Month: May 2015

Wow. That was one of the worst nights sleep I can remember.  I think I dozed for about 15 minutes about 3am and again for about 30 minutes around 5.  Surprisingly, I feel pretty good, but there are lessons to be learned.

First and foremost, I am going to hypothesize that video games are a method for dealing with anxiety by consciously invoking it, then creating situations of mastery.  The fight or flight response gives us the power/fear dichotomy, does it not?  I think this seems reasonable.

As Lara, I kept getting killed in really unpleasant ways, which made me mad, which made me go again.  As anyone who has played video games can readily attest, some levels are just damn hard, and you have to do them repeatedly, at least if you are an old geezer like me.  I started playing about 5pm, after pouring myself some tea and feeding my dog, and I awoke from my spell about midnight.  I don’t think I walked the dog, and the tea was cold.

That is a powerful focus.

What I want to say about it, though, is it is not play.  It is not the reconciliation of the social instinct with the hunter instinct.  It both creates and provides the solution for acute anxiety.  This is why it is so addictive.  When you finally get through a level, it is a huge relief, but then you want to do it again.  And again.  It fills you with energy, which is why I think I’m not that sleepy, despite having something less than 2 hours of sleep.

But what you are NOT doing is learning to deal with the anxieties of real life in an appropriate way. I was feeling very keenly the  passage of time yesterday.  I was clearing out old clothes and art projects and the like from my kids room, and going down memory lane.  I am getting older.  So too are they.  Their lives are in front of them.  This is a common enough happening for people of my certain age.

And it occurs to me that NOBODY wants to do this mourning, wants to deal with this change, but it is a fact of life.  It is a fact of life if we believe in God and if we don’t.  It is a fact of life if we have a fundamentally optimistic mindset, or if we are pessimists.  The former in both cases make it easier, but not effortless.

We have to–I have to–throw myself in the stream of life and let it carry me along.  I have to accept it. This is my task.  And what I did was short circuit that process somewhat yesterday.  I have had more than my share of sadness and change and bereavement.  Much, much more.  But that does not change the facts of the matter.  Happiness is courage, true courage.

I can’t say or tell where all these video games are leading, what the long term effects of social isolation and the weird sexual expressions that pornography (that is one addiction that has never tempted me) likely causes will be.

What I know is that the future exists in the future, and that I am capable of living in the moment contentedly and in peace, and can commit myself to doing what I can to build a better future, knowing that I may fail–we all may fail–but waiting to feel that grief, to feel that anxiety, until it actually comes.

As far as me playing these games, I am going to have to ponder if I want this energy in my life.  In small doses, these games are supposedly good for your brain, but me being me, I am going to periodically binge on them, and I have to wonder if Lumosity isn’t sufficient.  Of course, I have the Kinect and some dance games.  That might be fun.  It would be at least more social.

So I finished Assassin’s Creed 4, which set up a dichotomy between the authority loving Templars, who had a secret surveillance weapon that allowed them to spy on anybody at any time, and the Assassins, who were understood to be more or less anarchists, although of course the game was not overly developed philosophically.  Not too hard to read commentary on current events in there.

But I was feeling agitated today.  I am starting to engage with the world, and it feels weird.  I allowed myself to disengage after nearly a days good work.  I started up Tomb Raider.  It starts up nearly immediately with very macabre images, with dead bodies hanging upside down everywhere, corpses and skulls everywhere.  I don’t know if this is a feature of this series, but it was a bit disturbing to see the imaginative outputs of some very creative and probably young people.

Then I got to thinking about it.  In the game thus far I have seen perhaps 200 bodies, of people who were killed by some sort of sacrificial cult.  That may be on the low side.  Some of these scenes were quite over the top.  We react with horror to sacrificial cults, to human sacrifice.

But we killed some 100,000 Iraqis.  The number may be higher, or it may be lower.  But it was oceanic compared to even the awful scenes in this game.

And there was a lot of religious imagery, Buddhist and East Asian iconography, and it struck me that most of humanity has been crazy for most of human history.  War is craziness, but it has been a feature of human life for all of history.  History was CREATED to chronicle a war.

I get sometimes at a state I suppose the Existentialists would call authentic.  I feel keenly the shortness of life, the perishability of all relationships, and everything we build, and the constant possibility of the eruption of atavism into the order we think we have built.  Our animal natures are unseen by most, and fully tamed by virtually none.

And it struck me what a perfect thing it was that the Buddha came upon a method for NOT being crazy.  Very few of us value the knowledge that is handed to us on a silver platter daily.

I can honestly say I take my Kum Nye practice seriously.  I do the work.  I try to focus.  I try to learn the lessons.  But I can do better.

And I just threw the game away.  The game creators derived far too much pleasure in killing Lara in grotesque ways.

The lesson here, though, is that humanity has always been crazy, at least most of it.  It may be that some tribes of people for periods of time have not been crazy.  The Australian Aboriginals, and maybe some Native American tribes, and some African tribes, and some Asian Indian tribes, etc: some of them may have been largely sane.

But kings are insane. War and violence are insane.  Being stuck in a ritual order is insane.  Being other than happy, connected with people, and engaged with life is insane.

And I think about our troops and the wars we have fought.  I support our troops, but something in me has popped as far as wanting to emulate them.  All wars are tragedies.

We need to secure our borders, harden our grid to an EMP, rationalize our financial markets, develop an effective missile defense system, and vastly increase our HumInt capabilities.  And then we need to bring everyone home. I’m fine with the fleets being out there, but everyone else needs to look after themselves. It somebody attacks us, we hit them so hard nobody thinks about it again any time soon.

But particularly once you realize 9/11 was much larger than we have been told, and that beyond any doubt government investigators both suppressed information and outright lied to get the conclusions they did, then much of the past decade makes a whole lot less sense.

You really do need to clean out the past to make room for the future.

As I’ve said in many ways, directly and indirectly, I identify strongly with the values of duty, honor and courage.  Going the extra mile, and the mile after that, and the mile after that, because it is my job. Now, nobody assigned me this job.  I volunteered, for the simple reason that THE WORK NEEDS TO BE DONE.

Every day, without exception, I wake up trying to solve problems, trying to understand myself, trying to heal, trying to perceive something new about the world, and to dream something new about how it might be improved, how it might be led in a better direction.

And there is a cost to this: solitude.  The one unquestionable benefit of being in an actual military unit is shared difficulty.  Your buddies understand you, and you them, at least in important ways.  Me, nobody understands me.  I am a tribe of one.  I walk through the world largely unseen.  I do manual labor.  I walk in the construction entrance, and use the construction elevator, and spend my days with people who got their GED’s.  It’s better this way: I feel less misunderstood with people no one expects to do any hard thinking, than with people who theoretically could, but choose not to; who are encumbered with a variety of emotional issues even they can’t see; who are enmeshed in a political field which requires constant maintenance and tinkering.

Somewhere, though, there is a tribe of people who will get me.  It may not be in this world, but we aren’t here so very long after all.  I’m not feeling melancholy.  It is, I think, a good thing I am allowing myself this line of thought, though.  I have been alone so long I forget there are alternatives, and it’s always good to remember alternatives: it is a part of perception.

I was told many years ago by a hot Austrian “don’t think so much”. In this country especially, people who think too much are not held in much esteem, and as a general rule, those who do identify as “intellectuals” are leftists.  There are not a lot of conservative intellectuals.  But that may change.

At the end of the day, I am what I am.  I am not going to change to suit the winds.  I am not going to change to make things easier.  I am going to continue to do what I perceive as my job, until time takes this job away from me and assigns it to someone else.

Can you see why this card would excite me? Other than me being really weird, and screwed up in the head?  Why would this excite a psychologically healthy, but very contemplative person? Answer it for yourself.  Your answer may differ from mine.  That’s good.

Guess before you look it up, if you even give a shit.

I think PTSD is fully healed when you can survey the landscape of that epic battle, that place where your nervous system failed you through no lack of will, no fault of your own, and see it with curiosity.  This is a connection freed from the chains of horror.  This is of course a follow up/continuation of my previous post.

I will add to this that battles only need to be fought once. They are won, lost, postponed, or cancelled, but only once.  Ever after, you need to be either learning from them, or letting them disappear.  Preferably the first, then the second.

Nothing can be worse than a battle you can’t win, and can’t stop fighting.  You can’t change the past, but it can continue to change you if you give it the power to.

Never impose on yourself a guilt you would hesitate to hang on the neck of someone else.  Excessive guilt is actually a theatrical way of avoiding the responsibility of growing through failure and pain.

The more I grow, the more I realize the value of curiosity.  I truly think, in the end, this is the most important virtue.  It is the virtue which connects you with life. Love, in my view, flows from curiosity, which is the first step in an affirmative life path.

Specifically, what I am realizing is that every grain of our bodies is suffused with experience, some of it good, and some of it what we label bad.  And what I am realizing, in my own healing, is that my task it not just to accept the bad, but to enter into it with curiosity, which, again, is the opposite of trauma.

You have to be able to explore a house of horrors–something from a Saw movie–with openness and curiosity.  It is all gone now.  The terror is gone.  The novelty and newness and unexpectedness is gone.  But it is still there. The memories are still there.  There is a gallery in my consciousness that welcomes me, that welcomes my visiting, that wants to make my acquaintance, that wants to tell me its story openly, rather than through symptoms it is forced to use to capture my attention and maintain its own sense of existence.

The task is to do this exploration, not with fascination or repulsion, but with curiosity and interest.  To CONNECT with it in a relaxed, perambulating way.

My shaking is not going to kill me.  Accepted, it is not that unpleasant.  My task is to “massage” it–to take a term directly from Kum Nye, where mNye means “massage”: to loosen it up, to give it space, to let it breathe, to give it life and wings and release it.

I get glimpses of light sometimes.  I felt a powerful rainbow last night, and it made me very sad.  That was a small blink of the home we all come from, and are destined to return to.  It is so hard to remember light, living in such a dark place.

A free society is one in which people are free to speak their mind without fear.  It may and should be the case that for every one viewpoint there is a vigorous counter-point. If I question whether or not homosexual marriages are intrinsically and qualitatively no different from two parent heterosexual homes–and of course I’m leaving aside the fact that homosexual marriages can and do break apart as well (I have no idea what the rate is, or if anyone does)–then I accept, absolutely and with an absolute sense of duty, that someone may dispute this.  All I ask is that reason be used.

Researching this, it appears most studies that Google links to show that the parenting outcomes are equivalent: http://www.apa.org/news/press/response/gay-parents.aspx 

And here: http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20051012/study-same-sex-parents-raise-well-adjusted-kids

Here is a different angle: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/06/gay_parents_are_they_really_no_different_.html

Let us suppose that the Supreme Court rejects the right of any legal authority anywhere in the United States to treat other-than-heterosexual couplings differently in any respect.  Gay and transgender, and cross-dressing and all other couples have the same rights to adopt and raise kids, and nobody can say otherwise without an expensive lawsuit they will lose.

Let us say 20 years go by, and sufficient freedom still exists for someone to survey the children of these groupings, and they find that there are consistent, negative outcomes associated with being raised in an other-than-heterosexual home.  Let us say there are higher rates of alcoholism and drug abuse.  Since homosexuals are alcoholics and drug abusers at higher rates, this seems not unreasonable.  Higher suicide rates.  Higher rates of depression, both of which already are more common among homosexuals, and in my view not primarily because of alleged “homophobia”.

Does the Left take account of these facts and reconsider?  When does it EVER reconsider?

Over 100 years ago, John Ruskin, in his essay “Unto This Last”, argued that a minimum wage should be paid to people–a high minimum wage at that–EVEN IF this caused increases in unemployment.  His reasoning: we can only be held accountable for the principle upon which we act, not for outcomes.  He actually said this.

As I say over and over and over, though, Goodness is wisdom, and wisdom seeks the best possible outcome for all involved.  It does not privilege one group and ignore the rest. This is the very dynamic it theoretically opposes, not what it supports (although of course in practice it is quite anti-egalitarian, and quite elitist).

As a society, I feel it is incumbent upon us to give children the very best possible chance of thriving.  This experiment, of course, has not been done, and I cannot speak to its results.

But ask yourself, if you have seen the movie Bird Cage, if that was a healthy family?  Ask yourself if this young man is not wanting to get married in no small measure to establish his own masculinity and heterosexuality in a home dominated by a neurotic cross-dressing homosexual?

These can be asked.  They SHOULD be asked.  This is not unreasonable, and it is not hate.   Hate is making of people objects.  That is not my task here. That is never my task.

There are two things that bother me, not about the outcome of allowing gay marriage, but the process used to make it happen.  As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m not gay, so I don’t care.  Like exactly what heterosexual couples do behind closed doors–and that can get quite weird, too, as we continue to see from the popularity of 50 Shades–it doesn’t affect me.

I do care about the future of children, though, who in theory are under the protection of “society”, of which I am a member.

Here are my two issues:

1) The debate is not a debate, in the sense that both sides treat the other with civility and respect.  What has happened is that one side–well organized, and well funded, presumably by radicals–has initiated and sustained a campaign of relentless attack against anyone who still believes, now, what nearly everyone believed 15-20 years ago.  We are called bigots if we even question the idea that homosexual couples are in EVERY respect identical to heterosexual couples.  We are called hateful.

We can legitimately question any popular narrative which uses the category “thought crime”, which this movement clearly does.  They don’t have the power, yet, to arrest and “educate” people who disagree with them, but I get the clear sense that if they did, they would do it.  That is the level of hatred, and narrow self righteousness, and intolerance.

And I was thinking the other day that all you need to indoctrinate/propagandize a population are two things: an Other-Directed populace, and control of the information sources, which in this and most countries would be the universities and mass media.  The churches would be nice, but they aren’t there yet, although the current Pope seems willing to play ball on some issues.

How do you create Other Directed people?  Eliminate moral principle.  Moral Relativism is both necessary and sufficient for this purpose.  Once you cannot reason your way to a moral conclusion based on basic principles which are unquestionable, then you are cut adrift.  The only principle, really, that remains in play for these people is conformity.  I have said this often.  They claim to hate hate, but if they use the vehicle of hate–which they plainly do, as you can see in less than a minute if you visit any hard core left wing website–then hate, per se, is clearly not something they reject, or really even have the psychological sophistication to recognize. If somebody tells them to shout because someone is being “oppressed”–even if that alleged oppression is actually the long term outcome of policies they are touting on other days–then they do it.

This is an ugly dynamic, and should be opposed for that reason alone.  I say this based upon the principle that mutual respect and toleration and peaceful dialogue are essential elements in a truly Liberal order, and are necessary for the maintenance of personal and political freedoms.  I can derive this principle from observation.  I need appeal to no immanent element in Reality.  I need appeal to no God.  Simple contemplation and reflection offers this up readily.

And we need to be clear that on the reading of nearly all Christians homosexuality is wrong.  Historically, the wickedness of sodomy was understood clearly.  This makes homosexuality very different from racism.  There is nothing in the Bible that says black people need to be persecuted.  It does reference slavery in the Old Testament, but in those days most of the slaves would have been Semitic, and even those were to be released into freedom every 50 years.  You cannot reference a Bible verse saying a black man cannot marry a white woman, or vice versa.

Thus, the entire enterprise RESTS on an assumption that Christians have NO RIGHT to practice their religion as they see fit. It seems obvious that some of these gays SEEK OUT Christians–PERSECUTE Christians–not because no one else has an interest in practicing their business and making the money their business was set up to make by baking them wedding cakes.  Making the cake is the most obvious thing.  Like every other small business in the Obama Economy, I would assume cake decorators are facing tough times.  The overwhelming presumption is that absent STRONG objections, they will take gay cash as equal in every way to any other cash.

But you really can’t compare this issue to the civil rights movement, for these reasons.  This entire issue is very plainly a wholesale and State-sponsored assault both on religion, and the right to freedom of speech and conscience.

2) The violence of this non-debate prevents the very important discussion of whether or not gay-ness tends to be a function of sexual or other trauma. I personally think it does, in a very high percentage of cases.  This does not make it wrong or right, but it makes it a symptom of something which, in itself, creates unresolved unhappiness.  If you take some other symptom, say cutting, there is no moral content to it.  It is a reaction to something that person cannot process.  This does not make it healthy.  It is unhealthy, not in the sense that it does not provide relief to that person, not in the sense that it is not in some respects a healthy reaction to the situation, but in the sense that it indicates something deeper is not right.

I read this study, which could only be published somewhere like this: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2013/06/identical-twin-studies-prove-homosexuality-is-not-genetic/

Identical twin studies, in my understanding, are pretty much the gold standard for teasing out genetics versus non-genetic correlations.  You can compare it with, say, this study which no doubt sought to address it: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26572-largest-study-of-gay-brothers-homes-in-on-gay-genes.html#.VWBuQ9JViko

But brothers have different DNA.  Non-identical twins have different DNA.  The New Scientist has a clearly left-wing bias.  They still believe in global warming, which in this day and age is farcical, in my view.  The SCIENCE does not support it.

So our best evidence, in clinical work done in the face of an enormous lobbying and bullying machine which no doubt opposed it, seems to be that homosexuality is the result of ENVIRONMENTAL factors.  Given that, as I have chronicled, homosexuals are prey to nearly every negative more than heterosexuals–emotional problems, substance abuse problems–is it not reasonable to at least SUPPOSE that we are dealing with the after-math of some traumatizing event?

And I will speculate what it is: a young 12-14 year old kid, alienated from family and friends, is seduced by an older gay man.  I have read articles by gays–current and former–who have said this was the mechanism of their own sexual imprinting.

Self evidently, child abuse can cause this.

Overall, what I want to say is that no good ever comes from suppressing ANY truth, no matter how painful or difficult, because in the end YOU CAN’T.  Truth always outs, even if in distorted, weird ways.  It can out through pervasive violence against those who disagree with the idea of gay marriage.  This is a psychological defense mechanism: violent suppression of difference.

Goodness is being able to live happily on your own, and taking genuine pleasure in the happiness of others.  What it is not is angry screaming, shaming, threatening, and suppression of honest dialogue.