First step, pour the water out of your boots

This article was recommended to me. I just read it. It was maddening. About a woman in New York possessed with demons (despite, as the comical writer states over and over, her being sophisticated and good looking and white).

An aside: who is sophisticated these days (or ever)? I could expose that in two minutes.

So they're Roman Catholics. Not once do they talk about reading the Bible. They do talk about prayer, which is good, but you need the understanding that only comes from the Bible to know what to pray about, etc.

You can't be possessed by demons if you are regenerated by the word and the Spirit.

She and her husband say ritual and not sinning will get them through. Their ignorance of sin and salvation is at a cartoon level. Yet their main problem remains they avoid the actual living, quickening word of God.

They need to leave their demonic church, buy a real Bible (I'd recommend a King James Version), read it, get parts-in-relation-to-the-whole understanding of it, and put on the armor of God.

"Oh, my, I belong to a pedophile, Luciferian church, and I'm possessed by demons, and I don't know what to do!"

Take the obvious first step.

40 short stories I've just read

[originally an email]

It took me about 7 or 8 days. Originally I was going to read 100. All were found and read on my tablet. 20 or so from a collection I downloaded from Amazon for $1.99. I'm feeling bad I'm not going to read 100, but you sort of run out of quality after 40 to where I'd have to start buying books to get at specific stories, and this wasn't originally about reading every great short story that exists (that would be a big endeavor), but re-igniting my attention span muscles. I noticed early on that impressive novelists tended to write the most impressive short stories. A lot of short stories are overrated. Like they are merely gimicky concepts. Like the Lottery by Shirley Jackson. But then you read Araby by James Joyce, and you say, yes, that is describing something real and meaningful about the world or human nature. The epiphany stories tend to be the deepest. There are authors who you could read all their short works, and it wouldn't be a waste of time. Jorge Luis Borges is one. Joyce is one. John Cheever has many. D. H. Lawrence probably has many. Nathaniel Hawthorne. All of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Jack London has many. Katherine Mansfield. Kafka, Faulkner, and Stephen Crane. Charles Dickens (his first work, the Pickwick Papers has short stories, and many have said that one book is the truly pure Charles Dickens). Steinbeck. The great Russians Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gogol. (If those symbols don't render they are gold stars. I starred 12 of the 40...

01. Signs and Symbols - Vladimir Nabokov🌟
02. The Interlopers - Saki
03. The Enchanted Bluff - Willa Cather
04. The Horse Dealer's Daughter - D. H. Lawrence
05. Cathedral - Raymond Carver
06. The Strength of God - Sherwood Anderson🌟
07. Araby - James Joyce🌟
08. The Ambitious Guest - Nathaniel Hawthorne
09. The Garden Party - Katherine Mansfield
10. The Lightning-Rod Man - Herman Melville
11. The Nightingale and the Rose - Oscar Wilde
12. To Build a Fire - Jack London🌟
13. Eveline - James Joyce
14. Two Short Parables - Franz Kafka
15. The Secret Sharer - Joseph Conrad
16. That Evening Sun Go Down - William Faulkner
17. A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
18. A Dark-Brown Dog - Stephen Crane
19. Gusev - Anton Chekhov
20. The Landlady - Roald Dahl
21. All at One Point - Italo Calvino
22. The Girls in Their Summer Dresses - Irwin Shaw
23. The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton - Charles Dickens🌟
24. The Storm - Kate Chopin
25. Malachi's Cove - Anthony Trollope
26. The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
27. Young Goodman Brown - Nathaniel Hawthorne🌟
28. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? - Joyce Carol Oates
29. The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges🌟
30. The Five-Forty-Eight - John Cheever🌟
31. The Killers - Ernest Hemingway
32. Miriam - Truman Capote
33. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - Ernest Hemingway
34. The Chrysanthemums - John Steinbeck🌟
35. A Passion in the Desert - Honoré de Balzac
36. The Open Boat - Stephen Crane🌟
37. The Nose - Nikolai Gogol🌟
38. The Dilettante - Edith Wharton
39. The White Heron - Sarah Orne Jewett
40. The Dead - James Joyce🌟

My concise definition of truth

Truth is an influence that emanates from the mind of God that you discern with your Holy Spirit and Word of God quickened conscience.

Good quote from AJ

"This is a spiritual fight. Evil is manifesting itself everywhere, and none of us are perfect. There's incredible pressure out there to just be angry, or to give in to it, or not to care, or just go get blind drunk; and we can't do that; and so I'm not perfect, you're not perfect, none of us are perfect, but we love God, we love justice, and we want to be better. We have a conscience, and so people that love God and who are overall good people - we're all still fallen - are always feeling like well we shouldn't be leaders because we're not perfect, well, we're pointed toward that north star that's God, and, that's really our job, we just need to do the right thing, and God's going to take us the rest of the way. And that's really what it comes down to. We're seeing evil come out in the open, try and overwhelm us, try to break our will, try to demoralize us, try to make us give up, and that's not going to happen. My will is stronger than it's ever been."

I don't like AJ (Alex Jones). He speaks a lot of truth, but then he lets you down in that role of controlled opposition that he's taken the money to be in, but this is a good quote.

I've stated elsewhere I feel that desire to not care (because it gets so overwhelming and unrelenting), but I go against that feeling because I don't want to acquiesce to the devil. I think it's probably wise to not be too focused on every satanic performance artist of the ongoing horror show though...

How to increase understanding

To gain new understanding you have to extend your limits.

To extend your limits you have to provoke your limits by engaging influences that are just above your current level of understanding and/or just outside your current circle of interests.

This can involve mental, emotional, or physical activity. Classic books, higher music, athletics or performing arts.

This all requires effort and initiative. An active approach. Self-motivated.

If you want to understand yourself and the world around you better, don't merely work within your current limits, extend your limits with new influences. It's like giving your computer a better operating system, or new, interesting programs and applications. You're not a computer, but you know what I mean.