Month: November 2018

“Empathy and its absence is a hallmark issue for children and adults with history of developmental trauma.  Two kinds of problems arise: an impaired capacity to feel for the other and/or feeling for the other without end.  The latter may not be true empathy as much as a truncated ability to see the other as the other, and as a result, feeling the pain of other’s as one’s own.”

Sebern Fisher, pg. 19

On the one hand, these children are utterly unable to relate to conservatives as human beings, as an extension of their inability to relate to ANYONE as a human being, and on the other, the entirety of their moral world relates what amounts to an inability to form emotional boundaries, such that they ARE the people they speak for.  They truly believe they feel their pain, when in reality there is no true emotional understanding/empathy whatever.

There were consequences of women going to work en masse, and of the sexual revolution.  There are consequences of TV’s in every home, and in some cases, every room (We only had one TV in our home.  To this day, my kids don’t have TV’s in their rooms.  They do have piles and piles of books).  There are consequences of mobility and the loss of the extended family, because even if one mother could not do her job, perhaps her mother, or an aunt, or the other grandmother, could.  And when you have a single parent home, that mother is enormously stressed all the time, and needs to be a virtual saint to even perform adequately, especially where small children are concerned, and in a great many cases, that mother herself grew up with various developmental and other traumas.

In essence, I really think this is the primary drama and trauma and problem of black ghettos in this country.  I would hazard a guess that, if an honest study could be done, 80% of the kids in, say, South Chicago, suffer from some degree of DTD.  Most of them will never be diagnosed, and will never receive treatment.  Most of them will pass it along to their kids.  Poverty makes everything worse, but it is not the primary culprit.

Does putting a screen in front of your small child, or your small child in front of a screen, constitute neglect?

When my children were young, I always, when I could, watched all their TV with them.  I’ve watched more Barney, Clifford and the like than I could possibly calculate.  I’ve seen Mary Poppins at least 30 times.  The way I did it, it was social.  We talked.  We reacted to the screen together.

And I pretty much banned the whole Cartoon Network.  They were not allowed to watch Sponge Bob, or Rug Rats, or any of those shows.  I could feel how pernicious to the affects and intellect they were and remain.  As young adults now, both support me in that decision. 

Neither got a screen of any sort, other than a Tomagochi for my oldest around 4th grade, because I thought it built responsibility, until they were 12.  12 or so is the end of childhood, at least, and the beginning of the next phase.  We figured there were both social and practical reasons at that age for them to get screens.

But I will say that, if I am right, we are breeding a generation of children where Borderline Personality Disorder will become something like the default.

And I will comment on that, that I am reading an excellent book, “Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: Calming the Fear Driven Brain”, by Sebern Fisher.  In a section I just read, which made me think of this, she said that one of the researchers who wrote one of the more important books on BPD said that if she had her druthers, she would rename it “Emotion Regulation Disorder”.

And in my own mind, I have been thinking of all the Personality Disorders as varying forms of Developmental Trauma Disorder.  BPD is simply the basket which catches all the presentations that don’t neatly fit elsewhere.  They all share the same roots, though.

The good news is that treatments are being evolved for the worst childhoods imaginable. 

All of our problems are solvable.  We just need time, and we need people to stop sleep walking.

I have long wrestled with the difference between healthy emotion and sentimentality.  The latter has long seemed to me more shallow, less useful, more an end in itself versus a natural and spontaneous self organizing reaction to something real happening in the world.

And tonight, it seems to me that sentimentality consists in the main in pity: either maudlin self pity, or grandiose pity for “the world” or some reduced representation of it.  Sentimentality is a feeling which does not lead to a felt need for effective action.  It might and often does lead to a felt need for symbolic action, but that is a trifle.  This does no one any real good, and when substituted for actually effective action, it indirectly makes things worse.

If all particles which have once been entangled remain connected, then if we accept the idea of a Big Bang (the long term viability of which as a final explanation of the creation of the universe is far from clear) then all particles in the universe must have been once entangled.  They were in the same infinite mass from which everything comes.

I don’t know what ideas of physics I might be violating or not knowing here, but I thought I would put the idea out into space.

In my dreams last night I met a being that called itself Azazel.  It had the morphology of a demon–all chaotic and formless–but it also had the ability to create a form.  I asked it to form a body, and it was 20′ tall.  I wasn’t comfortable with it, but it was not as unpleasant as demons are either.

I looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azazel

Fallen angel seems reasonable.  Now, I had seen this name before, so perhaps this is some deep unconscious process I don’t really understand.

It does feel like I see the demons when I release held energy.  This was a higher grade held energy, so perhaps that is progress.

And I woke up after this dream, then went back to sleep, and my psychokinesis in my dreams was much better than usual.  I could move things from long distances, and of course fly like usual.  I have long been able to jump off any building or height.  I long ago dispensed with nightmares of the sort I had as a child. 

I think in life the most important love you can ever have is for your work.  And I think the most important aspect of a life partner is that they share your love for your work, and that you share their love for theirs.

Work is reliable.  It will never leave you.  And it defines you.  What you value says who you are, clearly.

And just as there are many ways of people relating to one another, there are many ways to relate to work, and many forms of work to love.

But what I think all share is a sense of being present, of being engaged, of feeling good, and of the commitment of energy.

Freud said the keys to happiness where love and work, but I would suggest that for most people work is vastly more important.  You can love a person, but what do you do with them?  Does fucking feel as good when you’ve been doing it for ten years?  Twenty?

What does feel as good?  A quiet day after a long week?  Yes, I think so.  Conversations about shared passions.  Yes.  And what is the main passion of most of us?  Our work.

They say you should not define someone by what they do for a living, which is somewhat true, but I think people who choose long term to stay in a field cannot but adopt they mindsets and habits of that field.  Cops are cops.  Doctors are doctors.  Accountants are accountants.  Sales people are sales people.  Construction workers are construction workers.

And the point, to me, is not that any one kind of work is better than another.  It is that every form of work offers an opportunity to share love and attention with the world, to bring your best.

Nothing can be more deadening to the soul than to lack work, to lack purpose, to lack an outlet for creative energy.  And there can be no more pernicious belief than that work is bad and being lazy is good.

Being lazy IS good sometimes, but only in the context of a larger purpose.  Whitman spent a lot of time lounging.  But he also wrote Leaves of Grass.  He was not really lounging: he was drinking Life, and that is work.

And I will comment that we conflate work with effort, and effort with difficulty and pain.  But look, as one obvious example, at Donald Trump: he LOVES what he is doing.  He’s not working: he’s playing.  He’s enjoying himself.  Work is the natural result of loosening the restraints on yourself.  It is an outflowing every bit as natural as water flowing downhill.   It is only when we fear it, when we reject it in advance, that it comes to be scary.

And to be sure, there can be too much.  Too much is not good.  But that means something is out of balance.

It is often forgotten that one of the main criticisms Marx made of “Capitalism” as it existed in his day, was that it deprived the individual of the feeling of the value of his labor.  However, this was not then and is not now a necessary consequence.  I myself have had jobs where I spent the day filing, or answering phones, or inputting data.  You can make all a pleasure by engaging fully with them, by making games of it, by offering your self, rather than your resistance and resentment.

One of the emotional qualities needed, I think, for spiritual growth, is the ability to tolerate emotional and intellectual confusion.  You don’t always know what you are doing, or what is happening.  Labels are impossible.  You have to allow it to happen.

All intellectual paradigm shifts pass through a period of uncertainty and confusion, until new information perhaps a reorganization on what is hoped to be a higher, more comprehensive level.

And I would submit there is an emotional analogue.  Emotions have a logic and form, and habitual pathways, which, too, are amenable to reorganization, provided one is sufficiently receptive to what amounts to a logic of self organization without intellectual input.

Put another, simpler way: you cannot grow without confusion.  I don’t think it is possible.  If you cannot tolerate confusion, you have permanently limited yourself.  This inability is both a source of, and a sign of, constraint and smallness.

And I would submit that, paradigmatically, this inability underlies most of the present failures of Western science.  It underlies Stephen Pinker’s rejection of Attachment Theory.  It underlay Stephen Hawkings atheism.  It underlies the failure of people like Richard Wiseman to admit that a superabundance of evidence in support of psi is actually meaningful and should lead to their acceptance that there is in fact an unknown force at work which warrants serious scientific attention by the mainstream.

Put yet another way, if you have to be who you have always been, you will get your way.  No one is stopping you from being small.  Indeed, no one can. 

There is no need to put lipstick on an invisible pig.

I am slowly calming down and seeing more clearly.  I am dreaming in recent days of journeys in the mountains at 8,000 feet, and of extensive work projects deep in the ocean.

And it occurs to me this morning that we are so fallen as a society that it is hard, very hard, for most of us to conceive of spirituality as something other than a means of doing some combination of selling books and getting laid.  These seem to be the aims of most of those who we have to choose from as role models and guides.

And I want to be clear that it is not Capitalism which has absorbed spirituality.  The Silk Road–which did so much to breed the spiritual traditions of Central Asia–was Capitalism, Capitalism fettered by many restraints by many rulers, which in their effect amounted to restrictions of the sort socialism imposes, and often to the same purposes: some combination of palace building by the ruler, and gifts showered from the sky to keep people docile and pacified.  There is nothing new, now, other than that we have achieved vastly more freedom than ever before.

What has changed is that God has been removed from the classroom.  God is not an acceptable purpose of life.  God is not a focus of life.  The Eternal sits on a dusty shelf in a back room, while we watch “The Walking Dead”, do our best to drink the best booze, and go on vacations which create sufficiently good selfies that we make others jealous.

And every once in a while something intrudes to cause you to buy a Marianne Williamson or Eckart Tolle book.  You do some sort of boujie retreat at Kripalu or Esalen.  But have you changed the structure of your life?  Are you doing something deeper than playacting the part of profundity?  Would you give your life for what you believe?  Are you willing to suffer for it over a long period of time, the way, for example, Christians and others are suffering from Islamic Arab atrocities in the Middle East?  The way the Jews have suffered everywhere, clinging to their ancient religion rooted in a place they were banished from for nearly two millenia?

I don’t mean to be cruel, but it is hard for me, sometimes, literally knowing no one who lives in the places I live, who sees what I see.  I am ripped apart daily, and reassembled.  And so it goes.  It is not quite true to say I suffer, therefore I am, but it is true to say that I choose to suffer, which means I have chosen a difficult path.

My work continues, and I feel I am making progress.  I will take on the world alone, if need be.

It just hit me that the same emotional energy which led the West to try and Christianize the world is behind efforts to destroy traditional linguistic structures based on gender, and to treat as hateful anyone adhering to the obvious scientific truth that there are only two genders when biological replication happens in a healthy and normal way.  You are a girl with a vagina and a uterus, or a boy with a penis and testicles.  These are the only two options.

But this ENERGY which is flowing into the public space is one of spiteful evangelism.  It is, I now realize, what I described in my poem about Change.  Accomplishing actual aims is not the intent.  The intent is to move away from an enormous nervous tension which has to find an outlet somewhere.  There is not actual thinking going on behind all this–other than as a thin, dull patina which can easily be characterized as imbecilic–but rather a rationalization of energies which make no sense.

No sanity is possible where high tension is present.  This is a simple biological fact, in my view, and the further fact is that most of the people willing to do the work to become professionals in nearly any field are animated by tension.  If you do nothing more profound than weaken the philosophical underpinnings of their work and lives, they will spin out of control in all sorts of directions. Our system worked when it made sense to everyone.  The tension was contained.

But now, most of our best universities are teaching that life has no purpose and that we are merely seemingly clever but random agglomerations of various chemicals which mean nothing, and will all soon pass away.  Unless we become machines.  But those are the options.  And I would ask: does the question of the meaning and purpose of life become less relevant even if some means can be found to embody consciousness in something more durable than a human body?

I would submit that machines can be engineered to accomplish nearly any How, but Why will always remains a human question, one which is not in need of vast reams of data.  It is answered in the heart.  It is, in important respects, fundamentally a simple question, one demanding a simple answer.  Nothing else will do, emotionally.

Violent evangelism is a feature which originated in the West, in Christianity, although I suppose we could blame the Greeks somewhat, since they did tend to want to impose cultural hegemony in addition to political hegemony, in marked contradistinction to the Persians.  They thought they were better than everyone, and knew best in all areas of life.

Christianity became Islam, and both of those energies animate those who ban people from Twitter for saying there are only two genders.

I have spoken from time to time of the philosophical importance of “this”, by which I mean a pointed finger.  What cannot be spoken can still be understood.  Wisdom reveals calm.  Intelligence shatters it.  The two are not incompatible, but the mind needs to know it must, in the end, be subordinate to what cannot be spoken.

I will continue to point to the philosophical importance of Kum Nye as a pathway to Shunyatta, to pure Presence.

On that note, I was reading another tired effort to justify the work and existence of Jacques Derrida the other day.  The Buddhists preceded him by several millenia, and exceeded him in every possible way.  It’s farcical that he did not simply take up Buddhist practice, and stop pretending he had something useful to say.

I will comment, though, that there was one interesting element.  Consider the following in light of the recent efforts at cultural suicide by most Western European nations, perhaps particularly France:

If one were to select a key term in Derrida’s ethical outlook, it might be hospitality. He was active in promoting the rights of the sans-papiers in France and in championing cities of refuge, and his whole cast of thought rests on a willingness to welcome what is outside the accepted norms of the academic disciplines and of culture more widely. The very motor of human and social existence at its fullest is openness to what may come, and this openness is directly related to the absence of a fixed ground: arche-writing, différance, the trace-structure – these alternatives to presence all imply the inevitability of change, the healthy contamination of the inside by the outside, the dominant by the excluded, the possible by the impossible.

This last pair may seem a mere rhetorical flourish, but Derrida in fact took the question of impossibility very seriously. Hospitality is impossible, he tells us. To be truly hospitable would be to wholly surrender one’s control over one’s property in order to allow the guest complete freedom, with disastrous results (perhaps for the guest as well). So we necessarily hedge our hospitality around with conditions and limits; but we can’t even call it hospitality unless it is underwritten by that impulse of unconditional welcome. The same goes for giving, forgiving, loving, mourning, justice: all are impossible, but their impossibility is what makes them the ethical values they are.

This is a good example of what I call the “Treasure of Santa Vittoria” principle.  In that story, the Germans had conquered an Italian village which had hidden all its wine.  The Germans were ordered to find it.  They looked exhaustively, Grundlich-ly, throughout the village.  No stone was left unturned.  It was a masterpiece of German thoroughness.  They didn’t find anything.  Then on the way out they noticed a cave, and one of the junior offices said: maybe we should look there?  The senior officer says, in effect, fuck it.  I’m tired.  Of course, that is where the wine was.

Derrida is famous for doing painstakingly long close readings of various texts.  His language is laborious.  His reasoning contorted and reflexive.  But he goes through this long effort to undermine the ethical underpinnings of Western civilization, then by way of recompense simply defaults to the cultural traditions he had learned by the time he was four in Algeria.  The great Professor teaches what he was taught as a small child by his mother.  He has not grown in any way.  He has not seen what was obvious, which is that there is tremendous value in our traditions, not least their ability to adapt, grow, and increase in self understanding and knowledge, none of which were things he tried to contribute to.

[Edit: it occurs to me I can be more clear: the point of a search is to find.  You cannot have a search if you are not looking for something which you can describe in some way.  It can be a more clear intellectual understanding, or it can be an emotional state or both.  Greater harmony, for example,  has been a common goal. 

What Derrida created was a method which was its own end.  Reading texts his way WAS his work.  If you are doing something for its own sake, that is not a serious intellectual pursuit, but a hobby.  He would have done less harm had he dedicated himself to building model airplanes, or moving rocks in one pile to another then back again, like Camus’ absurdist hero in “The Plague”]

It is maddening seeing what is or was possible, and how close things came, and may come, to being much, much better.

We have been gifted the ability to make and read maps.  Why would we consciously and intentionally burn them and turn off the lights, simply because some imbecile pointed out that maps are not ACTUALLY the territory and that mistakes remain possible?  OF COURSE mistakes remain possible.  Just stop being a fucking arrogant douchebag and over time we will get it all figured out, better than now.