Month: July 2022

I will put it this way today: courage is staying in the fight.

And here is the thing: it is one thing to stay in the Big Fight, when people are depending on you, when you incur shame if you fail, and glory if you succeed.  This applies obviously to war and other forms of violence, but also to a fight for, whatever, that involves other people.

But the main fight I am talking about is the fight to remain true to your values even when it is difficult.  People used to talk, in this country, about this sort of fight all the time.  They talked about integrity and wisdom and character.

Those seem in some places now to be forgotten, and in others to be White People Values, which would be something I would gladly claim, if some idiot wants to cede the gateways to happiness to me and people like me.  That leaves, for such people, moral scraps from the table that they can add to the economic scraps. It’s a quick route to poverty in all respects.

But what I would say is that it is EASY and INVISIBLE when you give up certain fights.  For me to give up the fight for healing would be invisible to most people.  I would still be me, and those who like me as I am would continue to do so.

BUT I WOULD KNOW.  So in these long term daily, even hourly fights, the battle is with delusion, detachment, quitting.  And in this arena most quitting happens as self deception, when you just start pretending that something you valued was never important to you.  It takes a microsecond.  As I say, it can be made to disappear.  You forget you ever cared, and then forget that you forgot.  It’s done.  Down the memory hole.

So resisting this process is what I will call courage today.

My progress lately has mainly consisted in beginning to grasp at a somatic, physical level just how much pain I have been living with.

And it seems to me if you enter this pain, dare it to hurt you more, embrace it, then you begin to win the fight.  That is what seems to be happening with me.

It’s really, really hard.  But that is the point of courage.  You don’t need courage to lay in bed and binge watch TV while eating Cheetos.  You need courage to confront honestly what it is in you that views that life denying process as better than feeling whatever it is you are suppressing.

I think I’ve figured out in some detail what happened to me, and the overarching psychology of it all.  That has been a hard part: I have major PTSD, but I don’t even know what happened to me, since it seemingly happened before I could form long term memories.

But I was born with a good mind, and a constitution able to withstand enormous damage, and I think I’ve sorted it out.  Processing it is another story, but I think I can get this done.

And I get short moments of lightness, in a good way, an airiness, and a sense of space, all of which feel good.  So many of us live lives where it feels like “the world” is pressing in somehow, and that there is never enough time.

There is always enough time.  Perhaps not to meet others expectations, but certainly to work effectively to the limits of your physical stamina without feeling rushed or stressed.  If your body is in the fight in a consistent way, there is no need to add anxiety.

And I would say that in important respects life IS work.  It just is.  What will feel good to you remembering at the end of your life will be conscious, purposive activity of the mind, emotions or body.  It’s work walking around Disneyland.  It’s work watching a football game attentively.  It’s even work having a spirited conversation about anything at a bar.  It takes focus.

Some things the energy just flows easily, and in other cases it doesn’t.  What a huge difference in the quality of all our lives it would be if each of us could bring a spirit of acceptance and fun to whatever it is we do to make money.  If you are going to call it a “living”, you might as well live while doing it, and living is not rejecting drudgery, even if it truly could be viewed as unpleasant.  Somewhere out there are happy sausage makers, and happy latrine cleaners.

 

I think one of the secondary gains of being overweight is that you have less energy.  This may seem like a loss, and in many respects it is, but less energy for anxious people means less anxiety.  Running out of energy means less worry, so if you run out of energy more quickly, you worry less.

I really, truly think that every fat person you see has many layers of emotional baggage they need to lose before that weight will finally come off and stay off.  They are fat because there are benefits for them–good reasons for them–for being fat, over and above the fact that food–particularly fat and simple carbs in combination–will calm you down.  I think that combination specifically and measurably reduces cortisol levels.

So in my considered view, all clinical obesity needs some clinical psychology more than dietary advice.  They know what to do.  They just have good reasons not to do it.

And I am one of them.  As in most things, I’m stuck in the middle. I’m not fat, but I’m not skinny.  I’m not athletic, but I’m not really out of shape.  I’m always caught between competing intrapsychic factions.

I think this is where I am going to make my stand, though.  It’s measurable, and a whole lot of things have to happen right to make lasting improvements–which is to say gains in losing.

Near as I can tell, my lean body mass is about 190, so I can reasonably shoot for 225-230 as a long term maintenance goal.  I will advise when I hit it.  I lost 15 pounds and kept it off when COVID hit, and now have maintained another 15 pound loss for a couple months.  So now I’m going for the next level.

I think Holly Golightly definitely had sex for money.  Not nightly, not as a dedicated professional courtesan, but often enough that it was a major source of income.  The guy pounding on her door when she gets home is not a jilted date who bought her dinner, but a paying customer who failed to receive his product.  I think this is true.  Certainly, a girl forced to runaway at 14–or earlier, since it’s unclear how long she and her brother were out on the mean streets– and marry a much older man is going to be able to do things like that.

When she realizes Paul, who she keeps calling Fred, is really a gigolo, she says “I understand perfectly.”  And she does.  She also says something like “acting crazy keeps people off balance and its better that way.”  So most of what she does is calculated at some level, if only the intuitive and instinctual.

So when she falls asleep next to him, as awkward and weird as it feels in the movie, it’s something–falling asleep in bed with a strange man–she’s done many times.

So Paul/Fred is her secret equal.  He too sells sex for money.  This creates an instant affinity, in addition to him not being an obvious dick, like most of the men she services.

And this OJ guy must have been with her for a while.  He was an obvious skirt chaser, but had no interest any more in her.  They likely shared a bed for six months to a year, while he taught her not to be a yokel.  When Paul calls him for the money, he says in effect “I don’t owe her.”  Then he thinks a second and repeats “I really don’t owe her anything.”  Why?  He had paid her well.  He may have even put up the money for the apartment, which was why he objected to it being a dump; but not too strongly, since he still liked her and had good memories of her, even though she disappointed him by being “fake”, which of course she was.  She was playing games with everyone.

And when she was confiding in Paul, she was more or less thinking of him as a true equal, in a world where she was in reality different.

And I think she called him Fred not just because he reminded her of him, but also because he reminded her of her goal of saving money for the two of them.

And obviously she knew Sally Tomato was up to something.  She was through all this vastly more clever and calculating than she seemed.

Her character actually reminded me of a woman I knew in college.

But anyway these $50 “tips” for the “powder room” were wink/wink, nudge/nudge payments for going up to her room and having a few drinks and who knows.  And no doubt she fulfilled her commission many times.  She had been there a year.  She went to Tiffany’s to feel classy whenever she felt like a dirty whore, as she likely did when she rolled up at 6am or whatever in the opening scene, following a paid night out (or in).

And it’s hard to know, now, what to think of Mickey Rooney as a buck toothed Japanese man. It’s worth keeping in mind we were at war with Japan as recently as 1945, and our soldiers occupied Japan proper for many years.  We were probably still there in 1961, when the movie was made, and so many of those who saw it may well have seen action in the Pacific or been stationed in Japan.  Those wounds were likely fading by then, but not gone.

I will make this comment: it takes knowledge and imagination to even have a hope of “looking” at the past the way it would have been seen back then.  But any time you do it, you cannot but see progress on many fronts, along with regress on others.

It seems to me that the audiences back then KNEW a lot of things that they did not TALK about.  Most of them likely picked up instantly on what took me a couple hours to key in on.  If the men were seeing hookers, they didn’t talk about it.  For that matter, if women were paying men to service them, nobody talked about that either.

So you have this huge subterranean world that was KNOWN to large groups of people, but which would never show up in books, magazines or of course movies.  That stuff didn’t start until maybe the late 60’s.

I will wonder aloud, though, what sort of film OJ had in mind for Holly.  I guess there is no way to know for sure, but it likely wasn’t one calling for tremendous acting skill.

I just watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  That last scene with the cat in the rain is great.

And there is a part of me that wants to say “life isn’t like that for most of us”, but another part wants to say, “and PARTICULARLY if that is true, that is the point.”

If no one is happy, is it not good to at least see it on film?  And if people ARE happy, then it isn’t that unrealistic.  The truth, of course, is mixed, and none of us are either fully in control of our destinies, or fully helpless.  Love does happen.  That is obvious enough.  And love with enough work can certainly last a lifetime.  I believe that.

And I think these sorts of things soften people up, make them more open.  I have recently seen this concept of emotional agility occur in several places.  Don’t movies, if you participate in them, take you through your emotional paces?  Up, down, sideways, loops, upside down, slow, fast, hot, cold?

Now, watching three movies a day blunts this.  I watch maybe 1 a week at most, probably more like 2-3 a month, and always something I’ve chosen.  And they stick with me a while.  I digest them.  I’m like a cow with however many stomachs they have.

But contrast that with, say, Mouchette.

Is the world not more like Mouchette for many than most of us would like to realize?  Yes, I think so.  Life has been brutal and hard for most of humanity for most of history, and probably worse for little girls than little boys, although there has no doubt been plenty of misery for all.

And it’s worth recollecting, since it is easy to forget on this side of the Atlantic, that famine was common in Europe during and after both the First and Second World Wars.  Audrey Hepburn endured starvation in Holland.  It caused her a lot of health problems, and I will speculate may have contributed to her relatively early death from cancer.  She also remembers seeing a boxcar full of Jews being loaded, and seeing a miserable little boy in pajamas about her age.  Many French were directly affected by the fighting and the Nazi occupation.  Au Revoir Les Enfants is in my understanding autobiographical for Louis Malle.

Spain was ruled by a dictator until the mid-1970’s.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall (while thinking about it, I will note that Kaliningrad, while larger, might usefully be compared to West Berlin, and at the moment to West Berlin after the blockade, in an interesting historical twist), most of us have forgotten “history”.  It’s all golden now, we were told.  We can’t fuck it up now, we were told.  You can trust your leaders now, we were told.

No, until we are training our children to be mature, responsible, industrious, and informed citizens, the risk of a complete collapse into the Dark Ages–with a technocratic twist–remains between possible and likely.

So that’s my Mean Red.  I think I’m going to try and remember that.  My much nicer comment is that this sweet movie, which is what it was, was a tonic for me, today.  That’s worth something.

And even within the movie they didn’t sugarcoat a lot of things.  “Holly” came from an abusive family she had to run away from (as did one of my grandfathers, who also ran away at 14) and married a much older man out of desperation.  Her manic antics had reasons behind them, which the writers and directors assumed people would get, just as they got that Peppard was in effect a gigolo.

Two cents, soon to be 1.75 cents.

It seems to me that a life lived optimally feels most of the time like a smooth flowing stream.  Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think this can be the case even in difficult circumstances, but this is a very difficult skill to learn.

I feel that our first hour awake in the morning is a key indicator where we are at.  Do you wonder what interesting things will happen, what wonders you will see, who you will meet, what stories you will hear, and what you will learn?

Or are you more like “Dear God, let today be mostly like yesterday.  Yesterday wasn’t too bad.  Please let nothing awful happen today and please help me get through it without too much trouble, pain and worry?”

The task, obviously, is to get from one to the other, but this is not easy.  It is very hard.

The Anaconda Strategy, as articulated by the brilliant but prodigiously fat Winfield Scott, amounted to “to get to Richmond, which is 100 miles away, we have to first get to Vicksburg, which is 1,000 miles away.”  And he was right, of course.  Vicksburg was Grant’s first real major victory, and how he was made Generalissimo of the whole conflict for the Union. It’s an interesting site.  You should visit it.

I am always reading multiple books.  A case can be made in both directions, of course, but practically that is what I do.

One current book is “Lean and Strong.”

There is a lot of good content here.  I don’t think any of it is particularly original, other than the specific use to which he has competently put it. But it’s a good book.  I would recommend it.

What I am realizing is that Cognitive Psychology has gotten a lot better than it was in my first foray into it, back in the 90’s or so.  As you would imagine, I’ve read a LOT of self help and psychology books, but other than “Learned Optimism” few were much help to me.  They sell the books by making everything sound easy.  But it isn’t.  Not for me.  There is no easy three step process, nothing you can accomplish in three weeks; and perhaps to the point, nothing you SHOULD be able to accomplish in three weeks.  There is no Enlightenment for sale on Amazon.

The two specific schools of thought and presumably practice that seem interesting are called Self Determination Theory and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

And I will note that within these models “safe spaces” and the habit and following demand of being allowed to avoid any hint of unpleasantness is every bit as unhealthy as it would seem to be on the face of it.  Trying to structure a world where you always get your way or go into hyperarousal is more or less definitionally pathological.

Martin Seligman (and no doubt a few others) is what some have taken to calling Positive Psychology 1.0.  What some are calling Positive Psychology 2.0, which was certainly latent in Seligman’s work, but perhaps better articulated now (I have yet to read, for example, this book ), focuses, more or less, on embracing the suck.  On recognizing that life is just fucking hard sometimes, but that some of the BEST stuff comes from all this.  You can, to some great extent, make bad experiences good by how you deal with them.

[I will note that another book that had a significant influence on me back in the 1980’s, which anticipated this in what I will call Maturity Therapy, and which he called Moral Therapy, was “The Myth of Neurosis”.]

And what I see in my own consciousness is that latent traumas sit like giant stones in the flow of your consciousness.  They disrupt focus.  They sap energy by forcing you to learn how to keep them from conscious awareness.

And a stone is a stone, of course.  It is a big, heavy, thick object.  But we are dealing with emotion, and the reality is that big, heavy, thick things can be gradually worn away with attention.  They break into smaller stones, and smaller stones, and eventually become integrated.  That integration frees up energy for positive experience.  We no longer need work so hard to keep them from intruding–intrusion, of course, being a more or less defining feature of trauma–and that makes openness to good things much easier.

And I have spoken of Dan Siegels SIFT model.  I don’t know if he came up with it, but he is the first one I heard talk about it.  Sensation, Image, Feeling, Thought.  As I have said, I think this is the order, and the two pairs are Sensation/image, and Feeling/thought.

And this morning it seems to me you need a strategy for optimizing flow and engagement at each level.  You need a method of dealing with sensation, which for me is Kum Nye.

Images I am feeling poetry works, and perhaps visual art, and perhaps interesting and good film.  The scene in the birch trees in Tarkovky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” is a good example.  Another odd one that pops in my head sometimes is the mailman riding his bike erratically at the beginning of the Sacrifice.  The key is evocation of sensations and feelings, pushing it out in both directions.

And I suppose I perhaps ought to also pair sensation/feeling, and image/thought.  That works too.  Kum Nye certainly works with the first pair.

And Cognitive Psychology obviously works well with thought.

And biofeedback, including neurofeedback, works with all of it.

I am slowly reconnecting with my spiritual energy, slowly making contact with my real tribe, which is out there somewhere.  I cannot begin to describe how excruciatingly difficult this has been.  Without being able to say this for certain, I feel I know from personal experience what the experience of war is like, of painful loss, and sustained emotional terror and physical difficulty.

My work continues.  It is raining outside, which I have always found pleasant.  It is a soft rain, moistening the world.

 

Take a look at this: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/07/not-laughing-now-wood-burning-stoves-firewood-short-supply-germany-citizens-fear-freezing-death-due-gas-shortages/

And this: https://www.theepochtimes.com/dutch-farmers-protest-climate-mandates-that-would-cut-livestock-by-30-percent_4570267.html

“Global Warming” has been a vanity project until now. It’s been a talking point, free of cost and effort, and a good reason to denounce–that is the word–the deniers, the skeptics, the SCIENTISTS who disagreed.

But 30% of Dutch farmers are going to be bankrupted by rules around global warming. There is a run in Germany on wood burning stoves and wood. Why? To prevent the efforts to prevent–or slow down, or strike a pose against–Global Warming from causing them to FREEZE TO DEATH.

Ponder that. Take your time. You might want to swirl in the predictions that have been made every five years or so since about 1995 that the polar ice caps would be melted within 5 years.

This whole fucking thing is like a fucking joke that people forgot was a joke. EVEN IF HUMANS WERE CAUSING MAJOR CHANGE, which we clearly aren’t, the whole race would need to cooperate. People warming themselves with wood fires–as perhaps half of humanity still does at times–would need to stop. India and China would need to cut emissions too, and they are going in the opposite direction, with China particularly in my understanding investing heavily in coal.

WE WOULD ALL NEED TO BE INVESTING HEAVILY IN NUCLEAR ENERGY.

Here is the thing: the nutjobs are finally truly getting their way. All of them are RICH, and none of these measures affect them AT ALL. And they don’t give a shit who suffers. It’s “for the planet”.

But would it not make sense to revisit the science one last time? Would it not make sense to ask “what would falsify this whole project?” How would we know if they were wrong, or mostly wrong, or possibly wrong?

I have simplified my own treatment of this.

• The Earth has been covered in ice and devoid of ice, all long before humanity. This means anything in between is natural variation.
• The Vostok Ice cores, from which nearly all historical CO2 data comes, have a resolution of no less than about 1,000 years. That makes anyone making statements about a 50 year period ignorant or corrupt, likely both.
• 3) The relevant climate data needs to be, and in the event can be, gathered by satellites. The hypothesis, were it to be formulated as such–which it has not been, making all this dependent entirely on a pure conjecture–is that CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels will cause a rapid warming in the Upper Troposphere, which will gradually cause more warming below, which will create a cascade of problems, such as disrupting the flows of warmer water to the north and south.

This hypothesis REQUIRES, in my understanding, differential warming at that altitude.  It should be warming 2-3x faster than the areas above and below it, not warming–and cooling–at the same rate as the rest of the atmosphere, which is what it has been doing. If that warming is not present, then the hypothesis–remember it is not technically an hypothesis yet, since it cannot be falsified by any means–is wrong.

Now, knowing this, you may ask why NASA and the NOAA insist on using surface based measurements. There are all sorts of technical problems with such measurements, and all sorts of confounding factors. Well, yes. Precisely. They can fudge the data this way much more easily, and use their own models to create the data which they are supposedly measuring, but really creating with statistical algorithms. It’s a con game.

So this whole thing is complete bullshit. It is low fat diets, and COVID, but sandwiched somewhere in the middle. And PEOPLE WILL DIE because of all of this. They will be impoverished. Standards of living will drop precipitously FOR NO REASON, all while we hand power over to people who used DECEPTION to get it. That’s not a good start, is it?  We are starting with crooks, and crooks who should never have been able to get away with such a patent and destructive farce.

I am doing a close reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.  I’m really enjoying it.  It is good poetry, which for me is words which induce in me deep feelings that are interesting and new to me.

One stanza is titled “The Fire Sermon”, which I had not heard of, so I looked it up.  Here is Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80dittapariy%C4%81ya_Sutta

I had an insight yesterday that the emotional connections I get in bars, which is where I do most of my socializing outside of work, are similar in tone to that of my family.  Superficial, characterized often by role playing, and transitory.  It’s what I’m used to.  It has always felt natural to me.

And it occurred to me that this way of being is not really healthy for me.  I can do much better.  I can actually be much happier in my own company.

And yesterday I got the briefest flicker of a connection with my authentic self.  It has been buried so long under so much garbage that I lost it.  And it felt good.

And then I thought of the Fire Sermon.  All the senses are “on fire”.

Here is what I would suggest: what we take to be real is a lit candle, which we take to be the source of all light.  But we actually live in an ocean of light, and focusing on that candle prevents us from seeing it.  We take that candle to be all there is.  We take our lives as they are–our homes, our relations, our pleasures, our pains–to be all there is.  We cling to them.  We focus obsessively on this small candle, which blinds us to what is possible.

Tarthang Tulku, in his book The Joy of Being, discusses how to loosen up and liberate each of the senses, which in the Buddhist canon includes the mind, which makes sense.  We do perceive with our minds.  I am looking with my mind right now, and so are you.

And I think most people misread what the Buddha was trying to say.  He was not saying to eliminate everything which we are.  He is not saying to be blind, deaf, without a sense of smell or taste, and insensible to the outside world, and devoid of thought.  What an austere and awful thing that is, to dedicate your life to your own death.  I would put this confusion on a par with the Christian idea that God had to sacrifice his own son in order to be able to forgive people for being human.

What he was saying is that there is light in our eyes which we do not feel, that every sense organ has the capacity to allow us to feel and register and participate in God, or Buddha nature.  What he is saying is that looking at the wrong thing–which is the outer appearance of things–blinds us to what lies behind them.  What he is saying is that joy is our natural mode of perception and being, but that our focal point is completely wrong.

He is not saying to contract ourselves into nothing, but to expand into everything, into Oneness and connection.

And Nirvana, of course, means extinction.  It is snuffing the candle out.  But this not extinction of the self, of what is left after we remember who we really are.  Rather, it is an expansion of the self into something vastly better, vastly more satisfying, and vastly more reliable.

It seems to me that all Buddhas are also Bodhisattva’s.  Nirvana is equal to Samsara.  It is the same reality, but seen rightly.  You simply gain the ability to move freely, to go wherever you like, consciously.

God, or Buddha Nature, is in light and darkness, dampness and dryness, pain and joy.  We have simply been choosing this, rather than that.  That blindness is the fire he speaks of.

I was talking with a nurse the other day.  In her clinic–and indeed every medical environment I have personally visited in the past few months–masks are still required.  I asked her if they might be permanent, and she said “I’m afraid they may be.”

Thomas Sowell famously said:

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

Here is the thing: this nurse has had four upper sinus infections this year already, something she said was “absolutely” because of the masks.

Here is my point: mask wearing is not only pointless–we know from multiple studies they make no difference not just for COVID but for any airborne respiratory viruses–but also HAS COSTS OF ITS OWN.

Increased rates of respiratory and sinus infections are just one cost.  Another is that many of these healthcare workers are going to get emotionally sick of wearing these ridiculous mouth diapers and simply quit and do something else, at a time when we are already short of workers in many places.  Those who don’t will be at increased risk of depression.  We all need to see faces.  It’s hardwired.

And we KNOW that masks are kids are bad for many reasons.  They are causing all sorts of developmental delays and traumas, some of which may not be correctable.  Kids need to see mouths to learn to speak and read, and they need to see faces to learn basic emotional cues and for most intents and purposes how to be social humans.

Etc.  Sweden never imposed masks, most Swedes did not wear them, and they finished with COVID a good six months before us, with a lower death rate than all but about 5 States, and certainly lower than California, New York, and other similarly ridiculous places.

But the fix is in, right?  The cronies and authoritarians WANT mass compliance, because masks amount to badges of supine compliance to irrational authority, and act as security blankets to people no longer able to suck their thumbs in public.

Here is my proposal: unionization and class action lawsuits.  I don’t know how many healthcare workers are unionized, but this is a case where they categorically need collective bargaining.

And here is the thing: masks are OSHA regulated.  They are a form of PPE, and as such come with a raft of regulations.  During the “pandemic” (I’m not even sure there was ever anything serious going on after the first real wave) masks were reclassified, I think by the CDC, as “Community Protective Equipment”.  This was always obvious bullshit, but now that even the pretense of an emergency is over, that classification needs to be litigated and relegated to a trash heap.  If you are asking people working for you to wear the fucking things, then you need to follow the fucking rules.  You need to justify the need for them, and that simply cannot be done.

So I think groups of nurses and doctors and administrative folks need to get together and file a class action lawsuit against the CDC, NIH, their hospital administrators and others for REAL DAMAGES.

This nurse should be able to sue for all her sinus infections.  Parents of children with developmental delays should be able to sue the idiots who mandated masks for their kids.  And everyone harmed by a mandated vaccination should be able to sue the people who made them take it.  Vaccine injury is very certainly a workplace injury and very much OSHA reportable (even though, like all our other corrupted agencies, OSHA is not collecting data on these injuries, obviously to protect the guilty).

And even Pfizer and Moderna and others are most likely liable for vaccine injuries because THEY FAKED MUCH OF THE DATA, or at least that is what appears to be the case.  They lose their liability immunity if they engaged in fraud.  The FDA, which approved these things, also needs to be sued.

In all of this is enough work to keep an army of lawyers busy for years.

There is every reason to think all of this will be successful.  The fucking bullshit needs to stop, and the veil needs to be torn off, to reveal the rot underlying it all.  The stink is obvious.  Let’s start looking at the sources.

Anxiety is really an instinctual urge to run or hide.  It can manifest for many reasons, but given that life can be dangerous and troubles do come down regularly, some degree of anxiety is absolutely unavoidable.

The problem, of course, is chronic and ambient anxiety.  This is I think always a mismatch between perceived troubles and perceived capacity.  As one example, some people feel no fear jumping out of airplanes, and others are paralyzed by the thought of driving a car, or being in a crowd, or even being outside.

Perception thus easily becomes reality, and if that reality is one that is unpleasant, then the task is to alter perception.  As I wrote a few days ago in my notes (not published here yet), it is possible to feel trapped while free, and possible–paradoxically and in large measure theoretically, from a practical perspective–to feel free while objectively trapped.  This sort of freedom is something many ascetics have sought, such as the monks and nuns who wall themselves into small rooms for years.

And there are two levels of anxiety: pure fear, and the fear of fear, or what I have decided to call for now meta-anxiety.  I don’t know if that is a good term, but it will do for now as the fear of fear, which is really the fear of hyperarousal, itself the result of traumatic helplessness.   This would be something like a panic attack.  If you have ever had one–and I have–you learn to fear them.  I think most normal people would and do go to great lengths to avoid repeating them.

[if you do have panic attacks, by the way, and have not yet mastered them, this is a really great resource: www.panicaway.com

What is great about this system is that it cures you.  It really works.  I have not had a panic attack in 15 years or more.]

And actually the term I came up with the other day was metaemotion, which is a feeling about feelings.  You can feel fear of shame, before you feel the shame.  Fear of shame is one of the glues that keeps human societies together.

And it occurred to me the other day there are two levels to learned helplessness.  The original studies were done on dogs, so I think this distinction was missed.

Learned helplessness, purely, is behavioral.  The dogs were “taught” to stay on electrified plates even when they could escape.  A painful stimulus was induced, and they did nothing.

But in humans there is an emotional aspect: you can be trained into feeling YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER YOUR EMOTIONS, that waves of something bad can sweep over you, and there is nothing you can do about it.

And in humans, this is by far the more important aspect.  The helplessness is relative to STATE MANAGEMENT.

And here is the point I logged on to make: there are three ways of dealing with anxiety.

1. By developing the emotional skill of State Management, such that painful feelings can be endured long enough to develop confidence and relative control.  Tom Cruise, in the movie and I think in reality, taught himself to feel GOOD in a tightly confined cockpit, operating at high speeds, and under considerable physical duress.  Anxiety can both be managed, and eventually transformed into ENGAGEMENT, or a sense of adventure, a thrill, excitement.  This is what animates rock climbers, and sky divers and other thrill seekers.
2. By intoxication.  Drugs, booze.  You achieve “state management”, and at that RELIABLE state management, by physically altering your reality.  Me, I still like to get drunk sometimes, but I don’t think I ever put it to myself quite like this.
3. By OBSESSION.  This is the one that really surprised me.  It just popped in my head, but it is true.  I am obsessive.  I always have been, and this is why.  What Obsession does is insert itself into the place of anxiety, such that every waking thought crowds out the fear and dismantles any perception of it.

Logically, an immature society–as ours in large measure is, not least because of the lack of genuine challenges, and the lack of a need to develop the maturity to manage them–is going to have enormous problems with anxiety.  We deal with it through distraction, frivolity, by flitting from one thing to another, which amounts to an obsession with stimuli.

We also deal with it, of course, with drugs and alcohol.

But, and here is the second point I wanted to make, in many respects our polarization amounts to an outcome of political obsessiveness, itself the outcome of ambient anxiety.   People are fixated on the latest grievance, the latest outrage, and there is enough out there for anyone to get their fix daily.

What is lost, obviously, is nuance.  Nuance is a mature emotion.  It implies balance, time, consideration, and even a certain generosity.  It implies a willingness to listen carefully, to allow facts and feelings to multiply and grow and eventually reach some kind of synthesis.

And putting it this way, Black and White thinking is, I think, almost necessarily and invariably an outcome of fear.  So when you see it, you are seeing anxious people dealing in an immature way with a world which frightens them.

It’s astonishing to me how much progress we have made in the physical sciences, without having learned how to generalize the learnable and trainable skill of State Management.  Every child should be taught this.  Nothing but good could come from this, if it were done intelligently by sincere and competent people.

And specifically, I am talking things like Biofeedback–of which Neurofeedback is a distinct subcategory–competent meditation, somatic psychotherapy, training in the basics of cognitive psychology and the like.

And I think I have mentioned this, but Milan Kundera talks about how what he REALLY wanted from Communism was dancing circles.  It was in a book of fiction, but that was likely true.  We need communal events, where all are included, that include play and celebration.  Look around you: do you see any?  Sports, maybe a little.  Church, to some extent, but you have to believe what they are teaching, and many of us just can’t, and in any event my personal experience is that it is fucking serious and a lot of those people are just not sincere.

My work continues.  I am making progress.  I feel that.  My basic objective remains the same, to form some sort of group that reliably meets these needs.

But I still have many miles to go.  I still have, deep down, an occasional cruelty that is simply the mark that was left on me by the cruelty of others.  But it does not belong in a place where I am asking for trust.  I don’t trust me, and won’t ask anyone else to until my work is done.

I was contemplating a podcast the other day, and some little voice said “not yet”.  And I asked “when”?  And on impulse I looked to my left and saw a crane landing in a pond.  I have never seen a crane before outside a zoo, that I can recall, so I took that as a sign that at the new year it may be time.  Cranes and babies.  Then I was like (trust me, you would not want to be the one trying to operate my little brain), no it’s storks.  That was nothing.

Then just now, I looked it up, and found this: https://www.livescience.com/62807-why-storks-baby-myth.html

Apparently in the original myth it may have been cranes.  Interesting.

On a related note, I was pondering the other day “what do I do with this anxiety?”, and something made me look to the left, and there was a car with “Adventure” written on the license plate.  That would be much easier to chalk up to an unconscious perception, but I liked it anyway.

So I guess with fear the task is transformation.  Fear can be used to live a better life, by turning it into an interesting challenge, and emotional stimulation.

For now I am going to continue to work on calming down, on building a work/life balance that I have really never had, on relaxing more without my reliable state management system, and on being less obsessive generally.

It’s slow, very slow.  But it’s movement in the right direction.  That’s the best I can manage for now.  It’s something, and something good.