Month: June 2017

It has long seemed to me that the people like Ray Kurzweil, who ignore the data supporting the existence of a soul, and who dedicate themselves to the dream of infinite intelligence, are people with major unprocessed emotions, who find themselves distant from the flow of actual human life, from the joys of being alive, from spontaneity, from dance.

Of what benefit would it be to be able to conjure any fact instantly, speak any language, solve any problem?  All the problems would be solved quickly, presumably, except the purpose of life.  That is a feeling, a touching of mystery, of the infinitely large.  I fail to see how a computer could help with this, with the task of touching the deepest root of LIFE.

It is a chimera, a delusion, a hoping, one cherished by people UNWILLING to solve their own emotional problems, now, using the ample knowledge which could be made available to them.

All the mystics, the mushroom eaters, the LSD trippers, the Ayahuasca adventurers, the St. Johns and the Rumi’s and the Nagarjuna’s say that knowledge can be contacted directly, that this Source is infinite, and that everything knowable can be made to appear before finite eyes.  This is the essence of what the Singularitarians want.  It is an eminently religious quest, based on a religious sentiment they find themselves unable to to indulge in a healthy way due to metaphysical errors their emotional constipation makes them unable to avoid or rectify.

I wonder sometimes about this alleged global civilization that built many extant monuments some 13,000 years ago, or thereabouts.  It is obvious, for example, that the Incan ruins have multiple architects.  Small stone construction which is not hard and which is found everywhere, is assembled on top of enormous stones which are fitted together with unbelievable precision.  It is not hard to conclude two different civilizations built two different layers.

But ponder a global civilization in many respects superior technologically to our own.  Could they not build structures they knew would endure thousands of years, then destroy their tools?  Could they not return to a very, very simple life of hunting and gathering, of story telling, of group dances, of profound meditation and spiritual mastery, then one day simply choose to die off en masse and inhabit another realm of existence entirely?

Why not?  I go places educated people are not supposed to go, but fuck educated people.  Jesus fucking Christ so many of these people are demonstrable retards, unimaginative, and unable to evaluate evidence which contradicts in any way their indoctrination, their intellectual crippling which they farcically enough think makes them MORE and not much LESS qualified for anything to do with real life.

I will always dream my dreams, and do my best every day to see what is in front of me.  When I am in a new place, I will sometimes spend 15-20 minutes just logging every detail.  I watch trees for 5 minutes at a time.  I look at how rooms are wired.  I notice holes in the floor and ceiling.  Life is endlessly fascinating.

My work continues, and I continue to have ideas and visions I am not sharing.  All in good time.

What do you think it feels like to finally give up on trying to heal and grow?

Answer: it doesn’t feel like anything.  That hunger and drive simply disappears, and is replaced by as many other thoughts, activities and feelings as it takes to forget.

All of us have, regularly I think, experiences of amnesia, where we were doing one thing and find ourselves doing something else.  It is a type of hypnosis.

And sometimes some part of us WANTS to forget.  I coined the word Forgession some time ago to connote the process of forgetting, of forgetting what we want to forget, and forgetting that we forgot.  It all disappears, from all but the innermost recesses of our psyches.

Memory is a strange thing.  It endures everything, but it is sometimes hidden for a lifetime.

I will add on a related note that I think our nature is to grow, to expand.  The only “growing pains” are those of growing beyond restrictions within us.  As one lecture I listened to put it, we go through many pairs of increasingly large shoes before we reach adulthood, and of course spiritually this process never stops.

And often these limitations only become clear when we are on the brink of something new.  They were latent, part of the landscape, assumed, until something different became possible.  And the juxtaposition of the small within us, with the imagined largeness at the next stages, creates cognitive and emotional dissonance.  Because you do not transition instantly from the one to the other.  There is faith needed in the middle.

I think most people naturally enough assume that any AI capable of destroying humanity would evolve within the Defense community, but why would this be so?  Everything is connected.  All AI is almost inherently AI on the internet, and anything on the internet can be hacked, and hacked quickly by a sufficiently developed intelligence.

All lives are wasted, but all lives are precious.

I speak abstractly.  I feel this, but I cannot see it yet.

Where are the pathways in the dark no one sees, and how do we find them?  Having found them, do they matter for more than a moment?  These are mysteries.

Whuman does Murller still have a job. We know the Russisn story was concocted and that there was never any evidence for it. Other than investigate Seth Rich’s murder, which the FBI should have done anyway, what can he do but dig for dirt?

Here is the thing: EVERYBODY has something to hide. All of us do things were not proud of. All of us benefit from some privacy.

This is why the saying, most recently heard on Harry Potter, that “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” is so insidious.  If you dig long enough on virtually anyone you will find mistakes, weak moments, neurotic habits, latent psychopathologies, and risks taken in the confidence of secrecy.

It is thus no sin and no shame to simply say “my business is my business”. Period. ALL Mueller could have in mind is sifting through Trumps trash to find something, anything, to damage him with.

This is ludicrous, given that the only evidence that has ever existed is the investigation itself, and a dossier created by an anti-Republican dirty tricks squad.

Mueller should be fired tomorrow. He never should have been appointed in the first place. Trump simply needs to say “there is nothing to investigate. Obamas people confirmed it,”

I recently checked out some Hercules Poirot mysteries from my library, and am immensely enjoying them.  I have never been much into the mystery genre, but it seems to me that on a mythic level it engages our innate sense that life is a mystery, and that a conscious life is one in which patterns are assembled from clues which are often small.

It continues to baffle me that Joanne Rowling is a de facto Leftist, because she was and is a very good psychologist, one able to work at a mythic level.  This is the underlying reason for her phenomenal success.  It would not be overstating the case much to say that she created a secular religion.  Not infrequently, I see the Deathly Hallows on cars in the place a Christian fish or cross might have been.

One aspect I would invoke is that Harry got many clues from Dumbledore, but he was never told how to assemble them, or how to find those that were still missing.  So much of life is like that.  We have the sense that there is something in front of us we should be understanding, something we should be seeing, but quite often progress consists in simply taking swings in the dark and hoping for the best.  And the best is sometimes what we get when we do.

And it seems to me that mysteries exist on many levels.  There are mysteries within mysteries.  Perhaps spiritual growth comes in graduating to higher and higher levels of incomprehension.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/06/24/a-cultural-revolution-in-slow-motion/

This article is great.  Please read it, and ponder it.

The soil has been prepared for mass death and destruction.  One sees this clearly in the abuse of words by the Left–I will note, perhaps unnecessarily, that Orwell pointed out that the abuse of language always precedes tyranny– and their physical and emotional abuse of all who dare challenge them on even the most ludicrous claims.

Large segments of our country–indeed the world–lives in this swampy miasma of bad ideas, continual rage, radical intolerance, self congratulation, and deep, deep, deep ignorance.

We all need to speak the truth to as many people as we can.  I think I am going to start responding consistently to my left wing Facebook friends until they unfriend me.  It is not worth buying the peace when so much is at stake.

What, indeed, could any competent psychologist make of people who see “fascists” everywhere, under every bush, behind every tree, but refuse to speak to them, refuse to engage with them, refuse to understand them, and who counsel violence as the only course?  What is the consistent element?  Their own minds, and their own fabrications and projections.

The “Red Menace” was quite real.  Evidence of this is seen, obviously, in the intellectual acid planted a half century by Communists and now filling the veins of our academics, our media, and far too much of the political class.

If there is a “Paranoid Style” in American politics, it is in the Fascists wearing masks and attacking Trump supporters in the streets.

You know, I often find myself weeping.  I weep for myself, for the weak, for the suffering in the world.  I welcome it, in general.  It means emotions are flowing, that I am alive.  I cried at Wonder Woman, at her quest to change the world for the better.  This is my own quest, too, and it seems so daunting.  There is so much fire and death, so much hatred, reflexive, willful, and willed ignorance, so many species of disgust and rejection, even of the better angels within us all.

And I have flows of energy hit me sometimes.  One did today, and I was trying to ride it to an answer to the question of why we should pursue heaven, despite all our pain.  Pain is so addictive.  Look in your own heart: you will see it to be true, or so I suppose.

What would it be like to live for thousands of years on the Wonder Woman isle (I did not quite catch the name), a place where “nothing ever happens”?  David Byrne, with his usual neurotic cynicism, captures the problem: would it not be BORING?  You know everyone.  You are perfectly safe.  You eat the same food, do the same things.

I have not read extensively on it, but in my limited understanding L. Ron Hubbard preached that all of us are spirits who once lived in perfect harmony and who got bored, so we created problems, we created hell, we created conflict and difficulty, knowing it would all sort itself out across eternity.

What is Duhkha, really?  A deep understanding of it, and Nirvana, go hand in hand.  You cannot separate the one from the other.  You can stipulate Duhkha, you can believe in Duhkha and the Path out of it, but you cannot REALLY “grok” it until you pass beyond it, and look at it from the outside.

So much of life depends on so much faith.  We must climb hills which we hope have been honest in their promises, but we can never know anything but that climbing makes us better climbers, and that if the truth lies on high, whatever we do searching for it conditions us to eventually find it.

I have been holding a post on Socrates, and the Western intellectual tradition, and will do so some more.  It doesn’t feel right posting it yet.  But I will note that after a lifetime of searching Socrates took with him to the grave, apparently with some satisfaction, the truth that he knew nothing at all.

Fire destroys.  But it also purifies, does it not?  Is anything in the world just what it is, and not also something else too?

The metaphor which presently works best for me is life as dance, living as dancing, as moving gracefully, as both leading and reacting, as interacting and separating, one within a whole, a whole within one, the universe as a self similar dance floor, filled with light, and the possibility for the benighted ones to see and feel something else.

You know, this blog often serves as my scratch pad.  I’ve posted drunk on here more times than I could hope to count, and not infrequently I have said stupid things.  I am not writing for money.  This is simply a hobby place, where I think out loud, and hope somebody reads it, and when I actually do have something useful or interesting to say, I hope I have an effect.

I went to bed last night–and I was not drunk last night by the way–and realized it was Gadot.  The Godot pun likely would have worked nonetheless, but ah, I myself have to groan at my poor attempts at humor.  I have always liked puns, and I read they are usually a sign of psychological health, so I will admit I do throw them out there a lot.  Most of the time they go over people’s heads.  It’s not something most people are waiting or looking for, so they exist mainly for my pleasure, but do also kind of serve as a test to see who’s awake.  I will occasionally watch a slow light dawn in people’s faces as they realize what I did.  My attempts at wit are sometimes rewarded with a smile.

On a related topic, and serving once again to demonstrate that there is no topic I cannot politicize–something which drives my children crazy–I wanted to mention that I watched the film adaptation of Tristram Shandy the other day with Steve Coogan.  I have nearly read this novel several times, but never quite gotten around to it.

Part of my learning difficulty, as I contemplate it a bit, is that everything I do, I do a bit obsessively.  When I read a book, I obsess about it.  On the positive side, I tend to have excellent recall of books I read many years ago.  I remember a very high percentage of what I read, and try to only read important books, so that is useful.

The down side is that whatever film or book I am currently consuming gets seared into my brain’s retina.  I see this now, although I have never said this, or perhaps even felt this consciously, although I have always known that any movie I watch will play in my mind and in my sleep for days, and so too do fictional novels.  I will often dream about the characters I am reading about, feel their conflicts, feel their pain.

So, making a circuitous route around what is a very simple premise–as I tend to do, but which is apparently richly warranted in this particular case–I read that Tristram Shandy is both the “first postmodern novel”, and a, on its own account, “Cock and Bull Story”.  Logically, why not make this a persistent and obvious connection for ALL Postmodernism?

Why could we not call the willful pursuit of incoherence of thought and language for its own sake what it is: BULLSHIT?  It might be entertaining bullshit, a sort of faux intellectual Ludetic system, but endless recursive circles will never make a line.

And the HABIT of consuming and enjoying the consumption of bullshit can only act as fertilizer for imbecility, uselessness, and–where that person chooses to still form strong opinions about the physical world and how it works–harmful.

Gal Godot gives me hope, because I could see a happy relationship with her.  Now, that line stands at about, oh, 25 million, all after her husband.   I, too, am waiting for Godot. (I would probably benefit from an editor to say DEAR GOD NO at some of my jokes.  To which I would reply: No, Dear God OT.  See what I mean?)

She does seem to have some honest depth.  If there is one nation on Earth that knows about war, it is Israel.  If there is one nation that knows about pointless destruction and endless hatred, it is Israel, which suffers it, to be clear, and would gladly grant considerable concession, if their enemies could be trusted in any way at all, which they can’t.

Just to overshare as I tend to do, I was rereading my EEG today, and apparently I have “learning difficulties”.  Today.  The EEG was taken a couple weeks ago.  So I am presently performing at some lesser fraction of what I would be capable of if my brain were not in continual turmoil.

It is like there is this huge seed within me which is slowly growing out of the shell of who I had to become to survive.  It is much, much larger than what I have been.  I have been in many respects a mediocrity and I admit it.  I can and will soon do so much better. I am doing the work. I am quite capable of making decisions and suffering for long periods consciously and willingly in the pursuit of inner knowledge.  No one picks me up when I fall, but nothing has killed me so far, and if I am not dead, I am getting back up.

For some reason I feel I may never marry again, but I do think there will be loves, and lifelong intimacies.  I just have to get this weight off my back.