Month: December 2018

I was dreaming last night I was given control of a halftrack, and placed in a battle of some sort.  I didn’t know what side I was on, but I was supposed to shoot everything I saw.  I had a machine gun, but I didn’t use it effectively.  I had a cannon, but I couldn’t figure it out.  I fought poorly.  I kept crashing, and dropping down into lower levels, where eventually I was fighting in water.

It was supposedly a game, but people were dying.

When it came time to give out the awards, a male wisdom figure told me to go hide in the women’s bathroom, which I did.

I simultaneously watched the awards, and everyone, victor and defeated alike, had their tongues stapled, so they could not speak.

There are several levels of potential analysis, plus the ones that are not obvious to me, but which may be obvious to someone else.

First, I think most men who suffer trauma fight the world their whole lives.  And the reward and price for victory, for even staying in the battle, is losing the ability to describe the fight, to forget who the real enemy is, to forget what was hidden, to identify fighting with masculinity.

There is a kernel of truth, of course, to the phrase “toxic masculinity”, but if the people using this phrase were honest and healthy themselves, they would use the phrase unhealthy masculinity.  Wounded masculinity perhaps.

And I would suggest men and women tend to process these things differently.  Men are not as willing as women to live in shame.  They become aggressive, abusive.  Women, in turn, allow themselves to be abused.  It is not masochism, per se, but perhaps a conditioned organismic preference for surrender–shame–to fighting or running, since biologically they know they have always been the physically weaker (and in my view emotionally stronger, on balance) sex.  You’re not supposed to say that, but it is obviously true.

Military formations may be a way of harness shame en masse.  It is a culturally acceptable way for men to allow the feeling of shame–of subordination–to be sublimated (if I might pull a term from the work of a man I intensely disagree with on most topics) into pride.  The Marines, as one example, break you, but then you get to claim you are a real man because you were a Marine.  But the breaking might include wading through literal shit in the cesspools of Parris Island, as a friend of mine from long ago said he had to do, as a member of the Correctional Custody Platoon, which he got into because he couldn’t do 3 pullups when he showed up for Basic.  This is shame inducing.

For me, this dream might be a realization that the way I have been fighting has not been working, that I might need to contemplate some surrender, some compromise.  Some of the “know the way of the male but stick to the way of the female” of the Tao Te Ching.  When I stop devoting all my energy to suppressing feelings, they become available to me.

On a broader level, I would suggest that in some respects war IS a game.  Men look forward to it, as a way of testing themselves.  But it is an absurd, idiotic game, in some respects.  Without denigrating the virtues of physical courage, profound loyalty, the increase in the capacity to suffer without complaint and everything else that comes with it, I would say that war steals from all of us our souls.  And it does so in such a way that it prevents us from speaking of it.  Veterans who show up in veterans groups to tell the same stories over and over and over, are really trying to convince themselves of the value of their sacrifices.  And a great many who cannot convince themselves, cannot perform that quasi-magic trick, wind up killing themselves.

And I am not saying we should not have fought World War 2 (although I am quite sure we should not have intervened in World War 1), or even Korea or Vietnam.  I am saying that war is an insane institution we need to understand should only be engaged in for the very, very best of reasons, and that even then, it is evil, and needs to be understood as much.

As Lao Tzu wrote, a victory should be celebrated as a funeral.  Do not brag and boast, and do not tell lies about the glories of combat.  As that same friend said, who did eventually see combat, who did have friends die in his arms, “war is as romantic as a meat grinder”.

I am presently listening to the audiobook of “The Metaphysical Club”, and it has dealt in the main thus far with Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., who saw a LOT of action in the Civil War.  He was shot three times: in the chest, in the neck, and in the foot.  He also had dysentery.  The book is clearly leading to the philosophical conclusions he derived from all of this, which are highly topical now.

Given that we all believe what we believe, how do we peacefully coexist?  This is both a social and a political problem.  We have solved the political problem with our Constitution.  It is the social problem, a very, very old social problem, an atavistic social problem, which we are now seeing played out in our streets once again.  It will be interesting to see where all this goes.

Few thoughts.

There is no right answer, because the problem is in the brain.

For me, being still creates anxiety, and moving creates anxiety. I can mask it with a false confidence.  I can mask it with strong, obsessive, almost manic movement, but it does not make it go away.

All my life, I have gone in circles, and not known why.  It is because I am trying to escape a pain in my own head, and I carry that with me everywhere.  So what people like me learn to do is play games.  Like Charlie Brown and Lucy, we assume over and over and over and over, that the NEXT time will be the one.  The NEXT thing will be the one.  And it never is.  And we sedate ourselves with our poison of choice, which builds the faith and confidence to try again.

And they call this addiction.  Here is the thing: for someone like me, drinking is a mistake.  It makes me less productive, less reliable.  To some unknown extent it dulls my senses (although in my particular case, I can remember details of drunken conversations years later, even while sober, so it is not state dependent), and of course it’s not good for me.  As evidenced by the raging hard-ons I still get in my sleep if I go too long without taking care of business, my aorta is quite clear, as it is with most alcoholics, but my liver and other internal organs cannot be happy with me.

But NOT drinking is a mistake too.  It opens me to profound emotional upset, with no good means of dispelling it.  I’ve tried everything.

Well, nearly everything.  I will reveal my little secret here: I have purchased a Neurofeedback device, and am doing it daily, and as far as I can recall, I did not shake last night or the night before.  This is a new feeling.  This is THE solution for people like me.  I have not found anything else, and am not aware of anything else.

And what I am seeing clearly is that where drinking is concerned, there is operant conditioning involved.  When I get drunk, there has always been the reward of reduced anxiety and emotional pain.  Alternatively, there is the punishment by body delivers when I don’t give it that.

Physiological addiction, as I have commented before–and which is a commonplace among writers like Johan Hari and Gabor Mate–is a non-issue.  We have known how to deal with that for a long time.

But in the same way more healthy people are soothed by seeing an old friend, people like me greet our own “soothers” with a physiological bump, with happiness, with the sense of a long conditioned reward which cannot be removed by simply getting unaddicted physically.

People who do not heal their underlying wounds who stay sober have simply, in my view, taught their nervous system to regard substance use as an abuse, as a negative reinforcement, as perhaps even a crime, and they have surrounded themselves with similar people who say the same things, and perhaps help them believe it.  They come to view the punishment of not drinking as less than that of continuing.  This is a solution for some, but they are still miserable.  As I have said, I have been to AA meetings, and as a group, they are mostly miserable.  They miss their Rosebud, their lost friend.  They miss the hope of a happy childhood, which was taken from them so very long ago.

In my own work, I have three simultaneous challenges: healing my own wounds, figuring out what the fuck I am going to do with the rest of my life, both how and why, and–because I seem to be enmeshed at an emotional level with the world as a whole–how all of us survive this time, and build a society equal to the talents all of us as individuals possess.

It’s scary.  It’s confusing.  I have no help at all.  I don’t anyone who is remotely equal to the challenge of understanding me and feeding back new and helpful ideas.

But according to my own metaphysics, I must have asked for this.  This was the battle I wanted, long before I was actually fighting it.  I feel confused.  I feel deep pain.  But I don’t feel self pity.  A good battle is a gift.

I read this article the other day: https://www.out.com/positive-voices/2016/12/01/woman-who-cared-hundreds-abandoned-gay-men-dying-aids

It teared me up a bit.  For all she knew, she was dealing with a leper.  What she saw, though, was a problem that needed fixing.  She saw useful work in front of her.  She felt the terror of this young man and felt compassion for him, then had the balls to do something about it.  She was the only one in that mass of people seeing a human being in pain.

This, in a nutshell, is my ideal of a hero.  They are the ones who see what others don’t, and do what others cannot imagine.

And I was thinking I can have multiple ideas of gayness.  This is the beauty of freedom, of the capacity to change my mind, or to allow multiple simultaneous strands of opinion.

I can say I have met bitchy emotionally demanding gays, and I don’t like them.

I know, as an historical study, that gays into S&M played an important role in Hitler’s SS.  This is, or seems to be, a common feature where severe cruelty is involved.

I look at the use of an 11 year old boy as a sex object in a gay bar.  Can there be any doubt that, if he has not already lost his virginity, he will well before he is 15, most likely to a much older man?  Whatever “parental units” may be in play would presumably have no objection.

But then I think of this poor young man dying, forsaken by his mother for his alleged “sin”.  And I feel compassion.  My own cousin was disowned by my aunt and uncle for the same “crime”.  And he was and presumably still is (I am largely disconnected from my family) a Christian preacher.

There has to be a middle ground.  There has to be a place where I am able to say: “some of what you do is to me weird, even while I grant that much of what some heterosexuals do I also find weird.  Most people are weird, and I include myself in that.  I am not fully convinced you are not acting out a trauma of some sort that has become bonded with your sexuality.  I am not fully convinced you can or should be foster or adoptive parents.  But I recognize you as a fellow suffering human, one who, like me, is confused by all this, who is doing with their brief life what seems to make sense, while lacking all the clues to ultimately solve the puzzle.”

And I would be willing to listen to what they say in response.  Lord knows I have plenty of practice being yelled at, so that would not bother me.  It doesn’t even anger me much any more, no matter how extreme it is.

But this is how helpful, useful, peaceful, and ultimately harmonious cultural evolution happens.  Gays are not monolithic.  They obviously–like every other group–include many opinions.  I knew a gay man who was traumatized by his first and only trip to a gay bathhouse, which he found disgusting.  There are gays like Rupert Everett who have gone on record saying that most gay men should not be raising children, and paid a price for it.  He must have suspected that might be the reaction, so that was most likely an act of courage on his part, like his previous act of being flamboyantly and proudly gay in public long before it was really mainstream.

I use the example of gays here, but it could be expanded to blacks, women, transgender people, Hispanics and all the other categories the Left tried to make immutable, monolithically uniforn, and radically separate in their propaganda.  They don’t want “us”–different groups–talking, because were we to do so openly and honestly, in the spirit of the true American tradition, we would find we have vastly more in common than in difference.

I will append two comments.

One: the bad guy in the new Aquaman looks just like the Nordic/Aryan original blonde Aquaman. I don’t think any of the writers wanted us to forget that there was an ethnic tinge to the new Aquaman, and even though the script was a jumble–where they obviously at some point just said “fuck it, people will come see Momoa, and we have some great fight sequences–I think they simultaneously wanted an environmental message, and a message of white imperialism, with the other king having red hair.

Second: I was talking with a guy from Flint, Michigan, who told me he had been told by a cop that the main problem there was horrific leadership, and that the main factor there was placing race above competence.  Obviously, there are highly competent black people out there–Ben Carson, for example–but not all black people are competent.  Neither are all white people.  You have to look at individuals as individuals.  If the bar is the race of your birth, that bar is much too low.  We should not be surprised when thieves and scoundrels abuse such ridiculous trust.

Actually, I will parse the phrase Individual for a moment.  Can I write it out as Me/others?  Is the sum 1, or am I to be reduced by my group?  For a true Notdividable, they are not reduced in this process.  This is of course an ideal, since obviously all of us are highly influenced to a greater degree than we can likely see (as we might logically deduce) by others.  Still, the world works better when we get as many eyes and minds on it as possible. Not all are equal, but all are potentially useful.  All matter, at the most basic level of theory and law.  All citizens, to be clear.

This is the foundational idea of our political system.  We place our trust in a system of immutable (in theory, obviously not in practice) laws–which should in my view be seen as written in stone like the original Roman laws of their Res Publica–as administered by people whose offices depend on periodic votes of confidence by all Americans who take an interest in our system, and in the process of their own government.

A good defensive system is still a prison.  If you put up high fences, and barbed wire, and land mines, and dig a bunker keep underground, you keep “them” out, but you remain in one place.  That is the only choice.

I have dreamed of secure hiding places all my life.  I used to physically hide from my mother when I was very little, presumably until she so severely punished me for it that I stopped.  Notions of secure places still come to me both in waking and in sleep.

There are of course real enemies. There are emotional vampires, who will hurt you before you even realize they have latched on; there are people who will lie to you and cheat you; and there are people who will physically hurt you for a variety of reasons, but particularly if you are a woman.

But for people like me, the enemy is already in the gates.  The images arise because of clear and present and continual assaults from our own brains.  There can be no escape, outside of embracing freedom, light in the sky, and movement.  Those enemies are not real, and thus can be vanquished finally, and completely.

I continue to find new value in the Windhorse symbol of the Tibetans, the horse running across the plain, with speed, and radiating light from a beautiful jewel on its back.

We Americans tend to see cowboys as a symbol for freedom, but ultimately they were always going from one city to another.  I would submit that the best symbol for the freedom many Americans–and indeed people from all over the world–seek is that of the Plains Indians, or perhaps nomadic wanderers generally, who could sprint on their horses wherever and whenever they wanted.  And before horses, they still had the sky.

I am in the process of reworking some long held patterns, and it is working.

Humana are the only animal on the planet, that I know of, who are their own worst enemy.  Lions don’t kill lions.  Sharks don’t kill sharks (I don’t think: some of the bigger ones may eat smaller ones, but same size do not feed on one another, I feel safe in assuming).

We are the only ones, and it has been this way so long, I think it is reflected in our brains.

If I am right, that shame is ceding superiority to, in the case of Developmental Trauma, the world, then it is logically inconsistent with the formation of personal agency, personal power, and a sense of personhood.  Shame is saying “you decide, because I am unworthy”.  It is living the lives of others, because you cannot conceive how to live your own, your own way, because everything you do is wrong, even before you do it.  It is wrong before, during and after.  I myself am very familiar with this sensation.

For those who seek power, of course, shame is an extraordinarily useful emotion to cultivate, and if I might comment, Original Sin is quite perfect for that purpose, particularly when those in power are dispensing the remedy.

What shame underlies those who seek such power, of course, must also be profound.  No sane person seeks power over others.  It may be that some one or two people in a group possess exceptional power of perception and action, and thus become logical leaders, but the people I am talking about seek power whether they are the most deserving or not.

Peace of mind is a precious thing, and no one who properly values it will disturb it except for the best of reasons.  Odysseus was right to feign madness.

These are the three powerful emotions associated with the Amygdala.  Fight and Flight are obvious enough as primitive survival responses, but shame is less obvious.

What I would submit is that most fear is related to our fellow humans, specifically the fear that they will hurt us.  This, of course, is an eminently valid fear.  Especially in recorded history, there have likely been 100 people killed by other people for every one killed by a shark, a bear, a tiger, or wolves.  Other humans are the most fearsome predators we face.

Shame is bowing your head, like we see dogs do.  Shame is telling other people you present no threat, because you submit to them.  Shame is surrender.  Thus: fight, flight, and surrender all originate in the same neurological place.

Surrender is not in my nature, most likely specifically because I always feel an underlying sense of unavoidable shame which I cannot get away from, which has no cause in my present behavior, and which causes me emotional distress.

I have speculated in the past that the best soldiers are most likely those who have endured humiliation and degradation, as is the pattern in our military indoctrination.

I will add to this the discovery that those who have suffered mild to moderate developmental trauma seem empirically to have much higher pain tolerances which, combined with greatly lowered emotional sensitivity, make for the qualities we value in those whose task is enduring hardship, and working hard to kill other human beings.

I was told once, by someone in a position to know, that most of our best soldiers are sociopaths.  War is insane, and in an insane world, only the insane truly belong and thrive.  We need these people, but as we saw in Africa with the murder of the Green Beret there–someone who evidently retained his moral compass, making his companions deeply fearful of what he was going to say–we need to keep them on a tight leash.

When fear forms the self.  You see the self, you become self conscious, when something drives you away from your play.

Fear really is THE essential consideration in all human life.  It acts as a sort of dye which stains everything it touches.

As I likely mentioned, I continue to read Sebern Fisher’s excellent book, and she makes the argument that fear underlies all psychopathology.  I believe this.

But it is never too late to begin the journey back home.

I continue to hope my life experience will see as a competent mid-wife and guide at some point.  Lord knows, I have traveled the road!!!

But you need to arrive once to show the way.  You need to be reborn at least once to be a mid-wife.  The stones on the path need to have felt your feet.

I was thinking about the dating scene, which I think I will be ready for in six months or so [I will comment that I am sort of an incel, but only in the sense that I would like to be in a committed, emotionally rich and deep relationship which includes good sex, but I am still too wounded to be emotionally available.  I had two girlfriends in relatively short succession after I left my wife, and I hurt both of them.  Thus I have locked myself away like the Magician of Lublin, until I can figure out the codes of my own soul, and find my light reliably], which is enormous progress, and it hit me that it would be helpful to have a dating site where everyone on there has been through a serious and competently created and executed personal growth program.

As an example, I have mentioned the Hoffman Process I went through.  That is not enough.  What I think everyone needs to do, at a minimum, is go through an Adult Attachment Inventory, and perhaps a six month course of Kum Nye, Neurofeedback, and Pesso-Boyden Therapy. 

Then it hit me: why not do that as a society?  Why not have an emotional growth process for marriage?  Why not do it at age 18, and do periodic ten year five week retreats?  Why not demand of our political leaders that they submit themselves to an even higher standard of demonstrated emotional mastery?

When the world wants you to look to the left, it’s not bad policy to look to the right.  The world is constantly playing magical tricks, and you have to not be fooled by the distractions.  The world is people, and people lie.  They don’t mean to lie.  Quite often they don’t even know they are lying.  Or if they know they are lying they rationalize it with a lie they don’t call a lie.  It was just their fair share.  What others don’t know won’t hurt them.  They deserved it.

So the whole of our public landscape is infused with half truths, everywhere, and cannot be otherwise until people learn to listen deeply to their own hearts.

We have the technology to build a paradise, but our psyches are breaking down, we are becoming madmen and madwomen.  Silicon Valley is a hotbed of out and out lunatics.  China is run by amoral bastards.  Have you seen this: http://www.visiontimes.com/2017/10/01/flight-mh370-disappeared-to-cover-up-organ-harvesting-crimes.html

Mao, whose picture is everywhere, including on the currency, starved to death 50 MILLION people.  Why would such a government bat an eye at the murder, for political convenience, of a couple hundred?  They wouldn’t.  That story may or may not be true, but it does seem to clearly be true that the Falun Gong members have been having their organs ripped out for some time, and I suspect had their bodies sold for these gruesome “Bodies” exhibits.

None of this is necessary.  All of this comes from severe developmental trauma.  It comes from motherless worlds.  The Party is a psychopath. It is a machine without a conscience, and animated solely by greed.

It is good to have utopian visions.  This actually reminds me of the point I was starting to make before the soap box appeared magically under my feet.  Socialism is a distraction.  It is a psychologically rooted way of directing attention away from the personal psyche.  If I spend all my time talking about US, I can avoid talking about ME.

Socialism is the exact opposite of the direction we would need to go to build an actual utopia.  Rather than focus on social relations, class relations, and inequality, we need to focus on mother/child, and to a great but lesser extent father/child and extended family/child relationships.  We need to develop security in the earliest infancy and childhood.

Happiness does not take much in the way of things.  We could live in grass huts somewhere and be vastly happier than we are now, isolated as we are, and suffering from the love we did not get from a distracted, overworked, and stressed out mother.

Economic inequality is the preoccupation of fools. 

And in point of fact if we look, say, at inner cities, the main reason that they are not thriving is that the mother/child relationship is consistently stressed.  Girls get pregnant too early, with no good way of caring for the child financially, and without the emotional skills to parent well.  The father is not there about 90% of the time, at least as a husband, and the overall environment is stressful because of the failures of the last generation, which breed crime, disorder, and anger.

Don’t look at the left hand, which promises a world where no one’s inner world matters that much, where all that matters are the physical circumstances of their birth.  Look at the right hand, which asks you to remember who you are, and what really matters.

In the Tao Te Ching it is written: “darkness within darkness, the gateway to all mystery.”