Month: May 2011

Watch this video “Doing the Continental”.
It almost made me want to cry with how innocent and yet fun it was. There is so much information in there, so much quality, such an open, expansive set of feelings, that complement in a wonderful way the hormones that were no doubt present as well.

Does this spirit still exist in this country? What are they playing in dance clubs, mainly? Hip hop. Music that is heavy, hard, aggressive, and focused purely on physical pleasure and domination. As I commented several weeks ago, we have had at least two big hits that dealt more or less openly with S & M. That is actually the name of Rihanna’s song.

Listen to this song for a few moments–Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back“

This is the sexuality of machines. It is contracting, compulsive, and utterly devoid of pleasure.

Returning to the theme of a few posts ago, I think sadomasochism is best understood as an effort to get into the open a covert reality: that of being assaulted qualitatively. In regard to modern sexuality, I think most women are in effect assaulted the first time they have sex by doing it WITHOUT LOVE. Boys say what they need to to get in their mouth and pants, and then abandon them. This hurts.

Consciously choosing pain is perhaps a way of managing it. Consciously inflicting pain is a way of expressing anger.

This is all very sad. Socialism, as a doctrine which effectively requires women to act like men in matters of sexuality, and which requires men to act like women everywhere else, is not just unnatural and perverse, but very indicative of cultural decimation, and the impossibility of an innocent existence in an intact cultural space.

Socialism makes “home” impossible.

It occurred to me the other day that the essence of the tactic of Alinsky is cultivating a sense of moral superiority without ever developing a coherent morality. It is binding (remember the root word for religion means to bind) people together in a shared feeling, but not philosophy.

Often, we focus on the effects of Alinsky on enemies, since his principles of character assassination and vilification plainly work at disrupting rational debate; we forget, though, that they also keep the herd in line.

“Good morning, my name is Bob. Welcome to Bob’s Engine and Philosophical Repair Shop. What brings you in today?”

“Well, I just can’t seem to get started. And when I get going, the power just isn’t there to go far.”

“I see, well let’s take a look. Do you spend a lot of time on computers?”

“Yes, I’m on-line at least 5 hours a day.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“No, I’m actually a big fan of Richard Dawkins”.

“How about your love-life? Do you believe in love? Have you ever experienced it?”

“Not really. I was actually pretty lucky, and first got laid when I was 15 with a girl I went to grade school with. It didn’t really work out, and she’s in a punk rock band somewhere down south. I hook up with girls now and then–I usually meet them on-line–but nothing serious. I never really wanted kids, and the idea of getting married scares me”.

“OK. What about politics? You a fan of Obama?”

“I’m actually disappointed in him. He seems to have sold out to Corporate America, and is continuing those stupid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“Right. Here’s my diagnosis: you’re not going anywhere because you don’t know where you want to go. How can you get started without a destination? How can you go fast in a direction you don’t have? You’re stuck.

First step is to expand your world. This includes opening up to the possibility of philosophical optimism. Get the book “Quantum Reality”, by Nick Herbert. He is a good physicist, and knows his stuff. The net is that the best minds on the planet cannot seem to locate a physical reality unaffected by consciousness. This militates against orthodox materialism, and opens up the possibility of something like God, the survival of death, and the non-physical interconnectedness of all things.

Next, read something by Dean Radin. I read “The Conscious Universe”. It details the evidence for things like psi, which has become overwhelming, even though many will not admit it. Quantum physics, though, opens up the physical possibility for these things.

Third, read this free book all the way through, and follow up on any particular lines of research that interest you. I enjoyed the book “The First Psychic”, by Peter Lamont.

If you do all this with an open mind, it should get you some space for dreaming, which is to say perceptual movement.

Next, read everything on this website. Having written it, I’m a bit partial to it, but it comes out of a similar problem to what you are presenting to me.

Last, but not least, remember that the excitement in life comes from small things, not big things, and that if you get good at building from small things, then you’ll get all the satisfaction you deserve. Buy the book Kum Nye relaxation, by Tarthang Tulku, and incorporate it in your life.

That, and a little elbow grease, should get you on your way. Thanks for stopping in at Bob’s Engine and Philosophical Repair. Philosophy: use it or lose it.”

This phrase popped in my head the other day. This is an apt metaphor, I think, for living systems. We are not fully free–you have genetics, hormones, nutritional imbalances and other influences external to consciousness–but my God we bloom.

There is a John Ruskin quote which I have long thought summed up the Leftist creed admirably, but I can’t find the damn book. It’s from his essay–an apparently pivotal influence on Gandhi–“Unto this last”. The net of it is that one must be held accountable to one’s principles, and not to the outcome of actions based upon them.

That is the sum of the problem. It is perfect since he was in fact an early and very influential advocate for Socialism, who was constantly advocating for morality in a strident voice; and yet he was a pedophile, who drove a young girl–I believe his niece–mad. She literally spent most of her life in a mental institution. He eventually went mad himself. Go to San Francisco: those are his people.

If one says that one’s principle is to be guided by principle, what one has actually said is that one is to be guided by ideas which can neither be vindicated nor negated by outside events. They connect to the external world not at all. This is why Leftism is so popular among intellectuals: all they have to do is think, talk, and write about; no one ever, within their community, feels the need to measure any concrete result.

Detroit is Detroit because of “urban renewal” policies. Some renewal.

This post is a bit of a repeat of things I have said before, but this point is critical to grasp clearly: if you are not naming in advance your desired outcome, then verifying your success or failure subsequently, and making intelligent changes as needed, then the actual principle upon which you are operating is solipsistic narcissism. The rest is words without referents.

This would patently apply to most academics in fields in which nothing ever actually gets physically done. They are not used to measuring anything–how do you measure an essay?–and see no reason to change their mindselt when it comes to their politics. That is how Fascist nations like China and Cuba get their approval.

To say “my principle is my principle” is to say “there is no there here–I am the world and all that matters in it.”

One extension of this baffling stupidity is that Leftism does not work well as a creed in building happiness even for Leftists. You want to find a lot of screwed up, confused, nihilistic people, look for heavy concentrations of Leftists.

I ran into something the other day I have never seen before: watered down hard liquor. In Ohio, apparently, only State-controlled stores are allowed to sell hard liquor, so you have in the grocery stores 40 proof whiskey.

At the liquor store, I was told that the State tells them what they can stock, and how much to charge; and if I wanted to use a debit card, there was a $1 tax imposed for hard liquor, but not for beer or wine.

Being me, I got to thinking about the Constitutionality of this, and what my thoughts were about that extent of direct government interference in what should be a free market, but was no longer.

Liquor is one of those things that can plausibly be argued to exist in the moral domain. Alcohol has destroyed more lives and families than all the drugs ever invented combined. It’s not even close. People drink and drive and kill people. They beat their kids and wives. They lose their jobs. They get in fights. They kill themselves.

At the same time, it is my understanding that beer is the drink of choice of most alcoholics, and certainly one can get drunk easily enough on a sufficient quantity of ANYTHING that has alcohol, so making it harder to get hard liquor does not necessarily cut down on ANY of the undesirable behaviors.

Constitutionally, it would seem to me this should be acceptable. The Constitution does not protect liquor sales, although it would, I think, prevent States from banning liquor imports from other States. Actually, though, I know that some States ban the shipping of alcohol.

Unrelated, too, but relevant, is the fact that it would seem the Federal Government ought to ban the de facto prohibitions on competition in the insurance and other realms that some States impose. For example, in Alabama Blue Cross/Blue Shield–the local branch–has some 85% of the market. Why? Nobody else is allowed in there. I would suspect rates are as high as one normally sees in conditions of legally protected cartels.

I’m not going to take the time to work through all the ramifications of this, but thought I’d pass a few preliminary thoughts along.

I am dealing with a large corporation that has applied a zero defect manufacturing mentality to the construction process. Although this would seem to make sense in principle, the reality is that machines can’t be stupid, but humans can and often are. If you are tired and hot, you sometimes get sloppy. This does not mean you don’t know what you ought to be doing–most of this is common sense–but that you momentarily forget. Then an accident happens.

This got me to thinking, though, about the difference in mindset between the farmer and the industrialist. Not all seeds sprout. Not very year sees enough rain, or enough sunshine. There is a great deal that you can’t control directly, making it foolish to even contemplate a zero defect strategy. Instead, you develop emotional tenacity, and quite often a strong religious faith. Prayers for the success of crops–or livestock–were very important in almost all known religions, and may well have played a role in the development of formal religious traditions.

The image of the manufacturer, though, is one of an endless series of perfectly conjoined wheels, all operating with perfect precision.

When we say that talents blossom, or speak of something flowering, we are acknowledging that living systems move, and that they have stages. You have the planting in the Spring, the growth in the summer, the harvesting in the Fall, and the surviving in the winter. “To everything there is a season.” (Ecclesiastes, by the way, is my favorite book of the Bible).

There are no seasons in manufacturing. There are production schedules, that can be rationally planned out far in advance, in theory for decades, although of course market demands cannot be mapped out that far, so cycles are likely closer to the year interval or so.

I think this basic metaphor, though, can accurately be mapped on to the difference between true Liberalism, and Leftism, or what I have at times called “gradualism” and “catastrophism”.

One can readily admit that a given social order warrants improvement, without thereby granting that the solution can be planned and imposed.

Leftism is nothing other than the idea that the ideas and methods of manufacturing can be applied to social “engineering”. The use of that word makes this abundantly obvious. The man who began the massive government interference in the economy that has characterized the last 80 years or so of anti-Liberal politics–Herbert Hoover–was nicknamed either “The Great engineer”, or perhaps just the “engineer”.

What is the word we see continually applied by Central Planners of the Nationalistic Fascist and Internationalistic Fascist sort? Rationalization. They assume that human systems can be made to operate like mechanical systems. They even apply manufacturing methods to their repressions. The Nazis developed the poison gas suggested by George Bernard Shaw to efficiently kill their opponents. The Soviets–being Russians–were much less efficient, but no less dedicated to the basic idea. They separated out “ingredients”–dissidents–who did not fit into the slots alloted them in the great machine they were trying to build. They put them in massive camps.

But people are like seeds. They have seasons. They alter as they grow. True, deep rooted social change comes about gradually. The attempt, for example, to impose “equality” on black people has been enormously counter-productive. They tried to erase hundreds of years of tradition overnight. They tried to give money to people to make amends for past wrongs, rather than simply allow them to continue incorporating themselves into the community on their own. The “War On Poverty” not only failed, but it made things much, much worse.

It failed because it used a manufacturing metaphor. As I have said before, Leftism is nothing but the application of the metaphor of the Procrustrean Bed to actual living societies. If you don’t fit, you will be made to fit.

True Liberalism is the antithesis of this, in that we all build our own beds. This is the way of kindness, decency, and moral sustainability.

This is apparently a band, a movie, an Army Fort, and who knows what else.

It is also a name I like for the unconcious/subconscious realm of our selves, obviously referencing the Alpha brainwave state. To my mind the “unconscious” is best understood as a sort of drama containing many characters, all of them the residue of imprints of various sorts. Our consciousness listens to all these characters, and chooses which ones to listen to. Perhaps what a principle does is create a perfect character–instead of the many imperfect ones who constituted our family and friends and strangers and enemies. You create a voice for yourself that is unchanging and unsusceptible to moods.

I’m thinking out loud here.

At times, when I meditate (and I have found, by the way, that some of my most useful reveries are sitting still in the darkness drinking whiskey, and simply watching my emotions flow by like a stream; I do not think I am rationalizing when I say this has been enormously therapeutic), I feel the presence of this universe, where things really don’t change. It is not perhaps an altered state of consciousness, but a focused one, where I have removed all need for problem solving, all need for purposive action, and most external stimuli.

Talking about feelings is not therapeutic, but feeling them flowing is. Things that flow tend to move, and blocks can disappear that way. First, you have to see the blocks, which is to say to feel them.

Returning to the stage metaphor, it is perhaps like you–I, as should be obvious, but this is hopefully tranlatable to the experience of any readers I may have–have been hearing a cacophony of conflicting voices from a dark playhouse, where you can’t see the stage, and now you are putting a spotlight on each character and asking them what role they play, and giving them the room and time to speak in their own voice.

Most all people have multiple “frequencies”. This was perhaps the only useful insight I retained from my study of Neuro-Linguistic Programming years ago. This is another way of saying that everyone has multiple “personalities”, multiple selves, some of which contradict one another, but which can be speaking at the same time.

One simple example is someone saying “I love you” when they don’t mean it. There is what Freud called the ego–and what I might call the “presenting self”–saying rationally comprehensible words that are understood by the listener.

Yet, these words have referents. We all have some idea what love is supposed to feel like, and if that feeling is not there, then the stage is set for cognitive dissonance. It is my feeling that we all have profoundly accurate intuitive understandings as latent capacities, but that many people–men, particularly–tend not to express them, consciously.

So we get a mixed message. Which one do we listen to? Actions speak louder than words, but one can always rationalize the actions of others, so there is always a choice.

This is the behavioral equivalent to those quizzes many will have seen, where you have to choose the color of a word quickly, but in which is typed a different word. For example, the word “red”, but typed in the color blue.

Persistent incongruities of this sort amount in my view to a sort of qualitative assault, in that you are demanding of people to choose between what is said and what is done.

To the point here, the only part that enters “Alphaville” is the reality, and to the extent we are not able to consciously separate the reality from the facade, then confusion enters the picture.

A good example of this would be beating children and claiming it was for their own good, when in reality it was an outlet for the anger of the parent. That child will internalize that anger, and not know why it is there.

We see a lot of anger in our culture today. There are no doubt many reasons for that, but among them are, I think, a heightened sense of entitlement/expectation, and the de facto qualitative assaults of the modern, retrogressive American family.

First, if you expect more, if you think “life” owes you something, if you think you ought to be able to live an exciting, fulfilled life of the sort shown in commercials and peddled by Hollywood, then most people are going to experience a gap between fantasy and reality. This breeds self pity, and self pity breeds anger and resentment.

Second, though: what about the parent who abandons you to the media, who instead of creating a living culture of interaction with their children, lets them sit in front of the TV? Kids find TV (and, to be clear, video games, iPods, computers, cell phones and everything else) fascinating, but it cannot replace constant living human reinforcements. There is a frustration that builds for many, I think, that arises from a LACK that they can’t identify. They are “communicating” with others via Twitter perhaps dozens of times an hour, but they are still lonely and afraid of being alone.

I wonder how many kids today could stand sitting alone in a quiet room for an hour? I think five minutes would be pushing it for most of them.

They have been abandoned, without knowing it. Their parents have disappeared, and turned into automatons, incapable of nurturing. Everyone has their own TV, and their own channel. Time is scarce, and everyone wants more, more, more.

The kitchen table, of course, is the solution.

These are a few scattered thoughts. I have had a lot of ideas since I last had time to focus, so I’m going to move on.

I don’t put many boundaries on my reveries: I just sort of let them go. One I have from time to time is reimagining the actual history of Christ. In evaluating Christianity, we have to remember that the canon was not put together for several centuries after the death of Christ, and that when it was done, it was a politically important enterprise, since the Romans had embraced the faith.

In evaluating the history of Christianity, the intersection of the Roman Empire and the Roman Universal (Catholic) Church is pivotal. Roman never fell. Its institutions morphed into a political apparatus appropriated by the Catholic Church, with the most important being tax collection.

Here is a short summary from Wikipedia that jibes with my own understanding:

“In the later organization of the Roman Empire, the increasingly subdivided provinces were administratively associated in a larger unit, the diocese (Latin dioecesis, from the Greek term διοίκησις, meaning “administration”).

With the adoption of Christianity as the Empire’s official religion in the 4th century, the clergy assumed official positions of authority alongside the civil governors. A formal church hierarchy was set up, parallel to the civil administration, whose areas of responsibility often coincided.

With the collapse of the Western Empire in the 5th century, the bishops in Western Europe assumed a large part of the role of the former Roman governors. A similar, though less pronounced, development occurred in the East, where the Roman administrative apparatus was largely retained by the Byzantine Empire. In modern times, many diocese, though later subdivided, have preserved the boundaries of a long-vanished Roman administrative division. For Gaul, Bruce Eagles has observed that “it has long been an academic commonplace in France that the medieval dioceses, and their constituent pagi, were the direct territorial successors of the Roman civitates.”

The point here is that it a matter of historical accident that Christianity survived. One can, of course, posit God’s will, but if you look at what was actually done in the name of Christianity–the Cathar repressions, the Crusades, the Inquisition–it is hard to see the hand of God in those events; at least not if we posit a loving God.

Making a short story long, I wonder about key events in the Bible. What if Jesus washed his disciples feet because he realized he was getting too full of himself? What if that was for his own growth, as well as didactic purposes? What if he never actually intended to get crucified, but could not figure out how to avoid it without snuffing out the groundswell of social change he had catalyzed?

As far as miracles, everything Christ reportedly did is contained in formal writings from India (and other places) that predate him, and which have been reported many times since. These would include walking on water, healing the sick, resurrecting the dead, and producing objects from nothing. There is an Indian guru who lived recently who according to many witnesses could produce sacred ash from his hands. I have not investigated the details, but plainly the stories are there, some of them much more evidential, being recent, than those of the Bible.

Daniel Dunglas Home was seen by witnesses to levitate, whose word on any other matter would have been accepted without question. It was in regard to his case that the word “psychic” was coined.

To my mind, the conclusion to be reached in regards to formal Christianity is that to the extent it encourages people to live with pleasure, and to love one another, it is a life affirming doctrine; and to the extent it is used to separate people, and to render judgements, it is life denying.

I feel the world is much too interesting to be packaged within a single unchanging creed dedicated to the proposition that non-conformists are tortured forever, and that the only means to avoid this is a slavish (“But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life”) devotion to the creed.

What needs to be made clear here is that “God” is not speaking, as one human to another, to anyone. What are being expressed are intuitive understandings that are different between people, and a set of verbal teachings which were put down by MEN, not God. This was Muhammad’s innovation, to claim that his teachings were taken verbatim from Allah’s chosen spokesperson, in a direct connection with the larger universe.

I might put it this way: to the extent a creed encourages playfulness within a context of fidelity to core values of honesty, sincerity, thoughtfulness and personal responsibility, among others, it is valid. To the extent it fosters hate and unreasoning fear, it is in my view wrong.

Here is a nice poem from Rabindranath Tagore I have always liked, and not infrequently quoted:

On the Seashore

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.

The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.

They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.

They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.
The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby’s cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play.

On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

Life is pleasure in experience. One example was I hit the road very early one day last week, and was driving a windy, hilly road. On one turn, I could see just the top of a very red sun, and thought it beautiful. Then it “set”, as I went down a decline. For the next twenty minutes, it played peek-a-boo with me, rising and setting, always in different places. It made me happy.

Driving the same road in reverse yesterday, I came upon an opening in the clouds with a beam of light coming down, like heaven had opened. Behind me I saw a rainbow. It was amazingly beautiful. I really enjoy complex, moving skies, and the interplay of light and shadow.

To the point, though, it would in my mind be a sin to let the beauty in our world go unnoticed. There is so much ugliness, that we must be attentive to what is right and good and wonderful.

Jim Morrison–who really wasn’t very smart, but had the capacity to seem that way–once said “no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.” That seems clear enough: live in the moment. But he died as a drunk and likely as a heroin abuser. Somewhere along the way, he lost the dawn.

And his apparent distinction–between morality and experience–is a specious one. Why would Christ not want us up enjoying the dawn? He would be there with us.

In my mind, sin is a separation from the capacity for this sort of experience, from feeling deeply. You don’t die because you sin; you sin because you die, because you lose contact with some primal feeling of respect for yourself and others. The first thing you have to do to sin–say to cheat on your wife–is rationalize it. This can include getting drunk, but that is simply a rationalization through avoiding an adult and conscious decision.

I have a clear conscience. I have not always done what I ought to have done, but I have only rarely done something I ought not to have done. My sins are of omission, of for example drinking too much when I could be up and about exercising.

There is something about innocence and pleasure that go together. Our children express emotions spontaneously, but as we grow, we pull back, many of us because we have made conscious compromises with our own first principles. You can get that promotion, but only if you stab the other guy in the back. You can run a profitable business, keeping money for yourself that could and should go to the people doing most of the work.

Whatever the cause, people lose touch with the life within them. For myself, I am endlessly fascinated by everything around me. I never, ever, ever get bored. I enjoy looking at how elevator signs are put together. I always find it interesting that nobody ever has a 13th floor, even though 14 obviously IS 13 (I saw a 14A and 14B the other day, which normally means a front and back entrance, but in this case it was just a new solution to this old problem of triskaidekaphobia). I like watching small insects, and how trees move in the wind. Etc.

I am not bragging on myself, so much as suggesting a possible way–Tao–of interacting with life. I am not being excessively self-congratulatory, I don’t think, in saying that I am a creative person. That creativity comes from a largely unregulated and spontaneous, living, interaction with what I do all day every day.

What I do for money sometimes involves ladders, safety glasses, and a hard hat. If you’ve never worn a hard hat, you may not realize that it gets hot under those things. By law, they can’t have any ventilation holes, so you sweat a lot. Safety glasses trap heat, too, and the cheaper ones fog up a lot. It’s uncomfortable, and I get a bit grumpy at times, like most people who do manual labor.

Yet I was standing there the other day, and realized that you can do that work with love. Rather than looking at physical objects as intentionally retarding your progress–there’s always something in the way in the plenum–you can stop being so damn stupid, and realize they are just there, and that with gentleness and attentiveness you get more done faster anyway. After thinking this, the day went faster, and I left happy. Any work can be done like this. There’s always some pile of something–patients, legal briefs, emails, phone calls, lighting ballasts, walls to be painted, lawns to be mowed–and you can attack that pile as an enemy and be irritable; or you can realize that that work can have any meaning for you that you want, and that if you are mad, it is because you are being childish. Life is work. It cannot be anything else. You can work with love, though, and grow from it.

Growth creates life, which creates more growth. This is how we are meant to live.