Author: White Whale

For reasons I won’t get into, from a thought process the source of which I won’t get into, I saw tonight the importance of NO for children.  When you say no to a child, on something important, it is like a tattoo on their soul.  It is the foundation, the building block, from which they will eventually create their selves, either in acceptance or rebellion. I think many children come quickly to appreciate parents who genuinely want to teach them useful life lessons.  My own children are proud of how tough their mother was.  And she was.  They were lucky, in her, and in me.  Both of them have said they will raise their own children the way they were raised. 

When you only say yes. there is no end.  There is no cessation.  The outward impulses go on forever.  Never saying no is a form of child abuse, for most children.

Consider that we all need no’s, but far too many children do not get them, or not in sufficient quantities.  Consider that the tattoo, the mark, SHOULD be on the inside.

What do you see?

Communism: the belief that if we give final and complete power to the bastards, they will immediately stop being bastards.

I will comment as well that Killmonger, from the Black Panther movie, might well be seen as the avatar of Communism.  He “invades” a nation he is connected to but does not understand, immediately foments an internecine civil war, and makes the principle aim of his regime the exportation of undirected but severe violence, all in the name of a “justice” whose main precept is that Might Makes Right, which in turn vitiates all possibility of claiming moral superiority.

As I have said, one bastard replacing another is not progress, even if it is your bastard.

I think we notice people saying no to us readily enough, but few of us notice the absence of people saying yes.

There are plenty of people to remind you of what they don’t think you can do, but not enough people reminding people of what their possibilities are.  The latter, in general, are vastly more useful.

I think gayness is really sadness, and that the outward exuberance one often sees conceals this.

I am not judging: merely trying to speak truth.  I find many heterosexualities nearly as weird as homosexuality, and that many gay couples are emotionally healthier and happier than many heterosexual couples I don’t doubt for a moment.

It does seem to me, though, that on some level it feels like a loss, and if we consider the idea that in many cases it is a sexuality redirected by premature sexual experience, sexual experience perhaps originating in the abuse of adolescent loneliness and already existing sense of loss, then this claim seems credible.

If I might speak autobiographically, I grew up in a home where we always lied.  Whatever we were feeling, we pretended that we were feeling what we assumed was appropriate.  This basic mindset seems to define the leftists world view, and I think I can speak psychologically when I say that this is one of the primary reasons it bothers me so much, why I react emotionally to it so much.  They want to tell all of us who we should be, how we should think, and are quite willing to use violence to get outer compliance.  Gays, it seems to me, as long term non-compliers, non-conformists, as victims of this mindset, ought to be particularly sensitive to it, not practicing it from a new pulpit of political power.

As things stand, the gay lobby (and many others) also likes to pretend that things are what they think they ought to be, that gayness is exactly equal in all ways to heterosexuality, that gay couples are exactly equal to man and wife, but I continue to believe this to be an unfounded claim, and an apparently quite inaccurate one in a great many cases.

The task is to evaluate things as they ARE, to see the individual nuances, to feel the differences and the similarities across populations, and to see individual variations.

What is great about gayness, and what is in some respects worse?  Above all, what is INTERESTING about it?  These are all fabulous questions.

Yes, fabulous.

And for those curious about my own sexuality, I feel not the slightest interest in men.  I just don’t.  My dick is utterly indifferent.  My concerns are ethical, both the very valid claims gays make that they want to be integrated fully, and the also valid claims that, particularly where children are concerned, there might in fact be differences that matter. 

The gateway out of the prison can only be found within the prison.  It never exists in the air.

I would like to define laziness as “wasting the flame”.

There are people who work very hard, outwardly, who do absolutely nothing inwardly, who are functionally difficult to differentiate from machines.  Machines do not have souls.  They do not have a flame.  Such work is useless, in the final and most important analysis, or at least largely so.

And sometimes laying around for hours can be productive, if you have a productive spirit, if you are watching and listening, feeling and thinking.  That is where new things come from.  That is how you give birth, which we all agree is work of a difficult sort.

Such is my rationale, perhaps rationalization, in any event, of this particular day, as I watch clouds cross the sky and dream. I have organized my work life to be able to do this, and my guilt is likely more perfunctory than necessary.

You know, Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes, was most likely a Pisces.  My birth day is somewhere in this neighborhood, but I don’t do details.

Anyway, here is today’s bon mot: Silence and solitude are mirrors which reflect one’s true Self.

I think this is true.  Kahlil Gibran or one of the other usual suspects may have said something very close to, or perhaps even identical to this, but it feels present as an idea and sentiment to me at the moment, so if it is plagiarized, I am seconding the idea.

I was feeling very sad this morning.  Rather, I was conscious of an antique, ancient sadness, one that I have felt since my youth.  There are certain feelings you have to embrace in order to go through, but that instant, that moment, is so frightening, and so actually painful–for an amount of time impossible to determine from the outside–that most people who are hurt early in their lives never go there.  They cross the long miles of sometimes long lives, without ever remembering who they once were, or what possibilities waited for them at one time, and never really left.

I am learning to go there, though, to focus on that one spot which every ounce of my being wants to avoid, to look away from, to distract myself from.  Only through there can I find my true Self, and only then do I become free.  It is the only way forward, the one place I most do not want to go.

If I might return to the excellent mythos of “Stranger Things”, you have to enter the Upside Down, through a scary portal, and you have to hunt down the monster, and you have to see your own face in it, a face of pain, of loss, of unresolved grief, of long term suffering, of keeping going when you couldn’t keep going, and you have to bring it home into your own heart.  Then all the darkness disappears, and the world is right again.  Both world merge.  I think this is close.  But I have not walked that path yet.

This is what I feel.  This is my work of the moment.  I will continue my reporting.  It helps me clarify things for myself, and of course I continue to hope this is read by, and useful to, others. I am fine either way, but that remains my hope.

One of the perils of truly deep relaxation, for most of us, is that what was nicely hidden, tied up, and disappeared, reappears.  What you had wanted to forget, and had forgotten, reappears.  Parts of your self you were dimly aware of you become acutely aware of.

And I think we are all psychic, to greater or lesser extents.  I think most of us, for reasons of self protection, systematically denigrate this capacity from earliest childhood until, not surprisingly, it largely atrophies in fact, if not in potential.

So I have been feeling this current flowing through me the past week or so, and it occurs to me that I am no longer just feeling my own traumas, but feeling a sense of loss that is flowing deep in the veins of America, my nation, and through much of the world.

We need connection to what I might call the Great Breath, the spirit that flows in and flows out, which–according to one very plausible reading of quantum mechanical theory, seen in a relatively orthodox way–destroys and recreates what we call reality a million times a second, which in fact creates time, and the possibility of the sense of flow that the existence of time enables.

It is a historical fact that much conflict over recorded history is connected to religion.  This is certainly the case in the Christian era, with Christianity, as developed by the Romans and Byzantines, being the world’s first experiment in radical religious intolerance (albeit one influenced by activities of some Jews in roughly the 1st and 2nd centuries BC).

I think some genuinely thoughtful people–which is always a minority among the numbers of those educated to render “expert” opinions–see all this violence and see religion as the root problem.  If we want to stop the hate, they argue, we have to stop believing in anything non-empirical.  We need to eradicate faith and belief, in favor of what we can stomp, throw and measure.

So we get this urge to erase from humankind’s historical memory all sincere attachment to religious sentiments, all attachments to any form of faith found outside some lab, in some form or other.  The French Experiment, we might call it, in willed public atheism, saw the world dichotomously in terms of religious sentiment and science, of the past and the future, of tribalism and universalism.

America was different.  We saw the need for God.  We saw the need for the divine, the transcendent, the sacred.  Our intent was to create a system within which many “tribes” could live in harmony, by living and letting live, by neither prohibiting nor requiring any particular religious form.

When we see people calling for the end of the expression of references to God or Christianity, however, we are seeing residue of the French Experiment, not the American one.  It was understood as self evident that religious people would guide their lives according to their faith.  What else could they do? 

It is remarkable that so many people can buy into the delusion that people who are deeply religious can somehow confine that religiosity to home.  An eternal soul does not change when it walks through the front door.  The purpose of life does not change when one becomes a politician.  Our whole nation was founded on live and let live.  This is a sound philosophy.  That of the French was “If you want to live, do what we tell you to.”  This is a bad philosophy, which is why you will rarely find it articulated that clearly; and why, to be sure, they have long been at pains to attack the notion of “bad”, as if you could attack any concept without substituting some new standard of measurement of your own.

But what I feel is we have banished an authentic sense of God’s presence from our lives, more or less.  Many Christians act more in fear of hell than conviction of the power of God’s love.

And to be sure I don’t feel God takes care of us.  But that does not mean that something wonderful, something magnificent, is not potentially present to all of us, every moment of the day.  A beautiful day does not take care of you either, but it still has the power to inspire, enlighten, and create joy.

God is not dead, and was certainly not killed.  God has simply been forgotten.

https://aeon.co/ideas/why-amartya-sen-remains-the-centurys-great-critic-of-capitalism

I read this, and would have commented there, but of course they did not offer a place to make comments.

In broad stroke, most modern intellectual call “Capitalism” literally everything they don’t like about the world.  Every visionary fantasy they can concoct from their places of muted emotional capacity, substandard social integration, profound moral stuntedness, and functional irresponsibility they claim is made impossible by our “economic system.”

This basic, obvious fact is largely made invisible by their unwillingness–indeed, inability, from several generations or more of lost practice–to speak clearly, and in ways amenable to concrete, gradualistic policy.

India was socialist from its independence to the early 1990’s.  During that time it stagnated. Starvation was common.  Horrific poverty was endemic. 

Then they got smart, and India has one of the fastest growing economies in the world.  Its people are hungry now for innovation, scientific prowess, and earned national pride.

Inequality is a moral issue only for imbeciles.  Resentment, yes, is a moral problem, best dealt with on the moral plain.  Trying to make the world fit your notions of how it should be–when done with no sense of empathy, connection, or sense of what it means to be human–is inherently vicious, violent, and the progenitor of horrors, pain, and mass death.  We have seen this over and over and over.  But the keepers of history refuse to learn the lesson.

Free markets, the right to private property, and enforceable contract law are merely economic innovations which make mass wealth and technological development possible.  They say nothing about what makes life worthwhile, nor should they.  You cannot make moral critiques of an economic system without having something intelligent to say about what we should DO with the money, and to do that, you need some sound point to human life.  These idiots never provide that.  They circle around, assume it, ignore it, but never get to it.

It is odd that this character would have been connected to Tagore.  I have been reading Gitanjali daily.  Tagore speaks of God, of the inherent value and wisdom of hard work, of grace.  He speaks of a world where the poor and rich are equal, and can both live in dignity and peace.  His is a world very far from the Procrustean bed of orthodox socialism which, valuing nothing, demands we all be equally debased and defrauded of any chance of realizing our soul’s destiny.

It is a truism in Spiritualistic thinking that people–more precisely, the spirits which animate them, and which survive the cessation of their bodily functions–exist at different levels of “vibration”, which is to say energy.  More pure spirits exist at a finer level, and bad human beings at a very low level.

It would seem reasonable to infer from this that one could say that there exist many simultaneous worlds, within our own world.  If you were to place a filter over the planet, showing only persons of low vibration, or high vibration, many of us would disappear.  The bad people exist in their own world, in some respects, even though they interact outwardly with everyone.  So, too, the good ones.

This is the value of this world: it is the great meeting of the worlds, which otherwise exist separately.  Hell exists, in many forms, in this world.  So too does Heaven.

I was thinking of the scene in the final episode of “Stranger Things”, where 11 is calling for God, asking “him” (I’m not politically correct, but I think it is reasonable to assume God has neither a penis nor a vagina) where He is.  This is Hell: that place without God, where He cannot be found.  It is, to reference what I think is more or less orthodox Christianity, separation from God.

We might think of 11 as an angelic being who gave the scientists what they really wanted: access to Hell.  She channeled who they really were, in their hearts.  She reflected, in what she created, the spiritual level of that place.

I continue to wonder how we can be so mad, so crazy.  We are happy to spend $200 million on a movie, millions of dollars on political candidates, yet places like the Windbridge Institute have trouble keeping their doors open, and remain largely unknown to everyone.

There are some of us who know we are crazy.  Most of us are completely blind, though, in what I might term the insanity of false sanity.