Month: April 2016

I really do feel that guilt quite often precedes, in the form of existential shame, any actual cause.  I further suspect many crimes are committed to relieve this sense by justifying it.

And I feel one of the primary crimes which is committed is that of judgement and hatred.  If you feel personal shame you cannot justify, you relieve it by judging others.  In my own case, I think I was broken violently so that I would be a “good”, which is to say compliant and obedient, person.  This creates shame, which creates anger, which creates hostility, which creates emotional and social alienation, which is something I am only now in my middle age coming to grips with.  I think this sort of thing is relatively common, but that most people never truly come to grips with it at all.  It is sufficient to simply exist complacently within the social system you were born into.

Christianity and Islam, certainly, are systems of political  and social oppression contained within theological systems, themselves based upon the assertions of those long dead.  Whatever they have to do with an actually existing God is accidental, and originates in individuals exercising personal wisdom and spiritual discrimination.

Let us suppose that the continuation of Western civilization is possible, despite the best efforts of the Left to destroy it.  What does Europe need to do?

They need to destroy most mosques.

They need to treat as criminals all people calling for Sharia law, attempting to implement Sharia law, or who talk in any way of living under a LAW other than that of Germany, France, Britain, etc.

They need to stop letting in economic refugees, and if they want to do “good deeds”, make an effort at letting in ACTUAL refugees who they think likely to largely assimilate.  Certainly, the Christians and Yazidis could use some help, as could the people traveling in families from actual war zones.

They need re-enable discussion of public morality which permits judgement.

I’ll likely have other ideas, but I have to scoop.

I like this guy: http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/22/is-milo-yiannopoulos-the-face-of-tomorrows-political-right/

I posted a week or two ago somewhere that I am increasingly of the opinion that offending people is our present patriotic duty.  The Left is doing everything in its power–not to protect decency and courtesy, since they have clearly rejected both vigorously and without hesitation–but to prevent the public discussion of their bad ideas.  The whole POINT of a truly Liberal political order is dissension, argument, and the airing of unwanted truths.

People like this give me hope.  I have been wondering where the fucking testicles are.  You can’t blow over every time somebody looks in your direction and claim to stand for anything. And if he wants to double up on the balls from time to time, well that’s his bedroom, and his business.

Money quote (thankfully not a money shot):

“For the [past] 30 years, the Left has just said ‘oh if there’s an argument we don’t like, they’re a hateful bigot so don’t listen to anything they have to say,’” he told TheDC. “They seek to delegitimize the speaker instead of actually presenting an argument while I force them to bring their A-game. They just realized they don’t have one.”

“Trump and I represent something that scares the Left — the utter, wholesale rejection of political correctness. Total defiance. The idea you don’t back down, you double down. When somebody comes to my event and says they’re offended by a joke, I rack my brain for a more offensive one… Trump does the same thing,” he said.

“He has shown the one thing that no conservative politician or pundit or anybody really on the political Right in American public life has done for some 30 years. He has shown fearlessness, he’s not afraid of [the Left]. And that inspires terror in their hearts and I’m the same, I like to think.”

I ventured into a bastion of ex-hippies yesterday.  My reasons were sound, and my purpose was accomplished, but I felt the whole time like a wolf in a pack of sheep.  Not a sheepdog: a wolf.  I am not yet required to wear a Yellow Cross–or Scarlet R–to identify myself as an ideological dissident or accused Racist, but it felt weird all the same.

Old hippies can be cool, but a very great many of them are still self important, focused on being “hip” (hence the name), highly judgemental, impatient, and more than a little crazy.  I know the breed well: remember, I went to Berkeley.  I lived there.  I breathed the air.

And I was thinking about it: after all the promise, after all the “revolution in the air”, what do they have to show for it?  What have they accomplished?  They put a no-name, second rate soap opera actor in the White House, who started several new wars and added our grandchildren to the national debt (our children were already in up to their eyeballs).

They have made it socially impossible for traumatized women to object publicly to sharing bathrooms with biological men.  They have that going for them.

They lost the Vietnam War for us, after it has been won–at great cost–on the ground.  This is one thing I have never understood: they shed huge tears watching some show about black slave families being broken up by the cruel slave-masters, but don’t even KNOW that hundreds of thousands of families were broken up in South Vietnam alone, sent to separate labor and psychological torture camps, and many of them were never reunited.  The people who loved Kunta Kinte did not give a flying phuc about anybody named Nguyen.  All that got disappeared, much like the desaparecido’s of Latin America, with the difference that nobody is talking about those horrors even today.

The fucking hippies still think their victory over national interest, common decency, empathy for the suffering of others, and political sanity counts as a great accomplishment.  I don’t.  It think it is a scandalous shame.

What do they have?  They accomplished something close to nothing.  Holotropic Breathwork has done me some good.  Peter Levine did some time in Esalen.  They brought yoga back from India.

But what I see, now, is that mostly what membership in this tribe provides is not vision, but membership.  That is the benefit.  They know one another.  They recognize one another.  When they meet–and I have the young imitators in mind here–they have an instant bond.

But the original hippies literally thought that if they shouted loud enough and did enough drugs, the world would spontaneously conform to their notions of the way “things ought to be”.

If we see kids now shouting about the way things ought to be, we can see the path back to them.  And we can easily see an identical but more fully developed narcissism, childishness, lack of understanding of how the world works, lack of a plan for actual long term improvements in the condition of any living human beings, and, most importantly, the same self congratulation based upon nothing more substantial than shared feelings.

I was thinking about the opposite of laziness.  Put another way, what avoidances create what we call “laziness”.

First off, it seems to me that, from a social and personal well being perspective, we work too much.  If we take an evolutionary perspective, ants work continually, because they are best viewed as little machines.  More developed animals, the mammals, like chimps and lions and seals, have lots and lots of time for relaxation.  So too did and to some very limited extent do, hunter-gatherers.  I read somewhere their average “work week” is perhaps 20 hours.  The rest of the time they can spend telling stories, playing games or music, fucking, and just laying around.  The sense of time constraint implied by our modern concept of laziness is simply inconsistent with our recent past, and has come about only in perhaps the past 2-4 thousand years.

Secondly, because I am not opposed to the new, to development, to visions of a greater humanity, I will say that we can and should aspire to higher levels of productivity, but that we need to balance creative mania, with some grounding in our nature.

And what is our nature?  I would say it is creative, but not relentlessly so.  We need breaks.  The alternative is addiction, and addiction by definition is contrary to spiritual development.

And what blocks creativity?  Fear.  Fear of all the sundry emotions which we have blocked out, away from conscious awareness.  To be truly creative one must be open, and to be open is to invite everything.

Practically, what seems to happen is we find and build grooves, tracks, simple things we do over and over in roughly the same way which meet the task of getting us fed, clothed, and sheltered, but which do not really arise from creative places, and which on the contrary feel confining.

It is tempting to wonder if we fear Great Time, within which are the realities we fear, most notably death and dissolution, but also separation, failure, and inconstancy.

Well, I myself have things to do, but thought I would throw a few thoughts out there.

I have been having some interesting dreams.  Many of my most useful dreams involve contemporary myths, like Harry Potter, and comic book characters.  I think in our modern world we do not value sufficiently deep symbols. The need for them is profound, and people like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Joanne Rowling, who create them, serve this need.  The “nerds” who thrive on their true fictions are precisely those who in other ages might have been priests and priestesses, the keepers of sacrificial, ritual orders.

Without getting into the details of last night, I will say that we all need to grasp that even the bad guys are us too.  I found myself in a fight last night with a force I could not defeat.  The good guys lost, and I chose death rather than submission, consciously, after thinking about it in the dream.

Then I woke up, and got to thinking about it.  What I think I chose was preferring the death of willful ignorance, to the conscious inclusion of my own defects, which include arrogance, self importance, laziness, and yes entitlement. I am what I hate.

And I look at myself, and I preach–that is the word–often about the Left as the cult of conscious resentment.  And I resent them.  I am what I hate.

Pema Chodron talks about how interacting with people can be very useful because other people will show you, in your reactions, everything you hate about yourself, what parts of your self are unprocessed, in conflict with the facts of life, in conflict with the destiny of peace, of accommodation with the realities of life, which include death, danger, loss, grief, confusion, and the need for frequent if not continual effort and work.

Isolating oneself is a means, perhaps, of learning more about oneself, but it is also an avoidance of all the “triggers” which we encounter in others which create unwanted, painful emotions.

And it feels to me that the process of “building” virtue is really a process of subtraction.  As an example, you cannot make yourself humble.  You can merely act humble, and suppress from conscious awareness all impulses arising from vanity.  You relabel them.  You see them, but make them into positives through a process of rationalization.

The process of enabling actual, useful, honest humility–and this is a worthy virtue–is that of slowly eliminating the NEED to feel superior.  Every virtue has a countervailing vice which arises from a lack of some sort.  If we are cruel, it is because we feel unloved and unlovable.  If we are covetous, it is because we are conscious of a sense of material, and thus social, inferiority.  We want the things we feel will stimulate within us the feelings we actually need.

As someone with what gets called an “addictive personality”, what I feel is that addiction is really that process by which we divert our feelings and sense of self away from all the things we feel we cannot face and process and OWN.  Almost everything in life is either addiction or truth.

Addictions are all strong feelings that overwhelm the awareness of the weak, subtle feelings.  They are the manias, the passions, the “highs” of various sorts that people seek out to trap themselves in places where what they fear cannot find them, cannot reach their consciousness.

You can be addicted to interacting with people and still feel alone.  Many people nowadays are.  “Social” media make it easy.

But you can also be addicted to “Goodness”, to “virtue”.  I am increasingly inclined to view the whole edifice of Christianity, as it has developed since shortly after Christ’s death and resurrection, as a monster which feeds the vice of vanity, the “easy out” of submission in lieu of personal growth and responsibility, and the corruption of the natural impulse towards personal empowerment into that of political and even spiritual–so it is claimed, no doubt spuriously–dominion.  I have said this before, but I don’t feel Christ would recognize anything of himself or his teaching in the modern church.

Looks like drugs.

My take will be brief: however old you are, if you have not dealt with your past, it is still there.  All of Prince’s manic energy, his creative obsessiveness, came from somewhere.  It is likely that somewhere is demons he could not expel, could not process, and could not face.

I write journal entries to this very day talking about my parents.  At my age, this is ridiculous, or I would think it should seem so for many people.  But the work is done when it is done.  Until it is done, it is not done.  This should also be obvious.

And the goal is not navel gazing, but discovering or rediscovering a richer, fuller, more vibrant life.

In my considered view, most people run the same programs in their minds for most of their lives, and never really question who else they could be, how else they could be, what is most valuable in life, or how to develop the skill of systematically building the capacity for richer experience.  They work, and they get old.  They learn a bit along the way, but they miss almost everything.

That is my opinion.  It may be completely wrong.  I am a grouch, to be sure.  And I have concrete dust all over me, nearly put my eye out a couple hours ago, and managed to scar my nose tonight.

On the plus side, I found a bunch of Rod Stewart songs I had never heard.

I am reading Pema Chodron’s “When things fall apart”, and benefiting from it, as I suspected I would.  It is, I think, very good to get a woman’s perspective on Buddhist teachings.  Women in general are smarter than men.

And what I am realizing is that I entered adult life with a profound sense of helplessness.  This was carefully engineered into me by my parents.  This is not a revolutionary idea.

What is new for me is the realization that in the process of rejecting this feeling, of denying it, of trying to pretend that I am much more confident than I am, that things are much more in control than they in fact are, that it has been easier to engineer failure as a result of pride, than to admit what I was feeling.  I would rather protect a false sense of self, and crash the ship, than go there and be with something unpleasant.

No one could accuse me of avoiding negative feelings, but what I am coming to realize is that going into these feelings with compassion, and granting them the space to be, without trying to alter them, without trying to will them into non-existence or hiding, is the only path forward for me.  Everything else leads to a combination of arrogance, anger, and resentment, which in turn lead to regret and failure.

Some wise person once wrote that “forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past”.  My new motto then is “abandon all hope of being someone other than who you are.”

And when I say who I “am” I am looking deeply, very introspectively. What you have done is unimportant compared to why and how you did it.  At the very bottom is where one finds the genuinely spiritual.  The task it to connect with that energy, identify with it in all its variegated beauty, and learn to expand and learn from it.  This is the purpose of life.

I had an economically productive day planned, but I think I am going to limit myself to the work I have to do, which is about 5 hours this evening.

I feel I am awakening from a dream, one which tells me that one must always be doing, doing, doing.  Laziness, so called, is vastly undervalued in our culture.  It would be possible on a large scale, now that we have made technology–robots–our slaves, if we had had sound money.

But our would-be, and perhaps largely actual, masters, are driven by the same manias–more so.  They, too, must be doing, doing, doing.  So all of us fall apart, and few remain to help us remember how to fall together.

I look at my books, my intellect, and I feel that “living” a “life of the mind” is really a continual process of treading water.  We have all seen those balloons and balls kept in the air in large crowds.  For an intellectual, if that ball every hits the ground, it is instant death.  Or so it feels.

A vast library is a large host of life rafts, of flotation devices, to keep one above the flood of emotion, of feeling.

And I wonder if perhaps the first and most important use of abstraction was not figuring out better ways to kill Woolly Mammoths, but negotiating the more intricate social landscapes that emerged as our brains developed.  The frontal cortex is, after all, the “social brain”.

And I wonder if, at a primitive biological level, the need to live in an abstract realm is an effort to recreate, or perhaps forge ex nihilo, in lieu of a time and sense of place that never existed for some of us, a sense of belonging.  One engages, evolutionarily, the capacity for abstraction when one is ensconced in a complex social, ritual, order.

But in our modern world, our alienated world, our modes of production have taken abstraction to an absurd level, to a level at which we cannot possibly hope to relate to the whole.  So we relate to abstraction itself, knowing that what we really want is impossible.  We can never land in socially complete place, of the sort the past several hundred thousand years conditioned us for.

I would say of both Marx and Freud that even though they were wrong about virtually everything, even when they were wrong, they were right.  Marx was not wrong to see “Entfremdung” as an aspect of industrialization, time clocks, “rational” modes of production, the buying and selling of time and thus human beings.  Note the “alien” in alienation, and the “fremd” in the German.

I feel myself floating.  I have always been floating.  So many of us are floating.  We struggle furiously to paddle this way or that, but mainly we have a relationship with paddling.  With one another, much less.

Hope begins with truth.  Thus, I see this post as quite hopeful.

Maxim: it is an absolute certainty that biologically rooted drives for social dominance will be expressed in all social orders, including those whose label is “egalitarian”.  If the field of competition is not the marketplace or actual battlefield, the battles will be political.  A ritual order will always be created.

Why do the Rockefellers and Castro admire one another so much?  They understand each other.  Communism is not and never has been anything but a very old story with a new title.  The King enjoys the ratification of History rather than God, but His prerogatives are no less, his abuse of power no less, and the injustice of the system no less than in the Egypt of the Pharaohs.