Month: June 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwbc_v1xBAU

I found this amusing.  I actually showed it to my kids, who thought it was funny.  And they went to a high school with a lot of Chinese and Indian kids, who ALSO thought Peters was hilarious.

What I logged on to say, though, is that there actually IS some wisdom in this.  My reasoning is this:  Shame is a product of trauma.  And people without shame are not fully socialized.  This means mild trauma is virtually a necessity in some respects.

Look at Asian cultures, the stereotypically “wise” ones.  Mild physical abuse is very common.  In Tibet, in the monasteries, Alexandra David Neel reported that in the public gatherings she witnessed, there was a monk whose job was enforcing order, and he carried a stick he did not hesitate to use to beat anyone misbehaving.

What got me onto this was the opposite thought: that people so abused that they have no way NOT to feel shame are doomed to lives of failure.  Maybe not absolutely: they may be fantastically successful by all reasonable standards.  But to FEELING like failures.  There have been a number of CEO’s of successful companies who killed themselves at the height of their success.  That is unredeemed shame.  They hoped that major success would relieve it, but it didn’t.

As one recent example, the CEO of Texas Roadhouse–you most likely have one in your community–got a bad case of tinnitus from COVID, and blew his brains out.  I’ve had tinnitus all my life.  I don’t remember not having it.  You don’t kill yourself over tinnitus.  Tinnitus was just the last little straw that pushed someone who was on the edge off into the abyss.  He could have bought any therapy he wanted.  He could have done Ayahuasca down in Peru.  He could have spent a year travelling around the world.  He had options.  But in the end, he was a prisoner, most likely of a shame whose genesis he could not remember, which was just a part of his life and always had been.  He probably could not do anything right, despite having started and being CEO of a very large, very successful corporation, which is the American Dream we are raised to believe in.

Many such people, of course, become criminals.  Because why not?  The shame is no worse, or at least not much worse.

So you need to spread the emotions, like rolling out bread.  You need on the one side a capacity for shame, but not too much.  On the other, you need a capacity for earned happiness and sense of accomplishment.  Between those two poles, you can live a good life.

And of course on the positive side what is needed is positive attunement, which amounts to effective love.  The child needs BOTH to be loved unconditionally and conditionally.  I actually told both my kids I loved them for two reasons: they were my kids, and they were loveable.  I told the first one would still hold if they became, for a period of time, unlovable in their teens.  Fortunately, that never happened.

I will add, too, though, that many of what have become cliches we think we have “progressed” beyond actually had and retain wisdom in them.  I read potato salad has something called Resistant Starch in it, that is good for you.  Who knew?  Our grandparents knew.  They understood the importance of pickles, apples, and vegetables too.

And remember “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you”?  No child who is getting spanked believes that.

But that is arguably the most attuned means of delivering the medicine of shame.  On the one hand you are putting into the physical body of the child a negative association with undesirable behavior, which will support good habits until the kid figures out the reasons for the rules.  And on the other, you are pointing out that the need to deliver this medicine does not mitigate your love for them.  And obviously physical abuse delivered out of rage and unhealthy emotionality on the part of the parent is always harmful.

Indeed, though, arguably mild corporal punishment might perhaps be something we reintroduce.  I have often seen the meme of some blue haired kid screaming something incoherent in support of idiotic and socially damaging politics, which says “this kid was not spanked.  You know it, and I know it.”  That’s not verbatim, but it’s close in spirit.

And of course establishing good habits is most of it.  Once you have done that, you won’t feel shame very much at all, if ever.  No need to, if you are living according to your own standards, and have no underling unresolved fight/flight/shame energy.

And I have commented for some time in various discussions and dispute on the internet that the people yelling at me and insulting me lack shame.  They lack a sense of remorse and guilt when they make strong claims they can’t back up, and don’t try to back up.

The way I was raised, if you want to argue something, and you are educated, then there is a process.  You state your facts.  You offer your logical extrapolations and conclusions based on those facts.  To dispute an argument, then, involves attacking either the facts or the logic.  Most of the disputants I meet–virtually ALL of them, and this number by now is certainly in the hundreds, and most likely the thousands–feel no need whatever to justify themselves, or to base their objections to my arguments in anything other than ad hominem and what amounts to the Bandwagon argument, which is the argument from conformity, that because everyone they know believes something, it must be true.

These people need shame.  They were most likely in most cases raised like the kid Ryan Russell Peters mentioned.  They were little demons, who got away with everything, who were given everything, and who view the world with contempt now.  They feel no need to justify themselves.  Their very existence is their justification.

Now obviously some of these kids are Republicans, if they grew up that way.  They are not principled, but habitual Republicans.  But Leftism is their more obvious natural home, particularly if they were raised without religion.  Christianity, too, teaches shame.

So I would like to introduce this nuance, that we need shame in the world.  Without it, our social world will dissolve.  What the best means of delivering this medicine is, what the best dose is, I won’t pretend to be able to say.  Less than what I got, but more than many kids nowadays get.

I personally think dancing is highly therapeutic, however you do it.  As far as I know it’s not well studied, if at all, but I know I’ve read African survivors of severe traumas saying dancing with their people did more than small armies of “trauma experts”.

And I don’t know how the rest of the world is, but it seems around here MOST–certainly not all, but a whole lot–of younger folks are not into dancing.  We have no dance clubs, and few places where much dancing goes on that would not be going on next to someones bar or table stool.

Me, I love it.  Some of my fondest memories of college are of Brazilian and African (Cabo Verde) dance parties that went on until the sun came up and everyone went out to breakfast.  Good times.

So get yourself a dance club on Amazon.

Pour lots of liquor and play great music that is not hip-hop (old school soul–James Brown and Johnnie Taylor certainly–disco, and a good mix of maybe Samba, Salsa, Soca, and jazz), then do a breathalyzer on everyone leaving when the State (Ordnung Ueber Alles) tells you people have to leave the bars and warm their beds.

Everyone who flunks EITHER has to have 1) a Designated Driver they can identify; 2) use a cab (yes, cab); or 3) sleep on a cot in a tent you provide out back.  Out back you have a little ad hoc bohemian community of drunks sleeping in tents.  You have bathrooms, water fountains with small amounts of electrolytes in them, and security guards who you have validated to be emotionally healthy, empathetic, caring people.

And when they wake up, you give them breakfast, if they can pay.  And if most of them can pay, you say fuck it for a few.  Everybody has breakfast together, hung over, but happy-ish.

That would be fun, wouldn’t it?  The Security guards keep the “sausages”–in a phrase I’ve heard in the last week, as in “sausage fest”–under wraps.  Everyone is safe.  Everyone can pass out in peace, puke in peace, pee in peace, and wake up to, in my preferred version, something like the Irish Breakfast, with suitable substitutions as options.  Not everyone is good with black pudding.

Hibiscus Tea and Yogurt.

Here is the thing: all of us–and by this, I mean ALL OF US–need to lose control sometimes.  We need spontaneity, craziness, letting it loose.

And when we do, we need reintegration.  And we need, OBVIOUSLY, to not hurt anyone when we go crazy.  If you are crazy, there needs to be someone in the area around you who is not.

I like to think I could pull something like this off at some point, but if one of you out there wants to lead the way, that will make easier for me eventually.  If not, well, I’m used to being the only one saying whatever it is I happen to be saying.

In Genesis, it is written that God looked at all he had made, and saw that it was good, and He rested.

To my mind, this is the foundation of everything positive in the world.  I will explain.

If it is truism that we mostly do things to either gain pleasure or avoid pain, it is also an underexamined premise, particularly with regard to the nuances of both.

There are short term, medium term, and long term pleasures, are there not?  We weigh the short term pleasure, say, of infidelity against the long term pain of divorce, or at least a guilty conscience.  So for long term pleasure, you need short and perhaps medium term relative pain.

Most of the best moments in life come from both the pleasure of an accomplishment that took a long time and a lot of effort, and from the daily smaller pleasures of personal balance and congruence, which depend, each day, on choosing a form of life likely to lead to long term felicity.

Here is my point: if you lack the capacity for positive experience, all this math goes out the window.  No matter what you do, how hard you work, how good you are, you never get a feeling of worthiness, and pleasure and earned and healthy self satisfaction, then there is NO REASON not to pursue short term pleasure.  That is at least reliable and concrete.  Getting drunk and having orgasms are undeniably enjoyable.

The basic model for happiness is love and work, as Freud put it.  That is one of the only things he said that I agree with fully.

And love of course IS work, isn’t it?  So basically all pleasure in life comes from work of various sorts.

But you can’t work ALL the time.  As I have said before, it is interesting to speculate how the Jews, as the Jews, survived roughly 2,000 years of being away from a land inseparable from their religion.  One of the factors, as I have argued on many occasions, is likely the Day of Rest.

A happy life is roughly work, work, work, work, work, work, rest.

But even that is hard to sustain if you cannot find pleasure in your work.  So many people I see–and I am one of them–mostly work out of fear of failure.  Or they work to make money so that people will respect them.  Or to get influence and power so people will respect them.

They work, in other words, out of anxiety, out of fear of loss, out of shame, out of incompleteness.  This is a bad long term strategy, and leads, in my view, to most of the damaging manias in the world.

You have to be able to work, and see that it is good.  You have to work and FEEL good, looking at what you have done.  And from time to time, you need to rest, and look around you and smell the flowers.

But all of this depends on the capacity for positive experience, for pleasure in what you have wrought, from satisfaction in what you have done.  You have to feel good at the end of an arduous expenditure of energy.

And it has been discovered, in fact, that happy people achieve more.  They get sick less.  They live longer.  All of this makes perfect sense.

And making your work an important part of your personal identity is both an engine of honest progress, AND a de facto expression of inner direction.  In my own view, that is the healthiest way to live.  We all do better together when each of us can do well alone.

Other Direction, in Riesman’s term, amounts to indulging an ambient anxiety that one is not good enough, and that only by matching others can one ever be good enough.  Positive feeling, in this case, is inverted: it becomes a daily avoidance of the bad feeling of being different.

And thus people become like schools of fish, changing direction at random continually, just because one did so, without really knowing why.

Where can you hang your hate in such a world? [note, that was a typo–I meant hat.  But I am going to call that a Freudian Addition, and riff on it.  In a world where you can never be yourself, are you not always frustrated?  And do you not then NEED an outlet for your frustration and nervous energy, and does that outlet not, by the defining rules of the system, need to be a target chosen by the collective?  And if you yourself are submerged in a collective, is it not easy to project on the rest of the world and assume they act in the same ways?]

Where can you do good work, see that it is good, and rest?  You can’t.  You won’t.  You are never you.  You are intermediated by the fluctuating whims of the Collective.

If politics is downstream from culture, culture in turn is downstream from individual health or psychopathology.

One way of putting the foundational premise of what is called Individualism (which has long seemed like a Socialist dig at something healthy, the way that Capitalism was a term invented by Marx as the black hat wearing villain in his cartoon opera) is that if we take care of the emotional health of each individual, the Collective will invariably also be healthy.

And conversely, a Collective consisting in extremely UNhealthy individuals can be expected to do JUST WHAT THE LEFT IS DOING TODAY.  They are neurotic messes, saying they don’t know what, and for reasons they can’t, in the end, articulate or justify.  And they know this, so they don’t even try.

And yes, neurotic is a bit passe.  I would like to bring it back.

It needs to be said that much of the naked propaganda spewing from our formerly credible “news” organizations may well literally be paid for.

Jeff Bezos, obviously, OWNS–lock, stock and barrel–the Washington Post.  But I have also read that Bill Gates buys shelf space too.  Why should we not assume China, and even North Korea, Iran, and everyone from the Australians, to the Ghanaians, to Indians, to Malaysians and anyone else with cash, is not paying for “news” to their liking?

Why should we not assume Gannett’s context is dictated by money, and not even the political biases we likely naively assume direct the bad reporting and censorship of most news organizations?

Maybe we have the cart and horse backwards.  Maybe the people who pay for everything only ALLOW the hiring of people ready and willing to say what they want them to say.  Maybe it is not that journalists as a group have a left wing lunatic bias, but that only such people who have such a bias can be hired IN THE FIRST PLACE.

And for that matter, we assume as a matter of course that Academia is Left Wing out of habit, because they lack useful life skills and thus want to create a world where words alone create beneficial outcomes.

But Universities run on money too, don’t they?  Their endowments come from rich people, and from corporations.  Why not assume that the string pullers–who get their power from money–are not consciously STEERING most universities in that direction?

Here is the thing: an omnipotent, ubiquitous government is in the INTERESTS of the power elite.  It is absolutely inconsequential–and perhaps even comically ironical–if they use the rhetoric of opposing large corporations in service of empowering them; or if they use the rhetoric of freedom to secure actual tyranny; or, obviously, if they use the rhetorics of compassion and tolerance and inclusion to secure the ENDS of cruelty, malice, radical intolerance, and radical exclusion to the point of concentration camps and even mass murder.

Words need not match reality.  This point is only not obvious to people so disconnected with effective action that words are all they have.  Words conjure ideas and ideas conjure action, but for anyone who lives ONLY to speak words, the outcome is always the words and ideas.  What happens to living, breathing human beings is fully invisible to them.

Kudos to both these kids, both Minnesotans.  Another biographical detail I will permit myself: I spent enough time in Minnesota growing up, that I still get an accent when I drink.

What’s sad is that the lunatics running anti-community media will most likely censor both of these.  In what meaningful respect are we not falling into Soviet levels of information control/censorship, and abject, unprincipled, hateful brainwashing?

Here is the point I would make: MOST PEOPLE ARE DECENT PEOPLE.  Decent people do not race bait.  Decent people judge people by who they are, and not by the accident of their birth.  Decent people do not INSTITUTIONALIZE RACISM.

What we are facing is a small minority of well organized, monomaniacal, and well funded lunatics, who have been scheming at least since the 1960’s to institute de facto Fascism in our country.

What they fear more than anything–I would suppose, although I cannot claim to be able to fully screw my brain into their little heads and smaller hearts–is a critical mass of citizens WAKING UP (note how they have reappropriated and perverted the word “woke” too, along with “justice” and “racism” and others, in what is a dull pattern completely concordant with Orwell’s observations 75 years ago) and realizing that all the processes taking place under the word “Progressivism” (another perverted word) are taking us back to Jim Crow, race based decision making, group hatred, and ultimately emotional and even physical violence based solely on skin color and other unchosen characteristics.

You’ve got to check out this 9 year old elementary school girl SMOKE THE SCHOOL BOARD😲! You know it’s bad when kids have morals and call you a lier, TO YOUR FACE😳. You go girl👊 pic.twitter.com/36Tl96h9s0

— Bobby D (@LateNightBobbyD) June 18, 2021

I would like you to picture a baby being scalded by steam, screaming in pain and fear, and a mother sitting next to it, knitting in a rocking chair, ignoring it completely, completely calm, completely detached.

This is Developmental Trauma.

The child can’t remember it, and what emerges from that is not a memory of pain, but a blankness, a nothingness.  The personality of that child will not develop normally, and the features of that failure will not show in positive pathologies, most of the time, but rather in pathologies of lack.  That child will lack a conscience, remorse, empathy.  It will be weak in impulse control, and incapable of thinking long term.

I myself felt that steam.  I am honestly not sure why I am not a much, much bigger mess than I am.  I am definitely weak in impulse control and long term action, but I very certainly have a conscience, feel remorse almost too much sometimes, and am extremely empathetic.

I will add, too, that “letting go” can only happen in conditions of relaxation.  If you want to “let go” of the past, you cannot think your way to accomplishing that goal.  You have to learn to relax deeply, to soften the spasms.

This image, by the way, came to me in a deep relaxation.

It has been some time since I have thought about it, but Johannes Schultz and Wolfgang Luthe developed a psychotherapy around Autogenic Training.  In the same way that, say, Stan Grof administered LSD to his clients, and used them to attain therapeutic goals in a therapeutic setting, Luthe taught his clients to achieve the altered state of deep relaxation, and proceed from there.

It was and remains my view that this particular type of therapy had and has a lot of potential.  I suppose the limiting factor is that most traumatized people need something stronger than Autogenics to get them to loosen up.  I use Neurofeedback, mostly.

But the two in tandem would be quite good, I think.

And I will repeat that for me personally the Autogenics works best if I do a series of static holds first (what I call Kum Nye 1), and do a full and leisurely body scan before starting the script.

I have been told more than once by vegetarians “I don’t eat anything that had a face.”  Some are sincere and kind.  Some mostly like feeling superior.  Both motives are most likely usually behind this phrase.

I remember thinking about living at the vegetarian co-op at Berkeley, called then Lothlorien.  One of the guys annoyed me enough that I wound up at Kingman–there’s a biographical detail–by pointing out he hated the “taste of blood and sinews and veins”.  Something close to that.

And as I have likely pointed out, the portrayal of pigs in barbeque places betrays enough psychological ambiguity that I have more than once contemplated a book of picture collected around the country.  The strangest I can recall, I think from North Carolina somewhere, was a smiling pig pouring barbeque sauce on itself.  The pigs are nearly always smiling.  Notice the next time you go out for barbeque.

Maybe, in this world, perfection is not possible.  I have made my case for eating meat by saying I’m not going to make the case, because I can’t, other than that I feel better, healthier, and thus hopefully more likely to contribute positives because of it, which in the Great Accounting Sheet in the Sky might yet get me to a positive balance, my many demerits notwithstanding.

But I had the vaguely comical thought the other day–which is the eventual reason for this desultory (I don’t have many of any other kind) post–that maybe if we eat meat all our lives, the animals up in heaven just won’t talk to us for a long time.  Imagine meeting an animal you ate and getting a talking to.

This thought recollects the old joke that if women ran the world there would be no more wars, but there would be a lot of countries who were not talking to each other.

Oh, there is so much we don’t know.  I will continue to argue that we need to bring all this sort of thing–metaphysics I mean, in all possible aspects–into the realm of scientific inquiry.  We need Departments of Afterlife Studies.  We need colleges where you can major in Afterlife Research.  We need national, well televised conferences.  We need to bring it into the political realm.

And I will note that Gary Schwarz, at the University of Arizona, has come close.  The Windbridge Institute is, as far as I know, the most credible institution in this regard, and they are doing outstanding work, as far as I can tell.

IONS is another one.  Keep in mind it was founded by Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo astronaut, who had a Ph.D from MIT in Aeronautical Engineering, making him a literal rocket scientist with the highest possible degree from one of the best universities in the world.

Keep in mind too that he is on record as having been told by first hand witnesses that Roswell was in fact the “flying saucer” crash that Phillip Corso also said it was.

I just watched this interview.  It is interesting on a number of levels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8gLfcnr5Sg

He was a remarkable man, who should be much better known than he is.

He is another metaphor: think of our news as a curated shelf in a grocery store.  There might be a thousand varieties of ketchup vastly better than Heinz, but if you don’t see them there–or on Amazon–you won’t know they exist.

Most people blandly assume that reality is roughly what we are told it is, by the plethora of “professional” reporters, who in theory go out there, find interesting facts, and then tell their story.  This idea seems absurd to me.

I will often consider–without deciding whether I believe them or not–all sorts of alternative views.  As one example, I watched this video today: https://youtu.be/L1fcc6YaFlA

It might be, and most likely is, complete bullshit.  But maybe not.  Or perhaps–and here is where the mental agility of not having a compulsive need for THE truth comes in very useful–SOME of it is true, but most of it is not.  Phillip Corso said that he and people like him would often offer small snippets of hidden truths, but always with the objective of hiding a much larger, much more important truth.

Professionals call this a Limited Hangout.

I start, with Socrates, with an assumption of being completely ignorant.  This is the canvas on which I doodle.  It is the best possible canvas.  If you start from the assumption that you BASICALLY know all the big stuff, and are just filling in details, it blinds you. It not only blinds you in the present, but prevents you from making needed corrections, when the corrections are needed.

As Edward de Bono argued in Practical Thinking–which was on balance probably the most useful book of his that I read–arrogance is a “mistake in the future”.  I have loved that line since I first saw it, and it has influenced me greatly.

To use a kinesthetic metaphor, when you are walking, you need to be agile enough to not fall down when the landscape changes unexpectedly, when you step in a pothole, or trip over something you didn’t see.  The looser you are, the better.  The more rigid you are, physically, the more likely you are to fall.  And falling, of course, is persistent error that could and should have been prevented by better attention and greater flexibility, which in character traits are best exemplified by the word humility.

I really like Moshe Feldekrais idea of “reversibility” too, which I have also often thought about.  Here is one take on it: https://alacartespirit.com/2015/09/09/feldenkrais-prufrock-reversing-disturbing/

I will quote this at length, then shut up for a minute.  The best discussion of this happens in his best book, The Potent Self.  I actually probably need to reread it.  Without knowing it, much less knowing why, I was much too wound up when I read it many years ago to benefit properly from it.  I may start doing some of his exercises again, now that I think about it.

I often wonder what I did all day.  A lot of the time, it is this.  I have structured my life in such a way that this is possible for me.  I don’t know where it is going, but I suppose I am leaving tracks on my life’s journey, both internal, and on the internet.  If I lost all this, though, I would be fine.

Anyway, here it is:

https://alacartespirit.com/2015/09/09/feldenkrais-prufrock-reversing-disturbing/

We do not say at the start what the final stage will be” – Moshe Feldenkrais

“Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” – T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

An important component of the Feldenkrais Method and martial arts is reversibility, being able to change positions or directions without reconfiguring oneself to do so. For example, when you are about to sit down, can you pause just before your derriere touches the chair, reverse the movement, and stand or turn? Or are you moving in such a way that you plunk or plop into the seat and have to reposition yourself to rise?

There is something elegant about reversible movement; in the case of Moshe Feldenkrais, who as a teenager walked from Europe to what was then called Palestine and, among other hardships, survived hand to hand combat as an early settler, being able to quickly reverse one’s movement can also save one’s life. Reversibility of thought is also a life skill: not continuous flip-flopping, but recognizing when one needs to change course rather than living out a decision that no longer serves.

I tend to do a lot of things for reasons which are unclear to me, but which become clear in time.

There is, in my view, a profound difference between seeing dichotomies in your mind as structures–as for example “power structures” or “structural racism”–and directions.

In the first case, they are static.  One knows that, in theory, the people involved in these structures, who operate them, who turn the lights on in the morning and turn them off at night after setting the alarm, are actual physical human beings, who piss, shit, get sick and die eventually.  They also fart and stub their toes sometimes.  We know this, but it is not latent in the vision we get.

No, the picture is something unmoving:  a brick building perhaps, or a skyscraper.  Whatever it is, it can’t move sideways one inch in either direction.  Because of this, it has to be torn down.

This is literally the logic of much of the Left at the moment.  This is the imagery which leads to the thoughts which lead to the actions which are so ludicrous they should not be possible.  But they happen, so they are obviously possible.

When speaking of direction, one can speak of movement patterns, dominant tendencies, recurring themes, and the like.  You can think of them as swirling patterns of water or air, which recreate approximately the same “structure” continually, but never exactly the same from one moment to the next.

And in my own mind, of course, I can see figure eights, and three dimensional systems of all sorts.

Here is the thing: when you step into a moving stream, it instantly reacts to you.  The pattern evolves instantly.

Likewise, if you want to alter a “power structure” what you need to do is change it in small steps such that it naturally evolves in the direction you want it to go.  If I have a hose, and water coming out of it, I put my thumb on there to create the spray pattern I want.  The flow of water was never fixed.  It was merely stable when not acted on by an outside force.  Rivers are stable, but you can’t get in the same river once, can you?

So much of what is wrong with the worlds of various intellectuals is that their fear and pain–which they were running from when they retreated into their heads in the first place–want to impose on reality a stability and firmness IT DOES NOT HAVE.  They want an art museum, where we can look at a variety of ideas, and choose to see them as WINDOWS INTO THE WORLD, when in reality they are pictures taken with varying degrees of accuracy, and always long ago.

Here is an idea: imagine you were an Amish farmer who never goes into town, and never interacts with anyone outside his small circle.  Imagine he gets a TV somehow, and somehow gets power to it–maybe it is battery powered and his friend smuggled a bunch in with it–but for reasons of this analogy, all the programming is from 40 years ago.  Imagine him worrying about the Cold War, and the nuclear Arms race, and the Iranian hostage crisis, as if they were happening NOW.

Much of the political Left, which is to say inter alia nearly all academics in good standing at most universities in most of the world, are watching TV much like this.  They are seeing things that are not there, trying to solve problems which by and large THEY CREATED and which they then chose, over and over and over, not to learn from.

Ideas have long had feeling tones associated with them for me.  Synesthesia is definitely something I have felt.  Sounds have kinesthetic elements for me, and colors, and tastes and smells.  For me, it usually defaults back to feeling, to texture, and to shapes.  Sounds have shapes too, though.

Leftism has, for me, oh, patterns with textures and colors that I can’t begin to describe.  So do the various Conservatisms–and there are a variety.  Much of the time, my ideas work backwards from sensations and images I cannot possibly hope to translate into words.  If I were an artist I could perhaps get closer, but nothing could ever match them.

Anyway, reframe Dialectical Materialism as two streams of blowing air, one hot and one less hot, one filled with red smoke and the other with yellow smoke.  There is never a pure opposition, never an inability to negotiate and compromise, and always a reasonably good synthesis happening naturally and organically.

It is the aspiring Utopians, themselves, who have done the most to push actual peace and prosperity, love and freedom, farther and farther down the road, to where it now risks utter destruction, for no good reason at all.  It is pure idiocy.  Nothing more.

Buddha nature is what is left after you develop the habit of Bidirectional Labelling ™.

Look at a painting.  Describe it as ugly and beautiful.

Just now, I was saying to myself “I am living in Time.  What the alternative is, I don’t know, but it is wonderful and terrifying.”

People are friendly and hostile.  Situations are lucky and unfortunate.  Everywhere you go you want to stay and you want to leave at the same time.

What is left?  What residual feelings could withstand all that?

If I ever figure it out, I will be sure and text you, with plenty of emojis, and maybe one of the sparkly fireworks or showers on your screen, if I can work out how to do it.