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Monthly Archives: September 2013
Fearing God Isn’t Scary
A few entries back, I opened with…
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 1:7
A common criticism towards this language and type of relationship with God is that our Creator is some scary, punishing God – one to be ‘feared’. I get quite the opposite from this. Sometimes we addicts must step back and suspend all preconceptions… and also be sure not to robotically press the ‘PLAY’ button in our heads. We must stay open and educable.
My translation:
Be humble, and in a healthy way, fear doing the wrong thing for the effect it will have on self and others. To fear wrongdoing is wisdom, for we have been blessed with the knowledge of the certainty of cause and effect, a knowledge which better allows us to love ourselves, love others, and ultimately love God. To fear God is also to be vigilant not to become narrow and closed to new ideas and information. Remain a sponge, yet firm in our resolve that God Is. The boundaries of our knowledge rest in understanding and respecting where we come from.
God, please give me knowledge and wisdom, and instruct me how to better do Thy will and Thy work…
Damaged Person Glass Analogy
Just heard this somewhere and thought it was brilliant. Wish I could give credit but just can’t remember. I think it was the radio, maybe some interview on WBUR.
Take a person and see them as a piece of pristine glass.
Some of us are smudged, some of us are cracked, and some of us are shattered.
Great analogy, to say the least. Let’s elaborate a bit for fun.
Smudges are easily manageable. Cracks can also be undone with some effort. But if we are shattered, there is virtually no hope, barring divine intervention.
I believe most addicts are simply cracked whereas, say, a narcissist or a sociopath (both the same really) are shattered.
God, help me to love those who are shattered, those who hurt others with no remorse…
Spiritual Debt
Just like our economy and supposed ‘recovery’ is fake – driven by the false prosperity of debt, consumption, government intervention, accounting fraud and false data – as opposed to savings and production – and will inevitably come to screeching halt or a slow painful death…
…so too the drug addict is fake, driven and fueled by the false solution of drugs and the accumulation of spiritual debt – and will also inevitably come to a screeching halt or a slow painful death.
Spiritual debt, i.e. the accumulation of various forms of poison such as fear, anger, resentment, self-pity, ego, pride, narcissism, dishonesty and immorality, must be eliminated and a replaced with a spiritual surplus of honesty, courage, strength, tolerance, patience, willingness, selflessness and love.
Special bonus tonight: Please have a look at Aristotle’s criteria of a tyranny (and more specifically a tyrant) in his timeless work, Politics, and tell me if you don’t see a frightening correlation to what we have developing today, especially under the current regime. Just sayin’. Aristotle – Politics (See Book Five – esp pages 127-8, 133-135.)
But times have indeed changed a bit since the days of Aristotle. The financial system is a complex ticking time bomb filled with trillions and trillions of worthless paper money, trillions in hypothecated and re-hypothecated securities, trillions in leveraged derivatives, and market rigging of the entire world’s interest rates, market rigging of stocks, bonds, commodities, elections, everything.
So what else do governments and central banks do when they are completely bankrupt, totally corrupt, and have no intention of ever repaying their debts? They find creative ways to confiscate the wealth of their citizens and then hire the media to lie about it. Wait, let’s get this straight – I mean even more money than the trillions they already stole from the American people during the planned financial meltdown of 2008 and subsequent bailouts, which, despite popular belief, was the antithesis of capitalism. We don’t have anything close to free markets.
ZIRP (our current Zero percent Interest Rate Policy) is nothing but an ongoing bailout for the biggest banks (which are insolvent), allowing them to borrow from the federal reserve at 0% while crushing savers, senior citizens, and creating asset bubbles from a misallocation of capital, of which average Americans are always the victims as they are for the most part clueless about the way our financial and monetary systems work. And now we have stagflation coming to melt away what little savings the middle class has left. Good job, central planners. You have completely and utterly broken the markets and destroyed the American economy.
QE (Quantitative Easing) is nothing but an ongoing bailout of the federal government as well as the banks, as it simply amounts to the fed printing money to buy our own debt (debt monetization), as well as to buy the worthless mortgages on the banks’ balance sheets. It has nothing to do with creating jobs or helping Americans. Nothing. The federal reserve serves their member banks, as does our government. They couldn’t care less about you except to make sure you are kept blind from the fact that you are a financial serf, to be sheared regularly, but kept alive, numbed and dumbed down such that you can continue being milked without protesting too much.
But since we are beyond broke and will never grow our way out of this increasingly unstable volcano of national debt, QE and ZIRP are necessary and will never end until we either default or hyperinflate it away. Since there is not enough foreign treasury demand to satisfy the government’s profligate spending, they are just idiotically printing money and lending it to themselves. That’s called counterfeiting, and it robs the purchasing power of the dollars you are working so hard for. Wages flatline but prices go up. Inflation is a hidden tax. It is theft. It is a wealth transfer from the lower and middle classes to the rich. These policies are dramatically increasing wealth inequality, especially since 2009, even though most people have been somehow led to believe the exact opposite.
As financial slave-master, Amschel Mayer Rothchild, revealed long ago, “Give me control of a nation’s money supply and I care not who makes the laws.” Not only does a private cult of bankers control the money supply, but through QE they have been actively buying our debt – mortgage debt and treasury debt. The fed owns your house and your nation, which they seek to dissolve, and with plenty of help from Washington. It is purposeful. If you want to control or own people, all you have to do is lend them money or buy their pre-existing debt. So, you see, we still have slavery – it’s just carried out through debt and other financial weapons of mass destruction.
Folks, this is the end game of the current climax of government corruption and our mathematically unsustainable debt-based monetary system. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter who you vote for since the Left/Right paradigm is just a hoax designed to fool you into thinking there are two different sides when, needless to say, there aren’t. Save for a few social issues, when it comes to economic and foreign policy, they’re both the same. They are puppets, owned by the corporate/banking elite and the oligarchs. They do not serve the people, the middle class. So that won’t solve anything.
This is a moral issue, a moral issue regarding the future of our children, of which there will be none if we remain blind and passive. So please, dear voters, stop voting for these jokers. They have no clue what they’re doing. Is it not time we get these war-mongering, surveillance-obsessed clowns and their collectivist debt state out of government and let some sane adults take over? Debt and war are crippling America and our insolvency will force them to confiscate as much of our wealth, wages, property, privacy and freedom as humanly possible. We don’t want our somewhat free republic devolving into a totalitarian banana republic.
God, please teach me that hard work and honesty is what changes me, builds character, and leads to success…
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
I am generally at a loss for inspiration during the summer when I take care of the turnover and maintenance on our rental property. Summer heat + physical labor + baby + dog = no good blog posts. So at times I’m reduced to re-posting older entries like this one about the modality of choice for your average therapist or addictions ‘specialist’.
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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is what the “experts” and the taxpayer-funded (immorally funded) addiction programs have to offer, besides doing skits, writing down triggers, or just sucking on Methadone wafers for the rest of your life.
“If I can’t think my way into right action, then I have to act my way into right thinking.”
“Hmmm, so Charlie… why do you think you use? Maybe we should dig into this family stuff and that might tell us why.”
“Sorry I just called you a stupid bitch and slammed the door in your face so I could go get jammed out of my skull, honey, but you see, it’s really not my fault… it’s the horrible depression I have!”
One of Seven Billion
Guess what? I am just one of seven billion people who all feel the same things and go through the same things. My human experience in no more novel than anybody else’s.
This State Doesn’t Work Either
I used to think that all I had to do to snap out of my depression was just to get out of my freakin’ house! I have to get out of town, man, and move across the country. Breathe the fresh mountain air! Oops, no wait, now I have to drive back home to breathe the cool ocean air! Nope, wait a sec, that’s not working either. Okay, I think I should change schools or jobs or relationships. Yup! Nope. Hmmm, nothing works. What the hell, man?
"How Does God Remove Your Mental Obsession?"
Saw this search phrase/question on the stats page.
Nobody truly knows the exact how of it, the precise mechanism of God’s power, which is surely unreachable and thus unknowable to us shallow, mundane creatures. The closest we can come to the answer is by experiencing it ourselves. Although once our obsession is removed and has become a reality, there is little need to ask the question anymore.
But it seemed like such a genuine and sincere inquiry, I thought it deserved some kind of pathetic-at-best answer.
Answer: God, being unlimited in Power, can do anything. He can literally rewire your brain such that you suddenly have no desire to drink or use. He restores your mind with the power of choice. As a direct result of rigorous spiritual work on self, a sincere desire and willingness to change, and when reaching out humbly, God can very suddenly or over time remove our obsession and restore us to sanity. God can alter our minds fundamentally, such that bio-chemical imbalances, obsessions, urges, thoughts, attitudes and beliefs that have haunted us for years are removed and replaced with balance, sanity, reason, spiritual principles, an entire change in attitude and the birth of a strong and accurate moral compass… but only if we work hard for it.
So if you are an alcoholic or drug addict and your obsession to drink or use is suddenly gone, you have no one to thank but God. Trust me, don’t thank yourself. You didn’t do it. If we have lost the power of choice, then how can we suddenly re-insert it? We can’t. If we have lost an innate power, the power of will, then it can only be restored by our Creator. This sort of power comes from somewhere outside of ourselves, somewhere well beyond the bounds of human faculty.
If you are a true addict and you can quit ‘upon a non-spiritual basis’, then let me know… and also let me know what the quality of your recovery is. Let me know what your relationships look like, and your career, and your emotional and spiritual well-being. I’m curious. I’ve never seen it done before, which is why I write this blog. It’s why I wrote the book.
A recent commenter (anonymous, of course) on some old post about triggers suggested I am grossly misguided regarding addiction, and that relapse prevention works for “most people”. Haha, that’s funny. Please. Talk to some parents, buddy. I went from an emaciated, lesion-covered, hopeless, pathological monster to completely and utterly free inside. I’m now a recovered alcoholic and heroin addict who hasn’t the slightest urge to self-destruct… I think I know what I’m talking about. But even so, who gives a shit about what I write? Um, does it matter one bit? I am nobody. So don’t worry about it.
God, please remove the obsession to drink and use drugs, and restore me to sanity…
Phony
The hardest yet simultaneously most important thing for any addict is to be honest. Not just honest in his word, but honest in his thought, action, and character.
Addicts are perhaps the biggest phonies on earth, besides your elected officials. That is, the way we act is fake. We are always trying and acting like anything BUT ourselves, which becomes necessary to achieve our selfish ends. Why is it so hard just to be real? Why is it so hard to be ourselves?
One, because we have no clue who we are. Second, because we have been full of lies and bullshit for so long, honesty and authenticity are unfamiliar territory, to say the least.
Another reason is a bit more subtle. I remember a story an old teacher of mine told me about how he asked a guy to join him in driving to another state to speak at some meeting. The guy responded that he would only go if he went with joy. That’s an honest guy for you. How often do we do things without really wanting to, but just to please someone or to look some way to others? It’s even more difficult to distinguish what it is we truly feel like doing – a natural problem of not knowing who we are.
So I’ve been trying to only act with joy, with the exception of needing to help someone, which honestly, I don’t always feel like doing. I’ve been trying to act whole-heartedly, if you will, in an effort to not just be myself, but to become who I am, to become truer to who I am, and accordingly, to become more honest.
For an addict, fake and phony won’t do. And once sober, being a phony is like a form of torture – it will bring you down until you become depressed… and then ill… and then… boom. It all blows up. Great job.
God, please help me to become more honest, to just be myself and to act whole-heartedly and with joy…