One morning a few weeks after he’d settled in to my apartment in Brooklyn, Mike said, “Honey?  I’m having a hard time this morning.”

   He was supposed to call his therapist but the prospect was causing him such anxiety, he broke down in tears.  I comforted him until the storm abated – at which point he said, “Would you make me breakfast?”

   “Why?” I asked suspiciously.  I provided the first B of B&B since he was otherwise homeless, and the ingredients for the second since he was living on donations from his long-time followers.  But why in God’s name should I have to make it?  Was he seeing how much he could get away with?

   Mike’s lifeline was honesty.  A legacy of AA, it was what had bought him his sobriety from which flowed his connection to other people, their affection and help, his sense of belonging, his credibility, his integrity.

   “I want to feel taken care of,” he said, but it was not so much an explanation as an admission.  The question had brought him up short and he was retreating with the grace that marked his many apologies, both public and private.

   We sat down with our respective breakfasts, obtained by our respective selves.

   “How does it feel to be taken care of?” I continued, veteran analysand that I am.

   “Loved.  Indulged.  Worthy.”

   Indulged.  Exactly.

   “Those feelings may come more readily to those of us whose birth was not met ambivalently by our parents,” I commented.

   “My parents weren’t ambivalent about me; they wanted me.  My father did, anyway.  My mother may have wanted me in order to please him.”

   On another occasion, Mike had said that he believed his mother married his father in order to escape her own father.

   “They’d tried for a long time to have a child,” he went on now.  “I was two months premature.  My mother spent the two months before that in bed.

   ‘I was pronounced dead at birth.  I cried on the way to the morgue.”

   It was my turn to cry now.

   “Who are you crying for?” Mike asked.

   “Your mother…  I don’t know.”  I believe that in addition to losing a baby before Mike, she also lost one after him.

   “I met the doctor who delivered me when I was twenty-five.

   ‘He remembered it.  I had no pulse.  I was blue.  They tried to get my heart going.  Then he handed me over to the nurse and I cried.”
As he put his dishes in the dishwasher he continued, “Some spiritual people have said I’m a take-over, a soul waiting for a body to enter.”

   Perhaps it was this entry into the world, or at least his awareness of it, that accounted for his upset when we once happened upon a news article about terminally ill newborns.

In light of these beginnings, read Mike’s last Facebook post:

I pray to all things seen and unseen, known and unknown, for we are all One.The prophecies are being fulfilled. The hour of birth is at hand. The waters break and rend. There is blood. There are screams of pain. There is death and much anxiety in the air. Things look very bad for our Mother and all of her children.

The Truth awaits just on the other side of the ever dissolving veil where all the screaming and the mess is going on. The Truth opens its arms wide to lovingly receive the newborn and to comfort it.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” The Truth exclaims.

I am your scout and this is my report.

Mitakuye Oyasin.

12 Comments on "Mike Ruppert’s Story – Part 2"

Davy, Hermann, MO on Sun, 20th Apr 2014 12:29 pm 



The dangers of being an honest doomer with mental conditions. Sometimes I think it takes a mental condition to appreciate being a doomer.

Ruddy Turnstone on Sun, 20th Apr 2014 2:10 pm 



Mike’s generation is probably the least equipped to deal with this slow collapse of industrial civilization.

GregT on Sun, 20th Apr 2014 3:57 pm 



“Mike’s generation is probably the least equipped to deal with this slow collapse of industrial civilization.”

Hmmm Ruddy,

How do you figure? It would seem to me that the more a ‘generation’ is reliant on modern technology, the less ‘equipped’ they will be when it is no longer available.

I am of Mike’s ‘generation’. We grew up without color television, calculators, computers and cell phones. We actually walked, or rode bicycles, far more often than we drove in automobiles. We grew up with large gardens in our yards. We had wringer washers, and dried our clothes on clothes lines. There was no such thing as credit cards. If you didn’t have the cash to buy something, you went without. There was no such thing as a sense of entitlement. Geez Ruddy, even our clothes were hand-me-downs.

No Ruddy, Mike’s generation is much better equipped to face the collapse of industrial civilization. The younger the generation, the harder the fall is going to be. Don’t kid yourself.

Joe Clarkson on Sun, 20th Apr 2014 5:41 pm 



GregT-

While you may be correct about the difference in mental toughness between the older and the younger generations, there is no doubt that the younger have (potentially) much stronger bodies. The world after collapse is going to be dominated by muscle power, so the young have some real assets that we older folks do not.

Of course, to get the best of both generations, they should live in the same house or at least be close neighbors. Multi-generational living situations will become the wave of the future. For example: I have a small farm in the tropics and will soon be building additional housing for the young farmers I will need to employ when age and infirmity prevent me from doing all that needs to be done. I know of several others in my area doing the same thing.

Jimmy on Sun, 20th Apr 2014 6:29 pm 



RIP Mike

To me Mike seemed insistent on saving humanity but couldn’t save himself. I feel he was a very sick man. Psychiatric illness is rampant in USA. Sad 🙁

GregT on Sun, 20th Apr 2014 6:33 pm 



Joe,

Agreed. A young, fit person, has a much better chance of making it through the bottleneck, and knowledge, and work ethics will also be paramount.

What I see around me, however, is an increasing sense of entitlement, poor work ethics, and an epidemic of young unfit people, that are addicted to fast food diets, and the drive, shop, consume, lifestyle. My 88 year old mother, has more get-up-and-go, than the vast majority of under 40 year olds, that I deal with on a daily basis.

J-Gav on Sun, 20th Apr 2014 10:30 pm 



Stronger bodies, stronger minds … are these suppose to be pitted against each other? let’s meld the two and go on from there.

Davy, Hermann, MO on Sun, 20th Apr 2014 10:46 pm 



Most young people I see today are inclined to be lazy. I think part of it is the electronics and food choices. I also see a very clear lack of rounded understanding that comes with studies other than what is on TV and video games.

Ruddy Turnstone on Mon, 21st Apr 2014 1:14 am 



The Baby Boomers, generally speaking, grew up in a time of expanding economic opportunities, cheap energy, a new public school system, and a powerfully self-affirming society. The end of all that is not something Boomers (again, generally speaking) anticipated. I believe the growing rate of suicide among this generation reflects an inability to accept limits. Society never said “No” to that generation.

Younger generations, on the other hand, have known nothing but gradual decline. It’s all they are used to. Are they lazy because careers are rapidly becoming a thing of the past? Maybe they just don’t see the point in homeownership, or committing to a $40,000 new car; how could they, anyway, when the best job they can get guarantees they will have trouble just making the rent each month?

I know many exceptions to what are both broad generalizations about Boomers and Gen Y’ers; but they are not the rule.

Welch on Mon, 21st Apr 2014 3:48 am 



It would be interesting to know, statistically, how many doomers suffer from clinical depression. My guess is that as a group it is far above the norm.

Nony on Mon, 21st Apr 2014 3:26 pm 



I know a lot of you all felt like he was a kindred spirit. And he was a human being as are we all. But…he was still full of shit with all the 9-11 crap (and a lot of the doomer oil stuff too).

And I can’t help but wonder if part of the reason for his final despair and suicide was because of the decline of the peak oil movement itself. If it were being hyped up and he was getting lots of big interviews, he might have been happier. I keep coming back to TOD dying, to the US shale book, to that graph showing Google searches for “peak oil” peaked and “fracking” rising.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hC819n9EoFM/UfkIFielYMI/AAAAAAAAAlw/wgwD7GDqfqQ/s1600/screenshot_12.jpg

Huntergatherer on Wed, 30th Apr 2014 6:29 pm 



Good point Nony. He was such a needy, pathetic, attention-craving, selfish man he couldn’t hack his rapidly approaching status as a nonentity.

He was a loser who had hurt a lot of people. In the end he was a complete, utter, total failure, and a nasty one who hid behind his latest fad of “spiritual” bullshit.