Month: April 2017

As is likely obvious, I have fairly strong misanthropic tendencies.  People suck, often.  Not all, not all the time, but this week, in one example of many, somebody is dicking me over because they can and because the normal human emotions of basic empathy and giving a shit are completely absent.

But I was sitting in a bar tonight pondering how much happier I would be if I saw the good in everyone, the Light in everyone, and rather than getting angry when they behave in ways which are hurtful, that I look deeper, and see that for some reason an important aspect of their divine inheritance–the Truth we are all born with–is unavailable to them.  They are like people eating cat food when they have a pile of uncashed winning Lottery tickets.

Disappointment on their behalf, and/or pity are better reactions.  Anger has its place, but it often accomplishes and heals nothing, and often makes things much worse.

And it seems to me that seeing the best–which is to be sure in pretty much all cases is the possibility, not the reality–makes it much easier to love myself.

Ponder: what is the psychological effect of imbibing an ideology which views all human beings as inherently depraved and wicked?  If you are human, you must loathe yourself, too, and loathing oneself it is impossible not to loathe others.  To be sure, if this misanthropy is welded onto a corresponding ideology of “love”, then compulsive actions with regard to love become possible too which mask the unhappiness inherent in this belief system.

Satanism is merely the Shadow of Christianity.  It shows what was present but hidden in church doctrine as it evolved.  There were countless acts of evil committed by the Catholic Church in the nominal name of Goodness, Piety, Truth, and Love.  This goes on even today.

Neither the forward Mass, nor the Black Mass, done backwards, make any sense to me as representations of important truths about God and humankind.

The Hindus, with their Namaste–this, “I salute the Divine in you”–are much wiser.  Yes, they had their Kali cults and Thuggees and some awful people, but they were shadows of humanity itself, not a necessary counterpoint to the highest beliefs they hold.

They do have their Dalits, too, so I don’t want to go too far in my admiration, but suffice it to say I am trying to evolve a world view and way of interacting with ugly people–who I will see along the way as long as I live–which either does not diminish my happiness, or which in fact increases it.

Generosity is generative for the giver.  As an old Sufi adage goes “The Sufi begs to give himself to you”.  He wants you to take everything, leaving nothing.  Because when nothing is left, there is nothing but Light.

It came to me just now that “there are no lies in this world”, and I felt and thought on it for a moment, and what I am tempted to say is some part of all of us sees the full truth all the time.  It is in the light.  It is not hidden.  We merely forget the way to the room with the windows to these insights, and we also pretend we have lost the key.

There are no lies: this is an interesting perspective.  I listen to my inner voice, and sometimes things come to me I don’t understand for a long time.  Deep insights are often like that, though.

But how liberating this idea is!!!  You already know what you need to know.  You know the path.  It is a question of bringing into your conscious awareness what you know, and have forgotten you know.

The origin of abstraction is feeling, and its proper purpose is a return to feeling.  I have spoken often, although not recently, of Perceptual Breathing, in and out.  You breathe in, and go up to the most condensed abstractions imaginable, like F=MA, then out, and you go out the limits of feeling and direct body perception.  In the middle, you are gathering and spreading facts, which are mini-abstractions.  A “fact”, if you think about it, is a symbol for a large reality, such as “most birds fly”.

But the reason someone built a motor car was for the feelings of accomplishment, of speed, of perhaps becoming wealthy and powerful, of safety.  There are many possibilities, but the only reason anybody does anything is to get a feeling.  The most uptight, cerebral, dissociated people you have ever met are seeking the feeling of having suppressed their feelings, of having escaped something really bad.  Usually, they are also seeking the feeling of power which the feeling of intellectual superiority gives them.  Many smart people become so because they are compelled by emotional conflicts to seek out knowledge, to thrive on abstraction and things that most people take no interest in.

I am meandering, and to some extent describing myself, but the point I wanted to make is that all abstractions are stepping stones, and if they become ends in themselves, this is inherently a sign of compromised and defective mental and emotional health.

In health, one decides what one wants to do, creates a plan based on abstract understandings and perhaps concrete observations, and then executes the plan.  The abstract becomes the concrete, and the concrete results then become the food for further and more accurate abstractions.  There is a corrective process in place, because there is a feedback process in place, and a firm clarity about the desired end result.

When one sees a phrase like “the consolation of philosophy”, it is stating directly that the goal in thinking a certain way is to feel a certain way.

Even when thoughts are made ends in themselves, they never can be.  You cannot divorce the process of thinking from the process of feeling.  You can merely tell bad lies by willing yourself to be stupid.

You cannot not feel.  You can only do it more wisely, or more foolishly.

I am, again, speaking to a part of myself which is unclear on all this.

I will add, I have a pile of diaries that is at least 8″ tall, filled with my scribblings.  I never go back and read them, and I realized the other day the reason I don’t  is that I fear that I will find there the same thoughts, the same struggles, the same lack of progress across decades.

And I likely would.  But these things take as long as they take.  Life is a school, and the curriculum lasts until the needed lessons are learned.  And I chew small things many times over.  I am like a cow with many stomachs.  But I also digest things deeply, or am in any event learning how to do so.

This will be my abstraction for the day.

I have had Spotify for some time.  It is wonderful, in that I can listen to anything from Beethoven to Neil Young (but not Bob Seger), but I understand, I think, why so many kids especially are listening to records.

It is possible to have too much.  Studies show too many types of ketchup make people LESS happy, not more.  It is possible to feel too many options.

A physical record is anchoring.  You can touch it and feel it.  It has weight.  There is an album sleeve, with large pictures on both sides and sometimes in the middle.  You will typically listen to one side, turn it over, then listen to the other side.

Digital media has no weight.  It is ineffable, like air.  As gratifying as some songs may be, it is hard to feel grateful for the whole.  It is impossible to imagine the whole, whereas it is very possible to look on an album collection with satisfaction.  Nothing will be added or subtracted during the night.

So many people worry that our greed has no limits, that our destiny as a species is to consume the resources of the Earth like a pack of locusts.  This seems as misguided as the concern that population growth is destined to be immense in all places forever.  In what we might call the developed Old Worlds–I include Japan in this–population has already started dropping.  I think a big part of this is pessimism about life itself, about its point and purpose, and a following sense of unwillingness to inflict it on children, and as far as that goes, to waste ones life on the pointless exercise of parenting.  It will all be gone soon, one can hear them say, even as they join the Chorus on the future terrors of Global Warming, in this massive global tragedy.

But I think humanity has within it the capacity for self correction, for moderation, for choosing satiety over rapine.

And I think, as small as the fact is that more vinyl was sold last year than digital music–or so I hear–it is relevant to the whole.  It represents a small self similarity to a much larger trend which is less obvious, a correction to the excesses of the Baby Boomers, who as a pack of locusts do still want to claim to have been responsible custodians, when they were nothing of the sort.

It hit me today that much of what I have called loneliness is really the pain of being alone with myself, my conflicts, the chronic sense of not belonging, of having no home and no possibility of a home, which I have avoided sensing my whole life.

And it hit me too that the parts of me which are at war with one another are both noble.  One part of me has always sought to accomplish great deeds, and think great thoughts, in the hope of winning love which was impossible so many years ago.  Another part of me knows this is futile, and is trying to point this out, that these are not my goals, or at least, not the energy underlying them.  And the two fight.  If the one loses, I live forever without love, and the other side cannot possibly win.  No amount of success could ever be enough.

And I was contemplating this tonight, drinking a beer, and a vision of myself walking shirtless in a snowstorm hit me.  I can handle the cold. I do not fear the wind.  But an enormous demon emerged from the snow and confronted me.  And it hit me that I could fight it, I could tear it down to nothing, but that what was really needed was harnessing it, and making it mine; not just facing it, but seeing my own face in it, and claiming that power.

And it seems to me that most of what we call wounds are really disorganized energies.  What was plain and given and obvious and flowing becomes stuck, hard, and confusing.  But there is never any path backwards.  There is no “healing”.  There is only transforming.

Yes, of course you can attempt to claim your saintly crown by turning yourself into a shadow of a human being, but that is not what this life is for.  We are meant to live with balls and fire.

Love is not an action. If it were, it could be willed.

Rather, it is a spontaneous emergence within a relationship.

I would say that when love is made a virtue, it becomes virtually impossible.

Please ascribe a precise life value to this performance:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClrBiMp7_Uk

You are allowed plus or minus 2 points, so please do not stress.  I just want you to measure what should be measured, and surely musical performances should all generate numbers.  We are a precise society after all, and number everything that should be numbered, which is everything.

Added this to my “watched” list tonight.

I am a Pisces.  I am an Ueber-Pisces.  This means that if I make it to breakfast without believing two contradictory things at the same time my day is wasted.

I am very sympathetic to the hippy lifestyle.  I am very understanding of the rebellions made necessary by the cultural poverty of much of this country.  We are profoundly stupid in some important ways.

At the same time, I am a defender of traditional culture, but–and here is the important point–not so much in the specific as in the general.

I did some work last week in a redneck town in the South somewhere.  The thing is, I live in a city where most people are not fucking idiots, at least compared to most of the rest of the world.  But I FORGET that there really are inbred imbeciles out there, who really are indefensibly stupid.

Today, in fact, I was listening to this guy trying to invoke the Civil War, but he kept saying the Silver War.  I don’t get this.  This is not remotely where I live, obviously.

I defend Christianity in general, forgetting often that much of what these people believe is farcical and harmful, at least in some cases.  Certainly, I am no fan of the Catholic church, even if I do my best to protect faith in general from its many critics.

I want to have my cake and to eat it too.  I want to support the dominant culture and at the same time to support rebellions against it.  I want to support culture as an idea, knowing that quite often stupidity is an inexorable concomitant.

The reconciliation of contradiction is perhaps the most important human task.  My sense is that it is not best done with thoughts, but with perceptions without names, that pass through once, leaving no form to remember, but which change everything.

My work will continue.  I recognize many, if not all, the problems.  Carry on is my motto.

What is the cultural effect of universal sanitation and cleanliness?

To this day, much of the world wipes its ass with its left hand and a bowl of hopefully but not necessarily clean water. Women are still sequestered on their periods (at least in Nepal: NatGeo recently did a piece on this) and for their part often do not have access to tampons. The opposite of sanitary napkins is unsanitary napkins.

Does the importance of the sacred–that which represents sanctity–become greater when people are confronted daily with filth?

Does it, in contrast, become less when our shit is invisible, and separated from us by toilet paper? How many Americans have EVER defecated without toilet paper?

Again: we are spiritual  animals. We can with justice look to the heavens and connect with our angelic nature. But we are also not so different than we imagine from dogs, who will not shit in their cage, instinctually.

I was in a very nice building yesterday, taking a dump in a restroom that smelled nice, with luxurious tile and wall covering and beautiful sinks, and I was thinking; this would be the nicest bathroom in the entire country in many nations. This would be how the rich live. And it was a generic building, and me a construction worker who happened to be passing through.

I had some dreams last night I won’t share that showed me clearly that the path to managing anger is accepting it, and recognizing its importance for mental health.  It is as unhealthy to never feel righteous anger as it is to continually be angry.  All emotions serve purposes, and pretending otherwise is a recipe for self deception and for the same emotions to come out anyway, but in all the wrong places and at all the wrong times.  They have innate wisdom, but when you push them down, they become profoundly stupid.

And it occurs to me that anger, too, is a profoundly social emotion.  It tells us when someone is transgressing community standards.  We feel anxiety when we ourselves break the rules, and anger when others do.  The two go together.

And what I feel is that unexpressed anger leads to emotional and thus perceptual rigidity.  As I have commented from time to time, conservatives by at least one standard of measurement are more complete, and thus arguably more healthy, human beings than leftists.

Jonathan Haidt posits five moral foundations for all human societies, which like musical notes and colors can be combined and recombined endlessly: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation.


Conservatives tend to have some concern for each of these, whereas Leftists focus only on the first two.


What I would submit is that, in making of “Compassion” a rigid ideology, the proper role of spontaneous anger is completely destroyed.  The way markers which would be offered automatically disappear.  The very capacity for non-ironic social inclusion is eradicated.  They become a society unto themselves, and at that one based only rhetorically on actual compassion, and actually based on the expression of the anger they do not know how to allow themselves to express in the right places.


As one obvious example, when you invite someone into your country, and care for them, and they attack, degrade, and very literally shit on your streets, anger is the appropriate response.  That is the worst imaginable affront to hospitality and kindness.  This has been utterly unacceptable behavior in substantially all human societies for recorded history.  But the Left makes of their complicity in such assaults on decency–here, sanctity and loyalty–a virtue.


As I have said often, you cannot make of any one virtue a god.  Or, if you choose, an idol.  At least, not in historical senses.  I have made of persistence, the rejection of self pity, and perceptual movement gods, but there is no content in this, inherently.  Persistence and movement and time will allow what was stuck to fix itself, and not feeling sorry for yourself prevents self obsession and all the delusions which follow.


In theory and to a great extent practice, any democracy is a self organizing system, and what it creates as Emergences depends nearly entirely on the ideas in play.  Bad ideas will INHERENTLY and ineluctably lead to bad things.  The quality of thought in a democracy is vastly more important than in any other possible system, and as I think has become obvious, we have been trending stupid for a very long time, and I will again submit that this rests on a dogmatic rejection of spontaneous social feeling,and particularly righteous anger.


Hell, we see some on the Left trying even now to justify crimes against children, and a resolute desire to ignore Islamic crimes against women and gays, even though these are groups they have invested enormous effort claiming they care about.


There are no actual principles in play.  I cannot say this enough.  There is a smoke screen, and uncontrolled, completely unconscious anger which seethes through everything they do.