Month: November 2021

Why were Trump’s first wife, his daughter, and his brother and his wife in the Black Book?

I’m not selling fluff.  If something looks ugly, I look harder.  I don’t have an answer, but I will say that’s a good question.

I see people predicting a conviction against Maxwell, and no name naming, and no more disclosures.  That may well happen.

And I was wondering the other day if John Durham figured out a long time ago that everybody in Washington is an asshole–that there are no good guys, and there are no people worth protecting–and he’s just going to do his job, as much as they let him, and forget the rest.

The causes of justice, peace, truth and sanity may have no effective advocates at a national level.  They are beyond doubt few.  That much is clear.

Been looking through this: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1508273-jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book-redacted.html

And I will note the conspicuous absence of Bill Gates and the Clintons, who we know had relatively close relationships with Epstein.

I will offer a dictum: the only path to lasting comfort is through discomfort.

Much of life, I think, consists in pushing, then letting go.  Pushing, then letting go.,

What hard work does is make easy work seem easy.  And how we define hard and easy depends strongly on what we are used to.

So if you want an easy day, line yourself up a lot of hard days, then contrast them.  And the harder your hard days, the harder your easy days, objectively.

The point of self discipline is to learn to tolerate easily the vicissitudes of life.  You know some shit is going to go down.  You just don’t know what or where or when.  So you prepare yourself by not being weak.  And you become strong by learning to be comfortable in harder and harder situations.  To use a cliche, to become comfortable in discomfort.

People from truly poor countries, coming here, are I think reliably astonished at how much we take for granted, and how lazy we all are.  We don’t even have to walk a mile there and back for well water every morning.  And we have stoves that heat up at the touch of a button.  Luxury.  All luxuries.

So much of what I might call preparatory spiritual work consists in raising the baseline of the amount of work and effort comes out of us spontaneously.

That was the other point I wanted to make: at a certain point, work stops being work  It becomes play, when we can do something well and spontaneously.  The task is to raise the level at which you can still play, and not feel yourself fighting.  This is the level of the will.  You want to avoid needing will power as much as possible, because it is perishable.  Play, on the other hand, can last a very long time indeed.

That was almost what I wanted to say.  I tend to think in, I’m not sure how to describe it, forms with textures and colors.  If you were psychic, I could show you.

Traumatized people, particularly Developmentally Traumatized people with disordered and insecure attachment, feel like the whole world has rejected them.  This is what shame is.

Not unreasonably, they ask “what about me?” as the world goes about its business, not realizing it was supposed to notice or care about them.  That was certainly someone else’s job, and it just didn’t get done.

Such people will alternate between conformism–which can be so deeply reflexive that it appears to them natural and what they want–and an anger whose source they don’t really understand.  It feels foreign, like something outside.

But school shooters are attacking “the world”.  And the countless people who relentlessly watch violent media are committing acts of violence vicariously.

Niceness means nothing.

And listen deeply to people.  Not infrequently you will hear calls for help from the bottom of the well.  Feeling heard, even for a moment, even from a stranger, will help bring them closer to the surface.

Much of what looks like madness amounts to sustained emotional risk taking.

And risks fail, and doors close.

But doors open, too, and risks find their rewards.

I made a comment a post or two ago about the Plains Indians perhaps not feeling the need for a Socrates, and just realized this is inadvertently funny: Socrates never wrote anything down.  He was philosophically opposed to it.  Every dialogue had a life which ended with the dialogue.  That was how he liked it.  We have him as a character, in Plato, and most likely in spirit, but not in his words.

How would we know if the Plains Indians had in fact produced their own Tolstoys and Aristotles and Newtons, and the history simply did not endure?

How can any of us know how much genius has happened on Earth, and gone unrecorded, the record lost, or the record unrevealed?

I feel like the Tao Te Ching could be translated The Book of the Eternal Flow, or the Eternal River.

I woke up this morning, and have started doing a practice described in the Kum Nye books, but which is likely pretty wide spread across various Buddhist traditions, of, upon waking, holding my right nostril and breathing out through my left all aversion, hatred, and avoidance; through my right all desire and clinging; and through both dullness of mind and stupidity.

And I thought: which of these is fed by tension?  The answer?  All of them.  All are fed by tension.  All are relaxed in relaxation.

Then later this morning I started feeling my job in this life is not to rise too high, nor allow myself to fall too low, but to participate, to accept each thing, each task, each emotion and feeling as it comes.  To be in the river with openness.

In this world, the main “sin” is getting stuck somewhere, emotionally, with emotion understood very broadly and widely.   When you say yes to flow you let everything go automatically.  The Universe will do that work for you, gradually, softly, patiently, and as completely as you need to keep flowing.  You don’t need to forget, but the remembering should not have hooks in it.

I think this is close to the truth.  No spirit is asking us for perfection, but rather for on-going participation, on-going dancing in an endless series of waves, all of which contain what we call beauty and ugliness, and which point to larger, more subtle flows that contain everything our souls have been yearning for in healthy ways.

Children are not yet “people”, are they?  They don’t yet “own” responsibility, care, trouble.  They don’t yet know how deadly serious the business of life can be.  They don’t own “understandings”, in which one is both under and motionless, holding something up one didn’t create, necessarily, and which one rarely looks over carefully.

The motion of the child is spontaneity, and it is never too late to grow down.

Do other cultures which developed unconnected to the West/Middle East have seven day weeks?  Do they have weeks at all?  What is the variety?  Do calendars exist in nomadic peoples, outside of the obvious seasons and solstices and equinoxes?  Do they vary tribe to tribe?

I don’t know the answer.  7 is of course not a foregone conclusion.  It informs Judaism, Christianity, and Islam for obvious reasons, and the cultures each of these cultures conquered in various ways, both peaceful and violent, but I was wondering in particular about sub-Saharan Africa, and the pre-invasion Americas.

I did some basic searches, but a superficial pass didn’t yield anything of interest.

Spectral notes, created anywhere, can be replicated anywhere.  Sustain them as long as you can, even at large costs in effort and pain.

This all goes on.  Sometimes it is heavy, sometimes light.  But light is always there, like seals in the ocean, to sometimes come out and play with us.

I was in a bookstore the other day with my kids.  I need more books, myself, like I need more holes in my head.  I already have one through which stability and intention leak with dismal regularity

And I saw a book: How to eliminate fear in 7 easy steps.  I thought: “How marvelous!!!  Just 7 EASY steps.  They are not even asking work from me.”

Well, in that spirit I will offer easy morality to you.  And you don’t even need to pay the price of a book.  All I ask is that you stop thinking for five minutes, then pretend I did what I said I was going to do.  Deal?

OK, I’m not bitter, but I do find myself unable to resist a little sarcasm.  You know, here and there, even though it is the lowest form of wit.  Particularly when I’m drinking egg nog much too early and smoking a good cigar.  My marathon is done.  All but the shouting.  Until the next one, which may come soon, and be followed quickly by another.

I’m at port, though.  No storms will get me today.

So anyway, before one part of me interrupted another part of me, this is what I wanted to say: the words Right and Wrong hold no interest for me.  Such words, in our current climate, are much too slippery to hold most people’s attention, or do anything useful in any part of our society, which in far to many cases has decided insipidity is the dominant virtue; and having no firm opinions about anything as an individual more or less the de facto equivalent of “right”, and being different in any way for any length of time the only real “wrong”.

Here is my proposed alternative, which may have longer legs: healthy and unhealthy.

How to define healthy?  Working in aggregate towards the Four Greats, Compassion, Love, Joy and Tranquility.

Unhealthy?  Working in aggregate to thick emotional skins, disconnection, solitude, misery and continual aggravation and disquiet.

Morality, then–itself a word which meant a lot in some places for many centuries in the Western world, and in many ways in all societies for most of conscious human history, even if, say, the Plains Indians never felt the need for a Socrates–becomes a question of emotional health.  Of psychology.  Of SCIENCE, in some ways, even if we admit first, at the philosophical level, that consciousness precedes experience and that ontologically we have no firm way of claiming that reality is real, that Berkeley was wrong, or that Elon Musk is completely wrong, even if socially inappropriate, in wondering aloud if we are not all in a giant multisensory Virtual Reality, while experiencing said reality as, at that moment, soaking in his hot tub, with people who seem to be listening, or seeming to ignore him as he goes at it again.

I seem to exist.  That is a reasonable first supposition.  And I need to make decisions to continue to exist.  That is a reasonable second supposition.  Given these two presuppositions, the logical question is how to organize my mind and action so as to lead to what seem to be the four attainable and worthwhile ideal states.

If we posit “As Above, so Below”, then what is practical in this world, is also desirable everywhere else.

I’ll leave it there for now.  I will need a nap soon.  I’m slowly undoing several months worth of semi-exhaustion.  That work, that physical work, though, was most useful.

Since I rarely shut up when I say I will, I will also comment as a general principle, that it is truly hard to say what is really good for us, and what bad, and that much of what becomes good only becomes so because we choose to USE it that way.

Experience, on this reading, is simply a tool the Cosmos hands us, to build what we like, or tear down what we like.  There is a beauty in this freedom.  There is a beauty in all freedom, even if this means that some people fuck it up completely, at least over the time horizons we can perceive.

If the movement of the universe is extension and then return–as I vaguely recall the Tao Te Ching teaching–then all the lost souls are scooped up in the end, and brought back to where they belong.  The Game completes, and then begins again.

For all I know, I have written this exact post an infinite number of times.

In life, it seems to me, it is good to both strong and loose.  The combination creates possibilities, and possibilities are good.

Perhaps I could add a 5th Infinite: the capacity for balance and duration.