Month: January 2013

The business of government is producing more government.  This process will continue until blocked by the will of the people.  The law will slow it down, but not stop it.

Yesterday, I thought I had screwed up, and that my mistake was going to cost me 4 hours of work.  I paused to consider.  In the process I wound up wandering around a huge construction site, that was to me in any event quite interesting.  If it’s not obvious, I like exploring.  I don’t need to do anything dramatic, just change scenery enough to SEE something new, think something new, create for myself a new experience.

Anyway, wandering around it occurred to me that even in failure you can find things that are interesting. Curiosity is a type of excitement that goes on and on and on.  It’s not quite a purpose in life–although I think it could serve as one, and a better one than many I see–but it certainly adds energy to life.

And it hit me that even in zero sum games, that you lose, there are things you can find that are interesting.  And it occurred to me that that fact can take all the sting of loss out of the thing.  You get the excitement of victory, ideally, and the consolation of learning something in the worst case.  Put another way, no excitable, curious person, can ever lose, finally.

That’s a good thought, I think.

My next bumper sticker–to cover up the last Republican who didn’t win–will say “Be Relentlessly Curious”.  There is so much value in it. Imagine if all Americans were genuinely curious, genuinely interested in asking questions and hearing answers.  It would change the landscape of our nation quickly.

Oh, and I solved my problem.  I just needed a bit of space to think it through.   To the point here, actually, solving it meant thinking a new thought, and discovering something I did not know.

What if you grew up without a mother, or anyone else to comfort and mother you?  You would have to learn self comforting.  It may seem counterintuitive, but I think people really can learn to say the things to themselves, and do the things for themselves that mothers normally do.

I think of the Buddhist monks wandering India–or the Sannyasin, or any other itinerant monk:  they get cold.  They get hungry, tired.  They must sometimes despair.  What comforts them?  Their creed and practice.  Their creed and practice serve the role of companion and mother, or wife.

Many mystics have spoken of God as a lover.  Lovers comfort, do they not?  They ease pain.

I would submit that the ESSENCE of spirituality is the facilitation of emotional growth which enables people to live happily alone and in difficulty because they have learned how to comfort themselves, or to take it in non-ordinary ways.

Stanislov Grof has talked about how he feels, based on very long term experience dealing with people in altered states of consciousness, that the birth experience is very important in influencing later life.  It remains with people until they process it.  Difficult births lead to certain personality impairments that can only be healed with what I tend to term ecstatic states, states in which the inner healer is enabled to function properly, in terms of qualitative reorganization of the personality gestalt.

This led me to wonder: in cultures where ecstatic states are rare or absent, do people unconsciously blame the mothers?  Is the inability to process these states a source of misogyny?

I think of Islam, where virtually everything is banned.  They don’t like singing, dancing, painting people, drinking.  They prize sobriety over all else.  Given a percentage of the population that will have undergone traumatic births, how can they ever process them?  They can’t.

Conversely, it would seem to me that cultures which value femininity would tend to have many more ways of processing feelings, deep experiences, of releasing deep down pent up tensions in some way OTHER than violence.

First off, errata:  I’m not a huge Bocephus fan–I like his father a lot more–but even I know it is whiskey bent and hell bound.  Also, I did not address the putative topic in my last post.  I’ll get to it eventually, but not tonight.  I’ve managed to tire myself again.

The other day I was in a Half Price Books store, and looked at the wall of movies and music, and thought “that is a wall of sensations, of vicarious experiences”.  That is what we buy, isn’t it? Experiences?

But following up on the point I made yesterday, it is SOMEONE ELSE’S experience.  You are watching.  They are doing. They are out there, and you are in there with them.  Some part of you, I feel, never leaves.

This is habit forming.  It is a way of interacting with the world that you don’t see, that is hidden.  After all, you swerve to avoid obstacles in the road, laugh with your friends, smell the grass when you are mowing the lawn.

But something is missing.  You are being carried.  You are not taking turns in your interactions with the universe.  In a room filled with light and life, you only see scenes from another room, far, far away.

Over the last day or so I’ve been swiveling around this seeming dichotomy of reason and emotion, of abstraction and concrete experience.

I have said from time to time that thoughts are machines.  Reason is the systematic use of thought.  It is, we might say, the MECHANICAL use of thought.  It is the building of structures that in theory, in the abstract, in their ideal forms, DO NOT CHANGE.  A squared plus B squared always equals C squared.

Plainly, reason machines are useful in building material things, objects for use, like tractors, and test tubes.

But reason cannot be made an end in itself.  It is a transitional device, a bridge from an A worth visiting to a B worth visiting.  Making it an end in itself is living on the bridge.  You live nowhere.  You are not alive to the real world. to the many forms of “weather” surrounding you.

The very first act of abstraction is to eliminate emotion.  You must be clinical, detached.  That’s fine, but then what?  The process becomes habit.  The emotional energy grows undetected. The disrupting passions erode sanity in the dark, unseen, because the perceptual filter of such people screens them out.  They are in their self estimation dispassionate, scientific, objective, and in reality horror stricken by the core lack of meaning in their lives, which they feel to the extent they put all their eggs in the basket of reason.

We can talk to the universe, and it answers.  That is where God is.  God is not an abstraction, or a logical puzzle, but a reality that is ONLY open to those who can process the world as other than detached observers.

Life interacts with life.  Machines do not interact with anything.  They are built for a purpose, exist for a purpose, and are not open to influence, only reconstruction by another agency.

Socialism is the logical end of logic.  It is society as machine, with all the gears well manufactured to fit with all the other gears.  It is abstraction brought into reality, dispassion expressed through an explosion of rage masquerading as something else.

Nice video.  Salient points: violent crime and homicides have dropped by 50% in the last twenty years.  Violent crime is 3.5 times higher, now, today, in England than it is here.  Put another way, Brits are much less safe, even though they are less likely to die from the violence visited on them.  Virtually all our crime is concentrated in cities.  If we cut out that crime, our crime rates would be equal to or lower than the countries the Left wants to compare us to.  Finally, only 3.5 %–roughly one in 30–homicides are committed with rifles, and the AR-15 and assault rifles generally are a subset of that.  The data is unambiguous that more guns equals less crime.

This is a set of three ideas, that as I contemplate them after what is for me a long day (I count anything longer than 12 hours as long, even though I know full well that by military and farm standards I’m a pussy) I think I am going to run together for simplicity.

First idea, which is a big one.  Yesterday, I got up, did my stretching, did my lacrosse balls . . .

[I need to do another post on them–hell, I may not: get 3 lacrosse balls, duct tape two together, and the smallest soccer ball you can find.  Use the single lacrosse ball on your traps, by leaning into the ball on a wall until it hurts.  Hold until it gets soft.  Repeat in another tight spot.  Do it on your shoulders, lats, chest (theres a spot just under your collar bone that will be interesting), your feet, your hips.  Then lay on it, with no weight at first, then after a few sessions whatever you can stand–I use a 40 lb. weight vest–and just find the tender spots, and stay with it till it gets soft.  The double ball you put on your spine, starting in your lower back.  Do a crunch of sorts, or whatever it takes to get weight on it.  Do many positions, and work your way up your spine.  Use the soccer ball for your hip flexors and upper thigh.  Doing this work, you will likely notice many memories and images popping up spontaneously.  I suspect that most people keep tension in some spots for years, even decades, and releasing it causes perhaps not accurate memories, but ones evocative of something long ago].

. . .then my Kum Nye exercises (I like to scent the room with rose essential oil.  Yes, I am heterosexual, decidedly so.  No, I do not have a satchel or a hairdresser.).  I was going to do some pushups and pilates, but decided to lay down again.  Some inner voice told me to.  As I lay sleeping/dozing, it hit me that there is a part of our brains which cannot tell the difference between TV and reality, with the result that many of us treat the real world, unconsciously, as a somewhat inferior version of TV. This spot is right in the middle of our existence.

The importance of this, I realized, is that existence is interactive, whereas artificial reality is not.  I realized this driving into a sunrise, and realized that for perhaps the first time ever I felt a PART of the scene in front of me.  It was not external to me.  The sun saw me even as I saw it, in some weird way.  We were connected.  I was a part of the context in a deep way of everything in front of me, in much the same way we are told Native Americans and other cultures looked at reality.  Those trees, those clouds: they are not fully “out there”.

TV dulls this.  Even books dull this.  Both act as intermediaries to experience.  Both give out, but do not return.  And I think living in either kills or numbs some part of our spirit.

Second point:  there is a violence in abstraction.  I have said this before, but as I contemplate it, reason itself consists in removing oneself from “flows” like water.  It consists in trying (I say “it”, and have in mind common sense–but in my view flawed–conceptions as iterated in modern scientism and socialism) to make all the currents of life stop, so they can be catalogued and analyzed.  It is like drying the ocean to see what is in it.

This is the emotional reaction Scientistic apostles have to RESEARCH, concrete empirical data that suggest the primacy of connection. of flow, and the illusory nature of object-hood.  It destroys their whole conceit.

It is sometimes logical to be illogical.   Specifically, what I have in mind is the NEED for emotional release, to sometimes allow oneself to completely lose control in whatever promptings are suggested in an ecstatic trance.  We have to balance the so-called Apollonian with the Dionysian.  I have said the before, but never seen it so clearly.  Quite literally, an overabundance of detachment leads to attachment.  Releasing emotional barriers is CONDUCIVE to the effective use of reason, and not at all an impediment to it.

I have in mind, of course, AT LEAST Grof Holotropic Breathwork, which is a time and space delimited experience that facilitates the eruption of whatever is truly deeply on your mind.  You can choose to attend.  You can choose to start, choose to stop.  You can attend once, or many times.  It is up to you.  But the experience is easy to induce, and should in my view become an integral part of any future global culture.

On that note, I did want to note that I have been searching for an alternative word to anarchy, since as all self proclaimed anarchists will tell you, they don’t want chaos.  I am of course sympathetic to the aim, even if most of them have done something close to no thinking as to how to bring it about.  To my mind, it is self evident that as the morality of a group or nation improves, the need for governance decreases.  So the logical task is to prevent the fucking bastards in the Academy and Wall Street from ruining our planet, while working to build increased moral virtue across the land.

Then I realized I already have the word: Telearchy.  That will work for a group of people of any size who have a shared goal, which I have repeatedly suggested ought to be qualitative joy, although eudaimonia would work well as well. 

Finally, since I have drinking to do and just realized my brain is full, I wanted to comment on the importance of curiosity.  As I realized yesterday, the HABIT of being interested is in itself something which will keep anyone, no matter their metaphysics or quality of their philosophy, moving forward.  Curiosity is reaching out to the world, touching it, interacting with it.  And as I noted several (some number) posts ago, when we reach out to the world through the sensations of interest and pleasure, we are reaching out to God through His creation.

If you eat a good meal and truly savor it with curiosity and attention, that is worship, in my view.  And it doesn’t need to be a simple meal.  Why not a great meal?  But my point is that a truly curious person, someone truly interacting with the whole of their perceptual being with their world, would also be able to enjoy a simple meal too.  I just want to note that I don’t think God has any desire to deny us pleasure on this earth, if we enjoy it with gratitude.

I will add as well that this whole concept of “mindfulness” works in concept, but it has never worked in reality for me.  You know, the whole “wash the dishes mindfully, etc.”  I can’t do it.  What I CAN do is enjoy the work, and in particular enjoy doing the work well and efficiently.  But there is nothing wrong with getting a broom that feels good in your hands, or selecting a very pleasant dish soap, or tableware you enjoy looking at, etc.

That is about half of what went on in my head today.  I just can’t contemplate the rest right now.  It will appear eventually, unless it doesn’t. 

Whiskey BOUND!!!  (but not hell-bent, if anyone was asking).

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/28-12-2012/123335-americans_guns-0/

He’s right. 

http://www.eutimes.net/2012/12/clinton-injured-us-navy-seal-killed-in-secret-us-mission-to-iran/

Add this: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/12/30/us-plane-reportedly-made-emergency-landing-at-iranian-airport-3-weeks-ago/?test=latestnews

The planes are different, but the timing is nearly exact with Hillary’s “fall”: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/12/15/167334538/hillary-clinton-falls-suffers-concussion

Dec. 15th the announcement is made.  Sixteen days from Dec. 30 is the 14th.  She does not attend John Kerry’s nomination.  The “suicide” announcement is made just before Christmas, but everyone involved in this thing would be sworn to secrecy.  It’s hard to get a dead man killed in action, and it doesn’t make sense to kill other people in a plane crash, so this must be what these geniuses came up with (if the story is true, which of course remains unproven and largely undocumented).

Let’s just play a bit with these facts.  What if the unnamed “intelligence source” on Benghazi was really RUSSIAN intelligence, perhaps operating under a false flag? They don’t want a war.  They don’t want to lose Syria.  And OF COURSE they have photos of the weapons shipments, which they could release if they so chose.

Are they using the threat of releasing their evidence of a massive coverup in Benghazi to weaken Obama’s support of the Syrian Islamists, and to put pressure on him to cut a deal openly with the Iranians?

Interesting possibility.  I don’t think that would be a bad play on their part, although of course there are worlds of details I’m not privy to.

Actually I will add that Russian intelligence DOES seem to be openly behind the story on the top.