Month: December 2013

Bit meandering, but I stand by my meanders.

Perhaps rather than speaking of reason, and unreason, we might more usefully speak of effective and ineffective reason, and logical reasoning and emotional reasoning.

When a human organism is in balance, it is possible to calmly think things through, and to readily change one’s mind when new data appears, or circumstances change.

When one is out of balance, however, as in conditions of living under tyranny, and being compelled to commit it, then logic is not logic at all.

A common example of insanity–the sort of insanity that could have been used to justify, say, Neil Cassady in his Dionysian revels–was the nuclear arms race.  Through the 1950’s and 1960’s, Americans took seriously the Communist intent to take over the world, and took seriously the fact that both sides had atomic weapons.

Hopefully, it will never become clear what the effect of a nuclear war would be, but many not unreasonably supposed it would mean the end of our civilization, and thus even the thought of engaging in one was insane.

It would have been insane, but the point missed by many is that Communism is an insane doctrine, and so too are all the “lite” versions of it, the essential element in which is the rejection of individual moral agency.

When you are dealing with fundamentally irrational and violent people, violence has to be on the table as an option.  This is, to my mind, a rational position.  You are good, they are bad: this can happen, and relatively speaking has happened many times in history.

In actual historical fact, our nuclear arms buildup, at least to this point, WAS rational.  It worked.  We are neither Red nor Dead.

When people say, though: “who knows what is good and what is bad” this is a rejection of the possibility of coherent moral action, and thus Communism lite.

If I ask you “is the sky blue or grey”, do you not need to look out the window?  Some days it is all blue, some all gray, many a mixture.  Some days it is mostly blue, some mostly grey, but it is moving, it is changing.  This does not mean we cannot make general statements about it.

All of us understand common sense morality: don’t do things to others you would not want done to you.  Don’t lie, in general; don’t cheat, in general; empathize, offer kindness.  Should you always offer kindness?  of course not.  Be nice all the time is a recipe for failure.  It is the creed of the morally vacuous.  So, too, is the demand for relentless and unreflective compassion.  Should you feel compassion for those who want to hurt you?  If you do, if you fail to take effective action to prevent or counter their violence, they will not just hurt you, but all the other people around you.  Do they not deserve compassion as well?  Do not the innocent deserve more compassion and mercy and regard than those whose lack of emotional wellness and development drives them into enacting violence in the outer world they cannot avoid in their inner world?

Everything begins with balance, but balance, in turn, sometimes cannot be brought about except by losing it, for some period of time.

This is obvious in Holotropic Breathwork, but even in my Kum Nye practice I have no way of predicting what will come up.

Charles Bukowski’s grave stone reads “Don’t Try”.  This is apparently what he meant.  Let it come.  If you force it you kill it.  And if you kill it, you have lost access to effective reason, of both the logical and the emotional varieties.

Sanity and insanity ought to cycle, should they not?

Few drinks, long week, lots of emotional processing, strange places.

So, watched a Thomas Merton biography.  Decided he was murdered in Thailand by Communists.  His last public statement before being found dead alone of an odd, freak, electrical accident in his locked room was along the lines of “Communism only works in monasteries.  But you can question me.  Questions are tonight.  For now, I’ll disappear and you can go have a Coke or something.”

Got to thinking about other thinkers of the 1960’s who died in freak accidents, and came across Albert Camus fairly quickly.  Here is an article alleging he was killed by the KGB: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/07/albert-camus-killed-by-kgb

Ferlinghetti was in the Merton piece, so I looked him up, then Charles Bukowski (real name: Heinrich Karl Buko(v)ski: he was born in Germany, and had an accent as a child for many years).  Bukowski was beaten with a leather strap by his father multiple times a week from an early age, perhaps 5 or so.

So: entropy: leather straps, failure, despair, creative response, alcoholism, p[oetry], sex, words, words, awful delightful words.

Sean Penn was apparently a Bukowski fan.  They went to the track together.  Penn seems big on symbolism, and relative photo ops.

So I got to thinking.  This is the point of this post, which I am allowing to be meandering.

Bukowski in some respects represents the 1960’s.  Many of the figures of the 60’s, like Ferlinghetti and Merton, were really from earlier generations.  And so was Bukowski, born if memory serves in 1925. Hippies, proper hippies, were born in the late forties, and early 1950’s.

Dionysian: this is the word.  Out of whack, countercultural, non-clicking, forgettable, outside, out there, stranger, death to normal: these are words for Bukowski, and they make a lot of people of a certain disposition like him.

Me, too.

But what I want to say, before I walk my dogs to avoid the smell of urine, is that this feeling of wanting to stand outside the normal social realm is in my view quite ordinary, quite normal. It is our culture (and you are me, no doubt: can’t I assume this?) which makes it abnormal.

Do we not need to integrate the unintegrated?  Do we not need to make ordinary Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness?

I looked, in my overly simplistic way, the Enlightenment, Rationalism.  And I saw a reaction to myth, a reaction to the religious abuse of power, a clinging to science in some form, and form in all events, to order, to reason, to the adequate at the expense of the insufficient.

Then I looked at Romanticism, and saw a reaction to reactionlessness, to unreason masquerading as order, which led to an insistence on myth.

Plato said moral values exist, roughly.  Others say they do not “exist”, certainly.  Ontology is greeted with deconstruction.  The quest for values is countered with the claim that they do not “exist” outside the verbal realm and should thus be–argue the children–cast aside.  Cue the assassination.

For me, I want to say that reason and unreason must coexist.  One day one, one day the other.  Like the alternating consuls, the alternating kings, of the Roman Republic, we must not ask questions like: Is Reason Paramount:?  Is Passion Paramount?

Do we suffer from such questions?   Of course: we suffer from all bad questions.  No, I have not stopped beating my wife yet: have you stopped your abuse of truth?

Yup: It’s time to Walk the Dogs.  I don’t like the smell of urine. [they really do pee on my rug: how truly do symbol and reality procreate?]

It seems likely I will change the terminology of the fore-going, but I am working a 9 day week, and don’t have time at the moment for more exploration.

A distinction I want to make though, is between awareness and personality.  Awareness is best thought of as expanding and contracting, more or less like a sphere around a person.  Here, I might at some point speak of an Inner Expander, and Inner Contracter.

Personality is built and destroyed, much like a building.  It has analogues in the brain, and is characterized nearly entirely by habits of mind, body and emotion.  Here, it is a question of building and destroying, constructing, and deconstructing.

It is perhaps–I am tempted to say likely–for this reason Buddha spoke of “no Self”.  The role of personality, per se, is simultaneously to stabilize experience and to LIMIT it.

Now, thoughts are machines, and all analogies used here–in this world, in this life–lose, we must assume, their validity in other qualitative realms; but since we are here, we have ample cause to take them seriously, when advanced by serious, accomplished teachers.

I’ve always had very lucid dreams, both in terms of actual lucid dreams–which feel very literally like out of body experiences–and much more commonly the ability to directly affect dream content. It’s sort of like a movie, where I can dictate to some extent what happens, but in which most of the time it is more interesting to just see what happens, and more or less knowing while it is happening that it is a part of me.  Put another way, it is a sort of moving, real time psychoanalysis.

Last night, just as the engineer was going to show me the keys to the building–the controls–the orcs and Giants broke through the gates, and surrounded me.  They were going to kill me, but I surrendered.  I normally fight them and win, but this time that seemed inappropriate for some reason.  Then I awoke elsewhere (in the dream), free again, but they were still loose.

As I contemplate this, it seems to me that the evil forces represent limitations, parts of ourselves which perform the function of limiting us, keeping us within bounds.  Particularly in traumatic situations, it is best not to feel too much.  It is best to limit spontaneity, best to control thinking and emoting, to allow some things and actively discourage or even squelch others.

But this is a very unsuitable situation in conditions of freedom.  What was a protective angel because a jealous captor.  Life evolves.

We use the word “healing” for going beyond the boundaries dictated by survival in a bad situation, but this is really not the best term.  What I think we fail to realize is that we were bound BEFORE.  When we shrink in response to survival necessity, that becomes our new reality.  This is the reality of having endured trauma.

Growing beyond this, experientially, in terms of how it actually feels, feels like crossing new ground.  We can gradually grow to remember old feelings that were discarded out of necessity, but we now know about this process of growth, and that necessarily brings into question the old boundaries too.  You are shrunk, but then come to realize you can expand past where you were.  This is how trauma, pain, difficulty, can be liberating.  It brings out the awareness of possibilities you had never had cause to suspect.

Experientially, this feels to me like creation.  So, until I change my mind and come up with something better, I propose we call this Psychogenetic Expansion.  “Healing” lacks all ambition.

The smaller the self, the larger the vision.

Healing from psychological trauma is an inherently creative act.  There is no status quo ante.  You cannot return.  All trauma inherently forces us to grow by pushing through it and integrating it.  There is only forward.

And it seems to me that in healing you end a “chain of abuses”.  The person or people who hurt you were also hurt.  Their inability to process their wounds is what created their cruelty and thoughtlessness.  When you create a new, stable self, without that violence, you answer the question we were all born for.

Sometimes it is selfish to think of others.

I needed to vent. I was going to post this on Facebook, but this is clearly a better place.

For some reason I’ve been on a Russian movie kick.  I just watched “Burnt by the Sun”, which is a very sad movie set in the Stalin era.  It is difficult to communicate the violence of hate I feel for the monsters who spewed and continue to spew this evil, demonic creed, that trails death, despair, darkness, and utter depravity everywhere it goes.  It is difficult to communicate the hate I feel for Barack Obama for shaking a mass murderers hand. 

What do we do with people who lock others in closets for years because it amuses them?  What do we do with people who torture others for fun?  What do we do with people who put guns to people’s heads and pull the trigger because they get a thrill out of it?  We despise them and we put them in jail.  But what do leftists do?  They lionize them. 

It is possible to build something close to utopia. I believe this.  But not on a demonic base.  Sean Penn is pushing the politics of Ted Bundy, openly, publicly.  He, too, wants to treat people like potted plants.  And most Americans are still too stupid to understand this.

It is one thing to diagnose an emotional malady, and another entirely to do the work necessary to integrate painful realities into an “after” consciousness, to grow beyond what ails you.

It is no doubt often the case that intellectuals–thought workers, to use my preferred term at least for what I imagine myself doing–often project their own internal realities on the world.  Those who seek to steal see everyone as a thief.  Those unable to find meaning in their own lives say that “life is meaningless”.

In my own case, I am integrating the loss of a mother, of the possibility of a mother; the fact that my own mother did what was in her power to destroy me psychologically, from a very early age.  These are powerful emotions.  They invoke terror.  But I watch, and I feel, and I cannot imagine a worse terror than that of feeling helpless, of giving up, of failing to use this life to grow as much as I possibly can.  And so I go on, and it is fruitful.

But to continue the thread, I look out at the world, and I feel in some respects I am working to heal not only my own wounds–my own lacks–but those of the world generally.  What has happened to the sense of place in our world, to the feeling of being nested, home, comfortable, warm?

We live in hives of activity, do we not?  A purportedly rational, or at least rationalizable, world, one filled with archetypal male energy which can solve any physical problem, which is impatient with confusion, with hesitancy, with fog, with damp, with dark, with caves, with water, with soft voices in the distance we cannot decipher.  Do we not, though, seek mothers?  Through all this incessant activity, do we not want somewhere to rest?  And how do we rest?  Through sopophorics.  Through distraction: through TV, mePods, Twitter (Flutter?), through movement, movement, movement, virtual or actual.

In some sick way, I sense that aspiring totalitarians seek, through the attainment of the ability to snuff out alternative narratives, alternative views, alternative behaviors, the “warmth” of place.  But of course they are using archetypal male energy, without empathy, without warmth.  Theirs is the energy of the psychotic mother.

And this point warrants making: the feminine has ALWAYS been far more powerful than men have admitted.  Even if men think they have bested their wives, they were once utterly helpless in the face of their mothers.

And this energy, in its best use, is highly creative, highly nurturing.  It is food for the soul.  Where men are efficient at generating things and actions, women are efficient at generating affective states.  And it is the latter that we really want.  We don’t want things: we want the feelings those things give us.  Women, at their best, help achieve the end without the middle.

Modern feminism is a process of making women into men.  It is a process of seeking quantitative power, not qualitative power.  It is a denuding of our culture of the energies that make life bearable, that make children happy, that bring joy to life.

Few–sensations, I will call them.  I am likely sharing too much, but fuck it.  My time will come, too, and I may as well get used to the idea of complete transparency.  Our world, in any event, needs more true honesty.