Interesting, Rob. I would give the same response that I gave to Kathleen. Does this belief system make me more or less afraid? Yes, it says, we're going to win but first it shows images of torture, imprisonment, subjugation. There are more of us than them, but of course the first wave will be crushed. Do you want to be part of that?
One reason that I think we need to pay attention to the true history of WWII is that we're being told, again and again, that we're back in it. It's the crux of Desmet's argument, based on Arendt: beware the mass psychosis that allowed Germans (white, civilized people like us!) to become monsters.
The first time I heard Vera Shiraz was also the first time I saw Tessa Lena. I'd say that Vera dominated the discussion by steering it into her outrage that someone had said she was lying about WWII. Whatever that panel was about, it became about anti-Semitism and how she should ignore those hate-filled people. Tessa was one of the most sympathetic.
To Vera, attacking her ideas and her as a person was one and the same, so I couldn't quite tell which the critic did. I almost stopped listening to Tessa then, feeling that she was too easily swayed by sentiment. Maybe it was a precursor--I don't know if she's still defending Malone.
If they tried it during the glory times where a single income could pay for a house and living costs of a family, there would be little push back.
In fact it happened with the interment of the Japanese during ww2.
The first wave was the vax mandates. People lost their jobs. Others took the hit and many got injured.
As for mass formation and how people became monsters, I made a good point here which makes me feel that the % of those turned into monsters is much less than during the "good times".
You are surely correct when you say we must re-envision the world and reinvent ourselves. Together reinventing our communities and families. Any barriers between our individual selves and our human and ecological interdependence will need to be jettisoned. The technological world we have fashioned will have to be dismantled. We will finally be forced to understand who we are as humans within the universe.
The technological world we have fashioned will have to be dismantled.
What parts of the technological world would you dismantle? Modern medicine? Dentistry (even the Pharoahs had abscesses) ? The internet? Air travel? Cars and highways? Should we go back to the forest like indigenous? Remember Fight Club? Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) summed up that kind of world neatly:
“In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”
I think that the critical question is always "Who decides?" As KW states, 'we select for serially abusive manipulators.' Why are we selecting people to make the rules by which we agree to be ruled? As long as decisions can be made by those who don't bear the consequences of those decisions, of course they'll lead to abusive decisions.
Technology, like money, is a set of tools. We need to take responsibility, I think, for understanding how to use those tools rather than choose between them using the tools against us or not having the tools to use.
Which ever parts need to be jettisoned in order to live in a world free of psychotic manipulation by serially abusive totalitarians. I would be great to think we could keep parts of our technological world and at the same time effectively outlaw the abuse part. So far no evidence that is possible. We select for serially abusive manipulators. What other animal does that? Civilized?
I was contemplating this for the longest time, spirituality infused in economics to make a more holistic society, didn't know Steiner came up this! I like to have one foot in the matrix and exploit it to my advantage and one foot in a holistic way of life in connection with nature... Btw love your poem!
Thank you so much, Alesiax, and your blog looks fascinating. I subbed!
I'm still working my way through Karma to do a post on Steiner but I find myself not in agreement with his view of occult knowledge (as I understand it so far). I think he's saying that it can be used for evil. I can understand why he'd think that since he was surrounded by the theosophical society at the time, who were backing and funding the Nazis.
Yet my experience is that all harms have origins that are all too human. I think that we disempower ourselves to give them supernatural power. I love the way you say that, "to have one foot in the matrix and exploit it to my advantage and one foot in a holistic way of life in connection with nature." Excellent point!
There's one video I made before I was on Substack that might resonate with your thinking, from my glance at your articles. It's called In the Context of All Being One on Daniel Pinchbeck: https://youtu.be/QOP1qgm6Z0U. Happy to have you here!
I am glad you are better Tereza, you look great. So you video content reminds me of my favorite bible verse, speak into existence things that are not, as though they were. Also as an entrepreneur it is a requirement to envision and speak of the business before it exists, down to every little detail. I think this spiritual practice can be applied to anything in life. I also think its part of the flow too. Thank you Roman Empire. Good video, thks.
Oh I love that Bible paraphrase, what's the original? I think that the Bible mixed truth and lies, as propaganda does, and it's important not to throw the truth out with the bathwater.
And thank you for the good wishes, compliment and entrepreneurial insight!
Hi T, listened to your video and read the post this morkin walking my dog. Just read tjis that Austrian Peter linked to. Resonate at all? https://un-denial.com/denial-2/theory-short/
Great cartoon! And interesting theory that dolphins and monkeys who had the mind capacity to be aware of death got depressed and died out without reproducing, but humans survived with a mythology of death denial. Brilliant!
I can't say I agree, but it's very creative and original. There's a superstition, I think, that goes along with 'fear keeps us safe.' It says, 'being realistic is believing the worst.' I'm not saying it's not true but I don't accept it ex nihilo (pun in point).
There's exactly as much evidence for the possibility that the world is our collective dream as there is for the only other two possibilities: 1) God is evil or 2) Evil is god. In other words, God created death or Death reigns supreme and always has the last laugh.
So I don't say we should deny death but question it as absolute fact. As the gnostic Gospel of Philip says, "How can what never lived, then die?"
Thank you Tereza. Lots of goodies embedded here. And kudos on your book getting coverage! I will definitely check it out.
Re the concept that we are either special and separate or One and individuated expressions of God. For many years this was my prevailing belief. It made sense. And in a certain context it still does; if that context is large enough then everything that happens takes place is in this Oneness. What I add in now, is that we are living in a world that allows for other - Steiner's Ahriman, or the Gnostics, Archons, etc. A world that has been overlaid with something deeply false, synthetic, even anti-life and surely anti-human. In this context, we do not experience oneness. So while the concept of oneness holds as some ultimate orienting principal, it doesn't serve us in the reality we are now existing in. We can't love a psychopath away. We can though become big enough versions of true selves, as expressions of love itself, to subsume them, energetically. It comes down to frequency.
As the frequency goes up on the planet and even solar system, these anti-human forces will not survive. So we don't need to fight them. However we do need to identify them, call them out, and see they operate from a fully non-human space.
Identifying non-humans from another source, allows us to make clear distinctions about what we will support, who we will support and create needed boundaries. We do not need to be in fear - and why would we? - given our cosmic heritage and our connection to a life-nurturing Source. But we also don't need to ignore them or treat them as if they too are connected to the frequencies of love. They are not. If they are capable of that, then great, let's hope they switch teams.
Steiner warned about this time, was, as I'm sure you know, very prophetic about this time, right down to the use of a vaccine to disconnect us from Spirit. He also saw the role of Ahriman as a necessary evil to our awakening. So, it has its place in a larger context.
I think many religions and spirituality has been hijacked, like everything else. If the result of that hijacking is, it's our fault, then we perpetuate (the highly convenient belief) that we are to blame. We're guilty. (I know you reject this idea) We're forever keeping ourselves at this lower frequency, where Ahriman can continue to thrive.
If meaning is fully dependent on its context (and it is) then given the context in which we are dealing, daily, with a highly infiltrated force that is looking to control humanity, I don't think it serves us to treat it as 'equal'. It's less than, its intentions are to harm and kill. It's distorted. Seeing that doesn't mean we must abandon an ultimate Oneness. Just like cancer in a body, we must deal with these invaders, if we want to survive it.
Lately I've been thinking how not that long ago there was no separation between church and state and the result of this collapsing created many problems - including what artists could paint. Once the spheres were separated out, (differentiated) then they could become integrated into a community that included them both. Differentiation precedes integration. If we attempt to integrate (we're all one) before we differentiate, we create a confusing mess. I think we have that now.
Hope that makes sense.
Always appreciate your good mind and heart, and always learn from you. Best.
Thank you, Kathleen, for your knowledgable articulation of this position, including your research on Steiner. I'm looking forward to your Ahriman post. It's a very essential point in ideology and I'm grateful to have the place of mutual respect, that you've offered, where we can discuss the difference. What I'm representing, as close as I can be to it, is what I see as the perspective of ACIM or the Course--one of many but the one I know best.
The question is whether evil exists, either human or non-human. Yes? I wouldn't actually say that we're individuated expressions of God. Are your hands or brain cells individual from you or are they as much you as anything? According to the Course, we don't exist as separate minds in separate bodies. This is only a dream we're having with figures and objects in it that, as Jung would point out, all represent aspects of our psyche.
If anything is real in it, it's all real. There's no inbetween. If non-human forces of evil exist, then fear is justified because death reigns supreme. Maybe there's some life after it but that would be a belief and I've already chosen, in your ideology, to believe in supernatural evil created to test me? toy with me? torture me? Not something that makes me think the same deity could be trusted to create a warm and welcoming afterlife.
You say you can't love a psychopath away--by definition, someone born with a penchant for cruelty. Why do you want to dream them up in the first place? What purpose do they serve? They certainly give everyone someone they can feel superior to and say, that could never be me! I would never do that, under any circumstances!
To adopt your belief system would mean adopting fear as realistic, and deciding how much I was willing to risk, how much I could lose--my health, my home, my freedom, my loved ones, my life? It would allow the thief of fear to stop me in my tracks without any evidence. Under the Course system where "Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists" I'm choosing to act without fear until proven otherwise. It doesn't mean I don't fear, but I choose not to act on it. So far I have no evidence to the contrary. It seems a worthy experiment.
Once upon a time, there was a tropical fruit tree that gives bananas that taste like salmon. The banalmon tree.
The texture of the banalmon is similar to the flesh of the salmon, not similar to the texture of the banana. That would be yucky.
There is a problem with this tree. Eating from it confers people the feeling of moral superiority.
If we ferment many banalmons and then we distill it several times, we get vodka of banalmon, or banalmodka, a very dry spirit.
Drinking banalmodka causes people to become nihilists and transhumanists. Stylish people add tonic water to banalmodka, in a cocktail named barrenbeer, because it causes people to become infertile.
Graphenated barrenbeer, with graphene-based parasites added to it, also will switch the sex of a person to that of the opposite sex. The bartender preparing the barrenbeer cannot add too much graphene because it will cause cancer of the lupus, which is very depressing. So the recipe can be tweaked to be used as an euthanasia poison. Lifehack #666.
After all the graphenated dudes and dudettes start crying because the drunkenness fades away, they make the mistake of eating the ripen banalmon. You know, for the vitamins.
They recover their moral sense of superiority, and it hurts. What a dick move. Regular drinkers of banalmodka know better than falling for unfermented things again. That is a setback in their plans for world domination. The fundamental aspect to become a good nihilist is to keep drinking and never eat, in the search for perfect uniformity: one sex, one drink, one people, one empire, one leader, über Alles.
Very funny, Roger. Or do I attribute it to the doppelganger? Does Agent Roger eat the fruit of GMO-spliced judgment or does he drink the elixir of empire? Nyah hah hah!
I knew I can count on you to understand my dark sense of humor.
Is there anything more nihilistic than juicing celery?
In Christianity, at least in biblical Christianity, there is a radical separation between Diet and the State. It's what comes out of the mouth that is unclean and defiles a man, meaning that he loses social status and range of action. But what enters through the mouth, the food and the drink, is irrelevant in regards to the relationship of an individual with God. Or, in atheistic terms, "be good to yourself."
It was a shock to me when I learned how some people run away from mere Christianity because of repression and irrationality, and then end up adopting extremely unkind eating habits, far removed from the hard boundaries of logic and proportion, and repressing themselves and others even more that whatever it is they originally ran away from.
It's not only about food. It's also ideologies and all the passions of the soul. But the food and drink is so important. If a person chooses to deprive herself of food and drink for a while, in the context of a religious practice or simply as a personal exercise, that person will see automatically shut off most of her intellectual anxieties and recurrent thoughts. The desire of the body takes over. The same happens when there is pain, as when someone has a sprained ankle.
When body is satisfied or calmed, the intellectualism comes back to the surface and takes over. But as with religion or spiritual practice, there is a huge learning opportunity in the inner observation of the transit from helping the body to helping the mind. For some, the real life is that small delta of time of pure calm between the two desires.
A good economy is one that allows people to maximize the time they spend in that real life.
Gin tonic is my fav, by the way. The tonic must have sugar because aspartame is from the devil.
Dr Zelenko's hope at the end of the documentary Never Again Is Now Global.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/i2LMRku3i3JA/
Interesting, Rob. I would give the same response that I gave to Kathleen. Does this belief system make me more or less afraid? Yes, it says, we're going to win but first it shows images of torture, imprisonment, subjugation. There are more of us than them, but of course the first wave will be crushed. Do you want to be part of that?
One reason that I think we need to pay attention to the true history of WWII is that we're being told, again and again, that we're back in it. It's the crux of Desmet's argument, based on Arendt: beware the mass psychosis that allowed Germans (white, civilized people like us!) to become monsters.
The first time I heard Vera Shiraz was also the first time I saw Tessa Lena. I'd say that Vera dominated the discussion by steering it into her outrage that someone had said she was lying about WWII. Whatever that panel was about, it became about anti-Semitism and how she should ignore those hate-filled people. Tessa was one of the most sympathetic.
To Vera, attacking her ideas and her as a person was one and the same, so I couldn't quite tell which the critic did. I almost stopped listening to Tessa then, feeling that she was too easily swayed by sentiment. Maybe it was a precursor--I don't know if she's still defending Malone.
I joke that we are in a limp dick dystopia.
If they tried it during the glory times where a single income could pay for a house and living costs of a family, there would be little push back.
In fact it happened with the interment of the Japanese during ww2.
The first wave was the vax mandates. People lost their jobs. Others took the hit and many got injured.
As for mass formation and how people became monsters, I made a good point here which makes me feel that the % of those turned into monsters is much less than during the "good times".
https://robc137.substack.com/p/the-milgram-experiment-and-how-we
You are surely correct when you say we must re-envision the world and reinvent ourselves. Together reinventing our communities and families. Any barriers between our individual selves and our human and ecological interdependence will need to be jettisoned. The technological world we have fashioned will have to be dismantled. We will finally be forced to understand who we are as humans within the universe.
Beautifully said, KW.
Thanks so much! Taking off on a new trajectory to come up with practical achieve able ways to reinvent our selves and our world.
The technological world we have fashioned will have to be dismantled.
What parts of the technological world would you dismantle? Modern medicine? Dentistry (even the Pharoahs had abscesses) ? The internet? Air travel? Cars and highways? Should we go back to the forest like indigenous? Remember Fight Club? Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) summed up that kind of world neatly:
“In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”
Really want to go there?
I think that the critical question is always "Who decides?" As KW states, 'we select for serially abusive manipulators.' Why are we selecting people to make the rules by which we agree to be ruled? As long as decisions can be made by those who don't bear the consequences of those decisions, of course they'll lead to abusive decisions.
Technology, like money, is a set of tools. We need to take responsibility, I think, for understanding how to use those tools rather than choose between them using the tools against us or not having the tools to use.
Which ever parts need to be jettisoned in order to live in a world free of psychotic manipulation by serially abusive totalitarians. I would be great to think we could keep parts of our technological world and at the same time effectively outlaw the abuse part. So far no evidence that is possible. We select for serially abusive manipulators. What other animal does that? Civilized?
I was contemplating this for the longest time, spirituality infused in economics to make a more holistic society, didn't know Steiner came up this! I like to have one foot in the matrix and exploit it to my advantage and one foot in a holistic way of life in connection with nature... Btw love your poem!
Thank you so much, Alesiax, and your blog looks fascinating. I subbed!
I'm still working my way through Karma to do a post on Steiner but I find myself not in agreement with his view of occult knowledge (as I understand it so far). I think he's saying that it can be used for evil. I can understand why he'd think that since he was surrounded by the theosophical society at the time, who were backing and funding the Nazis.
Yet my experience is that all harms have origins that are all too human. I think that we disempower ourselves to give them supernatural power. I love the way you say that, "to have one foot in the matrix and exploit it to my advantage and one foot in a holistic way of life in connection with nature." Excellent point!
There's one video I made before I was on Substack that might resonate with your thinking, from my glance at your articles. It's called In the Context of All Being One on Daniel Pinchbeck: https://youtu.be/QOP1qgm6Z0U. Happy to have you here!
Thank you Tereza. Here's another good piece of reading that I think you'd like to know about in case you missed it https://open.substack.com/pub/drjohnsblog/p/deep-state-class-war?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=p0tzp
Oh really pertinent, T. Thank you for sending this! I'll read with interest. Love Michael Hudson.
I am glad you are better Tereza, you look great. So you video content reminds me of my favorite bible verse, speak into existence things that are not, as though they were. Also as an entrepreneur it is a requirement to envision and speak of the business before it exists, down to every little detail. I think this spiritual practice can be applied to anything in life. I also think its part of the flow too. Thank you Roman Empire. Good video, thks.
Oh I love that Bible paraphrase, what's the original? I think that the Bible mixed truth and lies, as propaganda does, and it's important not to throw the truth out with the bathwater.
And thank you for the good wishes, compliment and entrepreneurial insight!
Hi T, listened to your video and read the post this morkin walking my dog. Just read tjis that Austrian Peter linked to. Resonate at all? https://un-denial.com/denial-2/theory-short/
Great cartoon! And interesting theory that dolphins and monkeys who had the mind capacity to be aware of death got depressed and died out without reproducing, but humans survived with a mythology of death denial. Brilliant!
I can't say I agree, but it's very creative and original. There's a superstition, I think, that goes along with 'fear keeps us safe.' It says, 'being realistic is believing the worst.' I'm not saying it's not true but I don't accept it ex nihilo (pun in point).
There's exactly as much evidence for the possibility that the world is our collective dream as there is for the only other two possibilities: 1) God is evil or 2) Evil is god. In other words, God created death or Death reigns supreme and always has the last laugh.
So I don't say we should deny death but question it as absolute fact. As the gnostic Gospel of Philip says, "How can what never lived, then die?"
Thank you Tereza. Lots of goodies embedded here. And kudos on your book getting coverage! I will definitely check it out.
Re the concept that we are either special and separate or One and individuated expressions of God. For many years this was my prevailing belief. It made sense. And in a certain context it still does; if that context is large enough then everything that happens takes place is in this Oneness. What I add in now, is that we are living in a world that allows for other - Steiner's Ahriman, or the Gnostics, Archons, etc. A world that has been overlaid with something deeply false, synthetic, even anti-life and surely anti-human. In this context, we do not experience oneness. So while the concept of oneness holds as some ultimate orienting principal, it doesn't serve us in the reality we are now existing in. We can't love a psychopath away. We can though become big enough versions of true selves, as expressions of love itself, to subsume them, energetically. It comes down to frequency.
As the frequency goes up on the planet and even solar system, these anti-human forces will not survive. So we don't need to fight them. However we do need to identify them, call them out, and see they operate from a fully non-human space.
Identifying non-humans from another source, allows us to make clear distinctions about what we will support, who we will support and create needed boundaries. We do not need to be in fear - and why would we? - given our cosmic heritage and our connection to a life-nurturing Source. But we also don't need to ignore them or treat them as if they too are connected to the frequencies of love. They are not. If they are capable of that, then great, let's hope they switch teams.
Steiner warned about this time, was, as I'm sure you know, very prophetic about this time, right down to the use of a vaccine to disconnect us from Spirit. He also saw the role of Ahriman as a necessary evil to our awakening. So, it has its place in a larger context.
I think many religions and spirituality has been hijacked, like everything else. If the result of that hijacking is, it's our fault, then we perpetuate (the highly convenient belief) that we are to blame. We're guilty. (I know you reject this idea) We're forever keeping ourselves at this lower frequency, where Ahriman can continue to thrive.
If meaning is fully dependent on its context (and it is) then given the context in which we are dealing, daily, with a highly infiltrated force that is looking to control humanity, I don't think it serves us to treat it as 'equal'. It's less than, its intentions are to harm and kill. It's distorted. Seeing that doesn't mean we must abandon an ultimate Oneness. Just like cancer in a body, we must deal with these invaders, if we want to survive it.
Lately I've been thinking how not that long ago there was no separation between church and state and the result of this collapsing created many problems - including what artists could paint. Once the spheres were separated out, (differentiated) then they could become integrated into a community that included them both. Differentiation precedes integration. If we attempt to integrate (we're all one) before we differentiate, we create a confusing mess. I think we have that now.
Hope that makes sense.
Always appreciate your good mind and heart, and always learn from you. Best.
Thank you, Kathleen, for your knowledgable articulation of this position, including your research on Steiner. I'm looking forward to your Ahriman post. It's a very essential point in ideology and I'm grateful to have the place of mutual respect, that you've offered, where we can discuss the difference. What I'm representing, as close as I can be to it, is what I see as the perspective of ACIM or the Course--one of many but the one I know best.
The question is whether evil exists, either human or non-human. Yes? I wouldn't actually say that we're individuated expressions of God. Are your hands or brain cells individual from you or are they as much you as anything? According to the Course, we don't exist as separate minds in separate bodies. This is only a dream we're having with figures and objects in it that, as Jung would point out, all represent aspects of our psyche.
If anything is real in it, it's all real. There's no inbetween. If non-human forces of evil exist, then fear is justified because death reigns supreme. Maybe there's some life after it but that would be a belief and I've already chosen, in your ideology, to believe in supernatural evil created to test me? toy with me? torture me? Not something that makes me think the same deity could be trusted to create a warm and welcoming afterlife.
You say you can't love a psychopath away--by definition, someone born with a penchant for cruelty. Why do you want to dream them up in the first place? What purpose do they serve? They certainly give everyone someone they can feel superior to and say, that could never be me! I would never do that, under any circumstances!
To adopt your belief system would mean adopting fear as realistic, and deciding how much I was willing to risk, how much I could lose--my health, my home, my freedom, my loved ones, my life? It would allow the thief of fear to stop me in my tracks without any evidence. Under the Course system where "Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists" I'm choosing to act without fear until proven otherwise. It doesn't mean I don't fear, but I choose not to act on it. So far I have no evidence to the contrary. It seems a worthy experiment.
Once upon a time, there was a tropical fruit tree that gives bananas that taste like salmon. The banalmon tree.
The texture of the banalmon is similar to the flesh of the salmon, not similar to the texture of the banana. That would be yucky.
There is a problem with this tree. Eating from it confers people the feeling of moral superiority.
If we ferment many banalmons and then we distill it several times, we get vodka of banalmon, or banalmodka, a very dry spirit.
Drinking banalmodka causes people to become nihilists and transhumanists. Stylish people add tonic water to banalmodka, in a cocktail named barrenbeer, because it causes people to become infertile.
Graphenated barrenbeer, with graphene-based parasites added to it, also will switch the sex of a person to that of the opposite sex. The bartender preparing the barrenbeer cannot add too much graphene because it will cause cancer of the lupus, which is very depressing. So the recipe can be tweaked to be used as an euthanasia poison. Lifehack #666.
After all the graphenated dudes and dudettes start crying because the drunkenness fades away, they make the mistake of eating the ripen banalmon. You know, for the vitamins.
They recover their moral sense of superiority, and it hurts. What a dick move. Regular drinkers of banalmodka know better than falling for unfermented things again. That is a setback in their plans for world domination. The fundamental aspect to become a good nihilist is to keep drinking and never eat, in the search for perfect uniformity: one sex, one drink, one people, one empire, one leader, über Alles.
Very funny, Roger. Or do I attribute it to the doppelganger? Does Agent Roger eat the fruit of GMO-spliced judgment or does he drink the elixir of empire? Nyah hah hah!
LOL.
I knew I can count on you to understand my dark sense of humor.
Is there anything more nihilistic than juicing celery?
In Christianity, at least in biblical Christianity, there is a radical separation between Diet and the State. It's what comes out of the mouth that is unclean and defiles a man, meaning that he loses social status and range of action. But what enters through the mouth, the food and the drink, is irrelevant in regards to the relationship of an individual with God. Or, in atheistic terms, "be good to yourself."
It was a shock to me when I learned how some people run away from mere Christianity because of repression and irrationality, and then end up adopting extremely unkind eating habits, far removed from the hard boundaries of logic and proportion, and repressing themselves and others even more that whatever it is they originally ran away from.
It's not only about food. It's also ideologies and all the passions of the soul. But the food and drink is so important. If a person chooses to deprive herself of food and drink for a while, in the context of a religious practice or simply as a personal exercise, that person will see automatically shut off most of her intellectual anxieties and recurrent thoughts. The desire of the body takes over. The same happens when there is pain, as when someone has a sprained ankle.
When body is satisfied or calmed, the intellectualism comes back to the surface and takes over. But as with religion or spiritual practice, there is a huge learning opportunity in the inner observation of the transit from helping the body to helping the mind. For some, the real life is that small delta of time of pure calm between the two desires.
A good economy is one that allows people to maximize the time they spend in that real life.
Gin tonic is my fav, by the way. The tonic must have sugar because aspartame is from the devil.