Month: April 2014

My emotional clouds seem to be clearing.  As I mentioned, I have invoked a Shugyo of consciously inviting and encouraging all forms of negative energy to manifest and feel at home.  What I am finding is that this is giving my unconscious permission to offer up access to formerly closed in pockets of emotion that have been affecting me, coloring my life, in subtle ways.

Your unconscious tries to protect you.  It will not release anything it does not feel you can take.  This is why consciously showing it that you can take nearly anything increases its range of motion, its flexibility, its openness.

I watched two very sad movies in two consecutive days: Robert Bresson’s “Balthazar”, and the Book Thief.  Both movies evoked strong emotions.  Both made my cry.

But I felt stronger in the end.  Here is the thing: we build up sadnesses in our daily life, just living.  We put them aside, to be filed later, but we never file them.  They linger.

Watching sad movies allows us to process all those things, to make us wiser.  We process not only our own sadness, but the sadness of the world.  We become more compassionate, in useful and not compulsive ways.

I would like to call this the “Old Yeller” principle.  People don’t watch that movie any more.  It makes them cry, and we don’t like to cry any more.  And this makes us weaker and more coarse.

Tonight, dreaming, I found myself locked in combat with Evil again.  It always seems to manifest as Voldemort, perhaps because Ralph Fiennes/Joanne Rowling achieved something mythic in those movies.  Connecting, committing: a sense of electricity fills me, like I’ve plugged my finger into a socket.  I can take a prodigious amount of pain, physical and emotional, but tonight it was primal: neither he nor I had any form.

And I thought: how can you out-hate Hate itself?  How can you be more violent than Violence itself?  You can’t.  It is impossible.  That is their element, their battleground, and always their victory.  So I set a table, and invited It to dinner.  After an initial increase in current, it faded.

I have had this rough dream before, with the same resolution, but it takes time to fully grasp. to fully enter, these realities.  On some level, I am reworking my Being (so-called: I am not invoking ontology in any sense, as life is more complicated than that) itself.

Christ, it seems to me, set a table for his enemies, and he sat at it all his friends, those he loved, and he dedicated himself to a simple meal, filled with the simple pleasures of satisfying hunger and thirst, and spending time in communion with his brothers.

When he offered up his blood, he was offering it to Evil itself.  When he offered up his body, he was offering it up to Evil itself.

And in this was his victory.  There is something quite deep here.  This myth happens every day in all of us.  Every day is the Last Supper, if we are wise and pay attention.

Your real name is who you are.

As I get older, I increasingly think that three quarters of life’s learning is realizing what you already knew.  Growth, then, is simply an increasing capacity to handle truth.  What appears to be perceptual learning is simply emotional toughening–and loosening.

I just watched a very well crafted documentary on PBS, the one narrated by Richard Gere.

Buddhism is a beautiful doctrine, but here is the thing: it, and all religions, are losing.  Buddhism is not the human future.

We must construct something that is both scientifically, empirically, grounded, and which speaks emotionally to people in the 21st century. That is the task.  That is the task I have set myself, and one which I would encourage you to set for yourself.

Morality: it occurs to me that morality should, in the modern era, best be seen as the intersection of structured thought–philosophy–and psychology.

Specifically, every moral “principle” I have ever articulated arises not from some religion, not from some appeal to the “nature of the universe”, not some arcane ontology amenable to linguistic deconstruction.  What I have done, and continue to try and do, is show how what we call moral behavior is in the best interest of all sentient beings.  And how evil is simply the loss of the capacity for the self understanding necessary to grasp this, and in particular the loss of the capacity to imagine being emotionally comforted, or freed from self hatred.

Logic dictates that if you want to be happy, you have to do the things that make you happy, and these, in turn, are the domains both of psychology and introspection.  And logically, if you want to be happier, then we have to admit grades of happiness, and admit qualitative grades of, and differences in, the type of work that needs to be done.

What I have termed qualitative pleasure is best pursued through the pursuit of meaning, of pain with a purpose, of qualitative growth.

Oh, we can do so much better.  I will leave it at that for now.

I enjoyed this movie.  I thought it ironic that Robert Redford would play himself, but I suspect he associates all the villainy he represented in the movie with Republicans, in the real world.  Like all leftists of a certain sort, he chooses to remain blind–consciously, of course, as some unconscious part of him is perfectly aware of the evil in him–to the consequences of the constrictions and restrictions and conscious political limiting of non-conforming “Others”, all of whom are very much being set up for some form or other of elimination.  The forcing out of the Firefox CEO is just a soft version of much harder possibilities.  All are constituted by mob rule, the eradication of moral principle, and hate.

As I say often, conformity is the ONLY value POSSIBLE for true leftists.  This is mathematically necessary.  And the myth/symbol of the Hydra multitudes shows this clearly.

As far as the film itself, there were a number of cases where escape was impossible, but achieved in the movie. Nick Fury cut a hole in 18″ of asphalt in 30 seconds.  Easier to believe that, than that the Winter Soldier did not follow him down into the sewers.  Or the underground compound after the missile hit, swarming with smart airships and skilled ground troops.  We are not shown how two wounded people got out of that.

Or to take a more prosaic, but much more insidious example, both Captain America and the Black Widow go into a public shopping mall.  He wears a hat.  Here is the thing: biometric technologies are already well developed not just to do facial recognition, but also gait analysis.  How you walk is very hard to cover up.

And somebody likely would have commandeered the mall cameras.  If they can’t do that today, they–the NSA, DHS, and other agencies–are working on it.

So often one sees in movies–or, hell, the Batman video game I have been playing–the lack of cameras.  All of us need to grasp that cameras are ubiquitous.  If we are in public, we are being filmed often, generally without our knowledge.

The Security State being erected will have no flaws.  You will not be able to do anything anonymously.  There will be no slipping past the secret police.  They will know exactly where you are.  They will hold all the cards.

Our future lies in honest people in the intelligence and military communities, and in those few politicians who are willing to stand up to our collective enslavement in the name of freedom.  And in We the People, those of us willing to call a spade a spade and admit that what is being built is a fascist tyranny, and that it is being supported, tacitly or actively, intentionally or unintentionally, by both Democrats and Republicans.

For my part, I decided years ago I would much rather be on somebody’s list for elimination that keep my mouth shut and entertain a merely illusory safety.

As they show, as well, in that movie, psychosocial algorithyms can and no doubt have been created to identify “dissidents” and those likely to resist the eradication of freedom in American “for our own good”.  If you have strong beliefs, you are likely already on a number of lists, so why not express them?  You may change minds, and enough awake people may be what it takes to protect our grand, our noble, experiment.

It might be worth reposting my two treatments of Obamacare.  Everything that is happening was inevitable.  Yes, of course some low income people are getting a great deal because they are being given healthcare they don’t have to pay for (the rest of us, and our children, do), but the net, aggregate, across the board outcome will be increased premiums AND taxes for nearly everyone, decreased access to medical care as fed up doctors and bankrupt hospitals leave the marketplace, and an overall decrease in access to “quality” medical care.  More costs, less service: in any rational polity, these would readily be seen as obscene, as the OPPOSITE of what Left wing nut cases were supposedly trying to achieve.

It should be added, that those increased profits are going to insurance companies.  They are constrained by the law in how much profit they can earn, but the law ALSO requires people to buy Cadillacs when they want more reasonable options, which means overall revenues will go up.  This is not because of price gouging, but because of the utter and complete indifference of Democrats to business and economic realities.

People forge or fail to realize, though, that the political radicals running the Democrat party are not trying to achieve ANYTHING but the eradication of morality through the eradication of moral difference, which is achieved by making relatively greater individual progress impossible.  No amount of bodies, no amount of suffering, no degradation of the human spirit is too much to achieve this aim.  If this sounds insane, it is, but that is the reality as I see it.

How else to explain the COMPLETE indifference on the part of all the Democrats I see to the disaster that is unfolding in front of us?  All they care about are poll numbers.  This may seem to be a subtle thing, but if you dig deep, the root problem lies in a metaphysical world view, one which many of them, admittedly, do not even realize they have.  They repeat slogans, and pursue policies out of habit, but all them push humanity down.

Short treatment: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Notes–31–healthcare%20in%20ten%20paragraphs.pdf

Longer treatise: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/obamacare.pdf

I will add, as I feel I need to from time to time, none of this is ccpyrighted.  I am not trying to make money or sell anything.  I am trying to help support intelligent, outcome-based dialogue on topics of intrinsic importance.  Feel free to borrow any or all of these ideas, if you are in fact trying to improve the world, and are capable of accepting a responsibility for outcomes.

Ponder the difference between a bacterial infection and cancer.

As I understand the issue, most of the symptoms of a disease actually come from efforts of the body to fight it off.  Fever, inflammation, mucous formation: all of these are intended to help fight off things that don’t belong there.  If you had none of these defensive elements, you would simply, in some cases, keel over and die when the disease reached a critical mass.  That is my guess, although disease pathology is not something I know much about.

Cancer can spread quite far without any symptoms at all.  I think of Randy Pausch, whose Last Lecture was so well known, who was the image of health even when he was destined to die.

Draw an analogy with emotional energies.  Can it not be that those who most manifest symptoms are in fact those who are trying to fight something off?  And those who manifest nothing are most sick, when not healthy?

Here is a principle I think works: successful efforts at healing are generally characterized by a worsening of a condition prior to improvement.  And if you can’t worse an “element”, it may be it is recalcitrant to healing.

These are high level, perhaps wrong ideas.  I am just playing with metaphors.  You can kick this pile of blocks over if you want.

The quest for final answers on “moral” questions is in my view stupid.  It keeps intellectuals busy, but it is impractical, and tends in aggregate to make things worse.

No moral decision can be divorced from context.  This makes all proper moral decisions, as I have said a number of times, local, necessary, and imperfect.

If someone says “what should I do in this case?”, one of the first things we need to know is who they are, and what their blinds spots are, so we can see the deficiencies in their description of the realities of the situation they are discussing.

What we want are decisions that work in aggregate and over time–systemically–to increase sustainable qualitative felicity.  Often, this involves periods of varying lengths of increased suffering.  This is the nature of how things work, or so I would argue.

I watched this movie, a silent film by D.W. Griffith, a few months back.  It has four stories in it, of which arguably the most elaborate screenplay-wise is the story of a rich old biddy trying to “reform” the working people of her time, by talking her rich brother–who George Shaw would have readily recognized as his sort of fascist–into prohibiting drinking and dancing, and most of the other ways they dealt with the monotony and anomie of their lives.  They refuse to comply, so he cuts wages.  Strikes ensue, people get killed, jobs get lost, and people who had decent lives get thrown more or less literally out on the street.

And the interference from these emotionally confused, intrusive, awful ladies continues.  In one case they take a baby from a woman who was a good mother, and deliver it to a sterile and loveless hospital.

Within this story line, an enormous quantity of awful human events, of suffering, difficulty, want, ensue because people are allegedly trying to HELP, and they, indeed, adopt in the end a self congratulatory tone, not having the foggiest idea–or CARING, to the point–what actually happened.

So much of leftist activity is like this.  They are no longer targeting drinking and dancing, but they are INTERFERING in the lives of people who have not asked them to, who if they were better informed or better led, would throw them out on the asses.  I have in mind particularly the black community.  It may be that the solutions to black poverty and black crime lie in allowing people with almost no job qualifications to be ALLOWED to do work at wages people would actually be willing to pay, so that they can get the skills to be worth more, and in turn be paid more.

Current government policy puts de facto walls around most ghettos, and call this enlightened.  It is not.  It is sluggish, self absorbed, amoral thinking liberally slathered with the most naked and gluttonous self interest.