Month: April 2022

You know, I look at my own dreams and the content of emotions in an average day, and feel the need to make this comment: all of us are crazy, and the worst among us are utterly convinced they are the sanest.

Me, I am crazier than most, BUT I KNOW IT, and in many respects I think I am thus saner than most.

In this time  and this nation it is very hard to be sane.  It’s impossible to be “normal”.  The best you can hope for is outwardly not unusual, and inwardly not too overcome with anxiety and obsession.

But we have propaganda cannons firing all around us, agitating us, pushing us, confusing us, creating divisions among us, all operated by people who themselves are utterly, batshit insane.  People like Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.  They are of course highly sane, in that they are pursuing clear plans with consistent diligence, but the Nazis were no different.  They had clear plans they pursued with absolute efficiency and scientific rigor.  But the PLANS were insane.

So be kind to yourself.  And if you want to start chasing sanity, try to get outside in the silence more.  Go for long walks in the woods.  Turn down or off the endless noise in your life.  Grow things.  Cook slowly and indulgently as time permits.

And for me, Tarthang Tulku’s Kum Nye has been a big help.  I’m getting consistent with 27 minutes in the morning and evening.  It’s not much, but going deep into feeling is terrifying for people like me, and probably like most Americans.

To take one obvious example, in the section on massage he says to massage your sternokleidomastoid muscle for ten minutes.  For those of us who are normally anxious, this is a long time.  Doing something really slowly for ten minutes, then sitting for ten minutes again, seems like a long, long time.

But it isn’t.  For me, this has been a wall of my prison cell I have been hitting, and stopping, and which is slowly getting softer.

As I say, for ME I need to stop blogging, but I thought I might offer something consoling, if in fact anyone benefits from a single word I write ever.  That was my effort, but it was the best I can do this morning as I head out to face projects that scare me, as I do nearly every day.

I have slowly evolved the conclusion that there is really only one pole that matters in human affairs, that between relaxation–the cessation of worry and neurologically rooted chronic trauma–and tension.  A chronically tense person cannot be truly good.  Period.  They might be, say, Mother Teresa, and work relentlessly for 18 hours a day across many decades in selfless service.  Don’t care.  They are not working from UNDERSTANDING, because understanding at a deep level is impossible if it does not flow from a physically relaxed state.

So I got drunk last night, again.  I’m very stressed and it’s an easy, short term release.  But a voice said to me this morning (me talking to me, to be clear, nothing more) that if I can stand 2-3 months of relative silence and sadness, that the wave will be over, that inaccessibility will be gone.

And thinking about it, what we need other human beings for is to comfort and calm us.  Children need parents for that–the mother in particular–and men need women for that.  And women need women.  Yes, there is a pattern there.

But loneliness, at root, is the lack of someone to calm you, and if you can calm yourself, you are not going to be lonely.

I have been making progress in my meditations.  I was able to pack in the whole bundle of hatred and aggression that loops in out and out rhythmically, and include it all in a bunch in my space on the meditation cushion the other day.  You have to get it in there to make it go away, and I did for a moment.  I was also able to directly access the pain of solitude.  Feeling ANYTHING, even something “negative” with sensitivity and presence is an inherently enjoyable thing.  This is the path back to Life for all of us.

And I also felt Impermanence, and realized that it is always simultaneously PRESENCE.  Yes, everything and everyone I love I will lose.  BUT THEY ARE THERE NOW, and knowing that loss is inevitable it makes their presence NOW richer, stronger, and more pleasurable.  If they feel permanent, they feel abstract in a way.

To my mind, as well as to what I feel, the idea of impermanence is not to loose all connections with everything and everyone.  On the contrary, it is intended that you love more deeply, feel more deeply, be more consciously happy of what is there.  Just recognize that every moment is a special moment that is bound to pass.  But then there will be another moment, and another, and another.  If you learn to be present to what IS there, then that is a good and intelligent way to live, right?  Yes, I will answer for you.

And here is a nice little saying that I came up with in the midst of a long series of problems that seemingly went on endlessly (at work): Patience is a constant, kind companion. (edit: what I initially typed was true, too, but banal; I AM a bit fuzzy this morning).

That’s good, isn’t it, if I do say so myself.  And it’s useful.

Think about this: if you are chronically irritated about this that or the other, you are in the presence, in effect, of a chronically irritated human being who constantly puts you on edge.  But you are choosing it, by not rejecting it.

It seems obvious to me that learning calm is learning patience in the midst of troubles.  It is asking yourself: who do I want as my passenger in the carseat of my brain?  Do I want someone who calms me down, or who agitates me?

And obviously, if you are patient and persistent, you get more done in the end, done better, and done much much more happily.  You have more attention, more energy, and more motivation.

So these are some of my musings in recent days.  I have realized that blogging is very much me trying to calm myself by creating an illusion of companionship.  I’ve said this before, probably several times.

It’s funny how you can encounter an idea, accept it, play with it, but not REALLY “grok” it for a long long time.  Impermanence is certainly an idea like that for many of us.  So are love and compassion.  Most of us likely dream in faded colors and grays, and don’t even realize it, since there is nothing to compare it to.

Last idea, not really part of this, but something I liked, so I will share: the word Hurtred.  I was in an alley filled with street art, and looking at these “poems” on the ground that sounded like the affirmations someone walked out of a psychologists office with, and looking at these two individuals, who appeared to be black women, but both gender and race were, to me, a bit indeterminate, so I made them a provisional lesbian couple in my mind.  And I pictured both of them with traumatic personal histories, trying to make things work, when both of them would fly into a rage sometimes over nothing; both of them both needy and terrified.  Typical human beings, in other words, who most likely thought they were unusual, since everyone else seems -so smiling and happy.  I pictured them hating Republicans as an easy scape goat for all the ambient hurt and anger, and then that word popped into my head.

Can there be hate without hurt?  I don’t think so.  Not true, lasting, gut level hate.  I will even posit this: hate is proportional to hurt.  Would the Holocaust have been possible without the disaster of World War 1?  I very much doubt it.

And that of course begs the question as to the source of the enormous volume of irrational hatred in our present world.  We live in the most affluent society in human history.  Our lives, by any reasonable physical standard, are if anything much too easy.

But here is the thing: hurt is proportional to capacity.  Weak people are vastly easier to hurt than strong people, and most of us are weak because we lack real problems.

But at a deeper level, I think most Americans, at least, exist at an emotional level of nutrition roughly equal to what you get with a sugary breakfast cereal or Pop Tart.  We don’t get enough DEEP connection.  Most of us live in this limbo where everybody is faking feelings most of the time, not least because they don’t even know what they are feeling.  Sentimentalism is the worse substitute for authentic deep feeling. It is superficial feeling, that becomes all the stronger for lacking true substance.

We are all lonely, in other words.  “The Lonely Crowd” was written in the 1950’s, wasn’t it?  Have things improved?  You know the answer to that.  Social media has merely made superficial human contact easier and vaster.  It is another form of fast food and white flour denuded of nutrients.

Oh, there are solutions to all this, for me.  I see a way out, for me.  And if and when I find that way, I will share it here.  I might even show my face here and there, and not even while drinking.

Courage is the root of all discovery.  Cultivate it.  Value it.

You know, I went into that pain earlier today.  But I failed to resist the siren’s call of a good bottle of wine, drank it, and am now on to some rum.

I’ve been good lately, mostly, in that I have been meditating twice a day, for 27 minutes each time.  In the morning, I do nine minutes focused on just trying to feel my breath.  I use the image of a dorje, in which the breath balloons into both my head and my heart after passing through my mouth.  It seems to open up heart energy a bit.

Then nine minutes of feeling.  I have been focused on my gut lately. I  try to imagine every organ, including the intestines, and feel what is in them.  Often, the energy is abundantly clear in my outer abdomen.  Whatever it is, I accept it and allow it.

Then thirdly, in the morning, I do a Kum Nye exercise from the first set of books.  Nine minutes is not really enough for most of them, but it’s better than nothing.  This morning, I wished it had lasted longer, but tomorrow it may be the opposite.  It’s something.  It’s something.

In the evening, I’ve lately been trying to do either 27 minutes or 45 minutes of massage, again per the first set of books.  Last night I did my hands.

Something has changed to allow this, since this basic structure is the first thing Tarthang Tulku recommends in the books, and I have found it impossible for me for ten years or so.  Perhaps a tad less.

But I see that the first drink for me, signals that the opportunity to make my pain go away had arisen.  My pain being what it is, it is rare that I don’t take it all the way to what I will call induced cessation.  I cannot honestly say I fully understand people who can have one, feel a bit better, then stop.  For me, the gashes are too deep.

But I also don’t want to be maudlin.  I like my life.  It’s interesting.  It’s a new fucking thing every day even when I don’t want a new fucking thing.  And that is useful, even if not always what I would have chosen.  Quite often, what most of us would have chosen is shit.  It’s easy, banal, and probably vaguely ridiculous, even if comforting.

Yeah, so that’s my pep talk today.  So go do that thing, and try not to suck at it, mostly.

OK, I’m some percentage serious here, but it’s making me laugh too.  Do something creative with whatever reaction you have to this.  Make yourself proud.  Look at all those unrealized possibilities around you, and introduce yourself to one, learn about it, and don’t be either too greedy or too shy.

Edit: that wasn’t actually what I logged on to write.  It’s an odd fact to me that if you walked up to me at random and asked me to talk for 30 minutes it would not be a problem.

The image that hit me, then hurt me, then said in some way “write about this”, was this: I got back to my birth the other day in a meditation.  I saw my mother after a long and difficult delivery, still hurting in her “birthing part” (that’s reasonable, right, as a term?) and focused on making sure she was going to be OK, to get over the pain, and figuring out where they were going to room her, and then eventually about holding the baby she just gave birth to.  I was a boy, which I was not supposed to be.  I don’t think she knew what the hell this thing was, or what the hell to do with it, so she made it up as she went along.  She was strongly dissociated and confused and disoriented.

And I felt this.  And I looked at this baby, and I realized that there is a field around this child, around all life, around my mother and everything alive, and that the fate of this child is not written either in its genetics, or what happened at birth, or what happened since.  Our fates are always much larger than this.  We live in swirls, or whirlwinds, or typhoons–of love, of hate, of kindness, of lack–and all of it is intensely interesting and “romantic” for those open to feelings as a kind of seasoning of life.

And I feel my own playfulness.  I am a first rate smartass, and a first rate inventor of games and jokes and play of all kinds.  But it comes and goes.  Sometimes it freezes up entirely.  Sometimes I am sober, serious, and people ask me–in bars and elsewhere–if I am a cop, or if I am a veteran.  I’ll never forget some drunk chick asking me no less than three times in a bar if I was sure I wasn’t a cop.  I just get that look on my face.  It’s a “don’t fuck with me” look, combined with a “I see all that you are doing” look, and it’s not entirely an act.  In certain moods, I would not fuck with me.  I’m untested, but I know what I know, and what I know is a lot of unconventional ways to fuck people up, even before we get to what I may or may not have in my pocket, or what the capabilities of a 270 pound man who does manual labor for a living may be.

So I look at that.  Then I look at me laughing, playing, joking.  I am a first rate punster and wit, in certain moods.  It’s an odd contradiction.  Who is this fellow, who is this, and then that?

Well, here is the simple answer: I’m still figuring it out.  But it’s an interesting ride.

 

Who is that?  Give this a watch.  It included facts I didn’t know.  Big picture, it is OBVIOUS beyond any serious dispute that Big Pharma paid off as many people as it took to suppress all effective and approved and repurposed treatments for COVID, which means they are directly guilty of mass murder for profit.  

Whatever you think of them–and your views should be dismal and tinted with both hatred and nausea–both Hitler and Stalin thought they were fighting for their nations and for a better world.  Pfizer and Moderna and the others can make no such claim, so their crime is WORSE.  It results simply from GREED.  I don’t think anyone who is not a psychopath can begin to grasp the evil needed for this; and it seems unlikely anyone who IS a psychopath can see a problem, other than that they left traceable trail of bodies.

The motivation of the “nerd” to be the smartest guy in the room is really no different than that of the track athlete to be the fastest, or the football player the strongest and most agile.  You want to be the best, and nearly everyone, in competitions of all sorts, harnesses aggression to get there.

The aggression of “jocks” is “I am bigger and stronger and more popular than you”.  The aggression of nerds is “I am smarter than you.”  You have no doubt seen engineers and certains kinds of scientists do this.  Intellectuals do this too.

And I think a part of this underlies the dynamic by means of which the truly abhorrent, anti-Liberal and morally incoherent ideas of the Left have taken over college campuses.  If you want to be seen as “smart”, then you have to buy into them, no questions asked about the fundamental reasoning.  If you don’t buy in, you may as well have a Southern accent and have grown up in a trailer watching Jerry Falwell and the Bakers on TV, right?

I FEEL the fear underlying all this GroupThink.  And I continue to try and understand what motivates it.  I myself came very, very close to living that life, where my whole existence was dedicated to publicly demonstrating the specific sort of intelligence demanded in the Academy.  Note, I don’t say intelligence outright.  It is a certain sort demanded, and certainly not creative intelligence, or unorthodox intelligence.  It is what I may term Track Delineated Intelligence.  And they do call it a Tenure Track, don’t they?

I was just going in to meditate this morning, and I FELT why I was so attracted to superheroes, to Conan, to powerful men with swords when was a certain age: they embodied power I lacked emotionally.  This is why weak people like nerds like strong men.  And presumably it is why they like dictators, who can do the bullying they want to do, but lack the power and will and overt psychopathy to perform on their own.

So my work right now is FEELING this lesser-ness, this humiliation, and doing so directly and consciously.

So I sit here for a moment, thinking “I don’t want to go in there”.  But then I do.

This is an interesting movie, and probably worth watching.  The Left is twitchy.  If they had guns they would be making spasmodic movements towards them continually.  As it is, they make continual open calls for the people who DO have guns to suppress, to hunt, to imprison, to silence the INSURRECTIONISTS–believe it or not, I see this farcical word used a lot out there in the wilds of Leftdom–before they RUIN EVERYTHING.

How, exactly, do they think we will ruin everything?  Well, rhetorically, it is by destroying democracy.  Implementing Fascism.  They don’t see, because they really don’t want to see, that their OWN methods are the only things resembling Fascism.  Asking reasonable questions about a patently rigged election is not Fascism.  Undermining through spurious investigations and continual harassment a duly elected President (Trump, to be clear) IS Fascistic.  Or at least Communistic, which is the brother to Fascism, even if the two don’t get along, as some brothers don’t.

So the people who are worried about the destruction of democracy and rule of the law, it seems, feel compelled to destroy the principle of one person/one vote through centrally orchestrated and more or less blatant voter fraud; to openly and enthusiastically break all of our immigration laws by importing illegally as many people as will come, in in the hope they will vote Democrat, since they plan to give them as much treasure as it takes; to conduct Kangaroo Courts for those they can, and to suppress investigation of their own wherever they need to and can; and overall to make a mockery of equal justice, with their own elites patently enjoying legal protection from any number of crimes, patently including taking bribes from foreign governments, as both Hillary and Joe Biden clearly have.

In this movie, note that in effect both sides understand that there is no military or violent solution to what in effect is a political problem.  Even extreme effectiveness–which the French Paras achieved–was not enough to prevent France from, in the end, leaving Algeria, forcing an enormous flight of refugees (many of whose descendants, I read, may decide todays election in France), and the mass torture and execution of those unable to escape.

Nobody wins, really, in tit for tats of that sort.  Algeria itself suffered another brutal civil war in the 1990’s.  Algerian contra Algerian.  Around the world, ending colonialism in certain ways often generated mass violence, with the partition of India–so eagerly sought for and worked for by Gandhi (who said “Western Civilization would be a very fine thing”, in effect, but who should have foreseen the consequences of his actions, in my view)–perhaps the most extreme example, in that millions of people died violent deaths.

This world is a violent place, but violence is rarely a complete long term solution to any problem.

In our own country, I continue to believe our only real hope is that with persistence and engaged eloquence and coherence and sincerity, that the delusion thinking of the Communists inhabiting our universities might gradually fade.  These children feel the pain of little birds and baby squirrels, but feel nothing about many of their fellow humans but hatred.  This hate is taught.  It is bred.  It is cultivated.  And perhaps it can be reversed.  It will take more courage than I see on display, but it is not impossible.

And again, if you watch that movie, you can see how awful things can become.  There were no innocents in that movie, by and large.  Both sides committed horrible atrocities.

Paul Assauresses, who was one of the models for the composite figure of Colonel Mathieu, referenced the El Halia Mine episode specifically.  Here is some detail on that:

The most heinous massacre of the day occurred at the El-Halia pyrite–mining town, where about 130 Europeans and 2,000 Muslims lived and worked together. The mob was essentially composed of hundreds of native peasants, both men and women, mostly armed with farming tools, axes, sharpened shovels, or knives, and was led by 25 FLN regulars. They arrived near 11 am, when most of the men were working in the mine while women and children were at home. A bloody massacre ensued, as European women were raped and disembowelled or decapitated, children had their throats slit and babies were slammed against walls until their heads caved in. Some of the local Muslim inhabitants who had initially watched without reacting enventually joined the excited mob, as it massacred Europeans under chants of ‘Allah Akabar’ that blended with Algerian women’s ululations. Thirty-seven Europeans, mostly women and children, were murdered in the attack

The principle is simple: violence leads to violence on both sides.  You may think you are the bad ass top dog one day, but the next you can expect something horrible in retaliation.

In the movie, the police officer sets a bomb (at the wrong address, by the way, in response to the arrest of an innocent man), and a few days or weeks later, French cafes get bombed and many innocents, on the other side, killed.  Nobody wins.

I believe in Fate of a sort.  If enough Americans commit to darkness, then perhaps that will be what we get.  In a just universe, that is the outcome.  You ask for it, you get it.

But if enough of us maintain light within us, then perhaps this evil can be ended.  I don’t know.  I have no way of knowing.  I am not the person to make mindlessly positive predictions.  History is filled with unredeemed horrors.

Humankind is weak, and mean, and stupid.  Fight these things in yourself.

during one of my nightly adventures: the past slithers up to the present and bites us like a snake.

I saw an obstacle course that was horizontal, but made through the magic of TV, through the angle of the camera, to look vertical and very hard.  They were crawling around the ground, as if they were soaring in the sky.

Then saw another obstacle course that was quite real, quite dangerous, and someone was making his or her way through it successfully, to honest cheers.  I saw the “climber”: it was a white dolphin.  I petted it for encouragement, although I was not supposed to.

In the end, the dolphin finished the course, and sprouted a leg.

 

The “joy” of cruelty, as described by Sade and others, comes from the temporary cessation of shame it enables.  I feel sure this is true.  It is a relief, a burden lifted, and thus a huge source of satisfaction.  It is, of course, drinking saltwater to slake thirst, since cruelty breeds more shame, even if that fact is denied and suppressed, with psychopathy perhaps  most directly consisting in the ability to do so effectively and quickly.  I don’t think anyone is purely cold all the time, although many come close.  I think even serial killers have short moments when they wake from their trance and feel momentary regret, which they immediately suppress with drugs, alcohol, and perhaps more cruelty.

I seem to be growing, and growing, for me, is consisting in feeling a lot of pain I had suppressed, which kept me moving all the time emotionally, from here to there and back again.  The movement was the method, and the method was running in circles without calling them circles.

Both of my parents poisoned me in their own ways.  My mother by withholding love she did not know how to provide, while often losing her temper with me, and my father through more or less conscious cruelty of the sort described above.  He was a bully.  He liked cutting people emotionally, while proclaiming his innocence and good heart.

But neither provided so much poison that it destroyed me.  I lived.  And looking at it now, with eyes slowly opening, I see countless small rebellions, countless darings, and facings of the dark, that enabled me to live.  With my past, it would be easily understood if I was a middle aged suicide.  If I had not taken the risks I did, then I would be hopeless right now.  Helpless.

But I did take those risks.  I did rebel.  I did take chance after chance after chance.  Some worked, many didn’t, but I never allowed myself to be fully boxed in by my past.

In contrast to most of the history of this blog, I am feeling some satisfaction NOT posting things.  I have a long list of ideas I keep, but I’m just not feeling the need or desire to post them.  This is good.  This means the squeeze, as I call it, is lessening, which is a key goal in my inner work.

They will show up eventually.  This may even be the year I take another stab at a book.  I think I have some useful things to say.

The root of grasping is wanted to directly control experience.  You eat a chocolate chip cookie because you associate a feeling with it.  That feeling, when you get it, feels like control.  The one led to the other, and that reliable connection is grasping in some ways.  Because it may not work every time, or work the same way, and that feels like pain, since something is now missing or gone, which was never promised to you in the first place.

So much of life is spent trying to stop time, and trying to create constancy.  Several comment on this occurred to me that I will share.

A bunker is a cage you chose.  We hate cages since we want to move, but if we don’t want to move, then cages don’t matter.  As Rosa Luxemburg put it: “those who do not move do not notice their chains”.  She also said “Freedom is for those who think differently”, which also implicitly says that Freedom is unnecessary for conformists.

Grasping is a bunker we create that becomes a cage.  In all the pain of the world, the demands, the distractions, we all forget that something good and better underlies all appearances.  Remembering this in one way or another is the primary task of all spiritualities.  In my own view, there is no difference between Allah, the Great Spirit of most American Indian tribes (maybe all: I wonder if any were atheists?  It’s not impossible.  There was much cultural diversity), and Buddha Nature and the Tao.  It’s the That.  If you feel it it needs no name.  If you don’t, then no name suffices or matters.

I think it is childish to NEED someone else.  One hears so many songs more or less equating needing someone with loving them.  Here is the thing: children NEED parents, particularly a mother or mother surrogate.  Adults should not need another person any more than a grown adult needs a pacifier or to be put to bed at night.

Love is building.  A beautiful marriage builds both partners.  And of course it is natural that you would miss your building partner when they are gone.  But that is not need.  That is affection given out, and perhaps the greatest loss is someone to whom you can readily GIVE.  This need is what motivates so many parents to elongate their children’s adolescence indefinitely.  They need their kids, more than their kids need them.  This is childish, immature, undignified, socially dangerous, and in my view morally wrong.

And it occurs to me to comment that we all need Yeses to balance lifes many No’s.  One way of getting them easily is deciding halfway to do something, like giving up donuts, then TREATING yourself to them.  Indulging yourself.  You set up the No so you can set up the Yes, which is otherwise empty.  I think a lot of behavioral circles have this component in them.

I have a lot of notes I’ve taken over the past while.  I’ve been working quite hard in the money world, and not posting them here.  I’ve also been enjoying the rest.  It’s likely true that words that can be said are not usually the words that really matter.  That won’t stop me from doing it anyway, but one day, if I grow up myself, I will talk myself silent.