Kimberly Steele

The etheric is the most overlooked aspect of our human lives. Ignorance of the etheric plane comprises much of what makes us spiritually and emotionally retarded. The etheric is the plane of energy and life force. It is vitality and animus. The etheric is not human-centric. To see it as revolving around humankind in any way is naive. That said, etheric starvation is the most common human malady of our time, and our species is responsible for most etheric devastation that exists on the planet at the moment.
 

Two types of etheric flows made the Universe — etheric yin and etheric yang. Yang expands outward away from itself and yin draws inward towards its own center. Yang embarks upon expeditions and seeks receptive eggs. Yin is the center of gravity and seeks to pull the outside towards itself like a magnet. The sun shines his light far and wide. The moon reflects light while captivating the oceans to follow her in the form of tides. Yin contains yang within itself and yang contains yin within itself.
 

A plant-xample

All fruits are the seed bearing part of the plant. Cucumbers and squash are fruits just as much as apples and strawberries are fruits. Fruit itself is very feminine or yin, because like yin, it carries seeds. When we trace fruit back to the flower from whence it came, the flower is also yin. Flowers are receptive on the physical plane, but the means they employ as lures, scent and color, are yang on the etheric plane. Pollen is the floral equivalent of sperm. Plants thrust yang parts out of their flowers called stamens covered with pollen. These stamens surround a receptive female organ called a pistil. Once the flower has been pollinated, it retreats into a yin state, drawing into itself and encapsulating what will become the seed or seeds. Petals fall off, the stem hardens and becomes brittle, and walls go up surrounding the fertilized pollen. The former flower swells around the seed with padding known as fruit. The seed is encased in robes of feminine flesh. Yang then takes over again as the fruit matures, expanding the flesh outward and falling off the branch, sending out scent and color messages that beckon “eat me”. The fruit is eaten, either by landing in an animal’s receptive, yin mouth or by rotting in fertile, yin soil. The fruit digests away and the yang essence hidden in the seed springs to life, becoming another plant.

You’ll notice that yin and yang are not only crucial to the life process, they are everywhere. One cannot exist without the other. Thoth Hermes Trismegistus left us with the statement “as above, so below”. Every natural law works as a function of fractals or ripples, and we meat bags of mostly water have but one hope in learning esoteric knowledge: we have to figure out how to recognize patterns.
 

Children and old folks

I recently saw a TikTok ad that was designed to make me feel insecure and diseased because I am past menopause. The ad featured a pretty, forty-something woman who was probably AI speaking gibberish about losing one’s cookies. Against my better judgement, I commented “Oh honey, menopause is amazing. I don’t miss my periods and I don’t miss being young.” In short, “You have no power over me”. Yes, menopause sucks for those who think looking 21 at age 51 is a good idea. Once the sex hormones start to wane, age starts writing itself all over the face and body. Things sag and wrinkle. Freckles, spots, and moles darken and enlarge. Perky muscle tone, once effortless, becomes a real chore that requires real effort. In other words, the body succumbs to yin forces and begins to visibly die. In a civilization that denies and hates the Divine Feminine that rules all the yin aspects of life, aging is cause for a freak out. Getting old is considered a disease, and the mad scientist transhumanists would like to cure it for all eternity, never grokking that for the new to be born, the old must wither and die. All of science has thrown itself at the rejection of death. Science is now a game of trying to go around Nature. “Surely we can improve where Nature fails!” they rally, dragging along a collection of septic perversions like the N.I.C.E. camp in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. Science worships demons at this point; they don’t even need the Goetia. Those who are terrified of aging and death are terrified by those who are unafraid of aging and death. Like the Skeksis in Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, they have become monsters in the quest for eternal youth, never understanding they already have it, if only they could allow their bodies to age and die without getting upset.

Old people are naturally yin on the etheric. Once we die, we are completely yin on the etheric. Women are etheric males and men are etheric females during adulthood. I am very much a woman, and like most women, I am an etheric male. This means that I dump my copious yang energy on the etheric. My etheric masculinity tends to take the form of traditional woman’s work such as teaching, tidying, cooking, and healing. Men are more forceful or yang on the physical plane, and this is why they are physically tougher, larger, and frankly uglier than women. They are better at fighting, construction, and what Mike Rowe called “dirty jobs”. Men are yin on the etheric, which makes them enthusiastic recipients of etheric yang. The key to a man’s heart is through his stomach, especially if he lacks the etheric yang talent to cook himself a decent meal.
 

All children begin physical life as females in the womb. One fact that modern science forgets and overlooks out of ignorance is that physical females are etheric males. We all begin life in utero as yin beings with yang energy. Children are only born of women because the yin being is the part that physically splits off when conception occurs. The yin creates the fruit and the yang, the little used-up spermatozoon, provides the life force. Children are technically female until puberty no matter what their physical sex, which makes them etheric males. Boys are indistinguishable from girls until sex hormones break the spell of childhood. Unless there is precocious puberty, a nine year old boy looks and sounds like his female peers.
 

Children under attack

As much as media likes to wax poetic about the sanctity of infants and children, no group has been more utterly thrown under the bus. Infants and children are yang on the etheric, being essentially female on the physical plane. There is always a spectrum, of course, and a hyperactive child who loves bright colors and yelling is more yang on the etheric than the quiet, bookworm child. Unsurprisingly, children need lots of play, exploration, and testing of the new.
 

The current predicament of our civilization is to starve en masse on the etheric, and that is why hordes are drawn to the abundant yang energy of children like moths to a flame. Pedophilia has never been so astonishingly brutal and commonplace. Pedophilia is a method of cracking the child like an etheric egg and slurping down the resulting energy.
 

Girls will be boys

Whether an XX chromosome person (a woman) tries to appear as an XY person (a man) or it is the other way around, transexualism mainly results in an erasure of maleness. Transexualism is rooted in fear of the Sacred Masculine. When a biological female attempts to transition into a male, she invariably ends up as a beta. Her fantasy expectation is to be the hot guy and her reality is to be a balding, potbellied, wide-hipped creep with a micropenis. She will always be a masculine-looking woman, and there are plenty of those who did not need to amputate their breasts or get a hysterectomy to achieve the same vibe. When a biological male attempts to transition into a female, he also invariably ends up as a beta. Femininity is far more than its obvious signs. I am all woman, but I don’t have large breasts or lush eyelashes. His fantasy expectation will to become a bombshell of patchworked girlie-girl stereotypes and his reality will be to look like an effeminate man.
 

Transexuals believe they can achieve vibrant, attention-getting, florescent colors via a sex change and they routinely end up the same shade of grubby beige. The reason for the failure of transexuals is the etheric plane. The polarity of etheric maleness crashing against physical and astral femininity is what makes men manly and women womanly. A man without a hyper-feminine etheric body, whether or not he is trans, presents as an unattractive dullard. A woman without copious etheric maleness will present as butch whether she likes it or not. When a person alters his or her hormones and/or amputates and reshapes body parts, their etheric body is diminished and etheric starvation becomes acute as there is lessened polarity to replenish it.
 

Modernity, maleness, and feminization

Industrialization and its onslaught of chemicals has resulted in large numbers of effeminate men and masculine women without the assistance of trans drugs and surgeries. When petroleum toxins are introduced into the environment, feminization is an observable scientific result in animal populations. Plasticizers known as phthalates have a nasty habit of not biodegrading. When plasticizers stick around, they wreak havoc by mimicking estrogen. Balls don’t drop and sperm are damaged and few. Girls and women don’t escape either — periods start early and polycystic ovary syndrome makes them a living hell. Girls are not developing into feminine women with yang etheric bodies. Boys are not developing into masculine men with yin etheric bodies. Sex is not as binary as it used to be, thanks to plastic chemical damage. Sperm counts have never been lower. The average young man of today has the sperm count of an 80 year old Victorian gentleman with mojo (or lack thereof) to match.

When men remain trapped in perpetual childhood due to a failure to develop their maleness, it is called neotony. Neotony is considered desirable in women as it makes them more childlike and feminine — do yourself a favor and avoid plugging neotony into a search engine — but in men, it is less desirable.
 

Release a domesticated pig into the wild and it will develop tusks, a bristly coat, and a tougher hide. Within a few generations, the pink piggies from the farm will spawn only fierce, wild boars.
 

Men have become soft and pink, eternally juvenile, and insecure. They will remain in the state of Puer Aeternis until initiation rites are brought back into vogue, whether by choice or by force. Harsh circumstances and having to bust ass from an early age (along with a resistance to plastic chemicals) forces the maturation process in humans as well as pigs and other animals, making a man larger, tougher, and more potent on the physical plane while feminizing him on the etheric, a.k.a. making him a chick magnet.
 

Women have become tough ballbusters, unable to rest in their femininity. This is a condition of being forced to take on men’s roles as men either opt or are forced into a state of weakness. Women fake neotony quite well and the damage of etheric starvation is not as obvious, but make no mistake, it is still there. Due to an excess of estrogen-impersonators in the environment, girls go through puberty at eight and nine instead of twelve and fourteen. Instead of invigorating the male etheric body, early puberty dilutes it, an that is why so many girls are shiftless, confused, desperate, and depressed during what should be a vital, joyous time of their lives.

As I have often said, etheric starvation will not truly abate until the last computer sputters the last line of code and the last plane falls out of the sky. There are also many plastic chemicals that will be around for at least ten thousand years, making hell for human beings. Modernity is a bitch and we are here, swimming in it. Science has completely fallen short of understanding the energy plane, dismissing it as woo. Yet the energy or etheric plane holds the key to all scientific understanding. Energy is everything and everything is energy, and even G.I. Joe admits that knowing is half the battle.

Apologies from my tongue, and never yours
Busy lapping from flowing cup and stabbing with your fork
I know you're a smart man (I know you're a smart man), and weaponise
The false incompetence, it's dominance under a guise

If we had a daughter, I'd watch and could not save her
The emotional torture, from the head of your high table
She'd do what you taught her, she'd meet the same cruel fate
So now I've gotta run, so I can undo this mistake
At least I've gotta try

The capillaries in my eyes are bursting
If our love died, would that be the worst thing?
For somebody I thought was my saviour
You sure make me do a whole lot of labour

-Excerpt from Labour (song by Paris Paloma)

 

The song I referenced puts a fine point on a cultural wave of resentment towards men. The video and the theme of the song itself — escaping a man who sees his woman as a “nurse then a servant /Just an appendage, live to attend him /So that he never lifts a finger/ 24∕7, baby machine” is utilized as a feminist soundtrack to many TikTok videos. Its Handmaid’s Tale vibe seems completely intentional, and like the Handmaid’s Tale cable TV series, the song drops the F-bomb and portrays a woman as a pretty, long-suffering slave. The woman-as-modern-handmaid trope is well on its way to becoming a huge astral pyramid. Like any growing astral pyramid, the Handmaid Pyramid has already been monetized.

The current system cannot function without a bunch of perpetually anxiety-ridden, confused humans to keep it going. Anxiety is big business and relaxation isn’t what it used to be. Nowadays, relaxation is synonymous with huge expenditures of money. It is a lifestyle to which we are supposed to aspire: meditation retreats, fancy meals, tropical vacations. The ideal human of this era can somehow afford life of constant leisure after having retired at age 38. We are all supposed to want what the hedonist tech bro has. Nevertheless, people who can retire at age 38 are uniformly hated because almost nobody has that kind of wealth at 88, let alone 38.
 

A love/hate relationship with work

We humans both idealize and resent work, whether it is the paid work of making a living or the unseen work of keeping a home. In my own case, I was so hell bent on liking what I did for a living that I forwent health insurance, vacations that involve any form of travel, and having children in order not to be enslaved. For me, enslavement meant working any job where I wasn’t in nearly complete control, and that’s why I chose my current situation of a 20 year old car and no health insurance.

Whose work is it anyways?

As we see in the song Labour, rancor between the sexes often has largely to do with the division of labor. Both sides idealize their own contributions via work and resent having to do that work. Since the Industrial Revolution, large areas of manual work have gotten technically easier or have become automated. Work of any kind has diminished to a trickle for certain well-to-do. For everyone else, we ended up soaking in a labor deluge and practically killing ourselves to keep our heads above water. A wise kid (not me) once said the invention of the washing machine did not mean less laundry. We just got more clothes and washed them more frequently. Elite Victorian bankers and kings of industry enjoyed obscene wealth without lifting a finger, stepping deftly into slots formerly occupied by monarchs. Proper Victorian ladies delegated their own woman’s work of tidying, washing, and cooking to maids, laundresses, and cooks. Most Victorian women of any status did not nurse their own babies, delegating that most sacred and intimate of duties to low paid help or slaves. The current lifestyles of the rich and famous similarly outsource any and all dirty work to peasants. This is perfectly in sync with Old Victoria.
 

For all her troubles, such as not being able to vote or inherit property, the Victorian lady had it much better than her modern, elite counterpart. She may have felt trapped, but she was never expected to do everything a man does while remaining a perpetually young, feminine, beautiful woman. Women, including this woman, are exhausted from trying to be all things to all people. Nurturer at home, ball-buster at work, warrior on the battlefield, mother, divine whore. Like men, women are generally hard working. Like men, modernity has taken advantage of our docility and tolerance. We are all frogs in water that is growing uncomfortably warm.
 

Not that men are doing any better, but women are between a rock and a hard place at the moment. We have boxed ourselves into our own corner by taking on too much freedom. In Appetites, a memoir of severe anorexia by the late Caroline Knapp, the author describes becoming anorexic in college, when her anxieties crystallized as an eating disorder.

“Starving, in its inimitably perverse way, gave me a way to address the anxiety I felt as a young, scared, ill-defined woman who was poised to enter the world and assume a new array of rights and privileges; it gave me a tiny, specific, manageable focus (popcorn kernels) instead of a a monumental, vague, overwhelming one (work, love)." -Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

Women tend to externalize blame in order to avoid their own culpability. In Knapp’s case, a fixation with self-abuse via starving supplanted the hefty task of narrowing down exactly what she wanted and mercilessly eliminating the rest. Anorexia became her arena for achievement; it also became the externalization of her indecision.
 

In Paris Paloma’s song, she describes a common scenario where a woman externalizes her own feelings of entrapment to be entirely the fault of the man, who surely tricked her into giving away her etheric labour via methods tantamount to rape.
 

What causes etheric starvation

The reason I enjoy lake shores, forests, prairies, gardens, and wild or semi-wild places so much is because they offer a glimpse of ecosystems where forces are balanced and in harmony. In my novel River’s Heart, the protagonist is sent out to sweep leaves in the yard as punishment. During her sojourn, she bitterly muses about having to clean up “nature’s mess”. Nature does not make any mess she cannot fix. When she visits destruction upon herself via a flood or a caldera exploding, she eventually fixes it up and makes it new again. The human project (which often looks like one of her mistakes) will peter out. Thanks to the 75% percent of humans who took MRNA vaccines, this may happen much sooner than originally expected. Whether we do it quickly or slowly, it is the lot of all civilizations to be compressed into a thin layer of carbon. This layer is not likely to be discovered or remembered by any intelligent visitors. If and when they arrive, we will probably be long gone. Nature will turn all heroes into zeroes whether they like it or not. So when I go on my long, solitary walks, I get to see the glacial process of the ecosystem correcting and balancing itself the way it did before humans and the way it will after humans are gone. 99.9 percent of species on this planet have gone extinct and I am confident humans will not be nearly as resilient as sharks or jellyfish. As a believer in the soul, I wonder if my soul will incarnate once humanity is a memory or if I will stay in the vapors and/or wander off to another universe. It’s not information I am equipped to know.

The reason working ecosystems are restorative is because they are places where the etheric or energy plane is balanced, or mostly balanced. Plants, air molecules, dirt, bugs, birds, and other animals have no other choice but to own the means of production, and the energy created of work where workers own the means of production is always more plentiful and nourishing than in areas where the means are far removed from the laborer. The song Labour is about the man stealing the woman’s energy via her work and dominion over her children, much like the cuckoo steals into a robin’s nest and kills the baby robins in order to hijack the mother and father robin’s half-digested worms.
 

The means of production

Every morning, I sweep the floor with a broom made of metal and plastic. The dustpan is entirely made of plastic and has a matching mini-broom that nests inside it. While I sweep, I boil water from tea on my stove. The water comes from Lake Michigan. It comes through pipes I did not lay. I filter it in a charcoal filter device that I bought online. As for the tea, I did not grow it. It is from China. I drink my tea and then go to another room in my natural gas-heated house. I burn incense imported from India and do my daily banishing ritual. I then meditate and record my observations in a notebook made of trees I did not chop with a pen made of foreign plastic.
 

Before I turn on a single machine, I have used at least a dozen items I had no hand in creating. Compare the pioneers and those before them: they lived in what James Howard Kunstler describes in his novels as “a world made by hand”. Pioneer lives were very hard, and they starved to death more frequently than us when they were not dying of sepsis. Nevertheless, they did not have the troubles we have with etheric starvation. They did not pathologically fear death as we do. Nobody before 1940 was turned into a medical zombie of perpetual agony, with teams of do-gooders rushing to hook him up to machines and brutal infusions of drugs. There were no armies of semi-alive drones on IV drips rotting in hospital beds, crying to be taken to homes that were sold off by the adult children who abandoned them.
 

Prosthetics for living such as the lightbulb, the food processing plant, cars, computers, and lately AI both giveth and taketh away. We humans increased our workload with machines and etherically starved in the process.
 

Etheric labor shortages

As I have said, all healing comes from the etheric and the further away we are from the means of production, the higher the likelihood we will have etheric starvation. Etheric body starvation manifests itself in illness and/or compulsive and addictive behavior. Etheric starvation is endemic to our current era; it is baked into the pie. Nobody can escape. Many will try by going back to the land or traveling to places of etheric richness like Thoreau tried to do with Walden. The whopping majority will attempt to remedy etheric starvation via one or more addictions.

Women, being male on the etheric, are the primary drivers of etheric wealth of the sort that alleviates etheric starvation. As much as women are the main creators of etheric wealth, men can do it too. Cleaning and tidying are etheric male activities regardless of the sex of the person doing them. Neatening and caring for a space infuses it with positive, vital etheric energy. When someone cooks, food is alchemically transformed into sustenance, and this is why cooked food is more nourishing than raw. The more love and skill that goes into the cooked dish, the more etheric energy it will provide. Only etheric males can conceive a child, and since children are etheric males regardless of sex until puberty, an etheric male (physical female) creating other etheric males (children) is about as etherically male as it gets.

Industrialization gave rise to upper class women being trapped inside the manor or plantation. From her gilded cage, the great lady was neutered of her etheric skills, as cooking and cleaning require practice in order to get any better. Her etheric labor was done by a bunch of indentured servants and slaves. Common women were abused for their competence and their etheric labor stolen. Almost nothing has changed since the old days. Once the plantation gave way to the factory, women were hoodwinked into amassing conveniences that further took away their motivation to practice etheric wealth-formation in any way save popping out kids. Vacuuming replaced sweeping the floor and microwaving a burrito replaced patting out tortillas by hand and chopping home grown tomatoes for salsa. Much time was saved but all that precious etheric energy said “Adios, amigo”.
 

The most devastating blow to the collective etheric plane was dealt when women were forced to work outside the home. Just because work (i.e. housework or chores) are not paid does not mean they are not worth money. I will argue in my upcoming book Sacred Homemaking that the value of skilled housework is beyond rubies. Even upper middle class households in my area of Chicagoland feature breadwinning wives. It’s just too expensive these days to have upper middle class perks like electric SUVs and trips to Europe every year without both spouses hauling ass in salary class positions.

Covid shutdowns trained an entire generation of workers that commuting to an office was unnecessary and sadistic. Home is where we go to heal our etheric bodies and when home is taken from us by work, it is a fate worse than death. Women rule the home just as they have always done; no amount of forcing women into men’s roles will take that away. When a woman is forced to commute and spend the majority of her time far away from home just like a man, she feels etherically castrated. Some castrati are simping, willing eunuchs who lick their oppressor’s boots. Others, like me, are outraged and planning a coup.
 

Freedom for women, a.k.a. feminism, forgot to include a space for women who want to assume traditional roles and stay home. As long as men are expected to be women are expected to be men, we will all suffer more etheric shortages, addictions, illnesses, and existential fatigue. Convenience came at a heavy price.

Residence of the Collyer brothers, world famous New York hoarders.

Autism is not a superpower.  As someone who has autism, I think it is a disability that is part and parcel of the astral conditions of our time that make it harder to do spiritual work.  Just as I won't pretend it is somehow more desirable to live in the worst collective astral conditions in human history, I won't pretend having autism makes me better than I would have been without it.  Autism cripples us on the physical plane and easily render the autistic person as a lifelong dependent with a menagerie of wasted potentials.  Plus, autism is exceedingly common.  One in every thirty six humans are born autistic in 2024 with the 1970s numbers being more like one in ten thousand.  I don't believe this is over-diagnosis, either.  I work with children and if my 30 year career is to be considered as a cross-section of what is going on with the general populace, I can confidently say autism is more common now.  Vaccines are probably to blame along with feminizing petroleum byproduct chemicals of the type discussed in the book Our Stolen Future.  

Body Bleed

From this occultist's perspective, autism is a disorder of physical and non-physical body sensitivity.  To better understand what I am talking about, I will invoke one of my Ogham tree cards called Saille, symbolized by the willow tree or Betula alba.  In my system of Ogham, balance is represented by an upright card and imbalance is represented by an inverted or ill-dignified card.  For every median point of balance, there are two extremes flanking either side that represent imbalance.  Saille is Sensitivity or Flexibility.  Imbalance comes in the form of excess sensitivity and flexibility or a lack of those things.  Autistic people, when imbalanced, are both too sensitive and inflexible. 

On the physical plane, autistic oversensitivity is easy to witness if you've ever seen it in action or suffered it yourself.  Autistic people, especially children, are picky about food and can easily turn it into a battleground with parents and caregivers.  The food has to smell a certain way, be served at a certain time, and it must be confined to a narrow range of "acceptable", often highly processed forms.  The reason behind this kind of pickiness is that autistic people are extremely sensitive to the etheric plane, which is the energy plane where things like aesthetics, vibes, smells, and textures truly matter.  Autistic perfectionism is at its most severe when it comes to food, and autistics want perfectly customized meals recreated from past "perfect" meals that alleviated their etheric starvation.  As children, famous autists Beata and Greta Thunberg tortured their mother with food sensitivities and requirements.  The poor woman had to cancel her career as a internationally renowned opera singer in order to constantly cater to her daughters' etheric demands.

Autistic people, including myself, often have trouble looking people in the eye.  The reason for this is twofold: one is that to look someone in the eye is to forge an astral connection with them.  For the normie, it's no big deal to connect some rando over the cash register, but for the autistic person with an oversensitive astral and etheric body, it is a potential disaster waiting to happen.  There is a common thread among many ancient cultures that photographs steal a little bit of someone's vital essence or soul, and I think this is relative to what happens when an autistic person makes eye-to-eye contact; it is an intimate act.  The second reason autistic people avoid eye contact is because they don't need to use their eyes.  Autistic people do not "see" so much with their eyes as with their etheric bodies.  In my own case, I know that I can remember people I know far more easily by their vibe and non-visual perception of their moods than I can their faces.  The astral source underneath the etheric vibe is a much more reliable source of identification for me than physically seeing a face and a body shape. I think autistic people who can't look at you in the eye subconsciously know that Meatworld is an illusion and a fakeout.  If they are anything like me, they close their eyes in order to get a true read of you and your feelings towards them without the distraction of visuals.

Sensitivity, like any force, can be good or bad.  If the autistic person can sense the truest, most meaningful nature of the person without use of the eyes, I guess that can be categorized as Good.  In the Bad corner, it is all too easy for the sensitive person to become overstimulated and suffer a partial or total shutdown due to sensory fatigue.

Autistic People and Their Mothers

The following is mere speculation because I have never been pregnant to my own knowledge in this incarnation. 

Pregnancy is a profound bond where mother and child share a single astral body and etheric body along with sharing the physical body.  The physical bodies of mother and child separate when the child is delivered.  The separation of the etheric body takes much longer to diverge: I believe mother and child are etherically linked until the child reaches the age of six or seven.  The astral body takes the longest time to separate and does not become fully separate until the child reaches puberty.  Because the etheric body of a biological woman is male (etheric yang to her physical body's yin), the etheric bodies of children -- being the same as their biological mothers for a time -- are male until true gender development happens at puberty.  

When you are adopted as I am and did not have a biological mother anywhere near the scene, the etheric bond is created with the primary caretaker.  Though this isn't quite the same as the etheric homogeneity of a biological mother, it is more than adequate if there is love for the child.  Fathers also create etheric bonds with their children if they choose to stick around and be part of their kids' lives.  Additionally, there are plenty of times when the etheric bond is not created between biological mother and child -- there are plenty of stories of mothers who don't form the bond or children that reject it from babyhood.  Interestingly, when a father (biological or otherwise) cheats on the mother of his child, he truly cheats on the child or children as well. If the child is under seven years old, he is cheating on both the astral and etheric planes, opening the subtle bodies of the mother and the child to parasites and mayhem on every level of their being. 

Speaking of Infection and Disease...

The astral and etheric permeability of children is already what makes normal childhood risky.  Adding autism and its accompanying hypersensitivity to the mix only makes it worse, opening avenues for the non-physical equivalent of infection and disease.  With the clutter of the collective astral right now rushing in to claim autistic people as astral pyramid recruits, it's seriously not easy to be autistic.  

Autistic children are often not raised with any form of diligence.  For a long time now, parents have been asking children what they want to do... as if the kids honestly knew.  Bribery is a common tactic.  "You can have ice cream/a new toy if you'll concentrate for the next thirty seconds, buddy."  Uh huh, whatever, mom.  Children crave boundaries because boundaries prove to them that their parents are powerful and can keep them safe.  When a child acts out, it is usually out of a subconscious fear that the parent is weak, cannot protect them, and is easily pushed around by outside forces.  The child is sharing an astral body with at least one parent.  In the case of younger children, the child shares an etheric body with mom, which is almost like sharing a physical body.  The child wants to be reminded that their body is strong and impervious to assault.  This is a natural instinct.  If the parent is wishy-washy, the child will push to see how far the weakness goes.  He or she has to assess how bad the vulnerability is by throwing a tantrum, crying, yelling, biting, and hitting.  The castle walls must be tested to see if they will crumble.

Adding boundaries and hard limits gives the child what they need to feel protected and secure.  A mother who says NO to ten minutes more of an iPad game or a request for tater tots and chocolate cake for dinner is the same protective, walled fortress who will say NO to the child molester who wants to date her in order to cover his agenda of raping her offspring.

 

Greta Thunberg failed to reach physical adulthood because she nearly starved herself to death during her pubescent years.  (If anything, tween anorexics need to take this as a warning: if you starve yourself now, you could very well spend the rest of this incarnation looking like an overgrown little girl akin to the 2009 film The Orphan, or if you get the motherlode of plastic surgery, like 2022's M3GAN.)  Greta nearly managed to emaciate herself to death despite putting her mother through a three ring autistic meal preparation circus at every meal. I cannot speak to Greta's astral development as I don't know her and I do not care to know her, but it seems abundantly clear that her etheric and physical development were curtailed somewhere near the age of twelve, and she has remained frozen in time. Cruel as it sounds, if I were Greta's mother, I would have given her two choices at the dinner table -- take it or leave it.  Perhaps I would be in prison because of it and perhaps my autistic child would be dead of starvation; we begin to see why I chose not to have kids.  I like to think my pretend autistic child would have grown tired of testing the limits upon finding they stood firm despite her autistic brat histrionics.  

Of course I cannot speak for all people with autism, but from what I have perceived in myself and other autists, it takes autistic people longer to to master the etheric and astral skills normies take for granted.  Sociability is prime example: autistic people are too busy being overwhelmed by the etheric and astral bombardment of other people's auras to figure out how to say what someone else wants to hear.  Going back to maternal attachment, many autistic people turn into eternal children as adults, retreating into an antisocial bubble.  Within this bubble, they depend on a parent, a set of parents, or someone who acts in loco parentis such as a spouse or relative.  Autistic adults who depend financially on more "normal" heads of household suffer from stunted astral development.  Their creative ability collapses into a set of fond dreams that is no more real than the games and TV/movie imagery they shovel into their minds.  

As for adult autism and the salvaging of our unseen bodies, I tend to think autistic people require spiritual protection above and beyond so-called normies because of our oversensitivity issues.  Whether this comes in the form of prayer, traditional religious forms, banishing rituals such as the Sphere of Protection or the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, or other unturned stones, I have no idea.  For me, it's the aforementioned SoP, Ogham, and discursive meditation, day in, day out, with the kind of German-train-schedule-regularity to which only an autistic could happily commit.

Like a Prayer 2023 -- same edgelord Catholic/Eyes Wide Shut imagery 30 years later. 
At least she is consistent!

To her credit, Madonna co-wrote the song Like a Prayer that would become the title track on her Like a Prayer album in 1989.  The song launched her long, protracted, now-overcooked edgelord era, with a video featuring a controversial and sexualized black Jesus.  Madonna still uses the song and its fetishized Christ in her current schtick, which are three ring circuses of air-humping Satanic Illuminati imagery and seizure-inducing lights.  At its best, her voice is irritating and whiny.  Her songwriting is middle of the road -- she's not terrible, but she's no Max Martin.  The only things she ever had in abundance was sex and the exploitation of the outré.  As we speak, Madonna is being laughed at and pitied for her desperate antics and ratchet appearance -- if adrenochrome actually works to keep anyone young and fresh, then it would follow that she is not on it.

Dullsville stinky vanilla BDSM lite LOONG before 50 Shades.  But at least
she looked good in pictures back then!

By the time Madonna's book Sex came out in 1992, shock literature had nearly jumped the shark.  I worked as a shelver at the town library at the time and the librarians had to order dozens of copies, all of which stayed checked out with wait lists for most of a year.  The appeal of the book was greatly aided by the controversy surrounding it.  Sex was packaged in a way that was accessible to curious suburbanites and it wasn't graphic enough to be actual porn; nonetheless, it was banned by the same legions of Tipper Gore pearl clutchers who got warning labels stuck on 2 Live Crew and Beastie Boys CDs.  Getting banned, of course, was the best thing that could have possibly happened to Madonna's career.  In his book The Satanic Witch, Anton LaVey reminds aspiring seductresses that there is nothing so appealing as "that which was not meant to be seen".  Madonna was also in her early 30s at the time and at the peak of her physical beauty and stardom.  She wasn't exactly hard to look at; people wanted to see what she looked like naked and she showed them.

Sex and the Etheric

The etheric plane is the plane of life force.  I consider the etheric or energy plane one plane more subtle than smell: that is to say it rides right on top of the physical plane.  Lightning and electricity are etheric plane phenomena.  All beings, objects, and places are surrounded by their own unique etheric field, sometimes generally referred to as an aura.  Clairvoyants can see this aura -- personally I cannot see it as I am not clairvoyant.  Martial artists manipulate their own etheric force in order to defend themselves and to do cool tricks such as breaking chunks of wood.  Feng shui is the science of manipulating etheric flows via house orientation, furniture placement, and home decor.  Traditional Eastern medicine and Ayurveda both work mainly with the etheric plane.  Traditional Western medicine used to do that too, and back in the day it was called humoral medicine. 

The etheric exchange of sex, whether willing or unwilling, is one of the most powerful forces on Earth.  During sex, the etheric body expands and contracts, exchanging energy as the physical body exchanges fluids.  In intercourse, biological females find that their etheric body releases like a dam overflowing or a pressurized spigot losing pressure.  For biological men, the etheric body is pierced and the sensation is like a vacuum being filled or like eating when you are extremely hungry.  In our era of endemic etheric starvation, humans routinely become trapped by the allure of sexuality from cradle to grave, and this is unfortunate because though sex is neither inherently good nor bad, being obsessed with it is predictably negative.

Off With Their Heads!

If I was appointed Queen of the World, I would punish pedophiles with immediate death by decapitation upon being found guilty in a court of law.   The reason I believe pedophilia should be punished with such extreme severity and finality is primarily etheric.  Children have very strong etheric bodies.  All children, regardless of organs, are etherically male, which is to say they are physically female just as they are as fetuses.  The child's etheric body is shared by its parents (often just one parent, the mother) until it reaches the approximate age of seven, when the etheric body begins to separate and morph in order to make way for puberty a few years later.  If we put this in the context of Eastern etheric science, children possess yang or active principle life force in excess.  The elderly are the opposite: they are for the most part etheric females regardless of biological gender.  

Let's look at the child as etheric male and elder as etheric female in more detail:  Children are needy and selfish, existing in their own bubbles until they are socialized and taught to "play nice".  As etheric males, they love bright colors, noise, and the energy of the playroom.  They are exhausting and they are loud.  They are yang energy personified: constantly exploring, creating, and learning how defend themselves.  Astrally, children reverse sexes again and regardless of actual gender are astrally feminine.  Their imaginations are fertile, ripe, and easily influenced. 

The elderly, on the other hand, are yin energy personified.  Nursing homes and hospitals are scary because of their yin excess.  Dusty corners, decay, darkness, and a sense of going back to the dirt from whence you came are all horror movie tropes, synonymous with the old and dying.  Our civilization, which pathologically fears the yin influence, is also terrified of aging and death.  The old person becomes stuck in their ways or male on the astral plane, wanting to influence and not open to outside influence.  Though this may superficially sound like a bad thing, it can also be construed as "owning your s**t" as an old person.  The old crave the company of the young because they are deficient in yang energy.  The young need the old in order to contain and limit their yang energy.  

Returning to the idea of the child as sharing an etheric body with 1-2 of its parents until the approximate age of seven, we begin to understand why human children are so lost without good parents.  Even when the parent is not a genetic relative, such as my own case because I was adopted at ten days old, there is a profound etheric bond between a child and its parent or primary caregiver for the duration of the formative years.  

Pedophiles

Pedophilia is about physically, etherically, and astrally breaking a child into a consumable form for a temporary, addictive high off of its abundant yang energy.  The pedophile seeks to pop the child's protective bubble and steal its contents.  At its core, pedophilia is a pursuit of unearned wealth.  Once the egg is cracked, scrambled, and devoured, the pedophile finds him or herself addicted as pedophilia is a Wendigo that demands greater and greater sacrifice.  The New York Times conservatively estimates the sexual exploitation of children is a 20 billion dollar industry, but that number seems hopelessly naive and underestimated to me.  In absence of deeper human relationships, regular porn addicts become child porn addicts.  Some even get to the point where they want to turn fantasy into reality.  Lather, rinse, repeat: new addicts become new pedophiles and new pedophiles become old pedophiles.  

This poor girl.  I do not envy her.

Peak Perversion

When I was a child in the 70s, pop culture was deep into the chase of the puerile.  Jodie Foster starred in Taxi Driver as a child prostitute at age 12 in 1976.  Brooke Shields starred as a child prostitute in 1978's Pretty Baby.  Poor Brooke, however, was the subject of pornographic photo shoots and likely sexual abuse at the age of ten.  A casual Yandex search of Brooke Shields at age 10 reveals young Brooke in full makeup posing provocatively in a hot tub.  It is patently obvious that the plot of Pretty Baby wasn't just a fiction set in the Gilded Age for Brooke Shields.  

The aforementioned Madonna upped the ante in the 80s.  With every new release, we could all count on Madonna to bring sexy back before Justin Timberlake was out of grade school.  Most girls of my era confidently assert that Madonna and her "music" were their first initiation into being sexualized at a young age.  Before you think I am on some kind of Victorian high horse, keep in mind I was personally all for it and wanted to be sexy and sexualized at a young age, I just had no idea how to do it because I have always been a complete nerd.  Madonna was a welcome influence for me and plenty other Gen X women.  

The 90s were a turning point.  By time the Sex book made the rounds, every envelope had been pushed and children were routinely sexualized as a spectator sport: the 90s were the era of child beauty pageants and JonBenet Ramsey.  It's odder at this point to have a childhood that is free of being sexualized.  You really do have to live in a cave or at least some kind of media-free zone where normal internet and gaming is not allowed.  Millennials grew up knowing virtually no sexual limits where Gen X at least had a few -- it is no wonder Millennials embraced hook up culture.  

Sexxy Red

There are a couple of viral videos going around where two teachers respectively lament the educational state of their four and five year old students.  The children act up, do not listen, and their parents are uppity, entitled jerks who question the teacher rather than disciplining their progeny.  Apparently, these precocious little ones sing and twerk to songs by hip hop artist Sexxy Red.  The songs, if you can call them that, are Pound Town and Skee Yee.  Pound Town's lyrics drop the N word about eight times per sentence and go into graphic detail about anal and oral.  Skee Yee combines the N bomb with the F bomb and is mostly about anal.   Though the teachers ask how a group of little kids came to know such mature music and scratch their heads, consider that these kids have spent the last three years (ages 2-5) mostly locked indoors with iPads and the answer is clear: they sing and twerk what they have been brought up on.  They parrot what they know.

Hip Hop is a genre obsessed with displays of unearned wealth, especially etheric wealth.  Yang energy is to be amassed and displayed in the form of golden teeth, fancy cars, mammoth McMansions, and curvy young women. The envelope has been pushed to the breaking point as it has in all mainstream media.  There is no longer anything worth gawking at.  Hardcore porn is just an internet connection away.  Mainstream TV (not that anyone watches anymore) is cozy with the F bomb and nudity.  Cinemax has been soft porn since forever: we used to call it Skinemax back in the 1980s.  Of course five year olds are getting thrown under the bus: when all the boundaries are erased, little kids get thrown into the pit until the last child is consumed by the last demonic pedophile.  I am reminded of the plight of the Gelflings in Jim Henson's animatronic/puppetronic wonder The Dark Crystal. 

Truth be told, pedophilia is boring because at this point it has been done to death, often literally.  There is something very off about the whopping majority of alleged travelers to Epstein's Pedo Island -- it's as if it is a psychic stain that won't wash off.  Like a subtle but bad smell, you don't notice it until someone alerts you to it, but once you know, it's all you notice.  I used to enjoy movies and music by those people a great deal more before I knew about the allegations. 

Maybe I am just getting old, but I can no longer bring myself to care about the output of artists who deliberately try to shock or titillate with sexuality.  It's boring.  They can throw all of the five year olds under the bus and make Sesame Street into a full on drag show -- I'm done and I don't care.  Every time Madonna does her OK Boomer geriatric gyrations onstage, it makes me grateful I was shepherded down the path of earned wealth, modesty, relationships that are based on deeper things than looks or money, and cleaning my own damn toilet.    

We live in a spiritual Dark Age.  Mainstream religions have wandered well into the ballpark of materialistic atheism.  Materialistic atheism has almost no tools to deal with human death, as it is in complete denial of the afterlife.  Because of this lack of tools, funerals have become yet another expensive, corporatized, dehumanized rite of passage.  To die is to pass through a depersonalized, one-size-fits-all grist mill for making money off the bereaved.  

Our age's terror at the prospect of the yawning memory hole of death manifests in psychotic symptoms.  Nobody is supposed to look old and death is better hidden and unobserved.  The elderly are warehoused so they can be forgotten in a kind of grift oubliette.  Families are atomized, begging the question, What is the point of having children if you cannot expect them to care for you in your old age?  

Many Ways to Die

Though there are many ways to die, there are two main types of death: expected or unexpected.  Overall, expected deaths are better for all parties because there is a chance to prepare.  Unexpected deaths are where things can get stuck.  Stuckness occurs in situations where death occurs by murder, heart attack, stroke, accident, suicide, or when an aged or infirm person has not made their peace.  

One way or the other, when we die we see parts of the astral plane fabric that are not visible in normal, physical life.  This is where the reporting of a bright, white light comes from in the NDE or Near Death Experience.  Unless you have gone out of the way and taken special pains to be a horrible person, chances are you will see the white light and be beckoned by its warmth and acceptance.  I fully expect to see the white light.  Though my life has been far from perfectly-lived, as it stands I have tried for many years to be a better person than I was yesterday, if only by the slightest amount.  Once you are received by the white light, there is a another reception on the non-physical side.  From what the dead have told me, we are received by our assigned spirit guides and by the HGAs or Holy Guardian Angels of our loved ones, including pets, places, and in some cases, objects.  This is why dying brings a feeling of going home, even if your Meatworld home was transient or a tar-paper shack on the side of a garbage dump.  You are briefly greeted by guides who comfort you and brought to a place of intimate familiarity, love, and genuine rest before being dunked into the Underworld.

We All Go to Hell, Regardless of Hand Baskets

The Underworld is my catch-all term for the kind of non-eternal hell or purgatory every human on the meat plane must go through before reincarnating into a new form.  The concept of hell and heaven is where most mainstream religions go absurdly and spectacularly wrong. Buddhists obsess about avoiding the incarnation process altogether, hoping and trying instead to escape the wheel of meat-plane cycling to skip the line to a subtle and masterful non-physical state.  They are not the only ones who fixated on escape: Aztecs and Mayans made the avoidance of our current demonic, materialistic age into an art, absorbing village after village primarily to attain victims for blood sacrifice.  The point of the sacrifices was seemingly to keep the priestly class out of incarnation and to prevent the world from becoming what it is now.  Christians misinterpret the Underworld cycle as an eternal pit of torture and pain for the unrepentant wicked.  The only alternative in this binary is an equally unbalanced assumption that they will sit for untold trillions of millennia at the right hand of Jesus based on the judgement of the works of a single human lifetime.  Only Hindus, who can proudly boast the world's most ancient and enduring religion, see the reincarnation process with a sense of balance.  Even they err by playing into the caste system, which has horrific repercussions for almost anyone who has ever believed in it.  The haughty presumptions that arise from belief in the caste system are kissing cousins to boneheaded Quranic and Biblical literalism.  

As I have mentioned in the past, an entity once shared with me that the grace with which we accept our judgements and descent into the Underworld determines how much bounce we will gain before going into our next incarnation.  My childhood as Baby Kimberly was terrible, and not because of anything my parents did or where and how I grew up.  My childhood was awful mostly because of the anger and sorrow I failed to resolve from my previous life.  In my most recent past life, I was a wealthy but embittered widow who lost her two sons in World War I.  Her unhappiness leaked into this life.  Many of her emotional issues were still on the table for resolution well into my current lifetime.

Once we have spent time in the Underworld going through the nasty process of sorting through most of our mea culpas and stupid crap we did that hurt our fellow sentient beings while in physical incarnation, we bounce back up to the higher astral plane in order to get ready for our next incarnation.  Contrary to popular mainstream religious belief and based upon what dead people have told me, we do not get a choice whether or not any part of these processes happen.  We cannot choose incarnation any more than a fish can choose to live in water.   As the world ebbs from its current peak, some souls will stay out of incarnation for longer periods and others will be reincarnated as animals.  Of course I could be wrong.  

Despite the way we have been trained to look at it, death is a good thing.  That said, ending your life prematurely can have dire consequences depending on the intentions behind the action.  At any rate, it does not speed up the resolution of any of your problems except on the most superficial level.

They're Still Here: How the Newly Dead Interact

I operate under the assumption that the newly dead can still see us and interact with us on the astral and etheric planes despite being divorced from the physical plane.  When my friend died of cancer in his sixties, he visited me during my daily Sphere of Protection and said that from his end of the astral, it looked like a fireworks show.  There is nothing strange about talking to the newly dead; in fact, it would be better if we all learned to talk with them.  There is also nothing strange about a dead person informing their loved one they have died.  This is usually called a haunting but I think this is far too dramatic a term.  The facts on the ground are the etheric body sticks around for most of the time there is still a corpse.  Cremation severs the link and immediately dissolves the etheric body.  When I die, I am specifically asking in advance not to be embalmed because I feel preservation of the corpse ties the astral and etheric bodies to Meatworld for far longer than necessary.  When I die, I expect to hang around Meatworld until I am either cremated or rotted in the ground from being buried.  Freed of my physical body, I will wander about visiting any friends or relatives I have left.  If they are used to interactions with spirits of dead people as I am, I will try to give them an etheric sign of my presence, such as a candle burning brighter or the scent of citrus, mint, roses, or incense.  If they are a normal person who gets freaked out by occult phenomena (likely) I will only observe and keep my energy to myself.  

Once my etheric and physical body separate anywhere from a few days to a few months after my death, I expect to be led by my spirit guides and my own higher self as I transit out of Meatworld and my old incarnation as Kimberly Steele.  If my experience as a dead person is a typical one, and I believe it will be, we can use it to inform us how to help the newly dead find their way in absence of their physical and etheric bodies.

Candles and Flame

Just as regular incarnated humans are drawn to burning campfires, fireplaces, and flame, candles draw both non-embodied humans and spirits.  Lighting a candle for a dead person has the same effect as giving them a powerful flashlight on a dark road.  Candlelight vigils should be done for any newly dead person in the spirit of helping them through the immediate afterlife process.  Candles burned at the place the newly dead person loved and/or considered home or best: they act as amplifiers of comforting energy and draw spirit friends to the corresponding area on the astral plane.

Flowers

Regardless of whether the person liked flowers while alive, fresh flowers are etheric plane improvers that act similarly to candles; that is to say they are amplifiers of comforting energy that bridge the etheric into the astral.   Once again, flowers provide a temporary energy source that draws benevolent helper entities.  What we think of as flowers are no more and no less than magical herbs.  Herbalists know that herbs have the power to drive away malevolent energy via banishing and draw helpful energy.  The result is greater illumination and purification on the path out of incarnation for the newly dead person.

Music

Music is an extremely potent purification tool and is very effective when assisting the newly dead to connect with their higher selves and helpful spirit guides on the astral plane.  Like flowers and flame, music repels malevolent entities and provides a bright spot on the astral plane so the newly dead can rally and prepare for their next steps.  It's especially powerful and helpful to play the music the dead person loved in life, even if it isn't the most agreeable music to the still living.  While playing the newly dead person's favorite music, send the intention of gratitude for their time in physical incarnation, no matter how brief.  Even unborn babies have "favorite" music that sensitive mothers can determine while they're still in utero.  While sending gratitude, also send wishes for their smooth and easy transition through the Gates until you see them again.

Prayer

Prayer is the most important tool we have in our arsenal for helping the newly dead.  The goal of prayer is simple: we ask a deity who is older, wiser, and smarter than we are to help with something they know a great deal about while we ourselves know very little.  In other words, we do what is perfectly logical.  The more connected the newly dead person is to the Divine, the easier their transition out of Meatworld will be.  The reason it is tremendously important to live a virtuous life by being generous, kind, compassionate, fair, modest, diligent, and moderate is because living the Word is far better than preaching it.  Unfortunately, it is common among monotheists to abuse prayer as conversion cacomagic: they take any fledging connection they have with the Divine and use it to guilt trip and browbeat others into serving their specific God.  This act is ironically Satanic and will likely earn them long stints in the Underworld where, as the Bible says, "they shall have their reward".  Instead of telling others how to accept your version of Jesus or some other god into their hearts, you go first by connecting to a god and doing your level best to serve that god with humility and grace.  Connection and discourse with the Divine drives out parasitic, opportunistic entities while affording glimpses of the afterlife process well before it is time to go to the afterlife.

Letting Go

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, our civilization has a problem accepting death.  We have a problem with divine grace and become dissonant when dealing with endings.  Grace means not clinging to what once was and not pining after what was not meant to be.  As far as I can tell, most of the dead move on fairly quickly -- a few days to a few months -- unless we compel them to stay with constant, intense, unrelenting grief.  When you are tempted to wallow in grief, light a candle and focus on the moments and legacies of the person, pet, or house that were given to you and ruminate about how your life is better because they were there for you in this world.  By focusing on the good and adding gratitude to the mix, you improve and sublimate their journey as well as your own, no matter where they are.  When you see them again, and I believe you will, they will thank you for it.  

Steve Cutts, Evolution

At nearly fifty years old, my life has been inundated with television since I began this incarnation.  My grandmother once told me that she got a TV early on (1950s era) and it attracted a fair-weather friend who came over only to watch soap operas.  She was one of the few people I remember who budgeted the amount of time the television was on.  My best friend's house was far different: they had cable TV in the early 80s.  Cable back then did not have commercials.  If regular TV was cocaine, cable was crack.  We watched countless R-rated movies without any form of adult supervision.  No wonder Generation X is so fond of its foul language and Facebook drama: our childhoods were chock full of both in the form of cable TV.  As a teenager, I began to be bored by most TV despite my entire family remaining addicted to it.  Despite my overall dissatisfaction and boredom with TV, my brother and I still fought to watch it when we went to our family vacation cottage as children, as if there wasn't an entire world waiting outside for us to break out of our trance and join it.

Approximately fifteen years ago, my salary class aspirations got flushed down the toilet when the company my husband worked for as a high level executive crumbled due to managerial infighting and incompetence.  My budget tightened like a noose as I scrambled to cut costs.  I played a constant game of Whack the Pop-Up Expense to fend off the forces that sought to consume the contents of my tiny, dwindling bank account.  One day the incredible noise of Duck Dynasty, a  reality TV show about a group of loud, redneck hunters emanated from the next room.  I strongly suggested to my husband that I wanted to get rid of our TV and its accompanying package of channels; he reluctantly agreed we could do without it.  We have never gone back, though this is mainly due to my status as the breadwinner of the house.  My husband likes TV a great deal more than I do and would most likely pay the hefty fees per month for a package of deluxe channels if he had the money to do it.  

The Astral and Etheric Poison Effects of TV

Consider a stereotype about the Boomer generation: the Boomer sits transfixed in front of the television most of his or her waking hours, slowly losing the ability to do anything except sit and watch.  The characters on TV become more real to him than his family.  There is more than a few grains of truth to the stereotype.

In Hubert Selby Jr.'s novel Requiem for a Dream, an elderly woman named Sarah Goldfarb retreats into television and diet pill addiction as her adult son and his friends retreat into their own parallel heroin addictions.  The genius of Requiem for a Dream is its brutal portrayal of Sarah's addiction, which is just as destructive and deadly as a descent into illegal drugs.  TV is designed to be addictive and the majority of American Boomers fell for it.  

On the astral plane, TV creates a mess of emotional manipulation mixed with addictive dependency.  The watcher’s best instincts of charity, love, friendliness, and bravery are turned against him as he becomes an inert captive, watching other people living a facsimile of the karmic lessons he should be out there having in real life.  Breaks in the monotony of programming are more potent and obvious brainwashing: commercials.  Again, we have an astral mess of being urged to eat “healthfully” yet being bombarded with images of processed convenience food.  Is it any surprise the TV-addicted Boomer has a refrigerator that resembles a small morgue with a smell to match?  Pre-packaged convenience foods seldom live up to their advertising. 

TV manipulates via mixed messages. The lovely, slim actors and actresses indulge in every vice yet remain beautiful and enviable. One moment, there is an ad or a product placement for convenience food. Thirty seconds later, there are two ads for the latest pharmaceutical drug to treat a disease caused by a sedentary lifestyle that involves eating lots of convenience food.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Despite the proliferation of emotional puppeteering designed to engage do-goodnik instincts among sedentary watchers, TV is a bad influence. The worst kind of behavior is treated with reverence and fascination on TV regardless of the fictional or nonfictional nature of the program. Crime shows about cops who run around chasing murderers and rapists are thinly disguised profiteering off of the excitement created by evildoers.  Without evildoers, the chickenhawk planted firmly on the couch would have nobody to look down upon. Without the alcoholic celebrity stumbling from hook up to hook up on the reality show, the wannabe would have no darkness to use in order to compare and contrast her beige, corporation-enslaved life.

In Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, a teenaged boy named Kevin goes on a massacre and slaughters other kids and teachers in his school.  When Kevin returns home, he murders everyone in his family except for his mother, forcing her to live down the shame of having a mass murderer for a son.  After Kevin goes to prison, he is interviewed by a media reporter.  Kevin remarks:

"All of you people watching out there, you're listening to what I say because I have something you don't: I got plot.  Bought and paid for.  That's what all you people want, and why you're sucking off me.  You want my plot.  I know how you feel, too, since hey, I used to feel the same way.  TV and video games and movies and computer screens... On April 8th, 1999, I jumped into the screen, I switched to watchee.  Ever since, I've known what my life is about.  I give good story.  It may have been kinda gory, but admit it, you all loved it.  You ate it up.  Nuts, I ought to be on some government payroll.  Without people like me, the whole country would jump off a bridge, 'cause the only thing on TV is some housewife on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? winning $64,000 for remembering the name of the president's dog."

 

The Feng Shui of the Black Box

The television is etheric poison.  Even when off, the TV is an ugly black box.  The only way it is ever going to blend into its surroundings is when it is either in a store full of other TVs or if it is hidden by the doors of an armoire as was fashionable in the 90s.  When it is on, it perpetuates a colorful and bombastic assault that destroys entire rooms with its etheric miasma.  If the average person could see the etheric plane, the television would look like a chemical spill vomiting its rainbow tinted poison in a toxic pool around itself.  The only true way of cleaning up the noxious spill of the TV is by getting rid of the device entirely. 

Video Games

Games or what used to be called video games are hideous astral plane polluters, replacing the normal functions of human imagination with caricatured worlds of television-like brainwashing. If you want to take a perfectly normal young man and turn him into a miserable, pale, flabby drudge who accomplishes no original works and never realizes his own unique potential, by all means introduce him to video game addiction. 

Video games are expensive.  The equipment and sheer computing power needed to use them cannot and will not exist in a world where server farms are no longer subsidized and where internet is expensive to the average person.  As in the case of the TV addict, we have an inert captive living vicariously through a fake, prefab set of characters.  Life lessons aren’t lived and learned; they are procrastinated and set aside for a “later” that will hopefully never arrive.  Once again, the television dominates the living space like a black hole, and instead of providing cooked food, heat, and warmth like the fireplaces of old, it is a cold electronic eye that watches and sucks the vitality of humans even while it is asleep. 

One of the reasons I chose not to have children in this incarnation was the influence of TV and games.  I was addicted to PacMan by the age of 10 and by TV and movies at the age of 18.  I was addicted despite knowing better and feeling in my gut that it was wrong to fritter away the hours in front of the barking, bleeping screen.  If I could not resist the pull of the electronic hypnotist, how on Earth would I keep my child from becoming an addict?  My hat is off to any parent nowadays who is able to sanely budget their child’s TV and game time.  I don’t think I could have pulled it off and that is why I decided not to do it.

The Rise of Influencers

The influence of TV has been supplanted by the rise of influencers, but this is not to say that influencer culture is any better than TV addiction. Influencing as a career offers far more than TV because unlike the world of Hollywood, there are no gatekeepers.  Though the Kardashian/Jenners and their ilk may be plagued with rumors about how they maintain their top dog status, top influencers do not need to be part of the alleged Satanic, supposedly fecalphiliac/infanticidal elite. All that is needed to get in to influencing is a mobile phone with a decent camera. Lovely young girls can stay far away from the neo-Harvey Weinsteins of the world and still make all the money. Like Kevin of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the influencer is not the watcher, she is the watchee.

The influencer is perfectly happy to leave the habits of her Boomer grandparents behind in order to embrace a new and equally fake set of images. Unlike the Boomer's worship of prettied-up celebrities, her altar is the digital mirror. Her own prettied-up, photo-edited, "improved" face and body becomes the standard by which all must be measured. The cadre of ghosts that haunt the aging Hollywood celeb become much more personal, and therein lies the rub.  Influencing takes a great deal of energy across the planes: like gaming, it only exists because of subsidized internet grids. Like a TV watching habit, it is a time suck extraordinaire to create the content and to whip the avatar into apparent good shape. Last but not least, there is the pouring of one's entire spirit into the avatar and the investment in its fake karma and destiny. But that's a topic for future conversation.

TV Isn't All Bad!

I am a visual learner and I owe much of my current knowledge directly to the television. Being a visual learner means that it often takes me three times as long to learn via written instruction as it does from watching a few boring, jerky images on a screen. I have learned countless skills from television: I remember Sesame Street helping me count, Schoolhouse Rock helping me understand the functions of government, heaven knows how many origami and cooking videos, and last night's tech guy video teaching me how to use Open Broadcasting Software (OBS). As I mentioned, I don't have TV, but I do have a computer screen that functions in much the same way.  

I use TV to learn but I also use it to relax. I am no stranger to movies and various series. I often watch them while I exercise on my stationary bike.  Right now, I am watching a sweet series from Japan called The Maikanai: Cooking for the Maiko House on Netflix. The show is a subtle education on what the daily lives of maiko (apprentice geisha) are like and since it is in Japanese, it is a good intro/review of Japanese language. It's also a straight up entertaining show. I am grateful for TV and much like any other pastime that can turn into a vice, I believe it is fine in moderation.

Humans are weird and we can turn anything into an addiction.  The moral of the story here, I think, is to recognize the good and the bad of the omnipresent screen and to do what little we can to amplify -- and be thankful for -- the good.

The first task of remedying etheric starvation is by recognizing that the aesthetics of one’s living space provide a primary source of etheric nourishment. In order to replenish etheric stocks, you must have a place where you feel you are home. “Home” is as individual and randomly eccentric as the people who live there. For some, home is an apartment in a big city nestled among skyscrapers. For others, home is a cookie-cutter three-bedroom suburban house. Some live in yurts, tents, boats, and vans because they have no other choice; for some, it’s exactly how they like it. For me, home is not just my tiny little house, it’s my garden or the forest preserve. The moral of the story is we all need an etherically-rich place we can regularly go where our energy is restored.

The Importance of Decor... Seriously

I am a big proponent of starting where you are, with what you have right now. If you have etheric starvation, and it is likely that you do, the easiest way of remedying it is to thank your space for its service to you. For instance, I sit at my desk writing this essay on a computer. I will later thank the computer, the desk, and the chair for helping me write the essay. When I do this, my gratitude will sublimate the material things I have thanked and this will return in the form of good luck for both me and the items I thanked. Another way to sublimate gratitude is to do something that blesses the environment, such as picking up trash in the forest preserve. Every little bit helps, which is why those who put effort into gardening or who decorate for holidays are blessed — those tiny bits of care and cheer go a long way in brightening a sad world and making it etherically richer.

I have said the etheric is one sense subtler than smell. Hospitals have a smell that indicates their etheric toxicity. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and if a place smells like you shouldn’t be there, you should probably try to get out of there as quickly as you can. Etherically-drained environments are terrible for human health. That is why you want whatever place you call home to be etherically rich. Allopathic medicine is not about to remedy itself or its approach to healing, which is why I believe the majority of it will be discarded in the centuries to come. (That’s too bad, because allopathic medicine does have an assortment of helpful protocols that shouldn’t be thrown away like the baby with the bathwater.)

The Formula

In some ways, alternative healing modalities are not as potent as taking an allopathic drug, and that can be a good thing. Allopathic medicine is often a blitzkrieg as it had to be in the case of my gall bladder whereas alternative healing methods are usually a gentle readjustment. When I have a sinus headache, I take white willow in the form of a capsule instead of taking Advil or Tylenol. The reasons for this are more complicated than they would appear. I often have to take more white willow than one would Tylenol — 2 or three capsules every couple of hours versus a single Tylenol for the span of half a day — because they aren’t as strong. Over the counter NSAIDS like Tylenol and Advil obliterate the endothelial single cell layer in my upper intestine, and this layer is the only thing that filters out pathogenic viruses. My headache might be solved, but I have just opened my immune system to any virus that comes my way, so if I have to be around a sick person, symptomatic or asymptomatic, I’m probably going to catch whatever virus they have. Willow doesn’t do that. Additionally, the health of my teeth is directly related to my sinus headaches, so if I have a sinus headache, I can remedy it by putting a thick paste of calcium citrate in the corners of my gums and behind my front teeth. I usually do this at night so I do not appear to be foaming at the mouth during the daytime. Calcium citrate stops my teeth from decaying. By remineralizing my teeth, which are just small bones after all, I slowly work on the root cause of the headaches, which is inflammation caused by infected teeth. Is this as instant or as powerful as popping an Advil? Heck no. Does it work? Yes. Another supplement I use if I have a sinus headache is zinc in the form of lozenges or gummies. Sinus headaches are the canary in the coal mine that say “You are at risk of catching a flu or cold”. If I get one, I supplement with extra Vitamin D, zinc, and put special attention toward improving my etheric state.

Magic Chef

Soup is an extremely powerful form of medicine, and it doesn’t need to be chicken soup specifically. Soup is healing because our bodies need salty water with a dash of sugar in it. Soup is the human body’s preferred form of hydration and nutrition. Soup made from scratch is the most etherically potent form, however, soup from a can or box “doctored up” with additions like chopped vegetables or noodles comes relatively close. Though most soup recipes call for broth, I don’t use broth when I make soup. The basic recipe for homemade soup is to start with a stockpot, put in about a tablespoon of oil, and fry a vegetable, usually onions, at the bottom of it. Herbs or spices follow for a brief sauté, and then the rest of the vegetables get thrown in there, the pot gets filled to the top with water, and then it cooks for anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours. I salt it to taste somewhere within that time span. Noodles or rice, if being used, don’t get added until the soup is cooked or mostly cooked. Soup is not rocket science. I have not used an actual recipe for many years.

Avoid the Modern-Brutalist Approach to Exercise and Everything Else