"Persons in whom the subconscious mind is near the surface, such as the artist, the crank, the unstable, and, for the matter of that, the genius in any walk of life, love the elemental contacts because they stimulate the elemental forces in their own nature which are to them the springs of their power and inspiration. But the average citizen, whose mental content is organised largely on a basis of repression and compromise in order that he may be a citizen at all and take his place in organised society, is upset by the elemental contacts according to the proportion of repression to compromise in his make-up. Compromise is the normal lot of humanity; repression is the pathology of compromise." ~ Dion Fortune

This used to be a place where I would get inspiration to write every day based on what I was reading at the time, which was when I had the time and energy to read every morning. Now I only read on my days off, because I normally leave for work before it gets bright enough to read. I also feel like I've hit a kind of plateau with things to read. Since my whole medicine journey into Peru, the book choices have been a little less than inspirational, or maybe I have been a little less phased by the inspiration. 

My partner still "jokes" about how much I read, and how many books I have, but my daughter has read far more than I have in the last couple years. She'll get through a book in a couple days, with her minimal responsibility and unnatural ability to read under artificial light. A book takes me months at this point, and they aren't sparking me like they used to. I still get books for my birthday, which is nice, but I don't even know what I want to read anymore, like my aimless creativity, searching for love of life. In the stack of books I got this last birthday was one titled Psychic Self Defense, by Dion Fortune, a christian mystic in England who wrote this 100 years ago (almost). This one is actually hitting me a bit, but not how I would have thought. It has spun me off into rabbit holes that are kind of driving me a little nuts, and I'm not sure if it's the book, or the current state of the world we live in, blended with a new obsession with pre-modern history and social resets by the ruling class, all compounded with my current age and absolute cynicism toward accomplishing anything useful in this life because of the obvious conditioning and control by those in power (I would be a miserable stoner to anyone within earshot, and would probably be institutionalized pretty quick, or just mysteriously unalived if I actually had an audience)...

..... which brings me to what this book really made me realize: the whole "institutionalization" phenomenon of the mid 1900s was nothing more than an evolved and adapted version of the Salem Witch Trials, funded and conducted in an "acceptable" manner by the ruling class in an attempt to completely stomp out those connected to what the ruling class has been conditioning you to think is unrealistic and absurd. 

The witches are still here, flailing in this world that thinks they are in desperate need of a lobotomy because they still feel the real that the oil money and pharmaceuticals were supposed to make disappear. Nice try Rockefeller. You can't make the collective unconscious forget the painfully obvious. Your glittery paint is fading. You'll have to inject us with DNA altering biology to delete this powerful generational memory, and you'll never have the opportu.....

shit.