Month: September 2014

This situation seems pretty obvious, but I have little faith in the talking heads to put two and two together, so I’m going to chip in my two cents.

The Justice Dept. is known to have incriminating emails relating to the Lois Lerner (and associates: let’s not forget probably 10 or more people belong in jail)  investigation.  Eric Holder is under considerable pressure from Obama’s handlers to suppress those emails, but he can’t legally do it forever, and if he tries to delete them too, he is likely to be charged with Obstruction of Justice.

My best guess is he finally told Valerie Jarrett that he wasn’t going to jail for them.  They are going to hard pressed now to find someone to sit in that hot seat and play ball with them.

This should work to the benefit of truth and justice, although only time will tell.

Never believe me when I say I going to stop politics.

This war is ludicrous.  It cannot achieve lasting military victory; it is illegal, both because Syria does not want us in her space, and because Congress CLEARLY, beyond any possibility of dispute, both has not authorized it, and MUST authorize it, per the Constitution.; and it risks a much larger war with the Syrian government (and potentially even Russia and Iran), which I have argued in the past may well be the actual goal, so that Obama’s Saudi patrons can build their natural gas pipeline, which has very close to NOTHING to do with American interests.

Americans are being betrayed by everyone who supports this fiasco.

I woke up this morning with a distinct SENSE of the value of negative emotions: they exist as helpers, tools, sensors, informers.  They are an artifact of evolution that, strange as it may seem, continue to play important roles in optimal health and performance.  They tell  us things we need to know.  They help us.

Problems arise when we fail to listen to them, when we develop the habit of tuning them out.  As one example, what woke me up was a sense of anxiety.  It’s still dark in my room, I figure it must be the middle of the night.  I look at my clock: 15 minutes before I was going to get up anyway.  I have a past history of going back to sleep, so some part of me was saying: dumbshit: why do you set the alarm if you are going to ignore it?  This is not good for you.  You would be happier and healthier if you consistently followed through on everything you imagine.

This is positive self talk, unquestionably.  It is on the side of my better self.

Or take hate.  It is likely the social equivalent of the felt sense of burning your hand on the stove.  That sense makes sure you never do it again.  We are social animals, and tend by nature to forgive and forget.  But some people we should never allow back into the fold, like psychopaths.   Hate enables us to remember this, and thus protects us.  Can and has it been abused?  Of course.  Of course.

And I think I see now Peter Levine’s genius is separating emotions and sensations.  What an emotion wants is to be HEARD.  What we resist, persists, as the saying goes.  If you consistently go into the sensations that lead to the emotion, you can learn to hear emotions before they are even born, and thus make it unnecessary for them to grow to full expression.  You can do this consistently.

And by going into sensation often, you build up a sensitivity to all the things they are trying to tell you.  You feel something, and then BAM you see what it saw, you see what you otherwise would have missed if it hadn’t been there like an alert guard dog.

All of these ideas are strongly positive, and I would encourage you to consider them carefully.

I am aggressive by nature.  If I find something that I can face and grow by, I find it, and face it.

So tonight, I do my routine: calm, peace, love on one side, then abject terror on the other.  Twice.  Then the third time I see an armored man sticking a spear in my face–killing me–and it’s gone, just like that.  I kept looking back: is that it?  That was EASY.

My best guess is this is a memory from a past life. I must have gotten tired and forgotten how to die properly.  It happens.

My sense is that I have been on this Earth many times, and been a soldier many times. I identify in many respects as a soldier even now, although my battlefield does not involve physical weapons.  I am quite prepared to die or be destroyed for fighting my fight.  A life worthy of rose blossoms and violent suppression is something to be proud of.

I am going to stop doing posts on politics for the time being.  I like to think I have a talent for analysis, but it comes from a place of emotional dissociation.  I cannot but put people in categories, cannot but separate myself emotionally from many of them; and what I need now is what most people need all the time, which is connection.

At root our problem is this: it is easy to separate naive idealists from their belief in a perfect America; it is easy to separate people who have been taught submission to authority from the notion that God is even a relevant conjecture; and having done both of these things, it is easy to create an irresistible impulse to join a new tribe, a new group, to obtain a new source of meaning, of belonging, of place, of home.

Until we can offer an alternative other than family, country, God and tradition, people of genuine good will will lose the cultural battle, and that battle in turn fuels what happens in Congress.

Consider that we are borrowing NOW almost half of a very large budget, and that the Baby Boomers have not even hit, and that we just massively expanded entitlements through Obamacare.

How is there even a debate?  How is there even a question as to what must be done?

There is a debate because the tribe members are coercive, powerful.  They are not happy.  This is not a good solution to the problem of generating human community and a sense of personal meaning; but until they have something else, they will cling to it with every ounce of their being.

I came up with a three symbol indictment of socialism.  I can’t find a “not equal to” symbol on my keyboard, but it can be drawn easily enough.

My intent is simple: improvement is not equal to leveling.  Improvement is not equal to making everyone the same.  Entropy being what it is, socialism always amounts to the project of tearing (most of) the high and mighty down.  Human nature being what it is, a class system is retained–one more rigid than the previous class system, and without any sense of noblesse oblige–and the whole thing justified through the very process of lies used to enact the system in the first place.

Consider this lyric: “tax the rich, feed the poor/ until there are no rich no more.”  Even within the logic of the lyric, the money runs out before the poor become able to feed themselves well.  Everyone knows this is how it REALLY works.  They just have no alternative meaning system to substitute for impulses which in some respects are no different from those which led previous generations into wars.

Here is another good phrase: More community; less socialism.  Socialism only builds meaningful solidarity within the ranks of the socialists themselves, who constitute a small elite.  What it does to the mass of society one can readily see in Britain and France: it builds a sense of helplessness, despair, anger, depression, and self destructive rage.

That is because it is not founded on actual empathy, on actual caring.  

I felt like I was going to crack up yesterday.  I haven’t had a full day off in at least three weeks, and a two day weekend in some months.  I drove at least 30 hours by myself last week, and spent most of my time working alone, doing difficult physical labor, at least in the case of what I did Saturday.

To this I add my inner activation work, and Saturday I got “flooded”, to use the term psychotherapists use.  It’s not where you want to be.  It’s where a shitload of stuff comes up at once and you feel like you are going crazy. Driving for some reason seems to be a sort of trance state conducive to allowing feelings up.

Anyway, I activated my social support network on Facebook, and they came through.  That made me feel good, or at least as good as I am capable of feeling deep inside.

Whatever the horror was that I went through, I have now touched it.  The thing about being capable of dissociation, though, is that you can let it go back into its cave, and bring it out when you want to.  It takes balls to do this–you are knowingly activating awful, awful feelings, knowing they will come through, knowing they will hurt; but also knowing they have a finite extent.  The lesson does not last forever.

I can do this.  Sometimes I use a technique my last therapist taught me, which is to look in one direction, and imagine safety, calm, love, beauty; and then put all the ugly stuff in another direction, say looking to the left in the one case and the right in the other.  I can pull up feelings so deep that I involuntarily scream.  The word is horror, absolute, abject horror.  Then I pendulate back, and it goes away.  Over time you dip your feet in there enough, and the feeling fades.

I can’t do this today. I am too spent.  But I will be at it again soon.

I really, really want to live a life of purpose, where I choose what I am going to do and why; and where I am able to take deep meaning and pleasure from my work, and all my relationships with everyone I know and value and love.  I want to build more structure both for my work and for my social web.

And the only way out is through.  This is why this work must be done.  I refuse to accept anything less than a life of excellence and beauty.

You cannot direct unconscious processes with the rational mind. It’s use is limited to finding or creating ways for unconscious work to proceed.

Corollary: you cannot be rational until you know how to be irrational.

This is a completely random post, of the sort any long term readers I may have have hopefully become accustomed to.

I can’t get the image out of my head of Robin Williams traveling around the world in spirit form looking for cocaine.  It is my understanding that those who pass on with severe addictions–which in my view should be viewed as severe unprocessed traumas which have been managed during life by recourse to chemicals which mask the underlying illness–keep those addictions, and that he has as well.  He never made it through the tunnel, or up the hill, however you want to frame it.  He did not surmount the challenges set before him in this life.

Here is an interesting account of a death and rebirth experience (NDE does not quite fit the data), in which he talks about the fate of addicts: http://www.amazon.com/Return-Tomorrow-George-C-Ritchie/dp/080078412X/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410961015&sr=8-1&keywords=return+from+tomorrow

The more times I review John Wooden’s philosophy of life, the more I  feel he really had things figured out.  Now, he was just a basketball coach, but I really feel that the emotional maturity needed to master ANYTHING goes far beyond any sport.

His father, who appears to have been a very wise man, gave him a card at a certain age–perhaps graduation from high school–with a number of sayings on it.

One of them was “Make each day your masterpiece”.

I have read this before, but am only now starting to understand it.

Wooden, in my understanding, figured he should take as long to PLAN a practice as it took his athletes to undertake it.  He would choreograph very complex drills in which conditioning was combined with very specific game day practice.

And he speaks on a number of occasions about the power of gentleness.  His aim, his accomplished aim, was gradualness.  His aim was to improve just a little every day, to plan ahead, to never reach a point where his lack of preparation required him to get agitated.  He looked far, far down the road, and never required “peak efforting”.  He never wanted his players to “rise to the occasion”, but rather be ready for it, to have reached a point in their preparation where the big game was something they looked forward to mastering.

Think about this concept of choreographing a day, to making your work and relaxation a work of art, an aesthetic statement about who you are and what you value.

You are not just planning to get X, Y, and Z done.  You are doing it with style, with a view to the long haul, with a view to self improvement, however you conceive this;  to, in important respects, master life, such that the major challenges can be taken in stride, because you were ready for them.