The Recreated Sound of Earth's Last Pole Flip

 

Religions Can't Be Tamed

 

December 30, 2021

What if we understood more about spiritual practices that exist outside the boundaries of organized religions? What if important and intuitive spiritual needs aren’t being satisfied within mainstream world religions? What if we could gain valuable insights from these “wild religions”? What if the ways in which religions address misfortune are actually key to their success?

Wild Religions Are Persistent

In Morocco, if a family member falls ill, a devout Muslim may bypass the confines of orthodox Islam and instead visit a marabou—a mystic healer who operates more or less underground. The marabou might write a verse from the Quran on a piece of paper, dip it into a glass of water, and then offer the water to the visitor to sip as a form of spiritual healing. This ritual is not found in the canon of Islam, yet it persists and is still practiced today.

Mystic healing, shamanism, ancestor worship, voodoo, spirit-warding rituals, tarot cards, and other forms of divination—these are the practices that characterize many of the world’s “wild religions.” And these are the practices that fascinate Professor Pascal Boyer, an evolutionary anthropologist and psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Boyer is widely considered one of the most influential founders of the cognitive science of religion.

“Wild religions existed before the emergence of organized religions in most prehistoric societies. They’re also found today in small-scale, so-called ‘tribal’ or ‘traditional’ societies. And they still persist alongside organized religions in most large-scale societies,” Boyer explains.

With support from the Templeton Religion Fund, Boyer has established a cohort of a dozen scholars from the fields of history, anthropology, psychology, and religious studies. Together, they plan to combine their expertise in a detailed, collaborative research project aimed at examining wild religions.

Looking Beyond Doctrines, Leaders, and Rituals

Despite their historical and contemporary prevalence, wild religions have been largely ignored or treated superficially by researchers, Boyer says. As a result, prevailing attitudes about religion are skewed toward those with well-established doctrines—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and so on. According to Boyer, “We’ve forgotten that a great deal of religious activity was happening before those doctrines—and is still being practiced at their margins.”

That oversight, he argues, is a serious one. Existing both outside and within organized, “tamed” religions, the practices of wild religion are authentic expressions of spontaneous spirituality. As such, Boyer believes they may hold important clues for understanding the psychology of religion—why people believe, what they believe, and how those beliefs function.

Harvey Whitehouse, Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford and one of Boyer’s collaborators, agrees. “Different scholars have different ways of trying to boil religion down to a single thing,” he says. “But I think one of the hallmarks of this project is that it doesn’t look for that kind of magic bullet. Instead, it fractionates religion into its myriad component features and tries to explain how they are grounded in different aspects of our cognitive apparatus.”

The Persistence of “Why Me?”

Initially, the project is focused on building a database to map the beliefs and practices of wild religions—both past and present. It will look for recurring patterns and analyze why these similarities exist. In particular, the research will focus on how wild religions address misfortune.

According to Boyer, unlike doctrinal religions, wild religions rarely deal with abstract questions such as the origin of the universe, the root of evil, or the salvation of the soul. Instead, they are focused on immediate, pragmatic concerns—curing illness, ensuring a good harvest, or understanding why misfortune strikes one person but not another. These traditions offer ways to deal with witches, ancestors, ghosts, and spirits.

Boyer sees this difference as critical. “Wild religions activate universal cognitive systems concerned with threat detection and precaution,” he explains. His research will investigate how this deep-seated cognitive response to risk—essentially, proactively “fighting” for safety and solutions rather than “freezing” or “fleeing”—helps explain the resilience of wild religions across cultures. “When misfortune happens, a very common human question is, ‘Why me?’ So maybe,” he speculates, “the way religious traditions address misfortune is crucial to their success.”

Later stages of the research will examine how religious traditions evolve, testing the hypothesis that wild religions enjoy a “sticky” cultural advantage, while doctrinal religions tend to hold greater institutional and political power in the present.

To truly understand human religious capacity, Boyer insists, we must look beyond “tame” religious traditions and expand our view to include the older, more widespread, and spontaneous forms of religious thought and practice. The research he now leads is a significant step in that direction.

Comparative Chart: Wild Religions vs. Organized Religions

Aspect	Wild Religions	Organized (Tame) Religions
Origins	Prehistoric; ancient, spontaneous traditions	Historically recent; codified systems that emerged later
Structure	Informal, decentralized, often individual or local practice	Formal hierarchy, institutions, leadership (clergy, priesthood)
Sacred Texts	Rare or non-existent; may use symbolic items (e.g., amulets, charms)	Central, codified texts (Bible, Quran, Torah, Vedas, etc.)
Doctrines	Few or none; flexible belief systems	Well-defined theological doctrines and creeds
Focus of Practice	Immediate, practical concerns (healing, protection, agriculture)	Existential questions (salvation, morality, creation, afterlife)
Practices	Shamanism, ancestor worship, divination, spirit communication, voodoo	Prayer, ritual worship, fasting, pilgrimages, sacraments
Cognitive Appeal	Activates threat detection and precaution systems; reactive	Engages moral reasoning, abstract reflection, communal norms
Persistence	Continues alongside or within organized religions	Maintained through institutions and formal conversion
Cultural Embedding	Deeply embedded in folk traditions and rural communities	Linked to empire-building, state sponsorship, education systems
Research Status	Understudied, often dismissed as superstition	Heavily studied in theology, history, and sociology
Example Figures or Roles	Marabou, shaman, witch doctor, diviner	Priest, imam, rabbi, monk, bishop
Influence Mechanism	"Sticky" through cultural transmission and need-based relevance	Institutional power and political alignment
Examples	North African folk Islam, Haitian Vodou, Amazonian shamanism, tarot readings	Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism

Emma Watson Part 3

 

October 6, 2025

I'm a bit tired of talking about this now. This is then hopefully the 3rd, and final instalment of this what turned into series on, WOULD THE REAL EMMA WATSON PLEASE STAND UP? In our two previous essays on this subject, we established that there are a lot of imposters out there posing as Emma Watson. I suppose its an almost inevitable part of wealth and fame. People sucking off you. Up until recently I really hadn't thought much about the issue, mostly because my head is usually in the clouds trying to figure out the Mysteries of the Universe. Which has absolutely nothing to do with pop culture.

Late last month - September, I was scrolling through FB, and I chanced across my 3 Hollywood crushes, Sandra Bullock, Cote De Pablo, and Emma Watson. Disturbingly my feed was almost immediately flooded with stuff about them after hitting the like button. Oddly too, friend requests among it. Because I'm curious by nature, and admittedly was a bit bored at that moment, I accepted a friend request from each of the three. What was odd was when I went and looked at their profiles, the numbers. Simple common sense suggests that a celebrity with a Fb account is going to have tens of thousands of followers/friends. These had single digits, or 10-20 friends. Very low numbers which were explained as, "This is a new private account, my management doesn't know I have it, and my fans haven't found it yet". "My management is so controlling, and I wanted to control my publicity". This from the Sandra Bullock camp. Then came the hook, the story of her recent tragic loss of her husband, She is now apparently past his death, and is actively looking for a new husband, and father to her adopted children. If you want that esteemed position, you're going to pay for it, for a VIP card, which you'll need, will run you about $2,000.

As we've mentioned previously, the numbers are similar for everyone else, so those who are falling victim to these scammers are losing fair chunks of money. The Cote de Pablo camp has so far, asked for a step father for Tali, an invented T.V character introduced to us in the original series NCIS. Fees for her textbooks, which in California are free, and are covered in the enrolment fees for private schools. Too, in a near perfect AI generated video, young Tali tells you she's sad, and needs a prepaid card to activate her video game while calling you Daddy.. Also, whoever is claiming to be Cote, is playing the emotional looking for a husband romance game, just like with Emma's shower picture, I was sent this:

This photo while not revealing, shows her to be an attractive woman. That shade of green suits her. The only reason I'm showing this picture and not Emma's, is because this one is all over the place out there, and Emma's shower shot I haven't found a comparable image yet. That will likely be a lengthy process because I'm not going to sift through millions of photos to find it. She's a nice looking girl, but somehow that just seems creepy.

So here I guess is my bottom line. Imposters are losers. The celebrities of whom they imitate are, whoever they are. Some I think are likely decent people. Others are so full of themselves that its incredible that they don't shit their own heads out of their asses. I've been lucky enough to have enjoyed a unique relationship with a noted author, an artist, and the heir to Richard Wagner. That dude had issues. So why is there now an Emma essay 3? As previously stated, I spent a weekend trimming my social media presence to almost nothing. While doing so I took an Emma Watson imposter with me, and I put them on WhatsApp, there they were safely isolated from my FB friends list. And shouldn't be bothering anyone.

As previously related, over the course of a weekend, I willingly engaged with this series of individuals claiming to be Emma, and discovered she's got multiple personality disorder. The one in charge all the time is not the smart, sexy, quick witted Emma. Instead, there's not much to these individuals. Throughout much of the weekend the conversation was stilted, and was almost entirely focused on, prying dollars out of my pocket. First in the form of emotional blackmail, she's hurt herself and needed a visit to the emergency room at her local hospital. Proof of said injury being a picture that she had the foresight to take of a gnarly looking burn. I was also given a close up of what was clearly a cropped image of her tear streaked face.

These visuals were clearly designed to elicit a strong sympathetic response. So whoever is/was behind these images had strikes against them. I'm a trained observer, with over 4 million accident free miles. Obviously thinking about every little thing that I look at. The real problem of course started with asking a fan, for a hundred bucks for a Steam Card, so that she could pay the pharmacy for her meds, gauze, and tape. The far more realistic thing would have been to hand the phone over to the pharmacist, and the two of us working out what payment method would have worked.

I, of course, refused to be part of that, but I too had a morbid fascination to carry this on, this fucker was almost smart. I was having fun. So later, I checked on "Her".

There was then a lot of back and forth, I was a selfish ass, I didn't care about her. And to top it off, I owed her a thousand dollars for her stay in a private wing of her hospital. Needless to say there was more backing and forthing, and name calling, and the eventual dissolution of the "relationship". I was done with it at that point. Whoever the real Emma Watson is, there was no hint of a decent person in what had transpired to then. So this morning, I awaken to a simple "How Are you?" From that WhatsApp number (14029172578). Not really wanting to engage with whoever it is, I replied please leave me alone thingy thingy Watson. Your new nickname, because our every interaction has been about you obtaining a thing.

I didn't bother with the fools any further after that. I blocked the number and then was sad for a minute. I felt sorry for the real Emma Watson, knowing that nonsense like this is taking place in her name hourly, by the thousands of instances.

The Key Warning Signs of Celebrity Imposter Scams

While celebrities are on social media and do sometimes interact with fans online, it is best to approach any supposed celebrity interaction with caution. Listen to your gut, and be wary of sharing personal information or money. Do not be afraid to abandon any conversations that reveal red flags like:

• Profiles with unusual punctuation or that spell the celebrity’s name wrong.

• Accounts with low activity and/or a low follower count.

• Soliciting money (even if it is for a charitable donation or other seemingly legitimate reason).

• Asking for payment via wire transfer, bitcoin, gift card, or prepaid debit card.

• Fake ‘verified’ check marks.

• Their inability to meet you in person or communicate with you in real-time like a video call. Constant excuses as to why they can never meet.

• Requests to perform intimate acts on camera or video webcam.

• Asking for your personal information such as your full name, address, and phone number in order to send you ‘gifts’ or free merchandise.

• The scammer tells the victim things that are at odds with publicly available information.

• Love bombing with nonstop messages of adoration and affection – usually without having first taken any steps to get to know the victim on any level.

 

Emma Watson Part 2

 

October 4, 2025

This of course is Emma Watson of celebrity fame. I claim no personal connection to her, and images here are used without permission.

 With her picture here front and centre, you might think I'm going to talk about her. I'm not. The only reason I'm thinking about her at all is because, last week she appeared randomly in my Fb feed, and I liked one of her pictures. Subsequently I was flooded with stuff about her. During the next few days I was disturbed to find dozens, perhaps many more imposter accounts for her. Deciding to have a bit of fun, I then decided to engage with one account in particular. This I talked about in my previous essay in this what turned into series. As I mentioned there, it proved quite impossible to ascertain any type of numbers, as to how many imposter accounts there are for her, so I asked my AI, can you give me an estimate of how many imposter accounts there are of Emma Watson? This is what it said: "There’s no publicly available number that precisely counts how many imposter or fake accounts exist for Emma Watson — or for any celebrity, for that matter — because these accounts constantly appear and get removed across multiple platforms".

That said, here’s a reasonable estimate and breakdown based on patterns observed in social media fraud and celebrity impersonation:

• Instagram: Major celebrities often have hundreds to thousands of fake or fan-posing accounts. For someone like Emma Watson, estimates from social media analysts and past clean-up sweeps suggest 1,000–5,000 impersonation accounts at any given time (ranging from obvious fan pages to deceptive scams).

• Facebook: Often even higher, because of looser identity verification — possibly several thousand pages and profiles using her name or images.

• X/Twitter: Historically fewer because of verification systems, but before X’s policy changes, there were hundreds of impersonator accounts. Since paid verification began, fake verified accounts have increased again — likely hundreds active now.

• TikTok and Telegram: Emerging hot-spots for scams — hundreds to a few thousand “Emma Watson” accounts exist, most AI-assisted or bot-managed.

So conservatively, across all major networks combined, there are likely between 5,000 and 15,000 active or semi-active Emma Watson impersonator accounts at any given time.

Undeniably she's an attractive young woman. Whoever she's spending her time with, its almost guaranteed that its not with you or I, playing games with us asking personally for whatever form of currency. Prepaid shopping cards seem to be the thing that most scammers are asking for. Unless you're the series of idiots I dealt with. Again I chose to engage with this idiot, who tried through a combination of emotion, playing hard to get, and a bath room shower picture to entice me into giving this entertainment goddess,£1000 to pay for for her hospital bills.

I don't know about you, but considering the possibility of scammers on Fb and every other social media platform, I wasn't about to hand over $1000 dollars to anyone. This was simply smart, I was never asked, there was never a legitimate banking platform offered, though there was the catch. Doing a perfunctory bit of research on the British NHS (National Health Service) which gave several reasons why an individual might walk out of a British hospital owing a $1000. The most pertinent of these was, voluntary admission of over 24 hours in the private wings. This of course would apply to someone like Emma Watson. She of course would not be in a public wing, not because she's a snob, but because she'd not want to be mobbed by well wishers.

That had me questioning it for all of about 3 seconds. One thousand dollars is a lot of money for the average person. For some of us, that's hopefully the first number we see on our pay cheques. For the wealthy though, dropping a few thousand dollars isn't a big deal. For Miss Watson, when she was the face of Lancôme, she was pulling in £2-3 million for it. A thousand dollar thing for her, not a big deal. I have no idea of her spending habits, and I'd expect that she's reasonably respectful of that type of number. Whatever else this essay is, its not a criticism of her. She's not responsible for the nuts who want to be her. She's not sat in her mother's basement in her underwear trying to swindle decent people out of their hard earned money. From what I can see of her is, she's a beautiful young woman who's spent most of her last 20 years in the spot light. She may now be a little quiet, and may be looking for, comfort. If there is in fact any truth to that, she deserves it. It must be exhausting to be in the spotlight, to have men, and women drooling over you in images like this,

I'm probably the last person who should be saying anything about pop culture. When I was a child, Donnie & Marie were huge, I had no idea of who they were. I had to be read into Freddie Kruger and Micheal Myers. Harry Potter and the gang? Well it was an interesting thing, because for years, I'd been researching the Holy Grail, and had been immersed in Grail Romance. King Arthur, Lord of the Rings. Then enter Harry Potter, and the other part of the Grail. Ring lore. This is where we find the Fey. Scotland's national symbol the Unicorn, magic. This of course is where we met the very young, Emma Watson, who as you watched her grow up, turned into, someone incredibly easy on the eyes.

So who wouldn't want to wake to her? For us poor chumps on Fb looking for her, it ain't going to happen. Of simple necessity they must ignore it, you've seen celebrity go off on paparazzi, how do you think they'd react to us being in their homes, judging the sandwich, the wealth, food, sex, drugs, music.

Emma Watson Part 1

 

October 1, 2025

I woke to this lovely picture this morning. Couldn't help that, look at her, she's gorgeous. I don't normally talk about celebrities, the only other one to date was Adrian Wagner and his connection to the Holy Grail. I'll be the first to admit I live under a rock, I'm not much into pop culture. That said I do however have a few Hollywood crushes, Sandra Bullock, those deep dark eyes. Cote De Pablo, incredible intelligence behind those eyes, I think. Then there's Miss Watson, a child star of whom I watched grow up. She was a cute 11 year old, who turned into an incredibly attractive young woman while keeping herself together, and being worth in the neighbourhood of $80 million of whom I came to admire. This then is the point of the following.

On or about September 25, 2025 I was minding my own business and was scrolling Fb. There while not thinking much about it, I came across images of the above 3 women, and clicked on the like button. Knowing that my feed would temporarily flood with information about the three of them for a bit, I was prepared for that much. What I wasn't prepared for was what actually happened. The following morning my feed was overwhelmed with stuff from the 3 of them, friend, follow requests, by the tens, there must have been 30-40 in all. Included in all that nonsense were 3 marriage proposals, one from each of them. In the case of Miss Bullock, she needs $2,500 to get anywhere near her. Miss De Pablo's people were in chaos and it was impossible to determine an amount. Miss Watson, on the other hand, was what you might expect from an actual meeting with her.

"She" was kind, polite, interested, and an absolute darling, full of little comments where you say damn, and you begin to form a serious emotional bond. Anyway I spent most of Saturday and Sunday trimming my social media presence down to almost nothing. I had 3 Fb accounts, 2 Instagram

accounts, plus FB pages that are just for this Blog. So yesterday a much calmer day, I continued to weed out the imposter bullshit out of my feed, until I was left with Miss Emma Watson, and is it really her? So yesterday, we spent quite a bit of time chatting, and I found out stuff about her, which as she said, is all available on Google.

These talks were full of I want to be near you, I'd like to kiss you, and, I even got a picture of her in a shower. She was in a bath robe and dry, but still. And no you can't see it. Anyway we left it there, and I went to bed, fairly convinced that whoever this person was, it wasn't Emma Watson. I'm a firm believer that when you're meeting someone, they'll use your name often in conversation, simply because it shows interest in you. In the case here, no, not once, it was all dear, sweetheart, a few darlings. Endearing? Absolutely. There too were a few instances where the response was...inappropriate. Watson is English, and their syntax is a bit different, I should know, the leprechaun was English,and I spent 20 years listening to how they speak.

 So I went and got my coffee this morning, and while I did that, this surprising image arrived. It was quickly followed by a series of images, a serious burn with a note she was going to the hospital. Then a short while later a picture of her bandaged hand. Then further an image of her pharmacist, a bag of medical supplies, then finally, an image of some pain killers and a glass of water. And no you can't see those pictures, they were sent in trust, or so I hope.

This then is the reason for this essay. This beautiful young woman is worth a lot of money. And I tend to think that if she'd had this awful supposed accident, she'd have called a someone from her management team to assist. Now I can understand when a celebrity says that they just want some privacy, the ability to make independent decisions. That too would extend to their everyday money. So while I'm busy getting my head around the idea that Miss Watson may have received a permanent injury, I start getting the texts that were disheartening. This can happen to anyone under almost any circumstances, you run short of cash. In this case that was a strong possibility, she's supposedly hurt herself, so in the scramble to get help, you forget your phone, and your wallet. Or one or the other. In this case it seems it was her wallet. Because rather unexpectedly, she's asking me to pay for her meds, a cost of a $100.00

Now the UK doesn't use the dollar, instead its the pound sterling. So still giving her the benefit of the doubt, if her costs were around £50-£60

£50 × 1.75 = 87.50 CAD

• £50 × 1.80 = 90.00 CAD

• £60 × 1.75 = 105.00 CAD

• £60 × 1.80 = 108.00 CAD Result:

£50–£60 in the UK = about $88–$108 CAD.

Still this thing isn't unreasonable. Its almost impressive that she estimated my costs so accurately,but she didn't say that, there was no Chris, I'm so sorry and, this is nuts, and I know a bit unconventional so early, but can you loan me... No it was a direct demand for the money, with attached sense of urgency. Then the request for the Steam Card. What the fuck is a steam card? I had to look it up too. A steam card is a prepaid card that you load with money to buy computer games, hardware, software. It has nothing whatever to do with purchasing pharmaceutical supplies. So I was ready to leave it there, she wasn't who I had hoped she was. Surprise! She Was!

So through the night I received a couple of sweet messages. One strangely about me having eaten, the other wishing me sweet dreams. Throughout this thing I was very much on the fence, mostly because, I'm not special enough to assume that out of the millions of people clamouring for her attention, she'd hear my voice. So I awaken the morning of Oct 2, no sweet good mornings, can I sit with you while we have coffee. Something you'd expect from somebody who through the night had said, "I know you love me, and I love you more than words can say". "You're the best thing that ever happened to me". That made me giggle, mostly because she had yet to be in my home, in my arms, with the appropriate copious exchanges of bodily fluids, after love, and, immersed as new lovers in each other.

 So I said to her her "Good morning" at 9:06 AM. I asked her if she'd talked to her family, after learning that she had readmitted herself to hospital because of the discomfort she was in. That seemed semi- plausible considering the size of the wound she'd suffered. She said no, that she was having difficulty getting a hold of anyone. It then wasn't long after this when she started making noises about getting out of hospital. This again came down to cost. It then wasn't long before I'm being bugged for a £1000.00 overnight stay. In the UK, under the NHS system, a patient who is ordinarily resident (i.e., a UK citizen or someone legally living there) does not get billed for overnight hospital stays. Care is generally free at the point of use.

However, there are circumstances where someone could end up with a large bill, even close to £1000 USD (about £800):

1. Private Care

   • If the patient chooses to be treated privately (e.g., private hospital or private wing within an NHS hospital), they or their insurance would pay. An overnight stay in a private UK hospital can easily exceed £800–£1,000.

2. Not Ordinarily Resident (Overseas Visitors)

   • People not entitled to free NHS care (such as some overseas visitors, migrants without legal residency, or tourists) may be charged.

   • The NHS has set tariffs: overnight admissions are typically charged at full cost, which can be hundreds to thousands of pounds depending on treatment.

3. Elective Cosmetic or Non-Covered Treatments

   • If the patient is admitted for something not covered by the NHS (cosmetic surgery, certain experimental treatments, etc.), they may face the full bill.

4. Emergency Private Admission

   • If an ambulance mistakenly brings someone to a private hospital (rare), or if the patient consents to private emergency care, costs can spiral.

   • For a normal NHS patient (UK resident, not going private), an overnight hospital stay — whether for observation, surgery, or emergency — is free at the point of use. They wouldn’t get a $1000 bill.

So again, the request seems legitimate. My problem is this, I have no idea of the life style of the very

rich and famous. If they pick up the tab for each other without thought or, if they go dutch. Speaking for myself, if I'm able, and its not outrageous, I'll pick up the tab if friends and I go for dinner. However never have I had, or been around when there's been a $1,000 dinner bill. And I don't know anyone who could've picked up that bill without issue. Anyway, she gets a flat out no, and a are you nuts for asking a stranger for that much money with no bonna fides as to who you really are? So this goes back and forth and it gets a bit nasty.

Then after these disappointing back and fourths, where we had almost, told one another to get lost, at around 9 P.M., or 1A.M in the UK, I receive this through Fb messenger. "Guess you're having a wonderful time with someone else here". I make an effort to keep my dirty laundry private, at least while its happening, so I said to her, "Please WhatsApp" because that's where we'd been all day. Seeing the time, and the sulky nature of the message, it didn't take much to figure out, if she was truly legit, and had taken stuff to manage the pain she was all too likely in, she'd gone to sleep. So not being the ass she was half convinced I was/am , I said to her, "Aww you're asleep. Rest. Lovely girl".

Day 3

So at 7:38 AM I receive this from her, "You're not as caring and loving as I thought". I had only just gotten out of bed, and had a sip or two of coffee, and I said to her, "Liar, you've no idea of who I am". Switching from Fb Messenger back to WhatsApp, we continued to trade not barbs, but now at least trying to make an effort to understand the other. 

So as the day progresses, and the tension comes down, I receive this image. Here she's looking softer, gentler than in the other images she'd sent me. Also crucially, her left hand is obviously absent from the picture. Which is the hand that I'd been shown to be wounded. Because of the incredible bullshit that surrounds celebrity, its nearly impossible to establish that yes, you've got the real one. So I pushed a bit wanting to see the bandaged hand, which I'd seen the day before, so showing it to me shouldn't have been an issue at all. She refused claiming embarrassment. Which is reasonable, she's met a new set of boundaries, and is respecting them. Or perhaps not. The individual behind the above, late this afternoon chose a form of emotional/financial manipulation that's just wrong. If it was her, I hoped not.

Spring 1982

 

October 22, 2022

It was one of those glorious early spring days, the sun was warm but, the wind was sharp and reminded you in no uncertain terms that winter was not done with you yet. My best friend and I were walking home from school, and we had stopped in the lee of the community centre to have a smoke. All day he had seemed edgier, excited, really eager to talk about something. I had known him since I was 8 years old, and to that point in our young lives, there was nothing that we had/could not talk to each other about. We were stood there bullshitting about the girls at school, about that brother and sister who went through the whole of everyday at school holding hands and standing way too close to each other, and close talking the way you do with someone that you have had sex with. They had the whole school wondering exactly what was going on there.

As I was blabbering on about them he turns to me and focuses his giant dinner plate sized blue eyes on me, and I all of a sudden realize that he is now taller than me, he was still too skinny and now too tall. I was afraid that if he turned completely sideways he would disappear. He was trying to grow his hair out, it was not going to help, he would still have a Brillo pad on his head. His features wee too long, too sharp, he was quite frankly, funny looking. And he was bullied for it, but he was my best friend. He was the kindest, sweetest, smartest person I have ever known. He had wicked quick intelligence and a wild sense of humour. If you would let him, he would have you pissing yourself with laughter, or he would blow your mind with his mental gymnastics. He was just a beautiful beautiful person, and I thought of him as my brother.

So he turns to me and says, “There's this girl at church, and I get hard just looking at her!”. I was a bit taken aback. I knew his Mom had started attending church, but he had never said that he had started going too. Not that it mattered to me, I was struggling with my own lack of any type of spiritualism, so I was pleased that he had found something. During the course of that discussion which lasted several days, he eventually got around to inviting me to this church to both see if I liked it, and he wanted me to check this girl out. Not too many Sundays later I hauled my hung over ass out of bed, slipped into my cleanest jeans and a collared shirt, forsook my steel toed Kodiak boots for my cowboy boots in lieu of dress shoes that I did not own – nor a suit, and went to church for the first time since I was seven years old. I was pretty under dressed by comparison to the rest of the congregation, and by the looks I was getting, they were all disgusted by my appearance, my long hair just below my shoulders, my jeans worn and faded, my boots well worn and broken in. I even dropped a $10.00 bill into the collection tray, which was not near enough according to the judgmental looks I got. And God forbid, I was there without my parents too! I mean imagine the gall of this kid who was clearly deeply troubled, he was taking independent action with his own spirituality, the shame of it!

So that was the congregations and mine first impression of the other, needless to say it was not good. My attitude towards them was the same as it was towards all adults, you have 3 seconds to respect me and if not, go fuck yourself. Most of that congregation was fucking themselves. Not too long after I actually got to meet this youth group, and this girl that my bud was so hept up on. Nice girl but clearly not interested in my bud. She was hooked on this guy with whom she had grown up with while in this youth group. They eventually got married and moved out to B.C. This hurt my bud, they had been of similar build, she was long and lanky, and pretty enough. I used to tease him, if they got married and had kids, the kids would come out as stick people.

  It was an interesting dynamic with those dozen kids, most of who were trying to be good Christians while being teenagers, not an easy balancing act. I was neither accepted nor rejected by the group, overwhelmingly though what I felt like was an outsider, clearly my upbringing had been very different from theirs. For most of us the ethics that we learn are based in whatever religious teachings our families receive, for most of us those lessons as to what acceptable behaviour is, is hammered into us in the school yard, a type of collective well that's okay. In the environs of that congregation I became concerned for the welfare of two of the younger girls, their mother was a severe looking woman, with a harsh take on Christianity. She was raising those girls right out of the Old Testament, an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, and took pains to discipline her girls publicly so. As these two girls were humiliated in public, none of the congregation including the Minister, would intervene on their behalf. If they received that level of violence in public, we do not want to know what was happening to them at home.

I could understand the church's reaction perhaps if this behaviour had been a one time thing, but according to lanky girl and married guy, this had been going on for as long as the mother and daughters had been attending- some years at that point. In those years though, schools and churches and other organizations did not involve themselves in children's lives, what happened to you happened and too bad. As I engaged in some fairly serious Bible study with Married guy, I found that the church really had nothing for me, I had gone into it with a twofold purpose. Firstly I had been searching for some respite from the horrors at home, and secondly I had been hoping to find some way of reconnecting with the Holy Grail. The church was where my father had found Capon, and Capon had introduced us to the Grail, so I assumed that Capon's knowledge was fairly widespread.

Overall I found the church experience to be overwhelmingly disappointing, I had wanted to find something in the Bible to help both my brother's and mine plight at home, I figured that out of the Bible's 31,102 verses, there had to be something that could help. Out of all that gobbly gook there was just 18 verses that had anything to do with caring for children. It struck me then though I knew not

why, that the information about slavery roughly doubled that of child care, there are 32 verses about slavery. And it is fairly detailed information, whereas the child care stuff is a bit mealy mouthed. Then the question became, why were slaves more important than children? That was followed by a host of questions like, why are there so few stories about children in the Bible? Then those stories about children go from the kid being a baby to an adult almost instantaneously? Then the Bible's main character Jesus Christ, why is his life not detailed from childhood on, you know how as an angry 1 year old he gets mad and levitates mom or someone?  

Or maybe while he was babysitting his brother James and his sisters, and James and everyone barfs all over him? Maybe you know, have him perform an early miracle and have him stop everyone barfing? This of course was not going to happen, they were royalty and nannies would have seen to such, but as the church presents him, as a working class carpenter, a regular guy, why are we not given the early details of his life? The reason for this is of course, if they told the truth of his childhood, they would have to acknowledge their lie about him, and therefore acknowledge his true Grail heritage. But back then in 1982 I had no real idea of what the Grail was about, I only knew that what the church said the Bible said did not add up. It would be nearly 15 years again until I figured out why the information about slavery is so concentrated and why the child rearing stuff is so limited. Those discoveries changed the context of the Bible, changed who and why god was. Gave real context to the most ambiguous verse in the Bible, Haggai 2:8 where God says the Gold and Silver is mine.

My best friend still attends that same church, and still has the church's crap bird fed to him Sundays. He is now unwell, and I guess tries to find comfort in the church, I feel for him and want to offer more, but the bottom line for all of is, whatever the truth of the afterlife, we will only really find out when we get there. There is no doubt about the truths we have discovered herein these pages, as we go forward the church and its lies will continue to be exposed, and we will better understand our sacred journey's purpose. When my bud figures out the truth he will bitch slap me hard and want to know why I did not tell him what I think, and I will look him in the eye and tell him the truth, that each of us has our own journey. He is really fucking smart and will figure it out.

Incremental Change

 December 12, 2021

24 Hour Sober Medallion. My sobriety date is July 27, 1999. This maybe 2 or 3 months after I'd moved from Toronto, to London in search of happiness. I was offered a medallion at my first meeting. I refused it, I was very full of myself, believing that I didn't need tokens to lean on. Plus I wasn't convinced that I was an addict. Yes absolutely I had been brought up in an out of control addicts home, yes clearly my thinking differed wildly from others. Yes I'd come home from work and sometimes stay drunk from the moment I got home to, eight hours before I had to go back to work. But my behaviour varied widely, that was the exception, not the norm. This though more than anything defined me, I was scared stupid that every drink, every toke, would hook me, and turn me into a carbon copy of either of my parents.

So there I was, sitting in an AA meeting, watching this pretty blonde receive her umpteenth 24-hour sober medallion.   

I had been going to meetings for a couple of months at that point and was only beginning to get it. She was frustrated with herself and was begging God for help to stay sober. I giggled to myself about that—God? He didn’t exist. And if he did, I thought, he was a complete ass.

After the meeting, I went for coffee with a guy who had been an MP with the RCAF (Royal Canadian Armed Forces), and from this fella, I learned a new definition of God.

I unloaded on him about my feelings toward God and how I was really struggling with the idea of God as a higher power. He looked me straight in the eye—and kind of pissed me off. His comments, though not unkind, blew the lid off something I had been struggling with for more than a dozen years.

When I was around ten or eleven, a neighborhood kid—who had a reputation as a clean-cut, do-what-he’s-told type—once said about both my brother and me that we were out of control and had no discipline. At the time, that statement was meaningless to us. What right did he—or anyone, for that matter—have to sit in judgment about how we lived our lives?

In retrospect, though, our entire family had been out of control, and the whole neighborhood had noticed.

Not surprisingly, this behavior in me had been easily spotted by the former military cop. He said to me, in no uncertain terms, that I needed to start living my life with G.O.D.—Good Ordered Discipline.

My immediate reaction should have been to tell him to go fuck himself. But the thing of it was—I knew he was right. And that pissed me off even more.

I owe that guy a great deal of gratitude. By learning about this serious shortcoming in my behavior, all of a sudden AA’s program—and its Twelve Steps—made a whole lot more sense to me.

It was at this point that I began to understand I had spent the previous 25 years in survival mode, and that, out of necessity, anything went. Under “normal” circumstances, there should have been absolutely no reason for a 13-year-old kid to be 50 or more kilometers from home on his bike—simply to avoid any chance of running into the kids, or my brother, who bullied me.

During the winter, I would cut class and ride the subway until it closed, then take the all-night buses just to avoid being at home. A lot of the trouble I got into during these adventures was a direct result of the rage I was filled with because of what took place at home. I lashed out at every opportunity. I had opportunities to join gangs, but I thought they were bullshit—and the people who joined them were weaklings, without an ounce of self-respect or the balls to say no.

The following 9 points describe what it’s like to live in survival mode:

1. You are doing everything you can just to get through the day.

2. You focus all your energy on the next 24 hours—you can’t even think about tomorrow, let alone next week.

3. You can only consider one task at a time. Everything feels urgent.

4. You feel utterly alone and helpless. You’re convinced that only you can do the job right—and that you must.

5. You push others away without thinking, because you don’t have the time or energy to deal with them.

6. You don’t eat properly, sleep is a foreign concept, and your stress level feels like it could snap at any moment.

7. You rush around like crazy but never feel caught up.

8. You can’t remember the last time you laughed or enjoyed a day.

9. All you can do is react to whatever arises.

The following can help enormously:

Be willing to let go. Pare life down to the basics. Remind yourself: We survived, and at that time, that was the goal. Start with what you can do right now. When things begin to come together, slowly add to it—one step at a time.

Put succinctly, survival mode involves adaptive physiological changes in the body that help us respond to stressors. When we experience stress, a cascade of hormonal and physiological responses prepares us to fight, flee, or freeze (Harvard Health Publishing, 2018).

But when we’re “surviving” too long, the effects become clear. Research shows that chronic stress and continuous exposure to stress hormones can be harmful (Hormone Health Network, 2018). Sometimes, our body overreacts to everyday stressors—treating a “rabbit” as if it’s a “bear.”

Frequent stress responses and chronic exposure to these hormones can take a toll on the body, affect our emotional health, strain relationships, lead to medical issues, and increase the risk of anxiety and depression (Harvard, 2018; Hormone Health Network, 2018). So what does this mean, and how do we cope better—how do we move from surviving to truly living?

When under stress, it can be tempting to stay in survival mode—riding the waves like a roller coaster and white-knuckling our way through. But there are ways to help ourselves:

THE BASICS

1. Connect with yourself
   Survival mode often involves disconnection—even dissociation. Reconnecting is key. Ask yourself: “What do I need?” When we’re in survival mode, we often overlook our basic needs. What is your body telling you? Are you tired? Hungry? What are your emotions saying—are you scared, angry, sad? Take a moment to check in so that you can respond intentionally rather than automatically.

2. Connect with others
   Seek support from friends, loved ones, a therapist, or safe people who can help you reconnect—with yourself and others. These relationships help us gain perspective, find stability, and shift from surviving to living.

3. Exercise
   Cardiovascular exercise is a well-known way to help the body manage stress and regulate the hormones involved in stress responses.

4. Be kind to yourself
   Don’t shame yourself. You didn’t ask to be stuck in survival mode. Our bodies are adaptive machines—and sometimes they adapt to unhealthy environments when they have no better options. Breaking the cycle takes time and patience.

It’s important to understand that for some—especially those with histories of complex trauma—survival mode becomes an automatic response. It may feel like the only way to be. While there’s beauty in our bodies’ ability to adapt, chronic stress or trauma can rewire the nervous system to make that stress response our “normal.”

Rewiring and healing take time, especially if survival mode began in childhood. Regardless of what put us in this state—or how long we’ve been stuck in it—we can learn to help our bodies and minds distinguish the “bears” from the “rabbits” and, over time, learn how to live again, instead of merely survive.