Author: White Whale

I was in a museum last night, that came alive.  Wild dogs were chasing me, and the people with me were all trying to arm themselves.  But there were many things which were simply interesting, thing growing and blossoming, new life.

And it hit me when I woke up that, like many popular movies, “Night at the Museum” has a mythic, deep psychological component.

Our memories are storied in exhibits which are static.  Such and such happened.  I had this relationship with this person, that with that person.  We remember them as we perceived them at the time.

But 1) what you remember may be entirely colored by emotions which clouded your perception; and 2) the process of growth involves reremembering who you “are”, which means recasting your past, not in a false light, but in the light of movement, of flexibility.  All the parts and pieces in your personal museum can be brought to life, moved around, brought into synchrony with one another, all without violence.  What was, and fixed, need be no more.

Clearly, the past is the past, but what the past MEANS can be changed.  Changing who you are means changing who you were.  By this I mean that who you were was someone for whom becoming who you are now was always possible, but invisible.  I can’t see my path forward, even now, but that there is a path forward, I have no doubt.  That growth is possible, I have no doubt.  But until you occupy that new place, you cannot imagine it.

Ponder the phenomenon of colors.  Our eyes can see only a very small range of electromagnetic radiation.  What color would gamma rays be, if we could see them?  We can’t know.  It is as impossible for us to imagine, as sight is for those who have always been blind.

But in important ways, who you become is who you were.  It was always possible.  You are not so much growing into, as shedding ignorance.  To become more, you become less: less stupid.  Less unaware.  Everything we need to know is already there.

And every movement forward is, then, a movement backward too.

I think I am making sense here, but if you want to call nonsense, have at it.  It won’t bother me.

I will add, that protecting yourself against yourself is hiding memories and unpleasant feelings.  When you open the doors, and turn on the lights, and reanimate the past, it is all there, good, bad, and ugly.

This is a fascinating process, though.  I wish it for you.

Thr thing about kicking over a bee hive is it makes it obvious to everyone that it was there. We would not see John Brennan in the public realm if Hillary–or Jeb, or Mitt–were President. The former Director of the FBI would not be telling people to vote Democrat lest they be labeled “UnAmerican”.

I was wondering today if our intelligence agencies are best labeled riddled with Trump moles or Deep State moles? Is the composition changing?

Was that explosion over Russia not quite something to behold? Those there were fireworks. Who saw them and realized they needed to change sides? Can Trump build an intelligence network within the intelligence network?

I am tempted to wonder if most human misery is not rooted on proto-narcissism, and the Anatta/Anatman of the Buddha not mature individuation.

Think about it: you think about what you lack.  You have to force yourself to think about what you have.  Were you aware you had a right hand?  Not until this moment.

When you have a self, you do not need to think about having a self.  You participate.  You are a part of the dance.  It is those who do not have a self, who are self conscious, who stand on the sidelines.

Buddhism is not about perfection.  It is about getting unstuck.  It is a practical psychology, created by a genius–and furthered by other geniuses–who were very certainly friends of humanity.

For some reason this morning I got to looking up alleged ET types.  There are the Nordic looking ones, the Greys, and the Reptilians, I guess.  There may be more.

So I watch this odd video, alleging a Secret Service agent is shape shifting.  Now, stay with me.

Is there any evidence this video was NOT altered to splice in images of Voldemort?  No, not at all.  But I am willing to grant it a shred of possibility.  Why?  Because that is what I do.  If you want to see everything it is possible to see, you cannot shut down possible inputs at their inception.

What do I see which is not crazy?  I see a Federal government which is spending its way into economic disaster.  Do you see this?  Does it not take a quasi-conspiratorial mindset to see this, when neither party wants to talk about it, when our media does not want to talk about it, when our schools do not want to talk about it?

Do you not have to be “crazy” to question why the Fed–an unelected body whose members we are not allowed to know, but which consists in our largest banks, in an arrangement in which they can vote themselves literally unlimited sums of money–is allowed to exist as it is?  Ponder this.  If you question the Fed, which is absolutely at the core of our economy, and you are crazy.  You are in the same league as people talking about the Lizard people.  Whacko.

So yes, I take regular trips to crazy town.  I don’t know what the truth is.  Neither do you.  The difference between me and most is I admit it, and I am always willing to hear new perspectives.  If you don’t, if you say “here be dragons” perceptually, then you always risk missing something major, and over time the risk of a perceptual failure is 100%.

The biggest coverups are hidden in plain site.  The budget numbers are posted regularly.  The Fed Chairman does hearings on C-Span.  John Brennan says he wants to overthrow the elected government of the US.  Should we not believe him?  Have his talents and contacts been exhausted simply because he no longer holds that particular job?  Is he a minority of one in the intelligence world, or do many others feel the same?  HE IS ON THE FUCKING TV saying these things. 

It is an odd fact that you can tell people they are asleep, and they simply work that back into their waking dream.

Ponder that the notion of a balanced budget has become a “right wing extremist” idea.  Nobody on the Left talks about it, and nearly no one on the Right talks about it any more either.  Only the people–like Rand Paul–who get attacked by everyone.

I think a lot of the time people wind up as non-conformists is they lack the emotional stability to integrate in a mature way into an existing group.  They do not choose non-conformity, so much as that how they were born, or the wounds they have received since birth, make it painful and unnatural for them to become natural members of the cultural order into which they were born.

Now, difference has happened everywhere, I am sure.  Within Native American tribes boys would become convinced they were girls.  I am sure there was homosexuality.  I am sure there were schizophrenics, and perhaps even manic-depressives, although that may be a disease of modern society.  Garden variety neuroses were likely uncommon, but as a tribe, I’m sure they worked out ways of integrating, to varying degrees, all manners of difference which did not threaten violence to the tribe itself.  If you simply have to accept a person, and not a principle–which is the core problem with mass society–then that is much easier.  You just adjust your perceptual frame to include them, and figure out how they can be made to belong.

The thing with mass society is there are no tribes any more.  Look at your neighborhood.  View every dwelling in there as a cave. The people who live there–if you live in a city, in any event–leave in the morning, work somewhere, come home, and lock the door.  They lock the door because they don’t trust the people around them.  They don’t know who may just happen along.  There are far, far too many people to keep track of, and all but the friendliest of them don’t even know their neighbors.  After all, the neighbors will likely only be there until their property value swells and they cash out to move to the next step up.   They are not committed to you or that place.  Not in America, in any event.

And the value of big cities for “fuck ups”–I am not judging them, but I think this is a reasonable approximation of how they think society views them–is not that they belong, per se, so much as that their differences can be made to disappear.  They vanish.  Everything that made them stick out no longer matters.

But to the point, they have not integrated into a culture.  They have not come to belong anywhere.  The culture, therefore, becomes “culture without culture”.  It becomes belonging with no standards.  But, as I have pointed out before, if there are no standards, the sense of belonging, itself, must become suspect.  And people sense this.  They sense questionably personal loyalty.

All in all, I continue to believe that the best solution to our cultural problems is to make everything much smaller, to find ways to create small tribes which truly value loyalty and sincerity. I have proposed ways of doing this.  It makes me dizzy thinking of the challenge, but I still think of it anyway.

For some reason I got to reading up on Alan Ginsburg and City Lights the other day, and was reminded of the obscenity trial with regard to Howl, which I still have on my bookshelf somewhere. I can relate to the best minds being driven mad.

City Lights, having been made a “historic landmark” by the city, is now Establishment, to some extent.

And I speculate that today, they are discussing Trump’s “treason” by meeting with Vladimir Putin. They are preaching about the patriotic duty of all citizens to accept at face value the stories told by our intelligence agencies.  They support former CIA Director Brennan in his calls for a coup.

How far we have come.

To me, I thought many good things were starting in the late 1950’s and 1960’s.  It was not unreasonable to want to be a non-conformist.  It was not unreasonable for homosexuals to demand the right to fuck each other however they chose to, and to write about it.

But something went wrong somewhere.  The people who were preaching freedom from censorship are now demanding it.  The people who shouted out “Question Authority” are now demanding rote submission to it.  The people who wanted everyone to have the right to think for themselves, and to live their lives as they saw fit are now lecturing us unceasingly about EVERYTHING.  MY GOD IS THAT A FUCKING STRAW!!!!  HOW DARE YOU!!!

The people who were fun, who wanted to live open and expressive lives, have now shrunk into small holes, and are doing their level best to pull the rest of us in there.  No thank you.

I remain a conservative hippy.  I see things my own way.  Freedom is a necessity to realize our purpose here on earth.  Some order and common sense is necessary to live in freedom.

And if you are shrieking at me, and telling me how to live my life, you have nothing in common with the best of the counter-culture, which was actually once a thing, before becoming monolithic, gray, and really really fucking boring, when not violent in roughly the same way, and with the same degree of prejudice, the KKK was with regard to blacks.  Then, they are scary, but still boring.  Do not look there for anything original, generative, or life affirming.

I may start sharing a few more links I find interesting for whatever reason.

Here is one: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/clintons-emails-fbi-foreign-entity-gohmert/

Summary: “So, in short, one of the lead investigators in the Clinton email case apparently learned that a foreign entity was getting all Clinton’s emails — including many that contained classified information — and … did nothing.”


I will comment that within the laws of our nation, as they exist clearly and unambiguously, Hillary Clinton on Comey’s own admission committed at least 8 or so prosecutable felonies, even before we get to obstruction of justice and evidence tampering and contempt of Congress.


I have even seen the claim that Hillary NEVER used a State Department email address.  Imagine what, then, must have passed through her private and illegal server, patently built to avoid Federal information disclosure guidelines.

Pray for Trump, but pray for all the people who are crazy.  And we are all crazy.  This madness has infected you, too.  Me, too.  It cannot but have affected all of us.  It is too large.  We were all submerged in the wave.

Some of us refuse to listen.  Let the rest of us listen more.

What I feel this morning is that with two narcissistic parents, logic alone dictates that I MUST have narcissistic tendencies myself.  I was not taught nurturing and true kindness.  And what I feel this morning is that the core FEELING at the center of a not-quite-malignant narcissism is the sense of no-self.  I am not quite there.  I do not quite have power over my actions.  There is not a person quite there who would make any decision.  I whip and beat myself, to survive, but it makes life unpleasant, and I would like life to be pleasant.  True generosity flows from a feeling of abundance.  It can come from no other place.  God does not demand of us true self sacrifice, and most people who do sacrifice themselves, I think, do so out of habit, out of the feeling of shame that would overwhelm them if they did not.  I think this is true of most soldiers, and no few wives of selfish men.

What I feel, now, is that this whole political conflict needs a new energy.  We do need Trump going toe to toe with his countless critics, but for the rest of us internet warriors, and those among us who retain some ability to discuss politics around the dinner table, we need to adopt a spirit of non-violence.  When they are violent, we need to be kind back.  This is the only way.  The actual physical violence has not broken out yet, but something needs to break the spell.  Using the tactics and spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi before him, seems to me at this moment the most likely candidate.

So if you are arguing with someone, feel the spirit of Gandhi infuse you.  When you get angry, when they provoke you, respond always with kindness, and–and I’ve never said this before–an optimism that one day soon they will see the light.  Present facts as possible.  Present arguments as possible, knowing in advance they will twist them, ignore them, and respond mainly with lies they have been told somewhere.

It occurs to me that chronic anxiety and low grade anger are extremely fertile soil on which to plant any seed of Agitation, and those emotions are fed exceedingly well in our modern age.  An addiction to your iPhone alone will ensure they are present.

There is no benefit to feeding this.  Let us all try and remember who we are.  We are not primitive beasts locked in a primal struggle.  We are noble by birth, and should act the part.  This does not mean surrender.  It means, rather, continual effort, but patient effort, and effort founded on a confidence of eventual victory.

We may not win.  I’m not one to speak empty optimism,   But if we ARE to win, this is, I feel strongly, how it will happen.

I am really feeling how unnecessary this conflict is, this turning brother on brother, friend on friend.  It is manufactured, created.  By whom, exactly, I can’t say.  It is a complex process, but that it springs from a root of hatred is, to my mind, indisputable.

Who are these people who want us at war with one another?  Besides things, besides gold and silver, what do they get?  And why do they want it?

Man’s misery lasts a long time.  The old adage was “all that glitters is not gold.”  The new adage is “all that glitters IS gold.”

We know how to build happiness and lasting peace.  Why can’t we?  Why can’t we?