Month: July 2014

As I wake up, I am increasingly feeling the people around me.  What you see is a lot of misery, and this can be overwhelming, IF you decide it is your problem.

But it occurred to me the other day: there is ALSO a lot of courage, persistence, selflessness, giving, ingenuity, patience.

Then it occurred to me that one of the greatest crimes you can commit is to attempt to deprive someone of useful suffering.  Useful suffering is transformation is growth.  Depriving them of it, is telling them to remain permanently stunted as human beings, and to fail–to the extent you can manage as their alleged guardian–to reach anything close to the potential with which they were born.

The essence of productive, useful culture is making emotional pain useful.

Our salient problem in the modern world is that we have rejected the notion of THROUGH, that you can get through depression or anxiety by embracing it, and accepting it, internalizing it, and using it as a teacher.  Anything short of a superficially happy Worker and Consumer is considered maladaptive and treated as a deficiency of neurotransmitters, or happy thoughts.

Fuck this.  It is stupid.

I am tempted to state as definitive, and will certainly state provisionally: the sole honest purpose of spiritual teachers is to teach people how to make pain productive.  It is in no cases to deny them the opportunities their pain grants them.

Thus, no one–not me, not you, not the local pastor or rabbi, or yogi–need concern him or herself with helping people directly.  Their concern is with good ideas, which enable them to help themselves.

I would draw an analogy between Socialism and Capitalism.

In Socialism, a fascist state is enacted to a varying degree, so that a core group of emotionally constipated individuals can avoid processing their own internal emotional trauma by claiming to care in the abstract for the misery of everyone else; they do this by promising something for nothing to ignorant and greedy people.  In the end, by working hard to deny people their actual misery, and by denying the need for pain in the abstract, they actually make everyone MORE unhappy.  There is no point in pain, in either a Sybaritic Leftist society like they have in northern Europe; and there is no redemptive pain in a Communist hell.  There are only lies.

In Capitalism, the goal is to create universal opportunity for people to choose their own work, to make their own way, to build their own fortunes.  Morally, this system is empty, except to the extent that functional emotional behaviors tend to lead to financial gain.

Are you beginning to see where this modern world went so wrong?

If you have been ill a long time, the end can feel like falling.

In my own case, I am finally ending the grip unprocessed trauma has had on me, and it feels like falling,  But it is like jumping into the deep end of a pool: you go down, but you also come back up.  It’s good.  You jump into a pool because you want to be surrounded by water.  Once you can swim, this is very enjoyable.

Until she is cuffed, fingerprinted, and dumped in a cell with bars, we cannot view Congress as equal to the task of doing their part in governing this nation.

Eric Holder is a bit more tricky, but if I were John Boehner, I would figure out a way to put him next to Lois.  Both have been convicted of the crime, effectively, of obstructing justice and of lying to Congress.

There is always peace in war, and war in peace.

Of all the sensory modalities, listening seems most appropriate to this perceptual task.  I don’t know why.

Ponder.

Two points:

1) I was wandering the grocery store yesterday, and it hit me that it is very possible I have never met a fully sane person.  In pursuing optimal functioning, I may need to discover many things no one I have ever met has been capable of teaching me.  There is a solitude inherent in this, but over time, I feel, a compensatory relief from the problems that have always dogged humankind.

If we all pursue enlightenment in our own way, we all pursue it, in the end, alone.  [Note to self: deal with it.]

2) How inefficient it is to pursue experience, rather than the capability of processing and using experience.

With regard to overpopulation, there seems to be a clear pattern of economic growth, population growth, then population stability, then in the case of all developed nations but the United States and I believe Israel, population decline.

Can we perhaps posit a curve similar to this over time with regard to consumption?  Can we not imagine that with a better, more fulfilling culture, we can all learn not just to make do with less, but prefer it?

We are at a point in time where we can turn left, towards the eradication of culture in a socialist tyranny, or turn right to a graceful age filled with a cultural and social fulfillment that satiates even the aspiring despots.

https://play.spotify.com/track/0zerx1p4hzPfb2qSELm65S

Can you see how this turns into angry hip hop?

Can you feel how this song retains some hope, hope now largely lost?

I saw the argument offered by George Takei–who I follow on Facebook because he often posts somewhat amusing bits–that this case would be much clearer if they were attempting to impose Sharia law.

With all due respect to whatever else he does well, this actually argues FOR the decision, not against it.

Freedom, if it is anything, is freedom of conscience.  It is freedom both from coercion to do things you think are wrong, and freedom TO do things you feel are right.  You can both not support abortion directly AND give to charities which oppose abortion.  Congress shall neither impose a national religion, nor interfere with existing ones.  This is very clear, and very logical.

The entirety of the outrage over the decision arises from the assumption by the left that their viewpoint is the only morally valid one, that “reproductive rights” are absolute.  This is not different in principle from the idea that all morality proceeds from the Koran and Hadith and Sunnah.  Both are absolutisms, dogmatisms.  All their arguments proceed from this assumption, from this failure to recognize the right of anyone anywhere in our body politic to oppose their version of moral reality.

I think all of us would oppose a national mandate for women to wear the hijab, and would support a Supreme Court decision which reversed it.  This is the point: our national government does not have the right and authority under the Constitution to make people violate their moral beliefs, to force them to do things they don’t want to do.

Women are not prohibited from getting Morning After pills by law, even if they work at Hobby Lobby.  Nor are they prohibited from buying their own insurance elsewhere.  They are neither forced to do anything they don’t want to do, nor prohibited from doing what they do want to do.  This is freedom.

What freedom is not is using the power of law to impose one set of moral views on a heterogeneous group.  All genuine diversity requires compromise, respect, and efforts at understanding.  The left does not do this with ANY group which genuinely differs from them.  That is why they are fascist at their core.

And to be clear, the argument, from the perspective of Hobby Lobby, is whether or not they can be forced by law to facilitate murder.  All one has to do transform this debate from one side to the other is put an = between “woman’s body” and “baby”.  The former construction, self evidently, is propagandistic, and in my view has led directly to a coarsening of our actual public morality, capacity for empathy, and even the skill with which we raise children.  There is a cost to treating helpless infants as lumps of unimportant flesh; and life itself as a disposable commodity.

No, not the Greek Ten Thousand, although that is a great story.

I have often quoted the Taoist–proverb, can I call it?–“the ten thousand things rise and fall without ceasing.”  You might say it is a motto of mine, like “que sera sera” (however you spell it).

Can I add that the ten thousand legs move forward and back without ceasing?  And who looks back when they are moving forward?  Forward, when they are moving back?

You might doubt me, you might and probably should laugh at me, but I am approaching lucidity.

I liked the second Wolverine movie, set largely in Japan.  I watched it the other day with my kids.

If you have seen it, note how Wolverine feels the need to protect people he has just met, in a culture and country he does not understand, simply because it is the right thing to do.

This impulse is largely Western.  Specifically, it is Anglo-American.  It is based in abstract notions of right and wrong, and in absolute principles.  It is chivalry, the code of the Horse.  This is quite different from the absolute loyalty to a specific man implied by the Way of the Bushi.  Both imply courage and honor, but deployed, potentially, in very, very different ways.

Some ideas are better than others, when measured against a global goal, which I argue often should be Goodness.

I believe I have mentioned this, but during the Vietnam War era, among the Vietnamese, it was apparently a commonplace that all you had to do was get an American drunk, and they would do anything for you.  They would give you the shirt off their back.  I personally experienced this: a Vietnamese man I was taking a Chinese class with got me drunk, then asked me to help him get his girlfriend back.  I did it.  The stereotype in my case was true.

I will contrast this with an example given by a martial arts teacher with many years experience dealing with Japaneses.  He said the Japanese will give you the shirt off their back, but they will resent you for it.

The female protagonist, throughout, wrestles with duty and honor.  It is noted clearly in the chopsticks scene that she understand herself to live in a world filled with humble obeisance to tradition and those who enforce it (men).

In the end, though, she “betrays” her grandfather.  Her father wanted to kill her, and her grandfather is trying to kill Logan.  She chooses Goodness, the right thing, over tradition.

In the course of human history, allegiance to principle over tribe is a very new innovation.  It is, in my view, an innovation which has most taken root in the United States, in our traditional, actually Liberal, culture.

My therapist (who I have seen twice, and I think may have done enough, at least for now) said that blue is safe, red is activated.  I noticed she wore blue in both meetings.

Can we not safely assume that even this detail of propaganda was managed by those who value influence over truth, tricks over reason, conformity over public discussion?

Have conservatives not ceded again the high ground to those who don’t deserve it?  It is likely this concession is as large as granting the word Liberal to fascists.