Diva at the Kineret
Spiritual counseling has afforded me the opportunity to talk to many people having emotional problems. Most people who come to me are the usual laypersons in need of spiritual services that involve maintenance or problem solving of the sort of dealing with external threats or proactive protection. Many come with matters of the heart that are solved with a little advice or coaching and a reading or two. A small but significant proportion however, are not only not proactive, but when you basically solve their problem, they mess things up again.
When the divination says that A is going to happen, and when it does, do B, and absolutely do not do Z, and even though everything goes down exactly as the divination said it would, and they do Z anyway, there is a problem. That problem is usually that the person could not control their emotions and in addition, could not control their reactions to their emotions.
After watching this happen a few times, usually with women, I realized that this is a sign of a bad trend. Women have always been a bit hormonal and emotional. We’re stereotyped for it. What we haven’t been until recently though, is slaves of our emotions even though we are often accused of being such.
Usually, men don’t get a window into our emotional world until they run up on the hostile or vengeful side of it. Historically, women have understood that our emotions, where interesting, are largely irrelevant. There is what we would like and there is what is. We can whine about what we’d like…write songs and poetry about what we’d like…protest for what we’d like…At the end of the day though, there is limited time to find a spouse and make children if that is what we want, and the same as with men, a limited number of years during which our labor will be valued unless we become socioeconomically elite or artistically or academically prized.
Women have had to be more watchful of the clock in order to successfully achieve things we hope to achieve. We have had to manage our time and our emotions very carefully. We are more prone to injury and disability, so the stakes are higher, and the mistakes more damaging than for men generally. We could never afford to be stupid or out of control. If our emotions rule us we are dead or neutralized.
We had to, and in some places still have to, hide our emotions in marriages. If we are in pain, we have to hide that pain on penalty of being accused of being bitter, bitches, or crazy. On the flipside, we have had to know when exactly it was okay, safe, or beneficial to express emotions. Female psychopaths and narcissists are more masterful than male ones, generally, in mimicking emotions.
When a woman could not control her expression of emotion, and could not frame her emotions properly and proportionally, she was considered pathological. What was proper was, for many centuries though, determined by men or by elitist women who used men to enforce a rather miserable status quo.
So now, we tell women that their emotions are all valid and that nobody should tell them how to feel or how to express it. Their feelings are the most important thing in a relationship. Women have become bad caricatures of spoiled boys who can’t take a no.
Because of this, I flat out will not do love spells for anyone who is not a reasonably good parent, a martial artist, or can’t at least show some experience that indicates they have a bit of control of their expression of emotion. If someone has no self discipline, they will ruin it.
I got fooled a few times, both in work and in relationships. I made assumptions that do not fit the current situation of young people today. I assumed that someone who made it through university would have some emotional resilience, self respect, and self discipline. This is no longer true for women. Their university experience is full of the wrong kind of empowerment. Only very elite and very poor young ladies are taught the value of self respect and self discipline in relationships during the university experience. In both cases it is because they can’t afford not to have them. One would end up screwing themselves out of a fortune. The other would screw themselves out of breathing. It’s the ones in the middle class who feel they have the luxury to express unfettered emotion because there is no one there to tell them any different.
For the most part, it is middle class parents who use what they think is the western/American schedule of child development. They treat 18 like some magical age when someone suddenly births into being a fully formed adult. In saner cultures and classes in all cultures in which the stakes are obvious, intelligent parents teach their children to be fully formed adults by the age of menstruation or fertile ejaculation, and their being adults or not is not relevant to their need for guidance and management. 18 is a legal landmark, not a maturity or social landmark.
Middle class parents working on a misinterpretation of the western norm idealize childhood and fail to teach their children necessary survival skills by the time they are relevant. Where others are learning the difference between what should be and what is, between feelings and facts, and between what is theirs and what is the family’s or society’s or the nation’s by the mid teens, the middle class children can’t tell the difference at 30.
Not everyone does this, but even those who are both middle class and sane should be aware that even if their child was brought up well, most kids around them were not. Their kids are either vulnerable to the corruption, or suffering because their current pool of mates is mired in it.
Postmodernism, for the parents of Generation Z, was not an opportunity to redefine themselves in a way that would bring about greater self satisfaction, and reinvent themselves for success despite the stricter class, relationship, and professional divisions of the past. Postmodernism became a free-for-all wherein there are no definitions, no boundaries, and no rules, even those dictated by Nature. They threw off the shackles of the past without also throwing off the damnable anti nature arrogance of the past.
…and this is why the middle class is not dying, but there is a changing of the guard as sure as there was during any revolution against any monarchy. The bulk of the current middle class is failing to breed or to be professionally indispensable, so they will be replaced by the currently poor. This includes those who were mislabeled “slackers”, but had the resourcefulness to create their own jobs. Now I think the kids are calling them “gurus”.
So…to my readers of Generation Z who are slaves of your emotions, don’t you want to be free?
Do you want to have something that can’t be replaced by a robot? I’m including sex bots and VR “experiences” in this.
In order to have a chance, you will need to get your head out of your own ass. You will have to stop thinking that how you feel is the most important thing in the world.
Do you know what the most important thing in the world is?
It’s water. It’s not your feelings.
I want you to meditate on that awhile. Yes, I know you’ve been to whatever meditation group that told you to focus on your breathing or along the way some other body issue, but that is putting the cart before the horse. People who have already got their feelings in check can start with breathing.
You can start with water.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to drink approximately 2.5 liters of water, and to use no more than 5 liters of water for other needs, per day, for one week. If you fail once, the week begins again. No exceptions.
The easiest way to go about this is to use leftover bottles or jars to portion your daily water. Take a bottle with you when you go out, so that you will not be as tempted to overuse sources of water outside and “cheat”. If you need to drink more, then do that. Sometimes in the summer, people need to drink 3 or more liters.
During this week, try to go about your normal activities and maintain a reasonable level of hygiene. If you smell unpleasant, you are doing it wrong.
By the way, your 5 liters allotment includes the toilet. For peeing, I recommend going outside or using a bucket and pouring it down the main drain. If you don’t know where your toilet water goes, you need to find out, and that is where you put your pee. For poop, there are products like a dry toilet. Alternatively, you can use the cat method with sand, wood chips, etc. You can bury your waste in a safe place where it won’t cause an environmental problem and may even be beneficial.
If you can’t deal with the toilet issue, then you should get into the habit of apologizing to your deity of water or if you’re atheist, a water archetype, for being a part of a wasteful system and not adjusting your life well enough to do a simple, temporary, partial water fast. If you must flush a toilet more than once per day, even at work, your remaining water allotment is 3 liters per day aside of drinking water.
This is one week of your life, not the rest of your life. However, once you do this, then it will be something you can do for the rest of your life whenever you notice that you are having a problem appreciating things. Now, here’s the bit that may make you very uncomfortable…
There is an old Kongo saying that none of us births ourselves or buries ourselves. Though I talk a lot of trash about the difference between independent thinkers and more dependent people, remember that I don’t idealize independent thinkers. First, we are only relatively independent. Second, there is a point where independent can mean psychopathic or narcissistic. Idealizing independence or individualism is a mistake for anyone at anyplace in that spectrum who does not wish to end up alone and useless. So if three people tell you that you have an appreciation problem or a gratitude problem or something along those lines, it is time to do a water fast.
For now though, do the first one.
Some issues will arise. Most people don’t make it through a week. Feel free to quit and start again later. Your development is your business, and it is better to honestly fail than to deceptively succeed or pretend to be more successful than you are. The goal of this is not enlightenment. This is something that has been overused and misused and misinterpreted too much. The goal is to function better as a human being.
Most of the world has to conserve water because there isn’t much clean water around. If you live in a city where there isn’t a nearby stable water source, then the abundance you think exists does not. This may become more obvious soon as resources run low and run out. Occasional water fasts make us more mindful, more useful in a crisis, and for those who do believe there are things beyond our senses and current tools to perceive, a sacrifice of convenience to show that we are appreciative.
If you have the balls or ovaries or lobes or whatever for this, get back to me in the comments.
Blessings and Ashe!
