Month: December 2017

This is similar to my idea that Bill Clinton started the Ken Starr investigation, to prevent anyone looking into his ties with the Chinese and possible involvement in the leaking–and even granting, in the form of dual-use nuclear technology–of important government secrets, in exchange for campaign support.

The fun thing about conspiracy theories is that no proof is ever needed.  Possibility is quite sufficient.  It is important, however, to remember that speculation is not evidence.  Still, I–obviously–have long enjoyed the game.

I might mention, for no particular reason, a game I spontaneously invented once with my kids.  I think I’ve mentioned this, but fuck if I can remember everything I post.

We had lunch at Pizza Hut.  There was a man sleeping in his car when we went in, which was odd.  When we came out, he was gone.  I immediately started inventing causes of his disappearance.  Holes in the ground, space aliens, rogue polar bears, secret government operations, he was secretly Inspector Gadget, etc.  We played this game for weeks.  The goal was to come up with the most outlandish and creative ideas we could think of.  My intent was to help them learn to think non-linearly, and “out of the box”, as they say.  Quite often it is simply being in the habit of coming up with multiple possible explanations for everything you see, even when there is one most obvious explanation.  I’m pretty sure this guy just drove away.

But I will never know for sure.

Now, the actual evidence is unlikely to lead to his desk, but his DoJ and his FBI clearly used fabricated evidence to justify political wiretapping that was the sort of thing one would have expected in East Germany, or the old Soviet Union.

AND THEY STILL LOST!!!

This is the great part of all this.  But people need to go to jail.  As I have been saying for some time, anyone who cannot see how fucking serious this is is a fucking imbecile who should not be voting in local, much less national elections.  We are being turned into a totalitarian surveillance state, slowly, but surely. And if there is no punishment for people we know are guilty, then there is no reason all this will not continue until we reach a moment where everyone is afraid to speak anything that is not on the menu of the “Politically Acceptable”, which need not stop with the merely courteous.  It need not stop short of the need for the continual praise of some Great Leader, nor short of the development of reeducation gulags, mass executions, and cradle to grave mind control.

It is that serious.

What if they actually came to value justice, peace, human dignity, and freedom from oppression?  Just to take one obvious example, the KKK never built psychological torture camps for blacks, and I have no doubt that there are far, far more people in such camps at the moment–in 2017, almost 2018– than were ever killed by the KKK.  The number might easily even be several million, which is roughly the total number of slaves at the end of the Civil War.  And as far as death tolls, there were years the Communists killed 10x the number of people who died on both sides in the Civil War.  There can be no comparison.

No Communist can accuse America of anything.  Their own crimes exist several qualitative leaps above our own, in their viciousness, systematic nature, and continuity over time.

China as a free nation: it’s a beautiful idea, even if unlikely for the foreseeable future.  One can always hope that sleeping consciences might awaken, at least where they are not made fully absent by psychopathy, or the equivalent as embodied in rigid ideology.

The only good solution is regime change.  It is my understanding that the few defectors there are have been waging a campaign to float balloons into North Korea with USB drives or something like that, with videos showing life here, and calling for resistance and true revolution.  The defectors who made it across the border were starving, their intestines filled with worms, and the most recent one apparently had anthrax antibodies in him.  I’m not sure what to make of that, other than that Kim seems to be telling the truth when he says he is trying to weaponize anthrax for delivery on warheads, which I will point out can obviously be projectile warheads too.  I don’t think I’m giving anyone ideas there.

So China would gain, economically, by not losing economically, if North Korea were to fall into the hands of the “people” it has always allegedly existed to serve.  As it exists today it is a Fascist oligarchy characterized by extreme disparities in privilege and wealth, with the vast mass of people living in conditions likely WORSE than those suffered by most serfs in the medieval period.  Not only do they face regular starvation, but they also face concentration camps I read are worse than those of the Nazis, and which have been a feature of life there for decades.  It is hard to imagine a more soul-killing, horrific regime.

And China itself is presumably still run by an enormously unpopular Fascist oligarchy, which is able to keep power mainly through allowing the very Capitalism/free trade to happen which its Communism would lead it to reject in principle. But they found they could not feed their people any other way.  They could not fund their military any other way.  They could not fund their internal Geheime Staatspolizei, and Schutzstaffel any other way, and who else could keep the oligarchs in power, when the people are rioting everywhere as often as they can (or were a few years ago)?

So one can, in a way, see the logic.  Even though economic logic and rational self interest should lead the Chinese to support what we are now calling “regime change” in North Korea, some combination of sentimentalism (some Chinese leaders may well have come out of the Cultural Revolution, and frankly likely did, and have somehow managed to avoid seeing the patent contradictions inherent in the wealth and privilege they enjoy compared to the brutal repression they visit on an often hungry and impoverished populace), and violent calculation that “as North Korea goes, so go we.” 

The fact is, “The People’s Republic of China” contains two lies.  It is China, certainly.  But it is a regime no different than that which Hitler would have operated if he had won all his wars.  There is the same censorship, the same relentless propagandizing, the same knocks in the middle of the night, the same concentration camps, the same elites drinking champagne and eating the Chinese equivalent of caviar.  There is no concern for the people.

And as I have said before, I actually respect the Nazis more than the  Communists, more than the Communist Chinese.  Hitler did, to all appearances, genuinely feel a sense of kinship and affection for the German Volk.  He was a psychopathic mass murderer, certainly, but there was at least some group he seems genuinely to have wanted, at least early on, to care for.

Had Hitler won the wars, there would have been slaughter on a scale never seen before.  Tens of millions of Russians and other Slavs would have been simply eradicated, as well as of course all Jews and other “undesirables”.  Large sections of the globe would have been enslaved.  But Germans, ordinary Germans, those who toed the line, would have lived like kings.  All of them.  It would not have been s small group, it would have been all of them.

This is the thing that gets me about Communism.  It is run by intellectuals, most of whom have never known true poverty.  I was reading, in fact, that Lenin lived on what amounted to an allowance from his mother–like a child–for some thirty years.  These people don’t understand the people they spout rhetoric for.  And they don’t care for them when they get power.  Then they seemingly act surprised that the repressive regimes they implement “for the sake of the people” somehow create vast relative privilege for themselves.

The whole thing is lunacy, top to bottom.  It is incomprehensible, outside of an emotional world inappropriate for any but the smallest, most immature child.  It is the covetousness of a 4 year old, inflicted on the world.

To make a long story short, it seems obvious to me that, if they are smart, the Chinese will help us end the North Korean regime peacefully.  That is in everyone’s interest, not least that of the tens of thousands, at a minimum, of North Koreans who will be killed in a futile war, the end of which is preordained.  The only question is how much pain they can inflict on the rest of the world, in dying.  Given that what hurts America hurts China–which I am going to go out on a limb and guess had an outstanding Christmas season–there can be no question what the intelligent course of action.  And that course is not violating sanctions and providing oil to North Korea.  Again, it is winter, and this is humanitarian aid, but everything gets much, much worse in the event of a war.   And Trump fully intends war, if no other solution can be reached to the problem of a lunatic using every resource he has to build nuclear missiles he keeps telling us he intends to launch at us at his earliest opportunity.

I was dreaming today, as I do every day.  I wander in and out of wherever I am.  And I was dreaming of a world where the Church researches, and understands the psychodynamic roots of these “sins”, and rather than viewing them as moral or spiritual failings, sees them as what they are: predictable results across statistical populations with certain common psychological histories.

The farther I go, the more I see, the more I feel that morality, per se, is stupid.  Fucking stupid.  It is not that I don’t believe in doing the right thing.  It is not that human beings are not happier when the people around them behave in predictable and harmonious ways.

It is simply the case that water tends to flow downhill, and people tend to implement the patterns with which they were raised.  They tend to become what they see, and they tend to repeat what they become.

Now, for some, “virtue” is easy.  Virtue on my reading and rendering is simply enlightened common sense.  It is intelligent selfishness.  It is seeing the big picture, and being personally integrated enough to act on it.

For many others, and I would include myself here, we have large weights placed on us, and we are cut in a thousand places.  We want to get rid of the weight, and avoid being cut again.  For many, this means cutting others first, resisting others first, mistrusting them first.  It means in no case being open, or trusting anyone enough to hurt us again.

In Christianity we are told to love.  How can you love, when you are bleeding, and the people who cut you preached love?  Can you reconcile those wounds with charity and caring?  No. 

So my dream is that notions of “morality” coupled with judgment gradually give way to on-going efforts at understanding, remediation, and teaching.

To be clear, we need social and cultural codes.  We need to know what to expect from one another.  We need an internalized voice telling us what is right and what is wrong.  I do not dispute any of this.

I guess the question I want to ask, which needs answering, is “How do we make all the things we want more likely?”  How do we make what we call morality more likely?  How do we build empathy in people?  How do we build self knowledge?  How do we build perceptual capacity, such that they can see far down the road?

As for myself, I am still a sinner.  I still am often wracked with pain.  But I do have a vision.

When you see and feel this energy in its pure form, you want to avoid it.  I want to avoid it.  I want to do things where it does not come up.  I want to avoid activities, like Kum Nye, like prolonged periods of silence, like long sets of rolling and stretching, where it comes up.  It is unpleasant.  I want it to simply disappear, in one session.  I want to call out to it and tell it to go away.

But it is like a fog, liberated from one place, and now trying to envelop my life. I feel this. I feel it like the monologue at the beginning of the Lord of the Rings, where Cate Blanchett as Galadriel says something close to “The world has changed.  I can feel it in the air.  I can feel it in the water.  I can feel it in the Earth.  The world has changed.”

But I of course have not changed at all.  I am simply becoming more conscious of who I am.  This is a change, I suppose, but closer to an unmasking than a true change.  My possibilities have increased, but only in the perceptual realm.

This morning I found myself spontaneously imagining the world as a Ring Wraith, which terrified me when I first read those books in the 5th grade.  What would it be like to look at the little hobbits as prey?  To feel a continual and unquenchable hunger for death and destruction?

Well, now, perhaps, I know.  I felt it in me.

And I feel how arbitrary the lines we draw between ourselves are.  We need tribes to feel at home, and we need violence, quite often, to reinforce the value of the tribes.  And to get beyond these tribes, we must confront our own darkness, as individuals.  The need to belong, and the need to reject, arise from the same place.  Violence and evil arise from the same place that the need for home and hearth, and kith and kin arise from.

The man wandering the wilds as a beggar or solitary hunter can be free from such compulsions, but this, too, is not a properly human life.  The way forward is for all of us to become free from the need for social bonds, then to reengage humanity as a great joy and open source of pleasure.  We must all become enlightened, in important ways.

But to turn to what occasioned this post, or in any event turned me from my lit incense and candles to my computer to type this, it seems to me that historically most all violence has felt just.  You do it in the service of your cause and your people.  Both sides in most conflicts feel themselves to be in the right.  This is a truism.

But even people working from the position of true selfishness, who simply want things, or power, or wine and women, rape and pillage–who, to be clear, do ALL the things we are supposed to reject on our shadow side, and thus in some respects become heroes to people who feel constrained by our world, and afraid–work from lies.  They do not perceive, and thus do not pursue their true interest.

To frame this slightly differently, even people who do not proceed from motives of idealism and zeal fail.  Their idealism is their own subjective sense of well being.  Their zeal is to have and be everything possible in this world, to fuck who they want, eat what they want, experience what they want, go where they want, to never be told no.

Even this is a failure.  Even this is Duhkha.  I feel this.

Just as you can go decades never sitting on the ground, you can also go decades never being in silence.  People turn their TV’s on first thing in the morning, listen to the radio all day even at work, and of course in their cars, some home to TV, and fall asleep watching it.

Now, I think most people go for walks from time to time, but even there, they are with people.  They talk.

There is something about both sustained solitude and silence which is cathartic.  I think this is the word.  It brings up latent conflicts, pains, residual emotional scars, and what I have found is that in the feeling of them, they slowly diminish.  They resolve themselves.  They perhaps do not disappear, but become largely irrelevant to your life. You develop a solid, stable base, at the core of your personality, which is comforting.  “Life” becomes bearable.  You become philosophical in a good way.

The opposite is running from these things, which are simply asking to be completed, run through, checked off as done.  You can spend your life fearing the contents of your inner psyche.  And it will never grant you a moment of true inner peace if you do.

My core personal philosophical collection, though, consists in three books: the Tao Te Ching, the Wisdom of the Idiots (Idries Shah), and my Kum Nye books.

The Tao Te Ching has influenced me since I first read the first line “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao”.

Kum Nye, of course, I have spoken of often.  It is not a philosophy, but what I might term a means to the approximation of one.

But I wanted to comment on The Wisdom of the Idiots.  It is not the book itself which is so important, but what it represents to me.

I wanted to buy it for my daughter, but she said “no, I want to study philosophy”.  And this–like nearly everything I see every day–got me to thinking.

There is no philosophy in this book, not in a traditional sense.  It is a collection of stories, some of which are quite difficult to “unpack” and grasp, and “grok”. I am, I am quite certain, far from understanding most of them, even if I have from time to time talked about some of them.

What it is is a thousand shards of meaning, of contingent, partial perceptions.  It is a cloud of possibilities.  It is shimmering, moving, evolving, changing, both there, and not there.

The way of the Sufi, as I understand it, is breaking all our meanings into a thousand pieces, and allowing them to reassemble in a self organizing way directed by our deepest consciousness, our deepest intuitive awareness, on a level far, far deeper than anything possible for the conscious mind, but directly in connection with our spirit, our soul, our deepest possibilities.

Your way is your own way.  Far too few people want to grasp this.  They want to be told “do this, believe that, adhere to the teaching of this person or that person, and the way will be laid out in front of you.”  Even though the Buddha–or one of his disciples–said something like “if you meet me on the path, kill me”, far too few people are willing to do this.  There is a Buddha Dharma. There is a sangha.  There are doctrinal teachings.  There are mantras to be said obsessively across decades.

Philosophy is broken. As I have noted from time to time, one of my favorite saying from any book ever is the quote I wrote down when I was 18 from Moby Dick.  Here is the quote in full, which is worth reading:

“I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is–which was the only way he could get there–thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should no be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such and such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have ‘broken his digester.”

It is the last line I loved so much.  There is no path but the path you make.  Even the Existentialists teach this, but they wind up being Communists.  One extreme breeds the other, if no wisdom intervenes. 

There is no safe path, no path free from the continual risk of delusion, self deception, grandiosity, unwarranted self satisfaction, obsession.  My mind wants to add “freedom” to this list, where it does not seem to belong, but as I contemplate, yes, it does belong there.  Freedom, true freedom, is also a risk.  How can you go where no one has gone before, truly?  It is scary, frightening.  To go your own way, you do need to become accustomed to fear.  You must make it your friend.  You must learn to allow it to recede, even in the unknown, and unknowable.

I do not think it unreasonable to call myself a Sufi.  I admit I am an idiot.  I am an idealistic, stubborn idiot.  Fully grasping the extent of your own futility, the extent of your failures and imbecilities, the vast ocean of things you can’t begin to say you understand, the impossibility of ever reaching in this world anything approaching a complete understanding: all of these constitute the BEGINNING of the path.  It becomes possible then to BEGIN the process of learning, of seeing, of perceiving with your own eyes and ears, your own body, your own tongue and nose.  And it is a path which winds off into a horizon which never gets any closer.  The path is your home, here.  It can never be any more.  But that is the point of life.  It is the purpose for being here.  And it can be a home.  It can be happy and fulfilling, when you let go of all the things which seek to keep you rooted, frozen, immobile, hopeless, and lost.

I mentioned this some years ago, but I was in fact annointed a Sufi in a dream once.  I was told by a group of wise men that I was to be crowned a Sufi.  There was a majestic ceremony, fit for a king.  And when the great moment came to place the crown on my head, it was 6″ too big on every side, and fell immediately on my shoulders.  We all laughed.  It was the laughter that completed the ceremony.