{{{Simon}}} has asked me if I would share some of my story of how I got to where I am, what I have been through to get *here*. So this is a little bit of it. Many of us are under the illusion that we have done the work required of the process. *Illusion*, I say, because most of us haven’t even started. There are issues still to be faced. Issues of co-dependency, issues that make smothers and fodders, SMOTHERS AND FODDERS.

I had a smother. I also had a fodder. Smothers usually raise little smothers and fodders raise little fodders. But in my family, my older brother became a smother, which left me the role of fodder. Smother/fodder, that was me, after both my smother and fodder had died.

My fodder died first, delegating to me the role of fodder for my smother, which in turn, meant being fodder for my older brother and sister, too, since they both lived off smother, being smothers themselves. Each one of them claimed the freedom to do whatever they pleased, feel however they pleased, believe however they pleased, and then turn to me to make everything in their lives work out the way they wanted. Just like they had done to fodder.

I was the family’s fireman, spending most of my waking moments running around putting out the fires they had started. At one time in my life, I was taking care of a baby born deaf, taking care of a smother with Alzheimer’s, and maintaining three houses, which also consisted of paying all the bills on those three houses. “Look at me, aren’t I a heroic fodder?”

I had no life of my own, and no role or meaning in it, except for being at smothers “beck and call”. But I wasn’t my smother’s fodder. I also wasn’t my siblings fodder. But like all co-dependents, once our fodder was gone, they looked to me to fill in for him. Seems like being a codependent was all the reason they needed, to demand sucking the energy of my life from me. Using the very idea that I would not jump at the chance, to prove how much I loved them, as the basis for all their demands on my time and energy. “Prove you love me, make me happy.”

Time passed, with smother’s Alzheimer’s steadily progressing. The very worst time for smom, was when she still retained enough of her functions to know that everyday she would wake up knowing less and less. It was both mentally and emotionally torturous for her. We spent many afternoons talking and that’s when she shared her own personal hell. For she expressed there wasn’t a moment that went by that she didn’t spend in regret and remorse. She was soooo sorry for what she had done over the years but could not apologize, because fodder was gone. But he had been right and her wrong. And now she knew it.

My smom could boohoo at the drop of a hat. As she often did when things did not go her way or her idea of the way things were suppose to go. That’s when she’d hit us over the head with guilt trips for “making her cry.” The very worst possible trouble we could get into with fodder, was upsetting smother. And what she admitted to me, is that what she had done all her life, was use guilt trips whenever she was unhappy, especially on fodder and especially when it came to my older brother. The sibling that had returned ‘home’ right after fodder’s death and been living like a leech off smom ever since. Forty-five years old, with two college degrees and had never earned a living in his lifetime.

This all stopped the moment that smom handed the reins of the family to me. For I lifted the burden of regret off her shoulders by promising I would take care of my brother and do what fodder would have done long ago. If she hadn’t manipulated him. I made a promise to clean up her mess. And told her not to waste one moment of her life feeling regret for me, for placing this burden on my young shoulders. I had broad shoulders, I could carry the load. I had been raised the youngest child after all, following behind two irresponsible nitwits. I had been the “garbage can” child of the family. Whatever the family’s garbage, it fell to me to deal with it.

Many thought of me as “tough” but my fodder had been the one person that *knew*. I wasn’t “tough” at all. I simply knew how to ACT “tough”, just like he had shown me. Just like is expected of all fodders in our Society.

I was made Steward of our family’s values. And I *knew* what my parents had wanted of me. I was their only hope they said, their only child that would ever have any kids of my own. They asked me to heal the family of our dysfunctions and pass along the Values they had, as parents, always striven to teach. On their respective death beds, both my smother and fodder asked me to become a mother and father, instead. “Find a way out of our box”, they instructed me. Knowing all along my penchant for finding loopholes in boxes.

I don’t get along very well now, with either smothers or fodders. For what makes us a smother or a fodder is being a co-dependent. And the very energy of codependency is what is no longer being energetically supported as a viable relationship pattern. Quite honestly, because it sucks and at its very foundation is a belief that is disrespectful towards humanity.

My smom sucked off my fodder. Exactly like the way my brother sucked off her. I realize many smothers and little smothers contend that the ‘feminine’ has been “abused” by the ‘masculine’ but this is not so. Smothers are the very ones responsible and accountable for the cultivation and nurturing of the debilitating pattern of “abuse”. Without any smothers, there would be no fodders, for one is the cause and the other, an effect.

Smom had tried her tricks with me after fodder died. They didn’t work. “I don’t want to talk about that; it makes me upset” she would say. And I would respond that we have to talk about it and to get over it, meaning her upset. My brother would also try the same tricks. Try, being the operative word. “I’ll walk out of this house and you’ll never hear from me again”, he would say. Just like he had threatened smom all her life. And I would respond by asking him if that was a promise, for it was my intent to hold him to it.

After smom was safely in a care facility where she could receive constant around the clock care, I informed my brother that if he wanted to continue to live in the ‘family home’, he was going to have to start paying the bills. He was going to have to get a “job”. He was going to have to provide the fuel for his own life, rather then expecting anyone else to pay for the costs of his choices for him. So with 2 college degrees to his credit, both bought and paid for by ‘the family making sacrifices for him’, he went out and got a job, finally, as a frozen food stocker at the grocery store.

I knew this brother of mine. I knew his excuses for avoiding responsibility. He would say ‘just tell me what to do that will please you’, then wail in self defense that he would only be doing ‘as he was told’. So I undermined his escape hatch, by simply telling him he was free to make his own decisions, of course, he was also going to be responsible and accountable FOR all those decisions and choices. Then I waited. Waited for him to leave of his own accord, because I wasn’t going to give him any ammo to use against me in the future, that I had ‘kicked him out’.

After finding another woman, a smother, that he could suck off of, he finally vacated the house. Just what I had been waiting for. I knew my smother’s lovely home had been trashed. I also knew that it was futile to try to restore it, so long as my brother was still in residence. Just as a house trashed by animals, has to have the animals removed before any real clean up work can be done.

We had to wear face masks as we first started to clean it up because of the fumes. The wall to wall carpet was soaked in urine as we carried it out of the house. We had to use snow shovels to scrape the carpet pad off the foundation, as it had started to rot and decompose. The parquet floors had been left in standing water and they had to be removed. And we had to use a small jackhammer, to break up the imported tile, since all the grout had been permeated with urine, too. Litter boxes were over full and feces were all over the place. Gaping holes had been chewed in the walls, and a houseful of antiques, gnawed beyond recognition. We took the house down to its very bones, then rebuilt it back again, from foundation to roof.

When my brother got kicked out, the woman finally catching on to what kind of cad he was, he called ‘me’, trying to weasel his way back ‘home’. I’m getting “all my ducks in a row”, he said. And that’s when I told him all his ducks were dead. He was owed nothing and better count himself lucky that I didn’t sue him for damages. That’s when Reality sunk into him, that I had truly meant what I said. That I WAS going to hold him responsible and accountable for all his choices. And his days of sucking off of family, were OVER. My foot came down right across his throat. For I wasn’t a smother and I wasn’t a fodder by that time.

I no longer believed nor supported the moral code of smothers and fodders. I found the role of parasite or the role of the fresh meat that all parasites live off of, unbecoming, which basically means, not something I was about to even try to become. Smothers had no value for their own lives, where I did.

The idea that made my smom into a smom, was the idea that the greatest value she could achieve in her life, was to lay down that life, for those she loved. It was a pitiful ideal. Of course, “pity” was what she counted on to feed her role of martyr. And while I had compassion, after all I had been through, I was fresh out of pity. I was fed up with castrating men into becoming fodders for poor pathetic smothers.

As a mother, I considered fodders unattractive and uninteresting. When it came to sharing my bed, I felt no desire for sharing it with an emotional child. I had no Oedipus complexes.

Over a period of years, every so often a smother or a fodder has tried their little game of trying to suck the energy from my life in order to feed their own. One time a young couple needed help, so we extended it. We gave them one month’s worth. At the end of that month, the young lady stood in my kitchen, yelling at me for not lying to her parents when they called. Don’t I know her parents worry about her?

“Well”, I said, “of course I do. It’s your game to make them worry. Every time their lives don’t revolve around you, you pull some stunt to make them snap to attention. Worrying about you is what you count on. If you REALLY didn’t want them to worry, then you wouldn’t choose to lock yourself in your fodder’s bathroom, and pass out in the tub, after swallowing a bunch of pills. You’d go swallow your pills some where they wouldn’t find out about it.”

“They worry about me dying!”, she shrieked.

“Of course they do and it is what you count on to manipulate them every time. But it doesn’t work with me. If you want to die then I respect your wishes. Go right ahead. I’ll do nothing to stop you. I simply ask that you do it someplace else.”

“You don’t care if I live or die?”, she asked, extremely perplexed.

“Of course I CARE but I’m not in charge. You are. And if your own life isn’t worth your own effort when it comes to surviving, then what makes you think it is worth mine? What makes my life worth less then yours? Nothing, that’s what. I love life. I cherish it. So much that I’m not about to throw mine away on someone who has none. Your life is your own. Go ahead and trash it. Throw it away. Just don’t expect me to trash mine, in any attempts to save you from yourself.”

She took off walking and I haven’t seen her since. I’ve heard about her, though. She’s a tweeker, heavily into meth, whatever that is. She’s a dealer for her fodder, who uses her dealership, as a way for her to show how much she loves him and he, her. She’s still leeching out a life from whomever buys into her pitiful story and game. Which sure as hell isn’t me.

I’ve learned the lesson of co-dependency: Don’t be one.

For those of us who haven’t yet learned this lesson, prepare for your life to start falling apart. “Aversion therapy” is what I think it’s called. For “our family home” which is our planet, has been trashed the same way as my brother trashed my smother’s lovely home. Irresponsible, emotionally self indulgent drama queens, willfully choosing self sacrifice and trashing the value of their own lives have been in charge: “smothers”.

Well…”Mother” is back in town and she in not pleased with the way her home has been treated while she has been away. She’s cleaning house. All of us who don’t know any better then to enable dependency patterns will learn – the hard way. As ability TO enable is taken away.

Every single one of us that has thought to drain other people’s lives in order to serve our own, will now find the living energy being drained out of our lives, instead.

I might be considered “rough” and “rude”, especially to some women, but I’m a cream puff compared to what is coming. Just consider me like a shot in arm. An immunization shot, for the purposes of jump starting our immune systems, so they will be ready to survive what’s coming. It isn’t a “good” time to be caught being a smother or a fodder. And the very best and most loving thing we can do for ourselves, our world and humanity in general, is to drop the whole idea of “laying down our lives for the love of another”. For there is NO Love in the ideal at all. None. Nada. Zippo. Nor any Honor or Self Respect either. There is only Need and an irrational wish not to be accountable for it.

Life. We’re in a cycle now of learning to love it or die trying.

All ‘animals’ are going to be housebroken or are not going to be allowed to enjoy our “family home” at all. It’s not fair nor respectful for family members to have to live with the filth, that those who know no value for family, create in their wake. Nor is it fair for some to have to keep cleaning up the messes of others. For it is by cleaning up our own messes, that we learn the wisdom to stop making them.

“Take up your bed and walk.” – Christ

Sincerely,

“Mother”

Observance of “taboo” was primitive man’s effort to dodge ill luck. It is the ancestor of savages’ self control. And the respect these taboos commanded in the mind of the primitive savage, exactly equaled his fear of the powers who were suppose to enforce them.

Fear of chance and the dread of bad luck literally have driven us into the inventions of religions, as supposed insurance against these calamities. Every tribe of us has had its tree of forbidden fruit, literally consisting of branches hanging heavily with thousands of ‘thou shall nots’.

As our savage mind developed to the point we could idea-ize both good and bad, the stage was set for the belief in “sin”. For it was only through the concept of “sin” and transgression against some ‘spirit’ or ‘spook’ or ‘ghost’ that our primitive minds could understand natural death.

Habitual violation of taboo is what became known as “vice”. Primitive law made vice a “crime”, while religion made it a “sin”. “Confession” was a public proclamation of corruption and defilement, followed by meaningless ceremonies and ritualistic schemes of purification.

Renunciation and rituals mortifying the flesh came next.

All this was what was needed to teach savages self control and self denial. To teach us to decrease our personal demands instead of attempting to increase our self gratification. Early cults were especially active in believing in the virtue of physical suffering, forming the basis for the Hebrew, Hindu and Buddhist doctrine of physical humiliation through castration. Vows of self denial and self torture were imagined as ways towards earning spiritual brownie points with god. Especially during times of emotional duress. Pledges that are harmful and of an extreme nature can still be observed among certain groups of us today.

What originated as a ritual among soldiers before going into battle, the denial of sexual gratification in order to heighten senses and awareness, became a continence cult known for tolerating marriage only as a lessor evil then fornication. This led to looking down upon women and started a war against creativity and the home. (Our institution of human progress.)

The formation of celibate priesthoods has all been based on these beliefs in ancient continence cults of self denial and self negation: fasting, deprivation, asceticism, humiliation, sanctification through sorrow and the mortification of the flesh.

We aren’t savages anymore. Self control, self discipline and becoming self governing as a policy of human behavior is wiser then extreme self denial. As a savage we did not understand about peptides. We did not understand about brain chemicals and our ability to produce them on a regular and constant basis. These chemicals our hypothalamus creates and floods the cells of our systems with…

making what we feel, a result of what we believe.

Primitive man imagined a grasping, emotionally insecure god, fashioning it out of his own image. A creditor deity that required all sorts of priests and potentates in order to administer meaningless rituals and sacrifices over an entire lifetime in order to get a man out of ‘spiritual debt’.

Jesus did not teach these unreasonable and irrational views.

Nor did he allow any savage and primal fear of death, dissuade him from delivering his message of unconditional love and all embracing forgiveness.

Is Satan real?

Only to those of us too lazy and emotionally self indulgent to claim our own fears and insecurities AS OUR OWN FEARS AND INSECURITIES.

“Satan” is the name we give our imaginary boogie monster, when we’re too small and bankrupt in inner substance of character to embrace our own demons.

Ah me, ah my. As the saying goes: the outside is a reflection of the inside.

An economic structure of a creditor deity that requires an entire lifetime of self negation to buy our way out of debt.

- Urantia

Notice that even in this work, it is a perspective of denial.  One of Judgement and Condemnation.  Since this tone is very much present in the work, it is easy to see that while intellectually beautiful, it is Spiritually sterile in Understanding of Spiritual realities.  Intellect  is still very much functioning as a slave/servant to instinctual emotions, until transcended through Intuition.  The work in and of itself, is an expression of beliefs in conditional Love, thus is contaminated with polarity/duality concepts.

From {{jon’s}} bog, Jon’s New Age Wanderings:

“Should marriage be abolished?”

Oh boy, what a can of worms!

What if I said that what most of us consider ‘marriage’ is a farce? That it is not a Union; it is a relationship of dependency and extortion. It is a contractual arrangement based on emotional need. And since it is based on need, it is not a Union of Hearts. It is not a Union made ‘by god’. For whatever is joined by God cannot be pulled asunder.

And this statement is True.

My 1st ‘marriage’ was one of these farces. Oh sure, we had the license, we had the minister pronounce us joined but we weren’t. When I walked out of it, I walked out saying that trying to change me to suit him meant he had no genuine love or respect for me.

The ‘marriage’ I enjoy now is based on genuine kinship and compatibility. There are NO conditions. My husband *knows* my love is unconditional. I wouldn’t think to limit or control ANY of his choices. The Fidelity we are committed to, is being Faithful to the Presence in our Hearts. As for ‘monogamy’, it is a personal choice. I may choose it for myself but I do not make it a condition that I insist he choose also. (Ladies, you’d be surprised how much allure disappears once the label of ‘forbidden’ is removed.)

We are pillars that stand together willingly, not sticks that lean on each other.

The reason why so many marriages fail these days is because they are actually prisons of bondage. The relationship is not based on Love, which is extended freely without any conditions, but is an arrangement of barter. “I will love you so long as you fulfill the conditions of satisfying my emotional needs but if these needs are not satisfied, I won’t love you any longer. For I really don’t Love you as much as I love how you make me feel.”

These farces that we have been taught are ‘marriages’, have historically been based on property rights and viewing the other person as personal property.

From {{Jon’s}} blog, Jon’s new Age Wanderings:

“the underlying question of course is “on what basis do you make your answer?” For christians, the appeal is to the bible of course. But New Agers don’t have a bible, so who says which answer is right? How do we decide? How do we know?”

It is a matter of Authority and Responsibility. Most notably, not surrendering it to ANY outside authority, for that act itself, is an act of Self Denial. And Responsibility, for doing our own thinking and deciding. We have been given the Gift of Will and we are accountable for how we use it. When we do not claim this accountability, it is the same as saying to Spirit that Life is too much of a responsibility and we don’t want to experience it anymore.

It is essential to realize that Justice is not a matter of “right and wrong”. It is a function of cause and effect. Any and all acts of Self Denial are acts of negating our own lives, of demeaning them. If we plant these seeds, we will reap a harvest of having our desires denied us.

“Knowing” comes from our hearts. There is a whole ‘nother post on knowing:

http://sueannedwards.wordpress.com/knowing/

Most of us don’t even know who we are, especially ‘christians’, for beliefs in ‘sin’ are effective tools of emotional manipulation. Who am I/who are you, freed of all fears of Acceptance? You’d be surprised how many things we choose simply due to fears of not being accepted or tolerated, how many things we choose because we’re looking for validation.

The major transition is to a altogether different value system.

The ‘christian’ religions as taught us to be leeches and ticks, for our reality is based of getting other people to believe likewise. It is a relationship of dependency, being dependent upon other people’s choices. This gives rise to controlling behavior, trying to limit choices. Judgments of ‘wrongness’ and ‘condemnation’. These are acts of emotional extortion.

While it may not be complimentary for us to realize what we’ve been doing, ie, negating other people’s lives in order to feed our own reality like a bunch of ticks and leeches, it is necessary if we are to cease our DisRespectful behavior.

A sense of Worth based on other people’s choices and actions is not a GENUINE sense of self worth at all. It is not secure, for it is a relationship of dependency. ONLY a sense of Worth based on ACTUAL substance of character is Real.

This attitude and elected value system brings our focus back to our own self, instead of upon others. We start endeavoring to clean up our own backyards, instead of having to control what other people’s yards look like. We change from preacher to teacher, for we gladly share how we got our yard clean, to those who ask, yet are unconcerned with those that don’t. Since we are no longer dependent, we can allow other people the FREEDOM and LIBERTY to be their own person. There is no longer any contest of wills, any conflict, for we are not trying to overpower and control.

In short, we claim the responsibility for being our own Father and being our own Mother. For making own own decisions and for being self nurturing.

Many ‘christians’ may not like it but I do often ask the question: Too lazy to do our own thinking, huh?

It boils down to choice. For each and every choice, there is a consequence. What I can share after decades of practical experience in associating cause and effect, is to say that when we base our decisions on a gut centered emotion, like fear or doubt, then the consequences will be something unpleasant. When we base our choices from the perspective of being a puny human, the consequences will be something unpleasant. When we base our choices on being ‘a son of man’ the consequences will be something unpleasant. When we base our choices on conditional love the consequences will be something unpleasant. When we base our choices on being needy the consequences will be something unpleasant.

Choose based on the perspective of being a ‘son of god’ and for *knowing*, listen to the Voice in our own Hearts. For our paths are varied and different. What is a loving choice for one person may not be for another.

To Our OWN Hearts be True.

(not our guts)

Question #2 from Jon’s New Age Wanderings:

“Is watching porn OK?”

…if you can’t partake, then I guess watching is about as fun as it’s gonna’ get.