Month: May 2020

As I share from time to time, I have dreams sometimes which seem larger than me.  My thought is that they always INCLUDE me, that some element is best and most usefully seen as representing some psychic process only occurring in me; but I also think sometimes they touch larger realities too.

I will share one which I think was mainly me, and one that I think was larger.

As context, I will comment that I realized Saturday that there are always two stories in me, always two ways of representing everything that I do and which happens to me.  One views work and change as unwelcome intrusions, and interprets them as such; and the other is the counter to that. It is a sort of Emergence created in response to the emotional torpor which characterized my home, and which I have carried with me all these years.  It’s the alarm clock, the wake up bell.

Somewhere between these two stories is an unformed, inchoate me.  That I am inconsistent is obvious.  Why is now more clear to me.

And I will comment that in the few original Buddhist Sutras I have read, like the Heart Suttra, they don’t say “there is no self”.  What they say is that everything we see and feel is interconnected in space.  There is no Self, and there is also no Not Self.  There is a cloud, with whispy tendrils, which changes form and evolves continually.  We are those clouds.  And somewhere in there is the release of the “Tight-Holding”.  I will call that my translation of the Pali “Tanha”.  The monkey trapped by the monkey trap.

Be all that as it may, I was a new servant at a hotel, waiting on a very, very demanding guest.  Everyone was terrified.  You had to do this, say that, then do this, and it was all very precise, all absolutely necessary, or he would be furious.

This energy is in me.  The salient part is the anger and rigidity of the guest, but the rest of me has to deal with it.

I said two stories: I suppose it would be closer to say two story-lines.  The stories are told daily in continuously varying ways, with differing energies, differing purposes, and no doubt take one another into account.

FEELING this energy, though, was good for me.  Feeling tension is the first step to resolving it.  Most of us don’t feel most of the tension that is manifestly there.  It just feels like us.  It feels like the water we can’t feel all around us, as fish.  It is “life”.  It is how life “is”, and absent substantial reflection and meditation, most people will cross life in that state.  This, too, is Duhkha.

The other dream, a lot of people were living in ice water.  Rock and roll was referenced.  I saw leather pants and the Rolling Stones, or at least the vibe of the Rolling Stones.  Then a giant wave came crashing in, and drowned many of the people.

Here is my interpretation: much of this country–and no doubt other countries–is sustained by what might be termed the Rock and Roll ethos, which might more broadly be called the Pop or even Consumer ethos.  Ironically, some of the most vocal opponents of physical consumerism are animated culturally by its superficial priorities.

Broadly speaking, beginning perhaps in the late 40’s through the 1970’s, some portion of our society cast off all the historical anchors that held us together, and which provided protection in times of true need and true difficulty.  This was made possible by historically unique and unprecedented improvements in the physical ease of our lives, through technology and simple abundance.

Put simply: life was not that hard, so no firm foundations were needed.  In such a soil, hedonism takes root easily.  Ask yourself, though: do you think Mick Jagger has led the ideal life?  He is more or less the poster child for the sexualizing of life, and the rock and roll lifestyle.  He has grown old.  He is perhaps 75 now.  What does he have, really?  Do you think he has the loyalty and love of children and grandchildren?  Maybe, maybe not.  That would not have been a large part of his calculations back then.

It seems to me he has spent most of his life chasing highs.  New music, performing old music, parties, sex and sex and sex and look at him.  All the highs fade.  The bright lights dim.  Sooner rather than later he will have played his last concert.  Then what?  Who is he?  What is left?

Much of our nation occupies that rough cultural space.  It rejected patriotism, Christianity, tradition.  Marriage–or at least uncomplicated, lifelong marriage.  Children.  All the boring things that boring people do that makes them stable and measurably happier than the hedonists.

I was reading that in San Francisco–and this is just the people commenting publicly, although it seems reasonable to think this is a national and even global problem–that the suicide rate is through the roof.  People who used to just put out a “cry for help” are going after it seriously now.  Not all are succeeding, but many are.  They saw, in their words, a “years worth of suicides” in the last month.

What do you cling to, when everything you have chosen was superficial and designed for a world which is easy?  Who do you cling to, when you have rejected loyalty as an arduous and inconvenient virtue?  What do you cling to when you have largely rejected the concept of virtue itself, which includes courage, true love, the pursuit of wisdom and learning, and honest compassion?

The ice wave gets you.  You were, in reality, living in a cold place–made warm solely by the illusions facilitated by your vanity and lack of self awareness–and when all the bad came, you had nothing.

As to how this relates to me, I survived.  But I lived there.  I belonged there, or at least part of me did.

I’ve been watching the show “The Good Place”.  I have been ambivalent about it.  On the one hand, it is really funny sometimes, and it has caused me to think more about the after-life.  But on the other, they make a mockery of things they probably should not make a mockery of.  Heavens and hells exist.  To the extent they were exploring the subtle craziness behind the concept of eternal salvation or eternal damnation after a single lifetime–one conditioned by many factors beyond the individuals control–I liked it.

But at root, it partook of what I will call “Rock and Roll” culture.  It was deeply superficial, in meaningful and important ways.

So by coincidence, fate, or divine intervention, when I went to Netflix to watch it last night, it had reset to the first episode.  It couldn’t figure out how to easily get where I was, which was about episode 38, so I decided to watch a short documentary on Islamic dervishes.

[I will note that I play the didgeridoo 30 minutes a day, mostly to clear my sinuses–which it does fantastically well, especially once I learned Circular Breathing–but I have also read that humming helps tone down the Vagus Nerve.  I do literally everything I can think of and/or know about to calm down.]

It is striking how much more seriously people in other countries take religion.  It is not a joke to them.  They see life and death every day.  You NEED religion to keep your sanity and to live happily.  No doubt watching that influenced me in my dreams.

If actions speak louder than words, then actions might reasonably be supposed to have some sort of syntax and order too.

Hence: behavioral sentences composed of behavioral words.

Paragraphs

Chapters

Books. 

I am still working on sentences.  I know most of the words, but “speaking” them consistently and coherently remains a bit of a challenge.

It seems to me animals have the task of physical survival.

By and large, most humans on Earth now have migrated to the trickier task–well, at least DIFFERENT task–of emotional survival.

And that is really about the awareness of self, of being a floating body in space, and of negotiating how we interact with the universe and other people and things.  Feelings guide us.  Feelings can also confine us.

Love is really nothing more or less than a path out of solitude.

Logically, if existing with other people in non-attuned ways increases fear, anger and shame reactions, then superficiality breeds all sorts of bad things.

Here is the thing: you can’t be intimate with everyone.  All societies depend on a certain degree of formalism, and rules of behavior and etiquette.  This holds particularly true in diverse societies.

BUT, I think many people are not truly intimate with ANYONE.  They have friends, yes, but superficiality can be a self reinforcing circle.  Connecting at a surface level leads to shame, and that shame causes you to feel the need to “apologize” to stay in the group, and this happens with everyone.  Pretty soon you have a stereotypical fraternity or sorority social milieu, where everyone pretends to be happy, but they stay drunk most of the time.

I think the problem is that Americans grow up with continual noise and banter.  TV’s are everywhere, and radios, and smart phones, and you know the drill.  Kids are socialized like that.  They are socialized by devices perhaps as much or more as by people.

For any level of emotional depth to develop, you need time and silence.  If you busy all the time and surrounded by continual noise, then you will be a superficial person.  I think this is true, or largely true.

If it is true that shame is the natural emotion most of us feel when we have committed a social transgression, or feel we have (in the mind it is the same), and if it is true that the feeling of shame is characterized by a sense of social exclusion, then it seems reasonable to suppose that poorly attuned relationships breed shame.

Put another way, if you don’t “feel felt”, then this breeds chronic low level limbic activation, initially via the shame mechanism, but neurologically shame, anger and fear all go together.  Not feeling felt, like you belong, breeds, then, anger.  It breeds fear.  And it breeds these at a primitive, unconscious level.  The cause will be clear to almost no one.

It is infuriating dealing with narcissists.  Why?  Because they only think about themselves, really, even if they have trained themselves in most cases to do a passable imitation of empathy and attunement.  With them, it’s not real, so anger will eventually emerge.

And it occurs to me to comment as well that the shame an individual might feel in contravening this own personal conscience can be made to disappear when that persons group as a whole endorses that action, which might range from the Holocaust to calling Trump Hitler.

The absence of shame among hard core Leftists is, to my mind, one of their most notable characteristics.  Without shame, or any felt need to justify themselves, they can shift seamlessly from the most outrageous and patently staged and invented accusations against Kavanaugh to complete indifference to the likely valid and true claims of Tara Reade (and many others).

This then leads to the natural conclusion that to remain a Leftist in good standing, you have to surrender your individual conscience and judgment.  This is really the essence of the conformitarian cultism I have called Cultural Sadeism.

Shame is feeling the need to be forgiven.

But where Developmental Trauma is concerned, there was no crime.  So there can be no forgiveness.

“Forgiveness” consists in gradually teaching the amygdala to calm down, and to react appropriately.

And I think the triad might be usefully framed “Fight, Flight, or Social Submission.”

Shame is a quintessentially social emotion.  It is the means by which we reconcile our differences peacefully.  If you do something that makes someone angry–triggers their fight response–then can “counter” it, or respond appropriately to it, by apologizing, by the verbal expression of social submission, by which you publicly admit your error.

And I think somewhere in here is the root of scapegoating.  If you are neglected as a child, or beaten as a child, or emotionally abused as a child–or all three, which is common enough–then you feel a chronic sense of unbelonging, that you are not good enough, that your people are not your people.

This might well be, and probably has been historically, latent.  You don’t admit this, and neither does anyone else.  But it is frustrating, feeling the need to apologize for a crime you haven’t committed.

The essence of scapegoating is the psychological projection of blame and shame, followed by violence, emotional or physical.  You accuse someone or some group of committing a crime, then you punish them for it.  The Germans with the Jews, for example.

I’m not inclined at this moment to do the emotional work to pursue this further at the moment, but there is something here, I feel.

That same bank President, who was obviously following the news quite closely, was unaware of the seeming correlation of Vitamin D levels in the blood and following robust immunity.

Why?  Why, two or more months into this, when I have been reading about the importance of Vitamin D for AT LEAST six weeks, is the public ignorant?  Vitamin D is really cheap, easily had, and seemingly a virtual cure. If you have high serum levels of Vitamin D, you don’t die.  It seems to be as simple as that.

Why is our media not doing everything possible to help our people survive this epidemic, and get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible?

Ponder it.  The ethics involved are horrifying.

As I have noted often, the degree of emotional disconnection and dissociation on the part of the Left with regard to, really, all of humanity, is striking.  They have rituals of thought which are important to them, celebrations of conformity that are important to them, but the whole thing has lapsed into near complete and clinical narcissism or, to use my preferred word, solipsism. 

Yes, of course they exist to fight everyone who is not like them, in the name of people they don’t understand or really care about, but they don’t REALLY see us as people.  We are just cartoon characters in their cartoon world. 

No one really dies, in their world.  No one really suffers.  Words are the sum total of the reality in the world.  Nothing else really matters.  This is why language policing suffices for them as complete and coherent policy, even though it does literally NOTHING to help people suffering from neglect, hunger, abuse, depression or any of the other long list of deprivations all humans are subject to from time to time.

I have for some time labeled most Leftists as suffering from some combination of Personality Disorders, but the degree of dissociation now borders on the Schizophrenic.

Read a paragraph or two of that link, then ponder what it takes to believe “Trump is literally Hitler”, despite literally ZERO evidence even suggestive of that.

By sheer happenstance, I found myself having a brief conversation with the CEO of a regional banking network.  I asked him how business was.

Not great, as you might expect, but he said the ReFi and 2nd market was very robust, which makes sense.

Here is the thing: since only banks can create money from nothing, people are surviving on credit.  A good friend of mine has maxed out what were paid off credit cards.  People who have a house are taking a 2nd mortgage out and using it to pay bills.  The very poor are borrowing money from their parents or friends. 

Those without those resources are truly miserable.

But in the same sense that some people are warning of inflation, since much of the “money” flowing into the system was created from nothing, we also need to be aware of the wealth transfer happening, from the small to the large, and from the poor and average to the already rich.

This “heyday”, as the Democrats see it–their chance for power and glory, electoral victory through cheating and blaming Trump–really amounts to an engineered recession, and recessions are ALWAYS very, very, very good for people with cash.  It’s Black Friday for the rich.  Everything goes on sale at a steep discount.

It’s hard not to wonder if some people out there wanted this thing for that reason alone.  The economy was just too good, and it had been too long since a good sale.

I will continue to insist my plan would work–not without pain in the short term, to be sure, but we are sure getting pain NOW, too, aren’t we?–and will do so until someone gives me a reason not to.

The issue with many of my ideas is that they are too original, in some respects.  People don’t know how to evaluate them since they are used to using the crutches of comparison and context.  They count the people on the one side, and then the other, and if it is close, THEN they start to sort of kind of think.

Few there are who can simply follow a path into the trackless wilderness, by the honest process of making one logical step, and then another, indefinitely.

If I have a particular strength, that is it.  There are people out there with higher IQ’s than me, but few with my stubbornness, tenacity, and capacity for being alone and different.

The only places there is a real problem is the States–New York, New Jersey, and Michigan stand out–where they pushed COVID patients into nursing homes.

If American still mostly are sane, then they should come out of this whole thing hopping mad.  Republicans are not innocent, but they CLEARLY were more reluctant to embrace extreme measures, and quick to begin reopening once it seemed reasonable to do so.

Even now, Democrats all over the map are trying to extend this thing indefinitely.  It’s unconscionable.  It’s a moral atrocity, and intellectually and empirically indefensible.

Democrats always want simple narratives.  The problem is, the world is not simple.  Inherently, then, logically, then, they will be perceiving much of reality incorrectly–which is to say incompletely–most of the time.

I don’t want to make saints of Republicans, but by and large anyone who goes through the indoctrination everywhere in our schools has to find their way back to sanity through thought, learning, and careful observation.  That makes Republicans largely a self selecting group, although there are no doubt legacy Republicans and issue Republicans out there in large numbers too.

And here is what I THINK they are thinking with respect to this whole COVID fiasco: let’s make it as bad as possible, pretend it was necessary, then blame the whole thing on Trump.  It also wouldn’t hurt if they could drag it out long enough that mail in votes become more viable as a general solution.  Mail in ballots seem to have been the weapon of choice in what I think was the pretty obvious fraud in the last election.

Simple minded, you say?  Yes.  Cynical in the extreme?  No doubt.  Feasible?  Yes, I would say it is.  It would not be with an alert, informed, and self respecting electorate, but large swathes of our populace have become complacent, ignorant, groveling fools.  The worse their cult gets, the more they want to remain in it.

I can’t say it won’t work, although this particular year they have a river of things to swim against, and I think most betting people would and should figure on HUGE Republican advances in November, if we can keep the elections mostly clean.

But on the other hand, we seem to have elected Barack Hussein Obama twice (I say seem, because it’s impossible to know now how pervasive the fraud was), despite hardly knowing the first fucking thing about him, other than that both of his fathers were Muslims–and that his mother at least had sex with one of them and married the other–and that one of his closest mentors in middle and high school was a card carrying Communist, drug dealer, and pornographer.

All that is in the rear view mirror for most.  Me, I don’t forget.  Apparently that is a Moon in Scorpio thing.  I haven’t forgotten the Vietnam War, or the creation of the Great Depression, or the machinations of the Federal Reserve, along with much else.