Month: April 2019

I am realizing by all rights I should be psychotic.  Both of my parents, in their own ways, tried to break me, to squeeze me like a grape in a vise.

But I remain psychologically alive.  This is a miracle of sorts.  I don’t know it happened, other than that I was some combination of agile enough, and resilient enough.  And I am getting stronger.

The capacity to endure this level of pain, though, I think makes me able to see more than most people.

And what I see is that our society, itself, is slowly becoming psychotic.  At least, some large segment of our cultural order has fallen into ruin, and what remains has as a full time job fighting to preserve in any form what remains.

Our academics–on their account at least the best minds we have–have given up on the pursuit of truth, beauty and sanity.  They have more or less consigned themselves to ruin.  This is what Collectivism is: ruin.  It is the destruction of all human potential, all genuine flourishing, all genuine goodness.  It is a mass psychosis.  We have seen its fruits in Ethiopia, and Cuba, in China, and Vietnam.  It is a grey world, run by grey people, where 2″ equals 3″ if the rulers say so.

If you take a traditional group, say the Hmong of southeast Asia, they have been living in essentially the same ways for thousands of years (so I assume, hundreds I would think at a minimum).  As a group, they have certain customs, and within the group you no doubt have tribes, and within the tribes perhaps clans, and within the clans families.  Everyone is born with a place.  It is all organic.  No one is telling them this is how it has to be.  It is how they want it, in large measure, even in the modern era some of their young reject tradition.

Collectivism is Plastic Soul.  It is plastic culture.  It is wide eyed psychopaths saying “we can build a better culture.  We know how.  We know just what to do.  We have read all the books.  We just, you know, need to break a few eggs, again.  It will work this time.”

There is nothing even remotely organic about it. 

Here is the thing: humans are innately creative and adaptive, so we are quite capable of building new forms which ARE authentically organic.  But we need to stop being attacked by the psychopaths, and everyone top to bottom needs to realize that this is not something which CAN happen top down, much less something which SHOULD happen top down, as directed by well funded propagandists broadcasting their shit from every street corner and news stand.

Stand down, assholes, and all will be fine.  Your static, your incoherence, makes new forms impossible.  Just stop trying the save the world and go play checkers somewhere.  Hire hookers and snort coke.  I don’t care.  Just stop trying to help.  Your help is a toxin which is paralyzing all of our souls.

And the wages of betraying the Church is death.

In Catholic dogma, which prevailed at least until the schism with the Eastern church, and all over Europe until the Reformation, the church is the conduit to God.  The Church equals Jesus, equals the intermediator (apparently I just invented that word).

Here are a couple amended scriptures:

“For God so loved the world that he created his one and only universal Church, that whoever believes in it shall not perish but have eternal life.”


“The Pope answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Recall too the power the Pope exercised for a long time of condemning the souls of kings and heretics to eternal, or least long lasting, damnation.  That is a magical, magisterial power, if you think about it.  And you indoctrinate everyone from cradle to grave to believe in it.  The Pope as spell caster, as God’s magician, as a sorcerer who can curse both your present life and your afterlife.

Who created this dogma?  Popes, and those who benefited from their power, obviously.

Christ had nothing to do with any of this.

There are many small things which will not make much of a difference in your day, but a huge difference, over time, in your life.

I read a quote somewhere in the past few months that went something like: Life is nothing more or less than a large conglomeration of moments.

If you have an otherwise bland tapestry, regular sparks of orange and gold and saffron will change the quality of the whole thing, won’t they?  “Life”, this reification so many of us cannot resist referring to, is the same.

I intend to say something else, but first off, it occurs to me that “Reflections” sounds deep, but literally it is by definition stopping at the surface.

Be that as it may, when insights–deep insights, about the past, about others, about Life–“intrude” on an average day, and square off, each in their own corner, against Time, who usually wins?    Is it not usually a knock-out of the insight by Time, within ten to thirty seconds?  Who has –what?–TIME to ponder the meaning and purpose and proper pursuit of life?  Things to do, places to go, deadlines to meet.

It’s very tempting to speculate that it is not Time which prevents deeper thought, but rather that most people are quite content with an arrangement which keeps them from thinking too deeply.  “Oh, I would explore those painful emotions, but I have a dentist’s appointment.”  “Oh, I would wonder if I’m living my life right, but who even knows how to answer fucking questions like that, and oh look I’m late for something or other.”

Now, I am not saying that condescendingly.  I may talk like I’m on the mountaintop, but I’m very much in the valley, often surrounded by fog.  I get how painful all this can be.  I get it personally, and daily.

I will say though that I have arranged my life precisely to support this sort of work.  Right now, this very moment, I”m not at work.  I have work to do this week, but it can be done at my own pace, on my own schedule.  Until someone lights a fire under my ass–which may happen next week, although I very much doubt it–I can take an hour and do my personal yoga routine, and take 15-20 minutes to write blog posts like this. 

My life is deeply uncomfortable at times, but I base it on a simple logic: if death is eternal, not much matters, but if we survive this life, then all we can bring with us is are the emotional riches we built across our lifetimes.  Nothing else.  As U2 put it, “all that you can’t leave behind”.  This makes work on personal growth the only way to build meaningful wealth.  This, then, means that economic “work” needs to be in support of finding time, and sufficient resources for whatever projects I may undertake, like Neurofeedback.  This is my logic.

And many nights find me shaking like a leaf, screaming, speaking in tongues (more or less: I don’t know what to call vocalizing in a words which don’t match any living or dead language, and which I think hearken back to my time as an infant trying and failing to communicate my distress in words), and feeling like I am dying.  And the demons of course.  Let’s not forget those.

All in all, not an attractive picture.  My life, as I have built it, is not easy.  But I find no faults in my logic, so I persist.  And as it happens, last night was free of everything but the vocalizing.  No demons, no shaking, no major conflicts (although I did meet up with a Tier 1 SoCom unit for some reason: but no bullets were fired by anyone).  This is progress.  I’ve been working a plan I will describe at some point.

But it seems to me this morning I have no people and no place, and on terms which do not require me to compromise, I never will, until I create them.  I have to create myself first.  I have to be a stable person.  To use the acronym, I need to be Flexible, Adaptable, Coherent, Energized and Stable.

Then I want to throw out seeds which will attract people I can bond with at a deep level.  In the end, as I have said often, I want to create a “religion” suitable for our time and place.  I have all the ideas.  It’s a question of me being the sort of person that perceptive people would trust.  I’m not there yet.

My work continues.  Every day is a small death, and every death a small victory, and every victory a small step up a tall mountain.  We live by dying, and we die more easily when we manage our fear of death.

In important respects, I think the Buddhist notion of Anatman amounts to this: if I am growing, then who I am today is not who I was yesterday, and who I am this morning will not be who I am tonight when I lay my head down.  And when I wake up, who that person is will not be who laid their head down.

There is some part of our brain which ALWAYS seeks homeostasis, which seeks the One Answer, answered once and forever.  At the ideational, philosophical, dogmatic level, you need a riposte to this impulse, to this voice, to this river of honest energy.

You have to be willing to lose your sense of safety, your ability to say, with seeming accuracy, I am “THIS”.  You have to lose yourself to gain the world.

Or to put perhaps a new spin on an old quote:


“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it”.


If you deduct the mumbo-jumbo presumably added by the early Church to increase their power, it’s not hard to put a Buddhist spin on Christ’s teachings.  They needed Jesus to be absolutely unique, but he wasn’t.  He was just another advanced soul doing his job.  And I will continue to wonder if that soul, on balance, found his work more useful than harmful.  There are lots of entries on both sides of the ledger.  But the notion of universal human rights is, I think, a notion which emanated from Christianity.  So too the disgust at animal sacrifice.


We would need to know how the next century plays out to make a final determination.  And that process, of course, can still be influenced for the better.

What doesn’t kill you, can help you learn to deal with the fear of death.