Month: January 2016

I had a somewhat enlightening experience today.  I’m gassing up, and I hear a woman say “I’ve never had this much trouble getting four bucks in my life”.  Sure enough, a black man–around here, they are almost always black–comes up to me and says in that tone of voice some of us know well “Sir, can I. . .?”  And I tell him NO.

I’ve lived in a number of big cities for long periods of time, and I’ve seen quite a bit.  When I was at Berkeley I used to get hit up by panhandlers several times daily.  I took to ignoring them, and if they persisted, looking them in the eye and saying NO clearly and unambiguously.  It was the same people, in the same places, nearly every day.  I got compassion fatigue within two days.  I was broke myself.

So his woman–wife, girlfriend, who knows?–comes up and says “leave him alone, he is rude”.  And I said to her “I’m not the one begging”.  She gets indignant: “I’m not begging.  I’m a Christian woman and I have a job.  I’m a manager at Taco Bell.  I have two kids back in the car.”  I looked at her and said “you are begging”.

She starts walking away, and says something about my “white ass”.  I tell her “I’ve never asked anyone for money in my life”, which is true.  I’ve been so  broke I donated blood for money twice a week for a period of time, and that is fucking broke.  You get needle marks on your arms, and have to wear long sleeve shirts, and even though it seems virtually never to happen, they tell you that on rare occasions the procedure will kill you, so you get to sit there thinking about that.

She looks at me and tells me to watch my mouth or she’s going to  bust it open.  I tell her “classy”, finish gassing up, and leave.  I’m not small, weak, or stupid, so threats like that don’t bother me.

But I understand the anger.  She is in a position where she is begging.  This means she has taken on the role of Victim, and once you take on that role everyone becomes either a Protector or a Villain.  I of course was a villain, and we are taught to be angry with villains.

And I thought about this some more.  To be response-able means that you have the ability to react to  circumstances, to choose your reaction, and in fact to proactively create the circumstances you want.

To be a victim is necessarily to feel self pity, since you are helpless. If no one helps you, then you don’t get helped.

And I thought about the old way of being, where people would rather die than take assistance, would rather do anything than be reduced to the indignity of begging.

It is my understanding that in the beginning of the Orwellian “Great Society” the government hired people to canvass poor neighborhoods and convince people to take public assistance, because the resistance was so strong.

And in our modern age, it is easy to say “Just take the money”, but what is missed in this is that in the process we all become prostitutes.  Anyone who places himself in a condition of dependence on another, where he cannot raise him or herself, where individual initiative is forbidden, unnecessary, or discouraged, is sacrificing their dignity, their self respect.

All the inner qualities are invisible to socialists.  All the things that make life bearable are invisible.  They only see things, and it is inevitable in the process that people would become things too, which is a fairly short description of the condition of slavery.  We assume slaves are USED for something, like building fences.  What are the slaves on this plantation used for?  Electing Democrats, obviously.

And I kept at this, and it seems to me the reason unhappiness is so common in our affluent and largely peaceful society is that in the old days the societal practice of judging people who did not take care of themselves, of judging those who failed in their duties, provided, paradoxically, a sort of comfort.  Everyone was subjected to the same standard, which meant that no matter how severe your penury, there were people around you sharing it with the same dignity, the same necessary acceptance.

Society was organized so as to reject self pity.  It was organized around the idea that life is tough, and we all need to be tough too.

This seems harsh, but if everyone accepts it, they avoid the burden of self pity.  Do you not think poor kids in the ghettos of New York had more self respect in 1900 than they do today?

Virtually the entire program of the socialists–and I am conflating them here with the Democrats–is oriented around stoking resentment, stoking self pity, stoking self righteous anger, and using those energies to get and keep power.

This woman was a racist.  There was no need to invoke race.  But she doubt sees that white people in general are more successful, and has been taught to believe her decisions, how she chooses to live her life, plays little role in her outcome.  She is helpless.

And ponder the recklessness which would land her in a supermarket parking lot with two kids, begging.

Do I think she donates blood?  No.  Do I think she works two jobs?  No.  I at one point was working three jobs.  I have been unemployed one month in my entire adult life, and that was because I got laid off immediately before Christmas, and nobody is hiring between Dec. 23 and Jan. 2.  I had a new job by Jan. 15th.

Most of the time, what appears to be the case is in fact the case.  What I was seeing is that she assumes white people have money and they should be sharing it with her, since she is only asking for $4.  She likely spent her money on cigarettes or lottery tickets, and begging to fill her tank with gas was part of a plan she has executed many times.

Being too compassionate is a kind of cruelty, because it enables people to live lives filled with resentment, unfilled potential, and self loathing they mask with chronic outward-directed anger.  None of us need to feed this.

And I think far too many people think that exercising their right to demand boundaries, to demand  respect, is cold and wrong.

The truth is you help no one by not being yourself, and you can’t be yourself if you think you have no rights, cannot make demands on others, cannot judge others, and have to be nice in all times and places.  Bullshit.

It may be that this woman is still mad at me.  It may also be that hearing the word “begging” caused a bit of introspection.  That was certainly my intention.

Watch this video and feel what you are feeling as you watch it.  Be honest.  Most men seem to feel a sense of righteous pleasure, that the bad guys got what was coming to them.

I am going to reserve comment for the moment.  This was a very long day.

I woke up this morning feeling clearly that the path forward for humanity, the great Next Step, is a generalized focus on and cultivation of emotional growth, which at some point becomes what we call spiritual growth.

It is so ODD, so stupid, so short-sighted, so ignorant, to feel either that increasing knowledge–an understanding of Relativity, the capitals of the world, the mechanics of nuclear fusion–is somehow equivalent to growth, which is the de facto belief of the Singularitians, who have somehow convinced themselves that an internalized Google would be other than a quantitative leap, if it were even possible, which I do not believe; or that a society can be improved in any way other than through the emotional and spiritual growth of all its members.

Why do, among others, Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg focus on externals, on the superficial? Why are they atheists?  They are both smart enough to be smarter.  The physics of metaphysics–the Zero Point Field and the retention of information–seems reasonably clear.  The evidence in total is overwhelming for our energetic connection and survival of death, and evidence continues to flow in daily, all over the world, as it always has.

Why the unrepentant anger from people like Barbara Ehrenreich?  I read this article and was reminded once again how emotionally and spiritually superficial the animating outrage of these people is.

Does she not know it is possible to live a very happy life in conditions of objective poverty and physical difficulty?  She is the one stoking resentment, and denigrating dignity.  She is one who fails to see that the non-material aspects of life are what make it heavenly or hellish.  She is the emotionally callow one who fails to see that no one who does not have a good relationship with themselves–as she seems not to–can possible be loving to others.  For her, yelling about pay constitutes love.  But of course it is merely her vanity, her self importance, speaking.  And it seemingly has a lot to say, which says something about her.

The path forward is the path inward,for all of us.  It is the tragedy of our time that our idiotic and grossly unjust financial system has denied us the time and leisure to  live genuinely contemplative lives, and that the systemic indolence and torpor of our universities has failed to embrace and integrate the vast quantity of non-conforming data indicating we are in fact spiritual beings and that while no religion can claim to have fully described God, that that concept is useful, and empirical.

I was thinking about the notion that if God is dead–if God does not exist, and is not going to punish us–then all is permitted.

Only on a very primitive level of development does one only behave because of fear.  Morality, decency, goodness: all are their own rewards, rewards which multiply when expanded across a social order, and which deepen as they are understood.

God is not a parent.  God is the soil within which we are rooted, and in which we are free to flourish or fail.

The metaphor of God as parent, however, has proven very congenial to authoritarians.

When you realize the myth within which you have lived is wrong, there is no path forward but through darkness and confusion.  People see this and infer wrongly that there is no path forward.  They call this disillusionment, but it is merely the substitution of one illusion for another.

We are left to wish for better darkness and better confusion.  Life is not easy or simple, but it is one grand game.

Like everyone else, I went to see the new Star Wars.  I try not to be too much of an outsider.

On the way to the theater I couldn’t help but remember how disappointing Hayden Christenson’s (name is close if not exact) transformation into Darth Vader was in the first three (second three, because as a meme has it “in charge Yoda was”.)  As several reviewers I read noted, he didn’t get evil so much as pouty, peevish, and bratty.

Being me, what occurred to me is that it would have been much more intellectually satisfying if he had been corrupted by ideology more directly.  It is difficult to get people to do things they consider evil, but easy to get good people to do or at least countenance evil they have been trained to view as good.

That would be a script I would find it interesting to write.  How do you seduce a good person into views which conform with evil, all while calling them good?  They did if memory serves invoke “safety”, but I seem to recall the Dark Side was always the Dark Side.

To do the thing properly, you have to call it the Bright Light, the connection with God, the right way, the path of righteousness.

This is certainly what Muslims do, and certainly what most other religions have done throughout history, including notably Judaism and Christianity.

Seriously: by what process of imbecility do you get militancy and war particularly out of Christianity and Buddhism?

The id is not sex.  I don’t see this.  It is not violence per se.  It is unprocessed developmental trauma, to the extent it exists.

Annakin Skywalker would have had major developmental issues to work with, and buttons to be pushed, but the whole thing–and yes I admit I am a crotchety old (working on it) man who is reading too much into an escapist epic–was done poorly on a psychological level.

And the new bad guy just seems like an emotionally undeveloped brat.

I’ll have something to say about the psychopath Deadpool after a while.  He is exactly what people need and want right now.  I can say that with some confidence.  Whether or not that is healthy is another issue.

We are sick, are we not?  And do sick people not do what sick people do?

Yes, yes they do.

A friend of mine just had to put down her dog.  It had a brain tumor, and in the end was utterly unable to rest or sleep in any position.  Everything hurt.

I remember reading about the deaths of people dying from cancer, who likewise cannot get a moments calm repose.  Up, down, sideways, on their stomach: nothing is comfortable.  There is no escape but death and the relative death of heavy sedation and pain-killers.

I find this in me.  The pain within me seeks constant motion.  I can escape it through my intellect, through distraction, through motion, and of course through intoxication.  Wherever I am, whatever I am doing, I should be doing something else, somewhere else.  Nowhere is home, and of course this was my primal experience.

What I am finding is that healing takes place by choosing to remain still, but simultaneously allowing this surge of restless energy to manifest, and to be present to it.  To speak to it, to understand it, to sympathize with it, to recognize its purpose–to protect me–and to give it permission to do so.

The process of trauma healing is one of allowing antique processes of affect and behavior to complete.  They were started oh so long ago, but had nowhere to go, nowhere to disperse, no way to release their energies.  And so they remain, ghosts from the past, constantly seeking release from an endless circle with no exit.

You can tap into this, poke a hole in it, and watch the sudden release of energies.

I continue my Kum Nye, but am finding regularly that my EmWave2 will also facilitate this work.  I can keep my heart calm and coherent, all while feeling manic energies flowing through me into the atmosphere.  It is an odd juxtaposition, but not really I suppose, all things considered.  We all “exist” on many layers, in many places, the connections between which are both robust and often obscure.

I watch and I learn. This is what I do. I often feel sadness, and often feel rage.  Often I feel I don’t feel anything at all, which I pour words on to;  but I increasingly recognize another possibility.

This is useful work, and I share it because sharing is therapeutic for me, but also because I recognize this world is filled with bullshit, and would likely benefit from a few people willing to struggle in public who do not want your money or recognition.

I am slowly eliminating my anger, and the anxiety that masks it.  What I am finding is that inhabiting my day, getting things done, I feel naked without my anxiety and latent rage.  I have always had it.  How does anyone get anything done without first tensing up then powering through it?

It seems to me that after a certain age–I would think for sure by age 30–you have developed a way of being in the world which has flaws–you have a limp you cannot see–but which on balance is functional.  And the longer you use it, the more comfortable it becomes.

In beginning any sport a good coach will make sure you learn good habits, and do not pick up any bad habits. As one famous example, John Wooden always ensured that his players knew how to put on socks properly to avoid getting blisters.

Life is like this too, but our parents themselves all too often don’t know what the good habits are, and which the bad.  They, too, were thrown out there and made whatever accommodations they had to to survive.  To the extent they teach at all, they teach what they know.  Most maps are flawed.

And so growing means losing old friends.  It means saying good bye not just to what held us back, but what held us up.  This is a formidable obstacle, and needs to be recognized as such.