Month: December 2017

It’s a bit longer.  How about “My name is Bob, and I feel emotional pain every day”?

When AA works–and it does work for some, although not for most over the long term–I feel it is because people find a communion they needed, among their own kind, among people like them, among people who have felt what they have felt, hurt like they have hurt.

It is painful to say you are an alcoholic, but perhaps even more painful–but more useful, possibly–to admit that you feel vast rivers of emotion you don’t know what to do with, how to deal with, and that a major part of your illness is having lost a sense of belonging, and of intrinsic self worth.

Then it hit me that I have perhaps–likely–reached the end of the road with alcohol.  It has proven a worthy friend, but this time may really be the end.

And then I felt a softness and a sadness.  Alcohol is not just alcohol.  It is the stand-in for, and symbol of, all the love I missed when I was growing up.  To give up alcohol is to trigger a process of mourning, not just of this reliable friend, but of all that it replaced, or did a poor job of trying to replace.  It was something, where there had been nothing.  To give it up is to look farther, to see and to feel the nothing, and feel all that I lost, all that is gone, all that was, all that was not, and all that can never be again, never will be again.  Everything I have to say good-bye to, in order to open up the present and the future.

And I feel mourning as a process of reassembly.  It is dealing with pieces that have been broken.  It is recognizing a whole that is no more, that never will be again, but that not all is lost.  There are pieces.  There are tools, and resources, fragments of a self, a coherent mind, a personality of sorts, and together all this can be put into a new form, resembling the old form, but hopefully wiser and larger.

And I feel that in our world coming across this need for mourning is a strange thing.  We Americans, particularly, tend to view life as an endless series of positive experiences, of things we can buy, of improvement in our lives, of progress of all sorts.  Progress, progress, progress.  Everything is always moving forward, in a dynamic tide of optimistic gain for all, all the time.

But loss is a cessation.  It is a halt.  I was looking at the clock on a funeral home yesterday, and even though it was 6pm, it showed midnight (or noon).  It is always midnight for the dead.  But it can be midnight for the living too.  We, too, can stop.

I am feeling increasingly like King Theodin in the Lord of the Rings, as he awakens from Sarumon’s spell.  Some part of him knew he had lost his son, but could not feel the loss, could not mourn the loss.  For my part, I am beginning to feel what I lost, and it is a strange thing.  These things happened 30 years ago or more.

But how many of us are like this?  I think of Tarkovsky’s postman, in the beginning of The Sacrifice, who tells his friend that he feels like he is just beginning to live, despite his advancing age.

Some flowers bloom in winter.  It is sometimes the only way, the only time.  And it is always good when what should be, is.

I do feel deep grief sometimes.  I grieve for myself, and I grieve for all of us.  Your problems are not my problems, and my path MUST go through healing myself before I can be the least reliable bit of good to anyone else.

We are all is such different places.  Humankind is a patchwork of countless colors and hues.  Some of us are dull and gray, or rust colored, some bright blue and orange and vermillion.  And all of us are in larger or smaller processes of continual refinement, expansion, contraction, love, hate, anger, sadness, grief, malice, generosity, envy and love again.  I can’t see it all.  It is as large as the stars.

But we do need to break this spell of pretending that life is all sunshine and apples.  Sometimes it is rotten.  This is an inherent feature of it, and the more we all see this together, the deeper our bond, the deeper our possible sharing, and the more profound our possible joys and loves.

If you think about it, the notion that machines are better than life, because they are replicable in an exact way, can be disassembled and reassembled reliably, and never do anything surprising, is inherent to the positivistic mindself.  If we are to make endless progress, then logically human beings, flawed as we are, must go.

But look at that idea.  What is the point and purpose of “progress”?  What do we really want, and is there anything shameful in wanting it?

Underlying this mania is sadness.  Sadness that we must all go.  Sadness that we are easily broken, easily damaged, weak, and profound in our ignorance.  There is so much we do not know.

I feel and I think understand this sadness.  I understand the drive towards both artificial intelligence–our replacement–and the Singularity, a world beyond death and stupidity.

These are deep feelings in our nation, in our people.  They may drive us to the extinction of humankind.

What most people need is a deep seated and honest sense that things will be alright.  A believe in the after-life helps with this immensely.  That is why I have often made the very obvious point that this topic is of VAST scientific importance, and that immense resources should be devoted to it.

My mind boggles at certain points.  This is why most spiritual traditions focus on the heart, on innate wisdom.

I hope one day to be able to say honestly that I love you and wish you well, no matter who you are.  I am not there yet.  I still live in a cold, confusing world, and I continue to try to be a little less of an asshole every day.

Results of the investigationEdit

Ponder further that this guy went to work for what I understood to be something like a mercenary CIA, a private, for-profit company that would “take care of things” like, oh, I don’t know, murderering Putin’s personal chauffeur?

Ponder this.  Ponder what someone without a conscience and with a lifetime’s experience dealing out lies and disinformation could do with a billion dollar check.

For my money, he either needs to be legally put into permanent retirement, or the books of his company regularly audited, so that we know precisely who he is working for and what they are doing.  All this needs to be made the law.

And we need to assume that anyone he was close to at the CIA or elsewhere is part of the Traitor State.  We are not a nation of purges, but there is something to the logic of guilt by association.  I am not proposing jailing or killing them, as the Communists would, but simply removing them from the web of capabilities that being within our intelligence apparatus gives them, and then putting a permanent and close watch on them.  Give them a sizable payout, then let them take up painting or yoga somewhere remote.

But they would call themselves something like Realists, or Pragmatists.  They would say “we can all see the worlds resources are dwindling”, or perhaps some are even so deluded as to believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming, their own lie, and say “if nothing is done, humankind will go extinct.”  Perhaps they think their globalism will mean global peace, and the end of war.

Collectivism, though, never means the end of war.  It means the institution of permanent war between the people and the State.  Where war does not exist, it is threatened, in the form of the possibility of arrest, confinement, torture, and murder.

All of this means that government employees, likely in close collusion with private sector individuals with either great wealth, or large political influence, are betraying their oaths of office to protect and serve both the American people, and the people they work for.

Having said all that, for practical purposes it seems to me that some large chunk of the CIA at least has gone over to the enemy.  What would prevent them, in the event of war with North Korea, from false flag attacks intended to destabilize the nation, and potentially even create the climate for a coup?

What is interesting about that place is that the pace and expense of life turns people into assholes, into functional psychotics, and this is happening at the same time as the relative influence of the people who work there is increasing drastically.

Look at the influence Google and Facebook, specifically, wield.

Look at the influence the words compassion and justice wield, even when denuded of functional content, even when driven into being their very opposites.

I went to Berkeley.  I found the people there cold, rude and unfriendly.  There are too many people in the Bay Area, too much traffic, homes are much too expensive, work is too stressful, taxes are too high, and by the time many people get home at night, all they want to do is hide.

These are the people who want to rule our lives. As groveling as most of the peasants are, there are kings and queens, dukes and earls, and a landed aristocracy.  And their sense of purpose in life seems to derive in no small measure from plans to lighten the load of plebians they do not understand, do not interact with on a regular basis, and whose relative failures and successes affect them in no important way.

I don’t know if these games actually help me think better, but what I have noticed–and I do think I have commented on this, but will comment again, since I can’t remember exactly what I said–is that there is a part of me which holds onto patterns which cause me to make mistakes.  I get in touch with a psychological stickiness.  There is a need there, which makes me stupider.

Even in apparent abstraction, even in places where emotion should not intrude, it does, clearly.

And I would submit that most of the maladies of the modern world stem from something like what causes me to make mistakes on River Ranger or Speed Match.

When you are dealing with abstract problems, the abstract solutions can be suffused to overflowing with emotion, drenched in it, composed with it, but expressed in such a way that they seem rational.

What else, to take obvious examples, could the obsession with Jews the Russians had be composed of?  Lenin created the process of what might be termed “classicide”, and all Hitler did was take that same “logic”–which indeed predated both Lenin and Hitler–and apply scientific efficiency to it.

One can indeed speculate that if Russians were built psychologically more like Germans, if something like a Final Solution might not have been implemented with regard to the people the Communists disliked.

On consideration, though, no.  Communism is very different from Nazism.  The narcissism and inward-looking of the Nazis had content.  There was in fact a German nation, a German history, a German language, a German culture.  When Hitler said “German”, there was a concrete, if idealized, referent.

When Communists refer to “the workers”, there is no referent.  Russia in 1917 was an agricultural nation, where something like 10% of the economy or less was industrialized.  The entire coup by the Bolsheviks was a sham.  It was based on the lie that people who knew nothing about a class which was in any event nearly non-existent within their domain could speak for them, work for them, build for them, better them.

And historically, the oppression fell first and hardest on the very workers in whose name what they disingenuously called “The Revolution” was conducted.

But there is never any there where Communists are concerned.  This means they never actually agitate FOR anyone, not even themselves, at least consciously.  It is a confusion, a mental illness, a sort of schizophrenia, where whatever needs to be true for them to retain some semblance of psychological structure is treated as if it were true.

And the Big Lie upon which all Communists rest their sense of self is that the project is intended to improve humanity as a whole.  Not some segment of it, which was the Nazi’s project, but all of it.  All of us are supposed to be made better by their obsessions.

This means logically that conscious mass murder is anathema.  It is acting as if they were not the saviors of the world, not the creators of a mass utopia.  It is rejecting people in principle who would love them if they only understood them as liberators.

And if you look at Communist death counts, the vast bulk of them are from famine. Stalin used the Holodomor to bring the Ukraine under control, yes, but I think he also needed the food to feed his loyalists, since his system was failing already everywhere.  Mao thought the peasants–and they were peasants under him too–were hiding food, and that reports of the failure of his crop seeding ideas, which he thought were genius, were lies.  In Ethopia, their state of delusion was so complete that they thought moving people from one place where farming worked, to some other place where it did not, would be effective policy simply because miracles happen, and whatever they needed to believe to protect their own psychological integrity HAD to be true.

Thus, I would argue the true crime of Communism as an ideology is not the death count, not the genocides which it plainly has committed, but rather the pervasiveness of what I called Psychicide, the manic need to destroy human souls, human spirits, in order to protect the psychotic impulses of people who have used abstraction to manage emotional excesses which they have hidden from their conscious awareness and thus conscious control.

Reading this, I see there is a connecting thought I have not fleshed out, but for students of history, or any long term readers of my blog, the pattern should be clear enough.  We should not excuse the Cubans, as one example, simply because their version of Communism did not result in the deaths of large numbers of Cubans.  Their project–their continuing project–has been to convince the Cuban people that they love their leaders, that they love mass incarceration, humiliation, and poverty.  Their continuing project has been to enslave the minds of their people, to facilitate their physical enslavement, which is made in the minds of Communists liberation, because that is what they need to believe.  Ah, I’ll leave it there.

I am quite capable of delivering sermons like this face to face, but do not presently know anyone who would listen.  Still, I feel better.  I’m going for a walk, then to get something to eat.

As I have shared, I have major sleep difficulties.  I have clinical Complex Trauma, which is PTSD, but worse.  EMDR, for example, doesn’t work because I can’t remember anything, and it is my reasonably plausible theory that it depends on visual memory for at least part of its efficacy.

Be all that as it may, I have found that essential oils seems to help a bit.  I put Vetiver, typically, in an atomizer, and mix Lavender into an otherwise unscented lotion which I spread on my chest and arms and belly.  I notice the difference when I do this, versus when I don’t.  I also take some sort of melatonin supplement every night, and the ones with ZMA in some form seem to work best for me.

In the mornings I have also taken to putting different oils in lotion and spreading them on my chest, arms and belly.  The skin is highly efficient way, or so I read, of getting them into my system in a relatively healthy way.  They tell me not to ingest them, but I will occasionally anyway.

I particularly like Birch, Cedarwood, Bergamot, Hyssop, Clary Sage, and Angelica. I can’t say if they help anything, but it is a practice I have grown to like.

I rarely get sick–I go years without having anything but the “bottle flu”, which I have largely stopped doing as well–but when I do I find Eucalyptus and Peppermint oil help.  I will either put them in an atomizer or put them in a pan which I heat to create steam, and inhale.

I have also made Sage and Thyme tinctures.  I will drink a few drops of those from time to time.

I just made some Tarragon soda, which is quite tasty.  I got myself a Central Asian cookbook, and that is apparently a thing there.  I made it from ginger bug, though, and they apparently just mix in club soda.
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I won’t get into all my projects, but thought I might share a couple I thought might be of use to someone.

My first thought in places like that is that I have vastly more in common with the wait staff than most of the patrons, which is certainly true.  If I apply myself I make good money, but it is doing work most people would consider menial.  Most of the guys I work with smoke, no small number of them chew, and if any of them own suits, it is for church and funerals.

But I was also contemplating that so much of what we call pleasure is the IDEA of pleasure.  We think to ourselves “I must be having fun, because this is what everyone wants to do, but most people can’t afford.”

And I got to thinking about wealthy people skiiing Aspen, staying in expensive chalets, eating fine meals every night.  And I can’t help but think that while there is CLEARLY an inescapable element of pleasure in all this, that it cannot but be comingled with an awareness of being elite, of being special, of doing something most people can’t do.

We feel pleasure in the places where we are supposed to, but some portion of this pleasure actually disappears in the IDEA we form of the context.  The idea of what we are doing mediates to some extent the reality, the direct experience, of it.

And to the extent we mediate our emotions by our sense of what it is we are supposed to be feeling, we are unfree.  The world comes to us, and we filter it.  We seek what is “good”, and avoid what is “bad”, but in neither case do we ourselves ride out to meet the world as it is, on its own terms.

Does pleasure uniquely arise in us in response to circumstances?  Or is there something in us which can rise up anywhere, and influence our understanding and experience of circumstances, such that the connection between what happens “to” us is influenced BY us, making all circumstances potentially under our emotional control, such that we can remain positive and happy in varying circumstances?

In my understanding, this is substantially the argument made by Buddhists, among others. How do you make the ordinary beautiful?  How do you make the beautiful spectacular?

How can I get MORE pleasure from Waffle House than a 5 star restaurant?  It all depends, does it not, on who I am when I walk in, what I hear, what I feel, what I see?