Deep Shite

Freedom’s just another word for…

What’s the first thing you ask yourself when you wake up in the morning?

In a dialogue between Piglet and Winnie the Pooh, Piglet claims that his first thought is of what wonderful adventures await him. Pooh says his first thought is of breakfast, whereby he believes his and Piglet’s thoughts amount to pretty much the same thing.

Many people in these times of crisis wake up from a troubled sleep and the first thing they experience is fear. Fear of the future. There are so many frightening things to worry about – food shortages, governments becoming more and more totalitarian, rampant inflation, war, rising fuel costs, prolonged pandemics, long-term side effects of medications – the list goes on and on.

And some of us ask ourselves: how can we circumvent a decidedly unfavourable future, what can we do to prevent the planet, or at least human existence on it, from going belly-up?

Perhaps you have heard the phrase attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Sure, it sounds wise. But what does it really mean? What was that thin brown guy who looked like Ben Kingsley telling us to do?

I asked Funky the Flying Monkey, who is my advisor when it comes to things too deep for my rapidly shrinking brain, what he thought. Funky looked at me with that look of scorn he is so good at. He didn’t even deign to jump down off the climber and speak to me eye to eye, primate to primate, but looked down on me from on high while he told me what he thought.

“The future, the future. Why is everybody so bloody fixated on the future? The future is overrated. Bah. Forget the future.”

“Forget the future?! But look at what the future has in store for us! All the terrible things happening in the world today are ruining our future. And what if an even more terrible future comes, like Schwab’s Great Reset, or Fauci’s World of Medical Tyranny or Huxley’s Brave New World or The Return of Velour Tracksuits?”

“Stop right there. Your brain’s starting to smoke from the friction. The future is not going to ‘come’. It can’t. It doesn’t exist.”

“Doesn’t exist? That can’t be right Funky. I’ve got a calendar, I can show it to you, and all of my future appointments for this and next year are marked and planned. Like here: March 31st, ten days from now in the future, at 9.00 o’clock, meeting with my seminar cook to plan a seminar we’re holding in October, in the future.”

“Just saying it over and over doesn’t make it true. Doesn’t make it exist. That’s thinking like a politician, or a marketing agent unable to find any real excuse for their product. ‘Repeat after me: this handy piece of gold-plated dogshit will change your life and bring you ecstatic moments of joy around the clock. All that for only 49.99. Available at your local WhaleMart’. Ugh! The future’s an urban myth. It never comes.”

“Okay, if it never comes, if the future doesn’t exist, how is it I can plan an appointment for 9 o’clock on March 31st?”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“It’s in the future. I’ve fixed a date in the future.”

“There you go repeating the word again and italicizing it. Where is this thing you call the future? Where does it exist?”

“On my calendar.”

“And the unicorns on your calendar?”

“They don’t exist. They’re just thought up… Oh, I get it! They’re in my mind. The unicorns are in my mind, they’re not really anywhere.”

“Like the future. Or the past for that matter. Look at Pooh and Piglet.”

“They don’t exist either? Wait – you’ve read the book?”

“Of course I’ve read the book. A.A. Milne was on the curriculum at Monkeyshines University. The thing about Pooh and Piglet is that both of them are aware enough to realize that the future, in their case breakfast as an adventure and adventure as an adventure, is manifested by acting in the present. Or more simply: the future IS nothing other than the unfolded present. However, the linear way in which your human mind grasps time usually prevents you from acknowledging this.”

“The future is all in my head?”

“Where else would it be?”

“Huh?”

“Are all homo saplings as dense as you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Good. Then write this down, maybe someone reading it will get it: As a more or less conscious animal experiencing the world through the lens of a linear sense of time, what you call ‘the present’ is all you have to work with. So, if you want to change what you think of as the future, your only choice is to change the present.”

“Change the present?”

“Is that all you wrote down?”

“No, no, I wrote it all down. But let me get this straight; you mean if I want something to happen in the future, I’ve gotta make it happen now, in the present?”

“Close, but you aren’t getting a cigar.”

“Hmmm. Oh, I get it. It’s like the law of attraction!”

“The law of attraction? Electromagnetic forces?”

“No, no, it’s the exact opposite of a magnet. To attract good things, you’ve got to have good thoughts.”

“You’re making that up.”

“No no, it’s a natural law, or maybe it’s a philosophy or a concept that states: ‘like attracts like’. If I have positive thoughts, I’ll attract positive things. If I have negative thoughts, I’ll attract negative things.”

“You must think a lot of ugly thoughts.”

“Very funny.”

“Does it have anything to do with the fact that you’re attracted to females with very little body hair? Kind of disgusting, if you ask me. It’s no wonder you’re the only primates who wear clothes. Yuck.”

“There was a book, and a film.”

“Oh, well then. It must be true, right? No need for me to explain any further. Read the book. Watch the film. You’ll be enlightened immediately.”

“I get it, you’re being sarcastic. Okay, can you explain it again?”

“I’ll try. Let’s say you want to go to a party and you want to wear your fuzzy brown sweatshirt.”

“I don’t have a fuzzy brown sweatshirt.”

“You should. It would make you look almost presentable. And cover up the fact that you don’t have enough body hair to make you attractive to nubile females. But just for argument’s sake, let’s say you do have a positively stunning fuzzy brown sweatshirt. And you want to wear it to the party. But you’re wearing that Che Guevara t-shirt. What do you do?”

“That’s easy, I take off the t-shirt and put on the sweatshirt.”

“Really? You don’t wait for the magical appearance of a future in which you’re wearing an attractive fuzzy brown sweatshirt just because you’re thinking attractive thoughts about being more hirsute? You don’t meditate on positive sweatshirts and visualize your appearance at a party in proper attire?”

“No, that would be silly. Oh, I get it. If I want something for the future that’s different from what I have now, I have to change it myself.”

“Of course. Because you only have the ‘now’. There is nothing but the ‘now’. I thought I had made that clear.”

“It sounds too simple. There must be a catch.”

“The catch is that you still believe the future exists. You don’t see the future as a construct of the limiting structure of your mind.”

“But what about my worries about the future? Are you saying I should just deny all of the signs telling me what’s coming?”

“Focussing on and acting in the present has nothing to do with denial. Allow your present personality to experience the present in an open, focussed way, and allow for action or inaction. Your actions are part of the present continuum in which your consciousness experiences life.”

“Don’t worry, be happy?”

“You’re quoting embarrassing lines from songs? Really?”

“Well, this whole business is so abstract that no one will read this to the end. Can’t you just sum it up? Something like Carpet D.M.?”

“Horace shit.”

“What?”

“If you’re going to pun, I’ll just pun right back.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what it means in practice? Your words don’t really give me any instructions on what to do. How am I to be the change I wish to see? What do I have to do?”

“Do what your heart tells you to do. Stop compromising your present for a non-existent future. Fix your awareness in the ever-unfolding present without fear.”

“And then the future will follow?”

“I give up!”

Wait, wait. I’ll rephrase that. What do I gain by following my heart and uncompromisingly focussing on the present?”

“Freedom.”

It’s Sunday: Placebo Domingo!

Placebo. I like that word. It sounds like a Spanish opera singer. Or like a Ukranian potato dish. Something comforting. Placebo actually comes from Latin and it literally means “I shall please.” Maybe a good motto for an escort service.

The problem for the escort service is that most people, when they hear the word placebo, think of the meaning in the context of medicine: “an inactive material, often in the form of a capsule, pill or tablet, that is visually identical in appearance to a drug being tested in a clinical trial.“ I have my doubts that inactive escorts who look like pills would attract many customers. But who knows? You can’t argue taste.

The administering of placebos is actually required when testing new drugs as a so-called “control“. The reasoning is that if the drug has no more success than the inactive material, it should not be approved for use.

The Mirriam-Webster dictionary goes a bit further in its definition, saying that a placebo is “a usually pharmacologically inert preparation prescribed more for the mental relief of the patient than for its actual effect on a disorder“. There are various subtle assumptions hiding within this definition, but I’ll just leave that for you to think about. The Oxford Dictionary is somewhat clearer: “A medicine or procedure prescribed for the psychological benefit to the patient rather than for any physiological effect.“ Now there’s a can of worms. By that definition, Prozac would be a placebo. I don’t think Eli Lilly and Co. would be pleased to hear that. Oh wait, a peer-reviewed study did in fact discover that Prozac attains no better results than a medicine with no active ingredients. So I guess the girls and guys at Oxford are right.

The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health comments: “The placebo effect is a beneficial health outcome resulting from a person’s anticipation that an intervention will help. How a health care provider interacts with a patient also may bring about a positive response that’s independent of any specific treatment“.

The question which always wanders into my brain in connection with placebo is, how far does it go? How far into the working physics of the world can belief reach? How much of what we experience in the physical world is the result of an underlying stream of belief systems that we as part of the world tap into?

One of the most well-known and medically documented cases illustrating the so-called “placebo-response” involved a man by the name of ‘Mr. Wright’. In 1957 in Long Beach, California, Mr. Wright’s doctor, Dr. Philip West, injected him with a serum named Krebiozen. Wright, who was on his death bed, had heard of this horse serum that appeared to be very effective against cancer and begged his doctor to administer it. Mr. Wright’s tumours, which were reportedly “the size of oranges”, melted overnight. The thing is, the serum that was injected into Mr. Wright’s veins was a placebo, an inert preparation.

Two months later, Mr. Wright read medical reports saying the horse serum was a quack remedy and suffered an immediate relapse. ”Don’t believe what you read in the papers,” Dr. West told Mr. Wright and injected him with what he said was ”a new super-refined double strength” version of the drug. Actually, it was water, but again, the tumor melted.

Mr. Wright was ”the picture of health” for another two months — until he read a definitive report stating that Krebiozen was worthless. He died two days later.” (Blakeslee, 1998).

If you enter a phrase like “fear lowers immunity” into any internet search engine you typically get over 3 million responses. Enter “fear kills“ and you get well over 9 million entries. Even if you sift out the fevered music videos and the patently misguided contributions, you have a whole heapload (I invented that word just now) of evidence that there’s a kind of dark side to this whole business. If fear were used in clinical trials the effect would be called nocebo – a harmless substance or treatment that when taken by or administered to a patient is associated with harmful side effects or worsening of symptoms (Mirriam-Webster).

I remember watching a film called „Sphere“, an adaptation of a book by Michael Crichton which, to my own shame, I have not read. The fascinating thing for me about the plot was that the people who had contacted the shiny sphere began to manifest their thoughts in the material world. Being a kind of horror story, their fears were manifested and not their joys. It wasn’t much fun for them.

Stanislaw Lem wrote a wonderful novel (which I did read, albeit in translation – my Polish is nonexistent despite my father having grown up surrounded by Poles) called Solaris where something similar happens. This too was filmed. This too led to complications for the characters manifesting their innermost thoughts and desires.

A book published in 2006 called „The Secret“ by Rhonda Byrne has, according to Wikipedia, sold 30 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 50 languages. Not everyone who reads the book becomes a Theosophist à la Blavatsky of course, but apparently the techniques for manifesting your thoughts work well if you’re looking for parking spots.

So, where am I going with this? You get what you believe you’ll get? So it seems. The esoteric community has long expressed the thought that we are all co-creators in this universe. It’s a scary thought. The characters in Michael Crichton’s novel, once they realized that they were manifesting their hidden fears, decided to manifest self-induced amnesia, forgetting that they had the ability to manifest. Maybe the esoteric community is right and we have all collectively administered a good dose of amnesia to ourselves and haven’t a blinking clue of what the underlying currents of reality are really about.

Abraham Heschel once wrote: „Under the running sea of our theories and scientific explanations lies the aboriginal abyss of radical amazement.“

I like that.

If we take this idea to the extreme, we could begin to wonder if not all of the medical interventions that we subject ourselves to today aren’t just placebos designed to convince us deeply enough of our ability to heal that we do in fact, from a level far deeper than the material, biophysical or biochemical level, manifest healing.

Medical science still wants to take the observers out of the equation. Perhaps because we still want easy solutions to our so-called illnesses and deficiencies and maladies. But what if the easy solutions, when they work, only work because they are ways of convincing us to touch a deeper reality? What if the high blood pressure medication I take only works because I and my doctor and my family and friends and co-workers all believe in the little white pills? What if the chemical and tissue realignments were actually the surface manifestation of a deeper realignment of consciousness and wouldn’t even happen if that deeper consciousness didn’t allow for it?

Thankfully, there is research going on to determine the extent to which placebo can be used as a tool to guide us towards more holistic and sustainable health. However, as long as placebos are still considered to be “fake drugs“, as an article entitled “The Power of the Placebo Effect“ published by the Harvard Medical School refers to them, it is obvious that preconceived notions of what interventions result in health will prevent any groundbreaking discoveries, let alone the paradigm shift that seems so necessary.

Are the “fake drugs” and the “real drugs” all the same thing, all just placebos, all just designed to call up our own innate abilities to heal ourselves and, possibly, heal the world?

Now that is scary.

At least the guys at Harvard admit that: “Treating yourself with your mind is possible, but there is more to the placebo effect than positive thinking.“

Thanks guys, I agree.

New to me

Read the following at your own risk. The same goes for not reading it.

Okay, I figured it was time to start getting all that important information out there to you, all the stuff I’ve been channelling for the wise guys on the other side of the fence.

Yes, I’m one of those guys who listens to people you can’t normally see or hear. You can’t normally see or hear them because your eyes and ears aren’t accustomed to seeing and hearing people who are dead or who don’t take well to expressing themselves in flesh. And a lot of you apparently don’t believe that people who are dead or not incarnate are nevertheless available to chew the fat. But they are. And they do.

So, let’s begin.

You’ve probably noticed that there’s some weird shit going on in the world today. Okay, you’re right, that’s an understatement. The bliss bunnies are saying that the world is in transition, trying to elevate its vibrations to achieve a new plane of existence. I don’t know much about that; Mother Earth doesn’t talk to me much. Well, she does actually, she just doesn’t say much about the affairs of men except: jeez are you guys dense, or what? Mud for brains and hearts of stone, that’s how she sees us. But she hasn’t given up on us. Mothers don’t give up on their children. At least not until the bitter end.

But I’m getting off track. I started this because the guys (I’m using guys as a gender-neutral noun here) shouting through the barrier are all perplexed about the Another Fine Mess we’ve got ourselves into, to quote the title of a Laurel and Hardy movie. They’re talking about this business of COVID-19, or as most people tend to call it: the Corona Pandemic.

First and foremost it’s Louis Pasteur who’s shouting: No no no no. Or maybe non non non non. What comes through is him ranting about how he’s sorry that he got it all wrong and how we should be listening to some other guy he calls „that turd Antoine Béchamp“. Go figure. If I interpret this right (and that’s always the problem with this „speaking for the dead“ business of course), Pasteur wants to rescind all of his theories and especially this business of vaccinations, a procedure which he claims has never really worked. All of his vaccinations were really failures and the germ theory was never proven, it’s just a wild theory. He tried to renege on his death bed, but things had gone too far and nobody was willing to listen – too much money to be earned eliminating evil germs I guess. He feels really awful about it, but he claims he did it to impress some young lady whom he found very ou la la. Okay, so where does that leave us?

Well, it leaves us running around with our mouths and noses covered with ridiculous rags for no good reason other than to save money on lipstick and mouth wash. And it leaves us distancing ourselves from our fellow humans when we should be standing them by. And it leaves us disinfecting hands until the skin falls off our fingers and accomplishing absolutely nothing but more business for dermatologists and chemists. And it means we’re all waiting with bated breath for a vaccine that will, at best, just poison us a little more. And most of all, it leaves us AFRAID! Okay, I can understand why Louis keeps pulling out his hair even though he doesn’t really have any hair any more, being what some people might call a ghost. Ghost hair is just not pullable.

Then there’s this guy Kary Mullis. Claims he won the Nobel prize in 1993 but that nobody is listening to him now. Duhhhh – most people don’t even listen to their family, friends and neighbours who are alive, so it’s kind of asking a lot to expect people to listen to a dead stranger, Nobel prize notwithstanding. Anyway, the Kary guy says he invented the PCR test that everyone is using to figure out who to burn at the stake next or, failing that, to put under house arrest. And now he’s saying it doesn’t work. No wait, he says it does work, it just doesn’t prove anything. Especially it doesn’t prove anything about corona viruses. He says no one even really knows what a virus does.

I think a lot of computer nerds would disagree. But it would definitely be a real bummer for the computer world if someone found out that biological viruses actually aren’t destructive or pathogenic, but in fact are an integral part of a biological system and are committed to, for instance, eliminating detritus. Oops, getting off track again. But really, wouldn’t that be a pain in the ass? If viruses turn out to be something essential or even good, the computer nerds would have to change the name of their computer viruses to something that really is destructive, something selfishly evil and pathogenic. Maybe something like: computer trumps.

So why is the whole world banging its head against the wall?

Well, this guy Oswald Spengler keeps knocking and he says it’s for the same reason that people always banged their heads against walls. Because they trust their governments to tell them the truth and forget that their governments are made of people just as clueless, spineless and self-serving as the Folk. I don’t know why he keeps calling the people „the Folk“. Oh, he says he was a German.

My mother says I should stop being so sarcastic. Okay mom. She was German too, but she wasn’t a historian like Spengler. She was an alcoholic with a very fragile and loving heart, bless her soul. She died in the same year that Kary Mullis got his Nobel prize. I don’t think they knew each other. But maybe that’s an example of synchronicity? If my mom hadn’t died in 1993 and instead died in April of this year, she would now be included in the COVID-19 mortality statistics, regardless of the fact that she died as a consequence of driving into a big tree. Yeah, statistics. And there he is, to round up my first blog: Winston Churchill. Laughing and coughing and smelling like stale aftershave. I’m starting to wonder if disembodied spirits can become senile because he keeps saying the same thing over and over again and laughing hysterically: “I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself”. Thanks Winston. Come again tomorrow when I channel some statistics.

Oh. Before I go, Winston wants me to give you his summary of the politicians of today, whose handling of the Corona Travesty he apparently watches quite closely from the other side of the veil (are you listening Boris?): “They occasionally stumble over the truth, but hastily pick themselves up and hurry on as if nothing happened.” Thank you Prime Minister.