Month: July 2014

It feels to me like the relationship of an addict to his or her “poison” is exactly that: a relationship.  It is not different in kind or principle with the relationship one has with another human being.  It has feeling qualities.  It has variation.  It changes day to day.

And it seems to me the essence of addiction is getting from chemicals a sense of connection with something, with feelings, and I think in particular the sense of relief from isolation, which is not quite the same as belonging, but awfully close. and as close as most addicts think they can get.

The cure lies in developing new relationships that over time exceed in value the relationship with the substance, which after all cannot quite speak for itself, and onto which feelings must be projected.

As I have said before, this is the principle innovation of AA.  It is not the 12 steps, but the inclusion of groups of like-minded people saying and believing the same things.  It is the creation of a tribe, or if you like, a church.

One can with justice ask how and why we are all–or if you like, why I particularly am–so stupid, why we (I) fail to meet our (my) needs in effective and harmonious ways.  I don’t know the Answer, but I will continue to come up with answers.

Sometimes one blind man has the trunk of the elephant, one the leg of an elephant, and a third the ass of a donkey.

Can you imagine your own non-existence?

For my part, I believe that consciousness survives death.  I believe, based on considerable study, that this is the only conclusion supported by the actual evidence.

And yet, our goal, we are told by those who have apparently passed on, is evolution, growth.  We have to expand, grow beyond our ego selves.

But who is left when this is done?  Are you still recognizably you? Is there a point where you take a final, divine breath, and merge with something?

It seems to me that we are built to fear dissolution.  We are built to favor survival, continuation.  This is in our genes, in our bodies, in our animal selves.

Yet, I would contend that even if there is no final moment when we cease to be as discrete entities, it is still useful to be able to visualize it.  It is when work is done.

We die nightly.  We “fall” into sleep. We throw ourselves into sleep.  We lose consciousness, assuming we will awaken again, and of course most of the time we do.

But we have to consent to die.  We have loosen our grasp on our faculties, on our senses, on our minds and bodies.

And I think it is precisely the openness needed to consent to die which facilitates growth.

I did Holotropic Breathwork last week, and one of my “emergences”–this may be the word I use in the future–was being nailed to a cross.  It filled me with grief and terror, and I had some powerful physical reactions.

But the space was filled with green.  It was not a sad space.

And in my next session I was hanging on the cross, and found it congenial.  I laugh to say this, but I did feel supported by the cross (in the sense that I was physically hanging from it).  From this vantage point I watched humanity in all its griefs, stupidities, and futile efforts.  I saw failure from ignorance, failure from pain, failure from violence.

There were moments when I was sitting, too, where the room darkened (visibly: I assumed a cloud was passing over the sun, but it felt deeper than that), where people were crying and moaning, that I felt a deep sense of the terror of being human, of feeling lost, of struggling and falling, never knowing which way is up, who to trust, where to go.

Death gives you this.  As Carlos Castaneda said, it is a valuable adviser.

I continue to make progress.

This is the way it works, but I’m not sure anyone has ever expressed it clearly:

You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet; and if you never actually get around to making an omelet, at least you got to break a few eggs.

This is why I call it Cultural Sadeism. The punishment is the point, not an incidental by-product.  Egalitarianism rests on a deeply rooted emotional need to place people on Procrustean beds and cut their limbs or rack their bodies.

Resentment–and Socialism is merely a cover for an intellectually respectable, if not defensible, expression of resentment–is the creed of those incapable of self directed happiness.

And I will say this: I am decreasingly inclined to anger at evil.  Some people need to be stopped–they need to be confronted in public, they need to be imprisoned, and some are likely best just put to death–but when I look at evil what I see increasingly is human beings turned into machines by trauma.  They are trapped, and do not know they are trapped.  Evil feels like a way out, but it cannot be escaped.

Goodness is freedom.  Goodness is happiness.  Goodness is creation, love and contentment.

And it is inherently generous.  When you can make more than you need, it is pleasurable to give it away.  We assume that what people most need are things, but this is of course stupid.  What everyone needs is love, which is to say a sense of being understood, of being accepted, and of being safe.  And being safe can mean having the freedom to take risks.  We all need risk in life.

What sane loving mother would protect her children from all possible harm?  Put another way, what sane, loving mother would build a cage around her children and call it love?

Yet, this is precisely the Socialist project.

Few musings.  I had not intended to write that much.

I’m debating someone on Facebook, and that is the wrong place, so I agreed to post statements I made that she disagreed with, and debate at length.

My invitation: Pick a statement you believe to be clearly true that contradicts anything I said; or pick a statement I made that you believe clearly wrong. I will cut and paste it verbatim to my blog, post a link to it, and we can debate until you start contradicting yourself, or we agree that insufficient data exists to formulate definitive positions. Or, until you embarrass me, and cause me to realize my sense of the strength of my positions is entirely unwarranted. I have never censored any comment, and for any lurkers will note that Anonymous is enabled. Feel free to pile on. 

Response: 

“Anyone who has ever formed a corporation, particularly a C Corp, is struck immediately by the gross unfairness of getting taxed both at the corporate level AND at the individual level.” My husband, Peter C. above, formed a C Corp and ran it for 30 years, and he posted Noam Chomsky’s video in response to that. 

Here is that video.

Second Response: “I suspect most people who are surprised that for-profit entities would seek to maximize revenues have never seriously thought about going into business, much less run one.” [this is my comment, to which she is responding]. Ummm, also inaccurate. Both my husband and I ran for-profit businesses and we did not engage in unethical actions to maximize profits. Putting profits above all else has resulted in egregious behaviors in many businesses. Presumably you don’t need me to provide examples (I am highly educated and just covered corporate crime less than a year ago and would have no problem finding ample evidence for this.)


Third Response: “None of you are emotionally capable of” [full statement, from me, in response to what I perceived as generalized repetition of bad propaganda: None of you are actually emotionally capable of seeing beyond your patent biases, or engaging in meaningful, useful dialogue].… I am a cognitive neuroscientist by training (PhD-ABD with an additional degree in psychology),. Do you have any idea what type of experiments you would have to run to determine anyone’s emotional capabilities? And yet you made this pronouncement to a group of strangers based on your own emotional responses. I don’t even need to refute this as it is patently absurd.


I do not have time tonight to respond in depth, but will over the next few days, in comments.

Logically, if Goodness is a volitional character disposition in which you take pleasure from the happiness of others, and can live happily on your own–my definition–then to the extent one pursues Goodness, happiness becomes a moral duty, which is to say a means.

Truly, deeply Good people are happy on the inside.

I get pissed off every time I have to fly.  As a general rule, I drive everywhere, if I have time.  I mean everywhere.

This last time, going through, it struck me that a resilient organism reacts to trauma with an appropriate fight or flight response, shakes it off, learns from the experience, then returns to a status quo leavened by new experience.

What happens when the government is involved, though, is that a new organism is created.  This new organism is unconnected with the old trauma.  Rather, like any organism, it comes into being and immediately sets out to expand and propagate, to ensure its continued existence.  It develops survival instincts, expressed through metastatis into domains and activities which can only tangentially be connected to its ostensible mission.

No one is trying to hijack airplanes in this country.  To the extent of my awareness, in BILLIONS of interventions–and forcing people to take off their shoes and belts, as one example, is an intervention–the TSA has not stopped ONE attack. None.

But people continue to diligently consent to full body scans, and getting every piece of luggage opened, and in general dealing with the stupidity of the process of security theater.

We all know 9/11 can’t happen again the same way.  Passengers will fight back.  The cockpit door is bolted and reinforced.

We all know that airplanes are much safer than cars, and I think anyone with a shred of sense would realize that they are safer not because the TSA does a good job, but because nobody is trying to hijack airplanes.

Yes, of course there are pockets of deluded, violent people.  Yes, the NSA can and should spy on them.  But this nonsense of patting people down and forcing them through ridiculous levels of security needs to stop.

Airlines should be allowed to opt out of airport security protocols, and passengers, having been informed of this decision, should be allowed to fly them.  If I run the risk of being shot down if the plane IS hijacked, I am willing to take that risk, and so too would many Americans.  I have known a number of people seriously hurt in car accidents.  I have never known, and never expect to know, anyone hurt in an airplane accident, much less an act of terrorism.

I give up booze, then get back on it, give it up, get back on it.  But every time, now, the hold is less and less.  I am doing daily relaxation practices that get me the same state, complete relaxation, that I want, without the hangover.

I have had alcohol now twice in 3 weeks, but the 3-4 days in when I was starting my booze-fast–roughly two weeks ago (I’ve been traveling, and am just now posting some thoughts I’ve had), I went to see “Edge of Tomorrow” with my oldest, and I had the most unpleasant night.  I kept waking up thinking no time had passed, that the clock said the same thing; that I was stuck in a never ending night.

And I got to thinking about it: trauma is like Groundhog Day/Edge of Tomorrow.  It is the same, the exact same, day in day out across a lifetime until you deal with it.  Its very timelessness is its defining quality.  All things that exist in time evolve and change; but trauma does not exist in time.  This is what this recurring dream/hynogogic nightmare was telling me.

Bringing trauma into time, inherently, is healing.  Inherently, it places it in the moving current of change, and nothing hard can long endure such circumstances.

I am reading a very, very interesting book by Peter Levine called “In an Unspoken Voice”.  I will have more to say about it presently.

In the meantime, I wanted to offer one more observation in this vein: we call hear about how we humans use only some small percentage of our potential brainpower.  I can’t comment on this (other than to say it appears a LOT of guesswork and abuse of the authority implied by credentials seems to be going on), but I can say this: we only use a fraction of our potential selves.

Now, I think most people use 80-90% of their potential selves, but there are in almost all people locked away traumas and negative feelings that they don’t process.  I would say further that the difference between 80 and 100% is not purely quantitative–in the sense of creating a ratio of feelings felt consciously, and dividing it by the sum of those feelings and feelings not felt consciously.

Rather, there is a qualitative difference between a robust, complete capacity to digest emotion, and ANY degree of emotional indigestion.  Certain feelings are impossible, I feel, without full awareness.

This is speculative, but it feels right.  For my part, I’ve been doing some deep work over the past week, and it seems to have done some good.  I’m still shedding emotional fur.

Can I say that?  Fuck it.  I’m allowed bad metaphors.  Shedding, as a gradual process of letting go, seems appropriate.

So, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, and saying to myself “what I don’t understand is 100x greater than what I do understand”, then I sit back a bit, and realize: what EVERYONE can understand is what they intend to do, and how they intend to do it.  The universe has nothing to do with this.  You push it out.

It occurred to me the other day that fear is to the emotional realm roughly what the inner ear is to balance.  You can’t walk without the orienting information your inner ear provides; and you cannot interpret your social environment without the capacity for recognizing something is wrong and dangerous. If you had no capacity for fear, you would miss large sections of what was going on around you.

This is a subtle but important point I do not have time to flesh out more at the moment.