Month: April 2019

291, I forgot, no booze.

Last night.  Whoa.  Dude. I don’t want to talk about it.

I am realizing that clinical dissociation, even in the sense of numbing and resistance to affect and emotional modulation, really does constitute a splitting of sorts.

They have renamed Multiple Personality Disorder Dissociative Identity Disorder.  People like this have “alters” which pop out when certain environmental criteria apply.

But for a person who has been dissociated for a long time, popping IN to spontaneous affect feels like an intrusion of some sort.  I built for myself a dusty room, which allowed in a bit of sun sometimes, even if it was mostly covered in shadows, and some other part of me is trying to open the door.

Right now, this is my core internal conflict.  I’m not depressed, or hyperanxious.  I’m trying to reconcile two disparate parts of myself which do not trust one another.  This is hard.

And I think “I wish I could trust a “professional”, but you really can’t.  They are, in bulk, people only slightly smarter than the average intellectually, often inferior in terms of emotional intelligence, and given to cant, recitation, dogma, and largely meaningless rituals.

Then I think to a book I wrote about maybe five years ago, “Spiritual Emergencies”, by Stan Grof, where he collected papers about, among other things, Shamanic Emergence.  Psychologically, that is what I am going through.  There is no easy path.  There is no one to guide me.

But surely this is not a unique human experience?

All spiritual traditions depend, I think, on people like me sticking to our paths, carrying on, and gathering wisdom through excruciating difficulty.  I really think this is true.  A true spiritual path is a type of warfare.  It requires the same tenacity, willingness to look death in the eye, and the same adaptability and result focus.  On the nights where I don’t think I am going to die, I usually feel like I am going insane.

But here I am!!!!  Motherfucker: here I am.  It hasn’t killed me yet, and all signs are positive.  Again, there are things I could write about, but am choosing not to.

How would you feel if I decided I was entitled to speak about what it is like “being white”?  You know, that I felt I could speak in general terms not just about my life, but about those of ALL white people in America?

Any white readers I may have would be like “hold on a minute.  You can’t speak for me.  I am poor/rich/ more educated/illiterate/liberal/socially conservative/from the northwest, the northeast, the midwest, and Deep South.”  Etc.

Why, then, do so many blacks feel entitled to speak of the “black experience”?  Is it not just probable that the goal is for black individuals to speak to white people, who can then don their camel’s hair shirts, and generate genuine pleasure in self flagellation, all while other black people either look on in disbelief, or wonder how they can get in on the action?

Does this process help any black people, outside of those who are in on this particular hustle?  That, I think I can say with certainty: absolutely not.  It is a quasi-religious ritual, performed by whites, not an act of political coherence, much less relevance.

293, I forgot, and I drank 8 beers.

Still, I slept well and I’m up early.

Question: why do women feel so much?

Answer: because they can handle it.

287, no booze, and I remembered.

What a shitty night, though.  I don’t have much issue falling asleep.  I’m not an insomniac.  What happens is terrors attack me about an hour into sleep.  Last night I started shaking at all four extremities, and it went inside towards my heart.  I thought it was going to stop my heart.  This happened two or three times.  The second time I got up and ate some Jordan Chick Peas (did you know there was such a thing?  Like Jordan almonds, but with chickpeas.  I bought it at my local Arab grocer, along with some honeycomb, Amba and sumac).

If I might describe this, it is like the worst, scariest scene in a horror film, the one that makes your skin crawl (if you still possess the ability to react), jumping out and attacking your skin.  What would you do?  You’d jump out of your seat.  You have a thousand spiders on you.

Yeah, so I got that. I’ve seen many “professionals”.  They are mostly fucking idiots.  I think on balance the world would be a better place if we imported a million witch doctors from Africa, if there are that many.  And if we wanted to complete the transaction with the actual benefits that flow from the actions of “liberals” with respect to the developing world, we would send them our psychiatrists.  We would fuck them over again, in other words, which is the main effect of most foreign aid given to governments (rather than the people: again, I am a huge Kiva advocate).

As far as I am concerned, the psychiatric profession showed itself to be made up mainly of mentally fucked up, arrogant, and largely whored out assholes when it failed to add Developmental Trauma to the DSM.  As I was reading in Sebern Fisher’s book last night (which I finally finished), one of the direct consequences of this is that, while you can get funding to study, say, anorexia, or depression, or OCD, you cannot get funding to study what they all share in common in early childhood.  You cannot get at the root.

This means that in fucking 2019 the framework STILL does not exist to even begin approaching these things intelligently, much less professionally.  It’s an ad hoc, patchwork approach, which works in some small number of cases because individuals are able to buck the system through their personal talents and charisma, but which by and large exists to make mental illness disappear, rather than be cured.  It is, in other words, utterly lacking in genuine compassion.  Small wonder most of these assholes are Democrats.  I have described that morality as “ersatz”, but it occurs to me I might describe it even more accurately as “plastic”.  Plastic morality for plastic souls.  Their morality may not be real, but it lasts forever.

So back to my central problem, I think I need to do neurofeedback 7 days a week.  I have been taking some days off, because I think there is value in doing it, seeing what changes, then doing it again.

But motherfucker, there are case studies in Fisher’s book where people are resolving very complex histories of horrific sexual abuse in less sessions than I have had.  I think my fucking Ph.D therapist made things worse by how he applied the protocol, but whether that is true or not, he certainly did not do anything with the skill Fisher apparently did.  I am my own therapist, because, with considerable justice, based on long term experience, I don’t trust anyone else.  That is the hardest way to do it.

But I will soldier on. I think I can avoid getting drunk tonight.  Tomorrow will be a particular challenge though. I think this self reporting is good.  It is boundaryless, but if it is useful to me, fuck it.

“They” tell you you have to have a morning ritual to “win the day”.  Me, I’m trying to see if I can connect days.  I have always dissociated every day.  I’ll start out in the morning often full of vim and vigor and somewhere in there a circuit breaker pops, and whatever I set out to do is gone.  I get the basics done.  I take care of myself reasonably well.  But I have a period within which to do it, then all bets are off.  One day never leads to another.  No sustained day after day progress has been possible for me.  I have of course made progress, but only by regularly making an effort on THAT DAY, and managing to string a number of single days together through my body, but not my mind.  I’ve deadlifted 510 and back squatted 420 through this process.  I have degrees from two good schools.  I’ve kept my business alive.

But I think I can do better now.  In the morning I fill a teacup to overflowing with water with a pinch of tea in it, then try to remember to empty it in the evening.  I forgot last night.  I have however managed to weigh myself every day for two weeks in a row.  This should not be much of an accomplishment.  Any idiot could do it, of course, and perhaps many idiots do.  But I have been the sort of idiot who could not.  My drinking, of course, has been a significant if not defining factor.

This morning 288.  I think I am going to track these three variables, publicly: my drinking, my weight, and whether or not I remembered to empty the tea cup.  These are barometers for how I am doing.

I will add that mindfulness is more or less equivalent to mental health.  Being present emotionally and perhaps spiritually. I do not think many of us can reach mental health THROUGH mindfulness though.  Rather, I think many of us cannot, even if some large number can.

For me: not a fucking chance.  I did meditation/mindfulness for 5 or more years.  It could not get to my brain.  Only Neurofeedback is able to do that, or so I believe.  This does not diminish the value of these practices, it simply means some of us have to do a lot of work merely to begin properly.

In life, there is the energy of coming together, which most of us do not experience nearly enough, and the energy of parting.  Often, just before parting, there is a heightened awareness of, and pleasure in the company of, our fellow humans.

Think the last scene in Grease.  You know the high will soon become a low, that Sandy and Danny will most likely settle into grumpy married-hood, that the glow will end, and most of the possibilities will be dimmed and then extinguished, for all but one or two, perhaps the ones one would least expect. Maybe Rizzo, after quickly realizing marrying is a terrible idea, gets her MD and goes and helps kids in Africa, or rural America, marries a handsome and attentive French patrician, and finds herself sad every time she goes back to her home town, in the latest model whatever car she wants to drive.

This coming and going is the energy of life.  It is the energy of sex.  Men, particularly, feel this fascination that grows and grows until, what?  Until they come.  Then the women loses her glow, unless there is genuine love present.  But as I’ve commented before, and why I’m not trying in the slightest to “get laid”, there is sadness in this too.  You have left a feeling human being feeling left in the lurch, abandoned, cast aside.  No feeling person can do this without self contempt.  Sex, per se, is a condiment.  It is not something which is emotionally nourishing in itself.

And we live on emotions.

I felt this energy strongly last night.  It was what I was dreaming of when I awoke. I’m reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Hello, Goodbye”.  I need to reread that book.  I’m not sure I ever even read it.  It’s on my shelf, though, with the Sirens of Titan and Cat’s Cradle.

How does one transform all strong emotions into a qualitatively interesting and varied, textured, nuanced joy?  This is the main question.  This is the focus of Kum Nye.

I have no intention of ever becoming a Buddhist.  We have a local Tibetan center where all the trendy people who relish the word “compassion” go.  The Tibetans are probably like, aahhh, we got cable, the foods not bad.  This is not such a bad life.  Target is in walking distance. We do our thing.  The setting is not remotely as beautiful, but we are still us, and some of us are still together.  That is something.  They have, in other words, a coming together among themselves, and a shaky but sometimes mildly real relationship with the public at large.  This will never truly belong to me, though.  We need something new.

I continue to dream my dreams.  I am a Pisces after all.  But I continue to believe a new form is possible and necessary.  I just have to become not crazy.  And although my dreams were emotionally intense, I don’t think I shook last night. I didn’t wake up and think I was dying.  No vocalizing.  Not a bad night overall.  No booze.

I continue my march towards, something.

The completion of ideology is when you are no longer capable of evaluating ideas on their merits, but rather submit all ideas to comparison with your fixed dogmas.  Everything must be exactly a meter, and to the extent it varies from a meter it is wrong.  People are meters.  Ideas are meters.  Production schedules are one meter exactly, 100 centimeters.  If they are 101 or 99, they are suspect.  If they are 50 or 150 they must be suppressed and reeducated, or destroyed.  Certainly anything but tolerated.

And I’m seeing this, of course, a lot.  Even kids in our best schools have lost the ability to understand WHAT I AM SAYING.  The words are lost on them.  What they hear is on a continuum from “he is with us”, which creates a harmonious sound in their brain, to “he is NOT with us: HE IS ONE OF THEM!!!”, which of course creates a symphony of disaster, a perfection of mismatch, a genius of cacophony.  It is unpleasant.  It makes them draw away.  It makes them hate the creator of this insidious sound, which is perfectly calibrated to make them distraught, each in their own way.

Tucker Carlson talked about this insightfully tonight I thought.  This thought has been on my mind, and of course I’ve said this rough thing countless times.

But what I am feeling more clearly is the INABILITY of so many on the Left to interact with alternative–alternative with respect to the small foggy island they live on–ideas.  You know, ideas like Liberalism being freedom.  You know, ideas which were the currency of the age a generation ago.  All gone now.

They literally cannot undergo the process of thinking new thoughts.  They literally cannot conceive any world in which their world view is not just correct, but demonstrably and irrefutably correct.

It’s a psychological weakness.  It is an emotional infantilism.  It is a form of madness, in most important respects.  They are not seeing literal hallucinations, but their ideas consist in very little other than projecting onto the world what they want to see, rather than what is actually there.  It is a form of grandiose wish fulfillment.  They want it to be so, so POOF, it IS so.  Because they wanted it to be so, and because the world cannot be a place where wishing does not make it so.

This is a deep sickness.  Large segments of our society have already plunged into darkness.  But Trump is President, and he fights the fight of the Cultural War.  And many people are waking up.  I think the Democrats are losing adherents in droves they will not get back in the next generation.  Their whole radicalizing game plan depended on Obama leading the way, and Hillary finishing up.  Again, this is why her loss was so catastrophic.  They can’t hide their radicalism any more, and they have no one on high protecting it.  Quite the contrary.

It’s an insidious sickness.  It has infected most of the “information” industry.  But it is far from clear this night might not have a dawn.