Month: September 2017

From my perspective, Alt-Right is normal political conservatism, plus drugs, Milo, and a healthy dash of Ron Paul (but not too much).

It is, in other words, principled political Liberalism, which would have been far too tolerant for Reagan era conservatives, and which presents a major problem to the Commissars of the Left, because it is socially tolerant where they are not, and politically principled, where they also are not.

Unchecked, it could lead to mass escapes from their carefully pruned and greened gulags, especially among the young.

One of the main reasons I took the trouble and spent the money to get authorized to teach Kum Nye is that it is much deeper and more subtle than any other practices of which I am aware, and I am aware of s great many of them.

Yesterday I was contemplating how I fear relaxation, and feeling that this is a general problem. We stay busy because the notion of spending an afternoon on a porch watching the grass grow is anathema, scary.  Why?

Within Kum Nye there are three levels of relaxation. The first is what you get with a good massage, as one possibility. But underneath this is Kun Zhi, which is that swirling torrent of unresolved emotions, everything running wild, and which you run from daily. It is all of your truths, your real truths. It is the ugly, but also the possibility of the beautiful. It is the temporarily painful, but also the germ of perennial happiness. It is all mixed together.

Within this mix is the feeling I think most of us have had, and certainly those of us who did not get “good enough” parenting, as psychologists put it, which is that life has no point. Living is useless. “Life is just to die”, as Lou Reed put it.

This feeling came on me strongly yesterday, and it felt familiar. Part of growing is remembering who we once were, and who we have always been, but not consciously.

This pessimism is corrosive, obviously, and especially in precocious children of the sort I once was. What is the superficial antidote? Burying the idea, and countering it with, in my case, a felt need to save the world. I want to save the world precisely because I have not known how to save myself. I feel there are many like me, and as a group we likely do much more harm than good.

Positive thinking manias are rooted in core pessimism. Positive thinking as a practice in high achieving people is of course useful. As an ideology, it is not.

I continue to be surprised by myself. Every day is a unpredictable adventure. Often it is scary, but I have known true horror, and I kept going. Slowly things are coming into place. Soon I will be good, I feel, and happy, after a long, long nightmare.

Edit: I meant to add that the statement “Life has no purpose” is silly to me. Life, per se, is an abstraction, a verbal reification of our experience, itself amenable to the process of decision, of which defining any number of purposes is a primary process. We can give any purpose to life we choose, and if we do t choose that is not “Life’s ” fault.

Practically, psychologically honestly speaking, this a FEELING of disconnection from wholes, from belonging to some process and some people. The thought arises naturally from a primitive but real and honest feeling.

Kum Nye, to me, is the emotional equivalent to reasoning. It is learning about chains of logical emotive causation at the level of primary experience. It is seeing how human emotional life is constituted for oneself, versus the abstractions one finds in books which, if they accurate, can only themselves have come from this process of inner work.

Self evidently, logical answers to emotional questions are found in the emotions. The words you say to yourself, or to anyone else for that matter, don’t matter one damn bit.

I try to say things which mean something. Perhaps sometimes I succeed.

Our insane monetary system has the effect of squeezing innovation out of society, but at the cost of emotional and social well being. We need each other far more than we need new stuff.

And it continues to be the case that greed and bad management keep getting conflated with “Capitsalism” by propagandists–who dish this pabulum out to eagerly receptive resentful minds–when in fact it is obviously and patently absurd.  If you hate your boss, start your own business. If the government has made it hard, blame socialism, not “capitalism”.

Do human greed and stupidity disappear when the government has a monopoly on them?  Of course not: they CONCENTRATE. All the abuses of Communism and its socialist cousins–for example in Venezuela and Zimbabwe, and India before it changed its ways–should seen as distillations of the essence of the abuses the people thought they were protesting, and which the very same sorts of people used to get coercive power over them.

As long as there are bad people, no system is safe from them. But what our system offers is alternatives. In the system created by our Constitution, each State was supposed to be an alternative to each other, and the Federal government something far away that mainly mattered in times of war.

We’ve had wars a’plenty, and look at our government now.

I feel my own personal life path is to figure how to make authentic love something more, rather than less, likely, and how to make it more common.

We are commanded in the Christian tradition to love, but ponder that. Love or die. Love or God will hate you. Love or you will be thrown into eternal darkness. I honestly cannot decide if Christianity is a net blessing or curse, although it is certainly both.

I think my most excruciating work is done. My struggles continue, but I have lost the need to drink, and this is a major advance.

I watch the news and it breaks my heart sometimes. How can the same poor islands that just endured a hurricane go through another. But people endure. It is what we do.

I continue to choose to believe that universal light is possible on this planet, and that humanity can survive the next 100 years with our freedoms and dignity intact. I can’t of course know this, but as Churchill put it, roughly, there is little damned use in negative thinking. Seeking and finding a condition of paralyzed helplessness is neither hard nor useful.

Many ideas continue to flood through me, but I am for now trying to stay with my primary experience, and my primary existential struggle, which I may describe more fully later.

Every moment is important, but none too important.

Love is what is most important, but sometimes we need to be selfish, and even cruel.

It is important to never waste time, but sometimes the most important thing IS to waste time.

You should dedicate yourself to helping others, but the first other is always you.

There are no absolutes, except when there are.

I have in recent days been trying, again, to puzzle out a life philosophy.  When I look out at the world, I see many solutions.  And I see many people driven mad by a felt need to conform to absolute dictates of one sort or another.

Life, it seems to me, is a tide: it comes in and it goes out.  What was becomes what is, becomes what will be.  There is no constant landscape, other than motion.

As a shelter from this, many humans have evolved inflexible rules, such as the Jewish and Islamic laws, or the Catholic liturgy.  Communism is little but an escape from freedom by assigning “law” to “history”.

Sometimes we need absolute rules.  But sometimes we don’t. 

And the philosopher–if I might style myself as such, my own reservations about that word and vocation notwithstanding–should see the big picture.  Sometimes, emotionally, you need to be firm, and obviously you must be firm in something.  This is rigidity.  This is Law.

But sometimes it is necessary to bend like the Taoist willow, allowing, without losing ones roots.

In some respects, I think I am trying to wrestle with my own tendency to be judgemental.  It was a functional adaptation at one time.  I needed it.  It was the only way I could make sense of the world.

But what I see is that it separates me from most of humanity.  All have fallen in some ways, but all have also risen in some ways, and found some light somewhere.  For me to be tense, to force a separation, is a violence to truth, and more than a little unfair to me myself.  When I push someone away emotionally, I lose what could have been an interesting interaction, potentially useful to both of us.

It is odd this word would mean two very different things. But they are not so different. To leave is to begin, and all doors are both exits and entrances.

One starts where one is, but few of us see all the places we can go.

Feeling a bit mystical today. It’s easy enough to use the language!!!!

It occurs to me most of us have one way of moving in the world, as our “posture”, or what Moshe Feldenkrais more comprehensively called our “acture”, and another posture hidden within our selves. Part of healing–really, I think most or all of it–is learning on a feeling level who you are, and part of that is connecting with your relationship with your body when you are not having to fool people so they dont attack you, or so it feels to some of us.

When I am not an inflated pufferfish, or activated porcupine, who am I? Where would I rest, if I could?

I heard on the radio that Norrh Korea gets 90% of its fuel from China. This means that without China they cannot survive. They certainly would not be in a position to develop and test nuclear missiles and warheads.

And they continue to support North Korea:https://www.infowars.com/china-warns-trump-we-will-back-north-korea-if-the-us-strikes-first/

Here is a simple idea: if and when North Korea launches an effective nuclear attack on the US mainland, we consider it an act of war by China itself, and react accordingly.

Obviously, a nuclear war is not the outcome we want, but it is not the outcome they want either. But given that China can shut them down any time they want, they are CLEARLY culpable.

If we add this to the table, along with the threat of a tiered trade war we can escalate gradually, perhaps they can be made to see reason.

China itself is not peaceful, and its leaders not secure in their power. They are corrupt, greedy, brutal, and indifferent to anything not directly related to an unearned national pride, or the internal violence needed to keep hundreds of millions of miserable people from committing mass slaughter of the dictators who call themselves liberators.

It is very possible to put real pressure on both these nations, or so it seems to me.

Sometimes you have to just watch those who have chosen death die.  There are countless seeds struggling to take root and sprout new life. Save your energy for them. None of us invented death. It is simply a factor in our existence.

Those who seek darkness will find it. Those who seek oblivion will find it.

Anger ends when the hurt ends, and I think the end of hurt is the same as forgiveness.  Forgiveness is when the thought of someone, or something which hurt you, no longer brings out strong emotions.  It is growth, though, which brings understanding.  Forgiveness makes it no longer matter.  Growth allows you to see.

I am still angry about a number of things, and I still hurt. For someone like me, being able to feel hurt in the first place is progress.  I never knew what was being done to me, because I checked out early on.

You can of course choose to forgive someone, but it seems to me this is simply a decision to consistently alter your focus.  This is likely helpful, likely healthy, and likely the only way to move on for some people.  But until you heal the hurt, you are papering it over, and it never fully goes away.

When I finish my inventory, I don’t want anything left.  What I want is consistently expressed creativity, focus, and pleasure in people and in work.