This is the ninth chapter from Les’ online novel titled, Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World, for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter again covers diet on multiple levels and how it relates to  inner peace and relative harmony.

Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World

Chapter 9

I’ve been thinking about what’s been said so far and I thought it might be a good idea to do another chapter on diet before moving along to something else. Although ‘eating’ is a physical act, it has major spiritual implications. In a certain sense there is no such thing as the physical. It is just a more manifest expression of the spiritual which is… everything. It’s all spiritual. Light is life and there are degrees of light precipitating downward into the manifest until light becomes solid. The sun is an expression of something finer and that is, itself, an expression of something finer and so on and so on up and in; the reverse being more and more down and out; for the sake of illustration.

The sun causes plants to grow. There is a fiery nutrition there which is absorbed by animal forms which consume them, including your own. Sunlight transforms into a power which makes the physical body possible. So, let us think of your body as frozen sunlight; light in extension.

This power can take the form of many things beneficial and many things poisonous. It’s a mere alteration of one thing assuming a myriad of states all as a result of the operation of the sun which, as has been said, is itself an expression of something finer.

Alcohol is a poison. Snake venom is a poison, whereas the serpent power is the resident motive force in everything. Snake venom anti-toxins are made from snake venom. There are many powerful truths that can be intuited from this by the inquiring mind. It appears from this that life and the conditions in which we find ourselves are all a result of the choices that we make. We make these choices based upon our reasoning and knowledge. When reasoning and knowledge are sound we make profitable and correct choices. When they are not, our choices are unsound and lead to undesirable conditions and complications. One of these is dis-ease or, the loss of harmony. Harmony in being is the optimum goal.

In today’s world, the common diet is more garbage than gold. So it is with our other diets; what we take in with our minds, what provokes our feelings, what we breathe and HOW we breathe. Proper breathing and eating both require a similar degree of attention. Fifty percent of the digestion takes place in the mouth. If you don’t chew your food long enough for this to take place well, …you do the math. It is the same with breathing. People who do not have control of their breath are in a poor position to manage negative emotion or to center their mind. Their energy is much less than it could be. Every organ is affected because posture is affected which effects everything else. Much of what I say may seem simplistic. It is up to the reader to extrapolate from what they read.

It’s the reverse of what it natural and normal for you to put shit into your body. Shit is supposed to come ‘out’ of your body. We’ve come to a point as a society where we put garbage in and garbage out. It’s a small percentage of humanity that takes the proper course.

Unfortunately, with many who are attempting to do the right thing another feature enters the mix and that is to become extremist in one’s practice and in one’s judgment of others. Keep in mind what has been said about snake venom. You can poison yourself trying to do the right thing, just as much as by doing the wrong thing. It is harmony you want, not some idealized white dove in the meadow of personal purity. Don’t scrub the pot so hard that you break it.

Some alternative dietary modalities verge on insanity, such as those who proclaim that eating honey is stealing from the bees, or that milk is only for calves and so on. I’m not a meat eater but I know that for some people at their level of personal development it is necessary. I’ve seen as many healthy meat eaters as I have unhealthy vegetarians. The thing to remember is that some meat may well be better than other meat. Some vegetables are better for you than others and, more importantly, some vegetables are better for you personally than others. A lot depends on your heritage and where you live and the particular genetic complex you have arrived at in your ongoing journey which does not end with death or begin at birth.

You can stop all input from the world outside and wind up unhappy in a room alone with no idea where to go. Consider balance above everything else and include ‘intention’ and a sincere desire to encounter the indwelling self. I have said in other places that if anyone were to go into a room for several days and take only water and for the duration ‘pray without ceasing; falling to sleep when it is unavoidable and awakening to immediate prayer with out ceasing that they could not fail to have an experience with the indwelling self. Think about it. You could not fail to have an experience. But who would do this? Not many would do this.

This is preferable to walking away from the world when you are not ready. But you do want to step away from the world at this time because the world has become a whirlpool that is sucking the inattentive and the willing down into a maelstrom of darkness. It is so because the opportunity for spiritual transformation is so great. Whenever the door begins to open for a spiritual quantum leap, all of the forces of ‘the world’ manifest strong attractions for the purpose of distraction from this possibility. It’s physics really.

Develop a burning need for union within. Let is accompany you on your daily rounds. In the midst of the chaos and lies and false advertisements for something that cannot be acquired or purchased in the marketplace, let your mind and heart be made aware that all is well and that none of this can touch you.

Diet is one of the keys to being able to do this. Breathing is also diet because you are eating air. Investigate the blood, oxygen exchange. The mind eats as well. Controlling your diet on all of these levels will grant you a positive state in which to experience inner peace and relative harmony.

People get stoned because they don’t feel good. They don’t feel good because of all the bad diet on all the levels of consumption. You would become very high if you were judicious and cautious about your diet. When you practice meditation as well, the collective benefits are truly impressive. It’s not only the bad advice that you need to avoid. It is also the bad advice that masquerades as good advice.

The key to gaining benefit from this book is to think about what you have read and then let your intuition guide you toward realizations that are uniquely your own. You must seek out your intuition and thereby widen the gateway through which the information passes. Think of it as doing spiritual sit-up and push-ups because it is just that. You must exercise something in order to develop strength and ability. Good diet on all levels is a good start.

In That Shape Again

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By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

This is the eighth chapter from Les’ online novel titled, Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World, for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter highlights several different diet techniques that could best suit your lifestyle and goals for weight loss.

Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World

Chapter 8

Now where was I? Diet, right… Today I think we talk about types of diet and let me set them out and then discuss them. I won’t be discussing any of the specialized diets that deal with particular maladies, physical imbalances or weight loss programs. You can find this sort of thing in Cosmo where their relative merits can be considered in the context of the advertisers present in the magazine.

First off, there is ‘macrobiotics’, a system of bringing into balance ones physical being by eating particular foods in proportion to each other. It should be noted that the founder, George Ohsawa was a chain smoker who was working on making a macrobiotic Coca Cola when he died of heart disease. I practiced macrobiotics for a period of time and I can tell you that it is a near perfect diet for those it is suitable for. I had tremendous energy as well as a sense of enduring equilibrium. The downside to macrobiotics that I have seen involves two conditions. One of them is that a certain portion of practitioners become food Nazis. These people are no fun to be around. The other is having insufficient information followed by reduced benefits.

If I were to want to explore macrobiotics at this time I would not read George Ohsawa because it could well have you tired, confused and moving on in a short period of time. I recommend Michio Kushi and you can get all the information you want from one of his centers around the world. It makes sense to attend one or more of their courses. For those whose systems and temperaments are sympathetic to this diet you will find the changes that you experience to be remarkable and possibly even supernatural.

I’ve mentioned temperament and suitability. Let me be very clear here. No one diet is the answer for everyone. No diet will be successful if you ignore basic eating disciplines such as thoroughly chewing your food; not drinking during your meal or for twenty minutes before and after, observing correct posture and having a peaceful or ‘settled’ demeanor while you are eating. These are all big considerations whether they seem to be or not.

The next diet I would recommend is Arnold Ehret’s mucusless healing system. This basically presupposes that mucus in the body is responsible for most of the body’s ills. Arnold came up with a system that substantially eliminates the mucus from your body. Arnold was capable of incredible strength and endurance. Wikipedia (which I don’t like to use) has some interesting things to say about Arnold including his manner of death. I have practiced this diet as well and it’s a good one for those so disposed.

I suspect the raw foods diet might have evolved out of this and I’m not going to spend a lot of time on that one and here is why. I’ve observed the raw foods discipline and it’s another of those fanatically-disposed systems that one should be careful with. Elements of Veganism also fit into this category. This system can have you spending most of your waking hours preparing your food. It can be quite expensive and time consuming and has become a temporary trend among celebrities and trust fund babies. I’m not saying it isn’t a good system though I think it would cause a gas problem with a lot of people. You’ll have to look into it and see if it is for you. I think that saying cooked food is poison is a pretty stupid comment and makes everything else suspect to me. However… this diet is far superior to the ordinary human diet and you would be better off with this than with the rest of the options in the mass diet.

Basic vegetarianism is a good catchall for anyone seeking to evolve their diet. It’s a good place to start and after a period of adjustment and familiarization you can specialize further on. Veganism is a curious one for me and I find that I don’t generally like to be around Vegans because they have a real capacity to develop a fascist mindset. You might hear that, “I don’t eat anything with a face.” Well, potatoes have eyes. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. When I hear that eating honey is stealing from the bees, my bullshit meter starts to act funny. When I hear that a cow’s milk is for the calf or curious views on chicken eggs, I begin to wonder. I’m not saying milk and eggs are good for you. I rarely if ever consume them but I do eat cheese and yogurt on occasion. My system of operation violates tenants of every one of the systems I have mentioned but that’s me. I’m basically a vegetarian but I occasionally eat fish and have NO PLANS to stop. Probably the Hindu and Thai diets suit me most.

Kinesiology is something you might look into as you develop a diet for yourself. All of us have some intolerance to something and it would be good to find out what that was.

Here are some things you should absolutely avoid; soft drinks, refined sugar and artificial sweeteners, processed foods, commercial meats, milk as a beverage, commercial snack foods and candies, most canned foods. This isn’t a comprehensive list but it’s a good start. You will note that I don’t mention caffeinated products like coffee and tea. I think moderation is the key with these but you must remember that caffeine affects the adrenals in a way similar to continuously starting your car while it is already running. Certainly caffeine is no good for you.

You can’t go wrong by eating whole foods, fresh vegetables and fruits. I’m not sure about organic foods as a total commitment; then again, if you can afford it, why not? It’s good to maintain perspective. Eating right will not make you immortal. It will not change other bad behavior not connected to diet. It might make changes easier and that’s the idea. Diet is just one thing to be concerned with. It is a big concern. Take a look around you at the appearance of people who have no concern about what they eat. Look at the society as a whole. Need I say more?

Nothing that I will discuss or consider in this book is going to be comprehensive. You need to look into things on your own. One thing I will HIGHLY recommend is Robert Gray’s healing system. You want to get The Colon Health Handbook by Robert Gray and his healing products. There are a lot of colon cleansers out there and some of them are radical and uncomfortable to use. This is the best, the slowest program and the most complete. It takes around two months to accomplish it but you will NOT BELIEVE how you will feel after you have done it. It will blow your mind. I’ve done it several times now. It makes very good sense to clean your colon at the beginning. Follow the instructions exactly and do not waver. It may cost you 2 or 3 hundred dollars to follow the complete program but you will not regret it. You absolutely will not regret doing this and the energy harvested will give you a major jolt in terms of continuing.

Regardless of which diet you embrace you must remember that eating too much is a mistake no matter what. Try to learn to stop eating when you are only half to two thirds full. It will make a tremendous difference in your well being. Remember to eat slowly and consciously and with gratitude. Remember to fully chew your food and not to drink liquids while you are eating. Look into occasional fasting.

If you should choose to follow up on what you read here you will find the benefits to be priceless. Don’t get sucked down into the hole that the wider culture presents. That is not the way to go. We may have more to say about diet as we go along. For myself I usually eat only once a day. Don’t be a fanatic. George Ohsawa says that if you follow his diet 90% of the time you can eat ten percent of whatever you want. I don’t know where we are going next but we’ll find out when it happens. Be well.

And a song

Everlasting Love

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By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

This is the seventh chapter from Les’ online novel titled, Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World, for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter addresses diet, and the practice of eating with gratitude.

Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World

Chapter 7

We’ve all heard the phrase, “You are what you eat.” You’ve probably also heard, “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he” You’ve likely heard, “for where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.” These are all connected to a common truth. Life feeds on itself and how you think and feel about what you eat has a great deal to do with its impact on you.

Life is a radiant ‘serpent power’. You’ve seen the mystical serpent with its tail in its mouth. It’s called ‘serpent power’ because when viewed in operation by those capable of seeing it, it behaves in a serpentine fashion. If you want to see an example of our mysterious origin and how the force that animates us behaves then close your fist and look at the spiral that it makes.

It is important to follow a proper diet. A proper diet functions on more levels than that which affects the stomach. We consume with our hearts and minds as well. It’s good to remember that both heart and mind are only different levels, or expressions of the same thing. It’s also good to remember that one does not live by bread alone.

Everything is composed of sunlight which is also radiant energy. The green in your vegetables is a chemical change that sunlight went through. We are light in extension. Think of your body as frozen sunlight that feeds on sunlight. Without the sun there is no life and no light. Of course, this sun is a physical expression of another sun and there may be more rarefied examples deeper in or further up; depending on how you see it.

I’ve said at other locations and on many another occasion that I believe one of the most powerful emotions that a person can possess is ‘gratitude’. A key feature that you should possess when you eat is, ‘gratitude’. Eating with gratitude is a magical act of great power. Observe how people eat and you will learn a lot should you be open to the evidence. Observation of life and a willingness to see into it will reveal understandings and truths that are hidden from most.

I am not a religious person and I belong to no religion. This does not mean that religion is not, in part, based on real truth. It means that religion obscures as much as it reveals and it often and invariably interprets wrong. Religion tends to view God anthropomorphically. It makes God a bigger you with all of your prejudices and shortcomings. God becomes a big idiot who reflects your little idiot perspectives.

Those who have looked more deeply into spiritual things with a questioning mind often come to see that all spiritual things have a scientific basis and can be explained and understood in scientific terms. Of course, there are those elements that will always be beyond the conscious, reasoning mind but even they conform to rules of behavior.

So, I practice certain behaviors that you also see among religious people. I always say ‘grace’ and I am, as much as I can remember to be… grateful. Eating with gratitude will change your life. I do not pray in the conventional way but I do contemplate and aspire toward a higher ideal of myself. I not only profoundly believe in a divine agency, I ‘know’ it is there. I possess a capacity to be willful and rebellious against my own best interest too… but, I’m trying to quit (grin). As will be the pattern here, before we can talk about the best diets and the choices of diet it is necessary to talk about the philosophical and metaphysical aspects of eating. It is important to know that we are feeding on different levels all the time and that the physical act of eating is only the most widely recognized practice.

In these times gratitude has been bred out of the process the same way that whole and nutritious food has been replaced by unhealthy garbage. You don’t see people take a moment to bless their food these days. You see them pile in, talk with their mouths full, drink while eating so that the digestive process is interfered with, not bother to chew so that complete digestion doesn’t take place, etc. You see the litter of our fast food nation everywhere and you see the physical condition of those who exist off of it. If I can get any idea across to you, I would want it to be gratitude. Be grateful. Get in the habit of being grateful for everything and you will see that you have more and more reasons to be grateful.

You don’t have to believe in a white-bearded fascist on a far away throne. This god is no more real than the god that the atheists do not believe in. But there is a living conscious force in you and if you feed it, its presence will grow. My wife does not believe in this god and generally is not inclined in this direction; though she is more spiritual than she will admit. The key inducement to my marrying her was during the first dinner I prepared when I asked if she minded if I took a moment to be grateful for my food. “Not at all.” she said and she joined me and has since. She understood the principle.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because much of contemporary religion and the religion of any time may be filled with absurdities and priest centric machinations to part you from your money and your reason does not mean something is not there. It is what feeds you. Be smart. Be grateful. Grow into a better idea of yourself and let your suffering diminish. Eating smart is a way to turn down the flame. If, as the Buddha taught, “All life is pain caused by ignorant desire.” then the more erratic and impure your flame, the greater is your suffering. Passionate people suffer more than others, DEPENDING on the nature of their passion. Turn down the flame and consciously feed it. True enjoyment will come and you will be healthy and filled with life.

This book is about ‘spiritual survival’. It is necessary to constantly point out that everything we can see and perceive has an invisible source. Acknowledge it. Be grateful. For those who are sincere and possessed of genuine interest, you will find much to assist you in these pages. And it is important not to associate any of it with me. Take what is useful and place your gratitude where it belongs. I’m just another climber on the ‘spiral staircase’. Since we are all on this staircase and since it is a spiral, always remember, try to never piss over the railing.

Remember too that this is a book about being welcomed into a community that will form around you as you think and feel and eat your way into it. Gratitude will be the light source that allows you to see AND recognize your companions. We all want to live in this community and we can but we must journey there and it is a journey within as well as without. You don’t simply buy a bus ticket. Many a prosperous soul eats properly but misses the connection between the spirit, mind and body. Living on a trust fund and dressing in white; attending seminars and talking about high minded things doesn’t guarantee anything. We need to approach the thing itself with humility and awe and most of all, gratitude. Talking about it steals the energy to do it.

In the next chapter we will present various diets and the esoteric practices that complete them. We have different needs and no one diet will work for all. For the moment you can start feeling grateful. Let your heart soar in the contemplation of what awaits you. Be grateful that someone attends your every footstep and waits at every point along the way. You are never alone and all the forces of good will fly to your side once you have taken hold of the conviction to carry on… once this conviction has taken hold of you.

Prevail

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By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

This is the sixth chapter from Les’ online novel titled, Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World, for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter addresses the “habitual mind”, and how to change these patterns through meditation, awareness of our reactive mind, and perseverance .

Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World

Chapter 6

There are a lot of disciplines out there (and in there). They span the gamut from the most intricate forms of hidden tantra to celebrity diets. Somewhere in the process, some small percentage of people may be helped by some of these. In most cases a lack of consistency in application accounts for failure. Failure also comes because the discipline is flawed or useless. We could talk all day about the how and the why of more subjects and processes than 10,000 meth-infused monkeys could discuss over 10,000 lifetimes and with about as much success. We’d like to add here that the more talk given to anything, the more the understanding and capacity to practice will depart. It disappears somewhere into the massive landfill where all the cell-phone conversations go to die.

There are some definite disciplines that will make your life better and we’ll talk about some of them; mental attitudes, diet, physical practice, emotional balancing, aspiration, imagination, determination, concentration and others. It won’t do to begin doing all of these things at the same time and later on in the book we’ll talk about time frames and adding on. Begin with care in a few small things and let the power that collects from doing a few small things the right way carry you into larger venues of being and acting.

Every time you change something that you have been doing you are also letting go of what used to occupy that space. If you begin to eat tofu-dogs where you used to eat pork cracklings then it stands to reason that tofu-dogs are going to replace flavored pig skins. There are flavored pig skins on many levels; physical, emotional, mental- subdivisions of and… beyond.

Anything can be okay for a few days and, like many before you, you may feel that you are breezing along and motoring on up the highway. Enter the reactive mind. The habitual mind can be triggered from various locations. Things that you hear and see will do it. Previous operating patterns will do it. Things you used to do may wait a few days before dropping in and wanting to know if you would like to cop some of the ‘same old same old’. Like the ache of an old love affair, the siren is going to sing to you of attractions that never were anything but a hallucination and are going to provide you with a new hallucination where the dog vomit looks like a wood-fired, brick oven pizza.

Here’s where the path veers. It may take five or ten hot button hallucinations of a condensation-beaded beer, a drag on a good smoke, the touch of willing, seemingly beckoning flesh, some Mexican-style jalapeno pork rinds… whatever it is it’s going look better than it actually looks and it’s going to promise you things it never, ever gave you at any time. It’s going to look the way that bar-hog looked last night at 3:00AM and not the way he/she looks this morning. It’s a routine as old as time and it’s part of the terrible ache of mortality and guilt that makes you old and longing for death… sooner or later.

The reactive mind is many things. It is as many things as it can take the shape of to get you to react while it tickles the emotions and the appetite and the ancient longing for something… something complete… that only comes when you have cut everything lose and long for nothing but the bliss of the eternal moment you are in. Then you can taste this and touch that but there is no sticky slime to weld you to the item in front of you or in your mind. The mind is actually both in and out and surrounding and composing everything which is all made out of the same thing and is all the same thing taking different shapes to appeal to different appetites so that you can sit in the cage and push the same button over and over that triggers that feel good thing which can’t be the ‘real, feel good thing’ because it ends and you have to do it again and there… there you have the world and all of the fantasies and shelves filled with products and the idea that you will be the one to drive that golden spike a few millimeters closer to the unreachable edge.

We need to go slow… start with one pushup and add another when the desire to do another comes from the strength that came from having started and being determined to do it right by not racing down the highway like somebody that got born again and who finds out that now that they are saved they can just indulge in every common thing except casual sex unless they are married because once you get saved you don’t have to do anything any more except make sheep noises in the pasture and expand horizontally while you wait for the chariot from Heaven to arrive. I hope you caught your reactive mind playing ping pong with your objective mind as you tried to figure out what might be wrong with this paragraph.

Watch yourself. Watch yourself and something is going to happen to your reactive mind all by itself as we take away some things and add some things in the hope of revealing some things. Don’t fight the reactive mind but you can do with it what was suggested earlier when talking about meditation; cast out thought. Stop thinking. You can also use replacement therapy. Put something you have chosen in place of these automatic images. Also you can pull it out of shape like taffy or put a clown nose on it or just take off it’s clothes. I often do this when I see some psychopath engineering the deaths of thousands while talking up the usual lies that get your reactive mind to go along with the program.

Before we can move on to other useful disciplines we have to address the basic circumstances of your being. We have to recognize that we have patterns that are out to get us. We have to be able to take a moment twice a day to meditate. Meditating is like sitting up in bed and calling your mother. Keep doing it. She will come. It’s like pulling the fish of death out of the great sea but it can also mean tossing bread on the sea or sailing on the sea or floating on the sea or merging with the sea.

At no time in your life will you suddenly hear horns and be informed that all of your troubles are over. Often the troubles you have are the clear evidence of where your reactive mind has put you and also helpful signs concerning behaviors that are no longer needed. Imagine that everything is perfect but that you are not seeing it. Learn to be still long enough that something deeper can emerge and engage you in a dialogue. All of the blessings of the spiritual realm are based on scientific fact and truth as yet undiscovered. You start to do certain things and certain things will begin to happen and resistance to your own well-being will come up alongside.

When you change your diet you will not notice much for the first few days, although you might feel better right away (and you might not). But after a few days the old taste requirements are going to start talking to you about Pistachio-flavored pork thins. Trust me on this. If you hold out for ten days to two weeks your taste buds will change and they won’t remember how Boysenberry Pork Rind Ice Cream tastes. All of the five taste sensors will be getting all of the things they ever got from the new things to which they have adjusted. You HAVE TO have enough drive to get this far. Alternatively, poor health may eventually force your hand… some terrible trauma or loss… life does this when you won’t.

We’re going to go into diet for the next few chapters and see if we can figure out anything about food. We’re going to make this so easy for you. No matter how easy we make it you won’t find it easy because it will be YOU who is fighting it. Yes… once we conquer the enemy within there will be no counterpart in the world without; no matter what ‘appearances’ say.

Something Good (is coming soon)

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By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

This is the fifth chapter from Les’ online novel titled, Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter addresses the “reactive mind”, and why controlling emotional responses to triggers from situations or people, is mentally and spiritually beneficial.

Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World

Chapter 5

Let’s talk about the reactive mind today. I see that in the process of writing this book that there are a number of approaches. Thinking about it, it occurred to me that I should intersperse related topics between the topics. That way we can creep up on things like diet, which is coming soon to a justgetthere blog near you and other subjects that won’t be injured by appearing a little later in the game. I like the idea of digressing and bobbing and weaving- more of which will appear when we talk about the martial arts- and stinging like a disappearing honeybee, floating like a butterfly and moon-walking across the stage to the beat of the auctioneers hammer at Neverland.

I can assure you that progress toward real independence and spiritual as well as temporal survival and security, not to mention general, overall well being, are highly dependent upon your control of the ‘reactive mind’. You know what that is right? That’s the part of your mental makeup that reacts to thoughts and words and situations. It triggers emotions and it can wind you up tighter than a Republican’s sphincter without anything more than your getting caught up inside the thoughts inside your head. I realize that using imagery like tight Republican sphincters is a bit of a misnomer given their predilections as viewed in news bites over recent years but you can go ahead and think of it in terms of the personality type instead of otherwise… whatever that might imply.

What I’ve done here- writing this the way I have and using provocative graphics in what is supposed to be a spiritual groove; all high-minded and like that… what I’ve done is to give you an example of the reactive mind inside your head as you read these words and wonder why I said this and that. This is something to keep in mind no matter what you read or feel or see or think or any part of the perceptions you have and the way you manage their interpretations. It’s always good to put yourself inside the mind of the writer and it is possible to get right there too. Just as there is a great deal going on behind the scenes in the world outside, there is also a lot going on behind the scenes of the world inside. Smoke and mirrors work in both directions.

It is my belief that control of the reactive mind is one of the most important issues you can address. Imagine what it would be like to not have your mind automatically react. Imagine what it would be like not to have your buttons pushed by your own thoughts and feelings or the words and actions of others. Imagine what it would be like to be so centered that nothing threw you off balance. It’s not impossible. In fact, it is quite possible. I’m no friend of Scientology and I can assure you they have been no friend to me but I would like to point out that everything they do is about controlling the reactive mind. Unfortunately… it looks more like their controlling it than you controlling it.

The military does this with you. Religions do this with you. Cultures do this with you. Your parents did this to you. Your schools did this to you. Doesn’t it make sense that you should do this to you to offset all the bad programming you ran into? Of course, all of the influences previously mentioned did not leave you with only bad programming. Some of the programming was good. We want to remove the bad programming.

How do you decide which programming is good and which bad? First you must come to some understanding of who you are? Who are you? Based on that you can determine if what you are is an effective representation of who you are. All of the battles you are fighting outside of yourself are based on inner conflicts. We know very little about ourselves and what lies beneath. There are things going on beneath the surface of your mind of which you are completely unaware. There are tangles and pressures and all manner of forces which work their way up into thoughts and words and actions.

You have to put on your tool belt and dive into the deep. Meditation is one way to do this. In the esoteric tarot, card number 17 is “The Star”. It is the card of meditation. Its name is Tzaddi which means ‘fish-hook’. The 12th card is called “The Hanged Man” its name is Mem and it means water or more specifically a body of water, like the sea. The 13th card is called “Death” and its name is Nun and it means a fish. Think about this.

You can take the fish-hook of Meditation and drop it into the great sea of the subconscious and catch and pull out the fish of death. I am not recommending nor discouraging this path. I wish merely to show you that there is a lot more to some things than might appear from cursory examination and the same applies across the board. You can take all of the tenants of Yoga and find them to be resident in the system of Hermetic Science and Alchemy. All of these sciences cross-reference. All of the real systems are complete, comprehensive and perfect. The only thing that is not is you and I and that is because the reactive mind of the personality is making you less than you could be and certainly less than you are.

Remember as we go along that the whole purpose of this book is to introduce you to a community of kindred souls and to provide certain tools that will grant you some protection from the dangers that consume everyone all around and which you can witness and hear about every single day. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. The reactive mind makes it nearly impossible to concentrate… to see time for what it is… to gain maximum enjoyment from life and to live and grow infinitely beyond anywhere you may be at the moment.

Treating with the reactive mind is best left for the next chapter. It’s enough for now to know that it exists and to begin to watch how it works. If you make it a point to be observant about how you react through your day, you will see and perceive some interesting occurrences that will cause your mind to point some things out to you that you might not have been paying attention to before.

It is important to realize that life is a magic show in all of the best and worst ways. Life is brimming to overflow with magic and we don’t see it because of the reactive mind. We don’t see the beauty of existence because we are in a continuous reflex mode. Something happens between puberty and adulthood that closes certain doors and the closest we ever get to the spontaneity and openness of our childhood is when senility sets in. We’re supposed to lose our innocence and we are supposed to regain it but…

This book is going to weave in and out of a great many areas. We’re slated for about 35 chapters and we are only on chapter 5. There’s a point to the manner of presentation and a point to the pointing at and to. I’ve nothing against Republicans or anyone unless my reactive mind tells me I do. We have allowed ourselves to become very confused about what is going on and this can be proven to be true just by looking at the dissatisfactions in our lives and the fact that we don’t change the conditions we are in.

This book isn’t for everyone. This book is only for those who want to find a way out of the hamster cage and into the clear living reality of a free human being. The tools to achieve this are available. Few people realize the power in imagination and faith as well as so many qualities we hear about every day and don’t think about. Opportunity abounds and life itself wants you to be prosperous and well. Something is concealing this from the popular mind.

Thank you for the supportive letters. We’ve only just started here and I think you will like where we wind up further along the road.

I’m Coming Back

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By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

This is the fourth chapter from Les’ online novel titled, Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter touches on intentional meditation for beginners.

Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World

Chapter 4

Trying to explain what meditation is and to autopsy the process and make recommendations is like trying to balance a bicycle on an exercise ball. It’s also like trying to rake leaves on a windy day. It’s not easy. Meditating is a lot easier to practice than to talk about and meditation isn’t easy unless you can gain the cooperation of the mind. If you can’t get the mind to behave you’re going to wind up with a head full of monkeys in a cellar filled with snakes.

Let me just say that one of the objects of meditation is to still the mind and one of the best ways to still the mind is to cast out thought. Sit at the door of your mind and throw everything out. Don’t try to keep it out or to imagine that you can reject a thought before it arrives; just keep cleaning house. Another approach is to focus on something particular and watch the mind as it works to distract you from that and to pull your attention back again and again to your primary focus.

A very powerful methodology is Awareness watching awareness but I wouldn’t recommend that for a beginning experience. The first thing you need to do is to try to meditate and see what you run into and see if it is enough to run you out of town.

I’m not going to presume to teach anyone to meditate. I will say that you meditate every day without realizing. Whenever you put your mind on something and give it attention you are meditating after a fashion. So it is that most of our meditations are of a negative variety because they come about as a result of our worrying over the solutions to conditions that the world throws up in front of us.

Intentional meditation addresses our intrinsic nature at a point prior to the seeming appearance of problems and allows for certain inexplicable mechanisms to sort things out for us without our having to do anything except to focus on a state higher than the one we find ourselves in. You see how complex it can become just talking about it? Do you see how many arguments might ensue as a result of my words not being comprehensive enough? Meditation is meant to go beyond words and words are the medium of argument. It’s possible to arrange your mental furniture so that arguments begin to be replaced by solutions.

What I suggest is to look about on the free resource of the internet and find a simple form of meditation that will give you a structure for daily practice. There are a lot of places you can go to get started. Well, look at that, there’s two already; found by a simple search for “simple meditation”. You don’t have to use any of the techniques within the system from which they emerge. You can apply these meditations to any format you prefer.

Meditation isn’t really difficult. Beginning to meditate is difficult. Being consistent in continuing to meditate can be difficult. Being aware of the ancient oppositions that come forth and maintaining the passion or dispassion (grin) necessary to experience continuing success can be difficult. The mind will make all sorts of excuses not to. The mind appears to be the greatest adversary to your ability to successfully meditate. For those who persist you will find that the mind can be transformed into your greatest ally.

Why do I think you should meditate? Why is it so important that I mention it even before diet and other imperatives that will follow? Unless you can get yourself right with yourself and which will automatically make your world more manageable in every respect you aren’t going to be able to make very much progress. Your mind will tell you that you don’t have the time to meditate. That you could even consider that to be true tells you what a control the negative side of your mind has over you. A wild, masturbating monkey is running many people’s lives.

Meditation needs to be consistent and to have a regular time. You can certainly manage five minutes in the morning and five minutes before you sleep. You can do it lying in bed before you even get up. You can do it lying in bed after you lay down. No matter how lazy you are you can start. If you do even this little consistently you will find that it will lift you into a sitting position soon enough and you will be so transformed by the noticeable benefits that come from this practice that you will have all the discipline and drive necessary to continue.

The key is to practice it long enough for the benefits to begin to arrive. For some people it is possible to see benefits in a few days or a couple of weeks. For most people who have not attempted it before it may take six weeks but I personally guarantee that you will see benefits no later than that if you persist. You will, quite frankly, be amazed.

By practicing meditation and changing your diet, while adding a daily regime of exercise, you can literally peel decades away from how you feel and within a fairly short period of time become a completely different person. Why would anyone not want this? See what your mind says to you about that. See if your mind already has an attitude about me or what is being discussed here… before you have even done any one of these things. Think about it.

The point of this whole book is to bring you to a point where a community materializes around you. The community has always been there but most of us have not been practicing members of it. The point of the book is to provide the tools that will manifest an aura of protection around you and cause good fortune to flow into your life. The purpose of this book is to give you some 3 in One oil to grease the flow of your existence.

We are already a part of a community no matter where we are and that community is based on how we think about ourselves and others. When a person enters into recovery for a drinking problem or related difficulty, one of the things they notice after awhile is that all of their companions have changed and that they cannot even remember who their former companions were. I’m talking about pure applied magic whose results can be clearly seen. Why would anyone not want the benefit of it?

You may feel free to choose any denomination of religion or to reject them all. None of what is going to be shown here will compromise that. This is about spirituality and spirituality isn’t going to steal from you your freedom of choice and the possibility of a normal human existence …or deny you the fruits of companionship and well being. If anything it will make it super normal and heighten your enjoyments across the board. You will enjoy ‘being’ so much that you may well be comfortable with that alone.

Begin to practice a simple meditation and begin to watch how your mind works. Make yourself open to greater possibilities. Watch your long term patterns of resistance to change. Watch the arguments and show them the door. Empty your mind. What really belongs there won’t be going anywhere.

Next time we’re going to talk about diet and we’re going to have a variety of solutions for the different temperaments that will be involved. One of the failings of so many systems is that they don’t provide any latitude for personal differences. The same thing doesn’t work for everyone. We’re determined to find what works for you.

Light Up Ahead

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By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

This is the third chapter from Les’ online novel titled, Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter touches on the power of meditation, and using it to  focus on changing yourself, in order to change the world around you.

Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World

Chapter 3

First thing I’m going to do is apologize to everyone for bringing up the God thing. As we get further into this book you’ll see that it was the necessary primary thing. It had to be confronted and thought about and then set aside, for the moment until it shows up again.

I don’t care if you believe in a divine presence or not, that’s your business but you have to have something you have faith in if you are going to travel along with us. It can be a rock; figurative or literal. It can be Nature. It can be anything you associate some power coming from because I need you to associate power coming from somewhere and having something to do with your capacity to believe and to make it. Otherwise you are a drag on the operation.

I don’t care for atheists anymore than I care for fundies. Extreme positions are never going to be useful in a successful community. You’ve a perfect human right to be either one but it doesn’t jell with this freight train. So ‘people get ready and let’s climb on board’.

Okay (rubs hands together and gives you that disarming Les Visible grin)… those of you still traveling along are probably wondering what’s going to happen next. I’m going to back track (sigh of polite annoyance fills the car). When I said you have to pick something, I mean you have to have a higher power (and no, I’m not in AA) it is because what will be coming requires you to have something on which to focus some of the things you are going to do (if that interests you) because I am going to be talking about meditation and diet and healing modalities and martial arts and a lot of things where it helps if you are not a complete clinician. I’d prefer that we had nothing but hands-on dreamers and mystics on this train but that would be silly because a real community embraces all walks of life with some exceptions and we will talk about that further ‘up’ the road.

As much as we will consider survival mechanisms that will become personal there is also the technical side and we won’t by pass that. There’s nothing wrong with having lights and amenities and entertainments. At least there isn’t according to me. The problem comes in when you are dependent on sources of power from governments run by corporations who are together playing games with your resources while sucking you dry.

What we are going to try to accomplish here is to make you familiar with a lot of tools that you can apply to making your life in your world a better place to be. You don’t have to apply any of these things within fixed parameters. You do have to apply them so that they work to your best advantage. Some of these things are highly benefited by believing in the existence of a supportive agency.

The community we are trying to build doesn’t exist in any particular place. It exists in your mind. You are the community wherever you may be and it springs up around you everywhere you go once you can see the possibility of it. As much as you will need a sense of self sufficiency you will also need to know that everything depends on something else. Everything is connected. Do you see why it is important to believe that there is a source of power? Look around you. All of this didn’t get here by accident and something is holding it in place. You could look at gravity as the will of the divine and you wouldn’t be far wrong.

Let’s talk about the first tool now before this essay just keeps on walking over the same ground in a different way. It’s important to do this because it gives ever new perspectives but that’s going to happen all through this book as we go so let’s not be concerned if we are missing something at the moment. It will come around later on.

Let’s talk about meditation. Some of you probably have some meditation discipline in place but that would turn out to be a small minority. The larger body of us are more likely to think of meditation as a good idea and to have done it for awhile now and then but have found that life intrudes and we just can’t seem to get to it in any regular way. It becomes elusive.

Meditation is only valuable when it is consistent. You can’t get very good at anything if you are only practicing it now and then. Before we talk about application let’s look at how life usually goes because we don’t meditate. Circumstances rush around us and compel us to action. We get up in the morning and we meet the day however it finds us and we take our chances on whatever our mood is and hope our mood is equal to the challenges that we will face.

Meditation makes it possible for us to control and alter our mood. It stimulates our powers of concentration. It quiets the mind. It influences circumstances. Everything within us and without us is composed of the same basic material. Everything is made out of mind-stuff and can be modified through meditation. This is one of the basic principles of applied magic. Let’s think of magic as being the power to alter our circumstances. If everything is made out of mind-stuff then it stands to reason that the mind can affect it, whether it is inside you or outside of you.

There is power within you and when you can focus it you can change your world. You can’t change your world until you change yourself. Somehow you have to believe that there is something within you that knows more than you do and that can makes the necessary transformations occur; you see, once again we are back to considering what was discussed in the last chapter. We know there must be something within us that can do this work because the evidence of it is there to see in the lives of thousands who are accomplishing it. Look at the lives of exceptional individuals who have existed through time, especially those who have practiced some form of meditation, who have developed their abilities to concentrate. Something is working for them. Is something working for you?

For a little homework why don’t you take some time for the next couple of days and read some things about meditation. You can start by typing ‘meditation’ into Google and reading here and there what interests you. It would be good if you looked into the definition of meditation and the varieties of meditation. We’re different people. It’s said that collections of us are on different ‘rays’. Think of it as wavelengths. Think of it as acting under the auspice of a certain color and vibration. You want to be able to tune to your groups vibration. So the same technique may not be as useful for some as it is for others. In the next chapter I’ll talk exclusively about meditation because it is very important and some form of it is a basic requirement for getting the most out of what we are going to be looking to do. I will tell you now that as we proceed you will find what we are talking about to be more exciting than you might have expected and that real success is not only possible but to be anticipated as a certainty; action and reaction and the space that permeates this eternal dance is a simple condition and process that we have made complex and which we can re-simplify.

I don’t care where you are in your life at present or what obstacles or forces you believe that you labor against. This can be profoundly changed. No matter how the world may look at this time it is absolutely possible to change your relationship to the whole and start having a more satisfying existence. We can always do better and in many cases we can do much, much better. See you in a few days.

A closing song- Every Fairytale

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By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

This is the second chapter from Les’ online novel title Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter delves into the subject matter of using meditation to open your mind and harness the untapped energy to reach your full potential.

Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World

Chapter Two

I would have liked to have gotten back here sooner but various things got in my way. I even began this and then lost it when the computer rebooted; no idea of what I was saying now.  So we come to Chapter 2 of Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World- just a working title.

You’ll be co-authors of this book with me because your input is going to determine some of the things that get talked about. In some cases it is also likely that something you send me, if it fits with the overall scheme and intention of this work, will find its way into the book as well with all appropriate attributions.

What we want to do is to locate the principles and disciplines necessary to give anyone who desires it, a leg up in their effort to be independent of the traps that surround us and to come deeper into the light that also surrounds us and is predisposed to fill us as well.

This brings me to one of the most critical points of the entire matter and one which many will wrestle with here and may cause them to discard whatever I say as a result of it and that is why you should pay careful attention to the way in which this is worded.

I will devote an entire chapter to this.  So much of life is devoted to this; the architecture, the art, the lifestyles and so much more has come about because of humanities faith in a divine being or rejection of the same. Much good has come and much evil too and this is something that has become a stumbling block for many who see religion as (what it is) a business. Some people cannot accept the existence of a God because of the conditions that exist on Earth/ “If God is all powerful then why does he/she allow this?” Good question.

I enter upon this subject with trepidation and I must use great care. The idea that I could cover any length of ground in a short essay like this is ludicrous when millions of pages have been written on this; contradicting each other, provoking war upon each other and, over the long course of time, changing in presentation like a sidewinder moving across the desert sand. It’s appropriate that I mentioned a snake and we will address that as we go along. One image I would like to leave you with now is that which is presented in Hindu posters and if you’ve never seen one then google “Shiva” or “Vishnu” or “Brahma and get yourself a graphic and look for the serpent, especially one that shows serpents over the head of the deity as a hood… a cobra hood… a brotherhood… just remember things said as we go. Keep in mind the serpent in the garden as well. This is the key element to understanding what is going on; always going on.

One can assume that in Heaven and in Hell (if they exist) that conditions are opposite in each case. One can assume that bliss is predominant in the one and suffering in the other. One might postulate that both of these are states of mind and if you are inclined toward Buddhism you have heard that everything is mind. I’d like to point out that Heaven, if it exists, begins where your feet touch the Earth. I’d also like to suggest that you don’t go anywhere when you die except right were you are (so you need to get there while you are here) and we are going to bring some physics into it now.

Metaphysics and physics; I’d like the say that metaphysics becomes physics once science (or philosophy) has been able to capture it into understanding, just as lighting captured becomes electricity. No one knows what electricity is but we can use it to our great benefit. I suggest that God is the same thing and that the same applies. The more you understand something the better you are able to use it. So I want you to think in terms of usage and benefit and the fact that you can realize something like that will make you grateful and gratitude is key. Gratitude and compassion are phenomenal You really want to have both of these.

You want to have gratitude and compassion because they ensure more reasons to be grateful and more justification for mercy when it comes to you. Therefore-

Try to understand that just because you can’t comprehend something (and never, ever will) doesn’t mean you can’t use and benefit from it. If you have read any cutting edge papers on physics then you know that they have pretty much proved the existence of God. They have proven that everything is mind-stuff. I’ll go one further and say that we are all frozen sunlight. We are sunlight in extension. Loving it and what gives you life is good because it opens the valves to get more. The other possible relationship is resistance. You can be a resistor if that’s what you want. You can play any role. You have to ask yourself what you want and whether you want something better for everyone or if you are just out for yourself. This is also key. Are you self interested or are you more expansive? Do you think you are an isolated element that needs to feed itself or do you not know you have the power to feed the world if you will only let the light shine in your heart?

The power that binds you is the power that frees you. “Lead us not into temptation.” The devil is the way that the wicked see God. There’s only one and if you could contain your fear when the devil presents itself you would see the corona of the angel hidden behind the frightful appearance. It is ONE thing. It is one thing and the inexpressible simplicity of it is what leads to the endless complexity of terms and explanations. “Be still and know.”

Forget religions. Religions are like lined paper in grammar school. Once you learn how to write capably you don’t need lined paper. Forget Jesus this and Mohammed that. If some icon works for you, fine but… truth is the same in every one of these systems. Truth is the body upon which the clothes of religion are draped and when the truth takes off its clothes the world disappears. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because religion is full of shit sometimes does not mean there is not sunlight to be found in the precepts.

I tell you these things because, if we are to create a community, real or virtual; if you are to realize your fullest potential, if you are going to try to achieve success where so many people have failed then you don’t want to leave out key elements and you don’t want to make rules and regulations against human freedom. At the same time, freedom is not license. Excessive repression and excessive hedonism lead to their own separate vales of suffering, even if the walls are thin and you can hear them next door.

My point? I’m sure I had one. Ah yes… in order to get where you want to go you need fuel. Your car needs fuel. Your body needs fuel. Your spirit needs fuel. You need to know where that service station is. In some cases it is a gas station and in some cases it is a kitchen or a restaurant and in some cases it is your heart. There, in the latter lies your kingdom of power and realization and the fuel therein is love. Everyone who gets good at anything gets there because they ‘love’ doing it. That’s all you need to know about God and all I’ll ever say about it… however convoluted may be the approach. Love what you do. This brings us to the first thing about how to survive on your way… elsewhere… work on loving and make it your first criteria… like a rusty pump it is going to take some priming but the water will run sweet if you will but try.

Back to those serpents. The serpent is radiant energy. Expressed in the animal kingdom it may be one thing, in the plant kingdom something else. In the human kingdom we can see people eating each other alive just like in the animal kingdom but maybe a little differently. This power feeds on itself. That is why it has its tail in its mouth. It’s the snake in the grass and it is the power of divinity over your head. Anything God has ever accomplished here has been through human agency. We are the hands.

So… you have to get right with yourself and the source of the power that holds you living in this moment and surrender is probably the best route and love is probably the best fuel. If you need religion it is there. If you need a direct connection look within; But before we go on to the tools and practices you have to accept that something is in control and it is a good thing, not a bad thing. You need to have some faith and you need to have the teacher write in your report card, “plays well with others.” I want to have some fun and fellowship without all of the personality games and insecurities thereof so… Make peace with yourself and then we’ll talk about techniques.

This book does not lead to Jonestown. This book has no connection to any religion. This book cost nothing but effort. The book profits no one but yourself. Take what you need and leave the rest.

And a closing song-

God’s Not Dead

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By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

This is the first chapter from Les’ online novel title Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter is a basic introduction of  his ideas of a free thinking, off-the-grid, anarcho-capitalist community.

Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World

Chapter 1

There’s no question that we are in dark days where the majority of the people have more difficulty tearing themselves away from their casual entertainments than they are able to muster the energy to contemplate how they got trapped on all that sticky confection in the first place. They’re like rats on a glue board who think it’s just a matter of learning to walk on snowshoes; even if the same shoe is on both feet. But later for the walking dude, something’s coming up that they just can’t miss and something’s coming up after that and one of these days something is going to be coming up that doesn’t miss them because they were too slow to get out of the way and never saw it coming in the first place.

I hate to be an alarmist and one of the reasons I hate it is because few people pay any attention anyway. I’m sure a lot of people, back in the days when you read about historical events in school… I bet a lot of those people always asked themselves, “Well, how come those people didn’t leave?” or “how come those people didn’t do something about it?’ or whatever ‘how come’ might have entered their mind. My question to you is the very same thing. You got an answer for that?

“It’s not the same visible, I don’t care what Frank Zappa told you. It isn’t going to happen here. It can’t happen here.”

The thing is, culture’s rise and fall. That’s a fact, look it up. Is there any culture that is what it once was, when it was? You could make the argument that the English banking system has replaced their navy in terms of ruling the world and you could even parse Churchill’s comment on the British Navy, “founded on buggery and the lash” and say that the same practices are in place. You could say that certain rural locations are going on like they have gone on for thousands of years but… that’s not culture is it? Culture is the thing that blooms in the morning in the hearts of a young and thriving nation and winds up at the back of the icebox in a covered dish by late afternoon.

There’s present time culture which spills into your lap from your TV set and we hope it doesn’t interfere with your masturbating hand and… there’s the culture you see when people dress up in the costumes their parents wore and dance in street fairs for a day or two. There’s the culture that winks at you through the microscope lens from a glass slide and there’s the culture that took your ass for a ride down into Hernado’s Hideaway.

There are all kinds of culture and they all fade and then show up on Halloween or the aforementioned street festivals. You don’t want me to tell you this but your culture is in decline. It’s dancing with dead leaves in a running gutter in a November rain. You got soft. You got fat and you got stupid and those whose industry is based on deceiving and milking you are going to prove hard taskmasters. The good news is that it will get you off your ass. The bad news is that it’s going to mean being a slave for the same parties because you ceased to be your own master when you gave up your vigilance and common sense.

So you think the world you walk through every day is normal? That makes you crazy. Sane minds would question every aspect of it. Do you remember being sane? That’s a hard one because some of you never were but… some of you were. You can’t remember. That’s how it works. Once you get from one point to another over a series of points, the original departure point is lost in swallowing mist. It’s especially hard to remember being sane when you no longer are sane because you began to agree with the madness; just to go along to get along sort of… so that now it is impossible to find your way back.

Look, I’m sane, relatively… even though I was locked up in some very hard institutions; even though I took enormous amounts of drugs, especially psychedelics… even though I drank a river until the river backed off… I’m sane. I’m sane because I never tried to fit in. Well, they wouldn’t let me fit in, would they? But that’s not the point. I didn’t go out of my way to do a Steven Hawkings on myself to see the universe their way. Yoga I like, bad asanas practiced with the idea of being a part of something that is totally wack is not.

What are you going to do now? Some of you are aging and your savings are dwindling and the culture is designed to make you sick because it’s based on bad food and alcohol and a voyeur’s idea of working out and staying fit and the medical people are going to get you and they don’t know what they are doing and they don’t care either. And I- and others like me could gift you with simple remedies but… but… that’s right… no fucking degrees… no suit and tie…. No office and no ad on the side of that bus going by… and most of it is simple and free and boy… do the people looking to enslave your ass hate the idea of anyone giving away something for free; especially when it works and theirs does not.

Well, if you ask me… I’d look for a community somewhere with people who care and aren’t into strange sex and control mechanisms, who want to pool their resources in a libertarian way with all the perks that come with that abiding grace where some special force appears in the midst of them without a lot of bad depressing hymns. That’s what I would do if I were you.

Myself… I’m fine… I left the United States and went to Europe with my guitar and a few talents I have and there I am. I don’t need that community but I wouldn’t mind one… but you… you need it.

I’m going to try to do something nice here. The good people at justgetthere have asked me to come here and write about whatever it was I was writing that got their interest but I’m thinking; why not do it one better and make it useful and personal at the same time? It came to me while I was writing this and… as usual… I had no idea where it was going to wind up. But what I’m going to do is write a book for you. We’ll call it… uh… let’s see… The Practical Survival Guide When your Culture is Going Down the Toilet and you are Hanging on the Rim? Too long… but it’s going to be like what you’ve been reading and it’s going to have current events dissected and little disciplines and commentaries on diet and physical movement as well as circumstantial defense against circumstance that may range from the martial arts to a mindset one can cultivate and including things like Shiatzu and diet and how to adapt to a batshit world and what we’ll do is… I’ll go on my merry way and you will ask me things and I’ll incorporate them into the mix and…

Some twenty or thirty chapters down the road we will have a book and it will be a pretty useful book that moves from Buckminster Fuller to Morihei Ueshiba, from Aldous Huxley to Terrence McKenna, from George Ohsawa to Arnold Ehret and on to Robert Gray. In the meantime we are going to be mindful of events in the windshield and the rear view mirror and by the side of the road we are passing and we are hoping that if you are hitching by the side of the road that… at some point… you are going to catch the ride that is going to take you to the community of which I speak. It may not exist yet but it is there… forming in the ethers… visualized in the focused mind… precipitating down… it’s there pilgrim. And you can get there.

The only question that remains is do you want to go? If so, then we will have a little journey here and we shall see what we come up with. Hey… I’d like to see it happen too. I may not hang around but I will help you build it. You have my word on that. So… as will prove to be the usual thing, I will close with a song.

Iridescent Dreams

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By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

Our featured author Les Visible helped kickoff the launch of our sister site JustGetThere.us 2 years ago. Over the course of months, Les graciously crafted an online novel that explores the connections between our physical environment and our metaphysical being, and ways to achieve harmony between the two. The chapters contain very useful information for getting off-the-grid mentally, so I will be posting these articles to this site due to the relevance of the material.

Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World

I’m trying to make my way, with as much care as possible, past the stacked appliances and two by fours; men in hard hats coming and going. It’s the usual scene when a new website gets close to launch time. It pays to move carefully for awhile because there are bound to be loose fittings and unexpected drops to floors below.

So I’m not going to say too much the first time out except to say, “Welcome, and thank you for coming by. I hope I can hold up my end of things and that you will be either more informed or more entertained than you were before you arrived.”

I’m going to be talking about geopolitical and social issues as well as metaphysics and trying to tie in visible effects with invisible causes. There’s a good chance that I’ll take unannounced side trips off into the bush, just to see what’s out there; or in there as the case may be and the conversation may even turn to books and movies on occasion.

I expect that a good deal of it is going to be controversial because the preponderance of lies set loose in the world is enormous and presently exceeds the known population of the Earth, even if you include the animals and the insects. One could make a case that you can hardly see anything at all for the lies that threaten to blot out the skies with their batwings of darkness.

I’d like to think that I’ll have an opportunity to present what I believe to be the truth whenever I get around to presenting anything at all. I also hope that you will be assured by my statement, coming up any moment now, which is that, “I’m wide open to being corrected and proven wrong should the unexpected occur.”

I feel a dull sense of fatigue settle over my frame every time I make the mistake of traveling to any mass media web presence with the intention of seeing what kind of thinly veiled bullshit they are up to today. I always knew that sham and artifice was a major product of the world’s business but these days it sometimes seems like its only product.

I’ve known that politicians lie for a good long time now and that they get up to gratuitous wars and profit from the industry all through the screams and the blood and the tears but… I never suspected that terrible psychopaths… bio-engineered serial killers, vat born in underground labs beneath Disney World would take over the United States government and, joining with psychopaths in other countries, conspire to attack a major American city, as well as various public buildings and a defenseless meadow in Pennsylvania.

We’ve come a long way from Romeo and Juliet to ‘bitches’ and ‘ho’s’. In a single generation, with the help of “No Child Left with a Mind”, millions of the world’s young have been turned into text-messaging robots. It’s an ‘LOL’ world baby.

The juries out on whether aliens have invaded and occupied the minds of most of the population but there can no longer be any question that the GWEN network is responsible for mind-numbing subliminal programming of some sort, or it’s in the water, or it’s in the air, or it’s in the food.

Food and water shortages loom on the horizon but that may be a mercy, given what many people eat by choice each day.

Hate, suspicion, disillusionment and despair, prowl like gang-bangers across the landscape; is it really that bad? Yes and no.

As always when one world is decomposing and recycling, another world is rising from the ruins of the last. I’m an optimist, though you may hear me say some hard things and occasionally start riffing out Jeremiads like I was scat-singing with a deranged jazz band. I’d like to think it’s all about saying, “Wake up and smell the bodies burning.”

I’ll try to inspire as much as I deride. There’s going to be ample non-politically correct content and the thought police are going to get to plump up their dossier on me but… you tell me. Is it better to bow your head before merciless creatures that possess neither heart nor soul or should one stand fast against the darkness with “this little light of mine”?

I don’t know who is going to show up here or where this temporary space in a temporary world that hangs suspended in an eternal mind is going to go but it will be something to do until the next thing comes along.

There’s an old Sufi tale about the constructs and presentations of life. The tale pretty much says that when a particular scene is called for that certain energies appear which erect the stage and then the performance goes down. Once the performance is over they roll it all up and head on out of town.

I’m hoping you’ll travel a little ways on up and around the bend inside this mind of ours and see where it takes us. I’m hoping that somewhere along the way it will be common knowledge to us all that there is only one mind and that we may all be the same person as well but that we appear to be different so that the spectacle can have some mystery.

These are scary times. They are also exciting times. It’s possible to be a hero or a villain. It’s possible to help or hinder however you are disposed to do. I know that the human heart is a kingdom of infinite surprise and I have no idea what is hidden there in these times. I’m hoping something greater is going to wake up in our midst and I am hoping we will recognize it and rally round for the good of one and all.

It will be my pleasure to travel along with you as we explore what can be seen from the window while driving by. I’ll let you know what I think and you can let me know what you think too. I look forward to it. Until the next time, remember, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there and just because you can doesn’t mean it is.

I’ll leave you with a song.

My Pickup Truck Got Pregnant

and if you want to read more
Smoking Mirrors
_____

By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com