Month: February 2014

If I ever set up a self improvement program (I’m still in the “healer heal thyself” stage), my slogan is going to be something like “let me help you be average”.

It’s counterintuitive.  I will grant that.

But it seems to me that in shooting for the moon we so often become unbalanced as individuals.  Are you driven, task-focused, perfectionistic?  You likely lack the ability to relax, and likely are somewhat stunted in your capacity for deep empathy.  Are you super-sensitive, giving, nurturing, loving?  Then you likely lack the stomach to truly grasp the extent of the capacity most humans have for evil.  Your entire political ideology likely rests on wishful thinking.

What we need are average people, well balanced people, people who have a good Go switch, and a good Stop switch, who care but not too much, who get things done, but stay in contact with their softer sides.

I think this might be usefully described as my version of conservatism.  It does not say you should not leap, but that bringing prudence and experience into the decision process is useful.

There is nothing new about government control of free enterprise.  There is nothing new about bread and circuses.  Every leftist initiative is in important respects a retrogression, counter-progressivism.  It relies on demagoguery, which was a term coined over several thousand years ago.  It relies on something for nothing, hand outs, promises to make life easy and happy.

It is not saturnine to insist that these policies have never and cannot work.  On the contrary, it is an optimism, founded an ideas which DO work, which DO elevate human consciousness.

I think it is true, and certainly useful to posit, that the calmest people are those who have been through the most storms.  There is no short cut to this state.

So every shitstorm you struggle through gets you closer to being the guy or gal that nothing bothers.  Every difficulty has its use, and sometimes that use is nothing more than developing endurance.

My two goals in raising my children were to develop resilience and empathy.  I figured the brains would take care of themselves, and were certainly no goal of intrinsic importance.  I am happy to report success in all areas, but did want to share what I just realized as to how to measure this.

Laughter.  If you can laugh at yourself sincerely, you are not self important, and if you are not self important you naturally have room for the emotional lives of others.  You can value them, share them, care about them.

And if you can laugh at pain, you are tough.  One of my favorite scenes in any book is a trivial scene in “Gates of Fire” where the Spartans are conducting a commando raid on the Persian emperor’s compound.  During some tough going, one of them breaks out laughing and says “Could we BE any more miserable?” 

That is beauty and poetry in my eyes.  It is what I have taught my children, to the best of my ability, and they have listened.  Frankly, I think they are both tougher than me, which is great.

Laughter is a salve and a lubricant.  It finds and loosens knots, heals wounds, and grants courage.

Any intelligence which considers itself superior to experience is no intelligence at all.

Failure to grasp this is perhaps at the root of most or even all large mistakes made by ostensibly intelligent people.

The example I would use is the rookie officer and the Been There Done That NCO.  It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how well educated you are, he still knows more than you do about the things that matter, at least until you get up to speed.

I will admit that one of my movie heroes is Staff Sergeant Nantz from Battle: Los Angeles.  That movie did not fare well critically, but fuck the critics.

I had intended to be more cryptic, but that is a game that only amuses me.  I will admit that too.  I know it.   I, too, am ridiculous.

The Sufis, at least of one or several schools, classified people by their Idiot Type.  I’m curious what sort of idiot they would have considered me.  Lots of possibilities!!!!

Do you not have a dominant tone?  A way of being, of moving through the world?  Can we not call this your paradigm, and insist with Kuhn that your way forward–IF you move forward, which most people do not, in important ways–is through paradigm shifts, or what I would tend to call qualitative progress?

Is there not phlogiston in your very being, right now?  I think there is.  Certainly, it courses in my veins.  I breathe it in, and watch it disappear.  I don’t know where it goes, or where and who I was just a moment ago.

To truly feel a global compassion, one must first mourn and process ones own wounds, but also mourn the fact that life itself, for all humanity, is for all of us sometimes painful. We put on a brave face, make the best of it, sometimes break down, often run, but this truth is there.

It is so much easier, more facile, to conflate niceness with compassion. Nice is an
outer ritual of sorts, an agreeable facade, but it often betrays cowardice and it must be said, confusion.

I have been reading about the “consciousness exploration” of the 1960′, and would echo a phrase from Chogyam Trungpa, that of “Spiritual Materialism”. I would add “experiential Materialism”. This is a topic I have visited before.

What difference is there between greed and
covetousness and social competition for the latest car out of Detroit, or a prime home in the best neighborhood, and those qualities applied to competition for the best guru, highest high, most far out experience, and most “exalted”state?

Can you not have competitions for most setene, or most compassionate?

Our options are global culture, or global givernment. In my view, they are mutually exclusive. Culture creates government, and government erodes culture.

If the human race ever evolves sufficiently to be able to institute a just global government, it won’t need it.

It is worth noting as well that history clearly showsthe connection between war and expanding government. The strategic significance of global warming as an idea is it creates a lobal threat against which a centrally coordin
ated “war” must be waged.

Given global peace, however, I think we all know there is no warrant for bureaucratic metastasis and interference.

To pursue peace is therefore to pursue, in principle at least, less government.

I think a case could be made for converse as well: large government has often waged war on the very people it supposedly protected.

Demons are just fences, and all fences have gates.