Month: November 2017

is not “how can I find a companion in the darkness?”, but “how do I find the light?”.

Ponder this.

I was feeling the urge to get drunk the other day.  It was a perfect day for it, rainy and cold, and I had no responsibilities.  I think it was last Friday.

And it hit me that there is a sort of perfectionism in my desire to get drunk.  And that made no sense at all to me.  But some part of me was saying that what I was doing was enough.  Nothing more was needed.  I will always fall short, some part said, and that is OK.

And I pondered this feeling–which I am rendering very incompletely here–and what I felt was that my brain is wired for shame, which in turn is the equivalent to social disconnection.  Shame is exactly equal to the frontal cortex being off-line in some respect, which itself is a common outcome of trauma.

And I felt that all day long I feel like I don’t belong, like I am a stranger in the midst of an otherwise complete, coherent world.  My very existence sometimes feels like a sin, like I have no natural right to be at all.

And within this context, drunkenness comes to be the equivalent of self imposed exile.  It is a perfection, because I am not polluting anything or anyone. I am perfectly free of the anxiety of being.  I am not asking anything of anyone.  I am willing a sort of mini-death, a mini-suicide, which actually brings me freedom from feelings which are otherwise extremely tiring.

I can’t speak to the experience of all, of course, but I feel something like this dynamic is very, very common, particularly for the long term alcoholics/drug addicts who are suffering from undiagnosed developmental trauma.

I was on a college campus today, and they had an alphabet soup announcement–they keep adding letters, and I have no interest personally in getting past gay and bisexual–and it occurred to me that, as with most things on the Left, this whole thing is a reasonably centrally coordinated propaganda offensive.

And the POINT of the offensive is to force people to take sides.  It is always to force people to take sides, to take some issue where reasonable people can see value in diverse perspectives, and make it black and white, and to pounce mercilessly on anyone unwilling to toe your side of the thing immediately and fully.

This has two practical impacts.  One, it trains people to be submissive.  It trains them to the herd instinct.  If you want to belong, they are told, then you have to shout when we say shout, and cry when we say cry.

Secondly, though, by diluting the world into two poles, it allows you to get acceptance of many things which most people would otherwise reject completely.  Pedophilia is an obvious example.  How long do you think the Left, in general, will withhold judgement on those in their midst who are using the transgender offensive to push sex with children?  I think indefinitely.  Once you are on one side, you accept the entire omnibus political agenda, or you are an island of one, adrift alone on the ideological seas until a conservative comes along and rescues you, and reminds you you have your own fucking brain, and can and should form your own fucking opinions.

Thus there is an inherent incentive for the Left to continue inventing problems, which they can then use to push further polarization. 

To state the obvious, though, solving real problems is not and never has been their goal.  It is simply to burn the world down, and cry and shout with delight watching everything go up in flames.

As I have often enough, one can compare it to Satanism, and I am not sure that Satanism does not come off the worse in that comparison.  Satanists at least are able to state clearly, in the sanctum of their temples, what their real goals are.  Leftists NEVER, ever tell the truth about anything.  This is why adding Satanism to the creed in some respects improves it, because at least among themselves some honest words are spoken.

You cannot fix a problem you cannot recognize, and cannot correct behavior which is unconscious.

What creates rigidity in people?  Tension.

Logically, then, if one wants to recover the spontaneity of children, the ability to live in the moment, to be free, then the only path is to unlearn chronic patterns of tension.

I will say again that Tarthang Tulku’s Kum Nye system is the smartest system of personal cultivation of which I am aware.  Some of the crazier of us will also need Neurofeedback, but I think the two together constitute a path back to a world most of us have given up on.

This is a sad but very interesting story: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/248785/sabina-spielrein-carl-jung

I like this term “memoricide”.  I have long had a passion for remembering and recollecting the forgotten. This is one of the reasons I regularly point out our victory in Vietnam, won at a high cost of lives, and life energy–not to mention American money–and then lost to frivolity, cynicism, and grotesque stupidity, not just then, but ever since, with Ken Burns merely being the most recent willing conspirator in this particular memoricide.

Be that as it may, Jung appears to have been a rapist and an intellectual thief.  The notion of archetypes and the Collective Unconscious is, from my perspective, one of his most interesting, and it is NOT HIS IDEA AT ALL.

What is one to make of these chauvinist pigs–Freud and his not-disinherited progeny also being nearly uniformly ugly, and Jung in her estimation a “psychopath”–parading around as the wizards of mental health, the knowers of the unknown, the able tinkerers with our innermost realities and failings?

I have said before, and will say again: in my view, the institution of “mental health” is actually one of the worst things to hit humanity in its long and sorry history.  Substantially all post-modernism, and therefore substantially all lunatic politics in the modern world, has a strong flavor of some version of psychoanalysis.

This women had some fantastic ideas.  I really, really like this idea of a “death and rebirth” drive.  You have Eros, as the urge to create new life.  Then you have what we might call the Phoenix impulse–I think she would like that–which is the urge to create qualitative new life WITHIN ONE’S OWN SELF.  Two, twin, life instincts, one merely passing through “death” as the cost of metamorphosis.

And could we not posit the urge to war as in some respects the urge to a new form of life?  An urge to gallantry, sacrifice, endurance, patience, brotherhood, and the like?  To be born again, in the crucible of fire?  The mass dying is not the impulse: it is the desire for a new life, and the lack of a better means of finding it.

Sabina Spielrein: she is now on my radar.  I will do what little I can to help the world remember she lived, and survived a great deal of grief and turmoil, to deliver to the world highly interesting ideas, one of which was much better than the diluted version Freud dished out to the world.

With the black community, so called, is not racism, but the BELIEF that racism is 1) the direct source of all their problems; 2) unavoidable; and 3) irremediable without complete and abject dependence on a political process largely controlled by white politicians who benefit from the status quo, and suffer no ill consequences from the long term maintenance of the status quo. Who, in other words, are happy to fail continually and over the long term because they STILL GET THE VOTES OF THE PEOPLE THEY FAIL.

RESPECT IS EARNED.  It cannot be commanded.

You heard it here first. Probably.

You can only really understand in others what you can find and understand in yourself.  Self knowledge is a prerequisite, in my understanding, to empathy.  If you cannot feel compassion for yourself, there is no use trying to send it out into the world.  Whatever you are sending is generic, non-targeted, impersonal, and in most cases often wrong.

Now, it is obviously possible for people who know nothing about themselves to develop an understanding of the signs indicating different patterns in other people, which they can then manipulate, sometimes by simulating feelings in themselves they do not actually feel, like compassion and understanding.

Things I think I personally understand are why people are consciously cruel, why they kill themselves, why they pick unnecessary fights, why they cut themselves, why they self sabotage, why they feel depression, why they get confused, why they become addicts, and why they lie.  This is a short list.  I have found every vice imaginable in myself.

With regard to evil specifically, what I think happens is that the lack of love–and associated emotional pain and social disconnection–is so intense, that a sort of sub-personality takes over.  The role of this personality is to hide them from their pain.  They in turn CAUSE pain, so they can retain some relationship with it.

It can be and often is useless reasoning with people in this state, since the entire PURPOSE of this way of being is to tell themselves important lies about who they truly are: helpless children, feeling spit on and hated by the world.  To ask such a person to truly understand themselves is to open up a world of pain those who have not felt it can scarcely imagine.

For myself, I think I have been to the brink of what is endurable.  Much more pain than I have felt is certainly possible, but not, I don’t think, without pushing someone over into this other world.  We all have built in circuit breakers, where beyond a certain point, that emotion simply disappears into a hidden folder, beyond our conscious awareness.  It doesn’t disappear, but the immediate sensation of hell diminishes.  This, in turn, conditions people to avoid this place.  To do otherwise is to walk back into the flames, and very few are willing to do that.

The reason I have done it is I can feel the pain of internal division. I can feel my separation from the world, and have long been willing to pay any price to find my way home.  Not back home, but to a new one, which I am both finding and building.