Month: June 2019

You know, when I interact with youth even at elite schools–like the University of Chicago–they have this fundamental callowness about them that was not present, I don’t think, even a generation ago.  Yes, a twenty year old is a twenty year old, but a twenty year old now seems to operate emotionally at the level of what would have been a 12 year old a generation ago.

They seem to think it the acme of comedy to repeat things, for group approval; to use some version of “that’s what she said” as the focal point of their argument.

It’s not possible for me personally not to see a role in all this played by electronics.  These kids–and twenty year olds are still kids, nowadays, most of them–grew up in a sort of hive mind enabled by texting and smartphones.  All you need to get attention is a single word, a point of resonance, to which the hive mind reacts in predictable ways.

What these kids have lacked in on-going adult conversation.  To get into an elite school obviously they took care of their test scores, got high grades, brown-nosed the right teachers, and demonstrated interests outside of school.

But did they ever truly undergo a process of emotional maturation?  It would not appear so.  They seem to think Spongebob Squarepants sorts of humor and interaction are normal and acceptable.

I had a very strict ban on that show specifically (and Rugrats, and Cartoon Network generally) as far as my own kids, because as I told them I could feel myself getting stupider every moment I spent watching that show.  But not all kids had parents like me.  Far too many of them, seemingly, consumed far too much of it.  If I were a Communist, working on social propaganda to weaken the United States, that is the sort of programming I would have come up with.  Maybe that is literally what happened, even if somewhat inadvertently.

But these kids learn to put up a tough front.  They learn synchronizing signals, things that will get everyone to laugh.  But inwardly, they are weak and pathetic and they know it.  They lack character.  They lack dignity.  They lack emotional independence.  They lack originality and creativity.  And they suffer inwardly because of all these defects, and because their social relations are fundamentally superficial, because they are superficial people.  They lack the language of deep emotion.  They lack practice using it, or even attempting it.  Their politics is a bandage over their fundamental rootlessness, uselessness, and directionlessness.  They are Outer Directed people who are not yet being consistently told what to do.  This is what makes some form of fascistic politics so vitally important to them emotionally.

Again, it’s hard to be optimistic.  But there are many game-changers which could happen on us in the course of week or even a day.  These are all abstractions.  I still have my health, my freedom, and another day.

Would you like our nation to go the way of Shel Silverstein Giving Tree, and for the same reason?

This phrase popped into my head today.

Quite often, what is called “healing” is really growing new emotional muscles we didn’t even imagine were possible.  There is no default setting for life.  You are either moving forward, or regressing.  I don’t think stasis, true equilibrium, is possible, even if the apparent motion in both directions is slow and barely perceptible.

I am not the person I would have been, had I had different parents, did I not carry this horror within me.  But that energy is something which drives me to new discoveries, to inner work which never would have happened had I been happy.  It has given me an extraordinary psychological pain tolerance.

Much of happiness in life consists in accepting fully who you are, where you are, and where you are going.

Free will is realizing, while you are floating in a strong rivers current, that you can still paddle.  Acceptance is realizing you can’t get out of the river, taking a deep breath, and embracing in advance What Comes Next.

Thinking about that documentary I watched yesterday, many people were upset by the Vietnam War.  Put another way, they were upset by something awful–from any perspective, even that of viewing it as absolutely necessary–which they could not control, but which also did not personally affect them in any way, as far as I could tell.

They were upset, in other words, by abstractions.  They were upset by things they would not have even known about, if it was a war in Asia 200 years ago that didn’t concern Americans.

Here is my question: to what extent is it healthy and responsible to allow yourself to be upset by large global events over which you have no control?

Self evidently Trump Derangement Syndrome makes a lot of people very, very unhappy.  It seems to ruin them.  They obsess about this President, even though they have not met him, will most likely never meet him, and even though his policies likely don’t affect them any way but positively, in the sense of being globally good for the American economy.

Or take the abstractions of death and pain, which we all know must come to us someday.  If they are not here yet, should we allow them to upset us?  To fracture our happiness, and rupture our tranquility?

And obviously there are at least two questions here: 1) Should we allow it?  and 2) Could we stop it if we chose to?  The latter question of course connects to the substance of the Buddhist method, which contains both ideas and concrete calming practices; although I should add in that regard that all religions serve to calm and comfort their adherents in times of doubt and pain.

Faith tells you it all works out.  Manifestly, it doesn’t all work out here, on this Earth.  Men that Obama was supporting in Syria took a hacksaw to an 8 year old girl and cut off her arms and legs.  I have more than once tried to imagine what sort of person would be capable of something like that.  I can’t get there.  But things did not work out for that girl or, presumably, her mother and father, who were likely already dead.

I’m just talking out loud here.  I’m not saying anything new or particularly interesting, but these are perennial questions, for which all of us can come up with different answers across a lifetime.

And I won’t offer an opinion.  I just don’t know.

Maybe some things we should worry about, and others we should let go.  If you lose sleep over all the evil in the world, you won’t sleep.  Ignorance is bliss.  At this moment, for example, I don’t know how many wars are happening in Africa, how many people starving, how many people suffering slow deaths from AIDS. I could inform myself, but to what end?  What can I do?  I do Kiva loans and will occasionally pay for a year of schooling for some girl in Afghanistan, but that is not much.  I guess I should do more loaning anyway.  It’s not much to me, but everything to some people.

I think I might stipulate a principle, though, that where individuals are concerned, everything is never close to enough.  Mother Teresa, as one obvious example, gets many but not all diseased people in Calcutta.  But she isn’t in Cairo, or Damascus, or Uganda.  There is too  much misery in this world for any one person.

The more I read, the more I think, the more I like the Tao Te Ching.  There is nothing dogmatic in there.  It says there is a Way.  It is hard to find, most people never find it, and this too is the Way of the universe.  Don’t sweat it.  It says to renounce sainthood, but I think I am safe in saying that Lao Tzu would have counseled all of us to be considerate and courteous in our everyday dealings with all the people in our lives.  That is a good start, and farther than many people get.

I’m rambling.  I do that.  

Wisdom, to me, is looking at every aspect of life as exciting, new, fresh, and invigorating.  It is looking at life as a small child, with the experience of an old man.

In Zen, particularly, they talk continually about Beginner’s Mind.  What I can’t see, though, is how anyone capable of embodying this energy could ever want to become a teacher.  Beginner’s Mind is a fetish they worship.  If you do Zen long enough, they sit you in front of people who offer you ritual respect, and ask your opinion on various topics.  Jail.  It’s fucking jail.

Me, I look at phrases like “Old Soul”, and think such a thing is incompatible with wisdom, unless you mean someone willing to offer help to people out of an overflowing of happiness, spontaneity, and love of vigorous challenge.

I take some pride in the fact that both of my kids have been called “Old Souls” by numerous people in various contexts.  What is intended is they are much more mature than most kids their age, and both have a spirit of service within them.  Both were called “Mom” in their peer groups, because they took care of their friends–and any strays who happened along.

But as I have almost certainly said before, a true Old Soul is a Young soul.

Oh, I’m drinking.  I wasn’t going to drink tonight, but then I realized with crystal clarity I was absolutely going to get drunk tomorrow or the next day, and I just have too much fucking work to do that.

But I am slowly quieting the buzzing.  When I get to the end of this phase, I will have freedom of movement, and that will be very, very interesting.  My whole life, I’ve had two hands tied behind my back.  Get me free, and I may actually start being smart.  To be clear, I think I have been smart, but my vision has been much too limited, emotionally and intellectually.  I can do much better.

It starts with an appreciation of beauty, all beauty.  I’m pretty sure of that.

I was reading, with respect to Alex Trebek’s recovery from cancer, that his doctors are ecstatic and that they have never seen anything like it.  As he comments in People (I think it was), it’s hard not to believe that millions of people praying for him must have made a difference.  Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer is normally a death warrant carried out quickly.

I continue to hope one day we figure all this out.  As with any exploration, the first step is to realize you don’t know everything, and go looking for something new and undiscovered.

Mediocrity is a form of selfishness.

A problem I have had for some years is I don’t know where to go to find groups of people interested in asking fundamental questions about our culture who are not unrepentant, reflexive Leftists.  Why does it seem to be either/or?  Either you are artistic or you are a conservative.  Either you accept things just the way they are, or you have to join this fucking cult filled with willfully ignorant, and–they claim–unintentionally destructive, self important assholes?

Again, Trump has brought all this to the surface.  Where are the creative types willing to openly embrace Trump?  There are a few, like James Wood and Jon Voight and Clint Eastwood, but they continue to have careers (if they do: Wood’s career seems to be over) only in spite of and not because of their political beliefs.  They exist as atoms in places otherwise hostile to them and their beliefs.

Where is the awakening?  Where are the smart people of good will willing to ask hard questions about their core assumptions?  I can’t go to New York, or back to Chicago, or the Bay Area.  As near as I can tell, I am going to need to be the attracting particle in something new.

Avant-Garde, in our current cultural context, consists neither in privileging the past, nor trying to destroy it.  There is a Third Way, a somewhat overused but still numerically accurate phrase.  It is still possible to bring humility and goodwill to the problems of humanity.

And it seems to me doing something other than shout through a megaphone, in our current situation, would be a big part of doing something actually different and new.

https://kartemquin.vhx.tv/products/inquiring-nuns

I really enjoyed this, and found it thought provoking.  It even features a soundtrack by Phillip Glass, who I had forgotten went to the University of Chicago (he entered an accelerated program at age 15).

Here is my take: taking global civilization to the next step, sustainable peace, requires a solution to dogmatism.  Dogmatism, in turn, as a result of fear and following rigidity, requires a solution to emotionally impoverished childhoods.  We need, as humans, to develop a way to give people who grew up miserable to in effect recreate on a more positive footing their foundational sense of life and its possibilities.

Nothing else will work, in my view.  All rigid people–myself included–deal in ideas.  But our attraction to one set of ideas relative to another depends entirely on the water in which we swim, which is to say our core emotional reality, our “presets”, our hidden emotional assumptions which color invisibly, often if not usually if not invariably, our reality.

What we take to be true, in other words, about “life”, has much to do with how safe we felt when we were two years old.  No amount of talking can alter this reality.  No talk therapy has a hope of liberating a truly liberal, truly open spirit, and within talk therapy I would include the work of all philosophers of the human condition.

With one exception: perhaps religion, and perhaps uniquely a religion based on love, like Christianity, MAY allow this frozen energy release.  This is perhaps the most important contribution of Christianity, particularly.  It is not a religion you are born into, when it is taken seriously, but one you are born AGAIN into.  This is a powerful metaphor, and seemingly one which feels quite literal to many people.

Religion, in this sense, is a sort of EFFECTIVE psychotherapy, and has served as such in countless cases across the past several thousand years.

But for this transformation to work, one needs to be much more open, and much less cynical than most of us are.  Very few people trained in the scientific method, bred to share the core assumptions which animate most professional scientists, are going to be ABLE to adopt a belief system like that of Christianity.

What remains, then, is slow steady progress, of the sort which I have been working at for many years.

I continue to believe Neurofeedback is our best hope.  It is helping me.  It is a slow, slow process.  I am recreating myself from the foundation up.  I am letting my manias slowly diminish and fade.

And I do think psychedelics may well play a role for many too.  I would like to see a world where most people take them at an appropriate time.  For me, that time is not yet.

And I continue to dream of my church.  It will take charisma, patience, and long persistence, but there is a strong need.  I simply have to emerge more fully into my own personhood and sense of agency.

I do feel agony sometimes, but it doesn’t break me.  And one day I hope that it will be of immense value.  There is very little anyone can suffer which I cannot relate to on some level.  Every suffering is personal, but much of it simply has to do with being human, with our nervous systems, being subject to the countless shocks and betrayals which are occasioned by being social beings, by existing in networks which are often hostile in ways which are silly and logical at the same time.  Everyone is protecting themselves.  Everyone is doing what makes sense to them, even if it is also true that if everyone on the planet stopped at the same time being mean and stupid at the same time, we would all instantly be sustainably happier.

A few thoughts.  I am continuing my emerging habit of fasting from 6pm Friday to some time after 6am Sunday.  It’s a nice practice, not just physically, but emotionally.

I am trying to burrow into and feel safe with my core self.  I am using all the tools I have been able to gather thus far, and making slow progress.