Fools for Christ, Fools for Atheism?

(*Well, here's the situation. I write lots more stuff than what I actually publish on my blog. On the blog, I only post things that are relatively neatly written, relatively coherent - although I know they aren't always - and I keep the subject matter restrained, proper, and calm, cool, and collected. But meanwhile, I spend hours and hours writing journals that I just keep without publishing them. I write them for my own entertainment, to enjoy my own thought processes. They're sloppy, they're rambling, they're disorganized. In my private journals I write about things that are vulnerable, things that are gross, embarrassing, sexual, personal, strange, bizarre. I write about what exactly the voices say and do, what happens, what they want, what we've been thinking about. I'm forming lots of unfinished ideas that aren't neat-and-tidy enough to publish. I write about specific people, too. So today I decided that this particular journal would go to the blog instead. I had to change a couple minor details because occasionally there are people whose names I don't feel comfortable mentioning in public. I might change that later on.*)

(*The problem with just posting this journal is that it mentions things and refers to things that I've written elsewhere. There is a long history of other journals before this one. People reading this would say 'What the hell?' because they don't have the slightest idea of what I've been spending all my time thinking about. You're basically opening a book up in the middle and trying to understand how you got there.*)

(*Sometimes, the neat-and-tidy stuff just isn't as interesting as the sloppy stuff that I don't publish. I have been interacting with 'the voices' for YEARS. This is not new! And some unusual, interesting, and also in some ways terrible, events began, starting in april and continuing through may, and on since then. I haven't publicly explained much about what in the world happened. In my notes I've been joking that it must have been the 'economic stimulus package' that caused all this to happen - which is why I find it rather frightening that Obama says we need yet another economic stimulus package! And the seduction community was also involved. So this writing has been going on for a while now, but I just wasn't ready to summarize the whole thing in a readable, organized way.*)

(*Once again, it's that situation where somebody has two different selves: they show one self to the public, and the other self is doing and saying and thinking all these things that nobody knows about. I keep the 'messy, disorganized rambling' writing away from everybody. But it's authentic and interesting in some ways.*)

(*So, beware. My writing is usually somewhat detached and impersonal. This isn't!*)




they're telling me that some of the guys are doing the exact opposite of everything i say, in order to be counter-authoritarian, or something. i don't know if it's true or not but they claimed that somebody actually got circumcised, while also being an adult and able to consciously choose not to.

then again, that could be just metaphorical, because i compared circumcision to my tooth removals - i said that if i rejected people for having been circumcised as infants, which they had no choice about, then it would be the same as if somebody rejected me because i had teeth removed from my mouth when i was too young to decide about it. so maybe somebody else had dental work done and that's all it is. they sometimes just give me fantasies about things so that i'll start talking about an entertaining subject. it's always supposed to be something that either is explicitly sexual or has an embarrassing double meaning that i myself am not aware of until it's too late. (i was thinking of something just now and they said the word 'watermelon.' this is based on the joke or myth, where you see a pregnant woman and say she must have swallowed a watermelon seed and it grew inside her. i remember that myth from when i was a kid, that swallowing watermelon seeds is what causes pregnancy. i know somebody told me not to swallow watermelon seeds but they didn't explain the reason why. now, i know apple seeds contain cyanide, as do flax seeds, which i only learned recently, so you don't want to eat lots of them. but watermelon seeds make you get pregnant. that must be how the 'pregnant man' got pregnant! i didn't read that news article.)

the 'fools for christ' research has to do with the idea that my obvious changes in grooming rituals can serve a purpose of drawing attention to my new religion. they saw it as just being chaos or 'troublemaking' or something, just having fun, but i can't just go have fun without some kind of rationale behind it. so for me, it's a religion. the joke was 'making sense out of making scents.' i smell unwashed because my religion tells me to be that way. the 'fools for christ' concept is just that people do strange, visible things that get other people's attention and help to convert them. i don't necessarily mean going crazy and talking to god out loud and walking around the streets half naked and some of the other things they described. i'll be a little more tame about it. just a slight nudge of cognitive dissonance here and there. but it's actually not just for that purpose. i really was 'doing what the voices told me to do.'

the concept of ending some people's deprivation, the people who are most keenly aware of grooming, aware of humans as animals, aware of the loss of hair and scent - only some people are strongly aware of it, others are only vaguely aware of it, others might briefly muse over an occasional question 'do i really have to do this?' when they don't feel in the mood to spend half an hour scraping a razor over the entire surface area of their legs, and others say 'of course you have to do it! human bodies are totally disgusting unless we spend hours and hours and thousands of dollars to change everything about ourselves!' - the goal is to find the small but devoted cult following, the ones most keenly aware of this loss and deprivation, the ones most grateful to see their fantasies manifested in real people.

when you walk around in public, visible to the world, as 'fools for christ,' (or fools for atheism, or the name of my local sect, whatever that sect's name will be) and people see a group of religious people who all have long hair and beards, and the women have hairy legs, and everyone 'smells like horses,' then it's an advertisement to the small but devoted cult following who's been looking for this all along. of course, the logistics of everybody having long hair at the same time are actually difficult. new members won't have long hair. they're 'in training.' you only get long hair after a decade or two. only the lifetime members will be really noticeable when we walk around in public as a group.

but it doesn't matter. body hair is fully grown in about a year. i can't recall which year it was, but i did shave off all of my hair sometime a few years ago. i stopped shaving back in the early nineties, like 1993-94, and had one or two temporary incidents of shaving it all off for one reason or another - i don't know for sure, but the one time was when i lived with eric, and he and i both shaved our entire bodies together for the fun of it. but it wasn't fun! after you've shaved a very large area with very long hair on it that has never been shaved before, the razor gets very dull. then the dull razor scrapes the skin and causes horrible razor burn, which tortures you for weeks. you get this bumpy rash over every single hair follicle. eric was furious. he swore he would never, ever do that again! if you ever try that, you have to remove the 'gross filth and heavy soil,' so to speak, the overall long hair, first, using an electric razor or something. then, finally, after all that, you can smooth it down to skin level with a sharp razor. 'gross filth and heavy soil' is something usually written in the instructions of cleaning products. it means that you won't get something very clean at all if you merely try to spray it with the cleaning product while it's still covered in large lumps of mud and dirt and things like that. you have to get rid of that first. that's why it annoys the heck out of me when i see people at work taking the scissors that were used for cutting the chicken strings, and the scissors are all covered with blobs of grease, and they stick it into the sanitizer container as though the sanitizer will magically sanitize all the way through those big blobs of grease. it's disgusting to pull a pair of wet scissors out of the container and see that it's all just a bunch of grease covered in sanitizer. nobody bothers to remove the 'gross filth and heavy soil' first. but anyway.

i've had these discussions with them in my mind. being obsessed with this phenomenon is a real thing and it's very painful and humiliating for the people who experience it. imagine if you really, really desire something, but everybody says it's disgusting, and they absolutely refuse to do it for you. they make fun of you for even wanting it, for even talking about it. i'm saying that this is legitimate and i take it seriously. they know i understand because i feel the same difficulty finding long-haired men with beards. (the typographical error said 'long-haired men with bears.' 'bears' are large hairy men, so that typo fits. in reality i've usually gone after the smaller and thinner men, but it was just an amusing typo.)

they like talking to me about this subject, they like it when i write about it, they like the fact that i'm actually doing it in reality, but at the same time they always feel sort of embarrassed, ashamed, or humiliated, for demanding this, for obsessing about it, for thinking about it so frequently. someone theorized that it's an 'oral fixation' of some kind that probably is connected with being hungry and thirsty. i know from my own observation that i think about sex a lot if i'm actually hungry and thirsty. so you could probably reduce the obsession if you just eat and drink something and 'take the edge off.'

i remember something i read about free trade. they said that free trade between countries is one of the best ways to prevent wars. if one country has something that another country really, really wants - like oil - then it will tend to cause wars if the countries don't have free trading of that commodity. people want to invade iraq so they can take over the plentiful oil wells. OPEC controls the production and pricing of oil, so that is something other than free trade - it's restricted trade.

well, the same thing happens when one gender controls resources that the other gender sexually desires and can't get on their own. if they restrict it, it causes that deprivation and obsession. it becomes a 'fetish.' we've mentioned that word and we think it's the wrong word to use for appreciation of the natural body, because, in my opinion, a 'fetish' is something bizarre, something unnatural, something that can't or shouldn't be done in reality. humans have had bodies like this for tens of thousands of years, so therefore, all the excessive grooming, the running water and electricity and hot showers and perfumed factory-made cosmetics - all of THAT stuff is the bizarre and unnatural 'fetish.'

i found this reassuring: i'm glad that i mentioned the 'horse barn' analogy. i love the smell of horse barns, even though that smell contains things that you might think would be disgusting, like horse urine and manure. horse sweat has a specific, recognizable smell. but being around the animals, and grooming them, and riding them, is a pleasant memory i have from childhood. i loved the barn. my mom loves the horses and they're the center of her life. the smell of the horses is part of that. if the smell were gone, the whole experience wouldn't be the same. whenever i feel embarrassed about how i smell, i think of the horse barn analogy, and i tell myself i smell like a horse. it reassures me.

actually, in reality, the smell fades away after i've been inside a dehydrated, air-conditioned building for a while, with the low humidity. i have tested going quite a few days without showers and, somehow, it stops 'building up' after some point. it doesn't just get more and more extreme. you reach a stable point and it doesn't get much more intense. but i find it uncomfortable to have sweaty, greasy skin, especially on my face, so i usually wash my face if only that. you sometimes rub your hand over your face, and it rubs the oils into your eyes, which burns a lot and irritates your eyes. there is a very soothing comfort to the 'sauna' effect of a hot shower, so i don't want to abandon showers entirely. however, in a small, primitive, subsistence community, hot baths and showers are extremely expensive. big pots of water boiling over a hot fire - that's where hot baths come from. that's not convenient. so you have to get used to going without it. (i don't like the 'have to' phrase.)

in the religion, the idea is that we explicitly accept that humans are animals, which is another reason why i accept meat-eating (LITERAL meat-eating). i ate pork ribs today from damon's. oddly enough, even though damon's is nearby, i never go there. but i wanted to try eating 'real meat,' because i've been eating all this awful processed food, like sliced deli meat. i haven't had any real food. i don't keep groceries in my refrigerator. each meal is prepared as needed, by purchasing it ready-made, because i have trouble cooking, partly because of cooking for only one person, and for a lot of other reasons. in reality, i would love to have made-from-scratch, prepared-at-home, feingold-diet, healthy food.

the voices - i'll get angry if i think about this - always attacked me, the criminals, if i was purchasing a lot of prepared foods or foods from sheetz. they called me a spendthrift and i wasn't a spendthrift. i bought foods on a day-to-day, emergency basis because of extremely severe chronic fatigue. you don't know how hard it is to cook for yourself when you are spending all day in bed. and whenever you feel half-starved, you can't even get up and move around UNTIL you've had something to eat, so i had to go get stuff to eat right away merely IN ORDER to get up and do anything. it is not easy at all to take care of myself whenever i'm sick and fatigued. but they did really terrible things, like giving me dreams at night, if i got food from sheetz (which they called 'shitz') and gave me dreams about shit. and they acted like i WANTED to eat food from sheetz, even though, actually, i can't stand their food, and i only buy it because it's the only place open in the middle of the night when THE CRIMINALS have awakened you, and you shouldn't be awake anyway. it's a convenient, nearby place, with awful food and no variety, and i don't buy it because i LIKE it, but because i am too sick and exhausted to cook, and everything i buy goes bad, because i can't eat it all. they acted like buying junk food at sheetz was a 'reward.' i remember times whenever they gave me 'rewards' by 'allowing' or 'encouraging' me to go out and buy junk food, even though in reality junk food is disgusting to me and i would love to have cooked-at-home-from-scratch food if i could. they never understood. they thought that my junk food was 'self-indulgent,' when actually it's something i don't enjoy at all. they thought that i LIKE junk food, and that i'm ENJOYING myself when i eat junk food.

junk food is starvation food. junk food is deprivation. healthy, home-cooked food is MUCH more 'self-indulgent' and is actually enjoyable. home-cooked meals depend on having several people there to prepare them and to eat them so the food doesn't go to waste. you can't make single portions inefficiently every day, after coming home from work and not wanting to do anything. you can't eat an entire head of cabbage or lettuce before it spoils. (actually, cabbage lasts forever, that's a bad example. but lettuce gets ruined really quickly.) that's why i wanted a garden. i would just pull a couple of leaves when i needed them. so i HATE being stuck here forced to eat junk food, fake food, and non-nutritious food. i want natural foods and home-cooked foods that meet my dietary requirements, that don't cause me to feel muddle-headed (like wheat gluten tends to do) and restless and sick and uncomfortable.

in my family, growing up, we had certain kinds of foods. my parents tended to purchase certain things that were not the kind of foods i would have wanted. i actually wanted more healthy foods available. i craved vegetables and fruits - they were scarce and special. we only had certain kinds of fruits, sometimes, and they were fruits i hated. I HATE APPLES! what part of 'i hate apples' don't you understand? but my parents always had things like apples and oranges. when i lived with them, whenever i didn't have a job, when i had to eat my parents' food, they always had stuff like cookies and chips available, but i couldn't go get a bunch of fruits and vegetables or 'real meat.' i could get bologna, or pepperoni, which aren't 'real' by my definition, and cheese, and stuff like that. but i had to wait for mom to make dinner if i wanted any real foods, and we didn't always have a prepared dinner, and it wasn't always a healthy dinner. we had canned foods in the cupboard, and so if i wanted a hot meal i could get a can of campbell's soup. but... canned soup is disgusting! i feel sick even thinking about what it was like when there was nothing to eat and i had to open a can of soup because nothing else was available and there wasn't any real food.

i really liked the food from damon's, actually. a small half rack of ribs was $14, which is really expensive. the ribs were great. they're like the caviar of pigs. i know caviar is fish eggs, but i'm referring to the fact that it's scarce and expensive and sought-after. the ribs are like that. they're so expensive but they're really good. i ate it all really quickly and it was gone. there was hardly anything there. i've been thinking about this because i read about the 'paleolithic diet,' which emphasized meat, since they were hunting mammoths and stuff before the ice age killed them all. (i can't talk about 'pigs,' because the voices always interpret pigs as referring to police officers. different animals refer to different kinds of people and personalities.)

i was studying nutrition and reading books about it. i wanted nutrition to help me with my chronic fatigue. i didn't understand that my chronic fatigue was probably happening because of pesticides and chemicals that were used to treat the wood on the sides of the house.

i was thinking back about why we didn't have good food. i sort of remember what happened, but i'm not sure. i had 'deprivation' times in my adolescence. a couple of things. i originally was focused on talking about food, but actually i thought of something else too. my dad moved us to west virginia, when we used to live in greensburg pa. it was because the hospital changed management. the policies changed and he didn't like the way they were running the place. we went someplace else because of that. that was my understanding of why we moved. anyway, dad had a 'midlife crisis,' which was the phrase mom used to describe it. he would've been in his early forties if i recall. the psychologists (the imaginary ones, who talk to me in my mind, that is) have all pointed out to me that i've spent many years dating older men, in their early forties - i dated the married guy joe who was 41 when i was 23, and i dated eric who was in his late thirties, when i was in my mid twenties. i found, ummmm, 'paul,' (yes, i probably shouldn't mention his name) who is now 41, and he was i guess 39 when i met him. i've dated men in their late thirties and early forties, over and over, and they tell me it's because that's when dad stopped being loving and fatherly because he went through his crisis. he withdrew, and became focused on money, because he hated his job more than anything else, and all that he wanted on earth was to be able to stop working and retire early.

so he focused all his energy on learning about the stock market, about saving money, about investing, and he made himself become wealthy, in order to leave his job. and he regretted having children, because if it weren't for the children he wouldn't have been so tied to his job. he explicitly admitted that, in a conversation with me when i was an adult, when i asked him about his choice to have children. this affected my own feelings about children, and how childbearing can be a wonderful thing if only you have enough social support for it, so that you don't become a slave to providing for your children at the expense of all your own happiness, your own free time, your own hobbies, time alone in private, fun activities and vacations, etc. we stopped doing fun stuff. we stopped going on vacations, because it was expensive to go to the beach and stay in hotels, and it was expensive to fly on planes. he also bought a large house, and actually, i don't really understand why we bought a large house. i'm not sure why they made that decision. we had only four people. and a couple dogs and cats and fish and horses. but the horses weren't in the house. :) we didn't need much space.

the house was expensive and he had to pay off the debt. this is ridiculous nowadays, with the housing bubble and the prices of millions of dollars for a tiny little place, but back then, in 1983, our house was really expensive - it was like $200,000 or $250,000, something like that. that was hugely expensive back then. it was a big deal. other houses were like $50,000. you can't imagine how cheap houses were back then compared to now, if you didn't see it. our house is pretty big. but he had to pay off all this debt and he hated being in debt, so he was a debt-slave because of a house that was really too big for us.

and they wonder why i don't feel comfortable about inheritance, and taking money from my parents - i can't stand it - i hate to accept their birthday and christmas checks - it's partly because it throws me off, financially, and makes it hard for me to predict what my earnings will be, and it's complicated - but it's also because self-reliance is an issue, where i'm not burdening my father. this is in the inigo montoya 'i want my father back, you son of a bitch' kind of spirit. money and gifts don't mean anything. you want the real person. i would rather have a close relationship with my father instead of a financial gift.

anyway, i was talking about deprivations. we were focused on saving money, and so we didn't get really nice food. we got cheap food. we bought stuff in bulk. we bought non-perishable foods, and you can pretty much bet that anything non-perishable is going to be fake and artificial and processed and full of preservatives. for me, going out to the freezer in the garage, and getting a box of frozen spinach, was a special treat. i had to ask permission to go cook a box of spinach, because vegetables were expensive. dad complained if i ate too many boxes of frozen vegetables. we had a garden in greensburg, and we made one in west virginia too, but we didn't really plant much in wv. i didn't even really feel comfortable cooking in the kitchen at all. it wasn't 'my territory.' it was mom's kitchen. i was afraid to claim too much of it, afraid to make a mess, afraid to really use it. it wasn't mine. so the kids on the school bus, and the kids at school, thought that my brother and i were 'rich' because my dad was a doctor and we lived in a large house. but we didn't live like we were rich and i didn't feel rich. we didn't waste money on indulgences. people were jealous of me, for something i wasn't even enjoying. you could be jealous of somebody for being miserable all the time, i guess, but that doesn't make much sense. actually i wasn't miserable, i was pretty happy when i was younger. i had moments of happiness. but i did have lots of problems with fatigue in my later teens and i spent most of the time sleeping.

it really meant something to me when john found the julian simon book. a lot of the important books i've read came from john. not all of them, but many of them. it totally changed my view of families and children. my belief in large families is not trivial - it's very serious. this belief in 'two children' is all over the united states. it's supposedly the 'american dream!' a family with two children is the 'dream' lifestyle. it represents 'perfection,' a desired state of things. but i love it in the harry potter movies, at the burrow, with all the weasley kids around the table. they're poor, but they have their own garden, and they have company. it's true, you would want space and time alone and you would need quiet and privacy. i understand that.

well, the midlife crisis thing was one of the deprivation problems. another time was later on, in my late teens, when mom for some reason kind of stopped cooking. i am not sure why. i remember that these neighbors moved in and we didn't get along with them. they were jerks in a lot of ways. the horse barn was on their property. we got along with the previous people, who owned the horse barn. we borrowed space in their barn because we didn't have our own. when the previous people moved out and the new people moved in, it was a major conflict since we were using their barn. and they were loud and annoying and they just ... i don't even remember the kinds of stupid things they did. they were destructive and irresponsible in a lot of ways. these were the people whose son i dated, the son who later turned out to be gay, the one that i got in a fistfight about. he collected all these japanese anime movies.

anyway during that time mom was always stressed and she didn't put much effort into cooking. we had sparser meals. she was probably going through menopause too. we were kind of on our own. i could go to the refrigerator and put something together, but it wasn't any good. it was that cheese and pepperoni kind of thing. not real food. (i know, anytime i talk about sausage-shaped objects, people are thinking about penises. but i'm just talking about LITERAL pepperoni.) so that time period was a major stress time, the conflict about our horses being stuck in somebody else's barn and we didn't like the people responsible for that property. so we started building our own barn. we bought the empty lot next door and put the new barn there. that really helped mom a lot and she loves having her own place. but for a while it was terrible.




it makes me angry because, why is it that people are able to read your mind, but they totally misinterpret you and don't understand you at all? they totally mis-portray and misunderstand everything you do, and distort it to mean something which is not you at all, and how can that possibly happen if they're able to read your mind and see everything you're feeling? why can't they understand how it feels to be you? and they rationalize that people enjoy pain and suffering, merely because they themselves enjoy inflicting it upon others without the victims' consent, when in fact, we ENDURE and SURVIVE pain and suffering, and we get stockholm syndrome, identifying with the attackers, and they make us behave in unnatural ways for years at a time, which is why i wrote the horrible emails to the guy i met in the chatroom. i didn't do that stuff because i liked it. i didn't like being the victim of an attack. i was a puppet and i was twisted and abused to do things that were not at all like myself or who i wanted to be.



so anyway. thinking of a religious community. it's going to be pro-sexual instead of anti-sexual, pro-body instead of anti-body, supporting life on earth, etc. all the stuff that ayn rand would've complained about whenever she hated religions - it's in the general spirit of doing the stuff she would have liked and avoiding the stuff she hated. although i am going to say that the ascetic urge isn't necessarily antilife, or any other stuff she might have said about it - for instance, it turns out that occasional fasting really is good for your mental clarity, because i know about the feingold diet, wheat gluten intolerance, and stuff like that.

and nathaniel branden pointed out other mistakes ayn rand made, in requiring people to be perfectionistically rational all the time, and disowning feelings and emotions, and all that - i don't need to go into it - it's easy enough to just read it from nathaniel branden himself. he did a good job of naming everything that made me uncomfortable about ayn rand. for a while, my brother was a hardcore rand follower, and he used to get annoyed with me if i said things that were 'irrational.' i was afraid to say anything at all for fear of making a mistake. i was afraid to be myself. (they're suggesting that maybe people are afraid to talk to me because i'm going to judge them harshly. but i'm a lot more tolerant than that.) anyway, the religion will explicitly address people's sexuality, instead of making sex into a big secret the way the puritans did. some of it i would say is 'inspired by objectivism' or 'based on objectivism,' although a lot of things are behind the general idea, the concept of it, the spirit of it. it's not very specific as of yet.

however, ayn rand wasn't pro-family. she didn't have children. she was focused on creativity, writing, thinking, philosophizing. she wasn't explicitly anti-family either, but she had a kind of scorn for people who excessively valued 'motherhood' and all that. there are themes through her books where she makes it look like valuing parenthood and families is bad. that's not really where i originally got my own feeling from. i was anti-family and anti-childbearing before reading ayn rand. i thought it would prevent me from having any fun, doing random and spontaneous things, being free to move around, spending my money however i wanted, etc. anyway i'm just saying that my religious concepts have some background in objectivism, but they're not LIMITED to objectivism. they incorporate other things that objectivism didn't have, such as emphasis on families and emotions and relationships.

it's interesting, i read that it's much more common years ago to have ten children, and other large numbers like that. i've encountered several instances of this in recent readings and discussions. i was talking to someone about geneology at work, and in her research she had found someone who had ten kids, and i just saw another example of either nine or ten kids in my reading, last night. often, the children died before they grew up. since i advocate the refusal of vaccinations, then having ten or fifteen kids is a good idea. (since i like the dozenal notation instead of the decimal notation, i should advocate having twelve kids. i just mention fifteen because that was the number i said many months ago when i first started talking about this.)

this is something they complain about with the africans - they say that africans are having too many kids, and all their problems would be solved if only they reduced their population. julian simon can totally destroy that whole argument. it's a load of crap. i don't know what caused the AIDS virus in africa, but it might have been caused by vaccinations. there are some decent theories as to how or why vaccinations could have caused the AIDS epidemic in africa. they want me to write about the disinformation campaign saying that circumcision (of course, it'll be universal involuntary infant circumcision, as always) prevents the spread of AIDS. i am going to argue that even if it were true and correct, it still doesn't justify involuntary infant circumcision. anyway, the population in africa ISN'T the cause of the starvation and economic problems and diseases! not only is the population moderate, not high, but also, the children born are all dying before they reach adulthood - so who WOULDN'T try to bear as many children as possible? i'd have to go get out the 'ultimate resource' book to really go into detail about how to destroy this disinformation, but that's the general idea.




if you ever are going to obey someone else's command, it helps if they're commanding you to do things that are congruent with what you're already doing - things that are in the same overall spirit of stuff you already like. they noticed that i already questioned shaving, hair length, mustache whiskers, and deodorant (which i've used intermittently, sometimes going without it for several years). so they said that if i were going to obey any kind of command or orders or rules at all, they would be rules telling me to do what i was already doing, and do an even better job of it, taking it to its 'logical extreme.' if i'm going to question grooming, i might as well question more and more aspects of it. and it helps if they tell me that i'm doing it for somebody, a guy, who either is disgusted by perfumes, outright allergic to them, or excited by natural smells, or all of the above. and since i sympathize with that myself, it's a 'downhill battle' to convince me.

well, i think i could write a blog today about religious and meditative experiences and how they used to be different. i'm claiming, by my 'humans instead of aliens theory,' that the change in psychological phenomena was recent, in the past hundred years. either the aliens only showed up recently, or else it's not aliens, and it really is because of advances in human technology that we're now experiencing psychotronic mind control events. i can't disprove the aliens theory, but i can get evidence suggesting that things only changed rather recently, and that long ago, people had totally different kinds of experiences while meditating. and the source of this material is the religious texts. they describe their meditative experiences, their visions, what they saw and heard and felt. they did not 'hear voices' explicitly speaking to them in words, telling them things. when they talked about 'hearing the voice of god,' they always explained that this was just a metaphorical thing, not a literal voice saying words - it was a special kind of mental experience. the large numbers of people who 'hear voices' nowadays is a NEW phenomenon. they literally hear words and sentences being spoken. that is not at all what the old mystics, meditators, and religious people wrote about in the old texts.


one thing i want to be careful about is this: when people know your background, when they know that you have 'psychological' or 'historical' reasons motivating things you do, giving you a perspective and feeling about something, they think that means it's no longer legitimate or logical. it's all merely psychological, therefore everything you're doing is a metaphor for something psychological that you're frustrated about. they could say that my religion isn't 'real,' because, actually, it's all just a bunch of deprivation and not having enough love from my father and things like that.

however, i'm going to argue this: physical appearance, clothing styles, hairstyles, grooming, etc, are all very ARBITRARY, unless you have an actual safety and health purpose for something. you can do just about anything you want, and objectively, it really doesn't matter. it doesn't make much difference how you dress or how you style your hair, in terms of objective results. there are totally different kinds of reasons for having a particular style of appearance. it tells people what tribe you're in, what group, what gang, what community. it tells other people that they can trust or distrust you, that you are familiar or unfamiliar to them. (note, i'm not saying we should go around distrusting everybody. i'm just saying we automatically trust people who look more familiar.) so i could just as easily argue that, for my religious community, we really need to wear rainbow-striped mohawks, and this is really important, and it has to be exactly that way and no other way, and the mohawk must reach but not exceed a particular length. objectively, there is no reason why not (unless you don't like touching the chemicals used for coloring the hair and spiking it up, which would fall in the 'safety reasons' argument). now that i think about it, the chemicals will probably make you more likely to go bald later on, although i'm not sure about that. but i'm just saying that you can pick any particular physical appearance you choose, for your 'sect' or community, and you can argue that it's just arbitrary, therefore 'why not this and not some other style?'

but anyway. if someone says that i have an obsession with certain physical appearances because there was 'something psychological' in my background or family history, that can be true, but that doesn't make it invalid. there is no particular reason WHY NOT. why not arbitrarily invent a new particular style of physical appearance, and ask that everyone who joins your group must look this way? the only reason i'm not openly urging anyone to do it right this very instant is because i don't actually have a plot of land picked out where i'm going to build my tents and shanties out of old junk. i don't have a chosen stream to pull buckets of water from. when i've settled my affairs here then i can go do that. that's when i'll start the advertisements saying something to the effect of 'hey, would you like to cook for me?'

they don't want me to abandon the 'community' fantasy if i start a real family and get married. if i have all those family needs satisfied, they think i won't care about a community anymore. they really would like to see this happen out in the real world, because it would have a helpful impact and it would help a lot of the 'lost' people who have nowhere to go. the people with no culture. the tribeless people who don't know what to do, and they live unhealthy lives because they don't know what to eat or what poisons to avoid. they don't know what to believe, what to value, what to think, how to understand anything, what's important, what's unimportant. they think that the stuff on television can tell them what they should value and believe. so they spend hundreds of dollars on hairspray and makeup. and big cars and big houses. (*and also, from another perspective, this will be important as the economy falls apart and makes more people homeless and jobless. the community is supposed to protect people against the collapse of fiat money.*)

because on television, all the tv shows are about renovating houses. i don't have tv, but i see it when i visit 'paul.' he has the tv on all the time, because his drugs and his illness make him too sick to really do anything useful at home except sit there. he can't be ambitious. the drugs make him tired and depressed. and he won't question anything about using those drugs or any of the advice the doctors give him. i can't help and i gave up on trying to help. i wanted to give him nutritious foods and some kind of herbal medicine, but it's just too much for me, with his kidney failure and him going on dialysis and all that. and my life fell apart totally, because i contaminated the house with ephedra, because i had chronic fatigue, which was made worse by contamination with st. john's wort.... which i had to use because i myself was tired and unambitious and couldn't do anything... which was because i didn't grow up in a community that taught me how to eat properly and how to avoid poisons and food allergens and other things. (although we were lucky my parents found the feingold diet - i at least vaguely knew about that, but most of my life, i wasn't on the diet.) and they wanted me to mention my metallic dental filling too. that wasn't good for me. (*i haven't written yet on my blog about the horrors of the new resin composite fillings! my advice is, don't get them, they're AWFUL, and i'm not quite ready to talk about it yet, but it's very, very, VERY bad for you to get composite fillings.*)

it goes on and on and on... it never ends... (*i've been chemical-sensitive all my life*)... one thing led to another... and so many things went wrong, and wasted so much of my life, and i wasn't able to help myself or help anybody else, for so long. all this time. just because of being sick and fatigued constantly. it's a huge, huge waste. and lots of people are experiencing this chronic illness. the chronic health problems are everywhere and they have many causes.

the community is designed to protect people against that kind of thing, so that our lives aren't wasted, and we can get started earlier, and more efficiently, to live happier, healthier lives.

they want to make sure that this goal still matters to me, even if my own needs are fulfilled by marriage and family. they don't want the community to be merely a fantasy, merely a metaphor for something unfulfilled in my own life. they want it to be a real place, with a physical location, and real people with names, living in it, for the rest of their lives, and it will go on after our deaths. it won't need a charismatic leader. it will be good enough that people WANT to live there, to meet the needs they can't meet outside. it has to go on after my death and after the death of the first generation who builds it. it's meant to protect us over the next millennium, which is really ambitious, since nobody can see ahead that far. i know we can't predict anything for a whole millennium. i know we can't perfectionistically guarantee that this exact location will still belong to our descendants 1000 years from now. that's not what i mean. i mean in just a very general, vague way, it will 'get us started in the right direction' and help things along. it won't be perfect. it won't be immortal. it won't be exactly the same 1000 years from now as it is today. it won't be what it was when it began. in fact we might not recognize it, or we might get mad and say 'that's not what we wanted for you!' but you still do it anyway.

the idea is that it's better than nothing at all. what we have right now in our society is a big mess. nobody knows what to do. nobody supports anybody. nobody knows their neighbors. people are isolated. families are in their own little worlds, in their own separate little houses. and it's not helping us to 'develop our unique identities,' by living that way. instead it's making people aimless, uncertain, afraid, not knowing who they are, not knowing what they want, and they try to do things that don't satisfy them. if living in isolated nuclear-family houses, without knowing our neighbors, actually DID help us develop unique identities, that would be different. if we really DID know our own unique identities because we're allowed to style our hair however we want, and wear whatever kind of clothing we want, then it would be okay. but we've done that, and it isn't working. we just have a big mess. nobody knows who they are.

meanwhile, and i have to mention this, and i know it interrupts the smooth flow of talking about a nice, pleasant community, and a nice, pleasant, primitive lifestyle, and families, and food, and religions, and all that, and hairstyles. but i HAVE to mention that meanwhile, underneath all this normal stuff, there are bad things happening that involve technology. and i don't know exactly how to do it, but that HAS to be incorporated into the protectiveness of the community. a way of protecting against it, understanding what it is, liberating ourselves from the slavery of it. that is absolutely essential to 'knowing who we are.' we can't know who we are, when we're stuck with other people's personalities in our heads. no matter how primitive this particular community or sect might be, i still imagine that it addresses all those things we don't like to talk about, the psychotronic technologies, no matter how hard it is to talk about those things, no matter how little detailed information we have about them or their sources - it HAS to be addressed, not avoided. if it's going to protect people for hundreds of years into the future, it MUST confront these technological phenomena. they're not going away.