Month: December 2016

Be that as it may, I was gratified to read a comment today that felt like something I could have written, except that some of these facts–I assume they are facts, being certainly plausible–were unknown to me.  This is good enough it warrants reposting.

It is a response to this article, calling for manna to fall from heaven to the coloreds (it is a racist article, and warrants descriptive words which are likewise racist) of America, because racism.

People long for connection to the past, to culture, to something received, as opposed to things perennially new, created, artificial.  The whole thing about men using women’s bathrooms: that is manufactured.  It is perhaps the deep rooted fear of realizing the manufactured nature of this controversy which creates so much anger.  The cost of losing is realizing that they have become fully rootless, and utterly lost in a present which has nothing for them, and a future that has less, at least on that path.

I do feel even they process the coming digital future as mean, cold and uncaring.  I certainly do, but even if people don’t see this directly, I feel that these images appeal instinctively on a mythic level.

I will add that the Spaniard seemed latently to evoke the “Republicans” (crypto-Stalinists in my own phraseology) in the Spanish Civil War.  If there was ever a romantic–and utterly misguided and foolish–rebellion, it was that in Spain.  And it was brutal on both sides.  They got that much right.

These avoidances are highly logical, but cannot end well.  Only in knowing that fear and hurt, by befriending it, by connecting primitive feelings with present power, present kindness, present “parenting”, one might and with justice could say, can these places be cleared for more effective, more peaceful, happier living.

Most people are driven all their lives in directions they do not understand.  This is masked by obsessions, and accidentally-on-purpose long and short term fuck-ups of all sorts.  That, in any event, has been my own experience.  I have always known I am much too smart to be this stupid, but I have not been able to find an alternative.  Every time I tried to leave the cage I was prodded with pointed sticks, and could in any event not find the door.

However, I think I have now found it, perhaps them.

My good nights are my drunk nights.  My bad nights are sober.  I am trying to encourage the latter presently, and all sorts of visions frequently come through me. [Edit: I have as yet no symptoms whatsoever of alcoholism, and I hope I never do.  I am speaking of dreams, and traumatic eruptions in my sleep, of the sort which make the prospect of pursuing a girlfriend more problematic than for many people.  I am trying, again, to quick drinking, but without the feeling of losing a friend, which is what breeds relapse.  A clean break is the product of doing your work, which is what I try to further a little bit each and every day, and feel warranted in saying I do.]

Since I feel many things, and have long allowed what is wicked and ugly in me access to my conscious awareness, I see many things.  You cannot accurately identify a feeling you have never felt, but I have felt most of them.

I feel the insanity on the Left at the moment.  In large numbers they are in full blown limbic activation, some even in the freeze response.  One can reasonably ask, why?  How could educated people in such large numbers fall into and STAY in such a primitive response?  After all, the POINT of a Liberal education is to teach more effective use of the frontal cortex, of the reasoning and social brain, and to facilitate the development of the ability to interact within the domain of reason and shared interest with various sorts of people.  Peaceful coexistence among diverse peoples depends on it.  The alternative is an emotionally rooted tribalism, which can and has led to most human conflict in human history, and is the antithesis of the claimed aims of diversity which animate the RHETORIC of the Left.

The answer, self evidently, is that they do in fact live at the tribal level, at the limbic level.  As the old saying goes, you can’t reason your way out of positions you didn’t reason your way into.  All these people were simply led down a primrose path which they were told was the path of emotional simplicity, goodness, social inclusion, and the cessation of the need to worry about the future.  Trust, and all will be taken care of is the mantra of the Left.

A cult, in other words.  And for the same reason some people get REALLY upset when their sports team loses the big game–even though it doesn’t actually affect their lives in any way many take it very personally–the member of the cult of Identity, self evidently, stake their sense of self on belonging with this group, whose power is their source of solace, whose power is their sense of safety.

That power was soundly rejected, on a national level.  They can no longer assume that they and theirs are in control, and since they have relocated all their conscious awareness of their own hatred, genuine racism, greed, violence, etc. into psychological projections of the hated Other, they see visions of destruction and doom which would overwhelm most of us, even if most of us would never allow ourselves to get that mentally ill in the first place.

If they were so great, then why are Cubans forbidden to leave, and put in jail if they criticize the government?

There is no answer to this.  These points are obvious, of course, but we are locked in a long term battle for human decency and basic truth, and it never hurts to continue efforts to refine winning arguments.

The problem, of course, is that most Leftists now refuse to interact in any fashion with people who disagree with them, and not infrequently fly into violent rages at the mere mention of ideational “alterity”, to use an academic word.

Note:  Folks, I bought some cigars, so I will likely have more to say in coming days.  If you like my sort of shit, then this will likely be the sort of shit you like.

  And he talks about titration as well, which is bringing in bits at a time, but in a slightly more steady stream.  That in any event is how I take him.

The difference I think is that in pendulation you are still dissociated more or less fully.  Those feelings exist in a subterranean space that is of course always functionally present, but rarely consciously present.  It might manifest as dread, or paranoia, an underlying sadness, something missing which you can’t quite place.  Contacting it at all is a revelation, and not a very fun one.

In my own case, it seems to be the case that somewhere around age 5 I submitted fully to the idea that I would never be loved and that life was hopeless, completely.  I did not do this consciously, and of course children are resilient, and for long periods of time life itself can keep such feelings at bay.  But I entered this energy the other day.  I entered the feeling of being completely dependent, fully helpless, in the care of someone I feared was going to kill me, and who only rarely made me feel wanted.

If I am honest, I cannot ever remember truly feeling that my mother–or anyone else–loved me.  To this moment, I am not sure I really know what the feeling of love is, although I do think I felt it for my children.  They certainly feel it for me.  I did my job well where they were concerned, even if my issues prevented me from being as effective as I might otherwise have been.  Given what I was otherwise feelings, I think I performed a miracle, to be honest.

Titration is, I think, a more advanced practice, where you maintain, as well as possible, both your old awareness, the one that allowed you to survive, but keep as a companion an awareness that around you somewhere is this other energy that you need to dip into from time to time, and that the process, while sometimes unpleasant, is in the end extremely healthy, and the path to emotional freedom and healing.

Titration can easily lead sometimes to pendulation.  You just have to get out of that place, and return somewhere safer.  But it is the path forward.

I have to laugh–and I do have a gallows humor sometimes–that all my work has been to get to the point where I can now begin the REAL work, which is discharging that energy.

But I have had moments of peace in the past few days, moments where all those old feelings cease briefly, and I feel, I think, like most non-traumatized people feel most of the time.  Progress continues.  My commitment is absolute, even if I do have to take breaks sometimes.

As always, I confess these things, to whom I know not, in the hope of sharing my human journey.  In the end, all is always revealed, and practicing transparency and openness here on Earth is, I feel, useful.  Certainly for me, but perhaps for you too.  Be brave.

I am a happy drunk, and have many times been told the next day that I was profoundly amusing.  I love everyone when I am drunk, and I feel all their pain.

I feel deeply about many things, feelings that show on my face, which sometimes scare people.  I am in the process of trying to process some deep, deep things in my life, in my past, and oceans sometimes rush on me.  I am a man.  I can deal with it.  I have balls.

But oh, the floods, sometimes.  I would be hard pressed to communicate to anyone the grief, the sadness, the terrors that sometimes fall upon me.  They cannot be shared.  They are mine alone.  And it is good.  I chose this.  I truly believe this.  You should not praise a drill instructor who accepts anything but excellence.

My job, as I see it at present, is to remain present to these deep feelings, and the overall mission, the point of all this, is for me to learn to recover from deep feeling.  To feel deep sadness, to go into it completely, then to slowly come back out of that abyss and feel normally, to be a normal human being, having learned what that abyss feels and looks like.  To explore, and to have the balls to walk into hell, and the recuperative capacity to heal afterwards, and feel and act like a normal human being.

I went into a local bar where I have become a regular, and they have a woman working there who can work a room of men better than anyone I have ever seen.  It is amazing: she can keep 10 men thinking they stand a chance for hours, and thinking when they leave that the next visit is the one that will do it.  Self evidently, she is people smart.  She took one look at me tonight and asked me if I was tired, or grumpy or something else.  I told her the truth, which is that I can feel 5 different things at the same time, and I wasn’t sure which one was predominating, although it was likely grief.  I went to see the movie Arrival last night, and it touched me deeply and I was pondering the role of fate in all our lives.  Maktub?  Feelings flow into me, and I seemingly have the stamina few possess to tolerate their company for long periods of time.

The further truth is that all of us can feel many things at once, but few of us can stay in touch with all those feelings.  Most of us choose one or two, and stick with them.

I am an intellectual, but one who dives deeply into sensations that terrify me.  But what is life without balls?  What is life without risk?  What would be life with perfect security?  If there is nothing out there that can consume me, how can I learn the value of life?  Without daring, what is love?

Presently I have four beers, a bottle of wine, and about 4 ounces of vodka in me, so take all that into consideration.  All of this is truth serum for me, though, and I truly appreciate it.  I thank God for it.  I will push through this phase of my life, but if you could feel what I feel, see what I see, you would understand the mercy offered by intoxication, self poisoning, and following resurrections.

When most of us hear this word, we think of someone who thinks about themselves all the time, who never considers others, who always wants to be the focus of attention.  This is somewhat true, but it implies choice.

What seems obvious to me now is that such people are made defective very early in their lives by what I suppose we could call Disconnection Trauma.  When as infants or toddlers they seek mirroring behavior in their caregivers, it is absent.  They share their feelings, and nobody cares, nobody responds appropriately, in an “attuned” fashion.  This is horrifying and not processable by someone that age.  So instead they seek from themselves the reactions and feedback that was absent in their environment.  They learn, at a very early age, and well before formal memory development, that they can trust only in themselves, that they must make a world of themselves, that–this is important–there is no one else out there, or else they would have cared for them, and nurtured them.

So at root it is a muted or absent capacity for emotional connection and intimacy.  It is precisely a defect, a gap, evidence of a loss long ago.  It is a type of trauma, and should I think best be labeled as such, particularly if we are to develop methods for helping people cope with these sorts of primal losses.