Month: May 2017

It seems to me that the bar can be set very high to feel like you belong.  Nothing is given in at least our suburban and urban worlds.  You have to conform to mutable trends of fashion.  You have to dress a certain way, act a certain way, be familiar with various types of media, have goals that align with the dominant–but mutable–group consensus.

This is the Gesellschaft/Gemeinschaft distinction Ferdinand de Tonnies drew.

Many critics of what they call “Capitalism” point to the transactional nature of our social relatedness, how people are seen for their values of various sorts.  Perhaps they offer a means to social climbing, which is to say, a means of bolstering a fragile and highly contingent ego through the means of attaining the envy and admiration of others.

Perhaps the people you meet on the golf course provide a means to making money.

Perhaps you are just lonely, and need someone to fill the slot “friend”, without really knowing what this could mean, or what could be built if you both only had more vision.

When one is “nested” in a Gemainschaft, you are to some extent unfree.  Belonging comes with commitments, with expectations of behavior which are NOT mutable, not negotiable.

But it does seem to me that in some respects stable, rooted social orders also provide more freedom.  Take as one example the treatment of “madness” in various societies.  Within many traditional societies behavioral forms which would get one imprisoned in a madhouse here, and heavily medicated, are treated as emergences of something qualitatively new, and potentially highly useful.  Most shamans go through periods of “madness” to earn their titles as wise men and women.

Where to go and what to do in a highly successful economic order are, or can be, very confusing questions.  There are so many possibilities.

I have things to say on this, and of course have said many things, but my introspection on our world continues.  I do believe a life philosophy built on first principles rooted in science is possible.

It seems to me that true kindness often says and does nothing, because it is not compulsive.  The drive to “help” people often hurts them, and to the extent this drive is unconscious this fact will be invisible to them.  They hurt and hurt, and manage to maintain a self image of being compassionate, thoughtful, and kind.

What I feel is that the deepest need most have is the need for connection, and even if you say or do nothing but see people as they are, and forgive them, this is always helpful.  We all need to “feel felt”.

I have lived in a harsh world all my life.  To use an analogy Bessel van der Kolk offered, alarm bells are going off in me 24/7, and have for my entire conscious life, even if I was able to suppress my awareness of them for a very long time. “Life” has always felt dangerous to me, and offered no right answers.  My main solace has been oblivion, both that offered by alcohol, and that offered by abstraction and emotional distancing.

I cannot say I have been a kind person.  I have, on the contrary, often been an asshole.  I have been rude, presumptuous, entitled, impatient, condescending, and sometimes outright mean.  I speak this merely as fact.  I can’t see how I could have been any different and survived.  And I am not done being an asshole.  I have many triggers.

But I can see how on some level I will be able to forgive, through a deep, heart level understanding, people who are mean. I’m not there yet.  It will take much more work.  But I can see a path, or at least the beginnings of a path, and it leads through a complete understanding of myself, who I am, and feeling my continuity with not just the rest of humanity, but of life itself.

Feeling the life all around you: this is how you begin to live.

It seems to me this morning that work is best understood as the expression of creative energy.  As such, we are all Creators–gods of a sort–when we sweep the floor, or do the dishes, or cook a meal.

I’ve seen often this Zen-ish call that “when you wash the dishes, wash the dishes.”  I’ve tried this, and all that happens to me personally is I feel the misery that walks with me every step of every day.  This is information, I supposed, worth knowing.  It is better to know who you are than to not know who you are, but I want something even from mundane tasks more than an absence of everything else.

What I want is a feeling of connection, of value even in the trivial, but I have not yet figured out how to do this, although I do have a current hypothesis: what I see clearing the blockages is the flow of energy through me, from God to God.

One of the most important Kum Nye exercises is called the Gold Heart Thread, and consists in nothing more than standing with your arms straight out to your sides, slightly bent, with your head straight or perhaps pointing slightly upward.  You do this for 10 minutes.

If you try this, most will find that your shoulders start hurting rapidly.  10 minutes is a long time.  But reportedly people work up to an hour or more, not as a feat of muscular endurance, but by enabling a specific type of energy flow.

The key, I am realizing, is that energy flows out from the heart through the arms.  But most people have many blocks.  They stop the energy unconsciously.  We oppose work.  We oppose difficulty.  We have in America today this notion that work is either a bad word, or something to be done simply to survive, or something to be done obsessively, so we can “get ahead” in the “rat race”, so we can “succeed”, and everybody look at us in envy.

But most people work for the work  for the weekend.  Most people are waiting on retirement, so this thing they dislike will be done, and they can do something close to nothing, and quite frequently the same as the day before.

What happens when you embrace difficulty, take it into your heart, not in a spirit of resentment, but as a wind beneath your wings, without which you could never fly?

And I will add that there are intermediate positions possible between the idea that God is all loving and that everything always works out no matter what decisions we make; and the idea that God either does not exist at all, or is completely indifferent or even malevolent.

It is possible we live in what I might call an Adult universe, in which our decisions count, and in which relative failure is always possible.  It is possible God is a sort of parent who gravitates to those who try, and distances himself from those who do not.  Our decisions may matter, as the Bible teaches.

And this may be true even when our decisions are very difficult.

Particularly when you add reincarnation to the mix, it may be that all of us have ample time to get things right, although it may be that people also suffer the consequences of their decisions for hundreds of thousands of years.

This is all a little hippy-dippy, but what I am searching in my own self for is the next step I need to take.  What I have found is that important change is gradual, and often happens before we realize it, but most of the time the ground has to be set with IDEAS, which, when seeded in an unconscious which has been prepared, bear fruit almost automatically over some time horizon.  Thoughts matter.  They are not all that matter, or even the most important thing, but they cannot be divorced from primary experience.  There are no real advantages to stupidity or naivete, except in contradistinction with truly bad ideas.

That, in my world, is my form of optimism.

We can’t know if it is our destiny to succeed, but we can know it is our destiny to give everything in the effort.

What is seemingly not obvious is that once you have a Special Prosecutor in place, they have very wide authority.  Kenneth Starr wound up far afield of Whitewater.

I read Mueller is Ranger qualified, served as a Marine officer in Vietnam, and was initially appointed by George W. Bush.

It seems to me that he can not just put to rest the propagandistic memes created by the Hillary camp, and spread by a hysterical media taking its cues from Goebbels and Lenin, which seems to have taken the Big Lie not as a possibility, but a real idea to be tested, again, in the United States of America, in the 21st century.

No: he can go the places Trey Gowdy could not.  He can go the places Comey dared not.  This could very easily wind up being an investigation of the Clinton Foundation.  After all, the nominal idea is that our elections should be sacrosanct, and that nobody should be selling influence to anyone.

This will of course depend on his character, his understanding of his proper role, and to a very great extent his courage.

But there has never been any evidence of the alleged crimes.  On the contrary, it seems not just that Seth Rich was the “hacker”, but that he was murdered (“made an example of”) and those responsible for his murder covered up by a D.C. police force seemingly corrupted by persons as yet unknown, although we can make some very good guesses.

It will be interesting to see where this goes, but one thing seems clear: Trump is not going to be impeached, much less removed from office, which has never happened.  The temper of the American people, what it wants, was made clear in the last election.  The tide is clearly in the direction of mistrust of our national politicians, Democrats in general, and contempt of our complicit and completely venal media.

I will add that although I continue to be filled daily with many ideas–many of them likely useful–that I need for a time to deny myself this access to emotional distancing from my issues, which I am trying to take on directly, and seeing success in so doing.

I will ultimately be more useful as someone living in the world, rather than floating somewhere above it.

I post on my phone sometimes.  I am a right pointer finger typist, and it hurts after a while.  If you see typos, this is to blame: both my use of my phone, and my sore finger, aka “fuckititis”.

My pedantic, perfectionist side compels me to point this out.  IT’S NOT MY FAULT!!!

Well, not completely, in any event. Goddammit.

This was typed on a computer.  I have a couple posts for tomorrow I did not feel like inflicting on my poor booger finger.

What I understand Bloom to have understood Rouseau to have been saying is that if there is no price to be paid for non-conformity there is no social order. And logically, if there is no order–what might be termed a cultural implicate order–then one cannot belong to it. One does not belong, cannot belong, anywhere in which there are no givens. Everything must be negotiated continuously and based upon ambiguous, mutable, and diverse rules.

One can readily infer from this the great social comfort Americans derive from “getting ahead”, since this form of rationalism retains some hold on this, and comfortably avoids the issue of who we ARE, by defining us by what we DO. But there can be no rest in this system.

And equally logically, the authoritarians–like the kid in the anecdote he relates who asked if we “should go back to sublimation”–infer that if non-conformity is punished, there must be an order, that the way back to Eden is to stomp out and destroy all outliers.

One sees many people desperately trying to break rules to affirm the presence of an order. At the present moment I see this in transgenderism, with perhaps bestiality, pedophiles, and necrophilia waiting as final possibilities. They want to hated, in some respects, since that hate implies an order they can juxtapose themselves with, and in so doing find a community of sorts.

This reminds me of gays I have read publicly lamenting their success. When they were outside they had something. Now that they are inside they suffer the same Last Man Syndrome the rest of us do.

To my mind, nothing could be more insipid or uninspiring than to define oneself by ones sexuality. We all feel sexual urges, but that urge, as a simple physiological tension, is easily dispelled through masturbation, and I think much contemporary sex is scarcely above that. I read kids are having less arc now, and I think it is because they too have realized this, that sex does not imply emotional intimacy, and that the feeling of being felt, as Dan Siegel puts it, is vastly more important, and vastly harder to satisfy.

I see kids experimenting with fluid gender red not out of innate psychological need, but as a means of forming SOME identity in a world denuded of way-markers; where, because everyone belongs, no one belongs.

This effort, it also seems to be, is a vulgar misinterpretation of the already bad ideas of Sigmund Freud.

Would it have been better for Trump to fire Comey day one, as many expected, or for him to wait, to allow some testimony to happen, to give him a chance to vindicate himself, and THEN fire him?  Is the latter option not more professional, more fair?

And if the Democrats don’t want to let this Russian thing simply fade away as the puff of smoke it is, why not start taking seriously the investigation of and prosecution of Obama and Hillary, both of whom have committed ACTUAL crimes, not the made up ones?

The history of this whole thing, as I understand it, is that one of the Baltic States cooked up some flimsy and evidence free bullshit against Trump.  The British ran with it.  Obama got wind of it, and used it as a pretexts to eavesdrop on an unknown number of people around Trump and including Trump, during the Presidential campaign, and afterwards.

The news media, since, being utterly unable to process the degree of irrelevance their continual lying has relegated them to, continues to insist with no evidence that “The Russians” somehow cost their Dear Leader the election.  The whole things is ludicrous.

But, again, if they want to play fucking games while living in a glass house, I say Game On.

I looked him up last night.  He only made it to 62.  That’s not very good, but it may have been overwork.

But it may have been grief from being misunderstood. I read he was generally regarded as a “conservative” among most intellectuals, but this is a misperception.  That this is a misperception is obvious within the book itself.  From my own perspective, one need only note the seriousness with which he regarded Rousseau, and the esteem he held him in, to see this.

Bloom’s book might well have been titled “The Etiology of an Error: how modernist stupidity ruined my fun.”

All he is really doing is pointing to the manifest and sundry contradictions within modern intellectual history, which like Ouroboros use rationalism to destroy rationalism, and, not surprisingly, then have nothing useful or practical to say.  In the symbol, the image is intended to connote both destruction and creation.  In the modern Academy, the snake succeeds, somehow, in digesting itself, leaving nothing, as Bloom says, but disingenuous but absolutely clear nihilism.

Another title might be: “How the modern University became civilization and democracies greatest enemy.”

Bloom is sympathetic when Rousseau talks about the General Will, and people being forced to “be free”.  He sees in Rousseau a foreshadowing of the later distinction de Tonnies drew between “Gesellschaft” and “Gemeinschaft.”

In his portrayal of the problem of the Last Man, Bloom is absolutely useful, though.  Who is this person in the strip mall, and what is their purpose in life?  What could, and what should be their purpose, and who are we to comment, criticize, or commend?

And where do we go from here?  Unlike Bloom, I retain what gets called a “normative” disposition.  I think the Big Questions can be settled in flexible but relatively fixed ways.  I might say it this way: I believe the beginning of a path can be described which will always lead somewhere interesting and useful if followed with diligence and courage.

He thought that some questions were inherently sufficient in themselves, and that the process of answering was the process of diminishing and eventually the process of destroying through innervation and starvation the culturally creative energies of the human race.  This, in any event, is what I understood him to have said.

I am in the 3rd part now, and should finish in the next week or so. I understand his fascination with universities and the life of the mind.  I have felt it myself.  I felt it at the University of Chicago, in fact.  I used to find bookstores enchanting places, because there were so many places to go.

That feeling has diminished to a great extent.  Where I saw endlessly magical places in the past, now I see a long series of dead ends, generalized admission of failure, and the marketing of niceness, novelty, and career success.

When I want the answers I seek, my most useful resource is a meditation mat in my room, looking at candles, and inhaling incense and listening to very pleasant music.

Why seek the counsel of neurotics if the goal is seeking an end to neuroticism?  All fools have solutions to the problem of foolishness, but . . .

Would it not be much more useful and accurate to speak of inter relating fields of thought and actions than “opposites”?  Predator/prey as one example could be seen simply idealization related to what level of the food chain a given entity derives the energy to exist from. Bacteria are predators, in many cases, as are deer, which eat plants.

Take any given Is-Ness, say “the rich”. There are many interconnecting fields, which I think would most usefully be visualized as clouds in motion. The “rich” sometimes become poor. Many are on the bubble. Poor become rich. Some rich, like some poor, are heartless. Some rich, like some poor, are very open hearted and philanthropic. Some are political and some are not. Some are reactionaries, some genuine Liberals, and some, like George Soros, are open opponents of democracy and political freedom.

I would submit that binary distinctions by means of which we confuse reality with our map of reality are artifacts of times when sime distinctions helped survival, and that exist not just in our brains, but our gut brains as well. Above the neck: one of us/one of them. Below the neck: safe to eat/not safe to eat.

But we have, now, the capacity for nuance, and I would suggest that capacity depends for full expression on the capacity for relaxation, which is to say the relative demobilization in a conscious way of our lambic system, and a following heightening of remaining perceptual capabilities.

And I will continue to insis on the PHILOSOPHICAL importance of Kum Nye as a fantastic answer to the question “how do we return to feeling?”