Month: August 2018

Learn to appreciate new and unexpected problems. Old and expected problems yield readily to old and tested responses.  By and large, if you are competent in anything, you should learn to anticipate and avoid them.

But new problems offer opportunities.  It doesn’t feel like that.  It certainly feels like effort.  But don’t add the weight of resentment to the weight of consideration and action, of response, perhaps failure, and another response, and perhaps another failure, until a new pattern is established, and your unknown problem becomes a known problem, and your circle of “influence”, which is to say, of competent action, expands proportionately.

I do regularly encounter new problems.  I do not regularly embrace them.  I swear, mostly, then get pissed, then calm myself down, suck it up, and focus until I get a good enough resolution.  This is not the best way to play this game.  This is not the switched on, every day is beautiful, response.

I know I can do better.  You likely can too.  And if you never see new problems, try harder.  Do something you’ve never done before.  No reason not to spend your time until you die mid-sentence trying out new ways to screw up, and then recover from it.

So today was physically very tiring for me, and emotionally a bit so as well, although I think I worked out those particular issues.  All things being equal, it is better to read people well and to think clearly than the converse.

But I felt the need to visit my watering hole, where I know most of the people who work there.  This individual usually allows me to get the stronger beers in the larger glasses, which I appreciate, and which I tip for accordingly.  I had two 20 ounce beers, 8% alcohol, and felt much better, and listened to the Kings all the way home.

So I am always on.  I am always asking questions.  I am always dreaming.  And pace my post earlier today, I wondered what it would be like to have an “ashram”/spiritual group, where we meditated all week, then got drunk on the weekends, then discussed what we learned on Monday.

So Bill tell us about this prostitute you picked up.  What did she look like?  How did she make you feel?  What do you think you know about her? Speculate.  Did this advance your spirituality, degrade it, or is it unclear?  Were you kind to her?  Cruel?

To my mind morality and wisdom are synonyms.  If you can’t see why something is wrong, perhaps it it isn’t wrong for you, right now, or perhaps you need to grow a great deal.  This universe is not eager to judge you. There is no council of Elders waiting for your every last misstep.

This universe is rational.  I believe this. I choose to believe this, but it also feels correct to me.  Your job is to figure things out.  For yourself.  It is not my job to tell you what to do, and it is not your job to bow down to Authority, which itself is as likely to be imbecilic as wise, as likely to be corrupt as noble.

It’s funny: these ideas were so self evident in the “counter cultural” era that they were truisms.  What happened?  I’m a hard core “conservative”, and I remember.  I remember mistrust in the government, and authority generally.  I remember a mistrust of consumer society, of mindlessness, of pervasive superficiality.  If this makes me a hippy, then I am a hippy.  My job, then, is to finish the fucking job, which the hippies left undone.  Or at least do my part, if I abandon somewhat ludicrous grandiosity.

Returning to the point: some of my best meditations are the mornings after I get drunk.  The air is clear.  It is like the air after a massive storm front passes through, and leaves everything feeling clean, clear, and new.  Fresh.

We are all humans, and as humans we have certain needs.  If elephants like getting drunk, why shouldn’t we?  Now, to be clear, I could reasonably be described as an “alcoholic”.  I tend to overdo it.  But I also do it in pursuit of something deeper and higher.  Some part of me NEVER forgets.  I never forget. I  never stop striving.  I never stop trying to remember, to see, to learn, to piece all this fucking mess together, so that something intelligent can be said, something intelligent done, some order seized–by force as needed–from this chaos.  This feeling, this sense, is with me always, if my mind is sufficiently present to know where I am and what I am doing.

I am going to found a Church one day.  I don’t know when.  But it will be a place where people are happy, where they feel free, and where learning is as natural as flowers sprouting in the spring rains.

Are priests not idols?  Are churches not idols?  Are they not, by design, intermediaries, stripping you of your own power, your own perceptions, your own capacity to apprehend important truths directly?

Spirituality is about your relationship with the Void.  The Void contains everything.  It contains terror, and demons.  It also contains joy, light and love.  It is all of this.  And more.  Words do not suffice, ideas do not suffice, and I suspect even feelings do not suffice, although they point the way most reliably.

Could we call feelings the words of your deepest self?  I kind of think we can and should.

I was reading about a 3,100 mile marathon–really, set of marathons–that Sri Chinmoy encouraged his followers to do, around one block in Queens, New York.  They have to net out to over 50 miles a day for some two months to run the distance in the time allotted.  It is a life commitment, one not that different, really, than that of the Marathon Monk of Mount Hiei, with the difference that there is no communing with nature.

Then I read about Sri Chinmoy, who he was.  Who he was–to my mind, saliently, was someone who reacted like a jealous woman when Carlos Santana decided to leave him.

It had been in my mind that the very arduousness of this physical activity seems to imply a paucity of qualitatively interesting ideas.  Tapas–asceticism–is of course foundational to the Indian tradition, but among others the Buddha found it, in the end, unhelpful to the end of Enlightenment.  The Buddhas way is called the Middle Way–Madhyamarga in Sanskrit, if memory serves.

Then I got to thinking about all the gurus of the 60’s and 70’s, especially in light of what I just read about the Beats.  D.T. Suzuki was popular.  He apparently pissed off some of the Japanese community by letting the beaded Beatniks in.  It was, they felt, their religion.  I can understand how they would feel this way.

Chogyam Trungpa, of course, is likely the best known Tibetan Buddhist teacher outside of the Dalai Lama himself.  On Ram Dass’ (Richard Alpert, I believe, in his pre-hallucinogenic days) account, Trungpa had a terrible habit of showing up to public appearances late, drunk, and with a coed in each arm.  He only lived to 50 or so.  Allan Ginsberg was one of his disciples, and there was an Institute of Disembodied Poetics founded near his place in Colorado, in memory of Kerouac, or one or all of them.

I look at all this, and am reminded of the sundry risks in the guru/pupil (Shiksa, perhaps?) relationship.  There is the risk to the guru of believing his own press. There is the very, very real risk that whatever progress they have made to that point will come to a sudden stop the moment they dedicate to sharing what they know full time.  I have said in the past, in fact, that I think a key point in personal growth is reached the moment you feel a strong urge to dump it all and go tell people how to live their lives, to become a “life coach”, to give motivational seminars, to, in short, avoid the hardest part of your journey by pretending your work is done.  Adoring fans, of course, make this lie easier to tell, and easier to accept.

Add to this nubile females, money, fame, and the stage is set for, among other things, an early death.  Trungpa, at some point in his life, was likely sober and serious.  I do not want to trash his memory.  I have read one of his books, and enjoyed it, but found nothing practical to DO.  It was all theory.  And the moment he ordered two misbehaving “initiates” to be forcibly stripped naked seemingly still has the power to create reactions among those who remember it.

The other risk is that of idolotry.  You, the student, place your faith in someone else, in a power outside yourself, in perceptions which do not arise in your own breast, to a heart which is not your heart, a mind which is not your mind.  You END your progress, in my mind, in entrusting your own growth to someone else.

And competent, honest gurus know this.  They know that they do YOU a disservice by telling you what to do and how to do it.  It’s an ego game. On balance, it is bad for you, AND bad for them, since they are both moving away from honesty themselves, and hurting you in the process.

I recently watched a documentary called “The Great Transmission”.  What I found gratifying to see was that the single man, the single living man, at any rate, whose story the movie was telling, was nowhere to be seen in the movie. 

Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche dedicated himself early on to protecting the culture of his people.  Arguably, by printing and disseminating key texts to the Tibetan diaspora, mostly for free to them, he has done more to protect Tibetan culture than the Dalai Lama himself.  But nobody knows his name.  FEW, in any event, know his name.  And I have no doubt that is how he likes it.

But he is the creator of Kum Nye.  It is his books I read.  It is his practice I follow.  I have no need of him: the texts are clear, I am stupid, and I have many, many miles to go before I MIGHT formulate an intelligent question only he could answer.  But I am nowhere close now.

And Kum Nye, in my view, is the center of the whole thing.  All the hippies liked “Time, Space and Knowledge”, because it seemed to be describing in some way what they experienced on drugs.  Likewise, I suppose, with “Knowledge of Freedom”.  Both are no doubt excellent books. 

But for myself, I continue–DAILY–finding new insights with the Kum Nye.

Spirituality is not a drive-through hamburger.  It is not what is easy and simple.  You can’t lay your money down and expect anything without long term, patient, effort.

Getting a “guru”, back in the day, was no different than trying to buy enlightenment for cheap.  Of all of the people who came out of that era, he seems to me the only one with no stains on him, no blemishes, no blatant foolishness.

And he did that by staying away from the idiots.

His goal is to protect Tibetan culture.  OUR goal should be to protect traditional AMERICAN culture, not the racist and homophobic aspects of it–which incidentally have been nearly ubiquitous around the world, and across time–but the evolutionary, learning, genuinely LIBERAL aspects of it, the welcoming, the authentic tolerance, the kindness, the pluralism, the work ethic, the sober appreciation for the importance of impartial justice, and the precept that NO ONE is above the law.  We believe truth can come from anywhere, that there are no worthy kings, that no one is born with intrinsic authority, and that each of us matters in our way, but none of us too much.

This, too, is a heritage worth valuing,and protecting–and from the same savages, by the way, even now, even now–UNBELIEVABLY–that destroyed Tibet.

I would like to second that clever fellow who made the previous post.  It is amazing how often I find myself agreeing with myself.  (or is it more amazing how often I disagree with myself?  Fair question.  Foolish consistencies and all that).

Communist Devolution.  Socialist Devolution.  The Cultural Devolution.  A Devolution in how we pay for healthcare.  The Bolshevik Devolution. 

The Bernie Sanders Devolution.

With Communism, it is all about breaking what works, and substituting tyranny.  People ask for bread, you club them.  If they object to being clubbed, you jail them, perhaps in a place where they spend all day working, and all night learning about how all this work is good for them, and how much the government loves them and how if they weren’t such upstarts and idiots they would see how wonderful the whole system is.

I will reiterate that Complex orders–which is to say, free markets and free societies–are informationally vastly more rich than what we might call, in contrast, simple or simplistic orders, which is one place for decisions, then a propagating apparatus which causes everything to synch up in the same way at the same time.  Such orders are informationally poor.   This is a mathematically necessary conclusion.  There is no other possible conclusion, although one can debate the merits of each approach.

But if we posit that more information is always better, then it is mathematically necessary to always view an increase in centralized control as a devolution.

And I will note that most of the advantages of centralized control stem from increased coherence in war.  Economically, such control is disastrous.  It is only for war that most large complex governments have come into being.

War, perhaps, is the ultimate dissolution, the ultimate disorder.  It is not similar to a free market, free society.  It is the polar opposite, and Communism–which in large measure is defined by the war of the elites against anyone opposing them–exists on that continuum, right next to open warfare, into which, of course, Communism has often entered vigorously. There were few major wars in the 20th Century which did not involve Communists.  Even Hitler could not have come to power EXCEPT in opposition to Soviet Communism, and those agitating for it in Weimar Germany.

ONE THOUSAND FEARFUL WORDS FOR FIDEL CASTRO

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am sitting in Mike’s Place trying to figure out
what’s going to happen
without Fidel Castro
Among the salami sandwiches and spittoons
I see no solution
It’s going to be a tragedy
I see no way out
among the admen and slumming models
and the brilliant snooping columnists
who are qualified to call Castro psychotic
because they no doubt are doctors
and have examined him personally
and are also qualified to call him Communist
with a capital C
because they know the difference between Soviet Communism
(which put the “slave” back in Slavic)
and socialism with a small c
and also know a paranoid hysterical tyrant when they see one
because they have it on first hand
from personal observation by the CIA
and the great disinterested news services
And Hearst is dead but his great Cuban wire still stands:
“You get the pictures, I’ll make the War”
I see no answer
I see no way out
among the paisanos playing pool
it looks like Curtains for Fidel
They’re going to fix his wagon
in the course of human events. . . .

He goes on.  He documents his bona fides as someone living a “real” life in a big city, where violence happens.  He mentions he is reading Camus.  It is all very dramatic, this is the shit, man, this is the shit, man.  I know they are going to kill this great man, who has a Beat beard, man, they are going to kill him.  No way out. No way out.

I have a bad habit of pointing out the obvious.  This, itself, is perhaps an example.  However, I will allow myself to comment that everything that was said about Castro, everything that was feared, was amply validated.  It is like some magical spell was cast on Cuba the moment the Devolution [by the way, I do think we should start speaking of Communist take-overs as either coups–which is usually the most accurate term, where they get support from people who just want freedom long enough to overthrow someone, and who then seize power from within that group, and then throw all their old allies in jail or shoot them–or as Devolutions] hit peak tyranny, and time stopped.  Nothing new happened.  Nothing new was allowed.  It was like a Twilight Zone episode, where the sun stopped in place, the birds stopped singing, the insects stopped buzzing, and whatever people were doing at the moment they continued doing forever.  The country was frozen in amber. 

This is how Cuba has long felt to me.  Periodically they drag someone off and throw them in a dog cage for a year.  Periodically a Party leader rapes some attractive girl or boy, but mostly nothing changes.  Everyone is on edge.  Everyone is afraid to move too suddenly, speak too loudly, or to think at all.  It is much like the place portrayed in Madeline L’Engle’s “Wrinkle in Time”, where It ruled, with It standing in symbolically–so I have long assumed–for Communism.  The Party motto is “Be Afraid.  Be VERY Afraid.”

I will note the petulant, borderline childish resentment and sarcasm there.  That tone is everywhere.  One sees it ubiquitously on the internet.  “Oh, I am SURE YOU know what you are talking about, Mr. Smart Guy.”  It is the anger of someone who is physically and emotionally weak.

And I will note that he said socialism small c.  He might as well have said, as those who are au courant presently are saying, it’s DEMOCRAT Socialism.  I in fact thought that was what he said, on first reading.  It fits so perfectly.  And he did say small c.  That was not a typo.  communism, rather than Communism.  That was what he stood for, communism.

Could he not have written this same poem about Huge Chavez?  Is there any doubt he would have been a fervent Bernie supporter?

What has changed in 60 years?  He was wrong then.  His descendants are wrong now.

Thinking about my last post–that phrase just popped in my head, so I figured I’d share it–it occurs to me that, logically, if hate is the result of love, then love is impossible without the possibility of hate.

Ponder where we are at.  Most people who want to stay connected with a mutable horde–which is to say, most people on both coasts, most college students, most people who fit in to big cities, most employees of tech companies and journalistic enterprises of all sorts–have to be very careful what they say.  You can’t be too spontaneous.  You have to measure everything.  At least, if you retain any capacity to go outside lines which keep moving.

This is the thing: I think people don’t just self censor.  They don’t just bite their tongues.  I think the core demand being made is that people limit their emotionality itself.  You have to reject truly grand passions, truly deep feelings.  For it, you substitute a vapid sentimentality, of the sort I described when speaking of the boy who called himself a “kind soul”.  This was his morality: looking down his nose at me, in pursuit of a nonsensical aim pursued incompetently.

If you can’t hate, you can’t love.  If you can’t love, what is the point of life?  Small wonder we are having an epidemic of drug mediated suicides, as well as regular suicides.  Really, if you think about it, all the deaths from drugs and alcohol should be added to suicide statistics.  None of these people were under any illusion about what they were doing.

To attempt to create a world truly devoid of hate, everything has to be made so plastic, so sterile, so superficial, that you wonder what COULD be left that will worth more than a steaming pile of dogshit.  Peace?  Peace for what?  Peace to eat ice cream with plastic spoons while watching vapid comedies, and spending your week moving numbers and creating letters in various forms on a computer screen?

There is no depth whatever in the “anti-hate” movement, as we might broadly call the Left. 

And, obviously, as I have discussed ad nauseum, the Left is not even tolerant.  It does not reject hate.  But here is the thing: people who have loved, knew they loved.  They can remember it.  If those people then hate, they know they hate.  They know who and what they hate and why they hate it.  There is no confusion, no emotional subterfuge, no lies.

This is not true of the demonic children we are breeding on college campuses.  They use words like Love and Peace.  They hug each other, they are glad to see each other, they say “that’s cool” to each other.

But if you do no more than dangle an appropriate–conditioned, to be clear, with operant conditioning being a key element in successful propaganda–and that facade disappears, and the fangs appear.  But even then, they don’t call it hate.  They call it a love of justice.  They call it defending the oppressed (who exist, in theory at least, somewhere, and who need to be defended always and everywhere rhetorically).  They call it being “kind souls”.

Nothing further from honest emotional intelligence could be imagined.

We–humankind–have a choice: do we pursue easy and wrong, simplistic, childish, and ultimately cruel and authoritarian ideals, or do we choose the harder, better path of emotional growth, maturation, honest dialogue, Liberal reconciliation and negotiation of true difference, and continuing freedom?

“Freedom is the first step to curiosity and knowledge”.  Gibbon.

No one hates more thoroughly than one who has once loved.

Corollary: anyone capable of great hate was once capable of great goodness.

I’ve really been feeling for the past couple days that the bottom could just drop out on the Democrats, and their support plummet by a third or more virtually overnight.

They are at peak propaganda.  You have a major candidate for governor saying America was never great, and will only be great if we meet some arbitrary standard of equality only met in nations where abject poverty is the norm.  Simply doing our best to give everyone a fair shot is not enough: they have to be equal at the finish line.  This is where the Democrats are now.  Substantially all of them.  Cuomo was merely articulating what has become the mean of Democrat views.

The media is at peak propaganda, but as I have commented from time to time, they are going Pravda in a world where the Voice of America is just a channel click or an internet URL away.  Yes, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times and others represent a good share of the media consumption in this country.  But people flip channels.  It would be devastating if a good chunk of their customers starting regularly watching Tucker Carlson’s monologues, or listening to Sean Hannity on the radio.  It would not take long.  They only have to listen long enough to realize there are major stories which simply are not covered by the complicit media, which focuses on trivia, while ignoring major stories like economic growth.

All of us, once we realize we have been lied to, remember it.  And we don’t forgive it easily.

Take a Brandon Straka.  What happened with him is he was a generic Leftist, who was very upset when Trump won.  Then he watched a video–for some reason, as a resistance to hearing alternative views is a defining feature of the Left–which pointed out that Trump was not mocking the disability of the guy who was lying about him, but the fact that he was lying about him.  It was a motion he did often, for all people.  Then he watched a video showing how the media was systematically avoiding showing the many black people at a Trump rally.  Then he put two and two together, and realized that his whole world view was built on lies.

Self evidently, you cannot build a stable foundation on lies.  It is the very instability, the inherent instability, of the world views of Leftists which makes them so nasty, so recalcitrant, so unable to see and bear, much less honestly consider and meditate on, the views of any people who even try to think differently.  The Left is a monolith precisely because it has to be.  They cannot tolerate dissent.  They cannot allow free thought.  If they did, the whole project would come apart like a sand castle at high tide.

This is why they are INHERENTLY authoritarian.  There is no other possibility.  This is why I feared a Hillary Presidency so greatly.  Imagine if Hillary were President now, after the first shot of global censorship fired at Alex Jones.  She would be praising it and calling for more.  It likely would have happened, actually, in the first year of her Presidency, and been extended to as many sites as she thought she could get away with.  She would have worked to silence her critics as quickly as possible, and as we have seen, in our modern world this is not hard.

Thank God for Trump.  And let us all pray this nest of lies is soon revealed more generally to be what it is, and the American people wake from at least some portion of their trance.

All beep and no bang.

The only reason to be  a Democrat is ignorance.