Author: White Whale

It is really an amazing thing, that we are all left to wonder about the nature of life.  I interact sometimes with dedicated atheists.  They tell me “it is all explained”.  I was told the other day by someone that Houdini explained how mediumship was done to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but he wasn’t hearing any of it.  This is, of course, a gross oversimplification.

But I’m sitting on my couch tonight, drinking, watching Captain America: Winter Soldier (and remembering that violent movies are not in general good for me), and it is all on the table.  Maybe the atheists are right.  I suppose I can accept all that.

But, logically, based on every piece of empirical evidence I have considered, or at least most of them, atheism, itself, is illogical.

But where does that leave us?  Small children who hear voices may be right.  African (and other) Shamans who claim schizophrenia and other psychoses are usually the result of malignant spirits are right.

We are, on this reading, surrounded with other spirits.  We are, on this reading, spirits in a material world.  We are approximately existing, existing out of habit, we are easily pulled out of our forms, and are, once this happens, glad in most cases to see a brighter, easier, happier world.

It is all so confusing.  But I feel this confusion, in its own way, is beautiful, even intoxicating.  Do you want to be one of these people who has a clear world, with everything fully explained, and all surprises mathematically eliminated?  If so, our paths will never meet.  I live, perhaps, in the mud.  I live with the stupid, the mundane, the ridiculous.

So be it.  My decision is made, even if I remember the possibility of other decisions.

Gratitude is valuing what is at hand, what you can reach your hand for and readily obtain, or even what is offered to you.

Longing is a focus on what lies beyond reach.  It can go one of two ways.  The first, mature way, is to develop a plan to get what is so far away, by creating stages of possibility–concrete steps–each of which offers the possibility of gratitude and fulfillment.  Longing is thus brought under control and turned into gratitude by concrete and purposive, incremental action.

But there is a second way, in which longing becomes an end in itself, when you learn to love the feeling of lack.  I think the valorization of victimhood arises from this feeling.  It is a longing you cannot possibly meet.  It is a feeling of incompleteness, no matter where you go, or what you do.  It is the Portuguese “Saudade”, which might for my purposes here be translated as “a gap”.  It is, perhaps, a happiness in sadness.  I can’t explain it, but I have felt it.

So much of true spirituality consists in the attainment of realistic objectives, actionable plans, concrete goals, purposive activity.

Particularly for those of us with primal wounds, it is easy to get caught up in dreams and fantasies.  This is a detour from life.  You can never get enough, if you have a hole in the middle, but perhaps the size of the hole shrinks with time, if you focus on getting and valuing what you can, in all the senses of getting.

I would stipulate as a absolute principle–or as close to one outside my “BigThree” I am willing to get–that government cannot be compassionate. It can grant people money and favors, but it cannot be  compassionate. Compassion, like all intrinsically moral acts, requires a specific human relatedness, talking and close listening, and wisdom.

One way or another, those of us who have a few decades left in us will see a radically new world.  It may be a fantastic world.  It may be a horrible world.  But with all the inconceivably new things being evolved I can’t imagine we will not change radically, that our world, for better or worse, will be qualitatively the same in thirty years that it is today.

All of our problems are easily solved.  It simply requires the honest and unfettered work of men and women of good will.

Our chief problem is that we are not evolving morally with our technology.  We seem to be becoming nicer, but harder, more tolerant, but less understanding.  More free with our bodies, but increasingly chained in our minds.

The decisive shift we need to take to build a genuinely better world is to generalize mental and emotional health, to make it the default, to value it, to build it, and to PLAN to build it.  We don’t need more things. We don’t seem some chimerical “equality”.  We need to believe life has a purpose, that we can share in this purpose, that we belong, and the universe is interactive at its most basic level.

I asked God “why do I suffer?”, and He said “because you have the capacity for it.”

I think this is the truth.

My particular way is not easy.  I don’t know if there are other, easier ways, but I haven’t found them yet.

I do seem to have a capacity to enter into hard places, and survive.  I don’t know why I don’t die.  I don’t know why I am still alive.  But I am, and my work continues.

I fought, and I lost.

I fought, and I lost.

I stopped fighting, and I won.

Most human conflict begins with internal conflict, and internal conflict cannot be resolved externally. No amount of external violence–physical or emotional–can heal anyone.

How is it possible for someone to hate themselves?  It can only happen through splitting, because presumably some other part does not want to be hated, if it is allowed to be honest. 

What happens, I feel, is there is a pain which cannot be resolved, and which can only be externalized through violence (with emotional disconnection, as I have said, being a form of violence).

The resolution of the pain happens when you stop trying to fight it, when you throw up the white flag.

There is wisdom here somewhere, even if I am not expressing myself clearly, because these are intuitions I have not fully brought into my brain yet.

Much of the magnificence of life is hidden in the interstices between slabs of pain.

I feel so many of us spend lifetimes fearing to look carefully in certain places.  We fear what we might find.  We know something is there, but we never spend the time to put a spotlight on it, to see if it is good or bad, to see if it is just stuck, and keeping some larger wheel from coming to life and contributing to our well being.

Fear, I think it can be accurately stipulated, underlies all cognitive, affective, and behavioral rigidities.  People keep fear, though, because doing the work of finding out what lies in that dark corner amplifies the fear EVERY TIME.  You look that way, introspectively, and the anxiety increases.  You look away, and the anxiety decreases, but never disappears.  You have to go in that corner to make it go away, to heal.

I get overwhelmed often.  I think big.  Nobody has my back, not really, and perhaps that is the way it always is, when you are trying to see the world with your own eyes.

But increasingly I feel that if I follow the stream of fear, that is where salvation is.  That is where joy and beauty are hiding.  It is a hard, hard path, and it is small wonder most people never even contemplate it, as far as I can tell, outside of some massive life event that makes some emotional shifts impossible to avoid.

But that is where life is, at the end of what you fear most.

http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

I haven’t discussed this in a while.  The way I work is I get on fire with a problem, write and think about it obsessively for a time, then let it go when I am satisfied.  This piece here needs revision, but the broad outline, that banks steal wealth, and that the solution is reversing the “current” of wealth long enough to make things right, then closing the sluice gates forever, remains my core contention.

It’s funny: I read stuff sometimes I wrote years ago and think: I LIKE this guy. 

One would hope so, but somehow I still find it surprising.  I remember who I was back then.

The flip side of the Broken Window fallacy is the support window makers have for rioters.  It is true that a broken window does not support society as a whole, because it directs resources from more productive uses.

HOWEVER, by redirecting those resources TO window makers, they become wealthy.  Such people, if lacking scruple, could be expected to support ardently public unrest, anger, violence, and vandalism, even if they only do so by supporting BOTH sides, and doing what they can to build tension between them.

This, in a nutshell, is the arms industry, and those around it, like Halliburton, which may actually be guilty of the charges made of it by the Left.

The Left lies compulsively, but that does not mean it is impossible that they are sometimes, accidentally, right on the money.

I don’t know what just happened.  Kim not wanting to be deposed, killed, and have a knife shoved up his ass (after which–who?–John Bolton perhaps?–can say “we came, we saw, he died” with an utterly inappropriate giggle, while millions struggle to dig out of a billion tons of radioactive debris) is not incomprehensible.  Zero sum demands make no sense in a sensitive negotiation.

It may be that Kim is playing us, but it also seems that complete denuclearization is ridiculous.  That is his trump card.  That is what prevents him from being forced into an abject and humiliating surrender and opening him to a massacre like those of the Indians in the American West.

Everyone involved should know this.

Our approach needs to be gradualistic, and we need to take regime change off the table.  Even if we could somehow use some ultra high tech light bomb to surgically remove every fighting man and woman and their weapons tomorrow with no cost to us, it will still take a generation for those remaining to regain some sense of intellectual freedom and possibility.  They have been brutalized far too long for anything quick to even be conceivable, much less desirable.

I want Kentucky Fried Chicken in Pyongyang.  McDonald’s.  Grocery stores filled with food.  Programming and other jobs for North Koreans.  Maybe their names will fill the credits of the next Marvel movie.

Kim may want to prevent a mass exodus.  Fine.  This might even be ideal.  The North Korean people need to work their way around gradually to new ways of thinking.  What we DO need is regular visits from people from the other side of the DMZ.  Let this all take time.

Kim knows, I suspect, that a nuclear war would kill him, and millions of his people.  He can’t hope to win.  But he CAN keep the threat of nuclear attack on the table to prevent a wholesale invasion of his country.  And we should let him.

I say again: there are many people in this world who benefit from the continual threat of war, and even more from actual war.  They don’t suffer from it: they BENEFIT.  These people need to be marginalized and kept at the periphery, and excluded wherever possible.

My personal view is that John Bolton sabotaged the peace on purpose.  Kim Jung Un is irrational in some ways, but utterly rational in others.  The threat of another Libya could really only be understood in one way, and only reacted to, at least initially, in one way, the one he chose.