Month: September 2014

Lives have seasons.  Seasons have essences, flavors, and these two words mark this season as it is evolving for me.

Try as I might, I cannot change the world, or at least overnight and through effort of will, through arguing and anger.  That I felt the need to do so no doubt stems from some primitive fusion between myself and “out there” that arose as a result of my very early trauma.

I can, I think, trust that things will work out, that overall good things are on the way, even if it is clear that horrific suffering can be found the world over, suffering that will never be redeemed in this life.  People are broken by fear and horror, and grief most of us cannot begin to imagine.

Still, hope springs eternal.  Human kind has been cruel since time immemorial, and we are now for the first time in a position to contemplate global peace, and able to hope it is one that evolves, and not one that is imposed.

is intended primarily for stupid people with long memories, particularly intellectuals.

I have found that Noam Chomsky rarely begins a book without a lie or gross violation of logic within the first three paragraphs.  Tonight I perused a book in which he claimed in the first three paragraphs that North Vietnam was a democracy in 1960.  One can only speculate at the psychopathology that leads to the NEED for lies like that.  To be sure, horror follows such lies, unimaginable horror.

I noticed my kids say this a lot.  I’ve been traveling a lot, so I have seen little of them over the past six weeks or so, but we try to make up for it with a lot of one on one time.  I took one out to dinner Friday, and the other to an arts fair Saturday.  I think with two kids it’s important to give each one focused attention.  Both of them will tell me things I don’t think they would if their sibling were present.

But I noticed both of them said this multiple times.  Balloons make me happy.  This candle makes me happy.  This song makes me happy.

I honestly don’t know if I taught them this or not.  Despite all my problems, many things–simple things, usually–make me happy, and I suppose I’ve commented on it.  Interesting cloud formations make happy.  Pretty sunsets make me happy.  Little kids playing makes me happy.  Puppies make me happy.  Beautiful fall days.

This is a good phrase.  It’s one step on from “I’m grateful for”–which is still a great phrase–but I think for most of us happiness is one of the primary emotions we are searching for (love and engagement being perhaps the two others), and it is a useful practice to consciously acknowledge it whenever it pops up, because pop up it does.  You can’t plan it.  You can’t force it.

And I think the more you acknowledge it, the more places it can and will appear.  It pops through the cracks you allow, until it is a more or less open window, and the sun is coming through.

What song will go unsung without you?

Physiologically, aggression is the neurological equivalent of running away, and I would argue it is the existential equivalent as well.  It comes from fear, from the fight or flight (or freeze, or collapse, which are the other two possibilities Peter Levine discusses) response.

As I think I mentioned, I have been rereading John Wooden’s book , and it is making more and more sense to me.  The drive to win is a drive, first of all.  What drives drives?  Fear.  Specifically, I think in most cases, fear of failure.  What does fear lead to?  Aggression.

I think one could perhaps summarize Wooden’s approach as “approaching perfection through relaxation, rehearsal and time”.

There is no doubt in my mind that his practices were physically grueling, and required all the will and effort his players could muster.  But what I feel is that there was little ANGER in his approach.  I think he felt if he needed to get angry with someone, that person probably didn’t belong on his team.  He speaks often of the power of gentleness, which is implicitly the power of gradualness and time.

When you are angry and fearful, you cannot manifest large plans in gradualistic ways over time in an organic way.  You cannot water something carefully, just a little, every day without fail until it blossoms.  You overwater one day, underwater the next, and forget entirely the following day.  It is not a wholistic, gentle approach.

I will consider myself fully healed only when I can pursue gradualism in Wooden’s way, as I conceive it.

I will add as well that a quote I have long had in my head was from Ivan Pavlov.  Someone asked him what the secret to success was, and he answered “Passion and gradualism”.  That is where I get that word from.

We need to reinvest Western, and to some extent, perhaps, global, culture.  I often ponder this, as any regular readers I may have know.  I think we need to be extremely cautious about assuming our way of life is the best, particularly when we manage to combine being fat, rich, and unhappy.  Still, I think people will adopt what they like, and ignore what they don’t.  We, ourselves, CERTAINLY need to find a new path, one that goes beyond an emotionally and socially dissociated passion for abstraction (yes, they can be combined), and gross carnality.

In the movie Equilibrium they take their doses of high tech Xanax/Valium mood suppressors at regular intervals.  They will be marching around, the bells sounds, and they dose themselves.

What if our culture had the feature of taking 5 minutes 3 times a day to sit quietly and feel our bodily sensations?  I have been doing this for a week or two, and it UNQUESTIONABLY contributes to self understanding, and relaxation.  What if the whole world did it?

All you have to do is sit, and scan your body.  Feel what is going on between your shoulder blades, in your jaw, in your eyes, front and back.  Feel your feet and toes. Try to feel your liver and kidneys.  Feel your ear lobes.  Feel your hands, feel the bones in them, the middle of the bones.

Obviously, some of these areas have few nerve receptors, but I think this practice helps reconnect “mind” and body in a very physical, nervous system sort of way, and permits greater sensitivity to excessive effort, excessive tension; and it relieves emotions like fear and anger, which always begin in the body.

And this is a subtle linkage, a subtle distinction between sensation and emotion.  But what I have found is that if you analyze “fear”, there is an effect on the mind, on your sense of your own relation to the world.  But it is possible to feel the physical concomitants–precursors–of fear, without that same sense. I can note tremors in my upper back and trapezius and neck, feel my eyebrows start to rise, perhaps my mouth open, but not lapse into what we call fear.  They can be separated.

This is a HUGE discovery.  William James–who to my mind is by far the greatest largely unrecognized American genius (in my view because of his participation in the scientific investigation of the after-life)–saw this 100 years ago, but Peter Levine to his credit has rerecognized this, and gone further and integrated it into an effective system for trauma resolution on a deep level.

Imagine a world in which no one had to feed themselves, or drink water.  Imagine we had no bodily requirements, even for sleep.  How would such a world evolve?  According to my beliefs, this is how at least one plane of what we call Heaven is, except that it is much more beautiful.  To get there, you learn contentment here.

It seems to me that we can satisfy spiritual hunger ourselves.  We can satisfy the need for the companionship of others, to some extent, although I think it is much like physical hunger, that we will always have in this world and these bodies.

Much of what we need, of our deepest, truest, most authentic needs, though, I feel can be satisfied by developing the right relationship with ourselves and our lives.

It occurred to me that what is called conservatism, and what I would call authentic Liberalism, is in fact the true egalitarian creed. It posits that all people are created equal, and assumes everyone is capable of using freedom responsibly until they demonstrate otherwise.  We are equal in principle, and if we become different that is perfectly acceptable, as diversity is the goal.

Everyone has the right to the same gun the cop carries, because they are equal in principle to the cop, until they break the law.

Everyone is equal before the law, and should be able to expect the same treatment no matter who they are.

Everyone has equal opportunities.  Specifically, no one is prevented from any activity by law which is not harmful to the community.  You cannot, for example, use the government to protect monopolies.

Leftism is based on the notion that people are NOT able to look after themselves, that some people are, by implication, intrinsically INFERIOR, and that their superiors–the intellectuals, and the people using the intellectuals rhetoric to enrich themselves–are responsible for them in ways they themselves could never manage.  And the practice is to make the proles equivalent in poverty, while the elite basks in all the pleasures of their ill gotten wealth.  I read that Nancy Pelosi stayed in a $10,000 a night hotel after she passed Obamacare.  Where do you think she got that money?

This sense of noblesse oblige is PRECISELY what we fought our revolution to eradicate, because for every act of ostensible generosity there are two acts of thievery.  In our present system, half our country is being bought with the money from the other half, by a political class that creates nothing.

Phrase popped into my head today doing my Kum Nye practice.  I think that is a pretty good summary, don’t you?  If you have to ask “of what”, we are likely working on different projects.

The phrase also popped into my head: “In order to lose your self you must first have a self.  Until then you are an unhatched egg.”

It is an unfortunate aspect of our political system that is requires both knowledge and the capacity for abstract reasoning to work properly.  We consciously seek many viewpoints and personal contributions through our electoral process, but the quality of the end result cannot be much better than the quality of the viewpoints and people participating.

And most people in this and most other countries very simply do not have the capacity for effective abstract thinking.  When things are good, they are complacent.  The assume things will always be good. When things are bad, they allocate blame based upon their gut instincts, and not upon seeking deep knowledge.

The gut says “feed me”.  Democrats say, “we will feed you”.  Republicans say “we will let you feed yourself, by creating conditions in which it is possible.”

The social sense says: “feed my friends”.  Democrats say “we will feed your friends.”  Republicans say “we will let your friends feed themselves too.”

It is easy to appeal to the infantile, grasping, sucking, wanting side of human nature.  It is much, much harder to appeal to the thinking, contemplative side, the side from which all large projects come, from which all large long term successes come.

It is likely safe to say that we have done well enduring this long, and it is a testament to the fundamental social maturity of Americans, in whom the concept of self reliance was cultivated early on until recently.

Self reliance presumes a self.  If we posit psychological individuation as a principle goal of human life, self reliance must be a part of it.  This is how one connects the political with the personal, again on an abstract level of the sort that must be present for our system to endure.