Month: January 2014

I have reached a point where I no longer have any desire to drink.  I am sleeping fine without it, and just don’t crave that sensation any more.  Things may change, but I don’t think so.

What has changed is that I have developed an ability to generate positive, qualitatively interesting states without alcohol.

And I would submit that the failure to be able to do this is at the root of all addictions.  Addicts are not just people who crave highs, but who crave “averages”, being unable to do so consistently on their own.

In my own case, I have suffered from low grade depression my whole life.  I was literally trained using Operant Conditioning not to feel, not to relax, and not to do anything out of the ordinary.  I was rewarded for essentially being not there, and punished often and early for everything else.  When the actual hitting stopped, the narcissism of both my parents made it difficult to develop a sense of self. 

At an early age, I found I could retreat into books and fantasy worlds without getting hit, and without having to deal with the emotional confusion inherent in dealing with people who conflate the people around them with their own sense of self, and that path has determined my life.

But it hasn’t been a happy life.  As I said, I wake up feeling hated most mornings.

Lately, though, I have been able to get some emotional distance from that sense of hate, some space.  That is what I have always been lacking is space.  Narcissists take it from you.  If you have not experienced it, this feeling is hard to describe, but it embeds in everything you do, and your very sense of self and ability to feel a sovereign consciousness within the world.

But as I said, I have been able to generate MY OWN positive feelings lately, and that has made a huge difference.

Looking at this, though, I truly think that all the people who wrestle with addiction are really seeking a way out of the sense of non-specialness, of boredom, of an inability to create positive states.  They are seeking movement, when they feel like a sailing ship lost at sea without wind.  They seek liberation from a sense of psychological claustrophobia, from an oppressive sense of themselves as unchanging, stuck, stiff, dead.

I am probably saying too much, and some of this may not make sense.  There are many forms of addiction, many ways to screw up, many ways to fail.

But this feels right.  Perhaps it may be useful to someone.  I will likely never know.

I will say that as my depression lifts, and as I stop drinking, my Lumosity score shot up 200 points after being stuck in the same place for many months.  It’s not the fuzziness that’s gone, but the constant self-checking, the stopping of consciousness to see if anything I’m thinking or feeling will get me hit or hurt.  I always, always, always had to be on the defensive, and it made it hard to be spontaneous, to just let things go, and certainly to have any connection to–and certainly faith in–the future.  I have been stuck in an oppressive Present for all my life, a room without a door.  Perhaps Sartre had this emotional background in his own mind when he wrote “No Exit”.

And I see how the path to meaningful compassion and love is through hell.  I am not quite there yet, but I get glimpses of just SEEING other people, seeing their histories, seeing their weaknesses, and their strengths.

And I can see one day being able to say to people “I will go into Hell with you.  We will go where it hurts, and I will not be afraid and I will not run.  We will touch that place, then I will lead you out, help you out, help you learn to walk out on your own.  And we will do it as often as needed.”

I would call this being a spiritual soldier.  I like this idea.  No fear, endless persistence, creative engagement, constant skill development.

I sometimes write things, then decide if they make sense, or if I mean them.  Sometimes I write things and I’m really not sure where I was going with it.  But sometimes I write things, look at them, and realize it did make sense, even though I wasn’t sure at the time.

I’ve been pondering my post on Belief, about how it connects to experience.  And I have been comparing that to a link someone posted in comments to a new old book by an atheist on using “reason” to proselytize.  You read the comments, and the words reason and rationality occur over and over and over.

Reason is a fetish with these people, not a practice.  What they do is connect emotionally with an abstraction–Reason–and use it as a way to buffer experience, to distance themselves from it.  They have directed their emotional life at a cypher which can mean anything they like, but whose salient benefit is the possibility of being unchanging.  2+2 will always equal four, and they will always be able to carry around a shield of “rationality”.

But here is what I realized: are dedicated religionists any different?  Have they in fact connected with EXPERIENCE, or with ideas about how reality is, which they connect to emotionally with no evidence.  Did God dictate the Koran to Muhammad?  I have no idea, but one must believe this to be a Muslim, and there is little evidence for it, other than the Koran itself, which I am uniformly told is brilliant in Arabic (unreadable in English, in my own experience).

This got me to thinking that perhaps belief disconnects us from experience.  Perhaps it does both.

And it occurred to me there might be benefits to believing two contradictory ideas each morning before breakfast, as I recall Lewis Carroll’s Queen doing.

And I got to thinking of examples, such as black is white.  This, I found, led to interesting ideas.  For example, the property of white is a feature of how blended light is processed by human eyes.  The property of black is that it absorbs all the visible frequencies.  But if you were the surface itself, if you can look at light hitting you from the perspective of the object, the light would be full spectrum, and thus white.  I think this makes sense.

Good is evil.  Think about this.  As I am often writing about, I have been doing a lot of soul searching and inner work, and I see now that most of the worst things done to me were done in the name of the Good, of religion, of making me a better person.  Can we not say that the world is filled with people doing evil in the name of Good?  Can we not say that if you have a compulsive need to “help” people that that fact alone is sooner or later going to lead to you manufacturing ailments you can then fix; that your principle aim is actually to help yourself, but that you are lying about it, to yourself and others?

Blue is green.  Animal eyes work differently than human eyes.  They see different spectrums.  Is it not possible that the frequency we see as green is actually blue for some eyes?  I don’t know, but it is an interesting possibility.

Neurophysiologists tell us that reason and emotion are integrally tied on a hard wiring level.  This means, logically, that to perform logic well you must be emotionally developed.

Few thoughts.  Not sure what I just said, but I’m sure that won’t stop me the next time my fingers get itchy.

I’ve always liked AC/DC, like most.  They play simple, hard, effective rock.  I have three of their albums.

Whenever they got big, I was in junior high, and I recall someone telling me that one of the Young’s–maybe both–dressed up as schoolboys, with the hats, and shorts, and sweaters, with the salient different that the back of their pants was cut out.  They would regularly moon the audience, I heard.  Crazy stuff.  Hard rock and roll.

But it occurred to me today that a schoolboy with his pants cut out would be to a homosexual pedophile roughly what Brittany Spears in her bubble-gum phase was to creepy old men.  From what I read, 13-14 year old boys are a routine fantasy for many older homosexuals. That was definitely the age the Spartans recruited their boys, and they were each assigned to one older man, with whom homosexual contact presumably occurred [not topical, but it is interesting that when the Thebans finally defeated the Spartans, it was with a modified line, with a salient–on the right, if memory serves–filled with 150 pairs of homosexual lovers, called the Sacred Band, again if memory serves.  They were their best fighters, and the idea was that they would turn the corner, and enable a flanking maneuver, which they did.  Alexander later used this technique, albeit not with a Sacred Band.]

Think this through, look at it from that perspective.  It is completely foreign to me, but does the logic not stand?

It has always made sense to me that AC/DC was a reference to bisexuality, but it never occurred to me what was actually being presented on stage.

What this means, what message they were trying to communicate, I don’t know, and they may not have known themselves.

My point here is that it is so hard to see what is in front of you.  As usual, Mary Poppins has this spot on. 

Granted, that was an odd segue.

Read this lyric, and ponder it, if you never have:

You got problems in your life of love
You got a broken heart
He’s double dealin’ with your best friend
That’s when the teardrops star fella
Pick up the phone, I’m here alone
Or make a social call
Come right in, forget ’bout him
We’ll have ourselves a ball hey

My word of the day is seemingly “Liberal”.  It’s a good word, even if it has been corrupted by awful people for use in anti-Liberal propaganda.

As I have more or less stated, or at least implied, my long term goal is to create what could be called a religion.  I have called it a church.

But as I ponder it, what I want, at the very heart of the thing, is a mechanism for evolving, for changing, and for changing without contradicting the core of the “creed”, to extent I have one.

Provisionally, I like my three “Goodness” principles, of rejecting self pity, persisting, and continually moving perceptually.

But other precipitates are likely, given a group.  What I want to build into this cultural system, and this belief system, is the same flexibility that true Liberalism–when deployed by sober (in the good sense), well intentioned, sensible people–allows.

When you look at historical religions, they are relatively inflexible.  There is only so far you can get from the Torah in Judaism, the New Testament in Christianity, the Koran in Islam.  There is only so far you can depart from the teachings of the Buddha, the Tripitaka, the 12-fold path.

What we need for the future is something which can grow over time, which can take on an organizational thirst for ever-increasing efficacy, as oriented around the goals of human well-being understood in the deepest possible senses.

Can Science and Belief not dance?  I think they can.

I think it worth saying that Liberalism as I define it below was developed by white Europeans, and their descendants in North America.  No other culture has anything like it, of which I am aware.  Certainly, most major nations have had periods of relative tolerance, in which diverse behaviors and creeds coexisted peacefully, but everywhere else one group has had dominant social status IN PRINCIPLE, and normally by law.  Almost all nations historically have had slavery, with most slaves in white nations having been white, and most slaves in black nations having been black.

As I said earlier, America is the only nation to have rejected slavery in principle to such an extent that it was willing to wage an enormously destructive war over it (and yes, I know the pedantic quibbles that can be made with this statement).

Does this make whites superior to other races?  No, but it makes our cultural history more benign than that of other races.  We of course are also the only ones to have waged global wars, to have developed weapons capable of destroying the human race, and of course to have conquered and colonized most of the planet.  With great capability comes great potential both for good and evil.  Had we not so much as invented the wheel, we would have remained capable of death and destruction.

From my other website, here is my treatment of Liberalism as I conceive it:

It occurred to me the other day that leftists–true leftists, of the sort tending towards the Cultural Sadeist variety (and I want to be clear that I don’t consider people like Nancy Pelosi necessarily to be sadists in a formal sense, but rather empty at their core of sincere belief, sincere feeling, sincere humanity) never speak for their own group.

Lenin was not a worker; nor were his Bolsheviks (whose very name “majority” party, was itself a lie): they were intellectuals, far more educated, far more able to earn good livings, than most Russians. 

Most of those wanting to speak for blacks in this country are rich white people, and those who are black do not live in ghettos, and most of them become rich in the process of “sympathizing” with the poor.  Where did Jesse Jackson, Jr. go to school?

Most of the architects of the “War on Poverty”, then and now, are rich.  Obama is rich.  Harry Reid is rich.  Ted Kennedy was rich.  Sargent Shriver was rich.

Fidel Castro’s family was relatively rich, and his father was more or less a moral equal of Batista in his cynicism and lust for ill gotten wealth.  I read some time ago that he had someone killed he owed money to, and who was asking for his money back.

Everywhere you look, you find almost no examples of people speaking for THEIR OWN group.  You see people speaking for other groups, for other tribes.

This point is subtle, and I’m not quite sure I am even yet able to make it quite correctly, but I am going to try: these people pursued “universal” principles precisely because they lacked any actual affection for any actual living people.

The defining trait of the narcissist is to mistake ones own emotions for those of others, to confuse what one wants for oneself, with what others actually need.

It is quite possible to pursue ones own psychological liberation through work conducted purely upon abstractions.  To be clear, this is not a “liberation”, but rather a way of enduring, of avoiding deep-seated terrors and inner demons, and conflicts.  You become “moral” in the act of welding your sense of self with an abstraction, one unanchored by any possible outside referents, any outside being, any outside real, true, living reality.

Thus, death-dealing becomes a moral act, if tied to the correct inner lies.  Torture becomes liberation, if framed in a way which protects the fragile ego from the emotional reality of horror.

And I see this process promulgated throughout the minds–not hearts–of those who want to define for us our culture, who want to tell us what is right and what is wrong, but who in so doing NEVER ask themselves if what they are pursuing is actually, in aggregate, helping or hurting those they claim to care about.

Jesse Jackon–unlike Martin Luther King, Jr.–has never ached for black Americans.  He has never truly internalized and felt the pain and suffering they feel; or at least not for many, many years.

Obama cares nothing for the hell-holes in Philadelphia, the boys crying out for their fathers, the girls seeking love in all the wrong places, having babies because they are too undeveloped to know that babies don’t give love, but demand it.  He doesn’t care about all the petty viciousness that attends poverty, attends wanting more but not knowing how to get it.

This is the truth.  This is why leftists NEVER pursue policies which actually work to end poverty, to end racism, to end the hopelessness that inheres in large segments of our population, that inheres in the heart of the richest nation on  Earth and in history.  They quite literally conflate their stated intentions with their own inner realities.  They believe that because they claim to care, that they actually care.  They believe that because they take actions to end abuses, that they actually sincerely want those actions to succeed.

This is not Liberalism.  This is savagery.  This is bestiality, cloaked thinly by false rhetoric.  This is emotional deformity, given a high platform.

Can we not see Obama as a high priest in a demonic cult, tossing the weakest among us into the flames?

History is clear that yes, we can.  This is a horrible truth, but truth it is.

What we need is a resurrection of tribalism, where people at least belong SOMEWHERE, where they feel sincere, true affections, for actual, living, breathing, suffering and celebrating human beings.

This is the root of Fascism, of course–which is a refuge for the utterly lost–but pursued with wisdom and a genuine Liberal intent, it is in my view the ONLY path to a desirable future, and world worth living in.

Something good seems to be happening to me.  I’m losing the urge to drink entirely.  For some reason watching the Buck Owens Show is helping me, but from the middle I felt the need to look up Bukowski quotes.  I am in that middle somewhere.

“those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.”

“Find what you love and let it kill you.” 

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire” 

“I’ve never been lonely. I’ve been in a room — I’ve felt suicidal. I’ve
been depressed. I’ve felt awful — awful beyond all — but I never felt
that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering
me…or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words,
loneliness is something I’ve never been bothered with because I’ve
always had this terrible itch for solitude. It’s being at a party, or at
a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel
loneliness. I’ll quote Ibsen, “The strongest men are the most alone.”
I’ve never thought, “Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and
give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I’ll feel good.” No, that won’t
help. You know the typical crowd, “Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you
going to do? Just sit there?” Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out
there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let
them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to
rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn’t want to hide in
factories. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been
lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have. Let’s
drink more wine!”

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should
make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened
by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

Bukowski is my kind of people.

But I look at Buck Owens, too, and I see courage.  This is the show I’m watching at the moment, that I have on pause.  He, too, had a rough life in his own way.  He went hungry as a child, was moved away from his home in Texas.  Despite the conventional need for smiling, he does not do it very well.  He tries, but he can’t quite pull it off.  And his guitarist, his best friend Don Rich (whose death in 1974 shattered him) smiles too much.

People lived in smaller houses then, led much more modest lives.  True poverty was still quite common.  The Catholic Church was still effectively facilitating pedophilia, and men could still demand sex of women at the work place without much risk of censure.

Owens music seems innocent.  I think to myself that Jimmy Hendrix was warming up in 1966. The whole culture was getting ready for a rupture from which it still has not recovered.

I see on the one side, the wholesomeness of Owens music.  Looked at more carefully, though, it is quite often about heartbreak and difficulty, too, with the important element that it aims to transcend heartbreak, to transform emotions, to help people carry on.

Owens himself, though, was married 4 times.  Quite often, it seems country music is not so much cathartic as descriptive. 

Here is a, to me, very interesting interview with George Jones, in which he freely admits his cocaine habit, that he nearly killed himself, that his promoters took out a life insurance policy on him (using a complicit doctor to commit fraud in the application) and that one of his big backers was killed by the mob: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJoQZRbbYr0

So often it is easy to sentimentalize the “good old days”.  We see human stupidity, evil, laziness, corruption, greed, lust, and the thought that human life has ALWAYS been like this–and in fact for most of history has been far, far worse–is really hard for us, in our easy living conditions, to accept.  It is hard for us to accept how hard the physical–and often cultural–living conditions are in much of the world.  We find it hard to accept that in the Islamic world men can beat their women with impunity.  We find it hard to accept the open pedophilia often on display there.

Just yesterday, I was reading about a man put into a labor camp in China, after being blinded in one eye trying to stop the rape of a woman by Communist Party connected sadists.  I had a dream some time ago about the atmosphere of fear in Cuba, where women are regularly raped by Party officials, and for which there is no remedy, no justice.  Think about it: how could there be, when “truth” is controlled centrally, and sadistic prisons (which among other things contain cages the size of dog crates) prisons exist where people can disappear indefinitely?

Can we not look forward?  Can we not take the idea of Liberalism, and continue to try to actually bring it into being, to generalize it?

For me, I take comfort in Buck Owens.  I don’t remember, but I suspect he was on the TV when I was very little.  But I agree with Bukowski that we need madness, too, and not the sort seen in alcoholic binges.  His alcoholism was only part of his character.  Countless people drink their lives away and create nothing.  He had a creative core.

I am rambling, as I do.  I am thinking aloud, as I do.  Perhaps there is something useful here, perhaps not.  But in my own way, I am trying the ENGAGE with the contents of my consciousness, to connect in a syncratic (idiosyncratic minus the idio) various threads of thought and meaning.

Can I not ask, of the wider world, more of this?  From all of you?

Compassion is an outcome, not a method.  It is an effect, not a cause.

I spoke of Hemingway and Kerouac as cultural icons in a previous post.  By this, I mean they are taught in our centers of acculturation, which is to say our schools.

Ask yourself: where in your high school education did you learn anything useful about transcendence, the mythic, the numinous? 

What was it mostly filled with?  Psychology–perhaps–and a bunch of books about screwed up people who had very few positive, useful lessons to convey. 

Our “ordinary” culture is of course defined by TV, radio, movies.  It consists in the magazines you see checking out at the grocery store.  That, and for many a weekly trip to church, to learn about ideas that are otherwise largely ignored.

What is problematic in our society is that our allegedly higher culture has nothing to teach us.  The best professors of philosophy, and even psychology, really have no good answers to the meaning of life, to the purpose of suffering.

Certainly, so-called Positive Psychology is preferred to the creed of “we’re all screwed up then we die”, but if you want to create a one-to-one layering of cultural and genetic inputs and the sense of self, then you have failed to provide good answers to very basic questions.

Hence the pervasive confusion we see; hence the valorization of hate through the rhetoric of love; hence the many minds twisted into a permanent project of subverting human freedom.