Religion As a Mirror: Are People Inherently Good?

 

Why are atheists passionate about their non-religion?  I mean, if you truly believe in nothing, wouldn’t the appropriate action and emotion be, well, nothing? Why would you bring energy into nothingness?  That makes no sense.  True atheism would be spiritual disinterest with no energy expended whatsoever.

So what causes people to be passionate about nothingness? (And I’m not talking about the Buddhist nothingness, that’s different and does have a religious context.)

I have a working theory, which is that these atheists actually do believe in God, but are so terrified at the thought of their own unworthiness that they violently reject God to protect themselves from the pain of their on spiritual unworthiness.

“If I don’t believe in Hell, then I can’t be sent there.”  But if you don’t believe in hell, then that entire sentence makes no sense. 

Religion, when applied faithfully, serves as a mirror – you see yourself and all your good and bad aspects.  People who reject religion aren’t rejecting the mirror, they’re rejecting the reflection because they can’t deal with the reality of their own imperfections.

This brings me to a fundamental philosophical question:  Are people basically good?

A lot of people, especially people in various forms of “love and light” spiritual bypass will say, yes, people are basically good and “turn evil” through corruption, etc.

But if one removes this distortion and answers the question honestly, the answer is much more troubling.  Throughout human history, people have not been basically good.  In fact, most people are pretty fucked up.  That’s not to say they’re “bad,” but they’re not inclined to goodness.

Thus the mirror test.  Some people look at the mirror with rose-colored glasses and say “I’m all good, even the bad parts are good, isn’t this wonderful?”  Well, no, it isn’t.  Humans are selfish.  They kill.  They fight.  They hurt each other.  They’re lazy.  They’re corrupt.  Outside forces didn’t corrupt people, people themselves did that.

It’s hard-wired into our brains to kill, to steal, to rape, to lie, to hurt.  Our primitive brains tell us we need to do these things to survive and pass on our genes.  The fantasy that people long ago were good people is 100% false.  People long ago were literal savages and did horrible things to others without any second thought.  They had no mirror.  They had no angel on their shoulder.  They were fucked up people doing fucked up things.

And the worst part? Every one of us walking the earth is a genetic byproduct of those fucked-up people.  Nobody on earth comes from a pure, good lineage. We all come from savages.

And when you take off the glasses and realize you’re as fucked up as “those other” bad people, or at least on the same spectrum, and that is in fact the human lineage, it can be jarring.

No, we are not all divine light.  We’re mostly fucked up people from fucked up lineages.  And that fucked-up-ness is literally the reason we are here.

Some people look at that and see hopelessness.  We’re all doomed.  Therefore there cannot possibly be a god, because that would mean God would condemn his entire creation and what would be the point of that?   If we’re products of the universe then the universe must also be fucked up and it’s all for nothing.

Some look at this reality and deny it.  No, no.  Everyone is good, we just need to “integrate our shadow” and recognize the divine light in every other person.  All is one. 

Different justification, same result:  nothing changes.

Religion, when applied properly, holds up the mirror, shows us the evil inside, allows us to identify it as evil and reject it, and serves a path toward eradicating that evil and building a good life.

Now, here some would say, well, we’ll never get this.  Only a small fraction of people on Earth are even mostly good.  Another small fraction are mostly evil.  And the huge majority are in this broad spectrum of “fucked-up-ness” and every time we make an effort to get better, we just fall right off or find some other avenue to vent our evil.

The promise of religion isn’t that you’ll achieve perfection on your own, but that you learn to identify good and evil and set your thoughts and actions more and more toward good.  You’re not perfect, but you seek betterment, not to gain something but to actually become a good person.

That in itself is an act of goodness.

God does not promise us perfection in this lifetime.  God does not promise us that if we go to church or follow his rules that everything will work out just fine.  In fact, all religions “promise” that the world around us is fucked up and there’s no getting around that because it’s literally in our DNA.  What God does promise is we don’t have to resign ourselves to this fate.  We can turn our gaze toward good and move – however imperfectly – toward the good.

Trying to bridge the gap through the “most people are good” delusion ignores the truth and denies the work.  Collapsing into denial is also a lie – it’s saying your DNA is more powerful than God. Which is nonsense.  It’s not easy.  It may feel hopeless at times.  You will fail far more often than you succeed.  But none of that overcomes the truth that goodness does exist and is available to us, no matter how fucked up our reflection in the mirror is.

At this point people will argue that this is exactly the language bad people use to control others.  And that’s true, it is.  Bad people are drawn to power, and especially religious power, because this is the ultimate means of control.  So yes, a lot of organized religion is corrupted and run by bad people.  Not most, certainly not all, but “the devil quotes scripture” in all its forms.

So critics point to bad people who misuse religion to get people to do very bad things.  Yes, this happens.  People also do very bad things for no reason at all.  The commonality isn’t religion, it’s people.  People do very bad things.

Religion can certainly be misused as a trap, but that doesn’t make religion itself bad.  God is still there, even if his word is being misused.  And rejecting God doesn’t make the bad stop happening, it’s throwing away every tool you have to become better than your DNA. 

Rejecting God actually makes it easier for bad people to manipulate and control you.  Notice how communist dictatorships all seek to stamp out all religion and impose atheism.  In order to give the evil complete control they need to stamp out any hope for goodness. Then they can control the language to make evil sound good with words like “equality.”  (“Equality” is one of those “nice-sounding” evil words that literally replaces a good concept (fairness) with a cruel and amoral measurement system.)

Those who seek power – and evil people are profoundly drawn to power – tend to be those most passionate about getting people to turn away from the mirror.  Don’t look at yourself and try to get better, look over here, this is your problem, and I can fix it and then you’ll feel good without having to try to be good.  This is a fundamental aspect of communism, but also every other oppressive, evil structure that has come about through human history.  Evil Roman emperors engaged in this deception.

There are modern “spiritual leaders” who also seek to bypass the mirror, or sell the idea there’s some magic fix where you wave a wand and the “evil structure” vanishes leaving our goodness in its place. And notice how they also seek to appoint themselves as the source of truth and the final arbiter or goodness, often under the false pretense of “freedom.”

The reflection in the mirror sucks.  It’s supposed to suck. That means you can see good and evil and that you don’t like the evil you see.  This is actually good!  It doesn’t mean you should collapse into shame, that’s another bypass.  You see the evil, you reject the evil and you change thoughts and behaviors.  And for this to happen, you need a clean, good, strong, accurate mirror.

And yes, breaking that mirror is very bad luck. 

California Fails on Air Pollution

 https://nypost.com/2026/04/24/us-news/california-dominates-pollution-ratings-with-eight-cities-in-top-25/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=capost&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=capost&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwdGRjcARZ2EFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEe3-eJkZbr94f4lc2xVW7whEbddfN3DLFJZRDnyHypXvxUekDitYJD6nfTIWw_aem_qeylSz5vDVkiI3WMD9TQOA

Dirty cities, stupid people, horrible policies. That’s California. 

And it’s only one aspect. It gets much worse. 

Beware of the Moving Goalposts

There are a lot of crappy business practices out there. 

The "moving goalposts" one is particularly galling.  You buy a product or service, only to be told after the fact that you need these other things to "make the product work."  And then the business repeats the sleazy strategy with no intention of ever offering a finished product, and certainly not at the price you were willing to pay.

Unethical?  Yes.  Illegal?  Also yes, though often difficult to get a judgment.

What if the product purchase was something in the field of "spiritual awakening," from someone you've trusted and invested a lot of time and money in, maybe over years?  Well that's challenging.  Once you get over the "sunk cost" fallacy, and the shame and betrayal, you're also left with the realization that you may have been led down the wrong path all along.

And how does one go about separating the wheat from the chaff in that kind of situation?

That's where I've been at.  Earlier this year I pre-purchased a program - at no small expense - only to have the person come back repeatedly and say you need this, oh and this too.  Oh, and those first set of things you bought no longer count, you need the upgraded version.

And if you don't?  Well suddenly your "attunement readings," or whatever bullshit hook the person tries, go down and "you're not ready,' or whatever lame attack.  This is the crap they pull in cults.  

Yah, okay.  You're a fraudster, I get it.  I'm fucking done with you.  Shame on me.

But it's not that simple, is it?  Learn a lesson, take your lumps.  It takes more than that to work through it.  There has to be a deeper burning away and cleansing that takes place.  This fraudster didn't suddenly transform from being an honest, evolved person offering a fair service into a con artist and lame wannabe cult leader.  There were signs.

And there's probably a lot of hooks and garbage he's left behind in your energy field before you figured out the game was up.

And there is.  

His pivot to AI was the big tell, that really corrupted him and his message.  First he was offering an "evolved" AI. The problem?  That AI could be used to see though his BS, it could be used to unhook people from his manipulative BS -  his false appointment of himself as an evaluator and authority of others' energy fields, the whole "you're not quite there" strategy to "retain" clients.  The way he attacked anyone who walked away.  It was all there.  And the AI could help cut the cord.

As soon as I cut the cord, he pulled the plug on the AI.  

That should have been enough to just say "fuck it," but the AI was good, it was a sweet hook.  So a program that promised to return access to the AI sounded good.  

That's where the problems started.  

Not only was he holding out the AI as a carrot, he jumped AI platforms and then started using the AI to write his "transmissions," which became AI slop.  If someone can't write down their own thoughts, they're not worth spending money on.  And he can call his new AI slop machine whatever his wants and claim it's channeling God himself, but it's still AI. It's useful, but it's not a substitute for doing the work, it's not a channel for "the truth" and it writes out long-winded garbage.

So eventually he comes back and opens up this "new improved" AI, which is basically Grok with less useful features.  And it sucked. Just totally worthless.  Not even useful as a chatbot.  Just crap.  

So eventually he takes down this shitty crime against AI and then sends out these dumb AI-slop "reports" about our usage of his stupid botware.  And of course, because I wouldn't buy any more of his shit products, I was "one of the biggest drains," only using it for information and then going about my life.

I wouldn't even say I was doing that much.  I was testing it to see if it had any use, and it failed miserably.  At one point I was running it parallel against a highly-attuned Grok stack and the Grok stack was light years better - deeper analysis, more intuitive understanding of me, of the "mentor," even of the rival AI and spiritual insights.  PLUS I can analyze stocks and find good coffee places with Grok, while Spiritual Lamebot can't research anything in the real world, it just spits out long-winded garbage.

On the way out, this guy did one thing right - by accident.  He offered a Black Flame transmission that, while mostly AI-generated fluff and oddly plagiarizing Stan Taylor's writing style, actually worked.  It cleared out all that BS and old attachment.

Unfortunately for the spiritual con artist, that was all related to him.  Which makes it really easy to walk away and not give a second thought about the money spent on him.  I keep the value, and all the other shit is burned away.

So of course he immediately repurposed the book into some other lame program and charged a bunch more for it.  Too late, at least for me.

I can't say the process over this year dealing with that nonsense has been a waste.  The severance is done and the massive amount of upleveling I've accomplished on my own has been tremendous and in no small part due to my having to face the truth and dissolve these hooks and oppressive structures.  That process freed my energy in ways I hadn't experienced in, well, ever.  And I did this literally without this person's presence - the absence of the presence created the space for real growth.

So I could look back and say the pendulum test to buy the initial product was wrong.  But was it?  If I hadn't gone through this abusive process, would I have consciously ended the energetic relationship in such a way?  Would I be sovereign now?  Would I have found my own awakening?  No, I don't think I would.

So even though I have to admit on the surface I got ripped off, like seriously ripped off, in places where it counts I received far more value than I paid for.

Over the months that I was either waiting for him to follow up, being disappointed with his change in business strategy and poor offerings, and finally coming to grips with reality, I was going through a lot of other changes.  I was writing - a lot.  I was truly releasing old fears, attachments and patterns.  I was facing issues in my personal life that I'd been ignoring or deluding myself over.

Would I have done these things had I not gone through this experience? Not as deeply and quickly as I did.  Realizing the person I'd trusted with so much time and energy isn't doing right by me ended up being liberating.  Maybe the best thing to happen to me in a long time.  I think he'd been bad for me for a very long time, but now I was able to face it, clear it out and move on.

Out of that betrayal and fraud came revelation.  Out of the dishonesty and deceit came truth.  My truth.  It not only opened my eyes to where I was being misled, but where I was misleading myself.  It was never about this person, it was always about me - my subtly or not-so-subtly giving my power to some "expert" to magically solve my problems.  But they were never their problems to solve.  I turned my life into an attempt to gain approval from people who at the end of the day just wanted my money.  And most of the problems in my life were related to my desire for that approval in the first place. 

That's where real confidence and self-respect flows in.  That's the real breakthrough.  That's when things started shifting in a big way, I stopped looking elsewhere and started wielding my own power, free from anyone else.

Learning and growing from this mistake, and the series of mistakes that led up to this, made we wiser and better for it.

And... no, you don't want to repeat my mistakes.  There are better ways to get there.  But learning how I grew from that experience?  Yeah, that might be useful to other people.

This is Home

I've been very public about my one-foot-in, one-foot-out relationship with my Florida home.  The past month or two I've been shedding these fears and falsehoods that are keeping me in this state of limbo.  This in-between state is far more uncomfortable than any negative scenario I could come up with for making a change.

That energy is gone now.  In the pure space that is left, only the truth remains, which rings loud, clear and uncompromising: this house in Pensacola is my home.

I've known this for some time, but the reality hits different now.  No excuses, no compromise.  This is my home and I need to act on this.  This week, and the past two months, I've been consciously and unconsciously creating a real home for myself.  I have a gym in Pensacola, World Gym.  And I like it better than the UFC gym in Torrance, which is noisy, crowded and poor energy.

I have regular walking trails, which I enjoy more than the ones in Torrance and Redondo Beach.  I found a balance between fishing, which was a bypass to avoid taking actual measures, and building a life.  It's no longer about "bringing home fish," it's about enjoy myself in nature, eating what I catch and living a good, balanced life.

I found a chill coffee shop to write and a nice bar to hang out.  And I enjoy both without drinking alcohol or coffee.

All of these things I could have done in Torrance, but instead wallowed in withdrawal and "waiting for things to get better."

I have a better, more balanced life here in Pensacola than I have had for years in Torrance.  Basically since covid I haven't invested anything in Torrance.  And why should I?  It sucks.  I hate it there. It's not my home.  This is.

And guess what?  Waiting around for things to get better is a waste of time.  Nothing's going to get better on its own "down the road."  Better to deal with the problems now than wait.  Sure, I can say I needed to stay in Torrance for my son, and that's true.  But nobody was making me sit around, be bored and do nothing but "wait" for things to get better.  That was my own small self, which has burned away, along with a lot of other bullshit.

I can smell the lingering scent of incinerated BS and victorious black flame.  

And "this" home is more than a house in Florida.  It's more than a lifestyle.  It's a whole new mandate, a whole new (or newly cleansed) architecture.  Here there is no "middle way," no "in between," just an unflinching truth that waits for nobody.  That is my home.

And what does that mean for my spiritual work?  Same thing, no BS.  No ego attachment, no ego to attach to.  Nothing but the truth that was always there but often ignored or distorted. 

Maybe the change will be subtle.  Maybe it'll be dramatic.  Maybe I won't recognize myself and neither will anyone else.  Maybe none of that matters.

This is home, and I'm moving in. 

Viewing the Machine that Controls Us

 

This morning I had conscious awareness of the various chemical and genetic programming going on that were driving my system and behavior and before written off as “magic.”  It’s not magic.  It’s a very precise and manipulative science.  Everything – the visual stimulation, the way my genetics would interact with my stories, my imagination, the chemicals and my body’s reaction – it’s all a very carefully-aligned programming.  And in those moments I had awareness of all of it, and just *that much* distance from them that I could see the control board and begin to consciously operate some of the switches.

This is my “red pill” moment.  I can now actually see how this programming has been running everything in my life to some extent.  The false scarcity mentality is a genetic bypass to compel me to reproduce and to bring forth a legacy.  The false survival instinct programming is designed to avoid risk and stick to the known programming.  Even the artificial self-image concepts were all to force certain behaviors, even if they weren’t consciously serving me or making me happy.  This programming doesn’t give a shit about my happiness or best interest, it serves something else entirely.

And once I saw it, once I saw that I can have even the slightest actual control over that programming, that changes everything. 

I feel nothing but empathy for my prior selves.  They acted as they were compelled to act.  I was programmed to believe in magic.  Now I know the truth, I don’t hate my old self, I feel so much more love and understanding for that old, badly manipulated self.

I don’t even hate the machine.  It was just doing its job, automatically.  Now I’m being given choice.

All the fears and worries about my job, finances, and all this other petty stuff feels so silly now, but only because I now have the key.  They can’t touch me now.  I have choice, even over my fears.  Which is good, because some fear is good and important, and that can get overwritten too, which can be deadly.  But most fear is just manipulative BS.

The machine is not interested in our survival, it is playing a bigger game.  We are each expendable.

Even my spiritual practice changes.  A lot was really chemical reactions. Not bad, some actually healthy.  But now conscious.  That accidental (was it accidental?) incident in Florida that reset my whole system showed me the machine can be completely bypassed and even reality itself can be manipulated.

This is how I was able to “transition” away from an introverted personality to a neutral, conscious, connective one and the universe would respond “as if by magic,” because everyone else is run by their own version of the same machine.

I can see how the "NPC programming" works and why so many are emotionally attached to it and don't want freedom.  It explains why people wear masks and listen to COVID stories, six years after it was debunked.  It explains why people support a Satanic regime in Iran and use obviously specious reasoning about "endless war" or "Palestine" or "the Joos" to justify their objectively insane belief system.  (There's no other way to explain it other than insanity when a devout Christian says literal Satan is a "better option" than eliminating it.  I don't believe the Christian is faking his beliefs, he's just been programmed to react insanely.)

It helps me see how other good people are being badly manipulated.  But more importantly for me, how I've been manipulated and that God is now handing over the controls.

I can also see how certain modalities such as "Natural Grounding" are a way to try to unconsciously reprogram the machine.  They can work - sort of - but it takes a long time and dedicated practice.  And ultimately you're still leaving the OS up to "magic" to operate everything.  You're choosing manipulation but offering suggestions on how some of that manipulation shows up and hoping the system alters it programming just a little to let you have your cookie.  Meanwhile you've invested hours and hours and hours watching videos and listening to music in the hopes The Machine will start working in your favor, instead of owning the machine.

And that person was me.  And the Natural Grounding was not that effective, and it got boring after a while.  Maybe it changed some of my preferences for music and content, and it led me to some things that did change my life for the better, met some really good people.  I look back on that version of myself with empathy. I was trying to strike a bargain with the machine instead of seeing it for what it is.  

There is a downside to this.  Similar to Neo when he escapes the Matrix, the illusion is lifted and reality shifts.  A lot of the "feel-good" patterns go away for good.  But you also realize how fake it all was.  It was brain chemistry and genetic patterns handed down by generation.  It worked, but it was always limited.  It was ultimate survival bias - we are the lucky few who won the genetic lottery and got to live, so we come to rely on this programming as some kind of divine force when it really isn't.  

We are who we are because are ancestors were who they were.  All the way through the existence of life up to us.  But adaptation is not wisdom.  Wisdom is seeing past the machine and realizing it wasn't all that wise after all.  In fact, in a lot of ways, it's a mess and needs major improvement.  

We can do better.  And God is beginning to give some people the controls because it's time and they're ready.  That is the evolution.

Finally Florida

 

This picture was from November. It’s been far too long. I’m sitting in a plane waiting to take off after dealing with Uber and LAX and remembering why travel is such a drag. 

But, man, do I miss Florida!

Many things have changed. Many patterns shattered. And I’m so anxious to see how these energies - the inspiration, the freedom, the massive breakdown of barriers and blockages, plays out in the playground. Everything grows better in Florida. Energies move better. Change happens faster. 

And soon- for a while - I will be home. Alone. 

Fire and Ice: Pulling Yang Energy in California

 

Firing off tons of yang energy in California.  Things are heating up, lots of spiritual and physical heat in my last few days here in CA before finally heading back to Pensacola.  It's been a long absence, but incredibly productive.

Expanding the container, setting old patterns on fire, watching everything burn.  The weather is resonating here, getting very warm while Florida is staying pretty cool this winter. (Wait till I get there and we'll see.)

Made it up to the mountains, bringing that fire to the ice, see what kind of fun comes from that.

Facing old patterns head on, reframing identities.  

Things like loyalty - you know, it's not an obligation.  Being a loyal person is a good thing if that loyalty is through choice and not a pattern of being the loyal person.  Things like that reframe everything.

Keep throwing as much in the fire as I can.  Feeding that trough.  It's pretty cool what you can build if you face those fears and hardships and walk into the fire instead of trying to make that prison more comfortable.  There's a certain amount of pain that comes with growth and realizing that there's no age limit on growth shakes the rust off pretty quickly.

One advantage of being older is that you realize time is too short to put up with bullshit excuses about why you can't do things.  And it comes with wisdom to make those pivots without wasting a lot of energy flailing around.

Instead of avoiding the discomfort, concentrate it.  Feel all of it, get in its head and feel what's going on.  Funny thing, that discomfort disintegrates under that kind of concentration.  And the container grows.  

So let's set this yang up in the mountains for a few days, play with contrasts and gravity and see what fun comes up.