Month: September 2016

There is a profound difference between “I have a path”, and “you must follow my path.”

I might say we all wonder through the woods in our own way.  We cross the endless eddies and currents of the sea in our own way.  A path is an evolving thing.  You can feel it being created, but you are not exactly the one doing it.  That is why, while you have influence, it is more like it is being made for you.

It seems to me that the universe is an endless concatenation of Rube Goldberg devices, where many critical junctures are Schroedinger’s Cat sorts of indeterminacies, that only come into being once a decision is made.

And it seems to me that the path of wisdom, and the fundamental method for dealing with and embracing change, which is our main task in this life, is treating this universe as interesting.  How UNEXPECTED.  I did not see that coming.  Well, this is interesting.  Where is the opportunity?  How can I surf this wave and enjoy it?

People who need you to do what they are doing have not, at root, found their OWN path.  They have not connected experientially with the ebbs and flows of life, and learned to interact with them in creative ways.  The compulsion to push others should likely, at the end of the day, be seen as a covert method of pushing oneself into something you don’t want either.  It is a way of pushing away fear.

I find myself speculating on this with difficulty, because I have never felt, as far as I can recall, any need to force my views on anyone else.  I persuade continually–indeed I argued continually about everything for many years, and still do sometimes–but I certainly don’t want to be copied.

It occurs to me Trump is having fun in this campaign.  Like most people, I instinctively like and tend to trust to a certain point people who know how to have fun.  It implies at a minimum they are not OCD ideologues, and at best a generosity of spirit and outlook, that I think does genuinely characterize Trump.

Obama comes across as a sour-faced scold, does he not?  Whatever the words he is given, he always turns them into a lecture about how bad you are and how good he is.  Trump is more like “life’s great!!!  Come join me on the podium.”

I was pondering today that final healing from the sorts of wounds that get expressed as addictions requires understanding the part of you that pushed you into those behaviors.  It is not mental understanding.  It is not describing what happened.

What it is is finding a qualitative gestalt within yourself, an array of sensations and feelings and thoughts, all conjured together in a sort of knot in your nervous system, contacting this gestalt, and doing Kum Nye with it: you contact the whole thing, enter into it, merge it with the breath, and expand it.

What I felt tonight doing my practice is that this part is inherently something that has had internal violence done to it, over and above the violence that created the initial traumatization.

Think about it: when something horrible happens, especially when you are a kid, and especially when it was done by cold and thoughtless, or even intentionally cruel parents or other people supposed to protect you, you still have to function.  You still have to show up to life, even though it terrifies you.  You have to go to school.  You have to be a good boy or girl, and continue to do what you are told.

How do you do this?  Push the pain back in the hole.  This is violence.  This is a separation made necessary by the need to survive.

You know what?  That is exactly what Tom Waits is talking about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw2MjRcVO4g

The Devil: he has a string in all of us that can be plucked, and it is a long time before it stops vibrating. For some, it never does.

Healing, then, is done with compassion.  It involves communicating to this part that as imperfect as your psychological command and control structure is, as imperfect as agency necessarily is when dissociation is present, that you will do your best never to act out in anger to this part, and to include it in your thoughts and prayers, to take it with you wherever you go, and to spend time with it, talking.

I am in the final stages of this healing, and I’m trying to figure out how to approach it.  This is what makes the most sense to me at the moment, and I thought I would share.  I hope it does someone some good.

It seems to me that tolerance is a mid-point between enmity and understanding.  You don’t speak of tolerating people you love.  There is a continuum between close friend and enemy.  Somewhere in the middle a modus vivendi can be crafted by the wise.

And as I ponder it, it seems to me what the word is INTENDED to connote is a situation in which the behavior of someone is mildly or greatly bothering you, but you choose to tolerate it, to put up with it, to let it be and let it go, because it is either not worth making the fuss, or because on a level of principle you have decided not to allow your own feelings about something to cause you to react with social or physical violence.  Putting up with flag burners as a matter of principle would be an example.

Here is the key point: if there is no internal friction, that is not tolerance.  And in this regard I would differentiate psychologically mature tolerance from the childlike and irresponsible version on full view in Europe and large segments of America.

Tolerance is “I have feelings and habits, and you have different feelings and habits, but we can still get along in peace.”  This is mature.  This is Liberal.

What the Left–what paid and professional agitators funded by that demonic wart George Soros and his ilk–do, is they say “you don’t get any feelings.  If you object, we will shout at you, insult you, attempt to marginalize you, and throw hate at you.”

Anyone who accepts this proposal is displaying a profound lack of psychological boundaries, of mature defenses, of personal agency, of moral discipline. You have submitted your own ego to the control of mutable Others.  This, again, is what happens with the headless ones, as I call them.  It does not lead to genuine tolerance, real peace, or any form of meaningful happiness.

OCD is anxiety with a terminus. It is a way of regularly grounding the Lightning.

Could we call leftists Hydrophobes?  They are afraid of the concept of purity, and of deep feeling, and it is a synonym for rabid.

I was listening to The Doors the other day and noticing Jim Mortison talked about freedom a lot. Most of the counterculture did back then. They don’t now. Rather than doing their own thing, they all do the same thing and feel entitled to demand the same if he rest of us.

If I were President, I would schedule a low key, informal meeting of the worlds leaders, and see if we couldn’t figure out some map to a future all of us would want to live in. The people “planning” our future don’t like most of us. I like America, but see no reason to pick fights. How can we all get along together? How can world leaders build effective and real friendships?

I am increasingly realizing that pendulating my own trauma is quite necessary–in and out, in and out–but that dealing with other peoples emotions requires some complex, intuitive coming in and out too.

There is benefit to sympathy, to feeling what others feel. But we also live in a world where something is tugging on this sense continually, every day, and most moments of that day.  If you look, you can find, as you choose, something to gratify, horrify, sadden, or gladden you, each and every day.

To my mind it is superficial to focus ONLY on the positive.  And it is masochistic to focus only on the negative.  It is possible to process both, without a large distance, but with some distance.  You see it, you acknowledge it, but you are not compelled to feel the obvious feelings.  Your feelings are your own.  My feelings are my own.

Maturity–boundary protecting–in this world requires the ability to recognize, to see, to process, to not overlook, what other people are feeling, without also getting caught up in it.

I saw this clearly today.

Math represents a static order. Nothing is in motion. No spontaneous evolution is possible.

Complexity represents order in motion. It is inherently robust and resilient as an order.

Imposed orders are inherently unresilient and weak. That is why on going coercion is necessary.

Many intellectuals–this is indeed perhaps the defining attribute of their cognitive depravities–want to use the mathematical model, the static model, in order to understand systems in motion. Such is the Marxian Dialectic Materialism. Such is the concept of “structural” white privilege. No such thing “exists”. It is posited as a static trait of moving objects.

I would assert that any system you can understand fully is not complex.

Given that the vanity of these emotion driven talking heads is that THEY can understand the world, the tendency is virtually irresistible to want to hack the world into simpler pieces, to satisfy weak egos driven by anxiety ridden minds and in general weak and clumsy bodies.

I value strength. Very little good comes from weakness, whereas much good comes with disciplined strength.

It occurs to me that the fundamental project of all authoritarians–and variants of the Leftist pathology are recorded early on in Chinese history, where they had de facto Communo-fascists ( to be clear, the rulers are never equal to the people in any authoritarian system by definition, so a devout dictatorship is equal to the results Communists always achieve in reality, if not in rhetoric, which is to say propaganda)–is to decrease systemic complexity.  Reducing the number of people empowered as individual agents inherently makes the system less complex, less robust, less interesting.

Early on, all aspiring tyrants learn they have to pander to the people until they get the weapons of the government under their control, and directed at a disarmed populace (guns, it occurs, to me, add complexity as well: to the extent they are distributed evenly they equate in some respects to distributed physical power).

Socialists of course appeal directly to greed: everybody wants more of everything, with less work.  They appeal latently to people’s sense of envy and resentment.  But of course this always fails.  Other peoples money runs out.  The promises can’t be kept, even if an echo chamber can be created between the government, community “leaders”, and the media, saying “everything is great, everything is wonderful.”

But what can be enlisted in their service, which has no practical limit?  Self pity.  Grievance.  The sense that the world owes you something, and that this is a moral claim, and that you can and should feel righteous anger at everyone who is not like you.  This justifies failure. It justifies lack of effort.  It nurtures the latent narcissism in weak people, and grants them a sense of self esteem which feels like the real thing, but which hasn’t been earned in any way.  It mobilizes anger, and makes it politically useful.  Because after all, the people proclaiming your victimhood MUST have your best interests at heart, right?  Right?

Of course not, jackasses.  Don’t be so fucking stupid.

It seems as well to me that a primary spiritual goal in most religions is inner peace; finding tranquility in an unfair, often hostile, unreliable and difficult world.  We read most these days about “fulfillment” and “meaning”, since these are needs, too, which seemingly are more important than peace, since for most of us life is, if anything, too easy, certainly in comparison with the lives of most of those 100 years ago and on back into prehistory.

But as far as peace, in what does it consist?  Systematically reducing the number of things which “trigger” you.  If someone offers you anger, offer them peace.  If someone wrongs you, deal with it without resentment.  Much of Christianity is about not being triggered, and using that as a path to deep, soul level relaxation.

So logically, if building inner peace consists in reducing your triggers, then the opposite would both be increasing the number of things that trigger you, and systematically seeking not to learn how to deal with it, but to change the outer world to reflect your inner disharmony and weakness.

Virtue, as I see it, is nothing but a reflection of psychological laws which exist at the level of instinct, body, and spiritual awareness.  It is not a set of rules for what you “must” do–I have in mind here both old notions of an ontologically rooted morality, and the more modern “angels on the head of a needle” versions of streetcars and quests for “perfect” moral decisions in complex perceptual environments–so much as rules of the game if you want to win at life.

Have a simple code.  Live by it.  Understand some failures are likely if not inevitable.

My own:

Reject self pity

Persevere

Be Curious.

It seems to me that the answer to nearly all political and social questions is “more complexity”.  “More freedom” is implied, but complexity is the point of freedom.

I had a relevant experience today, but without sharing it, I will ask: would you want to live in a world completely, utterly, systematically, deprived of apparent randomness?  Do you want to live in a world where nothing unexpected ever happens?

Me: fuck, fuck no.  Whatever happened to me–and in a nutshell something unexpected happened and I reacted as an asshole, because that is my default–I interrogated, and asked: what was that about?  And I got an interesting and unexpected answer.  This could not have happened, if something unexpected had not happened.

Most of Taoism can be summarized as a plea from the 6th century BC for complexity, and Hayekian Extended Orders.  Perfect morality is inherently flawed.  We have prisms through which this makes complete sense.  Fuck: observation will do.