Author: White Whale

It seems to me it is more interesting to build a continuum based on how much of their true core self people are willing to share in all contexts.  Someone willing to share all in all contexts is socially open. Someone unwilling or unable to ever share is closed.

Talking a lot does not mean someone actually like people, or is interacting with them honestly.

Conversely, not feeling the need to speak does not betray timidity or “introversion.”

Many people we label introverts are simply uncomfortable both with being emotionally dishonest and superficial, on the one hand, and being reliably misunderstood by silly people on the other. This says nothing about their latent capacities, only what they learned from repeated experience.

I am realizing by all rights I should be psychotic.  Both of my parents, in their own ways, tried to break me, to squeeze me like a grape in a vise.

But I remain psychologically alive.  This is a miracle of sorts.  I don’t know it happened, other than that I was some combination of agile enough, and resilient enough.  And I am getting stronger.

The capacity to endure this level of pain, though, I think makes me able to see more than most people.

And what I see is that our society, itself, is slowly becoming psychotic.  At least, some large segment of our cultural order has fallen into ruin, and what remains has as a full time job fighting to preserve in any form what remains.

Our academics–on their account at least the best minds we have–have given up on the pursuit of truth, beauty and sanity.  They have more or less consigned themselves to ruin.  This is what Collectivism is: ruin.  It is the destruction of all human potential, all genuine flourishing, all genuine goodness.  It is a mass psychosis.  We have seen its fruits in Ethiopia, and Cuba, in China, and Vietnam.  It is a grey world, run by grey people, where 2″ equals 3″ if the rulers say so.

If you take a traditional group, say the Hmong of southeast Asia, they have been living in essentially the same ways for thousands of years (so I assume, hundreds I would think at a minimum).  As a group, they have certain customs, and within the group you no doubt have tribes, and within the tribes perhaps clans, and within the clans families.  Everyone is born with a place.  It is all organic.  No one is telling them this is how it has to be.  It is how they want it, in large measure, even in the modern era some of their young reject tradition.

Collectivism is Plastic Soul.  It is plastic culture.  It is wide eyed psychopaths saying “we can build a better culture.  We know how.  We know just what to do.  We have read all the books.  We just, you know, need to break a few eggs, again.  It will work this time.”

There is nothing even remotely organic about it. 

Here is the thing: humans are innately creative and adaptive, so we are quite capable of building new forms which ARE authentically organic.  But we need to stop being attacked by the psychopaths, and everyone top to bottom needs to realize that this is not something which CAN happen top down, much less something which SHOULD happen top down, as directed by well funded propagandists broadcasting their shit from every street corner and news stand.

Stand down, assholes, and all will be fine.  Your static, your incoherence, makes new forms impossible.  Just stop trying the save the world and go play checkers somewhere.  Hire hookers and snort coke.  I don’t care.  Just stop trying to help.  Your help is a toxin which is paralyzing all of our souls.

And the wages of betraying the Church is death.

In Catholic dogma, which prevailed at least until the schism with the Eastern church, and all over Europe until the Reformation, the church is the conduit to God.  The Church equals Jesus, equals the intermediator (apparently I just invented that word).

Here are a couple amended scriptures:

“For God so loved the world that he created his one and only universal Church, that whoever believes in it shall not perish but have eternal life.”


“The Pope answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Recall too the power the Pope exercised for a long time of condemning the souls of kings and heretics to eternal, or least long lasting, damnation.  That is a magical, magisterial power, if you think about it.  And you indoctrinate everyone from cradle to grave to believe in it.  The Pope as spell caster, as God’s magician, as a sorcerer who can curse both your present life and your afterlife.

Who created this dogma?  Popes, and those who benefited from their power, obviously.

Christ had nothing to do with any of this.

There are many small things which will not make much of a difference in your day, but a huge difference, over time, in your life.

I read a quote somewhere in the past few months that went something like: Life is nothing more or less than a large conglomeration of moments.

If you have an otherwise bland tapestry, regular sparks of orange and gold and saffron will change the quality of the whole thing, won’t they?  “Life”, this reification so many of us cannot resist referring to, is the same.

I intend to say something else, but first off, it occurs to me that “Reflections” sounds deep, but literally it is by definition stopping at the surface.

Be that as it may, when insights–deep insights, about the past, about others, about Life–“intrude” on an average day, and square off, each in their own corner, against Time, who usually wins?    Is it not usually a knock-out of the insight by Time, within ten to thirty seconds?  Who has –what?–TIME to ponder the meaning and purpose and proper pursuit of life?  Things to do, places to go, deadlines to meet.

It’s very tempting to speculate that it is not Time which prevents deeper thought, but rather that most people are quite content with an arrangement which keeps them from thinking too deeply.  “Oh, I would explore those painful emotions, but I have a dentist’s appointment.”  “Oh, I would wonder if I’m living my life right, but who even knows how to answer fucking questions like that, and oh look I’m late for something or other.”

Now, I am not saying that condescendingly.  I may talk like I’m on the mountaintop, but I’m very much in the valley, often surrounded by fog.  I get how painful all this can be.  I get it personally, and daily.

I will say though that I have arranged my life precisely to support this sort of work.  Right now, this very moment, I”m not at work.  I have work to do this week, but it can be done at my own pace, on my own schedule.  Until someone lights a fire under my ass–which may happen next week, although I very much doubt it–I can take an hour and do my personal yoga routine, and take 15-20 minutes to write blog posts like this. 

My life is deeply uncomfortable at times, but I base it on a simple logic: if death is eternal, not much matters, but if we survive this life, then all we can bring with us is are the emotional riches we built across our lifetimes.  Nothing else.  As U2 put it, “all that you can’t leave behind”.  This makes work on personal growth the only way to build meaningful wealth.  This, then, means that economic “work” needs to be in support of finding time, and sufficient resources for whatever projects I may undertake, like Neurofeedback.  This is my logic.

And many nights find me shaking like a leaf, screaming, speaking in tongues (more or less: I don’t know what to call vocalizing in a words which don’t match any living or dead language, and which I think hearken back to my time as an infant trying and failing to communicate my distress in words), and feeling like I am dying.  And the demons of course.  Let’s not forget those.

All in all, not an attractive picture.  My life, as I have built it, is not easy.  But I find no faults in my logic, so I persist.  And as it happens, last night was free of everything but the vocalizing.  No demons, no shaking, no major conflicts (although I did meet up with a Tier 1 SoCom unit for some reason: but no bullets were fired by anyone).  This is progress.  I’ve been working a plan I will describe at some point.

But it seems to me this morning I have no people and no place, and on terms which do not require me to compromise, I never will, until I create them.  I have to create myself first.  I have to be a stable person.  To use the acronym, I need to be Flexible, Adaptable, Coherent, Energized and Stable.

Then I want to throw out seeds which will attract people I can bond with at a deep level.  In the end, as I have said often, I want to create a “religion” suitable for our time and place.  I have all the ideas.  It’s a question of me being the sort of person that perceptive people would trust.  I’m not there yet.

My work continues.  Every day is a small death, and every death a small victory, and every victory a small step up a tall mountain.  We live by dying, and we die more easily when we manage our fear of death.

In important respects, I think the Buddhist notion of Anatman amounts to this: if I am growing, then who I am today is not who I was yesterday, and who I am this morning will not be who I am tonight when I lay my head down.  And when I wake up, who that person is will not be who laid their head down.

There is some part of our brain which ALWAYS seeks homeostasis, which seeks the One Answer, answered once and forever.  At the ideational, philosophical, dogmatic level, you need a riposte to this impulse, to this voice, to this river of honest energy.

You have to be willing to lose your sense of safety, your ability to say, with seeming accuracy, I am “THIS”.  You have to lose yourself to gain the world.

Or to put perhaps a new spin on an old quote:


“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it”.


If you deduct the mumbo-jumbo presumably added by the early Church to increase their power, it’s not hard to put a Buddhist spin on Christ’s teachings.  They needed Jesus to be absolutely unique, but he wasn’t.  He was just another advanced soul doing his job.  And I will continue to wonder if that soul, on balance, found his work more useful than harmful.  There are lots of entries on both sides of the ledger.  But the notion of universal human rights is, I think, a notion which emanated from Christianity.  So too the disgust at animal sacrifice.


We would need to know how the next century plays out to make a final determination.  And that process, of course, can still be influenced for the better.

What doesn’t kill you, can help you learn to deal with the fear of death.

Surely there is some banker somewhere who would be willing to write a book titled more or less “How we rob you blind and why you should care”.  It seems very reasonable to suppose that most senior bankers understand the system well enough that, if they took a moment to consider what they do, they would realize that yes, of course they provide the “capital” to fund and continue economic growth, but that yes also, of course, they create the money ex nihilo–or some large part of it–and that by creating money you dilute, necessarily, the value of all existing money, and thereby steal, invisibly, some portion of the economic output of everyone who creates real goods and services.

I might perhaps profitably quote Keynes again, who in his first major work, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, told the truth:

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.” 

I will note there of course he is assuming the government controls the process of money creation. 

(Any other solution would be absurd, right?  You wouldn’t just hand the money over to the money people, the banks, would you?  That would create mass outrage, would it not? 

I’m being facetious of course.)

Moving on, I’ve long wondered: what is the actual reserve ratio for most banks?  People out there know what it is for particular banks.  As far as I can tell, individual banks can keep literally perhaps 1% of their alleged balances in physical cash and on the books, and reach the 10% or whatever it is required by the Fed through overnight loans, each and every night.  There may be billion dollar banks who in all their vaults have no more than a few million physical dollars.  With funny money, it’s all keystrokes and access.

Such a person would understand why we have business cycles, how excessive lending always leads eventually to a correction that may hurt banks in some places, but rarely hurts individual bankers, whose own fortunes are untouched.

There are millions of people out there who could write this book.  We really only need one, and at that there are plenty of ghost-writers–co-authors they are usually called–who could create from a basic first person narrative a compelling, and salable, story.

In my personal view, fixing our monetary system–giving their wealth back to the people–will need to be an intrinsic part of how we deal with automation, which is to say better and better robots, and smarter and smarter AI.

Over a hundred years ago, Oscar Wilde pointed out that one key outcome of increased economic productivity is the ability for there to be a leisure class which, for the first time in history, did not depend on slavery.  We make the machines our slaves, albeit at the risk of being overthrown and destroyed by them.

A cultural flourishing remains possible, even in the more or less immediate future of 10-20 years.  We can undo all our damage.  We can right all the wrongs.

But we need strong voices speaking strong and clear messages from the rooftops, messages of hope, of possibility, of goodness, and of beauty.

First off, I have decided I am going to log here every drink I have until I feel like the urge to get drunk is gone.  Last night, I had a bottle of red wine and a bottle of port.  That combination knocks me out but I can still function reasonably well the next day.  Still: I would like to see my grandchildren.  The pain is real, but so too is the opportunity given me every time the sun comes up.

I consciously avoided posting yesterday.  I am feeling, with greater clarity, the role this blog often plays for me in distracting me from, or allowing me to channel in sometimes nonoptimal ways, unpleasant feelings.

I watched 2 and a half movies yesterday.  I watched “Towards the Within”, a concert film from 1994 featuring Dead Can Dance (which was explained as a metaphor for making inanimate musical instruments “speak” or dance), Bohemian Rhapsody, and the second Harry Potter, during which I did my drinking.

I liked all three films.  Harry Potter of course I’ve seen many times.  I watched all those films many times with my kids.  Toward the Within felt like a spiritual experience.  Lisa Gerard has such a powerful and evocative voice.  I found it emotionally draining.  Much of that music would be highly suitable for Holotropic Breathwork.

Bohemian Rhapsody: what can you say?  Queen is fantastic.  Unique.  Nobody else like them.

And as always, when I sleep all the images and scenes flow through my brain.  It’s like I store them, then they go on spontaneous playback when I sleep.  Perhaps that is exactly what happens.

Be all that as it may, it occurred to me this morning, waking up in silence, the sun beaming through my windows, that all of our minds are filled with a lot of perceptual clutter, with countless images from countless movies we’ve seen, TV show’s we’ve watched, music we’ve heard.

There is a primary experience below all this, the one you get when you camp or go on a retreat and spend a week away from radios, cell phones and TV’s.  I wonder how many people walking on an average street in America today have had this experience: a week absent from all media.  I think the young, who were raised on phones, who had phones and other electronics in their cribs, would have particular difficulty.

But there is another speed possible, and at that one that is most likely more human in most ways.

Don’t fear silence.  Don’t fear inactivity.

And I will note that meditation is not really something you can plug into a life otherwise filled to overflowing.  You can’t “do” silence.  It is something you allow.  It is something you invite, and then wait, as long as it takes.

To reiterate the philosophy taught in Kum Nye, first you learn to relax, then become mindful–you become aware of what is there in totality, including deep within you–then, and only then, you focus on what is healthy and beautiful and good, and grow it.  That, properly, is meditation.  But meditation cannot be rushed.  It takes time, patience, and space.

Tarthang Tulku created Kum Nye as it exists in his books, as I understand it, to create a bridge between the average life of someone living in our hyperkinetic world, and the possibility of truly deep insight.  But that was in 1975 or so.  Our pace of life has, what, doubled since then?  How often do people stop by their friends houses uninvited and bring cake or cookies?  How many people feel they have the time to pursue meaningful hobbies?

There are of course underlying economic realities in play, too.  Our money supply has roughly quadrupled since 1980.  This means most of us are roughly one quarter as wealthy as we would have been had there been stable currency.  Ponder that.  Ponder how much time you would have if you could earn what you earn in one quarter the time.  You could double what you make in half the time you work currently.  Higher true incomes of course would affect demand and thus prices, but there is a core truth in this rough analysis.

The banks are driving all of us batshit insane.  Why, I can’t say, other than habitual greed for money they can’t spend, in pursuit of essentially meaningless lives.

This is my two cents–which should be worth 8 cents–for today.  Why economists are not up in arms about all this is a sociological problem I have not solved.  I emailed some 300 of them my argument.  Only one replied, and he misunderstood me.

They take the problem to be intelligent monetary policy.  I assert that having ANY monetary policy is stupid, and that it amounts to granting legal status to thieves to ply their trade with impunity.  The amount of money in circulation should be fixed, once, and never changed again.

Oi: you know, I had my astrological chart done, and one of the alignments, I forget which one, said I was destined to be a Cassandra of sorts.  Of course, another said that I had the spirit and relentlessness of Leonidas, whose name I had not heard until I looked it up.

No lives leave the world untouched.  Even the name Cassandra survives, and reminds us we should sometimes listen to the people telling us things we do not want to hear, or indeed are not even emotionally equipped to hear.  Truth can emerge from all places.  Watch for it.  This is in large measure the game of life.

I watched a very enjoyable, unpredictable play tonight.  I would share details, but I don’t share details.

Suffice it to say the postmodern ethos was well represented.  The play was often about the play, which eventually included a soliloquy by the putative playwright (actually an actor, although it would no doubt amuse the actual playwright to play an actor playing himself from time to time).

It was very funny, played with stereotypes in very interesting and both comical and cavalier ways (he managed to find black humor in drive by shootings, although we the audience were largely afraid to laugh).

The point I wanted to make, though, is that postmodernism as an ethos, as a worldview, is inherently and intrinsically emotionally rooted.  It is not an intellectual world view.  It is rooted in despair, confusion, and fear.

Both the comedy and the flirtation with nihilism were backed by biographical details which rang true, even if wrong in some important particulars.

And it occurred to me that so often in dealing with people’s defenses, we are dealing with a human shell game.  They are daring us to guess which self is the real one.  Often, I feel, they themselves don’t know.  Many comedians I think are like this.  Comedy is a sort of violence you can get away with for a long period of time.

It occurs to me to share my piece on Deconstruction, written some ten years ago or so, around the time I built that website.  All of these pieces still have value to me, but the discovery of the true pain within me, and its source,  is worth all of them ten times over.

You can say intelligent things without heart.  But those things will always lack the Way.  We need the Way in our lives.  It is the invisible Mother, the source of all things.

I can’t resist adding: I’m not a bad writer.  I likely would have made a decent if not great academic.  Probably a really good teacher.

But all my life I have tried to follow the path of discovery, and tried never to get too far away from “what’s next” on this journey.  I have never forgotten it, and I felt–and I think I made the right decision–that any number of choices I might have made, including academia or–believe it or not–law enforcement–would have pushed me backward in the long run.  I could not always see the way forward, but I never ever stopped looking.  I still look every day, but what I have found, what I am working with now, is very, very good.