Author: White Whale

I’m listening to the song, and drinking strong beer (I asked my buddy at the local open til 11 every night liquor store which ones were 7% plus, after a long ass week), and it feels to me at this moment that all churches should have holes in them, and stains on the floor, and scratches on the pews.

How else to welcome the fuck-ups, the ones who really need redemption? 

Our national religion, Christianity, is not bad, and in many respects outstanding.  But contradictions remain.

I can’t resist adding Johnny Paycheck, because The End is boring me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQjRxdMEGds

Social cleansing means teaching a better way to live, and doing so through personal example.  It implies wisdom, and love.

I seem to find myself in the wrong place often, but hopefully that will not last forever.

I think spiritual growth, after a certain point, leaves first the paved road, and then the dirt road.  Where you are going, there are no roads.  There is no path.

To follow in the footsteps of the Buddha, truly, is to do this, to walk where you feel lost.  What do you do then?  What does ANY explorer do?  Keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep their eyes open, use their brains and experience, and discover new things.

I am in a place without roads.  It scares me, but sometimes it is vaguely exhilarating too.  I did not stop when it got hard, and I’m not stopping now.

And actually, I will wonder out loud: how does it affect our psychology that our physical space is almost always completely sculpted for us?  We have roads, and as U2 pointed out, they have names, here.  How different does it feel living in a forest, or jungle, or trackless mountain area? 

I think it can safely be postulated that the “natural” state of human awareness is relaxed engagement and happiness. This is to say, that physiological arousal exists within a range, and on the low side there is pleasure and contentment. This is physiologically possible and thus “natural”.

Common, of course, it is not.

While granting this is a large, enormously abstract question, I would stipulate that most societies I know of use shame as a method of social conditioning and compliance. You are shamed into behavior g a certain way. Put another way, breaking from an established pattern creates fear, and thus feels like aggression. And who wants to commit acts of aggression against those who are in our group, who are “our” people?

Original Sin refers mythically to the development of shame—of fear and pain—as a method of control. On this account, a “return to Eden” would consist in lowering the levels of arousal of the amygdala in response to social stimuli.

Here is s testable hypotheses: I would argue that a psychologically normal person, of nearly any nation or group-/will show amygdala activation in response to the idea of them breaking rules they hold dear, or seeing anyone else do it. You could hook someone up in a lab, and show them pictures, or ask them to imagine situations, or even as an experimenter deliberately transgress their expectations.

Now, I have a couple books on my shelf about neuroanatomy and neuropsychology, but I have not read them. In limiting myself to the amygdala I am nearly certainly oversimplifying. I do think it is a good place to start, though, and the essential point remains, of certain types of neural activation being used for control, and that this system, in turn, is not neurologically optimal.

In some respects I am reiterating, say, the core argument of “ Culture and its Discontents”, but as I say often, Freud was pretty much always wrong, but nearly right.

A better society, a happier healthier society, will come—can ONLY come—from a generalized return to what might be termed—egregiously but recognizably—our neurological presets. Wealth will not do it.  “Equality” will not do it.

Feeling good is something we are wired to be able to do.  It is symptomatic of the madness of our time that so much focus is placed on knowing more and thinking more clearly, and so little on the process of enriching feeling and following experience.

When everything is political, the truth–and following possibility of rational, purposive action–has already been lost.

Put another way, the truth is the first casualty in political warfare too.

Shamelessness is a disease stalking our landscape.  It is impossible for me at this moment not to agree with Jacques Barzun that our civilization is formally decadent.  Our leaders lie, and the people seek, without knowing it, people to tell them what to do.

It occurs to me that emotionally unavailable people probably induce feelings of shame too.

And I feel like I have met people like this.  Perhaps, almost certainly, I have been like that.  People who just aren’t quite there, and you feel this sense of anger because they are so distant.  We are wired to feel connection, at least with people we see every day.  When they can’t offer it, it feels like they are denying it, and that produces fearangershame.  That, in turn, produces social anxiety and withdrawal, or can in people whose foundations are weak.

There is an horror movie playing around here called Midsommar.  It is more or less about human sacrifice in contemporary Sweden.  Since it is well known some part of our brains does not differentiate movies from reality–if we could not enter into that world, then we would not have the experience–then this experience must be something some people want.  For whom is it intended?  Who is the audience?  What emotional traits are they likely to have?

It seems, reading the summary, that it is about a group of emotionally disconnected, largely dissociated people, all but one of whom are killed, and the last of whom finally feels some completion in watching their destruction.  She allows herself access to the anger and violence inside of herself, which she had most likely kept hidden in her shell of a self and face.

I really can’t escape the conclusion that we are breeding monsters, with all these iPhones, with all this screen time, which lacks all the nuance of actual human connection.  Anger and fear and shame are accumulating in people who lack the self awareness to realize it, and who find themselves expressing them vicariously by watching movies like Midsommar.

I watched the new Spider Man movie last night.  It was OK, but I found it vaguely disturbing that MJ was fascinated by the Black Dahlia murder, where a woman was, as I recall the story, tortured, cut in half, and then the blood drained from her body and the body more or less placed on display.  It’s a horrifying image.  Peter Parker got her a glass black Dahlia flower.

Quentin Tarrntino’s new movie is about the Manson murders.  Tarrentino, cinematically, consistently brings the “ultraviolence” of Anthony Burgess.  It’s hard not to see him as a talented psychopath.

How, in such a world, do we reconnect with goodness?  With true compassion, true empathy, true kindness, true understanding, true caring?  These are my life questions.  Asking them pays me no money, wins me no recognition, does not further my career in any way. 

But I do have logic.  I have always had logic.  And my logic tells me these are intrinsically important questions.  And my logic tells me that entering back into the flux of feeling will help me recover a very robust intuition which will take me much farther than logic ever could.

I am 52.  I will share that.  And for some reason I am really feeling that keenly lately.  It’s middle age, by just about any standard.  I have my complete health, but I can’t really answer what I’ve done with my life.  Had I been a doctor or lawyer, I suppose I would be winding down a bit now.  I would have a big house, and a nice annual vacation somewhere, and a family I sort of know, but spent a lot of time away from, working.  I have been, in some sense, out living in the wild with wolves.

What I feel is how hard it is to enter into the right relationship with time.  If you feel too great a sense of urgency, it does not unfold.  You are never emotionally present for whatever and whoever is happening.  And if you have no plan and simply drift, you blink and 20 years has passed.

I feel the story of Rip van Winkle is about, in part, emotional dissociation.  When you shield yourself from emotional hurt, you also isolate yourself from emotional participation in what is happening around you.  Time passes, and you can’t feel it; it is like it is flowing over stainless steel, versus mud and sand.  In the one case there is no texture and in the latter there is.

There are many subtle pains in this world, but all of them need to be processed to be living as a proper human being.  What a confusing, strange place this world is!!!

I have certainly not been silent, and I have dedicated my days to understanding, so on an abstract level I have that, but I don’t feel that very well.  I feel how distant and cold I have been, through an incapacity to be any other way.

My children are wonderful–I do have that, and I suppose in this strange world raising genuinely good children is an accomplishment–but my life is far from over.  I think I am merely completing one phase, and entering another, hopefully better phase.

My father crossed a long life and seems to have learned nothing.  He spent much of his last 20-30 years watching television.  I think my mother will be the same.

My life is a reaction to that, but it has proven so hard to shake the protective numbness they bestowed on me by osmosis.

Even now, there are people falling all around us.  There are suicides every day in most large cities.  People found, perhaps after a few days, perhaps after a few weeks, and there are police who file reports, and people who gather up the bodies (I memorably shared a few drinks once with a guy who did that, and I could tell he was looking at me from the perspective of how he would move me if I was dead), and perhaps coroners who do the autopsies, and people who notify relatives, and people who have to figure out how to dispose of the bodies.

This world is magical, and it is horrible.  But my curiosity and wonder never flag.  I suppose I have that too.

I’ve argued that self defeating behavior stems from an overactivated amygdala, and the following effort of the organism to create emotional “logic”, an A=A sort of thing, though justifying ex post facto preexisting sensations.

Emotionally, what is dogmatism?  Is it anything but a permanent refuge from shame?  Is it not precisely the need to never apologize, to never feel bad, because you are absolutely right, and anyone who disagrees with you absolutely wrong?

How does dogmatism create an A=A relationship?  I think it does it by placing all the blame on someone, anyone, else.  You project your shame onto other people, by saying, “It’s not me, it’s YOU”.  What you do is create a rigid world view which creates inevitable conflict with other people who are not narrowly like you.  Dogmatism, in this sense, would be completely pointless in a uniform world, which would explain well why, as one obvious example, the lunatics in the Soviet Union turned on one another over very narrow atheological (theological style combined with actual atheism) disputes.  This was by Trotsky–who agreed with nearly all points of Communistic ideology–has to have an ice pick shoved in his head.  The followers of Zinoviev likewise.  They were too close to be ignored, but imprecisely affiliated. 

For the true ideologue, their enemies thus serve the precise purpose of Jewish sacrificial lambs.  And the point of the rigidity is to CREATE enemies, to create scapegoats.

And logically, the greater the rejection of actual shame, the higher the proportions of both fear and aggression remaining.  This is why the Headless Ones go into clinical hyperarousal every time someone disagrees with them.

I think is close to the truth.  What is the opposite of sacrificial culture, which is to say in the modern world, political identity politics and ideology?  Deep, deep, physical relaxation.  As the amygdala calms, all the insanity disappears.

I am increasingly convinced I have solutions which I will brazenly call the problems of humanity.

But I want to argue from the other side of the river, which I have not personally reached yet.  It is no good manipulating symbols.  It is, in my view, critically important to embody ideas, to be able to touch them, feel their texture, feed on them, be nourished by them.

I pray every day for help in this.  If you are inclined to say a prayer for me, please do.  I can use all the help I can get.

There is no real need to oppose atheistic explanations of religion with personal spiritual beliefs. There can be no doubt that psycho-social realities play out in all large human social systems.  There can be no doubt that some of the critiques of religion, and explanations of religion–such as, for example, those of Emile Durkheim–have some validity.  Much that happens while one happens while talking about God has nothing at all to do with God at all.  This does not mean something which is most usefully and easily called “God” does not exist.  They are separate question, to be separated by agile minds as needed to understand our world, and to solve concrete problems.

As I have shared from time to time, my focus in graduate school was on sacrifice.  I had a particular affinity for Rene Girard, who made it his focus.

As I understand Jewish practice when the Temple still existed, one had to go there once a year with an unblemished animal, say a sheep, which in this context was understood to be innocent.  Without me studying all the details of the ritual practice, I believe that a penitent–no doubt a man, perhaps with his sons–would offer up a sheep to a priest, who would ceremonially place the sins of the man on the sheep, and ask God’s forgiveness.  That sheep would then be placed on a stone altar, and its throat cut.  In some cases the sheep would then be placed in a ritual fire and consumed entirely by the flames.  This was called a Holocaust.  In other cases, I suppose, the sheep was eaten.

Now, as I have argued, much that is evil in human life comes from resonance with the predatory elements of our nervous system, the stalking, attacking, killing and ripping to pieces of food, food which was necessary for physical survival.  Our world demands some life be shed that we may live.  Even vegetarians take the lives of plants.  Even worms live on organic materials of all sorts.

The animal nature in us lives, I believe, in the gut, in the unmyelinated vagus nerve, which touches many places, all of which can contain excessive traces of this urge to kill.

This, in turn, in my rudimentary psychophysiology, is connected to the amygdala.  Big cats, when stalking prey, are highly aroused.  All their nerves are awake.  Their muscles are ready to pounce and kill.  Once they kill, they become relaxed.  Most predators feel little anxiety.  They eat, then go to sleep, satiated.

And I have read that our best warriors are like this.  When not deployed on a mission, they are more relaxed than most of us.  They relax easily.  But when deployed, they are able to be more alert, and more aroused than most of us.  This was shown in Heart Rate Variability experimentation.  They have higher than average HRV most of the time, and much lower than average HRV when focused on a task.

What is being placed on the sheep is sin, which is to say the sense of guilt, which is to say shame.  Shame, in turn, is a complex also containing fear and aggression.

Ritual killing, like any other killing, satiates some latent predatory instinct, I would argue.  The higher the levels of arousal, the more violent it needs to be.

Nearly all cultures the world over practiced some form of sacrifice, and a great many of them seem to have started with human sacrifice.  In my own work in graduate school, in what amounted to my Master’s Thesis, I argued that key Vedic texts contain nearly unmistakable evidence that human sacrifice was once practiced by the Aryan ancestors of those who eventually became known as Hindus (after the river Sindhu).  For example, in one of the best studied Vedic ceremonies, the Agnicayana, a number of heads have to be buried under the alter, by memory goat heads, horse heads, sheet heads, and a human head.  It is not unreasonable to suppose, looking at cultural practices around the world, to suppose those were the result of sacrificial rituals.  My paper was actually on another Vedic Hymn, but I don’t want to go into too much detail, not least because I can’t remember now most of it.

But the point I would make is that shame is necessary as a means of social control and restraint.  It is what keeps people sociable, on the trodden track.  But it is also always a source of anger and fear, and thus latent and actual aggression.  It has to be regulated.  There have to be safety valves.  I would argue sacrifice is one of those.

Sacrifice, though, in turn, has to be seen as a necessary result of a social order in which people never rise to the level of maturity needed to control and express their own impulses in healthy and appropriate ways.  It has to be seen as a result of people being enmeshed with one another psychologically, and unable to fully differentiate themselves from each other.

The solitary sage, then, would be outside the sacrificial order.

I have more to say, but my brain just got tired.  I’m going to post on dogmatism, then do some Neurofeedback.

I wonder if you can “get” PTSD from things in your future.  What if some part of you knew your destiny was to be tortured to death, in front of a crowd of ghouls? PRE-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

How would you live your life?  How would this affect your spiritual journey? 

In some respects, life is a game.  Games have rules, and the goal is to play as well as possible, to engage spontaneous resourcefulness, careful planning and preparation, considerable but not continuous effort (no one can be on all the time, nor is it beneficial to try), and faith in the ultimate outcome.

Dogmatism allows the certainty of answers without the necessity of questions.

Dogmatism is grey with no possibility of blue.  It seeks to avoid grey, and generates nothing else.

On this theme, what, I wonder, is the connection between shame and emotional/intellectual rigidity?  For whom is a stable sense of absolute certainty a welcome boon?  What emotional pain does it soothe?

Put another way, in what emotional circumstances is the pain of confusion or uncertainty made unbearable?

I will ponder this today, maybe.  My brain has a mind of its own (yes), so it may wander in some other direction, but it is an interesting question, and obviously one highly relevant for those of wondering what to make of the Maoist cult (without a Mao) materializing before us.  The capacity for physical violence is plainly evident, as is of course the actual and continual use of political violence.