connection between body and soul

2:48 PM 2/27/11

'They' have been asking me about my religion. I did not have an official religion at first, but instead it resulted from being questioned by 'them' about what kind of religion I would want, what kind of intentional community I would want to create. The intentional community is meant to last a very, very long time, like hundreds, or thousands, of years, and so it must be designed as a stable belief system with enough abstraction that it can respond to future changes. It must have some principles that are abstract enough that they will be universally applicable even in different situations.

One example of something they were asking me about recently is, How important is it to follow the 'quitting Christmas' requirement of this religion? Is that a what's-the-word, a deal breaker? (I forgot the word. It means: something you absolutely won't be flexible about. I was reading Diana Leafe Christian again recently. Non-negotiable.)

Well, they were asking why I required 'quitting Christmas' in my religion. And we looked forward into the future, when we might need to quit some other new holiday that somebody might create in the future, because things do change over time. We would need a more abstract, general rule to follow, not just something as specific as 'quit Christmas.' I didn't want to make a rule that would become too huge and restrictive and out of control, you know, quitting all holidays, being opposed to everything that could ever be fun, forbidding people to get together and have some kind of recurring ritual on a particular date every year - I am not opposed to all holidays and all rituals as such. Christmas is the one that offends me, and this is because I read a particular book about it (The Trouble With Christmas) and because I myself had negative feelings about it for a long time.

The idea was that in the future, what if Halloween got out of control? (This is just an example.) What if Halloween became like Christmas? You would be expected to buy expensive treats and presents not just for your own family, but for all the kids on the entire block, who would come knocking on your door. And if you failed to do this, you would be 'tricked' in some way, and socially stigmatized as a failure (the same way you are stigmatized as a failure if you can't afford to buy tons of expensive Christmas presents). Through the entire month of October, you would be forced to hear Halloween music playing on the overhead Muzak at every store where you went shopping and on every radio station.

So what general rules or principles lead to quitting Christmas? And how could that rule be defined so that we would, for instance, quit Halloween in the future too, but only if Halloween became a huge and obnoxious all-encompassing monster like Christmas? And how could we do this without being extreme in a bad way and forbidding everyone everywhere to ever have fun or enjoy any holidays at all together?

One of the ideas behind quitting Christmas was that we want to distinguish ourselves as a non-Christian religion. That's not the only idea behind it, it's just one of several ideas.

So, the other thing they were asking me about is: How important is it to include the rule that all members of the order must acknowledge the existence of electronic mind control? This is similar to joining a church: it's hard to join a church if you don't believe, at least slightly, that your soul is being saved by going to church, and that otherwise, something terrible will happen to you - you will go to hell. You can enjoy the community, the company of the people at church, but if you don't at least slightly agree about this particular 'irrational belief,' this belief that your soul lives on after your death and that it must be saved from going to hell, then you won't really feel the *need* to go to church, even if you somewhat enjoy being with the people.

So I have a similar belief. It is like an irrational belief. It is something specific, something strange, something esoteric and technical. It is something that not everybody believes. Not everyone agrees about it. Not everyone has observed or experienced this. To become an official member of the order you are required to accept the belief that electronic mind control and mind reading is real. That is very similar to joining a church and stating that Jesus Christ is your savior, that he died for your sins, and because of him, you can go to heaven if only you accept Christ. It is an irrational belief, and some people simply cannot say it. I can't say that (about Jesus) while also telling the truth. It is very uncomfortable. I am strongly an atheist, and I can't say that Jesus Christ died for my sins and I'm going to heaven because of him. There will be people who, like me about Jesus, 'can't say it.' People who can't say that electronic mind control is real. For whatever reason, they absolutely can't imagine, even after having someone explain it to them, that it could ever, possibly, be real or important, in any universe, that it could ever matter to them, matter for the future, that it could ever be anything but a crazy person's delusional belief. This belief is very much analogous to stating that Jesus Christ has saved your soul from going to hell. 'Mind control' is an 'irrational belief' that I arrived at through sensory observation, using my senses, having physical experiences of attack, reading articles about electronic weapons. It is an irrational belief. So if I ask other people to believe that along with me, that is a non-negotiable requirement of joining the order.

(I feel a clench of anxiety in my stomach when I say 'the order.' The Order does not yet exist. It is only an idea, only a plan. It is something that I have created reluctantly and unwillingly as a result of being attacked and as a result of having discussions with 'them.' However, if this religious order already existed on earth, and if they opened their doors and invited me to join them, I would strongly consider it. I just haven't ever seen anyone who already had all of the particular rules and beliefs that I like, so I have to create the intentional community myself. There might be similar communities out there, and if there are, then I might befriend them, but I haven't found them. The Order does not exist. It is an imaginary intentional community that I am making because I cannot find an existing community that meets my needs.)

About electronic mind control, where does this concept go in the future? What is the general rule behind it, the assumption, the principle, the belief?

This is based on a belief that your soul, your mind, is strongly connected to your body. Your soul is not 'someplace else.' It is not floating in some other universe where souls exist away from the body. (This all applies to the idea of 'mind' as well.) It is not an abstraction. It is part of your physical body and it has a finite life. Your soul dies with your body after a few decades (around a century if you are lucky).

An abstraction lives on after your death, but it isn't YOU. In the abstract, you can see other people in the world who are just like you, except they are born in different places under different names, after your death. It's like you were reincarnated, except you don't remember anything about the specific person who died. Those are people who have the same personality type you had. Their 'style' is the same. They 'feel like you.' If one of your friends or family met that person, they would recognize that person as being very similar to you, in the same spirit, as though you had been brought back to life. In that abstract way, your spirit lives on after your death.

You also live on after your death through the impact that you have on the world. Whatever consequences, whatever effects, resulted from your life, will forever affect the future of the world.

But aside from those things, we assume you die at the end of your life, and everything dies, all of you, including your soul. This is an atheist belief.

Because of this, we say it matters greatly what happens to you in your life. It is a tragic shame if someone suffers misery their entire life and never experiences fulfillment. So our goal is to do the best we can to make future lives better (in addition to our present lives), so that fewer people will have miserable and unfulfilling lives. We must take specific actions to bring this about. This is an atheist morality, a belief that it's good to do something.

Electronic mind control is part of the belief that our soul is inside our physical body. If our mind and soul are something that results from our physical body, then it seems believable that physical, mechanical things could influence our mind and soul, in good ways and bad ways. Our body's physical health directly affects our spiritual health, because if you are sick and in pain all the time, you can't be a very pleasant person, your mind doesn't function well, you can't achieve goals, and so on. Most people can accept the idea that our physical health influences our spiritual health if you explain it like that. If you explain that physical sickness affects the body so badly that it ruins your functioning, ruins your social life, ruins your relationships, makes you less able to think clearly and achieve goals, most people will agree with you at least somewhat.

Make the leap to electronic mind control. There are devices that are able to affect the physical body with radiation, radio waves, sound waves, electromagnetic fields. You don't have to believe in, or know about, which specific devices do what, and you don't have to know about or believe that these devices already exist and that unknown people are already using them on innocent victims (which is what I experience). You don't have to accept those things. Just the first one, that some devices exist which are able to affect the physical body by using radio frequencies, and so on. If you accept that this is true, then it can lead you to see that if that happens, then it can affect your behavior, your mood, your thoughts and feelings, your social life, your functioning, your job, your love relationships, and so on. Anything that affects the physical body affects the mind and spirit and social life and everything. If you can accept that devices exist which can do such things, and that maybe, possibly, some people might USE them to attack other people, then you see that it's important that they be included in a religion where part of your goal is to know your true self, to be yourself, and to improve the quality of your life and your relationships.

This wouldn't be important - it wouldn't be more important than any other specific health problem or crime, like, for instance, kidnapping. Kidnapping is a crime, and it matters, and it ruins lives, and if I wanted to, I could focus on nothing but the evils of kidnapping, and what we must do to rid the world of kidnapping and end the practice of kidnapping. Because I agree, kidnapping people of any age is an evil, life-ruining thing to do. And I could complain that governments all around the world, including the USA, are doing it to people. Putting people in jail is a form of kidnapping. We can argue about which particular 'crimes' they are accused of, for instance, 'victimless crimes.' I could focus on that and complain about that particular crime. Electronic mind control - is it somehow 'more important' than kidnapping? They are both crimes. Why am I focused strongly on that and not on other crimes?

It is important, because it's happening to ME, and I am the person creating this community. It is important because I believe it's being done to large numbers of people, secretly - unlike kidnapping, which is highly visible and noticeable when it happens. When kidnapping happens, everyone agrees that it's a crime and something bad is going on. (I realize that sometimes the police are slow to respond, etc, or someone might blame the victims or blame the family or whatever, but in general, people believe that it's real.) When electronic mind control happens, people don't notice it and they don't know that anything is wrong, unless the attackers make themselves obvious and attack very severely, and they only do that to some people, not everyone.

I believe that this behavior will continue into the distant future, and that it is now permanently a part of our society and it always will be, unless all of the paperwork and all of the computers are burned and destroyed forever and all of the scientists are killed who have any memory of how to make these devices, and any knowledge of all the sciences leading up to them. Since that isn't going to happen, and since I don't *WANT* that to happen, then, I must accept that electronic mind control will exist forever into the future. It has been created and it will not go away. So we need an ethical system that acknowledges that it is real and we need a way to respond to it.

I want my community of people to see this along with me. That is the only way we can help each other, if large numbers of people cooperate on building countermeasures to protect us against the attacks, and doing research to understand and reverse engineer how the attacks are done, while not intending to USE the attacks against anybody. There will be rules about how we are allowed to defend ourselves against this, just as there are rules about how you may defend yourself when someone initiates any other kind of attack against you. It is part of a religion, part of an intentional community, that we all agree about a particular belief in something, belief that it exists, that it's real and important, that it's OUR PROBLEM (instead of obscure and esoteric and unimportant and 'somebody else's problem'). It is part of the religion or community that we agree about what is appropriate, moral, ethical behavior when we need to respond to and defend ourselves against these attacks. I do not want to see a war going on with groups of people shooting each other forever and ever.

This is all part of the set of beliefs that says our soul is part of the body, that our life is short and finite and temporary, and that it matters very much what happens to your body during this lifetime. I also want to de-emphasize 'dying for a cause' behavior. I need to think more about this question, because I can imagine that there would be situations where people would want to die for a cause. But I don't want to encourage that at all in my religion. I want this to be a life protecting religion where everyone feels valued. 'You're worth more to me alive.' I want this to be a pacifist religion, but not the type of pacifism where you can never defend yourself at all against anything. This needs to be clarified, and it hasn't been yet. I only know that it's very important to accept the belief in the reality of electronic mind control, and that is a non-negotiable idea in the religion.

This is something that has resulted from having discussions with 'them.' I myself wasn't planning to try to create a religion. I was planning to leave the country and go to a hopefully better part of the world.

Ancient myths; Rant: Bring Back Frames! (on websites)

10:11 AM 1/16/11

I was recently looking at a website about ancient myths.

http://www.pantheon.org/areas/folklore/folklore/articles.html

(the main site is www.pantheon.org, if you can't figure that out)

I wanted to write about how myths are different from the stories and TV shows of today. I've complained a few times in my blog that there are very few 'concept' shows anymore, like The Twilight Zone used to be. A show would be based on some unanswered question or bizarre idea (something an enneagram Five might think of), which leads to strange or impossible things happening. Like, what if there were no gravity, or what if everyone on earth suddenly disappeared except you, that kind of thing. If you've ever watched The Twilight Zone (the old ones) you know what I mean. Questions about the laws of physics. Questions about people.

The old myths remind me of that. I can't remember all of the things that I read, but one of the myths was from the Polynesian area, Hawaii and those islands in the Pacific. It said that there was a bird that flies backwards. It can't see where it's going, but it likes to see where it's been. Right away I can see this as a 'concept' and it can be used as a metaphor to describe some people who aren't paying attention to the future and they're excessively concerned with dwelling on the past. Many of the myths were like that.

Then there's the idea of 'taking things to extremes.' There was a myth, I think a Celtic myth, about a dragon. Somebody threw a worm down into a well, where it grew big and climbed out of the well and started killing people. The dragon grew so long that it could wrap itself around the entire mountain three times. There was some other myth about an even longer dragon which could wrap itself all the way around the earth, and all of mankind was 'in its coils,' as in it wasn't just going around the earth in a straight line, it was coiled around all of humanity. (This is a myth translated from another language, but the murdering morons were pointing out to me that 'coils' refers to pubic hair, and I was being attacked after writing that sentence. It doesn't seem to matter to them that the original language wouldn't have used the word 'coils,' it would have used some other word, and we have no idea what the original word was or how it would have differed from the word 'coils.') And now they are saying that the whole thing is a phallic symbol, worms, and holes and wells and growing bigger and blah blah blah. They were the people who forced me to write this blog, so why would they act like I was the one who started it? It was their idea to talk about this.

(I am having a problem today because I have been posting on a forum, typologycentral.com, for the past couple days, and so I have been getting attacked by the murderers over things that I wrote in the forum. It's been a very long time since I used any online forums. This particular attack is because I wrote that I usually don't see 'sexual symbols' when people are using them. I had written that people are able to use sexual symbols secretly and I am completely oblivious to them and they go right over my head until somebody points out to me that they were talking about sex. So that is why this particular harassment attack is going on today.)

*****
Well, after using that website I noticed something which has nothing to do with mythology. I really, really want to start an internet movement to 'bring back frames.' It actually does connect with ancient mythology and old TV shows though because of the idea of bringing back something from a long time ago.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/8130-1-30.htm

(A quote from someone on that link: "...I had the flash of 'belonging' as I first saw a framed site - IT WORKED THE WAY I THOUGHT SITES SHOULD WORK.")

What are frames? Why are they not being used anymore? What was so great about them?

If you've ever seen really old web pages from when the internet first started, from when most people were on dialup, you would have seen frames. It's when the screen is divided into, say, two sections (although there can be more than two), and you can click a link on the one section, and the page will change in the other section. It's like having a remote control.

Nowadays, if you click a link on a web page, the ENTIRE PAGE DISAPPEARS and then you have to wait while the whole thing reloads. When you are on dialup, this takes a long time. It's annoying even when you're on cable. You sit there for several minutes looking at a blank page. (In the Opera browser you can set it so that you keep looking at the old unchanged page, but that's equally annoying.)

(The hacker problem that is affecting my browser is like this: I'm SUPPOSED to be able to display a partially loaded web page, with text and empty boxes that show that an image goes here, without the actual image in it. However, now that the browser is messed up, it takes like five minutes to show anything at all - it shows just a white, blank page - and it won't even show the text that I've gotten loaded so far (unless I push the button on Zone Alarm to cut off all access to the internet), and it won't show empty placeholders where the images should be. It just shows nothing. That wasn't happening when I first cleaned off my computer, but it started happening only a couple days after I got back on the net after cleaning off the computer, along with other various problems. This type of thing goes with the general harassment and computer problems. Usually whenever I talk about it or complain about it they get the bright idea to start attacking even more frequently and obviously. I usually don't complain about computer harassment anymore.)

Some web pages have tried to recreate frames that aren't frames. They've tried to do the same things frames could do, but without using frames. The results are usually annoying.

Why were frames bad? They had some problems which could have been fixable if somebody had designed a BROWSER that was able to deal with them. That's all they had to do. Just design a browser that can compensate for those problems frames had. If somebody had loved frames enough to be committed to using them no matter what, they would have designed a browser that would fix the problems, and we would still be using frames today, and none of these annoying web pages would be here. Maybe they just didn't know how bad things would become without frames.

(After reading that forum that I linked to up above, I saw that they think Google might not be finding pages with frames, or ranking them lower in search results.)

Frames were bad because... 1. If you tried to print a web page (and if you were using a wimpy browser that wasn't designed to handle these problems) then you would get unpredictable results. Sometimes it would print one section of the screen, but not the other sections. It wouldn't print the whole image that you saw in your browser. It might just print one frame. Sometimes it would print the wrong one, unless you knew what you were doing. It might print the box where you were using the 'remote control' section of the screen, when you were trying to print the 'actual content' section of the screen.

With frames, you click links in the remote control section, and the content appears in the other side of the screen, while the remote control stays still and doesn't disappear and reappear.

That was one problem. Another problem was 2. It was hard to find the URL of a frame. The WIMPY browser would display only one URL for the whole website, no matter which page you were viewing. The URL would just stay the same. You couldn't find the URL for a particular page so that you could put a link to it.

Sometimes, web designers fixed these problems by making a couple of links that would say 'bookmark this page,' 'link to this page,' 'print this page,' 'printer-friendly page,' and so on. That was usually because of the problems caused by BROWSERS that weren't able to compensate for frames. (I'm not going to say it was caused by frames. It was caused by browser designers who weren't committed to keeping frames no matter what, and doing everything in their power to make a browser that would be able to handle frames without the problems that the browsers usually had.)

(I am having a language problem caused by the attacks. They won't let me rephrase what I'm saying. I'm trying to say that FRAMES DO NOT CAUSE PROBLEMS. I'm trying to 'reframe,' so to speak, the entire idea, the whole concept. The 'problems caused by frames' do not exist and do not have to exist. It is caused by browsers not being designed to 'handle' (language barrier) them. They shouldn't have to 'handle' anything. They shouldn't have to 'compensate for' anything. Frames should be viewed as a normal, ordinary type of HTML instead of being viewed as a 'problematic' or 'difficult' type of HTML. They are just another ordinary thing. 'Dealing with' or 'handling them' is no different from 'dealing with,' 'handling,' or 'compensating for' ANY OTHER KIND of HTML rules and HTML behavior. I am having a language barrier problem and they won't allow me to use my brain to look for the right words to express this idea, and they are substituting words that give the wrong impression.)

So this ancient myths website was a site that used frames. And I was so happy to be using this website, to click on a link on one frame and see the other frame change without all my links disappearing and reappearing. And no weird fancy things like Flash. It was just plain old HTML. The website was there to provide ACTUAL CONTENT! Gasp!

Web designers have written about all the ways that 'frames were bad,' in many different places on the internet. They discourage you from using frames. But I want a different approach. Don't avoid using frames. Use them all the time, for everything. Use the old-fashioned kind, the bad ones. And then, DESIGN A BROWSER that will compensate for, or not have, the problems that frames cause in OTHER BROWSERS. This can only happen if somebody is committed to using frames all the time no matter what, and preserving them and continuing them because of their usefulness.

I love frames!

Story of the child molester. I'm leaving a bad ending on this blog today.

8:22 AM 12/12/10

When I visited West Virginia, I was looking at the bookshelves, not my books, but my parents' books and everybody's books. There are random things in there, some of them from John, some from me, some from my parents.

I saw 'Being and Nothingness' on the shelf. When I saw it, I felt sickness, disgust, loathing, hatred, and contempt. The person who gave me that book was named George. He used to visit my father a long time ago. Originally, he lived close to us when we were in Greensburg PA. He was a member of the scuba diving club. He stayed friends with my father and continued to visit us every once in a while after we moved to West Virginia. My parents kept scuba diving for a while after we moved, but not for long.

I was around 9 or 10 years old, I think, or 11. Not yet a teenager. One time when George came to visit, he was picking me up and carrying me on his hip, even just to walk from room to room in the house. I let him do this because I didn't know how to say 'no.' I just did whatever I was told to do by an adult. George wanted to spend a lot of time talking to me and carrying me around. He wanted to carry me all the time. I became annoyed with this, but I let him do it because I didn't know how to tell him to stop. It must have surprised my parents too because they didn't tell him to stop either.

George always wanted a hug, every time I saw him. If I was walking up the stairs while he was walking down the stairs, he would want me to give him a hug. If I met him anywhere in the house, he would want me to give him a hug. He didn't visit very often, and he only just started doing this, and nobody knew what to do about it.

He must have decided everything was okay, because one day in the kitchen, he grabbed my breasts while he stood behind me and lifted me up onto the counter. He wanted me to sit on the counter and spread my legs while he stood against the counter in front of me. Again, I didn't understand any of this, but as soon as he grabbed my breasts, I was sick, and I knew that he shouldn't do that. That was the moment when I figured out for sure that he was molesting me. Up till then I hadn't realized I was being molested. I just felt that this was very annoying and I was starting to get sick of it.

There are people out there who would hear this story, and they would wish that they could have been standing there beside me with a gun at the moment when this happened. I know how that feels.

After he set me on the counter, I said, 'Don't ever do that again.' I said it in a non-threatening way, with a cutesy little voice and a cutesy little smile. He said, 'Okay, I won't,' in the same cutesy little voice.

After that, I told my mom what happened. She told me to avoid him whenever I saw that he was nearby, to just stay out of his way from then on. So I tried to do that. I did actually start saying 'no' to giving him a hug every time he saw me. He didn't visit us many more times, just a few more times after that. It's a long drive from Greensburg to the house in West Virginia. Not only that, but I don't know where he moved to. He was always changing jobs and moving from place to place. (There's probably a reason for that!)

It was after that that I picked up the book 'When I Say No I Feel Guilty.' I think I was 13 or 14 when I read it. It was on that same bookshelf upstairs that I was looking at now on my visit back to WV. I read the book. I started using the skills. They actually worked.

However, I started using it at school, too, and it made me less popular. I used to be popular because I was submissive and I had no dignity. As soon as I tried to have dignity and self-respect, as soon as I took myself seriously, nobody liked me anymore. I saw things differently after reading that book. I was able to see when people were pushing me to do things I didn't want to do. I was able to say no to them. I was able to see when people were making me inferior. Nobody liked me after I started telling the truth.

I had a couple of close friends who stayed with me all the time. But the 'general' friends, the casual friends, the people who weren't really close, most of them disappeared. I remember seeing the shocked, hurt look on one person's face whenever I stood up to him when he was treating me as inferior. I remember that he almost never spoke to me again after that. I don't remember who it was. It was just one of the casual friends. No, I wasn't happy about seeing a shocked look on people's faces. It didn't make me feel good at all.

The book didn't 'convince' me that I was being manipulated by people. It was something that I had always known and felt, but had no words to express. It gave me the words and the ideas to express what was going on. But the people around me weren't reading that book. They didn't know how to respond back to me. And that book isn't the end of it. There are a million more things to know about how to treat people with respect, and how to communicate. The people around me would have needed help to express themselves, too. Nobody ever taught THEM how to talk to ME.

Later on, my brother found 'The Fountainhead' in a list of books about individualism. You could write an essay about any of the books in that list, and he chose that one. So he showed it to me, and I eventually read it, and we also read Atlas Shrugged.

When George found out that my brother and I were reading Ayn Rand, he gave me 'Being and Nothingness' to help me fight back against the brainwashing. That book was supposed to convince me that Ayn Rand was wrong. I glanced briefly through it and saw that it was meaningless and useless to me, and I put it on the shelf and never looked at it again. It's still there. I felt that sick loathing and contempt when I saw it.

It's true, Ayn Rand had a cult of people who were brainwashed to act a certain way, to fit in with the cult, to never be 'irrational' or do anything that Ayn Rand didn't like. Nathaniel Branden wrote about what it was like to be part of that cult, and he wrote about how he broke out of it. He wrote critiques of Ayn Rand's books later on and explained how the books made people feel that everything they did was wrong and it actually stopped them from being themselves because they were constantly worried about doing anything that Ayn Rand wouldn't like. I agree with all that. We experienced the same thing. My brother went through a hardcore Objectivist phase where he judged me for everything I did and said, but later on, he gradually changed his mind and mellowed out about Objectivism, and so did I. But 'Being and Nothingness' wasn't what 'rescued' me from hardcore judgmental Objectivism.

George is an old man now. I haven't seen him in, like, decades. I still feel that same sick hatred and contempt, after all these years. He's going to die someday, and I will still loathe him till the day he dies. It's kind of sad. I would want to forgive him if I could, but I can't make myself not feel sick at the thought of him.

George is the reason why I am careful not to touch anyone if it could make them uncomfortable. It's the reason why I was always so cautious with Curtis even when it sometimes seemed like he was openly flirting with me. I never, ever wanted to violate him or disgust him the way that someone else had done to me. It's the reason why I would have instantly given up on him and left him alone, instead of ever, EVER trying to actually start up a relationship with him. I always assume that he is disgusted with me, that he feels that same sick feeling of being molested and violated, that I am ugly and unattractive and loathesome to him. It's the reason why I would have done NOTHING AT ALL with him, except that the murderers controlled me and forced me to initiate a relationship with him outside work. And I STILL believe that he loathes me, even though I remember the times when he seemed to be attracted to me or flirt with me. (This would not be such a problem, except that I also have unconventional grooming practices that don't conform to the standards of female beauty - I don't shave, I don't remove my mustache, and nowadays, I also am growing natural dreadlocks, which many people think are disgusting, since I'm using the no shampoo method of growing locks, instead of growing fake, manicured, high-maintenance dreadlocks. I don't feel as afraid of being rejected whenever I'm conforming to the mainstream grooming standards. But I am not going to change my practices because of that. This is part of my personal belief system now.)

I tried, and tried, and tried, to get Curtis to officially say 'no' to me, to make boundaries, to tell me to stop, and I also tried to tell his girlfriend to do that, too. But neither of them would do it. Neither of them would have a conversation with me about this. I told BOTH of them, more than once, that I 'hear voices' and I do things that they tell me to do, and apparently, they're not that worried about it. His girlfriend still writes letters to me occasionally and she is still friendly to me, but she doesn't understand why I was so desperately trying to get him to say 'no' to me and forbid me to see him. He is too nice and too gentle to say 'no' to me and make a strong boundary telling me not to touch him. So one of these days, I'm going to get the idea that since he didn't say 'no,' after I begged him and begged him to say 'no,' I'll get the idea that it's okay to do it, and I'll try something stupid, and he'll push me away and hurt me very, very badly.

And none of this would be happening except that 'they' are still forcing me to have false hopes about him and to keep trying to stay connected with him instead of just grieving, getting over it, and letting him go, which is what I would have done on my own in the real world. Not only that, but they're also giving me a fake 'loyalty' to him, so that I get attacked whenever I try to go looking for other men to go out with instead of him, and if I try, they tell me that he's hacking my computer and he knows that I'm looking at other guys and he's jealous about it, so they make me feel like I have to be loyal to him and not cheat on him. Curtis isn't hacking my computer. THE MURDERERS are hacking my computer, and THEY are jealous about who I'm dating, not Curtis. Curtis doesn't know what I'm doing, he doesn't think much about me, and he isn't hacking my computer, and he doesn't care if I go out with other guys. He barely even remembers that I exist unless I'm bugging him. Out of sight, out of mind.

(I inserted a bunch of paragraphs while rereading this. This is back on the subject of parents and children.) If you teach your children how to say 'no,' then they will also sometimes have to say 'no' to YOU, the parent. You have to decide where the boundaries are. On which issues will your command override your children's 'no?' Sometimes, there are dangers that they don't know about, and when you're protecting them against those things, you'll want to command them even if they don't want to obey you. There might be ways of communicating more clearly and more respectfully, but you will still have to set a boundary on some things.

However, on a lot of issues, parents are extremely disrespectful towards their children, even when it isn't a very important or dangerous thing, even if it's some trivial everyday thing, and it isn't necessary to force them to obey you about those minor things. Like, which shirt are you going to wear today. Parents and children can get into big fights about something that trivial. I've seen them, other people, having fights and being horrible towards their children over stupid things like that. They act like it's a life-or-death decision if you wear that pale pink shirt that makes your skin look sallow, or whatever. You could tell your kids your opinion on something like that, without actually commanding them or forcing them to wear what you tell them to wear. There are ways to communicate opinions without constantly nagging people or disrespecting them or forcing them, and after a while, after you've said it a thousand times, it's better not to say anything at all.

A lot of this wouldn't be a problem if we didn't have child labor laws. Children aren't allowed to earn money, and they can't leave home until they're eighteen years old. I think they can sometimes leave at age 16, but I forget how that works. Some kids would have wanted to leave home many, many years before that. They become teenagers, they start standing up for themselves, and if they could just move out, they wouldn't have to fight against their parents over every little thing.

*******
They woke me up this morning after a dream about 'girl toys.' That came from McDonald's, where I'm asking customers about whether they want a girl toy or boy toy with their Happy Meal. Yesterday, I heard myself saying 'boy toy or girl toy' and I was conscious of it, because I had just been reading in the crew book that we're not supposed to say that. In the beginning it was hard for me to say 'boy or girl toy', because I was thinking 'boy toy,' as in, a guy that you are casually dating, a non-serious relationship, with a young guy. I've gotten used to saying it now. It has fewer syllables. But actually, we're not supposed to say 'girl' or 'boy,' we're supposed to tell the customer what the toy is (right now, it's a Transformers toy or a Hello Kitty wristwatch), because somebody complained that tomboy girls might want to get the boy toys (I know, I would've wanted them too, the girl toys are usually pathetic, but I always liked action figures when I was a kid). So it's embarrassing to ask for a boy toy to give to your girl. (The boys don't usually ask for girl toys, but it could conceivably happen.)

In the dream I was playing with the toys, and they were like the toy collection I had when I was a little kid, like the My Little Pony toys. They had all these tiny little accessories, little pieces that were easy to lose.

But I was a perfectionist (with my toys in the real world, not the dream), and I never lost any of the pieces - until I took the toys over to my friend's house, and we played with them for a few hours, and I went home and found that things were missing, and she was too stupid and careless and apathetic to recognize that there were pieces of toys that didn't belong to her, even though I TOLD her that I had lost some of the pieces in her bedroom, and I described what they looked like, and I asked her to please give them back to me when she found them - sorry, I still haven't gotten over it.

The only explanation I have for this is that she didn't care about her own toys at all, and she didn't even remember which parts of toys and which accessories were hers, because ALL of her toys were junk to her and she wasn't interested in them. I have an analogy to this. I've been buying Goodwill clothes, and sometimes throwing them away when they get contaminated (chemical sensitivity), so I'm not attached to my clothing anymore. In the past, I would have strongly recognized which clothes were mine and which were someone else's. But when I visited West Virginia, my mom offered to do the laundry, and she was going to mix up all of my clothing into the batch with hers. I warned her not to do it, because I said I wouldn't recognize which ones were mine afterwards, and I wouldn't be able to pick them out of the mix. That's because all of my clothes are new, they are 'disposable,' I'm not attached to them, they're non-unique, and I've deliberately avoided 'bonding' with my clothing or falling in love with it or making it part of my special clothing style or image. (Yes, I did used to have special, unique clothing styles in the past.)

So if my old friend felt that way about her toys, if all her toys were junk, then she couldn't recognize, or care, which little tiny toy parts were hers and which ones were someone else's, because she never played with toys and didn't care about any of them at all. I didn't understand that back then. I couldn't imagine that somebody's parents would buy tons and tons of unwanted toys that they forced on their children (especially at Christmas) because they felt that it was necessary to buy lots of expensive toys for their kids, when their kids hate playing with toys and will just trash them all over the room, break them, and lose them, and forget about them. Most kids I've seen don't care about their toys at all. They would be just the same if nobody ever bought them any toys. They'd be better off. They DON'T WANT their toys! This is one of the reasons why I officially stopped celebrating Christmas.

Well, in this dream, it was a symbolic dream, and I am disgusted by people who use 'symbols' to communicate, but, the 'girl toys' had 'shoes' that were 'in the closet.' Years ago, I heard the word 'pedophile,' and I thought that it meant a foot fetishist, because 'ped' is the root of words like 'pedestrian,' a walker, a person on foot. It's also 'pod,' in the Latin names of animals and their body parts. So I knew 'ped' and 'pod' from biology, so I thought that a pedophile was a foot fetishist. (That's before I was using the internet.)

So my understanding of this dream, which was written by a loathesome person, is that the 'girl toy' is ME, and my 'tiny little shoe toys' are 'in the closet,' meaning, my own pedophilia is still a secret.

Why would people write dreams that disgust you, for the purpose of making you hate them? Why would they do this same thing over and over again, and never learn, and never understand, that their behavior is disgusting and it causes you to hate them? Apparently, they DO know that it's disgusting, because they never reveal themselves to their victims. And I'm not the only one experiencing this - it's the same with all the victims who are writing on the internet. Their attackers are disgusting, loathesome people who do the same disgusting things, the same stupid, loathesome, pathetic, contemptible, repetitive things, every single day, forever, without getting caught.

Will electronic mind control ever be accepted as 'common knowledge' in our society? How many centuries are we willing to wait for that to happen? How long until the police officers admit that this is real? How long until they become willing to investigate these attacks, to go to your house and put up detectors and tracking devices that will figure out which direction the attacks are coming from? How long until they get a reliable method of detecting attacks at the moment when they happen, and arresting the people who are doing them, and destroying the systems that they're using?

THAT will never happen. They're probably not using 'their own' systems. They're probably hacking into other people's systems. The systems they're hacking into are used for legitimate purposes at the same time. They're probably hacking into things like radio station towers and cell phone towers, I'm guessing, and making them emit frequencies and carry information that the owners wouldn't have wanted them to do. Isn't it wonderful to have all of our computers connected to an always-on insecure internet connection 24 hours a day? And isn't it wonderful to have those computers open and exposed to electronic weapon attacks that control them even when they're not connected to the internet? (The answer is No. I'm being sarcastic.) I'm tired of our society's ignorance that never ends. It just goes on and on and on and never stops. People never stop being ignorant.

I would end this blog in a better way than that. But I don't know how.

I'm going to try to get up and do something now. Today is Sunday. I'm off work tomorrow, which is when the Weekend Warrior mode kicks in. Everything that I have to do to rescue myself, to redeem my life, to make it possible for me to get married and have children, that all has to be done in the two days that I'm off work. After those two days are over, I go back to being a government slave, to earn my income, and a very big chunk of that income will be taxed out of my paycheck, to pay the government to send slaves to other countries to kill the slaves in those countries. The little bit of money left over out of my paycheck will be used to pay the rent, and the landlady will use those rent payments to pay the extremely high property tax on these apartments, and that property tax will be used to pay the slaves to go to foreign countries where they will kill other slaves. Am I seeing a pattern here?

I'd like to live in a small cottage on land that nobody owns, where I don't make a rent payment or a property tax payment. The cottage would be made of natural materials. Nothing toxic or moldy. It would be very small. I don't need much. Or I could live in an RV. Buying a trailer is too expensive - I looked into that. It's like $80,000 to buy a trailer and have it installed on a lot. That's more than a HOUSE used to cost. There's no such thing as 'trailer trash' anymore. Trailers are for rich people. Poor people live in apartments. It's 'apartment trash' now.

This blog still doesn't have a good ending.

Little by little I get done the things I need to do to recover from my disasters and make progress in my life. I don't know how long it will take, but I am trying. That is all I can do. I am being constantly attacked by people who want me to fail at everything I try. It's like Neo fighting Agent Smith and his millions of Smith viruses. After a few more decades of trying to fight them, and trying, and trying, and trying, eventually I will give up and die.

There's a song of despair that I heard once, on public radio, on one of the folk music shows. I only recorded the very end of the song, so I only remember a few lines from it.

'Life is a trial and love is a trouble, beauty will fade, and riches will flee, pleasures they dwindle and prices they double, and nothing is as I would wish it to be... Last night in my dreams I was stationed forever, on a far distant isle in the midst of the sea. My one chance of life was a ceaseless endeavor, to sweep off the waves as they swept over me. Alas, 'twas no dream, ahead I behold it, I see I am helpless my fate to avert. She lay down her broom, her apron she folded, she lay down and died and was buried in dirt.' The Housewife's Lament. People loved, and hated, that song so much that on the internet, they've added extra verses by new people, to try to fix it, to make it hopeful, to fight back.

Maybe I will just leave it with a bad ending today. Sometimes I can't fix it.

How To Train Your Dragon, if I can talk about the movie without forgetting all the plot details

10:07 AM 12/8/10

So this was one of those lies disguised as mistakes. Apparently either I am too incompetent to recognize a Three in a movie, or else 'they' want me to look incompetent and they're putting words in my mouth and making me say things that are wrong, or they want me to discredit the enneagram and make it look like a useless personality typing system where you can interpret anybody as anything you want to believe they are. Whatever.

Anyway, I have been getting harassed by voices the last couple days ever since I mentioned 'How To Train Your Dragon' a few blogs ago. They are telling me that the boy is a Three, not a Nine, and I said he was a Nine.

Maybe all Myers-Briggs ISFPs look like Nines? Now what? They want me to say he's an ISFP? He's probably not. Based on my past record of being totally wrong about every single personality type that I talk about, that's probably NOT what he is.

Then, this morning, they went on to say that this movie is a metaphor for going to war against 'the enemy,' only to find that you feel guilty after hurting someone, and then you want to stay and try to help them and fix the injury you caused. But my response to that is, yes, but, there are people who really are trying to fix the injury we caused in Iraq and Afghanistan, and these people are getting killed and kidnapped when they go over there, and the best way to 'fix the injury' is to get out of the country and leave them alone. Just stop trying to 'do' anything.

I thought the ending of movie wasn't believable... This is a spoiler, if anyone wants to watch the movie and doesn't want to know how it ends. The other metaphor that they mentioned this morning was, we find out that the 'enemies' are attacking us because they have their own parasitic dragon to feed at home. Either that can be interpreted as 'the government,' taxing them and enslaving them the way our government taxes and enslaves us, or else it could be viewed as the wife and kids, since the big dragon was viewed as a female dragon like the queen of the hive.

I thought it was unbelievable, because the dragons, at the end, were all too happy to betray the big queen dragon and kill her and run away and abandon her instead of being loyal and fighting by her side. In real life, there would have been thousands of dragons staying beside her and fighting against the invaders. But in the movie, they were like, 'Hey, someone's here to help us! Yay! Let's get out of the way so they can do their work!' So all the dragons just left, and let the Viking guys kill the Queen, and the trained dragons actually were happy to fight against her. There wasn't a single loyal dragon fighting by her side. (What??? Now I'm not sure about that. I only watched the movie once. Now I think I'm remembering wrong! That can't possibly be true. I have a feeling this is one of those 'wrong memories', 'mistakes,' or 'lies.' They HAD to be fighting more than just the queen dragon by herself. I am remembering it wrong.)

Even Saddam Hussein had loyal supporters whenever the USA went to attack him. Besides, if Saddam Hussein was going to be the metaphor for the queen dragon, then we would have to include the fact that it was the USA who had Saddam Hussein put on the throne in the first place! Oops, was that a Wikileak? No, Harry Browne talked about that on his website. It's something a lot of the libertarians know about. It's public knowledge that, several decades ago, the USA was responsible for PUTTING Saddam Hussein there as the leader of Iraq. He wasn't just freely elected. He was a USA puppet.

There are websites that have a record of all the attacks that the USA was waging on Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries LONG BEFORE the USA was 'suddenly and unexpectedly attacked out of nowhere for no reason at all' when they destroyed the Twin Towers. So actually this metaphor for the queen dragon and the small dragons doesn't match up to the real war.

Anyway I thought the ending was unbelievable.

Speaking of which, I went to see Harry Potter again, and 'they' pointed out that the reason why Ron wasn't allowed to shout Hermione's name while she was being tortured was because it would have drowned out the dialogue of the other characters. It would have been too loud to hear the other people talking with each other. I disagree. I think it should have been fitted in there somewhere. I mentioned that because I was complaining that the scene was unbelievable when Ron didn't seem all that upset or frantic.

So, the queen dragon had:
1. No loyal supporters, not a single one (This has to be a 'wrong memory.' I only watched the movie once, and this is what I remember.)
2. Some of the dragons, the 'trained' ones, actually FOUGHT AGAINST her, willingly, but
3. Most of the dragons simply disappeared. They flew away.

It wasn't like the Vikings had superior technology. They didn't have much technology at all. They had inferior technology. The dragons were able to fly, breathe fire, and do all that stuff. So they wouldn't have been very afraid of the Vikings. It would be like some people from a foreign country walking up to one of the government offices in Washington DC, and banging on the front door, and pointing guns at them. Yes, if that happens, the people being attacked would be scared, but there would be thousands and thousands of other people surrounding them, in seconds, with bigger guns and better technology. The Viking attack on the queen dragon was like that. All of the loyal defenders wouldn't just run away. Attacking the queen dragon was way too easy in the movie.

Now I'm not sure. And I am not going to run right out and rent the movie again to make sure that I have my facts straight. You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of that column in 'The Onion' (which I haven't read in a really, really long time), where there's that guy, Jackie Harvey or something, I forget his name, and he talks about movies and movie stars and pop culture, but he gets everything totally backwards. You can't believe anything he says because a lot of it is random nonsense or the exact opposite of the truth.

I miss the bookkeeper guy who was fighting in the gang war between Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable as they tried to annihilate each other. Supposedly he died in the line of duty. Herbert Kromwell or something, that's almost his name. Kornfeld? Something like that. I haven't read 'The Onion' in a long time.

Well, anyway. Just about everything I've said about 'How To Train Your Dragon' is wrong. I've got the wrong personality type for the main characters, and now, I'm remembering the plot details wrong, too. So maybe I would like the movie more if I watched it again. That often happens. I am probably going to have to take back everything I said.

random stuff - sabrina, caden, movies, hearing voices

1:19 PM 11/20/10

saw sabrina
caden was crying
selling mcd hands
the movie: main character. needs to show eight's saving grace
voices want me to see curtis very soon and more often
hackers wondered about eye deformities
work today, left early

This is a bunch of random stuff.

I was scheduled to go to work early this morning. That was unusual. It turned out that we weren't busy and they decided to let me go after I finished making the salads and parfaits.

I think it was yesterday or maybe the night before that I saw Curtis's mother at McD. Drive-thru customers sometimes tell me that they like my voice. I use prosody, I sing my sentences, so they're pleasant sounding and not a monotone, and not harsh, and not conveying negative emotions. People tell me that I sound calm and soothing instead of gruff and irritable, not like 'whaddya want?' So she said the same thing to me. She was being very nice to me.

She also said she appreciated something about how I took the order, that I didn't interrupt every time she ordered a Happy Meal to ask her if she wanted fries or apple dippers with the meal. Note, there's actually a good reason why we do this, why we interrupt and ask about the apple dippers. The computer screen is designed in a user-unfriendly way, so that it's a major hassle if the customer starts to order a Happy Meal and then says, at the very end, 'Oh, yeah, and I wanted apple dippers instead of fries,' and yes, they frequently don't bother to tell you that. And our *NEW* computer system is *SLOWER* than the lean mean green screen system we used to have. So when you push a button, you have a delay time of a couple milliseconds while you wait for the computer to respond, and the customer keeps on talking, and your short-term memory starts forgetting what they asked for. The new system is badly designed in so many ways, I'd have to write a whole separate blog about it. Anyway I just skipped asking about fries/apples because I've decided to use the 'default option' a lot lately instead of asking. She was ordering Happy Meals really fast, one after another, so I just took the default options. Curtis has a bunch of half-brothers and sisters, and when his mom goes through McD she gets a lot of Happy Meals.

I saw his mother a few weeks before this, too, back when I hadn't seen Curtis yet. I saw her and I started crying. Also, there was an incident where Kayla drove through with Caden in the back seat, on the driver's side, and he looked up at me and he waved, even though he doesn't know me. I think 'they' made him wave. It's not likely that he did that on his own. I cried a little bit when that happened, but I also had the fakeness/puppet suspicious feeling too. (Like the way I felt about the movie Inception, where they manipulate the guy to do something he wouldn't have otherwise done, and it's supposed to be a cathartic, emotional moment when he meets his father at the end, but I know in my mind that it's fake and it serves someone's purpose. And like how I couldn't really get into the movie Avatar, not completely, partly because I got stuck watching it in 3-D when I would rather have watched it the normal way, and also, partly because I was asking, 'But aren't the avatars alive too? Don't they have their own minds and their own personalities? They're not just blank brains waiting to be controlled. They're living animals.' Whatever emotions are being expressed, they're not completely genuine because they are caused by an external controller, and you can't ignore that fact.)

Then, last night, I was taking an order, and I could hear a young child crying, 'waaaaaaahhhhahahahh! ahhhaaaaaaaahhh aaaaaahh! aaaaaaaaaaahhahah!' I mean, he was REALLLLY crying. I could hear him over the headset while she was ordering. I didn't know who it was... and then they pulled around to the window and it was Caden, Kayla, and her mother. I don't know why he was crying. Little kids cry when they're tired, hungry, cold, sick, or whatever. (I know, because I do too. I just don't do it in public.) It could've been anything.

****
'They' are having controversy over the movie that I watched, 'The Chumscrubber.' I didn't mean to make anybody think that this was the ***GREATEST MOVIE EVER*** or that I totally agree with and believe in all of the values and ideas expressed by the movie. But the voices have been bugging me about it, about how the guy... spoiler... does anybody care if it's a spoiler????... how the one guy dies at the end.

I was reading about moviemaking and about writing fiction. One web page talked about how you can make a story more interesting when you look at it from the point of view of another character, and he did this with the story Little Red Riding Hood, and he developed the character of the Big Bad Wolf.

So the voices were saying that the suspected enneagram eight character, the 'bad guy' in the movie, was now the 'main character.' They were wishing that he had had a 'saving grace' experience, instead of the bad ending that he had. The 'saving grace' is something in the enneagram, where each type could possibly become unhealthier and do worse things than they are doing, except that their saving grace makes them realize what will go wrong if they do. I am a self-preservation Four, and I already knew about my own saving grace years ago: whenever my life was going badly, I was able to look into the future and see what would happen if I continued to do what I was doing, about how bad things would get, so I had to take action to change things now before that happened. I don't remember what word they used to describe this in the book. It might have been something like 'being honest with yourself, being realistic, instead of fantasizing.' No more fantasies, no more wishful thinking - what's going to happen in the REAL world? The saving grace of the Eight is when they realize that if they hurt somebody, then everyone will reject them, and cut them off, and eventually hurt them in return. So they know, don't hurt people.

So, the eights need to see good role models in movies, of criminal eight characters who turn around when they realize all of the bad things that will happen if they hurt somebody or go too far.

*****
I wrote 'hackers wondered about eye deformities.' I was googling stuff about drooping eyes. I know somebody who has drooping lower eyelids, so that you can see the red stuff under the eye, like when you pull them down with your fingers. Her eyes are permanently like that. I wanted to know what's the name of that condition. She seems to have been born that way, because she showed us baby pictures, and her eyes were like that when she was a young kid. So I heard voices saying that the hackers who spy on my computer were wondering why I was reading about that.

****
'selling mcd hands' - This should be a whole separate blog post, and it should be well written, but I'm not going to make that much effort today.

This week at McDonald's we are supposed to ask for donations for the Ronald McDonald House Charity. If you donate, then you can sign your name on a little paper with a picture of a helping hand on it, and they stick it up on the wall. You don't have to sign the paper, though.

So I'm supposed to sell them in drive-thru. And it turns out that actually, I'm really good at it. I'm terrible at suggestive selling for the stuff that makes more profit for McDonald's, like I'm supposed to suggestive sell apple pies, or french fries, or a drink, or would you like the value meal Large Sized, or whatever. I don't feel comfortable suggestive selling food for profits. But it doesn't bother me at all to ask for a donation to the RMHC.

But McDonald's really, really messed up this time. And I can't believe that, with all their social skills, they didn't figure this out. They are undermining themselves when they sell the helping hands. Here's what they did.

I was told that we are supposed to tell customers that they can get a free apple or pumpkin pie if they donate a dollar. As soon as I tried to do this, I knew right away that it was wrong. I did it a couple times and then gave up on it.

First, I did that at the front counter. Selling the hands is harder at the front counter, because you are there looking at the big, scary customer. I hardly sold any at all at the front counter, and I wasn't comfortable telling them that they would get a 'free' apple or pumpkin pie as a 'reward' for donating to charity.

Not only that, but of course, we are losing a small amount of money every time we give them a pie, too. Not a big deal, but still. That's not as important as the undermining ourselves thing.

I can't explain how I know this, I just feel it. I felt it when I was trying to talk to the customers and offer them a 'free' pie for a charity donation. I feel it in myself, like if I were donating to charity, I wouldn't like this. I don't like to donate to an anonymous charity like RMHC, but still, I can understand how it feels to want to donate to charity. (I like the 'direct action' kind of donation. You know who's being helped, you know what their problem is, you know what they are getting, you know where the money went.)

You don't want to get a material 'reward' for donating to charity!!!

Nobody wants to! Not just the 'selfless' Christians that Ayn Rand complained about. It isn't just brainwashing, it isn't just Christianity, it isn't just mainstream culture. When you donate something to help somebody, you don't expect to get a material reward. You have reasons why you donate, and you don't want to get a 'free pie' in exchange for a donation! Getting a reward makes it feel repugnant, gross, contemptible. It's like they don't understand you at all. And you want to be understood.

There's a good feeling that I had when I sold the hands in drive thru. I sold TONS of them, and, again, I'm terrible at selling anything else, but for some reason I really found myself when it came to asking for charity.

When the people drive around to the window, I make eye contact with them. I look them in the eye and smile. I smile a little bit more, and my eye contact is a little bit longer and more direct, than it is with the other customers who don't donate. They smile back at me. We have a bond. We have cameraderie. We have togetherness. We both know and understand something. They are more likely to make a friendly comment about the weather, or about anything at all, to me, a total stranger. This isn't just a 'buying something' transaction. It's a shared feeling. When they leave, I say, 'thank you very much,' and I make sure they can hear me. I hold them there a second or two longer than usual. And they almost always act this way. A few people will still kind of ignore me and act like they're in their own little world, but not usually. They usually reach out to my world. Almost always.

Give them a free pie? That has nothing to do with it!

And the other people, when they are asking for the donations, they try to sell the free pie because they were told that's what they're supposed to do. The rule says that we are to offer the customers a free pie in exchange for a donation.

It makes it sound like this: It's like, we were trying really hard to get donations, but we failed. It wasn't working, nobody would donate... until some genius came up with the idea, 'Hey! Why don't we offer them a pie!' And finally, the donation drive was a success! Nobody would donate until we offered them some extra food! But in reality, this is the opposite of the truth! People WANT to donate. They are HAPPY to give. They LIKE doing it! Don't assume something cynical about how greedy everyone is, about how nobody wants to give unless they get something *material* in return. They do get something in return. They get a good feeling, and a social bond, but not a piece of food.

And that's not even getting into the issue of whether people even WANT a pie. The pies really aren't that good. They're just cheap junk food. I don't like them very much. I'm sure a lot of people feel that way. People don't want to be forced to take a piece of cheap, yucky junk food that they really didn't want to eat! But if you give a donation, you're REQUIRED to take a pie. Or it seems like it. Now they're going to try to push this McDonald's pie on you whether you want it or not! They'll be asking you questions, 'What kind of pie would you like, apple or pumpkin?' And then they have to say, 'Umm, well, I really don't want one at all.' It's like saying, 'Give a donation, and get a free platter of greasy grimy gopher guts!' (Only a Weston Price dieter would say yes to that. I guess that's a bad example.) You push them to take something they don't want... so they'd rather not give a donation! Just don't even bother with the pies. But the other employees were still following the 'rule' and offering them the unwanted pies anyway. People usually said 'no' to this, at least while I was listening. But they very often said 'yes' when I offered them NOTHING AT ALL. It really was about one out of four customers, at least, and sometimes more than that. It was a high percentage of people who gave me money in exchange for NOTHING. And it was more pleasant that way. Nobody had to say (in a 'yuck' tone of voice), 'I'll donate a dollar, but I don't want a pie.'

I twittered about this (SilentSoul74) a couple times and said that the only thing that made me not try to ask them for a donation was if I had trouble hearing them. It's very embarrassing to say, 'Would you like to give a dollar to the Ronald McDonald House Charity tonight?' 'mumble mumble.' 'I'm sorry, what was that?' 'mumble mumble.' I usually gave up and didn't add on the dollar when this happened. One time, I thought they said 'yes' when they actually said 'no,' and I had to remove the charity donation when they got to the window. So I only try it with people I can hear.

Well, the charity drive is almost over. I'm not sure if we do it tomorrow or not. They said it lasted a week, and I think it's been almost a week now. But I'm glad I did it. And I learned something I already knew, which is that people enjoy giving, and they like to feel connected to other people, and they like to help people.

*******
so... hearing voices. 'They' were wondering about me going to visit Curtis again. This time I would go with nothing, because I just recently gave him something. I would go empty handed and I would talk to him and listen to him, and I would gather up the courage to touch him again. 'They' were noticing that I didn't go yet and were hoping that I would see him more often.

It has to be a required routine. I need a rule for how often I will go see him, and it has to be a duty that I must perform, whether I want to or not. (It doesn't matter that I enjoy it, and yes, I do. I still find it hard to go do this, because it's scary and difficult and it's hard for me to get out of bed. So that's why I say 'whether I want to or not.' I DO want to.) It's a duty to perform, because I get terrified out of my mind every time I get close to him. I get overexcited and scared, and sometimes I start crying, but not always. If I'm 'allowed' to just not bother going there and being tortured and terrified, then I just won't bother to go. And it's a 'good' torture, because I can see him now with permission, and he wants to continue being my friend, and he likes the things I gave him. But even though I am feeling more safe now it's still very difficult.

******
I'm going to try to see Harry Potter today. Some of the shows will be sold out, but there might be a few left.

"Disappointed that you tried...?" No, I'm GRATEFUL that you tried.

Disappointed that you couldn't be like me?
Disappointed that you tried to be like me?

No, I'm grateful that you tried to be like me. Thank you for trying.

What's this all about?

I was thinking about the future of the Order.

What happens if I create the Order, but some of the members start to think they can do it better than I can? I see myself trying to start the Order, but some bossy people start thinking that THEY know what it's about, and I don't. They start complaining that I'm too extreme, that they don't want to follow this rule or that rule, but they like the other ideas. They like this, but they don't like that. They like the idea of getting a bunch of people together to cooperate with each other and help each other, or enjoy each other's company, or work together, or trade together, or do car pools together, or cook together, or have their own religion together. But one or two of my ideas are too extreme, and they just don't like that one particular thing, and they don't think we should be doing it.

Maybe they don't want us to be required to eat the same diet. Maybe they don't like the idea of not being allowed to cut our hair, or, the idea of losing status, losing compliance, if you do cut your hair while you're in the Order. There's always going to be something that they don't like. Some rule they don't want to follow. They joined this group thinking it was one thing, but actually it turned out to be something else, and it's not what they wanted.

What's my reaction to that?

I'm grateful that you tried.

They tried to be like me, but they couldn't. I'm disappointed that it didn't work out, but I'm glad they tried to do it. We can still be friends.

I encourage them to start their own group with their own name and their own reputation. People aren't competing to call themselves 'retmeishka.' That's a unique glossolalia name with no meaning. I didn't try to monopolize some really cool-sounding, meaningful name that everybody wants to have, for instance, 'The Free Will Order,' or something. I didn't take that name. I called myself a unique, meaningless name.

Somewhere down the road, in the future, after I die, people will struggle to follow the original intent of the Order. They will struggle to define the founder's original spirit. What would Nicole Binns do? What did she want for the Order? It's just like any other religion. After someone dies, people struggle to follow their spirit, without any guidance except their own interpretation of that person's writings, the memory of that person. They can only try. That person is gone, and that person can't tell them whether they're doing a good job or not. That person can't tell them whether they're accurately following the original intent, the original spirit, or not.

Sometime in the future, there will be a schism in the Order, just like there is with any religion. Someone will decide that the name retmeishka has been corrupted beyond repair. People are calling themselves retmeishka, but it no longer follows the original spirit of the founder. What do we do? Are we disappointed that you tried to be like me, and you failed?

No, I'm grateful that you tried. Both sides of the schism were trying to follow the original intent, the original spirit. They disagreed about what that spirit was. Thanks for trying.

And then, there are those people who aren't even TRYING to follow the original spirit. They're just making their own thing and naming it after themselves. What do I say about that? I say, go with my blessing. I WANT them to build their own groups. It's helpful for people to have a group to be in, even if that particular group is doing something we disagree with. Usually, for the most part, a different group with minor disagreements isn't doing anything really bad. Groups as such are helpful. They help people meet each other, work together, and cooperate. They support and guide people who don't know what to do. They give people something to rebel against, something to disagree with, something to question. It's better than having nothing at all.

So, sometime in the future, people will leave. They'll disagree about the original spirit that we're trying to follow, they'll say that one person or the other person isn't really following the original spirit. Or someone else will leave and create their own group, with their own spirit, and not even worry about what my original spirit was trying to do. Or they'll be inspired by bits and pieces of it, but they don't want the whole thing. They can all go with my blessing, and, thank you for trying. Thank you for trying to be like me, and, thank you for being yourself.

This is something that inevitably happens when you start an intentional community.

How To Save The Great Apes: Give Them Reading and Writing

The great apes already have their own language. We don't need to give them that. They speak to each other, in the wild, as they go through their daily lives.

But they don't have reading and writing. They don't have a calendar, either, a way of recording and expressing time in years. (As far as I know.)

I want the great apes, the bonobos, the chimps, the gorillas, and any other apes that are able to do it - I want these apes to write and read their own histories. I want them to record their own culture in books. It will be written in ape language. It will have their myths, their memories, their genealogy, their history, their ideas, their names, everything, just like a human history book would have.

It will be just as boring, and just as necessary and important, as a human history book. It might be hard to read. It might be mundane. It might not be wise and full of insight. But still it is necessary.

I like to imagine that somewhere in the jungles, the scientists have built a room underground with the apes' books already in it, protected. I imagine they've been working with the apes all these years to get their history recorded. All those researchers spending years and years in the jungle observing them, I hope they're doing something useful. I'd like to imagine that's what they've been doing all this time. An ape-written history would be useful. Not just history, but whatever else the apes want to write. Ape fiction, ape how-to books, ape philosophy, ape myths. All of it.

We could also give them a money system. Of course, I'd want it to be a good one, like gold and silver. Not fiat money. The bonobos already understand how to use sex as a way of trading for favors and food, so they'll be the first to understand money. But I'm sure the other great apes can too. They understand language.

(Why 'they' wanted me to write about this today, I don't know. There's probably a reason. It's almost always a 'joke' of some kind. But me, I'm not joking, I'm serious. I literally want to see the (non-human) great apes' reading and writing.)

i'm creating a new religion (work in progress)

they've been using my screen name, retmeishka, to refer to this particular new religious sect. we've tried different variations of the word, such as 'retmeishkan.' however, i'm seeing this as just 'internal jargon' for the time being, and it might not be the final name for the religion. the final name could be decided by consulting with several people who join it, once it exists and once people have been invited into it. i want the word to roll off the tongue easily enough. i'm able to say 'retmeishkan,' but maybe not everyone feels comfortable with it. and it sounds like 'red martian' or 'red munchkin' if you're not familiar with the word. you tell people 'i'm retmeishkan,' and they say 'what? you're red munchkin?' so, that might just be a temporary word until the final name has been decided, but for now, internally, we're referring to it as retmeishkan. so when i say 'retmeishkan,' it feels like sort of joking, not serious, but that's how we're referring to it for now. it won't be that way permanently, not set in stone.

i have been identifying the religion. i was going to go to 'beliefnet' and see, but i forgot to do that. i want to identify what makes this religion similar to, and different from, other religions.

it began because they wanted me to get rid of my mustache. when they first started attacking me, they didn't bother me much about not shaving my body hair, but the mustache in particular was always what they complained about (the voices). i started bleaching it as a compromise, but i was not willing to shave it or wax it or remove the hair. and bleaching a very long mustache doesn't look good - you end up with very long, highly visible bleached-white hairs instead of long, highly visible, dark brown hairs. but i chose that, instead of removing it, because i was very strongly against it, because of my beliefs and values and what it means to me.

i read an article talking about how women like men who have slightly feminine attributes, instead of liking the men who are extremely masculine. but the article went on to say that eyebrow-plucking (on women) was attractive, because it was still true that men like women with 'feminine' faces, and thin eyebrows are feminine, whereas thick eyebrows are masculine. they made it sound as though it was scientifically, objectively proven that we must pluck our eyebrows in order to look feminine, and that 'arched' eyebrows are more feminine, too. i can't STAND 'arched' eyebrows. they don't look like anything human to me at all. they don't look 'feminine,' either. the most beautiful women i've seen are the ones with whole, unplucked eyebrows, even when the eyebrows are thick, even when they go across the nose. those look real to me. (but 'we' don't have any disagreement about that. that's 'beating a dead horse.')

it's articles like that which make people believe things like 'humans lost their body hair because less hair means you're more intelligent than an animal, and it means we're not animals ourselves, and it means we are ABOVE them, and it's "more evolved" than animals.' like losing hair is 'progress,' instead of merely 'uniqueness' or 'some strange quirk of our species.' i see the hair loss as just a unique, strange quirk of our species. and i like the 'aquatic ape theory,' too - that humans might have lived at the edge of the sea, and were seafood hunters, spending most of their time in the water, or we might have lived by a huge lake when we evolved, and we lost hair, like the whales, dolphins, and seals, and we got subcutaneous fat, to be like sea mammals. it's just a quirk, not 'better,' not 'more progress,' not 'above the animals.' pigs don't have hair, rhinos and hippos don't have hair, some breeds of dogs and cats, whales, dolphins.... lots of mammals don't have hair.

well, what about 'being retmeishkan?' what does it mean to be retmeishkan? is it a noun, an adjective? are you A retmeishkan? i'm not sure about all that yet.

to clarify what's different about my religion, i ask these questions: why don't i just join some existing group? there are similar groups, and i've thought about joining a religion, but i feel dissatisfied with the ones that exist - they're not what i want.

a few examples:

amish: don't want to study the bible exclusively. i think a wide variety of books, both modern and old, teach about right and wrong, and how to live. i also want men with long hair. at least in the mainstream, men are permitted to grow long hair, whereas in the amish, they are not. however, just because they're permitted to, doesn't mean they do it. so my religion requires them to, and sees long hair as normal.

mennonite: similar reasons. i do drive a car, so i could be mennonite, but i have the same issue with physical appearance and seeing the christian bible as only one out of many books to read and follow.

so the bible is not the exclusive, one-and-only source of spiritual guidance. yet there is good information in there, but you can't refer to the bible as one whole, single book, as it was written over many years by many different people. the bible itself is already many different authors, many different books, and there are also large sections that are excluded from some versions of the bible, the taboo sections which are not known to most people, but are known to people who study religion. i don't recall all the names, but i think it's the gnostics and the book of thomas and others, which were sometimes part of the bible, and other times were taken out.

*christian bible is only one out of many different books that give spiritual guidance. bible was written by humans, who are fallible. human guidance IS valuable and trustworthy, but at the same time, it is not perfect, and there are many variations, many options, that are just as good, but different.

*men should have long hair and beards; male beauty is similar to female beauty; this is very important, not trivial, not just personal preference or being picky. male beauty matters a lot.

this was deeply repressed, in my beliefs, until the voices began questioning me about it. i stopped trying to convince my boyfriends to do what i wanted them to do with their hair. i already tried. it always triggered a rebellious 'I CAN DO WHAT I WANT!' response - or at least, i'm thinking of eric, who definitely would be described as 'defiant' and 'rebellious,' a rule-hater if there ever was one. he was formerly catholic, and doesn't like being micromanaged. but i have many years of experience with frustration about guys' hair, and about nobody respecting my wishes, and i gave up on it. they always just acted like hair was trivial and unimportant, and my desires were unimportant, and it didn't matter what i wanted.

so, this is being incorporated into the religion. there are people who enjoy following rules, and are happy to be told what to do, especially if the rules have a good reason and good intention behind them. i like rules where you can see the positive consequences yourself. follow this rule, then observe how much it helps you - like the feingold diet, which will work immediately on the first day you use it - you feel drastically better instantly - i can't rave loudly enough about the diet.

long hair isn't as obvious as to the 'why', because i have emphasized, over and over, while talking to the voices, 'no, growing long hair and beards WILL NOT guarantee that you get girls or get sex, if you're already having trouble with women. it will most likely just add to the attractiveness of men who are already attractive, while not doing much of anything for the men who are already seen as unattractive.' if someone is looking for the magic key to reliably seducing women and getting sex, then the natural grooming standard DOES NOT guarantee that. it might do the opposite: there will be many mainstream women who think it's AWFUL to grow long hair and beards. (*note, when i mention beards, i also include groups like native americans, and some asians, who don't grow beards. they're still included. i greatly value racial variety, in fact it's one of my highest priority values. i'm planning on adopting some nonwhite children, once i have my family settled.*)

*racial variety is a high value. this is another attribute of 'retmeishkanism,' (i say that word with a little smile, with cognitive dissonance) a word that's still just internal jargon to refer to this unique, tiny, not-yet-existing religion, with its one single follower - me. conscious, deliberate racial variety, instead of racial purity.

jewish: i have dietary restrictions similar to the kosher rules. i like the kosher food rules. however, i believe the intention behind them was to protect against illness, not just to unquestioningly obey a rule handed down by god, a rule which has no purpose other than 'god said so.' avoiding trichinosis is the reason why they don't eat pork. so if preventing diseases and parasites is the purpose of the rules, i have a lot of rules to add to the kosher rules. but i like the idea of voluntary regulations on food quality and how it's prepared and handled, and i agree with some of the kosher food rules i've seen. protecting our food quality is very, very important for health.

*'retmeishkanism,' (once again, said with a little smile, as it's not quite right, and probably won't be the final word, and i feel a bit silly) is what i might call a 'lifestyle regulating' religion. it isn't a 'liberal' religion. the protestant religions, and even catholicism and the other christian religions, don't regulate your daily life very much at all. you go to church on sunday, but then, you live the rest of your life freely, and nothing much is expected of you. you're allowed to eat whatever you want, look however you want, go to school wherever you want, and so on. there is very little lifestyle regulation at all. it's hardly any 'micromanaging.' retmeishka, this religion, DOES have micromanaging about some things: what you eat, how you look, and maybe perhaps how you dress, but the clothing question is not yet settled, and i am also a nudist, so there are two sides to the clothing question. nudism on the one hand, and on the other hand, what types of clothes do we wear whenever we're cold and need clothing, and when we go to the town and interact with mainstream people who require clothing. both sides need to be settled.

*nudism within the community is permitted (but not required, as of yet), and some form of modesty, some compromise with mainstream society, in public. there may be regulation of what types of clothing look good, and are healthy or unhealthy (i don't know if wearing polyester fabrics is good for you - that's probably no big deal, but i'm at least asking the question whether certain fabrics might have chemicals or something.). i strongly dislike most american clothing styles, and i desire some kind of change, but haven't settled on that, and would like to consult with the eventual new adherents. it's a work in progress.

disagree with jewish circumcision. some jews also disagree with that: there are groups of jews organizing to oppose circumcision, while still remaining jews - i've read about it.

*anti-circumcision. protect the wholeness of the body. this includes all organs and all medical treatments that remove or change parts of the body, including teeth.

some other religions forbid you to get medical care for certain health problems. i don't know much about this or what specifically they forbid you to do. i don't know whether i agree or disagree. there is such a thing as good medicine, and bad medicine. nowadays, i'm totally disgusted with almost everything that happens in a hospital or a doctor's office. however, that doesn't mean that all medical care as such is necessarily always bad or incompetent. i don't necessarily want to just accept god's will, if someone has an illness or injury. this question has not yet been settled. in fact, i'm interested in healing the sick, and i know someone who has diabetes type I and uses insulin, and i would like to find some alternative for his synthetic insulin, something like eating only protein foods, or something. there is such a thing as knowledgeable, competent, effective, moral medical treatment, but it isn't easy to find in the mainstream hospitals nowadays, under 'government medicine.'

there really are right ways, and wrong ways, of doing things. and there are also 'different but okay' ways. 'different but okay' means: i'm wearing orange clothes, and you're wearing green, and there's nothing wrong with that. strangely, loving the color orange is something that seems to run in my family. aunt jeannie loves orange (but she likes it on the pink-coral side) and my brother and i both love it, and we love redheads too. i think the weasley family is great. however, i include this in 'loving variety' instead of just loving redheads specifically. anyway, that's 'different but okay.'

and, with regard to medical care, it requires a lot of knowledge to decide. so here is what will probably happen in the religion: different sects will do different things. this is a 'sectarian differences' religion. we tolerate, encourage, and welcome dividing off into another sect if you disagree. we aren't the one-and-only way of doing things. religions, and intentional communities, as such, are SO BADLY NEEDED in this society, that i'm not going to stop someone from forming a new one and making their own. just having some kind of rules to follow, and some kind of community to support you, is so important and so badly needed, that we are glad, and grateful, to have somebody with a different opinion who will go form their own sect and make their own rules. so some of the rules for medical care might differ from sect to sect, because it requires so much knowledge and expertise, and there are different ways of doing things.

*new sects are encouraged, to deal with disagreements. some disagreements are viewed as 'different but okay.' communities and religions, as such, are so helpful and so important, that we'd rather see people branch off and form a separate group, so that we end up with two groups. that's better than just seeing the original group crumble apart and cease to exist. both groups can still exist, and cooperate with each other, and shop at each other's markets, and talk to each other. shopping at each other's markets is important: economically, 'the more the merrier' - the more people who are cooperating economically, the stronger and more self-reliant your community is. for instance, i might live close to a group of amish people, because in the amish community, there are small markets all within horse-carriage distance - it's a small, local community with a greater degree of self-reliance. everything you need is somewhere close by. i'm not amish, but i'd cooperate with the amish and buy products from them. that's just an example. i might not literally do that, but that's the idea.

how is it self-reliant to buy products from other people? well, self-reliant might not be the right word to use. i could use a different word. i want to distinguish it from: relying on fiat money and government money and borrowed money, which is what we want to get away from. we want to know that as the fiat money system bubbles happen over and over again, we will still have jobs, and food, and houses. we might have trouble paying our property taxes in fiat money, though, and we might end up being unofficial squatters on our land when the government wants to evict us. it could happen. but we will feel more secure knowing that locally produced food is available from people who are willing to help us, willing to cooperate with us, willing to give and receive from us, even if we do not use fiat money.

the borrowed-money system is so unstable, and jobs and businesses only exist for a couple years before they do layoffs or go bankrupt, and this is what i want to protect against. 'self-reliance' meant that we won't need to go to the government, asking for welfare checks, or unemployment compensation, which the mainstream people will have to do. mainstream society will be lining up around the block at the unemployment office trying to get their checks, or trying to get hired for jobs which are being created by the government ('let's build a giant bridge from altoona to bellefonte!' *note - to get that joke, you have to understand that altoona and bellefonte are two towns without any water in between them, and no reason to build a bridge. this wouldn't be obvious to someone who wasn't familiar with pennsylvania. let's build a big bridge from one point on the land, to another point on the land, just to have something to do!*)

i'll write down the other differences, which i wrote on a piece of paper, that distinguish the 'retmeishkan' religion.

*small, new, local sect with few followers. i'm the one and only adherent to this religion. there are many other adherents to the 'idelogical cluster' or 'beliefs cluster,' groups of beliefs which tend to occur together, such as anarchism and long hair and anti-circumcision. but this particular, small, local variant is my own unique little sect with its small differences from people who are in a similar beliefs cluster.

*anarchist, minarchist

*intentional community. groups of people will live together physically. this is different from, for instance, mainstream christianity in the united states, which doesn't have groups of people living together unless they are monks or nuns. however, there might be more than one intentional community, in different places, with 'my' religion. so they aren't all necessarily local to this particular place, but can be local groups in many different places.

*health, diet, lifestyle regulation. very strong rules, such as 'bottle feeding is against our religion.' breastfeeding babies is so important, it is not at all trivial, it is a VERY BIG DEAL in capital letters. bottle-feeding, and formula-feeding, and feeding anything other than human milk, causes a lifetime of obesity, health problems, allergies, and almost every other problem which is common in society today. along with vaccines, which are also a huge major cause of chronic diseases.

breastfeeding is so important, that if a mother has a problem that makes her unable to breastfeed, she is expected to find a wet nurse. and the community is a close, local group of people cooperating, so a wet nurse will be available. you aren't just told to go find one when there aren't any available. this is planned ahead of time. anyway, health-diet-lifestyle regulations are a very important part of this religion, which makes it different from 'liberal christianity' in the usa today, which doesn't tell you anything about how to eat or how to raise your babies, or anything like that. since this will be a local community, it will be visible and obvious to everybody if, for instance, somebody isn't breastfeeding their baby. it will be visible to everyone, and the response will be 'oh my gosh, you need help. let's find someone to help you.' immediately. it won't be something where nobody notices, for months or years, that you're doing something harmful, and nobody steps in to help. that is why a local-community lifestyle really does have health benefits for its members.

another difference: i oppose using synthetic vitamins and minerals. i do not advocate going out and buying a bunch of vitamin pills to make you healthier. in fact, i think those pills are dangerous. i've used them, and i react badly to them: they are toxic. synthetic vitamins and mineral pills are very dangerous. and they might cause other problems, which i have read about: there is a theory that breast density, heavy breasts, are associated with synthetic multivitamin pills, and this is visible on mammograms. i'm sure there are other things that these synthetic multivitamins do to the body, but i don't have time to get into it now. synthetic vitamin d, in particular, causes symptoms of vitamin d deficiency, strangely enough - i've read that it does, but i can't find the reference anymore.

(also, i haven't mentioned this before, and it might seem trivial, but i think children shouldn't be given pacifiers, either. they're made of plastic, and you shouldn't have plastic in people's mouths - no plastic dental fillings, no plastic retainers, no plastic pacifiers. the plastic is swallowed, in tiny quantities, and goes through the mouth surface directly, and affects the body, and might cause obesity and other endocrine problems. just let kids suck their thumbs, and let them do extended breastfeeding for many years. there's no reason why they have to have pacifiers instead of sucking their thumbs. i was told that my dental deformities, my malocclusions, were caused by thumb-sucking, but i don't believe that to be true. i was told that thumb-sucking caused me to develop an overbite. i think this is wrong, but i can't prove it right now. i'd show them weston price. and how is sucking a pacifier different from sucking a thumb, with regard to the teeth?)

*physical beauty. physical beauty is a sign of good health. 'ugliness' is usually a sign that somebody is sick or has a problem. there are variations in how people look, but in general, as a rule of thumb, 'all healthy people are beautiful.' i know that in reality, it doesn't always seem that way, but that's the general idea or intention behind it. healthy is beautiful, and 'ugliness' is a sign of illness or other problems.

however, my interpretation of physical beauty is one of the differences between my religion and other religions, and the natural grooming rules, including long hair on men, is something that makes this religion what it is. you can recognize a 'retmeishkan' if the men, women, and children are all following the natural grooming rules. i haven't settled yet on questions about how to wear our hair, for instance, in a bun, or combed versus uncombed, or what to do with the afro texture which is so different from my own. there are some variations there that are still within the standard. but that is part of my definition of what is beautiful. 'regulation of physical beauty' is an attribute of this religion. noticing it, paying attention to it, placing a high importance on beauty as a sign or symptom associated with good health. and also, a particular physical appearance indicates that you are a member of this community. and making rules for how to improve and protect health and beauty - that is different from mainstream christianity in the usa, which does not notice or regulate physical beauty, or even talk about it very much.

*the body. some religions (based on unhealthy enneagram type ones) tend to suppress the body, destroy the body, or see the body as evil. retmeishka (retmeishkanism? the awkwardness of my internal jargon) sees the human body as 'animal.' and there is nothing wrong with being an animal. animal isn't evil. i am a prude, and i know that i'm a prude, and i hide my sexuality and my feelings, and i am somewhat quiet and timid about talking about these things or expressing them, but still i actually believe in acceptance of the body and seeing the body as a healthy, normal thing, not something evil and sinful. that is supported by objectivism and nathaniel branden as well.

*family, fertility, sex, childbearing. this is different from mainstream usa culture. based on julian simon. i don't agree with every single word he says - for instance, i disagree with him about pesticides - but i agree with much of the spirit behind it and with almost everything else that he's arguing for. julian simon argues that pesticides like DDT aren't as bad as they've been portrayed. i disagree: they're WORSE than they've been portayed! not just DDT, but *ALL* pesticides, are *SO BAD* for humans, animals, insects, etc, that they should not be used - it affects us directly, because we would like to go *hunting* and eat the food that we hunt. eating wild animals and insects is what we want to do, so pesticides affect us directly, and are not just some abstraction of 'maybe it will possibly do something bad to some obscure species of animal someday,' but rather, it makes human beings sick, right here, right now, all of the time. ... anyway, as for fertility. i agree with his concept that increasing population, as such, is *not* the root of all evil. there are other problems: government regulations, taxes, and other laws are the cause of many things we see happening, for instance, how wastefully the land is used, and how people do monocropping and corporate farming and other things. anyway, this religion advocates having large families, and pregnancy and childrearing is of central importance.

mainstream culture believes that having children is a burden and it takes away your freedom. it's true that once you have children, you can't, or shouldn't, do certain things. you shouldn't move around a lot from place to place when you have children - it tears them away from their friends and all the people and places they know. and i know, because i remember when we moved from greensburg pa to scott depot wv, in 1983, and how traumatic that was. and i remember, before that, when i was held back and wasn't allowed to go into kindergarten because my birthday was past the cutoff date, so i had to wait another year, and all of the kids i was with in nursery school went on to kindergarten, and i had to go to nursery school for another whole year, and then i was a year older than everyone else in my class. i know how it is to be torn away from all of the people you know. i actually remember the thing about waiting another year to go into kindergarten, even though i can remember hardly anything else from back then, from that early in my life, from that young of an age - that's the one thing that i clearly remember. i remember being surprised and confused and not understanding why all of the other nursery school kids went on to kindergarten, and i didn't, and i had to let all of them go. it seemed stupid and pointless and i didn't understand it. it was really, really bad. they said i wasn't mature enough, and my birthday was past the cutoff date. the immaturity would be because of my ADHD, my hyperactive behavior.

anyway, you shouldn't tear kids away from everyone they know. so yes, it limits your freedom to move around from place to place. 'you can move when you get older.' it isn't as bad to move away, if you're old enough to decide it on your own, and have control over it. but you shouldn't be forced to leave because your parents decide it, and you have no control over the decision.

anyway, that's not the only way your freedom is limited by having children. there are many things you can't do or shouldn't do, after having kids. but the mainstream culture believes that 'having your freedom' is so much more important than anything else, that women are viewed as 'liberated' if they stay single and 'childfree by choice.' this is not viewed as a loss, but something to be proud of, something higher, more educated, better, 'more evolved,' 'more human,' more intelligent, higher class. having lots of children is viewed as low-class and uneducated.

having few children, or none at all, is seen as 'having a wider perspective about the effects of overpopulation.' my mother and father both believe that the world is overpopulated, and that we'd all be better off if a few billion people were suddenly wiped out by a nuclear bomb or something (that would be mostly dad saying that, i think - mom believes it but is less violent or extreme about it, however even *she* doesn't strongly oppose the idea that 'killing a whole bunch of people is a good thing.'). they both believe that there are too many people, and they both believe we'd be better off if a very large number of people died. this belief is seen as more educated, and superior, to 'small-minded' people who are 'thoughtless' about the 'harmful consequences' of having children, especially if you have more than two children (replacing the parents). julian simon blows this argument out of the water, totally destroys it - it is illogical, even the idea of 'replacing the parents,' which is meaningless when you look at what everybody else is doing, and how it's impossible to calculate or predict how many children are going to be born by all the people who you have no control over, and why is it that maintaining this particular number of people is good, but a lower number, or higher number, is bad. 'replacing the parents by having only two children' is meaningless. but mom and dad both believe in it. and the belief is seen as superior, high-class, higher-educated.

there is a common belief in the united states that 'low class people,' 'stupid people', 'poor people,' and 'uneducated people' are having large numbers of children, while smart, educated, superior, high-class, wealthy people are knowledgeable enough to restrain themselves and educated enough to know that unprotected vaginal intercourse leads to pregnancy (which the poor people supposedly don't know). you can google 'madeleine hoax' - darn it, i can't remember her name. madeleine somebody, an anthropologist, who visited other countries, and there was this one place where they hoaxed her, and told her that they weren't aware that sex leads to pregnancy. they pretended not to know that having sex makes people get pregnant, and she believed them, and wrote a book about it, which influenced all of 'white people' culture's views about primitive cultures, and is still there today in the 'educated' attitudes about primitive cultures, the contempt they have towards them, their own superiority, their seeing them as 'ignorant.' maybe her name's not madeleine. and i don't know how to spell it. i'll remember it later.

there's a belief that the number of smart people is decreasing, because smart people are smart enough not to have children, whereas stupid people are too stupid to restrain themselves. i've seen this belief in a lot of places, and i used to believe it myself before reading julian simon.

so, my religion opposes all of those views and attitudes about having children. large families should be supported by a close community, where your friends and neighbors participate in raising your children, babysitting them, breastfeeding them if you cannot, taking care of them when you have a problem, and educating them at home instead of sending them to public schools.

*economics, financial security. we oppose the fiat money system, the banking system, and the current way of borrowing and lending money (although there might be better ways to borrow and lend money, which will be decided later). we believe that people should trade using whatever money or barter they want, which will be decided locally, not globally, and it should not be enforced by law. we advocate a smaller, more local economy, in an intentional community.

*ecologic view. i am not comfortable with a lot of environmentalism, after reading julian simon: i don't like it if it says that you should make more government laws and bigger, more universal laws that apply to everybody - for instance, 'everybody everywhere should reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.' i think that law is wrong and misguided. however, my religion does have something of an ecological view, except it will be decided at the community level - we want healthy people, so we don't want to be living right next to a big factory putting out lots of smoke, or chemicals, or something. and we don't want pesticides, herbicides, etc. so, there is something resembling an ecological viewpoint here. but it is not exactly like a lot of the environmentalist movements, it's somewhat different. i'd say my emphasis is on economics: that the reason why a lot of the environmental problems happen is because of the monetary system and the laws. if you remove the laws and the money system, those problems won't happen anymore.

*psychology, personality. it is a 'meditative' or 'spiritual' religion. we are not necessarily 'praying to god,' but we do meditate, and search for the true self. understanding yourself is important to this religion. there are many books and many different sources of information about this. some of it is from psychology - the myers-briggs personality types, the enneagram, and other books, and nathaniel branden. lots of self-help books and self-improvement books.

the religion is distinguished from other religions because: electronic mind control is explicitly talked about and accepted as reality, as something caused by humans. hearing voices is interpreted as coming from living humans using technology, instead of coming from god, deities, demons, spirits, guides, ghosts, or anything else. that is part of our psychology and our search for our true selves, for free will and individuality, for controlling our own minds and bodies, for protecting ourselves against being controlled externally by other people using technology, for understanding what we really want and how we really feel. protecting ourselves, finding countermeasures, building shielded areas, talking about it, teaching it to our children: this is central to the religion, central to how we meditate, central to how we view ourselves. that is something that distinguishes my religion from other religions.

again, much of this came from asking the question 'why don't you just join so-and-so?' why not just join the amish, the mennonites, jewish, jehovah's witnesses, mainstream christianity, etc? why not just join another intentional community, like earthaven? the answer to that question is: because i want something slightly different, which none of those places are doing. there are certain things which are specific, unique, belief clusters occurring together in a particular combination. i like the idea of 'belief clusters.' it's really true, there are certain groups of beliefs and practices which tend to cluster together, when you read them on the internet. like anti-circumcision, and natural childrearing, and 'baby-wearing,' and co-sleeping, and extended breastfeeding, and other childraising practices. so, i'm saying that i don't see any other places which have ALL of my chosen belief clusters, occurring all together in one place. i'm not totally unique, however i do have a particular combination of belief clusters which doesn't appear in many other places.

*defensive pacifism with omnivorous diet. we are pacifistic, not aggressive, but also, we are probably going to fight back if some burglar (or government agency??? children and youth services? this is a very likely scenario which i am worried about, after seeing what happened at the FLDS ranch - i agree, it fits the definition of genocide) breaks into the house and tries to kidnap the children, or something. self-defense, family defense. mostly pacifistic, not aggressive, not making war with other sects, not initiating wars, not participating in government wars.

this religion is *intended* to provide an excuse, when the government drafts you, that you can tell them, 'i am retmeishkan. fighting in a war is against my religion.' this will be a 'sincere' religion, where you can clearly look at someone, and notice that their physical appearance and lifestyle is drastically, obviously different from the mainstream. the men have long hair and beards, and they dress differently, and raise lots of children, and live in an intentional community together. it is clearly, obvious a sincere belief system, which is present in their everyday lives, highly visible. it isn't just something that they spontaneously wrote on the paper in order to be 'too cowardly' to go fight in a war for the united states, or because they're 'betraying' the usa, or being 'unpatriotic,' or whatever. retmeishka (apologies, just the temporary name) will be a visible, obvious religion affecting every moment of their lives.

omnivorous diet, as part of this 'pacifism': some pacifists believe that you shouldn't kill any animals. this variant of 'pacifism' has to do with cooperating with other humans, but it doesn't include not killing animals. we see humans as an omnivorous, almost carnivorous species, and it is not wrong or immoral for carnivorous animals to kill and eat other animals. sharks, lions and tigers, other carnivores - we don't tell them 'you're immoral for eating that antelope.' we accept ourselves as an omnivorous animal. we believe carnivorous behavior is part of our nature, and we do not go against our nature. we believe that the human diet is healthiest when it includes some kind of animal or insect meat, especially for pregnancy and childrearing. we believe humans are 'just another animal,' although we see ourselves as a special, wonderful, unique, amazing, interesting animal.

*social behavior, social norms. there is some regulation of this in the religion, but i haven't gone into detail yet. i just jotted it down on a piece of paper. this has to do with community life, how we make decisions, etc, and also how we talk to each other. no details yet. and i'm in a hurry now because i have to eat before going to work.

*glossolalia, new words, new language. glossolalia is something that i do, that i have always done since childhood, making up new words and new sounds that have no meaning in english. this is associated with music writing, and with learning new foreign languages. in this religion, glossolalia is seen as a normal, healthy thing. it might be accepted and encouraged in children. i don't mean that everybody is required to do it. i just mean, it will be seen as 'normal' or 'something that happens,' and not a sign of mental illness or strangeness. it will be known, familiar, and accepted, but not required of everyone.

*imagination and pretending. make-believe. that was associated with glossolalia above. making something new, pretending. this is part of child psychology. i have read about pretending, in children, and using imagination, and i want to include that as something we accept and encourage as part of learning and living, even in adults. it would be 'green hat thinking' to edward de bono, but it's more than just that. it's also play-acting, role-playing, 'mantle of the expert,' etc. more details later.

*transdermal contamination theory. this has come to be of such huge importance to me personally that i want it to be a phenomenon that my community knows about and is familiar with. i can't find *anyone* on the internet who has written about a situation where they merely handled some medicinal herb seeds, and contaminated all of their carpets and clothing and belongings, *merely from seeds*, ephedra in particular, and had reactions as the chemical went through the skin, and the chemical lasted for *years* and did not biodegrade (ephedrine is like that - it doesn't biodegrade - it's very, very stable and long-lasting and has a long shelf life). i want this knowledge to be taught to others, and i want doctors to be aware of how it can explain some health problems such as erectile dysfunction (caused by prescription drugs and psychiatric drugs) and obesity. i want this to be less obscure, less esoteric, more well-known, and used for troubleshooting health problems. follow a decontamination protocol for curing people of illnesses and symptoms.

i jotted down a bunch of notes, but i'm in a hurry now, so i'll just write them here quickly. i've already said some of this stuff.

'prophets':
-drawn from variety of authors, ideologies
-use internet to locate ideas which are hard to find locally (hard to find in mainstream)
-not just one prophet or one book
-humans are fallible, make mistakes; and yet, humans are our guides. we should see the consequences of following some particular rule or piece of advice. rules are meant to be general, universal, and long-term (rules about how to be healthy, for instance), but they are not perfect or eternal, and they can change, or differ from place to place.
-mission/outreach? helping the sick, the poor, severely obese, people with ADHD or autism or other diseases caused by modern society

-some nomads, hunter-gatherers? traveling people, traders?

-not 'pagan'? different from pagans, doesn't do 'earth worship.' doesn't view 'nature' as a god, doesn't focus so much on the theme of 'the planet is a living organism and humans are violating the planet' belief system. doesn't do 'earth magic'. paganism might be more liberal, with fewer rules and regulations, but i'm not sure. paganist beliefs have many different variants, so i'm not sure - i'd have to read about it.

okay, i have to go eat, and i have to put gas in the car, or i won't be able to drive across town to go to work - i'm running on fumes, there is almost nothing left and the orange light is on.