June 2011 – Page 6 – Moderates United

It is today. And yesterday, and tomorrow. A culture which forgets its history is dying, and an important part of every culture is its heroes.

To my mind, what needs to be remembered is not just that brave men and women fought and died for our country, but also that they fought and LIVED for this country.

More: we need to remember all of the heroes throughout history, who did what was right and good and just because it was right and good and just. We don’t have to sanctify any of them: we just need to remember them, and resurrect in our hearts as much as we can of the spirit that animated them.

Things don’t change all that much. People don’t change that much. There has always been good and evil. There have always been those who took what they wanted because they could; who hurt others because they wanted to. There have always been those who stood against them.

We are in a stage in our history when our cultural custodians are in large measure trying not just to destroy American or Western culture, but culture period.

We fight them through memory, through focussed remembrance of who we are, who we choose to be, who we want to be, and how much farther down the path of light we can and still must go.

This is going to be a bit more meandering than usual. It is my effort to patch together many discrete threads of thought that are related, but who don’t know it. This will be a seamed whole.

I developed the Telearchic Cross (described on my other website in the introductory essay) to sort of formalize what I do anyway, which is regularly expand and contract my awareness. At times I am watching ants, or watching clouds, or trying to develop multiple theories on the genesis of a particular mark on the wall . . . to be continued momentarily. . .

[related sidenote: I once took my kids for pizza, and there was a man sleeping in the car next to us. When we came out, he was gone. I spent months giving them explanations of what happened to him, from aliens kidnapping him, to his car flipping over and driving off by itself upside down, to the concrete being actually a giant trampoline that threw him over the building, etc. It is always a good practice to try and inventory possibilities, even wildly improbable ones, and this was a fun way to try and convey that lesson, which they greatly enjoyed]

At other times, I am abstracting as much as you possibly can about the nature of time and the universe. Back and forth.

In recent days, I have been feeling an expansive energy, a liberating energy, that I have in the past called Windhorse, after the Tibetan word for what I think is the same energy. This is the energy of Goodness.

Often, I think we fail to pursue Goodness–spirituality in some form–since we assume that if we aren’t “sinning”, that we are good people. If you pay your bills, are polite to people, get your kids to do their homework, be respectful, etc, then you are Good. But there is Good and Gooder (let it slide): what is the lifelong path you can walk, in which you continue to develop Goodness all along, so that you actually ARE very wise when you are gray and your teeth are falling out (short in the tooth)?

This energy is expansive. It is learning to love life, and learning to value all experience fully, such that objects, per se, cease to matter so much.

This is going to be really scattered. There is a nexus, and it is me, but I am not a line of words; nor is anyone else.

I think sometimes about ascetics going into the woods or caves for years on end. How do they not get lonely? I think some people assume they do, but I’m not sure. What if you could counter-act the FEELING of loneliness with emotional energy that was much more powerful? What if going back into the world were the actual let-down? I think that is how it works.

As I say, I feel this energy sometimes, and it works whether you are alone or with others, and no matter what difficulties you have in your life, although of course maintaining it is much harder in conditions of stress. I find it is helping me manage stress–which I have a lot of at the moment–and work more effectively.

This energy is best developed through Kum Nye, in my view, which I have discussed in the past. It was a revelation to me, though, that my whiskey drinking could be adapted to this purpose.

I have had a lot of pain in my life–whether it’s because of objective difficulty or my own weakness, I can’t say, although it’s likely some combination–and that analgesic seems to complement well the reveries I was already doing on my meditation cushion. Things just flow out, and the effect lasts several days. Things that used to bother me don’t.

Yesterday I was thinking about anger. Anger is externally directed contracting energy, which I saw symbolized by < , where you look at it from the right to left. I don't know why that is the direction, but likely right brain to left brain. Whatever. That's my iconography, because it popped in my head. The use of will is =, where energy is balanced. The use of enjoyment and expansion is > . If you really enjoy something, do you need will or anger to do it, even if it is hard?

Then of course I got to thinking about unions. Posit a fixed number of people willing and able to work, and a fixed amount of work to be done. What unions do is increase unemployment by increasing project costs, while increasing wages for those who belong. If you pay one person $40/hour for something, you can’t pay 2 people $20. Since labor hours are what they are–if you build a five story building, it takes as long as it takes–if you require union participation, you also see a decrease in work.

What happens, then, [I am thinking here of government protected union cartels; I have no objection to unions people are free to join and leave, and to government contracts that are negotiated at actually prevailing–as opposed to imposed and artificially high–wages] is employment shrinks, and the work to be done shrinks, while the pockets of the unions expand. This is exactly what happened in the Great Depression. Hoover instituted what amounted to Union Scale wages (the Davis-Bacon Act, which is by the way still in force, and still driving up costs on all Federal projects), and of course FDR more or less granted the Unions the right to form legally protected cartels. Effect: mass unemployment, and economic malaise.

The point I wanted to make here, though, was that these effects are cumulative. The longer you allow the processes of contraction and contraction to continue, the worse things get. The people who fail to see these things are operating as if time did not exist. They are acting as if there is always a pool of workers, and a pool of money they are just trying to get their share of. But look at Detroit. IF you have a Union job, you’re paid great. But unemployment is huge, and now they are sucking money out of other States, by the means of the Federal Government supporting their pensions and medical benefits through the bailouts. It’s a black hole, but the people involved, many of them, can’t see it, since they lack the capacity for seeing the consequences of their actions on everyone around them. But they are shrinking.

Another example: sex. I think most people can agree that sex is best with someone you love deeply. Love is an intangible, but it is a flow that you can perceive readily enough. Good sex is expansive; there is much more involved than just physical friction. At its best–and I’ve never gotten there, but I can imagine this–it is mythic, IF you are relaxed and willing to let your consciousness go. It can enable you to tap deep into the very springs of primal consciousness, which in my view includes a vision of God.

This led to the thought that contracting sex is bad, and it is what is preached 24/7 by our media, which is confined to physical attraction, and physical friction, and devoid of a larger sense of wonder and purpose, and of course committment (which is the same as a larger context). It seems to me that prostitutes are honest about what they are doing, but women who allow themselves to be used are not. Most cannot REALLY endure that physical intimacy devoid of open compassion and love without losing some part of themselves. Many DO lose some part of themselves, in my view, as do the men.

An interesting corrollary to this is that the contraction is when women are treated as objects. Structurally, then, prostitutes and the kept women of the Middle East and Southeast Asia are the same: both have been turned from themselves into objects serving the interests of those with contracting minds, hearts, and energies.

I look at women, and most of them are up and down all day, feeling feelings all the time. Most men are like you take that basic process, and hit the Mute button. It’s still sort of going on, but inaudibly, and with much less range. Yet, if we value perceptual movement, women do more of it, in general. This makes them more spiritual, in general.

Socialism formally distances itself from what I have called in the Telearchic Cross the Systemic Dimension. This is the connection across time between purpose and outcome. It creates instead an Eternal Present. This is the system in Cuba, and that in North Korea. Nothing changes. Nobody moves. Nobody lives or dies. They are shadow-lit lands, living underwater for unendurable eternities (I let the poetic streak in me out from time to time). Think a fish tank, except the fish can’t move.

This is contraction. Broad-ly (yes, if you were wondering) speaking, expansiveness is a female trait, and contraction a male trait. Socialism is a masculine system, then, Liberalism a feminine system. Liberalism is nurturing not because the government can nurture, but rather because it does not STOP the processes of self liberation that occur constantly in all of us, absent restraint (contraction).

Think of very masculine systems. Take the Marine Corps. Everything is regimented. Or, as I’ve said, take Fascism: it is nothing but the extension of the Central Planning ethos of the military to the culture as a whole. Morality is produced centrally. The economy is planned centrally. Truth is distributed from a central point, and all power ends in one person. Communism is the same, but the person pretends to be a committee, and it pretends to care about you. Contraction.

Religions (religio means “to bind”) likewise contract. Now, you need some rules. You need boundaries. But as Lao Tzu said, you should “know the masculine, but keep to the feminine”.

Sometimes you need to nail people’s asses, but you also have to have tools other than a hammer, and you need to want to put that thing down as soon as you can. Violence and weapons are merely–sometimes–tools for building peace, which is the end goal.

We need to generalize this notion of Goodness, and people need to understand that there are practical, proven, effective methods for doing it, such that happiness becomes more likely for everyone.

What we’re doing sure as hell isn’t working. We are tightening into little balls of grief, envy, self destructive rage, and greed.

That’s enough wondering and wandering for now.