Monday, September 14, 2009

to YOU: from Emily:

Now that I have learned how one posts to this, I will be doing it regularly. You can see some of these articles at http://www.Ezines.com
and
http://www.SelfGrowth.com
If I have your email address, I will send you a link to join Self Growth. I think you will like it, there is so much there and something for everyone.

We have bought one tractor trailer load of GREAT HAY (dairy quality!) so Thank You!

Chicken Wing Drumettes with Your Barbecue Sauce

Barbecue Sauce Beneficial
on
Chicken Wing Drumettes

Easy barbecue sauce is not only healthful, not only easy, but it clings thickly to the food, isn't sugary, and is mouthwatering.

Get out your blender. Fetch a head of jumbo garlic, your best friend. Keep this a secret: You don't have to peel the individual cloves, no one will know! Put the cloves in the blender.

Shake a bottle of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce: That is the one that has the antique-looking paper from top to bottom. Lea & Perrins is the ONLY Worcestershire sauce: It has tamarind and other magic ingredients. Pour the black liquid to just under the tips of the garlic cloves – which will probably be about a cup out of the bottle. (Garlic cloves are in the blender, remember?)

Liquefy into a thickly frothy black gunk. Black gold it is. This is your barbecue sauce. Just make what you will use each time.

It does not taste like garlic or like Worcestershire sauce.

Chicken Wing Drumettes
Pour some of the sauce in a toaster oven size shallow pan. Put the package of chicken pieces close together but not crowding one another. Pour the rest of the sauce on them.

Bake in the oven at 350° for about half an hour (This time is from memory, chicken wing drumettes don't live in the wilderness one-horse grocery store here. If you want to know whether food is done, just sniff: The smell happens when the food is ready most all the time.

This meal is wonderful served on white rice. Taken to a potluck dinner, it will be the first to go and everyone will want the recipe.

One package of chicken wing pieces will serve two or three souls.
Or they can be glorious hors d'oeuvres.

Do it Yourself Diet for Life that Makes you Happy and You Can't Cheat on

Do it Yourself Diet for Life
that You Can't Cheat on,
that makes YOU happy.


Spend two weeks deep in thought about what your favorite foods are. All your favorite foods. Including junk foods, alcohol . . . think, think, because we don't eat our favorite foods just like we don't live the life we would prefer. Example: You love canned pineapple, but classify it as a dessert, and you seldom eat desserts.

While you are thinking, eat up what is in the house and buy favorite foods, putting the ones you don't have to cook AT EYE LEVEL.

Next stage is two weeks of fitting favorite foods into the way you cook, if you cook – into your lifestyle; combining them together. Example: that pineapple blended with pureed garbanzo beans, relish, a little horseradish, and crushed pineapple put into pita bread with grated cheddar cheese.


While you are thinking the second two weeks, continue buying favorite foods and putting them where your eyes trip over them. You will walk into the kitchen hungry and not reach for junk you don't want; you will reach for what you truly do want. Don't forget the simplest things like lettuce and tomato sandwiches.

You ease into this diet; it takes time. Remember you are not consciously trimming calories or fat or any other thing unless you WANT to at the moment
.
As you eat primarily the foods and the meals you enjoy, strange things happen. One, food ceases to be an issue: Anytime you want, you walk into your kitchen and eat something you like. As the food ceases to be an issue, you eat less: magic. Two, YOU BECOME HAPPY!!!!!!!!! Your body is happy, and it takes you with it. Not temporarily.

A happy consequence of this diet is your weight becomes what is normal for you. I invented this diet because I was so busy not because I was so chubby. And I lost 12 pounds over a few weeks.
All these things happened to me when I did this, and to all others who did; but that is only a few souls. There's a rumor of a similar diet that simply says: Eat only what you want when you want it, don't eat out of boredom, etc. In this diet, you can eat out of any motive in your vocabulary.
One day on this diet, I ate a huge bag of potato chips and three beers, in the sun sitting on a picnic table on a perfect day when the phone did not ring. I did not cheat on my diet that day, and I was soooo happy. I ate nothing else. I still remember that day.

Leadership: Tale of Two Cats, Tale of Two Dogs

Tale of Two Cats and Two Dogs:
Owly and his sidekick Iggy.
Molly and her sidekick Li'l Dude.
The same story.

Molly was a Jerry Lee type of German Sheppard: the medium brown body and black muzzle. She was from the pound, a young adult who had lived in the truck of an unemployed homeless rural western dude, with him. Molly hunted animals for his dinner and presumably shared it. She was a proud cold dog, a good watch dog, but not to be trusted with the ducks before I beat that out of her. She was the leader.

Li'l Dude was a starving abused infested stray from a convenience store on an Indian reservation. Molly had been here for a while when Li'l Dude showed up: It was the German's turf. Li'l Dude was partly the same kind of Sheppard Molly was and partly something smaller, possibly Pit Bull. People thought he was her pup, they looked so much alike. How he loved his bossy woman. The new arrival would not wear a collar for a year, and he chewed other dogs' collars off their necks. I guessed someone held him by his collar and beat him.

He cringed. When you petted him, he made noises like you were torturing him: They sounded vicious at the same time, snarling.

He was the follower. He whined a lot. He barked at random.

Likewise, Owly was the older cat. Both he and Iggy were the products of a Himalayan Gentle-cat visiting the feral peasant pussies of the ranch: cats who were genetically distinct and native to the continent: slender, longer tails, razor-sharp claws, elongated faces, very short fur and long legs: truly wild and not tamable by ordinary effort. Over the years, the Himalayan blood gentled down the gene pool, so that Owly – so named because his fur was so dense that when he turned his head it was like an owl turning its head: feathers straight out – Owly walked into the house and did not straightaway poop on the floor. He did get around to it, but I decided to tame him because he was gorgeous. Taming was a mutual ordeal.

Iggy was smaller and not as striking-looking, but here was another peasant who did not poop on the floor at all. Iggy was the lesser, he deferred to his boss cat. He looked like a pale imitation of the older resident: less distinct markings, shorter fur, softer gray and white than his cohort.

Molly and Owly shared the same fate: murdered by the western rural rubes who prey upon the pet animals of their betters.

Li'l Dude became the dog every man wanted and admired: He guards mommy and the ranch expertly, giving intelligent warning where before he had barked at random. He is now a prize who was the sidekick of his mate.

Iggy became the head cat of a pride of (now tame) kitties: 8 of them a close affectionate family.

It was not until Iggy became diabetic and went to live with the vet because the burdens of leadership were too great for his failing body that I realized how powerful a force he was among the cat family: They lost their political unity, going each his own way: No more eight-to-a-cuddle-heap. Iggy had taken over Owly's leadership position so seamlessly that no one noticed his achievement.

It is fascinating to realize that, but for the deaths of Molly and Owly, L'il Dude and Iggy would have remained vice presidents, and not developed the full personality that arises from responsibility.

Do you know someone this may be true of?

Instant Deviled Egg Sandwich

Instant Deviled Egg Sandwich

Everyone should keep hard boiled eggs in the refrigerator; they make a better snack than a midnight candy bar.

And everyone should have sweet mustard relish in their refrigerator; it is so good on so many things besides hot dogs and hamburgers. And this is one of them.

All you do is slice or quarter hard boiled eggs, however many you want in your sandwich – two is my number. Cover two slices of whole wheat toast with the relish, put the eggs in between, and enjoy.

If you are the ambitious conscientious type, you can mix the egg with the relish, and then put that combination on the sandwich. Purist!

Either way, the deviled egg taste is exact.

You and the Lottery Spirit: A Meeting of Minds

How to Win the Lottery

Trying to pick the winning number is going about it backasswards. This story is how to win in any type of gamble but of course it doesn't guarantee you will succeed any given incident. It may work for gambles in business and in getting away with your mischief, but I am less sure of that.

General Motors does not exist. Governments do not exist. They are on paper and they are in our heads but you can't say 'this is General Motors.' If we all woke up one morning and did not know what government was, there would be no government, until a thug got together with a bureaucrat and invented taxation. Likewise there is a lottery entity in mass consciousness, and this is as valid an entity as General Motors or a government.

Quite often people who win will say “I just knew this time I was going to win.” And people do things like blow on the dice.

You get in touch with The Lottery Spirit, who is probably related to the Muse. You address this entity and tell it to honor your choices. Instead of you getting the right number, the right number comes looking for you. Much cleaner. It doesn't work if you don't buy the ticket, though, or pull the lever.

Exactly how you get in touch with the Lottery Spirit is up to you. If you keep trying, the magic instant of connection may come to you, hopefully in a lottery that has a lovely payoff. But winning small ones is practice!

Try it, you have nothing to lose and it's fun. (If you win, send me a dollar!)

Emily's Elixir: You Feel Good Just LOOKING at this Drink!

EMILY'S ELIXIR
a/k/a The Lava Lamp Drink
(You feel good just looking at this drink!)

There is a hug in every glass . . .

Find 3 champagne flutes (glasses. Tall, stemmed, slim tulip shape a/k/a “champagne glasses”) for each person. This shape is necessary for the lava lamp effect.

Have a bottle of Cook's champagne – if it's not cold, that's OK: it will be. This recipe is waste of expensive champagne.

Have some candles of any kind. Or a dim lamp.

Some frozen blueberries. Got to be frozen.

A bottle of Valerian Root extract. (that's liquid.) You find it at a health food store.
A comfortable place to be and to sleep. Perchance a person to be and to sleep with.
A girlfriend to do girl talk with will do.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Fill each glass One Third Full of frozen blueberries.

Pour champagne to near the top. It will fizz, let it be and resume pouring when the fizz gives up.

Carefully float a dropper full – not just “a drop” - onto the top of the bubbly. Do not squirt!

Put the glasses in front of a candle or candles. Relax as the blueberries become 'airborne' and make their way to the top, bump into one another, relieve themselves of the bubbles they have collected, and sink slowly back down. As they wend their way back down, they are a lava lamp and they stir the grape color at the top into the electric violet color at the bottom, making a new color you will never see anywhere else.

The drink stays cold. The blueberries are tasty. The effect is gorgeous.

Valerian root is a muscle relaxant – sore muscles are soothed after you have picked rocks or run the marathon without forethought. So you get that warm and fuzzy feel that normally arrives after too many but comes now after the equivalent of only 1½ drinks because Valerian boosts the relaxant effect of alcohol. (I am saying 1½ because I did pour and measure: the blueberries displace that amount of champagne.)

Furthermore, the relaxed-muscle effect lasts for a day and a half, so if you do this routine every other day there will come the time your brain usually screams to your muscles to “Get ready. The sky is falling!” And this time your muscles say . . . “Uh, brain, I don't be thinking that way... seems okay here to me rat now . . .” The anxiety cycle is broken. You don't tense up because relaxed muscles just don't. It works for most people, even works for grief experiences.

Unless you are in AA, you don't have much to lose: a glass and a half of champagne every other day ain't gonna hurt and may help; and champagne is chemically different from other forms of alcohol – is even prescribed for at least one ailment. And Valerian, I am told, is Europe's leading arthritis remedy.

This recipe is good for:
*anxiety and depression (as explained above)
*insomnia (Honey, you WILL sleep after drinking those three flutes!)
*sore muscles (probably at higher-end doses)
*arthritis, I am told
*romance (Just try it. He can't drive home or shouldn't.)

And if you are in AA or don't like champagne, try this with seltzer water and Valerian root. And if you don't like Valerian root (delicious it is not), substitute kava, tryptophan, passion flower or other herbal relaxant. I have not tried any substitutes.

The New Moralilty and Me

The New Morality and Me

What people used to openly call good and evil in others must now be considered a matter of personal style or personality instead. This is the politically correct mores imposed by—hmm, the media perhaps? So now one can feel the same illicit thrill saying so-and-so is evil as one can saying a 'dirty' word...now known as an expletive.

The labels that differentiated acceptable behavior from wrong behavior are now themselves to be considered wrong. So [Sigh] Nixon is not a crook, not to be reviled. The only person exempted from the rule is Hitler. Yes, Hitler was evil. We are waiting for Number Two, apparently. Genghis Khan, you may not apply. No apologist has suggested Hitler had a difficult childhood; he did. No appeal for him, though; he is our poster boy of badness.

On the other hand, we don't have to harbor secret hatred for our moral betters anymore...unless they happen to be quirky like Mother Teresa or the Mennonites or such. Eccentricity excuses morality.
(1) A person can be 'good' if he is also 'a little weird,' in a good way of course. But not if he is an average person. One can't be good and be mainstream. We have bought into this, most of us.
(2) One cannot be good and be smart, either: Good folks have to be on the simple side, to excuse the—oh my God, I'm going to say it—virtue. Think Forest Gump.
(3) Nor can one be good and have status. A guy or gal who can say "Right's right and wrong's wrong" will have never been even to the coffee shop of the VIP lounge unless it were to pour the coffee.
(4) One can even impugn another's credibility now by suggesting he or she is moral or is a 'moralist' or is—God forbid!--'judgmental.' In fact, it seems you cannot be 'good' and be anything else: That is the be-all and end-all of your existence. Kind of like being black used to be (back when you could be 'black'). Being a decent person is being not cool.

Awhile ago there was a fellow on death row accused of something perfectly awful, something no one could condone even in our modern society. He had a following of susceptible females promulgating his case, his appeals. Then, out of the blue, came indisputable evidence he was—omigod!--innocent! His cadre of labile dames melted away, indignantly: they had been had! Mad is what they were. Wasting all that energy on someone who was actually innocent. They wanted their money back; it was a bad movie for them. I have been thinking about this for years, and it eludes me: What am I missing? Write me and tell me.

In countries like Canada (and like the U.S. In the 40s) where mass consciousness exudes disapproval of inappropriate behavior in even small ways, far fewer lurid crimes occur. Mass consciousness has a direct effect on mass behavior. Political and personal corruption has a very different style to it when people frown: not flagrant, not 'shameless.'
.

Take the Lid Off

Take the Lid Off

Small stresses lessen ability to focus on the meaningful stressors. They operate just below the radar of consciousness because we deal with them often by suppressing them so we can focus on important things. The problem is: a myriad of these gnats are as large a drain on us as a 'real problem' would be. The very fact a small thing annoys us compounds the tension as we feel we shouldn't be annoyed: a double whammy.

Here is a process you can use to take the lid off:

Spend a week or two sitting on your own shoulder focusing on what tenses you up – whether the reaction 'makes sense' or not. Pay attention to your belly, to your muscles, to your tone of voice.

Make a list. This is about small aggravations. You don't have to justify being irritated, either: Things don't have to make sense.

Now study the list. Think of ways to circumvent those aggravations. Let's say there are a lot of traffic lights on your very short trip to work in your standard-shift car. Look for a way that may be longer but has fewer lights. Maybe it will be more scenic, even. Let's say your long skirts sweep the knicknacks off the glass topped cocktail table. Move the knicknacks or the table. Let's say you have an energy-vampire friend, relative or neighbor who whines to you about her situation. There is no law that says you have to communicate with this person, no matter who she is. So don't – or develop a sense of humor about her, as if she were in a situation comedy . . . which she is. Dumb stuff like those three examples does add up. You will see.

Continue this process of discovering tension and relieving the causes of it that are minor. You will find you have more energy, more of your mind on tap, and more strength to deal with the big things that 'have a right' to upset you when the small steam-builders are taken care of.

You may even find, once you have taken care of the small things, that the next layer of tension-producers can be dealt with in the same simple way: that they aren't so big after all. And on up the line until the biggies aren't so big either. Who knows?

You have nothing to lose.

Echinacea for Birds and Poultry

ECHINACEA FOR BIRDS AND POULTRY

From desperation, creative solutions often arise. When all else fails, reach for that inspired thought. The more often you reach, the more accurate your reach is. Such was the occasion when Emily discovered some idiot had put duck pullet eggs into her incubator "So my son can see birth." It was too late to just take them out: The chicks were about to hatch, they were talking through their shells! For some good reason of their own, ducks do not set on pullet eggs.

36 infected bloody eggs were hatching, ducklings who had hours or days to "live."
She did not feel free to experiment with their lives until all but 6 hatchlings had perished. The vet said infected eggs defined 'a hopeless case.' So now Emily was ethically free to experiment.

For 9 days, ducklings live off the yolk inside them. So for 9 days they don't have to eat. Intuition suggested this was what to work with. Emily had some echinacea powder and some echinacea extract. She knew how general echinacea's benefits are. So here you go: Half of their gruel is echinacea powder; and one- fourth their water is echinacea extract--alcohol free echinacea extract.

These ducklings survived. Yes, they were small for their age. Emily continued feeding this way, reducing the percent of medicine as they grew larger and more active, especially after day 9 when they had to eat to live. Now, she wished she had done this from the beginning.

When the 6 joined the duck community, you could tell who they were because they were smaller. In a week or two, you could no longer tell.

That would have been the end of that inspiration had it not been for Turkey the Sparrow. Emily discovered him in the dirt in the peafowl pen in early May. Some snow was on the ground still in 2003 there. He looked like a frog with a beak: no feathers or feather tracks; and his eyes would not open for four more days.

There were no occupied nests to return him to. He was her baby.

Wouldn't you know, an avian biologist--who does surgery on eggs!--is her best friend. So Turkey was reared properly, with Leslie's expert tutelage, fed from a syringe Exact gruel and hand strained peas and carrots at exactly 105 degrees--fed this way every two hours around the clock for six weeks and his tiny body kept at the right temperature and so on. And he survived.

Outdoors, sparrows live two breeding seasons, eighteen months to two years. When Turkey was five years old or so, he was ill. When you weigh a half-ounce soaking wet and you are a bird, a bird way past his life span, and you live in some outpost where farm animals are what people value, and what the vets treat, you are down on your luck. Turkey was in distress; and birds die very quickly.

She remembered those ducklings. Let's do it again. But Turkey is an adult (no yolk to go on) and is not poultry. What to do? Was it the Muse who suggested drops of echinacea in Turkey's water over a long time? Perhaps so.

Non-alcohol-based echinacea extract to the rescue once again. She starts with about 12 drops in his water, which was about 3 ounces. She gives it to him for life at 3 drops, with some days plain water. She also gave him ginger extract in his water for a while, which perked him up. Is that beneficial as well? Don't know, but it happened and it did seem to be a good thing.

Turkey is very much alive right here as this is being written, possibly the most vibrant happy creature on the planet. Such a pleasure to know him! He is grateful for every moment of his life. He has passed 6 years old, and is headed straight for 7--which is the record for documented sparrow longevity.

Cornell University is keeping track of Turkey. It has a research department project going, on treating avians with echinacea. Because of Turkey! Avian biology is big at Cornell, where the woman who gave the instructions on Turkey's care is a graduate contributor. And those poor dying ducks brought all this about, through a string of coincidences.

All because someone was paying attention and thinking with both sides of her head at the same time.

The Echinacea You Don't Know (There is no such thing as the human body)

The Echinacea You Don't Know
(There is no such thing as the human body)

There is no such thing as the human body. Lately even the medical industry is beginning to face this fact. ("Oh? How old is it? What race and gender? Is it in good health? What are its habits and living conditions?") Well, in the good old days it used to be a 40-year-old American urban white male with money who might have heart trouble, but some things have changed, haven't they?

Personal experience is sneered upon by Western medicine; it's not a blind trial, don't you know – regarded the same way the religious industry resents truly decent unchurched citizens. (Mere citizens poaching upon the industry territory is what these two resentments have in common.) But precisely because there is no such thing as the human body, personal experience in healing is where to find what works for some individuals sometimes—and what therefore might work for you. In the real world, what works sometimes is all medicine of any kind will ever deliver. (There are 12 tissue types and there are positive and negative blood types in each of blood's categories. How and whether these variations in our flesh impinge upon healing is overlooked by the whole world. And there are more variables to come—another unexplored territory.)

Whew. That said, here is a history of personal experience with the glories of echinacea, the pharmaceutical the Plains Indians used most often – raw of course.

Number One Experience of the Glories of Echinacea:

Dr. David G. Williams (an M.D. and alternative medicine god) years ago published a regimen developed by a South African hospital that somehow had 5,000 infants with both hospital pneumonia and measles, and not enough antibiotics to treat them all. The hospital dosed half the patients with antibiotics and half with this formula. The formula won: better survival rate, fewer side effects. If you actually follow the instructions, the regimen works to cure a virus or regular cold the same as antibiotics would. Most people don't follow the instructions and think they did.
(The regimen cures more than a cold, obviously.)

Here is that protocol:

*A gram (1,000 mg) of Vitamin C an hour as tolerated (meaning you don't take it when your stomach or bowels complain).
*3 grams of echinacea 3 times a day. (That is 3,000 mg. That is usually 8 capsules 3 times a day because 380 mg is the usual capsule size. If you are lucky enough to find 500-mg capsules, it's easy: 6 capsules is 3000 mg.) Yes, 8 pills 3 times a day, and get over it: This is for healing, not maintenance. And don't forget to do it; take it, and space it an even time apart, it doesn't work in the jar.
*20 10,000 I.U. capsules of Vitamin A (oil, palmitate) once a day for 5 days. This is doing a 100-capsule bottle of 10,000 I.U. ones in the 5 days. Check to see whether you bought the 8,000 I.U. size, in which case you will be doing 25 pills a day for 5 days, a bottle and a quarter.) No, 200,000 I.U. of Vitamin A palmitate for 5 days is not an overdose. You would have to do it for more than eight months without letup to kill yourself.

Take all these as prescribed until 2 or 3 days after you feel better, or you may relapse—just like antibiotics work. Don't say I didn't tell you so: I too have stopped too soon.

This is the end of Dr. David G. Williams' published regimen.

Taking a capsule a day, or a dropperful of extract a day, of pau d'Arco with this routine is a good idea—no more than that! Pau d'Arco is a systemic cleanser that really works (You can tell by how you smell!) so going about it gradually and gently is advisable. (Upcoming article on pau d'Arco) The reason it is good with the regimen is, the regimen is stirring up a lot of 'bad stuff' intensely, and this flushes it out more quickly.

Number Two Experience of the Glories of Echinacea:

Chiropractors prescribe high doses of echinacea for an extended time for carpal tunnel syndrome. Echinacea over a long time reduces nerve inflammation. So any ailment that is inflammation of the nerve would benefit from echinacea—things like tennis elbow and carpal tunnel syndrome. Actually, echinacea is anti-inflammatory, period. (The pharmaceuticals that treat nerve inflammation are toxic to the liver, to be taken with caution and regular testing for liver numbers.) The carpal tunnel benefit and the allergy benefit are using the same dosage of echinacea as the South African Hospital Regimen and are based on personal experience, not on anything Dr. Williams has reported.

And by the way, there is a blind study about how surgery for carpal tunnel is not only ineffective but inadvisable. A small hospital thought it would put itself on the map when it discovered there had been no study to establish how effective the surgery was. They sure did put themselves on the map! Their study proved what a bad idea it was!

Number Three Experience of the Glories of Echinacea:

Allergies are an overactive immune system. People are always saying 'Don't take echinacea for more than two weeks because it could suppress the immune system.' Where the authority for this is, I don't know. But, suppose it is true: Suppressing the immune system is sometimes what you want; there are pharmaceuticals for that purpose. Inflammation is sometimes an overactive immune response too. Anyway, if you use echinacea for your carpal tunnel, you stand to lose your allergies along with your achy wrist. This applies to hay fever type allergies, and may apply to contact and food allergies as well.

If you wonder which echinacea to use—purpura or augustifolia—just buy a pound of powder of each and mix the two. Whenever you wonder 'which,' remember 'both.' That is a general principle to live by, especially if you include 'neither' in the list of choices.

Ducks' Capacity for the Enjoyment of Life Surpasses Humans'

Ducks' Capacity for the Enjoyment of Life
Surpasses Humans'

Here is a picture of ducks who have been slimed by the latest oil spill. They are doomed, and the water they float in is doomed. But here they are doing what ducks do, up until the very last breath of their lives. They have no horror on their faces, just a relaxed but miserable expression. They know. They are resigned.
They know but they do not question or rail against the injustice of their fate. The patience in their manner is evident. So is the fact they are numbed to the situation. Just a few hours or days ago, life was just ducky. And now it's all over but the shouting, buddies. So let's not shout. No one is going to save us, so let's close this chapter of our lives with some dignity, some beauty. See you over there later.

We humans feel we are facing our doom, too—most of us have that dreadful anticipation that these are the last of our days. But we feel tense, kicking ourselves for not saving up, not voting 'the right way,' or some such thing, as if there were a right way to vote, as if our vote accomplished something, as if saving up would make some real difference. We are in some apprehensive state of mind even though nothing has happened yet. We are not enjoying what we have now, as the black ducks are doing.

Sometimes a capacity for thought is a disadvantage. Sometimes not thinking is wisdom. Sometimes using every last ounce of gratitude for what we still have pays off. Sometimes we should just feel, feel the best way we can, because the stress of worrying about what's gonna be just makes it worse.

So let's kick back and do what takes our minds off of things while we still can.

Success, The First Step: How George Got out of the Ghetto

Success: The First Step,
How George got out of the Ghetto

Here is this book that was old in l959. George Washington Carver (the renowned head professor of the Agriculture Department at Tuskegee University; researcher into, and promoter of, alternative crops to cotton in the Reconstruction South; a man openly praised by President Theodore Roosevelt) was born a slave, and was a sickly child to boot. In the book, he is being interviewed as to what started him on his path from that ghetto predicament to being the famous scientist.

He said it all started with cleaning a cabin. The woman who ran the place where he was a young slave told him if he got this filthy dwelling place clean, he would be an indoor worker. But 'it really has to be clean, George. Call me when you have finished, and I will inspect your work.' She was favoring him. He describes being awed by her, the smell of her clothes, and really wanting to please her. She was from another world to him. George was born in l894, so this scene happened a little after 1900. He describes cleaning the place and proudly calling her.

'Oh, no. This isn't clean. See over there, see that.' George describes his insight into what 'clean' was: a whole new concept. He did as she instructed, and then cleaned some more things on his own. Surely now, he will have succeeded.

'Well George, that is much better, but you forgot the window sill, and those covers have to be removed to the laundry.' George describes a new level of consciousness within himself, an epiphany if you will. He says he sat down and really contemplated the situation with all his might: what 'clean' is. Each and every item in the cabin, and each and every square inch of the cabin, had to be nothing but 'cabin.' He saw several things she had still not mentioned.

This time he took a long time. Hours. He was energized, he says. He was in an altered state. And this time when he called the lady, she praised his work, said it was truly clean, and gave him that promotion.

That is where his success started, George Washington Carver reports in this old interview.

This is the man who made it his destiny to better the lives of subsistence farmers in the South. He researched what crops would put the nitrogen back into the overfarmed soil for them, he developed a training program to implement the crop rotation, and he developed peanut and sweet potato varieties for that purpose, then went farther to develop more than 300 products just for peanuts and 118 for sweet potatoes.

He bettered the lives of those around him. He was so far ahead of his time he promoted peanut oil as a biofuel.

He would probably still have been a success if the lady hadn't asked him to clean the cabin, but that, he says, is the way it actually did happen: That was the actual turning point.

The Mystic Path Out of the Box, Into Spiritual Power

The Mystic Path Out of the Box
and Into Spiritual Power:

Experiences, Sensations and Symptoms of Being On The Path;

Language as a Factor

(This is a treatise; it is not light or ordinary reading. I am trying to be clear as I write this, nevertheless it is long and is unfamiliar territory.)

The categories that human languages lock things into in our minds stifle creative thinking and block extrasensory perception. The categories are the 'box' to 'think out of.' Language fetters awareness:
*Most people won't think of or even sense something they have no words for.
*We dream of things we have no language for (a color without shape, a form without an outline) and therefore cannot retrieve the dream.
*When a foreign concept blossoms, we put Galileo on trial for his life in our heads.
*In some (obscure) languages, the forms of words (as in the conjugations of verbs, and what pronouns refer to) are not by time and gender; they are, say, by physical distance one is away (from the speaker), or the degree of family closeness, or a person's rank. Wrap your head around that one!

*Before the age of two, before language, our minds are structured parallel to 'out there.' That is why psychic perception and psychic experiences are so common and so accurate in very young children. They receive mental telepathy as pictures.
*At the age of two, when we are being indoctrinated with categories and labels, we are frustrated and cranky: We are railing against putting the system into place that changes the valid way we experience reality.
*After the age of two, once we have been reprogrammed to categorize—by naming and labeling things in our language--our inner being rails against whatever goes against the grain of the way we have those labels arranged.

Animals do sense what is going to happen and what is happening. Not having language in their brains is a factor that allows them this awareness. They were never two-year-olds who had to learn the cat is an animal, you are a person, the washtub is a thing, and the sand is something made out of a lot of things. No such distinctions clutter their awareness!

The mystic path includes training to deprogram one's mind of these blocks. The training is 'merely' experiences, many of which occur in sleep, dream state or trance. Mystics in training experience a feeling of 'stripping away' as well as an awareness of new input into the mind. The awareness of new input does not always include the input itself: You just know you received 'some stuff' at first.

At some point in the training, one sometimes perceives directly as animals do, and one's mind does revert toward the system one was born with, which is that each item is its own entity, and the connections that make the meaning are just that: the connections. Yes, during the reverting, one tends to experience the same irritation and disorientation two-year-olds feel when their psyches are headed the other direction.

After the reverting, one can 'float' an idea over the entire contents of consciousness and up comes whatever is connected to that in any way. Effortlessly.

After the reverting, the cat is no longer an animal unless the subject is the difference between a person and an animal; the washtub is no longer a thing unless the subject is the difference between a person and a thing; and the sand is no longer one thing made out of a lot of things unless the subject is the difference between a singleton and a group item. In other words, distinctions occur only as connections are made!

The purpose of the training is to get our minds back into sync with 'out there,' so we can be a connection and can make connections directly between the different planes of 'out there' and our world, in order that some things be accomplished quickly.

Oracles (Delphi. Nostradamus.) often fracture language: Their direct perception of idea without the compartmentalization language must necessarily impose is a factor there.

To one extent or another, mystical training does blend the conscious, subconscious and superconscious—or whatever you want to call these nebulous things—into one mind.

Usually mystical training occurs when the individual is receptive to it and ready for it: It is a natural unfolding, a level of maturity (the level of maturity at which ones loses one's greed and one's fear). But, if you want to force or to expedite this level of awareness, here's how: Grow up! Lose the 'wah,' lose your 'entitlement,' quitcherbitchin', quit 'understanding' evildoers and quit making excuses for the trespasses you and others do: 'Call a spade a spade,' not to be obnoxious but to look the facts in the face as they are. Don't kid yourself. Do not flatter yourself especially, because you can't take off from where you haven't landed: If you imagine you are in lofty Seattle and you want to go to Fort Lauderdale, it is too bad if you are really in lowly Key West—it's a big ocean you will be lost in.

A handbook for the process of preparing yourself for spiritual power is the book Way of Perfection written by St. Teresa d'Avila or St. Teresa of the Little Flower. The book is written as private instruction between herself and her nuns on gaining spiritual power. The writing in it is plainer, as contrasted to her obfuscated Interior Castle, which was written at the behest of the leaders of the Inquisition. In The Way of Perfection the writer asks how come we don't protest injustice when it benefits us? And makes the point that pettinesses are capital sins to spirituality. That point is in details! Another relevant book, a really deep one, is Dion Fortune's Training and Work of an Initiate. A modern book is Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics by Marsha Sinetar. It brings comfort to a person on the mystic path because It is the biographies and autobiographies of others on the path and how they are living.

Sensing parallels; seeing patterns; picking up telltale voice signatures in people, animals and spirits; awareness of causations without consciously observing effect first: These are some of the more easily identified new abilities that happen when the 'stripping away' and 'input' mentioned above is fairly advanced. At this level of training one has what seem to be psychic talents (and more), but no 'spirit guides,' no 'voices in the head' and no 'seeing things' that are characteristic of psychics as a group, no 'weird stuff' generally.

There are some weird sensations at some stages of mystical training, things like
*feeling feathery or heavy
*feeling large or small;
*thingslike being aware of everything happening on the planet at a given split-second; being aware of every time a particular thing has happened ever;
*or like the air is heavy, green and waterlike-- but these symptoms are very minor, and do not persist.

Mystical training occurs when the individual's mind develops a reception to it: It is a natural unfolding, a level of maturity. Speaking of labels, most people who are experiencing these levels of perception do not label them as mysticism or spiritual maturity, or even separate the experiences from life events; they just feel they have a different 'slant on things' and 'maybe I'm crazy.' No robed figure intones that you are now a mystic: That ain't where it's at!

Concepts in mass consciousness and myth (concepts such as right and wrong, such as ideals of 'freedom,' 'fairness,' 'democracy') exist at the mystic level. Group minds are there. So is mass consciousness. As a mystic, you may be working with these things, working on that level. You may also be doing combat at that level, if that is your calling. (Propaganda reaches—from its gutter—to motivate on the level of mass consciousness, often falling amusingly short.)

The psychic awareness and psychic abilities that arise from reaching the level of understanding we call 'mystic' are useful for practical purposes such as identifying patterns and motives in an individual's life, in current events, in history; and foretelling what will happen.

The most effective commonly used tools for divination reflect stereotypes or typical scenes in the mass consciousness of a culture in a general way. When these scenes are applied to the specific matter under consideration or specific question, the psychic's mind is forced to think intuitively and conclude intuitively on the mystic level. The scenes are pictures, which transcend language, which gets the psychic's mind into where causation occurs. Of course, the message has to be translated back into human language: That is the psychic's job.

Tarot can be a door to mystical thinking because frequently using the stereotypes and typical scenes depicted on the cards forces you to think in those terms and apply them to your life. That kind of logic rubs off on you.

You can demonstrate how tarot, for example, works, by taking anything based on common awareness—let's say traffic signs or cartoon figures or even sitcom characters—and applying the images or pictures of those to questions or situations to get an analysis or an answer. Eventually, you will work out meanings that function. This experiment has been done.

I will be writing a sequel to this missive regarding tarot, beginning with the matter in the last three paragraphs here.

Mystical Development: Illness Accompanies It

Mystical Development:
Illness Accompanies It

The making of American Indian shamans includes illness, sometimes serious illness: It is a common thread in their biographies, and also in the biographies of well-known mystic saints. You don't have to be a shaman or a saint for sickness to be part of your spiritual training; it is a phase in the development of ordinary mortals who are getting onto the path.

*One can speculate that the illness really comes first and puts a person in a different frame of mind, such as when one has fevers for months on end, that it is simply therefore part of the destiny.
*One can speculate that focusing the body's consciousness 'out there' strains the system and produces symptoms until adjustment happens.
*One can even speculate that illnesses in general predispose a person to spiritual consciousness,
*or even that the reorganization that takes place in the brain when one begins intense spirituality indirectly produces maladies. Research on this speculation is unlikely. (The individuals in the biographies are not sickly people to begin with; they go through a phase of malaise and pass out of it eventually.)

Plan for life disruptions of various sorts as you turn off the main highway of mass consciousness to go onto the Spiritual Path Expressway. You will be becoming someone else while taking care of your usual business; that is enough to deal with. But plan also for the eventuality of forced downtime as you go through all the rest of it.

After the baby is born, you forget the pain.

The Zucchini-from-Hell, A Heavenly Recipe for Them.

Where I live, in the dead of night people whose gardens have produced many of those monster zucchini will sneak onto the doorsteps of their neighbors and leave them like motherless children. Here is a recipe to make easy and fantastic use of one or more of the monsters.

Got a steamer? If not put a colander or large strainer that fits a pot into it in such a way the handles of the colander/strainer keep it from falling in. Now a lid will fit loosely because of the insert. Now you have a steamer!

Cut the monster in half the long way, lengthwise. Cut it into bite sized pieces, skin and all. Next, peel an onion (Cut one end partly off, then continue with the knife, cutting the other end all the way off, until you come back to the beginning point. Then pull the two round 'cheeks' off. It's peeled.) and cut in in half, then cut each half into chunks: This is accomplished by making equidistant slices three or four times, first one way and then the other.

Put the onion chunks on top of the zucchini chunks. If you have some curry, your body will thank you for sprinkling some on top of the onions. It does not add to the taste of this recipe, it is optional.

Put the lid on. In about 20 to 25 minutes, it's done. But you aren't finished yet-- unless you want to be, because this is already pretty good eating.

Open perhaps two cans of stewed tomatoes. Put them in a large nonstick pot, no lid on. Put your zucchini-onion mix in the company of the stewed tomato.

Heat.

Eat.

Not bad: No fat, no pot to scrub, low calorie, vegetables all, and not much trouble.