When imagination is not being used as a means for the creative solution of problems, in most cases it substitutes for the capacity to process present experience.  You can avoid what is in front of you by existing somewhere else.  The problem is that if you never “are”, you can never become.
 
I had in mind here comic books, and dungeons and dragons, and science fiction and fantasy; but this applies equally to leftwing utopianism.  They don’t count death as real.  They don’t count suffering as real.  They don’t count people as real, and they don’t count themselves as real.

Edit: I would actually add some forms of “right wing” utopianism.  In principle, is John Galt’s mountain hideout that different that varying iterations of a society founded on “reason”, or “science”, which is the claim made for Marxism?

This is an oldie but a goodie:

There are two novels that can transform a bookish
14-year-kid’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a
childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially
crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing
ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book
about orcs.  Raj Patel (who based on the title of the book where this quote apparently occurred, is likely a leftist despite the 50 year failure of socialism in India.)

Be here, now.  Solve problems here, now.  If you are somewhere else, until you come back, no one needs you.

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/10/27/the-war-on-us/

In the same manner that large Wall Street banks wrote the so-called “Wall Street Reform”–which plainly was intended to strengthen and make more secure large banks, at the expense of small banks and the taxpayer–large insurance companies from what I can tell in large measure supported Obamacare.

I have long wondered about this.  It seems clear to me and most that Obamacare is intended to put them out of business.  Certainly, some of them, like United Healthcare, the biggest insurer, may be counting on taking over most of the market, then getting contracted by the government to provide ALL services in a single payer-like scenario.  Or maybe the top five.

Certainly in terms of enrollees they are only picking up between them perhaps 10% of the overall market, and Obamacare puts caps on how much profit they can make relative to revenues.

What now occurs to me is that at least for the next five years–and most CEO’s of large corporations seem unable to think beyond that time window–most Americans will be required by law to buy health insurance policies of a grade and price beyond what they were buying, and those who are unable to buy them will now get subsidies from the government to pay for their insurance, which means that even the poor will be picking up expensive policies.

This means that net revenues overall will increase a LOT.  Not only are they bringing new people on, but they are able to force people, by law, to buy policies that are more expensive than they otherwise would have chosen.

When these insurance companies are sending out cancellation notices, they are thrilled.  Most normal middle class Americans will take the hit and pay the higher rate.  They are forcing people into more expensive and more profitable policies.  They may be constrained in profit percentages, but overall revenues will increase enormously; and in any event I don’t think what is being forced on them is all that different than their historical norms, and certainly more than they would expect to see in an actually competitive market, where all carriers could sell all products in all States. I think most big insurance carriers have considered a 5% net profit an extremely good year for some time.

So the CEO’s of Wellpoint, and United, and Humana and the others may have just said “fuck it.  Who knows what the future holds?  We can sure as hell make hay now.”

Certainly, I am in a position to know that these companies have been expanding steadily for two years or more.  Now it makes more sense to me.

Again, if a leftist is talking, he or she is lying.  Here, they claimed to be socking it to the insurance companies.  And they may yet–to our collective detriment–but not until after a lot of us get fleeced, and a lot of executives get richer.

Can we discard out of hand the notion that Saudi Arabia is to Islamism what the old Soviet Union was to Communism?  Can we reject out of hand that at the same time it is publicly condemning extremism that it is privately funding it?  Certainly, they seem to be funding the Syrian Islamists, and to be funding Muslim Brotherhood operatives the world over, who could usefully be compared to Communist International agents in the previous Cold War.

Can we hazard a guess that the co-conspirators on 9/11 were not in fact Americans–or not acting as Americans–but rather private mercenaries contracted by the Saudis in order to create a reason to invade Iraq, and to expand the scope of the American government?

Communists think on 50 year timelines.  Why can’t Islamists?  Why could they not fund through illegal campaign contributions and outright bribes a government which was all-powerful, which they could then in turn buy, as seems to have happened with Barack Obama?

Why could they not have a 100 year plan to convert the world through SUBVERSION first to leftist tyranny, then to imposed Islamism?  Why could they not employ the same tactics that Communists use?

Could it be that they rejected their non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council precisely to be LESS public in their opinions, so as to make their private actions less subject to and open to scrutiny?  Or was it a fit of pique that Obama wasn’t even honest enough to stay bought?

I don’t know.  I am missing a great many variables.  Good answers start with both good and numerous questions, though.

I was reading through my last couple of posts, and I use this word almost as a mantra.

Here is the thing: anyone who is not thinking practically in terms of the logistics required to accomplish specific, desirable outcomes, is between useless–and more often–damaging.

Most of us can likely agree that global peace and prosperity are desirable goals, but anyone who is proposing means without evaluating if those are likely to be effective means, anyone who thinks that merely having a goal constitutes morality, is being self indulgent.  It is narcissism, infantilism.  It betrays a lack of moral and emotional maturity.

And with regard to Leftism, even a casual student of its history knows that it is crooked and rotten at its core.  It is IN PRINCIPLE a rejection of the common sense morality and decency that makes it possible for human beings to live happily in harmony with one another, as I have repeatedly argued at length, particularly on my other website.

I am educated enough to know that academics in the Humanities spend a lot of time talking about Modernity, or used to, and I can’t see where else they can go within the limits they have set themselves.

We see Gemainshaft compared to Gesellshaft, which is roughly community versus society.  We see discussions of alienation, the lack of a sense of place, and the lack of a sense of purpose.

These, in my view, are not problems to be DESCRIBED, but rather SOLVED.  They are practical, logistical problems, and there is zero doubt in my mind they have solutions.  I have provided solutions in many ways on many levels.

The problem with our universities is they continue to embody the fundamental split in Western tradition between body and mind. The work that academics do involves writing books.  Even if it involves watching somebody or something for some period of time, the ultimate outcome is a big pile of words.

In religious studies, which is my field, there is a common tendency to overvalue the beliefs of a group of people, and to undervalue the praxis, because the beliefs can be analyzed and manipulated in the abstract more easily, since they are already ideas.  Praxis–by which I mean ritual in its broadest form–has to be DONE to be properly understood. You have to sit in their shoes, smoke their weed, get naked and dirty, to understand them.

But even if you do this, it still gets expressed descriptively.  There are not anthropologists coming back and saying “we should try this here”, by and large.  They are not trying to figure out how to improve the ritual element of our socity, how to reintroduce one that is vital, real, energizing, harmonizing.

That, however, is what they SHOULD be doing, as that would actually be useful.

Can we not grant that social harmony and individual happiness are not strictly a matter of dopamine receptors, and brain chemistry?  Can we not grant that culture can both hinder and further human happiness?  And having granted this, can we not grant that it ought to be the role of people who study culture to make SUGGESTIONS?  To add ideas?

Could you imagine a university in which emotional development was a core focus?  Why not?  Why not make personal development as important–more important–than reading Chaucer, or studying European history?

For myself, I have worked out a reasonably good model that I think will work.  It has content; it has ideas; it is does not consist exclusively in what it is not (which is the case for moral relativists and postmodernists).

I would like to see the mainstreaming of Holotropic Breathwork and Kum Nye, as expressed within a philosophical framework like that I created in my essay on Goodness.  You need a base belief structure–what I suggest are three absolute principles that can be deployed in innumerable ways–an individual practice, and a communalizing (I may have just invented that word, but if so it needed to be invented) ritual.

We all need ways of calming ourselves down and of promoting positive emotions.  Kum Nye does this.

We need some set of principles that does not change with the wind.  My three principles do this.

And we need both connection with others, and occasional craziness in our lives, ideally shared craziness.  Holotropic Breathwork does this.

In my dreams–and everything of course may fall apart completely, as I assume I am on multiple lists, and can imagine many ways I may die–we build temples where groups of people can meet and both meditate in groups, and do the Breathwork.  And there is no reason people could not give lectures on useful topics.

As I have shared, I think it would be useful and interesting to create a social structure parallel to the family structure which complements and supplements it, in which groups of 20 or so people develop long term bonds through repeatedly doing the Breathwork together.  Shared trauma and wild experience builds strong bonds, and seeing each other weekly or so over years, while sharing those experiences, would build bonds perhaps better than those forged in war.

I’m thinking perhaps one Holotropic Breathwork session a month, and shared Kum Nye perhaps twice a week. Over time, you could go to any of these people with any problem you have, and receive genuine presence, genuine caring.

And we build millions of these groups, the world over.  I have zero desire to tell anyone how to live their lives, other than that I would encourage them to value their lives and pursue their own vision of happiness.  But the very lack of specificity would allow local cultural preferences to be maintained and perhaps even enriched.  I want more diversity in the world not less, and there is no reason this would be inconsistent with peace.

We can build global peace and prosperity.  It is possible.  And we can do it gradually, and pleasantly.

All of the supposed “utopian” dreams of emotionally disturbed people contain nothing but their own desire to commit suicide, and their vain and psychotic need to make the world join them.

We have choices.  We all have choices.

I think it would be most useful to think of Obama as nothing more than an actor, reading scripts. In this regard, a good analogy would be with Ben Kingley’s Mandarin, who comes across as quite dramatic, but is in reality a low grade buffoon.

I have seen the claim that Valerie Jarrett–who takes nearly as many Secret Service members with her on vacation as Obama does–is the real power behind the throne.  And who she takes her marching orders from is anyone’s guess.  They do have names and addresses, though, which are knowable.

Do Mossad or Aman know?  One wonders.  The destinies of our nations are closely linked.

To be patiently persistent in matter of importance.

I am capable of using reason very effectively.  I have on many cases created what I view as very strict, disciplined, but thorough treatments of complex topics.

At the same time, I often trust my gut, my intuition.  The previous post was the result of being attacked twice in my dreams last night by Islamists.  One shouted “Allahu Akbar” (which means in most cases “I am about to shit on God and curse the righteous”) and threw a grenade.  Another tried to infect me with anthrax.

I very much believe that dreams CAN reflect deeper realities, realities outside the realm of my own unprocessed and unconscious emotions.  I still have a great deal to get through, so this could be some remaining reflection of self sabotage. 

At the same time, I do feel a Muslim influence in all this, and it seems likely the Saudis–who as a nation are unimaginably rich–are playing some major role in world affairs.

That is not what I wanted to post about, though.  I don’t claim to operate a normal blog.  I am odd in many ways, but I cherish that.  I think everyone should cherish the gift of being unique.

In my meditations recently, I have realized that when dark forces come up, I do not need to resist them.  Satanic powers will eat me, attack me, destroy me, and I can watch on calmly, as I have realized that I come back, I revitalize.  What I am cannot be destroyed.  I need fear nothing.  My body can be destroyed and my mind perverted, in this world.  I can be brainwashed and broken. 

But some higher self exists which never touches this world, which enables a “reboot”.  This means I can be absolutely persistent and indestructible, in an absolute sense.  I am unstoppable.

And I have been watching these things arise and, say, bite my head off and eat it, and I realize that what it is eating, what it can touch, is not my actual head.  My body consists in light, not darkness, and darkness cannot touch light.  To the extent it is doing anything, it is helping me purify myself.

I think this is the essence of the practice the Tibetans call Chod.

I will add as well an interesting experience I had yesterday.  Due to a bad decision, I got stuck unnecessarily in traffic for 45 minutes yesterday.  I’m like anyone else, and really dislike prolonged periods of alternating between stopping and going five miles an hour for twenty feet.

But they talk in Kum Nye about integrating experience with breath, so I thought I would try that.  I focused on my impatience and sense of being trapped and did my best to expand it, and blend it with my breath.  And to a great extent, it helped.  What I realized is that once you embed that process of accepting experience and blending it with breath you don’t conquer those feelings once, but potentially permanently.

What would life be like if you were permanently beyond complaining?

The flip side of this is that it is possible to suppress feelings, to never ask yourself who you are and what you really want.  Most people do this.  They fall by chance into one pattern or another and even though they are vaguely dissatisfied, they never address it.

I think a life well lived is one where you consciously pursue the things that make you happy, and on the flip side learn to accept without complaint all the inevitable inconveniences and sufferings of the world.

As I have said often, I view Kum Nye as an effective system for this, and will go farther, actually, and say that in my own experience it is by far the most accessible pathway to the sorts of realizations Buddhists talk about.  I feel most other forms of meditation get the cart before the horse: they ask people to meditate before they have learned to feel and to relax.

First off, we need to be clear that Obama seemingly has committed a Federal Felony by using a fake Social Security Number.  It seems likely he was never renaturalized after having been an Indonesian citizen.  It is quite possible–indeed it seems likely–that he never attended Columbia.  It is likely–and has in fact apparently been admitted by Michelle Obama–that Bill Ayers was the actual author of both of Obama’s books.  If you remember back to those halcyon days when it seemed Obama was intelligent and articulate, those books were principle pieces of evidence.  And for his part Ayers once envisioned massive concentration camps for Americans unwilling to submit to  Communist sadistic tyranny, and foresaw the need to kill up to ten million Americans.

So thinking that we are looking at a house of lies is scarcely paranoid.  On the contrary, it is difficult to grasp and accept the extent of the fraud which enabled Obama to be put forward as a candidate, much less elected twice.  It is impossible to fathom the depth of the betrayal committed by the complicit media, the extent of the lies propagated by people who should have known better.

What if the computer glitches are happening with regard to Obamacare because everyone thought that a coup would have already taken place?  What if they never thought they actually had to develop the website?  What if all the money given Michelle Obama’s roommate, or most of it, wound up in hands dedicated to other tasks?  What if some of it even now is supporting Syrian Islamists, or domestic radicals?

Alex Jones broadcast a story about a secret nuclear weapons transfer here: http://www.infowars.com/exclusive-high-level-source-confirms-secret-us-nuclear-warhead-transfer-to-east-coast/

Following this story two senior nuke commanders were fired: http://www.infowars.com/exclusive-high-level-source-confirms-secret-us-nuclear-warhead-transfer-to-east-coast/

Now Alex thinks they were bound for Syria, to start a global war.  It is just as likely they were going to be detonated somewhere in the US, everyone who knew about it killed, and blamed on Al Quedists.  We can’t know, but something stinks to high heaven.

This story was the result of an actual patriot leaking a story to the ONLY NEWS OUTLET THAT WOULD COVER IT.  What if all the cover stories were ready, everybody had their lines memorized, and ONE PERSON did the right thing and prevented mass disaster?

What if Obama has viewed his job all along as simply biding his time until other people completed the preparations for a coup?  What if he is on the golf course, and seemingly uninterested in his job because his job consists SOLELY in providing the necessary authority for others to put in place a road map to tyranny?

I would like to submit some ideas to senior military commanders as well.  I get this image in my mind of some 3 or 4 star General finding out about the FEMA camps, and the plan to house Americans in large numbers in them, and demanding an explanation.  Finding out it goes to the top, to Obama, he demands a meeting.  He is refused, by the Commander in Chief, to whose authority he must ultimately submit.

What that person still can do is create contingency plans to destroy or occupy these camps.  I hate to telegraph possibilities–I have a lot of ideas I never put in the public domain precisely for this reason–but my overall impression of the imaginative/creative capacities of senior military leaders is that they are not actually all that smart in most cases.  As I have shared, I was once told by a very seasoned, career, upwardly mobile Navy Commander about the prospects in Iraq, in 2006, that “I am career military and it is hard to be optimistic”, meaning he wasn’t seeing then anyone willing to understand the situation and respond appropriately.  But for every Westmoreland there likely exists an Abrams, even if they don’t usually get credit.

Further, anyone wanting to fundamentally address an attack on our Constitutional Republic and our way of life has to remember that the Fed controls all electronic interactions.  It may or may not be in the public domain where the servers are, but every debit card transaction, every credit card transaction, every money transfer between banks, every topping off through Federal Funds goes through the Fed.   They report to no public agency and they could shut down our financial system in an instant.  They may be complicit in this whole program–it seems certain that senior members are–and thus likely have a plan in place to do this.  In any civil conflict, taking control of the Fed would be a top priority.

I am of course no general.  I have no training in strategic thinking.  These things are in many respects obvious.  But I discovered long ago that was obvious to me was not obvious to others.