Month: September 2019

I read Jordan Peterson, who I respect greatly, along with many others, checked himself into a clinic for rehab from tranquilizers.

I watched his appearance at Dennis Pragers conference or whatever it was, and he was teary through the whole thing.  I get that completely.  I’ve been that guy many times.

We share, I think, a sense that if you fail to truly appreciate the inherent tragedy of human life–the unredeemed suffering, the pointless suffering, the ridiculousness of it all–then you have missed a big, probably crucial aspect of the human experience.

What I would suggest, though, is that one can remain aware of all the awfulness, and all the risks, without becoming overwhelmed.  As context, in recent weeks I’ve read about lasers that can penetrate nearly anything, invisibility cloaks, micronukes (Pakistan was talking about them: I hope I didn’t give anyone any ideas), exoskeletons that can lift cars, and of course the cross channel hoverboard trip.

This, and of course aliens, global depressions, and who knows what else.

To me, life is like a giant cave.  In one part of it you have all the tragedy and hopelessness and death.  But in other places you have beauty.  In most places you have the almost inherent beauty of human beings finding reasons to believe, and to care, and to love, as well as they can, which is usually not much, but all you can give is what you have.

I kind of picture myself in a good vantage point, viewing it all.  There is a large space outside of me.  But paradoxically, when I close my eyes, there is a much, much bigger space, one where the concept of problem does not even exist, where pain does not exist, where joy is the coin of the realm, but joy of a sort we have forgotten, and rarely even sip once in a lifetime on this planet.

Here is my proposition: happiness is a learned skill.  It is not something which happens.  It is not the result of internal circumstances, nor is it the result of simply “choosing” happiness.  It is a skill.  There are techniques.

And the best single one I have found is Kum Nye.  Nobody listens to me on this, as far as I know.  I have converted no one to a long term practice, despite talking often about it.

But happiness is a sort of breathing through your whole body.  It is a letting go and allowing, and that allowing causes contentment to burst out from where it was hiding.  Painful things come out sometimes when you allow.  I know this better than anyone, I think.  But the process both sweeps away the chronic ones, and teaches you to deal in real time with the ones you cannot avoid.

I’m in a strange place.  I am changing.  I can feel it.  I am feeling torpid lately.  I just sit here.  I’m not sad, or confused.  I just don’t feel like moving.  I think this is the appearance on the outside of an internal state, a paralysis that dates back from long ago, when I felt like a thing.

I will likely have more to say on thing-ness, when I figure out how I feel about it.

For now I will hope that Mr. Peterson puts down Dostoevsky and picks up Tarthang Tulku.  Despair (and anger and violence for that matter) can seem deep because they are often hidden beneath the social surface.  People like Marty Scorcese are supposedly “deep” directors because they talk about the violence all of us feel, that is always there.

Personally, I think the deep people are the ones who see all that, feel it, understand it, then keep going.  There is peace at the bottom.  

I have had this tension in me since I was a small boy that I have only in recent weeks begun easing with effective neurofeedback.

What I am realizing this morning is that self hatred is what happens when an already-activated amygdala can’t find a target.  The amygdala is intrinsically supposed to connect us to our environment.  It provides fight when we need fight–and evolutionarily sometimes we did and still do.  Most soldiers would die quickly without it.

It provides flight when we need flight.  It fuels you as you run, at least enough for a sprint which, if it isn’t enough, likely wasn’t enough when we were being chased by animal or human predators.

And it provides shame, which helps us recognize when we have socially misstepped, and which might put us at odds with our tribe or family group.  The expression of shame prevents or reduces the likelihood of aggression by others, particularly within our social grouping.

But when all these feelings are felt continually, as they are in victims/survivors of trauma, there need not be a target present.  In those cases, that feeling has nowhere else to go, and attacks the person themselves.  It attacks me.  It manifests as self loathing.

What I am seeing is that the way to rid myself of at least the sharpness of that feeling is to direct my amygdalic energy at a target elsewhere.  I need to find 1) someone to attack; 2) something to fear; or 3) someone to feel superior to.

I think 1 and 3 are pretty obvious, but 2 perhaps less so.  Chronic worry about things “out there” is a way to deal with amygdalic activation, is a way of distracting from the fact that it won’t go away by rationalizing and justifying it.  This is a comfort, in a strange way. It makes the feeling “rational” in a way, even though you are really just painting the reality over.

And I would like to propose a second Satanic three, as regards a post I made a few days ago: Rage, the need to conform, and hate.  It is like a color wheel.  The primary colors are Anger, Fear and Shame.  Anger and Fear create rage, fear and shame create the need to conform, and shame and anger together form hatred.

If light can glisten and shimmer, imagine an inverted light, a darkness, doing the same.  This is what happens with these feelings.  They are all connected, but shift easily from one to the other, making them all a whole, which needs to be seen as a whole.

The solution for hate?  Education–REAL education, to be clear–and Neurofeedback.

Here is one:

Children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again.

Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.

Another:

Of course it may be argued that this is a fairly bleak view of life. It means, for instance, that we can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them, if the pack demands it, will become your enemies-will, as it were, throw stones through your window. It means that if you are a member of a close-knit community, you know you differ from this community’s ideas at the risk of being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an evil-doer. This is an absolutely automatic process; nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically.

But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.

I have always worked to belong to that minority, as should, I hope, be obvious, while remaining quite aware those are the ones who get crucified.

The POINT I started to make, though–before getting distracted by Lessing, who I love–was that we choose to live inside prisons, because the prisons are within us, without our seeing them.

All automatic reactions you have, conditioned reactions, animal reactions–they are not you, not your soul, not your spiritual part.  They are limits on you.  A button is pushed and you are reacting before you can stop.  They are robotic.  Within our nervous systems, I suppose it could reasonably be said we are all already cyborgs with innate programming which we can change only with great effort and considerable time and skill.

That we are confined in these ways–and there are levels which proceed beyond the physical to etheric or more subtle–is the essence of all good spiritual teaching.  If we are defined by walls within us, we cannot but choose walls outside of us, prisons of behavior and affect.  As within, so without.

I don’t think one person in a hundred ever dreams of true freedom across a lifetime, for the simple reason that they cannot see their limitations.  Put more precisely, their conditioning blinds them to their limitations.  It is like putting wallpaper on the cells of a prison, then mistaking it for reality.

All of this is hard.  I deal with hard things.  It tires me.  It makes me irritable sometimes.  It makes me misunderstood nearly continually.  It makes me emotionally tone deaf at times, because I am not wired like most of the people I meet, for better and for worse–both, certainly.  But all I conclude, logically, is that I am here to learn, and that whatever missteps I may make, however often I may get or feel lost, I have to keep trying, over and over and over and over, until I die or find peace.

I’m reading “The Day after Roswell”, and the basic outline feels true to me.  Paul Hellyer–who as Defense Minister of Canada is the highest ranking government official to admit/claim that aliens are visiting our planet–read that book, and on his account was able to verify with some of the individuals involved the veracity of the claims.  That is a solid backing.

I just watched the movie “Unacknowledged”, which is really about the cover-up.  It is really quite impossible for me personally not to attach the CIA–some part of it at least–to this whole thing, and to connect all of that to the Deep State.

Perhaps comically, his more controversial claims in that book relate not to alien spacecraft, but to the infiltration of and subversion of the CIA by Communist agents back in the Cold War, and the CIA’s image of itself as a world unto itself, with survival and independence being their prime motivators. He claims that the KGB and the CIA were closer to one another than either was to their respective governments.  He claims the CIA spied on him personally.

If you add to this the claims made by Stephen Greer, the conclusion is inescapable that we have a secret government, one which operates with no oversight and no rules, and which seems to have reverse engineered astonishing technology indistinguishable from that of the aliens.

This is a large claim, one which is hard to digest.

And I ponder how many people would have nervous breakdowns if and when actual aliens were presented to us.  The Grays seem to have been piloting the Roswell craft (he says, incidentally, that our radars seem to mess them up somehow), but what if there actually are lizard people?  What if Men in Black actually is a CIA sponsored PsyOp to mock the whole thing, while masking the reality?

How would your world change, if you saw actual aliens on TV, or perhaps even on a stage somewhere?  How would our culture change?  How would the world change?

These are big questions, obviously.

I think, as with most things, once the shock was over, most people would accommodate themselves to the idea, and I think on balance it would be inspiring, particularly if these alien beings were culturally/spiritually more advanced than us.  The technology isn’t really important to me.  One world is enough, if we learn to see.

Think about it.  Think about how people deal with sudden traumatic deaths, say the death of a loved one in a car accident.  What initially feels like a gut punch, slowly looses its sharp bite.  And here, we are talking about not a loss, but potentially a huge gain.

I’m not of course sure what Trump has been told, nor do I have a good guess.  I don’t know secret motivations might lie behind his formation of a Space Force.  I can’t but wonder if the F-35 is intended to give us a publicly known craft which can chase the alien spacecraft.

There are oceans of ignorance in front of us. If you buy even a fraction of what is being claimed, then that is certain.

In the book, he has thus far claimed that quick leaps in a number of existing but primitive technologies were made because of the debris recovered from Roswell.  Thus far it is night vision, and the solid state integrated circuit.  I’m on the chapter on lasers, just starting.

But he also claims he briefed Bobby Kennedy on how the CIA was intentionally feeding the President Soviet originated disinformation, and that he played an influencing role on Kennedy’s decision to put a man on the moon.  He claims the original Army plan was a manned base on the moon by 1965, but they lost the political turf war with NASA.

Everywhere you look around you, if you are alert, there are mysteries.  Most of them are not hidden well, if at all, but we all have this brain feature which allows us to simply not see things we are not prepared emotionally to deal with.

I personally was speculating the other day that the (in my considered view) non-existent “threat” of global warming actually is comforting to many.  Given all the disasters which are possible, it allows them to focus on merely one, and one which conforms to their existing biases against, in most cases, the modern world generally.  AI is a threat.  Nuclear War is a threat.  Pandemics are a threat.  Asteroids and possibly comets are a threat.  Economic downturns and depressions and terrorism are threats.  But if you focus on only one threat, you can forget the others.  You are DOING something, and acting always calms people down.

So the whole Global Warming thing is not just useful for aspiring tyrants, but useful psychologically for otherwise normal but appropriately anxious people who otherwise feel like helpless spectators.

Largely, we ARE helpless spectators.  It helps a lot to vote people into office who actually feel affection for the notions of political freedom and equality before the law–people like Donald Trump–but there are decisions being made in tall office towers, and tropical island retreats, and perhaps ski chalets somewhere, which we have no influence on.

Life has always been risky, and it has always ended the same way.  We are lucky that we have the time and leisure to worry about abstract threats, versus the concrete ones of hunger, exposure, and threat of sudden death by murder or accidents in dangerous places.

Learning to be aware, but not freaking the fuck out, is a vital life skill.  It is the only way to learn to see what is in front of you.

Paradoxically, I will be a success when I stop calling myself a failure.  Rather, when I stop FEELING like a failure, which is to say when I down regulate my hyperactive amygdala.

So much of our society is driven by shame, which is to say the fear of failure.  Mistakes have to be possible.  I am sure of that.  Growth is not possible any other way.  But none of us should have to be elite to feel like we have a place.  Some of us will always be more talented than others, and that is good.  Such people should be rewarded.  But all of us should have a place, and right now far too man of us don’t.  Just look at the “deaths from despair” numbers on suicide, and deaths from alcoholism and drug abuse.

As I posted on Facebook last week, Roger Waters calls it right when he says “any fool knows a dog needs a home, as shelter from pigs on the wing.”

My work continues.  I actually feel good.  I am sleeping through the night without booze or interruptions other than getting up to pee.

I often find myself telling myself “I am not a failure.  I am not a failure.”

Here is the thing: based on my potential, my intelligence, my aptitude, I am, by societies standards, objectively a failure.  I didn’t get my Law degree, my M.D., my Ph.D, or build a lucrative business.  I’m a normal schlub living an average life, who doesn’t even own a home.

Here’s an autobiographical ditty for you: probably my single best friend from high school invented, or co-invented, the iPhone.  My other best friends from middle school/high school founded a software company in Silicon Valley after going to Stanford; won a Rhodes scholarship and became a tenured professor; and became a sculptor selling art pieces for pretty substantial sums of money, after doing a tour of Hollywood.

Me, I am obsessed with figuring out what life is about.  When I fail, as I more or less continually have, this is useless.

On this specific topic, though, what I am slowly realizing is that failure precedes failure.  An unresolved, hyperactive amygdala creates a periodic and sometimes strong feeling of shame.  Shame is what gets input into the emotional system as “being” a failure.  People who “are” failures have an overwhelming tendency to act the part. If you are a fuckup, what are your limits?  None.  You have no limits.  Prison, death, and some form of exile are the only limits.

I can honestly say that I have done my best to wrestle with the demons of our age.  For a long time, it has seemed to take all my energy.  I am trying to stand sane, aware, and open, in the vast wind of change and craziness blowing through our world.

When I die, I don’t know what will happen.  I believe life is a gift, and that we need to try and use it wisely.  I also believe that most of us are subjected to madness most of our lives, making it silly to suppose we would use our lives wisely.

I hope God is merciful, and sees how long and hard I have tried to become sane in an insane world.

And we do live in a mad world.  We value almost nothing we should value.  For my part, I try to keep my calm, try to carry on, and try to learn something every day.  I hope that makes a difference.

Edit: booze involved.

Fear plus shame equals a need to submit.  It equals conformity.  It equals a thirst for authority and authoritarianism.

Fear plus anger equal rage.

Anger plus shame equals hate.  I liked the bit Dave Chappelle did on “Sticks and Stones” (watch it before you comment, you schmuck) where he talked about poor whites in the South who told their kids “at least you ain’t a nigger”.

Anger at their condition.  Shame at their condition.  The two equal the KKK.  The two also equal the Nazis.

I am reminded, too, of the saying that “Germans are either at your feet or at your throat”.  The two conditions fit perfectly for a society which will wind up both being told what to do, and dictating to others.  That was then, of course.

I did read William Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”.  Notable in the history section was how often Germany was trod on, and by so many powers.  Trauma breeds the Satanic Three: fear, anger, and shame.

Oh, there may come a time when we all speak the truth.  Until then, I will try and speak my truth, and hope that others see it, recognize it, feel it, and benefit from me saying what had lain latent under the sea.

No time is ever devoid of the need for prophets.  Whatever else I am, I am willing to suffer for the truth, to suffer to bring it to light, and to suffer for doing it.

After all this time, I am slowly becoming used to being me.  You know, come what may, I am in the game.  I am in the game.

Might I suggest that modernist ethics is constituted by the substitution of traditional moral narratives by novel ones, and post-modernism by the replacement of moral reasoning with moral posturing?

I think this is close to the truth.

Place them on a pedestal they don’t deserve, them teach them resentment and self pity.

It is written, somewhere, that “those the gods want to destroy they first exalt.”

I am really feeling the truth of this this morning.

The converse, of course, is humility coupled with a spirit of acceptance and tranquility.

I think it is vitally important to distinguish between “crimes” of stupidity and crimes of malice.  For me personally, I had the realization a day or so ago that my parents were just really, really stupid.  Yes, in some respects it was protective arrogance which caused that stupidity, but it was stupidity nonetheless.

I honestly think it is more accurate to say “the world” in general is stupid than to say it is malevolent, or for that matter good.

This leads to the, for me, necessary conclusion that no more important task confronts anyone wanting to make the world a better place than to think clearly and act coherently. 

Be what you want to see.