The best parts are

EMDR therapy. Apparently eye movements have a major impact on the ability to process traumatic memories with less intensity & can actually change the way they are stored.

The concept of the mind as a community with certain parts of your personality which act as first responders who work to shield & defend the damaged parts. These first responders also tend to prevent healing by trying to prevent us from facing or reliving of painful things which is necessary for integration. The concept of thanking the defensive parts for their efforts (however hostile they may be) to disarm them is pretty powerful.

There is a lot of discussion of how yoga & rythmic or ritual activities can help people gain bodily awareness which can open the door to facing & dealing with trauma.

Supposedly, similar healing can come from acting stuff out & supposedly from acting in general, but I have a hard time believing acting is the cure he claims given the insanity that is Hollywood. But everything is relative, so I guess "success" is often measured from where people are starting from.

He also talks about some sort of real time brain imaging which gives people a visual reference for tension vs calm, pain vs pleasure, anxiety vs focus, etc so that they can begin to navigate their mental & physical states with some frame of reference.

He quotes Hellen Keller's books a couple of times in reference to the idea that learning to put words to our experience is the process of bringing order to chaos, and is basically how "the self" emerges, which is interesting.

He also injects some stereotypical leftist political nonsense toward the end which is kinda par for the course. The book probably wouldn't have been picked up by the publisher without it 🙄

Labor theory is an inversion of reality. Much like most other things socialists believe. The cost of labor has very little to do with the prices people will pay. The cost of labor only determines whether businesses can stay in business at the prices people can pay. This is what unions fail to understand when they work to increase the cost of labor without increasing production efficiency, they are actually just slowly putting whatever portion of industry they control or influence out of business.

History has been nothing but tribal wars, slavery, & grinding poverty for the overwhelming majority of history. Telecommunications & industrialization brought about the end of slavery & produced the greastest prosperity ever known. You can't whip a slave into doing skilled labor. The more skill & understanding is needed to produce things the more people have to learn to trade with one another if they want to be propersous.

Even fiat money, with all of its flaws, became dominant because the benefit of facilitating global trade was far more valuable to everyone involved than the costs.

Telecommunications have made EVERYONE better off. Previously people couldn't even coordinate with neighboring towns to figure out what they needed until they traveled there. A gold standard wasn't even needed except for trading with people you didn't know. The idea that undoing major tech advancements would make life better is COMPLETELY retarded. Technology generally empowers individuals & sets them free from their fellow man. While there are secondary effects that scale negative influences, direct and brutal slavery & most of the previously inescapable evils of individual tyrants are undone by technological progress. The major problem now is not that people don't have the capacity to say no to tyrants, it's just how many cowards & self loathing morons will work to destroy everything because they are too stupid to understand & appreciate what they have. You can set people free of others, but you can't set people free of themselves.

The political class grows out of gangs of people who figure out they can steal a lot more if they steal a little on a regular basis & act like it's for your own good. Unions, mafias, terrorist groups, etc. Unproductive groups/organizations that exist by threatening people who are productive.

"Pay me to protect you"

From what?

"From what I will do to you if you don't pay me to protect you"

Anarchism as an idea doesn't really solve anything IMO, anarchism will be the result of technological developments (like bitcoin, nostr, keet, darknet markets, & 3d printing or home manufacturing) that make economic freedom, freedom of speech, & the freedom to protect yourself impossible to violate in any enforceable manner. When it's easier to protect property rights than to violate them & violators are more likely to be shot than cheered, then we will be free. But I think things are likely to get uglier first. Too much of the "eat the rich" bullshit has taken hold of people.

The *directors cut* version of the Russell Crowe Robin Hood movie is pretty great.

"Rise & rise again until lambs become lions"

The story of a man fighting to protect property rights, twisted into one about destroying property rights.

The poor don't want to earn their way & the political class doesn't want those who do to be emboldened by stories of tax resistance. So there is top down & bottom up pressure to twist our stories in ways that serve the worst among us at the expense of the best.

Don't let #bitcoin culture be infected by parasites. Taxation is evil, & arbitrary political dictates are evil, but wealth as a result of peaceful & productive activities is good for everyone.

Govt is the only thing that remains when society collapses. If businesses were the real parasites & the real slave drivers, then only businesses would be left when everything else is destroyed. But businesses only exist in great abundance when an economy is healthy & free & in places where people want to live because they aren't being coerced & stolen from.

The political class works to ensare businesses into collecting taxes from employees for them, or reporting on independent contractors for them, or collecting info on customers for them, or into imposing some new ESG or DEI policy. If they don't play ball they get "regulated" out of business, if they do then the govt rewards them by regulating their competitors out of existence. So those who play the Washington game are rewarded for some time, until someone comes up with a greedy & destructive policy that will eat them too.

There really isn't much ambiguity to the matter at all.

I mean, whatever floats your boat. But it's the bans for warning people about the covid vax & calling out politicians for criminal behavior that are the real concerns IMO.

Not really what economic history shows. It takes govt regs to kill off the competitors & force consolidation. That's why we have millions of laws & regs, because they have to create new ways to kill competitors every time people figure out ways to route around old laws. Monopolies are only broken by new businesses. Taxies vs Uber for example. Govt is a monopoly that creates monopolies.

You are the product, and all products must conform to what the company wants or be discontinued.

I mean, it's just slavery sold to slaves as though they will get free stuff & have an easier life. And by the time most of them figure it out all other options have been removed, so they either obey or starve. Often both.

Accurate

The key to wealth is figuring out how to improve the lives of other people.

Fighting the govt would have destroyed the clarity between right & wrong. The sin Jesus died for, that people are supposed to recognize in themselves & guard against, is the tendency to obey or respect arbitrary authority. And if you are familiar with the Stanford prison experiments or the Milgram shock experiments, it would make sense that this is THE most critical lesson for people to learn. An innocent man was killed because people chose govt & human authority over God/reality/truth. If we remember THAT then maybe it prevents the pattern from repeating. If everyone loses the message then we get Assange & Ulbrict & Snowden & countless others until people wake up again.

I think this because it's the only way I see to reconcile all of the contradictions & connect all of the dots both throughout the Bible & across so many other life changing stories & records of history which follow these same patterns.

There are a lot of forces at work on a piece of literature like the Bible. When you make statues of people (both literally or in writing), what is remembered becomes larger than life & as a result becomes disconnected from it. There is also a pressure from both the everyday person, and from authorities to make Jesus into something you can't emulate. The everyday person doesn't want the responsibility of having to speak the truth, & authories don't want the threat of truth from everyday people. A key part of the story is that he was mortal & was killed. Which would be more significant: SuperMan taking a bullet for you or your dad? When you start to deconstruct the story it actually becomes MORE significant, not less.

The way I see things, the miracles are not the point of the story, they are literary representations of the good works he did. Bible stories were written before there was any clear distinction between subjective & objective language, so the feelings they wanted to communicate are all intertwined in the telling. And knowing just a little about language is enough glimpse the massive nightmare that is the translation problem. We have lost 90% of the jokes in Shakespeare's writings, even though we have every word written in the same language we speak today, but still we are no good at 16th century agrarian puns.

We have literary phrases like "it was as if a fire was lit within them," so I don't believe that literal tongues of fire decended from the heavens above the heads of the apostles. I see people today motivated to translate the best bitcoin information into every language because they understand the impact that bitcoin can have. I think the story of an innocent man killed by a supposedly just republic was just as important to the dealings of men at that time & produced a similar motivation, especially among his followers who wanted to see him vindicated.

It is said that we die twice. Once after we breathe our last breath. And again the last time anyone says our name. In that sense, Jesus lives. And it would have been as though he was at every dinner table. But he only lives to the degree that he is made real, IMO delusion has nearly killed him in our time & I think that's part of why so much of the same evil is repeating.

We are all living in a valley of dried bones, all the meaning is gone from all of our stories. We need new life breathed into them. I personally don't think we can do that without reconnecting them to the reality around us. The Bible only ever talks about bringing heaven to earth. The separation is the problem.

The Body Keeps the Score is a good read.

How bout this:

I could not disagree more deeply with this sort of framing, it may be that semanitics plays a large role in my disagreement, but I think that Christianity appears to have been almost completely inverted.

I believe Jesus gave people the greatest gift possible by refusing to sacrifice himself & refusing to sacrifice reality to arbitrary authority. Being true to reality & to who you are, even when faced with death, gives people back their lives. It gives them the freedom to be true to who they are too. The sacrifice (giving up one's highest value) would have been to deny the truth & to go on living as a slave to the arbitrary authority of someone else.

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn