Conspiracy Theory, Peak Oil, and Fukitol

Before the 9/11 truth movement existed I knew what we were being told was bull shit. I knew that because I was on the vessel that dropped the first bombs on Afghanistan as a result of 9/11. I knew in my bones that the American population, and the world, was being lied to, but I didn't know the specifics. I wanted out of the navy before 9/11 happened. I had realized that enlisting in the military was a grave mistake for me because I valued self exploration, autonomy, and intellect; none of which the navy provided, gave a shit about, or allowed to occur. I choked down the contracts I had signed until 9/11happened. It was one thing to be slaving away as a nuclear automaton relatively benignly as far as the world was concerned, but it was quite another to be assisting in the killing of invisible innocents. I wanted to know the truth badly.

After about a year of alcohol and drug use, I started to actively pursue the truth (in those rare moments of temporary sobriety). This search led me to Alex Jones and his infowars. It didn't take long before I became a card totin' prisonplanet member. I listened to his broadcasts and watched all of his documentary films. For a couple of years I was an Alex Jones disciple. He verified my anger and my actions concerning the navy. I knew that I was right to do what I had done, but I didn't have the proof until Alex Jones. When patrons came to my bar they got an ear full. I ran a lot of people off, but I opened a lot of eyes as well.

I was all about exposing the Illuminati for their NWO conspiracy to imprison the planet as an intellectual thing until I viewed "The Passion of the Christ." Shortly after viewing that film I had a dream where I met evil incarnate in the form of an old female demon that looked a lot like Zelda from "Pet Cemetary" only scarier. It was a vivid dream that felt more like reality than my waking life. It scarred the shit out of me and caused me to run back to the eager arms of Christianity, the religion of my child hood. Yes, for about six months I could be seen sitting behind my bar during the slow times reading a pocket sized copy of the New Testament. Then I started reading the likes of Tex Marrs, whom if you don't know, is a Christian evangelical conspiracy theory nut job. He takes the Illuminati seriously on a spiritual level and applies it all to Revelations and the end times. Now, I was a Christian conspiracy theorists, which is the original type of conspiracy theorists. In fact, the Illuminati really is a Christian conspiracy theory and doesn't make much sense out of that context. This is Satan operating amongst man. I even got into reading the "Left Behind" series at this point in my life (I don't mind if you laugh at my expense...I would). Then one day, and I don't remember the day or the moment, because I don't think there was one, I just stopped with the Christian nonsense. Basically the fear from meeting Zelda wore off and I came to my senses. All that meant was that I dropped the spiritual implications from what the Illuminati was. Now it was framed in a more secular content, but otherwise I was still ate up with it.

I met my wife in October of 2002, 10 months after flipping the penny that brought me back to the South. I was drunk, as usual, and I walked into one of the several bars I frequented looking for companionship. I was by myself this particular night. I noticed an ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine playing pool with a smokin' hot vixen (pictured above). I always liked Summer (the ex of the friend), and knowing her gave me the courage to start talkin' shit to that vixen. I was so broke at the time that Joey and I's fifth apartment didn't even have the power turned on yet (we had been living there for about two weeks). Our first date was financed on a roll of quarters belonging to Wendy. We went to a hole in the wall pool hall where they have .25 cent games and you can't see cause all of the smoke and bad country music, and then we went to the Waffle House where we drank coffee and she ate hash browns. I told her that I had lost count at 23 women, had done just about every drug under the sun, and usually scared women away because I was too "deep." I still have that paper coin roll in my wallet.  

Six months later Wendy and I were living together. Three months after that Wendy was gone and I was left with a Goodwill couch, an entertainment stand with nothing on it, and a computer. She had vanished due to a torrid affair that I had gotten myself wrapped up in presumably for being too "deep". I had fallen in love with a bar patron of mine who reciprocated those feelings. It is a long story, and one that I'll spare you the details of. However, for whatever reason, Wendy did not want to give up on me, and so a few months into the new relationship I was cheating on her with Wendy. It was a mess. When it was all over, Wendy and I were back together, and she was living 70 miles away. I had a drivers license and a broke down car that didn't work at this point. Wendy did a lot of driving on account of my sorry ass, and I still don't know why.

When we were engaged was when I got hauled off to the slammer for being a stupid drunk. I continued going to my job managing a shit hole bar via my bike. Luckily for me, the cop who had pulled me over had resigned from Spartanburg PD and moved to Charleston. Case closed. I got back my license and didn't get charged with a DUI (which would have sealed my fate as a loser cause I never would have worked in EMS otherwise). However I did lose 2500 dollars to a lawyer who required 5000 to represent me. He let me off the hook with just the 2500 dollar retainer on account of his punk ass didn't have to do a damn thing for the money.

At this point, engaged, and not a damn thing going for me short of tending bars, I decided I better do something a little more in line with a domesticated lifestyle. This was when I finally decided to become an EMT. Just before we got married I got certified as an EMT-basic and began working for a local convalescent transport company making 11 dollars an hour. I worked for them "Granny Snatchin" for a little over a year before I got hired with Piedmont EMS in Rock Hill South Carolina. Getting the job was the fruition of my goal to be on a real meat wagon working EMS. Shortly after taking that job we bought our first house, which they wouldn't allow us to buy with me on the mortgage. Wendy financed it herself with the income from her successful business as a wedding photographer. We got a really good deal. 3.65 acres surrounded by woods in the middle of the city of Rock Hill. The house was 1450 square feet with a detached 800 sqft garage. We paid 110,000 dollars with an APR of 7% fixed, which wasn't that bad for the time. A year later the housing market collapsed.

2007 was also the year that I ran into JHK's "The Long Emergency," and got schooled on peak oil. Up to this point I had never heard of the idea and had never even thought about infinite growth on a finite planet. Up to that point I was unaware that our problems were much more ominous than the Illuminati's NWO. Reading TLE was the first step on the stair case of reality and not conspiracy theory for me. I didn't let go of the Illuminati easily at first, but Alex Jones and I had to break up. He's a peak oil denier, and I couldn't deny the truth of peak oil and therefore couldn't reconcile why he would deny it. I moved on to Richard Heinberg, Michael Ruppert, Dimitri Orlov, and John Michael Greer.

Up to this point in my life I had never owned any land or seen the need to grow any food. I started gardening organically right out of the gates. Then I started prepping and dealing with the roller coaster ride that learning about peak oil becomes for anybody who doesn't decide to bury their head in the sand. I debated for a long time about whether to procreate or not. Wendy pretty much just took my word for it on the PO front. She was too busy running her business to notice or really care about PO and mostly just placated my concerns about the future. She wanted a child, and so did I, it was just the future I was concerned about. How could I willingly bring a child into a world that was on Hubbert's bumpy plateau? A couple of years of PO study and obsession goes by and we decide to have a child. In 2010 my son Ayden Zen was born.

My wife's business began to tank due to negative returns on technology. Digital camera technology is so good now that any dumb ass soccer mom can take 5000 pictures at a wedding and then photoshop 500 or so of them into descent pictures. Talent is rapidly dissolving into technology in photography. Camera equipment is very expensive, and this is part of the reason why photography got so expensive. Now rich soccer moms get their 3000 dollar camera along with thousands of dollars in related equipment and editing soft ware and they're in business. They can undercut the professionals because they are just playing for egoistic reasons and not concerned with paying bills cause their husbands handle all of that. In our case, my 28,000 dollar a year (gross income, I brought home 2000 a month) just paid for the vehicles and our house and I was out of money before I was even paid. Our son arrived and Wendy's business was on the downward spiral.

I was extremely stressed out by all of these changes. Wendy felt guilty about her money going away which put her in a bad mood, which further strained our relationship.  I was stressed out trying to live a 40,000 dollar lifestyle on 28,000 dollars with no feasible way to better my situation. My son added an entire new layer of stress to all of this. Healthcare was slowly changing from something I loved to something I hated due to all of the governmental changes. We went from patients to customers, and I began hating all of the new bureaucracies that became inherent in the new healthcare landscape. What I had was a house that was falling apart. A house that was a ticking time bomb fit to explode and leave us with a leaking roof, no heat, cockroaches, and thousands of other things that needed to be maintained with no money to maintain any of it. All my career working on the meat wagon was doing was keeping us from drowning, for the time being. I broke and ended up on fukitol for a short period of time. If you've been following Epiphany now for the last year, than you'll likely know what's transpired since then. It not, have a look around.

This post pretty much concludes my autobiographical stint, at least in any kind of chronological order. I'll be wrapping it up with one more post along with Jason Heppenstall and WHD (who's apparently going to begin and end his auto offering in one post soon). I'll save you any suspense cause we've got enough of that waiting on Jason. I'm just going to be writing a conclusion blog. I won't be concluding Epiphany Now, but I'll more than likely be slowing down. January 9th I'm going to be taking 13 hours of college prerequisites for the RN program at our local community college, plus I'm gonna be going back to work granny snatchin' part time. It's come to that. I've got to pay the monkey. My wife is five months along into our second pregnancy. We have no income for 2013 unless I go back to work.  We just found out yesterday that we're having another boy and the ultrasound revealed no abnormalities. After all of this, I'm going to be plugging back into the Matrix. I'll be talking about that and my plans for the future in my next post.

Faith

The idea of faith is one that was inevitably going to be discussed by me here. Faith, religion, spirituality, and psychology have always been the most interesting subjects for research by myself. The only real way to research these issues are empirically. Buddha himself said he just points down the middle path of enlightenment but you have to walk it. When it comes to spirituality only you are equipped to make decisions. The exploration of the ideas involved in this topic will probably span largely and require many posts. In fact it will be an on going topic on this blog. In this area I remain open to suggestion and new ideas with one stipulation; I will not change my mind on these issues unless you can first present your case logically. I will only get to the point of departure with you by exhausting logic first. In other words, you must show me that you have thought critically about why you believe what you do. Just parroting one liners from a holy book means absolutely nothing to me. Referring me to your particular religious fairy tale as an answer to a critical question like "why did God exterminate all but a few people?" is not going to get you anywhere with me.

In Grace and Grit, written by Ken and Treya Wilber, Wilber talks about the differences between exoteric and esoteric spiritual beliefs. Exoteric: Suitable for or communicated to the general public. Basically this is what you get in church. Those who hold exoteric beliefs generally believe in religious imperatives that they have never spent cognizant time with. That is that they accept all of the tenets and beliefs set forth by their particular religion as the alpha and omega without ever questioning them. Now I know that is not implied by the definition of exoteric, but I'm saying it is usually the case. If you are of that type of person than you probably are not open to knew religious/spiritual ideas and this blog is not for you.

Exoteric beliefs do not require you to question them. In fact they thrive when you do not question them. In my experience Christianity is composed mainly of people who have questioned the Bible at most a tad bit but usually not at all. The questions kids pose of the Bible are not the kinds of questions I'm talking about either. I'm talking about questions that arise from the age of reason. To be clear I do not have a problem with what I believe to be the true face of Christianity. That is to say, what I believe the real Jesus of Nazareth said and meant, and not what the red words subjected to the will of man over the last 2000 years say. There are Christians out there whom act Christ like and can carry on an intelligent conversation about their beliefs (usually up to a point at least), but in my experience they are the minority. The majority fall into the exoteric camp. They see the Bible as the unaltered perfect word of God. It's not my intention to single Christianity out during this discussion. It's just what I grew up in. The Bible was not able to stand up to my logical scrutiny. Things are different now but that's for another discussion.

Exoteric means accepted ignorance to me. I don't care what religion you are talking about. If you subscribe to one book as the word of God, than it's very probable that you are practicing that word exoterically. In order to say that one book is the perfect word of God you are also saying that the other "word of God books" are wrong and fraudulent. You see, saying that the Bible is the only way to God is inherently unchristlike. Christ does not condemn souls to hell, frustrated exoteric beliefs, on the other hand, do. Exoteric beliefs are largely used to control the will and mind of the masses. They have always served that function in society. They are a function of the controlling arms of society and nothing more. I have no use for exoteric belief patterns. In my mind the only thing that keeps the masses bound up with these all or nothing beliefs is fear. Namely the fear of death. Logic and reason get you pretty far but at some point you have to address questions that logic and reason have no business with. These questions pertain to faith and what it means to practice esoteric religion. This is the point where religion and spirituality meet. Fear is what keeps most people pigeon holed in a particular religion.

People are afraid to die. Exoteric beliefs provide them with recluse from the onslaught of this meditation. Meditating on the impermanence of your own life is an extremely powerful practice. Death as fear is a product of ego. Your ego, what you identify as you in your head, that constant monologue that you are prisoner to, the ticker tap that goes non-stop in your head, that is ego. It is concerned with only one thing and that is continual existence. Your ego wants to make sure that it will always exist and death is the antidote to that. Therefore it will not willingly allow you to ponder death. Death means that at some point the ego ceases to exist...unless. Unless there is some way that it can continue to exist after death. Enter exoteric religion and control of your mind by oligarchs.

Do not succumb to your visceral knee-jerk reaction to this idea. This is the point of departure I was talking about earlier in this blog. If you look at the history of religion, the use of religion as an ultimate vehicle of control cannot be denied logically. This is presented perfectly in the history of Christianity. It is historical fact that Christianity is a fusion of popular Roman beliefs and the then new Christian sect. Why would that be the case? I think, if you are willing to allow reason in, you can see why that would be the case. The important concept to keep in mind here is that just because your particular exoteric religion is caught up in this undeniable history does not mean that you must remain locked to it by fear. You do not have to remain an apologetic to your religion. What does it mean if you are an apologetic to begin with? It means that you are making excuses. For what?

Faith does not have to mean accepted ignorance. Faith can mean that you have exhausted the limits of reason and must now make decisions about what you feel the nature of ultimate reality is. This is the realm of the esoteric.