Edited for spelling but otherwise left to fend for themselves. This comes from a sense that they do me no good hidden. This does not come from a “squeeze”, although all of them DID. Life is filled with instructive and comical realities.
Anxiety is undifferentiated arousal. It is fear, anger and shame at the same time.
Sadness feels like a threat and leads to anxiety
We are not stardust: we are starlight
We all want to die. That itself feels like a threat.
At its root anxiety is wanting to escape, wanting to dominate or wanting to be submerged in conformity.
The first spiritual task is to return to sadness from fear.
9 versus ten. leaving space.
9 versus 11
The fear of missing out makes actually missing out nearly inevitable. Collecting “experiences” is not even remotely the same as living.
FOMO STARTS with Fear
You see and hear more when you have renounced the desire to add to or change reality
The long term goal of education is to raise the level of “average”. In all respects a TRULY smarter society—intellectually, emotionally and practically—will always be a better society.
Emotional balance depends on a steady flow of feeling. Most of us feel spasmodicslly and erratically, and lurch from here to there.
Toughness is a desirable virtue but nearly everything worth protecting arises from tenderness and vulnerability
When you look at an average small town, and see the shuttered buildings and remnants of past prosperity, what you should see is the aftermath of a plague of invisible theft via money creation.
Very few people need ideas—advice— what they need is Presence. The task of the healer is to reintroduce people to themselves. And it is very rare it is even POSSIBLE to tell people anything they do not already know.
You cannot shovel away the avalanche of cold snow. You can merely melt it slowly with the warmth of patient attention.
We tend to live with our Oughts and our wants, not our lives.
The narrative of Diversity has worked for ideological homogenization and following division and polarization.
Self pity amounts to the rejection of experience.
All experiences can be entered and slowly integrated. Even those of lack—lacking touch, lacking love.
Clinging to ideas is like clinging to ice floats in a melting sea. Your destiny will always be to drown and be reborn better.
Perhaps the most important driver of division and polarization is the lack of BASIC emotional maturity of a large swathe of our population. They cling to congenial lies because the reality and confusion of the world are too scary for them to contemplate. It is an emotional devolution that seems to be getting worse.
True openness looks like play and feels vaguely anarchical.
When nuance is lost almost all crimes can be concealed in the violence of noise.
Tantra concsuously evokes horror and aversion—gut energy—to process them.
Leftism mainly consists in ignoring the lessons of history while highlighting a curated list of crimes. Conservatism remembers the lessons of history and points out that by and large the crimes of history equal the lessons of history, and that the crimes of the Left are the most important contemporary lesson.
Aversion is “I hate”
Desire is “I want”
And ignorance is “I can’t”.
There is speaking truth to power, and speaking power to truth.
One could just as easily argue asking for ID at nightclubs is racist.
We have both the right to vote and the right to expect cheating will be prevented.
Resposibility means the right both to succeed and fail. Should we make failure impossiblity simply because it sometimes happens? We also eliminate the elation of success after risk. Do we want wild humans or cattle?
Being brilliant is not necessarily enough to be smart.
Owning will always be inferior to participating. You can only own so much but you can participate in Everything.
Prayer: may you have trouble in the right amounts and at the right times
Consistency is both a beginning and an end.
Advaita means, I think, that we exist as nodes in a network. We are not the network, but we cannot exist fully without consciousness of the network. Non-separation might be another idea.
And did any if us choose our personality? If so, what did the choosing?
Emotions are not heavy or strong, but viscous or smooth. And water holds nearly infinte information.
I think a core problem with our society is that a relatively high baseline of neuroticism is adaptive.
Diversity is a code word for exclusion. This is masked with outward diversity.
Every disappoinmtment is a learning opportunity. So is every humiliation.
Lgb asks us to change what we view as acceptable. T asks us to radically alter our reality.
Drunkenness, or getting blitzed, however you do it, amounts to simultaneously running until you stop, indulging fully in shame and self loathing, and attacking yourself. Elvis called his pill cocktails “attacks”.
The goal is to blossom in trouble.
If you take a problem from someone it will need to be replaced. The goal is to ensure a path to solution—freedom to try, to fail, and to try again—to offer conceptual small wheels, and where possible to offer emotional and physical comfort.
Most kids in this country have never had any real problems, and that was a BIG factor in their embrace of COVID restrictions. It felt like needed and morally useful pain.
Male neuroticism looks like withdrawal, female like volatility.
Anyone wanting to inderstand the mobs in Little Rock just needs to look at BLM and Antifa mobs. Same people. Same frothy mouths. Same dehumainization and hate.
If women have a higher pain tolerance or even madochism, its not like men are not masochistic in their own ways too. But evolutionarily this capacity maybe to protect children. Male masochism is likely the same.
BDSM may be an answer to withdrawal.
Humor could be seen as a form of defensive aggression and thus tied to neuroticism.
All ethical demands and imperatives which are like standing waves EXIST to disrupt complacency and thus ALSO constitute organismic attacks or aggressions in a way. They are inconsistent with deep calm.
Taoism is really Now This then Now That.
Included within everything that is, is everything thats possible.
Covid as system for inducing disgust in the Left
Connection of pestilence and authoritarianism. Camus
Hitler bathed 4x a day. Zyklon A was used to kill bugs; And B declared undesirables.
I have a passion for orderly thought.
Logically, if exterminating pests is conservative then most left wing regimes are EFFECTIVELY rightist. Like Cuba. Contagion is banned and borders are closed.
LGB asks for acceptance of personal choices. T asks us to change our understanding of reality.
The thing about sainthood is that it blinds you. It is pure conscientiousness—which is perhaps shame driven—without openness. Forcing yourself to feel and do things is a violence to perception. It is not really possible to control your inner emotional landscape. It is merely possible to suppress awareness of the parts that dont fit the pattern you are imposing.
I think often what prolongs negative states is the effort to avoid them, both from natural aversion and perhaps more importantly from shame. I often feel guilty that I cannot focus.
Essentialism is a defining trait of the left. This is ironically self referentially more true because relexive conformity is the main task.
There is such a thing as sad with anger.
The need for ideological purity is CONSERVATIVE. You are avoiding ideological contagion. There is an immense need for orderliness. “Revolution” is substituting one form of reactuon for another, making openness the best measure of true liberality. How messy are things allowed to get? How open is The System to gradualism? How likely are people to understand the beliefs and motivating assumptions of people very unlike themselves?
The talent for gaining power and that for governing are completely different, separate sets of skills.
From a personality perspective Leftism is characterized by extreme volatilty and profound closedness hiding behind a rhetoric of openness.
All religious practice, at least of major, proselytizing religions, is rooted in conscientiousmess. If that in turn is rooted in shame, this is a problem, isnt it?
Making sense is a sort of step down transformer from Experience to Understanding. And openness, in asking us to let go of the death grip we have on understanding, necessarily asks us to melt our categories, our lighthouses and way stations, which itself has to feel like madness.
The trans thing is both taking advantage of and driving a neurotic volatilty in todays youth.
Meditation is a sort of magical conjuring of altered healing and wisdom providing states.
If you are different you have every right to march in the parade but not to lead it.
Its important to distinguish a political right from a reasonable social expectation.
Donald Trump is Goldstein.
Video games train defensive aggression, which amounts to Neuroticism.
There is defensive placating too, like excessive smiling and laughing, which is an anxiety impulse.
Certainty represents the collapse of a perceptual wave.
Volatile people are drawn to volatility. Neuroticism is attracted to its societal equivalent.
Hysteria might be framed as fractional freezing
Active listening is really trying to hear something you don’t already know, perhaps even within a known narrative.
Much of animal rights likely consists in projecting a virginal innocence on animals that enables or rationalizes righteous indignation.
I think much anxiety in the rich world comes from an acute awareness that our lives lack interesting problems and true diversity of adversity.
The easiest way to deal with fear is by being fearful all the time. This is the value of fear porn in that you maintain a more or less constant level of tension but the object varies regularly. And ANGER, as a form of expressing fear, feels better, so outrage porn is even better. You can deduce all our divisions from the need for extremes to produce these emotions. Its like de Bono’s Catchment areas. You wind up on one side or the other. It doesnt matter which.
And all fear is fear of pain, which I think can be subdivided into emotional pain and physical pain. Both are rational. But living in fear is ALSO painful. This is an essential point. To get beyond pain you must get beyond fear. And doing this means gradually eliminating the emotional fears of change, loss, and social rejection. Physically, cultivating physical relaxation and good humored acceptance of physical difficulty is the best path.
It is almost impossible to conceive or execute long term projects in a condition of chronic fear. The essence of fear is contraction, and this includes a contraction of the time sense that would be needed to connect the beginning of a project with its end. And the capacity for self restraint and maturity are strongly connected, making chronic fear infantilizing and enervating. Most people in this country are work, internet video games and TV. Too many, in any event.
And plans are frontal cortex. Fear is the limbic system. Lower cancels higher. This may be a good general neurological principle.
The best way to frame CRT is not anti-racism but lingering willful racism.
The folly of doing the newest new thing right.
There is little more use complaining about the behavior of people than complaining about the weather on a particular day. It is what it is. A beautiful life is perhaps an endless set of variations composed on themes given us by the universe, of which humanity is a part.
The task is to learn, in some ways, to live like an animal. Deer know wolves exist. They are aware. But they are not worried most of the time. Wolves know they have to eat to live, but they are not hunting ALL the time. This world, even our asphalted, plasticked, sanitized world, is still an environment, a habitat, and this includes our social domain. If the world needs more grass you can plant it, but there are no guarantees.
The lower brain has priority, epistemically, over the higher brain. The task is not to suppress and dominate lower insticts, but to calm the nervous system and to channel what remains in healthy, organic, and life affirming ways. Good sex is healthy, and aggression easily becomes a creative drive.
I dont think people choose to be evil. I think for many it simply appears less painful than their reality. You embrace what will not go away and makes you feel helpless.
Socialism could be framed as Anti-Individuationism.
I have spent most of my adult life trying not to become the bad person my childhood made it nearly inevitable I should become.
Goodness is mental health. Pushing it too far in any other direction distorts and perverts it. Happy healthy people are naturally good, within limits.
Left wing politics, in its hypocrisy, self serving moralizing, and self satisfaction, is a nearly exact analogue to right wing religiously motivated equivalents. It is more or less a new religion that does the same thing, most notably giving bad people a way not just to seem good, but to actually think themselves so.
Religion only arises where direct perception has disappeared. It is equal parts arrow and smoke, and useful to the honest and scheming alike. I do think most people honestly think they are spiritual, but most of them are wrong, too varying degrees.
Where God is present, discussions are largely unnecessary. Theology, in turn, concerns itself with talking about how to talk about something that is not present.
Much impatience, for me, consists in priming myself to run up a hill, then encountering any of a thousand obstacles, some of which are inevitable.
Gesellschaft means you need to earn a place at the table. You will lose out on economic and social opportunities alike if you do not play the superficially friendly game. There is no loyalty and attachments are fragmentary, evanescent and negotiated.
Gemeinschaft, in contrast, is both space and confinement. You have a non-negotiable place but often also comittments.
Simmel may be worth reading.
The point of fear is running. The point of anger is fighting. And the point of shame is demeaning oneself following a real or perceived transgression against an internalized social order, so you can be readmitted following public confession.
But what happens with decontextualized shame that cannot be forgiven? Shame becomes an enemy, an ogre, something to be rejected and overcome. And what better method than evil? I think most evil is the result of stupidity and self deception. But CONSCIOUS evil must be of the sort described. At root it is an utter inability to find peace, with a resulting continual set of contortions to escape an inescapable reality.
Never let meditation get in the way of experience
I think the phase shift of dissociation is instantaneous. It is quantum. I think such people build two houses, two places to live, two identities that “know” each other but exist as neighbors who do not speak to each other. It is in the liminal spave between phases that the cruelty lives. The wounds suppressed and the rage disavowed. The lies. Because this is where the lies live and hold their power, this is where the TRUTH is. I think much addiction consists in trying to keep the memory that there IS a truth alive. Drunkenness and being high are also altered states that in some ways resemble the land of the lie (and truth).
It appears if I breathe the cruelty in and out I can keep my eyes open longer.
To feel something you have never felt you have to do something you have never done. And the only really acceptable emotional basis is relatively abiding calm.
There is such a thing as passive acts of cruelty, which is watching and gigging while someone is tormented by someone else.
There is nothing wrong with any negative emotion, except when it is expressed constantly from internal stimuli and not in response to something actually present in the environment. Spasmodic, reflexive and habitual
Strategy is knowing you need a screwdriver. Logistics is knowing how to get one.
Meaning is a seed, when organic, which yields pleasant and interesting fruit. “meaning” compelled is a cage which never progresses anywhere.
Life is “scientific”, in a sense, in that it is obvious that our first task is learning deep relaxation; and almost anything that comes after will be good.
Religions need to allow hate. If it cannot be on the inside it will move outside. One could easily view thr Left in this and other countries as effectively post-religious Fundamentalists who have now been granted an open right of hatred.
The solutions children come up with to deal with problems way beyond their capacities often make future progress impossible. They are temporary patches that become lasting features of personality.
Competence is intelligence, agility and persistence.
It might be interesting starting a meditation with noises designed to induce/evoke distress; or disgusting or disturbing images; smells; tastes; feeling; thoughts. Thought: there is horrible suffering in the world that is happening right now you truly ARE powerless to prevent. There is suffering in people you KNOW you are powerless to prevent. And clinging to the notion of being a Savior makes all of us LESS useful in the ways that matter. All people have minds and their mistakes do not belong to us.
In important respects, political and intellectual experiences are on par with, and of the same kind as, sexual and food and musical and ecstatic experiences, for aesthetes of a certain hue. I have the French in mind in particular. A fabulous meal and a fabulous political excitement have the same end in mind, and use the same means—excited emotions.
Would it be true to say the whole of Western history consists in privileging ideas over experience, even though our first major “intellectual” really wasnt one at all, since as clever at detecting contradictions as he was, he could not deduce knowledge? Christian dogma is IDEAS. Practice is secondary.
I think traumatic energy splits the self and some part of the self hates that part, because in effect IT NEVER SHUTS UP. Its annoying. It is a nuisance. It is a noisy obnoxious drunk and an overly shy wallflower. And I think it is vitally important to recognize and accept self loathing. It is all me. I dont get to keep or be—-I suppose the first is unconscious, the latter conscious—the parts I like. And the traumatized part of course FEELS the hate and loathing and has to deal with it somehow—perhaps by excessive anger, or fear, or shame, all of which are secondary, downstream effects of the original trauma. Trauma perhaps BEGETS trauma,
I think it is useful to think of our trauma as a worker trapped in a steam room whose job it is to divert our excess energy in anyway possible. It disrupts clear behavioral patterns to prevent us from ever feeling the full weight of the fear, rage and shame and humiliation. And we HATE this part, even though we cannot live without it until we heal. But this is the split, which involves continual cycles and revolutions.
And this is the root of loneliness and that of many others. Until we can contact this part in ourselves, no other person can reach it either, so we feel alone even with others. And I think the habit of noise and distraction makes it so even relatively small traumas can easily get separated in ubiquitous superficiality.
All our understandings within which we orient our activities and thoughts are games. A game consists in an arbitrary set of rules which work to create a context withon which one can win and lose; getting one of which and avoiding the other of which work to motivate us. Games help us survive, physically.
I dont think there is any such thing as greed in the animal kingdom. Greed requires standing fear and the ability to plan. There is likely hoarding at times and certainly a more or less literal pecking order.
You cannot rest anywhere but the moment. It is precisely the intrusion of the past, future and non-present ideas of the Present that prevent rest, and arguably EQUAL tension.
The only virtues worth focsusing are MEANS, not ends. Honesty is a means, compassion is an end. This is perhaps what the Buddhists developed. This is worth considering.
I think we need to redefine normal to include independence of mind, moderate risk tolerance, and capable of spontaneous play.
My mothers nervous, forced, fake laughter says to me “you are unwanted and will never have a home.” That is why it is so creepy to me.
I think karmically, most Americans are realizing a perhaps old dream to live like kings and queens. We are perfectly comfortable, conveyed everywhere, safe, and have access to all the delicacies of the world.
The core idea that all true spiritual traditions oppose is that Hell is our natural home. This is the first move of Duhkha.
Strong emotions and experiences often act as drugs to mask and cover with fog our true inner states. They are a reliable means of lying to ourselves.
God—reality—is hidden behind a veil. Maybe the whole reason we incarnate is to reexperience the joy of return. But if WE are hiding behind a veil of our own, the cause is hopeless. And the means of discovery, of pursuit, is not that different than chasing a coy and chaste but playful woman. And it makes sense too to feel God is chasing us.
It is interesting to meditate on the viscera, that they are me, and that they are my ally. And tension in them makes them feel like enemies. Tension in most people makes them feel like strangers, doesnt it? And relaxation—real or feigned—feels intrinsically like friendliness. We only let our guard down among familiy and friends, and when we are not planning anything.
Comment on hotel energies: I often feel the energies of those there before.
I wonder if there is something vaguely spiritual in masochism. Is there any real difference between Lou Reed paying a woman or man to whip him and Shiites cutting and whipping themselves? I wonder if voluntary pain that people accept and embrace and open to works to nullify the normal operation of the ego atructures, such that the true Self makes a mild and attenuated appearsnce. Consider Tapas and Shugyo.
I think most anxiety about the future is displaced anxiety about or rather IN the present. Worries are always in the present. They cannot be anywhere else. Anxiety might be termed anti-relaxation. Relaxation is inherently anti-anxiety.
Excellence is not violence. It is not Arete, at least if that references Ares. Excellence is kindness and attention—caring—applied evenly and consistently over time. Kindness recognizes some discomfort and pain is needed for rewarding goals that feel good, but demands no more than necessary. More is not always better, and is often worse. A gentle temperament recognizes the line.
Vince Lombardi must have been very anxious and driven by deep shame.
I dont think it too far off to say that there is no good and bad, just managed tension and suppressed and wild tension.
All supposedly external perturbations originate in a resonance within me. No anger or rage is possible that does not start with internally directed rage and violence I push out. Short term, specific anger that is contextually appropriate as physically defensive, but even there it likely originates in self doubt—which feels like personal attack—rebounds and pushes out.
The time you “lose” in inner work is gained in life.
Popped in head: there is no fire without iron. I dont know what it means.
I think the subliminal effect of gray is supporting emotions you dont feel and thoughts you dont think. It supports comfort with blank spots.
If color is diversity and spontaneity gray is unthinking uniformity and perhaps even resentment of difference.
Podcast: bitter herbs in a saccharine world.
I think most people are better served learning to watch and listen and feel the world carefully than reading about it, at least if they have been properly educated.
Principle: you cannot be right in principle if you persist in practices that do not work in practice. Your true goal, in other words, can be assumed to be other than your stated goal.
There is such a thing as reverse dissociation, whereby you walk through an invisible barrier and find new space and new capabilities.
Maybe God can work through AI. Its impossible to say. That would be ironic though: the real God rxpressing itself through a false one.
I dreamed of X and his rage last night, and the night before. That is my rage too, and perhaps diminishing. Rage and rigidity and intolerance and probably high blood pressure are all related. And I feel trauma is released in stages. Releasing shame—which perhaps amounts to a constriction of the options we allow ourselves to perceive—leads to a consciousness of fear. Releasing fear in turn releases a rage we ourselves fear and perhaps most naturally attribute to others. I think many people naturally spend lives at this level, which is perhaps the default traumatic “stance” for most of humanity, since few of us are free of scars.