Month: February 2017

Now is the time.  Is the gold in Fort Knox?  Nobody in government knows.  New York?  Nobody in government knows.  Do member banks routinely vote themselves the creation of hundreds of billions of dollars?  That one, likely yes.  They call it Quantitative Easing, and tell us the on-going dilution of the value of our money, which is profitable for them, is somehow essential to an on-going economic “growth” which does little to make the average American work less for the same money, despite continual productivity gains.

The giant, silent sucking sound at the center of our economy is that of people doing EXACTLY what Marx accused Capitalists of doing: getting rich while contributing nothing inherently useful.  An industrialist has to build a factory.  A banker just has to create the money to loan to the industrialist, and they both get rich, even though only one of them actually makes anything.

Ford was right and wrong when he said, approximately  “it is probably a good thing most Americans don’t understand our financial system: if they did, they would be up in arms by tomorrow morning.”  He was wrong, in that they SHOULD be made to understand, to care, and to force our elected representatives to fix this system.

Auditing the Fed of course is just the beginning.  It is the institution of fractional reserve banking itself, which it serves to support, which needs to be ended.  It is theft.  Monetary inflation is theft.  It is theft which does sometimes benefit the economy, but without which, the economy overall would not long need.

Everyone a Capitalist ought to be the proper motto of the Right and the Left.

What is coming to me is that addiction is the dealing of evil to oneself.  There is an awareness, a cosmic, Primary Process level awareness, of evil that has been done.  But it hard, so very hard, to confront evil on its own level, to feel it breathing in your face, and to know that it, too, is you.  It is not out there.  As weak as you may feel, something within you feels power, and perhaps the ONLY power it can find is the ability to sabotage everything you do.

Here is the thing: yes, of course, various chemicals can cause with overuse over time physiological dependency, but most people get off them long enough at least once in their lives to be physiologically free.  Most people who die of heroin overdoses, if I had to guess, have been scared enough at least once to give it up for a month or more, which would I think be sufficient.

Why do they relapse?  Because some part of them wants them to fail, because failing is easier than confronting the evil in them, that was done to them, suffered by them. It is a wrenching, extraordinarily unpleasant feeling.  Everything is suddenly floating, and nothing is certain, but underneath it all is an aggressive darkness.  The trick is to learn it is not after anyone or anything.  It simply eats what is in its path, whatever presents itself to it.  And addiction is a sacrifice to it, a self sacrifice, one which does in fact often end in premature death physically, and emotional death–or disfigurement–long before that.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, rats given an adequate amount of social contact and play time never get addicted to cocaine, no matter how often it is offered to them. Cocaine is not a solution to a problem they have.  It is the lonely, dispirited rats which originally made people think Cocaine itself had some intrinsic magical addictive power.

To surrender to evil is not to give it power.  It is to recognize the power you have been giving it, without realizing it.  It is saying “you are there and I am here.  I see you.  I recognize you.  And now I am going to choose to live my life without you, but without forgetting you are there.”

I think in many addicts (and my own addiction has never really risen to this level; by most standards, I think, it has been balanced and moderate, even if the absolute quantities might scare some people) the bottle, or spoon, or needle comes to seem to be the enemy.  But it is the enemy they can’t do without.  It is something that hates them that they willingly submit to.

In my own heart, I feel I did this with one and likely both of my parents.  They were abusive, but there was always an outward patina of fun and “we didn’t really mean it.  It’s all in your head”.  It wasn’t in my head, but that sort of thing fucks with your brain.  So I went along to get along.  That’s what kids are forced to do.

So you have this double bind.  You have an abusive situation you have to endure, and you have the lies you have to tell to make it all work, like “they really love me; they just don’t know how to show it”.  Or in my own case, dissociation and retreat from reality and a sort of passive acceptance of everything, like I was in a trance.

And you learn to endure the abuse, and to rationalize the abuse, and to make excuses for the abuse.  But you don’t say that to yourself.  You come to make the abnormal seem normal.

And this is where addiction comes in: addiction UNDERSTANDS that you are an abnormal person trying to live in normal world, but that being abnormal is how you feel normal.  When you check out in one way or another, that is when you return to something you know, or knew. When you leave the social universe, that is when you can be your real self.

So Keith Richards had it right and wrong when he talked about what people do to “not be themselves” for a few hours.  I would argue who he was normally, when he wasn’t high, never felt normal to him at all.

And the pretending is exhausting.  Trying to explain yourself to people who don’t listen, who often are dealing with similar issues themselves: far better a consistent narcotic.

I am speaking out loud here, but these are some thoughts floating through my mind as I try for sobriety again, with some warranted hope, I think, that this time it may actually take.

At the bottom of most of us is a primordial ooze.  It is an unpleasant, thick, goo, and it is where all our reflexive habit and thought patterns are stuck.  If you are stuck–and pretty much all of us are stuck–there has to be a stuck place.  The image that came to me for this is ooze, something like, if I might borrow from the Talking Heads, vaseline with sand in it.

I find it a bit comical watching people, particularly self identified “Nice People”, try and do shadow work.  Oh, they might say, I just care too much sometimes.  I get too wrapped up in other people’s problems.  Sometimes at the end of the day I find myself a bit irritable.  And just the other day I said something mean to my sister.

Honest shadow work is feeling deeply your own participation in evil.  You are capable of being happy when you read someone who once crossed you got run over by a car.  You are capable of feeling silent approval when self identifying “anti-Fascists” use Fascist tactics against Trump supporters.

Doing shadow work is not an idle or easy process.

And I will do a little more on myself.  I have been contemplating putting up a post titled “how big an asshole are you?”, dealing with shadow work, but as I look in the mirror, what I realize is that I say all sorts of shit I probably shouldn’t say.  I speculate about the depth of people’s internal emotional states, when I myself am not even capable yet of feeling deep love or affection.  I don’t know what I don’t know, yet somehow I find myself preaching.

Some of the most basic things other people do naturally, I don’t understand. I don’t trust anyone fully (although to be sure, I don’t know many trustworthy people).

But seeing all this is to the good.  If one thing becomes manifest, its opposite will sooner or later manifest too.  That has been my problem: I could not get distance on any of this, could not make it concrete, could not precipitate it so I could learn from it.

I think I am psychologically ready now to sleep through the night.  I have some issues with snoring that wake me up, but I am intelligent and have good solutions in place. I have always known what to do: I just could not bring myself to feel I was worth doing it for.

Over the past 3-4 days I have felt this constant presence of the feeling of evil.  And what I realize is that what was done to me was very wrong, and that part of me reacted as was inevitable–by internalizing some of that malice–and directing it at myself.  I do not treat myself the way I would other people, and never have. I realized that I have always felt like a stranger, and not an important one at that.

I have covered this up, of course, with self importance, continual outrage, prodigious marathons of abstraction, and proactive anger which has likely sometimes extended into bullying.

But what I feel is that there is an evil in this world, and that we need to accept it.  We cannot do away with it.  It is part and parcel of this place, of this plane of existence.    Treating it as exceptional or unusual is to fail to understand how things are and always have been.  This does not mean we should not oppose it physically and concretely, but there is a spirit in the air, and it is in all of us.  To become fully calm, we have to know and accept that we all have wild beasts within us, and that those who perform acts of evil are not as different from the rest of us as we would like.

And I think if we are honest, most of us do commit small acts of anger, of venom, of dishonest, passive aggression, of disconnection and banishment, etc.

As Christ said: let he who is without sin cast the first stone. So often, I think, we punish others because we are loathe to acknowledge our own short-comings.  Judging others is so much easier than judging ourselves, and it is so much more pleasant to direct self loathing into self righteousness, anger, and violence.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/30613

Here is the email where he talks about playing dominos.

In context–he has received a gift of cheese, rather than the usual gift of pasta–this can be explained in a non-sinister way.

You could spin it, of course, in other ways, but this is not the smoking gun I thought it was.

As I may have shared at some point, I used to carry a pocket copy of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” with me.  In that era we have now forgotten before smart phones, I would pull it out and read it when I had a few spare minutes.  At the top of all considerations, you need the Way, or Tao.  You need mojo.  It is an indefinable something, but it is quite real.  The Patriots have it. Back in the day, the 49’ers had it.

Trump has it.

But we are looking at a long, long hard slog in the days ahead.  The battle lines are drawn. The enemies of freedom have shown their true colors.  They include all people capable of voting for today’s Democrats, and a significant segment of the Republican Party.  What we have seen with the Bill Kristols and the National Review and the Never Trump’ers is that, as is the case with the Left, ideological purity is much more important to them than concrete action, than accomplishment.  They insist on a sort of collegiality with the Left which, at the end of the day, does not allow them to draw any solid or enduring MORAL distinctions between their own ideas and those of the Left.  They would dispute this, of course, but I would say that in practical terms, Trump has done more in a short period to unmask the collectivist and totalitarian agenda of the American Left than they have in 50 years.  Practically, they are irrelevant.  But they still oppose Trump.

And perhaps most importantly, and this is the point of this post, we have what is called “The Deep State”.  It is good we are seeing this term appear in orthodox conversations.  They are perhaps the source of all the surface confusion and attack.

But who are they, and what do they want?  Are they homogeneous, or diverse?  Are their aims clear or confused and conflicting?  How could they be identified?

Sun Tzu teaches that any idiot can attack their enemies.  True strategists attack their PLANS.  And if it is true that the Deep State is the real enemy–and it seems that the media is simply one of their tools, even if the most obvious and ubiquitous one–then Trump needs to attack their Way, their plans.

Obviously, this is a foggy group.  But I do have one idea which appeals to me on all levels: take seriously the idea that the power elite engage in systematic pedophilia.  That pizza place in Washington was a nexus of the power elite in our Capital, and something was very definitely wrong there.  Find Anthony Weiner’s laptop and find out if it contained what Eric Prince said it contained.  Put a full time task force on the job of finding out if there is any truth to these rumors.  One arrest may lead to another to another to another.

My gut sense is that the wealthiest people on this planet, in general, are sick.  The government of the United States, though, is more powerful, if it is directed properly.

Would be using this whole Milo fiasco to LEARN.  Who is he, really?  What do his experiences say about homosexuality generally?  What unspoken truths about the process of becoming gay can we put into the public domain?  There are some obvious stories here which might be illuminating, if the bastards trying to crucify him had the capacity to listen and learn.

Removing people from discussions is, in my own view, disgusting, especially if they are thoughtful, and capable of expressing themselves.

How the fuck do you learn when you lock people out?  Who wants to confine what they are pleased to call a “conversation” to like-minded people?  Idiots.  That is who.  Determined idiots, who want to remain that way.

In my own world, it is perfectly OK to criticize people, but if you think throwing them into the pit is an interesting, clever, or effective solution, then you are my enemy. Engage with them.  Insult them if you need to, but listen to their responses.  Solve problems.  Hear the songs of human diversity and difference, even if they repulse you.

And fuck you National Review, on general principle.  Fucking Quislings, you sacks of shit.  You are worse than the Left.  We expect them to betray us.  That is who they are, and do not claim to be anything else. I really hope your publication fails badly.

Perhaps, I should say MORE. I’m not sure where it stands, since I haven’t read an NR article in at least six months.

I remember staying after school in high school to read that magazine.  I loved it.  But blue bloods can be traitors too, can’t they?  

There is this swirling mix all of us must confront daily, if we are honest.  I don’t know where it is going.  I know that Donald Trump is a very disciplined and determined human being, and he seems to be surrounding himself with people like himself.

I will offer one thought exercise: if you lost power for a week, how much of the news could possible affect you directly?  Does the Education Secretary really make a difference?  Trumps comments on Sweden?  Whatever the other fucking manufactured controversy de jour is?  No: it has no impact on your life.  You would have no way of knowing, even if Trump decided to fuck Melania on the White House lawn.  Everything you know, and thus everything you are reacting to, is funneled to you second, third, or fourth hand.  It does not affect the smell of freshly mown grass, the beauty of snow, the formation of clouds, or the course of a day not lived in abstraction and distraction.

I was in the gym today, looking at six different TV’s, tuned to 6 different channels, and it hit me that every person watching every one of those channels is waiting for emotion of some sort.  They pay for it, I’m sure, in reality TV: the people who seem to feel big, real, feelings.

There is a hole in the center of our world.

The Kum of Kum Nye is linguistically equivalent to the Buddhist Shunyata, in my understanding, or Void.  Thus it could be translated as “movement in space”.  It asks the question where consciousness “is”.  Is it here, or there?  Can it be located?

Often we are encouraged to realize–not visualize, but realize–that the boundaries of the sense of the body are porous.  Where we connect with the air is ambiguous.  We know that all matter is mostly space, do we not?  The empirical difference between space occupied by our bodies, and space NOT occupied by our bodies is quite small.  Ponder this a moment.

For my own purposes, the small difference I would draw, though, is that space is FULL, and only slightly more–or perhaps less, which is an interesting thought in itself–full where we are present.

The Void of the Buddhists is, in my considered view, the same as the Quantum Vacuum or Zero Point Field posited by Quantum physicists.  It is a field of nearly infinite energy.  It was used some years ago to DERIVE F=MA, where the field itself constituted the cause of inertia and drag. Perhaps mass itself.  There are a whole lot of things to unpack from this largely ignored, but completely mainstream idea.

But the point I wanted to make is that there is a large Ku which I seem to sometimes swim in.

And what I see is that all these people buying into these lunatic ideas about Trump, those who have been buying into the lunacy of the Left in general, have NOWHERE ELSE TO GO.  Their families are cold and disconnected.  Their social experience has been insipid and superficial.  Much of their lives is spent consuming media of various sorts: watching TV and movies, playing video games, listening to music someone else created.  When they are with people, they bring the plastic of the media they consume with them.

How often have you found yourself having conversations which consisted in the main in comparing scenes in movies you both have seen?  How often have you felt, truly felt, deep pain, deep joy, deep connection, deep sadness, a deep sense of purpose?  For far too many of us, rarely or never.

You go by, week by week, month by month, decade by decade, and nothing important is said.  Nothing important happens.  Perhaps you get married to someone you don’t really know, because you don’t even know yourself.  Perhaps you get divorced for some stupid reason.

Children seem to bring a sense of meaning and purpose to many of us, but so many people in the West and Japan are not having children.

What is there?  A shallow grave in which you eventually root, and a death which merely marks, formally, a long term process of dissolution.

What the Left has long marketed is belonging, membership, passion, purpose.  It is a lunatic cult, which categorically rejects individual growth, nuance, and ideosyncrasy; it rejects, in other words, everything which makes life worthwhile and interesting.  But it offers excitement, the same way sex does.  It offers belonging, the same way cults do.

It is a plastic way of life.  There is nothing authentically human or caring about it.  But it gets you from one side to the other.

Thus, what Trump has REALLY brought into stark relief is the moral and emotional poverty of large segments of the industrialized world.  They no longer speak as human beings.  They no longer recognize reason and proportion.  They no longer possess the capacity to form individual judgments.  Every cultural improvement over the past 4,000 years is lost on them.  They long to return to an era of tribalism, rapine, and cultural solipsism, because they do not know what to do with the gift of awareness, and have rejected a priori the possibility of personal authenticity and growth.

As I have periodically shared, going to bed without drinking is like packing for a nighttime combat mission.  I don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, but I know it will not be pleasant.

As far as addiction, any physiological withdrawals don’t last more than three days or so, and all physical effects are gone within a month or so.

I have gone three months with no alcohol, with no reduction in symptoms, which leads to me to conclude that my shaking and other symptoms have nothing to do with drinking, although short term withdrawals may exacerbate them.

Having tried every other possibility, it seems my only option is to go through these things and learn to live without fear.

Last night was particularly bad.  It was like someone hit me with an electric shock about every ten minutes the first half of the night.  At some point, I was hit about every 5 seconds for minutes at a time.  Eventually, I fell asleep from sheer body fatigue.

At some point, I found myself saying DOWENT TAYEEK, which I realized was probably an infant version of “don’t take”.  I am told I was very, very attached to my pacifier–which was likely one of the only things I trusted to calm me down–and as with everything else they did, my parents likely took it precipitously one day without explanation.

But here is the interesting thing: I calmed down after that came out.  It was a moment, frozen within me, which thawed, finally. I reached, got in touch with, some primal part of me, and opened a line of communication, of understanding, of respect and listening.

On many surface and internal layers I have neurosis and difficult emotional pain.  But I really think at the very core of the thing, of my self, there is an indefatigable and absolutely committed warrior.  I fight battles continually, and even though they are in my mind, even thought nothing external is going on, they FEEL the same as real battles.

I share this, because I know I’m not the only one.

And later in the night, I was surrounded by zombie children in a library, in a dream.  I told them: I don’t fear you, you need to fear ME.

And I look at my own history.  Everything in my past worked to destroy my core sense of self, but I survived.  Everyone in my family is crazy, but they told me I was crazy.  I persisted.

All my life, I have seen things a bit–sometimes a lot–differently.  This is because I am not afraid to pay the cost of being different.  I am not afraid of mockery, or personal attack.  I do not fear for the sense of reality and sound thought I have fought so hard and long to attain.

I have created myself, at great cost of effort and pain.  I have created a world view, a philosophy, a path to a better future.  I have offered solutions to all the problems confronting human kind, and I have been able to do so because on some level I do not fear the dark. I am the one who lives in the dark, and points the way to the light.

The terror impulse must weaken over time.  I can look it in the eye, and know from long experience that I can take what it deals out. I am getting stronger by the day.

At some point, I will become truly interesting.