Everything in the modern world, from trucks to soap to breakfast cereal is sold using sexual innuendo. All the news stations have an older anchor with a young attractive news person, to give everybody the idea they are sleeping together. It’s no wonder people are confused about their sexuality. Once our sex drive is exhausted as a means for getting people to buy things they don’t really need, what’s next ~ our survival instinct? Alas, brutal violence is drawing millions to watch Mel Gibson’s new movie about Christ – how many would have gone if he had portrayed it more compassionately?
I consider viagra ads during prime time viewing to be offensive. God Himself told Job, “Gird up your loins like a man,” not to take drugs. I favor lust over viagra – it’s far more manly to try to solve your problems with pornography, sex therapy, or even securing the legal use of a belly dancer or prostitute; than to just drop a pill. I would even go so far as to say that the very knowledge that viagra exists should be kept secret from all but those whom have gone through all the alternatives: ignorance is bliss. Moreover, I suspect that the epidemic of breast implants, allowing women to accomplish with a top heavy profile what used to require feminine whiles, might just be what makes men need viagra in the first place. Viagra has become the date rape drug of the Baby Boom generation.
Recent advertisements by pharmaceutical companies promote prescription medication for chronic anxiety disorder. They say it may have bad side effects: drowsiness, loss of sexual drive, headaches, and irritability. Why not try some natural techniques – get a cat, and learn by example how to relax; go to church and learn faith; exercise; learn to admire poetry or painting. The side effects will be compassion, empathy, sensitivity, increased sexuality, and higher tolerance for stress. Prescription medicines are good for chronic or severe cases, but should not be a long term solution.
Learning takes place faster when you have the big picture. The mind likes to know some limits before it can soak up information fastest. When I was growing up my parents painted the big picture for me – my dad, an engineer; with math and the sports; Mom, the chemist, with the arts and sciences. Do your child a favor and share your experience to help set some boundaries so your kids can learn and be happy in school.
The autonomic response for supervisors when they find an underling is disabled or different in some way that is unpleasant to them, is to double the work load or – more subtly – half the time allowed to complete their work. I call this the Tough Love Syndrome, as promoted by President Bush and his Administration. Eventually the sacrificial lamb quits, leaving all that hard work for the supervisor to take credit for – to rebuild his or her damaged ego. It’s happened to me in my career time and time again, and I’m sure you know somebody who has been victimized like that too – minorities, gays or lesbians, older workers, women; you name it. It’s barbaric and uncivilized, and shouldn’t happen.
There was a very popular book called The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook. The first edition was published in 1981 and it had a chapter on “Orgasmic Reconditioning” showing how homosexuals could realign their psyche to be turned on by the opposite sex. Similarly, heterosexuals could enhance their sexual attraction to their mates by transferring it from other objects of desire, such as movie stars. This entire topic was deleted from the current 1995 edition. Now the psychological associations say it is too stressful to change sexual orientation. This is clearly the politically correct thing to say, but is it scientifically correct? If it is in fact accurate, then what has happened since 1981 to reduce the stress threshold for the general population? I conjecture that our dependence on pharmaceuticals has made all humans immune deficient . . . Not that the big drug companies care, because they make money coming and going.
Be that as it may, homosexuality has become an accepted condition, because of special interest pressure from the gay community. Which is OK, but they have no right to take the sexual re-orientation process itself out of the scientific domain, because there are those who might benefit ~ and not just homosexuals wanting to be straight. Adulterous men could use the method to become more sexually aroused, by their own spouses. Child molesters could fix their orientation. It would not be hard to make a case that this pressure by the gay community to make their condition OK has deprived the rest of the population of an important medical tool. That being the case, folks would probably not be too inclined to support this whole gay marriage rights movement underway.
I know my “psychology over pharmaceuticals” attitude has got to be annoying. Just take a few aspirins and you will feel better. The only people who believe in any of the original natural healing stuff that Jesus practiced way back when, are Wiccans and witches. And you know what any good Christian should do to them; what does the Bible say, “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live?” Nor shall thou suffer thyself to do time consuming meditation or relaxation exercises; when thou can take a pill instead.
There is a phenomenon called basking in the glow. Studies have been done that show testosterone levels increase when somebody – man or woman – watches their favorite football team, say, winning a tough game on TV. What happens after a whole season of victories, culminating in a national championship – do all the fans have a permanently elevated testosterone level? There are countless variations on this theme. A person who has a certain kind of truck, say, always “basks in the glow” to watch the glittery TV ads showing them doing heroic tests. Is our culture suffering from testosterone poisoning, driving us back down the evolutionary ladder. Does this have anything to do with the dramatic drop in fertility in both sexes; reducing the maximum age women can have children to the early 30’s and men to the mid 30’s?
I believe that memories are recorded at two levels. Every memory synapse has a factual core and an emotional context. The emotions can take up much more “RAM” so to speak, than the simple facts themselves. The more sensitive a person you are, the more emotions are stored with each memory. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a condition in which a huge load of negative emotions are recorded. I have personally found a remedy in my two knees that have bone-on-bone contact. If I focus the sharp knee pain on the painful negative memories, they slowly lose their strength and the mind clears. As they say, no pain no gain! In my own situation, when I do not do my knee exercises then the pain in my knees becomes quite bad and I am able to use this pain to clear the fuzz from the brain after prolonged stressful periods. The moral is that older people with arthritis and chronic pains can use this pain to clear the unnecessary emotions out of their mind and avoid Alzheimers that way. It’s not an easy thing to do, this emotional focusing; but with practice and a little training in medication and relaxation (or prayer, if you are a religious person) you will get there OK.
The incidence of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) has increased from a few hundred a year to almost a million new cases a year. The symptoms of ADD are identical to those of oxygen deprivation and carbon dioxide poisoning – what happens when not enough fresh air is delivered to air conditioned spaces (a typical classroom must have the whole volume of air changed out every fifteen minutes). Maybe our kids don’t need Ritalin, but more fresh air.
There are presently no laws against buildings that don’t provide enough fresh air; there are no penalties, civil or criminal. There are huge benefits, though: a school can reduce its utility bills by half or more by closing the outside air damper. I realize schools are chronically short of money, and that parents could care less about the welfare of their children; and that teachers need more money, but . . . . .
Modern medicine is going just the opposite direction to evolution because natural healing skills mean less need for medical care. Weak immune systems mean more drugs, more doctors, and more profit for the entire health care industry. Natural healing means off the shelf drugs, less intrusive care, and down sizing the health care industry. Health care should be more like it is in the military, where you’ll do anything possible to avoid it. That way people will use the experts for the things they are best at, and depend more on the inherent disease coping mechanisms of their own bodies.
One of the paradoxes about practicing muscle relaxation and the other basic medication techniques is that while you become more aware of sensations in the major muscle groups in the body – wrists, back, ankles, etc.. – you also become aware of the lack of sensation; a kind of numbness. This is entirely natural – it happens to me all the time; all I do is exercise the muscle group in question and the numbness is gone. I have a theory that most people never notice stress collecting in their body, and it stays there and causes permanent damage – arthritis, cancer, migraine headaches, etc.. – so the more you do to recognize and get rid of this stress (and a part of the program is knowing what events cause stress, so you will be on the lookout) the more healthy and long living you will be.
Long ago the early religions had to get people to focus on higher ideals by disassociating them from worship of nature. They made nature look evil. Religions still do. If you want to develop your natural “powers” you must return to the past and learn a healthy respect for nature. A good way to do this is to introduce some simple energy conservation ideas into your lifestyle. The first chapter in the abridged edition of my energy conservation book, Retrofitting for Energy Conservation, has a long list of ideas to get you started. There are more ideas in the real book, linked from the opening page of this web site.
The idea of man being created better than all other creatures is not supported by the facts. We share almost our entire anatomy with the animal kingdom – our stomachs work the same, our hearts, our intestines, etc… – so if anything we were created not by God but by our fellow animals. Were it not for our collective evolution, in which we all built the bodies we have now, man would not be what we are today.
Stress is more than a psychological concept, but a physiological one also. People with high stress levels tend to “send” the stress to their stomach area – they have indigestion and bleeding ulcers because the digestive system is short circuited. High stress levels keeps the body from absorbing all the nutrients from the food, and you suffer hemorrhoids and in extreme cases a chemical imbalance that may result in the onset of mental illness. I offer some ideas from my own experience in my screenplay and novel Behold Leviathan , that stress goes so far as to keep the body from completely absorbing medicines. This is a logical extension of the known fact that stress causes stomach and digestive problems. So stress isn’t just a figment of your imagination; stress is an active agent in the physiological operation of your body. It goes without saying, then, that if you are taking any kind of medicine, the better you can manage your stress level the more effective the medicine will be!
The chemicals in tobacco smoke is known to induce an autonomic response in the chest and lung areas, relaxing the muscles there. If people learned muscle relaxation techniques they might get rid of a part of their dependence upon smoking. Similarly, when you quit you need to make up for that lost stress reduction mechanism. Smoking is more than a physiological disorder, but a psychological one as well. If you are to free yourself of both dependencies, it’ll take more than a nicotine patch but a commitment to learning relaxation skills as well.
Psychologists say there is an optimum stress level in which we perform our best. Any less and we get depressed. Any more and we get chronically anxious. They have even made a scale that you can use to tally your stress level and can say with a high degree of certainty that if you pass a certain level you will suffer some physical illness. So a link between stress and illness has been proven in countless clinical tests.
Stress isn’t all bad, though. Consider stigmata, the phenomenon that happens when a very spiritual person gets so stressed out carrying the worries of the world on their shoulders that he or she begins to bleed at the places where Christ was injured – the wrists and ankles where he was nailed to the cross; the spear in the side; the crown of thorns; the lashes on the back. In our Christian society I believe a lesser phenomenon – petite stigmata – happens to highly spiritual people: they habitually send their stress to these areas of the body. Thus we are a society who suffers from a high degree of chronic back pain, whose hands and joints are riddled with arthritis; and we have high levels of heart failure and baldness. Perhaps Christ was able to use this stress collected in his own joints ~ after all, he was psychological victim to the Roman practice of crucifixion as much as we are in the modern day ~ maybe that’s why they had him killed (ditto for the so-called witches and other dissidents tortured and burned at the stake by the Inquisition for practicing the “dark arts”); because they feared the people would learn how to heal themselves without the benefit of a physician. For example, the stress in Christ’s ankles could have aided in his “walking on water,” the stress in his hands in his acts of spontaneous healing. In any event, stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless you allow it to collect and remain in your body over a long term. The remedy isn’t necessarily walking on water or practicing healing; but it IS important to exercise, to practice muscle relaxation techniques, to have a strong family and social support network, and to otherwise endeavor to keep stress out of your system. Perhaps, given the duality of stress, it’s healing properties can even be used to reverse the damage caused such as from arthritis or baldness.
Back to the main thread, I did not say this thing about stress collecting in these critical locations without personal experience. I was born six weeks premature, and premature babies are known to have many, many more nerve endings in their skin and surface tissues. I can quite literally FEEL stress in these places I have mentioned; and I can feel it go away too. I believe anybody can develop this level of awareness of their body – and, when you do, you will find that your mind is very much in control of where the stress goes in your body!
The next and final affect of stress unchecked is cancer. I believe deep hypnosis can be used in controlling cancer. Cancer is universally characterized by cells that have an extremely high metabolic rate. Self hypnosis can be used to slow this process down. There are any number of mechanisms the person can use, anything that means “slow” to them. I realize the general population scoffs at self hypnosis; I did too until I was diagnosed with an inoperable condition in which a nerve in my jaw presses against my teeth, causing excruciating pain. The only solution has been self hypnosis, in which I gently tell the aching nerve that “It’s OK, I get the message – no harm will be done; please stop hurting.” It comes back every few months; then I go into self hypnosis, and all’s well. A person should be able to make the same kind of suggestion to cancer cells that have been detected ~ to s l o w down.
In summary, I have shown that cancer may be caused by a localized concentration of stress. Successful prosecution of the diseased cells is therefore more than destroying them with radiation therapy or chemotherapy. The stress must also be gotten rid of. As the cells are weakened by the therapy the stress will be released into neighboring tissue – and can potentially cause the problem to spread. The stress must be stopped from doing that. The likely solution is exercise of the affected region in a physical therapy situation, for an individual unversed in self hypnosis or meditation. For those who are expert, they may have the capability of using the major muscle groups of the body to get rid of the stress even faster (assuming here that strenuous exercise uses up stress from the body).
These ideas are borne out by the latest theories in psychology. The medical community believes the panoply of symptoms associated with the Gulf War Syndrome – which include cancer type complications – is caused by nothing more than stress. This is a confirmation of all I have stated here. If stress can cause such severe problems, up to and including some types of cancer, then managing stress should be able to alleviate the problems. All that must be done is to train the mind to help make the chemical or other treatment more effective.
Psychology is locked in on the idea that the psyche is comprised of three separate, independent entities called the id, ego, and superego. Imagine three circles that have no overlap. My cat has a more sophisticated psyche than that. The more likely scenario is that the three circles are overlapping, forming a target with the id in the center, surrounded by the ego, which in turn is surrounded by the superego. The problem is that modern day marketing methods are unable to reach the ego. Consequently, many schemes have developed in our society over the years that force people’s psyche into the simple three non-overlapping circle format.
That makes people infinitely susceptible to advertising, which is just what business needs because that means they can sell useless products to gullible people with a minimum wasted on advertising. The only natural defense is a “Nullentropy Sphere” in which the psyche is how it’s supposed to be ~ something so extremely evil that it’s excised from the gene pool at every possible opportunity.
This is not something new. The traditional antidote to these kind of market pressures have been religion. Religious roots have been steadily undermined since the Reformation. Historical roots to religious phenomena have deepened religious zeal, necessitating new methods ~ shallow, “read easy” versions of the Bible, liturgy in lay languages instead of Latin, reform Judaism, secular Islam, and Wicca mysticism. Major strides were made when Freud formalized the three separate entities idea – despite strong resistance from Nietzsche – and then by modern statistical research in advertising, which has been able to plumb the depths of the psyche now that it has been standardized by a combination of science, peer pressure, sociology, and the media.
Another trend that has helped this transition is the popularity of recreational drugs. Alcohol and tobacco and caffeine undermine the last line of defense against people already stressed out from work and family responsibilities. The stalwart holdouts are falling by the boatload to marijuana, ecstasy, and painkiller addictions (oxycontin is heroin, although the media downplays the connection). As the war on terrorism winds down boredom with excessive leisure is setting in, and the survivors have precious little to challenge their minds and keep their psyches free of reformatting pressures.
People have a threshold of pain when it comes to technology.
They can only take so many unknown machines in their lives. Hybrid cars will never catch on because they are too complex – people already have video games, computers at home and at work, medical technology, cell phones, and countless electronic appliances at home. The war in Iraq has introduced many new machines, and popular TV shows like all the C.S.I. type shows have exposed them to many more. It has gotten so bad that people aren’t even interested in space exploration. As scientific literacy declines, they will become even less interested in new technologies ~ especially the extremely complex equipment needed for manned deep space missions like to Mars.
The solution of course is for people to become more like machines themselves. The body piercing trend, and the fad of men wearing ear rings was the beginning. People are now more comfortable with breast implants, laser eye surgery, artificial joints, and – increasingly – cloning. Science fiction is a mainstream obsession by a large proportion of the population, so much so that its a generational thing associated with immense peer pressure, to be fascinated by exploration of space. The only impediment to this is the technology threshold, and since psychology is unable to resolve the internal conflict, humans become more like machines and less like people. Naturally, business welcomes – and promotes and encourages – this trend, because simpler, more predictable people mean easier marketing.
I saw a NYPD Blue show recently where a teenager got arrested for assisting his girlfriend to commit suicide. That’s a felony. It should be. What about people vegetating on life support systems, or whose minds have been wiped clean by Alzheimer’s – that’s a different matter. They should be able to end their misery, and stop being a burden on their loved ones. It shouldn’t be easy for them to do it, but it should be possible. The medical profession has done everything in their power to prevent assisted suicides, under any condition. Why? Because those cases make the most profit for them. They don’t give a damn about the ethics, all they want is the money.
Many references have been made about the “NASA culture” in which scientists and engineers are afraid to speak their mind. This is not a phenomena limited to NASA, but is a characteristic forced upon all engineers and scientists – especially on the graduate level – by the educational system. It’s a result of the decades long Cold War, and now the war against terrorism, where the government enforces via security regulations a timidity upon all researchers and engineers with access to sensitive information. A timid person will not have the wherewithal to break security protocol, and a high level of security can be maintained at minimal cost. Similarly, scientists know instinctively that a student who has actually made an important discovery could never exist outside of their collective because the stress would destroy him. The whole system is completely institutionalized now, to the point where a year long investigation into the “NASA culture” at no point made any remark about the tens of thousands of academics, contractors, and consultants who make their living off of NASA funds.
The psychiatric community has been the prime contractor in this conspiracy of silence imposed upon the best minds in America. If not, then why didn’t the recent announcement of a solution to Fermat’s Theorem by a scientists who had lived in total seclusion for ten years while working on the proof (terrified that the slightest hint of what he was working on would enrage this scientists friends and make him a permanent outcast) raise a single eyebrow among psychiatrists? Nor did they comment upon the fact that John Nash, “The Perfect Mind” was able to get a Nobel Price on work he did while a borderline schizophrenic. These are significant psychiatric cases, and the fact that nobody bothered to investigated is an even more serious case study.
The end result is that virtually every leading academic in the world is schizophrenic. The only thing that keeps them sane is their bureaucratic infrastructure. One step out of bounds, one violation of security, and the resulting stress is so extreme it’s like being surrounding by a high voltage electric fence. The system enforces violations of this arrangement with extreme malice ~ witness my medical discharge hearing from the Army. It’s too bad now that industry needs scientists to be assertive and creative, they just simply don’t have the wherewithal. Kind words are useless; an intelligent person can perceive their insincerity instantly. Kind actions are a little more effective in breaking through the barriers; but, again, an intelligent person can perceive their intention and throw up barriers before you reach them.
Scientists are indeed schizophrenic – how else can you attribute all the grandiose delusions they have sold the world in the modern era: the superconducting supercollider that never got beyond a big hole in the ground; the International Space Station that isn’t even completed yet, but scientists now say has outlived its usefulness; a 85% failure rate on missions sent to Mars; the $1 trillion Freon Ban that has had no discernable affect on the deterioration of the ozone layer; the strategic missile defense system that can’t even shoot down a known target on a known trajectory, and so forth. Virtually every major scientific project of the modern era has been a total failure. Politicians need to know this because they trust that science will find a new energy source like fission before all the oil runs out – in thirty years or so.
If you think scientists are not paranoid schizophrenics, then consider the extreme measures they take against any errors published in technical papers. They are perfectionists to the nth degree, obsessively so. Normal people wouldn’t be worried about errors – engineers for example – just make their best estimate, try it with a hefty safety factor, then go forward. Scientists won’t go one millimeter beyond the absolute known. Any scientists who so dares – wrong or right – is ostracized for life, their career ended instantly with ignominy.
The consequences of a schizophrenic scientific community with delusions of grandeur could be extreme. The tendency to project everything at the high end could mean a lot of troubling things. For example, scientists say we have more oil than we really have; fission is easily in their grasp; nanotechnology will happen in ten years; fuel cells for cars are practicable; we can put a man on Mars in five years; oursourcing of jobs will create jobs in America; we’ll win the war on drugs, cure cancer, heart disease, AIDS, and Attention Deficit Disorder. All of these projects are heavily funded by the government, industry, and private foundations – all of them are based on a facile foundation of nothing but hope. Scientists have been saying all these things for forty years – and we still believe they are right.
You introduce a Leviathan to the already schizophrenic scientific community, and the whole system crystallizes as a hive mind. This is what happened when the Hebrews absconded with Leviathan from Egypt, and brought the “golden calf” with them on the Exodus. The Hebrews were at that time stressed out to the max by their captors, then the plagues, and all the extreme hardships placed upon them by pharaoh. The Egyptians had kept Leviathan for millennia in a semi dormant, comatose state in the Osireion at Abydos, according to my research. They were slowly, carefully exposing the Egyptian people to it to allow them to develop a resistance to Leviathan’s powerful psyche. They built huge pyramids at first, to cope with the stress; then that program leveled off into a concentration on the craftsman’s skills. The Egyptians were getting acclimated ~ then the Hebrews screwed everything up, badly.
The same happened with the Leviathan captured at Roswell in 1947. The military ordered it killed; the scientists kept it alive and eventually figured out how to use it for their own purposes. They are all part of the hive mind now, and the graduate education system has been reconfigured to assert so much stress upon students that by the time they matriculate they are part of the hive mind as well. Presently, the process is only in place for engineering and the sciences at major universities; eventually it will be implemented everywhere, for all programs and degree paths ~ even for Master’s degrees. Their system has only one flaw: they have no defense against exposure by a peer who is able to publish a breakthrough tech paper, using the resulting accolades to tell the whole world the Truth. Their defense against this flaw is to not allow any such papers to be published, and to immediately discredit anybody who dares to do so informally ~ e.g. on the web or in a fringe publication.
The hive mind acts in the subconscious, and is discernable only via the most careful observation. It is subtle, but inflexible. Most people are completely unaware of its affects; actually, only a very few people are ever even affected by it, and then only when they are privy to events considered important to the Queen ~ e.g. exposure.
Science is indeed at an end, because the scientists have made it so. Technology will progress no further, by collective agreement of leading scientists. These principles are being built right into the system; NASA’s problem is a grain of sand on the million mile long ocean of dunes, the whole thing enforced by an endless mirage of bureaucracy and rules dating back to World War II. It is enforced with Gestapo expertise, thanks to Homeland Security.
Anybody who comes close to a Nazi commune best leave, A.S.A.P.
Speaking of Nazis, they were the original Borg. They developed the triggers to impose schizophrenia upon a recalcitrant population. My own life history shows their methods: (1) I left Annapolis because of what I called at the time a dulling of purpose ~ I had three room mates + a single authority figure in Capt. Hodory; (2) I left UT without ever considering grad school ~ I had three room mates + Rick/Randy across the way; (3) I left Exxon abrubtly ~ there were the three Aguillar sisters next door + Dan Short/Bao Do: (4) Trouble at ORA because of the three principles + a single authority figure, Noel Robertson. Each of these circumstances caused a schizoid reaction in me ~ not to mention growing up with three sisters. Thus my hypothesis is proven in a variety of situations which suffice as clinical trials.
Western culture is riddled with similar schemes. The Roman triumvirate was the most successful such triad in antiquity; it subdued the masses for a millennia. In the modern day we have: (1) the “Charmed Ones” with three Wicca sisters; (2) Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and virtually every prime time TV program has three main characters – some obviously, others more subtly; (3) the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; (4) the variations are limitless, and omnipresent. These are the result of successful marketing and trial and error. Advertising is like engineering; they don’t need fundamental science to be successful. They all work on the Christian principle: impose a mild psychosis, which is remedied by belonging to a social support group like the Church. The Romans, the Nazis, then the Communists did this on a continental scale but they were restrained by lack of a fundamental scientific premise; America is doing it on a global scale, driven by commercial imperialism and not needing a scientific basis for what they do. This is the modus operendi for imposing security within the scientific community – has been for decades. Just as any scientist who goes against the grain is cast out – which is a death sentence for a quasi schizophrenic who depends completely upon his social support network (e.g. John Nash) – so too with any common citizen, eventually; being cast out is the most fearful of all consequences, and an extremely powerful incentive to absolute conformity.
All of these trends are accelerated by modern sexual aids that dissipate the body’s core sensitivity. Condoms and breast implants cause all sensitivity to be focused in the genitalia, drawn there as if by a black hole. This causes the id-ego-superego concentric target to dissolve into three separate, infinitely more vulnerable entities. Reversing this process builds back up the inner defenses, cures the schizophrenia, and even has the potential to make the psyche more expert in coping with stress. This latter process is benefited by physical exercise in the AM when the hormonal cycle peaks; with lesser peaks at mid day and evening. Having sex during such times reinforces the triage concentricity artificial erections when hormones aren’t peaking is extremely detrimental to both parties), doing nothing dissolves it – e.g. the Moslem practice of prayer 3x/day is the worse possible thing they could do. Who could tell them ~ do calisthenics instead of prayer? They are victim to their own immense oil wealth, which makes it possible for them to give up everything that makes them human and to still have a lifestyle.