You know, what the world asks is specific and literal. It is countable. It is numerical. It is nameable. Once you pay it, everything else–which is most of life–is yours.
Most people fail, across sometimes long lifetimes, to realize how much intangible wealth they were born with, and how easy it is to create more.
Caesar has no interest in your soul (or did not until Communism). Buy him off cheap. He will never know or care.
If you were hoping for something sappy, I am going to disappoint you.
I will say this: if you NEED to say “I love you”, it is only because there might have been doubt. For people deeply in love, saying it is superfluous.
Or so I suppose. I haven’t had this experience. I may not ever have it in this life. That is OK.
But I’m going to let my grumpy old man out of the closet and say this: most of the time, men say this to women to help them–the women–rationalize their way through a long series of warning signs. Women say it to men to storm the gates, and try and win power.
Now, obviously, I GET that men REALLY DO feel love for women, and women for men. I am a cynic, but I am also a realist, and obviously there are happy stories out there. Not enough, but they do happen. Truths are told. Souls are exposed and the trust rewarded. It often ends badly, but not always. Not always. Most of life is rolling dice, and sometimes you get lucky when you deserved bad luck, and vice versa.
Most of the time, of course, what you might reasonably have expected to happen, does in fact happen. This still somehow often surprises people. Mon Dieu.
But if I might continue to indulge my obsessiveness, my four stomach (I think that is right) cow, Camus’ more or less said this of Rieux and his mother. They loved each other. Both knew it. Neither said it. And nothing was lost by this. The words were superfluous.
Often what needs to be said will be a lie, and what cannot be said is the only truth.
That sounds deep. Maybe it is. I’m on my fourth beer, so I’ll leave it to you to determine. Is there a three quarters deep? Is it an either/or proposition? Is there a deep-ish? Deep with reservations? Almost deep?
Yes, that is me joking. I am however also listening to King Lear, and wondering what Cordelia’s problem was. Unlike her sisters, she was inarticulate but sincere.
This is a fascinating world. I am intrigued by damn near everything I see. I really am a fucking dog, sniffing everything and wagging my tail and especially when drinking smiling my dog smile.
I read that an FBI agent got arrested down in Louisiana yesterday for in effect being a pedophile and all around creep. That was on Gateway Pundit, and apparently he is the second in a few months.
That got me to thinking about Ted Gunderson. Watch this talk, if you are not familiar with his name and the broad claims he made: https://youtu.be/BplUD6kQYuU
Obviously, if I were a Rothschild and looking at the perhaps trillions I JUST made through this engineered disaster, looking at the people I own, the institutions I own, the corporations, the schools, the printing presses, looking at all that, I would feel pretty confident.
Me, of course, my brain tells me that if we live in a world where what just happened, and continues to happen, is even POSSIBLE, that corruption and cowardice are so endemic, there is little reason to anticipate a return to sanity.
It is what it is. My best way of fighting is working daily to be a bit calmer, a bit happier, a bit kinder, and a bit wiser. That is my play.
But all that got me to thinking about these poor victims of behavioral AND PERCEPTUAL modification through structured torture, aka brainwashing.
The basic method is one of creating so much panic and pain that a person dissociates to escape, and into a personality which is fully and reflexively compliant. A robot, in the ideal, whose robotic behavior can be turned on and off, like in the Winter Soldier.
As William James described at length, hypnotic alters are relatively easy to generate even for a good hypnotist with a good subject. The issue is that the alters are dull and uncreative. They are not real, in the senses we would understand from a common sense perspective. They are splinters cut off from the whole.
Here is the claim I will make, and the reason for this post: no one CAPABLE of doing such a thing to another human being could do so without THEMSELVES being already robotic, already trance driven, already a ready and willing slave and prisoner. How does such sadism arise? Well, it was inflicted on them, in some way. They were humiliated, terrified, caught, and trapped.
Prison guards still spend much of their lives in prison. And people who willingly inflict pain on others are just making them more similar to themselves. What they do to others was done to them, not literally, but in spirit.
Humiliation that was poured in as shame comes out as cruelty and arrogance, ruthlessness and hostility.
I continue to wonder about this world. We have answers to all the Big Questions which are decent, and we are positioned to make all those answers vastly better, through the intelligent, thoughtful, and morally aware use of science.
But a flame from long ago continues to burn through this world, to turn wisdom into ashes, joy into misery, and plenty into want.
I am certainly neither the first nor the last to contemplate this in my minds eye. But it’s the first time I have done it for myself today.
What I would suggest, though, is that ruling the world is not worth a bucket of spit. Those roaches crawling up and down the spine don’t disappear, there. That quivering in the stomach does not disappear. No amount of power is enough for one individual to end or even diminish their pain for long, and obviously if power winds up in one set of hands, there will always be another keen for it.
The spectacle worth pursuing is a happy, prosperous planet, filled with morally intelligent, capable, and sturdy human beings, living in balance with one another and the cosmos, who work and play, dance and sing, and who do not fear death.
One of the latent benefits of both the fraud surrounding the efforts to install Joe Biden, and the farcical anti-scientific narratives surrounding COVID is that their sheer audacity and scope make it scary for people to even CONSIDER that such ideas might have substantial validity.
Nobody would subject a billion people to desperate poverty, would they? Not on purpose? Nobody would enlist an army of people and develop a detailed tactical and strategic plan to completely alter an American Presidential election, would they? It’s crazy, right? Can’t be true, right?
Ordinary people can easily imagine small lies, told here and there, on small scales, and which affect few people. But few can imagine 20,000 people working to defraud American voters of their rightfully elected President, and rightfully elected Congress.
Few can imagine that Anthony Fauci has been lying since last March, that he participated in CREATING this virus–and possibly even releasing it, although I personally don’t think that was part of HIS plan–then participated in suppressing the most obvious life-saving measures, like the perfectly safe HCQ and Ivermectin, and vitamin and mineral supplementation.
To even THINK these ideas may be true is traumatic for many people. It fills their guts with fear. They feel rage and despair welling up in equal measures, which they can easily dispel by doing nothing more complicated than agreeing with their TV.
You have on the one hand unbearable existential anxiety, and on the other perfect peace and complacency. You need a strong mind to value truth over peace.
I might put it this way: to recognize a kick in the nuts you have to have BEEN kicked in the nuts. Most Americans have lived peaceful, decadent, slothful (outside of work) lives, filled with little thought, and less honest difficulty. Most Americans seem to have forgotten that people lie, cheat and steal, and not infrequently while simultaneously claiming to be working for peace, prosperity and justice.
Europeans have less excuse. In their case, they have good educational systems, but they seem to, if anything, be even more submissive to their own “experts”.
I have both light and dark in me. And I can consult both when the occasion calls for it.
I think it is much easier for demons to live in noisy places, and I mean that both emotionally and literally.
And actually I would add to that the cluttered intellectual landscape of too many words which mean too little.
This thing that just pissed me off, part of the trigger for me was the sheer banality of this individual. I am better than that, some part of me said.
And I well remember back in my youth, in my teens, deciding that WHATEVER I did with my life, I was not going to be a generic suburban statistic, with 2.2 kids, a house with a 30 year mortgage I planned to trade up in a few years, a wife who was good enough, and a job that mostly didn’t suck. Settling.
You know, a slightly better version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I9GqxDA4ac
But everyone who aspires to transcend our culture tends to wind up counter-cultural. When they go up, you go down. When they turn right, you turn left. And the bigger a fuckup you are, the more bohemian respectability you have, if you live in the right city, with the right people.
And of course Jack Kerouac and his literal fellow travelers kind of set up the model for this, in the United States at least. The rejection of bourgeois respectability and sensibilities. No: he was going to go down in a flame, fighting. Anything but the prison of normality.
Here is the thing: it is HEALTHY not to want to be a perfectly fitting cog in a machine which DOES NOT MEET YOUR EMOTIONAL NEEDS. It is healthy not to want to be perfectly synchronized with a world which always leaves you feeling hungry, and a bit emptier every day, sensations which you only make go away by allowing your inner knowing and spirit to atrophy.
At the same time, being a screwup is not spiritual either. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. I recently printed out a picture from the movie Leviathan to remind myself of this, and am looking for a poster, which I’m sure I can find when I have time. You can beat the system in small ways as an individual, but not in large ways. Masses of people can, but not any one of us. It will crush you, as happened in that movie. It doesn’t matter how mediocre and rotten it is, or how just your cause.
And I thought to myself: am I not living in a machine, too, albeit in my own way? Am I REALLY better in any meaningful, lasting way, than this guy? And it came to me that no, we are really much more alike than different, my vanity notwithstanding.
And if I style myself a “sage” someday, am I better? Not really. No, I think the main value of following a different path is the pleasure in it. It is the fun. The goodwill, the humor. It is not saying FUCK YOU to THE MAN. That is living in relation. Deal with the Man. Make deals with the Man. The Man has his place, his role, and it’s not my job to tell him how to live, or how much better I think I am. He is going to look down on me in any event. His values differ from my own, and he will never judge me by my standards. This whole process, of course, is why we live differently: we both pursue what matters to us.
And of course the ones following the paths less taken tend to have less money, and less stability. This is an obvious and common cost. If comfort and security are the measures, then this is a dumb path.
But here is the thing: my life is my life, and if I am living well, or poorly, it really doesn’t matter how anyone else is living. I asked for freedom: I have freedom, within limits largely defined by my own capacity for ingenuity and work.
You can’t “beat” anyone in Life. What you will die with is the sum total of your experiences, and you cannot possibly know those of anyone else, and have forgotten most of your own.
So I guess to forgive him for being conventional and banal, my task, really, is to live my own life better, while realizing we are both in the same maze, and if my life might in some way better, it is only because I have forgotten him in “following my own bliss”, which is a cliche I am permitting myself in honor of this post.
Flat things open, and reveal three dimensions. Grey envelopes contain the rainbow. If I am really dumb one day, I can always hope to do better in the next.
I just had someone piss me off, in a way which would have severely triggered me in the past. But I had just done a Neurofeedback session, and I’m like “ah, it’s in the past. It’s done. Forget about it.” And for a split second I DID.
And then I looked at that (it is called introSPECTION), and realized that holding on to wounds is something which happens mostly when there is already an underlying strata of hyperarousal. I will be mad about one thing one day, then replace it with something else the next day, but the whole thing is glued together with an underlying emotional current which makes it easy for me to float the paper boats of wrath and hostility, both of which amount to unforgiveness.
I take that underlying energy and transform it now into this memory of this offense, now into the other. And new ones spring out, more powerful, more palpable, more colorful, more charged, easily.
To forgive, phenomenologically, in terms of how it feels, how it presents itself to the consciousness, amounts to relaxing a tight knot of emotional dysregulation. It is relaxing a tension.
And obviously, no specific forgiveness will help, if there remains an underlying current of energy. Learning to calm the limbic system, to self regulate, amounts to the ability to forgive in advance.
We are animals, certainly. We are spirits, I believe. But our experience is where the two possibilities meet.
Forgiveness is the resolution of the fight or flight or shame response, from long ago. Humiliation is a wound, too, isn’t it? That wound triggers a chronic agitation, or emotional inflammation, that makes all future hurts easier to overreact to, and harder to let go of, which is to say forgive. We fight old battles, again and again, until we let them go. This we call forgiveness.
And you might say, well there was this one person, who hurt me long ago. My fiancee ran off with my best man on our wedding day. I will never forgive him. Well, what happens every time you think about it? You feel like breaking something. You feel like strangling one or both of them. You got into hyperarousal, in other words, in ways you can’t control, and this hyperarousal is liable to cause you to yell at someone you would not have yelled at, to drive too fast, to refuse to listen to your friends story. All of this only hurts you.
Forgiveness is allowing this tender spot to relax. Forgiveness is returning to a base of calm. Forgiveness is reaching a point where when you see or hear their names, or even see them, that you are not triggered.
Almost everything in life, good and evil, wealth and poverty, has to do with trauma and relaxation. I really believe this. Nothing is more important than figuring out how to undo trauma, and teaching the traumatized to let go of their natural fear, pain, grief, anger and shame.
Read this last Wednesday or Thursday: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/haarp-firing-faa-issues-warning-about-electromagnetic-radiation
Today Portland is 112 degrees. It NEVER gets that hot there. Many places don’t even have air conditioning. That is on the hot side for Phoenix. Portland in general is cool and rainy, or so I read.
It would certainly be easy to invoke divine justice, but I think HAARP–the weapon, perhaps, of some of the demons–instead.
Can we expect a harangue and “demand for action” on Global Warming from the usual suits–some of them expensive pants suits, and one of them Joe Biden, the nominal President–tomorrow? We will find out.
HAARP is one of those things where it is impossible to know how paranoid to be. But it does seem like with technology like that, heating up spots in the atmosphere must be very easy.
In a sane, functioning society, where the government was held accountable to the people’s representatives, and to the law, we would know a lot more. I would like to see Congress look into this and determine once and for all what all this thing is capable of, and as importantly, who is really in control of it, ultimately.
Is the Northwest being burned to affect the news cycle? Early reports on the Arizona audit may begin dropping as early as tomorrow, and Michael Flynn said that the Uniparty would do SOMETHING to disrupt and distract. This could do the trick, although lacking cable I don’t really know how hysterical they are at this point.
I have struggled over the years to define with reasonable clarity in my own mind what is “wrong” with sentimentality.
I have felt it and expressed it often enough when drinking. That is one of the perils of drinking; you become maudlin.
At the same time, one of the problems with the world is its, to use Weber’s term, “rationalization”. Most of us move around robotically, and seem to feel if anything much too little. That is why “passion” became a virtue, rather than a sin, as it was for most of history, until perhaps the 19th century.
Passion, we are told, is life. Life, therefore, consists in feeling a lot of it. But this is only half right. Yes, emotional health will lead to a healthy emotional connection to the world, and contentment and even joy, but feelings in and of themselves are not and should not be to the goal. The goal is connection. It is reacting the right ways to the right things, to the right extent. How can you know if you are doing that? It feels right, if you are healthy. That is the point and purpose of feeling: nuance, judgement, balance.
Contrast Sean Penn with whatever image you have of the Buddha or Christ. Who do you think is healthier?
[And I will repeat a joke told about Larry Ellison: the difference between God and Sean Penn is that God doesn’t think he is Sean Penn.]
Here is what I want to say today: the issue with sentimentality is it is emotion which clouds our judgement, and which arises from within reactions we have to ideas within our own minds, rather than in reaction to the world itself.
There is a closed loop, in other words, making this a fundamentally narcissistic way of feeling. And to be sure, narcissists CAN and often ARE sentimental. AOC, to take one obvious example, is no doubt honestly often emotional. But she is stupid and self absorbed, so what she is reacting to, by and large, exists only in her mind.
She is not seeing, to be clear, actual suffering “out there” and feeling compassion, so much as seeing the world and feeling what a pity it is that the world has so little of her. If only the world would bow at her feet, what a grand thing that would be. She would set all alright: and she wouldn’t even have to TRY. She is that good. Just ask her.
Healthy emotionality is organic. It is soft and subtle, most of the time. Most of our rages and depressions and great terrors spring out of trauma, when they are not healthy reactions to horrific situations. If you feel horror in the face of war, that is one thing. If you feel the need to kill outside of a war, though, that is another. That is an unhealthy passion, springing from trauma, itself the product of trauma, going “all the way back”.
But people who feel SATISFIED, who are getting a steady current of emotional nourishment–which is the aim of healthy spirituality in my view, and certainly in my own Kum Nye practice–are not going to go on wild mood swings, and they are not going to project their own unmet emotional needs onto the world.
Actually, maybe that is it: sentimentality is projecting our own emotional needs onto the world. If you need love, you cry because so many other people lack love. If you hurt inside, you cry because so many other people hurt out there.
Oh, that may be close. Have to think and feel on it.
And by the way, no thinking happens without feeling. This is certainly now mainstream biology (tltafdnr: too little time and focus; did not read), but also something easily observable. All of my thoughts have feelings tones for me, and I have often noted how feelings lead easily to certain sorts of thoughts. If you are wondering why a certain sort of thought–fearful images for example, or sad ones–keeps occurring, look more carefully at how you are feeling.
Our vision becomes clearer by subtraction. We have to identify and remove all the filters that prevent true clarity. Merely being “intelligent”–particularly as measured by tests of various sorts–is not even remotely close enough. There were plenty (dozens, in any event) of people as smart as Einstein. What he brought was focus, imagination, and most of all a spirit of play and curiosity. Those are all emotional characteristics.
And as I “heart” on this–what is the emotional equivalent to thinking, since “feeling” is so imprecise (we need a better word)?–this issue can be further simplified: honest emotion is accurate. It reflects what is out there, or at least what you can perceive at a given moment. Sentimentality is not.
Emotions become sentimentality, in other words, the moment they become delusional. I’m not sure if I agree with the following statement, but I’m going to play with it nonetheless. Discuss: Affection often becomes affectation.
Oh: and is affectation not often mistaken for affection? I was listening to some teenage girl talking on the phone at the mall yesterday. The snippet: “you know I love you and all. . .”
Life is a tragedy for those who think, and a comedy for those who feel. Wait, flip that. No move it back. Shit. Figure it out yourself.
Now, THAT I think is funny. Judge me if you must.
Some people say that little white lies don’t hurt. I tend to disagree. As one concrete example, masks don’t do shit as far as viruses, and particularly anything BUT an N95 mask.
It MIGHT have made sense to mandate N95 masks, but they are expensive, in relatively short supply–or would have been for quite some time–and to be used properly need to be replaced after one or at most two uses. That is my understanding.
You can argue, as the New England Journal of Medicine was in effect bullied into arguing, that they make people feel more safe. They create greater peace of mind.
This feeling of safety is illusory. It is social manipulation And here is the thing: the lie is not without cost.
Here is an argument I will repeat, before moving on. In my personal view, masks INCREASE both infections and following deaths slightly. They did this by creating a false sense of security, such that I have on many occasions seen three masked people huddled together closely talking, and doing because THEY COULD NOT UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER BECAUSE OF THE FUCKING MASKS.
Given that masks don’t stop aerosolized viruses, this made infection MORE, not less likely. If they had been able to understand each other, they might have been farther apart. It seems possible for the virus to spread 20-30′, but the largest concentration is going to be within 5′ or so of the infected person. The 24″ spacing I saw often, obviously, is less than that.
And as I’ve said, masks gave mildly sick people an excuse to go out. Maybe your only symptom was a headache. Well, you otherwise feel fine, and in any event, the mask protects others from you. Only it doesn’t.
So on the one side we have bad science being used to buttress what amounts to social policy. And on the other, we have the consequences. As said, increased infections are likely one outcome.
But there are others. I think the psychological trauma of masks will last a LONG time, particularly in kids, who are more or less being trained to be hypochondriacs and germaphobes. They are being trained to OCD in various forms.
And the RAGE that was directed by the Covidian Fundamentalists at heretics is not something I myself will forget any time soon. There are businesses in my town I will never go to again. I have a shit list, and I have a list of people who were cool. And it is MADNESS to me to think this shit is STILL GOING ON in many places. Batshit insanity.
And most experts think several billion masks will wind up in the oceans.
It took me a minute, but that brings me to my point: there are real, physical outcomes to lies chosen by our elites. Those billion masks are physical things, that will directly affect living things, including human beings. Those masks will ONLY be there because they LIED TO US. That is an undeniable physical cost to their lies.
And more generally, global warming–as I argued at length in the very first post on this blog (just go back to the Beginning)–is bullshit. The Earth may well be warming, and we may be affecting it SLIGHTLY (that is the WHOLE source of actually scientific, rather than political, controversy), but not much. It is not an emergency.
We are being told Global Warming is an emergency, which all educated policy makers know is a lie, because it is a PRETEXT for a power grab by the elites.
But this lie has consequences too. Here is what I would argue: plastics, in our water ways, oceans, estuaries, lakes, and streams, are a VASTLY more clear and present danger than global warming. But precisely BECAUSE global warming (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, to be clear) is bullshit, they CAN’T ADMIT IT. So they keep pushing this idiocy, when in fact GENUINE potential crises NEED TO BE ADDRESSED.
I don’t believe in absolute moral principles (other than my three), but the importance of honesty in the public domain is close to it. Nothing good comes from lies, even when told with what was once benign intent. One lies leads to another lie, and the people telling these things get so tangled up and eventually confused themselves that INTELLIGENCE BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE.
Never make intelligence impossible. I will amend a post I made a while back that lies and censorship act as a sort of intellectual Gresham’s Law, and together drive out all good ideas, and eventually all good PEOPLE.