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The benefit of trauma

From the perspective of survival, traumatic dissociation can play an enormously valuable function: it shuts down the emotions until they can be processed.  We can survive using only our rational minds. We can go on when some part of us has been overwhelmed and shut down, even if it is at the cost of suppressing much of our vital life energy.

I am getting powerful, primary, what I tend to call antique feelings coming up, and at that age trying to keep contact with those feelings and keeping my sanity would have been impossible.  I wonder if some of the people who are driven mad by circumstances perhaps lack or have a substantially muted ability to dissociate.

And what I am realizing as well is that dissociation is like having an emotional vanishing cabinet–a place you can go where no one can find you.

I need to bring those feelings–that part of me–into the flow of my every day life.  The payoff will be vastly increased happiness and energy.  Some part of me wonders, though, if there is some way to keep that, just in case.  I suspect the answer is yes, since the pathway is known.  It is a door I can close, where I don’t visit any more, but which does not disappear.

It is perhaps unwise to step into wellness one foot at a time, but this is unknown territory, and I am taking my best guess.  That is all you can do.  Observe, orient, decide, act.

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Posting

I am in the process of the final conquest of my fears.  During that process, it seems my need to post the processes of my inner life will diminish.  If I post less, that is why.  It is all good.  I have other irons in the fire as well.  I won’t disappear.  With luck and skill, I will transform, and come back a more skillful eagle.
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Christianity

As I continue my listening of Gibbon, my sense of trust in, belief in, and confidence in the values of, Christianity continues to plummet.  On his account, the first sack of the Library of Alexandria was by Christians, dedicated to eradicating Paganism.

Alaric was a Christian.

But more than anything I feel this sense from my own history of sin, of needing to beg forgiveness, for NOTHING.  If you accept Christian doctrine, you are born a sinner as a little baby, before you can smile, before you can babble, before you can crawl, and long, long before you can walk and talk.  In your very crib you have been judged and found wanting.

Catholics get around this–and I will stipulate as a general principle that their theology is light years ahead of, and vastly superior to their rivals, even if their actual practice and actual organization have been and continue to be filled with mediocre and even awful human beings–by baptism at birth.

But most people who are not Catholic are born sinners, in the view of Protestant Christians, and can only with difficulty get rid of this stigma.

Christianity was unique in human history to that point in its radical intolerance, its violence towards alternative practices and beliefs, and in the fear it was able to exert in the cause of avoiding eternal damnation.

Islam was a logical outgrowth of  Christianity.  It takes a basic idea–that those who have not been saved face eternal damnation–and builds on-going wars, ubiquitous fear, and an absolute sense of superiority, even in the very processes of taking slaves, raping women, marrying children, and killing their enemies and taking their possessions, which would normally be called theft..

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Silence

I am realizing there can be eloquence in silence.  Sometimes you say a lot by saying nothing.
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Learning

Everyone is stupid sometimes.  Some people are stupid most of the time, but everyone is a genius every once in a while.  To remain absolutely and consistently stupid, what are needed are dogma and fear.
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The future of philosophy

There has to be a there there.
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Post Investor’s Business Daily

In moderation.  My history of getting through moderation is poor, so I’m reposting.  This has to do with Trump’s recent comments that Bush seems to have known something was coming, but done nothing to prevent it.  This is of course in response to Jeb Bush’s claim to be the man to go to for national security.  If you allow something like that on your watch, so the argument goes, you don’t get “do over” points by starting two wars in response.
For may part, I find it increasingly likely that Cheney and other hawks, doing the math, figured some sort of WMD attack was over some time horizon certain, and that by sacrificing a few thousand now, could get in place the security apparatus to prevent the death of millions later.  This is what makes most sense to me, and would explain why no one involved in this conspiracy has yet come forward.  They may of course be too dead to do so as well, but it does seem certain at least elements of our national security apparatus and certainly NIST were complicit in the cover-up.
Speaking the truth has become an act of defiance in this openly Orwellian world. Barack Obama did not provide a birth certificate that would be valid in any court of law, or any State or Federal agency for any purpose. Period. This is not open to discussion. He provided a heavily edited PDF file which was a manifest forgery. Stating this, though, makes one a “birther”, even among those who claim to want to speak truth, and who claim to oppose Obama.
And while one can question how high the conspiracy goes, there can be no question that our government interfered with and completely botched the 9/11 investigation. Beyond any POSSIBLE doubt, Tower 7 was imploded with preplanted explosives, and in direct violation of standard investigative guidelines, the evidence was immediately removed and destroyed, despite this being the first high-rise to allegedly collapse due to fire in the history of skyscrapers. Most people don’t even know about Tower 7, since the media stopped covering it the moment it collapsed.
2,360 Architects, engineers, fire protection specialists, demolition experts and others in directly related fields have signed a petition calling for a new investigation. At a recent Structural Engineering convention 100 people stopped by, and 25 signed the petition on the spot after reviewing the evidence.
You can review the EVIDENCE–and it is that, empirical evidence–here:http://www.ae911truth.org/gall…
It is later–and worse–than you seem capable of grasping. You people need to get your heads out of your better halves and start looking at the big picture.
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Acting as lying

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/marlon-brando-tell-cinema-audiences-6647767

I thought this was interesting.

When I did the Hoffman Process it turned out I have some talent at acting and improv, so I took an acting class locally, and the instructor actually asked for my picture, as she thought I was good enough to do commercial work.  I felt a weird resistance to it, which I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

And I think Brando here has done it: acting is lying.  Its very essence is insincerity. It is pretending to be someone you are not.  And you can learn to portray emotions convincingly that I think you don’t feel.  I think many Hollywood actors feel they are much more passionate than they actually are.  What they are is sentimental, and sufficiently talented at mimicry that they can do suitable imitations of deep passion.

I was able to portray a lot of emotion without feeling any of it, and I think that is how it works for most of them.

I am deeply uncomfortable with the role actors play in our culture.  We admire them without knowing them.  Cloaking their real selves is the essence of their craft, so we can never be sure the person we think we know–smiling, friendly, seemingly open–is real at all.  We admire them for the roles they play.  It is but a short step from that lie to admiring the soap opera actor Barack Obama for how well he is able to act “presidential” without any real character, any real beliefs, any real compassion or caring, any honor, and any actual dignity.  Hell, people seem to be taking mediocre actor Hillary Clinton as the real McCoy.  We don’t even demand good acting from our politicians.  Just good enough for the masses.

I recollect that in traditional Chinese culture, which had a sort of caste system, actors were right at the bottom, far below farmers and the learned.

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Politics

I think we might almost define politics as “that which divides us”.
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This is why Donald Trump

https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2015/10/report-limitless-immigration-creating-permanent-democrat-majority