Month: December 2016

What, really, is the point of pointing out that the many networks and publications who lied to get Hillary elected do not somehow constitute credible sources now that their lies have been exposed?  Does any sane person need to be told that?  No, of course not. And the rest can’t be told anything.  Regrettably, “the rest” constitutes a rather large number.

I will comment here simply that the current head of the CIA was a Communist in 1976, not too long before the CIA hired him.  He was asked to choose between Ford and Carter, and chose instead the Communist.  Ask yourself: is Communism an evanescent thing among diligent, disciplined, intelligent young people?  Was Communism an obviously desirable alternative to what we might broadly call “Americanism” in the immediate aftermath of the chosen loss of the war in Vietnam?  Did good things happen to the South Vietnamese, or the Cambodians?

What seems more likely: that Brennan had a moment, then became a solid and staunch believer in the American Way; or that he had an epiphany, that he could undermine the “American Way” THROUGH the American way, by becoming a Fifth Columnist?

Fuck the CIA.  With luck, Trump will eviscerate them.  Me personally, I would fire everyone promoted under Obama, fire Brennan, fire everyone he ever so much as had coffee with, and put in place career military whose loyalty to America, our Constitution, and our ideals, was beyond doubt.

I have not forsworn booze yet–at least since the last time I did–so I have decided to get drunk tonight, because it is raining.  Rain always makes me want to drink.  Perhaps so I dissolve in one of the streams.  When the drunk Russian in Nostalghia says the flooded church feels like Russia, I feel Russian too.

And it hit me, sitting on my couch, that the core malady of addicts of all sorts is the inability to find genuine deep solace, comfort and sense of safety in any other human being.  Your drug is your friend.  Your drug is reliable.  Your drug won’t let you down.  I’ve said this before, but perhaps not this way.  Or perhaps exactly this way, and I”m mimicking the drunken O’Malley brothers (the one about the two men at a bar finding all the things they share in common)

I will add I had an unpleasant truth intrusion tonight, something which I recognized immediately as absolutely valid and relevant, but which hurt me.  And it occurred to me that in a healthy person the ego expands and contracts regularly.  Not even that: the sense of self expands and contracts.  Sometimes you are acutely aware of being you–and fine with that fact, in a healthy system–and sometimes your sense of self fades completely as you partake in larger wholes.  It is an organic, natural, adaptive process.

When spiritual teachers speak of eradicating the ego, the intelligent, sane, useful ones (a minority in my view among those who aspire to claim your mind and allegiance) intend learning to loosen what amount to spasms in the emotional and perceptual body.  What came to me was a spasm, a holding, a clinging which held on in no small measure because it was unseen, unrecognized.

It came to me too that the “shadow” self has no need to hide.  It is always there, influencing your thoughts, your decisions, your actions.  What can happen, with diligence, commitment, and honesty, is that you learn to see it standing behind patterns you know intimately, and which you have to learn, once you have seen this goblin, to see differently.  Perhaps you are not the saint you thought you were.  Perhaps you are not innocent of bigotry and hate.  Perhaps some part of you wants to set fire to everything you see, but your smile at everything and everyone has blinded you to this fact.

I am a cynic in many ways, but under that cynicism, I see why people go mad, why most people stay mad, and on some level what it means to be human, living in the “human condition”.

Open the door.

Oh, Lord, may those I want to serve always need me more than I need them.  May they never go anywhere, become free, or cease in their desire to be helped.  May they be ever helpless, and may they always look to me as the God I aspire to be.  Amen.

I watched this movie a couple of weeks ago.  As I wake up this morning, I realize that the real theme of the movie is solitude.  I say this because the version I saw came with an alternate ending where the main zombie just wanted to get his girl back.  Will Smith gives her back, the zombies leave, and he heads to Vermont with the girl and the boy.  They quietly hope he is wrong and she is right, and they drive into the rising sun.

There are also four short animated features, each grimmer than the last.  In the first, the last girl alive in Hong Kong writes a suicide note then jumps off a bridge.  In the second an escaped convict finds himself trapped in the prison he just escaped.  In the third (or second: I may be confusing the order, and my memory is a little hazy) Latin American troops gun down both the medical personnel and the people they are treating.  Three kids watch it, and as I recall, one of the kids winds up infected too.

In the last and to my mind worst, a young girl in India is ordered by her father to go to a shelter they have, but she defies him and goes to see a young boy she is in love with.  She comes back eventually, and her father will not let her in, since he fears she may be infected.  They tell her they left her food, and will let her in in 48 hours if she is not yet infected.  She is infected, and slowly goes mad with hunger.  At some point, the door opens, and she sees only ghouls in the vault, and kills and eats one, her father.  Then she goes to find her boyfriend, who is also hungry, and brings him back to the vault, where they kill the rest of the family.

To my mind, this whole zombie thing relates to the regression to a primitive social state while still within an outwardly normal social context.  We Americans–but to some extent much of the West, and perhaps even the world–feel primitive rages, the compulsion for ritual activity that is driven by neurological knots, feel isolated and alienated because we have not yet graduated to higher spiritual states, and no longer have access to ritual mass death, mass hate, mass violence, as seen in wars and true bigotry.

To comment on the specific metaphor, I think a young Indian girl radicalized to left wing politics by indoctrination by her professors would fit this metaphor well.  She no longer loves in any traditional way.  She no longer feels affection for her family, her people, her country.  She no longer exists as part of a whole.  Her mind is warped, her nobler emotions blunted, her sense of anger and violence sharpened, and her capacity to attack her own family at the core of its being well developed.

To return to Will Smith, ponder someone fully alienated in New York City.  They are surrounded by people all day long, but they feel alone.  There may as well be no one on the street.  Perhaps they can trust their dog.  We all get that, I think. This is why “I am Legend” could easily end differently.  A number of other endings would have worked just as well.  What if Will Smith had become a zombie with his dog and taken to still roaming the streets, but only at night?  He would have adapted, but kept his dog. That actually would have been more congruent with the animated endings.

I read in the Old Testament something like “with wisdom comes sorrow”, but I increasingly feel that pains have textures, and pain is rarely pure, rarely unmixed with joys, and sensations and feelings which are simply interesting, new, different, if we allow them through in their pristine purity.  This is perhaps one root of masochism, although of course there are others I won’t get into here.

And the other day it occurred to me that observing my emotions was like watching fish in a large tank.  They swim around, but they don’t affect me.  And I felt, why not expand the tank?  Why not allow my emotions range within a wider and wider universe?  They sparkle and change.  What they are one minute they may not be the next.  I don’t control them: I can merely control my focus of attention, and in some cases suppress awareness of what I am feeling, or substituting one emotion for another: perhaps anger for sadness, obsession for helplessness.

I am those emotions, and I am not those emotions.  The I can travel back and forth, and this traveling itself is a form of spiritual growth.  But I do feel the image of emotions in motion at a distance–as opposed to being frozen in amber, in an eternal static form of the sort engendered by true dissociation–is growth as well.  One can enter the “amber” as well, but what it is is a hologram that always enacts the exact same thing, in the exact same order, eternally.

So much of life is softening what is hard, finding new motion in old circles, and realizing how much larger we are than is immediately apparent.  The tacit notion that we are all machines exists at a primitive level, it is bred into us from an early age, and it is both quite pernicious and quite superable.

Psychologically, do we not need to bond with people, places, and things for optimal well being?  I would argue that a certain amount of “nestedness”, when combined with a general openness to the new in all forms, is precisely what most modern people are missing, and that efforts to denigrate possessions, a la John Lennon, are misguided.  Clearly, in the developed world we need less than we have, but only in order, I feel, to value what remains more.  We need some things.  Native Americans had them, and so do all “primitive” peoples.  They don’t own “nothing”.  They just don’t have ten room mansions, and 4 car garages; and some of what they do have, particularly ceremonial items, is sacred to them.

I just waded my way through an old Soviet era silent film called “Earth”, by Aleksandr Dovzhenko.  He had been cited by Tarkovsky as an influence, and as with Bresson and Antonioni, I felt the need to check him out.  I described it to my kids as quite possibly the most pretentious things I have ever watched.

Stylistically, with the long shots on nature, on apples, on fields of grain, on scenes of people doing ordinary things, one could clearly see echoes of this work in Tarkovsky.

But it was also a propaganda film.  To the extent it had a theme, it was the overtaking of “old” ways by new motorized farming, as exemplified in a tractor, and which itself symbolized the end of personal land through coerced collectivising. The chief exemplar of the new way, the aspiring Commissar and de facto bully, was played by an actor who made him look like a serial killer who had simply not been caught yet (and who was himself killed, by a “reactionary”, which is to say someone who did not want his land stolen by a snarling bunch of bullies).

You get, although this was not the intention, the patent jealousy and vindictiveness that was barely under the surface, if concealed at all, in the Soviet project.  All the riff-raff get to go steal from the rich farmers.  It would be as if in the modern day members of the poorest neighborhoods got to simply walk into the homes of the richest and take whatever they wanted.  This was a Soviet theme, and it was a Nazi theme.  Both played to the worst human instincts.

And this film was of particular interest in that it came out in 1930, some three years before Stalin starved millions in the Ukraine to punish them for not cooperating with what amounted to an effort to industrialize and thus dehumanize, the agricultural sector.  Where you had a plot of earth, however small, to call your own, now you were just one of many working on what for all intents and purposes could become an endless field.  You did not keep the fruits of your labor, and could not call anything your own.  You became a cog in an endless machine, one not operated for you, or really for anyone else.  It was simply one more way of causing you pain, which is the true purpose of all Leftisms.

It is odd that Marx saw clearly the alienation which mechanizing work brings, and yet such a process was ubiquitously undertaken in his name, at least within the Soviet sphere of influence (Cambodia and Year Zero is another story).

I feel keenly the emotional retardation and shortsightedness which underlies totalitarian impulses.  All these people–all the Communists, all the Nazis, all the Fascists in Spain and Italy–make reasonable decisions given their world views.  As one example, many people who believe in Global Warming would, if they could, have anyone who disagrees with them literally put in jail.  People who are surprised at the sundry leaks which have sprung up in their propaganda bubble want to criminalize all those who report news they have not doctored, reviewed, or been given the chance to suppress first.  Goebbels and Lenin certainly would have appreciated the irony of the people doing the lying and indoctrinating accusing everyone else of it.

All you have to do to generate authoritarianism is combine absolute certainty with political power.  The rest follows naturally.  “Errors” are punished, and nothing wrong is seen in this, since they are after all mistakes.  That true errors cannot be detected in such a system is a thought which is foreign to the system. One must elevate ones thinking a level or two, which is where true Liberalism makes its appearance.  Rule by authority is a rule by arrogance, and arrogance, as de Bono points out, is always an error in the future.

It is also odd that such atavistic emotions and thoughts should be so common among people educated in a world which exemplifies the alternative to the various Fascisms, and who are STILL too stupid to see what is literally everywhere in front of them.

I get psychopathology.  I have felt most of the emotions which underlie it, and grown beyond them.  But I continue to be puzzled at how so many people can be so stupid for so long.  No important truths are more than a Google search away.  The books are on the shelves, the documentaries on Netflix and elsewhere on the internet.  The knowledge is readily available.

One can hope that sanity somehow finds its way back into the addled minds of those who educate our young.

It is odd that the one nation most obsessed with a recent racist past is importing in large numbers the one ethnic group among whom admiration remains for the Nazis and anti-Semitism.  It is odd that their stand “against” racism is creating a climate of hate and fear among what Jews remain in Europe.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, if you fail to learn the lesson the first time.  Outer forms do not matter.  Structures in hidden motion do.

I’m  not sure how my description of some of my experiences sounds, but I would like to suggest that if they allowed themselves, most addicts would experience similar things.  That is the POINT of addiction: to keep such things contained, at bay, in a box or a drawer that, with the help of sex/work/weed/heroin/booze they can keep closed.

I am not unusual.  Where I think I might be a bit unusual–and “fake modesty” is not yet on the Verboten list, but I still see no reason to practice it–is in the extent of my ability to contact negative experiences, and not just stay with them, but to enter into them.  I feel fear often, but I do not fear fear. It is simply a color in my day, which I see and acknowledge, and which I am in the process of mastering.  I rub elbows with it, I dance “cheek to cheek” with it, to borrow a metaphor popular with the main Kum Nye teachers.

So many people endure wounds before age 5 that never get healed. I can’t guess at the number, and I doubt very much most professionals can do more than hazard a best estimate.  This is so hard to measure, and the very notion of Developmental Trauma, although intuitively obvious, has only really entered the mainstream, as far as I can tell, in the last 20 years or less.  Prior to that, it was assumed that absent the COGNITIVE ability to form memories, that environment mattered little.  This seems at least to have been the de facto notion, although even on the face of it it is stupid.  We are animals, and even dogs remember who kicked them.

I continue to pendulate and titrate my Developmental Trauma.  I contact a chthonic energy–existence level fear, hate, or helplessness–and allow it to be for a time.  Then I get drunk.  When I sober up, I try again to allow that energy some expression.  And so on.  As time goes on, I am gradually decreasing the need for alcohol, I think–and many a drunk has said this many times–for good.  It has been some weeks since I brought hard liquor into my home, although I have twice in the past two weeks closed down some local bars, which is saying something since they close at 4am.

And of course all the “deep” stuff comes up: what am I doing with my life, how will I feel when my parents die, how will I feel when I am facing death, where is this world going, have I done what I could for my kids in building a better world, what are the limits of the possibility of my responsibility, etc.  It’s hard facing these questions alone.  Most people don’t like going to these places, because most people instinctively avoid painful questions for which there are no ready and obvious answers outside of submission in some given order, most obviously a church, or bleak cynicism.  I suppose I can understand the anger with which dogmatic atheists hold their views:  the possibility of hope scares them more than their certainty of extinction.

On one level I am definitely a fuck up.  I am a highly intelligent person with no career.  I am not an engineer, or doctor, or scientist, or lawyer, or academic.  I don’t own the place where I live.  Many months I am hand to mouth, not least because my obsessions and poorly regulated grief often cause me to manage my money poorly.

But I ask myself: what was the criteria by which you intended to live your life?  What was the managing purpose, the theme, the goal?  And my answer is simple: life is about learning to know oneself, and about service to others.  And the one thing my lifestyle has in abundance is time–time for meditation, for contemplation, for reading, for writing.  My that standard, I am pretty much a genius.  I make outstanding money when I do work, leaving me lots of time to not work.  I don’t have a boss, don’t have to attend pointless meetings (which is most of them, at most companies), and don’t have a regular schedule.

And I look at all the work I did on Goodness Movement, and all the ideas I have developed here, and even if I have as yet received no recognition, even if it is unclear if I have yet affected any human lives for the better, I have tried.  God knows I have tried, and will try again.

I often feel abject horror, still: mainlined fear, the pure stuff, which drives you out of your mind, a bit.  But I’m used to it.  I know it doesn’t kill me.  I have on many occasions dreamed of being the Wolverine.  Everything is conspiring to kill me, and I have no home, but I don’t die.  I think the Wolverine appeals to many men particularly on a mythic level, because he represents in some respects a masculine ideal, or one at least that invokes something in many of us of a certain generation and before.

I did last night, after more episodes of shaking and attacks of terror than I can count.  I literally wear myself out after a while, then sleep well.   I often wake up “speaking in tongues”, which in my case amounts to babbling nonsense that sounds like a foreign language, but which I think is certainly nonsense.  I have looked it up, but seen no good explanation.  My best guess is that it is recalling a primitive trauma before I could actually speak, and the part of my brain responsible for language is experimenting with different ways to speak to communicate distress.  Sometimes I wake up and I am more or less lucid but it continues, and it becomes actually a bit interesting, in that I can kind of just observe it.

But here is the thing: the deeper I can get into the shit, the closer I am to being done with it.  This is my strong feeling.  But you can’t do it all at once.  This is the essence of one of Peter Levine’s most important insights.  But the willingness to “go there” is also important, and this is where I think I am wired differently than most people.

I see wounded people in bars all the time.  They are not hard to recognize, and as a general rule, it is most of them, if they are there regularly.  Most of the people who work in bars are also wounded.  What I have discovered, though, is that almost nobody wants to talk at a deep level about wounds.  They want to leave them alone.  That pain they felt, they have no desire to revisit, even if dealing with the lasting effects means smoking too much, drinking too much, weed and other drugs, or long term failure to thrive.  I know many college graduates who work in bars and show no signs of ever leaving.

This is not always true, and more than once I have had people tell me deep stories they said they had never told anyone else.  In those cases, I can tell it is therapeutic for them.  Freud was not wrong that talking about things can sometimes be therapeutic, but only if it is something very important that has remained a secret.  If you are the third therapist in a year they are sharing “their story” with, then they are simply practicing, and absent true trauma, most likely need something like this.

Where I’m going with all this, other than an inventory of where my thoughts are at the moment, I’m not sure.  Since I am lonely, and since most of the other people I see are lonely–even a great many people with multiple “friends” often seem to feel trapped in a realm of unreality, of superficiality, in a longing for something deeper without the ability to identify that longing, or even guess how to satisfy it–I am going to print cards with a web link to a site I created for my “group therapy” project, or what I call my “Bohannon” project.  I am going to pass them out at bars, until I get 20 people, then start.  I actually think this is a good plan.  I have realized plans get better as ones seriousness grows sharper.

I will add on a tangent to that last comment, that I realized yesterday that everybody is serious on some level.  All human beings have something that matters to them deeply; there is some inner reality they may never show which is in absolute earnest.  Some part of our psyche ALWAYS touches the survival instinct.

I say this in regard to some meditating I was doing about my father, who in important respects is really quite a clownish figure.  He is ridiculous, even when he doesn’t realize it.  But that is not how he sees himself.  It is always tempting to take people as they present themselves, but this is quite often a mistake.