Simon & Garfunkel, “The Boxer”
So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, January 5, 2021
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex.
About five light-years "tall", the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left. The gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using three different telescopes.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100513.html
"What If..."
"What if when you die they ask, "How was Heaven?"
~ Author Unknown
A truly terrifying thought...
"How the Elite Use Hypnosis to Control the Masses"
"How the Elite Use Hypnosis to Control the Masses"
by Joe Jarvis
"On July 20, 2012, James Holmes opened fire inside a theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing twelve people, and injuring dozens more. The attack was elaborate and well coordinated, Holmes even left explosives rigged to blow at his apartment. And yet when he showed up in court, the media reported that Holmes “seemed dazed and largely unaware of his surroundings.” Holmes would later tell a fellow inmate that an “evil therapist programmed me to commit mass slaughter.”
And strange enough, some of the evidence submitted at trial conveniently included a journal belonging to Holmes, found in a university mailroom, addressed to his campus psychologist, confessing all sorts of evil, violent fantasies. The fellow inmate claims that Holmes said he felt like he was in a video game while he carried out the shootings, and mentioned neuro-linguistic programming, a form of psychotherapy or hypnosis.
Now, clearly this man was crazy, so you have to take what he says with a grain of salt. But it does make you wonder– the FBI, for instance, has been known to approach unstable mentally ill people, and entice them into agreeing to carry out a terrorist plot. The FBI supplies their target with fake explosives, and then arrests them at the scene of the crime. This allows the FBI to claim they foiled a terrorist attack, when in reality, the culprit would have been mentally incapable of planning and committing the crime without the FBI’s guidance.
So when you hear that Holmes was a neuroscience student, obsessed with mind control, confessing his deepest, darkest secrets to a therapist… suddenly it doesn’t sound so crazy that he could have been set up as the patsy in a larger plot.
Of course this theory hinges around the idea that someone could be hypnotized to carry out such an atrocity. Hypnotists are not magicians, but they are experts on tapping into the thought currents already running through the subject’s mind, to both ride the wave, and direct the flow of the subject’s brainwaves.
Your brain operates at measurable frequencies, that correspond to what state of mind you’re in. For example while in deep, dreamless sleep, your brainwaves are in a Delta state, firing at 1-3 hertz. The Beta brain state operates between 12-28 hertz, and occurs when awake, alert, or focusing on a task. But when you are meditating or daydreaming, you are operating in an Alpha state, around 7-13 hertz. And when you are in a light sleep, dreaming vividly, that is called Theta, from about 4-7 hertz.
Hypnotism is really just a matter of finding the right triggers to put your mind into a highly suggestible state, such as Alpha or Theta. They do this by piggy-backing on your preconceived notions, existing mental archetypes, and psychological “shortcuts” we use to save brain capacity. Right from the start, the hypnotist establishes authority by calling himself a hypnotist. This begins the process of hypnosis, because we all carry in our minds an idea about what a hypnotist looks and acts like, and what hypnosis is. You are getting sleepy…
Research shows that children as young as 10 already have a mental picture of a hypnotist etched into their minds. It doesn’t matter that we all picture slightly different things, nor does it make a difference that the hypnotist doesn’t know exactly what our particular impression of a hypnotist is. What matters is that we have already started preparing ourselves to enter a different mental state. We are thinking about hypnotism, perhaps wondering if it is real, maybe imagining times we went to a hypnosis show. Or your anxiety or excitement could be rising, in anticipation.
You start thinking, can I really be hypnotized? What can he make me do? Will I lose free will? Can my mind be controlled? Now you are primed, so the hypnotist starts to push you a little further. He says he has a test to see if you’d be a good subject to be hypnotized. He is confident, in charge, and says, pay attention to me, which of course, you were already doing. This reinforces that he is in control, and you are doing as he says.
He’s using a particular cadence to speak, like the lines on a highway flickering past your headlights and causing highway hypnosis. He’s leading you down a path, you’re already starting to drift under his influence, before he even begins. Then the test starts.
It will be something like, hold out your arm, tense it as much as possible, tighter, tighter, flex those muscles, your arm is a steel beam, its cannot bend, it will not bend, keep it tense, a metal bar runs from your shoulder to your hand, making it impossible to bend, it cannot bend, it will not bend, now try as you might, you cannot bend your arm. Of course if you are following his instructions to keep your arm tense, flexed, and firm, that’s the real reason you cannot bend your arm.
But if you don’t mentally process this fact, it feels like the hypnotist has taken over some part of your free will. And this feeling is what allows him to take the hypnosis one step further. Now you believe that he can control your mind with words, and hypnosis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now the hypnotist will look to reinforce this control. If your breathing has become shallow, he will say, “Your breathing is becoming shallow now,” and boom, there is more proof that he can control your body. This generally culminates in him squeezing your shoulder and saying, “sleep” and you slumping in the chair.
From there, most hypnotists will give you a little meditation spa treatment, by putting you into a deep state of relaxation, telling you that all your cares will lift out of your body and evaporate, until you have not a worry in the world. Can he really make you relax? No, but you can make yourself relax. You’ve allowed yourself to be put into a deep state of meditation. In this state, all on your own, you can implant ideas, better attitudes, and healing. But in the case of hypnosis, you are allowing the hypnotist to do the implanting.
Most people don’t really feel like they have that kind of power over their own mind. It is much easier for them to abandon control, and cede it to an “expert” like hypnotist. And when he starts the session by putting you into a deep state of relaxation, this allows the subject to drift further under his control, because it is already a rewarding experience. How often do you get to feel truly relaxed, free from all responsibilities of a sentient, rational mind?
Hypnotists reward you by allowing you to let go, to cede control to them, to finally turn off, and relax, and not have to worry or plan. Finally, you can just exist, with no expectations, no discomfort, just stillness.
If you’re at a hypnotist show, this is the stage when the crazy stuff starts happening. They make you think you’re a duck, or forget your name. Or they convince you to become a loyal devotee to support their quest to overthrow every oppressive government and replace them with a private governing system, devoid of coercion, with ultimate respect for each individual’s freedom… for example.
In real life, this is the stage of hypnosis when they make you bow to the woke mob, and abandon all sense of reason. It feels good. It feels so nice to stop questioning, abandon rationality, to sink under their control, and to become a properly programmed part of the collective. People underestimate that appeal, of surrendering all sense of self, and all responsibility to someone else– a hypnotist, an expert, a politician, a scientist. And what makes the allure all the more powerful, is that sometimes it can be healthy.
For instance, the deep spiritual healing of Ayahuasca or mushroom trips can only occur when you abandon control, and allow yourself to fall under the hallucinogens’ spell. With mushrooms, Ayahuasca, or LSD, all you have to fear is what the substance brings out in your own mind. But when you abandon your self control to another human being, you are entrusting that they have no ulterior motives, and nothing to gain from your obedience.
If you have a trustworthy, competent therapist, they could help implant ideas they think will help you overcome mental hardships… or, perhaps, as I mentioned earlier, they could reinforce the worst of your nature, and bring our more sinister elements of your psyche. Personally, I believe that at least on some level, all hypnosis is self hypnosis. You have to allow yourself to be hypnotized. Under normal circumstances, no one can seize your mind without your permission.
Remember, the hypnotist is working with what is already in your head. But a particularly gifted hypnotist could probably reach some pretty deep corners you might not even know were there… Which is why meditation can help you protect yourself from this type of influence, by making sure you are the first one to explore your subconscious mind, and get a feel for the place.
How the elite use the power of hypnosis: You have probably already noticed elements of how hypnosis applies to the way the elites control society. You can’t deny that they have great branding: we refer to them as elites. Already their status is heightened in the mind. Just like hypnotists, we all have a different idea of what exactly an elite is. But that idea will generally share some common elements: power, status, secret societies, wealth, control of government and other institutions. Others may associate the term with elite athletes, or elite schools.
“Elite” seems out of reach, exclusive, too powerful to resist. Something is going on behind he scenes, out of reach, which we cannot control. This is also how the government prefers to be seen, as I discuss in my video on the “traps” which keep us from freeing ourselves. Posturing as “elite”– or an expert, or a leader– cuts down most opposition before it even starts. They marry the elements of hypnosis with marketing. Edward Bernays hypnotized America by associating cigarettes with women’s empowerment, and by finding doctors who would say bacon and eggs is the best breakfast you could have.
Obviously, the elite benefit from controlling large centralized institutions which can team up to hypnotize us into believing the experts. Random volunteers will deliver electric shocks until it appears the subject has passed out or died… all because a man in a lab coat told them to keep going. That was the Milgram Experiment on obedience to perceived authority.
And indeed, most people go through life in some level of hypnosis. Take the belief that a government, with a monopoly on security and justice, which allows no competition, and forces people at the point of a gun to fund them, is the most peaceful way to run society.
Never-mind that the single biggest cause of death in 20th century was government. Most people are under such a spell that they cannot conceive an alternative way to organize society. Simply the thought entering the mind that we might not need a government, as we currently know it, makes people defensive, confused, and angry. It’s almost as if someone instructed them, while in a deep state of hypnosis, that when they wake up, they will violently reject the idea that their captors are not their saviors. Some call this Stockholm Syndrome. But most call it good citizenship.
The media is the most obvious mass-hypnosis machine. They often report real news, but framed in such a way that it supports their narrative. But most hypnosis is reinforced by our peers, in a mental shortcut called social proof. For example, a college degree has mattered for so long, that your own parents will try to hypnotize you into borrowing six figures for a gender studies degree.
Of course the Universities were taken over by the Marxist hypnotists long ago. They present their conditioning as education. And their subjects react violently to ideas which contradict their conditioning. That is why they need safe-spaces, hate free speech, and cancel anyone who dares to present a dangerous idea.
The banks hypnotize customers into believing they are a safe institution to keep your money in, when in reality they are on the brink of collapse, use your money gamble in instruments like derivatives, work as spies for the government to report “suspect” financial transactions.
Fiat currency itself is a huge hypnotism move. Paper money, printed by government, made valuable by decree and nothing else but mass hypnosis.
There are too many examples of hypnotism being used on society evert day, so please comment with more examples. But all these institutions cannot be entirely useless– some research is real and beneficial, some news is relevant and helpful, some education is worthwhile, a medium of exchange is necessary, and so are many products created and sold by corporations. The real trick is convincing people these are the only ways to learn, govern, and spend in an advanced economy. It’s like when the hypnotist tells you to flex your muscles, stiffen your arm, and then try to bend it.
Obviously while the government has a near monopoly on security, other alternatives atrophy. They seize control of policing, courts, and say– just try to stay safe without us, try to bend your arm while flexing, try to protect yourself while it is against our rules to protect yourself. You can’t do it, can you? Well I guess we need them, I guess they do control me, I guess I am powerless.
But trust in all these institutions is crumbling. That’s a good thing, although the elites still try to frame it as a bad thing. We still believe that a society must rest on certain foundations, and the loss of those institutions can still make us uncomfortable. Most people are waiting for a prompt from the hypnotist, and cannot conceive of alternatives on their own. Once this is overcome, the elite have lost their game.
And in fact if you understand the message of this video, the elites have already lost their power over you. I would encourage everyone to use meditation to recognize and dissolve those artificial barriers and walls erected in our minds by society’s hypnotists. In a sense, self hypnosis gives you control over your mind, and makes it much harder for others to implant harmful ideas."
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"How the Elite Trap You in Their Unfree World"
"Where Your Gaze Lingers..."
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that has nothing to do with you, this storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up the sky like pulverized bones.
You have to look! That’s another one of the rules. Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.”
- Haruki Murakami
“Closing your eyes won’t make the awfulness go away. It may be that nothing will. But dwelling on it, dreading the evil, playing out the misery in your head – doesn’t this feed the monster? You can’t close your eyes to life, but you can choose where your gaze lingers.”
- Richelle E. Goodrich
"What Goes Around Comes Around"
"What Goes Around Comes Around"
by Bill Bonner
WEST RIVER, MARYLAND – "Before moving on to 2021, it might be useful to better understand what happened last year. Like moving on from a bad marriage, we want to know: What went wrong? So, we are digging deeper into the dementia that was 2020. What a bloody mess!
Polite Corruption: Let us begin, rather au hasard, with yesterday’s big news. In it, we find that former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen got paid about $7 million for speaking in whole sentences and reassuring Wall Street that she has the big banks’ backs. Here’s CNN: "Janet Yellen made millions giving speeches to Wall Street banks she'll soon regulate. Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for Treasury secretary, made more than $7 million in recent years by giving speeches to Wall Street banks, major corporations and industry groups."
Today, defeated congressmen turn into lobbyists, old generals make their fortunes with “defense” contractors, and ex-Federal Reserve jefes cash in on Wall Street. This sort of polite corruption has been so “normalized” and sanitized that its beneficiaries are almost proud of it.
Deserved Gratitude: But look more carefully, and you see the slime. Ms. Yellen, for example, focused much of her wisdom on a single big company, Citigroup. The bank paid her nearly a million dollars for a series of talks last year. It was probably no coincidence that this is the same bank that was saved by the Fed during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. At the time, Citi was looking at a string of losses adding up to more than $37 billion and already had more than $1 trillion in debt. But instead of failing, as it should have, the Fed (then led by Ben Bernanke… he with the “courage to act”) bailed it out, giving it $45 billion worth of Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds and guaranteeing some $250 billion more of its dodgy loans.
Of course, Citi was eager to show Ms. Yellen the gratitude she deserves. But that is past… part of the corpse we are now dissecting. And yet, here is where we find the future, too. Michael Corbat, Citi’s CEO, is no fool. He knew that busts follow booms. And he also knew that the Fed’s money-printing would be the key to Citi surviving the next one. He knew what to do, in other words.
False Pretenses: But let’s not get distracted. We’re taking 2020 apart to try to understand what happened. The Swamp slime grew. But it didn’t grow alone. As you will recall from yesterday, 2020 was the most preposterous year of our lives. Never before have we seen Americans so disgusted with each other.
The Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate both had their houses vandalized. The U.S. economy was smaller in December than it had been in January… and the government was nearly $4 trillion deeper in debt, with the Fed “printing” new money at a rate of $30 billion per week just to keep the show on the road. And ’90s pop sensations Jennifer Lopez and Shakira sang together at the Super Bowl.
Almost everything that happened in 2020 was done in bad taste, or under false pretenses, outright lies, or self-serving delusions. In the presidential election, to take a big example, neither candidate was what he pretended to be. Biden, a big-business, big-government apologist all his life, pretended to be a reformer, working for the little guy. Trump, a reality-TV-show star and leveraged real estate speculator, pretended to be a conservative capitalist.
Capitalism, we remind readers, is no “system.” It’s just what happens when people are allowed to decide among themselves who gets what. Socialism is an imposed system in which the feds make the decisions. Donald Trump increased the reach of the government more than any president since World War II, making it more “socialist” than ever before. And yet, many voters thought they saw him on the ramparts of “capitalism,” struggling valiantly to hold off the Bolshevik menace. And now, Biden the “reformer” prepares to move into the White House… bringing Janet Yellen, thousands of cronies, and the Deep State nomenclatura with him.
The electorate was bamboozled by them both.
Going in Circles: Looking back, the fatal disease began long before COVID-19 struck… even long before Donald J. Trump came to Washington. By January 2020, it was well advanced. The economy was then at the tail end of what should have been its longest and biggest boom ever. Yet, instead of making hay while the sun shone, the feds mowed it down.
These were the fat years… when the feds should have been paying down debt and laying in stores of surpluses for the hard times to come. Instead, led by a Republican president, they were projecting a deficit for 2020 of $1.2 trillion. It was as if Pharaoh had gotten it backwards, storing up the grain in the lean years and releasing it when the fat harvest came. And here, we pause to make sure we’re all watching the same show.
Everything in nature is cyclical. The sun stops shining every day, in other words. People die – even without the coronavirus. Markets boom and crash. Empires decline and fall. That’s just the way it is.
Inevitable and Ineluctable: Yes, everything changes… but the cycles continue. And that’s why we turn to history for instruction. What happened yesterday will probably happen again tomorrow. From a distance, we have no problem identifying the pattern. Flowers bloom. Then they wither and die. But the flower doesn’t see it that way. It thinks it will bloom forever. The lover believes his love will always be beautiful. And the empire is always eternal… until it collapses. The cycles are obvious. From birth to death… from honesty to corruption… from boom to bust. They are inevitable and ineluctable.
Where Are We? But the problem for us is always the same: trying to figure out where we are – at the beginning or near the end? As 2020 moved along, it became more and more apparent that we were on the downhill slope.
The COVID lockdowns… the election shenanigans… the Fed’s money-printing… record deficits, record debt… bigger government… Proud Boys and Antifa… bailouts… bamboozles… In short, it was the damndest year we ever saw. And there’s more to come…"
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What goes around comes around, eventually, inevitably...
In other words, "You're Gonna Get What's Coming"
“The Psychological Mistakes People Make That Lead to Misery”
“The Psychological Mistakes People Make That Lead to Misery”
By Jonathan Rottenberg
“The puzzling reality is that human depression is increasing in an era when environmental conditions are relatively benign. The average citizen in Western society now lives longer, is less likely to starve, and enjoys considerably greater wealth than his sixteenth-century counterpart. Presumably these objective conditions for survival and reproduction would cause depression rates to fall, not rise to nearly one in five citizens. This environment-depression disconnect seems less strange when we appreciate that there are additional human-specific routes into depression. Homo sapiens has the dubious distinction of being a species that can become depressed without a major environmental insult.
There is no scientific consensus about why human depression rates are rising in the industrialized world, but several compelling possibilities exist. Their common thread is our species’ unusual relationship with mood and the doors it opens for unique routes into depression. A chimpanzee is capable of feeling bad, but only a human being can feel bad about feeling bad. Former tennis great Cliff Richey, in his memoir “Acing Depression,” described how he became engulfed by low mood: “One of the horrible things about depression - in addition to the foul, odorous, sick, deathly mood you’re in - is that you’re now spending so much of your time, almost all of it, just trying to fix yourself. You’re consumed by, ‘How can I fix this horrible thing?’”
Humans have a host of unique thoughts and reactions to low mood, many of which are highly cognitive. Only a human can keep a mood diary or write a book about depression. We often think of what’s uniquely human as uniquely better. Surely pride may be a reasonable emotion for the species that harnessed fire and put a man on the moon. It’s easy to see traits such as advanced language, the ability to be self-aware, and participation in a rich shared culture as unalloyed virtues. Yet when it comes to “fixing” mood, all of these special human assets can turn into liabilities, with the unintended consequence of making depression worse.
Sinking Through Thinking: A hallmark human response to low mood is to try to explain it - as we do with moods generally. We use language to construct theories about where painful feelings come from. The basic idea is, “If I understand why I feel bad, I will know how to fix it.” This impulse makes sense. It fits with a main function of low mood, which is to help draw attention to threats and obstacles in unfavorable environments. In a low mood, behavior pauses and the environment is analyzed more carefully.
However, exactly what “analyze more carefully” means depends on which species is doing the analyzing. The schnauzer, Ollie, just separated from his sister, may sit at the window for hours looking for signs of her return. Visual search is the sum total of his environmental analysis. When a human pines for a loved one, say a mother missing her son away at summer camp, the analytical field is far wider. Our outsized language capability draws in thoughts linked to the situation: “That head counselor seemed awfully young.”; “Did I remember to pack sunscreen?”; “I wonder why we haven’t gotten a postcard?” These thoughts may then trigger further mental images - a flash of Tommy drowning, the funeral - as well as feelings - a pang of guilt for ever letting him go to Camp Meadowlark in the first place.
Such reflections on mood have a purpose beyond self-flagellation. The mood system is practical and most interested in what to do next, in finding the action that will enhance fitness. What people brood about is not random but tracks key evolutionary themes (finding a mate, staying alive, achieving status, defending kith and kin, etc.). Mothers and fathers worry about their children at summer camp because mistakes in child rearing are evolutionarily costly. A mother who figures out that she’s dwelling on a failure to pack sunscreen can send a remedial Coppertone care package, and, the next time Tommy is sent away, he’s more likely to be fully provisioned. Even the most backward-looking counterfactual thinking (coulda, shoulda, woulda) has a forward-looking element: understanding why bad things happened helps us prevent their recurrence.
Reacting to low mood with thinking has evolutionary logic; it enhances survival and reproduction (fitness). Sadly, what’s good for fitness is not necessarily good for happiness. Only sometimes does thinking about mood enhance happiness. We see this fairly reliably in certain brands of psychotherapy, in which the process of thinking about mood and discovering its meanings is specially structured and guided by an expert. For a novice to think his or her way out of low mood and depression to get to a happier place - that’s a dicier proposition. Humans are understandably confident when trying to think our way out of a low mood. We solve so many other problems by thinking, such as how to get a stalled car to start or how to make a healthy meal out of scraps in the fridge.
Becky, a college professor in Maryland, organizes a team to analyze old production data from a distillery to figure out the determinants of good whiskey quality and use this information to ascertain why the distillery’s product loss between brewing and bottling is nearly twice the industry standard. She is now in an episode of depression. Every morning Becky wakes up and says to herself, “What can I do today to solve this problem?” But even with a PhD degree, considerable insight, and bookshelves filled with self-help books, her depression hasn’t budged for thirteen months. If you speak with her, even in her depressed state, it is immediately obvious that she is intelligent. On paper, she has every reason to believe that she can solve her depression.
Yet most humans, including Becky, are not nearly as good at this as they think they are. And our confidence in thought makes it more difficult to recognize when thinking is not working. The pitfalls of such an approach are under-appreciated. In fact, “thinking your way out” might actually provide new ways in, new ways for low mood to deepen into serious depression.
Our advanced language and ability to hold ideas in mind, called working memory, combine to create a formidable meaning-making machine. Yet this machine can be too productive for our own good. It can easily churn out new interpretations of a troubling situation well after the situation has passed. On Friday, a worker can still be mulling over her boss’s hostile comment from Monday and wonder, “Maybe it was that e-mail I sent three weeks ago that set him off.” Once the meaning-making machine is in overdrive, a bad mood can prompt a potentially unlimited number of implications. We can generate dozens of seemingly plausible environmental reasons for the question: “Why I am so blue?” (My job is boring. I need to lose weight. We can’t stop global warming.) Even if you are feeling only a tiny bit sad right now, take sixty seconds to try this yourself. I doubt you will draw a blank on possible reasons. You’ll have leads. Yet many of the leads will be false, that is, irrelevant to the real source of the mood. When the real source of low mood is a thyroid deficiency or a low-grade infection, an analysis of the environment is moot. Or worse than moot, because with all the attention we pay to the false leads (all the reasons I hate my job), we may find fresh reasons to feel low. The generation of false leads may be good for fitness (the value of an exhaustive search), but it’s not always so good for happiness.
Given our natural reliance on and our confidence in thought, the urge to repetitively think about the causes and consequences of low mood can harden into a habit. Researchers label this habit of thought rumination. Some people enter a ruminative mode even when facing minor troubles, or even when their environment is benevolent. A consistent body of data - much of it collected by the late psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema - shows that this is a dangerous habit. People who report a greater tendency to ruminate on a short questionnaire have longer periods of depressed mood in everyday life, are more pessimistic about the future, and have a harder time recovering from the effects of stressors such as a natural disaster or a recent bereavement.
The human meaning-making machine is so good at what it does that it can generate interminable interpretations. When persistent thinking gets stuck, it does not arrive at a stable theory of the problem, does not solve it, and cannot come to terms with it. Far from engaging in active problem solving, a person may simply perseverate on the fact of the problem (or problems) for months on end.
When the meaning-making machine gets caught in this way, its analysis turns inward, shifting its focus from a problematic environment to a problematic self. Analyses of various kinds of thoughts have found that those that repeatedly focus on the failings of the self are the kind most closely linked to depression. Insistent problem solving by itself is not necessarily harmful. In fact, therapeutic techniques that bolster active problem solving (say by breaking a problem down into structured subparts) can be helpful for depressed persons. It’s the deconstruction of the self that really causes trouble.
As Homo sapiens sapiens, we know, and we know that we know. An elaborate conceptual self - another thing that’s usually a point of pride - becomes a vulnerability. We’re committed to our autobiographical self, our story. It’s as if we have films of our own lives playing in our heads, with us cast as the heroes. Depressed people, however, recast their movies with themselves as villains and play them in an endless loop. A depressed chimp, lacking a deep autobiographical self, is spared this screening and will never have the experience of lying awake at night thinking, “I am a terrible mother.” Our capacity to dwell on our own failings makes us more vulnerable to depression than our fellow mammals.
Humans also have a special category of failings because of our heightened ability to self-monitor: our failures to change mood. This was true for Becky, who said of herself, “As a goal-oriented person, I keep looking for (and trying) things I can do to snap out of the depression. Medication, meditation, sleeping pills, trying to spend time doing ‘things that bring me joy’ (which just backfires, because I end up feeling hopeless while I’m doing them).” Every day that the depression goes on, failures to change mood turn into nagging thoughts: “Why can’t I just get over this?”; “Why am I so weak?” These self-monitoring statements become further fodder for rumination, which becomes further fodder for depression, and we are reminded once again that our powers of language are a decidedly mixed blessing.
All Cheered Out: Culture and the Pursuit of Happiness: We are the only species to look to culture to guide us on what feelings are desirable and how undesirable feelings should be managed. And as humans try to “fix” low mood, they are never alone. No creature ever living has had available so much advice - spiritual, medical, psychological, folk-inspired - about what to do when it’s feeling down. In the past fifteen years we have seen an ever-growing stream of psychological and popular science books examining happiness and how people can increase it. Ideally, these resources should serve as bulwarks against depression. Perversely, the opposite may be the case. Our predominant cultural imperatives about mood, though surely well-intentioned, are worsening the depression epidemic.
In the West there is a powerful drive to experience happiness. This tradition is particularly strong in the United States. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of anything more American than the pursuit of happiness. Along with life and liberty, it’s written into the Declaration of Independence as a fundamental right. Wanting happiness is as American as apple pie. But how happy should we expect to be? Happier than other people around the globe?
It would appear so. Analysis of thousands of survey responses found that when people in different countries were asked to rate how desirable and appropriate it is to experience varying psychological states, positive states like joy and affection were rated more desirable and appropriate in Australia and the United States than in Taiwan and China. Cross-cultural research by Jeanne Tsai of Stanford University has also found that European Americans place the highest value on specific forms of happiness, idealizing states like enthusiasm or excitement, termed high arousal positive states. By contrast, Chinese and other Asian test subjects place the highest value on other forms of happiness, idealizing states such as calm and serenity, termed low arousal positive states.
Consistent with the notion that culture inculcates ideals about feeling states, cultural differences show up early in life. When young children judge smiling photographs, American children prefer the expression that shows an excited smile to the expression that shows a calm smile. Taiwanese children do not show this same preference. American preferences for high arousal positive states probably have many roots, but they stem in part from a media environment that values peppy happiness. An image analysis of smile photos in American women’s magazines found that they contained more excited smiles and fewer calm smiles than smile photos in Chinese women’s magazines.
So what’s the problem? Everyone I know wants to be alive, free, and happy. What’s wrong with pursuing happiness to the fullest extent possible? The more you value your happiness, the happier you’ll be, right? Wrong, says compelling recent research.
Two studies led by psychologist Iris Mauss found evidence for an alternative hypothesis: people who value happiness more are less likely to achieve their goal of feeling happy. In the first study the researchers administered a questionnaire designed to measure the extent to which people valued the experience of happiness as a fundamental goal. Mauss and colleagues found that some people put an especially high value on happiness, endorsing items like, “If I don’t feel happy, maybe there is something wrong with me”; and “To have a meaningful life, I need to feel happy most of the time.” Surprisingly, women who said that they valued happiness more were actually less happy than women who valued it less. Specifically, women who valued happiness highly reported that they were less satisfied with the overall course of their lives and were more bothered by symptoms of depression. Strangely enough, valuing happiness seemed most problematic for women whose lives were low in stress—the people for whom happiness should have been within easiest reach.
The second study was a clever experiment in which the researchers tried to briefly increase how much the participants valued happiness. They did this by having one group of participants read a bogus newspaper article that extolled the importance of achieving happiness (the other group read an article that did not discuss happiness). Later in the experiment participants watched different short films. Those women who had read the happiness-extolling article reported feeling less happiness in response to a happy film. The authors again concluded that, paradoxically, valuing happiness more may lead people to be less happy, especially when happiness is within reach.
These experiments help us understand why predominant cultural imperatives about mood might be worsening the depression epidemic. Our current cultural ethos is that achieving happiness is like achieving other goals. If we simply work hard at it, we can master happiness, just as we can figure out how to use new computer software, play the piano, or learn Spanish. However, if the goal of becoming happier is different from these other goals, efforts devoted to augmenting happiness may backfire, disappointing - and potentially depressing - us because we can’t achieve our expected goal. Mauss and colleagues concluded that setting a goal to become happier is like putting yourself on a treadmill that goes faster the harder you run.
Rising happiness standards widen the gap between what we want to feel and what we actually feel. We know from Jeanne Tsai’s work that people in the West generally idealize excitement and other high arousal positive states. Although this is a general tendency, she has also shown that people vary in how strong their positive ideal is. Importantly, for people who have that strong positive ideal, there is potentially a large gap between what they would like to feel and what they actually feel. The size of this gap predicts depression. People who have a larger gap between their ideal and actual positive affect have more depressive symptoms.
This is not surprising: to someone with high happiness goals, low moods are as demoralizing as a foreclosure notice is to an aspiring billionaire. If you believe that a high positive mood should be easy to achieve, a prolonged low mood is an insult, which probably prompts the isolating and stigmatizing question: “What’s wrong with me?” Negative feelings about negative feelings make them a greater threat. People who set unrealistic goals for mood states may be less able to accept or tolerate negative emotional experiences like anxiety or sadness. Oddly enough, being able to accept negative feelings - rather than always striving to make them disappear - seems to be associated with feeling better, not worse, over the long run. There is evidence that when people accept negative feelings, those experiences draw less attention and less negative evaluation than they would otherwise. Some research shows that people who report an ability to accept negative feelings when they arise are less likely to experience depressive symptoms in the future.
Ultimately, the strong cultural imperative toward being happy bumps us up against a wall: our mood system is not configured to deliver an end state of durable euphoria. Happy euphoria is a reward the mood system metes out along the way, on the road to pursuing other evolutionarily important goals. For example, euphoria is a reward for having sex or for when your first-choice date to the prom says yes. By design, these rewards are meted out sparingly rather than liberally.
Yes, pleasure after eating the carrot rewards the bunny for finding the carrot, yet a well-designed bunny does not stay satiated. It’s the end of the pleasure and the promise of more that gets the bunny hopping off to find more carrots and ultimately to survive long enough to make more bunnies. So clearly does intense happiness fade after a goal is achieved that psychologists and economists have given the experience its own label: hedonic adaptation. It is powerful, and studies show it to be virtually omnipresent: whether after purchasing a zippy new sports car, getting a big promotion, or moving to a cool new apartment, with time (often surprisingly little) the euphoria fades.
Hedonic adaptation and our unattainable cultural imperatives make for a cruel combination. People will usually fall outside the zone of intense pleasure, and they will consider that failure. In this scenario, shortcuts are tempting. Forget having to realize an evolutionarily important goal and just give me the pleasure now, please. The high from smoking crack is almost immediate, but it does not last. In the long run, the shortcuts backfire. The mood system has the last word.”
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Related:
“How To Be Unhappy: 10 Surefire Ways To Be Unhappy in Life”
“Mary Oliver On How to Live ‘Your One Wild and Precious Life’”
“Mary Oliver On How to Live ‘Your One Wild and Precious Life’”
by Sanjiv Chopra, M.D.
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
- Mary Oliver
“The quiet, plain-spoken poet Mary Oliver died on January 17, 2019. An outpouring of emotion and tributes spanned the globe. She was both mourned and wildly revered by those for whom her words were a totem. With stark simplicity, she offered us both spiritual guidance and common sense, all of which was garnered from lessons she learned while simply meandering in the woods.
Mary Oliver’s gift was her ability to marvel at the world with an unsentimental acceptance that it (and we) are temporary. She looked clear-eyed and with unflinching certainty at the impermanence of our existence. In it she found not despair but rather joy. She chose to live in the moment and to be dazzled by it.
Mary Oliver’s roots were thoroughly midwestern. She hailed from Maple Heights, Ohio, a leafy suburb of Cleveland. From all accounts, hers was a difficult childhood. She wrote in “Blue Pastures” (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award): “Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them.”
This darkness of her youth led her to escape into nature and into books. Words and woods offered her solace. She fiercely embraced them, noting that “the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books – can re-dignify the worst stung heart.”
We know, and she acknowledged, that overcoming adversity isn’t easy: “There are stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet.” But she persisted. She said she read, “the way a person might swim, to save his or her life,” and that nature offered her “an antidote to confusion.”
She advised, “you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.” And in saving her life, she rekindled so many of ours, using words that were deceptively simple but that had the power to shine a bright light into the dark crevices of our pain and misfortune and to set us free from the past. She gave us clear instructions for living a life:
“Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
And for her- and for so many of us who have long sat at the knee of her prose – it worked. Mary Oliver wrote, “Having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.” And when she died, she gave it back.
Mary Oliver’s religion was simple. It could best be described as “gratitude.” And so, as she departed this world leaving for us so many gifts, we offer this prayer for her – thank you. To honor her, we share here one of Mary Oliver’s most powerful poems, one that offers sage advice about accepting imperfection.”
“The Ponds”
“Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe
their lapped light
crowding
the black
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them -
the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch
only so many,
they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?
I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided -
and that one wears an orange blight -
and this one is a glossy cheek
half nibbled away -
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.
Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled -
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire
of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing -
that the light is everything -
that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading.
And I do.”
- Mary Oliver
"It Is Easy..."
“It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be.”
- Bill Bryson
Musical Interlude: Yanni, “Standing in Motion", "Live At The Acropolis"
Yanni,
“Standing in Motion", "Live At The Acropolis"
"Background Music for Deep Focus, Studying and Work"
Greenred Productions,
"Background Music for Deep Focus, Studying and Work"
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 1/5/21"
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 1/5/21"
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JAN 5, AT 11:05 AM: "Rate Of Adverse Reactions To COVID Vaccines Already 50x Higher Than Flu Shot"
JAN 5, AT 6:45 AM: "Germany Latest To Extend Lockdown, FDA Warns Against Stretching COVID Vaccine Doses: Live Updates"
JAN 5, AT 4:49 AM: "Portuguese Nurse Dies Suddenly After Receiving COVID Vaccine" "Another suspicious death..."
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Jan. 5, 2021 8:11 AM ET:
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 85,768,300
people, according to official counts, including 20,864,927 Americans.
Globally at least 1,855,300 have died.
Jan. 45, 2021 8:11 AM AT:
Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count○
"The COVID Tracking Project"
Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases,
hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.
- https://covidtracking.com/
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Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases,
hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.
- https://covidtracking.com/
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"Economic Market Snapshot AM 1/5/21"
"Economic Market Snapshot AM 1/5/21"
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will
do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
- John Maynard Keynes
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"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/5/21:
“Important Market Updates Plus:
U.S.A. "Property Of" The Federal Reserve”
○
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
Daily Job Cuts
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And now, the End Game...
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