Month: July 2018

I think all addiction should be viewed as withdrawal from life, from present moment, open, focus. 

In this past week I have several times abstained from getting drunk when I ordinarily would have.  I have allowed myself to eat a bit more than I ought to have–I am on a diet, in theory–to somewhat absorb that emotional energy.

And I have been using an odd tool, the “bed o’nails”, aka the Spoonk.  This consists in a mat and pillow that have these plastic spikes on them, and no matter how they market it, these things HURT initially when you lie on them.  It’s uncomfortable.  There is no easy, pleasurable way to do it.

But I have found over time, sometimes, a deep relaxation does follow.  They speculate that endorphins are released, as I recall.

Just as often, for me, I initiate the same shaking and involuntary verbalizations I get when I am sleeping.  I had bought the thing because it supposedly helped with sleep, then stopped using it when I got the same problems.  What would be the point of subjecting myself to this, when I get what I was going to get anyway?

I think a secondary aspect of this thing is it creates a low grade challenge to the fight or flight response.  It asks it: are you going to fight this, or let it be?  And over time, I think it MIGHT lead to less triggering.  I do feel that when I have my “attacks”, they do end with a sense that some of that energy is draining out.  I do feel that if I do it 40 minutes before bed–I like to do it while listening to a soundtrack of a thunderstorm–it helps with my sleep.

And I have also been doing my “free running” thing.  I haven’t been to a bar in 2-3 weeks, when I was accustomed to stopping in somewhere 2-3 times a week.  And what is happening is old feelings are coming up.  I am seeing myself, now, and in the past, in a new light.  I am realizing ways I have been stupid.  Last night, I was mourning my lost marriage.

You know, as painful as divorces are, it is ASTONISHING they are so common.  They are financially very difficult, and usually emotionally worse.  They are hard on kids, hard on the adults.  But at least 1 in 2 marriages ends that way.  That number is much higher in some places.  Is it really worth it?

In my own case, I needed space to explore what was hurting me, space I tried to negotiate within the marriage, but which in the end I could not.  And that led to my advice to anyone I run into who is thinking about divorce: only leave if you would be happier alone.  Do not leave thinking you will find someone else to “complete” you, even if that person is a current lover.  It likely will not last.  And you are not as young as you used to be, and you are going to be broke, if you are like most.

Be all that as it may, I am finding and seeing my own severe defects, at least some of them.  Emotionally, I had my wings clipped early.  I had my Achilles tendon cut.  I was prevented from running or flying.  And it has prevented a normal individuation.

My usefulness, to this point, to the extent it has existed, has consisted in a combination of hypervigilence and a high intelligence.  I naturally seek out and look for problems and solutions.  I am always scanning, always looking for the first iota of a problem, and this includes the abstract realm.

We, as the modern, industrialized West, have many, many problems.  We have the threats of nuclear war and global epidemic, economic crashes, personal financial troubles, relationship problems, and anomie of modern life.

And we have addictions in all forms dangling in front of us continually, the most obvious of which is the internet, simply getting sucked in.  I was contemplating yesterday I rarely read books any more.  I am sucked into this damn keyboard.  I listen to more books than I read, even though I have some fantastic books on my shelf.

Internet porn is just one category.  News, just plain news, by which I mean the daily emotion of outrage and self righteousness which the sites which stay in business seek to evoke: this is addictive. 

Food, in all forms: pizza, hot pockets, cold beer.  TV shows, binge watching.

I return to this theme from time to time, but when we watch movies like Dances with Wolves, and the Last Samurai, what we are really dreaming of is a socially connected, non-addicted world; a world free of all the trivialities which daily drain our energy, suck out our brains, siphon off our souls.

I am trying to find a way through, for myself.  I can’t say I have it figured out.  I am posting here, after all.  But perhaps in this meandering mess there is something useful to someone.

This is interesting: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/20/trump-poised-to-take-control-of-the-federal-reserve.html

As any long time readers–if I have any–know, I am against Fractional Reserve banking, period.  There is nothing wrong with saving up money, then lending it at interest.  But that is not what banks do.  They save up enough money to be granted the legal right to create more, which they then do.  When it works they get rich, and when it fails we have a recession or depression.  In the first case they siphon off wealth, while adding nothing of intrinsic value, and in the second case they are the direct cause of mass poverty and economic and cultural dislocation.  There is no case to be made that Fractional Reserve banking exists for the public good.  It exists to make a wealthy elite more wealthy, and more elite.  It is at the root of the growing disparity of wealth and power, in my view.

And the Fed, of course, exists in theory to soften the blows of the financial cycles.  It exists to slow down inflation–which is the result of mass creation of and circulation of new money by banks–and to prevent bank crashes, when they don’t get back the money they created in loans.

Practically, though, and to an extent we can’t know, they also exist as a private source of capital for the largest banks in the United States, and perhaps even the world.  We can’t know, as the Fed is more secretive, arguably, than the CIA, since the CIA at least in theory reports to the President.  The Fed, by law, is required to do nothing other than deliver periodic reports which can, and generally do, say almost nothing about the details of their actual operations.

Consider the Quantitative Easing program.  Some $50 billion a month was created for something like 5-8 years.  Let us say it was five years.  50×12=600.  600×5: 3,000.  This means some THREE TRILLION dollars was created by the Fed in the Obama era, on the low side, and disbursed to banks.  We don’t know the details.  We don’t know who got the money.

BUT THIS MONEY WAS CREATED FROM NOTHING, AND GIVEN TO MASSIVE BANKS WHO WERE ALSO PART OF THE BODY VOTING THE MONEY.

Can you see the problem here?  If we call money potential wealth, it remains in potential until it is spent, which is to say put into circulation.  Once it does start circulating, you get inflation, which is to say money competing with money, driving the overall value of it down.

Obviously, if the Fed is raising rates, it fears inflation.  This may be a valid fear.  But what I would like to encourage the President to do–and obviously this is the single most important blog on the internet (just ask me), so he will obviously read this and unhesitatingly follow my advice–is rethink the whole system.

We can, in one stroke, abolish all debt in the United States, and engineer a system which will be immune to economic cycles.  Economic cycles should be a thing like smallpox epidemics, or malaria outbreaks, which we read about as having existed in the past.  If money is real, if it’s value does not change, we get a supercharged, bulletproof economy which makes everyone into a wealthy person.

Self evidently, I do not favor unlimited consumption of everything, but I think wealth is most likely much like population.  Most industrialized nations, once the inhabitants realize their children are highly likely to survive childhood, see a drop in population growth, and in older nations–such as most of Europe and Japan–birth rates are currently negative.  Their populations are shrinking.

Likewise, I think once everyone has a taste of the good life, their need for all the fine things of life will diminish.  It is possible to savor what is local and special.  It is possible to build a global culture based on a sense of the plenitude of life, of the value and beauty in small, non-material things.  It is possible to grow gardens the world over; to, as I say, feed the slow and nurture the small.

Anyway, here is my treatment of the topic: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

Love is the art of being with other people.

With regard to this issue, I simply want to recall to your memory that Obama quashed the investigation into the Fast and Furious by invoking Executive Privilege.  That this was absurd–because it had nothing to do with him, or so he claimed–didn’t matter.

And I will recall to your memory as well, as I like to from time to time, that Alberto Gonzalez, the first Hispanic Attorney General, was forced to resign as the result of a campaign of whispers and innuendo, nothing more.  No evidence ever emerged he was guilty of anything.

On the one hand, you have Eric Holder getting off scot-free despite seemingly more or less engineering an increase in border violence he intended to use to push gun control–in which he was, to be clear, complicit in hundreds of murders, hundreds of human deaths, simply to pursue a partisan agenda–and on the other a good man, as far as I know, being forced out of office as a result of coordinated lies launched by Democrats and the media they control.

Ponder this.

the problem, of course, isn’t the Democratic System
it’s the
living parts which make up the Democratic System.
the next person you pass on the street,
multiply
him or
her by
3 or 4 or 30 or 40 million
and you will know
immediately
why things remain non-functional
for most of
us.

I wish I had a cure for the chess pieces
we call Humanity. . .

we’ve undergone any number of political
cures

and we all remain
foolish enough to hope
that the one on the way
NOW
will cure almost everything.

fellow citizens,
the problem never was the Democratic
System, the problem is

you.

I will add the comment, too, that the core difference between true conservatives and everyone else, is that we are not looking to the government to rescue us.  We are not looking to politicians to magically make life better.  We simply want the freedom and the space–from sons of bitches in the government, and sons of bitches everywhere else who want to lie, cheat and steal–to make our own way.

And we figured out a long time ago that some clever politicians CREATE the sons of bitches, so that we vote for them to make them go away.

We need some government.  We need cops, so we don’t have to shoot the sons of bitches ourselves.  But beyond that, we ask only that God protects us from good politicians, from government “aid”, and from all the hands that hold us down by trying to hold us up.

You know what this whole thing feels like to me?  A textbook CIA AgitProp operation.  It’s win/win for them.  They get the entire political Left acting as if the CIA has a long history of unfailing patriotism, truth telling, deference to the law, and accountability. AND they get to call Trump a traitor in public, which is a word which has historically meant NOTHING to the Left–they don’t like this country to begin with–but which resonates with political conservatives.  They are shaking the tree, to see what  falls out.  It acts as a synchronizing signal for the pools of little fishes, with their little fish brains, and as a reason to leave for Republicans.

But as I keep saying, a failed propaganda operation, when opposed vigorously, as this one has been, risks losing ground overall.  Some people WANT to be lied to.  Those people are reliable.  But most Americans instinctively hate liars, and once you are on that list, your capacity to tell the Big Lie is at an end.

And this “Trump is a traitor” meme is one of the biggest Big Lie’s I’ve seen in my lifetime.  It is up there with the official NIST report on 9/11, but with the difference that there is really no official reason to grant this lie credibility, other than being a gullible dupe.  NIST is at least composed of scientists, who on their own account used science to reach their conclusions, even when this proved a manifest lie upon even superficial consideration.

I’m bullish on Trump.  They are pulling out the stops, but nothing is working.  The American people don’t care about Russia.  And more and more are getting tired of the relentless shrieking.

As I was telling some guy on the internet, how does THIS call for impeachment differ from the one you were making last week, last month, and last year?  You don’t HAVE a reason to remove Trump from office, other than that you don’t like what you know about his politics, and you don’t like him as a person.  But that’s not how our system works.  In fact, it betrays a fundamental contempt for the will of the people, as expressed by popular voting within our Constitutional framework. It betrays autocratic biases, arrogance, and a belief that, in the end, might makes right.  Nothing more antithetical to the American spirit could be imagined.

I was in a museum last night, that came alive.  Wild dogs were chasing me, and the people with me were all trying to arm themselves.  But there were many things which were simply interesting, thing growing and blossoming, new life.

And it hit me when I woke up that, like many popular movies, “Night at the Museum” has a mythic, deep psychological component.

Our memories are storied in exhibits which are static.  Such and such happened.  I had this relationship with this person, that with that person.  We remember them as we perceived them at the time.

But 1) what you remember may be entirely colored by emotions which clouded your perception; and 2) the process of growth involves reremembering who you “are”, which means recasting your past, not in a false light, but in the light of movement, of flexibility.  All the parts and pieces in your personal museum can be brought to life, moved around, brought into synchrony with one another, all without violence.  What was, and fixed, need be no more.

Clearly, the past is the past, but what the past MEANS can be changed.  Changing who you are means changing who you were.  By this I mean that who you were was someone for whom becoming who you are now was always possible, but invisible.  I can’t see my path forward, even now, but that there is a path forward, I have no doubt.  That growth is possible, I have no doubt.  But until you occupy that new place, you cannot imagine it.

Ponder the phenomenon of colors.  Our eyes can see only a very small range of electromagnetic radiation.  What color would gamma rays be, if we could see them?  We can’t know.  It is as impossible for us to imagine, as sight is for those who have always been blind.

But in important ways, who you become is who you were.  It was always possible.  You are not so much growing into, as shedding ignorance.  To become more, you become less: less stupid.  Less unaware.  Everything we need to know is already there.

And every movement forward is, then, a movement backward too.

I think I am making sense here, but if you want to call nonsense, have at it.  It won’t bother me.

I will add, that protecting yourself against yourself is hiding memories and unpleasant feelings.  When you open the doors, and turn on the lights, and reanimate the past, it is all there, good, bad, and ugly.

This is a fascinating process, though.  I wish it for you.

Thr thing about kicking over a bee hive is it makes it obvious to everyone that it was there. We would not see John Brennan in the public realm if Hillary–or Jeb, or Mitt–were President. The former Director of the FBI would not be telling people to vote Democrat lest they be labeled “UnAmerican”.

I was wondering today if our intelligence agencies are best labeled riddled with Trump moles or Deep State moles? Is the composition changing?

Was that explosion over Russia not quite something to behold? Those there were fireworks. Who saw them and realized they needed to change sides? Can Trump build an intelligence network within the intelligence network?

I am tempted to wonder if most human misery is not rooted on proto-narcissism, and the Anatta/Anatman of the Buddha not mature individuation.

Think about it: you think about what you lack.  You have to force yourself to think about what you have.  Were you aware you had a right hand?  Not until this moment.

When you have a self, you do not need to think about having a self.  You participate.  You are a part of the dance.  It is those who do not have a self, who are self conscious, who stand on the sidelines.

Buddhism is not about perfection.  It is about getting unstuck.  It is a practical psychology, created by a genius–and furthered by other geniuses–who were very certainly friends of humanity.

For some reason this morning I got to looking up alleged ET types.  There are the Nordic looking ones, the Greys, and the Reptilians, I guess.  There may be more.

So I watch this odd video, alleging a Secret Service agent is shape shifting.  Now, stay with me.

Is there any evidence this video was NOT altered to splice in images of Voldemort?  No, not at all.  But I am willing to grant it a shred of possibility.  Why?  Because that is what I do.  If you want to see everything it is possible to see, you cannot shut down possible inputs at their inception.

What do I see which is not crazy?  I see a Federal government which is spending its way into economic disaster.  Do you see this?  Does it not take a quasi-conspiratorial mindset to see this, when neither party wants to talk about it, when our media does not want to talk about it, when our schools do not want to talk about it?

Do you not have to be “crazy” to question why the Fed–an unelected body whose members we are not allowed to know, but which consists in our largest banks, in an arrangement in which they can vote themselves literally unlimited sums of money–is allowed to exist as it is?  Ponder this.  If you question the Fed, which is absolutely at the core of our economy, and you are crazy.  You are in the same league as people talking about the Lizard people.  Whacko.

So yes, I take regular trips to crazy town.  I don’t know what the truth is.  Neither do you.  The difference between me and most is I admit it, and I am always willing to hear new perspectives.  If you don’t, if you say “here be dragons” perceptually, then you always risk missing something major, and over time the risk of a perceptual failure is 100%.

The biggest coverups are hidden in plain site.  The budget numbers are posted regularly.  The Fed Chairman does hearings on C-Span.  John Brennan says he wants to overthrow the elected government of the US.  Should we not believe him?  Have his talents and contacts been exhausted simply because he no longer holds that particular job?  Is he a minority of one in the intelligence world, or do many others feel the same?  HE IS ON THE FUCKING TV saying these things. 

It is an odd fact that you can tell people they are asleep, and they simply work that back into their waking dream.