Month: January 2022

In truly good books, not infrequently I find some feeling within me expressed that I had not known so well before as I do after.  Since there is a lot of latent grief in me, I find situations filled with pathos very moving, and find myself crying.  But it is salutary, even if difficult.

I would draw an analogy between emotional and physical wounds.  Physical therapy following, say, knee or hip or shoulder surgery, can be very painful, but that is the only way you get as much movement back as you are going to get.

And with emotions, of course, they are more subtle, and there is no Physical Therapist with a clear, if difficult, plan.

Participating vicariously in the feelings of others, through art, is a sort of therapy, if you give yourself up to it.  I suppose that is why I have read little literature these many years.  I like Doris Lessing a lot, but most likely because she is intellectual, and does not stir up the same feelings in me that this current book is.  She is clinical, observational, and extremely trenchant in her observations, but it seems likely she moved on to the next world with many things unfelt within her.

Or I could compare it to a large selection of essential oils.  You sniff one bottle, and that’s not it.  Nor is the next.  But the third brings out a lot.  It’s a frequency, a tone, a gestalt that is not a form at all, but which has a recognizable presence all the same.

Most people spend their lives in a very small range of permissible emotions, and certainly the American obsession with work does much to both support and further this.  As we lose touch with our feelings, we redouble what is causing this fracture.  We learn to walk on broken legs, to swim with broken arms.

And then we wonder why sad music makes us so sad, and why life seems tedious and pointless after a time.  Why life seems like WORK, rather than play.

We have done much with science, but in the process most of us have lost much of our humanity.

And it is my personal challenge that most of the people who are most open to ideas of this sort tend to be naive enough to believe silly political lies, such that where I might otherwise be able to find community is largely closed to me.

But every day I feel the energy in my belly lessening just a bit, and I am getting fractions of a second of peace, such that I know it is possible even for me.

Speech is how you leave silence, isn’t it?

I am reading the excellent  book “Extremely loud and incredibly Close” [that felt right, writing it like that], and I can relate to Oskar well.  I wonder sometimes if I am not “on the spectrum”, as I believe is the currently appropriate phrasing.

But really, I think whenever you try to fit a large quantity of trauma into any human psyche, large sections of your self become immobile.  This immobility makes you stupid and insensible to things you should be able to see.

I seek and I search because I have lost something valuable.  Most of us have.  Nearly all of us have, I think, but our world offers a plenitude of means by which to forget this.  I coined the term Forgession some time ago to describe the process of forgetting.  It can be done daily across a lifetime.  This much is clear to me.

Words, mere words, are an island in the sky that are protective.  If you look at a library or bookstore, you should also see a lot of forgetting.

And, to quote a fictional sincere soul, “that is all I have to say about that.”

I commented today that just as Zhou Enlai was not wrong to say in the 1970’s that it was too soon to judge the French Revolution, it is also too soon to judge the effects of British Imperialism.  My friend was wishing the Zulus had been better armed against the British, and I pointed out that the Zulu were hardly innocents.

And without denying countless crimes were committed by the British, which all began with their forced presence in nations which did not want them, what they also brought was a mindset, that of IN PRINCIPLE–certainly not in practice– but in principle the equality of all human beings, both in theory and before the law.

This principle, among other things, caused the British to be the first culture in recorded history to renounce the historically universal, or nearly universal, practice of human slavery.  And when slavery was banned, it was banned everywhere in their considerable Empire.

No one who condemns racism can but do so from this perspective, which did not exist in most African, Asian, or American cultures.  The idea that prejudice, bigotry, racism and oppression are wrong has never acquired such prevalence in any culture before that of 18th or 19th century European culture.

White people did not invent wars of conquest.  We did not invent slavery.  We did not invent human rights abuses.  We merely made them HYPOCRITICAL.  And should we renounce all principles, merely because crimes can be committed in the name of them?  Should we renounce all principles because they can be used for their contrary?

For all intents and purposes, the answer of the modern Academy is YES.  Emphatically YES.

But the idea of ideals has done immeasurable good in the world.  When people speak of human rights, that is a European invention.  It has no analogue anywhere else I know of in human history, even if countless enlightened leaders have observed them out of simple compassion, dignity and decency.

And broadly speaking, the IDEAS of white Europeans have conquered the world, permanently and irrevocably.  There is no going back.  You can choose Marxism, as for example in PRINCIPLE (but not in practice) the Cuban and Chinese Communists have done.  They claim to want to “free” people while using slave labor and torturing dissidents.  There is nothing benign in that.  If you want to find something truly good in those nations, your sole recourse is reading their words and ignoring their actions.

And all nations pursue science in their own ways.  Science–of the sort which invented penicillin and the atomic bomb–is now universal.  It will not be put back in the bottle without a global catastrophe, of the sort many seemingly wish for.

What is at stake at the moment is which sort of European ideal will win out.  I would assert that broadly speaking Communism is a European social system rooted in the ideal of systematic hypocrisy–you can call an elite living in abundance at the expense of an ocean of oppressed serfs, in the NAME of the serfs, nothing else–and its opposite is honest Liberalism.

And please note that when I use the word Liberal I not speaking of rich hypocrites like Nancy Pelosi.  I am speaking of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and our Founding Fathers.

I would go so far as to say that the system in  China today is not really different in principle or practice from that of the medieval Church, in which a small oligarchy imposed on the Many ideas which brooked no opposition, and which worked to the enrichment of that oligarchy at the expense of the many.  Chairman Xi is the Pope, and his Party the wealthy and omnipotent Church.

The dominant Bad Idea animating this farce is that a SOCIETY can be improved without working for the betterment of any individuals within it.  Within the notion of SOCIETY as an actually existing organism, innumerable crimes can and in the event HAVE been committed and hidden.  That process continues today.  A Falun Gong practitioner may be having his liver cut out at this very moment to provide to a Party member who has spent his or her life drinking too much.  Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are enduring the conditions in work camps on a scale never contemplated by the British at the height of their arrogant hubris.

The Opium Wars are dwarfed in scale by the atrocities committed by the Chinese Communists.  Not even close.  Not within several orders of magnitude.  The British were merely greedy.  The Communists want people’s bodies AND souls, and will tolerate nothing less.  That is the domain of a Church.  Mere greed and garden variety rapacity never asked so much, even if they always asked much too much.

Communism represents a return to the old.  Liberalism, in contrast, sees in humankind the possibility of moral improvement, of enlightenment, of growth, of sustained and generalized felicity.

Human individuals are and must be the core concern of any person trying to improve the world.  And to improve people you must have ideas on how to do so.  This obviously is my own concern.  It is why I wrote what I will call my essay on Goodness.  

[I would modify that piece in some ways now, but have not taken the time.  The most important change is that I decided Curiosity, as a value, stands in well for, and is less challenging intellectually than, Perceptual Movement.]

In order for some human dignity and freedom to survive, in the long run, we MUST have an articulated and actionable moral code that is generalized and willingly accepted by most people.  My whole intent with that essay was to formulate principles which did not lead to zealotry, to dogmatism, and to rigidity in all forms, but which in aggregate and over time still worked to improve people, to make them happier, healthier, and more naturally communal and beneficent.

As Milan Kundera commented in his bitter “Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, what he really wanted in Communism was laughing people dancing in circles.  And if you look at the cover of the book carefully, you may see the hidden image below.  They are floating in the air.  But what is real is seen on the ground.  It’s a great pictorial metaphor.

We have seen that mass murder can be justified under the name of Love.  What crime is not possible in a rigid people?  None.  All have been committed.  Many are being committed at this very moment.

And I do think that the notion of God is very relevant, for this reason: with God all individuals, in the end, have their own accounting to make.  With Society–which is the God of Communists and their countless brethren who use differing names–the accounting, in the end, is with an omnipotent State.  Politically, this was true even in the Medieval Church.  Given that only horrible people would WANT to have that power, or participate in such a system, only human degradation, impoverishment spiritually (and usually materially), and ruin and loss can be the outcomes.

And as I continue to insist, the existence of something most reasonably called God IS AN EMPIRICAL QUESTION.  We have the power to bring science to bear on this question.  We KNOW that within the paradigm of Quantum Physics none of the shared assertions of most traditional religions are impossible.  By all means renounce the notion that you have to be washed in the blood of the lamb to avoid eternal damnation, but do not reject the notion of a benevolent Creator, the reality that our souls transcend our bodies, or that we are all connected spiritually with one another and all Life in ways we are only beginning to guess at.

Read the books of Dean Radin, and Rupert Sheldrake.  A good commentary on Quantum Physics is Nick Herbert’s Quantum Reality, although there are many.  If and when any honest skeptic–and this is virtually an oxymoron (although one could make the case that the word oxymoron isn’t one)–starts reading in this vein, there are thousands of good titles.  The evidence is everywhere, and cumulatively vastly, vastly better than the evidence for matter.  Matter does not exist.  Anywhere.  Not in an absolute sense of a bottom to Reality.  The only place matter exists is in the mind of ignorant people.

Love, where it is present, does not need to be said.  And where it is not present, it cannot be said.  Now, I tell my children every time I speak to them that I love them, but only because the words, too, where the reality is present, feel good.  It is an added kindness to a felt presence.

Silence is a sort of island in the river of Life where beginnings and ends, before’s and after’s, consequences and responsibilites, fade.  You cannot seize one moment in time, but perhaps you can seize a group of them, all at once, and live in them in peace until the spell fades.  Most of us spend much of our lives looking for such peace, and it is always right there.

I don’t know if I just said anything worth reading, but it felt needed in the writing.

Logically, if asking for Voter ID–as they do in the rest of the world for absurdly obvious reasons–is racist, then asking for ID when someone buys a six pack is racist.  It is racist demanding a Drivers License.  It is racist demanding someone present an ID when cashing a check, or buying a house, or boarding a plane.

It is “racist”, we are told, to ask mental children to do what the rest of us grown ups do.  That is because, it is implied, black people are inferior, and cannot be asked to meet standards the rest of us meet without the slightest problem, issue, or hesitation.

Personally, if I were black, and I heard someone claim it is “racist” asking for an ID that everyone has–black people drive cars, too, Holmes–it would infuriate me.  I would ask that white person why the fuck they hate black people so much that they would insult them that way.

If it is true that time flows in both directions–or that there is no meaningful distinction except in our perceptions between past and future–then could it not be argued that our present decisions affect the PAST?

As I understand it, Feynman Diagrams can be read in both directions.  What would it look like, going back in time?

I don’t know.  If you do, please leave a comment below!!!

In some respects, would knowing the future not be like going back in time, as for example in the excellent movie Arrival?  The future is what we don’t know.  If we know it, does it not become past in the knowing?

I post not to bring peace but a pocketknife with a corkscrew and a toothpick and a magnifying glass.

I will thank God I am free to be whimsical and stupid.  I take advantage of that freedom often.

Try it.  Your mileage may very certainly vary, but it does seem to disrupt tinnitus, which I have in both ears, to varying degrees; and it has a soothing quality, to me, after a while.

I think it is useful to imagine that within all of us exists a room that by nature is silent.  I will call it the Room of Remembrance, because when you allow yourself to remain silent and still, it will fill with all the emotions that suffuse you, which is all the emotions from the past that you have not processed, and all the emotions of the present which you have postponed feeling.  Now is the time.

Most people, myself certainly included, put a stereo in this room playing random noises that prevents the mists of the past and the present–including present forebodings with respect to the future–from slowly penetrating it, filling it, suffusing it.  Distractions fill our days.  They fill the empty room with nothings that hold back the somethings.

I honestly think people in the past were in general much less anxiety ridden and fearful–even if they were often delusional as we see things now, they were delusional in cohesive groups–because silence was much more common.

Our world is built perfectly to enable people to remain disconnected emotional children even across long lifetimes.  You have to wake up once, to begin waking up again.  To learn how to learn you have to remember that learning is possible.  Most people have forgotten this.  Their rooms are filled with clutter, junk, cliches and other people’s ideas and feelings.

Most of life consists in the parts we can’t wait to be done with.

I post this in the middle of a yoga session, that as usual is evoking unwanted but still present emotions.  They are bills that are due, and yoga is my bill collector.  Still, I don’t want to pay them.  So I write.

But, as I noted long ago, in some respects I have learned to make at least a small virtue of my countless retreats.

And of course, I’m going back into the breech.  I will finish what I started.

There is a sense in which other peoples stupidity is no business of mine. If they want to wear mouth diapers as a repository of millions of bacteria, while filtering no viruses in either direction, that is their own business.

But I think most of hs rightly fear mass stupidity as a latent threat. For one thing, the stupid sooner or later tend to close ranks and punish all dissent and dissenters.

For another, if we take the notion of community seriously, it is a linc series of reciprocities which the stupid cannot be depended on to fulfill faithfully or competently.

So anger in response to stupidity amounts to a latent sense of threat which is real enough.

The task of course is to recognize this, feel this, and get through with the knowledge now conscious, since the emotion provided the needed message.