As Above, So Below

 

(Author’s note: After six novels in under five years I promised myself I’d take a little break between installments of the Mourning series I’m writing, and that lasted all of three days before I started the third novel. I wanted to spend some time going through my files and posting some old and interesting stuff, including some short stories or novel fragments if I can find them, but scenes from the new novel kept jumping in my head. Life of a writer I suppose, but perhaps I can do both things and spend a little time celebrating the 20^th anniversary of The Turtle’s Voice blog. In many ways I’m not much different than I was twenty years ago, and some ways my thinking has altered quite a bit. Of course if we don’t change as we age then I’m not sure we are growing and moving forward, and the world has certainly changed in the last twenty years, although many of its problems are still the same.

 

This piece made me chuckle when I found it buried in a file from 2007, and I believe I wrote it about the militarization of small town police forces that I saw happening after 911 and The Patriot Act. In the tiny town in North Carolina where we lived back then I saw the local PD change, adding the ram bars to their vehicles, changing their uniform from tan and brown to solid black, and parading their tiny tank, a MRAP, and other military type vehicles around town. It was a strange time in the world with lots of changes coming fast toward the end of Bush era.)

 

 

 

 

As above, so below, that’s what the old folks say and it’s a simple phrase that contains much wisdom.  Remember as a child that aunt, uncle, or family friend, I think we all had one, who hugged too tight, pinched too hard, or worked to scare the crap out of us at every opportunity?  As children we would avoid them if given the chance, but every time this relative visited we’d have to say ‘hello’ and the cycle would be set in motion again.

 

We’d tell our parents we didn’t like this person and they would chuckle, because they remembered suffering through this odd family member’s affection, but since they survived the uncomfortable intrusion, they figured we would as well.  So each holiday or get together we walked stiff legged, braced and prepared, across the room to say hello.  And when we had our own kids we also sent them on that long walk.  Luckily now this person is old and maybe doesn’t pinch so hard anymore, but it is family and we must treat our elders with respect. 

 

The perspective of children fascinates me, and perhaps like animals they listen to their instincts.  As children our survival instinct tells us to be wary of this person or that person, relation or not, but our parents in a perfect example of doing to us what was done to them override our instincts and demand that we listen to them, not our gut.  Ever watch those funny home videos?  Ever notice how young children respond when seeing Santa Claus for the first time?  The world says it’s funny, but I find it to be quite disturbing because most kids are terrified.  But then the parents step in and explain how Santa is good and brings toys, and once again a child learns not to listen to their instincts.

 

I spend a lot of time reading opinions and lately there has been a lot of talk about folks waking up and realizing that we have all been lied to about various truths.  Often, upon first waking, these folks are in shock and disbelief at how far and wide the lies spread and they are amazed that so few seem aware.  But for me it’s just another example of as above, so below.  As we force our children to ignore their instincts and tell them that the frightening man who watches them all the time is safe, our government does much the same thing to us.  As we force our children into making that long, uncomfortable, walk to the relative they fear, our government does much the same thing by putting us in uncomfortable situations at work, school, and during recreation.  They tell us not to fear the men with guns, tanks, and strange clothes, just as we tell our kids not to fear the man in red with a sack on his back. 

 

Real change occurs on the Home Front, not in the Homeland, and perhaps the wisdom of the Golden Rule is something we are all missing.  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  If we don’t want our government filling our heads with lies and fairy tales, perhaps we should stop doing it to our children.  And if we expect our government to listen to us when a policy scares the crap out of us, perhaps we should hear our children when something we consider ‘normal’ scares the crap out of them. 

 

 

As usual, keep seeking.

 

 

My UFO Sightings

 

As the world is once again focused on space and little gray men, almost as though it is the 60s and 70s again where space travel seemed a real possibility and the movies introduced us to strange beings, I thought I’d share some of my odd UFO experiences. I grew up in the 70s and remember watching the sky a lot, especially up at my grandparents’ house in North Georgia where there wasn’t a lot of light pollution back in those days. My brother and I would set up lounge chairs in the front yard, or lay on a blanket on the grass, and watch the night sky until we were called inside. I don’t remember what I saw there, but I do have recurring dreams of that time, and in the dreams I see plenty.

 

I’ve seen a lot of strange things in the sky over the years, but a few events stand out and those are the ones I’ve thought to share. Earlier in a blog post about my NDE (Near Death Experiences and the Bible) I mentioned experiencing abduction-like events in those years after waking up changed and then dabbling with the occult, so I’ll start there. I am unsure of the exact year or date, but it was a Saturday night somewhere between 2006-2010, and we were living in North Carolina. We had a nice yard there, and our house was over a hundred years old. The property was close to a patch of wetland, and no one would build on that spot in the modern era, the ground was marshy and felt like a marshmallow, seemingly swelling with the rain, and the dirt was dark and rich and good for growing. The house had been rental for decades before we bought it, and I always turned up treasures in the dirt when gardening, mostly toys, silverware, and coins.

 

At the time the conspiracy boards were full of posts about a moving star that was being seen in the western sky. No, it wasn’t Venus, and the light flashed in colors, green, red, blue, yellow, etc., and I was fascinated by it. I saw it most every night after dark, and sometimes it moved, not with the other stars making their slow journey across the night sky, but quick, sudden, jerky movements going against the grain of the usual nightly transit. It must have been summer as I was cooking chicken on the grill, and dinner wasn’t ready until after dark. We made our plates, and sat outside to eat just after 9pm, watching the moving and flashing star in the western sky just above the tree line.

 

Hours later I awoke, my head on the back of the chair facing upwards, and I opened my eyes to see a massive (what I thought was an) airplane above me, so low I could see the windows in it. It moved slowly and silently and seemed so close it was like I could reach out and touch it, and then it was gone. I looked over at my husband beside me to see his head was back as well, and then down at the ground to see our plates with our half eaten meals. I woke him up, and we picked up our plates, carrying them inside, and there I saw it was 3am. We didn’t say much, and just went to bed.

 

Now, let me make it clear I don’t just drift off to sleep ever, I’m not one who takes naps either, and sleep has never come easy to me. My fight or flight mechanism was too tightly wound back then to just fall asleep in the middle of a meal, much less in a chair outside at 9pm on a Saturday night. In those days sleep was something I avoided, and would take hours of restlessness to achieve, so the idea that I drifted off to sleep while eating dinner is simply not something that would happen to me in normal circumstances, but that night was, apparently, not normal. The strangest thing to me was how my husband and I didn’t even discuss it for days, and when we did it was awkward, and strangely embarrassing. He didn’t remember anything from those lost hours, and I didn’t either, only recalling the sight of a massive silent airplane too impossibly low to the ground, and the windows in it. 

 

Later, I saw a silver cigar shaped craft (?) dart across the sky, south to north, on a bright sunny day as I sat down outside to rest after cutting grass. It was silent as well, and covered the length of the sky in just seconds. And still later in 2011, the night of the earthquake that rattled the entire east coast, we were sitting outside after dark and saw three lights moving in the sky, they suddenly seemed to fall, and then stopped right over the tree line. They hovered there for a several seconds, and then darted away one by one, moving faster than seemed possible, and with an intelligence that felt disconcerting.

 

During those years of seeing strange things in the sky and dabbling with the occult we had bought a sound activated voice recorder that I would place on my bedside table at night to catch EVPs. We would hear voices sometimes, but we also heard things that made no sense, and listening back in the morning I’d get a cold chill. First, I’d hear the bell on my cat’s collar jingle, and then the thud as he jumped off the bed and left the room, almost as though he knew what was coming and wanted to be away from it. Then the room would fill with loud grinding metallic noises, sharp pops, and a whirring type sound. These sounds never woke us up, which is odd because my husband is a light sleeper, but we heard them many nights on the recording device. At the same time I’d wake with my clothes on backwards, or inside out, and I’d have red dots on my arms in triangular shapes. After hearing those noises on the recorder several times I quit placing it in our bedroom at night, and decided that ignorance was indeed bliss.

 

In 2012 we moved back to Augusta, Georgia, and since we lived in the city I didn’t sit outside and look at the night sky as the light pollution was too intense, and there was an over abundance of palmetto bugs in the neighborhood. I didn’t see much there except for a couple times out partying until late on Broad Street where we’d see strange lights flying over the downtown area and the river, which is right beside it.  We lived there for five years and then moved out into a rural area in South Carolina and began watching the sky again.

 

We’d often see faint lights in high altitude moving about up in the sky, perhaps whatever people refer to as satellites, and we’d see dozens an hour busily moving different directions across the sky. Life changed for me, as those who follow this blog know, I got myself sober by the grace of God, my faith in Christ grew stronger, and so much of the weird stuff in my life just stopped. Praise God! Fully accepting and surrendering to Jesus halted the usual paranormal things in my life, and I’ll forever be grateful for that. My last experience of seeing something shocking in the sky happened after just a year of sobriety, and it was around that time that I stopped seeking things in the sky after dark. “You are all children of the light and of the day; we do not belong to the night or the darkness.” 1 Thessalonians 5:5  

 

Our yard is about an acre, surrounded by a mix of hardwood and pine trees, and we can only see a couple of our neighbors’ houses deep in the winter. I was on the northwest side of it cutting grass on a hot summer day, the sky was clear and deep blue, and there were no lines marring it. It was after noon, the sun high in the sky, and I saw an incredibly bright flash. I stopped and looked over to the southeast side of the yard to see the edge of what appeared to be a massive disc pushing through the atmosphere just over the tree line, and I assume that the flash I saw was a reflection of the sun off the polished silver. I stared, the mower still running, and at first I thought it was a plane, an airliner that was far too low.

 

The atmosphere around the edges of the disc wavered like the heat coming off the highway on a hot day, and it took me a second to realize that it wasn’t a plane at all. The part I saw was massive, and I couldn’t comprehend how big the whole thing would be if it was fully visible, but I just saw the edge of it pushing through the clear blue sky. The whole event only lasted seconds, and I don’t know how many seconds I stood still, staring, the lawn mower running and filling the air with sound. Then it moved away, the sky closing up again, and it dawned on me what I had just seen. I didn’t freak out or run inside or really react at all, I just stared a little longer at the place where it had broken through the sky, and then resumed cutting grass. I didn’t report it or post about it on social media or the conspiracy forums, I only told my husband later and pointed out the patch of sky it had broken through, and the length of it that had to cover well over a hundred feet.

 

I don’t profess to know what these things are, but I don’t believe they are aliens from other planets, and tend to think the answer is simpler, yet far more profound. The world with its predictive programming wants us to fear, and they push their ideas through movies and paid experts, and focus our eyes on extraterrestrials from far away planets so that in itself tells me their ideas are incorrect. The discs, lights, and cigar shaped rods have been seen for all of written time, and you don’t have to look far to find them in old paintings and cave drawings, and if anything I think they have always existed, and may just be another aspect of living on earth.

 

Are they evil, demons, as the vice president and others have suggested? Are they harbingers of doom and destruction, appearing more and more before the earth undergoes great changes? Are they voyagers from unknown lands down here on earth? Are they from the future and observing us to understand where we went wrong? Are they fallen angels, the nephilim? Are they angels like Enoch and Ezekiel described? Are they life forms we simply don’t understand? I don’t know. Whatever they are they have always been, at least as long as mankind has been drawing, speaking, and writing. I suspect we may know soon enough, but whatever the world explains them to be we can be sure that it’s not that. Invariably whatever the majority believes is not the truth, as the one thing I have learned is that the masses are always wrong, especially if the government and media are supporting their ideas.

 

As usual, keep seeking.

 

 

Change Is Coming

It amazes me how so many people claim to want change, they demand change, but then seem to expect things to stay the same. If there is change they are angry and afraid, despite calling for it day after day, post after post. “Not that way!” they exclaim. I suppose we all want change, for myself I want to stop the hurt dished out to children. I want to stop the medical tyranny that injects poisons from the first hours through the first years and leaves them injured and trapped in uncomfortable bodies, and I pray for that often. I also want to stop the predatory nature of mankind on children, and know that children are the biggest commodity in the society in which we exist. I pray for the kids a lot, and I suppose that ache inside of me for the young ones of this world comes from my own difficult childhood, as I know what it is to feel helpless and under attack. I know how it feels to be mocked, bullied, hurt, cast out, and slandered, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

 

The world is changing rapidly, and we all know that it must, but we fight against the changes fearful of how it will affect our own private worlds. Those of us of faith keep our eyes and thoughts on God, those without faith seek their gods in the world through actors, musicians, sportsmen, political agents, and influencers who work harder for clicks than for truth. There’s very little truth left down here these days, and what is left is censored and hidden and mocked and declared ignorant and destructive, or racist, sexist, homophobic, and the usual spiel from the young, misinformed, brain washed, and inexperienced. 

 

Change is coming, though, and it always does. I look to my grandparents born in the late 1800s, and the vast changes that occurred in their lifetimes, and even my own parents were born before electricity was in every house, and radio was in its infancy. The changes my elders saw were mind numbing, but they survived and adapted and I assume we will as well. Change is intimidating, no doubt about that, and not just to us humans, but animals feel it as well. We all like our schedules, we like the security of knowing that day to day not much changes, and we relax in the normalness of our routines, and I’m no different than anyone else. Change can bring a lot of stress and anxiety, especially these days where everyone’s opinions are heard, and fear seems to be the one thing we all have in common, fear of the unknown, but also fear of the known.

 

We here in America have been on the fast track of change the last hundred years, and I can say with certainty that not all of the changes have been good. The technological advancements have been amazing, but harmful. The medical advancements have been have been life changing, but not always in a good way. The societal changes in the moral fabric have been detrimental to a peaceful existence and caused a lot of suffering, but we declare we’ve reached true freedom. The over abundance of rules and laws and taxes and language manipulation has broken the backs of many, and our compassion has been misplaced as we march toward some dystopian vision none of us would have chosen in a more stable and healthy environment.

 

The institutions we’ve known in our lifetime, be they medicine, finance, government, or entertainment are changing, and this strikes an odd fear in us. Intellectually we know they need to change, but we also know not all change is good, and can be quite uncomfortable. We look back on the past with rose-colored glasses believing the era in which we grew up was the best, the safest, and now to see those forever names, brands, and institutions change strikes a cord of unease in us. We’ve grown accustomed to our cages, the rules, the taxation systems, the government decisions, and the news programs telling us the way to go, and life would seem scary without those agencies leading the way. Perusing history we see that great nations and peoples have risen and fallen over and again, but we know what we have achieved is permanent and safe, steady and dependable. We don’t often see how those things have grown with an insidious parasitic nature to take more and more, and give less and less. We don’t always see how those corporations and agencies and programs have infiltrated so many aspects of our lives, and we have become very dependent on the normalcy of knowing they exist, and have existed for a long time.

 

Change is coming and I don’t profess to know how it will look, I pray that the changes would be good for us, but one can never tell in the beginning how it will look in the end. I think America has been under attack for a very long time, but the average citizen doesn’t see that, they tend to look upon the world and the actions of the worldly as just the way it’s always been and give it no additional thought. We’ve always paid high taxes, we’ve always injected our kids with chemicals, we’ve always eaten this brand, we’ve always done A, B, or C, and what we’ve always done must be good because we’re still here. But what we don’t know is how heavy the burden actually is until we set it down and walk away from it, and then it dawns on us, “My God, that was heavy! How did I not know how heavy it was for so many years?”  We don’t recognize the full extent of the darkness until the light is turned on, and we don’t understand how sick we truly were until we are healed.

 

For me I pray that the changes ahead of us are simply the dissolution of the parasitic and forever draining agents of darkness who cannot exist without our acceptance and approval. I pray that we are moving toward a future where we don’t have the sickest children and citizens in the world, where suffering in its myriad of forms grows less and less, and where the burdens of simple existence aren’t so heavy for the average person. I pray for less “education” and more learning and growth, I pray for nutrient rich foods without sickening chemicals, I pray for the land to heal after being sprayed for decades with heavy metals, and the water to be cleansed of all the chemicals that the dark agenda decided were needed to make us easier to control. Above all else I pray for the children of the world to truly know love and peace and physical, mental, and emotional ease, a world where they are not a commodity to be used and abused by evil people. Change is coming, but perhaps we have more power than we know to create a future that is good for all, and not just the few sitting on the top who believe they are our ruling gods.

 

Keep seeking, and keep praying.

 

 

 

 

 

On Health and Healing

 

I don’t talk about my health much because I loathe putting myself in that position. A lot of people deem themselves healthy because their doctors have declared it, but metabolically they’re not healthy at all. The world states that a human can be on three maintenance medicines and still be considered healthy, so I’m not sure our medical system would even recognize a healthy person. For myself I attempt to eat right, have cleared out very many chemicals from my space and daily consumption, and have worked out ways around the need for pharmaceuticals. I don’t speak often about the ways I handle my own health because if I do I know there are those who will take offense and who will begin to wish ill health on me.

 

It’s been nearly twenty years since I’ve been to a doctor, and the longer you stay away from such things, the stranger the whole experience becomes. I stayed away because I got the distinct impression they were trying to kill me, perhaps not consciously, but through drugs and tests and surgeries it was the road I was on. The weakest and most injured I have ever been happened with the hands of physicians, and it became clear the wisest thing to do was to step out of that world where the goal is to find something wrong and treat it, sometimes aggressively, and sometimes to the death of the patient. So I stay away from them, I joke that God and I made a deal after my near death experience (brought on by a medical mistake), but maybe it’s not a joke, and only that I have come to trust Him with everything. “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.” Mathew 9:12

 

During the pandemic the medical community certainly showed its true colors. Physicians who spoke out against the dangerous treatment plans and the experimental jab lost their licenses, were run off the internet, and accused of spreading harmful misinformation, while others made millions by injecting unknown substances into their patients. Fortunately for me I didn’t have the pressure millions of others faced to accept the poison shots or lose my livelihood. And because I don’t watch TV I didn’t have the cultural pressure as Covid was written into every show and newscast, and each pushed the jab as the only way to return to normal, and if you refused you were accused of wanting to kill grandma and hating your neighbor. I missed all that. I was taking a break from social media and the news, and was writing a book at the time. When the book was finished and I peeked out at the world again I was shocked and incredibly dismayed to see almost everyone I knew lining up for the jabs. The media pressure and programming worked exceptionally well and now they say nearly 70% of the world’s population accepted at least one injection, and I truly pray that they are mistaken and it wasn’t that many.

 

It’s nearly impossible to be healthy in a world that poisons us from every direction from the moment of our birth, and if that doesn’t prove we’re living in the little season of Satan then I don’t know what could. Infants get their injections of aluminum and foreign DNA within minutes of their birth, and it continues every few months for the first years of life, and now we have the sickest kids in history. Pharmaceutical commercials fund our news programs, and it’s difficult to have a conversation with people my age that doesn’t dissolve into discussions of their doctor visits and diagnoses and medical procedures. We tend to label ourselves with our mental and physical illnesses these days, and looking around I’ve never seen such sickly, unhealthy, unhappy, and angry people, but they still line up to get their annual injections and pick up their prescriptions and wonder why dementia and Alzheimer’s and other neurological disorders are at an all time high. It hurts me to see such suffering day in and day out from children to the elderly and I guess that’s one reason I tend to separate and isolate myself. I believe God heals, and I’ve seen the truth of that in my own life on more than one occasion, but He certainly has His hands full with people in this world who are poisoned within and without from the cradle to the grave.

 

The one thing this world doesn’t want us to know is that our bodies are self-healing, they were designed and created that way, and I suppose that’s why evil men desire to inject us with toxic chemicals from the moment we take our first breath. These toxic chemicals interfere with the healing mechanism, and open us up to all types of illnesses, and then those evil men profit off of us again and again. The entire medical community is set up to harm and treat, but never cure and heal, and the only exception to that is emergency medicine where they piece us back together after traumatic injuries. And a continually sick population is the least likely to stand up and protest their leaders or demand change. It takes a lot of energy to fight all the poisons coming at us all of the time, not to mention the energy it takes to go to a myriad of doctors who divide us up into pieces and only treat a piece at a time, instead of healing the whole being.

 

People would assume that I must not have had any illnesses or injuries in those twenty years I haven’t seen a doctor, and those people would be wrong. I’ve had both injuries and illnesses, but I trusted God and believe we die when we’re supposed to and no doctor can change God’s plan for us, they can only increase our suffering. I’ve experienced things that would have sent me running to the emergency room in the past, but now I wait and trust and pray and research and find natural ways to assist the healing mechanism.

 

Just over a year ago I fell down the stairs, and at my age it was a very traumatic injury. The way I fell could result in broken bones, bruised liver, and a partially collapsed lung, and I believe I did have those injuries, although I didn’t rush to the doctor to verify it. I’d had a collapsed lung before and it felt the similar, and I knew they couldn’t do much with fractured ribs, and feared they’d make the other damages worse. I couldn’t get a deep breath for months, and found myself breathless for all that time. My mind wanted to wander into worse case scenarios, but I focused on God, did some research, and began treating myself naturally.

 

Apparently surviving abuse, neglect, and trauma has given me an odd threshold for pain, and I didn’t even realize how injured I was for a couple days, but then it made itself known by waking me with a breathless panic attack in the middle of the night. Earlier in my life I would have rushed to the ER, but I was hurt and didn’t need the added stress of all that, or the toxic radiological tests, and used herbs as medicine, and acupressure once my ribs healed to get them back in place. I fasted because our body heals in a fasting state, I did a parasite cleanse because we all need to at least once year just as our pets do, and took the time to finally read the Bible cover to cover. The Bible certainly supported my thoughts on the harm doctors put out into the world, and as it states in Proverbs the Word is health to the flesh. And I recovered without invasive and harmful tests, without being poked and prodded by strangers, without toxic pharmaceuticals or injections, and without being treated as yet more cattle on the conveyer belt of our medical system.

 

The point of this blog is not to brag on myself, but to praise God and His amazing creation, us, and to point out that healing can be found without enriching another. Healing and health doesn’t come from toxic injections, parasitic pharmaceuticals, or through dollars spent. Healing is our natural state if we allow it to work, and herbs are the original medicine given to us. It’s not always comfortable to let your body heal naturally, or to strip all the chemicals and toxins from our lives, but I have at least proven to myself in the last twenty years that trusting God above man has saved me from much suffering.

 

 

As always, keep seeking.

 

 

 

Scripted

 

Looking out at the world, the media, politics, and the news cycles I keep feeling like everything is so scripted, like a made for TV movie. People watch and many believe what they see, blinded by the illusion that the news programs are under some obligation to be honest with us. It grows hard to listen to the lies being spouted, even in tiny snippets, as certain factions struggle to remain relevant and trusted. I feel bad for those who watch “the news” and TV daily, and even worse for those who keep it on all the time. The truth is in there somewhere, but only through separation, discernment, and prayer can it be understood. 

 

The way to understand it is to know whatever news subject they spend a lot of time on is usually a lie, or a distraction, or a societal psychological operation. They’ll insert a random truthful fact in there somewhere, usually in the middle of the night when their viewership is low, and then never mention it again. But the main focus will be some made up story to get the viewers hooked and emotionally involved and keep their eyes where they want them to be. When this happens, it’s time to dig deeper into what else is going on out there, what other situations are unfolding, what other events are happening that they don’t want you to see or know.

 

The world exists in two different realities right now, and the simplest way to explain it is one side watches and believes what they see on TV, social media, and mainstream news, and the other doesn’t. Maybe the split came in 2020 with the whole sickness psychological operation, but it has been building for years, at least the last 20+ years I’ve been paying attention, and now that split is growing rapidly. On a spiritual level the division is a moral one, one side seeking justice and righteousness, the other embracing some darker ideals, but the world is an expert of confusing people and situations to muddy the waters. 

 

I had a bout of eternal recurrence years ago when my life changed quite radically, and during that experience it was as though each day was being repeated, and every word, every thought, every situation felt familiar as though I’d heard it, thought it, and lived it before, many times before. And looking out at the world today, the news, the sports, the politics, etc., it feels that way again, as though what I am seeing is simply a scene that must play out, a chapter that must be read to understand the end of the book. It all feels manufactured, as if the ability to create any new trauma is gone and the playbook has been completely played out. It seems tired, weak, and near exhaustion, and perhaps that is why the televised dramas are coming so quickly these days, they need to stir up the energy to drain it.

 

People are beginning to learn that evil is real, and once they realize how real the evil is there is nothing else to do but turn to God, and I believe that is the split we are seeing. I believe it is the Gog and Magog war, and perhaps we’ve been in it longer than we know, perhaps we’ve been in it our whole lifetime, but the eternal recurrence of it, the continuous and repeated abuse, is ending.

 

People have a hard time envisioning how life can change for the better, but we are to imagine heavenly things. The world, of course, shows us only destruction, fear, anger, violence, and death, and some take that in for all the hours of their waking time, and sleep with it playing in the background. We are to step out of the world, and trust that all things work for the good of those who love God. Change is happening, and the televised traumas are coming fast and furious, draining the viewer of more than just their emotion, but control of their minds, higher thinking, the ability to discern truth, and in the end their souls and connection to God.

 

The truth is judgment is coming, and a lot of people aren’t prepared, it’s not even on their radar as a possibility, and this makes me very sad. The whole world makes me very sad, which is why I take it in small doses. Incrementalism is a real thing, and in the twenty years since I turned off the TV, the lines and boundaries of decency have been pushed along, inch by inch, so that when I peek in at it now it is truly shocking. As well as what is now considered entertainment and beauty and progress, but I digress…

 

We were told that the deceptions would be so vast that even the elect could be deceived and I think we’re there now, nothing we know down here is true, everything is a lie, and we’re being sickened by the cognitive dissonance that creates inside us. The good news is that we’re in the final stretch, and we’re incredibly blessed to be here at this time. The good news is that the end to this madness is just around the corner, and we just need to hang on and trust God with all that we have inside. All things must be revealed though, and that will likely be hard for a lot of people, so be kind where you can. Just know it’s all in God’s hands and He wins in the end, and the end this time is also the new beautiful beginning. Praise God!

 

Turn off the noise and seek

 

 

 

Time Is Short

 

I felt pressed to give this message this morning, so here it is.

 

It’s chaotic out there, and if you look too deeply at the world it can lead to a lot of fear. It’s designed that way, especially now. Things are being revealed that I never thought would be seen. I have prayed for years for the world to see the truth of what our elite, leaders, and idols are up to, and finally it’s trickling out. The Epstein stuff was never just about the teenage girls, yes, that’s definitely part of it, but that is certainly not all of it. It’s deeper and darker than most can conceive, but I’m afraid we’ll all have to face it for it to finally come to an end. They are literally farming babies, with all that farming entails, from the planting of a seed to the harvest.

 

The ugly truth of this world is that children have always been the biggest commodity there is, it’s how you change the thinking of the nation, and how you gain power in this season of deception. Reading the Old Testament it is easy to see that things haven’t changed, people are still the same, making the same mistakes, and choosing the wrong gods. The events are still unfolding as they did in the day of old, although repackaged for TV viewers into something palatable as we’re being numbed and desensitized. Child sacrifices are ongoing, just as they did back then, but now we call it by different names. The darkness in this world is all encompassing, and I suppose that’s why we were told to turn from the world, to step out of it, and not to conform to it.

 

The most depraved are on award shows, dressed in their finery, and holding up their gold statues, and many watch and applaud their favorites. The approving audience watching their screens don’t seem to know that their very souls are on the chopping blocks by their acceptance and approval and simple viewership. We are told to come out of her. We are told to have no idols before God. We are told a lot of things that we now think are archaic and backwards and old fashioned, but the truth is the truth, and the end is closer than we imagine. I believe we’re in the beginning of the great Gog and Magog war, the final fight between good and evil, light and darkness, beauty and truth against filth and lies, and then judgment comes. This little season of Satan’s deception is coming to a close, but he’s not going out easily, and he wants to take as many as he can with him when he’s thrown into the pit.

 

The people and faces of this world that many trust and idolize are leading them straight to hell, but they are blinded by modern terms and a belief that God is not real, does not exist, and is some fairy tale from the past. God’s voice is softened now by the noise of our modern technology, and our hearing is dampened by the sorcery we believe we need to face each day, the pharmaceuticals we take to numb our pain, but He’s still speaking, and He doesn’t want to lose you.

 

I believe we’re in the last days before judgment, and looking around it couldn’t be clearer to me. I’ve never seen the divisions between the different factions quite as angry as they are today, I’ve also never seen them this misinformed. The media is selling lies and applying emotional manipulation daily, while the influencers stoke the flames for clicks, and the average citizen is drowning in deception and confusion. Something terrible has happened to people, and many are fueled by fear, anger, and hatred, and it simply can’t continue to go on in this manner.

 

It’s going to get weird, it’s going to get ugly, it’s going to get scary, and when the truth is finally revealed, the truth of how those people came to fortune and fame, it’s going to break hearts. It won’t only be hearts that are broken, but the minds of those who have given their power to the world and trusted what man has sold to them. There is a darkness so vast, so insane, so ridiculously depraved that men’s hearts will fail when it is revealed. Everything we think we know down here is a lie, and the deception is beyond what even I can conceive, much less put into words.

 

For those still clinging to hope, clinging to beauty and truth, clinging to goodness and peace, do not fear for our Father sees you, and knows how you’ve struggled to stay righteous and true.

 

For those still fully ensconced in the world I don’t know how much time is left for you to change your thinking and begin to repent. Time is being shortened, the truth is being revealed, and the era of straddling is over.

 

Please seek God.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Near Death Experiences and the Bible

 

Twenty-three years ago I had a near death experience (NDE), and it occurred just months after I lost my only child. It wasn’t the typical experience you read about with a tunnel, light, and seeing heaven or hell, it was far subtler than that, and I woke completely changed. My death was caused by a surgical mistake, and although I had to be revived a couple times on the operating table during a life saving surgery, that wasn’t when I died. My death came several days later when I was still bleeding internally, but no one had discovered it yet. I remember waking and looking over at the blood pressure machine and watched the numbers steadily drop lower and lower. It dawned on me that I was dying as I’d seen the same the night my father died, but I didn’t feel any fear. It was simply a realization of my impending demise that I easily accepted. 

 

I woke sometime after midnight to a beautiful and kind redheaded nurse bathing me, changing my gown and sheets, and being incredibly gentle and sweet to me. This happened on Good Friday and as the sun rose the bleeding was discovered and I had a couple rushed emergency procedures, was given several bags of blood, and finally began to recover. I never saw the nurse again, and I did ask about her, but the woman I described didn’t match anyone on the nursing staff.

 

Recovery took several bed-ridden months left with open wounds, bags, drains, more surgery, and nurses coming to the house twice a day to change my bandages. Back on my feet again everything was different, even my things looked a little odd and different, and stepping back into my old life was impossible. Something profound had happened to me and I didn’t have the knowledge or language to fully express it. As I didn’t have the typical and popular experience I had no real foundation to build from, all I knew for sure was that I was different and somehow I knew something I wasn’t supposed to know, but didn’t know what it was.

 

The years afterward were challenging, I was dealing with chronic pain and changes in my body while also trying to accept the loss of my son. It seemed most around me expected me to just snap back in gear and set aside my grief, loss, and spiritual and physical changes and continue on as before my life was altered. Apparently, to them, enough time had passed and there was no excuse for not stepping back into my old life. But I couldn’t return to my old life, the person who lived that life was dead and gone, and I was left vulnerable, exposed, and radically changed.

 

I figured it was Christ calling me so I committed myself to Him and gave away all my belongings in my desire to follow Him. I began speaking with religious people with hopes of guidance in my strange situation, but found that they looked at me suspiciously, shamefully, and quickly dismissed my experience with one Bible verse. “Just as man is appointed to die once, and after that to face judgment.” (Hebrews 9:27) The people I spoke with seemed to have only one agenda, bodies in a building, butts in the pews, and money in the tray, but it was more than that. It was as though there was an underlying fear or jealousy or anger, and it seemed so separate from my newfound faith, so small and worldly and dirty in comparison with the profound change inside me.

 

Unfortunately at the time I didn’t choose to read the Bible cover to cover to understand it for myself, and was soon drawn into many new age and occultish type ideas as I tried to understand what I knew, but couldn’t remember. I began exploring the world, researching and investigating whatever called my attention with the goal to understand what happened to me, and got lost for a while in many dark rabbit holes. Before this change I had always been a little haunted, but afterwards these occurrences increased dramatically due to opening the doors to the occult in my desire to understand. And I experienced depression, alcoholism, UFO sightings and alien-type abduction events, sudden short lived bouts of psychic abilities and visions, ghostly sightings and EVPs (electronic voice phenomenon) in my home, an incubus draining me in my sleep, and suicide attempts from pure hopelessness and exhaustion. Needless to say, it was rough, and I grew no closer to the forgotten knowledge that had been pressed on me, but with the absolute grace of God I survived, again and again.

 

Worldly events would strike a deep chord in me, and I would be reminded of the change and the unknown knowledge. I would feel both great fear and awe that whatever I had been shown in my NDE was happening, but I had no idea where it was leading. The years passed, the chord inside me rang like a bell with many different events, as though they were simply reminders and road marks along the way, and they left me in tears, but also with a great sense of awe and excitement.

 

And finally I sat down to read the Bible and found that being woken from death is not at all unbiblical as I had been told, and led to believe. From the Old Testament to the New Testament people have been shaken from the grip of death. So I have to wonder if those religious people who instill shame and quickly dismiss the idea have even read their Bibles at all.  

 

From God answering Elijah’s prayers in 1 Kings 17:17-24 and waking the son of the widow Zarephath from death, to the son of a Shunammite woman being raised by Elisha in 2 Kings 4:32-37, to the unnamed man coming back to life after touching Elisha’s bones in 2 Kings 13:20-21, there are many examples of people being brought back from death. Eutychus falling asleep listening to Paul’s long-winded sermon, falling out a third story window to his death, and Paul reviving him and finishing his sermon (Acts 20:7-12), people have been brought back to life many times in scripture. And let us not forget Lazarus, and the others raised by Jesus, or the tombs opening at Jesus’ resurrection and the saints coming to life again and appearing to people in the Holy City (Mathew 27:50-53). Or in Revelation 20:5 where it states, “But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished…”

 

The Bible doesn’t follow the lives of those who were raised and given a second chance, but I’m sure they had opinions and feelings about it and their experiences were interesting. So clearly being pulled out of death isn’t unbiblical, or an impossibility, or a shameful lie, or a horrible sin, or a trick of the devil. But perhaps it only happens to a few, and perhaps I am one of the few. I regret not immediately sinking down into the Bible and reading it cover to cover, and feel I’ve wasted some time, some energy, and some innocence peeking under the rocks in the abyss seeking something that isn’t hidden in the darkness, but perhaps the journey was important in a way I don’t yet understand. 

 

The Bible mentions many times the importance of wisdom and knowledge, and how they are more valuable than any jewel, and implores us to seek. It also states that those who do seek and gather wisdom may be a little melancholy with the results of the search, but it’s important to do anyway. “For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Ecclesiastes 1:18 KJV

 

 

So as always, keep seeking.

 

 

 

The Pecking Order

 

I keep chickens, and the pecking order is a real thing. For me it’s hard to watch, but I’ve learned over the years to let nature be nature as much as possible, although sometimes I have to intervene. There is definitely a hierarchy in a flock of chickens, be the flock small or large. The leader is usually the biggest, the strongest, and the healthiest, and the line works down to the smallest, weakest, or the odd bird that is different in some way. Those differences could be of personality, but often it is because they look different, or are a different breed. The bottom of the pecking order gets picked on a lot, pecked by the other birds, run off from the food and water, and they have to grow rather creative to get their needs met. After all these years I can identify the bottom of the pecking order with a glance as they appear a little disheveled from their feathers being plucked out, a little smaller as they don’t get as much food as the others, and they are separated from the flock and forced to range and forage alone. 

 

When I first became aware of this fowl order I was a little dismayed. “Why can’t we all get along?” And I’m softhearted and wanted to rescue the bottom chicken, and occasionally I have to bring one in and give it special treatment to bring it back to health, but that’s a slippery slope if I plan to reintroduce it to the flock. Once the bird is brought back to health and set back into the flock the order is immediately reestablished, and the bottom has to literally fight its way into its new position. Sometimes it manages to work its way up the ranks, but usually it’s back to being ostracized after a good butt kicking by the leader and a few others.

 

People aren’t much different than chickens in this sense. Having worked in offices with a majority of women the pecking order is quite apparent, although it rarely gets physical. The hierarchy in an office is ruled much the same as a flock, the leader is usually the one with the most seniority, position, and control over the group, and the bottom is usually a newer member or someone different who doesn’t automatically fit into the group. The bottom of the human pecking order doesn’t get pecked and kept from food and water, but does get ostracized, gossiped about, and excluded. Fortunately for me most of my jobs were solo endeavors where I wasn’t with the group full time, and my jobs were outside of the office, or separate from the group, and usually something that I did alone. But the politics of the pecking order still reached out to put me into my place and clarify that I didn’t fit with the group.

 

I’ve been blessed with not caring too much if I fit in, and usually I didn’t have a lot of respect for the top of the order for various reasons. Perhaps it was early childhood training and being excluded from a young age, but frankly I’ve never really cared to fit into a group. I’ve also never been motivated by the jealousy that would require me to fight like a chicken to achieve a higher position, I simply didn’t care, and had other things on my mind. My attitude was often infuriating to the top tier because in their minds fitting into the hierarchy of office politics was important, but to me a job was just a means to survive in the world, and other than receiving a paycheck not much else about it mattered. I did my job, and did it well, and kept to myself, much like the odd bird that ranges and forages alone.

 

The hierarchy of the pecking order is also quite present in dysfunctional families where everyone bends over backwards to keep the leader, the most dysfunctional one, happy and content. And perhaps this is where my early childhood training taught me not to care too much if I fit in or not. As a child I knew what I didn’t want to be, I didn’t want to grow up and be bitter, I didn’t want to be angry all the time, and I didn’t want to hurt and put down others, so I would never be the leader. My place at the bottom of the pecking order was something I was used to by the time I entered the working world. As a child I had to figure things out for myself, no one was gently guiding me or teaching me how to do anything, from house cleaning and cooking to keeping up with school work to getting along with others all the way down to personal hygiene I had to figure everything out alone. These early skills of learning to figure things out made me a valuable employee in many of my solo jobs, but a pretty lousy member of the office pecking order.

 

In the Bible there are many comparisons to nature, from sheep and shepherds to fig trees and crops (wheat and tares) to the various birds and animals mentioned throughout the stories, and I think it’s important to understand these things to help broaden our understanding of what the Bible is teaching us. We are above the animals, meant to care for them and be good stewards to them, and to do that we must understand their natures, and see how in our own natural state we aren’t much different than them. Most people desire a leader, but seem to only look to man instead of putting their eyes on and hearts to our higher power, God. If we follow the rules that have been laid out for us there is no real need for the pecking order, if we obey and seek wisdom God will lead us away from the pack, the flock, the politics toward His truth and His peace.

 

The pecking order is brutal and cruel, but God pulls his chosen ones away from that low and uninspired thinking into the much broader view of the spiritual world. The leaders from the human pecking orders won’t have much when judgment comes, but those at the bottom, odd, strange, different and peculiar have a much greater reward as this world dissolves away and a new earth and a new heaven is born. I’m grateful for my place at the bottom of this world’s pecking order, because my leader is not from this world, and does not want His children to fit into it or conform to it. 

 

 

As always, keep seeking. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Psychopaths and Monsters

 (Author note: Another from the archives. I'm not sure if this has been published, unfortunately my archives are a complete mess and requires a lot of guess work. In my files it's simply titled Psychopaths, and I can't find a corresponding or closely worded title on any of my published lists. It was written in 2007 or 2008, and I removed some old links to dated political information.) 

 

 

 

I spend a lot of time reading opinions and attempting to unravel the mysteries of all the barriers we place between us. I recognize that folks are different and that is the beauty part of the beast, but we have been taught that down deep we all share similarities. The dictionary defines the soul as “The animating and vital principle in humans, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion and often conceived as an immaterial entity” and the spirit as “The vital principle or animating force within living beings”. I once asked some religious people for the difference between the spirit and the soul and none could provide an answer, but for me, I define the soul as that spark of light inside and our spirit determines whether or not the spark becomes a flame. 

 

From the time of our birth we are told we are all alike, the differences between us are only visual. Medicine and science also confirm this idea, although we are men and women, young and old, and come from a variety of cultures and religions, basically we are the same, but I have wondered if we really are all the same. Do we all have souls? Do some possess neither the spark nor the flame? I think that the difference between us is deep below the surface, unseen, and it has nothing to do with race, culture, religion, or gender, and has everything to do with either having that spark or not having it.  

 

Some have suggested that those in power, relentless executives and politicians making the rules for us all to live by are psychopaths, which Dr Robert Hare, creator of the psychopathy checklist, describes as "social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets. Completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret." http://www.hare.org/  Often when we think of psychopaths we think of brutal criminals sitting in jail or receiving the death penalty for their unimaginable behaviors. And statistically we understand a lot of folks jailed for their criminal actions tend to come from poverty and abuse-ridden homes, but what happens to those young psychopaths born into grace and wealth?

 

John Lennon once said, “Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.” And I think he was correct, we live in a psychopathic world and we are being trained to become a psychopathic population. I think the mistake many make when thinking about psychopaths is we envision that they are sinister, murderous, and television has done a fine job of teaching us that they usually get caught. But the truth is psychopaths are charming, cold-blooded, superficial, and I am beginning to understand lacking both the spark and the flame. They are the movers, shakers, and climbers of the world, carelessly seeking their own agenda, while around them those with simple goals, conscience, and who feel compassion and empathy for their fellow man fall and flail and flounder. 

 

They hold power over us because we believe we are all the same, we believe we all possess the same emotions, so it is hard to imagine a view without those connections. I am coming to the conclusion that we do not all have the spark of light and for many who still do in these days of old, it is sputtering. This darkness is not a new thing on this earth, history and legends have always attempted to explain the lack and left us clues in scary stories of monsters, devils, aliens, zombies, and vampires. But what has been lost in translation is that on the surface those monsters look just like us, the calculating beast resides deep below what we are able to see. And because our lack of knowledge has made us blind, we follow the boogey men and our spark begins to sputter and die.

 

The psychopaths and monsters have taken over and they have convinced us that their way, full of lies and deceit, is the truth. And we believe because we cannot imagine that some folks are completely empty inside. They keep us distracted with work, sex, and fancy gadgets, and sooth us with convenient drugs. We quickly learn if we work very hard we can find God and our mansion, which can only be bought with lots of money.  We spend hours watching their magical and hypnotic box as they instruct us in the way we should go. We hand over our children earlier and earlier with each passing generation and then wonder why our children begin to grow to see us as the enemy. We, who carry the spark inside of us, are being conquered, divided, deceived, and extinguished at an unbelievable rate.

 

It seems we have come to believe that if it is not on television, then it is not the truth, as if those attempting to deceive us are going to tell us the truth. The television, and then the Internet, has been the evil-doers greatest success in molding a human, tearing down the moral fiber, dumbing down the population, and creating a sense of apathy, fear, division, and sedation among the people. Do we really believe that they, the ones without spark or flame, are going to inform us that our flame is in the process of being extinguished? How can we understand we are living in deception, yet accept that deception as truth?

 

With all the chaos occurring in our world, I wonder how many understand that underneath the chaos a spiritual battle is being waged. In these modern times, it is easy to believe that what is occurring is just a product of advanced civilization, a sign of the times of living in a terrorist era or a technological age, but the battle being fought under the surface is as old as time. A wise man once said that the path is a narrow one and as I look about the world and see how easily we have accepted the training to surrender our spark and accept this psychopathic way of being as normal, I understand that man spoke truth.   

 

As always, keep seeking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Psychology of Conspiracy Theories

(Author note: I'm back in the archives and will be in there for a while as the 20th anniversary of Turtle's Voice grows nearer. This article was published in The American Chronicle on 1/16/08 under the title of The War on Thought and Individualism. I've removed the links because there are all dead now, lots of things have disappeared off the Internet in the last couple decades. This article is a little dated as hardly anyone relies on newspapers for information these days, but it's definitely worth sharing again.)  

 

 

 

What is truth?  Is it only what appears on the cable news networks, the national evening news or in the mainstream newspapers?  Does truth only become truth when it is checked and approved and then put before the masses?  What if that approved truth doesn’t answer all the questions or perhaps even raises new ones, is it still the truth?  And what about those people with the lingering doubts over the official story, are they insane or just troublemakers?

 

President Bush, in a speech before the United Nations on November 11^th, 2001, said, “Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty.”  I didn’t hear this speech when it was made and at the time I fully believed what the television had shown me, but had I heard his words I would have sought out information on the conspiracy theories he mentioned because I’m a curious person.  Perhaps being curious isn’t very popular today, perhaps curiosity is a threat. People tend to label and categorize, I suppose it makes us feel secure and a lot of people believe that conspiracy theorists are crazy, ill informed or even potentially dangerous, but what if they just like things to make sense? 

 

I think one of my greatest downfalls in this life is that I expect things to make sense, I like to understand the rhyme and reason of things and to do that, I have to look at all possible explanations, not just one.  And I figure, mixed up in all those ideas and propaganda, the truth can be found.  But I fear that a day will come when curiosity is no longer tolerated, and thinking outside of the approved box will no longer be permitted. 

 

In 2004 issue of Psychology Today, Kathleen McGowan has written an article entitled “Conspiracy Theories Explained” and the subtitle states, “Random events are deeply meaningful to paranoid schizophrenics. Is something happening in their brains?”  The article begins, “Paranoid schizophrenics are prone to delusions, tales in which random events become deeply meaningful. Some believe in complex conspiracies; others think they are Jesus Christ.”  And then it continues to explain the research of Shitij Kapur, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and vice president of research at the Canadian Center for Addiction and Mental Health, in relation to the role of dopamine in addiction and schizophrenia.  The body of the article does not mention conspiracy theories again, but the implication is pretty clear, people who question the official line are paranoid schizophrenics. 

 

The definition of conspiracy is an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act and conspiracies are as old as mankind.  On the lighter side of conspiracy we have practical jokes and high school pranks, on the darker side we have events like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. And in it’s most accepted form we see it in business as one corporation plots to overtake another, but we don’t call that conspiracy, that is considered ‘just business’. 

 

It’s interesting to me how we often hear of the little guy being arrested for suspicion of committing conspiracy, but somehow we believe that when large groups of powerful people unite there can be no conspiracy.  Even presidential candidate and former first lady, Hillary Clinton, claimed the idea of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to defend her husband Bill during the Whitewater scandal, so am I to assume that she is a paranoid schizophrenic? 

 

Am I to assume that anyone who believes that conspiracies exist may be insane?  Would that include Woodrow Wilson, who stated, “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”  Or James Madison, who said, "History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and it's issuance".  Or Winston Churchill, who stated his believe that, “Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.”  Even the Bible points out that those in power will conspire in Eph. 6:12,  “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high [places].”

 

Conspiracies do exist, but not all conspiracy theories are truth, although many make for quite an entertaining read, true or not.  So what are we left to think when our leaders, both past and present, have spoken of conspiracy as an actual issue in society and government, but the psychiatric community sees it as delusional thinking?  Could it be that the psychiatric community is far more concerned about social control, easily counted bean drawers, and power than it is about mental health and truth?  Could the hand holding between the pharmaceutical companies and the psychiatric communities be a conspiracy to keep Americans compliant, consuming, and easily controlled?  Is the drugging of over 8 million American children with minimally tested psychotropic drugs considered ‘just business’?

 

Many speak of the war against terrorism and the war on drugs, but perhaps the only real battlefield exists here at home, the war waged against thought and individualism and the weapons of choice are psychiatry, propaganda, and pharmaceuticals.  The American Psychiatric Association is busily adding new entries into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), these additions aren’t developed through research or discovery of known pathology, but simply by member vote and some of the newest mental disorders include Social Phobia, Mathematics Disorder, Disorder of Written Expression and Reading Disorder.  At the rate the APA is going, soon no one in America will be considered sane and I am beginning to wonder if one day mental illness treatment will be mandatory, much like the vaccines for childhood illnesses are mandatory today.

 

The simple fact of the matter is that people think and perceive things differently due to a myriad of reasons, including upbringing, culture, and experience, and that used to be the beauty of being an American, but now it seems that the APA, in hand with other organizations, want to weed out those who are different and medicate them.  Is it because those differences imply mental illness?  Or could it be that those differences create money in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies, a solid customer base for the psychiatric communities, and a compliant citizenship for the rulers of the American government? 

 

 

As always, keep seeking.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dark and Brutal Beginnings of Psychiatry

 

(Author’s note – I’m going through my archives and hope to share what I think are some of my interesting old articles. This one was originally published in The American Chronicle on 1/22/08 under the title of Psychiatry, Tom Cruise and Scientology. I’ll include the old links and hopefully not all are dead, and some are still active.)

 

 

 

 

 

Tom Cruise sure has been in the news a lot of late, between jumping on Oprah’s couch, attacking psychiatry, and Brooke Shields’ use of anti-depressants, and now with the odd leaked Scientology videos, he seems to be generating a lot of attention.  And I’ve noticed in the reporting of each incident we are being led to believe that Tom Cruise is insane or brainwashed or worse.  So I began wondering, why?  The media certainly wants us to see Tom Cruise, he’s everywhere, it’s hard to escape, but they also want us to believe that he has fallen on the wrong side of the crazy wall, why?  Could it be what he’s saying?  Could it be his attack on psychiatry?

 

I’m not a fan of Mr. Cruise and I haven’t been to the theater in years, but when I heard his views on psychiatry, I sensed he was telling the truth.  But the media has created a thinking in our nation that if you are against psychiatry and the accompanying pharmaceuticals, you must be one of those crazy Scientologists.  I don’t care if Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, this is America and we are supposed to be free to believe in whatever belief system we choose. I choose not to align myself with any organized religion, but I do understand there is merit in the idea that psychiatry is a suspect science.

 

The manual used to define mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and each new entry into this manual is done by member vote, versus research and discovery of known pathology.  According to psychiatrist Ron Leifer, “So the DSM is basically an arbitrary classification of thoughts, moods and behavior decided upon by a committee of psychiatrists who are picked by the American Psychiatric Association.” 

 

Psychiatrist Colin Andrew Ross states, “It’s bogus that you can even accurately identify who has the behavior of schizophrenia.  It’s bogus that you can tag it to genes.  It’s bogus that you can detect those genes through any kind of test.  So the whole is basically bogus.”  And clinical psychologist Ty Colbert paints a disturbing picture with his words, “So we can theoretically find a way to drug every set of symptoms that’s different from what we think should be normal.  So we could have hundreds of different situations in the future and which we are attempting to drug.  So you just extrapolate that over a couple generations and it could be the fall of our civilization.”  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8705742804699284911&q=psychiatry&total=1725&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=2

 

Dr. Jeffrey A Schaler, a psychologist and professor in the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University’s School of Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., in a acceptance speech for the Thomas Szasz Award, states,  “What do we know that is true, that the cult of psychiatry keeps telling us is false?  First, the idea that there is a known brain lesion causing mental illness.  The truth is we cannot tell who is mentally ill and who is not by looking at pictures of their brains or analyzing their blood.”  Dr. Schaler goes on to refer to the DSM as a great work of fiction, clarifying that each disorder in the DSM is invented, whereas diseases listed in a pathology textbook are discovered. 

 

Dr. Schaler continues, “Mental illness refers to something a person does, real disease refers to something a person has.  Consider this yet another way – It takes one person to have a disease, it takes two people to have a mental illness.  If you are alone on an island you could develop a real disease like cancer or heart disease, but you cannot develop a mental illness such as hyperactivity or schizophrenia.  This is because mental illness is always diagnosed on some sort of social conflict, when people do something that others find objectionable, they can be diagnosed as mentally ill.  If the person doing the diagnosing is more powerful that the person diagnosed, then there’s trouble.  In this sense, the diagnosis of mental illness is always a weapon.”   http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4857231661511715395&q=dr.+schaler&total=11&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

 

These are powerful statements by educated people in the field of psychology and psychiatry, yet the media has sold us on the idea that if we are depressed it is a chemical imbalance and the medications are simply balancing our deficit.  But the truth is there is no test to prove that anyone suffers from a chemical imbalance. In a video entitled “Psychiatry – No Science, No Cures” Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York, states, “The actual truth about chemical imbalance is that it’s an actual lie.  Nobody has yet measured, demonstrated or created a test to show that somebody has a chemical imbalance in their brain, period.”

 

And psychiatrist Dr. Grace Jackson, states, “There is no rational science behind what they think is the cause of these symptoms.  The medications that are being given to people are, without exception, introducing chemicals that are altering the brain in ways which can be very damaging.  And I’ll go a step further and say that in the absence of proven chemical imbalance, for which the medications are “rebalancing” or fixing, the medications are in fact, toxic.”  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8058160857846500132&q=psychiatry&total=1725&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

 

I recognize that this is a controversial subject, with millions of adults and children on these behavior-altering medications, and I wonder how many understand that these drugs are not curing diseases, they are only altering our behavior and perhaps, even, our brains.  Maybe we are a culture that just likes our drugs or maybe we like to have an excuse of why we don’t perform as well as we perceive others as doing or maybe it’s just easier to numb what is bothering us inside, instead of attempting to fix it.  But the simple truth remains; we are not getting the facts on the medications we are using to fix our behavior. 

 

Gwen Olsen, a former pharmaceutical drug sales rep. and author of the book, “Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher – God’s Call to Loving Arms”, spent fifteen years selling specialty pharmaceuticals to psychiatrists, among others.  She left the field after she felt a moral obligation to inform the public of the policies of selling drugs, which she felt was a danger to the “American people, at large”.   She states that there was “consistent minimization of side effects” and that it became “less and less popular to give full disclosure about our drugs, as time went on in my profession, and we were more responsible for marketing information being given to the doctors, than actual good medical information.” 

 

After seeing how the lack of full disclosure concerning prescription drugs was harming and in some cases, killing patients, Ms. Olsen decided that there was something wrong in the way drugs were being approved and marketed.  “I heard on more than one occasion people refer to ‘our friends’ in the FDA or ‘our people’ in the FDA.”  Ms. Olsen states that while selling psychiatric drugs in mental institutions she began to understand that many of the behavioral manifestations of mentally ill, were actually side effects of the drugs she was selling.  And Ms. Olsen was instructed to discredit people who were not in favor of psychiatric drugs by her district manager, who informed her, “Any time anybody isn’t for psychiatric drugs, if you just label them a Scientologist, that will discredit them, because everybody knows they are crazy.”  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8005785861839485871&q=gwen+olsen&total=23&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

 

The corporate media has sold us the idea that the only people who are against psychiatric drugs are Scientologists and they are, in fact, crazy.  But what of the experts, the scientists, the psychiatrists and psychologists speaking out against psychiatric drugs, are they also crazy?  The television tells us that a chemical imbalance has been proven, but the scientists insist this is not proven, that it is a theory at best, or a lie at worst, and no scientific test has ever been developed to make this chemical imbalance a reality.  Yet, we believe our televisions and we take the drugs and we give the drugs to our children, seemingly unconcerned about the potential effects of those drugs on developing brains. 

 

The history of psychiatry is full of wayward experiments on patients.  The Father of American Psychiatry is Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813); he was also a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  Dr. Rush believed that too much blood in the system caused psychiatric and physiological disorders; this idea was strengthened when he decided that bloodletting cured him of yellow fever.  He also created the Tranquilizing Chair, which was said to address the fact that “madness” was an arterial disease, an inflammation of the brain and through being confined in the chair, which looked much like an electric chair, it controlled the flow of blood to the brain.  He also believed that another way to ease madness was to repeatedly dunk patients in ice-cold water. http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/paharc/features/brush.html

 

Dr. Henry Cotton (1876-1933), medical director at New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum, Trenton, felt that mental illness was caused by hidden infection in various body parts and the way to cure the mental illness was to remove the offending organs.  He began with teeth and tonsils and if no noticeable change occurred in the patient, he would precede to remove the stomach, spleen, cervix or colon.  Needless to say, like Dr. Rush, Dr. Cotton’s patients did not do well.  http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_new/PAW04-05/14-0511/features1.html

 

Psychologist John B. Watson (1878-1958) believed that psychology should address “the prediction and control of observable behavior.”  He was such a believer in experimental psychology that he performed a series of experiments on his 11-month old son, Albert.  Watson is quoted as having said, “Give me the baby, and I’ll make it climb and use it’s hands in constructing a building of stone or wood… I’ll make it a thief, a gunman or a dope fiend.  The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless.” 

 

Interestingly enough, Watson was best known for his parenting advice in which he stressed the idea of never showing affection to children.  “…Remember when you are tempted to pet your child, that mother’s love is a dangerous instrument.  An instrument that may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”  In 1954 Watson’s son Albert committed suicide, and in 1957 the APA awarded Watson a gold medal for his contributions to psychology.  http://www.mental-health-abuse.org/harmingYouth12.html

 

And a couple of the legitimate psychiatric diagnoses from years gone by include drapetomania, a mental disorder existing in slaves who ran away to freedom.  And hysteria, a very popular diagnosis in the Victorian era as a condition only women suffered, especially those who rebelled against male domination or who tended to “cause trouble.” 

 

Some believe the psychiatric communities are working to end the pursuit of individualism and creativity and site the lives and deaths of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Farmer, and Judy Garland.  Others believe it is about social control, eugenics, and racism.  But unfortunately most believe their television and the marketing of the idea that we are all suffering under one banner of mental illness or another and luckily for us, there is a pill for that.  

 

I think all religions hold pieces of truth and perhaps the piece the Scientologists hold is the fact that psychiatry is a destructive, non-scientific practice with invented diseases, more of a tool to control the masses, than cure them.  History shows that torturous experiments were done in the name of psychiatry and ridiculous assumptions were called fact and those practices have not changed.  The only difference now is that the experiments are occurring with millions of people used as lab rats and the encouragement to claim our diagnosis and take the pharmaceuticals can be found throughout print and television media.

 

The fact of the matter is psychiatry has made mistakes before, fatal mistakes.  Sixty years ago there were six or seven mental disorders, now, according to the DSM, there are well over three hundred.  Are we, as a society, growing crazier as each year passes?  Who is in charge of defining what is abnormal or mentally disordered, versus, simply different?  As the long arms of psychiatry invade all facets of our lives, including our schools, social services, military, legislations, and churches, perhaps this is a question we all should be asking.  

 

 

 

As always, keep seeking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The World is a Stage

 

Be grateful for who you are and what you have, and also be grateful for who you aren’t and what you don’t have. Remember we were created and formed by God, He has a purpose for our lives, and He loves and thinks of us. Of course the world tries to turn us away from that knowledge, that hope, the moment we’re born, and pounds away at us relentlessly through our most vulnerable years. From toxic injections with our first breaths to enforced conformity with the world’s norms throughout our years of schooling, and by the time we reach adulthood and can make decisions for ourselves, most of our Godly connections have been severed.

 

The devil is in charge down here and the last thing he wants is a society of God-centered people who want to use our God-given talents. Some of us put our thoughts of a loving God away not wanting to be the brunt of the joke, while others strive quietly to find the connection. Some use drugs and alcohol to lower the man installed blockages, and some spend their days going to church knowing that if they are diligent they’ll find the connection again. At one point in time the ether around us sang with heavenly choirs, the wind full of inspiration, but now the air is deadened and cluttered with uncomfortable and harmful noise that the ears can’t hear, but the body, mind, and spirit feel. The devil is the prince of the power of the air, and he likes the ether cluttered and noisy and polluted with no angel song to lift and light our sputtering spirits.

 

Rejoice that you’re still here, still alive, and still feel the connection even if it’s just a thread, even if you don’t feel it every day, but only sometimes. Rejoice to know that the devil’s time is short and that’s why the noise is so loud right now. He wants to take as many as he can with him when he’s thrown back in the pit, and all his minions are busy with distractions and attacks on those who still carry the spark. Be careful of what you allow in your sight and mind, and be careful of the rabbit holes that are calling you to explore right now. There is a season for everything, and I believe we’re in the season of quiet and calm spiritual preparation. Be kind to yourselves, unbury your talents, and guard the spark within. Don’t let the ugliness of this fallen world be all that you can see, imagine heavenly things, imagine the great beauty this world works to defile. 

 

Over the years I’ve been to the bottom of many rabbit holes, and the main thing I’ve learned is that the hows and whys, the identity of the crisis actors, and the depths of the illusions don’t really matter in the end. I suppose seeing the illusions can be important for discernment, but in the end we can’t change the worldly script no matter how much we learn, or how much we can prove, or how much we share and insist others see what we are seeing. In the end the script is pushed, and the questioners pushed aside. It doesn’t matter how it happened, or if it happened, what matters is the idea and the energy has been released, and knowingly or not, it touches each of us.

 

The world is a stage, and sometimes I feel that the same agendas have been playing over and again like a broken record for generations, but it’s their stage, not ours. The shocking events are meant to change and guide us, lead us to a predetermined conclusion that usually just equates to us losing bits of our soul and faith. Now is not the time to climb down into the dark and lightless rabbit holes with notes and microscopes and determination, now is the time to look up to the heavens and sink down into the Word.

 

Some may say I’m jaded and cynical, but after staring into the abyss for over twenty years I can say that none of what happens in there really matters, all that matters is our personal connection to God, and our salvation. The world’s chaos will increase, the pollution of our dirty technology will thicken, and the voices of the angry masses will only increase, and now is the time to clean up our prayer closets, and protect that inner peace, that inner spark, the inner knowledge that the world still hasn’t stolen away. Focus on what is good, what is light, and what will help us make it through the doors of the beloved city. This world will continue to rent and tear itself into pieces, and the spiritual attacks of all we hold dear will only get stronger and more psychotic. Truth is beauty, energy, and reason, deception is ugly, exhausting, and confusing, and the people will continue to choose their sides, often motivated only by ignorance of God’s grace and anger.

 

We must continue to rise above the noise, to remember the knowledge we held at birth, and to hold on to the simple, yet profound, gifts of God’s love and attention. Do not get mired down in the muck of what the world calls right, stand strong in God’s righteousness, beauty, and truth. Don’t let the filth of this dark world soil you any further, and don’t let it take up all your thoughts and hold your mind hostage. The world’s stage is the devil’s stage, at least for now, but a new earth and a new heaven is coming, and we must have the oil in our lamps to be able to see it.

 

Keep seeking God