Month: August 2015

One of the consistent objectives of my Kum Nye practice is a sense of merging sensation with space, and I really am increasingly feeling a sense of expansion and diffusion.

Today, walking in the park on a very nice day, it hit me that what keeps us out of the present moment is past momentS.  We carry simultaneously many moments, moments of terror, of joy, of loss, of gain.

If you think about it, you can likely quickly access many life-changing or defining moments.  The moment your parents told you they were getting divorced.  Many moments hearing them arguing, but maybe one moment you really don’t remember until you focus on it, when you started shutting down emotionally.

Perhaps you had something wonderful happen, and you said to yourself “I will never be happier than this”, and your unconscious heard that, and took it seriously.

If you are a soldier, you may remember when you heard you were going to be deployed.  Or redeployed.  Or reredeployed.  You may have PTSD, and many, or certain, moments burned into your consciousness.  I suspect your healing will begin with the realization that there are other moments like that in you too, which are simply not as intense.  They passed away, and so too can these memories, even if it doesn’t feel that way.

Emotionally, we are aggregates of many moments of heightened sense, heightened emotion, heightened connection, for better or worse.

And I felt this surge of energy and thought that it is time for all my moments to begin to open their doors to one another, to open up a general connection of feeling and emotion, and it felt clear to me that that is how you learn to live in the present, actually.

When you are living in the moment, you don’t know it.  You can’t will it, because in the act of observing it, you leave it.  I think there are people who talk about “the moment” who sit there thinking: “here I am, living in moment.  Fuck I’m awesome.”

Conscious presence is an emergent property of a well organized nervous system and psyche.  It is then, in other words, an emergent property of emotional health, which makes psychological work–or let us say, more broadly, energetic release work–the path to it.

Kum Nye literally means to massage your subtle being, your intermediate part between your body and space itself.  It is built for this sort of thing.

I was reading it is common in Japan for people to work 100 weeks.  Then I seemed to recall they have been trying Keynesian economics for quite some time–decades–then reasoned that they have likely inflated the currency.  I look it up, and sure enough, the dollar bought 85 yen about 5 years ago, and now it buys nearly 125.

Here is a summary:

The USDJPY traded at 122.26 JPY on Friday August 21, according to interbank foreign exchange market quotes. The Japanese Yen averaged 154.56 from 1972 until 2015, reaching an all time high of 306.84 in December of 1975 and a record low of 75.74 in October of 2011.

One of the first things modern “economists” tell developing economies to do is deflate their currency so that they can export more.  That makes their stuff more cheap for other countries, but also more expensive FOR THEM.  And the money comes from somewhere, does it not?  It doesn’t grow on trees.

It comes from banks, normally from central banks, but also possibly from the government, depending on how things are set up; and from the fractional reserve banking system.

When you see Keynesian economics, you see this same dynamic, this same desire to pump money “into the economy”, so that even though Japan was developed, it likely acted as if it weren’t.  And when you see all this what you also need to see is a power elite making fortunes, by stepping on the necks of ordinary working men and women.  The same thing is happening here, just to a lesser extent than there.

I read the Japanese even have a word for “death from overwork”.  It need not be that way, given sane economic policies.

Some day someone will listen to me.

I think we need to bring this concept back to describe people overwhelmed by the presence of dissension and even criticism.  You get the sense that if you told them to go fuck themselves they would evaporate outright, and all that would be left is a cold foggy cloud.  At a minimum, they would wet and crap themselves and need sedation and several weeks to recover.

What nation can endure like that, in a world still containing many Morlocks, many cannibals from the deep?

Christina Hoff Sommers is an avowed feminist and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She’s spent a lifetime visiting college campuses. Recently, upon her arrival at Oberlin College, Georgetown University and other campuses, trigger warnings were issued asserting, in her words, that her “very presence on campus” was “a form of violence” and that she was threatening students’ mental health. At Oberlin, 30 students and the campus therapy dog retired to a “safe room” with soft music, crayons and coloring books to escape any uncomfortable facts raised by Sommers.
The problem for students and some professors is that Sommers challenges the narrative, with credible statistical facts, that women are living in a violent, paternalistic rape culture. As a result, she has been “excommunicated from the church of campus feminism” in order to protect women from her uncomfortable facts. This prompted Sommers to say, “There’s a move to get young women in combat, and yet on our campuses, they are so fragile they can’t handle a speaker with dissenting views.” I wonder whether there will be demands for the military to have therapy dogs and safe rooms in combat situations.
The University of New Hampshire published a “Bias-Free Language Guide,” which “is meant to invite inclusive excellence in (the) campus community.” Terms such as “American,” “homosexual,” “illegal alien,” “Caucasian,” “mothering,” “fathering” and “foreigners” are deemed “problematic.” Other problematic terms include “elders,” “senior citizen,” “overweight,” “speech impediment,” “dumb,” “sexual preference,” “manpower,” “freshmen,” “mailman” and “chairman.” For now, these terms are seen as problematic. If the political correctness police were permitted to get away with it, later they would bring disciplinary action against a student or faculty member who used the terms.

What I will submit is that Political Correctness is an ANTI-morality.  It does not teach its adherents what constitutes a good life.  It has no equivalent to Eudaemonia, and likely in most cases explicitly rejects “normative” moral systems.


But what is left?  Attack.  That is all that is left.  If you cannot live your own life in peace because you believe nothing–you don’t believe in the ideals of “manliness” or “womanliness”, or fathering or mothering, or believe in America, or God, or Christ, or even Goodness of any sort–then all you can do is detract from the lives of others.


Egalitarianism is the creed that all people are equal, but it is not the creed that all CREEDS are equal.  If it were, it would be tolerant.  As it is, it is radically INtolerant.  It reject and punishes anyone who believes in notions like the relative worth of one morality versus another.  It rejects and punishes anyone who thinks moral and spiritual growth are possible, since that would necessarily imply that some people are morally better than others–which is obviously, plainly, blatantly the case, which is why the propaganda and violence, to hide this fact.


This is why Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor wanted to immolate Christ.  


This is why, to take a vastly different, but relevant example, Dr. Frank N. Furter had to kill Eddie in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”.  It has been some time since I’ve seen this movie–25 years at least–but I remember Meatloaf projecting an unambiguously masculine energy, in a world where all such distinctions were erased.  All of these things, all of these signs, are all around us, of moral decay masked as moral superiority.


I just yesterday saw some informational buttons which had Male, Female, and Other.  


And one has to ask: who is helped?  No one.  Who do I help, really, refusing to use the word American?  Homosexual?  Mothering?  Elder?


This is a system formulated by and for drooling, philosophically imbecilic children.  There used to be a grandeur and respect that attended being an “elder”.  “Mothering”, in a positive sense, was understood as one of the most important tasks possible.


We lose all the good that came with these words when we lose the words.  And we gain nothing.  This whole thing is a system whose sole function is to allow anti-social, emotionally disconnected nihilists to feel the thrill of moral superiority doing nothing but advancing violence into the world under the banner of peace.  

The notion of Obama getting elected–an obvious closet Marxist, an obvious red diaper baby, someone obviously dedicated to pushing a far left, anti-American agenda–drove me crazy in 2008.  I don’t do helplessness well, so I reasoned that chain emails start somewhere, so I started a bunch of them.  I sent them to a list of about 100 people, which included business and personal acquaintances, and the editorial emails of various news journals and journalists, like National Review, Front Page Magazine, and Glenn Beck.  My hope was they would go viral.  At least one apparently did, as it is still being referred to in the present era.

Here is one link: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/11/obamas-america-the-view-from-prague.php

I do seem to swim to the beat of my own drummer, if I might mix metaphors in an appropriate manner.  I can see why someone saw fit to attribute this to someone outside the system, capable of seeing it from a high level, from a distance.

But what I do is phase in and phase out.  I can exist in the system, and outside it.  I can and often am the only person on the planet saying certain things.  My treatment of the financial system is a good example.  And I think this makes me useful.  It is a burden, a hardship, a heavy load sometimes doing the WORK of seeing things with fresh and untainted eyes, but it is my “terrible privilege”, to quote Tony Stark.

The background of this commentary should be obvious.  In his first few years, and again when he was running for reelection, I often summarized the negatives of Obama.

There can be no question that the “Stimulus” was a political payment–with zero or even negative economic utility–and little question that large, multi-billion dollar sums were redirected to causes and people unknown.

There is no doubt that the IRS was used as a political weapon.

There is no doubt that Fast and Furious was a very cynical ploy to support gun control.

There is no doubt that Obamacare is intended over time to either force Single Payer, or create a system in which a small insurance oligarchy controls the market, and works in a fascistic fashion with the government to create complete bureaucratic control.

There is no doubt in my mind that Obama created ISIS, in the process of trying to overthrow the government of Syria in support of Saudi objectives.

There is little doubt in my mind that Obama, his supervisor Valerie Jarrett, and whoever his actual backers and handlers are, want the Iranians to get nuclear weapons.

To this small and very incomplete list can be added many things, which would include the secret things we still don’t know about, such as the possible intentional diffusion of chemical weapons to Al Quedists in Syria for a false flag operation.  One happened.  People died.  Does anyone other than me remember this?  Do you remember Obama wanted a war, with our soldiers fighting next to the rapists and murderers of women and children, in support of their supremacy?

I will say this: if you required all voters to describe the major candidates, their views on three specific issues, and the pros and cons of those views, you would reduce the electorate by at least 90%.

We have people who can’t say who we fought in the Revolutionary War.  We have people who can’t name the century in which the Civil War started, or find France on a map.

In important respects, Donald Trump is the conservative–really, moderate–answer to Barack Obama.  He appeals to the same needs, the same desires, the same avarices, but adds to this at least some REASON.

It has become problematic rooting for this country.  It has become socially disadvantageous in many groups to root for white people, for working class people, for the people who founded, and run this country.

We KNOW what happens when you put Mexicans in charge of a country.  They create Mexico.  Do we want that?  Do even they want that?  The root problem with most Latin Americans is that they have no problems with the abuse of law and principle, as long as it is THEIR group in charge.  Much of the world is like that.  Only in the Western world have people risen above principal identification with their clan to look to the well being of the whole.  And look at what we have created.  The place everyone else wants to come to, take advantage of, and in their avarice, to tear down.

Things to do.  I’m ranting.  That’s enough for now.

That would be a better book title for the present era.

I was reading that Kant apparently suffered from depression: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/kants-depression/

It would seem to me the author, like Kant himself, draws the wrong conclusion.  Kant’s philosophizing–his obsession with reason and with transcending and separating from his body and its sensations–was likely the RESULT of unprocessed emotions.

When I study Western history, it is in large measure the history of IDEAS, when ideas are only a part of the human experience.  There is no history of practice, so much.  Yes, various churches had various practices.  The Romans practiced sacrifice.  They kept altars.  Christians began singing early on, and took the Eucharist and wine and practiced baptism.

But these are all outer, social rites.  Only in things like the practices of St. Ignatius does one find something possibly useful for personal growth.  In the modern era, even most psychology has been useless or even harmful.  Only perhaps in the past 30-40 years have useful things like cognitive psychology and positive psychology, and trauma therapies come into being.

To this I would oppose the many spiritual practices of the East, like yoga, and various meditations, and my favorite, Kum Nye.

I wonder if one could summarize modernity as the collective realization that ideas do not provide spiritual food.

And I wonder if we could view the advent of Christianity as the substitution of orthodoxy for orthopraxy.  How often does one see the latter word in the history of the West?  Virtually never.

It feels to me like the feeling we call shame is biological, instinctual, and an inherent part of trauma.  The fact of shame is a flattened ego, a sense that one cannot take part in human affairs as a full equal.  You cannot exist.

Guilt can lead to shame, but what is the fact of shame?  Social isolation,  Withdrawal.  The rejection of others, in shame based social orders.  I think shame is the thing that makes your dog put its tail between its legs and hide.  It is fear, but also a profound sense of withdrawal.

Clinically, I feel, the two manifested elements of trauma are dissociation and shame.  The first detaches you from your instinctual emotions, which is to say from yourself; and the second detaches you from the rest of society.

The two combine to lead to the presenting symptoms of depression, anger, paranoia, intrusions, and the like.  When you detach from the world, it becomes out there, and out there is not controllable or predictable.  It becomes foreign ground, occupied by strangers.  Everyone is a stranger, even the person looking at you in the mirror.

I think this is close to the truth.  My work continues.

Edit: to be clear, I think most of tend to think people feel shame because of something.  The most obvious example is incest, which transgresses rules we can be aware of consciously.  But I don’t think this gets at the root of it, where there is no “because”. It is because it is. It is because it is built into us as animals.  It is a direct nervous system level disruption of the social instinct.

When you first look at this majestic house, it is impossible to suppress feeling like you are seeing the home of an aristocrat, someone wealthy beyond the imagining of most of us.

And I well know that many see that house and see abuses, see crime, see theft, see injustice and unfairness. I think it might serve as the basis of an interesting thought experiment comparing Capitalism–to the extent we have it–and Socialism.

When it was built, from 1890 to 1895, it employed hundreds of skilled workmen, the talents and energies of two of the best architectural minds of that era, and bought, from near and far, large quantities of materials which were sold for profit by those providing them.

It spread wealth, in other words.

Once occupied, it employed hundreds of domestics, paying, as they noted, New York wages in rural North Carolina, making employment there a highly sought after opportunity.

And I suspect that today it employs even more people than it did back then.  You have a ticket office.  You have the same numbers of groundskeepers.  You have someone standing in nearly every room.

And outside the gates, there is an entire village devoted to cashing in on the tourist traffic.  You have nice cafes and steak houses, and gift shops and art galleries.

That home, in other words, was from its inception to the present moment an engine of economic opportunity, of wealth, of employment.  It was and is productive of all the material comforts which attend prosperity, for every layer of the community. Someone owns the cafe where I had an excellent Florentine and eclair.  They will be called Capitalist.  But people work there, and work there only because that cafe exists.

Let us run this experiment in reverse.  Let us say that Socialists had seized power and confiscated the allegedly ill gotten wealth of George Vanderbilt, and handed it out on the streets in tens and twenties until it was all gone.

The home disappears.  Those construction workers are never employed.  The architects lose their contracts.  The domestics remain impoverished in homes with dirt floors.  The village is never built, the jobs of people working there are never created.

In short, a system of wealth production and sharing is never conjured into being.  It is killed before it can sprout and bloom.

The precise defect of Socialism is that it kills things before they can come into being.  Since most people are stupid, since most people do not see what COULD have been, but never was, they continue to fail to see how destructive it is.  Their energies are engaged in tearing down, not seeing that they hurt themselves and their posterity in that very process.

Capitalism is the goose that lays golden eggs.  Unfettered trade and innovation create more of the same, generalizing wealth.  Fettered trade, and the punishment of new ideas, create poverty.  If you look at most of the world, most of the poverty you see is, at root, the result of some combination of resentment, greed for gain without corresponding effort, and simple sloth.

And what were the advantages that the Vanderbilts enjoyed?  They had indoor plumbing, but now we all do.  They had people to cook their meals, but are we not in effect employing the labors of servants whenever we go out to eat, which was rare in that age, but ubiquitous now?  We can pay people to do our laundry, to clean our homes, to mow our lawns, and these are very affordable services, even if most choose to do their own work.

In short, as a result of the very imperfect operation of free markets–wealth creation being undermined by those who create and debase our currency and the public wealth–most of us enjoy comforts only afforded the elites of bygone eras.

Even the Roman emperors used chamber pots.  Ponder that.

First of all, I am going to comment that the place I blog from seems to have had its foundations eroded.  I was out in a glorious day yesterday–for me a glorious day is one with rain and sun, fantastic clouds, and nature–and it really hit me that my Kum Nye work is yielding results.  

Specifically, it hit me that thoughts are like branches floating down a river, and that my experience is the river.  The river is the PRIMARY reality, and thoughts merely a periodic interruption.  Joy and happiness are found in the flow, and thoughts interrupt this flow, even if they are necessary.

And it hit me too that thoughts are a type of perception.  Thinking is a sense like sight.  We don’t think of it that way, but it is.  It is a way, for example, of “seeing” the future, or possible futures.  It is a way of seeing things far away in time and distance. It is a sort of magical power which can allow us to exist everywhere BUT the present moment.  But since the present moment is the only place we actually can exist, thought and existence are incompatible in some respects, even if this magical power is enormously useful, and represents the primary difference between us and animals.

I am in an odd, unfamiliar territory.  And whether I like it or not, my brain tells me that cautious optimism is in order.

To my point, I was listening to the history of the conflicts between the Arians and the Niceans, and was forced into the conclusion that Christianity may well have caused more specifically religious death and violence than any religion which came before, and if we consider that Islam merely takes the worst elements of Christianity–dogmatic absolutism based on a terror of eternal damnation, coupled with physical violence to impose conformity to that dogma–then we are forced to conclude that no more violent religion has ever existed on Earth.

Both great cultural imperialisms–Islamic conquests, and Christian conquests–arose from the atmosphere of early Christianity.  Western languages and Arabic are spoken across most of the globe because of the early theological conflicts within Christianity, and, importantly, how they were resolved.

In pagan religions, by and large there is great tolerance.  If you believe in a multiplicity of gods, there is no reason to fear new ones.  There were cases of statues of Moses and even, if memory serves, Jesus, simply being added to temples as added objects of veneration and worship.

What Christianity adds, uniquely, is the idea of eternal damnation which, combined with the doctrine of Original Sin, makes nervous wrecks of everyone. I drive around the country a lot, and it is not at all uncommon to see giant billboards saying things like “Hell is eternal”, and “If you die tomorrow, where will you go?” (with the words Heaven in white, and Hell in red superimposed).

Do you think the people putting up these signs are uncommonly kind, uncommonly charitable in a spontaneous, open way?  How would they react if they found out their child was gay?  How do they raise their children?  If they raise them anything like I was raised, they raise them to FEAR God.  They raise them to fear disobedience.  They raise them, in other words, in a loveless, oppressive environment which teaches them to embrace the psychological tortures inflicted on them gladly, to feel they deserved it, to feel what I might term Original Shame, and to find emotional release ONLY in the compulsive worship of a God who loved them so much he had to inflict the fear–and potential reality–of eternal damnation on them.

Only scholars remember the conflict between the Arians and Niceans.  They differed, as Gibbon points out repeatedly in his inimitable and brilliantly witty and subtle way, more or less in the exact pronunciation of one Greek word, that for consubstantiation.  The entire conflict rested on the exact interpretation of the notion of the divine Trinity.

And in the course of this conflict many people were slain.  Literal rivers of blood–which filled the rain ditches–were spilled.  Men and women had their mouths forced open by wooden devices that a Holy Wafer might be forced down their unwilling throats.  Vestal virgins were whipped and raped, and had their breasts pressed between wooden plates.

All over nothing.  Literally nothing.  The difference between PotAEto and Potahto.  Words.  Empty words.  And I know enough of the history of the Church to know a great deal more blood is coming, well over a thousand years of blood and rapine, all in the name of a man who preached Love.

It is inconceivable to me that if Christ was in fact a holy man, a deeply spiritual man, that he could have looked at what was done in his name and do other than weep at the vanity, folly, avarice, violence and stupidity of men.

All of this mania is driven by the profound fear, the horror and terror, of eternal damnation.  It is an odd fact that we are required by this theology to love a God whose bloodlust, whose eagerness to condemn us to unending and unimaginable tortures, is without comparison in other world religions.  The Chinese had nothing like this, or the Indians–Asian or American.  The Greeks and Romans had nothing like this.  I don’t know much about African religions, but I doubt they did either.

Much of what I suffered as a child was a direct result of these beliefs. I think my parents were driven largely by vanity, by fear that I would misbehave and make them look bad, but on to all of this was layered on weekly sermons teaching love through hate.

Fear and love are opposites.  They cannot coexist.  And it takes an enormously well developed spirit to overcome the fear of the lakes of hell in favor of genuine, real, spontaneous love.

The British conquered in no small measure in the name of love.  So too did the Spanish, who tortured eagerly those who were too slow to embrace their new God. The gods of the Aztecs merely consumed the blood of their victims.  The Christian God consumes the very souls of those who He deems unworthy.

As I grow as a person, I increasingly realize that most of humanity is crazy.  There is no correspondence  between what they do, and their own true interest.

 I visited the Biltmore Estate in Asheville yesterday, and it struck me amid all the opulence that the only true and lasting pleasure it could have brought its inhabitants came from the pleasure of entertaining, and that the true and fulfilling root of that is simply the comfort and joy of human companionship, of love, of community, of connection. The quality of their lives was not determined by their wealth, but by the possibility of giving and receiving the affections of others with sincerity and depth.

George Vanderbilt seems to have been a decent human being.  Certainly, one can expect the story to be skewed in his favor in his own home, but I believed what I heard.

But so much more is possible.  There are METHODS of developing deep feelings which are incomprehensibly valuable.

I looked at those high ceilings, and it struck me that all the civil wars in the Roman world which I have been hearing about revolved around buildings of that sort, around petty vanity, around petty avarice, around the gratification of base feelings which were a curse on those feeling them.  They did not really want or need fame and power. What they wanted was to feel less alone, to feel loved, accepted, valued, cherished, and to be part of a family of humankind.  We all need that.  I need that, perhaps more than most.

As I have often shared, I have ideas in this regard.  I am very close to going operational, as I put it.  I am going to do a trial run, then open my doors to everyone with what I am likely going to initially call a social experiment, but which I fully intend to become a Church of Goodness, which will accept everyone who is lonely, lost and hurt, which is most of humanity.

I have had an extraordinarily difficult time getting to this, but my hope is that I am on the verge of creating something great.  My faults are sundry and on some days regrettably obvious to all, but thinking small cannot be numbered among them.