Month: December 2017

The ability to BE who you are is essentially the same as the ability to feel who you are.  Being able to describe, in however much detail, who you are–which is the chief virtue taught in most forms of psychotherapy–is quite distant from this ideal, and tends away from, not towards it.

In my own case, I have consumed countless books telling me what to do.  But what has always been missing is a sense of who it was who might consent to do these things.  Until you are one, you are two or many.  This is a complexity which is impossible to make sense of.  One can walk on two feet.  Many cannot walk at all.

Connecting the ache with a past real self.

This is the short version.

It seems to me there are two real prerequisites for emotional growth.  First, you must be aware of what you are feeling, and the pain it causes you.  Second, you must see an alternative.

Lacking the first, you will never seek or see the second.  Lacking the second, some part of you will prevent you, at a preconscious level, from becoming aware of the first.  To do otherwise is to admit functional helplessness.  Some can, but most can’t or won’t.

This is of course the rough outline of the Buddhist Four Noble Truths.  It is as important to convince people their houses are on fire as to convince them there is a way out of it.  And that first argument is hard to make with people who have been living a certain way for a very long time, and getting along just fine, thank you.

What I see is that many of our obsessive, rigid patterns, originate in antiquated but once useful adaptations to real situations.  The problem is that they exist in a space beyond time, and bringing them into time–the present, specifically–is the only way to show them that circumstances have changed, and that something new is desirable, that they have a path either to extinction or improvement.

In some cases, these relics make us tired and old beyond our years.  In such cases, allowing them to sleep is quite welcome.  It is setting down an unwanted burden.

In others, they are thwarted life energy, and what is needed is an infusion of new energy, of new passions, and new directions.

Most of us enjoy the idea and prospect of travel in the outer world easily enough.  We naturally want to go places we have not been, in most cases provided we can then return home to a familiar place and way of being.

Where I–and I think many others–have often erred, is in thinking that changing means going somewhere new and staying there.  What I think it really means is learning how to build a much larger, and much safer home.  It means expanding the domain of comfort, of surveying new land, finding it congenial, and expanding emotionally and psychologically, such that there is no need of return, because you are already there.  You are already welcome.  You are already at ease, and feeling safe and known, in a world you in turn know well.

In the past five or six years, I could easily have traveled the physical world with all the money I have spent on personal growth–money, indeed, I continue to spend.  But my feeling has been “why go anywhere else, when I don’t know how to be where I already am?”

I have filled by bookshelf with some old Buddhist texts, but my sense is that the path forward for all of us, as it evolves, assuming it does evolve, and evolves in a way consistent with freedom and dignity, will not lie through any historical creed or teacher.  It will be an Emergent Property of science, which has done so much in so many realms, but as yet offered us so little in terms of culture and reasons for metaphysical optimism, despite the fact that its methods lead inexorably in that direction, when applied–and this of course has been the problem–with diligence and true scientific integrity and dispassion.

Diogenes would search in vain in most universities the world over, when searching for those who are truly honest when it comes to the nature of reality, and as-yet unintegrated empirical research in domains like the survival of death, and the energetic fields which seemingly connect life with life, humans with humans, and past with present and future.

A piece of cloth with a hole in it cannot be considered whole, in the same way that a gap in the ocean’s depths is inconceivable.

The cheesemongering of the Marcès and other Spaniards went underground in reaction to the policies of Spain’s military dictator, Francisco Franco, who ruled the country from 1939 until his death in 1975. The country’s economy was depleted by civil war, World War II, and Spain’s exclusion from the Marshall Plan. So, he initiated a grand economic plan designed to achieve self-sufficiency: Spain would pool its resources and centralize production.
As part of this policy, quotas were enacted that outlawed milk production under 10,000 liters a day. This made small dairies and cheesemaking productions (such as the Marcès’) illegal. To comply with the law, they had to sell their milk to larger companies.

I will note simply that centralized control of the means of production, whether actually implemented, or merely implied, is a key aspect of Fascism.  It is what Keynes described both in “The End of Laissez-Faire”, and at the end of his “General Theory”.

Liberalism is free markets, political diversity, the right to private property, and the ability to achieve political change peacefully.  Everything else might as well be called Fascism, wherever the polemicists and propagandists choose to put it on the political spectrum.  Certainly, for the Spanish, whoever won the Civil War, they were going to be told what to do.  The victory of the Stalinists (who in typically deceptive fashion called themselves “Republicans”) would likely have meant something close to what they have in Cuba, though, whereas the reign of Franco merely lasted as long as he did.

And Franco did not hate his country and his people.  This also put him one up on those he defeated.

I can’t resist commenting–or most likely repeating a theme which occurs often with me–that the Nazis and Italian Fascists, and Spanish Fascists, and perhaps Pinochet and others, all existed in a clear continuum with repressive regimes as seen throughout human history.  Mass murder is not something the Nazis invented, although wedding it to bad science was unique.  But even there, the concept of defining, stigmatizing, and to a great extent deleting entire groups of people was something the Soviets really invented.  They destroyed the “kulaks” before Hitler.  They defined and killed or imprisoned in remote places large numbers of political non-conformists before Hitler.  Hitler got the IDEA of a concentration camp from Lenin.  Goebbels got many of his best ideas on propaganda from Lenin, Stalin, and ironically enough Woodrow Wilson.

What is unique in Communism is the deletion of the soul, the deletion of the self as something capable of existing outside membership in a mutable collective.  What is unique is how little it gives a spirit to hang onto, and how much it asks him or her to give over in the process.  You have to surrender your capacity for moral judgment.  You have to surrender your history. You have to surrender your family, if asked to do so.  It is assumed you will surrender any residual religious belief you may have.  You might need to surrender your friends.  You might have to surrender your lifestyle.

And at this moment in history, you have to do all this to join a cult which has been unmasked as inhuman, brutal, dishonest to its core, and constituted by the very worst human beings possible.

I’m rambling.  I look at the gobbledy-gook Leftists keep spewing, and I continue to wonder how they are so unreflective, so uninterested in helping real human beings, so contemptuous of reason and the clear use of language.  So much good is possible, and they shit on it every day, to the extent of their ability, and call their work noble.