Deep Thoughts for the Winter Solstice

by Grow Up Conference | Dec 13, 2023 | Media Partners, The New Agora

www.heartstarbooks.com

About the Author

Written by ethompson

Elva Thompson was born in England in 1947 and moved to Rosebud Lakota reservation in 1987. She is the author of the Heartstar Series; Book One: The Key made of Air, Book Two: The Gates to Pandemonia, and Book Three: Walking In Three Worlds. Her other interests include organic gardening, ancient phonetic languages, sonic sound and their application in the healing arts. She is also a medical intuitive and teaches sonic re-patterning using sound, colour, and essential oils. Elva Thompson is on Amazon Author Central @ amazon.com/author/heartstar

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The 4 Scariest (but secretly wonderful) Steps Toward Enlightenment

by Grow Up Conference | Dec 13, 2023 | Media Partners, The New Agora

www.self-inflictedphilosophy.com

The 4 Scariest

(but secretly wonderful) Steps Toward Enlightenment

by Gary Z. McGee

“Make no mistake about it – enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”  ~Adyashanti

The first thing to remember, here at the outset, is that enlightenment is not a destination but a direction. It is not a truth but a process. It is both imaginary and real. It is not an either-or, but a both-and. It is only achievable when it is understood that it is an unachievable thing. Once we can let go of the need to achieve it, then we free ourselves to allow the process to unfold, and we become the achieving. It is the constantly expanding horizon of human flourishing. But it can hurt like hell.

Indeed, enlightenment is no walk in the park. The first teacher met on the path toward enlightenment tends to be Pain itself. Enlightenment is both a reckoning and a wrecking, both expansion and annihilation. The following four steps are just the tip of a much deeper iceberg of trials and tribulations, fraught with menacing thresholds and sinister Rubicons. Thin-skinned, faint-hearted, status-quo-junkies addicted to comfort, need not apply. And if you decide to apply, leave your invulnerability behind. It’s an illusion anyway.

Here then are four of the scariest, but secretly wonderful, steps one can take on the path toward enlightenment.

1.) Vulnerability and Self-Honesty:

“There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.” ~Alain de Botton

Vulnerability is downright scary. But in order to gain the ability to learn from our mistakes, to have fun with our inherent hypocrisy, and to have a good sense of humor regarding our fallibility as an imperfect species, we must first have the capacity to be vulnerable, which requires brutal self-honesty and ruthless self-interrogation.

Brutal self-honesty and ruthless self-interrogation forces us to face our own demons. It pushes us to confront our most personal foibles, fallibilities, and unhealthy propensities and to question all authorities, especially our own. It forces our head over the abyss of the human condition, searing our soul with the unavoidable blazing flame of truth: impermanence. It slaps us across the face with its absolute mockery of our happiness ever being a thing that can be permanent. It insouciantly rattles off the almighty cosmic joke, making damn certain we realize we’re the butt-end of that joke.

Which is why a particularly effective strategy at achieving a state of vulnerability and self-honesty is to use our sense of humor. When we laugh at ourselves, we loosen ourselves up. The screws of our seriousness get unscrewed by the genius of our humorous sincerity. We suddenly go from being the butt-end of the joke, to laughing at the joke, thus turning the tables on the jokes power over us, and thus on power itself.

When we can laugh at ourselves, we are allowing ourselves to be “weird,” to tackle the dilemma of the self from another angle, to impose a state of existential vulnerability that transforms the soul into a prism where the light of truth can shine through and take the form of the rainbow of self-honesty.

And Pain is the terribly beautiful, shiny red, thorny and jagged little pill that we learn to swallow, again and again, with a devil-may-care, existentially masochistic smile on our all-too-human face. Bottoms up!

2.) Swallowing the Jagged Red Pill of Truth:

“The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.” ~Osho

Without the painful red pill of truth, we’re stuck with the all-too-comfortable blue pill of deception.

The blue pill gets stuck in our throat, causing no end of blockages, suppressions, oppressions, and depressions. The blue pill is a beacon of deception, lodged in our throat chakra, jamming all frequencies and preventing us from speaking our truth and from being impeccable with our word. The blue pill is a magnet for lies. And lies are sexy, scandalous scoundrels. They float around in a foggy smoke, seducing us with false kindness, kissing us just the right way, and lulling us into brain-washable complacency and a heightened state of malleability. Under the blue pill’s seduction, we are pawns wallowing in self-incurred immaturity.

Taking the red pill dislodges the blue pill, thus clearing the passage and opening all frequencies to the truth. As Immanuel Kant said. “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.”

But seeker of enlightenment beware the teacher who longs to jam even the red pill down your throat. The choice must be yours, and yours alone. A good teacher will guide you to the red pill, but he/she should never force it down your throat. Like Adyashanti said, “My speaking is meant to shake you awake, not to tell you how to dream better.” You have to want to dream better first.

As G. K. Chesterton said, “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.”

Swallowing the red pill is a frightening prospect. It shatters worldviews and dissolves certainty. It replaces answers with questions. It upends all outdated apple carts: psychological, physical, and spiritual. It reconditions preconditioning. It cleanses the doors of perception. It shatters the glassy essence of cognitive dissonance; the shards of which splinter off and sting like mad in the fleshy heart of truth. It leaves your soul naked, vulnerable, and blank-slated in the angry eye of an apocalyptic existential-hurricane of uncertainty.

It reveals that you were always God in hiding. And the heavy burden of that prospect alone can be a soul-crushing responsibility. But, as Seneca said, “A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.”

3.) Ego Annihilation:

“There are plenty of difficult obstacles in your path. Don’t allow yourself to become one of them.” ~Ralph Marsten

This one is arguably the most painful. The death of the ego is no walk in the park. It is more like a walk through a dark night of the soul surrounded by an angry abyss that’s really just the small-minded version of you not wanting to lose what it feels is the essence of you: your ego. But the ego is not the essence of you, and it never was. The real you is an interdependent cosmic force, an interconnected frequency, a unified cosmic agent going through the motions of being a mind-body-soul.

As Friedrich Nietzsche explained, “But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”

Ego annihilation leads to the ashes from which the phoenix of the soul rises. But first there must be descent. There must be a tearing part, a burning down, a sacred disintegration. But the task of severance is repentance. It speaks the language of vicissitude. It howls inside you like old night. It moves through you like fresh smoke. It is the blood of a full moon’s howl. It is a cruel wheel spinning its cycle of animal angst, of species-crimson. It is ‘in this moment.’ Here, at the crux of the cross, at the knot on the wood, where the crooked trees mock your martyrdom and all your ancestors can smell the scent of your heart’s full blossom, blinking in and out of the ether, screaming at you, “It is time! There may not be another life to love.”

And so you descend. And so you cross the Rubicon of the self, bridging the gap between Man and Overman above the Existential Black Hole. And so you lose yourself in the blue smoke, in the loose shadows. You scream out like Yin. Your fists clinch like Yang. The fish feed on their tails. The snakes do the same. It’s like heaven and hell in your body.

People can smell the animal in you, the wild-self coming to life. Death hums a eulogy in the trees, and you die a small death: the exulting death of your ego. And then you’re quiet as a doll, vulnerable, astonished, and cataleptic from the fall. But now you’re a force of nature first, a person second. And the Earth has finally discovered its salvation—the awakened human soul.

4.) Fearless Forgiveness:

“In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.” ~Robert Anton Wilson

Fearless forgiveness is scary because it is uncomfortable on an ontological level. It’s both a tearing down of the walls that protect us from the world and an unlocking of the prison door of our expectations. When we tear down the walls, fear is paramount and must be faced, and that can be dreadfully uncomfortable.

But, like Farrah Gray said, “Comfort is the enemy of achievement.” So it behooves us to get uncomfortable. Like Neo waking up from the Matrix for the first time. When we unlock the door to our prison, the way the world truly is despite us, and in spite of our expectations and worldview, becomes the harsh Desert of the Real, which only we can face and resolve for ourselves. But at least now we have the double-edged sword of fearless forgiveness to cut through all the red tape.

Forgiveness hurts because it is the ultimate letting go. It’s a deep, visceral acceptance of the way things are, regardless of our need for things to be a certain way. It’s a decisive shedding of the burden of what we cannot control.

Tantamount to Buddhist non-attachment, fearless forgiveness is a reckoning of existential proportions that turns the tables on the concept of control itself. It gives us permission to authentically and sincerely go with the flow. With fearless forgiveness it suddenly becomes okay that the game of life is “rigged,” because our fearlessness is a willingness to transform whatever negative, counterproductive, unhealthy shit gets thrown at us into something positive, progressive, and healthy. And our forgiveness is a giant sigh saying, “It’s okay.” It gives us the insurmountable courage to transform demons into diamonds, fear into courage, anger into strength, and disdain into compassion.

Fearless forgiveness is allowing ourselves to be intimate with the cosmos as it truly exists. Like Dōgen said, “Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” And intimacy with all things is just as likely to hurt as it is to feel good. But that is perfectly okay. It gives us permission to take the good with the bad, the unhealthy with the healthy, and the immoral with the moral. And then it gives us the courage to transform it all into our own amazing thing—art, adventure, love.

In the end, enlightenment is scary and painful, but it is so rewarding that it doesn’t even matter. As Camus said, “Life should be lived to the point of tears.”

We must ride the fine line between ecstasy and misery in order to enjoy the great mystery. Question thyself, overcome thyself, forgive thyself, then rebirth thyself, ad infinitum, and the path toward enlightenment shall not elude you.

Image source:  Interstellar by Rolzay

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (The 4 Scariest (but secretly wonderful) Steps Toward Enlightenment) was originally created and published by ©2015 Waking Times, all rights reserved. For permission to re-print this article contact wakingtimes@gmail.com, or the respective author.

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A Criminal of Purpose

by Grow Up Conference | Dec 13, 2023 | Media Partners, The New Agora

A Criminal of Purpose

Preparation aches and the myopic lens of ‘survive at all costs.’

Note: This post was originally split into two parts, but they don’t work well separated.

Preparation Aches

For decades the preppers and survivalists were mocked and chided as paranoid obsessives or fearful impulsives. While their numbers increased after the financial crisis of 2008, and those with gold and silver holdings made out very well in the aftermath of that latest banker-created scam, the masses of deluded normies still mocked them as if everything would go back to normal.

The preppers and survivalists have thick skin because they know things the normies don’t. Those Normie words do nothing to keep them from preparing for anything and everything. Sticks and stones not only can’t hurt them, but they use them for fire kindling and slingshots.

Then March 2020 happened and the global population was imprisoned for an invisible sniffles bug they were told was creeping everywhere and inside everyone. When the normie rush to big box retailers kicked off for toilet paper and bottled water, and whatever scraps of frozen and canned foods remained on the shelves the preppers were at home, comfortably observing the weeks of chaos with chronic cases of mild to severe schadenfreude.

While not all preppers are survivalists, and few have all the skills required to be considered well-rounded preppers, none of the preppers and survivalists are normies.

There are homestead preppers, defense preppers, financial preppers, food preppers, doomsday preppers, and nuclear armageddon preppers. Each group of specialized preppers has a little knowledge and skillset utilized by every other group.

The more one knows about each specialty, the more prepared they are for any type of coming calamity, all of which must be foreseen to be mitigated. The mentality of every well-rounded prepper is that all of the foreseen calamities are just around the corner, with a few unforeseen ones as well.

The irony of setting off on the Oregon Trail for preppers is that once the journey begins, there is no destination—it can never end because the prepper becomes certain that as soon as they relax even a little bit to set up camp and enjoy rabbit stew, they’ll be caught, unprepared, with a band of roaming Shoshone taking their scalps. And an unprepared prepper is destined for the same result as every normie—confusion and chaos, or death.

The homestead preppers have their piece of heaven, their plot of earth to toil and roam. These plots are isolated and secure with a fresh water supply nearby. They’ve upgraded them with perimeter fencing, warning technologies, motion sensors, night vision surveillance, and maybe even 12 gauge trip wires to warn of wild animals or intruders. Nothing will raid their garden or come within a country mile of their front door without them knowing in advance. But one day someone will try, and that day could be today.

The defense preppers have all that perimeter security with a couple of fierce working dogs, maybe Malinois or German Shepherds roaming the premises. They also have bug-out bags, hideouts, bunkers, and more arms and ammunition than a well-organized militia. If that zombie apocalypse ever strikes these people will be “the last of us.” One day it will happen. It’s just around the corner.

Food preppers are canning and preserving wizards. They have orchards and acres of vegetables, nightshades, and fruits. To extend the growing season they have root cellars and greenhouses with more vegetables and vertical stacks of herbs. They keep chickens, maybe a pen of hogs, a flock of sheep, or a cow or two for milking until the slaughter.

In their cold dry basement, they have enough food to feed five families for a few years if all the grocery stores on earth suddenly disappear, or the food supply magically finds engineered deficits. Food insecurity is the number three step of the tyrant’s guide to enslaving the masses, after speech laws, and gun grabs. One day it will happen. It’s just around the corner.

All it would take is a couple of engineered strikes of a few labor unions like United Farmers, combined with less fertilizer production, or deficits of nitrate and potash to curb crop yields, maybe a government plan to reduce farming and agricultural production to “save the planet” from an essential element needed for plants and trees to flourish.

Throw in some supply chain disruptions in the Panama Canal or Suez or both, and those food preppers start to look like geniuses for simply preparing for what they could see coming.

The financial preppers have their Liberty safes with digital codes that the feds have access to filled with stacks of silver liberties, buffalos, gold Krugerrands, maples, or Her Majesty the late queen. Nobody is stacking The Great Reset’s royal pimp King Charles. Every financial prepper must have a sufficient overlap on the prepper ven diagram with the homestead prepper and defense prepper to deter home invaders from a big heist.

These preppers know the dollar is on its last days, and the entire financial system will be intentionally reset as those in power continue to destroy petrodollar-based geopolitical hegemony through one seppuku policy after another. Turns out that weaponizing your currency against other countries through economic sanctions and incessant bullying doesn’t inspire confidence in former friends around the world to want to keep holding your debt. Printing endless dollars for the controlling classes to loot on the backs of three generations of Americans with no rudimentary understanding of money or finance is easy theft.

More on failed banks seizing cash soon after bank runs, and the coming destruction of crypto here:

Your Money Is Their Money (Part 1)

Read full story

In recent days gold has hit six-month highs with the deluded “market” believing the Fed will lower rates next year because inflation is on the way down. This has pushed the dollar index downward, and with corporate buybacks and CTAs luring retail idiot investors into another bull trap the stock markets are running up on hopium and vapors again.

Banks have been shutting down branches by the hundreds each year since 2021 to cut costs because of the yields on treasuries they’re forced to hold. March saw the collapse, bailout, or mergers of several banks, with the Federal Reserve forced to create another temporary plug in the leaking ship that is sinking the financial system. The entire Potempkin charade is a satire, a laughable exercise in delaying an inevitable collapse until it can be blamed on something else, or someone else—like Russia, Iran, or China and another engineered banker war.

All wars are banker wars.

The fact is inflation is at 8%, double the regime’s rigged official figure, and it peaked around 20% last summer, double the regime’s rigged figure at the time. Any consumers not suffering short-term memory loss who frequent grocery stores know that the prices of everything essential on those shelves have doubled in the past few years. The financial preppers know that inflation is compounding, and unless wages increase at the same rate of inflation while decreasing easy credit, people are losing their labor value with every hour worked and every paycheck earned.

Soon, holding dollars will be like holding C-4 with an invisible timer. The fiat bomb is ticking and it will be detonated for the global agenda of World Economic Controlled Demolition.

More on engineering global economic collapses here:

World Economic Controlled Demolition

March 10, 2022

We have reached the economic destruction phase of management’s Silent War plans. The lockdowns that destroyed millions of small businesses over two years for a sniffles bug weren’t enough. Currency inflation from printing trillions isn’t happening fast enough. It’s time for the scorched earth period of the show, the ‘set your own house o…

While there is no greater weapon for inducing mass fear in the population (apart from non-existent invisible round spikey things) than nuclear armageddon, it’s more than likely this was always the purpose of keeping nuclear stockpiles armed and ready and ending the de-escalation treaties borne of the late Cold War Glasnost era.

Don’t bank on any nuclear exchanges no matter how tense the “dialogue” seems between nuclear powers, the parasitic controllers have too much valuable real estate in the northern hemisphere and they don’t want it radioactive and worthless, they simply want all of what they don’t already have.

The nuclear armageddon preppers are the most peculiar lot because they have to entertain some pretty dark scenarios to prepare for a world of thermonuclear exchanges and the subsequent century of inhospitable and uninhabitable nuclear winter that would follow.

The nuclear scenario requires food, water, iodine tablets, and gas masks, all inside an underground bunker with an air filtration system to live for a week or more after the mushroom clouds blanket the northern hemisphere. This all begs the obvious question of this peculiar bunch: If they believe this will happen, why not just save half a million dollars and move to Patagonia? They have clean water, and real food not injected with chemicals, and the cost of an underground bunker would be 50% off.

My Grandaddy tilled this land and his Grandaddy before him! I ain’t going nowhere!

If you believe that any day now your great grandaddy’s cucumber patch will be giving off five thousand Roentgen an hour when Vlad launches those Sarmats what the hell have you emotionally attached yourself to? Why would you pay taxes to a nation you believe is hell-bent on making this earth-destroying humanity-culling nightmare scenario a reality, forcing you to spend six or seven figures preparing for it? And even if you do make all the preparations do you think your government will provide you with ample warning in those fifteen minutes from the launch of hypersonic nukes before impact and your certain death? Why are you betting your life savings and life on an assumption your government will tell you the truth for once?

Companies manufacturing underground nuclear-proof bunkers have been doing steady business since the plandemic, offering a range of bunker models as if they were second homes. After watching a few Atlas Shelter videos on YouTube, a company based in Texas that has expanded operations to Europe, I learned that surviving a nuclear exchange with a 90% favorability only requires putting the earth above your head, with as little as five feet of earth being enough.

A well-sealed shipping container with air filtration, and food storage for just a week would increase that favorability to 98% or greater. Throw in iodine and water treatment tablets and one-year survival outcomes rise to near certainty.

But what kind of world awaits the nuclear armageddon preppers when they emerge from their air-conditioned subterranean vacation home foxholes?

What do they do with their underground hotels until things get hot?

Could they collect some side hustle income until N-Day arrives by renting it out on AirBnB?

The Atlas Arizona model could deliver some sweet cheddar, with two bunk houses sporting ten bunk beds, two bedrooms, six showers, seven sinks, six toilets, a game room, a greenhouse, and a cinema room. I hear the views are gorgeous.

Are y’all coming to Texas for the holidays this year?

Yes we are, we’re so excited to see you and Dale and the kids again.

Oh, that’s great, where y’all staying?

In a nuclear shelter fifteen feet underground outside of Denton. They have a ping pong table, shuffleboard, and bunk beds. The kids can’t wait.

There are preppers of all stripes and then there are survivalists.

If the two categories could be distinguished by a movie it would be Rambo Part II. The preppers are Murdoch and the team at headquarters with the Hueys, the comms, the weapons, and the million-dollar equipment. When it all fails at the start of the mission, there’s just one man—the survivalist with his compound bow, arrows with explosive tips, bowie knife, biceps, and bare hands, who knows that he’s expendable.

“You not expendable Rambo.”

If some preppers are survivalists, and all survivalists are preppers, then some preppers are not as prepared to survive as they may think.

If the homestead preppers had to flee their homes, how many would do well out in the wild playing the survivalist?

If the food preppers had to abandon their food stash, how many would last one week across the Rocky Mountains in winter?

If the financial preppers could only take a few stacks of gold kruggerands into a post-apocalyptic frontier, how much fresh water would those stacks get them in a world where safe food, clean water, and weapons are gold?

Could they kill a white-tailed deer with a limited edition Trump silver bar?

Maybe.

There are many outcomes and variables to consider when prepping, and they all revolve around six major themes: shelter, warmth, wealth preservation, water/calories, energy, and defense.

Once those major themes are addressed, the questions begin, and they all start with the same six words: When the shit hits the fan…?

When the SHTF will the water still be running? Will there be round-ups and transfers to government concentration camps a la Australia in 2021 based on a made-up virus spreading a contagion of irrational fear?

How will we run the generator when our diesel fuel stores are gone? Where will we get power when they shut the grid down for “climate change” fear-mongering? What would we do for comms if an EMP took out all satellites and telecom infrastructure, or even a solar storm? Where would we play Angry Birds?

If preparing sounds exhausting, well, that’s because it is, and that’s why most people will never be close to prepared for the mildest emergency, even if they’re told it’s coming, and they agree that some preparations should be made.

The great Mark Steyn wrote, “The assumption of permanence is the illusion of every age.” People of every age are blinded by the illusion. “That foreseen emergency I’ve been reading about for a decade now on all my favorite blogs, it’ll come someday,” people tell themselves.

It didn’t happen yesterday, so it won’t happen today. We can start tomorrow.

My father kept an eye on the Cascadia earthquake subduction zone for thirty years, long before anyone was talking about it. He spent his working years managing the construction of electrical substations near the hydroelectric facilities lining the Columbia River. After trips to southern California with structural engineers (where a lot of those lines send power) in the aftermath of earthquakes, taking soil samples and assessing how well certain equipment fared and why others failed, he was well versed in the damage risks of even mild Southern California earthquakes.

After the big one in Japan in 2011, he spent years watching tsunami videos on YouTube imagining what will 100% happen in the next fifty years to the Oregon and Washington coastlines. Of all the emergencies to be prepared for, that’s the one that’s definitely ‘around the corner.’

And yet despite knowing this and following the work of Oregon State University geologists taking sediment samples beneath the Pacific Ocean for decades to estimate the frequency of “big ones”; despite spending hours watching animated simulation videos of the entire fault line slipping toward a 9.0 magnitude bomb, and reading about all the downed bridges across the Pacific Northwest, and how rescue operations would take weeks to reach people with food and medicine, and how the foundation of his house would likely pop up three meters dislodging water lines, my father never once bought the emergency food supplies or water sachets that he kept saying he would buy.

He obsessed over an emergency that geologists say has a 35% probability of happening at any moment, increasing by 1% each year until E-Day, and yet, after all those years, knowing all those facts, he did nothing.

If this sounds foolish it may very well be, to a prepper. However, I’m pretty sure he catastrophized the whole event so thoroughly in his mind that he often admitted they wouldn’t make it and resigned himself to a fate of nature’s timing that most preppers and survivalists spend massive fortunes fighting.

After moving the folks to a semi-remote gated community in Arizona last summer the Cascadia threat is no longer, and his obsessions with this catastrophe have dwindled. And yet, in another episode of “I must be adopted” this past black Friday, he and Mama Citizen finally pulled the trigger on the website mypatriotsupply.com and bought a thirty-day supply of emergency food that will last 25 years in proper storage conditions—mostly because it was discounted.

Still, the mentality of the average person is, “We can always prepare tomorrow.”

Until… it’s March 18, 2020, and all the toilet paper and bottled water are gone from the shelves.

Until…it’s March 20, 2020, and the Polish cops come by your apartment every day at 14:00 to ensure you are locked down for the sniffles bug.

Yes, that was my life for two straight weeks after arriving on a flight from Mexico City on the first day of global lockdowns and having Polish soldiers get all my contact information on board the plane at the arrival gate.

If I dared leave my flat the police would have fined me $1200.

It was that day when I was unprepared that I became a mild prepper overnight, and having set out on that path, now often ask those prepper “When the SHTF?” questions before making major life decisions.

Having set out on that journey, which once started, cannot cease, I’ve also come to ask the question: Is there such a thing as obsessive prepping that hinders living?

The shortness of our existence meets the economy of attention and emotional investment at the crossroads of cheating death or living and loving life.

Choices must be made.

Can one travel both paths?

Prophets Profits of Doom and Gloom

There’s preparing, surviving, and thriving, and there are also those who go past the edge of the cliff into the great dark abyss of living in constant fear and paranoia through the process of becoming obsessively prepared.

The number of growing websites and YouTube channels dedicated to prepping is dizzying. There’s Survival Dispatch, The Canadian Prepper, City Prepping, Sensible Prepper, and for those who prefer a female hero there’s Survival Lilly.

There are investment advice channels that peddle catastrophe porn to lure newbie investors into buying their software or investing in their schemes. Each new thumbnail outdoes the previous day’s in calamity clickbait and yet, people can’t help themselves.

There’s Steve Van Metre, the bond king, who posts daily videos combining market analysis with financial doomsday warnings that simply never materialize in the weeks that follow. He sells specialized software that front-runs computer trading algorithms that determine market prices today. According to his videos, his CTA Timer Pro software is never wrong, ever. He attracts new money with clickbait chicken little thumbnails. Are many of his long-term market and economic assessments true? Sure. Are many of these assessments overblown hysteria that financial controllers will patch up with some new special-purpose vehicle that will only worsen inflation? Yes, and anyone paying attention already knows that.

Then there’s the full spectrum survival channel, which sports 370,000 subscribers. One look at recent thumbnails also says it all.

He seems like a well-intentioned father and husband who wants to protect his family and help others do the same. His channel hosts many useful survival videos, but his entire income appears predicated on scaring the shit out of his followers with overblown hysterical, and irrational interpretations of daily domestic and global geopolitical events.

Take the border crash in upstate New York from last week. His rush to post a video without details led him to completely misinterpret what was either a vaxident, murder-suicide of a wealthy couple, or Anne Heche style remote controlled crash by alphabet agency or Mossad psychopaths meant to look like a terror attack, with Zionist-funded stenographers reporting an Iranian passport found at the scene. For him, it wasn’t options A or B, it had to be a terror attack that was simply covered up.

He does this nearly every other day, selecting information to fit a catastrophic narrative because fear is a powerful weapon of consumer manipulation to lure more patrons. The same is true for this platform. There are more than a few Substacks that have no other agenda than to peddle daily Vaxocaust fear porn to readers. While it can’t be good for the psyche of readers, it probably pays those Substackers very well.

Frozen with fear, hindered by mental instability and physical inaction is exactly where the manipulators of global events want the masses.

What we pay attention to, believe, and use as valid information to guide us in our major decision-making processes can often be to our detriment, and lead us down the wrong path.

This brings us to the most important kind of prepping not just for surviving but thriving; a kind of prepping that most of those fear-porn channels rarely mention. While they exhaustively cover those six major themes—shelter, water, warmth, calories, energy, and defense, and all the gadgets, equipment, supplies, risk assessments, potential calamities, and scenario exercises to prepare for each one, far too many of them manage to ignore the most essential tool for survival.

Heijōshin

Miyamoto Musashi, a renowned Japanese swordsman and ronin, famous for his unmatched skill in swordsmanship authored the famous philosophical work “The Book of Five Rings” (Go Rin No Sho), in 1645. It is a classic text on martial arts strategy, tactics, and philosophy. Musashi touches on various aspects of preparedness, both in the context of combat and in life.

One of Musashi’s key ideas is preparedness and the concept of “Heijōshin”, which means having a calm, steady, and unflappable mind. A warrior, and by extension, any person, should be mentally prepared and maintain composure in all circumstances. This state of mind allows for clear thinking and effective decision-making in critical situations.

Musashi wrote, “In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, the spirit is nothingness.” This highlights the importance of being grounded in wisdom and principle, suggesting that a clear, uncluttered mind (the void) is the key to virtue and effectiveness.

It’s quite possible that centuries before there were modern-day ‘preppers’ there was Miyamoto Musashi who asserted that the most prepared for adversity are not those with the most wealth and riches to accumulate the most gadgets and gear, but those who have challenged themselves in life by not always desiring the easy path. The strongest swords are forged with extreme elements. First, the intensity of the burning fire followed by the ice-cold water.

“Do not sleep under a roof. Carry no money or food. Go alone to places frightening to the common brand of men. Become a criminal of purpose. Be put in jail, and extricate yourself by your own wisdom,” Musashi writes. Self-reliance and the necessity of being prepared for and resilient in the face of adversity cannot come without constant challenges to mind and body.

Musashi also emphasized adaptability to respond fluidly to changing circumstances: “You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain,” he said. Preparedness is not just about having a fixed plan, a notebook with flow charts for various situations, but about that Marine Corps. motto—improvise, adapt, overcome.

Overall, Musashi’s teachings advocate for constant readiness, mental flexibility, and the cultivation of an unshakable spirit. His ideas on preparedness extend beyond physical combat and have been applied in various fields such as business, sports, and personal development, resonating with people who seek a disciplined, mindful approach to life’s challenges.

If you have ever been in a sticky situation, maybe even a life-or-death emergency with other people, you may have noticed the different personalities that suddenly emerge when adversity strikes.

Adrift

I first saw this as a young boy, in a grave situation in the middle of the mighty Columbia River. Nearly every Sunday in the summer we would join several families at a beach on Sauvie’s Island. All the kids were part of the local swim team—all strong swimmers.

By the age of this event, nine or ten, I was one of the strongest and had already accumulated several shoe boxes of blue ribbons and various trophies including the most valuable swimmer on a team of 120 swimmers aged 8-18. By age seventeen, the last year I swam for the team, my name was on all but four pool records going back to age eight.

A boy and girl two years older than myself were goofing around on a floating single mattress and a small two-person raft. She was on the mattress holding onto a rope tied to our raft, with no ores. Nobody was wearing a life jacket, not that they would have helped us, but we all simply viewed those (for better or worse) as things for people who couldn’t swim.

After fooling around splashing each other, none of us noticed the current had quickly dragged us toward the center of the river and even closer to the other river bank which was Washington State. When we heard all our parents and a dozen other kids screaming we looked back towards Oregon and saw them jumping up and down excitedly waving downriver where mighty container ships entered from the Pacific Ocean at Astoria to dump their cargo at the port of Portland.

Every other Sunday, one of those large container ships arriving was the massive Toyota vessel coming from Japan with the latest Toyota imports for the Pacific Northwest. When we saw the nose of the ship there were mixed reactions. The girl panicked and almost lost the handle on the rope connecting her to our raft. The boy older than me suggested we paddle toward Washington’s shore and recross the river to Oregon after the ship passes, to which the girl agreed. As we paddled we barely moved after five minutes and gassed ourselves out. When we stopped to rest, I noticed the current had quickly dragged us back to where we started.

The ship was getting larger and larger by the minute as we went nowhere. It was headed right for us and by now had seen us and was blasting its horn which alerted all the beachgoers at shore to our situation.

I knew the paddling by hand was useless, and having to drag a girl on a separate single mattress was slowing us down. With only room for two people, I demanded the girl take my place inside the raft and toss her mattress on top so we only had one inflatable to move, together. With our arms burned out from paddling I told the other boy to quickly get out of the raft and join me in the water.

We began kicking. He wanted to kick perpendicular toward the shore, but we needed to use the river’s natural current to our advantage or we would be stuck in the same situation again—completely exhausted and having moved nowhere.

They yelled and cursed at me to kick toward shore and not toward the oncoming vessel, but I ignored them. I kicked my legs harder than any swim race while cursing them back, and demanded the older boy join me in propelling us at an angle with the river’s current. We screamed epithets at each other. Blame went around. There was talk of death.

By now the ship was enormous. The bow was round, a blue and white steel wall, and towered above us like a skyscraper at only a hundred meters away. The rust from parts of the hull was visible. I could see paint chips and water outlets. We had maybe three minutes to move out of the ship’s path to avoid being sucked into its draft. If we were even within ten meters the sheer weight of the ship would produce a suction effect that would have pulled us right into its side and maybe beneath its hull.

As we both kicked simultaneously toward the vessel and the shore we finally started moving a little but it wasn’t fast enough. I cursed at the girl to jump toward the front of the raft and start paddling with both arms. We kicked and paddled, and kicked and paddled, as the ship blasted its horn in front of us. Using the downstream current in our favor was enough to get us more than twenty meters away.

Exhausted, we stopped to watch as the ship passed us by. The ship may have altered course slightly to help us, but I didn’t notice any help at the time. The Toyota letters were massive. The crew was outside on the bridge looking down at us with binoculars. We used the ship’s wake to propel us toward shore where a large crowd of family, friends, and strangers awaited us.

We probably took several years off our parents’ lives that afternoon.

Strangely, they weren’t angry with us. Just relieved.

As I relived those fifteen minutes in the following days, I began to realize that panicking and cursing each other did us no favors, and we would have been much better off if we remained calm and used our brains first, to work through our options to find the most practical solution.

The point of this story wasn’t just a flex on my former life as a human fish, nor about reacting in stressful situations for one’s survival, or how survival is instinctual in all of us. It also might as well be a metaphor. With all that is happening in the world today, it can often feel like we’re all just isolated pods, out of control—adrift in a planned future that no free-loving individual would ever desire or consent to without a gun pointed at their head.

Sometimes we become our own jailors and captors, preparing for ourselves the undercurrents that keep us from moving, mental prisons that keep us from growing and excelling.

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Dumb and silent we are being led, like sheep to the slaughter.

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