Month: September 2013

I like this idea.  They recommend books for various ailments.  I have been proposing for some time that the path out of the intellectual squalor that has characterized the Humanities–here, English Departments–has been figuring out the USE of literature.  If it has none, then the Departments ought to be abolished.  But that seems unlikely: we NEED literature, in some ways.  It is formative, provocative, growth-inducing. 

Why not approach the thing intelligently, though, as they have done here?

This in my view is what constitutes progress.  The next obvious step is TESTING the ideas, which here are a matter of highly subjective judgement.

I am going to ramble a bit.

The short lecture by Arnaud Maitlin I posted in the last post got me to thinking/feeling.  In how many ways are we fractured, is our consciousness fractured?  It seems to me that there is a dimensionality in, for example, feeling how something looks or sounds; or in visualizing a feeling or scent.  The goal is synaesthesia, which is full integration.  The goal of Kum Nye is to open sensuality.

Is it not a terrible misfortune that we more or less equate sensuality with sex?  Your typical work hard/play hard business executive is winding down with golf, some drinks, and an attractive woman.  That is his world.  I have met this man many times, gotten drunk with him, paid attention.

I can achieve much, much higher qualitative states, much higher order sensuality than he can, even if the room is filled with attractive women, as was sometimes the case with Tiger Woods.

Why run when you walk?

Time: as a culture do we not lack time?  It seems to me that you need time to process things, to process feelings, to become a complete human being.  If people are becoming less “real”–and I think in some respects this pattern, which I view as real, can be seen expressed mythically in zombies and “body snatchers” of the sort seen in “The Worlds End”–it seems to me that the first aspect is simply that they have developed the habit of being always task motivated.

The second aspect is that we have many alternatives to being real.  Often times, depth comes from processed emotional hurt.  But you have to walk through that dark tunnel and come out the other side.  In our era, you can distract yourself very, very easily.  Distractions are hanging like lotus blossoms from every tree.  Our rooms are filled with them.

I have not had TV for many years now, and it is hard for me to imagine, but in many homes the TV is almost never off.  They turn it on first thing in the morning, it’s in the bars and medical offices you go to, and people fall asleep watching it.  Most TV’s have a sleep timer, in my understanding.

There is never silence.  We fear silence.

And I think in many marriages, they fear silence because both people have emotional realities that they can’t quite express even to themselves–they are distracted all day every day–and thus can’t share with their spouse, and some of these realities frighten them.  Who did you marry, anyway?  Why?  Who were you then, and are you that person now?  You don’t know who you were then, because you STILL don’t know who you are today.  You haven’t taken the time to figure it out.

And importantly, you haven’t had access to a good emotional technology like Kum Nye or Holotropic Breathwork.

We constantly hear about people trying to “find themselves”, but not as often do we hear about people “finding themselves”.

Every person has in my view, my feeling, an essence, some subtle quality of energy that makes them unique.  If it is true that every snowflake is unique, surely it is also true that most of them look alike, and only sustained inspection allows one to differentiate them.  This inspection is worthwhile, with people.  It is fun.  It is something innate in us, something which resonates with what is best about being human.

Evil: I was laying in my bed today watching the Joker.  I am fortunate in that I set my own hours, and my boss sometimes decides it’s best to lay in bed for several hours in the morning. 

I have a sort of TV in my head.  Images will just sort of appear, and I watch and follow them.  I’m not asleep, just in a sort of trance, but it is almost always useful.

Again, I was watching the Joker today, and it occurred to me that he is split.  His outer persona is a superficial disguise he put on to get through some trauma, which he has learned to identify with.  His head and heart are split.  His actions are guided entirely by his heart, by deep unprocessed feelings, but the feelings he allows himself to feel are associated with his disguise.

Could we say there are “thought-feelings”, which is to say affective states that are really just robust abstractions, but which come to substitute for real, nutritive experience?  I don’t know.

But it seems to me that we need to look at evil as a sort of multiple personality disorder.  The hurt child is still in there, locked in a room.  It simply lacks a means by which to escape, no alternative to misery.

For me, my current growth spurt only came about because I have found in my Kum Nye practice a means by which to generate positive feelings.  None of us are strong enough to endure powerful negative feelings without feeling an alternative to them.   You run out of space to hold them.  You shut down.  You have to.  There is a sort of emotional circuit breaker that does not let us transmit more voltage than we can handle.

I’m not quite done with this, but I’m not sure where it’s going.  I’m going to leave it for now.  I did say it would be rambling.

I read this piece a while back, discussing meditation, silence, the sense of self and other deep topics.  Reading it, I felt uncomfortable.  Take this passage:

Sitting still, denying yourself physical movement, the mind’s
instinctive reaction is to retreat into its normal buzzing monologue —
hoping that focusing the mind elsewhere will relieve physical
discomfort. This would normally be the case; normally, if ignored, the
body would fidget and shift, to avoid accumulating tension. But on this
occasion we are asking it to sit still while we think and, since it
can’t fidget, it grows more and more tense and uncomfortable.
Eventually, this discomfort forces the mind back from its chatter to the
body. But finding only discomfort or even pain in the body, it again
seeks to escape into language and thought. Back and forth from troubled
mind to tormented body, things get worse and worse.

Who would want that?

As my Kum Nye practice deepens, I realize that learning to relax is contingent on untying the sorts of emotional knots this author still plainly has a lot of.  It is about healing.  It is about undam-ing places where the flow of energy (which you can understand as “subtle” or an attribute of the nervous system, as you choose) has been blocked.

Trauma is encoded in the body.  It is encoded in how we breathe, our posture (Feldenkrais invented the word “acture”, which I have always liked), the quality of our voices, the “tone” of our eyes, how we walk, what we hear, the dominant expression on our faces.

Trauma is continually reenacted in our habits of being.  It must constantly be recreated to maintain its effect on us.  Kum Nye is about NOT renewing it, about allowing what would otherwise have been our natural “acture” to emerge as a result of not preventing it from emerging it.  You do less, not more.

The point I want to make here, though, is that “meditation” can mean many things, and if you are trying to sit still without constantly working to liberate tied up energies, it is more or less masochistic.  I did a mantra meditation when I was in what I call my “Blue Years”, and it didn’t help in the slightest.  I think it made me MORE agitated.

Meditation can be a form of repression.  You can teach yourself to mechanically calm the surface by learning not to listen to emotions, not to allow them to flow, but you have not healed.

My current lesson of eKum Nye, 2.5, he talks about how you can develop calm and then enter it, and THIS is actual meditation.  You have to do a lot of preparatory work to even BEGIN meditating properly.  He (Arnaud Maitlin) discusses it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2m_Ssa7Fng0 

I have felt this calm a couple of times in the past week or two, very briefly.  Lesson 2.4 is opening up the navel center, and it brought up a lot of powerful and unpleasant emotions for me. At times it felt like I was being attacked by demons, but this is a familiar feeling for me.  This time, rather than resisting it, I went into the feeling fully, and that fog seems now to be clearing.  I attained one very important psychological insight that I think is going prove extremely valuable.

On a more general scale, I look at the past 100-150 years (really, it may as well be human history), at Hitler, Lenin/Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot. at “thinkers” like Sartre and Nietzche, and they had none of this.  They did not have access to these technologies of helpfulness, of happiness, of contentment, of joy.

All of the problems of humanity have solutions.  They can be solved, and they can be solved without recourse to totalitarianism.  Those who want to impose their own order on the world are morally and emotionally demented.  They are fractured in ways which can themselves be healed through technologies like this.

All that we NEED to know is already known, and much of the most important technology of humanity, the methods of building emotional self sufficiency which eliminates the need for greed and consumption as lifestyles, are known only to very few.

All the billions of dollars we spend on universities is in many respects fully wasted.  We do not teach people how to be contented.  If anything, we build a sense of entitlement, greed, lust, and anger.  Nothing done in any of the Engineering, or Physics, or Social Sciences, or English, or Biology, or Chemistry or any other department is more important than learning contentment.

Quite literally, if we regressed to the living standards of the 18th century but adopted globally the technologies of Kum Nye and Holotropic Breathwork, I would view this as a huge advance.  We count progress in entirely the wrong ways.

We can generalize Tibet.  We can propagate these insights, these sparks of genius, around the world.  Step one is to bring the spiritual into the scientific realm.  This is easily done.  The empirical evidence is copious.  Two, we teach it as normative.  We teach kids in school how to process emotions, how to grow spiritually.

If we fail to do this because of emotional mechanical-ness, because of utterly unnecessary stupidity, it will be a tragedy.  All tragedies have a hero, and he always has a flaw, a hamartia, something without which everything would have worked correctly.  Who is the hero here, and what flaw will doom us?

Science, and fear of mystery–fear, to shorten it to its root.

I posted this somewhere, but can’t remember where.  If it was here, I won’t say it the same way.

First off, it occurs to me that we might term “illegal aliens”, or “undocumented Democrats” “illegal job seekers”.  That is what they are.

Secondly, there was a time when Democrats plausibly stood for the “working man” (and woman) in America.  They wanted higher wages, better benefits, more job safety, etc.

But there is no benefit to AMERICAN workers to illegal job seekers pushing down wages.  We see constantly “they only do jobs Americans don’t want to do”.  First off, bullshit.  Second off, they do work Americans don’t want to do AT THAT WAGE.

It is my understanding that Cesar Chavez strongly opposed illegal job seekers.  Why?  They depressed the wages of those who did things the right way and came here legally. 

Chavez understood loyalty and principle.  Modern Democrats will gladly sell out their mothers to stay in power.  That is ALL they pursue: their own selfish self interest, and that while proclaiming loudly how much they oppose actually economically productive greed.

Modern Republicans are scarcely better ethically, but they are not actively seeking to undermine everything that works in this country.

It is already a propaganda victory to refer to Obamacare as “the health care bill”.  It is a health INSURANCE bill.

In actual fact, the near certain outcome of this horrible law, if it goes into full implementation, will be a huge DECREASE in access to healthcare.  Hospitals will be bankrupted.  Doctors will leave the trade in droves.  Fewer people will enter the medical profession in the first place.

Language matters, and I would encourage any readers I have to use it carefully, and to refuse to EVER do anyone else’s propagandizing for them.

On that note: stop using the word Liberal.  Friedrich Hayek called for this 30 or more years ago, likely closer to 50. There is nothing in the slightest “liberal” about the left wing in America.

Our Constitution is a liberal document.  Obamacare is soft fascism.

I was reading this piece on the propaganda of Lenin and learned something I did not know, which is that many of the “Bolshevik” soldiers fought only because the Communists threatened to kill their families if they didn’t.  I know that was why many “Vietcong” fought, and as far as that goes, why may of the NVA who were pointing guns at their heads, and raping and killing their wives and daughters in front of them did so themselves.

We have all seen that scene in a movie–pick damn nearly every third action movie made ever–where the good guy gets the upper hand, but the bad guy gets his family or friend, or whatever, and threatens to kill them if they don’t put down the gun.  In most American movies, they do it, face nearly certain failure, then some “Deus ex machina” plot device allows them to avoid execution.

Here is the thing: in the real world, if you are dealing with people capable of killing your family, they are going to kill them anyway.  Do you think the “Bolshevik” soldiers families fared better because they fought for Lenin?  It seems much more likely to me that in almost all cases the fact that they had to be made to fight counted against them, and many were likely put to death anyway, directly through execution, or likely far more commonly by having their food and provisions taken from them.

I have told my own children that if somebody is pointing a gun to their head, and telling me to put down mine, I am going to shoot anyway.  All that happens when I put down that gun is I get shot anyway, along with the family member I was trying to protect.  Same outcome for them, but worse for me, and they get away with it.

Here is my point: I suspect members of our intelligence community are under VERY strong pressure from Obama and what can with justice be called henchmen; his SS, if you prefer.  There may even be a Himmler somewhere out there in the background.

I think people who were at Benghazi are having their FAMILIES threatened if they speak out.  These men were likely almost all special operations personnel, and not cowardly in the slightest. Neither would they feel any strong loyalty to that mission, or Obama personally.

But when you bring the family in, either by threatening direct violence, or loss of benefits if the service member is killed–which can be easily arranged, and in my view likely was arranged with regard to the large Seal Team Six loss in Afghanistan–that adds a layer of complexity.  Men who might be quite willing to die are unwilling to sacrifice the lives of their loved ones.

If I am right, though, here is the thing: any person or group CAPABLE  of such activity is capable of anything; moreover, the clear intent is fascistic control of government and eventually media and finally every last aspect of our lives.  A deal with the devil is still a deal with the devil.  If they are allowed to win, then all promises are null and void, and no rectification of wrongs will be POSSIBLE.

If we fail as a nation of laws, then there will be no safe place for anyone.  There will be nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.  There will be no one to ask to keep the promise of safety for the family.

Thus, I would ask that if you have personal knowledge of things which are treasonous and are remaining silent because of your family, ask yourself what your families life will look like 10 years from now, given how things are TODAY, and ask if the future is not worth the risk of speaking out.

We all die.  Everyone in your family will die.  But it is worth a LOT to live in freedom.  We still have it, but the trend is not good.

I really think there is a need for informational outliers, and I have gotten to where I check http://www.infowars.com regularly, if not daily.  My main news sources are Drudge, Lucianne.com, and my Facebook news feed.  I like aldaily.com for random stuff, and used to frequent frontpagemag.com, but am increasingly hostile to the breed of military interventionistic tendency that in some respects truly does warrant the abused but occasionally accurate appellation “neoconservatism”.  Still David Horowitz has done yeoman work over the years, and does still post some good stuff.

As far as Alex Jones, take this news story , in which it is claimed that a rapid response, well armed, well trained police group was told to stand down DURING the Navy Yard shooting, which almost certainly resulted in more deaths.  Following this order, they were never debriefed, their commander was replaced, and 4 of them went on leave.  These are the allegations.  Like all journalism, it warrants investigation, but if true this is HUGE.  Who gave the order?  Why?

As most know, Alex Jones believes that the New World Order speech of George H.W. Bush, which most of us contextually understood to be referring to a post-Communist world order, a post Cold War order, ACTUALLY was on par with Obama’s “in five days we begin the fundamental transformation of America”.  He believes that the World Trade Centers were brought down by governmental agencies with the cooperation and knowledge of George W. Bush.  He believes that the Bohemian Grove is effectively a center for occult worship, rather than a congenial gathering in a frat atmosphere of overworked, and overstressed people who walk our corridors of power.

I don’t agree with this.  But here is the point I would make: the possible viewpoints in the world extend, let us say, from A to D.  The news we get in our complicit and complacent media extends from B to C.  I may not be willing to go all the way to D or A, but that does not mean that SOME of the data I gather in traversing that route is not useful.  Just because someone is paranoid does not make them wrong.  If they can only see red, that does not mean the color red does not exist.

All information has to be sifted.  The problem in our world is that far too many let someone else do the sifting for them, both in terms of what is news, and in terms of how to interpret it.  That latter part is by far the more pernicious, because it implies to the informational consumer that they need not interact critically, and this is how people lose the ability to think.

Success begins locally and expands; only failure can be exported.

Don’t feel like explaining this at the moment.  I think it is clear enough.

Actually: interrogate.  Do you think this is true?  In what domains?  To what extent?  To what extent is this a coherent statement?  What would falsify it?  How many ways can it be true?  What alternative formulations would you suggest?  What is missing?

Concise, confident statements tend to have an allure that can lead to being blinded to their limitations.  A paradigmatic example is the opening to Anna Karenina, which I have never agreed with.  All human qualities, from happiness to sadness, from goodness to evil, have unique manifestations. 

Never treat the world as an abstraction, because that ends the conversation.

Was that an example?  To what extent can abstractions which counsel against abstraction be trusted?

We all sleepwalk, every day, most of the day.  Once in a while, we get that feeling when you wake briefly from a nap, and realize you were dozing.  But sleep is so much more pleasant, even if less instructive.

Should we deny one another the comforts of very incomplete knowing? Or are they comforts?  That is the question.  My answer is that much more is possible, if we just wade through the shit.

It seems to me need to distinguish the PURPOSE of life from the meaning. The first is a thought you think which, if you are congruent, orients your thought, then emotion, then behavior. The second is an affect, a present reality. It is what we REALLY want. We dont want a thought, even though intellectuals almost as a defining trait deal them.

Logically, if the purpose of life is learning to give and receive unconditional love, then the MEANING of life is the present reality of love.

I think many who search feverishly for “the meaning of life” are really suffering from a lack of love in their own lives. I look at my own childhood, and my mother really didnt know what to do with me. I was not severely abused or neglected. She did what she thought mothers did, but largely without enthusiasm, and without EVER connecting with me emotionally as an unique and interesting little human.

Without knowing the name of it–having no personal experience with it– I now realize I have been looking for love all my life. Only in the past day have I seen how my unhelpful behavior patterns, my self destructive patterns, have had that as a goal; it is now my responsibilty to internalize and accept that thatworld is long gone, and succes impossible, with the methods I have been using. I have to be my own parents, and give myself the nourishing they failed to I can see,now, how this done, and for once feel optimistic about my future.

Power springs from the barrel of a gun; therefore own all the guns.