Month: September 2021

What data are you aware of which would contradict your claim, and how would you respond to it?

Now, most people, of course, don’t even have data to SUPPORT their claim, other than the dismally obvious and ubiquitous “Must Be” mistake, as Edward de Bono labels what amounts to arrogance, which is more or less to say chosen blindness.

But this is a good clarifying question, for you if not for them.  What is the destination of your pearls of wisdom?  A sty, or a mind showing signs of a living education and capacity for Liberal thought and sentiment?

Most authentic spiritual teachings are wasted on most people.  Most people are TRULY preoccupied, I think and feel, with truly petty worries.

Without speaking to the rest of the world, I think what most Americans need is just to grow up.  To mature.  And what is maturity?  For me it is calm consistency.  Achieving this is harder than you think.  I’m not there yet.

And to be clear, I’m not advocating for the treadmill.  The Buddha was calmly consistent, in all the right things.  Jack Kerouac spoke of Buddhism but died of alcoholism.  To be calmly consistent, far from being stuck, is being able to CHOOSE your life, rather than have it dictated to you.  If you really get down to it, Kerouac had his life directed by emotions he never processed and dealt with.  They killed him, and of course his friend Neil.  HE was on a treadmill, wasn’t he?  Of getting up every day, feeling the same things come up, then running from them as far as he could, and never succeeding?

And, again, to most likely say something I don’t need to say, I am very, very familiar with Corporate America.  I am outside of it, but connected to it.  I observe it every day.  There is a lot there I would not want to be stuck in.

For the clever, though, there is always a way out, and perhaps your first move is to try and be more clever.  Actually, prior to that decide there is CERTAINLY some way you can improve your situation.  You are not helpless, not even now, not even with two kids, a mortgage, and a lawn that needs to be mowed.  There is no doubt there is something you have not thought of, some feeling you have not yet felt, some insight which has been knocking on the door you have been telling to go away.  Some scary thing that may just be the gate to the next path of your journey through this life.

But it is interesting to note that you can buy within ten seconds books whose content was a closely guarded secret, in many cases, as recently as perhaps a century ago.  There are teachings out there which, if an initiate would have unwisely divulged them, could have gotten him or her killed.  There are books people would have given their right hand and ten years of relentless effort to possess, that you can have delivered in a day with Amazon, or find today at your local bookstore.

We have this ocean (make that a large fresh water lake for the following metaphor) of wisdom, of spiritual water, and the inability of Tantalus to drink from it [actually, is there a salt water ocean of stupidity out there, that makes all who drink from it more thirsty?  I think so.]

Obviously pearls are wasted on swine.  The task most of us face is not looking for an advanced teaching, but developing the ability to benefit from it.  If you want pearls, don’t be swine.

And there is of course this notion of a “spiritual bypass”, a term which made immediate sense to me when I saw it.  I tried to do that in my late teens and early twenties.  You read Rumi and Advaita, and the Tao Te Ching, and Meister Eckhart, and try to get spiritual.

This is a recipe for emotional illness.  Trust me on this one.  At some point, some part of me said “fuck this: it isn’t working, and it’s not going to work.”.  That’s when I started reading psychology, which is vastly more useful for most, and certainly was for me.

Still, it is interesting to note–and I am not sure I have here–that I have had my Kum Nye books since the late 80’s.  The actual physical books.  They are one of my oldest possessions, along with a cow’s horn that was made into a trumpet of sorts, that I blow every time I move into a new place.  I’ve had that since my teens.  It made me feel like Boromir, if I am honest.

It hit me this morning that Kun Zhi (“hard ground”, in Tibetan, or so I understand, and which I have mentioned in the past, albeit most likely a few years ago) is really the emotional ground we walk on.

You have all your normal emotions that you go through your day with.  The ones you walk with and drive with, which are present when you are upright physically.

But you move on a substrate of emotions which are NOT consciously available to you.  This would be, in a less elegant term, the unconscious.

The ground creates the sky, and in turn both create your “world”.  The purpose of meditation is for the ground to disappear and merge with the sky.  Shunyatta.

We cling to forms–which very certainly includes most importantly emotional forms–but what we really want are higher feelings, such as that of release, of joy, of belonging.  We settle for constancy, and the vague promise of a permanence that is of course impossible.

The image came to me a few weeks ago of what I called “The Crying Stone”.  This is something I conjured as a reference point.  It is all the memory and thus presence of misery.  Any time I get confused, I can orient myself by bringing forth and touching the crying stone.

That such a process is severely limiting should be obvious.  Some part of me just has not yet come up with something better.  The only something better that makes sense to me intellectually is a better way of walking emotionally.

But that walking will need, eventually, to be done without feet, and without ground.  This “walking” is what covers levels of meditation.

And that connects with an experience I had yesterday.  I was listening to some sad song, that misted my eyes up.  And I thought “oh the HUMANITY.  I feel people’s pain so much.”

Then I looked more carefully: what was REALLY happening was that I was sad, and I was rationalizing my own reasonable and appropriate responses by making them something more high minded.

For me, I was never given permission to feel my own emotions.  I am therefore, of course, obsessed with them, with obsession itself being perhaps at root a LACK of feeling, not overabundance of it.

It is in some respects a calming and easing thing to do, to project and generalize your own painful emotions.  You are upset and sad, and sadness easily can seem like compassion, and such sadness can easily lead to anger, and such anger can easily be rationalized.  You just flip on the news and get your dopamine hit of self righteousness, and you have taken a transient personal emotion, that you could and ideally would have identified, felt fully, accepted, and allowed to pass, and transformed it into a more or less concretized and enduring politics.

You have, in other words, avoided dealing with an intrinsic emotion, an endogenous, personal feeling that was telling you something important about yourself, and created a prison out of everything that followed; and at that, one with generally negative social and often even physical (in terms of policy outcomes) consequences.

If arrogance is a “mistake in the future” (Practical Thinking: worth the read), as Edward de Bono rightly observed, then self righteousness is a conflict in the future.

And feeling this, I felt myself get softer.  I quickly fixed it by flipping through my news, but it was there for a split second.

That is a joke, but it is also more or less true.  These are not the confessions of an innocent man, and even though I often moralize, I do so from a very short stump, if not sometimes a hole in the ground.

In reality, I probably float up and down continually.  I likely have some basis for saying what I am saying at some moments, and none whatever in others.  The words endure.  The man who said them changes continually.  Their life, I suppose, is what you choose to do with them.

Most authentic spiritual traditions exist to point these sorts of things out.  As I say, I am partial to my understandings of some sorts of Buddhism (it is, by the way, always perilous to speak of “Buddhism” as if it were unitary;  it branches off in many ways after the 4 Noble Truths, or so it seems to me), but I think any tradition which involves long periods of silence, and a focus on something transcendent–with Buddha Nature being a sort of ersatz God–is going over time to lead in approximately the same direction.

As time goes on–or appears to go on–it seems to me that one of the Idealisms seems most likely to best accord with how the world “really” works, which is to say that Mind is the main reality, and that speaking of anything else as “actually” existing is a mistake.  We can create anything we like, so there is no limit to what is “really” real.

Oh, the whole thing can simplify down, I think, to being glad you are alive.  That is simple enough, and if I get my choice, that is what I choose.  Enjoy your coffee.  Enjoy Autumn as it slowly makes its way into your life, if you get one; and if you don’t, then enjoy the flowers and persistence of Spring.

Even if we are eternal beings, it’s nice to have a cookie once in a while, and I am partial to fondue.  On some days the air feels wonderful, and of course we always feel better after a workout.

I’ll stop the rambling there.

A plantation system in which the slaves lack even intrinsic monetary value.

That this is more or less literally true is shown in two ways.

First, you will not infrequently see left wings nuts differentiate Communist slavery from “chattel” slavery. The tacit, and among the less self aware explicit, argument, is that Communist slaves have it better because THEY HAVE NO MONETARY VALUE. You cant buy or sell. One Commissar can just them to do anything he wants one day, and something different the next. The Commissars pocket the profits and can beat, rape and steal from his human cattle with impunity and even praise.

Second, Communists treat their slaves WORSE than slave holders in the United States, Ethiopia, or Niger ever did or would. No matter how inferior racists or tribalists (black people who own other black people from another tribe or ethnic group) considered their human cattle, they still had monetary value, like cattle. You do not beat to death cattle for no reason.

But Communists have OFTEN killed their slaves out of sheer indifference and stupidity. The example burned in my mind is the trainloads of political slaves dumped by Lenin in the woods of Siberia in the middle of winter, with no tools, no shelter, and insufficient winter clothing. Nearly all died, and thise who lived had to engage in cannibalism.

No slave owner would EVER do something that callous and stupid.

And of course the death toll in all is 100 million or more. The KKK in its whole history killed about 4,000 people, most of them after slavery was abolished.

Putting this yet another way, what the Cuban Communists have done to Cuba is vastly worse than what white slave owners did in the antebellum South.

You think of Kunta Kunte always running away. What do you think the Boat People—both those from Cuba and South Vietnam after our ignominious retreat—are? People who would rather DIE—and who often have, as entire families—than live in Cuba.

Slaves were whipped, you say. What do you think they do to dissidents in Cuba? What horrors are not possible in a place filled with torture chambers which would have put a smile on the face of Torquemada?

A purportedly humanistic system that would work vastly better with robots.

He didn’t call Russia, did he?

 

I read the SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden tweeted “20 years after 9/11 the Taliban control Afghanistan, and I’m on a no fly list.”

And it is worth noting, in regard to the recent allowing of the Taliban, who operated mainly in Pakistan, which is supposedly our ally, to retake Afghanistan, that we knew all along where Bid Laden was.  I was told this in 2005 by a former Spec. Op guy who had tasked with Blackwater in Pakistan: Bin Laden, Zawahiri, “everyone”.  Finding that out fucked with his mind, which in turn fucked with mine a bit.

In my understanding, Seymour Hersh later validated this.  I have not read all this review, but in my understanding that was the gist of his book: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n10/seymour-m.-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

What really just happened?  We pretended to fight a war, which we just lost in less than a month after winning for 20 years, but which was fought with an enemy directly and openly supported by a supposed ally.

We knew where they were, and just watched them march into Afghanistan without doing anything.  Biden supposedly told the Afghan President to hold his tongue, even as he was losing his country.

Who really runs this country, and what do they want?  I don’t know.  You don’t know either, if you are honest.  But I think the stories we tell our fighting men and women nearly always are lies, and most of them have nothing at all to do with liberty, here or anywhere else.  They are not fighting for “freedom”.  Not when we are losing it here to the very people pushing the buttons.

Consider that the FBI, the primary and oldest Federal law enforcement agency, seemingly wants nothing more than to provoke an incident that will allow them to put football stadiums worth of people in jail, most of them veterans who fought for this country, killed for it in many cases, and watched friends die in many more.

Is the FBI not a vastly more clear and present enemy to the rule of law in this country than the Taliban?   On the one hand they aid and abet the crimes of the elite.  I have seen people ask “what do the  Chinese have on Joe Biden?”.  Well, for starters they gave Hunter a billion dollars to start a company he seemingly never started.  This was on the laptop they claim they never looked at.  The one they did not seize from Rudy Guiliani, which contained many evidences of corruption: with regard to Ukraine as well, and Hunter’s own admissions, all in addition to images which could and shut have put Hunter in jail.

And of course they have been covering for the Clintons for a long time.  Her emails alone would have put you or me in jail for life.  Not just the fact of the emails, but the server itself.  Everyone knows this.

And would it surprise you to learn they played a role in Jeffrey Epstein’s murder?  Certainly, they are accomplices to the cover up.  They took the “malfunctioning” cameras, remember?  Have you heard a peep since?  I haven’t.  As I have mentioned, I talked to a guy who works in a jail, and in his view most of the people on shift in the BUILDING had to be in on it.  At least a dozen people or so.  Nobody served a minute, and I’m not even sure anyone lost their job.  And nobody is looking to see if their bank accounts or stock investments went up suddenly, or they went on around the world cruises, or God knows what weird stuff nobody will ever read about.

And on the direct attack on our freedoms side, they seemingly provoked Jan. 6th with Agents Provocateurs, and if the Capital Police allowed all that to happen, it must have been coordinated with them.  They then arrested–according to some reports without reading them their Miranda rights, as Simone Gold for one alleges–people whose main crime was naivete, and many of whom they continue to allow to be held without trial, as what amount to political prisoners, all while Congress–Nancy Pelosi specifically–refuse to allow the video footage of that day to be released to defense attorneys.

In America you have the right to present evidence as to your innocence.  Pelosi has both the legal and moral duty to allow them their defense.  She is not doing it for two reasons: 1) it will make her own complicity in the whole thing obvious; and 2) because the aim is to SCARE people.  They want people rightfully angry about real abuses–real abuses which of course most of our Goebbelsian media will spin as either necessary or non-existent–too frightened to take to the streets.

The whole thing is fascist.  Authoritarian.  Contrary to the rule and principle of the laws of the American people.  The exact sort of thing we would protest in other countries–hypocritically, as it turns out.

I wonder daily what the solution is.  A big part of the problem is that a good third of our country seems to adore Fascism.  There were Italian Fascists, remember.  They had the support of a lot of people.  So protests which include elements across the political spectrum are unlikely, not when so many people WANT to be controlled and abused.

Politically, one of my main hopes remains the Arizona Audit.  I don’t know why it continues to be delayed.  At some point, you have to suspect fear, or corruption.  Both are powerful forces.  We are lied to continually by people we should trust.

This country has already fallen, much of it.  Agencies which we know are corrupt include the CIA, FBI, most likely the NSA, most Secretaries of State and Governors in most States, the FDA, of course the NIH and CDC, the DHS, and honestly I don’t even want to continue.  It’s most of them.

I have to assume all these agencies include honest people who feel the time is not right, or who are too scared–and always will be too scared– to admit they are not on board with the coming final (as opposed to the contingent and supposedly temporary COVID measures) destruction of the liberties all of us value as integral to our lives as we have always conceived them.

As I have said often, I don’t really deal in hope. I deal in persistence.  That is reliable.

Try not to be a bigger dick or bitch than you need to be.

Try to be a little nicer than you need to be.

I thought about calling this post “Boundaries”.  My reason was that sometimes you DO need to be a dick.  I’ve said this on many occasions.  Not many “spiritual” writers would say it that bluntly.

And most of the time, none of us need to be MUCH kinder than needed.  Most of the time, the excess says more about stories we are telling ourselves–about our vanity, or about our public virtue signaling, which we may not do ourselves, but hope someone does for us–than about how loving and genuinely considerate we are.

This headline is a joke on me.  It  just came out, and I left it.  What I am realizing is that Grand Schemes are almost always the outcome of large–grand–unresolved conflicts.

Most saints are probably secretly more than a little psychotic, and their secrets were hidden well.

I was reading up on Rajneesh the other day, who was remarketed as Osho after high level followers tried to kill people, and plotted to kill more.

It was a sex cult.  Did you know this?  Everyone was having sex with multiple partners nearly all the time.  His cult members were working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, while he owned NINETY THREE Rolls Royces.  He apparently was very fond of valium and nitrous oxide too.

Here is the thing: he was a great talker.  People from the time remember fondly how charismatic he was.  But that was the background, and can you not infer major emotional problems from all that?

The passion to “change the world” often comes from a bad place.

We read MLK, Jr. was certainly a philanderer, and most likely at least an accessory to rape: https://news.yahoo.com/martin-luther-king-laughed-rape-friend-fbi-documents-145714868.html.

Does that detract from who he was?  Yes.  Does it mean there was not still much that was very admirable?  No, of course not.

I think, perhaps, we all need to lower our expectations of each other, on the right and the left.

On the Left, of course, they are more or less training one another to be devious, corrupt pricks.  Since you cannot be forgiven, once called out, you have to both be systematically and carefully disingenuous, and–like Harvey Weinstein for many years–you have to play ball with the System.  If they are lying, you have to praise and support the lies.  Everyone lies, and all their allies support their lies.

If you do that, they will protect you.  They only pushed Harvey down the stairs to get at Trump.  They will sacrifice their own in a heartbeat if it serves some major, if transient, purpose.  There is no loyalty, which is why the need for caution, where  it is possible.

But maybe Saint Francis was molested.  Can you imagine the plight of someone subjected to sexual assault and pedophilia in the 12th Century?  Maybe Mother Teresa also.

Crazy people change the world.  Sometimes the PR folks for those people, with time and general ignorance, can make all the craziness disappear, and create a picture which works for all who come after.

Now, Mother Teresa–or Albert Schweitzer, who I really do have a lot of admiration for–really did get a lot of concrete, physical things done.  That is all to the good.  It would not have been done without her, so she deserves the credit.

But I think all of us lose something interesting, contact with possibilities within ourselves, when we naively submit to simplistic notions of sainthood, goodness, virtue, and morality.

If everyone did 5% better tomorrow, the world would be changed in a week.  As I think Elie Wiesel said, about 10% of the world is mostly good, and 10% mostly bad, and 80% is just following the winds.  In such a world, being a leader is a good thing.  But I think the less we ask of our leaders in terms of sainthood, the more capable leaders we are likely to find.  The reason we got Donald Trump is that 1) he IS capable, even if often also abrasive; and 2) many people who might have done as well or better refused to deal with the sliming.  And EVERYONE is hurt when solid people won’t step forward.  The Left can’t see that–they are trained parrots, for all intents and purposes–but it is the truth.

My two cents for today.

There is not as much difference as you would suppose between living in a world consisting mainly in projections, and living imaginatively in a purely fictional place like Narnia or the world of Harry Potter.

 

Procrastination is a sort of suicide.  All wasted time is.  It is some portion of life which goes unlived, and which disappears with no trace but the memory of what could have been, possibly with a sense of regret.

It seems to me, for this reason, that dual track of Buddhist practice consisting in meditation and what I always see called Skillful Means makes sense.

On the one hand, you learn stability in silence, and learn to “move” in stillness; and on the other, you learn stability in noise and hustle and bustle, and learn to remain dynamically balanced–which is a form of stillness–while moving, calculating, deciding and doing.

We all fail.  It is nothing to be too concerned about.  I am writing this because I am reflecting on my own countless wasted days (and nights).  I was a drunk for many years.  I tried really hard, but I couldn’t figure out how to balance my pain with my life.

There are a lot of us.

But do something daily to raise your game.  That I can honestly say I have done, and it is slowly, slowly, slowly paying dividends.  Don’t expect immediate results of any sort whatever.  But also never forget to show up–to some extent, in some way–and try.  Treat it as a principle, and it’s likely it will slowly grow into something real.

And I will add that much or more time is wasted in excessive haste–in a desire not to let one moment pass without a moment’s worth of distance run–than in excessive indolence.  There is a balance.

And as I say, my emerging simplification of the purpose of life is to simply enjoy a simple gratitude and pleasure in life, in the small and large troubles–which can be seen as challenges and tools for both growth and warranted self approval and self esteem–and of course the countless small pleasures that are everywhere, and the large ones which also happen from time to time.  Enjoy moving and enjoy being still.  Enjoy silence, and enjoy noise.  Enjoy your work, and enjoy what emptiness and expansion you can find on your meditation cushion.

It’s a question of balance, of riding the ups and downs of life like a good equestrians rides the ups and downs of a horse on an uneven landscape.

“As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” H.L. Mencken

To be clear, Joe Biden did not win the election, but I cannot honestly say we don’t deserve him.

The rest of these are worth reading, too: https://fee.org/articles/12-hl-mencken-quotes-on-government-democracy-and-politicians/

What if, like water fluoridation, they are intended to make all of us just a LITTLE stupider?

“Brain fog” is a very commonly reported side effect, and the Japanese showed that the spike proteins enter most of our organs, including the brain.

In my view, the people we are dealing with have a very long term plan, and are very, very patient.  After 9/11 they waited nearly twenty years to go up the next notch.

And just as I suggested years ago–without really meaning it, since this is very certainly not what I believe–that Alex Jones could be a Russian agent, could Edward Snowden not have been IN FACT an agent, in the end, of the 1 in 100 million, via Deep State cut outs?

Think about what he did: he exposed the pervasive abuse of the NSA.  He showed it to the world.  And almost nothing–or perhaps literally nothing–happened.  We learned to live with the knowledge that everything we write on the internet, in private texts, in emails, or say on the telephone is recorded, and that whoever at the NSA and other alphabet soup agencies wants to partake in the details of our lives as they happen electronically, can.

We learned to live with that.  Is that not a temperature notch up in the pot, which is slowly coming to a boil?

These would be people constantly introducing small changes, little variations, constantly undermining apparently unimportant things.  But a little soon becomes a lot, doesn’t it?

So why not make the world just 3 IQ points dumber?  And maybe it is 1 IQ point per jab.

And I will comment that I don’t drink tap water.  Whether it makes a difference or not, I can’t say, but it is actually the Chloramine that I am mostly trying to avoid.  I assume there is some fluoride there, though, too.

Ponder, though, that if fluoridated water makes kids just a little dumber, then we are all a bit more stupid than we should be, or would be with actually intelligent public policy.

And ponder too that all this corruption is very old, and that what is new is not its extent, but the extent of its exposure.  That is a tenable position. Yes, it is all very ugly, but it has been ugly a long time.  Just 60 years ago Jim Crow was still legal in much of the country, and workplace sexual extortion just something women mostly had to live with.  Being gay could get you beaten to death, and even arrested as late as the 1980’s in some places.

Things HAVE been getting better.  The people who call themselves Progressives HAVE in fact helped improve some things.  But that is not the case now.  They are pawns.  Nearly everyone you see in public life is a pawn, being played by, in most cases, they know not who.  That is my honest personal opinion.

And are there competing agendas?  Multiple interlocking and sometimes conflicting conspiracies?  Maybe.  That would be consistent with human nature.

And as regards these spike protein injections, I personally think taking a LOT of good quality fish oil for a couple weeks on either side of each injection is most likely a good idea.  It will reduce overall inflammation, and blood clots specifically.  It would not hurt to take 81 mg aspirin daily either.

And as regards mental effects, maybe Lion’s Mane mushrooms.  I just read about those, and am thinking about adding that to the already long list of pills I take every day.