Month: January 2014

I got the chance to go to the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville last Friday night, where they had four of those sorts of talented, committed, passionate artists that get described as “up and coming”, which is regrettably often–but certainly not always–a euphemism for “not quite A-List”. As one of them put it, there is really only room at the top for about 12 people.

It is an “intimate” place, which means small, but frankly it also does create a sense of being close.  I talked afterwards with all four people, and got some sense of them as individuals.

A variety of styles were on display, with some very quiet and contemplative, some loud, and some funny.  I laughed a lot.  One of the singers, Mark Narmore, had a very funny song about how Neil Young got placed on the prayer list of his 70 member church in the middle of nowhere, Alabama.  He did impressions of Bob Dylan, and Neil Diamond, and others.

Paul Sikes was my favorite.  I got his autograph and CD for my kids.  Here is him playing one of his beautiful songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yov6Ne2KoDE

And being me, I was both participating, and analyzing.  In such a lowlit room, filled with art designed to evoke emotion, I felt like I was in a temple of sorts.  This temple is devoted to making us more complete as human beings, but only if we REACT.

Now, I have a booming laugh.  This likely does not come across in my posts, but I have a very lively sense of humor and love to laugh.  I laugh without reservation, and not being a small person, it is quite loud. And I laughed a lot.

But I cry too.  It embarrasses my kids, so I held it in, but much of what I heard, of heartbreak, of sacrifice, of deep suffering, moved me.  Paul’s songs, and a few of Mark’s, really moved me. Mark cowrote this beautiful song, recorded by Tracy Lawrence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLfHM4IX1uM

He said the third verse more or less came to him in a dream, from God.

Courage is a beautiful thing.  Stubborn persistence in what is right is beautiful.

And I felt: this place is dedicated to the evocation of I have seen therapeutically reduced to NOSC, or Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness.

Do we not all need to “escape” to our deeper selves, regularly?  If life is a river, does not much get caught in circling eddies next to the shore, perhaps trying to escape the water, but unable to?

We live in water, but does not it usually seem safer for many to remain dry?  But can we?  Not without losing life, not without creating gaps, lacunae, that are not life. Life is about emotion. It is about feeling.  What I think many miss, and what is central to my own embrace of what gets called “Tantra” in spiritual traditions, is that the path to deeper emotions, deeper connections, deeper experiences BEGINS with being present here, with all the apparatus God gifted us with.  Yes, it sometimes seems a curse, but it is not.

This led to some contemplation.  What is an “ordinary” state of consciousness?  Is it not the FEELING that we are in control, that we are engaged in a purposive activity we direct?

What then is a non-“ordinary” state of consciousness?  Is it not a feeling that feelings are coming to us, that we are being “moved”, that the contents of our consciousness are being directed, by our deeper self, by something oceanic?

What is creativity?  I have said before that it is uncovering some small section of the infinite possibilities that are already immanent in the universe.  It is discovery.  But I would say that most creative people–and rightly or wrongly I like to place myself relatively in that category–often find that their best stuff comes to them spontaneously, and that the role of craftsmanship, of art, is placing them into a communicable media in an effective way.

The juice, the essence: this comes to us, unbidden.  But what some people do better than others is ask for it, and listen to the answer.  Inherently, this implies an ability to place aside what we call the “ego”, but which is really the habit of stability, of being unmoved, unchanged (we think, wrongly), of always being in control.

And what artists do is both listen to this voice, and very importantly, spend ordinary time, conscious time, directed time, developing the capacity to translate inspiration into communicable form.

Now, I know that usually NOSC refers to things like LSD experience, shamanic trance, deep hypnosis.  But do these things not exist on a continuum, one which BEGINS with the capacity to channel experience?

I am a conservative hippy.  I see our modern, mechanical world, and see a NEED, a deep, unprocessed NEED, for something like drum circles, for smoke in the air, for yelling and screaming, and emoting.

This makes us more human. Or, more accurately, it makes us more available to our own experience, more able to be present when important things present themselves.  It allows us to hear what was already there, to see what was already there, to feel what was already there.

And experientially, phenonomenologically, do we not alternate all day long between ordinary and non-ordinary states of consciousness?  One can deny this, but one cannot escape it.

Is Scientism not an effort to escape from this, which is to say an effort to escape from madness, as seen from a mathematical perspective?

We have anchor points now, do we not, in “absolute” truths like F=MA?  A squared plus b squared equals c squared?  E=MCsquared?  These truths connect us to our visible world. They allow us to predict and thus control experience.  They put a man on the moon, and food on our table.

But we can’t live in this world.  It is precisely the effort to do so which, in the modern world, had led us astray from the paradises we might have built.

There is nothing wrong with math.  It, too, is beautiful.  I intend one day soon to teach myself the Calculus which eluded me in college.  I have a Teaching Company lecture series on it.  It, too, is a creative blessing.

But the curse of Socialism is precisely this: it is an effort to reduce human experience, human life, human emotion, to formulas, and to paper over the resulting horrors with lies–mathematical lies, to be sure, carefully created, carefully deployed, carefully orchestrated, as if lies could also be beautiful.

What is a lie, though?  It is a subtraction from experience; it is something that makes us less human, less evolved, less loving, less happy.

I will leave you with a song about life, another song cowritten (he would certainly want to share the credit) by Mark Narmore: What I love about Sunday.

In my considered view–and I am historically quite literate, and quite capable of extended abstraction–this song contains the kernel of the success–thus far–of the American Experiment.

I was drinking my tea this morning, and the word “microtrauma” popped in my head, and I thought I would do a brief post on it.

In every interaction with other human beings–and as far as that goes, within our own heads, but most of that is a distillate of times long ago, when actual people were involved:  there is the chance for understanding, and misunderstanding, for connection and distance, for building, and for not building and for destroying, all in subtle ways.

There are times, and we have all experienced them, when our own open expression of emotion makes possible the reaction in the other of love.  This is the reaction we expect.  When it is not forthcoming, this is a communication.  A decision has been rendered, even if no words are ever spoken, even if you never ask the question, and they never verbally provide the answer.

I think the children of parents congenitally, temperamentally, incapable of empathy–which is really nothing but a precursor of the larger capacity to express love–learn to accept this process, and learn to stop tacitly asking the question, but more importantly reject the question itself since, never have received a positive answer, it comes to seem a ridiculous question.

Microtrauma is the thousand tiny cuts, which add up to a pattern of a large trauma, but without any perceptible, single precipitating event.  You were not molested, you were not savagely beaten, or forced to go without food or shelter.  In fact, your parents mouthed both in public and private the pieties they were supposed to. If they never said they loved you, that was the way of the world then.

And in truth, saying “I love you” really is superfluous, because the reality is what it is, and on some level everyone understands what that reality is, even if they cannot consciously access that understanding absent considerable work.

In my own case, I tell my children constantly that I love them, but I also mock them regularly, as indeed they mock me.  Our back and forth banter at times would likely offend traditionalists, who so often mistook and mistake outer form for inner reality. I respect them and they respect me.  I love them, and they love me.  Our very confidence in this allows us to take it for granted when we have fun at the expense of each other.

As far as microtrauma, could we perhaps call it “Psychological Fabianism”?  Fabianism is about breaking down all social rules, all culture, all instinctive affections, all honesty, all honor, all love, all duty, in the name of “Social Justice”, and in reality as a result of deep seated psychopathologies on the part of those who follow this path, which is defined morally entirely negatively, as seeking to cause individuals to lose their way morally, and in turn to come to depend entirely not just for material goods, but their very sense of the self on the State.

Now, few parents plan CONSCIOUSLY to destroy their children’s sense of self, itself the root of the capacity for developing happiness in this world–although these people plainly exist, and we justly call them evil–but as I ponder depth psychology, it seems to me that if we posit that we all have many “selves”, particularly those who have themselves experienced trauma, there is in fact a “self” in such parents that suffers from no illusions, which does in fact consciously and sadistically with damage upon those children.

That self presents itself in moments, in split seconds, in the gap between spontaneous emotion and the well learned habit of concealing it–from both the world, and the banal but seemingly kindly facade which enables social existence.

This is, I think, the role of Sade as role model for many modern “thought esthetes” [in the same respect that I reject the word Liberal for those I split into the categories of Sybaritic Leftist, and Cultural Sadeist, I want to propose a more accurate word for what so-called “intellectuals” do.  Within my typology, you have–at least–the categories “Thought Esthete”, and “Thought Worker”.  I consider myself the latter.  But do I need a type for those who simply use abstraction for the rationalization of emotional pathology?  Probably.  I will have to ponder it]: he breaks away the mask for the terminally confused, those who hate, and cannot admit that they hate, cannot rationalize or explain their hate, who are split between inner demons and a banal, seemingly kindly outer face.

Sade makes all that OK, so that their new mask is placed over their faces consciously.  They can now embrace an evil whose genesis they still do not understand, but which they claim now as their own.

At root, of course, such evil is the result of some combination of large trauma and microtrauma.  It represents a failure of courage, and we must be honest and admit that in the modern world, much of the problem is the failure to come up with adequate REASONS for courage.  We are, after all, merely machines, in the idiotic and counter-empirical prevailing narrative.  What can be expected of us?  Who can look too long at their inner world when all they will find is a cage and  living death?

Our world is made for superficiality; it damn near demands it.  And in that world, how does one process deep inner wounds?  There is no God there.  There is no salvation.  0’s and 1’s are palliative.  All else is suspect.

And think about the risks of empathy in such a universe.  Human consciousnesses built on a house of cards do not want the wind of risk blowing through them.  They do not want to risk seeing people with differing views as humans.  They must view them through the same prism of alterity that has animated all death and cruelty between human communities since the first preverbal protohuman killed a member of another genetic strand for being unknown to him, and thus inherently a threat to all he felt to be familiar and familial.

Of course, I am talking about me.  I am all this.  You can only see that which you have in you.  I have all this.  I have hate and love, mockery and truth, cruelty and salvation.

It is confusing to be me. But only the confused can truly value clarity.  And when one wants to distill something, it is best to be able to draw from a large pool.

When I write syllogisms, and I can do that extremely well at times, it is only because I was able to see in the process my insanity, which is to say all of our insanities.  Madness is inherent to the human condition.  That will be my next post.

As for this post, can I not admit that there are many sorts of exorcisms, many ways home for the wandering?  And on a long journey, are there not little huts along the road, to shelter from the wind?

The refusal to accept the existence of evil makes blindness inevitable.  It forces a sort of negative hallucination, in which what is manifestly there, cannot be seen.

I will put this another way:

If you cannot see evil in yourself, you cannot see it in others; conversely, if you cannot see it in others, you have no ways of seeing it in yourself.

The motion of the world consists in expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting.  Goodness is expansion, evil is contraction.  Logically, then, a blindness to evil consists in a blindness both to contraction, and to a lack of expansion. It means blindness to precisely what is holding you back.

If we posit that the demonic is that which contains you, punishes you, makes you smaller, then a blindness to the demonic means you have no hope of controlling your own life, and will therefore need someone else to do it for you.

I have in mind Sybaritic Leftists, but there is a clear continuum from rejecting Good and Evil in principle, to embracing the latter.  I see references to this throughout the culture of the last 150 years.

These are some of the issues I tried to deal with in my iteration of the Grand Inquisitor.  This here is slightly different language.

I will reiterate that I am a Liberal.  I want more freedom for everyone, to be and do whatever makes them happier, whatever best unleashed their creative energies, and creative bliss.  I simply REFUSE to be stupid, to believe things out of habit, or because they are repeated around me constantly.  All of us were born with consciences and minds, with the expectation we use them.  There is no better system of government than our own, in principle, even if culturally we have fallen far short of the moral courage and honesty needed to operate it properly.

 Posted here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/harrybinswanger/2013/12/31/obama-to-americans-you-dont-deserve-to-be-free/2/


I will add, that it is a good thing I have no issues with being alone, or being the only one saying something.  I have to be perfectly honest and admit that I consider a lot of authors on the Right self-congratulatory jackasses as well.  


Can I be the only one who sees the patent abuses in front of our eyes?  As far as I can tell, I am the only one to propose what I consider to be a solution that is in the right zip code, which takes both a moral and a practical approach to problems of poverty and structural inequality which WILL NOT BE SOLVED IN OUR CURRENT SYSTEM.

The present default assumption among our power elite seems to be that a massive failure of the American project–a large down-sizing of our standard of living, beginning now, and moving “progressively” forward over the next two decades, is the only answer.  Bullshit.  Bullshit.  BULLSHIT!!!!!

 
The critical point you are missing is that our BANKING system is not Capitalist.  It has never been Capitalist.  It only amasses enough Capital to justify money-printing, which is its actual business.

Look at every economic crisis ever.  With no exceptions I can think of, money creation through banking was the prime culprit.

To take the most obvious example, I just finished the book “Lords of Finance”, the principle argument of which is that the gold standard caused the Great Depression, because it was deflationary.

Why is deflation bad?  Because it increases the cost of loans, which causes more loan defaults, which causes bank defaults which furthers the deflationary spiral.

But if the money supply were not constantly being expanded, it would not hurt anyone if it contracted.  If everyone were not leveraged to their eyeballs, the cost of loans would be relatively unimportant.

Put simply, did we not have a fractional reserve banking system, and a federally chartered but privately run Central Bank, the value of our money, of our labor, and of our innovation would have steadily increased over the course of the last century, making problems of poverty, unemployment, and healthcare disappear entirely.

Be bold.  Think big.  Given 100% reserve banking, we could not have had the Great Depression.  We would not have had the 2008 crash.  All these banks do is bet money, then cry to the government for taxpayer money when their bets fail.

Henry Ford put it roughly this way: Our banking system is very much like me parking my car in a garage, someone else taking it out for a drive without my permission, wrecking it, then asking me to pay for it.

How is this just?  Socialists are quite eager to blame “Capitalism” for our failures, but their methods don’t work either.  What they have going for them, though, is that their arguments are primarily MORAL.  There is a MORAL case to be made as well that banks have NO RIGHT to take from people, through inflation, the wealth they create with their own hands.

Keynes noted after the First World War that not one person in a million really understood the predatory theft that monetary inflation implied.  I would put the number in the billions.  All these years later, and even ostensibly intelligent people fail to grasp what is being done, day in and day out.

I: simply want to assert,, the right to:::::use punctuation any way;!!!!I please.

I am a bit fastidious at times, and I know I’m screwing up here and there.  My vanity compels me to admit it, but my fun compels
me
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It is such an obvious point that I have almost certainly said this before, but the reason people with emotional problems so often wind up dispensing advice is that it is a covert means of dispensing advice to themselves, without in the process granting that they need it.

So often, as a condition for surviving trauma, one–here I speak very specifically about me, but I think this point can be generalized–develops a split between head and heart.  The head retains in this split the capacity to describe emotions, even the emotions of its heart, but it always conveys them in its own vernacular.  It puts them in words, where the heart puts nothing in words.

I wake up every morning feeling hated.  I wake up every morning like there is nothing I can do today, or any day, ever, for the rest of my life, that would make me love myself, or feel loved by someone else. I could win the Nobel Prize, save a small village, cure cancer, rectify all the world’s ills, and it would not be enough. It is small wonder I often sleep in when I can.

Gradually, I am working my way through this.  The process is unpleasant: I have to enter this emotion deeply and stay there.  I don’t like it.  My courage tires.  But I do finally see a way out.  I can and will make this turn.

Being me, though, I think in broader psychoanalytic and cultural terms.  In my own case, my issue, very simply, is that my mother did not want me, and resented me for the first few years of my life, which she expressed through verbal and physical punishments I suspect were entirely disproportionate to the “crimes”, and never counterbalanced these punishments with sufficient affection for me to feel like I was not hated.  Given how demanding even wanted kids can be, I would assume this is common.  Look at average street, and you will see very few truly happy people, able to give and receive deep affection easily.

Culturally, I wonder about several things.  Clearly, the early bonding between mother and child sets a template for that child’s life.  It is critical.  In my own case, I have found getting emotionally back to that period is extremely difficult, and pretty much impossible using most normal methods, like Depth Psychology (although in some cases hypnosis may help).

[Now, I feel the need to say again that I get that in many respects worrying about these things seems itself a variety of narcissism, of selfishness, that I should just “get on with it”.  I have “got on with it”.  I have two happy, successful kids, a decent career, an education.  But I wake up every morning feeling hated, and I don’t like it.  Problems remain problems until solved, and this is the solution.]

In American culture, it is common to move around a lot.  One effect this clearly has is diminishing the number of females around a young child.  I don’t suppose narcissism is more or less common in other cultures, but what it seems to me is likely is that even children with mothers unable to give honest affection can still find a caregiver in the person of an aunt, or grandmother, or cousin.  I suspect it only takes one person to set that template of feeling loved.  That that person’s presence has been made by the circumstances of our culture and economy mathematically less likely has not been much commented on.

Nor has there been much discussion of the fact that a mother with an outside job is likely to have less energy for giving affection and order to that child.  When we (we is of course me, for one) comment about the superficiality of our culture, can we not trace one source of this to the role electronic media play in parenting, a role made larger by women who work outside the home?  No game, no TV, can talk back to a child the way a mother can.  The machines are superficial, to begin with, then the programming is awful (there were a number of shows I flat out refused to let my kids watch, like Rugrats, and Spongebob.  With regard to the latter, I can literally feel intelligence leaking out my ears watching it, and my kids, now older, feel the same way): small wonder we are raising odd, emotionally detached, deeply unhappy, confused kids.

Then God.  “God hates us all” is apparently an actual book, but was a fictional book in the series Californication, itself likely based on the life and work of Charles Bukowski.  We (I, and then perhaps you) read:

In his autobiographical novel “Ham on Rye” he talks about his physically
and mentally abusive father, along with his apathetic mother.

Freud–being an atheist, lacking knowledge of quantum physics, of the fundamental weirdness of “reality” as best we can determine it–supposed that God was a construct made necessary by psychodynamic necessities or conflicts of some sort.  I don’t know the details of what he proposed, as they are not germane to my purpose here.  Suffice it to say that he viewed God as fiction.

Now, the nature of reality, the nature of life, the future of our self awareness when our bodies cease functioning: these can all be brought within the empirical domain.  They are scientific questions.

And “Science” (always beware when someone is bold enough both to reify the work of many millions across millenia, and then speak on “its” behalf, especially if they self describe–always inaccurately–as “skeptics”) tells us that the God concept makes sense.  If we think of God as an infinitely rich informational field connecting all life and all existence in an eternal moment–a thought, of course, that won’t really fit in our heads, but does give us a starting point for discussion–then God likely exists.

But how we FEEL about God remains, like all feelings, psychodynamically driven.  And if our early experience is violence and abandonment, that feels like the NATURE of “existence”, does it not?  Had Sartre felt truly loved when he was 2, would he have written what he did?  I don’t think so.

So often “The love of Truth” is simply another way for clever people to project onto reality, to “ontologize”, if I might coin a word, their own head iterations of heart sentiments they cannot process.

Do you feel unloved?  Then “reality” is cold.  God is extinct.  Science, then, will be your “langage de l’amour”.  Or perhaps you will write about the hate of God.  In some way, your metaphysics will be emotionally driven on a deep and in most cases entirely hidden, unconscious level.

Manifestly, it has proven psychologically very, very difficult for scientists to broaden their perspectives to include God, to include available data, and available models integrating that data into a much more interesting–and most likely more accurate–worldview. 

I feel better.  Something there needed to be said.  Now a psychological burp of satisfaction, and on to a meditation–a medication–I don’t look forward to, but will do nonetheless.

If you cannot brew tea, why learn the flute?

In stillness I see what has value in motion.

In silence, I see what sound matters.

Can we not posit that to embrace something you must first realize you are separate from it?