Month: July 2019

Faith represents, formally, an enduring personal order in the midst of chaos and change.

Faith, therefore, represents a qualitative alternative to chaos. It is above, where chaos is below.

And living by personal rules in a consistent way is a type of faith: it represents the notion that things will be better over time with organized, ordered behavior, relative to doing every last little thing that pops in your head, consequences be damned.

From this perspective, the dictum “do what thou will” is a rejection of faith, and of order.  It is a descent below the level of the animal, since even animals, acting by instinct, act always with purpose.

I have seen enough demons to say their shared essence is chaos and formlessness. This is why faith and trust represent their  antithesis.

https://www.infowars.com/report-alex-acosta-said-he-was-told-jeffrey-epstein-belonged-to-intelligence-and-to-leave-it-alone/

Whoever it is, I think it is very clear large segments of our intelligence and law enforcement apparatus has been, as they say at least in the movies, “compromised.”

Put another way, a massive purge of these Augean Stables is needed.

For my part, I wonder if Epstein was not arrested in the main to try and find or create dirt on Trump. The FBI is plainly not an honest organization, so the fact that his crimes were awful, obvious and sustained means little.

Should not so much be viewed as a terrorist group—although they clearly are that, albeit not seriously yet—but rather as the public “face” of a political cult. Look at them: they ARE faceless, but they are all matching to the best of the same demonic, anti-human drummer.

Cults of all sorts proliferate when the old beliefs fail. It would not, I think, be overstating the case to say that the goal of Communist infiltration, subversion, and propaganda is to enable such cults, because they betray a complete failure of common cause and common purpose.

Communists dictate, and shoot or torture those who disobey. True Liberals negotiate and persuade, and any force which can disable that process helps the actual fascists, who the Antifa cult support and publicly embody.

And somewhat tired of talking.

To talk much is to see and feel little.  

Think back to the happiest time in your life.  For me, it would probably be at one or another theme parks with my kids.  We had so much fun.

Were you you, then?  What I think happens is that we have moments where we open, and allow joy to happen.  These moments, in turn, tend to solidify and become a part of who we “are”.  We treasure them, and in treasuring them we calcify them, and in no small measure kill them.  What was living in them lives in us yet.  What was joyful in them lives in us yet.

But being open feels like rolling the dice, doesn’t it?  You can’t get lucky forever.  We all know that.  So we stow away what we think we have, and take it out from time to time and look at it. I was talking with a guy in a bar the other night the high point of whose life seems to have been a Little League game that happened 50 years ago.  It still makes him happy telling the story.

Growing old, though, is I think ideally about learning to value life itself, to value each day, to find links today with old joys.  With Acceptance, perhaps, above all.

I feel deeply sad sometimes.  I am an Empty Nest-er, but without a wife.  My kids are gone, off doing their things.  They are healthy, happy, successful.   I did my job.  I talk with them, I see them sometimes, but it will never be what it was.  This is sad.  I can’t get those moments back.  My task, as I see it, is to become wise, which is what I am trying to do here.

There is so much sadness in this world.  This has not changed in 3,000 years, even if our physical comforts and life spans have vastly increased.

I cannot continue to be who I have been.  This is a clear conclusion.  This, too, is sad.

But there are gates we all have to pass through.  And there is an other side.  That is where the hope is.  It is nowhere to be found in who and how I have been.

Pray for me if you are so inclined.  I could use help and wisdom.  I am slowly remembering who I once was, so very, very long ago.  What was done was awful.  It shattered me.  But somehow something endured, and if I can cross this desert, I will have something useful to say to everyone.

The more your capacity to process life diminishes, the more rigid your sense of self becomes.

In important respects, Anatta (Anatman) is about learning to remember, again, the small things in life, the small pleasures, and the thrill of the new and unexpected.  It is remembering open curiosity.

Put another way: to become the sort of person who finds life exciting and interesting, you need to forget entirely what sort of person you “are”.

To clarify, some people who seem to be living exciting lives are living the sort of lives they imagine exciting people live.  All of us live in confusion, to greater and lesser extents.  It is a miracle any of us can tie our shoes and function at all.  That part is all hive mind and instinct.

There is something else, though, and seeking that out is the point of being in this tiring and awful world.

Life doesn’t stop when you stop being able to process it. It just stops feeling like life.

Never trust anyone who says they want to save the world who has not saved him or herself.

Progress for me continues.  I will explain a myth to you.

The Norse and Germanic people believed that their God of War, Tiwaz, or Tyr, for whom Tiw’s Day is named, sacrificed his hand, in effect, to bind the giant wolf Fenrir.

Fenrir represents the wolf-like, carnivorous, appetitive element in human nature.  It represents both trauma and war.  It was an externalization of the war which Tiwaz was the God of.  To tame HIMSELF, he had to lose a part of his personal wholeness, which was perfect in war, but inappropriate in peace.

One has to assume that, before the Norsemen descended on  Europe, that they fought extensively among themselves.  Binding Fenrir is what allowed them to mount their long boats together, and rape and pillage (both quite literal, for those of you who do not read history) everyone else.

For me, I was reading about Tiwaz last night, since I am thinking about getting a little sculpture to put on my little shrine every Tiw’s Day–since it brings a little mythic into my day–and last night I was dreaming about adopting a giant wild cat.  It morphed in my dreams, but it was roughly a 15′ at the shoulder jaguar or puma, that was a bit tame, but always in danger of attacking small children and anything vulnerable.

This is progress.  It is an externalization, within my dream, of an anger and a meanness I have been long trying to identify and process.  It’s not fully under control–and I’m not sure I ever WANT it completely under control, since it represents a strong natural instinct of self protection and empowerment–but it is now recognizable, distinct, and for itself, whole.