been impossible then. People memorized and shared the data of the essentials, writing down what people needed to know for the faith that had factually occurred.

But now let's imagine that some hundred years or more has gone by. Someone in your family may have been that relative of a disciple I mentioned (imagine if you belonged to Judas Iscariot's family descendants!) Now you have to watch for agenda. This is the problem with so called Books that people wave around once in a while and claim that they are "true" and "give the real story" of "what happened." These are well known, and a few years ago media manipulators tried to get everyone all excited about the Book of Judas with claims that he and Jesus had an agreement, blah blah blah. The same has popped up about Mary Magdalene and others. There is of course more pious versions such as the stories of the Blessed Virgin Mary and how Joseph selected her (or she him) with like a flowering wand or something like that. These are all written many years, often centuries, after Jesus, of course, was actually alive, by people who were not there.

How do I know they weren't there? Use logic my friends. If they were there it would have been in the Gospels, Acts and Epistles, duh. People were doing agenda-free documenting of all that needed to be known about Jesus (we don't know what side he slept on or what cereal he liked best) but we know absolutely everything about his ministry and the nature of the New Covenant with God. So anyone who actually had been on the scene and had a significant role would have been documented accordingly.

So through dating but also pure logic we know that all these extra books are ancient but not comtemporary with Jesus. Anything that pops up centuries later and claims to contain secret or "real" information is bogus because no one had any need to "hide" anything when Jesus was alive (except the Jewish religious authorities after he resurrected, ha). Jesus lived an entirely open life surrounded by hundreds of people constantly, and Jesus was doing a continual stream of teaching and role modeling, preaching and ministry at all time: there were no secret deals or any such imaginings. That would have lost the entire point anyway. Jesus did not have to arrange with Judas to be betrayed (it would be funny if it was not so faith warping) because, duh, the Gospels document how often Jesus had to flee or dodge people who wanted to kill him right then and there (even in his hometown).

So this is why you have to use a little common sense to discern agenda. The Gospels and rest of the New Testament had no agenda except to document and communicate the marvelous events that had happened, plus the teachings of Jesus. Anything from a later date that is not part of the Christian community communications via letter, sermons and so forth is going to be a combination of two very modern phenomena: 1) Spin doctoring by people who wanted to get their piece of celebrity action, so like I said, I bet Judas' descendant family members would have wanted to write a 'he didn't do it' saga and 2) Genuine remnants of memories of things like the life of the Virgin Mary, but now glossed with all sorts of sentimental fiction to romanticize her genuine purity and virtue (in other words, the "cute meet" story between her and Joseph that is supposedly preserved).

Thus remember, which is why I brought this up, the disciples had no agenda as they authored the Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles, and Revelation, rather than to record precisely what had occurred as this was a nearly total verbal culture and society in the world. The model for such precision in writing was of course the Torah and all the books of the Old Testament. People used witnessing to get the facts in writing to reach those areas they could not achieve through travel, and also to preserve and hand down the information to the next generations of what had actually happened. Likewise God had no "agenda" other than send his Son, the Savior and Messiah, to do what he did. God did not have to plant "significant numbers" or "hidden meanings" or any such thing because that is self defeating and remember that God is all perfection. God is what he is. So don't get diverted thinking there is hidden or arcane meaning to be "gained" in the scripture, since, well, think about it, God seems to have to hit humans over the head again and again and again with the simple truth. Subtlety is lost on humans and God would have no reason not to make things very, very, VERY plain over and over and over. Points 1-6 rather than "oooooh, the number of loaves 'means something!'" Finally spot agenda before it spots you. Use common sense to discern the difference between people who were part of the fact checking witnessing of the group of disciples who were actually there versus writings by some sort of imaginary hanger oners years and centuries after the fact who have obvious "My grand pappy's neighbor's shepherd knew them too!" types of motivations (or like Judas Iscariot's poor family descendants, ugh, who would want to have been them?)

I hope this helps.

Exercise to detox from cult thinking

I just thought of this exercise for you, which is part history lesson and part a detox study for debunking cults and their warped thinking.

Let's start with setting the stage for this exercise before I explain the background. Suppose that President Obama developed the ideal comprehensive health care plan, one that is absolutely solid, just, fair and would work. The only problem is that for some reason no American can have an individual name nor know their birth date. That is the only "price" for this health care plan. This is just a mental exercise, so don't worry about hidden reasons for this... there are none, this is a totally innocent and obvious case study. So everyone agrees that they will no longer have a name and they will no longer know their date of birth. What do you think would happen? Would the world end? The universe implode? Everyone go crazy?

No...obviously not. People would start to have nicknames "Like brown eyed dumb ass" or "The tall guy who is son of the short guy." People would celebrate "birthday parties" whenever they want. And a lot of computer systems would have to be rewritten, LOL. Life would go on, and better than it ever did before because in this case study we are assuming that President Obama really did come up with an actual great health care plan.

How do we know that there would not be chaos or, more to my point, that there is no "spiritual" or "apocalyptic" fallout of having no names or knowledge of birthdays?

Because that is how most of human life already has been lived.

Young people, you must realize that no one even owned a calendar, say nothing of caring about the day a child was born, until very recently in human history. Only a hundred years ago plenty of people had no idea of their birth date.

And the giving and having of a formal individual name is also a very recent phenomenon. People were forced to think of names for themselves when governments organized enough that they wanted to draft and tax them. This reached its height in the Middle Ages, when people were forced to think of last names for themselves. This is why many Jews have pretty last names (when translated), meaning things like gold, roses, etc. Since they were forced to think of last names, they just picked out really cool names for themselves.

Most of the world did not (and many still do not) have last names. Even their first names were not unique. I remember when "Mary" was the most popular name for girls. In Islamic countries they continue to use the most frequent, often of the Qur'an, names, with last names being the lineage of who was the father, then grandfather.

Why am I teaching this to you? Well, what is the cornerstone of most crazy occult beliefs? That there is "significance" to a person's name and birth date. Cultists who are by definition totally delusional over analyze and become control freaks over names and birth dates, deriving sounds, anagrams, synonyms, numerology, "symbolic meanings," astrology bull crap, supposed reincarnation bull crap.... all from information that ninety nine percent of humans did not have and did not track during their entire history.

Whenever you are tempted, young people, to believe some baloney about the "significance" of your name or your date of birth (and hence numbers etc), think of this scenario that I have now presented to you above. What if President Obama wrote and funded a perfect health plan, but all one had to do for some innocent reason was give up having a formal name and knowing one's date of birth. I mean, would the universe "fall apart" because there is this bat crap crazy notion that it is secretly "controlled" via that information? Information that still does not exist for much of the world AND did not exist at all, since people had no names or "dates" of birth, for most of the thousands of years of civilization. Um, obviously not because you all are here, aren't you? You are descended from great great grandparents who didn't even necessarily have last names and/or didn't record the date of birth of their kids, even if they knew what it was. If you are of my age you probably knew when you were a child elderly people who remember the times when large families barely kept track of birth years and months, say nothing of the date.

I hope that you have found this helpful as another way to 1) use logic when confronted with a dubious theory 2) use reasoning to think through "test cases" of comparative examples of scenarios and 3) to train your mind away from believing stuff that has absolutely no logic when closely examined and 4) use the truth of real human history to study what actually happened. I mean, have countries where most of the people still have only one casual name, no last name, and no clue as to the exact date that person was born, and name generation after generation of daughters Mary and sons Abdullah have some sort of black hole hovering over them because freak cults aren't "in control" to keep "the universe in so called 'balance?'" Obviously not.

Read for example any newspaper article in countries like Indonesia, India, China and so forth. When interviewing bystanders the reporters often have to say something like "Witnessing the incident was a man who only goes by one name, Chan...." etc. I see that all the time, where in those cultures people still have just one name, a common name. If you go there and talk to them, many would have no clue as to their birth date. That is how humans developed and how they were for most of their history, not with crazy bat crap notions that have reached almost Nazi type of control hysteria that names or dates of birth have "spiritual" significance. They do not, obviously.

I did a blog a while ago where people could watch me calculate how you can divide the population of the earth by 365 to see how many people have the "same birth date." It means nothing and you can see that because human beings exist today at all, and thrive in numbers, if not in mental health, precisely because they were, until recently, reality based, and not moon calf imagining about the "meaning" of alphabets and numbers in a personal life or societal well being. It is such crap I cannot believe that anyone who is not on drugs or drunk has ever believed it.

But you, young people, have been taught by teachers who secretly believe this, and parents who believe it, and who themselves are the victims of not bothering to learn the basics of real science, real arithmatic, real geology, real sociology, or logical thought etc. Too much "whatever" and "correctness" being shoved down kids throats instead of their minds being filled with strength, integrity and knowledge. Hope this has helped!

OK, an exercise hint

I can hear the people who have engineering orientations and are heavy number crunchers screaming that the exercise I just proposed is impossible, LOL. So here is a hint about one-just one-way to understand that it is not impossible.

Suppose these people need to cut one hundred boards of exactly the same length for construction, but they don't use numbers for counting (either quantity or dimensions) but use colors instead.

What if they used a prism that generated a detailed pictorial of a color spectrum, and using a color filter or wheel they can define a certain length as being one line on the standard color spectrum and quantity being another line on the spectrum?

Engineers would have standard access to spectrums and modifying color wheels that act as filters for different purposes. People then use a precise reading of a spectrum line to represent a quantity. "No numbers or counting are used in this, simply visual comparison of colors and their spectrum lines."

This is one way that precise work can be done and replicated without numbers. It's a hint how a color based computer would work too, and not via just a bit based system that uses color instead of 0 or 1. It would be like a visual (optical recognition) manipulation of matrices of colors and spectrum lines!!!

Once you loosen from the tyranny of thinking that human tools rule humans and not the other way around, you realize there are other ways that could be used, and you start to loose the compulsions of OCD and occult type of thinking.

"Numerology" detox exercise, also creative writing

Here is a mental exercise that serves two purposes: 1) another in my series of tutorials about how to regain genuine creativity, such as in the entertainment media, without having an occult, depressive or paranoid sub agenda and 2) how to continue to detach from and detox from compulsive OCD "counting" and also occult numerology "beliefs."

Imagine humanoid life on another planet, who are happy and successful, but they differ from humans in one fundamental way: they never developed a system of counting using numbers.

What did they do instead? Let us say that they use colors to count, to inventory and to create formulas?

How would that work? That is the exercise. Write a short story, or an outline, of how a humanoid race could not only get by but thrive without any concept of numbers, and how they used colors for their manipulation of quantity.

For example, what if they had a very simple system where red represented a single quantity, and then the introduction of blue represented additional quantities?

It really is a struggle at first to think about that because humans have become so invested in numeric thinking, to the point where it is an addiction.

But if you persist you will start to see how numbers ultimately do not have any meaning at all, and that there are ways that one could survive and thrive using a different system, such as colors, to manage concepts of quantity.

Can you imagine a computer invented by these people based on color wavelengths? I can.

Give it some thought and see how it liberates you from thinking that counting and numbers have any meaning other than the way humans selected to manage quantity. Numbers were invented by humans to serve humans, not for humans to serve numbers. Life can exist quite well without that particular system. So work on thinking about this planet and race of people who manage their concept of quantities by using colors, in either a simple way (discrete colors and their combinations) or complex (the continuum of multiple spectrums!)

I hope that you have found this helpful.

More about freed slaves burying Union dead

Here is more about the photograph of the freed slaves disinterring and reburying with dignity the remains of the Union soldiers.

First, here is the background of the battle depicted in the picture. This is from the book “A. Lincoln: A Biography” by Ronald C. White, Jr:

Lincoln could see the cost of the battle in the streets of Washington as the wounded arrived throughout the day and night. Attorney General Edward Bates wrote in his diary on May 15, 1864, “For the last 8 or 10 days, the most terrible battles of the war have occurred in Virginia. The carnage has been unexampled.” After so much bloodshed, questions began to rise about the price of victory. Grant and Meade had suffered [my emphasis in bold letters here:] SIXTY THOUSAND CASUALTIES IN ONE MONTH OF FIGHTING, almost the size of Lee’s entire army. [My comment: again, compare that the USA has lost three to four thousand troops in all of Iraq and Afghanistan; the Union army lost sixty thousand in one month in the war against slavery].

The carnage increased as Grant attacked the crossroads called Cold Harbor at the beginning of June. Lee, for whom Grant had increasing respect, was turning this war into a war of attrition, and so Grant decided to mount a massive assault. On the morning of June 3, 1864, hundreds of troops pinned their names and addresses to their uniforms in a premonition of what lay ahead. In the next hours, Union soldiers charged forward and were met by a withering hail of bullets. Grant lost 7,000 men, while Lee, fighting from trenches, suffered 1,500 casualties. At the end of the day Grant stopped the attack, admitting defeat. The Union army learned that day what European armies would learn a half a century later in World War I: the deadly horrors of trench warfare. General George Mead wrote to his wife, “I think Grant has had his eyes opened, and is willing to admit now that Virginia and Lee’s army is not Tennessee and Bragg’s army.”

The public began to turn against Grant, but Lincoln did not. The president told Noah Brooks, “I wish when you write and speak to people you would do all you can to correct the impression that the war in Virginia will end right off victoriously.” He continued, “To me the most trying thing in al this war is that people are too sanguine; they expect too much at once.” Lincoln, who would not make predictions, told Brooks, “As God is my judge, I shall be satisfied if we are over with the fight in Virginia within a year” (p. 632).

So I went back to the bookstore today after lunch and bought the book where I had seen this tremendously moving photograph that I described in the previous day’s blogging. The book is “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” by James M. McPherson. Here is the caption to the two photographs that I described:

The grim harvest of war is illustrated by these two photographs. The one on the left was taken at Gettysburg on July 5, 1863, two days after the battle, showing the bloated corpses of Union soldiers killed there. The other photograph depicts freed slaves after the war disinterring the remains of Union soldiers who had been killed at Cold Harbor, Virginia, for the reburial in the national military cemetery established there. Those killed at Gettysburg were also reinterred in one of the first such cemeteries, where on November 19, 1863, Lincoln consecrated “these honored dead” and resolved that they “shall not have died in vain.” Seventy-two national cemeteries were ultimately created as the final resting places for Union soldiers who died in the Civil War-and also for later veterans of the U.S. armed forces. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (photographs located between pages 174-175).

Thus by cross referencing two books I found a description of the dreadful battle and Union soldiers toll with the photograph of the freed slaves disinterring the Union bodies and taking them to the new national cemeteries for honorable burial.

The photograph shows four freed slaves in the background digging with shovels into the ground to unearth the bodies. In the foreground a freed slave is crouched next to a simple stretcher upon which they have been piling the remains of the Union soldiers. There are five skulls visible among a pile of their bones and uniforms, and a leg with a boot dangles over the side. It is a remarkable and unforgettable photograph, one of the many treasures of the Library of Congress.

So there are two things we can think about. One is that in Washington, as President Obama was inaugurated, we all thought of how Washington was built by slaves. But we should also remember that Abraham Lincoln saw a constant inflow of the dead and wounded Union soldiers on that very same ground, who had fought and died to free the slaves. In one Virginia battle the dead Union soldiers were piled five deep.

I am making much of this point because young Afro-Americans have grown up only knowing one side of the equation, those who considered them less than human, less than objects and chattel. However, I believe that the self esteem of young Afro-Americans would have been raised if they understood the magnitude of the other side, which is that there were 600,000 Union casualties, dead and wounded, as the Union soldiers fought for the freedom of the slaves. To feel that no one but Abraham Lincoln cared about your ancestors is to forget that hundreds of thousands of people cared with their lives.

So my second thing that you can think about is that those who live near or pass by Cold Harbor, Virginia can stop and contemplate a real moment of history and Afro-American pride. That is in knowing that the Union soldiers who died by the thousand were not left to rot on the battlefield, but were disinterred by the freed slaves and buried in places of honor established by Lincoln and the government. That is something I’d want to tell my children about, and I guess I am now.

http://www.cem.va.gov/CEM/cems/nchp/coldharbor.asp

While researching this item I came across this passage from the book “Tried by War:”

When the news of Richmond’s fall reached the North, wild celebrations broke out. Lincoln felt the same way, but his response was more restrained. He met with Grant in Petersburg on April 3 and discussed the pursuit of Lee, which would bring him to bay at Appomattox six days later. Meanwhile Lincoln returned to Adm. David D. Porter’s flagship USS Malvern, anchored in the James River, and told Porter: “Thank God I have lived to see this! It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone. I want to see Richmond.”

Porter was dubious about taking the president to see the still-burning enemy capital two days after it fell. But Lincoln insisted, so they went. With an escort of just ten sailors, he walked the streets while thousands of freed slaves crowded to see the Moses they believed had led them to freedom. “I know that I am free,” shouted one woman, “for I have seen father Abraham and felt him.” To one black man who fell on his knees before him, an embarrassed Lincoln said: “Don’t kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” The president was profoundly moved by these encounters (p. 261).

By the way, notice that this reference to who and who is not God is on page 261. I’ve written before about how the media is infested with Antichrist obsessed people with weak mental and moral capabilities, who manipulate significant text in even textbooks to occur on what they consider a mystical number of the Antichrist and the beast, 126, 261 and 621. You can read more about this subliminal pushing of occult Antichrist agenda by following the labels I include on this post. It has ruined my enjoyment of media, such as books, for many years now. If I were Afro-American I would also be embarrassed and enraged to be pawns in these dispensationalist and cultists’ manipulation, by the way. It’s quite an insult to be used that way when Afro-Americans have traditionally been the most faithful to pure Christianity and their God. Lincoln would be mortified that his words and deeds have been exploited by those who manipulate for occult purposes.

I have in front of me the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which I have quoted from before. I will close this blogging with the first note that he wrote to Robert E. Lee after the fall of Richmond. In a future blog posting I might group all the correspondence together so you can read and enjoy it as I have. I include it because General Grant was quite stoic about the incredible loss of life, and it is here as he urges Lee to surrender (which Lee rejects) that Grant refers to the carnage.

Headquarters Armies of the U.S., 5 P.M., April 7, 1865

General R. E. Lee, Commanding C.S.A.
The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking of you the surrender of that position of the Confederate States army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.

U.S. GRANT,
Lieut.-General

How to have a Christian spiritual meditation

Here I’m going to demonstrate for you how one can have a mystical contemplation of the Cross, one that is based on numbers. I have blogged much about how people misuse numbers and misuse spirituality, but use of the term misuse (as in using something improperly) implies that there are proper ways to do these things. I love meditation, mysticism and numbers! But I am very strict that they only be used in a God centered and spirit lifting way, not as props for human ego. So here is an exercise I’ve developed for you, an example of how one can meditate on the mysteries of Jesus Christ and the Cross, using numbers, in a God centered way.


With this meditation I am also making a second point. Protestants tend to not represent the body of Christ on the cross, while Catholics display and venerate the crucifixion, the cross with the body of Christ. This meditation will demonstrate that depictions are important and how a minimalist modern “progressive” use of the symbol actually curtails the richness of the meditative spiritual experience. In other words, this meditation unfolds but completes very quickly if one is only pondering the Cross without the corpus.


1 There is only one cross.
2 There are two axes of the cross, vertical and horizontal.
3 The one cross unites the ground and the sky.


At this point one rather runs out of meditation, since one is only contemplating the Cross without contemplating Christ. Here is how Catholic mystics would develop this meditation on the Cross that is the crucifixion.


1 There is only one Jesus Christ.

2 Jesus Christ and the wooden cross.

3 There are three nails.

4 Christ, the Cross, the ground and the sky.

5 The three nails, the lance piercing the side and the crown of thorns.

6 Three nails through three positions on Christ’s body, each hand and the combined feet.

7 Christ, the Cross, the ground, the sky and three nails affix them together.

8 The arms and legs of Christ and the four arms of the Cross.

9 Christ, nail and Cross three times.

10 Christ, nail and Cross three times, and the Cross is placed in the ground like a nail.

11 Christ, nail and Cross three times, the Cross is placed in the ground like a nail, and Christ’s gaze up to heaven.

12 Christ, nail and Cross three times, the Cross like a nail in the ground, Christ’s gaze up to heaven, and his Mother, from whose womb he was born, stands beside him.

13 Christ, nail and Cross three times, the Cross like a nail in the ground, Christ’s gaze up to heaven, his Mother who he emerged from beside him and John the Apostle that he loved stands beside him. (Later John will be the fastest Apostle to arrive running to the tomb of the resurrected Christ).

14 The seven last words of Christ, the three nails, the lance piecing the side and the crown of thorns, the ground and the sky, all bound together.

15 Christ, nail and Cross three times, the Cross like a nail in the ground, Christ’s gaze up to heaven, Mary his Mother, John the Apostle, and the two thieves crucified on either side of Christ.

16 Christ, nail and Cross three times, the Cross like a nail in the ground, Christ’s gaze up to heaven, Mary his Mother, John the Apostle, the two thieves crucified on either side of Christ, and the Temple on the horizon.

17 Christ, nail and Cross three times, the Cross like a nail in the ground, Christ’s gaze up to heaven, Mary his Mother, John the Apostle, the two thieves crucified on either side of Christ, the Temple on the horizon, and the city of Jerusalem.


You see? You can go on and find every number in this meditation of the crucified Christ, and all this does is to safely unfold more and more of the mystery and the glorification of God. This is the difference between focusing on numbers and becoming overly fascinated by them to the point of giving them a reality that does not exist, and using a love of numbers to glorify God and unfold a richness of a spiritual meditative experience and learning. That is also one of my objectives in developing this meditation, to help people who are "counters" and overly fascinated with the meaning of numbers to have a proactive way to restore balance. With this meditation you see that all numbers are located in the Crucifixion, and thus there are no good, bad, missing or controlling "numbers." Numbers or, rather, the ability to count are another gift from God to humans to make their day to day life easier, but also to use in spiritually uplifting ways that remain God focused, opening up greater understanding, spirituality and mysticism rather than binding and narrowing it down due to the slavery of superstitious thinking.


I hope that you use this meditation in your own devotions. Ponder it as I presented it, and then further develop it in your own unique way, always keeping the mind, heart and focus on the glory of God rather than the meditative tools themselves.

Sad anniversaries & problematic societal change

The problem with sad anniversaries

Modern humans have an obsession with remembering sad anniversaries. It has become such a powerful and self reinforcing part of the culture that it is now assumed that it is a “natural” part of the human experience, and that it is “helpful” to the “grieving process.” Now, before I continue the discussion, let me explain that I do not critique or question the mourning of a loss or thoughtful remembrance of the tragedy or loved one. I am talking about the feeling that one must be weighed down and focused upon the tragedy on “significant dates,” usually the anniversary of the loss. Many people this past weekend, for example, are commemorating the horrible and inhuman loss of Flight 103 to terrorism on this, its twentieth anniversary. This is a complicated subject, and one that has given me a great deal of concern about human health and well being, so let us use this as a case study.

First of all, do recognize that sensitivity to calendar dates and times is a very recent human development, one that cannot be argued as being inherent to the human condition or an evolutionary “advantage.” For example, many people did not know what day they were born, right up until the last century. They may barely have known the month. My own stepfather had two different traditional birthdays, separated by four months, and no one was positive which the correct one was. Large farm families, and large urban families, lacked any “day of the week” context except for going to Sunday worship services. For most of human history people did not read, count, have calendars (or even know what they were) except for two purposes. One was the natural calendar of the seasons, so that one could plant and build shelter according to the needs of that time of the year. The second was the religious calendar, according to the local faith. This is something that the Jewish and Muslim faiths, for example, have in common: they love the moon as a gift from God, because it provides them with a natural light at night and a means to measure seasonal time for planting and for worship, but they do not worship the moon, or the time that it represents, itself. So to be accurate, one must understand that a sense of date, week, month or even the “specific” numeric year is not natural to the human condition nor did it evolve to provide some sort of survival instinct advantage.

In fact, the significance of secular dates and times of the year did not come from religion, as some would suspect, but because pressure to have reliable means of accounting for time came from the aristocracy, the ruling class, military leaders, tax collectors and other accumulators of wealth and power. The demand for a secular calendar did not come from “God’s” side of civilization but from “Caesar’s” side, to use the analogy first expressed by Jesus Christ of religious obligations compared to secular obligations. The religious people possessed calendars as inheritance of the agricultural and the worship cycle heritage, and thus they had a great say in how secular calendars were established but they were not the drivers or motivators for secular calendars! It was those who accumulated wealth in cycles, power in cycles, and who controlled the subservient populace according to cycles who motivated the development and intense focus on secular calendars. Look in the Bible to understand the difference. No one gave a hoot about when a baby was born; they only cared that certain religious obligations took place a certain number of days after the birth. The ancient Israelites following the Law given to them by God offered a precise amount of sacrifice at the temple at a precise time after a baby was born, but no one really cared what particular day, week, month or year the baby was born.

In fact, if anything, you must realize that religious focus on calendar time actually loosened in direct proportion to the increasing focus and tightening of the rulers grip on secular time. We see this in the Catholic faith where there is infant baptism instead of a temple offering, but the timing of when the infant is baptized is very loose. Further, the Protestants did away with infant baptism and view it as a childhood or adult decision to make when they “accept Christ as their savior.” So far from being concerned about calendar time, the great faiths have all moved away from even their relativistic interest in dates (this number of days after a birth, instead of caring about the birth day itself) to one that is more significant only in the liturgical year and in the individual path to salvation, the sacraments and other milestones of intersection of human life and faith. As society became less agricultural (the first “calendar”) and less ritualized in worship (the second “calendar”), it became more time, money, resources, body count and elite power transfer absorbed, and this required a strong, common secular calendar. Thus focus on specific dates and “anniversaries” were the tools of tax collectors, rent collectors, army builders, men and women of title and lineage, and “office holding” rather than any natural inclination of humans, either biologically or spiritually. Sensitivity to specific dates, and later to “anniversaries” is not at all a natural trait of humans, either individually or socially. Calendar dates and their sensitivity is a tool of ruler ship of the majority by the minority. It is not a coincidence that date obsessed practices such as astrology did not percolate “up” from the masses as a form of “common knowledge,” but rather was invented and pushed down by as a handy dandy tool of pharaohs, rulers, despots and those in their courts who practiced occult “arts” in service to those absolute rulers.

It’s not like ancient Egyptians or Indians were all sentimental and loving of their children that they cast their horoscopes in order to make sure they had the right “career” or were “happily married,” since neither concept existed for either the elite or the common people. No one had “careers,” they all farmed the land for survival, and no one had as an objective to be “happily married” since that presumes a leisure and survival rate of individuals that just did not exist during the time that secular calendar obsession started via tools such as “astrology.” Rulers and the power elite wanted tools to enhance their holdings and their war capabilities, period.

In fact, focusing on sad events and making them part of numeric ritual is an anti-survival strategy, one that works against human survival and thriving, rather than as many assume, being a “civilizing” and hence helpful practice. Again, one looks at the Bible for historical guidance. The Israelites were nomadic people who very quickly buried their dead and “moved on.” This does not mean that people individually or as a group mourned any less deeply the loss of their loved ones and leaders, far from it; they felt the love and loss very keenly for the rest of their lives. But they did not compartmentalize mourning and memorializing on the calendar: only religious ritual was performed according to a calendar, and that was the natural one of the moon. Why is it anti-survival strategy to do otherwise? You can understand this on many practical levels. In a time of high infant and child mortality, one needed to be ready to have another child as soon as one was physically and emotionally ready; no one could afford or wanted to be stultified into a calendar driven mentality of grief or recovery. Thus a parent who lost a child might think about how, sadly, they lost their most recent child during the harvest moon, and thus they would have memories around that time, but they were not focused on the mindset we see today which is “Well, on this day it was exactly one year ago that he or she died.”

To explain this more broadly, humans are biologically and mentally programmed to remember the pleasant far longer than the painful. The obvious example is childbirth. If humans were more sensitive to pain memories over a long period than over pleasure memories over a long period, they would have been immobilized by fear of pain from not only childbirth, but from the pain and risks of agriculture, hunting and necessary travel. A survival trait that is essential to all life, and especially to humans who have the brain capacity to “think about things” is to shed memory of bad pain as quickly as possible and retain memory of good sensory experiences as long as possible. That, by the way, is one reason addiction is so hard to kick. Substance addiction relies on the fact that pleasurable sensation is stronger and longer lasting in the memory than the feelings of pain associated with the consequences of addiction. If humans had evolved to cling to painful memories stronger than to the ordinary memories that are hallmarked by the pleasant memories, depression and fear of pain would have stunted the evolution of humans at all. Humans would have avoided childbirth and any at risk activity, which included the daily working in the fields and hunting that was their only means of survival.

So there is absolutely no reason that humans should, to return to our case study topic, self-remind and focus emphasis on normal grief and return of normality according to the calendar. If anything, calendars are a set back to recovery. Yet what does society do? Society focuses more and more on the calendar, especially whenever the power structure is involved. Just think about “grief counseling” and how that is offered, controlled and reimbursed by insurance (if even covered) strictly by calendar, and not by natural healing or periods of deep and spontaneous need. Society has become enslaved to the secular calendar and it is to such an extent that people no longer remember what I am describing, which is the natural and pro-survival healthful way to grieve and heal. In fact, people now give dirty looks to those who have suffered a shared loss if they do not put on the sackcloth and ashes on the “anniversary dates,” yet those same disapproving people do not at all understand the individual nature of the healing process.

In fact, timetable grieving has joined all the other slaveries of the calendar to contribute to the mental and physical health breakdown of individuals and society. For example, it is well documented that heart attacks congregate just before the “work week begins,” which is for western society Sunday night into Monday morning. People feel enormous stress that builds up on Sunday (which is supposed to be their day of rest) and often peaks Monday or Tuesday with a heart attack or other condition. This is an entirely fallacious condition that should never have developed the way that it did, where humans are expected to be automatons that turn on and off their work and rest “clocks” according to work week schedules. When God mandated the Sabbath, the day of rest, remember that was against a backdrop of not a “work week” but the continuous labor that humans had, without peaks or valleys, to tend to their farms, flocks and crafts. God forced humans to take one full day off with no work pressure whatsoever; the Sabbath was never meant to be the “gearing up” day to the first day “back at work” in a calendar driven work week! You can make all the arguments about how organization is necessary for civilization that you want, but you must remember two things. One is there is a difference between necessary organization and obsessive slavery to the date and time. Thus, yes, if companies must have work schedules, do so, but do not then layer additional stress filled time constraints one on top of the other and then call that the “natural” condition of humans, as it most certainly is not. For example, when humans were agricultural, the work was hard but it varied by month, not in lockstep in a work week. A month would be spent preparing the fields, then the next month sowing the seeds. Work was scheduled on what inventory managers call today an “as needed basis.” But that is certainly not how the vast majority of “work week schedules” are designed and strictly enforced today!

Therefore, even if you accept that modern life requires a rigid workweek schedule, society as a whole is crazy to add layers of pressure of time sensitivity that is optional, but they have come to think of as logical, natural and mandated. I mentioned the example of mental health, where the very people who are in a great deal of confusion and pain are given long drawn out schedules of “relief,” such as a once a week therapy session, and a once every half year or so fifteen minute checkup with a psychiatrist who provides their medications. Even if health care professionals were more numerous and had more hours to give, the insurance companies and the state payers would never tolerate a natural flow of resources as the individual patient needs; if they need “more” they are told to check themselves in on an inpatient basis, regardless of family situation (and then inpatient is heavily regimented but usually too short in duration and certainly is not residential in cycle or benefit). Thus a patient with great psychic pain is told to suck it up for a week, and then spill it all out in their given one hour therapy session. To say that is unnatural is to put it mildly. Having seen my share of patients it is obvious to anyone with a brain and a heart that one patient may need someone every day for a while, while another needs intense periods of “on call” availability, while a third may flourish with a cycle, and a fourth needs a residential role modeling experience, which they do not get in inpatient structures, obviously. Whether a patient has a psychosis, a low grade depression, or is a healthy person who just suffered a trauma, all of them are expected to “obey the tyranny of the calendar obsessed society.” Worse, that is even condescendingly explained to them as “part of their therapy” to “restore structure in their life.” What? It is no joke that the system is crazier than the patients, because at least the patients know when something is wrong and they yearn for it to be right.

So do you begin to see the foundation of the problem as I am explaining it? Humans are biologically and emotionally evolved to follow a natural calendar that is of nature and of religious ritual that punctuates and frames a less defined calendar of day to day ordinary necessity. Farmers would have busy periods during, for example, harvest, and then in some climates do almost nothing during the winter except tend to the animals and repair their gear. Contrast that to the mess that humans have made while “organizing” themselves in modern times. They have the necessary schedules of schooling and genuine job needs. Fine, that is obvious and logical. But the workforce with their work schedules are far from being managed on genuine job needs basis; they are structured to be cookie cutter mindless enslavements to schedules. This is especially true as we’ve gone from a manufacturing to a paperwork society. The service industry seems to remain the sanest because it is truly “on demand” and thus logical in its workforce scheduling, with natural flows that employees can benefit from. My point is, though, that society as a whole has created a dictatorship of the work week that has little or nothing to do with either productivity or employee natural health.

Then, on top of the necessary school and work schedules, you have unnecessary work schedules and assessments and compensation that depend more on the delusion of work than the delivery of actual productivity. For people to “get ahead” they have to work “longer hours,” provide more “face time” to the influential and, often, have to “get another degree,” thus cramming education into what is left of their non-office time. Honestly, I’d rather have a sane employee who works half time in the office and is the other half time in school (if the degree is really necessary) than to have the new form of slavery that I have seen over the past thirty years. To make it worse, recreation (especially for children) and health care are also all too, as I explained, slaves to their own overlords of the calendar. Certain days of the week, hours, times of the month, all artificial numbers and constructs that make up the “calendar” have taken over, growing to mutant giants of “importance” that steer, for better or for worse, every aspect of one’s life. Even those who say they want to “fix it” only push their fellow slaves further into the tyranny of the calendar, rather than guide them back into natural life. How many times have we heard these gurus talk about children’s “play dates” and even the wisdom of adults who “do not have enough time for their love lives” to “make dates with each other?” What? Sure, that’s what every couple needs for their libido, another schedule, another pressured “delivery date.” Everyone has become enslaved to the calendar and have both forced and lured everyone else into the same pit.

And so we come to the anniversary of a tragedy. The media has been brainwashed by this magical thinking of the significance of the calendar into being some of the worst promoters of the slavery of the calendar. I am not criticizing them; far from it. They think they are being respectful by bringing up tragic anniversaries. But please notice two things. One is that they rarely bring up a “good” anniversary. For example, when was the last time that someone mentioned in March that “so many years ago today George Washington, our first president, took office?” The media has been brainwashed into thinking that they must mention tragic anniversaries to show respect (and sometimes that is true, and sometimes it is not) but they NEVER mention positive or educational anniversaries, including ones that changed history in a meaningful way. For example, how about mentioning on the nightly news, “This is the anniversary of when President Abraham Lincoln first mentioned the problem of slavery in a speech.” But the media has been brainwashed and now have become the obedient slaves in turn to the calendar mentality that one must mention only the tragic and the heartbreaking, and only on the anniversary of when it occurred (or an "in progress" or "update" “human interest” story of a survivor.) It is unbalanced and hence not ultimately respectful in the long run, even though very well intentioned at the time.

Whenever you analyze the goodness or error of something, do not just look at “what is there;” look also for “what is missing.” If you look at the anniversary grief of tragedy syndrome, you must look at what is missing, which is the entirety of anniversaries of good and positive events. One is much more respectful of loss and can put it in perspective if those losses are not the only news, as if the rest of life does not happen, and there is nothing to learn from or role model on “their" anniversaries and, instead, have a more worldly perspective. If the media is going to do the tragedy anniversary business, they MUST also do the “let’s not forget on this day these great things happened” side of human history.

The second problem with the media tragedy anniversary business is that like the teachers, workers, health care workers and recreationalists, they are buying into the lock step calendar management of grief and social progress. For an example, let’s look at someone very good in the media who has fought this tendency with mixed results. Anderson Cooper on CNN has had an admirable holistic appreciation of what happened to the Gulf Coast, particularly New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. Anderson is the one example I can think of in the entire mainstream or cable media who attempts to keep understanding of Katrina reality in a real time continual natural life context, rather than as the tragedy anniversary. It ought to be like that for all of the news. Progress should not wait for reporting until a grief anniversary. Otherwise even those who grieve find themselves being structured by the media and the calendar in presentation of the messages they may genuinely want to deliver. Why is a loss assumed to be felt the worst, and also most logically reported, on the tragedy anniversary?

Here is an example. My father died on a certain day forty two years ago. My mother is one of those people who has been totally brainwashed by the magical thinking of the grief anniversary and here is what happens as a result. Several years ago I was there on the death anniversary, watching late night television. She came storming out and attacked me for “not seeming to care” that it was the anniversary of my father’s death. When I said, “Um, mom, I miss him every day and think of him every day” she was dumbfounded: that never occurred to her. Why? Because she has compartmentalized her grief by calendar, so that she feels lousy (and a lot of self pity) on the actual date, but does not really miss him (she of course remarried so that is logical and healthy) the rest of the time. I, however, do not forget a father because it’s not like one “moves on” from having had a father. As a result of calendar slavery people have forgotten what each other feel and think as normal people. Gosh, it never occurs to my own mother that I might actually you know, miss my father on dates such as my birthday, Christmas, or when I see a bowling alley (he loved to bowl) rather than just missing him on the day he died? This is the tyranny of the calendar in action.

Those of you who have lost someone dear to them know what I mean. You see something and you think, “Wow, he or she would really have liked to have seen that.” You don’t wait until the death anniversary to think that, do you? Of course not, but we have as a society given a magic power to the calendar that almost dictates that very restricted slavery of thought. Thus when someone, like me with my father’s death anniversary, does not put in face time of grief on that day and only that day, people feel entitled to judge and assume! Nowadays ordinary people who lose someone due to accident or crime are often interviewed on the spot and often become media personalities, and thus go into the file folder based on calendar slavery. The disappearance of a child such as the little girl in Florida becomes an entirely time driven event, with regular reports on the number of weeks missing and key tragedy anniversary dates. The same is true with the plane crashes that receive ongoing attention: the natural power of healing has become enslaved to a calendar mentality, both privately and publically.

Part of the reason this has taken place is that modern society for all its brash confidence has really kind of lost its way, and looks for numinous or “special” reasons-almost magical-for how and why tragic things happen. One component of this almost magical thinking is to put great weight upon the tragedy anniversary especially as one can explore “What if” and “Could that have happened to you or me” scenarios. This is a cousin of the natural distancing human reaction that some use toward crime victims (“Well, what was she doing out so late at night and alone?”) When one reflexively blames the victim one is trying to distance one’s self from the thought that such a crime or tragedy might ever happen to you. The focus on the anniversary tragedy rather than the day to day reality of healing, or not healing, is related to that impulse to distance one’s self from the thought that one could have been in that or a similar tragedy. It is human nature to do this, but the problem is that the media is inadvertently codifying a “too close for some” and “too distant for others” emotional rollercoaster by focusing only on tragedy anniversaries. The slant of much of the media (and the consumers’ interest) is in people who didn’t take that flight, for example, and thus “cheated death.” That is human nature but it is only one of the many resilient mindsets and reactions that the well balanced human has. No one used to think like that. When a chariot ran wild in Rome and trampled down a bunch of poor people, no one was philosophical about “why him or her” and “if only she had gone to the agora earlier.” People grieved and bemoaned their fate or lot in life but nothing like today because back then everyone, even the wealthy, understood that life itself is risky. Today it is like people live in cotton fluff of illusion that life can end suddenly (and it will end for everyone eventually, of course) but only for someone else and that there is some sort of great hidden meaning in every date and every event and every circumstance. In the old days when often half of the infants born in a family died in their first year, people understood that life can end suddenly and with no particular “meaning” or “message” in the “timing.”

Another reason that there is this misbalanced tragedy anniversary focus is that as I pointed out, people live increasingly less calendar and ritual based religious lives, and more and more calendar and secular based lives. When religious participation used to be the majority of the structure in one’s life, one had a perspective of continuity that gave greater strength and fiber to those who lived through very tough times, such as tragedies or wars. A religious based natural calendar strengthens fortitude and provides more assurance of the continuity of life, while a secular calendar seems to be comprised of “reward” or “punishment.” One shows up at work at the right times, look busy, has the right attitude with the right people at the right times: one gets good performance reviews, raises, perks. One shows up whether one is sad or not for therapy on the appointed time and one gets his or her weekly hour of therapy: miss it for some reason and you are punished by not being given a replacement hour. If your kid misses football practice he’s in trouble. If you miss your filing for tax returns or for insurance reimbursement, you are in trouble. The secular calendar is a slave driver of reward and punishment. The religious calendar is the continuity of God’s presence, love and promise of eternal life. Oddly, secularists call God the bully for having heaven and threatening hell, yet one can go a year or a decade to church and never hear hell mentioned once. Go ahead, just try being late to work one day if you are not the boss, and try getting through one month at work without hearing about an upcoming performance review. The religious natural calendar (being close to the natural cycles of the earth and life with religious observances the steady markers) is actually the positive and uplifting reality based foundation for balanced life, while the secular calendar is so highly artificial and heavy in its burden that it has contributed to much of the malaise, depression, fright, seething anger and despair that stalks society today. The secular calendar is like a cruel stalker that society has not only invited into one’s house, but has given to it increasing power every year, and forced more and more to obey. Eventually the stalker takes over and one does not even realize that he or she not only enabled the stalker but invented it, handed it some of its weapons.

Here is another example of the irrationality of the calendar. When I first went to work for a Wall Street bank in the 1980’s I had severe allergies. I was otherwise a healthy person. We had two weeks of sick leave per year, and since I was rarely ill, but did have occasional bad and disabling allergy days, I would call in sick perhaps three times for one day, compared to a person who was out sick with the flu for a week. I quickly received a warning letter of bad performance for having had “3 incidents” of being sick, while a person, who is out for the entire week, or even two, receives no such letter. That was the bank wide corporate policy based on calendar days and number of times one used the same block of two weeks. I could not believe that for using three sick days that I was entitled to for genuine miserable allergy spells I got a warning and an incident report in my personnel file (and I was a vice president no less) and was highly embarrassed. Their explanation for this quaint practice was that all employees used to be tellers (the clerks that served the public) and thus being out for a day at a time was a higher inconvenience than being out for a week. The fact that this was no longer true meant nothing to the slave drivers of the calendar. The calendar rules and overrules common sense. People came in sick rather than use the days they were entitled to, and I learned to do the same.

In a related story I worked for a petrochemical company that had on site medical facilities. One day my office mate told me that she had seriously bumped her head over the weekend and that it still hurt. Alarmed, I realized she might have a concussion and walked her across the driveway to the medical facility. There the staff was angry and refused to see her. Why? I’m not making this up: the sign said “Emergencies from 10 to 11 a.m.” Yes, the expensive medical facility for employees accepted employee “emergencies” only one hour of the day. You had to schedule your emergency to happen between 10 and 11 o’clock, otherwise they refused to see you. I am still boggled when I think about this and how I knew it boded very poorly for where medicine, ethics and attitudes were headed back in 1980-1981 when that occurred. By the way, they thought I was the bitch for not understanding their refusal to treat my office mate.

The religious calendar is about mercy; the secular calendar is about punishment. It is never a good time to do something bad, and it is never appropriate to delay doing something good. Yet the secular calendar and the tragedy anniversary mentality, and other dysfunctions of societal attitude, have created a system of inappropriate response, like laughing at a funeral. Here is another example. I was told by corporate trainers to give employees bad news on Friday so they would suffer with their families over the weekend and not be a bother at the workplace. Yes, that same Wall Street bank taught all managers to give bad performance reviews to employees on Fridays, to lay them off or fire them on Fridays, and to have difficult conversations with them on Fridays, so they would then go home and be their loved one’s problems and not be miserable at work and thus make everyone else “uncomfortable.” Friday (the Jewish Sabbath by the way) was by policy transformed into the killing fields’ day. The secular calendar was used to hurt people in a way that they could get no immediate relief or continued dialogue because they were enforced away from work due to the two day weekend and rather than sympathy for the family, managers taught this with glee that the injured employee was “now the problem” of the loved ones. These are the same banks who are taking handouts and bailouts of billions of dollars on the tax money of those they fire on Fridays (and they happily accept the loot any day of the week). This same bank, by the way, had a history of doing painful reorganizations on Pearl Harbor Day. The long time manager who told me that didn’t know why they did it, but knew it was deliberate and thought that they thought it was funny. Yep, nothing like using a tragedy anniversary of hundreds of bombed and burned American veterans to do a reorganization that rewarded or punished in new assignments. Gosh, who can’t see the connection? Very funny-not-and again, this was in the 1980’s, so this is what I mean about multiple decades of a disastrous trend for humanity and well being of individuals and societies. And conservatives wonder, by the way, why the auto unions hesitate to give up anything they have, even if it is the right thing to do? When a society lives and dies based on a reward and punishment secular calendar mentality, you’d be a fool to willingly give up any protection and buffer zone that you have, even if it harms the long term well being of the company itself.

So you see what I mean? I am far from saying that we should not mention or cover tragedy anniversaries, such as the weekend’s Flight 103. And first let me say something about that particular horrible event. I was glued to my chair in horror as I watched the reporting from Locharbie, and I can remember it as if it was yesterday. I will never forget the astonishment and the horror of seeing the first reports, and of the burning hole that fell upon that town, killing townspeople along with all those on board. I was horrified and stricken and remain so to this day: and that was well before I realized that many students from the city near my hometown were on board. I grieve for all and do not need to think that it was “my people” on board. Further, while the pathos of Christmas week when this happened is obvious and heart rending, it is no less so for people who lose loved ones on an “average” day in an “average” week. You know what really hurts me? When I read one of our soldiers was killed in Iraq weeks or only days before they were scheduled to return safe and sound. It’s not the date that matters, there is no “magic” or “luck” or “destiny” in the day, week, month or year, it is the individualized tragedy of personal loss, of the pathos that he or she was just about to arrive home safely when tragedy strikes.

The other side of the coin is those veterans who return home safely and then end up killed in an auto accident or some other mishap. I grieve when I read that too, and I think of how the surviving family is just as hurt by that irony as they might have been had he or she been killed in action before coming home. At least they have the time together of having returned home. You see, it’s all about the heart and not about the calendar.

People are too stressed and burdened by the tyranny of the secular calendar and how those in power wield that calendar like a mace or a pointed spear; I think they need to stop and recognize what has unconsciously crept up on them and what they themselves have enabled. What happens when Presidents decide there is “no more time” “on the calendar” for negotiating? What happens when thousands lose the calendar game and therefore their jobs, while the money looters “won” the calendar game? In Wall Street you don’t just “follow the money” you “follow the calendar.” What kind of societies fire on the Sabbath so that the sad, frightened or angry employee gets “escorted to the door” by security and dumped on their family, so that Pontius Pilate can wash his or her hands of them? So why does the media buy into the brainwashing that only the tragic must be reported on anniversaries, and that there is nothing in between? Why have children lost their childhood to the calendar? (Another reason I think homeschooling for all its drawbacks is now the more natural route, or at least a faith based school that does not view the calendar as the means for reward and punishment). Why is tragedy elevated and memorialized in the media while absolutely nothing of joy is given the same attention? Why are calendar “face time” “jobs” more important than real jobs? Why is Sunday evening the saddest and least favorite time of the week for the vast majority of employees? Why is healthcare, such as it is, one of the worst of the slave drivers of the calendar?


One of the things I had hoped to do by this time and since that didn’t happen maybe in the future was to try to get people to understand the flexibility and health of a more natural calendar, one that is reality based and not reward and punishment based. Remember, civilization arose from a natural calendar, not a secular calendar of enslavement. Even schools were not forced march identically scheduled full days but were scheduled around farming and ranch activities. Yes, in the 1800’s the hours of school in a locality varied by when and where the children were needed at home. Even the wealthy students at private schools had structures that recognized apprenticeships. Calendars used to be tools of convenience for growing industrialization, but now they have become slave drivers and bull masters that bludgeon people into reward and punishment conformity. Where calendars are used for joy (such as Christmas) they are attacked but where they serve the masters dominating purpose, people wring their hands and claim that “it’s the rules” and “they can’t help it.” With every innovation and recreation we enslave our children more and more toward calendars, away from real life, rather than toward real life. Now even the youngest children have timetables for unrealistic goals and joyless waiting, instead of fruitful natural ordinary life, until the “key dates” and “events,” such as “wealth and fame.” One could not write a more insidious science fiction about robots “taking over” than what society has already unconsciously done to its self and worsens with every passing year.

I hope that you will give what I am advising some serious thought.

Debunking cult thinking: pop artist case study

Nothing like a smoking gun in the artist's own words. I've often blogged about how there is a network of people I call 'cultists' who often present themselves as even mainstream Evangelicals and so forth, but who harbor cult beliefs and practices. Worse, these beliefs are "hidden" in their productions: movies, books, art work. I've mentioned how it is easy to flip to just about any book and find interesting items on pages 126, 216 and 612 because editors work to put "Left Behind" and "AntiChrist" references, even in boring textbooks, on those pages. Well, here we have a case study from today's news.

Just by background, there was a much beloved artist, Al Hirschfeld, who included in his caricatures of celebrities (usually to illustrate a newspaper review) the name of his daughter "Nina" as part of the pencil work. It was not occult or secret since it was an open tribute to his daughter, and when he signed his works he would indicate the number of times he has placed "Nina" subtly in that day's drawings. I enjoyed looking for them, in my copy of the New York Times. That is an innocent tribute and one that's nice.

What I've learned, however, is as I describe one scenario above, every piece of media, as far as I can tell, passes through the hands of either the producer or the editor who includes occult meaning. The most common is "lucky numbers," but with a fortune teller and "numerology" purpose. They hide these numbers, not so the viewer can, as with AH, look for the "Nina," but so they feel they are encoding occult power in their works. They are also doing the old canard of subliminal hypnosis. They figure, if they have a 'birthnumber' that they want to be 'lucky' for them, to include that number in lots of works that lots of people buy. No matter how you spin it, it is idolatry.

So, here is an article about a very popular artist of schmaltz, Thomas Kincade.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/culture/2008/11/14/thomas-kincades-16-guidelines-for-making-stuff-suck.html

When you read the article the reviewer is focusing on the very easy and totally justifiable focus of bashing TK's art as being total talentless schmaltz. But the reviewer includes a memo from TK about how the filming of a movie should maintain his "look." Here is the smoking gun, his fascination with hiding personal occult numerology in his works, which suckers then buy, unknowingly participating in his cultist mindset.

snip

6) Hidden details whenever possible, References to my children (from youngest to oldest as follows): Evie, Winsor, Chandler and Merritt. References to my anniversary date, the number 52, the number 82, and the number 5282 (for fun, notice how many times this appears in my major published works). Hidden N's throughout -- preferably thirty N's, commemorating one N for each year since the events happened.

Yeah, I know. Those of you who are still stable and balanced figure that this is just an example of someone very anal with a lot of narcissism, but otherwise harmless. That's what I thought too, giving people the benefit of the doubt ("dumb but not malicious") until I spent five miserable years undercover among the people who are actually doing this sick stuff (sick because of the occult underlying belief and the desire to manipulate the "destiny" of others) and had what they were doing explained to me in their own words! It's unbelievable and incredible how warped so many human minds have become. God knows, sees, watches and waits.