Month: March 2016

It seems to me the path of the Bodhisattva is not to eliminate pain, but to increase it.  The path of com-passion is to know all pains from personal experience.  How else can you SEE the pain of others, how else can you know it?

Suffering plainly is real, and in this world, the pains of this world cannot be avoided.  You can be born in the lap of luxury to loving parents, and live a fulfilling life doing useful work.  You can see the world, fall deeply in love, bring up a happy family, and live in health to an old age, and then everything you built and knew will fall away.  You will have to begin again, in some way.  This cannot be avoided.

But suffering can be processed.  It can be digested, like food, like drink.  The task is to become stronger, more able to do this; to become larger and in becoming larger to become wiser, and thus more useful.

In a true spiritual path I believe you are lost most of the time.  The sense of being lost, too, is a suffering, and that, too, can be transcended.  I increasingly believe that what the modern world most needs is a recovery of the sense of the magic of time and place, of the moment, of the world.  You can live forever in every moment you truly feel flowing through.  We are surrounded by rivers, and choose to stay on the shore.

It feels to me like the authentic spirit of Buddhism passed away with the growth of the monasteries, with the growth of barriers to life, to the wilderness, to the wild beasts, randomness, and to most forms of unplanned loss.

This is what I feel today.

Read this story: http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/roth.html

Then listen to this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK-5OS1WAFk

It is perhaps not sad enough–I find it comforting–but there is something of life in it.

I find myself feeling the gap between the meaning of life, and my habits.

Living is a skill, and we are all born, I think–most of us certainly–far from it.  We paper over this gap with thought.  We think: “I can think the meaning of life. It will be much easier than finding my way to it.  Yes, that is the path”.  But of course, you cannot think your way there.  You must dare your way there.  You must embrace what hurts you, and in the hurting, find the healing, and the way.

Here is another nice song, also from John Harford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEOjcQstUc 

You only know a small fraction of what you think you know, and if I am lucky I know even less.

Happy Easter!!!!

Perseverance is one of my core values.  So I got to thinking about my previous post.  Am I getting soft?  No longer willing to fight the good fight?

Well, AM I fighting the good fight?  Who really gives a shit what I have to say?  Not many people.

And then I got to thinking that persuasion is a laudable and valuable goal, but it can virtually NEVER be approached from a stance of anger or judgement.  If you claim to want to persuade people, and you are yelling at them–as I have always tended to do–then you are deceiving yourself.

I need to take the anger out.  Step back.  The world clearly will end one day, perhaps one day soon, but it has no plans to ask me first, and there is no reason not to get as much sunshine and light in the meantime as I can.  You know, the jacket, the wind and rain, and the Sun.  Old story.

By chance I spent the day at a college.  I used to get excited going to colleges.  There was so much possibility, so much learning.  Now, I find them depressing.  You go there to learn how to live a better life?  Ain’t gonna happen.  You read all the English authors.  Or you major in German or Spanish or Portuguese.  Latin or Greek.  Philosophy.  Psychology.  Who will provide you with a comprehensive template for personal growth?

Kids come there with all sorts of hopes and dreams.  They want to make a difference.  But the Western world has lost the capacity to respect individual moral growth.  It can’t define it, because it can’t differentiate good and bad outside of social contexts which are themselves based on political contexts. Is rape wrong?  Well you have to tell me who is raping whom and why.  Yes, of course, in general, but surely the bombs being dropped on ISIS are far worse than their crimes against women?  It’s Western Imperialists imposing Western Imperialist values.

And I thought, as an African-appearing man walked by me (have you noticed that you can usually tell the difference between African born blacks and American born blacks by the dignity and seriousness of the former’s carriage?) that in the early 1960’s Britain was decolonizing.  Imperialism was still a very real thing.  But that was over 50 years ago.  Not many years before that, Japanese Zero planes were crashing into our aircraft carriers, and Jews were being turned into soap.

Virtually all the language and thought of today was formed in that period.  The professors teaching today still look back on that era as a Golden Age.  It is all they have.  And what they have is deficient and pathetic. It is based on lies, willful misunderstandings, sloppy thinking, and infantile fantasies both of power and freedom from responsibility.

We need an individual moral code.  It is possible that before Christianity all religions were intrinsically social, and thus in conformity with our ancestral, evolutionary past.  But Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, is individualistic.  It is about an individual’s relationship with God, unmediated by society and political structures.  This is a powerful means of forming the individual conscience, and moving humankind along.  But it no longer works.  We need something new.

This continues to be a project of mine.  Progress has been slow, but shit I’ve only been off the bottle for a month now.

I like to start my morning by doing my EmWave2, while listening to Gregorian Chants.  Then I roll myself out with a lacrosse ball and foam roller, 3 minutes or so per body part. It can be quite peaceful.

This morning I got up and read my Facebook, Lucianne, Drudge.  And I found myself linking an article describing the terrors of Brussels on my Facebook, and pointing out the obvious, that these people want Sharia Law in Europe, which means the abrogation of women’s rights, racial rights, homosexual rights, the freedom of speech, and the very ability to not agree with them about anything without being physically attacked and hurt.

I posted the obvious.  Then I did my routine.  And somewhere in there–I usually find rolling my shoulders very relaxing–it hit me that the obvious is indeed obvious.  What is not obvious is why so many people have such a hard time telling and accepting the truth, or at least what appears to me to clearly be the truth.  I deleted my post.  I realized I was planting seeds which could not be received precisely by the people who most needed them.  The seeds were unnecessary for people with intact perceptual capacities, and invisible to everyone else.

A great many people in our time have a hard time just existing.  Large numbers of us are killing themselves.  If memory serves, more people now die in the United States of suicide than in car accidents.  If not, then the numbers are knocking on that door.

And I think to European history over the past century.  Even before the first World War, people were saying life was meaningless.  Even before that war the intelligentsia was repeating “God is dead”.  After that war, they were filled with fatigue and horror.  Most of them turned to one Fascism or another, such as Bolshevism, although no doubt Scientism–which interacted with both–also played a role.  Nazism was “scientific” based on biological evolution.  Communism was “scientific”, based on economic evolution.

Both had no use for the individual, and perhaps this is precisely why they were so valued.

I look at Brussels today, and what do the white people–the people who founded that nation, built it, and who have maintained it–have to live for?  Most of them are atheists, and most of them can be assumed to be what I call Sybaritic Leftists, which is to say people who reject the necessity of pain in life, and view a life of relative comfort and ease as the highest good.

They are decadent, in other words.  How can one speak hard truths to decadent people?  I do not see a way.

I love to preach. Preaching is my way to feel like I am making a difference.  But the truth, of course, is that I make very little difference.  You cannot make the deaf hear.

And I find a place in myself which is still capable of viewing them with kindness.  We may all be on a bus to hell, but I do not need to be so angry.  My life does not make the Pacific any larger, and my eventual passing will not diminish it.

I do of course worry about my children.  But my belief is that we choose our lives.  They chose their lives.  They chose what they would experience.  I have no control over that, and even though I will never cease from my striving, this world does not exist to meet my needs, to be kind, or even to be comprehensible.  This is still no reason to feel sorry for myself, or be less happy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/18/why-smart-people-are-better-off-with-fewer-friends/

Here is my proposal: large segments of my emotional life are tied up in ideas which are intellectually incomprehensible to most people, and when I am seeking emotional intimacy, this is an important part of it.  Since it is beyond most people, I can’t share it, and since I can’t share it, I find trying to interact with people on that level frustrating and it generally makes me feel worse. I would rather be greeted with a blank stare than 50% comprehension.  That 50% just makes the failure feel worse, and it’s always 50% or less.  I have emailed most of the Economics professors at most of the major universities in America and Ireland, and not received one answer I deemed intelligent.  Granted, I have not received many answers at all, but those that I did receive confirmed my suspicion as to how the thought process went for whatever percentage of recipients actually read what I had to say.

This is why I do construction for a living.  Nobody asks me any hard questions, and whatever interacting I do is on a basic level.  It is a decent modus vivendi with my particular ontological joke.

Well, that and I love working with my hands, the free time it gets me, the self employment, and the travel.  And if sitting is the new smoking, then I can do my regular smoking and feel less guilty. I’m not smoking twice.

Even when I was in my teens I fantasized about doing construction.  I just had to figure out how to make way more than the Union guys without doing my time, and without joining a Union.

I haven’t posted this in a while: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page11.html

The “money” piece referenced became my Econ Fix.  I moved away from a gold standard, but the ideas are otherwise the same.

Garp I watched a few weeks ago, and just didn’t feel like commenting on.  I may have in passing.  I can’t remember.

Alphaville, by Jean-Luc Godard, I watched tonight.  It was pretty bad, but the ideas were somewhat interesting. I won’t comment long, as I have some Sleepy Time tea brewing and a nightly routine to perform, but I did want to say that I really feel that the computer, the reification of “reason”, so-called, is really a reification of our animal, bestial, MECHANICAL instincts.

What we share with ants: this is what we share with machines. This is why machines would, in turn, want to reduce us to ants.

But what makes us human, makes us beings with souls, is precisely where we differ from machines.  Consciousness is typified by what I tend to call non-statistical coherence.  Animals are typified by statistical coherence particularly the lower you go in complexity.

There is a scene where they have managed to combine executions with water ballet, and I was struck by the continuity with actual history, with actual public executions, which were attended by and enjoyed by thousands, in plazas you can still visit in Paris, to this day.  Paris itself is marked by two exhibits dedicated to that same “revolution”, the Arc De Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower.

That time, too, was marked by the rhetorical appeal to reason, and the actual submission to violence, savagery, and anti-humanistic cruelty.

Insanity leaves markers. If you know how to read them, you see them everywhere.  Most human societies, for most of time, have been two thirds insane.  Those who did not build large cities and armies roamed the wilds largely devoid of compassion for anyone outside their tribe.

This was one of the first R-rated movies I saw, and the first major picture, if memory serves, with Robin Williams in it.  I got to thinking about it one day, then by sheer coincidence one of the women I work with told me it was her favorite movie, so I thought hell I’ll watch it again.

For the early 1980’s I thought it weirdly percipient.  Or, perhaps more accurately, it described those times–roughly the late Sixties to mid-Seventies–well, and we have circled back around.

You have John Lithgow as Bruce Jenner. And you have radical identity politics.

Several points I wanted to make.

Garp came in as a baby, and he left as a baby.  He came in wanting and fantasizing about his father, and he left fantasizing about his father.  Moral: he needed his father, no matter what psychological accommodations he reached with his actual life.

Glenn Close was exceptionally emotionally detached.  She had not the slightest bit of fellow feeling, or felt empathy.  Nothing fazed her. Her beliefs–her eyes, which one can readily imagine foreshadowing her much more famous role in Fatal Attaction–were abstract and purely intellectual.  She didn’t bat an eye when the women who cut out their tongues in sympathy for a rape victim chose to continue their weird cult even after the actual victim explicitly told them to stop.  Everyone to her was a symbol, and no one, even her own son, was truly to her a person.  She was obsessed with her role, with her nursing outfit, but only as a role, only as an expression of inner ideology.

She also over-identified with Garp.  She moved to New York with him.  She started writing when he did.  She procured a hooker for him, after using her herself first for her own purposes.  They both wrote books that got them hate mail.  They both even died the same way.

The whole thing was extremely unhealthy, even if I got that I was supposed to get that as odd as the whole thing was, there was still love.

And the women she surrounded herself with viewed the world through the logic of collective guilt.  They did not want to allow her own son to attend her funeral, because ALL men were guilty if one was.  This is the worst sort of tribalism, but it is on display, today, on every college campus in the country (or nearly, at any rate.).

You saw, of course, the rabid hate that we see today, which was fringe then, but mainstream now.

And I could not help but see in that book John Irving wrestling with his own fatherless childhood, and perhaps allowing himself to bring out and express some of the pent up rage he felt. He killed his son, then he killed his mother, then he killed himself.

This movie is due for a come-back.  You heard it here first.

I have read several pieces in the past few days I regarded as genuinely thoughtful.  This makes me happy, since I see it so little.  One of the traits of thoughtfulness is accepting your own limits–recognizing who you are, what you believe, and that other possibilities exist–and being willing to go outside them, to talk out loud for a while, and to settle down without a sound bite, or ideologically actionable verdict.  Sometimes the straight path can only be found by rambling.

http://chronicle.com/article/How-Safe-Spaces-Stifle-Ideas/235634

I particularly liked this paragraph:

Our educated classes regard the university chiefly as an instrument of our collective purpose and an efficient engine for transmitting anxiety about ideas felt to be dangerous or out of bounds. Bizarre that a culture officially committed to diversity and openness should be essentially conformist, and that the hostility to the clash of incommensurable ideas and even to elementary difference should be promoted with the sort of clear conscience that can belong only to people who don’t know what they’re doing.

George Lakoff famously proposed that “liberals” (his word) operate more from a maternal, nurturing, caring sense of things, and conservatives from a paternal, rule-governed, obedience based model.

Jonathan Haidt provides, perhaps, more nuance, arguing

there are (at least) six innate moral foundations, upon which cultures develop their various moralities, just as there are five innate taste receptors on the tongue, which cultures have used to create many different cuisines. The six are Care/harm, Fairness (equality)/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation. The theory was developed to explain cross-cultural differences in morality, but Haidt and his collaborators at YourMorals.org^[21] have found that the theory works well to explain political differences as well. Liberals (leftists) tend to endorse primarily the Care and Equality foundations, whereas conservatives (rightists) tend to endorse all six foundations more equally.

What I would suggest is that while both writers have solid points in my view, what they are REALLY referring to is what sorts of propaganda both groups respond best to.

One can be empathic and care about others, and be led to support policies which actually work to achieve the opposite of the outcome you wanted.  This is the case with most Democrats.

One can be callous and cruel, seeking ones own interest, and in the process of building up a large company–say, Microsoft–in actual fact enrich the lives of millions of people.

What I can say with some firmness is that the Left chooses to focus on the discussion, and conservatives–to the extent we actually exist any more, having been largely pushed in fact if not name from the national and international stages–choose to look at history, and particularly political and economic history, as models to predict the future.  And we are rarely wrong.  Human nature has not changed since the time of the Romans and Greeks.  Nor is it likely to any time soon.

Simply because someone says they want something, does not mean that their means are not counter-productive.  And if you criticize people who oppose those means as inherently mean-spirited and evil, then you have eradicated the capacity of that system to learn, adapt, and grow, which is where we are at today.  All of our problems have solutions, but none of the problems can be named, and thus all of the solutions look abusive and wrong.

The goal of free markets and the protection of property rights is generalized wealth and well being.  But because it LOOKS like self seeking and greed, stupid people can, have, and continue to misunderstand this, even though the data is absolutely, categorically clear, beyond any possibility of rational dispute.

An appeal to prejudice is inherently an appeal to ignorance.  There is no other way to look at it, in my view.