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I've noticed there seems to be a disproportionate amount of overlap between the categories of psychically sensitive and sensitive to MSG. Since MSG is apparently found in foods naturally, this suggests an etheric link. This would also fit with MSG's main effect being to make processed foods taste better. Since a major problem with processed foods is etheric deadness, this could be countered best by something with a strong etheric presence, which people would register, and sensitives would react to.

I'd like to know if anyone else has noticed this overlap as well, and if anyone has done anything with it.

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: Heading to a Kitchen

I'm watching the ongoing debacle with regards to AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine with a certain sense of vindication. When the vaccines were first approved, I was deeply troubled, for a very simple reason: they are experimental, and experimental medicines almost always have unexpected side effects. These may be safer than the diseases they treat, but they may not be, and until the vaccines are fully assessed for safety, we don't know. We cannot know whether they are safe or not at this point in time.

The very fact that so many countries approved AstraZeneca and then withdrew it overnight tells me that the findings are worse than we're being told, since we're being told that the blood clotting was what is expected. If so, the fact so many regulators pulled it is strange. Far more likely is that there is something there that hasn't come out yet.

I'm well aware that this places me strongly outside of what is considered acceptable these days, but I think these vaccines are all very risky, and the more people who get them, the worse the potential outcomes become. Let's imagine, just for a moment, that one of the vaccines has a nasty side effect afflicting around a percent of people who take it. This would be extremely mild compared to the worst case scenario, but it would be typical for an experimental pharmaceutical. If, furthermore, as often happens, the first symptoms of a problem don't show up for a year or even longer, then it would be literally impossible for anyone to have detected this with any of the Covid-19 vaccines yet.

The problems are that modern medicine is staking its entire claim to legitimacy on these vaccines, and if anything goes wrong, the consequences will not be limited to these vaccines. The anti vax movement has already been given a massive boost by the combination of the experimental nature of these vaccines and the medical establishment insisting that these are as safe as any other vaccine: lots of people are hearing that and wondering about other vaccines. If it turns out that even just one of them has horrific side effects, then a full blown crisis of legitimacy for modern medicine will follow.

This is not something that I want. I am only alive today because of modern medicine: because I was born very prematurely I needed help in order to survive when I was first born, and had an infection as a child which would have killed me without antibiotics. I am firmly aware of the benefits of modern medicine, but I'm also well aware that a reflexive distrust of doctors is a logical response to what could happen.

Imagine if over the next few years the news covers an extraordinary rise in Early Onset Alzheimer's, and even starts to cover a new condition, Very Early Onset Alzheimer's, afflicting people in their 20s, teenagers, and in at least one case, a four year old girl. Families are devastated, watching their loved ones drift away. The explanation first starts spreading on the alternative news sites, but these patients all received one of the Covid vaccines. At first the doctors deny it as mere speculation, and it takes a few years, but eventually the company responsible for that vaccine confirms that their data shows this happening to their experimental group.

After being told repeatedly these vaccines are perfectly safe, and there are no possible risks, how could anyone trust anything their doctor, or the mainstream media, told them afterwards? How could anyone trust the regulators for medicines, or for food safety? The ensuing crisis of legitimacy would be one for the record books, and frankly, I don't want to live through it. At this point though, it just keeps getting more and more likely.

Current Mood: cold
Current Location: Last Days of a Dying World

Something that's taken me by surprise, but in hindsight shouldn't have, was the aftermath of the winter storm in the American South. I don't mean that the fact there was a winter storm in Texas, nor the fact it knocked out power and water, but rather the length of time it took for people to get it back took me by surprise. I figured we still had a few years before the rural electric grid would be allowed to decay, and power would start getting intermittent like this. I had assumed that there was a major piece of infrastructure which would be allowed to collapse first, but I'm realizing I had that backwards.

The internet will survive the rural electric grid. We could support the rural electric grid for another decade or two past its impending collapse if we were to allow the internet to degrade, but this is not what will happen. Instead, keeping the internet running appears to be a top priority of our governments, at least here in North America.

The main consequence of this is very simple: over the next twenty years or so, daily life in urban and rural areas will diverge. As rural areas lose electricity, they will undergo a radical transformation, as people adapt to the realities of de-electrified life, with its harsh limits: strictly limited artificial lighting, far more manual labour, and a great deal of work merely to survive.

Urbanites, meanwhile, will remain living a semblance of modern life, with electricity, and everything that goes with it: easy refrigeration, TV, electric lighting, the internet, vacuums, and a great many other perks. I expect this world to be fully established by the 2050s, and the divide here is going to be immense, and probably be one of the major issues in societies of that era.

It will not appear all at once, however. For a while, the rural grid will be intermittent and unreliable, but still there much of the time; for a longer while, everyone but the poorest will find ways to generate some electricity for personal use, and even in the 2050s I expect plenty of businesses will exist reliant on some amount of electricity in rural areas; they'll merely need to generate it themselves.

The divide will still be immense, however. A society where internet access involves going to a cafe, where there's a reading room with a light in the library but most homes use lamps, and where cinemas dominate because no one has a TV will look very different from one where most people have internet access, there is copious amounts of artificial light, and most people have TV at home. These two cultures will exist next to each other, and very likely a lot of conflict will exist between them, but I freely confess I don't know for sure how that will play out.

Although I believe we're living through a long decline in our civilization, one which has been ongoing for more than a half century at this point, I have hope for the future of our major urban areas. In 2050, I expect most of the large cities in North America to be doing better than they are today, not despite of, but because of this decline. There will be exceptions (ex: New York will likely be dealing with quite damaging sea level rise), but overall, most cities will soon begin to recover as they are cured from a terrible affliction: suburbs.

The problems with suburbs are manifold, but they boil down to three major problems for their host city: the first is that they create a large number of people who are outside the city centre, but who regularly commute to the city, thus increasing the number of people the core must be able to handle, without providing money to the core the same way that people who live there do; the second is that they take a disproportionate share of the well paying jobs, and this results in an increase in the poverty rate in the urban core; finally the third problem is that they are quite good at taking control of local planning for their benefit, and in the process harming the city core.

The cure for suburbs is actually quite simple: they depend on car culture, and if something happens which makes that impossible, they will very quickly descend to their eventual fate: the ring of slums which will surround most cities mid-century. This arguably should already be well under way, but there are a variety of tactics which are being used to funnel money out of the cities and into their suburbs. One example has to do with public transit in the Toronto area: trips into Toronto from surrounding areas provide funding solely to those areas; while trips from Toronto out to the surrounding areas results in money going to both Toronto and the other region's public transit. The result is that the suburbs end up with more funding for the same services.

Meanwhile, oil, a necessity for car culture, is heavily subsidized, and the same is true of the automobile industry itself. All of this provides a transfer of wealth away from cities and to the suburbs. The reason is quite simple: without these massive subsidies, suburbs would not be viable. The results, however, of allowing them to fail would be horrific, and violate a number of our culture's taboos (one of the big ones being letting the well off suffer); and so everything that can be done to keep suburbs alive is being done.

Sooner or later, this will fail, the suburbs will fall apart, and when this happens the cities, no longer being suffocated by their suburbs, will begin to recover. There will be crises as this happens of course, but for the cities, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Current Mood: optimistic
Current Location: In a City

Over at John Michael Greer's last Magic Monday, there was a rather interesting discussion inspired by someone asking if the copious electricity use in modern cities might be causing etheric effects. Since I have a high degree of natural sensitivity, and have been looking at this myself, I figure it's worth my time to describe the effects I see it having on the planes.

First, I should explain the idea of the planes for those who don't know it. The occultist divides reality into a number of different "levels", or planes, which coexist in each area. The lowest is the physical, the world of matter and energy; the next is the etheric, the world of the life energies; then there is the astral, the plane of concrete consciousness, emotion, and imagination; then there is the mental, Plato's world of forms and the level of abstract consciousness; then there is the spiritual, felt by most of us solely as the essence of awareness in the core of our beings; however there are practices to awaken us on the spiritual plane, and some people are naturally able to perceive it on occasion. As I'm in the latter category and have done practices to increase my sensitivity, I've had several experiences on this plane.

Two very important notes are in order before I begin. The first is that these are my own experiences with electricity, and input from others would be greatly appreciated, especially where your experiences are different. The second note is that what follows is an attempt to discuss the effects of electricity itself, and not any particular use of it. TV, for example, generates a lot of other effects on the human bodies from the astral on, but these are a subject for another time.

Physical: In the world of matter and energy, electricity is moving electrons. These electrons generate small magnetic fields, which might alter neurological function with unpleasant results. The main effect electricity has on this plane however is found in the massive changes to daily life: electricity enables lots of things to be done cheaper and easier (ex: refrigeration, elevators), and allows us to do some things which would otherwise be impossible (ex: TV).

Etheric: The etheric plane is heavily affected by electricity. Electricity seems to function as a cutting, shredding force on the etheric. Constant exposure to this is about as healthy for the etheric body as it would be for the physical, but there are at least two other important consequences of this: first, anything on the etheric is shredded. Our etheric bodies are strengthened by a link to our physical, and so can withstand things etheric entities cannot, leaving the etheric plane depopulated in electrified areas. The second consequence is that the etheric plane is far dirtier in areas with electricity: all the stuff ripped from our etheric bodies and those of everything else in the area remains like a miasma polluting the etheric.

A second effect electricity has is due to the fact electricity has a strong presence on the etheric plane in and of itself. Strong enough in fact that the human body registers it, and this wreaks havoc on the circadian rhythm, above and beyond the results caused by the ubiquity of electric lights in urban areas. Electricity seems to convince the etheric body that the sun is still up, making sleep far harder.

Astral: Electricity seems to have a profound dispersing effect on the astral. Creating patterns on the astral, is far harder in areas with electricity (an experiment I've done is turning my lights on or off for ritual work: they make the visualizations essential to ritual practice far harder, and when there's a blackout, the imagery, which I usually struggle with at least a little, becomes crystal clear); this effect is strong enough as well to disperse plenty of spirits, which contributes to the fact that urbanites tend to find atheism more accurate than religion: most of the entities which human beings usually interact with are not around in areas with lots of electricity. Whether they find it too unpleasant, are unable to manifest, or can't survive these conditions at all likely depends on the entity in question.

Mental: The mental plane is the world of forms and abstract consciousnesses. Any set of laws which describe reality are found here: mathematics, laws of physics, natural law, and any other set of abstract principles. This is the level of meaning, and it too is disturbed by copious amounts of electricity. The effects are similar to those on the lower planes: ideas are dispersed, scattered, and harder to grasp in areas with electricity. What this means is that understanding things, seeing the meanings and patterns underlying it, becomes harder in electrified areas, and when accomplished it becomes harder to hold onto it.

Spiritual: Here we run into the problem of the fact that the spiritual plane is very hard to describe. As it lies above the astral and mental, the levels languages work on, it transcends the categories language uses. However, it's worth trying since electricity has effects on the spiritual, or at least our ability to sense it. The first is that I find it much harder to sense the spiritual with electricity, and far easier to sense it when there is no electricity. The second is the quality of the spiritual plane when it is sensed tends to be quite different in areas with electricity. The effect is best described as being darker, duller, and colder, with the caveat that those words, indeed any words, are inadequate to describe the spiritual plane. To what extent this is merely changes to the human senses on this plane and to what extent this is a true effect is a question I can't even begin to answer.

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: One of Our Overly Electrified Cities

One of the weirdest things which has happened over the past few decades has been the descent of the privileged classes in North America, and worldwide, into insanity. I've just spotted one of the roots of this: the media. Specifically, however, a particular aspect of the mainstream media has made this happen. This is a simple matter of the fact that the people the media is supposed to influence, and the people who trust it implicitly, do not align.

The people outside of the bubble of privilege are, by and large, distrustful of the mainstream media, and have been growing more and more distrustful of it over time. The reasons are not important, but what is important is that these are the very people the media is supposed to influence. The benefits of controlling public opinion do not matter if they are limited to the top: nor do the benefits of persuading the elites to buy products, for the true market is the general public.

The people inside the bubble are going to have the ideas that the privileged want them to have anyway, for they are the privileged; they will consume to wretched excess no matter what happens, since they are sheltered from economic wants. The real prize, is convincing the millions outside the bubble to believe what you want, and to buy whatever you want them to.

This is best done by one of two methods: the first is that of earning trust, and then persuading people that what you want them to think is in their best interests; the second is the method of propaganda. Propaganda works best by hammering home on the emotional, shutting down the rational mind. The problem with this is quite simple: what is warm and fuzzy to one person can be cold and prickly to another, and it works best if you can either persuade people to trust you or overwhelm them with repetition.

The privileged trust the media, and by and large share many of the same values as the people making the media. Those outside the sheltered classes have many reasons to distrust the media, and have had them for decades. The result is that the mainstream media has started resorting to propaganda, as it is impossible to fix what they cannot admit: that people have valid reasons for distrusting them.

The result is that those outside the circles of privilege see less and less reason to trust an increasingly Soviet media, and the privileged classes are getting caught up increasingly in their own reality, being manipulated more and more powerfully by a mass media that is increasingly losing its grip on reality.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Somewhere without TV or Radio