Month: February 2017

One bite at a time.

This popped into my head. Metaphorically, it would refer to pendulation and titration.

But then I wondered if this might be a root of cannibalism, if the unwanted, inaccessible trauma is projected onto a hated Other, and then ritually fed to the digestive system, which is where trauma hides.  The trauma feeds itself, and in so doing is pacified for a time.

Is a Doppelganger you, but with access to your hidden trauma?  The You you don’t want to see, can’t see.  The real truth?  A monster “out there” psychologically?

And would eating babies not be a logical solution for people whose “monster” is Developmental Trauma, trauma they can’t begin to remember, but which dogs them all the days of their lives?  Would it not seem obvious that the root of Satanism is Developmental Trauma?  That baby IS the monster, made flesh, for such people.  It connects them to their own deepest mythic–which in this case is to say emotional–reality.

And how would rituals such as the sacrifice of children, as has happened in many cultures such as Carthage, perpetuate?  Would not fucked up parents create fucked up kids, to whom all this makes perfect sense?  Would not this fucked-up-ness be very easy to perpetuate?

I will repeat my core intuition that some of the most wealthy families on Earth screw up their children on purpose, and have for many generations.

I think there are some very important insights here.  You’re welcome.

Actually, I will add on the positive side of the ledger a story I read yesterday, where supposedly in some Indian tribe the babies birthday is dated to when the mother got the idea of having the child, and set aside quiet time to hear the “song’ of her future child, which is to say to feel the quality of its unique self, which she obviously cared for, and which then became a healthy, happy, well adapted and peaceful adult, who then fathered or mothered more such children.

We have choices in this life.  But all choices involve perception.  What is called “creativity” is simply picking from among the infinite unrealized possibilities in this life, and bringing them into concrete being.  Every creative act necessarily leaves an infinity behind.  This means we are all infinitely wealthy in the ways that matter.  That is a positive thought.  Look at me: I’m channeling Tigger rather than Eeyore, after writing what I just wrote.

LOL.  Seriously.  I’m a nut, but I find my madness congenial.

It occurs to me, now that my internal conflicts have become open to me, now that I have brought light into some unpleasant spaces, that addiction is nothing or less than undeveloped emotional intelligence, and that healing consists in nothing more than cultivating emotional intelligence, and specifically self regulation.

And I want to be clear on that point: the self regulation in question is not a question of knowing when to stop.   It is a question of learning to regulate the emotional flooding–much of it perhaps unconscious–which CAUSES the bingeing.  The bingeing is just a way to make it go away.  You look in one direction and see a monster.  So you run to the comfort of something else, in the other direction.  You turn away, because you cannot face it, that part of you which is woven into the fiber of your soul, that you cannot escape, but which you cannot control, cannot own, and cannot face without terrible cost.  It is a truly awful situation, and the background of otherwise incomprehensible behaviors which see outwardly decent and caring people kill themselves, directly or indirectly, rather than pay that cost.

Now, I do not want to say that alcoholism and other addictions cannot be influenced one way or the other with will power.  I do not want to say you cannot just say QUIT one day and make it work at the expense of a lifetime of taking it “one day at a time”, and being forced to admit regularly you “are” an “alcoholic”.  I have known many people over the years who did this.

What I want to say is that there is something in me which is psychologically “grundlich”, as the Germans put it: thorough, meticulous, and wanting to be as deep, wide, and absolutely comprehensive as I can be.  Mental health is a process, in some respects, of careful, long term craftsmanship, and such work should be done as well as humanly possible, and if angels can be enlisted, so much the better.

On the other side of tension waits a friend.

I try to do Pilates every day, at least part of the routine.  I have realized I make excuses to avoid it, and have realized it is because some of the exercises, oddly enough the Rolling one, elicit fear in me.  I contact that rich subterranean river of fear.  I get shivers all over.  It hides in my upper back, particularly.

Now six months ago I would not have allowed myself to feel this.  I would have exhorted myself to “get it done”, done it faithfully for 4 days, then given it up for three weeks by making excuses and then forgetting it completely.  This is the truth.

Now, I see what is happening.  And it occurs to me this fear has limits.  It does not go on forever.  I will pass through it.  And having passed through it, I will not only not fear the Pilates, but look forward to it.  It is after all intended to be rejuvenating and relaxing.

I feel good things coming my way.

First off, I will repeat that all Leftists memes directed at the right need to make a U-turn and point back at them.  If Noam Chomsky accuse the Right of it, he is guilty of it.  He may as well talk about the Manufacture of Reality, because that is his main preoccupation: creating atrocities where they do not exist, and vanishing those which do exist, but do not fit his narrative.

Secondly, anyone who cannot process emotion, who cannot or does not allow it to flow freely, is governed by little else.  The most rigid, ideologically driven people you know, the “analysts”, the “logical” people: they are deep wells of emotion.  This is what makes them rigid.  Free e-motion allows free motion.

And allowing feelings to flow does not mean that one is feeling all the time.  One is sensing and perceiving all the time.  One is awake, alert and alive.  I go up and I go down, and it is all interesting.  An ocean, on balance, is level, even if no part of it is level at any time.

Third, the point I wanted to make, is that our media exists to create an illusion of consensus and reality.  They historically have been able, themselves, to shout and scream about a politician or a policy, throw some trained and paid or brainwashed activists in the streets, and create the sense among the people consuming their media that everybody thinks a certain way, that they represent the mainstream.

But to state the obvious, whatever is happening, wherever it is happening, chances are quite good you are not there. You are getting your news, at best, second hand, and those hands have long felt it their right and duty not to report what happened, but to carefully sculpt a reality which supports their political ideology.

Thus to say newscasters exist to “report the news” is farcical.  In the main, they exist to CREATE the news.  They exist to ignore stories which do not support their narrative–choosing what to cover is the first part of their filtering process–and then to spin whatever stories they do cover in disingenuous and unethical ways.

Banning CNN or the New York Times is not to ban them from reporting the news.  It is to recognize that they abandoned any serious efforts at journalistic integrity long ago.  What is anti-democratic is a free press which supports the agenda of the continued erosion of ACTUAL civil liberties, which supports the on-going vitiation of our Constitution, which supports politicians who further this agenda, which LIES to further all these goals.

I was wondering yesterday if the Left has the stamina to keep up this hyperventilating for four years. I  was very upset when Obama won, but even I was not calling for impeachment the first day.  That would have been ludicrous: he won the election after all, and had done nothing to warrant impeachment (although of course he later did, e.g. the IRS scandal or Fast and Furious, or the Bo Bergdahl swap).

But many Leftists continue to seem to feel there is a quick and easy “solution” (Endloesung) to the Trump question.  There isn’t.  He is not impeachable.  There is no Russian connection. And even if Trump went down, somehow, Mike Pence is a very able and competent man who will continue implementing the same ideas.  The Democrats–and their media partners–LOST, bigly, and as Obama so snidely remarked, roughly, “elections have consequences”.

As should be obvious, if you are shouting at the top of your lungs 24/7 that people who disagree with you are “being divisive”, you are the one actually guilty of it.  It’s slightly elevated version of “who smelt it dealt it”, but it operates at about the same level of maturity.

If you hate people who hate and accuse everyone who disagrees with you of hate, you are the one who is guilty.

If you use fascist tactics to “oppose fascism”, YOU are the guilty party, not them.

In all of this, you will note there is no give and take.  There is no connection, or circulation.  There is not an exchange of opinions.  Trump could be a stuffed moose sitting in a museum and it is hard to see how the rhetoric would change.  It doesn’t matter what he says or does, because those who hate him–who hate the idea of ideational diversity, and hate even more the idea that their cause is unjust, and their crusades damaging to the very people for whom they claim to speak–are not listening.

It has apparently not occurred to them yet to accuse Trump of not listening, but it would be a logical extension of the fundamental process of projecting onto ideological Others all their fears, manias, aggressions, and other unprocessed emotions.

I was walking in the park the other day and saw a guy with a t-shirt that said in enormous letters “Black Lives Matter”, and underneath it “Unapologetic Radical”, and I thought: there is a guy who has built a wall around his core self, and instituted perennial rage as an alternative to feeling whatever is going on inside.  He isn’t helping black people.  And Radicalism is the result of the inability to embrace gradualism, which is the only creed historically which actually works.  It is the inability to touch nuance, to relate to other human beings in an honest and genuinely loving way.  It is the mark of an outcast, of someone whose social brain has not developed properly, who does not really understand human feelings, and who substitutes abstraction in their stead.

Very few of us, today, confront genuine injustice in our personal lives, other than perhaps bad bosses.  But the world, of course, is filled with both genuine and manufactured injustices.  And if you want access to Perma-Rage, then simply create impossible demands, and rail continually against the fact that they have not been met.  This is a loop out of personal development, out of inner work, and it readily supports infantilism, and absolute emotional stagnation, all while presenting to the person internally the excitement of being “useful” and part of a grand romantic crusade.

I woke up feeling this morning that in a healthy world, there would be no need to talk about compassion.  In a healthy world there would be no need to speak of tolerance.  Everything would be negotiated between individuals on a case by case basis, coming from a place of emotional plenty, genuine empathy, and a shared understanding that the human condition is both tragic and glorious.  Tragic in that we will all suffer here.  It cannot be avoided.  Glorious, in that this suffering can be transcended.

I have had this song stuck in my head the past couple days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR-2ctCRukA

His girl (perhaps his boy) doesn’t love him any more.  Or perhaps he has realized that the love was never truly there, and they just didn’t know each other very well, which is more likely.  Sex makes people feel closer, for a time, even if they are both emotionally undeveloped and suffering the lack every day without knowing it.  It made me cry.  There is so much pain in this world, and this person may never reach a good resting place, a place of emotional safety, of warranted and rewarded trust, of belonging.  He may travel this world as a hungry ghost all the days of his life.  It happens often.  You reach the time to die, and you don’t quite know how you got there, but you know pain was barking at your heels the whole way.

I feel, often, the pain of the world.  I myself of course am covered in scars. I was cut emotionally to the bone with a razor often.  I don’t know why I am still alive emotionally.  Something in me seems very hard to kill.  There is a resurgent energy which keeps me going, even if I don’t know how I keep going.  Many years of my life were just trying to get through one more day, and just trying to get through one more hour of that day.

But I do feel something beautiful slowly opening up in me.  I find an acceptance of all this.  I find myself feeling, for split seconds, like I imagine “normal” people feel.

We live in a world of noise.  Everyone is competing for your attention.  Everyone, seemingly, wants something.

I made some effort years ago to “monetize” my ideas, but it felt wrong.  I don’t know if my ideas are any good, and I am quite uncomfortable in the role of emotional guru.  I have far too many problems of my own. I remain fucked up in important ways.

I like the purity of this blog.  There are no ads, no links, nothing.  I don’t even have my name on here.

I’m talking out loud.  Time to do my Kum Nye practice.  It is an odd thing, that it always feels like jumping on a boat floating down a river whose course I don’t know.  I never know what will come up, or where I will go.  This is part of the practice: just letting it happen.  The Nye, the massage, does itself.  And when it works well, it feels like going sideways emotionally, cutting across the deep ruts of my habitual patterns, and creating the possibility of something new.

I touched deeply the sadness I felt as a child today.  You would think if I had a sad childhood, I would know it by now.  Truthfully, what I remember is normal, but always being a bit emotionally disconnected.

But this is what I realizing about dissociation: the emotions continue.  You are not actually suppressing them; you are just suppressing AWARENESS of them.  Which means I have an entire emotional history which is foreign to me, some of which came back today.

And what hit me is that sadness hurts more than fear.  Fear is unpleasant, yes, but it out there.  Sadness is within you, and it is much deeper.  It is more absorptive.  It touches more of your core self.

And then it hit me that this is the simplest explanation for horror movies: fear pushes sadness away for a while.  You are swapping one emotional discomfort for another.

My work continues.  I’m watching Zootopia tonight. I don’t feel like dealing with anything serious.

I feel that the sense of self is best thought of as an Emergent Property of a long series of what might be called “ping and response events”.  You send a call out into the world, and an answer comes back. You do it again, and another answer comes back, reliably.

As time goes on, and you get older, the quality of the pings begins to matter more.  You send a specific sort of energy out into the world, and you get back an appropriate response, one which matches, or fits, your call.  You come to understand the quality of your calls as you, and the quality of the answers as others.  You realize you belong within a system.  You are both a self and a part of a larger whole.

Thus, in healthy individuation, one naturally learns to care both for oneself and for others.  Self nurturing and other nurturing are our genetic and evolutionary heritage.  They are, after all, life itself.  We are meant to sustain ourselves and to sustain one another.

Consider, again, what happens when this process breaks down, when individuation does not occur, when no healthy sense of self is possible, because the care-givers never respond appropriately, or perhaps at all.

The organism has an imperative to survive.  In some respects–and I certainly do not think this is a full explanation, but for its part I think it is accurate enough–we are stomachs which evolved bodies and brains to eat more and eat better. If the social brain does not develop properly, the appetites of the body do not disappear.  They come, rather, to seem to be all that matters.

Could we not locate in this mechanism irrational greed?  Sexual predation, made “necessary” by an inability (on some level) to conceive that a woman could consent?  A violence brought into being by an innate sense that the world is conspiring to kill you, a sense which is amplified by the reaction of the world to antisocial and aggressive behavior?

Could we not derive evil from a lack of good, the good of having been heard and seen, felt and nurtured, appropriately?  This point seems obvious, and I’m sure it is, but I am attempting to say old things in a slightly better way.

On another level, I am confronting my own evil, my own unmet needs, the stone wall I faced as a child in the way of contentment and a sense of safety.

And in the process, of course, I am trying to learn more about what it means to be human, to be here, in this body.

And I will add that in my previous post what I was alluding to was an interesting pendulation.  I cycle to abstraction–and speculating about ancient civilizations is abstraction–when I can’t stay with feelings.  Emotional health is being able to stay with feelings for a long time, which is to say, the ability to be relaxed and not on edge, not on alert, most of the time.

And I wonder, too, about the personlessness–the radical devaluation of the individual–in “utopian” schemes and the failures to individuate of the intellectuals who obsess about such schemes.  Communism feels right to them because it is a world, in theory, where they belong, because you don’t have to have any distinguishing traits.  Self evidently, such people often consider their politics to be their distinguishing trait, but at root I think many or most of them are sad children.

It is a psychopathology, and like all pathologies, worth explaining in as much detail as possible, at least when speaking in generalities.

http://www.hiddenmysteries.org/mysteries/terra/map-creator.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumapunku

I will from time to time intentionally go into “liminal” areas.  I will read about UFO’s (best evidence is that aliens exist, and visit us; I won’t justify this comment at length other than to say I put a lot of time and effort into reaching this conclusion, which is shared by a number of NASA astronauts, and one former Minister of Defense of Canada), or giants, or, as I am doing presently, revisiting the evidence for a lost but highly advanced, likely global, civilization which existed at least 12,000 years ago.

I chose to drink tonight.  I said to myself before my meditation today that if I went into overwhelm, I would allow it.  Well, fucking shit hit.  I can’t describe what hits me, but my past description of “mainlining fear” is close enough.  I’m somewhat used to it.  I am largely resistant to it.  I can allow massive amounts of fear to flow through me without fearing the fear.  But I have limits.  There is a point where I disappear.  And I did.

Returning to the topic, and attempting to make a circle of this, I continue to wonder what it is we don’t know.  I continue to think that a socially and psychologically advanced people would not need air conditioning, fancy food, indoor plumbing, or the light bulb.  What if the whole of their “technology” were oriented around maintaining an individual and thus social sense of harmony and health?  What else, in the end, do you need (besides music)?

Actually, I will go there.  There is a perception I wanted to share I hope I can put into words.

When I feel a bit lost and alone, I have a variety of coping tools, but one of them is to imagine that things worked, once, long ago.  By extension, they may work again, if we can rediscover what they knew then.

I feel, and this is an intuitive guess, that many Leftists have this exact same sense, this nostalgia, this Fernweh, this Saudade (if I might mix languages and linguistic intents), this sense that wherever you are, you want to be somewhere else.  When you do not love yourself, you want to be somewhere else, if you cannot be someone else.

So I read some Communist movie will be played here locally to the accompaniment of our orchestra.  Rich, well dressed people will go spend good money to watch a movie remembering the revolution with nostalgia.  What is it they really want?  They want a home.  They want a sense of belonging.

And these things, for most of them, are “out there”.  They are not present to their awareness.  They may be longings and aspirations they share with other people, but their connection to those other people is contingent on a shared delusion: that collectivism is something other than putting the rapists and murderers in charge of everything.

If you watch, there is an oscillation here, from here, to there, and back again.

I watch these things–I don’t know what I’m going to write until I write it, quite often–and find them instructive.  All of us have deep patterns within us, things which make sense, but which can only be viewed accurately from a distance.

I will leave this there.  Yes, I know I am talking out loud, but it is making sense to me, and I feel better.

My work continues.  I have many miles to go before I wake.

And it does not help that the road I travel I am inventing as I move.

Edit: I read this, and there is of course stunning logical consistency here.  Emotional logic, but logic nonetheless.  I always walk straight lines, even when I am swaying.

If you ever want to show me a full circle, I can stay there with you the whole way.  Not many people can say that.

http://www.royal-rife.com/

This story was new to me.  It appears well validated, and I have in fact read of recent work along these lines which purports to be “cutting edge”.

How much good, I wonder, has been erased from the world by dismal and unimaginative people who think power, wealth and prestige are worth a bucket of warm spit?  Who, in other words, are STUPID in the only ways that really matter?