Month: December 2018

1. What if we are all gifted with an “Easter Egg”, a special puzzle hidden deep in the fabric of our lives, which is really our main purpose for being here, this time?  Get that done, and all’s good.  The vision of a simple task for life is, to me, quite attractive.  I would oppose to this, say, the Buddhist texts which emphatically insist that this is the first and only chance in a million years and that if you don’t spend every last moment desperately seeking enlightenment you have wasted your life.  Some of them come very close to Evangelical Christian fervor in their hortatory declamations.

YOU MUST, they say, OR ELSE, they say. 

I don’t know what’s true of course, other than that I am quite certain based on close and long term observation, that fear makes people batshit insane.  Truly fucked up shit never comes from anywhere else, at root, although some people do a passable job of burying their terrors deep down in the hole. I always have, at least until now. Now, I’m sometimes the bad guy in my own dreams.  I joined the other side.  Or did I just become aware of it? 

Rumi once said that no one who does not have both good and evil in them belongs with the Sufis. He was not extolling evil, obviously, but rather the AWARENESS of it.  Anyone who thinks they are pure good is fucking somebody over, guaranteed. 

No saints need apply for sainthood, if I might paraphrase a Lao Tzu line I have quoted often.

2. And the phrase came to me earlier “there are no calculators in Heaven”.  There is no invisible accountant keeping a list of merits and demerits in a heavenly (or in the case, infernal) Excel spreadsheet, and planning to do a summation at the end, such that positive scores go one way, and negative another. 

Imagine yourself as a painting in space.  How much gray is there?  How much yellow?  What colors do you show daily?  How do they vary?  What forms appear?  How beautiful or ugly are they?

What sounds would surround you?  Tinny, muffled thumps, harps, rocks rattling in a coffee can?

What smells?  How would you feel–pointed and jagged, soft, stiff, curved, straight?

Imagine that where you go is perfectly suited for who you are, and that who you are is absolutely obvious.  And that there are infinite gradations, adaptations, and that tides and waves sweep regularly through the whole thing.  You bob up and you bob down, in this infinite ocean.

3. How hard would it be for AI to imitate you?  How patterned are you?  We all tend to do certain things at certain times.  But do you say the same things?  If someone watched you for a week, could they easily predict what you will say to Jim at the gym, Gladys at the front desk?  If you were cloned, how hard would it be to fool people?

If information is the degree to which a given evolution is unexpected, how much information do you produce in a given week? I would tend to submit that spontaneity and rigidity are roughly what openness and fear are to one another.  If you do exactly the same things day in and day out, does fear underlie it?

Were you born merely to replicate something, or to create new riffs on the old, and to discover the new?

God loves new dance steps.  Nothing is new, but much can be new to us.

There is death, but there is also life.  There is the Being-Born.  This continues.  And none of us know where all this is going or even, really, how all this is built.  Both optimists and pessimists are wrong every day.

Outside of this blog, I keep my feelings to myself.  This sort of thing scares the shit out of nearly everyone, with very few exceptions, and God knows I seem to feel more than many, and I think where I live most of the time would kill most people.  Perhaps I am wrong, but I don’t think so, based on what I seem to see every day.

Mothers are the intermediaries between the individual and an infinite universe.

In traditional societies, mothers are the ones who convinced their children that the universe was smaller, closer, and more comprehensible than it is.  Even the Catholic vision is vastly more comfortable than our present vision.  It has a place in hell for the truly irredeemable, but a place for second chances for everyone else.  And the universe looked to the Earth, not vice versa.

I have been feeling this coldness of complete exposure.  It is very unpleasant.  Maddening, if I were someone who fell apart easily.

And I have been feeling the evil which underlies most human culture.  I have been feeling the evil in me which was latent when I started writing about goodness.

It is a fear, a powerful fear, an exigent fear, a primordial fear.  It is the caged animal, the raging beast, the cheater, liar and thief.  Only perfectly nurtured people lack this, and I don’t think those are more than, perhaps, 20% of the population.  Everyone else carries forward, because they must, something from which evil can spring.

And I feel how human culture exists to provide rationalizations for these feelings, to put a positive spin on them, to make of conformity a virtue, because it papers over the evil within.

Is it not ODD, when you think about it, that in our popular culture tolerance is granted supreme value, that all the good people of our world spend all their time practicing “compassion”, as they see it, and yet that our media is filled with the most horrific violence?  Shows about serial killers and the details and even reenactments or portrayals of their crimes?  The knife they used, the sort of wound they inflicted, how they tortured their prisoner.

At a deep psychological level, of course, this all makes perfect sense.  No one can be friend to the world, not really.  We are not wired like that biologically, evolutionarily.  How do you do it?  You make it an abstract value to cover up the real anger and malice you feel in your being, and which lacks an outlet for expression.

Oh, my world and work involves countless deaths  When I don’t drink, I feel like I am dying every night, multiple times.  I wake up screaming.  When I do drink, of course, that too is a death of sorts.  I have seen much too much death, much too much dying.

But I am making slow, painstaking, ridiculously hard progress.  This is the truth.  And one day, I will get past the storm, and will see something much better.  And it may be soon.  One can hope.  As always, though, I place my ultimate faith in persistence, and nothing else.

Might I coin the term Homo Persistens (or whatever the Latin is for persistence/perseverence)?  We are that animal which keeps (and kept) going.

It occurs to me that most of the down sizing, and megamergers, and general corporate bullshit that started happening in the 1980’s originated in places like Harvard Business School

Profit is ethical.  It is the only sane motive for economic activity, at least for masses of people.  But every last ounce of profit at any cost: terrible.

Corporations are not families, but for a long time, in America, there was dual loyalty.  Employees felt it towards the company, and the company towards them.  That ended, again, some time in the late 1970’s to the 1980’s, largely as a result of what newly minted MBA’s from top schools were taught and went out into the world and practiced.

Virtually every problem in the modern world in the realms of economics and public policy is the direct result of academics.  I will not overlook the vast progress in the sciences, but anything touched in any way by bad philosophy has been corrupted by academics and metastasized.

In the realm of culture, we would all be better off, I think, if all Humanities departments were abolished, as they exist in the main today.

That is perhaps going much too far, but perhaps it is not going far enough.  What role should we allow in our society for ruinous ideas?  To what extent should we publicly fund their propagation?

This post was occasioned by a trip someone was describing to me of a trip to Avery Island and the McinHenny Company, which makes Tabasco.  Apparently they take care of their workers very well.  Every company could do that.

And here is the thing: even if greed is good, what is it good for?  More money flows through the system, landing preferentially among those at the top, and what do they use it for?  Booze, women, and fancy trips and fancy cars.  That is our society as it exists today.  Our elite are self absorbed hedonists.

You know, in traditional Sufi story-telling, I think all metaphors were understand to have 7 layers (I forget the number, but let’s use 7), each more subtle, such that only the most wise could decipher them all.

I, for my part, will submit a second meaning to the metaphor just referenced, which is that we are distanced from the ground of reality by artificial appliances, and that reality, in turn, is obscured by shifting clouds of ignorance and the pushing away of knowledge.

This is more abstract.  I prefer the original meaning, the feeling-tone of which came to me in a dream.  The car was driven, by the way, by someone I know who I consider an exemplar of personal discipline and applied common sense.  A man. 

Now, it’s been so long since I’ve been laid, I look for signs of incipient homosexuality in my dreams, but it continues to be the case that in my rare sex dreams it is always women.  I will admit to being thankful for this.  There is something sad, to me, as I observe it, in homosexuality, at least male homosexuality.  It’s not a question of morality to me–what men do with their dicks is, I am quite sure, a matter of indifference to God, as long as no one is hurt–but what I see and feel. I have known quite a few gay men, and there seems to be this feeling of an unknowable loss of some sort.  That is my perception, in any event.  Perhaps I am making things up.

But with regard to reality, this is much more abstract concept.  I don’t like that level of abstraction.  This is why I have parted ways with much of the Indian tradition, with what might be termed Raga Yoga.

I like the Tibetan tradition, as taught by Tarthang Tulku, in which one approaches reality bit by bit, as tangible feelings and sensations, as wholistic affective gestalts which are irreducible, but categorically present and felt.  Nudging your way in.  Step by step by step, every one leading to emotional healing and spiritual cleansing.

I will admit to some things going on in my life I am not talking about.  I will eventually. I am superstitious in some ways, about some things.  It’s perhaps irrational, but, perhaps, not.

G.I. Gurdjieff’s book “Meeting with Remarkable Men” is the only book of his I’ve read.  I have an album of some of his music too (everything is so easy, now, isn’t it?  It reduces somewhat the joy of finding and getting).

He speaks of “wiseacring” in the beginning, and is as good as his word.  The book is filled with metaphors.  In one place he paints fake birds, a simple enough symbol.  In another he takes a heavy rock and dives deep into the ocean to find treasures, another simple enough metaphor.

But in one case he crosses some desert in Asia–perhaps the Gobi, I forget as I read this more than a decade ago–and they use stilts to stay above the shifting sands.  I have long wondered just what he meant by this.  It was obviously a metaphor, but I wasn’t sure for what.

Last night I dreamed I was in a car with extended wheels that went down 40′.  A storm hit and the water came around the car, but it was still able to move, still able to drive.  I have had one other similar dream, where I was with my children.  I kept the seat we were in stable, in a sea of change.

The stilts, in my view, and the extended car, are ways of connecting with reality in a sea of emotion and change.  Quiet, and stillness are ideal, but not always obtainable.  The stilts are a way of saying to yourself, when must pass through a difficult place, that “reality is what I say it is”, because you cannot at that moment see, cannot feel clearly, cannot sort things out, cannot find peace and quiet.

The stilts are a will with which you orient and move yourself in times of random movement, of shifting sands.  It is how you keep your sanity, and ability to come back to earth eventually.

The alternative, which I also saw on display, was many cars floating on the tide.  A car, in America, is a symbol of power, of control, of motion.  To float on the tide, is to lose agency, to lose personal power.

And so many people, now, are floating on the tide.  The storms of our modern world have overwhelmed them. They have lost their footing, and cannot now find their way back.

This is a very hard time.  Very hard indeed.

My work continues.

I don’t have the meticulous patience to be an actual inventor, but I have a lot of ideas, a number of which I have not shared anywhere.

But here are two, one of which I think I may have already mentioned.

1) Baby FitBit.  A wearable something for babies to monitor their levels of arousal.  You could get a baseline for a month, and when you are using childcare with very young children, you could make sure at the end of the day that they didn’t cry for hours on end, or get hysterical over something.  One bout of severe hysteria is enough, I suspect, to inflict lasting harm.

Good mothers attune to their infants naturally–this is more or less the definition of a good mother–but all mothers might benefit from seeing patterns in sleep and arousal, and there might even be an “alarm” that could be created when crying infants go beyond a certain level of upsetness, although the volume of their crying is likely a good enough alarm. 

It would help make sensitive mothers more sensitive, and God forbid whenever men might be caring for the infants, it might help them be much smarter than they are now.

You’re welcome.  Remember me in your will. 

2) Vibrating earrings.  As I heal, I am starting to think about sex more and more.  I’ve always been able to talk with women, and although I am to smooth roughly what sandpaper is, I used to get laid a lot just because I wasn’t afraid to ask the question.  Rather, being afraid of everything, that was not much of a jump for me.

But I really really think that the combination of vibrating earrings–and/or possibly something which makes it feel like they are being sucked on–on the earlobes (which I know I have discussed can, alone, make some woman come), with good cunnilingus would be enough for just about any woman.  I would bet money on it.

If it’s true that if momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy, then this would be one way of making momma happy.  And it’s quiet too, if she is.

Whenever I start having sex again, I think I might make it a hobby.  It’s a horrible thing to say, but like anything else, it is amenable to logic.  Logically, I need to be emotionally available and open.  This is the necessary starting point.  But after that it is varied forms of pressure and friction, tension and relaxation.  I have all my minor points, like the ribs, and inner thigh, and earlobes and neck, and I have my areas which can induce orgasm like the earlobes, nipples, clit, G-Spot, cervix, and to a lesser extent and perhaps in a different way, the anus.

I know I am ridiculous in some ways, but if you think about it, why wouldn’t most men make an actual study of how to make women come, and come again (You know, in the balls that are “bouncing to the left, and bouncing to the right”  Edit: I will note the original seems to have been, uh, pulled)?  The beautiful thing about women is they have no real limit.  They don’t run out of orgasms, just energy.

Sex is a very natural thing.  Sex without connection, at least for a time, is not.  Sometimes a shared rut is just the thing–sometimes both want it, both need, and both really enjoy it–but somehow we seem to make it all very dirty, even when as a matter of high level social policy everything is perfectly, perfectly acceptable in every way.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/andrew-sullivan-americas-new-religions.html

Much of this I could have written.  I found it particularly interesting seeing that John Stuart Mill reached the same conclusion long ago that I reached myself, which is that most “liberals” NEED people to need them, and that if the need disappeared, they would be rudderless and empty.  Their lives would be pointless. 

This creates what we nowadays call  codependent behavior, in which, for example, the “champions” of black people routinely pursue policies which hurt them.  Why?  One, they need the votes, but two, even I am not cynical enough (and I am very cynical) to believe that all bleeding hearts are only about votes.  What happens is that there is an unconscious conflict, in which one part of them wants to help, but another wants to withhold help, so that blacks can retain their value as victims, and as the needy objects of their attention and effort.  The right hand giveth, and the left hand taketh away.

This is one major reason they resist debate: it is not just that they can’t defend their policies, but that open discussion risks rupturing their self delusions, which in turn are foundational to their sense of place in the world, their sense of meaning, and their sense of purpose.  Without their delusions, they are lost.  Small wonder so much anger appears when they are challenged: it is an existential question, not a mere policy question, as it could, should, and would be, if the well being of blacks (or women, or gays, etc.) was truly at the root of their work.

I of course disagree with his treatment of Trump.  Trump is the one who speaks the truth.  Nothing less, nothing more.  He was forced on us by the long term abdication of courage by substantially every politician in Washington.

In the same way Churchill refused to concede victory to the Nazis, despite it being the most obvious, and certainly the easiest short term route (by the way, my favorite scene, the one that got me and made me tear up, was when the King visited Churchill, alone in some spare room, up all night, worrying and worrying, and told him: I have your back.  Odds be damned: we can’t let the bastards win.) Trump has refused to concede victory to the forces trying to control speech, to force lies on all of us, to make political cant the only acceptable language, to enshrine in our halls of power the right of de facto Commissars to inflict social violence on all people straying outside narrow lines.

Trump, in other words, is roughly to Political Correctness what Churchill was to Nazism.  This is the reason he is so hated.  His policies are ordinary.  Defending the border was not a controversial issue as late as the 1990’s.  Tax cuts, particularly for corporations, have always reliably generated tax growth eventually, and economic growth immediately.

No, it is his refusal to accept what we might term the “New Politeness”, which could easily be a Fabian term, which makes him such a danger.  He isn’t cowed by howling.  On the contrary, he seems to enjoy it.  He is every bit the public gladiator that Churchill was, even if we grant that Churchill–a Nobel Prize winner for Literature–was vastly the greater wordsmith.

Still, Churchill did love the one liner, and it’s interesting to speculate what use he might have made of Twitter.

“An empty car pulled up and Clement Attlee got out”.

“I may be drunk, but you are ugly, and in the morning I shall be sober.”

Etc.  He was no saint.  Not by a long shot.  If the task is a fight, don’t look for saints.  Look for people who like to win, and who have a track record of doing it.

And for that matter, Churchill’s record of winning was scant to non-existent when he became Prime Minister, and his record of disasters was quite long.

In the long run, pugnacious but principled assholes are vastly more useful than polite, cheerful gentlemen, who lose with dignity, and ultimately make no difference, what-so-ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xWVRE9FskQ

It seems to me, based on my limited experience with it, that heaven and pleasure are a process of gathering, of creating a core self which learns to choose affects which are pleasurable, which learns to give and receive/accept love freely, and which is able to grow and expand these feelings.  This is the core process of Kum Nye.  You discharge all the “bad” stuff into the atmosphere (bad, of course, is a value judgement which can, in turn, create further affects which then also need to be dealt with.  If you don’t judge it the first time, you don’t need to deal with it a second and third and fourth time, making non-judgement vastly more efficient), then gather what they call the “cream” of Kum Nye, which is the positive, relaxed, pleasant, connected experience.

The obverse of this is being fragmented into many pieces.  As I grow, paradoxically, I keep dropping back into hell.  What happened to me was extraordinarily unpleasant, and all the affects are still there.  It’s an ocean of feeling, a universe of feeling.  Nothing would have been easier for me to have become an academic or professional of some sort who lived in his head, who dealt–well, since I am intelligent–in the abstract.  My body likely would have protested with illnesses of various sorts (as things stand, I am very healthy.  I never get sick, and have not, yet, suffered any effects at all from all my drinking), but I could have achieved and maintained a relative homeostasis.

But in hell the pain forces you into many places.  If I might use traditional imagery, one part of you is dangling over a pit of fire, another is being drowned, another confined to a small cage, and another eaten over and over by wild beasts.  This does not quite happen simultaneously, or sequentially, but all are true at the same time.  The pain has to be distributed, somehow.  A unitary self cannot face it alone.  This is the principle of dissociation.

Practically, in my understanding–and although I am quite certain my understanding is incomplete, I am not certain the science itself is complete either–dissociation manifests as delta waves.  Parts of you go to sleep, in effect.  We have all seen, I suspect, dreamy people who have been through severe trauma, people who are not quite there/here.

The delta is a sort of fog which covers up the light of clear memory.  But those memories, when theyh hit, hit in many places.  The unitary self cannot endure.  Severe abstraction is one symptom.  Substance use (sic) is another.  Such trauma is always an encircling, with the victim at the center.  If I might be so bold, I think primitive sacrificial rituals come out of a literal reenactment of this primal wound, when carried by many.  They make social and psychological sense.  They pacify, for a time, some discomfort, some terror, in the soul of those present.

As I say, perhaps as a lunatic, perhaps as a genius, perhaps as a misguided fool, I want to write a Gesamptphilosophie.  I want to start what I might call a new religion, based on a very, very deep understanding of the nature of human kind, as combined with the best in neuroscience.  I have suffered a great deal for what understanding (I think) I have won, and will no doubt suffer more.

The thing about suffering, though, and this is the third of three ideas I mentioned some months back, is that when it is done, it is only a distant memory.  When you hold your breath, every second can feel like an eternity at the end, but when you get that breath, all is forgotten.  When you are very hungry, all is forgotten when you sit down to dinner. 

All the anxieties I felt on December 12th, 2017, and 2016, are forgotten.  I can’t begin to say what they were without going back to my blog and diary of that period.

I read, when I was 18 or 19, that Meister Eckhart commented that “nothing is as sweet as having suffered.”  Now, this is not a motto for a masochist.  What he is saying is that it is a fantastic feeling when any misery ends, and a better feeling than a baseline which lacked that suffering. 

People who come to this nation from poor places value it (at least, the immigrants we WANT value it) because they have been in places of mass poverty, and no opportunity with almost any amount of work to get ahead without becoming criminals.

People who have suffered value ordinary days.  People like me who have been tortured every night for many years value a good night’s sleep.  Or at least I think I will.  I think I am close.

But all this is magnificent.  None of this is wasted.  Nothing that happens to you, or that you choose to do, is ever wasted.  The universe conserves information.  Everything can be used to learn.  Nothing is forgotten.  What takes time, though, is learning to remember mainly the good. It’s always there.  It isn’t going anywhere, and no one is hiding it.  We just place it in the shadow in our waking consciousness, or at least some of us less enlightened souls do.

Putting first things first is a hard thing to do.  But as I’ve said before, if I had to pick a one word motto it would be “REMEMBER”.  If I had to pick a second it would be “ENDURE”.

You could build a good life on those two.  

If you think about it, Communism was a Western idea which was sold to the developing world as an antidote to other Western ideas.  It was supposed to be the magic elixir to undo the effects of colonialism and imperialism.  It was the magic bullet.  It was the antidote to the poison.

But it was vastly worse than all of them.  Far from being an antidote, it made the effects of the original poison more deadly.  Communism, by far, is the most horrific export from the minds of Europeans ever.  It is the disease we gifted people who were already suffering.  It was the serpent for people seeking the dove.  It was the betrayal which fell upon all who trusted it.

Americans and Europeans are far from innocent.  So too are the overwhelming bulk of the people we colonized.  Study any culture which some Western nation conquered: they had weapons.  They had warriors.  They had kings.  They fought and killed one another, attacked and enslaved one another, long before the first visit from us.

There may have been innocents here and there, but by and large, no nation and no people is innocent, and it is pointless and even counterproductive pretending otherwise.  Mexico is named after people who would flay their victims and run through the streets in their skins; who would cut the hearts out of people, whole, in front of vast mobs, and throw them into a pit (as I understand it).

If you are seeking simple solutions, then you don’t know very much.