Body Is The Tasty Testing Ground Proof Pt 3 — Manna From Heaven Detour
Before I Out My Gout, I’ll Root About In My Money By-Passing Ways
When I closed part 2 of my body by-pass foray I had the clear intention of continuing with ‘no gout about it’, to address the question: how is it possible to have gout on a super clean low-fat vegan diet?
This essay is stand alone and doesn’t require reading the previous ones.
the body’s nose, even when battered and bloody, knows when we’re lying and being lied to and doesn’t take it lying down
And yet, this body, ‘my’ body expressing the Universe as Soul (or something) has decided to take me with itself on an alternative tao. This is a detour away from the somatic spirituality of gout and food as sacred into the ephemeral and the diurnal, the intangible and yet omnipresent, the filth and the lucre of the fiat ‘reality’ we call money. (‘Money’ from the name of the temple of Juno Moneta in Rome, where a mint was: wiktionary.) Funny about money, we have more fiat for that than the stand-in feet that we have blind faith enough to stand on.
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Money is often held onto tightly to various degrees between lust and revulsion, perhaps with those two attitudes intermingled uncomfortably within our mental and gut-brain-biome altars as both benefactor and malefactor to differing degrees, person-to-person, faith-to-faith. And money might be, next to yoga, religion and food, our most delectable of the spiritual by-passes: we love to eat it as if it was manna (2. any boon which comes into one's hands by good luck: wiktionary), and are disgusted when its golden promises turn to noxious calories that sicken us.
Have Fiat, My Friends, I Come Not to Castigate Economics, I Come to Venerate It
To the extent of its effect on society as a whole, which is that money is a spiritual-by-pass disguised as economic truth, it is certainly the most dominant and pernicious by-pass. It creates from its core the easy justification of death to humans, animals, insects, plants, ecosystems, rivers, lakes, oceans, atmosphere, the planet as simply the rational expression of the natural goodness of greed economics as a religion of an invisible hand.
In formal economics-schooling greed is used as the ‘rationalising’ human principle because it is inferred to be the most reliable predictor of human behaviour. That so-called predictability of greedy behaviour, which economists pretend to grant isn’t 100%, is used to allow mathematical economic ‘laws’ to be developed. Other human emotional or psychological expressions are too unpredictable — what mathematical or even economic value have charity, generosity or love? Or even the so-called negatives of hate, jealousy and anger? These are so unpredictable as to render them useless to normalise mathematical laws and so at its core economic principles are, in real sense, transhumanist and based on what most ethical systems consider to be one of the most, if not most, unethical principles humans are happy to express: greed.
At some point the perception by economists and, likely, most of the wealthy who comprise the beneficent globalist ptb cabal and those who own them, believe that most every human will, like them, take the money if it is enough to do something that under ’normal’ circumstances they wouldn’t do. (And hence was born ‘greed is good’, and the irony of its usage in the movie ‘Wall Street’ was absolutely totally missed.) Evidence of that is coming to light with the increasing exposure, the apocalypse, of the existence of people who worship some form of blood moloch/satanic/luciferian money-power organisation. (Really? A good place to start that investigation for the incredulous and curious, is with Anneke Lucas’s story as a satanic cult survivor of the Belgium elite. It is at the same time utterly horrific and hopeful. Epoché #003 - Anneke Lucas.)
In the past I’ve argued that economics is our age’s biggest religion. I’m not quite as confident of that anymore, although I maintain that it is bigger than the forward facing faces we see of the big and small world religions. In the mid 1990s I wrote ‘Death by Freezing’ that looks at the religious nature of economics by comparing economics to the karma of Buddhism in Thailand. Both express a facile moral ease of letting die or of actively killing their religiously undeserving. For many contemporary people perhaps Stalin or Mao might come to mind as epitomes of those economic killers. And yet American invasions with multinational support, both military and via covert CIA operations, have likely killed even more economically undeserving people than Stalin or Mao did. (There are many more examples, of course, from all the colonising countries!) All of these country/world leaders used economics to justify their so-called political driven killing actions. Their rationales are not that different from the Spanish inquisitors who tortured to death their version of the religiously undeserving, or the Catholic Crusaders who on their way to and from suppressing Moslems and rescuing Prester John killed those undeserving French Albigensian, Cathar and Bogomil heretics.
Soon after I discovered that our economics is religion I completed an economics degree. I was shocked and angered by what was spewed as economic-religious gospel from the mouths and pages of those university priests of faith standing on their daises of academic truth, with their poor logic, poor psychology, and poor mathematical science. It was so outrageous that I was inspired into a five year rabbit-hole dive that resulted in my creating two anti-economics courses: ‘Economics Debunked’ and ‘Banks Skanks.’
Home Sweet Home, Where New Age Doublethink Hypocrisy’s the Norm
In effect, my tuxedoed white rabbit in the hallowed halls of economic academe did nothing to undo the childhood indoctrination I had received that money was powerful and evil and that poverty is the gateway to authenticity and salvation. In childhood I was taught something about eyes of needles and rich men and camels, the corruption and perfidy of money as power in such a way as to elevate weakness and torpor as agency and strength of heart. I now understand that this was an early example of my childhood experience of platitudinous doublespeak as made manifest from parents who had been unconsciously infected with the New Age version of Orwell’s doublethink.
I spent many hours with a grandfather who took me with him into the forests and rivers of the gold-rich areas around Barkerville in order to strike gold and with that become rich. And I had a mostly absent father who at one point made his presence distinctly felt when he was guided by New Age mysticificationism to build a somewhat elaborate cardboard pyramid to exacting measures within which he put lottery tickets that were expected to be energetically elevated by the magic of pyramid power enough by ‘everything that is good’ — thus naturally excluding rich people and their money who were always bad — in order to make our family rich in freedom with money from the lack of money. Hmmmm. I wonder from where my problematic relationship with money may have arisen?
A Moment to Mindfully Meander on the Munificence and Malevolence of Money
And now, Dear Reader, I ask you to consider the following: what is your means of by-passing the ‘true’ spirit of money as it manifests in your life? What is that ‘true’ spirit? Does money have a ‘spirit’? If it doesn’t, how does it charge us all up the way it does and fill our literatures, bibles, news agencies, universities, crematoriums and graveyards? If it is solely evil, how does it do good? And vice versa? Is fiat money only possible with the threat of the spear, as I read an economist once astutely and yet surprisingly, openly state? Is it true that fiat money has rarely existed in human economics, with its prominence being only in the two most violent times in human history, ours and the Greek/Roman? (Passim, Debt: the First 5000 Years.)
Someone who has also looked critically at economics and suggested its being fundamentally at odds with personal sovereignty and healthy community is Tereza Coraggio in her substack Third Paradigm. Her recent essay is a great introduction to her ideas and suggested alternative that, imo, has a lot of merit and worth investigating and action on.
Back to me: in this essay I look at or dance around these questions while I re-investigate my own personal money by-pass spiritual molasses/morasses journey, its roots and possible evolution and recent shadow integration. Here is — I hope completely was — my money by-pass journey and recent change-of-heart surgery.
After that Introduction, Now a Prelude to Money By-Pass
As a kind of prelude to me, and now to you, of ’money, money, money/it’s a rich man’s world’ this humour-filled energy-spirit thingy of Life provided me with a small small and delightful synchronicity last night after I began to write this. It came from the novel Fifth Business, which I have recently begun to re-read, and am surprised that it is as if I’m reading it for the first time. In it Robertson Davies’ protagonist comments on the spirit of money and its influence on those who by talent, not a teachable skill, acquire money easily. Davies’ writing sings to me with beauty and depth and, in this reading, a seemingly endless supply of synchronicities that keep hinting at various aspects of my own journey in many different ways. His authorial comment on money and wealth being just one of them:
I thought they were a terrible pack of fatheads, but I was also aware that they must be good at something because they were so rich. I would not have had their cast of mind in order to get their money, however, much as I liked money.
They were a strange lot, these moneyed, influential friends of Boy's, but they were obviously interesting to each other. They talked a lot of what they called 'politics', though there was not much plan or policy in it, and they were worried about the average man, or as they usually called him 'the ordinary fellow'. This ordinary fellow had two great faults: he could not think straight and he wanted to reap where he had not sown. I never saw much evidence of straight thinking among these ca-pittle-ists, but I came to the conclusion that they were reaping where they had sown, and that what they had sown was not, as they believed, hard work and great personal sacrifice but talent - a rather rare talent, a talent that nobody, even its possessors, likes to recognise as a talent and therefore not available to everybody who cares to sweat for it - the talent for manipulating money.
How happy they might have been if they had recognised and gloried in their talent, confronting the world as gifted egotists, comparable to painters, musicians, or sculptors! But that was not their style. They insisted on degrading their talent to the level of mere acquired knowledge and industry. They wanted to be thought of as wise in the ways of the world and astute in politics; they wanted to demonstrate in themselves what the ordinary fellow might be if he would learn to think straight and be content to reap only where he had sown. They … were so humourless and, except when they were drunk, so cross that I thought the ordinary fellow was lucky not to be like them.
It seemed to me they knew less about the ordinary fellow than I did, for I had fought in the war as an ordinary fellow myself, and most of these men had been officers. I had seen the ordinary fellow's heroism and also his villainy, his tenderness and also his unthinking cruelty, but I had never seen in him much capacity to devise or carry out a coherent, thoughtful, long-range plan; he was just as much the victim of his emotions as were these rich wiseacres. Where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? Not among Boy Staunton's [very rich] ca-pittle-ists, nor among the penniless scheme-spinners in the school Common Room, nor yet at the Socialist-Communist meetings in the city, which were sometimes broken up by the police. I seemed to be the only person I knew without a plan that would put the world on its feet and wipe the tear from every eye. No wonder I felt like a stranger in my own land. (166-8).
This ends the introduction and prelude. (Where’s the music for that? Here — Glen Gould or here — Paul Mauriat.)
The Frightened Nice Guy Who Thought Being a Doormat Was the Courageous Manly Thing to Be
It was around 1987. I was about 26. I had been working at the comfortably well paid temporary — yeah right! — corporate job for about six years by then, and that would quickly become thirty-four years. And it was about eight years since I had left the childhood home under pretty horrific conditions associated with the emotional and psychological damage of the extreme co-dependency created with having been traumatised, not raised, by a narcissistic devouring mother. For some details on that, see:
Who Were You? Asks One Version of A Chronic Nose-Picking Son.
And/or:
Freud and Kinsey are Dead! I’ll Manga Out the Inflated Penis’s Envy of Edie’s Puss.)
And I was afraid. I was very afraid of everything so much so that I didn’t know that I was afraid of any thing. Everything was, in this way, a simple and perfectly contracted expression of the New Age belief-desire to be one with the ‘one thing’ of everything. Did/do the New Agers consider the possibility that fear is a, or maybe even the, great unifying energy because it by-passes personal responsibility and with that captures us with its sweet sweet feel of victim in a soap-box melodrama or heartfelt I Feel The Earth Move co-dependency ballad? We are taught that fear is the mind-killer and so with that ungrounded teaching we mistakingly embrace our fear of fear as a kind of singularity saviour from personal responsibility!
More subtly, perhaps, is that fear also provides another truly pernicious by-pass: the removal of differentiation and the suppression of the desire for nuance as natural human expressions in this three-D existential manifestation. (The ease with which the convid psyop was able to make manifest obedience to authority and mass formation are examples of that.)
And being unconscious of my fear it was bound to express itself like faeces from a poorly fitted and leaky diaper: it was going to leave its ordure odour in all the wrong places and at really inconvenient times. And that is how I came to know, eventually, my by-pass. Although it took another twenty-five plus years more before I took full responsibility for the smell of my own financial excrescences.
Well, actually, there were two linked fears that slowly I became aware of: debt and old-age poverty. These fears became conscious because it had come to pass that the shopaholic OCD codependent partner I was with, and who without question had saved my life from the narcissistic cult-family eight years earlier, burned through money faster than it was coming in. Much faster. And credit cards were quickly maximised. In our first two years together this behaviour wasn’t quite so obvious as it became later. In those first two years of co-dependent togetherness I was still a university student and she was, supposedly although only in my mind, recovering her financial bearings after her recent divorce. And her wealthy father was helping her replenish her purse.
My awareness began to change after I dropped out of school — I didn’t see a financially viable future with a math-physics degree and my competency at them was way higher than my passion for them. I left academe to enter a good paying technical job in a big safe corporation. This gave me good cash flow and with it easy access to credit. Soon thereafter I began to see the problem. The problem was her reckless spending. Obviously, because I could see that I wasn’t’ the problem. At the time I wasn’t a man at all, let alone man enough, to take responsibility for my own financial choices. Big shout out: “Let’s go emasculated co-dependency! Let’s go!”
So instead, over the next fifteen years or so, I did lots of stuff! I signed up and paid for a financial freedom correspondence course and I read ‘great’ helpful books like The Richest Man in Babylon and Think and Grow Rich. I graduated from a correspondence ‘How to Write Children’s Literature’ course that I thought would be an easy way to supplement my income. (It wouldn’t have helped do that even if I had become a successful children’s writer.) In time my efforts included the great New Age by-pass book Creative Visualization and many many others.
Nothing I did stopped the expansion of indebtedness or eased the cash outflow because I wasn’t able to stand in my own truth. I was, after all, that bridge to ease her troubled waters. At that time the words and ideas I was reading were ‘teaching’ me about it and so I kept looking at more and more books while looking for someone to give it — that mysterious it — to me in some way. Fortunately the Universe or whatever there is that is much bigger and funnier than me, guided me steadily towards books that insisted that the key was to take personal responsibility. I first remember reading that idea in the Seth books transcribed by Jane Roberts and then by the one-two punch of Constructive Living Psychology by David K. Reynolds and the personal responsibility Analytical Psychology of C.G. Jung.
At the time I didn’t properly understand that take means not waiting for someone else to do it for me, or to give it to me.
What Has That To Do With My Money? Nothing And Everything.
After an out-of-the-blue surprisingly large cheque from her father I did my best imagined imitation of being a man and (feebly) insisted that we use that cheque to leverage a mortgage in a particularly beautiful and energetic area of the city. It was near where I had worked for a few years before being transferred from it. To no avail. Her father had promised to buy her a house and so she had no need of my lily-livered and limp-wristed help. (NB: The real estate in that part of Vancouver increased in value by about twenty times in the subsequent ten years after the government changed immigration laws to only let rich people in. No more cheap farm labour and hello high real estate values! Ah well!)
That sum had quickly disappeared — and I partook in its disappearance, so I am fully aware of my own culpability in by-pass stupidity and enablement. With that disappearance the elasticity of debt was such that we were then facing insolvency. I was anxious and tense and sleep and dreams were troubling. What to do? So long as I didn’t need to take full responsibility for that doing, of course.
A Good Start from a Poor Foundation: A Delightful Trust-Fall Trap
And I did take action. What I thought at the time was Taoist non-action action. It was while considering this essay that I realise now that that was one of my turning point ‘trust-falls’ into the Universe. I decided to let go of the need to control the money flow and to stop fussing about becoming insolvent. And, even better, it had a good rationale to ease somewhat those stomach acid churning thoughts! The rationale was that with the experience of insolvency the ex would learn something after which our money flow would improve. There was definitely a kind of terror that gnawed at my heart with this decision, especially that old age poverty fear, which I did my best to ignore. And yet I looked at that near terror and made the decision anyway: insolvency here we come, yippee ki-yay!
Now with age and experience I doubt very much if that embarrassing (to me and more so to her) economic religious failure would have actually been enough to ‘teach’ my ex anything. And it would seem that the Universe, or whatever, had that same awareness. The same awareness and an absolutely wicked sense of humour because that insolvency was at the last minute resolved by unexpected events. And then the next one, something similar. Another insolvency near miss. And then a for sure insolvency was avoided with the unexpected death of her mother, who left her with a nice cheque and a comfortable, although inadequate for independence, annuity.
It was after that particular magical insolvency-busting intervention that I chose to stop fearing pennilessness and went full deep dive into trust-fall by-pass: I stopped the pretence of even expressing a smidgeon of responsibility in the energetic form of the impotent anxiety that had been created in me for my enervating choices. And so it was that I put on those lovely dark glasses by having unknowingly, and with great New Age spiritual intentions, chosen to remain blind to the money events of my life. And I was mostly still blind to my fear of everything because a significant part of my trust-fall by-pass was to allow me to remain unconscious of my relatively high base-level fear that was completely independent and deeper than those penury fears that had captured me so fully.
In a very real way I was the perfect example of the yogic disciple who was tossed by the rampaging elephant because his guru had told him that all was god and that he need not fear god’s multiplicity of manifestations. That disciple had misunderstood the instruction to mean ‘I do not have responsibility for my own actions here in the one-world-dream within which I can sit and pray and bow without taking appropriate eccentric action.’ (Here is the link to the full Ramakrishna Paramahamsa Swami Vivekananda ‘Elephant God and Mahut God’ parable.)
And that was what I did with money and thus allowed a trust-fall into the Universe to become the monetary spiritual by-pass within which I had put all personal responsibility to act appropriately in any given moment in all situations. Abdication to a ‘greater power’ is a wonderfully New Age adaptation and possible evolution of Buddhist karma and Christian blind faith. This is the exact opposite of the spiritual truth of appropriate eccentric action that requires being present in this physical moment with a fear-free Self. Because I was still full of unconscious fear, that fear was being made manifest in my life and I was not able to be appropriate nor able to see that I was being inappropriate in my actions. There are none so blind as those who do not see [their own fear].
And like with all good spiritual by-passes initially I experienced a significant increase in calmness and several significant physical health improvement changes around that time, including better sleep. Of course I thought I was approaching something like happiness since my sleep was better. And I was able to ignore all the other somatic warning signs: I was deaf and blind to some of my other health issues, such as gout, and the slow and steady movement towards obesity and to a kind of … how to put it? A kind of feeling of something more than spiritual acceptance, a kind of egoistic pride maybe, of my great accomplishment of letting money go and to have become nonchalant even as my by-pass blindness kept me from seeing the monetary god directing Ganesha to wreak its havoc in my young financial life. And it gave me courage enough to apply for and get, by the smallest of margins abetted by a special government economic incentive at the time during a real estate slump, our first mortgage.
And that god continued to assist my hubris because the next insolvency was avoided with my getting an unexpected opportunity to be a telecom engineer with a big jump in pay. And then the next was avoided by the ex’s father dying. That last one provided her with enough cash and a big enough annuity for us to get an improved mortgage and a beautiful and opportunistic condominium purchase. That was in 2004.
Fast Forwarding to the Time of Parting the Relationship and Other Rude Awakenings
As mentioned in part 2, a key turning point in my dietary health occurred around the time when the MBA-ism driven executives decided to double kick their financial encouragements to get the expensive and now obviously useless union engineers out the door: we were to be easily replaced with cheap non-union engineers-in-training who by some magical osmotic process wouldn’t need the specialised five year telecom mentorship and would likely be more amenable to slave-like labour conditions. I understood that this was how Rome burned — death by a thousand cuts to the real-world civil structures by disregard for those who actually have the hands-on task and abilities to keep the water flowing, the lights on, and the communications systems alive.
And with this great synchronicity-in-the making the money god was likely rolling on the floor with glee at the perfect opportunity to whack-the-by-pass-guy sidewise by making me ‘rich’. My fifteen minutes of wealth. I was paid about a year’s salary to leave, with options to hide some of that from the tax man within a retirement investment. Before my final day I had been offered a wagéd job to set up a telecom engineering section within a large North American power company. They had been reading the industry news that the gringo American telecoms were eviscerating their engineering departments and that that non-telecoms would have the opportunity to contract bid on telecom engineering. And my company pension was accessible to me with early retirement exactly one month after my official early retirement. And so it was in 2016 that I had three years of income concomitantly.
And I didn’t act appropriately. I did not act responsibly and somehow drifted with the idea that now, now at last I would experience some kind of financial freedom and I wouldn’t be scrimping to find money for a yoga class or a three day retreat. I could stop denying Tai Chi classes or partaking in creative writing groups. With all that money flowing in I was to be on easy street.
With long hours and my company pension I managed to make about three times as much annual income in the years 2016 and 17 than I had in my best years leading up to that. Now things get funny. I wasn’t prepared for the tax consequences and by 2017 I owed more than 20k in unpaid taxes. Oops. Hadn’t seen that coming — because I hadn’t taken responsibility for the details of the changes in my income. I had by-passed that responsibility to the money god. Or Ganesha. Or…
In February 2017 my ex had the hugest unprovoked screaming uncontrolled rage episode I have ever experienced. Ever. It was a Sunday, sunny and I was in the kitchen preparing food. She was trapped with increasing immobility, pain and discomfort in her wheelchair in the living room. My yoga and meditation allowed me to remain calm during the explosion. In my mind’s eye I saw her body explode onto all of the tall walls I had painstakingly painted white in the condominium. I saw her blood, guts, brains and body parts splashing and thudding out everywhere. When I finished calmly cutting the vegetables, I put down the knife and went upstairs to be in my space, the library. I was still. I allowed the realisation to settle in that it was time to leave before my being her ‘loving’ caretaker became the agency of her spontaneously combusting or exploding one day. (In 2014, after years of getting a ‘No, it’s not time to leave’ response from The I Ching, when I asked, I had got that ‘Yes’ at last. After which I stopped consulting The I Ching until the day of her explosion that firmed my resolve to leave in 2017.)
After two or three hours I walked down the stairs and calmly told her I would begin arrangements to split. I would find a lawyer the next day. I had the contact of someone I knew who had recently divorced. I used the lawyer whom he had recommended because The I Ching confirmed the validity of that choice for me. On Monday I contacted the lawyer. Note that this was about 10 months after the diet change that had changed my body and mind so profoundly.
For various reasons, the most prominent being a lack of free cash despite this being my fifteen minutes of wealth, it wasn’t until the end of July before I had moved out with the assistance of more great synchronicities. And that date was, now that I think on it, a trust-fall as well. In May I firmly committed to that date without an actual confirmed residence that I could afford. And even as the committed date drew near without a confirmed home I was calm and confident with a spirit-feeling of bodily alignment to what was happening. I see now that I wasn’t coming from blindness; rather it was coming from the truth that my presence was killing myself as much as it was killing my ex. And so it was that ten days before my move-out deadline, as if by ‘chance’, I was given a great place at about half the cost of rentals in that expensive city. It was central and had excellent access to transit, an organic shop not far away, etc.
My Freedom Existence Moves Deeply into Commedia Dell Arte if Only I Can Laugh With It
In the meantime the Universe was still creating a commedia dell’arte of my life. Of our lives.
In an astounding series of events our separation agreement didn’t get signed until the summer of 2018. That was sixteen months after I initiated it. Why so long for something uncontested? The ex delayed getting a lawyer by being extra-nice for about three months, after which she said to me ‘I’ve been nice so maybe you will change your mind about leaving?’ ‘No,’ I replied with my best effort at equanimity. I spoke calmly, without anger or resentment or happiness or joy. Then she began to find a lawyer. The lawyer had to be female because all men are assholes. After finally getting one that met her requirements she was told via a call from the office’s paralegal, about an hour before she was to meet with her for the first time, that her lawyer had been locked in court by the judge and wouldn’t be able to make the meeting. ‘Would another lawyer work for you?’ she was asked. It was a reluctant ‘Yes’.
With this odd event the ex wound up having a male lawyer who approached separation as a war and proceeded to war against me and thus wracked up his hours and created paperwork blockades and the associated delays. His hours were, ultimately, to be paid predominantly from my income.
After that we were delayed because a new evaluation of the condo that was required for the settlement was interrupted by a water leak that needed about three months to repair. Within a week or two of that being completed we were delayed because of the death in France of my lawyer’s mother. It was a messy family situation and she was absent for about two months. A week or two after she got back my ex’s lawyer’s younger brother died suddenly and unexpectedly. They had been close and her lawyer went on an extended bereavement leave for about six weeks. About a week after he came back his dog died and he took another month off to recover from that. Thus it came to pass that we didn’t sit down to final numbers and signing until the late summer of 2018.
Consequences
It would seem that it was important for the me to understand what kind of consequences can arise with spiritual by-passing. And the real world lengths that the Universe will go to assist in that lesson. Losing my teeth hadn’t been quite strong enough, at the time, for me to recognise that loss as a consequence of my irresponsibility and associated disrespect for my body. As to the legal separation it turns out that the laws of my land dictate, with no room for equivocation beyond expensive courts, that my alimony payment to my future ex is a significant percentage of my previous two years of income. And she gets half of my company pension, which if I had been attending the process appropriately I could very well have seen that part modified in some way. So, if the extended delays of signing that agreement hadn’t happened the alimony base would have been about two-thirds what the law dictated. And that did not take into account taxes, and since the alimony payment is after tax income, it was a whomping amount.
I didn’t see that coming not even after I had signed the agreement. With looking back I am astounded at how really blind, ‘spaced-out’ even, I had been throughout the process. My by-pass had completely disconnected me from the reality of the heaviness of it. NB: it is also important to note that part of the by-pass rationale was my firm conviction that with all the horrific bad food, very high blood pressure and all the other problems and dozens of pills a day she took, I did not expect the ex to live for more than two or maybe three years at most.
Post Post Addendum:
Tereza Coreggio expressed in a comment her surprise that alimony payments in Canada not tax-deductible. I seem to inferred something in my writing and so this is to correct that mis-impression with an apology. I’ll clarify that alimony is an income tax deduction and that yes I had the deduction on my taxes. I didn’t think of that detail because I didn’t see a penny of the tax-refund those deductions because they went straight to repay the back-taxes. And because I owned back-taxes, I wan’t able to reduce the tax deduction taking off before payment.
Now to step back a little. Why did the law dictate such an onerous payment schedule? And why didn’t I fight more? A: Because in our 37 years together I had been a nice guy (aka ineffectual doormat) and had not insisted that she work to earn her keep in our life together. Because I hadn’t been forceful enough (as a kind of Taming of the Shrew Petruchio) to insist that she work, by that inaction it meant, obviously, that I was also willing to continue to pay for her expenses in the manner with which we had lived together. Yikes! Uncontrolled shopaholic and feeble minded enabler. LoL! And so it was. I could dispute it in court, at a cost to me of between 25-30,000 dollars or more, against her bull-dog aggressive lawyer who would dig in with great joy to fill his pockets at our expense.
So, reducing that payment was a high cost endeavour with a questionable outcome. And if the payment was reduced by even $1000/month that would take 25-30 months to repay. If! So, since my ex was very very unhealthy at the time with the most horrific diet you can imagine exacerbated with more than a dozen powerful pills per day, most of which she had been consuming for years, I imagined that she wouldn’t be alive for many more than two or three years.
My fifteen minutes of wealth had never felt wealthy and left me with $25k in owed taxes, a disproportionate alimony payment, reduced pension by fifty percent and all the credit card and line-of-credit card debt ‘we’ had created up to the time of separation that amounted to another $50k or so. Interesting.
There Were Warning Signs, Soft Voices, Easily Ignored that Become a Two-by-Four Whack
After learning from Tommy Rosen and R20 in 2016 that I was stuck in the frequency of addiction, I subsequently listened to Tommy and many of his compatriots in addiction recovery talk about ‘the story’, ‘the narrative’ that addicts use to keep themselves blind and powerless. In 2017 my sister hinted at the nature of my by-pass story in the most subtle and powerful of ways. It was while returning to her home after a great walk along a roaring BC river. I had finished retelling my money story, of the near-miss insolvencies and the Universe’s wicked sense of humour. Even I had started to see that it had become a polished, truly staged sort-of stand-up wanna-be comic monologue. ‘You know,’ she said to me, ‘I’ve heard that exact story a few times now.’ That was a truth-slap and I knew it. ‘That is a sign,’ she added, ‘of your co-dependency.’ Yikes! A spotlight had been shone into one of my shadows. I knew that she was correct. ‘And,’ she added, ‘that when we are not centred ‘letting go’ in the way you did with money, for example, was opening you up for Life to really kick your ass.’ Yup. I understood it, intellectually and enough more deeply to be embarrassed at being caught out repeating the monetary story of my ‘true’ life. However, it wasn’t enough of a slap to wake me from my by-pass slumber that went much deeper than the actions and speech patterns of co-dependency that rely on repetition and disallow spontaneous appropriate eccentric action. Going forward I hung on to that story. And I was careful not to retell to her.
Life Really Does Have a Pointed, Delightful and Wicked Sense of Personalised Humour
So, now what? It is 2024 and the ex is still alive and healthier in most ways than she was for more than twenty of our joint thirty-seven years. As soon as I left I wasn’t there to ‘blame’ and she took some responsibility for her health. After watching me and how I went from obese to thin she proceeded to change her diet in much the same way I had and what she had refused to do while I was there cooking for that change. Within a year of my leaving she had lost more than 45 kilos (100 pounds) on her small 150cm (4’11) talls body. The junk food was gone and she eliminated most of her deadly pills. She said her doctor actually cried when she saw the changes!
The Positives
1) My large alimony payment is mostly being used by her to pay the mortgage of the condo we didn’t sell and which she continues to live in. We split ownership instead of selling and splitting the capital. And so the biggest hurt has been that my cash flow problems continue. And, if all goes well with real estate up to when I turn 65 — that is when legally I can force the sale of the condo — it is conceivable that I could then be financially comfortable. (Of course, the great reset’s planned financial collapse may intervene and so… [shrug.] As life post-injection-rejection has made clear, there are the plans of humans and mice and the gods simply laugh.)
2) If the alimony hadn’t been so onerous I may have struggled to hamster wheel myself in Canada after choosing to remain uninjected. And with that I would have missed out on the experiences that provided me with the circumstances, conditions, opportunities and encounters to live spiritual-life-as-body as expression of spirit or soul.
3) Equally I would have missed out discovering the amazing joy and beauty of these Mexican people who are calm in their humanity and go mostly placidly and contentedly within this theatre stage we call life. They are human! For example the people across from me are often yelling at each other and upsetting their three young children. And there is alcoholism and all the other expressions of human struggle with the challenges of somatic dualism and distresses. And yet there is a joy that is completely absent from gringo Americans. The many gringos who have spent time here all have the same comment, and shake their heads at the absolute bullshit lies ‘proper’ gringo news and government agencies ascribe to Mexicans. [Headshake.] The more I live, the more I see that likely if something has passed through ‘proper’ news lips and/or the presses, it is a lie. Until convid I had kind of thought there was some truth in the news at least some of the time. And that the problem I had with it, and why I stopped all news input, was I had no way to sort the truth from the gaslighting shit. Now I can rest easy: it is all gaslighting toxic shit with an agenda to stupefy, numbify, desensitise, and predictively program the readers, viewers and listeners in some way.
4) Now I see and bodily understand how important a clue our stories are at exposing our shadows, and spiritual by-passes. And now I see it more easily in other people, without it being a projection. That now gives me compassion, understanding and joy in life as a shared journey and not one of absolute ‘truth-false’, ‘right-wrong’, ’hero-villain’. I see in other people and in myself that it is the telling of a practiced well-loved and oiled narrative that is showing us the door into the shadow, the gateway to freedom. As soon as we take full responsibility for that narrative.
5) Finally I would like to think that I’m not any-more in monetary (or other) spiritual by-pass. I practice living in the moment with my body as soul guide. (That is still, at times, giving directions that are absolutely antithetical to so-called ‘proper’ financial, dietary, and/or exercise directives: and yet, I feel more alive, connected, strong, effective and helpful than I ever have.) I no longer need to be right about anything and I look at the contents of my thinking and imaginative mind with curiosity, now, not a reverent or apprehensive need to be sure they are right and/or aligned or contrarian with the righteous. I am open to being totally responsible for appropriate eccentric action and learning from those times when I’ve exercised inappropriate eccentric action in this moment-point, that time of now that is lived by my body as the sacred expression of the soul.
Here is my edit to Blake’s brilliant observation:
The man who never alters his narrative displays his standing water, and breeds the reptiles of the mind he sees in others.
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Part 4 continues here:
No Gout About It, Outing An A-List Health Myth And Other Premature Elations
Playlists:Spotify
YouTube Music
YouTube Talking
Song of the Essay
Freedom!
La la la la la la la la la [x4]
[Verse 1:]
Hold on to me
Don't let me go
Who cares what they see?
Who cares what they know?
Your first name is Free
Last name is Dom
Cause you still believe in where we're from
Man's red flower
It's in every living thing
Mind use your power
Spirit use your wings
[Chorus:]
Freedom! [x3]
Freedom [x3]
[Verse 2:]
Hold on to me
Ooh don't let me go
The cheetahs need to eat
Run antelope
Your first name is King
Last name is Dom
Cause you still believe in everyone
When a baby first breathes
When night sees sunrise
When the whale hops the sea
When man recognizes
[Chorus:]
Freedom! [x3]
Freedom [x2]
Breathe in
[Verse 3:]
We are from heat
The Electric one
Does it shock you to see, he left us the sun?
The atoms in the air
Organisms in the sea
The Sun, and yes, man
Are made of the same things
Freedom! [x3]
Freedom [x5]
Humans are so incredible. Out of this massively distorted world, we find meaning, often post grinding misery, and constantly rewrite our stories and our understanding and then whops, let's do that again.
It's impossible to be a healthy sovereign being in this world without creating all kinds of by-passes, check-outs, and all the rest of it. We don't know what we don't know but proceed because we must.
I think of Nicola Tesla and Vincent van Gogh. So much brilliance and feeling and commitment in a world that couldn't really receive them, wasn't set up for them, yet beautiful, sad legacies.
Somewhere inside I think most of us know this is a temporary experience, (what's really ours can't be lost) and that embodied life is both precious and fragile yet so confining compared to our larger selves, we battle these two things and all try to find a way to be responsible here while holding it lightly.
You weave so well, Guy. I will go back now and listen to your playlist. Best.
What a journey, Guy. You're hard on yourself for not making the right choices but it's hard to see what good choices were there to make. The divorce process is a major part of the dysfunction in our economic system. Curious that Canada doesn't make alimony deductible. Trump made that change here, that it wasn't, for divorces after 2018, when mine was finalized after 30 months of negotiation. That was a bonanza year for lawyers because everyone, even those on the fence about getting divorced, suddenly needed to do it that year. The lack of deductibility makes no sense. I've really puzzled over what benefit it has to the overseer class. Glad you made it through to the place you are now.