Month: December 2021

when you or someone you care about, near or far, is being hurt by someone, whether intentionally or seemingly unintentionally.

This applies to physical harm and to emotional harm.

Harm is violence, and violence requires a barrier of sorts be built, to recalibrate the “system” without that person or group, and judgement is the means by which this separation happens.

Judgement means separation.  It means the conscious creation of distance.  But this is sometimes absolutely necessary.

We all have both a right and what I would argue is a positive duty to mend our own fences and tend to your own needs.  If you don’t, you become a burden to others, and that is a type of harm.

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we STILL become a burden.  This is OK.  Accept help when needed, rid yourself of the need for it as soon as possible, then pay it forward, if I may indulge a cliche.

But for me, despite many years of unrelenting effort and focus, I am still finding ways my mother messed my mind up.  What people do consciously can be very hard to detect, if done with subtlety, but when you are dealing with what amounts to a cunning Alter, that is so far in the darkness it is nearly impossible to see.

But I don’t quit.  And when you don’t quit, you will sooner or later succeed.  I may have just discovered a means of relieving myself of some huge burdens.  We will see.

I was pondering two ways to get where I was going.  I decided if the light was green when I got there I would go straight, and if not go right.

And while doing so I realized there is a feeling of a decision.  There is a bit of anxiety, and then a “cutting away”, which is the meaning of decision.  One limb of the tree is removed, leaving one remaining.

[I have not been able to verify this, in the time I am allotting, but I believe decision, incision and precision are all related, with the root verb being, I believe, caedere.]

This takes energy, and it hit me that a big benefit of monasticism is that your day is regulated.  There are few if any decisions.  You eat what you are served, do the work you are told to do, sleep when everyone else sleeps, etc.  This is true, at least, in most forms of Christian monasticism, and most forms that remain that I know of with regards to Buddhist monasticism (with Tibet, at least the Tibet before the Chinese Communist Imperialists and thieves conquered them, being a conspicuous exception).

Reducing the number of decisions needed in a day should free up spiritual and creative energy.  This is the same reason Steve Jobs wore the same outfit every day.  It was one less distraction.

Here is the rub, though: you need randomness too.  You need the habit of stability on the one hand, and destabilizing and unpredictable events on the other.

In my own case, I am continually required to do things I don’t want to do.  I am working today.  I don’t want to work today.  Boohoo.  I get it.

But being pushed across my own grain is in general useful for me perceptually.  I whine like a little bitch, but I keep after it, and if I have anything useful to say, it is mostly the shit I didn’t want to do that is the ultimate source.

I was dreaming last night about a client of mine, reimagined in my dream as a sort of cult, where everyone was happy, everyone was cared for, and everyone had glazed eyes and an agenda.

In America, our religion in many ways is work, isn’t it?  Do you leave work at work?  Most of us don’t.  Most of us lay awake at night sometimes, worrying about this or that, this unsent email, this email that might ought to have been worded differently, how we are going to solve some specific problem, which will be replaced in short order with some other problem, and another after that.

But work is givenness.  It is a place of focus, where our mental and emotional energies can go and live, and in no small measure take us away from the pains of our individual personalities, the love we did not get, and are not getting, the pains of confusion about Life generally, the anger at other people for not loving us, fear of the future.  You can make your own list.  It will be similar to, but not identical to, my own.

And as always I like to look at my dreams as both descriptions of realities “out there”, but also symbolically reflective of deep processes within myself.

Cultishness and dissociation I think go together.  The cult is the place where you lose your own emotions, where they go into a common pot.  You lose your positive personal feelings–say, of personal loyalty and integrity as an individual–but you also lose the “bad” ones, like alienation, bitterness and hostility to an often cruel world.

It is so hard to stand on your own feet, to feel confident feeling your own feelings, to feel confident finding your own way.  In my own self, I constantly default to my image of the expectations of others.   This is cultish, in a way.  It is HUMAN, to be sure, but we all seem to have emerged from the swamp as little creatures with a need to be told what to do, and how to feel about what and when.

But this is a stage through which we need to pass.  There is no need to continue living there.

My work is hard.  I get tired often, with all that floats around and in me.  I have immense reservoirs of stamina and physical strength, so I keep going.  This is the work.  This is the game.

And I do think of Rupert Sheldrake, too, and his ideas about Morphic Resonance and morphogenetic fields, for which vastly more evidence exists than is realized by skeptics who lack the scientific integrity to look at it or for it.  Once one person has found a new way–or new to this time and place and culture–then the next person has an easier time of it.

I am alone.  No one is helping me.  I may be surrounded by like minded spirits, each thinking the same thing, but it is not obvious to me.  My task is to brace myself and head into something better.  To work, to learn, to grow, to move, to forge; in my own case, always in the face of an inner voice screaming “NO, YOU CAN’T DO IT.”

 I would like to get rid of that voice.  I haven’t figured out how yet.  But I think I’m making progress.

I think I wrote about this a few weeks ago–or more–but I was driving up a road I drive up a lot, stuck at a light I get stuck at a lot, and it HIT me that there is a completely different dimension you can live in if you just change your relationship with time.  The world alters completely in how it feels, even if everything looks just the same.  Certainly you will SEE more, but that is not the point.

Just slow down 5%.  Do what you need to do.  Lord knows I don’t want to ask you to make some radical change in your life.  Just do 5% less in the same amount of time, and, if you need to, work just a little longer.  You will have more stamina in any event, and work will not seem as stressful.

All the emotions that are possible for any of us anywhere, are open to all of us at any moment.  Much of spiritual training is emotional training which consists first in AWARENESS, and then learning to feed what you want more of, and starve what you want less of.  You never get 100% good stuff, and 0 bad stuff, but the balance becomes something you can control within certain wide boundaries.

I can flex my bicep any time I like.  Imagine being able to conjure–and I like this particular word–gratitude and appreciation and acceptance the same way.

Here is a nice quote, that I think is relevant:

Even though they dwelled in austere, even harsh places, the great yogis of history were highly developed internally; they were constantly enjoying every drop of their living experience.

 

They rejoiced in the sounds they heard, the flavors they tasted, the odors they smelled, the textures they touched and the light they perceived.  They were artists without a canvas; their way of being in this world was their masterpiece, and even their most ordinary gestures and expressions could conduct creativity.

Tarthang Tulku, in Kum Nye Dancing.

I said something like this in the past year or so.  I honestly don’t remember if I may have read this before.  It’s definitely possible.

I had this dream the other day when I had accidentally signed some contract that called for me to drill underground conduit through a graveyard.  I was going to need to drill through coffins and bodies, or exhume them and reinter them.

The whole thing filled me with deep dread and horror.

The same night I had another dream where I was on a monorail, and a terrible tornado was chasing us.  It destroyed the city we were traveling to, and there were fires everywhere.  The dream ended with me trying to gather everyone together and develop a plan for survival.

What I think was happening is latent, deep feelings were and are becoming bold enough to express themselves.  I’ve been living with horror and deep dread all my life.  I just shut it away in a closed room and push that door as hard as I need to to keep it from coming out.

That of course is tiring, and it takes energy and focus that could and should be put to much better uses if and when I heal myself by diminishing that energy.

But it occurred to me to wonder, on waking, if people don’t have some latent NEED for this feeling of horror.  If horror is not a spice of life, without which we cannot maintain some level of balance.

Or perhaps horror is a gateway to some larger self.  Perhaps it is the feeling of being torn apart, but perhaps we all need to be torn apart at some point in our spiritual growth.  Perhaps horror is what becoming a larva looks like.

Certainly horror movies have become a staple of American life, but there are analogues for example in the Tantric traditions of India and Tibet, where yogis live in cremation grounds, or where bones are scattered, in Tibet.  Some will smear their bodies with the ashes of cremated people.  In Tibet bone necklaces are apparently common in some sects, or were, with one story I remember from Alexandra David Neel where a teacher had a necklace with 108 polished bone spheres, each from a different skull.  And drinking from skulls is of course common in Tibet, or was.

And in normal, traditional life, the feeling of horror would be felt by all who slaughter and dismember animals.  That’s how you do it.  You cut the head off, the limbs off, saw through the ribs and back, etc.  A guy was describing in detail the process of butchering a whole deer to me the other day. He would kill it, hang it, gut it, and he had a particular way of cutting down the vertebrae.  It was vaguely horrifying, but as a cook he was very enthusiastic about it.

And most of us are a bit horrified, if we think about it, about how the slaughtered animals we call “meat” get to our tables.  I’ve heard many times that if you like hot dogs or sausages, you don’t want to know how they are made.

But do we NEED that, somehow?  Does the presence of death and dismemberment meet some latent psychological need?

This is certainly a counterintuitive idea, but obviously I never give a fuck about getting outside the lines.  In general I forget there are lines or a box.  If I was coloring with markers, there would marker everywhere in my book, on my clothes, in my hair, on my face, on the table, and probably the walls of the house and the dog.  It is important to be thoroughly unsystematic.

And in India in particular, they are very, very rigid in their distinction between clean and unclean.  The historical elites are vegetarian, but view with horror lower castes and their “filth”.  And to this very day they have people who are ritually unclean, and treated worse than black folks were in the Jim Crow South.  Much worse, and in much larger numbers.  They are called Dalits now, and I have talked about them.

And I did want to make a general comment on elites, that I may as well put here.  When you are in power, when you have all the good stuff a society values–typically prestige, power, and wealth–you have a great deal to lose.  In the Great Game of Life you are going to play not to lose, because you have already won.  You will not take risks.  You will spend all your time defensively, and even fearfully.

This is not a world into which innovation and emotional truth will easily enter.  Only a person seen as a madman or madwoman could bring anything new.

But the folks at the bottom have little to lose.  They have no reason not to try and meet their emotional needs, particularly if they can’t meet their physical ones well.  And because they are under stress, they are more or less FORCED to develop methods for resisting gravity, for persisting, and for surviving.

So the so-called subalterns are where most of the most interesting things happen.  In America, most of our best artistic ideas came from black folks, at least musically.  Jazz, Rock, Blues, and much of Country music is all black in origin.

And as a comedian on Dave Chappelle’s show commented, “everybody wants to be black but nobody wants to be black.”

To state the obvious, those who have the least to lose have the most to gain.  Ponder that just a little longer than you think you should need to.

And Merry Christmas!!!  All this may be a lump of coal, but you can use coal to make light and warmth, and with the right setup, a diamond.

I think all focus is inherently spiritual, and so too are all completed plans.

Much of spiritual work is developing internal coherence.  There has to be a place for spiritual energy to land, and an awareness to perceive it.

I have a book on Psychosynthesis, and the earliest exercises are basic visualizations, like stroking a dog or cat, or shaking someone’s hand, or the smell of pepper or cedarwood, or a blue circle or red triangle.

In my own case, I’ve been doing them when I sit in the sauna.  It’s interesting watching them move and squirm and fuzz and fidget.  If I was aiming a gun it would be doing endless loops.

All this is obviously going on all the time.  As I have said many times, many of my ideas come from running in circles.  This is one of my shelters.  I feel an endless need to run away, get away, and one obvious way is to run from FEELING, right?

Oh, look at me with my pipe and tweed sweater and bookshelf filled with erudition and big words: I’m above all that.

Here is a brain teaser for you: is it possible to be an emotional pedant?  I don’t think it is.  Pedantry amounts to an accumulation of unmoving knowledge.  You cannot accumulate, catalogue and store feelings.  They are like birds that land, stay for a time, then leave, and you may see the same birds a lot, but you cannot control this process, cannot regulate it fully, except by doing your best to extinguish it entirely.  But that is not control, and it dampens the inner fire of life.

If you are going to BE, you can only do it now, and only do it not knowing one moment to the next what is on the way.  And ultimately the only way to do this is complete acceptance and surrender, which of course are the positive, flip side of antagonism and fear.

These are cliches of course.  Words are easy, of course.  But still, it seems to do me good repeating things I’ve heard and read, and doing so with slight alterations, sometimes, and verbatim in others.  I’m working my way to understanding, and quite often the gate to the path is built with words.  The path, of course, isn’t, but it’s quite impossible to finish anything you don’t start.

A phrase.  You know what I mean.

For most of recorded history–history in general being written by agriculturally based societies which quickly developed power structures–humans have lived in cults of various sorts.  You could think of a cult as a “mass formation” of the sort Mattias Desmet wrote about, but oriented around metaphysics.  People will both live and die for their cults, for their people, for the beliefs that have become a part of their core sense of self.

And thus it should not be surprising that many people only get out of a cult by joining a new one.  There may be in intermediate phase of, what?: social alienation, unregulated generalized anxiety, and non-specific aggression, which “fixes” when that person adopts a new cult.

And what does a cult–and it just hit me that culture is over half “cult”–do?  It tells you what you are allowed to see and think, and what you are NOT allowed to see–even if it is in front of you–and what you are not allowed to think or of course say.

In my view, the entire progress of civilization depends on getting past these sorts of mass formations, these collective and in the modern era collectivist psychoses.

The key to all human progress is empowering every set of eyes and ears and brains and noses on the Earth to perceive independently.

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And the related thought I will perhaps expand later is that life is fuller for those who feel they have less to lose.  Anyone who is STUCK in a cultural structure, or lifestyle of one sort or another, is simply living the same day over and over.  They will grow little.

When you have little to lose, you RISK.  You put yourself out there.   And you get broken sometimes.  Bad things can happen.  Certainly, unexpected things WILL happen.

But this is the game.  This is how you play.  Those with the least to lose gain the most.  This is in the Tao Te Ching, so it MUST be true.

That joke was for the ghost of Lao Tse.

I personally think Elon Musk should loan a billion or more dollars a year to https://www.kiva.org/

Where the UN exists as a corrupt body pursuing venal interests, usually leading to, and supporting, tyrannies of all sorts, Kiva makes loans directly to individuals.  It bypasses governments, not in large ways, but small ways.  Small ways are sustainable.  There is not enough money there to be worth stealing, but plenty of money to change lives.

 

Thinking about this, if the jabs do not really lessen rates of infection all that much–here is one study–then the main claim to be made about them is that they reduce the risk of serious illness and hospitalization and death.

But TREATMENT does the same thing.  That makes them medicines, no different in principle than following the Zelenko Protocol, or taking Ivermectin or HCQ preventatively BOTH with respect to COVID AND Malaria.  As I understand it, HCQ is mainly used to prevent malaria, by killing the parasites before they get going.  That makes that use of HCQ effectively equal to a COVID “vaccine”.  Neither confers full immunity, but both are claimed to reduce risk of infection, and to reduce the severity of illness.

The COVID jabs are medicine.  They are a medical treatment.  They are a drug offered prophylactically to reduce the risk of severe problems. And they are a drug whose effectiveness, on all accounts, wanes relatively rapidly, and the effectiveness of which depends a lot on the specific variant in question.

In this vein, consider all the ads for drugs you see on TV, with all the smiling actors, the pleasant pool scenes, the romantic walks along the beach, while the voice performers calls out a long list of possible side effects–”in rare cases seizures may occur, and call your doctor immediately if you have an erection that lasts longer than your Netflix binge watching session”.

Do you see ANY of that with these jabs?  The risk of miscarriage, which is patent?  Myocarditis/ Pericarditis?  Autoimmune disorders?  Blood clotting?  Stroke?

Keep in mind it is governments paying for these ads.  They don’t have a fucking bit of verbiage indicating ANY dangers, any side effects, even though it is WELL KNOWN that they happen, and it is likely, in my view, that added together the list of problems is vastly longer than the list of purported benefits ESPECIALLY once we factor in known safe treatments, like Vitamin D sufficiency, and Ivermectin/HCQ given with zinc, an antibiotic, and Vitamin C.

As I said in a previous post, the way they got around the need for Informed Consent–which is a bedrock basic in first week medical ethics, in my understanding–is they just DECLARED these jabs perfectly safe.  Not mostly safe, with qualifiers, but 100% safe in all cases for all people with no qualifiers, which a microsecond’s worth of thought will tell you HAS to be BS.  No medicine is completely safe.  None of them.  Not even herbs and vitamins, if you ramp the quantities up.

Every way you look at this thing it is complete madness for any sane, educated person to be buying into this utter and complete bullshit.

You need something like a Vanguard and Blackstone and State Street to wrap your brain around the organization and global corruption needed to push so many good minds into such drooling imbecility and recklessness and criminal incompetence.