My inspiration de jour is “Manic Monday” by The Bangles. There was a period in the mid- to late 80s when pop music was actually tolerable and produced some great songs, and this one has stuck with me all these intervening years. Anyway…
I’m expecting some incredibly good news this week, which I’ll share when it comes through, so in the meantime I’m preparing a mini-feast on Saturday for Mrs. FarSide and myself. I bought a beautiful Australian farm-raised pork tenderloin, which I’ll roast with a rosemary-thyme glaze, along with potatoes au gratin and Caesar salad.
No one has an oven in Indonesia, so I cook everything on stove top with a Dutch oven. I also take great pride in preparing every part of the meal by hand from scratch, including the croutons. No bottles, cans or boxes, and spices straight from Mrs. FarSide’s porch garden.
Cooking is a form of meditation for me, and that is the point of today’s rant — staying quiet in turbulent times.
It appears, as I write this on Monday evening, that “They” have decided they can’t beat the Trumpians. KaMAla is a washout and isn’t going anywhere, so they are pulling the plug on the global economy, since there’s no reason to keep it afloat, and they can blame it all on Joe Biden.
I’m looking at my crypto wallet shrink, my gold devalue, and pretty much any tangible asset deflate, at least in terms of fiat currencies.
I’m not too worried about it. I just paid the annual property tax bill of $50 for two houses, and the monthly power bill is about the same amount for both places. High-speed internet for both places is about $50, and our monthly food budget is roughly $300 for two people, so I can survive on very little, though those numbers are outrageously high by Indonesian standards. The vast majority of folks in these parts muddle through on $500 per month.
I don’t want to get distracted by cost-of-living discussions. That’s another article. What I want to talk about today is staying centered in the wildly out of control world we find ourselves in just now. The Magicians want us to exist in a frenetic state of high anxiety, because anger, fear and confusion make us pliable conformists, which is what they need us to be to maintain their control.
There is a way to subvert it that is very old and spans multiple cultures. The methodology is always the same: stillness, but the terms and theology vary a bit.
Readers who have been around for a long time will recall that I lived in Dubliin, Ireland, from 1979 to 1980. I followed that experience by donning a backpack and circumnavigating the planet, returning to Texas in 1981. That experience was so profound that I ended up as a Postulant in a Benedictine monastery.
I should mention that my high school English teacher exposed me to Zen Buddhism, and Thomas Merton showed me how Buddhism and Catholicism were linked through certain meditation practices.
In the monastery, I learned the Hesychasm form of “prayer of the heart”. This is a contemplative form of meditation that seeks, in broad strokes, to make every breath, every heartbeat a prayer.
Hesychasm, like Zen, involves controlled and focused breathing, a mantra, and sitting very quietly for a period of time every day. Starting out, it may be five to ten minutes per day, but with regular practice, this can extend to literally non-stop meditation. In other words, the goal is to set aside quiet time that eventually becomes portable, so that no matter where you are or what you are doing, it is quiet time in your mind and heart.
Anyone interested in this concept should begin at the beginning, with the Desert Fathers. The desert monks in North Africa pre-existed Christianity, and their practices were likely foundational to early Christianity, and certainly the Essenes were.
My goal here is not to promote any particular religion or theology. I certainly have no truck with any organized religion. Instead, I am promoting a set of established and essential techniques that have withstood the test of time, across multiple cultures, and which promote a state of internal peace and focus in a world designed to keep us in a permanent state of chaos and frenzy.
As we discussed in my previous column, “They” are throwing everything at us as fast as they can to keep us off balance, afraid, and searching for a savior. This is a dangerous place to be for the masses, since they will glom onto any figure or organization that promises to calm the seas and steady the boat. This is a state of mind that is exploited to great effect by cults and political movements.
Anxiety and uncertainty keep the individual off center, and like someone falling, folks will grab onto anything that looks stable and secure. Leaders who know this and use it to their advantage can get millions to flock to them by projecting an image of being solid and in control.
If you watch the GeezerMedia in your polished shield from a safe distance, you will notice rapid-fire edits during stories about chaos and panic, then long lingering shots of those chosen to be the “leaders”. This is one technique used to steer the masses, the color blue is another — the image of calm and steady, versus yellows, reds and browns, shaky handheld cameras, and edits less than two seconds, so we never have time to mentally and emotionally focus and relax. Yes, the color palettes are deliberate and chosen specifically for their emotional impact. I know, because I’ve done it.
I am by no means an expert or guru in the field of meditation. I have spent my entire adult life working at this, and I am still a beginner. I have met only two people in my life who I would classify as experts. It is vital that the practicioner not despair, as that is even more dangerous than anxiety and fear. Anything worth doing takes practice.
If ever there was a time for folks to pursue inner peace, this is it. We humans are under attack by those who would use our insecurity and uncertainty for their advantage. We must not only seek to calm our inner tree of monkeys, but to radiate that feeling out to everyone we encounter. I am not good at this. I have a temper and a short fuse, and it takes a lot of work for me to project calmness in a storm.
The hardest part of all this is being ready to shed anything holding us back. Think of the common house lizard or gekko. When a cat grabs its tail, the tail breaks off and wriggles around, distracting the cat while the lizard gets away. The tail grows back and the lizard lives to fight another day. That is how we fight the world we have at the moment: let go of the extremities to save the core.
OK, this is bordering on preaching, and I am preaching to myself more than anyone out in Reader Land. My goal here is to offer tools and techniques that I have used to survive attacks that should, by all rights, have destroyed me. I can attest that these tools work, but there are no shortcuts. We have to put in the effort to get the benefits.
As we noted in the last screed, we are in dangerous times. The old power structures of the last 1,000 years are collapsing, and “They” are grasping at anything stable and secure to steady themselves, while at the same time trying to project that panic onto us. Our greatest weapon and defense is to find our inner peace and ignore their thrashings.
One of the hardest things to do is to watch someone drown and not dive in to save them. A drowning person is in a blind panic and will drag anyone in reach down with them. “They” are drowning, and if we get anywhere near them, they will drag us under and the Reaper will get a 2-for-1 discount. We can throw a rope to anyone who will take it, but we must keep our distance or end up in Davy Jones’ Locker with them.
The only way to fight the anger, fear and panic is to nourish and maintain the rational mind: stay balanced, focused, and keep our inner peace.
Economies flourish and crash. Civilizations rise and fall. Cultures expand and contract. It’s scary and we may lose a tail or two in the process, but we will live to rebuild and grow again, and really that’s the most important aspect of life. A dead man achieves nothing. The tools, techniques and analogs are objective facts that don’t require belief, just effort and a willingness to learn.
We can win this war without blood on our hands or moral ambiguity. Our teachers left us detailed instructions. Protesting and rioting achieve nothing for our side, and only feed the Beast.
One of our amazing readers here on the FarSide sent a link to their efforts along these lines. Take a look and see if it offers something for you.
And I would be remiss without a nod to Cole Porter.
And with all that said, I offer my suggested film of the day: The Name of the Rose (1986). Another one of my all-time favorites, this one offers Umberto Eco’s brilliant writing, Jean-Jaques Annaud’s stunning direction, and a dozen amazing performances (along with the debut of Christian Slater’s signature mouth breathing), with a compelling story, and a haunting score by James Horner. Enjoy!
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Rufus, Your meal sound excellent. The old saying is, "Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys." Monkeys would terrorize African villages. They would grab small dogs, even infants, and eat whatever the villagers had.
So, when the monkeys were screaming in the trees outside the village ready for their next raid, a villager would grab a chicken and a knife. He'd take the chicken out in front of the monkeys and cut off the chicken's head. The headless chicken would then run around scaring the feck out of the monkeys. They never come back.
Thomas Merton was assassinated by the CIA in Thailand in 1968. The monastery where he came from in the USA covered it up by not doing an autopsy and hiding the photos of the crime scene.
I stay calm by avoiding people and the TV. I stay up until dawn sitting in the dark drinking beer and doing absolutely nothing but thinking.
I also protect my psyche by not giving a shit if the human race survives or not. I don't have any grandkids. I have no skin in the game.
But I wish you well, Rufus. You are a good man.
Thanks 😊