Three random mentions of Tony Robbins

In the past 24 hours, I've run into three random references to Tony Robbins in three completely unrelated YouTube videos.

Here's Mormon cult leader Shane Baldwin: "If I had to pick anybody out there right now who I thought was Enoch incarnate, I'd pick Tony Robbins" (20:00):

Here's political commentator Mark Dice, replaying with approval a 40-year-old clip of Tony Robbins using the nigger word (8:21):

And here's, uh, the "Hyperborean Knowledge" guy, randomly interrupting a discussion of ADHD and the GATE program to say "Where my Tony Robbins fans at?" (21:40):

Tears, sighs, and hermits

I read this today in Orson F. Whitney's Elias: An Epic of the Ages:

Where perfect love casts forth the jealous fear,

A diamond in thy diadem each tear;

And every sigh that rent thy suffering breast,

A wave of rapture on the shores of rest.

These lines, identifying each tear and sigh with something quite different (a diamond, a wave of rapture), reminded me of a quatrain found in Blake's "The Grey Monk" and "I saw a Monk of Charlemagne":

For a Tear is an intellectual thing,

And a Sigh is the sword of an Angel King,

And the bitter groan of the Martyr's woe

Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.

("For a Tear is an intellectual thing" is such a perfect line! Blake was a genius of the highest order.)

The idea of a Grey Monk already had me thinking about the Hermit card, and when I looked up and reread those Blake poems, I found that each also includes this stanza:

But vain the Sword and vain the Bow,

They never can work War's overthrow.

The Hermit's prayer and the Widow's tear

Alone can free the World from fear.

(In "The Grey Monk," this is immediately followed by the first stanza I cited above, which I think is poetically correct. In "I saw a Monk of Charlemagne," the line about the Almighty's bow is the final line of the poem, which is also poetically correct. Thus I link both versions, being unable to give my unqualified endorsement to either.)

Blake's reference to what "can free the World from fear" syncs with Whitney's "perfect love casts forth the jealous fear."

In "A dove from the fridge, a reaper angel, a white SUV, and An Account That Moooves," I dreamt of a Tarot card depicting a gray-robed angel with straight blond hair, holding a scythe. In the commentary on this in the post, I included images of two Rider-Waite cards: the Hermit, who wears a gray robe; and Justice, to whom straight blond hair is unique in that deck.

Justice is crowned and holds a sword. Combining this with the reaper angel on the dream-card, we get "a Scythe is the sword of an Angel King" -- differing from Blake's line by but a single phoneme.

We could also respell Blake's line as "a sai is the sword of an Angel King" -- meaning, presumably, the archangel Raphael.

A big shark and a long-ago memory

Brave gave me an interesting background image, so I clicked to see what it was. It's called "white and black shark in water."

That's about the biggest shark I've ever seen!

A few minutes later, I went to my Google Photos account. Apparently Google is trying to jog distant past-life memories now.

Those were the days! Not a cell phone in sight. Just people living in the moment.

Who had John Wayne shooting on their bingo card for this year?

As I was waking up, a rapid-fire series of voices said things like "Kill John Wayne!" "John Wayne shot!" "Shoot John Wayne!" and finally "Who had John Wayne shooting on their bingo card for this year?"

Not many people, I would guess, since John Wayne has been dead for 47 years. I document the dream anyway in case it should turn out to be precognitive in some unanticipated way.

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Update: I published the original version of this post (above) at 8:29 a.m. As I was thinking about how it might somehow be precognitive even though John Wayne is long dead, I thought it might refer to another person called John Wayne -- like, for example, the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Gacy is long dead, too, of course, but he's an example of the fact that "John Wayne" can refer to more than one individual.

At 10:17 a.m. Taiwan time, someone posted on /pol/ "BREAKING: MASS SHOOTING AT THE SPACE NEEDLE IN SEATTLE." The second reply shows someone in clown makeup, and the third reply says "More like the gayce needle."

John Wayne Gacy performed as a clown and is known as the Killer Clown. I'm sure gayce is just supposed to be an alteration of space to include the word gay, but by analogy with Edgar Cayce's name, it should be pronounced as Gacy. A search of the /pol/ archive for other instances of gayce shows that most of them are misspelled (or perhaps intentionally gayified) references to "John Wayne Gayce."

In one of J. W. Dunne's precognitive dreams, he dreamt details of a disaster not as they actually happened but as they were reported in the newspaper he would read the next day -- so it makes sense that my own dream would be retroactively influenced not by the facts of the shooting but by the way it was reported on /pol/.

Cold but not frozen

Maolsheachlann's recent post "Interesting Words" led me to leave a comment mentioning the scene in the Balzac novel Le Père Goriot where people keep putting the suffix -rama on different words. I last read that novel in 2012 and didn't remember all the details of the scene, so just now I looked it up, clicking on the first search result that came up for balzac rama, a page called "Elfinspell: Honoré de Balzac [1821-1881]: The Suffix 'Rama ...," which has an uncredited English translation which I recognized as somewhat different from the Henry Reed version I read back in 2012. It includes this exchange:

"It's a rare old frizzorama!" said Vautrin. "Now, then, Father Goriot, move round a bit -- Ye gods! your feet stop up the mouth of the stove."

"Illustrious M. Vautrin," said Bianchon, "why do you say frizzorama? It is a mistake; you should say freezorama."

"No!" interposed the museum official. "It is frizzorama; according to the rule you should say: my feet are frizzen."

"Ha, ha!"

Since freezing has been in the sync stream ("Many are cold, but few are frozen"), I looked up the original:

— Il fait un fameux froitorama! dit Vautrin. Dérangez-vous donc, père Goriot! Que diable! votre pied prend toute la gueule du poêle.

— Illustre monsieur Vautrin, dit Bianchon, pourquoi dites-vous froitorama ? Il y a une faute, c'est froidorama.

— Non, dit l'employé du Muséum, c'est froitorama, par la règle: «J'ai froit aux pieds.»

— Ah! ah!

Neither froid nor the variant froit means "frozen"; both words mean "cold." Many feet are cold, but few are frozen.

A dove from the fridge, a reaper angel, a white SUV, and An Account That Moooves

I had a series of very brief dreams:

1. I heard the single word "fridge."

2. I opened a refrigerator, and a live dove flew out.

3. I was explaining how to do something with a deck of Tarot cards: "So I cut once and then turn the deck over and look at the bottom card." I demonstrated this, and when I turned the deck over, the bottom card puzzled me because it was in the style of the Rider-Waite but not recognizable as one of that deck's cards. It depicted a figure which I took to be an angel, though he had no wings or halo. He had long, straight blond hair and was dressed in a long light-gray robe. His face was turned to the left side of the card (the angel's right). In his right hand he held a scythe, the blade of which was curving over his head to his left (the right side of the card). The angel's feet were not visible in the picture, so I could not determine whether he was standing on something or levitating. My second thought when I saw the image (my first being simple perplexity at seeing an unfamiliar card) was "the reapers are the angels" (Matt. 13:39). The card was in reversed orientation, and when I tried to rotate the deck so the image was upright, the dream ended.

4. I was driving a white SUV (I was the driver but could simultaneously see the vehicle from the outside) and made a sharp left, turning perhaps 120 degrees.

5. I was looking at aa children's book called An Account That Moooves, with the multiple o's (I'm not sure exactly how many there were) intended to suggest the sound a cow makes. I opened it up to a page that had no text, only a picture. In the foreground was an extremely stylized cutesy Japanese-style cartoon of a cow with its eyes squeezed closed and its mouth open extremely wide -- so wide that, with an anatomical logic only the Japanese understand, the bottom of the mouth extended past the chin. This was obviously meant to convey some strong emotion -- perhaps fear, surprise, or anger -- but I've never really been able to read these goofy anime expressions. In the background, a mountainous wave, like a tsunami, was approaching the cow from behind.

Upon waking, I performed the operation I had dreamt of, cutting my Rider-Waite deck once without shuffling and then turning the deck over. The bottom card was the Magician.

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The fridge dreams of course made me think first of Bill's dream about someone he later decided was me raiding his refrigerator, but that line of thought didn't really go anywhere. The next thing I thought of was my recent post "Many are cold, but few are frozen," since a refrigerator is specifically designed to keep things cold but not frozen. In the poem discussed there, important knowledge is depicted as being stored up in the "frozen snow-crown" of a mountain, waiting for someone with "the melting gift" to release that knowledge into the world in the form of speech or song. Since the dove is the standard symbol of the Holy Ghost and the inspiration thereof, a dove being released from a refrigerator could represent revealed knowledge being made known. The imagery of a refrigerated Holy Ghost also made me think of the old Appalachian song "The Ghost of John," which ends with the line "Wouldn't it be chilly with no skin on?" Ghosts without bodies are "chilly" -- cold but not frozen. John was "a just man and an holy" (Mark 6:20), so the ghost of John would be a "holy ghost."

The Tarot card is puzzling. At first I thought of it has being "Trump 13½," since the 13th trump is Death (traditionally, though not in the Rider-Waite, depicted as the Grim Reaper with a scythe), and the 14th, Temperance, depicts an angel. However, I think it's also likely a continuation of the Hermit sync stream, since many of the details -- the light-gray robe, the face turned to the left of  the card, the long staff -- match those of that Rider-Waite card.

The closest thing to long, straight blond hair in the Rider-Waite deck is Justice, whose hair is only chin-length. The hair of the angel in the dream made me think rather of the Vanyar, or of Nordic aliens. Coincidentally, the Nordics with Trump in the images recently circulated online are wearing clothing quite similar to that of Justice.

When I was writing the description of the Tarot dream above, I opened a new tab in Brave so that I could look up "the reapers are the angels" and get the scripture reference. The background image in the new tab (randomly selected by Brave from a large set of possibilities) was this:

At first I thought they were red tulips -- the flower whose presence on some of Oswald Wirth's Tarot cards is what first brought Debbie to my blog. They're actually poppies in Serbia, but there's certainly a resemblance.

I think the white SUV dream and the Account That Moooves dream are probably related. In "The 96, the 48, and the white bull" (May 2024), I connected a white SUV with this image of a bull in the sea:

The image of a cow about to be overwhelmed by a wave is a continuation of the "Underwater Cowtown" (April 2025) symbolism. That posts mentions a possible connection between Mu, a lost continent sometimes conflated with Atlantis, and a cow's moo.

Many are cold, but few are frozen

Looking at my blog dashboard, I saw the beginning of the title of a recent post, "Many are . . .," and my mind completed it as "Many are cold, but few or frozen," a humorous alteration, independently invented many times, of "Many are called, but few are chosen." This was reinforced when, minutes later, I read an allusion to the latter expression in Elias: An Epic of the Ages:

The called are not the chosen past mischance;

The sanctified to glorified advance,

And stewardship becomes inheritance.

I had a vague memory of having made the "many are cold" joke before on this blog, so I searched it for the word frozen. I didn't find any instances of the joke, but I did find this, in the original "Reading with my eyes shut" post (September 2025):

Upon waking, I couldn't remember any dream imagery, just two couplets. The first was a new version of the Jinbad couplet from "With?" In spoken form, which is how I received it, it is ambiguous and could be written in either of the following ways:

Jinbad the Jailer holds the keys.

He locks up some; and others, frees.

Jinbad the Jailer holds the keys.

He locks up some, and others freeze.

In the joke, frozen stands in for chosen, and being chosen is a good thing. Here, freeze is a second meaning of frees, and being freed rather than locked up is a good thing. The frees/freeze connection reminds me that there is a Disney movie called Frozen, of which I know nothing except that it is known for one of the songs on its soundtrack: "Let It Go" -- i.e., set it free.

Early on in Elias, the poet apostrophizes one of the mountains of Utah, addressing it as

Lone, looming hermit of the hills, apart

From where thy banded mates in union dwell!

The word hermit of course caught my attention. The poet continues his speech to the mountain:

Thrice wondrous things, once thine to wisely scan,

Fast as thy frozen snow-crown, still in store,

Hadst thou the melting gift -- of sovereign man

The sunlike glory -- mightest thou restore,

Till learning's tide o'erwhelmed the shining shore . . .

This "hermit" wears a "frozen snow-crown" which represents all the knowledge it holds -- knowledge which would become an overwhelming flood of learning if only the mountain had "the melting gift," glossed in a footnote as "The power of speech or of song." Some 55 years after Elias, Rodgers and Hammerstein would aver that the hills do indeed have that power:

The hills are alive

With the sound of music

With songs they have sung

For a thousand years