Catch yourself and stop it

 Now that's interesting,  I'm beginning to catch myself (my ego/pain body) diverting attention away from what I am doing.  So far I think I've been able to catch it most times.  It's trying hard and dragging up memories from the past, some that I've only just remembered through this fight in my head.  The crazy thing is that there isn't any pattern to the daydreams and memories at all.

There's some interesting stuff that I've not remembered very well, the insides of buildings for example, I recognise some of the people and recall some of the situations but I'm realising what these are and stopping them.  What they are, are an attempt to divert me and drag me back to having all this stuff going around in my head.

What's good is the emptiness and space I feel at the moment - like things have been lifted away and long may that continue.  It's taken a while to get here and I just need to make sure I work at it and fend off my mind's attention seeking - lets see how I do?

On the up!

 Well, that is good, things are on the up and I feel much better than I did leading up to Christmas and the New Year - I'd been down for 6 or more months by then even and so it's nice to come out of the other side.  Mind you, two deaths in as many days, My Auntie who, bless her was 96 and had been suffering dementia for some years and a friend who I spoke to in December and really wasn't well who passed away overnight, he developed pneumonia and the drugs just couldn't save him.  Sad in that he was such a live wire until a year ago when he developed this illness that has eventually took his life.

Another friend in a faraway country is also down on his luck so I've sent him some money, not that I can afford, to alleviate his sufferings.  I hope that he will be able to turn things around.  Abroad is nice but no welfare system like we have to help if things go wrong.  

As for me, well I spent some time in my Eckhart Tolle books and some YouTube things he has done and I've gotten back on top of my brain!  There's no one inflicting pain on me physically and the idiot I have to deal with will always be an idiot and do stupid things and so it shouldn't anger me or cause me any pain and I know how to deal with him now as well.

I can feel my ego/pain body wanting to fight back as they lose control over me and raking up old affairs and situations is a way that they do that.  It's a matter of realising what is happening and stopping yourself from reacting.  It's not easy to do this I grant you but part of the solution is knowing what is going on and realising that your reactions are what they want to get from you.  Once you realise you can stop it and bring yourself back into the present moment, the now if you will and that pushes these things away for a while.  

I've found that leaving Social Media alone has helped and I am trying to disconnect from all social media as well as State broadcast news and so on.  Again, try to work out what the "programming" is - try counting the times that a news programme or documentary mentions, for example, Climate Change, Man-made carbon emissions, Sea Level rise, Extreme Weather, Environmental impact blah, blah, blah.  When I watch it (if at all) I can almost predict the script.  There was a programme about the London flood of 1928.  That was due to huge snowfields melting, persistent rain and a High Tide / Storm Surge.  It happened again on the 1950s and in the 2000s - they managed to get the lot in here a full house of environmental impacts caused by man, Climate change, sea level rises and extreme weather - so this happened 3 times in one hundred years.  I doubt in 1928 many of us had SUVs!   If they'd bothered to look further back into history they'd have found more floods and generally around the same time of year when we get high tides sweeping up a narrowing estuary, heavy rain and so on.  We get it every year, we live in a maritime climate - that's what happens.  

It's all very predictable, the country programmes are made by people who live in the city and not in the countryside and they have an agenda of their own, they haven't really got a clue what happens out here.  If these people had a few more brain cells they'd be stupid.

So anyway, I'm better than I was, still battling the ego (as the rant above will show you) and the problem is just that.  I need to disconnect away from all these utter bollocks that are happening out there, the crazy psychopathic headlong charge into wars, destroying our food and fuel for some crazy theory that hasn't even been proven and the data doesn't support.  It sounds harsh but I feel I should fight all of this and rage against the machine and yet in reality, I and my fellow citizens need to wake up and withdraw from it, take away these crazy people's power and focus on living ignoring all the noise and nonsense around us.

Easy for me to say and very very difficult to actually do.  I can only be alert and present in small bursts.  I was better 11 years ago when I could get out of the house and just feel at one with the world.  The catalyst then is not available now.  I need to recreate what it felt like and learn to dismiss all the crap around me.  When you get it and feel at one with the world it really makes you mind and body sing, go light, rejoice and all the day-to-day rubbish is banned for as long as it can last.  At the moment it is short, more seconds and minutes, years ago it was longer perhaps tens of minutes.  It's hard going given the way our brains are programmed but I intend to get myself there in the end.

OK That's Better

 So apart from having to pay that thieving London Mayor to drive into what is to all intents and purposes the edge of London - you know the bit surrounded by fields and the like, I survived going out to my meeting. It was probably a good thing I went as I got my 40-year citation and was asked to make a toast which actually got me up off my backside and doing something.

I have to say that I've been feeling better and a lot more relaxed about things.  Even my other half commented that the idiot giving us the grief wasn't triggering me as I suggested to her that he'll do what he wants to do and we will react to that. I know what my response will be to what I think he is going to do so that's OK.

We endured a second power cut after the recent storm, 24 hours this time, I think it was a couple of hours last time and about 24 hours the time before that.  That's the trouble of being in the country and fed by overhead wires, a tree falling or a branch crashing into the power lines will soon bring everything to a halt.

Yes, I am feeling calm and I've spent quite a while going back over my Eckhart Tolle books and YouTube videos and also just chilled a spent quiet time disengaging my brain as much as possible.  

Wasn't that impressed that someone turned up with a cold on the day as I'm only just getting over a cold that I must have caught from him at the meeting. 

Amyway, much better place, much lower stress levels and hopefully I can keep it that way!  

Let's see how today goes shall we?

 Well, I chatted to a friend and he asked me to come along for the meeting today and I said yes, then I realised that I'd have to go into the London (FFS it's nowhere near London) ULEZ zone and my car (as I live down a green lane in the country) is an AWD Diesel - it actually has low CO2 emissions and is relatively cheap to tax due to that doesn't fit in Idiot Kahn (I think that's its name) London which goes all the way out to where I used to live in the countryside!  FFS.  So I've pinched my nose and will have to cough up £12.50 for one journey into "London".  Honestly, it's a joke and daylight robbery and I can't vote the git out as I don't live in his area.  No taxation without representation and my MP can't (or won't) do anything about it!

So I digress, as you do. Off to a meeting and I haven't been for 6 or 7 months at least so it will be different and I don't think I'll get the claustrophobia attacks as I've sort of clicked out of that a bit now.  I did some serious "A New Earth" book reading and whilst I'm not back to my old self, I have certainly stopped shaking and being so stressed.  I'm not letting other stuff bother me and I see it has been 2 months since I stopped interacting with Facebook and Twitter other than birthday greetings and postings only for the club. 

I hope that it will go well, I think once I get there it will be OK and I can just go with the flow a bit and see how things progress.  I'm sure they'll be happy to see their Treasurer back and doing the finances :-)  

Wish me luck, I hope I'll get through this meeting and be able to move on a bit more once again.  I'm certainly a lot better as I do not feel any tension about going today.  

 

A Little Better

Things are a little better.  My mate gave me a call which was good of him and that's made me feel a little better.  I'm not sure if I am going to get myself up to go out next week.  I kind of hope so but I'll make a decision over the next day or two - that's standard procrastination that comes with this sort of depression.  You leave it and leave it and then corner yourself :-)

It's been a strange day today as I've not actually done anything constructive as such.  Taken the bins out and fixed my Stove Fans that I killed by having the log burner burning over 300 C!!  Oops.  Hopefully, they'll be fixed by inserting these new components.

So I still feel sick most of the time, not like I'm about to throw up but it's there just in my stomach, clear signs of stress and a reminder to me that everything is not "alright", far from it.  At least I know what it is, I can manage it, I'm in control most of the time but the flashbacks are most unusual.  These are daydreams, full colour and sound of incidents of my life.  Everything from encounters with specific business situations, girlfriends and other meetings with people who I thought I'd long ago forgotten about.  Going back to my teens and my first job and the people I met at College and so on.  It is most unexpected and also somehow, these flashbacks are tinged with regrets.  What might of happened plays out in many of them.  People lost along the journey is also a common theme.  By that I mean people I was close to in my working life and we just drifted apart and that was it, I never saw them again and it plays on my mind now but I don't know why.

Here's the thing, you cannot change anything that happened to you, nor can you worry about it or I suppose regret it. It happened, it was what it was and could be no other outcome and it's over.  You can only truly deal with now, this moment.  You cannot do anything about what might happen tomorrow nor should you worry about it either.  I'm expecting something stupid to land in my email from the narcissistic idiot.  I should not worry about it but I am.  I need to take my own medicine or eat your own dog food as it was once put to me :-) It goes back to my absolute hate of idiots and stupid people (stupid by nature or by design).  People who are incompetent, stupid, feckless and unprofessional will bring out the worst in me too.  No one needs to be ignorant or stupid but a lot are.  I'm very surprised that their brain tell them to breathe or sit the right way up on a toilet but I suppose it might be hard programmed thing and nothing to do with intellect.

I now tend to treat the majority of people as stupid unless proven otherwise.  There's a total lack of common sense these days.  Stuff on the TV is obviously bollocks and no one calls it out.  Useless statistics make huge claims about pollution, nature, climate change, and so on and people regurgitate this stuff as fact.  One of the claims was that let's say butterfly numbers are 70% lower this year.  OK, lower than what?  What number are we talking about, over what period etc etc.  This stuff is cherry-picked out.  Like the hottest temperature ever at Heathrow Airport.  Firstly, there wasn't an airport in the 18th century, it certainly wasn't surrounded by square miles of brick, concrete and tarmac and aircraft pushing out hot exhaust emissions.  So how is that representative of "The Climate"  utter bollocks once again.  

Why do rational human beings swallow all this stuff and regurgitate it parrot fashion to you?  I have no idea, these are the mask-wearing public who think that if you walk around a shop in one direction only saves you from getting a cold?  Who thinks that an IFR of .096 is frightening, who sees death as some sort of outcome of getting a cold when they are fit and healthy.    When will people see that they've been played, that they've been part of one of the worst lies in history.  

And so probably this too is playing on my mind in as much as the vast majority of people I speak to seem to have had their intellect stolen.  They no longer discuss things they take sides and argue aggressively and use ad hominem attacks to make their points.  Since when did shouting at people and calling them names secure an argument?  I had an interesting conversation with someone about climate change just before Christmas and it was a civilised discussion about facts.  I challenged their accepted thinking about CO2.  Having worked with that particular gas most of my life, I think that I can discuss its properties quite well.  I gave the example of bailing out CO2 fire suppressant that had gone off in a transformer bay.  It was bailed out by hand using buckets.  It, being heavier than air (let's call it) was trapped in the chamber and needed to be removed.  At no time did that room get any warmer.  When I asked how much CO2 was in the atmosphere, they were wrong by a factor of hundreds.  Most people think it warms the atmosphere but if it is just 415 parts per million i.e. 0.04% then how does it do that?  Everyone appears to have forgotten thermodynamics and surely water vapour is a great greenhouse gas than CO2?  Surely it must be?  Just think about other things like how much water there is on the planet.  I like the warming poles too, that makes me chuckle as it is warming twice as fast there they say.  What does that even mean????  It means nothing at all.  For it to melt, wouldn't it need to be able 0 degrees C?  In winter in the northern hemisphere, it's dark and cold the sun doesn't shine at all on it and some odd molecule of CO2 is going to heat it up and melt it?

 So where am I rambling, oh yes, of course, do some basic investigation, do some research and fact-checking and ask is that right? How would that work then? What are the figures behind the claims and so on.  No one asks these basic questions and we are lied to constantly and it once again, irritates me that people accept what they hear and see on the Radio and TV as fact without challenging it and then proceed to berate me about my lack of knowledge.  Of course, once I'm belting out the facts and challenging them, they generally go quiet or they say "You're a climate change denier!"  Always a useful addition to a conversation is that.  Bravo, you've used a phrase alluding to Holocaust denial to prove that you are right and to close down any debate.  That's annoying me too.

Blimey I didn't mean to write that lot but obviously, it was in my head so it's good to get rid of it.  Maybe I've a few more issues that I thought I had :-)

Onwards and Upwards.