Month: May 2019

My quest is to be fully authentic, not so much for other people, although this will be an outcome presumably, but to myself.  I want to stop lying to myself about anything.  If there is a sign above the gate to Hell that says “Abandon all Hope Ye who Enter”, there is one, perhaps, above the gate to Heaven which says “Abandon all False Hope, Ye who Enter”.

And what I realize is that if you have pain in you, learning to feel it is part and parcel of the path.  Some pains, like that of feeling unloved as a small child, cross the sky.  They are so vast that I don’t know how anyone copes with them without drugs or alcohol.  Most people don’t, of course.  Perhaps no people do, not the pain I am talking about.  Most people pull back.  They don’t walk into the thing undiluted.

It is the pain of contracting your whole being into a tall post, and feeling someone chopping at its base.  It is terror and pain and hopelessness all bound into one and amplified a hundredfold.

But this pain passes.  I think most pains you only have to feel fully once.

That’s my sunny two cents for today.

It occurs to me that tiny infants act as a kind of truth serum.  You cannot lie about who you are in the presence of children.  If you are impatient, it will be shown.  If you are callous, it will be shown.  If you are a fearful person, it will be shown.

And I can’t resist speculating that some parents react to these unconscious and completely innocent effects of children by refusing to claim them, by rejecting them, by blaming the children for their own deficiencies.

And since what I write about is me, here, mainly, I further cannot resist speculating that I was a very precocious child who saw and understood things far beyond my age, and it frightened and then angered my mother.  She told me some years ago–I think it was a confession of sorts, although she laughed and tried to make it a joke, and certainly did not seem to feel any genuine contrition–that they used to spank me sometimes for being too quiet.  I would just be sitting there, I guess, in a trance of sorts, and that scared them, so they hit me.

Worse things happen to kids, obviously, but effects are also proportionate to the sensitivity of a child.  Some kids seemingly can handle nearly anything–especially if they have at least one caregiver they bond with, which I didn’t have–and some of us just sort of spin in circles then crash.  I crashed.

This is an interesting thought, though, that children more or less compel self knowledge and personal development of parents–especially mothers–if they are sincere and trying to do it more or less right, and that much child abuse may come from parents unwilling to read the tea leaves being presented to them, which they interpret (no doubt in the main unconsciously) as reproaches and inappropriate accusations of deficiency.  That little shit, they say, I’ll teach him (about me, as I see me, and what I consider my role in this whole thing).

It occurs to me that the goal of personal development is that your emotional reactions are perfectly appropriate to and proportionate to present existing realities.  Not imagined realities, not past realities, not possible future realities (except of course to the extent it is prudent to feel emotions now about things which may happen in the future in respect to which concrete actions can be planned and executed.)

And when there is nothing to react to, there is contentment and satisfaction, as a default state.

Most of us, of course, are twisted into many times, and many imaginary spaces, nearly always in ways it is usually impossible to feel fully, and respond to appropriately.

It occurs to me this is one draw of adrenaline sports: you can’t be present anywhere else, so it is a drug to make everything else disappear for a time.

Drugs and every other addiction of course too, quiet that nest of unquiet.

But if emotions have logic–and they do–then the goal is for that logic to conform to present circumstances, and present circumstances only. If you are well integrated, no one ever need worry about or wonder why you are reacting the way you are.  It is the way any healthy person would react.

Any more, though, to be healthy is to be special.  My standard is very high, and I very certainly do not meet it.  Yet.

I won’t share everything I’m thinking here, but it occurred to me that, from a psychodynamic perspective, labeling myself with an old school Inferiority Complex might not be completely unreasonable.  When I was with my mother a bit ago, I really noticed how small she made me feel, how insignificant.  I dreamed one night about being Ant Man, and repeatedly growing and shrinking as needed.

And it occurs to me to posit, likely accurately, as may some day be discovered, that there is an intimate and necessary connection between what are called Complexes, and the unmyelinated vagus system, including all the viscera.  The stomach plexus almost certainly plays a role.  The Complex feels like something outside, or inside but autonomous.  The gut nervous system and reptilian brain would certainly fit this description.  In some circumstances, they more or less run most of the show emotionally.

For me, I think I learned to toggle between shame and normality, or perhaps between shame and freeze/invisibility.  The latter is more likely.  I never felt free of fear, so normality was never really anything but a relative option.  Played out in any other context this would be alternating between dissociation, and anger/violence/fear/inferiority.

On this rendering, the Inferiority Complex would be a residual traumatic residue where most of the holding happens in the shame mechanism, even if the other members of the Unholy Triumvirate–fear (the urge to run) and rage (the urge to fight and destroy)–are not absent.

It’s not too late for psychology to become intelligent.  There are many near misses, but where wholistic approaches are concerned, as far as I am concerned, there are no bullseyes yet, no methods where reliably positive results can be expected among all trained practitioners, regardless of their own personal ideosyncrasies and (presence of or lack of) emotional intelligence. 

There is no penicillin yet, although in my view Neurofeedback has that potential.

My work continues.  Last night was interesting, both in good and really unpleasant ways.  I’m used to that shit by now.  I still get scared, but my recovery is getting faster and faster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel

In 1968, Merkel joined the Free German Youth (FDJ), the official communist youth movement sponsored by the ruling Marxist–Leninist Socialist Unity Party of Germany.^[34][35][36] Membership was nominally voluntary, but those who did not join found it difficult to gain admission to higher education.^[37] She did not participate in the secular coming of age ceremony Jugendweihe, however, which was common in East Germany. Instead, she was confirmed.^[38] During this time, she participated in several compulsory courses on Marxism-Leninism with her grades only being regarded as “sufficient”.

Later, at the Academy of Sciences, she became a member of its FDJ secretariat. According to her former colleagues, she openly propagated Marxism as the secretary for “Agitation and Propaganda”.^[40] However, Merkel has denied this claim and stated that she was secretary for culture, which involved activities like obtaining theatre tickets and organising talks by visiting Soviet authors.^[41] She stated “I can only rely on my memory, if something turns out to be different, I can live with that.”

Here is another thing we forget at our peril: not only was Germany Nazi in the not too distant past, a good section of it was COMMUNIST in the more recent past.  Germany’s current Prime Minister–I think is her title, or Chancellor–was a Communist.  She was raised as a Communist. 

She was raised, other words, to hate Capitalism, liberal Democracy, Constitutional curbs on the power of government, and to believe that the State should be the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.  She may, for obvious reasons, want to distance herself from all that, but all Communists lie.  This does not mean that she is lying, but if she is a Communist, there is no reason she would not.

I look at the history of the past 100 years, and I see fields littered with corpses, and people still, even now, trying to deal with the aftermath of all that death and destruction.  The divorces, the addictions, the psychological pain.

Without intense inner work, it is nearly impossible for most of us to even know what diseases we are carrying, and this is important, since many of them are contagious, particularly and most egregiously to our children, which I will remind everyone Angela Merkel never had.  She does not speak for future generations of any personal significance to her.  It is all an abstraction, which is all any politics ever is for a Communist, or any other sort of ideologue.

We read about World War 2 nowadays as what seems like another era, another time, but it is still very much present.

The EU was conceived as a way to repeat the sorts of disasters which happened in the two World Wars.

And what I just sort of grokked is that the “Swinging London” very much has to be seen as an extension of the trauma of World War 2.

Specifically, I watched a documentary more or less on the Who, but focused on their managers, Kit Lambert, and Chris Stamp (Lambert and Stamp), and realized Pete Townshend was born right around VE day, in May of 1945.  Roger Daltry was born March 1, 1944, not long before D-Day.  Keith Moon was born the 23rd of August, 1946.

All of them, in other words, were born into an atmosphere of fear, pain, want and privation.  This is not specifically mentioned in their autobiographies, but it was there.  Eric Clapton, to take another example, was born of a Canadian soldier there for the war, who impregnated his mother when she was very young, and who was raised thinking his grandparents were his parents.  Another war story.

Wars ripple down the generations.  They do not ever end when they end.  Today’s soldiers will be leaving traces for 2-3 generations, both good and bad.  They bring home both nobility and inner chaos and pain, not infrequently in the same mind and body which they keep together however they can.

I had not realized until this moment what stunningly bad law Roe v. Wade is.  

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In order to make all abortions legal because it is a “private matter”, you have to assume, or assert, that no crime can be committed in the commission of an abortion.  Otherwise, people selling drugs behind closed doors have a “right to privacy”, as do people running guns, operating illegal casinos, trafficking in humans, embezzling from their employers, etc.  The list is endless and can be made to compass substantially all the crimes on the books.

If a pregnant woman goes to a known abortionist, then there exists “probable cause” to assume a crime is about to be committed, if it is illegal to murder fetuses.  There is probable cause a crime HAS been committed, if there exist “medical remains”–fetal remains–indicating an abortion has taken place.

Thus, if we accept Roe v. Wade on its face, the same legal logic could be used to affirm ANY crime the SCOTUS wanted to support, if I am understanding this correctly.  The bookie taking illegal bets could claim that the law has no business interfering in his private business, and the Supreme Court could concur, thus making all forms of gambling impossible for local jurisdictions to criminalize.

In order for Roe v. Wade to make sense, it has to be ASSUMED that not only is killing a fetus not a crime, but that no legislature of any State has the right to claim it to be so, now or at any time in the future.  It has to make an enduring and categorical definition of human life without any possibility of rebuttal or change.  This is an assertion without any basis whatsoever in philosophical reasoning or legal precedent.  It is the sort of activity Jefferson specifically feared they would start to engage in, and thus ruin the Republic.

It is utterly corrupt intellectually, at the least, and certainly legally.  Laws are to be made by legislatures, and are to be mutable based on changing views about a variety of things.

This is a completely different topic, but I finally watched Deliverance, and wanted to share my conclusion that there were two different men, which is to say that Jon Voight killed the wrong guy.  Yes, it is apparently the same actor, but the same actor can play multiple roles in one film.  John Boorman had a pathetic budget which among other things required the actors to perform their own stunts, including Jon Voight actually scaling that cliff without a safety harness.

Here is my reasoning.  The two rapists were most likely wanted criminals.  They were going to kill Ned Beatty and Jon Voight and perhaps just leave them somewhere, knowing that it was likely someone would come looking for them sooner or later.  They just figured they would vanish in the woods.  They were not just standing there waiting for Beatty and Voight: how could they have known they would come ashore just there, or even that they were on the river (unless of course the hillbillies up the river told them)?

They must have been hunting, and if this is the case, then they must have only had one gun, or both would have been armed.  And that gun was a shotgun–double barreled as I recall.  That gun was buried with the dead man.

The man Jon Voight shot was armed with a standard rifle.  He also had teeth.  And the dead man in their party (was it Ed?  I forget as this was a couple weeks ago, and not important enough to post until now) had no gun wounds, and that he passed out from nervous exhaustion was the most logical explanation.

And even while watching the movie climbing that cliff made no sense to me.  If the guy had shot their guy, he was still pretty far up river.  If he was heading to that cliff, it was going to take time.  Burt Reynolds was hurt, and they were still, no matter what, going to need to get down river to get him help.  The time to go was then, not to wait until the guy, if he was there, caught up with them.  And even then, that was a long distance at which to hit a moving target, firing at that angle.

So my take is that the second criminal got away scot free, and the men managed to kill an innocent man, who was the hunter the sheriff was asking about.

This seems to be a minority opinion, although not absent on the internet.  Again, it is complicated–no doubt somewhat intentionally–by the use of the same actor.

As to the rape, I really have nothing intelligent to say.  Maybe I will tomorrow.  This is a violent, sometimes very unpleasant world, but there is nothing deep in making that obvious point.

I was contemplating last night my off-hand comment I think the night before that I had no idea what would happen that night.  And this was true.  I’ve seen everything from visions of heaven (some years ago) to many different demonic appearances (more recently) to mindfucks I can’t begin to describe where I am split into pieces.

Always, I awake and cohere, and go to work (if I have any that day), and it occurs to me that this is roughly the proper way to live.  I don’t have recurring nightmares: I invent new ones.

I am open to new experience.  I wait and listen and see what happens, then I try to learn from it.  Every day is a completely new day.  Nothing is the same, even if nearly everything is the same.

And in my contemplation, I was pondering that the mission of the early Buddhists, who were sent off to beg and wander the rest of their lives, was to treat every new day of the rest of their lives as a new day.

What I find is that when you risk your current understanding of yourself, it refreshes, in a slightly new way.  The picture moves, perhaps, but is still recognizable.  It’s still you.  But you are learning flexibility, trust, to leap into the vortex with faith.

And everyone has their own refresh rate.   You are clearly NOT the same person you once were.  The river does not stop flowing.  But if you live in a tight social system, you are reaffirmed daily that you are who you are.  You see the same faces, hear the same names, do the same things, walk the same streets. Your image of you is presented back to you by others regularly.  This is a high refresh rate.

Those who live more solitary lives have much slower refresh rates.  They go longer between validations that they are who they are and not someone else.  And what I am finding is that with a very low refresh rate, you sort of free-flow.  Your identity does not seem as fixed and solid.  This feels, initially, like incipient madness.  But if I was going to go crazy, it would have happened long ago.  Long, long ago.

No: what this becomes, with time and practice and flexibility, is a new way of being, of being a person in this world.  You find a more stable foundation of trust and hope and joy.  I woke up very happy this morning, for no reason I could discern.  This is the point: it is something you allow, not something you create or force.  It is a gift which visits in the night.

Maybe we are all paying the price now for how they survived back then.

Context: I laid down to go to sleep, and it hit me that we have never had it so good.  100 years ago no one reported incest, but it must have happened.  Likewise most rapes.  Life was hard for most, disease and premature death common.  In much of the world hunger was and remains common, as does insufficient or bad quality water.  There were wars, economic crashes, forced marriages, loveless and inescapable marriages, dead kids.  There were bosses who were tyrants, companies which ground down your soul.

Is it true that Americans now are less tough, or that they are just more honest?  Can we not stipulate it is a bit of both, and that the new softness has also a new kindness that need not become decadent?

I am just musing aloud.  I should and will go back to bed, for my nightly adventures.  God only knows what will happen, but if it’s interesting and something I’m willing to share, I may report it tomorrow.