Month: September 2013

First time you’ve seen that word, I bet.  I don’t know what it is about neologisms, but they amuse me.

My point: if, as I believe, all true healing and personal growth comes from within each individual, the only possible role for a teacher is helping that individual learn how to help themselves; and I think the better teachers–and here I have in mind as a prospective candidate a man about whom I know almost nothing as far as his personal life, Tarthang Tulku–instinctively realize that if they are not careful, they will become the focus of attention, and that the progress of people will be slowed if not halted outright because they are seeking answers from him, and not from themselves.  As far as Tarthang Tulku, he has given us a large tool set, building materials, and a blueprint.  What else can you ask for?  The rest is up to us.

As well, I think once you come to feel that the ideal is “out there”, to some extent it becomes unrealizable.  The extent of your possible freedom has been curtailed.  The better model is that it is in you, and simply, at the moment, hidden.

Obviously, there are always fools willing to lead fools, but that is a complex sadomasochistic dance that has nothing to do with emotional or spiritual liberation.  Can I say “a fool and his freedom are soon parted”?

I was sitting doing my Kum Nye exercises, and a feeling came upon me that has been increasingly regular lately, which is both that I am growing emotionally AND that this is a formal system for doing it.  People say all the time “I need to work on myself”, or they need to do such and such for “personal growth”.  I am all for Outward Bound or NOLS, or BOSS (I want to do that one). I’m all for, up to a point, sitting down and telling your problems to a shrink.  I don’t think it is a good method for healing injury, but it seems to work for some people.

But what I am doing with this Kum Nye practice is literally scheduling a time for me to do something which I expect, based on experience, will allow my emotions to flow more evenly, to generate increased calm and satisfaction, and which I have every reason to hope will one day allow quite refined states to flow through me.

Here is what Tarthang Tulku has to say: When we truly use our senses, every part of the body becomes alive
and healthy – mentally and emotionally we become fully awake. We
discover we can experience ecstatic beauty at any moment, as if we were
always hearing
beautiful music or seeing the finest works of art. We are even capable
of healing ourselves, for this relaxation quickens a feeling-tone that
itself becomes a self-generating massage, a system of self-nurturance
that expands and develops.

To be blunt, I think I have a pretty good BS detector.  I have been lied to many times, and I think I am reasonably good at spotting sketchy people and practices.

What I have experienced in my own practice, though, has born these claims out.

What I think happens with many people who are suffering from some form of emotional trauma (perhaps I should say, that is more than normal–or better yet, since we all experience trauma and need to to grow as people–UNPROCESSED trauma).  Start over: What happens for many people who are suffering from unprocessed trauma, undigested trauma, is they look for comfort somewhere. 

Drugs, sex, music and booze are always good candidates in the short term, but they have sizable downsides.  So you get into “spirituality”.  These are the ex-hippies chanting OM in the ashram.  They are the flaky New Age types who collect crystals (I should actually be honest and say I did have a powerful reaction to Scolecite crystal once, but only once) and obsess about astrology.

You talk to them, and there doesn’t seem to be a there there.  They are not actually following a spiritual path because they CAN”T until they process all the experiences that are frozen, glued, stuck in the mud inside of them, and their very practice prohibits the sort of open, casual, relaxed but focused exploration needed.  They also lack the technology.

I would submit that perhaps the first obstacle to a spiritual path is the believe that life is supposed to be easy, or that following a spiritual path will necessarily make life’s burdens lighter.  For some period of time, it may make them worse.  It is not pleasant accessing things you had neatly hidden away, locked from consciousness.  But you have to clean house to even START.  This is my firm conviction.  I myself have not even started.  On my best days I am getting faint whiffs of what a good beginning might feel like.

But I think once people are willing to do the work–and again there are countless people who profit from helping you postpone this work–they lack a good method.  I have lacked a good method.  Kum Nye is a good method.  I have done courses in Yoga, I’ve done Zazen, mantra meditation, “sitting”, and the like.  None of them hold a candle to this work.  Not even close.  Not in the same city, much less zip code.

Tarthang Tulku (who incidentally is apparently a big of a recluse, and who certainly is not in it for the fame or money) says, apparently in congruence with Buddhists texts, that Relaxation, Mindfulness, and Concentration are three different things, and that what would be an appropriate practice if you had already mastered, say, relaxation, is not if you are still struggling with that entry level barrier.  You are not only wasting your time (and this is my interpretation now), but making things worse.

Here again is a link to the programs. 

Actually, here are some free programs.

Try it.  Stick with it long enough to get results.  There could be no gift POSSIBLE greater than the ability to generate deep satisfaction at every moment, and that is the goal.  Actually, it likely gets deeper than that, since Nirvana is the end goal, but would that not be much, much, much farther than 99% of humanity ever gets?

Oh, I had an analogy too.  Growing feels like turning sideways to my life.  I was trying to figure that out.  Consider a giant cone, and that your life is traversing one level of the cone at a certain level.  You have a rut, and you go around and around and around, never looking up, and only occasionally looking down.  You understand down, since we all know people worse off or crazier than us (if you don’t, it’s you); but up is something too slippery to keep in mind too long.

Kum Nye is like looking up, and stepping up, to a higher groove, raising the quality of your experience. 

One encounters relatively early in the educational process the “nature versus nurture” debate, and it tends to get framed as if one side or the other COULD be most right in principle.  I see nothing USEFUL in framing it this way.  Whenever you see dichotomous thinking, you are usually seeing facile, clumsy, heavy handed, emotionally detached thinking. I say emotionally detached, because it is increasingly clear to me that good thinking involves good feeling, open feeling.  If you are emotionally constricted, so too will be your thinking. 

[Richard Dawkins is an excellent example.  He is a dogmatic bully who claims in principle to value free thinking and scientific skepticism, but who in point of fact has dedicated his life to advancing an empirically wrong, and morally pernicious world view.  He spoke out recently about how mild pedophilia was not a bad thing,  I think he has some serious underlying emotional issues which he has not only not processed, but in repressing which he has made a career for himself, and won the admiration of uncritical thinkers everywhere.]

Be all that as it may, our task, the goal of our thinking, ought to be to figure out how to build a better society.  To build a better society, you build better individuals.  This amounts to developing emotional and then mental health.  Put in a more felicitous way, it amounts to developing methods people are encouraged to follow which we know as scientists will lead to optimal outcomes.  Nobody “does” anything to anybody.  That is what socialists and utopian bullies do.  We create an environment and an opportunity.  The environment is created through political and economic freedom, and the opportunity through freedom of action and conscience.

I am meandering.  I do that sometimes.  Let us take a concrete example, the ghettos.  A black kid born in the ghetto is some large multiple more likely to kill or be killed, be put in jail, suffer a variety of mental and physical health ailments, suffer from addiction, etc.  You know the drill.  We all do.  We just live in nice places, and forget how perhaps 1 in 15 Americans lives.

Are these outcomes their fault?  Yes and no.  To take a specific example, you can’t just tell these kids to get a job.  First, there aren’t many jobs available to them with the skill sets they typically bring to the interview.  They are in many cases worth less than the Minimum Wage, at least until they get trained up.  The perceived lack of a way forward, and in many cases the reality of a lack of a way forward, readily breeds frustration and violence.

Further, black people are just not as smart as white people, on average.  IQ tests do a good job of measuring things like the abstract ability to anticipate outcomes, to perform symbolic operations, and in my understanding persons of African ancestry typically score about 15 points lower than white people, which is quite significant.

This is a practical problem.  You cannot expect the same pay if you are not as smart as other people.  Is this their fault, though?  Their birth certainly isn’t, but it’s unclear how much of this is mutable, and sensitive to the unstable and violent places they grow up. 

Have we ever done an experiment on trying to raise IQ’s?  For example, I personally would support making a brain building program like Lumosity available for free to anyone who earns less than, say, $30,000 a year.

I have things to do.  I’m not making my point well, but what I am trying to point to, clumsily, is that in any sort of purposive activity–and the main goal of thinking is problem solving, since our sense of satisfaction and contentment is not dependent on it,and frankly often disrupted by it–is not categorize, but to move.  Where do we want to go?  What would a better world look like?  What tools do we have?  What do we know, what do we think we know, and how do we go about exploring the huge dark areas of things we don’t know?

Oi. that isn’t it either.  I’m going to stop now, and try again later.  I am being foggy.

My two cents is that it is stupid to pretend that Obamacare is not going to get implemented.  Republicans are not going to win this fight.  Even if they did, it would be Pyrrhic (“another such victory and we are undone”).

I have on my Facebook members of the military.  If the government shuts down, they stop getting checks.  The military spouses, who have already suffered enough, get no money.  Soldiers in combat get no money.

Obamacare is hugely unpopular, but so too is shutting down the government.  We need to face the fact that the Democrats got this idiotic monstrosity passed, and that we are going to have to deal with it.  There are too many ways around it.  Much of the spending is already in the Executive Branch. There is nothing we can do to stop it that does not hurt the Republicans in 2014, and as I said probably nothing we can do, period.

It is a horrible bill.  I wrote a 38 page treatise on it.  But right now our task is simply step out of the way, let this thing blow through town, cause a lot of unnecessary suffering, and make sure not just that the Democrats get the blame, but that the point is generalized that government intrusion is out of control.  That is how we set the stage for Rand Paul in 2016.

There is a time and a place to take a hard stand.  There are also times and places to be as soft as water. 

Be smart, Republicans.  You have little practice in it, but you have to start somewhere.

As I think about it, I think healthy guilt is a means of course correction.  It is what tells you you have deviated from a plan you developed, upon which your sense of self is based.  Healthy self respect is constantly renourished, constantly renewed.  When you see some fat middle aged man talking about his glory days in high school, that is not healthy self respect.  At one time he had it, but life moves on and he hasn’t.  They say you should die mid-sentence.  I would say mid-step, on a path which includes regular opportunities for emotional growth.

This quality of motion is missing from so many moral discourses.  So often they are conducted as if moral laws could somehow be as unvarying as the Pythagorean Theorem.  I have always loved the idea of geometric proof, but it is obvious to me that you must add motion.  In all thing, there is a pendulum moving back and forth, which is visible proof of life.  Your heartbeat itself is an example.  It is constantly expanding and contracting.  So are your lungs.  Perceptual Movement, as I have termed it, is coeval with life itself.

There is a Way to life, as the Chinese put it: this is a useful concept.  But the Way is something we walk as we go.  It does not come with a road map, and sometimes it will turn in interesting, fun, surprising ways, if we can only have the flexibility to see it.  Most of us keep walking straight, and only find the Way again later, after unnecessary difficulties caused by our perceptual failure on a subtle–or not-so-subtle–level.

Enough banter: let’s talk about me.  I’m mostly joking, but there is a sort of solipsistic quality to internet blogging.  I would likely be embarrassed to meet anyone reading all this, but I really do think, in an abstract way, that even my personal musings and struggles may be useful to someone, which is why I put roughly half of my truly personal stuff out there.  As I have said before, my personal metaphysics is that when we die all the scales fall away, and we are exposed in totality for who we truly are. There is no hiding.  We may as well practice that idea, and the following idea that we should live in a way which is not shameful.

I had an enormously important insight last week, a life-changing insight.  I realized that my entire life has been characterized by setting very ambitious goals, then self sabotaging them, and that both have had as their intent winning either love or hate.  I spoke a bit about this last week, but will speak more now.

I have spoken about saving the world.  In point of fact, I have developed an ethical program; metaphysics based on science; reinforced the importance of hewing to the actual political principles of our Constitution, which in important respects is the most important, most beautiful political document ever created; and developed an economics program which will enable global economic development and the eradication of poverty.

I have done this because saving the world is really about the highest goal you can set.  And this will not get me love either.  Nothing I do or can do will make my parents capable of love.  Nothing I do or can do will allow me to accept love, if I can’t first learn to love myself.

Increasingly, it seems to me that the very first task, the sine qua non of personal growth, is truly believing that you deserve it, and truly believing that you can enjoy, emotionally, the benefits of success.  If you don’t think you deserve a good job, a nice house, a beautiful, intelligent, loving spouse, good kids, or happiness anchored in nothing, then you will have a hard time getting it.

There are countless self help books out there, lots of really good advice.  But if you don’t, in the end, believe that you deserve success, none of them will help you.  And that “deserving success” comes from feeling loved, which is an experience that many people have lacked in their lives.  There is so much unhealthy emotion out there, so many people who are poorly developed.

I cannot speak generally, but in my own case my self sabotage seems to relate to a game, a tactic, evolved in my very early life.  If I cannot get love, I can at least get attention through hate, through punishment.  In my own life, this takes the form of not taking my own goals seriously.  You would not mock someone else trying to achieve something, but many of us mock ourselves, we denigrate ourselves, we start on a path we know on some level we never intend to complete.

Hate–or perhaps more accurately the sense of emotional helplessness and discouragement that we often felt as small children–is a familiar feeling.  It feels like the home we grew up in.  And it is easily achieved, and achieved again.  I see some of these really fat kids with horrible self esteem, and feel there must be a parent who secretly wanted them to fail, perhaps because they themselves cannot conceive of any higher aim than helplessness and the drug-like affects of overeating.   The kid is just a reflection, a symbol, of a larger sick system.

To return to Me (on My blog, me, me, me: you know, self obsession is the emotional equivalent of eating styrofoam; in my own world view I don’t exist, per se, outside of my relationship with the world), my motivational system is completely out of whack.  If I am not in emotional or physical pain, I feel guilt.  I feel like I am failing.  My pain tolerance is enormous, but my potential tasks are infinite.  I ask myself daily if I am a failure because I have not done everything within my power to save the world.  But obviously countless things are possible in saving the world.  Too much is never enough.  And my circuit breaker trips, and I wind down to drink again.  This is neurotic, unhelpful.

My troubles are uninteresting.  Here is the point I wanted to make: if this life is walking, our task is to walk with a goal in mind, but to walk with enjoyment.  Healthy guilt is what keeps us on the path, and having an appropriate goal is what makes it enjoyable.  I really think this is the essence of mental health.

I think this is a powerful parenting phrase.  I will tell it to my kids from time to time when giving them a reward of some sort.  I think it works on several levels.  Most importantly, it tells them that there is a point where enough is enough.  It tells them that they have earned self respect.  They do not have to go on and on and on in search of praise; nor do they have to endure superficial rah rah praise.  Both of my kids only like praise in small quantities.  Too much annoys them.  This tells me I did something right.  They are internally directed.  They do what they do because they want to do it.

In important ways, I have parented my kids literally the opposite of the way my own parents did.  Where I felt a sense of helplessness, they feel empowerment.  Where I felt unloved, they get affection every day. 

Another little ritual is I will ask them “Why do I love you?”  The answer is “because I am lovable and I am your kid”.  I have explicitly told them that the latter part is in case they become unlovable some time in their teenage years.  This gives them the space to periodically rebel in small ways without risking losing my love.

I tell them that their job is to leave me, to go away and make their own lives.  They will always be welcome and I will always be happy to see them, but that is their job.  Again, this gives them the space to become who they are, without fearing a clinging, emotionally needy parent who secretly wants them to fail, which is what I had to deal with.

It is an odd thing: I did not receive any love worth speaking of, but I have given a great deal.  What this has taught me is that it is not something that has to be given to be received.  You can create it yourself.  This has led to the logical argument I have made, based on increasingly sound experience, that you can literally create all the positive affects of being in a loving, supporting relationship, while all alone.  You can literally be as happy in a cave as you would be surrounded by a network of affectionate family and friends.  I truly believe this.

This does not mean I want to be alone.  On the contrary, I am increasingly understanding the importance of social contact, not least because I have something to give as well as receive.  But this realization, too, opens up an important freedom.

Little emotional Seinfeldian moment.  I pulled into a very tight space at work–they redid the parking lot, but not the lines–and on my way out, despite being very careful, I put a little door ding on my neighbor’s car.  Actually, I think it was two.  One I wiped away–they will disappear sometimes–and the other I pretended was not mine, even though it likely was.

As I drove away, I looked at my feelings, and the feeling was a species of guilt, but what was most noteworthy was anger at myself for screwing up, despite trying to be very careful.  I made a mistake when I was trying to do it right.  That made me angry, just a bit.  Again: small dings are small things.

But I was watching this, and I think a lot of what people call “guilt” is really internally directed anger at failing to meet some standard.  I think much religiosity springs both from this place, and from the shame others direct at your failings in a communal setting.

What came only belatedly was an empathetic relatedness to the person whose car it was.  Now, as I think about it, I’m not sure what an optimal reaction would have been.  Perhaps if I were a better person I would have found out whose car it was and offered to take it to a body shop if I couldn’t wipe the other part away.  Maybe I could have resolved to do some good deed to resolve the karma, or at least reduce the guilt.

I’m thinking out loud here, and not quite sure where I leading.  Here are a question or two, though:

1) What is the proper role of guilt? 

2) What is the proper amount of guilt, and how do we know?

These feel like Self Help sorts of questions.  Ah, they are needed too.  Please put on a pastel sweater before answering, though.  Crystals are optional.  Answers will be on Dr. Phil on Thursday.

I may have seen this somewhere, but I can’t remember:

A fanatic is someone who reserves his strongest vitriol (anger/hate/feelings) for those who only agree with him 99%.

I will add that this tendency, clearly, is emotional in origin, and particularly related to inflexibility, itself tied most closely to fear, with a strong leavening of ignorance.

I can’t remember if I have pointed this out here, but Obamacare clearly will work to relocate insurance companies from the realm of providing a needed service at a competitive price, to the realm of being an extension of the Social Welfare State (let’s do the inversion exercise here: the system for enriching a few, while reducing the standard of living of the rest).

My reasoning is simple.  Insurance companies now have to enroll people who are already sick, but who have paid them nothing, and the rest of us have to pick up the check. This is the functional equivalent of waiting to buy car insurance until AFTER you have wrecked your car, then fully expecting the company to reimburse you.

Smart people will simply drop their coverage (if it costs more than the penalty), which means less will be paid into the system.  At the same time, costs will go up, because people are showing up at the proverbial doorstep with cancer, or heart disease, an HIV infection, or who knows what.  Those people will pay their premiums, if able; otherwise, the government, meaning us and our creditors, will pick up the difference.

Insurance companies cannot store money away for bad years.  They are limited by law to roughly 15% of income having to cover both operational costs as well as profit.  Practically, they will likely overcharge, then rebate the excess at the end of the year if their costs were lower than anticipated.  I have already received one of those checks.


But the point is clear: costs will go up because they HAVE TO, because they are no longer providing insurance, but rather a social service.  More is being provided, and that has a cost.

Quite literally, the insurance companies are being made an extension of Medicaid, and our increases in premiums are effectively TAX increases.  If we consider that Medicaid, itself, is being vastly expanded under Obamacare, it really boggles my mind how any sane human being could support this monstrosity.

Answer: they couldn’t and they don’t.

It occurred to me that my separation of the Left in Cultural Sybarites and Cultural Sadeists could be summed up as “good people who are ignorant”, and “bad people who lie.”

I will reiterate that I call myself a Liberal, because I want the most freedom possible consistent with not allowing other people to curtail my freedom, for example through crime.  I believe governments are necessary at this stage in our cultural evolution, but hope that at some future point we can evolve past their necessity.  As Madison said, if all men are angels, we need no government.

The word Libertarian is unnecessary.  It is redundant.  True Liberals granted a major propaganda victory to the fascists when they allowed them to start using a word which described the opposite of their intent.