Month: August 2014

I would argue that in the spiritual realm who you are is what you teach.  This applies to parenting as well.

As I mentioned within the past couples weeks, I twice had occasion to learn deep, valuable lessons without words.

And as I say from time to time, this is what the Tao Te Ching refers to as “that”.

We have all heard the metaphor that different religions are like different sides of the mountain.  I have never liked this metaphor and never understood why.

Here is why, I think: a mountaintop is a place which is static; what is wanted is a dynamic state, a way of moving, including moving in being.

Here is, I think, a better metaphor: different religions are like different types of dancing.  No educated person would confuse a waltz with samba.  One is very formal, elegant, measured.  The other completely exuberant and spontaneous.  But both, at root, are cultivating the same pleasure in movement, the same freedom, the same root spontaneity.

And in a sense, is trusted spontaneity not perhaps the defining attribute of freedom?  Is it not one of the things we long for most?  Is it not in some ways HOW we create what we call our selves?

Can anyone doubt that some Viennese, however repressed and cold in the rest of their worlds, took profound, deep, exuberant pleasure in this recreation?

What one seeks in dance, in many respects, is consistent across cultures.  You seek altered states, pleasure, a sense of connection, a sense of balance and rhythm, and even joy.

And does it matter what dance form brings these feelings?  All can succeed, and all can fail, particularly if excessive focus is placed on external form rather than internal motion, connection with the sensation of pleasure in movement.

I have personally seen people make samba miserable, by trying to do it exactly right.

As with so many things, look to un-self conscious children to see the proper spirit.

It occurs to me that the only emotions which connect you from the inside out to the environment, which flow from you, are joy and love.  Positive emotions.  Creativity.

Hate, anger, grief: these separate you from the world as a whole, EXCEPT that if they are shared with others, they can bind you to them quite strongly.  But necessarily there is then a Us and a World.  There is a separation.

All of us need in my view to be principled concerned with our relation as in-dividuals, as undivided entities, as personalities and souls, with our relationship with God, with Pneuma, with spirit.  This is where deep, lasting connection and joy are found.  And sharing this connection does not create an us/world split, as God is everywhere, and the group mutable and spontaneously expressing this connection.

This occurred to me pondering Kum Nye Dancing versus Kum Nye itself.  The former is an EXPRESSION of emotion, and necessarily if it is you contacting the world spontaneously, these are positive emotions.  Kum Nye, is about contacting emotions and expanding them.  They can be anything, and they are localized to you.

I think of the Tibetans sitting in caves for three years, three months, and 3 days.  They are, ideally, in constant contact with soothing emotions, and primitive joys.

I had a lot of very spiritual dreams last night.  It was good.

Asking too much of someone is a species of cruelty; so, too, is asking too little.

This is the core problem with egalitarianism: they do not recognize the category better on an individual level, on the only level in which excellence can POSSIBLY be deployed.

The tyranny of low expectations is just one more flavor of the moral monster I aggregate as Leftism; it is just one more expression of concealed, vicious Sadism

Breathwork always frightens me.  I can face any fear, though.  On some level, everything frightens me, because fear is about all I felt when I was very young, and I function reasonably well in the world.  No one calmed or comforted me.  I state that as fact, not because I am feeling sorry for myself. [edit: I cannot resist pointing out how maudlin and untrue this is.  OF COURSE I was comforted.  My mother held me, read to me, and did many of the things mothers do.  She simply scared the living shit out of me a few times when I was very young–quite possibly literally–and as I grew, was unable to separate her personality from mine.]

The point I wanted to make is this, though: I said to one of my fellow participants that there really is no choice but to do inner work.  You have on one hand a lifetime of mild misery that never ends, and on the other a much shorter but harder period of concerted effort.  You get misery either way, but one does not have an ending point, and one does.  And what’s more, you become useful.

I have been to the mountaintop. I have felt what is possible for human beings to feel and express, and I want it.  Duhkha is anything short of exuberant happiness, and whatever comes after it, which the Buddhists label Nirvana.

My house is on fire.  So is yours.  There is no choice for the wise, for those who can see.  None.  And you should be grateful for this.

Emotions are the result of the interaction of our sense of self with the world, both the world as it is, and the world as we imagine it to be.

There is a deep truth here somewhere, that I do not have the time to contemplate.  I will say that I have always felt an intuitive connection with Tantra; and I was thinking about Zen this morning: it feels to me like the effort to interact with the world via mind, without the mind.  It is an attempt at pure experience, without emotions.  It has always felt hollow and superficial to me, a putative cure for intellectualism which actually feeds it.

But what do I know?

Wonder is one of the best emotions you can feel.  I have always loved glass art, and was looking at a piece in a museum yesterday, and was filled with this sense of awe and beauty.  The capacity for wonder can salve a great many wounds, injustices, and insults.

Straight lines do not appear in nature.  They come only from the math animal.

Ponder.

Fascism, from the inside, likely appears as nothing more or less than the right sorts of people FINALLY being in charge, and making needed and overdue changes that everyone would support if they were smart enough to understand how necessary they are.

Lois Lerner, we now read, thought “right-wingers” were crazy.  Within the Fascist mindset, the law is really intended for stupid people who are not gifted with the intrinsic wisdom and insight that guides the Statist.

Within their own minds they are right, and everyone else is wrong, and given that they are right, what moral or legal impediments should slow them down?

The Jews had to be purged, right, for the good of the human race?  Nazism was nothing if not social engineering of precisely the sort leftists have ALWAYS called for.

Dissidents have to be put in jail or killed–right?–because they are WRONG and risk screwing the perfect system up.

And it is hard to wake up from within this system, because it is self sealing.  You simply do not talk with or interact in any way with people who disagree with you.