Month: June 2019

What if we are eternal beings, all sparks of something large, but to which we cannot return without personal extinction?  Might we not engineer for ourselves a forgetting of this fact? 

Might there be no higher moral command than that we take pleasure in the company of one another, in our work, and in small things, all in harmony, all in the present moment?

There is no requirement which stipulates that the universe be benign in any way.  Indeed, large masses of those among us have concluded it is cold, infinite, and indifferent entirely and that all traces of our personal existence will be gone in the blink of an eye, cosmically speaking, no matter what we do.  This seems to me a completely unnecessary conclusion–one not supported by the evidence–but I am playing with ideas here.

What might it mean to escape Samsara?

What if you could control everything in your environment: the physical conditions, the condition of your body, and you could move forward and backward in time and space at will?  What if you could manipulate the past, then move forward and see what happened an endless series of times, sort of like Apocalypse from the X-Men series, but with time control too?  What if you forgot what the initial beginning point even was?

I had these powers in a dream last night.

And I was left to wonder several things.  First, would we all necessarily be happier if evil were gone from the world?  Does it perhaps not serve some useful purpose?  Is it perhaps a base form of an energy without which life would have no savor and joy, and thus something which needs to be transmuted, not destroyed?  I think this is the case.

And if you could have anything, might you not just find it easier and more interesting to see where the chips fall, and accept the outcome?  This is perhaps a harder question to answer than you might suppose.

What if, rather than say “I love you”, you said “I feel good when I am with you”, and if you were so inclined, to add “I feel safe and find myself wishing for your happiness like my own.”

Addiction ends when a person recognizes that their problem—fear of life—will not be solved by their chosen method of many small deaths.

Recognizing this opens up a new box of tools, and unsuspected capabilities.

“We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Here is what I would submit: what is actually being admitted, for those for whom this system works, is that the addiction cannot solve the actual problem, that no amount of alcohol is sufficient to heal the wound, that the behavior is intrinsically futile, and must lead to death if taken to the logical extreme.

I read an excerpt from the writing of William R. Burroughs perhaps six months ago, and saw something which resonated with me, but which I think I have not posted before now.

After traveling to Colombia to find and take a drug called Yage, which seems to have been a species of Ayahuasca, but with perhaps a slightly different recipe than used mostly now, he succeeds, and writes the following:

I sat there waiting for results and almost immediately had the impulse to say “that wasn’t enough.  I need more.”  I have noticed this inexplicable impulse on the two occasions when I got an overdose of junk.  Both times before the shot took effect I said “This wasn’t enough. I need more.”

Roy told me about a man who came out of jail clean and nearly died in Roy’s room. “He took the shot and right away said, ‘that wasn’t enough’ and fell on his face out cold.  I dragged him out into the hall and called an ambulance.  He lived.” 

As you might imagine, given the setup, what follows reads like it was profoundly unpleasant.

Why would someone not say “that wasn’t enough” when it is the right amount, but say “that wasn’t enough” when it is too much?  My take is that some part of them wants to die.  The only real solution with drugs is death.  That is the end state where the pain actually stops permanently, at least in this reality.  Everything else is a compromise.  When they say “that wasn’t enough” some part of them is speaking a hidden truth.  What they really want is all of it; they want five times what it would take to kill them.

Did you know Keith Moon committed suicide?  I had always assumed it was a Janet or Jim or Jimmie style accident, but no, he took 36 or so pills, of which the first 6 killed him, and the rest were found in his system.  That was enough for him.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman had enough drugs in his apartment to kill himself many times over.  Looking it up, he was found with the syringe still in his arm, and a mixture of heroin, cocaine, benzodiazapenes (tranquilizers), and methamphetamine in his system.  He had enough, by William R. Burroughs standard.

Dealing with addiction directly is recognizing that palliatives cannot heal you, and they cannot even really palliate you.  They help you forget for a time: that is all.  When you wake up, you are still you, and you still hurt in all the familiar ways, plus the contributions of the hangover, social alienation, and/or whatever else attends your particular method of avoiding dealing with your injury.

This is the cold truth.  It is also the only way out.  There are many, many tools which can help this journey, but this fact must be recognized. 

For me, seeing this much has already required a lot of progress.  Many if not most people like me never see that far, I don’t think.  The pain makes clear sight impossible, not least because an important part of dealing with the pain is denying it even exists. 

You know: I’m fine.  It’s all good.  I feel fine.  I just like to have a drink or two here and there. I’m basically happy.  Why wouldn’t I be?  I have everything I need, a good job, a good wife, good kids.  Everything is fine, perfectly OK.  Just need a few here and there to calm me down.

It is like living in the rain, and denying you are wet.  I get all this.  It is all emotionally logical.  And it is not the consequence of emotional weakness.  It is being taken over by survival circuits which do everything they can to get you as long a life as possible, without having a fucking clue how to fix the underlying malfunction.  Everything is autopilot, on some level, even when it feels like choice.

Becoming free–or as free as we can get in this world, in these bodies–is a very difficult task, one which is accomplished by very few people.

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

According to his biography here, Gary Gygax, who more or less invented–or at least co-invented–Dungeons and Dragons, was a Republican poll monitor in the 1960 election, where he witnessed numerous “irregularities” that we can assume to be cheating, by Democrats.  He was offered–it does not say by whom–a scholarship to the University of Chicago, if he would keep his mouth shut.  He did not report the violations, but neither did he accept the scholarship.

It has long been alleged that Daley may well have thrown the national election by cheating in Chicago, which gave Kennedy Illinois.

It’s interesting to speculate how history would be different, if Nixon had won.  We certainly would not have had Johnson, and it’s unlikely that, if we had had “Vietnam”, that it would have played out incrementally, slowly, and at such high cost under Nixon.  Nixon did, I will remind you, win the Vietnam War, with General Creighton Abrams.  That victory was then crushed in the dirt and abandoned by Democrats who, for all intents and purposes, were the enthusiastic lackeys of the Communist dictators, invaders, tyrants, and sadists.

If you cannot process the past, you cannot process the present.  And if you cannot process the present, you cannot process the future.

Put another way, if you cannot look forward to today, you cannot look forward to tomorrow.

Put another way, the past clings, and until you can rid yourself of it, it will make you heavier and slow you down.

And if I might contradict myself (I might, in the event), if you do not know where you come from, it is impossible to know where you are beginning, when you decide where you should go.

I would actually unite these by saying that knowing who you are is really the outcome of processing the past.  It allows you to begin where you are, rather than where you wish you were, or mistakenly believe you are.

All of us, I think, simultaneously overestimate and underestimate what is possible for us.  Although I hate to quote him, I think Bill Gates captured this reasonably well by noting that most of us overestimate what we can do in a day, but underestimate what we can do in a year, and seriously underestimate what we can do in a lifetime, with focus, and with a plan.

But practically, for many of us, there is this whole sequence of largely unconscious emotional events which happen every morning on rising which color everything.  They limit what we can see, and they do so every day of our lives, until they are dealt with.  Dealing with these events is learning to begin to live consciously, and until we do that, all of us are boats on the sea without sails or rudders.  I made this sound like a good thing a few days ago, and it is, but on a much higher level.  In the end, none of us is really fully in control.  We never know for sure what may unexpectedly burst into our lives.  But this does not mean we cannot engineer and support regularities which are meaningful and healthy.

In most left wing areas–in areas populated by people who in most cases lie by calling themselves “liberal”–there are a lot of ethnic restaurants.  Such people pride themselves on their cosmopolitanism.  There are Chinese, Korean, Thai, Ethiopian, Turkish, Greek, Japanese, Indian, Lebanese, Persian, etc. restaurants.

Here is my thought: all of those countries are vastly more conservative, socially, than most conservative Americans.  This would apply even to Greeks, their fondness for Communist rhetoric, and long term flirtation with it, notwithstanding.

Leftists love themselves for their fascination with the Other, but their fascination is really a fascination with themselves, striking a pose which resembles but never approaches an ACTUAL engagement with the Other. It’s all narcissism.  It’s all nonsense.

My dislike for fat, slow, ignorant people notwithstanding, I’ve decided to eat at Cracker Barrel more often. Those people are also honest, and it cannot be said of most of them that they are trying to break our country apart, or willingly help our enemies–and those of freedom and decency generally–tear it down.

And I would add to that that I really think even the Muslims are just a tool in all this.  They have a role to play in tearing us apart, in weakening our institutions, in helping create divisions.  But in the end they, too, will be rolled into the general demise of everything good.  Their faith in Allah will do them no good, and it will not be protected.

Think about it: the Left is getting ready to roll out Pedosexuality, as the P in LGBTQP.  I’ve already seen it.  Most of these people will take a deep gulp, then DO IT.  They will accept it. 

Why would people trained to such an extraordinary degree not be perfectly willing to be defending the Muslims one minute, then denouncing them as retrogressive misogynists and homophobes (which they are) the next?  Once you train people to dance on strings, you can bounce them one way, then the other, and few of them will even realize you are doing it.  After all, part of the training is convincing them they are the smart ones, and thinking for themselves.

Wake up.  Whoever you are, wherever you are, wake the fuck up.

What to me is somewhat interesting about my last post was how quickly I dissociated.  I went abstract about my identity confusion, which is to say my lack of a felt sense of who I am.

Concretely, children who do not receive secure love, who to do not feel secure attachment, never really establish a firm sense of who they are vis-a-vis “the world”.  Figuring out how to do this is the task.  The essence of the promise of neurofeedback is giving adult children a retroactive secure, adequately nourishing childhood.

And I might add a post I nearly made a few days ago, after getting drunk Saturday night.  I woke up feeling strongly that my purpose in life is understanding the nature of evil, and HOW TO HEAL IT.

As I see it, there are two big metaphysical problems which can and should be dealt with by science, which would in a sane world be the focus of most of our resources (rather than better coffee pots, and faster cars): the nature and cure of evil, and the nature of life after death (is there any, and if so what is its nature).  Meaning formation–what to do–follows logically from ones understanding of these two.

I am not meant to be a part of the “Life after death” team in this lifetime, although I hope some more smart people within the scientific establishment take it up much more robustly than has yet been done.  Currently there are already some excellent contributions by people like Eben Alexander and the Windbridge Institute .

But really the lack of funding is tied to the problem of evil.  It is tied to spiritual constriction, lack of imagination, excessive hubris, and the loss of faith, really, in life itself, within the materialistic paradigm which is–for all I can see–completely indefensible empirically and scientifically.

I’m on Team Evil.  My job is to experience first hand all the things which make people mean, angry, dishonest, scheming and nasty.  I know why people kick dogs.  I know what it is like to feel continual rage and fear, and to bury them in denial, and even in benign rhetoric, such that the evil becomes rationalized as good. I am quite capable of writing soaring verse about love, then being nasty to the store clerk.

And I’m getting a strong sense of deja vu.  Maybe I’ve written all this before.  Be that as it may, my job is to figure out how to turn dog kicking into authentic love, and figure out a SYSTEM that people can copy and emulate.  That is my job, here. 

And my work continues.  I’m not an innocent man yet, by any means.  I have many miles to go.  But that is my purpose.  That is my identity: chosen or assigned, I don’t know and don’t care.

And what I just wrote was authentic.  That was not dissociative.  On the contrary.

My shaking and shouting, without dreams, seems to be giving way to dreams where I feel deep confusion about who I am.  My fear has defined me; now I am confused.  This is progress.

To grow, you often need to forget who you were, to let it go.

But this has limits.  Since I have a long standing habit of making everything political, I did again this morning.  Specifically, this whole gender confusion thing: what it seems like to me is adding a consumerist mindset to identity.  But in liberating some people, it is setting many others adrift.

There are of course true transgender people out there, who feel like they were born in the wrong body, but for every one of those, there are, now, probably 5-10 kids who just feel like being somebody different, just because they can.

But the passion is missing from this, it seems to me.  Watch this video, which it seems to me is only barely satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j4rrgr0KeU

When we read that kids are not having as much sex nowadays, this makes sense.  Allan Bloom talked about this back in the 1980’s, how the passion was missing, how it was inconceivable to the kids he taught that they would kill or die for love.  They were just like “whatever dude, it’s just a relationship, you know, the one I’m shacking up with for now.”

Listen to the kid: everything he says is abstract.  It’s like he has no hormones at all.  This is a comedic exaggeration, but in far, far too many cases, I suspect, not much of one.

In Politically Correct culture, all native impulses, all spontaneity, have to be surrendered.  Everything has to be run through a filter which asks if that behavior is presently acceptable.  I will reapply Mencken’s famous quote on Puritans:  Political Correctness: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

As for me, it seems to me that, while I think identity needs to be flexible, it needs some wide parameters.  Rumi was, in the end, a Muslim, even if he recognized other roads.  The Buddha formed a set of ideas and practices which he, or at least his disciples, called Buddhism, and which defined them.


I think we all need something like that.  Our organism needs something like that.  You need to know what you are protecting, what furthering, and why.  We are teleological organisms, and if there is nothing seeking a purpose, we will be intrinsically frustrated.


So it is perfectly reasonable to seek to grow as a person, while recognizing that growth in this life has limits, or tends to for nearly all of us, and not to be too greedy.  A steady even pace is the ideal.


And I would contrast personal growth, in which each individual processes the world and their experience within it differently, for their own individual use, with putative “social growth”, in which each individual is expected to subordinate their own experience to dictates handed down on high.  This latter process cannot but build frustration which cannot be expressed within the system, and cannot but build emotional fools who have learned nothing but the suppression of all their natural instincts, which alone can guide them to true wisdom.