The Universe Remains a Conspiracy for my Benefit

I wrote about this idea over two years ago in this space.  It seems still to be true, based on recent events.

(1) We continue to prosper financially beyond what one could reasonably expect .. my work is going well, and we just attracted some consulting help that will help us pay off another big chunk of debt, if this plan works at all.

(2) I've come into a few health challenges the past several months, but fortunately nothing at all life-threatening, just annoying, uh, plumbing issues. I have what seem to be competent doctors involved and expect a reduction in my symptoms (if not a complete cure) within the next several months.

(3) I live in an era where are there are several assets available not around previously:

• An online community to discuss (anoymously) health symptoms and other ideas
• A relatively open and tolerant political environment (though of course challenges remain)

(4) My loving wife still is hanging in there with me, despite my faults ...

(5) Last and least: I've been playing Wordle and enjoying it very much.

A Hospice Nurse's view of death

 I recently came across Julie the Hospice Nurse and have appreciated very much her perspective on death. Here's one, for example:

If you subscribe to her YouTube feed, you'll get a lot of perspective on death and dying that you probably haven't seen before.

I certainly have! I hope you enjoy this ...

How to Tell if Your Guests are Safe to Visit for the Holidays ... without sticking anything up their noses!

 The coronavirus tests currently available are rather invasive, requiring a swab to be put way up the nose:

I originally asked my stepson and his girlfriend to take this sort of test before I would allow them into our house for Thanksgiving; they said no. I then remembered I knew another way to test!

It's called behavioral kinesiology: basically your body already knows everything there is to know.

Dr. Diamond used to randomly distribute blank packets across the audiences he spoke in front of. The packets had two different substances:

• 1/2 had artificial sweetener
• 1/2 had organic vitamin C

He then had each member of the audience turn to his or her neighbor and do this sort of
test:

Basically the idea is that the body tests "strong" (locking the muscle) in the presence of beneficial substances (or ideas) and "weak" in the presence of harmful substances (or ideas). Diamond reports that the audience did these tests and then examined the packets in their and their partner's pockets. The results:

• Vitamin C: 100% "strong"
• artificial sweetener 0% "strong"

Details are in Diamond's book ... Here are a couple of videos that show ways of testing others

and by oneself:

This one gives a method you can do by yourself

This one shows how to do one person testing another

As for my stepson and his girlfriend: I did the test by myself and they came up free of coronavirus, so they got to come in the house for Thanksgiving. (I'll test them again just before Christmas.)

On Christian Charity

 My lovely wife is a Lutheran, and recently I had a spate of unemployment.

I filed for government unemployment assistance and received it, but I just missed the big extra that was available this past spring. I got one extra chunk from the 'Trump extra' that he jiggered loose from elsewhere in the federal budget, but we were still well short of being able to pay all of our responsibilities.

Kate put it out to all her church friends and even to people she'd just met via a yard sale we were having late summer.

Several of these people responded by sending us cash, unsolicited!

My wife handed me the first $800 saying "this is from God!" She asked "do you believe this?" I said "yes" ...

But I don't see it that way, really.

There is a belief among my wife and her Christian social group that "God will provide" ... and apparently they feel compelled to help God/ act in God's place, something like that. So a human social web was in charge, however inspired.

I am not complaining, trust me; I am grateful for this blessing. As challenging as the months of unemployment have been, they'd have been so much worse without this charity.

My goal is to get our finances in order so that we can send some of this back into the community, particularly to the local food bank which my wife has been taking advantage of for the last couple of months, as well. (This would never have occurred to me.)

I am working now, but catching up on some payments that we had to let slide during the last few months ... also starting a business that should start producing extra revenue shortly.

Uh, halleleujah!?

A Heretic Economist whose time may have come, at last

The old joke about economists: If you laid all the economists in the world end-to-end ... they would still point in all directions.

So a corollary of this is that being a heretic to standard schools of economics isn't as much of an impossibility as it was for Jacques Benveniste with his proof of homeopathy to the scientific establishment.

Current schools of economics have, shall we say, a problem with the models they use matching reality. Just look at one of the major economic events of recent years:

• The 2008 "great recession" and subsequent events. Almost no mainstream economist predicted it, and many predicted rampant inflation after the "quantitative easing" the Federal Reserve used to try and fix the effects of the recession ... which of course did not occur.

Our "heretic" says she has a model of economic reality called Modern Monetary Theory that better matches the economic facts on the ground, and after reading her book, I believe her.

Here she is:

Dr. Stephanie Kelton

Her views diverge wildly from the mainstream:

• A balanced U.S. Federal budget is undesirable, as it does not fuel the economy sufficiently
• Deficit spending in any country with "monetary sovereignty" (like the U.S., Japan, the U.K., Australia, even China) is, within very large limits, a benefit to that country's citizens
• We have plenty of resources in the U.S. to achieve guaranteed full employment and fully funded health care for everyone, without necessarily raising taxes a whole lot
• Austerity in any country with monetary sovereignty is a preposterously self-limiting strategy
• "pay as you go" plans to make sure any new spending is "deficit neutral" are unnecessary and actively harmful to the economy

If this makes you want to know more, the book she's just published is very readable:

And if you're more of a Youtube person than a reader, here's a small example for you to enjoy.

The Universe is a conspiracy for my benefit; a visualization to keep this going

Is visualization the key?

Seems worth a try ...

Despite many mistakes I've made throughout life, I seem to be in much better shape than I could expect:

• I have degrees in computer science and started with Python in 2006, and now that's a hot job ticket

• So I've just started a w2 job which I can work from home doing for as long as the coronavirus shutdown lasts, making a good salary
  
• 
  
• I have a loving wife who's stuck with me through thick and thin

• (fingers crossed) I remain in excellent health, not even having a cold more than once every two or three years
  
• I didn't get to work in anything related to the 'gig economy' or the hospitality industry or the restaurant industry ...
  

But there are things I want and don't yet have:

• A net-zero-energy house on acreage

• A Tesla or similar electric car
  
• Enough money so that my lovely wife can travel to her heart's content
  

... and so forth. But this is kind of a busy bunch of stuff to visualize, so I think I am going to just focus on one number: my FICO score.

700

This is what I need to be able to do what I want (get construction funding to get a house built, etc.)

Right now my score is around 640 as I have way too much debt and no obvious way to pay it down quickly.

So what could happen to fix this? In order of likelihood:

• I could win the lottery (I'd have to buy a ticket more regularly than I have been, I guess)
  
• This blog could go viral and could get enough views for me to sell ads on it
• Our business venture(s) (Rain, DirtRich) could hit it big
• Something else I can't imagine, or some combination of these things, or both

So I'm going to spend 5 or 10 minutes lying in bed visualizing this number every day until I have it.

Here goes:

700

700

700

Any visualization help you can give is welcome!

Proof of Homeopathy's effectiveness (except on Wikipedia)

In the late 1980's this researcher, Jacques Benveniste:

made a remarkable discovery. His team had been studying the reaction of white blood cells to allergens. But due to a team member's error, the concentration of allergen being tested was too diluted to be effective ... but somehow still showed an effect.

"Go back and do the work over," he said.

She did, but also tried the same ultra-dilute solution and got the same "impossible" results.

"Looks like homeopathy", a tutor on the team with a background in this specialty said.

But homeopathy claims that ever more dilute "remedies" produce stronger and stronger effects:

Benveniste and his team decided to investigate this alleged property and found that it worked ... more dilute concentrations produced stronger effects, even to the extent that it was extremely unlikely that a single molecule of the subject under investigation would exist in the ultra-dilute solution.

From 1985 to 1989 Benveniste's lab and cooperating labs in France, Israel, Italy and Canada, all of which were able to replicate these results!

Unfortunately these results ran afoul of the dominant paradigm of the day: fundamentalist materialism.

John Maddox, editor of Nature, where the paper was published, acted as self-appointed priest of the materialist "church", using explicitly religious terminology in defending the faith:

"This book is the best candidate for burning in many years," on Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life in 1981. He otherwise was known to use the word "heresy" for work he didn't like.

Benveniste and 12 coauthors published their paper in Nature, nonetheless ...

And I submit that Benveniste's treatment thereafter was effectively his having been branded a heretic.

 a heretic being burned at the stake

By 1988, the high materialists priests were no longer allowed to burn heretics at the stake; instead they just got to shun and excommunicate them from the Scientific Materialist Church.

Not that shunning is much less painful; one former Mennonite referred to the Amish practice of "shunning" as a "living hell of torture".

The ensuing storm destroyed Benveniste's reputation as a mainstream scientist and caused him to leave the lab where he'd been working for decades ... instead, according to one report, he wound up working in a "shack" on the parking lot of his former lab.

He worked on related "too weird for the mainstream" experiments on the electromagnetic signaling between cells. He died in 2004.

I normally link to Wikipedia for some subjects I discuss, but the Wikipedia article on homeopathy looks to have been written and maintained by Maddox's heresy-busting heirs. They label it a "pseudoscience."

In fact there is a later researcher that also replicated the original results, Madeleine Ennis from Queen's University in Belfast.

References and Further Reading

Andrew Weil, M.D., Health and Healing (1983), chapter 1 "A Homeopathic Cure?"

Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. The description above on Benveniste and his troubles comes from chapter 4 of this excellent book.

Shunning quote: Lynne McTaggart, The Bond, chapter 5.

Where the 'shack' note comes from https://q-mag.org/jacques-benveniste-and-the-memory-of-water.html

Bee stings are therapeutic, but do they actively seek out sick people?

Paradoxically, stings of the order hymenoptera have been shown to be generally therapeutic for humans. The colloquial expression of this: "beekeepers never get arthritis."

There is a specialty called apitherapy that uses bees and bee products for enhancing human health. There have been various standard medical studies showing that bee sting therapy in particular is effective, this one looks at its "adverse effects" (anaphylactic shock in the worst case).

So bee stings (and wasp and yellow jacket stings too, but these two are just harder to manage than are bees) have been used to treat arthritis and other conditions for millennia.

But this doesn't mean that bees actively seek out sick people to sting, does it?



Here's another story (possibly the origin of this Youtube story above?) by somebody saved from Lyme Disease by bee stings ...

Readers? Ever hear of any such story?

A mainstream article on Reiki

Venerable magazine The Atlantic magazine published a not-too-skeptical article on Reiki recently ...

No surprise; it turns out there is a bunch of scientific evidence that Reiki works, but no theory as to why it works.

One part of the Atlantic article that leapt out to me: veterans whose "body had forgotten how to sleep" were asleep on the Reiki table in minutes ...

My Lovely Wife is an insomniac:

But maybe after a few Reiki sessions she could learn to sleep more like this:

We'll have to give this a try!

A precognitive dream? Maybe ...

I have been interviewing for jobs lately and really need to go back to work as soon as possible as I have payments (including rent) coming up the first of next month.

This came up in my dreams, though, when I got a very clear message:

It won't happen until after the 18th

And in fact: I got the initial acceptance call on the 16th and the first actual paperwork acceptance ... on the 19th.

I'll have to watch for other messages carefully!

Crystal healing: nonsense? This doesn't fit my experience

There was a big flap a while back on Google searches for "crystal healing" having spiked ... and how that was such nonsense.

Let me tell you about an experience I had in the 1980's ...

I was a young kid from the South who had moved to Seattle and met a Sophisticated Older Woman who recommended I try massage. I had never heard of such a thing, but this woman had recommended various other activities that were generally fulfilling, so I decided to try it.

I can't find an image of the kind of massage I received ... there are a lot like this, but mine was different.

The therapist started working on my back and shoulders, where I carry most of the tension, and came across a knotted muscle. She stopped and instead of working on it with her hands, took some kind of crystal (I think quartz), somehow focussed her consciousness through it, and the knot in my shoulder dissolved.

I have no explanation for this and no theory of how it could work. The therapist moved away maybe a year after I started seeing her, and I haven't found anyone else doing this since.

But don't be so sure that crystals are "nonsense" ... I'd love to talk with anyone who's had an experience like this or can refer such a practitioner!

How I stopped smoking marijuana by failing to have an out-of-body experience

I smoked marijuana rather successfully (i.e. I graduated from college in 1978 and

worked throughout the rest of the period as a computer programmer) from 1977 to 1987.

But in 1985 I started reading Robert Monroe's book Journeys Out of the Body, about

his OOBE's. The sequel, Far Journeys, revealed that Monroe had quit his career as

a cable TV executive and founded a research institute to explore the OOBE. 

The Monroe Institute, which still seems to be going strong today, gives various programs for the public. In the 1980's their first program was "The Gateway Voyage". (They're still at it; check their website.)

Far Journeys has a section describing an episode of OOBE sex between two participants.

Since at that point in my life I was unattached (yet on fire sexually!) I signed up the week after I read this.

The Institute responded with an intake form that one was supposed to fill out and return with the fee, and I answered the questions honestly. One was "what mind-altering substances do you use?" ... or words to that effect. I replied honestly that yes, I smoked marijuana once or twice per week.

The Institute replied that "you're accepted for the August 1987 Gateway Voyage ... and please cease your use of marijuana" for the duration. This was in February 1987.

I thought "oh, no" but wanted to give the program a chance on its own
terms. I had "one more for the road" and gave the rest of my stash away to a colleague. I didn't miss it as much as I had  anticipated ...

For one thing, TMI sends participants this audio package (at the time tape but these days probably mp3) of 'hemi-sync' that is designed to get the two halves of your brain in sync and in shape to experience "expanded awareness." OK, I was ready to try this ...

I started using the tapes regularly when they arrived, and at some point I started to feel these episodes of  "vibration," as if I were a water pipe and someone had turned on high pressure water through me. I didn't know what to make of this, though it didn't seem to be harmful.

I kept this up through the 6 months before I left for the Gateway Voyage, just "vibrating" periodically but not otherwise getting much into expanded awareness as far as I could tell.

The course itself wasn't mindblowing, at least for me, but was very pleasant. The setting is in the rolling hills near Charlottesville VA, in a dormitory-style building that has sleeping quarters wired for audio, the better to put hemi-sync through to the participants ... There are way more bathrooms than would otherwise be justified in such a facility, as the staff advises all to relieve themselves before one of the hemi-sync sessions so as not to be slammed back into one's body by having to pee!

As for any improvement in my sex life, there was none either in body nor out. I basically got blasted with hemi-sync all week but I really didn't have anything like a paranormal experience; just "vibrated" a bit.

I came home and was just feeling wonderfully energetically "open" until ...

I got ahold of another batch of marijuana and smoked a bit ...

This was like turning off a light switch the way the energy in my body was closed down.

I was shocked ... until I thought about it a bit.

I started smoking marijuana as a completely left-brained teenager, so the energy blocked would have been mainly my left brain and for the first time allowed me to experience colors, taste food, etc.

But at age 30 when operating on both energy channels ... an energy block is just a block.

I stopped smoking grass after that one joint and haven't had another since ... I since then have been energetically a bit more open or closed at various times and really haven't missed marijuana.

Dowsing for a missing harp

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer was a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 when her daughter's "smaller, uniquely valuable" harp went missing.

She tried all the normal routes: the police, instrument dealers, a television news story. None of this worked.

A friend suggested that "you should be willing to try anything. Try calling a dowser."

She did, and the dowser found the harp's location accurately.

The rest of the book is Dr. Mayer's exploring further out of the bounds of her scientific training, everything from talking with Hal Puthoff on the Pentagon's remote viewing experiments to counseling a Ph.D. researcher who was running scared after intuiting answers to four decimal places that she couldn't have known rationally.

I usually think of dowsing looking for water, something like this:

But apparently there's more than one kind of dowser! As for the dowser ...  his name is Harold McCoy and he's since then founded the Ozark Research Institute, dedicated to "healing, education and research." He's also written a book:

I am ordering this book and I'll report on it in a future post.

The self-expression curve

Often it's easier to conform to the expectations of your peers at work and elsewhere in your social orbit:

This is a mistake when taken too far, though, as you'll miss attracting the people who are most on your wavelength. The range of response to any signal you're sending out, whether by your attitude, writing, singing, anything ... will be distributed something like this:

Negative                                       Meh                         Positive/Resonant

The fat part in the middle will be the majority of the response: indifference, slightly negative to the left and slightly positive to the right. At the extremes will be the people on the left who just hate your signals and the right who just resonate to them.

In certain circumstances you may want to restrict your real signal to a select audience:

Debris outside the offices of Charlie Hebdo after the 2011 attack on their office

But mostly you shouldn't have to worry about the people who don't like what you're putting out: they'll mostly ignore you ... just what you want.

So if you just conform and don't send any signal out that you think might offend anybody, all you get is meh. If you're willing to say something of what you really are, you'll get this wider range and you can gather up people to love and resonate with, like this:

Try it and see what happens!