Month: December 2015

As some of you may know, it has long been my ambition to found a “church”.  Well, it turns out that name market tests horribly.  It repels people either because they figure they are going to get lectured about something, or because it is just plain weird.

The intent is to create standing groups of people who sit in circles and speak the truth. I would include something like “Authentic Relating” circles within the domain of what I want to do, but I intend much more.  I do have a philosophical basis I bring to it.  I do have specific practices and techniques I bring to it.

In no small measure all my explorations have been intended to help create my own readiness to launch this thing, which I literally intend as a supplement to, and in perhaps many cases, an alternative to, traditional families.  That structure is failing in many many cases in this country, and I think has always been limiting in some ways even where it remains robust.

This is something I intend for me. I am not complete. I have not vanquished all my demons, but I don’t think perfection should be the price for starting something; and those who ask for it ask, in my opinion, to be lied to.

Anyway, you can’t miss the survey.  Vote if you like.  You can select, I think, as many as you like.  If you have other names you’d like added to the list, put them in comments here, or there, if it takes them. This is a new feature for me, so I’m not entirely sure how, and how well, it works.

My intent is to pick a name, reserve a website using whatever contortions I need to perform to get something close, then fill it with the sort of commentary I have left littered all over the web, but expressed as clearly as I am today capable, which is better than yesterday, and much better than a few years ago, or so I hope.  I have put a lot of thought into my thing, and have not even come close to sharing all my ideas here.  I have separate files for that.

If we take the part of fear, then of course we look at a billion something Muslims, and wonder what percentage supports the killing of civilian non-combatants in peaceful places and calling it an act of justified religious war, even though the long term effect is likely going to the alienation of those populations from the alleged goal, and increasingly severe military and social responses.

But ponder this: do not ISIS militants, with their snuff films, sex slaves, and mass crucifixions not ask of ordinary Muslims–who have been acculturated to Western standards of fundamental decency, respect for others, and “civilized behavior” in the broadest sense–where they stand?  They are told in no uncertain terms that if they do not stand with them they stand against them.

Could all this sociopathic cruelty and violence not lead to a backlash in the other direction among most Muslims?  I like to think it possible.  If I were President, I would do all I could to feed that.  I would emulate the Soviets and spend huge amounts of money on propagandas of various sorts.  We live in an age where our main choice is whose propaganda we are consuming, not whether or not we consume it.  Only those able to make their decisions can hope to avoid it, and very few people know enough to be able to do this.  I like to think I can, but who really knows?  I can’t say this for sure.  I perhaps merely differ in the degree, not the fact, of my delusion.

In any event, I and others have been saying for some time that Islam needs some form of reformation, some sustained engagement with the history and theology of the religion which has as its aim the incorporation into pervasive belief and practice what most inhabitants of the world as it exists today consider to be decent, humane, and just.

God, it seems to me, has not stopped speaking to us.  We could view sacred scripture as a sort of epigenetic landscape, where many possibilities exist, but only those come into being which are invoked into being by use and attention.  A religion, like a life, becomes a combination of its innate possibilities, and the environments in which it is expressed and lived.

Is it wicked to reject the mass murder of people whose sole crime is not sharing your religious faith?  This is, I think, a good question.

Is it wicked to treat women as equal to men in their claims to dignity, education, and respect?

Is it wicked to consider rape as always wrong, even when done by Muslims to infidel women?  Is that a clear rejection of what God himself taught, and even if so, can verses emphasizing mercy and charity not also be invoked?  And if not, if rape is merely permitted but not commanded, then can it not easily be condemned by the pious as itself wicked?

Doing my Kum Nye practice I felt that my history has been one of reward and punishment. Operant conditioning is used in pretty much all societies, but is likely particularly intense in social groups, like Jews, Christians, and Muslims, where God Himself is seen as interacting with the world through rewards and punishments.

This appeals to a simple dichotomy which is wired in our brains, the yes/no operator, the good/bad operator, which exists even in the very primitive brain.  One can easily train animal behavior through operant conditioning.

But what happens is you get strong instinctual reactions on both sides, as you approach them, that reduce or even eradicate nuance, reason, proportion, and the capacity to use a continuum for perception.  Good is good.  We seek this feeling.  Bad is bad.  We seek to avoid this feeling.  And in both cases, most people are quite able and content to lie to themselves about both.  Where in the New Testament does Christ say to torture heretics, and wage aggressive wars in the pursuit of Christianizing the world?  But it has happened, often, and across large land masses and involving large numbers of people.

Is it good or bad?  This is a question based in fear.  What is it?  What is interesting about it?  How can I learn more about it?  These are the questions of a civilized mind.

The good/bad instinctual reaction is based in a biological history where quick decisions meant life or death.

It survives today through traumatized children, and the adults they become.  Even today, we have not evolved into a seeking and learning society.  It may be that good/bad operation has been expanded and refined, but anyone who says “science” is in inherent good or bad, fails to perceive with nuance.  We want so badly to simplify the processes of perception, and to simplify the signs of the tribes, to make clear who we belong to.  We want a unique, shared truth, that returns us to biologically primitive times.

When a leftist shouts “racist” with all the reflection of a knee reacting to a rubber mallet, that is a conditioned response.  They are rewarded for this behavior by their tribe.  They get what they want and need, and truth–lacking its own voice, and being forced to speak through people who are violently silenced–need be heard no more than the counsels of compassion were heard in the Spanish Inquisition.

I feel humanity is at the bottom of an immense, perhaps infinite well.  We are barely better than animals, and share a great deal with them.  I believe there are in fact angels, and angels above the angels.  Somewhere in there is genuine freedom.

Our task, at this level of existence, is to do what we can to stop reacting like squirrels, fishes, caterpillars, and grasshoppers.  We have a long way to go.

I was listening to a Leonard Cohen song, and thinking about the hippy “islands” in the 1960’s, where the “freaks” could land to safety and reassurance, and it hit me that freedom for such people consists not in the space to create their own personality and own sense of self, but rather in being with like-minded people.  The difference is assumed, since the people in that group are not like most of the people in the larger culture, even if internally they all think the same. Freedom is freedom from people who think differently.

There is of course nothing wrong with pursuing alternative paths to contemporary America–as it existed then or now–but to do so purely in opposition, and not in a genuinely creative spirit, is to value conformity not genuine freedom.

All you have to do is remove the love beads and Nehru jackets and you get people saying openly and seemingly without shame that free speech should be confined to people who think and act like them, and thus belong to them.

It is so easy to confuse the outer form with the reality that most people do it.  People who sing about love need mean none of it.  They can limit it to accepting people who were already in their tribe.  People who sing about freedom need mean none of it: they can limit it to not being different than a group which defines itself as different, without any felt sense to actually BE different.  All gray mediocrities can claim they are special, if they also claim the right to inflict violence on their chosen enemies.  The Nazis did it.  The Communofascists did it, and continue to do it.  Muslims can do it: they claim their world view is unique and special, even if everybody within it marches in lockstep to an ideology which celebrates rape, murder, torture, pedophilia, imperial conquest, and pillage.

I read a Heinlein quote which simplified the world to two groups: those who want control over others, and those who don’t.  Freedom only benefits those who value it, and to value it you must be capable of imagining new things, new ways of being, and doing so in isolation and without immediate reassurance and reinforcement;  you must value exploration and perceptual movement.

Those who fear the new, who fear movement, join the first group, where their first act is surrendering their uniqueness and individuality.  This is all Islam really demands: that you become a slave.  It’s very name means submission.  How many people, I wonder, know this?

I never really thought of it this way–I don’t think, as I can’t remember all the places my mind goes–but Islam is very similar structurally to Utopian leftism.  What it wants is to reject the world it finds–the non-Muslim world–and remake it top to bottom in its image.

It is totalitarian in that it seeks to bring all aspects of life under the dominance not so much of an all-powerful government, but an ubiquitous need to conform to all the people around you: your family, your neighbors, your employer, people on the street: all can report you to the Brownshirts–and they do have religious police in many Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia, where they can burst into your bedroom to confront you in an act of adultery or homosexuality, and drag you off to be killed or partially dismembered.

It is radical in this respect, in that like the Communists it wants to remake all aspects of life and then make them permanent.  In this, it is perfect for people seeking an escape from freedom, and it has long been my suspicion that the child rearing practices in most Islamic nations make their children frightened of the notion of an individual conscience, personal responsibility–at least outside those defined by the family–and terrified of free thought and where it might lead.

Oh, I have more to say, but I’m trying to limit all this.

I will say this: all the recent news, in my opinion, has many otherwise thoroughly acculturated men and women between the ages roughly of 18 and 40 rethinking their lives.  They have assumed that they had to integrate, but people are getting away with murders which are making them wonder if this is true, if all the scripture and Koranic study they did when children may in fact be relevant publicly.

Imagine if, instead of being told to love your neighbor as yourself–as many of us were weekly for many years–you had been told there is only one true religion and that everything else is an affront to the only God who exists, and that to rectify this situation that God has commanded religious violence until all the world is brought within the one TRUE religion.  That is both a simple and a powerful story.

The story with regard to Muslims is not that there are so many radicals, but that there are so few.  Jihad was commonly called the 6th Pillar of Islam for many, many years.

I am increasingly sleeping through the night.  I still have a lot of stuff that I know doesn’t happen to most people, but I’m dealing with it.  I offered $20 to anyone on my Facebook who catches me being political in any way, and it occurs to me now that that is actually a good way to stop myself from drinking, since that lowers my self awareness and control and bad habits are otherwise likely to intrude.

Some things I do seem to want to continue posting in public, after writing in my diary.

Last night I was dreaming of waves of men dressed as 7th century Saracens or Moors crowding a modern space with drawn swords, seeking to kill anyone they encountered.

We have reached a place where it is reasonable to suppose at least hundreds, and likely thousands of Muslims safely ensconced in our midst are secretly plotting to kill us.  If we assume roughly 10% of the world’s Muslims are “radicalized”–which is to say they have decided to take the Koran’s message of jihad seriously again after centuries of neglect forced by military inferiority–and that roughly 1% of those people are willing to act on it–1 Muslim in a thousand–then among the world’s billion Muslims plus there are one million aspiring jihadists.

Within the United States, some 12% of the Muslim population wants the death penalty for critics of Islam.  Can we not call these the “radical” ones?  Can we not admit that we, too, have “them”?  This should seem obvious after Fort Hood, Chattanooga, and San Bernardino, added on to all the other arrests for crimes allegedly planned but not committed.

We have between 5 and 12 million Muslims, I read, in the United States.  Let us use the lower number.  1% of 10% is 5,000.

Imagine if this prospective threat were Christian in nature.

Islam is asking us what century we want to live in.  Most suburban Americans literally have no place holder for, no ability to comprehend, a world view which does not consider being nice a more or less religious commandment, which hates dogs and women, and which is capable of inflicting horrific violence carefully and after long planning on completely innocent people who are completely disarmed and unexpecting, and doing so not just without mercy, but with the enthusiasm of the true sadist and savage.  Why else the GoPro’s?  They wanted to create and share snuff films.

I”m pissed off and more than a little confused.  It feels like Western civilization made a very good start with appealing to reason in negotiating differences, with granting fundamental human rights to all citizens, with working hard to make sure the law applied equally to everyone, and with setting as a goal universal education and enlightenment.

These are laudable ideals.  They are unique in human history in their universality.  All previous experiments with “civilized freedom” were confined to power elites, who in all cases I know of still kept slaves.  The Greeks did.  The Romans did.  Even some of our Founding Fathers did.

And we have reached an age where almost every fact which has ever been known can be summoned before us with a few keystrokes. I can read Shakespeare while I am waiting at the dentist. I can study quantum theory, or Roman history.

And somehow we have reached a point of what might be termed imbecilic saturation.  The indoctrinated outnumber the thinkers.  Obviously, generalized stupidity has been and remains the goal of dedicated propagandists, but what drives the propagandists? Do Bill Ayers and George Soros REALLY believe their lunatic visions will somehow benefit humanity?

How did this happen?  I have attempted in so many ways, so many times, to explain all this, but I am feeling deeply the mystery of this whole thing, like there are swamp vapors on this planet that feed every sickness of the mind and spirit until every last decent sense has departed, every last vestige of genuine reason has been perverted into ideology and habits of mind which cannot be questioned.  Until the life we were granted, the divine spark we emerged from the ooze from, has been silenced and abandoned.

The proximate cause of this vexation is an inability to comprehend people who still do not understand that the Koran has an effect on many people which is exactly what was calculated.  How does a Muslim man go to Saudi Arabia, come home with a Muslim wife, grow his beard out, collect guns, armor and bombs, put a Go-Pro on to make snuff films with not get called a Muslim terrorist?  How are so many people not just willing to not say the obvious, but to defend Islamic terror outright?

We don’t like bullies, do we?  What else can it be called when someone puts a gun to your head and says “believe as I do or die?”

What so many people lack is a sense of principle.  Some things are inherently right–like protecting the innocent weak–and some are inherently wrong, like oppressing them.

We can and should discuss the morality of our wars.  There are many tenable ideas about our wars with Iraq.  There are many tenable ideas about what we should DO in the face of Islamic terror threats.

But it has become so hard to speak the truth, for so many.  They live in slippery places, where without realizing it, they have come to be mere mouth-pieces for organized propagandists, who can change their ideas and themes on a dime.  Rape can be a horrible crime one minute, and a non-issue the next.  They will call consensual sex a crime one minute, and defend ISIS the next.

I am really feeling like someone out of my time and place.  I know there are many like me, but I needed to get this out.  I don’t know if I feel better.  I’m going to do my Kum Nye practice.  It will be interesting to see what happens.

Update: it went well.  What I realized is that I touched a strong current of existential helplessness.  I deal with this sense through what is often violent action, which is to say arguing with people who are not ever going to agree with me, because it would require them to admit in the face of a determined and angry person that they are wrong. If you want to lose every argument you ever engage in–if winning is defined as persuasion–then start by insulting the intelligence of the person you are arguing with.  Simpler yet: argue in the first place.  Dale Carnegie was right.

What I am realizing is that I am somewhat falling prey to a common delusion: if I FEEL I am doing something, I actually am.  Now, the emotions have their own logic, and this action is logical from that perspective.  But I am a man who values both reason and effectiveness, and I have been silly.

And what I am realizing too is that stupidity is hardly unique to the modern age.  There were Salem Witch trials.  There were many Inquisitions.  The First World War was fought, and so was the Second.

What I think I am sensing is the sheer amount of wasted possibility.  Humankind has NEVER been closer to generalized peace and felicity, and yet somehow large segments of our society–understood as Westernized culture generally–want to destroy what has been built.  They do not see how much beauty is possible.

Hate is a burden without a benefit.

I am feeling a growing disgust with this blog, not because I have changed my mind about anything, or have begun to feel it is not worth exploring topics I view as of intrinsic importance in public.

Rather, it feels to me like I have used this as a crutch, and it is time to put that crutch away.  That this process will necessarily be difficult and painful in no respect means it should not be done.  I have to learn to walk, either again, or more likely for the first time.

Still, I do continue to want to share some ideas from time to time, and here is one.

A few days ago I was doing my Kum Nye practice after watching Jim Jarmusch’s “Mystery Train”, which is billed as a comedy, but which is quite serious in its own way.  He deals continually with outsiders, with qualitative outliers, with people external to whatever system they find themselves in.

And for me there is an affect to this sense of rootlessness. I remember the feeling-tones of the 1980’s, the sense of fear, the emergence of punk rock, the wondering what is or could be next.  These feelings were very much on the cultural surface, or so it seemed to me.

They seem now to have gone underground, but I think if you look at the fierceness with which leftists cling to their falsified religion, or the attendance numbers of horror films, what I think we will find is that we have almost collectively decided not to talk about certain things, to not feel certain things openly, to not go too deep.

And yet there is this feeling current which remains, and perhaps grows stronger for not having been consciously seen, not consciously felt.  I feel it.  I sense it.

And it occurred to me that my meditations have to include this cultural element, this “verworfenheit”, this anomie and nameless fear.

And then it occurred to me that ALL genuine spiritual paths have to go through a trackless place, where all the old signifiers fall away, where there is no form, there are no reference points, where there is a sense of universal and complete loss, and sense of being lost.  “The dark night of the soul”, as I think St. John of the Cross called it.

The Buddha had to traverse modernity.  So did Jesus, and Lao Tze.  Nothing has changed, really, except the scale of the problem.

In the Buddha’s time, society was organized around tribes and clans and families.  When he left his home, he was a nobody to everybody.  When he sat under the tree and felt alone and abandoned, confused, hungry, and fearful, nobody comforted him.

The task of deep growth is indeed a daunting one.  But it is all the more magnificent for it.  Thank God it is not too easy.  All of us have been given the chance at a great, noble victory.

The practice of believing nothing, violently.