Month: October 2012

I believe an effective psychotherapy will consist in four elements: holotropic breathwork conducted in multiple sessions with the same people; mastery of autogenic and progressive relaxation; Kum Nye; the capacity for intense physical exertion, of which CrossFit is in my view the paradigmatic example; and a simple cognitive strategy, of which for me personally the best example has been my own triad of 1) never feel sorry for yourself; 2) Keep moving, internally and as needed externally 3) a commitment to lifelong learning and growth in all aspects of my life.

The most important element is the Holotropic Breathwork–and I think a long term supportive group should be a part of this–but I would submit that it would benefit hugely with a partnership with CrossFit, since CrossFit builds courage and pain tolerance, and both are needed for optimal outcomes with the breathwork.

I was driving down the highway yesterday, listening to that Midnight Oil song about giving the land back to the Abo’s, looking at the size and pace of our modern civilization, pondering both the ridiculousness of the idea, and also what was lost in the destruction of their culture, and it hit me: we can build a spiritualized tomorrow.  There is hope.  We can make all these walls and towers and highways talk in ways which are meaningful.  What was lost can be built again.  I see how.  It can be done.

I want to go on record as saying that I do not support the proposals of the Positive Money movement in Britain, which I feel are being reported on and supported by some of their local press ONLY because they serve Fabian/Keynesian goals of complete government control of the monetary system.

Their proposal for gradual deflation will cause widespread economic harm, since the actual costs of all extant loans will go up steadily, which was more or less the mechanism that initiated our own Great Depression.

Their idea that ANY amount of money printing, particularly by the government, is desirable, flies in the face of my often-repeated contention that all inflation is theft, which I dealt with extensively in my financial treatise.

They are of course correct that banks steal when they print money, and I do support that educational work; but I feel strongly that their proposals, if accepted, would only further undermine a nation that once had the largest Empire the world has ever seen, but which has been in steady decline for nearly a century.

I think the essence of healing is emotional openness and motion.  You have to get, somehow, to places where you are hurt, then add motion.

As we move through life, many of us have our flow of action blocked, or constricted, or redirected, as an unconscious means of going around and avoiding emotional knots tied to traumas, large and small, which forced at some point a reaction of avoidance and forgetting (what I have called forgession, which is a more or less intentional forgetting).  The image I would use is a flow of water constricted by many partial dams and turns in the river.  Action is tied to emotion, which you will note has the word motion in it.  Less blocks, fewer bends, and you get more effective expressions of energy, of emotion, of action.

As an example, I would submit that anxiety is simple a very small dose of anger, directed at people who hurt us long ago.  It is both precautionary–a mild, highly diluted fight or flight response–and reactive to certain eternal moments that exist in us, certain places which NEVER CHANGE, certain situations that you can’t get over, not least because you can’t remember them, or remember them in a way which subtracts the honest emotions you felt.

The task is to feel those feelings, which we have done many times, but to add motion.  What Holotropic breathwork does, as an example, is first induce a state in which suppressed emotions are allowed to come up, but then through gradual changes in the music, adds motion.  You don’t know where the music is going, what is next, and you have to accept this.  This adds motion.

Or another example would be Barry McDonough’s 20 second response for panic attacks.  First, you accept the anxiety.  Second, you ask for MORE.  Finally, you add a 20 second countdown.  You ask it to do its worst, but in 20 seconds, no more.  The countdown, I realize, adds motion.  Where a panic attack is more or less falling into what feels like a never-ending spasm of terror and sense of incipient insanity, you break that spasm by adding motion, by adding time, by putting in on a line which you move along, one which has an end.  It’s a very clever system.

I think I’m getting close to figuring these things out.  One of my goals is to create an actually, consistently effective psychotherapy.  The Holotropic Breathwork is already invented, and already effective. What I feel, rightly or wrongly, is that I may be able to better systematize it, and better able to frame it cognitively such that it sees much wider use, which I feel could only benefit our society in pervasive and desirable ways.

I did actually watch the debate.  I like to deal, here, with deeper issues, but will allow myself a short break into the very temporal.  The following I posted on Yahoo, in response to this very partisan and in my view disingenuous editorial.

Obama is worth $10 million. He has NEVER been an average American. He
went to a high end prep school, and was educated at two elite
universities. He doesn’t care about ordinary Americans. His Energy
Secretary wants gas prices to be $10 a gallon. His pension fund invests
in the same companies Romney’s does.

The salient fact of the debate was that Obama has kept NONE of his major
promises. He did not get unemployment down. He did not cut the
deficit. He did not enact or even propose an immigration solution,
despite having majorities in both houses of Congress.

Obama is an empty suit. He is a windbag. He is an unprincipled
charlatan whose reelection will cause massive layoffs, skyrocketing
energy costs, a complete breakdown in our healthcare system, continued
foreign policy failures, and an unnecessarily diminished America.

Since I’m on the topic, I think it worth posting as well a quite remarkable quote from a former aide and supporter who knew him well, and who was caught in an unguarded moment, defending the President, but in such a way as to be very revealing:

“People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people. My analogy is that it’s like becoming Bill Gates without liking computers.”

As I posted a few days ago, I think the stages of mourning concept can be applied to life, to the proposition that ALL lives will contain pain and that this is inevitable, and even desirable.  Sadness and difficulty make us wiser and more GENUINELY compassionate.

I would submit that Sybaritic Socialists are stuck in the Bargaining stage. They don’t want to deal with anger or sadness, but can’t use denial (which in part is what the Hippy movement was about, using drugs to become functionally dead, as in Grateful Dead, and thus numb to the actual question they were being asked to answer) since they need some purpose for their lives.  They want to cut a deal with life.  They want to use self delusion as a means of avoiding the sadness and anger that attend actual emotional growth.  They want to remain morally and emotionally as “innocents”, as if that were possible absent more or less conscious choice.  They want to pretend this world is safe, or would be if we just did what everyone said.  They want to pretend hard choices are never needed, and that we can postpone all griefs and pains indefinitely.  All you have to do to get this deal is submit,  Merge into the herd.  Listen and do as you are told, and all will be well.  They are EAGER to sell their freedom, if the alternative is any quantity of suffering.

It is a truism that family businesses fail in the third generation.  The grandfather is serious and starts the business.  The son, being the father’s son, and having watched the business be built, is also serious, but not quite as much.  The grandson is flippant, since all he has ever known is success.

The Baby Boomers are grandchildren.  They are infantile, and they are actively ruining everything good in this country.

Cultural Sadeists, those who express and intend only evil in their politics, recognize the pain in life but they refuse to accept it.  They refuse to feel it.  Since they recognize a need for pain, they seek it in others.  This is the root of cruelty.

You have to be emotionally strong to live well.  You MUST be willing to allow unpleasant emotions to wash through you.  You can’t feel sorry for yourself, and you have to keep going.  This is the only path to Goodness.

I just edited the piece so the hyperlinks can be accessed, and altered the Guaranteed issue a bit.

I deleted all the other posts–I’m not completely sure why I posted them, since I don’t know how many readers I have–but in any event this is short.

Here is the link: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page25.html

It is 30 some-odd pages, but I have to say I think it is good work.  

I wonder how many recognize that view.  It played an important role in American history.

I watched “The Avengers” for the fourth time today, and had a thought: it really is a pity that Captain America was put to sleep during the Communist era.  Obviously, the Left did and continues to do a good job of lying about the INTRINSIC evil of coerced egalitarianism.  That is what they do: they lie.  Long practice makes expert.

But interestingly, as I pointed out somewhere, the very first Iron Man was located in Vietnam, at the beginning of the war.  In it, Iron Man defeats a model of an NVA terrorist leader. 

Marvel knew then what was subsequently forgotten as a result of the diligent efforts of leftist “scrubber”: that the war consisted in vicious men infiltrating from the North, terrorizing small villages until they agreed to support them with food and troops, and a systematic expansion from these bases of assassination and terror directed nearly ENTIRELY against civilian targets.  Women were raped and killed in front of their husbands.  Young girls were tied to trees to die of thirst and exposure. Flame throwers were used against grass and wood huts.  Village and government leaders were shot in the streets.

All of the evils that Captain America fought in World War Two, mythically, were amply present in the two shooting wars we fought with the Communists in Korea and Vietnam, but TO THIS VERY DAY people do not understand how awful Communism was and is.  It is really shocking.  Obviously, I deal with the whys and hows of this nearly daily, but even now it shocks me how complacent those who should know better are in countenancing and even defending evil.

Even today, the Left is trying to portray the take-over of the Middle East by Fascist thugs as somehow good.  Men are being crucified.  Little girls are being beaten, or, alternately, married off to 50 year old men when they are 10, in the tradition of the “Prophet”.  Women accused of adultery are stoned.  None of this is good.  It is “unholy” in a very formal sense.  These people WILL be punished when they die, because they KNOW on some level they are committing evil acts.

I believe in God, and I believe that He put within us an innate sense of right and wrong.  What undermines that sense is EFFORT.  You have to work at it.  You have to adopt an ideology which allows you to turn off your intuition, your own judgement, in favor of a rigid behavioral code.  Prepubescent girls should not be forced to have old men humping them.  No one can defend this.

But the Left does, typically by turning a blind eye. 

The root of this word is “content”, which means to contain.  Happiness is what you are filled with.  It is an internal artifact, and one which need not be tied to outside world (although self evidently I do not dispute that some external circumstances are easier to find happy than others.)

I ran into Sam Harris’s profile on Facebook today, where he was more or less mocking a neurosurgeon who had a very powerful Near Death Experience. I offered to debate him, but of course the likelihood is close to zero.I know these people don’t REALLY debate, they don’t REALLY use reason, if by reason we include a willingness to evaluate impartially all data.  I know this from long experience.  They don’t bend.

It did occur to me though that the tactic for me would not be presenting absolutely, categorically true and irrefutable proof.  They always have a way out.  What would however be easy would be pointing out that their views are not based upon empiricism.  Given that their belief system and self understanding rests FIRMLY on empiricism, this makes them hypocrites of the worst sort.  This would be easy enough to show.

As one example, take William Crookes .  He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, and one of the most prominent scientists of his generation.  Yet, when he carefully investigated medium Daniel Dunglas Home–who was the first person to be called “psychic”–and found his power genuine, he was vilified.

When a scientist does an experiment, do other scientists take his word for it?  Of course not.  They try to, what:? REPLICATE it.  How many scientists tried to replicate Crookes work prior to denouncing it?  None.  In what other field of science are apparently successful experiments done by qualified professionals not subjected to efforts at replication?  These scientists, at a minimum, could have attended a Home seance.  He took all comers, and did his work in well lit rooms he had not previously visited.  If you read about what he did, and ponder the sheer quantity of witnesses, you have to conclude that it nothing short of a scientific crime that so few investigated him.

That was not actually the main point I wanted to make, so after my foray into channeling Arlo Guthrie, let me move on to Part Two.

I have long felt that atheists have a different vibe to them, as well, a certain emotional detachment, a certain machine-like-ness, a certain feel of metal.  It is not a strong, but a subtle thing.  As William James pointed out right at the beginning of his Pragmatism lectures, your sense of the world and your place in it is by far the most important element of who you are, and such people at root have to admit they are dirt that exists in apparent consciousness for a short time, then disappears for all eternity.

This emotional aspect got me to thinking about how they handle emotions, then it hit me: I think dogmatists pick their stance, their form, their religion based upon what emotions it enables them to suppress.

Think about it: no dogmatist of any stripe can claim to be rational, since by definition they are unwilling to change their views in response to new evidence.  Consistently, of course, the strategy is to avoid new evidence, to make this fact less clear.

If you believe in God, you believe in your connection with the universe and your fellow humans.  If you do not, then you are alone.  Some people like that idea, that they have private chamber that is theirs alone, in which no spirit, no psychic, no transpersonal anything can penetrate.  Their mind may consist solely of electrical impulses and chemical reactions, but it is THEIRS.

As I see it, spiritual freedom consists in allowing a constant wind to blow out of you into the world.  It does not blow constantly, or always in the same direction.  At some level, we have to reject all fixity in order to follow and grow it.  Buddhist monks wandered, to facilitate this.  I would argue that if you don’t interfere with this flow, you can be anywhere and doing anything, and grow equally.

But some people don’t want that flow. They don’t want that connection.  They don’t want to grant certain emotions of pain deep within them access to light and air.  This is why they reject so violently people who are religious.  As I said, I have debated many atheists, and a great many of them border on the sadistic.  They know full well that the ONLY thing that gets some people through life is their religious beliefs, yet they DELIGHT it attacking them and their faith.  They invest enormous energy in it.  I wonder if they are attacking their own vulnerable selves, that lie buried beneath a facade of apparent rationality, one heavily conditioned by emotional attachments they cannot manage because they cannot recognize.

This idea of flow is key.  I am sure of it.  What stops the flow is bad, and what facilitates it is good.  Atheism stops it, so it is bad.  People like Sam Harris have caused a lot of suffering, not least among those who admire him.  What he has done for them is rationalize shelving unwanted pressures and failings, angers and sadnesses, into a package that purports to be perfectly tranquil, perfectly reasonable, and fully compatible with the best ideas of science.

It is a lie.