Month: September 2015

The essence of healing trauma is slowly, by and by, kneading relaxation into the deep personality structure, all in small doses, all gradually, and with kindness.

I have confessed this to a practitioner of this work, but it feels to me like the Holotropic Breathwork I did, while useful in some respects, as a system works to retraumatize people.  In trauma work, you don’t want to, as powerlifters and throwers say, “go big or go home”.  Low and slow and steady needs to be the motto.

The whole thing is potentially very useful, but only once it loses the drug culture machismo.  Hunter S. Thompson’s motto may as well have been “go big or go home”, but what concrete good did it do him?  He was on various drugs and large quantities of booze and cigarettes his whole life, and he killed himself long before he reached the terminal stage of anything.

I woke up in the middle of last night and was really feeling that the whole of human history is defined by unresolved trauma.  Religious sacrifice is related to trauma.  Religious war–a related phenomenon–is as well.  Everywhere you go in history, every where you look, you see–at least I see–unresolved trauma.  The best parents, with the best of intentions, can traumatize their children.

I was in a comic book store the other day, selling the remainder of my collection (less Nick Fury #1, Warlock #1, and Avengers King-Size Annual #7, which has always resonated with me on a deep level, since I have long identified with Warlock, who “dies” and is reunited with his people in that issue) and it hit me that what I was seeing on all the walls was not all that different in intent and use than what one would have seen on display in a Roman or Greek, or Chinese or Japanese temple.

Comics always gave me this feeling I could not quite define. It was a sort of escape, certainly, but also a certain empowerment through visualization.  I could imagine some psychological part of me was more like, say, Captain Marvel, than me.  I could access, in other words, feelings imaginatively that were utterly denied me in the real world.  I could access power.  The essence of surviving and transcending trauma and learned helplessness is resurrecting a sense of power.

And what did suppliants at altars do in the ancient worlds?  They asked for favors.  They asked for blessings.  And sometimes, they would feel powerfully that they got them.

Then I got to wondering about an experience I got getting invited last week to watch football at someone’s house. I don’t get invited to those sorts of things often, because I don’t really belong.  I understand football better, I think, than most, simply because I am intelligent, and have watched enough of it.  I don’t know the players and coaches that well, although it does seem obvious Nick Sabin belongs in the pantheon–see what I did there–with Bear Bryant.

And I was watching them yell at the television, as if they had the power to get that runner that extra yard, as if they had the power to make that receiver hold on to the ball, or the ball to make it through the uprights.  And it occurred to me that this was a sacred setting in some places, one where the ritual space enabled and even encouraged the expression of emotions, of excitement, elation, despair and defeat, that were not allowed at other places and times, at least for men in groups.

It met, in other words, an emotional need, a very real one, one which is otherwise poorly met in our modern world.  It is RATIONAL for grown men to yell at the TV and paint their faces, just like the Picts did of old, and for the same reasons.

And I feel this deep, deep solitude sometimes.  This is not my world.  I don’t have a world that I have found yet.  I like watching football, and I like cheering for my team, but it cannot be sacred for me in that way.

And I felt that in this vast void of human experience, there needs to be a spark thrown farther into the darkness than any other, to illuminate and explore it.  There needs to be someone on this planet, here, watching, who can simultaneously look at it from the outside and the inside, and  figure out how we move forward from here.

The question is this: how can humankind as a whole learn to process and harness trauma in ways which increase emotional well-being, cultural wealth, social connection, and ultimately enable us to move farther and farther away from our animal natures, into the realm of a different type of experience, a different type of emotion and sensation, and towards the light which hides within all existence?  Towards God, in other words?

This, at root, is the question of my existence.  My intent is to build concrete ideas, expressed through specific people in groups, and to evolve them through experimentation so as to solve these problems, heal these wounds, and enable a human future, where such a thing at present appears doubtful.

This of course is ridiculously ambitious.  But my logic is sound.  The work needs to be done, and I can do some of it, at least.  You cannot but begin where you are with what you have, and do it as soon as it makes sense to begin.   The councils of prudence do not demand all projects begin immediately, but rather in the seasons when they makes sense.  That time is soon.  I am preparing.

There is no such thing as addiction, in view, outside of the very manageable physiological aspects. What there is, is a juggling between an effective means of battling emotional pain and the social, health and legal costs of that method.

And so it happened
one day
the Joker looked in the mirror and washed away his face paint
and tinted his hair brown
     He went out to eat and had a steak au poivre
and pommes frite
with a nice Cabernet

Meanwhile,
Batman pondered his rage and his disguise
   and burned both

They passed one another the next day on the street
and smiled and kept walking.

2 crushed ice cubes on the bottom of a tall glass
2 jiggers Southern Comfort
1 jigger lemon juice
half jigger agave nectar
top with champagne.

That is an E=MC squared.  It’s what I’m drinking.  Here is the recipe in Italian: http://www.cocktailmania.it/ricette-cocktail-esotici/376/E%3Dmc2.html

And I’m sitting here listening to Al Stewart, and it occurs to me that if black is defined as a “color” which absorbs all light, then black lettering on a white background–white being all colors the human eye can detect–is technically read by inference.  Letters like you are reading now are spaces–like stencils–formed in an otherwise uniform pattern of radiance. They are actually gaps, when we assume they have positive existence.

There is something interesting in here somewhere, but at a certain point I have to stop posting.  I don’t always–but I should, and usually do.

Seriously: I don’t surf porn.  I don’t play video games.  I don’t watch TV.  I work, I drink, I write, I stare for long periods at the wall lost in thought, and love smoking cigars.  I suppose one could question if I am a ‘Murican at all.

Oh, I think one could say that what is most special about this country is one is free to love it in any way one pleases.

I will be sane very soon.  I can feel a light breeze and a light blowing through me already.  And I am increasingly able and inclined to contemplate with satisfaction some of my accomplishments, while also granting a great deal of work still needs to be done.

Tonight I am thinking specifically of Wittgenstein’s famous dictum that “whereof we cannot speak, must we pass over in silence.”  Now, I am by both inclination and history a very amateur philosopher, in the sense of reading people who describe themselves as “philosophers”, but my understanding, based on having read something like Wittgenstein for Dummies (I’m not joking: it was a serious comic book) and Wittgenstein’s Poker, is that we can only speak intelligently about things which exist empirically.  This does not mean everything else is constructed, but that we cannot speak about it.  It does not mean God does not exist, but that it is impossible to have an intelligent conversation about something which is not tangible.

In my understanding, morality, too falls in this category.  For a very long time we were told by philosophers and the keepers of religions, that moral law was God’s Law, that it was woven into the very fabric of Being.  We were taught moral ontology.

Then we were taught that all the rules of morality could be had through Reason, and reason alone.

Then we were taught that we were basically highly evolved animals with no inherent purpose in life, and that “morality”, whatever it was, was in all cases used by those in power to keep power; that believing in the “existence” of morality was tantamount to being played for a chump.  This claim, too, of course, constitutes a morality, a bad one.

My rules are that the task of human life is learn to become happier by oneself, and to learn to take greater pleasure in the happiness of others, in a progressive and theoretically unlimited way.

My system for judgement is simple.  I assert that people who are capable of moral judgments are on balance better able to defend their sense of self, but that people who only judge are on balance unhappy people who are stepping over the bounds set by others.  Some judging is good, but too much is bad.

Proper moral judgments are necessary, local, and imperfect.

Necessary because the sense of self of one or more people is involved and some sort of emotional resolution is required, which may involve an empathy based negotiation with someone else.

Local in the sense that the “rule” is not understood to exist permanently, in an unchanging way in all places, but that where it may not be possible to speak of A rule, one can speak of endless rules, endless possibilities, endless permutations of valuation.

Imperfect, because if you say perfection is possible, you again lapse into useless arguments about pedantic minutiae.  There is only relatively better, and relatively worse.  This would, for example, allow me to say it is relatively better to have drunk sex, and relatively worse to gang rape a sex slave.  This might appear a general principle, and likely it is, but I am not stipulating it is, merely that comparisons become possible.

Ultimately, I am arguing you CAN speak about morality as something tangible and empirical, and which properly exists within the broad domain of what we can call science.  We can speak to the effects on the metrics we care about–happiness–of varying courses of action, varying moralities, varying decision patterns.

It might be the case–I would argue it IS the case–that allowing people to struggle with difficulty for long periods of time is ultimately the only way for them to build self respect and happiness.

It may be the case–I believe it is the case–that using violence to suppress honest public dialogue in the long run hurts the social fabric, the levels of trust, the ability of people with differing views to interact harmoniously, and overall levels of satisfaction with life.

It is always possible to mortgage the long term for the short term, and always possible to help one group at the expense of another.  But people concerned with the general welfare, with all of human kind, in decreasing bands of loyalty, must work to build as much happiness as possible.  I do not help you by sacrificing myself, and if you are good, you do not ask me to.

We can do so much better.

it occurs to me that my formulation of Goodness is functionally exactly equivalent to emotional and mental health. If you are well, you are good, and vice versa.

That which builds mental health, then, builds Goodness.

It seems obvious to me that the lessons being learned, the knowledge being gained, by psychologists is entirely disconnected from academic politics. Even though most psychologists tend to be Sybaritic Leftists, one would think they would have more to say about our public discourse, other than blaming conservatives.

It does occur to me though that if we posit unrecognized and unprocessed trauma as the root of emotional and mental dysfunction, and further recollect that trauma science remains in its infancy, we might safely assume that most psychologists are as fucked up as everyone, and positioned to indulge in the delusion that leftist rhetoric can be squared without violence to the truth with their actions.

I read Openness is one indicator of mental health. Can it be called such if it leads to delusion? The very concept of mental health is nurtured within a set of cultural assumptions; no Humanities student of the past forty years has not had this pounded in their head.

So I need my own definition. Turns out I already have it. How convenient and inevitable.

The universe will always be what it is.  It is the quality of perception which evolves.  Logically, given sufficiently developed perception, it does not matter where you are or what you are doing.  Like all things, this is much easier said than done, but I think should be held out as a practical ideal, to be pursued using empirical methods.  Not only is there nothing wrong with embracing the next world through this one, I think in point of fact that is the most advanced attitude possible.  This is the essence of Tantra.

I threw away both of my “Perfection through Death” flags today.  I needed them.  They were useful. But their usefulness is at an end.  I no longer need to confront the world, but to embrace it.

And sitting here, pondering, I feel I want to feel the world is a warm and comfortable place, one filled to be sure with many miseries, but one which, viewed properly, with wisdom, humility and acceptance, can be loved.

And then it hit me that the fundamental assumption of Christianity is that the world is a hostile place.  That is is dark and dangerous and animated by a vengeful God.  That temptation and sin–and following eternal damnation–are everywhere.  That fear of impiety, fear of imperfection, fear of error and sin, must attend every day of a person’s life.

We are told that God loved us so much that he gave us his only begotten son, as a human sacrifice, but what loving person first tells you he is going to torture you forever, then says, well, maybe if you do every last thing I tell you to perfectly, maybe I don’t have to?

No loving person says that.  When terror is present, all submissions cannot be viewed as  voluntary.  The love of God cannot be said to animate the person who fears God.  The two emotions are incompatible.  And what God could be said to be loving who created Hell?  Hell for people who refuse to accept 2,000 year old second hand accounts which were hand picked from a large abundance of alternative accounts, which were suppressed with violence by the religion of Love?

The situation is much more akin to someone who ties you to a wall, whips you mercilessly, then says that they will be kind, and if you only kiss their hand, they will let you go, and that you are supposed to feel grateful for this.

No, this whole thing is horrible.  Empirically I cannot side with the atheists, but psychologically I do.

I view the world as an interactive place, where the energy you put out is reflected in some way, as in a pond.  I believe that decent people go to varying grades of heaven, and that there are hells, but they do not last forever.  I believe we are eternal beings, and that I don’t have the faintest idea how to process that.

I am going to found my own Church soon.  I cannot say if it will succeed, but I can speak to the fact that I will make the effort. We can do so much better.  

I once sort of dated an Austrian woman–never got to home base–who told me of an assignment she once got, an essay.  The topic?  Freiheit: wovon?  Wozu? Freedom: from what?  To what?

It’s a good question.  I was just sitting here drinking whiskey (until it’s all light and happiness on here, don’t trust me when I say I’m going to stop; what pattern interrupted me tonight was this whole Syrian thing; my own boundaries, my ability to not care about what happens half a world away, are insufficiently developed), listening the wonderful voice of the lead singer of Hem (Sally Ellyson: I looked it up) and was thinking about these people who are OUTRAGED that most of the world still believes in gender stereotypes.  They want to be free from the assumption that you can believe ANYTHING reliably about someone about whom you only know she is a “woman” or a “man”.  They want freedom, freedom, freedom.

But this is freedom from.  What is it freedom to?  To act how you like?  Have women not been free to be castrating bitches since time immemorial?  Have men not been free, at least in certain classes, to behave effeminately?  Do you think American Indians or Australian Aborigines did not have occasional people who truly were “born that way”?  Not knowing otherwise, I assume the whole range of reactions was deployed, from full acceptance to exile or even death.  But in loosely bound societies cruelty is likely rarely practiced.  So I suppose, perhaps wrongly.

You cannot have a negative morality. You cannot have something worthy of the name which consists entirely in the things you cannot say, and the things–judge–that you cannot do.  A negative morality is a cage, and only the wingless can truly find a home there.

My conception of Goodness is positive.  The more happy you can be on your own, and the more pleasure you can take from the successes and happiness of others, the “gooder” you are.  It is progressive, but in a way which is built on feeling, and concrete accomplishment.  It is a HUGE accomplishment being able to be happy with little, and alone.  It is a HUGE accomplishment taking as much or more pleasure in the success of others–particularly strangers–as in your own.

These PC police: they are mean and sad, and only distract themselves from it with the ostensible passion of their cause, sex, drugs, music, and that most powerful anti-anxiolytic: actual emotional detachment through convoluted intellectualism.