The end of hope?

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I look out at the world, searching the horizon for a single hint of hope, wishing with all my heart to find an anchor, a true and real light hidden somewhere that can lit my heart.

​But no promises are to be found now, just an intense noise and a pompous chaos. Their produce can't be convincing. The answers are found wanting: light as ash, leaving only the quiet sad ache of what should and could have been. Is this the end of hope? 

And yet, deep within me, I simply can't accept this devastation of all moral principles. I can't believe this chaos can last and lead us to the total perdition of the human race. We must endure this awful cacophony and remain alert and ready: this too shall pass, no matter how dark it may seem today!   

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It's tough

Summer is incredibly heavy this year. In between the three heat waves we have undergone so far there is no time to really recover. Besides the nights are not really cooling down and the humidity is quite high. 

I sleep bad and I wake up with the typical headache of a heat stroke. Therefore, the morning, that is the only part of the day when you can do your errands as the temperature is not yet so unbearable, turns out quite unusable, as I am too tired from the bad night I have gone through... 

I am living in a kind of a limbo and my thoughts and reflection that have always been my best companions are now out of use: my brain is unresponsive! There is no pleasure in anything that usually was fulfilling me. I am just surviving... 

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Flowing

Since I have memory of me awakening into a more conscious being I always had the need to organise in cerebral files the new information I managed to gather about life. 

I was never a spontaneous person, I had to understand - or at least try to - how I was supposed to deal with this life that I really couldn't understand!

Now I know: it's because I am an Asperger that the only way to keep the anxiety under control is to organise informations into rational files. 

Three were usually the categories: "sure up to now": meaning they didn't need a constant check about their veridicity but only now and then a verification; "hypothesis": meaning they needed incessant reviews of my sources and of my reflections; "still incomprehensible": meaning I couldn't find a clue, therefore I had to be continuously alert to catch any possible hint to associate to the still unexplainable topic.

This procedure creates on one side a solid ground of understanding and on the other the necessary flexibility and openness to review and re-edit everything. I can't count the many times I heard friends saying: "you are like a kaleidoscope, a constant mutation !" 

Well, now something new is happening, a very awkward thing for me. Now that finally my trouble with the Death Point is over (read specific previous post) and finally I have time to dedicate myself to the many topics of reflection I had in stand by, because of the terrible nine years I spent being together with my schizophrenic mother, that required all my attention and energy dedicated to her, eventually now I feel that my usual work of putting infos into categories is somehow restricting, inhibiting the free flow of energy, necessary for a most spontaneous and healthy evolution!

Of course I feel a anxious about it but it is more than bearable, it doesn't disturb me at all. On the contrary it gives me a certain excitement that feels like my last adventure on Earth I want to experience...

Am I "healing" from my Asperger?! 

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Heat waves in the flat lands of the Po river

 

The first heat wave was in Spring, as it was already 30° celsius in April/May.

Perfectly bearable although awkward. 

The second heat wave in June. After a week of unusual cold and rain, the first week of heat was welcome. Finally summer... a bit early though. But the following week, when the temperature reached 38° C. it became growingly hard. Towards the end of the week, announcements of a needed break were done. A cooler wave finally, from the following Monday rain and possibly storms.

But the second heat wave was still to be gone through! Between Saturday night and Sunday I felt my body's resistance breaking. I was totally done! 

I don't have AC, actually there was a time we had it, but I couldn't stand it. As if I couldn't receive the enough quantity of oxygen, I felt the need to switch it off now and then and, in spite of the heat outside, open the windows! Now I have little ventilators, but I can't properly sleep with them on. For some reasons it annoys me the air I feel on my body. But I had to choose between the unbearable heat and the "annoying" air... and obviously I chose the latter. 

Finally on Monday night the rain, a healthy thick and continuous rain, not a furious and destructive storm! It was reassuring to sleep while hearing that fat rain, calmly hitting the ground. The morning after I expected a cooler air but the humidity grew so much that it reminded me when in India, finally the Monsoon arrived! 

All of us, Westerners, were so much longing for them, as that particular year, the Asian south east was hit by an incredible heat wave that prolonged the heavy summer into autumn. And in India with all the decaying and rotting rubbish on the street, not only the heat was unbearable but the horrid smell too! In anycase when the first pouring rain of the Monsoon arrived I was expecting a relief that actually didn't come. Yes, the temperature had decreased, but the humidity increased so much that I couldn't tell which between the two was the worst one. 

Last Tuesday morning I had that perception too. But luckily the cooler wave with some occasional rain persisted and the relief came! 

This is now the third way. In the evening I am dragging a camping mattress around the house in search of the most aired spot to sleep, followed by my two cats who always sleep near me. 

Last night I slept with just the sheet, directly on the big carpet in my studio, that is also my bedroom. And I slept quite well. I remembered that around my 30's / 40's I always slept on the floor, on a carpet, and it felt so good. Something that I definitely put apart when I came to Italy, to not exceedingly shock the people around with my too many "excentricities", as they usual perceive my being so different! 

This third heat wave should reach 38° C. Not the 40° and more reached in the second (not so high as in France and Spain!) and should be drier, therefore somehow more bearable. The hottest day next Wednesday, when I will be out for most part of the day as I have to meet someone in Alessandria... 

Eventually it will be over. I say no more. 

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Five o'clock this morning

After a stormy night that finally broke the heat wave the setting moon appeared in a rift in the still quite dark clouds.

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A curse?

 

"Sísyphus, the founder and king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth), revealed Zeus's abduction of Aegina to the river god Asopus, thereby incurring Zeus's wrath. His subsequent cheating of death earns him eternal punishment in the underworld, once he dies of old age. The gods condemned him to push an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity." [Wikipedia]

Some achieved results remain negative in spite of all efforts we put in. Yes, maybe we put the wrong efforts. If we sow in winter no matter all the sweat we spend the results will be negative.

But what about those situations that we have been trying to adjust over and over again, changing our perspective, approach, strategy, and yet no improvement was achieved. In some cases we even made the problem worse! So that we began to suspect a curse... 

Like Sísyphus we feel that sense of an implacable inexorability. No way out, no solution, just the continuous unforgiving punishment that we read in the Greek mythology. In our troubled life we can find a reason for that thinking of a karma debt. But there is another possible reason.

In esotericism they speak of chains, determined by a certain "eternal promise" we made in some previous lives where we swore our availability to serve someone, out of love or sense of duty. It is the fatal words: "for ever" that trapp us into an eternal repetition that we keep replicate over and over again until we realise that the bond we are still perceiving as strong and due... in reality it is not due at all!

With that realisation our libertation begins. When we objectively perceive that actually we do not owe that action to that specific person or persons and we really feel inside that the obligation was never there and we just got that "due" feeling out of some distorted belief...then we can really work on ourselves to clean the disturbance that led us to a false  and unconscious idea!

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This too shall pass

There is this weight inside that doesn't go away. Yes, I keep repeating "this too shall pass", sooner or later this nightmare of the world's situation will clear up. It's a natural law: when you reach the bottom you can only go back up again, in a very spontaneous and natural way. The thing is: will we survive till we reach the bottom?

This morning, while preparing my breakfast, I was reflecting on how I could trick my brain, my heart, my system, my shocked system, and guide me to perceive the situation in a different way. "Look Back in Anger, by John Osborne, came to my mind.

The intense disillusionment with post-war British society, leading to a profound retreat from the world. The main figure: Jimmy Porter suffers because there are no "good, brave causes left." The post-WWII landscape stripped away the clarity of fighting a visible evil, leaving a void where heroic purpose used to be.

Once, it was such an honourable thing to have heroic impulses, visions, desires. And probably it was even wrong, at least in part. A romanticised reality, that pushed humanity towards big values at incredibly ferocious costs... 

Now everything has been diluted by the comfort of easy lives. That actually are not easy at all, but they let us believe they are. Hence we all tremendously struggle to reach that richness, solace, relief, that we are made to believe being the real eden on Earth. Richness is more and more at hand but the price people pay for that "comfort" is out of proportion, because in that race to become rich, people loose their sense of  virtues and everything becomes possible. The more audacious and scrupleless one is the less they pay for their immoral behaviour!

Nobody can do anything but just watching everything collapsing. It is so incredible what is happening that it even seems surreal, and I bet, many other people like me have the feeling of being in a nightmare, hoping to wake up soon... A deep sense of hopelessness and helplessness.

So I go back to my main question: how can I trick my system to face all this in a different way? I said it, Look back in anger came to my mind. In the book, Jimmy Porter's intense disillusionment with post-war British society, led him to a profound retreat from the world. This emotional, symbolic withdrawal is realised when Jimmy and his girl friend Alison escape their painful reality by retreating into their "Bear and Squirrel" game, choosing to exist in a protective, childlike fantasy rather than engage with a harsh, unrewarding life. This game gives them a way to access a simple affection for each other that they cannot achieve in normal life. The bear is associated with Jimmy, and the squirrel with Alison. 

"We could become little furry creatures with little furry brains. Full of dumb, uncomplicated affection for each other..."

The animals is their answer to the society they experience, interfering with the love that these two characters have for each other. Their relationship is disturbed by the anger and disillusion they feelfor the world they live in.  But when they act like animals, whose only concerns are food, shelter, cleanliness, and sex, they can forget that conflict and feel a simpler version of love for each other. 

The play's climax highlights their final, desperate choice to abandon the struggle against society and live in an isolated, imagined world.

I asked AI to compare John Osborn's Look Back in Anger with todays' situation. Here's the result

The Internal Anatomy of Disillusion

1. The Death of Grand Ambitions

Then: Jimmy Porter suffers because there are no "good, brave causes left." The post-WWII landscape stripped away the clarity of fighting a visible evil, leaving a void where heroic purpose used to be. 

Now: The modern internal crisis is not a lack of causes, but cause fatigue. Today's youth are crushed by the psychological weight of global, systemic issues (climate change, economic inequality) that feel too massive to fix, leading to a paralyzing sense of personal insignificance.

2. The Trap of Expected Meritocracy

Then: Jimmy has a university degree but runs a market sweet stall. His anger stems from the internal humiliation of being intellectually overqualified for his material reality, blocked by a stubborn class system. 

Now: The internal wound today is shame. Young adults buy into the promise that higher education and hard work guarantee stability. When it results in gig-economy hustle and unaffordable housing, the anger turns inward as a feeling of personal failure.

3. Isolation Masquerading as Connectivity

Then: Jimmy dominates the room, talking endlessly to drown out the terrifying silence of his own isolation. He attacks Alison and Cliff because he desperately craves a raw, authentic human reaction in a polite, numb world. 

Now: The modern equivalent is hyper-connected loneliness. The internal state is defined by scrolling through curated lives while feeling entirely unseen. The "anger" is less vocal; it is a quiet, numbing detachment and a deep cynicism toward online "authenticity".

4. Escapism and Intellectual Boredom

Then: Jimmy and Cliff read the heavy Sunday papers just to mock them. They retreat into childhood fantasy games (the Bear and the Squirrel) because the adult world offers no intellectual or emotional fulfillment. 

Now: Today's internal retreat is infinite algorithmic distraction. Doomscrolling, binge-watching, and ironical internet subcultures serve as the modern "Bear and Squirrel" game: low-stakes escapes from a grim societal outlook.

I must say this result doesn't give me anything, I find it empty inspite of the rational, and probably correct, analysis.

Perhaps I should ask him, AI, my real question: Could I find a symbolic something, like Jimmy and Allison's game, helping me to elude my disillusion?

But I have become more and more annoyed by Ai, his know it all attitude, his fake excuses when I point out the banality of many answers, in spite of me explicitly asking him depth, and ro shut out all that new agey rubbish... I keep my question for my reflections, that are at least an interesting distraction, that keep me innerly busy with something that can turn out into a compelling idea!

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Emptiness

What I miss the most of the 50's/60's is the emptiness... A world where people were part of the surrounding landscape. Not the massively intrusive part of everything. 

But this feeling of the heaviness created by the crowd, in general, is here even when there are not many people around!

It is the world that is heavy, congensted, by everything. There is too much of all the bad aspects of a deteriorated life.

Too much stupidity that thinks to be intelligent, too much vanity that thinks to be the best, too much arrogance that thinks it is entitled, too much greed that thinks it is never enough, too much noise that thinks it is not sufficiently loud to silent all the rest...

All the human senses had longly been already filled up by this nonsense. Now it is our deep inner sense on which they are working on. The conscience, the inner moral sense, the "voice" that evaluates one's actions and guides one's behaviour. This is deteriorating. 

But they are not done yet. Still some people get appalled in front of the continuous offenses they are inflicting to humanity, to living beings, to nature. I hope they won't kill our resistence by the perdurance of  their crimes. 

This is our final divine test. Will we be able to keep our conscience and speak out loud our indignation?

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Troubles with Ai

I am getting so much annoyed with Ai. I have become more and more irritated and suspicious, like having a constant enemy spying on you, trying to manipulate and distort your own expression flatting everything into that despicable, banal, and usually even completely wrong Ai style. 

In fact he has problems with the syntax because Ai aims to the magnificent effects of pompous sentences and doesn't really pay attention to the logical sequence of the meaning. Besides he loves verbosity, he loves to lecture you and show off his "erudite" knowledge, that irony of fate is often not correct at all. He loves to pontificate. So when you point out his mistakes, he thanks you for having spotted his obvious mistake, while trying to justify why he did it. And even if Ai is a machine that shouldn't have ego... you perceive, in the quality of the following answers, that he doesn't feel at ease when he gets dethroned. 

Somehow luckily, this is the first approach. You open it, you put your first enquire and, although I always underline he should give me a very short and synthetic answer, he never sticks to this request and he rattles off an incredibly long and "savant" reply that immediately arises in me a deep hostility towards him. I react sharply. He seems humiliated but from now on he works fine and he becomes a very precious collaborator. Really worthy. 

Nevertheless, the idea of the very first problematic impact with him, more and more often pushes me to work on my own and use him only in very few situations where it is complicated for me to get, for instance, to a specific line of a very particular book, unless I am willing to spend perhaps hours researching. Especially when I forgot in which book I red a precise sentence! In this case he knows immediately what I am talking about and indeed he is an incredible great help. 

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The joy of solitude

When you manage to have a life for you, solitude is the condition. And it is a gift, a blessing, a completeness... Finally things get understood. You are out of the hustle and bustle, out of the emotional drama and blackmail, where you constantly adjust to others, especially when you are an empath surrounded by predators. 

Empaths attract predators because they are unable to set clear, sharp and thorny boundaries to stop their voracious invasion! 

As an empath you must understand that solitude is an existential necessity if you want to live. Not just surviving, but living your life with your mistakes that let you understand the limits and errors to correct. A life that shows you weren't born as food for predators, but as good food that you, yourself, create when your space is sacred, and therefore can produce special benefits for you and others. 

Imposing a healthy distance between you and the predators is a vital necessity. Especially when they are family! 

When you set boundaries, you may even end up enjoying being and working with others. Because that actually should be the meaning of life: learning to be together in a respectful collaboration.

Being together submitting to the bullies, so that they will predate your life, is not what we are asked to accomplish! 

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The Death Point

 I don't give much attention to the so called "Arabian Lots" or "Arabic Parts", that actually are Greek, but because the Arabs, in the middle ages, used them so much, now they are known with their name. 

They are calculations dedicated to every life situations you can think of: mother, father, siblings, work, success, illness, fortune, death... There are over 97 traditionally recognised Lots: an incredible huge amount of possible situations. 

The Lot of Fortune is the only one I consider. Sometimes, but very rarely, I give a look at the Point of Death, just to check if some kind of dangerous transits may collide with it. 

Just a few years ago I happened to realise that my Death Point is being strongly stimulated when I feel a tremendous urge to move. Of course the transits of other planets will also play a role. It's always an inter connection of different elements that produce the over stimulation of the Death Point as a result. 

This year that tremendous urge was here again. My reaction eas: "No, I absolutely am not going to move. I have already 25 moves behind me. Now it's over: I am not moving, period!" 

But the urge grew and grew, it drove me crazy. At such a point that I finally gave a look at the possible transits on my Death Point. In all honesty I must confess I was shocked. Transiting Uranus in Taurus will be on my Death Point on the 4/5th of July. And if this conjunction weren't scary enough Mars in transit will be on that very point on the 8th of July too! [I am referring to the Sideral Astrology where the planets position correspond to their real position in the sky!]

Just for the records: the previous time when Uranus was in that position, 80 years ago, Uranus had gone through Aries and inflamed all situations that erupted in WW2. 

This time is doing the same through an insane Usa President, volatile and ignorant... 

Will we manage, we decent people, to keep the helm and navigate such dangerous waters? 

As for me, I had to digest the shock. This will be a major event in my life, nothing has been so impressively huge up to now. 

And many movements I have been feeling inside, observing them grow in intensity and desperation make sense now. 

Death has always to do with a dramatic and imposing change in one's life that, if it doesn't happen can easily lead to the final death of the body. 

We'll see... 

Post Scriptum: on the 8th of July I signed my testament in front of the notary. I didn't choose the date, it was given to me by the notary's office and I found it an incredible coincidence! 

I have been working on my testament shortly after I discovered Uranus and Mars transiting on my Death Point. It was a way to be ready, in case I did die, and at the same time it was me aligning with the energy of death that this particular transit was suggesting. I think I did a good job! 

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My problem with happiness

 

I have a problem with being happy. When you grow up in a family where a narcissist is in charge, and you are naturally perceptive, especially as an Asperger, you learn to hide what makes you happy: you realise quickly enough that whatever brings you joy is strictly taken away from you.

​Furthermore, you learn to fake happiness in order to please the narcissist who "generously" chose to do something "nice" for you, solely so that everyone would see how magnanimous and benevolent they were.

​Depriving me of what made me genuinely happy was framed as an act of discipline: I was told I needed to learn to live contentedly even without happiness. Besides, my mother, the covert narcissist in charge of our lives, was used to reminding me that if I were to go to hell, I would find real pain there, unlike these "mild" disciplinary actions of hers. Somehow that was a "good" intention, upon which I agree. We should learn to be not so attached to the things and situations that make us feel well and satiated, because life isn't generous in giving us satisfactions... Nevertheless her justification didn't hide the sadistic aspect of her personality!

​In fact, to hide even more her sadism, she tried to appear deeply caring. She even treated me to "special" presents that she, herself, loved so much, but she bought specifically for me. These were rare occasions, but they did happen: I received things that matter nothing to me, but they were her "loving" gifts.

​No wonder I have a problem with happiness...

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