Swimming with Zombies: How To Protect Your Heart

An intimate story

Photo by Warren Coetzer on Unsplash

In the past three years, there has been a lot of pain distributed to the people by the maniacs in high chairs. There has been even more pain that enchanted people did to each other out of foolishness, arrogance, and fear. And so this story is about hard times, dealing with betrayal, and how I personally stay upbeat (not fake upbeat but sincerely optimistic and joyous) even when a part of me wants to scream and cry.

Swimming through sewage cheerfully, keeping the eyes on the prize (which is getting out of sewage)  

This is a very mysterious chemical reaction of the soul.  Being optimistic—sincerely—comes easy after you have been through so much crap, betrayed and dragged down do many times, that after bouncing back every time like a phoenix, you grow wings.

In the process of growing wings, you bang your head on the wall, and you bang your head on the wall some more, and then some more, and then you realize that you are living in a fairy tale. Not in a sense that things are easy—but in a sense that a lot of the things that hurt you right now are learning experiences and adventures.

You walk straight, you zigzag, you fall and rise, you get a lot of help from the universe and from good people. Occasionally (or often, if you are doing something important or have a strong potential to heal a chunk of the world), proverbial Bad Witches try to mess with you ruthlessly and interfere with your progress—and the trick is to stand up straight, to pray for guidance, to never-ever-ever in any way betray your dignity, never lose faith in your destination of joy. To love yourself completely. To believe in yourself completely because you are  not a bystander, and your work matters to the world A LOT. You are learning how to be a victorious warrior against the Bad Witches so that you can keep them at bay, and so that there may be peace.

And as you do all this, somehow, in the process, your intellectual identity falls off, you don’t even notice or remember the times when it controlled you, and you become an arrow of love, a messenger of your soul.

I believe that all of us go through some version of this journey, and the point of any crap we go through is remembering  important things and learning important things, remembering that there is no other way to be useful to the world than to respect and love yourself completely and be a messenger of your soul. Not a pleaser of other people’s opinions or, God forbid, television opinions,  not a pushover, not a compliant slave of anyone’s prejudices or rules—but an arrow of love, a healer, a co-creator of this world, and a messenger of your soul. Completely independent, from the inside, in alignment with the loving forces—which puts you in harmony with the good things in the universe.

How Real Optimism Works

Doubling Down on Love: How to Stay Calm When It Hurts

The messengers of crap, the Bad Witches

The metaphorical Bad Witches are the people who knowingly choose the dark side and whose “success” comes through the bending of natural laws, through theft, through trickery, deceit, seduction of the not so good kind, and arm-twisting.

For a long time, I couldn’t reconcile their existence and visible control of so many people with the love that drives the universe. I couldn’t understand it through the lens of philosophies and institutional religions that I learned from the outside.  All explanations felt rigid, rule-based, and dysfunctional, and unsatisfying. And then slowly, slowly, I started understanding from the inside that the cold-blooded cruel people allowed to be because their role is to give us the experience of being victorious over them at the end of the fairy tale--and in the process of overcoming them, of learning about our own strength, making important connections to others, remembering our power, enjoying it with humility, and growing our soul. And that the way to be victorious over Bad Witches is born not from fear but from massive love.

It took me a long time to understand it. For years, I cried and lamented over seeing cruel people succeed, I couldn’t understand how such cruelty was allowed to exist. I was still crying and lamenting over it in 2020 (especially in 2020, for obvious reasons). And then, in the past couple of years (that were brutal, and I am going to get back to that), I realized that there was beauty in the entire thing, and the beauty becomes more evident as the storyline proceeds.

The entire thing—the entire thing—is a learning experience.  Bad Witches are fussing around day and night, constantly scamming, trying to steal love and influence from good people,  to confuse good people with vanity and fear, to bully and intimidate good people, to trick good people into acting like traitors and fools.  They are very bothered, those Bad Witches, and they rarely rest. They are like toxic mold in your house. Their purpose is completely  inconsistent with yours and they take any space they are allowed to take.

There is no point in being afraid of them like there is no point of being afraid of a bug. They just need to be expelled. On my end, I don’t try to “solve” them or “understand them” beyond the fact that they are in my way, and they shouldn’t  be. I just hand them to the Creator to deal with because I am not smart enough to know their path, but they are not entitled to getting in my way. So I hand them to the Creator and ask the Creator to deal with them directly.

Such Bad Witches popped up every now and then all through human history, it has been this way since the dawn of humanity but up until a few thousand years ago, they  were met with strong spiritual clarity, and they didn’t go very far. Then in the past few millennia, they have managed to install themselves into many positions of power, rewrite the language we use, put their tricky words into God’s mouth, and mess up many generations of people into the state of self-sabotage.  Under their spells, it became common “knowledge” that people’s nature is “bad,” and that morality needs to be “grafted,” as opposed to found from the inside. It was then that the people accepted a dysfunctional nature of our relationship with authority. Dysfunctional relationship with authority is an aberration, an anomaly, but we’ve been pounded with it for a very long time and we accepted it as the baseline.

We, modern people, are very much like cells that are born into a body overtaken with metastatic cancer. We only know  how to be a part of a sick body and, based on our immediate practical experience, we ascribe our starved state to  “just how things are.”

But no. This is only how things are for a cell that exists in  body overtaken by metastatic cancer.  This is not how things are by default. This is how they are now. And we are in a journey. We are swimming through sewage collectively, and we’ll get to our destination faster if we keep swimming forward and keep our eyes on the prize (getting home, washing off, and forgetting all about the crap).

Yes, there are many Bad Witches who are constantly scamming. Yes, a lot of problems are a result of their activities. They flock to any area of good energy and try to rot things down. If you have money, you are surrounded by Bad Witches. If you are in an area of influence, you are surrounded by Bad Witches. If you are beautiful, you are surrounded by envious Bad Witches. If you are doing anything important, you have a large number of Bad Witches trying to mess with you. And the trick is to be grounded and even-headed, to pray for guidance (because you can’t say afloat by yourself) and to train your senses without any participation of your ego.

The Bad Witch and Weaponized Pain: A Children’s Tale

When good people do bad things

Bad Witches do occasionally (or often) trick very good people into acting against their own interests, into making alliances with those who try to destroy them, while being hostile or mean to those who defend them.  It’s a part of the fairy tale.  COVID spell and the hatred of the dissidents (who were trying to help, educate, and save actual lives!!) is one example but it’s not the only one.

A lot of foolish, ugly, treacherous things that good people do to those they are supposed to love and protect are due the scams of cold-eyed and seductive Bad Witches. Good people who do  soul-dead things are not themselves. They are enchanted, beholden to a combination of a spell and their own bad habits and generational hurt.  And by the way, I believe they still hold the responsibility for all their choices (even under a spell), and it is in their best interests to run from under the spell ASAP and fix what they broke. Responsibility is inescapable in the long run, it’s the natural law. But in terms of not getting hurt when they do crappy things to us, it helps to understand that they are not themselves, and that the Bad Witches will get expelled faster if you don’t let yourself get hurt. (This is kind of like a zen warrior, I think, but in an intellectual way, it makes little sense. It starts making sense when you know that if you allow yourself to hurt, you’ll die. And then you don’t hurt and survive.)

And that is the reason when I talk about love all the time. When people succumb to such trickery, they do horrible things sometimes. It’s a dance of their learning paths with the learning paths of the people they are being cruel to. Everyone has something existential to learn. One of the things one can learn from being on the receiving end of cruelty is self-love and being able to finally relax (it may sound like a paradox but when you are at your wits end, the next step is usually learning how to relax.)

Being on the receiving end of cruelty TEMPORARILY is like fasting. When you fast, it helps your body to get rid of various junk that has piled up. Your body, forced to rely on its own resources for sustenance, finds ways to self-sustain. Similarly, your soul, when starved for much needed and fully deserved love from the outside, shows you how to consciously love and respect yourself from the inside. And then you remember that you are worthy of love through and through, and all the crap that anyone has ever done to you falls off  And then you stand up for being loved and respected with dignity and without fear. And you become, again, an arrow of love and a messenger of your soul.  

On a side note, there is a tendency  to talk about “mind control” like it’s some kind of a juicy topic that can be mastered in an intellectual way. But there is nothing juicy about it. It is mostly just very sad. It is very sad when people throw their potential to support each other and to heal each other down the toilet and turn into zombie traitors for some time. It is very sad when good people do crappy things to each other when under a spell. It is super, super sad. But, sad or not, when we face it, we deal with it. And expelling the Bad Witch from the community, which happens at the end of every fairy tale, is the point.

Expelling the crap

So here is the therapeutic part.

Once you realize that in a healthy world, love-based, affectionate behavior is natural, that affectionate, love-based behavior is what you  have deserved all along, and that all your cruel-acting friends and loved ones would  be very good to you if they were themselves and not full of holes, you are no longer a hunted animal but a warrior of love.

And you see that most people in the world are not quite themselves. They are traumatized in a million different ways and under many spells. You understand that the world is a big and spiritually meaningful place, and each person is walking their individual journey to healing, and some people really should know better than to betray you in any way (and they have really gone overboard, yo) but most cannot impact you too much, they are just walking their journey, on their terms, and you are going to survive in any case.   And then, if you are observant, you can watch very good, sincere people go in and out, shiny-eyed one day and then gone. And then shiny-eyed. And then gone. And then shiny-eyed. And on and on, back and forth, until they reject—from the inside—the prospect of succumbing to any metaphorical spell. Until they fight for staying shiny-eyed at all times like their life depends on it—because sometimes, it does.

And all this dynamic is very much like a fairy tale. It is magical. The monsters are trying to get you—they are trying to steal good things from you because that’s on the monsters’ job description, they are trying to create things to scare you and to make you cry—and you just keep going. You cry when you have to—and then you keep going,. You keep going because the world depends on you, and you are important and deeply loved. Because everything is a learning experience, and the destination is always joy.

(And people will hear your truths when they are ready. Yes, they will.)

What to do

So what do you do when good people turn into zombies before your eyes?

Most importantly, don’t freak out and don’t take it personally. It’s not your fault. First and foremost, protect your soul and establish that you are a warrior for love having a learning experience, not a hunted animal. A respected, dignified warrior for love. Do whatever makes sense to protect yourself, practically and emotionally. Don’t allow any poison in.

If this is someone who is integral to your life, then love, sincere reliance on the higher powers, and child-like, non-intellectual prayer are your defenses and their medicine. Hand the entire situation off to the higher powers, however you believe and pray on the inside. We are not smart enough to understand the entire dynamic, and resolving such situations and healing them is the job of the higher powers. You may need patience but the truth is on your side, and the world will be better when love prevails.

It is very important to be grateful for all the good things in your life already. Sincere gratitude puts you in alignment with the loving powers. Usually, there are good things in your life even when you are dealing with crap. Whether it’s someone who loves you, or good health, or having food on your table and a roof over your head, or an act of kindness, there is always something good already with you—and saying “thank you” and feeling lucky about it adds to the mysterious act of staying whole no matter what.

It is also very important to not be unfair in any way, even if it hurts. If you decided to be unfair, you would extend your pinkie toe over to the dark side, which would be detrimental to you.

If the enchanted ones are on the outskirts, then just let them be. All these people will come around. It is the timing of when they come around (or whether it’s in this lifetime or later) that is unknown. But people cannot remain hijacked forever. People eventually rebel against the hijacking and come around.

And at all times, decline any poison offered to you. You will be tempted to feel dejected, angry, completely alone. You are not alone. You were born to do this. The entire universe is with you when you allow yourself to be a dignified, even-headed messenger of your soul.

Breaking Up With Fear and Conformity

A request

I am in a place where I need help. My past couple of years have been brutal in multiple ways, between the betrayal and family circumstance and the nasty enemies, my stubborn insistence to write what I think and not fear monger or sensationalize for clicks, and the bigger-than-life pharma project that I am pushing though in the background, I am trying and trying not to drown. If you are supporting me already, a big thank you. I am grateful to you for your kindness. If you are considering it, now is a very good time. I love you. I respect you. All free will.