This week is a busy week, for a variety of reasons.  We had houseguests over the weekend, so there was extra cleaning and cooking involved.  The fish died.  It is the last week of public school for my three children.  I’ve got three doctor’s appointments.  There are band instruments to remember to take to school, meds to remember to pick up from the office on the last day of school, safe treats for the allergy kid to take to school, a recognition ceremony, swimming lessons, a field trip to plan for, soccer practice, and a meeting with the school principal, along with other longer term planning to do.

One of my kids is sick.  The best laid plans will always fail, one way or another.  Murphy’s Law states it best: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.  Nassim Taleb agrees, and asks you to consider the risk of ruin.  What is the absolute worst thing that could go wrong?  This is actually an emotional centering type of activity, because, having thought of the worst possible thing, you aren’t completely blindsided by it when it occurs, and can roll with the punches that life inevitably throws at you.

If one of my children were to be expelled from public school, I could deal with that.  It wouldn’t be a bad thing.  No, it would be an opportunity.  If I find out that I need surgery, it isn’t the end of the world.  That’s an opportunity for my children to learn how to run the household.  Having accepted that bad things can happen, most of the time, they don’t.  Proper Prior Planning Prevents emotional meltdowns on my part.

A week like this requires a greater amount of meditation.  Here I am.  I am okay with whatever happens.  I am still here.  I will never be safe, this body is going to die.  Yet, I’m not dead yet.  I don’t control the world.  I don’t even control my own bodily functions all the time.  I don’t say, this wound will scar and this one won’t.  I don’t say, this muscle will tear and this one won’t when I crash my bicycle.  Yet, I do have enough control over my bodily actions to breathe, to relax when I can, to find some chance to laugh.  I do have enough control over my emotions to treat people with respect and dignity, to disobey them when necessary, to speak the litany against fear and manufacture rage when I must, and then look inward to see where my emotions have led.

Contrary to the public face I may present to the outside world, I suffer from fear, anger, despair, rage, love, joy, female PMS, a mother bear’s protective instinct, and all of the other intense emotions.  Yeah, emotions lead to suffering, but then, not having emotions is also suffering.  Life is suffering.  That’s where you are.  The question is, what will you do about it?  What makes the pain worth it?

There are a number of self-help authors out there, who try to get you to describe what your best self would look like 5 years from now.  The hope is that if you write it down on paper, you’re more likely to actually hold yourself accountable to that kind of goal.  A bit like how a sigil is supposedly going to work.  Some of them go further, though.  Some of them get the person to describe what horrible things will happen to them if they continue on down the road they are currently on.

What’s the worst that my bad habits can bring me?  Well, I’d be alone with no friends.  My family will be too busy to spend any time with me.  I would have no job, no career, no point, no joy in getting up each morning and knowing that what I was going to do that day would matter in the grand scheme of things, disconnected.  Okay.  So I’d be a hermit.  Great!  Then I could write books without getting interrupted all the time!  That doesn’t really sound all that bad.

No, that’s not hell.  Hell is other people.  Hell is working a pointless make-work job for a psychopathic boss who decides to mentally torment me by constantly belittling me, and making sure to point out every single mistake I’ve ever made, while never ever saying “good job” if I happen to get it right for once.  Hell is being made responsible for getting something done and not having the authority to get it done.  It is being overwhelmed by the sheer constant chatter of noise, making public speeches on a regular basis, being openly criticized for those same speeches on an even more regular basis, and having people be so busy attacking me that the entire enterprise falls apart for neglect.  Hell is being wrong, and knowing that I’m wrong, because the voices in my head are far crueler than those outside of it.

Well, that certainly explains why I avoid leading groups if at all possible.

What if I could change that?  What if I could change my own personal definition of hell?  What if I could be willing to face hell every day, for the bright and shining star of an idea?  I can face my fears, if I’m sufficiently motivated.  What would it take for me to be willing to be utterly wrong?  I think I know.

This week, I’ve been watching Jordan Peterson on youtube.  When I went to college and obtained my BS in Psychology (pun intended), his lectures were the ones I really wanted instead of the ones I got at my college.  One of the segments I watched is on how to pick friends.  Friends are the ones who actually listen to you when you’ve got bad news to tell them, without judgment.  Friends are the ones who celebrate with you when something incredible happens, instead of talking about something that happened to them 3 years ago, or otherwise downplaying the good thing.  The “friends” you don’t want are the negative ones.  They are the ones who are constantly miserable and constantly making you miserable when you’re around them.  Why would you choose to have a person like that in your life?

I thought to myself, I wonder what other fields of knowledge I can apply that concept of choosing not to be miserable in?  So, the first thing I do, is give it the acid test.  The best way to feel miserable I know of, is to believe in Near Term Human Extinction.  I mean, let’s face it.  If humans go extinct within the next 50-100 years due to extreme habitat loss (i.e. they starve or suffocate to death), there is not much meaningful progress that the human race as a whole could possibly achieve, much less you, you worthless eater and heat producing individual.

When you take people’s meaning away, they experience a large amount of existential angst, in general.  You have to understand, though, that not everybody derives their meaning from human progress.  In fact, a great chunk of people don’t.  If you’re a Christian who believes the rapture could happen any minute, and you’re still around and doing great stuff?  Your meaning comes from a different place than outcome based surroundings.  A lot of people with higher IQs than you have contemplated the meaning of life in the face of certain destruction for many tens of thousands of years.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could hear their thoughts on the matter?  Well, due to the internet being a bigger force multiplier on information exchange than Gutenberg’s press, you can!  You can read all kinds of old books online for free, or not for free, at any time or place that is wifi enabled.

So, here you are, facing certain doom (again).  Can you choose not to be miserable?  Well, yeah.  Tons of your ancestors, and tons of childless people managed to successfully do it in the past, so we know for certain that it can be done.  You know what?  You can do even better than choosing not to be miserable.  I mean, that’s a pretty low bar.  You can choose to be satisfied.  You can choose to be your best self.  It’s a bit of a cliché, but what else have you got control over?  Not the climate, that’s for sure.  You can’t even control your local politicians!  What makes you think you can control the vast majority of the politicians on the entire planet plus every single banker and transnational corporate CEO?  What are you, some kind of control freak?

Obviously, being a control freak was an adaptive response to something or other in nature, or we would not have so many of them around!  However, the point remains, that your locus of control remains in your self.  Then you think to yourself, gosh, I can’t even control myself.  Look at what I eat!  Look at what I weigh!  Look how much I don’t exercise and procrastinate from doing the things I need to do but don’t want to do!  What the heck does this have to do with climate change, anyway?  Ah, there you go again.  Being your best self isn’t about controlling the planet.  It never was.  It was always about choosing not to be miserable.

It’s hard not to be miserable sometimes.  If you’re a stay at home mom, nothing you do is ever acknowledged externally.  Nobody will tell you “good job!” and mean it, because you did the laundry, but didn’t manage to fold it yet, and you somehow managed to get everybody fed, but didn’t wash all the dishes yet.  If you are motivated by extrinsic motivations like people telling you that you did a good job?  Stay-at-home motherhood is going to be one very depressing experience for you.  So what are you going to do about it?

You’re going to decide that it is worth it.  Figure out what it is that motivates you.  Is it smiling children?  Well, that’s a problem then, because children don’t smile from approximately 9 years old until maybe 22 years old.  That’s still an extrinsic motivation, controlled by somebody other than you.  To illustrate better, intrinsic motivation is wanting to be honorable and productive, and extrinsic motivation is wanting to be seen as honorable and productive.  It is character versus reputation.

When you are intrinsically motivated, then you can face Near Term Human Extinction, just as your ancestors did, and choose to be your best self instead of collapsing in a puddle of existential despair because no progress will ever be made.  You can also face the sleepless nights and endless diapers of raising babies without collapsing in a puddle of existential despair because no progress in your friendships or career will ever be made.  What kind of person do you want to be?  Hardworking?  Smart?  Honorable?  Compassionate?  A lazy bum?  A genocidal politician?  You still have all of those options, and more!  Even if you, the individual, will die tomorrow, next decade, in thirty years, or whatever.  Everybody dies eventually.  Face that, and choose not to be miserable.

I am in constant pain.  If I think about it, I’ve probably been in constant pain since late February.  It isn’t bad.  It just interferes with my sleep right now.  One of the things I’ve been doing to deal with the pain, is to get into pointless arguments on Fearbook.  They’re pointless, because they’re part of an echo chamber, and nobody is going to learn anything at all from them anyway, except maybe me.

Yesterday’s pointless argument started off well enough.  One of the more pointless arguments out there is to argue the historicity of Jesus to a bunch of atheists.  I don’t really understand why atheists don’t think there was a non-magical son of a carpenter (or was it a Roman Legionnaire?) going around spouting anti-Roman rebellious sedition, who got crucified and died because of that, and stayed dead.  Why is it so abhorrent to their worldview, or at least the ones I was arguing with, to even think that most of the myths of the world have a kernel of real world material truth to them?  I’m not even claiming that non-material reality is true for that one.

No, they said.  The myths around the world have no real world component to them.  They sprang up out of, I don’t know, the ether? The vacuum? The void? And then afterwards, people started imitating the parts they could.  Meanwhile, I’m arguing for the existence of archetypes.  Take Disney’s jealous step-mother, for example.  Based on a true story, right?  A village savior who sacrificed himself so that the village could continue to exist.  Based on a true story, right?  Little Red Riding Hood is based upon the true story of a girl who goes to visit grandmother, meets a bad guy on the way, and, depending on where you are in the world, because the story really is global, either gets saved or gets gobbled up by the bad guy.  No, they said.  Never happens.  These myths have absolutely no basis in reality, they say.

Do they not realize what their position leads to, down the primrose path all the way to the end?  If the myths of the world are not based upon a material reality kernel of truth of some kind, no matter how small, then spirits must exist.  If big ideas, a couple thousand years old, of Little Red Riding Hood’s admonitions about the privacy of location information online, do not arise out of material reality, then there must be a non-material reality from which those big ideas arose.  If scientific discoveries frequently occur simultaneously on two or three separate locations around the globe, before the internet and before telephones and before the telegraph, then there must be a non-material reality from which these ideas arise.

The muses are spirits.  They can be propitiated.  They can be welcomed.  They can be shut out.  They can leave you and find somebody else.  They can hang around and cause feverish spurts of unbelievably prodigious amounts of writing in a small amount of time.  If the simplest explanation for widespread mythological uniformity is a war in the spirit world, then why not go with that?

Myths change the meaning of actions.  If you believe that humans arose from trees, are you going to log them and burn them all?  If you believe that humans arose from dirt and a blood clot, then are you going to not make the dirt bare and spill blood?  If you believe that humans arose through random chance, are you willing to make the selfless sacrifices required by your community for its health and continued existence?

If Jesus was a channeled spirit instead of a body that actually walked around, then that would explain why so very many atheists refuse to believe he actually existed.  Yet, even the rocks cry out for the existence of animism.  They’re alive too.  So, what if Jesus was a channeled spirit who still exists?  What then?  The question is: is Jesus worth listening too, given all of the other channeled spirits out there?  Does Jesus work for your particular community, or for you as an individual?  Or do other spirits, like your ancestors perhaps, have more skin in the game and work better?  Is he too high up on the spiritual food chain now to actually affect material reality for you personally?  Don’t you want a saint instead?  Especially a forgotten one stricken from the calendar whose attention is not spread among quite so many people, so it is easier to get their attention?

I need more sleep.

If you lived in Rome during the decline and fall, and knew that the Roman Empire was collapsing, would you take the bread, and would you watch the circuses?  This is one of those trick game theory questions.  It does not say where in the Empire you live, nor does it say what class of people you are in, nor does it explain whether you belong to a close-knit group of people capable of repelling outsiders’ noses from your business.  It does not say whether Rome is burning as we speak, or will collapse 40 years from now.  It does not say if the bread causes ergot poisoning, or if you have other means of feeding yourself.

Different people in different circumstances will respond to the question differently.  Perhaps you are a circus performer yourself.  Perhaps you are part of the Legion.  Perhaps you are high up in the Emperor’s household or staff.  Perhaps you are a slave.  Perhaps you are a trader from outside of Rome, living there temporarily while you collect your wares.

These are the kind of thoughts that flit through my mind, as I run through the forest on the wide paths.  A woman walking her dogs warns me that there have been bear sightings in the area.  She is glad that there are a lot of people on the trails.  Being in larger groups makes her feel safer, I suppose.  Yet, there are limits to safety in groups.  Too large a group, and you’ll be less safe, because the bystanders will do nothing.  Too small a group, and you’ll be at risk of predatory behavior.  Does being in a large group make me feel safe?

I hate large groups of people.  So, the answer to the question of whether I’d go watch the circuses, is a big NO, unless it was vital to my business affairs.  I remember the scene from The Life Of Brian, where the People’s Front of Judea, or was it the Judean People’s Front, met at the coliseum to plot and plan, or gripe and complain.  I don’t go to football games.  I don’t watch baseball games or basketball games.  I hardly ever go to the movie theater.  I haven’t watched a single episode of Game of Thrones, or Supernatural, or whatever it is that people watch these days.

However, I do take the bread.  I live in upper-middle-class suburbia.  Raising livestock is forbidden by ordinance.  I can grow some plants, and I do, but ultimately I depend on the grocery store, and I take full advantage of their rewards card.  Some of you don’t, both because you grow a lot more of your food, and because you value your privacy over your money.

Agriculture is not sustainable.  Or is it?  Climates have changed, and droughts and floods have completely changed the landscape.  What was sustainable in the past, the traditional local land management permaculture practices, is no longer sustainable now.  Things have changed too much.  Perhaps I should qualify that: monoculture oil-based agriculture is not sustainable.  There are other farming methods which are also not sustainable.  Do they build the soil or deplete it?  Do they build diversity, or reduce it?

Do bread and circuses build soil?  Do they build biodiversity?  Are there more species of fungi living and breathing as the soil or less?  What do bread and circuses do to the trees?  Are the trees healthier because you took the bread or went to the circus?  It is possible for the answers to these questions to be yes, although not very probable.

I finally got around to watching Jupiter Ascending over the weekend.  It was absolutely hilarious!  Little grey aliens and crop circles, and cloaked space ships with gravity beams!  Angels with wings!  Dinosaurs that were gargoyles!  Such rich mythological material!  (sigh)  Then they had to go and ruin it with the plotline.

The underlying story is that humans are a crop grown for the profit of royal bloodlines.  Certain humans receive the bounty of the technological prowess of so very many generations, and others are just harvestable stock of variable quality.  As if we should be proud to be robust stock.  That is such a metaphor for Jupiter.  Jupiter, after all, is the God of Emperors.  He doesn’t care at all about the little people, unless they get in the way of his profit, his power.

This brings me to talking about the oft-rumored breakaway civilization.  It has been inferred or surmised by quite a few intelligent people, that there have been quite a few technological advances which the deep state has acquired, yet only dribbles out to the masses in bits and pieces over the years.  For over fifty years now, we have had stealth fighter jets.  For over fifty years now, there has been a patent on mind control or brain entrainment technology held by the military.  Stare at your cell phone, and realize that just about every piece of that device came from or through the military, NASA, or DARPA.  When Jupiter Ascending talks about Monitors and Keepers, it does so because those things exist already, and you don’t even have to believe in space aliens to see that the military’s use of surveillance technology has improved vastly over the last 50 years, more so than they’ll admit.

I often wonder which nefarious or benevolent organizations have access to the results of the surveillance tech.  Such vast databases have got to be worth quite a bit to the mid-level minion class, and the profit-minded criminal classes, not to mention those who would control everything as if it were encoded in their genes as their birthright.  Yet, Congress can not see them.  If a Congresscritter asks to see the database, they’ll experience technical difficulties, or the person they are asking won’t have the clearance or authority to show them, or they’ll get the usual evasive answers.

This is to be expected at this point in the timeline.  Perhaps timeline is not the right word.  It is too linear, and does not account for the cycles of time.  Perhaps I should say, Congress is plagued with administrative bloat, with tons of different factions all fighting for power, resulting in gridlock, at this stage of the wheel of time.  If there are more than 15 surveillance agencies within the US Government system (that have been admitted to), and none of them talk to each other or cooperate with each other very well, why would they ever share the information they’ve gathered, their control files on various influential people, on the Congressional record?  Only if they were taking somebody down as part of a revealed blackmail material plan.

How many girls did Jupiter/Zeus impregnate on the side, much to Hera’s wrath and displeasure?  If pedophilia is as rampant within the US Congress as it is within the Roman Catholic Church all through its sex lives of the popes history, nobody wants to bring that out into the open.  However, all pipelines peak, all markets leak, and all secrets get revealed in time.  Even the technology discovered and developed in Antarctica will be increasingly disseminated into the wider population.  Jupiter isn’t the only god, you know.  Humans are more than mere crops, grown for the pleasure of the grains and the fungi in symbiosis, and harvested in time with skulls being kicked down from the top of the pyramid once more.

I’ve been listening to some Star Trek soundtracks while recovering from a bicycle crash.  There is a rich vein of metaphysical gold within the Star Trek Universe, just as there is in The X-Files, or Marvel’s movie franchise series.  Part of it is how Star Trek’s general political plotlines tend to follow the political plotlines of the times in which those particular episodes or movies were written.  We start with exploration of new technological progress, uh, I mean new civilizations, move on to the peak of empire’s power and glory where we have conquered, uh, I mean they have seen the wisdom of joining the United Federation of Planets, destroying the Borg (either biblical heaven or the communists), and then slide down the end of empire into darkness.

I was interested in Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, because it seems to be a summation of how I see a species’ genetic attempt to survive the darkness that nature throws at us, much less the gods.  It is a critical component of decentralization.  You know you have reached the centralization narrative when you hear the unspoken words “we should all do this.”  We should all achieve healthy BMI.  We should all eat less meat.  We should all work a 9-5 job.  We should all receive a Universal Basic Income.  We should all be on statins and blood pressure medication.  We should all drink lots of fluoride.  We should all get vaccinated.  No.  No we shouldn’t all do anything.

Let me explain with an example.  Not all dogs should look alike.  A Terrier should not look like a Border Collie.  A husky should not look like a Great Dane.  A French Poodle should not look like a Chihuahua or a Mastiff.  There is a wide variety of dog breeds and types, because these dogs serve different functions in their local ecosystems.  The rat hunters are not sheep herders.  The cold-weather adapted dogs with thick fur coats are not the hot-weather adapted dogs with big ears and very thin short fur coats.  Not all dogs should eat the same diet either.  Working sled dogs need more calories than tiny subway purse dogs.

The same is true with people.  The hot weather adapted people look physically different from the cold-weather adapted people.  The hunters are not farmers, nor are they shepherds.  Some people are born to run, and some people are born to lift heavy things instead.  Some people are born followers, some people are born leaders, and some people are born loners.  Not every person should eat the same diet.  We’re supposed to have a wider range of body fat and body muscle than the BMI scale accounts for.  People are diverse, because diversity works.

Diversity of immunity is how species survive disease.  If, say, every banana plant on the planet were the exact same genetic clone, then all it would take is one devastating disease to wipe out the entire species.  If everybody lived on bread alone, then wheat rust would wipe out the entire food supply.  If every army on the planet used bronze swords and chariots as their only means of attack, then smallpox infected blankets harboring pneumonic plague infected rats would kill them all.  Diversity is such an essential species survival strategy that even the single-celled organisms do it.

What does this mean for you?  It means that we should not all worship one creator god.  It means that we should not all become one big happy global government, nor should we all become anarchists.  It means we should not all grow our own food to survive the end of the unipolar US empire.  We should not all stop having children, nor should we all get married and bear 3 children.  We should not all wear the same clothing style no matter what the outside weather is and what our diverse jobs are.  We should not all eat the same 10 plants (corn, soy, wheat, potatoes, you get the picture) in our diet over and over and over again.  We should not all vote in any given election, nor should we all abstain from voting in any given election.  A wide variety and diversity of things are possible.  There are times when uniformity works for the species, when the ants all gather together and hold onto each other to form floating mats during a flood.  However, nothing is a default, and ants holding onto each other when there is no flood means you can’t bring the food home.  We’re not supposed to be centralized and united, and the land spirits and deities will grow in their infighting to make sure that we do not become so.

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?