Month: May 2016

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0516/prager052416.php3

This is worth the read.

I will add my two cents.

Each of us, in every moment, has a choice to try and improve the world, or to allow sloth and apathy to dominate us, to simply drift.

Often, improving the world involves improving ourselves.  We can be more contemplative.  Alternatively, we can be more active.  Always, what we do, though, flows from who we are and what we value.

When we improve the world, we put something into it.  It might be the energy to help a little old lady across the street.  It might be having done the inner work to be able to relate honestly to others, to understand them, to support them where they live, and to thereby help build happiness and trust where it was not present.  This is important work.

With regard to Trump the question is this: do I vote for someone who I dislike simply because he is less bad than the alternative, or do I privilege my VANITY over that choice, and pretend that I become better, or the world becomes better, when I refuse to make a decision in an important issue, simply because my vanity rejects the necessity of that choice?

Obviously, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice (thanks Neal Peart).

Do you help Killary get one step closer, or push her one step farther from the White House?  This should be a simple decision, and frankly I am disgusted at the intellectual incoherence, moral imbecility, and tacit admission of Leftist sympathies–or at least vulnerability to Leftist propaganda–which is exhibited by any person claiming to be conservative for whom this requires a more than 5 second deliberation.

You people believe nothing, if your vanity is more important than exercising what power you have for what good you can do.

Do what you can, with what you have, and do it now, as Teddy R. put it.  And if you refuse, you are a whiny little bitch.  That is how I see it.  And I don’t like whiny little bitches.  It saddens me to see that you are the people who claim to be on my team.  I don’t want you.

And perhaps this whole conservative thing has just been a phase, like cross dressing.  If you want to get back to the roots of your core indoctrination, have at it.  With tepid friends, who the fuck needs enemies?

Because of Donald Trump.  ONLY because of Donald Trump.

“I’ve talked to most of the women,” Goldberg stated. “You can’t talk to them all, life’s not long enough. But the women that became public reached out to me because of my involvement with the Lewinsky affair.”

I asked whether she found Clinton’s accusers and mistresses to be credible.
She replied:

To a woman, they were class acts. They were lovely women. They came from good backgrounds. They were ladies. These were not barflies that he picked up, although I’m sure there were plenty of those. These were lovely, lovely women.
You can tell when someone is lying to you, and especially about something really serious. And I believed every one of these women. Women don’t talk about something that intimate and make it up. There was nothing in it for then.  I mean, they weren’t selling books that would make them millions of dollars, or making movies, or going on lecture tours. They were telling you the truth.

Referring to Donald Trump’s willingness to discuss the issue of Bill’s accusers and Hillary Clinton’s alleged role in silencing the women, Goldberg predicted, “This is going to be a highly sexed, with a lower case ‘s,’ highly sexed campaign.”

“Because as I say, Trump will say everything,” she added.

The other day I did the flurry of posts–shit, was it yesterday?–I meant to mention that the conscious cultivation of happiness is the last stage of personal growth, and can only happen once your psyche is relatively in one piece.  Otherwise, the darkness is always just outside your door.

I think of the Lemony Snickets movie, which begins happily enough, then cuts to the real story.  I think people who have unprocessed grief and terror are always waiting for the real movie to begin, the other shoe to drop.

It has often seemed to me that much of the New Age movement consists in the desire to say and do and live happy things, without admitting knowledge of the darkness without.  Yes, they give lip service to the “shadow”, but they overvalue niceness much too much to truly fool anyone.

And I will comment too that hypervigilance is only ONE possible outcome of trauma.  HypOvigilance–too little vigilance and too much trust–is the other possibility.  These are the broken people who stand up for nothing, trust everyone.  They are the doormats.  Yes, they get angry, but rarely appropriately, at the right people, at the right times, for the right reasons.

I think it is safe to say the Europeans are quite hypovigilant at the moment, as are a distressingly large number of Americans.  I wish life were easy, sometimes, but the fact is that it demands we stay awake.  That is the rule of the game.

Resistance breeds response.  The need for adaptation breeds selection.

In our current political climate, one in which dispassionate evaluation of important topics in public by high minded and serious people is made impossible by leftist propaganda, the only possible selection can be in the direction of survival of people, not ideas.  In an ideal world, one not suffused by angry nonsense, the best IDEAS would win out, consistently.  This is the premise behind free speech: it is more efficient, over and above the moral value we subscribe to it.

John McCain and Mitt Romney were “selected” as the “candidates who can win”.  Republican voters gave up on that idea in this election cycle, because, obviously, they were NOT candidates who can win.  They were saps, who failed to articulate clear goals, to stand firm on principle, and who may as well have been Democrats, such was their quite actual “moderation”.  What sane person would elect the architect of Romneycare to undo the damage of Obamacare?

No, the person selected has to be able to deal with a mean environment, continual manufactured controversy, and the sense on the part of many Americans that our dreams and ideals are being slowly strangled by virtually everyone, D and R alike.

Leftists created this environment.  They have no right to complain that the system is operating properly.

I just read about mirror neurons for the first time.  They seem to be a part of our social brain that fires in response to interactions with other beings, which of course evolutionarily would mainly be people, but today could be animals, cartoons, pictures or anything else we connect with.

Empathy is an emergent property of the proper functioning of these neurons.  We instinctively feel what the other person is feeling.  Logically, there can be different sorts of relations.  One person can be feeling something strongly and the other person mainly reacting to it. There can be a loop, in which Feeling 1 generates Feeling 2, which is reacted to by generating Feeling 3, or a stronger 1, etc.

What narcissists would seem to react to is others mirroring them.  What interests them is them.

The mother looking at the baby is a paradigmatic image.  We assume that mothers mother, but why?  Many mothers, particularly young mothers, bring an enormous range of emotional problems to the table.  If they are emotionally needy, the neediness of the child will trigger them in unpredictable ways.  Babies being babies might anger them, or provoke sadness, over and above, all the naturally irritating things like crying, pooping, and needing to be fed regularly.

And I wonder specifically at the relation where a mother is looking in her childs eyes wanting to see herself, who rewards herself when she sees it, and ignores everything else.

And I wonder what connection will eventually be found between the operation of the mirror neurons and narcissism.  I need to learn more before I speculate further, but it is an interesting question.

That we are in some respects machines I do not question.  I simply do not share the belief that that is a complete, fully accurate, or even reasonable–based on the totality of evidence, much of which never makes it into university labs and classrooms–conclusion.

I see no reason to discard brain science or evolutionary theory, even if I think some of the underlying assumptions are clearly faulty.

It has been remarked by many people in what gets called the Recovery field that there is something spiritual in it.  I am listening to William James “Varieties of Religious Experience”, and he described in 1904 experiences of the sort that led some 30 years later to AA.  He talks about alcoholics having major religious experiences, of warmth and light, of God.

I would of course like to have such an experience, but my path is a slow one, a long one, but also one where I can take notes, find waymarkers, map out the route.  I can say “I have been there.  I have felt, I think, what you are feeling.  I understand terror, sleep disturbances, addiction, loneliness and isolation.  I have been there, and I have walked through it.”

And it occurs to me that most of human life is characterized by addictions–lies which conceal the whole truth–and that this is the essence of what the Buddha taught.  Tanha–craving–is what submerges us in unwholesome loops which make us unhappy.  As I have commented on occasion Duhkha–suffering–is best understood as anything less than complete contentment and happiness.

And at root, it is the insight that almost all of what we are taught to value arises as mutually reinforcing tanha.  To be different, you have to see differently.  To get out of the swamp, you have to see it is a swamp.

And addicts are well positioned to see, having known all-pervading craving, to see how common it is, how universal it is, and in giving up one addiction, giving up the rest of them, if they have stopped running.

Well, I gave in to the fear impulse that came on me the other night.  I lived with that emotional energy for a time, then decided to do an experiment.  It’s not so much that I lost the battle, as I decided not to even try and fight it.  I drank a 32 ounce beer, and 95% of a 750 of tequila.  I slept 8 hours, woke up a tad fuzzy, had a couple cups of coffee, and an hour later I was 100%: fully lucid, no shakes, no headache, nothing.  My tolerance is undiminished.

But I had an extremely important insight, a critical insight, driving to work: all addiction is based on a self deception. It is based on the idea that whatever it is WORKS, that you can in fact avoid the pain, that you can in fact avoid the struggle, that it is an answer.  It is a shelter from the storm, it is a place you can run to and get warm.

This is a lie.  There will always be that brief moment where truth appears, and is then submerged in a web of deceit and oblivion.  And the truth is that the addict wants to run, but they don’t know where to run to.  It rests in a primal fear which cannot be resisted or avoided finally, but about which lies can be told; which can be redirected into rationalizations which can last a lifetime, particularly when supported by altered states which diminish consciousness.  Sex, for the sex addict, is an altered state.  Work, for the workaholic, is an altered state–one of focused and sustained attention on ANYTHING but what they are avoiding.  Gambling is an altered state.  And booze and drugs, of course, that is what they do.

So what is the solution?  An alternative.  What alternative?  An endogenous positive state.  The ability to generate feelings of pleasure and warmth and connection without feeling the need to run away.

People like me, we are constantly forced to choose from among many bad options.  Alcohol does not particularly make me feel good, so much as stop me from feeling bad by muting all my emotions, when taken in sufficient quantity.  It is a narcotizing agent.  It dulls pain.  It is a depressant, formally.  Nothing in it is intended to induce feelings of euphoria.  Those are different drugs, and even those drugs–I have in mind cocaine and Ecstacy–force most people into a crash landing when they are done.  They wind up feeling worse than when they started.

Kum Nye numbers the exercises, and Kum Nye 5, which I am presently working on, has you find in your memory, or create in your imagination, or find in your body somewhere, a positive feeling.  You then focus on this feeling, amplify it, and try to expand it.  I call this sort of work “extending the thread”.  You have this coil of compacted and largely useless energy, and you untangle it–or allow it to untangle and extend itself–and something becomes more free, more expansive, and more comfortable.  Over time–shorter times for the non-traumatized, perhaps very long times for those with knots–this becomes a refuge of sorts.

The logic is obvious, even if not often stated: if you want positive states, why not PRACTICE them?  If you want a better free throw, you shoot free throws, and/or imagine shooting perfect free throws.  And from what we know of mental imagery, if you can’t visualize perfection, you will have a very hard time doing it for real.  Logically, then, you develop stable sources of positive energy in the quiet of your home, then over time learn to bring it into the world.

Yesterday I went to a bar and had one beer.  I wanted to see how I reacted to it.  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  That drug won’t work for me any more.  My addiction is done.  I’m going to continue for the time being not drinking at all, since it is an expensive habit even recreationally, and I would like a bit more practice, but I think I am now the person who can regularly do one and done.  The craving is gone.  The self deception is gone.

And I was thinking too of Dean Martin’s line “I pity people who don’t drink: when they wake up in the morning that is as good as they are going to feel.”  This made sense to me for a very long time.  I thought the booze was making me feel better.  I thought I was missing out.  But all I have to do is picture Dean slurring his words, offering incoherent thoughts, tripping on his way to the bathroom, and the mirage disappears.  No: my feeling good will be health, and a disciplined pursuit of endogenous pleasurable feelings.

One other thing: I was thinking about AA.  They have a 95% failure rate, and I think I can now guess why.  When people come to them they are usually in despair.  They drink so much that their personal lives are suffering: their relationships, their health, their job.  They get handed the Blue Book, and buddied up, and invited to future meetings.  They get told they are helpless, and to let a higher power–as embodied in a concrete group of like-habited people–take over.

Put another way, they are given somewhere else to run to.  Alcoholics are enthusiasts because there is an enormous well of emotional energy that underlies the need to run.  They are not calm people.  They are not dispassionate people.  Quite the opposite: they are driven people.  There is a devil at their heels and their life is spent trying to avoid and outrun it.

So they jump into AA, if they are going to, with both feet.  They become AA enthusiasts.  But at the end of the day, the devil never disappeared.  He is still waiting in the darkness and they know it.  The urge and need to run never disappeared.  The fear never disappeared.

AA creates a sort of magical circle of light, where they feel relatively safe, if the thing is going to work.  And even if only 5% make it, I suspect strongly that number is not evenly dispersed.  There are probably groups where half or more of the people make it. And there are probably groups where virtually no one makes it.  I know for a fact that there are groups where half the people are still alcoholics, who drink on the way to and from the meetings, but keep going because they like it, or it is court ordered, or it’s a good place to hook up and indulge a side sex addiction.  My local group is like that. I’ve been twice, and felt no common bond at all.  Everyone who had actually quit drinking lamented the loss of a friend, seemingly, and the fact that they were forced into giving up the friend because he was killing them.

There is even a word for people who give up drinking, but not their passion for it: dry drunks.  Dry drunks are typically irritable, edgy, moody.  They have not “done their work”, as they say.

But what I would say is the opposite of the first Step: you are NOT helpless.  God is not going to save you.  What you are is someone who has had the shit beat out of you by life, who has been chewed up and spit out alone.  You are someone for whom drinking is a logical, if ultimately unhelpful, solution to a real problem.  The problem does exist.  People forget this, in acting like drinking is somehow something one is born with a genetic predisposition to, or some nonsense like that.

It is simply the case that we don’t have the diagnostic apparatus to recognize many traumas, particularly of the developmental variety.  But really, how many people have the emotional wherewithal and strength to recognize narcissism in their parents?  It is a subtle malady, but one with absolutely devastating consequences.  I know, well, since both of mine are.  We seem to have a sort of dysfunctional psychic connection, since our intervals of long silence are typically punctuated at the very moment when I undergo some major surge in personal growth.  I accept it as emotional weight training.  If I have to tow a car behind me everywhere I go, when I let that fucking thing loose, I will be the Hulk with reason.

But I would like to emphasize this phrase Endogenously generated positive emotion.  In my view, this is the future of effective addiction treatment.  You have to have a place to call home, and it has to be pleasant, desirable, and, to state the obvious, not terrifying, which is where most addicts live in some part of their consciousness.  It is ideally complemented with social connection, but for those of us for whom trust comes slowly and is lost quickly, having something in us, which is controlled by us, is the most secure foundation from which to proceed outward.  If it is in me, it cannot be lost.  That is very important.  If growth is seen as a series of circles, each larger than the last, the center one is the individual sitting alone, feeling good.

I feel I could call this my Sobriety Day, but alcohol was never the monster.  Alcohol was my ally in hiding under the covers and pretending the monster couldn’t see me.  Where I am now, I see the monster IS me, too.  I see my own evil, my own violence.  I feel like there are countless threads radiating from me, and I can see now that some of them are dark, and they are my own.  They are no one elses.

And there is something beautiful in all this.  Coming home is realizing I have always been my own enemy, but that I don’t need to be any more.  I can embrace my evil.  Our minds do so well creating inner/outer, here/there dichotomies, but our selves are never that simple.  They are made of cloth with many different strings.

The word Tantra seems to be related to this concept.  I am in that sense a Tantric.  It is all connected.   I will do my best to lie no more.

Never get too far away from the spirit of children playing.

The essence of propaganda is reducing conversation, consideration, reflection to an absolute minimum, and ideally eradicating it entirely.  As Jacques Ellul framed it, there are really two types: agitation propaganda, and integration propaganda.

In the first, you want to get people upset.  All the nonsense about North Carolina passing a law saying the boys use the boys room and the girls use the girls room was agitation propaganda.  “They are evil.”  “They must be stopped.”  “This will not stand.”  “This is an outrage.”  Etc.  They want to get people upset and to take action of some sort, such as a boycott.

That this whole thing consisted entirely in propaganda is evidenced clearly by the fact that none of the States with similar laws were targeted, and none of the nations where homosexuality is a capital offense were even mentioned.  I think all thinking people should be able to look at this and see pervasive and incontrovertible evidence of a conditioned response that has been inserted into large masses of our population.  If you say “Jump” in the right way, they give it all they got.  They don’t bother asking how high.  If there is any question. they rightly assume they can just look at those around them.

The other sort is integration propaganda, which is intended to calm people down, and deter them from action.  This would be the sort of thing which says that NSA spying is perfectly OK, that it doesn’t matter where Obama was born or who his real father was.  It says “you are one of us now, and we will do the thinking.  What a relief that will be, right?  We are lightening the load of life.  We are your friends, and fellow soldiers, your family.  Everything will be fine, because we say it will.”

Which of course reminds me of the final scene in Fight Club, where somebody is saying how everything will be fine while we are watching buildings collapsing in the background.

But to get to my point–and I know this is something I say often, so this is somewhat redundant, but this is how I explore, by saying similar things in slightly different ways–we have reached a condition which was the end goal of this long term purpose specific propaganda, which is a large mass of people in this country who can be relied on never to think for themselves, to hate on command, and who value enormously their membership in this social grouping.

Who fights these people?  Can it be a limp wristed pussy?  Whoever it is can reliably assume they will be called every name in the book, some names that never occurred to them (like conserveretard toon, as I was called by a Vanderbilt professor who likely therein reached the acme of his potential and talent), and vilified on a 24/7 basis by nearly every alleged “information” outlet around the world.  You have to be able to take that, laugh at it, and dish it back.  Donald Trump does that.  We can ask no more, in this fallen world.

I think this metaphor, which is very deeply embedded in the American psyche, best expresses the hopes of those of us who support Trump.  We don’t know if he will let us down, but my sense is that his need for applause, his love of approval, will work reliably to cause him to do most of the things he says he will do; and what appears to be a common sense morality and sense of fairness, the rest.

Such is the hope.  We have had a clown for a sheriff for too long, who has been actively conspiring with the men in black, from several different gangs.

And I will comment, too, how ODD it is that the Left really seems not to GET why people get mad at them.  When they call us racists and bigots, somehow they fail to grasp that we find it offensive because we, too, hate bigots and racists, but are completely innocent of the charge.

Somehow they don’t get that 8 years of relentless insults and name-calling are being remembered in this election cycle, that the silence they bought in some small measure through aggressive bullying has never been consent to their reckless schemes, relentless lying, and thirst for blood and destruction.