It starts out bad and, second by second, it gets worse. You know the kind of night I’m talking about, where you’re so tired you want to lie down right where you are, where your legs are so heavy they feel like they’re sinking into quicksand, yet you can’t close your eyes, you’re so twitchy, anxious, worried about dozens of things that might not ever happen, but they could, and you’re just waiting for the axe to drop.
“Wired & Tired” they used to say after a music gig. “Wired and tired.”
There’s a thin film of sweat all over your body, and a general malaise, nothing definite, nothing you could point to, but SOMETHING is bothering you, making you tremble, sweat and shake.
A feeling of impending doom falls on your head, and you can’t shake the thought that something dreadful is about to happen or may be happening right now, just outside your circle of awareness.
Nothing seems to help. You lie there, waiting for sleep to come, but it never does, not when you’re like this, it doesn’t. Finally, in desperation and writhing discomfort, you struggle up out of bed and somehow dress yourself in something not too uncomfortable, but warm enough to help with the coldness, the biting chill, that eats at you from all sides.
Now comes the guilt, the worry about being anxious and depressed, the horrible fear that you might either be anxious, or you might BECOME anxious, the realization that you’re in a deep depression, and that nothing you do will bring you out of it anytime soon.
“I should not be anxious. I mustn’t be anxious. I have no reason to feel anxious.”
You’re quite right, the doctors will tell you that you mustn’t feel anxious, that anxiety is bad for you. There’s nothing bad happening, nothing horribly wrong, nothing going on that hasn’t been going on for some time, but now, tonight, at this hour, you’re anxious, and this makes you depressed.
Then you start thinking about all the reasons you might be depressed, trying to find some logic in it, some rational reason why depression is indicated, and somehow, you always manage to find at least one reason to be depressed, and you land on that, then zoom in on it and peer at it from all sides, which makes you even more depressed.
Things look awful, dreadful, horrible. All your efforts are futile, everything you do will someday crumble into dust, your friends are moving elsewhere, finding new interests or getting stuck in old ones, or simply dying off, leaving a “High School Reunion” effect on you, where you’re looking around the room, wondering where everybody has gone to.
Well, the fact is that most of them were never there in the first place, merely figments of your imagination, in the sense that what was really going on inside them was nothing like the picture you built up of them and robotically maintained, in the face of new data.
The illusion of worthwhileness, of some intrinsic deep lasting value, has tracelessly vanished. Your job, your career, such as it is, your family values and your self-image are all shattered, at least for this dark hour and other dark hours.
Your sense of accomplishment, of having made good efforts with good results, is gone. Everything looks absurd from here, a rat-race of struggle against selfishness and social betrayal, greed and meanness, and the horrible impact of living on Planet of the Apes hits home.
You sit there, motionless, unable to make yourself even lift a finger to help yourself. You can’t fight this choking, smothering, overwhelming blanket of helplessness and despair.
Dark, dark, darker. The usual worries and fears give way to deeper worries and fears, and in the end, there’s nothing to do but sit in the darkness of the soul, the spiritual darkness that persists in the brightest light and the most crowded of conditions.
There is no special hour for The Dark Night of the Soul.
Not only are you unable to fight through it, you really don’t care, you don’t really want to make the effort to fight it, because you know it’s true. Everything you do is shit, everything that happens leads to misery and suffering, and every effort you make to climb out of it lands you deeper and deeper in the mud.
Even if you know the cause of this darkness and despair, it doesn’t help; it doesn’t clear away the cobwebs or make the fears vanish or make the worry dissipate in a cloud of particles.
The anxiety could easily be explained in a surprisingly large majority of people, by a simple but uncomfortable buildup of waste material in your colon, and no, I’m not kidding. An amazing number of “anxiety” cases could be cured if they were taught how to make the passage of potty a whole lot easier through the use of diet, correct breathing, and correction of their potty-passing habits.
The First Law of Liquids in Magical Notation is that liquids are connected — air or other gases that form between liquid masses tend to disrupt the flow, and that goes double for your colon.
Allowing the gas to pass first makes it easier to pass the solids, get it?
I know this is an uncomfortable subject, but so is an intolerable level of depression, so bear with me, all right?
Depression happens when something is wrong with your body and you can’t get a fix on what it is or where it’s coming from, and Colonic Anxiety, among other temporary bodily griefs, is one of those undefinable issues that plagues everyone, but is invisible unless it’s looked at directly, and even then, the colon can fool you, meaning that you might not be able to detect the colonic pressure until your body is actually ready to eject the waste material, meaning “poop”, if technical you want to be.
Most people receive potty training when they’re very young, but ALL potty training leaves out THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR, and you’ll howl with rage, and rightfully so, if you were never told about this. Here it is: “Wait until the peristaltic wave is on you, THEN it’s okay to use that automatic impulse to GENTLY and SLIGHTLY push or grunt, to help the potty out.”
Jesus, what a simple thing, so simple that everybody ignores it. If you push when the peristaltic pressure is NOT there, you’ll rip yourself a new asshole, if it gets out of control, and hemorrhoids will be your reward.
What is Peristaltic Movement? It’s simply an automatic contraction of muscles along the colon that propels the bolus of used food toward the exit door. If this muscular contraction is active, which happens about every 60 seconds in most humans, but can vary by several minutes, the potty will move through, and you can strategize your efforts by timing this.
If you’re able to read on the toilet, so much the better. You can distract yourself while the body does what it has to do to eliminate waste products. You share this experience with all other animals, except that some creatures use this effect to propel themselves around, as well as to ingest and eliminate foods and food products.
Okay, maybe that handles the anxiety, maybe it doesn’t. Digestive issues are not the only cause of anxiety, especially body-anxiety, which is the culprit about 99% of the time. Business failures, family concerns, social issues and household problems tend to cause worry, but not anxiety.
Anxiety, it turns out, is a special brand of worry that can happen without any actual worry. The problem with anxiety is that it’s bothersome and disruptive. Anxiety makes you feel weak and unable to move, unable to think, unable to find any direction.
Maybe you’re hungry.
If you have a tendency toward hypoglycemia, low blood-sugar states, your reaction to the idea that you might be hungry will be a combination of rage, annoyance, irritation and disbelief, because you don’t FEEL hungry, you feel crummy, just miserable and down and dumped on.
Okay, so put aside your disbelief for a few minutes and go ahead and have a bite to eat. It’s best if someone else volunteers to make some hot food for you, something simple and easy to digest, something that tastes good and is pleasant to eat, good texture, just the right amount of hotness, in a nice bowl, cup or plate, with a real non-plastic spoon or fork.
Keep it simple, and make it FAST. Don’t think you have a lot of time to do this, because when hypoglycemia strikes, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE.
Regardless of any other consideration, when you feel like this is no time to be making major life-decisions.
If you’re tired, you need to teach yourself to rest. Agitation about things left undone is part of your conditioning, your organic social and educational training. It’s all about getting things done, isn’t it? Busy, busy, busy. An idle hand is the Devil’s playground. Protestant Work-Ethic and all that sort of rot.
Well, it’s deeply implanted in you to serve that particular demon, and serve him, you do, every time you can’t let go of a project until you drop from exhaustion. This is okay when your body is young and resilient, but the fundamental things apply, as time goes by, and it’s a long, long time from May to September, and the days dwindle down to a precious few, as they say.
When you’re Able to Rest, you should. That’s the rule. No exceptions. Part of being “Able to Rest” is being psychologically able to take your hands off the keyboard or whatever they’re on that needs completion before relaxation.
This neurotic habit is part of that desire that all young have to please their parents, at least at first, until they discover that their parents lie to them, but that “Great Betrayal” is nothing compared to the betrayals you’ve had that convinced you to develop Trust Issues, the Number One Cause for failures in the area of spiritual development, awareness and expansion.
Trust comes from long experience, and experience generally teaches us that we can expect betrayal more often than not, and this makes us wary of others but not of ourselves. Inside everyone are hidden surprises.
It may not come as news to you, but ALL the information that IS this universe is within you, right there in easy reach. Replication and mirrors, symmetry and bubbles, origami folding and unfolding and numbers, numbers, numbers are what it’s all about, and if you can’t forget that, you need some serious Dark Hours help, and that’s why I’m telling you about this stuff, because Dark Hours Help is Here to bring light into the darkness, at least until Dawn.
When we first come into this world, we feel the automatic urge to please our parents, not so much because they are our parents, but because they represent comfort, food, milk and water, warmth, protection and, most important of all, amusement.
My friend John Cunningham Lilly, M.D. used to say “If the mind can’t find something interesting to keep itself busy, it will manufacture something interesting, right up to and including a full-scale three-dimensional holographic hallucination”, and his Samadhi Floatation Tank design concept proves the point.
You can get into one of those tanks and have a total full-blown hallucinogenic experience, and you might never know that it sprang out of your own pure consciousness.
One of John and Toni’s friends came over to their house on Decker School Road to try the very first early experimental Samadhi Floatation Tank, back in 1971.
Here is his story, taken — with permission — from John’s floatation tank session records, which we used for our collaborative book, “Tanks for the Memories”, available from Gateways Books & Tapes:
“I had a very pleasant first float, then fished around for the top, which opened easily, as John had promised it would. I stood up and stepped over the low lip of the tank onto a large soft kitchen mat. I was covered with salt water from the tank, so went directly to the warm shower, where I rinsed, then I walked over to the small outside window where I looked out at the teepee outside the tank room.
“I went into the house, and Toni served me a hot drink, I’m not exactly sure what. After a short conversation, John asked me to write up my experience in the tank log book, which I did, then left the house and drove home.
“I had the best sleep of my life that night, got up, jumped out of bed like a cannon shot, went to work, had a great day, went home, had dinner, watched Johnny Carson, then fell asleep.
“When I woke up, I was in the tank. This happened three times before I finally woke up in my own bed, and to this day, I’m not quite sure whether I’ve actually left the tank or not, and I suppose that was John’s point all the time. You’re in the tank whether you know it or not.”
Does This Happen Often???
Yes, it does. Maybe it happened to you when you tried the tank. There’s nothing to worry about, eventually most folks come out of it. Of course, there are always those that don’t.
Just kidding. It doesn’t last long. But why are we such messes?
Well, we want to please our parents, our friends, and our teachers, and bosses, and co-workers and in fact, everyone around us, so they will treat us well and like us, respect us, approve of us, appreciate us, and most importantly, to make them want to be around us.
Pleasing others can go so far as to convince us to make ourselves sick, feeble, bent and crumpled in order to be pleasing, because some people prefer their friends to be slightly lame and stupid.
Your friends and family will teach you how to manifest — you learn fast, from the time you’re looking for food and comfort.
When you appear weak and vulnerable, this is pleasing to any passing victimizer. This bowing down and scraping the floor is called, in the animal kingdom, “submission”, and you can’t be a dog without it.
Dominance is generally appreciated, so if you can appear submissive, you might be tolerated. That’s the computation, and it isn’t worth the paper it isn’t printed on.
Is There a Cure For Paranoia?
Some say there is. Let’s first define paranoia as “The irrational and unsupported fear that a conspiracy against you is happening right now.”
The proof is that you can’t prove it. The enemy is too elusive, too sneaky to catch at it.
So how do you cure paranoia?
“No problem,” say several of my Classical Clinical Psychiatric friends, some of whom are in active clinical practice even as we speak.
“Irrational fear that someone or something is out to get you is only paranoia if it is unsupported by evidence. Take away that uncertainty, and the paranoid is cured.”
“Okay,” I prompted, “How do you remove the uncertainty? What kind of therapeutic treatment do you offer?”
“No treatment is necessary,” said my psychologist friend.
“I Don’t get it,” I said.
My friend the doctor was an M.D. specializing in mental disorders and reintegration of the paranoid schizophrenic, with lots of clinical successes.
He smiled and said sardonically, “You just get the patient to actively and publicly become a known nuisance — make problems with the tax people, the immigration people, the financial people, the news people, until the agencies they fear are finally, actively watching them.
“The dreaded government agency is now doing what you’ve suspected they were doing, all along.
Your fear is no longer vague and unfounded. It’s quite real, now that you are indeed under government agency scrutiny. You yourself have brought about the conspiracy against you that they knew was out there all the time.
“By definition,” my friend added, “they are no longer paranoid.”
This is the kind of cure that I can understand and appreciate. It’s real, it addresses the issue and it gets real results, fast. Is there a downside to curing oneself of paranoia by inviting attack?
I can’t think of one.
It’s not that they aren’t there, I just don’t happen to have a clue right now at this very moment of a downside to … wait a moment, I can think of at least one, but either way, you’re doomed to wear a canvas dinner jacket and sit in a rubber room somewhere or other, if you persist.
I happen to know how many U.S. dollars it actually costs to conduct a full-scale full-time around-the-clock surveillance on someone — it runs into the millions per day — and how much it costs to keep a chopper in the air just in fuel costs alone for an hour, and then add the cost of pilot and ground crew, maintenance and flight command and have them hover over your house 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and see how fast it adds up.
Then there’s the whallopingly enormous cost of covert “Humint” human intelligence field operatives dedicated to the surveillance of someone who has done nothing to make themselves stand out other than publicly announcing loudly and strenuously that they have the paranoia that they are being watched by some secret government agency.
I have met only a few people who were important enough to rate that kind of expenditure, and a government agency with unlimited funds — even my old outfit, the Men in Black — doesn’t exist.
There’s a limit to how much you can spend to watch someone, and a definite time limit on the surveillance you can muster, taking into account the appropriations your agency happens to have available for that particular annual budget.
That’s the whole point of the 20th century films “THX 1138” and “Logan’s Run”, with both movies clearly indicating that pursuit must stop at the moment when the funds run out.
“In Vino, Veritas”, say the Romans, “In wine, there is truth,” meaning that someone sloppy drunk will not typically have their defenses up, and will be more likely to tell the truth, or to fall into bed, with a total stranger.
Getting dead-drunk is no solution.
All organic creatures seek comfort and try to avoid pain. Comfort can be food, warmth, safety, absence of enemies, sleep and regeneration. All living creatures endure the same miseries in their own way, and animals of all kinds are known to have anxiety and depression. It’s part of the organic machinery.
The difference is, you can actively DO something about it, right now, this very moment. There actually IS a remedy for anxiety and depression, once you’ve applied the remedies mentioned above, ie; get some rest whenever you’re able to do so, go to the bathroom and move a little potty, and eat something, just a little snack, not a whole meal. Do this in any order, THEN apply the deeper spiritual remedy that you’ll find in my Dark Hours Remedies.
So what are the “Dark Hours Remedies”?
I thought you’d never ask. I have created a series of activities, experiments and creative amusements that can take up the awful slack and keep you going in a good way, even though you’re thoroughly miserable.
I don’t try to fix the misery. Let the misery be. It will go away or it won’t. The secret here is to not be afraid of the misery, the unhappiness, the feeling of failure, of regret, of overwhelm and impending doom.
One thing I can guarantee, absolutely and unequivocally: THOSE FEELINGS ARE SAFE.
As weird as it may sound, those feelings of impending doom and failure and misery and fear and suffering and torment are all safe emotions. They, in themselves, will not hurt you and just because you feel them strongly doesn’t mean they’ll come true.
They might come true, they might happen, but the FEELINGS themselves are safe. It’s important that you LEARN TO LIVE WITH THESE FEELINGS instead of trying to fight them and eradicate them or obliterate them with drugs or electroshock therapy. Those feelings, as uncomfortable and miserable and scary as they are, are safe.
You can cultivate a tolerance for those feelings. It takes serious training, and just as much effort as it took to put the FEAR OF ANXIETY into your body, it will take to make yourself tolerant of those things, and knowing that they are SAFE feelings makes them easier to take, although they still make pain inside you.
EMOTIONAL PAIN tolerance is part of the training you will need in order to grow spiritually, along with tolerance of FEAR and LONELINESS. Boredom is a big issue that will handle itself.
You can use my Dark Hours Remedies to improve your odds of growing past the organic; they have a terrific effect on the expansion of the spirit and elevation of the Soul into Higher Realms, which is what it’s really all about, but the good effects on the lower bodies is well worth the extra effort required by these spiritual exercises and experiments.
The Dark Hours Remedies are a collection of specific activities, none of which require interest, but all of which require you to actually perform the experiment or exercise. Just reading about the remedy is not the remedy.
Waiting for doom is like waiting for Godot or watching a kettle boil on a stovetop. It won’t happen while you’re watching it, right? Incredible as it may seem, that’s the computation. It’s an “Animal Thing” to watch something that seems dangerous. While you’re watching, it won’t dare attack.
This might be true about wild animals, but it isn’t true about you. Impending doom is always just around the corner. Four asteroids narrowly missed the Earth over the past several years, any one of which could have caused an Extinction Event, which would have included us. Someday this will happen, and you’ll have been right all along.
Until that day, why not relax?
I know why not. You can’t “make” yourself relax, and do you know why not? You’ve been trained not to make yourself relax. How were you trained? The same way you were trained to have no control over your emotions, your mental state, your decisions.
People don’t control their emotions. If you can go from smile to frown and back to smile, you’re either an actor or a psychotic, or you’re one of those psychotic actors they write about in the tabloids.
It’s not just a belief that you can’t control your Hidden Self, it’s reinforced throughout your childhood years and well into adulthood. The business world is a pressure-cooker with you as the main course, and the social media is the regulator of all behavior. Any modification will be handled by the environment.
This is, of course, untrue, ridiculous. You can reprogram your machine all you like. It’s incredibly easy. You can metaprogram the hell out of your Higher Self as well, if you know how, and you can re-set all the buttons, all the habits, all the tendencies, with a few simple but deft twists of the wrist, if you know the steps to take, and all of it safely, with no more tools than your hands and your willingness to APPLY my Dark Hours Remedies against fear, worry, anxiety and deep depression.
I am working with Uncle Claude to organize the DH Remedies for your application & use. These remedies are very specific to the situation, and include a wide variety of TYPES of actions, all of which can be applied at night, when alone, at home, in the midst of a terrible, crippling kind of depression that leaves you unable to function, maybe even unable to move a muscle.
When I say “Dark Hours” I MEAN “Dark Hours”. If you don’t ask for help, you won’t receive help. Lesson #1 of the ABD is: “Learn to ask for help.” The first stage in asking for help (yes, asking for help is a multi-stage operation) is to recognize that you’re in trouble. The Second Stage is to overcome your unwillingness — for whatever reasons you’ve dreamed up — to ask for help from another.
You have a million reasons not to ask for help. When you’ve asked for help in the past, it didn’t come, or it didn’t actually help, or it turned out not to be help at all, but control. There are many reasons why you don’t want to ask for help, and creating a problem is one of them. You don’t want to make trouble.
Never mind all those reasons. You have the controls in your hands that enable you to ask for help, although you don’t know that they are in your control, and even if you figure out that you have the controls in your hands, you’re convinced that you don’t know how to use them.
People have worked on you for a long time to convince you of that. You seem safe to them only when you are predictable, when your habits rule and you walk, talk and look just like everyone else. This is called “Protective Mimicry” and is practiced by all living creatures everywhere.
You can escape the trap, but you must SEE the trap first, and only you can extricate yourself from the web-like cocoon you’ve woven around yourself.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby