Month: February 2022

It is the unhappiest people who are most concerned with how the rest of us are living. They claim they want to help us, but they really just want more company in their misery.

Most of this is unconscious.

And I will add that Christian doctrine, as typically iterated particularly by Protestants, places a dual and terrible burden on its sincere adherents: not only do they have to walk a narrow path themselves, but in some measure the duty is placed on them to help others avoid eternal damnation.

This breeds terror quite naturally, and frightened people are productive people and honest people, but not spontaneous and authentically good people. And they are more or less BOUND to be in the business of the rest of us, even if it is contrary to the natural inclination of the better souls among them.

*************

In sports, as in life, there is no other team. The Bengals will play the Bengals today and the Rams will play the Rams.

This was John Woodens key insight. If the Bengals achieve perfection, they cannot be beaten. Same with the Rams.

The service each team will perform for the other is work hard to reveal any and all latent flaws. The goal is not to win, but to exceed all previous performances, and come as close to ideal action as possible in a highly circumscribed and essentially arbitrary environment. This is why we call it a game, and why we call it play.

How is this: Ego is clinging to your own boundaries?

Or: Ego is clinging to arbitrary boundaries?

Ego is one of these words, like love, that have been worked to death, and which I generally try and avoid.

But that popped in my head this morning so I shared it.

And I will add something else: I think much of the beginning of learning to live is learning to do nothing.  I think  most of us are like automatic cars that are in gear.  Unless we hit the breaks, we move involuntarily.  So most of us, even at rest, have to exert energy to stay at rest.

Working is good, but working compulsively, out of fear and avoidance–which is the case for most–is not.

In a universe which granted our every wish, which is how I think the next life works, you would be slipping on that ice continually.  You would veer first this way then that.  Learning to be still, to genuinely be still, to not want  anything, not crave anything, not want more than what is right there, is the most important spiritual task, in my view.

And to take a concrete example, wanting to be loving is a form of compulsion.   Wanting to “rid yourself of ego”, whatever that means, is a form of compulsion.  You start with doing nothing.  That is the beginning.  Laziness, if I might put it this way, can be work, if you are not being compulsively lazy, which is also common.  Laziness can be a fear of work.

The doing nothing I am speaking of involves conscious attention.  It involves listening, to use the word common in the book from which some of these ideas, as perhaps slightly adjusted in the filter of my mind, come: “Let the Moon be Free”.

Another way of putting this might be that the first spiritual task is relaxation.   This is the same as consciously doing nothing.  Nothing to be done.  Nowhere to go.  Everything full and complete.  A death and a continually renewed beginning.

It occurs to me to comment that a key aim of leftist indoctrination, as funded and supported by nations like China and Cuba, has to be to make betrayal and treason much easier for Americans in positions of trust. Particularly if the money and favors are good, how guilty can anyone feel selling out what they have been carefully trained to believe is a wicked and unjust nation?

And obviously an element in this—what might be termed meta-indoctrination—is teaching people to despise principle based reasoning, because the only real alternative, socially, is obedience to authority, which may be a mob, a dictator, a Party or a handler. Or whim, which can never achieve social relevance.

We are being sold out at all levels of government. It could well be that giving the Chinese access to our technology was part of the deal by which they enabled Joe’s people to cheat his body, if not his mind, to the top.

What if that advanced fighter was dropped into the ocean on purpose and a Chinese submarine was waiting for it?

This is the rough ballpark from which reasonable people should see our current situation, in my view.

That we are being betrayed is one of the few certainties I have.

I had a dream last night that I was trying to stop a train with a couple of sticks in the tracks.  I didn’t think it would work, and I was pretty sure it might kill me, but I tried anyway.  The train came through entirely unimpeded on a parallel set of tracks I didn’t even see.

Then I was in a large truck driven by my mother.  I was in the back.  She missed a wide turn badly, then slid backwards downhill while I clung to the back seat. I finally told her to downshift and pull the emergency brake.  She did, and I realized terror had made her stupid.

Interpretation: the two dreams are related.  I think most “plans” to “save the world”, when they are roughly sincere, are rooted in fear.  Ideology is almost entirely the Emergent Property of dominant fear.  Rigidity and stupidity, also, are the results of fear.

We–and here I mean me, but many others too–come up with  schemes and ideas to change the world that originate in fear, but the REALITY is that most of what most of us do does not matter all that much.  The train can simply arrive elsewhere, and ignore us entirely.

And to be sure, I grew up in a fearful home.  It was repressed fear, hidden fear, but in my mothers case was very close to hysteria most of the time.  She simply lied about it, to herself and everyone else.  Seeing the effects of such lies is no doubt an important reason emotional honesty is so important to me, as is self examination.

I am reading a very interesting and useful book called “Let the Moon be Free”.  It is an outstanding companion book to my Kum Nye practice.  He talks often about listening to your body.  Logically, if one part of you is listening, then the body is talking.

And he points out that none of fear the present so much as we fear the future.  My PRESENT, as it exists at this exact moment, drinking coffee, doing laundry (waiting on a machine), typing, is not in the least bit scary.  No one is going to burst in and attack or arrest me.  No: all that is in the future, where dragons, mist and darkness seems to be.

And he points out that fear is endemic to the human condition.  The sooner you get away from the idea that fears in aggregate can be managed by managing the world, the better.  No, you have to make friends with  Fear, the root, Fear the unanchored and ambient and potentially omnipresent.

Here is what I would suggest: most of us are completely helpless.  I of course heartily approve of what the Canadian truckers are doing.  That is basically a highway sit-in, as I understand it.  Rather than involving self absorbed students it involves ordinary citizens who are rebelling, but doing so non-violently and peacefully.  THAT IS THE WAY, politically.  Passive and even aggressive non-participation, and non-cooperation.  No violence, but no saying OK any longer to the patently absurd.

But returning to the point, all of us can commit resolutely to staying AWAKE, to learning to recognize propaganda when we see it, to stop obeying stupid rules thoughtlessly, and to asking a LOT of questions.  I would like to see all thoughtful people running interference campaigns in their localities on whatever medias are public and in general use.  Just insert true ideas that they are trying to suppress through lies, grotesque distortions, vitriol, and outright censorship.

Don’t be afraid.  Whatever the future is, it will come with or without your permission, and most likely regardless of your best efforts.

Good remains possible.  I honestly think people are starting to wake up, and that is BY FAR our best hope for a truly good and desirable future.

One last comment: it occurred to me the other day that Tarkovsky’s Stalker might be seen as an interesting metaphor for Ideology.  The realm feels good to him, but it has no smell.  None of the people who enter it have any desire to penetrate to the heart of it.  And the Stalker leaves heartbroken that other people do not believe in something he himself cannot bring himself to enter, all while his daughter–real life–is performing miracles.

As such, this was a sly and very subtle condemnation of Soviet Russia, which got through the censors.

There is no Republican equivalent to Jim Crow.

100% of genuinely racist legislation and practice is Democrat. It is of course claimed by the Democrats that all the pre-1960’s racist Democrats left en masse to join the Republicans.

Now, they CAN cite, say, Strom Thurmond, who was a Democrat when he spent 24 hours filibustering the REPUBLICAN sponsored Civil Rights Act of 1957, and who later became a Republican when fellow Democrat LBJ pushed though yet more civil rights legislation.

But former Klan LEADER Robert Byrd never felt any need at all to leave the Democrat Party. He died a Democrat and hus life and career were feted by people like Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This is where the rubber meets the road though: no former Democrat as a new minted Republican EVER pushed through or even attempted to pass any actually racist legislation.

This is why Democrats have to PANDER to the black vote to keep it. They have to promise a winning lottery ticket in every election, knowing full well they will be believed when they blame Republicans in the next election cycle for preventing them from passing laws THEY NEVER HAD ANY INTENTION OF PASSING.

And this is why they invent boogeymen like voter disenfranchisement. That lie helps keep blacks onnthe plantation and also helps support their cheating.

On that score I ask a simole question: why should the global home of mass democratic representation not be AT LEAST as secure in its elections as EVERY OTHER NATION ON THE PLANET?  No other nation would buy this Democrat bullshit for a second. It is ridiculous, and a prima facie indictment of our educational system and people that ANYONE is falling fir this preposterous nonsense.

Cancel Culture is an oxymoron. Culture is about protecting and preserving essential and useful human knowledge. Cancelling is about DEDUCTING knowledge.

Second: when the last human being has been cancelled the only figure left on the landscape will be the Devil himself. Cancelling is about hate and division, and those are his natural home. So Satan cannot be cancelled, but he is no doubt enjoying the show.

And I would add that every new unforgiveable victim brings us closer to evil.  In a world where hypocrisy is the only virtue, only the most vicious survive.

When have the people who refused to engage in honest dialogue with people who differed from them EVER been the Good Guys or Gals?

As I have said, the difference between a Liberal and a Leftist is that the former can hear Difference without going into clinical hyperarousal and supercilious condemnation IMMEDIATELY. The latter cannot.

Leftism generally is a Mass Formation Psychotic cult whose dangerousness cannot be overstated. What is at stake is Civilization itself. What is at stake is everything good all human civilizations have built in the past few millenia. They have an emotional NEED to make despairing slaves of us all.

Here is what I think is a secret: all Tibetan singing bowls are Grails.

A Grail is a figurative vessel which you impregnate with intention, and which is then carried by a sacred feminine to fruition. A man can impregnate a woman in a minute, but that child will not appear until it is ready.

The Grail is an image of deep new life that is conceived and nurtured in some deep personal or shared reality.

And this energy is perverted and list ny haste. It cannot be forced in any way. It is like making love to a woman: it CAN be done quickly, but not quickly and properly. Haste causes you to miss all the best parts.

And to perhaps slightly oversimplify, men tend to think of a goal: orgasm. Women tend to think of—rather feel of (think of /feel of: why is this not part of our lexicon?)—the PROCESS.  The river. The flow of feelings, as they come, often surprisingly and pleasantly unexpectedly.

And this is I think a good metaphor for spirituality generally. The Buddha attained Enlightenment when he stopped trying. Becoming enlightened—or saved—is much like an orgasm. You chase this experience and ignore everything else along the way. But learning to enjoy the way, to live peacefully and joyously IN the way, IS the point, IS the Way.

There is no There. You will ALWAYS be here. Making deep peace with this is the work to be done.

So you plsnt the seed in a deep spiritual feminine, nurture it, and wait. Learning that there is no hurry and that this cannot be rushed is how you give that seed permission to grow into a new Life.