Willy Nilly Learning

I’ve been thinking more about spirituality from this Gnostic viewpoint, it’s liberating actually, because it just affirms knowing the divine through knowledge of anything/everything. I think sometimes things which seem supernatural are actually just intelligence/overexcitablity working in tandem. Which isn’t to deny that strange things don’t happen, because I’ve seen all kinds of stuff in my life. But I think sometimes people worry that a leader is going to have to be some kind of Gandolph figure. Which isn’t to say those people don’t exist either. But if you just start from this simple idea of using knowledge, it doesn’t seem so impossible.

I wanted to explain something weirdish I did this past winter, because I know it freaked my cousin out a bit when I did it. We were driving to Preston’s and were out on the grid roads coming up to a steep hill with a train track along the top (really the dumbest piece of engineering ever). Before I had noticed a car on the other side of the hill, and so did she, and she got freaked out because it was just sitting on the side of the road. And I think she was scared of it for different reasons than me maybe. I suddenly slowed my perception of time down, I don’t know how, but 20 seconds suddenly elongated to the thinking process of about two minutes. During that time I considered the fact that it could be someone dumping a body, in which case they would speed off as soon as we got up to them (yes my mind leaps to worst case scenario first), or (and more likely) that it was some drunk teenagers who were going to do some really stupid driving like zoom over the hill at top speed without looking if someone is on the other side. And I also calculated that they would probably drive closer to the middle of the road, if the stupid drunk kid theory was true. So I suddenly told my cousin to drive closer to the right hand side of the road, and she didn’t ask why she just did it and sure enough the car came flying over the hill at top speed and would have had a head on collision if we hadn’t moved over. But to me it was a slow thoughtful process, because I used that thing we all notice where time slows down in an emergency.

And I think sometimes that’s what precognition is, you just somehow deduce the most likely outcome and react accordingly. Which is one thing I remember at the emergency school meeting for students after September 11, when people were crying and crying and while it was because people died, it was because they also knew it meant there would be a major war that we would all be forced to watch. People knew not because they were receiving special spiritual knowledge, but because we’d watched America enough to be able to predict it’s reaction based on history. And we also knew that patriotism would fuel it happening, because that’s a common flaw in nations everywhere. There are specific things in every culture worldwide which we are taught not to question, and those weaknesses get exploited. Right now in my community some AA driven spiritual dogma is marching into the community under the name Traditionalism, because you don’t question tradition, that’s all we feel we have left as Native people. But a lot of these Nouveau Traditionalists were the people who made fun of their elders way back and refused to listen to what they had to say. So there was knowledge that was lost in those people. They probably did try to mentor under people, but you have to be really choosy about the people you pick to be your mentors, and sometimes people are taken in by the wrong one.

I have a prediction, just based on what I know of history. I predict that George W. Bush will be overthrown from the inside, in what appears to be a democratic process. I think he’ll become the administration’s fall guy, and I think he knows it too. They’ve been trying to offload certain key players just to make it seem like things are changing, they had to get rid of Rumsfeld because it had to appear that they knew things were going wrong. But even after he was gone this troop surge was proposed. The American people are waking up, I don’t think it’s fair for the world to assume they don’t know what’s going on, because they do. And they’re trying to figure out how to change it in a way that is non-violent, because like anyone eventually people notice when a cycle has to stop. But I don’t want people to think a regime change will make a difference, because there’s something more fundamental going on than Democrat vs. Republican. I think some names for that kind of corruption get scary, so let’s just say particular corrupt people in power, because corruption can happen to anyone.

Anyway, particular corrupt people might try to look like they fit in more adequately with people promoting peace, because if they change tactics they can still achieve their aims. That’s why psych wards are using ritual abuse techniques now. And mental health is the new sacred cow, because everyone wants people to be healthy, and healthy in mind, especially when so much corruption is out in the world. So they’re using that now, the health angle. And it’s happened before, I’ve seen it. This doesn’t mean you stop going to your doctor, but you at least find a doctor who’s humble enough to be willing to listen to you talk about research you’ve done and work together on an issue, rather than being diagnosed without information. And there are good doctors out there too, and there are even professionals in the mental health system who know it’s corrupt and that’s why they’ve trained in the field. It’s just finding those people through all of this dogma and misinformation.

If you want to know what’s going to happen if we’re correct that it’s the same corrupt people in power, then you go back to history. You’d want to look at the peace/hippie movement and what really happened in that time, and you’d also want to look at the end of Vietnam and follow all the threads around that time period. I don’t know where you’ll end up, because I haven’t done much research there myself, although I know I did die at the end of Vietnam, but I think I know why I did that. But no, I can’t access many of those memories because I was hanging out with my mom and dad, and that would just be too weird to remember.

Anyway, that’s how I learn new things, I just go from place to place willy nilly and eventually work things out. I think willy nilly learning is fun.

Loving Imperfect Mothers

Wow, I just unblocked a HUGE piece of programming that I didn’t even know I had. I mean, I knew something wrong had happened in the hospital, I knew that, but on medication I could never really get a clear picture of what it was. But after reading Ewan Cameron’s writing on psychic driving I suddenly understood what happened.

I got two programs, the first one is about mothers, so I’ll explain how they do it. And remember, it might be triggering but it’s also really illuminating, so have someone close by if you need it.

I was influenced by MANY things to go insane, like Riel it was crunch time, the world was on the brink of war and I had to stop it. But instead of feeling like with everyone I could stop it, I became an army of one, and I knew I could do it because I had so much information. And previous to this I had spent a lot of time researching ritual abuse, just because I was meeting so many ritual abuse survivors that I wanted to know how to avoid setting them off or how they got hurt or how you could help them. And the more I read the more it seemed impossible, it was like a highly wired brain/bomb and one false move could detonate it. And I was also highly empathetic already and living in a poverty situation with two survivors. So I was actually going crazy for them, I took on their stuff just because I didn’t know how to block that kind of energy out. And I heard about a specific kind of ritual abuse from them, but I wasn’t raised in an organized cult like that. I was raised in colonialism though, which amounts to the same thing.

But Montreal already established itself as a mind control psychiatric system. It had the work of Ewan Cameron to thank for that, and I’m sure many before him. So I flipped, I was malnourished and poor and I didn’t know anyone really and I came home and started acting weird. Plus I found out about what happened in Vancouver to those women. So I flipped, and I was upset, and being a gifted person all my senses went completely haywire. I have a bizarrely complex brain, so when I started connecting dots it just went on and on ad infinitum. And some of those places are still worthwhile, but it just went on overload and stuff came pouring out of me in a really incomprehensible chatter.

So what do people do when someone gets incomprehensible? They take them to the only place that they know that helps people, the psychiatric ward.

And that’s where programs get installed. Therapy sessions were designed to convince me that not only was I a sick and worthless individual, but also that my mother had done this to me. I was fucked over by my mother. My mother didn’t protect me, in fact she sent me to this place, which was abusive, and if she did that then it obviously meant she hated me. Her number was blocked from the hospital phone I used so that I couldn’t call her until six weeks was over. When she called the hospital they hung up on her. They kept me in a french speaking ward because then the patients would see this bizarre anglophone talking in a language they literally didn’t understand. They knew I was a rape survivor, so they deliberately made me stay in all the wards that a sexual offender was staying in. They knew I was falling in love so they convinced me I wasn’t just some goofy girl in love, I was a stalker, a psychotic stalker, and that’s when I did do something stalky after the program was in. They knew I was smart, my mother told them I was smart, so medications were piled on with definite instructions that I had to take them for ever, and these were seriously cognitively affecting drugs, including 20mg of Zyprexa, which was already known to cause weight and diabetes. And the final nail in the coffin was to convince me that my mother was out to get me, that my mother would hurt me again.

And they used her too. She got a different story, I was calling when I could yelling at her for being a bad mother because they made me think about it every minute of everyday. So suddenly my incomprehensible behaviour, while before it was noble and about saving the world, became incomprehensible behaviour about hating my mother, which scared her of course. And then she would talk to the doctors to try to understand why I was doing that, and they assured her it was normal for sick people to do that, that was how psychotic episodes worked, but I would thank her in the end. That point was always affirmed to her over and over, I would eventually thank her because she was doing it for my own good.

So I stagger out and on all these pills and knowing I was so not healed, I was broken in fact, but I barely moved and I had stopped talking, so they assumed the therapy worked, this would be the best I could ever hope to get. And I tried to tell my mom that the hospital was a bad place, but it would trigger both of our programs now. She needed to believe she had done the right thing, because mothers always want to protect their kids. So she dug her feet in and reinforced the programming. She didn’t know there was programming though, they just used her mothery instincts which every mother has. So to her it sounded like “I did it because I loved you” but to me I would hear “I did it because I hate you.” And that would trigger the programming again. I would want to explain what was wrong with the hospital but suddenly I hated my mother again and she was ruining my life, instead of just being a human being. So I would get agitated, because I was programmed to get agitated, and the thoughts would scramble themselves again to this screen memory. And this need to talk to my mother was what would heal me, but when I started healing I kicked off the programming as a matter of course. I had a bomb for a brain. And when I kicked off the programming suddenly I would remember the hospital, because that’s where the trouble started. And I would remember the cops and I would remember the violence and I desperately didn’t want to go back.

So suddenly, boom, crunch time, the thoughts go weird because it’s a turning point in deprogramming. And my mom was taught that when I went through that healing episode which now looked highly violent, it was time to take me back to the hospital for her own safety. And if she did take me to the hospital, the programming would be reinstalled. No healing, no growth, just a constant schism between myself and humanity, and especially between myself and my mother.

I can’t believe I unravelled my programming. I was worried I wouldn’t. But it suddenly looks so silly, those weren’t any of my thoughts, that my mother was my ruin and that me in love is a stalker and that I was never going to amount to anything. They took the last little bits of hope I had and manipulated them into something seriously fucked up. And they did it outside of what people view as traditional satanic ritual abuse. And they use the medication to keep it in, because higher level cognitivity is what leads people to empathy and healing. Basically, they kill the intelligence to make a good slave class that will be grateful just being able to hammer a piece of wood or wash cars. And then the word on the street is, this is the best we can ever hope from these people.

My mission is to learn to love my imperfect mother, because she’s just a human being like the rest of us.

Gospel of Mary

This is a little tidbit from the Gospel of Mary, the Magdalene Mary, who was loved more than other women in Jesus’ life. Here she’s trying to explain what Jesus said to her, because he told her things in private which he didn’t share with the men. She also stayed in contact with him after his ascension.

“I said to him, ‘Lord, how does a person see a vision, through the soul or through the spirit?’
“The saviour answered, saying, ‘A person sees neither through the soul nor the spirit. The mind, which lives between the two, sees the vision . . . .'”

She also says there are seven forms to the fourth power and they are:

“The first form is darkness,
the second, desire,
the third, ignorance,
the fourth, death wish,
the fifth, fleshly kingdom,
the sixth, foolish fleshly wisdom
the seventh, angry person’s wisdom.”

I like that, it’s really practical. My Gramma fusses at church if they use too many metaphors, she likes things to be practical. I love my Gramma.

Books

I went to the bookstore again today. I’m a book hoarder. Maybe it’s some leftover paranoia from my life in Nazi Germany. I’m just more comfortable having literature around in the event of the loss of internet access, which could happen just from not being able to afford the bills, I mean, it’s not overt paranoia. Anyway, I did get There is my People Sleeping by Sarain Stump, which was marked down, but maybe that was good just because 6.50 is a good deal on a book, especially if you think you wrote it yourself anyway. It has a lot of drawings which is why it’s not really reproduceable online in it’s full entirety. Anyway, that satisfied my curiousity.

Then my mom and I were driving to go eat at the bookstore and I said “Mum, I think I might be a poet.”

“Oh god! First you’re a lesbian, then you’re a man and a woman and now you’re a poet!? They make even less money than filmmakers!”

I could just see her waving goodbye to any idea of a comfortable life, I bet she thinks I’m going to live in her basement forever.

“Why do you want to be a poet?”

“Because I want to write about things that don’t make any sense otherwise.”

“They don’t make any sense after you write them down either!”

And then we had a really good discussion about Vonnegut’s alter ego, the infamously obscure Kilgore Trout.

Later on I said “What if revolutionaries are just poets in a dangerous time?”

You don’t want to be like those damn Futurists though, that was just woefully silly, an art movement that joined the army and was completely wiped out in a matter of years. And it made their machismo warmongering art work look kind of pitiful. The art movement of which there were no survivors.

Anyway, I got more books, of course. I got Sky Burial An Epic Love Story of Tibet by Xinran. It’s the memoir of a woman’s life in occupied Tibet over three decades. I got Notes from My Travels by Angelina Jolie, because I’m tired of trying to read about her through mass media, she’s got intense identity politics going on, it makes people weirded out, even though she just talks about the state of the world. Oh, she got a blurb from Jane Goodall. I remember my friend Annthea was going to some luncheon with Jane Goodall and I was trying to get her to take a picture of her ponytail. Nothing else. Just Jane Goodall’s ponytail. I also got Black Elk Speaks, which is just a classic that I never got around to reading yet. I think I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in Grade Seven and got pissed off at my white classmates. That’s when I started arguing with people about the merits of Original Sin, I turned very contrary, to them. I thought it was silly to start out life automatically minus one point. Anyway, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee freaked me out enough that I didn’t really want to touch anything from that era for a while. And then I got one huge tome that’s just going to be something that gets dipped into once in a while. It’s the Gnostic Bible, but it’s texts from various spiritual ideologies like Judaism, Islamic, Christian, Mandean, Pagan, etc etc.

My auntie is going to be a priest soon, so now I have someone to banter with. She’s fun for filling in some of the gaps because she’s read similar things over her life as me.

An idea for a land claim settlement: or how I learned to stop hating Montreal

Apparently a young Louis Riel went to Montreal and ended up in various mental hospitals being rescued over and over by various workers from being detected by his enemies. But he still ended up in a Montreal hospital, which is bad in and of itself. I don’t think I was protected by anyone in Montreal hospitals, and it kind of scares me because I worry about having blocked memories. So much of that time is really scattered. On the other hand, people could have pretended they’d been protecting Riel when in fact they were installing programs to make sure the rebellion would fail. I mean, no one really knows except him. He didn’t recover very well, but crap, I mean that was a fucked up time, it was like a political crunch time for someone who was also undergoing some kind of spiritual journey. He was alone most of the time in there, and I also almost wonder if he started getting a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. His last poem was written to his jailer, but I think he also knew he had ensured a place in memory. I mean, he tore across the country on a rampage, you can’t not notice that kind of fervent energy. But on the other hand, you can’t not notice that kind of fervent energy. I think he hadn’t picked up any idea of proper military maneuvers, because the only maneuver that worked in that rebellion was the one proposed by my great great grandfather. I think he didn’t want to learn military tactics, because at heart he was a pacifist who felt he made major mistakes. But he ended up leading an army anyway, although a tiny one.

I don’t think violence solves anything, but this maneuver is pretty interesting if you just look at it in a certain way, which is that you decentralize your base of operations and have people everywhere and yet no where, like ghosts. It’s working in Iraq, which sucks because it’s not working in the right way, it’s still using violence. But a decentralized healing and awakening, that would work, and is working. I think that observing the internet, this kind of thing is happening now all on it’s own. People have all kinds of opinions to look at and are thinking critically. And an awakening doesn’t even have to be a spiritual thing in the way people imagine, it can just be the destabilization of particular ideological channels. Maybe it’s true that the CIA has an agent in every news room, who knows, but it’s also true that the CIA doesn’t have time to write all the blogs, and probably doesn’t even want to. We dodged a bullet by being viewed primarily as vanity pages for a long time. And the other irony is that the internet was invented to survive a war, and not only that but the internet has a history of academia. The new slam is “Oh I bet you read that on the internet!” and it’s kind of funny, because lies can happen anywhere and it’s not a purely online phenomenon. It’s like saying “Oh I bet you were reading that in a book!”

Oh yes, but back to Montreal. I went there with stars in my eyes, I don’t know, after Sept 11 I suddenly up and quit my BFA and told everyone “I am going to Montreal, and I don’t know why.” Well, I kind of did know why, I was going to go and learn french and fall in love and drink espresso and write tortured poetry. And I remember on my way out of Vancouver, Archer Pechawis said “Try to revive the aboriginal art scene because we all had to leave.” And I said I would try.

There’s something creepy about Montreal. What is it? The people are so sexy, yet so creepy. Not all of them, but the ones who are creepy are REALLY creepy. I think it’s separatism that made people creeps. I had so much trouble finding a job, because I didn’t speak French, but in a decent world that wouldn’t be so negative. A friend of mine in film school came to first year without speaking a lick of english, and yet somehow he got through one year of anglo post secondary schooling without being detected, I think it being an art school made it easier. He drew a lot of things with stick figures to communicate. I still remember we were out for beers and talking raunchy and he was trying to talk about his favorite position and had to draw these smiley face stick people doing doggy style. When we were graduating he finally said he never took the english equivalency tests because the school made a paperwork slip and forgot he needed to take them.

He made us watch the moon for half an hour, little brat.

The irony of Montreal is that Riel’s name is used a lot in support of separatism and yet he’s an aboriginal man, and Quebeckers seem to have a real hate on for aboriginal people. I’ve never quite grasped that. It’s like they forgot who’s land they’re standing on, like they forget they would have died if it hadn’t been for the people of Hochelaga. I remember being in this francophone hospital trying to get transfered to an english hospital and they wouldn’t do it and they wouldn’t do it even though it meant I had shitty standards of care, to the point where I couldn’t even communicate that I burnt my hands to the nurses on staff. I did communicate it, I said it in English though and they thought english was the language of pig-dogs.

And I remember thinking Fuck the French because they weren’t any better than the anglophones who put Louis Riel on trial in a different language. And the funny thing, and hard thing, about saying Fuck the French is that I am French too, so it’s kind of just me being an asshole to myself. And even though I speak English, I don’t have a drop of English blood in me. But what was fucked up is that I had wanted to learn French, which is why I moved there, but I got terrorized through extreme separatism. Oh man! It’s so ironic. I remember I only felt okay walking up and down Saint Laurent because it was the dividing line between the Francophone side and the Anglophone side. And if I lived three blocks over, I might have been able to be in an english speaking hospital.

The funny thing is that I feel like I can prove Montreal psych wards are using politics in their treatment, because I remember there was a girl who was my age going through the EXACT same thing and we talked to each other all the time, but she was francophone and spoke no english and I was anglophone and spoke no french, except for the rudimentary stuff she and I had both learned of each other’s language. Sometimes she would write stuff down to me and another patient would translate it for me. But we got along splendidly, which is what I had hoped for in Montreal. But she was white and francophone, and I was an Indian and anglophone, and you can guess who got better treatment. And she knew it too, and it was really upsetting for her.

So I think there is something to Montreal, I think it’s the last colonialist outpost. No that’s not true, but it did turn into the most racist cesspit I ever had to live in, and I have no idea why except that the people really believe they can claim total theocracy over Hochelaga.

And so, I think we should do a land rights case for the Island of Montreal. I think it could be fun. And we could leave the cross up on the mountain just for irony’s sake.

How Riel was Pardoned, sort of

I’m now looking more at this figure of Louis Riel. He had terrible luck with the women. I think he forced a spiritual awakening which is what landed him in an asylum in Montreal. His trial was bogged down in a lot of debate about the state of his mental health, various people said he was mentally unstable, and still others wanted him hanged anyway (not hung, alas).

Frank W. Anderson reviewed his case in 1949 and this is what he came up with:

Louis Riel’s Insanity Reconsidered
Notes: Anderson examined some of the evidence to determine whether or not Riel was sane when he was tried in 1885. He concluded that Riel was sane because his major decisions “reflected both his sense of right and of humanity.”

Riel died in Regina Saskatchewan. Personally I never liked Regina, even though I was born there. It’s a very blocky city and it’s got a bazillion oogly woogly feelings walking down the street. I don’t know how else to describe them. But wouldn’t it be funny if I could prove I was Louis Riel in a past life and overturn my diagnosis? Oh that’s silly, people don’t reincarnate. Oh my god, better yet, I could just prove I was thinking about things which reflected my sense of “right and humanity.” Actually, this is a very interesting piece of legislation which could be used to markedly reduce the control of the government on “insane” persons. Used properly it would be a precedent setting law that would radically alter the mental health act community orders here in Canada. However Riel at the last minute realized he could use the insanity defense to his advantage, basically he remember his tort law he learned in his early years working in a law firm. I think it’s still a legal tussle over him being pardoned, although essentially people seem to agree he was mistreated.

In fact, here is an outline of the exact argument used to overturn the conviction of Riel. The irony is that while this was by and large a symbolic gesture, ANYONE could apply this law to their own forced commitment order, at least here in Canada. They never proved he was a messiah, because you can’t prove something like that. His sanity was debated forever, but in the end he did something for Canada that was above and beyond the call of duty, even while he was having a nervous breakdown. I know they do a reenactment of his trial The Queen vs. Louis Riel down in Regina once a year, but I’ve never gone. It seemed stuffy. But maybe I will, just because I do think a revolution can happen in an entirely legal and peaceful way, it’s just figuring that way out that’s tricky. Inciting hate is a crime, but I don’t hate anyone in particular except people committing gross injustices, and I know they are doing things outside of the law. It’s exposing them that is tricky, and also figuring out how to properly wield law. But I remember when I worked in Mandell Pinder I had great fun reading law and watching lawyers run down the halls saying “There is no justice!” It was like absorbing legal chatter via osmosis. I know there’s one law which is what the government wrote, but another law that is just decency and justice. I was always told “It’s a legal system, not a justice system.” But I think it has enough laws on the books now that it can become a real justice system. I was working at Mandell Pinder when Louise Mandell got promoted to Q.C. (Queen’s Council) and it was such a giddy environment at the time. God that office was full of sexy women, it was somewhat distracting. I was tempted for a while to go to law school, but seven years or whatever to become a recognized lawyer, oh that is so slow!! So I decided to just learn law on my own when I felt like it was important.

Did you know Judge Judy makes more money that any Supreme Court judge? That is hilarious.

Riel wrote one last thing before he died, which only recently came to light.

Terrorism is bad, m’kay. But a non-violent, legal and sane revolution does have a lot of legitimacy at the moment. It’s just figuring out how to bring people together in this scary place, because everyone seems so terrified.

I think I am liking looking at these particular figures in history because I’m learning from their mistakes. The only real law being used against possible revolutionaries is the Mental Health Act, but the fact that the evidence shows Riel was in the middle of a major manic episode while at the same time leading his people. I don’t think he was ready to lead in a manic episode, which is why the Rebellion failed. But I do think if it was spiritual emergence and someone had told him what to expect he could have slowed down and taken it easy. So all of this is really interesting.

My mom’s stressing me out, I’m trying to calm her down because really I’m just learning, and I think all of these figures in all tribes have created certain legal precedents in government law and in religious law and just in the law of being a decent human being.

here are some of the things he said:

“. . I have yet and still that mission,
and with the help of God, who is in this box with me —
and he is on the side of my lawyers,
even with the Honourable Court, the Crown and the jury —
to help me and to prove by the extraordinary help
that there is a Providence today in my trial
as there was a Providence in the battles of the Saskatchewan.”

“I have acted reasonably and in self-defence,
while the Government, my accuser,
being irresponsible and consequently insane,
cannot but have acted wrong,
and if high treason there is,
it must be on its side
and not on my part.”

“My thoughts are for peace.
But such a great revolution will bring immense disasters
and I don’t want to bring disasters during my life
except those that I am bound to bring to defend my own life
and to avoid, to take away from my country, disasters
which threaten me and my friends and those who have confidence
in me. Of course they gave a chance to Riel to come out,
a rebel had a chance to be loyal then.
But with the immense influence that my acts are gathering
for the last fifteen years and which,
as the power of steam contained in an engine
will have its way, then what will I do?
I may be declared insane
because I seek such an idea,
which drives me to something right.”

There are three laws at work here, the Mental Health Act, Treason, and just an unspoken agreement that people don’t call themselves prophets. Oh yes, and that you don’t shoot people. So what if you don’t call yourself a prophet? What if you just say you’re intelligent and working on one particular legal puzzle for your whole life? And a lot of insanity can also be overturned by people recognizing the characteristics of Giftedness too. It’s just making this safe house for people to go through that experience, that’s the only thing we really need for everyone to be a stable Riel. And then there are also specific spiritual laws at play too. It’s a funny little puzzle, but I’m starting to see what kind of order these things go in instead of jumping to the very end.

I think he felt like his hand was forced, he was on a gradual path to enlightenment but his people needed him so badly that he felt compelled to force his own awakening, and also he went through a period of extreme poverty which diminished his capabilities. I think a lot of people felt their hand was forced when the attack happened in New York, because it was a real time event that was broadcast around the world, and then that image was replayed over and over. And people wanted spiritual leaders to return, including people who had been on an awakening for a while already. And so a lot of people forced it and got diagnosis and medication and ended up feeling frozen but not sure why. But I think we know why, because some of us did identify various people in our lives as fledgling spiritual beings and when they went crazy we lost hope, because then they were just dumb broken people after all.

But we’re not broken, no one is, although I know a lot of people are wanting to have a tussle over the DSM and it’s relevance to society today, because people believe in it way more than any Bible or Koran or Torah. The DSM has taken the place of the sacred, we have troubles and we turn to it in times of need and follow all these recipes for various mental health states. It has become a book of law in and of itself, and it transcends the other laws by virtue of being written by doctors. But who are these doctors anyway? We know most of them are paid by big Pharma, which has a capitalist investment in a particular ideology of mental health. And even then, the DSM is easily overturned altogether because it relies on clusters of symptoms without being able to adequately diagnosis a specific reason. They pretend they have a reason, they call it brain chemicals, but in fact they actually have been unable to prove it time and again. And the pills, they also have reams of evidence proving that they are detrimental to the functioning of the human brain. I’m kind of stressed because now I feel like I have to prove manic psychosis really can be a temporary blip in a life, and my mom keeps asking me about my mental health.

My health is fine. I even lost all of my resentment towards my family, which is really awesome. And I’ve realized I’m not willing to force myself towards any particular destination without carefully looking at all the facts.

Synchonicity

I just realized that my video Through the Looking Glass, which was a discussion on being red and white, was shot on the ruins of St. Norbert Parish Church, which was a crucial site of Riel’s legacy. Riel also spent time in a mental hospital in Montreal.

Freakin’ ironies are scary. Do you know half the time I do stuff and have no idea why except I should?

Mistreatment of transgendered persons

I remember when I was fourteen and came out, people kept giving me the same damn book over and over. Not that it’s not an interesting book, it’s just that it’s been given to me so many times!!! Now I’m realizing I have someone else I have to give my second copy to, so it’s okay.

It’s called The Spirit and the Flesh and it’s by Walter L. Williams. It’s an overview of two spirited people in “American Indian” people. By the way, I don’t mind using the word Indian myself, even if it is a misnomer, because that’s what it says on my treaty card. Anyway, yes, it’s more of an anthropological book, which is why it’s somewhat boring, and it’s written by an outsider, but he was permitted to hang with the two-spirited folks.

There are some other names for two spirited people, one is berdache, another one is winkte, which is the Lakota version. I think two spirited has been simplified to mean Gay and Lesbian, but that’s kind of inaccurate. Two Spirited people are by definition androgynous people, and some chose gendered roles and a lot chose a third gender, which was basically something that stood outside the binary gender role. In their tribes they functioned in all kinds of roles, they would bridge the gap between women and men, for one, which was a useful trait to the community who might not understand each other otherwise. I think also that it should be noted that while some two spirited people may have been intersexed, often they did have a specifically gendered body, but their body would be overlooked in favour of acknowledging their dual nature. Of course not all people in the tribe were nice to two spirited people, there was transphobia that flared up once in a while.

When the residential school system came in, two spirited children who had taken on a different gender role than their biological body were identified immediately by horrified europeans, and from the history I can gather were summarily executed. I don’t think many two spirited children survived in those places, or if they did survive it was only by hiding themselves really well. A lot of rapes which happened in the school system were also of a same sex nature, not all, obviously, because a lot of babies being born in the schools were also being killed and buried to cover up male on female rape. But it did something where people in our community have a huge hate/fear thing going on with anyone who seems gender or sexually “deviant”. It think it’s important to remember that sexual abuse is about power and control, not about a specific sexuality or transgendered quality.

I think that eliminating the two spirited person’s role in our community was done to effectively shut people off from spiritually aware humans. In most cultures around the world androgyny has been noticed to correlate with highly gifted individuals, and it’s coming out in gifted research as well. In spiritual terms they say it’s because these people have accessed a higher spiritual path that transcends gender. In gifted terms, I don’t know if they know why. But they have noticed that people with extremely high IQ’s and all the overexcitabilities have a tendency towards androgyny, and it makes them targets for hatred in the school system. That’s one of the issues right now in gifted education, trying to create a safe space for profoundly gifted people who are often androgynous.

In doing my funny research, I have discovered that Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl was also a two spirited person. That person is often called a man in contemporary terms, because ze was a leader and ze did so many things, but in some accounts ze was male and female, and I think that’s a more accurate assessment of the person. Quetzalcoatl was a historical figure, and that has to be remembered more than the whole god thing I think, just because gods seem really out of reach of people right now. Anyway, the historical figure known as Quetzalcoatl was a spiritual leader who was also a political leader and who also resolved issues of food shortages and so on so that people could concentrate on art, science, agriculture, music, and poetry, which basically led to a massive renaissance. Ze also eliminated human sacrifice and wanted people instead to sacrifice birds, butterflies, snakes, and jade to the gods. But to appease a tribe which felt blood had to be shed for the gods, Ze also instituted bloodletting, which sounds awful to certain folks, but this was more of voluntary acts with safety rules around it. Yes, Quetzalcoatl liked blood play. But that’s a bdsm act that you don’t really have to think about if you don’t want to.

I’ll put it in a more modern context though, so that it doesn’t wig you out. I remember on september 11 when the towers came down there was this unprecedented blood donation around the world. Around the whole world!!! People wanted to do something to help the victims, so as one they were drawn to the red cross and donating blood to save these lives. It was so touching. I remember a photo of Yasser Arafat staring in horror with a tube coming out of his arm while he donated his pint of blood. And of course, that horrible moment later in the day, when we realized there were few survivors. But that collective memory of the importance of blood, that was intense. And I think that response was the humane response, that was people spilling their own blood without injuring themselves and with a common goal of help in mind. But that kind of memory of using blood to appease the gods got twisted into, of course, this huge war we’re in now.

I think there is something else interesting about blood donation though, which I think is something Quetzalcoatl would have encouraged rather than ritual bloodletting had that person been here today. Since AIDS hit in the 80’s, new rules have been instituted to ostensibly stop the spread of AIDS but in reality shut certain people out from accessing that kind of charity. In Canada here you can’t donate blood if you’re a man who has sex with men or slept with a man who has sex with men (although heterosexual sex statistically accounts for 70% of HIV transmission), you can’t donate blood if you’ve been pierced or tattooed within the last two years (even though piercing and tattoo shops are often following some stringent health procedures, and you should read about these before you choose a shop actually), sometimes you can’t donate if you immigrated from a country with high HIV rates (what country doesn’t have HIV/AIDS? No really, I’m curious, is there a mythical land such as this?), and of course IV drug users are right out, even the ones who never dared share a needle.

As you can see, this cuts out HUGE demographics from the blood donor pool. For one thing, I know very few youth who haven’t gotten at least a piercing, and then there’s also been a revival over the years in tattooing, so a lot of people gather piercings and /or tattoos during their lifespan. I’d like to be able to donate blood, but I’d also like to keep getting tattooed over my lifetime, and so it cuts me out from ever engaging in Canadian Blood Services. And it’s too bad since I don’t have any money but still feel a need to be a charitable human being. Also the rules stipulate that for men, having sex with a man even ONCE since 1977 means they can never donate, even if the last time they had sex with a man was in 1977 and they didn’t smoke man pole since and got 8 clear HIV tests in between then and now. And you know, a lot of men have sex with men, although they think they hide that secret really well. And I don’t think it necessarily means they are gay, although it means something and everyone kind of wants to find a name for it.

But what I find interesting is that instead of actually figuring out an accurate non-discriminatory method of screening blood, the Red Cross/Blood Service organization leapt to cutting out an entire demographic, a demographic which is quite a bit larger than one would think. And then they’re like “What the hell? No one’s donating anymore.” Yeah, because a ton of people fit into those screening categories. And besides that, a guy could be having unprotected sex with a lot of women and still contract HIV. We seem to invent these categories of low risk high risk safe safer, and then abstinence is being promoted as the ultimate in safety. But who wants to be abstinent? There are low and high risk activities, but there’s still this constant argument amongst gay men about tops and bottoms, and tops apparently NEVER contract HIV, and so this other weird thing has come into play where bottoms are kind of considered just like a garbage pail. It’s so wrong! Bottoms are lovely human beings with a charming receptive grace. And also people switch too, which complicates things. But yeah, being a top doesn’t guarantee anything dudes.

Oh bother, I have no good ending for this lovely morning rant, except a quote from my old babysitter Tracy Lenz:
“Riel was hanged, we don’t know if he was hung.”

Louis Riel, leader of the Metis Northwest Rebellion

Oh man, another interesting tidbit I picked up from Shawna Dempsey was that someone (was it her grandfather? I don’t recall) was at a wild west show when this man on a horse came riding up out of no where, said “Dumont” and went away. Was it Gabriel Dumont? Probably, that sounds like something cheeky he would do.

Healing, continued

Wow, my body is so detoxing right now. Ever since I talked to my auntie, I felt all this stuff just start to come right out of my pores, and it started out smelling, like my mom said, stagnant water, and then it smelled really awful after a while. I took a longish bath in water with sea salt in it, and it seemed to ground my energy really well. I’ve lost a lot of fear today especially, I think because I feel like I know how to articulate certain things now in ways that are relevant to people, and that is a relief. Sometimes it feels like I have so much to say and I feel so agitated about it because I feel I don’t have enough time to say it before I get dragged away by the cops. I think that kind of extreme pressure is what made me crack, I felt in Montreal that my living situation was so untenable, and so much was happening in the world, that I had to get enlightened like, right now!!! And so I forced a process, in a way. I hope people don’t feel that pressure, I think there are enough people right now on the planet who have woken up in their own ways that things aren’t as dodgy as they were before the war started, although it probably doesn’t feel like that to some people. But believe me, letting it happen slowly and naturally is better, certain things have to be absorbed in certain orders for it to be okay.

And I know, it feels like there’s this intense hierarchy, and you have to get to the top as fast as possible because then people won’t hurt you anymore. But there is no hierarchy, not in life and not in the awakening process. Or healing process. Whatever you want to call it. I mean obviously someone did put in a crap hierarchy, but it’s so bunk.

I really like that word bunk right now. It’s like a slam on something, but in a cute way. It’s better than saying something is shit. Colonialism is so bunk man!

I did one mandala today, and it was really good, just the process itself is calming, because you can’t do it in a rush, it’s thoughtful. I did it with mostly symbols of various things, but I think it’s going to end up getting quite abstract in the end.

I think what was so upsetting about the hospital is that no one seemed able to really, I mean REALLY understand how traumatizing it was to me. It felt like if I talked about it people either didn’t want to listen or decided to argue with me that it was for my own good, and that really was unsettling, because they didn’t understand the extreme abuse I endured not only in the hospital but also from the people around me, it felt really rejecting and it felt hateful, there wasn’t anywhere for me to turn for compassion, and it isolated me further from humanity. I don’t think it’s in anyone’s place to tell someone that the hospital was a positive force in their life, because of that last word, FORCE. Studies have shown that coercive treatment often has a deleterious and detrimental effect on the psyche of people who are victimized by the process. I kind of understand why residential school survivors have wanted an apology, a proper apology, but at this point I’m well aware that an apology for psychiatric ritual abuse isn’t coming for me. And I don’t want to wait for it so I can heal. And I don’t have to forgive anyone for it either, because if someone doesn’t apologize you really don’t have to forgive them. That’s just some weird crap that lets people off the hook for their shit.

I know there is one particular person in my history who has kept putting his shit on me and I have no idea why, I’m not related to him in anyway, he just shows up all the time and demands stuff from me or steals stuff or I hear him beating his girlfriends or I hear people telling me about getting raped by him and somehow, fuck. I don’t know, people forgive him all the time because he plays the victim card really well. Being victimized isn’t an all access pass to victimizing other people. And I don’t know why people let his shit slide so easily, and sometimes I wonder if it’s because he’s a man, albeit a very broken one. I once read where he called a rape a grey area misunderstanding, and I was so fucking pissed off. There isn’t a grey area to rape. But what appalled me was all these people saying “Yeah, you go bro.” Ugh.

I’m getting more strict about who I allow in my life these days. I know there are certain people I often feel, I guess I get a bad “vibe” off of them, but it seems more related to feeling judged as kind of a garbage throw away person. And I have an intense amount of empathy, so I do feel things off of people. I’m also starting to realize I can’t handle large crowds well, and not because I’m afraid of people, but because I pick up their energy, and it’s often very scattered and angry and fearful. And I am also realizing that I took on a lot of trauma vicariously from people who have been in my life. And some of that is hard to deal with, I mean how do you heal from something that happened to someone else? But I’m realizing that people might come to me to tell really intense stories to, and sometimes I’m just not able to hear it. And it’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I’ll take on that story too and it’s very difficult for me. I think I need to figure out how to identify people that they can talk to instead of me, I don’t want to shut them out.

I think I’m doing well though, I feel like I just had to finish something I got frozen in. Just before the meds hit I was starting to say things about Venice and Mesoamerica, but I had no idea why afterwards. I do now. And I think it’s just, for me, kind of an interesting little quirk, and it’s not so, hmm, scary. Or overwhelming. I think it’s one of those beliefs that can seem rather benign, it is benign essentially. Maybe benign is the wrong word, because that implies inert or something. I guess it makes sense to me and it feels like it places me in an order of things where I really didn’t feel like I fit in to any kind of an order before.

It’s a scary thing, to feel not only that there is no place to fit in and also that people hate you because you don’t fit in. I think being kind of uncategorical frustrates people around me too, and that’s really strange. So much of two spirited history and so on was lost, and it’s always really upset me because I feel like whether it’s a woman’s ceremony or a man’s ceremony I am always standing outside looking through the window. I don’t want people to think that this is all aboriginal people though, there have been a lot of people I’ve met who get it, totally, and it’s nice because then I can relax enough around them to be goofy. But otherwise I often feel like people just demand that I explain myself, my identity, my history, and that explanation takes a fucking long time!!!

I think something else which always upset me was when I’d like someone who seemed to be waiting for a man to come and save them, because I’d always feel like “But I am a man!! But not! But I am! Arg!” It was so, I don’t know, it often felt like being invisible in a way. And same thing if people look at me and don’t see this female part either. I think people have a hard time with the idea that both can live in one body. I remember one thing that pissed me off about going to queer film fests is that often the men’s sex program would run at the same time as the women’s, and you had to choose, but what if you want to see fisting and cocksucking? No way man, and it’s ironic because a lot of women do like watching guys go at it. That’s just a funny aside though.

I think I’m beefing up my support network though, I seem to have a lot of people around to talk to, and I’m not scared of talking anymore. Although I still probably won’t talk to people who are kind of stupid/mean, just because it feels like I’m either going to have to fight or be humiliated.

Anyway, I’m going to read a couple things on the process of detoxing your body and then go sleep. Sleep is coming really well right now.

What happened to me in Montreal (in Ewan Cameron’s Words)

This is what “psychic driving” is as developed by Ewan Cameron in conjunction with the CIA under the MKULTRA program, this ideology is used still on certain psychiatric patients in Montreal, particularly those of minority groups such as women, people of colour (especially aboriginals), gays/lesbians, and especially transgendered people.

“Playing back to the patient, by means of tape recordings, important parts of therapy sessions has proved valuable in treatment. The procedure consists of insuring extended and repeated reaction by the patient to his own verbal cues (‘autopsychic driving’) or cues verbalized by the therapist, but based on the patient’s psychodynamics (‘heteropsychic driving’). Since this compels a continued response within a field largely limited by the cue material, it has been termed ‘psychic driving’. Selection of a satisfactory key statement for psychic driving requires awareness of the patient’s major problems. Autopsychic driving has as its primary value the penetration of defenses, elicitation of hitherto inaccessible material, and the setting up of a dynamic implant. Its purpose is usually achieved within thirty minutes of driving. Heteropsychic driving is best carried on over extended periods (ten to twelve hours daily in hospitalized patients or during sleep). Its primary uses are changing of attitudes and setting up a dynamic implant.

“Psychic driving has been used in many ways: with pillow and ceiling microphones, presentation of the same theme in different ways, isolation of patient, etc. Purely mechanical variations seem of little importance. The responses to psychic driving include immediately constructive reactions, partial blocking, rejection and later acceptance, and rejection and escape, among others. By this method, the patient is shielded from the full implication of his own verbal communications. The voice sounds different. One’s own voice is heard ordinarily as a synthesis of air and tissue conduction. Defense against hearing what one does not wish to hear is organized against the synthesis of tissue and air conduction. In psychic driving, tissue conduction is eliminated and thus there is a new situation against which defenses have not been organized. This breakdown in the shielding occasioned by elimination of tissue conduction is one of the basic reasons why driving is effective in penetrating defenses and in enlarging the area of the patient’s communication, both to himself and to others. The patient is able to understand more of his communication when it is driven than when he hears it for the first time because of the differences in talking and listening. As the driving circuit is played back repeatedly, both patient and therapist hear more and react more extensively.

“Driving (driven material) is verbalization of a part of a community of action tendencies, with reference, for example, to the relationship to the mother, to self-assertion, or to sexual experiences. The reheard verbalizations constitute a cue which will set the particular community of action tendencies into operation, and not any others. In ordinary therapy the patient tends to move away from a painful area; in psychic driving he is unable to do so. The endless repetition confines him to a continuous reactivation of the particular community of concepts.

“There are continuing effects of psychic driving. Striking continuously at a given community of action tendencies produces intensification of the individual’s behavior. He becomes tense or anxious and this provides the persistent driving force of the implant. Efforts at freeing himself from this intensification cause continuous reactivation of the area concerned and thus further recoganization of the area is brought about. Psychic driving invariably produces responses which tend ultimately to be therapeutic.”