The concept of projection makes it's appaarance as a very complex issue. It might appear that we get caught up in the emotion of having an opinion or judgement of others that puts them in their place by our labels and nay-me-ing.

Even more difficult to recognize seems to be that our projections are our opinions of what we would think of ourselves if we spoke or acted as we perceive "the other" has done. Stripped down to the seed of our words and actions, our judgement of others appears as our own opinion of who we "think" we are.

This seems to exist as the crux of the problem. That which we truly ARE... exist beyond our opinions of ourselves as being this or that. With the question being, how did we come to think/ideate that we are this or that kind of person? How did we identify with this persona/mask that many reflective people are perfectly aware is not so?

This seems to pertain to the saying about getting the board out of our own eye before we attend to the splinter in our brother's eye. It doesn't seem to be enough to recognize we are projecting our own idea of self on to the other. Yes, that does seem to be the first step, to claim responsibility for making them into ourselves as convenience. However, to realize the mechanics of what we are doing when we project, is not enough.

It only then that the real work of removing the board/splinter from our own eye begins. The next step is to understand how we formed these opinions about ourselves that dictate our behavior, and forgive ourselves for having done that. Then, and only then, can we get the chainsaws out and go to work.

It might be that at this point, if it ever happens, that another option occurs. That of leaving the world behind or staying here to make some sawdust. If that moment arrives for me, I certainly don't know how I'll decide. I might do this. I might do that. Making decisions about what I'll do in the future seems as futile as trying to decide what I should have done in the past. Ecstagony.

This confrontation I'm having with the State tax people has led to a rude surprise. It has caused me considerable consternation and lots of heartburn. I feel like a victim, but in many ways I am the root cause of much of these disturbances. I have real problems about money. Not so much with money, but about money and my perception of what it means.

A few years ago I bought a cheap EKG machine from Radio Shack. I figured for $12.95 I could use it to have a little fun while using it as a lie detector. It was small enough to put in my shirt pocket and the wires were long enough to run inside the sleeve of my shirt down to my fingers upon which I connected the necessary electrodes. My intent was to wear it around during my daily affairs to see if the buzzer would go off at some unexpected time. My original purpose was to find out if I was lying to myself even when I didn't recognize it consciously. I seem perfectly aware that it is necessary to lie for the sake of social amenities, but it horrifies me not to know when I'm doing it. I don't really like lying even if it's to allow others to feel good about themselves. I especially don't like my feeling good about myself dependent upon a lie I'm telling myself.

I had the machine rigged up one day when I had to go to the bank to cash a check to get some pocket money. About a half mile from the bank I heard the buzzer on the machine faintly. The closer I got the the bank the louder the buzzer got. When I got to the bank, parked outside, and opened the car door to go inside the bank the buzzer was sounding loud enough for the people around me to hear it. The very idea of my reaction to circumstances involving money became conscious to me. It makes me very nervous. Then, I began to see how I would do just about anything to avoid the types of situations when I had to involve myself with monetary affairs.

This is what happened with the tax deal. I avoided taking care of business when it first arose. If I had not tossed the warning signs away when I first become aware there might be a problem it would not have been such a big deal. The same thing happened to my dealings with credit cards, and paying bills in general. Most of the time I would have the money to make my payments, but I would put writing the checks and mailing them on time off until the last possible moment, and many times, not even then.

Back when I was married, my wives took care of the bills and the money in general. This made me very happy, and yet made me feel terrible. I became familiar with a song entitled "The Pocket Is The Proof of the Pants", and it symbolized the feelings I got from letting my wives handle the money things. It made me feel like they had a control over me that had the effect of arousing resentment. But, it was either letting them take care of these things or listen to them scream at me for not doing it right, which was even worse. My relationship with money was the root cause of our divorces. Both women loved me and I loved them, but in the end, it was my fault we had the problems that led to our breaking up. Better to live alone and not make others miserable about my own shortcomings.

This tax thing has freaked me totally out. I thought I had solved these money problems by retiring at 62. I didn't get a very big social security check, but it was enough to survive on if I am frugal. Frugality is easy for me. I have learned to control my desires and to not want stuff I can't afford. Like women. The biggest benefit... no taxes! I don't mind paying taxes, I just don't like the paperwork. I thought if I didn't claim any dependents the various tax agencies would get more than enough money to make them happy, and they would leave me the hell alone. I was wrong. They are not leaving me the hell alone. Damn!!!

I feel overwhelmed and in danger of being destroyed by the system because I can't find a piece of paper. The piece of paper is my W-2 tax for 1997. That W-2 form shows that the company I worked for paid my state taxes for that year. I never claim dependents on my taxes so I can get my maximum refund from the federal and state taxes and see it as a little windfall each spring. However, the State of North Carolina Department of Internal Revenue lost my records that shows my employer paid my state taxes. To show me I'm not going to get away with this state of affairs they have assigned penalties from 1997 that amounts to more than I make in a year, and more penalties will be assessed as long as I can't find that piece of paper as proof that the company I worked for paid the state their pound of flesh. The company I worked for states that they have no legal obligation to keep the records that would show they paid my state taxes after four years, and refuse to supply me with a duplicate of that lost W-2 form. So, I'm screwed I guess, and eventually the State will take everything I own to punish me. They have already threatened to send the Sheriff out after me, so in addition to losing all my property I will probably spend the rest of my life in prison. Just what I need.

The idea of conversion techniques evoking an animal state that has evolutionary roots has become most fascinating to me. I experience this fairly regularly during my meditation practice. I get the distinct feeling of being an apeman up in a tree attempting to rest while simultaniously being on the alert for predators. Today in a response to a discussion group I sub to I thought about it in the sense of how dogs roll over on their backs and expose their belly when confronted by a more dominant dog. This seems somewhat equivalent to what happens when overwhelmed by the conversion process.

Successful plays only make you think about what the moral of the story is AFTER the play is over. Same principle in preaching. To effect emotional conversion of the audience. The same as a rabblerouser moves a mob to charge the Bastille or kill all the Jews in Germany. It works.

An acquaintance told me a metaphor. He said there were three kinds of people. People that make things happen. People who wait for things to happen. And, people who wonder what the hell happened. At some point, everybody ends up in the third group... What tha hell happened?

Seduction! That's what happened. We were seduced. And just like children who get abused, we have grown up to be seducers.

I am, it seems, particularly easy to be seduced. I was when I was young and gullible, and I am now. Maybe even more now than then. On the other hand. I am a fair to middling seducer. Maybe even to the point where my whole existence is to seduce seducers rather than the innocent prey. They should gnow better, but like me, they don't.

I have often wonder how this whole seduction thing got started. I don't remember a particular event when I was a child in which I was seduced or abused sexually. I only assume that it happened. I assume it happened because I seem to have some sort of foreknowledge of things sexual when I began seducing others at a young age. I knew what to do. I knew what I was attempting to get other people to do. The principle that everything seductive spins on, however, is clear. The point of seduction is to get someone to do what they have been instructed by others NOT to do. What they are not supposed to do can vary. On the other hand, it doesn't make any difference what they have been told not to do. The only point of seduction is to get them to do THAT.

In about three weeks I will be 64 years old. As I have aged, I have become increasingly selective about seducing people. Seduction itself gets old. I have seduced others into doing about everything under the Sun. I have seduced individuals by the score, and often, when I was younger, I seduced crowds of people. Others exist who are much better at seduction than me. Some people seduce entire nations of people. Entire ethnicities of peoples! So, are we now waiting for the greatest seducer of all? The seducer who can seduce the whole world and everyone in it? Certainly there is no shortage of candidates for the job. Surely, we as a people, are available to be seduced. Who doesn't like to be seduced? Who among us doesn't like the idea of being seduced when we perceive with every modality available to us that those around us are just as eager to do what we're not supposed to do? Let's do it! With the question being, is this the time? Is the world ready for the Great Seducer? Are we to be-co-me One?

Maybe in death. If we all die in one fell swoop we can ALL be One. So, are these current wars and rumours of wars the beginning of the end? The end we all seek so as to be together in death as One? I don't gnow. But, I'm getting mighty suspicious. Is the mother of all comets with the mother of all space ships behind it just around the corner? LOL

I dreamed this morning of women, fish, school buses, and Jesus Christ. Or at least, that's the chant I kept going while I went to the bathroom, made cofffee, and made my usual banana sandwich for breakfast.

It started off with the schoolbus, which was first a big semi-truck I learned to drive in later life. I found myself parking it beside the junk yard about a mile away from the house I was growed up in and walked there, but when I returned to get the truck I couldn't remember where I parked it or even why. When I did get into the truck I started backing it up, and that's when I thought I must have stripped all the gears except reverse, and that's why I parked it.

But as I started backing it up it turned into a school bus, and then when I stopped I found myself talking to a fellow who was hiring me to drive stolen parts for him. Then, I was up in the mountains hanging from a huge bridge suspended in the air by a bungee cord looking at these huge fish swimming against the current in the clear water of this big river, that somehow was located between the legs of my first wife, who with a big, happy grin, was shouting, "Jesus Christ!" For political expediency and with the awareness that I am writing this on a public forum, I left out the verb form of the "F" word between Jesus and Christ. My first wife would appreciate this having been raised in the Church of God right up there in the foothills by a zealot father and mousy mother who somehow managed to send her to college while working low paying jobs in a sock knitting factory. That's Drexel for you.

I'm thinking the truck got mistaken for a school bus because they were both orange. Different shades of orange or maybe it was because the truck was shinier. I used to catch rides while hitch-hiking with the big trucks occasionally, and maybe that's where I got the idea of driving a truck, one of these days. I was old when the opportunity finally came, and as a matter of fact, that whole venture was not was it was cracked up to be. It did, however, satisfy my deep longing to see if the country songs, which ain't perfect unless they include something about truck-driving, were right.

Well, they were right in one sense, it sure is a hard way to make a living. When those stupid people who worked for the trucking company, that paints all their stuff orange, finally let me get through the driving school they run for their own sake, eventually gave in and assigned me my own truck, it was green. They had bought out another trucking firm whose truck color was forest green, and I'll bet you good money that is the true reason I eventually failed both myself and them at becoming a million mile driver... I had the wrong color truck!

The whole thing may have been precipitated by my father buying his first farm when I was thirteen years old. Up until that time we had always lived in small towns, and moving to the farm was not only hard work, even harder than it had been before, and the most humiliating part of the whole damn deal was that I had to start going to school by riding there in a school bus! This was very distasteful to me. In addition to always being the new guy in town, which was just one of the reasons I was never in the clique, now I had to show up like some dumb-assed hick. Getting off the school bus and walking down some imagined inspection line by the prettiest girls in town was complicated by the fact that sitting on those hard school bus seats gave me a perpetual teen-age erection, and so when I got off the school bus to walk into the school being laughed at by the prettiest girls in town, I had to cover my embarrassment by holding my school books in front of the small bulge in my pants, and wondering if I had gotten all the cowshit off my shoes since getting up before the rest of the family and milking a coupla Jersey cows before sun up. Ahhh, the good ol' days.

I suspect there is a definite connection between the big fish, the mountains, and my first wife. Mountains were not and are not my native habitat. I was raised in and on the coastal plains, where the land is as flat as a fly flitter. The furtherest I could see when I was a kid was in the huge tobacco and corn fields carved out on the ridges that were farmed between swamps. The only relationship between the coastal plains and the mountains might be that the swamps were sorta like inverted mountains.

I remember riding with my father when I was a small child in his automobile out to see his agriculture student's school projects. Each student had to have a small field crop of his own that he would keep records of how he did it, and my father would grudgingly take me along to visit those boys to see how they were doing their home work. All the roads were dirt roads when I was a kid, and there was no electricity or utility poles back then, and so when we drove out to the farms, the trees and the forest was right next to the road. The branches of the trees grew out over the road and it was like driving through a tunnel. Occasionally we would emerge from the shadows of those tunnels of trees into a big, open sun-lit field and the brightness would literally hurt my eyes.

Coming out of the darkness of the forests into the light of those fields was just wonderful. It was the only place I could see for any distance at all. To see the sky in the coastal plains you either had to look up through the trees or be out in a field. We lived in a very closed society physically, and socially it wasn't much better. Jesus was everywhere. In the church, in the schools, over the radio, and even at home under my mother's and older sister's eyes. The opportunity to sin without getting caught was next to nothing... but my time would come.

All I can remember from my dreamtime this morning is that I keep driving vehicles in which the brakes don't work. I don't have wrecks for some reason, but I am in constant panic when I'm driving, and I have to somehow will the vehicles to stop. I have a very strong will. It seems to work best when I will that I won't. Not so well when I will myself to do something positive. So many of my positive intent things turn out to be what someone else thinks would be good if I do it, and I attempt to will myself to do what would please them. I keep asking myself, during these futile moments, why I would do to please them rather than myself. The answer, most of the time, is that there is not very much that I want. Unfortunately, I am fairly satisfied with what it is that I am, whatever that is.

It took me a long time to learn what little of astrology I know. What I have learned has been very helpful to me. The best way to learn astrology, as far as I'm concerned, is to relate everything I came across to my own natal chart. I have a pretty good natal chart. I have 37 major aspects in it, and 33 of them are positive aspects including a Grand Trine in Earth signs. The 4 negative aspects, naturally, are very, very bad. The malifics, Mars and Saturn are square to each other and in mutual reception. Mars is in the best sign it can be in and is part of the Grand Trine, and Saturn is in the worst sign it can be and is in far conjunction with my Sun. Mars is in Saturn's ruling sign, and Saturn is in Mar's ruling sign. The worst aspect in my natal chart, however, is the very close square of my Sun with my chart ruler Pluto. It's the closest aspect in my natal chart. According to the interpretation books I have studied, this aspect is that of a very viscious bully. It's true. I am at least that. A very viscious bully in a beautiful package of sweetness and light. The sweetness and light are also true. I am also that. What a mixture!

As life has happened to me, and it seems true that life has happened to me rather that the other way round, I have had to learn to deal with this bully aspect of myself. Quite naturally, as a bully, I have had my come-uppances, and suffered the same humiliation I have inflicted on others. I didn't like it anymore than my victims liked it. Well, some of them liked it, and admittedly, there have been occasions when I have enjoyed being the victim myself. That I have liked being humiliated, at times, has been one of the surprises life offers. These days, it seems that I reserve my bullyishness to other bullies. Quite simply, as far as bullies go, I am one of the very best. And even when I am not victorious in my effort to bullying bullies, the reward of defeat is delicious.

I like mincemeat pie, and as I swish the taste of it around in my mouth I like to contemplate the fact that mincemeat pie doesn't have one iota of meat in it.