Month: December 2013

I don’t like getting too personal–although of course I do by implication in my chosen topics and opinions often–but it seems appropriate, today, the day when even non-drinkers get drunk, to meditate in public on my drinking.

For some years, regardless of how I might define the term myself, I have been physiologically an alcoholic.  I have drunk enough on a daily basis that I got withdrawal symptoms if I skipped a day.  Not serious symptoms, not DT’s, but enough that it always made more sense just to drink than to not drink.

For a long time I was the guy at the party who, given an open bar, would consistently overdo it.  Otherwise, I’d have a few beers every night, and maybe a bit of gin to wash it down.

As my tolerance and disposable income grew, so too did my consumption–mostly at home, but I was no stranger to a few bars.

At a certain point, I got Barry McDonough’s “Panic Away” kit, which helps you deal with panic attacks.  I have only had one, at an extremely hard point in my life, but I believe in collecting tools, and this was one I wanted, since I did not want to be that helpless again.

The essence of his method–and by the way I recommend this to anyone who deals with anxiety on a regular basis; it is worth the money–is to accept the anxiety, and ask for more.  Rather than moving away from painful emotions, you move to them, you kill them with kindness.

I got to thinking: this has to apply to more than anxiety, and decided, when I drank, to direct my attention to my dark places, to the emotions I could not process sober, could not confront sober.  I figured if I was going to be drinking anyway, I may as well make it useful.

I did this for a year or two–I honestly don’t remember–and made progress.  At a certain point, I realized I needed to do Kum Nye seriously, and figured signing up for the eKum Nye program would help, even though all the exercises it covers are already in the books.  I figured correctly, as it gave me a more formal structure for my practice.  In theory it was unnecessary; in practice it was.

It is an interesting fact that my two Kum Nye books are literally the only books I have carried with me since I was a teenager.  I bought them in a New Age shop in Rancho Bernardo, California, back in the 1980’s.  I think I knew they were useful, but I always feared them. I feared them, since I knew that with emotional release a lot of really shitty emotions would come up.  They did every time I started the process.  It was like sticking my finger in a light socket.  I knew I needed to do it, but lacked the recovery skills to keep doing it often enough to get through it.  I was alone, because of my life history–which among other things involved getting yanked from every place I developed an attachment to throughout my childhood–and because my traumas isolated me, as indeed they do everyone who has suffered in particular ways.  It is a defining symptom of unprocessed trauma.

But my drinking therapy got me far enough that I was able to combine it with Kum Nye, and that has been the situation for the past six months or so.  About 4 weeks ago, I decided to quit drinking, and have reached a point where I go days without drinking.  It is always hard, because I have opened up many emotions, and they come to me, and I am unprotected.  But I am developing the ability to recover, and I can say that today I can feel a point coming where the role alcohol played–the important, beautiful, needed role–is no longer needed.  It propped me up, kept me from falling, but now I can stand on my own two feet.

This is a wonderful Christmas present, one that has taken a lifetime of work.

I will share a dream I had last night.  There was a drag racing track, with a very unusual feature: a right hand turn.  You had to make the turn, THEN accelerate with all the power those engines have.

I was noodling around in a bookstore today, and came across a book I had read a review of some time ago, “Trip to Echo Spring”, which deals with the intersection of creativity and alcoholism.  It is likely a book I should read, since alcohol has played an important role in my life for some time.  I can’t say I have wrestled with alcohol: on the contrary, it has unquestionably been a net boon to me.  All the same, why I drink is to me a very interesting question.

This book seemingly has the metaphor of water throughout it–she visits the sites where several writers, like Virginian Woolf, drowned themselves, and she deals with a story “The Swimmer”–and I would submit that this metaphor has occurred in my own dreams.  I was once told more or less explicitly to stop drinking and start swimming.  I took this literally, and bought myself a suit and some goggles, but I don’t like swimming.  It’s funny, but it’s true.  I likely will take it up before long, but I am for now dealing at its root with my own unfreedom, exploring it, understanding it, massaging it, to use the Kum Nye metaphor.

And I see now that the image is metaphorical.

Let us let water represent emotion, and the ocean deep, uncontrolled emotion, and the swimmer someone reconciling himself to emotion.

Can we not posit that many reject, in what we might term Ordinary State of Consciousness (OCS), the possibility of the ocean?  When I say emotion, I mean all emotions, good and bad: joy, love, hate, sadness, anger, attachment, obsession, sex, sex, sex, power, powerlessness, belonging, rejection.  Emotions have all the shades and varieties of clouds.  None are the same, even if we speak of types out of the necessities imposed by language.

And can we not posit that many writers, in unleashing their creative potential, always unleash at the same time unprocessed demons–which I have recently begun to believe are those cages we have internalized that seek to limit us?  Can we not say, perhaps, that they are driven to create by what they fear, and simultaneously liberated and enslaved by entering through intoxicants Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness?

Can we not see the ocean as potential, and grant the possibility of rejecting this potential in ordinary waking states?  Can we not say that people with serious, deep emotional issues are afflicted by dryness without alcohol, and an admixture of terror and joy which get expressed through creative synthesis when high in some form or other?

As I said a few posts ago, Charles Bukowski’s tombstone apparently reads “Don’t Try”.  Can we not add: “Let it”, where it is a spontaneous flow which emerges when allowed? He was an alcoholic from an early age (13, if memory serves).  He apparently tried early on, and failed.  Alcohol let him move without trying.  That is why he consumed so much of it.

It not the task then, liberating creative energy without lust, without fear, without panic, without compulsion?  Has not most of the creative energy of the last century within our dominant cultural sphere been traumatic and unhelpful, because mixed of both toxic and life-bearing elements?

I am thinking out loud here, but I think there are some thoughts here worth considering deeply.

Bit rambling, so be it.

Being me, mostly, I got to thinking “what if Heidegger had had a tool like Kum Nye, that he used consistently?”  It is, I think, a good question.  He thought a lot ABOUT Being–Dasein and the rest.  But when he bought his coffee in the morning, who was more emotionally present: him, or the person serving him?  Chances are overwhelming, are they not, that it was the person serving him, who perhaps because Heidegger thought “deep” thoughts considered him his superior?  In my own worldview–can I say Weltanschauung?–Heidegger of the two was vastly the inferior, since he had made an apparent virtue of actual existential retrogression.  It does not matter how deeply you THINK about being: if you are not there, then no one is.  You are operating an unclever machine, which spits out informationally flat 0’s and 1’s.

Or take Sartre: “L’etre et le rien”.  He sat at a cafe, high on speed, and drank coffee and wine all day long, smoked furiously, and wrote 10-20 pages of something most of his adult life.  Was he there?  No: he was cruel, he was angry, and in my own moral cosmology this means inherently that no, he was not there.  He did not think he COULD be there, and one could perhaps look at his entire life’s work as an extended rationalization of a failure necessitated by being stupid. Or, put more precisely, by being unwilling to allow his emotions to percolate, process, and “rationalize”, both due to inherent lack of deep awareness, and due to lacking a METHOD.

I am superficial and ignorant enough to take the two as types, the first of Fascism, the second of Communism. In Heidegger’s case, he had “feelings” for Nazism.  After his initial infatuation he lost his enthusiasm, but he in my understanding never resigned his membership, and never fully rejected the Nazi project.  How would he have conceived the Nazi project?  The formation of Home in conditions of existential confusion. (again: I am not well versed on this topic, and am perhaps projecting as much as analyzing, but I still think this basic project is useful).

Hitler, in my view, was a much better man than Stalin.  Objectively, Stalin killed more people–particularly once one factors in the Comintern and its role in mass death the world over, not least through leading agent Ho Chi Minh, and the mass deaths he facilitated throughout Indochina.  But more importantly, Hitler was capable of at least loving ideals.  I don’t think anyone capable of such atrocities would be capable of loving actual people, but Hitler clearly operated from a wellspring of deep emotion, which is what made him such a powerful orator, and charismatic leader.  He truly loved his vision of the German people, and he truly wanted what was best for them, as he conceived it.  He wanted for them wealth and power, and security and stability.

Stalin had none of that.  He was a calculating machine, which loved no ideal, wanted no concrete outcome, had no attachment except to power for himself.  He recognized no truth outside of power, no reality outside of power.  He had no love for the Russians or any other nation.  He rejected his homeland of Georgia in rejecting his name.  He had no place, he wanted no place, he dreamed of no place for those he “led” through abuse.

I repeated a claim a few weeks ago that Camus was murdered.  I wonder if Stalinist Sartre knew of this, if in fact that is what happened?  He would not have cared, would he, since his whole life was rejected in the course of his arguments as to why and how he and no one else could exist, despite his furious and sadistic exhortations that that was the “essence” of life, to the extent it had one.

I am a Liberal.  Period.  To my mind, adding “classical” is to accept the lie that modern “liberals” are anything but people who do not exist, and so must grab power in the name of others to protect themselves through power from the lie at the core of their beings.

I reject, of course, Fascism.  I simply reject even more strenuously the creed that Obama and others seemingly still carry, which has no love, no life in it: nothing but lies and death, moral and physical.

I have been doing eKum Nye level 2.8 for some weeks, off and on.  This is the 18th, if my math is correct, module I was emailed after enrolling in the program.

This level includes a very simple exercise, called Heart Gold Thread, which seemingly has a very powerful ability to evoke latent emotions.  Now, the previous 18 or so lessons were a lead-up to this lesson, and it is my understanding it is best to open up other energies nexuses before doing this exercise (consult your physician, astrologer, priest, tarot cards, best friend, chance before trying: I’m half serious, because I can’t claim at this point to know how any of this works), but I will describe it and my own experience.

You simply stand, feet about 6″ apart, and slowly raise your arms, palms down, to slightly higher than shoulder level, and stand there for 10 minutes.  Working up to 25 minutes is a desirable goal.

Needless to say, I hope, your arms get tired and painful.  I have very strong shoulders, but I also have large arms, and 10 minutes, I would assume, is a lot for nearly anyone, at least until they build up.  It seems after a few minutes an impossible task.  I have to lower my arms even now a couple times.

Nothing happens for some period of time.  You are just standing there, wondering what the point is.  You close your eyes, and in a strict iteration put your tongue to the back of your teeth, open your mouth slightly, and try to breathe evenly between mouth and nose.

I don’t know if anything will happen–good or bad–for folks who have not done preparatory work, and would again encourage folks to sign up for the whole program at http://kumnyeyoga.com/e-kum-nye/ ,but in my own case particularly when my arms started getting wobbly, and I decided to keep them up there anyway, powerful emotions would after a time rush through, so strong I wanted to yell: feelings mainly of fear, but also sadness, and occasionally calm.

And like any Kum Nye, you just stay with the feeling.  You let it burn.  You tolerate it, knowing it will not last forever, but that it is or was a part of you that was holding you back, keeping you from manifesting something better.  You embrace it, welcome it, thank it.  Whatever its role was at one time in your life, it was useful, protective, needed.

It is very literally like emotional housecleaning.  It is getting into the corners and attic, and just seeing what all is there, and letting what you don’t want manifest and then diminish.  This process is still on-going.  I am going to start the next level today, but will continue to do this every evening, probably after doing my Emwave 2 for ten minutes, which seems to be beneficial.

So often people feel a sense of powerlessness because knowledge is power, and they lack knowledge.  Most of what you need to know does not consist in “be nice”, despite what our educational system would have you believe.  Being nice is the consequence most of the time for people who are emotionally healthy, with the only exceptions being when it is inappropriate.

The dictum “be nice” is soulless, devoid of meaning, devoid of POSSIBLE affective depth.  In our world we are taught close to nothing about how to become deep, meaning-full human beings.  We are taught how to describe our emotions, but not how to feel them, how to be present now, so that some new present can manifestly (forgive me) presently.

Our culture is weak.  We lack the TOOLS needed to become otherwise. I submit this is one possible such tool that is virtually unknown.

Sadomasochism is the result of it hurting more to tolerate the pain of freedom that to endure either the pain of separation implied by cruelty, or the manifest pains of masochism, which include the overt loss of freedom.

Now, I want to be clear that I mean much, much more than simply sexual sadomasochism.  I see the rejection of freedom all around, and very definitely within me.  I look at my own psychodynamic history, and there was simply no room for my own healthy development of a self.  It was not just not encouraged, but very actively discouraged–punished is the word–in ways I was completely unable to see at the time and for a long time since.

But I feel, I think with some cause, that this basic process is common.  A great many people fail to fully individuate: it is a process of spiritual growth, and our society more or less conflates growth with careers and money, neither of which matter when one is simply acting as an automoton, acting on programming, understanding and truly choosing on a deep level nothing.

Plainly, in many ways we are constrained, as many silly people love to point out.  Yes, of course, there are genetics and family and social milieu.  In principle, this is not in any way a different constraint than that in other days assumed by the process of a deterministic astrology.

What I have stipulated often is that we have the freedom of “non-statistical coherence”, that of making choices which define who WE choose to be, choices that may be small, but put us in a different slot than the one for which we were destined, and that choice can include fully ACCEPTING the path we are on, embracing it, making it our own.  There is a space we can perceive, and in which we can feel freedom of being.  I have sensed it many times.

All evil and all good comes from this process.  Evil is simply the rejection of freedom at the root emotional level, regardless of what the mind says.  As such, it is a rejection of existence outright, both that of oneself and by emotional implication that of others.  At a root emotional level this contradiction between the fact that one is alive, and that one cannot LIVE causes both all manner of cruelty, and toleration and even embrace of that cruelty.

I saw all this in a dream.  I have interesting dreams.

I’m watching “Birth of a Nation”–which I understand was used for propaganda purposes in the resurrection of the KKK, and in a telling piece of symbolism, was the first film shown in the White House, to the patent racist Woodrow Wilson–and have reached the scene of a Ball, in the (at that point relatively) antebellum South.

I think we should bring back the institution of the Ball, where people dress to the nines, act genteelly, and dance all together in dances all know.  The Ball, of course, was an aristocratic institution, something denied the plebians.

But if America is anything, if the project we started means anything, it is about the generalization of all the things that make life congenial and pleasant.  To my mind, the American project remains among the most bold, most audacious, most GOOD, ever attempted in human history.  Our principles are sound, even if like all peoples at the time, our early history was contracted by bias and ignorance.

We destroyed the Indians.  We enslaved the blacks, at least across half our domain.  These are historical facts that cannot be undone.

But history as a whole is FULL of such atrocities.  It more or less CONSISTS in the repetitious fall of one nation and the rise of another equally bad, but more congenial for those who suffered under the previous one.

Only here, only in this nation, only under this Constitution has a serious effort been made to end “history” by making freedom general.

There is great beauty in what has been attempted, great courage, great vision.  It is therefore only with sadness, as I have said many times, that one looks upon all the efforts to recontract us, to make us dumber, less principled, to return power to an elite that looks upon the masses with contempt, as do Socialists, and all the others who use their rhetoric for their own ends.

The laws of the Roman Public Thing, the Res Publica, were written in stone.  It mattered not, when the caliber of humans running the enterprise decayed beyond redemption.

The only faith we can have is in the pursuit of Goodness, which can be conceived many ways, when conceived in sincerity and good faith.  We can reconcile the many ways, in peace, and public piety, when we remember who we are, remember the brazenness of this enterprise, and remember the sorrow of history.

I will submit that the Ball is one way to do this, one way to remember.  We have reached a point of prosperity where such things can come into being again.

I know, of course, that I am in many ways a fool, preaching to the wind.

Still, one must have dreams.  I am an archetypal, ueber-Pisces, quite content to be skewered by contradictions I embrace.  The waters rise and fall: this is an eternal reality.

I think what I like most about this day is the silence.  There are few cars on the road, few people out and about.

It makes me think of how things must be and have been in predominantly Jewish communities on the Sabbath.  It is hard to rest when everyone else is out and about and doing, but when the community, everyone, is silent, resting, peaceful, it is much easier to unwind: nowhere to go, nothing to do.

Family: it works better in such conditions.  We all need a rest from the ache of work, of worry.  I can’t be the first to say this, but the Sabbath may well have been the key to the survival of Judaism, which antedates almost all world religions, and has the dubious distinction of having been cast out of its homeland more than once, and in the last case for several thousand years.

One sees the men clad in black walking to the Synagogue, and knows they have a candle lit at home.  This is culture.  Plainly, it works.

Resolved: that in a plural society diversity includes moral diversity, and that moral diversity in principle includes diversity on all topics, including that of sexuality.

Corollary: any society which does not tolerate diversity on any topic of consequence is by that fact alone no longer pluralistic, and if this lack of diversity is enacted by violence–whether directly physical, or by eliminating the ability of dissenters to express their views–that society is tyrannical and inherently, definitionally anti-Liberal.

With regard to the Phil Robertson case, what is at issue is neither whether or not homosexuality is moral, nor whether it is moral to believe it is immoral.  What is at issue is whether we remain a pluralistic society capable of resolving or at least reconciling our difference through open dialogue, or whether we are becoming mon-archic–an order based on One, on one vision, one view, one way of behaving. 

As a practical matter, we have in this country competing societies, competing social orders.  One remains pluralistic, and the other is patently Fascist in habit and expression.

Fools rush in where the wise fear to tread; sometimes the wise are cowards, so this makes fools at times invaluable.

I am well aware that I repeat myself–that some themes recur.  I would submit, though, that even though words and themes may repeat, FOR ME their meaning evolves, or at least I hope it does.

One could in principle utter the same phrase a thousand times–say, God is Love, or Good is love–and mean one thousand different things.  Such is the nature of language. 

To use an analogy from a previous post, can the word “cloud” ever mean the same thing twice?  Have you ever seen two identical clouds, even though when we use the word we all know approximately what we mean?

There is a continuum between an infinitely sharp blade and an all-encompassing fog–hell, let’s make it an INVISIBLE fog, even space itself–which we all need to traverse regularly.