Month: February 2013

I am in an internal space, non-verbal space, so I’m not posting much.  I have been thinking/emoting a lot about this process of trauma.  It is INTERESTING that the same experience that might permanently scar one person won’t even be remembered by another.  What makes the difference?

I would propose it is your digestive capability, your processing capability, your ability to integrate.  Thus, I propose four grades of trauma:

1) Life trauma: this you can integrate into an existing sense of self with little modification.  This would include the death at a normal age of a parent.

2) Life trauma that forces an improvement in your sense of self.  Example would be Marine Boot Camp.  Most people leave feeling a part of something larger than themselves, more energetic, and more disciplined.  War, similarly, has this effect on many people; others it breaks–see number 4.

3) Life trauma that forces a degradation in your sense of self.  An example would be a bad marriage, in which to keep things together you have to sacrifice parts of yourself that are important.

4) Life trauma you can’t integrate at all, like premature sexual experience/molestation, or “combat fatigue”.  This goes into a hidden, timeless place which you can’t remember well, but which frequently sends out signals in all sorts of weird ways that it is still there and unprocessed.

Some errors are so egregious they take a Harvard education to rationalize, and a Phd to repeat.

There is no such thing as gun control: there is only CITIZEN control.

I have a Facebook friend who is quite different than me politically, but who for certain reasons I have always tried to respond to more gently than I normally would.  Here is what I wrote in response to his most recent call for increased gun controls (note both that we ALREADY have gun controls, and that our basic position is best expressed as the fight for continued gun freedom).  I doubt it convinced him, but he “Liked” it, so I suspect it did succeed in convincing him that at least my position is not definitionally one of being callous. 

{}. my reading of the actual, empirical evidence is that guns are used ten times by honest people to protect themselves from harm for every one time they are used in the commission of crimes. One statistic will show the pattern: when Concealed Carry laws are passed, homicide rates go DOWN, by a national average of 8.5%. Why this would be, should be obvious enough. Criminals vastly prefer being the only ones armed. This means that, statistically, 8.5% of the murders in all States that do NOT have relatively lax Concealed Carry Laws were PREVENTABLE. This means the living breathing human beings, with families, kids, parents, jobs are murdered in these States simply because guns–like all tools, and they are tools–can be abused. The salient question, though, is: what public policy has the longest, best track record at preventing unnecessary death and violence? Yes, people use guns for suicide. Yes, accidents happen. But the evidence is that the quality of life is best when gun ownership is easy, and worse when it is not. Only 4% of guns used in crimes were purchased legally. Ponder that fact, then add the fact that at the moment there are well over a 100 million guns in circulation, many of them never registered. The practical, empirical, and moral approaches to this question all lead, in my mind, to the belief that we would be better served with MORE guns, and more places to carry them. I am compassionate. I do want what is best for my fellow humans. And after giving this a LOT of thought, these are the policy positions I have adopted as most likely to foster peace, and the well being of our nation.

In this experiment, which is easily replicated–as shown by the Mythbusters link following–measurements are made which are inexplicable within the dominant contemporary models of life.

Please watch this clip.  It is just over 8 minutes, but powerful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGRluepFwdg

Here is a modern replication of this experiment, done some 40 years after the original experiments, but with a Stoelting 22600, the same model Backster used.  It is just over five minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fStmk7e9lJo

In this Mythbusters episode, you will note that they start not just as skeptics, but believing that the very idea is farcical.  In the end, though, as they say, “it’s hard to dispute the ink.”

Watch their reactions, though: having found something potentially very profound, they more or less shake it off and move on.  This has been the history of reactions to Backsters work, which is a shame.  People have a hard time seeing the large.  As Churchill put it, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”

Please do me, yourself, and your children a favor: share this post with absolutely everyone you know who may benefit from it, but PARTICULARLY with anyone you may know in the life sciences.  My goal is that some brave soul somewhere, ideally with tenure, will replicate this experiment in a formal academic setting and get it published in a journal of the sort that will make this work hard to ignore.

PLEASE do what you can to make this happen.  Thanks!!!!

Most leftists–all, if we only include actual and latent Cultural Sadeists–lack a coherent meaning system based on a sincere sense of connection with others outside their political involvement–which is to say personality involvement based on power and conformity.

Obama does not believe in God.  He does not relate to or care about poor people.  He does not relate to or really care about poor black kids in single parent homes living in poverty.  Nor does he truly hate the wealthy, per se.  He rubs elbows with them daily.  Nor does he oppose privilege.  He enjoys it every day, and works to build it for his supporters in a thoroughly nepotistic way.

What he believes in is distinction: he and his against everyone else.  He KNOWS, based on long experience, that the invocation of hate can win him power and all that goes with it.

Yet, we ARE connected, and it can be shown, empirically.

For me, and here is the crux of this post, the most important thing we can do is generalize awareness of Cleve Backsters work, and do everything possible to get it incorporated into the modern life sciences.  It will work to erode atheism, and that in turn will work to erode the ENTIRETY of the Leftist project.  I truly believe this.  ALL of it is based, ultimately. on flawed metaphysics. 

Personally, I have had cards printed up, and have decided to start sending letters, physical letters, to biology professors, challenging them to try and replicate Backster’s work.  I am also going to create a one page summary of my economics plan, and challenge economics professors to consider it.  This, too, has the potential to radically alter our political landscape.

There is a need to maintain the battle in the center.  We should not let up at all.  Yet, we also need to understand that you can’t win an argument.  You can overpower someone with reason and fact, but that doesn’t mean they will change their mind.  They just hate you more.  A very special set of circumstances has to be in place for people to more or less grant someone else moral or intellectual superiority, and one key element is usually the ability to do so without a perceived loss of dignity.

Working on the metaphysical level–which is what this is–enables that, in my view.

I will summarize the ideas in my next post, and encourage those with the inclination to share it with any folks they know involved in the life sciences in any form, but particularly plant biologists.  Our goal is to get findings published in a well regarded journal that quite simply are inconsistent with materialistic atheism, and thus the dominant thrust of our age.

I rarely use this word, quite consciously.  Its meaning has been overpowered by overuse.

Still.. . .

I spent the last week doing (W)holotropic breathwork, and came back with some little tingle in me that might be love.  I look at people, and I see the scars, the hidden wounds, the worries, uncertainties, constrictions of motion.  If I do this long enough, I think I will come very close to being able to read people’s minds, without using psychic abilities at all.

And I can look people in the eye and say without words “your wounds do not scare me.”  Many people–particularly very wounded people, of whom I met a few this week–have throughout their lives seen fear in people’s eyes when they tried to share their experience.  This song expresses this nicely, and the video compliments this well: Lyle Lovett’s “Pontiac” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEk7_Y4JRA0  (I will add, that his wife won’t stop talking because his eyes make her uncomfortable, but neither of them know what to do about it.  Such is the human condition.)

I rarely quote Gandhi either.  It is cliche.  I put few people on pedestals.  Yet: “be the change you want to see in the world”.  Do you need comforting?  Do you feel sad?  Then comfort others, and be happy.  They are like you.  No different.  The chain must be broken.  The cross must be borne.

Politically–one of my preferred means of expressing what might be termed love–it seems to me that we have developed a very vocal, engaged group of conservatives.  Even on the HuffPo, there is quite a bit of dissent.  I see many well reasoned, factually congruent arguments across the internet, which did not seem to be the case 4 years ago.  There is no reason to believe it will subside.  How can it?  All the arguments are valid, and things are getting worse.  Love for our children, and respect for those who came before dictates a fight.

For me personally though, it seems like my highest and best use is in writing, which in turn necessitates reading.  I want to write a book on my economic plan, and I want to develop a church, both of which will take time that is probably NOT better spent arguing with fools on the internet, or even typing here.  I lack discipline, so I may well continue to post here often, but my plan is to try to redirect that energy into the less immediately satisfying task of reading books.

I do also have a plan to start writing professors of biology and economics, which I will deal with in the next post for simplicity.

Beginners mind is unconscious skill. (OK: not so bonmotish, but hell, I like it).

Misery is often a means but never an end.

I’ve been off in the desert, literally and figuratively, the past week.  I’ll have more to say soon enough if anyone has missed my public ideosyncrasies.

This was a popular phrase with Ayn Rand.  I can’t remember if I’ve posted on this, but if so, I apologize.  Usually I can come up with a slight variation in how I repeat myself.

The only reason to say this is in response to people saying “A is NOT A”.  Who were these people?  Philosophically, I don’t know who she thought she was responding to, but psychologically I would submit that this was a response to her narcissistic mother.

Narcissists lie pathologically.  They confuse the border between themselves and others.  This is particularly damaging in the relationship between a mother and a child, particularly a daughter.  They will feel something, and assume you are feeling it too, when you are not.  This leads to all sorts of issues with emotional development.  The child become unable to accurately label its own feelings, and tends to doubt their truth outright.  They tend to avoid emotions.

This was certainly the case with Rand, who was obsessively, compulsively intellectual, spending many hours every day for many years talking in the abstract with her coterie of admirers. Her only genuine spontaneity seems to have come when she would celebrate something by breaking out records from her childhood and dancing to what she called “Tiddlywink” music, in what seems to have been a genuine but happy regression to some happy periods of her life.

To counter the ill effects of such a childhood, you have to develop a strong will, and the ability to enforce borders and boundaries.  You have to be willing to call a lie a lie.

This is what Rand was doing, in my view.  A is A means “I will not accept covert attacks on my personhood, and my understanding of truth which flows from it.”  She was very dogmatic.  On many occasions she banished those unwilling to meekly accept her version of truth.  She was rigid, because becoming that way had been a requirement for her psychic survival.

Now, I have planned for some time a more comprehensive treatment of her ideas, but have not been successful in my time management to the extent I would have liked.  I have been spending a lot of time trying to sort my own issues out.  But I will read Galt’s speech, Rourke’s speech (sp?), and rescan her biography, and the plot synopses. 

I am in no way trying to minimize the value of her contributions.  For a period of time, hers was virtually the only voice speaking out against Collectivism.

And we need to be clear: Narcissism is a FOUNDATIONAL psychological element in socialism.  It is the conceit that the needs of one person are equal to those of another.  It is by definition a cultural blending that diminishes the individual both philosophically and practically.  It is the creed of malignant mothers demonically feeding on their children.  It is the creed of zombies and vampires.  This is the heart, even if many nice people are fooled into thinking that their politics is a way of improving the world.

I will often see things being uncovered in the dirt when I am having my deeper, more expository dreams.  Our brain’s silt of forgetting covers up so much.  The other day I had a dream like that, but it was recovering a memory of my grandfather’s.

This raises an interesting question: if you can remember someone else’s memories, who are you?  For me, the feeling was one of relief.  I could see THERE, there is where it started.  And that memory was clearly part of me.  His experience became the experience of my parent, and thus my own.  We all live in long lines stretching across unfathomably large expanses of time.  And yet all of that is still here, now.  I exist the way I do because of a decision someone made a million years ago.

As I recall (and I recall mistakenly sometimes) Nietszche considered “the Asian religions” (in roughly that broad stroke, although I’m sure he would have known some Sanskritists and Sinologists) to be pessimistic because they viewed life as drudgery, and the task to escape it, to escape Samsara.  Now, he was an atheist, so this life is all he got, so logically he HAD to make the best of it, which is how he came up with living the same life over and over and being OK with it. (One wonders: is he doing this in some otherworldly sphere now? It’s an interesting thought).

But if we drop the materialism, what we get is the possibility of experiential EXPANSION.  When you lose your “self”, you are not shrinking.  You are not dying.  That is what your brain tells you, since its job is to differentiate things, to make sure you know this is this and that is that, and the two are not the same.

But experientially, in the same way perhaps you are overcome with emotions when going into a splendid and beautiful new room for the first time, or hearing music that just transports you somewhere else, growing into a larger self is a pleasurable, exciting process.  You are not losing: you are gaining.  You are becoming larger. Your perceptual power is increasing.  Your flexibility of motion is increasing.  The best positive emotions you have access to are being refined in quality and intensity.