Month: July 2015

I was in a bookstore yesterday, and noticed that the Investing section was right next to the personal growth section, which they thoughtfully titled something like the “Living your ideal life” section.

Whenever I get a bit of extra money, I always invest it in personal growth, which I would assert is synonymous with learning to be happier with less.  Who is richer: the man with the house on the hill constantly fearful of losing it, and constantly desirous of getting more; or the person who has mastered his or her inner domain, and is able to live quite contentedly in a shack somewhere?

This is of course a commonplace, a truism, the sort of thing that pedants preach and rarely practice.  But could we not consider that the great avarice of our time, the great and frantic, overwhelming thirst to have more and more and more is symptomatic of spiritual emptiness?

This, too, of course, is a truism, but one that can have practical consequences.

What is wiser: taking an expensive vacation to relax, or learning to relax even while working?  What is wiser: amassing objects to enjoy, or learning to enjoy all the things which have been provided for free?

Where, in short, should you be spending your money?

The short circuit in all this, the great problem among ideas which are otherwise logically irreproachable, is that most people who claim they can provide happiness don’t.  Most self help courses are bullshit.  Most cynics are justified in their cynicism.  Your emotional need becomes merely a means for them to buy more trinkets and more praise for their worldly success.  As much good as Joel Osteen has done–and I don’t dispute him this, and only single him out to provide a specific example among countless others–he has still chosen to live in an enormous mansion.

People think of voluntary relative poverty as a punishment.  You wear the sack cloth to punish your body and all its sensations.  You seek misery in this life to attain happiness in another world.  This is stupid, in my view.  It is vanity and folly.

There is nothing wrong with happiness.  There is nothing wrong with living a life of pleasurable sensations of all sorts.  There is nothing wrong with pursuing the appreciation of beauty, of love, of taking pleasure in both work and rest.

What is needed is the capacity for digestion.  Gorillas are able to amass their great strength on a vegetarian diet.  They make the most of what they have.

My vision for a future world is one where people are able to digest experience sufficiently well that they can live extremely well, extremely happily, on very little.  This is my answer to those who want to depopulate the world to “save it”. What is needed is not violence, but meaning; not anger and brute force, but reasoning and methods of the soul.  This is the path forward.

My own work, of course, is oriented around finding things that actually do work, and eventually putting together a system which yields uniformly positive results.  Even if I am wildly successful, I don’t plan to ever pay myself more than $100,000 a year in today’s dollars.  That amount will purchase anything I could conceivably need, and one day even that may be excessive.  Money will not buy me love, or the esteem of others, or self respect, or the capacity to fully enjoy the days remaining to me.

I will add that some of the things that are not in my view bullshit are the Hoffman Process, Holotropic and Integrative Breathwork, Kum Nye, the EmWave2, Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Emotional Transformation Therapy, and seeking out and regularly enjoying beautiful art, particularly music.

As I may have mentioned, I am presently listening to Gibbon’s 127 hour “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” [which, by the way, provides quite early on example after example of why our Founding Fathers feared a powerful standing army.  I’m up to about 250 AD, and the last 15-20 Emperors were both made and in most cases killed by the army, in nearly all cases more or less because they were not able to extort enough money] and contemplating that even most of the Roman relics are lost to antiquity.  The temples were sacked, the sculptures and other pieces of art destroyed, and much of the writing and daily culture subjected to time.

The Romans were of course brilliant engineers.  And I think even a cursory reading of military history makes it clear that engineers tend also to be great warriors.  They build better weapons, develop better tactics, and better undertake the logistics which alone make warfare–especially at a distance–practicable.  Some of their aquaducts are still in use 2,000 years later.

But if we posit that the purpose of life on this Earth is to grow spiritually, we must ask what all of this means.  They amassed great material wealth, but they squandered it on sexual licentiousness, debaucheries of all sorts, and vicarious cruelties, as in the hunting of animals for public spectacle, and gladiatorial contests.  Of “Panem et Circenses” they had plenty.  Of genuine spiritual insights, there appears little.

He deals with the Germans (and other “babblers”, as we might translate the Greek “barbarian”) in very general fashion–necessarily, of course, due to the paucity of records, and the utter lack of a written language on their part–but being me I got to dreaming and wondering.

What if in 200 AD an enlightened tribal chief–say in present day Estonia–discovered a miraculous set of practices and beliefs which uniformly raised the spiritual level of all those who practiced them to great heights?  What if this great tradition reigned ascendant for 250 years until everyone in that tribe was slaughtered by a competing set of babblers?

There would be no record.  No stupas or temples.  No written record.  Nothing.  All this despite that fact that this was, in fact, “high culture” by what I would consider the only rational standard.

What if Indian culture in North America 1,000 years ago was suffused with the most brilliant, subtle, and effective spiritual beliefs and practices, but only among the nomads?  We would have no way to know.

How much of history is unwritten?  Can we not assume most of it?

As a general rule, what is called “high culture” by historians is nearly exactly synonymous with a culture which was militarily aggressive, successful, and ruled in an hierarchical fashion by a ruling elite, whose very existence is to my way of thinking antithetical to genuine spirituality.  No good person wants to rule or direct the activities of anyone else.  It is antithetical to personal growth, to spiritual growth, to coming closer to what I might term the great Generative Spirit.

Goodness is personal gradualism.  That may be a definition I want to retain.

To the extent I have a distinctive talent, I think it is being able to view large subjects with new eyes.  I feel very little emotional connection to Zen, so I will not call it Beginner’s Mind, but perhaps an open mind will work.  It is so very hard and so very unusual to see what is in front of you without first and only seeing it through the eyes of those who have come before and told you what to see, and how to see it, and implicitly threatened you with social exclusion for failing to comply.

I suppose that is my other talent: I really don’t care about the opinions of others.  I have Kiplings “If” on the wall of my bathroom, where I see it every morning, and I really do think I can listen to the opinions of others, but still go my own way.

I wish there were more like me.  What an interesting and genuinely diverse world it would be if everyone took the task of seeing as a matter of great importance, and a matter of personal not social responsibility.

Our great nation is being destroyed before our very eyes, and the masses seem to be preoccupied with boating and barbecues. But thus it has been before, many, many times.  There is nothing new under the sun.

I will offer a ludicrous and absurd idea I have of myself–of my personal craziness:  I feel I have been on this Earth many times, trying to do good, but this is the last time.  All patience must have an end.

Will we be spiritual beings or animals?  Will life or the machine prevail?  The question remains open.

In the Hoffman Process they teach you to think of your “self” in four pieces: your Spiritual Self, your Intellectual Self, your Emotional/Inner Child Self, and your body.

I wonder if I might rename these.  1) your Spiritual unconscious; 2) your emotionally dissociated self; 3) the part of you which holds the trauma and which expresses your joys; 4) where all these land physically, and express themselves.

The Process itself deals with issues that happen birth to age 12, or roughly puberty.  And it is interesting that they tend practically to conflate the emotional self with the inner child.  In inner work, it is really quite astonishing to note how much and how pervasively the past inhabits all of our presents.  Rosebuds live in us all, or so I think.

And if we think of our unconscious as a set of containers, then the task is to learn to move between them skillfully.  I think much of the delight in life comes from a sense of childlike wonder and enthusiasm and curiosity.  Yet, we must also dissociate sometimes from the present moment so as to plan, and think, and perceive with our minds.  Life cannot be all fun and games, even if it should also not be devoid of them.

But the biggest reality underlying all this is our lack of consciousness of our spirit.  It, too, exists in a sort of repressed box which some people never open at all.  We are dissociated from our spiritual selves, to some greater or lesser extent; divided from a source of life and vitality that floats in the very air.

I would posit that your knowledge of God is innate.  Your spiritual instincts are innate.  But like emotions, spiritual tasks must flow through us.  They do not manifest as abstractions.

It has been said we live in the age of abstraction (which I will note is quite different from an age of Reason).  If so, can we not posit from that fact alone that to the extent this ideal is pursued, emotional skill is reduced?  And is not abstraction a perfect refuge from emotional wounds and traumas of all sorts?

I have what I suppose I will call kinesthetic images present themselves to me from time to time.  I was pondering my own growth, and saw as an alternative the path of evil, which consists in placing a barrier roughly halfway down your life, and confining yourself to that.  It is a roof, placed at a low level, which forces people to crawl to move. It spreads out horizontally forever.  Only in crushing others can such people suit themselves to their space.

I am not entirely sure what that means, but suffice it to say Goodness is a movement of expansion, and its contrary one of confinement and contraction.  Their actions are therefore confined to reducing the movement of others, of tearing down, breaking, and defiling.

This evil consciousness is available to me.  It is in me.  That is the only reason I can see it.  It was one of my possible paths, should I have chosen to stay broken, had I chosen madness.

But I didn’t, and I now have space.  I have time.  I exist in a much larger world I am only beginning to connect with, only beginning to learn and love.

This post is a mess.  I will leave it to you to connect it all up, if you can.  And if you can’t, there may yet be some shiny fragments you can call into use in making your own way through this dangerous, confusing, interesting, beautiful world.

There is no substitute in life for gradualism.  John Wooden’s father taught him to “make each day your masterpiece”.  Add enough of those up, and you get what he got.

This is an obvious point, and I think I am posting it to remind myself, more than anything.  Going to walk the dog, then some other posts I’ve been waiting for time and a cigar to make.

You know, an enormous benefit of having what amounts to a public diary–which chronicles probably 95% of my inner work–is that I can be absolutely open and spontaneous.  I don’t have any huge inner secrets, demons I can’t name or mention, or anything to hide.  I am what I am, and I have spoken who I am, publicly.

In my view, this is the way to live.  If you think back to tribal times, when people lived in tents together, it really wasn’t possible to keep anything secret for long.  You were known to be the person you were.  I see no reason not to suppose this the case, and of course the quantity of distractions and allurements were a very, very small fraction of what they are today.

Today, you can live in a cave and nobody need know what you are doing on the internet, what private perversions and vices you have developed, and just how far off of normal and healthy you have drifted.  I look people in the eyes and I don’t know what they are going to home to that evening.

Still, and I am going to try and develop the habit of returning to the positive, we live in a very peaceful era, filled with people who are overwhelmingly honest and hard-working, and I remain grateful to be me.  I like the skin I live in.

I’m going to call it: my inner self is a white dog, my third spirit animal.  Left to myself, unobstructed by past and present terrors, I am very social, very enthusiastic, very curious, and I love to laugh.  Really, I am an overgrown kid.

My nearly infinite capacity for finding and focusing on negativity notwithstanding, and my clear and I think accurate understanding of our grave present dangers also notwithstanding, I have decided to do my best to enjoy every day and live happily.

Death takes all of us.  But does it take us in the middle of a moan or a belly laugh?

Fuck the odds.  I’m going to do my best to live until I die.

Last night I dreamed I got stopped at a Nazi check-point, and my papers were in fact in order.

I believe this is a positive dream.  It is now possible to cross from one zone to another without fear or shame.

I may choose to be happy one of these days.  Happiness is after all the best revenge.

If you are enduring with patience, you are transforming with time.

I posted this on someone’s Facebook, and realized I liked it.

I would like to posit that Spirituality is nothing more or less than mental health attuned both to this world and the next.  Mental health and moral growth are the same thing in my world, and moral growth at some point is best described as spiritual growth.  Morality is just the foundation, the beginnings, the parameters and rules of a game which needs to be transcended. It is rules for children, until they can see with their own eyes, and feel honestly with their own hearts.

As a system for rejecting individual moral growth, Socialism is therefore counter-Spiritual.  It contains and diminishes souls.  It does not exalt and expand them.  Indeed, most Socialists are overt atheists.  This is why they are Socialists in the first place: their meaning-makers are broken.

Now, I have many friends who I am very fond of who no doubt more or less conflate leftist economic policies with generosity of spirit and compassionate intercession.  They feel that the people who want to feed and clothe and shelter the poor are intrinsically good for this reason alone.

In this regard, it is worth separating actual generosity from Socialism.  Socialism is a moral philosophy based upon egalitarianism, whose first premise is that no people are better than any others, and whose necessary first correlate is that only societies can be good: individuals cannot, and the creed named for them is intrinsically to be rejected as selfish in a formal sense: it retains notions of self apart from its relation to the State.

The ESSENCE of the teaching of Christ, among others, is that people are different.  They make different decisions, follow different paths.  All the deep spiritual teachers taught that some paths are better than others, that the people who follow them become better than others–not in the sense that they increase their right to demand obedience or wealth from others, but on the contrary that such things become less important to them as they develop personal–intrinsically individual–relations with Spirit, or Dharma, or Christ, or God, or the Tao, or whatever words you want to use to describe the indescribable.

It is categorically good to feed the poor and provide them with the opportunities to better themselves.  But that is not the task the modern Democrats have set themselves.  They decided long ago that actual economic outcomes are far less important than political outcomes.  It has been obvious for some time that what poor kids need are two parents, but that does not fit the socialist meme that all people–and implicitly all family forms–are instrinsically equal. So what do they do?  Paper over their failures with indefensible excuses, hatred for anyone who still fails to agree with them, and on-going promises they still cannot keep, and which they never will be able to keep.

It is position that annoys people, but to my mind there can be no doubt that Christ would be a socially liberal but politically conservative Republican.  He would feel deep compassion not just for the poor–and by the standards of his day, our poor are very rich–but much more for the people who are lost, who are despairing of God, of meaning, of hope for something better; who despair they will never be loved, understood, cared for, integrated into something meaningful and large.

He would love gays equally as straights, but I think he would ask the same questions I am asking: where is the mutual consideration?  Where the mutual respect?  Where the concern for the feelings and sensibilities of those who are profoundly torn and disturbed by being compelled by force of law to betray–as they see it–the very reason they have for living, the very purpose of their life, by people who have only inferior ideas and practices to suggest in its stead?

Where is all this going?  Much is being taken away, but very little given.  We are told what we cannot do, but no one is spending much time thinking about what we can do that is worth doing.  Hedonism is a vacuous philosophy.  People need to make sense of death, and need to know how the universe works so as to feel they are doing useful work while alive.  Leftism cannot provide this.

People need challenges. They need hard work.  War has often provided this, but so too do the radicals.  This is one of the main methods of Communists: to demand not little of their accolytes, but an excessive amount.  It provides what people need, and pulls them even closer to the cause, since everyone is naturally more fond of anything they have given much to.

Thoreau once wrote “it need not be long, but it takes so very long to make it short.”  When I repeat myself, as I clearly do, it is in a process of trying to take complex ideas and reducing them to their smallest irreducible, but still faithful to my concept, selves. I think that sentence makes sense.  Little bits which mean something.

Socialism, then, is a creed which inherently rejects individual moral growth.  Rather than uplifting it, it replaces it.  It is necessarily, then, an assault on the individual ego, sense of agency and choice in matters of importance, and an agent of infantilism, learned helplessness, and ultimately of despair.  These facts are clothed over by two current processes: the sense of mission in implementing Socialism, with no capacity for reflecting on what that means; and pervasive distraction.

If all electronics crashed tomorrow, I think half of America would lapse instantly into overt mental illness.  Erich Fromm said this of newspapers half a century ago.  But nobody, then, read their papers all day and into the night.

I read Zuckerberg wants people to be able to convey their thoughts instantly: http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/01/zuckerberg-facebook-qna/

My thought is: who has anything worth saying anymore?  What can people discuss?  Other people–who themselves have nothing interesting to say–or current cultural productions of very questionable ultimate value.

But this sort of thing meets a very real need of CONSTANT CONTACT, constant reconciliation.  If you don’t know who you are, if all inner direction has been eradicated through effective long term social propaganda and imbecilic lack of skill in structured thought on the part of our alleged thought leaders, then you MUST “refresh” yourself constantly.  You must be told all day every day that you exist, that this person with your name is in fact known to others.  Your thoughts are not your own.  Your actions are not your own.  But every time you ping the world, something comes back, so there must be something or someone they are responding to.

I am not sanguine about the future.  I wish I could be.  I wish I could be all sunshine and rainbows.  But I have spent most of my life depressed, and the one clear positive of this is that it improves reality testing (although one could of course dispute that this is a positive here).

We all must do our work.  Doing work without a reasonable hope of success is harder.  But I have always persevered, and I always will, and history–while filled with preventable and idiotic tragedy–does also furnish occasional examples of triumphs against all odds, and a rebirth of good things via good people.