Skip to content

Be Careful What You Believe

Navigating a Narcissistic and Codependent World

My work over the years has focused on people with a mental disorder known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Not as a psychologist but as a writer, sharing the experience of my early marriage, and how I pulled our family back together—first hand. For privacy sake there is only so much that I can write about that subject, as I am still married to the same man. I will speak generally about marriage and family in this book but my own marriage is not the topic here.”

My work as a writer has entailed me spending many years in the trenches, hearing the worst about marriage inequality. Like a general returned—personally—victorious from war, I now have to ask, “What on earth has created this conflict between women and men?”.

By the end of this book, I hope that I will have gone a long way towards answering that question.

Like many of us alive today in the West, I grew up through a heady time in history. A time when the Beach Boys, Sonny & Cher, Elton John and The Eagles were releasing new hits. Everyone was talking about peace, and most teachers railed convincingly against ‘limiting beliefs’. You can do anything you put your mind to! Don’t let fears or conservative thinking hold you back! The sky is the limit! The only thing to fear is fear itself! Inexplicably, my mother even told me as a child that I might one day be the first woman president of The United States. The only real enemy to target was any doubts I might hold about myself.

This challenge, considered critically, presents a truly daunting task for anyone, let alone a socially awkward child who preferred to read books and look at the stars. A child who feared other people looking at me and had little concept of where I had landed in the world. A child who—to the consternation of my parents—took apart just about every toy given to me trying to figure out how it worked.

In a sane world, I might have become an engineer or mechanic. In a world that had put forward limiting beliefs as the enemy, I spent many years of my life attempting to deconstruct my insecurity.

I did my best to impress my teachers, mainly as I saw their interest in me as the only protection available from other children—all trying to compete in a world where the expectations on everyone were set too high. Still, I sensed—very early on—that seeking the kind of glory and courage needed to walk towards such bright stage lights, in itself would create shadows both long and dark.

I spent a lot of time as a child looking for small spaces to curl up and hide.

…..

The Invisible Cage of Self Doubt

One aim of this book is to question the wisdom in promoting a ‘no limits’ mindset in a society’s citizenry. Our limits as individuals are glaringly obvious. On our own, we are physically weak and vulnerable, no fur, no sharp teeth or claws, no night vision or ability to even make much noise to defend ourselves. Emotionally we are anxious and insecure. Most of us—in truth—pathetically unable to defend or protect ourselves—even from the judgements and put-downs that come from our own family and friends; let alone rise to the heights of glory promised, by those suggesting we must free ourselves from all limiting self-doubt.

Self-confidence is important, of course, as is open-minded, creative thinking and aspirations that are both achievable and worthwhile. But knowing our true limits and setting realistic expectations on ourselves—and others—is an unavoidable step towards any real success we can hope to achieve in our life.

Another aim in the pages offered here is to burn through the flimsy safety nets most people base their day to day sense of personal security—and hence sanity—on.

In short, this will not be a journey for the faint of heart.

I am, however, not a nihilist and in the end, hope to bring you, my reader, to solid and expansive higher ground; not my higher ground but your own—a place of emotional and physical security and real rewards such as meaning and love. Replacing any deceptive belief systems, you may be counting on to get you through what lays ahead of us all in our world right now, with something more reliable and sound.

I have never been satisfied with platitudes. I want a life built on solid foundations I can test.

The Urgent Need to Courageously Re-examine Our Beliefs

Belief is a subject I usually avoid talking about. Personally, I don’t put as much weight on it as many people do. As belief is such fertile ground for discord, it is generally a subject best left off the table. That is good manners and what I would advocate in normal times.

We are, however, not living in normal times; with chaos and political divide being fuelled by propaganda generated by liberal billionaires versus conservative billionaires. That in itself is normal. It has however reached a point where this divide is reaching a crescendo and a larger bipartisan agenda rising from the chaos. A worldwide bureaucratic plan that has been in place for many years now, that may not bode well for our personal freedom in the near future.

More on that agenda later in the book. I will say upfront that uniting our families into solid working cooperatives may be the only chance we have against what is being planned. I can provide a lot of resources towards that type of defence. I have been issuing this call to action for many years now. You can find an earlier article of mine on this subject here:

Men and Women Must Organise to Defend Their Families

It was concluded from a recent US Gallup poll that most people won’t risk hearing news that differs from what they already believe. Highly educated Americans were found to be the far most closed-minded group. If this situation doesn’t change, when will people learn anything new? Dangerous times are not times we can afford to keep our doubts and fears to ourselves. More on this a bit later when I discuss politics in this book.

Doubts and fears if allowed to ‘fester’ inside of us can grow distorted in the dark. For the sake of our freedom and liberty, I am finding the courage—and humility—to walk my own doubts and fears into the light of day.

Shell Shock

This book also deals with a subject that academically I know little about, but experientially have lived with most of my life. That subject is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, commonly referred to as PTSD.

Most people associate PTSD with war; in my line of work, marriage and family is the more common battlefield.

The framework of my story will be my struggles overcoming PTSD. In the hope that some of that information I put forward might help you to make sense of what currently may not make sense in your life.

The first time I ever heard PTSD described, in a way that caught my attention, was only recently. That is what inspired me to write this book. It was in an audio file embedded in an article titled How PTSD treatment can learn from ancient warrior rituals.

Speaking was Karen O’Donnell From Durham University who talks about trauma being similar to an earthquake that rips through the landscape of a person’s inner world. The trauma ruptures a person’s sense of identity, altering their perception of time, their beliefs and their ability to communicate. You can’t talk about what has happened to you because it just doesn’t make sense. A person’s belief system is at the core of the damage. When you think about trauma and belief, she says, what trauma does is to pull belief completely apart.

A belief system based on rigid doctrine Karen explains, can be harmful and leave a person more prone to PTSD. For example, if you are told always ‘God works all things for the good of those who love him,’ and you are a woman who has experienced miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage, how can you believe that to be true? “What does that mean about me, then?” This woman might ask, “Am I not a good person? Does God not want good things for me?”

Presumably a Christian, Karen goes on to describe giving people overcoming PTSD a really wide space in which to reconstruct a new way of thinking about their faith. Because if you have experienced a trauma, you can’t go back and hold on to the things you always believed to be true—because they’ve been proven not to be true or at least seem that way.

Every Day I Write the Book

The most important part of recovery Karen says is the construction of a narrative (a new way of looking at the world) that makes sense of what you’ve experienced. That narrative needs to be personal; it has to be written by the person who has experienced the trauma, it can’t be imposed by the official beliefs of a church (and I would add community). The other stage of recovery she adds is being part of a witness community that believes what you have said.

The presenter in the podcast states; “So it is easy to see how dogma can undermine a person’s ability to recover. There needs to be room for doubt, for questioning and reconstructing your belief system. This space is crucial in the three stages of recovery.” The first of these, Karen goes on to explain, is needing to be safe and not in a place where trauma is still occurring. Secondly, you have to construct a narrative that makes sense of what has happened to you and, third, a reconnection with society.

Recovering from trauma, Karen explains, is not a linear process. We jump around from point to point—sometimes visiting each one of these ‘houses’ four times in an hour—through our period of recovery. Putting our beliefs, identity, sense of time and ability to communicate back together slowly and simultaneously.

I would suggest that this is not an easy challenge in a highly specialised and judgemental world, where doubts and fears are not encouraged to be spoken about in any real way.

Listening to Karen O’Donnell’s explanation, for me, was like an Eskimo first hearing someone talk about ice.

Putting together a new understanding. Putting myself back together. Being able to talk coherently again.

The main reasons that I write.

Understanding that belief is at the core of our ability to form a consensus within ourselves—which in turn allows us to construct an identity that can communicate with others—encouraged me to find what I might call from here an ‘all-weather belief system’ that might both heal and help prevent PTSD. A belief system so firmly grounded in a solid reality that it might even help pull our fragmented community back together again.

My work over the years has focused on people with a mental disorder known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Not as a psychologist but as a writer, sharing the experience of my early marriage, and how I pulled our family back together—first hand. For privacy sake, there is only so much that I can write about that subject, as I am still married to the same man. I will speak generally about marriage and family in this book, but my marriage is not the topic here.

What is relevant, is that my work on this subject led me to understand trauma in people with NPD. I would say most NPD sufferers have faced trauma in their lives which has caused them to put together a belief system in the form of a coping mechanism, based on their ability to project an ego-based persona of who they are.

Reality is dangerous, and everything depends upon their ability to act that ego-driven part.

Unable to live with the vulnerable part of themselves whose hopes and dreams might be ridiculed, the NPD sufferer creates a new identity freed from all self-limiting belief.

Our Inner Representative’s Convention

As Artie Wu from Preside Life (Artie hosts excellent online emotional healing courses) might put it, they kidnap their vulnerable, loving ‘board member’ (of their inner counsel) that caused them to feel unacceptable to the world—and lock that part of themselves away in the cupboard.

That board member is still there, however, and although never consulted or reasoned with it still can and does send in its vote by proxy—creating chaos and anxiety in their lives.

An NPD sufferer’s life becomes a theatre. They must carefully control anyone who sees through their act. Like interacting with a stage hypnotist, using your own will or questioning their honesty is a much greater sin than the fact that their act is a lie. The stage hypnotist’s power isn’t derived from anything but dominance. They are in charge of the narrative. No one wants to hear your doubts or fears; no one paid to see your show.

Better to go along with the show and make a fool of yourself doing what they tell you to do than resist their suggestions and risk real humiliation in front of the crowd. Just tell yourself you won’t remember. That’s what’s supposed to happen, right?

The NPD sufferer likewise creates a protective bubble around the new invincible character they have created for themselves by winning an audience, dominating the narrative and putting other people down.

The City of Failed Emporers

Individuals assessed with NPD usually end up facing further trauma in their lives when their act no longer holds things together in the way that it once did. Their narcissistic persona experiences a breakdown, and the rest of their vulnerable ‘inner counsel’ becomes very dependant while they put things back together again.

Without solid help and guidance at this point, this person’s shattered ego will usually put itself back together into a somewhat pathetic version of their former act. In the brilliant book The Never Ending Story, there is a city of ‘failed emperors’, filled with these poor souls. They walk in circles doing and saying things that make them still feel powerful. Things that to outsiders look nonsensical and often completely mad. The similarly brilliant Australian movie Murial’s Wedding shows Bill Hyslop’s life as a failed politician, berating his children in a restaurant, in front of his mistress, as his wife looks on uncomprehending and self drugged. In Murial’s Wedding, Bill Hyslop is redeemed by his eldest daughter breaking the spell.

Most failed politicians are not so lucky. In the real-life ‘city of failed emperors’, they run in circles barking at people to carry their luggage, complaining about the impossibility of ‘finding good help these days’ and standing on street corners hailing cabs that never come.

Someday My Prince Will Come

While growing up, the codependent—on the other side of this ugly marriage dysfunction coin—learns that the best way to avoid conflict and trauma is to serve other people’s needs. Stay positive, and don’t rock the boat. Make sure you keep smiling and try and make everyone around you feel good. One day your Prince Charming—or Damsel in Distress—will come and all of your needs will be met.

Codependents make great subjects for the narcissistic stage hypnotist’s act.

Meanwhile—outside the narcissistic and codependent theatre—real life goes on. True rewards and riches, such as creativity, meaning, love and inspiration, are by and large neglected and deemed too far ‘outside of the box’.

One thing that I learned while focused on writing about narcissism and codependency is that these mindsets comprise two opposing belief systems that can be found just about everywhere you look.

Beliefs Worth Believing In

So let’s commence our journey together. Pulling our belief systems apart; examining them in a safe space and ultimately putting them back together again. To build something stronger, more flexible and less constrictive than the all too flimsy narcissistic and codependent belief systems that most of our society bases our security, identity and ability to communicate and conduct meaningful relationships on.

What I have come to believe—in the journey I will share—is not important unless it helps you.

As Karen O’Donnell explained, our narrative has to be personal; it has to be written by the person who has experienced the trauma.

I aim to share my own doubts and fears alongside the ‘all-weather belief system’ I have constructed for myself, to hopefully help you to find the confidence to construct your own.

I don’t believe it healthy or even possible for us to all believe the same things.

There are dangerous beliefs; however, I do feel that need to be questioned. Ones sold to us for nefarious reasons, or that we sell to ourselves to protect our fragile egos at the expense of the people around us. I will be exposing and questioning many of those beliefs along the way.

Ultimately, of course, only you can decide what you believe.

An ‘all-weather belief system’ won’t make your life perfect or easy; it will, however, provide you with a reliable inner compass. A set of values that are worth fighting for. Values that will, in time, give your life more meaning and comfort. In particular, the personal comfort of feeling okay about who you are.

Bernie The Bonecracker

My father was an Osteopath who was very talented at working on people’s backs. He was a big man, 6 ft tall. Plagued by lower back pain himself; Dad spent a lot of his life looking for someone who could do for him what he did for other people every day.

Due to his large frame, most Chiropractors and Osteopaths my father visited could not adjust his lower back.

One day I came home from school to find Dad hanging upside down in a contraption he had bought and screwed into the door frame near the top of our stairs. Onto this solid bar, he had hooked his ‘upside down boots’. Dad had also bought a walkman and was listening to the Ghostbusters theme song. “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts!” was a line he liked to deliver that always made him laugh.

I often write about my father, mainly because my children never got to meet him. He is not the subject of what I will go on to share with you here. In my mind, he did the best he could to be a good husband and father. I am not writing about him in the context of codependence or NPD.

When we first moved to Australia, my father’s back pain led him to the door of a neighbour up the hill. Not a doctor, ‘Bernie the Bone Cracker’ still had a reputation and home practice. Dad was desperate and ready to give anything a try.

As their friendship developed, I met Bernie and his wife. They were more in love with each other than any couple I had ever met.

A year later, Bernie’s wife developed breast cancer and turned to my father for help.

I was only 13 years old and had already faced trauma earlier in my life. An incomprehensible trauma that I had shared with no one, but will speak of a bit later in this book. I had put things back together, so to speak, by embracing Christianity with a fervour most uncommon for my age. I drove the school chaplain crazy with my questions. I was looking for something a lot more reliable than he cared to face.

I took the Bible seriously when it said that God would answer my prayers. I prayed every night and morning for Bernie’s wife.

A year later, she died, and Bernie was left alone.

I did not share the fact that I had prayed in vain with anyone. This trauma ripped my beliefs apart. Not only my faith in God and prayer, but that love was the answer and would create a Happily Ever After scenario for me.

At school, I handed in my next assignment in bible class with a picture I had drawn with the earth as the pupil in an eye. Spaceships with guns were flying around the pupil earth, battling with each other. The title of my ‘essay’ was The Eye of God.

I had no idea that I was—once again—struggling with PTSD. I no longer had words to coherently express my inner world.

My rebellion continued and in many ways assisted (in a negative sense) ripping my already shaky family apart. I became promiscuous and unmanageable and started using alcohol and drugs. I left home a few years later in search of a narrative that would explain the trauma I had experienced in my life.

The Marriage Casualty Diaspora – Happily Ever After PTSD

Many people face trauma when their belief in Happily Ever After is proven a lie. Women tend to hold out a lot longer. Against all evidence, they keep the faith. If single, they adapt by believing they will “do” marriage better than the marriage they saw fail. If their marriage has failed, they placate themselves that it was all their husband’s fault and ‘next time’ they will know what true love is. Faced with the ugly behaviour of other people’s children, they say to themselves, “My children will never behave like that!”. By the time their 2nd or 3rd marriage fails, and their children move out, many develop full-blown PTSD.

You see them in every shopping centre and on the streets—older women who look haggard and can no longer communicate coherently.

Men in my experience break more easily, once shown the evidence that Happily Ever After is a myth, they hide their hearts and swap their need to be loved and understood by another human being for an act. The world is filled with roles for men who wish to be part of this kind of ‘snake oil’ show. Belief in the reality of what they are selling is not essential. Their ability to ‘act the part’ helps them hide their weakness and pretend that they are strong. They turn to porn, prostitutes or sex dolls for comfort, filling their need for love and attention on the podium or stage. Most of what they profess to believe, like the stage hypnotist, is only important as far as it furthers the act.

Dominance becomes their new belief system; only they can run the show in a way that will prevent them from feeling weak and hurt.

When life becomes theatre, truth loses all value if it spoils the act. If charm or coercion doesn’t win their audience, they will play the victim and look for sympathy instead. All that matters is that they get what they want and don’t have to do things they don’t want to do.

They find wives—who still desperately believe in truth and love—to fill the gaps that over the years will only continue to grow.

The real person inside of these men—that still needs to be loved—gets locked out in the cold. This denial of their vulnerable inner selves causes them to feel jealous and enraged when they observe weak and vulnerable people who are happier than they are.

By the time they end up in The City of Failed Emporers, the vulnerable inner part of themselves—they have locked in the cupboard—is angry as hell. You see them in bars and our city streets with no idea what to do but take their anger out on themselves and anyone they can hook into their destructive dominance game.

My understanding of all of this came much later in life. At 13, I had seen true love with Bernie and his wife and couldn’t see any reason why a loving God would not answer my prayers and spare her. I also didn’t fool myself that I could do better at marriage. Relationships had never been a strong point for me.

I faced my first Happily Ever After Crisis at 14 when she died.

Don’t get me wrong that I might be advocating giving up on marriage. Marriage and family—as you will find out later in this book—is something I believe our society needs to protect.

The flimsy Happily Ever After belief system is not about marriage itself. It is based on the false assumption that love between two people should instantly heal and protect us emotionally and physically. That belief is assuredly a myth.

The Search

At 14, I took up a belief system prevalent in people who have PTSD. I didn’t have answers to explain the trauma I had experienced and witnessed in my life, and so became a Seeker of Truth.

The search numbs the pain and gives the seeker hope, but at a considerable cost.

Instead of concentrating on learning skills that might have benefitted me, I spent a lifetime studying arcane subjects in books.

I was anxious and obsessive and still using drugs and alcohol to muster the courage to face the world and ease my pain. No longer satisfied by looking for religious edification, I studied politics, psychology and history too. Not the standard versions, because I could see the world readily believed in things that did not hold up in practice. I was looking for a solid structure that had somehow been lost.

I tried many times to put together a narcissistic persona, but luckily—from what I know now—generally failed within weeks or years.

I continued taking apart subjects meticulously, only to find theories based on little more than greed, wishful thinking, and professional privilege, buttressing ‘experts’ ability to earn a living based on tenets that were often easily proven false.

I discovered that meaning is so vital to our sanity, that people will defend the indefensible if it provides a paycheck, and they have no place else to land.

I had nothing better to offer and so what use was my search?

I went through a string of failed relationships and got married twice and divorced once.

My early marriage to Steve became the subject of books I wrote.

Losing My Religion

Many years later, already having read far too many books, I began studying the bible again with an open mind.

God to me—I would now call myself a Diest—logically could not be human. These larger than life characters—so dutifully passed down to us throughout history—must have been based on real-life people I could find if I looked.

This idea caused further searching and in many ways, wasted a lot more time. Who wants to invite someone to your party who is only going to challenge everyone’s deeply held beliefs? Church was no use either. Not many people as interested in religion as I was were reading the bible to look for the gaps.

Gaps that are glaringly obvious if only one cares to look. Christianity, for instance, is said to be the champion of family values, yet Jesus himself did not profess those.

In the book of Matthew Jesus said:

For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.” Matthew 10:35

For more of Jesus’s views on families, there are more biblical passages that might surprise you here: http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/cf0_injunctions.htm#families

The Old Testament is just as bad. There is not one functional family to be found within its books. If you’re curious, you can read a brief and humorously accurate description of OT families here: https://kidzblitz.com/dysfunctional-families/

I had come full circle getting back to the bible; isolating myself while looking for The Answer, which was ironic in the end. Human connection is everything it turns out, and I was damaging that in my search.

By this stage, I was already writing about human connection, but deconstructing religion was now even isolating me from many of my most devoted readers. I wasn’t ready to talk about belief and wasn’t ready to sell out to a lie.

Where was it going to end?

Still, I had kept my family together and had learned some useful things along the way. Things that had helped me and many people who still write to me today.

I continued trying to help them while avoiding the subject of belief.

But most people who contacted me for help were struggling with PTSD. Trying to help them without addressing belief was becoming harder every day.

My Rock

Most of what I had found that had been useful, ironically, was information about human emotion—usually discounted as stuff that clouds our reason and should not be trusted to guide us in any way. Research doesn’t back up those claims. Emotions need to be regulated, but give us vital information that little else can. The feeling we get from someone’s tone of voice. Our gut instincts that something’s amiss.

Noticing and regulating our emotions is critical in our search for knowledge that benefits us emotionally.

For example, a person whose unregulated jealously drives them to gather information on their partner may cause an all-out war with many unintended consequences.

Noted and regulated; however, jealousy is a vital signal that a precious relationship may be under threat.

Once regulated, this emotional signal may prompt a whole different course of action that draws their partner close and builds stronger bonds through empathy and understanding.

Understanding is not the same as knowledge.

Understanding has a profoundly emotional foundation, assisting us to relate to each other in ways that create peace, prosperity and the kind of security that makes the quest for knowledge worthwhile.

Left unregulated, emotions can have disastrous consequences in our quest for knowledge. Humans have been proven to be fairly useless at predicting what will make us feel happy and secure.

And where does understanding find a rightful place in a world preoccupied with highly questionable facts?

AI Just Doesn’t ‘Get’ Me

As most of us have not been trained to regulate our emotions—as we enter the ‘brave new world’ of artificial intelligence (AI), with the Fourth Industrial Revolution already in full swing—machines that do not even possess emotions will undoubtedly lead us to a world of truly horrifying unintended consequences.

If you have ever been frustrated by an automated customer service system, imagine where AI might take us when it starts to dominate every aspect of our lives.

The value of relationships emotionally is something that machines will obviously struggle with, unless programmed by humans with emotional intelligence. More on AI later in this book.

Did you know that we are on the cusp of the biggest industrial revolution in history? One that we have been told very little about—let alone given any say over—that will leave our world largely unrecognisable by 2050.

The New Age Movement has been predicting a coming ‘awakening’ for many years now, but I doubt this tech revolution will be what they expect.

Religious organisations have likewise been promoting a coming saviour. More on that soon.

Many of us have been primed to look for positive change on the horizon. I would suggest that in this way many of us have been groomed to accept what would—without this grooming—be obviously unacceptable.

The extent of this grooming alone does not bode well for what The Great Reset, royalty, corporate leaders and government are all chirping about in chorus now might actually involve.

Massively promoted fake apocalyptic predictions, such as Y2K  and 2012 have made anyone aware of what is coming in a similar position to The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf.

The Great Reset, however, is not some archaic doomsday prediction or unplanned computer glitch. Royalty, government and corporations conducting a worldwide ‘reset’ in tandem is technically called fascism. Most with any understanding of history know fascism has never been a good thing. The uber-rich are dressing up The Great Reset to be in our interest, but if that is the truth why have we not been consulted and why have we been so heavily groomed?

Positive change doesn’t happen overnight. It can only be the result of slow, well thought out and measured steps. The uber-rich have never served anyone’s interests but their own, why would that suddenly change now?

When the World Becomes a Stage

Remember my work on NPD and my analogy between NPD and a stage hypnotist? As I mentioned previously, years of working with partners of people with this disorder and watching the same dramas play out in the world around me led me to see NPD everywhere.

Watching TV or looking at our smartphones leaves us in a position where it is not us who controls the show.

Why should we trust news stories, put out by the same industry whose first aim is to entertain us by suspending our disbelief? We see these stories on the same devices and through the same channels as we watch actors in hi-tech studios producing fiction aiming only to deceive. Now the uncanny valley has been bridged https://rke.abertay.ac.uk/en/publications/why-bridge-the-uncanny-valley-photorealism-vs-suspension-of-disbe computer graphics (CG) technicians cannot even tell the difference between what is a CG generated human speaking and real-life footage:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/make-videos-say-what-you-want-face2face/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-racist-legacy-of-computer-generated-humans/

Just as the stage hypnotist screens his audience making sure anyone who might be ready to question his ‘hypnotic powers’ is left powerless to intervene; TV’s real-life actors strictly control anyone who cares to question the act. Gaslighting (wrongly labelling a person as crazy) and social alienation are encouraged by sarcasm, mockery and more lies. Just like what happens to the partner of someone with NPD.

The idea that we live in an actor-based reality is one that only a person with an open mind, and who is thoroughly grounded in a self-governed belief system should check out. Otherwise, it might—understandably—drive a person mad.

No matter how convinced you are that what has been sold to you as truth is real, conflicting information from external sources can reach the point where it often appears that our narcissistic/codependent world has gone mad.

Land of the Free?

Why had I delved so far into subjects that would make any sane individual even doubt the reality of what we see on the news?

As a child, the first trauma I had experienced were nightmares that included highly repetitive audio that continued throughout the day while I was awake. I didn’t dare tell anyone. I already understood that what was happening to me would classify me as insane. I was terrified but not crazy. I would dream of bombs under our house and awaken to hear the ticking continue throughout the day. I would dream of a horse and carriage carrying me away and still hear the horses neighing as if miles away, days later when playing in the street. I look back at pictures of me throughout that time. First, a smiling relaxed and happy child, a year later, I looked a neurotic mess. Something had happened to me that I couldn’t comprehend and still can’t fully explain to this day. I will touch on the military operations against civilians that I discovered were going on in Northern California around that same time later in this book. Information meticulously detailed by an award-winning investigator that made my fears that something broadscale and terrifying was going on not seem so far fetched.

Back then—around the same time—a woman from my father’s church was shot and killed at our local bank. It was a crime that made the papers nationally and caused an intergenerational war. The SLA members that had committed the crime had previously kidnapped the 19-year-old granddaughter of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Patty Hearst drove the getaway car after having joined their ranks.

Before delving further into the depths of what can only be described as pure evil—that I discovered while pulling my beliefs apart to find a new narrative for myself—let’s start on a road back to sanity along the way.

The numbered points that will follow through this book are the framework of my ‘all-weather belief system’ for keeping yourself sane and safe while navigating a narcissistic and codependent world.

1. Stop Waiting for a Hero to Save You

My grandmother was born in 1883 and lived out her adult life expecting Jesus to return in her lifetime. My father—born in 1919—did the same.

If you believe that Jesus is sure to come soon—because of the strife and turmoil the world is experiencing now—consider that my grandmother raised my father through the Spanish flu pandemic, great depression and two world wars.

Or perhaps you believe in a political saviour; one that will somehow gain the majority and set the problems in our world straight? Only a brief look at history with an open mind should expose the improbability of that happening any time soon.

And what about Prince Charming? After reading what I have said about marriage, I hope you are beginning to see that he is not worth counting on and is assuredly a myth? A myth with a murderous dirty secret I will expose later in this book. On an emotional level, the more perfect the act a new man presents in a woman’s life, the more likely he has hidden away his vulnerability. The essential part that is needed at his ‘inner conference table’ if he is ever going to allow any joy in a life that they plan to share.

What is wrong in your world that needs a hero to set straight?

  • How would you survive if your paycheck stopped tomorrow?

Many people have discovered how easily that can happen with our current lockdowns—due to the Coronavirus—cycling through various parts of the world.

  • Or maybe you are living with insults and sarcasm directed towards you in your own home?

Healthy debate towards a consensus in a family is one thing, but disrespect and passive aggression should be seen as dangerous signals that you really shouldn’t ignore.

Don’t hit the snooze button waiting on heroes or saviours. Your life is the main feature, not the warm-up act. By the end of this book, I hope that I will have helped you decide to stand up for yourself and step out of The Narcissistic and Codependent Theatre and start putting things right for yourself and the people you care about in real life.

2. Start Following Your Conscience

Let’s face it, most of us avoid our conscience because we fear that—by insisting we give up our guilty pleasures—our conscience will cause us to suffer.

In reality, conscience cares for us in ways that nothing else can. The gut feeling you get about a favour being asked of you. The voice that tells you that you need your sleep instead of watching one more YouTube movie or looking for another news article to read late at night. In these cases, it is easy to see that our conscience is not depriving us, but wisely protecting our time and sleep.

Conscience is the foundation of the ‘all-weather belief system’ I will offer here.

Conscience does not depend on religious belief. It is a very personal inner state that should be sought with intention and free will. It should advise you what is right or wrong for you to do, not impose your views on someone else.

Instead of blindly following the dictates of your community leaders and peers, take time out every day to stop and ask yourself—deep down—what is the right thing for me to do? The benefits of locating and tuning into this personal moral compass are immense; the very difference between heaven and hell.

YouTube video

Conscience in Our Recent World History

With the world in the grip of the COVID 19 pandemic, it might be topical to share a historical example of our conscience caring for us—that might be wise for us to consider today; back to my American protestant ancestry.

I wonder how many people know about the opiate problem the world faced in the late 1800s or that heroin was marketed by the Bayer Corporation—just after the turn of the 20th century—as a cure for opiate addiction?

Or that peer-reviewed science has put forward evidence that many Spanish Flu pandemic deaths were caused by patients overdosing with aspirin?

Opiates were made prescription-only in 1919, the first time prescriptions to obtain a drug became required by law. This class of highly addictive painkillers had previously been sold everywhere, including heroin—syringes and all—even by mail order in the Sears Catalog! Women didn’t smoke or drink, but in high society injected themselves with morphine—and later—heroin in their thigh under the table. Children’s candy was even infused with the stuff!

With opiate-based pain killers off the open market in 1919, one can only guess that opiate addict’s withdrawal cravings were not satisfied by a single safe dose of aspirin. Addicts must have been downing as many aspirins as they could get their hands on!

One can only speculate how many deaths from addicts overdosing on aspirin were attributed to the Spanish flu.

Inside our Theatre of Narcissism and Codependency, mega-dosing with aspirin was the recommended protocol to deal with the Spanish Flu. Investigations, which have included the exhumation of bodies, now believe this protocol may have been much more deadly than the flu itself.

Mega dosing with aspirin came partly from panic, but also from the fact that Bayer’s new pain killer had only just been released with no one apparently aware of its dangers in high doses.

The Survivors

More reliable than these dangerous drugs, back in those days, was a firm American Protestant tradition that mothers be considered the ‘physician’ in their homes.

This tradition most certainly saved my father’s life when he contracted pneumonia in 1919, at six months of age. My grandmother wrapped his chest firmly in a warm compress using pyjama pants as the last layer, with the legs crossed over in the front and pinned firmly at the sides to keep the compress in place. It is a tradition for chest infections that has carried on in our family to this day.

Two churches that I know of from this era—both led by female prophets—built massive worldwide congregations by espousing a clean living health message that avoided the use of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. My grandmother belonged to one of those churches.

I can only speculate that the congregations of these churches were swelled mostly by men and women who sensed that “God’s own medicine” (Morphine) and Jesus pills (heroin laced pills handed out to the Chinese by Christian missionaries) were not the best solutions for dealing with sickness in their homes. This concern, based on conscience and personal observation of what drug use was doing to people, was certainly not what the estimated majority of up to 50 million addicts in the world (at that time) were advocating.

Where did all of those addicts go? It seems more than a coincidence that the exact same number of people were said to have died from the Spanish flu.

Outside of mainstream thinking back in those days, the people who put faith in conscience and their own judgement fared better than those trusting ‘a saviour’ in the guise of a new drug.

A new drug that I might mention is still sold without a prescription to this day.

It might be interesting to note that one of these women, Mary Baker Eddy, the female prophet of the Christian Science Church, was also an early civil rights activist.

Mrs Eddy’s brother, Albert, elected to the New Hampshire Legislature, was also a human rights activist who succeeded in having the law that imprisoned people for debt abolished.

These were other popular movements led by conscience, in times that sound very similar to our own!

Who Do We Trust?

As described in depth recently in a Netflix documentary titled The Social Dilemma, our conscience can no longer trust what we see on our TVs, smartphones or computer screens. Artificial intelligence plays against our search for information, serving up anything (it has discovered to work previously) that will keep us transfixed. The more screen time each social media platform can boast; the higher its value to advertisers. We are not social media website’s customers; we are their product sold to corporations who in turn attempt to sell their products to us.

AI is intentionally ‘farming’ our attention with little or nothing to do with truth in the information it serves up. If this is how AI is being used now, what lies ahead?

This corporate engine keeps us consuming by feeding our insecurities and fears. It’s advertiser’s love to make us feel anxious about ourselves. Most media programming aims to make us believe we need something outside of ourselves—that it’s advertisers just happen to sell—to make us feel acceptable to ourselves and the world.

‘Working on ourselves’ has become the new holy grail. Deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, toothbrush and toothpaste, razors, clothing and underwear, perfume or cologne, moisturisers, other skincare, makeup, tattoos, supplements and drugs, psychology, education, transport, jewellery, hair colour, nail colour, a thousand different hair and beauty products, diet and exercise programs alongside political and religious indoctrination that sells personal pardon and self-assurance in the form of pretend certainty that we are standing on the highest possible moral ground.

Only a hundred years ago, many of these products didn’t exist. People cleaned their hair by brushing it; men wore beards and men and women both made a lot of their family’s clothing. Our sense of community was also much stronger before we all began listening to the radio and watching TV.

Who is Your Tribe?

I would argue that as a society, we have differentiated along many of the wrong lines. By dividing the world into groups based on age, politics, religion, race, gender, sexual preference and specialised professions, have we built stronger communities? Do these groups have as much in common as we pretend they do? Stereotyping—along the wrong lines—puts every one of us in an isolated cage.

Schools once had classes with mixed age groups of students. Younger students learned about the world from older students, elders and mentors and not from their peers.

Gordon Neufeld writes about the dangers of peer attachment in his heartbreaking yet essential book Hold on to Your Kids. After 20 years of working as a psychologist in the field—helping families and friends of victims of teenage suicide—he found that peer rejection amongst young adults—who were also peer attached—was the single predominant cause.

Vertical attachment he found—where children’s primary emotional attachments are to people older and younger than themselves—was protective against suicide.

Youth suicide—and the despair it represents—is now at an all-time high.

Conscience and Inequality

Rather than dividing people into peer groups, if we really listen to our conscience in addressing the inequality in the world, might it be more important we differentiate along the lines of pay rates for labour? Income disparity, between the top and bottom, is now greater than ever. CEOs live in an entirely different world than their front line labour force.

And when addressing the issue of gender inequality, what about the often ignored statistics of female abortion and infanticide in the world? As quoted from Melbourne University’s website:

A preference for sons in patriarchal societies across the world means we are missing 126 million women.”

Correlated against the higher numbers of men dying from violence in the world, this disproportion in sex ratios is probably an underestimate of the true number of female infants that have been intentionally aborted or killed. Infanticide throughout history is widely acknowledged as largely hidden and under-reported—more on the horrifying sociological consequences of this practice later in this book.

Don’t Fall Off the Conscience Tightrope

Back to our divided community and inability to trust our mass media.

With so many hidden forces intent on hijacking good causes and dividing us now, conscience can no longer rely on mass movements but instead has become a more personal matter of survival.

Female prophets will not save us this time around! Each of us needs to follow our own conscience in making health decisions and how we treat our fellow citizens. Ultimately we must do this work as individuals, deciding what is right within our own workplaces, communities and homes.

What Conscience is Not

  • The feelings that result from codependency or a codependent mindset

Back to deconstructing beliefs that do not stand up to scrutiny. Conscience is not people-pleasing, false guilt, or the habit of valuing yourself based upon the opinions or behaviours of others.

People with a codependent mindset tend to mistake any negative judgment from others as conscience—making them easy to manipulate and exploit.

Feeling distraught that you may have made someone feel bad by disagreeing with them, is not conscience but codependency.

Most church congregations, alongside TV and Smartphone audiences, are codependent at their core. Little of the show is about creativity, innovation or open-minded research and investigation. Instead, we are encouraged to focus on the coming religious or political saviour or working towards becoming a more acceptable and respectable version of ourselves.

Anyone questioning the prevailing narrative is judged and often gaslighted (incorrectly labelled as crazy). More on gaslighting soon.

Codependents need to find the inner voice that tells them right from wrong. They then need to find the strength to follow that voice inside of them and step away from the stage hypnotist’s act.

The perspective and wisdom conscience and emotional intelligence can offer will help this person find the courage to stand up for what is right for themselves and the people in their care.

  • Media driven agendas (on either side of an issue) that try to sell you something—preying on your prejudices, hopes, and fears

As described in The Social Dilemma—mentioned above—media agents spend countless hours—and dollars—developing narratives that serve interests that are generally not our own. This may be as simple as “click-bait” headlines created only to raise advertising revenue—feeding the media’s own dollar making machine. It also includes corporate-funded research that has been deliberately biased to cause an audience to believe one product or medical protocol is healthier than another.

More sinister still is content created to sway public opinion, inciting people to violence and even war. The excellent independently produced documentary by John Pilger, The Coming War on China, provides a chilling example of this. I highly recommend you watch it today.

It is much easier to spot the agenda behind a position we disagree with than one to which we adhere. The agendas we spot are usually not aimed at us.

A historical example is Marilyn Monroe’s numerous interviews saying she kept her figure from eating eggs, meat, and dairy—especially for breakfast. This was part of a hidden advertising campaign led by Edward Bernaise. It could be described as a direct marketing war on the plant-based cereal breakfast American protestant businessman John Harvey Kellogg had promoted for years. John Harvey Kellogg, likewise, had his own agenda.

Eating bacon and eggs for breakfast was obviously not aimed at Seventh Day Adventists—the church Kellogg was eventually disfellowshipped from—Muslims or practising Jews; none of which eats pork. Likewise, Kellogg’s claim that Cornflakes was an anaphrodisiac intended to curb sexual lust was clearly aimed at puritans and not the secular crowd.

The claims and counterclaims of what constitutes a healthy breakfast continue to this day.

  • Conspiracy theories and gaslighting

Conspiracy theories often fall within the media agenda realm. Gaslighting and conspiracy theories often go hand in hand.

While working on this book, my husband, Steve, reminded me that we would all do well to remember that conspiracy is a crime. People with theories on potential conspiracies are no different than armchair detectives who develop theories about a murder.

With the desperate poverty in the world today and the majority of wealth held in so few hands, can anyone seriously doubt the rich conspire to maintain their wealth and control?

Conspiracy theories should be taken seriously, and if a crime has been committed, it should be investigated and prosecuted. Likewise, if people with a hidden agenda are discovered intentionally putting forward false theories—for whatever reason—this should also be explored and exposed.

If someone falls victim to a false theory—deliberately put forward to gaslight them—whose fault is that? Most of us these days have little understanding of who is behind promoting most of what we believe.

Tolerance and interest in others’ beliefs—no matter how crazy they might sound to us—will always help keep us united as a community against larger and more important threats.

This is tough in a codependent society, with us all focused on the enemy being our own insecurity and striving so desperately to fit in.

Conspiracy Theories in Recent History

Back in the late 90s, for instance, I once read about a broad survey that had been conducted in the Australian community. It was found that over 60% of people believed that UFOs were genuine alien spacecraft that world governments knew about but kept secret. Most of these same people also understood that talking about this subject might cost them friendships or even their jobs. Because UFO enthusiasts had been regularly gaslighted in the media, everyone knew that UFOs were something that should never be discussed at work.

For how many years have we been fed a rich diet of movies that feature space and alien beings? Fiction sure—but UFO sightings have also had a lot of press. The X Files and similar shows also put forward the government coverup theory. Considering the TV shows and movies we have all been raised on, is it any wonder that many people would believe in UFOs? What is so crazy about that?

But even today few people feel safe to talk about their honest beliefs about aliens and their supposed spacecraft. The fear of being ridiculed keeps our mouths firmly shut. This is a classic example of codependence in a community. J.K. Rowling touched on this theme in the Harry Potter series, where the evil villain Voldermort was known by the community as “he who must not be named.”

Naming our fears is uncomfortable for sure, but also helps us discuss and tame them.

Catagelophobia is the fear of being ridiculed. A genuine and normal fear that I would like to name in this way.

A fear that is deliberately used against us in the Theatre of Illusion, to keep us feeling we cannot and should not say what we really believe.

Fill the broadcasting schedule with shows about spaceships and aliens. Also include programming with talkshow hosts and news reporters who drop in mockery and sarcasm making fun of anyone who believes that UFOs or aliens might be real.

It doesn’t matter that the majority of the population back then believed in the possibility of alien life more advanced than ourselves. They themselves felt alienated and knew they must be extremely cautious about what they said.

As I will describe in more detail later in this book, immediately addressing and overcoming our catagelophobia may be vital for protecting our freedom, no matter what we believe.

Conspiracy, Women & Catagelaphobia

Through my life, I have, at times, been a fan of sci-fi and popular science. Most women have a higher level of catagelophobia than men. They avoid talking about these or other subjects—that might subject them to ridicule—especially with other women. UFO and sci-fi buffs are usually men. Scully and Mulder from the X Files come to mind. Scully—a woman—the sceptic, Mulder—a man—the believer.

Most women with children today have no choice but to work, many in highly specialised positions. At home, we play stricter roles than most men—statistically doing much more of the unpaid labour—with little or no time or space left to follow our own interests. I have also found that women, in general, tend to be more sensitive about being considered stupid. Considering the negative stereotyping women deal with every day, this is a fear I completely understand.

The Garden of Eden Story, for instance, at the beginning of the bible—seen rationally—is wresting any decision making authority from women. I mean look at the mess Eve got us into! Why should husbands ever trust their wives again?

Is this the reality you see in your life? From where I sit I would say that for the good of everyone in this world, wives and mothers need a lot more respect.

Some women shouldn’t be trusted for sure, but exceptions don’t prove a rule.

This scapegoating of women and doubting their judgement is a pattern seen throughout history by authority figures intent on exploiting human labour. Ironically it is the exploitation of women’s labour that is generally the goal. Send men out in the hills to shoot each other and then round up the women and children to work in ‘free trade zones.’ A much easier task once the men are distracted and made to feel they are weak or unmanly for listening to their wives.

Men treating women as inferior and ‘not to be trusted’ is propaganda—courtesy of our world’s male-dominated corporate war machine—which as far as I can gather is as old as time. More on the murderous mechanics of how this system is perpetuated later when I expose Prince Charming’s Dirty Secret.

It’s a system that hurts us all.

In reality, men are not weak for listening to their wives. Considering your partner’s views, with respect and consideration, is an essential executive management skill. Balancing power in our families is the only rational road to peace in our homes and broader communities.

To be truly educated, women, along with men, need to be open to a broad range of viewpoints. Women must find the courage to deal with their catagelophobia and resist the hypnotist’s act.

Women would do well to become aware that the self-love of permitting themselves to follow a broad range of interests, will also make them more loving and interested in their family and friends.

Conspiracy and Gaslighting Today

Despite the gaslighting, it may subject you to, healthy curiosity about life and the world around us is not the road to extremism the self-satisfied mocking talking heads on TV pretend it to be. Healthy curiosity about life and the world around us is—in fact—a good antidote to egotism and extremism. It takes courage to stand up and question the stage hypnotist’s act.

Are Anti Vaxxers or Flat Earthers (the latest targets for scapegoating the world’s problems on), for instance, really that stupid or crazy that they genuinely deserve the derision often levelled at them? Are they really to blame for the state the world is in right now? Or are they just people interested in exploring and challenging the baseline scientific data our current world view is based on?

Government and corporate corruption are much more likely to blame for the world’s problems, that receive very little attention in the press.

Flat Earth

If looked at with an open mind, The Flat Earth movement, for instance—which cops the most severe ridicule and gaslighting at present—is a fascinating phenomenon.

Flat Earthers are certainly not, as slyly suggested at one point in The Social Dilemma, people prone to inciting violence in the streets.

Something of a renaissance of the renaissance man; flat earthers, could be considered the new Davincis and Galileos of our times. Ready to take on “The Church” of settled science with hands-on experiments and a holistic approach to knowledge. One that, if nothing else, exposes art’s staggering role in our understanding of scientific truth.

“Show us pictures of the earth as a globe and footage of real-life spacecraft that are not CG (computer graphics)”, they ask NASA with little or no response.

Is it a coincidence that many early scientists were also artists? How much of our understanding of science comes from cinematography and literature and earlier works of art? What proofs do we have of the things we believe, if we clear away popular culture and just look at the scientific data? The line between fact and fiction these days has become very hard to distinguish. Hands-on practical scientific experimentation (as many flat earth enthusiasts conduct) should always be encouraged!

A scientific theory is just that; theory. The standard theory is the best we have at any particular time in history. New hypothesis and theories need to be encouraged for scientific discovery to progress.

Cosmology is a subject that cannot be described as settled science. If you have any doubts about this check out the BBC documentary https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x225pr1 Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong?

In that documentary scientists—a few even responsible for our Standard Model—practically beg for that model to be challenged and knocked down. With 99.9% of the universe now classified as ‘dark matter’ that cannot be detected or measured, only described and set aside so that the Standard Model’s math still functions.

Flat earthers are the new alchemists, if you will, throwing out all certainty to challenge our dangerous era of overconfidence and over-specialisation. Helping us question what specialists all kept on a ‘need to know’ basis really know about the bigger picture.

Studying cosmology, including more serious contenders for a new model—such as the Electric Universe Theory—is certainly a pastime for those who have settled the more urgent issues their conscience might point out to them. Issues such as housing and income security that we will get to later in this book.

But moving past over-specialisation and globalism may be important for our personal survival in the times ahead. Around our house, these days, Steve and I certainly have to play many more roles than we used to. We are also becoming much more involved in our local community. We do not have the time or money to conduct scientific experiments on cosmology. I will say, however, that if we did have more of both, I would happily join that exploration. To suggest that people who want to get out in nature and do experiments that question ‘settled science’ are dangerous, to me is an exceptionally dangerous idea.

Steve and my shared interest in exploring subjects often considered taboo, is a lot of what has kept our marriage interesting and real.

Anti-Vaxx

More prominent in the media today is the vaccine debate. Those who support vaccines would say that if you don’t vaccinate, you are putting others at risk. No matter if you believe that anti-vaxxers may have been deliberately misled by conspiracy theories, you might consider if your conscience really feels okay about allowing people to be bullied into accepting any medical procedure they truly believe might cause them harm?

That is a dangerous precedent to set. The agendas fed to us on both sides of the vaccine controversy rarely address this point. Lest we willingly accept totalitarianism; conscientious objection and consent are principles that should always be protected.

Considering what I have outlined earlier about aspirin overdose deaths contributing to the Spanish Flu Pandemic, might give us pause. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say. Unbiased research collaborations such as cochrane.org are a good place to start when deciding if a drug you are considering is safe.

My personal experience with vaccinations causes me trauma to this day, in part because a close friend of our family contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome after receiving a flu vaccination in the late ’70s. I visited him in the hospital more than once. A grown man with 5 children who had previously been active, vibrant and fit, lay paralysed and on life support and only able to blink. He was in that state for nearly 6 months and was lucky to survive. My father (not only an Osteopath but also a GP) was very cautious about prescribing just about anything by the end of his long career. His own experience of hurting people with drugs he had trustingly given them, haunted him for much of his later life.

The idea of mandatory vaccinations terrifies me. Flu vaccines in particular after my experience seeing what one shot did to Alan, and the truth I uncovered about The Spanish Flu.

Am I an anti-vaxxer? No. Any drug I consider taking will be researched and judged on its individual risks and merits. I would add that any drug or procedure administered to a healthy person—to prevent them from getting sick—needs to be considered with extra caution: A humorous and factual movie about The Epidemic of Fake Disease by Dr Rohin Francis can be viewed at https://youtu.be/yNzQ_sLGIuA

YouTube video

Standing up Against Conspiracy Theory Gaslighting

Regardless of my own thoughts on these topics, I will not stand by and allow anyone to be gaslighted for their beliefs. I will stand on the side of anyone who is being scapegoated and ridiculed by our society. Call me a Flat Earther, Anti-Vaxxer or Conspiracy Theorist if you like. I would say that kind of name-calling, says a lot more about anyone ready to use those terms as insults than they do about me or my beliefs.

Conspiracy & Censorship

The Social Dilemma avoids discussing that the kind of divisive propaganda—that they air concerns about being pushed on us through social media today—has occurred since the beginning of written history. Not a good idea spoiled by a bad business model as the documentary suggests, Google from its inception, was a military financed operation, collecting intel on us all at a level that should cause any rational person fear. Fake News —including conspiracy theories—has now become the chilling target of these tech giants. How will investigative journalism and healthy scientific debate survive if they are allowed the kind of censorship they now so obviously seek?

Conspiracy & Counter Intelligence

Let’s remember that a false conspiracy theory—if deliberately put forward to scare and gaslight any group of people in our community—is a conspiracy in itself. This might sound complicated, but in reality, has a simple name in military operations. It is called counter-intelligence and its practice as old as time. Gaslighting is rampant in our world right now. It is also known as controlled opposition. Make your opponents look violent or crazy and—by swaying public opinion—you are miles ahead in winning your war. This, of course, doesn’t make this strategy okay.

Back to my childhood, there is a lot of evidence that a counter-intelligence operation occurred in California in the late 60s through into the 70s when the military tested LSD on the population, instigating a wave of violence and terror. Their aim, in part, was to gaslight the peace and black rights movements, both of which had previously been led by level headed politicians and academics with good reputations and their community’s respect.

More sinister perhaps—if anything could be more sinister than promoting war—is the highly substantiated evidence that the CIA was also using LSD on kidnapped subjects—in doses that equal prolonged and inconceivable torture—to create controlled killers with multiple personalities; kidnapped ‘assets’ that could be directed to kill and then forget—or disassociate—from what they had done.

Fake news? Propaganda? Perhaps, but why was there a wave of serial killers in California and the Pacific Northwest throughout that time? And why did it take the award-winning investigative journalist, who published this evidence, over 20 years to get his book out? My neighbourhood was targeted by one of the worst. Joseph James DeAngelo, known first as the East Side Rapist and later as the Golden State Killer who was only caught and sentenced recently. As it turns out, he was a policeman investigating break-ins through the daytime and raping and murdering people in their homes at night.

Just to highlight how weak and vulnerable we are, Joseph James DeAngelo would make distinctive calls to his victims weeks or months before the break-ins, but still, no one could stop or catch him. So much for conquering our limiting beliefs. Our whole community felt vulnerable and terrified.

DeAngelo described his actions being carried out by a different personality, “I did all that, I didn’t have the strength to push him out,” DeAngelo said before his sentencing, “He made me. He went with me. It was like in my head, I mean, he’s a part of me. I didn’t want to do those things. I pushed Jerry out and had a happy life. I did all those things. I destroyed all their lives. So now I’ve got to pay the price.”

This exact idea of a multiple personality killer was dramatised 30 years before DeAngelo was caught, in a series called Twin Peaks—set in the Pacific Northwest.

Tom O’Neill’s book Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, certainly helped cast my childhood nightmares in a new light. I have learned enough not to want to know more; I am just glad that I now live a long way away.

Karen O’Donnell’s advice comes to mind. I have finally come up with a narrative that helps makes sense of what I experienced throughout that time.

In light of the terror inflicted on a civilian population by CIA and military operatives, my childhood ‘nightmares’ could have resulted from some hi-tech experiments that have not yet been investigated or disclosed. It has taken this long for me to find the courage to talk about it. How many other children might this have happened to? Where is my witness community, who will believe what I say happened to me?

As it stands, without evidence of something tangible that caused those ‘nightmares’—which sometimes went on for days—I can still share that I spent countless nights lying awake in terror, after hearing stories about The East Side Rapist’s evil antics in homes not far from ours. In the daytime, I watched TV reports—that were validated by my father’s friend being shot in our local bank—about the wave of terror and violence that had been set loose in California at that time.

This was the backdrop my nightmares were set to. Is it any wonder they caused me PTSD? This was the beginning of a life long search for answers that would finally help me feel safe in my home at night.

Far from my discoveries terrifying me, they helped me understand that the kind of evil that had been such a feature of my childhood did not occur naturally in human society.

Conspiracy in Politics

Politics too had disappointed me in that search. The world of politics—from all I can gather—is run by families of what can only be called gangsters, with democracy a failed system at its core. I arrived at this sad fact in part from reading years of military intel written for mercenary military operatives in the field.

Military and political parties work for opposing commercial interests. None give a hoot about us except to influence our beliefs or as Noam Chompsky puts it to, ‘manufacture consent.’

Abridged from an article by American writer and investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s website: Strategic Culture Foundation:

Gallup: Americans Tend to Trust Only News That Confirms Their Beliefs; Highly Educated Americans Are by Far the Most Closed-Minded Group

Overwhelmingly in America, only Democratic Party information-sources are trusted by Democrats, and only Republican information-sources are trusted by Republicans. Each side distrusts the other’s information-sources. Gallup’s news-report aptly noted the important fact that “This plays into the political polarization in the U.S. national discourse.” The more prejudiced a population are, the more polarized it will be. Of course, one would expect this to be the case, but Gallup has now found striking new empirical evidence for it—that the public’s closed-mindedness is greatly increasing America’s political polarization. Each side is craving propaganda instead of truth, but each side’s voters want only the type of propaganda that is funded by the billionaires who also fund that side’s politicians and control that side’s ‘news’ media. Consequently, American politics is controlled by the conflict between liberal billionaires versus conservative billionaires—totally controlled by billionaires (instead of by the public). There is the liberal herd, and the conservative herd, but they’re both herds—not by the public in an actual democracy…

Neither Democrats nor Republicans can become exposed to the other side’s evidence and arguments unless they see those—the other side’s evidence and arguments, both for its own case and against the opposite side’s case (i.e., against the case that oneself believes). Not to see the opposite side’s viewpoint is to be blind to it, and thus to become locked into whatever oneself believes…

What all of the billionaires want is what the American public get as their Government. It’s bipartisanship amongst its billionaires. That’s what produces this Government’s policies…

Everyone has prejudices, and truth can predominate only if people are constantly skeptical of the sources that they are relying upon—constantly trying to root out and replace whatever false beliefs they have. This is the essence of the scientific method. Democracy depends upon it. Aristocracy requires the opposite. America has the opposite…

The leading segment is also the most closed-minded segment. These are crucial agents of the billionaires, and they crucially inculcate into the next generation of Americans the aristocracy’s values…

This means that the leaders keep themselves, conceptually, inside a cocoon. They have minimal contact with the most vulnerable members of the society, which is the less-educated members. That enhances inequality of opportunity, throughout the society. Since the most-highly-educated Americans are the group that are the most-closed to opinions which are contrary to their own, it’s easy for the most-highly-educated Americans to view individuals who disagree with those persons’ views as being simply a “basket of deplorables.” Their disagreement then becomes their contempt. ‘Facts’ about politics are—for those persons, highly educated persons—more derived from their values and priorities, than their values and priorities are derived from the political facts. Scientific epistemology is being turned upside-down, regarding political issues, in such a country. Overwhelmingly, some sort of faith, instead of any sort of science, determines what individuals in such a country believe about politics

The leadership’s minimal contact with the public makes exceedingly unlikely the leadership’s compassion, concern about the sufferings that they, themselves, are causing down below. Actually, though every aristocracy claims to want to improve conditions for their public, the reality is that whenever doing that would entail their own losing power, that claim becomes exposed to be sheer hypocrisy—a lie; often a self-deception, and not merely a deception against the public. Deceiving themselves about their own decency is easy because they have minimal contact with the most vulnerable members of the society, the very people whom they claim to care the most about (and to be working in politics to help). Fakery is built into each and every aristocracy. Americans’ strong tendency to be closed-minded causes the aristocratic con to be widely accepted as if it were instead truth

This is a perverse situation, which bodes ill for the future of the entire nation. Any country which is like this is not only an aristocracy instead of a democracy, but it is greatly disadvantaged, going forward. It will be disadvantaged both in the arts and in the sciences. Its future will be stultifying, instead of dynamic. Aristocracies tend to be this way. Also, because it will remain highly polarized, its internal ideological frictions will waste a large proportion of the nation’s efforts. As a nation, its forward-motion, its progress, will thus largely be crippled, by its internal discord and distrust, between the two warring factions of its aristocracy—and friction between the respective followers on each side…

This describes a declining culture—a nation that is in decline.” (emphasis added)

Eric Zuesse

What this article puts forward is that the political debate in itself is a conspiracy enacted to divide us. Narcissistic and codependent theatre at its zenith. With what both sides of billionaires want—namely the fourth industrial revolution—never being openly discussed.

There are no good guys on the horizon in politics or war. What humans need is not majority rules, but consensus, based on mutually beneficial agreements made between equals. That cannot happen from the top down in politics. It needs to start in our communities and homes.

Instead of calling people crazy for tuning in to a religious, scientific, political or military media narrative that differs from your own, perhaps you can start by exploring any possible hidden agenda behind the narrative you subscribe to? This will certainly take courage on your part.

What will happen if you discover your worldview is based on lies and that it is you that has been deliberately misled? Unless you find the courage to explore your own beliefs with an open mind, what gives you the right to insist that others are misled or crazy for not doing the same? As this recent Gallup poll attests; most people don’t want to pull back the curtain, they just want to watch the show—but who are the scriptwriters and what are they selling us and where will our current story end?

One woman who has conquered her catagelophobia is the beautiful, courageous and intelligent Rosa Koire. Watch her Youtube interview titled The Hidden Agenda Behind The Planned Destruction of America if you would like some ideas about the plan underlying our current ‘Punch and Judy’ political divide. https://youtu.be/EGA18p_XerE

YouTube video

Another interview about the end of the American empire—this time with Colonel Wilkerson—a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Colonel Wilkerson paints a similar scenario, just from a different perspective. Note the best he says we can hope for by 2050 in light of what Rosa Koire has claimed. He paints this scenario as a positive outcome and is not honest about the fact it has been planned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx-c6IrB62Y&feature=emb_title

YouTube video

Using Wilkerson’s own metaphors; Scramble—in fact—has a Blueprint.

Who are They?

Who is behind this plan?

Neoliberalism and the corresponding libertarian movement was sponsored by the Mont Pelerin Society run by the ‘remnants’ of European royalty after WW2.

If you want to learn more about the Mont Pelerin Society, read: How the Neoliberals Stitched up the Wealth of Nations for Themselves, a Guardian article—by the brilliant journalist George Monbiot—now more than 13 years old.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/aug/28/comment.businesscomment

How a cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the economic debate, and we are now dealing with the catastrophic effects.

From that article;

The first neoliberal programme of all was implemented in Chile following Pinochet’s coup, with the backing of the US government and economists taught by Milton Friedman, one of the founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society. Drumming up support for the project was easy: if you disagreed, you got shot. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank used their power over developing nations to demand the same policies.

But the most powerful promoter of this programme was the media. Most of it is owned by multimillionaires who use it to project the ideas that support their interests. Those ideas which threaten their interests are either ignored or ridiculed. It is through the newspapers and TV channels that the socially destructive notions of a small group of extremists have come to look like common sense. The corporations’ tame thinkers sell the project by reframing our political language (for an account of how this happens, see George Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of an Elephant!). Nowadays I hear even my progressive friends using terms like wealth creators, tax relief, big government, consumer democracy, red tape, compensation culture, job seekers and benefit cheats. These terms, all invented or promoted by neoliberals, have become so commonplace that they now seem almost neutral.”

Thanks to Richard Stanley from https://postflaviana.org/ for uncovering much of this information. May he rest in peace.

Personal Politics & Guns

My politics these days are personal. Is there any point in getting caught up in trying to change society’s laws, without first correcting the power imbalance in our own homes?

How can we successfully call for gun control, for instance? Will the people who enforce those laws carry guns? And will those laws take guns out of the hands of our true enemies?

With technology all getting smaller and cheaper, can you honestly believe that guns will be any different? Automatic weapons can already be 3D printed. Like most other moves that our conscience may consider beneficial for the world, there is no simple political answer to how we deal with the terrifying issues that smaller, cheaper and more deadly personal weapons will create.

I am happy to live in a society in Australia where guns are largely prohibited. But can I really stand in self-righteous indignation against societies that don’t do the same? What about countries where guns are already everywhere?

Guns in Australia are not popular for a reason which few people here even know. Many of the guns shipped to Australia in our distant history were rejects from gun manufacturers in the US. The guns sent here were more likely to hurt the person using them. People in Australia soon learned that it was better not to trust guns for personal protection. I believe that the cultural fear of guns in Australian society has more to do with this history than it does with any laws.

Still, while examining our personal politics, we must tread with caution. Belief gives people a lot of security, and deconstructing belief can have a truly negative effect. Do cattle being raised for slaughter for instance—as some people say we are now akin to—really want to know the reality of their existence? Would knowing their impending fate help them in any way?

This is an extreme example. Most of us have more choices in our lives than cattle. We do, however, at this point in history, need to make those choices wisely and deal with reality as it is and not how we would like it to be. Where is our world heading right now with so much gaslighting and hate all around us? Where will the conflict and inequity in the world lead to if we cannot even start by addressing the inequality in our own homes?

A favourite line of mine dealing with victims of domestic abuse is, “Just how bad will things have to get before you understand that it is you who needs to take charge?”

The dangers involved in following the crowd must be balanced against the very real danger of the crowd turning against you. The fear I have experienced on this narrow path is real. It might help to remember that fear comes in waves and that these waves pass. Not being scared in the times we live in today—in my mind—would be of much greater concern.

Use conscience first to establish your position and emotional intelligence to evaluate your environment and move forward in measured steps.

To keep our communities strong, we must research what is behind media-driven agendas with conscience and an open mind—not allowing our families to be divided or gaslighted for exploring beliefs that might differ from our own.

  • Your personal ambition or strategy for success

No matter what excuses you find to focus solely on your ambitions; if you don’t take time out every day to set aside your aspirations and consider your conscience, you will be creating hardship and chaos for someone somewhere. This negative effect may at first impact people you can marginalise, but will eventually find its way back to hurt you.

For example, people feeling enriched and clever about ‘hunting down’ goods and services at the lowest possible price, allows corporations to justify exploiting third world countries. While people fool themselves this kind of bargain hunting only hurts big corporations who can afford it—and that third world workers are happy to work for a bowl of rice—the truth is that this exploitation eventually comes around to hurt everyone.

Men’s Ambitions Don’t Include Helping Out with the Unpaid Labour at Home

Likewise, putting yourself above others in your household/family by doing less than your share of the unpaid labour in your home will, similarly, hurt the most vulnerable members of your family and eventually hurt you all.

In the short term, you might get away with ignoring the inevitable complaints levelled against you—by claiming the person issuing these complaints is mixed up or crazy—but gaslighting family members that are doing the bulk of the unpaid ‘dirty’ work at home (to avoid doing your fair share) will distort your view of reality in dangerous ways—eventually hurting you and the people you love. Is the City of Failed Emperors really where you want your own story to end?

Maybe you don’t understand how common this is? So common that I would call it the number one marriage conflict cliché:

a. Wife complains about her husband not helping more at home.

b. Husband goes to a local bar and finds—just about any other man drinking at a bar at night—who will join him in saying ‘Your wife is obviously a crazy bitch’.

Wives are commonly described as ‘crazy’, ‘hysterical’, ‘anxious’, ‘nightmares’, ‘the ball and chain’, ‘psycho’, etc., in general, for simply asking their husband and children to help with more of the unpaid labour that needs doing at home.

“But he works for the money,” people will say. “He deserves to relax when he gets home.”

Chances are these days that his wife will work too—and statistically will also be much more likely to foot more of the couple’s household expenses from her pay.

Women who succeed in getting their husbands to help with the housework are also often considered a ‘castrating bitch’. The stereotype is so ugly that most women give in—still harbouring a lot of resentment—and do a lot more than their share in a couple’s home.

Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women by Susan Maushart, describes this situation in depth.

Women’s Ambitions Can Lead their Husbands to Bankruptcy, Suicide or Mental Breakdown

In general, women tend to gaslight their husbands by shaming them for not providing more money than he is able—or feels prudent—to provide.

Wives running up exorbitant credit card debt, and then shaming or gaslighting their husbands—if they complain about their spending—is a common complaint I hear from men.

Balancing Personal Ambition With Available Resources

If you are being gaslighted by your own family and treated as a second class citizen, understanding the concept of gaslighting as a shield against fear can help you to empathize and get underneath what is actually going on. Empathy and emotional intelligence both are strategic and conscience-driven tactics to face and combat injustice at home, professionally and in society in general. Emotional wounds are at the heart of the fear that drives individuals to elevate or protect their status at others expense.

Empathy aside, the unpaid labour in a family should be distributed evenly if your household income is to be evenly shared. Empathy does not mean you should allow others to exploit you.

From a narcissistic mindset, even in the face of criticism—which deep down they know they deserve—people will ignore their conscience and look for other people in their family or community who will give them sympathy and defend their right to do less than their share. Unhealthy narcissism is largely indistinguishable from a term in psychology called ‘groupthink’. Gaslighters rarely work alone.

Group Think & Ambition

Groupthink is when a collective of people affirm their right to exploit or scapegoat another person—or group of people—and together help each other ignore their conscience to do what is right.

Groupthink is present wherever people are claiming that exploitation is tradition or preordained or that people with genuine fears, complaints or requests for help should be labelled as paranoid or crazy. Steve calls the cliché I describe above as a male ‘protection racket’ that I will describe in more detail later in this book.

Ignoring conscience and criticism using groupthink will, over time, create built-up resentment and hard feelings. As we see in the streets today with the BLM protests, people who use groupthink—as a means of protecting their status—may face anger when eventually the people whose exploitation or fears they excuse or ignore ‘snap’.

Once things reach this point, the blame will keep getting thrown around and cause an extreme downward spiral. Gaslighters and counter-intelligence operatives enter the terrain, using emotional or physical aggression and hysteria to discredit protestor’s complaints.

In our work, Steve and I witness this same downward spiral in family relationships every day; not something you would wish to occur in your home.

In families, counter-intelligence operatives are sometimes called ‘flying monkeys’. Most commonly children who will back their father saying their mother is crazy for wanting more help with the unpaid labour at home. ‘Flying monkeys’ may also include family members who support a wife insisting her husband support a lifestyle beyond their family’s means.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

For this reason, it is best to avoid gaslighting (claiming anyone who has a fear or complaint is crazy) and instead use empathy to address family members fears and complaints. Your needs must also be considered before agreeing on a new way forward.

Using empathy to deal with criticism is not weak but highly professional conduct. It is not easy to master but is a skill that may literally save your family from destruction.

If you are being gaslighted in your home, don’t resort to anger or violence! Instead, check out the steps we offer in Back From the Looking Glass. These steps will not only help a family dealing with injustice at home. We have had testimonials from smart individuals who have used these same principles successfully to change the prevailing narcissistic and codependent culture in organisations they work within.

Last on the subject of gaslighting for now. Gaslighters themselves should not be labelled as crazy, or when will the gaslighting ever end? Gaslighters are often trying to protect their own or their family’s status. This is a valid shield against fear. Understanding this may help if you are the one being exploited and labelled as crazy. Remember what I said above: emotional wounds are at the heart of the fear that drives one to elevate or protect their status at other people’s expense.

Again, using empathy will work better than blame. Clearly state that you understand status is important, but that you are not willing to donate more to that cause than you believe fair. What constitutes status to them? A clean home? A fancy car? Nice clean clothes? A stable home? It can’t all depend on you. How can your family’s status be maintained in a way that shares the input from everyone on the team?

If a family member feels you must live beyond your means to protect their status, perhaps suggest that they do a short course on healing their emotional wounds. Healing your own emotional wounds first will, of course, put you on more solid ground.

  • Blindly accepting criticism

Criticism or negative judgments against you may sometimes alert you to the fact you have not been considerate or fair. Accepted blindly, on the other hand, criticism can trigger co-dependent tendencies and set you up for exploitation instead.

Criticism needs to be evaluated using active-listening, conscience, empathy, and conflict resolution strategies to consider the specific issue at hand.

If someone is upset with you, ask your conscience first and then use our conflict resolution process at TheLoveSafetyNet.com to respond to the complaint using empathy. If the angry person will not let the issue be resolved, there is a chance they may be gaslighting or scapegoating you. In this case, please consider point 5 in this book.

You cannot insist that someone else use this process when you are upset with them. It is something you must master yourself. Defending yourself against exploitation will usually take a lot more than simply requesting a person play fair.

  • Imposing your views onto others

Conscience is our own personal guidance system. What is right for you may not be right for someone else.

Do I expect you to accept all of my claims here and take on my beliefs? Of course not. People insisting that everyone must adopt their views have usually fallen victim to the myth of democracy creating peace. Unless you are being paid to tell people what they want to hear, I can guarantee that trying to win a majority to your views will be a waste of your time.

3. Stop Romanticizing

Prince Charming’s Dirty Secret

How could it be that throughout history, so many stories have been told encouraging ‘common’ women to keep waiting for ‘their prince?’ Wouldn’t royalty prefer to marry one of their own? Why is their such a surplus of princes around, looking for a marriage that lacks an equal social footing?

Female infanticide is usually described as a practice that became necessary in poor communities that wanted to protect future generations from overpopulation—and hence starvation—and also avoid paying dowries for their daughters given in marriage.

While this may be true to some degree, the fact that female infanticide was predominantly practised in upper class or caste families is well documented but largely hidden—by being buried—amongst tomes of anthropological and sociological research.

Lower class families were expected to feel honoured to pay a heavy dowry for the privilege of their daughters marrying upwards in society.

In India, the Jahareja Rajput’s ‘removed’ virtually 100% of female live births prior to British suppression of the practice.”(Dikeman)

The British claimed to have ‘discovered’ this heinous practice and made concrete efforts to curb it. They identified the high caste khatris, bedis and rajputs as primarily responsible for infanticide in colonial India. Imperial reports regarded caste pride/hypergamy (the action of marrying a person of a superior caste or class) and the exorbitant expenditure on marriage/dowry as primarily responsible for these infanticidal deaths. Contemporary scholarly discourse has, however, countered these imperial claims and has shown how on the one hand colonial policies were primarily responsible for the failure in checking and on the other hand, perpetuating this menace. They (British) never found it worthwhile to examine the social effects of their own methods of governance and development that produced the milieu in which sons became even more preferred and dowry gradually acquired the very characteristics that the British purported to reform.” [Oldenburg 2003:17].

The British, I might add, legislated marriage in India as only legal with a dowry.

A similar hypergynous system probably occurred at least in parts of preindustrial Europe… There sex ratio distortions were greatest in the upper class and clear evidence of selective aggressive neglect and abandonment if not outright infanticide is provided. The importance of the traditional dowry in traditional Europe is well known… preferential female infanticide operates in a variety of human socioeconomic systems as a significant contributor to the maintenance of social structures ranging from 10-100% of female live births per social unit.”(Dikeman)

Female infanticide in many parts of the world has been as prevalent privately as it has been publically disavowed. Unbalanced sex ratios in a community, however, make the practice impossible to hide. While England has had a long history of queens on the throne, how many living female children did they produce compared to surviving male progeny?

Although these queens—either single or paired with a partner of equal or lower standing—have made more stable and trustworthy rulers throughout history, only a cursory glance at any royal or elite family tree in Europe or the Americas will show a predominance of healthy male descendants.

Upper class or caste women have not only been killed, abandoned or aggressively neglected throughout history; they have also been locked away in nunneries and infirmaries. Many who survived were spinsters or disinherited. The ones who did inherit usually did so under strict provisions in their father’s wills.

As Dikeman says in the quote above, this becomes a significant contributor to the maintenance of a male-dominated society. She goes on to say:

Female infanticide guarantees the operation of the model of male competitive aggression and reproductive success: in stratified societies it magnifies the natural discrepancies in in primary sex ratios between upper and lower classes that is a result of socio economic status and birth order.”

To this day, women are encouraged to marry upward. With fewer women in the upper socioeconomic classes, this shifts the out-of-balance birth ratio down to the lowest classes. Men without women to marry are then used as cannon fodder or inadequately paid labour.

Prince Charming doesn’t want to free your life from drudgery. He wants a wife that will bring his family a dowry and servitude. Don’t ask what will happen to any daughters you bear him, or what will happen to you if you don’t bear him sons.

The social implications for all humans in this practice are as vast as they are horrifying. Remember our stage hypnotist? His power is not based on anything but dominance.

The worldwide convention of men marrying women who are younger, less educated and less intelligent continues throughout most societies. Men who never marry are at the lowest end of the intelligence quotient with spinsters at the highest.

The Princess Bride, arguably the most popular cult movie classic of all time, challenges the Prince Charming trap for women head-on.

The Queen of Garbage

YouTube video

While women and men in the West may not be able to stop female infanticide in the world, we could become aware that a marriage based on equal social and intellectual standing is much more likely to balance power in our homes in a way that allows each of us to be loved and appreciated for who we are.

Inequality in marriage only serves upper-class male domination. An age-old conspiracy, if you will, that keeps us all divided to this day.

While researching this, Steve added that men feeling superior to their wives in society works as a kind of male protection racket. Any time a wife complains about her husband not doing his share, there exists an army of other men he can turn to that will always offer him ‘protection.’ Men are encouraged to protect their ‘me time’. Macho, competitive sport replaces the distraction of the battlefield.

Feeling the need always to project a higher position of status at home leads to problems that often become unmanageable for men. All of us need to learn to step up and step down at times, depending on what problems we face. The need to hide one’s vulnerability at all times is not a comfortable position of power to occupy—especially at home.

Home should be a place we can relax and be ourselves, which can only happen if we embrace equality and balance power in our homes.

People who believe that female infanticide is a natural phenomenon, that is essential for controlling overpopulation, should dig a little deeper. Raising families out of poverty is a far more moral and reliable means of stabilising population growth than killing female babies and allowing the rich to use poor unmarried men to kill themselves by being worked to death or to kill each other on the battlefield.

Some of the most despotic and violent countries, such as Saudi Arabia have the lowest numbers of female-to-male ratios in their societies. Surely we can deal with overpopulation in much healthier ways than promoting violence, inequality and war?

Out of balance birth ratios are also known to be a major cause of wife stealing, child marriage and sex trafficking.

Love is Not the Answer to Every Question

Another disastrous romantic belief about marriage is that it is a panacea for loneliness, poverty and insecurity. As Sidney Pointier—as Mark Thackeray—says in the film To Sir With Love,

Marriage is no way of life for the weak, the selfish, or the insecure.”

The decision to marry is much like starting a business partnership. No one is stupid enough to believe that finding the right business partner will magically lead to a successful business. This step is obviously only the beginning; after finding a suitable partner, there is a vast number of policies and procedures that must be decided on and put in place. Just like starting a business; a Mission Statement, Roles, Budgeting, Facility Layout etc. will all help to create efficiency alongside peace and longterm prosperity.

Marriage is a partnership that should be conducted between adults who consider themselves equals, with shared interests and mutual respect. Children raised in this environment—with realistic expectations put on them—will grow up feeling confident and secure. Political activism needs to begin at home.

Achieving this kind of power balance in your family is what most of my previous books and resources are about.

Running a Functional Home is Not a Romantic but Utilitarian Endeavour

Are you trying to create an idyllic marriage for yourself, and storybook childhood for your children?

Rather than wishing to play out a naively chosen fairytale, your family is probably more concerned that you have matured enough emotionally to:

a. put yourself in their shoes,

b. share information honestly—even when it is uncomfortable,

c. deal gracefully and intelligently with criticism.

Family life is not a romance novel. Parents need to make tough and ugly decisions sometimes. For instance, taking computer games, TV and smartphones away from children, and giving them roles of responsibility in your household, may take all your mettle to accomplish, but—in the end—may also save your whole family from the destruction and despair caused by romantic drama in your home.

Wise leadership has nothing to do with romance. It requires us to develop roles that our family members feel motivated by and are aligned with—while also providing enough challenge for members to feel a sense of pride and belonging in themselves.

A Call to my Brothers & Sisters

Are you still waiting for Prince Charming? Or perhaps you like the idea of a wife—or mother—who will play subservient to your every whim? This type of longing for status within a marriage leads straight to Blue Beard’s Castle. If you haven’t read that fairytale, I suggest the version in the groundbreaking book, Women Who Run With the Wolves.

The dungeon filled with dead women in Bluebeard’s castle is less a metaphor than it is truth. I have broken Bluebeard’s royal command by using the key and opening that door.

In the fairytale, once the dungeon has been opened, the key starts to bleed. When trying to hide the key, the blood destroys the Queen’s wardrobe of fancy royal clothes.

As happens in that tale, this book is my personal call to my ‘brothers and sisters’ to come and help me destroy Bluebeard. Who will come and help?

Changing the attitudes of our culture towards marriage equality is something that will require a whole army of—male and female—influential minds.

4. Plan Family Adventures that Build Teamwork and Rapport

My father, as outlined above, was raised an American protestant. He was, however, also an inventor and explorer. He took our family on a trip to Death Valley when I was about ten years old. The trip aimed to buy a crystal he needed to build a crystal radio set with me. As a child that radio was genuinely awe-inspiring. Not a new ager by any means, Dad still gave me a clear demonstration that ‘the magic’ of crystals is something I will never scoff at. He also taught me to sail and how to use a sextant. My mother—raised Church of England, once shared her idea that God was water. I feel very fortunate that my father and mother both encouraged my sense of curiosity and adventure.

What can you do for fun together that doesn’t include eating or looking at a screen for a few hours? Think of some ideas—really—I dare you! Please share those ideas with us in the comments section below, and they might be included in the print version of this book when it is released.

5. Don’t Support People Who Use or Exploit You

Don’t demonise; instead, just stop giving more than others are willing to pay you for in some way.

Giving less may make your user angry at first—so make sure you do all you can to protect yourself and your interests—learning to say no, however, is the only way you will ever give mutual respect a chance.

Jordon Peterson is famous for saying that women are not paid as well as men because women are, in general, more agreeable. I will add that righting this for women doesn’t mean becoming disagreeable! Learning to become less agreeable doesn’t mean you need to be argumentative. It just means learning to politely and firmly say, “no”.

Don’t Feed the Wolves or Sharks

Establishing a fair exchange may involve changing the system you live and work within.

Try negotiating to fix your current system before starting a new one. Revolution is fertile ground for predators and never sure to create peace in the end.

Divorce, unfortunately, can be this type of revolution, allowing a whole new set of predators to enter your family’s landscape. Personally, Steve and I are not against divorce. We do, however, always advocate that couples—especially ones with children—do all they can to end the conflict first. This, of course, may not always be possible, but getting a clear perspective on your own situation and security is better than feeding already rich divorce attorneys or rushing into another relationship or family structure that may leave yourself or your children even further at risk.

6. Stop Playing the Victim

Worse than waiting for a hero can be rushing to find someone to blame for the problems you are facing. Everyone has experienced grief and hardship. Blaming others is likely to only to alienate you further.

Before seeking sympathy or handouts, be sure that you are making the best of what you already have.

A drowning man is not choosey about the rope thrown to him. Be careful that an offer of salvation won’t lead somewhere worse than you already are.

If you need help reorganising your life so that you are no longer used or exploited, ask someone you trust and who is willing and able to help you put a better system in place. Don’t ask if you are not willing to listen and consider that person’s viewpoint. Positive change will undoubtedly put you out of your comfort zone for a while until a new normal is established.

From victim to victorious was the motto I chose for myself while in the throws of balancing power in our home.

7. Stop Taking Other People’s Faults Personally

If you feel hurt that someone is not giving you what you need, before assuming they don’t care about you, consider if what they are doing is about their own immaturity.

If a person is rude to you, for instance, is it that they don’t care about you, or are they disrespectful to certain categories of people in general?

Insisting that your hurt feelings should be a reason for them to change their behaviour probably won’t work.

Most of us have a hard enough time keeping our feelings about ourselves positive than to be able to act in a way that keeps other people happy.

Instead, learn to deal with these situations in a way that protects your self-esteem.

In the case of someone rude to people who they judge as inferior to themselves, this behaviour will usually only change when doing so starts to make that person feel small. Developing witty comeback lines is a great way to protect yourself and accomplish this.

If someone regularly talks down to you, it might be time to pre-plan a response so that what they are doing stops hurting you and instead knocks them down just a peg or two.

“Are you right there?” is a common comeback line in Australia. In the US, “Was that meant to be funny?”, or, “Whatever”, are comebacks that come to mind. Look to movies and literature for examples. There are plenty to be found. “Yes, yes, yes”, was a fun one that I found watching Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot series.

People will generally only stop putting you down—to make themselves feel big—when doing so starts to make them feel small.

8. Deal With Your Self Righteous Indignation

Do thoughtlessness and stupidity easily anger you? Do you feel isolated in your superior knowledge and judgment? Do you feel lonely and misunderstood?

These are signs you may be trapped in a dangerous groupthink bubble—now sometimes called an echo chamber.

The more you learn to listen and consider other people’s beliefs with an open mind, the less isolated and anxious, you will begin to feel about the world.

Anxious and alienated vs a life filled with meaning and belonging. The choice is yours.

The gap finder exercises in the last chapter of The Love Safety Net Workbook may help lead the way out of your self imposed bubble. The work will be challenging but certainly worth your while.

9. Get Your Home and Income Secure and Organised

What changes need to occur in your life to give your family more peace and security?

If they involve people with power over your life; put yourself in their shoes and do some scenario planning.

See if you can best find how to allay their fears upfront. Think of how to win a connection. Then address the scenario that causes you the most fear and uncertainty. See if they will discuss their plans.

Even if it can’t be solved, you are better knowing in advance than living with that fear hanging over you.

For example, tuning into my conscience, I determined that the policy of short residential leases in Australia being standard (2 years is about the maximum offered) was responsible for most of our family’s problems in the past.

Long residential leases are a cause I hope to champion in Australia. The state of Victoria has already moved on it. The uncertainty in tenants’ lives in Australia is horrendous, not allowing people the security needed to establish a family home.

This led me to push the landlord of the place we have recently moved into to strengthen and extend the security of our lease.

This goes against the grain of what many people around us are advising. Many people see a long lease as risky in the current economic climate. Most people live on a week to week tenancy once their initial 12-month lease has expired. This being standard acclimatises people to uncertainty.

After doing a complete risk assessment of our financial and emotional security, I came to the opposite conclusion. Now is the best time for us to negotiate. Temporary accommodation is a sector that will survive whatever is in front of us economically, and for many years now we have sub-let rooms in the places we live.

Rental houses with a lot of bedrooms are generally easier to find—and are more affordable—as people struggle to get along with each other—and become more isolated—in our peer-oriented world.

After my assessment and then asking my conscience, I stood my ground against others’ fears and opposition towards me insisting on a long lease.

The owner of our place had offered a long lease to entice us to move in before we were ready and help him finish fixing up his house. He then proceeded not to make the repairs he had promised as his part of the deal. He framed our delay in signing a lease until the repairs were completed as us being difficult tenants. He then used this as an excuse to only offer a 2-year lease.

This man’s English is not great, and he used this as a cover for not allowing an agreement to be talked through. He would get angry when we said that we didn’t understand him and didn’t respond to our emails.

Steve got fed up and became resentful and was ready to burn our bridges. But we did not have the resources to move out of this house which is perfectly positioned for my long term goals in particular.

I finally managed to get Steve to calm down and protect us. That took many days of me being very stubborn—but also as calm as possible—considering the situation with our long term security again at risk.

I then pushed the envelope with the landlord and insisted that—based on our original verbal agreement—we get a long term lease in place. I also offered him a bit more rent if he would agree and also finish the repairs.

I did all of this in writing, using my legal knowledge which I knew would intimidate him.

Instead of responding in writing, he finally arranged a meeting. He brought a big friend along—probably at first as a means of intimidating us. This man ended up acting as a translator who in the circumstances was vital.

The night before our meeting, our good friend Dallas helped me to frame the scenario planning I had prepared from our landlord’s perspective.

A master negotiator, Dallas helped us know how to allay his fears early in the negotiations and keep things calm enough to communicate effectively.

Steve told the owner that we had the bond ready to pay and still wanted to sign a lease. We stated again that we were prepared to pay more than he had asked if he would finish the repairs he had promised. Calming him down took Steve nearly an hour out the front of our house.

I then invited him and his friend in for tea (the table was already set beautifully), and we sat down and soon became like family.

The scenario planning had shown me the only fear I needed to worry about was if he planned on moving back into this house in the future. Selling it wouldn’t be as much of a problem. In that scenario, we could help find a buyer who was interested in the house as an investment that would be happy to honour a long lease with good tenants, which Steve and I have a reputation for in our community.

When I told our landlord this was the only situation I feared, he shared that this fear was indeed a reality.

He said when he bought this house, he felt he had found his forever home. He talked about it very emotionally.

This was not good news for us.

He also shared that his wife is sick and dying.

I gave him a small gift to give his son. A chandelier crystal to hang in his window. He loved the gift. I wrapped it in a napkin, and he held it tightly and told me 3 times that he was looking forward to giving it to his son.

In front of his friend—as a witness—he let go of his dream of moving back in here and acknowledged it was not practical.

If we pay our rent and don’t give him pain—his words—he will never make us move out. It was a genuine and heartfelt promise in front of witnesses.

He is now paying to do all the needed repairs, and we are paying him a bit more rent than he asked for. He is handing everything over to an agent to manage and complimented me on what I have done with his property. He said I could make any changes that I want and that he loves my ‘artistry.’

It will all be contracted soon.

He looked happy to have let go of his dream to move back in here. His life is now somewhere else. His dream of moving back in here had become a burden causing too many complications.

This house is now our forever home and not his, but he now has a huge worry off his mind and has obtained financial security.

I don’t think many people in his life have made the effort that I did to understand him and come to a heartfelt agreement.

Without the effort at understanding, it would have been a disaster for us both.

He hadn’t been honest when he first promised we could stay here for as long as we wanted. We had reason to be wary and angry. But maintaining that anger would not have changed anything. Regulating that emotion—as always—was key.

Not many people in Australia would admit to understanding my anxiety over the promise of a long term lease being swapped for a 2-year lease. 2-year leases are the maximum usually offered. But at my age and with what I want to do here, accepting that would not have been right for me.

Agreeing to a 2-year lease would have resulted in us risking being uprooted again, just as we would have been getting settled in here and the house and property in good shape. I am too old to keep letting property owners take advantage of me. I put a lot of work and energy into improving the places I live.

I was horrified that I had walked back into the same trap I had worked so hard to escape last year when we worked to set up a successful motel that was then taken from us in a similar dishonest way.

It was a tough negotiation. Our landlord was here for 4 hours, but by the end that was fine. I understood that he was saying goodbye to a dream he once had, but that also freed him up to give his family more time and attention.

He took pictures of everything to show his wife and boys. He was pleased with how nice I had made the house look.

During our negotiation, he made everyone stop talking at one point to thank me for the nice morning tea I had made for them.

I think he may have even learned that honesty is better than conning people. That road causes too much burden.

Income security is another issue that many people’s conscience may alert them to. It is an issue that needs to be addressed realistically. Any plan that involves your dependence on being healthy and swapping your time for money—in the long run—will obviously become a chain around your neck.

The book Rich Dad Poor Dad is a good place to start. I have unfortunately never saved enough money, however, to become much of an investor. Saving is Steve and my shared gap. Investing is not something we have ever been interested in.

We have dealt with income security by learning to manage shared accommodation households. We currently rent more than one house that we sub-let rooms in with the owners’ approval. We add an extra margin to the rent by providing cleaning and extra services that are easily incorporated into our daily routine. We provide accommodation for students or travellers. Air BnB has made this easy to do. It also provides us with extra rooms for our adult children when they come home for holidays. Renting rooms, providing cleaning, meals, laundry etc. is an age-old practice. It suits my love of Eighteenth-Century novels and sensibilities. It also gives us a base to practice our people skills. Many travellers are happy to help share household duties in exchange for a room close to the kitchen and amenities.

Family is something that is missing in many people’s lives now. Our shared accommodation often gives isolated people a sense of belonging they wouldn’t get elsewhere.

This is just one idea of how to create an income that is not tied to selling your time to the highest bidder. I need time to write and this is the best way I have found to accomplish this.

One principle that may help is not being too ambitious about income. As my financial mentor James once taught me, area 1 in your income strategy should be a plan that doesn’t involve too much of your time, but just covers your basic expenses. Set this up to be as automated as possible. Allow space in your plan for other people to run the operation.

I know women who have set up medical practices in a similar way. Instead of subletting rooms to tenants, they sublet rooms to doctors. They set up the facility and let someone else manage the practice. The doctors pay for their office, a receptionist, secretary and bookkeeper. It is a deal that, if set up well, works for everyone. You don’t even need to own the property. Nice old houses work well for this. Long term leases are always available for commercial properties. Owners like this type of financial security.

With area 1 sorted out, your time is then freed up to make extra money doing things you are more passionate about to finance more luxury expenditure. If it is your thing, it also leaves time to manage investments.

I will add that with more people working from home, it might be time to challenge our local governments to loosen the regulations in regard to mixed commercial and residential tenancies. If people working for corporations are allowed to work from home, why shouldn’t small businesses be allowed these same rights? Family businesses were, in the past, often run from home. This would certainly help end the isolation that many women and children feel, locked away in small suburban homes.

Practical, Well Organised and Efficient is Beautiful

Make your home a place where everyone can find what they need—to do what they need to do.

Don’t let people tell you to throw out stuff you love and treasure.

I was told for years that the furniture I was collecting made me a hoarder. In fact, I was planning towards furnishing multiple houses to secure my financial security. That was part of what made this plan attractive to me. I like collecting beautiful old furnishings!

Care for your belongings and use them to their best benefit for everyone.

A disordered mind creates a disorganised environment. An ordered environment can also help create an organised mind.

If your environment is disordered get someone to help you. Don’t keep recreating the same messed up life!

10. Stop Defining Yourself With Unhelpful Stories

Do you tell people you are an ex-drug addict? An ex-drinker? A coffee addict, insomniac, or hoarder? Or perhaps a fan of some team, musician or actor? Is this the best story you can come up with to define yourself?

Why not come up with a more descriptive and useful title and narrative? Household operations manager? Chairman of the family board? You can describe yourself however you like, so how about you consider talking about yourself kindly? What descriptions will help people align with what you want more of in your life?

Pay Attention to Your Dream Stories

When we sleep, our unconscious mind provides us with metaphorical stories in our dreams that can help us plot a course through life. A classroom is a place in your dreams that is probably teaching you something and a kitchen giving knowledge for sustenance and growth.

The information our dream stories offer is tailormade for us from an unlimited data bank of personal information about ourselves and our lives.

You have your own set of dream symbols. Keep a journal of your dreams, and you will soon start learning what these symbols mean to you personally.

Make your dream stories your own morning news service and you will start getting very useful personal advice.

11. Stop Talking About Yourself and Learn to Listen

Be honest. Are you not that interested in anyone but yourself?

The desire to be more interested in others is the starting point for leading a more satisfying and meaningful life.

Understanding other people’s needs and motivations—and setting up a system that considers those in your planning—is the road to long-term prosperity and peace.

This is a point I am still working on and am open to readers’ advice!

12. Give Yourself the Attention You Crave

What unhealthy things do you do for attention? Pretend you are better than other people? Exaggerate about your successes? Make yourself sick with psychosomatic illnesses? Work to impress instead of working for the common good?

Only you can be your perfect lover. Start giving yourself the love and attention that you crave.

We have been led to believe that self-love is inferior to love from someone else. I can assure you that this is not the case. What would your dream lover do for you? Consider doing those things for yourself!

——–

The points above are here to help you escape the Narcissistic and Codependent Theatre that exists in our world today. The final point below is the golden rule, if you like, in keeping balance in a narcissistic and codependent world:

The True Pearl of Wisdom = Moderation

Is your life focused on yourself? Is it focused on your partner? Are there other consuming addictions or obsessions you nurture?

Just as walking into the light creates a dark shadow, giving up one thing leaves a gap for something potentially worse to enter.

Regulate your life and enjoy the bounty; balance never comes from a single focus in life.

…..

So how do I personally reconcile my own conclusion that we are on our own here, weak, vulnerable and not able to trust in a coming religious or political saviour, despite numerous powerful threats—including a ‘Brave New World’ AI tech revolution—we now face all around us? That politics and much of the arts is propaganda, serving interests far above most common men and women’s needs?

As mentioned previously, I would now consider myself a Diest, believing that God can only be seen and worshipped in the world of nature.

But Darwin too was not the man he is said to have been. Survival of the fittest and much of evolutionary theory can be seen —if one cares to look—as Malthusian justification for colonialism and the exploitation of darker races, which by its tenets were seen to be less evolved and closer to monkeys than white men.

Back to cosmology: personally I cannot accept that the intricate order and creativity seen in the creation all came from nothing in one magical ‘big bang.’

My work on emotional intelligence led me to this final conclusion: empathy is a virtue that many humans possess. As created beings, it is only logical to me that our creator must also possess this virtue.

If I was created by a non-human—yet vastly powerful—entity that has empathy, I must logically still have a connection with that source.

Seeking this connection through mediation on conscience directed me to research female infanticide. I was instructed that the imbalance in sex ratios was the primary cause of the war and hatred that exists in the world today. In the beginning, that information made no sense to me. I had no idea that researching this subject would lead to Prince Charming’s Dirty Secret. When I finally uncovered the truth about female infanticide, I found the missing link I had been looking for all of these years.

Female infanticide, used as a social control mechanism, is a practice which explains comprehensively why we continue fighting each other to this day.

I do not claim myself to be any kind of female prophet in being given this revelation. Emotional intelligence, conscience and the understanding that we are part of something wondrous and creative—with power and energy that links us all—assures me that each one of us has this type of knowledge and insight available.

Equality in our homes is not a subject that only addresses liberating women. It is a practice at the very core of liberating us all. Men do not benefit from our current system that requires them to dominate women to prove that they are men. This is an unhealthy and unrealistic expectation. We are here to help and support each other. Men and women working together collectively and collaboratively constitute a value system that needs to be fought for with strength and the certainty that it will lead us to a better world.

Debts can and should be forgiven—as even stated in the Lord’s Prayer. The way our monetary system works, there is far more debt in the world today than there is money to pay it back. Financial reform is desperately needed to end our current system of debt servitude.

On an emotional level, most of us would do well to forgive much of what we feel others owe us. Creating an ’emotional debt’ is at the heart of the destructive codependent mindset. ‘If I love you and take care of you; you owe it to me to take care of me in return.’ Rather than give codependents what they are seeking, in a narcissistic and codependent world, this only leads to disappointment. Allowing oneself to be manipulated and exploited doesn’t lead to anything but resentment and subjugation.

What we seek to be respectable and united is not outside of us but within us. Our codependent society cannot stand aside and allow a world of narcissistic men and women to continue dominating our narrative. The stage hypnotist’s spell must be broken with steady and measured steps. Working to make our lives financially and physically secure and our communities united despite our differences in belief.

 

Addendum

And what about my beliefs regarding religion? As I know this is a challenging topic for many, I have left the results of that search for those who are interested here at the end. It is research that has taken most of my life uncovering and will hopefully help other Seekers of Truth spend a little less time searching than it took me.

Eventually, I discovered the answer to my questions about religion. Unfortunately, I was right. God and Jesus were indeed based on historical characters. Religion, like most other information I had deconstructed, was political propaganda in service to the rich. Political propaganda, as I mentioned earlier, that appears to have begun as early as written history appears in ancient texts.

I will only put forward a brief start to my research into the God of the Old Testament, a subject which is quite complex and not studied by many modern scholars.

Anyone brave enough to face the truth of the historical origin of the gospels, however, might find solid answers if they look here:

The Genius of the Few by Christian and Joy O’Brien,

Jesus was Caesar by Francesco Carotta

Caesar’s Messiah by Joseph Atwill

Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity by James Valliant and C.W. Fahy

The first book listed here, written by the most qualified geologist and translator of ancient languages I have found to date, challenges much of what we believe about the Old Testament, while still posing God as a supernatural character. Christian O’Brien didn’t wear a tinfoil hat. He was the head geologist for British Petroleum in the Middle East.

His translation of Genesis alongside ancient Sumerian texts reads like a science fiction movie script. The God’s (most definitely plural and not singular) came to primitive civilisation as a kind of ‘landing party’. Where they came from was unfortunately lost when their library was burnt down. Not necessarily from another planet, they may have been restarting civilisation after some kind of worldwide catastrophic collapse. The first landing party consisted of one woman and six men.

The woman, Ninlil, created humans as slave labour when the workers—from amongst their own ranks—rebelled. Sperm was donated by all of the male leaders in the group and a small group of earth women artificially inseminated. The progeny were then paired, and the modern human race began.

Their scientific resources and lifespans must have been considerable to effect this in their own lifetimes. This created the ‘chosen race’ of patriarchs who were then set charge over their—supposedly inferior—human subjects. The ‘Shining Ones’—as these ‘gods’ were sometimes called—leader was named Anu. He sometimes visited but did not join the new settlement. He is described as living somewhere else.

Anu is said to have been very disappointed in the patriarchs from the start. Their tendency to be exploitative and self-serving was noted early on. Anu was angered even further—to the point that his own leaders became quite perplexed and dismayed at the punishments he instigated—when a second landing party of craftsmen formed a pact and rebelled against the strict rules they were given, taking local women as their wives.

The progeny of these marriages were giants that devoured everything, putting their whole ‘mission’ at risk. The flood was the solution that was arrived at. ‘Cleansing’ the world of the mutants this unauthorised ‘breeding’ disaster had unleashed.

It didn’t appear to succeed, however, as the despotism of the ruling classes continued, and many of the Shining Ones themselves were again distressed about the violence involved in this plan.

Further breeding initiatives were attempted with numerous accounts of earth mothers having divine or ‘miraculous’ births.

Eventually, the Shining Ones, all left.

If this all sounds like a wild story, in my thinking it probably is.

Christian O’Brien and his wife Joy were incredible translators and scholars, but like many translators—in my opinion—felt a little too much sympathy for the characters in the stories their translations uncovered.

Considering the later and scientifically-conclusive work by Joseph Atwill re the Gospels, the story laid out in these earlier ancient texts are dubious at best. Only royalty and the wealthy could read or write back in ancient times, and their stories aimed not at liberation, but to deify themselves and institute systems of control.

Saying we had been created by our new ‘overlords’, and that our rulers were created superior to us by birth— but were also to blame for all the problems that arose later—to my mind sounds like fairly typical political propaganda.

The second book, Jesus was Caesar by Francesco Carotta—for the less intrepid—is probably a better place to start. It brings us to the question of who Jesus might have been modelled from in history. From Carotta’s website and quoted from ancient sources:

Then (Julius) Caesar hastened to Rome. Victor of all civil wars he was feared and celebrated like no one before him; therefore all kinds of exaggerated honors were created and bestowed upon him, even superhuman ones: offerings, celebrations, sacrifices and statues in all temples and public places in each of the provinces, for every community and for all the kings allied with Rome. The inscriptions of the statues were various; on some of them he wore an oak wreath as the savior of the native country, because according to an old custom those who had been saved used to decorate whoever was responsible for their salvation with it. He was proclaimed ‘Father of the Country’ and elected dictator for life as well as consul for ten years. His person was pronounced sacred and inviolable and it was decreed that he could dispatch his official functions from a throne of ivory and gold; furthermore, he always should offer sacrifices in the triumphal robe, the city annually had to celebrate the days of his victories; priests and priestesses had to offer public prayers for him every five years and the administrators had to swear an oath immediately after being appointed not to resist any command of Caesar. To honor his birth the month Quintilis was renamed Iulius (July), furthermore, numerous temples were to be built to him as a god, inter alia one for him together with the personified Clementia (leniency, grace) hand in hand. So much was he feared as ruler and so strongly was he beseeched to bestow his mildness and grace unto them. There were even some who wanted to proclaim him king, until he learnt of it and forbade it under dire threat as the very idea was despised by their ancestors as a sacrilege. He dismissed his Praetorian bodyguard who had served him since their war days, and appeared in public alone with the usual servants … He also pardoned his enemies and promoted many of those who had borne arms against him. (emphasis added)

Carotta continues after the historical quote above:

These honors which were decreed during his lifetime began to be enacted more or less straightaway, but came into full effect after his death, specifically when the members of the triumvirate conclusively defeated the assassins of Caesar. All the honors not only retained their spirit but became something more: the violence that was done to him, and the refusal of the people to accept his murder, served to guarantee his honor, title, and cult, forever. Dictator perpetuo meant thenceforth not only for his lifetime but for eternity. Even the fact that he did not want to become a king in this world only helped to gain him the kingdom in the other world. In the same manner as the earlier Osiris, Minos and Zeus, he was now granted not only in the world to come, but even jurisdiction over the present world from that other world.” Carotta (emphasis added)

A wax effigy of Julius Caesar’s slain body was presented, raised above the bier, at the exact spot where a cruciform tropaeum stood and was then rotated for the attending crowd. The image linked below shows a reconstruction of Caesar’s simulacrum on the cross from the available archaeological sources:

Liberalia: Julius Caesar’s funeral and Resurrection

Wreaths and flowers are still placed daily at the temple of Julius Caesars to this day.

The section of Jesus Was Caesar that describes Julius Caesar’s death and the burning of his wax effigy on a cross is both gripping and moving. Reading it, I had to remind myself to breath.

Julius Caesar’s life (not the fictional and deliberate misrepresentations put forward by Shakespear and many historians’ later works) is inspirational in what constitutes good leadership to this day. Protecting anyone who accepted his protection. His noble “Who is not on any side, is on my side” was later turned into the more sinister “Those who are not with us are against us.” His ultimately fatal habit of forgiving his enemies and even offering them leading positions in his army saw many opponents in war defect to join his side.

Julius Caeser represented the popular party that challenged the Roman ‘Republicans’ who were the wealthy landowners of those times. His intention to repatriate war veteran’s with land—when they returned victorious from war—was a move that eventually saw him betrayed and murdered by the senate.

Joseph Atwill’s book Caesar’s Messiah has far less to offer in terms of beauty or courage from history. His statistical literary analyses uncover numerous parallel events in sequence which ultimately reveal the identity of the true authors of the Gospels. This analysis is true science, beyond any feasible probability that the same events with specific and distinctive linked content could have appeared by coincidence. Closely comparing the work of Josephus with the New Testament Gospels, “Caesar’s Messiah” demonstrates that the Romans directed the writing of both. Their purpose: to offer a vision of a “peaceful Messiah” who would serve as an alternative to the revolutionary leaders who were rocking first-century Israel and threatening Rome.

Creating Christ is a more recent book that ties Carotta and Atwill’s work together. The Roman Providence theory is put forward by James Valliant, one of the authors of Creating Christ, in a very concise and straightforward written interview here:

https://metaphysicsofphysics.com/transcripts/episode_ten.pdf

James Valliant it might be noted, was a Law instructor at San Diego University, from 1988-1989. He has also been the deputy district attorney at the District Attorney’ General’s Office in San Diego, since 1989. Again not a man who wears a tinfoil hat.

The understanding I might add to this story is that by writing the gospels, I believe the second dynasty of Roman ‘Caesars’ (the Flavians) who had co-opted the title of Caesar—previously a family name—also wanted to free themselves from the long shadow that Julius Caesar’s deification and legacy had left them under. It allowed them to undermine some of the values that had made Julius Caesar both honoured and loved as a leader—forgiving and paying debts of the poor in particular.

The story of Jesus shows clearly that debts cannot simply be forgiven. Even God himself is subject to this law and forced to sacrifice his own son to pay sinners’ debt.

But weren’t early Christian’s martyred by the Romans? Valliant explains, with the well laid out evidence you would expect from of a prosecuting attorney, that early Christians were, in fact, messianic Jews who were political opponents of Rome. Their version of Christianity was much closer to that of James the Just, who—although said to be Jesus brother—had his message argued against numerous times in the gospels and conspicuously played down.

Paul, in the gospels, was preaching a very different style of Christianity than these ‘Christian’ messianic Jews. One that eschewed the very elements of Judaism that the Roman and Jewish aristocracy had problems with.

Rome had become very cosmopolitan. King Herod, the Great, to name only one wealthy Jewish royal family as an example, had killed a number of his sons. Their progeny understandably—it could be argued—in turn, rebelled against hardline Jewish law. Circumcision being required for their daughters to marry gentiles, a kosher diet and not eating with gentiles—with them being friendly with the new Roman Empire’s upper echelons—did not suit their new cosmopolitan lifestyle. A new Judaism that eschewed these hardline Jewish laws offered a lot of benefits for themselves and the Romans alike.

This rift amongst the Jewish community was fuelled and exploited by the Romans to instigate The First Jewish-Roman War while also excusing the Romans for killing the militant Jews. From Wikipedia:

Josephus claimed that 1,100,000 people were killed during the siege, and 97,000 were captured and enslaved.”

Not really a conspiracy. If you read the gospels with this understanding you will soon see that Paul’s message of a “new Romanised Judaism” clearly incited hatred and violence from most Jews at that time. Paul was promoting a Jewish messiah while at the same time advocating practices that were completely unacceptable to Jews. Time after time, Paul is protected by Roman intervention from angry mobs of Jews who wanted him dead. This, alongside the names of Paul’s Roman and Jewish friends in power who helped him, is written plainly in many New Testament accounts.

Jesus, as a new Jewish messiah was not bringing peace to the Jews. The gospels were, in fact, stark antisemitism; a ‘prediction’ of the destruction of their temple that exonerated Rome and put the blame squarely on themselves.

This ‘prediction’ of the temple being destroyed when Jesus returned—that famously said by Jesus himself would occur within that generation—is acknowledged by most biblical scholars to have been written after the destruction of the temple had—in fact—already occurred.

Vespasian Flavian along with his son Titus—a military leader under Nero—who led the First Jewish-Roman War, was considered in his times a political ‘Jewish Messiah’ by the Romanised Jewish elites.

The Flavians had little ancestral claim to the throne of Emporer, so like many rulers before them wrote a fictitious religious account of their arrival being predicted by an earlier ‘Jewish’ prophet introducing a new religion more favourable to their rule. Paul was most likely a real-life character, working for Rome as a counter-intelligence agent.

The Flavians emporers claimed that they had brought peace to the Rome Empire.

The new Christianity, however, was only bringing peace to the Roman elites, tax collectors and prostitutes (in reality royal Jewish women who had become the mistresses and wives of Roman rulers) and military leaders. It merged Greek philosophy, Paganism and Judaism in a way that allowed the governing classes to merge and unify their power structures in a way they previously could not manage. This new ideology was so enticing to the wealthy classes that it survived all opponents over time.

One of these opponents was Dominitian, Titus’s younger brother, who not being part of the First Jewish-Roman War waged a campaign against the new church—whose leaders had become his rivals—when he took the title, Emporer of Rome.

The new church was not entirely vanquished by Dominitian however and the Roman Empire in time became the Holy Roman Empire.

The first pope was a family member of The Flavians when Titus was still Emporer of Rome.

The militant religious Jews were eventually expelled and forbidden from entering Jerusalem by the emperor Hadrian in the Second Jewish-Roman War—who again found the gospels useful as historical propaganda towards that cause. These militant religious adherents eventually re-emerged later in history as the Islamic faith.

Again I was left with not much that was edifying from my search. Rather than Julius Caesar being remembered for his forgiveness and mercy and his protection of the poor by feeding the people and pardoning and paying their debts (one likely reason in my mind that Romans and Jews alike both rewrote much of Julius Caesar’s true story out of history) the memory of his leadership has been so distorted, that the Klu Klux Klan burn crosses to this day.

Yet as described previously, fresh flowers are still put on the mound in the Roman Forum daily—all that the remains of the Temple of Caesar—where Julius Caesar was cremated when the crowd tore the interior of government buildings apart to construct his funeral pyre…

“Who is not on any side, is on my side” is a motto wise leaders, beginning at home, might remember.

More important for humanity today is the understanding that Jesus was not mistaken when he predicted his second coming to occur within that generation. The second coming has already come and gone. We must assuredly start working to save ourselves.

…..

 

 

For fifteen years, the Coopers have offered themselves as humble guides and mentors, helping families avoid cynicism and chaos. Leading the way as peer support specialists whose own family has traversed love's dangerous terrain.
Taking you to that place inside yourself that you can't go by yourself. Helping you get back in touch with the power of love within you to restore the sanity in your marriage whether you stay or leave.

This Post Has 0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back To Top
Search
TheNCMarriage.com