Emails from the Token

[Mikado14]

Fruitbat,

Demons. I wonder if when we are born, there are no demons. As life goes or the act of living, is similar to some demonic rite whereas we conjure them up from our internal energies derived from emotion and experience. Since they are of and born from ourselves, we should be able to identify their weakness and in the long or short term slowly deny them the food or energy to exist and the act of doing so will release us from the very chains that bounded Jacob Marley.

I see the post you made as being tough to do. An explanation derived through self introspection. That is a difficult endeavour to accomplish much lest get it right.

I will take this opportunity to tell you about my foray into introspection and perhaps a bit of an explanation as to the fracas that has taken place over the past three years with Linda.

On March the 3rd of 2005, I was with my boss at the time in a place called Toughkenamon Pennsylvania on a job. We were at a Verizon depot picking up some vehicles that required repair. I had been going through a good deal of stress over a legal situation that had been going on for years so needless to say, I smoked too much, didn't get enough sleep and in short, felt like I was on high alert 24/7. This had been going on for years.

After we were loaded on the truck with the equipment, I felt funny with a twinge in my chest, like I pulled a muscle. We ended up turning around and going back for we apparently forgot something we needed to take, more like they forgot to tell us when we were there.

After we arrived back where we started, my boss went inside the secured building. He told me to stay in the truck and rest since I was complaining about this twinge and not feeling at all well. He was inside and I started feeling worse. I went to try and get inside the building and could not find a way in. I went to the garage door thinking he was inside...hoping he was inside since the equipment would have been there...and banging on the door. As I was looking through the window, I saw him coming and I slowly slid down the door and onto the ground. I told him to call for an ambulance and I was asking for aspirin. The supervisor only had Tylenol which I refused. They called for an ambulance.

Toughkenamon is in the middle of nowhere in a sense. It might look like it isn't when viewing on a map but where the location was is beautiful countryside where you can look up one side and down the other in a valley populated with farms, beautiful really but when you are waiting for an ambulance...an eternity passes.

All my life I had a recurring dream, a feeling, that I would die alone, no one around. The only one there was my boss Fred. I wouldn't let go of his hand. Inside I knew that if I did, I wouldn't be here anymore. When the ambulance finally arrived, they were quick to get me inside....I had to let go of his hand. I was slowly resigning myself to the fact that this was it. They sprayed nitro in my mouth under my tongue....no effect. I could hear them talking to the hospital...over 10 miles away and it didn't sound good. They were prepping for my arrival. I heard the word cardiologist was not on hand. I heard there was no bed (trauma room) available and they were making one ready and meanwhile, I kept getting sprays of nitro under my tongue. The pain was becoming unbearable and felt as if I would go out of my mind. I tried to perform relaxing techniques for meditation but my concentration was not there. Eventually, we arrived.

I was wheeled into the waiting trauma room. The ER doctor came in eventually and it was a mad house....no EKG machine...just a crash cart. The Doctor asked for a pair of scissors to cut my blue jeans off and I said I could do it. He looked at me and said, "Are you sure?" and I said yes. I got the jeans off and by this time, two nurses were there with the EKG and I briefly saw a crash cart coming towards my bed. I rolled to my side and said I was going to be sick. I threw up into the nurses hand. As I stared at my vomit in her hands, I heard someone screaming "code blue" as I rolled on my back.

The next thing I remember is sitting in a chair and watching the Doctor straddling my body and performing CPR with a nurse rushing in with some kind of blue bag. I said to myself, "this is not good" so I looked up to the ceiling and I was transported to a room that was all white.

Needless to say, I had an experience. One that some call an NDE or a close to death experience. The short version is, I had no pain. the excruciating pain was gone and I felt better than I had felt in a very long time. It was a time for deep personal introspection, the kind where you can't bullshit yourself. The reality of the situation, whatever it is, is profound. I remember sitting there and hearing noise behind me. In front of me was a white wall with a white circle slowly beginning to form. I thought about my children, my parents, my ex-wife, my family...everything in my life that I should have corrected and I thought how I never told Kim how I felt about her. All my fears that were unfounded. Things I always had the power to change and didn't for I used excuses to justify not doing anything. I how was at fault in my relationships and I how could have corrected it, sometimes with a simple word. I was my own worst judge and then, I felt as if I knew I would be returning in another life to learn all these things. The noise was getting louder in the front and the noise in the rear was waning. As the light became very bright, the noise became clear and a voice said, "It is not your time yet". At that, the noise became louder behind me, I felt disoriented, ill and confused and some of the pain returning in my chest. The noise became very loud in my left ear and I thought I was on a telephone. I reasoned...no...I can't be..I was at Verizon....I was in a hospital....I think...I would pay real money for whomever it is shouting in my ear to shut up....about that time I could make out that it was someone saying in my ear...loudly...that I was going on a helicopter ride and I would be alright. I turned my head looked at her and cried and said , "Thank You" and I repeated it several times for at that moment I knew that I could change what I saw but eventually, I wondered...why? ....why me? Why would I be given a second chance? Why did I deserve a second chance? And what was I supposed to do with it?

One of the things I asked Linda was,...."Do you know why I came back, what was the reason, what am I supposed to do?" And she said she knew. I would tell her, most times, I didn't want to know but in the end when I asked her sitting in McDonald's in July of 2011 what it was she knew, she said she didn't know anything. After all those years of her telling me that she knew why I didn't die she couldn't answer for she didn't really know.

How would you have felt? I could go on with the introspection part of it but will if you wish to hear it but is it necessary? Is it really essential to say what has happened because of it? The result is, I suffered a good deal of trauma in them saving my life. I had TMI strokes in my brain that resulted in memory loss. The cracked my chest from the CPR. They pumped 350 cc of blood from my stomach and the whites of my eyes turned purple due to the capillaries breaking.

I wouldn't want to go through it again but I am glad I did.

Mikado

[LuisP]

Fruitbat,
"....I see the post you made as being tough to do. An explanation derived through self introspection. That is a difficult endeavour to accomplish much lest get it right..".

Mikado

Concur.

[LuisP]

What about personal responsibility and freewill? To excuse bad behaviour on some external force is avoiding taking responsibility for actions. Whilst good and evil may exist it is freewill that decides which way you go. The choice is your responsibility not some 'excuse' of an unseen malevolent external force made me do it! Very handy but ultimately dangerously wrong.

Sorry FB we are sadly I at different compass bearings over this.

Concur.

[LuisP]

On this note, i’d like to call here the presence of a tremendous Man, who faced Evil in the eyes and lived to talk about it, and what It could do to any Average Joe.

Until he killed himself, that is, because no one – he came to believe – listened to what he had to say.

I’m talking about Primo Levi.

Listen to Him … and, allow me to say - Think.

These are very powerful, troubling, advices :

- “An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.”

- “We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.”

- “The harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate - terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever”.

-“It is, therefore, necessary to be suspicious of those who seek to convince us with means other than reason, and of charismatic leaders: we must be cautious about delegating to others our judgment and our will. Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion.”

- “It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege … but one must never forget that this is a war without end, and arm ourselves to wage it.”

Hope you found peace, Primo.

And, Thank You.

[Fruitbat]

I am sorry wags and Luis, I did TRY to make my posting readable, but clearly you missed the point.

At no point do I neglect free will, or personal responsibility. Indeed, I'm trying to help share a tool that should assist you both in excercising those things.

As our gracious host explains so lucidly, that post was all about the difficulty one can encounter when looking inwards for solutions. I can only speak for myself, but frankly although I'd like to always "have the high ground", and always be "right" when it comes to life's little conflicts and frustrations in reality I find that sometimes I don't. Worse, I find that my actions have sometimes seemingly been impaired, by anger perhaps, or fear, and I have not conducted myself in a way that gets the best possible outcome. Now it is very easy, when looking at ones own actions (particularly in real time) to fail to see the wood for the trees, add a smudge of intermittent mendacity, and the picture can be quite confusing, as several of you have pointed out.

Most of you claim to be trying to attend to serious matters, like fukushima radiation, or bullying, or alternative physics so mental fitness is as useful to all of us, as physical fitness is to an athlete.

My IMAGINARY demon is merely a construct, to help me to improve my performance, when I otherwise I can get trapped in a cycle of crapulence. Since it's been visibly working for me recently, and I don't really bring very much to the party except a bit of humour which sometimes makes it across the keyboard and cultural gaps, I thought I try and share what seems to be working for me. And also try and show that Linda's idea of malevolent remote influence isn't as crazy as it might seem, because by recognising that something similar seems to happpen to us, on occasion, and having the putative excuse of it being a malevolent external force it makes it easier to excercise self doubt and hence correction where neccesary in those of us wh would otehr wise completely trust our instincts.

A practical example of this would be when earlier today I was very tempted to give wags a bit of sharp tongue in a PM over a private matter. I felt (still do) very justified in what I was writing, and I believe that if I could get him to the same understanding that I have in the matter he would be better off in life, but PRACTICALLY speaking, I am fairly sure all he would have got from it was the sharp tongue. I might have felt a bit better getting my feelings off my chest, but I feel sure he would have hated reading what I was going to write. I might well think I am being fair and honest, but he may well have read my words as being cruel. By looking for the possibility of external malevolent influence, I was able to see my actions though a different lens, that outside of my own self interest, and I believe that I made the right decision when I stopped sending that email. The issue between us does of course remain, and will have to be solved at some point, but today, I managed to avoid "giving him some crap". Eventually I am sure I will find a nice way or the correct time to get my point across.

The alternative approach, is the one Kevin benefitted from over on the token. When he started to get in my face, I just reacted and "gave him some back". The result was that he left the token in disgust. It would be easy to say "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones", or to translate for that situation, "people who publically give me crap should be able to take it when it comes back". But if I had had the tool of considering Kevin to be "under malevolent influence" when he was chipping away at me on the token, or disrupting every single bleeding attempt anyone made to have a scientific based discussion, maybe I would have treated him with a bit more kindness and he wouldn't be wobbling around here crying like a wounded duck about what a hard time he had had. If he'd also been using that tool maybe he could have extended me a bit more psychological leeway too.

I know a judge. She impressed me once by acknowledging her "luck" to have been blessed with the combination of personal qualities that have put her into that position. So many people who attain a decent status in life start giving it the big I AM about how they "worked hard to get where they are today" etc, which whilst true, isn't the whole story by any means. I know people who no matter how hard they work will never have any money, because their aptitudes have put them in the low income trap from where, barring a lottery win, they will never escape, thorugh no fault of their own. Our hubris sometimes leads us to disrespect people completely unfairly. Any tool that can help us be less judgemental and more helpful to others should only be discarded after careful though I believe.

But what do I know? :c)

FB.

[Fruitbat]

And Primo Levy according to wikipedia may not have killed himself...

Rita Levi-Montalcini, a scientist and close friend of Levi, commented, "If Levi wanted to kill himself he, a chemical engineer by profession, would have known better ways than jumping into a narrow stairwell with the risk of remaining paralyzed."[32] Also, Gambetta has pointed out that Levi had complained to his physician of dizziness in the days before his death. Having visited the apartment complex, Gambetta concluded that it is more plausible to assume that Levi lost his balance and fell accidentally to his death.

FB.

[StarCat]

Thank you for sharing your story Mikado. I knew bits and pueces of it from Linda, but getting the sequence of events from the eventee, puts a much different perspective on things.

Cat

[wags]

FB,

In the scenario that we were talking about (ie the Token), your point is giving Oxygen to a situation that requires Argon!

I have realised I could not walk along the fence, pretending it was not there. Sometimes it turns out the money was being placed on the wrong nag. I asked Linda to correspond over the 'Mediation' by PM. She persisted in going public and making strange vague undefined accusations that were not acceptable to me on 'Mental Health Trap' grounds.

I am disappointed that you did not spot this and warn me yourself. One warning bell should have been Linda sharing the secret disclosure of my PM's to you. Now you cannot be expected to take responsibility for that you did not send them, but you should have kept me informed as it was happening. I feel I have been subject to GIGO, on more than one occasion in past 12 months. Not a very good given that is a large part of why I am so disappointed in general! I just do not need anymore of it.

Wags

[kevin]

Could someone please tell fruitbat to shut up.( seeing as he has his head up his arse relative to moi.)
He keeps on referencing Myself with his peculier perspective of My reactions to him and the cosmic forum.
He can say what he likes , but needs to make it clear that it is his opinion, which I see as ballocks.
I have no, or have had no problem with him, he sure has some weird problem about me.
WHOEVER He is????
I thought by exitting the resolute he could keep his weird ideas on there, but no he had to carry on on the cosmic forum, and thus I immeadiately left.
It wasn't in disgust, it was because I knew my presence was untenable seeing how they had made him captain , or whatever of the resolute.
It was untenable for the forums, and little boy blue clearly reckoned the self same.

Sorry to have to ask, but basically I am sick of been referenced out of context.
kevin

[kevin]

Perhaps I should highlight some bits from fruitbats above post relative to Myself.
1,"started to get in My face"
2,"left in disgust"
3, "chipping away at me on the token"
4, "Or disrupting every bleeding attempt ANYONE made to have a scientific discussion"
5," He wouldn't be whirling around here crying like a wounded duck , and what a hard time he had".

WHY is He bringing such verbal garbage over onto here?
It is exactly the self same modus operandi used against Mikado.

Can someone tell whoever this is to stick the above comments where the sun don't shine , and whistle dixie, please.

It is bullshit been thrown until enough sticks to convince all others that there is some basis for it.

I am not about to get into a protraced debate about such, as I would rather simply shut off this F~~~~~ machine.

Divide et impera.

Kevin