Month: January 2018

My oldest has taken an interest in “dark matter/energy”, and it occurred to me that–to the extent I understand the problem as a non-mathematician–it could likely be solved if we simply posit that the Zero Point Field is not distributed evenly throughout the universe.  And why would it be?  Could “space” not be “thicker” in some places than others, at least as seen from the perspective of being in the precipitated, material part of it?

My gut instinct is that physicists are terrified of the Zero Point Field/Quantum Vacuum, because some form of determinism is as close to a God as most of them want to get.  They want to BE gods, not learn about one.  And incorporating indeterminacy/randomness into the core of physical theories as an inescapable fact cuts them down from demiurges to technicians.

Arrogance.  If you want the answer to why people do stupid fucking things, the two answers are actual stupidity, which is much rarer than one might suppose, and arrogance in some form, some refusal to accommodate oneself to what is.

It might be appropriate here, too, to follow up on my post about assuming moral imperfection as necessary.  Here is the thing: if you keep in your own mind your own failings, brought about because you do not believe in perfection, brought about because you believe notions of perfection must inherently be based on the limitation of accurate perception (which is to say the willful suppression of wisdom), then you cannot judge others with a clear conscience either.

And this is not to say you should not judge, but it is to say that this, too, is quite often a sin.  Everything good begins with accurate perception.  It does not flow from ideas.  Not even this idea, because sometimes you need principles.

What is the essence of a dance?  Flow.  Movement.  This is why I made Perceptual Movement a core principle, with curiosity the simplest way of expressing this idea.

If you aspire to be a genuinely moral being, there is no way around a guilty conscience. The world is not simple and rarely gives us the simple choices which we emotionally crave. Most of the time, we are offered two bad options, where’re neither option is acceptable, but a decision still must be made.

This is how the world works. To avoid facing this fact, the only two obvious alternatives are building an artificial world where all is simple, and self deception.  Most people chose self deception, because they cannot tolerate the idea of being bad people. And in lying, they make much worse evil possible, and usually inevitable. Very few people are capable otherwise of the cruelty which moral certitude makes possible. What can be beyond the pale, when you are “saving the world”?

Yeah, so right after posting about how deep and shit I am, I got overwhelmed watching Andrei Rublev.  It was making me want to drink.  So I spent the rest of the day playing Call of Duty: World at War (the first one, the 360 one).  Yes, I am a hypocrite.  Yes, I do deserve to be laughed at sometimes.

I did want to comment, though, that this is a really interesting history lesson.  It follows the campaigns of a Russian in what I think was called the 3rd Shock Army, and a Marine in the 1st Division.  I forget the details of the Russian, although it ends in the Reichstag, in what was likely something not too different from what actually happened.  They really do create the feeling in the game of the world ending, and they really do give you some sense of the SIZE of that war, which was unbelievable.  They say World War 2 cost 60 million lives in all.  The Japanese killed large numbers of Chinese, particularly.  All sides lost many, many soldiers.  I want to say I read the Soviets lost some 20 million people alone.  The Nazis starved the Ukrainians, again.  You have the Holocaust, and pervasive hunger among hundreds of millions of people, perhaps even a billion or more.

The Marine fights in Peleliu and Okinawa, in what was also likely reasonably realistic.  Playing the Marine, particularly, it becomes very obvious very quickly how crazy in some ways you had to be to fight that war.  Death is everywhere.  Death is random.  And you can’t be 100% alert 100% of the time.  It’s impossible.  They say 12,000 men died, I believe in those two battles.  You only had a 1 in 5 chance of making it through the war in the Pacific alive, and it is easy to see why.  You can do everything right: use cover, fire accurately, and somebody you missed, a random grenade or mortar attack, or lucky or accurate fire from a distance can end your life in an instant.

And it becomes obvious very quickly too how easy it is to shoot your friends and fellow Marines in what is sometimes the literal fog of battle.  A moments hesitation can get you killed, but sometimes it takes a moment’s hesitation to avoid a fatal mistake.  More than once–OK, quite a few times–I shot the wrong people, and it struck me how hard that would be to live with, even if you knew their chances otherwise of making it through were slim.  And it must have happened many times.  Friendly fire is not something anybody wants to talk about, but it must happen often in all wars.

So yes, I played video games.  No, I did not pursue the Buddhadharma today.  But I did still choose to learn from it, a bit, at any rate.

For some time, the burden of life felt to me like Frodo’s ring.  For a time, I actually had Sam’s speech at the end of the Two Towers on my mirror where I could see it each morning, along with a picture of Gandalf fighting the Balrog.

I rewatched those movies a month or so ago and it affected me for several weeks.  Images from the movie kept coming back to me.  And it continues.  Earlier this week I was pondering Galadriel saying to Frodo, approximately: “the task of being a Ring-Bearer has fallen to you.  If you do not find a way, no one will.”

This is what I have long felt.  I can tell you psychodynamically why this is likely so, but it remains a reality.  But then it occurred to me this applies to all of us.  All of us are ring-bearers.  All of us have been given tasks to fulfill.  All of us were born to a purpose, a purpose which will be difficult, which will cause us moments of doubt and fear.  All of us were born to at least the potential for heroism, for going far beyond what we thought possible.  Somewhere in our hearts, I think everyone feels this, and I think mythically this is why Lord of the Rings has resonated so strongly through the souls of so many sensitive people.

Too many of us feel the opportunities for heroism are few and far between.  That opportunities for greatness are behind us, that all is settled, or will in any event be settled for us, and that our voices count for nothing, our actions count for nothing.

I of course am powerless to predict the future of the world, but I am not powerless to predict my own actions, what I choose to do, how I choose to live my life, the commitments I choose to take on, the responsibilities I choose to shoulder and advance as well as I can.

So, in important respects, we can all predict the future.  We can control what we control, and if this spirit is generalized sufficiently, that WILL make a difference.  It cannot but make a difference.  The best offense any enemy can marshal is the ability to convince his enemy he has no chance.

To take a concrete example, as I will never tire of pointing out until the truth is proclaimed generally, the American people were convinced, AFTER we won the Vietnam War, that it could not be won, and this belief, and this belief alone–as embodied in what has rightly been termed an Imperial Congress–cost the South Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and the Laotians their freedom, and incalculable suffering.

And the way is, at some point, always down the Paths of the Dead, another metaphor from Lord of the Rings.  How do each of us walk into our own internal “deaths”?  How do we confront what is within us, but not living, not blossoming, which is hidden in fear and abandonment? How do we face fear itself, naked, uncloaked, unavoidable?  How do we find and master the many monsters each of us hides even in the bright light of day?

What did Aragorn do?  He walked into a dark place, filled with inchoate, ineffable terrors, and confronted them.  He mastered them.  And he took their energy to achieve concrete goods, then allowed them to dissipate fully.

I look at my own life, and it often seems I do little.  I don’t socialize that often. I can talk to anyone about anything, but most people get frightened when I “get deep”.  This is partly my own fault.  I have not mastered my demons.  My touch is coarse.  I am indelicate.  Emotionally, it is sometimes like trying to paint with kitchen mitts on.
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But it is also easy to see the entirety of our world as engineered to prevent the emergence of deep truths, to foster and feed self serving lies.  You cannot speak deep truths without reminding people of the demonic, of everything they fear, of everything they would give anything to bury forever.

Now, this is the place where the Good lies too.  You cannot separate them easily.  The Earth touches the Sky through us.  This is a Kum Nye metaphor, or at least I have appropriated a specific visualization for this purpose.

I am watching Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev again, and as always with his films, am having “things” emerge continually.  Back to it.

I will add that I was watching an interview with one of Kieslowski’s friends a couple weeks ago, after watching Camera Buff (which felt vaguely autobiographical, although that was not mentioned), and he commented that Kieslowski’s belief was that art–good art–was supposed to be work.  It was not entertainment.  It was conscious work.  It takes effort.  But what do you get with any effort, any work?  Something new.  Working is building, and building, for me, is Life.

In some respects, it is a profound misfortune to encounter a spiritual teaching for which you are not ready.  All of us–there are no exceptions–can only proceed one step at a time.  It may happen that some proceed quickly, and it is usually the case that most of us proceed slowly, but there are no quantum leaps in spiritual development, or at least in spiritual readiness.

Life is somewhat like a cave which does open up suddenly sometimes.  We come through an opening and perceive a larger space, greater light, a vision of the path in the distance.  But we can only enter that cave one step at a time.

If there is perhaps one most ubiquitous and damaging fact about human thought and behavior patterns, it is the thought that we can skip steps, that outward forms are “more or less” the same as inner knowing, inner clarity, inner vision.  That if we act in a certain way, say certain thinks (sic; I intended things, but thinks also works), discipline ourselves to think certain thoughts, and pretend we are feeling the way we conceive we ought to feel, that some progress has been made.  Most of the time, this is actually regression, because the path forward has been foreclosed by a precipitous and fatal error.

This is Socialism, certainly–the Great Leap Forward in human well being–but it is also most other forms of religion, too.  Socialism is simply taking the spirit of error we see in, for example, Christianity, and implementing it aggressively in the secular, god-but-not-obsession-free domain.

Socrates was wise in not allowing himself to be misunderstood.  Everything he had to say, he said.  What he could not say to an individual, in a specific context, he did not say.  Nothing was written.

This is what I feel reading one of the foundational texts of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.  No doubt there were hidden teachings too, but it is one size fits all.  Small wonder that many Buddhists in all traditions found themselves reduced to reciting some of the foundational Sutras as mantras, which cannot have been the purpose at all.

The Sufis have a saying that when the student is ready, the teaching cannot be withheld, and when he or she is not ready, it cannot be given, by any means.

I do feel a kinship with their teaching method, as I understand it, which consists in stories which would have been in general tailored to specific groups and even individuals, which could only be understood as the result of real progress in perceptual acumen.

Now, it is of course interesting to speculate how much knowledge remains hidden, and with good reason.  We in the West are mostly fucking imbeciles on all levels.  We equate progress with increasing abstraction, increasing separation from the natural world, with the death of God and the gods, and with the amelioration of all negative physical conditions–hunger, thirst, cold, heat–which might cause people to inquire more deeply into the nature of life.

Can I perhaps stipulate that where no one is poor, everyone is stupid?  This is certainly not quite true, and certainly not necessarily true, but I do think it has a tinge of truth in it.

I was standing in the wind the other day, watching some bushes move in breeze, and it occurred to me that there are no physical preconditions for a the spiritual path.  I’m certainly not going to give my stuff away and become homeless, but it is a useful thought, I think.

I feel I should comment on the first set of stanzas, too.

The translator makes the point that both Essence and Existence are abstractions.  One can sequence them however one likes, but they remain ideas divorced from experience, from what he calls Being. 

Proceeding from this point, Kum Nye becomes an extraordinarily logical act of philosophy, since it offers a practical method for returning to experience, to Being.

God is Being.  And until we “speak” being with our selves, with our souls, God remains an abstraction.  The only reliable source of wisdom and comfort in this world relies in a return to what is, and that is not done with the mind.

I had meant to point this metaphor out a week or two ago, but don’t recall actually typing it.  If the goal is to get from A to D, logic can be B and C, but it cannot be A or D.  A is what we want, what our hearts desire.  It is the source of logical operations.  It is the source of the problem we are trying to solve.  D is the desired end state, which is also a feeling.  It is a change from A.  It is progress in a way which matters.

Logic can always be a means, but never a final end.  I can add to that, but it is close enough for my purposes.

Actually, I will add that the root problem we all face is separation, separation on many levels, but most pressingly from our own Source, from the light which animates us.  Logic–and the language which it necessarily uses–is always a means of making distinctions, of drawing out differences.  It, in important respects, IS the source of separation.

If you set this template on religion, and philosophy, one starts to see recurring patterns.  The whole of reality is constituted by what David Bohm called an Implicate Order, which is yet another word for what I am speaking of.

The most obvious example occurring to me at the moment: “Worueber man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen.”

I am reading Longchenpa’s “Kindly bent to ease us”, and just read the section on impermanence (the first, in any event: it will likely be a recurring theme).  And it occurs to me the intent is not to deprive people of everything which comforts them, now.  It is shock method of waking them up to focus on what is subtle, what is latent, and what is real and permanent.  In my own iteration, I would call this God, which modern science–which knows close to nothing about it–calls the Zero Point Field.  It is Space, the source and return of everything.

Who can see what is subtle when they focus on what is bright?  Who can see what is distant–perceptually–when their whole attention is focused on what is near and tangible?

This is the meaning of impermanence, in my view.  Although, obviously, empirically, this is merely stating clearly plain facts.

It just occurred to me that being involved with narcissists is in some vital way to be shunned.  As most will readily know, shunning–intentionally and blatantly avoiding social contact with specific people–once played an important role is social regulation.  It was an explicit punishment for some transgressions, and of course has always been a tacit one in response to perceived affronts of all sorts.  You don’t talk to people who piss you off in some way, or from whom you feel a need to socially distance yourself.

But the child of narcissists is shunned at a deep level continually.  Their real selves are not recognized.  They might talk with their parents, but there is no authentic connection, no sharing of self, no true recognition.

My process of thawing continues, and very old, very primitive, entirely forgotten feelings continue to emerge as the ice thins.  It is likely not true to say I was never healthy, that I never spontaneously exhibited honest childish exuberance and playfulness, but these feelings were not fed, and likely in most cases punished, explicitly, or tacitly, and this–added to an on-going inability of both parents to see me as a separate and different person–is what led to my crash some time between 5 and about 8.

You know, we call it a nervous breakdown when someone loses the ability to work due to “nerves”–large volumes of conflicting emotions they cannot process well enough even to function–but there is no difference between this and a broken spirit, other than that a shell of obedience remains.  The inner vitality is gone.  And perhaps “nervous breakdowns” are healthy, in that the person–forced to choose between surrendering their self and the social ignomy a period of helpless dependence compels–elects the former.

I’m rambling.  But there is something here.

What virtue would you universalize if you could? Love, I suppose, would be the best one. I don’t really understand it, though. It is an abstraction to me, as I feel it is to many people.

It would not be compassion, since compassion without wisdom easily becomes complicity in self indulgence and failure. Some people do need mercy, but some truly need a boot in the ass.

I think: this is the point I wanted to make. Until each of us has progressed VERY far down the road of wisdom, it is very difficult to know what people truly need.

Being “nice” is simply lazy, as I have said many times. It is good for social harmony, and do appreciate the many people I encounter every day who are nice, who are not assholes, even if they sometimes want to be.

I suppose we all project on the world, and I am no different. My own vote for the one universal virtue would be curiosity, because everything else can be built from it over time.

I was up early yesterday, looking at a full moon on a very cold morning, and it hit me that seeing and appreciating beauty and feeling good are very nearly the same thing. Everything is ugly when you are down, and the world itself is beautiful when you feel happy and content.

Logically, two things follow from this observation.

1) If you beautify your world, and you are not depressed, you will be happier. This applies on all social levels and in all ways, but obviously it is the personal level over which we have most control.

2) If you teach yourself to see more beauty, to find it in more contexts–more people, places, things, and ideas–you will be happier.

As I have said often, in my own view happiness is the source of space ntaneoya, non-compulsive goodness. As such, it and beauty are important intrinsically.

I will add that the sources of intellectualism–thought aestheticism–can be better understood through this rubric. If we trace the idea that ideas can be beautiful, can be works of art, can be faithful if diminished emanations of the ineffable, back to the Greeks, as seems proper to me, it becomes obvious what value this approach might have had. They were convulsed in frequent wars. Socrates fought in one if the Persian wars, and could likely fell the Peloponesdian War o its way. I think that history is correct.

If you place the most important source of beauty in your life beyond human hands, beyond the power of a torch to consume, beyond the power of enemies to carry off, then your achieve something like security. Ideas become something like cherished possessions.

But the source of this need, itself, asks more of them than they should be asked to provide. Ideas–reason–is a means to an end, and it is arguably the case that the Western obsession with ideas on themselves which has led to the dead ends, futility, and overt and aggressive stupidity one sees in our universities, which in concept owe so much to Greek models.