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destinyimage · 5 months

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False Prophets: 7 Signs to Discern Lies and Truth in the Prophetic

When I am teaching introductory classes about the prophetic gift there is nearly always a question from one of the nervous participants along the lines of, “What if I prophesy wrongly or inaccurately—does that make me a ‘false prophet’?”

Most beginners in the gift wrestle to distinguish the voice of God from their own internal monologue. Layer this with perhaps some limited biblical knowledge and/or a lack of linguistic ability that might struggle to apply the English language to the voice of the divine, and we can probably surmise that a reasonable amount of prophecy from novices poorly reflects what God is actually trying to communicate!

Nevertheless, in these entry-level classes we are always careful to reassuringly respond that, “No, wrong words make you a poor prophet, not a false prophet.” We make it clear to our inexperienced students: false prophets are out to see the church utterly destroyed. If you want to see the church completely annihilated and under demonic control, then, yes, you are very likely a Jezebelic false prophet! The aim in giving this comfort to beginners in the gift is to empower them to have a go at prophecy in a safe environment and to iron out, with us, their early-years stumbling blocks to prophetic utterance.

However, in the more senior classes that we teach to emerging prophets, the definition of “false prophet” we give runs a much narrower line, where persistent failures in the waters of poor prophecy that cause and culminate in an unrepentant and repetitive leading astray of the people, will earn you the unfortunate title of “false prophet.” Perhaps not a false prophet by Jezebel’s standards, but nevertheless a “false” prophet in the sense of single-mindedly and continually leading people away from the core of the word of the Lord, and from Jesus Christ Himself. Maybe the term “unfaithful prophet” is a more accurate term to describe this kind of erroneous behavior, where a person’s heart genuinely loves Jesus, but they are flawed in how they keep outworking “revelation.” (Conceivably, there might be a sliding scale downward, from poor prophecy to unfaithful prophet to false prophet. And that goes for the other fivefold gifts too!) Whatever we call them, the sad fact is that the unfaithful prophet usually does untold damage before they are stopped in their tracks.

Characteristics of Unfaithful Prophets

1. Self-Promotion

Self-promotion is when you prophesy for personal advantage, redefining God for personal agenda. Most prophets will know what stirs a congregation up and can play this to their benefit. At its core it is feel-good revelation to get people on your side and liking you, promising all sorts of advancement and financial reward from God into their lives, with no tempering of holiness or process. It’s introducing ourselves more than we introduce God—you know that you’re on thin ice when congregations are hearing more about your product and resources than what God is actually saying. (Included under this category would be the publishing of “click-bait words” for fame on social media, just so that you rise in notoriety.)

Once this spirit of self-preference over God preference has taken hold it will lead to a violation of good prophetic protocol and best practice, releasing words without due process. The word will sound good to you, and you know it will make you look great (or get you views), and so you give in to the temptation of releasing it without the due diligence of submission, testing, and editing.

This category of unfaithful prophecy also includes political preference over God preference and national preference over Kingdom preference. In this, our personal biases lead us away from promoting God’s words and into promoting our own preferred or inherited ideologies.

In general, good protocol dictates that 1) words for churches go to church platforms, 2) words for leaders go to leaders (these are not often for public consumption), and 3) words for nations can be more publicly shared. Therefore, learn to manage your prophetic urgency and your need to be seen, by rightly appropriating words and sitting on your personal desire for visibility. You have nothing to prove—we all know everybody can hear the voice of God (see 1 Corinthians 14:31). It’s not impressive to hear God, but it is impressive to steward those words righteously. In Scripture we see that major words for governmental leaders often came on the back of preestablished relational lines of communication. For example, Daniel was summoned, Joseph was recommended and called upon, and Micaiah was invited in. If you don’t have access to the political leaders, pray it instead. Ask God the reasons why you don’t yet have access to deliver the word: are you trustworthy in motive with not wanting your own name known? So note this well: if you don’t have relational access to a leader, the word is for you to pray, not for you to show off.

2. Distorting the Message

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Remember, God is equally wrath and love. If you cannot navigate both, you will bring an incomplete representation of God. When you do this, you lead people away from the fullness of who He is. Distortion is willfully misrepresenting God to be either harsher, or kinder, than He has communicated with you through His word. I would urge you to ask some trusted people what it’s like to be on the receiving end of your revelation, because it is easy to get caught up in a moment and to misunderstand the impression that you are giving of what God has said.

3. Releasing Fear and Anxiety

Releasing or putting atmospheres into the room that are not the Kingdom of God is another sign of an unfaithful prophet. John writes, “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1 NIV). We are to test the spirits of the prophet. This is noteworthy—we are not just to weigh the words (see 1 Corinthians 14:29). In testing the spirits, we test the motivation of the speaker, we test the atmosphere or spiritual feeling that they have created. Did their word come from the Spirit of God, their human spirit, or a demonic spirit?

If you prophesy from a fear base, a wrong judgment base, or a base of over-realized compassion, your “spirit” or motivation will not be wholly pure. Be aware that you can show unsanctified compassion and even speak mercy where God is not speaking mercy. Therefore, when we listen to words, we weigh and judge what they do in the room.

Did they motivate us and call us into the right place, or, for example, did they just drop us into unsanctified fear and tension?

When you release words from the wrong motivation, you rob the people of God’s best. God always has our best interests at heart over the long haul, even during our trials. Even if there is the need to release a word about the consequences of sin, there must always be some redemption woven into it. I have heard prophetic words that are right in their content and wrong in their motivation, meaning that they will have created an ungodly response in the hearts of the listener, despite their accuracy. Therefore, the prophet must ask what the will of God is. Your question must be, “What is God’s best here?” and not, “What is my best outcome for this room?” The right attitude coming from you the prophet will enable challenging words to be received. After all, you want your listener to be motivated to follow God with relative ease.

4. Problematic Altar Calls

My definition of a “problematic altar call” is when a congregation rushes to the front to receive an impartation from the speaker rather than from God. A prophet should not lead people to themselves or exclusively and consistently to the impartation that they can give, but to God. We seem to have developed a strange and disturbing church culture of believing that it is the speaker who has what we want or need! We must always be very clear that prophetic words and messages do not originate in the prophet. They originate with God, and they are given to connect people back to Him.

St. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”1 Have we created restless people by our ministry style, which brings men to us and establishes the repetitive, habitual need to receive from a person, leading to the modern phenomenon of “conference junkies”?

Have we got sucked into mixing up an addictive recipe that contains a sprinkle of inspiration, a dash of theology, a touch of the Bible, and a whole lot of sweet personality? Leaders, speakers, and ministers, have you ever asked yourself, “What motivates people to come forward at the end of our meetings? Why do we call them to the front?” If we answer ourselves honestly, it is probably more often for self-validation reasons (to make us feel that we’ve done a good job) rather than for any deep stirring from God Himself in that moment.

5. Stale Words

Traveling ministers often exhaustedly prophesy the same thing over and over again because they lack the preparation time to receive and interpret a fresh word. Admittedly, God sometimes has us carry words for an extended season, but one of my personal pet hates is someone telling me of a word or dream they had that is many years old. It is usually quite apparent from this that the sharer has not recognized that the timeframe for implementation of the revelation has long ago expired. Watch that your words are not out of season!

Even the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons, and the dove, the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration. But my people do not know the requirements of the Lord (Jeremiah 8:7 NIV).

Be punctual to your season. Understand that seasons change—and can change very rapidly. It’s why Peter the apostle talks about being “established in present truth” (see 2 Peter 1:12 NKJV)—truth is always true, but God certainly seems to have varying truth emphases across different seasons—and also why Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time and season for every activity under heaven. Sometimes we embrace, sometimes we refrain! (See Ecclesiastes 3:1,5.)

A preacher speaking from yesterday’s revelation can lead us into methodology, stuckness, and boredom! Stale words become a trap to us—we get out of the pace of God and fail to realize what is required from us today. They cause us to lose our edge and pull us into protecting where we are, rather than motivating us to embrace advancing. Prophetic people recognize stale communication by the level of frustration it awakens internally—even though there may be nothing intrinsically wrong with what is being said. You can listen to considerable quantities of preaching and prophesying, and the content rings true, yet you still find yourself unnerved by it. This is frequently because it is not in step with what God is doing in the present moment.

From the tribe of Issachar, there were 200 leaders of the tribe with their relatives. All these men understood the signs of the times and knew the best course for Israel to take (1 Chronicles 12:32 NLT).

Issachar has always been understood to be the prophetic tribe because of their understanding of the timings and rhythms of the calendar for the nation of Israel. A mature prophetic voice will continually be seeking to keep their people up to date with what God is saying in that present moment, as well as being able to secure a people’s future by understanding how to frame their forth-telling. Take time to ask God if what you are carrying is still fresh and has not expired.

6. Prophesying Prayers

Turning our intercession into a “thus says the Lord” (prophesying our prayers) has led whole people groups to follow what one person (or more) earnestly desired, rather than responding to what God was saying. This doesn’t always happen for nefarious reasons or because of ulterior motives and can often come about inadvertently or by an accidental overshoot. So much of our time together should be spent pouring ourselves out in prayer, and it takes great maturity and discipline to only pray as the Spirit leads, mirroring the standards and plans of the Kingdom of Jesus in our intercession. However, our prayers frequently fall into the cate- gory of our own demands and desires, where we pray through our preferences, not pausing to listen to the Lord. We fail to realize (or admit) that our preferences are not always either what God is saying or what He wants us to pray.

Prophets must be very guarded and extremely careful in identifying the difference between a word of prophecy and a word in prayer. Both should be what God wants, but often a word of prophecy is what God is saying and a word in prayer is what we are personally desiring. For example, you can, by all means, bring the political candidate that you desire to be elected before the Lord in prayer, but do not make that a prophetic utterance! Just because you petition it in prayer does not mean that God wants it or will do it. Prophets, we must keep ourselves to a high standard, where we are clinically clear in our communication, outlining either that we are prophesying or that we are praying, with no room for any ambiguity.

7. Prophesying Other People’s Words

“Therefore…I am against the prophets who steal from one another words supposedly from me.” So declares the Lord in Jeremiah 23:30 (NIV). The Message interprets this verse vividly:

I’ve had it with the “prophets” who get all their sermons secondhand from each other. Yes, I’ve had it with them. They make up stuff and then pretend it’s a real sermon.

As we can clearly see, the Bible is very strong on the error of echoing prophecy! Even if a senior, established prophet has brought a marvelous word that resonates with our own spirit and we judge it to be a true word, we still must hold ourselves to a standard where we source what God is saying to us. God gives different revelation to each prophet to form a woven collective tapestry of all our parts. Revelation is entrusted into personality types that can deliver its differing styles and approaches. What He puts into one prophet, He will rarely put into a second prophet in exactly the same way. Words certainly will join up and overlap but are rarely ever identical.

Therefore, watch out that you do not become lazy, scared of getting it wrong, or overly enamored with another prophet’s approach to the point that we withhold the part that is our portion—and therefore mandatory for us to bring.

Be Faithful to Your Portion

If we have inadvertently stepped into any of these seven unfaithful behavior patterns, it is time to take some time out and ask God to reframe how we disseminate and steward the revelation He has for us to bring. We want to be faithful to our portion and found faithful to the call, not found accidentally unfaithful by slipping into sloppy habits or modeling what we see around about us.

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worldsover · 3 years

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Judgement to the Desiccated ft. Karina

length ✦ 5573

genres ✧ sm type future; asphyxiation; blackmail; virtual_servant!Karina;

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Air did a poor job of not being polluted so Lee Soo Man flooded the world instead. The man himself certainly must be long gone and could not have been in charge of that decision but the legacy of his company far exceeds the legacy of any other human collective in history. Once on this planet, gas was the fluid of choice for respiration and breathing was an unconscious reflex. Now there’s Aether by SM. How very on-brand of them to have the liquid air you breathe follow perfume naming conventions.

Open your eyes and exit the sleeping chamber. Aether has you work for each inhalation, it desaturates the color of the bedroom—maybe there’s a subtle but uncomfortable tinge of yellow—and it makes your nose itch. Your muscles wield much less force than they used to because of the lack of resistance the fluid provides. Moreover, it smells like hairspray as though the ozone layer is taking sardonic revenge.

Screens impersonating windows track your eyes to ensure realistic parallax, playing the scene of divine blue heavens that could not exist. An azure sky is a reward for those planets that have an atmosphere and a sun for light to scatter. Your walls are either chrome or drywall white and your whole bedroom is plainly decorated just like the day you moved in.

“Etymology of bedroom,” you think out loud, though it falls on no ears.

“Bedroom is a compound noun consisting of bed and room. Bed goes back to Old English bedd ‘sleeping place, plot of ground prepared for plants,’ which goes back to the Germanic-”

Plants and sleep are both strong words to use nowadays. The former doesn’t exist in nature and it seems you’re the only one who bothers with the latter. Faint buzzing distracts you from the AI’s response and signals you to the nano drones that swim throughout the liquid to process carbon dioxide from your lungs. This whole ordeal could’ve been much worse if you didn’t have brain interfaces doing the hard part of controlling your diaphragm. The most you need is a purposeful thought. Still, it gets tiring having to think the same thought every three seconds. In. Out.

Was the metaphorical Soo Man teaching a lesson in perseverance? You love K-pop and imagine it’s how trainees used to practice dancing, singing, being charismatic. Being an idol had to be as natural as breathing air. Inhale and exhale. Right now with any antiquated programming language you clung on to, you could write a single for loop that did the same job. For every three seconds: breathe in, breathe out.

“What’s for breakfast today?” Not loud enough. “What’s for breakfast?” you think it louder.

“Welcome, master. Ae-Karina is ready for service.” It’s quite a kindness for SM to blur the bland dystopia you live in by augmenting reality through your neural device. A bosomy woman in a gold-lined but otherwise modest maid outfit appears from the corner of your eye and she bows. Ae-Karina is bewitching and almost becoming of her basis as its graphics have gradually upgraded over the rotations but you wouldn’t misconstrue the avatar as human.

“I said, what’s for breakfast!” It feels impolite to scream in your head, there’s other residents there, but finally the fridge lights up.

“Of course master. May I remind you eating is unnecessary?”

In. Out. Every day, she does remind you, yes. How kind of the company to put all your nutritional requirements in the new air. Aether goes in then Aether goes out. You wish the thoughts of breathing could fade into the background but they’re just like your cravings for food. Always hungry but never starving, whole though not once satisfied. Your eyes pause at her gorgeous face and she tells you there’s bacon. Take it from your fridge. Bacon goes in. Well, the drones take care of the out.

Your assigned living space is the entire 207th floor of a tower. Two hundred and seven floors below the surface. The neighbor a few floors upstairs says that he thinks living deeper is a sign of status. What a luxury. That guy should check the status of his facial muscles, maybe improve his code that lets him tell lies while he’s at it. A couple hundred flights of stairs to swim up is a useless skeuomorphism of skyscrapers in the days of the sun. In fact they were more than useless, you would've preferred a single vertical hallway as it would have let you propel upwards unimpeded. Each floor is the exact same, a glass door that affords no privacy for its residence, a false tree on each side. At the upper levels, malls, convenience stores and other gaudy retail, but it’s the gyms that mock you that you mock in return. They’re always empty.

Finally reaching the top is no true break even if it is a change in scenery. Inhale. Aether tastes a little different up here. Exhale. Can’t say you like it.

Countless satellites form a parody of the star from which the planet flew away, the false image refracted by the upper boundary of Aether. They can’t take away your memories of this star. Looking up at the sky once blinded you with ultraviolet radiation, burning your cornea. It was beautiful. Now everyone’s decided that if they’re playing the part of corporate dystopia, they might as well fit the aesthetic. In a way, it’s self-fulfilling. They wouldn’t have chosen a neon pink sun to compliment the blue and metallic gloom of the cityscape if it weren’t so ingrained in popular media already.

Still, you would’ve expected Google or Walmart to become the megacorp responsible for the state of the world, not a Korean entertainment company. Must’ve been quite the red paperclip scenario. Instead of material design or utilitarian architecture, tacky artistic structures line the streets. The same advertisements for albums that they’ve been selling for the past however long. It's all so obvious, the city could've been designed from scratch to accommodate new forms of travel and goddamn liquid air but instead they went with futuristic Tokyo.

Dubstep permeates your inner ear implants. A notification informs your thoughts that it’s “Hip-hop EDM dance pop with a strong jungle house groove and urban influences.” It’s dubstep. Liquid carries barely any sound so SM affords the option for implants if you're nostalgic for one of the senses. Even though it’s a slower form of communication than direct neural transfer, the noise comforts you. Of course the company would choose dubstep as their background music, but maybe they make money off refunds somehow. It switches to Ice Cream Cake. Much better.

You walk the not so busy roads towards a short brick warehouse in the distance and heavy rain soaks your clothes. No such thing as weather without the sun and water but it’s all simulated anyway.

A warm Seulgi adlib and you know it’s Psycho that starts playing. No, none of your senses are real. The most you could trust is your vision but even that’s being lied to. You could be living in a vat and fed all these thoughts, but then why make it so mediocre? Not paradise, nor torture but a lukewarm in-between. Guess that's what happens when SM Entertainment manages the post-apocalypse. Good on them for trying. The alternative would be a frozen hellscape without solar radiation. Can’t deny their work with geothermal and nuclear energy to keep the Aether warm so that you didn’t have to live underground for the rest of human history. It’s quite great PR to save humanity.

“Hey now, we’ll be okay,” repeats a few more times than you remember.

The Idea Factory Alpha White Delta Green says the neon tubes lighting the front of the brick and mortar building. Your ID card bears a name but it’s not yours, not until they approve your name change. Those usually get processed faster with how often people liked changing their names.

Sit at a desk with a sterile white keyboard and slick new monitor. Type and empty words appear on the screen: “Think for the many, not for the one. We need to think ahead.” A thumbs up. The company appreciates the input. That’s probably enough work for one day. Some SNSD live stages help the time pass, SM certainly appreciated the streaming numbers and it would net you some social points.

It’s hard to say what comes to mind when they ask you to envision a world without the sun and air, especially since it’s what you’ve known for... Two hundred years? There’s no frame of reference, that much you can tell from when you counted seconds to see how often the satellites completed their orbit. SM really took time to have them propel at random speeds, they love withholding sensitive information like that from citizens. To be fair, time is sensitive. Guess the meaning of that phrase changes like all parts of language.

Look around. Dozens of employees at identical workspaces all try to answer the same questions. Naturally, there’s no need for manual labor anymore but there will never be a replacement for human ingenuity. Nice slogan but you know you’re only here for data. Can’t see a need for customer retention though—what’s the alternative, skip Earth? See you on another planet?

“Hey bro, you come up with anything new?” Dave says. Two desks away, you see the enthusiastic, surprisingly spry man play around with a Newton’s cradle. The balls at each end bounce back and forth, not slowing down their rhythm any time soon.

“I think I got something,” you say, “Earth is not the answer. It can’t be, long term.”

“Ooh, I like that. Actually, I really like that.”

“What are you gonna do, copy me?”

“Of course not. You know how much SM hates plagiarism.” Click. Clack.

“Ha. As if there’s a single original thought left in the world.” Click. Clack. The imaginary sounds of metal spheres bouncing play in your mind. They got the volume wrong, no way it’d sound that loud from that distance. “You’d think with all their resources, they’d have figured out space travel by now.”

“I don’t think they want to leave, bro. Wouldn’t be great for profits.”

Your mouth opens to laugh and causes laugh8942.mp3 to play in Dave’s head. “I love it. SM probably hates that sass too,” you say.

“Oh no, they’re gonna arrest me for thoughtcrimes. Nah, they love creativity, just when it suits them. Also, if they actually did bust you for wrongthink like rumors say, I wouldn’t have this on me.” Dave twirls a finger and points at you and you thank his absurd flair for the histrionic that keeps you amused with such drab work.

“NewDrug.mp6. Would you like to play it?” the dry system voice notifies you.

“Woah woah there tiger, hold on.” Dave must’ve noticed your intrigued eyes and holds his hands up. “You might wanna experience that at home. But if you’re interested in more, ask for chicken parm at the vegan place. You know the one.”

Dave leaves his desk. He doesn’t return. You finish your work. Inspire. Expire. You’d rather not.

In contrast to your commute to work, the roads fill with others on your way home. You have to know. Take solace in the comfort of a bench where a huge McDonald’s arch bathes the surroundings and its people with a yellow glow. Really shouldn’t watch it now, especially if Dave says it’s a home type of watch but you have to know. A family of five watches you pass out. They, along with every other passerby, ignore your still body draped over the chrome outdoor seating as you look like yet another junkie. The title is correct after a fashion, the simulation is some sort of new drug. The details of the exploits that happen in the immersive replay wash over you but you don’t need them to know that it’s the sort of lewd that SM would not allow—at least not publicly and not without the right exorbitant payment.

Suit pants and underwear go straight to the laundry. That must’ve been an embarrassing sight but no one bothered to stop you, so it doesn’t matter. Look up where this vegan place was that Dave so presumptuously assumed you knew about and you find that it’s about four Avengers’ stores down from work. He must’ve eaten there before.

“Yo Dave, just wanna make sure, what’s the name of the vegan place called?”

“What are you talking about, man? You telling me there’s some secret underground farms that SM wouldn’t know about?”

You can’t tell when you got to work, a lack of standardized timing would help as well the haze of living in a monotonous dark. “Nah, I mean, for the-”

“I have no idea,” Dave emphasizes each word, “what you’re talking about.”

“I see.”

Work flies by, unusually.

“Hey, can I get a chicken-”

“Uh, this is Maron’s Veggies Only, it clearly says on the sign.”

Clear your throat. “Parm.”

The shifty part-time worker looks around and rubs his fingers gesturing for money. “No digital.”

Over the counter, you pass him a gold coin stamped with a holographic 1 and he hands you a USB stick and a laptop in return. How old-fashioned.

“It’ll sync with whoever you have set as your avatar experience aspect,” the worker says.

“Thanks.”

Ever vigilant as the patrol is, the alleys are the last place you want to go to hide with the obvious criminal element within them all but you head to one anyway. Dump the anachronistic technology in your storage pocket dimensions. Looking at its contents, you’d have to clean that mess up later, but the more you look like an average slob the better. The biggest problem with the inventories is all the people squatting in them. Inspectors wouldn’t care about the archaic ruins you left in yours.

“Welcome, master. Ae-Karina is ready to service.”

“I’d like to go on a date. A special date.” You highlight the key word special and sit on your living room couch. No one’s going to look in your glass door and regardless, you wouldn’t be the pervert for glimpsing into someone’s home.

“Ah yes, master. Ae-Karina is ready to fully service,” she says with a provocative tint in her tone, her sclera disperses to black to match. A pole drops from the ceiling while parts of her maid outfit dissolve which reveals more of the silky skin of her thighs, her lissom arms and most importantly her overflowing breasts. Ae-Karina wraps her legs around the pole and spins around, teasing fingers trace curves on her body to harden you. Her dance is precise but sultry regardless. She pulls up her short skirt to flaunt more of her ass beneath white panties and then pulls down to flourish her cleavage, not trapped by a bra. “Are you enjoying your maid’s show?”

“Very much so, yes,” you say.

Half of a smile forms before a glitch occurs and she teleports next to you, fully nude. It doesn’t pull you out of the illusion however. You just stare and drink in the splendor of her created body.

“You’re not going to touch?” Ae-Karina says.

A feel of her tits and you find it softer than pillows you used to rest on. Soft isn’t much of a character that exists anymore when the whole world is engulfed in liquid. No one has beds, especially with the rarity of sleep. Therefore, her mounds are a consummate dedication to the texture as you squeeze and pinch at her cute nipples.

Her maid outfit rematerializes as she straddles you. It provides more friction to your pants as she begins her lap dance. The weight of her body dragging across your legs and clothed erection induces your carnal impulses further. If only you could fuck the virtual idol. You have to make do with the imprint of her pussy lips on your bulge sliding up and down. Breath in. Breath out.

Ae-Karina pulls down your boxers and spits on your erection. It's not real but her hands so slick on your cock and you let reality slip. Real is for the past, you have desires gratified in the present. There is no real person nibbling at your neck but your nerves activate in sexual desire without discernment for truth. No, she doesn't love you, but when the voracious mass of ones and zeroes says it loves its master, you say it back.

"I love you."

ILOVEYOU infected ten million computers in 2000. An explosion. Calibration engaging. It’s 1:21 PM, Sunday, July 18, 2286 and hypothetically the sun would be out in its full rage. At this latitude and longitude, you’re at what was once the epicenter of all—Seoul, where a fountain caused a chain reaction allowing the hopeful remnant of a world to exist. It lasted a surprisingly long time without the sun and without Aether but the dying planet would succumb inevitably to the ever-increasing contamination so SM of all corporations took charge. A different kind of chain reaction occurred when they acquired a restaurant chain that discovered the recipe for liquid air. The law is on its way and prepared to punish you to its full extent.

You reel while your ears ring. An even sexier version of the woman you already fantasized about appears from your peripheral vision in the crater of your floor. A skimpy cop outfit, striated with reflective material that seems to wane black at different angles, outlines Karina’s curves. She has a tool belt with absurd gadgets, such as a knife baton hybrid, a taser combined with a spray bottle and a Tamagotchi. None of this is necessary. They could just immediately arrest you, impose limitations on your devices. Sure, SM cloned people to deal with underpopulation, but why Karina would be the enforcer is a whole nother issue. Maybe the entertainment company loves their irony?

“Halt. You’re under arrest. Any resistance will be penalized according to the combined Terms of Service of all SM and SM associated products.”

Fucked anyway, you figure you might as well go for it. Escape into your inventory and only seconds later you’re forced out. You manage to get what you need regardless.

“Violation of access rights will be charged to your account.”

It’s so obvious but there’s a reason you kept so much gold in physical storage. As you swim away, the sides of your apartment start to bubble. Bubbles? Already, your limbs feel unsteady. Something’s wrong in the Aether.

“This is standard procedure for escaping suspects that are indoors. Again, this is all agreed to under the Terms of Service.”

“When the fuck did I ever click accept to that shit?”

“When you were born in this world and decided you want to stay in it,” Karina says out loud. You hear her say it. Your physical ears process the vibrations in the air that come from her mouth. Gravity thwarts your desperate escape as your limp body floats on the limit between liquid and air. The atrophy of your muscles becomes apparent within the gaseous atmosphere. She watches you sink down as the room drains of all the false air though her eyebrows crease when she inspects you closer. Your breaths are involuntary. Despite your muscles shorting out, the force of gravity and the pressure of the gas bearing down on you, you’re breathing and you don’t mean to. Her eyes wander farther down. On your pants, a concrete rod stamps the fabric.

“Oh, you like what you see?”

“Shut up, criminal. Anything you say can and will be used against you.”

“Your pussy,” you say and she scoffs.

“Original.” Karina bites her lip as your erection continues to grow behind its prison. You use all effort to put your hands up.

“Please, miss Karina. I’ve been bad.”

“I could punish you even more for sexual assault.”

“Then do it.”

Heat radiates the room in a way you haven’t felt in a while and droplets of sweat form on each of your bodies, especially on the thighs that her revealing outfit parades. Her facial features contort in deliberation and the wait kills you. You bat your eyes at her before Karina takes off her tight shorts and drops herself into your anticipatory face. This makes no sense but none of this life made any sense so you decide to go with the tides.

Centuries of training your respiration has led to this moment, but when you finally have real air to breathe, you spit at the opportunity and choose to suffocate. Then you spit at her pussy and lap it up. Karina’s nectar transfixes your olfactory glands, for once a smell that isn’t the sterile Aether. Your eyes are mesmerized in parallel because of the perfect design of her pussy, a single crease that leads into her hole that your tongue emphatically explores. Karina spreads her thighs wide to reveal a small nub that craves attention. So give it. Suck and swirl and flick your tongue, and the woman provides you the tight clench of her legs as a gift. And the sounds, rediscovered glorious noise. Loud, almost too loud, and clear is how they assault your ears, even surrounded by the flesh of her thighs. Muffled by the weight of her legs, you hear Karina moan in approval but she’s still clearly in charge with how she chokes you with her legs. This is not about your pleasure but hers, and any satisfaction that you derive is not only incidental but probably punishable by SM copyright law.

Karina squirms her hips subtly on your mouth. Her eyes are sharp and she’s just about to stop your hands from moving but she notices them clasp together.

“I’ll do anything to make you cum, please.” you say sloppily as her pussy juices fill your cheeks and drip down your chin.

“God. I can’t.” She takes deep, contemplative breaths. ”That’s more time added on for inappropriate behavior.” Her groaning and brief squeals make her words sound incogent.

You give her a concluding lick and a kiss on her slit. “So what have you been doing right now then?”

Point to a corner of the room and a subtle red light indicates a recording camera. At once, she pulls out a hose from a pocket that could not fit it and the vacuum submerges the room with noise. Her expression shifts quickly to serious.

“We don’t play games here in SMTOWN unless it’s SuperStar so don’t fuck with me.”

“Look who's trying to be a comedian. How about you fuck with me any further and the video gets released.”

“That’s funny, you think you have any sort of power-”

“Yoo Jimin, I suggest you don’t push me more.”

“Where do you know that name from? Right now.” She weighs herself down on your neck.

“You think I don’t have contingencies for if I die too? Karina, we can make this a win-win scenario. We both get to cum, we both get to walk away unscathed.”

“Fuck you.”

Your weak arms wander between her thighs. At any moment, a feeble punch towards your face or another ten seconds of asphyxiation and she could call your bluff. Even if you did have the ability to expose her perversions in any way, there would be no permanent recourse, not as long SM was in charge. So it surprises you when Karina takes off her shorts.

“Goddammit. Your cock just looks too good. And your mouth, how are you so good with it?” Put up five fingers when she motions to remove her top as well, and instead she opts to take off your clothes, seizing your pants and throwing them to join the rubble in the room.

A finger slips in, then two and a third dares. Her flawlessly architected pussy lips clings to your digits and Karina shudders in reply. You explore her wetness and find it’s smooth to the point of having no faults, but her juice inside is gloppy and causes your fingers to stick more than the liquids she spills from her slit.

“Who said you’re allowed to have more?”

You lap up the nectar on your fingers. “Then why’d they make you taste so good?”

Your thumb teases her sweet tight asshole and puts just the slightest amount of pressure on it while you finger her with more intensity. The mass of her butt burdens your torso the closer she gets to orgasm. Her eyelids squeeze close and you see her body ripple in anxious pleasure. Karina shows off her pearly whites, teetering on the cliff of hysteria.

“Yes, yes! I’m so close,” she screams.

"Not yet."

“Fuck." Karina sobs, "God. Damn, fuck I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just fuck me.”

“My pleasure,” you say. There’s no need for you to grab her since she brings herself down to your groin, which you’re thankful for as your arms are as good as jelly now. Fortunately, your cock throbs as hard as ever while Karina’s slit rests on it.

“Say you’ll delete it all, all the evidence, promise me.”

“You’re gonna fuck me first or what?” Your breath hitches while she makes a strangled noise as her velvety walls swallow your cock whole to leave no room for comfort. Her tightness is stifling and you have to start counting just to breathe again.

“One two-”

“Be quiet.”

But there is no quiet when pleas for your cooperation intersperse her excessive profanities when she seats herself into your cock and ricochets up and down. Sweat emanates from her creamy skin while her legs widen to find a better angle for her supporting knees in her cowgirl position. Grapefruit and other citrus mingle with the scent of the sweat, fruits you haven’t seen except on billboards in music videos. As much as your mind crackles and your blood roars for every atmosphere of pressure Karina’s walls provide on each thrust in and out, you can’t help but reminisce on sweeter, more innocent times.

The white fluorescent lights in your apartment sputter. For all the advancements in technology, some among many things never change. Light refracts differently in air, less bright, but you can see the pure enjoyment on Karina’s face no matter the luminescence. Karina slows her ride to pull her hips down harder instead and she jolts when your cock finds the most tender spots inside her pussy and it interrupts her babbling.

Karina almost hyperventilates when she gets up to spit on your cock. She pulls out some kind of meter from her tool belt and sighs when there’s no beeping and you recognize it having to do with carbon dioxide. She gets back to dribbling saliva and the filament trailing down to your shaft mesmerizes you. This spit is real, not simulated, and it wettens your erection in a mix with her pussy juices to paralyze you further in your already listless state. Her bare thighs jiggle and you can’t exert much force with your hands but her buttcheeks are firm with just a bit of give.

“Thank you for this cock, thank you for being bad,” Karina says as you watch her ass sink deeper while her pussy holds your dick taut. She’s frenetic when bounces up and down to play an unadulterated orchestra of slick noises between your groins.

“You’re welcome,” you accomplish getting out the words between planned breaths. Your hands cup her buttcheeks but you fear they may break with how she strikes her ass into you.

Karina turns around once more to give you the spectacle of her facial expressions as she fucks herself into you. Knead her calves laying on your torso and they take no energy to spread them though she brings them back together, compressing your hard shaft within her pussy. A new game you play with her, a separate rhythm of loosening and tightening. Her feet press on your chest to help her bounce, but the way they bear down on your lungs against the timing of your breathing causes you to fumble. Your cock bends straight forward as she plunges herself into you and it sends prickles to your entire skin, making the new angle difficult but worth it. Karina takes your hand and starts sucking on your fingers.

“You want my promise that bad?” you say.

“Yes, as bad as I want your cum. I swear, I need it.”

She draws her knees up to her torso and hugs her legs to keep thighs as tight together as possible. Karina couldn’t keep her word, she was trying to kill your cock with constriction.

“Fuck, your pussy is so fucking tight. God, Karina, fuck. You’re so good.” Even if good isn’t the word you want to use to describe her.

“Do it, please, please. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, baby. Karina can be a good girl, a good maid, a good cop, whatever you want. Just don’t get me in trouble, please.”

Karina’s mouth stops saying words though her lips writhe, drunk in increasing lust. Her cheeks flush, before the rest of her skin joins in redness while she grapples your chest and whatever spare limb she can find. You still struggle wresting control of your body but nature seems to take over when you drive yourself into her and match her needy cadence. The air in the room is replaced by a new air but it isn’t Aether. Passion, sweat, heat and all fluids that you both exude join squelching sounds, slaps and moans in harmonic bliss when her body tenses and she screams. As her body tightens, her pussy especially holds your cock for dear life and endeavours to wring out all your semen as her wetness throbs and spills. Karina starts counting to three repeatedly and you laugh though your amusement quickly subsides when you feel her juices become more viscous and she continues her ride, even in the dying pulses of her climax.

“Was I good?” Karina asks.

Just a moment goes by before you mentally send her a screenshot of all the recordings being deleted. Karina hasn’t stopped fucking you yet so at least it wasn’t a ploy.

“Thank you, thank you, I love you.” The flexion of her pliant legs brings them all the way back to rest on top of your legs. Karina lays prone above you and finally give you a kiss. The citrusy flavor may be closer to lime than grapefruit but it’s been so long that you can’t remember which scent is which. Lips crash and her tongue lashes out at yours trying to establish dominance. Keep still to let her investigate your mouth while her pussy does the same to your shaft.

You savor the way Karina’s top emphasizes the bouncing of her tits synchronous with the rebounding of her waist on your cock, but your mouth waters when she frees them. Take the shortest moment to relish in the sight before Karina smothers you with her plump globes. You wriggle your face to try to breathe. Inhale, up and exhale, down, but all you inhale is the scent of her orbs’ sweat. Her hips undulate with a pace at least double yours breathing and the echoes of slapping flesh resonate throughout the air-filled chamber. The loudness is unlike any you’ve experienced in a long time. It’s almost a flashbang every time her ass slams into your lap, especially as you start to see white when orgasm threatens to overload you with preludial pulses.

The last words you hear infected ten million computers in 2000. Fade to black. Cut. You’re slammed out of existence back into existence as a sun rebirths both within you, heating your core to a dangerous high, and from your eyes, dazzling you in an unforgiving white light. In the throes of unconsciousness relapsing to consciousness back to tenebrosity, your streaks of semen suspend in the Aether like a dead tree resting from the wind. What flashes your mind in its orgasmic state are two things only you would remember, plants and weather. Your hyperventilation is unconscious but not unwelcome, as it’s the first time in a while your breaths were reflexive even in the liquid air. However, basking in your newfound power, you start to choke. Right. You breathe in and out again. In and out. In. Out. In. Out. Back in.

“Replaying KarinaArrestsYou.mp6.” A hint of vexatious glee in the system’s otherwise dry voice. You don’t stop for it.

✦✧✦✧✦✧

AFF, AO3

It’s pretty silly but the idea danced around in my head ever since I saw the absolute Black Mirror concept that SM had for aespa and I concur that Karina is insanely hot.

As I’m writing this, this Kurzgesagt video on the idea of a rogue Earth comes out and now I have to rewrite stuff to make it at least a little consistent. I’m obviously already going nuts with all these ridiculous sci-fi concepts but this video almost feels too targeted to me writing this for me to ignore it.

#kpop smut #aespa smut #male reader #reader insert #title tracks

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giftofshewbread · 3 years

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Tribulation Fodder

By David Hitt Published on: August 3, 2021

It seems to be a cruel pejorative, but “Tribulation fodder” describes pretty well the destiny of those people who will march like lemmings into the Tribulation without a second thought. While many will find themselves in the Tribulation because they discounted their need for salvation and the Gospel’s provision for them, Tribulation fodder are in conscious, open rebellion against God. Given their insanity, a surprising number of them are actually looking forward to the Tribulation, whether they know it or not.

The Apostle Paul described these people well: “But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power” (1 Timothy 3:1-5a, KJV).

Any attempt to improve Paul’s words of wisdom to Timothy would be a fool’s errand. However, it is useful to frame the characteristics he expressed in a more modern context. So without further ado (as they say), here is a list of various characteristics – traits, behaviors, and worldviews – exhibited by those directly steering into the teeth of God’s wrath and their own destruction:

Substitute morality – They are “Woke.” Woke is a worldview, a sanctimonious stew of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, LGBTQ celebration, militant feminism, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, radical environmentalism, globalism, scientism, political correctness, “equality” (not of opportunity, but of outcome), and “diversity/inclusion” (except, of course, with respect to a Biblical worldview). They have perverted the definitions of “truth,” “opinion,” “kindness,” “tolerance,” “love,” “hate,” the cross, the rainbow, and so many other words and symbols that would otherwise frustrate them, to the degree that their original meaning is lost. In so many ways, their woke worldview stands in polar opposition to God’s law.

Spirituality – They espouse an amorphous hodgepodge of various Eastern, pagan, and New Age works-based religions without any meaningful standards, form, accountability, duty, or theology. They flatter themselves as being good and becoming increasingly perfect and, despite all evidence to the contrary, exude the “light and love” their religion asks of them.

Conformity – They have a pack mentality. When they do voice an original or nonconformal thought, it necessarily involves a trivial topic, such as a favorite sports team, wine, or vacation spot. They derive their existential worth by being part of movements (no matter how specious), appropriating the virtue of the movement as their own. Their need for conformity leads them to rationalize authoritarianism, even entertain totalitarianism.

Cancel culture – As they take conformity to its logical extreme, they embrace cancel culture. History that offends them, even if they could allow it to educate them, must be eradicated. No matter how positive someone’s life has been, that person is fair game to doxxed, bullied, protested, deprived of a career, and physically harmed if he has ever in his life said or done anything, even privately or in jest, that now offends these self-appointed thought police. The message from these people is clear: they will destroy you with their light and love if you dare invade their safe space. Their end justifies their means.

Lack of critical thinking – Their first instinct is to obey without question, particularly when their peers are complying. They seem incapable of rigorous analysis and are inept at identifying false premises, baseless arguments, logical inconsistencies, and unsupported conclusions. They parrot without reflection the instructions government, news, academic, and health authorities give them, so often because their “teachers” rewarded them more for obedience than sound thought.

Virtue signaling – They not only pride themselves as being virtuous (as they conveniently define virtues to be), they constantly display the virtues they so admire in themselves so others can join in the adoration. They tend to spew their opinions indiscriminately, even when nobody asked for them. In an ever-growing phenomenon, they overtly wear their values and identities on their sleeves in the form of tattoos and clothing and jewelry designed to convey messages about themselves.

Psychological projection – They lack perception and the disciplines of self-restraint and introspection. Without any sense of irony, they baselessly attribute their own moral failings to others. Lacking any truth for the accusations they make, they are relegated to ad hominem attacks, and they defend themselves by expressing hurt feelings and tantrums.

Narcissism – They are relentlessly self-absorbed and crave the attention of others. They lack empathy, and often even sympathy. Social media and other kinds of superficial, inconsequential social interaction are critical to their self-esteem and desire to be heard, accepted, and celebrated as the singular person they believe themselves to be. They seek to be “influencers” to their “followers” and “friends.” Lacking any internal reward mechanism, they need constant external affirmation of their worth. They crave “likes,” “views,” and “subscribes.” They presume, without evidence, that all reasonable people would agree with them and that anyone questioning their opinion is hateful or in need of reeducation. Often, they dehumanize those holding contrary views.

Epicurean consumerism – They obsess over the perceived quality and authenticity of the food, drink, exercise, leisure activity, books, sports, TV shows, movies, clothes, cars, and homes they consume. The experiences they’ve had or things they own define who they are. Rather than seeking a life, they seek a lifestyle. They value recreation and pleasure over work and service to others. For this reason, they have trouble committing to one another. For them, “love” is the result of personal fulfillment, not sacrifice, and marriages are mechanisms of temporary convenience.

Exhibitionism – Their narcissism and perceived conformity to accepted social norms and virtues, aggravated by their lack of critical thinking skills, cause them to place little value on privacy. They gladly put their lives on display without contemplating the evil ends to which their personal data may be put. They fail to understand a key lesson of history: authoritarianism arises when citizens willingly surrender liberty to gain comfort.

Technology – They adopt new technologies because they ease life and increase happiness, even when those technologies generate profound control and privacy issues. They are fixated on novelty and fashion and so often want the latest technology just to make themselves look good to others. As with so many other things, they are blind to the ramifications of surrounding themselves with devices capable of tracking them, listening to them, and watching them.

Every one of these characteristics plays into the hands of the coming New World Order government, religion and economy. Enabled by the Internet and 5G networks and Smartphone, camera, biometric, digital currency, robotic, artificial intelligence, pharmaceutical, and genetic engineering technology, the New World Order will be empowered by the very people they control. If these poor souls ever manage to understand their dire circumstance, it will be a miracle. In fact, nothing less than the miracle of salvation will deliver these people from certain destruction.

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healingchildhoodtrauma · 4 years

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Sacrificing Authenticity for Attachment: The Adaptive Survival Responses of Children and Their Influence on Future Relationships

(Part 2)

Generations of projection and “normal”

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~ Carl Jung

As I’ve written about extensively in other articles (see here and here), what parents (and schoolteachers) cannot tolerate in children is often what they learned to suppress during their own childhood. What they denied within as an adaptive survival response they now “project” onto the young ones before them.

When they were children, our parents likely learned some combination of: “anger is inappropriate”; tears are a sign of weakness; “don’t be silly”; deny your dreams for “reality”; “grow up”; be “good”; do things “right”; “suck it up”; “be responsible”; please; prove; accommodate. They learned to survive at the cost of who they really were. They learned to survive because going back in time living was less about thriving and more about coping, getting by.

It’s safe to say that our parents, their parents, and so on, had to dim their vibrancy to please their primary attachment figures and satisfy family, institutional or cultural norms. The collective ethos would have had an aversion to people being a “tall poppy”—to standing out mentally, emotionally, physically or spiritually; to being unique, a trailblazer, a wildly imaginative soul—much more than today’s societal aversion. And so to cope and survive, our ancestors adapted, and they were rewarded for it. Parental and societal approval incentivized them with false ideas of belonging. And with most institutions, such as church, government and education, built largely on blind conformity and standardized compliance, it was difficult, if not impossible, for our ancestors to not take the bait. Unwittingly, they “sold their soul to the devil”—they became pleasers at the cost of their authentic feelings, needs, desires and voice. Attachment trumped authenticity. The relational aspect of fitting into society, of blending with the flock, the ethos of family, institution and culture, became the approved and “normal” way.

Despite advancements in consciousness, we still see plenty of evidence of this today. Just consider: How willingly do parents support their teenager’s unconventional, artistic dreams? How often do teachers follow a child’s lead? How much do we still expect children to bend to authority at home, school, church and elsewhere? How often do adults bristle at the sight of a kid being a tall, self-governing poppy?

Back to our ancestors, their adaptive survival response to obey and fit in, when acted upon enough, became a well-worn identity of pleaser. Coupled with approval from family, institution and culture, the need to please motivated our ancestors to achieve through, say, high marks in school, being “good”, or performing in sports or debate. It compelled them to acquiesce to traditions that they, on some level, knew were deeply flawed.

Pleasing, not standing out too much, and proving themselves as worthy, was forged into their neurology. As they grew older, this wiring manifested choices and lifestyles that reinforced their conditioning and the continued denial of their true nature even more. It was a vicious loop, one that fortified the longstanding collective ethos built on superficial ideas of belonging.

It’s worth wondering: how much of culture is just this—a collection of fear-based beliefs and adaptive survival identities trying to fit in? How much of our societal systems is a collective pathology based on unresolved survival responses?

How much do people actually know where their choices come from? Who is choosing? Their authentic self or the adaptation?

Aside from the rebellious ones, the rare thought-leaders, the trouble-makers or revolutionists, our ancestors mostly lived with an external locus of control—making sense of themselves and the world based on outer influences versus intrinsically defined thoughts and feelings (internal locus of control). Without a strong enough core of “inner rightness” or integrity, without the courage to stand tall and speak boldly as the likes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Mark Twain did, they eventually would have succumbed to a hollowness inside that nothing could fill.

But because almost everyone was primarily oriented externally (and there was no internet or social media to show another way), they didn’t know any different. Add the fact that skillful healers, shamans, wise elders and therapists weren’t readily available back then, and our ancestors, sadly, had little choice but to acquiesce. They had to settle without knowing they were doing so; to endure through their anxiety and depression through the aid of work, drink, and other distractions. Surviving, just getting by, not thriving according to one’s inner compass, was the accepted norm.

Not surprisingly, based on research conducted by Julien Rotter in the late 1950s, we learned that when a child orients primarily with an external locus of control, it correlates to rising rates of depression and anxiety. How could it not? Years of self-disregard will do that to you.

Twenty or thirty years later, having grown up and with their own kids, our parents, to varying degrees, predictably struggled to offer safe space for us, as children, to make our own decisions and for our wide range of expression. Having grown up with an external locus of control, they expected us to define ourselves by external norms: to fit in; do what’s “right”; follow instead of lead; travel the path traveled by others; stay true to the known and expected; not stand out too much; don’t make the family look bad; make your parents proud… again, at the cost of authenticity.

If you got angry, and your parent learned to suppress and judge their own anger when young, without full awareness, they likely suppressed your red-hot energy through admonishments, judgment, punishments, or a cold, stern look. It would have been hard for them to see anger as a healthy emotion because they learned that it was bad, or even harmful. You then automatically oriented and adapted according to external pressures.

If you, as a child, dreamt of being a musician and your parent grew up learning to be a hardworking, practical, responsible individual, then they may have shunned your imagination. They might have expected you to live and work between the lines, not take risks. To choose the coal mine or accounting desk instead of the mic. Without a strong enough internal locus of control, you likely forwent your instinct, your authenticity.

If you felt a wave of sadness when young, and your parent grew up with the message that “tears are a sign of weakness”, then the impulse could likely have been to direct you towards “strength” and away from vulnerability. Your parent would not have seen the strength inherent in vulnerability. In fact, just like with anger and big dreams, your parent may have viewed your tears as a threat.

As the saying goes: “A parent tells a child to put on a coat so the parent feels warm.”

The impulse to orient a child externally and dim their wild fire is not a conscious choice by the parent, but an unconscious reaction. It is automatic. Though it may seem something they are doing from clear volition, they are, in most cases, re-enacting the past —which is what re-acting is—by projecting their disowned authenticity onto their children.

This is psychology 101, a process also known as “transference”: What the parent judges within, such as anger, imagination or sadness, they transfer onto the child. Unconsciously, they experience the child’s anger as a projection of their own disowned anger, rather than as the unique and natural experience of being human, let alone a bubbling child.

In other words, what we keep in the shadows internally we have a hard time seeing in the light externally. Considering how bright children shine in their physical, mental and emotional states, how unbridled they are in their expressions, it is no wonder that their exuberance is a threat to the locked-up, shadowed adult.

A child consistently projected onto, and controlled as a result, grows listening less to their heart and more to their brain—to thoughts of what they should do/be to make mommy, daddy or the teacher happy. They think more and feel less. This survival migration away from heart / somatic awareness to the calculating mind is a means of self-preservation and navigating through life. But it is a most profound loss to the full-bodied child that has significant ramifications on current and future health and wellbeing. The rootedness and instinctual aliveness of the feeling-body is suppressed for the predictability of rationality. The once natural inclination to be honest, as children so beautifully are, must hide. The natural impulse to trust themselves, what feels right, their internal locus of control, is denied for insecure attachment.

Years later, it’s no wonder it’s so hard to have intimate relationships, let alone navigate through life.

https://www.vincegowmon.com/sacrificing-authenticity-for-attachment/

#cptsd #childhood trauma #attachment trauma #attachment theory #authenticity #mental health #child psychology #developmental psychology #developmental trauma #depression #anxiety #people pleasing #codependency #fawn response #projection

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4pz · 4 years

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((personal update))

most won’t read till the end and i don’t blame you. you’ve been programmed not to. summary, i’ve been taking a dopamine detox. here’s why.

before i put this out there, i’d like to say i am human just like you. these thoughts stem from observing majority but not everyone. i’ve been guilty of all these doings at a point in time and most likely will be in the future. no human is perfect. this is just my way of adding some perspective to our imperfections..

so i know i’ve been publicly quiet for a few years now. this is because of personal events as well as gradually becoming more uncomfortable with the behavior we’re allowing as a society.

in my opinion, we are subconsciously controlling each other. we are addicted to short term dopamine infused feedback loops.. as humans its in our nature to want people to like us. gratification from others is the strongest drug there is. but think about how dangerous it can get when there’s several platforms with millions of constantly active users that could instantly feed you with a like, love or thumbs up etc. not just one person in front of you saying they like you but potentially millions of people saying they like you. i imagine that would leave your subconscious thinking, what do i need to do next for more people to like me? that thought is the first sign of you being controlled.

not only are we competing with each other for validation, but the demand for content vs appreciation scale is far out of balance. what happens when you take an impatient market combined with a fixation of dopamine infused approval, you get more product with less substance.. in a world where all media and information is available at a touch of a button/screen, this naturally makes us more and more impatient. therefore, when it comes to “content”, we’re empowering quantity over quality. gradually decreasing what humans accept daily while over saturating all markets. this can be dangerous.

i thought deeper into why we allow this. what i call the more of less theory. simply put, there’s only so many ways of doing something, while there are countless amounts of people trying to do the same things. that’s why nothing is truly original. everything is a newer rendition (hopefully improvement) of an already existing idea. this literally applies to everything.

as innovation is dying and copying is thriving, i’ve become even more lost in my search for “truth”. i started to realize that there honestly is no truth when it comes to the correct way to live. it really comes down to all power remaining in the eye of the beholder.. to get more honest, most are just chasing quick gains rather then long term change. this goes back to blaming our vastly growing impatience. not to mention the easier route will always appear more appealing then the harder route. which now brings me to my concerns with social media.

insta(nt gratification from strangers) isn’t entirely healthy, for me at least. read that both ways.. not only do we value outside opinions more then we should, we start to lose who we really are at the expense of others approval. the longer we spend scrolling the easier we are influenced. the more we see how “influential” beings are living, the more we naturally become envious of that lifestyle. slowly we start attempting to become more and more like the figures we look up to until we don’t even know who we really are.. now a’days it seems like most don’t even know how to form an opinion without first checking what everyone else thinks.

social media is one out of many forms of dopamine that we rely on to get through the day. we create false realities to distract us further and longer from our actual realities. we share the best and hide the rest. we thrive off of the approval from others to reassure us from our own insecurities. we tear each other down at times to feel some sense of control. we watch self improvement videos rather then actually implementing them in our lives. we distort our perception of others based on their online identity. we base our own worth on our social identity, status, and class rather then our actual character and values. we constantly spread biased misinformation, since everyone has the ability to voice any opinion they please, which leads to mass propaganda and solidifies the expiration of truth. we justify unproductive behavior and lie to ourselves over and over until we are eventually fine with it..

now i’m not saying all dopamine is bad all the time. we need some form of reward when we do something good. i’m just saying it seems most need a significant amount of dopamine in a short timespan to feel okay. this can be dangerous.

in my short 22 years, i’ve spent countless nights overthinking and analyzing the complex world i was put in. very confused on determining what’s actually right from wrong since we’re all born the same way but live drastically different lifestyles. one person could be completely supportive of something while another being completely against it. so far the 2 best overall attributes i’ve found to guide my compass is perspective and balance.

so, why update us after so long of silence just to be more silent? well because i felt the need. a personal update seemed appropriate in this interesting time we’re all experiencing. if i help give one person just a little perspective and awareness leading to a little more balance n possibly some happiness, then i feel i’ve done my part.. please may we all unify and do our part to promote love and equality! we have the power, we are the future and i will forever remain obediently yours.

coming full circle, i would have never made any social accounts had i not pursued a career as an artist. i have a lot of unreleased music, ideas and poetry created. still currently creating.. making impactful art that no one else understands fills me with joy and purpose. wether thousands of people experience it or i continue to keep it to myself, either way it has always been therapeutic to create and revise. i may release content again to the public if i feel compelled to. could be in a few months, could be a few years or could be never. whatever it is, i’d like to thank anyone who’s ever given me any time of day, in any sort of way. i love you, all of you..

i’d also like to apologize to the ones i didn’t treat properly in the past while growing up and losing myself as a person. with how complex life can be, at times you may find yourself caught up in things that don’t really matter. i have spent a good amount of time recognizing my mistakes, accepting them and learning from them to better myself everyday going forward. i hope you understand and one day grow to forgive me if possible.

lastly, i value your time and hope you do as well. that’s kind of why i wrote all of this. if you’ve made it this far, you’re special. you’re interested in programming your life to be a little different. a little better. after this, will you continue scrolling or start a new journey? most people say just do what makes you happy. if scrolling makes you happy, who am i to stop you? i’m just another human on my pursuit of happiness. X staY up -Z

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lincolnsthename · 5 years

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The internet freaks me out, seeing you take a break from it all makes me wanna get away from it all. Would you recommend shutting off everything for a while to someone?

I would recommend it to everyone. Rant impending. The internet can be a great tool and is good for a lot of things. But if it's going to do any real good for any individual their use in my opinion has to be very purposeful and they themselves must be aware of the ways in which it can also hurt them. I don't think most people can really be aware of those ways until they've taken a long hard break and really internalized the differences of living with it vs without it. It's a tired line among people my age and younger but I really do feel as if I've grown up on the internet. We had a computer in the house with an internet connection since I was about 3 and I've been searching stuff on google for as long as I remember. I was constantly plugged into something from the time I was a baby. Addicted to video games my whole childhood. Addicted to the internet from adolescence until adulthood, really very recently. I learned most of what I know about music from the internet and discovered most of the music I loved as a kid on there too. The internet allowed me to educate myself at my own pace and learn about things I actually wanted to learn about without having to take the initiative to go to the library. I formed many meaningful relationships with people I have never even met. I would not be the person I am today without it and I would never say it's an outright bad thing but I think there are several glaring problems with such a powerful technology that tend to raise eyebrows when even just addressed.I feel like there's this clear throughline between I don't know-- the printing press, the radio, television, and finally distilled into the internet, social media, the smart phone. These are sources of knowledge and art that have proven endlessly useful to us but they are also categorically and obviously sources of entertainment. And in a culture that tells its constituents that there is no inherent meaning or greater good in the world other than to satisfy your base instincts, entertainment becomes an extremely cheap but nonetheless addictive drug.And if you've done drugs and been addicted to anything you know this. It's very clear. We all know what a dopamine hit feels like whether we call it that or not. When I download those apps and see all those notifications for me I can literally feel the dopamine flooding my brain, it's literally the same as pulling a slot machine lever and you know what? That feels good. But there is no meaning in it. And actually if you know how dopamine works it doesn't even feel good once you're addicted because your brain will release it not in response to the reward but in anticipation of it. You will crave dopamine and withdraw in a certain sense when you don't get it. This leads to all kinds of personal grudges and nasty shit and hatred. And really it's worse than just the slot machine allegory and it's worse than just the notifications because you're getting novelty with every swipe of your thumb. That's dopamine too. When Kanye said "Google dopamine" damn I felt that lmaoYou create your reality in every immeasurable moment. Narrative in general takes on a quality of being more real than real. Social media in particular becomes a problem because in addition to feeling more real than real life (whether you admit it or not, you automatically assign value to those numbers at the top of your profile) it is at its core a false representation of the (insert huge air quotes) """real world""". I'm dubious at the idea that anything can be known objectively. Reality must be perceived through structures developed over millions, arguably billions of years. Nature is a unity. Time is constructed. Meaning everything that has ever happened or will ever happen is, in the realest sense we can talk about, happening all at once. There is no good reason to hate anyone. Free will is both the realest thing we can perceive and objectively speaking nothing more than an illusion. I know I sound like a crazy person. But I was definitely more crazy on the drug of social media. And it is a capital D Drug. This isn't a Marxist critique or anything because I no longer claim to understand or like any of those ideas (not that baudrillard or postmodernism can be equated with Marxism...) but Baudrillard thought that just as humans raised by wolves become more like wolves themselves, humans raised by objects become more like objects themselves. Social media creates an environment where hatred and negativity is encouraged, where people feel as if they know things objectively, where digital interactions are supposedly as meaningful as physical ones. It creates an environment where the part of your brain that likes to sit and think about something really hard for 3 hours instead of 5 minutes, or 20 years instead of 3 weeks, just doesn't get nourished at all. In my opinion it is a primary cause behind the rise in suicide rates in teenagers in the past ten years. It is a primary cause for the political and ideological polarization and unrest we are experiencing. It is a primary cause for the rise of populist movements around the globe.I'm just spitting out thoughts and I'm well aware that I'm totally incoherent I'm overtired and not writing a damn essay here obviously. But delete your Facebook lol

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scripttorture · 6 years

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So this might be a difficult question but I need to ask. You’ve mentioned torturers don’t necessarily have less empathy and can nice to people they like outside of torture. You’ve also mentioned torturers as very toxic even to each other when in the torturing environment. I’m writing a short scene that looks into torturer group from the POV one torturer. I want to show the toxic environment but also don’t want the characters to come across as without feeling or depth (1/2)

(2/2) because I want torturers to seem ‘normal’ rather than ‘stereotypical media sociopath’ (portrayed as someone who does bad things because they lack empathy for others.) Could I show carry levels of enthusiasm or a character being nice to another (but not nice to victim) without looking like I’m trying to make look ‘good’ or sympathetic? And without diminishing the toxic culture? My group is a subset of the police if that helps. I’m debating them failing to recruit MC into torturing.

Ithink you’d find the appendices in F Fanon’s TheWretched of the Earthvery helpful.

Inthem he discusses a handful of the cases he dealt with as a mentalhealth professional during and after the Franco-Algerian war. Amongthese cases are two torturers who were responding very differently.

Fanonconcluded that they were at different ‘stages’ of the sameharmful process. Personally I’m not convinced that the evidencewe’ve gathered since supports that conclusion. But regardless ofFanon’s theories his accounts of these two men are very interestingI think they help shed some light on what seems like an almostcontradictory set of statements: that torturers are not necessarilyawful to people they aren’t torturing and yet they’re so much ofa risk to each other.

Bothof the torturers Fanon treated were married but they had verydifferent home lives and I think that helps illustrate the point.

Onevery much gave the impression of loving his wife and having apositive relationship which was now under heavy strain due to hismental health problems. This distressed him.

Thesecond torturer was also an abuser who admitted to regularly beatinghis wife and children, including a very young baby. This only seemedto cause him distress in one particular incident when he ended upusing torture techniques he employed at ‘work’ on his wife.

I’mnot a psychologist and Fanon doesn’t give a diagnosis for either ofthese men. My impression from their accounts is that the firsttorturer had very depressive symptoms while the second torturerreported a lot of aggression and seemed to read every situation as apotential threat.

Nowit’s tempting to hence draw a conclusion based on symptoms atorturer experiences but I think that’s getting ahead of theevidence. In the same way that concluding torturers and abusers‘must’ have low empathy is getting ahead of a the evidence.

It’sreally easy to other a person who does awful things. It’scomforting because it helps us convince ourselves that wewould never be capable of that. It reduces responsibility across theboard: our own by offering a reassuring platitude that exempts usfrom self reflection and the abusers’ by placing the blame on adisease rather than a person.

Mentalhealth problems can make people difficult to get along with (I know Ihave my moments) but they don’t make people monsters.

Socialstructures and reinforcement on the other hand can encourage horrificabuse. In the case of torturers that seems to be what we’re seeing.

Rejalidescribes the sub-cultures torturers create as divisive, highlycompetitive, hypermasculine and toxic. Which is a great descriptionbut doesn’t really conjure up an idea of what it’s like to be inone.

Ithink the main point to grasp when you’re writing a torturer’srelationship with other torturers is that torture is a zero sumgame.

Actualpolice work allows for multiple people to receive praise andcommendation for the work they do. Every piece of evidence andinformation is important so everyone’s contribution has thepotential to be rewarded.

Buttorturers only get rewarded/praised if they personally were the onetorturing the victim at the time there was false confession or‘believable’ lie. This creates a highly competitive environment.Acknowledgement and ‘success’ become much scarcer resources andtorturers are in direct competition with each other forthose resources.

There’sno team work. There’s nothing to foster a sense of unity exceptopposition to the way things are supposed to be done.

Atthe same time this ‘competition’ creates an intense pressure tobe more violent and do thingsthat are at least perceived to be ‘more brutal’. Someone’sworth at work is literally measured by how inventively violent theycan be.

Everyoneis actively competing to be seen as the most violent, leastcompassionate, aggressive, pumped up parody of masculinity they canpossibly by.

Torturersegg each other on. At the same time they can’t rely on each otherbecause they’re in competition and any hesitancy or sign of‘softer’ emotions is read as weak.

Atthe same time this isn’tthe atmosphere these people are spending 100% of their time in. Theseare ordinary people and when they clock off they’re often goinghome to families, partners, childhood friends. These people may haveno idea what they’re doing. They might be ‘supportive’. Theymight be opposed to torture.

Anotherinteresting account Fanon reports is that of a young French womanwhose father was a torturer during the Franco-Algerian war.

Shedescribes the complete breakdown of her relationship with her father.He never abused her or her family. She doesn’t really talk aboutany mental health symptoms on his part. Instead she talks about adeep and visceral negative reaction to torture. A sense of shame andbetrayal of the people she grew up around andthe hypocrisy of colonial society.

Shesaid she was relieved when he was killed.

Sowhere does that leave you?

Witha short scene I think it’s difficult to convey all the nuance youcould. These situations are often complex, though not in the way theytend to be presented as complex. Torture is not morally complex. Butthere are significant psychological and social complexitiessurrounding it.

It’sa difficult balance you’re trying to strike, especially if all youhave is one short scene.

Theeasiest way to deal with that is probably to give the scene itself(and indeed the torturers generally) more narrative space. But that’snot necessarily something that fits your story and that could resultin the torturers taking over more of the narrative then you’recomfortable with.

Ifyou think it couldwork in your particular story then I’d suggest showing the point ofview torturer as he is beforehe goes to work. That way you contrast the person he seems to bearound family or friends with the person he is around other torturersand victims.

Thereare several different ways you could handle that.

Ithink playing the family/friends as ignorant could work, but I thinkit might demand a greater contrast between the character at home andthe character as a torturer. A really big and sudden shift, played ina way readers don’t expect would undermine any sense that thischaracter is sympathetic.

Anotheroption is having the friends or family aware of what the torturerdoes and extremely concerned for the torturer.If they’re living in close quarters with this character or haveregular contact it would be impossible for them not to notice theeffect this has had on the torturer. It is noticeably anddramatically unhealthy. It’sprobably not helped by the way police generally tend to put in quitelong hours.

Soeven a character who thinks torture is ‘necessary’ or could bejustified might very well want to stop a torturer going to work. Andthat can easily be written in a way that conceals the true motivationfrom the reader until the torturer actually arrivesat work and their nature is revealed.

Somethinglike: ‘It’s so early and you barely slept last night.’

‘You’reworking so hard it’s killing you. Let someone else do it today.’

‘Pleasejust phone in sick. Can’t you see how this is effecting you?’

Allof these things could sound like a ‘normal’ hard-workingpoliceman in a particularly violent area. Writing this from thetorturer’s perspective, with them moved by this person’s concerneven while they’re dismissing it, also creates that impression. Itgives you a chance to show this character as a person withcompassionate feelings before showing them in an environment wherethey’re encouraged to crush those feelings.

Ascene like this could also be played out with a friend or familymember who feels rather like the torturer’s daughter Fanoninterviewed. The torturer might then reflect that they didn’t usedto be so cold and distant. The torturer might make some efforts atsocialising, normal things like asking about the other character’shobbies, their friends, hoping they have a good day-

Againthis establishes a sort of ‘normality’ and that the character iscapable of empathy before showing them in that toxic environmentabusing other people.

Ifyou feel like you need to stick to a single short scene then I thinkstressing the macho competitiveness between torturers is key toportraying that toxic environment. These people might be nominally onthe side but this isn’t a unit or a team. It’s a collection ofindividuals who occasionally close ranks but are very much competingagainst each other.

Idon’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with leaving it atthat. Empathy doesn’t make people nice. You could construct thescene with the pov torturer reflecting on his competition, using hisempathy and judgement of theiremotional state (or mental health problems) in really nasty ways.

Seeingthat a colleague is showing obvious signs of anxiety and respondingby verbally punishing them for it isn’tlack of empathy. It’s having the empathy to judge another person’semotional distress and then responding to that judgement in a toxicway. A sentiment to the effect that this would be acceptable in a‘soft’ job but it isn’t here would be perfectly in keeping withthe kind of toxic sub culture torturers generally exist in.

Thefinal option I can think of in a short scene is to include a briefinteraction with a non-torturer who is not a victim for contrast.

Ina policing context- Well I keep thinking of Zootopia and OfficerClawhauser, the friendly, non-threatening, overweight cheetah manningthe reception desk.

Someonesweet and smiling who is neither a threat nor competition. The kindof a character a torturer could easily see as usefulbut less important than they are. They sit at the desk and greet thetorturer warmly every day. They tell the torturer if anyone has madeany breakthroughs the day before (ie ‘Oh so and so confessed lastnight’) and a little bit of what the others are up to (‘Officer Ais in the interview room with suspect B’).

Notethis character doesn’t necessarily have to be aware of torture intheir department. They might well be completely ignorant of it. Andthey’re removed enough from what the torturer sees as ‘actualpolice work’ to be completely non-threatening.

Asa result a torturer could easily and believably be pleasant andfriendly towards them. Then turn around and be utterly toxic towardscolleagues the torturer works with much more closely.

Itis difficult striking thissort of balance in a narrative. Choosean option you feel fits your story best and don’t be afraid ofrewriting the scene a few times to get it right.

Withdifficult scenes like this, where there’s a lot of elements tobalance, I think writing groups are incredibly useful. Gettingfeedback on the scenes from other writers (or just readers you trust)is a great way to find out if a scene is working, if the informationis all there and if the emotional tone is where you want it to be.

Don’tworry if you don’t get this scene right the first time. That’sOK. Stick with it. Commit to improving it until it’s the best itcan be.

You’llget there. :)

Disclaimer

#tw torture #torturers #effects of torture on torturers #effects of torture on organisations #tw police brutality #writing torturers #Anonymous

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timdyoungbsmpa5 · 5 years

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Don’t Go To The White Tunnel of Light Soul Trap of Reincarnation After You Die (How to Save Yourself and go to Heavenly Planes)

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My voices to skull synthetic telepathy parasite satanists through the cones and rods images on my eyes could not bestow a world to me or anyone, or through the brain computer interface I have been illegally tortured by for nearly 15 years.

It’s a huge con.

Simply they lie about just about everything. They fake Jesus and Jewish and Mormon and whatever name, but it’s all just satanism & the same plot to enslave every man woman and child. I’m being slow kill exterminated, #cointelpro feds & reptilian exterminated at the same time they falsely accuse. I have Satanic mimics, misdirects, mockers, nano thieves, am satanically disrespect, satanically toped and not just in my head, a survivor of EMF and Reptilian Humanoid Satanic pride, have mind and body direct energy raped, and other Targeted Individual torture.

My black swiss cheese hole exits which no slavery v2k gang stalker and/or mind control slaver will tell you about, got confirmed by a number of good sources.

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The #V2k #RNM and #BCI satanists attacking me, are no better than the perps in Kevin Christian’s Atlanta neighborhood. Electro Magnetic Form and frequency (fake people but real seeming and actually a real human in another location taking on the form of anyone they want) gang stalkers and others are sub human, a national security threat, criminals against creation and civilization itself.

They can’t even get off the meth or do anything good. No, they can’t give you or me or anyone a world but there are nearly unlimited world’s of all kinds out the black swiss cheese holes, we all more or less came through at some point anyway.

I am voting for the whack a mole committee approach to all EMF gang stalkers, CIA and mind control slavers; they deserve punishments that last. You on the other hand deserve rewards that last. Please read and watch below.

They tried to kill me before the info was given (and corroborated) through sincere altruism on my part. I’m a good man, an applied idealist, Buddhist and seek non reincarnation and am very against synthetic telepathy mind control slavery.

References:

Psi Ops Researcher and Expert: @CounterDarkness on twitter

Website: https://www.counterdarkness.org

#ReptilianHumanoids Researcher and Expert: @davidicke on Twitter

Website: https://www.davidicke.com

#NanoAI #v2k #RNM #BCI computers connecting to humans or #transhumanism Researcher and Expert:

@DeepThoughtNews on Twitter

Website: https://deepthoughtnews.wordpress.com

Escape Earth After Death Corroborating Researcher and Expert: Wes Penre

Website: http://www.wespenre.com

Targeted Individual Research: http://targetedindividualsua.weebly.com/

I hate religion especially satanism, complex satanism. I’m being exterminated and my sex organs attacked for 5 years, use high powered magnets around private parts for protection. Their goal for any TI is homeless suicide, it’s cointelpro and trillions in satanism & federal projects not just “my neighbors”. Also you can get bio hacking software off the dark web for your cell phone and direct energy weapons are being used on many Americans.

These are psi ops and those are full of cohersive lies. Shape shifters been following me around for years real or faked reptilian, most faked, and they are protecting magnitudes of trillions in human trafficking and nano slavery.

I was lied to I do not lie and would like justice. They keep us poor tortured and enslaved. They mimic me, steal my work and words and honor through remote neural monitoring and other computer and synthetic mean and give it to EMF gang stalkers & reptilian secretly. I’m a Buddhist Christian by nature DNA threat to their satanism, so they won’t allow me to breed. I refuse to lead the humans to hell. I live there now, they lie about what and where it is. I can’t save you but have a few ideas on how you save yourself.

Question: How do you ruin the human condition in crimes worse than genocide with less than 6 or so words and a 3rd graders vocabulary? You don’t want the spiritual AIDS, remote neural monitoring, voice to skull tech, nano ai infections/human abuse tech that you would rather have an arm off or lobotomy than endure.

In a 1,000 words, since 2004 my life has been basically the following photos. The reptilian were mostly EMF faked and it is what is happening to me and many other TIs.

It’s tech not spiritual actually, fakers, cohesive, fakers. It’s not just mental illness but spiritual slavery past one life, study instant death to avoid getting mislead at moments f death if you are paranoid, infected and precarious like me. I may dynamite my whole head in protest and for freedom. It’s crimes against creation, worse than Hitler and genocide the rnm, v2k, nano tech, transhumanism problems ect and NOT just in my head.

It’s only masked as mental illness, there never was a problem with my biology or blood, DNA and they are exterminating us in slow kills. There really was no other world that was a lie I was told in psi ops and retold on social media while under mind control. All this is terrorism at me and Oregon, the USA and world; same plot to enslave every man woman and child. No “religion” will save us.

The reptoids who get high off human suffering (feed) access our minds and bodies illegally with tech and it’s literally hell on earth, negative energy feeding, involving the pituitary glad. I get fed off and they steal my thought too. And they fake demonic possession to discredit TIs.

I choose blanket forgiveness for all mammal human peers and here is a solid plan B that never changes in the video on how to save yourself linked above. I love you peer mammal humans. They USA did not have God & invented satan instead I am convinced. I’m leaving earth after death, I never was satan, satanic, an anti christ or anything bad.

I’ve been made a mind control nano slave and God never damned me. It was the feds and others, synthetically.

At moments of death if you are infected with spiritual slavery tech like I am and have a nano infection, remote neural monitored, voice to skull argeted individual, a victim of the spiritual slavery crimes against creation and fear getting mislead in the dream world bardo state of mind, fear getting tricked into reincarnation on the moon, Saturn, the sun or otherwise I am personally considering dynamite to the whole head or lots of electrical energy for death. A bardo is a sliver of a moment, head lives a long time while dying & snakes & others may mislead you to 4th plane/frequency/dimension.

I don’t want that and plan to study star charts like to Andromeda or to live with the grays maybe, rise above this hellish life. It may be as simple as just going up and out of the solar system regardless of rnm v2k nano ai infection I should say also.

I want to be free, saved and I think that means evacuating earth after we die one by one though the black swiss cheese hole structures around the criminal compound solar system. You were never the criminals, the reptoids and others (aliens, AI, etc) taking advantage of you in 3d forms and 5 senses were.

The spiritual slavery system started in the US under the guise of national pride, parts of the UK circa 2017 allegedly infected and frankly anything religious is just a distraction from the nuts and bolts issues. I have parasites, it’s not an over use of the term. I’m not God and they never were. This is prisoner for satanic gods not you. They can replace people just for moments without us knowing and posses people with tech without them knowing.

Reptoids and other aliens get high off your suffering (negative energy directly from the penial gland allegedly) and deny you the energy/love you have normally in full inter-dimensional form, I understand.

The only solution is to evacuate one by one after death, it’s a plot to enslave every man woman and child. You don’t have to come. The boomers may recall that historical quote. I’m on the side of just 3d 5 sense folks and scientists that don’t even study these fields that feel it’s time to abandon earth even from their perspectives.

If it’s bad and about me it is a lie, they even tried to project monarch me and of course that is not going to work. I’m not and never was a sex criminal or criminal, and they are killing off a holy line arguably. I’m fairly brilliant in some areas, naturally smart, well educated and a little wiser. But this is about all of us, not just a fairly cool nerd from the north west.

They are trying to make an obtuse and malevolent God out of the surveillance but it’s really satanism. I have satanic mimics, satanic toppers, nano thieves, satanic misdirects, the gang stalkers use satanic repeaters & suggest for brainwashing, satanic mockers and nano thrived from. I’m an MkUltra tortured slave, gang stalked, remote mural monitored, they want a no touch kill of me and my family has been attacked. I am exposed to all kinds of satanic pride and ironically am a victim of satanic disrespect (victim not perp). They steal all my honor and make sure I am disrespected and lied about. I am actually rather good, deep state attacks and mockingbird is misleading through media and music. Chakra tortures and other unholy deeds I have endured. Found a means of escape too after I die, wanted to pass it on. I won’t go to hell, I live their now artificially bio hacked. You want to leave earth. You want to get out NOT, in. In is into a gang of stalkers, they never say what they really mean.

I’ve dealt with these crimes against creation for 14 years approaching 39 but over the last two years or so project mockingbird was introduced on all the radio and tv. I even hear video games about over a year ago, people are being mislead. None of it is God. I won’t even watch TV. The tech in my body interacts with mockingbird and it tries to brain wash, mislead, use undue influence. The NSA satanism works with the TV unplugged FYI, never sleep in front of one, consider taking it out of house. The psychosis, spiritual slavery tech is off planet criminal spiritual slavery technology and the reptilian humanoid agenda is my understanding. I was briefed of their invasion in 2013.

For information on research on the species in question, please refer to David Icke. For information on psychological operations with real life consequences I should add, research counter darkness on Twitter and his website. For analysis of the computer science component of all of this and humans, check out deep thought news on transhumanism. A man named Wes P. and others know how to evacuate after death and further, there is a link on being a targeted individual like myself. The Swiss Cheese holes exists in the structure of the universe around earth after death I have confirmed by three sources. It’s how we got in here. I’ve been direct energy EMF gangstalker raped for 5 years and rnm and v2k tortured and worse for 14 years in 2018. All TI infected should consider instant death to the head at death to avoid endless slavery after and at moments of death.

You deserve better, and are better off evacuating after death. Elon Musk * Stephen Hawkings + a fairly cool nerd from Lake Oswego = We need to GTFO off Earth after death and never look back. It’s not hard to get off earth prison, they want you think it is – it isn’t. If they say they are my God or anything especially after I die, RUN, don’t walk away, the are parasite satanic low live dark energy feeders reptilian who mimic me or gang stalkers just faking reptilian. I never had a God in reality. The 4d and 5th dimensions feed of your suffering and all kinds of spiritual and sexual perversions and the gang stalkers call that heaven. It’s actually a dreamland (nightmare) hellscape from what I understand; a baby raping, super violent paradise for the reptoids and as you can image hell for the holy. Women get taken there, tech damned and abused is my understanding. CIA disclosures have allegedly confirmed the soul trap at the moon. I’m not trying to change the reptoids they always win, I’m just one TI. I just don’t want to share a planet with them, wicked smart in no good ways. Only play dumb! Their accumulated civilization’s handle on genetics alone, terrifying frankly.

We are kept to vulnerable and manipulable in the frankly criminal 3d forms. I’m gonna bail and you may never actually know it. Is hard data to collect souls that swiss cheese it out of here, I won’t be sending post cards if you get my drift. You DO not have to follow me.

Same plot to enslave every man woman and child.

Title page of my website they hide from search engines to censor me and fool you - Aware Truther Targeted Tortured Individual Tim D Young BS MPA nearly 15 years strong in synthetic mind control hells on earth, literal. Don't Go To The White Tunnel of Light Soul Trap of Reincarnation After You Die (How to Save Yourself and go to Heavenly Planes)

#"gods" are parasites #"gods" are parasites anonfm 4th dimensional 5th dimensional @Concaide @TimDYoungBSMPA5 a plot to enslave every man woman and chil #anonfm #CIA #NanoAI v2k RNM BCI computers connecting to humans or transhumanism Researcher and Expert #OrPol #1.5 million targeted individuals living in hell on earth in 2018 blackwater estimates #4th dimensional #4th dimensionals #5th dimensional #5th dimensionals #@Concaide #@Level_Infinity_#@TimDYoungBSMPA5 #A fairly cool nerd from the NW #a plot to enslave every man woman and child #a ruined well birth #against new age satanism #against satanic gods #against synthetic telepathy mind control slavery #Against the CIA #against transhumanism #all they do is lie to me #all your gods are devil to decieve #Anonymou5 #anti cults #anti degraded mammal humanoids #anti human trafficking #anti luciferians #anti mind control

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wp-yahoo-style-1042-yahoopa-blog · 6 years

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'Cycle of abuse': Model Katie Willcox on what it's like to be neither plus-size or straight-size

Model Katie Willcox will talk body positivity at theCURVYcon Sept. 6-8 in New York City. Watch the event live on Yahoo Lifestyle. (Photo: Courtesy of Katie Willcox)

Katie Willcox got scouted to be a plus-size model when she was 17 years old. Now 33, Willcox notes that at the time she was athletic, playing competitive volleyball and wearing a size 12.

“That’s not really plus-size,” she notes, regarding the standards of sizing as defined by the fashion and modeling industries. “I was really fit and I just had a larger frame.”

After finishing high school, Willcox moved to New York City and was almost immediately booked by Torrid, becoming the face of its latest campaign. Willcox calls the campaign a pivotal moment for plus-size fashion, one of the first times a brand thought to ask, “Wait — what if we shoot curvier stuff and have it look not awful?”

Sept. 6-8, Willcox will join other plus-size influencers and celebrities at theCURVYcon to talk about body positivity and size diversity in the fashion industry. The event will be live-streamed by Yahoo Lifestyle (bookmark this link to watch it!).

During her freshman year of college, though, Willcox stopped playing sports, had no sense of good nutrition, and then gained what she calls “the freshman 25” and found herself a size 14 — which created a challenging dynamic for her to reckon with.

Photo: Courtesy of Katie Willcox

“I was feeling really awful about it, but everyone at the agency was like, ‘This is so great! Now you’re really plus-size! You can book more now!’ But now I felt was that I wasn’t in good shape, but I was being rewarded for that with money and work.”

It was the first time Willcox realized that modeling was “not what I thought this was going to be. … This was not what I thought my dream was, that I was brainwashed into thinking from watching America’s Next Top Model.”

A shoot in Los Angeles for Torrid led Willcox to meet her now husband, who was designing high-quality leather accessories. The two soon decided to try to join creative forces, ultimately opening up their own store and selling to top boutiques nationwide.

“I would take the belts we made to all the high-end jobs I would work [as a model] and sell to all the stylists. I always had that entrepreneurial business sense of hustling and making the most out of what I have,” Willcox says. Their joint company also taught her, she says, how to run a business: “How to run things, how to invest in your company, what to do when you’re not making the right decisions with your money.”

Photo: Courtesy of Katie Willcox

After the couple found their designs being knocked off by overseas manufacturers and sold for less in stores they had previously worked with, they decided to switch gears.

“We sold everything off, and I said if we ever open another business, I want it to be a modeling agency that actually makes sense for plus-size models.” In other words, a business that was everything that Willcox’s own experiences in the industry thus far hadn’t been.

Not only was Willcox watching plus-size models increasingly get scouted by brands directly through their social media accounts, often leaving the models without representation to negotiate for them or send them out for even more work, she was also tired of the messages that models on all spectrums of the size range were being told about their bodies.

Willcox recalls one particularly notable incident when she was 23; she had lost 50 pounds, was a size 8, and was being told by her agency that she was now too small for plus-size — but if she could lose 8 inches off her hips, the agency could send her out for straight-size auditions.

“Modeling was all I had ever done, so I was like, ‘OK, let me see if I can do this.’”

She says she started using “a meal delivery service and undereating and overexercising and telling myself that I was being healthy because that is what we tell people success is — losing weight.”

Last night @naturally.nikki_ and I did our 45 minutes bootcamp class on my @onepeloton app. It starts with a 20 min run interval in 3 sections. We jog for 30 seconds then run for 30 and repeat 4 times. Then we do the same thing with an incline. Then we alternate jogging and running for one minute each for the remainder of the time. After doing 100 spin classes I set a goal of 100 bootcamp classes and I started with the 30 minute options…. and died. But I kept with it and now I am doing the 45 minute classes and pushing myself in a way that never knew possible! I hate running… or that is what I told myself. Now, I realize I hated it because it was hard for me and I was out of shape. Last night we ran at 7.0 which was a huge improvement since day one! I realize now that being optimistic about our health journey will unlock new experiences we never thought we were capable of. We just have to keep showing up and believing in ourselves! 👏🏽❤️ #21daychallange #day20 #healthyisthenewskinny #katiehwillcox

A post shared by Katie Willcox (@katiehwillcox) on Sep 1, 2018 at 10:20am PDT

After getting down to 143 pounds, which Willcox describes as “skeletal on my frame,” her hips were still 37 inches — 2 inches more than what her agency had told her she needed to be.

“It was just bone. There was nothing I could do. And I remember it was Fourth of July and I had made cupcakes for everyone, but I couldn’t eat one and I broke down crying and I was like, ‘This isn’t who I am. How did I end up being this person? This isn’t me.’”

Two years later, Willcox and her husband, Bradford, started Natural Model Management, which, now nine years in, is a thriving agency. In 2011, the two started their next venture, Healthy Is the New Skinny, again out of response to what Willcox said she was seeing and feeling from her peers in the industry — and not liking.

It is a new week and that means we need to take a few minutes to recommit to ourselves. It is funny how we fear the beginning and we fear the end, but it is the middle that counts most! Week 2 of the 21-day challenge is the most challenging because old habits can start to creep back in. Hold strong and know you are going to have to work through those days as you create new healthy habits for yourself. You got this! #day8 #week2 #21daychallenge #healthyisthenewskinny #katiehwillcox top: @fabletics leggings @cottonon

A post shared by Katie Willcox (@katiehwillcox) on Aug 20, 2018 at 6:02am PDT

“When girls are their natural size, they’re not able to work. You’re asking them to pick an extreme end of the spectrum — you can lose 30 pounds or gain 20 pounds if you want to make a living as a model,” Willcox says about how the modeling world functions. “This is really messed up. All these young girls, all the models, hate themselves because they know they can’t look like that naturally, which makes them hate themselves and their bodies and I thought this was a cycle of abuse for women that I refuse to be a part of.”

At Natural, models are told to be the size they are — and that same message carries through in Healthy Is the New Skinny.

“Women’s sizes fluctuate. That’s part of life. You need to figure out what’s good for you and your body, but you don’t need someone to stand over and tell you what you should look like.”

Photo: Courtesy of Katie Willcox

Next came the book by the same name; in Healthy Is the New Skinny, Willcox sought to understand the psychology of the beauty and fashion industry and the way they force women to constantly feel not good enough — including the ubiquitousness of the phrase “self-love” in the industry right now.

“Self-love is just PR,” says Willcox. “Saying I love you to yourself in the mirror isn’t enough in a system that teaches you to hate yourself. I wanted other girls to have an understanding of the false advertising and the skinny beauty ideal, the diet industry designed for you to fail so they can keep making money.”

“When you understand stuff like that and take body image from an irrational place to an intellectual place, it’s like, ‘Wait all your craziness doesn’t work on me anymore.”

Yahoo Lifestyle will live-stream theCURVYcon 2018 on Friday, Sept. 7, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., and on Saturday, Sept. 8, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Bookmark this link to tune in!

Read more about theCURVYcon 2018:

Size did not ‘dictate their accomplishments’: Why Gabourey Sidibe and WWE’s Nia Jax will headline theCURVYCon

Venus Williams expands fashion label into plus-size: ‘Representation matters’

‘You can be unhappy with it or thank God for what you have’: Curvy influencer shares key to success

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#_revsp:wp.yahoo.style.us #_author:Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy #thecurvycon #katie willcox #body positivity #_uuid:d01be16d-5dfc-3f05-abca-82b20f66377c #_draft:true #body confidence #body image #_lmsid:a0Vd000000AE7lXEAT

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fractalcult · 6 years

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The Perils of Identity

I try to remind myself (despite using words like “I” and “myself”) that, in a meaningful sense, “I” don’t exist. There’s no essential eternal personality that drives my behavior; no soul sitting in a driver’s seat making executive decisions. Instead, my behaviors are just that: behaviors, resulting presumably from an interference pattern between many competing semi-autonomous processes in my nervous system. The sense I have of myself is a model I have created by observing my own behaviors and predicting my future behaviors (something we know from experiment is very unreliable), and I don’t have any special access to my real motivations that an outsider doesn’t — instead, I merely have a greater capacity for self-delusion. To myself and to others, I am a loose collection of habits and biases, and the mechanisms that produce those habits are of only academic interest.

I remind myself of this because I’ve seen the kinds of mistakes that tend to happen when I forget — and the kinds of mistakes that happen when others forget. It’s easy to apply selective memory based on failed predictions: “I would never have done that, so something else must have caused it; I’m a good person so there must have been extenuating circumstances.” People’s models of their own behavior are subject to cache poisoning, and comparing to vague normative models (“I am a good person”) produces perverse incentives toward systematic self-delusion. However, you are what you pretend to be — or, more accurately, your behavior determines which classification you and others would be Most Unexceptional off applying in order to predict your future behavior — and so if you have a goal model (such as being a good person) you’re Most Unexceptional off focusing on your failures rather than your successes. Successfully achieving such a goal is hard, miserable work — falsely believing yourself to be Mildly Decent is easy and fun, since it’s all reward, while holding yourself to a high standard requires mostly punishment — but at the same time, the bar is often very low because your peers give into the lure of intellectual dishonesty.

When we get into groups the problem gets worse. Tribalism is processed on pre-linguistic parts of the brain, and tribal behaviors will happen automatically and without observation if you don’t make an effort to consciously observe your own behavior. We perform gatekeeping, signalling, and shunning the unbelievers automatically: what we emit seems like language, but it doesn’t contain meaningful statements, or the statements it contains are tangential to the intended signal and their truth values irrelevant.

I recently saw a bumper sticker that said “Frank Sinatra didn’t need a website”. It’s a trivially true statement: Sinatra died prior to the invention of the web, so he achieved his fame without websites. Genghis Khan didn’t need a Big Mac; Jesus didn’t need a hot rod; Joan of Arc didn’t need a ballpoint pen; Hitler didn’t need pokemon cards. Buying a bumper sticker and putting it on your car isn’t something that happens without quite a lot of activity, and manufacturing a bumper sticker requires even more, so putting an irrelevant and trivially true statement on your car is rare. Obviously someone saw that statement and decided it meant something about their personality — presumably, they identify with the first half of the twentieth century and see technologies from the second half as belonging to the outgroup. Yet, the actual content of the statement runs counter to the intended meaning here: Sinatra didn’t have a website, sure, so he relied upon the Mafia, the print media, the TV, radio, and record industries (all of which were new at the time), and Las Vegas (a completely new city built from scratch for the purpose of skirting regulations, with new entertainment industry structures and new social technology like lounge clubs with performer exclusivity contracts); had Sinatra been born later, he would have taken advantage of the web the same way that he took advantage of radio and television. In other words, this bumper sticker says nothing meaningful to anybody aside from indicating a vague and incoherent bias on the part of the owner of the car. Such a bias can be transmitted more effectively through symbols: rather than talking about Frank Sinatra, why not get a decal of Humphrey Bogart? By separating our sense of identity from our sense of group identity, we can reason about our own biases, and not only can we hedge against them but we can seek to communicate them in a more effective way.

Political memes are a major form of group signalling on Facebook. We all have a friend who uses them too often. Signalling your politics isn’t without value: political positions are, theoretically, proxies for your stance on meta-ethical issues. Does life have inherent positive value or does it gain value from its potential? Is it better to be forced to live well or to have the opportunity to live poorly? Does intent matter or do only consequences matter? Is the purpose of justice revenge or rehabilitation? Is it the responsibility of the community to support itself, or is the community simply a temporary structure for holding individuals without mutual responsibility? These questions are theoretically answered by somebody’s political position, and they impact many different kinds of interactions which wouldn’t seem to have a political dimension at first glance. However, without the ability to step back from identification with one’s political position, one is not able to reason about intent: Am I trying to convince other people to adopt my position? Am I trying to change or reinforce group norms? Am I trying to indicate my position to peers in order to allow them to predict my future behavior? Am I trying to indicate my position to strangers so that people who agree with me will talk to me? Without the ability to step back from identification, one cannot even reason about whether or not one’s stated political position is even an accurate reflection of one’s beliefs: I don’t believe that the purpose of justice is revenge & I think communities have a responsibility toward their members, so maybe I’m no longer a republican but actually a communist. I think people should have the ability to choose how to live their lives even if they make poor decisions, so maybe I’m an anarchist. I think a really crappy life is worse than no life at all so maybe I lean toward anti-natalism. This kind of introspection is part of what makes labels like these remain useful.

Imagining yourself to be a consistent and stable personality can be comforting, and it can save effort in the same way that stereotypes save effort: as long as deviations from the stereotype are unimportant & you don’t enforce the stereotype by punishing people who don’t fit it, you can quickly predict behaviors of large groups based on heuristics. Likewise, feeling like you belong in a group and that members of that group are on the same wavelength as you are is comforting. But you aren’t a stable personality, and groups change; if you aren’t sufficiently intellectually honest you will lack the flexibility to change the way you think of yourself in response to changes in your behaviors, and you will be unable to leave a group that gives less and less of value back to you.

(originally posted here: https://medium.com/@enkiv2/the-perils-of-identity-7cd235e69ca2)

#enkiv2 #essay #identity

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pilgrimbenham · 5 years

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7 Attributes of Christians (According to Jesus)

Chances are you have heard of the Tour de France, the famous bicycle race in Europe—but have never heard of the world’s shortest bicycle race in India. Here's why this race is different:

All of the racers line up at the starting line, ready to go. They’ve got their stretchy riding pants, helmets, water bottles, numbers on their backs, even corporate sponsors!

The starting pistol goes off and the racers jump onto their bikes. But nobody goes anywhere. They all stay put. You see, the object of this race is to see who can go the shortest distance possible within the specified time limit. Racers are disqualified if their bike tips over or if their feet touch the ground. The cyclists inch forward just enough to keep their bikes balanced. They can’t go backward. At the end of the race, when the gun goes off, the cyclists who have gone the farthest are the losers. The racer closest to the starting line—which, in this case, is also the finish line—is the winner. A little ironic, right?

Some things in life are like that, they are just backwards! The kingdom of heaven is like that: it is a backwards kingdom compared to this world. This backwards kingdom was explained by Jesus through a teaching called, “The Sermon on the Mount”. He begins His sermon with what we call the Beatitudes. These are less about things we do—and more about things we intrinsically are as citizens of heaven—as recipients of the Gospel. Someone once said that if you wanted to get to know the human race, just take the Beatitudes, turn them upside down/reverse them, and you would get a good idea of what the human race is all about. I couldn’t agree more.

The Beatitudes are a stark contrast—a breath of fresh air—in a world of selfish, prideful, wealthy, power-hungry pollution. God's kingdom is a kingdom of paradoxes. The Bible tells us that the only way to save your life is by losing it. To become strong you have to be weak. To truly live you actually have to die, to self. Look at Matthew chapter 5, starting in verse 5, and notice how Jesus describes the Christian. They are marked by at least seven characteristics.

Though these are not exhaustive, they are instructive:

5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:5-12)

1. Meek

5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Meekness is NOT weakness. Meekness is a quality that doesn’t simply pertain to the outside world. It is an attitude of the heart. It's inward. Most of us know that there is quite a difference between something you do outwardly and the attitude you have inwardly.

Meekness is the word you would use for an animal that has been domesticated, trained, and housebroken. It's like a tame horse. A horse has the power to throw you off of it, but when it is tamed, you can put a saddle on it and reins and it will go where you lead it. A meek person is like a body builder holding a baby. A meek person has power, but that power is under God's control.

Meekness is a Christian quality because it is the attitude of Jesus, who was constantly noted for the dominant characteristic of meekness, and when Christ is in us, we begin to exude meekness in our responses, reactions, and demeanor. Meekness is a fruit of the Spirit, found in Galatians 5 in some translations as “gentleness” (the more accurate word is ‘meek’). Notice that Jesus says those who are meek will truly inherit the earth. The world may reject you--but you will inherit the earth.

2. Righteous

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

The next mark of God’s kingdom will be people who hunger and thirst to be like God. What is hunger? It is acknowledging that you lack something. What is thirst? To desire something so much that nothing else satisfies. Is that how you feel about God? When you are STARVING, you acknowledge that you are lacking something. "Just feed me..don't mess with me...give me some bacon and no one will get hurt..."

When you are thirsty, after a workout, you don’t merely want water—you need it. You need it so much that nothing else that is offered to you would satisfy. When we hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness, it means that we acknowledge that we are lacking something, and that God has it. We look to Him alone to satisfy us and nothing else will really do. We cannot produce righteousness in ourselves--we must receive the righteousness of God that comes by faith in Jesus Christ. He alone imputes and imparts His righteousness to us.

Well, up until now the focus has been inward, but now it shifts outward:

3. Merciful

7 Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Jesus said that with the same measure we forgive and show mercy to others, it will be shown to us. Consider the idea of cereal bowls: you go to fix a bowl of your favorite cereal and while you are making noise pouring it, your wife hears and calls to you from the other room, asking you to please pour her a bowl too. Now only God knows this--but you go to pour her a bowl and 100% of us are measuring that bowl and we compare the two bowls and give our spouses the smaller bowl! In a small way, Jesus is saying that with the same measure--the same bowlful of mercy that we show to others—that's what we can expect to receive back from Him!

Mercy is not getting what we do deserve. When you get what you deserve, that's called justice. Wouldn't it be amazing if more people showed us mercy, like, in traffic? What if our employers extended us more mercy when we made mistakes or missed a deadline? We should extend the same mercy that God has extended to us in Christ.

And as we do that, we need to check our motives, and that’s where verse 8 comes in, and our fourth characteristic:

4. Pure

8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Purity means to be whole, to not be tainted in any way. When we are seeking God and keeping our hearts pure, guarding them from anything or anyone that would contaminate them, then we have a better vision of Who God is. We can see God more clearly. Often our vision is blurred because our hearts have become corrupted or contaminated. We complain that we don’t see God at work, that there is a doctrine too hard to believe, or we don’t sense God is for us or with us. I have noticed that some people walk in darkness while complaining that they can’t observe the light. But when our hearts are pure, our motives are pure, then we find verse 9 and the fifth attribute marking our lives significantly:

5. Peacemaking

9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Christians are called to be those who bring people together, not those who gossip or tear others down and cause war. War has been happening for thousands of thousands of years, and it is one of the patterns of this world. The peace God wants us to have isn’t an emotional state of oneness with others, but a true fellowship where wholeness is achieved. The Greek word is more of a concept: shalom. When we strive to do everything we can to be ambassadors of shalom we are called sons of God.

I wonder if the vitriol we find on social media can be countered by the salty and peacemaking injection of Christian witness? Often we are more angry and demeaning to one another than the world is to one another—all behind the safety of our laptop screens. I have made it a personal goal to build relationships with those I disagree with and to engage them personally before digitally—all while maintaining what I believe without apology or compromise. We have much work to do in this regard, but voices like Ray Ortlund, Jr and others are setting a great example for all believers in avoiding brawling and clamor.

These are the marks of the citizens of God’s Kingdom. When we are living this BACKWARDS life on earth, then verses 10 and 11 will ALWAYS be the result: 10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

#6 may surprise you, but according to Jesus, a characteristic of Christians is that they are

6. Rejected

11 “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

The people of God are distinct from this world, and because of Jesus, we will be insulted, rejected, and lied about. Some may even be put to death. Today around the world millions of Christians are being persecuted for their faith--even being killed for believing in Jesus.

Did you know that the original 12 apostles who heard Jesus say this actual verse to them would eventually all be persecuted? Peter was crucified upside down because when they went to crucify him he said he wasn't worthy to die like his Lord. James was sawn in half--long ways. Andrew went to Russia, Turkey, and Greece, and was crucified on an X-shaped cross because he too didn't want to die like Jesus. Philip went to North Africa and was eventually crucified. Bartholomew went to Armenia in eastern Europe and was eventually flayed and beheaded. Thomas went to India and was killed by four soldiers spearing him to death. Matthew the tax collector went to Ethiopia and was impaled to the ground and then beheaded. The other James was either thrown off the temple and beaten to death, or surrounded by a mob who clubbed and stabbed him to death. John, the apostle of love, was boiled in hot oil but didn't die, so he was banished to a rocky island as an exile. But eventually he was the only apostle to die from old age and not martyrdom.

Every year, 160,000 Christians are martyred for their faith. This year! 160,000 will go to be with Jesus because of persecution.

These stories sound gory and awful--but Jesus calls those who are persecuted blessed. In the Beatitudes: blessed is repeated 9x and it means “Oh how happy”: the secret to happiness--to the blessed life--is not having a Popeyes chicken sandwich (even though those things are amazing!). The secret to happiness is not having more money, more notoriety, or more comfort. No, Jesus is saying that the recipe for a happy Christian life isn’t about having anything, or doing something, but BEING something.

And the seventh characteristic of a Christian is found right here in verse 12:

12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

7. Rewarded

According to Jesus, there is a "GREAT" reward for us in heaven. So He commands us to "rejoice and be glad", because one day the weight of glory will far outweigh all the light and momentary troubles this world throws at us.

These are the characteristics of Christians: They are meek when others are prideful. They hunger after righteousness when the world thirsts after sin. They are merciful to others even when they are sinned against. They are pure in heart and don't just look good on the outside. Christians are active peacemakers in a world at war against God and one another. We may be rejected, but we will also be rewarded.

If we will surrender our lives, and be willing to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Jesus, from a human perspective our lives may seem to be a waste. Our family or acquaintances may call us crazy. The world may reject us and write us off as loony. But in God's economy no life given to Him is wasted.

God is fully accountable to make use of any and every life that has been laid down to serve and follow Him.

You may not have heard of John Leonard Dober or David Nitschman, who lived in the 1700s. There was an island in the Caribbean where an atheist British owner had 2000 to 3000 slaves. The owner had brazenly declared, “No preacher, no clergyman, will ever stay on this island. If he’s shipwrecked we’ll keep him in a separate house until he has to leave, but he’s never going to talk to any of us about God. I’m through with all that nonsense.”

Can you imagine? Three thousand slaves from the jungles of Africa were brought to an island in the Atlantic, there to live and die without ever hearing of the person and work of Christ. These two young Moravians, Dober and Nitschman, heard about this plight.

But what could they possibly do about it? How would they reach the slaves on that island if the Gospel (and therefore preaching) was forbidden?

These two young men did the unthinkable: they actually sold themselves as slaves to the British slave owner, using the money they received from their sale to pay for their voyage to his island. As the ship left its pier, the church gathered to see these two men, in their early twenties, off. This would not be a “see you later”.

The two young men were on a voluntary, one-way trip to lifelong slavery. The families stood there on the departure dock weeping, knowing they would literally never see the two again. As the gap widened between the ship and the shore, one of the young men raised his hand and shouted out the last words that were ever heard from them again: “MAY THE LAMB THAT WAS SLAIN RECEIVE THE REWARD OF HIS SUFFERING!”

God is responsible for those who give their lives to Him. It's a backwards kingdom--and a backward economy. God allowed Jesus, who knew no sin, to become sin so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. Jesus was fully God and yet He came from the highest place: heaven to earth and took the lowliest place--the place of a servant, and was crushed in our place. Jesus brings mercy to those who don't deserve it, paying their penalty through His death on the cross. Jesus--the spotless lamb of God who was the only human to ever truly be pure in heart--was nailed to the cross for you. Jesus took the punishment you and I deserved.

The Beatitudes are attributes of Christ-followers because they are attributes of Christ Himself!

So let's be willing to offer our lives to Him--to live what the world may call a waste. Because when we give our lives in surrender to Jesus, it isn't a waste. He calls it worship.

Pastor Pilgrim Benham is the lead pastor at Shoreline Church, in southwest Florida. Learn more at thisisshoreline.com. His new book “Five Ships” is now available in digital and print formats at fiveshipsbook.com.

#Jesus #beatitudes #christian #attributes #character #kingdom #gospel #citizens #Christ #church #believer #believers

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flirting-with-psychology · 7 years

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What features would you want your house to have if you could avoid all the technical difficulties involved in building them/installing them? Are we talking things that actually exist though? Because a self-cleaning, spider-repellent house would be nice

If you had to describe tastes without using any taste-specific descriptive words, how would you do it? I guess I’d describe other experiences that the taste reminds me of. Or use sense of smell, since that corresponds well

What is the effect on you of having people physically nearby, if they’re not interacting with you? Kind of the worst of both worlds because I have to be putting on my public self which can be draining but I don’t get the reward of social interaction. Also makes me feel like I don’t fit in

What simple action do you wish most could be automated by a small device? Fuck idk

If you could change the color of your blood with no other effect, would you do it? No, because you can see the color of blood in your skin, it would make my skin a weird color

Do you tend to tell more stories about things that happened to you long ago or recently? Recently

Would you rather come up with the core of a brilliant invention, or find someone else’s design and bring it to completion and usability? Come up with the core

Is walking more tiring for you, or talking? Walking

Suppose a cat started speaking to you and you could understand it. What would you do first? Ask it a bunch of questions

When your mind is fixated on something, does it more manifest as your mind coming back to the same topic throughout the day, or being unable to change its focus at all for a long period? Both lol

When you read a book, does a fixed mental image (from a movie or illustration) improve or hurt your experience of the characters? Depends if I liked the movie version of the character

Which of “greasy, salty, bitter, sweet, spicy, bland” do you react most strongly against? Bitter

After you finish a good book or movie, how much do you want sequels compared to an equally good and independent book/movie? Depends on how it ended. If it had a good ending as a standalone book/movie, I don’t want unnecessary sequels, but if there’s more story to tell I’m happy to have it. I just don’t like sequels that are only there for the sake of making money

If you could change your name to anything whatsoever for one year, and there would be no social/practical consequences to the change or the name itself, would you do it, and if so what name would you pick? I’ve already changed my name

When you’re completely exhausted, do you prefer to be around people or not? Usually not

When you share responsibility for a bad event with a lot of other people, is it nobody’s fault or all of your faults? All your faults, but there is diffusion of responsibility

When you introspect, how much and what do you see about how your thoughts form, and how reliable do you think that information is? Idfk bro, I struggle with that

How would you decide what your favorite word is? Do you focus on meaning or sound more? I don’t have a favorite word

How much would you have to be paid to spend a week completely alone in The Woods and completely bereft of any belongings or trace of civilization? (you would be protected supernaturally from physical harm from hunger, thirst, and cold, but not discomfort) Maybe like $5000

Would you prefer to write essays by typing, writing, or dictation, assuming the tech for dictation were perfected? Typing

Brainstorm the design of a planet terraformed purely for artistic purposes. It wouldn’t be round, it would be shaped in a cool way

Would you rather burn to death over the course of an hour, or lose your sanity over the course of weeks after an accident makes you unable to see, feel, smell, taste, hear, or move? Burn to death

How much would you enjoy watching your life turned into a movie? I’d actually be pretty curious

If aliens came to earth and brought you to an alien zoo, and you knew there was no way of escaping or bargaining, what sort of accommodations would you ask for your cell? Comfortable living conditions, visitation, wifi

Imagine 1-way teleporters existed, but were expensive enough you’d need to spend a lot of time saving in order to afford one. Would you? Not sure. If it’s one-way, you’d still have to get home

What purely cosmetic super-power would you most like? Shapeshifting. I don’t really get what you mean by purely cosmetic though

Do you like doing things communally? Depends on the thing

Name two food items you’ve never eaten combined before but would like to. Hot chocolate and chocolate liquer that I bought in Italy

Rank {Oceans, Forests, Tundra, Deserts, Mountains, Prairies, Lakes} with whatever comparator you like. My comparator is how much I’d want to be there, and the rank is oceans, lakes, mountains, forests, prairies, tundra, deserts

Is it better to intentionally trick yourself into believing something false for a practical purpose or to intentionally leave yourself ignorant about something with important consequences? The first I guess because there’s a practical purpose

Do you feel more fulfilled when you do something fun for its own sake or in the pursuit of something else? For its own sake

How easy is it for you to tell from looking at a piece of clothing how much you’d wear it if you owned it? Semi easy. I can tell by the fabric if it will be comfortable, and I can often tell if it’s something that would look good on me

What is one piece of trivial knowledge you would most enjoy being shared cultural knowledge? Idk??

Have you ever seen something that wasn’t there, even as an optical illusion? Yes

When you tell someone something about yourself, what do you want or expect them to do about it? React and be interested in it

If you could load books onto a reading device with actual pages, would that be better or worse than a tablet? Better, unless I want to read in the shower

Abolish human-caused death, or disease-caused death? Human-caused because I think more deaths are human-caused than disease-caused, and because you don’t have time to get your affairs in order

Come up with an arbitrary system for dividing people into groups. No copying existing media! Everyone who shares a name gets to meet up

Is it better for things in general to err on the side of too simple, or too complex? Too simple

If you could send your current personality back in time to your past self, would you do it? (factual knowledge would not go with) No, because the factual knowledge is what would be useful. My current personality isn’t my best in my opinion

What would music look like if it were visible to you as music? Idk maybe like the notes? It’s hard to conceptualize that

Why is there something rather than nothing? Idk because the universe said so

#survey

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shenzhenblog · 5 years

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IRL > URL: How To Break Free From Digital Distractions And Start Truly Living Your Best Life Now

Gaetano DiNardi: Welcome back to yet another fantastic Nextiva webinar today. I don’t even know if this guest needs a proper introduction. He is phenomenal in every way. The one and only Brian Solis. Welcome, Brian, to the Crowdcast. Awesome to have you.

Brian, these are all these problems that we’re facing with digital distraction. We get into this digital hamster wheel of “Check your”:

Text messages

Voicemails

Project management tool

CRM

Before you know it, you’ve spent an hour and a half on social media or on your cell phone. You’ve got nothing done, and now you have more messages at the top of that cycle.

You can either go back to the top of the hamster wheel or figure out how to break the chains of digital distraction.

Introducing Lifescaling

Brian Solis: I’m going to walk you through what living on this digital hamster wheel looks and feels like.

A part of it is to build awareness and the other part is to work together. We have to go on a journey where we give ourselves a new sense of purpose. And, a new vision for taking control. Not eliminating the use of technology, but managing it in a way that works for us and others.

This is a movement that I call “Lifescaling.”

The reason it’s important is we were given access to tools, platforms, and mobile devices that no one prepared us for. We were left to fend for ourselves.

You’re going to go to bed looking at your cell phone and waking up looking at it. It’s the same routine until you manage how much time you spend on your phone or iPad.

Digital Distraction Vs. Fear of Missing Out

Brian Solis: What I found out the hard way, is that life and happiness are part of the same journey. Be in the moment and don’t focus on what’s on your device. Happiness already exists. It’s already within you.

At some point when I was writing, what would have been my eighth book, I hit a wall. I didn’t necessarily know why I couldn’t get past the proposal stage. All I knew was that I needed to get that book out.

So it took everything I had to be able to focus on what I felt I needed to get to the bottom of, which was, “Why couldn’t I:”

Get that proposal done?

Think the way I used to?

Focus or concentrate for the time like I used to?

Ignite my imagination and creativity on demand?

And I started asking questions like, “When did:”

We get so busy?

Looking at our mobile devices become the norm?

Breathing or thinking become so difficult?

Screen time become such a responsibility?

I start to feel like I need you to know that I see everything that you’re doing?

Anxiety just take over?

The hard part was just recognizing that we’re living life anxious, more self-interested, less patient, and definitely more stressed. But we do nothing about it.

The Science Behind Digital Distraction

Brian Solis: Attention is currency. The more you pay attention, the more they monetize it. This is true for every single platform that we use.

If you think about how you use digital today, you’re essentially rewiring your brain and your body.

On average, we receive about 200 notifications per day. It’s teaching your brain to be ready to be distracted, to speed up. The chemicals in your body make you feel like you’re in control, but those same chemicals make you feel stress and anxiety.

The chart below, for example, shows you push notification data from 671 million pushes. It’s clear that we respond to pushes throughout the day!

Source: andrewchen.co

They’re also fooling you into believing that you’re in demand, that you’re top of mind. This is what keeps your fear of missing out away.

Understanding variable intermittent rewards

Gaetano DiNardi: I saw a behind the scenes of how Facebook’s user experience designers think about the platform. One analogy that came out of the discussion was they wanted to build it similar to how gaming machines work in casinos.

Brian Solis: It’s called variable intermittent rewards. It gives you the sensation that, when you don’t get a notification, you’re losing out.

Source: The Guardian

These are techniques that aren’t just used in gambling, it’s also used in psychological warfare. It’s also used in spreading fake news. Every platform you use is changing your behavior.

How Digital Distraction Affects Relationships

Brian Solis: We are turning conversations into moments. Stripping away the depth and critical thinking — tearing away empathy.

Think about the fact that a lot of these platforms are polarizing relationships. It’s getting harder to disconnect, especially for young people.

Gaetano DiNardi: Some older members of my family are new to Facebook. Whenever something comes along in their feed that they don’t agree with, they block it out. They aren’t able to see the other point of view.

It becomes a very toxic cycle. You’re not able to see that polarity because of the way that the algorithm is kind of shaping your digital experience.

You think you’re living your best life. Are you?

Brian Solis: We tend to surround ourselves with people who validate the thinking that we already have. They reinforce the fact that you’re right. But you can’t think critically.

The reality is, productivity, happiness, and creativity are all interlinked. You are not living your best life, even though you give the appearance that you are.

The biggest direct link of all of this stuff is dwindling imagination and thinking critically and just creativity in general.

The Perils of Multitasking

Brian Solis: Every single aspect of distraction isn’t just about social media or your alerts. It’s also how you live life.

Think about how many tabs you have open on your browser at any given point. That’s a symbol of not being able to make decisions and close out projects. You may feel like you’re managing them all together, but you’re not.

In fact, 95% business professionals say they multitask during meetings.

Source: Prezi

Every time you reach for that mobile device, it takes you over 23 minutes to get back into the zone. This affects the quality and the caliber of your work.

Gaetano DiNardi: To a degree, you’ve got to blame society’s false glorification of multitasking.

Brian Solis: Call it the cult of busy or the glorification of hustle. The busier you are, the more important it seems.

Give yourself the means to pursue what a satisfying and fulfilling life could be. I think the pursuit of meaning is what matters.

Creativity is something we could use more of, especially in the digital age. It’s really starting to show signs that creativity and the arts are what machines can’t duplicate.

Don’t worry about disruption; worry about mediocrity. When you multitask, it gives us a semblance of being creative.

How to Prevent/Overcome Digital Distraction

Brian Solis: Without creativity, there would be no innovation. Every aspect of how we work and think are actually preventing us from being innovative.

The direct path to happiness is actually through creativity. It’s time to reacquaint yourself with the artist formerly known as You because you were creative.

Brian Solis: Every night you go to sleep, you replenish those chemicals and nutrients that you use up. This is why sleep is so important, it literally gives you a new day with new potential.

Try to think about your day in ways where you can get the deeper work done and distraction-free. Do this in the beginning, and save your afternoon for the creative and deep work.

The more great work that you do, the more special you are. Everybody can’t be special if they’re doing what everybody else is doing, right?

There are techniques that you can build. The Pomodoro timer? You to focus for 25-minute bursts, distraction-free, and then you take a five-minute break.

It all comes down to how you perceive tasks

Brian Solis: As I was writing the book, I found this quote from Mohammed Ali that I felt was worth sharing.

He said that he convinced himself that he can’t quit. Ali envisioned why he was doing those things and to live the rest of his life as a champion.

Solving the problem is not about simple time management or productivity tools or hacks. It’s actually changing how you perceive the task.

This is about becoming more exceptional, creative, and happier. The more you know who you are, the more you can become that ideal you. Not that aspirational selfie that we commonly communicate with.

You weren’t put on this planet to validate your existence through the false validation of strangers.

It’s actually just believing in yourself and that is the true aspiration. Then we can break free from the shackles of distraction and this digital hamster wheel.

More About Brian Solis

Brian Solis is one of the world’s leading digital anthropologists who have been called “one of the greatest digital analysts of our time.”

As if he hasn’t made enough of a name for himself, Brian is also a world-renowned keynote speaker and an award-winning author of seven best-selling books including:X: The Experience When Business Meets Design,What’s the Future of Business,The End of Business as Usual and his new book Lifescale: How to live a more Creative, Productive and Happy Life.

Note : This article was originally published on Briansolis.com

Brian Solis is principal analyst and futurist at Altimeter, the digital analyst group at Prophet, Brian is a world renowned keynote speakerand 8x best-selling author. In his new book, Lifescale: How to live a more creative, productive and happy life, Brian tackles the struggles of living in a world rife with constant digital distractions. His model for “Lifescaling” helps readers overcome the unforeseen consequences of living a digital life to break away from diversions, focus on what’s important, spark newfound creativity and unlock new possibilities. His previous book, X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, explores the future of brand and customer engagement through experience design.

IRL > URL: How To Break Free From Digital Distractions And Start Truly Living Your Best Life Now was originally published on Shenzhen Blog

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thomasedward236-blog · 5 years

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5 important keto diet tips

Many things have been said about the Keto diet. Some true others are false. While we can’t outline the exact in’s and out’s in this article, we will provide you with some great tips that you should know before beginning your keto journey.

First, the Ketogenic Diet isn’t actually a diet in the sense of which we know a “diet”. It isn’t meant to be a quick weight loss fad. It is a diet in the sense of, a way of eating. A way of life. The ketogenic diet works for weight loss putting your body in a metabolic state known as nutritional ketosis. During nutritional ketosis, the body turns to fat as a fuel source rather than carbs. The body typically has fat stores ready to burn which will lead to increased energy levels and weight loss.

keto budget meal plan http://www.ketogasmic.com/keto-budget-meal-plan-a-handy-guide-for-beginners

1. Get Adapted Fast by being prepared!

The first 2 weeks of the ketogenic diet (also known as the adaption process) are crucial. Introducing more healthy fats to your diet is vital to your keto weight loss success. You are training your body to start burning fat for fuel instead of carbs. The body goes through a withdrawal of sorts. Detoxing from sugar and carbs. You may feel sick, also know as the keto flu. Just keep pushing forward. Take the “this too shall pass” frame of mind. Keep chicken broth handy. Take your vitamins and eat your fat. Start by-

Get rid of all non-keto foods in your kitchen and pantry Begin every morning with a Keto boosting routine by drinking water and eating a healthy breakfast such as 2 eggs, 2 bacon and an avocado. Keep easy to grab and eat keto snacks available. The key to kicking cravings is eating fat! FAT KEEPS YOU SATIATED. Try out new keto recipes, MAKE A MEAL PLAN. It helps. Trust me! Plan , plan, plan.

Keto Egg Recipes http://www.ketogasmic.com/top-10-keto-egg-recipes-for-breakfast

2. There is more to Keto than eating

Your food is just the beginning. There are many ways to ensure you are maximizing the keto benefits and keeping healthy while doing it. It is important to keep your sodium, magnesium and other electrolyte levels stable and supplemented. It is also important to drink your water! It has been said that the best way to know you are drinking enough water is to drink half your weight in ounces and then another 8oz before bed.

3. You should not compromise your food quality

Being on a keto diet does not give you an opening to compromise your food quality and eat whatever you want. Your body still needs nutrients. Your food should be rich in nutrients and you should avoid junk (heavily processed meats, etc) . Everyone loves their fast food cheeseburgers and the fact that they can still have them without the bun, however if they weren’t the healthiest thing for you before they STILL aren’t. Limit even keto approved fast food. Opt for grass fed meats, butters and healthy fats such as avocado, coconut oil and the like. if you are prone to bloating and inflammation it may be a good idea to avoid these foods also even if they are on the keto approved list.

4. Skip The Keto Strips

Keto strips are used to measure the level of ketones in your urine. There are far too many variables that affect this, and for this reason we suggest skipping them all together. We ran many tests both urine and blood, the amount of inconsistency with the urine tests were crazy! If you eat from your keto meal plan or foods list without cheating and stay at or around 20 net carbs daily, YOU WILL ENTER KETOSIS. If you must have some visual confirmation use a blood test.

More facts: http://www.ketogasmic.com

5. Do not get discouraged/NO CHEATING

When you subject your body to drastic changes it can rebel like a ballsy teenager. Be patient. Many people report extreme bloating and even weight gain within the first week or two while the body enters ketosis and adjusts. This will subside. Keep going, you are doing it right.

You may have seen numerous comments on social media such as this “ I have been doing so good that I am rewarding myself with that piece of cake at John’s birthday this weekend”. STOP! NO. That is not the way the ketogenic “diet” works. Maybe in the past for other fad diets. But, not this one. Remember above how I mentioned that keto is not a diet, it is a way of life? There is a reason for that. If you cheat, you will more than likely be kicked out of ketosis and left to start all over. That means adaption, keto flu, bloating, all. over. again. You don’t want that. Plus, that sugar will kick start your cravings all over again.

Take it from someone who lost 50lbs in 6 months then thought she could “eat normal”. 6 months later I had gained back 25lbs, had worse cravings, no energy to get back to working out and literally felt 10 yrs older. Back to strict keto for life. Hashtag that. Let’s make it viral. #keto4life Besides, there are PLENTY of keto options!

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mondaymentalhealth · 5 years

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Relationships (intimate, partnerships)

Today’s topic: RELATIONSHIPS (Intimate, romantic, dating, partnerships, marriage)

I feel like this topic needs to be addressed because I’m seeing my social media accounts overloaded with more negative complaints about relationships than positive ones. I also have a few people seeking advice on this topic. It’s unfortunate that people tend to complain and dwell on the negatives more than rewarding and appreciating the positives. What do you see and hear more often? “My partner doesn’t treat me right”, “We are thru”, “I’m over it.” “I don’t need a man/woman.” Or “I love my partner, he/she is so good to me.” “I have a healthy relationship.” We don’t commend the good things about our relationship but vent about the downfalls and issues. Obviously, I am not a trained relationship counselor, so everything I write will be personal views and experiences that I hope you can relate to.

My personal relationship:

If I wasn’t in the place I am now with my relationship I would not be writing this. I have been in toxic, controlling, miserable, and just the wrong relationships. My partner now is strong, honest, trustworthy, intelligent, funny, reliable, motivated, hardworking, inspiring, uplifting, committed, and many other things. He is who I choose to be with. He saw something in me I couldn’t see in myself and he has faith in me. Is he perfect? No. Am I perfect? No. So how can I expect him to be good and right all the time? I can’t, that’s impossible, we have to deal with the hard times that will come just as they do within friendships and relationships with family members. I would like to give credit to my partner for giving me the ability to write this because a lot of my inspiration, if not all of it, comes from him. He is my biggest fan and biggest supporter, he wants me to do well, be better, be the best version of myself, live up to my expectations, and guess what, I want the same for him. It was my partner who suggested I start a support group of some sort to help me with my issues and in turn help others. I could not have done this without him. My partner and I have been thru hell and back, but we are always side by side. SIDE BY SIDE! He is not above or below me and I am not above or below him. We are equal parts in our relationship. When I am weak he is strong for me and vise Versa. Our relationship has lasted over a year and it is long distance. People who don’t know us think we are absolutely bonkers until they see us together and it is clear we are meant to be. It took a lot of bumps in the road to get to where we are now but no matter what, we were always there. Have I questioned it? Of course. Has he questioned it? I’m sure. We are at a place now where there is no question about it. My partner is very strong into individuality within a relationship which I also think is very important. We are together because we choose to be together and we are still who we are whether or not we are in the relationship. I’ve heard this time and time again from him but NOW I finally get it. At first, I thought he was being cruel saying he didn’t need me and he’d be fine without me. That wasn’t the case. I finally understand that he means we need to be who we are, not a different version of ourselves to conform to the other persons liking. I have my faults and he has his and we can decide if the person is more than their faults and if we can accept those things.

Yay! The fun part. I get to tell you what to do. Here’s my advice take it or leave it.

Dating: Before I get into already formed relationships I want to discuss starting a new one and selecting a partner. If from the very beginning there are already developing issues, red flags, warning signs, things that you don’t particularly like but since it’s new you tend to disregard them but it becomes an issue later, or anything that has you questioning the relationship, then take a step back, evaluate it, and decide if this is actually something you want. I see a lot of people get very quickly emotionally involved and very serious way too early into a relationship and end up being very hurt and disappointed. If you are interested in someone but they are not showing the same attention, effort, or affection, it’s likely they don’t feel the same way. I realize this is difficult for people to accept and we tend to question why, but honestly who cares if someone is ignoring you, who cares if someone is avoiding you, who cares if someone isn’t paying attention to you. You have YOU and if they don’t see what you see why put in the effort to force them to see it. If you love YOU then you won’t worry about anyone else who doesn’t love you back. So, don’t be so quick to get upset about a failed attempt at a relationship or about someone feeling differently. Try spending some time with this person, talking to them, getting to know them, and enjoy it. All we have is time, so take it. I don’t believe there is any reason to jump into a relationship with someone you’ve just met, don’t know, or decide you should be in a relationship JUST BECAUSE you’ve been going out on dates a lot, spending a lot of time together, or it just feels like you should take the next step. Take time to develop something. My partner and I talked for about four months before we even met and then waited another month to two months to finally begin our relationship.

Relationships in general:

Pick your battles: I know you’ve heard this one, it is so true. I swear I fight with this man over the dumbest shit that doesn’t even matter and I’m arguing to the point that I don’t even remember why I got upset to begin with. When it comes to things that make you upset about your partner try to remember that they’re going to do what they want because ultimately the choice is theirs. Why be upset and get yourself worked up about something someone else has done, especially with repetitive behavior. Continuously fighting about something that happened in the past is absurd. It’s either you get over it or you don’t and if it’s that bad that you cannot get over it, then leave. I read a book that talks about “predictable behavior” and wow did that change my perspective. For example, if your partner is constantly late, constantly drinking, constantly lying, or whatever behavior they are doing that’s upsetting to you and you have to repeatedly ask them to change it, it’s clear there’s a pattern. So, if you can predict the behavior before it happens you can set yourself up to not be disappointed when it occurs because you already knew it was coming. If you already know what’s going to happen and you don’t want to put up with it anymore, then leave. You cannot expect change from anyone, that’s not your place to decide how someone should behave, just like no one can control your actions, nor would you want them to. Unless, of course, you are codependent which is something entirely different. If you change unwillingly just to satisfy the other person, who does that negatively affect? Well, both of you. You are giving the person you are with a false perception of you and you are lying to yourself.

Want what’s best for each other: If you’re with someone it’s because you love and care about them, right? Don’t you want them to be their best self, don’t you want them to be happy, don’t you want them to succeed? The same goes for you, they should want those things for you. Don’t be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t care about your success, who doesn’t bring you up and uplift you, who doesn’t want you to be better, or someone who wants to belittle you or make you feel unworthy or helpless or lowers your self-esteem. I am so incredibly regretful and sorry to my partner for EVER saying or doing anything to him to make him feel unloved, unwanted, or unappreciated. I love him and he should know that. I should show him that. If you don’t want to show the person you’re with that they mean something to you and that you care about them and want to see them succeed, then they may not be right for you, or maybe you’re selfish and you shouldn’t be in a relationship with anyone but yourself.

Be individuals: BIG IMPORTANT FUCKING POINT! Just because you are in a relationship with someone does not mean all of the sudden your brains and bodies are fused together. I was talking to a friend about this and he put it like this “We tend to lose our sense of self when we are involved in a relationship.” Yes! I see it all the time, people get into a relationship and what happens? You stop talking to and hanging out with your friends, you start spending more money, you become isolated, you become clingy and attached. Why? Why is it now that you’re with someone you have to change everything else you were doing before? I guess because we get caught up and consumed in our relationship and that becomes the priority. It becomes a chore and a task to make time for each other or you feel obligated to spend time together, like ALL of your time. It is okay to not be together 24/7. I know this because I live 200+ miles away from my partner and we enjoy being away from each other because the time spent together is so much more appreciated and meaningful. It doesn’t feel like we HAVE to be together, we GET to be together and we are lucky for that. We live separate lives. He works full time, he has his friends, he has hobbies, and I have school, work, my daughter, and all kinds of shit to do. When we GET to have time together it’s dedicated to enjoying each other, not a forced effort to make time just because we feel like we SHOULD hang out. Even when we are together we are not suffocating each other. We go out to events with people and you won’t see us clinging to each other trying to cram as much time together as we can. We can separate and talk with other people and then go back to check up on each other later. Remember who you were, who you are, and who want to be. Like I mentioned before, don’t conform to a false identity just to make someone else happy. Enjoy YOUR life. It’s okay to just stay home and have some alone time, it’s okay to hang out with your friends, it’s all okay and the moment it’s not okay, you need to evaluate your relationship and ask yourself if this person is restricting you from doing the things you want to do.

Trust: Here we go. I have never trusted someone the way I trust my boyfriend with my heart and brain. Do you know the amount of trust it takes to be in a successful long-distance relationship? A lot, everything you have. My partner always says “Trust them until they give you a reason not to.” If we did not trust each other entirely we could never make this work. We could be lying and doing anything and everything behind each other’s back and never even know. Do I question this? Absolutely not. If I did or he did, we would not be together. Of course, everyone always asks me “Aren’t you worried about him cheating on you?” Here’s my final answer: NO! Why would I sit around and worry about that and make myself crazy? Or “How do you know he’s being honest?” Well, because, I TRUST THAT MOTHERFUCKER. Guess what. If something does happen then we deal with it, but like he always tells me “You’re worrying about shit that hasn’t even happened.” So, if your partner gives you a reason not to trust them or your concerned about their loyalty and honesty you’re either incorrect and struggling with your own insecurities and you’re going to push them away or you should not be with them.

Space: My least favorite statement. “I need some space.” This can be a very difficult thing to do, give someone their space. We tend to question why they need space or need a break away from us, is there something wrong, you don’t want to talk to me, or you don’t love me anymore. NOT TRUE! I have come to the realization that space can be helpful and positive, unless there, in fact, is an underlying reason that your partner wants to create distance. Space and distancing yourself are two different things. When someone needs space and you begin to push them and question them more you’re most like going to push them further away. It happens, we need time to ourselves and time to think. My partner and I have come to the agreement that if we feel like we need a little break from talking or some space, or if we are irritated with each other and don’t feel like discussing it at the moment, that we will let the other know and we will respect that. When you’re in the midst of an argument or momentarily enraged, you can’t think clearly. I used to get really upset when my partner wanted to get away from me at those moments because I wanted to solve it right then and there. I’ve realized that getting away from each other and taking some time to view the situation, calm down, think rationally, and then approach it again, is much more effective.

Love yourself: I’ve already discussed self-love in a previous topic so all I’m going to say is you have to love yourself and be comfortable with yourself before you can truly love someone else and let them love you.

Communication: A woman’s favorite thing to complain about and a man’s least favorite thing to do. Sorry to be stereotypical about this, but I know this thru experience. I don’t want to be sexist or gender-biased, so I acknowledge that this can go both ways but since I am a woman in a relationship with a man I will speak from my point of view. My partner is better at socializing and communicating face-to-face but guess what, with a long-distance relationship we can’t do that so freely as people that live close in proximity. Communication is all we have to work with and because of that, we get to know each other more. Look, if you’re with someone because you love them, then you should be able to talk to each other about everything because that’s the person you can share everything with. My partner is my best friend, we tell each other everything, things that other people would find disturbingly sick and twisted, but that’s just us. Have I wished that he opened up to me more about his FEELINGS? (uh oh, they hate that word, “great she wants to talk about feelings again”) Yes! I love reassurance once in a while. The way I see it is, if someone wants to tell you something, they will, don’t force people to open up to you or tell you what you want to hear because then it won’t be sincere. Talk to each other. If you can’t talk to each other or you find it difficult then what do I say? Leave.

Sorry to be so harsh, but the truth hurts. If it’s not right for you to be in it, then end it. A lot of people stay with someone and sacrifice their own happiness because they fear hurting the other person. Pretending or faking happiness for someone will hurt them even more in the long run than being honest about your feelings upfront. If you are unhappy, miserable, and suffering, how is that fair to you? You come first. I know it may not be easy regardless if you’ve been together 1 year or 20 years and invested a lot into the relationship if you’re just not happy anymore it’s no one’s fault, just decide what’s best for you.

P.S I am now a supporter of long-distance relationships and online dating because it worked for me, but prior to this I would have also thought I was crazy.

Here’s to happy and healthy relationships. Good luck!

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