Month: November 2015

This concerns me.  Let me rephrase that.  Everything I write concerns me, even when it is not about me.  All visions, all truths which I attempt to articulate, arise within me, and share my preconceptions, blind spots, emotional valances, and ordinary stupidity, as well as of course what I hope are my virtues.

To grow qualitatively, to reach the next valence shell, you have to cease to exist.  “You” disappears, and a new “you” appears.  Most people cannot deal with this.  That is why they get stuck.  There is nothing in the middle.  You have to accept this nothing.

Specifically, what I see is that my identity is closely tied to conflict.  Certainly, I have often sought out conflict with other people, but what I most have in mind is this sense of internal conflict.  In my particular case, although I think this is likely common, I self sabotage because to do otherwise would force me into a confrontation with this Void, with a non-self.

When I make plans, my pattern is to disrupt them.  That is what my family did.  But I see that even within my own internal psycho-ecology, if I might coin a term new to me at least, what self disruption serves to do is prevent the emergence of smooth waters which would show me “I” don’t exist.

Within my Kum Nye practice, they say one of the common effects of falling into a very deep, profound relaxing state is for some part of our self to activate and throw out a surge of thinking, to fill the deep empty spaces with SOMETHING.  The task, of course, is to persevere.

When you are doing qualitative work with your self, you can only grow as far as the number of times you are willing to die, and how much you are willing to die.

But here is the thing: “you” were never there to begin with.  “You” are a habit, an abstraction.  This is my understanding of what the Buddha taught.

The value of learning to connect with feeling and sensation, which is the practice of Kum Nye, is that something is still there where “you” cease to exist, and if your mind can accept this continuity it can let go.  If it lets go, you can accomplish much.

It is not uncommon for me to feel traces of something much larger.  I suppose this is mystical in a way.  None of it can be spoken.  But it is all very interesting.  And open to all.

I went to an uber-hipster-y place tonight.  Lots of beards, odd hair-cuts, tattoos.  I even saw a woman  with the mascara of Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner–all the way around sideways.

And I breathed.  I am half sponge, and I can fill myself with and feel atmospheres.

What I felt was that all the difference and identity was an inch deep.  I felt like if I pushed most of these people they would lapse into an innate neuroticism and deep anxiety.

“Who are you?” is one of the most basic questions you can ask of yourself, and of others.  “Someone who has a nice beard and listens to musicians no one has heard of” is not a very good identity.  When I ask of myself and others “who are you”, what I want to know is what I, or they, are willing to fight for.  What are you willing to die for?  Suffer for?

And I felt this demonic voice present in the background.  It did not speak loudly, because it did not–does not–need to.  What it offered was comfort and shelter and strength and power.  All you have to do is join the cult, to join the headless ones.  All you have to do is turn your brain off, and accept at face value all the news you are given by approved outlets, and feel the appropriate emotions when you are told to feel.  Feel sad when you are supposed to feel sad, and angry the rest of the time.

All of this seems magical, like some sort of thing that would exist in a book and not in the real world.  Spells are not cast in our empirically minded world, are they?

Of course they are.  Daily, and often.

Unless you feel you are often fighting off spiderwebs, and pulling back curtains, you have likely accepted a manufactured truth, and more likely, many.  Up is down anymore.  Gravity exists in the real world, but not in our psyches.

I was watching this, and recalling something else I read a week or two ago, and thought about my reworking of Einstein’s formula.  I haven’t thought about this in years.

E+i=MC squared, plus i, where i equals information, but I suppose it may be interesting to substitute “consciousness”.  My gut intuition tells me this is the bridge between the big and the small; between the falsified general narrative of General Relativity, and the still extant narrative of Quantum Physics; between the three fields which have been unified, and gravity.

I have no basis for this claim.  I am not a professional.  I don’t even understand calculus.  But this is what I feel.

I will add, too, that I was driving the other day and it hit me that creativity always involves the body.  Even in purely abstract disciplines like math and physics, GENUINE newness always has an emotional component, perhaps an agonistic component, or perhaps comforting and palliative component.  But interaction with the OUT THERE via the body is always necessary for genuine creations of the mind.  No true creation is possible in the purely abstract.  It only appears that way once it has come into being, been digested, and properly presented as if it had no passion behind it at all.

I am finding myself being a cliche: I’m looking up people I used to know and finding out what became of them.  Because of the circumstances of my life, all the moving around–some of which was beyond my control, some of which was not–I lost touch with nearly everyone.  Not to be too mawkish, but I have had more than my share of good-byes.  Many people have simply disappeared from my life.

Be that as it may, I’m looking up so and so, and that person, oh and her–Ph.D, good on her–etc. I’m quite sure my high school hasn’t the faintest idea how to find me, so I haven’t been invited, ever, and I doubt very much I would go if I were.  All my friends were in classes above me.

Most of my friends have been very successful: I count a software company founder, a professor, a high-up-the-corporate-ladder, and an investment banker, none of whom I have spoken to in many years.

And I think to myself, for the umpteenth time: what is wrong with you?  I have a high I.Q.  I was a National Merit Scholar.  All I had to do was stay in my head, play the nerd game, carry it through to a Masters or Ph.D in some egghead field–and Humanities is fine, if you are on board politically–and build a life around that.

And I could have done that.   And I would have gotten to the end of my life never knowing myself.  I would have wondered all my life why I could never fully relax, why I was on edge, why I was irritable.  There would have been nothing in the way of me pushing people away from me forever.  I could have lived happily–relatively speaking–in my head.

Without knowing why, I have consistently thrown myself into things for which I was congenitally–or habitually–unsuited, with Sales being the most obvious example. I have turned into a competent sales person, but I would never have thought that in a million years.  I am a competent tradesman.  I also never would have thought that.

What I think I felt is that if you are overbalanced in one area, it is important to do something else.  And I did that.  I have done that.

My head tells me, because my heart doubts me, that a life spent pursuing personal growth, self knowledge, is a life spent well.  I look outside my window, though, and this seems to be a rare sentiment.  I am keenly aware that I am different, that my decisions do not and have not followed the normal flow chart.

Just in the last few days have I contacted, finally, an energy within me which wishes me well.  So much of my life has been spent dodging arrows and sling bullets that I have been firing at myself, lest someone else do it.

I may wind up in a shack in my last years, but I hope when it comes my time to die, I will not have to lie when I say to myself I did my best to become the best I was capable of becoming.  I have looked myself in the eyes and unhesitatingly told the truth.  This trauma–the puzzle of my past and more importantly what to do about it–has been an extraordinarily complicated problem to solve, but I have nearly solved it.

I can feel peace just over the next hilltop.  That is all I’ve ever truly wanted.  People who have not breathed hellfire likely cannot understand this.

I have also long said that my biggest fear is getting to the end of my life and realizing I lived someone else’s life.  I say this mostly in earnest.  This is a big issue for the children of narcissists.  It can take a very long time to figure out where to set boundaries, and where you end and everything else and everyone else begins.

But even for the children of healthy parents, I think it is common to get sucked into whirlpools of various sorts.  To live authentically, all of us have to endure at least moments of feeling crazy, because as far as we know, we are the only people on the planet thinking x, y, or z.  For most things, this illusion is quickly dispelled, because most varieties of crazy are actually quite common, normal, and healthy.

For others of us, not so much.  I am going back and forth with an economist at present on my ideas, and he seems not able to wrap his head around seeing the trees in a new way.  Trying to convince professional economists to think new thoughts, and failing, and failing repeatedly, is just not a problem most people have.  Actually, though, to tell the truth, I like that problem.  It’s an interesting challenge.

The gestalt, the Ursprung, from which all this flows, though, is quite unique, and I find being ignored vastly preferable to being misunderstood, particularly by earnest people, but being ignored has its cost too.

Woe is me, woe is me!!!!  It must be time for bed.  Nothing wrong with me a good night’s sleep won’t fix.  Sleep: the Reset button for life.

This is a term we need.  It has many potential uses, but who I have in mind at the moment are the ghouls on college campuses who have renounced human connection and the possibility of genuine empathy in the pursuit of an abstract and quite fictitious humanism, and dispassionate compassion.

It occurs to me that the social form I want to create amounts to communes in the middle of suburban America.  The idea was always good, but you cannot build homes on shifting sands.

In my Kum Nye practice I am encouraged to “take refuge” in Kum Nye.  For someone who has felt exposed to a cold and hostile wind all his life, and used character armor and emotional deadening to deal with it, this sounded pretty good.

Being me, of course, I got to wondering what it means to “take refuge”.  I think of Bobbie Zimmerman’s (Bob Dylan’s naked name, perhaps?) song “Shelter from the Storm“.  I think of the Buddhist practice of taking refuge in the “3 Jewels”: The Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.”  And I don’t think it is taking it too far to say that the 12 Steps is a “taking refuge”.  It is taking refuge in what amounts to a Dharma and a Sangha.

And I think the question is this: what remains when you let your guard down?  What remains when you relax at the end of the day, open to all that you know is out there, even if only in principle, as you lie behind closed, locked doors in a safe place?  Is there something still there, watching over you kindly, like the loving mother you lacked?  Or something out there, standing guard against the forces of destruction, doubt and death in all its forms?  What will remain of the day before, in the day that comes after?  Will some patient force remain there, able and willing to help you rebuild what was torn apart and cast to the winds?

I feel here questions are enough.  I will leave it there.

My current Kum Nye lesson has to do with the neutrality of feeling.  In some ways sadness is equal to anger is equal to regret is equal to fear.

And it is very interesting that on close analysis, what I can feel is a neutral energy like electricity providing power to what amount to different engines.  There is an “engine” of anger, another of sadness, another of regret, another of fear.  These apparatuses expand as we feed them images and cognitive contexts–both historical, and social. They shrink as we deny them food.

But underlying it all is the same power.

What preceded psychology, in much of what I will summarize as “Western Civilization”?  Sin, which is to say a choice between conformity with a system quite capable of violence, and expulsion, castigation, and perhaps even death.

Sin, in turn, might perhaps most usefully be defined as any species of outer non-conformity.  If one reads the history of the Church, it is filled to overflowing with greed, anger, violence, jealous rage, power-mongering, hypocrisy, hedonism, and so on.  This applies both to actual pontiffs, and to the kings and all their vassals and allies who professed the Christian faith.

One wonders if the “saints” often were merely people incapable of tolerating the “double-bind” of living within a system filled with such lies.  I wonder if many of them were dealing with severe traumas and had no way of avoiding insanity other than voluntarily leaving society and living in a cave, which in turn led to people assuming they were better because different.

I spoke poorly of what might be termed “psychodynamic” literature.  Perhaps it has been needed.  It is impossible, I feel, to properly individuate in a world with strong digital distinctions, coupled with violence.  The opposite of either/or is nuance, a spectrum of emotional and behavioral colors, which alternately flare and recede in most of us in the course of a day.

It does seem to me that some Eastern systems developed sound systems for mental health, but without knowing fully why they worked.  I think it is particularly important that we are finally beginning to grasp the importance of developmental traumas and PTSD, the importance of empathy, both felt and as a principle, and the very rich, interesting tapestry of human psychodynamic activity.

The transhumanists want infinite “knowledge”, but I wonder how much attention they pay to the nuances of feelings.  How important is consciousness, per se, to them?  And how important, really, can it be to understand the next seven stages of math describing the universe, when accessing it experientially can only be done through a soul, which we have all been born with, which naturally return home, and which do not lack thoughts, but the inner knowing best reached through inner feeling, healing, hope and the following generation of the peace and joy we all truly want, need, and seek?

Transhumanism is born both of the despair of mortality–itself founded on a demonstrable empirical error–but more importantly–since this error could be discovered–upon an unwillingness to feel.

I have been through many hells.  They have all been worth it.

It occurs to me too that the people who are actually “deep” are those who are able to love deeply, offer sincere loyalty, adhere to their own moral codes, and live lives of constancy, even when it is difficult.

What is the easiest game in the world–and I’ve played it–is mistaking an inability or unwillingness to assume adult responsibility for depth.   Simply because you read books we are told are deep does not mean you are.

In the end, what we call superficial necessarily includes a conception of what is deep, which is to say what “life” “really” “is”.

Plays like “Streetcar named Desire” are called deep because they deal with complex human conflicts.

Is conflict the necessary nature of human existence, or is it the result of emotional superficiality and incompetence?  I would argue the latter.  Does the “deep” not then consist in what shows us how to TRANSCEND the easy emotions of anger, resentment, lust, greed, jealousy, hate and the like?

I get the sense sometimes that writers in the latter part of the 19th, through roughly the mid 20th Century thought they discovered how nasty people can be.  How is this profound?  I doubt anyone who lived then had not seen it.  They didn’t talk about it, and they sure as hell wanted escape from it in their entertainment, because they lived it, but they were not the naive fools culturally disconnected fools seem to have thought they were.

That is my view, at any rate.

What is deep, in my own world, is expanding emotions and my sense of self to Space itself, to where I can make direct contact experientially with the energies which surround us in infinite varieties and ways, and which all come from one infinite source.  Violence and conflict are of no more intrinsic importance than human imbecility and physical deformity.  They are unfortunate, and it is appropriate both to care for and to not to pity them, but it is the height of idiocy to see them as profound in and of themselves.

It was Helen Keller’s triumphant expansion of self and joy which marks her as special, not the ways in which her physical senses were broken.  This should be obvious, but it seemingly is not.