Month: July 2022

Why would someone want to keep some other person, or some other group, small?  Because they feel small themselves, and want to protect themselves from awareness of this fact.

Why would someone want to fear someone else?  To rationalize irrational fear that is stable that they do not want to acknowledge and process.

Anyone who wanted to build a Mass Formation has to first denigrate individual judgement–for example by building a cult where the Expert is the High Priest, and by ritually expelling all qualified people unwilling to speak Orthodoxy–and then by generalizing anxiety with violent media, weakening of the nuclear family and religious communities, relentless hysteria in the news, and isolating people in their homes with TV’s as cultural altars that they control.

Thinking about it this morning, the core problem we have in much of the world is that people have been made to NEED enemies.  This is the true disease.

The symptom is that they reject dialogue.  They reject efforts at negotiating difference in conditions of mutual respect, that is at least contingent on achieving understanding before judging.

The root problem is not that people believe, for example, that men can become women, fully and completely.  The problem is that they become hysterical when anyone doubts it, for example by referencing the whole of Biology as it existed until a few short years ago, when like most of science today, it was politicized, and ceased speaking open truth as presented by the evidence, and started speaking possibilities as needed to get grants and avoid denunciation and cancellation, and depersoning.

I talked for a half hour or so yesterday with a lifelong Deadhead.  He had by his estimate attended 500 Grateful Dead shows.  He  claimed it was the world’s longest continuous work of cultural art.  I liked this idea.  It’s tenable.

Since he was also a bit of a Dead historian, who taught me a lot about the culture, he noted that the whole thing came out of CIA/military experiments.  I had not realized it, but Ken Kesey himself participated in MK/Ultra at Stanford.

This whole article is quite interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lysergic_acid_diethylamide

At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The project studied the effects on the patients of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT.^[40] Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. Kesey’s role as a medical guinea pig inspired him to write the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962.

On this guy’s account, the whole counter-culture that emerged in the 1960’s arose from that period.  This is also a tenable hypothesis.  Ken Kesey was the Uber-hippie and the way LSD came to be used and seen in the 1960’s could without too much trouble be traced to his Acid Tests.  And since Neal Cassady was their driver, he was sort of the bridge between the Beats and the Hippies.

So I got to wondering: what if this whole culture was created in some respects as a matter of POLICY?  This guy was claiming the CIA was trying to see if they could get people to dance in the streets.  If so, they succeeded.

And as support he pointed out that the whole Dead thing could have been shut down at any time.  It wasn’t.

So being me I got to wondering if this whole bifurcation in our society was not engineered long ago.  The Left, as it exists today, traces its cultural roots to the acid and marijuana culture of the 1960’s.

This is their happy place.  Their happy time.  Their colorful time, in a world where Gray is literally and figuratively becoming a dominant color.  This is where they MADE A DIFFERENCE.

If the Freedom Riders were not dropping acid, the people who were supported them strongly, at least after the fact, and after the real danger, conflict, and struggle were largely over.

All of this kind of coalesced eventually into a world where the United States, in principle, as constituted, was the enemy.   They grew not to oppose this or that, but the WHOLE THING.  Obama was the apotheosis of this, in that we still have no idea who he really is–whether, for example, his real father was Frank Marshall Davis, as to me seems likely for many reasons–and of course Joe Biden is his retarded and morally vacuous successor, whose sole job is to rubber stamp whatever people whose names we don’t know cause to be put in front of him.

We live in a world where, to modify a cliche, more and more people know less and less about more and more.  I don’t think most Antifa members could give a coherent two paragraph summary of who the historical Nazis were, what they believed and why, and what they actually did and how.  Yet, in their own minds, they oppose “fascists”.  How do they define a fascist?  Anyone who opposes THEM.

I will remind you Mussolini defined fascism as “Everything inside the State [Us], nothing outside the State [Us], and nothing against the State [again, Us].”

So the fundamental Fascist activity is eliminating opposition and genuine diversity of opinion.  Who is trying to do that?  Well, they have many names and exist in many places, but their militias–their street mobs morphologically identical to the SA and Black Shirts–are Antifa and BLM.  Their job is to intimidate people into compliance that they cannot win with persuasion.  They are functionally terrorist groups, intended to build terror.  Say the wrong thing, they show up at your house.  Hitler or Mussolini would readily recognize, for example, what these mobs are trying to do, and being allowed to do by Joe Biden, to the Supreme Court justices they have identified as outside the State as they want it constituted.

What is a traitor?  Anyone outside or against the State AS THEY WANT IT CONSTITUTED.  What is an “insurrection”?  Any group protesting openly against the State as they want it constituted.

The mob that was allowed, and even directed, into the Capital on Jan. 6th was not there to overthrow the government of the United States.  This is obvious.  They went into the Capital, took selfies, then left peacefully.  Their arrests by and large happened later, one by one.

As I have said before, the whole Hippy thing really amounted in many ways to an abdication of adult responsibility.  It amounted to a decision to remain, on some level, a Flower Child.  The conceit is that they are harmless, innocent, loving, good, because outside the system where nations contend for power and prestige.

But living in a Liberal democracy, or Republic, was not compatible then with the aims of the sociopathic narcissists running the Communist world.  It had to be opposed.  Choosing “peace” in a world where fights had to be fought was never an option.

And as I will never tire of pointing out, our decision to retreat from Vietnam AFTER WE HAD WON, caused horrific pain and suffering in South Vietnam.  Hundreds of thousands were executed outright.  Millions of families were broken apart, and villages that were perhaps in some cases a thousand years old broken up and destroyed.  Torture was common.  Misery was nearly universal, and for many years.

Here is another core problem: Leftists–people who came out of this culture–have got to admit THEY WERE WRONG.  Nixon does not have to be made a good guy to admit that leaving Vietnam–and Southeast Asia generally–the way we did creating completely unnecessary and unimaginable suffering.  Laos suffered, and continues to suffer.  And Cambodia saw a third, perhaps, of its population murdered in more horrific ways than most people can begin to imagine.  A great many were literally tortured to death, as a matter of policy.  They were not looking for information.   There was no goal: just the infliction of as much pain on people whose sole crime was, perhaps, owning eyeglasses, which marked them as potential intellectuals, and thus Outside or even against the State.

For my part, I can listen to anyone tell any story without judgement, and I have heard some doozies, and had solid reason to suspect crimes which were not confessed.  Judging individuals as individuals is more work than I normally want to do.

But judging groups for the behaviors which arose from their core beliefs is something that in my view is necessary.  And that judgement, for me, takes the form of stating obvious truths, such as that mass murder is a bad thing in all cases, and if we support it, then that is bad.

But who supported mass murder in Vietnam?  The Left.  The hippies.  In no small measure, and no doubt mostly passively, the Deadheads.  And to be sure, the DEMOCRATS, who literally condemned millions of people to gruesome deaths when they cut all funding to all of Southeast Asia and forced the withdrawal of all troops.  Among other things, that created the space for the emergence and military victory of the Khmer Rouge, who were at one time allied, if memory serves, with the North Vietnamese Communists.

With the Plumbers Richard Nixon was trying to protect the victory he and his policies won in Vietnam, which resulted in the Paris Peace Treaty.  Nihilistic liars sacrificed all that on the alter of their narcissism and belligerent stupidity.

There is a current in our society that stems from all this that says “Just live for now”.  YOLO.  Live like a child, free from the cares of adult responsibility and accountability.

But no sane person would call this good.  It IS good to be present to the present.  It IS good to be aware and focused on living well.  But you also need intelligence.

Abstraction is how we predict and CREATE the future.  Behavior organized around governing principles defines the direction of our cultural order as a Complex system.  I have called this a Telearchy.

Living for the moment is a telearchy destined for collapse.  Living without thinking is a telearchy destined for less and less authentic, real, spontaneous order, and one which more or less demands an externally imposed order of the type fascists–or their predecessors, who were religious zealots of one stripe or another–are only too happy to provide.

This nation cannot survive with so many people hysterically attached to childishness, to a primitive and atavistic narcissism.

And I will add one more comment: animals are functionally narcissistic.  There are cases of one species interacting harmoniously with others, but rarely in the wild.  Some species take care of their own; some, like sharks, literally eat their own.  But animals are not people.  They do not possess the capacity for abstract reflection, and for truly empathizing with other animals, truly understanding them.  There is a certain capacity for altruism in some higher species, but it is instinctual.

So here is what I have suggested before, and will say a bit more strongly: I don’t think the vegetarianism of the Buddhists and Hindus had to do, primarily, with the killing of animals for food being wrong.  Tormenting them clearly is, but our entire Earth is covered with animals who readily consume one another for survival.  Within a block of you birds are eating worms, and larger birds are eating smaller birds.

I think the axiom to not hurt came from an effort to reform social orders based on sacrifice–which is to say primitive narcissism–by making their fundamental element anathema.  Sacrifice, and probably including human sacrifice, was an essential element of Hindu culture for a very long time.  As Frits Staal discovered in funding an Agnicayana in India perhaps back in the 1970’s or 80’s, the original instructions for that ritual included a human head built into the base of the altar, presumably from sacrifice.  The Ashvamedha certainly included the sacrifice of a horse.

Human life is not so complicated that we cannot abstract useful governing principles from it, and the more ideas we allow and discuss and investigate, inevitably the smarter we get.

What we are facing is in effect a global Primitivism, an atavism, an apparently induced instinctual obsession with returning to an earlier and worse state of human consciousness, all buttressed by an ubiquitous and less and less surmountable technology; all of which is rooted in primal fears we could and should have overcome long ago.

We could institute meditation in schools.  Biofeedback and Neurofeedback.  Audio-Visual Entrainment.  Training in Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology.  We could legalize all psychedelics for research by qualified professionals, and introduce those which work into our mental health system.  This would cause, among other things, though, a huge loss in revenue to Big Pharma, who–no doubt among others–has been and can be expected to continue to oppose all this.

What sane person would oppose all this?  No sane person would.  So who DOES oppose all this?  I honestly don’t know.  It remains a mystery.

We live in a world where individual psychopaths can and do exercise more and more disproportionate influence.

All I know to do is continue to see as clearly as I can, and in all honesty hope for a miracle of some sort whose source I cannot see.

I had intended to make this point in the previous post, but the opening did not appear.

Patriot, as best I can determine, has the root of pater, or Father.  In the original Greek it seems to have connoted something like “an order of the fathers/men.”

I think there is an effort by all people in power, in any complex system, to be seen as parents.  In patriarchal orders, which is pretty much all of them in the modern world, this is the father.

Does this not then make all those governed children?  I would argue it does.

And if we want to make government the all nurturing Mother (in principle obviously, because impossible in reality) then our attachment to the governmental teat needs to be called Matriotism.

The precise structure of our Constitution was intended to explicitly remove this sort of thing from our world.  Your business is your own business.  Your family is your family.  Your community is your community.  Although different, with differing ideas on all topics, we will meet in a public space–a Res Publica–and negotiate as adults.  No person in Washington or anywhere else is going to infantilize you.

And obviously the balancing consideration is that we are all free to rise or fall on our own.  No omnipresent father or mother from the government is going to pick you up.  That is for your friends and family, neighbors and community to do.

Our system was founded based on the idea of mature adult individuation.  It was founded as a “Republic of Virtue”, which I think is a quote from one of the–what do we call them?–the Founding Fathers.

And that term is not entirely incorrect.  They fathered a radically new form of government which recognized and codified in law ITS OWN LIMITS.

Here is a simple heuristic: the fascists are the ones who want more control over your life, your thoughts, your speech.  Period.

The Liberals are the ones who emphasize choice and freedom.

In our current landscape, to my mind it is very, very obvious who is who.  It’s not complicated.

And since I brought up choice, the relevant choice with regard to abortion is WHO GETS TO DECIDE IF IT IS RIGHT OR WRONG.  Is it the national government, or the States?  You can still murder a full term baby in Oregon.  It’s still legal.

(I can’t resist sharing this on point commentary by Bill Burr, which I understand has gone viral for the right reasons: https://twitter.com/LegendaryEnergy/status/1550181134658637827

Allan Bloom commented back in the 1980’s that we need to understand that deep moral issues are NOT SIMPLE.  They need to be wrestled with, and considered with appropriate seriousness.  We have not come close to doing that in the public space with respect to abortion.)

One last point: left wing lunatics who have been burning flags for a half century suddenly found a love for patriotism and a hatred of “treason” and insurrection.  Why?

Simple: they are attached to THIS government, to a government run by THEIR people, in a purely tribal and unjust way, and are appropriating a rhetoric they KNOW resonates with normal Americans, but which they invoke purely for tactical political purposes.

Our soldiers swear an oath to protect and defend the CONSTITUTION, not to protect and defend the person and people who happen (in this case through massive and obvious fraud) to be in charge.

The loyalty most normal Americans feel is to the PRINCIPLES they see when they see a flag.  Equal justice for all.  Liberty for all.  Transparency and limitations for the government.

An internet friend (which is a friend I have not yet had a beer with or worked out with) asked me to write a post on nationalism/patriotism, and sent me an American flag emoji to clarify.  This was around the 4th of July.  Well, here it is.  It’s not likely the sort of thing expected, but I think most people who know me come to realize at some point that I rarely walk or reason in straight lines when I’m exploring.  Logic gets you from A to B, but the process of understanding something as complex as nationalism, for me, consists in something like scribbling circles over and over in random loops while I keep my mind on the topic.

And I am going to endeavor, actually, to combine two lines of related thought here.  I think the emergent product will hopefully be satisfying, for me and for others.

My process, however, since I am going to try and tie a lot of things together, is going to begin with some disconnected observations.

First, I wanted to comment that the idea of a nation, from which nationalism stems, is actually quite recent.  Until perhaps, say, 1800, people felt loyalty to their locale, to communities small enough that they knew the leaders, if not well enough to have over for dinner, but well enough to recognize on the streets.  I think Aristotle said the proper size for what I will call a human societal unit, or Polis in his time, was no larger than the range within which someone shouting from a tower could be heard.  I think 10,000 was his limit.

I’m listening to a book on the 30 Years War, and the accumulation of territories by the Hapsburgs in 1700 was interesting.  Their king was in Spain, but they ruled Austria, parts of Hungary, parts of Germany, parts of Italy, etc.  They might have Saxony, but not Prussia.  They might have Florence but not Venice.  Everything came in what we would view as small parcels of power, all of course with a king or some equivalent, like a Duke, or Viscount, or something of that nature.  Some regions, depending on the people, were no doubt more open to discussion and even criticism, but democracy per se was not seen anywhere in Europe, or as far as I know anywhere else on the planet, outside the Greek Democracy, and the Roman Republic, both of which did not last very long.

And keep in mind the linguistic diversity of most of the world.  Consider the language Kashubian.  Have you heard of it?  I hadn’t.  It’s spoken in a region smaller, I would suppose, than most US States.  Nearly all of the world is like that.

Look at this very interesting map: https://www.tribalnationsmaps.com/store/p315/Tribal_Nations_-_48%22×55%22.html

There are no borders, are there?  You only need borders when somebody is expanding and you want them to stop.  If everybody stays put, keeps their population stable, and leaves their neighbors alone, then you don’t need good borders for good neighbors.  If life were not much better, for now, in the United States than Mexico, we would not need a fence to keep them out.

So here is the first point I will make: most nations are in effect empires where all diversity has been conquered and tamed or eliminated.  In the United States, I have for some time said we might view the entirety of our nation as an empire conquered from natives, most of whose languages and customs disappeared.  A

Now, much of this was from disease which we did not spread intentionally.  There was one case of the British giving a blanket infected with smallpox to some tribe they opposed, but most of the death from disease was just a lack of the immunity most Europeans were more or less born with, since those diseases had long spread in Europe.

I recently read a very poignant story about an Indian kidnapped by the British from his home somewhere in Massachusetts, and taken in effect as a curiosity and a present to the Queen.  When he was eventually allowed to return home, they–he and the English bringing him home–witnessed mile after mile after mile of deserted villages.  Disease had killed everyone.  People fleeing the disease in one village had unwittingly spread it to others.  There is no way to calculate the cultural cost of all this.  Entire societies were wiped out in months.  We will never know what precious knowledge was lost.  Most of these tribes had their own languages.  They had their own beliefs and rituals.  There was no more a “typical” Native American than there was or is Barack Obama’s “typical” white woman.

But of course we fought and beat and marginalized many Indian tribes.  As I have commented, the Trail of Tears is not so very different from the Bataan Death March.  Japan, then, was merely acting from roughly the ethnocentricity of America in the 19th century.

Which brings me to the second line I want to pursue.  My intent is not to run down America.  Rather, I want to place us in a context where we remain unique; unique not in our actuality, but in our ideals and founding assumptions.

I think it can be taken as a more or less axiomatic principle that those who condemn the imperialism, or injustice, or racism of America readily accept equal and usually much worse crimes elsewhere.  This means no real principle is in play, and the criticisms personal, subjective, and tribal.

If you look at the Communists who want to criticize America, there is a perspective from which many of their complaints are valid.  But compared to WHO?  The Soviets?  The Russians?  The Chinese?  The Venezuelans?

There is no nation on the planet run by people whose ancestors did not commit crimes.  Without even looking at the history, I feel very sure that white people in Sweden ran the natives–the Suomi, or Laplanders–out of much of their land.  But it happened 1,000 years or more ago.

France, to take another example, was never a nation.  Our name for it comes from the Franks, who were an aggressive cultural group.  For a long time it was called Gaul, but by the Romans, who conquered much of it.  They displaced the native Celts, who largely assimilated and disappeared.  This has some interesting facts in it: https://frenchmoments.eu/what-is-france-in-french/

And for that matter, one of the first peoples the Romans conquered were the Etruscans, who were in Tuscany.  I remember reading somewhere that Lorenzo de Medici still spoke Etruscan, back around 1500.

So it is reasonable to say that the nation, per se, is almost always and inherently constituted by acts of violence, just as almost all nobles, wherever they are found, are the inheritors of past effective acts of violence (I think the latest Kingsman commented on that, which I liked; I also liked how the first scene showed a concentration camp in the Boer War).

So is any nation innocent?  No, I don’t think so.  It’s just a question of how bad the violence was, and how far back it does.  Switzerland alone stands out to me as perhaps largely innocent.  They originated a basic democracy a very long time ago, and have maintained it.  They are a Confederation.  It’s in their official name.  They are overlooked by nearly everyone, and I think they like it that way.  The primus inter pares Central Bank, the Bank of International Settlements, is located there.  If there is a Them, it would seem They have a strong foothold in that nation. So that makes them guilty!!  But I digress, as usual.  That is the White Dog.  I’m sniffing under that bush over there to see if any of my virtual friends–I only ever meet them by smell–have been there lately.

But I think that brings me to my second point–which is an assertion I will attempt to justify–which is a large shift, but hopefully a useful one.

All cultures, for all of human history, have been predisposed to what we would term narcissism, both in their internal relations, and in their external relations.

Bear with me for a moment, while I explore this.

What I would assert is that, just as the idea of a “nation” is modern–which is to say recent with respect to human history–so too is the idea of INDIVIDUATION.

When I look around me, I see a LOT of people who, even now, even with our focus on self determination, personal autonomy, individual conscience and the like, have failed to emerge from the fog of functional emotional and energetic disconnection.

Now, it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to feel sure of this, but why would relatively poor and stunted emotional development not have been the default for most of the life of physiologically modern humans?  Life was precarious and short, and much cooperation happened to ensure communal survival, which obviously implied the individual survival most people naturally worked for.  So helping others helped you.  That didn’t mean you were sensitive to their deep emotional states.  That didn’t imply more than the most rudimentary empathy, that necessary to see obvious feelings and react accordingly.

So when the Babylonians, I think it was, would cook captives taken in conquest slowly over fires simply because they enjoyed tormenting people, this was because THEY DID NOT SEEN THEM AS EQUAL HUMANS.

Seeing the Other as human is not something most cultures have done for most of history.  Japan is the Land of the Rising Sun.  China is the Middle Kingdom, which is to say the center of the world.  History is largely a chronicling of one horror after another, committed with the thoughtlessness and lack of remorse of a lion killing a deer.  Of animals, in other words.

This Beast, who might now be reified as, say, a goat headed man, has always been present.  We WERE animals and for a very long time.

Now, I have pondered narcissism long and hard–as I’ve shared repeatedly, both of my parents were in my view narcissists, which is a bad start, but it made me who I am, whoever I am–and I want to make some claims.

Here is one: narcissism consists in the unconscious denial of an inner Shadow, specifically fear and latent aggression.  I’m not sure that’s the exact list or exact formulation, but I’m going to play with it.

Primitive people, as we call them, believed the world was magical and filled with spirits who determined nearly everything.  If something good happened, or something bad happened, it was spirits or gods.

Now, from at least Durkheim onwards, social analysts–who might reasonably be called deconstructionists in the obvious outer form of that word without referencing the actual history of that term–have said that all these spirits were just externalizations of emotionally charged imaginings.

If you lack true self awareness, and a true capacity for inner reflection–finding a mirror in yourself, and studying what you see there reflected back–when you feel fear it might easily seem like something OUT THERE is causing it.  An evil spirit is present.

So what I think I want to argue is that narcissism is defined by seeing bad OUT THERE, and only good IN HERE.  In me.  In my home.  In my people.

And I think this leads to the nearly universal practice of sacrifice.  If evil is out there, then it can be collected out there, and dealt with out there.  If a community is filled with rage or fear–which of course can happen for many reasons, from bad weather, to sickness, to personal conflicts–that rage or fear can for a time be dissipated by murdering something out there, which could be a human or an animal.

And I think in my mind to the Jewish priests ceremonially murdering spotless lambs.  Two things happen at the same time.  On one level they make the lamb perfect and beautiful and sacred AND THE PRIEST ACQUIRES FOR HIMSELF BY NARCISSISTIC OSMOSIS THOSE QUALITIES, while ALSO putting all the sins and disquietudes of the community or person offering the sacrifice onto the lamb, which then has its throat slit, and then is perhaps consumed whole by a fire in the ritual called a Holocaust.

So in a narcissistic community, God is created in mans image of himself as powerful, pure, and just, even when, according to our modern understandings, evil is being done, and innocents hurt and killed.

I think this is close to the truth, and it explains the odd dichotomy of religions founded on forbearance and justice acting in truly awful, bloodthirsty ways with no self awareness at all.

Just because I found it interesting, I will note that until very recently–it was most likely stopped by the Chinese, but lasted well into the 20th century–it was the practice in Lhasa to have an annual scapegoat, which was a person (it may have been two) upon whom the sins of the city were ceremonially dumped, and who was ritually expelled from the city.  And it was considered a bad omen if they lived more than a week or two out the harsh Tibetan wilds.  Such is my recollection from Alexandra David Neels account of it.   I will note, as I likely did at the time, that her “My Journey to Lhasa” is one of the most interesting books I have ever read.  She is one of my heroes.

Here is a second claim I will make about narcissism: it consists in ROLE PLAYING.  The priest plays the part of the priest.  The wife plays the role of wife.  All of this is enforced with VIOLENCE.

And this is the root of hierarchy, in my view.

Here is the thing: a narcissist is someone who is incomplete without seeing themselves reflected back in the eyes of another.  They do not have complete self awareness.  It is precisely the lack of a stable felt sense of self which drives them.  They have shut out conscious awareness of their own capacity for evil, and the cost of this is that they have to play roles which work to hide this fact.

And of course this felt sense of incompleteness creates anxiety.  One obvious and logical correction for this anxiety is to feel different because superior and better.  Social hierarchy is how one set of people enable themselves to escape this anxiety by being SEEN by others, and treated by others–this is essential–as better.  Different.  A hierarchy is a means of generating narcissistic supply by creating a social system, buttressed by an ideology imposed by social and physical violence, in which some people can see in the eyes of others respect and to some extent fear or even “love”.

And here is thing: living as an incomplete human being is WORK.  You are living a lie.  You are embodying a lie.  Narcissistic supply is what makes it EASIER.  You are forcing others to join you in the lie, to support you in the lie.

Do you see how Leftism embodies this process perfectly?  It takes all the worst aspects of human history, eliminates God, and erects idols to psychological maladies.  It makes a positive virtue of being an incomplete, relentlessly fearful human being.  You simply push your own evil out to others.  THE Other, who is anyone not like you.

And I will be doing whatever, musing, and sometimes thoughts will hit me that make my jaw drop a bit.  Here is one: there is such a thing as suppliant narcissism.  Submissive narcissism.  Narcissism where you get your own supply by BEING the one in the order who is not just providing narcissistic supply to your “superiors” (who if anything are your inferiors and at least equal in most moral respects) but benefiting by the LOSS OF FREEDOM.

What do you get?  Freedom from your OWN anxiety.  Freedom to ignore your OWN needs, your own history, your own personality, your own spark.  And freedom to be cruel by externalizing all the fear and pain you are not allowing yourself to feel and process properly.

Fear is the root of all of this, again, specifically unconscious fear that people do not allow themselves to feel and process.

And what is cruelty?  Anything you do out there is something you feel in here.  It is axiomatic that cruel people are unhappy people.  Why are they unhappy?  They are incomplete.  They are playing roles that are hard to play because they are artificial and unnatural.

All of this is in the Tao Te Ching and other places.  When the Tao is lost, goodness appears.  What is goodness?  It is set of rules you have to follow to be a “good” person.  What is lost?  Spontaneity.  Sincerity.  Understanding.  GENUINE goodness, which is always imperfect, and always approximate, but always based upon acting from your real, true self.

I wrote in my notes the other day, on this score, that there is a sort of aggressive “giving” and “helping” that is actually motivated by a desire to hide.  It is actually a means of keeping from conscious awareness an inner cruelty and callousness.  Again, this is the Leftist mode in a nutshell.  They don’t actually TRY to help people, because they are playing a ROLE, the role of the “Good Person”.  And obviously the game is to be SEEN as doing so.  This is literally a ritual activity that does not differ at all from the sacrifices of the druids or the Jews.  It is a public piety which brings the attention of others, which works to reduce anxiety.  It is a form of narcissistic supply.

And so called Equity or radical egalitarianism is, in my view, based on the core, unacknowledged sense that we are indifferent ash heaps.  No moral or spiritual growth is possible, and the best way to enshrine–note the word–this idea is by rejecting morality and spirituality in practice, while invoking them for narcissistic supply.

Ironically–I use this word a lot because as someone who tries hard to think and live consistently I am keenly aware of the contradictions all around me–the only true path to honest and fruitful and happy and healthy egalitarianism is by recognizing that people ARE unequal.  We differ in our talents and aptitudes and motivations, but only through acknowledging them, and teaching people HOW TO GROW do we get to a world where we are all brothers and sisters embracing one another in the light of a shared God.

What we have now is a radical hierarchicalism USING the rhetoric–the role playing, to be clear–of egalitarianism for narcissistic supply–which again is a means for reducing anxiety in insincere, incomplete people.

Another note I made was that ironically the only time People of Fear, as I have started calling them, are not wearing a mask is when they ARE wearing a mask in some sort of ritual or other.  I have in mind conclaves like “Eyes Wide Shut” or the stereotypical dark room of people in hooded cloaks chanting something while they do something horrible.  This event purges them of anxiety.

I read today that the New York Times recently published an editorial apparently praising the idea of cannibalism.  No joke: https://www.infowars.com/posts/if-the-food-runs-out-new-york-times-accused-of-normalizing-cannibalism/

And chronic anxiety, again, is the result of denying your own capacity for evil, your own IT.  So evil is done to prevent the conscious awareness of evil.

And of course conscious evil is embracing a half life.  It is embracing a final defeat in the activity of becoming fully human and fully alive.  I do think, though, that even most evil people find means of rationalizing, which is to say externalizing, what they do.

Sade is a hero to some people precisely because he decided to simply declare all rationalizations unnecessary, and that what he did to survive emotionally–to not kill himself from his relentless misery–a positive virtue.  His vision was everyone wearing a mask in perpetuity, then disappearing into nothingness for all eternity.  He specifically requested that his grave be hidden, if memory serves, and located far out in the wilds.

Actually, here is the specific request:

I categorically forbid the dissection of my body for any purpose whatsoever; I must pressingly request that it be kept for fourty-eight hours in the room in which I die … During this time an express messenger shall be sent to M. Le Normand, firewood merchant … to take my body and in his care transport it in the said firewood wagon to the woods on my Malmaison property … where I wish it to be placed, without any sort of ceremony … once the grave is filled in, acorns are to be scattered over it, so that in time the grave is again overgrown, and when the undergrowth is grown as it was before, the traces of my grave will vanish from the face of the earth as I like to think memory of me will be effaced from men’s minds

To state the obvious, he didn’t love himself, and no doubt felt that was his proper destiny.  This is not a life to be wished for by anyone.  It was not happy.

And this is worthy pointing out, because I am seeing Darth Vader touted as a hero.  And as I’ve commented before, we made serial killers a kind of cultural folk hero long ago.  These images are antidotes to fear, for fearful people.  They represent Power, and Power is an antidote to helplessness. To get rid of fear they amplify it.  This is not smart, happy, healthy, or likely to end well.

Now, I think all of this has been clear, to varying extents, to many people across the ages.  This is the basic point genuine spiritual teachers try to share, each in their own way.  Christ taught that love is all that matters.  What is love?  REAL love is the opposite of narcissism.  It is the opposite of hierarchy and the NEED for sacrifice.

And nearly all spiritual teachers have recommended solitude.  What happens in solitude?  You confront your–what do we call them?–your inner demons.  By doing so, you INDIVIDUATE.  The narcissistic spell falls away.  The Buddha taught this.  The Hindus instituted this, among many ways, with the practice of the Sanyassins.  The Sufis did this.  Many aboriginal tribes of all places often had at least shamans that would do this.  The Scandinavians had a ritual of sitting outside overnight.

And I think only as a person who EXISTS in this way can you really make contact with the one TRUE God, which is a spirit which is infinite and good, and who does not CARE what we do.  We are all microbes.  We can either choose to live in accordance with God, or not.  The laws don’t change.

And to do what I probably often do, I will state the obvious.  I’m on I think pretty firm ground in saying that I operate at a different level from most people, so I’m never sure that what is obvious to me is obvious to others.

The specifics of all existing religions are almost entirely spurious.  God doesn’t care what two men do with their dicks in a closed room.   God does not care if you keep the Sabbath or go to church.  There are perhaps some religions, like Buddhism, more conducive to creating open, good, individuated people than others, but no religion is better than another.  Some PEOPLE, as individuals, are better than others, but for my part I think all of it should be scrapped, and the whole thing brought within the realms of physics and psychology.  What a beautiful thing if we actually used our technology to help people become happier, healthier, and life more harmonious for all of us.

As I have said many times, the Zero Point Field, or what Ervin Laszlo called the Akashic Field, or Lynn Taggart just THE Field is how this whole thing could and should be brought into science.

What is stopping this from happening?  People of Fear.

I am reading Joan Grant’s book “The Eyes of Horus”.  I really like her work, and have decided to read all her books.  They feel real to me.

She says in there, in what she purports to be a memory: “Father says fear is the only real enemy.  Set and fear are two names of the God of Evil.

Now, I have mentioned this before, but there is a Temple of Set in Santa Barbara.  It is my understanding that among others that some Rockefellers have mansions there.

This is from that page: “Highly individualistic in basis, the Temple promotes the idea that practitioners should seek self-deification and thus attain an immortality of consciousness.”

Does everyone get to become a God?  No, only a select few.  Who can we assume runs the thing?  Probably some very powerful people.

Here is the thing: I would conflate both this basic fantasy–which is what it is, according to how I understand the universe–with Transhumanism.

I wrote in my notes the other day that “Transhumanism is an effort to reach an eternal Now or Present without openness.”

Both of these idea and ideals are efforts at skipping the most important step in the process, which is becoming fully human, of individuating, of contacting and processing and learning from your wounds, from your rage, your fear, your sadness.  Both stem from absolutely unmanageable shadows, filled with hurt, fear, loss, pain and a sense of division and separation.  The fantasy of becoming a relative God in one way or another is simply Hierarchicalism taken to the next level.  It is narcissism taken to the next level.  It is sickness, unhappy, unhealthy sickness, taken to the next level.

It has long seemed likely to me that these hidden power elites torture their children to keep them in the fold.  They grow up with the same insane need for power and unlimited wealth and privilege as their parents.  The families protect their position by destroying all hopes of happiness in their children.  I don’t think most people are able to grasp how unhealthy and sick some of these homes are, and will not share here any more than I already have in previous posts how I got a look at all this.

Which brings me back to Nationalism.  In the modern era Nationalism as an ideology has mostly been used for war.  Did the United States REALLY need to fight all the wars that it has?  I don’t see it.  What good did our war in Afghanistan do?

And Communism is really Nationalism simply taken onto a global stage.  If every existing nation is an empire built on the bodies of conquered people–Russia certainly qualifies, as does China, France, Germany, the United States etc.–then Globalism, or Internationalism, is really just a desire to impose the same fate on the planet as a whole.  It is a desire to eliminate cultural diversity, and impose a uniform anti-morality based on violence and conformity–upon generalized NARCISSISM of an ancient variety, based on fear–upon the whole planet.

The Globalists, in effect, want to do the same thing to the whole planet that Caesar did to Gaul, or the Scandinavians to the indigenous people, or the Russians to all the many varied peoples in that enormous empire called Russia, or that we ourselves did to the Native Americans.

As I see it, our two choices are stairs or the steamroller.  The steamroller has been winning a lot lately.  Either we embrace the notion and practice of individual flourishing, or we lose our humanity.  And here is the thing: the people pushing this are only pushing it because they themselves have already decided NOT to individuate, not to grow, not to open themselves to Life.  They have already lost their own battles, or at least have been losing for a long time, and of course lying about it.

I had a dream the other night I will share.  I was in some sort of old cathedral.  It was dark.  Someone said “take the stairs. You will find it interesting.”  Mozart was somehow involved–just by feeling–then I saw two men dressed like 18th century gentlemen, then I saw George Washington at the foot of the stairs.  He watched me go up the stairs.  As I was ascending someone said “It was Frank Lloyd Wright who figured it all out.”

I got to the top and it was absolutely astonishing.  A roof had been built on the church that crossed the sky, and the whole scene was filled with amazing colors.  I could see where the walls of that cathedral ended, and someone said “there are the supports”, and I looked at a support that was at least miles away rose up into the sky. It was so dizzying I had to sit down in the dream.  Light was streaming in everywhere.  Someone said “this is much better than windows”.  The roof extended many miles in every direction, but somehow did not block the light.  Then the structure I was on became buoyant in segments, and I wondered if it would fly.  Then I woke up.

This brings me back to America.  Most nationalisms are not that different in principle from rooting for a sports team.  Germans have their history, and if they want to they can look at the good stuff and feel proud–Goethe, Bach, Kepler, Planck, etc.–and SO CAN EVERY OTHER NATION.  But these are parochial attachments.  They are contingent, local, subjective.  And to be sure often the great heroes, as seen later, were attacked or ignored in their own times.

What I want to suggest here is that in that one respect America is no different.  We can point to victories in the World Wars, putting a man on the moon, etc., but this, to me, is not the salient point.  This is not different than being a Stealers fan even though you know Roethlisberger is a creep because they win a lot.  America has its baggage.  As many self loathing Americans, and haters worldwide, have obsessively commented, we have done a lot of bad things too.

BUT AMERICA IS THE ONLY NATION ON THE PLANET FOUNDED ON THE BASIS OF HUMANISTIC PRINCIPLES WE TRIED TO TAKE SERIOUSLY.

Did we have slaves?  Yes.  But slavery was universal at that time.  Nobody objected to it.  American Indians practiced it.  Most Africans practiced it.  The Chinese and Muslims practiced it.  Slavery is a universal in human history.  Why? Narcissism.  It was in one sense practical to force people to do your work, and in another an easy way to get a sense of superiority, aka hierarchy.

But how was slavery ended?  ON THE BASIS OF PRINCIPLE.  Lincoln did not set out to free the slaves, but the Civil War started because he was a relentless and articulate opponent of slavery.

What does founding a nation based on principles get you?  A STAIRCASE.  A path for social and personal growth.

America is an anti-narcissistic project.  It is founded on what was then the radical notion of HUMAN EQUALITY.  It was founded on the idea that all lives matter.  Did we then live out the “content of our creed”?  No, but we created space for people like Martin Luther King Junior to point that out.  We created a path for change, for evolution, for a system not rooted in tradition, ritual, and the ceremonial abuse of power.

Nothing like this had been done before.  If Europe has often had democracies over the last one hundred years, we blazed the path.  If most of the world speaks of “human rights” we did more than any other nation to make that possible.

If we say that racism is evil, then that is a white European notion, one founded in the enlightened notion that we are all equal.

True Liberalism–which is to say a true commitment to life, liberty, the right to the fruits of your own labor (versus having them stolen by whoever could, which is most societies for most of history), and the pursuit of happiness–is anti-narcissistic.  It assumes that we all have both the right and the duty to grow as human beings.  American was EXPLICITLY founded as a nation where ethical growth, personal growth, individuation, was protected and nurtured.

So you can really look at the flag in two ways.  You can see both the triumphs and failures, and do some kind of math in your head, or you can look at it and see a dream, an ideal, a glowing city on the hill, whose defects–indeed like those in each of us–can and should be acknowledged, but which can be IMPROVED.

The way I interpreted my dream was that the initial cathedral was America, whose creation started long ago somewhere in Europe as a dream and vision.  But was eventually built was a roof that was big enough for all nations.

The windows were ideologies, prejudices, subjective and narcissistic tribalistic thinking, and they were DONE AWAY WITH.  The same light shined the same way on everyone.  And once this was done, everyone and everything became covered in light, and fit to rise yet further, to things we cannot even imagine.

In your own life, if you do something thoughtless, cruel, unkind, stupid, you don’t put a bullet in your head.  You don’t say “I made a mistake so I must die”.  No, you recognize your defect, do your best to understand and correct it, and keep moving.

It is a signature aspect of the narcissistic personality that when they do something bad, they never take responsibility.  They don’t grow.  They can’t grow, without honest introspection, so they blame everyone but themselves.  Does that sound familiar?  You can see it written between the lines in the news every day.

And so there is an obvious parallelism with our worst critics.  They don’t want to understand and grow.  They want to destroy.  Our past is their Out There, which means the Present must be sacrificed to quiet their own anxieties rooted in their very real, very large, and obvious personal character flaws; and quite often their own outright wickedness, which arises from a thirst for power, money, and privilege.

I will end this with a James Baldwin quote that I think captures this balance well:

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

What is he pointing to?  The staircase.

 

https://www.theepochtimes.com/dr-harvey-risch-why-are-vaccinated-people-getting-covid-at-higher-rates-than-the-unvaccinated_4602409.html

I just had a bot pull it off my Facebook page, and threaten me with being banned.  I of course immediately reposted the essential ideas in my own words, and a search string to find the original interview, along with quite a few f bombs.

As I said there, what I don’t get is the level of fear needed to believe that someone with the credentials of a Harvey Risch should be marginalized, attacked, and censored.

Even five years ago I think most people who identified as “liberal” would have found the idea of suppressing actual SCIENCE, as conducted by qualified SCIENTISTS–people with Ph.D’s and long careers in relevant fields–abhorrent.

How has this happened?  How has this dark cloud been allowed to descend on all of us with almost no public outcry?  Why is the President of Yale not shouting from the rooftops about the cancelling of a talented and intelligent member of his faculty?  Why are ALL the Presidents of ALL the Universities not shouting out about academic suppression–SCIENTIFIC suppression–which cannot end well.  It never ends well.

Can any actually informed person claim that the idea that “my ideas are better than yours so yours should be suppressed” is new?  As I have no doubt pointed out before, the gutters of Constantinople literally ran with blood at times from street battles between factions fighting over the exact interpretation of the Trinity.  I don’t remember which side won, but that side made sure that NOBODY was ever allowed to speak the heresy they opposed again, under pain of death.

Was America not FOUNDED precisely to stop all this sort of thing?  And leaving legal issues alone, consider the PRINCIPLE of free speech.  Free speech is about open debate, which is about the competition of ideas.  All the ideas enter the ring, and perform to the ability of their advocates to articulate and reason them.  Over time, after going through many trials, some emerge as better than others.  This is an EFFICIENT means of identifying and acting on the BEST IDEAS.

Why would we want to get rid of an efficient system?  Well, only the CORRUPT benefit from the suppression of free speech.  Only people who KNOW they are lying and cheating benefit from the suppression of free speech.

So any AUTHENTIC Liberal has to shout out “even the Nazis and KKK have the right to free speech, even if I hate the motherfuckers.”  That’s what I remember Norman Lear saying back in the day.  If memory serves, he commented specifically on the (small and poorly attended) neo-Nazi march in Illinois back in I think the 80’s.

I may die in jail.   Some nut job may shoot me.  But I won’t ever stop doing my best to speak THE truth AS I SEE IT.

Obviously, every person speaking is speaking their truth, but the ones worth listening to–and I strive to be one of those–are speaking a truth YOU CAN SHARE.  They are saying things like “you should listen to Harvey Risch, because he is qualified and has something to say worth hearing”.  That can easily become OUR truth.  There is nothing solipsistic about that.  I am saying THIS IS WHAT I BELIEVE AND HERE IS WHY.

And if you think my reasoning is flawed, then in a free market of ideas, you can say so.  Maybe my reasoning IS flawed.  If you point out where and how I can repair it, and improve it, you are doing me a favor.

Only narcissistic bullies fear criticism.  Only narcissistic bullies tie their ideas to their core sense of self, not least because they dont’ HAVE a core sense of self.  What they are really tying their ideas to is a role they are playing and very attached to.

I have a post to make on all that, but I’m not yet sure I want to do it today.

But please click on the link.  If you don’t have a subscription to Epoch Times, as I say it seems to have been rebroadcast, although I personally choose to subscribe to that publication.

I will note the first post on this blog, published some 14 years ago, deals with global warming at length.

Short version: it is bullshit. The “science” looks exactly like the “science” behind lockdowns, masks, and “vaccines”, which is to the only real difference is that intelligent, motivated, formerly honest people have been whoring themselves out for decades rather than years.

Slightly longer:

1) The Earth has been covered in ice and devoid of ice. Everything in between is thus in the range of natural variation.

1.1) The resolution of the ice cores used for all this is 1,000 years or so, so no honest SCIENTIST can say anything about this period, nor WOULD they.

2) The only relevant temperatures are those about one mile up, in the Upper Troposphere, both because they are much more stable, and thus easier to average, and more importantly because THIS IS WHERE THE HYPOTHESIS (if it were formatted as an hypothesis, which would mean falsifiable, which would mean there would be SOMETHING, like a snow storm in Miami on July 4th, which would cause the Warmists to say “we were wrong; right now they would just call the snow “clinate change” and double down until wooly mammoths make a reappearance) predicts the warming must ORIGINATE.

Water vapor is the main greenhouse gas in the lower atmosphere. That only transitions to a CO2 dominance higher up. Whatever climate forcing might happen would show up as rapid differential warming there.

This prediction is how global warming would or could become a formally scientific hypothesis.

3) The science is therefor corrupt, since there are enormous and known problems with ground measurements, not least that many are generated without measurement using algorithms that assume warming.

4) People who lie once will lie twice; and if they will lie about one thing most will lie about anything.

5) Ergo: we all need to fight this bullshit as sggressively as possible. It is pure fucking lunacy, just like COVID.

If these narcissistic solipsists get their way, millions will die and billions will suffer, all for NO REASON.  These rotten human beings DO NOT CARE. Period.

A narcissist is a person who by definition has never felt loved.

This may seem counterintuitive, but I think it is true.

What narcissists do is interact with themselves, using other people as proxies to hold their delusions about themselves.  Every conversation is a monologue, but it is vitally important for a physical person to be there to sustain the illusion.

Narcissistic supply, then, is really the fuel that sustains their defensive insularity.  In effect, it helps them protect themselves from themselves, because there is no solitude like a narcissistic solitude.  Such people are alone with others; and much more alone when actually alone.

I’ve been playing with all this for the past week or so.  I haven’t quite figured it out, but this is a progress of sorts.

You can’t heal what you can’t feel.

I can’t have said that first, but I’m the first one to say it today on this blog.

I am in general trying, not so much to suppress, as not to indulge my long habit of processing each thought that comes up like a bubble.

I have realized that, possibly, these thoughts are a somewhat healthy habit I have developed to substitute negative thoughts for at least relatively neutral ones.

It is an interesting (to me at least) fact of my particularly way of being in the world that thoughts of all sorts are continually percolating up in me.  Some of them are good, some otherwise, and most related to whatever specific things I have going on at the moment, making them spatially and temporally circumscribed.

But I am realizing there is a way of being where my brain is NOT always going, and I DON’T always feel the need to say something about something to somebody.  Just silence and presence.

If you read this blog much, you know what I am talking about.  I just always feel like justifying myself for some reason.  Except when I don’t.  Not sure why it lands on heads one day and tails the next, but that is how it is.

Anyway, I just watched a good talk by Jordan Peterson on social media, and recollected that I woke up yesterday thinking maybe media violence explains VASTLY more than we have supposed.

Everybody on Twitter has been socialized for extreme media violence, or at least most of them.  They’ve watched horror movies, crime dramas about gruesome murders, war movies, and god knows what.  A good percentage have played video games for many hours a day for many years.  One writer I was reading the other day talked about how some childhood friend of his that used to be addicted to Grand Theft Auto and pot is now a fully blown Communist.

This sort of transition from fuckup to uniform wearing bully is common enough in recent history.

Communists and Nazis alike appealed to their societies trash heaps.  People went from addicts to Commissar and Inquisitors in months, with no training, and no limits or supervision.  As I’ve noted, the Cheka liked to kill men accused of something or other (details didn’t matter any more than evidence, and obviously to be accused was to be guilty), then make sex slaves out of their wives and daughters and have drug and alcohol fueled sex parties.  Why not?  There were no rules.  Lenin liked people capable of things like that, who had no moral scruples of any sort.

So I’ve been watching this landscape for some time, and strangely enough, in a land characterized by the most liberal political order in human history, and the most wealth and freedom, potential jack booted thugs seem to be out there in prodigious and unbelievable numbers.

Here is the point I logged on to make, though: the effects of media violence are REAL, well documented, and LASTING.  Letting kids grow up watching 300 and playing Medal of Honor has consequences that can be measured and tracked, and almost no one is talking about all this any more.

The political angle is, or was, simple, from a left wing perspective: what is the connection between media violence and mass shootings, especially by young men?  10-15 years ago they felt liberal enough running articles like this, and talking about them.  NPR may have done a segment on this, for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2704015/

Here is another link: https://www.encyclopedia.com/media/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/desensitization-and-media-effects

I could post links like this indefinitely.  Here is the thing: watching violence leads to increased interpersonal aggression. It also leads to desensitization, which is to say diminished empathy, compassion, and overall social intelligence.  It diminishes both impulse control and social connection.

These are invisible diseases out there, which have been radiating out in wave after wave for many years now.  I remember when I was young how people Alan Alda and Rob Reiner would speak out against media violence.  We were told to watch PBS. I always thought this was good advice  My own kids DID watch PBS.  They were watching Clifford the Big Red Dog when other kids were watching The Lord of the Rings.  I remember vaguely traumatizing one of my kids at age 10 or so watching a Sherlock Holmes where they showed a body hanging.

But to me, horrible images SHOULD trigger something.  You are not a better person if you can watch beheading videos, or graphic torture.  Quite the contrary.

Obviously, as adults, we don’t always choose in the WORLD what we see, but we can obviously control our media.

If Peterson is pointing out that Twitter feeds malignant narcissism, as I think it does, I think the same can be said for violent media.  How can anything that desensitizes you not also make you more superficial, lastingly callow, less engaged, less understanding, less human?

And depression is also a common outcome of all this.  Depression and addiction are both diseases of disconnection, and losing the capacity to relate honestly in an intimate way with others is bound to cause long term disconnection.  A mob might justly be seen as the family of people characterized by malignant narcissism.  They are all pointed the same way, feeling the same things, and this feels as close to connection as emotionally distant, disturbed and traumatized people are likely to get.  And if it feels good, we get more of it.  Obviously.

So I would encourage this generations Alan Aldas and Rob Reiners–or for that matter the two hypocrites themselves–to get their heads out of their asses and bring this issue to the forefront.

Politically, of course, this has devolved, as all complex issues will when treated by ideologues, which is to say emotional children.  The issue now is Guns Ueber Alles.  Vee haff to get ze guns.  Vee haff to get zee gunz.

That’s the rallying cry.  But of course as we are seeing in the Netherlands and Australia and elsewhere, fighting abusive government is a different animal when the nation has been disarmed.  So of course all this anti-gun stuff, which has not the SLIGHTEST interest in the cultural and societal causes of all this–which more or less literally in the rhetoric seems to believe guns shoot themselves–is just generic Communism.

And if Communism is “breaking things and lying about it”, then it is the natural home of malignant narcissists, who cannot but welcome into their ranks young kids who share their delusions.

The basic spiritual task is sitting in peace, and working in peace.  Being neither numb nor anxious.  This frees up Life to flow readily, slower and faster, in larger and smaller portions, but freely and spontaneously.

What I am noticing in my work is that I tend to wish I could just wave a magic wand and get it done.  Something like in Harry Potter, or telekinetic powers like Eleven.

And I was pondering this.  Nobody ever said this was how it works.  Or did they?

Think about in how many respects we CAN get virtually instantaneous gratification.  Place an order on Amazon for damn near anything, you have it the next day.  Go to the grocery store and almost any food you could want you can find.

And get on the internet: almost any EXPERIENCE, of hope, whimsy, terror, sex, romance, humor is available on what amounts to a sort of mood organ.  You can transform your state with NO WORK almost instantly, in any number of directions.

How would this habit of vicarious and instantaneous gratification NOT bleed over in some ways?  Why would kids raised like this NOT come to sort of the world as a magical place where whatever they can dream up just appears with little work; and conversely, learn to resent the world when it pushes back in any way?

Honest work takes time, and long term effort.  Starts and stops, hits and misses, but overall perseverance and time.  How is that sort of work portrayed in movies?  The montage.

Ironically enough, as they point out, the montage avoids the work of watching the work.

Yeah, so I’m going to try and watch this tendency tomorrow.  God knows I have plenty of work to practice with.

You know, people tend to attribute an almost metaphysical quality to “the shadow”, at least if they know Jung came up with it (at least I THINK he did, so maybe “know” is the wrong; maybe if they have been similarly misinformed).

Here is how I feel it: the Shadow is much like the Upside Down in Stranger Things (which by the way is the only show I have ever binge watched; the implausibilities are vaguely cringe-worthy, but I think they get some things mythically right; the image of Vecna has been useful for me personally, in ways I won’t get into right now).

Damn that was something like 17th century English prose.

Here is what I want to say: the Shadow is mainly passive.  It is grief and loss, loneliness, and fear.  It is a child shrinking from an enormous and incomprehensible world.   This is its undisturbed state.  This is its natural state.

But because it is passive and weak, it NEEDS to be defensive.  It needs to fight aggressions before they happen.  And defensiveness easily turns to aggressiveness, which easily turns to cruelty.  It like a whole series of wheels go into motion unconsciously, and what is profoundly illogical makes emotional sense.

And because this process is largely invisible, we can easily imagine it happening in the shadows.

But we all have flashlights.  They are called Attention, specifically open, undemanding, responsive, and curious attention.  You cannot conquer irrational fear and anger until you feel clearly where they come from.  That is my view, which I see with my emotional eyes.