Dear Claude Epistle #6.1 A Un Padre Muerto - Ira Y Una Muerte Cercana Cerca El Día De Los Muertos§
The Pain Of Anger In The Hip Hops Over to a Montaignesque† Synchronicity Blitz, a Foray of Fauré Balls
§To a Dead Father — Anger And A Near Death Near The Day Of The Dead
†Introduction á là Montaigne: Really, Introduction to an Epistle? Really? Read on to See Why
As with the last epistle to you Claude, my dead father, with this one I wound up circling around and editing it several, and eventually, scores of times — and it became too big to stay as a one act synchronicity play. Thus it is not really an essay nor really a letter. A Montaignesque word dance, perhaps in the fullest sense of that word, since Montaigne edited all of his essays and perhaps some of his letters dozens or even scores of times even up to his death. It seems that I have, perhaps unwittingly, given this epistle enough time to breathe and with that space enough for it to continue to expand into a multi-part verbal ball room, blitzed with an expansive folly of perverse synchronicities. Often badly punned. With that I was faced with a dreadful privileged white man’s choice, a real life and death decision to make: alienate readers by including these puns and synchronicities that somehow managed to traipse into a trumped up Trump-dancer on feet of clay? Or play it safe within the gritty bounds of my intention to write to you of your anger in my hip? Both?
And to realise that this horrible decision is to be made subsequent to my having denounced all expertise as untrustworthy authority. Who to ask, now? That leaves me stuck with me, my body and I as guides into appropriate — or not — a-moral-pun behaviour. Or is that ‘to be not to be’ — an a-pun-moral eccentric and synchronistic behaviour?
A Guide to Those Reading This ’Thing’ Who Are Not My Father
As this epistle morphed between letter and essay and as the eccentric synchronicities interposed or imposed themselves with increased frequency and potency, it became increasingly difficult to incorporate them — which seemed somehow central to the thrust of my sitting here with you. Eventually I called the synchronistic intrusions ‘intercessions’ to help the narration. And I’ve given this writing-form the neologism lets-say for letter-essay.
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Intercession #1: Going Into and Out of Yogic Calmness, Men Meeting the Spirit and Ghosts of Tobacco Exit the Hip Stage Right and So Much More
As will become clear as you read this lets-say it has been for me … what? Troublesome, unruly and truly an epitome of the true karmic (in)appropriate eccentricity of life, Life as Gautama Buddha’s dependent co-arising, Life as synchronicity wherein I start in an intended direction and arrive into an alternative universe — México instead of Nicaragua, Spanish instead of the French of our ancestry! Or some things difficult to describe. A seemingly never ending loop or möbius strip of strangely attracted fractals. This lets-say thing began on October 15th and today it is November 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and before I finish this it is likely to be, now, hopefully done by the end of this day, a day not necessarily determinate by that written intention of this now.
The synchronicities continued even as I suspended documenting them in this lets-say. In late October I followed my intuitive-body guidance to revise and to create the audio for, the 2022 essay
![Q: 'I agree that [yogic calmness] is important, so how do we account for all the yoga teachers who fly Ukraine flags and require masks in their studios?' — Audio](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F151307402%2F6ff5e93c-9396-4d86-97c2-56d33c091334%2Ftranscoded-1730953510.png)
A: Yoga as Drug.
And in that edit what began as a simple audio transcription was like here festooned with new synchronicities.
In that essay I argue that most people who teach and practice so-called yoga, perhaps especially in the west, are in spiritual by-pass. Funny, today on the 18th, into my head popped an image of you directing us to begin a meditation practice! And for a while Sathya Sai Baba had a place in our life too. Wow, so vague! What other memories are … waiting to appear like magic out of the vibhuthi (sacred) ashes that Sai Baba would make?
Many students and teachers of yoga do not have a core equanimity and the associated engaged warm-hearted stoic indifference to social opinion and authoritarian manipulations that the true yogi / yogini has. This idea became a multi-part synchronicity later, when I was sent an email linking me to a podcast with energetic teacher Joel Schafer. In the interview he described the same phenomenon with people studying the shamanic spiritual path in his interview with Kelly Brogan called ‘Are you REALLY awake? Or are you dreaming?’ I’ve documented the synchronicity in detail further down in this lets-say even though it happened earlier. I’ll publish that instalment in the near future.
Apocalyptic proof of this lack of yogic centredness was, when push came to propagandised psyop shove, that these ‘yoga’ practitioners, with complete lack of self-awareness and cold-hearted indifference to their own compassion for others, jumped to aggressively finger-point and actively scapegoat the uninjected. Seemingly without hesitation or shame they willingly participated with more or less overt or covert shaming and shunning practices as agents for the government, and government as pharmaceutical shill, to encourage compliance and obedience to an oligarchic authority.
These are yoga-modoki, not true yogis / yoginis even when their perfect asanas (postures) and 200hr yoga courses give the appearance that they are. Instead of being warm-heartedly indifferent to the authorities who inhumanely took away personal medical autonomy, employment, travel and shared social activities, it was to be a cold hearted mockery of yogic equanimity. Their actions created and/or exacerbated suffering in the lives of the uninjected, those who had become an undeserving-other to be disrespected, disregarded and dehumanised. And, although it is from my limited experience and purview of the experiences of others I have met or know, few yoga teachers expressed in some way an equanimous f-you independence from the demanded convid social conformity, let alone acted on or inspired in others that yogic equanimous independence that is the core purpose of so-called ‘real’ yoga.
Lets-Say Intercession #1 Ends
Intercession #2: Men Meeting the Spirit and Ghosts of Tobacco — Exit the Hip-Pain Stage Right and Enter Stage Left the I Ching for More
And on the 1st of November, more than two weeks ago now, I experienced yet another astounding synchronicity. Perhaps even more extraordinary than the one I experienced and documented earlier: it happened earlier in time, last month, although now it reside further downstream within this lets-say. With the Nov 1st synchronicity I experienced yet another example, and another unnecessary confirmation, of fractal dependency co-arising to gleefully mock my time management out of existence, humbling my arrogance: it is impossible to hold synchronicity to constraints of the gritty pettiness of linear time even when that time gets down and dirty to the twisting of the laws of motion and and gravitas.
And this latest one is particularly delightful to me because it arose out from what C.G. Jung considered to be the universe’s — whatever that is — synchronicity detecting method, the casting of the I Ching.
As is synchronicity’s wont it began a few days before the men’s meet. During this meet the topic of fathers was still full of energy and potency from the previous meets. I came to it with having had a strange experience a couple days earlier. I intuited at the time that you, Claude, were a contributing participant with my writing this let’s-say. I felt that I was struggling to breathe with a choking feeling on what smelled like cigarette smoke not physically present and found my hands rubbing a toe joint in my right foot that felt like gout. Both symptoms occurred at the same time for most of the night. Both were gone when I awoke the next morning.
I could tangibly taste and smell the smoke — Buckingham or roll your own Drum, maybe — the two brand names that I remember you enjoyed. And the gout in my right foot was unexpected because of my diet and practices and the infrequency of it appearing in the last four years. And more recently that that gout had come up in a family constellation session I had in July in which my maternal grandfather came to assert that that was his signal in me of his presence in my life and that he was going to remove it going forward. So, how did that happen, this two, two for the price of one sensory experiences in my body? And these specific sensations suggested to me that the energy-spirit of you (the smoke) and your father-in-law, my maternal grandfather (the gout) were present within my somatic experience that night. Intuitive muscle-testing confirmed that that was the case.
So, forward to the meeting: at one point in the mens’ meeting the detail of who in attendance had dead fathers was a topic of interest within the broader discussion of a failure of fathers to bless their sons and the importance of that failure. A majority of the people in attendance had not been blessed by their fathers and were now fatherless. Furthermore the majority of them, like you, died very young. As last week was within the time of el Día de los Muertos de Oaxaca, which has a tremendous energy here, I came to the idea of doing a tobacco ceremony after the meeting for you and my grandfather. And I offered to those at the meeting that I would extended it to their dead fathers too, if that was okay with them. It was. (On hindsight now, I didn’t think to ask you or Laurence for your okay or not.)
So, after the meeting and following my body’s guidance on how to proceed with the tobacco ceremony, a process of which I am completely ignorant, I found myself sitting on a crudely made zafu on the floor inside the small cabaña. I had a small fire in a broken pan beside me. I’ve not done that before — open fire in the house. And also beside me was the I Ching and associated casting sticks because, while preparing to do the ceremony, it came to me to do an I Ching casting at the same time. The ceremony went well, although it turned out that tending the small fire precluded me doing the casting while the fire was active. Once the tobacco had been burnt off, the fire had become embers, and the cabaña infused with smoke, I proceeded to do the casting. I addressed the sage as follows:
…
I guess, since we didn’t really talk — maybe I’ll ask you, Claude my dead father, what do you want to share with me via the I Ching — and in return for listening, although without it being a condition, I ask you to clear out from my body your anger. I have carried it for long enough. [Then I addressed the Sage of the I Ching, thus:]
Hola, Sage. I feel a little tired. The fire is now embers. The wood and tobacco smoke is clearing from the cabaña. And the smoke is also for the five other dead fathers in the men’s group. Dear Sage, what does Claude want to release from himself, to share with me, in order to be more free? And I ask from him to release from my body his anger (edited for clarity here).
Intercession #2.1: Another I Ching to Check That I’m on the Right Path
As the days passed into edit after edit, I asked an on-line I Ching casting page: ‘Is it appropriate for me to continue my essay as I am doing it?’ Answer: 33 Hsien / Attraction ‘Supreme success’ becomes 36 Ming I / Eclipsing the Light ‘Stay true to your course, despite the visible obstacles ahead’. Okay. No ambiguity or metaphysical or metaphorical leaps with that! I’ll stay on eccentric synchronistic course.
Lets-Say Intercession #2.1 Ends
Resume Intercession #2, ‘Men Meeting the Spirit and Ghosts of Tobacco … I Ching for More’
Result:
55 ‘Abundance’ ☳ above chên / the arousing, thunder ☲ below li / the clinging, fire becomes 15 ’Humility’. ☷ above k’un / the receptive, earth ☶ below kên / keeping still, mountain
From 55 ‘Abundance’:
…
The midday sun soon sets. The full moon soon wanes. Heaven and Earth fill and empty, ebb and flow according to their proper seasons. And isn’t this even more true for people, more true for ghosts and spirits?
From 15 ’Humility’:
…
It is the way of Heaven to reduce excess and augment humility, the way of Earth to transform excess and spread humility. It is the way of ghosts and spirits to ravage excess and enrich humility, the way of people to despise excess and love humility (I Ching, translated by David Hinton).
Well, what are the chances that the first hexagram that I cast made reference to ‘ghosts and spirits’? On the day after the day of the dead??! Very small. What are the odds that that happened in a casting in which I was addressing you, as a spirit energy of some kind, Claude? Smaller. And beyond that, that shortly after I left home in 1979 you had become an official ghostbuster of houses and homes via the Spiritualist Church in the 1980s? And that you had made it into the Province Newspaper as a ‘ghostbuster’ a year or two before you died? Infinitesimal.
Then what are the chances that that casting would transform to the only other hexagram in the translation that I used that also contained the phrase ‘ghosts and spirits’?! That was so odd, that I scanned the sixty-two other hexagrams in the Hinton translation, twice, to see if ‘ghosts and spirits’ appeared in any other hexagram. I did not see it. And I checked the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of Abundance and Humility. ‘Ghosts and spirits’ was not present. Eventually I did a deep dive to find an on-line pdf version of the complete Baynes/Wilhelm text so that I could easily search it. I confirmed that this, my favourite translation, does not contain ‘ghosts and spirits’. Nor ‘ghosts’s. The word ’spirit’ occurs only as reference to the character or energy of a person or culture. Now I had become a little OCD. A bit more digging added a curious twist, that modern translations have cleaned up the text to remove those kinds of unscientific references. Hinton’s translation is a fall back to pre-post western enlightenment scientific languages:
Down the centuries the accent on ghosts and spirits was removed from the I Ching, such that if you look at the most popular (and still the best) English translation, that of Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, you will find little about spirits, rather the tone is ethical and philosophical, some would even say moral (from the book review by Joel Biroco of Way of I Ching by Stephen Karcher.)
And with that OCD having been triggered, I also did not find ‘ghosts and spirits’ in the other hard copy I have in my tiny library: the terse and fine translation of the I Ching by Frank J. MacHovec.
This particular synchronicity piqued my mathematical curiosity, because it does have some elements that allow for statistical analysis. (And at one time I was a math/physics major.) I even found a page on the web that does these kinds of I Ching calculations, although this particular situation — my asking my dead father’s ghost, who was also a ghostbuster, on a day of the dead and being given from the I Ching the only two hexagrams that refer to ‘ghosts and spirits’ — is not covered. (I’ve left a comment with the blogger because I am curious.) From the blog’s instructions the chance of my getting just the first hexagram, #55 landing on exactly ‘ghosts and spirits’ without the other constraints is about 0.00000319.
What about the other constraints? The chance of my doing this on a day of the dead on top of that is about (21/365)*0.00000319=0.000000184, since the ‘day’ of the day lasts about three weeks overall here and because it was pretty random the timing of the topic of fathers being a focus of the men’s group at the time of el día de los muertos.
And I don’t know how to calculate the chances of the 2nd hexagram being the only other one that refers to ‘ghosts and spirits’. Possibly the same as getting the first one. If so, that would have the odds of 0.00000319*0.000000184=0.00000000000587, which I suspect is high. Then the final(?) statistical element to incorporate is what are the odds that my question would be about me talking with you, or the ghost of you, on a day of or near the day of the dead using the I Ching? There is some statistical chance of that because in epistles I have, in previous years since being in Oaxaca, communicated with my remembrance of you as a kind of ghost. This was the first time I thought of doing that using the I Ching and the first time I actually asked for your help that created something closer to a kind of dialogue, even if rudimentary, instead of being my monologue. And this is the first time I thought of using the I Ching with fire and tobacco. Did my having choked on your energy smoke a few days earlier bring forward or upwards that idea?
As to the other constraints, I don’t know how to calculate them for sure. I suspect that the number of ghostbusters in the world is not nothing and not common. Which brings forward another linked synchronicity: for some reason, for the first time ever a few days ago, YouTube put into my feed an actual exorcist, a high level ghost buster. Why was it there, that first time occurrence with near perfect synchronistic timing? Was it really random or was YouTube noting my writing and/or speaking out loud my lets-say about ghosts and so put to me an exorcist interview as something I might be interested in? Hmmmmm. So, while that may not have come to me with complete randomness — for certainly Google has the ability to listen and likely does — it is still curious that I would go beyond just noting it to actually listening to it. (The interview turned out to be interesting. See ‘Ray Comfort Describes Terrifying Encounter With a Demon-Possessed Woman 'Like a Horror Movie’.’ And I won’t elaborate on it here on how, somehow synchronicity-like, the conclusion by Comfort on successful ‘ghost busting’ goes back to personal responsibility and the quality of equanimous intention, a theme I’ve been exploring in different ways in recent months.)
Addendum on the 18th: YouTube had not, since then, directed anything ‘ghost-like’ towards me, until this morning. Before I resumed editing I heard …
Intercession #2.2: Real World NPCs on TV’s NBC News Anchor as MK-Ultra Plant
I decided to click on someone by the name of The Alchemist, who talks about metaphysical / spiritual aspects of human existence. My click was to listen to her matter-of-fact discussion that within the human realm there exists NPCs, non-player characters. See ‘Non Player Characters Explained (Who are the Backdrop People?)' Just before I wrote that, I heard the following NPC-like reference/question from a socio-political reaction video blogger:
0:35: Markwayne Marin absolutely cooks another one of these bot mainstream media journalists on NPC's [auto translated from NBC in error] ‘Meet the Press’. Now this one is very interesting for a number of reasons. First of all being that I always like to watch the conduct of these sort of mainstream media anchors because I am becoming more and more convinced by the day that they aren’t actually human. …
19:01: I genuinely am beginning to think that these guys are all like these MK-Ultra plants. I mean the first key giveaway is the eyes. You look at the eyes and they tell a story. Really not much going on behind them. And secondly they're like programmed bots and that they all just run the same playbook. They'll ask a question and then as soon as [the guests] start responding, if they say something that they don't like, they are eager to get in there [to interrupt] like a Chinaman at a wet market and they can't let them finish their sentence. And then when they do get in there it's always the same lines: ‘Oh well actually there's no scientific evidence for that’ or ‘We're just going to let the viewers know that there's no evidence for that’ or ‘Actually that's been debunked.’ I mean it's so funny these anchors just all of a sudden become the experts on absolutely everything…. (‘MAGA Patriot DISMANTLES Smug Mainstream Host With Facts!’ RattlesnakeTV.)
Intercession #2.2 Ends
Resume Intercession #2, ‘Men Meeting the Spirit and Ghosts of Tobacco … I Ching for More’
Now to compare those odds with something known: my chance of being struck by lightning before I turn 80 is about 1 in 15,300 or 0.00006536. That is about 355 times greater than my getting just the first hexagram, without it including the 2nd hexagram or that my question was to my dead father’s ghost, or that he was a ghostbuster, or that I did this casting near the day of the dead, or that I watched an exorcist video while writing this. And getting struck by lightning is 11,134,583 times more likely than getting the second and first hexagram on a day of the dead if my statistical guess is correct. That is synchronicity. Well, a lead-in to the beginning of a ‘real’ synchronicity because …
And Beyond That, There is More to Ghosts in That Synchronicity than ‘Mere’ Statistics 1: Meanings of the Hexagrams is Combination and Puer Aeternus
Before I dive into the meaning of words, the symbolism inherent in their meanings, I will add that you had a copy of the Baynes/Wilhelm I Ching in your library. And to the best of my perception of its physical state, it was untouched. I remember being curious about it and being called to it, although at the time I was too young to appreciate it — I was around ten or eleven, I guess. And I do not remember you having ever used it.
The second aspect of the casting is, of course, the deeper meaning(s) behind the words. Claude, I confess to finding them engaging me, at the time, at a level that was doing its best to stay unconscious. Wordless. To at least some extent I felt, without words, that there was something tantalising about ‘abundance’ becoming ‘humility’. What might these two ‘simple’ words mean together ?
In an odd timing I find myself, at this time, in the situation of having just enough money by the slightest margin to pay my alimony and rent for December — if I don’t pay some of the other bills and perhaps resort to eating thin gruel for the last week of November! So… is the I Ching suggesting that I am abundant even without money? This does feel resonant with me.
And ‘abundance becomes humility’ is an intriguing way to phrase this, because an old definition of ‘becomes’ is ‘to be suitable for’ or ‘to be appropriate with’: humility is appropriate abundance? Or humility is that which is appropriate to create abundance? Hmmmmmm. That has a much stronger resonance across a few octaves of my life.
This hints at a peculiar expression of your life in our family: your intellect was hugely abundant and now, looking back, had an arrogance to it. For example, your harsh dismissal of the university intellectuals of Quebec. Was that part of your choosing to be disengaged from life with your wife and children? Intellectual arrogance to isolate from life is, as described by Marie-Louise von Franz, one of the significant characteristic of the eternal boy in the body of a man. And, at the same time you lacked the ability, the fortitude, strength to stand up as a man within the immediate or extended family circles.
Back when I was reading about the eternal boy lost in the paradise of childhood in Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle With the Paradise of Childhood by Marie-Louise von Franz, I saw clearly how much of that eternal boy-energy von Franz described was you. I saw how it had manifested in your life as near complete infatuation with the power of thought and ideas as a means to separate the ‘boy’ from the terrible mother, the wife that was devouring you. And how that divorced you from physical reality as husband and father and human. And that precluded you from developing into a matured masculine vitality that could seize your life from your narcissistic wife. I saw this clearly because, shocking as it was for me to realise at that time, that had become exactly how I was living: books, ideas, and disengagement from physical intimacy with my body and with others, including my partner. And the inability to be man enough to live my life, to keep my self from being devoured by the terrible mother, the narcissistic wife. (For the curious, here is a video of the Jungian idea of Puer Aeternus.)
And Another Beyond That, There is More to Ghosts in Synchronicity than ‘Mere’ Statistics 2: Do People Really ‘Despise Excess and Love Humility’?
At first the second part of ‘It is the way of ghosts and spirits to ravage excess and enrich humility, the way of people to despise excess and love humility’ was not obvious to me. It has taken a few days and some interesting synchronicity encounters to perhaps bring some clarity of meaning to me. That process began with something my sister wrote in response to my having shared the casting and its synchronicity with her in an email. She initiated a huge ‘aha’ that brought to me the awareness that to be humble is the way — perhaps the only way — to receive abundance because those lacking humility are already full (of themselves) and so there is no space in their hearts, minds and spirits for abundance to enter.
Note that my use of the word abundance includes much more than just material well-being. It is not just money and the things of gritology — as Clif High criticises the practices of contemporary physics to delimit our reality as only grit. Perhaps, most importantly, it includes the fullness of life in all aspects, because we all know or know of very arrogant people who are monetarily rich yet suffer from a dearth of living life well. And the contrary, too.
As I considered this more deeply, it came to me that abundance is to be in a state of equanimity in the mind-body-spirit continuum because that is what creates the space within ourselves that sees that abundance is the natural state of our existence. Life is abundance. Life is dependent co-arising. Life is synchronicity, even in this little thing I am creating within life, this tiny epistle from a son to a father that has gone off the rails into flush synchronicity.
And when I came back to edit the let’s-say, on the 10th, it was after reading and commenting on an example of the hubris of excess in the USA Democratic Party. And how that excess of money and arrogance contributed to their being ravaged on the November 6th election. Here is what I read and commented:
When you consider what the modern Democratic Party has become, you begin to understand how they lost touch with their base. At the home of a major donor, a billionaire who lives in a mansion overlooking San Francisco Bay, I listened to the speakers hoping to raise funds for the 2022 midterms. Waiters dressed in black with silver trays bounced between wealthy elites. The speakers outlined their strategy for winning the midterms and the 2024 election saying: ‘We no longer want to win the working class. We don’t need those people anymore. They’re gone forever. The future will be young Latinos and people of colour. ¶I was infuriated by this talk. I also thought: That is going to be a good way to get Donald Trump reelected.’ (‘I Raised $50 Million for the Democrats. This Week, I Voted for Trump.: The Democratic Party turned its back on me and my family long before I turned my back on it’ by Evan Barker. And in my comment I compared that statement to the hubris of the French Aristocracy having triggered the French Revolution by a similar contemptuous comment at a sumptuous party. At least as per our commonly accepted version of that history, correct or not.)
And then a day later, I heard this: ‘Kamala Harris is in the news this week for, among other reasons, having run her billion dollar campaign down to the studs … she's reportedly $20 million in debt after fruitlessly blowing through a billion dollars. … [S]he blew the vast majority of that last 20 million on big name celebrity entertainers. … For example, Oprah's production company hosted a Harris town hall-like meeting. When asked about getting paid to host the Harris promotion Oprah said ‘No I didn't get paid anything.’ However Oprah didn't mention that her company, Harpo, got paid a million dollars!’ (‘Megyn Kelly on Shocking Details About What Kamala's Campaign Paid For the Oprah Town Hall and More’ my rephrase for brevity and clarity).
The following day, now Nov 14th, there is more on people despising excess: ‘… I am admittedly big mad, big mad because I just found out that Beyoncé allegedly got paid $10 million for that pathetic little endorsement of Kamala Harris. What was it? Three minutes? $10 million for three minutes of her life. And she's not the only one who allegedly got paid in a major way (‘Beyoncé Was Paid $10 Million For A 3 Minute Endorsement?! | Candace Ep 103’).
Before Intercession #2 Ends, Claude, I Humbly Submit Humility Synchronicity Intercession #2.3 For Your Perusal and Consideration
At almost the exact time I was writing and editing the original part of the above, a ‘humility test’ came into my email at 1:30am on November 13th: Intellectual humility test for the ConspiracyTest.org critical thinking experts.
From:
As critical thinking expert, Jesse Richardson, states, the key to critical thinking isn't knowledge of logic and understanding of cognitive biases, it's intellectual humility’… .
‘People can be extremely intelligent, have taken a critical thinking course, and know logic inside and out. Yet they may just become clever debaters, not critical thinkers, because they are unwilling to look at their own biases.’ — Carole Wade, cognitive psychologist (my emphasis and near perfect description of the democrats pre and post US election).
And that arrogance of reason and logic is one of the key Puer Aeternus characteristics, asserts ML von Franz. Men in particular get enamoured, siren-like, with logic, debate and intellectual concepts without willingness to self-reflect. And at this time that mien is in full force in our face with the reasoned vitriolic displays by ‘trusted’ men of authority and/or the legacy media in contrast with tears and head shaving of the women to the fascinating downstream effect of the US democrats having lost the presidency to a ‘fascist, racist, misogynist, orange-man clownish buffoon’.
All around are calls for the losers to self-reflect. And that triggers them back into an infantile (puer aeternus) arrogant blaming of everyone but themselves for the election result: the electorate are being stupid, ignorant, racist, misogynist or whatever. The best the dems can say is that ‘we failed to get our message out’ or ‘we need to learn to talk to them.’ Both phrases unambiguously show that they are coming from absolute arrogance because neither statements have the humility to simply commit themselves to listening person-to-person. And they turn to polls and focus groups to create arrogant and condescending talking points or advertising. To talk down from an intellectual arrogance because the polls have taught them what they are to dictate in order to manipulate, not engage, the other. (A great pointed and very funny summary of that, with a focus on the vote-consequence of feminist man-hating as an important aspect of the democrat ideology that turned away male voters, is ‘"Why Are Men Moving Right?” | The Man Problem’ by Shoe0nHead, aka June Nichole Lapine.)
Lets-say Synchronicity Intercession #2.3 Ends
Resume Let’s-say Intercession #2: Humour Has Synchronicity, and Synchronicity is Humour, so Synchronicity Humbly Triumphed and Elected the Orange Nazi Monster, the Mussolini or Hitler of Our Time — Or So You Are Emphatically Told by the Trumped Democrats Who are Completely Full of Their Delusion of Truth
And despite his money and his bluster and inappropriate language from time-to-time, and despite or because of his human faux pas, Trump actually has the humility and easy energy to talk with people and to laugh openly at and, seemingly, with life and all the foibles of his experience. At the 2024 RNC Tucker Carlson said ‘… ‘Trump is the funniest person I’ve ever met in my life, actually’ (~6:48 ‘Tucker Carlson Rocks the Stage with Epic Speech, Earns Standing Ovation.)
Synchronicity Intercession #2.4 Clown World and the Death of Humour as a Critical Theory Plan
The democrats do not have humour. And in a small synchronicity on the 15th I came across a short exchange between Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay near the end of their long and interesting conversation on the progressive left ideology having ‘gone too far’ and its roots in Marxism, post-modernism and before that. Lindsay discloses that the post-modernists’ plans include the humourlessness of Clown World:
[JL] … So Judith Butler talks about the politics of parody [in order to] give this kind of despair.
[JP] I didn’t know any of that had actually been a laid strategy.
[JL] [The] politics of parody; the clownish forms that irritate the establishment. I remember reading this because, of course, Clown World is the meme on the internet. And l'm reading Marcuse and I stumble on this: ‘take on the clownish forms’. It's like, oh my God, Clown World was a plan, right.
[JP] The only thing about the evil clowns is they're not funny.
[JL] No they're not funny.
…
[JP] They’re not funny! At all. That's quite interesting, too, because one of the things you see about the totalitarian left is they really hate comedians. They love parody but they hate comedy. [Konstatin Kisin became a social commentator beyond just being a British comedian because, in part, he saw that same abhorrence from the left of comedians in Britain. For example, see, from 2019, Do We Need to Censor Humour? | Good Morning Britain.]
…
[JL] [And the parody,] it's always dark or almost intentionally stupid or destructive. Every time. Every time. Grotesque, frequently (~1:46:58’ You are the Target | James Lindsay | EP 367’. Slightly edited for clarity.)
And humour is a key element of synchronicity, in my experience and also in those I’ve read about and listened to. (A good book on synchronicity, with humour and a lot more is There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives by Robert H. Hopcke.) Perhaps humour is a mark of abundance and humility at the same time? Interesting, because the woke left are deadly serious and at the same time contemptuous and filled with hypocrisy and over-the-top bat shit crazy hyperbole and hypocrisy. Really? Hitler and Mussolini? So full — some might say full of bs — that in general they do not have even the capacity to hear anything but their humourless and frequently pernicious echoes.
So… without initially seeing the connection, my being puzzled at ‘the way of people [is] to despise excess and love humility’ was instantly, somewhat humorously and with crystal clarity addressed by connecting it to tangible real world socio-political events of the day. Claude, that is synchronicity.
Lets-Say Synchronicity Intercession #2.4 Ends
Intercession #2 Resumes: And Perhaps Another Synchronicity Event with the I Ching On How Abundance Becomes Humility and Death
A friend I talk with frequently called last week. I told him of my getting near to a financial bottom for this month. He suggested that one of the reasons I am short of funds, right now, is a certain arrogance that isn’t willing to attend to my situation ‘properly’.
That is a valid concern for sure, I replied. How do I know that I’m not blind, lost in my own avidyà, to being inappropriately eccentric in my thoughts, words and actions?
Synchronicity intercession #2.5, ‘How Do you Know You’re Not Crazy?’ Jordan Peterson asks James Lindsay
[JP] Okay so how do you know you're not just crazy?
[JL] I ask myself that a lot too and I don't know that I have a really great answer for that. (~1:48:01 You are the Target | James Lindsay | EP 367’.)
And two days after I wrote that, after I finished the absolute last edit of this lets-say and before I posted it, a James Lindsay discourse came into my purview. It was his deconstruction of Hegel’s dialectical arguments regarding the contrast of experience and the idea of ideal as the means of moving our understanding towards something approximating ultimate truth of the knowledge of good and evil. (My paraphrase; see. ‘The Dialectical Faith of Leftism | James Lindsay’.) It is both fascinating and an important, perhaps even critically important, examination of the religious and Gnostic roots and nature of woke/marxism.
Lets-Say Synchronicity Intercession #2.5 Ends
Synchronicity Intercession 2 Resumes: ‘Another Synchronicity Event with the I Ching….’ How to Know Whether or Not I am Crazy
My friend’s concern, and Peterson’s question, are valid. Perhaps the most valid, because they cut to the heart of both Gautama’s and Patañjali’s practice: how do we know that what we see as true really is true? And, equally importantly, how do we know if what we see as false is in reality true? These questions, perhaps more importantly, the questing to answer these questions, is the heart of yoga. The fluctuations of the mind become increasingly calm the more our thoughts, words and actions have a coherence with our experience of physical reality.
I like to keep ideas in somatic life, to my experiences of life, in order to know that what actually is happening is recognised as the truth. A contemporary example: since the crash and burn of the US Democrats on Nov 6th, many of the most outspoken and echoed defenders of the Democrats’ ideology of what constitutes democratic ‘truth’ are continuing to be pundits of that delusion. Pretty much all of the legacy media’s amplified voices had prognosticated a Harris victory. Since delusion crashed into reality — some brave groups had warned of a crash and burn — they have, in ostensibly a state of cognitive dissonance at the scale of the incoherent event, been in an aggressive campaign to deny that they have hit the deluded addict’s bottom. By ‘bottom’, I mean that their experience of reality is so incoherent with their ungrounded expectations, ie delusions, of how reality is or what they expected it to be, that they have a choice between waking up and learning, or denying reality and dying. In my experience most people choose death to real change because real change means the very difficult act of letting a false-truth die. And that is far more painful than letting the body or an organisation die. The latter is easily rationalised with finger pointing at something or someone that provides the lazy absolution by oneself from oneself of personal responsibility for the situation.
And what has been the result of this kind of incoherence between progressive liberal (democratic) ideology and reality: the lunacy displayed by ‘truth’ screamers and, more importantly, the reality of measurement. For a thorough look at how the dems numbers don’t add up and are a possible indicator that their days are numbered, ie have been trumped by TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) see ‘The Dems Are WAY More F£@%ed Than You Think’.
Back to my experience. For me to know that I am not crazy is to have the courage to see my experiences, as they are, without any sort of self deception or illusion. And with that courage, to begin to see how the synchronicities of my life are the greatest touchstone of staying sane in an insane world. What do I mean by ‘insane world’? We live in a world that has rationalised as ‘good’ child mutilation towards a freedom of sexual expression, while condemning the immorality of the genital mutilation of girls subject to female circumcision done to free them from the sin of sexual pleasure. We live in a world that puts miso-paeds (child rapists) in prison for sexual perversion and at the same time put into grade schools homosexual pornography. These are two of many examples today. There is no coherence between the ideologies being expressed at a scale of hypocrisy that, on the surface, is impossible to imagine by anyone not addicted to their delusion.
Regarding delusion. In a small synchronicity I recently watched Jordan Peterson share the answer he got when he asked democrats the question ‘How does the left know they have gone too far?’ ‘Bill Maher & Jordan Peterson | How 'Trumpism' was created by the Far Left’. No one he asked had an answer. And that emptiness of self-reflection is on full display now as many amplified voices in the dying legacy media continue to blame their defeat on the racism, sexism, and misogyny of stupid people. And in another small synchronicity, James Lindsay argues well that the progressive ideologues of critical-theories have no end to their limits, which coheres with Peterson’s experience with the Democrats who are unable or unwilling to answer ‘when is enough enough?’ Or even, ‘What is a woman?’ See ’James Lindsay | Woke Culture Has Not Gone Too Far - 6/8 | Oxford Union’ [because its philosophical structure has no end until total social destruction has been achieved].
Now back to my friend’s concern that my current state of monetary dearth is the result of an arrogance that I am not seeing. To help me look at that possibility I queried my body because I am concerned that I could well be suffering from not seeing what is true. I have indeed done exactly that a lot, even for most, of my life, after all. How can I trust that I am not stuck in yogic / spiritual by-pass? To what extent is my essay a kind of criticism that is my projection of my spiritual bypass? And that was a significant part of the subject in what I edited and wrote about in my inquiry into Spiritual Bypass and Yoga as Drug. My body’s intuitive test process insists that I am fine and that I have no need to be anxious about money, despite its dearth in this now. And that I am in fact abundant in life. And in my revised version of ‘Q: I agree that [yogic calmness]… A: Yoga as drug.’ I addressed that concern with another Q&A: I asked and then answered with a certainty that could easily be deluded arrogance:
… how do we, any of us, know we are awake, I mean really awake? How do we know we aren’t asleep still, that we have with absolute confidence mistakenly trusted as true something that is false? … The answer comes, in my experience, with the quality and direction of the synchronicities we get: synchronicities are the connections between intuition, appropriate eccentric actions and interactions with the world and with our selves. And wonderfully they are frequently funny.
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Intercession #2.6: The Tightness of Money as Trust-Falling Rite of Spiritual Passage. Another Synchronicity? Really?
This afternoon, Nov 17th, I talked via the internet with a friend I hadn’t talked to in almost a year so it was a catching up with each other conversation. And when I explained the money situation and why, LB, who has been on a high level spiritual truth quest for a very long, commented that every person she knows who has been on a clear-eyed and dedicated spiritual path has spent time with little or no money. Being broke for a while, she has concluded, is a part of the process of being in ‘trust fall’ — my phrase — with the Universe. Whatever that is.
Yesterday, going back to Lindsay and Peterson. Lindsay shares how when he made the decision to dedicate his life to researching the roots of critical race theory, that he didn’t know if there was money for it. He wanted to quit his work as a massage therapist. He went to his wife:
[JL] … Can I dedicate all of my time to studying this and telling the world about it as fast as I can learn about it. And she, being a woman of great practicality and wisdom, said ‘Can you make money doing that?’ … And I said I don't know.
…
She gave me a runway: ‘You have 18 months to figure that out and if we get to the end of 18 months — and she's a woman so 18 months is 15 months in reality. So we got about to month number 15 and it got a little rocky. … I'm completely crowd supported other than the speaking fees and so I —
[JP] You're actually an autonomous intellectual.
[JL] Correct. … I did this very intentionally so that nobody can tell me I have to shut up. And because things have to be said and I don't know what has to be said but I can't be told to shut up when I have to say it. And I can't have anybody, some think tank guy looking over my shoulder saying just don't go there don't insult so and so we're not going to drag that into the light. I can't have any of that.
And so I wrote myself a salary check at month number 16, that was the whopping total for 16 months of effort to try to build the beginnings of this of $2,000. This is my big oil money.
[JP] $2,000 is not zero (~1:25:41 ‘You are the Target | James Lindsay | EP 367’.)
Lets-Say Intercession #2.6 Ends.
Conclusion to Episode 1 of Epistle #6 to Claude, My Dead Father
And thus I come to the end of a long part 1 of a lets-say that will be composed of I don’t know how many parts. Although at least one more. The next section moves into Castaneda, Giant Snails fighting Christian Knights, and venom. And so many more synchronicities begun and punned together.
Song of the Essay
Miriam Makeba — Quit It.
Request for Help
In July of 2024 I had unexpected pacemaker surgery that cleaned out my savings.
I requested donations to help me through the pinch. I anticipate that my immediate threat of insolvency will be cleared before the end of the year.
If you have come to this essay before January 1, 2025, and you are in position to help and would like to, you can check out the details of that in the link in the post. Once my yoga based trauma recovery centre is given the green light with confirmation of my residency, I anticipate the need for immediate financial help will disappear. As the situation changes I will update my requirements. At this time, I’m about 1/3 of what I anticipate is required. So if you are curious and would like to help me, please consider my request for donations and give an amount, if you are called to do so, that gives you joy. I appreciate and am grateful for you giving me your consideration.
I give my deep appreciation to you for sharing your valuable, perhaps even precious, time with me.
All The Best With What Is Changing. Everything Changes! With Peace, Respect, Love And Exuberant Joy.
🙏❤️🧘♂️☯️🧘♂️❤️🙏