TABBY CAT Gamespace

No Nonsense

"To the question How long do I have? every genetic testing prediction ultimately returns some variant on the same answer: Not long."

-Richard Powers

* * *

The Sheriff (who teaches at a med school) wrote in raking me over the coals for saying that docs have primarily dollar signs in their eyes (yesterday post), claiming that many are dewy-eyed young'uns who merely truly want to help others. Well, (although in my personal opinion the best way to help anybody is to leave them alone) she's probably right. It was an unfair blanket statement! I wasn't myself, I was a bit under the weather, had the sniffles (no not Avian sniffles nor Swine sniffles, don't slam me in an interment camp please bro)  when I wrote that stupid post (I should have qualified it the way Byron Katie does, something like "It's true - but only all the time." AHAHAHA! (I would be slapping my thighs now if cats had thighs)

* * *

I should write sometime about Pranic Healing. That's another stealth alternative healing thing. I say stealth because it doesn't seem to have the internet presence of Matrix Energetics. And for sure, the PH teaching seminars do nowhere near the box office of ME. I mean ME packs 5 to 6 hundreds butts-in-seats, filling a large hotel ballroom, every single time dozen times a year depending who/how you count, while the many PH classes I attended (admittedly 5 years back or so) would have a few handfuls of students. So in terms of marketing it's no contest. Richard is just that much more charismatic than Stephen Co (the main USA-based Pranic Healing teacher, at least back in the day when I did it). 

But what is Pranic Healing in the first place? Well in many ways it is just another minor variant of the usual energy healing thing, like Quantum Touch, Reiki, etc. In fact many PH attendees were already Reiki "Masters" (Reiki's pioneering use of this term Master for anybody who shelled out sufficient seminar bux was a brilliant stroke of marketing but has resulted in Masters littering the ground knee-deep like an autum leaf pile). 

For some reason I was bedazzled enough by PH that I took their training in the following sub-disciplines:

• Basic Pranic Healing
• Color Pranic Healing
• Advanced Pranic Healing
• Crystal Pranic Healing
• Emotional Pranic Healing
• Psychic Self-Defense
• Arhatic Yoga

The best was the first two: Basic and Color. For anybody who already knows some form of energy healing they might be redundant, but I found it to be a good generally workable system that covers all the more or less universal basics that everybody, all these systems, seem to pretty much agree on. The various competing systems do their marketing differentiation more in the esoteric upper reaches. These two first courses were generic and good in that sense.

The rest of the courses got increasingly nutso-New-Agey (from my limited Neanderthal perspective) and I finally drifted away. It gets more and more churchy, borderline cultish, as you get more into it. Though I mean that only in the intellectual sense, the material per se. Operationally nobody ever threw me in a van or drove me to a weekend retreat to repeatedly sing "When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin' Along" til I broke. 

As far as actual healing, I never witnessed anything very dramatic. Usual faith-healing "Doesn't it feel better now?" type of stuff. However, I have found it very effective for SELF healing, particularly of headaches and joint/bone/tendon types of muscular-skeletal injuries.

Co was alright. What finally put me off them for good was the Arhatic Yoga course, taught by their grand Poobah Himself, GRANDMASTER Choa Kok-Sui. I felt the guy was overly pompous. But maybe he really was (now deceased) some kind of super universal meta-master, who the hell knows. But I didn't like the vibe at all. That's when it really began to feel churchy (but that's just me).

Anyway, I do reach for the Pranic Healing basic method as the first item in my alt.med toolkit whenever I need to fix something on myself. That or G-Jo which I've already covered. But I don't use all the salt and special holy water spray bottle and all the goopy PH protocol. I just brush with basic energy and basic color palette.

All Hail

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n forth of Holy Writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.

- Shakespeare, Richard III

 * * *

I'm almost ready to launch my spiritual healing cult. Oh didn't you know that's why I've been studying all these alternative healing methods? Yeah, it's all been marketing research. So watch this space closely.

I admit, I haven't got all the theological terminology worked out yet. But that's ok, according to  voluminous research I've conducted over decades on cults and crazy mass movements, most of these guys  just make it all up as they go along.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're wondering whether a bipolar, foul-mouthed, violently irascible schizoid alley cat really has the sex appeal to make the big time spotlight in the competitive world of for-profit mind control. I won't deny that Tabby, as a figure paid to bear Celestial Light down to the Earthlings has ... er,  issues ... image issues. *cough*

And yet sometimes an apparent ding or dent can be turned to a silk purse. In fact, usually the more utterly dumbass the message and the more totally insane The Prophet, the faster the cash piles up. That's what I'm counting on.

I see that one of my Mentors of Scam, Dr. Zhi Gang Sha, has turned some quick bucks by simply using high-tech vocabulary to describe his bogus hand flutterings as "Soul Downloads" and "Spiritual Software Install". He just throws around words like hard drive and bandwidth mixed up with standard New Age medicine jargon and how easy the koolaid goes down (see illustration above).

But not to be outdone by a mere human, Tabby is gonna go that schmuck one better! I'm gonna turn the tables right back at him. Instead of the usual scam of dressing up my fake healings in bogus spiritual vocabulary, this Sha joker has inspired me to return to the source - I'm going to use Western medical jargon as my metaphor base! So, see, I'm doing a 180 turn and I'll be dressing up my fake spirituality in bogus medical vocabulary! Ah genius thy name is Tabby.

Now you may be thinking, Tabby is that wise? Thanks for your concern, but perhaps you have failed to appreciate the underlying brilliance of this um .... deceptively (hee hee) simple move.

By saying stuff like Spiritual Penicillin or Soul Prozac or Ritalin of the Heart or Podiatry for the Inner Child, I expect to straddle, nay, to bridge and bring together the traditionally mutually suspicious worlds of icy chilled Western allopathic meds vs New Age warm fuzzies - both of which have so much to offer my lifetime net worth. I mean, it's not an either/or thing - that's such 20th century, pre-2012 thinking. And if the medical jargon doesn't do box office, I'll just switch to car repair metaphors...

And then I'll surrounded by babes (see illustration).

Anyway, thank you for your attendance and donations today, and always remember:

THERE IS NO CAT BUT TABBY

Because you have asked so I have told you this

People wrote me about yesterday's medical post, particularly with questions about acupressure. Of course I'm not the real expert on it. Books are always best. But I understand the impulse. Even a nutso net cat somehow seems like a better source of info than anybody pimping a commerical book or course, no matter how well-intentioned.

So here are a few additional points. These are things that might be hinted at in some of the books, I don't know. As far as I'm concerned, they just derive from my own experience using acu-pressure.

1. ACP seems to work best, for me at least, on muscular-skeletal conditions, impairments or pain relating to joints, motion, bones/muscle/tendon type of stuff. You saw the conditions I listed yesterday. The books all talk about lots of other stuff, basically every possible medical condition from insomnia to hot flashes. All I can say is that I've tried it for some of those more 'internal' type of things and it never seem to have much effect. But then I haven't got a lot of internal complaints, knock wood. To the extent I do occasionally run into something, other stuff (see yesterday's post) worked better, particularly Pranic Healing's energy cleansing method and most especaily Cayenne pepper - the absolute and unrivaled King of medicinal herbs. But please experiment on your own.

2. I want to make a distinction between identifying a point for your particular problem vs. finding the point for it. Identifying the point is by far the greater problem. Identifying the point means selecting the one or two points that will fix your thing from among the dozens or hundreds (depending on what ACP book or system you are going by) on offer. That's the stickiest problem. ACP works but you gotta identify the point that gonna do it for you. Once you have id'ed the point, then you need to use precision in addressing it (this is what I call finding the point) but typically the extra sensitivity of any point area will be all you need for that more refined level of locating work. You will be tempted to end run the point id problem by shotgunning. That's when you start pressing everything in the book in a wild expectation that something will work. But in my experience that isn't the way to go. First, if you shotgun, you don't really learn anything about your condition and ACP overall. There's no royal road. You won't always want to press every point several times a day for days or weeks on end for every problem you have. There's no substitute for putting in the work to identify the right point or at most 2 or 3 points for a given single condition. Secondly, in my experience, there really is a right point for a condition. I think using lots of points, even if the right one happens to be among them, reduces its effectiveness.

3. Time is another issue. How long should you stick with a given candidate point or small set of points before concluding you're barking up the wrong tree and moving to try another point? I gave some personal examples of 3 days total cures. But it could take as long as 3 weeks for total elimination of your condition. But in my experience, the sign that you may have a good point is that you should experience "noticable" relief of symptoms immediately. Not saying total cure, but if you do not notice some degree of definite relief with minutes, it's qutie possible you should consider moving on to another candidate point.

4. You should press both symmetrical right/left members of any paired type of point (which probably the majority of them are), even if you only have symptoms on one side.

5. Be very careful. Don't go hog wild, pressing too often or too hard. ACP is serious medicine, and like any medicine, if applied wrongly or excessively, it becomes dangerous. Excessive pressure or frequency of pressing some points can actually lead to nerve damage. Firm but not forced, never more than 10 seconds or so per point per session, never more than 3 times per day well-spaced - play safe always. Again, the desire to press long and hard often means you have the wrong point. The right point feels right, right off the bat.

Caseload

And a woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any.

- Luke 8:42

~ ~ ~
I don't know if any of the healing methods I've been into would cure Swine Flu. That's because so far knock on wood I have not contrated SF. It's true that I'm into learning healing. But I have a weird approach to it - I believe in serving as my own lab rat. That means I try all the modes and methods primarily on myself. I want to know that they work (or don't) from the inside out. Because I believe in that greatest, highest of spiritual wisdom handed to us by the commercial airlines of all people:

PLEASE SECURE YOUR OWN MASK

BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO ASSIST OTHERS

Doesn't that really say it all? So even though it seems like everybody at all these seminars and classes is alarmingly eager to heal me, and grudgingly willing to have me experiment on them, basically I learn these modes as feedstock for my evolving understanding and personal self-cure method. Don't worry - if I ever hit on a generically effective universal great method better than anything pre-existing out there, I'll be the first to letcha know. I'm willing to experiment with just about anythnig, with the sole exception of the crap peddled by white-coated corporate drug pushers.

So today's post is a summary of results of that, to date. I've intensively studied about 6 non-standard healing modalities. But only what is explicitly mentioned in this post has actually been effective on a long-term basis for a particular problem. The modalities not mentioned here, e.g. Matrix Energetics or Quantum Touch among many others, remain of interest to me, I do not fully dismiss them, but they have not yet delivered any actual concrete cures so they cannot be included in this summary post. Maybe someday. In past posts I may have mentioned some of these conditions, such as the hip pain, and even suggested treatments for it but only what is written below has actually worked, long term and fully.

'Severity/Pain' scale means how horrible the condition felt and/or degree of disabilty it gave me. 1 is mild discomfort, 10 would be unbearable torture. 'Cure Efficacy: can take on 3 values: minimal, partial, or total. Incidence is either: Acute, Chronic, or Occasional referring to the timeline of the condition. Note that Chronic conditions can involve very acute pain, that's a separate issue.

Of course I have had tons of other much more horrible and life-threatening things thrown at me in this life, so I'm totally on Life Number 8 for sure. But here I'm recording only fairly recent conditions to which I was able to consciously apply some kind of alternative healing modality.

These are all my own results, from my own self-treatment records. Your experiences and opinions will be entirely different.

Case Number: 1
Complaint: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
Type: Chronic
Severity/Pain (1 to 10 scale): 9
Cure Method: acupressure (point pressing with fingers)
Cure Time: 3 days
Cure Efficacy: Total

Case Number: 2
Complaint: Plantar Fascitis
Type: Chronic
Severity/Pain (1 to 10 scale): 9
Cure Method: acupressure (point pressing with fingers)
Cure Time: 3 days
Cure Efficacy: Total

Case Number: 3
Complaint: Sciatica / severe hip and leg pain on one side
Type: Chronic
Severity/Pain (1 to 10 scale): 9
Cure Method: acupressure (point pressing with fingers)
Cure Time: 3 days
Cure Efficacy: Total

Case Number: 4
Complaint: Headaches
Type: Occasional (cure applied as needed)
Severity/Pain (1 to 10 scale): 5 to 9
Cure Method: Pranic Healing energy cleansing
Cure Time: immediate
Cure Efficacy: Total

Case Number: 5
Complaint: Sore Throat
Type: Occasional (cure applied as needed)
Severity/Pain (1 to 10 scale): 5 to 9
Cure Method: Cayenne pepper powder gargle at first symptom onset
Cure Time: immediate
Cure Efficacy: Total

I don't think I need to add much commentary. The results speak for themselves. Anybody with half a brain would have to be a damn fool to be involved in any kind of combative training or extreme yoga such as Ashtanga and not look into acupressure healing, for example. Don't have half a brain to spare? Then blow it off. And the Cayenne pepper powder thing is another obvious no brainer. Works every time, for me. And speaking of swine flu, I bet that Cayenne powder could give it a run for its money. It seems to be the most powerful medicinal herb in existence.

But if any of it doesn't work for you, well then, we urge that you do contact our Tabby CaterrificClientCare(tm) Unit immediately and after providing your Tabby CaterrificClientCare(tm)Representative with a few standard transaction verification details such as your name, SSN, bank name, account number, PIN, password, and account balance you will be given full directions on how to receive your complimentary personal "fuck off" from the glorious "One True Feline" and "Beloved Astral Animal" (Tabby Cat) himself.

剣

I practice the Tai Chi sword form whenever I can. This is perfectly exhibited by my teacher's teacher in this video.

From a practical standpoint, Tai Chi sword is a total pain in the ass. Especially if you are traveling a lot. Because of two things you need: the sword and a lot of space.

But still I do it whenever I can because it cultivates and deploys your ki in a unique way. It is light and quick (only about 3 minutes to complete our TCC sword form) but by means of this you can really project your ki fantastically.

Then when done, if you stand in yubei shi, the ki will inflate your palms and fingertips, swelling them up like mini-gas balloons, an incredibly fun ki effect like nothing else.

Open wide for me

You say there's a Secret,
But it's one you can tell.
You say there's no Owner,
But you have it to sell.

We don't want Believers,
We seek only the real.
But get out of your Head,
Or you'll never heal.

- Tabby Cat; from 'Rounds'

[T. Cat Collected Works: New Age Modalities; vXIIV cit. b92:3]

* * *

I have attended a Dreamhealer (Adam) seminar in Vancouver (Canada) years ago when Adam was just a 16 year old high school kid. I have also attended Levels 1, 2, 3, and PC of Matrix Energetics, all in Seattle.

One difference between Adam vs Matrix seminars are the attendees. At least when I went to Adam, the vast majority of the audience was people with real serious medical stuff happening. We are talking stretchers, oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, mobile IV's, the works. Those people really wanted (needed?) a practical, old-fashioned vanilla HEALING - meaning fix the !@$%* problem and don't wave your hands and blab about "transformation" and "whatever you notice you notice" <== standard Matrix sloganeering

Like you really wouldn't appreciate it if your car smoked out and choked to a stop on Hwy 405 at rush hour but when you had it towed into the mechanic they not only didn't actually get it driving again, they belched fumes about "What we do here, see, it's not so much about automotive repair  per se, it's actually automotive transformation". ("That'll be 500 dollars." Ahahaha!)

The Matrix seminars on the other hand were like 80% or more practitioners, that is, people with a professional interest, if you will. They were massagers or acupunc's or chiros or whatever, looking to offer another branding in their product lineup.

But though I liked Adam's intelligent and innocent persona, there isn't really much to choose between him and Richard Bartlett in terms of actual outcomes, neither Matrix nor DreamHealer modalities seem to work particularly well for hard cases. But both have their cheering sections, as always with human stuff.

Adam's books have incredibly gorgeous illustrations that are supposed to help you visualize the energy tactics that he recommends. I haven't worked much with them. Too much trouble. But maybe if I felt myself really in some medical hotseat again I would give that a whirl. Help me to enliven an otherwise lackluster dieoff.

The Devil Knows His Own

Well. So we find ourselves here again do we? What bogus crap shall I foist on the innocent net reading public today... Oh yeah, I've been meaning to rant on two themes, structure and energy healing. Hardly a novel direction for me, would you say?

Structure... GRRRRRRRRR! What the frick is it with that these days? Every goddamn Tom Dick and Harry who in years past would've used the proper Daoist energy ladder terms 精 气 神 虚 to describe the dynamics of their art (such as T'ai Chi) now has got to paint the word STRUCTURE on their nose in neon pink.

If I hear that word one more time, I'll go insane!

(I know what you're thinking: "He'll go insane... ?")

Get off it. Structure is bullshit. Forget about it. I don't give a spit in Hell for structure. All this pansy ass stuff about the mandibular hip torque must be 63.5 degrees angulized into the trochanter for proper rotational momentum of the acetabulofemoral kua... (yes, they like to throw the Chinese word kua into the soup pot now and then for ethnic flavoring) ... Fuck all that.

See the thing is, everybody's embarrassed to talk about ki energy nowadays. Becuase they don't feel it. Unless you are a real New Age Bunny and truly have no shame whatsoever, otherwise it's embarrassing to talk about ki because after all, yuh cain't smell it, nor can yuh taste it, durn yuh cain't even see the frickin stuff. And yet people still like the atmospherics of the Internal Arts, they don't wanna give up that ... aesthetic. So the thing to do is reinterpret everything in terms of PROPER STRUCTURE. Which has the advantage that you can posture and show off your arcane anatomical terminology, be a joint-and-tendon geek as much as any pencil neck Chinese major ever nerded out on ancient Taoist flim flam terminology.

But I say screw all that. Structure is for girly men... if we translate to Yoga terms, structure is for Iyengar people! Like I said, girly men... ahahaha! (If anybody reading this is getting pissed, go walk off a short pier, you have no sense of humor an a we don a wanna yu here! *smile*)

Yep, girly men. Pussies. The real shit in Yoga is obviously Ashtanga, where we don't need no steekin' STRUCTURE.

The point of all the Internal Arts whether Tai Chi or Yoga or any other damn thing are the following:

• Flow
• Spirit
• Energy
• Bliss

That's all. You get tied down in all that earthly structure shit, you're just a cat chasing his own tail down into a bottomless pit of pointless digression. When you relax, the energy is there for you, no matter what pose or angle your physical body is at. Lot's of great Chinese masters have been deformed physically in various ways, didn't make any difference. So what if they had a hunchback or a club foot, or they walked with a gimp lacking the perfect Nazi goose stride... what you want a Disabilities Act lawsuit on your hands? Eh? So lay off all the structure crap.

What if you have to fight on ice, or trapped upside down in a drainpipe or something? Where's your precious structure going to be then eh? What BS. Nope, in fact you can wiggle your ass like Elvis, go hog wild out there,  totally mess up your nicey nice little structure thang and still be a kickass internal player. Because it's energetic, not physical.

Now it's true that some truly great arts, such as Zheng Man Qing Taijiquan as taught by a few (minority!) of great masters do appear to emphasize structure in the beginning. For example there are Five Principles as below:

1. Relax
2. Body Upright
3. Separate Weight
4. Turn the Waist
5. Beautiful Lady's Hand

In practice, as exemplified in the form, these seem to cash out into structural Do's and Don't's. But that's only a baby phase. The one Great Principle is the first one: Relax.

That means, of the elements, be like Fire, Water, and Air. No structure! Tao = Flow.

The other four listed there are useful in so far as they get you to understand the first one. Relax. After you cross the bridge, don't look back. Don't get obsessed with your physical body. You are "Live on Earth For a Limited Time Only" ! Cain't take it with you son!

We live for the Spirit only, for All Else perishes!

Ah, here's some feedback (below) ... It's nice when friends give you their constructive perspective on your behavior, isn't it?

Q: TABBY, ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND??! THIS IS MADNESS!

A: THIS. IS. TABBYCAT!!!

Word!

*pant* OK  I was gonna riff about Energy Healing... What got me into the whole Matrix Energetics thing, where I guess I'm now a certified Wizard (though not practitioner), was that in reading Richard Bartlett's book, his photo's and descriptions of his Two-Point thing really looked so much like Tai Chi push hands work. I thought hey! This is Medical Push Hands! Well, it turned out to be more like Medical Air Guitar than anything else... medical theatrics.

But anyway, now here's yet another pretender to the throne of Ultimate Emperor of Healing, Dr. Zhi Gang Sha. I have written a little about him before. I am prepared to regard him as another bogus scamster, basically. Like almost everyone.

Yet there is one intriguing thing about him: he studied for years at the feet of somebody that I actually do respect quite a lot: the author of Body Space Medicine, Zhi Chen Guo. This Dr. Guo really has the shit. He is the real thing, I can feel it in my bones as I read his book. In his own book, BSM, Dr. Guo makes many fascinating and highly original points about illness, cures, and the body. His take on herbal medicine alone is worth the price of the book, in fact, it's absolutely revolutionary though not many Westerners seem to have realized what a piece of genius that stuff is. But let's not get into the whole herbal deal right here.

But I do want to call out another interesting point Dr. Guo makes. You all (should) know the direction of the normal so-called microcosmic orbit of internal energy in the body - typically described as  up through the spine, down the front. But Dr. Guo says nope, the traditional Taoists basically got that wrong in a big way, it's the reverse. So you can try reversing the flow when you meditate or whatever you do. (Hey Tabby Cat Central Enterprises Inc. assumes NO responsibility if you blow out your brains or something from trying this - at your own risk!) But it was interesting. This Dr. Guo guy is a thinker, a maverick, somebody to watch and admire.

Now his chief disciple, Dr. Zhi Gang Sha, comes across as your basic New Age quack. However, in his book Soul Mind Body Medicine, he does present something very interesting which I thought has some relation to Matrix Energetics'  Two Pointing technqiue, which in turn I felt was related to Push Hands training. Almost half the book is the long section: Techniques to Heal Common Ailments. And in that section, every technique is a kind of Two-Pointing. You position one hand near the afflicted part and your other hand at some distance away, and the over bloated stagnant energy of the diseased area supposedly will flow to the emptier area of the more extended hand, guided by its position.

Have it from the horse's mouth:

The Body Power technique used for almost all the ailments in this chapter is the One Hand Near, One Hand Far healing technique. To review, the One hand Near, One Hand Far healing technique is based on the principle  that high density or pressure flows to low density or pressure naturally. The Near Hand is placed four to seven inches from the area of the body that has high energy density, while the Far Hand is placed fifteen to twenty inches from the body, creating a difference in density or pressure in the energy fields between the hands and the body. Excess or blocked energy in the area the Near Hand faces will move away, removing the energy blockage in that area and promoting healing of the pain, inflammation, emotional imbalance, cysts, tumors cancer, or other ailments resulting from that blockage.

Very interesting, an admirably creative idea, I must say. There is an interesting tension between the emphasis in Pranic Healing (another one of these energy healing systems) with it's heavy emphasis on energy cleaning or removing blockage vs. Quantum Touch (another of these systems) that entirely emphasis sending or inputting energy to fill depletion. This Body Power / Near-Far Hands approach of Zhi seems to me like a natural bridge having elements of both ideas.

I'll be working with that and get back to you on it.

Wash your hog Mister?

Times being what they are, let's talk about money, the economy, stuff like that.

I recently attended a New Age seminar training for an innovative healing method and times being what they are, money was also covered. Since I'm not going to write about that particular New Age healing method any more, I am not going to write about the inane idiocy that the presenter offered on this topic.

If, however, I were to write about it, here's what I would write:

* * *

The presenter (we'll call him "MD" cause he likes to be styled DOCTOR) says he's going to explain money to us. Specifically, the question of the day: why is Person X rich while Person Y is poor? MD asks the audience of FOUR HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE HUMANS PLUS ONE FELINE ALL OF THEM BONEHEADED ENOUGH TO PAY FIVE  HUNDRED DOLLARS A HEAD FOR THIS USELESS SHIT WHEN ALL THE FELINE AT LEAST EVER WANTED IN THE FIRST PLACE WAS A VIABLE PRACTICAL ALTERNATIVE HEALING METHOD FOR REAL-WORLD INJURIES AND ILLNESSES THAT CAN FUNCTION WHEN INDUSTRIAL MEDICINE FINALLY COLLAPSES for two volunteers, one rich and one poor.

Some confusion arose about definitions and precise valuation methods here, but MD indicated absolute figures didn't matter much, just a Person X who considers him/herself rich and a Person Y who thinks s/he's poor would do. Now while ironically, in absolute net worth terms, it's a fair guess that the feline was in fact the richest attendee, nevertheless the feline, already at this first hour of the seminar smelling a rat, decided to lie low. Thus it came to pass that two women, one supposedly rich, the other supposedly poor, offered themselves up and mounted the stage and stood before us.

Ms. Loaded was slim, dressed tastefully and elegantly in white and other light colors, wearing a gold chain and a stylish but understated hairdo. She looked intelligent and prim.

Ms. Broke was heavy set, too much lipstick, black ill fitting outfit, but a very kindly expression and smile. She seemed a bit older than Ms. Loaded.

DR: "Whoa! Can you feel it? How many can't feel why [Ms. Loaded] is rich and [Ms. Broke] is poor? How many are having trouble feeling it?"

(Don't even get me started on how New Age seminar presenters always do this dumbass "Can you feel that?" stuff, just like the fake tailors in the story I quoted the other day.)

After some confusion the crowd basically asserted that yes, it was obvious why L is rich and B is poor. It's a vibrational problem, MD helpfully explained. You see, he said, Ms. L's "heart is open, and it's emanating. It's clear and she is therefore manifesting abundance." While Ms. B on the other hands, sadly her heart center is blocked, her Divine Abundance receptors and re-manifestors are blocked with a lot of personal and ancestral sludgy stuff (shudder!), some of which has to do with her Hispanic ancestry/ethnicity (no he wasn't psychic he asked where her family was originally from and she named a Central American country).

Ok great. Thanks for that MD! We can sure take that to the bank! But just when I was congratulating myself on how much my apparent waste of FIVE HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS was being unexpectedly validated by this kind of deep insight, he continues:

"You see, money is low frequency vibration. What goes together with money? Sex and power. Those are the big three in our material world - money, sex, and power. And see, all of these manifest from the darkest, low-frequency vibrations. And what is the seat of low frequency vibrations? It's the lowest chakra's, down with the digestive, excretive, and sex organs. So to manifest money, you have to screw people over. You have to be ruthless and just push out your low-spirituality power/sex/money vibes from your lowest, most material chakra's, which is why the world is presently so fucked u-

*screeeech* (Tabby attempting to stomp on my mental brake pedal)

What the FUCK!? I wanted to ask: "MD-sensei, Did you or did you not just now teach that richness was due to higher, heart level manifestation of pure clarified love and light and such? And now all of sudden it's low vibrations from our goddamn sex chakra?? Well I don't mind either way, but fuck, I'm writing my notes in pen here, which is it gonna be??"

But I didn't. Like I said, we felines keep a low profile. Hint: that's how we survived so long in the face of relentless human hostility!

I kept quiet because what am I gonna get from joining this Mad Hatter tea party? But it did occur to me that one could (mistakenly no doubt) perceive a contradiction here and I was sure one of the humans would pick up on that but nobody did.

I wish they had. I'm sure there was some perfectly straight-forward, logical explanation for the apparent contradiction. For example, since MD had told us he was channeling all the info that day from his guides, probably the astral sound lines just got switched or mixed or something on two different guides out there representing competing schools of thought on the question. Like, y'know, open mic night or something.

Anyway, he offered Ms. Broke the advice that if she stood up a little straighter, and connected with her heart, she'd soon be as rich as Ms. Loaded, and dismissed them from the stage. Perhaps it was reasonable advice, who am I to say? I don't know the human world.

He went on to talk about breasts, and offered all kinds of original insights on that topic, such as how the breast symbolizes abundance, and how men's extreme interest in female breasts arises from their attempts to return to their Mommy, and how breast cancer is caused by the sufferers themselves because the breasts are over the heart and those womens' hearts are not emanating properly and that's causing their breast cancers.

I should have raised my paw and said Mr MD sir why not instead of all this stupid ass cliched hogwash, why not suggest that all FIVE HUNDRED of us go home and read the fantastic book "Reinventing Collapse" by Dmitry Orlov, which is written in a highly amusing sardonic style and at the same time delivers the very serious facts on the impending collapse of the United States, illustrated by comparing common features from the Soviet precedent? In other words why don't we get serious? Learn some practical, survival economics from Mr. Orlov?

But I didn't raise my paw. We felines know that low key is best.

* * *

Now. Aren't you glad I no longer discuss that alternative New Age healing method in this blog any more? If I had written it you might have wasted several minutes reading it.

Buhbye

What! Does the [Tabby] come hither,
covered with an antic face,
To scorn and jeer at our solemnity?

-Tybalt (A-1;S-V; Romeo & Juliet)

* * *

Well damn. Hey! This post is gonna show me being judgmental, left-brainy, and in my stuff. As these are practically capital crimes in the New Age world, I advise you to get out of this blog right now.

Today was the 3rd and final day of Matrix Energetics Level 3 Wizard Training course. So I guess I'm now certified as at least a Wizard, even though I'm not (and never will be) certified as an actual ME practitioner (even though I've taken all their trainings now) because I have not created and submitted a Practice Journal of actual treatments done with ME, which is one of their cert requirements. Hell, for that matter, I didn't even pick up my cutesy little printout certificate for completion of the Wizard course today.

Screw it. I'm sick of Matrix Energetics. I mean that in the nicest possible way, because I don't doubt that ME has a great deal to offer most people. I'm just one of those rare, inevitable assholes who finally has to admit to not really getting it and moving on. Too bad - quite a few hundred bucks down the drain there for sure, which would've been better spent creating a parking meter change fund or buying stale bread to feed the ducks.

Anyway. Let's talk about today, the final session. It was a change of pace in that the Man of the Hour was not Richard Bartlett today, rather it was the Robin to his Batman, a Dr. Mark Dunn. This is another naturopath type of semi/pseudo "doctor" (as they often like to style themselves).

Though he seems a personable enough guy, to my grotesquely judgmental mind he's a big step down from Richard B. He basically a sort of not-very-funny New Age stand up comic. Of course, Bartlett is mostly just that also, but though Bartlett also isn't truly funny somehow his content came off as waaaay more practical and less pretentious than Dunn's. Just to me, as I said I'm an asshole who's in my stuff and doesn't get it, ok? So if you are still reading this you can only blame yourself.

Yeah, as it has been written once before by a clever literary critic "there is much here that is new and much that is true, unfortunately what's new here isn't true and what's true isn't new." That's what I felt about DOCTOR Dunn's presentation today.

He seems to be on a kind of Messianic kick, some kinda complex going. Of course he cloaks it in all kinds of folksy "I'm just a reglur guy who happens to be totally clairvoyant and clear and who knows all kinds of things about how to save you and save the world  BUT pay no attention. Let's have another lame joke or sight gag. Pay no attention to that Messiah clowning in front of you."

The program of self-improvement that he attempted to teach was pretty confused but to the extent I could make heads or tails from it, the idea was the usual thing about vertical transcendence (a standard Western concept that is brutally and brilliantly dissected in Morris Berman's great book Coming To Our Senses). He said that animals are ok but since they go around on four legs they therefore cannot access the Divine. It's a postural thing. So humans are meant to be Lord of All. Just all kinds of standard New Age bullshit, in fact, worse than that, almost crypto Christianity, except it had the New Age emphasis that "you are God". Like I said, confused.

But that's ok. I'm sure the apologia would be that you gotta listen with your Heart or at least with your Right Brain. (The interesting thing about the idolization of the Right Brain in current New Age circles is that no less a figure than Robert Monroe stated on numerous occasions that learning and applying Left Brain-style making-sense-of-stuff, figuring-things-out, and bullshit-detection was one of the main, perhaps the main, point of incarnating into the human/physical Time Space Illusion in the first place, given that Out There it's "All Right Brain, All the Time", so only Here can Left Brain-y skills be picked up and used) It seemed the mere exposure to this guy was supposed to be setting in motion some kind of process that would clean up our stuff. Yes your stuff is a Big Big Deal with these guys, everybody has too much stuff! That's common across all ME speakers. Well after all if your  house didn't have termites how could the exterminator bill you, eh?

He sometime meandered into claims of Non-Duality in a very confused way in that he's offering a process that takes a lot of time and leads to you being clear (yeah, in fact it did sound a lot like Scientology or some equivalent bullshit cult now you mention it.) Yo! Mark-sensei! News Flash! That ain't Non-Duality, at least as experienced and expressed by those who truly seem to know, like David Carse. He stirred in a lot of superstitious fear mongering, like if your roof caves in it was probably some enemy (perhaps working in groups) attacking you psychically. As DOCTOR Dunn might do to me should he ever read this! Ha ha ha! ... *bite nails*

Incoherent, ridiculous, and worst of all, not even funny. No fun.

But I shouldn't actually be blaming DOCTOR Dunn. Because he stated right up front:

"I'm going to be channeling everything I say today, direct from my guides."

*A ripple of genuflective awe races through the crowd*

But ever since I saw a vid clip of Ramtha... channeling doesn't turn me on anymore. But it hit me again, here are 500 adults sitting here who'll pretty much beLIEve any damn thing you tell them. Or better yet, they'll pay money to beLIEve any damn thing. Doesn't get much better.

If these guys think they're channeling they should try to keep in mind the wisdom of Confucius:

天不言 (Heaven does not speak).

Another thing bugged me was Dunn's constant exhortations: "You guys are the pioneers! Word harder to get what I'm giving you, because you are the first ones!"

That line about you guys are the elite, the lucky avant garde is such a totally standard bullshit cultic line of snow. I can't believe he used that one so unselfconsciously and baldfacedly. Cult or merely scam? You be the judge.

But of course the crowd totally loved this guy. That's when, seeing this guy present, it hit me: I am that rare occasional asshole (ya cain't weed 'em out totally up at the ticket gate), who just isn't ever going to join the ME fold.

Like I said, he did present a few things I could resonate with - but I'd heard all those a million times before. Just cliches. But this guy has a giant rep in ME circles as a mystic, healer, shaman, clairvoyant, doctor, and comedian extraordinaire. So who am I to quibble? Therefore this is my last post on Matrix Energetics. Screw it. May it RIP.

I will say, more charitably, right here at the end, that probably Bartlett himself has some truly useful and innovative healing ideas, and lot of interesting practical experience treating people via alternative modalities. Somebody with half a brain should take it up and see where they can go with it.

All the Matrix Energetic healing styles, tools (their term), and practices seem to me to relate to actual healing and medical practice as shadow boxing relates to actual boxing. In other words, they are simulating healing, making empty gestures in the air and mystery words over the "patient". But even so, just as shadow boxing has some value in boxing training, probably ME style medical theatrics has potential value in healing - at least when performed by a real showman like Bartlett. His insights and methods should be studied further, but please scrape this Dunn guy off the shoe before proceeding.

Naturalism

I got bored with the New Age scenesters around me today (3rd and Final day of Matrix Energetics Wizard Level 3 Seminar).

So during the breaks I did another two of my unique renditions of natural phenomena (always animals or plants).

Too many words on here lately eh?

So as a treat for your eyes, here are the two artworks:

And here's the other one. Both are Copyright (c) Tabby Cat, 2009:

I really oughta write that graphic novel one of these days.