Month: February 2014

Oh, we have all gone, I think, those places booze takes us.  It loosens up emotional flow, leading to too much, on many occasions, but for many too much is needed, at least at times.

For me, this resurgence in drinking will not last long. I already feel its limits.

For years, I have said that anything I say while drinking is true, and that remains true as I read the increasingly “loose” stuff I posted last night.

How many of us, I wonder, really grasp on an emotional level the tyranny of the alarm clock?  How many of us feel how little the world CAN care about us, when all the movements are scripted?  How many of us can dream openly of a world where we belong?  Where everyone belongs?  Where belonging is a principle characteristic of that world?

How many of you feel the evil in those who want to confine us, cage us, reduce us, kill us?  How many of you see this on the horizon?

I am certainly hung over, but not drunk at all.  I got enough sleep.  Normal madness should be a part of every day.  I retain, at this moment, the capacity for sustained close reasoning, but choose to express myself in this way.

I would wish for you today to look at your world as a stranger, and understand all the ways in which it does not make you feel at home.

And tomorrow, may you feel all the ways you belong.

Still working on the 750.  Just about done.   What I feel is a happiness and beauty I want to share.

What I will say to you is that everything you do and say in the coming day is holy.  Do you believe this?  Is this Stupid?

Pay attention.  You can do better.

I’m drinking.  I’ll have a 750 of tequila in me before I hit the sack.

My blessing and curse is to retain a high degree of lucidity.  What I am processing is weeks of ambiguity.  I hit in the past few weeks the Getty in LA, the LA County Museum of Art, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and other places.  I watched people, and more importantly watched art.  I felt.  I went deep.

I did Breathwork, and my spiritual guide was five circular saws dedicated to destroying me utterly.  Yesterday and today, I decided to give it rein.  I see myself being cut to pieces, sawed into pieces, dissolved in acid, decapitated, thrown from height, smashed into a pulp.  Hated, always hated.

I have allowed and emphasized negative internal dialogue: you are stupid, you suck, no one likes you, you will fail, everything you do is meaningless, you are ugly and fat, no woman will ever like you, you are still stupid, you are still ugly, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

Funny thing: not only am I still alive, but something in me is getting stronger, and it thinks this whole thing is funny.

I will never be New Age material.  I will never stop saying the word Fuck.  But I will say that solutions are possible for all ailments.  Sometimes the fix is making the problem worse.  Do you disagree with me?  Go fuck yourself.  Use your right hand unless you are a lefty.

Ooh Rah.

Edit: goddammnit: I am a cliche.  I feel love for all the absurd when I am drinking.  I feel love for all those who don’t fit in.  I feel love for curved lines, stupidity, bold but dumb chances.  I’m on the side of those who bet their life savings on a bad tip and lose.  I see those who try but fail.  I feel those who love but lose.  It all crushes me, and I die, but then I am still there.  May you kill me in a new way.

Ooh Rah.

Fuck love: fuck love.

but we all know it will never die.  It lives.  It lives.  you live.  you live.  Somewhere, we were meant to go, you can start, now. . . .

[Following is in invitation to debate for a specific individual].

Resolved, that the following study can as easily be read as evidence FOR psychokinesis as against it, and that far from being conclusive, it leaves many questions unanswered.  Given that it fails to honestly address these facts, it must be seen as disingenuous and intended to support a preexisting conclusion.

http://www.ebo.de/publikationen/pk_ma.pdf

I wanted to respond in a post to a comment someone made.

It seems to me there are two paths to most emotional “gestalts”, which work in tandem with one another.  One is the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy approach, in which you consciously work to change thoughts and behaviors.  You reinforce on a daily basis what you are grateful for.  You have a gratitude jar, or a daily practice, or try to remind yourself as often as possible how many things are working, how much is going right, how much you take for granted that need not be there (food, sleep, companionship, work). 

This in my view is a useful practice.  I can say with certainty that “Learned Optimism” is one of the most useful books I have read, because it taught me a habit I have retained across many years of making the difficult temporary and local, and in assessing with great care both my actual responsibility for mistakes and failures, and emphasizing the degree of control I actually have.

At the same time, I would say that within my psychological worldview, anything short of radiant happiness, spontaneous gratitude, abundant health, and the ability for the effective work that always leads to success in a reasonably just society–such as we have had for some time, and which may yet survive Obama’s patent assaults on it–is a result of a sort of knot deep within the spiritual body or psyche.  We are meant for happiness, but we tie ourselves up, we disrupt energy flows, we prevent the spontaneous emergence of order and everything that comes with it.

This is the level I am trying to work on.  I can feel, at times, huge amounts of energy flowing from me in clouds, but I can’t maintain this. I shrink back, become sullen, irritable, fearful, none of which are attractive traits.  I can and have tried to simply maintain a facade, but it doesn’t feel right for me.  I feel like I am going to get stuck in a perma-smile of the sort one sees on long term car salesmen.

My sense is that gratitude is a natural result of unveiling a deeper wisdom.  It comes naturally, unbidden.

The other day I had overindulged in drink the night before, and thankfulness came to me for my hangover, or what passes for one with me, my apparently substantial ability to process alcohol being what it is.

And it hit me that experiences all contain something interesting in them.  I would use the metaphor of someone deeply thirsty drinking dirty water.  It still tastes amazing, because you are thirsty.  Likewise, that ability to react with glee, with happiness, is still latent even in a time when you are NOT thirsty. 

Or imagine not having seen a human being for weeks.  When you finally run into someone, will you not overlook virtually all their flaws, unless they out and out try to kill you?  Was this capacity for appreciating human contact not already there?

Few thoughts.

I felt clearly tonight that evil is an internalized acceptance of self hatred.  I felt it in myself, struggling with the constant streams conflicting within me of emotional legacy, and desire for release and new growth.  You cannot accept self hatred.  You have to ride it out.

This point is deep, I feel.  It is important.

I have been feeling a lot of gratitude lately, and I have noticed that I am able to be grateful even for negative experiences.  The key is not to label them, but simply accept them as “experience of any sort”.  All sensations, all feelings, all perceptions: they move us in ways, change us in ways, make possible the liberation of joy and happiness.

In my own case, both my parents tried to kill me in their own ways.  The aftereffects of this subtle but very real energy have bothered me my whole life.  But that poison is becoming separate from me, outside of me.  It is the not seeing that is most dangerous, most hurtful.  It is the hurting and not knowing why, because if you can’t see the source of something, it is very hard to turn off the spigot.  You are shot invisibly in the dark, helpless to defend against it.

I am grateful for this poison, and for the seeing of this poison.

Oi, I can’t write what I have been feeling.  It is very much of “that”.  I am a thought worker, but thought workers must align their emotions, process their feelings, must do prep work before trying to think at all.

Ponder these pictures: http://www.giger.cz/1.html

Crazy Swiss, posted by crazy Czechs.

I had intended to make a post on abreaction.  This may be the point, despite the manhattans.

Freud, early in his career, both realized that most of the cases of hysteria he was treating were the result of childhood sexual trauma, and that the most therapeutic modality was facilitating an emotional expression of those deep feelings, which he called “abreaction”.

Being an asshole, he abandoned both correct ideas the moment it became inconvenient for his career. 

Stanislav Grof, who is justly well known for many reasons, amplified the work of Otto Rank in stipulating that the birth process was traumatic for almost all infants.  I recently had the chance to watch a speech of his, in which he noted how ludicrous it is that physicians place an emphasis on immediate nursing for newborns, immediate bonding for newborns, but fail to consider AT ALL the trauma of birth itself.  The dominant paradigm is that babies feel NOTHING until they take their first breath, and then at that point the attention paid them is critical to their psychological development.  Why?  Does it not seem stupid to stipulate that these little proto-humans, these fetuses attached by an umbilical cord destined to be severed, feel NOTHING until they first nurse after their umbilical cord is cut?

Grof, for his part, did a huge amount of LSD.  He was one of the first to “partake” after Albert Hoffman had his bicycle ride, and for him it was huge. Over time, he brought a LOT of people in with him, particularly at Esalen, for month-long sessions that created varying varieties of craziness.

Having seen a LOT, having done LSD psychotherapy, both in Czechoslavakia and the US, he came up with the idea that much of our imaginal experience comes not from early life traumas, but from traumas DURING our birth.  Specifically, he proposed the Perinatal Matrices, which is to say, the parts of our own births in which we become stuck.

Freud found early on that facilitating emotional reactions was healing.  It brought relief of symptoms.  He himself, though, was unwilling to accept what was likely the truth that most of upper class Vienna had parents who molested their children.  By extension, he refused to grant reality to their stories.  He had to insist it was all imagined to avoid being ostracized.  No doubt, he actually became an asset.  He corroborated lies.

But releasing stuck emotions is clearly healing.  Jung rejected abreaction of emotions whose origin he could not fathom, given particularly that he rejected birth trauma as significant.  But things continued to progress.

Atha: Giger.  These images are from Grof’s Matrix 2 and Matrix 3.  I look at them, and a hidden poison manifests, that I had not known was there.  I feel a sickness I had not known was there.

This is therapeutic.  Ah: how do I post while drinking?  Everything we need, every clarity we crave, is there.  It is all there.  You are complete.  I am complete.  Are we not both simply persistently stupid?

I wish you well.  If you reading this blog, you are crazy anyway.

This has two meanings; or, none.

I like circles, except when I hate them.

Ah: it will end well.  That is my feeling.  I wish you a good night, and a good day, repeated until done.

Watched this movie, largely starring Christian Bale, about a post-apocalyptic political order based upon a universal requirement for people to take something like Prozac at prescribed intervals, to stop feeling, and to eradicate all attachment to spirit, to beauty, to sincere human connection, and to all of those aspects of life I have called qualitative.

Without discussing this overly much, this in my view is the actual reality, the banal, ugly, repressive, evil reality of political orders like those in Cuba and North Korea, and what the Chinese have imposed on the objects of their imperialistic aggression, like Tibet.  The POINT of Communism is the suppression of joy, happiness, love, kindness, decency, ambition, culture, and human connection.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  This is why I created the term Cultural Sadeism.

I leave you with an image: listening to Fidel fucking Castro talk for 6 hours about how wonderful he is, how great Communism is, how evil Capitalism is, and doing so in a crowded hot room, knowing that the least hint of impatience, boredom, or God forbid disagreement, would be enough to get you locked into a dog kennel for a month in a hot room.  This was and is the reality.  You don’t get to go to the bathroom.  You don’t get to go to the drinking fountain.  You are watched carefully the whole time, and expected to shout enthusiastically even if your mother is sick and can’t get medical care, or if you have not had a good meal in three days.

And this is a trivial matter, compared to most Communist atrocities.  I feel, though, that sometimes the reality comes through better in the trivial instances.