Month: June 2018

Looking at the spectacle the Professional Left–the politicians like Chuck Schumet, and their obedient press–made of Trumps historic meeting with Kim yesterday, I think I can callthis is a Learning Moment. A perceptual swivel point, if you will.

No sitting President has ever met with the ruler (I don’t know the formal title within which his power is cloaked) of North Korea. Given that this follows the also-unprecedented handshake at the border with the South Korean leader, we can safely say we are on new ground, figuratively and literally.

Yet when I listened to NPR yesterday–in my usual less-than-five-minute dose, which is all I can stand of their pseudo-pious informational charade–they were taking great pains to point out that all the promises made here are the same as before, with ZERO nod to what is actually, objectively new.

Add this to some discussions I’ve had over the past few days, and it occurs to me to submit that embracing ideology means renouncing at the level of principle all possibly competing ideas. You don’t have to hear the competing idea, much less comprehend it, to reject it. All you need to know is that it is different.  CONSIDERING the idea, of course, is anathema. Considerers are heretics, and heretics are unwelcome.

The notion that Trump may know what he is doing, that he may well be what he has emerged to be–a competent, well meaning leader working in the interests of the American people, which is his job–is such an idea.

All that binds Leftists together is conformity. This is what makes it sacred to them, and heresies like Kanyes so dangerous.

In my meditation this morning I saw an Indian (Native America, although the phrase probably should be native-er, or something like it, in better English) man looking at a lakebed filled with muddy red water which was undrinkable.  It was a nasty mix of clay and water.

He devised something like a still, in which water was boiled in a pot, with furs overhead, which caught the condensation, and dripped it back down, purified.

Now, this may have been a past life memory.  If my between-lives self is anything like my present self, I like to roam.  I’ve been everywhere, man.

But symbolically, it answered a question I had been asking myself: how do I heal wounds of lack?  How can something become present which has always been absent?  How do you set about doing this work consciously and directly?

Answer, you don’t.  What you do is enter into these knots–and everything which is not flowing is best understood as a knot, although an eddy on the side of the river may be a good metaphor too–and allow them through gentle focus, gentle interaction, to become vapor.  One moment they are knotted, solid, and tight, and slowly they melt.  The chemical definition of sublimation is transitioning directly from a solid to a gas.

Now, all knots can be assumed to be admixtures of the good and the “bad”, the fresh and the rotten, the wholesome and the unhealthy.  By “melting” these knots, the good floats up, and the rest disappears.

Freud, of course, used this metaphor too, for the process of converting socially unconscious impulses into more appropriate ones.  The sexually repressed person becomes a great pianist.

But returning to my oft-repeated claim that Freud was nearly always ALMOST right, but prodigiously wrong in important respects, what we can say is that if the sexual impulse gets tied into a knot through an inability to express sexuality healthily, then yes, it creates social dysfunction.  But the opposite is not leaving it as-is–primitive, needy, continual–but rather INTEGRATING it.  You release ALL energy when you release ANY held energy.  You can look at your sex, when you are healthy, feel it, find ways to express it, and make it a daily part of your life. You are not repressing it, but EXpressing it.

So too, say, with violence.  Inner rage does not get sublimated to, say, an obsession with peace.  When you untie this knot you find that a part of you has an innate need to set boundaries, and to feel safe expressing a core sense of self.  Once you do this, the capacity for violence does not vanish, but it is possible to limit it to appropriate times and places, where it is genuinely warranted.

It is obvious to me the Left has not processed its rage and frustration.  They call for peace, but not intelligent peace, not peace based on a principled adherence to common sense notions of human rights and human dignity.

And obviously when I speak of “The Left”, the concrete referent is people who adopt and push this Weltanschauung.  You cannot not be bitter and angry, and still want Europe to fall to people who think it quite acceptable to beat their wives and rape kaffir women.

This last lecture is not necessary, but today, particularly, I am left contemplating the spectacle of masses of people so blinded by hatred that NOTHING Trump has done or could do would suffice to satiate their rage.

“HE IS NOT US”, I hear them scream.  “No”, is the answer, “no he is not”.  And thank God for that!!!

I was wondering just now if the back to back suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain would cause a jump in the suicide rate, then I recalled that suicide was one of the first topics ever undertaken by sociologists.  I think of Emile Durkheim, specifically: https://www.thoughtco.com/study-of-suicide-by-emile-durkheim-3026758

I am not a sociologist, but I don’t think it is greatly overstating the case to say that Durkheim is to sociology roughly what Freud is to psychiatry.  He did not have Freud’s passion for control.  He was not sneaky like Freud.  But he did seminal work at the very beginning of the field.

And it is interesting that suicide was the first topic he chose.  It would seem, intrinsically, to be a social “crime”.

And I recall, to the point, that one of his first findings was that publishing acts of suicide causes copycat suicides.  Thus, for over 100 years you will rarely read in the papers of suicides.  Yet forty five THOUSAND people kill themselves every year.  That is a staggering number.  And for every one who succeeds, 25 TRY.  That is over one million suicide attempts each year.

And this presents the interesting point, at the moment: we have a major problem, but it is a problem that gets worse the more we talk about it, at least within certain forums.

For my part, I tend to view it simply.  We have one large segment of our society that killed God to their satisfaction long ago, and which seeks to destroy every relic of common culture outside of its political tentacles.  Life for nearly all of us is difficult at times, and nearly insufferable for long stretches of time.  Culture evolved to protects us from our confusion.  Less culture, more confusion, more people jumping off buildings.

And as I indicated in the last post, a belief, or rejection, of God makes a big difference.  The data is clear, for example from POW’s, that the survival rate in all circumstances for the religious is significantly higher than for those who are atheists.

In my thought, and in my action, I am always looking for what I tend to call flanking paths, which is to say non-obvious ways to influence what we can see.  When dealing with complex systems, most of the time there is no other way.  You cannot impose a simple order on a complex order without destroying it.  And simple orders are actually vastly less ordered, formally, than complex ones.

But to the topic here, I continue to insist that we need to bring the spiritual into the scientific domain.  The work of Cleve Backster may be a way.  The work of Gary Schwartz, or Dean Radin may be a way.  There are many people doing fascinating, scientifically rigorous and disciplined work in these domains.  They need to be funded, supported, encouraged, lauded.

To my mind, this is obvious and simple.  But people love their confusion.

“The luster of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with.  Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in; and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values.  Place around them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular-science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.”

From this blog post:
http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/entry/suicide_and_the_life_after_death_factor

I need to read more James.  I need to read more, period.

I will note in passing, though, that my goal with this blog is not to summarize the words of others.  You can do that yourself.  My goal is to say “I went down to the river today, and this is what I found.”

I don’t read as much as I used to, because my own thoughts keep me entertained and busy. I hadn’t thought of this until now, but I think that is true.

As I try to impregnate, to invest, my actions with active feeling, I am struck how undignified and immiserating it is to be continually in a hurry.  How can you take pleasure in a day when it is one stressor after another?  How can you feel the dignity of being human when you are continually racing from here to there and back again?

I was in the book store yesterday–I am glad there are still book stores–and saw Marie Kondo’s book.  It occurs to me today that most of us could stand to see our TIME uncluttered.  Watching mindless TV, for many of us, is the equivalent of a closet filled with shit we don’t need, will never use, and yet still manage not to throw away.

Do you have time to spend a few minutes today watching a rain shower, or birds singing in the trees?  Why not?

How much do you really need?  Your mansion will not save you from premature death from stress, chronic anger, chronic frustration, and alcoholism.

A Return to Dignity.  This might be a good motto for something.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5826669/Will-Kim-seek-burger-diplomacy.html

I think that, while it is true we have people stupid enough to compare North Korea to Libya, there are also MAJOR differences.

There is really no internal opposition to the Kim regime, and has not been for many decades.  There is no civil war waiting in the wings.

And if Kim is at the point where he is willing to liberalize economically, to allow private investment, to create wealth, to bring in plentiful foodstuffs, then there will be no reason for rebellion for some time.

His hold on power might be a bucking bronco for a minute, but while I am not one normally to vote for tyranny, tyranny with food and opportunity would be much better than what the North Koreans have now.

Trump has demonstrated many times now a pattern of making extreme demands, and then relenting.  He is by design unpredictable, because he learned long, long ago that this improves his negotiating position, especially if he is starting from a position of strength.

I don’t know if complete denuclearization is a reasonable demand, but RELATIVE decreases would certainly be a reasonable demand, in exchange for opening up the North Korean market.

A plan can be developed for a complete denuclearization, but over a window of, say, 5 to 10 years.  This gives Kim a chance to see how things go–none of us know what will happen, but at least as far as the people of North Korea it ought to be good–and then make a decision.

For our part, there is no need to invade a nation which is liberalizing.  It would be counterproductive.  It has seemed obvious for some years that the North Koreans are kind of in a deep freeze, and will need to be thawed out, politically and socially speaking.  And this would have been true if we could have conquered North Korean with magical dragons with no loss to ourselves.  We still would have had a nation of people used to absolute tyranny.

I think cautious optimism is warranted.  Trump is unpredictable, but he is not stupid.  He has a plan, and that plan can certainly embrace limited steps on both sides in the near term, followed by a reassessment in a year or two.

Kim can give us three nukes now, and we can build 20 McDonald’s in Pyongyang, to be staffed by local people.  Trump can build a tower, or have some other developer do so, and Kim can open an office to evaluate the hundreds of investment plans which will likely come flooding in if and when various corporations become convinced he is serious about opening up.

North Korea could become like Cuba.  I am no fan of Cuba, obviously, but Cuba is better than North Korea currently, and anything which deescalates nuclear tensions has to be good.

And who knows?  Perhaps Kim will prove smarter than the Castros.  They could have done so much better than they did.

Without fear, there is no relief.  Without hope, there is no vindication.

I think I have figured out why I have so much trouble forming new, more healthy, habits, despite a reasonably strong will.  More generally, I think I know one reason why life seems so hard to people with PTSD.

As a reward hormone, as a “the world is right at the moment” hormone, dopamine is secreted when the person is within a relatively normal hormonal state.  However, chronic hypervigilence, chronic amygdalic arousal, chronic stress, prevent the normal operation of this system which allows people to become behaviorally and socially nested in a conscious and affirmative, healthy way.

If everything is frightening, then the very hormones which would and should calm you down are not secreted.  Given how much of life SHOULD be habit–what I have called acquired instinct–this requires continual exercise of renewed judgement and will power.  When you should be able to go on autopilot, you can’t. 

In my own case, cooking frightens me.  How is this even possible?  I don’t really know, other than all things which work to empower me seem to have been beaten out of me at an early age, making all positive things things which frighten me.

But, again, SEEING THIS amounts to a beginning of a cure.  What do I do?  I consciously connect with my emotions when I am doing something I want to make a habit.  I allow myself to feel good, to engage in positive self talk and reassurance, and in general to remain emotionally present.  It takes a little more time to do it this way than to force myself to do x, y, or z, but it is untangling a thread I want to make long and strong.

The process of consciously going into and feeling your body.  It is the tactile equivalent of visualization, except that you feel what is there, rather than see what is not.

I don’t know if there is a need for this word, but it’s my blog and my playground, so fuck it.  

With regard to my last post, I will comment that the core contradiction at the heart of our society and culture (to the extent it is represented by our institutions of “higher” learning) is that those trying to run it seek an aristocracy of spirit, without believing either in aristocracy, or spirit.


That their intellectual output looks like a 200 flies in a shoebox should surprise no one.


But the hunger for power remains. This is our problem, those of us who retain some shred or shreds of sanity.  It is the problem of all people of good will, who value freedom, human dignity, human rights, and genuine morality.