My Why, and Why I Cried.

I wept today. Music did what music does and took me back to a MDA trip I had with some of my loved ones. My intention for the trip was to get an answer to my question, “Who is my audience?” (regarding writing.) The answer MDA and my loved ones synthesized for me that day was, “our children.”

Its 6 months later and the truth of the realization hit me today. Hence the glorious weeping. My life I live is for my children.

I’m going to write books. I’m actively working everyday towards this goal. I’m obsessed by what is fundamentally the urge to help people heal themselves. Before I feel adequate in giving advice, I need to heal myself, heal my Self. And this is no short order. And honestly it is not a goal with an end. Life is a constant growing.

I don’t know what caused it exactly, but the tears were more a culmination of a few things. On one side, the human condition is abundant in its suffering. On another side, my personal luck staggers me. Like most of you, my childhood was full of trauma large and small. All of ours are. Our parents were all parents of child abuse. Most of this abuse was well-intentioned naivety. Trauma it was regardless. The third side is the experiential fact that the adaptation and fortitude of the human condition is greater than almost all trauma. There is hope and growth and healing available.

This hope consumes me. I live in it every day. It breaths purpose into my body. My existential void from adolescences is filled. The answer is, I do it for my children, and all the children of those I love. Honestly, I do it for everyone, but my closest cloister of proximity is that of my loved ones. I do it for our children. 

How I'm trying to resurrect Carl Jung

Since becoming single again, I knew I’d be getting weird again. Self-fulfilling prophecy fulfilled. Synchronicities have been dancing around me these last couple of weeks. A part of me keeps the perspective alive that this mental headspace I’m cultivating is a tightrope over the abyss of schizophrenia, but I humbly slink across confident I can maintain balance.

I’ve been experimenting. I want to be a knowledgeable psychologist. I need a mentor. I don’t have any in my time-space prison, so I’m resurrecting one of the greatest psychologists the West as ever produced; Carl Jung. Well, a boring materialistic rationalist would say I’m reading Carl Jung’s collected works. A magician would say I’m resurrecting Carl Jung. I’d say, I’m reading the works of a great thinker every day, and actively practicing trying to talk to him via active imagination, with the hopes of, after a few months, having a little Carl Jung program running in my consciousness that I can turn to for advice and guidance.

I think this kind of thing is necessary if you want to reach your highest potentials. All of us have a creative function and we owe the world the manifestation of that gift. Somewhere in you, you know what your creative function is. There are great men and women through history who had the same creative function as you and used it to excel at the game of life. Find them. Read about them. Download them into your psyche as little helpers.

However, it’s important to note; do not try to be them. Use them as guiding lights to your unique destination. There is no one who has the particular configuration of genetics, environment, and spirit as you. (If you feel a part of you already attacking this statement, you have a lot of self-healing to do. Good luck.)

Resurrection Program

So, allow me to try to turn on this new, (and still in need of patches), program.

Carl Jung was the inventor or discoverer of what is now called Depth Psychology. This is a school of analytic psychology that differs from Freud in believing that the unconscious is more than only sexually repressed fantasies. Carl Jung believed that each person had an ego, a person unconscious, and a Collective Unconscious. The Collective Unconscious was his big and unique idea.

The ego is the you you think of as you. Ego is your conscious self. The personal unconscious is what most people understand as the unconscious. It is all of your personal experiences, memories, and the like, coupled with all sense perception that isn’t charged enough to become conscious. (like the way your feet feel right now, before reading this, you weren’t aware they felt at all. Now, with the flashlight of your ego, you can sense them.) The personal unconscious is accessible.

The Collective Unconscious is never accessible. It is inherent in every living creature. It is the place of psychic life where our bodies know how to create a human, repair cells, digest food, harness energy from air. Our instincts arise from this place. The energy behind adaptation and evolution also arises from here. The Collective Unconscious is an ocean, the submarine without lights is your personal unconscious. Your ego is the human with the flashlight trying to maintain leaks.

Archetypes

Jung believed that the Collective Unconscious communicated to consciousness through dreams. The CU communicates through images. These images are what Jung called archetypes. Archetypes are images that represent instinctual ideas that charge the body with energy. The simplest example the fight-or-flight instinct. We also believed dreams to be compensatory in nature, so an example illustrating all of this is as follows; yesterday you are walking and a dog lunges at you and scares you. You instantly feel the adrenaline, then you feel shame at being scared (dad would scold you when you acted meek.) Now you’re angry at the dog but you walk on. That night you have a dream you’re a knight and you fight off a wolf and return to the King for praise.

The activated archetype was the fight-or-flight response. Your ego interprets the event in all sorts of twisted ways due to your unique personality. Your unconscious tries to help you by offering an example of you responding in a positive way to the situation. The actually archetype is the motif of the knight being brave and receiving honor from the King.

Yeah, I know it’s a lot. But much of human life is archaic. We have the same bodies we had thousands of years ago. The same energies arise in our bodies. The same physiological processes of infanthood, puberty, adolescences, adulthood, parenthood, and aging are still here. It appeared to Jung that our bodies, our unconscious, has a built in guiding function. Learning to communicate with this guiding function is what he called “individuation.”

The Transcendent Function

The way we learn to listen to this inner guide to Individuation is a technique he called “The Transcendent Function.” He calls it this because the process of Individuation is when the consciousness identifies and absorbs a part of the psyche that was previously unconscious. Each time we do this, there is a challenge or resisting because the ego kept the unconscious unconscious for a reason. The young girl who naturally starts masturbating and witnesses the shock and scolding of her naïve Christian parents is taught that sexual self-pleasure is wrong, and these the natural bodily sensation has to be removed from the ego. We all have dozens and dozens of these kinds of repression.

TF is Jung’s way of liberating the ego. Psyche growth is a constant identifying and absorbing. It is never completed. So, how?

First, you collect unconscious images. Record dreams. Practice Active imagination. Read Mythology. Learn how to understand symbols. Ideally, find a psychoanalyst (a convenient recommendation coming from a psychoanalyst lol.)

Second, and this happens naturally, you’ll start finding patterns in the material produced and you’ll start to try giving meaning to it. Allow this to happen.

Third, consciously accept whatever the material is showing you. Your dreams will constantly be alerting you on your current progress.

Self

The point of the Transcendental Function is a technique to help in the process of Individuation. The point of Individuation is to help the ego become more conscious of what Jung called the Self. The Self is the totality of the individual’s psychic apparatus. Because a large part of the individual is the Collective Unconscious, one can never know the Self in its entirety, but, more Self-understanding is better than less. The Self is everything.

Experience

Jung has written thousands of pages. This reproduction is more a reflection of the limited software I’m running then the actual ideas of Jung. What I love about his approach is his emphasis on direct experience. He was adamant that what the individual experiences is as real as anything we call real. If you saw in your imagination you were on the moon. He believed you have been to the moon.

So, God. God is an experience. God is a symbol that represents your personal transcendent experience. The thing the symbol “God” tries to represent is something completely beyond the comprehension of our intellect. But what we do have is the experience of the divine. This is the individual’s bridge to God.

Semantically, and philosophically, we all have a unique individual God. It is our unique mixture of biology and psychology that will craft the lens we interpret the feeling we get when we have a transcendent experience. This is our God.

I hope you find a symbol system that allows you the chance to experience your God. Fuck any symbol system that has rules in place where there is some mediator between you and God. That deprives you of one of the most powerful and intimately human experiences.  

I love you. Namaste. 

How I Placebo’d chronic back pain

My back’s story

When I was a sophomore in high school I went to block a layup, bumped a hip midair, lost my balance and landed directly on my tailbone. Something popped, cracked or shifted. Coach whistled and the drill was over. Practice was over. It was time to run laps. Pride, fear and adrenaline got me to the base line. That night at practice, I cried in front of everyone I respected running those sprints. I knew something was wrong but these suicides needed running.

Since then, I’ve had chronic back pain. I’ve been told I have signs of arthritis at the base of my spine. I’ve received pain killers and epidurals. I’ve tried corrective stretching, strength training, yoga, foam rollers, etc. These things helped a little, but the pain would always return.

Last month something severe happened. I was walking into my bedroom and my back seized up. I felt the muscles of my lower back slowly, powerfully, clench to a point that I simply couldn’t stand. I fell face forward on my bed. I couldn’t move.

It’s weird thinking back to that moment. It was like when I was in a car accident. I became completely, only, a witness to my experience. I had no control as an actor or affecter. I just watched. I watched my body disregard all conscious singling. I felt my back angrily spasm between contracting and relaxing.

I laid there for a good 20 minutes before I called for help. I was having a little existential crisis. I thought about how suicide seemed like a sensible option if I lost control of my legs. I realized I feared dying (for a long time, psychedelics had me thinking I wasn’t afraid of death. Naw. I am.) I thought about what I would change if I could walk again.

That day was hard. But I got through it. And a couple days later, while listening to a Joe Rogan podcast, I heard a man talk about a doctor he went to see for back pain. The proselytizer was convinced this doctor had a unique and successful perspective and treatment of back pain. Curious, I Amazon’d the doctor’s book.

Dr. John Sarno

I read the book. Wow. Never had I read a book by a clearly sober and scientific individual whose perspective was so psychedelic and psychological.

John Sarno was a professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. His perspective is simple. Most back, neck, shoulder, and butt pain is not due to any physiological or structural abnormalities in the spine. Most pain is a function of repressed emotions.

If you are a skeptic, please, read his books. Check his studies. The results are impressive. I don’t have his book handy and I’m not a doctor so I won’t try providing scientific evidence to support his theories. I’m only here to share my experience.

Sarno’s treatment is simple. Step one, believe your pain is due to repressed emotions and not due to structural dysfunction. Step two, search for what emotions you may be repressing and work with them consciously. (Go to the doctor and get their opinion and read his book if you have back pain. Do your research. Knowledge here is particularly important.)

I’ve been using this perspective the last five weeks. Whenever I feel the familiar flare of pain in my back. I take a moment and tell myself that I have no structural abnormalities of the spine. I tell myself that I am repressing an emotion. I take a moment to look at what emotions I could be ignoring. Normally, the answer is always fear or anger, more commonly felt as anxiety or frustration. I try to let the emotion come into consciousness and I accept it.

That’s it. In my experience, once I take maybe a minute to do this, the pain goes away. The pain fucking goes away. I’ve used this maybe once every couple of days.

The new story of my back

Basketball was the activity I felt most alive playing. I was just good enough, and naive enough, to genuinely believe I could play basketball as a way of life. I let the dream consume me. I thought about playing basketball more than I thought about sex as a teenager. I could only imagine my future through basketball.

Yeah, I injured my tailbone in high school, but it healed and I didn’t have back pain again for a while. The back pain started after I had rotator cuff surgery. After thinking about when the pain would flair up, I found it always got bad around the time I’d start getting really invested in basketball again. I use to think the pain was always due to me tweaking a lingering injury.

I tried a new perspective. The pain flared up whenever I started reminding myself of my dead dream. Getting back into basketball shape, and getting close to what I once was, triggered the repressed emotions I had never dealt with. Giving up my basketball dream was forced on me and I had never processed my anger.

After choosing to try this new perspective, I tried something weird. I wrote a raw and honest apology letter to my body. I apologized for pushing him as hard as I did. I apologized for being angry at him after he failed to live up to the goal I made. I told him I was sorry and that I’m grateful for everything he does. He regulates my autonomic nervous system, he constantly breaks apart and reassembles molecules for repairing. He does a lot. I apologized.

And, as crazy as it may sound to the skeptic. No back pain. It’s gone.

What is happening?

I don’t know. Sarno’s theory is that repressed emotions manifest as pain throughout the nervous system due to deoxygenation. He thinks the mind creates this lack of oxygen to produce pain to help distract the individual from an emotion the unconscious doesn’t think the consciousness can handle.

Skeptics and most people who consider themselves rational would say this is a placebo. Saying “placebo” implies a kind of false cure. This is an unconscious assumption of a dualist, rationalist, materialist, or scientist. I don’t know if it is wrong to have this bias, but be aware that it is an unconscious bias in many scientifically inclined individuals.

Experimentally, the individual is free from pain. You've been brainwashed if they hold any kind of knowledge above self-knowledge. What you experience is beyond all other appeals to knowledge. (haha, this is obviously biased by my experience. Cue, paradoxical loop.)

We have thousands of unconscious beliefs running in the background of our subconscious. Many of these thoughts trigger shame, guilt, envy, etc. Many of these thoughts constrict our potential.

Experiment. Your life is your experiment. Explore your mind. Wanderlust for new reality tunnels. You are thoughts away from drastically new lives. Play.

Okay, done preaching. I love you. Thank you for reading. Namaste. 

Why I have a Dream Journal

I’m a semantically-inclined domesticated primate, so finding the divine has been a journey. As a child, I charmed with the Logos. As a teen, I swung the Logos as a weapon. As a young adult, I was confined by the Logos. I found a growing mushroom near one of the walls of my Logoic prison and Cubenis helped me vault over the labyrinthine wall.

Haha, you can already see how easily I can get carried away by the Logos.

Words are seductive. With them we can read the minds of dead legends, we can telepathically communicate (I’m in your head right now), and with language we have augmented evolution with memes (not a grumpy cat meme, a meme is a cultural idea that is passed down generations through language.)

So words are tremendously powerful, but they limit. Almost my entire life, I valued the creative control dead domesticated primates displayed in regards to the Logos. I valued their symbol manipulation over my direct experience of reality. Rationalism and Logic are the deities of the Logos. I sat obediently at their feet.

Eventually I acquired the perspective that it may be possible that maybe there is more to the human experience then what can be captured and conveyed through symbols. It was a wild thought at first. I was stubborn.

My affinity for language is like an addiction. I relapse every day. If you know me, you can see me linguistically stroking my ego with monologues. I love yall for patiently allowing my indulgence.

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Researching and learning about the subconscious mind, how to interpret symbols, and recording my dreams have been a kind of nicotine patch to my linguistic addiction.

The subconscious speaks through symbols. Understanding symbols is more an intuitional practice than a conscious semantic exercise. There are symbols like MacDonald’s arches or Apple’s logo, these are not the kind of symbols I’m referring to. The kind of symbols your dreams use represent fundamental human ideas, like water signals rebirth, life, or emotions, a fire represents transformation or purification. These symbols make sense in an evolutionary, primal way.

The belief I hold, (shout out to Carl Jung), is that dreams are meaningful, dreams speak in symbols, and symbols are interpretable. So, I attempt to record my dreams, try to decode them, and try to understand them.

(An interesting epistemological investigation offers two perspectives. Maybe my belief in all this spurs my brain to create these kinds of dreams, and I’m just playing a little, board-line psychotic game with myself, or, maybe, dreams actually are meaningful, symbolic, and understandable. I don’t know. But this brings me to something I believe very passionately in; your life is yours to understand and explore. Experiment and value your personal experience more than statistics, polemics, and other people’s stories. Experience your truth.)

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So, dreams are meaningful, dreams speak in symbols, and symbols are understandable.

I have a journal and pencil near my bed, open and ready to record. Whenever I wake from a dream, I try my damndest to role my lazy bundle of flesh over and scribble down whatever I remember. Pro tip: start from the last thing you remember in the dream and work backwards. Then rewrite it chronologically. This works really well for me.

I normally doze back to sleep. When I start my day, in my daily three pages, I try to understand the dream. Most dreams aren’t saying much. Maybe that I’m excited about my day off or I’m wanting to sleep with a woman. I consider those practice. The important dreams, and you know exactly which ones are the important ones, those are feasts. Better yet, they are the raw ingredients. You have to interpret them, or prepare them, in order to digest them. (yay for food analogy.)

Learning to interpret dreams has been a journey too. A good deal of it is intuitional. A gloriously fun way to practice interpreting symbols is to play “The Cube” game with everyone you meet (at the prompting of a beautiful friend, I’m going to start posting my results of these games so yall can get a feel for how to do it, and it’s fascinating.)

Also, feel free to share your dreams with me and I’ll do my best.

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The reason I have a dream journal is because I believe in the idea of “Individualization.” It is an idea presented by Jung and it is beyond the scope of this already growing post. To sum it up, your dreams will guide you towards the full maturation of your soul. If ya don’t listen; neurosis, physical ailments, “bad luck,” and a mid-life crisis await you. His elaboration on all of this is fucking fascinating and I recommend any of his books if you’re interested. He believed that your subconscious is wise beyond comprehension and it wants to help your puny confused ego navigate life. I agree and I try to listen.

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I’ll offer a personal example of a dream and how I interpreted it.

I listened to a poem two Thursdays ago while driving back from Austin. The poem resonated with me and I cried a couple times. I realized that my expectation of how a romantic partner should be was naïve, childish, and limiting. This poem broke me up and I cried because I was thankful.

That night I had three dreams and each was intense and easy to remember.

In dream one, one of my close female friends died. She was on a plane and the plane stopped existing. Dreams don’t make logical sense, but the feeling of this important female friend dying was strong. I wept and wept and wept. You know that kind of wailing a mother cries when a child dies? It was to that intensity.

The second dream was me arriving at my first day of college at an all women college. I was led to the gym where an older man, the wrestling coach, asked me if I wanted to wrestle one of the female students. I accepted.

Instantly the dream changed and I was sitting on a back porch. I was in the suburbs, the afternoon sky was comforting and the trees were dancing. It felt nice. I was sitting with the two women I had been in love with in my life. I was talking with them explaining how I was looking for a new woman who was “more.” That was the only adjective I used. I looked down to my phone and I saw a tinder profile of an updated version of my first love. I declined and woke up.

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Okay so here is what this ish means. Or, more precisely, here is how my perspective organizes this data.

A quick background before we dive in. The Anima is an archetype Jung labeled that represents the ideal female in the subjective individual’s psyche. The Animus is an archetype that represents the ideal male. These archetypes show up in dreams. As a straight male, my Anima will show up as females around my age. My Animus will be an older male but not elderly. (You may already be starting to put the puzzle together.)

The first dream symbolized the death of my Anima (the poem scorched my childish perspective of what a woman can and should be). My friend represented my old perspective of what a female should be. The weeping was my subconscious helping me processes the emotions attached to losing a part of myself.

The second dream symbolized my Animus helping me find a new Anima. (The coach asking me if I’d like to wrestle with these woman.) I don’t know why, but smarter people then I have observed over the decades that the unconscious likes to play with language. The obvious play here is, wrestling with new perspectives. I agreed to wrestle so I got a new dream.

The third dream was my subconscious helping me process this change. The two girls represented the two stages my Anima has already passed through. I was getting a chance to talk with them about my new direction. My subconscious asked if the right direction was to go back to my first Anima and I chose no.

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I think it is beneficial to believe dreams are meaningful, to learn to understand them, and record them. 

This is all subjective. I fucking love it. I hope you will try it. Let me know how it goes. I love you. 

Why I write 3 pages a day.

Metaphysical literally means, “beyond the physical.” Religion is metaphysical. Some philosophies are metaphysical.  Proof, in the scientific sense, cannot reach beyond the physical. Metaphysics is where we are all free to play. We can get lost too.

For a long time, I never ventured beyond the physical. I rejected it all and stayed safely inside materialism. Most scientists I knew and admired stayed inside with me. They were brilliant. I was in good company.

Outside was scary. Preachers hypnotized followers. Neurotics worried in isolation. Conspiracy theorists weaved hypotheticals. From my window, these people seemed lost. I didn’t realize that I was focusing on the worst cases to protect my choice; a choice rooted in fear.

I didn’t notice the Buddha or Jesus. I didn’t see the legions of artists chasing their particular dreams. I couldn’t hear the oratory of the existentialists and their proclamation of radical freedom.

There was one scientist who I noticed carried a ball of thread with him. As I observed him, I caught that occasionally he’d slip out whenever the others were busy debating semantics. He’d tie the thread to a polished rock he used to keep the door open, and he would adventure into the metaphysical playground!

He always came back, more, I think the best way to describe it is, alive. Sometimes his smile would be so wide his eyes became little slits. Other times his brow would be so furrowed his forehead vein could be seen pulsing. He was one of the more strange scientists, be he fascinated me. He answered to “Carl Jung.”

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Jung was the man that liberated me from atheism. Religion in my youth was oppressive. Those who taught it were stiff, sharp, and stern. They embodied the ideology and they were not good people. I had questions early in childhood and the answers never satisfied. As I grew and the sophistication of my questions grew, the hostility of their responses grew.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, my mom was taking online college courses. One of her classes was an intro to philosophy course. She shared the ideas with me. That was the turning point. Before then, I had always questioned and had no answers. In philosophy, I started finding more answers then I knew how to organize.

The moment I found rationalism, the scientific method, and logic, I planted my flag. For years I proclaimed myself an atheist. I argued with the religious. I dove deep into logic and science. I became a cliché atheist. Rude, critical, mocking, and to the outside observer, obviously lacking spiritual happiness or fulfilment of any kind.

I think most atheists are coming from a place of genuine curiosity and a love to understand the world. The anger most of them seem to acquire is a response to the apparent absurdity and flawed-thinking in religion and spirituality. Couple this with the fact that most of these nonbelievers are completely shut off from mystical and divine experiences, anger flows naturally.

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Around my junior year of high school, I ate a couple grams of dried psychedelic mushrooms. It would take me a couple of years to digest the experience. Essentially, my nervous system’s first metabolic dance with mushrooms ended my atheism. Experience trumped everything I had read in books. It took years to acquire the language to explain what happened. But I knew then that there was something more than rationalism, and to believe in rationalism as zealously as I did, was absurd to the point of fits of laughter and tears. I laughed and cried, my next six to seven psychedelic experiences.

My clinging to rationalism was absurd. Rationalism is a human construct. I believed in it, just as a Christian believes, or Muslim, or Jew believes in their respective realities. I found my hypocrisy hilarious. I took my learning rationalism and logic so seriously. I wanted to create a perfect system of thought. Psychedelics helped me see the futility. A little book, “Godel’s theorem,” gave me the words to understand my futility. I became agnostic.

The freedom of Agnostism left the door cracked open for Jung to stroll in. There are certainly other humans who have brought others out of their rationalistic wombs, but Jung being a psychiatrist and me fancying psychology; he was the mentor that supported my explorations into metaphysics. My current life still involves me exploring the metaphysical playground. Much to joy of my creative spirit, I’m finally getting the courage to build a little castle. If you are interested, I’d love to share some of the foundational sand bricks with you.

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One of my castle’s bricks is inspired by Jung. I choose to play with the belief that all mystical and divine entites/manifestations/archetypes are within us. He called it the Universal Unconscious. Another way to say this, although vague and likely to cause a swarm of associations, is “God is within us.”

I think we can talk with God (I like to call her Goddess). I think she/he/it/love communicates with us in a few ways. One way Goddess communicates is through winks Jung called synchronicity. I can talk about this idea for hours but that isn’t the focus of this post. I think the divine also speaks to use through our unconscious. Dreams are the easiest avenue to the unconscious. This is another idea I’m going to talk at length about, but not day. Today is about stream-of-consciousness writing.

Every day I write three full pages, long-hand, stream-of-consciousness style. I got the idea from “The Artist’s Way” (A book I cannot recommend enough.) This book and this technique have spurred more personal growth in two months then I acquired all through college. Seriously. The magic of this exercise needs to be experienced.

The best resource is to buy “The Artist’s Way.” The second best course of action is to start writing three pages every morning. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t reread or show friends. Just get the unconscious, looping thoughts you carry every day and purge them onto the page. (But for reals, get the book.) 

Writing these pages have brought me closer to Goddess. Or, writing these pages have helped med understand myself more. Its the same thing.

“Empty yourself so God can fill you up.”

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I love you. We all are riddled with unconscious, emotion-limiting, programs that we inherited from well-intentioned but naive parents. If you want to reach beyond your current life you need to start new habits. Start this habit. Learn to heal yourself. Tell me how it is going. I love you. Namaste. 

Why I listen to Podcasts

A brief history of Smalltownitis

Protect yourself from Smalltownitis

I live in a town where the rate of smalltownitis is high. The diagnosis is apparent even to the undergraduate. Those afflicted tend to procreate early, normally passing the disease down their genetic linage. They tend to acquire debt early from purchasing symbols they’ve been conditioned to see as representations of success. They unconsciously live the lives their well-intentioned but equally unconscious parents imprinted on them. They artificially entertain a religion that keeps them from directly experiencing the divine. They watch television, their true dreams repressed.

In such a hazardous environment, I protect my psyche system with a daily supplementation of podcasts. The FDA currently is not regulating the podcast market so you have to be responsible with which supplementations you ingest.

For balance, I would recommend at least one scientifically supported podcast. Radio Lab or Hardcore History are two solid, data-backed supplements. The beauty of the podcast market is the diversity. Do your homework. These are your dreams and personal goals we are protecting here. Suit up!

I then like to mix the science with a little alternative medicine. These are the weird, but in my experience, the most successful at battling smalltownitis, podcasts that expose the psyche system to new, and challenging ideas. These are the Joe Rogans, Duncan Trussells, Aubrey Marcus kind of podcasts. By exposing your psyche system to these wild and foreign ideas, you bolster your psyche system to fight off the ideological viruses small towns are filled with.

Transcend temporal friendship restrictions

Space/time can be a bish. Before domesticated primates gifted themselves the power of telepathy and thought teleportation via communicative technologies, we were confined by the temporal dimension to who our friends were. (Unless you were one of the mutants who read books.)

“You are the average of your 5 closest friends.”

This maxim was fucking death to the average domesticated monkey born in rural America a century ago. Dad was a farmer, mother was basically chained to the bed and kitchen, and the greatest man in town was the local priest, (and how great of a human can you be if you haven’t allowed another human to stimulate you to muscle-shaking orgasm)? In this reality-tunnel, dreams don’t grow beyond the fence built by smalltownitis.

But we eventually endowed ourselves with the communicative technologies and started liberating the mortals from smalltownitis. There were complications at first, as we’ll see below, but now we are free to unshackle ourselves and listen to Joe Rogan talk about mushrooms for the 83^rd time. Powerful Joe Rogan.

Preservation of mental health

Radio and television were, by accident, crude cures to smalltownitis a couple generations ago. Exposing ourselves to wider arrays of different manifestations of ourselves helped liberate a generation from smalltownitis. The crudeness was in the illusion the old communicative technologies offered about reality. People went from having smalltownitis to being afflicted with delusions of grandeur. Their dreams were rooted in falsehoods. The results were generations of sick, fat, and depressed domesticated western primates who are consciously emaciated by smalltownitis.  We harmed ourselves by mass producing false representations of reality.

Podcasts have the potential for the curious, spatially-restricted humanoid to glimpse a genuine lot of people which that humanoid aspires to be like. We are social creatures. We unconsciously look to others for information on how to live. This is a mechanism of the psyche that the virus smalltownitis exploits. Observe liberated monkeys. Restrict your exposure to the infected monkeys. Climb out of the pit your small town psychically dwells in.

Because fuck television

Fuck television. Ol, ima force feed you advertising every 7 minutes on bullshit symbols that require resources that exploit the poor and damage our earthly mother.

 Ol, ima give fame and power to some of the fakest, most broken souls who then become the idols to millions of unconscious confused children who are placed in front of a television because their parents aren’t able or willing to raise them with human to human contact.

Ol, out dated, hierarchical, monopolistic information source that has been manipulated by money and greed and has been used as a tool to manipulate the public into supporting war after war.

Fuck Television. Fuck commercials. Fuck monopolizing information. Fuck smalltownitis.

Summary of Protection

Listen to Podcasts.

Take care of meat suit (Eat well, work out, orgasm).

Play with spiritual systems.

Try a meditative practice.

Don’t take medication that represses emotions that need to be confronted.

Eat psychedelic mushrooms.

Let direct experience guide you (and if that means ignoring all of this, that’s exactly as it should be.)

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I love you. Namaste.