Author: White Whale

Your best memories were at one time in the future.  There is no reason this process cannot be repeated over and over, unless you choose, having passed those times, to try and return to them in memory.

Allow life’s bounty.  This is all that is asked of us.  It will all be tallied in the end.  You will see where you have been, and you will know what you know, and what you have learned along the way.

Look forward.  Look backwards only to improve the future by learning from mistakes, and doing better.

You know, there are people like Thanos on Earth, who believe that the solution to all our problems is a mass extinction of some sort.  Bill Gates seems to be of this camp.  He keeps talking about how awful a global pandemic would be, but if you study his beliefs, he can’t have failed to see what, within his world view, would be the upside of such a catastrophe.

And these ideas sometimes appear naked in public spaces, as with the monuments in Georgia: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/05/georgia-guidestones-doomsday-monument.html

Obviously, we can’t support unlimited population growth forever, but there is no reason we cannot all decide to plan on reducing the population over the next few centuries.  This is the strategic role of the Global Warming hoax, in that it allows those pushing it to claim that we only have a little time, when in reality we have quite a bit of time, as far as anyone can tell.

Yes, things would be better in many ways if we had, say, 2 billion people on Earth.  But as I understand the math, we could fit everyone now living into suburban houses in the State of Texas, and give most of them back yards.  The rest of the Earth would have no one living on it.  There is lots of room, and lots of uncultivated land.

And if the Earth does warm that will free up hundred of thousands of square miles of added farmland, depending on how far north the ice line goes.

There is no need to panic.  What we need to work on first is global emotional health, which will necessarily involve gradually weeding out the psychopaths.  How we do this, I’m not yet sure.  My best guess is that if we can demonstrate the survival of death, beyond any reasonable doubt, many people who are currently beset by demonic ideas originating in their own sense of the pointlessness and futility of existence will evolve in new and more positive directions.

There is nothing more important than knowing if we survive death or not, but if you pick any possible research topic, like whether or not right handed or left handed people pick their noses more often, it will almost certainly be better funded.  Why?  This is ludicrous.  We spend many billions of research on everything under the sun, most of it merely validating things which were already reasonably obvious.  Some government has probably funded studies showing men in general prefer large breasts and that many women like chocolate.

This is the world we live in.  Hopefully one day it starts making more sense.

If you think about it, when Jesus said “God loves you”, if he did, the intent can only have been to teach people to look within themselves for the love they needed.  If people love themselves, they don’t NEED others to love them, and are instead ready to OFFER love, when it is appropriate.

In a perfect world, everyone is perfectly content with themselves, with who they are, and “in love” with themselves such that they are happy and radiant without needing the validation or support of anyone, even if they choose, with their happiness, to share that happiness with other happy people.  This is a short definition of heaven, at least as understood socially and intrapsychically.

In a perfect world, in other words, the people who feel the compulsive need to “serve” others, in order to meet their own unmet needs, have no work.  They would, instead, become the objects of compassion themselves.  “Why so much anxiety about saving the world?”, they would be told.  “The world is saved.”

You have to always look to the end goal, and work backwards.  Seen from this perspective, much of what passes for compassion and love is simply mislabeled mania.  It is easy to deflect eyes from your own inner emotional world when you are always “doing” for others.  Obviously, this is the root nature of what is called codependence.  The “Co” references the often overlooked second lane on that street going the other way.  It is fine to be codependent with dogs.  They are kids who never grow up and can’t be expected to grow up.  It is not fine to be this way with human beings.  It is a type of emotional assault which I might term emotional sapping (in both the sucking sense, and the military sense of undermining).

One other clarifying comment I wanted to make is that if we accept that souls are eternal, there are, finally, no parents and no children.  The relations of any given set of souls is that of their relative development, not their birth order on this planet.  This leads quickly to the thought that there is no incest in the other plane, which is a gross thought, but then to the further thought that we get everything backwards here, and misunderstand, consistently, what matters.

Sex is basically a means of resolving physical and emotional tension, which evolved as a means of propagating physical existence on this planet.  It is a very low level of relatedness when it comes to soul contact.  What is beautiful is not great sex, but great love, great seeing, the sharing of light and love and laughter instantly and completely.

Imagine seeing all the souls for a mile around you, without the walls.  Imagine they were all happy, and we all lived in this endless quiet ocean.  Seeing their happiness would make you happy.  This is close, I think, to what is meant by pure love.

It is obviously true that helping people build themselves, their spirits, their egos, their capacities is work, and it is work undertaken with a vision of who they can be, and with the expectation of one day realizing the happiness of seeing them succeed, of becoming who they wanted to be, or were meant to be, as you both understand it.  This happiness, though, is the goal.  The rest, what we call love, is a mature process of delayed gratification.  It is self oriented, in that you want to feel something, but selfless, in that you take no direct benefit from the success of others.

Few thoughts.

I was listening to some kid at the theater tonight–I did finally go see the movie that may as well have been titled Thanos–and thinking he was nerdy.  Then I thought, well, he has lived his whole life surrounded by media, and has been undersocialized.  This is basically what being nerdy is.  A kid might be nerdy because he studies all the time, because plays video games all the time, or because he finds some other way to hide in his room, perhaps with a few people like him or herself.  But the lack of interacting, talking, going back and forth, learning how it all works: that is fundamental.

Then I thought about what I was doing there.  A movie theater is a good place for a nerd.  There are lots of feelings there, lots of emotions, lots of ways to live an ersatz life.

Then I got to thinking about how it is quite possible, in our world, to spend a majority of time feeling other people’s emotions, ones that are peddled to you.  I have long said I don’t want to die and realize I lived someone else’s life, but in important respects, if you consume media habitually, that is what you are doing.  When you come to die, when you look at how you spent your time, how you got your pleasures, how you got your equivalent, in many cases, of social interaction, it was vicariously, through either people playing roles, or pretending to be real on reality TV.

What IS a life spent watching TV or playing video games?  Is that life at all?  Is not killing time a sin of some sort?  If you spent the time staring at the wall, emotions would come up that were YOURS, no one elses.  Those emotions make you who you are, and not someone else.

But vast sums of money are made pushing emotions, pushing feelings.  “They are making a new Mission Impossible, and it looks like lots of ups and downs.  I can’t wait.”

Why would this movie be exciting?  Because you get lots of ups and downs.  They do deliver, in most cases.  This is not a lie or a false promise, EXCEPT that no movie can give you a life.

Obviously, I am a bit of a cinephile, but I view cinema as a way of ENHANCING my life experience.  I watch perhaps two movies a week when I am watching heavily.  I watch Jeopardy most nights, and allow myself to watch some of the documentaries on the Weather channel and sometimes American Ninja Warrior.  That’s it.  My normal day often includes no TV but Jeopardy, which I enjoy, even thought I am just not QUITE good enough to play on it.  I’m not good at pop culture, and current novels, and sometimes I just brain fade.  On the latest quiz I couldn’t remember Myanmar.  I don’t know why.

But all that as it may, consider the role ersatz experience plays in your life.  Do you sit still long enough, ever, to really know who you are, and to be able to observe your self as it expands and contracts, as it reacts to things and situations, and people?  Can you feel subtle qualities of sensation as they arise and stay with them?  This is what the Indians in the trees and plains and mountains did.  This is how you feel a landscape.  This is how you feel a place.  This is how you sense subtle changes.

That which is not used withers and dies.  We are exposed to vastly too much affect, such that our endogenous capacities seem to be weakened.  People complain they can’t feel anything.  This is most likely because they have felt too much, for too long, that had nothing to do with them at all.

Souls take nurturing too.  They require water and sunlight and fresh air.  At least, our relationship with our souls, our conscious relationship, does.

We all die.  This is sad, and it is happy.  Perhaps when it is my time, I will breathe a sigh of relief.  My last words might be “Fuck, that was hard.”  But I do think we all need to take care to live in our own bodies, to think our own thoughts, to feel what we feel, to allow what we feel, to learn to understand and regulate at its own level what we feel, and to find our own ways in life both intuitively and rationally.

This woman has a remarkable ability to get in the news for saying profoundly stupid things.  Given this, though, I spent a few moments thinking about her.

Here is the statistic she really owes her voting public: since her entry into “public service”–which is a very, very lucrative profession–in 1990, what have been the economic trends in the districts she represented?  She has represented 3 districts in California, as I understand it: the 29th, the 35th, and now, since 2013, the 43rd.

Never mind that, as a public servant, she has earned enough money to afford a $4 million mansion that is not located in her home district, even thought that indicates a lot, even to the near sighted.

What has been the net effect of her presence in Congress for the core black constituency she not only claims to speak for, but which she claims to speak for so strongly that she feels she can brand anyone who disagrees with her on anything a regressive racist?

I am finding that poverty trends over time by Congressional district are hard to come by.  Would this not be a useful statistic, for a lot of reason?  What were the poverty trends in Chicago while Obama was President?  Are blacks in the 29th, 35th, and the 43rd districts on balance better off since she was there?  Does anyone know?  And if they don’t know, how can they claim she does something other than talk a good game, eat fine meals paid for by lobbyists, show up in the House once in a while, and otherwise just cash her checks–Representatives make nearly $400,000 a year, plus lifetime paid benefits–and have a good time?

Do YOU think that, if I were to find this data, that her presence would be in any way detectable?  My best guess is that everything in all the Districts she has represented got worse from 2006–when Democrats took over Congress–until this year, when Trump’s presence began to have an effect.  More importantly, the data line representing “Percentage under the poverty line” has probably flatlined in all her districts, statistically, since 1990.  Whoever replaced her likely did as little as she does.  Blacks vote for Democrats.  This means Democrats don’t need any game at all.  They don’t have to deliver on anything.  They don’t even have to try and pretend. They just need to talk about the damned system, damned white people, and damned Republicans from time to time.  That’s all it takes to keep the racket rolling.

Does anyone want to openly say they view their job as getting black people better quality crumbs from white people’s tables?  That is in effect her spiel, one that keeps her in a job, and a very good job at that, with little work, high pay, and a whole lot of perks we aren’t allowed to know about.

So I read some other rapper wants someone else (not him, not him) to fuck Kanye up.

And I am left to wonder, AGAIN, why the black community thinks Trump is out to get them.  Trump has always been very open to minority participation and success.  That’s why he got an award on the same platform as Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali.  That is why Jesse Jackson partnered with him on minority outreach.

If I were to pick one single aspect of public black life which most opens them to the accusation that they are inferior in some way–to be clear, to racist beliefs–it would be their inability to see, after fifty years, how blatantly they have been used and abused by the Democrat party, which was ALWAYS the party of Jim Crow.  There was never a Republican Jim Crow, only Democrat.  The  Republican Party was founded to end slavery, and to some vastly lesser extent, to end racism.  Republicans oppressed Southern whites, but all the racist oppression: 100% Democrat.

And now, not to be Democrat is to hate blacks?

This, to be clear, is why they are told to hate Trump: he isn’t a Democrat, and, they are told, only Democrats protect blacks.  But how?  What have they REALLY done to protect blacks?  Free phones with 150 minutes of speech a month?  Slightly better food stamps?  Seriously?

As Kanye pointed out, Chicago did not change in ANY WAY in Obama’s 8 years, other than that it got more violent, the economy got worse, and the educational system either stayed the same or also got worse.  And Obama was from Chicago.  Do you think he gave a shit about the blacks who voted for him?  Of course not.  He was more worried about the price of arugula.

In my current Kum Nye practice session, I am to end with a 10-15 minute meditation on love.  I am not comfortable thinking about love, but I did it anyway.

And it occurred to me some of the different things that happen under the name “love”.  There is the person who sweeps in and takes over, who makes your bed, and ties your shoes, and packs your lunch and tells you where to go.  This is “cloning of the self”.  It is an aggression, committed by someone who wants to see more of themselves in the world.  It has nothing to do with you at all.

Then there is the person who just wants to leave their scent everywhere, who affects a benign presence, and more or less “blesses” you.

There is the desperate need to get, from romantic love, what one did not get as a child.  Both people demand of the other everything they have, while giving only their need.  Sex can tie this together for a time, but not forever.  It spins apart in various ways, although sometimes someone–usually the woman–can keep it together by giving much more than she gets, over a long period of time.  The man, in this scenario, remains a child, with a lover/mother.

And it does occur to me that how a mother separates from a child, particularly a boy, is of vital psychodynamic importance.  There has to be a union when the child is young, and a specific separation at an appropriate age.  As I have said, I do believe in the Oedipal Complex, but I think Freud got it backwards: I think the children imbibe the unhealthy attachment of their mother, who is often using their child as an object to get the love they do not get from the father.

What I feel is that real love, true love, is a taking away of affect, not an addition.  What I feel, what I see in my waking dreams, is all of us living in water, connected, naked to one another.  We all live in bubbles which can be made opaque, which can be made larger and smaller.  Love is not adding or taking anything away.

I am not sure what I mean by this.  I am speaking aloud.  Perhaps I will see more in time.

It is really a remarkable thing, coming into life with post traumatic stress.  The worst that can happen, has already happened, and then used as a baseline.  People like me are in some respects strangers, at least among those who have not suffered such stress. 

But it is hard–impossible, really–to know for sure how many people are affected by Developmental Trauma Disorder.  It is a new diagnosis.  It appears in many ways.  It is perhaps like an inflammation of the soul.  It is perhaps the true genesis of all evil.

I was reading an article by Stephen Pinker (I saw his picture for the first time, and was struck by his dandyish hair style, and presumably underlying sense of affectation), and it occurred to me that, while Reason is vitally important for all human undertakings, that he is asking the wrong question.

The question is not what is rational, but how do we become fully rational human beings.  He, himself, is clearly not a rational human being.  He rejects the science of the afterlife, of psi, of everything non-physical, but extremely empirical and hence scientific on his own terms.

I am tempted to postulate that people who “live in their heads”, who overemphasize reason and rationality, might be presumed to suffer as a group from developmental trauma.  They were not loved enough at some point. They don’t REALLY understand love.

Reason is a natural outgrowth of emotional health.  If you are trying to get from A to B, then reason is the best way to do it.  Since you are emotionally healthy, you will reliably choose the best path. 

But reason tells us NOTHING about what to value, and about when protecting our own emotional health might require detours and rerouting on otherwise straight lines.  It is rational to protect one’s emotional well being, but if one is insensible of what that might mean, then this aspect of rationality is lost.

And in the same sense that Robespierre trod a straight line from the Revolution equaling human well being, to the destruction of all possible opponents of the Revolution also equaling human well being, I think it quite appropriate to fear, in the abstract, all people who would fetishize both “science” and “reason”.

If one assumes perfect rationality is possible, then there is no logical reason it cannot be canonized in a single authority with supreme power.  It is made supremely powerful because it is supremely rational, and because by definition what it considers an abomination must be wrong.  If it follows the methods of “science”, then it is infallible, just as we are told, in many ways, that the IPCC is infallible, and the “science is settled”.  Those spouting this view lack the political clout to create their tribunal, thus far, but the principle is there already, and the social support for it is there as well, among many, who already clamor for the heads of dissenters.

In reality, of course, a singular authority represents a perceptual choke point, which kills many possible ideas.  This is the reason “science”, properly understood, can NEVER be understood as anything other than ALL the opinions represented by people who follow the method.  If it is uniform, it can be ASSUMED to be dead.  Where there is only one opinion, it can only mean the others have been killed, figuratively or literally.

As I have pointed out before, Newton’s Laws of Motion, which are as canonical as a body of ideas describing physical reality can be, were shown to be incomplete and wrong in some cases.  This is why we now use General Relativity which, itself, may one day be superseded.  As a final answer for the nature of reality, it is clearly wrong, as it cannot incorporate the discoveries of Quantum Physics.

A better tomorrow will necessarily, structurally, need to begin with comprehensive, deep, emotional health and well being.  It will necessarily begin with people learning about, getting in touch with, and learning to meet their true emotional needs.

This is the only logical approach.

So I listened to Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit” and had many ideas.  I will share those I can remember intelligibly here.  Those I can’t remember intelligibly will trickle back to wherever ideas which have been thought and then unthought go.  They are likely still there somewhere.  I may yet find them again, but presumably they will have changed clothes by then.

Basic idea: Humans have space in our behavioral memory allotted to what amount to programmable instincts.  We are like birds in that we can feel the need to nest or mate, but unlike birds in that the precise nature of our instincts can be made to adapt, in real time, to current circumstances.  We call these programmable instincts “habits”.

A culture is the sum total of the habits of a given group of people who have bonded together to some greater or lesser extent.  How such habits form is a formally complex process which is not replicable, but which is comprehensible, as a series of responses which are more and less effective to the problems of human life as they relate to confusion about the nature of life and the world, the concrete problems of physical survival, and the social problems of how to make group decisions and how to concentrate or distribute power to either optimize happiness on one pole, or safety–or perceived safety–on the other.

This means that who we “are” within a cultural context is a set of habits we did not invent, do not understand, do not execute consciously for the most part, and which confine us in important ways, while also allowing us to belong to a protective social order and to meet our needs for community and interpersonal connection.

I propose that for habits we can substitute “dharmas”.  Now, I am a bit fuzzy on the Buddhist use of the word, but it is clearly applicable to Hindu notions of place and duty.  As I understand the Buddhist use of the word, they include a roughly Hindu notion, but also use it to refer to what exists, the bits and things floating around, understood abstractly.  Here is one selection:

Mahayana texts sometimes use the word dharma to mean something like “manifestation of reality.” A literal translation of the Heart Sutra contains the line “Oh, Sariputra, all dharmas [are] emptiness” (iha Sariputra Sarva Dharma sunyata).
Very basically, this is saying that all phenomena (dharmas) are empty (sunyata) of self-essence.
You see this usage also in the Lotus Sutra; for example, this is from Chapter 1 (Kubo and Yuyama translation):
I see bodhisattvasWho have perceived the essential characterOf all dharmas to be without duality,Just like empty space.Here, “all dharmas” means something like “all phenomena.”

To be without form is to be without habits.  Physiologically, psychologically, this is very, very hard.

Duhigg talks about habits as constituted by a trigger, a behavior, and a reward.  They are conditioned responses, in other words.

Here is the thing: the trigger is most often a feeling of some sort.  A feeling flashes before your inner eyes–perhaps so fast you don’t even feel it any more–and you find yourself doing something which seems logical, but you don’t know why.  Having done it, you feel better.  Not doing it elicits all sorts of bad feelings, notably craving.

Craving–the Buddhist Tanha–is the word Duhigg uses, and it first occurs in the case of monkeys who were more or less addicted to blackberry juice.  Once they got the jones, all they wanted to do was get more juice.  Their brains were rewired.

One can easily look at the Buddhist spiritual path, particularly, as oriented around nothing more or less than superior mental health.  Logically, if we can learn to avoid constant cravings, if we can learn to deal well with uncertainty and change, then we will be happier all around.

Within Kum Nye, the whole point of the thing is to feel what you are feeling, to find what is hidden, to find what slithers around in the darkness, or in the periphery of your vision, or which moves so fast you think you are imagining things.  All of these things lead, ultimately, to habits which have cravings associated with them, and following unfreedom and behavioral compulsion.  If you stop to feel, you automatically stop the looped behavior. If you give that feeling freedom to breathe, it can go anywhere it wants, which makes you more authentic and more intuitive.

Returning to this conception of culture, Duhigg offers what to me was a good analogy (although of course I am extending it much farther than he did).  Researchers watching mice learn a maze noted that the first time they walk it, they are hypervigilent.  They proceed slowly, sniff everything, look at everything, pause often, and generally expend a lot of energy.  After they have completed the maze a few times, they go faster.  Eventually they run immediately to where the cheese is.

Living within a culture is like this.  It takes a bit to become acculturated, but once you have, many things, many behaviors, happen automatically.  You celebrate the 4th of July by grilling out.  You celebrate Christmas with a Christmas tree and gifts.  The details both vary by culture and define that culture.

With learned/conditioned behaviors, you get dopamine reinforcement, which is something Duhigg did not know about, or chose not to discuss.  Dopamine is an inherent reward for a given behavior.  It is the completion hormone (is it a hormone?  Neurotransmitter?  I’m not sure), at least as I understand it.

Living within a culture is living within known bounds is living within a maze you understand and know how to get rewards out of.  Culture is in some respects a dopamine dominated system, and an organized method for getting behavioral reinforcement.

That comprises most of my notes.  Some of the ideas I had don’t fit neatly here, and I don’t feel like making a follow up post.

But there are some very interesting ideas here.  I do believe in the afterlife.  I do believe we go on.  But it is also possible, I feel, to dumb Buddhism down to a concrete method for developing mental health here, now, before we go anywhere at all, and one which works even if you are a materialistic fundamentalist.

The phrase I think I would use to describe this film is “sympathetic absurdity”.  He show how ridiculous, how ponderous, how lustful we can be for “life”, however we define it, and how these sentiments, which we hope will be pure, deep, profound, can often shade quickly into absurdity, without our seeing it.  He is not saying life is absurd, but that Ferdinand is absurd, and that those who are like him are likewise absurd. 

Do you think your life will change in profound ways by running away?  Don’t count on it.  You simply create a world of new problems, which you will not be equipped to solve.  Stay in the fold.  Leave only when you are ready.  Less is very often more.

The boldest lines are sometimes the shortest lines.  La Ligne Chance, I think was the French.  You want a long line, one that goes over the horizon.