Month: June 2022

Stuff on my phone. My brain won’t stop sometimes. I’m over sharing again—I’ve left the diary entries in—but will say I dreamed of heaven again last night, for the first time in a while, and you cannot lie there. And mostly what I describe are wounds, some existential. Is admitting I am a scarred and often scared human being shameful?  No, if anything I think it is brave. It gives permission to others to admit to THEMSELVES that they know exactly what I am talking about, and have always known, but could not ADMIT they knew, because it hurt too much.

I’m going to skip most of the editing. Im never going to be good with these little keypads with these large hands.

 

Notes 3

Be sure and comment on the importance of role playing in authitarian systems.

One could argue that the roles of history—say caste roles in India—made people more stoic and stronger and more accepting. This is likely somewhat true. But such coerced social roles also no doubt engendered the subterranean hate and anger which fueled the wars and atrocities of history; in India wars against women, the Dalits, and eventually Muslims.

Whatever its true source or more likely sources, Q took off because we all KNOW we are being lied to, and that big decisions are being made in the darkness. And hope depends in no small measure in having SOMEONE in the system who still cares about freedom, truth and dignity.

I think a key spiritual task is getting comfortable with discomfort. It is vastly safer and vastly more productive of happiness.

Sufficient unto the world is the violence we find. Ahimsa is perhaps most usefully not adding unnecessarily to it; and it is perhaps the most interesting insight of Ishmael that agriculture is unnecessarily violent, and more violent than hunting and gathering.

The value of psychological maturity is that it both frees you FROM unmanageable anger and shame and anxiety and frees you TO pursue worthwhile goals that build stable happiness and self respect. Maturity is the ONLY path to a happiness over which the individual has any control.

A hypocrite is really a traitor to virtue.

Its interesting that mid20th intellectuals lacked Attachment Theory, or any theory of trauma.

I would stipulate something I wil call the Law of Emotional Continuity, which states that when ideas change radically they tend to retain the same emotional tinge. De facto worship of the Tsar became worship of Communism. The Frenck killed a king but maintained a thirst for legal Absolutism.

In a culture worthy the name it is not laws that keep people from killing each other, but mutual regard and mature restraint. Laws only become needed when civility is breaking down.

You can’t win every fight but you can fight every fight to the end, if the cause is worth it.

Himan history is one of Collectivism. The different have always been punished when they transgressed the sacred, although few likely did so, since they needed the others to survive. What is new about Orwellian Collectivism is its scale, its retention of the pretension of scientific rationality, and its utter and complete repudiation in reality of all rationality, all reality testing, and even the flimsiest shard of an effort at consistency. Modern Collectivism is nothing more or less than a segment of humanity refusing to grow up.

I think it is useful to stipulate that psychology parallels but precedes spirituality.

A sense of shame and disgustingness can and often does lead to a high level of performance, but the only real satisfaction achieved is relief in avoiding failure. There is no self there where positive feelings could reside.

A shame based life is lived not to fail. It is lived to reduce negative experience, never to experience positive ones, even if positive experiences do accidentally happen from time to time. It is findamentally unfulfilling and I think particularly most mid-life suicides come from people simply tired of living with a continual critical gaze on them, and who lose, or feel themselves losing, the energy to fight for an impossible perfection.

Warriors live not to fail. Their only real positive is public recognition. Permanent warriorship is innatural, and it is worth noting the citizen soldiers of Athens were the equals of the Spartans. It is reasonable to don the mantle of “fight not to fail”, and then take it off and become a warrior in potential only, just as one is artist or jurist potentially.

Comment also on the black community being treated like supprresed children.

The sun shines on good and evil alike; on the living and the dead; on decaying life, on barren sand, and ice it will never melt, at least in any of our lives. But if it chose not to shine on death, decay and evil all life, and all possible goodness, would die too. An open life cannot really choose who receives the benefits, nor should it, as new life is often hidden in old death.

With the Boomers you have an entire generation that refused to grow up, and refused to learn to face the world in an honest and mature way, and they raised immature kids. The goal of their political engagement is creating narcissistic supply through the sacrifices of others. “You can’t afford a Tesla. Well I can. That makes me better.”

In the actual jungle the strongest predators need fear the least. In the human jungle this is true too, but strength often looks like ruthless sociopathy.

Ponder importance of celebrity and social media recognition in a world starved of attention and authentic relating.

The narcissism on the Left is not in caring for the poor and unlucky: it is not caring about actually doing something sustainable and good about their situations. It is confusing gesture for action, and verbal intention for careful thought and responsible attention.

Why do human problems go unsolved? Immaturity, of which both dishonesty and sloth are examples.

Hallucnigens would be vastly more effetive if done within an emotionally intimate and supportive community.

Totalitarianism is structural enmeshment. Authoritarianism is the strict parent—perhaps an irrational and even psychotic parent, but one who only wants your body, not your mind and soul.

I kept dreaming about being able to lay back on both my knees so Im ordering that book. OR, maybe just adding pilates leg thing to routine.

It is very hard to react appropriately to emotionally numb, humorless, uncontactable parents, because you are not reacting to what is emotionally there, but to what is absent. This morning I felt rage and the urge to strangle my mother. And I myself lapse easily into numbness out of habit, particularly in calibrating with her, as that is the only emotionsl response she can understand and which does not make her anxious, which of course I pick up on. Craziness.

This is the kind of weather for which ice WATER was intended. As I’ve noted, most soda cannot be drunk in quantity any other way.

Rejecting self pity really should be framed as acceptance, as in “accept what I cant or should not change”; and all virtues both positively and negatively: accept your lot without complaining in general/ reject self pity; don’t quit/ persevere; dont shut down emotionally/remain curious.

Persistence is not a virtue until you think about quitting. Acceptance—although on a continuum—only really comes consciously in play when you start rejecting.

All my life I think I have balanced the fear of failing if I do act with the fear of failing if I don’t. I think a more positive, proactive, mistake and forgiveness friendly mindset woukd be an improvement.

Ots an idd fact that one can be anxious about being made more anxious. It actually is common to fear fear.
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For my diet it might be worth planning a major fuckup so I can practice getting back on track.

It is not so much that the world has lost its mind so much as those who control the lens through which we see the world have.

Courage and work capacity are related.

The real problem with Authoritarian Enmeshment (are there other kinds?) is that all emotional growth first depends on consciously feeling what you are feeling, and that is imposdible when everyone is getting their feelings jumbled up with one anothet. It would seem a sense of confinement and following rage and panic would be the result. Emotionally it is asses and elbows with no end in sight, or possibility of planning an escape but through individuation.

For me, I need to let depression, despair, anger and fear alone, and just live within them until they diminish or, better yet, I learn to manage them. And managing happens at that level. If I have to invoke philosophy or psychology then I’ve already “escalated.”

Another way of putting it: I do want to live in a world where the dude in a skirt, or the men or women holding hands, do not feel fear of emotional or physical violence, but I also want to live in a world where they do not feel empowered to direct emotional or physical violence AT ME. You do your thing in peace. It stops there. This allows me to do my thing in peace also. The demand that I share your worldview amounts to an imposition of secular religion, which the first Amendment was specifically intended to prohibit. I would actually go so far as to say that, within the principled framework of the Constitution, discrimination based on political views amounts to a secular religious test, and a clear violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

Put another way, Political Correctness as a uniform and coercive creed, amounts to an Establishment of religion, where religion is defined as a set of practice and belief organizing and orienting the lives of a mass of people.

I need to focus on what is possible for me. Competent work is neither hasty nor desultory, and that would be a good place to start. I think I need to go through a period of conscious arrogance in order to expand my felt sense of what is possible for me. I would guess sustained confinement can generate grandiosity. I need to let this be. In any event it was almost certainly already there. I just suppressed my awareness of it. What us there, I need to see.

Listening to White Rabbit I kind of feel a chill and latent cruelty in it. And I think the mobs of the 60’s could easily and perhaps accurately be thought of as lynch mobs out for blood, based on bad information, and utterly unconcerned with the truth. Then or now.

I don’t think there is any point—and likely harm—in trying to get rid of any emotions, like jealousy, gluttony, lust, sloth, anger or whatever the others are. You CAN’T get rid of them: you either deny them, and in so doing give them the power invisible powers have over you; or you own them recognize them, process them, and leave them without hate or revulsion in a tool box, ready to serve you if they are needed, as in modified forms they sometimes are. Lust, for example, is not bad: obsessive and self indulgent lust is. All the sins are simply virtues—or at least natural feelings— taken too far.

Historically, Communism has been the act of imposing an aristocracy in the name of equality. I will note too that the pleasures—for those who feel them—of privilege are enhanced if you first immisserate the mass of people.

One of the things movies and TV do is allow you to live vicarious lives, sharing dangers and ncertainties with no real danger or end meaning to the uncertainty.

I think all times in human history contained both difficulties and opportunities (obviously in varying proportions). I think an intelligent approach is to identify the problems of our time, accept their presence and inevitability, then work patiently to do what is possible to ameliorate them—while recognizing no problems and excessive ease and easy sloth ARE ALSO problems. This, and personal growth are, I think, the two best aims of human life.

Logical reasoning is not usually that complicated. It is accepting the RESULTS of good reasoning where many people have trouble.

I think true meditation begins when we give p all hope of directing our experience and simply allow it.

Often our “chains” consist in something we are pulling or pushing.

I think I use the news as a sort of thermostat to turn my emotional temperature down.

I think children stop growing emotionally when they encounter premature sexual energy. Innocence enables later flourishing.

The Lefts true strategy is to go low then protest in the most strenuous terms when their targets do anything but go high. They then call their own road the high road and proclaim themselves morally superior. This is more or less the literal truth. Trumps undeniable virtue is that he understands this game. Nothing he did or said would have been exceptional or noteworthy in any way coming from the Cult. Just to take example from countless cases the CHILDREN of Supreme Court justices are being threatened and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are tacitly not just condoning this but ENCOURAGING this. How much lower can you get?

I think much pleasure in life comes from contrast. A cool day after many hot ones feels good. Likewise a warm one after many cold days. Rest after work, but also work after too much rest. And the enjoyment of privilege sought by elites is heightened by knowing most people are miserable. Non-duality is learning to grow beyond these responses, which are largely biological and conditioned.

Social media, for many, is a sort of mirror. You take selfie after selfie, trying to get it just right, just “casual” and unaffected enough, while of course feeling the opposite of casual. The Victorians likely actually were more casual. But was in not precisely a mirror which trapped Narcissus himself?

I think for many engineering an apolcalypse makes more sense than waiting for Godot. It promises an end to thrir anxiety and confusion.

The philosophical importance of psychology is that it posits there is a unitary human species, in which all humans share the same drives and same needs, and following similar moralities and claims to moral virtue. Psychology is inherently anti-exclusionary. There is only Us.

Logically, anyone who wants to avoid growing up—which amounts to an aversion to change, which can present challenges to the childish temperament—needs an intellectualized and ritualized “place” to live. Ideology fits this need perfectly, since all you have to do is conform, not think and grow; and you are surrounded by like minded and equally weak-spirited people with whom you perform ritual behaviors, like marches and protests. The whole thing acts like an insulating cocoon. If someone tells you to grow up, your “friends” (in quotes since all must obey the same master and getting out of synch will result in the ejection of anyone, so personal loyalty CANNOT be a value in this world) are yelling back in unison with you, and that feels good. It actually makes you relish that sort of conflict.

I think understanding someone who has never felt understood is close to rescuing them.

Electronic vehicles are easier to control. Its hard to stockpile batteries andcI suspect they are easier to turn off remotely.

Regarding “whiteness”, simple question: is it better to be born black in this country or any majority black country in Africa you want to choose? Any of them. Is the answer not obvious, that even though this nation was founded BY white people and FOR white people that the principles of science and political Liberality and Liberalism have worked to make all lives better? There is no mass exodus to Africa. In fact a great many of thrm want to come HERE for better lives. CRT is just a resurrected reverse racism, created by frustrated ideologues for whom emancipated and thriving blacks are just as frustrating as the bourgeoisie was for classic Marxists, and for the same reason: people who do not need them make them feel less important, as indeed they should. A life lived for conflict and scarcity cannot but feel the loss in peace and plenty. It ill suits their destructive rage and deep vanity and narcissism.

I think as a child I was too frightened to admit I was frightened. This has persisted into adulthood. Keeping that energy out of conscious awareness has been very tiring

Fear ebbs and flows. The fear of fear does not. That is why it is better to admit fear frankly. Sometimes it will disappear entirely.

The fear of fear is really a fear of triggering traumatic helplessness. I think playing with fear, edging into it, helps alleviate this fear, every time you allow yourself to feel and admit fear, but that complex does not activate.

It was in Elementary School where I really learned to lie about my fear. I read many books with heroes and buried myself in other worlds. That habit continued until today, perhaps. Its odd that even in D&D I never wanted to be a brave fighter. I always wanted to stand in the shadows or at a distance.

This whole COVID thing feels like Corporations have taken over the world. And the Left is fine with it. Supportive. Enthusiastic even. Turns out they dont oppose illicit profits but people who DIFFER. Left wing greedy corporations are not a problem at all. It is like the CDC has become the PR agency for Big Pharma and most TV a sort of intracorporate rolling ad campaign to keep people groomed and on the inside.

There is a strong connection between role playing and sentimentality, to the point that the entirety of their moral sentiment is better viewed as unconscious affectation.

Its likely my mother saw me shake in fear.

Diary: I saw a dance studio and had positive thoughts. Then it hit me I like the IDEA of dancing but not the work. Never the work. And my whole life is like that. I like cookbooks but not cooking; buying books but not reading. I am good at thinking but not doing. Some of this I guess is common enough, but I woukd like to learn to do better.

The preeminent act of freedom, both personal and political, is self assertion. And the core outcome of the transgender agenda is to engender a muted and confused sense of self, and one tied up in knots of triviality. This conscious and organized assault on the psyches of our children, in other words, is rxplicitly intended to make them politically, socially, and psychologically malleable. If you can be convinced to give up your birth gender—one of the most basic and primal units of identity—what then is not possible with thw slightest push? Hitler and others said “get them young”. Well they are getting them young.

There does not need to be a Satan for there to be Satsnism.

I think “being in the moment” is nothing more or less than living without fear, which translates nearly instantly, and certainlg easily, to a spirit of play.

AA line: choose your tomorrow but start today.

Politics—which is say the manipulation of perception and conscious alliance building—is only necessary in a reactive system. If elections are corrupted our politicians do not need to play politica with the elrctorate. Their only truly political considerations concern their standing with the Power Elite, which in this country is SUPPOSED to be the people, but which cannot be if their influence is eliminated by fixed elections. And this fact appllies to all. If Democrats are happy with the claimed direction of our country, by the time they want to raise objections, it will be much too late. The Beast will not bare its fangs fully until the cage is shut. And at that point “meaning well” is no better than greed or larceny, both of which it enabled.

I wonder if drinking baking soda before taking probiotics would help them get through the stomach. It seems likely.

There is a close connrction between the feelings of emotional confinement and that of being lost. When you lose your inside the outside world becomes incomprehensibly chaotic.

I think what narcissists—wmotionally immature and incomplete people—do is fail to respond on many channels. You feel something, express it, then get nothing. It is invisible to that person. It doesnt exist. Some part of YOU doesnt exist, and this creates existential doubt, emotional pain, incompleteness, and feels in some respects like a prison, because your emotional range of motion—your emotional freedom—has been curtailed. And often some part of us feels shame and self loathing for failing to get the love and understanding we needed. It blames itself. “YOU HAD SUCH A SIMPLE TASK. JUST GETTING YOUR OWN MOTHER TO LOVE YOU.”

I think there is a Principle of Traumatic Decay—and my comparison here is with particle “decay” of Particle Physic-/which I would state that as a long standing traumatic spasms loosen, one trauma will decay into 5 or more smaller imaginary traumas. You still have unpleasant, bad dreams, but nonetheless manageable ones, versus ones where you just shake, or awaken screaming with no memory of the dream.

I’ve long had an inner voice saying NO ONE LOVES YOU. I got the addendum today: AND I WILL MAKE SURE NO ONE EVER DOES.

In some resects atheism is a medicine intended to heal some types of wounds created by some forms of religion. This is the claim made by proselytising atheists in paticular. But it is a medicine given out indifferently to everyone thst creates a different sort of illness, and arguably a worse one. As individuals, atheists are about as likely to be good—healthy emotionally—people as the religious. The difference is that religion provides powerful contextual support to doing socially good, self sacrificing things, and the doctrine of eternal oblivion does not. Dogmatic atheism also causes its adherents in the end to reject SCIENCE if it fails to conform to their orienting assumptions, just as happens with the religious. In important respects, it is the identical disease.

If Everywhere is Here, and Everytime (a word we need) is Now, then you can never BE lost; you just FEEL lost, and you feel lost whdn you lose the emotional agility to br here and now because of fear and shame. You can fear fear, fear shame, be ashamed of fear and even ashamed of feeling ashamed. These are all traps that fisconnect us and make us FEEL lost.

I think two forms of human connection are possible are abstract and. ceremonial, with traditional culturres in important respects lresembling enmeshed families; and mature, Liberal individuated personal and specific connection. Violence is inherent to the first. Sacrifice, as actual animal and himan sacrifice, war, and emotional repressiveness, becomes needed to mediate undifferentiated people. And in this sense the “gods” of that group may usefully be seen as shared hallucinatory and socially mediated delusions, as Durkheim, ia, argued. There is only one real God, the source of everything.

I think to say we are wired to be tribal is pdifferent than wired for connection. Tribal, maybe, is wired NOT to individuate. It could be argued most human beings for most of human life have been enmeshed in some ways; and I think we cannot begin to fully inderstand the cruelties this has enabled.

I think the idea of meta-emotion is useful. This would be the fear of fear, shame of shame, guilt of guilt, etc., and perhaps any of them mixed. The method and aim of learning emotional digestion, which I would argue is the BEGINNING of honest spirituality, is getting back to primaries, and allowing all of them to flow as the dynamic information for which they are intended and as which they are most useful.

It may be that gentleness is strength, but it may not always be best to be strong.

Trauma works like this: your capacity to process emotions is like your RAM. If it is exceeded, that slice of experience is removed and stored for later pricessing. It continues to make subtle and not so subtle demands on attention. This reduced openness makes future overloads more likely and at some point numbness results. This is a loss of the capacity fir emotional processing and amounts to a loss of the felt sense of life. The likelihood of overwhelm, of overvoltage is of course tied on one side to what actually happens, and on the other to what may best be termed confidence, which I will define as anxiety less ability to self calm. High anxiety with no capacity to self calm is helplessness, which makes overwhelm almost mathematically inevitable. Some aituations are objectively helpless, like an artilleey barage, or prison. But feeling lucky or blessed—or feeling the presence of God—amount to self calming strategies, increasing perceived power and confidence.

Dealing with immature people, you can grant their behavior stems from their own homes, their genetica, and the like, but SOME PART of their behavior, of the percetions they allow themsrlves to see and ackniwledge, IS CONSCIOUS DECISION.

There is an adult equivalent to that baby experiment where the mother looks away. I tried and tried to get my mother in particular to feel me, to empathize with me, to connect with me, but like that mother in the video she refused. She continues to refuse. That is why it still hurts to talk with her. As an extremely precocious and sensitive child I was often very upset, and she never chose to understand. Some part of this is conscious, and I think rationalized by her Biblically based conceit that in effect I am her slave and owe her allegiance. She chooses not to see because she seea no ethical reason to do so, and is not authentically generous in any way. I went into hyperarousal, as a baby, infant, toddler, youth, and young man repeatedly. She never showed me any meaningful mercy. She no doubt threw me a few small crumbs I clung to, but carelessly, thoughtlessly, and never consistently. What has taken me SO LONG to realize is that I do have enormous unmet emotional needs. I knew this, but have been unable to stay present long enough to begin integrating them.

The Unconscious is that place where words are not the medium of movement.

As the individual psyche progresses in complexity, the need for complex mirroring increases too. Where a hug may have sufficed, and a look of familial reognition, more complex beings need more compmex “touch”. They need to talk about feelings, which cavemen likely never did.

The sactificial cult arises from a social order that is in principle static, and which assigns a role externally to all members. The Hindu caste system might in some ways be seen as a subcontinental tribe. The sacrifice arises from unspent, pent up energy that cannot be dispeled by individuated connection.

I dont know why but it is a strange thought to me that I may have known a book or poem in another life. With poetry especially, perhaps other feelings bleed through, as they would with anything truly mythic and deep.m

There is, I think, a tipping point with evil, where all paths forwardp contain pain, but where the comforts of cruelty come to be seen as offering more immediate and reliable relief.

Softening of the pain of betrayal or sin is perhaps equal to forgiveness. When the pangs of regret or rage diminish, the crime has lost its hold on your present consciousness. The knot is undone. That is about all any of us can ask.

Sadness is a dilution and dissipation of energy. It is grounding. It is energy melting down and out, perhaps like a cold candle. It can be a sustained calm emotional movement, and sometimes, perhaps always, one of emotional reorganization and reintegration. Perhaps sadness could be defined as the energy manifested in conscious but resisted change. Anger fear and shame all tend to concentrate and expand. This makes sadness in some respects their balancing counterpart. Humor also dissipates energy, and in most is probably connected in sime way to sadness.

Behind every enduring hardness within us is an unresolved softness, usually a sadness, one of loss, or a related and seemingly interminable regret or guilt.

Empaths with narcisstic parents I think get confused on a deep level as to which feelings are theirs and which their parents. They mirror their parents but their parents do not mirror and acknowledge as real and valid the feelings of children who have no experience in all this and no easy path to learning this distinction. This is me. I am literally finally learning, at my Age, which feelings are mine and which a sort of self sustaining residue of ambient strong currents from my early childhood. I find myself often physically disgusted at what was done to me emotionally, but feeling THAT is I think healthy.

Communion, as an interpersonal wave function, is not meant to be continuous. It is part of a rhthym between particle and wave. Both are needed for health. Mass Formation, or enmeshment, or being a headless one, is a sort of unnatural spasm.

I think I finally figured out my rescue fantasy: when I fail, my mother is eager to rescue me. She always tacitly encouraged me to fail—such as by obsessively saying “don’t work too hard”, and inducing anxiety in me whenwver sqhe could—and my father of course loved it, because he could both mock me and not have to fear me. So some part of me has LONGED for failure and FEARED SUCCESS, because on an unconscious level it meant I would never be loved, and not unreasonably I never wanted to give up that hope. Well, that dream was never possible, outside of me willingly becoming a pliable child again, and in any event my mother does not have long to live. It was always sick, always wrong, but i have needed something—a sense of safety? A challenge? Time and space?—to bring this deep latent splinter out.

So this ache and this resiatence and pain comes to this: every time I start something some part of me says “if you succeed you will never be loved”, and I can feel my mother looking on at my paralysis, confusion and pain with approval. Then another voice says “if you dont get this done you will feel shame.”. And I fight it out, always using vastly more emotional wnergy than this essentialky simple work requires. It is the same with mental work, but the advantage of physical work is it is easier to use will to force a body to move. That is why I gravitated to physical work. And my intellectual work is really my effort, ironically, to STOP feeling drunk, disoriented and confused. It is my effort to impose order on a spinning world.

This is all close to healing insight. Im close to some form of freedom, but I need to continye relaxing into my work, and not drinking, and trying to achieve comfort in behavioral consistency.

I think my mothers almost conscious plan was to keep peomising me love if I failed and if I diminished myself, but never giving it. I was either going to break down and die, in which case she wookd have been glad because she hated me; or shrunk to almoat nothing, moved in next to her as she specificallt told me she fantasiEd about, and allowed her to use me vampiriaclly as narcissistic supply the rest of her life. In neither case was I ever loved or understood. Some part of me felt this intuitively but I was so lonely, and in ao much emotional pain, that my orienting feelings were alien to me. I knew she hurt me but I did not knkw why.

These abortion protesta are making it obvious there are a lot of women out there who hate children. We like to assume all mothers love their children, but this is clearly not true. Hate is not uncommon, and I suspect bouts of resentment are nearly universal.

There are so many problems with the Uvalde response that, combined with a propped door I still do not get, I will wonder aloud if this TOO was a set up, designed for the use to which it was in the event put.

The Pro-Choice movement, or faction, is pro-abortion, obviously. This makes them effectively an Anti-Birth Movement, and its not hard to tie that back to an Anti-Life Movement by a pathway other than reversing Pro-Life. It is reasonable for women to assert the right to only give birth when they choose, but all this goes far beyond that; again, via a different pathway than anti-human radical environmentalism, it returns to a fundamental self loathing and following Misanthropy.

In dealing with money its all gain and loss. More is good less is bad. But in LIFE its all about buoyancy. What mskes you lighter (in both senses) and what heavier and darker? There is no real connection between the two processes. They are disconnrcted lines, OTHER than that struggling to hold on to wealth and achieve PERFECT security makes you heavier and darker, always. You can have money and be spiritual, but not CLING—the Bible says love—to money and be spiritual. Money is a pass through means, that is all. All useful work is latently work on yourself, which is to say building lightness. It would be worth working for no money, if gains are reliably achieved, and no amount of money can compensate destroying your soul, which is to say, your remembrance of what really matters.

Kum Nye is really creating acmild stress—an indrntation on your forearm by your thumb, sustained attention to your belly, a fast or vigil or hard work—that cause the underlying, latent system—which we call energy patterns—to react in a homeostatic effort to reassert themselves. This propcess, with attention, thus reveals them, and awareness ofvthem permits flow and self (re)organization.

The “bourgeois” type was hated by the Left—the new words are White supremacists, but it means the same thing, which is “non-communist” and nonparticipating member of the elite—because it was for them just that: a type. It was a role which felt to them banal, unreflective, uninspiring: in a word, boring, tedious, and through sheer torpor and mental and behavioral inertia inimical to the REALLY COOL STUFF THEY WANTED TO DO. But of course the Communist type is a type too, nest pas? And it a type that because it REQUIRES all members to view the world through the same narrow and distorting prism, is actually more tedious than the bourgeoisie. And on some level, no truth can be fully ellided, so they substitute rage fir passion, and willfully confuse destruction with creation. Both do, after all, alter the status quo. And because most of these people hate themselves and their lives, WHY NOT blame wveryone else and pretend that ALL THEUR LIVES NEED is the final victory of, well, whatever, as long as it isn’t bourgeois white supremacy. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE WANT, OK? BUT YOU ARE THE ENEMY. THAT IS ENOUGH FOR NOW.

All work is meditation, so do it with reverence an competence, but without greed or aversion.

Desire drives a crooked road.

Heaven is a place where David Byrne can spend the next thousand years listening to all the music ever created in human history, in the company of the people who created it, and have CONTINUED creating it.

You cannot lie to all of yourself. All you can do is allow cowardice to partition your conscious awareness.

A good aim is to make all work—ALL work—magical and entertaining. How do you do this? Cultivate a sense of the magical then slowly generalize it.

Adventure is really misery and uncertainty embraced, often after the fact, sometime long after the fact. But it is best embraced as vivid experience while it is happening, which is a skill requiring a lot of confidence. As such it is a sort of Hard Kum Nye, in that it makes STRONG indentaions on your patterns and not infrequently destroys them, both for good and worse. This time we are living through is an adventure. Its scary. None of us know how it will end. So be it. Amen not to what I want or what might be, but to what is, just as it is in this moment. One day your grandkids may be asking you: DID YOU REALLY LIVE THROUGH ALL THAT?

If I ever do a podcast the topic will not mainly be what is right, but how we return to the capacity to discuss our feelings snd views about what is right in peaceful, reverential and resprctful, thoughtful and productive ways. How do we grow up as a society and civilization, in other words? If I might amend slightly a great Thomas Sowell quote, the most important question is not what is right, but how we talk about what is right.

Mattias Desmet in a condensed talk on Mass Formation.

https://plandemicseries.com/massformation/

In my view, there were many mass formations in the 60’s and 70’s. As Mass Formations they faded away—the numbers and day to day cohesion dwindled— but many tens of thousands of people who found in that mass enmeshment and surrender of ANY effort at mature individuation a RELIEF and even joy that gave their lives a sense of (trivial) meaning continued. They took over our universities, and have been hypnotizing our kids into their cult ever since.

Our current Mass Formation, in my view, sprouted in 2012, when the True Believers were forced to choose between the, to me, obvious reality Obama was a failed Messiah (and patent mediocrity), and the comforting lie that his victory was all that mattered. They of course chose the latter. These are Headless Ones I wrote about back then, who allowed themselves to be ritually murdered for the Collective.

Trump, of course—as an honest, competent, and blunt man willing to return fire at the same level they were dishing it out—caused this core group to expand greatly.

COVID then simply layered on to this existing group psychosis. The numbers swelled quickly because the base was already large. Mask wearing was tantamount to hating Trump, as all the hypnotized were required to do.

And even though Trump himself deserves both the credit—and in the event the blame—for the rapid “vaccine” development, the Left quickly coopted them as a sort of self sacrificing, self flagellatory act of ritual obedience to the Collective. Taking the shot proudly says “I am willing to die rather than stand out in any way, or risk the displeasure of the enmeshed, undifferentiated, violent Mob.”

These are deep seated problems. COVID is just the latest chapter in a long novel.

And actually, the whole Roe v Wade hysteria is clearly another Mass Formation. They can layer on one another, with varying templates and slightly varying human real estate, but suggestibility is obviously the common factor, and that in turn is clearly inversely correlated with psychological individuation and following capacity for rational and dispassionate thought.

As we watch these Anti-Liberals try to bully the world in mobs in coming days, weeks, and quite possibly months—this being a VERY severe wound to their narcissism—notice that in most of the places where the rage and violence and Brown-Shirtism is deepest and widest NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

Abortion until birth is still legal in I think Oregon, New York, Washington DC, and laws remain very generous (to the mothers) in California, Illinois, and I assume most of New England.

And where abortions will be banned most of the WOMEN support that. Demographically, in my understanding, there are more Pro-Life women than men. Many are no doubt loving mothers for whom the idea of hacking a defenseless baby to pieces is horrifying. This is not an unreasonable position.

And I wanted to share a quote from Czeslav Milosz that I don’t think I have shared here. Asked in the 60’s or early 70’s if Sacramento was not basically a concentration camp, Milosz replied “you are unable to distinguish a pin prick from the rack.”

That is a good way of addressing the infantile hyperarousal which conflates ALLOWING, but not requiring, those States with voting populations who want to do so to ban abortion, on the one side, with Theocracy and the Taliban on the other.

Its past ludicrous. It is reality testing in the clinically schizophrenic range. It is mental illness, mental derangement, which is only made possible by a general lack of emotional maturity—healthy individuation—and truly execrable ignorance, both combined with the attention spans of gnats.

I find myself strangely happy. I’m not sure why. I have been growing a lot lately, and slowly sleeping better.

One thing that is clear, but needs to be said, is that this decision was BRAVE. Courageous. A victory of good legal judgement in the face of largest violent counterwind perhaps in American history. Kudos to these brave men and woman.

Who knows? Maybe more spines will start showing up. A nation denuded of generalized courage is a nation failing. Its not enough to have a few brave people here and there. You need to be able to pick nearly anyone off the street at random and find someone capable of difficulty and risk. That is how America historically was.

And I an abortion moderate. I think it should be safe and legal, but that after the baby has roughly the awareness of a puppy, killing it for anything but a REALLY good reason should be illegal.

And it occured to me yesterday that the argument that a baby only becomes a “life” if the mother wants it—placing it in a mutable Schroedingers Cat limbo of being either “biological tissue”, to be disposed in the garbage, or a precious life, to be buried with tears—is analogous to saying the murder of an adult person should only be illegal if someone LIKED them. If no one liked them and no one misses them, then they were not a “life” either.

Philosophically, sprcifically ethically, this is a highly unsatisfactory argument.

And of course this argument is made implicitly by policy demands made by pro-abortion zealots. They do what they want to do, then call it good. There is no true debate or principle involved. It is only people like me who do that, who point to the necessary assumptions for a chain of logic to be valid.

And of course logic itself can be and often is a METHOD OF IMPROVING PERCEPTION. It provides a trail of bread crumbs leading both back to assumptions that were hidden, and forward to necessary behaviors, if your stated aim is your true aim, and effectiveness in that something you perforce value.

As I have often pointed out, you can deduce peoples TRUE aims from their behavior. Its simple. Everyone always acts logically. They simply often lie to themselves and others about their true assumptions and true aims.

As I say, I like a solution in the middle, personally. I do not know what life is, or where the souls of babies come from. I do not feel I have a scientific understanding of matters called spiritual. As I have often said, I think every university should have a well funded Department studying these topics, like the one they have at the University of Virginia.

But OBVIOUSLY if our only ideas on all this come from religion—or the rejection of all metaphysics outside of dogmatic Materialism—then religion will and SHOULD play a part.

Many of our States were founded specifically as safe places for ideosyncratic religious practiced and beliefs. This nation was FOUNDED both to protect the public exercise of religion (no hiding in caves, or fear of persecution), and to avoid any one group getting the power yo say to all THIS IS WHAT YOU MUST BELIEVE AND THIS IS HOW YOU MUST ACT.

In fact, if you view Leftism as a secular Church—which is really what it is, complete with priests, a catechismof required beliefs, and of course congregations everywhere, particularly universities—then what it is trying to do is become what the Pope was to Christendom for many centuries. They want their doctrine declared infallible, and heretics arrested and imprisoned and/or murdered.

This ascension of such a Church to a de facto throne is exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent, particularly the 10th Amdndment.

Unless I miss my mark—which definitely happens, but not often—what we are about to see needs to be described as some combination of a childish temper tantrum, and the emotional and physical abusiveness of a man who beats his wife and limits every aspect of her life, in order to control her.

These people are not interested in debate, the law, or even womens rights. All of it is pretext fir “what the world needs more of is ME.  US.”. And FUCK EVERYONE ELSE. They have no right to live, to speak, to believe anything we don’t tell them.

This is where the nice and quiet psychopaths reveal who they really were all along.

Thank God for the Second Amendment. It exists for times like this and people like this. I fully expect many angry acts of violence, and will caution sane people to just let these people alone. Let them show the world how many anti-Liberal pathetic tin pot dictators there are out there. Watch it on TV.

Compare what is about to happen, as it happens, to Jan. 6th.

People are still in jail, often in solitary confinement, just for BEING there. They set no fires, hurt no one, and in some cases DID NOT EVEN ENTER THE BUILDING.

Stephen Colbert’s people trespassed and harassed people but were set free immediately.  So too were arsonists and looters, not just in DC but all over the country.

If there are multiple tiers of justice, then THAT is oppression. What is bring done to Jan. 6 protesters—and that is what they were—is no different in principle or fact from the legal atrocities committed in the Democrat run Jim Crow South, or British India, or South Africa.

We were supposed to be beyond all this, but patently we are regressing in nearly all ways; or, at least, our schools are being run by regressive infants, who cannot hear or tolerate independent thought, who go into hyperarousal—which is itself a form of emotional bullying—on the slightest pretext, and who are grotesquely ignorant and indifferent with respect to all aspects of truly Liberal history and philosophy.

Fuck these people. The only solution for them is for sane people to outnumber them, name them, marginalize them, and to renew the process of teaching our children to be better people, which is to say honest, principled, mature and individuated people.

And if Roberts refusal to hear the valid cases against that ridiculous eldction was motivated by a desire to avoid riots, well shit, he may as well double down now. Trump would be protecting them. Biden’s people are probably hoping a couple of the “conservatives” get murdered, and doing their best to help make it happen.

I said I would explain this.  I won’t dig up the quotes, but roughly speaking, some kids, when confronted with emotional environments in which nothing makes sense, tend to internalize all the conflicts, and some tend to externalize them.

Internalizers are the empaths, who have a very, very hard time of it sometimes.  There is so much going on, and none of it makes sense, and it takes a long, long time, often, for anyone to explain it all.

Externalizers tend to deal with it all by pushing it out, which makes emotions something out there, and people out there tools to be used to meet emotional needs, rather than emotional needs being something intrinsically their own.  It is an immature behavior, and the root pathway to continuing the rot and trauma of the family system.

This is a very imperfect description, but I am tired of typing and have a long to-do list today.

Ponder all this.  I am proposing that if we make something like Maturity, or Emotional Intelligence, a priority, that the downstream positive effects will be enormous; and that if we continuing empowering children to act like adults, and allowing adults to act like children, our demise is only a matter of time.   Liberalism is only suitable for grown ass adults, who act like adults.

I’m intersectional today: time, motivation, coffee and cigars intersected so that I am going to take some time and perform the tedious task of quoting a book at length.

Why?  I think it’s useful.  And the author deserves credit.

The book is “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”, by Lindsay Gibson.  I will note that I make no money from this blog, and that on balance if I have any effect, it will be to sell books for her.

Now, the book is not something that will ever be filed under “Classics”.  It’s not Voltaire, or Thomas More, or Jean-Paul Sartre.  But in some ways it may be more USEFUL.

Much philosophy, I am convinced, is just a beard for psychology.  Principled are developed and articulated at length in complex systems, all to avoid dealing with the fact that your mother didn’t love you, or your father was harsh, or your mother was harsh and your father didn’t love you.

I remember writing down the quote from Moby Dick (the one and only time I read it, just after high school) that “when I hear a man give himself out as a philosopher I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old man, he has “broken his digester.'”  That’s from memory, but close.

Much of life is very simple.  It is avoiding the difficulties of that simplicity that gets us into trouble.

Here we are in 2022, and most people don’t have a fucking clue why they are on this planet, so they are grasping at straws.  Existential crisis?  I prescribe a double dose of global warming hysteria, and maybe a sex change for six months.

That’s not healthy.  No serious person can argue it is healthy.  It flies in the face of Liberalism, as a political creed founded specifically, if not explicitly, on the idea that our society was filled and would continue to be filled with responsible adults capable of independent rational thought.

Get rid of the adults and the rational thought, and Liberalism no longer makes sense practically or emotionally.

Anyway, in my own particular case, I got to thinking about Enmeshment, which I learned in this book was apparently a term developed by Murray Bowen in the 70’s.  When I was still seeing therapists–when they still had something to say I had not heard, and before I had read most of the books on all their shelves–I was told my family was “enmeshed”, and I was the “Identified Patient”.

It is a particular and peculiar aspect of emotionally unhealthy systems that the most unhealthy people display few if any outward symptoms.  The symptoms manifest in those unable to handle the contradictions without breaking down and falling out somehow.  That person is called an Identified Patient.  As I will argue, in Totalitarian systems, that person is called a dissident (or cockroach, rat, traitor, Jew, Fascist/Bolshevik, reactionary, right winger, White Supremacist).  They are the ones shouting truth in a world of lies, and usually paying a severe price for it.

I will write out both her definition of maturity and the characteristics of immaturity, but right out of the gate read this and think of George Orwell:

If you were raised by an emotionally immature parent, you spent  your early years tiptoeing around the anxieties of an emotionally phobic person.  The enmeshed families created by such parents are a stronghold against their fear of individuality.  A child’s individuality is seen as a threat to emotionally insecure and immature parents because it stirs up fears about possible rejection or abandonment.  If you think independently you might criticize them or decide to leave.  They feel much safer seeing family members as predictable fantasy characters rather than real individuals.

 

For parents who fear both real emotion and abandonment, authenticity in their children presents frightening evidence of the child’s individuality.  These parents feel threatened when their children express genuine emotions because it makes interactions unpredictable and seems threatening to family ties.  Therefore their children, in an attempt to prevent their parents from becoming anxious, often suppress any authentic thoughts, feelings, or desires that would disturb their parents sense of security.

 

Parents who need to keep strict control because of their anxieties often teach their children not only how they should do things, but also how they should feel and think. . .Such parents teach their children to be ashamed of any aspect of themselves that differs from their parents.  In this way, children come to see their uniqueness and even their strengths, as odd and unlovable.

 

In such families, internalizing [I will offer her definition presently] children often learn to feel ashamed of the following normal behaviors: Enthusiasm; Spontaneity; Sadness and grief over hurt, loss or change; Uninhibited affection; saying what they really think and feel; expressing anger when they feel wronged or slighted.

 

On the other hand, they are taught that the following experiences and feelings are acceptable and even desirable: obedience and deference to authority; physical illness or injury that puts the parent in a position of strength and control; uncertainly and self doubt; liking the same things as the parent; guilt and shame over imperfections or being different; willingness to listen, especially to the parents distress and complaints.  (page 159)

Pick your regime, pick your time and person.  I think of Fidel Castro giving 6 hour harangues that were the same bullshit as the last one, but during which all listening were too scared to use the bathroom, lest they be pegged as a dissident and sent to jail to be tortured and “corrected”.

Think of any totalitarian regime: is this not a perfect description?  Why do they care about your mind, if they have your body?  Because they feel chronic uncontrolled anxiety, because they are adult children.

We read 1984, and wonder at the evil and wrong of it, but how often do you wonder about how the principle perpetrators, like O’Brien, became that way?  What did the family system of Vladimir Ulyanov look like?  Adolph Hitler?  Joseph Jughashvili?  Nguyen Sinh Cung?

Politics is an arena not that unlike family dynamics, and it is not a stretch to suppose that political leaders recreate, both consciously and more likely mostly unconsciously, dynamics with which they are familiar.

This means, in turn, that there is most likely a Liberal type of family (note, I am using the word Liberal as it was used before it was bastardized and coopted by authoritarians).  That family would be one characterized by emotional maturity and health.  Liberalism depends on an emotionally healthy and engaged populace.  It invokes and depends on the wisdom of the community.  It facilitates freedom, because freedom is what is healthy for healthy people.  Freedom is useless to the sick and morally and mentally infirm.

Logically, any aspiring Authoritarian, then, would want to infantilize their target population, making them unsure of themselves, weak, greedy, and all the rest.

Here is a definition of healthy maturity:

‘Emotional maturity’ means a person is capable of thinking objectively and conceptually while sustaining deep emotional connection to others.  People who are emotionally mature can function independently while also having deep emotional attachments, smoothly incorporating both into their daily life.  They are direct about pursuing what they want, yet do so without exploiting other people.  They’ve differentiated from their original family relationships sufficiently to build a life of their own.  They have a well developed sense of self and identity and treasure their closest relationships.

 

Emotionally mature people are comfortable and honest about their own feelings and get along well with other people, thanks to their well developed empathy, impulse control, and emotional intelligence.  They’re interested in other people’s inner lives and enjoy opening up and sharing with others in an emotionally intimate way.  When there’s a problem, they deal with others directly to smooth out differences.

 

Emotionally mature people cope with stress in a realistic, forward looking way, while consciously processing their thoughts and feelings.  They can control their emotions when necessary, anticipate the future, adapt to reality, and use empathy and humor to ease difficult situations and strengthen bonds with others.  They enjoy being objective and know themselves well enough to admit their weaknesses. (page 28)

So what is immaturity?  Well, the opposite.  I will offer some snippets.  See if you recognize any of this in our current political and social (can we any longer differentiate them) climate.

Traits associated with emotional immaturity:

They are rigid and single minded.  As long as there’s a clear path to follow, emotionally immature people can do very well, sometimes reaching high levels of success and prestige.  But when it comes to relationships or emotional decisions, their immaturity becomes evident.  They are either rigid or impulsive, and try to cope with reality by narrowing it down to something manageable.  Once they form an opinion, their minds are closed.  There’s one right answer, and they can become very defensive and humorless when people have other ideas.

 

They have low stress tolerance.  Emotionally immature people don’t deal with stress well.  Their responses are reactive and stereotyped.  Instead of assessing the situation and anticipating the future, they use coping mechanisms that deny, distort, or replace reality.  They have trouble admitting mistakes and instead discount the facts and blame others.  Regulating emotions is difficult for them, and they often overreact.  Once they get upset, it’s hard for them to calm down, and they expect other people to soothe them by doing what they want.  They often seek comfort in intoxicants or medication.

 

They do what feels best. Young children are ruled by feelings, whereas adults consider possible consequences.  As we mature, we learn that what feels good isn’t always the best thing to do.  Among emotionally immature people, however, the childhood instinct to do what feels good never really changes.  They make decisions on the basis of what feels best in the moment and often follow the path of least resistance.

 

They are subjective, not objective.   Emotionally immature people assess situations in a subjective way, not objectively.  They don’t do much dispassionate analysis.  When they interpret situations, how they are feeling is more important than what is actually happening.  What is true doesn’t matter nearly as much as what feels true.  Trying to get a subjectively oriented person to be objective about anything is an exercise in futility.  Facts, logic, history–all fall on deaf ears where the emotionally immature are concerned.

 

They have little respect for difference.  Emotionally immature people are annoyed by other people’s differing thoughts and opinions, believing everyone should see things their way.  The idea that other people are entitled to their own point of view is beyond them. . .They are only comfortable in role-defined relationships where everyone holds the same beliefs.  The quieter, nicer ones are the same, but in a quieter, nicer way.

 

They are egocentric.  Normal children are egocentric as youngsters, but the self involvement of emotionally immature adults is more childish than childlike. [emphasis in original].Unlike children, their egocentrism lacks joy and openness.  Emotionally immature people are self preoccupied in an obsessed way, not with the innocence of a child.  Young children are self-centered because they’re still commanded by pure instinct, but emotionally immature adults are commanded by anxiety and insecurity, like wounded people who must keep checking their intactness.  They live in a perpetual state of insecurity, fearing that they’ll be exposed as bad, inadequate, or unlovable [such as by not wearing a mask; my comment, obviously].  They keep their defenses high so other people can’t get close enough to threaten their shaky sense of self worth.

 

Before you start feeling too sorry for them, keep in mind that their defenses work seamlessly to keep these underlying anxieties below the level of awareness.  They would never see themselves as being insecure or defensive.

 

They are self preoccupied and self involved. Anxious self preoccupation is a quality all emotionally immature people share.  They’re constantly monitoring whether their needs are being met or whether someone has offended them.

 

They are self referential, not self reflective. Emotionally immature people are highly self referential, meaning that in any interaction, all roads lead back to them.  However, they aren’t self reflective.  Their focus on themselves isn’t about gaining insight or self understanding; it’s about being the center of attention.

 

They have low empathy and are emotionally insensitive.  Impaired empathy is a central characteristic of emotionally immature people, as is avoidance of emotional sharing and intimacy.  Being out of touch with their own deeper feelings, they’re strikingly blind to how they make other people feel. (pages 29-35)

She goes on in this vein, but this should suffice to make the point.  The whole chapter is worth reading, as is much of the book, particularly for anyone who can relate to any of this in their own lives.

I will ask an open question to anyone reading this who has spent any significant amount of time interacting with the Left: does this not all sound VERY familiar?

And here is the kicker: a Leftist could read all this, recognize none of it as applying to them, then cut and paste it as applying to conservatives without batting an eye.  Since they lack any real emotional depth or intellectual creativity, I noticed long ago that they just take the valid complaints we make about them, then more or less literally say “I know you are, but what am I?” by literally taking the same words and simply reversing the direction.  They may do that with what I just wrote. Childish, yes.  That is the argument I am making here: it IS childish, and not in a fun way.

So what does this add up to?  A huge problem, no?

But is the first step in solving any problem not identifying and describing it?  Applying mature reality testing?

In my own mind, I have a certain metaphor, that may not be a metaphor, that  I like to use, and which I find comforting in a strange way.

I like to think that before I was born my assigned task was to parachute into the darkest place I could find, far from comfort and the Home of  Light that is where we all truly belong, and to do so without a map, without a guide, and find my way back through every possible emotional shitstorm imaginable.  I have actually had the good fortune to get to know a few real commandos reasonably well, who I have used as models to help me.

That is what I like to think of myself as doing here.  We are fighting a battle for adulthood as a species, as Humankind, writ large.  The battle is being fought in emotional terrain.  My job is to map that out, to make what was hidden visible, to describe what is being done, how, and where, so that any remaining sane, well meaning people out there can begin to act more intelligently, with more purpose, and with more effectiveness in helping lead humanity to a future characterized by dignity, personal freedom, emotional growth, spirituality, and sustained prosperity within the bounds of respecting the life of this planet.

I am an environmentalist too, but I think we need to focus on real problems, not made up ones.

Imagine, for example, we were spending as much money preventing plastics from entering our oceans–and pulling out those already there–as we are on the ludicrous notion of Global Warming.  Imagine we were taking sane and practical steps to reduce plastic use, rather than pretending to recycle plastics, then shipping them to Asia, where they get released into the oceans.

Or, alternatively, I suspect that if we took the money being spent on global warming in, say, Holland alone, we could stop the need for poor Brazilians to burn rainforest.

But we aren’t.  We are dealing with emotionally immature, rigid people with completely perverted reality testing.  They can’t get the attention they crave with practical measures to solve real problems.  They need crises that they claim only they can solve; and so they CREATE them, never mind who they hurt.  Those people are invisible to them.

It’s an odd thing, but the stress of watching a President and Congress destroy our country–while a corrupted Supreme Court does something close to nothing to prevent it–seems to be a sort of tonic to me.  Stress is tension, and tension CAN be a solvent, if you allow it.

Think about massage: you put pressure on your muscles, then release it.  Tight muscles loosen through temporarily increased tension.   This is the whole premise of Kum Nye, except that you are using body positions to place stress on patterns of muscular and energetic tension.  Can Life itself not also be used this way?  Can difficulty and stress not be used this way, if we feel them, then learn to loosen up within them?  I believe so.

 

In every possible way, “let them buy electric cars” is equal to “let them eat cake”.

Pete Buttagieg and the people running Biden are not going to even TRY and do anything but blame everyone but themselves for this problem.

Things are going well for me, if also busy.

A key insight I had recently is that the notion of emotional maturity appears to me to be both necessary and sufficient to explain our present political world. I will explicate this at greater length when time and available emotional energy intersect, but will note broadly that immature people tend to see their problems originating outside themselves, tend to therefore blame others, to see the world in inflexible black and white (literally) ways, and are always on the verge of aggression when anyone questions them in any way.  Is this in a nutshell not fully descriptive of left wing social, rhetorical, political and dare I say ritual practice?  Yes. My answer is yes.

Mature people hold themselves accountable, try to be responsible, learn from their mistakes, are open to nuance and special circumstance, and are always happy to try and negotiate differences peacefully.

This is not politics speaking. This is orthodox developmental psychology.

This prism is, in my view, quite useful. It both explains our present and offers an articulable path forward that is non-violent and apt to lead to optimized outcomes for all concerned.

That is todays comment. Here are notes I’ve left myself in the past week or two:

Notes 2

What sort of world do I want to live in? One I don’t fear. Can I not choose to live in that world today? This very moment?

Righteous indignation easily shades into chronic indignation, them chronic anger, and eventually decontextualized chronic hate.

I think meditation is beginning when the pad feels spacious and time ample and generous.

Maybe I need to invent adulting or maturity classes.

Post on maturity. The primary political demand of the Left is that no one should ever have to learn to negotiate any difficulty of a sort or severity they did not choose, as regards both the people protesting themselves and those they are patronizing in both sense of the word. Their socialism is a fantasy world in which they are protected from the consequences of all their decisions and the world rendered fully safe.

Feeling is an abstraction of mixed sensations. It is perhaps the result of a catchmenf area that can and does go different ways.

Feeling and releasing emotions reduces their compulsive power, both by obvious pushing, if they are conscious, and subtle long term manipulation if repressed. Press is out; repress is in. Interesting.

Eating good quality, tasty food in moderation is a gesture of balance. Imbalance is driven by unmanaged compulsions, by winds, by pushing.

Working smarter IS working harder for most of us, but amounts to multiplying outcomes with the same effort.

If you grow up rejecting adult authority this is functionally a rejection of adulthood itself. The counter-culture has itself become a de facto movement of infantilism and refusing to mature and individuate, because adulthood and adult resppnsibility in large measure is what was rebelled against. Children want both a perfectly safe world—one made safe for them by others—and freedom from personal accountability. Government obviously has come to serve, both conceptually and practically, in loco parentis. But government does not have a body or soul. It cannot teach empathy or compassion, dignity or courage. There can be no true bonds of mutual affection and loyalty. Choosing an abstraction as a parent cannot but dilute and bleach people into flat superficiality, banality, and insipid harmlessness outside of a mob. The mob then becomes a means to personal existence. And mobs do not need to be physical. Most of them arent. A mob is participation in a mass formation, most of which are expressed and lived now on social media.

Any group of people motivated by fear and shame will sooner or later commit atrocities.

In the Tao Te Ching he does not counsel to “pay as much attention to the end as the beginning” just because it is good advice, but because to do otherwise implies impatience, which is rejecting Now. It is necessarily an Unacceptance, a desire to transit stonelike and senseless through moments in time.

Would I not be happiest if I was as happy at work as at rest? Lessening that resistance would be smart.

You cannot cross a river until you come to the river. Likewise, you cannot dispel feelings and tensions until you become aware of them.

I was a pallbearer at my own funeral.

Emotional strength is very related to tension and anxiety in terms of what I can express in the world. A highly sensitive or anxious (not nevessarily the same thing) person may feel more fear driving a car than s good soldier in war. Both may express the same will. But the OUTCOMES are very different.

All work and play, stillness and noise, all experience, is Kum Nye if we enter into it and flow with it. Kun Zhi is all our energetic habits that blind us, that tell us there is only one way to do things, and that rote repetition is our friend. The thirst for stasis is an alliance with death.

The world is so large and its problems so complicated that it is almost inherently productive of fear and confusion. Left wing propaganda uses the fact that people are confused and afraid to offer a simple way out by saying Trust Us and it will all be fine. If that burden is ever placed once on them it will require an almost superhuman effort to reshoulder that burden. You have traded anxiety—usually INTENSE anxiety—for relative peace. And obviously you will easily hate anyone who questions or threatens that peace. This explains a lot. A mass formation happens easily when there is a lot to fear, and obviously the organizers of all this learned to push relentless fear long ago. This has been going on for decades, and in cases like nuclear war, the objective danger cannot easily be dismissed. It is in some respects a propaganda triumph that the valid fear of nuclear war has seemingly been largely eradicated among those being led around by the nose.

Emotions are timeless, are they not? And they have a non-linear—which is to say non-spatial—logic.

The empty vessel of Taoism is not just empty of distracting and misleading conceptions and biases, but also unnecessary anxieties and EMOTIONAL predispositions: no superfluous thoughts, images and feelings, with only raw sensations remaining, from which everything else is built. “Beginners Mind” is thus not mind per se at all.

I think practically most “Progressives” define progress ex post hoc as “what we did, what we do”, and in advance as “what we will do”. The conceit and obviously delusion is that they are intrinsically good, so no matter what they do and who they harm, if they touched it, it was and is good, with all evil residing solely in those who critique and question them. I cannot imagine a more carefully constructed anti-Rationality, or a better means to thwart all spontaneous amd accurate perception, or to more completely prevent mature reality testing

Democrats—and to sure many Republicans—are not interested in solving problems but in USING problems. The moral hazard of needing problems is obvious and the root cause of most of our social and political dysfunction.

When physical or strong emotional conditioning is used at anearly age, it becomes background, not conscious psychology. It is instinct rather than choice. And some of this is necessary. The 3 year old ego cannot remain in charge. It must be limited, if also ideally not broken. But these emotional patterns run so deep they virtually constitute the felt sense of self and its possibilities.

My life internally has been much more Scorsese than Tarkovsky.

Post on maturity.

To say you hate everyone—or people—is to say you fear everyone. People obviously can be and often are thoughtless, rude and stupid, but this is not the general rule, particularly when not under stress and not acting as part of a herd.

Logically, if avoiding talk or even awareness of deep emotion is a facet of immaturity, then social media is both supporting and breeding it like a pestilential swamp.

It is one thing to withdraw from emotionally abusive parents but another entirely to invent and see what was possible, and in so doing finally see them in their true light.

Often, I think, negative emotions are like attached parasites. If you keep moving they will often fall away.

Pain and loss—or the never-present—are stories, and stories are excuses, and excuses are stumbling blocks we place in our own paths, those which lead to work we know we need to do. But forgetting those who hurt us is losing a part of who we are, which is to say what fragments remain, which survived in spite of All That. Spiritually, perhaps loss is always our friend. But psychologically it is definitely not, and I truly think the path to the AUTHENTICALLY spiritual lies through the psychological.

The 3 Refuges were intended to provide itinerant monks with a traveling home, and thus calm place/port in the storm. We all need an emotional home, especially if we renounce our physical one.

There are roughly three ways to deal with chronic fear. One is to untangle the knots giving rise to it. This is best. Second is becoming stronger. Strength weakens fear, and ironically some of the strongest men were most fearful. Third is to deny it and weave it into narratives of moral outrage and shame based enmeshment with a mob of mutually calibrating fish. You can pivot on a dime on any issue, but if everyone does it THE WORLD LOOKS THE SAME. And ideas can change constantly because it is the EMOTION that remains the same.

Communism is really just thr politics of the emotionally immature.

Whenever an idea about things is born, it is born in two: yin and yang, good and bad. Faith in the future is born with pessimism, hope with despair. Love with hate, kindness with coldness. It is better to connect directly with the totality than indirectly through what amounts to a narrowing filter. An idea is a constriction point and polarizing filter. Or can be, in any event.

It is possible to walk through a door with the abstract goal to save the world, or with an authentic self, but not both: they won’t fit. Grandiosity is lying. Sincerity is more realistic.

The authentically Liberal ideal is a self organizing dynamic personality interacting relatively stably and fearlessly and happily within a mutable matrix of various self organizing systems which multiply individual effort and talent both physically and spiritually. People help one another accomplish physical tasks and to grow. This is a normative ideal, one opposed to the whole human and animal history of collectivism and the primacy of primitive instrinct and violence in the service of conformity.

If I look at the past thirty years as my career and my career as growing personally, then I am about in life where I want to be, on the verge of beginning to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Oddly, I think a very good case can be made that this is really the only “career” that matters, at least if we take survival seriously.

It may be useful to use the words emotion and information interchangeably.

The connection between book people and masks is simple: they are almost invariably physically weak and timid and fearful. The Cult grants them solace and the Cult demanded masks, which it said would make them safer. The Cult, remember, exists to create a stable shelter from fear and confusion. To leave is to shoulder all the fear and confusion of our time alone, which few can even stomach contemplating.

Using other peoples money to make yourself feel good, as Democrats do, is really USING them, isn’t it? Its even worse when they steal freedoms from some and give them to others.

A “church” in which people pursue a wide variety of spiritual practices but still get together once or twice a week would be a lot like a Tibetan monastery. And the periodic meetings would serve as reinforcing and comforting social contact.

Forgiveness, as a mature act of letting go of the pain associated with a betrayal of trust, is healthy. But often what people call forgiving is really forgetting, and part of that persons self is renounced along with the right to righteous anger, self defense, boundary protection, and effective emotional autonomy.

Maturity/immaturity is a better continuum than healthy to sociopath. Extension is easier on the positive side.

Satan is a symbol of fear, of power—a palliative for fear, but no cure—and of belonging without intimacy or individuation. It is the creed of externalizers taken to an extreme.

Leftism provides a place and an assigned playacting role. As such it is effectively extended emotional enmeshment. Human history consists almost entirely in enmeshed groups of people externalizing against each other. People are comforted in groups, but absent individuation, each grouping, each tribe, becomes a separate competing animal species. There is no humanity: there are a million species, all fighting with one another like wild animals. Only principles bridge this gap.

Perceptually, the relevant cultural continuum is between nuance and black/white thinking; between large, moving, complex perceptions on the one side, and simplistic yes/no operators on the other.

I saw a vegan place with a nod to Satan. Its an odd combo, but not really: militant veganism is not really about loving animals who, unlike people, cannot protest that your love is fake. It is about using the pretext of caring about animals to be angry all the time and to hate most if not all people, most likely as a severely immature psychological externalizer. And if Satan is an enemy of the System and people (normies) you hate, then he is a logical ally. Its a great way of pulling in—but not TOO far—a few allies and telling the rest of the world to fuck itself.

What we did to multiple groups of Indians after defeating them militarily was not that different from what the Japanese did to us in Bataan.

I wonder if it would be accurate to say our global cultural task is to make the world safe for psychology.

The possibility and usually the reality of hypocrisy no more invalidates an ideal than the possibility of cowardice negates the value of courage. You cannot judge a value in its failure, but only in its success. And to reject values outright is to institutionalize failure and pernicious chaos as values.

It would be interesting, in an electronic book, to block reading at a song, say “first fall of snow”, then ask: “did it make you cry?”, if yes, then you go one place; if no, another. This was one of my original ideas, to create a multisensory and mutable book. I can even change things once it is published.

Blaming Republicans for everything is textbook externalizing.

Other peoples stupidity is no more my fault than the weather or where a bird builds a nest. And the hostility of the stupid is also no more personal than a mother bear thinking she needs to defend her cub. Countless things happen in this world that would not happen if it were rational. But it isn’t.