Month: December 2015

Can you train a dog to enjoy playing with a ball with a club?

People rarely physically conduct penance now, but how often every day do most of us limit who we can be through conditioned fear?

An important part of life is to open yourself to daily change.  Every day, ideally every moment, spirituality consists in a curiosity what is in this present moment, and where it is going.

We see some teachers saying “stay in the moment, that is where life is”.  This is of course true, but moments generally come in groupings.  There are winds that flow through our lives, scents, textures.  Feelings, of all sorts.  Change is all around us if we but open ourselves to it.

It seems to me that most of the people who actually live in the moment are living in series of moments, who are swept away by things which fascinate them, and whose principal virtue consists in the openness required both to see and to be led by what comes by.

A kite is of course tethered, as we are by our physical bodies, and sense of self, but it is wildly free to roam about within those limits.  Even when apparently stationary, it feels the flow of air underneath it, and the precariousness and exhilaration of its position.

I have been speaking of evil, the evil I find in me, and which I assume must exist in varying measures in others.  I have perhaps been wounded more deeply than many, and carry deeper scars, but the principle of emotional death and resurrection is the same, I think, for all of us.  We have all suffered deaths.  And I think my own case is far more common that generally supposed.  I think if anything is unique about me, it is simply that I have discovered it, contacted it, and am in the process of dissolving and dispersing it.

But of course you cannot be me, thinking about evil, VIEWING evil, feeling it course through me, and not think about Original Sin. Christ talked about sin.  All the early Christians were obsessed with sin, with the “flesh”.  Many of the most “saintly” of the Christians were those most willing to inflict pain upon themselves obsessively, through fasting, through whipping themselves, through wearing uncomfortable clothes, and living solitary lives for many years.

This all seems stupid to me. Edward Gibbon comments upon all this repeatedly, asking how someone who hates themselves can love humanity.  They can’t, of course. It is solipsistic.  It is one part of the evil.

Some atavistic part of you–I think in most cases relating to some unknown trauma endured as a baby–says you are unworthy, worthless, useless, a piece of shit.  Some other part asserts, rightly, that no, you are worth something.  But we are social animals, and it is hard to sustain an internal image that is not ratified in the eyes of others.  So how do you reclaim your power?  You take that self loathing rage out on your body and call it good, and this pronouncement is ratified in the eyes of others; if not in adoring laity, then at least in the eyes of fellow penitents, for whom you perform the same service.

Alternately, of course, you seek out power over others.  You make others smaller that you might feel the bigger.  Self abuse and other abuse is still causing pain, still unpleasant, still unnecessary.

And sex, sex, sex.  Sex is expurgated.  Evil.  Wrong.  When you have wet dreams or wake up with a hard-on as a man or dream of some man penetrating you or sucking on your nipples as a woman, you have “sinned”.  You couldn’t help it, any more than a small child who wets his or her pants, but you are a “sinner”.  How awful is this?

Small wonder that some take an equally extreme and opposite approach and make sex the focal point of religious practice, as Aleister Crowley seems to have.

I propose we rename “Original Sin” a “birthright of growth”.  We are born as animals.  We behave as animals.  These are not in my view theoretical postulates, but obvious facts.  Can we help the fact of needing comfort as infants?  Can we help the fact of our biological needs for warmth, food, rest, and shelter? Is there anything the slightest bit moral about any of this?  Can we help the genetic traits (and astrological traits, for those who believe in them; I view the two as part and parcel of the same issue)  with which we were born?  Can we as adults control the conditions under which we were raised as infants?  When puberty sets in, is any part of this voluntary?

Can we help that some part of us is hard-wired to be voracious, aggressive, and concerned on a deep genetic level solely with survival and reproduction?

As I have mentioned, I am listening to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and it is a story of invasion after invasion, betrayal after betrayal, with humans behaving as ravaging beasts, as soulless monsters.  It is the story that what is built up by one will be torn down by another.

And it is the story of the ascendancy of the Christian Church, which used this creed of the original worthlessness of all humankind to build a vast and powerful empire–what we cannot call a spiritual empire, but an empire of psychological coercion dependent upon terrors created through visions of hell conjured by those who benefited from fear–of people who benefited by providing an answer to it: redemption through the sacrifice of individual conscience to group norms; to rules enforced through violence; to conformity compelled under threat of death, torture, exile, and public execration.

Christ cannot have wanted or willed any of this.  Assuming he was a real human being, someone who walked this Earth, he must have been up there thinking “I fucked up”.  But what can he have done, but let this disease–this new disease, which contained within itself its cure–surge through the body of humanity, hoping one day it would run its course?

Can we not find within the notion of universal human rights–which is under attack by the egalitarians, who invoke an ancient tribalism in their false appeals to the universal–an origin in “love thy neighbor as thyself”?  There was nothing in European history one could not find in Chinese history, or Indian history, or Aztec history.  Conflict.  Death.  Famine.  Tyranny.  Compelled conformity.  The thirst for power and glory.  Structural separation from the actually Divine.

Marx was not wrong in seeing in religion an organized effort to coerce the masses.  One of Constantine’s initial reasons for embracing Christianity–it seems to have been the primary reason, although his beliefs seem to have evolved over time–was that it encouraged passiveness and obedience to temporal authority.  We might even wonder if Christ ever said “render unto Caesar what is Caesars”.  Much blood attended the suppression of the various “heresies”.  Tens of thousands at least, likely hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, died for failing to conform to the ascendant “Universal” faith.  Such a creed of love!!!  Nothing says love like rivers of blood, and tears which are not destined ever to be comforted in this life.

Gibbon seems to be misunderstood as blaming Christianity for the fall of the western Roman empire. As he points out, all the conquerers of Rome were themselves Christians.  Attila was not, but he never conquered Rome itself, nor did he rule in Italy.  The Goths were Christian.  So were the Vandals.

So obviously being war-like and being Christian were not mutually exclusive.  The Romans were decadent because they lived at the expense of others for many hundreds of years.  They did not plow fields, or do useful work.  They did not earn or deserve “paychecks”.  They partied and they played, and let others do their fighting and working for them.  They were provided food and entertainment, and as Gibbon also points out, what is interesting is not that they were conquered, but that it took so long.

Returning to my main point, we are bred and conditioned to easily feel rage and fear.  Existing at this level is natural for us. As I see in myself, there is little difference between the two.  Both remove from consideration the perceptions of space, of options, of flexibility, of patient pursuit of long-term ends reachable only through self restraint borne of a longer, more relaxed vision.

We are bred as conditioned animals.  This is our birthright.  Few see this.  We all want to say we chose what we were compelled to accept.  Our vanity demands it.  But it is a lie.

The sine qua non of a spiritual life is to awaken to the power of choice. You must see in life what those around you do not see.  You must be willing to submit to the risk of ostracism or worse in order to follow a road whose path you cannot see down more than the next moment, the next breath.  You must cast yourself into a different sort of wind, and be willing to die to what you know–rather, what you think you know.

To understand Original Sin is to understand and feel the yoke you were born with, the pressure to act like all others, to be an animal like all others, to live and die with little purpose or progress.

We live in an exceptional time.  All the old restraints have been loosened.  Human societies are far freer in what they will tolerate than ever before.  And this scares the living shit out of a lot of people.  They want a return to chains, and are quite willing to tolerate the lie of freedom in the name of escaping it.

Who will win?  Who will lose?  I of course cannot say.  I am limited to my own life, my own words, my own conduct, my own pursuit of excellence as I perceive it.  There is much in here worth pondering, for those willing to expose their vanities to the possibility of loss without immediate gain.

I’ve said this many times, in many ways.  This is today’s way.

The Anti-Tribalist ethos serves the cause of Tribalism quite well.  You get to hate everyone who is not just like you, and feel morally superior in so doing, all while surrounded by people just like you.

The other side is in the middle. Blink twice, then look again.  You are not actually seeing what you are actually seeing.

http://www.breitbart.com/california/2015/12/29/police-may-confiscate-guns-without-notice-owner-starting-january-1/

I will again encourage people to watch Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil.  Of all the dystopias, his seems to have come closest to reality as it exists today.

I don’t know if I am unusual in this, but I spend no time wondering if there is someone out there who can “fix” me or complete me.  I know I am a very unusual cat, and finding someone who really gets me is going to be tough.

But over and above that what seems obvious to me is that if I am not complete, then I am asking someone else to do the work of completing me.  Practically, for men seeking women, they are looking for mothers, or at least cheer-leaders.  They want someone else to put out effort they could and should be putting into themselves.  Many women are happy to do this, since care-taking comes naturally to them, even to the point of being harmful to themselves and their own happiness.

You cannot expand until you exist as a unit of consciousness.  Until then, you are getting into various muddles of confused emotions, codependence, emotional life-sucking, and unhealthiness.  You can mislabel all this and call it “spirituality” by talking continually about love and compassion, and how much you care about others.  Many do.  Many spend their lives as articulate imbeciles.

But spirit, true spirit, true Truth, doesn’t give a flying fuck about who you pretend to yourself and others to be.

The world has rules.  This seems clear enough.  Step one is learning them.  I’m still working on it.

As I investigate my own evil, I realize I have often been a bully.  The way this works is that if you are not cruel and belittling to others, you are so to yourself.  Even the most sniveling, apparently cowardly person has within themselves the capacity for rage.  You can go a life without expressing it, but it remains there, nonetheless.

My father was and remains a bully.  I suppose I have dealt with my mothers energy, now it is time for his.

And in what does bullying–power seeking, evil–consist?  It is the opposite of love: where love builds, it tears down; where love values, it denigrates; where love brings peace and happiness, it brings obsession, anxiety, self loathing and chronic anger.

The essence of power seeking is to make others smaller by making oneself relatively bigger.  Since you have forsworn actual emotional growth, this consists practically in remaining exactly who you were, and making everyone else cringe and shrink.  All sadisms exists on a continuum, but at root consist in making others feel small, however that is done.

And sadism and so-called masochism are related.  Sade himself was a masochist.  He liked being whipped, too, in my understanding.  This is not necessarily what he wrote–I am hardly a Sade scholar, or desirous of becoming so–but what he did.

And why not?  He was cruel because he was small.  Allowing a full circle, allowing others to denigrate him, simply validated his own self perception. He wanted his grave to disappear from human sight.

The essence of love is to make oneself actually bigger by making others bigger.

What I am going through currently is a very non-linear, cloud-like expansion.  I do not feel love, but rather see billowing waves of what was small within me expanding into my sight and perception.

It is not pleasant.  I sat down to a meditation last night and it felt like I was sitting with evil, like I was drinking tea with the eminently mythic (in a formal psychological sense) Lord Voldemort, and imbibing all his energy.

But what I feel is that these heat waves, these shimmering clouds, also want to expand.  They were trapped, and it is the nature of all coiled up emotional energies to blend with life, with motion, with air, and to lose their immediate power in rejoining the universe, which of course retains its power always.

I will add as well that I vowed to give this blog up as a crutch.  Well, seemingly I still need this crutch.  A soldier uses every tool at his disposal, however ridiculous or inappropriate it may seem.  The goal is victory, not victory in a specific way.

The other side is in the middle.

I’m going to leave this a bit cryptic, not least because I’m not fully sure myself what I mean by it.  Do ponder this, though: what inferences must be made based upon the principle that “the truth is somewhere in the middle”?  If we take this “truth” at its word, must the truth not be found somewhere other than the middle?

Empirically, of course, many people repeat stupid, illogical and empirically false arguments for decades, even when they are allegedly “educated”, allegedly “intelligent”, and allegedly concerned for the common welfare.

I will offer as well something of a non sequitur, that when we walk in darkness, it is always our own darkness.  And it is the perception alone of our own darkness that creates the possibility of light.  It is like the darkness hides within, and only when you have grown to such an extent that it can hide no more does it reveal itself, and create a seemingly dark day.  What seemed bright becomes dark.  But this is progress.  I was pondering last night if the night–literally and figuratively speaking–is perhaps more honest, in offering us no false lights.

I am learning that negatives, cast out from within, mean that I am slowly learning to deny them residence in my psyche.

I was in a deep meditation the other day, and it was made clear to me that if I feel confusion, nausea and disorientation, those are all features of this world.  They are in the air.  They are in the water.  We are disconnected from the Source, at least consciously.

The task is to function and persevere anyway.  I think of jet pilots, who cannot spend too much time worrying about which way is up and which down, who endure multiple “g’s” in their work, and who nonetheless do it well.  The method is focus and intention, and not clinging to one way of being, one way of moving, one fixed target.  The race is with ourselves, with our quality of energy, with our own evolution, which always takes place by going inside.

I was thinking yesterday, too, walking in the rain, that having a code can be both simplifying and confining.  Take Bushido.  It makes light of death and fear.  It makes life into something clear and simple.  But it also means that you inflexible in some ways.  You buy one freedom for one confinement.  It is clearly better than cowardice, but it is only appropriate at the level of development which feels and wants to embrace cowardice.

What code is mutable in the right way?  Growth.  Growth is ordered motion, but it can go in any way it needs, on the way home.

And what does growth MEAN?  You tell me.

Concealed trauma tries to remain hidden.  When you approach it, it has warning signs everywhere, and tries to push you off track, to guide you anywhere but where you were hurt, and continue to bleed.

But if you ignore the signs, and march on in, then on the other side is a truly interesting landscape, one denied those who were not pushed over the edge into the abyss, and forced into creative adaptation.

This landscape, believe it or not, is warm. And it is peaceful.  And it is richly textured.  It is a good basis for a different sort of life.

It occurred to me last night, in my sleep battles, that middle age is a sort of second adolescence.  We speak of a “mid-life crisis”, but one could equally speak of a second crisis of emergence.  Rather than emerging into a world of possibility, we are emerging into a world of reality, that of aging, of the awareness of finite possibilities.  And just as adulthood must be accepted for mental health, so too must old age and time.

And do we really want it all?  I think most of us just want a few things that are really good: a good partner, good friends, simple pleasures, and useful work.  These can be had.  They are quite possible.