Month: September 2015

I am more or less inventing my own trauma therapy.  I have severe trust issues which are frequently exacerbated by being much smarter than the people wanting to give me therapy.  I see them, and I see that they are one chapter, if that, ahead of me, and that they are just following a set of instructions they have not fully understood.  I’m like: fuck that, I can figure it out before you do.

I continue to have issues with trauma related shaking, particularly at night when I am trying to sleep. If the NSA is eavesdropping somebody somewhere is saying “shit, I’d drink like a fish too”.

But I came up with an idea I like a great deal, and thought I would share for anyone reading who may have some degree of PTSD or other fuckedupness.

I call it a trauma walk, and what you do is walk very mindfully and slowly, while imagining that all your fears and terrors and negative emotions are flowing out of your feet in a stream into the earth, which is vast and receptive.

Simultaneously, and this is a bit of a challenge, you both connect with your senses with the scenery around you–it is good to do this in a park, or somewhere pretty–and conjure positive energy around your head and upper body.

So you have energy flowing continually out of, in my case, my lower belly, solar plexus, and an area just above my heart, and you are activating both sensory consciousness, and positive feelings, all while walking meditatively.

I’ve done this twice now, and gotten some very interesting results.  Now, I have been doing Kum Nye for some time, and apparently have some very developed powers of concentration, but shit it gives you something to try.  I think a core problem with PTSD is you can’t escape it, and you don’t know what to do with it.  I walked 2.4 miles, but obviously there are no limits.

I have a second prong to this attack that I have in mind, but can’t execute yet, and my intuition tells me there is a third prong, but I don’t know what it is.  Yet.  All in due time.

We need to be clear that Trump is a 60’s era Democrat in many respects.  I have not researched it, but I think it likely that they strongly opposed illegal immigration as damaging the jobs and livelihood of American workers.  Cesar Chavez, for example, was STRONGLY opposed to illegal immigration: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/07/10/mark-levin-cesar-chavez-believed-enabling-illegal-immigration-wasn-t-compassionate/

Rand Paul, to my mind, is the most principled person running.  But I can’t see how he can get the nomination when the Republican party doesn’t want him, and he isn’t rich. If he can, fantastic.  I  hope he does.  But failing that, plan B.

I read Ben Carson is surging in the polls.  Here is the thing: whenever a clear frontrunner emerges, however briefly, all the attack engines of the vicious Left will go into high gear.  In the last election cycle some of us hoped for Rick Perry.  They destroyed him.  We hoped for Herman Cain.  They destroyed him.

The ONLY way you can fight this insidious operation, designed to prevent honest debate, and to control the dialogue through sheer and shameless aggression, is to HIT BACK.  Carson won’t do that.  Jeb Bush won’t do that.  I don’t even think Cruz or Paul will, to the extent needed.

Trump is the only one willing to take strong stands on controversial subjects.  He is the only one who is saying he will roll back all the law breaking of the past 10 or whatever years.

And I will remind folks he is the only one who protested Obama’s birth certificate.  The situation could not have been more clear.  That patent forgery would have been thrown out of every court in the nation, likely with a contempt charge.  But everybody was afraid of the media, afraid of negative attention, afraid to make a stir.

There are really two issues in play here.  One is Donald Trumps actual politics.  I think those are evolving, but can be counted on to always work to resonate with a base of some sort.  This puts limits on his flexibility.  We know there are more conservative candidates running, but I don’t see any others surviving the meat grinder, at least without back pedaling on nearly everything they say the believe.

The other issue, though, and this is the important one, is that of style.  Trump is demonstrating how you deal with left wing propaganda, how you deal with Alinskyan attacks.  You cannot ever concede anything, and you have to attack back relentlessly.

Our media is shameless.  They are nakedly partisan and unprofessional.  And we all know this and have known it, but we have seen candidate after candidate cravenly apologize for non-crimes.  We have seen them apologize for speaking the obvious truth.

And if NOBODY in the public domain is willing to speak the truth, we are well and truly fucked.

Trump gives people hope because he exists outside a system which fills most of us with helpless rage.  At least, we hope he does.  He may disappoint us, too, but at least there is a CHANCE he won’t, which is more than I can say for any of the Establishment candidates.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/us/teenagers-protest-a-transgender-students-use-of-the-girls-bathroom.html?_r=0

If you cannot set boundaries, then your ability to say no erodes.  A boy with a penis going into a girls changing area is simply unacceptable.  It is a “hostile” environment, to use the term they would use if they were trying to demonstrate sexual harassment.

But the Left does not truly believe in anything but cultural destruction, so they are quite content to contradict themselves regularly.  They don’t see the contradictions because that would require the disciplined use of logic and principle, and if they were capable of either they would not be Leftists.

With respect to the last post, I think my intuition is this: most people have lost the ability and courage to stand on principle, to swim against the current.  Seemingly, all you have to do is call most people names and they are willing to bend on anything.  I admire people who say NO simply because they can.

There need to be people who say “I am not OK with this”, and there needs to be space.  I don’t think gay marriage has existed in any nation or any time other than this present one.  How is that something that was unknown to the world 30 years ago is suddenly so blatantly OK that people who disagree get death threats?

We need to fear the herd instinct.  We need to fear the rejection of compromise and the public practice of principled disagreement.

I cannot help but wonder what is next.  Seemingly they are trying to eliminate the words man and woman.  Do you want to live in a world where you have to come up with an alternative to the words for Human with a penis, human with a vagina?

What we need to grasp is that a desperate moral pessimism and intellectual exhaustion underlie all this.  No concrete good is planned.  It is simply that our thought elites have lost all contact with the real world, all contact with physical reality, and are instead forced to live in the world of language without even the substance of meaning.

Meaning connects language to reality, but they don’t believe in reality because they are unable to make any affirmative moral judgments, and accepting the existence of a reality independent of language would force them to come to terms with this lack, this powerlessness, rather than stick to the safety of empty talk about talk.

Put another way, the people doing this do not believe in God or Truth or Beauty. They should be opposed for this reason alone.  If they are the only ones shouting, and everyone with a shred of sense is cringing and running, then our nation is doomed.

Most of us are not stupid.  Most of us are simply too polite to risk being labeled an -ist.  But these people are batshit fucking crazy, and we all need to wake up to this fact.

http://news.yahoo.com/clerk-issue-gay-marriage-licenses-court-ruling-083217111.html

The clerk’s husband, Joe Davis, came by to check on his wife. He said she has received death threats but remains committed to her faith and is “standing for God.” As for himself, he said he believes in the Second Amendment: “I’m an old redneck hillbilly, that’s all I’ve got to say. Don’t come knocking on my door.”

He pointed to the gay rights protesters gathered on the courthouse lawn and said: “They want us to accept their beliefs and their ways. But they won’t accept our beliefs and our ways.”

My whole issue with this non-debate is not the content, but the violence and lack of empathy and effort at understanding.  A person’s religion is their sense of self, their shelter in a cold and often cruel world.  To point a gun at them and tell them to violate it is in some important sense to rape them.

Yes, I can and have condemned Christianity. But I also do not deny–because it would be foolish and wrong–that it has accomplished and continues to accomplish a lot of good in this world.

Nothing good comes from propaganda, and this whole thing has consisted entirely in propaganda.

When the Communists used to–and still do, unless I miss my mark badly–say “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet”, they are speaking, for all practical purposes, of human sacrifice, and ritual torture.

What is a Gulag, but a game played by sadistic psychopaths?

What is reeducation, but ritual torture?

Could there be any important distinction between a victim made to cry out Satan or Mao while in pain?

I myself am capable of inflicting pain.  I am no angel.  Where the protection of my children particularly is concerned, I am capable of anything you can imagine, and since I am more imaginative than most, likely much more.

But what I am willing to do is place my attention on this place, on taming it, on recognizing it, on allowing it to do the things which are appropriate, which are good.

I don’t ever want to lose my testicles.  I don’t ever want to be helpless coward.  I don’t ever want to give in to that very congenial lie that we can all get along if we just go along. I want to be a warrior who detests war, and does everything–everything–in his power to make it less likely, and its converse–a joyful peace–more likely.

This is what I think Life asks of me, and I try daily to show up and do my best. I can do no more.

I actually think it is more useful to tell people they are lovable than that they are loved.  If you love them, you may leave.  But the quality of being lovable becomes an attribute of THEM.  And people sometimes lie when they say “I love you”.  I’ve been lied to many times.

Much of my parenting has been intuitive, and largely based on doing the opposite of what was done with me, but it occurs to me this was the other side of a little ritual/game I played with my kids.  I”ve described it before, but perhaps not quite this way.

I would tell them “I love you”, then ask “do you know why I love you?”  And they were supposed to say “why” even though they knew what I was going to say.  And I would say “because you are my daughter and because you are lovable.”

So this creates a triple stability.  They are told they are loved.  They are told my fidelity is absolute even if they choose to act unlovable.  And they are reinforced in the traits which make them lovable, while hopefully internalizing as an on-going permanent sense of their self that they have worth and value.

Neither of my kids has acted out in the slightest, and I don’t think they will.  Their teenage years were as easy–actually easier, since I rarely see them–as their earlier years.

It all depends on the relationship you build, and build is the word.  Words do not matter at all.  What matters is who you are, and whether or not you actually care about them.

I’ve been feeling like there is something I need to do before I expand, and it hit me that I need to connect, as a gestalt, as a “that”, the quivering in my gut with an intellectual acknowledgement of the presence in this world of evil.

All of us are capable of evil.  But I think when we fear evil out there, we are really projecting out, really externalizing something still within us.

If I might perhaps add an appendage on to Jung’s work, the Shadow self layers nicely onto the gut energy centers and neurological centers, particularly the unmyelinated vagus nerve.

I don’t think anyone incapable or unwilling to see evil in the world can ever really tap into the personal power we were all meant to have.  We all live half lives (most of us: I like to think there are some people out there I would REALLY like to meet), compared to what is possible.

In sacrificial culture they had regular access to this part, and it likely felt like something transcendent when they touched the primal animal in themselves, with all the energy and vigor it released.  These Satanists–and we can speak with certainty when we posit their existence, since they are increasingly proud of it–no doubt find release in their rituals.  They do something.

I remember talking with a woman many years ago in Europe who had participated in a Satanic ritual, and it scared the shit out of her, because some very real, quite tangible stuff happened.  I don’t doubt this.  There is a barmaid in my town I think was into that sort of thing in her twenties.  I can still feel the stain on her.

But the point I wanted to make is that I have a merger I need to make.  I have long noticed that I will sometimes feel a compelling need to seek out the weird and anomalous on the internet.  Sometimes it is the Graham Hancock stuff, sometimes ghosts, sometimes UFO’s, sometimes serial killers, but all of it is “out there”.

Our animal instincts present themselves to us, initially, as something foreign, as something alien. And what I now realize is that some instinctual part of me, some intuitive part of me, was trying to tell me that all that WAS me.  It was not out there at all, and that I could find some really interesting experiences making the acquaintance of my shadow, of my gut, of my viscera, of my stolen rage,and my potential power.

Yes.

Sadism is a poor solution to a real problem.