Learning Day: Light Emerging (Patreon)

The mysteries of the universe: When are we here? What did the big making? Who is after death? And of course: if you enter a black hole crotch first, are you frozen in orgasm forever?

Science cannot answer these questions, for mortal brains cannot comprehend this intersecting holographic universe. Fortunately, a woman named Barbara Ann Brennan was contacted by a superdimensional entity named Heyoan, who crammed existence into terms your stinky meat-processor can understand. This is their book:

Barbara heals the energy fields of people with ailments that—please, quiet your gasps—are difficult for medicine to detect or treat. Her primary spirit guide is the genderless Heyoan, whom Barbara assigns male pronouns due to his garrulous ignorance. He mansplains life despite never having dipped his formless toe into our holistic, holographic, homeopathic waters:

Here on the vibration you experience as the Hot Dog wavelength, you’ve witnessed a parade of hucksters, snake-oil salesmen, and dweebs who write sex guides by Googling “canv gina tar-pit a mans turgid self defens??”

Barbara Brennan is not one of those people. A healer and a Level-7 spiritual surgeon, she preaches love, writes intelligently, and admits her beliefs are outrageous. Sure, fixing invisible trauma to an energy field beyond all earthly metrics sounds cuckoo, but don’t all metaphysical beliefs? She seems nice!

The real creep here is Heyoan: obviously a malevolent entity posing as a friend…yet his heart isn’t in his demonic work. Let’s dive into Slacker Paimon’s explanations of why Hitler things happen to Tubman people.

Heyoan says we were all once light-God-stars, and we’ll return to it after this. The middle is pretty much the same no matter what. We choose life on earth to help heal the pain other people experience, but…all people were once luminous beings? Sounds like a pyramid scheme.

Anyway, it’s all fluff for his real agenda. Just look at how he’s led Barbara astray. You can pinpoint every one of her beliefs by drunkenly improvising the keynote speech at a magnetic bracelets trade show: bioenergetics, homeopathy, harmonic induction of field pulsations, gold therapy for cancer, bioplasmic streamers, same-body reincarnation, and why solar-charged air is more energizing than food.

If I said “Feng shui acuvibrates the Kirlian soul-tentacle using crystal resonance” you’d have no goddamn idea if I was making up all of it or none. The word-cloud for this book is this book.

Despite this, half her advice is solid (“eat right and brush your teeth”) for weird reasons (“because food’s cosmic pulse rate attunes your organs’ vibrations”). The other half is to brush your friends’ auras with your fingers, possibly as a pretense to get the astral bra off their soul? Unclear, but you miss 100% of the chakras you don’t rake.

If something has a scientific explanation, Barbara digs up an underlying super-explanation. Like how pollution is bad for us and the Earth…because it clogs your orgone, and that causes health problems. Seems like an unnecessary extra step that creates a middleman opportunity for the healing center, but that’s how God—who is all of us—made the world.

She also drags real science screaming from its context, borrowing credibility from unrelated studies. Or else cites “doctors” with degrees in prism-chanting from Dreambow University. It really doesn’t matter what discipline it comes from, so long as she can say it echoes on the psychic plane. That’s why her skepticism about real scientific fundamentals is infuriating:

This woman takes the morphogenetic field as an agreed-upon baseline, but thinks evolution will disprove the second law of thermodynamics…if this so-called “origin of species” can pass the rigid muster of holistic science.

But you know what she accepts in total faith? Heyoan, who arrives softly and whispering unsettling hidden knowledge. Eventually, he reveals himself:

Since this is a horror movie, Barbara’s gut reaction is revulsion. But for six months, Heoyan looms over her. All too soon, she surrenders her meatsuit for his use. This must be why the two have very similar styles of pronouncing broad claims that can’t be tested.

If you’re wondering which civilization in all of Africa that name comes from, wonder onward, astral traveler. Heyoan led them all into ruin and scattered their memory into ashes, such that not even their language remains.

I mean…it’s that or Barb just made up a name and meaning. But she would never do that, even if she had just spent months self-consciously affecting voices, right around the time one guy got rich doing it, and everyone else suddenly discovered their own guides.

Ignoring her first instincts, she lets Heyoan joyride her body while she removes to The White Room. There, she is shown the future but cannot interpret it. If only it were because false prophecies would prove her a fraud! Since I know she’s speaking her truth, I must conclude tomorrow is so awful she’s blocked it out for her own sanity.

At this point Barbara has to realize she’s toying with a malevolent force.

Easy there, Heyoan! Ozzy Osbourne got sued for writing a song against suicide. Maybe throw down some palliative conditions before you rubber-stamp self-termination.

One way healers differ from doctors is they’ll withhold life-or-death info if they feel you’ll be upset by it. Like when Heyoan murmurs.this doom:

Terrified, she hides this revelation. It gets weird:

I get why Barbara doesn’t reject science so much as ghost it: all of this stuff feels like real-life experiences, and doing math is hard. It’s easier to gesture holistically at scientists filtering electromagnetic noise from their observations of the sun, and claim she’s doing the same for mental energy. One day, she assures us, science will prove it, but she’s here to give readings, not take them. This dingbat actually uses work derived from Galileo to position herself as the Galileo of psychics, then tells science to do her homework for her.

But what does Barbara do? A very, very real client named Liz asks on your behalf.

Surgeons answer that question a lot! Usually in one sentence. Look, I’ll do it for you: “I cherry-pick science for vague connections to an imaginary energy field.”

And a bonus: “But my real passion is dalliances with forces I can’t comprehend.” Behind her shoulder, and yet—all around her at an angle for which humans have no word, Heyoan chuckles.

It’s a difficult question to answer using a mere five senses, so Barbara ignores it and creates the metaphor of chakra-radio:

Liz’s skepticism, just like Liz herself, evaporates fully satisfied. Perhaps she was swayed by Barbara’s newly minted words for common concepts like ESP or not eating lead. She rebrands new age belief in terms that a rogue AI would use only if it was trying to calculate the true name of God.

Despite how ephemeral her work is, Barbara’s idea of holistic health is astoundingly literal. See if you can figure out which one of these quotes I stole from a popsicle stick:

Like most people who find science selectively useful, she sometimes lets dogma lead her into troublesome declarations:

Gosh, it’s weird how the soul has ways of shutting down destiny in cases of legitimate gripe. But at least the many unplanned teen heart chakras, drawn by destiny to states that obstruct Planned Parenthood, get children to love. Some people’s souls choose grimmer STIs than a baby. Barbara stresses that illness is not punishment but the result of our consciousness dictating reality. This is immediately followed by some real interesting theories on HIV transmission. Gird your human energy field...

No one will blame you for not reading so many words about neo-natal AIDS on a comedy site. Just know that if the cops ask who gave all these babies AIDS we have to get our alibis straight. We were playing pinball down at the boardwalk, with society.

This woman has the same understanding of epidemiology as the playground poet who discovered the cooties vaccine. And her joint research study with Heyoan is no better at justifying learning disabilities:

Sorry, frustrated kids who know you’re smart! You chose this life to inspire us.

Heyoan talks about this case of dyslexia having fulfilled its destiny, but nobody does anything to cure it. In fact, they never fully heal any qualifiable ailment:

A parade of wounded people crawl through the healing gates, and every one of them limps out confused, discontent, or placated for a very short period. Her biggest success was a collaboration with The Holy Spirit herself, and the result was still “Only needs one lung transplant now.”

Since I know Barbara’s a good person, I blame Heyoan for this bullshit. He’s the only spiritual guide whose shtick is “Everything’s fine, unless it’s not, but even so, it’s chill; all will be consumed in the final twilight. You want to get Del Taco?” The true mark of his evil is that his only clear statements are all eerie:

Heyoan jabbers about the beauty of fear and pain so much I’m curious why Barbara’s description doesn’t mention all the pins in his head. Probably she thinks a state of perpetual acupuncture is normal.

I don’t know how she could miss the blood omens, except that she stresses bioenergetics is not for the rational thinker:

When these two counsel a woman who desperately wants to avoid heart surgery for her three-year-old, you can tell Barbara knows she’s stepped in it.

Lucky for her legal liability, Heyoan tag-teams in to tell this desperate mother, “Eh, cut your kid open or risk her health, either’s fine. Live or die, they’re both learning experiences. Let your toddler do whatever she wants, it was her dumb decision to be born here. Five dollars, please.”

It’s so blasé, you might easily overlook the part where he tells her the child’s fate is sealed.

He looks at the entire span of the universe as a balanced equation. Since everything is energy, how it gets used doesn’t matter. After all, we’re just meat Jell-O to creatures like him.

I call shenanigans. I’m like…at least 1% metals.

Hey, speaking of iron tools, did you know these are the same healing techniques that cave dwellers used to live their famously long, healthy lives?

Ha ha ha, good luck with your med school loans, caregivers. How does it feel to be the heroes of 2020 now that you know any yutz in a hut can figure out how to “roll backward in time” and do what 3000 years of medical advancement can’t?

God, you general pract-idiots could have cured COVID in ten seconds if you’d just aligned your tan tien and admitted infection is the result of longing. You stopped a virus, but you couldn’t start the star-core light emerging field from the crown-chakra of true health. Cretins!

I wish we had time for all of Barb’s sidequests: befriending the sun after a (scheduled!) miracle, founding a healing center at the spot shown to her by invisible guides, sacrificing her psychic powers after a vision of bejeweled beauties tempt her to throw open her midichlorians full throttle, and the nature spirits who dance around her periphery on walks…Barbara Brennan has had the transformative experiences that founded five out of seven of the world’s biggest religions.

But if you get curious about even one thing we can’t discuss here:

Just before casually mentioning that you can become omniscient, she introduces sulky alien teens grumbling that this planet sucks. All of them come from a Krypton or Asgard, the same way earthbound reincarnates were perpetually Cleopatra or Marie Antoinette’s confidante. Not one of these pre-Tumblr alienkin was ever born on a bog-world amid a splattering of eel-people eggs.

Alas, our astral journey concludes. It was loopy, sure, but no surpri—

Wait, what? She was a scientist all this time? A NASA scientist? Who specializes in actual star energy? I’m the stupid one? Help me, Heyoan! Teach me your wisdom!

Ugh. Humanity is an irrational animal. I’m going back to X’ebuloxx*Uk-ptang-[whistle noise]-ak-ak-ak to live among the Eel-People.

We all just lost comedy writer E. Reid Ross to cancer. It fucking sucks. Instead of stitching invisible soul-lines like an asshole, go donate to his family and to your fellow Hot Doggers Chase and Tyler. They’re raising funds to fight Tyler’s cancer and its stupid costs.