Month: August 2015

It seems to me there is deep relationship between the two, and a deep relation between both and personal growth.

When people “fall in love” is it not in large measure because of curiosity about, interest in, the other person?  And when curiosity is gone, when all that was unknown is now known, do they not fall out of love?  Could we not call some romantic flings “curiosity induced relationships”?

Are people who are “intriguing” not so because they inspire curiosity, which is to say open engagement?

By its nature, curiosity is about change, isn’t it?  By its nature, it is searching out the new, it is seeking discoveries.  It is the opposite of complacency. It is going “out there”, and never content with staying “in here”, with “this”.

And is USEFUL love not a true curiosity about another human being, a desire to learn about them, to get to truly know them, to connect with them?

Could we not say that endless curiosity leads in short order to endless love?  I think so. The more I “think”–this is not quite the right word for what I do–about it, the more I think they are flip sides of the same coin, and worth considering as such.

I am realizing there are really three stages to psychospiritual growth.

1) you have to open up your psyche, your mental/emotional/physical body to hidden places, frozen zones, areas where movement has stopped and the birds been frozen in the sky.

2) having touched those feelings, and the thoughts which come from them, and the physical sensations which they give rise to, you have to learn to transform them into positive energy.  You have to reinvent yourself.

These two stages are psychological, and could be said to consist in healing, but healing is really just growth from a place of being incomplete, so I tend to prefer the term growth or a synonym.

3) you have to learn to do this with ALL experience, continually.  You have to both remain aware what is going on in you, and be able to transform it on an on-going basis.  You have to reinvent yourself continually, which means you cannot be too attached to any one form.  This is, as I think I have argued repeatedly, the basis of the Buddhist Anatta, or Anatman.

This process is spiritual, or at least I think that is the best term for it.

Most of the time, the obvious thing happens.  In a contest, the stronger, better prepared party wins.  The one with leverage wins.  The one who apparently has all the cards wins.

But not always.  This is why you have to play the game.  Sometimes strange things happen, sometimes all the pundits are wrong, sometimes the impossible happens.  Miracles happen.

I was in a situation today that felt quite bad, but I am in the habit of persisting and adapting, and what felt quite bad suddenly flipped into something strongly positive.  You just never know.

Do what you can, and let Fate (or chance, as you may see it) decide what the outcome will be.  You don’t need to, and never quit until the Universe speaks back to you.  Then retool, and go again.

I can’t begin to count the challenges I have faced stone cold alone.  Nobody has had my back most of my life, not even me.  But I kept going.  And there have been a number of situations, 3-4 come readily to mind, where if things had played out only slightly differently my body never would have been found or identified.

But I think there is something in me–in all of us–which we might call luck, but which is more of a species of intuitive intelligence, where a spontaneous decision completely changes a course of events.  When miracles happen, I think this intelligence is quite often behind it.  Some part of you knew.

It is the task of all of us to identify, befriend, and learn to listen to this part.  That part lives in the Tao, and partakes in the movement that underlies all that is, and all that is not, but could be.

You know, we are animals, in part.  It is our ability to think, to weigh options, to invoke principles and heuristics, to foresee, which makes us different.  Thus, it is only in making decisions, in choosing courses of action–for reasons, which are some combination of intellectual or emotional or intuitive–that we rise above our animal nature.

The reason I was saying this is that I in a phase of my life where I am having to make a lot of decisions, and I am thinking back to Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.  I can understand the impulse to surrender freedom, to become a part of a herd.  We speak of a “herd instinct”, but I wonder how often we realize the literalness of this metaphor?  To be in a herd is to feel safe, to feel protected.

And do you not instinctively want to be in the middle of the herd, and not exposed on the periphery?  That is the image, the feeling, that I get.

To be free it is necessary to learn how to feel calm and safe without a herd.  It is necessary to be able to make calm decisions, and to do so even when no one supports you, and even when everyone opposes you.  This is the essence of the learning that we need at this level of existence.

You know, Trump’s popularity should tell us a lot about the modern political scene.  In important respects, we already have CHOSEN to live in a Stalinist state, where truth is verboten.  Who, among ALL the Republicans, other than Trump, have pointed out the OBVIOUS fact that Obama has NEVER demonstrated that he was a natural born citizen?  That he has NEVER produced a valid birth certificate, and in fact when motivated to do so by, if memory serves Jerome Corsi’s book, foisted a blatant, indefensible forgery on all of us and GOT AWAY WITH IT?

Nobody can condemn Trump without first looking in a mirror and asking themselves how complicit they have been in the blatant lies, the naked, open, glaring in your face lies, of the Obama years.

Most of the Republican establishment has been craven.  If they want to call Trump crass and hypocritical, well, he is those things.  He is also at times capable of telling the truth, which differentiates him from the jackasses in theory providing an alternative to the swift and definitive failure as a nation the Democrats are ushering in.

http://nypost.com/2015/08/09/lawsuit-could-reveal-secret-saudi-connection-to-911/

Whoever was behind 9/11–and I mean planting the explosives in the buildings–had to have been extremely well funded and organized, and they needed support within at least elements of the US government to conceal their involvement, and indeed the very presence of the explosives.  It seems likely this would imply a government level involvement.  I have said all along the Saudis would be one obvious candidate.  They feared Iraq, too, as indeed they fear Iran, and have pushed for war, by us, with Iran, for them, just as they pushed for war with Syria, also for them, and their jihadists, although both Al Queda and ISIS are at least outwardly too radical even for them.

There can be NO DOUBT, none, that the full story of 9/11 is not in the public domain.  People literally got away with mass murder, and concealed the fact of their crime, so there was never even a serious, credible investigation.

One hopes our system remains sufficiently robust and honest that at long last at least these redacted facts about the Saudis can be shared with the people our government exists in theory to protect.

http://www.ae911truth.org/news/225-news-media-events-sefi.html

Peer reviewed paper, accepted for presentation, rejected at last second for blatantly spurious reasons.

In my considered view, nothing is consistent with the facts but a massive conspiracy on 9/11, and thereafter, which continues to this very day.  At least hundreds of people must know something.  Why do they say nothing?  Fear?  That’s a quite valid hypothesis, but belief seems more likely.

What do they believe in?  Ah, that’s a question for full sobriety.  I have ideas, hinted many times.

This is a really odd blog, isn’t it?  I change on a dime, with the wind–or without the wind, simply because some bunny invisible to everyone else ran across my field of vision and distracted me.  C’est la me.  I think I’ve said that before.

So, I get these momentary, fraction of a second, something seen out of the corner of your eye, moments of deep, deep happiness.  Peter Levine talks about trauma resolution as an important spiritual path, and I seem to be walking that path.  I am in touch, on a primary emotional level, with what I felt as a small child.  I understand why I dissociated.  I understand why this was necessary, absolutely necessary.

And I look at all of us, craving love from others.  Everyone you meet, you really want, on some level, love from.  Most of us are so lonely.  Not all: I know happy, well adjusted people exist.

But many of us carry, in some unseen place: wounds, blood flowing out, there was a knife, where did it come from?  Who has been living my life?  I need to check in.

This is where the thirst for alcohol, or sex, or gambling, or weed, or heroin (a logical choice for some problems), or work, or just checking out emotionally comes from.  I see this.  I feel this.  Water flows downhill, and emotions have an irrefutable logic.

But ponder this: if, instead of asking every person you meet “will you love me, will you complete me, will you lighten this burden I have carried as long as I can remember?”, you instead were filled with a deep, rich, warm, flowing LOVE that instantly connected you with them?  What if the love flowed out, rather than in?

Social isolation is the result of trauma.  But in healing it, what if it inverts?  I am increasingly inclined to think that may be the case.  Which would be super cool. (that last line makes me laugh.)

Yes: alcohol.  But I am getting more and more moments of connection, at a deep level, with the gestalt of alcohol-less-ness. I have reasons, good reasons, for why I am how I am.  As Winston Churchill put it, roughly: I have taken far more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.  It has been a Godsend, a lifeline, something without which I could never have managed the pain flowing through me.  I would have remained dissociated, in all likelihood, and if ever pushed hard, thrown into overt psychosis.

But new feelings are flowing through me, new thoughts, new imaginings.  The horror is subsiding.  The shaking is subsiding (but certainly not gone).  I can allow antique feelings to flow through me, and I can watch them and not detach.

It’s impossible to know what good this blog does, but I really do, from the bottom of my heart, wish it to be of use, to someone, somewhere.  I have a prodigious amount of love in me.  Oceans.  And I am just getting started.  I am only a child in the world where I want to spend the rest of my life.

It occurs to me that PC is precisely bigotry directed at white males, particularly WASP’s.  It is OK to treat “them” as a monolithic group, and direct all forms of derision, mockery, prejudice and hate at them, in the abstract, in a process morphologically identical to those subsumed under the terms of racism, sexism, and classism.  This is what Jon Stewart did every night.

This is the ugly under-belly of the notion that NO criticism can be directed at, that no general statements can be made about, anyone BUT white male Christians.

Here is the thing: the principle that we all deserve, as individuals, to rise or fall in the esteem of others on our own merits is–or should be–absolute.  If you are a solid person, your race, gender, proclivity for male parts or female parts, or income, should not matter.  If you are a fuck up, likewise.

Nobody cares about white fuck-ups, and there are plenty of them.  Turns out, most white fuck-ups are OK with that.

The problem lies in that fuck-ups of other races have excuses made for them, when that is the last thing they need.  Failing is easy, always, and pushing through tough times is not.  If you make it easy to fail, you also make it harder to push through the tough times.  This helps no one.

https://video-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hvideo-xtf1/v/t42.1790-2/11799144_10153563021276171_1992158956_n.mp4?efg=eyJybHIiOjM3NCwicmxhIjoxMTQzLCJ2ZW5jb2RlX3RhZyI6InJlc180MjZfY3JmXzIzX21haW5fMy4wX3NkIn0%3D&rl=374&vabr=208&oh=52960b85075270ceea228d94b5bd066f&oe=55C7E8CE

I like where this guy’s head is at.

To be clear, I understand it is quite obvious he is trying to push every button he can, but I think that sort of thing has a place and time.  And I would find an equivalent rant by a feminist about conservatives equally funny.  Words don’t offend me–not insults anyway.  Lies do make me mad.

I have actually wondered if it might be fun and USEFUL to have Politically Incorrect days, in which you have a room where people stand up and make the most politically incorrect speeches they can, in the midst of a diverse audience.  Whites go off on blacks, blacks on whites, gays on straights, straights on gays, men on women, women on men, and every other area of social difference they can think of.

Think of a roast of Political Correctness.

I think we would find that words only hurt if we let them, and that it is actually liberating to be able to actually speak what you were thinking anyway.

I also think that it is obvious that PC speech codes make it HARDER to solve actual problems, because you can’t discuss them.  40% of inner city black kids drop out of school.  This, when jobs are already hard to come by.  How is it any wonder they are economic failures, who fail to parent the children they father, and thus create another generation of the same?  Who is talking about this?  Who is saying the politically incorrect thing that you can scarcely call someone “disadvantaged” who is not already making use of the advantages they DO have?

I do wonder if at some point these PC lunatics will push things so far, make things so ridiculous, that the whole thing blows up completely.  We are already seeing some hint of this in the on-going popularity of Donald Trump.  I think many people are tired of feeling compelled to ostracize and denounce people for thought crimes.  We should not have to treat adults as hypersensitive children; and I think the demand is reasonable that people only be offended on their OWN behalf, and not that of others they don’t understand, and certainly can’t speak for.

This made me think of this Murphy Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GSk5RabXTk  The part I like starts about 13 minutes in.