Month: January 2017

Edward de Bono called arrogance a “mistake in the future”.  What he intended, of course, is that someone who is too sure of him or herself will sooner or later miss a fork in the road they needed to take.

I would submit that tension is a mistake in the future as well, and the likely precursor of arrogance, which is a form of rigidity.

My Mobility Meditation is working splendidly, and I am really beginning to open up.  I am getting more visions, and more insights, few of which I will share here.

But one thing I will share I am seeing–the word is feeling, actually, although it is more of a synesthetic sense–that I am like everyone else, and everyone else is like me.  There is no human expression I have seen on a city street which could not occur to me.  There is no human impulse which could occur to anyone else which is fully foreign to me.  We are all born with the same needs, the same instincts, the same confusions, and same compensating need for certainty.

Ritual, it occurred to me this morning, is little more than a way of shaping order out of chaos.  It is something recurring, stable–a table to which all are invited at the same time, to share in its benefits.

I felt too how feeble must any attempt at coherent action be in the face of pervasive tension.  Certainly, this has been my own problem: the unresolved tension from my childhood (and for that matter youth and most of my adult life) makes calm action impossible. I can impose my will, but it is very much like overcoming an engaged parking brake by stepping on the accelerator harder.  Ironically enough, I have in fact destroyed not one but two clutches in my life doing that.  How?  Tension induced stupidity.  And youth.  I was younger and dumber once.

And when I get really relaxed sexual imagery sometimes comes into mind.  Healthy sex begins and ends with relaxation.  You can’t kiss well with a tense mouth.  You can’t ride the wave, allow things to happen, when you are tense.  You can’t be playful.  You can’t be fun and spontaneous.  At its worst, for men, it is a job to do: generate an ejaculation.  Actually, worse: conquer her, using sex.

I feel much of the contemporary obsession with sex is really an obsession with relaxation.  And it seems obvious why tension would intrude on all this: sex alone cannot generate the effect needed, and it doesn’t, so various manias come into play.  BDSM from this perspective is really just the generation of an extremely tense state, so that releasing it feels like bliss.  Well, I’m sure its more complicated than that, but that is likely a factor.  I’ve never done it and never will do it, but I’m acutely aware of what both psychological masochism and sadism feel like.  They are in me too.

And I got to thinking about all the talk about sex we saw in the recent election.  Would you not agree that Bill Clinton and Trump have very different sexual styles?  Bill Clinton has all the hallmarks of a sexual addict.  He just needs fixes.  He just needs to get his rocks off, and doesn’t much care how he does it.  He seems to hold women in contempt.

Trump, on the other hand, genuinely seems to love the company of beautiful women.  And he does respect them: he has promoted women to high positions often.

It does seem likely that he has groped women, but it would seem to me the reason no one has ever called him out–the women who popped up during the election and have since disappeared don’t count–on it is that he has an extraordinarily developed sense of judgement, and that any women he may have done that with took it as a compliment because he had accurately judged they wanted him sexually. In fact, some he likely did subsequently seduce.

But the point I want to make is that his overall relation with women is one of PLEASURE, of consensual sex, of fun.  He has always loved having a good time, like when he got Mario Andretti to drive him for the Apprentice .  This is a guy who knows how to relax, and not always take himself too seriously.  Obama could learn a lot from him.

Bill’s addiction was based on a need for dominance, not pleasure.  Bill cultivated a great, goofy smile a long time ago, but he is deadly serious when it comes to power, to the pursuit and cultivation of it.  He is privately a very angry man, we were told long ago when he was in office, as of course is Hillary.

The fact the Left does not want to talk about is that women do sometimes not just want but expect some degree of sexual aggression.  It lets them know they are desirable, worth pursuing. Not all women, obviously, and certainly not traumatized women, but many women. And any man who consistently guesses right, and backs off immediately if and when wrong, is playing that game in a manner consistent with the instincts of both genders.

Edit: women want PLAYFUL sexual aggression.  There is an expression a man can wear where it is OK, and one where it is not, and it really can’t be faked.  The first time I really felt a strong sexual instinct was in a pillow fight with a bunch of girls at camp.  We were laughing and having fun, but I suddenly realized I wanted one of those girls, and I think she wanted me.  It would have flowed very naturally for both of us, if you will forgive that phrase.

We say the birds and the bees, because the urge to reproduce is a very important instinct, and it is the most natural thing in the world.  We have made it something very, very complicated.

The Constitution clearly grants the right to declare war to Congress.  Since leadership by group is inefficient, the President is granted the right to lead our troops.  When the Constitution was written, no standing army was envisioned.  The idea was war would be declared, troops mobilized from the sundry States, and that they would be demobilized when the threat was over.  No permanent General-ship was imagined, because it seemed to them to be highly dangerous.

We are witnessing now Obama–for reasons which are opaque, but certainly not connected to valid policy interests, or anything remotely defensible–seemingly trying to provoke Putin, seemingly trying to wring some sense of accomplishment from his eight years of nearly continual failure.

Specifically, we know he has sent troops to Lithuania (or so it has been reported: let me not follow crass mediocrities and liars like CNN and NBC and assume this to be a fact).

Here is the thing: crossing the border could be construed as an act of war, and those soldiers have every right to refuse to follow that order.  All of our troops take an oath to defend the Constitution, and they are allowed to refuse to obey unlawful orders.  Even if they were arrested and court-martialed, Trump could and would pardon them.

Our pilots have the right to refuse orders to provoke the Russians in Syria, or to fly into Russian air space.   Our soldiers, until a formal declaration of war with Russia by Congress, which is not forthcoming, have every right to refuse to obey any order to do anything which could be construed as an act of war by Russia.

Now, I think Putin will keep his cool, Obama’s amateurish and childish provocations notwithstanding.  He has no interest in war.  It helps neither nation, and wars are always expensive and greatly damaging even when won.

We have allowed many small wars, like the one in Libya, and the one in Yemen, and for that matter Panama and Grenada back in the day, to be waged quickly with no Congressional consent.  But if there is anything obvious about this, it is that a war with Russia would be a potentially catastrophic event, and that even ONE life lost in pursuit of nonsensical policy seemingly motivated by petulance and completely inappropriate vindictiveness would be a war crime, a murder, a treason to the loyalty of our troops.  They should just tell Obama to pound sand.  Motherfucker will be out soon enough, and relevant only to a small, small segment of our population, which will quickly forget him, his mediocrity, his failures, and his vast and unearned ego.

It occurs to me that the continual need for competitive adaptation–the very real fight to be cool, which seems to be very acute in cities like Seattle and Portland and San Francisco–is tiring.  This itself would lead to the longing for stasis of the sort created by totalitarians.  Time stopped in Cuba, didn’t it?  This mythic longing was perhaps well expressed as well by Dormammu (?) in the Dr. Strange movie.

They called them “hippies”, because being cool, being “hip”, was in their very genetic profile.  It was interesting for a time, but the obsession with novelty fades, and is replaced with a need to stop.  But it is unclear where or how to do that.  One cannot return, and one cannot create something new without the trauma of creating boundaries, of creating non-negotiable demands.  So it seems, I think, to many.

I sense that perhaps many feel Islam represents a possible solution to this quandary.  It is categorically inconsistent with Western ideals, but very consistent with the need for perfect fixity and the final and complete absolution of individual moral conscience and struggle.  One can finally merge with a herd which in principle never changes.

I often have phrases pop in my head.  This morning, after a night of very odd and evocative dreams, it popped into my head “the essence of GroupThink is the group.”

Now, I get the phrases, but then whatever meaning they might contain other than, to reference Dickens, some piece of undigested meat, I have to tease out.

But in the context of the dreams I was having what I think it means is that the Group is vastly more important than the Think.  What people think is vastly less important, particularly in the early phases of an indoctrination process, than that they both think it together, and depend on others to think it with them.

Take the Oscar Meyer song: “my bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R.”  People of my generation used to sing that song.  It’s a commercial, but I still remember it.  It is inherently meaningless, but it became a part not just of so-called “pop” culture, but culture itself.  Pop culture is culture.  It is who we are.  We like to think it is out there somewhere, but we are saturated with it daily.

And we become used, as Americans, to continual change, to new daily commercials, movies, TV shows, products, apps, video games, clothing trends.  We reference them with each other.  It’s how we know we belong to the same culture: we are referencing the same things; we’ve seen the same movies, watched the same shows.

I was watching this rant from Paul Joseph Watson last night: http://www.infowars.com/why-does-popular-culture-glorify-being-a-pussy/

He’s both right and wrong.  Wrong, in that I really do think many people are not getting their emotional needs met, but right in that helplessness is not a virtue.

He is also right that signalling “I’m so depressed” can also become a de facto unifying theme.  It becomes a way of creating a grouping in an atomized world where no reference points last more than a few weeks.

And this is perhaps the miracle–intended, as I think, or not: our young particularly always feel no more than a few weeks away from being socially isolated from their peers.  Hopefully they have good, stable parents–although many, perhaps most–don’t, but when they are trying to connect horizontally, they need to have watched the movies, heard the music, know the words, all of which are always changing.

What roots people?  Church roots people.  What happens on Sunday is not very susceptible to larger cultural fashions.  It is something you can depend on, and people you can depend on, who are not very concerned with the broader culture as a whole.

A sense of place roots people.  Things not changing, or only very slowly.  Seeing the same people on the same street corners every day.

Given this, is it any wonder Trump’s support came from stable places where church-going is still a “thing”?  This, despite his manifestly unChristian lifestyle and urban roots?

Virtually everything in our culture exists to create a constant matrix of change, distortion, and perennial movement.  You teach people that the latest fad is their connection to others, then you simply connect the IV drip of political propaganda, and you have the spectacle, which I have recently seen, of people literally repeating HuffPo headlines as their own thoughts, and accusing anyone who dares think differently of being in a propaganda bubble, and engaged in GroupThink.  Well, which of us can have a five minute discussion without getting triggered?  Which of us can explain in depth what we believe and why we believe it?  Hint: it’s not the person who starts with propaganda–with repeating a superficial, factually inaccurate but emotionally evocative phrase–and moves immediately to hate.

This does perhaps explain the extent of the emotion felt by the Headless Ones when confronted with alternative viewpoints: their very sense of self, psychologically, has been staked on their conformity to GroupThink, but they cannot admit this to themselves, or they will face the devastating truth that they have been living someone else’s life, which I personally have always viewed as my own worst fear.  It is literally an existential attack on their sense of self.  As such, it is treated rightly as a matter of grave concern, one of far more significance than a mere political disagreement, which individuated, psychologically stable people can and do have often, but which they cannot.

Think about it: they have taught themselves to adapt seamlessly–perhaps even prided themselves on being ahead of the curve–to all changes coming down the pike.  This is how they live their lives: they adapt to the ideas of others.  How does one rationalize this?  How do any trendy people justify themselves?  Pride in being DIFFERENT.  Pablo is quite the clothes horse.  Pablo is so TRENDY, so fashionable.  So different from those of us who are not trendy.

Someone who is a trend-setter is out front, but do they too not have to remain in constant motion, constantly setting new trends, lest someone else overtake them?  It is inherently an unstable and insecure position.

Does being fashionable not create anxiety too?  Does one not become worried about getting behind the curve?  What if you are the last one to realize that the Russians hacked the election?  What if you are the last one to realize that Obama HAS to take some sort of action, and that if necessary nuclear war is absolutely an option if the Russians hacked our election?  What if thinking all this through has nothing at all to do with the mortar which holds you together?  Well, you get the headlines at HuffPo and the Daily Cause.  That is what if.

So you combine this HABIT of conformity, with the FEAR of being left behind, and you get this monolithic mass of people confronted, at this very moment in America’s political history–following not just a resounding defeat on a national level, but 8 years of failure at the State level, and an overall out-going tide where the Democrat Party is concerned–with the choice of realizing they have gone far, far down the wrong path, and now need to turn around if they want any meaningful capacity for independent thought and accurate reality testing to develop, or choosing to double down.

Keith Ellison is what doubling down looks like.  He is the choice of lunatics.  And to be clear, I WANT them to choose Keith Ellison.  I really do.  I would normally dissemble that, but here is the thing: they can’t understand what I am writing here without waking up.  It is one or the other.  And emotionally, the simplest thing is to just say “fuck that guy, racist motherfucker, we’re going to do what WE want to do, and that is nominate somebody who isn’t white, isn’t Christian, and who is therefore best qualified to lead us to a post-racial era.”  I get that.  I don’t live in a box.  I move around.

So logically, of course, they will need to accuse me of being stuck, fixed, and utterly entranced by right wing propaganda. Projection, pure and simple.  We all tell ourselves the lies we need to to get by, but hopefully for all of us, at some time in our lives, we realize we are not really who we thought we were, are not really controlling our lives consciously, and can and should choose new directions.  This starts with the notion of choice itself, with agency, with the capacity to devote time and energy to what you decide, as an “Undividable”, what matters.  Your body may not be whole, but all of our minds can be.

But living in a propaganda matrix is a half life.  I can’t say I know for sure what is true–in fact I’m quite sure I get things wrong often–but I can say I do my best to make my own decisions on that score.  That is all any of us can do, but far less than most of us DO do.

I seem to be getting more accurate.  And I am touching a place of hypercompetence within myself.  I know what the fuck I’m doing, even if I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

Some part of me has its shit together times two. It is gradually opening up.  This can only be a good thing.  I have had bees buzzing around my head, and horns sounding in my ears, and been getting punched at random for a long time.  It’s distracting.  But something sees through it all.  Something never loses focus.  Something never, ever, ever, ever, quits.  It feeds only on victory, and then only if more work is not needed.  Battles do not win wars.  Never quitting until the war is won wins wars.  And even then, as the Japanese say, Zanshin.  Do not fear, but do not forget.  That would be a good motto.

Be all that as it may, I’m not going to celebrate until I can do 20 good strict pullups.  Getting my squat back into the 400’s would sure feel good too.

I was looking at a guy in my gym today with 5 45 pound plates on each side.  He was doing deadlifts.  It looked like a lot, but shit, I used to be able to do that.  510 is my PR.  5 plates is 495.  Bob Peoples did 700 something in his late 40’s.

I maxed out my squat at 200 for 3 today.  It’s embarrassing, but I’ve been not working out for so long I have to rebuild the tendons and ligaments and soft tissue in that specific range of motion.  I’m going very gradual.  5 days a week.  I might comment on my workout later;  I might not.  Diet is definitely suboptimal, but as I say, something very, very powerful seems to be waking up within me.  It is not and never has been my destiny to be weak.  My destiny is to get the shit beat out of me in every possible way for a very long time, then use all that as information to not be a fucking moron.  That’s what I try to do here: not be a fucking moron.  I sincerely hope I mostly succeed.

I do think it can be credibly asserted that unnamed power elites have developed a system for manipulating public opinion in ways which further ends which are unknown, but which certainly include at least increases in their already enormous and unusable fortunes, and their considerable power.

They have a method for using directional pushes in the American political climate.  They have ways of using Democrats to get rich, and ways of using Republicans to get rich.

There are two competing rhetorics, those of compassion versus security, those of progress versus freedom.

In reality, of course, both words are abused.  In the name of security and  freedom we enacted the Patriot Act, which allows government snooping of a scale and scope that would have astounded Orwell.  He merely envisioned cameras everywhere.  With smart phones, and particularly with the many apps people use, considerable behavioral data becomes possible: psychology profiles, spending profiles, friend networks, movement patterns.  They can even know how well you sleep and if you snore, if your phone is in the room with you, which for most people it is.

In the name of compassion and progress we enacted Obamacare.  We fought and lost the war on Poverty, which may as well have been named the war on the nuclear family, or on two parent families.

We swing this way, then that way.  Everybody gets to feel like their people are in charge from time to time.  And the same people get richer and richer no matter who sits in the White House.

Trump, I hope, is not a part of this.  This is why, I think, we are seeing this highly irrational behavior relative to Russia.  Perhaps somebody is thinking that if we can provoke patriotic sentiments that command and control of the Republican base at least will become easy again.  Push our buttons and wait for Pavlovian reactions.

But I don’t think this is what is going to happen.  Most of us don’t give a flying fuck what John McCain and Lindsay Graham think.  They are either imbeciles or traitors.  Solid thinkers, and honest patriots, not so much.  We have no interest in war with Russia, and the very, very thin thread from which Obama seems to be trying to weave a casus belli rests on the hacking of John Podesta’s emails, which seems not to have even been the Russians.

We can only hope that these demons run out of ideas, and are cornered by the logic of the situation, and their inability to fool all of us all the time any more.

It is apparently the practice of some Tibetan Buddhists to do solitary meditation retreats for long periods of time.  One I have seen referenced is 3 years, 3 weeks, and 3 days.

Here is the question: morally, can such a practice improve a person?  Can they become better people in the absence of interactions with other people?

It would seem to me that for a true Leftist, the answer would necessarily be no.  They do not think in individual terms.  They might have something to say about the economic position of the monastery, the selfishness of such a practice, the uselessness of such a practice and the like, but one person cannot become better for them EXCEPT in relation to others, and specifically as a member of one group in relation to another.

This is the root problem of Leftism: it is not a morality worthy of the name.  Abusive abstraction inheres in it and cannot be removed by any means.  It is an abuse of thought.  It treats words like “society” and “class” as if they actually existed.  Individuals exist-because they have bodies and names–but societies do not, not in the sense they intend.

Obviously, believing in God makes moral development a much more obvious thing: it consists in doing those things which bring you into closer communion with God.

But even absent a belief in God, I would argue that moral development consists in psychological development, which itself is at root learning to physically relax the body, learning to avoid spasms of learning and ratiocination, and learning to connect deeply with the social brain, and thus with other people.  Having done that, all other virtues fall into line naturally.

I want to argue that Kum Nye is a moral system par excellence, even though it says NOTHING about morality at all.

Here is another way to put it: the more force needed for you to do the right thing, the less moral you are.  In the worst cases, law alone and the threat of punishment keep you in line.   Slightly better, your conscience and sense of guilt.  Best, though, is consistently WANTING to be compassionate, generous, light-hearted, diligent, and honest.  True morality is its own reward.  It needs no justification, and no commentary by pundits.

Edit: I almost forgot an important point.  I also want to argue that Leftism is the method emotionally dissociated individuals use to create the feeling of connecting to other people, through the medium of “society”.  It can and does obviously induce strong passions, but not strong passions for actually helping people, not in the fully developed disease form we see in true Communists and Fascists (actually, Fascists are not as sick, because they at least do care about some people).  No: it provokes strong connection to the IDEA of helping people, not the people themselves.

It thus constitutes a psychological trick to avoid unwanted emotions by pretending that they are already there, that virtue is already there, that moral coherence is already there, that they can both be good people and never, ever deal with their own unprocessed emotional shit.

I will note as well that this basic process could easily be applied to all dogmatisms, such as sick Christianity.  God did not ask the Spaniards to torture Jews or Aztecs.  No: sick people used religion as a means to justify their sickness in their own eyes.

I am really liking what I am going to call my Mobility Meditation program. I can literally watch as my desire to think, post, pontificate, rant, write decreases across an hour.  I find I have less to say.  But I’m saying it for now, because I wanted to work a couple things out for myself.

Inner work consists in the main in finding and feelings emotions which have hidden.  Accepting feelings is equivalent to completing the delivery process.  They arose to tell you something, but you didn’t have the capacity or insight at the time to hear them.  So they held on, perhaps in the viscera, perhaps in a persistent tightening of the shoulders, perhaps somewhere else or in overall body tension.

The core insight I think some of us walking wounded have to come to is admitting we did not get the love we needed as small children, and that there is NOTHING we can do about this.  We cannot change the past.

And to some greater or lesser extent I think a great many of us carry some incompleteness into the present.  There are many ways of dealing with it.

Abstraction is a great one.  I literally think muscle tension leads to the need to philosophize.  Intellectuals, people who talk and write and think all the time, do so as a means of dealing with and expressing persistent tension.  This is the root distinction between intellectuals and what I call thought workers.  The latter are trying to solve concrete problems.  The former think because they have to, and inefficient thinking is actually preferable, because if no problem is ever solved, they never need to leave their comfortable thinking place.  I think this is a CORE problem with Leftists, and this tension is a principle reason that violence comes easily to them.

Work is a solution.  Addiction is a solution.  And developing unhealthy relationships with others is a solution, particularly grown men asking women to mother them.  It is an emotionally logical request, but it is unfair, and it does not solve the problem.  No wife or lover can take the place of a mother, although this request is perhaps related in some way to Freud’s Oedipal Complex.  He was always almost right, but never quite.

But what I am realizing is that all the components of self love, of the feeling of having been loved, can be assembled from scratch.

What are they?  The capacity for deep relaxation, a positive self image, positive self talk, the capacity for pleasure, and the ability to relate in a healthy way with other people.

Both a top down (a decision to act in certain ways), and a bottom up approach are applicable.  Bottom up, though, is vastly more important, which is where the Kum Nye comes in.  It is a gradualistic process of first undoing tensions and emotional blockages, and then of developing positive feeling.  Positive feeling, in turn, becomes at some point (I’m not there yet, but this is the theory) self reinforcing. This is the Nye.

What I felt today is that I have been waiting for someone to rescue me.  It is not fair that I was unloved, and frequently abused.  It is not fair that I didn’t get a chance at a happy childhood, and that all sorts of things have carried into my adulthood, all sorts of dysfunctional patterns I could not even see for a long time, expectations about the world and other people, unacceptably low standards for myself, and an absolute incapacity to imagine what love might feel like.  It’s not fair.

But of course this doesn’t matter.  It is what it is.  The key thing, though, is I have finally accessed this sense at the root, base, bottom level.  I have confronted it, owned it, allowed it to percolate, and can now imagine holding myself to higher standards, which in turn will begin over time to generate the results I want.  I think 2017 will be a great year.

And it helps a lot that I don’t have to worry about our highest leader working daily to undermine and destroy everything that works in this country and around the world.  Trump will have flaws, and no doubt I will disagree with some decisions. But he is not a zealot focused on avenging crimes none of us committed, in the name of people he holds in contempt.  That is an ugly world.  That is a world where hate truly wins.

If we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it, we will need to repeal it to see if there was anything we liked.

Commenting on any of these manufactured controversies which erupted following Trumps victory has come to seem to me a species of perverse masochism.  They are so obviously fabricated, the arguments so weak, that one has to be a fucking imbecile to buy them, or in on the very poorly played game.

Be that as it may, ponder the spectacle of the same people who hate Citizens United with every bit as much fury as they were told to exhibit, being ENTIRELY silent on the issue of foreign governments funding our political candidates.  Hillary spent some 1.2 billion dollars, and I read the Saudis funded 20% of that.  That is a lot of money.  The Qataris, I think it was, sent Bill a cool million dollar check, just cause he’s a swell guy.

Trump has proposed a ban on such investments in our political process, which DO stink as much as the alleged Russian hacking of John Podesta (which was likely done by UFO hunters, or our own intelligence apparatus).

Joke:

How did the Russians help Donald Trump win the White House?

Answer: by helping the Democrats finally deliver on their long promised transparency.

I read even Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are buying into this “punish Russia” bullshit.  Well, Trump went around them to win the Presidency, and although it would help to have them now, there is a whole lot he can do without them, and not much they CAN do without him.

The Presidency remains a powerful office, and it is always helpful to be on good terms with the man occupying it.  And sometimes vindictiveness is a useful political virtue.  It helps the negotiating process by clarifying options.