Month: July 2019

In my understanding, Alan Watts, Chogyam Trungpa, and Carlos Castenada all died young of alcoholism. Trungpa was around fifty, Watts 60 and Castenada 70.

Infer from this the obvious.

The goal, as  I understand it—and some of this comes from flashes I have had from time to time—is to feel more like yourself. It is to feel larger, more connected, more natural, more calm and ready.

I think this notion is often confused with emotional dissociation and obsessions of all sorts, such as those with goodness, with compassion, with “empathy” (a badly abused word at present in my estimation), with “justice”, however you may define it.

Much of my own work has been to create a conceptual world for ME to occupy, and much of that has been to make hard things soft to the point of being dissolvable, even vaporous. We all know what s cloud is, even if the lines don’t exist.

There is much confusion in this world. Sometimes, though, confusion is a good thing, perhaps even wisdom.

I am tempted, without for the moment dealing methodologically with the problem of how to define them, to assert that the principle psychosocial root of cultish behavior is the enmeshed family, which is to say a family where roles and places are unclearly defined.

And it occurs to me to comment that, while sexual energy can be highly destructive outside the family—obviously in the form infidelity, and following marital trauma, conflict, and in our culture divorce—it is vastly more destructive within the family.  I don’t think we have yet begun to fully grasp the inter generational, long term effects of incest. And in global culture, I don’t think we have a clue even now how prevalent it is, and has perhaps always been. As open as the United States is, it has only been “on the table” for perhaps 40 years, since the early 1980’s.

Freud, remember, saw it in Vienna, and realized he had to choose between his career (and sense of self importance) and the truth. He chose, obviously, his career.

But can we plausibly believe we understand it’s extent in Islamic countries? In India? In China? In Japan? Everywhere else? I don’t think so.

I would stipulate that the core psychological task which alone can guarantee a healthy, adaptive, fair, prosperous, peaceful and happy society is psychological individuation, and I would assert this process is inherently the antithesis of cultish behavior.

The context of these comments, as is likely obvious, is the rise of what might be termed “political cultishness”, in our own, and many Westen societies. We are prosperous. We are free. And that is plainly not enough for far too many people. They feel lost, atomized, alone, and personally deficient.

When technology raises a child, can it truly be said the father was a father, and the mother a mother, even if both are present? I don’t think so.

I would assert as a general principle that the clear use of language is always inherently anti-authoritarian.  It is anti-Fascistic and anti-Communistic, both of these -isms–and perhaps the -ism of Islamism as well, since what is done in its name bears little resemblance to the practice and example of Muhammad as I understand it, and as its regrettably few moderate exponents express it–being defined by the abuse of thought made possible only by the abuse of language.

That last sentence might understandably not be viewed by all readers as itself a clear use of language.  Duly, noted.

But I wanted to state clearly the ideas underlying the on-going, continual, looped accusations of racism by Democrats.

The logic is this: the future and prosperity and overall well being of African Americans is so inextricably linked to the Democrat Party that opposition to any Democrat, or support for any Republican, is exactly equal to wishing for the failure of blacks in this country.

Ponder that, particularly given the state of most ghettos in this country–all of which have been presided over by Democrats since at least the early 1970’s, and in most cases well back into the 1960’s.

Ponder that, considering that a black Democrat was elected President twice, and nothing changed in the black “community”. In fact, violence and reliance on government assistance both increased.

Ponder that, considering that when black unemployment is at an all time low, this is viewed by most Democrats as a disaster, because it makes them less attractive.  They don’t want to talk about it.  They don’t want to discuss how it was achieved, other than to implausibly claim that the job killing policies of Barack Obama somehow kicked in instantly when Trump took office.  I don’t think anyone is stupid enough to believe that.  Obama was in office 8 years.

And logically, if black success is bad, then can black success be plausibly claimed to be the actual goal?  Would it not be more reasonable to suppose black VOTES were the goal, and black well being something no senior Democrat cared or cares about in the slightest, perception–which they devote all their actual energy to–being everything?

In my view, this is the only reasonable, supportable conclusion, based on the totality of evidence.

And as the saying goes, with friends like these, who need enemies?

It’s an odd fact of our present era that we are literally seeing that people are willing to abandon family members rather than abandon their hatred of Donald Trump.

For his part, Trump is sometimes tacky, certainly a womanizer, but the farthest thing from the embodiment of evil that he is made out to be, somehow.

And it occurred to me this morning that in the same way physical diseases can be modified and made more virulent in the lab, so too can mental illness.  It can be fostered, developed, and perfected, such that the target ONLY believes what the operator wants them to believe.  That such a thing could be obtained in a free country is really a “triumph”–if we want to use this word for a fundamentally evil process–of science.

Mental illness can be induced and controlled.  This is the fundamental insight of propagandists.

It is obvious to the point of being tautological, but all long term errors are the result of failed perception.

And speaking broadly, all long term perceptual errors relate to cognitive rigidity of some sort.  The corrections which would come naturally and easily in a connected perceptual system, in an emotionally healthy person, simply do not happen.  What you get is repetition.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make: Leftism, in its core, is a dysfunction of abstraction.  Abstraction, per se, can be both useful and harmful.  It is needed to build cars, and even to count when the numbers are not present.

But it occurs to me to comment that there is a reason I came up with the idea of Perceptual Breathing so early on.  The fact is that, while abstraction is essential in dealing with complex systems like a human society and culture, it can easily acquire a life of its own, and veer very, very far from any actual thing, any actual process, any actual person, any actual reality outright.

Marx, to take an obvious example, was an economic failure.  Only 3 of his seven children survived to adulthood, and all seem to have been malnourished–again, because he was a self absorbed, combative fuckup.  His ideas have to be seen as an imaginative alternative to his sordid personal reality, most of which he brought on himself.  He was not preaching from a position of possibility, but rather of bitterness, anger, and temper.

As I have said many times, human culture is in my view most usefully broken down into four basic tasks: 1) the production and distribution of meaning; 2) of Truth; 3) of Power; and 4) of wealth.

The first and second are obviously related, as are 3 and 4, but all of them are logically distinct, in my view.

Leftism is an attempt to find, through politics (the creation and distribution of power), answers to both the meaning of life, and the nature of truth.  Made simple, it aims to force everyone to conform to the same system, same ideas, and to stamp out all alternatives.  This, for the pious obsessive, is supposed to allow personal peace.

But the whole project is insane.  It uses words like justice, and truth, and compassion, but all of them are made to mean everything but what they mean in common sense usage.  All are coopted into this lunatic cult because they have to be.  It is the only way the thirst for blood and death can be even superficially rationalized.

In recent days I am really FEELING the insanity of this whole thing.  It is like trying to talk sense into Moonies or the Manson cult.  The fellow feelings, the sense of propriety and restraint, the understanding of boundaries, the tolerance of difference: all completely eradicated, destroyed, killed and buried.

That such a thing should happen in a free land, where information, even now, is available on nearly all topics, is really quite astonishing.

One thing I was thinking the other day is that social alienation has the effect of increasing vulnerability to cultish sentiments.  People whose social connections are weak fear greatly being cast out still further.  They are quite prepared to believe the most outlandish things merely to fit in a little bit, merely to get to participate now and then in GroupHate against some out-group.  This was the psychosocial framework that enabled the Nazis, and which animates Antifa–the modern Brown/Black Shirts–even now.

It’s been a longish week or two for me, and I find myself swearing sometimes when something won’t work, and particularly  when some part of my body—usually my shoulders—is aching terribly.

Swearing represents an activation of some primitive, even childish, aspect of ourselves. It is sort of a magical incantation or perhaps mantra, whose role is to channel and dispel aggression pain and frustration.

But I was looking at my plans just now and working out my strategy to completion and it got me that FINISH also had an effect on me. This word had the opposite effect of swearing. It channeled calm focus and control. It was the opposite of helpless.

So there is an opposite of curse words. Until I come up with something better, I’ll call them bless words.

Finish.

The only obvious referent for Trump’s tweet was Ilhan Omar.  The other three just kind of piled on.  They apparently thought “Anti-American?  He must mean me.”  And they were, and are, obviously, quite happy to wear that mantle.

And they are now the face of the Democrats.  This has been the de facto reality for some time, but it has now become obvious, thanks to a clever trick by Trump, which should have and would have been seen as a trick by mainstream Democrats in any era before now.  But they couldn’t help themselves.  Their passions are too strong, their lunacy too embedded.

Trump will win easily in 2020, if we can avoid massive fraud, and prevent the media monopolies from the successful use of mass propaganda.

I woke up happy.

You know, the great spiritual power that matters is feeling life flowing through you and around you.  It is the power to say you feel relaxed and connected, and that everything makes sense, and you feel hope, serenity, and excitement.  This is all possible.  I know it is, because I get moments of it.  Your current physical circumstances don’t matter.

I have moments where I think of a relationship with God as like a wonderful relationship with a woman, but 1000 times better.  This is certainly consistent with Sufi imaginings, as well as writers like St. John of the Cross.

In romance, there is this longing, this felt need for completion, to close the loop, to stop the endless dissipation into the horizon.  This RELIEF, and this excitement.

Oh, I hope I see more clearly someday, and before God takes me.

OMG, what do the people in that place think about that thing?

You know, we have a global interface capable of sharing essentially limitless amounts of information, and it is used as a place to gossip, and a simultaneous extension of, and weakening of, community.

I wonder how many of you remember desks with phones and typewriters.  Turns out life was still worth living back then, and perhaps more worth living, based on increasing rates of suicide and related depression.

Maybe we should blame reduced rates of smoking.  I am 36% serious.

Maybe we should blame the dilution of social bonds through their replacement with virtual equivalents.  I am 86% serious there.