Month: April 2010

I commented to someone the other day, jokingly, that maybe we need to start a movement for normal people to go see psychotherapists to help the THERAPISTS become normal. As things stand, they seem to derive enormous satisfaction from relationships in which they are the parent, and the clients children.

In this context, a great many of them offer up ideas which are as farcial as they are damaging: for example, that benefit attends a thorough investigation of the past. As we have all likely personally experienced, this leads in many if not most cases to grown men and women blaming their current behavior on things that happened decades ago. Of course, indulging peoples innate capacity for playing the role of victim will always be profitable in such a context. Business success, in this field, often implies professional incompetence.

One could easily, of course, draw an analogue with Leftists, who likewise cherish the role–typically unearned and for which they are fully unsuited–of playing the role both of mother and father for whomever is foolish enough to entrust them with their upkeep.

And in the same spirit, they like to bring up crimes from the past–such as slavery–for which NOT ONE person alive today bears any responsibility.

Perennial childishness is the seeming objective for both therapists and Leftists. One would assume, if this formulation were logical, that they would at least be qualified to play the role of adults, but regrettably their own ideology creates the spirit of childishness in them, too.

We have learned in history, though, that you are never too young to be ruthless. Many of Pol Pot’s most prolific murderers were in their teens, and the spectacle of the maniacal, sadistic children torturing and killing their teachers in Mao’s Cultural Revolution should be burned on everyone’s mind. Should be.

Most Americans would have no idea what I am talking about, though. We really are that stupid, and stupid by design.

I was looking out the window of building in Phoenix a couple months ago. It was rainy, and you could see the mountains in the distance, alternately shaded and “sunned” as wandering clouds passed over them. It was very pretty. We even had goats on the other side of the street, spread quite incongruously in front of a sport stadium.

It got me to thinking: if the windows were actually high definition TV’s, that were so good you couldn’t tell the difference, how would that affect your perception? If you didn’t know it, it wouldn’t matter, would it? If you did know it, though, to what extent would that matter? What if you “knew” (because you were told) that they reflected some reality on the other side of the planet, or some past reality of that spot? Or some projected reality, generated by a computer?

Extending this: what if we created animatronic robots, that responded through virtual reality with someone on the other side of the planet? For example, what if your wife was on the other side of the planet in some sort of virtually reality suit, and you were too, and the two of you made love? How would that effect things?

What if the other person were deleted, and you were ONLY interacting with a robot programmed to act like your lover?

In my viewl, TV as we use it today has an effect of creating a perceptual distance between the viewer and the world. It tends to create a spirit of detachment. It seems to me we are all becoming more mechanical, less engaged in our actual emotions and whatever that gestalt is we call our selves, that can reach out and touch other realities.

At the same time if we accept Hindu ideas of Maya, the “real world” was ALREADY TV, it was already a projection, as Plato argued, on the backs of our minds. TV, then becomes one more delusion in a world of delusions.

When I first saw “The Matrix” I told my friends that maybe it was actually a signal intended to release us; maybe it was a sign. I was being facetious, of course, but they didn’t get it.

This is a note to myself. It would be interesting to learn something about the modern history of spectator sports. When was the first stadium erected? Was it in Britain? You would need leisure; or would you? It likely would have been America that led the way.

Does bullfighting have a continuous link back to the Roman Coliseum? I think so, but it would be interesting to find out.

My thesis is that some types of sports–most obviously bullfighting, but to a lesser extent things like boxing, wrestling, and even football–are sacrificial. We want to share, as a group, in someone else’s suffering. It is a sort of minimized martial impulse.

There is also a tribal element, an element of identity. If you are a Red Sox, or Yankees fan, it is an important part of your self understanding; yet, you control and influence nothing.

The role of sports in our culture is quite obvious, and in my view important from a mythical perspective.

Bon mot: you only get to keep the myths you cannot recognize as such. (is that true? Not true? Partly true in some times and places? Indeterminate since poorly defined?)

Since Leftist efforts to breed stupidity in the tax-payer funded political incubators we call “Public Schools” have been largely successful, it has been forgotten by most that the Democrats were the party that supported slavery from their founding under Thomas Jefferson, all the way up to where they had to be strongarmed by one of their own–LBJ–in the 1960’s into supporting the Civil Rights Act. McClellan, a Democrat, was accused by some of intentional incompetence in the Civil War, since he sided with the South.

For the record, according to this website, in the House 61% of Democrats and 80% of Republicans voted for the bill; in the Senate 69% of the Democrats, and 82% of the Republicans voted for the bill. And to the extent of my understanding, even the ardent Democratic segregationists like Strom Thurmond never left the party. It took the ludicrous ruling in Roe v. Wade to begin to coalesce the social conservatism that converted most of the South to being Republican.

To the point, though, I would argue that what we have in the ghettoes today–to be clear, what 30-40 years of Democratic policies have wrought in places like Detroit and South Chicago–is STILL a plantation, in which many, many people RELY on the Democrats to pay their bills, and keep getting them “stuff” (“cargo”, as I have called it elsewhere, in a reference that will be familiar to some).

AND THIS IS HOW THE DEMOCRATS WANT IT. They want to be the party that gets poor people stuff (not opportunities, note, but stuff), and they want to be able to portray the Republicans in perpetuity as racist since they don’t agree with the idea that you can help people permanently by doing for them what they can and should be doing for themselves.

It is not at all a difficult case to make that this is itself a racist position, since it aims not at actually materially and morally improving people’s lives, but rather in permanently denigrating the capacities of African American communities for self improvement, so that their votes can be depended upon.

I won’t dispute many ghettoes are hell. Yet, if they are so, they have become such under the eye and control of generations of Democrats. Incompetent or cynical and powermongering: these are the choices. Well intentioned and competent–MANIFESTLY–is not.

I have a vivid dream life. Long ago, I taught myself to fly, so I never fall anywhere. I often jump off of buildings because I can. Sometimes I jump UP on them. Not infrequently, I find myself fighting dark creatures. Often, I win; sometimes I am forced to retreat and regroup. Always, though, I fight. I never have the dream of running slowly while something pursues me, any more. They always meet my face.

Several nights ago, I had an interesting dream I will pass along in support of a larger point. I was fighting Lord Voldemort, from the Harry Potter books (I own all the movies, and probably watch one of them at least once a month). I was “winning”, but suddenly realized I was being stupid. I came down (I was floating), and hugged him, and told him “I love you, Tom”, and felt energy from my heart pouring into him.

(If I have any readers (an open question), some will part company here. So be it. It will likely be political again soon.)

I felt it. It was sincere. I looked at this spirit of darkness, and realized how hellish it was to be him. I was not so naive that I thought that he would suddenly change his ways, but the effort had to be made. I was not afraid of him. I knew I could defeat him. I was in no danger. (and in the event, he ran, and regrouped with another “Deatheater”, and tried again to attack, with no success).

Love is more powerful than anger, and you cannot permanently defeat the spirit of darkness with violence. Love, in this sense, is a type of aggression: you are sending out an energy that they cannot combat. This is, of course, the mythical symbolism that Joanne Rowling employed in her books.

Now, obviously, there are times when we need to treat other human beings, in effect, as objects to be disposed of. There are evil people who simply need to be ushered to the next world with as little delay as possible. There is no do-gooder idealism here.

At the same time, if the task is building a peaceful–yet energized, interesting–world, then we cannot meet hate with hate. [I will note, that this is different from claiming that you should not meet violence with violence. That claim is stupid. War solves many things; you simply don’t have to hate your enemy.]

As I thought about this more deeply, I got to thinking about the relative powers of light and darkness, understood as on some level empirical energies. We tend to think of the universe as mostly dark, since that is what appears to our eyes to fill the spaces between stars. The universe, in this imaginary picture, is a vast–infinite, possibly–space, filled here and there with motes of light. Much like an atom, actually.

Yet, it is a FACT that much of space is filled with all sorts of energies our eyes simply can’t process: gamma rays, x-rays, etc.

More importantly, it is a premise of Quantum physics that, as Richard Feynman put it, “one square meter of empty space has enough energy in it to boil all the oceans on Earth”. This is a postulate of one of the most successful scientific theories of all time.

Needless to say, this is counterintuitive. Yet, can we not hypothesize with some justification that LIGHT–energy–is the dominant presence in the universe, and darkness merely a misperception of reality?

Certainly, this is a claim that has been made by many.

Can we not view all the evils of the world merely as temporary errors, that will sort themselves out in time? This is a conjecture not readily amenable to proof–although I suppose we could falsify it in the near term by blowing substantial parts of ourselves up, or falling into the darkness of totalitariansim–but is it not on some level comforting? And to the extent it facilitates a mental state compatible with achieving that aim, is it not “true”, in the sense that it supports its own end?

Contradiction in terms, no? I was wondering about this, though: say an atheist has a vision or dream experience in which they meet God, or angels, or transcend somehow the physical world, what “truth” content can that have for them?

If one follows the doctrine of Scientism–which in broad stroke reduces all possible experiences to material conditions which have been in theory determined since the beginning of time–then one must step back from such experiences, process them “rationally”, and then reject them. You must kill the idea they might have actual validity, and erase the positive emotions associated with them.

As I have long said, though, true skepticism is equidistance from both belief and and disbelief. You neither take peoples word for it, nor reject anything out of hand as impossible. You investigate. That is what scientists–real scientists, who are a subset of that class we call “scientists”–do.

And in the case, say, of a dream, let us say it leaves a lingering positive effect. It makes you feel better, in ways which are hard or impossible to articulate. From the perspective of Pragmatism–understood here formally both as a philosophically method, and in the broader sense of something that is simply useful–such as experience is true, because it yielded a desirable result. Empirically, you feel better. This cannot be disputed. The MEANING and ORIGIN can be disputed, but not the actual feelings.

Let us further posit that, in the end, our atheist determines–in perfect congruence with his philosophy–that some biochemical event has happened, which in its wake left a series of positive neurotransmitters or chemicals that enabled this experience.

Even so, does that eradicate the value of such an experience? Even if, ex post facto, it is determined not to be “really real”, is such a thing not desirable? And what if you pursued religious faith, not out of conviction, but because it often engendered such neurochemical responses? Would that be wrong?

Plainly, many hippies have used LSD, mushrooms, mescalin and other such drugs to the effect of facilitating mystical experiences. There is, I am told, even now research going on as to the use of such drugs to treat things like chronic depression, alcoholism, and even a sense of meaninglessness. We know they hit certain parts of the brain, objectively, and subjectively that when used in the proper conditions they are life altering events.

Is this wrong?

What I am always at pains to do is build pathways for qualitative improvement. I personally believe that such experiences ARE real, in some sense, but I don’t want to part company with people who are unable to share that belief.

We need, I think, always to be keeping what is useful, and trying–within the flexibility integrity permits–to improve on it.

In my own terms, there is both qualitative and quantitative knowledge. The former would relate, most importently, to knowledge about how to live and why. The latter would be things like State Capitals, and the use of algorithyms.

I think one could posit a best practice for the communication of the latter, although even there some variation would be needed, but with respect to the former, literally an infinite repertoire of tactics of communication might be needed.

Ultimately, happiness and contentment are immanent: they are the emergent properties of a system in motion–an individual personality–that has reached a qualitative state in which those outcomes are common and even perennial. Since they are not tangible, since can’t touch them, it is difficult to communicate how those states were reached. You can say “I think this way”, and “I act this way”, but as religious teachers throughout the ages have found, that is often not enough, and quite often words have a way of causing people to be ignorant with confidence. Wars have often been fought between religions of “peace”. This is the result not of religion, per se, but of human stupidity.

Hindus have this concept of “darshana”, Sufis of Barakah, Jews of Berakhah, and Christians of grace, where simply being in the presence of someone who is spiritually advanced helps one advance. I have never met anyone I can recall who I really feel helped me (nor have I spent much time pursuing them, although I would really enjoy meeting Doris Lessing), but–and if this sounds like wishy-washy pseudo-mystical California bullshit, so be it–I have seen such people in my dreams. I have SEEN Windhorse, felt it. I have met angels, and however people want to psychoanalyze it, the experiences were life-changing. Not life-shaking, but they have had a subtle salutary effect on me.

It is a truism that children tend to become how you are, not how you talk, and that is an excellent example of the verity of the principle of qualitative communication.

Zen, by the way, is an explicit philosophy based on the idea that there are some things worthy knowing, that cannot be said.

When my children skin their knees, I congratulate them for doing their job as children, which is taking mild risks, and playing spontaneously. I don’t offer sympathy, since after all they heal quickly. And they accept this. They don’t suffer for want of affection.

I would like our nation to be like that. Skinning your knee should be a source of pride, not whining.

This morning I saw a building shaped something like a large hill, where you had to climb up the outside to get in. It was literally like climbing a rocky hill, and mildly, but not excessively dangerous. In such architecture you would set up a powerful archetype that you need to pay attention, and that life is not risk-free.

In other ages, the dangers of life were quite obvious, since death from famine and disease was everywhere. In our modern world, people need to be reminded.

Actually, you could add a rivulet to the building too, as a sort of integral fountain. That would be fun.

The Tibetans have this nice idea of “Windhorse” as standing for Goodness. Iconographically, it is a horse with a bright diamond on the back of it. It is intended simultaneously the connote light shining, and the power of the wind as the horse runs through it.

Goodness, then, is something that is shining moving pushing out flowing like water all the time. It is a quality of being. Now, having felt it, I think you can expand it, but until you hit that particular groove, morality is what guides you.

As I see it, morality is not so much intended to put you on the right path, but to keep you from error. Once you can feel or see how to live with purpose, how to move forward in a positive way, you are confined to not moving AWAY from light, from Goodness.

All the days of our lives we are moving, here, there everywhere. Constantly, we are making decisions. Life is a chaotic system, in which we as individuals, and of course our social system, and even the physical conditions surrounding us like the weather are in constant chaos, held back from complete randomness by principles, which in the physical arena would be called “Strange Attractors”, which represent immanent order of a sort in what is outwardly fully random.

As you bounce about like a pingpong ball, if you don’t fall in the wrong slot, eventually you will find your way. You are helped tremendously if you know in advance all the wrong ways to do things. This, again, was the point of Buddha’s quite exhaustive 8-fold path. He wanted to give you a LOT of ways not to do things. But as he recognized, even if you give this to people, there is always the risk that you will stop moving, and when you do that, you can never find your way forward.

The way forward, to be clear, is not an idea, but a quality of perception, that cannot be gifted.

In my own conceptions, I think the essentials of my ideas of Goodness can be integrated into all religious–and even irreligious–traditions, with benefit. Let Muslims reject self pity, persevere in understanding their God, and accept that mercy and generosity are the important parts of their faith. Submission, then, means accepting these virtues without complaint. And to complete faithfulness to their Five Pillars could one not add a desire to want for others what is best for them? How could a doctrine of death and destruction be in conformity with the will of a benign deity? Surely if they want to spread their faith, they can do it by showing the superiority of their results in living in happiness and peace? Is peace–Salaam–not the goal?

This basic pattern of thought can be added to all religious traditions of which I’m aware, with the obvious exception of Satanism, which is the conscious pursuit of evil, and attractive to some because it is cloaked in novelty and deceit. Not until much too late will anyone foolish enough to follow this path realize what it is they have done. Nothing but pain and death lies there.

Love is a word I don’t use very often. I don’t like it. Overuse has turned it into something like being nice, generally coupled with softheaded sentimentalism. You can do anything in the name of love and people will accept it. This needs to change.

Goodness is a doctrine of love, where love is defined as wanting for others what is best for them. And what is best for them is always defined qualitatively, as working to help them foster the capacity to be happy on their own, and to take pleasure in the happiness of others; in other words, to want to help other people become good. Love is wanting to help others exist as morally sovereign human beings. It is not being nice, and it is certainly not doing for others what they can and should be doing for themselves.

So often, those who speak of love are talking either of emotional neediness temporarily being satisfied with someone elses generosity (in the case of men), or effective self deception (in the case of women). This, or one is speaking of imposing ones will and power over others, by speaking for them, when they should be speaking for themselves. This, in my view, has been the tragedy of African-Americans in this nation, after losing the genuinely Good leader Martin Luther King, Jr. All that have followed him have been de facto racists, who kept people down for their own selfish political purposes.

Love is not tolerance. Tolerance is merely not antagonizing people. It is not helping them. It is a strictly negative virtue, in which you forego a crime, rather than “perpetrate” a positive act, that of positive connection.