My gall stone issue seems to be mostly resolved although I have not yet completed the Protocol. I still need to do the flush part of the regimen. Evidently the flush part makes you feel like shit for a few days, and so I’ve put this off until my work schedule is a bit more caught up and I can allow myself a few days of unproductiveness.

Note to my single-girl friends: dating three guys at once is a really bad idea, even when they all know about each other and claim not to care.

Aside from these various things, I’ve been pondering stuff related to extrication. Namely, how different things are now, in just one generation, from how they used to be. My generation was the first to come of age during the era of globalization and culture wars. I graduated from high school in 1986; my peers were graduating from college during the early 90s recession, and I had many good friends who went a year before finding anything other than Dairy Queen type jobs. What we dealt with back then was something of a foreshadowing of what college graduates and people that age are dealing with now. Everything economic that’s come since the 1980s has been simply a series of bubbles which, upon bursting, send more wealth higher up the caste ladder and more jobs overseas.

I suspect that no one who graduated high school before 1980 can even truly grasp what the ensuing generations have to face. Theirs was the last to see things like job-dependent health insurance, job security, retirement and other savings and the like as the normal course of adult life. Everyone I know my age who has these things either works for the government, in banking/finance, or in the medical industries. Everyone else skates from job to job, doing the best they can, and never getting ahead.

But for myself, even if I had access to such things, I’m not so sure I’d want them. Medical insurance is a fucking joke — you pay and pay and pay through the nose, then when you need it, it either won’t cover your problem or the doctors can’t find what’s wrong with you. You actually save money by not having health insurance, and just paying out-of-pocket when you need a round of antibiotics or something. Even if you get in a car accident, it is still cheaper to pay the hospital bill out-of-pocket rather than the insurance premiums and the deductible and whatever isn’t covered. At worst, it’ll be a wash.

Near as I can tell, the medical system is a frankensymbiote with big ag, flip sides of the same coin. Big ag profits by making us us sick; big med profits by covering it up; big ag profits by making us even sicker; big med further profits by covering it up. Apply the maxim “you are what you eat” to society as a whole, and the whole thing starts to make sense.

As for money, I can’t bring myself to care about it either to the degree that I work and work to accumulate more of it, or work and work to live completely free of it. Either way, the level of obsession about money is the same. There are, without a doubt, things I want and need — but money isn’t one of them. The only thing I need money for is to acquire the things I want and need which are, at this point, relatively few.

Right now, nothing works as it used to, and whatever new systems will arise in the shadow of the old systems haven’t yet congealed. It’s a scary time and things are only going to get more confusing, less secure.

None of this is news to anyone, I’m sure. I don’t have any answers. For myself, the best I can figure to do is to adopt the strategy of that fabled guy who ride the Twin Towers rubble all the way to the ground.

Now I just gotta get the Android browser view squared away.

So here’s the scoop. I went home on Good Friday to visit for Easter, and woke up Saturday morning in such excruciating pain I could hardly stand upright. It scared me and I came back to the squat later that afternoon because I have herbs and stuff that usually help. But they didn’t help this time and the pain continued to get worse. Last Thursday I had a severe attack that lasted about 10 hours, and I very seriously considered going to the ER for fear that I had a liver infection.

It did subside however, and the next day I borrowed the money and ordered an herbal remedy which, in combination with a specific, strict diet, will break down the gall stones in about two weeks. It took about three days to really kick in but it did finally. I’m about a week into it now and the pain is pretty well gone, though I can still feel a stone in there. It feels exactly like having a stone in your shoe only it’s just inside my right shoulder blade. It will occasionally start to hurt a bit but Advil takes care of that. I’m also getting tired more easily.

I’ll do the herbs for another week and after that I need to drink olive oil mixed with lemon juice for three days — nasty! — and stick close to the bathroom. There’s a pretty reasonable explanation of the actual flushing process here — skip down to Step 3.

So my plan of doing a spring detox fast came up a lot sooner than I expected. This gallbladder flush is essentially a targeted semi-fast that will break down the stones and sludge and what-have-you throughout my entire digestive system, including my pancreas and liver. And it occurred to me yesterday that if I really want to clean out my body — after more than 12 years since my last detox — the best thing I could do is target my digestive system first and then do a more general detox. My body is smarter than I am!

Getting my health under control has been at the top of my list ever since I came to Pittsburgh. Financial stabilization was the most urgent order of business, but now that’s done and I’ve been making small excursions into healthier lifestyle things — eating better & more organic, less coffee, stuff like that. Ran’s visit was inspiring toward that end, but on the whole, getting healthy is just not something I’ve been looking forward to. For me, all that healthy stuff feels like deprivation and in the case of some types of physical exercise, just straight up painful. I love coffee. I dislike smoking but cigarettes do, in fact, function very well as a coping mechanism. Walking for very long on a daily basis gives me shin splints. And there’s no way in hell I’m doing the gym thing again, with 20-yr-old girls prancing around in lime green thongs and me there in my sweats, overweight and actually sweating.

Everyone says: do cardio first; eat whole grains; quit your meds; avoid red meat; quit coffee. All of these things suck and make me feel shitty. The very last thing I need is to feel even worse. So taking care of my health is forever procrastinated, because getting healthy feels worse than continuing to be unhealthy. Health is something I should do in order to avoid negative outcomes and ultimately death, even though it will basically suck forever until I actually do die. It’s the same coercive logic that compels people to have jobs. Getting healthy is all stick — the only carrot on offer is that more men will find me attractive. Really? I’m in violation of serial dating rules as it is.

I don’t want to do all that. What I do want is to feel better. And it occurs to me that this was a lesson I learned a very long time ago, back in my 20s when I got really sick for like a year. Maybe for other people getting healthy is a matter of sucking it up and suffering through. For me, getting healthy is the same thing as feeling better. A targeted digestive detox was nowhere on my “getting healthy” radar, even though I’ve had problems with my stomach since I was in high school. But this is not part of the prescribed “getting healthy” regimen, so I never paid attention. The things that do actually make me feel better have always been luxurious self-indulgences: massage, good shoes, great sex, acupuncture, the occasional cannabis-induced super lazy Saturday, sleeping until I’m done sleeping.

I remember now that my body really is smarter than I am. It doesn’t listen to conventional wisdom, nor is it swayed by studies and experts. It lets me know when there’s a problem — even when thyroid tests come back negative, dental x-rays show nothing, and the most common type of gall stone doesn’t show up on medical imaging equipment. It lets me know that a grain-based, low-fat diet does not provide the nutrition I need, that cardio isn’t where I should start.

In light of this lesson relearned, thanks to my debilitating gall stone issues, I’m changing my “get healthy” plans to “feel better” plans. I’ll let my body tell me the order in which I need to take care of myself — things that hurt or feel bad require attention; things that make me feel better require prioritization. And this is actually very much in line with efforts to address my personal energy distribution, because when anyone feels better they automatically have more energy.

I’ll write more about this as the process continues. In the meantime I do have a half-finished continuation of Disentangling the Deities, which I hope to complete in the next couple of days.

If you’re interested in the treatment I sent for, you can read about it here. The website is built in the worst internet marketing way imaginable and makes the product look like an utter scam. You can be forgiven if you can’t get past that, but in my line of work, I’ve seen lots of good people with good products that have gotten really bad marketing advice.

I’ve set up functionality to allow anyone to subscribe to email notifications of new post replies, whether or not you actually leave a comment yourself. Once you’ve subscribed, you can also manage your subscriptions. The subscribe option is located just below the comment form on each individual post page.

Also, I finally fixed the search results page. The layout is now showing up correctly and the post titles actually link thru to the posts. What a concept.

My take on the Bible, and Judeo-Christian mythology in general, is completely different than anything I’ve found in the mainstream or even the mainstream fringe. When I started looking into J/C mythology I threw away everything I ever knew about it — I mean everything, I would on occasion spend weeks trying to identify whether what I thought I was reading was actually there, or whether it was something I was projecting onto the text. This has become an ongoing process for me whenever I delve into the mythos.

It’s also been extremely important to find accurate translations & extended explanations of biblical Hebrew. This language does not function even remotely like English, and there is simply no way to translate it with precision in the absence of cultural context. I’ve relied a lot on the endlessly compelling Abarim Publications website for this information, and in particular the Names of God section of the Names Vault.

I should also give credit to Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael for putting me on this quest in the beginning. In the novel, Ishmael shares an interpretation of the Cain & Abel story in which Cain represents up-and-coming, agriculturally-based civilization wiping out the shepherding cultures, represented by Abel. I don’t know if Quinn knows this, but the Cain & Abel story has ever been a skull-cracking problem for even the most learned theologians because it simply makes no sense in the context of any Christian theology. This presentation is the first I’ve ever seen that actually makes perfect sense. And upon inspecting it further, I discovered that this particular lens brings all kinds of things into focus that Quinn evidently missed, perhaps because he escaped having the Bible jackhammered into his head the way I had growing up.

In my reading and researching, there are a few fundamental things I’ve realized about our conception of Judeo-Christian mythology that are just completely wrong.

1. The original creation-force in Genesis, Elohim, is not the same concept Christians worship as “God” today. (And maybe Jews too, but I don’t know.)

Elohim is the first name of God used in Genesis, and it is mysterious because it is plural, while God is actually one. It’s a mystery, but as Arie explains at Abarim Publications, “Though certainly much debated, this Name (still most probably) has to do with the first God-experience that people had; awe or fear for the powers of nature,” and that, “Bottom line: the Name Elohim has something to do with powers: The Powers That Be; The Many Powered.”

After further reading and meditation, I concluded that Elohim has more in common with Wakan Tanka and the Tao than with any anthropomorphized, personified deity projection. Some level of understanding of Wakan Tanka is especially helpful here. From the link above, a quote from a Lakota medicine man named Lame Deer:

You can’t explain it except by going to the circles within circles idea, the spirit splitting itself up into stones, trees, tiny insects even, making them all wakan by his everpresence. And in turn all these myriad of things which make up the universe flowing back to their source, united in the one Grandfather spirit.

Plural, yet one. I believe this is much closer to the original concept of Elohim than a white-bearded white dude on a throne. In fact, I don’t even think the word “God” applies to Elohim. English doesn’t have an equivalent word.

2. Elohim’s evolution runs in tandem with the line of paganism’s evolution. Though intertwined, they are distinct, and both Biblical literature and the archaeological record demonstrate periods of disentanglement. Elohim mythology is fundamentally separate from civilization’s mythologies.

With the rise of civilization and its pantheons of pretend gods that don’t actually exist, the name Elohim changed, and continued changing, in what I believe was a reaction by the ancient proto-Hebrews to distinguish Elohim and themselves from these.

The difference between the two is that the Elohim concept dates back to the paleolithic, prior to the advent of farming, and is fundamental to an animist worldview. The proto-Hebrews tried very hard to maintain this worldview and developed shepherding, as opposed to farming, as their primary subsistence strategy. Shepherding is in some ways similar to nomadic hunter-forager subsistence — it is essentially a domesticated version of following game from place to place throughout the year, and as such, would have no reason to view themselves as separate from nature the way farming cultures did.

That notion of separateness underlies farming cultures and places humans in a competitive relationship with nature rather than a dependent one. The same singular-plural Spirit that was once viewed as the source-of-all now becomes an adversary, and requires equally nebulous, farming-friendly “spirits” to ensure the nature Spirit doesn’t ruin the harvest. Over time those natural processes that could be ported to agriculture — fertility, growth, rebirth and the like — got pulled from their places on the other side of fence, placed in an imaginary spirit realm, personified, named, and eventually became the pantheons associated with early farming civilizations.

Much of the Old Testament is devoted to the problem of keeping the ancient Hebrew culture true to its original concept of God, e.g., Elohim, in the face of tremendous cultural, political, and military pressure from the civilizations growing ever larger in the Mesopotamian region. The books of the Prophets are filled to overflowing with admonitions to stop worshipping “false gods,” “false idols” and the like specifically because they are not real. For example, Jeremiah 10:4-5 (NIV):

(4) They adorn it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails
so it will not totter.

(5) Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field,
their idols cannot speak;
they must be carried
because they cannot walk.
Do not fear them;
they can do no harm
nor can they do any good.”

I have written about real vs. not-real elsewhere. Nature and our connection to it is real; and I contend that the Elohim-Tao-Wakan-Tanka animating force of nature is real. Farming and civilizational developments are not-real to the degree that these are separated from nature. The pantheons that arise from farming and civilization are equally not-real. Elohim mythology could not be more separate from civilization’s pantheistic paganisms.

3. Christianity is not and has never been a development of Elohim mythology. It is Roman paganism, plain and simple.

Everyone knows Emperor Constantine got saved in 312 AD, and from that point forward the names of Catholic (which means universal) deities got plastered over preexisting pagan deities & holidays until the whole empire was officially Christian. All major Christian holidays were originally pagan. A lot of minor ones, too, especially those named after Catholic saints. We celebrate Halloween because the European pagan subjects of the Holy Empire wouldn’t give it up.

Imagine you’re a Roman soldier fighting under the tutelage of the deity Mars. Then one day you hear that the deity is now called Jesus. What exactly has changed?

Imagine you’re a Roman general suppressing insurrections and expanding the Empire’s territories for the glory of Jupiter. Then one day you find out you’re now doing these for the glory of God the Father. What exactly has changed?

So far as I can tell, all Christianity and the Catholic Church (since it was the only church until the Reformation) managed to do was thrust Roman paganism forward through history under another set of names. None of it — including later Protestant Christianity — has anything whatever to do with either Jesus or Elohim. I don’t care how much ink has been devoted to Christian theology by learned scholars and wise men. I don’t care how complex and Christianly-symbolic the liturgy. Nowhere in Christendom does anyone even attempt to tease apart this conflation of Roman pagan deities from Christian names — until they do, Christianity will always be Roman paganism by another name.

4. Jesus was an anarcho-primitivist dropout and a memetic mutation

Everything Jesus did and said was in opposition to civilization and empire. He walked away from a lucrative career and hit the road on foot to tell people that life in civilization is fucked up, that they can find abundance and joy outside of it, that the meek and the poor shall inherit the earth, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

Any reading of any gospel — Nicene-approved or otherwise — comes down to basically the same philosophy: there is safety in dropout mode; there is danger in embracing civilization’s honors; heaven and eternity are already here on earth for those who choose it. This makes perfect sense in light of the original Hebrew concept of Elohim: “…the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.” (Gospel of Thomas)

What I personally find inspiring is that the things Jesus taught are practically a road map for extrication. Had his message not been so violently oppressed, then absorbed into the mainstream culture and rendered impotent, it may have triggered a sizable dropout movement within the Roman Empire. TPTB have held this memetic mutation at bay for two millennia, but it’s looking more and more attractive to us here on the brink of global collapse. Downsize, trust the land, gifting as a form of economy, all of this is evident in Jesus’ teachings.

There’s a reason the meek shall inherit the Earth. I would say almost anyone on the extrication path chooses “meekness” precisely because we have a better chance of inheriting the Earth in the end. We get it.

Concluding notes. This already got quite a bit longer than I expected and I’m nowhere near done hashing through this. For the time being I am going to post this, and pick back up after the weekend.

Sidebar: since it’s Easter weekend, last year’s Easter post might be worth a read if you haven’t already.

05.18.2012 Continued

The following is an addendum to the above. I had originally planned to do an entire new post, but I only got one more item before I realized that everything else I had to say was a rehashing of what I’d already written. So, instead of a brand new post, I’m tagging it onto the end of this post.

5. Elohim mythology — and Jesus’ teachings, by extension — do not encourage or condone coercive, political religion over all the world. This is an artifact of imperial paganism that got carried forward in history along with the underlying pagan mythologies. Elohim mythology & Jesus’ teachings encourage extrication from empire, not establishment of it.

This goes along with #4 from my previous post. One of the most eye-opening unlearning experiences I ever had with regard to this subject came during an email exchange with an Orthodox Jewish gentleman, whose name I now forget because it was so long ago. He explained to me that the Ten Commandments were part of the original legal covenant of the Jews with their God, and were never intended for Gentiles. The only laws intended for Gentiles were the seven Noachide laws. These are super basic laws that anyone with a shred of common decency and compassion probably follows anyway.

It was quite a light bulb moment and brought into focus numerous things that Jesus taught to both Gentiles and his fellow Jews. The entire reason the ancient Hebrew culture came into being was to separate from the pagan civilizations springing up all over Middle East, and to remain true to the original Elohim from the Garden. As a Jew, this cultural separation would have been central to Jesus’ identity; as a prophet, teacher, messiah or what-have-you — or even as just a really really smart guy 2000 years ahead of his time — he understood the wisdom of remaining separate, of not being brainwashed by civilization’s stories.

This theme of remaining separate carries through the entire Bible, all the way through to the end of Revelation. It is always a small contingent who separate, everyone thinks they’re crazy, then when TSHTF their separation is what saves them from the disaster that befalls everyone else.

Now, there are indeed places in the Old Testament where the Israelites go on the warpath and kick the living shit out of some culture or other that was minding its own business. I would have to go back and trace this out to be certain, but if memory serves, this kind of behavior comes about only after the Israelites had spent many generations in captivity as slaves to the Egyptians. Their own culture had been decimated; what they knew from civilization got incorporated into their own culture. The nature of the ancient Hebrew God seems to change in conjunction with the level of the Israelites’ exposure to civilization. This is not an excuse, just an observation of the effects of Elohim-paganism entanglement.

(On a side note, I am in fact aware that no archaeological evidence exists for the Hebrew enslavement by Egyptians or their subsequent exodus. The important point is what can be learned from the mythology. If the archaeology supports, or denies, the mythology, so much the better.)

I got the fracking part wrong but everything else so far seems on the money. From Energy Bulletin:

A crisis situation has developed at a gas and condensate production platform in the Elgin field in the North Sea. Gas is leaking out of a well near a offshore platform at a rate of approximately 2 kilograms per second (12 MMCF/day if gas), and a large sheen (assumed to be condensate) has been observed on the water. All workers on Total’s Elgin PUQ (production-utilities-quarters) Platform plus those on the Rowan Viking drilling rig, which had been working next to it, have been evacuated. On Monday, workers on a platform and drilling rig at the Shell-operated Shearwater field (4 miles / 6.4 km away) were also evacuated. There is currently a two-mile vessel exclusion zone around the site and a no-fly zone. As current winds are light, the most immediate concern is the potential for explosion both at the PUQ and elsewhere. While it is possible that the leak rate will lessen over time, the Rowan Gorilla V jack-up drilling rig is being provisioned by Total for a possible relief well that could take months to drill.

The gas leak is occurring about 150 yards from an open-flame flare stack. So far the wind has been blowing the gas away from the flare, but if the wind shifts or dies before the flare either goes out on its own or is put out, the whole fucking thing will ignite.

It looks like the trigger, astrologically speaking, is a square between Pisces Chiron and Sagittarius North Node. That is some very serious karma.

I have a chart prepared but it is too late at the moment for me to dig through it. I’ll have more on this in the next couple of days.

And special thanks to commenter Gaianne for bringing this to my attention.

Venkat borrows Nassim Taleb’s metaphor of the hydra from his forthcoming book Antifragility. The point of the metaphor is to demonstrate how an antifragile system works: when hit with an shock, an antifragile system will respond by becoming more robust, just like cutting off one of the hydra’s heads will result in two new ones springing forth.

In this brief interview, Taleb explicitly cites both nature and evolution as examples of antifragility, of the hydra in action so to speak. But here’s the thing: the hydra mythology is itself a metaphor for the complete and final defeat of nature.

And in fact, all of Greco-Roman mythology is rooted in the defeat of nature and the rise of civilization as The Divinely Ordained Way Of Things.

Is this remotely useful? Isn’t this the mythology that got us where we are right now? I understand that Taleb uses it simply as a metaphor, but to see someone even of Taleb’s stature left without a better metaphor seems really telling. Our smartest and most influential thinkers don’t even have access to any competing archetypal universes.

The contents of our irrational, collective unconscious drive us with far more power than does our supposedly almighty rationality and logic. The metanarratives into which we fit our experiences determine the outcomes of our efforts. If we don’t get some better stories, we’ll just repeat the same mistakes again and again.

I don’t like Western pantheism, nor any of the pantheisms that trace their genealogies back to Sumeria. Pantheisms in general are fundamentally agricultural — agriculture being the cornerstone development upon which we’ve built our crowns of shit, making up stories about nonexistent deities along the way to legitimize the destruction we dole out so nonchalantly.

The only Mesopotamian mythology that calls bullshit on all the rest is the ancient Hebrew mythos as recorded in Genesis. And in fact this is the only Western-Mesopotamian mythology I am aware of that posits nature, and those who adapt successfully, as ultimately victorious. I realize that is a supremely distasteful thing to say but it’s true. Don’t we need a story, a mythos, in which we learn from our mistakes and create something better? Is shooting ourselves in the foot really the best mythology we can come up with?

Last week, after a four year misadventure on an ultra low-fat vegan diet (no meat, no cheese, no eggs), I turned around 180 degrees and resumed eating all those verboten things again. I had been feeling shitty for a long time, in particular with muscle pain, muscle weakness, penetrating fatigue, and some weird neurological symptoms and I decided to take drastic measures.

…in these nearly five years I allowed the authority of my doctor to persuade me to drive down my cholesterol by all means available. I now regard this as a mistake, perhaps even a personal fiasco. I think I have done a lot of damage to my system and that it will take a long time to repair. But I am back in the realm of meat, cheese, and eggs. And, yes, I do eat a lot of vegetables, especially green and leafy ones, and I am watching my carbohydrates (but not eschewing them).

But I wonder if doctors are losing their legitimacy now in a way similar to the other authority figures in our culture: the political leaders, the bankers economists, the business executives. To get back to where I started this blog, all is swindle these days. And medicine, being the life-and-death racket that it is, may be the biggest swindle of them all.

There’s a joke that used to circulate around the Amish-influenced, meat-and-potatoes rural Pennsylvania counties where I grew up: “Why do people at the health food store all look so unhealthy?” It wouldn’t be funny if it wasn’t a legitimate question.

I think veganism, and to a lesser extent vegetarianism, end up being the flip-side of the processed American cheez-doodle diet. All these really manage to do is replace processed meat products with processed soy products. They are still fundamentally part of the same binary narrative, and as such, are no better for most peoples’ health; you just end up with a different range of deficiencies and excesses.

I’m a fan of the paleo diet. It can get pretty strict and obsessive just like any diet, but it does offer a great rule of thumb: eat only things that humans are evolved to properly digest. Do not eat things that humans are not evolved to properly digest.

We are not evolved to properly digest grasses and grass seed, which is what all grains are. Nor are we evolved to digest any one or two things to the exclusion of everything else. We evolved as omnivores — we do not have two stomachs as grazing animals do; we do not have the exceedingly short digestive tract and intense stomach acidity that carnivores do; our teeth evolved to both grind and tear, and our digestive tracts are mid-length to process both plant and animal foods. Our various cells, organs and tissues require a swath of nutrients that cannot be found in a strictly vegan or carnivorous diet. If we can just respect our evolution — and I’m as guilty of not doing this as anyone — our healths will be just fine.

If this issue is of interest to you, check out the book The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. Here’s Keith in an interview sharing her experiences and research.