Month: May 2017

There is never any loss, only gain.

I have offered this phrase before, but am only slowly realizing the life changing potential of treating EVERYTHING that happens as an opportunity for growth and following happiness and effectiveness.

We cannot control loss, outside of exercise of common sense and prudence, nor can we directly control our reactions.  You cannot force yourself to feel anything.  You feel what you feel.

But what you can do is add a cognitive filter which looks at situations in one way, and not another, and which is primed not to wail and moan only, but to see what is there that is positive and has been missed.  This applies both to the situation itself, and to emotions which are latent and possible, but suppressed.

I really do think many people make themselves much weaker by assuming what they are capable of, rather than allowing their actions to do themselves.  Not sure that’s the best way to put it, but allowing is a big part of my current focus for myself.  I had no idea I could feel good in the morning, feel good at work, and feel good in the evening.  This is not my habit, but I see it is only possible by suppressing natural corrective energies which emerge spontaneously if allowed.

https://www.infowars.com/ex-banker-claims-he-was-invited-to-take-part-in-child-sacrifice-rituals/

Think this through: imagine he goes to these orgies, and they film everything.  That is already a basis for some blackmail.  He is more or less describing Eyes Wide Shut.

But imagine a ritual where someone is killed, and all but ONE of them wear masks, and that, too, is filmed.  All you have to do is get someone to do something they had not even planned to do, document a serious crime, and you have them by the balls.

It would seem obvious that any serious secret society has to have the power to get you jailed for life before they will even begin to share anything serious with you.  This guy likely did not even scratch the surface.  He is merely making informed guesses about the nature of the whole thing, and cannot begin to know how far it goes.

I do feel there is a spirit of this Earth.  It is trapped here.

Samuel Johnson famously asked (approximately) “how is it the loudest yelps for freedom are coming from the drivers of slaves?”, and I thought I might render an answer (and then, if I am candid, wander around a bit trying to say I’m not quite sure what, but don’t have time to edit further.)

The Southern slave holders were the closest thing to a British style aristocracy we have ever had.  As such, they had ample time to read philosophy, law, and what we would now call political science.  They had time to contemplate it, and to reach reasoned conclusions.

In this, they were no different from Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, who also benefited from slavery.  They were no different from many Roman writers, who also benefited from slavery.  They were no different from medieval writers, who benefited from the feudal system, which amounted to slavery.  They were no different from the many Islamic writers, who also benefited from slavery.

Today, many think of Southerners as ignorant and stupid.  This is because their best and brightest–at least one, and in some cases two generations–were slaughtered in civil strife, and the survivors condemned to conditions in many cases only slightly better than the “freed” slaves.

People forget that wars leave invisible scars.  Those who survive often do so missing a leg, or arm, or eye, or with pieces of metal permanently stuck in them.  They survive with psychic wounds which make them permanently different than the person who left.  Particularly in defeat, it makes them mean, cold, and hostile.

Given the Union’s decision to humiliate the South in defeat, to boss them around with blacks uneducated to the task, and egged on in their hatred and aggression, all while using and abusing them every way possible, it is no wonder that a paramilitary force–the KKK–came into being as a means of the defense their governments could no longer provide them.

I can’t and won’t defend the KKK’s racist abuses.  But they were no different in kind or outcome than the mass slaughters and mass shames inflicted by the North on the South.  Shit rolls downhill.  There were multiple single battles in the Civil War where more Confederate troops were killed than were killed in all the lynchings in all the South in all of American history up to the present day.

We have been conditioned to view Lincoln as a great man.  But in my own view, based on my own reading, slavery was in any event on its way out.  It was not an efficient economic institution.  We could have tolerated two nations for a time, and it might well have been possible to negotiate the South’s reentry in the United States within a generation, and possibly with the simple alteration of a moderate in the White House.

We live in a Looney-Tune world.  Much of our chattering class really ought to adopt Porky Pig as their most articulate spokespig. You know, the pig who is more smarterer than the others, as well as being more articulater.  Stuttering is the least of the crimes when idiocy is being preached.

History in some respects is very simple.  The Civil War was not fought because the South seceded.  It was fought because Lincoln reacted with military force, and an invasion of the seceding States.  This decision was made on April 15th, 1861–or in any event announced–making it one more addition to the already awful history of this date (which, karmically, also includes Lincolns death, four years later).  [One wonders, should it not be 4/16, not 4/20?]

That Lincoln started the war proper is obvious.  Yes, South Carolina did fire on and storm Fort Sumpter, but mainly as a means of arming themselves for what they rightly perceived was going to be a full scale invasion.  That is how I remember the history, in any event.

One can argue about why they South seceded–in addition, obviously, to their never refuted claim that they had the right to do so in the face of what they perceived to be a tyrannical Federal government–and one can argue about the wisdom of Lincoln’s decision to end the lives of some 650,000 Americans, with a multiple that in casualties which radically altered lives, but one cannot dispute that if Lincoln had not responded as he did, that there would not have been a Civil War.  The South had no intention of invading the North.  They only did so after several years of war as a means of trying to get the North to cease its incursions.

Had Jackson, in other words, been in Lincoln’s position, there would have been no war.  Period.

And that it was possible to foresee the Civil War is obvious.  It was predicted when the Constitution was passed, and was only narrowly avoided several times in the decades leading up to the final split.  Jackson himself was categorically in the States Rights camp (as was Jefferson).

By nature, it seems to me most men become more rigid under stress, and most women more compliant.

Both tendencies, of course, can be pattern interrupted with mindfulness, but this seems to be the tendency.

And I would add, that  most men fail to see when women are being compliant.  They fail to see when they are going along to get along and assume that an equal bargain has been struck, when it hasn’t.

At the same time, I do think many American women expect too much of men.  Men naturally act like men, but they are now supposed to always know when they are supposed to be men and when they are supposed to be women.  They are supposed to change roles malleably and instantaneously, which is just not something that will ever be realistic.

Gender roles evolved–and I am am invoking both culture and biological evolution here–for reasons.  All of us can become better human beings.  This is our task.  But the start of all real progress is recognizing with honesty and wisdom the present realities, and not attempting to build on any other foundation.

I would add that all these gender confusions are in my view really attempts to escape from life itself, which is overwhelming for many.  Rather than take on a task in life, one takes on a role, in the same way an actor plays someone else.  This is ignoble.

Some men have always felt the need to dress as women, and some women, men.  This is very old.  And there is no reason to treat these people with the cruelty their alleged advocates devote to people who persist in traditional beliefs.  At the same time, they are also not special because of their particular obsessions, and even if they are harmless, they are also not role models for any of us who are not by nature driven in that direction.

No society thrives by making ideals of the peripheral and unhealthy.

No, not pouting and throwing tantrums in the street in a Halloween mask, playing make-believe revolutionary in one of the safest and certainly most prosperous countries in human history, while being largely protected by cops and a mob of fellow travelers.  This is mere farce.

No, I want to speak of acts of actual courage, and actual potential usefulness.

Psychological resistance is what I have in mind.

I would like to submit again that for many modern Americans, some of our most potent mythic symbols are comic book characters.  Certainly, that seems to be the case for me.  Growing up, my four favorite superheroes were Wolverine, the Beast, the Vision, and Warlock.  There are really two groups of two: one is animals, channeling aggression and “bestial” energy; and the second two are both artificial beings, above the fray in some ways.

The Wolverine particularly is the essence of resistance.  No attacks go around him.  Avoiding things is just not something he does.  He always heads straight into the middle of everything, and it always hurts him.  But his core is the hardest substance known to man, and he himself heals from everything.  But not without suffering.  Not without countless cuts and bruises.

As I have shared, I have had dreams of being the Wolverine, fighting everything and everyone.  Wolverine is also the symbol of the wounded man, the PTSD sufferer, the lone wolf, the misanthrope, who spends all his time licking internal scars that never fully heal, even if his body does.

Last night I was the Vision.  I could walk through walls, through people.  Whatever anybody threw at me went right through.  I could go into basements, and below basements.  I could see peoples lives, their secrets hidden in places no one else could get to. I could go forbidden places fearlessly.

And it was a very different feeling.  What you allow, you do not have to fight.  This is the essence of integration, which is allowing things to flow.  This is the essence of Kum Nye, which in important respects is about diluting the sense of self so that it blends with surrounding space, and exists not so much as a point, as a wheeling circle of energy in continuous motion, which objects to nothing and can be made to include everything.

I have not fully worked my way through all this.  I am going to do a Kum Nye session now, but my dreams of the past week or so have been very interesting.  Something that was dead is now in motion, after many years of effort.

I watched the movie Assassins Creed the other night and wanted to make a point: the idea that there is no truth is the flip side of the coin upon which is stamped “there is only one truth”. Both are what I might term Monoidealisms.

Likewise, “everything is allowed” is the flip side of Nothing is allowed. In a world where all is equal, it is impossible to value anything. Being given no means of identifying and building a self is as absolutistic as being coerced into a social role and place.  What could be worth doing, if all acts are equal to all other acts, and nobility a lie?

The deepest human needs are connection and a sense of meaning. We want to belong with others and we want to belong within ideas and shared words and images. This is how we balance our need for growth with our need for belonging.

Within the mythic universe of this game, the Assassins are more or less Satanists following the dictum “Do what thou will”, fighting an authoritarian Universal Church ( even if outwardly the Assassins are tacitly Islamic their creed clearly is not).

There are countless healthy ways to behave, countless solutions to the problems of meaning and belonging. The notion, though, that there is only one truth is very pernicious.

But, and here is my point, you have stayed in the same ideational and cultural space if you vehemently deny ALL truths. You become, actually, more stupid, and we see evidence of this everywhere.

Ideology in general, and Communism in particular, is a coping mechanism for wounded people.  The Communist states “because I belong nowhere everyone must belong everywhere.”  They want to attack in other people what they loathe, fear, and avoid in themselves.

They want a global devaluation of culture, of nesting, of belonging outside coercion, of identity, of honest friendship, of self, and in its place a global superstate where one cog fits as well in one place as another, where names may as well be dispensed with, along with families, because everything is a machine where things are put where they belong.  And they are put there, not by people, not by agentive entities, but by an abstraction called History or Science, made all the worse no one can posit with any plausibility at all “its'” actual existence.  It is a grinding horror film, an awful play, enacted by monsters who, in seeing only evil around them, do only evil.

They want horror, because they live in horror, and because one of the ways they protect themselves from consciousness of the horrors within themselves is using congenial, friendly sounding words, as if it were possible to murder and enslave people for their own good.

Where is it still common for people born American to grow up in an extended family?  The country.

Where is nearly everyone culturally and emotionally isolated?  Large cities.  There are no cultural givens in large cities. They make of this a virtue, but if no one belongs, it is hard to see how this fosters better human beings.  In fact, it seems to breed emotional dissociation, a fixation with abstraction–which is why intellectuals congregate in cities and long have–and thickened senses.  City dwellers are no longer in touch with the air, with the earth, with natural life.  Yes, it is present in confined areas, like zoos from plants, but not everywhere as it is out the country, where bonfires are common, hunting is common, and laying out at night looking at the stars is common.

No person who had retained an ounce of their God given sense could have contemplated ingesting whole and without vigorous objection the propaganda we were fed about the Clintons.  And fortunately, many American have not yet lost their God given sense, the best efforts of the media whores attacking them notwithstanding.

Deep problems require deep solutions.  What I am trying to provide here is perspective.

I spent this morning dreaming of protecting a defenseless baby, at times one as small as a bean, one I could barely see and was worried about stepping on.

When I don’t drink I face the night largely defenseless, and I often regress to infancy, when I was helpless and terrified.  I wake up shaking in terror often.

So of course finding and protecting “the bean” is a good sign. At one point my mother dropped it into 5′ of water, and I rescued it.

And I am of course intelligent enough to realize this is deep stuff, and psychosis not an impossible concomitant.  But if I were going to go crazy, it would have happened long ago.  You don’t go crazy when you contact deep realities: you go crazy because you cannot.

And it is odd to me to think that the whole Western world was obsessed with the ridiculous Freudian ideas of psychosocial development for so long, especially since he saw, then discarded, the only true part of it, which is that the sexual abuse of children and adolescents was common then as now.

What children need is warmth and understanding, and it is a trauma and crisis of our age that we have multiple generations of emotionally superficial, wounded people providing the care to the next generation.

What is natural for humankind, what is in our genetics as they have developed across at least hundreds of thousands of years, but which likely stem from much deeper roots, is for a child to be raised by multiple generations of women who are from his or her family.

I think generalized neuroses really began in this country at least when we became mobile, and women were separated from their mothers and aunts.  One woman, alone with an infant, is a herculean task.  I really believe this.  And this situation will amplify the fears and maladjustments of that woman in ways which no one is there to see or correct.   The husband is gone.  There is the child, housework, and TV.  There is the telephone, too, of course, and my mother make ample use of that.  She was lonely, and she was often angry at me, in no small measure, no doubt, because I was a rambunctious and nearly compulsively disobedient child.  For her part, she was obsessed with appearances, and obsessed with the horrifying idea that I might be, as they said, “a brat”.

I look at all this, and I look around me, and I see dead children everywhere.  They are the ones who use heroin, knowing it will kill them eventually.  They are the alcoholics, and the cruel.

My path forward is to forget about saving other people.  That has always been a distraction.  I think I might come back to it–I hope I do–but it will only be intelligent and useful when I have walked through my scars and inner landscape and returned to this very moment as a single human being.

It is hard, being someone working on these issues in a world which is manifestly frightened of deep emotion, but I have done it my whole life, and see no reason it won’t continue.  I feel, in fact, all this is slowly getting easier, as I let the largest things express themselves, and as I, in turn, mirror with attention my own inner experience.

Depth is not a place you get lost if you anchor it in your body.  Your body does not lie, and contains within it the seeds of everything you need.

Just within the last week I realized I have been suppressing positive emotions.  They come up, they show up at my door, and I tell them to go away.  I’m having a fucking pity party and I don’t need no fucking good cheer.

But why?  Oh, we are all ludicrous–perhaps not, actually–but I certainly am.  Habits run deep.