Month: September 2020

 I think Trump should go on Joe Rogan regardless of whether or not Joe Biden agrees to it. It will be a good format for him.

Candidly, it seemed like he was feeling sorry for himself last night. It is fair: he has accomplished a lot and all he gets from most of the media is lies and personal attacks. It would be tiring for anyone.

BUT THAT IS THE JOB, as currently constituted in this lunatic bin of a country.

I cannot claim to be able to have been able to watch that thing through other peoples eyes. I view both Biden and Harris as gross insults to the American people, even if our past stupidity makes them viable insults.

I do wish however that Trump had interrupted less, snd more obviously spent time polishing answers, the way Biden hiding in his basement seems to have done. Trump has the decided advantage that he can tell the truth. Biden obviously will say anything he needs to to win, then do whatever he is told to do by the radicals making his campaign possible.

 I will stipulate a principle, one which is somewhat obvious: those who study trees professionally have a hard time seeing the forest, just as most of those who enjoy the forest know little about it.

And those who study grievance quite generally ignore context—as one obvious example the ubiquity of slavery in all times and places outside the modern Christian West—and suffer from the added defect that, in absorbing themselves in what amounts an abstract activity, which compares an arbitrary ideal to an imposed generalized “reality”, quite often find themselves INVENTING the trees which they still fail to locate within the forests of history and place.

It seems to me that the first step in grievance studies is creating an ideal society which has NEVER EXISTED ANYWHERE, and comparing that to the present and then getting angry.

There is nothing wrong with dreaming, and nothing wrong with reform and improvement—these are, after all, Western ideals which have already worked for levels of prosperity and justice unique in human history.

Bit finding deep “oppression” in the midst of a wealth of opportunities most of humanity would have given their first born for, for most of history in most places, is ludicrous.

And to perform this exercise it is necessary to construct a golem of sorts, something neither alive nor dead, called “The Black Experience.” This is a mystical, unitary thing floating invisibly in the air, which white people cant see or feel, but which most of those interested in the topic will not shut up about.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE, will be spit by white people at other white people. Fair enough, is the reply, but neither do you.

And in my view, neither do most black people. The experience of an African King is different from that of a Bahian fisherman, and no doubt there are subtle shafes of difference if you grow up in the hood in Birmingham, Alabama, Birmingham, England, Detroit, or Watts.

And obviously there are a lot of middle class blacks. They may protest—my life is not that bad—but the Grievanceistas will scream at them YES IT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE BLACK AND SYSTEMIC RACISM. DO NOT DARE DEFY US.

There is a marvelous, witty and in my view very useful play written by Dave Harris called “Everybody Black”. It has enpugh in it that you can walk away with many messages, but I viewed it as a deconstruction in a helpful way of the notion of “Black Identity”. He breaks the fourth wall in the first scene, if memory serves—and spends the rest of the exploring black IDENTITIES, which ranged from a comical then tragic portrayal of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben (ironic foreshadowing—this was a year or two ago I saw this), to a black Oxford Professor, to a very comical ghetto rap contest.

Here is the thing: the notion of a unitary black identity, one characterized by unitary and even and demonstrable oppression, is a racist fiction. Saying “black people are oppressed” is as racist as saying “white people are racist.”

The GOAL is coherent principle, in my view, which is how we as Westerners came to critique the racisms and bigotries many thousands of years old, and came to oppose them consciously.

And the PRINCIPLE is diversity: people vary in their characters and experience all over the place, so we need to judge them as individuals, on the basis of their character, according to MLK, Jr., although each of us may in turn differ as to what most matters to us. Both the people judged vary, as do those judging. 

And of course some white people ARE racist, which means they see s black face and make a whole series of assumptions about them that they thrn never question.

But many white people are curious, ask questions, learn and develop honest friendships with everyone who deserves it.

 I think I am going to start calling it that.  As I have commented, the amygdala seems to involve shame as well as running and fighting.  Where traumatic experience is concerned, all three are present more or less continually, even if the specific face presented varies.

And if you consider that most people, if some bad thing is done to them, tend to emotionally want to reverse it in a way by doing it to someone else, then the thirst for power, in response to traumatic experience, becomes easily explicable.

We humans tend to be clumsy.  We are continually breaking one another, and then paying the consequences.  We put shit in our own soup.  It may be that someone else eats it, but what we eat was made by someone like us.  It all extends far back into the past.  It’s not always equally bad–most things exist in waves–but it is a recurring and continual theme.

 One of the objections I think a lot of women have in response to Trump was that leaked private conversation he had, where he talked about how “when you’re rich and famous, women will let you do anything”.

I have thought about this, and even though I am no ladies man, I’ve been around the block a few times.  I’ve seduced a lot of women.  In the spirit of honesty, nearly always clumsily.  I was and to some extent remain somewhat stupid.  I am a good talker, not afraid to try, and was reasonably handsome in my youth.

And what needs to be said is that women want to have sex too.  It is pretty obvious that sex is actually vastly more pleasurable, at least potentially, to women than to men.  It is likely true, as one comedian put it, that they are lowering their standards for nearly all of us, but that they hardly offering acts of charity exclusively in asking a man to join them in bed.  We can dispense with myth that all women are naturally chaste and modest virgins until marriage, or that they should be.

And with women, timing and feeling are everything.  What is objectionable and traumatizing in one time and place with one person might be erotic and pleasurably memorable in another with another.

If you listen to what he said, he said “women WILL LET YOU DO anything”.  Voluntary.  

Trump, despite being one of America’s most prominent billionaires, was never sued for sexual harassment.  Not once.  And even though he often hosted beauty pageants, the women uniformly described him as genteel, courteous, and well behaved.  The woman he described as fat was the reigning Miss Universe, and her term was one year, during which she was expected to not let herself go to shit, and to some extent, she did.  Her job was to show up at charity auctions and charity events, and be beautiful, so that rich patrons would show up, donate money, and some worthy cause benefit.  She failed in that job and Trump being Trump, told the truth about it.

But here is the thing; in the right time and place, getting your crotch grabbed by a rich, famous and good looking man would be one of the juicier parts of a Harlequin Romance novel.  If you go to the less-good used book stores, there is usually a wall of these things, which seemingly many women consume by the dozens in a typical year.  That is the sort of thing which, if consummated, makes for a very enjoyable memory, and if not, a subject of later masturbation.

In my view, this is how it works.

On the other end is Joe Biden–who is disconnected emotionally from humanity, being, in my view, a sociopath–grabbing a young and admiring intern, shoving her against a wall, inserting his finger in her, and more or less saying “let’s go somewhere and fuck”, and when she protests saying “I thought you were into me” the same way he called a bunch of soldiers “dumb bastards”.

This is the opposite of Harlequin.  He would be the bad guy in a Harlequin novel.  Wrong time, wrong place, wrong vibe, wrong guy.

The universal sentiment where Trump is concerned, if I might paraphrase, is that people who actually meet him in person feel felt.  They feel like he connects with them, listens to them, hears them.

Yes, he is blunt.  The attacks against him are nasty, continual, and intended to try and destroy him emotionally.  He has to be the way he is to deal with all that as well as he does.  He could not be any other way.  Rand Paul, for example, my admiration for him otherwise notwithstanding, would have been buried a long time ago.  With these people, if you are not speaking their language and fighting them effectively on their level, you lose.  The system they have engineered works like that.

We were just beginning to see, in February, how good things could and would be if our government actually worked for us.  That is why the lockdowns were instituted, something which had NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE.  No nation has EVER destroyed itself this way.  

But there are a hidden elite who DO NOT WANT US TO SUCCEED.  They want some part of us to remain poor, angry and thus manipulable.  They oppose one side to the other, and nobody sees the strings they are pulling, or the mass theft their control of the financial system continues to enable.

Trump is the answer.  If you oppose unnecessary wars, support prosperity and justice for all, and want a decent, honest human being in the White House, he is the ONLY vote.

 I think for traumatized people rules can feel like cages.  The essence of true traumatic energy is being trapped.  Neurologically, what happens when you trigger the fight or flight or shame/submission response and none are possible–when you can’t run, fight, or grovel–some part of your self collapses; some boundary fails; some flood is released which drowns some part of you.

For me personally, I struggle continually between my rational, rule making self, and some childish part of me which resists and sabotages my efforts.  I think anyone who is ineffective at anything has something of this in them.  I think it is very common.

Socialization is a tricky thing, and I think we still have not worked out the optimal way to do it.  You can’t let three year olds run wild, or you get 33 year olds running wild in the streets.  Look at your news: those kids were probably not spanked, and were probably not told no very often.  This is what happens.

But conversely, if you beat the shit out of kids, they spend their lives shaking in the corner, emotionally.  There is a middle way, the details of which would be a highly useful and fascinating topic of research for honest (they are manifestly not all honest; it is confusing to me why all therapists are not conservatives, since they all understand–or should understand–the value of personal agency and moral autonomy) psychologists to study.

But if the whole world feels like NO, then it is not unhealthy to scream FUCK YES!!!   And this happens even if the no is reasonable ,and intrapsychically, even if it is in response to some rational, frontal cortex idea and plan.

My work continues.  As I’ve said before, I think my particular life task is to understand the nature of evil–how it arises, what it is, and most importantly how it is healed, and prevented in the first place.  Perhaps, as Lao Tzu implicitly taught, history began with the emergence of evil.  In this time, when so much has happened, so much learned, and so many possibilities are present, it is past time we completed that loop consciously, and returned to our beginnings, but this time with awareness and control.

 Most religious folks agree on certain basic concepts, like the Golden Rule.  One sees versions of the Golden Rule in all religions I am personally aware of.

But does Black Lives Matter accept the Golden Rule?  I don’t think so.  The people running this thing don’t seem to just reject traditional morality, but morality outright.  This is what Marxist Satanists do.  Rather than seek to live under a law of any sort, they reject laws outright, codes outright, and make of anger and destruction themselves virtues.

The destruction being done by BLM to the black community is incalculable.  They are destroying black buildings and black businesses; destroying the economies of the cities where they are rioting; alienating the police that people need to keep the peace, with accompanying huge increases in all sorts of crime in black neighborhoods; and destroying–along with the lockdowns being pushed first and foremost and hardest by Democrats–the TAX BASE which is used to fund all social programs.

And it seems likely to me that they are breeding tacit but very real racism, in that many employers, now, are going to be hesitant to hire angry black people.  If they can get away with racist hiring, they will.

And it is unlikely any useful changes to policing will be made.  After all the anger, arson, theft and death, the police departments will be doing well to return to the status quo ante, where they return to patrolling the streets and arresting the same drug dealers and gang bangers they used to, and who they are letting run rampant right now.

All this is for nothing.  It is a stage play, enacted on the theme of “Democrat good; Republican bad”, but it is far from clear that the black communities–who are suffering much, much, much more from the riots than from police brutality–will draw the conclusion that is being shoved so aggressively and viciously down their throats.  They may just say “I want a job, a good school for my kids, and safe streets”.  No Democrat is positioning him or herself to deliver those.  Not in this election.  You need Republicans for that.

Obviously, some people just want a free ride.  They want to live without working.  Those people deserve what they get, which are scraps from the table of life.  That is not living, though.  There can be no self respect in that world.  I personally am not racist enough to believe that describes more than a small segment of the black community.  And there are plenty of poor whites like that too.  The worst abuses I personally have heard of were from white families, actually.

This ad is truly outstanding.  This spirit has long been needed.  I will openly hope this is the year the Democrats finally, truly, and OBVIOUSLY went much, much too far.

 I think we can all see, now, that it is very common to be addicted to the emotions of outrage and emotional violence.  The raw tinder is provided by people skilled in the knowledge of what will burn brightest and longest–nearly always lies and willful misrepresentation based on preexisting stereotypes and biases–and social media is the wind which spreads it.  I’ve given you one appropriate word to describe this.

I watched this interview with Hugh Jackman the other day, and he talks about resting in pain and discomfort as perhaps the essence of how we relate to God.  Finding equanimity in a cold shower.

As I pondered it, I’ve seen this concept many times.  Kum Nye, in its apparently original form, uses it.  If you take a simple posture–say raising your arms over your head–and hold it longer than you think you can, and relax into it, underlying energetic patterns loosen.  If you can comfortably do it a minute, but do it 2 or 3 minutes, and FOCUS on accepting the sensations, and relaxing into the sensations, some rigid, holding part of you softens, and life becomes easier.

Much of our trouble in life comes from self pity, from saying “I should not have to do this”, or “this hurts and I should never hurt”.  If you can learn to laugh at that sort of thing, honestly, without pretense or force, you will be much happier.

Soldiers, as one obvious example, more or less have to learn to tolerate this sort of thing.  This is to the good.  But the nature of the sheer volume of pain they endure often makes them mean and even cruel.  That is not good.  I’ve said this before, but a TRUE warrior is a killer.  He or she is someone who, seeing a target, kills them instantly and without hesitation or remorse.  This is, to be sure, something which is sometimes regrettably necessary, but none of us should aspire to this as an ideal.

I would say, rather, that learning to accept life’s inevitable pains is a part of the process simply of becoming human.  In the same sense that giving black berets to all members of the Army did not make them elite, calling oneself a “warrior” does not make one equal to that title.

I say this as someone who feels a bit of that grizzled asshole in me.  Cuts everywhere, spewing hatred and venom, spewing I will fucking hurt you don’t fuck with me.  It’s unattractive.  Hell, maybe I am just discussing myself.  I don’t know.  It’s not spiritual, other than that it is not complacent, is very alert and aware, and is willing to suffer.

As a more abstract point I’m not sure how to make, but will try anyway, I was pondering for the umpteenth time the nature of the difference between good and evil, as we construe them.  It is most likely true that no one is purely good or evil, but it is OBVIOUS beyond the possibility of discussion that some human being enjoy inflicting death and pain on other people (and animals, and indeed the Earth itself) for the sake of the thrill it gives them.  Sadists exist, and evil is as good a word as any.

It is a truism that the evil reject God and God’s Law.  This is thousands of years old.

What I want to suggest this morning is that they find themselves utterly unable to find rest in tension.  They cannot accept the necessity of restraint.  Laws mean nothing to them.  They cannot see the souls of other people, feel them, care about them.

Why?  This is the question I am asking myself.

Evil comes from trauma.  I am very sure of that.  Trauma is an inability to relax on a deep level, consciously.  You can get away from the trauma through dissociation, which amounts to hypoarousal, which amounts to a disengagement with life, a listlessness, and lack of a rudder.

But when dissociated, you cannot consciously be yourself.  No spontaneous feelings are arising, no viable sense of self.  We feel our unique selves by what we value and reject, and the quality of our own feelings.  If you feel none of that, you never feel a sense of a unique self.  All of this is subtle, like the aromas of skillfully prepared meal, or in a bouquet of mixed flowers.  But all of us have our own unique footprint, our own unique energetic gestalt.

And what I feel is that people that are destined to become evil–take as an image serial killers, who have become large in the popular imagination, but who are sick people who enjoy inflicting pain and eventually murder on strangers, and who relive their crimes often in their imagination–are people for whom the word no has been conditioned to provoke hyperarousal and what might be termed traumatic shock.

In my own case, nothing I did was good enough.  There was no safety, no shelter, or none that I remember.  I don’t really know why I am not crazy, or crazier.  Even if I have moments of meanness and even cruelty, they are few and far between, and it doesn’t take much to keep them in check.  And I have many moments of genuinely spontaneous generosity and kindness.  I don’t know why.  I must have gotten just enough love.  Just enough that I kept my sanity.

But not everyone does.  Little babies are often driven mad before they are 2 years old.  Their life paths, emotionally, are set by that time.  They are dissociated, which facilitates cruelty, which alternates with bouts of rage and violence.

In some respect, evil has got to consist in punishing “the world’ for crimes committed against that person that they can’t even remember (and of course, in many cases, ones they can).

But at root, I think the root anger is that of being unable to accept the world, unable to rest in difficulty, unable to accept life as it is, because every time they try, the same rage comes out.

At root, evil is an inability to rest, to come to peace, to become coherent and eu-adaptive to the world as it is.  It is a restlessness and homelessness.  It is a ship in a stormy sea, denied entry to all ports.  It is a punishment meted out on the world for denying it comfort and succor.  This punishment breeds pleasure because it makes them feel alive as individuals, as people.  It is their way of telling the world they exist, and in turn of FEELING that they exist, which is an enormous relief.

Looked at this way, sadism is not that hard to understand.

Would masochism then consist in rest within powerlessness?  Rest within formlessness?

Oh, this is all very complicated and deep.  That is enough for today.

 Everything in its own time.

Came to me in a dream.

I am kind of a Numerology skeptic, but there are three infinity signs there, are there not?  And our numbers all have morphologies, do they not?

The other day I saw someone had written, in response to the “69” on sees often in port-a-johns, 22.  Took me a second.  That was a new one.

In Kum Nye, 3 and 9 are the numbers.  You are enjoined to do something either 3 or 9 times.  108 seems to be a special number too.

I know in Japanese 4 is bad, since either the word for it or the character for it resembles their word for death.

I was pondering all this, and it feels to me that EVEN IF numbers mean something, we should probably all welcome a steady diet of variety.  In the same sense that “bad” events are often hidden blessings–as odious and indefensible as these lockdowns have been, they have been good for me personally–so too open blessings are often hidden curses.  Lottery winners, I think, often find themselves hating their families.

So we need, and to be sure, get, all the numbers.  I still find it interesting watching them, and do still tend to view random occurrences of lots of 3’s and 9’s as good luck.  It is likely pointless, but all of us have our little rituals which season life.

 Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, 

and remember what peace there may be in silence. 

As far as possible, without surrender, 
be on good terms with all persons. 
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; 
and listen to others, 
even to the dull and the ignorant; 
they too have their story. 

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; 
they are vexatious to the spirit. 

If you compare yourself with others, 
you may become vain or bitter, 
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. 
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. 
Keep interested in your own career, however humble; 
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. 

Exercise caution in your business affairs, 
for the world is full of trickery. 
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; 
many persons strive for high ideals, 
and everywhere life is full of heroism. 
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. 
Neither be cynical about love, 
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, 
it is as perennial as the grass. 

Take kindly the counsel of the years, 
gracefully surrendering the things of youth. 
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. 
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. 
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. 

Beyond a wholesome discipline, 
be gentle with yourself. 
You are a child of the universe 
no less than the trees and the stars; 
you have a right to be here. 
And whether or not it is clear to you, 
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. 

Therefore be at peace with God, 
whatever you conceive Him to be. 
And whatever your labors and aspirations, 
in the noisy confusion of life, 
keep peace in your soul. 

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, 
it is still a beautiful world. 
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

 It occurs to we define ourselves by our tension. This is how we create ground beneath our feet, and fixity generally. Without feet, without ground, the innate Verworfenheit of the human condition becomes obvious.

I think I do no violence to the Buddhist doctrine of Anatman by summarizing it as “throw yourself out there and wait. Eventually you will be glad you did.”

And how do you do that? Deep relaxation, to the point where you feel yourself getting lighter, and then floating.

Within Kum Nye theory, the Nye does the work. All you have to do is show up, witness and participate.