I watch myself sometimes.  You can slow down a psychological process and watch it, more or less frame by frame, and see what happens.  In my case, I have profound conflicts with food.  I’m not addicted to it or anything like that, but I have the devil’s own time exactly following the diet that makes the most sense to me, a roughly Paleo Zone.

And I have a thought, then a reaction.  I think something I want, then something blocks me from completing that thought.  Then I will my way through it, then get tired.  That is perhaps the source of the cycling: fatigue.  That makes sense.

But if I follow this thought process of an inability to form new learned instincts–if I am unable to undertake voluntary “imprinting” (can we call it that?)–then what has happened is that different layers of my nervous system are in some respect in conflict with one another.

Obviously, this is historically termed “psychological conflict”, but I wonder if we can do better, if we can be more precise.

I have no resolution, but have come to the conclusion that I am a dumbass. I was reading back through Steven Levine’s book and realized I had forgotten half of what he wrote.  Specifically, that the theory upon which he based his ideas is the Polyvagal Theory, so called because it incorporates different forms of the Vagus Nerve.  When I say “gut”–and this is why I looked it up, since it seemed to me it might not hurt to occasionally try to speak with precision–I mean the Unmyelinated Vagus Nerve.

Here is what looks like an interesting paper I don’t have time to read at the moment, from the originator of the Polyvagal Theory, Stephen Porges: http://www.stephenporges.com/images/stephen%20porges%20interview%20nicabm.pdf

And I will add, as I do from time to time, a caution that I am not always diligent.  I try to be, but this is a personal project, and there is no quality control other than my own attentiveness, and I get lazy, busy and sloppy.  Sometimes I think I’m pretty smart, but sometimes I’m saying things that make no sense.  It continues to be my belief that the path to wisdom is often through idiocy, but that middle part can get pretty ugly.

Whenever I did one of my camps, the instructor talked about how humankind exists in a middle place between the animal and the spiritual.  We have wolves in us, and angels in us.  This is of course a cliche, but I did want to point out that much of my recent work has been to try and push that logically in both directions.

If we are animals, then we need to know this.  If I accept–as indeed I must–all the breakthroughs in neuroscience, and all the odd behavioral and cognitive defects that invariably or nearly invariably attend certain brain lesions, this does not also compel me to assume that is the WHOLE story.

Self evidently, the fossil record is one of steadily increasing complexity.  Self evidently change happens over time.  What is at issue is what the WHOLE story is.  I do not think Darwinian accounts have everything they need.  I think that natural selection plainly happens, but that systemic adaptation does as well, and there is no room in materialistic accounts for intelligence of any sort.  Self organizing systems do not spontaneously organize in PRECISELY the way needed, repeatedly, over millions of years.  No, there is something spooky, something immanent, something whose effects I think we can measure, but which we cannot see.

So I take on the one side clearly “true” findings, and simply confine them to their domain.  Then I look at the SCIENTIFIC evidence that we are spirits occupying what in some respects ARE machines.  But we are not the machines.  We operate them, sometimes skillfully, sometimes not.  And sometimes they malfunction.  This, too, is scientific.

Our task in bridging the two domains is to enter into, understand, and accept fully both.

This word popped in my head, so I looked it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothymia

At one time I was very conversant with all the terms, but that was some time ago.

Still, what I have begun to notice in myself, I think, are cycles.  I push for a while, then I KNOW a push back is coming, so I back off, then I push again, then I back off.  It is precisely finding a line, linear progression, that I have so much difficulty.

Indeed, much of my life has been devoted, I now realize, to figuring out ways to make these circles productive, to get as much when I can as I can, and to lose as little as possible when the tide recedes.

I don’t think I am cyclothymic, although that is a possibility to consider.  I think it’s quite possible my mother was.  As a child, I would have become used to the cycles, without even realizing it.

Through force of will I can make myself do nearly anything for about three weeks.  But it never gets easier, and my will gets tired.  We now, know, that will is a muscle of sorts like any other, which can be both trained and fatigued.

In psychologically normal people, you can pass the task off to your habitual self after a period of time.  This is where that 21 day thing comes from..  I was thinking this morning that that is really what what we call discipline is: the habit of doing certain things a certain way.  In many respects, for many people, I think it can even be comforting, calming.  Certainly that seems to be the case for monks and career soldiers.

Then I got to wondering if habit might be termed, in ethological terms, a learned instinctual behavior.  Squirrels don’t have to THINK about gathering nuts.  They just do.  And people who are in the habit of getting up at 5am don’t have to THINK about it.  It just happens, and the farther they can get on autopilot, the more will they will have for the random tasks that demand them.  They can get more done, by acting often like animals.

And is depression in part a disconnection from the Instinct-Forming-Self?  Does it force ALL behavior on the social brain, and on will power, such that everything becomes vastly harder, and more tiring, and more psychologically draining?

It is an interesting thesis, and one I think close to the truth.  So what do we know about the biology of habit formation?  I don’t know. It’s in part an academic point, but I suspect it may prove an important one.

Did you know only 2% of hourly workers work at Minimum Wage, most of them teenagers?  http://www.tpnn.com/2014/02/07/38-unemployment-black-teens-continue-to-suffer-under-obama/

I started out at a minimum wage of $2.85, worked up to $3.35, and then something like $4.00 within a year.  If you stay at Minimum Wage, you are an idiot.

When you look at left wing propaganda campaigns, you need to understand they are PLANNED.  They are planned with roughly the same diligence Proctor and Gamble uses to roll out new products.  They focus group everything, work out the specific words and images that best create EMOTIONAL reactions, and then simply repeat them with the discipline of Madison Avenue.

People get impassioned, infuriated, about how conservatives are just big meany heads who want people to starve.  If this were true, I would understand the anger.  And it is true, in some cases.  I have met Republicans like that.  But in the worst case a Republican is heartless and solely concerned with his advancement and caring for his “tribe”.  Such a person not only is not a drag on society, but is likely to be someone who pays a disproportionate amount in taxes.  Such a person may be a sociopath, but they are socially useful sociopaths.

I would contrast this with a sociopath of the Democrat variety who, while calling for and implementing policies which decrease national wealth and security, claims to be advancing humankind, and does all of this, also, for purely personal interest.  The callousness and cynicism is not a jot different, but it works to make the world worse.  Joe Biden is an excellent example of that.  So is Hillary.  In my view both are conniving sociopaths.  In Joe’s case, the reason he keeps up with the malapropisms is HE DOESN’T CARE.  He is incapable of shame or embarrassment.

To return to my point, the reality is that most Republicans have very active moral senses, and are at least as likely to help anyone who needs their help.  They take care of themselves, those around them, and those in need in the community.  They are much more likely to be generous in their personal charity donations.

The key difference is that most of us simply understand economics and political science.  It takes more courage and brainpower to think things through than to join the parades of goose-steppers, who are everywhere, carrying their torches and singing anti-patriotic songs.

We value dignity, and understand that there is a profound difference between having a job and being on the dole.  The psychological costs of socialism can readily be measured, once one takes up the simple expedient of connecting structural unemployment with excessive regulation and taxation.  The connection could not be more historically clear or obvious.

Telling the truth is simply difficult for a great many people, particularly intelligent people, who have ingested particularly complex untruths, and grown what they think are wings, but which are really intellectual cancers.

I do wonder what sort of past lives I’ve had.  My feeling is that I have at times acted as a bridge.  I would not have been someone you’ve ever heard of, but what have made some small difference.

One vision I had the other day was imagining I was at the Constitutional Convention, and literally the only thing I ever did of any note in my entire lifetime was preventing an argument from escalating, say between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, in some moment unknown to history. Maybe all I did was bring in some food at some key moment when both were tired and testy, and if I had not, they would have blown up at each other, factions would have taken up each side, and the whole thing exploded, resulting in a failure of America to be birthed.

Now, as it exists today, America is an extraordinarily powerful force both for good and evil.  What the eventual meaning will prove to be of America having been created remains to be seen.  But I think much of history is like this, of the “for want of a nail” variety.

In my own way–which is the only way I have–all my blogging and other “informational” activities are oriented around not being found deficient when some such moment comes along.  I will have done what I could.

If everyone does this, things work.  If no one does this, things fall apart.  The essence of the authoritarian impulse is suppressing such initiative, of moving from self organizing, organic systems to what we may as well call machines, which are indifferent, lacking in true complexity and deep order, and which work to grind people to mush.

Google: all you have done, in hiring Ray Kurzweil and adopting far-left politics, is literalize this truth.

As I have pointed out before, in hypnotic language, don’t be evil is heard as Do Be Evil.  Palling around with someone who wants to destroy everything good our nation has created certainly qualifies.

Or do you count it a victory that unemployment in the black communities has escalated enormously under the Administration of someone who was hired to help blacks?  38% black teen unemployment overall, 92% in Chicago?  Do you count it a victory that this truth has been suppressed?  You cannot both believe what you do, and demand from yourself intellectual coherence.  The two are incompatible.

If you are a decent human being, you want good things for everyone.  Only sick people are more preoccupied with punishment that lifting people up.

But how does the lyric go?  “Tax the rich, feed the poor, until there are no RICH no more.”

It always has been and always will be much easier to destroy things than to create them, at least superficially.  But to commit oneself to destruction one must first anesthetize some part of ones self that is needed, and which will sooner or later have to be revived.

One can only find horror in horror.  Redemption is walking out of that room, through an open door.

I have often described my favorite album as Lyle Lovett’s “Joshua, Judges and Ruth.”  But Mozart’s music for two pianos is also my favorite.

And this of course got me to thinking about the relationship between our “favorites” (people, places, things, etc.) and our identities.

Wellington has a dish named after him, since he was so fond of it.  What happens if you one day discover a new favorite, then another?

It seems to me that what matters in every interaction is the extent of our open engagement with it, our openness to experience, and that we enjoy everything NOW, and then move on to what is next.  Clearly, we will have recurring patterns.  Life is large and chaotic.

But I think it might be useful to regularly change favorites, or at least to explore.  The goal is not to destroy enjoyment, but to weaken the clinging part of us which imprisons us in places where happiness and enjoyment are not possible.

And I would add to this some thoughts on Exploring versus Exploiting I learned about in my lecture series on Complexity.  To some extent, they are mutually exclusive.  In the first case, you are looking for something–say in this case the best Beef Wellington on the planet–and in the second case you are eating it.

You could in theory stop at the first restaurant you find which serves it, and consume theirs forever.  This would be a case of more or less pure exploiting.

You could continue to try new versions for the rest of your life and never go to the same place twice.  This would be pure exploring.

Very smart people feel–and I must say that the end of all our explorings is still a feeling, that of confidence–that the best solution in at least rugged landscapes is what the call Simulated Annealing, which in my understanding more or less works out to lots of exploring giving way gradually to lots of exploiting.  They of course use symbols and shit.

But in a dancing landscape, you can never stop exploring, and life is a dancing landscape.  This is something like, say, Hogwarts, which changes over time.

Ponder this: there is a favorite something that will one day be in your life that you have not yet imagined.

My life sometimes feels to me like crawling through a pile of razor blades, being cut at every moment, bleeding and regenerating, and it is very unpleasant.  But ideas of some sorts bring me solace and comfort.  They reconnect me with beauty.  And sometimes, very rarely, I feel light.

There is no doubt in my mind that I am willing to give my life to learn.  And it does seem to me that over the long term, perhaps things are a bit like my Assassin’s Creed game: if you keep going, and keep the faith, you never have to traverse exactly the same landscape twice.  You cannot lose.  You merely encounter delays, perhaps lifelong ones.

And I get this sense I have been on this Earth many times, and I have failed many times.  You take your place in the line, and you try to hold it, and you are overwhelmed.  You did what you could, but it wasn’t enough.  The opposing force was too strong.

But I do believe in reincarnation.  I do believe in second and hundredth chances.  The evidence for what they used to call metempsychosis is overwhelming.  You can’t beat me.

I think this is my all time favorite piece of music: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mozart-music-for-two-pianos-piano-duets-ludwig-hoffmann/11217?ean=28945402628

I’ve been listening to it for 20 years.  I used to play it for my children when they were little as they fell asleep.  Not infrequently, they would want me to lay on the ground next to them until they were asleep, and we would lay there and listen to this, some other Mozart (I love all his piano concertos), and a Baroque compilation I had.

Of course, I wanted little geniuses, because at that time I vastly overvalued intelligence.  My views evolved quickly.  Today, they ARE quite smart, but I am much prouder that they are well rounded, responsible, genuinely decent human beings.

I’ve put myself on a Facebook fast, so I may post a tad more personal stuff here.

http://www.appleseeds.org/10_Cannots.htm

This creed is the essence both of common sense and common decency, and in my view displays very conspicuously the MORAL and practical superiority, in all respects, of political conservatism, when practiced honestly (something which has not happened in a very long time).

And I would ask Google (read this: http://nypost.com/2015/03/28/google-controls-what-we-buy-the-news-we-read-and-obamas-policies/ ) what I would ask leftists the world over: what concrete goods do you do people?

The Civil Rights movement: oh so many goods were presumed to flow from that.  Those were noble days, no?  Blacks got the right to sit at all lunch counters. They got the right to vote.  They got integrated schools.

And they are so much better off now, than they were then, right?  Because to believe otherwise would be to question both the methods and the people involved in “battling racism”.

I do so question.  I drive through ghettos and I see sad stories that would not have happened if people had been allowed to grow past bigotry gradually, organically, peacefully, one on one, and without a gun to their head on either side.  But no, very rich, very entitled white people could not wait, the situation was too urgent.
Now, 50 years later, we are 50 years behind.  We have not only not fixed anything, we have made things much, much worse, and the same tactics that got us here continue to dig the hole deeper.  I wonder how many Google employees live in East Palo Alto or Hunter’s Point.  I suspect the blacks of 1915 had more self respect than those of today, despite the on-going nastiness of Democrat racism (which, I will grant, has “evolved”).  They at least had families, jobs, and the drive to make their own way, even if Wilson shut them out of his government, and refused to do anything about lynching.  They understood the value of dignity, I suspect.

As I have said before, there is a reason Frederick Douglas–perhaps the greatest black civil rights author ever–has been largely ignored in the Leftist Canon.

Rev. William J. H. Boetcker download as PDF You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help little men by tearing down big men. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by destroying men’s initiative and independence.  And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

I was wondering where his spirit is, now. I feel he must feel a great deal of regret and sorrow. It is an odd fact of life that permanent decisions can be made in temporary conditions. In a moment of anger, you can say things that cannot be unsaid or forgotten.

In his particular case, I don’t think he knew how to reinvent himself. He was trapped by being “Robin Williams” who everybody thought they knew.  He needed to not be Robin Williams, and he didn’t know how. It likely seemed to him there was no way out, that lies and misery were the entirety of his remaining days. I’m sure his wife thought she knew him, but he must have felt otherwise.  He was, obviously, a talented actor, which is to say deceiver.

The thing about depression is it can seem permanent.  The defining factor is an inability to imagine a better future, even though–and this is an operation I’ve performed many times–one must logically posit one, given the data points of current location and direction of movement.  If you are trying, and keep trying, and keep learning (repeating a bad strategy can lead to repeating a bad strategy), logically you will eventually succeed.

I have been getting moments, flashes, where my sadness drops away momentarily.  And I can see that I will eventually reach a condition in which I can’t remember why I ever felt like that.  This is the thing: if you have not had these feelings, they seem absurd, and looked at logically, they are.  Looked at with emotional logic, though, with the very real and very profound sensitivity that is at the center of all of our hearts, it makes perfect sense.

One day it will all be gone, because I am doing the work I need to do.  This is rational framing.

I will add for any depressives reading this some things I’ve added to my inventory.  I’ve been getting really deep with my EmWave2.  It has been provoking some powerful emotions. The thing is to stay with them, and maintain a calm focus on staying on track.  Some very nice music to listen to is Vangelis’ L’Apocalypse des Animaux and Opera Sauvage.  I’m also quite fond of Edwina Francesca’s little known “Breath of Heaven”, with Pacificas a particular favorite.  I need to get Ishmael, since I suspect it also is very, very good.

I’ve been taking 5-HTP at night, along with a ZMA supplement with melatonin.  I’m not a big melatonin fan, but they changed the blend I like at GNC, and I haven’t resourced it.  I do my Alpha-Stim for 20 minutes every day, Kum Nye for an hour, and plan to take up yoga.  I take fish oil and Vitamin D,  this Mental Clarity supplement, and just started taking Ashwagandha .

I do not and never will believe in the things that psychiatrists prescribe.  My strategy is multi-pronged, and based on a philosophy that if it is unlikely to hurt and may help, I include it.

For anyone who may have similar issues, I would simply say Carry On.  It is a good motto.  It is not the same thing as saying everything is alright or will be alright.  Most depressives can’t imagine everything being alright, so saying they will be feels close to a lie.  Carry On, though, says nothing but “don’t kill yourself.  Keep trying.”  And those ready for it will also hear “Maybe, just MAYBE something good will happen someday.”

I thought I might pass along the link to the steadily improving and already quite professional website for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth: http://www.ae911truth.org/

I donate to them on a monthly basis.  This is a hugely important topic.  Almost all the wars of the past 10 years–and much more importantly–the pervasive NSA surveillance and other curtailments of the civil liberties assumed by and protected by our Constitution are enabled in large measure by the climate of fear enabled by 9/11.

It may be, of course, that there are people out there working to set off nuclear or biological weapons (chemical I fear much less, because their path of destruction would never be more than a few thousand), but even NSA experts say that if we watch suspects, the people they talk to, and the people they talk to, that will be quite sufficient.  Going beyond that creates the potential for a gulag state, for a police state of a scale and scope no fascist regime ever even dreamed possible.  Big Brother is already here.  If you have a Kinect or Wii plugged into the internet, they can literally watch you in your living room now.  If you keep your cell phone in your bedroom, they can listen to your pillow talk and snoring.

This is not the direction of a hopeful future.

And even though we can’t know for sure who was behind 9/11, SOMEONE obviously had extensive access to, in all likelihood, all three towers, and for a long enough period to place enough explosives to rig the buildings like professionals.  The Towers had already been attacked, and I don’t think it too unreasonable to suppose there was SOME level of security, even if tens of thousands of people were coming and going every day.  The people who did this would have needed to get behind locked doors, and been able to transport explosive material behind these doors.

And, importantly, they would have needed access to nanothermite, whose residue was found throughout the wreckage.  This implies a very developed nation state.  I have proposed the Russians (I nearly called them the Soviets, since I find it impossible to separate Putin from that species of fascistic control called Communism) as suspects.  Putin no doubt had reasons to hate America, and the operation happened roughly 18 months after he took power.

Others have proposed the Israelis, who no doubt had the technical sophistication to do this.

But we have to ask the question: why did NIST intentionally falsify data and overlook basic elements of physics to reach a wrong conclusion they have stood by ever since?  I have proposed cowardice.  That still seems possible.  But as an agency of the American government, they also reported to the governmental command structure, and it may be that they were ORDERED to reach the wrong conclusion.  That would not look good, would it?

Here is a lengthy treatment of this topic, which appears careful and meticulous: http://www.911review.com/articles/ryan/demolition_access_DonPaul.html

Increasingly, my gut tells me it was a nexus of Americans and Arabs.  That is more or less his claim, and it appears plausible.

Whatever the truth is, it is CLEARLY not in the public domain.