I’m doing a program called “e-Kum Nye”, in which they email me a “class” with comments, notes and added instructions. This is the 9th class introduction in the first series. I can’t now find it on their website.
But dealing with change is the point.
Anyway, he says in this video that the point of Kum Nye is dissolving duality, and I have really been trying to enter into this realm.
We are all fragmented, and the quieter I get, the more I realize I fear stillness. I was actually doing the meditation for the 10th class, and finished thinking I needed to look up videos on UFO’s, or conspiracies or something. I wanted to refresh my fear.
This was before today’s practice. I went into this feeling, and realized that to “be” is to find and identify with our deepest emotional roots, our most primal emotions. For the large percentage of people who were not well nurtured when young, this is going to lead to a fear of abandonment.
But it goes deeper than this. Even for those who WERE nurtured well, there is I think generally a desire to hold on to something primal, such that was not a fear of being, per se, becomes a fear of becoming. This fear of becoming is, as one example, at the root of all fundamentalisms. I think Islamic fundamentalism is only particularly violent because their entire creed rests upon the ability to compel social conformity, and upon violence as a means of proselytizing. But Baptists Fundamentalists are quite capable of the hate that blind fear gives rise to. The history of religion is in no small measure that of competing fears, competing attachments, and competing manias arising from an inability to adapt.
Within my own world, I look back to a fear I had of the country when I was small. What I feared was the lack of structure–really the lack of plastic. I was raised as a typical American suburban kid, protected from most of the real problems of life. I spent an enormous amount of time watching very insipid TV, collecting comic books, and not thinking much about anything. My breakfast was normally coffee creamer consisting almost entirely in artificial ingredients (I was and am somewhat lactose intolerant) with Captain Crunch, or Life, or Cocoa Pebbles, or Rice Krispies with lots of sugar.
Lunch was whatever they served at the cafeteria. I remember in high school my favorite lunch was a fried beef and bean burrito, a Snickers and a Mountain Dew. When I got home from school I made toast with butter, sugar and cinnamon, and turned on Gilligan’s Island, or the Rockford Files.
My parents would eventually get home, but nothing real was exchanged; nothing truly nurturing for me. I just existed. We all had slots to fill in life, and went about it without enthusiasm.
Where in any of this is there a place to feel anchored, solid? Is something like this not the life of millions of American kids even now? I remember talking with a couple of skateboard kids, one of whom I had coached in soccer but not recognized because he had grown long hair. They were complaining that none of their teachers made ANY demands on them. They were craving order, structure. They complained that they came home and had NOTHING to do, no homework. Their teachers were preoccupied just trying to keep order, presumably because expelling kids has been made hard to do by do-gooder assholes whose own kids go to elite private academies, like Obama and Jesse Jackson’s kids.
When I look at the dominant feeling from those years it was like I had cotton in my brain. Nothing felt real, meaningful, worth the trouble.
This in my view is the root of the angry music we see. Kids want SOMETHING, fucking ANYTHING, to hang their hats on, to believe in. They want something with gravity, to get away from what Kundera called the “unbearable lightness of being”. Kids, at heart, WANT to be kicked in the ass from time to time.
Precisely because life offers them nothing heavy (obviously, there is constant family drama, divorces, abusive parents and what not; but none of this truly creates anything but annoyance compared to the overarching sense that life FEELS meaningless), they become resistant to the idea of deep relaxation, of entering into deep, meditative states. They, on the contrary, stay constantly busy, texting, playing video games, watching TV. My oldest reports that it is common from groups of teenagers to get together and sit in a circle, texting other kids who are not there. There is never any actual Presence, any actual being-with-others. Sex becomes a drug because it comes CLOSEST to Presence, but if any actual Presence does enter it, at least one partner is bound to run, usually the boy.
And this drives people mad.
I keep threatening to do a series of posts on Propaganda. In some measure what has stopped me is laziness–I will need to type large sections of a fairly recondite book. What also gets in my way, though, is the emotional burden of recognizing just how far what Jacques Ellul calls Integration Propagandas have progressed, such that substantially all the gravitas of a truly Liberal tradition has been sapped in favor of the intellectual equivalent of Kool-Aid.
Yes, of course there is the Jim Jones metaphor. But consider further why they were there. He founded a church based upon the idea of people being isolated, lonely, directionless monads. He promised them an end to their freedom, an end to their lonely need to make their own decisions, and the overwhelming bulk of them followed him to their literal deaths.
Obama’s core followers are no different. He has rescued them from freedom, and they have not forgotten it.
And to be clear, obviously any conformist group demands as a condition of membership certain behavioral standards. If you want to be in a Frat, you need to do certain things. If you want to be a member of Christian congregation, you need to do certain things.
What I would submit, though, is that for a cult the principle element is membership itself. Cults protect from the fear of becoming because, in absolute subjugation to an external authority, you are not really becoming at all. The fundamental of doing what you are told never changes, even if one week you are told to support X and the next to oppose it.
Voluntary associations, on the other hand, rely upon principles. You come together because you believe certain things, which within certain ranges are non-negotiable. Jews are not Christians, or vice versa. There is room for both, but they are not the same.
That will have to do for now. I needed to vent a bit.