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For Social Justice Warriors, the bargain was struck. The point of entry was the brainstem, the realm of motor instincts, urges, and sheer will to survive. The Hebrew letter Qoph means "the back of the head". It is attributed to one of the Tarot trump cards called The Moon. There is another lunar card called The Priestess, but this is absolutely NOT the same moon as the Priestess. The Priestess is the illuminated side of innocence, purity, and mercy. The Moon is the darkness to her light, the cruelty to her kindness, the Sea Witch to her Little Mermaid. If the Priestess is the young girl, the Moon is the old hag.

The Crossroads

The crone lives at the crossroads where parasitic infection meets addiction. As awful as "parasitic infection meets addiction" sounds, the initial foray into an addiction is almost always exceedingly pleasant, gratifying, and satisfying in a way that makes us humans spend an inordinate amount of time trying to replicate it once its halcyon days have passed. If you've ever tried opiates, you might be familiar with the comforting, warm-blanket-and-a-hot-cup-of-cocoa sensation the opiate family provides. Opium tinctured with alcohol, a.k.a. laudanum, was "heaven bought for a penny" to Romantic poet Thomas DeQuincey; beautiful dreams for a few short months that quickly morphed into a living hell. Falling in love feels the same, often with similar results.

For me, going vegan at age 38 provided a big boost in my physical health and stamina, a rush of energy, and a small army of new BFFs to help me enjoy my newfound moral superiority. The trade off was that I became an officious, self-righteous prick determined to push my diet upon all and sundry for a time. Fortunately, I realized the error of my ways before I alienated every family member and non-fair weather friend. Not all are so lucky. Needing to be right is a hell of a drug, just ask the Seventh Day Adventist fellow I met at a cooking class who preened about like a pigeon, attributing his robust, young, genetically-predetermined health to his perfect diet and being right with God. Hubris is never pretty and for him, there was an excellent chance of his life going wrong in ways he never dreamed possible in all his supreme arrogance.

Baby Boomers, blessed with idyllic postwar childhoods, thrust themselves into passionate young adulthood. They championed sexual revolution, worked in the city and made homes in the suburbs, and looked forward to an enlightened Star Trek future. They had easy, conflict free lives. They had plenty of money for one spouse to stay home. A single, middle class income was the only ticket necessary to the American dream of a house, a car, more than ample food, and vacations once or twice a year. They deserved it because they were the Good People. They didn't pay attention as the houses got larger, the jobs got scarcer and more cutthroat, and the cars multiplied like roaches as garages swelled to accommodate them. They didn't notice the arbitrage of labor to Third World countries. They voted in the era of Reagan's excess, not the be-uncomfortable-like-Jesus Christian guy (Carter) for whom there would be no American morning. The pork went down smoothly, aided with sips of pricey pinot noir and gleeful nihilism. Meanwhile, a swarm of undulating tapeworms split into two battalions, one seeking entrance into the intestines and the other swimming towards the brain...

Birth of the SJW

Boomer children and grandchildren grew up to become today's Social Justice Warriors (SJWs). Generation X and Y have grown up monumentally angry without ever being able to divine what exactly angers them. Had they any power of self-analysis outside the societally-approved Freudian Psychoanalysis 3.0 thrown about as an expensive but necessary companion of copious prescribed antidepressant drugs, they would be able to put their finger on what ails them:

-Kept indoors long enough, any creature goes insane. Humans are no exception.
-Imagination has been replaced by online games and porn.
-Success is measured by meaningless standardized tests and the amount of house you can mortgage later for being a good little test taker.

The resulting case is an extremely entitled human with a large ego who thinks she is the Main Character but in reality is a Non-Player Character, parroting the latest cacomagic as sold by CNN, Target, Nike, and Sephora dutifully. She's depressed. Who wouldn't be? She's never had any protection from religion -- those old fashioned customs like masses, holy water, and prayer are relics of the past. She has never been taught to appreciate the luxury of potable water or fresh fruit in the wintertime. She doesn't have interest in let alone understanding of the way things work, for instance, her typical biophobic upbringing divorced her from appreciation of how food grows, how heat becomes electricity and then heat again, or how her country was founded by complicated and difficult people. So she hates, and hatred feels GOOD. She allows herself to hate a little more. She makes the decision to bully. Bullying is better than sex. Her programmers tell her to carry a sign. They tell her to block traffic and to be brave as the oppressors attempt to commute to their bourgeois jobs. They tell her to scream to get her voice heard, and if that doesn't work, to spray paint a vile expletive on the window of a shuttered local business. And if that doesn't work, to learn how to make a pipe bomb...

Smashing the Patriarchy

Social justice seeks to right perceived wrongs. Righteousness itself is their addiction. The consequences of their righteousness are not considered. At one end of the spectrum, there lies an ideal of Christian marriage that peaked in the Greatest Generation, the one that spawned the Boomers. The Left was not wrong to paint Christian marriage in the bleak tones of repression, frustration, and sorrow. Divorce used to be nearly impossible to obtain. Being gay wasn't legal. For quite a few people, traditional Christian values sucked. The Left rushed into the fray with the Final Solution for Christian family values: their opposite. The Left threw its weight into the entertainment industry, using its many cronies there to promote eternal dissatisfaction. For the oppressed black people, they ushered in the welfare system. Suddenly, it was far more financially beneficial to be a single mother. Black families, also once fans of Christian marriage, were utterly destroyed, condemned to multi-generational ghettoes. US prisons, expanded under Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, happily took in black men among others in their continuation of the Confederate plantation system hybridized with the Victorian workhouse.

They're Having a Riot

The Left found its fetish in the destruction of the ideal Christian nuclear family. It did this in three ways: it "freed" the oppressed with welfare so that the father had no role save sperm donor in the new Utopia. Secondly, it sowed the seeds of discord and consumerism via its domination of the entertainment industry, including infotainment in the form of news. Thirdly, it demoralized and gelded three generations of males via pornography, sucking away their last reserves of virility and motivation.

The inevitable result was Washington Middle School in Green Bay Wisconsin. Kerstin Westcott, a Golden Apple-winning, veteran teacher who walked away from nine years at Washington, testified that student bullies regularly:

-threatened her and other students
-fought with weapons
-vandalized cars
-spouted constant verbal abuse
-fought until bystander teachers were sent away in ambulances with serious injuries
-tortured other students
-sexually molested other students in front of crowds
-masturbated in front of teachers
-pinched, slapped, and punched other students in the chest and groin
-pantomimed crude sex acts in front of students/teacher
-set fires
-bought, sold, and used drugs

In other words, they exhibited most of the behaviors we associate with classic demonic possession. I would venture to say that Washington Middle School, which is demographically 51 percent Hispanic, 16 percent black, and 20 percent white, is rife with demons running amok. Washington is far from special in its basketcase school status. Teachers may blame the school administrators and look to them for reform, but the root of the problem lies squarely in fatherlessness. Remove the father's power and there's ample space for demons to rush in. Modern day demonic fatherlessness, that monstrous creation of the Left, cannot be stopped by a paltry set of rules dictated by a school official.

Revenge of the Nerd

The trouble with bullying is that it feels fantastic and doesn't beget regret. Once upon a time, when I was in high school, there was a popular bully who talked smack about misfits, nerds, and geeks just loud enough for the misfit, nerd, or geek to overhear her. This was her favorite form of torture and it was devastating. I was born with an unfortunate talent for ad hominem attacks, so one day when I was in a bitter mood, I did the same to her. My verbal arrows were aimed at her Achilles heel, which was her boxy, corpulent figure. She became so upset, she cried for the teacher, who promptly shushed me. But I wasn't done. I lowered my volume but continued my tirade, spewing poison-tipped barbs I knew would cause her emotional pain for the rest of her life. She got a hefty dose of her own medicine and I am nearly certain she never used her talking smack technique again, but she wasn't the only one dragged down by our interaction. Bullying masquerades as justice. For the weak, especially those who are told they are oppressed and deserve handouts, it's a power trip. Power feels good, especially when you view the Other as worthless, fat, stupid, and deserving of your wrath. Wrath has its price: it is a crappy place to live. Being hated for being just another bully as well as a nerd only added to my malaise as a teen. Considering my greatest fear back then was the predicament of being misunderstood, joining in the bully's fray only made a bad situation worse. I could have displayed far more bravery by rising above the bully and refusing to dignify her situation with my words. Make no capitulation to demonic obsession and the infection is defeated.

Power feels great. Righteousness after what seems an eternity of not having the courage of one's own convictions feels like heaven, like the greedy heights of an addiction. The peak of any addiction, however, is the prelude to hell.

Current Mood: contemplative

Submit your question or request for a general "what's up this week" reading and I will be happy to oblige!

I believe that the Left as we know it is plagued by demons. I realize that most people don't have an opinion on demons as they probably don't believe in them. I also fully acknowledge, as always, that I could be wrong. I believe the average leftist is beset by ancient, non-embodied creatures of exceptional power and cunning. These creatures are called demons and their key characteristics are:

They dwell on a plane that is best described as "lower" or more dense than the planes upon which we can perceive the world around us. They have been with us since time began; in fact, they seem to be a much older race of beings than humans. Qabbalists say are outcasts or shells leftover from a previous Universe.
They hate humankind and are simultaneously jealous of us. They will do whatever they can to trick us and hurt us, whether this is individually or in large groups. Because of their intense hatred of mankind, when they do choose to interact with us, it tends to be with us acting as the host and them acting as the parasite.
They absolutely cannot be defeated by sinking to their dense and scummy level; in fact, the only thing they are afraid of is when we align ourselves with higher and more complex forces who can and will squelch their activities.

In the upcoming series of essays, I plan on explaining my theory that individual leftists are suffering from severe demonic obsession, which is a symptom of a greater disease of demonic possession that afflicts the Left as a group. The Left is not the first group of people to be possessed by demons and it certainly won't be the last.

Demonic Obsession Vs. Demonic Possession

Demonic obsession is different than classic demonic possession, where the victim is able to contort their body in strange ways, can speak languages they've never heard before, and barks obscenities day and night. Demonic obsession can be just as deadly as demonic possession, but in general it is far more subtle, contagious, and therefore more insidious than possession. The demonically obsessed are best described as herd narcissists who refuse to engage in any form of self-reflection or self-analysis. They are consumed by hatred, but because of their willful ignorance of their own motivations, will project the shadow onto the hated Other and in turn be eaten alive by repressed anger at their own hypocrisy and dissonance. Their external dialogue becomes one of censorship, because internally they are censoring their own dissonance. This is where demons can enjoy an energy buffet of anger and spiraling despair as the obsessed person walls herself off from redemption and seeks ever new lows of depravity in which to devolve. For instance, leftists who could not censor their own projected shadow in the form of racism (theirs happens to be anti-white racism) have sunk to a new lowest common denominator of endorsing Black Lives Matter rioters and looters. Five years ago, they would not have been debased enough to say "theft and vandalism is OK", but given enough time to immerse themselves in the demonic, they're boldly and publicly signing on to demonic behavior.

In the 1980s, it was ironically the Christian Right that became demon-possessed as a group. Herd narcissism in the name of Jesus manifested itself in conservative rhetoric and leadership. The entity being appeased wasn't Jesus. Jesus said "By their fruits ye shall know them." Mentally ill people were dumped into the streets en masse by an arms dealing, junta-funding Reagan as the Christian right hoarded wealth for itself and covered up the priestly class's child molestation habits. Just like the Left projects its own shadow now and then proceeds to melt down in paranoid hysteria, the Right was once known for doing the same thing. The Left has its pet boogeymen of the Patriarchy, racism, fascism, and COVID to panic over where the Right once had illegal drugs, abortion, and the Satanic Panic to splatter upon headlines and newscasts. The Right was once the go-to source for Luciferian arrogance and complete intolerance of dissenting views. Factions among the Right still cling to the old bon mots of anti-drug and anti-abortion paranoia, but for the present time, these cause celebres are considered somewhat vestigial and out of date.

"But Kimberly," you say, "These actions by groups are just par for the course human failings, not the grandiose actions of a supernatural demonic force." There is a fine line where normal human foibles end and demonic influences begin, and that line isn't easy to detect. Demonic obsession isn't in-your-face like demonic possession, but that does not make it illegitimate. The path of herd narcissism and its accompanying arrogance is what Dion Fortune described as the Left-Hand Path. The Left-Hand Path leads towards devolution, simplification, and decay. It is the path of dismantling, breaking down, and going backwards. When a person or a group of people make the decision (whether consciously or subconsciously) to blindly pursue power and the rush it provides at all costs, they have entered the Left-Hand Path. The Left-Hand Path also happens to attract demons, who are more than happy to assist with the devolutionary process and feed upon its cast off energy.

The Invitation

Nevertheless, as I said in the title of this essay, nobody gets in without an invitation. Demonic possession does not happen by itself. The perverse truth about demonic possession is that it is always initially allowed by the possessed person, no matter how badly they regret their decision later. Folklore points in this direction: the vampire who cannot cross the threshold of the house without being invited, the fairies who cannot keep the mortal within their realm unless he chooses to eat fairy food. Tragic, horrific, and deadly possessions like that of Anneliese Michel (the true story that became the film The Exorcism of Emily Rose) and of "Roland Doe" (the true story that became the film The Exorcist) could not happen without the acquiescence of the victim in the beginning stages. In the Michel case, the door was probably opened by Anneliese's disproportionate, dysmorphic sense of Catholic guilt -- she often slept on a cold, hard floor in an attempt to atone for the sins of others. It is easy to imagine her inviting a demon into her psyche if it promised to grant her the power of truly paying for the sins of others. Some victims of possession invite the demon in because they believe the demon will give them goodies and toys God would not grant. I think for many of the possessed, I think their initial welcome of demons is simply a matter of wanting desperately to be the center of attention.

In the case of the religious Right, their invitation was spurred by their naked lust for power. Their domineering, one size fits all approach to worship and cantankerous declamations of judgement for anyone who dared stray outside their warped interpretation of Bible theory laid out a welcome mat for entities promising millions of converts and undue influence on economic policy. The price tag -- completely turning their backs on the authentic teachings of Jesus Christ -- never occurred to them until it was too late. By the 1990s, the hypocrisy of the religious Right was a caricature: Dana Carvey as The Church Lady, morbidly concerned about what other people did in the privacy of their own bedrooms and utterly convinced the average person was destined to fry in eternal hell.

Belief in the Unseen Hand

In the case of the largely atheist and secular Left, the promise of infinite Progress was the demonic lure. Just as Christians believe God will deliver them, atheists believe in the power of the free market or Progress will grant their wishes, and if not the wishes, the wishes of their descendants. The bottom line is both the hyper-religious and the anti-religious don't believe they have to act in the concrete, material world for the result of their will to appear. If they want a thing fervently and it fails to appear, the religious person turns to more fervent prayer and the thought-stopper "God works in mysterious ways". The atheist cements his resolve in the thought-stopper that God does not exist. Belief in any power higher than oneself and one's will becomes an insult to humanism. Both the atheist and the Christian believe in the Unseen Hand. There is zero discernment or refinement of one's own intentions. There is no aim or construction of concrete actions to move toward the desired goal. God and/or Progress is a cosmic Santa Claus and it's all supposed to happen by magic like it does in Harry Potter.

Muddled intentions draw the atheist and the Christian into a place of deep and embittered narcissism. Lonely and arrogant, the believer thinks he is at the top of an elite pile of intellectual superiority when he is actually blind and in the corner of a maze. Like the avant garde musician with his "music" of electronic fart noises and random clinking of keys, there is the delusion of achievement. From this vantage point, animism is impossible, because it involves the acknowledgement and respect of powers who are either indifferent or possibly superior to one's own self. The Evangelical Christian doesn't allow for the world to be imbued with a spiritual, non-corporeal ecosystem, because all instances of ghosts, fairies, or gods other than the Christian one are manifestations of the Devil. The atheist similarly dismisses the non-corporeal ecosystem because non-physical phenomena are not allowed according to materialist science. Without the basic "magical Kindergarten" of recognizing non-corporeal entities and the spirit of place, the believer in atheism and the Christian are spiritually stunted and ripe for demonic obsession. To make matters worse, they may be trapped in an egotistical imbalance of trying to write the spiritual equivalent of a symphony before they have written a three-chord song.

Thought-stoppers as Preparation for Demonic Infestation

Using binary thought-stoppers in the Christian sense (there is God and everything else is the Devil) or in the atheist sense (God doesn't conform to my expectations, therefore God does not exist) naturally open those using the thought-stoppers to demonic obsession. For those enveloped in the Progress narrative, their struggles are not learning opportunities for improvement because God in the guise of Progress owes them an easy life, however, God does not exist. In their minds, they are always bargaining for a better deal, whether it is the Evangelical using the cosmic vending machine approach to prayer or the atheist, who is compelled to amass all the goodies because "you only live once". They are reaching out to someone, but it's not the someone they were expecting.

Enter demons. Demons can feed upon entire groups, in fact, I believe this is the way they prefer to feed. Why settle for a single, troubled pre-teen in a country backwater when you can have entire football stadiums of crazed lunatics to suck energy from? The religious Right used to provide the juicy hysteria and vile behavior preferred by demons, whether it was via the energetic Prosperity Gospel sermons of Joel Osteen to fill Mammon's tanks or the picketing of fallen soldiers funerals by the Westboro Baptist Church to satisfy the appetites of Galamiel.

The Left, having thrown away all but the pretenses of helping the working class, has signed a deal in blood with what it thinks is the promise of infinite Progress. Leftists put their faith in career politicians for the span of more than 40 years, only to find their cluelessness blowing up in their face in an unexpected age of populism. Thought-stoppers opened it to demonic possession as a group and demonic obsession as individuals. There is no mystery in the race towards the bottom of current leftist behavior: the parasites feeding on their addled minds and spirits yank the strings and tell them to riot, to shout obscenities, to scream in to the air, and by all means necessary to avoid self-reflection.

Invitation is only the first foray of demons into the Left. I see demonic infestation as a five part process, which is why you can expect this post to turn into a series. The five phases of demonic infestation are:

1. The Invitation. Consent is the sine qua non of any demonic infestation. It may happen by trickery and guile but there is always consent.

2. The Honeymoon Phase. Demons are great liars and they promise glory. This is the glow phase of the relationship before the parasite/host relationship takes its inevitable turn.

3. Numbness and Fracture. The personality splits and infighting begins. The host is beginning to diminish.

4. Acute Possession and Derangement. The war is in full throttle and only one side will win. The demon is fighting for its place and the host is fighting for their life.

5. Aftermath. What can be expected both in terms of blowback and thoughts on strategies for protecting oneself from the demonically obsessed.

Thanks for reading my essays. I look forward to your comments. If you do choose to comment, please refrain from the use of obscenities.

Current Mood: awake

Hi Everyone,

I do free Ogham readings on Mondays! Submit your question here or via PM and I will do my best to answer it here. I can also do a general 3 card reading for the day, the week, or the month.

There are some questions I can't answer for legal reasons, for instance, questions about certain aspects of health and medications. Thanks for understanding.

Here's a website I made about Ogham: http://druidogham.wordpress.com

Dear Friend,

There are reasons why I have blocked you out of my life. Right now, I am facing the consequences of your actions. Your paranoia about a disease that has been statistically proven to kill fewer people than heart disease per year has nearly destroyed my business that is twenty-four years in the making. That’s more than half my life. You, who attained higher degrees at great cost yet have not been able to do what I managed out of determination, originality, and sheer chutzpah now sit back, demanding the eternal shutdown so you and your loved ones can obtain the communist welfare utopia you think you want.

I did my best to keep my irritation at bay, but when your derangement over a legally-elected president exploded into its latest virulent form, I had no choice but to bring down the hammer of judgement. You are, quite literally, ruining my life right now. Like many Americans, I was just beginning to see a bit of financial prosperity when you cut the economy’s legs off with shutdowns and then riots.

To understand how we got here, I want to go on a journey into your psychology, a thing that you have almost no understanding of despite your general pretenses of being book-smart and expensive psychotherapist addiction.

Once upon a time, there was a senator from Vermont who rose to recognition on waves of the middle class economic frustration. He was axed in a tragicomedy of high-grade corruption so obvious a third grader could have figured out the storyline. The result of this cheating was the election of a charismatic Caesar, which if you knew anything of history, you would know is a common event during the decline of Empire. If you weren’t so mentally damaged, you might also know this outcome is better for you and the class to which you aspire than the alternative, which is mass bloodshed and beheadings of a fossilized elite a la Robespierre.

You operate exactly like a person under a malign spell. You still have not gotten over the results of an election nearly four years in the past. Please let that sink in. There has been plenty of time to sit back and reflect why your party lost and even more time to cultivate ways to do better by potential voters. Instead of doing this, you have thrown a multi-year tantrum that began with lumpy pink hats. The excuse at that time was sexual harassment of girls and women. Part of the first #metoo phase was to pretend you are a witch and throw bad intentions at the alleged misogynist patriarchy; this summed up the zeitgeist adequately. Your karmic punishment for these bad intentions is a blubbering, senile pedophile you’ve cruelly thrust into the debate chair.

The next phase of manufactured outrage was Russian collusion. Projecting your own shadow, you cried about espionage and electronic manipulation. Boy, did you get your rear end handed to you on that one.

After that, it was masks. You’re still in this phase. The mask is at once a virtue signal and the grown-up’s version of a binky: a sad, dilapidated totem that symbolically shields its wearer from being perceived as politically conservative. That’s why you want everyone to wear the mask; just like you would like us to believe there are more than twenty people who want to vote for your demented presidential candidate, you want to enforce the appearance of political hegemony among people who have no interest in backing your party. Holding the entire economy hostage isn’t enough. Having the entire mainstream media in your pocket isn’t enough. Since cable viewership is down, you have discovered you cannot force your way into the public consciousness via the television screen and its ads. Only a person under an evil spell would be horrified by this, and horrified you are. You would have George Orwell’s 1984 without envisioning the consequences, and because you are deeply afflicted, you have bankrupted yourself intellectually out of lust of result.

Like the aforementioned French 18th century elite, you are losing your heads due to an acute lack of self-analysis.

Your final, desperate act is to play the race card. To do this, you have enlisted an infantry of white, college-educated liberal women and their pathetic, ineffectual male cuckolds. Behind them, yanking the puppet strings, are viciously racist blacks, Latinos, and Asians, cheering on the disintegration of the working classes as business districts are torched. Like you, the riots are motivated by a fundamental disconnect from reality. Large corporations that benefit from times of unrest are unscathed when one or two of their stores are burned to the ground; small businesses are not. You bleat about systemic cruelty, yet wasn’t it you I saw on Instagram modeling stretch pants or fashionable new Amazon.com outfit/toy? Wasn’t your new item made via slave labor in the Third World? You live in a segregated neighborhood, whether it is all white and Asian, all black, or all Latino. I don’t. My lower middle class neighborhood is mixed, just like my own racial make-up. You are voting for the party that put more blacks in jail than any other party, yet this is somehow about police cruelty, not the institutions that control the levers of law enforcement. Once again, you piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

I have blocked you because you are no longer sane. I hope this is a temporary condition, but I have no problem if it is permanent. You need me more than I need you. You need businesses like mine so the economy isn’t completely given over to the large corporations you claim to be taking to task. You need my mental stability and my willingness to stand against tyrants. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” You, who say you are brave, manifest the opposite of bravery in every deed and word. You have thrown me under the bus, and in doing so, you have become the despised tyrant. You are not the victim. You are the perpetrator. This time, it's personal. Sayonara.

Current Mood: grumpy

Hi Everyone!

I am going to do some Ogham readings for free every Monday.

Please submit your question either as a comment or in my private Inbox.

I may have to limit how many I do depending on what's going on in my life at any given time, so it's definitely going to be a first-come, first serve thing. Please have at it!

Please check out my Ogham website!

Photo of signage from Antifastan/CHAZ/CHOP collective

Like tattoos and cigarette smoking, the F-word used to be edgy. The F-word was bad enough to be off-limits/verboten in the trashy horror I read throughout my childhood. The F-word used to appeal to me, especially when I was age 12 and crushed by insecurity. Using it with my few friends made me feel larger somehow. When I wrote my own first horror novel at age 31, I made sure that the F-word had a few cameo appearances.

The F-word comes to us from Germanic languages of the 16th century. In Swedish, a similar word, focka means "to sack" in the plunder and loot sense of the term. Its roots are potentially Indo-European from a verb that also birthed the Latin pugnus, which means "to strike".

Once the domain of longshoremen, edgy 12 year olds, Harley dudes, and late nite comedians, the F word has become the pillar of leftist Newspeak and the crucible within which they seek to reduce all human language.

By doing so, they have cursed and they have also cursed themselves.

Our culture's hangups are reflected in the word that rhymes with duck. We all know that its first meaning is "to engage in sexual intercourse". One of the worst swear words, it is second only to the word that rhymes with bundt for shock value. As much as we post-Feminist Sexual Revolution kids would like to think we're over Victorian prudery and horror over basic bodily functions like masturbation and sex, we are clearly still terrified of our bodies and ourselves. As proof, we have the two worst swear words in the American vernacular, one that refers to a woman's genitals and the other that refers to the act of sex. A distant third curse word is s**t, which means poop and doesn't pack anywhere near the punch of the previous two. There is a popular children's book about everybody pooping. Children's books about the other two subjects are mercifully absent. The F word reflects our culture's compulsive shame about sex.

The left loves nothing more than to project its own shame. Leftists of all colors are secretly ashamed of their privilege. Most of us are privileged, but it is leftists who have become so uneasy with their guilty role in it, so instead of adopting a sense of noblesse oblige, humility, and gratitude, their reaction has been to deny that they are privileged and to chastise others (including historical figures) for being plunderers and rapists. Classic projection of the shadow.

The leftist who doesn't have the human decency to feel guilty about the small mountain of plastic garbage in her $120,000 car that runs on coal-generated electricity bellows about losing her childhood because of global warming. The leftist who sent back his food three times at the restaurant and then forgot to tip votes for a politician who has sneered at the working class and off-shored jobs so other leftists can have cheap nannies and suppliant food service workers. The leftist who champions black lives mysteriously lives in a 95% white neighborhood of gated subdivisions with no plans to move. The leftist with black skin and a persecution complex riots and steals in a scene straight out of the KKK playbook.

It's no wonder leftists feel like the world is closing in on them all the time and seek to blot out that feeling by spending lots of money or by calling out "privilege" like shouting fire in a crowded theater. Hypocrisy is its own inherent trap and sooner or later every religion dies of it. Leftists with their beloved religions of Atheism, Marxism, and Holy Progress are no different. But just like the F word loses its power once you've seen it and heard it a million times, hypocrites who scream hysterically about privilege find that the ears of the masses become numb. I think everyone senses this numb is the calm before the storm, and if the average leftist has any sense of self-preservation, they will look to calm discourse and rational exchanges instead of working themselves into a froth at the mere mention of the Orange Man or populism. There's only so much screaming allowed before the screamer gets backhanded, possibly into the previous century. Leftists probably wouldn't mind this, because a massive problem among them is the pretense we are all still in 1960, with all of 1960's racial oppressions of non-white people, gender conflicts, and wild economic potential. As a bonus, if you are mentally locked in 1960, you can still safely blame Russia for ruining everything while not understanding the grotesque failures of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Unfortunately for leftists, we aren't in 1960, and I have a hunch about the word they would choose to describe how they feel about it.

Current Mood: chipper

Thinking Like a Mage series:

https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/thinking+like+a+mage

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a symbol is worth a thousand pictures. Symbols occur to us in obvious ways all the time: the red cross that means first aid or health care, the color green on a traffic light that tells us Go, and the very alphabet letters of this sentence, which your human brain miraculously puts together and deciphers a message from me to you.

The human brain is wired to unpack symbols. For this reason, one of the great tragedies of our time was the hobbling of the Christian tradition of discursive meditation. Discursive meditation, once common practice, was nearly done away with during the twentieth century. Personally, I was shamefully ignorant of discursive meditation until well after my college years, and that’s too bad, because I would have been a much happier, smarter, more well-adjusted person had I discovered it sooner.

What Is Discursive Meditation?

Discursive meditation is a procedural method of thinking where one severely limits ones thoughts to a narrow focus and then deeply explores the object of that focus. Discursive meditation is one of the great traditions of the West. European Medieval monks codified exercises of prayer, discursive meditation, and mysticism, commonly using individual Bible topics or passages as meditation subjects. Only in the 20th century did the practice become nearly extinct among regular people. My friend’s father, who is now near the age of 80, was taught Catholic discursive meditation when he studied to become a priest (he obviously decided against becoming a priest).

The picture below is an Orthodox depiction of Saint Benedict of Nursia, a 6th century monk who is considered founding father of discursive meditation.

If you want to try discursive meditation for yourself, all you have to do is pick an object, find a chair, plant yourself in it, and go into anywhere from five to thirty minutes of intense thought about that object. For instance, as I write this, there is a pencil sitting to the right of my right hand. The pencil was most likely made in China as it was part of a Dollar Tree pack of Halloween-themed pencils. It is about seven years old. It is made of soft wood and its writing tip is made of graphite. The pencil was invented by a blind-in-one-eye scientist named Nicholas-Jacques Conte serving in Napoleon’s army. The etymology of the word pencil means “little tail”, which evokes images of the delicate brushes used to illuminate medieval manuscripts. Writing itself was most likely invented in ancient India, though some speculate it was simultaneously invented in China and Sumeria. From what we can tell, only humans engage in it. I can also relate to pencils personally: in the opening scene of my first novel, two characters earn a high school detention because one borrows the other’s pencil. I could go on at length, but I hope you’ve understood that a pencil isn’t just a pencil. With discursive meditation, a mere pencil becomes a treasure trove full of information to be discovered and explored.

When Westerners threw out discursive meditation for the plethora of garbage that replaced it, our ability to communicate and negotiate with each other also went down the toilet. I don’t entirely blame myself for the disaster my brain became as a young person. Television displaced reading as a popular habit in the 1950s and I grew up in a household that was obsessed with it. Nowadays, internet/smart phones are displacing television. In effect, most people born after 1940 became consumerist zombie victims of Madison Avenue and I was as bad as any.

One predicament of the human mind is our tendency to free-associate and daisy chain our thoughts whether we try to do so consciously or not. A simpler of saying this is “we tend to jump to conclusions”. The less disciplined our minds are, the quicker we are to make snap judgements and rash decisions because of the daisy-chains that are always going on in our mental-emotional backgrounds. Discursive meditation is an excellent way of grasping the reins of the subconscious and bringing it into the light of understanding.

There is so much in our rich, weird world to meditate upon. No single human mind could ever get to it all. I recently commented to my atheist, rationalist husband that one could spend an entire lifetime in discursive meditation on a single tarot card. If the tarot card is a trump, one could spend several lifetimes!

Eastern meditation, where one deliberately empties one’s mind, can easily become poisonous and destructive. Used improperly and without the context of traditional co-disciplines, various Hindu and Buddhist meditation techniques decimate rational thought processes and provide a convenient vacuum where ill-intentioned gurus, advertisers, and corporate interests can implant their programming.

Bastardized, out-of-context Buddhist and Hindu meditation of the kind taught in American yoga studios and corporate retreats represses the thought process and prevents it from exploring the potentials of the object by shoving it all neatly back under the surface. The result: The subconscious mind remains a hot mess. Despite frantic efforts to supplant the Christian traditions with Eastern ones, is it any wonder we have four generations since the invention of television who are tormented by depression, anger, greed, and materialism? One way or the other, we have been taught and encouraged to empty our minds. Driven by subconscious urges placed in us by the heads of large corporations and sociopathic mainstream media, we desperately seek refuge in religion, including the godless religion of atheism/Progress. Most religion is eager to tell us that all of our materialistic wishes will come true if we simply believe.

Discursive meditation easily reveals nefarious agendas and renders the forces behind them powerless, so it is no wonder the powers that be have no interest in letting people know about it!

Current Mood: happy

Egomania is only a good look on cheesy 90s superheroes

As I have mentioned, I have distanced myself from my leftist friends because of the karmic blowback I sense they have coming at them like a tsunami. I could be wrong and my avoidance of former pals could be all for nothing. I am willing to take that risk as I have become increasingly disgusted by the hypocrisy and detachment of my former allies. My distancing is also motivated by pure selfishness -- I don't want to be around if what I believe is coming for them actually appears on schedule. I don't relish being dragged down by people who are already at this time unhappy and toxic to be around.

I used to be unhappy in the same way most leftists are unhappy: I suffered severe depression. Though the thick of it happened in my teens, depression was a normal condition for me that only faded completely when I started doing the Sphere of Protection and discursive meditation every day as part of my Druid religion. I know the state of depression intimately. I know its manias and its black holes. I know its behaviors and false hopes. Most individuals on the left suffer from some form of depression or mania, and those who are able to keep their own subconscious inner turmoil at bay usually succumb to various forms of addiction, food addiction being the most common.

Trends have it that it is fashionable for leftists, especially women, to declare themselves witches. The number of good role models out there for the young witch are close to zero. Brought up on Harry Potter and American Horror Story, a young witch is sets out on her own with cartoon images of what magic is and does. Witches with street cred who should honestly know better set traps for her, insisting you can invoke the djinn or faeries or whomever and they will do your bidding to "free that imprisoned lightning to strike down injustice and bring home the consequences of their actions to those who perpetrate it." A newbie to the Path, she is already the victim of a glamour designed to get her to buy more cool stuff so she can get a larger Instagram following. She enters witchcraft as the victim of hostile magic. To make matters worse, she is depressed.

That's where the T-shirt store comes in. There are at least seven T-shirt stores selling this design called "Hex the Racists":

"Racists" are defined as anyone who isn't pro-rioter. It's presumed "racists" are white but non-whites also qualify if they are against rioters. David Dorn, a 77 year old black man who died via a rioter's bullet, is considered a racist against his own kind. I mentioned leftist hypocrisy, and the former example is unfortunately one of at least a million.

I have learned the hard way that it's a bad idea to hex people even if you are particularly good at hexing people. Karma works in mysterious ways, and one of the reasons I think leftists suffer pandemic depression, chronic pain, and insomnia is the hurt they've thrown around coming back to hit them where it counts.

When a commenter on the Hex the Racists T-shirt store post suggested one should not hex, all hell broke loose among leftist witches intent upon killing the messenger.

Abject terror of consequences for one's actions is a calling card among modern leftists, including those who do not lean towards the occult. This comes from a place of not being able to recognize one's own first world privilege and the high costs of that privilege to everyone who is not first world. Hence the immediate overreaction of "don't tell me how to walk MY path" and "your path isn't the only one!" as if consequences for one's actions where a matter of elective choice.

The OP comes back with (essentially) that you don't have to call it karma for it to work, and that's where we get a grandiose egomaniac informing us that she is karma. The grandiose egomaniac is a black woman, so immediately a sycophant rushes in with an appeasing "my daughter was molested and I hexed her abuser!"

The next page has another egomaniac making up rules that absolve her from natural law just as long as the hexed person was a racist or committed an act of violence. As we have established, a racist is anyone who doesn't emphatically agree with a leftist. Real racism does not have to be demonstrated to condemn someone as a racist, and real violence most likely includes people who say mean, disagreeable things that hurt the witch's feelings.

A bystander who I will call White Witch asks about the law of three and is quickly shot down with more arbitrary limitlessness. Christianity is fashionably denigrated, most likely because of that stuff Jesus said about "Do unto others".

The OP chimes in again with more mild suggestions of sending protection instead of flinging harm, again citing natural laws of energy bouncing around.

This upsets the "the rules are anything I say!" witch who now basically tells the OP to leave her alone. OP comes back with "this is just science, yo."

Egomaniac No. 2 comes in with "The hex IS the karma." I'm reminded of a scene from Judge Dredd.

Also notice my comment is the only one of this whole group that has zero likes, ha ha! Guess I did a good job of scaring them...

White Witch dares to complain about being crucified for asking about the Rule of 3.

She is given virtual hugs by the OP and another white witch. Then a creepy message aappears from Our Sponsor offering 30 percent off on a T-shirt to one of our hex-happy witches.

A popcorn-munching fence rider pops in to say she enjoys reading all the different opinions. Seems legit. A third grade flame war occurs between yet another "I make my own rules" witch and a witch who takes an agnostic approach yet cannot raise herself above primary school "BUT SHE SAID" butthurt.

Remember the witch who hates Christianity and makes up her own rules? She's back, insisting karma isn't for her because she said so.

A troll stops by to mention that karma applies only to Hindus.

Anti-Christianity, who must correct others on absolutely everything, graces that person with more of her wisdom about "tenants in different faiths".

Troll returns with a revelation about being Christian herself and more hatred of Hinduism because her God allegedly hates anything she has misinterpreted as being against God's will.

Egomaniac No. 3 burps out "A hex is an inconvenience. If I want to hurt you, I will curse you".

Just as magic exists without one's personal belief being necessary, karma exists with no belief needed from you or me, no matter how important we think we are in the scheme of things. Every now and then, karma is obvious, such as when the rioter tries to hurl a brick into a car window and it bounces back and hits him.

Karma usually isn't obvious and it takes a staggering amount of careful discursive meditation to understand the tiniest fraction of it. Unbeknownst to these witches, karma affects us through all of our incarnations. Like gravity, it never sleeps. The toxicity we see in the above thread is the result of spiritual ignorance and confusion. Who ever told these women to turn off the television and shut off the Instagram feed and consider the possibility you don't just live once? Karma isn't just for Hindus and neither is reincarnation!

For this reason, I have taken to leaving vengeance to the gods. Sure, I still get good and angry at people who have done colossally stupid things. Then I take a moment and remember that I too do colossally stupid things. My only recourse is my vow to be a better person than I was yesterday, if only by the slightest bit. You are all welcome to steal my affirmation for yourselves... no bad karma in that at all!

The garden... it's a work in progress for sure!

First, the beautiful path my husband built. I wish I had not lost the old pictures of the front yard when we moved in and my phone got stolen (it was later returned). The yard was nothing like it is now. My amazing husband built this path directly over the muddy, sunken sidewalk in gravel two years ago. This year, he went over the gravel in brick. Can you believe has never taken a single landscape design class?

The formal front garden is my design and my husband's build. I am in the process of propagating enough boxwoods to grow them as a hedge as you typically see in formal gardens. I'm not sure if I will fill the beds with hydrangea like the ones in front or just go with various perennials such as sedum and daylily as I have started to do here.

Here is a view from the side. Cedric the cedar is in the background and you might be able to see I have made a tiny corner garden by the path. In that corner have transplanted one of the many maple seedlings that comes up in my beds there along with a hosta and an evergreen that I have been trying to propagate from cuttings from a bush at work. All the hostas were divisions from my parents' garden. The ferns were donations from their next door neighbor who was getting rid of them because he was putting an addition on his house. The black cohosh is a division from a huge plant in my parents' garden. The tree is a pear from Home Depot I have had for three years. No fruit yet!

Here's the baby oak I transplanted from the bed full of dill to the back... He or she needs a name!
Any suggestions?

Here is the back. My husband has been busy! He built a beautiful porch AND a two story feral cat hotel! Not long after we moved in, he built the Celtic cross garden, again my design and his build. I have planted it out with marigolds, daylilies, and herbs this year: anise hyssop, wild monarda, mint, catmint, thyme, sage, oregano, yarrow, and skullcap.

Om nom nom...

More garden pictures as the season progresses, I promise!

Current Mood: nerdy

True confession: I talk to trees. Better yet, they answer back and we have conversations. I'm aware that this isn't "normal". I believe I'm far less crazy these days -- talking to trees, my car, the gods, thanking my food -- than I was when I didn't believe nature could answer back if you talked to it.

People (freaks) like me who talk to trees don't discriminate. I talk to trees in the forest preserve. I talk to trees I pass driving to my office. During breaks, I talk to a tree who is growing against the back end of the building where I work. I'm so fond of chatting with trees, I made a video about how I do it in an effort to encourage others to strike up conversations with the trees in their lives:

Watch on YouTube

Let's call the tree in the back of my work Mama. She is the same tree I was leaning against in the video. Mama is an Eastern cedar. She's had half her upper bulk sheared to accommodate the building. Mama isn't a particularly happy tree and she's also by power lines. I knew this when I entered the relationship. Unfortunately, both Mama and I foresee a high probability that the building will be torn down (it's a rickety piece of crap) along with Mama, prematurely ending her life. The town where I work is infamous for its ruthless appetite for demolishing independent, beloved small businesses in order to install mega-chains. That's why Mama and I suspect it's only a matter of time.

After I made my video, I came back to visit Mama and she sent me a jolt of panic. Only then did I see a small version of Mama about ten feet away from her growing in the crack between the building and the ground. I'm not sure how, but Mama reproduced. Her little baby grew along with a bunch of weeds in the unkempt area between the decrepit wooden steps and the parking lot.

"He's in trouble!" She said, and I don't mean aloud. I heard her say this to whatever part of my head is able to perceive feelings from others. I suspect it's the exact same part of the brain that can tell someone is mad at me or pleased with me before they speak; that is to say clairaudience of this nature is a talent I believe every human being possesses.

"You have to save him!" Said Mama.

Of course Mama was right. Modern city dwellers would never dream of seeing a tree growing in the crotch of a city commercial property and its parking lot as a being worthy of a second thought, let alone respect. The small tree was destined for removal as a nuisance. How dare anything wild grow where Man's sacred concrete has been erected! To most modernites, communicating with trees is a relic of childhood at best and an omen of schizophrenia at worst. But I digress.

My inner thoughts were something akin to "Ugh..." The little tree was close enough to underground wires to be dangerous if dug with a metal spade.

I just happened to have a small plastic garden shovel, so I fetched it and began carefully and laboriously digging through the gravel and weeds with no promises to Mama. Fifteen solid minutes of struggling and sweating later, I somehow managed to finesse the baby cedar out of the corner, landing square on my behind several times as I jockeyed for the right position and shimmied to avoid potential electrocution.

Once the literally dirty deed was done, Mama sent me a feeling of relief so palpable I can still mentally conjure it months later. This overwhelming rush of emotion was tinged with bittersweet melancholy. Her child was free and safe but she would never again be physically with him. As a result, I felt tired and wired. The little tree was unearthed and temporarily housed in a busted popcorn bowl serving as an impromptu pot.

I was mentally and physically drained. I could feel Mama's gratitude and sadness reverberating through me in alternate waves, and I knew I had to get home as fast as possible to plant Cedric in his new forever home, my front yard.

The neighborhood's cedars whispered across blocks and the great oaks, elms, plentiful maples, and copious elms and black walnuts bore witness as I dug a hole for Cedric the Unplanned. I placed him into the soil as a light spring evening rain began to patter on my receding hairline of a lawn. I said a silent Druid prayer as I watered him in.

A few months later, I am happy to report Cedric is doing swell. He seems to have taken root and sports lively chartreuse on the tips of his branches. After work, I talked to Mama today to let her know he is OK. She thanked me again and said that she has already been updated through the "tree grapevine", whatever that may be.

Current Mood: grateful

It does not matter what I think of Donald Trump, because I don’t devote any significant part of my life to thinking about him. I once rooted for Bernie Sanders to win the 2015 Democratic primary. I was not surprised by the outcome of that primary. Had I voted for Donald Trump from where I reside in Illinois, it would not have made a difference because Illinois has a way of voting blue no matter what. That’s exactly what happened in Illinois in 2016.

As a vegan, it is assumed I will vote either for Democrats or Progressives at election time. Both are left-leaning parties that pride themselves as being the choice of the “good people” and of compassion. Vegans are the supposed epitome of compassion, refusing to spare anyone down to the very insects from our beneficent largesse. Vegans are therefore not allowed to vote for an overgrown Biff Tannen who regularly makes an ass of himself on Twitter and marries women who are far better looking than he is. But why stop at preventing anyone in the fold to vote for Trump when you can attempt to censor their thoughts? Thinking of Trump as anything except LITERALLY HITLER is not allowed. Admitting he isn’t the worst president the US has ever had, if that is indeed your opinion, is not allowed. Questioning the mainstream media’s generally negative opinion of him is not allowed.

If the only argument you have is “REEEEEE YOU MOTHER$^#**er SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP REEEEE!!!!!”, the other side starts looking appealing by default. Certain types of Evangelist Christians who lurk around and occasionally bomb abortion clinics display the same kind of arrogant hysteria as the anti-Trump crowd and they are repulsive for the same reasons. Both claim to be virtuous and holy, yet we would be hard pressed to find a finer example of classic Luciferian evil. The need to be right is a hell of a drug.

My refusal to engage in the Trump-hating fashions of my era has meant I have had to create a metaphorical social distance between myself and those who live and die by that narrative. By my lack of desire to cloak myself in the daily ugliness of bashing Trump and his administration, I have become a pariah among the majority of my leftist friends. If they could gain a wider perspective, I think they would be horrified to see what they have become: mired in astral filth; dripping with bigotry, intolerance, and arrogance; devolving quickly into earlier and more crude forms from which it could take decades if not lifetimes to regain a state of astral hygiene. I believe that underneath the spitting hate, they are good people with great passion for healing the world, but they have completely lost any sight of empathizing with their fellow human beings enough to make change.

Over the past year, I was saddened to see good friends of mine whom I otherwise consider to be sane outright wishing harm on other people because they support Trump. Many leftists openly and transparently wish for more to die of the current plague because that somehow proves Trump is as evil as they say he is. I’m not even going to go into how stupid wishing harm on others is (there are concrete reasons why I don’t do that anymore) — to be succinct, wishing harm is like flinging your own poo: you can’t do it without getting sticky fingers and smelling like crap. Anti-Trumpers who wish harm are so obtuse, they don’t catch on when the harm they wish ricochets right back at them and causes them the losses and heartache they aimed like missiles at others. The #MeToo movement is a perfect example of this: wishing harm on Trump for his pussy-grabbing comment resulted in Trump potentially getting away with alleged sexual crimes against women while Joe Biden is held accountable for his alleged crimes.

This brings me to what I sense is coming for those who marinate in malefic intentions and hatred that can be easily proved with a few screenshots on any given day: this does end well for you and the blowback you’ve earned will hurt you and the ones you love. Stop now if you can, while you still can. Invoke the highest version of yourself and if you’re amenable, look to higher powers instead of hatred to get you through the coming dark times. I could be wrong, but I believe a tsunami of retribution is coming for the Left and all of its disingenuous, virtue signaling ill-wishers. The deeper you are, the worse it will be for you, so please stop digging.

Be blessed.

Warning: Any profanity in the comments will be deleted.

Censorship is great within limits. There is no reason for a four year old to watch A Clockwork Orange, and hence we have movie rating systems that indicate language, nudity, and gore. Forbidding an eighteen year old to watch the same film is where we run into a wall: can’t we trust their judgement? Do we actually believe they’re not going to find the forbidden film and watch it anyway?

In the Midwestern US, there is an unwritten system called Midwestern Nice. Midwestern Nice is a tacit code of everyday conduct made famous by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) and epitomized by the movie Fargo. Midwestern Nice is about saying volumes without saying anything at all. It is the opposite of wearing your heart on your sleeve. Don’t let Midwestern Nice fool you — it is often unflinchingly brutal, because for the uninitiated, it’s like trying to win a game of Don’t Blink with a potato. She who shows emotional upset first loses the Midwestern Nice game. Therefore, people more prone to express themselves are the losers at this haute form of emotional poker. So imagine that you want to force someone who is Midwestern Nice into your way of thinking or your agenda: how exactly do you plan on doing it? How do you tell if they are following your orders or not? Easy, you don’t, because you’ve already laid it all on the table and lost the game by telling them what you’re up to, and all along, they’ve been doing their quiet and extremely opposite thing with a pleasant smile on their face.

These days, it’s exceedingly common to witness random, otherwise-intelligent people who are interested in censoring what others have to say because it does not mesh with their opinion. It is one thing to shut down a friend or a mate when you don’t feel like discussing a particular subject at a particular time and it is quite another to attempt to shame them out of discussing the topic with people besides yourself. This is a key distinction between intimacy (that which is discussed among friends, lovers, and family) and community (that which is discussed in the public forum). When you try to shut down all discussion of say, Pedogate, instead of just saying to your friend, “I don’t believe in that, can you save that opinion for another day or for other people?” and instead you cry, “You are not allowed to talk about Pedogate with anyone, anywhere because it doesn’t exist!” You have just ensured the person you are trying to censor will talk about Pedogate with reckless abandon, just not with you.

The attempt to shut down free speech is ultimately what the brilliant Christian occultist Dion Fortune conceived as the behavior of the Left Hand Path: it tries to force devolution and to strip away complexity to return to a simpler, more primal state. When the Left tries to shut down any form of dissenting voice of the week with an -ism such as racism, sexism, ableism, or Anti-semitism, it is the bull in a china shop action of wrecking the playground because they are afraid of losing the game. Long ago, George Orwell wrote the prescient novel 1984 to describe a State gone wild with its own power over its people. The goal of Big Brother in 1984 was to strip away the subtleties of language, to unify the rainbow of human dissent into an amorphous, voracious greige blob of groupthink.

The reason Donald Trump is President at the time of this writing comes from the attempts of Democratic censors to police free speech and extinguish free thought. Luckily, their efforts have proven largely unsuccessful. In the aftermath of COVID-19, I believe even the Chinese Communist Party will find it increasingly difficult to ruin average people’s lives enough to make them submissive. The next Cultural Revolution in China may end up ushering Big Brother to the guillotine.

Current Mood: indescribable

This is a transcription of my YouTube video (below) about preventing night terrors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxDd_HD5Qus

My first video about preventing night terrors only covered one small way of combatting them: mainly via the use of vinegar, the fumes of which interfere with a malevolent entity’s ability to manifest on the physical plane.

If you’ve already tried vinegar at your bedside and regular hoodoo baths and are still having night terrors, it may be time to get out the heavy artillery.

First, a bit of a rant: The problem with modern psychiatry and psychology is though it addresses some of the mental problems that may be causing night terrors, it has absolutely zero understanding of the astral plane, which is where both dreams and night terrors take place. We humans exist in all planes at once — the astral plane is the plane of imagination, and any creature with an imagination, which absolutely includes non-human animals, exists on the astral plane and the physical plane at once. But the astral and physical aren’t the only planes we exist on: every single one of us exists on all of the planes all the time, however, we have limited perception, and unless we are psychic sensitives or trained in the occult, we have no idea what sensory information is coming in from planes other than the material one.

Night terrors are more than just physical, so if you want to make them stop, you are going to have to take more than just a physical approach.

That said, the first line of defense against night terrors is going to be pragmatic stuff like cutting your caffeine intake way down, not marathoning horror films or playing video games until 3am, and not eating a giant, spicy meal before trying to sleep. Basically what you are trying to avoid is the in-between stage of twilight semi-sleep where night terrors tend to happen. Just acting on the physical plane may not be enough, and that’s what frustrates me so much about the various psychiatrists and psychologists who post videos trying to help people with night terrors: in my case. You mean well, but by attempting to convince night terror sufferers that it is all in their heads, you are basically claiming expertise about a subject you know little to nothing about. It’s like the blind leading the blind. Nevertheless, you’ve got to do some practical, physical things to get a better night’s sleep to avoid night terrors, and chances are chronic disease or pain may stop you from doing that. Just do your best to not get too crazy with the caffeine and staying up late is what I’m saying.

The next plane we address is the etheric plane, which is the plane I was essentially talking about in my previous Night Terror video. If the entities in night terrors are described as shadow men, the hag, straight up monsters, demons, ghouls, etc., vinegar can be described as their Kryptonite. The invisible energy known as chi in Chinese medicine and feng shui is the playing field of the etheric plane, and for reasons unexplored by modern science, vinegar just happens to disrupt that energy field in a way that nasty, malicious spirits can’t toy with you when it is present. The same is true of cold, running water, and that’s the occult science behind the hoodoo bath video.

You’ve taken reasonable measures to get decent sleep and you’ve got your vinegar at the bedside, so now it is time to address the astral plane or the plane of dreams and imagination. This is where the Sphere of Protection or some other basic banishing ritual comes in. Learning the Sphere of Protection takes time, but anyone can do it and it is very adaptable and modifiable. One can easily modify it to only invoke the Christian god or no god at all by invoking the forces of nature for various directions. I made a video showing how I personally do it here. The only warning I’ll put here is if you are a kid watching this and you are either not finished or not even going through puberty yet, it’s magically dangerous for you yourself to learn and do this ritual, but it’s fine for a parent or someone who has already been through puberty to do the banishing ritual in your presence. Stick to prayer and asking others to pray to end your night terrors for now, as prayer works on several planes. More on prayer later in this video.

The next plane to address is the mental one, and for the mind, the best thing to both understand and prevent night terrors is discursive meditation. Discursive meditation is where you take an object, a phrase, a part of a concept, or any tidbit from life, focus your attention on it, and think through all of its permutations and implications, opening it as you would a mental ZIP file. For instance, if I make a discursive meditation on a pencil, I will sit there and think of nothing else except thoughts in relation to the pencil: I will consider what the pencil is made out of, where the wood came from, what petrochemicals the synthetic graphite is made out of, the invention of writing, the invention of pens as an alternative, types of pens, the invention of calligraphy, hieroglyphics, and before you know it, thirty minutes have passed and I know everything there is to know about a pencil and then some. I can repeat the same kind of intensive thought process with any subject or object, including elements of my own dreams or situations in my life. If I do this type of mind-filling meditation every day, which I have for approximately three years at the time of making this video, I become a more thoughtful person. It is also very calming and grounding, and that’s the opposite of night terrors.

The final plane to address is the spiritual one, and this is where I suggest you cultivate relationships with beings whom you cannot see but are smarter, better, and more powerful than you are. If you are an atheist, you can think of these beings generically as “nature” and as long as you are doing plenty of discursive meditation and daily protection rituals, you don’t have to invest in any one religious system to be helped out, however, you will have to subdue your own ego and accept that nature is more powerful than you and you do not have limitless control over it. Atheists, and I know this from having been atheist, can tend to be solipsistic and very resistant to forces that would otherwise help them. For everybody else, praying a higher power will be your number one asset in getting rid of night terrors, and it is also a good idea to get everyone who knows you suffer from night terrors to pray to their god or gods on your behalf.

A great book on generally getting rid of nasty spirits and the anxiety and depression that invariably accompany them is Spiritual Cleaning and Protection by Violet Bertelsen.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/http://www.lulu.com/shop/violet-bertelsen/spiritual-cleaning-and-protection/paperback/product-24483949.html

I hope this helps someone out there get rid of their night terrors. I made this video after watching a woman named Jenna’s video about her awful night terrors and the anxiety they cause her and her family and then watching the next recommended video, which was of a typically clueless psychologist giving almost completely useless advice to those suffering night terrors. If this video helps one person get rid of their night terrors for good, it will gladden my heart and brighten my world. I used to suffer with night terrors, anxiety, and depression and I know they’re no picnic. I hope this video helps you to overcome night terrors and develop habits that improve both your waking and sleeping realities.

Thinking Like a Mage series:

https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/thinking+like+a+mage

It is my sincere belief as an aspiring mage that intention is crucially important.

I was an atheist less than five years ago and before that, a lackadaisical Christian in an extremely secular, why bother going sort of Protestant church. Both as an atheist and as a Christian, I had zero concept of what my intentions were, let alone the importance of them. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is not altogether true, however, I think it can be more accurately restated as “The road to hell is paved with eclectic intentions.” My intentions, much like my personality back then, were all over the place. I didn’t know whether to wish people harm or ill, so I did plenty of both, swinging on a Tarzan’s rope from one set of emotions to the next. When your intentions are sloppy and largely unknown to you, it becomes almost impossible to achieve anything you want to in life, love, and career. For instance, I was once obsessed with landing a low six-figure salary for myself as I thought it would solve various problems in my life, such as owning my own home. Had I examined my intentions, I would have realized that money was not my true desire — instead I craved the feeling of security afforded by resilience. Once I examined and refined my intentions, it became apparent that my much-desired resilience would only be achievable if I trained myself to make do with much less than most suburbanites, and stay rooted in my particular niche career. My career is nowhere near six-figures, but unlike the executive position I once thought necessary, my business is one that can pick up and move anywhere people cherish good music education, and anywhere includes the online realm.

I used to throw around my good and bad intentions rather freely, and though I am not proud to admit it, I often reacted harshly and negatively to both my enemies and general disappointing circumstances. Druidry taught me that it simply is not okay to wish people harm because they cut you off in traffic or because they could not have a rational conversation with you about politics. I wasn’t transformed into a do-gooder, however, I make more room nowadays for humans to do stupid human things. My intention becomes to get out of the way when someone is being an ass instead of attempting to school them on why they are wrong. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, and he can take care of that mess. I no longer consider myself skilled enough to try to right the world’s wrongs. I can only do my personal best; the rest I leave to powers much stronger and better than me.

Once my ego shrank to a manageable level, I naturally became a better listener, and not just to other humans. I often converse with non-corporeal beings. Some are ghosts, some are angels, some are just random beings passing through, some are hostile and perhaps demonic, and some I believe are actual gods. I have small intentions of “I am drinking tea and it makes me alert” and “I accept my husband for what he is and not some impossible ideal” but the larger one is always “I am a better person today than I was yesterday, if only by the slightest bit.” My community of various non-corporeal conversation partners are aware of my intentions, as intentions are the currency of the astral plane where they live. Now that I have good intentions, I attract a good community.

Current Mood: good

When my husband and I moved into my house three years ago after long stints of living with my parents between apartments, it felt amazing (still does!) to wake up under my own roof and to have my own yard. One of my many headstrong notions when I got here was to provide a feeding and watering station for the wide variety of northern Illinois animals who frequent my yard. Within weeks of the move, I was feeding and watering everyone from the raccoons evicted from our fixer-upper’s attic to sweat bees to the occasional fox on the move.

In exchange for the regular grub and drink, the animals provided us with plenty of visual entertainment, of course. Additionally, the feral cats unwittingly policed my raised garden beds of lettuce: I was the only person in the suburbs hauling garbage bags full of fresh lettuce out of my beds during nearly three months of temperate 2019. Elsewhere in the suburbs, rabbits ensured that didn’t happen. From the beginning, there was a sense of a relationship being built between me and the birds, squirrels, bugs, cats, raccoons, opossums, and skunks.

After only three years, the garden is barely established. It isn’t yet the sanctuary for animals (including human animals) I intend it to be. Nevertheless, when a skunk came into my yard to die three days ago, it wasn’t the first time an animal had sought shelter in my yard. Approximately five seconds after the garden shed was built, raccoons and skunks started living and hiding under it. My husband became concerned about this, but I was adamant that as long as I live here, let it be. The shed is the epicenter of the yard for animals at this point — it is where the animals eat and close to where they hide out storms and terrible weather.

For nearly a year, we’ve noticed one skunk who did a strange dance out by the feeding station, circling around, doing the skunk version of backflips. This was not mating behavior. The skunk, who dragged herself into my yard to die a few days ago, most likely had distemper. Distemper is similar to rabies. It is always fatal. The poor skunk wanted shelter and had dragged herself to the feeding station in a last-ditch effort to stay alive.

My husband was in the yard, so he picked up the twitching, flailing skunk with a shovel and put her out in some brush near the alley behind our house. At first, I wasn’t happy he did this, but when I realized distemper is spread through feces and bites, I thought it was for the best because the animals congregate in fairly close quarters near the shed, and I think nowadays most of us are acutely aware of social distancing when it comes to combatting viruses.

This is where I went wrong. We both knew the skunk was not going to live from looking at her, but we left her by the fence in hopes nature would take its course. Nature had slower plans. I kept checking the skunk throughout the day. Though her flailing slowed down, by the evening, she was still going, having dragged herself about six feet across the fence’s length in her agony during the long day. During the day, I called half a dozen different public institutions that one would think could have come and dispatched the skunk, ending her misery. Shockingly, even with the help of the Animal Help Now app, there wasn’t a damn person on government payroll willing to put down a skunk with a contagious virus. This begs the question why my tax dollars fund the Department of Natural Resources in the first place, and I’m mad enough still to write them a scathing review, but at any rate, my mistake was in not hiring a private service to euthanize the skunk the same day she wandered into my yard to die.

The issue was mostly about money. Because a skunk is considered a “nuisance” animal, and because skunks can spray, the charge was $150. In hindsight, I didn’t want to upset my husband by spending $150 during a time he has been laid off from his job, but then I realized my own hypocrisy at dropping $30 every few days on takeout in an effort to keep a new vegan restaurant in my area alive. I went to bed that night and slept fitfully and badly, hoping the skunk would die a natural death.

I got up the next morning and went outside. No such luck. She was still twitching and worse yet, raising her head. Distemper had made her into a skunk zombie. The look of it reminded me of the final stages of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, when the brain is gone and the body clings to life. I immediately called a private animal control service. A guy named Frank came out and ended the skunk’s life on the spot. I won’t say how, because people in the suburbs can often be complete asshats. It took two tries. The poor creature was finally off to the next phase of incarnation after a forty-hour ordeal. My only consolation was that I had surely shortened what could have been an even more obscenely extended death.

The thing that upsets me about my own behavior is that I kowtowed to financial and social pressure not to save an animal. A little over a year ago, my reclusive aunt died, and I braved social/physical/mental hell and high water to save her two cats, so I’m not sure why I wasn’t able to muster up my usual fire to dispatch a little skunk. Yes, it’s frustrating that government services failed me. That said, as I have gotten older, I have realized that most people in this culture shut down when it comes to dealing with animals. Our relationship with them is deeply fractured, and there’s nothing like a wounded animal wandering into one’s yard to remind us of that. Like many, I have had to start from scratch when it has come to how I think about animals, and ignoring the plight of the skunk for nearly forty hours was a nasty reminder of my old habits.

Compassion and bravery are traits we humans think we can pass on when it comes to animals. We are raised thinking they exist to serve us, entertain us, clothe us, and feed us, when the truth is closer to what Alice Walker said:

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.”

Inasmuch as they were not created for me, I believe that all humans have an innate responsibility to act as animal stewards and protectors. Most of us shirk that responsibility our entire lives. Sadly, in order to get the job done for the skunk, I had to go against the grain. Just like the time when I rescued the cats, it quickly became abundantly clear that I was the only person willing to act like an adult where the skunk was concerned. Everyone else, including the state services which are supposed to do jobs like this, shrunk away in cowardice, leaving the skunk’s fate to chance. This was eerily similar to what happened when my aunt died, as nobody else considered going to her place to get the cats who would have frozen to death within a day or two if they weren’t attacked and killed by other animals.

Our relationships with non-human animals have been terrible since the day some dude decided to get a party together to spear a mammoth. Our despair and haplessness manifests itself in myriad ways. There are the sick, well-intentioned efforts of those who try to keep pets alive at all costs, making them go through hellish surgeries and veterinary treatments because they can’t bear to allow Fido or Fluffy to die a few years ahead of the ideal schedule. Worse than them are those who buy or adopt an animal and then abandon them because they are tired of the responsibility or because they birth human kids or because they move. Several of my neighborhood’s ferals started out as someone’s house cat. The primary reason I chose not to have children is because I didn’t want to end up with the horror of regretting it. When I adopted my cat, I knew I was signing on for no less than 16 - 23 years. The choice to abandon is just as bad with a non-human animal because neither baby nor puppy can understand what is going on or fend for themselves. And that’s just our relationship with pets…

Anyway, the poor skunk is gone now and bless her little soul as she makes her way through the planes, only to return again. I hope to see her again soon.

Current Mood: contemplative

My husband and I moved into our small fixer-upper house in May 2017. It's too long and personal a story to go into why we were so delighted to move into "the little house" in our northern Illinois suburb... suffice to say it is something we both truly longed for. We love living here despite the continuing fixer-upper-ness of this house and we are incredibly grateful to have a house, a yard, and a garden.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the yard was a hot mess when we moved in. The grass was out of control, there was junk strewn everywhere, including a large pile that took us two solid years to get partially hauled away/redistributed.

The house being a fixer-upper, of course there were always about a hundred fix-up projects going at any time, oh wait, there still are! That's why I'm confining this post to Before and Afters of the backyard only.

May 2017... it was tabula rasa! This is a view from the back window through a screen. A whole lot of junk, waist-high grass, and a non-running car the old owner left behind and only picked up after a few days.

One of the first things my husband built for me was these raised beds. I was SO happy! They are cedar and they were a kit from either Home Depot or Walmart from what I recall.

A year later, my husband began to build this by my request.

The view through the screen as of 2019's growing season:

He put in matching cedar beds on the other side once the circle was finished. They are a gardener's dream come true.

We have lots of neighborhood ferals. Being a natural-born Crazy Cat Lady, I set up a feeding, watering, & shelter station for them. It is visited every day and night by cats, raccoons, skunks, opossums, squirrels, bees, and the occasional fox. My Dad built the kitty shelter.

What a fertile year 2019 was. The zucchinis approached Little Shop of Horrors dimensions. I only watered once because of ample rain. I was hauling two garbage bags full of lettuce out of the beds every week for a month and a half.

These thymes started out as two 4x4 inch pots!

Another view of the circle garden. This year (2020) I'm planning on putting in skullcap, catmint, dill, and lavender to fill in the circle quadrants.

Some caterpillar friends enjoying milkweed donated by my master gardener friend Ted in the back area of the garden.

Current Mood: excited

Dear Coronavirus: First they ignored you, then they laughed at you, then they fought you, then you won.

Coronavirus’s power was not in its ability to shut down schools (hilariously, when the kids in my local schools got the news school would be closed for three weeks starting March 16, the cheers were deafening) and it wasn’t in its ability to ruin small businesses. Its true power was much more occult: it brought our culture face to face with the one thing it is far too afraid to talk about: the fear of death.

Simply put, the people on this planet in the current era are afraid of aging and dying. For this reason, it is perfectly normal for a modern human to put herself or others through the worst forms of degradation, torture, and pain in order to extend time spent alive a few more precious days, months, or years. Even those armed with living wills and embossed DNR jewelry easily find themselves on the business end of a feeding tube or an iron lung because that’s the mandate of modern times. Forcing someone to live has become so fashionable that it’s fine to keep hydrocephalic babies alive despite the torture of living with deformity and disease. The pro-life movement does not stop at the fetus. In our culture, keeping someone alive through pain you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy is a way of screaming “I LOVE YOU!” to all and sundry. Because there are a few Stage 4 cancer victims who cling to eking out a few more years at all costs, the culture has presumed every Stage 4 cancer victim feels the same way. Because an Indian woman from the untouchable caste eats her own vomit in an attempt to survive, or because the Donner Party ate its own dead, it’s assumed that the killer instinct to survive becomes universally active when a threshold is reached. I am aware that I will trigger lots of sensitive souls by saying the above out loud, however, if you are triggered by what is no more than an honest opinion from a silly individual like me, perhaps it would behoove you to ask yourself "Why?" before coming down like a load of bricks.

One of the reasons I admire the Samurai of medieval Japan was the notion of Bushido: honor until death. A Samurai was disciplined, dutiful, and willing to kill himself for the honor of his lord. If necessary, a Samurai would commit ritual suicide, and he would vastly prefer a noble, self-imposed death to an ignoble, sniveling, fearful one.

What Corona brought out, except in a few rare and shining cases, were the snivelers and the cowards. It takes a special kind of stupid to visit a bunch of stores in order to hoard toilet paper, and despite my better self’s admonitions, I found myself hoping police would find a TP hoarder accidentally mummified in the stuff, having starved to death cocooned for warmth in his doom bunker because he forgot a can opener. Other dingbats are still acting out a contemporary version of the Masque of the Red Death, licking toilet seats and aluminum anti-perspirants for Instagram clicks. If this made you think of the phrase Darwin Awards, you’re not alone, but since I’ve mentioned Darwin, I’d like to point out the staggering irony of a leonine, solar-named virus stalking and killing the weakest, oldest, and sickest of the human herd. Nature is cruel and her limits are harsh. Why is this a reason to freak out?

When this thing began, I thought, “Oh no, all of the sad sacks who lust after the Apocalypse are going to try to DIY one out of this.” That’s exactly what they did. Coronavirus, no matter what anyone wants to make out of it, is not a heinous child-killer/disfigurer like polio, measles, or mumps. I live by a graveyard that is full of little gravestones of babies and kids who died of past epidemics, and not once did the Victorians shut down the entire world economy because of it. Young people do catch the virus, especially when they party on beaches and lick toilet seats, but when we’re honest, COVID targets Boomers. Boomers who have a sense of proportion would have insisted on triage, not the closure of every tiny mom & pop restaurant. The old and comfortable classes weren’t in the front lines of COVID; no. Millennial grocery store workers and Gen X small business owners are the ones paying for Boomers to luxuriate in their terror, in blood when necessary. Nurses and elder care assistants haven’t had a single day off lately, and nobody seems particularly concerned about their welfare.

One trend I’ve found unappealing to watch is the tendency for members of the upper middle class and their aspirants to use Coronavirus to virtue and fragility signal for themselves and their families. By constantly chattering about their own fragile condition, or that of a relative who will surely die if they catch Corona, they can do double-duty political correctness policing and virtue signaling if anyone has the audacity to question government lockdown. If the Left wants a docile, welfare-dependent state and is using the Coronapocalypse to get it, they messed up bad by accidentally shutting off the flow of illegal labor and by almost utterly ruining the tax base they wanted to extort. As popcorn-worthy as it was to watch the Left shoot itself in both feet via a suspiciously bio-tinkered looking virus from a fishy Chinese lab, I’m anxious to try get the business I built from scratch 23 years ago back on its feet. Wish me luck, because like every other working class person in the US, I’ll need it.

Current Mood: tired

I’ve always harbored an instinctive reaction to the religious notion of shame: repulsion. Though my perennial endeavor is to process it and deal with it constructively, shame, especially the post-Victorian, largely Protestant Christian shame that permeates US culture has never failed to aggravate me.

Shame can and will be weaponized, and that’s what we see when Social Justice Warrior types attempt to ruin the life of a random person on the internet by doxxing them or when a pedophile’s crimes are outed in prison; that is to say, it can be weaponized for the greater good or for the greater bad, depending on your perspective. One of our culture’s great imbalances — and we have tons of them — is shame. Americans especially have a warped concept of what to be ashamed about and what to be absolutely shameless about.

I’m sure you can guess I’m no fan of the Muslim hijab. To me, wearing one is the epitome of misplaced shame. The hijab is ostensibly worn to prevent men from being overcome with lust when they see a woman’s flowing hair. I think this begs the question “Why can’t Muslim men be counted upon to keep it in their pants?” It’s the ultimate blame the victim scheme. Asking a woman to wear a hijab (and they’re really not asked in most Muslim contexts, they’re forced) is a breach of limits. It’s like making little kids wear chastity belts at all times because a decent percentage of the adults in their lives are pedophiles.

I have a former friend who is a Jewish male in his fifties. He is single, in good shape, and average to good looking. The reason he is my former and not current friend is his addiction to shaming himself. My ex-friend is a talented voice actor and an avid animal rights activist. He’s smart and capable, or at least I used to think this. Nevertheless, I had to amputate our friendship when he went on Twitter raging about how women do not enjoy sex as a result of biological design. Of course the internet rose to meet his challenge with a chorus of “Dude, if you believe that, you’re doing heterosexual sex wrong.” My friend had his five minutes of internet fame. He got what he wanted, which was to be viciously shamed and mocked. He wants to believe in his own inadequacy. He wants to wallow in shame, because if other people believe him to be less than human, then he has solid reasons to remain a scumbag in his own mind. Why aspire to be a better human being at every small opportunity when you can muck around in a self-created puddle of whining, tears, and despair? That’s my ex-friend’s motto, unfortunately. For him, shame is a form of assisted suicide.

On the opposite end of the shame spectrum, we have the shameless. I follow a Millennial blogger named Jennifer with the tag The Daily Connoisseur who rails in the most delightful manner about classy versus trashy behavior. Jennifer, the busy young mother of four children, talks about old fashioned things like decorum and poise, about how it’s not okay to wear your house slippers and stained exercise pants to the grocery store, and how the Superbowl’s half-time show producers might consider making a program that’s actually family friendly instead of populating it with crotch grabbing and stripper pole acts. Though Jennifer gets huge amounts of flack for gently suggesting that we all raise the bar and that we can start by putting on real shoes when we run out and do errands, I think she’s part of a growing movement.

Shame can easily go overboard, but can easily go the other way. For instance, the F word. I used to be a fan and user of the F bomb. When I was twelve years old, using it when I was hanging out with my little friends felt like a release. I felt like an edgy, cool kid. When I wrote my first novel much later at age 33, I wasn’t about to avoid it because it had become part of my environment. My brothers utter the word regularly, so does my husband. All my friends, who range in age from 20 - 70, pepper their speech with it. Yesterday, I saw a bumper sticker that said “F*ck Cancer” which tells me that for some, it’s OK to nearly spell out the entire F word for all ages to read on a bumper sticker as long as it is in the service of battling a dread disease. You know what though? I’m tired of the F bomb. It’s boring. I have an extensive vocabulary and the F bomb is no longer part of it. Perhaps it will make a tiny cameo someday when I drop something heavy on my foot, but hopefully I will be alone at that time.

Another shameless thing I don’t want to emulate is wealth-signaling. For the life of me, I will never understand the Christmas postcard some American families send out of their children standing in front of famous landmarks. This is meant to do two things: show off the children and to display proof of fabulous vacations taken during the year. Though it’s demonstrably less insufferable than the old custom of listing your child’s achievements and virtues in excruciatingly detailed paragraphs (meanwhile, everyone knows the parents have hated each other for years and that the kid most likely has a raging cocaine addiction LOL) it just reeks to me of imbalance. Just send a plain, photo-free card. That said, I’m considering sending my relatives a Christmas photo card with me, my husband, and my cat badly Photoshopped in front of various world landmarks when December arrives.

If there’s anything to be taken from these various examples, I hope it’s that shame is not modesty and modesty is not shame. There’s a place for getting rid of shame completely, and ideally I think that place is a bedroom when two consenting adults would like to express their joy for one another. Other than that, it helps to have shame in moderate doses.

I’ve believed various things about dreams during my near half century in this life, and my beliefs have run the gamut from atheist dismissal of dreams as insignificant make-believe to the polytheist’s view of dreams as interaction with other human souls, spirits, entities, and gods on a plane that connects to our material one called the astral plane. At the time of this writing, I fall solidly into the latter category.

When I was sixteen, as a churchgoing Christian Protestant, I experienced an intense run of night terrors. Almost every night, I would drop into a twilight, not-quite-sleep state where I would see things lurking in my bedroom through the red haze of my eyelids. A feeling of pressure accosted me as if I had a heavy weight on my chest. Breathing was difficult. Dark shapes amassed in corners and huddled against walls. If the sights were terrifying, the sounds were worse. I heard low hums of chorused voices that would rise in response to the small movements of my body. One of the worst ones featured two malicious teenaged girls whispering in the corner of my room, plotting to assault me with a hammer. Since I already suffered with depression at the time, I figured I was going crazy. I have never known much more than my ethnicity because I was adopted shortly after being born, so due to my genetic wild cards, I suspected my night terrors heralded an early descent into paranoid schizophrenia.

The Protestant church that had granted me confirmation a few years earlier had zero answers; I would have been an idiot not to know this and did not bother asking. My inadequate study of the occult at that time did not help because I was too incompetent a researcher to seek out the right study materials and mentors. I had no comprehension of dreams and the astral body at the time I desperately needed exactly that form of cold, non-superstitious understanding. What follows is that which I believe I needed to hear at sixteen years old:

“If each human’s existence is likened to the Everlasting Gobstopper/Jawbreaker, the material plane is the sour candy shell on the outside. One layer in, there is a different flavor called the etheric plane. This plane of energy is what Chinese people call “chi” and Indians call “prana” and is what feng shui, acupuncture, and Ayurveda works with. The etheric is invisible to us humans while we are awake in our stodgy plane, but some sensitive people can see it and most can feel it whether they realize it or not. The next candy layer in is the astral plane, which is most easily understood as the world of dreams you go to when you sleep. The dream world is part your own brain and part collective, meaning, other peoples’ dreams are part of your world/vice a versa and you can interact with them and they with you. Dreams are not what you choose them to be: just like other people’s emotions or the weather, they aren’t controlled by the dreamer. There are rules and limits to them just as there are rules and limits on the physical plane. Of course these rules and limits are different than the ones on the physical plane. The next layer in is the mental plane, which is the plane of learning and mastery that separates humans from other animals. For instance, being able to figure out how fast an object falls to the ground because of scientific laws falls under the mental plane category. Another layer into the Gobstopper is the spiritual plane, which is the primary reason you were incarnated and is the core from which all of the other layers of the Gobstopper emanate and cannot exist without. Take note that all the planes are the same Gobstopper, they are just different layers of a whole candy.”

I needed a tutorial on the subtle bodies divorced from all traces of woo. I needed to be told that night terrors weren’t all in my imagination. I needed to be told that I wasn’t crazy, only depressed. Of course medical professionals told me I was crazy and medicated me accordingly, which is why I fired them long ago. Though I offer no advice to anyone else taking psychiatric drugs, I personally chose to stop taking medications, especially since the ones I was on tended to exacerbate my night terrors instead of stopping them.

The Astral Plane as Nouns: Persons, Places, and Things

Of course no two human’s dreams are identical, nor are their perceptions of the astral plane, which is the separate-but-connected layer of the Gobstopper where dreams take place. Furthermore, if each dream is as large as the being’s imagination that perceives it, we can describe the astral plane as infinite as far as our tiny brains are concerned because it is a collective of all dreams ever dreamed by sentient beings. Additionally, it is at least a billion years old, just like animal life on Planet Earth.

One of the few dependable traits of dreams is that humans dream of other humans, and unless you’re a truly unusual human, you are probably dreaming of people you know as well as deceased relatives, celebrities, non-human animals, and perhaps a fictional character every now and then for spice. If the astral plane is full of people, including yourself, the next logical question is “Who are these people in dreams?” Atheists, who do not believe in an astral plane even though they have no choice but to go there every time they sleep, will answer, “Those people are figments of the dreamer’s imagination.” On the other hand, a credulous true-believer type will answer, “Those people have nothing to do with the dreamer’s imagination: they are one hundred percent real.”

It is my opinion that the truth is somewhere in between the two extremes. Some of the other people in dreams are absolutely only in your imagination and have absolutely nothing to do with any person, real or living, in the waking world. Others are literally your dead relative who is trying to contact you to reassure you that it will all be fine and you needn’t tear your hair out over their death. Others, and I suspect this is true of the majority, are a blend of your projections onto the screen of their essence, meaning a part of them that science has yet to understand is interacting with you and another part is all your perception of who they are. If you have a particularly intense dream about someone, living or dead, my thoughts are that you should give it some deep self-analysis. You might learn almost nothing about them by looking into why you dreamed about them, but you’ll learn almost everything about yourself.

As for non-human characters, I dream about non-human animals all the time. I know what they mean to me. Animals frequently represent to me what children represent to parents. Most of the animals I dream about are creatures of fantasy, for instance the giant wild dogs that populate my parents’ yard in dreams. There are no wild dogs of that size in the Midwest. If I dream of my cat, however, chances are she is part my imagination and part my actual cat projecting her astral presence from where she sleeps, which is usually on or near my legs.

When it comes to places that humans dream about, it begins to get truly interesting. A simple online search will reveal entire communities talking about recurring dreams of a certain style of mall and a certain style of school. Though malls and schools are part of the common waking experience, the uncanny part is that two or more dreamers from completely unrelated locations and backgrounds can describe the same layouts, store owners, and nitty gritty details about the astral plane mall as if it existed on the material plane. Once again, the atheist chimes in with “oh come on, it’s all just a coincidence” yet the most cursory perusal of Jungian psychology would reveal an undeniable rabbit hole that would be positively un-scientific to ignore. I too dream of the mall. It’s a multi-story structure and it’s always in a state of closing; it is often only half lit because it is closing down. It is often attached to a grocery store with a large apartment building nearby. The school was once high school in my case and has now become perpetual college. I’m never prepared and I have no class schedule, which I am instructed I must see a counselor on the first floor to obtain. Meanwhile, I am missing one or more classes. I often dream my parents have moved into a round or octagonal custom built open plan McMansion with far more seating areas and bedrooms than necessary for an old married couple. This structure often has windows that view a shared wall with a conjoining building that is similarly deluxe. I believe I dream of the mall because it exists in the collective consciousness of dreamers, especially dreamers in and from the US. We are all going to the same mall, but unlike a physical mall, it is as huge as consciousness itself with inconceivable numbers of minute permutations. When I dream of my parents’ house, I believe it’s mostly my emotional pictures of that place with a tiny bit of the “real” house and the spirits who dwell there mixed in.

Speaking of spirits, I will now provide a trigger warning to any atheists still reading: if you are one of the many atheists who claims to be openminded but is actually no such thing, please surf away now and go back to your simple, comfortable blue pill world. I was an atheist for a while and I am quite familiar with that world; it’s nice there and there are lots of select-a-size paper towels and neatly mowed lawns. Nevertheless, magic does not require your belief in order to exist, and neither do angels, elementals, spirits of the dead, gods, or demons. We wouldn’t want you to become frightened by things you are wholly determined not to believe in!

Non-corporeal entities, otherwise known as spirits, are everywhere in all the planes, as are gods and demons. Unlike on the material plane, we can see a great many more spirits on the astral plane, but the forms they take depend on our own perceptions. Gods and angels can’t be understood by our primitive walking ape minds, so if they show themselves to us in dreams, it’s anyone’s guess what form they will take. One ancient description of angels depicts them with four faces, for instance the Book of Ezekiel in the Bible which describes cherubim with the simultaneous faces of a man, eagle, ox, and lion. For me, this description provides obvious representational symbolism of the four elements — man is water, eagle is air, ox is earth, and lion is fire — and not much else. In The Exorcist’s Handbook, Josephine McCarthy hilariously describes angels as having autistic personalities: often excruciatingly literal. Their appearance is whatever the human’s puny mind can handle.

Things in dreams, for instance, a window or an apple, are also maddeningly subjective. To you, a window might represent an opportunity or a path to freedom. For me, it might be an item made of glass and plastic that’s on sale at The Home Depot for $159 and nothing more. For this reason, dream interpretation and books on that topic are pretty much useless. Symbols and archetypes are deeply personal, and though we can talk about larger sociological trends to hint which ones are important, in the end it all comes down to the individual’s nature.

One thing I have seen more than my fair share of in dreams is demons, especially in the old days before I knew about the Sphere of Protection, hoodoo baths, and prayer. What does a demon look like? Well, to me, they often pose as people I know, except they are off and deformed. I call this type of demon an Impersonator. Other forms are typical to horror movies: the classic Hag, ogres, disembodied hands. As far as I can tell, the astral plane is absolutely infested with demons and malicious entities at the moment and it’s only getting worse. This infestation is due to the murky state of people’s imaginations as they become increasingly removed from nature and more heavily influenced/corrupted by the poisonous media machine. Industrialism has not been good for human consciousness, and if demons need to be invited in order to make a home, the mechanization of our fragile biosphere has rolled out the red carpet.

I hope the above gives you a remote idea of what I think dreams are made of (cues song by The Eurythmics). One thing that is certain is that dreaming isn’t studied enough. Our culture is ill-equipped to study human dreams, as there is the stupid belief in the revelatory potency of EEGs and brain scans with fun rainbow colors. In my opinion, a culture that denies the existence of the astral plane as ours does cannot have any understanding of dreams, because dreams ARE the astral plane. So for now, it’s up to occultists to figure out the astral plane, unless science decides to get a clue.

Reading List:
The Astral Body and Other Astral Phenomena by A.E. Powell
The Exorcist's Handbook by Josephine McCarthy
Psychic Self-Defense by Dion Fortune