Someone asked me recently how I write, longhand or type? I said, when I entered my freshman year at Ramsay High School in Birmingham, my father told me to take a typing class, because typing would come in very handy later on. I said typing was the only usable skill I learned in school, before I attended law school. I ended up writing about 20 books and 50,000 or perhaps 70,000 pages at blogs, some of which became books, because I knew how to type. I did not say, but for inheritances from my father, I would not have written any books, I still would be homeless, or I would be dead.
Some things are so priceless that I suppose they make angels sing:
POETIC OUTLAWS April 27, 2024
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.
Sloan Bashinskypoignant-
getting married,
birthing a child and having it die at seven weeks,
birthing two more children
and raising them,
or trying to,
watching them grow from nursing and shitting their cotton diapers
I washed out in a toilet,
watching them learn to walk and fall down and walk, and talk,
watching how curious and full of energy they were,
watching their mother and I grow apart,
watching me not being the father my children needed,
watching my life go to hell,
watching my children have their own struggles,
some their doing,
some because I was not the father they needed.
watching me get married 7 more times,
each wife remarkable,
each wife woke something up in me
I did not know was there,
they enriched my life,
I hope the same for them,
since I was not easy to live with,
nor was it easy for me to live with me,
how empty and I suppose boring my life would have been,
but for those women and the three children,
the one who died suddenly
so unhinged me
that I was never thereafter able to fit into
the molds and plans
made for me by my ancestors and me,
he broke my heart and set me on my journey,
a dozen different lives in one lifetime,
I did leave the old, many times,
and start anew,
in places where I knew no one,
but now I’m back where I started,
my hometown,
a blue southern city surrounded by MAGA counties,
the local churches seem right where they were when I left
and came to wonder when I ever was not in church?
Most people I once knew here
seem where they were when I left the first time in 1986,
I have lived in this same old apartment building three times
after I stopped running away from home,
It was all-white, then it was somewhat integrated, now international,
the Internet makes it a lot easier to run away for a spell,
but everywhere I go,
there I am,
can’t run away from me,
nor from many, many memories,
waiting for the Lord to take me,
hopefully before I am in assisted living
or a nursing home
or nut house,
I crawl out of bed each morning
and engage what gets on my plate today,
chop wood, carry water, I suppose
Some things are not entirely priceless:
Nicholas Morrissey SubstackThe Wisdom CompassI am up to 300 Subscribers and got my first paid Subscriber today (besides me Ma. Love you, Mom. Lol). Thank you so much, JD!! I very much appreciate it and it definitely helps out for further work! I will be adding my book behind the paywall shortly!
substack.com/@myalchemicalkitchen?utm_m…JD Greene SubstackA cook, a baker, a candlestick gazer, a forest bather, a magick maker, a writer and weaver of tales. These are j...
Sloan Bashinsky
This flopped out of me the fall of 1993:
“God’s gifts are not for sale, but are freely given to angels, saints, sinners, devils and fools alike, because all are God’s children.”
At that point in my life, I still hoped to become a great capitalist like my father and his father, and I hoped to do it through my writings. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter what I wrote, no matter how many people told me they liked what I wrote, non-fiction, poetry, novels, stranger than fiction, it didn’t happen.
I then went through a dry spell when I wrote nothing, during which I prayed to die and plotted killing myself every day for 16 months. That had nothing to do with my writing or wanting to be a great capitalist. It had to do with entering what I later would call the black night of the soul, in which there was no light, no hope.
I was in a 4-year dark night of the soul when the God’s gifts are not for sale poem flopped out of me. I knew what it was, because I had read Antonio T. de Nichola’s book, St. John of the Cross: Alchemist of the Soul, about a year prior at the suggestion of a licensed clinical social worker friend, after he heard some of my not of this world stories.
In his commentaries, Juan de la Cruz described two dark nights of the soul. He called the first, the cleansing of the soul. He called the second, the cleansing of the spirit. He said the first dark night was rough, but doable. He said, the second dark night was unimaginably horrible, and woe be to anyone it befell, who was not in a protected environment with people who understood what was going on.
The black night started to lift after I left my 4th wife. I wondered if I would start writing again? What happened instead was I was taken by angels known in the Bible through an unimaginably intense physical and soul cleansing and healing, which lasted about two years. Then, the Muse returned, in spurts. Then, She ran full-bore.
I was homeless off and on for several years, and when I was homeless, I hoped my writings would somehow make me a living wage, but alas, no, it seemed I was slated to be the Anti Capitalist.
No real surprise, after I slept in a tent near Helen, Georgia, I was told by the angel Michael in a dream that I was going back into a prison where I had once lived, and the next night Michael told me in my sleep, “You cannot do this work correctly, if you are looking to get anything back from the people you are trying to help.”
By then, my writings, non-fiction, poetry, novels, stranger than fiction, were very different from when I was in the dark night of the soul.
In 2007, I started blogging, and I suppose I wrote 50,000 pages on blogs, maybe more. During that time, I wrote no books.
In 2019, I wrote another book, which was about different parts of my life. I wrote it on a blog, and a publisher took it on, but it did not sell.
I wrote several more books at blogs, one was a sequel to an earlier novel. A friend with unimaginable to me tech skills formatted them into books at the free internet library, archive.org. He also scanned and digitized some of my earlier books and put them at archive.org, which is funded and operated by colleges in America. It specializes in out of print books, and books by authors who are not trying to monetize their writings.
Archive.org has a translator, which lets people read its books in English and about 35 other languages. My tech friend tells me that my books at archive.org average about 1,000 complete reads per month, per month.
My friend learned that the free library readers are far more open to and interested in something different, than are users of regular libraries.
If you wish to see what books at archive.org look and read like on any device, open archive.org and enter Sloan Bashinsky in the search space and click Enter. Icon links for my books will come up and you can click on the links and open and read the books.
You might be asked if you are sure you want to open that site. People all over the world use that library, because they can find material there, which they cannot find in libraries where they live.
My tech friend also created The Redneck Mystic Lawer Podcast, where I did most of the talking. He launched it on Spotify, which is audio only. We did not solicit money and we did not let Spotify run ads in our podcast. We developed a pretty good following worldwide.
Spotify’s cash cow, Joe Grogan, made racial remarks during one of his podcasts, and a number of Spotify’s celebrity clients ditched Spotify, which kept Grogan and ditched a lot of its small clients, including us.
My friend launched The Redeck Mystic Lawyer Podcast onto YouTube. I was seen and heard, and he was heard but not seen. We did not solicit and we did not let YouTube run ads in the podcast. We developed a pretty good following worldwide.
My friend discovered the Torrent platforms, and we started launching the podcast there, too. We learned that Torrent clients were far more open to and interested in something different, than were YouTube users. My friend told me our podcast averaged about 300,000 complete watches per episode.
Eventually, we stopped using YouTube, which became more difficult to deal with, in part, because our material was not well received in some circles, and, in part, because YouTube was overwhelmed with political posts and its server was overloaded and its AI moderator and upload was moving very slow.
My friend says on torrent platforms our podcast averages about 300,000 complete watches per episode.
Torrent providers are a breed apart. People living in countries that control what they can see online can bypass Big Brother on Torrent.
However, some torrent platforms contain malware, and people who use Torrent need to know what they are doing. Based on how our podcast does in the Torrent universe, there are a lot of internet tech savvy people out there.
Nicholas MorrisseyThe Wisdom Compass
archive.org had been a website I used for years and years and years… Another good one is, sacred-text.org.
If you want to write shorter letters, I will reply to those. Too long, too much going on here to make time to reply to, unless it was just random? Anyhow, thank you though for taking the time and for the thought.Pick just one or two topics and I’d be happy to discuss those :-)SloanBashinsky
The topic I picked in my long-reply to yours was getting paid for spiritual work.
April 2001:
“The World's Greatest Failure”
I know what it is
to love fully,
have my heart broken by death
and by loved ones’ rejections,
Over and over again,
So I can love even more.
I know what it is
to be engulfed in pain,
Awash in evil,
Terrified, enraged, despaired,
Believing God has again forsaken me,
Then be given the truth
that again makes me free.
I know what it is
to doubt,
Be lost and wandering
time and time again,
Then be rescued yet again
and my faith grows deeper.
I know what it is
to blindly trust,
Then be destroyed by betrayed
time and time again,
Until I trust only God.
I know what it is
to have much
and be completely of this world,
Then have it all taken away
and be in the world but not of it.
I know what it is
to fail in this world,
And fail and fail and fail:
The world’s greatest failure,
I can serve only God.
I know what it is
to give and give and give and give;
I cannot stop giving
because giving is receiving.
I know what it is
to explain God
time after time after time again.
Something demands I keep explaining:
Maybe someone will listen,
Maybe me.
Nicholas MorrisseyFor anyone with a conscience, making money on the spiritual path can be a great challenge. I had given away work for free for over 15 years. If you’re truly helping people, they will support you. It also depends on your message and also social awareness.
Sloan Bashinsky
I’ve been at this since 1987. I had various trainings in the human realm, which ended in 1988, when angels took over completely. Very few people have any sense of what is really ailing them and what they need to do. I can only speak for myself, it is forbidden for me to charge money or solicit money or anything else that benefits me.
I look at the Sufis of old. They did not try to earn a living off what they knew. Nor did Jesus in the Gospels, nor did Buddha, nor did Lao Tzu, nor did Yogananda’s teacher. I think there is a really good reason for that. The reason is, when there is nothing in it for the teacher, then the teacher has no conflict of interest, the teacher loses nothing if the student leaves. The teacher has to be at ease with having no students.
I take no credit for the changes in me other than I kept trying to hang in there with the angels, who had captured and harnessed me, and I did not kill myself, or try to escape via booze or other drugs, or by running away and trying to hide from what life was serving me, which the angels used to test and refine me. Their main tool was standing me before endless mirrors, looking at me.
What I experience is not imaginable to anyone around me but two people I know well. I knew a few people in the past, who were in somewhat similar predicaments. There are stories of it happening to people in history, but they were anomalies, who felt like they were from another planet, stuck on this planet until their time was up. They mingled with people, they were in this world, but they were not of this world.
Some things cannot be repaid- posted at religiousforums.com on Memorial Day:
"Gaza was before the war the greatest open-air prison. Today it's the greatest open-air graveyard," Borrell said on Monday at a meeting of EU ministers in Brussels. "It's a graveyard for tens of thousands of people and also a graveyard for many of the most important principles of humanitarian law."
Icehorse
MayPeaceBeUpOnYou said:
"Hamas is backed by Iran. Hamas built a multi-billion-dollar war machine to attack Israel, after Israel gave them Gaza.”
That doesn't sound very "oppressed" to me. It sounds like Jihadis and Islamists pursuing the idea that no Jews should live in the ME. Please recall that Jews have been living in the ME for thousands of years. There are now virtually no Jews in the ME except in Israel.
Tell me again how oppressed Muslims in the ME are?
Redneck Mystic Lawyer
What’s going on in Gaza is horrific.
The “good Catholic” President Biden keeps sending Israel money and the weapons it needs to keep obliterating Gaza and killing, maiming, battle-shocking, displacing and/or starving around 2,000,000 civilian men, women and children.
I wonder if Gaza’s surviving civilians wish Hamas had not launched the October 7, 2023 attack, because Hamas seems to have zero concern for the civilians in Gaza and uses its October 7 hostages to bargain for the release of Hamas’s people in Israel prisons?
It looks to me that when Hamas’s war strategist Yahya Sinwar spent many years in an Israel prison, he figured out how Israel’s psyche worked, and Hamas could not beat and America-backed Israel, and he came up with an attack that would provoke Israel to respond as it has responded in Gaza, to turn the entire world against Israel and America.
I had many discussions online and in person with people about Gaza, and my take is American Christians, who back Israel in that war, do it because their Bible says God promised land in Palestine to the Israelites, and Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem at the behest of Jewish leaders, and they want Israel to protect where Jesus was born, roamed and was killed at the behest of Jewish leaders.
Donald Trump has said he is Israel’s best friend. If President Biden were to cut off all money and weapons to Israel, Trump would win by a landslide this November. Perhaps American Christians, who back Israel’s war in Gaza, should ask themselves how Jesus feels about that war? I can’t imagine he would applaud that war. Nor can I imagine God would applaud that war. Nor can Imagine Allah would applaud the October 7 raid, my 81st birthday.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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