Month: January 2014

In one Buddhist compassion meditation, we are supposed to view all souls–even those who do us harm–as having once been our mother.   This may work for some, but for me, my thought is: “what the fuck happened?”  How did you slide so far down that you are now oppressing me, hurting me?  Why should I forgive now the crimes you commit simply because at some point in the infinitely distant past you were loving?  Why should I not have the right, now, to defend myself emotionally from your assaults?

Here is my version: imagine that you yourself have in the past committed every sin imaginable, across thousands of lifetimes.  You have killed and raped, tortured, maimed, stolen, lied.  You were a pedophile, committed bestiality, performed human sacrifices.

But you suffered, learned and grew.  You passed beyond that ignorance to your present condition of mostly not sucking as a human being, and trying to do better. In this life, versus the past, you have committed few acts of cruelty, have been mostly honest,and done your best as a parent.

Look at all the evil in the world, the viciousness, the stupidity, the unnecessary suffering, and realize you, too, have been the perpetrator.  You, too, were there, and you grew beyond it.  So, too, can those who are evil today.

This helps me, at any rate.  As I said in the previous post, I am in an odd mood, for specific reasons, but dealing with old emotions in, I hope, new ways.

I will add that it is odd that most of us want to have been kings in the past.  We want, at a minimum, to have been average.  But if in some primordial way we all rise from the spiritual muck, why not assume the worst of ourselves?  We are not like that any longer.  We have done our time, paid for our sins.  And so, too, will those around us.

I am having an odd day, but because I am seemingly in a heightened state of awareness, it is pushing me in interesting directions. I am not resisting it, but rather trying to integrate it into my breath, as I train to do in Kum Nye.

At this moment it seems to me I would be hard pressed to trust anyone I cannot visualize taking up a blade and taking blood to defend something, or more importantly someone, they loved.  I cannot see myself trusting anyone who is unwilling to defend causes that matter to them.  I cannot allow into my tribe anyone who rejects tribes.

Now, we see constantly that tribalism is the source of all violence, where violence is assumed to be the principle evil in the world.  This idea is bullshit.

First, the essence of Liberalism is recourse both to universal ideals, and specific, contextual tolerance as expressed in a political system which permits wide arrays of behavior and law.  Within a truly Liberal context, differences are not suppressed or ignored, but actively explored by the parties concerned in mutually beneficial and instructive ways.  Both grow as a result of exposure to difference.

But we do not live in a Liberal society, by and large.  We live in a society in which the dominant culture is suppressed by the dominant culture, and difference not explored, but lionized, making one party feel superior with no justification, and the other inferior, also without justification.

There have been no civil wars in any other nations over the issue of slavery, which continues unabated to this day in many Islamic nations, since they see nothing wrong with it.  It continues unabated in Cuba, and North Korea, and to a great extent China (even though they claimed within the past few days to have closed their slave camps).

Secondly, violence as an evil is vastly inferior to moral vacuity, meaninglessness, an addiction to the sopophorics mouthed by those who truly believe nothing.  We all die, but is it not worse to die having done nothing meaningful after a long life, than to live a short, but connected life?  That is my view.  Better a day as a lion than a thousand as a sheep.

I am doing some emotional house-cleaning–as well as some very literal, very physical house-cleaning–and I want to say something many won’t like: I don’t trust the Dalai Lama.  I have sensed in my meditations that he has more or less directly cut a deal with the Chinese not to make trouble for them.

We watch him smile compassionately.  His embrace of ahimsa seems genuine.  He has told the Tibetan people that their sufferings will be rewarded with greater virtue.

But I call bullshit.  There are campaigns that could be waged against property.  There are sit-down strikes that they could do.  They could sit on train tracks.  There are many things the Tibetans could do to make things so hard for the Chinese that they would cease their de facto war against the culture of the Tibetan people.  He could have called for guerilla war long ago.  The Tibetans are tough, and their terrain would likely make it hard to resist a long insurgency.  Certainly, it would slow the pace at which the Chinese are moving in, and forcing Tibetans out of their own cultural centers.

I may not know what I am talking about.  I don’t know the details of the mass rebellions that happened several years ago and which were brutally suppressed.  All I know is that Tibet is disappearing: what once was will be no more; and as the only leader they have (few know that the Panchen Lama was identified as a child decades ago, and promptly disappeared into Chinese custody, never to be heard from again), more is possible.

Again, specifically, it irks me to see compassion lauded without placing equal emphasis on wisdom.  Compassion is an easy virtue.  It can and often is the virtue of cowards, who believe nothing. All of the emotions we were born equipped to feel have uses.  Hate has a place and a time, even for the wise, in my view.  You cannot permanently suppress any emotion in this world and not lose some part of your efficacy, your utility, your full humanity.

Rumi once said, roughly, that there was no place in his hall for those with no evil in them, and this is what he meant, in my view.  He sought men, not machines.

Our culture in many ways seems turned to the negative.  We valorize–to use an academic term–people like Ernest Hemingway, or Jack Kerouac, who are basically screw-ups, who have little to offer in the way of the sort of deep myth which enables individual and cultural transformation in positive ways, and whose principle contributions are aesthetic.  Having failed in the mythic realm, our more talented minds are quite frequently led to Scientism, which deals with myth by rejecting it, by rejecting subjectivity, by rejecting direct experience, by rejecting agency and the “first person”.

Small wonder that our model for aging sees youth as superior to age: how can age matter when wisdom is a chimera, and personal growth impossible?  So we pack our parents away in government funded asylums, and more or less assign them to one controlled compartment in our lives.  We can see them or not see them as we see fit, as they accord with our convenience or sense of duty, or–to be sure–in some cases with love and affection offered sincerely, although I think in most of those cases Mom and Dad live at home until truly impossible.  The wife working, of course, makes this happen sooner and more often.  It is culturally destructive in many ways, as is the erosion of the extended family.

Within this milieu we have the myth, the institution, the known “happening”, of the mid-life crisis.  You get to 40 or 50 and realize that you have been living someone else’s life, perhaps that of Madison Avenue, more likely that brought on by our cultures superficiality, and dependence on people not asking too many questions.  You go along to get along, until you can’t get along, and in the stereotype you buy a motorcycle, or grow a pony-tail, get a young girl-friend, dye your hair, etc.  This is both a way of rejecting aging, and of granting that your own behavior to this point has been tepid and lacking in audacity.

So in the classic formulation, you look forward to old age and senescence, and react by embracing the things of youth.

What I would suggest, though, is that the opposite is also possible: you can conquer old wounds, grow beyond old limitations, finish unfinished business.  You can look back and finally find reconciliation, peace, and look forward to continued growth across the rest of your life.  You can look forward to the back half of your life, not living it like some kid, not rejecting the process of becoming wise, but rather embracing it and welcoming it.  You do not need a motorcycle: you can buy a paintbrush, paints, and canvas.  You can take up that hobby which you have always dreamed of.  You can go more deeply into experience.

Oh, we have problems.  But they all have solutions.

Came across this quote:

A myth is something which never happened, but which is always true.

It occurred to me yesterday, in a moment of deep reflection, that belief is what connects our sense of self to our experience.  It is what connects mind to heart, what merges them.  It is what enables certain perceptual possibilities to emerge.

I have long felt that atheism does something to people.  I have danced around this quite a bit, and likely said roughly what I am about to say, but hopefully not exactly this: the problem with rejecting life at the core of the universe, at the core of experience, is that it makes one feel an object, and feeling like an object causing a dimming of life energy at the core.  Clearly, many atheists live interesting and adventurous lives.  But it has always seemed to me some spark was missing.

And Cultural Sadeism is about failing to connect with experience at all.  It is the head connecting to the head,which is connected to an IDEA of connection, of universal salvation, of universal liberation, freedom, happiness, love and hope, all abstract virtues for people capable of none of them.  It is a retrogressive, cultural tautology.

There is more to say about this, but I haven’t figured out what yet.

Here is what to my mind is an interesting thought experiment: could we perhaps judge the importance of virtues by how hard they would be to teach to a robot?

What got this train in motion was realizing that you could teach a robot “tolerance” with a few lines of code.  You simply have it reply to all behaviors and utterances “I accept this”. It doesn’t matter what the behavior or idea is.  You blow goats (to use a Wayne-ism)?  I accept this.  You are a mass murderer?  I accept this.

It is only in conditions of repugnance, of visceral rejection that tolerance truly becomes a virtue.  It is only when you find it hard to accept someone that accepting them, via empathic identification, becomes a virtue.

And love, inherently, requires judgment of an extraordinarily subjective kind.  It is not saying “good job” and hugging.  These are mere outer manifestations, that again could easily be programmed with a few lines of code.  “I hear you.”  “You matter to me.”  Code.

What it takes is a capacity to understand others, and help them on their own journeys, to help them learn to help themselves, to love themselves, to grow and expand.  And this would not easily be taught to robots, even if humans even now approach being machines in their own programmed, stereotyped, reflexive reactions to a variety of stimuli.

Being nice, likewise, is a robotic virtue, if chosen as a default.  If you feel genuine connection with others, kindness come naturally.  But Ted Bundy knew how to be polite, and nice when it suited him.

The further I dig, the more strongly I feel that we all must retain some connection with our shadows, because failing to do so blinds us.  It removes affective and perceptual possibilities.  We are animals, too, still, here in this world.  This fact does not disappear if we fail to acknowledge it.  It hides.

This is an old koan, readily familiar to those of a certain reading list, and immersed within certain cultural habits.

My own two cents is that it is impossible to meet the Buddha, because he does not exist.  Given this, there is nothing you CAN kill.  The Buddha spirit is quite safe, and so are you, as long as you are committed to death.

This is offered in the spirit of facilitating perceptual risk taking.

If this is cryptic, shouldn’t it be?

I’m getting ready to do my Kum Nye, and it just hit me that I resist it, not just because it sometimes brings up unpleasant emotions, but because it “misdirects” me from a day I otherwise would have tried to spend in a single emotional state.

Do we, in our culture, grant in any way cycles other than those of machines?  Yes, we have 8-ish hour workdays, and we have weekends, and we have holidays.  All of this makes us efficient at making and distributing things.

But how many really decompress at the end of the day, or end of the week, or in the course of a one week vacation filled with screaming kids? In our culture, some lucky few–the smarter, more foresighted, more talented, more lucky–have 10-20 healthy years at the end of a career to “find themselves”.  And some do.  But I think many merely continue the distractions that got them through their days all their lives.  And most of us, of course, can look forward to nothing but hoping our health holds while we work our way into final senescence.  Anyone who thinks the promises of our government can be kept is a fool.

In my own case, analytic distance–can we call it the Vulcan Stance?–served me well at one time, but no more.  It takes a lot of will, a lot of energy, to prevent spontaneity; and precisely because there are large parts of me crying out for release, spontaneity is what I need.

But at times I surrender without realizing it to the dominant tone of our culture, which is about work and pleasure, with church thrown in for some at the end of the week, and taken seriously.

Where is the space for self discovery?  As I have been arguing for years, it is absolutely economically possible to create a society in which automation frees up the time for people to spend as much time as it takes to become deeper souls–or more in touch with the soul that was already there.  I think we are already there.  We simply have a profoundly unjust, anti-humanitarian system, run by and for bastards who ALSO have no conception of what a life well-lived would feel like.  Cocaine and sex have their limits.  I suspect they all figure this out, and substitute power, pure and simple, as their principle, life-defining drug.

And the quest for power is monophasic too, isn’t it?  Perhaps this is how it creates shelter from the wind: lust never changes.

In order to adapt, you must change, you must grant you cannot control the winds and waters, even if you can both sail and swim, even if you can interact creatively with the conditions you find.

If I go up, I do not want to go down; and if I go down, I do not want to go up.  This is an odd aspect of human existence.  We are not robots, and I think it is precisely because mechanisms provide final shelter from the need from change that so many people WANT to die, WANT to become Terminators, meta-humans, programmable devices.

All of the bad philosophy, and the deficient metaphysics backing it, results from deep seated emotional failures, the principle of which is the defiant need for rigidity in the face of an intrinsically mutable–and here we can paraphrase this as “interesting”–world.

God,

Grant me the grace to embrace every day, knowing that my destiny is to be shredded.  When I look at a thousand saws, eager to cut me to pieces, let me walk into them knowing that I will be reborn on the other side.

Nurture within me the capacity to die.  Nurture within me the capacity to walk into death.  Bless me with the courage needed, and the love to know that life is everywhere, that You are everywhere.

God, let my thousand fragments fertilize this earth with needed life, and grant me the rain to blossom over and over again.

So let it be.

Hell must be extinguished one person, one soul, at a time.  This was the essence of the Buddha’s insight, in my view: both that it can be extinguished, and a series of methods by which to do it.

We live in Hell, and do not realize it.  So much more is possible, both in this world, and beyond.