How to Cope with the Albuquerque Mosquito Plague of 2022

I’m sick of seeing closeups of mosquitoes in the act of biting someone’s arm. Here’s a winsome cave cricket instead.

It’s a bit late in the season to start giving advice about mosquitoes, but I’m hoping that this information I’ve spent a lot of time gathering will be of some use to people around here.

Around the beginning of August, here in Albuquerque lots of us began to find big, itchy, even painful red welts on our legs and arms. For me, they spread into patches of red rashy dots two or more inches across, especially on my ankles. This was not a normal experience.

We wondered about mosquito bites, but we were not seeing or hearing any mosquitoes, and this was happening in broad daylight, not at dusk. Eventually it dawned on me that we must have a new and different species of mosquito invading the area. Readers living in other parts of the world may be laughing at my ignorance, but I had never even heard of day-flying mosquitoes in New Mexico. Or at all, really.

By this time, the matter was getting some press attention. It turned out that yes, we now have Aedes aegypti living with us, not just our classic old-school Culex species that mainly fly at night. Oh joy, the yellow fever mosquito! Smaller, faster, quieter, stealthier about evading our attention and thus our swats, perfectly adapted to attacking humans, its main prey. And super aggressive, often biting multiple times on the same body part. They do have one happier trait: they’re not a major vector for West Nile virus like the Culex family.

Here’s how screwed we are: 
https://sourcenm.com/2022/09/12/a-new-mosquito-is-stalking-new-mexico-is-the-state-ready/

These buggers have been around since 2018, but they didn’t become the scourge they are now until this year’s exceptionally wet monsoon season. I remember saying in 2021 that I hadn’t seen a single mosquito. That was true— I never saw them— but I now realize that the two bouts of what I thought were severe, unexplained hives were actually caused by marauding Aedes. I don’t know where I ran into them. We weren’t getting hit at home, and kept blissfully and obliviously hanging out under our newly-built patio roof.

This year, there seemed to be nowhere to hide. What to do?

I read everything I could find about bug repellents, a subject I hadn’t had to think about much since my youth back east. The essential oil spray I already had was doing nothing, though some people seem to have success with some oils against some mosquitoes. DEET works well, but will eat plastics and synthetic clothing, making it fairly impractical. It also smells and feels unpleasant. Picaridin is sold as a safer alternative for kids (though DEET is considered safe too) and doesn’t have these drawbacks. Oil of lemon eucalyptus (which is not the same as lemon eucalyptus essential oil) was said to be as effective as DEET, according to the FDA, and the smell isn’t bad.

I spritzed, probably not thoroughly enough, and still got some bites. Long pants and sleeves worked but were too hot and were not foolproof, since the critters can sometimes bite through clothes.

I ordered a concentrated garlic product to spray around the yard, which was supposed to kill mosquitoes it hit and deter others, without killing other bugs wholesale.  Little or nothing happened.  The small sprayer I had may not have been adequate.

To deal with the bites I hadn’t been able to avoid, I found the Bug Bite Thing, a small suction device that is meant to pull insect saliva or venom out of the skin.  It has to be used soon after the bite is inflicted, but it does meaningfully reduce the itching.  It doesn’t completely stop a welt from forming or keep itching from showing up later, but it helps.  It’s supposed to work on bee or wasp stings as well; fortunately I haven’t had a chance to test it on those.

I got to thinking about adding mosquito netting to our patio, but that sounded difficult, limited, and probably expensive. It hit me that one could make clothing out of mosquito netting, and then, that someone must have done that already. Yes, they have indeed. There are many brands, but here is one that’s made in the US and decent quality: 
https://www.bugbaffler.com/collections/insect-protection

I ordered a shirt and pants right away, and they arrived very quickly. They don’t make for the most fashionable outfit, but they make it possible to have a nice breakfast on the patio without becoming breakfast oneself. They aren’t as hot as regular clothing and there’s no toxicity or nasty smell. They also keep other insects out, and can even be used by beekeepers.

We already had netting covering our rain barrels, but we added oil on the surface of the water as well. This is a major means of control, as it keeps any larvae that hatch in the water from breathing. It’s possible that some females had gotten past our netting in the beginning. Aedes aegypti are considered weak flyers and tend to stay near the area where they hatched, and we had no other water in our yard, so the barrels were suspect. We don’t know what sources of standing water our close neighbors may have, but it doesn’t take much.

Hearing that city government was suggesting that we call them about spraying to kill mosquitoes, I checked their website. There wasn’t a word about the new skeeter situation. I figured that the traditional evening spraying of pesticides would be inappropriate for Aedes, since they’re active when bees and other innocent bystanders are around, but called to find out whether there might be some kind of help I was unaware of.

The pleasant man at the Environmental Health Department, Nick Pederson, confirmed my suspicions about pesticide spraying being a bad strategy for combating Aedes species. The spray has to hit them when they’re flying, he told me, so it would have to be applied during the day and would indeed kill other insects. He said his department was trying to get a Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) product to spray over neighborhoods in hopes of it wafting into water where the bugs can breed, but they had been hampered by the supply chain problems that seem to be everywhere these days. Otherwise he had very little to offer, except for the hope that people would spread the word about getting rid of every bit of standing water in their yards.

He confirmed what I had read about insect repellents, and added the detail that oil of lemon eucalyptus works well, but you have to use a lot of it and apply it often.

A patient who has also been hit badly sent me information about mosquito traps, which I was not aware of. They can be used for official monitoring and research as well as to reduce populations around homes. If we have another bad season next year, I’m thinking in terms of getting one to add to our arsenal, but apparently they’re limited in how much they can do to stop bites, and they may even lure in more females which will then attack any available humans. 
Here’s an excellent article on traps: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/insect-repellent/mosquito-traps-lures-bug-zappers-a6094812568/

The spike in the mosquito population this year has been life-changing, in a restrictive and nerve-racking and health-damaging way. Yet a number of other insects have gone AWOL. I haven’t personally seen or heard a single cicada, and the grasshoppers that usually pop up everywhere we step at this time of year are mostly absent. There have been a few crickets, but only a few, and no significant cricking to drive us crazy. We didn’t have the usual spring onslaught of big brown miller moths; that’s not too strange, as the population level varies a lot, but I don’t think I saw any.

I would be very worried about all that, except that multiple species of bees, hornets, butterflies, small moths, and ants seem to be doing better than ever. And gnats, so many gnats! I wonder what to make of it all. Climate change must be a factor, but there hasn’t been a dramatic enough rise in temperature from last year to this to explain such a sudden shift in populations. We did have a dry spring and a much wetter summer than average, but was that enough to make the difference? And are people in other neighborhoods seeing the same species in their yards as I? I’ve heard that cicadas have been singing in other parts of town, but everyone seems to be noting an absence of grasshoppers.

If anyone reading this has insights into entomology in central New Mexico, I would love to hear from you. Our state is big on bugs, including some really big bugs, but there are some mysterious absences. I’m particularly curious about what happened to the elm beetles and cave crickets that were our constant companions in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. I bet I haven’t seen an elm beetle in 20 years, but they used to be legion, and the same trees are still present to host them. It’s possible that measures intended to get rid of them were successful and that’s why they’re gone. Not that I miss them, but something is fishy about this.

I do sort of miss cave crickets, which are cute as insects go, and do no harm to us. They used to frequently become snacks for our cats— who delicately avoided the long legs and left them strewn about— but local felines alive now may never have encountered one. I hope none of this means catastrophe is on the way, that is, worse catastrophe than we were already expecting.

Reports from around the world say that insect populations are declining precipitously and that this threatens all life on Earth. In our yard, with gnats and flies buzzing around one’s head and pollinators energetically zipping between flowers, it’s hard to imagine, but it’s true in so many places. In this context, the increasing success of mosquitoes is a maddening irony. Yet another new normal, one more thing to keep us off balance and uneasy in this alternate-reality world we now inhabit.

We do have more birds in our yard than I’ve ever seen before, so something must be going right. Maybe some of those insect-eating bird species who have lost supplies of their favorite foods will adapt to eat mosquitoes. Maybe the blood-sucking midges (yesss!) that prey on mosquitoes will provide some cosmic balance and damp down their numbers. Maybe local humans will be bothered enough to work consistently at control measures. If any of those things happen, they will take time. Meanwhile, I’m going to look funny in my mesh bug suit.

Photo source: The greenj   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ceuthophiluscricket.jpg

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Delta Blues, or how I spent my summer not being able to take a vacation

We still need all of these layers.

When I started writing this post, I was planning on a straightforward update on the current situation with the delta variant (sorry, I couldn’t resist the obvious title). And then a 13-year-old killed a classmate at a local middle school for no discernible reason. And then the Taliban took back Afghanistan.

The murdered boy was trying to talk his killer out of continuing to bully his friends. He stood up to him with words, doing exactly what most of us would teach our kids to do, what my daughter would do, what I would do. The right thing.

Going into Afghanistan was never the right thing. I remember writing “Can you say ‘quagmire’?” back then. Three quarters of Americans thought this war was a great idea. I was part of the other quarter. I take no pleasure in being right in this case. Afghanistan continues its reputation as the “graveyard of empires.”

In order to avenge the deaths of 3000 Americans, we killed or maimed tens of thousands more, plus tens of thousands of Afghans and then Iraqis, naturally including myriad children. We spent 20 years and a couple of trillion dollars and we accomplished what looks right now to be little or nothing.

And to begin with, the perpetrators of 9/11 were Saudis, and we never gave Saudi Arabia the slightest grief over that. We always fought the wrong battles for the wrong reasons. For so many years we, that is, our leaders knew we were failing and we just kept on going, perhaps in the belief that whenever we left things would be exactly as bad as they are now. And things were always worse than we realized.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/08/10/afghanistan-papers-book-dick-cheney-attack/

I suppose I should not be surprised that instead of effectively fighting this pandemic and its wide-ranging ills, we spend so much of our energy fighting each other.

Pulling the Fangs Back

Anger at the unvaccinated and the irresponsible among us is real. While a more-transmissible strain like delta was bound to come along, wider uptake of vaccines and more stringent adherence to public health common sense would have helped limit the damage, and would still damp down the development of newer variants. Our US deniers and anti-vaxxers are only one aspect of this; many governments have been too poor or too inefficient to get vaccines out to the majority of their people. But seeing Americans die or cause others to get sick because they haven’t taken the most obvious steps to avoid it is maddening.

Dr. John Lapook said, on the Stephen Colbert show on 8/16, “We come into these conversations coiled.” He suggested “pulling the fangs back” when trying to convince someone that getting vaccinated would be a good idea. I didn’t realize how “coiled” I was until I ran into a certain friend at an outdoor event in July. She announced that she wasn’t hugging anyone because she wasn’t vaccinated, which she said was because of her health condition. She really does have a condition in which it’s reasonable to be extremely cautious about medications, but it could just as easily be said that she needs the vaccine all the more because of it— her situation is honestly a bit fuzzy and it’s not crazy that she has hesitated. She has also fallen for a lot of the misinformation, though, and that has been frustrating to deal with. Anyway, I lit into her. Without knowing I was going to do it, I snapped at her. That is, I snapped. She reacted just as badly. Not a productive exchange.

A doctor in Alabama has even refused to see patients who are not vaccinated. ‘“If they asked why, I told them covid is a miserable way to die and I can’t watch them die like that,” wrote Valentine, who has specialized in family medicine with Diagnostic and Medical Clinic since 2008.’ Alabama has the lowest vaccination rate in the US and a high number of residents hospitalized with COVID.


Summer Non-Vacation— Why Is This Happening?

What did you want to do this summer? I wanted to have the party I didn’t get for my 60th birthday last year. (Oh, well— at least I was alive to have another birthday!) It’s very unclear what to do now. Nothing involving a large group of people, certainly. Is it OK to have a small outdoor gathering with vaccinated family and friends? And should we stop attending any non-crucial indoor events of any kind, even with masks and good ventilation? How much have things changed now that delta has taken over?

Amanda Mull wrote a compassionate piece about where we stand with these questions, “Delta Has Changed the Pandemic Risk Calculus.”
‘Assessing risk pre-vaccination was often bleak, but at least the variables at play were somewhat limited: ventilation, masks, crowds, local spread. Now the number of additional, usually hyper-specific questions that people must ask themselves is itself a barrier to good decision making, says Jennifer Taber, a psychologist at Kent State University who studies health risk assessment. “When people feel like things are uncertain, they engage in avoidance,” Taber told me. That can manifest in disparate ways. An unwillingness to acknowledge that many new things are safe for the average vaccinated person is avoidance. So is a refusal to continue taking even minor precautions for the benefit of others.’
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/08/delta-variant-pandemic-risk-safety/619798/

A big part of my job as a clinician is helping patients to sort through all the available information to answer health questions like this, and it’s not easy these days. Just as we’ve been through the entire pandemic, we’re still flying by the seat of our pants, trying to keep up with ever-changing conditions and advice. The rise of delta has been a predictable but chaotic and confusing development that hit us with a bait and switch just when we thought we were getting our lives back. It’s still new and we’re still figuring it out.

What I mean by predictable is that this is normal virus behavior. A more transmissible variant will obviously outcompete others, and it would have been a surprise had we not seen a variant like this eventually. Viruses “want” to produce as many copies of themselves as possible, and any mutation that leads to more chances to replicate is great for them.

In general, causing less illness and death is also good for viruses, because having hosts walking around spreading viral particles results in far more replication than having hosts lying isolated in hospital beds, or in graves. So over time a viral species is likely to become more transmissible but less deadly. Sadly, delta seems to cause at least as much and as severe disease as earlier forms of COVID, maybe more.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-variant.html

We had some small hope of getting enough people vaccinated quickly enough, as a planet, to limit the possibility of worse new variants popping up. We didn’t make it, and that too was predictable. Viruses can adapt much faster than we can. We can still hope to escape without a far more dangerous variant coming along, but time is not on our side. The more humans there are who cannot access or will not accept vaccines, and the more who refuse to take other precautions, the more opportunities the virus has to mutate.

Here’s a good way of putting it:
‘You might think of viral replication as buying lottery tickets, in which the virus accumulates random mutations that very occasionally help it spread. And the fewer lottery tickets the virus has, the less likely it is to hit the mutation jackpot. The appearance of troubling new variants may slow down.’*

The now-famous Provincetown outbreak around the 4th of July has taught us a great deal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/05/provincetown-covid-outbreak/
The area population was so highly vaccinated that the tens of thousands of visitors who descended on the place didn’t worry about getting sick. They even packed cheek by jowl into indoor venues, without a mask in sight. No one expected to need them. Here you can get a sense of just how packed together the revelers got:
https://theboatslip.com/tea-dance
Then some folks noticed they were feeling unwell or had lost their sense of smell. By that time it was dawning on us all that delta was different and that we had been wrenched into a yet another new reality where we had to learn the rules all over again.

The misinformation mill has seized on Provincetown’s experience as an example of vaccines not working. That’s not remotely the case. Yes, 74% of the infections were in vaccinated people, but with over 900 infections, there were only 7 hospitalizations and zero deaths. An unvaccinated population would have a very, very different outcome. This article explains everything you need to know about the outbreak and what it means for the rest of us:
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/scicheck-posts-misinterpret-cdcs-provincetown-covid-19-outbreak-report/

You could just read the article, and you should, but I’m going to summarize some key points:

— Imagine a population that was 100% vaccinated. Vaccines are not perfect, so there would be some infections, and 100% of them would occur in vaccinated people.
— Infections in vaccinated people are rare, but since the vaccinated population consists of hundreds of millions of people, a significant number of people do get infected.
— The most important thing: With current strains of the virus, even if one does become infected, vaccination means essentially no chance of dying and very little chance of becoming severely ill.
— It looks like vaccinated people may harbor as much viral material in their noses as unvaccinated ones if they get infected, but infection doesn’t get as far into the body and the viral load goes down quickly as the immune system responds.

Research is ongoing to try to determine how likely an infected vaccinated person is to transmit the virus. That may be less than some studies suggest. From the same article:
‘For one, these sorts of PCR tests are good at identifying viral RNA, but they can’t tell whether that genetic material is in an intact, infectious virus particle or not. That becomes especially relevant for vaccinated people, Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, said.
‘“Antibodies from a vaccinated person can coat the released virus and keep it from infecting other cells,” he told us. “And T cells can kill infected cells, releasing viral genetic material but not infectious particles.”
‘Second, the tests are only looking for RNA present in the nose and throat, not the lungs — even though vaccines are likely to have more of an impact there, according to previous research.
‘“Though it isn’t entirely clear how much of transmission comes from the lungs vs. the nose and throat,” Bhattacharya said in an email, “it is almost certainly some.” That would also suggest a vaccinated person with a similar cycle threshold as an unvaccinated person would be less infectious.
‘Vaccinated people also likely aren’t infected as long, since their immune systems are quicker to respond to the virus, which would also make them less likely to infect as many people as an unimmunized person.’

Here is a similar explainer, with data from the UK, where delta has run rampant:
https://theconversation.com/covid-the-reason-cases-are-rising-among-the-double-vaccinated-its-not-because-vaccines-arent-working-164797

Another highly vaccinated place that’s weathered a recent surge is Iceland.
‘Iceland, the experts say, is providing valuable information about breakthrough infections in the fully inoculated. Yet it also remains a vaccine success story.’
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/iceland-has-been-a-vaccination-success-why-is-it-seeing-a-coronavirus-surge/ar-AANl2dx +

As with the surge in England, soccer was involved. ‘The country’s top health officials linked most of the cases to nightclubs and to residents who traveled to London to attend Euro 2020 soccer matches that some warned would be “a recipe for disaster.”’

Epidemiologist Brandon Guthrie gave some perspective in the Iceland article:
‘“We’ve handicapped ourselves in what the definition of success is,” he said. Scientists originally hoped for vaccines that were 50 percent effective, he said, and the goal was to prevent death and severe disease — not to provide blanket protection against any chance of infection.’
That is, the current reduced effectiveness of the vaccines is about as good as we hoped vaccines would be in the first place. Keep that in mind whenever you feel like despairing.

Even if it’s been quite a while since you were vaccinated, and you don’t have a lot of antibodies circulating in your blood, your T and B cells still remember how to recognize and fight SARS-CoV-2. Infection won’t get into your lungs because it will have been fought off by that time. It may take as much as 5-6 days for the body to marshal a good crop of antibodies, but generally it would take 10 or more days for a COVID infection to get as far as the lungs.

But meanwhile, kids are getting sick and being hospitalized, and some of them are dying of this disease that too many adults insist is no big deal for them. Vaccines for the under-12 cohort are on the way, but at this point the behavior of adults is the only real protection younger kids have, and in too many places adults are doing a crappy job.

“This new variant is a major contributor, but a major issue is that people’s behavior has changed,” said Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “I don’t think we can absolve people and leaders of responsibility for this because it gives them a pass. The reason kids are getting infected is because we don’t have those precautions and parents and households are getting infected.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kids-sick-covid-are-filling-children-s-hospitals-areas-seeing-n1276238

‘Kline said it is unclear what kind of long-term effects babies and children will face.
‘Specifically, Kline referenced the brain fog adults see after contracting the virus.
‘”How does that affect a baby who is still having a developing brain? We just don’t know.”
‘Kline said another concern is cardiac issues in children.
‘”It worries me a lot that people say sure, kids can get COVID-19 but most of them recover uneventfully,” said Kline. “We know almost nothing about what those infections could produce down the line. I think there is a real risk that a proportion of these kids will have some long-term effects.”’
https://www.wdsu.com/article/new-orleans-louisiana-children-sick-covid-19-unvaccianted-adults-responsible/37259391

And all this is before school starts in a lot of the country.

Conspiracy Theory Roundup

For the sake of readers who live in a bright future where this craziness is forgotten: Droves of parents are currently following right-wing leaders and fighting requirements to wear masks in schools, sometimes with physical violence against teachers, principles, health care providers, and other parents.

As far as I’m concerned, there is no excuse for willful failure to protect children; I suppose it relates to that tendency toward avoidance when things feel uncertain. Yet, even the parents who give the most insane reasons for refusing to let their kids wear masks believe they are doing their best for them. Some may have thought things through and come up with vaguely rational justifications, but most have surely spent too much time in the conspiracy-verse, where they find an endlessly creative cornucopia of crap being produced every day.

The funniest example going around is the claim that vaccinated people will grow tails. My first reaction to that was Cool!  Unlike the claim that we become magnetic, this one cleverly avoids being immediately disproven by saying that the tails will grow at some point in the future. At least that’s how I heard it. I hope it doesn’t take too long….

For a while we were hearing that women would become infertile if they were vaccinated. Now the same scary disinformation is being aimed at men.
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/06/scicheck-research-rebuts-baseless-claims-linking-covid-19-vaccines-to-male-infertility/

Oddly enough, sperm counts have actually been found to increase after vaccination! The reason is unclear, but it’s been a consistent effect.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2781360
“Sperm Parameters Before and After COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination”

President Former Guy rejected masks and publicly visible vaccinations as making him look less manly, but hey, maybe vaccines make for more manliness. I think we should really hammer on this selling point!

(Stephen Colbert pointed out that the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause a drop in fertility must be true— all those elderly people were vaccinated first, and sure enough none of them have had kids since.)

A more insidious claim is the one that COVID is being brought in by people coming over the border from Mexico; this is in line with centuries of blaming “foreigners” for disease. And of course it neatly deflects blame from the GOP fearmongers and unvaccinated Americans who are actually driving the high case counts. But this too is easily disprovable. We know that the bulk of transmission is coming from people within the US, not those coming from elsewhere, because we can track the genomes of various strains of the virus and see who is carrying which and where those strains are prevalent.

The lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, added further venom to this trope by disgustingly blaming Black Texans for the state’s horrific rise in COVID illness and deaths. Patrick is the same guy who last year said people over 70, like him, should be willing to sacrifice their lives in order to keep the economy going. And he’s only doubled down in the face of criticism of his racist statements, which again are easily disproven.
‘Patrick acknowledged Texas’ public-health crisis — rising cases, hospitalizations, and fatalities — and said he’s aware of the criticisms of the state’s Republican leadership. But the lieutenant governor insisted the blame be directed at unvaccinated African Americans, not the GOP officials who remain passive toward the pandemic.
‘”The Democrats like to blame Republicans,” Patrick said. “Well, the biggest groups in most states is African Americans who are not vaccinated. Last time I checked, over 90 percent of them vote for Democrats in their major cities and major counties.”’
‘…In fact, the latest data suggests unvaccinated White Texans outnumber unvaccinated Black Texans by a roughly three-to-one margin.’
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/dan-patrick-falsely-blames-covid-surge-unvaccinated-black-texans-n1277307

Meanwhile, Patrick’s cohort Governor Greg Abbott continues to interfere with requirements for masks around the state in the name of “freedom.” He’s getting plenty of pushback, but why should anyone have to use up their energy— or money— fighting for the right to protect their or their children’s health? Meanwhile taxpayers’ funds are drained away in court battles the state need never have started, instead of meeting real human needs. If only we could immunize against stupidity and self-serving political posturing.

One way out of the mess is to make masking voluntary, but as pediatrician Dr. Danny Benjamin said, a voluntary masking policy is “like having a no-peeing section in a pool.”

Onward with Delta Force

A major development just occurred: the FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine, so it is no longer being given under an Emergency Use Authorization. Moderna was later to submit data but its approval will be coming along soon. Many of the vaccine-hesitant have said this would make a difference in their acceptance of the shots.

The biggest question among my patients right now is when and where boosters will be available. I’m in the camp that wonders whether large numbers of us privileged sorts should be getting a third dose when so much of the world hasn’t even had a first one. We’re told that there are plenty of doses to go around in the US and that we can both give extra protection to Americans and send vaccines to poorer countries, but I personally don’t feel great about using a dose someone else may desperately need, and I recognize that the only way to protect everyone is to protect everyone.**

Giving a third dose to organ transplant recipients on immunosuppressants and others who have not been able to mount a strong response to their original vaccination is a different matter and a clear benefit as far as we know. For the rest of us, we’re told that we should probably get a booster about 8 months after our second shot. For me and a lot of health care workers, that’s early October, so we’ll need to decide pretty soon.

Surprisingly, it appears that flu shots give some protective effect against a range of severe symptoms of COVID. I was figuring that since I would likely stay masked this winter, and that if pandemic limitations continued we might have little or no flu season last year, a flu shot would be pretty worthless. The risk/benefit calculation has changed again. The authors suggest that for populations that have not had access to COVID vaccines, flu vaccine might be better than nothing.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0255541
“Examining the potential benefits of the influenza vaccine against SARS-CoV-2: A retrospective cohort analysis of 74,754 patients”

What about those who have already had COVID? Aren’t they immune? They do have some protection, though we aren’t sure how long it lasts. However, since the virus has ways to evade the immune system as part of its normal strategy, natural infection doesn’t confer immunity as well as the vaccine. If you have both a history of natural infection and the vaccine, you have the highest possible level of immune response. For you, a vaccine is essentially a booster. (Similarly, if you become infected despite being vaccinated, the disease has a booster effect.)
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/covid-19-survivors-may-be-able-skip-2nd-vaccine-dose

Last year when vaccines were being developed, there were breezy assurances that we would be able to tweak them to take new variants into account. Can’t we do that for delta? Well, yes, but no. The practical problem with creating vaccines against specific variants is that by the time studies are done and the product approved, that variant may be gone and another may be ascendant. If a variant comes along that completely evades current vaccines, though, we will need to meet that challenge.

Intranasal vaccines are being developed. Injecting a vaccine into the arm doesn’t teach the body to be on the lookout specifically for a respiratory virus. That is, giving a vaccine in the nose tells the body that the virus involved is going to enter through the nose and that’s where defenses need to be placed, so it’s a more efficient strategy. It should also be a bit easier on the needle-squeamish.

‘Charneau and a group of scientists in Paris have shown that natural SARS-CoV-2 infections trigger both systemic and mucosal immunity. But our current crop of COVID-19 vaccines offer only systemic protection. Developing vaccines that are sprayed up the nose, rather than injected into the arm, could change that, Charneau says. Mucosal immunity in our noses could be like a guard at the door, potentially helping stop even small infections of SARS-CoV-2 right where they start.’
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/Intranasal-nose-vaccines-stop-COVID/99/i21

I’ll leave you with another hopeful note, a story about former pastor Curtis Chang, who has been working within the vaccine-resistant evangelical community to dispel common myths.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/08/this-former-pastor-is-changing-evangelicals-minds-on-covid-vaccines/

‘Historically, the evangelical movement has baked into it a certain wariness of dominant secular institutions. And this can be captured in the saying that Jesus called us to be in the world, not of the world. We’re not of the world in the sense of just conforming automatically to the assumptions and beliefs the world. But what’s happened is that this orientation of being wary has gotten weaponized.

‘‘There’s been three main forces that I think have done that. One is that you can actually gain a lot of ratings by playing up those fears of what Washington is doing or what the left is doing. Christians are being bombarded by so much conservative media that they automatically just assume they’re out to get us. Another one is that conservative politicians have realized that you can gain a lot of votes by playing up these fears. And then the third is sort of outside conspiracy movements. QAnon, the anti-vaxxer movement—they have realized that evangelicals are fertile hunting grounds for their theories, because they are already primed to be distrustful of institutions, and so they can be easily kind of recruited into their deep conspiracies of distrust.’

Pastors, Chang says, are in a difficult position. Most of them are in favor of vaccination, but they risk backlash from their congregations if they speak too strongly about it— same problem GOP politicians have. (I would argue that both have helped create this problem.)

‘I understand that people are frustrated, that they’re losing patience, that they just want to make things via mandate, and give up trying to persuade these people. I think that’s short-sighted, for a couple of reasons. One, if you just resort to sheer coercion, it just confirms the narrative that they’re out to get us, that they are shoving things down our throat. You’re just laying the groundwork for a deepening divide. The second reason is that you have to realize that we’re still in the first or second inning of vaccine outreach, globally. You have to realize that parts of Africa and Asia are heavily influenced by Christian culture. A country like Uganda is like 90 percent Christian. Those churches, those places in Africa, they actually take their cultural cues to a great extent from American evangelicals, especially leading white evangelical voices. So America is—unfortunately, through evangelical culture—exporting its vaccine hesitancy. A lot of the same conspiracy theories and doubts and fears that we’ve been battling here, we are definitely seeing emerge and being replicated in the rest of the world. Changing American culture is not just about getting more American evangelicals to take the vaccine, it’s going to be critical to getting the rest of the world vaccinated. And ultimately, for all of us, if we don’t get the entire world vaccinated, we’re all at risk. ’

‘…What’s going to be really important is for Christians to convey to other Christians is that it’s okay to change your mind. The Christian virtues of grace and acceptance are going to be paramount here because people are going to be even more resistant if they think that in changing their mind they are going to be shamed.’

Grace and acceptance… those sure sound good right now.

***************************************************************
TAKEAWAYS for the Delta Era:
— You can still get infected even if you’re vaccinated, though most likely you won’t.
— Remember the Swiss cheese layer concept and take multiple precautions as reasonable and available.
— Be good to yourself and others and acknowledge the effects of the unrelenting pain and uncertainty of our time.
— WEAR THE DAMN MASK!

************************************************************

Original source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/iceland-covid-surge-vaccines/2021/08/14/bdd88d04-fabd-11eb-911c-524bc8b68f17_story.html

Data from the UK, May to July 2021: 
https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf

*https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/how-we-live-coronavirus-forever/619783/
“The Coronavirus Is Here Forever. This Is How We Live With It.”

***https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/04/1019780576/why-who-is-calling-for-a-moratorium-on-covid-vaccine-boosters
Meanwhile, Israel is not waiting and has already given third doses to around 600,000 of their citizens— while Palestinians next door in Gaza and the West Bank have had so much trouble even getting a first dose. Here’s part of that sad tale, in which they were offered nearly-expired doses, for which Israel would have received fresh replacements:
 https://mondoweiss.net/2021/06/we-returned-them-palestinians-axe-1-million-pfizer-dose-deal-with-israel/

A new examination of the possible origins of COVID-19:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/08/16/science.abh0117
“The animal origin of SARS-CoV-2”

I Don’t Know How the Pandemic Started, But I Do Know These Things

I got to thinking about what we do know for sure about this and other pandemics, trying to clarify it all in my mind. Here is the list I made for myself.

— New diseases arise all the time; most of them don’t spread far so most people don’t pay much attention.
— The warming climate has pushed disease-carrying insects and other creatures farther north. 
— The growth of the human population has pushed humans into new territories with more contact with animals in their habitats, and pushed the animals to migrate. Both of these movements make transmission of diseases more likely.
— It’s crucial that we study zoonotic diseases and their vectors, and do everything we can to prepare for the next ones that will come along.
— Tick-borne diseases are emerging as an issue of huge importance, again exacerbated by climate change.

— Plagues and pandemics of many kinds have happened commonly throughout history.
— The origins of most pandemics, including the 1918 flu, have never been definitively determined.
— More pandemics will arise in the future. This is the one fact of which we can be absolutely certain.

— Accidents happen, mistakes are made, and anything that can go wrong eventually will.
— Humans are tremendously creative and awfully smart in terms of developing things like new technologies, but also incredibly stupid in many important ways, and common sense is not common.
— Facilities such as microbiology labs are run by humans.
— More humans and more facilities mean more possibilities for error.

— People don’t like to be wrong, and they like admitting it even less.
— Mother Nature always has the last laugh.

***********************************************************************

Meanwhile, I was involved in discussions with a colleague who outlined some questions about the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, both the natural version and the inactivated version coded for by the mRNA vaccines.  I tried to chase down some solid information and found a lot of fascinating stuff, which I’ve collected for you here:

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/spike-protein-vaccines-covid/618954/
“COVID-19 Vaccine Makers Are Looking Beyond the Spike Protein”

 

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vaccine-lung-damage/
“Will mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines Wreak ‘Havoc on The Lungs’ in 4 to 14 Months?” [Spoiler: NO.]

 

https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/byram-bridles-claim-that-covid-19-vaccines-are-toxic-fails-to-account-for-key-differences-between-the-spike-protein-produced-during-infection-and-vaccination-misrepresents-studies/
“Byram Bridle’s claim that COVID-19 vaccines are toxic fails to account for key differences between the spike protein produced during infection and vaccination, misrepresents studies”
[Worth reading carefully.]
‘Ogata et al. found extremely low levels of the spike protein compared to the harmful levels reported in animal studies, as Uri Manor, one of the authors of the study in hamsters, pointed out on Twitter. The blog Deplatform Disease calculated that the amount of spike protein that the authors found in vaccinated people was about 100,000 times lower than the levels of viral spike protein shown to cause harm. This is “a situation that could hypothetically occur in severe COVID-19 patients, pending studies confirming it, but not achievable in vaccinated people, at least for those who received the Moderna vaccine, and unlikely to occur for the other vaccines”, explained Al-Ahmad.

‘While some of the vaccine might end up in the bloodstream, the body breaks it down over time. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) explained in a 23 March 2021 letter that the proportion of vaccine that enters the bloodstream is very small and almost all of that ends up in the liver:’

‘…I have personally discussed these biodistribution data (as obtained by Bridle and colleagues) on my blog, as I teach pharmacokinetics to pharmacy students. The data is pretty clear: the number of vaccines needed to be injected in a 12-year old to reproduce the findings observed in rats and reported as “terrifying” would be equivalent to 60,000 doses given at once, to reproduce the number of nanoparticles used in that study.’

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201029141941.htm
“SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins disrupt the blood-brain barrier, new research shows”  [Can this explain some or all of the neurological symptoms?]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211124720302928
“Route of Vaccine Administration Alters Antigen Trafficking but Not Innate or Adaptive Immunity”  [Where the vaccine goes after injection]
‘The transport of vaccine antigen to the local LNs [lymph nodes] is crucial for priming of T and B cell responses (Liang et al., 2017b). We and others have shown, using both flow cytometry and positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT), that vaccine transport after i.m. injection is restricted to the local LNs and is not disseminated systemically (Liang et al., 2017a, Liang et al., 2017b, Lindsay et al., 2019).’

https://www.science20.com/w_glen_pyle/the_thorny_problem_of_covid19_vaccines_and_spike_proteins-254373
“The Thorny Problem Of COVID-19 Vaccines And Spike Proteins”
‘In addition to engineering the spike protein so it can not be fully activated, the protein is tagged with an extra piece called a “transmembrane anchor”. The transmembrane anchor allows the spike protein to appear on the surface – or membrane – of the cell, but it is held in place by the anchor. This prevents the spike protein from drifting away and creates a fixed target for the immune system to recognize the foreign protein.’
‘…Lei and colleagues conclude their paper by noting that their study “suggests that vaccination-generated antibody and/or exogenous antibody against [spike] protein not only protects the host from SARS-CoV-2 infectivity but also inhibits [spike] protein imposed endothelial injury.” In other words, the spike proteins used by currently available vaccines actually offer a double layer of protection.’

https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/tiny-tweak-behind-COVID-19/98/i38
“The tiny tweak behind COVID-19 vaccines
Prepandemic coronavirus research by Jason McLellan and Barney Graham led to a trick for stabilizing the prefusion form of spike proteins”
[This one, linked in the article above, has drawings of the molecular structures of the natural and inactivated spike proteins to help us understand what was changed and why– good to nerd out on]

https://magazine.ucsf.edu/what-covid-doing-our-hearts
“What Is COVID Doing to Our Hearts?”
‘Healthy heart muscle (left) created from adult stem cells has long fibers that allow them to contract. SARS-CoV-2 infection causes these fibers to break apart into small pieces (right), which can cut off the cells’ ability to beat and may explain lasting cardiac defects in COVID-19 patients.’

 

 

 

What Are Viruses? In a Way They Are Us

Coronavirus structure. An artistic response to the last SARS epidemic, in glass. https://www.lukejerram.com/glass/gallery/sars-corona-virus

At the beginning of the year, I wrote about the goddess Kali, having no idea how soon she’d be coming after us.

I also wrote about the interconnectedness of everything on the planet and everywhere, and how the dichotomy of humans vs. nature is false.

It turns out that even the dichotomy of viruses vs. us is false. We all learned in school that viruses are tiny beings that exist in a strange twilight zone between the living and the nonliving, and that they can’t reproduce without using the machinery of plant or animal cells. I hadn’t followed that thought to its conclusion, which is that since viruses must build themselves out of the materials of our own cells, they are in a sense made out of us. They, too, are inextricably entwined with ourselves.

This came up when I was looking for layperson-friendly articles to explain viral structures and functions to my readers and patients. Here is a source:
“Conserved and host-specific features of influenza virion architecture.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25226414

“Abstract: Viruses use virions to spread between hosts, and virion composition is therefore the primary determinant of viral transmissibility and immunogenicity. However, the virions of many viruses are complex and pleomorphic, making them difficult to analyse in detail. Here we address this by identifying and quantifying virion proteins with mass spectrometry, producing a complete and quantified model of the hundreds of host-encoded and viral proteins that make up the pleomorphic virions of influenza viruses. We show that a conserved influenza virion architecture is maintained across diverse combinations of virus and host. This ‘core’ architecture, which includes substantial quantities of host proteins as well as the viral protein NS1, is elaborated with abundant host-dependent features. As a result, influenza virions produced by mammalian and avian hosts have distinct protein compositions. Finally, we note that influenza virions share an underlying protein composition with exosomes, suggesting that influenza virions form by subverting microvesicle production.”

OK, that was not a particularly layperson-friendly paragraph, so let’s unpack it. First, what is a virus? It is simply a chain of RNA or DNA, which normally is covered by a coating or envelope of protein. A virion is the whole package of genetic material plus the coating that allows it to get into cells, that is, the infective form of the virus. Note that virions are pleomorphic— they can exist in different forms. We’ll come back to that.

 Virions contain “substantial quantities of host proteins.” That’s the part where they’re made out of us. That’s also how we know what sort of host the virus developed in originally, and can tell that the current SARS-CoV-2 came from bats.*

But there is a deeper answer to the question “what is a virus?” and it is that a virus is information. That information is constantly transmitted between species, just as similar particles are generated and used by organisms within themselves. From the same paper as above:
“Spherical influenza virions are a similar size to exosomes, membrane-bound structures which also transfer protein and RNA between cells. By comparing separately-purified exosomes and virions we show here that they also have a strikingly similar protein profile – by many measures, an influenza virion is simply an exosome that has been enriched with additional components. Similarities have been noted between exosomes and a number of other enveloped viruses, most notably HIV, for which the ‘Trojan exosome hypothesis’ was proposed to explain virion budding as a subversion of cellular pathways for exosome biogenesis.”

I’m embarrassed to tell you that in decades of reading in medicine and biology, I had never learned of the existence of exosomes. It turns out that cells are constantly releasing exosomes, which are little packets of information in the form of microRNAs with coatings, very similar to viruses, and which can turn genes on or off and affect the functions of other cells that encounter them. This includes exosomes we ingest in our food!  This is one of the mechanisms by which substances in foods create benefits to our health.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4851829/
“Interspecies communication between plant and mouse gut host cells through edible plant derived exosome-like nanoparticles”
“It has been known for decades that people eating a variety of edible plants daily are the recipients of many beneficial health effects when compared to subjects that ingest fewer types of edible plants. Ingesting EPDENs from a variety of fruits and vegetables daily would be expected to provide greater beneficial effects for maintaining gut homeostasis than ingesting EPDENs from a single edible plant.”

Exosomes are even present in breast milk, providing a way to convey the mother’s immunity to the baby.

“With the recent discovery that non-coding microRNA’s in food are capable of directly altering gene expression within human physiology, this new study further concretizes the notion that the age old aphorism ‘you are what you eat’ is now consistent with cutting edge molecular biology.”
— Sayer Ji, https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/amazing-food-science-discovery-edible-plants-talk-animal-cells-promote-healing

Indeed, you are what you eat, and you are also what you breathe in. Back to viruses. What gobsmacked me when I read all this is that I had seen very similar ideas way back in my youth, in the Seth material! It turns out that decades before these discoveries, the Seth entity (famously channeled by Jane Roberts) had been telling us the same things. And I had been thinking about his ideas when I first considered writing this post; for some reason they had stuck in my mind all these years. I didn’t expect to be able to find specific quotes, but the internet being such a magical place, I was able to come up with some right away:

“Many viruses INHERENTLY capable of causing death, in normal conditions contribute to the overall health of the body, existing side by side as it were with other viruses, each contributing quite necessary activities that maintain bodily equilibrium.”

“All viruses of any kind are important to the stability of your planetary life. They are a part of the planet’s biological heritage and memory. You cannot eradicate a virus, though at any given time you destroy every member alive of any given strain. They exist in the earth’s memory, to be recreated, as they were before, whenever the need arises.”

“Viruses appear to be “the bad guys,” and as a rule you think of them separately, as for example the smallpox virus. There are overall affiliations in which viruses take part, however, in which delicate balances are maintained biologically. Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. These — and I am putting it as simply as possible — take turns being active or inactive within the body, in accordance with the body’s overall condition. Viruses that are “deadly” in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful at given rates of action. These in turn trigger other cellular changes, again of a beneficial nature.”

“Now: In the same way that a member of such a society can go [askew], blow his stack, go overboard, commit antisocial acts, so in the same fashion such a person can instead trigger the viruses, wreck their biological social order, so that some of them suddenly become deadly, or run [amok]. So of course the resulting diseases are infectious. To that degree they are social diseases. It is not so much that a virus, say, suddenly turns destructive — though it does — as it is that the entire cooperative structure within which all the viruses are involved becomes insecure and threatened.

“You are not aware of the inner army of viruses within the body that protect it constantly. Host and virus both need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle.”

“Thoughts interact with the body and become part of it as viruses do. Some viruses have great therapeutic value. The physical body will often let down its own barriers to these, knowing they will counteract certain others that are not beneficial at the time.
So-called harmful viruses are ever-present within the body. You are very rarely vulnerable to any but a small percentage, though you carry within you traces of the most deadly of them all of the time. Viruses themselves undergo transformations completely unsuspected by medical men. If one virus disappears and another is found, it is never suspected that the first may have changed into the second; and yet through certain alterations of quite natural character such is the case.” [Remember the pleomorphic nature of flu viruses that we read about above.]

“More is always involved, however, for those viruses that you consider communicable do indeed in one way or another represent communications on a biological level. They are biological statements, literally social communications, biologically made, and they can be of many kinds.”

“There are all kinds of biological reactions between bodies that go unnoticed, and they are all basically of a social nature, dealing with biological communications. In a fashion viruses—in a fashion—again, are a way of dealing with or controlling the environment. These are natural interactions, and since you live in a world where, overall, people are healthy enough to contribute through labor, energy, and ideas, health is the dominating ingredient—but there are biological interactions between all physical bodies that are the basis for that health, and the mechanisms include the interactions of viruses, and even the periods of indisposition, that are not understood.”

“The species is also always in the process of keeping within its genetic bank millions of characteristics that might be needed in various contingencies, and in that regard there is a connection, of course, between, say, viruses of many strains and the health not only of man but of other species.”

“The epidemics then serve many purposes — warning that certain conditions will not be tolerated. There is a biological outrage that will be continually expressed until the conditions are changed.”

Wow. If there was ever a time for biological outrage, surely it is now. 

Sayer Ji elaborates this “open-access” view of the biome in an article connecting it with our non-coding “junk” DNA and the Gaia hypothesis:

“This view also invites a complete re-visioning of the tree of life. Unlike the conventional model, where the DNA is hermetically sealed off within the lockbox of each species, evolving in isolation at a glacial pace, except for extremely rare horizontal gene transfer events (such as retroviral vectors that incorporate into the germline and become endogenized as endogenous retroviruses), the newer, more “open access” model would permit species to alter and affect another’s phenotype in real-time, along with potentially altering its long-term evolutionary trajectory by affecting epigenetic inheritance patterns. This speaks to a co-evolutionary and co-operative model, with all areas of the tree of life, co-developing in a highly complex and seemingly highly intelligent, carefully orchestrated manner.

… So, in the post-Genomic era, it is starting to look like the ‘dark matter’ of the human genome is eclipsing in importance the known, protein-coding sequences, which account for only about 1.5% of the DNA’s 3 billion base pairs. Why? Because it has been recently discovered that most of our genome (estimated 70-90%) is transcribed into non-coding RNAs. And why would this be so, if not for a purpose? Life does not concern itself with producing anything without reason.” [my emphasis]
https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/genetic-dark-matter-and-return-goddess

Please consider this very carefully. Species can affect each other’s structure and function in the moment, and they can affect each other’s evolutionary path by changing inherited traits, something that until fairly recently was considered laughable. And viruses are part of that web of communication. 

One might wonder why terrible diseases exist. Many explanations could be brought up, but it is important to remember that most viruses, most bacteria, most fungi do not create disease, and some actually prevent it. Among these are the viruses which kill harmful bacteria in our mouths, and of course the crucially needed bacteria that live in our guts. Like it or not, we are not so much individuals as communities in motion, ships carrying innumerable passengers and crew who must all work together to stay afloat.

**************************************************************************

The Seth entity and many others remind us that disease and resistance to it are largely (or entirely) produced by our thoughts, both on an individual and a population level. This does not mean that we should stop our physical-world measures to reduce transmission of COVID-19 or any other illness. Although the physical world is essentially an illusion, if you jump off a cliff, gravity will have something to say about it! We have to live in our shared reality and follow its rules. However, we can also use our thoughts to reduce the trouble we find ourselves in and to create new structures as we recover.

EFT teacher Dawson Church reports: 
“Three years ago, with a wonderful group of research colleagues, I studied the levels of immunoglobulin antibodies in people at a 2 day EcoMeditation workshop (with a lot of tapping) at Esalen (Groesbeck et al., 2018). Plus a weeklong EFT tapping workshop (including EcoMeditation; Bach et al., 2019).

“We found that the weekend retreat was associated with a rise in immunoglobulin levels of 27%! That’s a big increase in your body’s ability to fight off invading viruses!”

“While the coronavirus is a “novel” virus and we don’t know how well our existing antibodies work against it, we do know that it’s very useful to have 27% better general immunity!”

He can be found at https://www.eftuniverse.com/

Lynne McTaggart, well-known for her Intention Experiments and Power of 8 intention groups, is holding weekly Facebook Live sessions of applying group thoughts to mitigate the coronavirus crisis, as well as weekly group sessions to help with healing for individuals. https://lynnemctaggart.com/

EFT tapping, meditation, prayer, whatever you choose— you can use your coronacation time to improve your individual situation and the world. I sincerely hope that you are physically and mentally well and that you have enough material goods and finances to get by. If you don’t, please reach out for help in any way you can!

 

 

*‘But how did the outbreak occur? Solving this medical mystery is important to prevent future pandemics. What’s increasingly clear is that the initial “origin story” — that the virus was spread by people who ate contaminated animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan — is shaky.

‘Scientists have identified the culprit as a bat coronavirus, through genetic sequencing; bats weren’t sold at the seafood market, although that market or others could have sold animals that had contact with bats. The Lancet noted in a January study that the first covid-19 case in Wuhan had no connection to the seafood market.’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-did-covid-19-begin-its-initial-origin-story-is-shaky/2020/04/02/1475d488-7521-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html

**********************************************************************

Here is more of the relevant Seth material, with the quotes above in context. There was far too much to include in the body of the post. I found these passages at https://findingseth.com, https://www.wireclub.com/topics/philosophy/conversations/UmK3dAOnShBELwai0, and the Seth Quotes page on Facebook.

These books contain the quotes:
NoME = The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events
NoPR = The Nature of Personal Reality
TES = The Early Sessions
DEaVF = Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment
WTH = The Way Toward Health

“The viruses and infections were of course present. They always are. They are themselves fragments, struggling small fragments without intention of harm. You have general immunity, believe it or not, to all such viruses and infections. Ideally you can inhabit a plane with them without fear. It is only when you give tacit agreement that harm is inflicted upon you by these fragments.” -Seth, Early Sessions, Vol 1

“Give us a moment … In those terms, thoughts move far quicker of course than viruses. The action of the virus follows the thought. Each thought is registered biologically. Basically (underlined), when you have an immunity to a disease you have a mental immunity.
You think of viruses as evil, spreading perhaps from country to country, to “invade” scores of physical mechanisms. Now thoughts are “contagious.” You have a natural immunity against all thoughts that do not fit in with your own purposes and beliefs, and naturally (pause, groping), you are “inoculated” with a wholesome trust and belief in your own thoughts above others. The old ideas of voodooism recognized some of these concepts, but complicated and distorted them with fears of evil, psychic invasion, psychic killing, and so forth. You cannot divide, say, mental and physical health, nor can you divide a person’s philosophy from his bodily condition.”
—NoME Chapter 6: Session 841, March 14, 1979

“The patient, therefore, often feels relatively powerless and at the mercy of any stray virus that might come along. The facts are that you choose even the kind of illness that you have according to the nature of your beliefs. You are immune from ill health as long as you believe that you are.”
—NoPR Chapter 5: Session 624, October 30, 1972

“Many viruses INHERENTLY capable of causing death, in normal conditions contribute to the overall health of the body, existing side by side as it were with other viruses, each contributing quite necessary activities that maintain bodily equilibrium.
“If (certain viruses) are triggered, however, to higher activity or overproduction by mental states, they then become ‘deadly.’ Physically they may be passed on in whatever manner is peculiar to a specific strain.
“Literally, individual mental problems of sufficient severity emerge as social, mass diseases.”
—The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Session 802

NoME Chapter 6: Session 840, March 12, 1979   5/52
[… 3 paragraphs …]
(When I arose early on the 26th so that I could wrap the proofs for mailing, however, I noticed that Billy [their cat] didn’t appear to feel well. Jane watched him while I went to the post office. He was no better when I returned, and as the morning passed we came to realize that he had a urinary problem. That afternoon I took him to the veterinarian, who kept him for treatment; the problem was serious; by then the cat was in great pain. Jane and I both wondered: Why Billy? Why should such a seemingly perfect young creature suddenly become that sick, for no observable reason? “We were shocked,1 no doubt about it,” I wrote in my notes for the 836th session, a private or nonbook one which Jane gave that evening. During the session Seth discussed Billy’s illness to some extent, while also giving the first “installment” of an answer to a longstanding question of mine: I was curious about the relationship between the host — whether human, animal, or plant — and a disease it might contract, one that was “caused,” say, by a virus. I’ll return to the question at the end of these notes.
[… 6 paragraphs …]
(“All viruses of any kind are important to the stability of your planetary life. They are a part of the planet’s biological heritage and memory. You cannot eradicate a virus, though at any given time you destroy every member alive of any given strain. They exist in the earth’s memory, to be recreated, as they were before, whenever the need arises.
[… 5 paragraphs …]
(Pause.) Viruses appear to be “the bad guys,” and as a rule you think of them separately, as for example the smallpox virus. There are overall affiliations in which viruses take part, however, in which delicate balances are maintained biologically. Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. These — and I am putting it as simply as possible — take turns being active or inactive within the body, in accordance with the body’s overall condition. Viruses that are “deadly” in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful at given rates of action. These in turn trigger other cellular changes, again of a beneficial nature.
[… 3 paragraphs …]
Now: In the same way that a member of such a society can go [askew], blow his stack, go overboard, commit antisocial acts, so in the same fashion such a person can instead trigger the viruses, wreck their biological social order, so that some of them suddenly become deadly, or run [amok]. So of course the resulting diseases are infectious. To that degree they are social diseases. It is not so much that a virus, say, suddenly turns destructive — though it does — as it is that the entire cooperative structure within which all the viruses are involved becomes insecure and threatened.
[… 3 paragraphs …]
You are not aware of the inner army of viruses within the body that protect it constantly. Host and virus both need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle.

NoME Chapter 6: Session 841, March 14, 1979   8/21
[… 5 paragraphs …]
The case was startling, again, because of the obvious suicidal acts. The poison was, after all, left as evidence. Had the same number of people been found dead (pause) of a vicious disease — smallpox or whatever — the virus involved would have been the villain. I want to discuss thoughts and viruses, along with the health of the body.
You think of viruses as physical, and of thoughts as mental. You should know that thoughts also have their physical aspects in the body, and that viruses have their mental aspects in the body. At times you have both asked why an ailing body does not simply assert itself and use its healing abilities, throwing off the negative influence of a given set of beliefs and thoughts.
When you think of thoughts as mental and viruses as physical, the question is understandable. It is not just that thoughts influence the body, as of course they do; but each one of them represents a triggering stimulus, bringing about hormonal changes and altering the entire physical situation at any given time.
(Pause at 9:16.) Your physical body … give us time … is, as an entity, the fleshed-out version — the physically alive version — of the body of your thoughts. It is not that your thoughts just trigger chemical reactions in the body, but that your thoughts have a chemical reality besides their recognizable mental aspects. I will have to use an analogy. It is not the best, but I hope it will get the point across: It is as if your thoughts turned into the various appendages of your body. (Emphatically:) They have an invisible existence within your body as surely as viruses do. Your body is composed not only of the stuff within it that, say, X-rays or autopsies can reveal, but it also involves profound relationships, alliances and affiliations that nowhere physically show. Your thoughts are as physically pertinent to your body as viruses are, as alive and self-propagating, and they themselves form inner affiliations. Their vitality automatically triggers (long pause, eyes open) all of the body’s inner responses. When you think thoughts, they are conscious. You think in sentences, or paragraphs, or perhaps in images. Those thoughts, as clearly as I can explain this, rise from inner components of which you are unaware.
[… 1 paragraph …]
(9:28.) Give us a moment … In those terms, thoughts move far quicker of course than viruses. The action of the virus follows the thought. Each thought is registered biologically. Basically (underlined), when you have an immunity to a disease you have a mental immunity.
You think of viruses as evil, spreading perhaps from country to country, to “invade” scores of physical mechanisms. Now thoughts are “contagious.” You have a natural immunity against all thoughts that do not fit in with your own purposes and beliefs, and naturally (pause, groping), you are “inoculated” with a wholesome trust and belief in your own thoughts above others. The old ideas of voodooism recognized some of these concepts, but complicated and distorted them with fears of evil, psychic invasion, psychic killing, and so forth. You cannot divide, say, mental and physical health, nor can you divide a person’s philosophy from his bodily condition.
Give us a moment … While I say all of this about thoughts and viruses, remember the context of the discussion, for new information and insights are always available to an individual from Framework 2, and the body does indeed send its own signals.
[… 2 paragraphs …]
The people who died at Jonestown believed that they must die. They wanted to die. How could their thoughts allow them to bring about their [bodily deaths]? Again, the question makes sense only if you do not realize that your thoughts are as physically a part of your body as viruses are (intently).
[… 5 paragraphs …]

NoPR Chapter 7: Session 631, December 18, 1972   7/23
[… 5 paragraphs …]
You must remember that you dwell always in a natural framework — which means that your thoughts themselves are as natural, say, as the locks of your hair. In what may seem to you to be an odd analogy I will compare your thoughts with viruses,* for they are alive, always present, responsive, and possess their own kind of mobility. Physically speaking at least, thoughts are chemically propelled, and they travel through the universal body as viruses travel through your temporal form.
Thoughts interact with the body and become part of it as viruses do. Some viruses have great therapeutic value. The physical body will often let down its own barriers to these, knowing they will counteract certain others that are not beneficial at the time.
So-called harmful viruses are ever-present within the body. You are very rarely vulnerable to any but a small percentage, though you carry within you traces of the most deadly of them all of the time. Viruses themselves undergo transformations completely unsuspected by medical men. If one virus disappears and another is found, it is never suspected that the first may have changed into the second; and yet through certain alterations of quite natural character such is the case.
So viruses can be beneficial or deadly according to the condition, state, and needs of the body at any given time. It is known that one disease can often cure another; sometimes, left alone, an individual will go from a serious disease through a series of less severe ones that are seemingly unrelated to the original problem.
[… 1 paragraph …]
(Pause at 9:58.) I am not suggesting that you not visit doctors or not take drugs of that nature, as long as you believe in the structure of medical discipline that the Western world has evolved. Your bodies have been conditioned to it through the use of such medications since birth. There are many casualties, but this is still a system that you have chosen, and your ideas still form your reality. No one dies who has not made the decision to do so — and no disease is accepted blindly. Put simply, your thoughts can be regarded as invisible viruses, carriers, sparks setting off reactions not only within the body but the entire physical system as you know it.
Your thoughts are as natural as the cells within your body, and as real. They interact with one another as viruses do. While you are in this reality there is no division between the mental, the spiritual, and the physical. If you think there is, then you do not sufficiently understand the spirituality of the flesh or the physical reality of your thought.
[… 5 paragraphs …]
It is natural to live after death, and natural to return the body to earth and [then to] form another. It is natural for your thoughts to be as quick, responsive, and alive as viruses. It is natural for you to have probable selves as well as reincarnational existences.

DEaVF1 Chapter 6: Session 906, March 6, 1980   10/39
[… 8 paragraphs …]
Subject: Viruses as part of the body’s overall health system, and viruses as biological statements.
Viruses serve many purposes, as I have said before.1 The body contains all kinds of viruses, including those considered deadly, but those are usually not only harmless, or inactive, but beneficial to the body’s overall balance.
[… 1 paragraph …]
(9:01.) In certain fashions (underlined), that system also keeps the body from squandering its energies, preserving biological integrity. Otherwise it would be as if you did not know where your own house began or ended, and so tried to heat the entire neighborhood. So some indispositions “caused by viruses” are accepted by the body as welcome triggers, to clean out that system, and this applies to your present indispositions.
More is always involved, however, for those viruses that you consider communicable do indeed in one way or another represent communications on a biological level. They are biological statements, literally social communications, biologically made, and they can be of many kinds.
(Still quietly, but at a good pace:) When a skunk is frightened, it throws off a foul odor indeed, and when people are frightened they react in somewhat the same fashion at times, biologically reacting to stimuli in the environment that they consider alarming. They throw off a barrage of “foul viruses”—that is, they actually collect and mobilize from within their own bodies viruses that are potentially harmful, biologically trigger these, or activate them, and send them out into the environment in self-protection, to ward off the enemy (more vigorously).
In a fashion this is a kind of biological aggression. The viruses, however, also represent tensions that the person involved is getting rid of. That is one kind of statement. It is often used in a very strong manner in times of war, or great social upheaval, when people feel frightened.
Now, your friend had been to the Olympics (last month, at Lake Placid, New York), and he was charged by the great physical vitality that he felt watching that athletic panorama. [Because of that, and for other personal reasons], he could find no release for the intense energy he felt, so he got rid of it, protected himself, and threw out his threatening biological posture: the viruses.
[… 2 paragraphs …]
(Pause at 9:17.) There are all kinds of biological reactions between bodies that go unnoticed, and they are all basically of a social nature, dealing with biological communications. In a fashion viruses—in a fashion—again, are a way of dealing with or controlling the environment. These are natural interactions, and since you live in a world where, overall, people are healthy enough to contribute through labor, energy, and ideas, health is the dominating ingredient—but there are biological interactions between all physical bodies that are the basis for that health, and the mechanisms include the interactions of viruses, and even the periods of indisposition, that are not understood.
[… 12 paragraphs …]
1. Seth first mentioned viruses in the 17th session for January 26, 1964, when I asked him to comment upon the recent deaths of our dog, Mischa, at the age of 11, and of a pair of kittens Jane had obtained from the janitor of the art gallery where she worked part time. (The kittens had the same mother, but had come from successive litters.) I was 44 and Jane was 34, and in conventional terms both of us were still struggling—not only to learn about ourselves and the world, but to find our creative ways in that world. Seth’s answer to my question was more than a little surprising and saddening to us, and opened up a number of insights:
[… 1 paragraph …]
“The viruses and infections were of course present. They always are. They are themselves fragments, struggling small fragments without intention of harm. You have general immunity, believe it or not, to all such viruses and infections. Ideally, you can inhabit a plane with them without fear. It is only when you give tacit agreement that harm is inflicted upon you by these fragments. To some degree, lesser, dependent lives such as household pets are dependent upon your psychic strength. They have their own, it is true, but unknowingly you reinforce their energy and health.
[… 5 paragraphs …]

DEaVF2 Chapter 7: Session 906, March 6, 1980   1/34
[… 11 paragraphs …]
The species is also always in the process of keeping within its genetic bank millions of characteristics that might be needed in various contingencies, and in that regard there is a connection, of course, between, say, viruses of many strains and the health not only of man but of other species.

WTH Chapter 2: January 28, 1984   2/33
[… 9 paragraphs …]
— is instead the result of an exaggeration or overextension of perfectly normal body processes. You are not attacked by viruses, for instance, for all kinds of viruses exist normally in the body. There are no killer (underlined) viruses, then, but viruses that go beyond their usual bounds. We will have more to say about such issues later on in the book — for I hope to show you how certain feelings and beliefs do indeed promote health, while others promote an unfortunate extension or exaggeration of perfectly normal bodily processes, or viral activity.
[… 3 paragraphs …]
(Long pause.) People have been taught that their bodies are a kind of battleground, and that they must be in a constant state of readiness lest they be attacked or invaded by alien germs or viruses or diseases that can strike without warning.

NoME Chapter 1: Session 802, April 25, 1977   9/63
[… 4 paragraphs …]
Dictation: (Pause, one of many.) Now: To a certain extent (underlined), epidemics are the result of a mass suicide phenomenon on the parts of those involved. Biological, sociological, or even economic factors may be involved, in that for a variety of reasons, and at different levels, whole groups of individuals want to die at any given time — but in such a way that their individual deaths amount to a mass statement.
[… 8 paragraphs …]
Now if you believe in one life only, then such conditions will seem most disastrous, and in your terms they clearly are not pretty. Yet, though each victim in an epidemic may die his or her own death, that death becomes part of a mass social protest. The lives of intimate survivors are shaken, and according to the extent of the epidemic the various elements of social life itself are disturbed, altered, rearranged. Sometimes such epidemics are eventually responsible for the overthrow of governments, the loss of wars.
[… 1 paragraph …]
The epidemics then serve many purposes — warning that certain conditions will not be tolerated. There is a biological outrage that will be continually expressed until the conditions are changed.
[… 1 paragraph …]
The sight of the dying gave them visions of the meaning of life, and stirred new [ideas] of sociological, political, and spiritual natures, so that in your terms the dead did not die in vain. Epidemics by their public nature speak of public problems — problems that sociologically threaten to sweep the individual to psychic disaster as the physical materialization does biologically.
(Pause.) These are the reasons also for the range or the limits of various epidemics — why they sweep through one area and leave another clear. Why one in the family will die and another survive — for in this mass venture, the individual still forms his or her private reality.
[… 17 paragraphs …]
They do not “worry.” They do not anticipate disaster when no signs of it are apparent in their immediate environment. On their own they do not need preventative medicine. Pet animals are inoculated against diseases, however. In your society this almost becomes a necessity. In a “purely natural” setting you would not have as many living puppies or kittens. There are stages of physical existence, and in those terms nature knows what it is doing. When a species overproduces, the incidences of, say, epidemics grow. This applies to human populations as well as to the animals.
[… 2 paragraphs …]
There are also “trial runs” in human and animal species alike, in which peeks are taken, or glimpses, of physical life, and that is all. Epidemics sweeping through animal populations are also biological and psychic statements, then, in which each individual knows that only its own greatest fulfillment can satisfy the quality of life on an individual basis, and thus contribute to the mass survival of the species.
[… 2 paragraphs …]
Many children, who, it seems, should have died of disease, of “childhood epidemics,” nevertheless survive because of their different intents. The world of thought and feeling may be invisible, and yet it activates all physical systems with which you are acquainted.
[… 1 paragraph …]
Love involves self-respect, the trust in individual biological zest and integrity. To that extent, in their way animal epidemics have the same causes as human ones.

https://www.wireclub.com/topics/philosophy/conversations/UmK3dAOnShBELwai0
from The Individual And Nature of Mass Events.–by Jane Roberts———–
—— “Unfortunately, many of your public health programs, and commercial statements through the various media, provide you with mass meditations of a most deplorable kind. I refer to those in which the specific symptoms of various diseases are given, in which the individual is further told to examine the body with those symptoms in mind. I also refer to those statements that just as unfortunately specify diseases for which the individual may experience no symptoms of an observable kind, but is cautioned that these disastrous physical events may be happening despite his or her feelings of good health. Here the generalized fears fostered by religious, scientific, and cultural beliefs are often given as blueprints of diseases in which a person can find a specific focus-the individual can say: `Of course, I feel listless, or panicky, or unsafe, since I have suchandsuch a disease.’
————— “The breast cancer suggestions associated with self examinations have caused more cancers than any treatments have cured. They involve intense meditation of the body, and adverse imagery that itself affects the bodily cells. Public health announcements about high blood pressure themselves raise the blood pressure of millions of television viewers.
—— “Your current ideas of preventative medicine, therefore, generate the very kind of fear that causes disease. They all undermine the individual’s sense of bodily security and increase stress, while offering the body a specific, detailed disease plan. But most of all, they operate to increase the individual sense of alienation from the body, and to promote a sense of powerlessness and duality. Your “medical commercials” are equally disease promoting. Many, meaning to offer you relief through a product, instead actually promote the condition through suggestion, thereby generating a need for the product itself.”

“Examine the literature that you read, the television programs that you watch, and tell yourself to ignore those indications given of the body’s weaknesses.

2020 Vision

… is a joke that’s going to get old real fast, so I’ll try to use it quick before that happens.

A free-to-download version of the Kali Yantra from kalibhakti.com, empty of color and ready to receive your preferred reality.

I was going to write about the terrifying prospects we face in the next year and the next decade, and the way they’re battering mental health all over the planet. But you know about all that. What do we do with it? Here are a few musings.

Some interesting takes on how to cope with this apocalyptic Anthropocene era have crossed my screen in the past week. One was the “post-doom” concept espoused by Michael Dowd: “Post-doom: what opens up when we remember who we are, accept what is inevitable, honor our grief, and invest in what is pro-future and soul-nourishing.”
https://www.postdoom.com/

I heard about this in an interview by Steve Bhaerman, the alter ego of my guru Swami Beyondananda. 
https://omtimes.com/iom/2019/12/michael-dowd-post-doom/

It reminded me of the beautiful Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Inner Light,” in which a probe from a long-dead civilization causes Picard to experience the existence of a man who lived near the end, as the planet was being roasted by a malfunctioning sun. The people knew that soon there would be nothing left of their world, but they managed to retain their joy in living despite unimaginable tragedy.

Next I was introduced to “rewilding” by Micah Mortali, interviewed by Tami Simon:
https://www.soundstrue.com/store/weeklywisdom?page=single&category=IATE&episode=14107
Rewilding is a term for conservation efforts to return land to a wilder state, including the reintroduction of large predators, but Mortali was talking about human beings reconnecting to our natural environment, knowing ourselves as animals that belong within it. When Simon asked him how he would suggest that we deal with climate change, he said something I thought was striking and potentially very useful: we should go outdoors and be with nature, and pay attention, and the Earth will teach us what we need to do.

Mortali also pointed out something that it totally obvious but that people forget all the time, that we grew out of the primordial soup of this planet and we are entirely part of her, not separate. The dichotomy of “man” and “nature” is false. Thinking further, then, how is it that nature has led herself to a situation in which one segment of life on the earth threatens to destroy all the rest along with itself?

I remember that when I was a kid I heard adults talking about a time to come, not too far in the future, when the world would be shaken by earthquakes, terrible storms, upheavals of all sorts. They spoke as if this were inevitable and as if everyone knew it would happen. I have never been able to track down whatever they based this belief upon. Nostradamus, perhaps? At any rate, dang, here it is. I think I’ve always subconsciously expected it.

I was also exposed, from early childhood, to Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, in which humanity would go through a period of worldwide crises (around the 1990s, in the Star Trek canon), then emerge into an age of peace, enlightenment and prosperity. He is not the only one to imagine this, as far as I know. My impression is that it forms a strong thread in the current human psyche.

Can we say that, logically, whatever is happening must be what is supposed to be happening? And will we create that golden age that is supposed to show up afterward?

I would love to think that God/the Universe/Mother Nature will take care of us and allow us to survive, along with taking care of all the other creatures. However, we know there have been repeated mass extinctions, where nearly all life was lost. This is something Earth has done from time to time, and no doubt will do again. Then things continue in a different form. I think often of the Hindu concept of the Kali Yuga, when things go downhill and are destroyed, to make way for a new cycle. I think also of the goddess Kali (which I just found out is a different word from the above) who performs the necessary act of destruction, without which creation cannot occur. While looking up other information for this post, I became fascinated with reading about her.

I am beginning to consider that Kali may be a perfect image for our time and our response to it. Though she is fierce and bloody, Kali is also the most loving of mothers, in her guise as Kali Ma, symbolizing the ground of being that underlies all that is. She is ultimate darkness not because she is evil but because she embodies all possibilities; she is the void which can give birth to all reality. As the force of Time, she both brings everything into being and causes everything to pass away.

If you have been reading my work for a while, you may remember a book that describes encounters with the Goddess in her dark form, Waking Up to the Dark. https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/review-waking-up-to-the-dark/ It seems that She, like any loving mother, stands ready to discipline her children when they get out of line, but also as our mother, she will not abandon us in our time of need.

So many people perceive deities and entities of various sorts that are either working to protect us and back up our efforts, or are doing their best to sow discord and undermine anything positive we manage to produce. (I have encountered a range of beings myself, but for the most part they’ve been of the helpful type.) Some feel a certain complacency about things being monitored from behind the scenes, while others may despair in the face of evil forces they think are overwhelmingly powerful, controlling us without our having any choice. But even the most fundamentalist among us believe that humans must take responsibility for carrying out the will of God. I am very much a proponent of “the Lord helps those that help themselves.”

I submit that whatever cosmic beings are working for our good or ill, or their own, we are not separate from them. In the end all of reality is made up of the thought processes of One Mind. We are no more nor less important than the other myriad components of that Mind.

A while back, as I told you, I asked my friend Fryderyk if there was any help from the spirit world coming to us. ‘I wondered if they have any involvement with trying to help our dire situation on our dying planet. He said, firmly, that this is the responsibility of those who live on the planet at present, that we wanted and intended to be here and deal with this, that it is “your burden.”’
https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2019/09/17/things-you-can-do-when-youre-dead-and-some-you-cant/

As hard as it appears, this is the logical conclusion. We are here, at this time, because we wanted and needed to be here. We are the ones willing and able to take on the greatest challenge humanity has faced. We may feel utterly inadequate to the task, but it is our task.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We have to be. There is no one else.

 

While I don’t want to get overly exercised about these metaphorical ages, this very complicated explanation of the Yugas has some fascinating information about cataclysmic events within known historical periods. I think we can all agree that, one way or the other, the path of the Earth and life on it is more cyclical than linear.  
https://grahamhancock.com/dmisrab6/

 

https://www.hinduhumanrights.info/kali-as-the-yuga-shakti-the-power-to-create-a-new-world-age/
The gorgeous depiction of Kali with a tiny dragon on this site was made by Mei Huang: http://www.meihuangart.com/#/illustration/

Katie Does Grief Counseling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most people, and maybe animals too, feel better if they know their deceased loved ones are OK.  In this sweet story, given to me by someone who has lived with many fine dogs, a beloved pet takes it upon herself to deliver the news of her death:

Katie Scarlett

My partner and I found a German Shepherd/Blue Heeler puppy on Central Avenue. The puppy was trying to lick water from a puddle and tossing her head back with each lick. I ran to pick her up and saw that a very tight flea collar had grown into her neck. We rushed her to the vet and had it removed.

We named her Katie Scarlett because of her strong will to survive. Katie was severely dehydrated and malnourished. We thought she was about 3 months old, but the vet said she was closer to 6 months old and severely deprived of care.

Katie became the sweetest, most gentle dog we had ever known. She was so careful with our grandkids, cats and other dogs. She was fiercely protective of our home and our family.

When her fur finally grew back, Katie was a beautiful brindle girl. We affectionately called her our “Jamoca almond swirl girl.” She slept on the foot of our bed for 15 years. We took her to work with us, camping, hiking, and swimming in the lakes, ponds and rivers.

As Katie aged, her hips began to cause her discomfort. We found alternative treatments so she could live life to the fullest pain free.

At the end of her 15th year, mobility once again became an issue. My partner knew that Katie was beginning her transition to the other side. Katie had always loved to sleep late, but she began to rise early and stare out the windows at the sky. It appeared she was seeing things not available to us.

My partner needed to go away for a few weeks and she was fearful that Katie might pass while she was gone. She spent time with Katie letting her know how deeply she would always be loved and how cherished she would always be. She told Katie if she had to leave, it would be okay. She assured Katie that we would miss her terribly but we would be okay and we would all be together again someday.

A week after my partner left on her trip, Katie left her tired earthly body behind. I was devastated and did not want to ruin my partner’s trip by sharing the sad news. I saw no need to tell bad news in a hurry.

Katie handled that for me. Late that evening, my partner called in tears. She told me Katie had come to her room and laid on the foot of her bed. As she reached to touch her, Katie flew away.

We do not die. We will all be together again. This life is but one of many. Katie was one of the very best blessings I ever received. I will be so happy to be with her again.

— Judy Talley

What Is This Qi Stuff, Anyway?

(Written for my colleagues on Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine Day, 10/24/18, and posted on the website of the New Mexico Society for Acupuncture and Asian Medicine.)

The field is the sole governing agency of the particle. — Einstein

There is a school of thought that seems to be gaining currency in our profession lately, which says that the concept of Qi is nothing more than a quaint misunderstanding of what the ancient sages were really writing about, and that our medicine is really all about the nervous system and other purely physical aspects of the body.

This is simply not true.  In an apparent effort to align their work with biomedical science, these authors are actually ignoring a great deal of that same science, not to mention the experiences of myriad practitioners and patients. 

Let me start with typical human perceptions of the energetic field surrounding the body, the manifestation of Qi we think of most often.  While Qi can be complicated to pin down in terms of exactly what types of energy and what frequency ranges are involved, close to the body it’s very simple to perceive and to demonstrate. 

When I am scanning for active points or disturbances in patients’ bodies, the person on the table often says, with surprise, “I can feel exactly where your hand is!”  Of course they can, as this is a normal human ability.  When patients ask me what Qi is, or what is meant by Qi Gong, I have them try a very simple exercise: Hold your palms near each other, about a half inch apart.  Notice what you feel. A kind of pressure, a bit like the feeling of trying to bring two magnets together with the same poles facing?  Warmth?  Tingling?

Nearly everyone can perceive this immediately.  I’ve tried this exercise with hundreds of people when I’ve given presentations to groups, and only a couple have ever said that they didn’t feel anything. 

When I used to teach Reiki, I introduced the concept of the human biofield with another simple exercise.  One person would stand facing a wall, eyes closed.  Another person would walk up to them from the back.  The first person would raise her hand when she felt the presence of the other one.  This would happen consistently when the two were about four feet apart.

But although those effects are consistent and reliable, science likes objective, numerical measurements with instruments.  There are plenty of those to be had as well, and many of them have been done by researchers right here in the US.  That’s been going on for decades.

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to meet the biophysicist Beverly Rubik, who has spent 40 years studying the human biofield, and was part of the group that coined that term.  Her current work is largely in the area of biophotons, the weak but important light emitted from the body in the ultraviolet range.  Among other things, she has studied the changes in biophoton emissions involved with healers and healees, showing that more light is emitted from the hands of healers when they are doing their work.  One instrument she uses to detect biophotons is the Bio-Well gas discharge visualization camera, which is available commercially and has clinical applications that could be useful in an acupuncture office.

She stated at the conference that as a child she could feel energy, but that “it was educated out of her.”  The biofield, she said, is proposed to be “a high-speed wireless communication system, a bridge between the mind and body.”

I had already encountered Dr. Rubik’s work in a 2016 online course, “The Science of Energy Medicine,” given by the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology.  Here are some quotes from her presentation there:

‘… I see the biofield as a complex dynamic standing wave within and around the body. Let me tell you more. You’re already familiar with the concept of standing waves from musical instruments, for example a wood instrument, a clarinet. There’s a standing wave when it’s being sounded, or the plucking of a string in a violin or a guitar. Once again, a standing wave is vibrating and rendering sound. Not only sound standing waves are possible. There are also electromagnetic standing waves, too.’

‘There was one main prediction from the biofield hypothesis, and that is that if we can shift the biofield, we can change the physiology and chemistry and move the body, the body mind, to a new steady state….’

Experiments have consistently shown that intention is of great importance in causing measurable energetic effects: ‘I come back to that old principle of Oriental medicine. Where mind goes, chi, or energy, flows, and the blood and flesh follow.  This is the bottom line when it comes to how we can heal ourselves. We must change our minds. Then there are shifts in the biofield, and then the flesh and blood is the slowest to change overall.’

You might wonder why, after four decades of work like this, the science of the biofield is not more familiar, even to those of us who deal with it every day. Dr. Rubik gave some reasons why it is not: ‘We have certain challenges in biofield science. We are dealing with complex dynamical fields that are actually very low-level that become difficult to measure and we have to use a variety of tools. There is no one singular tool that you can grab off the shelf that’s ready-made to look at the biofield, but rather a collection of different tools to understand and probe the biofield through different windows.

‘There’s also very little funding and no concerted effort. Unfortunately, the NIH has dropped the ball and it is not a lead agency. We have no leading organization that’s making a concerted effort to forward biofield science or its understanding in the frontiers of medicine, and I’ve long been an advocate of something I call a Human Energy Project [along the lines of the Human Genome Project].’

Here is an article in which Dr. Rubik gives a lucid overview of methods of measuring the biofield:
https://www.faim.org/measurement-of-the-human-biofield-and-other-energetic-instruments

Another researcher who started measuring the biofield, even earlier, was Valerie Hunt, who began as a scientist with no knowledge of or interest in esoteric or energetic matters.  She eventually developed new instrumentation that could detect immensely higher frequencies than had been measured around the body previously, in the range of hundreds of thousands of cycles per second.

‘My academic background is as a neurophysiologist, and I was also a registered physical therapist. I was working in electromyography and electrocardiography, and I was interested in the patterns of electromyographic energy in the body that were related to emotions. Eventually, I established a pattern of emotions connected with neurological energy. In the process, I was the first researcher to have a telemetry, electromyography instrument. This was when the first astronauts went into space. They had to have monitors of their basic health — the heart rate, the blood pressure, and the galvanic skin response — sent from space. They did this using telemetry, which is a radio frequency instrument system. It would send a signal on an FM frequency down to the earth, where NASA would record the FM frequencies and know what was happening to the astronauts.

‘When I heard about this, I got in touch with NASA and the young scientist who had first made that telemetry instrumentation, and I had him build for me the first telemetry electromyography instrument. This meant I could test a person using an FM frequency, a radio frequency, process the data through my instrumentation and record it. And when I did this I found the electromagnetic energy field.

‘This was in early 60’s, and I thought, “Oh my God, what have I got here?” So I brought in researchers from the university’s chemistry, physics, and engineering departments. I said, “What have I got, an artifact?” And they kept saying I didn’t, that my equipment was working fine. They tested everything, and finally I realized I was dealing with a new kind of energy in the body.’

https://healthontheedge.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/the-human-energy-field-an-interview-with-valerie-v-hunt-ph-d/

Dr. Hunt famously worked with the healer Rosalyn Bruyere, and was able to correlate her perceptions of the human aura with the readings made by her instruments.  In addition to making measurements of the biofield, she was able to create practical applications for healing.  She was still going strong on a number of projects when she died in 2014.

All of these electromagnetic emanations from the body are relatively weak.  How do we explain the much more extreme effects that can be produced by well-trained Qi Gong masters and some others?  That’s not at all clear, but the effects are incontrovertibly there.  For example, a fascinating series of trials by Mikio Yamamoto in Japan was reported by Lynne McTaggart in her seminal book The Intention Experiment, involving a master doing tohate, in which the master could push another person back several yards through sheer force of will and Qi, while the other was trying to resist.  The master was isolated in an electromagnetically shielded room on the fourth floor of a building, while his student was placed in a similar room on the first floor.  Neither the distance nor the shielding prevented the effect; in nearly a third of 49 trials, the master was able to push the student back.  (p. 53)

A nonexistent energy could not visibly, objectively move a body. 

Probably quite a few of us have felt a more mundane version of this kind of effect, being pushed back from the treatment table when a blockage in a patient suddenly released, maybe even feeling that we were “knocked across the room” by a considerable force.  How can the biofield, which seems so feeble when measured, create a force like that?  I don’t know of anyone who has answered that question in terms of biophysics, and it is urgently begging for an answer.  There has to be something more to Qi than the types of electromagnetism we have detected in and around the body so far.

At the conference where I met Dr. Rubik, I had an unusually dramatic experience of being strongly tapped between the eyes by someone who was not physically present.  It didn’t hurt, but it knocked me back a little, and everyone in the room saw that.  Some years ago, such a person pushed my whole body a few inches sideways on my chair.  You can’t help but be impressed when an invisible force moves you against (or at least without) your will.

The other issue with explaining Qi solely as a matter of electromagnetic fields is that electromagnetic effects rapidly diminish with distance, but Qi has no trouble at all being transmitted across any given amount of space.  The tohate experiments are a particularly vivid example of that, but many of us do remote treatments that are effective in a quieter way.  What, precisely, is being transmitted?  Or is that the wrong question?

Here, from the ACEP course, is Gary Schwartz attempting to deal with this issue:
‘Now, how do we explain effects that are taking place across 3000 miles or in London, which is what, 6000 miles from Tucson [where he is based]? Or Sydney, Australia, which is even further. Electromagnetic field effects are insufficient to explain that kind of data because the intensity of electromagnetic fields decreases with the square of the distance, and they are modified by all kinds of objects in the environment. That’s one reason why you need to consider higher level or more sophisticated theories of physics to be able to explain this.’

‘To say that a quantum field is involved in distance, which it may very well be, for example, does not mean that the electromagnetics are not involved in proximal things. You can have multiple layers of mechanism being operative at the same time. That’s why I use a staircase for the explanations so people can see this. The problem with skeptics and probably most of us is that we don’t look at the whole picture.’

So at this point, we are very clear about many aspects of the human biofield— which we can call a manifestation of Qi— but there are large and crucial holes in our understanding.

To be continued….

 

Another Human Being’s Identity Is Not Yours to Dictate

(Rant Advisory! I am as upset about this as if it pertained to my own child, or to me.)

So very often I am reminded of the old song that goes “None of us are free if one of us is chained.” It adds, “And if we don’t say it’s wrong then that says it’s right.”

Sometimes the chains are kept locked by those who think of themselves as far beyond bigotry or intolerance.

In the past week I have encountered two attacks against transgender people that appeared on the surface to have some higher intention. Both were warmed-over versions of old arguments.  One came in the form of a supposedly spiritual look at gender identity through the lens of reincarnation, and the other purported to be a principled defense of the rights of women by a feminist group.

GIVE. ME. A. BREAK.

I could call out the “spiritual” thinker by name, but I’m not going to, because his presentation is not just his own but represents a turn of thought that is all too common. It’s been used against gay people, too. The idea is that if you are not comfortable twisting yourself to fit into a gender-binary, heteronormative life, it’s because you were a different gender in a previous life, and either through confusion or through willful stubbornness, you are still clinging to identification with that gender. If you persist, you are stupid and bad. You should just get over it and move on, and then you’ll be fine.

This is the exact same paternalistic crap promulgated by religious groups who insist that God made you either male or female and that’s that. God doesn’t make mistakes, and so if you don’t feel right in your body, you are going against God, and therefore you are sinful and bad.

I’ll get to the so-called feminists later. First, I want to take a look at exactly what God/nature/biology did make. Because we do have some actual facts to work with.

While it would be nice to have human reproductive biology all wrapped up in a neat, understandable package, the more we learn, the more we see that things are complex and fuzzy. “Male” and “female” are not definite categories with hard edges. I’m sorry if someone dislikes this, but it’s reality. Some easily accessible sources of information follow.

http://www.isna.org/faq/ten_myths/rare
According to this, about 1 in 2000 humans are intersex. Another source estimated 1.7% of births. That’s a lot of people. Some may never realize they are anything but typical male or female, or may only find out late in life. One person I’ve read about was a seemingly ordinary middle-aged man with a bunch of kids, who had an abdominal surgery and was found to have a uterus in addition to his full set of male reproductive parts.

https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001669.htm
There are a variety of possible intersex conditions, with varying appearances and health considerations, briefly summarized in this article.

If that’s not enough, take a look at the fascinating case of the guevedoces. A few weeks ago I learned about them in an excellent PBS program, Nine Months that Made You. In the Dominican Republic, about one in 90 boys have this condition, which has also been found in Papua New Guinea. They have XY genotypes like “regular” boys, but they lack an enzyme that is needed to develop male genitalia in the womb, so their parents think they are girls and raise them that way. At puberty, they have the usual surge in testosterone and become obviously male all of a sudden. Of course, they were biologically male all along.
http://www.pbs.org/show/9-months-made-you/
http://www.newsweek.com/rare-condition-causes-girls-become-boys-puberty-374934

So are we clear now that external genital configuration does not equal gender? Likely we’re not clear at all and I’m still going to get a big argument from those who insist on a binary world, but in that case, they’re going to have to register their objections with God, because this is the way nature is put together. A religious and/or spiritual viewpoint, it seems to me, would have to say that there must be a good reason for things to be this way. A purely materialist viewpoint would say the same— that nature has shaped human bodies and brains in a dazzlingly diverse variety because it’s been helpful to our survival.

Some might then point out that transgender people are not the same as intersex people, and that most probably have clear male or female genotypes or phenotypes. But there appear to be differences from cisgender folk in those cases too, albeit subtler ones. As far as we can tell, transgender people have brains that function more like the gender they say they are rather than the one indicated by their genital apparatus— though this too is complex and a bit fuzzy.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-something-unique-about-the-transgender-brain/

Here is a link to another useful PBS program.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/growing-up-trans/
What struck me most about it was that the kids decidedly look like the gender they say they are. That’s not a hard scientific fact, but to me, it reinforces the concept that there is a physical basis for being transgender.

I don’t pretend to understand much about these aspects of our biology, nor how they fit with how we become who we become when we enter a new life on this planet, or what choices we have or don’t have about our embodiment. My conjecture is that gender exists as a spectrum so that we can experience every permutation of it, but that’s not fact. What I know for sure is that it makes no sense to tell others how they feel inside themselves— either how they do feel or how they should feel. It’s illogical and it’s just plain mean. And when it’s coupled with a holier-than-thou or more-enlightened-than-thou message, it’s positively sickening.

I agree completely, George.
https://www.omaze.com/made/equality?ref=equality

Now, to the lawsuit filed by the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF. It’s the bathroom thing again, same as the extreme right’s fearmongering, strangely enough. They are insisting that “men” in women’s restrooms are a threat to women’s safety. I’m not going to rehash the reasons why trans women are no threat to cis women in this context (or anywhere else, really). You can find those all over. I’m only going to point out that trans women are not men. In their brains, the part of the human body that matters most, they are women. So denying ordinary human rights to those women cannot be feminism. Not in any way I can recognize it.

The latest post on WoLF’s Facebook page, in reference to the rule allowing kids to use school facilities consistent with their gender, states: “Girls’ rights to personal privacy and freedom from male sexual harassment, forced exposure to male nudity, and voyeurism have been eliminated with the stroke of a pen.” This makes my stomach churn. I am of course not a trans girl trying to navigate high school (which is hard enough for the rest of us), but reading this, I can viscerally relate to what they experience. It is terrifying. To be just a kid and know that others assume you are a sexual predator, when all you want to do is attend PE class and not get beaten up… to be hated and censured by “righteous” people one has never met… it boggles the mind and even more the heart. Imagine being, say, a second grader, too young even to have a concept of voyeurism or anything like it, having no idea why people are saying these terrible things about you.

(Please note that I don’t mean to ignore trans boys.  It’s just that WoLF seems to be targeting trans girls and women specifically.)

WoLF’s lawsuit clearly contradicts two of their main stated goals, and they seem to have no clue that this is the case. The home page of their website says: “WoLF is a radical feminist organization dedicated to the total liberation of women. We fight to end male violence, regain reproductive sovereignty, and ultimately dismantle the gender-caste system.” The total liberation of women has to include ALL women, not just the ones who look a certain way. Dismantling the gender-caste system (a laudable goal) has to mean completely dismantling, so that no gender is discriminated against.

Why should we settle for anything less?

 

It’s a great song:
http://www.altheaknight.com/None-of-us-is-free-if-one-of-us-is-chained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC2mmeA9CA8

More Healing Mandalas from CJ, and Her New Book on the Wolves!

I am beyond delighted to tell you that CJ Rogers’ first book, Raised By Wolves: A Pack Odyssey has been published and is now available.  It tells the story of her first four years of living with and learning from the wolves.  She has a great deal more still to say about the couple of decades between then and now, and further books are in the works.

http://www.amazon.com/Raised-Wolves-Odyssey-CJ-Rogers-ebook/dp/B01BUI0TTM/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1458078390&sr=1-1&keywords=cj+rogers+wolves

You may remember that CJ is known as the Jane Goodall of wolves.  She knows them more intimately than perhaps any other human on the planet.  If you have any interest in wolves themselves, the development of early human societies and our relationship with canines, or the natural world in general, you will find a lot to think about here.

When I introduced you to CJ’s fascinating artwork a while back, for some reason I was unable to access the website that houses many of her mandalas, and all I had to show you was a few poor-quality photos.  Here is a look at the huge bounty of designs she’s done, including some new ones:

http://www.cjmandalas.com/

CJ was describing to me how life-saving this process of drawing mandalas has been for her during times of the most extreme pain and illness.  She has highly recommended that I try it, but my little attempts have not resulted in anything much so far.  Maybe you’ll have more success yourself?

CJ doesn’t have web access in the area of rural New Mexico where she lives, but please feel free to contact her through the website, and the message will be passed on to her.

 

 

Review: Waking Up to the Dark

Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age
by Clark Strand
New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2015

In the vision exercise called palming, you attempt to see complete darkness. The idea is that when the eyes and brain are struggling to see, the muscles overwork and the optic nerve is constantly irritated, so that even with your palms blocking out all light, you see persistent flashes. It can be a challenge to relax and let the darkness happen, but when you stop trying to see, you become able to see more clearly.

What would it be like to let complete darkness happen? What would happen if we turned out all the lights? What would it be like to truly rest?

Clark Strand’s thesis is that artificial lighting is the fundamental evil behind every form of human trouble, and that before electric lights came into use, humans did truly and deeply rest, reaching a state of grace every night that we rarely if ever experience in the modern world.

I had already heard of this, that people used to go to sleep early in the evening, wake and go about quiet activities for two or three of the wee hours, then sleep till dawn. Apparently there are many written references to the “first and second sleep.” There was also a fascinating experiment, described in the book, in which subjects were kept away from all sources of artificial light for a month, and they soon developed that same pattern of sleep.

Although it is still common to wake in the middle of the night, most usually at 2 or 3 am, now people are typically held to a schedule where this becomes a vexing and draining problem, and they lie there anxiously staring at the ceiling. Strand writes that this time has been called the “Hour of the Wolf” because of that distress, but he sees it as the “Hour of God.”

Throughout his life, Strand has awakened and walked outdoors during that hour, in all settings and all weathers. Even as a child he did this, and he claims that he has never gotten into any serious trouble. He never takes a flashlight— it seems that his vision is exceptional. He experiences darkness as a friendly and nurturing presence.

I can relate to this, even though it is more natural for me to reach the Hour of God simply by staying up till then, not by waking after a period of good sleep. When I was little my mother, also a night person, taught me not to be afraid of the dark, and told me that it was comforting and peaceful. I took that feeling in early, and I still have it. I partake sometimes of that clarity that Strand talks about, where suddenly thoughts come together in a new way, answers click into place, and poetry may arise out of the depths. Of course I am often doing this in an environment that includes electric light, so it is not quite the same thing.

Lately I have been reducing the intensity of light as much as possible, though; I started that even before reading this book. One aspect of that was my purchase of a Kindle, essentially an electrically-lit book. I’d been reading e-books on my laptop, and both the heat and the light generated were irritating at night. The Kindle is much gentler that way, and besides it uses less power.  A little way into the book, which I was borrowing, I decided to buy my own copy, and perhaps ironically, I bought the Kindle version, thinking how much Strand would disapprove of this self-lighting of his book. Yet, this allowed me to nestle in my bed, wrapped securely in the dark, like a child reading with a flashlight under the covers, instead of being flooded with the light I would need to read a print book.

(It must be noted that Strand’s book, even if only in print, could not have been produced or distributed without electricity and lighting.)

As valuable as Waking Up to the Dark is, in some ways it goes seriously wrong. Strand mentions teaching his kids about our prehuman ancestors, and he has apparently read a great deal about them, but it seems to me that he has missed some important understanding. If I read him correctly, he believes that the introduction of fire into our caves was the beginning of our sense of separation from the rest of Nature, and the hubris that causes us to want and expect dominion over her. (He even states, based on someone else’s book, that fire is responsible for the fact that humans reproduce year-round. I would be extremely surprised if there were any evidence for this, especially since our close primate relatives also mate at any time of year despite an utter lack of firelight.) The use of fire far predates the existence of Homo sapiens. Can we confidently attribute a modern human imbalance to people who were a completely different species, beings we know next to nothing about? What kind of hubris would that be? Strand also seems to ignore the fact that even now, people in traditional cultures feel themselves to be part of the natural world, co-equal with other creatures, not set above them. That must have been the norm everywhere in the relatively recent past, up till no more than a few thousand years ago.

I find it a bit confusing, too, to be told first that modern electric light is the root of all evil, and then that the trouble started even with ancient firelight. Discrepancies like this may stem in part from the fact that this book is based on years of recorded experiences, during which Strand’s ideas must have evolved and shifted. Strand reports that his wife, Perdita Finn, wove the book from material in his 59 notebooks about rising to walk at night. Perhaps a few threads were crossed or twisted in the process.

The last part of the book is focused on something that, despite my not-entirely-different experiences, gave me rather a turn. I referred to Nature as “her” above for a reason: that is what Strand encountered, or rather, who. As he progressed with his exploration of the depths of night, at some point the darkness itself, the Yin principle one might say, began to visit him in the form of a beautiful young woman, three-dimensional, visible, audible, and solid to the touch. When he first saw her, her lips were sealed by a creepily evocative X of black electrical tape, which she wordlessly pleaded with him to remove. Sometimes her appearance would change. He recognized her as Mary, Isis, Sophia, Diana, the Shekinah, the Queen of Heaven, and especially the Black Madonna. In all cases, She is the personification of Earth and Nature, the Mother we all come from and who we ignore at our peril, the feminine essence that so many human societies have suppressed with desperate force.

When Strand realized it was time to understand Her destructive and terrifying aspects, he discovered an image of Kali. He describes the Hindu view of the Kali Yuga, a stage of destruction that is necessary in order for a new cycle of creation to take place. He sees this as natural and inevitable, but at the same time, he believes that we are bringing it about through our insanely imbalanced technological way of life. Turn out the lights, he says, and all will be well, because we then will understand how we should live and we will save ourselves and the earth.

But here is another source of confusion. “The night is a natural corrective to that most persistent and persuasive of all illusions: that human consciousness is the reason for the world.” (p.96) I understand what he means, but human consciousness is, at the very least, the reason for the world that we experience. There is nothing more fundamental than consciousness. Further, our consciousness is not separate from that of the planet and its other inhabitants. This is the very same interconnectedness that Strand says we will experience if we turn off the lights. Are human thoughts and activities truly in opposition to Nature and the Earth, or are they the working out of the path and destiny of the planet and actually in divine order? Complex arguments could be made about this. I tend to think that if something, anything, is happening, no matter how dire it looks, it is part of the overall Plan and would make sense if we could see the big picture.

A healer I know replied to this question by saying that Earth and its inhabitants are being hampered and interfered with by entities who benefit from our confusion and strife. A lot of people see things this way. I am much more aware of entities who do their best to help, but just because I don’t perceive a particular thing, I can’t prove that it’s not there. I do think that we are more than capable of screwing up massively on our own, even without anyone working to make it worse for us. And I have a hard time imagining anyone or anything more powerful than the Goddess herself. Even if She is only a concept, a construction of the greater Mind of humanity, as my materialist friends may postulate, She is a concept with immense energy, perhaps more than we have ever completely understood. “My body is the body of the world,” She said to Strand. “Your body is one with that body. What could there be to fear?” (p. 124)

On the more hopeful side of this idea of harmful entities, someone told me the other day that a channeler she knows had been told that as of the end of 2014, the “good guys” had removed a whole lot of those beings from our planet, and there was a big positive shift going on because of it. She used Pope Francis as an example of movement in the right direction. I don’t know— I’d like to think that’s true, but I don’t see much basis for it. Meanwhile, I await further guidance.

Which may have arrived already, two weeks ago, on the day I started writing this.

Bob decided he really needed to stop at DaVinci’s Pizza after Nia class, and I decided I really needed to work on this post, so by way of organizing my thoughts, I started to tell him about the visitations from the Blessed Mother in her many forms. I was about to open my mouth to say that Strand saw her as Mary when the sound system suddenly broke into “Silent Night,” the section that goes “round yon virgin mother and child.”

It was October 6. Everyone knows businesses don’t start playing Christmas music till Halloween! This was obviously a mistake, and was immediately replaced by some very ordinary hip-hop. Or it wasn’t a mistake at all, and it meant that She was listening.

Synchronicities have been coming thick and fast lately. I had my laptop with me, and I opened it to find an email from Steve Bhaerman, my dear old Swami, describing how he had lost his voice right at the beginning of his tour of the Southwest. He concluded that he needed to shut up and listen. “You need to listen to that still small voice inside… that’s still small, because you DON’T LISTEN. You need to stop the endless rat-a-tat-tat of thoughts, and listen to the silence.” Listen to the Silent Night. In the dark.

One might wonder where the Father and the Son in their own various guises fit in with the story— those in whose name the Mother’s lips were misguidedly taped shut. They haven’t gone away, but as Strand points out, fathers cannot produce sons without mothers, no matter how much the patriarchal religions would like to deny mothers their due. Yang cannot exist without Yin, as we all know, and there is nothing so Yang as our current America. Swami Beyondananda, who always travels with his wife, says that when a society is based only on masculine energy, we have a stag-nation, so we need the feminine energy to make a doe-nation in order to create the imagi-nation that builds the world.

When I read Strand’s chapter about the apparitions of Our Lady, as usual it was very late at night. I put down the book and turned in, and I could feel myself as partaking of that essential feminine principle, being, in myself, a source of creation. This principle lives in males as well. I’m not sure that we have to turn off the physical lights in order to find Her within ourselves and return to our Mother, whom we have never really left.

*******************************************************************

The photo above was taken when I visited Paris in the fall of 2010.  A rose– symbol of Mary.  Growing behind the cathedral of Notre Dame– Our Lady.  In the dark.