Month: March 2017

I would like to assert that there are no “bad” feelings, merely unprocessed ones.

Is a fire alarm bad? Not if there is a fire. That is what it is there for. You call the fire department, they check it out and either put out the fire or tell you it was a false alarm. Then they reset it. This is how it is supposed to work.

Nervous systems of course are much more complex, but the principle is the same. An emergency–or what feels like an emergency–emerges, and in a healthy system awareness is maintained, resources, particularly calming resources–are deployed, and a healthy status quo que ante is reinstated.

PTSD is not a fire, but rather a fire alarm that cannot be turned off. The fire was long ago.

And on a slightly different note, could one not argue that sadness can be an EXPANSIVE emotion? In feeling your own pain can you not feel that of the world? Where could compassion arise except with an honest feeling of, and processing of, through kindness and gentleness, ones own loneliness, brokenness, and silent fears?

I would like to suggest that the most important thing about a person, as far as predicting who they will be ten years from now, is curiosity.  Curiosity inherently breeds growth, or so I believe.  And incuriosity likewise breeds stagnation.

As I have noted on several occasions, the tiny nation of Israel, is at least one thousand times more inventive on a per capita basis than the Arab and Islamic world.

Islam means submission.  And that submission is to a final text, written roughly in the 7th century AD, which purports to include all knowledge necessary to transit this life successfully.  No added science is needed, no learning of any sort.  Nor is any soul-searching, or dark nights of the soul needed.  You just have to do exactly what you are told, across a life-time, then you reach an eternal heaven.

In my own view, no more pernicious doctrine for actual spiritual, social, cultural, economic, or political development could be imagined.  No doubt many people grow anyway, become good people anyway, but all that in spite of, not because of their foundational text.

In South Asia, many Muslims dance and play music.  So too did the Sufis.

In the 1970’s, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and other nations were quite liberal with respect to women.  The Islamists–who in my view were largely funded and driven by the Soviets through their agents–ended all that.

What more dull life could be imagined that being forced to recite the exact same prayer 5x a day for the rest of your life?  Where nearly every possible spontaneous expression of praise and joy is forbidden?

Violence is the inevitable result.  One could as easily lay our impulse to conquer North America to our Puritanism, frustration, latent anger, and following self congratulatory moralisms.

Well, I think I have reached a root understanding of human violence in my own body, which continues to attack me at night in the form of unprocessed trauma.

I think the root of human violence is that in most forms, people do not see it as violence; or at least, they invariably frame their own violence as protective, proactive, necessary.

I’m watching a documentary on Dietrich Bonnhoeffer, and they have footage of Hitler.  It is a recurring theme in his actual speeches that he does not want violence, but by God he is not going to let it be visited on the German people, that he is sick of the crimes the Jews commit against Germans, how they sabotage them at every turn.  And how the international community cannot wait to shrink Germany into a small space and cut their balls off (in effect).

Hitler never said “we need to invade the Soviet Union and Western Europe”.  What he said was that Germany needed space to live and breathe, and that on all sides everyone was trying to prevent it, and to confine them.

All mass violence begins like this.  People have violence in them at all times, but they need an excuse to let it out.  An excuse, to return to the modern era, like the belief that “fascists must be attacked”.  This belief, of course, has less validity than Hitler’s claim that the world wanted to confine Germany, which was somewhat true (they did after all start World War 1, for somewhat similar reasons).

Be all that as it may, I am going to try for a longer term sobriety again, this time based on understandings I did not have even a week ago, which is that at root addiction is internally directed rage, and as such a remnant of a violence which happened outside of me, which I could not control, but which presumes my own life is worthless.  My own life is not worthless. I cannot control the storms which happen outside of me, and which regrettably play out within me still.  But I can focus on the good, and learn to calm myself.  I have already had some successes.

So, I feel this violence, deeply. I  do not get sex yet, but I get violence.  I think I can say that.

And what soothes violence is music and dance.  I was reading this piece yesterday, somewhat at random: https://www.absolutept.com/mental-physical-effects-drumming-review/

Does it not seem obvious that music has, as the saying puts it, the “power to soothe the savage soul”?  Does it not seem obvious that it brings people together, even disparate, different people?  Does it not seem obvious that dance does as well?  That it brings about spontaneous social orders which are robust, at least for a time, and quite real?

Ponder in this regard the prohibitions in Islam respecting music, dance, representational art, and intoxication in any form.

Could one not say that this religion is constructed so as to PREVENT the formation of any spontaneous order OUTSIDE of violence?  War is of course a well proven way of building comradery, and group cohesion.  And I suppose gang rape is a sort of war, isn’t it?

Islam is an order intrinsically and intentionally based on the use of force.  Force to prevent women’s “immodesty”.  Force to ensure conversion to Islam.  Force to ensure no one leaves Islam.  Force to make sure people pray 5x a day.  Force in the face of anyone who criticizes Islam.  Everywhere, a war, even within the “House of Peace”, to keep it homogeneous.

Genuine individuation and the development of personal moral consciousness is impossible in such a situation.  It is a totalitarianism which in the case of the Saudis literally extends to your bedroom and what you do with your dick.

I have always noticed on college campuses that the Muslim students are almost invariably clustered in groups of 2-3.  If they are not in a group, they are looking for one.  People who do not value independence and individualism need one another for continual reinforcement.  It has no room for a personal, conscience based relationship with God.  Rather, it is a social system organized by force to coerce everyone to interact with one another and the process of prayer in ways determined 1,500 or so years ago, in a desert far, far away.

This is the major point, though: how is peace possible with people who hate joy, who hate dance, who hate singing, who hate music, and who hate non-abstract art, which is to say, virtually all of the crowning achievements of the human spirit, the world over, and who are unique in all this?

Rand Paul is absolutely right that the longer we delay, the less likely a full repeal is.  I think the situation is simple: it is a Gordian Knot, so cut it in half once, and decisively.

Rand Paul’s free market ideas will work, and as far as all the people added to government rolls, give them 2–hell, 3, or 4, as long as it is a finite number–years to find something else, then end the subsidies.

Just simplify it that way.  Everything that started under Obamacare goes away in a fixed period of time.  Full Stop.  Put into place sane free market principles and policies and watch people’s rates go down, and their coverage go up, along with the overall amount of healthcare available in this country, which has been declining for obvious reasons.

When did Republicans turn the tide, and start winning back seats nationally?  Since TWO THOUSAND TEN, which was the first election after Obamacare passed on a completely partisan basis.

This number of 1,000 net seats gained gets passed around, but it is ENTIRELY dependent–the motion towards Republicans everywhere in all governments–on Republicans acting like conservatives, and SPECIFICALLY their repealing Obamacare.

Remember 2006?  Democrats retook Congress.  Why?  Because we had a Republican Congress and a Republican President, and we may as well have had Barack Obama in the White House then, Ted Kennedy running the Senate, and Tip O’Neill running the House.  It was ludicrous.  It is a major miracle Obama was able to perform even worse.

But if Republicans even START going back to those days, their support will vanish in a whiff of smoke.  They have every possible support they could ever want.  Now is the time.  Fuck it up and there will be consequences.  There was no Tea Party then.  There is now, and we are paying attention.  Do not fail if you want to keep your jobs, especially in the House.

I’ve been watching some of the many videos on YouTube about the evidence for a lost civilization that was wiped out in some massive cataclysm about 12,000 years ago.

With regard specifically to a wall built in Peru or Bolivia that they could not explain–the rocks in many cases are so hard they could only be cut with diamond tools, and are cut in many cases with such precision that in the modern era it could only be done with precision machines, and given their many ton size, even that would present considerable logistical challenges–I had a vision.  I allow my inner world fairly free rein, and thought I might share what came to me.

One of these walls was built by three brothers in the course of a week or two.  They possessed an ability to liberate or activate the space within the boulders, both to make them relatively weightless, and to allow them to be molded like marshmallows.  One brother made them weightless, one carried them, and one fit them into the wall.  It is not that the found conforming rocks and cut them, but that they used any available rocks and just squeezed them in.

They were quite funny.  They were very carefree, and joked continually.  And the wall was built not as a structure to live in, but as a way of altering the subtle energy flow in the area.  When they were done, they sat for a very long time, perhaps days, perhaps weeks, soaking in the energy, feeling its flow, and it nourished them the way food normally would.

This whole notion of activating space I have pondered.  All matter is mostly space.  This is simple scientific fact.  It is 99% plus space.  What appears solid is constituted with these little tiny bits that are just tiny, infinitesimal specks in the overall thing.  In a typical atom, if you have a golf ball sized nucleus at the fifty yard line in a football stadium, the electrons are somewhere in the upper bleachers, and perhaps marble sized.  This is my rough recollection.

Now, we also know space is never empty.  There is an oceanic, essentially infinite energy source all around us called the Zero Point Field, or Quantum Vacuum. Activating this would be activating space.

And when I ponder this, I wonder what gravity really works on, and why it is so strong.

We continue to not understand gravity, but obviously it is related to the creation of Mass.  This is an interesting thought: does the mass exist prior to the gravitational interaction?

Without being able to understand the math–I have only had very basic Calculus–I recall reading somebody derived Newton’s F=MA by integrating the Zero Point Field.  This equation has always simply been posited.  It was not supposed to be derivable.

Most of the interesting work in the 21st century will, in my view, take into account the Quantum Vacuum.

And I did want to follow up on a previous post: if Abstraction is the modern equivalent of ritual sacrifice, then the ultimate avatar of Abstraction–a violent, anti-life process, even if it allows us to build things–is Artificial Intelligence.  The underlying emotional drive motivating those who obsess over this technology is in my view self loathing.  There is no need for this technology, which is obviously very dangerous, and could lead to the end of at least human life on Earth.  There are many possible Apocalypses.  Why build any?

I had a tough time this morning.  I drank too much last night, but what that does–what I hope it will do–is expand me and break down walls, which it did in a major way.

It broke something I have been lapping up against for some time, which is the very high wall of my intellectualism.  Abstraction, I see, is a powerful narcotic, one which allows you to avoid most emotions, perhaps for a lifetime.

But it does so at the cost of being in the moment, of genuinely feeling happy and connected with the world, which is what I have been trying so hard to cultivate.

Here is a bon mot: Abstraction is the Sacrifice of the modern era.

What I mean by this is we bind parts of our collective lives in abstraction.  We sell a part of the experience of having a soul, of being a living, breathing being on Earth, for protection from the realization of our more primitive instincts.

What I also mean is that Sacrifice–human, animal and other–was a means of processing for a time all the demonic impulses within a society.  In our own society, we in general eschew violence–at least our chattering, academic class does, and particularly when it appears warranted in the pursuit of national security–;but it does not go away when it is ignored.  It appears as abstraction.  Individual and social “selves” are split into the sane and shadow.

And one sees this process of abstraction in place when you ponder the ease with which the Left has been able to peddle, and get repeated, the ridiculous comparisons of Trump with Hitler.  Agree or disagree with his policies–and by and large they have been pretty clearly expressed, and all seem on their way to being implemented–he is NOTHING like Hitler.  His supporters are nothing like fascists.  Only people lacking the capacity to connect emotional intelligence to the process of thinking could possibly be that stupid.

And I see too that “crusading” is almost always both the result of abstraction, and an effort at avoiding unpleasant feelings.  Many people need to be needed, so even if the people they want to “help” don’t want that help, even if they explicitly reject it, they will “help” anyway.  And in the case of black people, part of the dynamic has been convincing them they are functionally helpless, and that they do need help, which to my eye looks like grotesque racism.

And if the problem does not exist, they invent it.  By and large, the transgender folks have been managing the bathroom issue quite well for some time.  The only current addition to the debate is whether or not people who are OBVIOUSLY a different gender get to impose their will on others.  This does not make sense to me, or most people, which is why this is a great cause for people who need to be needed.  Since they are battling common sense and long custom, they are well positioned to use the resistance they encounter to bolster their internal sense of moral supremacy.

But to take that last shot of abstraction away from myself, I was in my body for a time, and it felt good.