Month: May 2021

This is a phrase I heard long ago in Sales training, and I liked it.  I instinctively understood what was meant.

Today, it occurs to me that brutality is sometimes necessary for kindness to prevail even within our own psyches.

As I have said often, the “kindness” being promoted by so many–most of whom identify closely with the political Left–is really a corrosive habit of self abnegation, which leads to latent anger, hostility and resentment, which is what we see daily in the bombs lobbed continually at all dissent by the proponents of “kindness” and “tolerance”.  I don’t think it is all that complicated psychologically.  If you develop the habit of lying to yourself, everything is possible.  All crimes are possible.  All lies are possible.  Nothing is outside the pale when you do not allow yourself, much less force yourself, to see clearly who you are and what you are doing.

I think ALL human possibilities, all malice and hate and anger and fear and hostility and cruelty and everything else, has positive possibility within it.  Everything is seasoning, everything must be in proportion.

For example, most religious traditions teach us to hate what is bad for us.  The ability to hate makes it easier to follow a benignant path.

Nothing human is intrinsically evil, and no human capacity is intrinsically good.  Kindness in the wrong place, with respect to the wrong person, in the wrong way and wrong proportion, is bad.  Cruelty, likewise, in the right place, to the right extent, can be a positive good.

How is this: the core goal of spiritual work is to learn how to habitually and skillfully turn all experience into pleasure and balance.

And note that challenge and difficulty can not just be pleasurable, but perhaps represent the best path to the highest forms of happiness.

And consider that balance is active, not passive.  We play a role, and the universe plays a role.  The resultant is the art–in all senses–of life.

As an exercise in perceptual fluidity and flexibility, ponder the idea that the capacity for masochism is God’s gift to us in order to tolerate the intolerable.  Sadism, likewise, is the gift of being able to inflict the intolerable, in pursuit of personal psychological and sometimes physical survival.

It is far from clear just what sort of universe we live in, or how it operates.  Perhaps all of us, in the landscape of infinity, are vastly more powerful and resilient in all respects than we suspect.

I am not now who I was, nor am I who I hope one day to be.  If I cling to now, then, or an image of myself in the future, I am stuck, not free.

I will append to this an encouragement for anyone wanting to ponder in more depth what it really means for any us to “have” a personality, or sense of self, to read William James treatment of these topics in the first volume of “Principles of Psychology”.  I would particularly encourage any students of Buddhism or metaphysics generally to look that book up.  I myself need to reread it, but suffice it to say most should find it quite interesting, confusing, and perhaps enlightening.  Most of us make assumptions which really are not warranted by facts we already have.

It is in my view reasonable to suppose energy is only transformed in this universe.  It is never destroyed, merely changed, redirected, reshaped, repurposed.

To rid oneself of anxiety, which is to say worry–or what manifests as worry, since the feeling of tension often precedes the thoughts which arise as a direct result and response–it seems to me you need to replace it with something.

And that something, in my view, is the habit of careful planning, consistent diligence in execution, and sufficiently developed reality testing that you recognize accurately 1) what is beyond your control; and 2) that anxiety about the uncontrollable hurts you, and has no effect on the universe.

Several quotes I have used often are one I believe was Voltaire or Montaigne, to the effect of “my life has been filled with terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

And it was, I believe, George Bernard Shaw who said something close to “Worry does not rid the future of its terrors, but the present of its pleasures.”

The other shoe may drop.  This is an ever-present possibility.  There is every reason in the world right now to be anxious, scared, on edge and petrified.

But if you would not inflict that on someone else, why inflict it on yourself?

We are here, we all may suppose, to learn the art of living.  And no sane person would ever suggest that living well involves daily bouts of terror and self inflicted intimidation.

I think the essence–and I do this essence thing often, and here is another–of the Buddhist path is the sense that you have been in this tent before, in front of this fire, with this family, eating this food.  You have been there many times.  An odium sets in, even in congenial circumstances.

And does it not sometimes seem that some people are real, and others merely NPC’s, going through the motions?  Is it perhaps possible that some bodies are inhabited by spirits and some are not?  I have not seen anyone suggest that that I can recall, but I wonder it myself.

And getting through the keyhole, escaping all this, requires not just renouncing the desire for things and people and comforts and aversion to things and people and difficulties, but to the SELF too.

Looked at in this view, the rejection of self is utterly logically necessary.  There must be a clean sweep.  Nothing can be left.  You cannot cling to this idea of your Self.  Therefore No Self must be posited.  Consistency demands it.

But this does not mean that no self is being liberated.  If this were true, how could the term “liberation” mean anything?  Who would be speaking and who listening?

Buddhism is simply an articulation of very high level, very disciplined logic.

I have a lot of ideas stored up.  I am not sharing them, because I am not feeling it.  I likely will soon.

that within his lifetime Anthony Fauci will be seen by the whole world as the monster that he is.

I literally think Fauci will in the end be responsible for more human death—and perhaps as much or more misery—than Adolph Hitler. The metric is about 20 million dead, if memory serves, which includes the 6 million killed in the Holocaust, and all the soldiers and civilians killed in all the countless small atrocities which happen in war.

Fauci is not stupid. He is not grotesquely incompetent. No: it is much, much worse than that.

Willful stupidity is a form of cruelty. It is a subtle and usually unrecognizable form of sadism.

And what is willful stupidity? An emotional resistance to effectiveness and accurate understanding. It is an internal lie told to mask an unpleasant truth, which is the presence of unclaimed and unacknowleged viciousness.

Nearly all of us are capable of cruelty we do not want to own and admit. Sades own defense was that he was like most other people, only honest and not hypocritical. This of course does not make evil good, but he was not wrong in stating that most outwardly pious people were much more like him than the angels they praised.

I would say careful and sincere efforts at understanding others—and the world itself—are always a form of generosity of spirit. Indeed this is often all I have to offer, but one can only give what one has. I am otherwise a very poor man. I work daily to become more wealthy in the ways that matter.

I would like to offer this definition of science: “an active and reactive intelligence oriented around effective action and accurate understandings of human life and our universe.”

As such I think it is purely benign. It could also be defined in its fallen and impure form as “a process of rationalizing ineffective and misguided policy in the service of political expediency”.

I was gratified the other day to see someone very independently of me reference Lysenkoism.

That is just me fooling around. The point I wanted to make is that maybe mask wearing IS scientific. We have been told we are being required to wear masks to accomplish a scientific end.

But what if the scientific end is getting us to wear masks? To create a cause which can be amplified in our compliant propaganda apparatus suffciently that coherent and well considered social engineering goals can be accomplished?

It is absurd to think that slowing an undangerous virus 1.5% per month across a YEAR is sensible, when considering the psychological toll, especially on our young. I heard Lin Wood refer to this as satanic and I agree. That is my feeling exactly. It is a sadistic game, played on us by a power elite, and has become a masochistic one on the part of far too many.

Yesterday some woman asked me to put my mask on and I asked her if this made any sense to her AFTER A YEAR. She replied that the mask did not bother her and that we all needed to wear them until we were all vaccinated. This is the catechism, is it not?  The faith and the creed, duly and dully recited by the robotically compliant?

But even Trevor Noah found himself wondering ALOUD why the same cretins pushing masks are telling the vaccinated they STILL need to wear masks?

It seems obvious nobody even KNOWS what these injections being given to as much of the worlds population as possible DO.

They do not seem to confer immunity. It is not at all clear they prevent severe illness. And as I said recently we have VASTLY more data on the illness than these sundry medical “treatments” which were cooked up in a gold rush, to cash in big, using NEW TECHNOLOGY. New to this purpose, in any event.

A vaccine is injecting an agent to which the bodies immune system reacts. These “vaccines” consist in material which causes the body itself to create the disease FROM YOUR OWN CELLS, and to which some other part of the body reacts. How long this “magic” lasts nobody knows. We may be inducing permanent disease and continual immune reactions in response, which are unnatural and highly likely, as many have commented, to lead to all sorts of autoimmune disorders.

And returning to the actually scientific use of masks, all of us, when presented with a trivial but inappropriate demand, can react with anger or compliance.

In some respects—and this just occurred to me—healthy anger is like our social immune system. It keeps out, spontaneously and naturally, what is bad for us.

Perennial, indefinite mask wearing to no truly logical purpose in effects degrades some important aspect of our social immune system and opens us up to further and more severe “infection” in the form of yet more intellectually depraved, idiotic, and abusive demands.

The propagandist and brain and heart washer might well adopt the unofficial SAS motto “always a little farther.”

The thing with reflexive compliance is that it becomes first a habit, then something people CLING TO. We are wired as social animals, and clinging in groups to arbitrary totems and symbols is something we do naturally. What triggers People of the Mask when they see the relative Other is DIFFERENCE. It is not really the fear of physical disease but moral and social contagion. They do not want to be reminded other possibilities exist. They want to forget their freedom by denying it to others.

I well remember recently having a kid wearing a mask come out from behind a large plastic shield 30’ from me, which protected an enclosed room—where he was about as safe as safe can be—to come yell at me for not wearing a mask while I was STANDING drinking coffee, rather than sitting drinking coffee, in a hotel breakfast area where I was the only occupant. I yelled at him because it was patently abusive, but looking back I should have just sat down and asked him “happy now?”

But this is the sort of psychotic intrusion a year of madness makes both possible and in important respects inevitable.

Here is my net point: THERE ARE NO TRIVIAL ABUSES OF FREEDOM.

Our courts and legislatures and too many State and local leaders have been failing us for more than a year.

Laws are made by legislatures. This is Poly Sci 101. Governing by Diktat for more than a short span of time—as the Whitmers and Newsom’s and Cuomo’s and Wolf’s and others have done—is OBVIOUSLY wrong according to every precedent in American history and inimical to everything we supposedly stand for.

Done without legislative oversight and consent, such law making is law BREAKING.

And SELF EVIDENTLY both our courts and legislatures should have put leashes on our sundry Governors 8 months ago or more.

I would argue that Hitler never REALLY ended democratic representation in Germany. He just declared a State of emergency that only ceased with his death deep in thr flaming rubble of Berlin.

Most large scale evil in human history has been the result of giving too much power to bad people. Every particle and word in our Constitution vibrates with the admonition “do not allow the concentration of power ANYWHERE.”

I woukd assert that much of this last year has been IN EFFECT teaching people to tolerate giving too much power to bad people. It is training. And masks, in important respects, are our leashes. Reject them.

 

 

Life is a sort of groove we flow down in a current of water somewhat beyond our control. We can work with it, or against it. The world does not care.

Imagine a stick which flows sideways down a narrow channel, getting caught continually.

That same stick can orient perpendicularly and flow easily.

What I eould suggest is the easiest way to live is to establish habits of daily industry and self improvement, which are carried out patiently and reliably regardless of circumstances. If things are bad you do not panic; and if good do not become complacent.

These are old ideas, but seemingly need to be perennially renewed and sold in new ways.