The internet is filled with virtue signaling these days.  What does it look like?  It looks like electric car pictures on Facebook.  It looks like large solar panel arrays and an off-grid farm, posted on Facebook.  It looks like pictures of people attending the March for Women, or the March for Science, posted on Instagram.  At least, that is the liberal left echo chamber’s version of it.  There are also pictures of purity rings on children’s fingers, and baptisms, and mission trips, and the giving of all of your money to the church.  It looks like “I Voted.”

Slavery is an old institution.  The Native Americans owned slaves, as did the Greeks and Romans, the ancient Egyptians, Sumeria, India, China, pretty much everywhere in the ancient world where the population concentration was big enough.  While there is coal and oil available to do the labor of millions of people for them, it is popular these days to proclaim that everybody is equal.  They’re not.  People can never be equal, but the proclamation that people “should” be equal under the law, that no man should own a woman or child, is one of the most blatant forms of virtue signaling out there today.

Equal rights for men and women, the destruction of the monarchy, the destruction of the wealth of the Vatican (namely, gold), the civic religion of progress, these are all interwoven strands of a tapestry that leads into darkness.  The ancient Knights Templar would have shuddered in horror to see what their actions have wrought.  Yet, I think they knew.  They knew that the sin of the Demiurge is still with us.  They knew, in a very gnostic sense, that they could not change anything, even if they did see it for what it was clearly enough.

The inability to change anything on a spiritual level is a thing I ponder while I’m out running or bicycling or swimming.  I can’t die.  Neither can the Demiurge.  If I can not change the way the souls surrounding me act, can not control them all through the force of law, then the civic religion of progress becomes merely an illusion.  If you can’t change anything, you can’t save anybody from sin, then obviously, you can not ever progress anywhere.  You can’t learn anything despite the millions, billions, or trillions of reincarnations you may have gone through.  You can neither acquire nor discharge Karma.

This means that virtue signaling is a lie.  You will never be a good man.  You’ll never be a bad one either.  You’ll just be part of the ecosystem.  Some parts of the ecosystem eat the other parts and convert them into food for the next generation.  There will always be killers, cheaters, liars, neglectful, people who spur the entire nation to go to war.  There will always be people who destroy the grain crop, steal the sheep, and poison the wells.  There will always be gangs and warlords, slaves and harlots, and the powerful old lady at the edge of the village who might heal your wounds, but then again, might curse you stone dead.

There are a bunch of people out there, who when faced with peak oil, climate change, the business cycle, economic collapse and destruction, and the like, have decided to grow their own food.  Grow your own food because the fake food is killing you!  Sounds somewhat reasonable, especially these days with Chinese melamine laced food, glyphosate laced grains, mad cow disease, and so on and so forth.  Homemade food tastes better, it is true.  Blueberries fresh from the bush are so much better than the ones “fresh” in the store.  Yet, not everybody should grow their own food.  Especially not now.

Right now, there are a whole bunch of governments out there with monetary problems.  Federal, State, County, City, some of them overspent.  Some of them decided to steal from the pension fund, or not to fund it adequately, and the bills are coming due.  So, these entities will be looking for more income.  They will be looking to tax all the things, and that will not be limited to healthcare.  One of the things they also tax is property.  If the 90% income tax bracket for incomes over a million didn’t work, then perhaps they will try something else this time.

How can you possibly hang on to your farm if the property taxes are higher, and the drought/flood/weather destroyed your crops this year?  Somebody has to do work that is not farm work, to get money out of the banks/government, in order to pay the taxes.  If it is just two people, they get injured, they get old, and how can they keep the planting and weeding and watering done year over year?  Then they die, and their estate value is over the estate tax exemption, and their children lose the farm.

What is to come?  These days are not those days.  A lot of people are going to die.  Slavery will return, regardless of what it is called.  The enclosures will come down, the dams will come down, some of the .1% snakes on the gorgon’s head will be cut off.  Others will take their places, because nature abhors a vacuum.  Nature hates bare soil.  Even if you killed every member of the Hapsburgs or the Rothschilds, others would take their place, and might even do their jobs of culling the weak and shackling the strong to do their bidding more efficiently.

Just because more will spring up like flowers on a soldier’s grave, picked by children every one (oh when will they ever learn), doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.  One of the gnostic responses to the knowledge that I am powerless to change anything on an eternal scale, is to say, well, since God sucks at running things around here, I might as well run things.  I know for certain that I can’t mess up more than he did.

I went to church on Easter.  I know what you’re asking, what is an ex-Christian like me doing at church on Easter?  Well, I wanted my kids to hunt for eggs after the music-filled service and get free candy.  Easter music is always of better quality than regular Sunday church music, where the second lady on the right sings the high notes slightly off key, and the second guitar on the right has one string out of tune.  That stuff grates on my nerves every time.

My husband is a progressive Christian.  My kids live in a predominantly Christian nation, although the local region is predominantly “none of the above”.  They need to understand the basic rituals involving Christianity, for cultural context later in life.  The church is filled with other progressive Christians, in contrast to the greater body of the church.  They proclaim to be open and accepting of everybody.  I make no such claims.

One of the rituals this church does on Easter is to stick chicken wire and ribbon around a cross, and have everybody put flowers on the wooden cross.  I can totally appropriate a public ritual for my own ends, and I did, but that’s a private matter.

The pastor’s sermon was on death and resurrection, as it would be.  We are all dead, in one way or another.  We have experienced a wide variety of personal deaths, whether of illness, or of job loss, or of relationship death, or of identity deaths.  This is one of the pieces of the inner transformation of a magician, the killing off of the parts of yourself that don’t work for you.  Then, there’s resurrection, and we are all come back from the dead as well.  We have healed of our illness, gotten a new job, made new relationships, forged new identities, created new communities, and brought back to life the parts of yourself that have started working for you again.  Silly people, you can’t die, so how could you kill parts of yourselves?  You can diminish them, strengthen others, but that shame, that guilt, that incorrigible trouble-maker, will always be there to call on when you need it.

This is basic cycle theory, after all.  Markets rise and fall.  Civilizations rise and fall.  The age of the dinosaurs rose and fell.  Saviors and comic book heroes do the same.  As we plunge into darkness, is there faith that the light will rise again?  Heading into spring, heading into fall, the seasons cycle, the years cycle, the sunspots cycle, the climate cycles, the planetary orbits cycle, the ice ages cycle, never again to be born the same, yet promising to revisit vaguely familiar times again.  People rise and fall.  That’s part of Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, to acknowledge that people go through waves of self-confidence and humility.  That’s not bi-polar.  That’s normal.  Women get happy and mad and sad in cycles.  So do men.  I ponder whether spirits and deities do as well.  The myths certainly say so.

This past week, as I was reading some of my favorite people’s blogs, I happened to notice that a couple of them were Orthodox Christians.  I realized that I knew very little about Orthodox Christianity other than that they broke from the Roman Catholic tradition way back in the 1000s.  I was raised in the Evangelical Free Church of America, and if you want to know what that means, go watch the Jesus Camp movie sometime.

I was thinking about Nassim Taleb’s statement that old technology is better than new technology.  Fasting and Prayer is old technology.  How old?  I have no idea, because I still have not managed to snag a copy of Star Ships by Gordon White, but I’d venture to guess that Fasting and Prayer to the spirits is older than Gobekli Tepe.

It is technology which has been lost or altered by much of the mainstream Protestant Christianity sects.  The Muslims have Ramadan, a month of only eating or drinking when it is dark outside, and giving to charity is linked to it.  The Latter Day Saints have Fast Sunday, where they are supposed to skip breakfast and give the money they didn’t spend on breakfast to the poor, um, I mean the Salt Lake City Mall.  The Evangelical Free Church has no official fast days that I know of, but private fasting happens.  The United Methodist Church doesn’t have any fast days either.  The Jews have Yom Kippur.  The Roman Catholics have Ash Wednesday, every Friday, and Lent, but these tend to mean one full meal and two small snacks, or merely no meat, and varies considerably by location.  The Orthodox have a very extensive fasting calendar, in which they are practically vegan for half the year.  They take their fasting very seriously, and unlike some of the Protestants you don’t give up some weird thing for Lent of your choosing, but rather you give up exactly what everybody else in the Orthodox church is giving up for Lent.

Of the pagan or indigenous religions, I know little, because they have the intelligence gained from tens of thousands of years of experience not to tell outsiders the truth.  What little I have gleaned, indicates that fasting was ever a part of their practices as well, whether through vision quests, or through medical practices, or through the simple practices of sacrifice and gifts to the spirits.

Fasting works on quite a number of different levels.  It lowers blood pressure.  There have been people who simply didn’t eat anything for a year and lost a hundred pounds.  It promotes self-discipline to people who mindlessly eat in front of screens.  It provides people with the experience of being hungry so they know what to do during the next famine to make it more comfortable.  It changes people’s relationships with their environment, with their deities, with their spirits, even with their ancestors.  There are people who starve themselves to death, but most won’t.  Most of the traditions around the globe have exemptions from fasting for pregnant or nursing women, and for children.

Keep in mind that food is a local phenomenon.  Giving up all animal products for Lent does not work so well above the Arctic Circle without access to food flown in from the southern lands.  Giving up all animal products for Lent in the practically vegan parts of rice-belt Asia is not much of a sacrifice at all.  What works for you?  What works for your gut microbiology?  Is fasting merely an agricultural phenomenon not practiced by hunter-gatherers?  Did the Ancient Egyptians practice it?  What about the Aztecs and the Mayans?  How does Decentralize All The Things impact the practice of fasting in your particular location?

There are times in my life when I need to get out of the way.  I mean that in multiple senses.  There are times when I need to get my hopes and fears to shove over, to be blocked or to be breathed through.  There are times when I don’t have any power at all over a situation, and I need to recognize when that is the case and stop struggling to change the thing I can’t change.

As a weird person, I have had a thing in my head since childhood, telling me the probability of things.  It is not like counting cards in Vegas, though.  It is more like, this person is likely to cheat me and lie to me, or there will probably be an Earthquake in this region within the next 10 years.  Sometimes, I feel the “disturbances in the force” preceding and during mass events.  It is a slippery feeling, and it usually results in my becoming very aware of the things surrounding me, in the fight or flight sense.  I’ve spent a very long time working on my ability to shut the awareness down, because it really doesn’t help my social skills.

There are times when I do have at least a little power over a situation, but I don’t have enough information to make the eventual choice.  I’ve come to recognize the feeling I get when that is the case.  These situations tend to be false dichotomy choices.  A simple example would be: are you going to vote democrat or republican?  The answer is neither.  Sometimes I vote democrat, sometimes I vote republican, sometimes I vote third party or non-partisan, and sometimes I don’t vote at all because all the options are bad, or because the act of voting gives my power or privacy away in ways I don’t want at the time.  The amount of energy I spend deciding a thing needs to be commensurate with the amount of power I have over the thing and its consummate impact on my life or my friends’ and family’s lives.

Sometimes, it is necessary just to wait.  The solution will present itself in time, at least according to the probabilities.  I don’t particularly like the cognitive dissonance of waiting.  Yet, that is where I make a bunch of decisions from, a place of patience and deep thought.  While I wait, I must get out of my own way.  Ruminating and obsessing over a decision I can’t make yet is not very helpful.  There are times I need to distract myself, to move on in my thoughts to another place, to be able to discover the joy again.

Joy.  Joy is a powerful thing, and I can have it anytime.  I don’t have to wait to be joyful.  I don’t have to be perfect to be joyful.  I don’t have to make the right decision to be joyful, even in the midst of despair and loneliness, or shame and guilt.  It is always there, if only I’d just get out of my own way.  Oh, but I have things to do, children to raise.  And climate change/an EMP/nuclear war/hackers overloading and permanently disabling the electrical grid will kill us all and make us go extinct!  Yes, I see you, anxiety and fear.  I wouldn’t live without my anxiety and fear for the world.  They have a very necessary evolutionary purpose, and are valuable in spurring me to get things done.  Yet at the same time, they don’t have to overwhelm me into paralysis.  They don’t ever have to overwhelm me into accepting authority when that authority is misguided and toxic.