ETA on this point - I think it might’ve been a little better if the demons had looked like Sophia’s son’s little goblin toy that she had as a memento of him, or if it had looked more like them. It would’ve provided for better foreshadowing and suggested that the demons were looking into her mind to twist and pervert her memories to better torment her. There is a nice use of foreshadowing where she barricades her bedroom door at the beginning to keep Solomon out, and then does so again in the climax.
“Solsbury Hill,” by Peter Gabriel?
Indeed. I’m not entirely sure what Peter Gabriel’s intent for the song was, but it’s always struck me as being about having a revelatory experience and wondering how to go on with life after your entire worldview has changed. “To keep in silence I resigned, my friends would think I was a nut, turning water into wine, open doors would soon be shut” is certainly a good description of how I’ve been feeling since I started contemplating doing this.
Musically, “Solsbury Hill” has a beautiful acoustic guitar intro. But while there have been many songs that have defined my life (John Lennon’s “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans” has certainly defined mine), are you sure?
Understand, I am not trying to dissuade you. But what happens if life happens when you’re busy making other plans?
Guess I’ll just have to see. Whatever’s going to happen will happen.
Heh. I’m reminded of a line from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: “Now you know what happens next.” At any rate, good luck to you!
He wrote it about his decision to leave a successful career leading Genesis and go solo. So more about something he decided to do instead of something that happened to him.
Well, I guess he’s off. We await developments.
I saw him perform it at Woodstock 2, and it was the only song of his I really wanted to hear.
One-week update;
So far things are going well. I’ve kept to my diet and my prayer/study/sleep schedule, and I haven’t posted anywhere online except for this post right now. (I’m going to allow myself to post updates on Sundays, but not necessarily every Sunday.) Outside of work the only person I’ve kept in touch with is my mother, and at work I’m keeping my conversation strictly to what’s necessary for work and to brief polite chat with my coworkers if they ask me how I’m doing or such things.
I’ve found that without even trying I’m eating less than I used to without being hungry. Between work, cooking my meals, my prayers, and my study, I wind up with about 2 hours of free time a day which I’m using to keep up on the news and some light recreation, and I’ve been going on walks on my days off.
My twice-daily prayers are taking about 20-25 minutes each right now. Currently they consist of me reciting four pre-existing prayers, reciting one of my own composition, a spontanous prayer on anything that happens to be on my mind that day, reciting two psalms, and singing a spiritually-themed contemporary song of my choosing (selections thus far have included Peter Gabriel, Pete Townshend, and Sheryl Crow among others.) The cats don’t like the idea of me being in the closet where they can’t get at me and have been sitting outside the door meowing and scratching, but I’ve learned how to stay focused during much more annoying things in the past.
My bus commute to and from work has proven the ideal time to get my two hours of study in. On the ride to work I’ve been reading the Old Testament - so far I’m on the book of Numbers. On the ride home I’m reading Jewish Literacy (which is proving very interesting, though I wish the author would stop talking about how he’s such good friends with Dennis Prager) and some online sources for any topics from the OT that I find particularly interesting - I spent most of Thursday going down a rabbit hole reading about the origins of the golden calf story, and how scholars believe it originated as a political polemic by the Levite priesthood against Jeroboam II establishing alternative temples and a non-Levite priesthood in the northern kingdom, and that Aaron in that story is basically a stand-in for Jeroboam, as if someone had written a story about Donald Trump being president during the Civil War and centuries later historians conflated the Trump of that story with the historical Abe Lincoln.
I was worried that I’d get two or three days in and decide this wasn’t for me and abandon it, and I’ve been having weird dreams that seem like they’re trying to make me doubt myself, but so far things are going well. I’m optimistic about how things are going right now.
Will post another update in a few weeks.
Thanks!
For those playing from home, the six month hiatus from using the board for anything more than to update this thread lasted one week.
Moderating:
If you feel the need to attack the OP, please do it in another thread, in the pit.
Three-week update; I’m 10% of the way there!
I’ve had a few minor setbacks. Firstly, I’m having a gout flare at the moment. It’s a fairly minor one, but it’s been 4-5 years since I’ve had one at all and it’s forced me to take a few sick days from work. It’s a little odd, since the main triggers for these things tend to be things like red meat and deli meats and beer, and I’m not eating ANY of those right now.
I’ve also been having unsettling dreams that have been giving me trouble sleeping. They tend to revolve around me being pursued or harassed by monsters or evil people, or being tempted to do things that I can’t do right now like eat meat or drink alcohol or gamble. As much as a skeptic as I am, I was briefly inclined to suspect the book’s warning that evil spirits would try to beset me and get me to give up was coming to pass. Upon doing some reading, I think what’s more likely is that I’m experiencing a phenomenon many occultist practitioners refer to as “the Dweller on the Threshold”. The name comes from a fantasy novel by Bulwer-Lytton, but in modern practice it describes an aspect of one’s own mind comprised of your past regrets and doubts and such that often confronts people shortly after beginning a spiritual transformation, sort of testing you to see if you have what it takes to stick to it. I’ve had some success at warding off these dreams by performing “the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram”, a Golden Dawn rite which consists of crossing yourself and drawing pentagrams in the air while chanting divine names. It may just be a placebo effect, but it does seem to be helping.
I’ve gotten to really enjoy my twice-daily oratory sessions. It relaxes me and helps set my mind at ease. I’m letting my beard grow out for the duration of the operation as an outward display of my progress and dedication (I got the idea from the description of the Nazirite vow in Numbers 6). I’ve been keeping up with the news, but I’ve stayed away from Facebook and social media in general, and it’s been pretty good for my psyche to not spend all my time stewing over political matters.
My Bible reading is coming along nicely - I’m reading in the Jewish order rather than the order in the Christian OT, and I’ve just finished the books of Kings and am about to start Isaiah. The greatest insight I’ve gotten so far is that our country would be a lot less screwed up if people actually read the entire thing and understood it as a compilation of mythology and legend and folklore and political commentary, and analyzed its history and the reasons it’s written the way it is, instead of treating it as literal history while only half-remembering the parts they’re taught in Sunday school and letting someone with an agenda tell them what they should think about it. R/academicbiblical has been a very useful resource for me to get a better understanding of some of the stranger stories. It occurred to me while reading the books of Samuel that the story of the life of King David is remarkably similar to the legend of King Arthur, which has given me a stronger understanding of how both stories serve as national founding legends for their respective cultures. (Samuel, for example, could be seen as a parallel for Merlin, Absalom for Mordred, Bathsheba for Morgan le Fay, etc.)
I’m about halfway through Jewish Literacy, and I’m learning a LOT from it that I never even heard of before. The edition I have is an older one (it refers to the Soviet Union in the present tense), but given that the religion is ~2500 years old I can’t imagine it’s changed a whole lot in the last 35. Telushkin is obviously writing from an Orthodox perspective, which is really helping me understand that sort of Judaism, but I don’t think I’ve ever even met an Orthodox Jew in my life and I wish there was more in here about how Reform/Reconstructionist Judaism (which is what pretty much all the Jewish people I’ve ever known have subscribed to) is practiced. I’ll likely look for a book written from a Reform perspective after I finish this one, and I’m also looking to read a book about the Talmud so that I can get at the very least a broad-strokes outsider perspective on it without trying to study the actual thing (which I’ve been told would be pretty much impenetrable to someone like myself).
To close with a culinary discovery - the 10 oz. rounds of panela cheese they sell at the grocery store are the right size and shape to slice into two, sear in a frying pan, and use as a meatless substiture for a burger patty.
Your sudden diet change probably caused your gout flare.
Have you lost any weight?
Otherwise, how are you feeling physically?
I weighed 295 at the dr appointment I had a few days before I started, and 288 when I weighed myself at work a few days ago. So a few pounds lighter.
My face itches from the new beard growth but other than that I’m fine.
I’ll post another update in a week or two.
5 weeks in. One month down, five to go.
The unsettling dreams have subsided. (I did have one this morning where I took my mother to an indy wrestling show and revealed to her that I was about to make my debut as a masked monster named “Black the Package”, but that’s fairly normal as far as my dreams go.) I have yet to miss an oration or violate my fast. I almost forgot one of my psalm recitations this week by accidentally repeating the previous day’s, but I made it up by the end of the week.
In my Bible reading I’ve just finished the Minor Prophets. The books of the prophets are an absolute slog. There are only so many ways you can say “The LORD says repent, for your cities will be destroyed and all will come to ruin, but I will spare the righteous and you will be blessed” over and over again before it all blends together. I can see why Christians pick them apart looking for foretellings of Jesus because otherwise it seems like they’d have little value except as historical snapshots. Now I understand the scene in Life of Brian where the prophets are all crowded up near each other shouting various dooms, and I get the impression that ancient Jews must have thought of them the same way my dad’s generation felt about Hare Krishnas at the airport. Jonah, as it turns out, is now interpreted by scholars to be somewhat of a parody, so that at least was an interesting break.
At the rate I’m going, I should have the Old Testament finished by the time I start the second phase in three weeks. Once thats done I intend on reading the Apocrypha before I proceed on to the New Testament - I intend on reading the entire Bible from front to back, but while I’m engrossed in this operation the Jewish side of it is what I really want to learn more about. Once I’ve finished reading the text, I’ll continue my morning reading with a scholarly book about it - Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? seems to be held in high esteem by r/academicbiblical, so probably that one.
As for my evening reading, I finished Jewish Literacy Friday night. Incredible read, highly recommend, and I now have a lot of jumping-off points for topics to learn more about. Next on my reading list is The Essential Talmud by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. The late rabbi (covid got him in 2020) was the editor of the definitive modern Hebrew-English version of the Talmud, a task which took him 45 years to complete, and this relatively slim book is his summary of his accumulated knowledge of its history, its writers, its format, and the philosophical underpinnings of it, which is probably the closest I’ll be getting to studying it any time soon (although Ethics of the Fathers, one of its more accessible tractates, is also on my reading list.) Once I finish that, the next thing I’ll likely be reading is The Thirteen-Petalled Rose, Steinsaltz’s summary of the nature of philosophical Kabbalah (as opposed to the so-called “Practical Kabbalah” the Abramelin derives from). On a less philosophical note I also intend on reading the Teyve stories by Sholem Aleichem - I’ve never seen Fiddler on the Roof, but based on Telushkin’s chapter about Aleichem, the stories it’s based on should make for an interesting read. I’m also going to look into taking an online course on basic Hebrew - the online sources I’ve been reading will occasionally have some Hebrew casually thrown in, and it’d be nice to be able to read it, or at least sound it out, instead of just staring at it and thinking to myself “Those sure are letters, alright”.
Next update in a few more weeks.
I look forward to these updates, thanks.
And I thought I read a lot.
On this point we agree. I have praised the book before on the SDMB. It is a big and heavy book. However, IIRC the longest entry in it is only three pages long. You can usually learn about a topic by reading about ten pages. It is very well researched and written.
Tomorrow is the beginning of the second “phase” of the operation. It’s pretty much the same as the first phase but with a few extra rules. I have to wash my face and hands every time before I enter my oratory, extend (by no specific length) the amount of time I spend praying and studying, and fast from sunrise to sunset on Fridays. The fasting will be difficult since I almost always work on Fridays, so I’m going to allow myself to have water and electrolytes. For extending my prayers I’ve decided to add a couple of traditional Jewish prayers I’ve learned in my studies - specifically the Amidah and a rabbinically-approved-for-Gentiles version of the morning and evening Shema.
I finished the Old Testament at the beginning of this week. I’m now working my way through the Apocrypha - I’ve read Tobit, Judith, and 1 and 2 Maccabees, and I intend on reading Baruch, Ben Sirach, Wisdom, 1 Enoch, and Jubilees before proceeding on to the New Testament. I’m honestly far more interested in learning about Judaism right now than the Christian side of the Bible, but I want to be able to say by the time this six months is done that I’ve read the whole thing.
The amount of Judaica I’ve acquired is likely to keep me busy well until after the operation is complete. I’ve finished The Essential Talmud, which I found very interesting, as well as Who Wrote the Bible?, which I understand is a little dated but provides some interesting analysis of the Deuteronomistic history. The Thirteen-Petalled Rose is still on my reading list, but before I start that one I’m reading Judaism as a Civilization by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. Kaplan was ordained Orthodox but went on to become the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, a small (about 100 or so synagogues worldwide, mostly in the US) sect that views Judaism primarily as an evolving culture where traditional law has “a voice but not a veto” and generally takes a Deist/humanist approach to its views on God, which I find highly compelling. I’d never even heard of Reconstructionism until recently, but it turns out that out of the two Jewish congregations in this county, one of them, which I know to be very active in the community helping the poor and pursuing social justice programs, is Reconstructionist. (The other is a Chabad center, and to be honest those guys kinda weird me out.)
I’ve also got a compilation of the short stories of Sholom Aleichem and a compilation of Jewish folklore to read at some point. This fall, towards the end of the ritual, I plan on enrolling in an online Intro To Judaism course intended for converts, which the rabbi of the aforementioned Reconstructionist temple is one of the teachers for. (Not that I’m necessarily saying I want to convert, and if I do I don’t intend to schedule meeting with that rabbi about it until nearly a year from now, but for now I’m feeling very “This too is Torah and I must learn”.)
So far I do feel like this process is having a positive effect on me - I’ve noticed that I’m not so easily stressed out and I’ve been doing better at not letting myself get angry at the state of the world. I’m looking forward to when I’ll be able to eat a big ol’ steak again and sometimes it’s hard keeping my opinions to myself, but all in all things are going well.