Month: June 2015

It seems to me the two basic approaches to life are those of aggregation and transformation.  The first consists in collecting objects and experiences, which can and often does include the experience of power, but could also include travel and the gratification of varied interests.

The latter consists in a focus on inner reality, and where and how that reality meets the external world, and continually working to refine it so as to have transformative, paradigmatic, qualitative experiences, ones which do not add to previous experiences, but supplant them.

I would submit that both Consumerism and Socialism are variants of the first objective, where Socialism is preoccupied not with adding things or experiences, but in theory with deducting them, with eliminating the possibility of negative experiences of racism, sexism, greed, and inequality.  It is assumed that purely by deducting the alleged negatives, happiness will blossom.  In the long term, and particularly where the alleged grievances were not actually that severe, this is very rarely the case.

An active meaning system=Living=transformation.

Collecting=dying=stasis.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/26/15-reasons-marriage-equality-is-about-neither-marriage-nor-equality/

I thought this thoughtful.  Anyone who has watched this non-debate must, regardless of their views on the actual topic, be impressed and discomfited by the sheer weight of conformist violence which has been levied against anyone still articulating views which were commonplace 10 years ago.

And we must wonder where this abstract war against the very real existence of penises and vaginas is leading.  As I have asked repeatedly: what virtue inheres in denigrating the obvious fact that women and men differ in their biology and social expressions, even if the range of possibilities on both sides is wide?

It is my view that we are born wired with a “difference maker”, a tribal instinct.  And this instinct, far from being extinguished in egalitarian projects, is in fact inflamed and made all the more vicious for its very intellectual and moral vacuousness.

Leftism results in extreme violence precisely BECAUSE of the intellectual sophistry underlying its claims.  People become MORE violent the weaker their claims to injustice.

One must always, in the end at least, and preferably in the beginning, ask what the purpose is.  What is the purpose of life?  Where do we want to go as a nation, and as a people?

I would argue that the real oppression of gays is not the existence of laws regulating the words they can use to describe their relationships, but rather in their very existence in a society which has renounced the use of reason, capitulated in its quest to find enduring meaning in life, and all but abandoned the conforming masses to the beliefs that human souls are a fantasy, that human life ends in biological decay, and that all our work means nothing.

As I have often said, the colors of autumn signal not new life, but new decay, and all the supposed efflorescence of this new reality–that of using the Bill of Rights to confer a right which appears nowhere within it–is in fact a signal of cultural loss and decline.

As has become customary for those seeking to avoid the censure of the reflexive, I will admit candidly I don’t care whether or not gays can marry, because it doesn’t affect me.  Every gay within ten miles of me could be married and I wouldn’t know it.  It is the larger realities which alone concern me.  It is the tone, and the lack of intellectual principle–of genuine Liberality–which concerns me.

And at the end of the day, I think my principal concern even with gays is that this whole project is making it HARDER to answer the question “who am I”?, not easier.  If everyone and everything is equal to everyone and everything else, the loss of the ego is assured.  As they say implicitly in this interesting article, it is in important respects better to be “oppressed” that fully integrated: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/scotus-same-sex-marriage-gay-culture.html?_r=0

What I want more than anything is a return to–or first general use of, depending on your reading of history–the use of negotiation to resolve difference.  There is a profound difference between eradicating alterity, and accepting it.  The first is the egalitarian impulse, and it leads to existential angst and unhappiness.  The latter is the basis of genuine Liberalism and the persistence of meaning.

I took a brief hiatus there because I had to see a man about a horse, but I’m back.  My brain has of course been percolating, and I will allow it fuller expression tomorrow, but for now I wanted to submit that my emerging conviction is that fearlessness and spirituality are more or  less synonymous–at least the proper beginning of spirituality, which is a word I have used only rarely as abused, misused, and largely denuded of the capacity for conveying any important truths.

Constant vigilance is not fearlessness.  Constant preparedness is not fearlessness.  What is needed is to step into the ether, and stay there as well as you can, floating on whatever emerges to meet you.  This is the path forward.

As I mention from time to time, I have some interesting nights.  Last night was quite useful.  I will often wake up babbling nonsense words, but I had this interesting vision: a set of boxes that contained different experiences.  I opened them.  In one of them, I was happy, laughing, babbling, and then BAM I took this major shot in my solar plexus. I think biologically, archeologically, this is what happened.  I was punched as a baby.

Then I was given a clear message: a feeling of happy verbalizing, the punch, then shaking.  It was literally a phased message in body code, as crystal clear as it could be.  Words that were better than words, because it included the demonstration of “that”.

This is a great thing.  I think having pulled that out, it will take my solar plexus out of the loop in terms of generating tension.

And I feel pride in having pulled a Houdini.  Born to narcissistic parents, traumatized before I could walk, hit regularly from age 1 to 4, moved around regularly–preventing the formation of stable, long term friendships–and disconnected from regular contact with any family: I am still growing.   Fuck the odds.  I am still alive.

And after this I had all sorts of paranoid dreams.  An omnipotent security state tracking down the last remnants of humanity.  Dreams of course can have multiple levels.  For me, of course, what I was seeing represented was my fear, the fear soup I have lived in all these years, of being chased and pursued.  Actually, another one of the boxes contained me crawling, desperate to escape, and being unable to, since of course I was just a small baby.

But we of course do need to fear this.  There are, in my view, a considerable number of well organized and well funded people who want to build a planetary government, which will be run by emotionally immature people with crap ethical systems, no empathy, and no true long term vision other than universalization of control.  They want to rule the world because they can’t figure out how to live actually useful lives.

In my case, fear is disappearing outright.  It is simply dropping away.  I will resist these people–and try to talk to them, through this blog–by pointing out better way, more human ways, less evil ways, of building a global civilization.  This is what we want: civilization.  Culture.  Global government is merely a system of control.  Laws exist where men are bad.  We should want less laws, not more, because men (and of course women) are growing steadily morally.  No plan exists among the globalists, that I can see, to do more than indoctrinate kids in egalitarianism, where radical environmentalism adds the postulate that we are all equal to the earth, and it us.  Socialism as mass death, despite the scientific feasibility of continuing with the present population, and letting it naturally decline as standards of living get higher.

This is the fundamental challenge I am negotiating at the moment.  My history is to view the world as a hostile place, and all action to start from the presumption of resistance.  This of course creates problems that did not exist, and more than anything, it is tiring.  The amygdala can only take so much fight or flight activation.  Practically, every time you activate it, you will need a recovery period.

The alternative is what I once called the Turtle Approach, which is to nurture, to feed, to shine light on, all the things I want, and do it daily, and for a long period of time. Never take anything to the limit, but always show up.  Be consistent.  And most importantly, enjoy the process of nurturing.  Enjoy the current, very small result, and look forward to the long term result, but not too much.  If you take enough care in the now, the future will take care of itself.

And one of the things I am thinking is that for people who like to fight, there is no end.  You can win every contest across a lifetime, and not run out of opponents.  Musashi was never defeated (actually, I think he was once, by a bo practitioner), but I wonder how well he slept at night.

The way I think it works is fights come to you. And if you build every day, when they come, you will be ready.  And if they don’t come, you have not wasted your time in useless tension.

We all die.  It is not a great failure if your sin is taking a walk in the park rather than fortifying your windows.  To fear greatly, is to live poorly.

This has been one of my issues: I don’t want to die stupidly.  I have not wanted to fail to investigate that weird noise. I have wanted my perceptions to be perfect.  Let nothing happen to me or my loved ones simply because I was not paranoid enough, not prepared enough.

But you can live a life looking constantly over your shoulder, worried about everything.  This is not living.  This is not confronting the inevitability of death directly.  This is not confronting the EVITABILTY of living directly.

I read a warrior is prepared for everything.  This may well be true.  If so, I do not want to be a warrior.  I want to be a simple man, perhaps a foolish man, but a free one: free from fear, and free to live openly with confidence, courage, and optimism. Let them take me when they will: I surrender to fate, and what will be.

As I mention from time to time, I find it an interesting practice to draw a weekly and annual Tarot card.  I don’t know if I believe in it, but it really doesn’t matter.  It’s interesting.  It acts like a Rorschach or a filter, allowing you to focus on one aspect of your life.  Imagine if you took a series of lens and looked the world, to see what colors it elicited: a green lens, a purple lens, a pink lens.

Or imagine using essential oils to pull out latent aromas in food, cigars and wine?  What if you drank cherry wine while diffusing cherry essential oil (or something complimentary)?  I may actually need to try that.  Kijafa is quite good.

But of course I meant to say something else entirely.  Here is the thing about Tarot: ALL the cards are good.  There are no bad cards.  There are no cards that are gloom and doom.  I have pulled the Death card.  I have pulled a card where a dead body lies bleeding, pierced by many swords.

Living is transforming.  Not transforming, not changing, is mere existence.  It is dull, and not at all the point of life.  To transform, parts of you must die.  You must leave things and people and ideas and old emotions behind.  You must live light.

So all the cards, essentially, are either amplifications, or indications something is falling away.  Either something bad is ending, or something good is beginning or getting stronger.

You cannot do better for a philosophy of life than by assuming you can handle everything Life throws at you and make good of it somehow.  Tarot, to me, embodies this.

Edit: I will share a dream I had a few weeks ago.  I was in a many wheeled off-road vehicle with my kids, and everything was falling apart.  I wound up driving on a series of telephone poles many feet off the ground, all of which were collapsing as I was driving, but I stayed the course.  I kept above it all, in a constant dance of power and balance, and in the dream I thought to myself “This engine is damn strong.”.  It all ended well.  We covered the contested ground.

There’s a meme floating around that goes something like: “when a man says he’ll do something, he’ll do it.  No need to remind him every six months.”

What stands in the way of gradualism for most of us?  Is it not fear?  That little project is not something you’ve done before, and you’re not sure you can do it, so you distract yourself.  You look at other things.  That project disappears through a process of negative hallucination.

But that project represents your unprocessed Shadow.  It is by no means inconsequential, especially if its something that could be done in a few hours.

I think we could view the sum of our chosen Delays as the sum of our external Shadows. Each of them needs a ray of daylight.  It needs to get done: and not hastily, sloppily.  It needs to get done with affection and tenderness, and friendship.

What you offer the world is what you offer yourself. Therefore, what you offer yourself can be seen all around you.

Look around you.  I would encourage you to make decisions, if they are needed.  Do some one little thing, now.

It is one thing to live in a cave; and another to scamper out, tag a tree, and make it back alive.

I did that today: I replaced two toilet paper holders. Holy shit, you say, how fucking lame is that?  Are you kidding me?  Who says that kind of crap?

I do.  I was squeezed into a tiny little space long ago, and crushed.  For many years I have spent hours each day on the internet, and next to no time cleaning or organizing.  I have a good art collection on my walls, but beyond that, I have barely done anything.

The internet, I see, is one way I avoid life.  Drinking is another. Intellectualizing is another.  For many people this role is played by watching TV or playing video games.

Nobody really wants to be alone with themselves when they have a lot to deal with.  But before TV, you had a lot less distractions.  It was far less easy to escape, which meant that most people on some level had to come to grips with life and living.  Now, it can be postponed indefinitely.  If you get an Information Age job, you never, anywhere, have to encounter messy emotions. You can push them out there, and act childishly your whole life.  The only reckoning is death itself.

And what I am realizing is that life can be really good when you touch it, shake its hand, make friends with it.  There are so many fun things you can do.  Every day can be FILLED with accomplishments, each of which you can take pleasure in.  You cooked a meal: pride.  You organized everything: pride.  You worked out: pride.

And all of these things put together do in fact equal considerable actual, real accomplishment over time. They are how you get “switched on”.

I think that was John Wooden’s great secret: he derived pleasure from every exertion of every day.  Every movement he made in the direction of perfection filled him with joy, and even at times elation.  He was happy in every practice, and every game, and in PREPARING for the practice and the game, all by himself, often.

My current Kum Nye level has me looking for joy.  They say it is sometimes hidden at the bottom corner of your experience, or partially hidden behind a veil.  It is a blinking light you only slowly become aware of.  It is a faint melody or scent, almost too ephemeral and ethereal to catch, but which leaves a stronger impression for it.  It was there, dammit, I know it was there.

I have reached a point where I look at people differently, or at least I have.  I was driving down my main drag two or three days ago–a pleasant series of shops and trendy bars–and realizing that before I saw how everyone was suffering.  Now, I see that I actually may be in a position soon to help them do something about it.  It is not an innate human condition: it is a potentially temporary condition, brought on by ignorance.  There are tools and methods and ideas which can alter states at a fundamental, deep level, and do so permanently.

This, I think, is the essence of the Buddha’s insight.  He saw pain, but he also saw a way out.  

If you think about it, Quantitative Easing is actually a negative interest rate.  How do you get interest rates below zero?  You give money away.

Our nation is heavily indebted at all levels.  Our children start adulthood heavily indebted for school, and continue the process all their lives, most of them.  Our State and local and National governments: all heavily in debt.

Short of something like my proposal, we really have no means of absorbing and recovering from a major economic shock.  The Fed can’t do it.  The national government can’t do it.

And in large measure, WE can’t do it.  We owe too many people too much money.  It makes you clumsy, slow, unwieldy, inflexible.  When you have a large monthly nut you have to cover, then you can’t invest, and you have no savings.  Most Americans have no savings.

It continues to baffle me how the criminality of our system is not the subject of widespread outrage, at least among those who, in theory, ought to be able to render intelligent opinions on the topic.  Why am I the only one (as far as I know, and of course this is a large world with many voices) proposing the obvious?

Helpfully, I have had some major technical problems lately.  I bought a new iPhone, for example, and it took a good six hours of work to get it to synchronize (I said a while back I wouldn’t buy another Apple product, but eventually reached the conclusion that there really are no good guys in high tech, and I may as well use something that tends to work more than to not work.  Music is important to me.)

As I was wrestling with this and a couple other unanticipated problems, it occurred to me that there is machine time, and non-machine time.  There is interacting abstractly with an abstract environment, which is what I am doing here.  And there is sitting at my kitchen table, working on a model, or practicing Tai Chi, or finally putting up new toilet paper holders and fixing the coat rack.  They feel different.  Here, I am more comfortable, but I think precisely because it takes me out of ordinary time.

My Lumosity scores have been going down the past few days, and I am realizing it is because I am living less in my head.  This is a good thing.