Jump! JUMP!!

The popularity of e-mail and e-mail discussion groups lasted just long enough for me to figure out through constantly writing what I've lusted to understand for at least fifty years. A few years ago I realized that my true quest in life was to find out how charismatic people manipulated me so easily. They could get me to do things I wouldn't ordinarily do. Getting me to have sex with them more often than anything else. The earlier time I actually remember was when I was about 6-7 years old. It was only after I underwent religious conversion at the age of nine and joined the First Baptist Church that I became even more vulnerable.

We are not human beings on a spirit quest, we are spiritual beings on a human quest. ~ Ben J. Miller

Getting seduced is not something most people complain about. Who doesn't like to cum? For me, however, it was about like getting raped. Not so much that I was being physically forced to do anything, but the seduction techniques used to get me to go along was put to me in such a way that i couldn't resist. Sort of like being black-mailed. It was sort of like I got set up and certain types of people could see me coming.

Understanding the relationship or equivalency of baptism by submersion and waterboarding explained everything to me. It's no wonder that I began to consider getting seduced into have all forms of sex with people to be tormenting. In my early forties the situation began to ease up some because I was getting older and less appealing to the people who tormented me.

I've describe previously how my first term paper in college for my English Composition class was based on the subject of brainwashing. I wrote about how the North Koreans used torture to brainwash American soldiers. I was eighteen years old. By the time I was 24 years old I had completed my first hypnosis school. I'm certified in at least four different styles of hypnosis, and have the certificates around someplace. I hardly ever used them. I just wanted to understand how hypnosis worked by being hypnotized myself and learning how to hypnotize others. That first school I went to taught me how to hypnotize people non-verbally, and that technique became the mainstay of my practice for the last forty odd years.

Hypnosis doesn't convert anybody to anything. It's a powerful argument, and extremely useful, but when push comes to shove, it won't get you over the hump with most people. There has to be a convincer. Waterboarding disguised as baptism is only one type of convincer that will get the job done, but it is the one convincer I haven't considered ere now.

When this ritual is performed in the correct manner by knowledgeable people (who are also grateful for a little luck) and who say and do the right things at the right moment, it's as powerful a procedure as can be effected. In the past, I've commented on the ability of the chemical sacraments to remove the barriers to conversion, and they're definitely great convincers in the right situation, but they certainly don't explain how so many people were converted to a belief system so quickly and so radically that they would purposefully face death head on without flinching, as in the early Christian era. Baptism as a waterboarding-like technique does.

I've experienced the terror many times. I have written a lot about what i think is going on. Speculating about this and that as prime cause. My main ideas about it came from a Native American friend of mine. We do hypnosis together, but it's only been during the last five years or so of our twenty year old friendship. It started out with me using hypnosis to help him pass a welding test.

He came by one day and asked me if I wanted to ride with him over to a neighboring town, which adjoins the Cape Fear River. He wanted me to meet his newest girlfriend, and they were going with a group of people to the river to go swimming. He's told me about his near drowning during that trip to the river many times. No one witnessed how he nearly drown because it all happened underwater, and he was the only one who could have known he came close to losing his life.

He sometimes tells me about that incident as if a way of figuring out what happened himself, because I was there that day. Not because I was a witness to what happened. He saw his life pass before his eyes. That's what he tells me, and I believe him. That's happened to me several times, my remembering vision notwithstanding. I guess that's why I take him serious when he tells me how he liked to have drowned that day.

Today, after coming up with the connection between waterboarding and baptism by submersion, I'm taking another look at Billy's near-death experience. It's proof that nobody has to be in your presence to induce the near-death experience by drowning. How many of us have nearly drowned at some time or the other in our lives, and there was nobody there to witness it or sometimes realize it was happening right in front of them without their realizing we were in trouble. I somehow figure that seeing our life pass before us is the only clue we have that we nearly drowned. Nobody knows.

How would Methuselah (meth use ah? LOL) live 400 years? By abandoning his "sins" every so often? By "healing" himself through near-death experiences, and getting born again? By being taken down to the pond and getting himself nearly drowned every time the stress built up?

Carlos Castenada writes of his mentor Don Juan taking him to a cathedral in Mexico City to meet a person who was several thousand years old. Those of you who have read Castenada are probably familiar with this described incident. Part of the deal with this coven of shamans was that they were required to jump off a cliff thousands of feet high to conquer their fear of death.

I might have not believed this happened if I hadn't done it myself, but without a physical mentor present to assure me I was doing the right thing. As far as I was concerned at the time I was jumping off that cliff to commit suicide, pure and simple. I knew I was as good as dead, and I wouldn't make it through the approaching night, so I jumped. Only when I survived without a scratch did I realize something unusual had happened. Curiously, I don't feel one whit younger.