Month: December 2015

I watched a trailer for a new horror movie called “The Boy” a few weeks ago when I saw the last Hunger Games with my kids.  The gist of it is that this doll is treated as human by his parents, even though the boy he is based on died some years earlier.  This doll has rules, and if you don’t follow them, the sorts of things happen that people go to horror movies to watch.

I can’t speak to other people’s experience, but it had a deep affective resonance with me.

In recent days, every night has brought new revelations, and every morning a coalescence–slow, but diligent; a learning, a stock taking, a measuring, and a movement of the marker, denoting progress.

Last night I first contacted the spirit of my shaking.  It is bird like, flighty.  Although I used to find it intimidating in itself, I see now that it is merely a bird leaving its branch when it detects a predator.

The predator is a baby doll.  This doll has rules which must be followed, or else bad things happen.  It cannot be satiated, only given away.  As long as it is your burden, it is a constant burden.  The feelings of this dream were the sort that sends literal chills up your spine, and makes you want to run in terror, but you can’t because you know it will pursue you. You must stay, captive, and pretend.

And I got to thinking about a frustrated baby.  It is completely helpless.  It is for all intents and purposes paralyzed in a way not that different than a toy baby.  Neither can choose to go from here to there to get needs met.

And when it cries too long, or hurts too much the result is RAGE: insatiate, omnidirectional, absolutely primal.

And what does it crave, if not solace?  Order.  At least order.  At least consistency.  Small children love routines.  They love knowing what is next.  And they hate randomness, especially random and to them incomprehensible emotions.

How many of us have a baby within us that screamed itself to sleep more than once?  The needs of this baby do not disappear, and what I think I saw is that they reappear in compulsive conformity.  This is a root, perhaps THE root of Fascism.  How often in history must small children have gone without, gone uncomforted?

And I was thinking too that modern thinkers want to find some sort of explanation for Fascism, while ignoring that violent imposition of conformity has been the rule for most human societies for most of human history.  War has been the rule.  Tribalism and taking other peoples stuff have been the rule.  The only thing surprising about Communo-fascism is the extent of the intellectual subterfuge needed to enable minds trained in reason and concepts of universal human rights to tolerate them.  Otherwise, they are merely new iterations of very old things.

And it occurred to me that science has often been the handmaiden of cultural atavism and tribalism.  It is merely a tool for rationalizing.  It allows people to appear to belong to this world, while dancing naked around fires in the wilderness.

And all this layered on a feeling I had the other day that each and every day is like a new jazz solo.  It may sound much the same day to day, but it is never exactly the same, and our true mission in life is come up with new melodies, new harmonies, new rhythms.

Of course Hitler had to find jazz degenerate.  It could not be heard by a trapped child who only wanted the same thing, day after day after day, and which was quite willing to commit psychological and even physical violence to whomever and whatever prevented this perfect repetition that was not there when it was most needed.

How to free yourself?  See.  Feel.  Understand.  When it feels the motion, it is already too late for everything built in the sand next to an ocean.  The work is the work of the universe.

It happens fairly regularly, I just noticed, that I sit calmly in my practice as primal terrors come up.  I am not connected to them, even though of course I am. I have learned they have a texture that is neither good nor bad.  It is THAT, and that can at times be very interesting.

Is a road connected to a car?  They are related, obviously, but the one will never be mistaken for the other.

What makes roads useful?  I will plagiarize Lao Tzu and say space.  If they are filled, they are useless or slow.

It seems to me an essential outward element of being a true Sufi is one must contradict oneself.  There is no other way.

Yes, immodest as it may sound, I do consider myself one, with the proviso, of course, that one cannot be one.

I was dreaming last night–I would say I had an odd dream, but aren’t they all?–and saw a sort of reverse Apocalypse.  Aliens had conquered Earth, and the bodies of the dead were everywhere, all turned blue.  A vortex had opened in the sky, and an alternate universe was engulfing this one.  Then–and it was made clear to me in the dream I had nothing whatever to do with this–it stopped.  The vortex closed and the normal sky returned.  And the dead started coming back to life.  People who had died in hospital beds, and even already been placed in coffins came back to life.  The feeling was very joyous, after a feeling of deep despair and loss.

And I got to thinking about it.  I have been seeing scenes of the dead, or near dead lately, in my dreams.  On one had, one could see that as a fixation with death. But that is not the case with me.  What I think it is is seeing FOR THE FIRST TIME the existing death in my own life.

As they say, when you are dead you do not know you are dead.  I do not remember most of my sleeping hours.  I do not remember what I could have seen while driving somewhere day dreaming.  I do not know what at this moment I could perceive, but am dead to.

To see a new life, you first have to see the old death.  To see death, you need life.  Death cannot see death.

And to see death from life is a resurrection of sorts, is it not? Is not the task of the spiritual worker to resurrect the dead, who fill the streets and homes of this Earth, after first resurrecting themselves, or, more probably, connecting with a Spirit capable of this task, and accepting it gratefully?

Healing is not something you can will.  I cannot will a wound to heal faster than it is going to, and I cannot force my spirit to bring to peace old scars and fears, deep shames, deep penetrations of evil, and the devastations they bring with them.  What I can do is feed a process which does this.  This is the Nye of Kum Nye, and what I have been carefully cultivating in most of my waking hours for the past several years.

There are four things, as I see it, you can do with deep psychic wounds.  You can seek our processes and people who comfort you when you need comforting, and challenge you when it is necessary for growth.  You can take the spiritual path, in other words.

You can rationalize the dysfunctional behavior that comes from these wounds.  This is not quite the same as lying, but also not quite telling the truth.

You can repress these wounds.  This can only be done at a very primitive psychological level, and I think typically only at a very young age.  The effect of this is that you get periodic eruptions, or consistent irrational behavior that you cannot explain to yourself or others.

You can embrace the evil.  You can say to yourself that it is good for you, and seek out more.  I think this is a combination of 2 and 3.  I think such people cannot truly access their pain existentially, but they know on some level  it is there, and rationalize evil as a means of dealing with it. I think most genuinely evil people still need to find reasons–specious as they may be–to justify their hatred and violence.  Hitler has reasons for everything he did.  So did Lenin, and so does Castro.  All monsters, but they could easily tell you with seemingly perfect sincerity why so much torture and murder was the only possible solution to unavoidable problems.

And here is what I think is a symptom of deep healing: being able to look at your wounds with interest.  That is the stage I am at.  I think the stage after that is compassion, but I am not there yet.

She was likely speaking with an adviser about strategy, was told what the time limit was, and simply chose to ignore it.  She thinks we are all peons, and that the world should conform to her convenience and desire.

As I climb out of my slumber I get more in more in touch with my absolutely irrepressible curiosity.  It is a defining trait for me.  Even as a small child I was always opening all the doctors cabinets and peaking under the bed, and doing as much investigating as my mother would let me.

And I have been doing some of the quizzes on Sporcle.com.  Some of them are really useful, like trying to find all the countries of Africa or Asia without any lines at all.  You have to start with easy ones like China or Japan, and work your way in, typically with lots of errors.  I still have major problems with Inner Asia.

And it hit me that it might be fun to have a Country of the Week, where I read a couple articles about its history, and make one of its dishes.  Every recipe you can imagine is on the internet.

This week is Bulgaria, and the dish is Ljutenitsa, which is a red pepper relish.  Good fun in my world.

Then I was like: why not listen to a play by Shakespeare every week too?  It’s about 3 hours, give or take, of audio.  Most people watch that much TV every night.  As I think I mentioned, I did “A Winter’s Tale” this week.  That was an odd play.  I underline the lines I recognize.  A merry heart goes all day was from there (I may have slightly misquoted it).

Then I thought: why not listen to some classic piece of music, too, like the major jazz records of the 20th century.  Devote 45 minutes to it.  45 minutes of listening to music never killed anyone, I don’t think.  So I listened to Dave Brubek’s “Time Out” twice.  Now I’m on John Coltrane’s “Blue Train”.  All this stuff is available free, with ads, and ad-free with only a minor cost from Apple or Spotify.

This is a nice hobby, one I expect to stick with for some time.  We live in an Information Age, I am told.  It seems to mostly get used to track our every move, but why not apply it to personal growth?  

It seems to me that it may be useful to think of grief as a planted seed, one inured by nature from all the hazards of surviving in hard soil, without water, wind and sun for long periods of time, which may with time blossom.

And what is that blossom?  A new self, one without what was lost, which may retain some hurt for this lifetime, but which has also been transformed by the process.  Such flowers grow in the winter, and are thus inherently beautiful, because they are always miraculous.

One of the bartenders at my bar is going through some intense grieving.  I have watched myself trying to counsel her, as I have tried to counsel others.

I have fucked this up often.

Here is what I have come to believe: people who are not grieving tend to think of grief as a problem to be solved, that there are words which help, actions which reliably help, things which can be done and thought and felt.  This is, speaking generally, not the case.  Quite the opposite.

Grief is not a problem to be solved.  It is a happening, like clouds crossing the sky.  You can observe, you can interact, you can witness, but by and large we are all helpless.

And there is dignity in grief, if we allow it.

So–and I intend to create a rulebook for dealing with grief in others, which I intend to run by people I know who have experienced recent and severe grief–by and large if your mouth is moving, you are probably screwing up.

If you are hugging them, that is likely good.

If they are talking and you are doing nothing but listening, that is likely good.

If you are helping the worst stricken with cooked food–delivered with few words–or chores done while they lie around and grieve, that is likely good.

Every grief, I feel, is a bit different.  They are not all the same, and none of them are problems.  All of them are existential opportunities both for failure and for growth, and which it is is ultimately up to those suffering.

This is a rough beginning.  At some point, I will do better.  It is a worthy topic.

As I mentioned a while back, I have started to sleep on a relatively hard futon mattress on the floor.  My reasoning is that as I sleep my inner organs get a massage.  Everything gets moved around, rather than being stuck.  Everything has to adapt to the surface, versus a soft surface accepting my rigidities and inflexibility.

My lower back hurt for a time, so I started spending 3 minutes a day in the squatting posture used the world over for people live with dirt floors, or who spend a lot of time outside.  Actually, that is the posture used in much of the world for crapping.  I remember visiting a bathroom in Geneva with running water, but which had two foot pedestals in the middle of a giant basis.  You squatted, did your business, then flushed the whole thing down.

In any event, it worked.  And it has changed the quality of my sleep for the better.  I can’t say how, merely that it is different.  The night seems more open somehow.  I first noticed this sleeping on hotel room floors while traveling with my kids when they were littler.

I do sometimes miss softer beds, and do sometimes get them when I travel, but this practice is on the whole salubrious.  The Buddhists made it a point to sleep on hard surfaces.  One can see this as a sort of asceticism, but there may be a practical reason as well, one conducive to inner work in some way I am not prepared to speculate on at the moment.

I am at a point where I can feel brief bursts of new feelings, but I don’t know how to keep them, to invite them to stay.  It is a bit maddening, knowing that who I am I will soon not be, and all at the same time that I am looking around me and realizing that everyone is crazy.  I don’t  know anyone who can help me with this.  I am on my own.  Certainly many people have been through this, but I don’t know any that I trust have.  It’s a strange thing, setting off to cross a desert.

And it occurs to me that I have both an advantage and a disadvantage in that my time is my own.  Most days I can get up when I want, do what I want in the order I want, and go to bed when I want.  I have to get certain things done, or the money will stop flowing, but I have wide latitude.  It is not uncommon for me not to speak to one person all day.  I work out of my home, even though I do in theory have an office I can go in to.

Our jobs are powerful medicine.  They help to provide structure and routine, even if most people resent that structure and routine.  Cziszentmilhi (I don’t feel like looking it up) found that most people, contrary to their own predictions, were actually happier at work than watching TV.  We have just been conditioned to reject work as one of the most basic dignities afforded a free people.

Me, I live in trackless waters, and it confuses me sometimes.  I am directly confronted with deep existential realities in my solitude, and, most of the time, silence.  It is a sort of meditative retreat, I suppose.  I am not alone all the time, but I am alone enough that I feel I can feel currents flowing around me, which would be unseen if I felt I had to talk or listen all the time.

Spirituality, it seems to me, is always at root the feeling of new feelings.  Whoever you are, no matter how happy or sad your childhood and life until now, you can go deeper, travel farther.  There are states of awareness which have been described many times, which are real, but which cannot be reached through the feelings and emotions you have until now allowed yourself.  You must go somewhere new, and that is frightening.

It seems to me drugs are quicker, but less profound.  There is something about dwelling on that threshold (nod to Van Mo), and crossing it in little ways over and over, that opens it wider, and allows, over time, more and more of the energy of that space to billow into and occupy your life in your normal waking hours.  I feel what is in my future are more and more happy days, a fascination with life and the world around me, and the ability to see people as they are and love them anyway.

I do feel often that some part of me has a large cloak over it.  It is hidden, from myself and the world.  It is a part that sees nearly everything, that feels nearly everything, and if it were liberated all of a sudden, it would flood me in an unuseful way.  But again, I can pendulate over that threshold and back, and train that part of me which is actually in touch with my true needs to gradually increase the information it gives me, as my ability to digest it increases.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING NOT COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Tonight, driving to my workout, it struck me that once one grasps the ubiquity of developmental and shock traumas, you have to rethink the whole concept of morality, and the concept of free will and responsibility upon which it is based.  These things color entire lives, often without the person ever realizing they are there.

I continue my study of history.  I spent about 10 hours last week listening to Gibbon, and 2 hours yesterday working through Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale”.  As I think I mentioned, it is fun to check the audios out from the library and listen along.  You get far more of the nuance.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that violence and submission have been the rule for most of human history.  Servants and masters.  And what serves those causes best?  Trauma.  Fear.  Violence.  For most of human history, most people have been driven by forces which we would today call manifestly pathological, but which were efficient and accepted in their social orders.

One sees Marxist treatments of power relations, but where are the narratives asking how the need for power came about, and what the psychosocial solutions to this lust are?  Revolution, involving the same people in the same culture, can only achieve the same result.  That is what happened in Russia, and China, and Cuba, and Vietnam, and Korea. Yes, they traded one rhetoric of power for another, but not the inner forms, the inner compulsions, the inner violence, and the rationalizations for preexisting realities.

Again, if you want something REALLY new you have to grab your balls and jump in the deep end.  Or start in the shallow end, and wade out.  However you do it, you must go where you have never been, and never wanted to go, because it is unknown.  Intellectuals, their conceits to the contrary notwithstanding, invariably go to what is known.  They just rename it, then proclaim themselves geniuses in, say, the way the  Roman Catholics proclaimed their superiority to the Arians.  They then pretend this subterfuge is new, when in fact it was old 2,000 years ago.

We see philosophical treatments of free will which go nowhere.  The new fashion is to look at evolutionary biology, and things like epigenetics, to try and say intelligent things.  This doesn’t interest me.

But where do we see people talking about the manifest fact that we have unconscious minds which are often programmed to react in habitual and even reflexive ways?

It seems to me it is far better to talk about emotionally healthy and emotionally dysfunctional than good and evil.  In my own way, I have anticipated this by making Goodness contingent upon emotional realities which are only open to the healthy.  I see Tarthang Tulku anticipating this by promulgating a practice which teaches people how to “make their homes in the world of feeling”.

Wherever one comes down on the free will argument–and it remains my view that to reach a final conclusion on the operation of the system one would have to be external to the system, which is not finally possible for humans–it is a manifest and obvious reality that most people operate with little more self awareness than dogs and cats.

Yes, decisions are made.  Yes, reasons are offered for those decisions.  Sometimes those reasons are valid, but particularly in emotionally charged issues, that is rarely the case.

As I open and penetrate my own inner space, I can feel clearly what has been driving me.  After a certain period of practicing Kum Nye, feelings come to have an almost tangible, touchable reality.  They are like words made manifest.  You can touch them in space, and move through them, get to know them, all without any actual words.  It is an extremely interesting process, even if it remains one quite often filled with pain for me.  I am in touch with rage, and I don’t like it.  I am in touch with rage, and I realize it is me, too.

MY FINAL POINT

I was feeling non-judgmental the other day, and it hit me that judgement is always a splitting of the psyche.  To call something good you have to call something bad.  And to say that both the good and the bad are possible is to say that YOU have both in you, since you are capable of both.  So you develop a split in your psyche, between the part of you that you accept, and the part of you that you reject; the part you feed, and the part you consciously starve.

But it is all you, and in rejecting a part of yourself, you are committing an act of violence on yourself, one which is unjustified, because to be capable of conceiving a sin is not the same as committing it, and even committing it is not the same as BEING a “sinner”.  The “being” part is added as a feature of the attack pattern you already programmed, which was an essential element of the judging process.

There is a certain nimbleness needed for morality as I conceive it.  You cannot get stuck.  You do not get to imbibe one moral order forever and then apply it mechanically with no more thought than a postage machine.

And the moment you create the good you create the bad.  This is a pretty standard Taoist concept, but virtually everything in the Tao Te Ching and other Taoist texts goes very, very deep.

I would say that Christianity created Satanism.  Satan had no power, Satan was not an important figure in any religion, until the possibility of heaven created the need for hell.

Certainly, you had cults like that of Baal, in which living children were thrown into massive fires.  One can likely see evidence of a sacrificial cult in the story of Abraham and Isaac.  These have always, in my view, been the emanations of unprocessed, deep traumas.

But to make an ideology out of it, requires a prior ideology.

To paraphrase the Tao Te Ching, who can walk quietly, leaving no mark?  Who can pass through the doors without a key, and without announcing themselves?  Who can tend a garden which always blooms?  Who can look into the Sun without flinching?

Oh, I’ll leave it at that.  I am not drunk, but I am drinking.  This has been a very odd day.  I don’t know what to make of it, and there is no one to ask, to consult about it, or who would really understand what it is I am feeling.  I value and fear my freedom and solitude.