Month: March 2014

I have not written in my journal for months.  Two reasons occur to me.

First, I was reading this website yesterday: http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/science-of-happiness/?gclid=CNzym6nTsr0CFbBj7AodvRIAkQ

Their first recommendation is to “express your heart”.  It occurs to me that is what I do here.  The fundamental difference between my journal and this blog is that I am making things public, and that feels to some part of me much more like an intimate conversation.  Yes, I likely share too much, but as I have said before, I also think our civilization is characterized by mass alienation, both from one another, and from our own feelings. I can claim to myself that I am setting an example, doing something useful.

And in any event the beauty of this is I have complete control.  I am never interrupted, and I can go as deep and as long as I want.  I do have friends I share things with, but no one who is willing to consistently go the places I go.  My emotional pain tolerance is, I think, quite extraordinary.  My practice–my Shugyo, to use the Japanese word for asceticism that I have always liked, and as I tend to call it for myself–would I think be much too much for many.  No one comforts me.  I have no one to run to with a complete expectation of openness. I am subject to constant psychological attack.  And yet I go on.

Sometimes I think of the Tibetan Buddhists who spend as I understand it 3 years, 3 months and 3 days in solitary meditation.  Think of all the things that come up: every fear, every worry, every imaginable demon.  And yet they go on, and are cleansed at the end.

I used to be completely and utterly serious all the time.  I had no sense of humor.  I never laughed.  I didn’t wear a trenchcoat and boots, but if I have felt more able to express myself, I might have. I felt no freedom to express anything.  I spent most of my time more or less wanting to shrink into a hole, EVEN THOUGH, and this is an interesting point, I never would have admitted it.  I had no idea WHAT I was feeling, because I was able to live in my head, in both ideas and fantasy.

I did learn to laugh, but it has felt like I have two houses.  I have the one I built for my children, which is well lit, orderly, happy, full of love; and another one, that is dark, filled with ruins, rain, wind, and dark clouds.  It is not, by and large, angry, and I feel grateful for that at least, although I am at times also prone to bouts of inappropriate anger.  I am trying to speak the truth, because I feel close to being able to do something about it.

The other idea which occurs to me is that writing and feeling are two different things.  Writing about feelings is not feeling feelings.  All art is like this.

Think of some angry art you have seen–Picasso, say, whose work in his best known period has always felt to me like a big Fuck You.  How do artists remains in similar emotional places all their lives, when the idea is self expression?  How is that H.R. Giger has apparently remained in much the same place for the last 30 years?  Why is no happy stuff coming out (that I know of)?

Here is the thing, you can approach a feeling, interrogate it, take pictures from all angles, sculpt it, paint it, sing it, write poems about it, act it out in a drama, and put it into countless forms, and never process it if you never ENTER it fully, if you never allow it to possess you fully, to burn its fire within you.

In my view, only “primitive” art can be cathartic.  My “poem” of the previous post was the level I am talking about.  Nothing refined, nothing sophisticated, nothing that takes a lot of craft.  Nothing, in short, that would get published or hung on a wall.

Can I perhaps redefine “good” art as that which promotes effective abreaction? 

No.  I would add a level of art that I will call “mythic”.  This is art which pulls things out of people. like Giger, either negative things, or sublime things, which allows people to feel feelings that were there, but unnoticed, of a positive nature.

These things are complicated, and I feel like I am wandering, so I’ll leave it at that.  I’m sure I will have more to say presently.

I woke up this morning and ate a tangerine.

It was good.

It occurs to me–and I will readily grant I am in some respects trying to pass off a truism as wisdom–that precisely to the extent you try to force a child into a box, into an inorganic restraint, onto a path they would not have chosen, you weaken permanently, perhaps, their capacity for honesty, creative expression, and true emotional resilience.

Think of your stereotypical Church Lady (SATAN!!!!, not Santa): was she not forced into an artificial box early on?  Has she not spent her life denying any number of emotions, well in excess of the merely sexual?  Does this not make people angry and frustrated, even if they cannot express these emotions CONSCIOUSLY?  Of course, and of course all this gets out, one way or another.  Think Westboro Baptist Church, which I will not even attempt to defend.

Think of Islam.  I cannot imagine a cultural order better suited to the suppression of individuality (other than  Communism, with which it seemingly has much in common).  Everybody–all the men, I should say, who at that still have more chance at self expression than the women locked up in their homes–has to do the same thing (prayer), the same way, at the same times, every day.  And if they don’t, they are condemned.

Heaven and Hell are absolute, irrevocable, eternal, and both contingent on conformity to the dominant cultural forms.

Is it any wonder so many are so eager to kill themselves?  Obviously, it is in their faith (actually, suicide in the pursuit of mass murder is not, but how can I quibble with the clergy who extol then excuse it?), but it seems to go deeper, to an actual social NEED, to something people want.

Now I have no issues with Christianity or Islam per se.  If I had to pick a “faith” it might well be Sufism.  But to extend this example, the Sufis have been and are persecuted for apostasy or heresy.  Many have been killed in Iran, at a minimum, in recent years, and that despite the brilliant Persian poetry of men like Hafez, Rumi, and Omar Khayyam.

There are countless ways to break people, and all of them are easier when they are young.  That so many continue to be practiced in the modern world shows how far culture has yet to progress.

My kids are on the same sports team, and I was talking with the coach the other day, and he commented on how different they were.  I’ve always sort of taken this for granted, but I got to thinking about it: part of my role as a parent, I have realized, is eliciting their individuality, teasing out what makes them unique and interesting and different.  I am not “placing them in. . .” but rather drawing them out.

Just one seemingly small example: my youngest does not like the volume control on the radio to be on an even number, and I indulge her in this.  There is no good reason for it.  I could easily just demand she stop being irrational, but I go with it.  It is small, and seemingly important to her.  I tease her, of course, but I let her get her way.  If I clamped down on her, I would not just be clamping down on that one thing, but many things.

It sounds perhaps like an exaggeration, but it is not: my singular gift in parenting is in knowing what to do by doing the opposite of what my own parents did.  I was crushed, absolutely, ruthlessly, and with no remorse.

We all have to get to our Real Selves.  This is the part that, definitionally, is real, and by contrast everything else is some degree of lie.  Most anxiety, failure, depression, anger and other negative emotions come from being out of touch with this vital, mutable, emotional place.

In my own case, I am beginning to arrive.  My Real Self is an electrical hurricane; it is Fear itself–not “fear of”, but Fear. I think I discussed my vision of needing to hug a giant rotating circular saw.  I pulled it into my chest in my “dream”, and it killed me.  As I mentioned, I have been doing this repeatedly.  This morning I looked into the eyes of a demon that used to haunt my dreams as a child.  It would hover over me, while I was in a state of sleep paralysis, and I could not open my eyes. I could feel it breathing though. 

This demon symbolizes many things.  This is one area I will not discuss in detail, but I finally saw it this morning, and it scared the crap out of me.  But I kept looking, kept going there, over and over and over.

I inhabit my Real Self and it is a bloody red pancake.  It has no height.  But I truly, really do have faith in the Inner Healer, that rectification, reorientation, renewal are an integral part of being human, if we simply keep moving.  If we “go there” things happen, things organize, light starts seeping in, and what needs to be fixed, gets fixed.

Many would question my capacity for rational or scientific thought in saying this, but I truly do believe there is something to astrology.  There are many ways to interpret charts, but in all of them I have an extremely prominent Mars.  Whatever the source, there is something in me that will not quit in the pursuit of learning how to live and how to learn. It throws me against the rocks over and over and over, breaks me over and over and over, but I keep going.

All of this, all of this introspection and examination, is in the pursuit of learning how to achieve effectively in the outer daylight world.  All my life I have had constant eruptions of unwanted and inappropriate emotion, had constantly to use willpower to keep myself on task, and I truly believe I am on the verge of ending this.

And I will say that I would much rather learn how to learn that be born with knowledge.  It is much, much more useful.

Success for a leftist is going from failure to failure with no increased self awareness or sense of responsibility.

Nod to Churchill.

 From here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/22/climate-change-deniers-have-won-global-warming


As I have said often enough, my comments seem to have a knack for disappearing.  This one is mildly snarky, but nothing remotely like most of them.  It is my content people object to.  Cognitive dissonance for the True Believers is an epically unpleasant feeling.

Your comment  that global warming is as proven as the murder of Jews and dissidents at Auschwitz cries out for psychosocial analysis.  You are not apparently unintelligent, and presumably read something or other substantive every day, so your capacity for thought does not remain fully unexercised.

Why then consider something proven, when every hypothesis–which is what a climate model is–has proven wrong?  You do understand, do you not, that guesses as to what might happen do not count as what some quaintly call “facts” in what most of think of when we refer to this process called “science”?

Do you remember Al Gore telling us in 1998 that absent drastic changes the polar ice caps would be gone by now?  I do.  Well, they seem to be growing, despite much greater increases in CO2 than was predicted.  The major change is that Al Gore’s purported humanitarianism has made him one of the richest politicians on the planet, and at that one who uses the most energy.

The “science” can be analyzed point by point, and it breaks down at every level.   This is what I did in 2008, before Climategate made it impossible for any serious person to believe the discussion was unpoliticized: http://www.moderatesunited.blogspot.com/2008/01/global-warming.html

What I have since learned is that atmospheric CO2 is ALREADY absorbing 100% of the radiation which it is capable of absorbing.  How do those pushing this agenda get around this?  They abuse physics. They claim things can happen which have never been measured in any lab.  They lie: that is how.

You need to get out more.  You need to talk to more people who do not have glazed eyes and permaworry lines on their faces.  You need to study the scientific method, and you need to step back and ask what, if anything, has been proven, other than “weather happens.” 

As should have been obvious, I had some really good emotional breakthroughs this morning.  This afternoon, I did really well on Lumosity.  I crushed my previous score on one, and got Top 5 on everything else. This despite the fact that I have been doing this thing six months or more nearly daily.  I’m top 2% in my age group now, and should have 1% soon.  Once I get my diet and exercise routines dialed in–both are shit right now–I”m going to shoot for 1% across all age groups.  I’m pretty sure I can do it.  I’m just getting started.

That is me indulging vanity.  Now the point I wanted to make.

There is clearly a link between emotions and even what we might term mechanical processing/RAM sorts of things.  The brain obviously in some ways is a machine, but it is a machine within a web of emotions.  Unprocessed emotion can dictate what you see, how well you see it, and how fast you see it.  They slow you down and make you stupider and less agile.

When one looks at rigid dogmatists, like the proselytizing atheists–who I tend to think of as paradigmatic dogmatists–what you must see FIRST is corrupted emotion, frozen in time, and directing their capacity for honest thinking away into more congenial–but wrong–climates.  The first line in my Grand Inquisitor is “Myth always preceded philosophy” (or something close to that).  This is my point.  Myth–primal beliefs about the nature of the world, of people, and of one’s self–always happen before one starts the process of “reasoning”.

You can debate facts, but you cannot debate myth–at least not until you get people deep enough to realize that deep rooted assumptions about the world can in fact be questioned, and may in fact be wrong.  Misunderstanding this fact is often fatal to productive dialogue.

You cannot reason about people, per se. They are a mutable, reactive surface.  You can only use reason consistently about objects.  Math we can all agree is a use of reason, of logic.  Its practice–if not its inspirations–is devoid of emotion, or the need for emotion.

As I say, though, there is emotional logic: it is simply not linear OUTSIDE of the emotional sphere.  There it is linear, but not in a way we normally think of.

In emotional logic, if you want to avoid accessing suppressed and dangerous emotions, you must live in your head.  If you live in your head, you have to do something, and you have to justify that something.  Logically, this would involve immersion in an activity devoid of the need for emotion.  “Science” fits this bill nicely.  But you have to go further.  You have to protect yourself from the possibility of unwanted emotion.  How to do this?   By making the world into objects.  Objects are susceptible to logic, where people are not.  Thus a metaphysics forms from childhood trauma.

These points are subtle, but what I am showing is how intelligent people become stupid–or rather, one of the ways.  There are many.

I am going to wander in this post.  When I’m not sure how to start, I just start.

Abreaction means “to react away from”, from the German Abreagierung.

Sublimate: Chemistry .

In “The Assault on Truth”, Jeffrey Masson detailed how Sigmund Freud early on stumbled upon nearly incontrovertible evidence that the sexual abuse of children–particularly young girls–was very common, even among Viennese elites.  He saw clearly the relationship between early unprocessed sexual trauma and hysteria, which had been his focal topic of interest.  He wrote a paper called the Aetiology of Hysteria (note how short the citation is) which he presented, and which was more or less greeted with silence.  No doubt many guilty men sat in the room.

Being fundamentally a vain and ambitious man, he realized, on some level (this is Freud we are talking about), that this work was a path to career suicide.  Thus, again on some level, he concluded that the patients must be fantasizing about such abuse, and we the modern Western world were eventually introduced to the idea that very small children have sexual fantasies about their parents, and not the converse.

Masson’s book was ground-breaking, and led in short order to a generalized awakening about the pervasiveness of child sexual abuse.  When it was published in 1984, the shocking revelations about a conspiracy in the Catholic Church to hide and protect pedophiles (as I have discussed, his role in covering up such crimes–and the discovery of his role–is likely why the last Pope resigned, in an historically unprecedented fashion) was years in the future. Altar boys were still being molested, and not believed when they reported their crimes.  This is not directly relevant to the point I’m about to make, but ponder that, and also ponder how in most of the world, there has been no such awakening.  It remains my strong belief that in the Arab world in particular, with its heinous and emotionally abusive segregation of and violence towards women, child sexual abuse must be endemic, both father-child, and brother-sister/cousin.

Here is the point I actually wanted to make: why not posit an inverse “Oedipal” dynamic?  Logically, if many children were in FACT sexually abused, were not many more simply looked at as sexual objects, in ways they could not understand, but readily felt?  What sort of introject is created when a parent expresses–perhaps unconsciously–sexual desire, but does not act on it?  Should we not have a name for what opposite sex parents feel when their children reach puberty and young adulthood?  Of course.  As a culture, we are imbeciles, primitives.  We feel and see almost nothing that matters.  We have iPads, but we do not understand love.

It is really a global tragedy that Freud both attained such influence, that he was clearly a genius, and that he abandoned nearly at the outset almost all of his most useful ideas.  My next post will be on Abreaction, which is a word I like the more I use it.

I am making progress.  I have said that a number of times, and it has been true.  I have had many, many, many miles to cover.  When I do things, I do them correctly and completely.

This week I have been noticing a “Gollum” voice and puzzling over it (to be clear, I am not hallucinating, but rather paying close attention to what I suppose I could call inner psychological moments.  I have a CD created by Paul Ekman on lie detection through what he calls “microexpressions”, which are facial expressions that for a split second betray true emotions, prior to being covered up.  There is an inner psychological process similar to this.)

As I analyze it, it occurs to me that it is an expression of self loathing IN TANDEM WITH a sense of some external perfection. Very early childhood wounds can create this emotion, but the mind needs reasons; and by mind I mean that mind/heart synthesis which in Hindi they call Mun.  It seeks reconciliation, and like water it flows by the easiest path, which quite often is not the correct path.  It does not necessarily, and in fact frequently does, describe truth.  Truth might be that your mother was a thoughtless uncaring bitch, but that is a hard truth to accept.

So your relatively Unconscious creates a perfection against which you have failed, and against which you will always fail.  You cannot hope to succeed, which means that you will never have to honestly explain your feelings of self hate.  The more Gollum hated himself, the more beautiful the Ring became.

And consider Sauron himself.  I have described evil as the inner acceptance of self hatred.  Can we say that power itself is the perfection against which such self loathing is measured?  That such people seek power precisely because they hate themselves unconsciously, and yet semi-consciously fight against this?  That they are in a conflict between justifying their existence and execrating themselves?  I think this gets at something very deep.

Remember, Sauron’s very existence–his soul, his self–was tied with the Ring, and hence the unrealizable ideal of perfection.  We have this common sense notion that, as Bruce Springsteen put it, (in what used to be one of my favorite songs) “Poor men want to be rich/ Rich men want to be king/ and the king ain’t satisfied ’til he rules everything.”  And at that, ruling everything would not be enough either, because in the end power was not actually the goal.  The justification of existence was, and the self loathing only increased in the process of doing all the evil things it takes to win and keep power.  The process is inherently contradictory.

In my own case, I have wondered what used to drive me to debate so hard and long on the internet.  I used to spend hours every day arguing with people, being insulted relentlessly (this is what leftists do: I state this clinically and as a matter of extensive empirical validation), and it seems to me it was simultaneously a desire to be abused, and a desire for power, both deriving from unprocessed emotions I have finally figured out how to process. That is why I can say this.

William James commented 100 or more years ago, that psychology really only has three tools: introspection, measurement, and a combination.  Clearly, when we want to generalize our own emotional processes, there is the risk that we projecting.  At the same time, many of us clearly share many life experiences, feel the same things, and this fact creates the possibility of connection.

Peace be upon you.