Apollo

         In 1967 I was working on the Apollo project at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. I was a computer programmer working on the spacecraft simulator the astronauts used to train for the flight to the moon. We all had our own rental cars and I, in this, my first real job, was enthralled to be able to pay a little more than the rate we were reimbursed in order to drive the Shelby 350GTs and Corvettes that Hertz rented at the Houston airport. I finally settled on a nice blue Corvette that cost me $15 a week and happily bombed around in it. Our team worked second shift and what with the vagaries of computer and other problems I frequently got off at 9 or 10 PM at which time I would head off to my favorite watering holes which increasingly became the infamous Gaiety Supper Club in Galveston, about an hour’s drive south.

I totally adored the once elegant nightclub that was now nothing more than a whorehouse and bar. The sinister seamyness and rawness of life at the club enticed me night after night. I drank and became friendly with pimps with real six-shooters on their hips, met wild, outrageous customers, listened to story after story of the ‘working girls’, and in the wee hours of the morning after closing the club would frequently go out with Joyce, the owner, and her assistant Bobbie drinking until 8 or 9 AM. I mean I’m talking drinking 40 or 50 or 60 drinks sometimes! I could tell because my drinks were $1 a piece and I would only put $1 or $2 in the jukebox and I always started out with $50 or $60. I began drinking Hennessey brandy and soda at the club because I read in the New York Times Book Review that’s what Winston Churchill’s father drank. I thought buying the Sunday New York Times while in Houston would anchor my life in some way. Bobbie, Joyce and I once went down to Harold’s on the beach to drink beer at about 6 AM. Harold was an ex-Marine who loved us all and he didn’t close his place until God knows when. Joyce gave me directions and I just kept going and drove my Corvette right down on to the beach and starting driving doughnuts around Harold’s grass beer shack spraying sand all over and honking the horn until Harold woke up and woozily came out to greet us, all of us laughing like crazed hyenas which, of course, we were.

         Joyce was beautiful and truly wild. Half Cherokee Indian and half Mexican, she once got a load on at the club before it closed and Bobbie took a long scarf and tied her in her barstool so she wouldn’t fall off. One time I was just warming up, drinking my usual quick 4 or 5 drinks so I could begin to talk to everyone and Joyce looked at me across the bar and asked me how old I was. When I told her 24 her eyes welled up with tears and she blurted out, “Oh, you are just a baby. You look much older than that.” It was true and it was to be 15 long years before I entered my early adulthood and now in later years my childhood. About 4 years ago I was working as a baker in a girlfriend’s coffee shop and was talking in sketches about my life to one of the college students working there while we were on a break. He quickly grasped the drift and said, “You are living your life backwards.”

         I would drive, completely drunk, from Galveston back up to Webster, the Houston suburb where the Spacecraft Center is located. I always thought it humorous when I would get caught in traffic jams of those going to work when I would just be coming back ‘home’ to my hotel. Frequently, I would go into the coffee shop of the hotel and eat breakfast and ask the busboy to pour me what I thought was a hangover cure, ½ orange juice and ½ seltzer water. They hated to do this as it always fizzed all over the place and made a mess. After eating I would go up to my room, ask to be called at 3 PM, and totally crash, only to do the same thing over again the next night. And this was my week day schedule. On the weekends I would look for excitement. I’m sure I found it but I had begun to experience alcoholic blackouts and so I couldn’t remember. Saturday afternoons I’d frequent the boat drag races and drink beer with Red Adair’s guys who put out all those oil well fires. They all drove red Cadillac Eldorados.

I once came out of a blackout driving my Corvette on a desolate flat back country road in the early morning hours. It was like a surreal movie about someone else as I saw myself driving with one hand with a drink in the other. I looked down at the speedometer to see how fast I was going but couldn’t see the needle. I glanced again and finally saw that I had nearly pegged the needle near 120 or so and hadn’t noticed it. It took all my willpower to mentally force myself to slow down as I had no concept of danger or excess. When I finally got back to the hotel I turned the ignition off and passed out, frozen, with a drink in one hand and the keys in the other and stayed there for about 5 hours despite all the attempts of my co-workers to awaken me and get me out of the locked car. Although the hotel staff became increasingly used to my ‘schedule’, shall we say, I totally shocked the desk clerk one day when I called up and asked him what day it was. He told me and then I asked what time it was. He handled it all real well until I asked whether it was morning or evening.

         I also hung out in George’s, a small bar in a little town about 20 minutes south. I frequently ate dinner here and would go off to Galveston if there didn’t seem to be anything exciting about to happen at George’s. On night I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me at the bar and he began to tell me about his skydiving. Then he told me about his used airplane parts business. In south Texas this is a euphemism for smuggling in and out of Mexico. I became increasingly skeptical as we drank and drank. We began to speak of guns, which I love, especially machine guns. He knew as many technical details as I and told me he had an extensive machine gun collection. The last straw was when he told me of the large female black African lion he had at his house. I got angry and called him on it.

“Oh come on!”

“Yeah. You just come with me and I’ll show you.”

“Okay.”

Off we went in his Pontiac Safari station wagon. His wife icily greeted us and my friend escorted me into his den to wait while he and his wife went off to argue about where he had been all night. Every wall of the den was covered with machine guns and automatic weapons of all kinds, maybe forty or more. My friend returned and we went out back to a large cage where the lion was. I quietly got into the station wagon, the only safe place I could think of. The lion leapt up into the back of the wagon from the tailgate and we headed back to George’s. I wasn’t saying a word, obviously my bluff had been totally called. A few minutes down the road the lion was breathing heavily over my shoulder and was about to put her paw on me. I slunk down in my seat as much as possible and mumbled unintelligibly. My friend stopped, yelled at the lion and then went to the back of the wagon and tied her chain to the tailgate somehow so she stayed in back. We reentered George’s, lion first, my friend holding the chain second, and me a distant third. The three black girls who worked as barmaids and waitresses took one look at this procession and split out through the kitchen. Two of them never returned to work at all, ever. The last I saw, a drunk at the bar went to pet the lion on the head and the lion bit his hand. I slunk out the door and went ‘home’. It wasn’t until months later I ever recalled the incident as being unusual or out of the ordinary. What the hell, I was literally flying to the moon at work every day so my nocturnal activities didn’t seem at all out of the ordinary and I never spoke of my work when I was out carousing or of my carousing at work.     

The Drama of the Gifted Child - the Search for the True Self Alice Miller - excerpts and notes

The Drama of the Gifted Child - the Search for the True Self

Alice Miller

Revised Edition 1997 ─ the revised edition is important

Alice Miller website: https://www.alice-miller.com/en/

Arguably, one of the most important books of the last century.

“Experience has taught us that we have only one weapon in the enduring struggle against mental illness; the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood.” pg. 1 (opening sentence)

“The repression of brutal abuse experienced during during childhood drives many people to destroy their lives and the lives of others.” pg. 2

“Their (the child who was talented and a high achiever, and, by extension, ANY child) access to the emotional world of their own childhood, however, is impaired─characterized by a lack of respect, a compulsion to control and manipulate, and a demand for achievement.” pg. 6

“The child’s needs for respect, echoing, understanding, sympathy, and mirroring have had to be repressed, with several serious consequences. One such consequence is the person’s inability to experience consciously certain feelings of his own (such as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, helplessness, or anxiety), either in childhood or later in adulthood.” pg. 9

”These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child risks losing the mother’s love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress her emotions. … She will fail to experience them at all but they will nevertheless stay in her body, in her cells, stored up as information that can be triggered by a later event.” pgs. 9-10 (PTSD)

“Several mechanisms can be recognized in the defense against early feelings of abandonment. In addition to simple denial, intellectualization is very commonly encountered as well, since it is a defense mechanism of great power. It can have disastrous results, however, when the mind ignores the vital messages of the body.” pg.11

“Accomodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the “as if” personality.” This person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected off him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that no one could scarcely know how much more there is to him behind this false self. He cannot develop and differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it. Understandably this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. … The integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut off.” pgs. 11-12

“So he killed his anger, and with it a part of himself, in order to preserve the love of his mother. (?He killed his love in order to preserve the love of his mother?) … The difficulties inherent in experiencing and developing one’s own emotions lead to mutual dependency, which prevents individuation. Both parties have an interest in bond permanence…” pg. 13

“An adult can be fully aware of his feelings only if he had caring parents and caregivers. People who were abused or neglected in childhood are missing this capacity and are therefore never overtaken by unexpected emotions. They will admit only those feelings that are accepted and approved by their inner censor, who is their parent’s heir.

Depression and a sense of inner emptiness are the price they must pay for this control. The true self cannot communicate because it has remained unconscious, and therefore undeveloped, in its inner prison. The company of prison warders does not encourage lively development. It is only after it is liberated that the self begins to be articulate, to grow, and to develop its creativity. Where there had been only fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fantasies, an unexpected wealth of vitality is now discovered. This is not a homecoming, since this home has never before existed. This is the creation of home.” pgs. 18-19

“When he presents material that fits the therapist’s knowledge, concepts, and skills─and therefore also his expectations─the patient satisfies his therapist’s wish for approval, echo, understanding, and for being taken seriously. In this way the therapist exercises the same sort of unconscious manipulation as that to which he was exposed as a child. A child can never see through unconscious manipulation. It is like the air he breathes; he knows no other, and it appears to him to be the only breathable air.” pg. 21

“The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality─the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.” pg. 60

“Narcissus was in love with his idealized picture, but neither the grandiose nor the depressive “Narcissus” can really love himself. His passion for his false self makes impossible not only love for others but also, despite all appearances, love for the one person who is fully entrusted to his care: himself.” pg. 67

My parents never received the acknowledgement I never got from them. My own quote

“Probably the greatest of wounds─not to have been loved just as one truly was─cannot heal without the work of mourning. It can be either more or less successfully resisted and covered up (as in grandiosity and depression), or constantly torn open again in the compulsion to repeat.” pg. 87

“We find a similar example in the behavior of addicts. People who as children successfully repressed their intense feelings often try to regain─at least for a short time─their lost intensity of experience with the help of drugs or alcohol.” pg. 81

“Hesse, like so many gifted children, was so difficult for his parents to bear not despite but because of his inner riches. Often a child’s very gifts (his great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness─and his ability to be critical) will confront his parents with conflicts they have long sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations. These regulations must then be rescued at the cost of the child’s development. All this can lead to an apparently paradoxical situation when parents who are proud of their gifted child and whom even admire him are forced by their own repression to reject, suppress, or even destroy what is best, because truest, in that child.” pg. 101

“Oppression and the forcing of submission do not begin in the office, factory, or political party; they begin in the very first weeks of an infant’s life.” pg. 103  

“All our lives we have feared and struggled to ward off something that really cannot happen any longer; it has already happened, at the very beginning of our lives while we were completely dependent.” pg. 105

“The aim of therapy, however, is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient both to confront his own history and to grieve over it. The patient has to discover early memories within himself and must become consciously aware of his parent’s unconscious manipulation and contempt, so that he can free himself from them. As long as he has to make do with a substitute tolerance, borrowed from his therapist or his group, the contemptuous attitudes he inherited from his parents will remain hidden in his unconscious, unchanged despite all his improved intellectual knowledge and intentions. This contemptuous attitude will show itself in the patient's human relationships and will continue to torment him, as long as it functions in the cells of his body. The contents of the unconscious remain unchanged and timeless. It is only as these contents become conscious that change can begin.” pg. 106

“A child can never see through unconscious manipulation. It is like the air he breathes; he knows no other, and it appears to him to be the only breathable air.” pg. 21

“As the child grows up, he cannot cease living his own truth and expressing it somewhere, perhaps in complete secrecy. In this way a person can have adapted completely to the demands of his surroundings and can have developed a false self, but in his perversion of his obsessions he still allows a portion of his true self to survive─in torment. And so the true self lives on, but underground, in the same conditions as the child did with his disgusted mother, whose memory in the meantime he has repressed. In his perversion and his obsessions he constantly reenacts the same drama: A horrified mother is necessary before sexual satisfaction is possible; orgasm … can be achieved only in a climate of self─contempt; criticism can be expressed only in (seemingly) absurd, unaccountable, and frightening obsessive fantasies. Pg. 89

“Mark, thirty-two, who suffered under his perversion and constantly feared the rejection of others, bore within himself the unconscious memory of his mother’s rejection. Without knowing why, he was compelled to do things that his social circle and society in general disapprove of and despise, although he feared the punishment he was provoking. … what he was compelled to seek was not permission to use one or another fetish, but─with the hope of a better outcome─his mother’s disgusted and horrified eye. He looked for that response in his therapist, too,.... This provocation of course recounted what had actually happened at the beginning of Mark’s life. Pg. 91

“Struggling for social acceptance of special forms of addictions, sexual and non-sexual, is one of the many ways to avoid confrontation with our own history.” pg. 92

“The contempt for others in grandiose, successful people always includes disrespect for their own true selves, as their scorn implies: “Without these superior qualities of mine, a person is completely worthless.” this means further: “Without these achievements, these gifts, I could never be loved, would never have been loved.” Grandiosity in the adult guarantees that the illusion continues: “I was loved.” pg. 107

My commentary:

Whew, what an indictment of the human process! We are indelibly patterned, it would seem, by the treatment we receive from our main caregiver, mostly in the first 3 years of life. And this patterning, Miller says, causes us to live our lives as ‘false selves’, ajar from who we really are, ‘our True selves’. 

Thinking about it as a God might though, it couldn’t be any other way FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THE MAJORITY OF THE SPECIES. One of the finest expositions of this is the film ‘The Other Son’ (2021), in which an Israeli and a Palestinian boy discover they have been switched at birth, but not until they are about 12 years old.  Both are so

Few indeed are there who have escaped from this early patterning and live even close to emancipated lives as ‘their true selves’. In the first place, it requires, as absolutely as best as possible, a detailed knowledge of the milieu, events, an emotional content of one’s earliest life. I am so fortunate that when she was alive, my mother sprinkled me with lurid details of my infancy, largely, I see now, when she recognized my massive dysfunctionalism beginning at about puberty: overeating, drinking alcohol, destructive tobacco smoking and wildly asocial, antisocial and destructive interpersonal relating. Simply, I was a mess.

The single most helpful and insightful tool has been NOT attempting to ‘inventory’ my actions and underlying beliefs and behaviors BUT inventorying MY PARENTS, then applying or seeing how all those traits apply to MYSELF. ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS has as its original inventory step, “Took a blameless and searching inventory of OUR parents, because we had, in essence, become them.” This is perhaps the ONLY way out of Miller’s conundrum for the ‘patient’ who

The person attempting to inventory themselves is hopelessly caught in their own patterning OR the patterning and inter-twining of their patterning with the therapist. 

I can’t begin to describe in words how crushed I was when I, with huge difficulty, came to the conclusion that my parents tried to kill their own children. I was only able to gloat over my huge realization, that I had spent a lifetime resisting, for a few minutes when I applied that behavior pattern to MYSELF and realized I acted out the same behavior, and worse, had the same underlying emotional and moral makeup as my despised parents. All this is what I resisted my whole life.

There is a theory that ALL the important changes that have occurred to the Earth and its inhabitants have come about not by gradual change but by meteor and asteroid strikes─sudden and overwhelming changes: Call it quantum evolution. Similarly, the agents of societal change are those who Miller would call

A synopsis of my writings on the “Narcissistic Defense” from Alice Miller and Hyman Spotnitz

The Maturational Agent

“In recent years I have conceptualized my clinical role as that of a maturational agent helping people with psychologically reversible disorders resolve whatever obstacles to personality development they may have experienced.” pg. 16

“No patient wants to be with a therapist who functions perfectly all the time.” pg. 20

“No other profession provides a better opportunity to experience the full spectrum of human emotions. From the bewildering variety of feelings communicated by patient after patient in diverse sequences and tempos, and at different levels of intensity, one distills from this unfolding panorama of psychic change the essence and the flux of human existence.” pg. 20

“An analytic treatment requires from both doctor and patient the accomplishment of serious work, which is employed in lifting internal resistances. Through the overcoming of these resistances the patient’s mental life is permanently changed, is raised to a high level of development and remains protected against fresh possibilities of falling ill. The work of overcoming resistances is the essential function of analytic treatment; the patient has to accomplish it and the doctor makes this possible for him with the help of suggestion operating in an educational sense. For this reason psychoanalytic treatment has been justly been described as a kind of after-education.” Freud, as quoted in Spotnitz, pg. 61 THIS SENTENCE IS SUPER IMPORTANT

all from Psychotherapy of Preoedipal Conditions; Hyman Spotnitz, M.D., Med. Sc D.; Jason Aronson, 1995

I believe a more correct term would be Preverbal Conditions. Abuse that occurs early in life remains in an amorphous state and I don’t think Freud’s believing the first maturation stage is a sexually based [oedipal] conflict is correct. But, that’s the value of being under-educated in these matters.

IMO Spotnitz writes like an angel, in long, flowing, wonderfully descriptive prose. Spotnitz embodies ALL of Wilbur Strunk’s hopes for vigorous writing:

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

The only person who has an equivalently flowing style was Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker, author of Up in the Old Hotel and Jay Gould’s Secret. One of my favorite former descriptions of myself and flourishment was a phrase from Mitchell about the children of the Mohawk Indian high steel workers thriving like gutter sparrows, despite modest circumstances. My searches for wisps of Jay Gould were the impetus for my late night forays to Greenwich Village on my motorcycle. That story, The Gold Star, is  https://ballantynesinspiredmusings.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-gold-star.html

more from Spotnitz:

There is more but I’m going to wrap this even though I am not complete with my work on it. Currently I’m in the section of schizophrenia, it’s causes, effects, and treatment. All of it is relevant to my case. In very brief, the schizoid personality re-directs his hatred to self-hate. MY case would then have been to live a life RESISTING acknowledging that I had hatred for myself, as compensation, for hatred for my abuser, neglecter, my mother. That’s my take on it after 2 nights of study. It IS very helpful to not have a TV.

Anyway, I’ve had an enlightenment. I’m not resisting being abandoned again as I already experienced it and just re-experienced it again and I survived it. Again, the importance of Freud’s comment on resistance is noted. I have not acquired anything, I stopped my resistance to what was and is. As a result of my ‘enlightenment’ I have come out of isolation and am leading hikes for a local hiking Meetup group. When I wrote up my profile I noted that in my 10 months in Sedona I have been on about 180 solo hikes.

Spotnitz describes the schizophrenic as lacking emotional insulation and therefore, developing destructive patterns of insulation:

·       Self-isolation

·       Shutting out stimuli

·       Forceful repetition as a protective pattern against new stimulation

·       Clinging to one idea

·       Self-justification

“All his energy is invested in compensating for the inadequate insulation.” pg. 123

“Highly complex and overlapping sequences and mechanisms which are aroused by the desire to reject some form of reality.” pg. 102 [reality like I was horribly abused by my mother when an infant, etc. Obviously, each person has to come up with their own reality.] The first thing I wrote in the journal I’ve been working with after my ‘enlightenment’ was, “I can relax now.”

“The clinical material supports the hypothesis that schizophrenia represents a pathological mode of insulation against the destructive effects of undischarged aggressive energy. When the goal-directed therapist operates in term of this understanding to build up the insulative capacity of the ego, and help it develop appropriate patterns for the discharge of this energy, the patient is able to function without recourse to ego-sacrificing forms of insulation.

         The scarring of the ego caused by the schizophrenic process cannot be completely obliterated, but evidence of past pathological tendencies will only be found through careful diagnostic testing or interviewing in later life. The organization of a mature ego - that is, a well-insulated ego commanding an abundance of patterns for verbalizing emotions – tends to immunize a patient against a return of the illness.” pg. 135

Too Much Hyman Spotnitz is Just Right

Continuing my discussion from BIM 96 and my own experiences as a result of reading Psychotherapy of Preedipal Conditions, by Hyman Spotnitz, M.D., Med. Sc. D.

Spotnitz asserts that very early life trauma that he calls pre-oedipal [before an infant’s supposed rivalry with the father for the mother], causes a defensive mechanism to be constructed. This defensive shield is “highly complex and overlapping sequences and mechanisms which are aroused by the desire to reject some painful reality.” Freud as quoted by Spotnitz. That defensive shield Spotnitz calls the “Narcissistic Defense” and he and others assert it is unassailable by any ordinary therapy. I wondered for 20+ years why the last therapist I went to told me at the beginning of the session, “Therapy will never work for you.” So at last I know why. I felt pretty hopeless after the session as the therapist did not even charge me and as a compensation asked me to give her an intuitive reading, which I did. She complimented me on my insight.

Recapitulating and condensing, hopefully accurately, the narcissistic defense arises from anger at the necessity to mold to the expectations of the caregiver in order to be fed and clothed and that creates anger which is not expressed to the caregiver but directed inward at one’s self. Hence the term “narcissistic.” This whole set of “highly complex and overlapping sequences and mechanisms” are carried into later life unchanged.

Do not trivialize the power of this self-directed anger. Spotnitz confines his discussions to schizophrenic and ‘psychotic’ patients, but these mechanisms apply equally, if not more so, to alcoholism, drug addiction, anorexia, and other illnesses which should all properly be called neuroses. “Neurosis is self-division”, Jung.
http://jungiancenter.org/wp/jung-neurosis-part-definitions-causes/

Distilling what Jung has said AND “It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving that the compensating function of the unconscious works with entire success.” Aion—Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Second Edition, C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press. Pg. 20

Then a generalized definition of neurosis might be anything or anytime we are not following the path of instinct.

Spotnitz also suggests that “the tendency of the schizophrenic patient to accumulate destructive impulsivity in his ego appears to be connected with 2 pathological situations;

1. the historic failure of the infantile mental apparatus to acquire a good protective coating,

2. and the under-development, or strangulation, of its discharge patterns… Schizophrenia [by my definition, ALL neuroses] itself appears to be a pathological process of compensatory insulation that is set in train by these developmental circumstances.” pg. 117

Spotnitz also suggests the need for ‘emotional insulation’ so that our psychic circuits do no short out [my terms] AND he emphasizes the need for healthy, directed discharge patterns rather than self-directed anger.

A few relevant examples from my own case:

In the weeks before Bonnie, my late girlfriend died, she would sometimes ask me to just lie in bed with her and hold her hand. I could, but only for so long then I would have to turn away or get up and clean up, do laundry, etc. I was able to see from this the lack of care I received as an infant and the indelible patterning of aloneness it created in me. It was very difficult accepting that’s who I AM when so starkly confronted by it.

On the other side of the grief of accepting myself is the knowledge that that is who we all are. That IS what makes us human beings. Some people don’t have bad patterning and some people good patterning; ALL human beings are imprinted with an indelible patterning [until shattered by a ‘spiritual experience’].

I’ve thought about what my patterning IS perfectly suited for. The only thing I can come up with is the yogi or other religious mendicant. Since I’ve never strongly attached to anyone when an infant, and, therefore, anyone later in life; my mother, father, sisters, wife, daughter, or even my guru, and therefore probably not strongly attached to myself, then I have been able to traverse the universes and have had a couple of overwhelming ‘spiritual experiences’. I may be strongly connected to what or who was there for me early in life – God.

Clearly, I recommend reading Alice Miller, Drama of the Gifted Child, and Hyman Spotnitz, Psychotherapy of Preoedipal Conditions. You only have to pay attention to about a third of Spotnitz as a lot of it deals with group therapy dynamics and case studies.

And a little more Spotnitz that didn’t make it into BIM 96:

“…the infantile ego which was not trained to release aggressive energy toward its object in feelings and language responded to prolonged periods of frustration by internalizing its destructive impulses. Much of the energy that would have been available for maturational processes was expended to bottle up this impulsivity.” pg. 105

“Sacrificially, he attacks his ego to preserve the object.” pg. 105

“An understanding relationship with a therapist who has a genuine interest in treating him, and feels comfortable in his presence, enables the schizophrenic patient to acquire a more positive orientation to his family and society. But this type of re-education is a time-consuming process. A minimum of five years is usually required to predispose him to accept the pain and suffering which the realities of his life may entail.” pg. 116

AND “This is to be done successfully only if the patient in an authentic candidate for analysis, and we must not be too optimistic in our evaluation of how many of our patients are. If there is violent resistance to this reflux procedure, it means that analysis is not appropriate for the individual. One is dealing with a weak ego, or a young ego, that does not have at present the capacity to assimilate shadow. It is as if such a person is out in a little rowboat that can’t take in any very sizeable fish or the rowboat will sink. Therefore, resistance to the analysis of shadow projections must be respected.” Jung

“In my discussion of the narcissistic defense, it was hypothesized that the excessive self-love and self-preoccupations of these patients serve as a cloak for self-hatred. Their pathologically narcissistic behavior is patterned very early in life into a primitive defense system against the discharge of high accumulations of mobilized frustration aggression. The ego is sacrificed to prevent the release of destructive impulsivity in action that would injure the object [my note: generally the primary caregiver-the mother].” pg. 117

My notes: Illness is a compensatory insulation.

“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering” Jung

BIM 69 Ballantyne’s Inspired Musings December 2012 - sample

  

BIM 69

Ballantyne’s Inspired Musings

December 2012

Vox Clamantis in Deserto

The Mount Everest of spiritual, philosophical and random publications

Your primary duty is to know your very own Self and be free.

Vishnudevanand

=================================

New interminable subscriptions $25 or more. The more you send the more you get. I attempt to elucidate ahead of the curve ideas and notions to an intelligent audience. A prime example is my 2005 declaration that the US Empire was over.

Carlos Ballantyne      carlosjii@gmail.com      https://twitter.com/#!/carlosjii

—

More about Heath!!!!!!!

I’ve been taking Teitelbaum’s Energy Revitalization System and my energy seems to be better. I’ve been doing a new 6 hour, 15 mile hike in the mountains here at least once a week with no after-effects, no tiredness or soreness. I’m careful to take my recovery formula consisting of whey protein, glutamine and magnesium at the end of each hike. During the hike I take CytoMax! This stuff is the best. CytoMax is a carbohydrate and electrolyte formula. I have weaned myself down so that I do not begin taking CytoMax until at least an hour into my hikes so as to be on a fat burning cycle rather than a sugar cycle. Write me if you want more information on this important topic.

I have begun using Teitelbaum’s suggested magnesium glycinate instead of magnesium asporotate. Don’t forget—even Dr. Oz says magnesium is one of the most important minerals in the body.

The spider expert seems to be doing better. After 3 Myer’s cocktails and a glutathione push IV she has begun oxygen treatments at the ND’s place. They draw out a pint of blood, bubble oxygen through it turning it bright red, then put the blood back in with an IV. This treatment was originated by Dr. Frank Shallenberger from Carson City, NV, a very well known alternative medicine specialist.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/oct/17/young-blood-reverse-effects-ageing?INTCMP=SRCH

I’ve fiddled round with health issues for a lot of the past 40 years resolving my own and many other people’s health problems—some of long standing. The spider expert’s case has been the most difficult I have come across as it has a very broad spectrum of symptoms, many seemingly unrelated—stomach, back, brain fog, balance. Frankly, it was only after pretty randomly coming across the NYT article on Cipro toxicity that I had the Eureka moment. The spider expert has been increasingly suffering for about 9 years, since beginning a regimen of Cipro for parasites from trips to Peru. The Cipro caused significant stomach and digestive problems which incompetent doctors in Tahoe diagnosed as needing extensive stomach surgeries and the problems spiraled out of control from there, each surgery caused more and more Cipro to be applied, as hospitals routinely give it to thwart the rampant “bugs.” I just had a case of a guy with an infected blister who was prescribed Cipro! This is crazy!

“More often than not, the sudden onset of bizarre symptoms in a healthy person will lead a doctor to diagnose a designer “mystery” disease. In fact, there is suspicion that the fluoroquinolone family of antibiotics may actually be responsible for the sudden and prolific rise in NEW illnesses, such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Crohns Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Gulf War Syndrome and others. How many people do you know who were normal and healthy one minute, and irreversibly crippled with one of these “mysterious” diseases the next? I wonder: how many of those people had taken a fluoroquinolone antibiotic prior to the onset of their auto-immune disease? Perhaps someday, someone will figure this all out and actually do something about it. Until then, it is up to us; to be informed, educated and responsible for our own consumption. It’s a little thing called consumerism.”

http://www.survivingcipro.com/http:/www.survivingcipro.com/uncategorized/117/about-cipro-2/cipro-side-effects/

I have probably learned more about health in the past 6 months than in the past ten years and I have been able to apply much of that knowledge to improving my own health and my overall energy. That said I recall now that not only has my last girlfriend likely had Cipro toxicity but the one before that also! So, three in a row. The first one was in about 2005. She took a trip to Spain over Xmas 2004-2005 that I told her not to take. Oh, but they had a deal on airfare and her daughter wanted her to go. Sure. They froze their asses off in Spain and then went to Gibraltar where they were assaulted by the monkeys. My then girlfriend bean getting sick immediately and had to be carried on to her return international flight. The diagnosis? Bacterial meningitis. The cure? LOADS of IV antibiotics. I was not talking too much by then but likely she got it from the monkeys. She became a zombie after her “cure” and I spent the next many months carting her around to alternative therapy appointments as she could not drive.

“The main mechanism through which fruit and vegetable consumption is likely to influence mental health is through the absorption of water-soluble minerals such as potassium (Torres, Nowson and Worsley 2009) and vitamins such as folic acid and B-12 (Gilbody, Lewis and Lightfoot 2007; Gilbody, Lightfoot and Sheldon 2007; Fava et al. 1997) which have an impact on adrenaline and serotonin receptors.” http://www.voxeu.org/article/are-fruit-and-vegetables-good-your-mental-health-well-your-physical-health

Even Dr. Oz is promoting the benefits of a plant based diet—“nothing with a face.” So IT MUST BE TRUE if Dr. Oz said it. Oh, have you seen former President and Big Mac eater Clinton recently??????? Clearly someone put him on a ‘plant based diet’.

Dear Carlos,
The founder of Fungi Perfecti, Paul Stamets, gave one of the plenary presentations at the Bioneers Conference in 2011 which is where I heard him talk about providing the Turkey Tail fungi that were used in a study related to breast cancer.  What I have read said that the Turkey Tail provided immune system help during breast cancer treatment, not specific efficacy on cancer.  He talks about his mother's breast cancer because of this study and his belief that she is cancer free because of Turkey Tail.  He may talk about it in his TedMed online talk too, though I have not seen it. 

I recommend his company because his scholarship in general and on mycology in specific is so impressive, but it is important to me that your friend know that the treatment of cancer is outside the scope of my practice and that of any Licensed Acupuncturist.  It is likewise outside the scope of the practice of an OMD, though I am not an OMD.  That title was discontinued in California before I became an L.Ac.  The new title is DAOM and I do not have that degree.  I am a Licensed Acupuncturist.  I am delighted to help anyone I can, as you know, but it is important to me that those things are clear.  If my colleague is still at the New England School I will pass along her info to your friend if she asks but the same limits exist on the scope of my colleague's practice too.  We treat only symptoms as Acupuncturists.  These distinctions are important to me and our profession as a whole.  I hope you will pass them along to your friend. 

Another very helpful site for health and nutrition information is nutritionfacts.org.  Dr. Michael Greger produces short videos relating the best of the best from nutrition studies showing the good effects of a plant based diet.  It is an excellent resource for the latest and best info for health.

all best,

J. Mxxxxxx Bxxxx, L.Ac.

From @Carlosjii, medical professionals who know the limits of modern medicine, often opt out of life-prolonging treatment  http://gu.com/p/35bcj/tw  via @guardian

Back to Bedrock

“The claimed power of the president to kill whomever he wants, anywhere in the world far from any war zone or battlefield, without a whiff of due process, oversight or transparency should be vehemently opposed first and foremost because it is the supreme expression of tyrannical power.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/19/benghazi-attack-suspects-drones  

“The core guarantee of western justice since the Magna Carta was codified in the US by the fifth amendment to the constitution: "No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." You simply cannot have a free society, a worthwhile political system, without that guarantee, that constraint on the ultimate abusive state power, being honored.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-terrorism-kill-list

“For several decades, the US government - in annual "human rights" reports issued by the State Department (reports mandated by the US Congress) - has formally condemned nations around the globe for the practice of indefinite detention: imprisoning people without charges or any fixed sentence.” [Yet]

“The US has long been demanding that the Afghan government continue the American practice of indefinite detention without charges, and still presses this demand even after the top Afghan court in September ruled that such detentions violate Afghan law.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/20/iraq-afghanistan-daqduq-indefinite-detention

When an old person dies it’s like an entire library has burned

A former friend from Laguna Beach has gone blind from Parkinson’s and just old age and gave her library including lots of astrology books to another friend of mine. He invited me to take what I wanted so I got about 30 books. I just missed getting a copy of Anima and Animus by Emma Jung as my friend came by and took it back. It is always MOST interesting reading or talking to the wives of ‘great’ men.

Reading through the books I excerpted some few important pieces.

“Jung once said that the anima is not only an inner figure, she is also a living woman. Likewise, the animus is not only a dream image, or the masculine pole of a woman’s psyche, but a living man.” Pg 27, New Insights in Modern Astrology, Liz Greene & Stephen Arroyo, CRCS Publications, 1991

“If we lost our capacity to be hurt we would be dead to life.” Pg 41, Greene

“There is an essay by James Hillman which is worth reading, called The Necessity of Psychopathology. He is writing about the Greek Goddess Necessity….also called Chaos. Plato had the idea that 95% of the cosmos was ruled by Reason, but 5% escaped Reason and was ruled by … Chaos. That 5% has no meaning, no reason, and cannot be changed. That’s the aspect of life we find intolerable. It’s just cruel and messy. …We can accept the agony of the Crucifixion because we believe there is meaning in it. But accepting raw human bestiality or irrevocable, undeserved bad fate is quite intolerable to the ego, which is ruled by Reason.” Pg 35. Greene

Nietzsche says, returning to the point with which he opened the third essay, "man would rather will nothingness than not will."  From BIM 68. This area of Chaos is beyond or will. My former Japanese girlfriend, a Pisces lover of Chaos, once said about India, “That’s what’s so great about it – the Chaos.” That’s why it’s a tough travel destination for most.

“Sometimes you have to face the problem of returning to normal life, because the experience of the outer planets is like suddenly being plunged into a myth.” Pg. 42, Greene

Greene was speaking about how powerful astrological transits, temporary influences, can catalyze relationships. In 1990 I returned from a six month trip and was walking around Laguna telling a few people I was God. I spent the next week after that uncontrollably crying. Soooo, yes, stepping back out of the myth can be problematic. 

Genius is only childhood recovered at will,… Charles Baudelaire

“Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries.” Rumi, Pg 101

Aron Abrahamsen psychic mentioned -  http://www.nhne.com/specialreports/srnhneearthchangemap.html#sources

I am due to take a trip “out West”, actually East from here—zip 91311, to AZ, NM, TX, possibly looking for a place to move to get away from coming earth changes.

De Tocqueville said America would remain great as no one could take away its land. Don’t be too sure. The US has built up a lot of bad karma from its Imperial wars and is due, IMO, for a comeuppance. Take a look at some of the earth changes maps in the link above! An inundation of the East Coast does not seem as farfetched as of December 2012, does it? Like it was a loony idea in September 2012, right?

My letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein –

another of my California scum legislators. Questioned on Fox News Sunday, Ms. Feinstein said that she would investigate why the F.B.I. did not notify her Senate Intelligence committee beforehand [of the Petreaus investigation].

“Gimme a break Dianne! This “investigation” was FBI payback in some imagined slight against the CIA. Oh why the date????? Because 11/7 is Pertaeus’s birthday and the small minds at FBI wanted the most pay/im-pact. Do some investigation on your own instead of blundering and blustering in public.

The FBI should have been BIG TIME shaped up since their ineptitude basically caused 9/11. Where was the “Intelligence Committee” when the FBI blew $$$B on a computer system that couldn’t do a search on ‘flight’ and ‘school’ in the same search parameter?

Almost all this stuff is the fault of a malingering Congress – and you as Intell Comm member are one of the most at fault. I believe you are too old for public office.

DO NOT RESPOND TO ME – GET TO WORK. IT’S NO ACCIDENT CONGRESS HAS A 11% APPROVAL RATING –or lower”

==================================

Petaeus is a war casualty, probably suffers from PTSD, and did 5 [FIVE] tours in Eye-rack and Afg. Thank God you have pointed out the great failure of the “surge” that also swept up Obama who was elected to wind down the Afg fiasco. Let us also remember the Shadid’s riveting Pulitzer pieces on the Iraq surge such as ‘In Anbar, U.S.—Allied Tribal Chiefs Feel Deep Sense of Abandonment’ and the fact that most of that surge’s success had to do with factors we did not create, such as paying off the Sunni militias.  We abandoned the Montagnards in Vietnam also.

Regarding America’s cult of the Generals and the military in general – We have FAILED TO PREVAIL IN ALL FOUR MAJOR CONFLICTS SINCE WW 2. This failure has assured the demise of the Empire and the failure of the US dollar – a disaster for all of us of the highest order.

A comment I made to a Michael Cohen article in the Guardian regarding Petraeus’s fatal flaw – hubris and the Afghanistan surge.

There is no is

Back to the burning library

Decartes – Cogito ergo sum - commonly translated as “I think therefore I am,” which is not quite accurate. A better translation would be “I am conscious, therefore I am.” This is the bedrock foundation of every individual’s existence. The Aion Lectures, Exploring the Self in C.G. Jung’s Aion, Edward Edinger, Edinger attempts to explain and expand some of Jung’s most difficult writings.

Note Emmet Fox—“ Life is consciousness.”

Contrast this with—Yoga is the restraining of the mind stuff [chitta] from taking various forms [vrittis]

“The world as representation”, this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him. It then becomes clear to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world around him is only a representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself.” Schopenhauer – The World as Will and Representation. Edinger pg. 23

Or, as was once said at an est seminar of mine, There is no is.

“According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the deceased comes into the judgment hall to meet the Goddess of Truth, Maat, and is then obligated to make the following confession. The deceased is talking to the Goddess:

Verily, I have come before thee, and I bring before thee Right and Truth. ..I have done no hurt unto man, nor have I wrought harm unto beasts. …I have caused none to feel pain..I have not committed murder…nor have I purloined the cakes of the gods…I have not caught fishes with the bait of their own bodies…I have not broken the channel of running water. I have not quenched the flame in its fullness…I have not thwarted the possessions of the god. I am pure. I am pure. I am pure. I am pure.” Pg. 28

“This is to be done successfully only if the patient in an authentic candidate for analysis, and we must not be too optimistic in our evaluation of how many of our patients are. If there is violent resistance to this reflux procedure, it means that analysis is not appropriate for the individual. One is dealing with a weak ego, or a young ego, that does not have at present the capacity to assimilate shadow. It is as if such a person is out in a little rowboat that can’t take in any very sizeable fish or the rowboat will sink. Therefore, resistance to the analysis of shadow projections must be respected.” Pg. 27

My commentary – Jung and Edinger may be neglecting the truth that we are ALL at the same spiritual level. Another point is that in dealing with artists, if they get too “cured” their art can go away as it is an expression of incompleteness. One must be sensitive to other people’s, patient’s, path. AND there’s the problem of therapists being unable to handle patient’s shadow material as it is too close to their own, unlooked at stuff. This is one of the main reasons patients get medicated—to obscure their problems which the ‘doctor’ can’t handle.

“Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition. Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind. This is extremely important from the therapeutic standpoint, because constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its co-operation. The unconscious as we know it can never be “done with” once and for all. It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in blind alleys.” Edinger, Pg. 33 quoting from Jung, Aion, par. 40

Some of what this means practically, for example, is that addictions MUST be constantly coddled in a recovery state as they are “autonomous factors.” In other words, keep going to meetings! A psychologist friend of mine used to say, “My brain has a mind of its own.”

Jung’s quote from pg. 33 of Aion continues, as I have quoted many times in the past, and I have included a few more sentences before and after.

“The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious ensures that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided. It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving that the compensating function of the unconscious works with entire success. The more civilized, the more conscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature. Opinions, beliefs, theories, and the collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention then should be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work. Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as constant, autonomous factors, which indeed they are.” Aion—Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Second Edition, C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press. Pg. 20

“Fixing reasonable boundaries to the ego is an important feature of practical analysis. For instance, it is commonplace to hear such remarks as, “I made this mistake, I had that reaction,” when in fact these events are products of the unconscious. Jung gives an example…The young interviewer asks why a patient selects a particular symptom and Jung jumps on him with a vengeance. “He doesn’t select; they happen to him. You could ask just as well when you are eaten by a crocodile, how you happened to select that crocodile; he has selected you!” Edinger, Pg. 40, referencing R. Evans, Jung on Elementary Psychology, pg. 216

“Jung then goes on to speak of two alternative psychic catastrophes, one in which the ego is assimilated by the Self, and the other where the Self is assimilated by the ego. Now “assimilation” is a euphemism for being eaten. Throughout nature, the basic question is who eats whom. If the Self eats the ego, at worst there is an overt psychosis. If the ego eats the Self…the world of consciousness must now be leveled down in favor of the reality of the unconscious. …If the ego devours the Self…the ego assumes itself to be the totality…[and] the antidote must be that the powers of the ego be leveled down in favor of the realities of the unconscious. In the previous situation, in which the Self assimilates the ego, the contrary is called for; all the conscious virtues-attention, conscientiousness, patience, adaption-must be mobilized to the maximum degree.” Pg. 41

“Magic exercises a compulsion that asserts itself against the conscious mind and will of the victim; that is to say, a strange will arises in him and proves stronger than his ego. The only comparable effect capable of psychological verification is that exercised by unconscious contents, which by their compelling power demonstrate their affinity with or dependence on man’s totality, that is, the self and its “karmic” functions.”

Jung is saying that every neurotic symptom, every compulsion, every addiction, every primitive affect that cannot be controlled by the ego-all these aspects of psychological symptomatology derive their power and effectiveness from the Self. …the Symptom, the primitive effect, the compulsive drive, that unconscious content which has the ego in its grip-that is the dragon, that is the serpent, or the cinedian fish with the motive power. But at the heart of it, contained within it, is the precious stone of the Self. This is what needs to be extracted …from the symptom, from the primitive, compulsive experience. Pg. 112

Spiritus contra Spiritum!

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,/Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,/Wears a precious jewel in his head” As You Like It – Shakespeare pg. 112

“Between the conscious and the unconscious there is a kind of “uncertainty relationship,” because the observer is inseparable from the observed and always disturbs it by the act of observation. In other words, exact observation of the unconscious prejudices observation of the conscious and vice versa.” pg. 165 referring to paragraph 355 of Aion.

“If one does not mold one’s life to an ideal, one will mold one’s ideal to one’s life.”

Exploring Jupiter-The Astrological Key to Progress, Prosperity &Potential, Stephen Arroyo, CRCS Publications, 1996, Pg. 2

Oddly, Israel was born under the same Saturn-Pluto conjunction that followed the Holocaust. This is either a piece of immense cosmic irony, or it’s something very profound. Unfortunately the behavior of this very great and dedicated new nation sometimes verges horribly close to the very thing that engendered its birth. This suggests something very paradoxical, which Jung called enantiodromia. That means that if you polarize very violently against an opposite, you have a tendency to secretly become that opposite without realizing it. The Outer Plants and Their Cycles, Liz Greene, CRCS Publications, 1983, pg. 51

“In cases of difficult psychological diagnosis I usually get a horoscope in order to have a further point of view from an entirely different angle. I must say that I very often found that the astrological data elucidated certain points which I otherwise would have been unable to understand. From such experiences I formed the opinion that astrology is of particular interest the psychologist, since it contains a sort of psychological experience which we call “projected”-this means that we find the psychological facts as it were in the constellations. This originally gave rise to the idea that these factors derive from the stars, whereas they are merely in a relation of synchronicity with them. I admit that this is a very curious fact which throws a peculiar light on the structure on the human mind.” Jung as quoted in My World of Astrology, Sidney Omarr, Wilshire Book company, 1973, pg. 83

“The fact that it is possible to construct, in adequate fashion, a person’s character from the date of his nativity, shows the relative validity of astrology. Whatever is born or done this moment of time has the qualities of this moment of time.” Omarr quoting Jung, pg. 86

OM

ABOUT KUMBHA MELA IN PRAYAG

I just got a notice from Omanand, my guru’s successor, that this upcoming February is Maha Kumbha Mela. Held every year at the New Moon, every twelfth year is considered particularly auspicious and the size more than doubles. Even in off years the mela is the largest human gathering in the world. An estimated 20 million or so will bathe in a 2 square mile area of the Ganges on this upcoming peak day – 10 February 2013. This is the New Moon of the coming Year of the Snake in Asia.

 

OM

ABOUT KUMBHA MELA IN PRAYAG

DEAR DIVINE SELF,

                                YOU KNOW THAT THE AUSPICIOUS PLACE PRAYAG RAJ (ALLAHABAD) IS THE KING OF ALL THE AUSPICIOUS PLACES  CALLED AS TIRTHRAJ PRAYAG .EVERY YEAR IN THE MONTH OF MAGH (JANUARY/FEBRUARY) IS HELD A BIG FESTIVAL CALLED MAGH MELA.IN AFTEREVERY TWELVE YER HELD MAHAKUMBHAMELA, BETWEEN THE TWELVE YEAR HELD ARDHA KUMBHA MELA.  MOSTLY THIS FESTIVAL RUNS FOR MORE THAN A MONTH. THIS FESTIVAL USUALLY BEGINS FROM 14TH JANUARY APPROXIMATELY ACCORDING TO PROPER ASTROLOGY.

THIS YEAR 2013 IS WILL GOING TO HELD MAHA KUMBHA MELA AT PRAYAG (ALLAHABAD)

THIS IS THE LINK PLACE OF THE RIVER GANGA, THE RIVER JAMUNA, &THE MYTHOLOGICAL HIDDEN SARASWATI RIVER.

 EVERY YEAR MONKS, SAINTS, DEVOTEES &MANY SPIRITUAL PERSONS FROM ALL THE AUSPICIOUS PLACES OF INDIA ATTEND THIS MELA TO ENJOY& TO RECHARGE MIND&SOUL MANY SPIRITUAL PERSONS, DEVOTEES COME

DIFFERENT PLACES   OF WORLD TO VISIT & ACHIEVE PEACE, HAPPINESS&BLISS.THE MONKS&DEVOTEES PERFORM MANY KINDS OF SPIRITUAL ACTIVITEES LIKE SATASANG,&DIFFERENT TYPES OF DIVINE SERVICE&SOCIAL SERVICE.MANY SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS  ALSO COME TO GIVE THEIR SERVICE.

MANY SPIRITUAL PEOPLE, DEVOTEES, MONKS& SAINTS OBSERVE THEIR KALPAVAS (REMAINING THE WHOLEMONTH IN SPIRITUAL PRACTICE).DAILY THEY BATHE IN TRIVENI SANGAM& STAY IN THE FESTIVAL AREA FOR THE FULL MONTH. EVERY DAY THE PILGRIMS COME & THEY TAKE THEIR BATH.SOME SPECIAL DAYS ARE MOST IMPORTANT DAYS&  A HUGE GATHERING OF PILGRIMS ARRIVE TO TAKE THEIR AUSPICIOUS BATH TO REMOVE THEIR SIN,MISERY,STRUGGLE&TO ACHIEVE SOLACE, HAPPINESS,PEACE,ENERGY, POWER&TO RECHARGE MIND TO GET A SUCCESSFUL LIFE. THIS MAHA KUMBHA MELA WILL HELD BY LARGEST SPIRITUAL GATHERING OF WORLD.

OUR GURUDEV BRAHMALEEN (LATE) SWAMI VISHNU DEVANAND SARASWATI THE DISCIPLE OF YOGIRAJ HANDIYABABA (HRIDYANAND SARASWATI) HAS A SMALL COTTAGE OVER LOOKING THE MELA CALLED ASHRAM YOGA VEDANT KUTIR. BY OUR REVERED GURUDEV’S DIVINE GRACE THIS ASHRAM MANAGED BY ME IS SITUATED ON THE BANK OF GANGA&JAMUNA TRIVENI SANGAM. DURING MAGH MELA IN OUR ASHRAM ALSO WE CELEBRATE SOME SPECIAL PROGRAMMES.

EVERY YEAR

SWAMI BHAJANAND SARASWATI THE MAIN PRIST OF KALI TEMPLE, LAGUNA BEECH.KALIFORNIA U.S.A. IS MY DISCIPLE VISITED WITH HIS DISCIPLE&FRIENDS TO OUR ASHRAM YOGAVEDANT KUTIR SINCE LIFE TIME OF OUR REVERD GURUDEV DURING THE MELA. RAMPRIY DASH (TRAVERHALL) OF KALI TEMPLE&BHAJANAND ARE SINCE LONG TIME SERVING THERE SERVICES ASHRAM&ORPHANS BY ME.BY REACIVING THERE SERVICE &HELP.THERE HELP ARE VERY HELPFUL FOR ME TO SERVE ASHRAM, POORS, ORPHANS&NEED PERSONS.I AM VERY GRATEFULL FOR THEM.SWAMI AMBIKANAND A PRIST OF KALI TEMPLE&MANY DEVOTEES, BHAKTAS, SPIRITUAL PERSONS&SOCIAL WORKERS ARE VISIT ASHRAM YOGAVEDANT KUTIR DURING MELA&STAY IN OUR ASHRAM&ENJOY MELA EVERY YEAR.THE ASHRAM YOGAVEDANT KUTIR INVITES YOU TO JOIN &ENJOY THE MAGH MELA OF TIRTHA RAJ PRAYAG.DURING MAGH MELA OU ARE INVITEDY YOU LIKE TO STAY IN OUR SMALL COTTAGE I WOULD BE HAPPY IF I’ M ABLE TO SERVE YOU& DEVOTEES&SPIRITUAL PERSONS.

ENCLOSED IS PROGRAM OF 2013 MAHA KUMBHA MELA.

LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR DIVINE LOVE&CO-OPERATION.

                                                                                                                          THY

                                                                                                      INNERMOSTSELF

                                                                                                                    GURUJEE

                                                                                                                   OMANAND       

And Then

I had a significant dream of a small black snake lying in a black cast iron frying pan in a white cupboard in a kitchen. I took out a Moleskine notebook to draw the dream and later going back to look again at the drawing came upon a prospective ad for a creative cooperative I thought to found.

Some of your qualifications might be;

1. Don’t like cops, doctors, lawyers, and most people in uniforms.

2. Have multiple computers going at once each with multiple browsers open with multiple tabs - all open at the same time.

3. Wish you had a T-1 line.

4. Have a cell phone with a hard or soft full keyboard.

5. Have more than one avatar.

6. Have been called crazy more than once.

7. Have one or more of the markers for creative genius:

         A. Loss of one or both parents at an early age

         B. Had a lot of personal autonomy – personal freedom, abandonment, time to come and go and day mare

         C. Raised in a multi-cultural milieu when young – spoke more than one language

8. Do some of your best work while what is conventionally called “depressed.”

9. Know you can never get enough of what you don’t really want but keep trying anyway.

What we are trying to do;

Create, Invent, Daymare, Envision, Doodle, Breakthrough new applications and technologies. Loosely collaborative creative thinkers somewhat akin to Bell Labs in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Ideas we’d like to have had include the original idea of cellular routing, Mysterium chip in the R.E.D. camera, Twitter, credit card app and reader fro the iPhone, Craigslist, MP3 coding, Shannon’s original paper on information coding.

Hey! So where’s the beef? [We probably have to come up with something quick to pay the bills.]

Ron Paul’s Farewell Speech, close to as good as Washington’s

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/11/ron-paul-american-hero-his-farewell.html

Gold and Economic Freedom by Alan Greenspan

[Before he became senile]

This is really all you need to know about gold, money, the government, and the coming problems.

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense ... that gold and economic freedoms are inseparable.

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation.

But who would buy these newly issued government bonds in sufficient quantities over a long period of time to emplant the welfare state firmly onto the American public? There was in place, finally, the purchaser of last resort:

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which — through a complex series of steps — the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit.

The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money ... increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard. http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm

See also - http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/07/6-charts-that-show-the-welfare-state-run-amok/

An Apocalyptic view of Things

First, I am worried about finances – the United States’s finances. No fiat (paper) currency has EVER been successful in human history. All have failed. The U.S. dollar has been a completely paper currency since Nixon took us of the gold standard in 1971. Governments ALWAYS attempt to resolve their finances by printing or creating more money. Our government does this now by a subterfuge of the U.S. Treasury selling bonds which are bought by the Federal Reserve. We, the U.S. Government, operates NOW like Bernie Madoff.

There are significant and increasing concerns about personal freedoms in the U.S. which we took for granted as little as 10 years ago. No more. The best single reference for these issues is Glenn Greenwald’s column in the Guardian.

Third, I am worried about possible earth changes especially here in “the West.” What I have begun doing is beginning to buy a few extras of camping stuff when I go to the market and stashing it. So I now have 6 extra propane bottles around for the camping stove. A former Navy Seal on Dr. Drew today was giving survival suggestions. Basically, he suggested creating a stash of emergency stuff in a duffel bag or box you can just pick up and split with.

A friend of mine lives on Long Island with about 20 cats. During Sandy she lost all power for about 12 days and due to the miracles of electric living propounded by Wm. Levitt in the 1940’s her all-electric house in Levittown was DOA - no heat, no stove, no nada. She was freezing her ass off AND one of her cats was peeing in her bed. My friend had no sleeping bag.

I’m thinking of looking for another place to live far from California and changing lifestyles to one of maybe living in an RV or comfy trailer for 6 months of the year – or longer. There’s a lot to be said for living in Tucson 6 months of the year and somewhere in the mountains for 6 months.