Don’t eat comfort food. The comfort is short-lived, the calories are forever. Cultivate contrast in your daily life. Alternate pain and pleasure, hunger and satiation, noise and quiet, anxiety and bliss. Reduce the scale of your food contrasts. Allow simple fare to satisfy by cultivating your hunger for an extra hour before each meal. If you are not hungry enough to eat oatmeal you are not hungry enough to eat. Make The Bliss Diet work for you not against you. It takes twenty-four hours to recover from a glass of wine. Don’t lose your bliss to alcohol. The Big Engine prefers that you keep your bliss to a minimum That is why wine is available in every supermarket and glorified in newspapers, and cigarettes are all around us, and prescription drugs and drug-filled meat. Bliss is the enemy of The Big Engine. Your spiritual fulfillment is the very last item on its agenda. The Big Engine fears your independence, your fulfillment, your happiness. Be defiant!
Bliss Bubbles and Hell Holes
Bliss and Hell are balanced on earth. Bliss is manifest in bliss- bubbles and is balanced by hell-holes. The following are bliss bubbles: Mozart, Chardin, Cezane, The Beatles, LeCorbusier, Louis Kahn, the Kronos Quartet. The following are hell-holes: Jonestown, John Gacy’s crawl space, Jeff Dahmer’s apartment, Auschwitz, The Vietnam War. Rings of fire are combinations of both: Frank Lloyd Wright, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Wilf, Johnny Cash. As the war in Vietnam accelerated during the sixties, the Beatles condensed out of the ether. Hell sells, bliss is a bore in the realm of mass media. Given the scope of pain we read about daily, there has got to be a lot of quiet bliss out there to account for the balance we experience. Quiet bliss is the warm, dark matter of our civilization. There must be a lot of it to keep the mad force of the civilization from tearing us apart.
Bliss is not Seduction
Bliss is not seduction. Bliss requires no polish, it glows from within. There is nothing seductive about a bowl of oatmeal. A healthy mind and a radiant spirit are attractive. Many Americans do not know they are being seduced or they know and don’t care. Children used to be disciplined, deprived and ignored, now they are coddled and seduced by the corporatocracy as future consumers. Children are now programmed to accept seduction in every transaction, sugar with every bite of life. The essence of seduction is that after the immediate pleasure evaporates, you have been reduced. After that expensive dinner at the upscale yuppie seafood restaurant, you are fatter, poorer, stuffed, hung-over, bliss -deprived, and tired. Was she impressed? Were you seductive? If you employ seduction to achieve your ends you are a seducer. If you harness the seduction of others to your ends – you are a seducer. A seducer is a spiritual thief.It is easy to fall into a cycle of seduction via food. The Bliss Diet will cure you. It will remove seduction from your eating habits. It will restore the pleasures of your mind. If you currently derive your sense of well- being from the SAD HEN: serotonin, acetylcholine, dopamine, histamine, epinephrine, nor epinephrine i.e. from food, alcohol and smoke and the neurochemicals they release, you are depriving yourself of the spiritual resources that can make you consistently happy.
Positive - Negative Space
As there is the notion of positive and negative space in the visual arts, sculpture and architecture as well as music, one can look at life’s problems, roadblocks, obstacles using the trope of positive/negative space. Instead of grappling with a perceived problem or person as a discreet object, look at the variety of space that abuts it, surrounds it - select a zone of abutting space for your attack, pursuit or attention. All matter is defined by its context. As you change one aspect of the context you are changing the nature of the original object / solid and as it changes you may find the new thing more accessible to your skills and pursuits.
Pleasure - Pain
If it feels good, don’t do it. Choose the most physically painful / uncomfortable alternative for any action. If your choice is to read a book or walk twelve miles with weights then start walking. If it tastes good - don’t eat it. If it smells good, don’t say hello. If it sounds good - change the channel. Pleasure equals danger and or waste ninety eight percent of the time. Don’t choose the pleasurable for yourself. Let pleasure follow from your hard choices as relief. To choose pleasure is to short circuit pleasure itself. You don’t choose it - it chooses you.
Chosen child
How might one account for an adult who fails to leave home, fails to develop a strong will, forms a smothering bond with one’s mother and lives with and cares for her until her death? This child is chosen from among his / her siblings. At an early age the parents commence their corrosive gradual erosion of this child’s self esteem so that during the age of individuation, adolescence, this child remains psychically attached, always seeking approval that is always withheld. This is a conscious or unconscious strategy to ensure a caregiver in old age for the parent(s). Husband and wife collude on this culling strategy and enable one another in their project to dissolve the integration of the personality of the chosen child. This child has been known to murder its parents in order to gain psychic freedom.