Month: August 2018

When dealing with people, it is important to respond to what they are REALLY saying, rather than the words they are using.

In a great many cases, there is a latent emotional tone which even they may not be aware of, but which contains, for practical purposes, the most important part of the communication.

What made me recall this idea is that it is relevant to me at the moment.  As is often the case, I am having to negotiate something with someone I don’t know very well.  As is often the case, I am forced to speculate as to motivation, background, and the like, with very little concrete information.

If you deal with people enough, you can usually make pretty good guesses.  With respect to this specific person, I think I am dealing with resentments he has felt since childhood.  I think he feels the need to feel superior to me.  I think much of his life has been dedicated to proving wrong all the people who said he would never amount to anything.

It is not the case here, I don’t think, but it is likely I have often made people feel dumb.  I use “big” words without thinking about it, because English is a great language, and I see no reason not to plumb its resources.

But, to take that concrete example, when you use a “big” word–let us say the word superfluous counts, for some people–you are using the word, but you are also displaying a level of education, and you are making an assumption the person with whom you are using the word shares that education.  If they don’t, they may hear “I am better than you”.

My job is to see and feel this, and if possible to remedy it, because if I don’t, I am telling that person not to feel comfortable around me, not to like me, and not to trust me.

It is, I think, impossible to view any person, thing, idea, feeling, etc. which you NEED, clearly.  If you need a person, you cannot see them as they are.  If you need to believe America is a horrible nation, or a beautiful nation, then you cannot see what is in front of you.  If you need to believe the worst or best of people, you cannot see what is in front of you.

If you don’t need people–this is my current process–then you can see them honestly, in all their glory and defilement, in all their potential, their failure, their curiosity, their hostility, their love, their joy, their hate.

It is not entirely inaccurate to describe myself as a hermit living in a cave.  It’s a very comfortable cave, to be sure.

And, there: Buddhism is a logical set of ideas.  If you want to see life as a whole clearly, then need as little as possible.  Eat only enough to survive.  Reject material comforts beyond the absolutely necessary.  Abide in no fixed place.  Be a perennial stranger to all but the Dharma.

But, then, Tantra: what you get when you loosen your attachment to this world is a constantly replenishing joy, which is the attribute of another world–one of many, but the best one, and the source of them all–which suffuses this one.  You get to that world by accepting everything in this world, by digesting it emotionally, by digging, digging, digging, until you reach the light.  No, it is more like floating down, slowly, as you untangle knots which constrain the light.  It is a process of slowly remembering what is at the root of your being.

I had something else to say, but it is hiding from me.  Come back, idea.

It’s giggling and running away.  Ah, it may come back.  It may not.  I wonder if we recollect all the ideas we had and forgot, and forgot that we forgot, when we do our Life Review.  For me, this will be quite a few.  I try to note things down as they come to me, but I don’t always succeed.

It’s an interesting process.  I wonder sometimes what I would feel if this blog just disappeared one day.  I don’t think it would bother me very much.  The goal, here, is to develop myself, my own ideas, my own practice which flows from these ideas.  All of that is in me.  I don’t need these words.

No, not Zamyatin’s We.

Here is my question: if I point out that the cultural depth of many Americans goes no farther, seemingly, than that of the script of their favorite movie, do I have the right to feel, or should I then feel, superior?

My sense is no.  These are my people.  You are my people.  I owe you a life debt.  I owe you my efforts to get you out of this trance.  If I want to say that you are stupid, I owe you something better.  I owe you my life blood.  I have plenty.

It is far too easy, otherwise, to use “cultural criticism” as a means to the very simple end of feeling well endowed with virtue and moral elevation without doing the work of being worth a shit to anyone.

I was sitting at Hooter’s tonight, after a long day as both a worker–very literally, as I am sweaty, covered with dirt, and physically worn out–and a Capitalist (since I own my company), looking at my bartenders fat ass, wondering about the process of getting into those shorts, when it occurred to me that I really should read Theodor Adorno.  It was of course a logical progression.  He’s not somebody I expect to like or agree with, but all of these people were pointing out real problems, even if their reflexive (SIEG HEIL!!!) solution was always Marxism, which in practice meant “And here a miracle happens, and the unicorns and rainbows appear, and the children dance, and we all live happily ever after.”

But I want to crunch the gap between Edmund Burke and Theodor Adorno.  In what respects were BOTH of them right?  I don’t know.  I intend to find out.

Could we (and You) not always view We as a Synthesis, and the dream of a new We as the project of cultural evolution?

This really is an oddly fascinating time.  We are playing for all the marbles, for global death and destruction, or the contrary.  For a blossoming of human potential, or a boot on our necks for enough of time to seem like all of it.

It does seem to me that, as with economic models which assume that behavior does not change in response to tax rates–which of course is ludicrous, since people will work harder for two dollars than one dollar–much of the consensus about the future rests upon an assumption that only elites have the brainpower to change their behavior in response to changed circumstances.

I read this MIT “computer model” predicts global decline by 2020.  Certainly, the Rockefellers and their ilk likely have the power to wreck just about everything economically.  One of their people is always in a position of some influence at the Fed, and who knows what else they control via an extended set of strings.  The Fed could cause a Depression tomorrow.  Ponder that for a moment.  None of them are elected, none of them are accountable to anyone, and we don’t even know for sure who the member banks are.  It is classified, or so I read some time ago.  The Fed is invitation only, extended via stock created for the purpose, which is non-transferable.  This beast is in the heart of our world, and its tentacles on every street corner, every restaurant, every skyscraper, every car, every home, and in the air around the world.

Be that as it may, my view is that if we can shift from a model of happiness and economic output based on mechanized, habitual consumption, to something more organic, more healthful, more natural to how humans have evolved to live, more congruent with “LIFE”, in all the senses of that term, then all these problems disappear.  All the problems to which tyranny is the proposed solution vanish, making the essential power mongering and psychopathy underlying what no doubt appears benign rhetoric at times to be revealed as what it is.

All problems are simultaneously adventures.  None of this is boring.  Far from it.

1. So two of my three main news sites (Drudge is the other, in addition to incidental stuff on Yahoo and Facebook)–Lucianne and InfoWars–have recently been hacked and taken off-line by computer sabateurs.What does the Left fear, if not the truth? Why Alex Jones in particular? He speaks often of high level interest in pedophilia, in sex trafficking, in organized conspiracies, of pervasive corruption. It was certainly a conspiracy that took him off most social media. And he predicted it.There are no conservatives trying to hack left wing websites. We win our arguments through debate. Who but aspiring totalitarians win through censorship, violence, and aggression on every front open to it?
This stuff is ugly. It may not affect you yet, but there is no reason that it will not someday. Someday you, too, will cross some line you did not realize existed until you face consequences you don’t understand, which are not fair, which you cannot defend against, and which are unavoidable. This is the spirit infesting large segments of our nation, and nesting very comfortably throughout the tech sector, among the many among them whose antisocial personality disorders make radical politics their only option for feigning a moral sensibility.
An attack on any of us is an attack on all of us. Even the ACLU has finally realized this.

2. Here is Alex Jones on all this. Here is my view: half the stuff he says seems crazy. He himself CERTAINLY seems crazy. I have great trouble watching him, and rarely do.
But why the attacks, if there is no truth behind what he is saying? No one is committing acts of violence based on anything he says, and, conversely, people ARE committing many acts of violence based on things Facebook/Apple/Google et al see no problems with. This is not principle based. There is no hate they are remediating. His is not a hate site. His is a site which says things THEY DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW ABOUT.

The only logical conclusion is that he is RIGHT about nearly everything, or at least enough that he is dangerous. There are many powerful people who do not want you to hear what he has to say..

Jones is saying, unbelievably, but now everything is believable, that the goal is to bring about a Chinese style social scoring system, where people win or lose points on a scale based upon their conformity to the beliefs the Party (in this country, the Democrats, and the Republicans who are more or less on their side) wants them to hold.

Apple recently made the tyranny in China much more effective by making every electronic transmission in China much easier for the police to track. This was an evil move, which will certainly result in death, torture, and the continuation of an evil oligarchic regime. Why do this, unless they are either amoral, or anti-moral to the extent of fundamentally agreeing with most of the views of the Chinese Fascist elites?

Do you want to gain or lose promotions based on your Facebook posts? Do you want your political affiliations to be used in determining whether or not to hire you? Do you want colleges vetting your political conformity prior to even considering your applications? Need I go on? Is this the world you want to live in? Because that is where we are heading, and Jones is one of the ONLY people willing to state this directly, clearly, and openly.

And do you think if you are a Democrat, now, that that is enough? It will never be enough. You have to hold ALL the right views. They simple tighten the net as they rope in the major outliers, then they move to the minor outliers. If this is allowed to continue, freedom will be gone within ten years at the outside in this country, and indeed in Jones case is disappearing NOW.

This should concern everyone with a pulse, a brain, and a conscience.

If habits are learned instincts, and if instincts are important for survival, then it would seem we have a biological imperative to form habits, of some sort, in some form.  Formlessness is inimical to neurological peace and calm.  We all feel this, I think.  Taoists formed habits.  Buddhists formed habits.

I visited a Zen Monastery, and in the pursuit of Beginner’s mind, they all follow very precise routes of behavior every day, doing the same things at the same times in the same ways, every day.  They meditate the same way, at the same times, and I could not resist the sense that the content and quality of the meditations varies little as well.

This is one thing I love about Kum Nye, is that there are hundreds of movements and patterns, and you are encouraged to never repeat ANY of them in exactly the same way, if possible.  How can you feel the waves around you, when you insist you must remain perfectly still?  We live in an endless ocean.  Perfect quiet is impossible, even if we can perhaps float like sea otters sometimes on its endless swells, quite content.

But we need all need this feeling of reinforcement, of reward.  In my own home–and there are many like me–I was early on often punished for doing the wrong thing, but rarely rewarded for doing the right thing.  Both parents were emotionally detached, as long as I was not blatantly misbehaving.  They were in their own worlds.  They still are. I can’t bridge this gap, not in this lifetime.

But I can’t help but feel, at this moment, that a root cause of the many variants of fascism, with Communistic Fascism being ascendant at the moment, is that people need to be complimented, rewarded, made to feel good, as a result of some action they can control.  And Communism is all about rewarding compliance and conformity.  Do what they say, and you are guaranteed an attaboy and a pat on the back.

Likewise with the Nazis.  If you were standing there, in that mass of people on the parade ground at Nuremburg, I think it was, you felt proud.  You were told to feel proud.  You were told you had made exactly the right decision for the right reasons.  You belonged.  You were valued.  You were important.

This is the dopamine feeling, as I understand it.  We all secrete it, but only when the organism feels the need to reward a behavior, and this, in turn, is learned.  If we do not learn it in childhood, if we are not given a set of behaviors about which we are taught we can reliably feel good–such as being law abiding, pious, and hard working–then we seek them out in other places, or find ourselves in any of the countless addictions, which do the same job, poorly.  It is like, say, a sex addict, gets one tenth of a hit of dopamine every time he or she scores, and this is never enough.  This is what drives the addiction.  Someone in a satisfied relationship, in contrast, might get 2 hits of dopamine every time they have sex, making frequent sex unnecessary.

But perhaps we could view the Communistic Fascism, the conformity, the painted shields and uniforms, the pride in “standing up” to people who, in general, are puzzled as to what the problem is, and who certainly have not been violent, can be viewed as the failure of our culture to provide templates to these kids–and the kids who biologically grow to be adults–for how to feel self esteem and pride in healthy ways.  It is, perhaps, that simple, at least in America, at this time.

A story: I was on an airplane a week or two ago that was seriously late.  I was never quite clear what the exact problem was.  Anyway, we were about an hour late into our major connecting airport, and the pilot asked that anyone who did not need to make a quick connecting flight stay seated to allow those in a hurry to get off.  The guy sitting next to me was telling everyone that he had ten minutes to catch his flight, but nobody was listening.  We were in the middle of the plane, he wasn’t speaking very loudly, and I think most people, like me, figured anything less than half an hour in a large airport was close enough to warrant standing up and getting off.  So 40 people crowded the aisle in front of us.

While we were standing there, some 20-ish guy, who looked very Portland or Seattle, although of course he could have been from anywhere, was standing facing backwards.  He first asked two Filipino looking guys if they had a quick flight to catch.  They said yes.  One looked at me, then looked back, like “who the fuck is this guy?”  Then, apparently having decided not to hassle the non-whites when he has a white male clearly at hand, he looks at me, and asks me if I had a flight to catch.  I said yes, it’s in about 25 minutes, and I have no idea where it is.  Then he says, “this guy only has ten minutes” or something like that, and I tell him I am not the problem.  The problem is the 40 people in front of us.  Then he makes some sort of snide comment I did not quite catch about the tshirt I was wearing, and I look at him, and he looks at me with this haughty smirk on his face.  Then I say to him: “Look, I’m not slowing anyone down.  We are all tired.  There is no need to be a dick”.  He replies “exactly”, which I am quite sure he thought was quite clever.

As expected, when the aisle cleared we moved very quickly.  It was literally no more than two seconds between me and the guy behind me.  I made no difference.

But a minute later, as I am looking for the Departures screen, he walks by me and says “see, you could have caught your flight”.  I can’t resist commenting “you are a Democrat, aren’t you?”.  Unbelievably, he replies “I am a kind soul”, then flips me off, which he undoubtedly took to be a mike drop.

Here is the thing: he got off right after me.  He had no way of knowing if there not more people in the back half of the plane who were in a similar–or now worse–predicament.  This did not occur to him, seemingly.  And I am very sure it was very important to him to be close enough to me to point out to me his moral superiority, for waiting two seconds longer, but not five minutes longer, to be sure all the truly close connecting flights got off.

What he did is make a meaningless gesture which brought him dopamine, which brought him a feeling of “job well done”, which brought him a feeling of moral superiority and self esteem, all bought at the feeling of contempt and anger he directed pointlessly at me.  Nobody really won in that situation except him. 

And of course he was able to tell all his friends about this evil conservative he met, how we are all dicks, all while again trumpeting his seriously superior compassion, despite the fact that he almost certainly delayed someone else farther back as much as I did.

This sense of superiority is really, truly, ugly.  I won’t say I find it intolerable–I have been dealing with these sorts of assholes for many years–but it makes me fear for the future.  What I saw, looking in his smug face, was indifference to real suffering, an absolute rejection of moral autonomy and true personal responsibility, and a complacency to all the real crimes people like him have committed and continue to commit the world over.

He didn’t need results.  He didn’t need to know he accomplished meaningful good. All he needed was the ability to contrast himself with someone he asserted did not “care” the way he did.  This act alone sufficed for his purposes.

And this suffices for the Democrats as a whole.  They don’t need results.  They reject accountability.  It is sufficient for them to hate us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW9cCWm53H4

I had not heard of the Fugs–it was Fucks, but they couldn’t get away with that in 1961–but came across them reading this book about the Beats.  They were kind of a link between the Beats and the hippies.

Ponder, though, how the well warranted mistrust of the CIA has given way to the very same people now accusing anyone who does not believe John Brennan and James Clapper of being unAmerican.  This is farce.  Satire.  Except it really happened.

I saw a bumper sticker on an old beat-up pickup truck when I was in California that read “I love my country, but I don’t trust my government”.  At one time, this would have automatically meant he was a Democrat of a libertarian bent.  The government was the Man, the drug war, the people who were overthrowing the governments of other nations, the oppressor of all non-conformists and misfits.

But now?  I see all the old hippies arranged in rows like Hitler Youth, parading around, with their ponderous boots of self importance and complete lack of humor and mirth (Stephen Colbert and company, in general, are not funny: their humor is that of a bully mocking someone he knows his audience hates.  Everyone laughs, but it is not a happy, inclusive laughter), and doing what they are told to do, saying what they are told to say.  It is like someone slipped them a brain control pill.  Someone Blue Pill’ed them.  It goes both ways you know.

To be honest, it bothered me quite a bit to read even Norman Lear had gone over to what I view as the dark side.

It’s still the fucking CIA, Man.  Don’t forget it.  They don’t seem to be on our side.  I’m not sure whose side they are on, but what most of us want from the world is not what the elite want from the world, so we can be reasonably sure they are up to no good in many, many ways, as well as, of course, the NSA, and the agencies whose names we are not even allowed to know.

Where did your free spirits go, hippies?  You went from an incoherent mass of colorful gobbledy-gook, to a highly coherent, synchronized set of zombie drones.  Somewhere in there choice was possible, but most of you missed it.

In some respects, it might be said that Western culture as a whole has been thrown into the void.  You are free in the void, but it is hard to know what to do, and why.

In some respects it is perhaps reasonable to say that the whole of Western philosophy has returned to Socrates, to knowing nothing.

Our universities, in the Humanities, do not speak of Truth any more.  They don’t even really speak of Beauty.  They speak of these as constructs, not as something real.  Nothing is real in the realm of ideas, we are told, no moralities are true, no  life paths are better than others.

This is, of course, a dual communication.  They say these things with their mouths.  With their feet, the submit vigorously to rote conformity to mutable political agendas, ones in most cases created by others, but which sweep daily, hourly, through all the halls of academia.

We are infants.  We were not ready for all this.  Just as we were not ready for our technology, for all the ways we can destroy ourselves.

It is true there is no Truth.  But there are countless truths.  All of us are true.  Our selves are true.  Who we are, in space and time, is true.  It is a task of feeling our way forward, of allowing growth to happen without stopping it by asking too many questions once the train leaves the station.

I seem to be OK with the place I am at.  This surprises me.  Like everyone else–or nearly everyone, as I cannot know with certainty what I am seeing around me–I have always craved a cage.  With a cage, you can see and feel the walls.  You know where you are.  Everything is fixed and familiar.

When you walk out the door, you can smell the air, and it smells good.  There are both flowers and the stench of decay.  There is life and there is death.  And you can’t know where you are going.

It is, I think, our task for a long time, in this life and in what comes, to travel, and to make the road our home, and every chance meeting an act of beauty, every friendship a richly crafted artwork, and to see the love which underlies it all.

This is, of course, an ideal, and I am far from ideal.  I will continue to share my thoughts, though, as I evolve.

Because waking up and realizing you are blind, but cannot yet figure out how to see, is terrifying.  It is  much more comforting to assume everything you think you see is real, and will remain the way it is.

I might speak of the blindness of ordinary life, the blindness of the beginning of a path–I suppose it could be called a darkness, which really only means that you are realizing you were already living in darkness–and a severe myopia which, possibly, at some point, emerges into genuine sight.

We are all lost in an endless ocean without eyes, at least, without eyes we know how to use.

It is no wonder, really, that people choose to remain small.  For my part, I am trying to do a better job of remembering this.  I am, to be clear, still as blind as a bat, but it has occurred to me something better may be possible.  That is what I seek.  And I am willing to step into the void to seek it.  This is the only way.

And I will add that I am beginning to see what the Buddhists mean with the Void.  It is a heart vision.  It is something which is felt, when you enter a world devoid of markers.  You cannot float if you are unwilling to risk sinking.

Tides and waves are reliable, though: they are always moving.

I will add something, too.  I was tempted to say something negative about some group, but will refrain.  I will suffice myself by saying that I feel that a living meditation should feel like something is growing in you, it should feel like something is flowing, that something is  alive and moving.  Meditation should feel like participation.  You are not sitting apart.  You are joining what really matters.

If it makes you feel dull, if it makes you feel like dry wood, then you need a better system. I will again recommend Kum Nye.

In my travels, I have yet to meet anyone who has heard of it.  Someday I will, and it will make me happy.  And I have more to say about it, but not now.  I am tired and drinking.  And dreaming, like always.  I see and feel a great deal in an average day.  It is tiring, but I seem to be used to it.

My takeaway is that Leftists continue to lie cheat and steal in an effort to frame the narrative in a positive way for them, while being devoid of good ideas and suffused–the way a ten pound bag with fifteen pounds of shit is–bad ideas.

Self evidently, the Democrats want to impeach Trump. They likely could not convict him in the Senate, but they can prevent Trumpfromdoing his job for six months, all in pursuit of betraying the EXPRESSED will of the American people. They want to reverse the election, which they STILL have not accepted they lost fair and square, by running a worn out career criminal with zero charisma.

We all have to ask ourselves if we want Nancy Pelosi to have the gavel again, and using her parties power to stonewall criminal investigations, and prevent Trump from being an effective and successful President.

And with Justice we can and should question the priorities of people who want the elected President to fail, even if it means great suffering and difficulties for the very peons they claim to speak for. Pelosi is rich. All the House Democrats are rich. This a game to them, and the casualties of that game invisible and irrelevant.

They feel no obligation to even pretend to speak the truth. They just have to pretend to care. Why are they allowed to continue to play this nasty game?

Edit: I had intended to also to make the obvious point that the Democrats sent an imposter to this meeting, who was wired. That, or one of the caterers or somebody was working for them. Like all good aspiring authoritarians, they have a dirty tricks team. They don’t–can’t–compete on ideas, so they cheat.

Do you remember the MoveOn.org girl who nearly derailed Rand Paul by rushing him in a way calculated to provoke a response? I do. That shit, and this Nunes eavesdropping is another example, should piss off all people who value truth, common decency and the spirit of fairplay which, when present, makes life so much better, and which, when absent, makes life for everyone so much worse.