Month: February 2016

I am feeling that in order to feel genuine hope, you have to be capable of despair.  One of the mistakes people make, which I have made, is thinking that if they allow a “negative” emotion to gain traction that it will suck them in and devour them.

This probably does happen sometimes.  But if you develop emotional agility, which is the practice of feeling, of anchoring emotions in prior sensations which you can tell are mutable, then you need not become stuck.  You can allow deep shadows to infect you, and then pass over you.  They have no claim on you.

What prompts this post specifically was a meme stating in effect that the problem is not Hillary or Bernie, but that Americans are willing to vote for someone promising free stuff to everyone, and someone who lies nearly as often as she talks, and who by all credible accounts belongs in the same jail cell any senior member of the military would have found themselves in had they done a fraction of what she did.  Her crimes are many times more egregious than those of David Petraeus, and he is still paying for them.

This meme, of course, reminded me of my email that got attributed to Vaclav Klaus, in which in 2008 I said the same thing.

Maybe we are past the point of no return. This possibility has to be considered.  We are stupid as a people, and propaganda has made open inroads in all our universities–most strongly in our allegedly best universities such as Harvard and Yale–making future growth of effective propaganda likely.

Then I read that technology is decreasing the social skills and particularly the capacity for empathy among our young, which makes them crave propaganda like they crave media, and that odd state between connection and isolation which never really changes or risks anything important.

Maybe all the work I have done, or thought I did, has been for naught.  Maybe I have wasted my time.  Maybe our destiny is nuclear war, or pestilence, or the triumph of the fascist globalists.  Maybe I will end my days in a concentration camp, or worse.  Maybe one day the unthinkable will happen, and we will all get pits in our stomachs as we wait for the missiles to hit, or the fall out from a nuclear attack 200 miles away to hit us, changing all of our lives irrevocably.

We will all die.  This is a certainty.  The Transhumanists do not understand the human part of their equation.  They do not and never will reduce life to a mechanical process.

You have to have courage in life, and courage is the proper response to despair, to an honest appraisal of the situation.  You have to look out there, see life as it is, realize that bad things have always happened and may well continue to happen, but still, with all this in mind, put on an honest smile and thank God for a good fight.  What else can we ask for?

I continue my healing process.  I think I’ve kicked my drinking habit, and of course some of the things I was hiding from with it are coming up, and I am having to face them.  But I am doing it.  It is working.  It is not just that I am no longer regularly drinking to excess, but that I don’t feel that compulsion any more.  That is huge.

You cannot read history like I do and realize that complacency tends to result in failure, in defeat, in outcomes which are unpleasant, and often irreversible.  You cannot fail to realize that falls, when they come, are often rapid, and unexpected by the masses, even if there have been many Cassandras crying to the winds, who did not listen.

For my part, I have felt as much fear as I think it is possible for a human being to fear.  Picture your worst fear–spiders, heights, psycho killers, confined spaces–then distill it to an essence, a black oozing essence, then inject it into your arm, or better yet your heart.  This is what I have felt night after night for a very long time.

And what I have realized is that we instinctively keep fear at arms length.  We don’t want it.  We recoil from it.  Certainly I did.  It was out there, coming at me, infecting me, seeping through my pores, infiltrating every breath.

But there comes a point where you stop pushing it away.  It is too tiring, and it always wins anyway.  And when you let it come close, you realize it is not uniform.  It has textures.  It has a pulse.  It ebbs and flows.  It has an intelligence which can be communicated with.  It is a sort of living thing, with which it is possible to develop a symbiotic relationship.

I don’t ever want to be without fear.  It is my friend. It warns me when something isn’t safe.  I would no more want to be without fear than to be one of these unfortunate souls who cannot feel heat, and who not infrequently burn themselves accidentally.  Nothing warns them.

And when you accept it, it can flow through you, but what I am increasingly realizing is that this is the root of courage as well.  Fear and courage are not opposites.  They are brothers.  Courage is the result of no longer pushing fear away.  If you do not push it away, you accept it, and in accepting it it loses its power.

I was contemplating the difference between a circle, and, say, a preacher and his or her congregation.  In the one case you have a flow; and in the other, a Here and a There, a going out and a coming back in; a right and a response.

Then I was imagining a world without bowing, where everyone was equal, a true social egalitarianism, one uncoerced by psychpaths.  There would be no need to bow, no need to acknowledge inferiority and superiority (which have always obviously continued to exist in Communist societies, which merely make class permanent by lying about the existence of class distinctions).

Then I thought that no truly advanced person needs recognition.  They don’t need validation to buttress their egos.  The only real purpose of a true spiritual teacher in asking others to bow to them is to teach them to respect themselves, through the process of respecting someone else.

And in my own ridiculous way, it occurred to me that an interesting and counter-intuitive way of expressing respect might be spitting on people, by means of which you convey your understanding that they are beyond pettiness and vanity, and hence superior.

And I was thinking that our psyches are better organized as circles. Jung, I think it was, noted that mandalas contains selves, senses of self.

In contradistinction to this would be the inner stentorian voice, coercing through fear compliance with rules which the organism, the relaxed sense of self which is caged, can never understand.  They are the result of varying degrees of operant conditioning, which are the result of varying sorts of psychological and physical torture.  Such beings never come into existence in this life-time, and for this reason I think we need to see beyond the lecturings of people who in all too many cases seek a pulpit in lieu of actual personal growth. 

I sometimes talk out loud on this blog, and not everything I say makes sense.  Always keep that in mind, my reader or two.

If hunger is the engine of this Earth, then servants of it are the fear of falling, and the fear of loud noises, both of which most humans seem to be born with.  Both serve the cause of survival, of which hunger itself–and of course the sexual instinct–are servants, in our biological selves.

For myself, I often imagine jumping into an unsupported vortex, a world of energy without solid ground, and I feel a fear of falling, a vertigo. But I do it anyway.  And it occurs to me this is an energy–a primal instinctual fear–which we must also master.  This is the root of the idea that jumping out of perfectly good airplanes is somehow a part of a Life Well Lived.

But Falling in Love.  Falling into Bad Habits.  Fallen by the Wayside.  Raising yourself up.  Etc.

I woke up dizzy this morning.  I didn’t got to bed drunk, I don’t think I have an ear infection.  I have to wonder if it has something to do with these blinding headaches, and blurred vision.

Just kidding, that would gratify some.

No, it may be an ear infection, but what I think it is is the externalization of anxiety as a sort of psychological hysteria, where emotional symptoms become manifested physically.  And in the same sense that negatives coming into consciousness constitute in my view a sort of release–their mooring have been undone, and they have been condemned to the current–so too, I think, is a release of hysterical (I am using this term in the clinical sense of Freud’s time, and in which he used it before his cowardice and ambition got the better of him) energy.  That is good.

If this body is an engine, we have to learn to engage with and master its energies, which are primarily hunger, sexuality, and fear of falling.  That is my view at the moment.  I am typing this rapidly on the way somewhere to someone who will be annoyed with the delay.  C’est la vie.  C’est la guerre.

There are guerillas.  Are there Guerissimos? I want to be one of those.

I woke up this morning and it occurred to me Bernie Sanders is the equivalent of that well known American phenomenon: the impulse buy.  He is the equivalent of someone with maxed out credit cards coming under stress and deciding that a new purse, or shoes, or gun, or boat is going to make it all alright.

We are borrowing $1 trillion a year NOW.  We have a $19 trillion national debt NOW, and interest alone on that debt will within a few short years exceed the Defense expenditures leftists love to target as discretionary.  Well, the interest on the national debt will not be discretionary.

Nor will the massive increases in the annual amounts due to our seniors be discretionary.  That is what is defined as non-discretionary.  Members of both parties, but obviously most cravenly and consistently the Democrats, have consistently raised Medicare and Social Security benefits to where they far exceed what was paid in, and even much of what was paid in was long ago spent on the salaries and benefits, and buildings and business conferences of the 100,000 or more bureaucrats who administer these programs.

Social Security is a coerced program of negative investment, where you are lucky to get back 25% of what you paid in, and where the difference is made up on the backs of the working poor–who in all cases cannot avoid this 15% tax on their paychecks–and the young, who pay into programs their whole lives, without it being likely they can make back what they paid in, at least without major reforms.

Returning to my main point, we have some $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities TODAY.  Edit: that seemed low.  Here is one from two years ago: http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/01/17/you-think-the-deficit-is-bad-federal-unfunded-liabilities-exceed-127-trillion/#1ace05a510d3  $127 trillion is the number they use.

And is it not INTERESTING that virtually no one is talking about it today?  Rand and Ron Paul talked about it, but it’s not a major issue with anyone else, that I can tell.  When I Google it, why is such an existential threat the virtual hit equivalent of Googling Belorussian UFO’s?

We are lunatics.  In past times there was an excuse.  It was much easier to hide information.  Now, if you look, it is there, with very little work.  You do not even have to go to the library and search card catalogs or pull microfiche, which some of us remember doing.

Consider, honestly, these claims being made.

Bernie says he can reform instantly a system of higher education which has been getting more and more ridiculously expensive because the Federal government makes and backs student loans, but offers no way to dismiss them in bankruptcy.  He says he can make education “free”, which is to say he thinks he can get taxpayers to foot 100% of the bill of an overbloated, ineffective system, and do it in a short 4-8 years.

Bernie says he can make healthcare “free”, which is to say he thinks he can raise taxes enough, and redistribute them through a system of healthcare which has been evolving over many decades, and do it in such a way that everyone performs better at lower costs.

This is someone with $20,000 in credit card debts–which incidentally were incurred by a long term repetition of the same psychological malady–thinking that if they could only get $5,000 more, everything will be OK.

People who want to vote for Bernie are like 800 pound bed ridden losers who think one more package of Oreos will solve everything.

It is the solution of fools, of the deluded, of the imbecilic, of the childish.

Government is not supposed to give you everything: it is supposed to protect your right to go out there and get it.  If you don’t want to do that work, then you are no longer a responsible human being, and your useful term on Earth is at an end.  There is no learning in sloth and dependency.  It is necessary for infants, but no later than that.  Socialism is the creed of the decadent.  The decadent become weak, and as Eric Ritter argued, weakness becomes hate becomes cruelty, and that is what I call Cultural Sadeism.

If you want to be good, you have to learn to interact with the world’s pain, to feel it, and to become an organizing agent, a worker, a rebel in the face of a world of hunger.  You cannot grant it final ascendancy, as those who simply want a full belly, an empty mind, and endless circuses and games do.

https://youtu.be/QAK0KXEpF8Uhttps://youtu.be/QAK0KXEpF8U

He quotes a British psychiatrist who said that “when you cannot control your own emotions you begin to need to control other people’s behavior.”

Think of the HELPLESSNESS, the childishness, implied by needing to be protected from disagreement, PARTICULARLY when you are spouting, but unable to defend, utterly inane, nonsensical, lunatic ideas.

It seems obvious to me that the nature of delusion is that it feels correct.  It is invisible to the “practitioner”.  For anyone actually committed to getting things right, this observation makes humility mathematically necessary.  No one is immune from this disease, and those who think themselves most immune are the most likely to be carriers, and to be profoundly infectious.

Witness the Global Warming folks, who are unwilling to grant even that their need to rename it is a major mark against the whole idea.  One can obviously grant that increased heat will cause unpredictable weather, but one must also grant that the increased heat is an ineluctable element in the whole equation, without which one is simply discussing weather itself, a definitional complex system.

Here is the point I wanted to make, though: I am often chased by zombies in my dreams, by fanatics who find it absolutely necessary to inflict their disease on me, such that I become happily one of them.  They of course use violence to do it.  They do not of course know they are zombies.  They merely see that I am not one of them.

Now, I do think this connects to the physical world, the observable world.  I do think my paranoia has merits, that it refers to actually existing processes and people which should rightly be feared.  I think this intellectually, while reserving doubt that I could be completely wrong.  Kipling and all that.

But paranoia can also of course be an outcome of primitive developmental wounds, and likely is in my own case, so these dreams are showing me something within myself.  As such, this is great.  It is not great that I have extended dreams of conflict, evasion, hiding and escape.  But it is great that I can see it.

What I seem to see, to realize, is that anything you can embrace you can unplug.  My moving into this energy consciously, in a relaxed way, I can diffuse it.

Yesterday I felt very clearly in my Kum Nye practice like I had become a sort of primal silence and darkness, and that the whole world focused on an emotional knot I had projected into space.  If you give them space, all knots loosen.  And what I saw was that they loosen, and become threads, and that thread becomes pure energy.  And pure energy is all there is.  This is the basic use, in my view, of the Buddhist Shunyata.  No thing “is”.  All one can see are energy patterns, with intelligence, with purpose, but also without purpose, depending on your level of magnification.

Rumi said “The dark thoughts, the shame, the malice: meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.  Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”  That is good advice.

Why is it that the “Keep Austin/Portland/etc. Weird” people are reliably Democrats?  Why do they value diversity in brew pubs and clothing stores and book stores, but somehow think a global monolithic government delivering “one size fits all” solutions to all problems of human existence will not quickly become unweird, bureaucratic, and just an overall drag on life?

It often seems to me that the schooling I got, which taught us to value intellectual coherence, principled reasoning, and a concern for actually accomplishing stated ends, was anachronistic, and that carefully disguised lunatics and unfunny clowns have infiltrated our halls of education, and created a primrose path, decked in flowers and balloons–and with a parade to boot–to hell.

The author in the previous post–I need to memorize his name, but not in the middle of the night, or first thing in the morning after that night–argues for some form of elitism.  I take the opposite path: I think our goal should be a genuine democratization of virtue.  A good society is a stable, robust, prosperous society, and my idea of government is simple: push power out to the fringes as far as it will go, to the cities, even communities, even blocks.  Decent people possessed of common sense can work out differences peacefully, which reduces greatly the need for laws.

Only mediocre people create bad societies.  It is a conservative truism that people are not perfectable, that they cannot be improved, that some depravity is inherent. I reject this argument.  I simply do not believe that the government–as a simple linear system, and as such profoundly DISordered and truly chaotic–is the proper agent.  I feel that the intersection of moral values and principles can be integrated into a Hayekian Extended Order, as indeed has happened in America for much of her history, through the social utility of a generalized Christianity and following behavioral norms among most of the populace.

Indeed, it is only by a cultivated and calculated abuse of Christian charity and an innate cultural generosity that Soviet propaganda has become so powerful in this country.

I have heard of this book, but am only now actually reading it.  This man’s views are nearly identical to my own, at least with regard to his diagnosis of the cultural cancer of Leftism.  Much of what he has said thus far is virtually identical to conclusions I reached on my own.