Month: October 2017

Contemplate the phrase and image of an Endless Square.

This might resonate with someone.  It just came to me.  I can explain it, but I won’t.

I pulled out my old Bob Anderson stretching book, the one that has Jim Fixx–are you old enough to remember him?–as a reference, and actually followed his instructions.  He talks about the stretch reflex in there.  And I did it so gently it was more like the idea of a stretch, and a means for focusing on that part of my body, of becoming aware of it, of letting it release its knowledge, which is a very Kum Nye approach.

And lo and behold old feelings and the memories associated with those feelings started coming out. I have repressed–held back, hidden–so much, out of necessity.  It is odd, making contact with my 6 year old self, what I was feeling.  I stopped asking myself what I was feeling around then, and was not old enough to do it any earlier, although I am sure I expressed myself, as young kids do.

And it hit me that this sort of healing activity is the MAIN activity of spirituality.  I was reading my Kum Nye reading earlier, and it is all about relaxation and well being.  A spiritual person feels everything anyone else feels.  They react the same way in the same situations.  But having taught themselves to process emotions, the recover vastly more quickly.  They get back to a high baseline, where many people start bogged down in unprocessed emotion, then stay there, and in some cases get dragged down further by circumstances, or perhaps more accurately, their understanding of the circumstances which their unprocessed emotions compel on them without their awareness.

And then it hit me that much of the Big Three (as seen from the chair I am sitting in) is focused on sin and an invisible God, on rules, obeying the rules, breaking the rules, and an invisible hereafter.  It is not at all about feeling good, and in fact, all three to some greater or lesser extent want people to feel ashamed, unworthy, and generally like shit because of sins someone else committed, or because of their inability to fully repress healthy instincts like sex, a desire for a comfortable life, and for objects of beauty.

This is absurd.  Goodness–real Goodness–flows from a sense of abundance.  Generosity of self is the natural consequence of feeling good, just as material generosity is a natural outcome of abundance.  It requires no special virtue, no special compulsion.

Here is the thing: if you seek goodness directly, you cannot find it.  It is, as Chuang Tzu said over 2,000 years ago, crooked.  It is not found in a straight line.  It is not found in a simple prescription like “be nice”.  It is not found, in my view, in any religious frameworks oriented around ritual behavior.  It is found by valuing one’s self, one’s own well being.  At some point, perceptive people find that helping others be happy makes them happy, but this point is not reached in a condition of personal emptiness.  You can dedicate your life to helping others, and die empty, if you do it from the wrong place.  This is my opinion.  Some measure of selfishness is required of all honest spirituality.  To say otherwise is to adopt a spirit of compulsion in my view.

And I will share two other posts here for my own convenience. 

Compulsion is equating 90% with 0%.  A healthy person sees 90% as 90%.  It is not 100%, but it is not nothing either.  Partial measures are always better than no measures, and not everything in life is worth 100%.  Most things are not.  You save the 100% for the things that are.  If you try to treat everything as a matter of life and death, you wind up shutting down much of the world out of necessity.  If you have to give 100% everywhere, you have to shrink your world.  There is no other choice.  You have to shrink your domain of action and thought.

If, conversely, it is acceptable to give 10% to some things, then many more things emerge from the darkness for your consideration.

The other point I wanted to make is that frequently lesser goodness is greater goodness.  I have, in my own life, often made things worse for people in the process of trying to make them better.  As one example, I see people’s pain when they do not, and have at times spoken of it.  Almost always, this is a mistake.  They hide their pain from themselves for a reason.  Bringing it out increases their suffering.  It does not decrease it.  They have to find their pain, and process their pain, in their own time.

I think most of the time–and this is a provisional hypothesis, since I don’t have this figured out–it is best simply to mirror what people give you voluntarily.  Show them that you hear them, nothing more.  Sometimes this is a small consolation in the midst of a vast suffering, but something is better than nothing, and trying to be greedy with your “goodness” can undo everything.

I would actually, to complete the circle, equate trying to do too much with stretching too hard.  You activate their impulse towards contraction, and they wind up smaller because they met you.  This is incompetence, period.

Don’t be incompetent.  This is not a bad rule.  And if you figure it out completely, feel free to comment.  I’m still looking for ideas.

We are all fools in our own ways.  The best we can hope is that we live long lives in which we become a little less stupid each day, which is perhaps close to the Taoist idea of doing more by doing less.  Remove what is unnecessary, and the path becomes brighter and simpler.

No one can drink water for anyone else.

I have this notion I have articulated from time to time of perceptual breathing, of a global perceptual In-Breath, and a global perceptual Out-Breath. Large to small to large to small.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes you need the thousand words, and more.
Sometimes pith is the essence of wit, sometimes wisdom speaks long and carefully.

Be all that as it may:

Addiction is not the problem: it is the RESPONSE to the problem.

Love is when you feel completely safe with someone without using denial.

No sane person will deny that life is often hard.  Whether it SHOULD be hard or not is a philosophical question, but that it is for many people is clear.

We are all born where we are born, to parents who may or may not want us, who may or may not teach us useful lessons, who may in fact inflict pain on us, and denigrate us.

Where you are is where you are.  Nothing can change this.  Given this, if you stipulate, through excuses, that you are helpless, then you have taken your own destiny out of your hands.  You have given in to helplessness, and this in turn makes whatever pain may be present worse.

I think most people make excuses.  Certainly I do.  My feeling is that my excuses are often reasons–which may or may not be true, although if I’m honest it likely isn’t true–but they are reason on a path to personal accountability.  I take frequent breaks climbing the mountain, but I look at the summit often, and when I am done resting, I continue climbing.

It is perfectly acceptable to ask for help, but it is never consistent with a healthy sense of self, of healthy self empowerment, to demand of others that they do for you things you can do for yourself.

This is an axiom of genuinely Liberal culture.  This is an axiom of good people. 

The alternative is people USING other people for their own selfish and unhealthy ends.  Some people need to infantilize other people, so they can remain perennial parents.  Not because they are good parents, or care-givers, but because it gives them a sense of power when others depend on them, which is easily rationalizable as morality.

This is the root dynamic of race relations in this country.  The political Left tells blacks that it will care for them, and far too many blacks are content to take them at their word.

Again: this is spoken from a place impatient with the low self esteem implied by the complicity of ordinary blacks in this system.  Black people are capable of vastly more than they are showing as a cultural group at the moment.  They are capable of genius.  They just need to believe it.

We all make excuses, and in my view, there is no warrant for judging people for it.  At the same time, it is perfectly reasonable to hope for other people what they fear to hope for themselves.

As I have noted often, many people–most, perhaps all–have many “parts”, which can and do send contradictory signals.  I would like to assert that in the presence of combined passive aggression and apparent courtesy, the most damaging signal should be treated as the primary one, even if it is subtle and intermittent.

Particularly when you try hard to consciously focus on the most obvious, most socially acceptable one, the second one becomes vastly more damaging, because it becomes  a virtual hypnotic suggestion that you deserve such treatment.  To combat it effectively, you have to ignore the socially acceptable parts of the communication, and focus on the damaging signal, because in reality it IS the primary one.  It comes from the root of that person’s consciousness.

To the extent all these notions of unconscious racism have validity, this is the source.  At the same time, you do not change how people REALLY think by forcing them to avoid certain words, or to avoid expressing certain thoughts.  The feelings remain, and will always find an out.  As with feminism as well, the best offense is generalized success.  If blacks want to eliminate racism, they need to start graduating from high school at the same rate as the kids in the suburbs, working as hard as those kids, and taking responsibility for their families.  They need to stop blaming the world, and need to stop looking to leaders who encourage them to do so. 

These are not things you are supposed to say, but it is the truth.  It may be that vigorously policing peoples expressed ideas eliminates or reduces psychological discomfort among blacks–I’m sure it does–but it does not raise the standard of living, make the streets safer, make the schools better, or increase the number of good quality jobs.  It doesn’t.

Returning to my main theme, I would in fact suggest that there is a covert hostility–or at least actual racism–inherent in the ideas that whites need to “look out for” blacks, that they depend in inherent ways on the political system, and that they need to be guided through life like little children.  These ideas–particularly since they are not expressed in clear language–weaken them.  If the Irish, Jews or Italians had had friends like the modern Democrats, they too would still be impoverished in disproportionate numbers.

And in dealing with narcissists, the double communication is the main source of damage.  In order to delay the realization that they are radically alone and incapable of honest human contact, the narcissist–particularly in “romantic” relationships–will often offer to the other the same esteem in which they hold themselves.  This appears to be generosity, but it is simply a cloaking device, a concealment, a trick they don’t even mean to play.  With most, I don’t even think it is conscious.  It is simply who they are.  They have a behavioral soundtrack that they play through, then reset at the beginning with the next one.

Grandiosity, though, betrays an inner lack.  Conversely, GENUINE humility–which is rare–indicates an inner fullness and richness of experience.  You don’t need to always be right, because the world is a fascinating, large place, and there is much you don’t know.

All of this, of course, is personally relevant to me.  My work continues, as does success.

All human action begins in the body, is processed by the brain–some brain–and expressed symbolically if communication is desired, most commonly through language. Language, in turn, both expresses ideas AND creates them. Images we form are often in response to words. This primitive feelings can go through many forms, themselves constantly changing and evolving.

The deliberate abuse of language is a deliberate abuse of ones fellow humans.  Conversely, consciously accurate use of language is a form of compassion and even love.

Hence: gun control is the effort to reduce illegal gun use by reducing legal gun use.

Corollary: gun control is the effort to reduce the number of illegal guns by reducing the number of legal guns.

I would stipulate John Lotts phrase should have a word added: more LEGAL guns, less crime. This is a highly defensible statement. It may be that low crime areas exist without guns–this is certainly true-/but I very much doubt there are any high crime areas outside war zones where legal gun ownership is common. Witness much of South and Central America.

This song is from 1979: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xfxfmi

There are others.

What is interesting about this whole Hollywood thing is that the open secret has become simply open, or is in the process of doing so.

In every other business, sexual harassment has been punished quickly and severely for decades now.  The question is why it has been allowed to continue in Hollywood, with both men and women coming out now in large numbers.

I was reading an op/ed citing a rabbi who claimed that the Times piece on Weinstein was the result of his plan to make a philo-Semitic movie about the Warsaw Ghetto, and they found that politically unacceptable.  I suspect, though, that they had no idea how many rats would come fleeing out as well.

It seems likely left-wing culture itself made the sexual harassment possible.  It both stipulates that all sex is meaningless, that one should pursue pleasure at all times and all costs, and that the cause is always more important than any individual sacrifices.  Weinstein was a staunch leftist, so hurting him was hurting Democrats was hurting whoever it is that person thought they actually helped.  The little people, lets say, or oppressed minorities who would otherwise be completely helpless.

Weinstein knew everybody, and they seem to have known him.  We might call this the “Bill Clinton” principle, that all sins are forgiven if you are on the right side, because, again, the cause exceeds any sacrifice.  Paula Jones and the rest of them were just the price of progress, so called.

It will be interesting to see if the naked and undeniable double standard being displayed everywhere at the moment will open any eyes.

For his part, Trump seems to have been quite astute at picking willing women.  Weinstein was pretty much a “I’ll fuck anything that moves, bring me meat”, but Trump has always seemed to me to truly enjoy feminine beauty for its own sake, and the company of intelligent, individuated women.  He may have grabbed pussies, but if so, those woman likely consented at some point, and slept with him because they wanted to. 

Trump has been sued over 4,000 times, but not ONCE for sexual harassment.  Ponder the odds of that: a multi-billionaire playboy not sued once.  And I have never seen one allegation of hush money, which have trailed Bill Clinton and Weinstein (and others) all their careers.

Here is the thing: I think Weinstein and Clinton HATE women.  Sex becomes a means of punishing them, of asserting power and dominance over them.  This is the real turn-on, which makes it so the target doesn’t matter at all.  They are all–perhaps, if I might indulge myself in some psycho-dynamic oversimplification–their mothers.

I think of Fellini’s City of Women, which presumably echoed Freudian themes, but I do not think Freud was fully wrong about everything.  He always got to the right intersection, then made the wrong turn.

Despite being only 12 pages, and free, I found myself skimming this after a close reading of the first 5 or so. He goes on and on about the importance of time–which is a useful topic–but fails to tell us what it is we should be doing.  He merely conveys the regrets of many, and the failures of the few who lived as he counsels.

This is a paradox of our own time.  We have, relative to at least our recent past, much leisure.  It is possible, for example, for someone to make a best seller of a book titled “The Four Hour Work Week”.  But we don’t know what to do with it.  That same author seems to find himself now working 60 hour weeks, not just because of money, but because he doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself.  He “meditates” daily for 20 minutes or so, because it “sharpens his mind”.  It is a best practice of high achievers.

I read many billionaires are now micro-dosing with LSD to make them more “creative”.  Creative to what purpose?  Amassing another billion?  A fifth billion?  Becoming the wealthiest man in the world?  Why?  What does this get, if not leisure?  I get that making money is a game to them, that it is autotelic, but on a deep level is such play an important part of life?  They could get the same satisfaction surfing, without needing to be cuthroat, as so many are.  There is not just a play element, but a power element, and the thirst for power is inherently sick.

Such people cannot be role models.  They have no idea what to do with life.  Whatever they are focused on, it is not learning how to love and be loved, how to relax deeply, and how to get at the deep and rich spirit of each and every day, which to my mind and heart are the points of life, and which I, in my own way, pursue each day.  I still ache everywhere, and I still have much work to do, but I am on the path much more than any billionaire, or even most millionaires you might read about.

What to do with time?  That it can be wasted is clear, but what constitutes the best and highest use is made no more clear by the current passion among many for the Stoics.

Socrates, for his part, considered “philosophy”–the love of Truth–the highest use of time.  And he ended his life only able to say he knew nothing.  Is this really the Summum Bonum upon which to base the edifice of our civilization?  That, or the deconstruction of the notion of truth, and a following obsession with material well being, or lunatic schemes of social engineering, in which men become at best herd animals?

The answer is in your body.  It is not in your mind, unless by mind we intend the integrated heart and mind conjured by such words as the Hindi “Mun”.

I continue to see stupid people.  It is my curse.  Perhaps I am stupid, too.  I am willing to consider that.  But my body tells me I am on the right, if difficult, path.

You can only see the future through the lens of the present.  Anything else is a lie.

Corollary: if you cannot see the present, you have no business speaking of the future.

Obviously, both of these are large problems at the moment, and have been for a long time.