Month: March 2018

Trump has good instincts, usually, with regard to people.  And it seems to be his opinion that Oprah lacks the courage to run for President.  But add this qualification: if she did, the media would be falling all over itself to praise her, to build her up, to tell her and the world how wonderful she is, which is precisely what she has always craved and thrived on, and obviously withered and saddened her when it diminished.

Consider that if she knew she would have to endure round the clock insults, continuous harassment and threats, and a national campaign involving even American secret police and trained subversive agents working closely with most national media, THERE IS NO CHANCE SHE WOULD EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.  Oprah is not Trump.  Trump became who he is because he loves winning.  He loves entered tough playing fields, and outworking and outsmarting tough opponents.  He thrives on it.  Oprah became who she became because she needs to feel loved and adored.  I have never felt that she held any beliefs so strongly that she would not change them on a dime if she thought her audience was demanding it.

And I will remind you that, at least as I recollect the thing, her endorsement of Barack Obama was a very important early victory for him.  She lives in that world, and has for a long time.

Our political choices have become, on the one hand, continuing everything that has worked for America throughout its history, including promoting and supporting the best and brightest; or, on the other, abdicating all sense of responsibility to our children, and to those of anyone born here, and pursuing aggressively policies which breed, and have always bred, political tyranny, mass poverty, violence, the diminishment of the human spirit, gross injustices, and long term oligarchies.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oprah-winfrey-childhood-trauma-ptsd-60-minutes-report/

I have of course written about all of this quite a bit.  The point I would make is that the question is not just “what happened to that child”.  I’m not even convinced that is the most important question.  The better question is “what did NOT happen to that child?”  What affection was withheld or absent throughout the child’s life?  What moral clarity was absent?  What early nurturing did not happen?

What we call PTSD is what, in my understanding, the professionals now call “Simple Trauma”.  It is simple because it stems from a series of events, or even a single event which, as horrific as it was, was time delimited, and known to the survivor.  Car accidents, medical emergencies, combat: these can all produce PTSD.

What in my own terms I will also call Complex Trauma, but which I might be defining in my own way (I have been diagnosed with it, so I do have some insight), consists in my view in traumas both of presence and absence.  Bad things happened, at an age when the brain was still developing, but the resources to deal with them were also absent.  Most kids, I suspect, endure multiple things in an average childhood which COULD, but don’t, produce traumatic after-shocks.  This is because in a loving, nurturing, emotionally aware environment, they are given the space and sense of safety to develop inner resources to deal with “bad” things.

Overall, though, and even though she does not say it directly here, and I very much doubt she has the courage (she is not actually, in my view, a genuinely brave woman, but one who has always had an instinct for what people want to hear, and a talent for making everyone feel special) to say it in the interview, which I don’t plan to watch, but in my own estimation traumatic stress is the principle factor “holding” the black community down.

We know that stress can be passed from parent to child epigenetically. as well as, of course, through the personality structures doing the parenting.  This was shown with regard to survivors of the Holocaust and their children.  And we know that, at least since roughly 1970, the average child in a black neighborhood has existed in a world largely denuded of healthy, nurturing two parent homes, has grown up in a world filled with violence and poverty, and has been faced with a schooling which was utterly inadequate to the task of preparing them for most jobs.  That such a system should be self perpetuating should surprise no one.  That throwing money at it is not the solution should be obvious.

What if we offered no or low cost Neurofeedback to all low income children whose parents wanted it?  What if we offered it to the kids who misbehave and act out?  What if we offered it to JAIL INMATES, most of whom, I strongly suspect, have been REPEATEDLY traumatized, not least by the prison system itself.

What if we state unambiguously that there is such a thing as sound emotional health, that it matters in all areas of life, including economically, and that supporting and increasing it should be a national priority?   What if we stop saying racism is the problem, and start saying that fucked up kids from fucked up homes are the problem, and that it is not a moral question, but a practical one, one amenable to solutions more effective than continued pontification, bloviation, objuscation, and predation being practiced by the purported allies of those suffering distress?

So many people, whose lives depend on this status quo, would hate the idea.

But, and this thinking underlies my work, the bastards don’t always win.  Sometimes the good guys and gals do.  Look at the world as it is.  But what it is is always also something possible, waiting to be born.  The first step on the path of the possible, if it is in fact possible, already exists.

For reasons I won’t get into, from a thought process the source of which I won’t get into, I saw tonight the importance of NO for children.  When you say no to a child, on something important, it is like a tattoo on their soul.  It is the foundation, the building block, from which they will eventually create their selves, either in acceptance or rebellion. I think many children come quickly to appreciate parents who genuinely want to teach them useful life lessons.  My own children are proud of how tough their mother was.  And she was.  They were lucky, in her, and in me.  Both of them have said they will raise their own children the way they were raised. 

When you only say yes. there is no end.  There is no cessation.  The outward impulses go on forever.  Never saying no is a form of child abuse, for most children.

Consider that we all need no’s, but far too many children do not get them, or not in sufficient quantities.  Consider that the tattoo, the mark, SHOULD be on the inside.

What do you see?

Communism: the belief that if we give final and complete power to the bastards, they will immediately stop being bastards.

I will comment as well that Killmonger, from the Black Panther movie, might well be seen as the avatar of Communism.  He “invades” a nation he is connected to but does not understand, immediately foments an internecine civil war, and makes the principle aim of his regime the exportation of undirected but severe violence, all in the name of a “justice” whose main precept is that Might Makes Right, which in turn vitiates all possibility of claiming moral superiority.

As I have said, one bastard replacing another is not progress, even if it is your bastard.

I think we notice people saying no to us readily enough, but few of us notice the absence of people saying yes.

There are plenty of people to remind you of what they don’t think you can do, but not enough people reminding people of what their possibilities are.  The latter, in general, are vastly more useful.

I think gayness is really sadness, and that the outward exuberance one often sees conceals this.

I am not judging: merely trying to speak truth.  I find many heterosexualities nearly as weird as homosexuality, and that many gay couples are emotionally healthier and happier than many heterosexual couples I don’t doubt for a moment.

It does seem to me, though, that on some level it feels like a loss, and if we consider the idea that in many cases it is a sexuality redirected by premature sexual experience, sexual experience perhaps originating in the abuse of adolescent loneliness and already existing sense of loss, then this claim seems credible.

If I might speak autobiographically, I grew up in a home where we always lied.  Whatever we were feeling, we pretended that we were feeling what we assumed was appropriate.  This basic mindset seems to define the leftists world view, and I think I can speak psychologically when I say that this is one of the primary reasons it bothers me so much, why I react emotionally to it so much.  They want to tell all of us who we should be, how we should think, and are quite willing to use violence to get outer compliance.  Gays, it seems to me, as long term non-compliers, non-conformists, as victims of this mindset, ought to be particularly sensitive to it, not practicing it from a new pulpit of political power.

As things stand, the gay lobby (and many others) also likes to pretend that things are what they think they ought to be, that gayness is exactly equal in all ways to heterosexuality, that gay couples are exactly equal to man and wife, but I continue to believe this to be an unfounded claim, and an apparently quite inaccurate one in a great many cases.

The task is to evaluate things as they ARE, to see the individual nuances, to feel the differences and the similarities across populations, and to see individual variations.

What is great about gayness, and what is in some respects worse?  Above all, what is INTERESTING about it?  These are all fabulous questions.

Yes, fabulous.

And for those curious about my own sexuality, I feel not the slightest interest in men.  I just don’t.  My dick is utterly indifferent.  My concerns are ethical, both the very valid claims gays make that they want to be integrated fully, and the also valid claims that, particularly where children are concerned, there might in fact be differences that matter. 

The gateway out of the prison can only be found within the prison.  It never exists in the air.

I would like to define laziness as “wasting the flame”.

There are people who work very hard, outwardly, who do absolutely nothing inwardly, who are functionally difficult to differentiate from machines.  Machines do not have souls.  They do not have a flame.  Such work is useless, in the final and most important analysis, or at least largely so.

And sometimes laying around for hours can be productive, if you have a productive spirit, if you are watching and listening, feeling and thinking.  That is where new things come from.  That is how you give birth, which we all agree is work of a difficult sort.

Such is my rationale, perhaps rationalization, in any event, of this particular day, as I watch clouds cross the sky and dream. I have organized my work life to be able to do this, and my guilt is likely more perfunctory than necessary.

You know, Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes, was most likely a Pisces.  My birth day is somewhere in this neighborhood, but I don’t do details.

Anyway, here is today’s bon mot: Silence and solitude are mirrors which reflect one’s true Self.

I think this is true.  Kahlil Gibran or one of the other usual suspects may have said something very close to, or perhaps even identical to this, but it feels present as an idea and sentiment to me at the moment, so if it is plagiarized, I am seconding the idea.

I was feeling very sad this morning.  Rather, I was conscious of an antique, ancient sadness, one that I have felt since my youth.  There are certain feelings you have to embrace in order to go through, but that instant, that moment, is so frightening, and so actually painful–for an amount of time impossible to determine from the outside–that most people who are hurt early in their lives never go there.  They cross the long miles of sometimes long lives, without ever remembering who they once were, or what possibilities waited for them at one time, and never really left.

I am learning to go there, though, to focus on that one spot which every ounce of my being wants to avoid, to look away from, to distract myself from.  Only through there can I find my true Self, and only then do I become free.  It is the only way forward, the one place I most do not want to go.

If I might return to the excellent mythos of “Stranger Things”, you have to enter the Upside Down, through a scary portal, and you have to hunt down the monster, and you have to see your own face in it, a face of pain, of loss, of unresolved grief, of long term suffering, of keeping going when you couldn’t keep going, and you have to bring it home into your own heart.  Then all the darkness disappears, and the world is right again.  Both world merge.  I think this is close.  But I have not walked that path yet.

This is what I feel.  This is my work of the moment.  I will continue my reporting.  It helps me clarify things for myself, and of course I continue to hope this is read by, and useful to, others. I am fine either way, but that remains my hope.

One of the perils of truly deep relaxation, for most of us, is that what was nicely hidden, tied up, and disappeared, reappears.  What you had wanted to forget, and had forgotten, reappears.  Parts of your self you were dimly aware of you become acutely aware of.

And I think we are all psychic, to greater or lesser extents.  I think most of us, for reasons of self protection, systematically denigrate this capacity from earliest childhood until, not surprisingly, it largely atrophies in fact, if not in potential.

So I have been feeling this current flowing through me the past week or so, and it occurs to me that I am no longer just feeling my own traumas, but feeling a sense of loss that is flowing deep in the veins of America, my nation, and through much of the world.

We need connection to what I might call the Great Breath, the spirit that flows in and flows out, which–according to one very plausible reading of quantum mechanical theory, seen in a relatively orthodox way–destroys and recreates what we call reality a million times a second, which in fact creates time, and the possibility of the sense of flow that the existence of time enables.

It is a historical fact that much conflict over recorded history is connected to religion.  This is certainly the case in the Christian era, with Christianity, as developed by the Romans and Byzantines, being the world’s first experiment in radical religious intolerance (albeit one influenced by activities of some Jews in roughly the 1st and 2nd centuries BC).

I think some genuinely thoughtful people–which is always a minority among the numbers of those educated to render “expert” opinions–see all this violence and see religion as the root problem.  If we want to stop the hate, they argue, we have to stop believing in anything non-empirical.  We need to eradicate faith and belief, in favor of what we can stomp, throw and measure.

So we get this urge to erase from humankind’s historical memory all sincere attachment to religious sentiments, all attachments to any form of faith found outside some lab, in some form or other.  The French Experiment, we might call it, in willed public atheism, saw the world dichotomously in terms of religious sentiment and science, of the past and the future, of tribalism and universalism.

America was different.  We saw the need for God.  We saw the need for the divine, the transcendent, the sacred.  Our intent was to create a system within which many “tribes” could live in harmony, by living and letting live, by neither prohibiting nor requiring any particular religious form.

When we see people calling for the end of the expression of references to God or Christianity, however, we are seeing residue of the French Experiment, not the American one.  It was understood as self evident that religious people would guide their lives according to their faith.  What else could they do? 

It is remarkable that so many people can buy into the delusion that people who are deeply religious can somehow confine that religiosity to home.  An eternal soul does not change when it walks through the front door.  The purpose of life does not change when one becomes a politician.  Our whole nation was founded on live and let live.  This is a sound philosophy.  That of the French was “If you want to live, do what we tell you to.”  This is a bad philosophy, which is why you will rarely find it articulated that clearly; and why, to be sure, they have long been at pains to attack the notion of “bad”, as if you could attack any concept without substituting some new standard of measurement of your own.

But what I feel is we have banished an authentic sense of God’s presence from our lives, more or less.  Many Christians act more in fear of hell than conviction of the power of God’s love.

And to be sure I don’t feel God takes care of us.  But that does not mean that something wonderful, something magnificent, is not potentially present to all of us, every moment of the day.  A beautiful day does not take care of you either, but it still has the power to inspire, enlighten, and create joy.

God is not dead, and was certainly not killed.  God has simply been forgotten.