Month: June 2021

These are large ideas and long posts, but I am going to shorten them.

One: For many of us–certainly for me–there is a voice saying continually, you are a a failure, you are nobody, no one loves you.

Yesterday, I decided to say “you know what?  You’re right.  No one does love me, not the way I need, and they never have.  And if I am a nobody, that means my time and life are free.  I don’t owe anyone anything.  And as far as failure, this IS the way forward, is it not?”

And it hit me that the path back into Eden goes through the cherubim with the flaming sword.

You have to live emotionally with those voices.  Why?  Because they are YOU, in important respects.  Rather, they are the way back to you.  That is the last place you would ever look.

But if “going home” means returning to, or feeling for the first time, a vivid sense of the Self, then does it not make sense that we feel exiled until we learn to look beyond what those voices represent, and cease to fear them?

I think this is true.

And I think the cherubim is on our side, but secretly, silently.

Oh, I could say more but I won’t.

My work continues.  I meditate most mornings (Kum Nye), and every other day I do what I have taken to calling Kum Nye 1, since I do it before Kum Nye 2.  It is really a bunch of static poses.  I have worked up to, today, 1 minute 7 second in each of them.  I do each three times a week, and add 2 seconds each time.  One amounts to a close grip push up position plank, another the Bear position, another an ass down squat.  All together, virtually every muscle in your body will be under tension at some point. I can only assume that, among other uses, this series–if it is actually historical, which is not entirely clear–would have helped full time meditators keep at least some physical strength.

But it is also a marvelous thing to lead into Shavasana and Autogenic relaxation.  I do that, too, most mornings.   Go through your body and feel everything, starting with your fingertips, then do an Autogenic progression (my arms are getting heavy, etc.)

What I noticed today is that in the longer, harder holds there is this panic that starts up.  I hear a voice say “you can’t do this.  This is too much.  It will last forever.  You will never make two minutes (the goal).”

This voice has a feeling tone.  Here is the first point I want to make: positive THINKING, if it is to be of any use, has to come with positive FEELING.  I read people talk about Positive Thinking.  Well, most people like me have tried it.  And people like Al Franken (the then Al Franken–I wonder what he is up to now?) of course mock this, with some justification.

But if you take a Michael Jordan, he has a large reservoir of successes.  When a negative thought occurs, he can use a positive thought to lead to a positive emotion. And we call this “positive thinking”.  But it really only works for people who have access to a reservoir of positive feelings.

For me, reframing helps a bit, but positive thinking is completely useless for me.  Just putting one foot in front of the other, thinking as little as possible–good or bad–is the only thing that reliably works for me.

But I think PRACTICING panicking within a controlled situation, letting that roll over me, and carrying on, is one of the ways you build reservoirs like that.  You learn to calm within the tension.  And you learn to take each moment as it comes without allowing yourself to become aware anything else exists.  This is a learned and learnable skill.

And what I am calling Kum Nye 2 of course comes out of what Tarthang Tulku (the Tulku of Tarthang Monastery) was taught in Tibet back in the 40’s and 50’s.  Apparently in the early days he would have his students hold their arms up for very long periods of time.  Two of the holds in Kum Nye 1 involve that too.

And in the second book one of the exercises is called Golden Heart Thread, where you hold your arms out at shoulder height for up to 25 minutes.  10 is what is suggested to start, and even that is a lot.  Try it: feet about shoulder width, arms extended, hands cupped down.  Maybe look up just a tiny bit.  See how long you last.

As you hold, tightly held patterns soften and release, and you get large splashes of primitive emotions.  That is the goal.

Curiosity, as any long term readers I may have (if any: it’s OK if you are not reading this) will know is one of my core values, along with persistence and the rejection of self pity.

As I think about it, the habit of curiosity really amounts to reframing virtually all experience away from “good” and “bad” and into “interesting”.

My own work at the moment consists in learning to surf experience openly, without trying to dictate the contents of my perception.  I often don’t know what I’m going to say or do until I do it.  I’m trying to deepen my perceptual field, and that involves touching recesses I don’t know much about.

All of us, we float up and down.  The ten thousand things and the ten thousand people rise and fall without ceasing.  We just lie about it.  We don’t FEEL the up and the down.  You can do this if you live in your head.  It’s not hard.

But some part of is feeling abandoned when you do that.  You are losing life.

Life is scary.  It really is.  Especially if you got the shit knocked out of you emotionally or physically or both when you were little, which a lot of us did.

But openness is the game.  More life is the prize.

All cinema and theater is latently voyeuristic.

True, not true?  Somewhat true?

And particularly if true, what further social consequences can we infer from this?

I will add, that I keep thinking about Blue Velvet.  Whenever I see a movie, my brain keeps processing it until I see the next movie.  But even then things keep popping in.

Here, I was thinking about Kyle MacLachlan in the closet.  That was voyeurism within voyeurism.  We watched him watching her.  What are the subtle effects of this sort of thing?

Hell.  Further thoughts.  MacLachlan finds the ear in an in-between zone. That is where his adventure begins.  A liminal zone, as I would say in an academic paper.  And he is throwing stones.   This is an Islamic practice, essential to the Hajj, where they reject evil.

And the evil he finds meets the innocence from where he came when the evil–the victim of evil, but still tainted–shows up naked.  And she says that he put his poison in her.

Life itself is a poison, too, isn’t it, in some ways?  Granting life is cursing a soul, from a certain perspective.

And even though she has been repeatedly abused–raped is probably the best word–she says it flowed from him.  One can say this is because he is a man.  And obviously something physical is meant.  But he hit her too, didn’t he?

And it occurred to me to wonder if those flowers at the beginning and end were roses, and if they had thorns.  It would a nice touch to leave them thornless in the beginning, and thorned at the end.  Or even vice versa, depending on the exact statement he wanted to make.

OK, that may do it.

As I think about it, perhaps I am underestimating the importance of comparing Trump to mass murderers in that Wisdom of Trauma movie.  The way it was done, it amounted to anchoring in feelings of revulsion, in some respects.  George Soros would have found his money well spent supporting that movie.  Sometimes the most lasting images are the most fleeting, and seemingly the most trivial.

Still, I think that movie is worth watching, but it amounts, for me, to one more betrayal by people who could and should know better.

I think the core problem with what I have termed the Sybaritic Left is that they lack the hardness to see the nastiness of the people in their midst.  In a confusing world, one filled with pain and suffering, they psychologically feel compelled to assume that SOMEONE means what they say, that their side, in using the rhetoric of compassion and caring, means at least SOME of it.  But at the top, the very top, they don’t.  They never have.  They are hard hearted bitches and bastards.  That in my view is the truth.

This is where I think my emotional pain tolerance comes in.  I certainly WANT to see positive things, but I am capable of foregoing false hopes.  I am capable of telling even truths I myself find horrific.  There is never any use in lying.

And to be honest I have NEVER really seen the Trump most people seem to see.  I don’t see the fake tan or tanning bed tan, or the hair, or the seeming arrogance and narcissism.  I don’t see any of that.  I see what I would argue is the reality, which is the ONE GUY in the whole fucking country who was willing to point out that Obama could not have gotten hired to work at Burger King with the birth certificate he provided.  This was obvious, indisputable.  But nobody had the balls to say it, other than Trump.

And I didn’t look at his speeches, or how he waved his hands, when he was in office.  I looked at what he DID, at the policies he enacted.  His record was not perfect, but he was also fighting corrupt RINO’s in Congress.  And his record was very good.

I look at Joe Biden, and in his case I can’t help but notice his mind is teetering on the brink of complete dissolution.  I notice he is actively importing people he does not know a fucking thing about and distributing them around the country.  He is not just tolerating people breaking into our country illegally, but more or less giving them chauffeured rides to States which don’t want them, to places where they are more likely to be a burden than a blessing.

And the Chinese bought him, obviously.  I think he is one of those rare creatures who owes damn near everybody something, but he owes them the most.  And why would he not be making provisions to share all of our best military technology with them?  Why could he not issues orders that military officers have to follow, in which Chinese agents are easily able to lay their hands on blueprints and computer models and even actual weapons?  Why not?  Ethically nothing would stop him, and he is the Commander in Chief.  If he is issuing orders to people like the Army Colonel I described in a previous post, they will RATIONALIZE it.  They will figure out how to make the unacceptable acceptable.  Because they themselves operate out of diligent and disciplined codes of ethics, it is easier for them to assume other people do as well, even though no one who dealt with the budding sociopath in kindergarten–and most of them have one–should be that naive.  Certainly not people entrusted with the safety of the United States.

So yes that hurt a bit seeing that in the midst of all that beautiful and healthy emotion they anchored an image of Trump as a dictator.

The truth is a jagged edge.  You have to be prepared to make rapid turns, and to be cut at any turn.

I still think that movie is worth watching, but my enthusiasm is a bit deflated.

I have, by the way, determined that I can’t go back to at least Holotropic Breathwork.  They went full in on Trump hatred, and I will never feel emotionally safe there again.  As I say, I have to ask myself what that dynamic is, and how real any of that ever was, if they are that emotionally blind.  Honest, open people, remain honest and open in all circumstances.

Here is the thing: if you look deeply, most would-be healers never REALLY complete their healing.  They just get a couple chapters ahead of the rest of us.  That’s all.

I have been, in my view, emotionally more intelligent than most of the therapists I’ve been to.  But I still carry that dull pain.  That pain is not one of unawareness, but it’s also not something I have been able to make go away.

But I am not going to position myself as an authority on anything until I do.  I will not sell anything, or offer anything in person, until I do.

If and when Donald Trump gets back into the office he rightly won on Election Day, I would like to see a Trauma Czar, and a Survival of Death Czar, each with a first year budget of $2 billion.  That is chump change, a rounding error, in the current climate.  We spend more money on the mating habits of tree frogs, I suspect, than we do teaching doctors and teachers and parents about trauma, or in making the large volume of evidence for survival yet larger, more compelling, and more KNOWN.

In principle, as ostensible humanitarians, the Bidenistas could embrace something like this, but it’s really like all the corporations of the world–the plutocrats of the world–got together and assembled a sort of hybrid Frankenstein monster who would reliably do for them whatever made them the most money.  At this point, with his degree of decrepitude, he is more or less a living corpse providing a curtain, behind which we don’t really know what is happening, other than that none of it is good for this country, or the citizens of most other countries.

I would even include in this corporate take-over most of the nations, like China and Iran, in this.  They are about greed, too.  Don’t let the pious sounding lies fool you.  Those are all bullshit.  It is about money, sex and power, whether it is a corrupt nation, or a corrupt corporation.

It is as important to be darkness in the light of false knowledge, as to be genuine light within the darkness of ignorance.

Darkness within light, and light within darkness.  Both are relative.

https://wisdomoftrauma.com/movie/

Obviously, I don’t think Trump should be compared to Kim Jung Il, but it’s interesting that I think I have a better understanding where that comes from emotionally.

We are all of us talking past one another.  I myself am physically very healthy, and I think it is because however much I hurt I have always given myself permission for that.  I don’t hold back and I don’t lie.  These are, I see, conspicuous virtues in a world of lies and madness.

Let us continue to hope.  I have proposed more than once and will propose again that understanding and identifying trauma in all areas of our collective life and culture is the only real path forward for human civilization.  It is at the root of evil, of violence, of despair and ultimately of stupidity that persists.

And I will continue to insist that Capitalism is BY FAR the best economic system ever developed.  But the creation of wealth is only one of four cultural tasks.  Wealth does not provide meaning, it does not provide useful truth, and it does not tell us how to structure power relations in a healthy way.  On the contrary.  Obviously.

Money tells us nothing.  Money teaches us nothing.  Money creates the time and the space to begin to heal, which is to say, to begin to learn, to feel, and ultimately to hope.

And I will add that, to me, connection would logically fall with the cultural task of Meaning.  The very first connection, though, the one that matters the most, is the connection each of us forms with our self, with our emotional reality, with our own deeply felt spirituality.  That is the only reliable path out of the disconnected solipsism so many of us begin with.

I honestly think many of these Tibetan (and of course many others) who spend their lives in caves are HAPPIER, in all the ways we value, than those of us surrounded, like Tantalus, with the water of possible human connection that never reaches our lips.  So many of us choose, as U2 sang, “the poison, from the poisoned stream” (that song always makes my cry, because I GET it), because it WORKS when nothing else does.

You know, what really makes my cry is not my own pain.  It is the feeling of hope in the midst of all this.  That is what hurts me, over and over.  And I hope it always does.

As I say, please help this film become a blockbuster.  Help it move through the world.  Share it where you can.

I think all of us are born with a latent desire for great struggles, and great overcomings.  This has often resulted in wars and other turmoil. I think it often looks like masochism.

This urge has been met in much of human history simply by the struggles of life.  But urban/suburban/exurban: in America, we all have it really easy, all things considered.  Most of us have not just WASHING machines for God’s sake–for dishes and for clothes–but DRYING machines.  We have hot water for showers we can take any time we like.

I think much of the addiction to violent TV amounts to an effort to enjoy second hand the struggles of others, in a world denuded of them.  Video games likewise meet this need.

And of course lunatic politics, which has as its end aim returning most of us to awful circumstances, plays a part in all this.

It was genuinely audacious being an open Communist until recently.  It is easy now, but I think that because the 100% of most of these low spark boys and girls is so minimal, it still feels daring.

We all need a Crusade of some sort.  I think this splinter of an insight should be added to the woodpile of ideas with which I am trying to warm up the world.