Ladies and People Who Came Out of Ladies, this article features a trigger warning: Contains discussion of sexual assault, violence, murder, and gratuitous sexual imagery.

When Puff Daddy’s house was raided in 2024, they found thousands of bottles of Baby Oil, enough to fill a pallet. It wasn’t until a year or so later, during the trial, that it was made clear what the oil was for. They were supplies for P-Diddy’s so-called Freak Off parties. They’d drug girls and bring in male and female sex workers and oil everyone up and command them around.

But what does it mean for a man’s sexual appetite to be so rampant he requires people to do things against their will in order to achieve the ecstacy available to us all via sex?

Rape culture can be seen a spectrum. On the lower end of the spectrum there is unwanted advances at a coffee shop and on the far end there is aggressive, violent rape and murder. The incels on r/nicegirls like to claim that women are so on edge about rape these days that it’s impossible to even express interest in a woman without getting accused of accosting her. But in reality, if you are approaching a stranger and she is acting offended, it’s probably because you’re being offensive.

The truth is: this is not a society where it’s likely that a little boy will grow into a man. The white misogynistic capitalist patriarchy made sure that the whole world is a little boy’s oyster. “The sky is the limit,” “conquer the day,” “nothing can stop you.” (Even though she is unsurprisingly a Zio,) Amy Schumer has a good skit on rape and football that feels relevant to this point:

Little boys are impulsive, they need constant stimulation, and they act without considering consequence. To be on their best behavior, they need a coach. . . they need a mommy or daddy to put them back in line.

Like children, men too kick and scream when their behavior is “corrected.” And often, if they are held lovingly throughout the process (again, like a child must be) their nervous systems show their appreciation for the boundary, and they know their lives are better because of it.

Just last night, I was watching my son playing in the backyard while the sun set and as the air started to grow colder, I watched his little hands and feet turning red and his skin tightening. I told him it’s time for bathtime. He said no, “I want to be out here in the cold.” I expected this: “It wasn’t a question. It’s time to get in the bath.” He started crying as if I killed his dog. Or as if I was a woman, and he was a man, and I had expressed my feelings about how his behavior affected me. But as he is crying and staring and me in horror, I watched his body autonomously begin to take of his clothes. As he dragged his feet into the house through the kitchen and into the bathroom, he undressed all the while and got in the bath before taking a big sigh and relaxing into the wam water. He was still mad though. “Bad dadda, I’m never going to play with you again.” Still, I watch his skin settles down, his blood returns to his hands and feet. He is calm and soon distracted by a toy boat floating past. My presence and direction kept him regulated.

At other times, my dysregulation may make my kids get out of whack when otherwise they’d be self-regulated.

There’s a misconception I held for most of my life that the goal of anger was violence and submission, and it’s certainly used this way most commonly. If someone is angry at me, especially someone I don’t know, it’s not hard to imagine them hurting me physically. But if the people are in relationship, that same anger enjoys a container of love, and it can help the system regulate just like any other emotion does. But then how do people get stuck in abusive relationships, say, with P-Diddy?

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Whenever some new sexual assault celebrity scandal happens, I immediately think of Big with Tom Hanks, and how horribly wrong that all could have gone.

Harvey Weinstein, P-Diddy, and the like were plucked like Tom Hanks from their young bodies and breathed into some adult man’s body. But instead of it being a kind-hearted 2-hour Tom Hanks movie, they were left there in those bodies for the remainder of their lives. Don’t you see the loneliness in their eyes? The decrepitude is real.

Coming Correct

One of the first books Marley gave me when we started dating was The Sexual Teachings of the Jade Dragon: Taoist Methods for Male Sexual Revitalization. In the book, a Green Dragon is defined as someone driven by raw desire, often impulsive and undisciplined. This state is characterized by uncontrolled sexual chi, leading to behaviors that are more about personal gratification than mutual connection. Think of a little boy revved up in the backyard knocking over trampolines and kicking balls and throwing brooms. This is explosive, uncontrolled sexual chi (Westerners likely would call this “testosterone,” though I think thats just a part of a bigger story that “sexual chi” better encapsulates).

While Western Puritanism is suspiciously afraid to discuss childhood sexuality, Taoism is mature enough to explore how sexual energy grows and morphs in the human body. This energy doesn’t just come on line on your 18th birthday—it’s a slow fade. Humanity’s whole raison d'être is to have sex, so it makes sense that the second we can walk and talk, we’re touching ourselves and wondering what the deal is with these skin flaps we hide away all day. We don’t know what they are for, but they have a gravity to them we are interested in. We are born sexual beings. Being born is sexual.

All people start as Green Dragons and can, through physical practice, become Jade Dragons who serve their partners with strength and clarity, control their sexuality, and are a stabilizing force. In Taoist tradition, the word “jade” refers to semen, and the jade stone itself symbolizes dragon cum.

The patriarchy has us existing in a world where men can show up to a woman all Green Dragoned out, energy leaking like a sieve, and that she should be so grateful that he has chosen her. And then the man leaks all over her life and has the gall to say “nothing will ever make you happy.”

If sexual energy just grows throughout life without thoughtful education and experience, you get men willing to murder and maim in order to achieve peace, men willing to rape in order to achieve intimacy, men willing to make people around them unsafe so they can feel safe. Men who are incapable of actually relating to another person in a cosmic dance, but must order people hierarchichally and mistreat those below them.

In The Teachings of the Jade Dragon, a Jade Dragon could visit a white tigress to train him to use his sexual energy in a controlled way. One of the lessons involves the White Tigress having sex with a Jade Dragon while the Green Dragon (in training) sits in the next room listening. The intention here is to teach the Green Dragon to listen to a woman in a real away, understanding the pacing she needs to feel safe, understand what it feels like to be in the room when she is being drained of energy versus when she is being filled up. Even though Western (white American Christian) culture isn’t unique in its misogyny, it is unique in its near complete lack of matriarchal lineage and respect. Even if you update the history books with the great women of history, it’s hard to avoid tokenizing because the current of the status quo is so strong toward writing women out of the story. That’s why wokeness, especially in bureaucratic and corporate environments, comes off so cheesy and forced.

Because a violent patriarchal society has de-personified woman in men’s eyes, women now have the added labor of having to really slap men around a bit in order for them to be seen as a whole human and the real relationship can begin. Most of us were raised by mothers who were willing conspirators in unjust and patriarchal norms. We don’t even know what it feels like to interact with a decolonized woman. What it feels like to come correct to her when she comes correct.

I believe if you don’t come correct to a woman they have three options: (1) leave you in the dust, (2) whip you into shape, or (3) take on the patriarchal worldview where they need a man and their man, no matter how obviously grotesque a person, is at the top of the family hierarchy. And option 3 is a relationship where one or more people are ultimately unfulfilled and both people usually feel non-consensually submissive to their partners. That is, it is a hierarchical relationship—there is someone on top reaping the benefits.

M***********g S.I.M.P.

If you’re steeped in patriarchal mind games like this lady ⬆️, you probably think being a simp is a bad thing.

You probably read The Superior Man and went to your mens groups or talked to your girlfriends and settled on the idea that real men are stable, secure, and strong. You’ve probably understood simps as needy, eager, and submissive. These definitions are on their way out.

To all my d00dz (is that gender neutral for dude?), next time you try and approach a woman, remember that option number two is your goal. Hold space for the possibility that this woman might know how to whip you into shape and that it won’t always be an enjoyable process. Remember that your job, as a man, biologically speaking is to help her feel safe enough to procreate.

That is why the most sexually tense exchanges often involve a bit of bickering, and it’s usually the woman doing the bickering. It’s a test, to see if he can handle it. Are you going to hang your head and skulk away or dance with her? Someone once told me, “Do you know how to know if a woman is testing you? She’s talking. Do you know how to know if you’re failing? You’re talking.”

The lesson here isn’t to shut up, but to listen, to take in your chosen person’s critiques and painful feelings and emotions and quirks and transmute them into something that strengthens your bond. Allow your ego to be big and strong, not big and brittle.

While men can take the lead here and there in the material realm, in the emotional realm, let the woman take the lead. That doesn’t mean collude with every one of her anxieties and fears, but it means treat their feelings as if they arrived like gems from heaven and it was your job to keep them safe, not to smash them into sand and say “problem solved.”

One of the saddest aspects of the crimes commited by Diddy, Weinstein, and the like, is that they all had inumerable avenues to get sexual gratification consensually, and in a healthy way. Healthy here means: with people and in situations where everyone leaves feeling good. The world would be better if your sex was better.

My Thing

In November 2017, five women accused Louis C.K. of sexual misconduct, alleging that he masturbated in front of them or asked to do so without consent. He admitted, “These stories are true,” acknowledging that he abused his position of power. He disappeared from the public eye for several years and then returned with a comedy special where he talks about how every guy has “a thing”—a sexual predilection that is the holy grail of their sexual experience. But he laments that in getting outed, now President Obama knows what his thing us. He likes to jerk off in front of people; like a neglected Green Dragon might with their sexual energy run amok. As Louis points to himself he says, “Some people just like fucked up sex.”

I used to have “a thing.” I had some shame around it; it wasn’t even that rare or weird. But I felt like there was no way I could experience it without feeling bad for my partner, like I was forcing them to do an extreme sport. And then I was lucky enough to marry to a former sex worker, who has let me hold “my thing” in reverence, and turned it into a way—in her mind and in mine—for us to be connected and intimate in a serious way. Tending to the rougher edges of our selves as a way of building a container of safety.

If P-Diddy was coming correct, he would have made a situation for himself where rubbing baby oil all over some guy and asking him to have sex with his girlfriend wasn’t so. . . fucked up. But, as Louis hinted, and as I used to think about my thing, some people want the fucked up part. The darkness is a turn on for them. I can’t think of a better example of how colonizing and misogynistic thought patterns destroy the external world as well as our internal world.

Why? Why does the hurt need to be real?

I think most men want someone to show them how their darkness is nothing to be ashamed of. But that is an active process. They can’t just wait for someone with the right temperment to help them transmute this darkness. They must be on their own journey with it, and using the relationship as a proving ground. The goal is to have healthy relationships and to me this means decolonized, non-hierarchichical, sex positive, and shadow affirming. This is a pie in the sky, I recieved too much nervous system level programming to just CRISPR it out of me. Miosgyny lives in me. Racism lives in me. We’re all on this fucked up sitcom together, we might as well have great, consensual, life affirming sex.

From the quagmire of american misogyny, we did recieve one gem of cliche wisdom: “Happy wife, happy life.”

It’s simply true. And if we extrapolate it to the whole globe: happy wives, happy lives, If you make it your goal to serve women’s nervous systems, many of the world’s ills would be healed. Most of us men are lost, our nervous systems are all out of whack. We need you.

In The Superior Man, David Deida says that when a woman is unhappy she is not like a car engine that needs a new carburetor, she is like a flower that just needs some water. In other words, don’t over complicate it, don’t worry about her personality and what you think of her—that will make you reactive and un-present. Just focus on her nervous system: what can you say or do that will make her feel truly safe and held?

Anyway, this is all such b******t. I know this is what I need to do, but every day, I’m still a grumpy guy who makes ill-timed jokes and slips into autopilot 80% of the time. Sorry, I just got the feeling I was writing a bit too flowery trying to close this article up. I don’t want to social-media shame you into thinking I’m great and my relationship is perfect and radical. It ain’t.

This stuff is sometimes touchy and I appreciate you reading. I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Love,

Josh

When I was 12 years old, I was browsing through Borders and found a book called Jokes Women Won’t Laugh At. I still remember an embarrassing amount of those jokes by heart. I read it like The Bible. Indoctrinated into the hilarious world of misogyny.

I’ve been watching the Kevin Spacey documentary, and it’s grotesque in a way I hadn’t imagined. He is at once abusive and sexually exploitative, with decades worth of mistreatment and grooming under his belt, and also simply a deeply traumatized young boy.

While watching Spacey Unmasked, memories of my own semi-troubling ‘fling’ with a famous gay man came rushing back, and I felt a whole assortment of good and bad and shame and confusion.

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For many born-and-bred Zionists like myself, the massacre of October 7th marked an awakening that immediately put every person on Earth in one of two categories. Half of my Jewish brothers and sisters were defending Hamas, an organization that we had only, until then, known as a terrorist organization in Palestine. And the other half were suddenly stanning for Israel as they ruthlessly murdered Palestinians en masse. It was a jarring turn of events. October 7th rattled me awake from a deep Zionist slumber. My friends in the latter group watched in abject horror as I started posting solely anti-Israel, pro-Palestine content, out of the blue. I must have appeared to them like a person celebrating 9/11.

Palestine is, of course, bigger than Palestine. When the Zionists scream, “Why don’t you care about Sudan? Why don’t you give the land back to the Native Americans?” We say, “Yes, that too.”

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.- Jiddu Krishnamurti

It’s been supremely hard to put a post together. There’s nothing to say but free Palestine. End wars. Stop fascism. Never in my life has this Krishnamurti quote been more accurate. At every turn, well intentioned people are telling me that my political stances are affecting my mental health, that I should stay grateful and retain perspective. And the most high-vibe, conscious response I can muster is “f**k off and die.” I have no interest in being well-adjusted to this society. Every day I seem to be one more step at odds.

It feels like everything is falling apart. It’s not that I don’t have hope for the future, it’s that I think “hope” itself is silly and maybe even nefarious. I don’t “hope” society goes anywhere in particular, just like when my son is having a tantrum I don’t “hope” it ends, I simply wait for it to end. I know it will change. I know it will return to peace. It’s just energy rattling through the material realm and it’s so scary and hard to watch. And that’s all that’s happening to society—it’s having a tantrum, and, like my son after a tantrum, the peace after it ends will be full of awareness, grief, loving, and presence. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight, scream, and rage, it just means that our fight is part of a natural process. Nothing is going wrong. That’s why Palestinians call the dead martyrs.

Today, I’m writing to you about what remains when it all falls apart, because it is falling apart. Today, I’m writing you about how disintegration is dis-integration—the end of integration, and also the precursor to a new sort of integration. Today, I’m writing you about how the concept of family is melting along with society, and what that means for you and your loved ones. And finally, I’m writing you today about how you should follow your gut even when your gut is clearly batshit crazy.

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Aliens in the Outfield

Earlier this year, we were going to move to Ojai. We found a great spot, kind of a dream. But something didn’t feel right. The landlord was a very famous UFO researcher and influencer. The kind of UFOlogist that focuses on the government and military side of things. It was out in the farmland beside the mountains and did feel like the type of place an alien might visit. Marley was proper scared of the whole vibe.

I tried a bit to push and see how serious she was and when it came time to sign the lease, it just didn’t feel right for either of us. Marley said it was about the aliens.

Someone had mentioned pesticides in Ojai were an issue on this side of town. I looked up the address and found it was surrounded in pesticide spraying farms.

I’m sure it would have been OK—people live out there and in all sorts of places. But if I don’t have a job calling for me in Ojai, I don’t need to be living in a cloud of pesticide with a 6 month old baby and my family.

What started as my guffawing at aliens being an issue, ended with real environmental concerns.

I’ve started to realize, in general and in partnership, that the source of the skepticism about a certain decision doesn’t matter. Your instinct—or gut— may seem outlandish, you may be tempted to rationalize why it’s wrong, but if you feel it, it’s right. Time will prove it right. And if it doesn’t, your instinct will tell you again, and you can act on that then.

I know this isn’t isolated to me, but my spidey senses are going off in a greater sense. Many people are talking about capitalism’s death rattle—that last gurgle of air before someone dies. People are noticing the environment’s getting angrier and more confused. People are noticing that right wing extremism is on the rise globally. People are noticing that societal connections and institutions seems to be getting pretty tenuous. Our financial debt as a country is comedically high. Our material debt to the Earth is comedically high (We take so many resources, we don’t repay the soil).

It’s worth noting here Tchaikovsky’s famous rule about storytelling: “If you introduce a gun into the story, someone must use it.” To that end, it’s worth noting, nuclear bombs have been introduced into the human story. We’ve used them before, they will be used again. And when we do, there will be large swaths of the public justifying their use. And this will be the case until the bitter end of our civilization.

My spidey senses are going off and it’s about all of these things and none of these things. Things are clearly disintegrating at a higher rate than normal. First Trump’s election put everything in perspective. Then Covid. Then George Floyd. Then Palestine. It has been a f*****g battering of a decade. Obviously a lot of other things happened but these were my milestones; the things that really made me realize that the way things were headed was going to be a messy messy mess. And I’m not ignorant to the fact that the past was even more fucked up, whether the Holocaust or slavery or environmental decimation or colonization. The difference now is it is televised, and “the people” that have power don’t care, and “the people” that do care are noticing how limited their power is. Blocking traffic on the bridge is fine, dismantling the bridge is great.

While part of me is kind of waiting for “clearer signs,” I also don’t know what those signs are or how they could be clearer. I don’t know what more I need to see to know that Western civilization is death rattling.

Today, I had the realization that if the people I really align with all feel it, and I feel it—which is mostly true—then it’s real. Together, we make society.

Even more alarming, people I don’t necessarily align with seem to be feeling it too.

I believe this alignment is the death rattle itself. There is nothing more to wait for. If I wait for larger “indisputable “signs, then I will have entered popular consensus territory and popular consensus is turning every day over to fascism as the only way to fend off societal collapse. My friends and I long to divest financially, emotionally, spiritually, and physically from that timeline. Like an unwell, down-and-out friend who you have tried everything to help and they are starting to impinge on your own health and happiness—you’ve kind of got to let the sickness burn out how it will and just watch the show with compassion.

My Family (Feels Like) It’s Falling Apart Too

On the phone with my mom the other day I heard her say something I’ve heard before, “You don’t choose your family.” I think she intended this to make me feel better about some family drama, but my immediate thought was, “Yes, you do.”

That’s why chosen families are such a big part of our generation. We have come to take our modern—Hallmark—conception of family for granted.

Here’s a quick overview on the history and state of families in the West off the top of my head:

* We used to be farmers and small communities that relied on one another, had very little luxury, and mostly stayed in one place for most of our lives. Our families were always around and our activities and behaviors were inextricably tied to one another.

* Transportation made it that it became common to take long journeys—by boat or train, far away from family. We left knowing we may never see them again or even talk to them except for some letters that may or may not make it to them. Now families were commonly separated into various geographical places and people had lives and jobs that their family really had no part in.

* Transportation speed increased again with planes and communication increased with phones so now people could visit one another without upending their whole lives or going on treacherous journeys. They could also keep in touch immediately without leaving the phone booth. Family “closeness” was rekindled a bit even though geographically many families were still separated.

* Now everything is lightning fast. Now, no matter where we are on Earth, our moms can text us the first thing that comes to their mind and it will notify us immediately. It’s almost like telepathy.

But does this new state of affairs seem healthy or natural? Is it normal for family who has very little impact or influence on my daily life to text, call, or email and expect me to operate my life like some sort of switchboard operator at a crowded hotel? Should I be constantly fielding questions about my activities, my state of being, my plans, and so on? Is that healthy?

Messages from family arrive like intrusive thoughts. I read them and wonder: why am I reading this? Can I unsubscribe? What does this person want?

I’m not intending to be cold or dramatic. I love my family. I think they’re fun and nice and wish a million blessings upon everyone— they haven’t done anything gruesome or unforgivable to me. But the idea of talking all the time and planning expensive, resource intensive trips every year to come together and play-act like it’s our childhood house again feels perverted.

I feel bad writing this. Like these feelings mean I’m a bad son, father, or brother. But boy does it feel worse playing along. I’m re-aligning to the possibility that hanging around with all these negative feelings would be the thing that makes me a bad son or brother. Who knows? It’s all painful. But I feel in such good company as so many of my peers are working through similar upheavals.

Recently, and in a way that melds the two parts of this post—the end of society and the disintegration of family—I told my sister I wanted to share some land in upstate New York or Asheville to pool our resources and energies. She told me that her and I couldn’t even decide on a place to AirBnb vacation together, how the hell was my farm plan supposed to work? How the hell was I supposed to be a good land partner when I couldn’t even be relied on to make it on time to dinner or to come to Thanksgiving!

Going to an Airbnb for no reason other than escaping daily life is unwell. Offering to upend your immediately family and pool all of your time and resources in service of mutual support financially, environmentally, and personally, feels quite healthy. But my dream is considered crazy, and trying to live inside a Hallmark card is not. And this is what we mean when we say it’s not healthy to be well adjusted to a sick society. If general consensus says it’s healthy, it’s probably not.

Baby boomers are now in their last couple decades of life on earth. And in that time, they are going to use (read, burn through needlessly) an insane amount of resources on their way out. They’re going to burn through their savings (remember for the average working household in the US it’s $1,200 but for baby boomers it’s $200,000). And that money spent will result in not only less money for their kids, but continued environmental destruction—the same kind they knowingly/unknowingly dedicated their lives to perpetuating. Baby boomers are the generation that coined the term “shrink” to describe psychologists because they feel that going to therapy shrinks your brain. Reminder that a psychologist’s job can be summarized as helping people understand how and why their actions affect the people around them. They pathologized empathy.

I’m becoming a prepper, but not the canning, gun-toting kind. I’m the kind of prepper that needs people who can hold my anger and grief and joy and desires and pleasure and sensitivities and soul. I need people who are committed to peace. To destroying the parts of themselves that hurt others and the Earth. I want my new community to squeeze from me the poisons of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and racism.

The type of safety we are going to need in the following decades will have very little to do with money—though the very richest people will probably do fine (in the material realm). The type of safety we’re going to need as the Earth get’s hotter, dirtier, full of more war and less efficient, is the same type of safety we’ve always needed. Love.

I love you, have a good week.

On this post in particular, I’m interested in your thoughts. Do you have hope? Do you align with the death rattle? What’s going on in your mind? Are we frogs in boiling water? What does the next decade hold? Am I going through a mental health crisis? Wrong answers only.

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Hey y’all. As much as my Substack articles represent what’s on my mind, the music I’m making is also what’s on my mind, just in a different way. I will try to release a song alongside my posts when I find the time and space. Here’s a little ditty for today’s post. It also plays throughout the podcast/audio version of the article.

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha.” This means that if you can find Buddha and say, “It’s this way; Buddha is like this,” then you had better kill that “Buddha” that you found. Contemplative and mystical Christians, Hindus, Jews, people of all faiths and nonfaiths can also have this perspective: if you meet the Christ that can be named, kill that Christ. — from Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron

I’ve been thinking a lot about the long tentacles of war.

The way that this war in particular is sucking energy and life force not only from the people of Palestine and Israel but from all the people of the world.

Reaching out from the Middle East are the long arms that come even into my house in Portland, Oregon. They suck energy, compassion, anger, grief, and vitriol out of me and my wife. And I’m sure in some way they also suck from my children, who are too young to understand what all of this means for them but can feel mom and dad’s somber tone and feel our distracted hearts.

I can barely look at them without having images of screaming Palestinian children flash before my eyes. Multiple times a day, survivor guilt shoots down my spine like a chill.

I can’t sit down at the Thanksgiving table this year the way I have for the past three decades. This was the last straw. I won’t ignore a modern genocide for a day while I celebrate a past genocide. I don’t want my sons to see that sort of cognitive dissonance. I want them to see their dad wide open, confused, hurt—feeling. I’ll ‘celebrate’ by praying and grieving and singing with my fellow Substacker The Big Heart and his family.

It’s good to see that people aren’t watching idly as European colonialism claims more lives and erases more civilizations. People are protesting. I’m writing and thinking things that even a few months ago would have felt totally uncharacteristic. My Zionism was a given until recently. It went unchallenged and unexplored.

While a lot has been said about Hamas’ tactic of using Palestinians as human shields, I find it more reprehensible and shocking that the US and UK are using my traumatized and desperate Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel as human shields for their own holy war.

On dealing with anger, the Buddha is believed to have said that “when someone offers you a gift, and you decline it, they get to keep the gift.” And this is the compassionate way to handle someone’s anger. If they throw anger at you (the gift), you can politely decline, and then they can keep it for themselves so it can run its course elsewhere.

In making a deal with the devil to establish the state of Israel, the Jews accepted Hitler’s angry gift. Since then, they have been regifting that anger to the Palestinians. Anger is like a brain virus constantly looking for a host; its hotheaded hosts are always excited to find new hosts to infect.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been taking an inventory of all the angry gifts I have received over the years. This has been most clear in two words: jihad and terrorism.

I’m seeing now that these are racist slurs that represent the West’s (by which we mean the White’s) anger for different cultures, different colors of people, and those unwilling to simply accept the West’s way of life and vision of the future at face value.

According to US culture, are there white terrorists? No. Not really. We call them white nationalists, but some people might consider that a compliment.

Is there a white jihad? No.

And, after some pickup truck plows over a parade of people, news anchors on every station wait with bated breath to see if the authorities deem it “Islamic terrorism.” If it’s Islamic terrorism, it’s newsworthy. It needs expert analysts, deep investigation, and coverage, and is the result of a complex web of evil people who want to destroy the American way of life. And, if it’s just some economically stressed, mentally unwell white person, well then, it’s just the news of the day, and we won’t hear about it after some time.

The implication is that horror brought by brown people, or non-Christian people, is worse than the horror brought by white Christians.

The word jihad, similarly, is supposed to be scary because it’s in Arabic and it relates to Islam. But really, it’s just a holy war, the same that Christians and Jews and Muslims have been fighting for millennia. We’ve been led to believe the racist narrative that only Muslims are backward enough to want a holy war. But the reason the Christian West stands by the Jews and Israel is not because they are morally superior; it’s because their own jihad dictates that the Jews must be in Israel. There’s this idea that only the Muslim world has holy wars and that America is above that and past that. But nothing else can explain the vehemence and shamelessness with which they are backing the Palestinian Genocide.

I was daydreaming the other day and had the lovely realization that if explorers today had found some new continent, the arrival would likely go much different. Landing on this uncharted land with new cultures and peoples, the explorers would be excited and curious, not scared and angry. They’d, as sensitively as possible, ask questions about the cultures there, the technologies, the language, and the customs. There would be a cultural exchange, the kind we dream up in fantasies, like the fictional Thanksgiving dinner where the American Indians taught the colonists how to grow corn. There would be an openness.

But for many people—Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike—they are still in these dark ages of fear and anger, of good and evil. They see outsiders and different cultures as threats to their existence. They don’t feel they are part of that dynamic in any self-aware way. They feel they are the world’s peacekeepers, always on a higher moral plane, always with God on their side and their side alone. Everyone else should get on board or die.

Turns Out I Don’t Understand How the World Works

This war, as much as it is fought with guns and bodies, is also a PR war. I said in my last post that Israel could probably win this war on both the PR front and the physical front if they would do something nontraditional, such as dropping billions of roses all over Palestine.

But these alternatives to war do not get corporations and nations very excited. They deem them to risky, too hippie.

When I propose peaceable options like this, Zionists will often tell me that I just simply don’t understand how the world works.

As far as I can tell, the world works with war, money, and fear, and choosing options that change this deadly dynamic is the only real route to peace. And the route to peace is not one humans often walk. We don’t know what that route holds, what other lurking dangers hide there, and what sort of fallout such peaceable actions might result in. And that’s where the sadness lies with me. It’s the same sadness I get when I think about our capitalist society and where it’s led us.

I can see how wealth and technology have benefited certain corners of the world and certain people, but I know deep in my heart that there are better options, endeavors, and ways to spend our energy. And my sadness is that I don’t know when we will all get together to choose a better way.

Election season is coming, and like every election for the past decade, pretty much since Obama got elected, I greet each election season with a deep sense of dread, not excitement about my democracy.

Election season now serves to remind us of our powerlessness, not our powerfulness.

And that’s how you know something’s up.

Get Out and Don’t Vote

Today, I’m laughing at all the people up in arms around election season, trying to get other people to vote. There is a deep judgment about people who don’t vote as if they are part of the problem; they are the evil bystanders. While this might be true, the same logic applies to those who don’t use social media to fight evil. Voting is just one of many small ways we can partake in making a better world.

Whatever your reasons for not posting about this publicly, not talking to your friends about it, and not kicking up dust in the name of the world you’d like to see, it is a cop-out. I take more of an issue with people declining to share their thoughts on social media and being part of the conversation than with people who decline to vote. The only thing that matters in a functioning democracy is that those in power understand the views of those who feel powerless.

And these days, the medium for this sort of expression is social media, newsletters, and blogs like mine. I’ve often said I don’t care about people’s political views. My friend the plumber, my friend the graphic designer, even my friend the doctor, we all lead small and local lives. Our view on one thing or another doesn’t really matter. Maybe it’s my Libra rising, but I don’t put too much weight on people’s political views. But I do hope that whatever people’s political views are, they’re sharing them. Even if you’re Zionist, sharing your viewpoint with the world lets people know where you stand, and that’s valuable and honest on a level that can’t be underestimated.

Marshall McLuhan, the media philosopher who inspired the title of this blog, once said that “the only alternative to war is conversation.” And as these nations do represent us, we must show these nations how to communicate without war and how to approach peace without putting our safety at risk.

The real estate agent that helped us buy our new house in Portland is Palestinian. He also has a deep fondness for Jews, even though Zionists kicked his family out of their land in the 40s. This past Shabbat, he purchased tons of Challah from the local Jewish bakery and stopped by each of his Jewish friends’ houses, including ours, to give it as an offering of peace, grief, and camaraderie.

These are the ways we fight this war. With food, with love, and with openhearted grief for the pain that must be in the hearts of the people who consider war the only option.

This is not a new feeling; pacifist activist Jews and Palestinians have all been murdered in this war. I’m saying nothing new. Every time a new war begins, troves of people come out to scream: “Give peace a chance.” This isn’t rocket science—don’t kill people.

There is No Good or Evil

The concepts of good and evil are solely Judeo-Christian creations. Any other cosmology could have gained precedence on Earth, but we are stuck with this one.

But it needs an update.

We know that trauma affects people in head-spinningly confusing and complex ways. I don’t think I believe in good people and bad people anymore.

There are certainly people who are so hurt and angry that they commit bad actions at a frequency and with an energy that is incomparable to most ‘good’ people. We might be tempted to call these people Evil. But once we do, they are dead; there is no more communicating with them, there is no more community with them, there is no more relationship with them. Just like that, we receive their anger, and it infects us. Now we are closed off and hellbent on destruction, just like them. And suddenly, we begin exhibiting the very decision-making that made us call them evil.

There is no nuance in the good or evil binary—it’s a tool for dividing and destroying people, and it’s the modus operandi of Christianity and Islam. Jews may have been responsible for the First Testament (and I’m no scholar), but they had very evolved views of good and evil and had what we might call a more Eastern sense of duality. That Jews are now caught in the grips of a war between good and evil is how I know that something is awry and that they are being used to fight someone else’s war.

For those interested in this sort of thing, I have been working on a book about the trauma cycle with a psychologist in San Francisco for 3 years. It’s called DADDY and it is now available for purchase. My readers get 25% off using coupon code CONTENTUSER.

No discount, but you can also order on Amazon.

I’m going to end this article here because there comes a point in writing about this that it feels stupid. There is nothing more to say. I start to get nauseous that I’m even having to write this. Stop killing people. Stop thinking anyone is evil. You are perpetuating the trauma cycle. Peace is possible. Death is inevitable. Life can be good. Love your families. Be present. F**k Thanksgiving.

Thanks for reading,

Josh

I started this post before Hamas’ massacre of Israelis on October 7th 2023. Just days before the most recent flare-up in this decades-old war, I was taking Yom Kippur seriously for the first time in twenty years.

I started dabbling in Judaism again in late 2022. A friend and his wife would make challah and bring over candles and wine and we’d celebrate Shabbat. I was rusty. I forgot the prayers and the way things were done. But reconstituting this tradition felt serious and meaningful for us and our young families. We’d sometimes bring friends, and I rather seriously wanted it to be only Jews. This particular desire felt out of character for me. In retrospect, I feel like my nervous system was preparing for a war I didn’t even know was about to happen. I just felt safe in the cocoon of my people.

What kind of Jew am I? I’m the did-a-bar-mitzvah-but-just-memorized-the-Torah-phonetically-rather-than-actually-learning-Hebrew kind; the rich kid kind; the kind of privileged Jew who got a fax from the Prime Minister of Israel on the day of my Bar Mitzvah because my grandfather and him were friends; the type of Jew that doesn’t believe the Holocaust can actually happen again on the same scale; the type of Jew that knows our traumatic past doesn’t disqualify us from committing genocide. I’m the kind of Jew who was raised Zionist, went to Israel multiple times, and was led to view the settlements as a kind of achievement.

It's been a wild ride, this move from California to Oregon.

A tangle of tendons and nerves getting massaged out.

Arriving just in time for Pacific Northwest Winter.

Chasing the sunlight and feeling the desire to sun my a*****e just to soak up every ounce.

I’m discovering that people-pleasing is just a different angle of narcissism.

Here are some thoughts that have been percolating. Click play if you can

I never get lonesome

When I was 13 years old, I filled pages of my journal trying to untangle different angles of loneliness. I’d write “Lonesome. Lonely. Lone. Alone. Loner” and then explore lengthy definitions of each one.

I’d recently read The Phantom Tollbooth and felt like my literary cherry had been popped. I became obsessed with language and how words splice up experience into a million little slivers. It was the first time I’d ever read stuff like this in a kid’s book:

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”

I don’t know, stuff like this just hit me: language is a tool we use it’s not just a soup we’re swimming in. There’s this scene where they are at the farmer's market, but instead of vegetables and fruits, they buy and sell words, letters, and punctuation, and I saw how we bargain for meaning with each word we use. The origin of the word spelling is casting spells.

I was 13, starting high school, feeling lonely. So, I became hyper-focused on understanding the shadows and crests of loneliness and how to describe it.

My journal entry went like this:

Lonesome: Usually a bit tragic but respectable. Self-sufficient. Legubrious.

Lonely: Eeyore. Tragic. Lonely people tend to talk a lot about their loneliness. It’s a feeling. Elliott Smith.

Lone: Lone Wolf. Lone Ranger. Romantic. Talented. Strong. Admirable.

Alone: Matter of fact. You’re sitting at a table with a friend, then they leave, and you’re alone. When someone tries to start a fight, you say, “Just leave me alone.” Bodily. Physical.

Loner: Kind of like a lone ranger but prepubescent. This word has some derogatory tingles to it. Hoarders are loners. Loners are kind of freakish.

Each word is just a sliver of the concept of loneliness we perceive as it splits through the prism of culture and our experiences. These words represent the different ways we view more or less the same behavior in someone. For every feeling, characteristic, vibe, etc., we have a collection of words to describe what arises from each different social angle.

Intelligent Design

All the lonely people

Sadly, Intelligent Design people took that name because the universe does have intelligence. We are proof of it. That’s the funny part of asking if the universe has intelligent life. Yes. Apart from having to eat something to harness the energy needed to keep on living, there is something else (I believe) that every soul on Earth and off Earth understands: loneliness.

Ask yourself if a sea cucumber ever feels alone. It’s a dumb question. They might not feel lone, or lonely, or lonesome, but they definitely feel alone. That’s the sliver of loneliness their experience allows.

Yes, sea cucumbers feel alone.

There is surely a chance I’m anthropomorphizing, but I think feeling lonely is the litmus test for intelligent life. If we could contact every civilization and soul in the galaxy, I’d imagine many of them might have also looked out at the stars and wondered if they were really alone. Even if they didn’t wonder about this, they might be surrounded by their friends, and then their friends all walk away, and they are left alone in the desert. There’s that feeling of loneliness welling up again.

Okay, sorry I got all aliens there on you. Biological life isn’t really what I wanted to talk about, I wanted to talk about how things like loneliness, pain, and other core elemental feelings associated with being alive permeate throughout the universe. The words we use to describe them are just like naming stars—we do it as a practice of defining something intangible but present.

God’s Shirt

Everything about life seems to be about patterns. The pattern of cauliflower, the patterns in our skin, on our shirts, in the weave of our shirts. There’s even a pattern in the shirt's weave on the back of the person weaving your shirt for you.

There are patterns in how people behave toward one another too; I’m sure you could visualize them as a mycelial network of their own. For now, we will have to settle for the DSM.

But I like to imagine these behavioral patterns as animalistic species that evolve, go extinct, and adapt, rather than definitions in a dictionary. Certain people respond one way, and other people respond another way. It all feels familiar like we all saw it in the same movie. These species of behavior have ways of being and interacting. We tend to ask whether or not we learned certain behavioral patterns from television, movies, or our parents. But “Who came first the chicken or the egg?” isn’t an earnest question because we all know the chicken is the egg. We are all part of the weave of God’s shirt. We made the movies and the movies made us.

Each word for loneliness describes a different emergent pattern or behavior relating to loneliness. They are different species of loneliness. And this genus of loneliness, which contains all those species, is an entity that exists out there in the universe. Like it’s own kind of interdimensional element or entity, loneliness sits beside pain and fear of death as a reality of waking life in our galaxy.

Now, of course, Kim Kardashian also exists out in the universe as a concept that an alien might understand and even conceive of, but she exists on a wafer-thin plane most aliens wouldn’t have the intelligence or ability or even want to perceive. On the other hand, pain, loneliness, and death feel like unavoidable behemoths that permeate every inch of the universe.

All living things engage in pattern recognition. Even a krill knows where it is and how it’s related to the whole group. This is why pattern recognition is considered a mark of intelligence; it is the mechanism of evolution. We’re all fishing for interesting patterns in the energetic goop of conscious life. Like fishing, sometimes you get a behemoth, and sometimes you get a wafer.

Waking life, and often sleep, is a treacherous bog of hormones, sensory input, and external events. It can feel thick and messy. Sometimes, it can feel free and easy. Language is the attempt to achieve exactitude in describing what you might be able to harvest from that bog. David Lynch says it this way:

I Lied, I Get Lonesome a Lot

I’ve been feeling very lonely since we moved. 😞 It’s been hard to say out loud because

Rumor has it that when you take magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, or LSD, you hallucinate. You see walls moving, you smell sounds, you imagine things that aren’t present, your mind becomes non-linear, and you might even think you can fly. Have you ever experienced this? Pretty cool right? Maybe you were scared. Maybe you couldn’t get enough.

But, what if they weren’t hallucinations?

In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley imbibes with mescalin and explains that maybe the brain makes us “hallucinate” the life we call sober, and hallucinogens actually allow us to experience reality unfiltered. Some good science backs this distinction up. Huxley writes:

"The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful […] a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, and the victim in so far as it […[ bedevils his sense of reality. He is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things."

So our brain is actually the hallucinogenic device. It shows us a very simplified view of the world. And I don’t just mean simplified; I mean gutted. Bless our five senses, but we can’t process even a moment of unfiltered inputs from them. Like a good assistant, our brain is always looking for a way not to bother us about something. It decides whether the tingle on your leg is a mosquito or the wind. Sometimes the data doesn’t match reality, and we end up swatting at an empty leg. Our brain stops us from hearing the buzzing air conditioner in our room, but then you can’t unhear it once someone points it out.

On top of this ability to filter out unnecessary information, our brain also gifts us the confidence that we actually perceive all there is to perceive so we don’t doubt ourselves. This is called the rich phenomenology experience, and I discuss it more in this post. Conscious animals are all confident that what they/we see and hear is the whole truth—reality. But that is the grand hallucination.

Who is the real hero?

Two reputable scientific investigations bring our reality into question. First, when people on psychedelics have their brains imaged in an fMRI machine, one would expect their minds to be going wild like fireworks coming up with all sorts of hallucinations to feed the consciousness. In reality, their brains are, across the board, calmer, quieter, and less active. That is, the brain is simply doing less work. What does it mean for the subjective experience of a less active brain to be much more active and lively and full of movement, color, and insight? Interestingly, fMRIs of people on LSD and mushrooms look very similar to a child’s MRI. It goes to show that psychedelics put you in a more receptive mode where you have less control over your inputs.

This study actually changed the way I parent my children. I now see that my role as a father is to facilitate their psychedelic trip. When they feel scared, I’ve got to make them feel safe; when they are really enjoying something, I’ve got to make it fun for them. They are a friend who I promised to sit by as they go on their psychedelic journey. We all need chaperones because our brain is not prioritizing survival when its in these states.

Quantum physics has shown us that physical reality is a lot more interconnected and bizarre than our five senses let on. Quantum entanglement connects atoms across hundreds of miles—yet they are connected intimately in different dimensions. That isn’t woo; that’s where modern science has led us. You can separate two entangled atoms by 150 miles; when you shake one in a certain pattern, the other one shakes. And they aren’t communicating; they shake instantaneously—faster than the speed of light—because they are still connected in another dimension.

We know all space is filled with a network of dark energy and mass that accounts for the whole universe. Billions upon billions of subatomic particles are passing through our bodies at each moment without us noticing. The sun seems like it shines light down so we can see the world, but that’s just the energy we evolved to see. If we could see other existing energies right in front of our face—the world would be all light. Our brains limit what we see so that we can partake in the mundanity of life.

We walk down the street and have the cockiness of feeling like we see and perceive everything in our sightline, but we see such a small sliver of visible light and within that visibility, we are aware of even a smaller slice.

If you could take a drug that made you see those particles, feel them, hear them, would that be a hallucination? What about weird little energy shifts rather than discrete particles? What about shapes in shadows, the ulterior motives of a friend, the sweetness of a stranger, the divinity of a flower or a bug? That’s what psychedelics do.

They aren’t making you hallucinate, they are putting you in touch with subtler energies your brain usually really works hard to keep at bay.

If you give a rock a psychedelic, nothing happens.

Since I’ve started this way of thinking, I’ve often felt that the most aware being in the world is simply a rock. It has no brain to stop it’s perception, it is receiving all things with no filter, no calculation, no reaction. Consciousness in a biological flesh suit involves severely narrow awareness and senses. We don’t see the whole visual spectrum, hear the whole sound spectrum, smell all the smells, or taste all the tastes. We just sense what works for humans and what we need to persist. Everything else feels imaginary.

The fact that this flesh suit reality is not the whole reality is exemplified by the fact that most high doses of ayahuasca, mushrooms, LSD, etc, result in the same experience: full ego dissolution and complete connectedness with the energy field that pervades the universe. Even more tellingis how boring of a trip this is to hear about. It falls under the same category of telling someone about your dreams: it’s entertaining and informative here and there but if you talk about it all the time and put too much value on it, it turns meaningless or even psychotic sounding.

In everyday life, it can be a bit eh to discuss ultimate connectedness throughout the universe. Few people want to live with the awareness that they are intimately connected and in-differentiable from Tucker Carlson. The ultimate reality—as opposed to flesh-suit reality—has no differentiated personalities or discrete bodies.

This is what is meant by “we are all one.”

And that’s why some stoner’s trip—“I was connected to all beings and I saw the divine light of oneness!”—is more of a cliche than a revelation to the sober mind. The sober mind has no room for these shenanigans, it’s focused on shitting and eating.

So what do we do with this information?

Well, there isn’t much to do. In my life, I have crystalized this all into a little motto: the mundane is divine, the divine is mundane. This reminder gives me perspective on all happenings. These divine experiences of connectedness and universal perspective are really no different from the experience of unloading the dishwasher or kicking a ball—each are simply opportunities to surrender into the universally acknowledged fact that we are not really in control of our fates to the degree our brains would like us to believe. That is why Alcohol Anonymous’ infamous serenity prayer goes:

God grant me the serenityto accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Importantly, AA’s founder got the idea for the program after having experienced high doses of LSD, and realizing the perspective could help people disembark from the vices of their lowly flesh suits and connect with the divine. In the 60s, when it was founded, people would rather pray to God than do drugs so all references to psychedelics were artfully avoided. But that is why AA’s God feels very non-Christian.

AA’s god is about a mundane “higher power.” This higher power is the jello—for atheists and zealots alike—in which we all sit. This higher power is the answer to all your questions, whatever they may be.

Drugs and psychedelics are just shortcuts to ecstatic states of consciousness that can be accessed in other ways–sensory deprivation, meditation, hunger, insomnia, etc. Most meditation focuses on calming the mind so that true experience can be. . . well, experienced.

This goes to show that what our brain does is help us hallucinate a much simpler, easier sort of reality, and hallucinogens and other mind-calming endeavors open our mind up to the confusing, sometimes scary, sometimes beautiful chaos that surrounds us.

I believe, whether you’re on psychedelics or off, that when you get overwhelmed by life and your external inputs, the only thing you can do is simply breathe through it and wait for it to pass. A lot of our time as a society is spent trying to get rid of overwhelm and discomfort, but this only breeds more.

I use this mundane, boring, and cliche mantra: Surrender, breathe through it, and trust in a higher power.

When I take deep breaths, I find true awareness, until, of course, it slips away a moment later and I have to track it down again. And again. And again, until this hallucination ends and I’m returned to the dirt from where all rocks come.

It will be so easy to be conscious then.

As always, I end my posts with a picture of my sons and a picture of my breakfast:

PART I:

I remember finding out you don’t exist. In the back seat of my mom's car, my hand in my pants, the empty space of a ball I didn't know I had been missing. I remember the story: "You had a bacterial infection." "It inflated to the size of a grapefuit." "A softball." "A Bucca di Beppo meatball!"

My mom nervously holding different protective cups for me to wear during soccer.

The whispers and laughs spread through the room, the grade, the whole school. Big news. My parents consoled me by saying things like "Those kids are idiots." I knew it was a big deal and also not a big deal. All these memories are storied deep in my body somewhere, etched into the cell walls.

PART II: