Author: White Whale

Imagine there are ten souls floating out there in space for every star we can see.  No one knows where they come from, but they seem to be thrown into being by an infinite flame we call God.

Imagine Earth as a giant halfway house, for those who are defective in some way, who have lived somewhere, and moved away from order, into chaos. Imagine Earth as a compassionate offering to souls which would otherwise have no chance at redemption.  Imagine it as a source of light in the darkness, and a welcome respite from eternal wandering.

Theodicy is not so hard then.  I feel keenly all the things mortal flesh is heir to.  We can be raped and killed, tortured, imprisoned, separated from love and our loved ones, made to wander without rest.  And if we live in peaceful times, we are slowly separated anyway from those we love, and eventually our health and life.

Imagine the plan for this planet is to create a place of relative calm and peace, for souls to be born and die, having learned how to be better.  Imagine realities much better than this one, which we simply cannot yet see.

This is the universe as I believe it exists.  It is an odd thing, believe in immortality.  It is absent from our science.  It is posited, mostly, as fantasy in our TV-based indoctrination.  But if you drive through most American cities, you will see churches–edifices and, at least at one time, a body of people–dedicated to the proposition that we are eternal creatures.

As I move through the world, I feel much pain and confinement, but I also see possibilities.

http://yournewswire.com/justin-trudeau-fidel-castro-son/

You know, when you reach a certain point of awareness, you realize most people tell little lies all day long.  You realize that some people who are polite to you don’t like you, that your bosses lie nearly continually, that most people are greedy and self centered, that most people don’t really listen–well, here’s Lou Reed’s list, in his ode to Lady Jane (Cowboy Junkies version):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4XVJj4jER4

And there’s even some evil mothers
Well they’re gonna tell you that everything is just dirt
Y’know that, women, never really faint
And that villains always blink their eyes, woo!
And that, y’know, children are the only ones who blush!
And that, life is just to die!
And, everyone who ever had a heart
They wouldn’t turn around and break it
And anyone who ever played a part
Oh wouldn’t turn around and hate it!


Bottom line: cynicism is not an unreasonable viewpoint.  But what I see is that there is a place behind it.  It may be that EVERYONE is a liar.  But this doesn’t mean I have to lie to myself. This doesn’t mean I can’t influence others.  This doesn’t mean I can’t live my own bold and courageous life.  This doesn’t mean I have to be like other people.


And of course there are honest people in this world, although in my own experience, most of them are weak.  If you want to be yourself, you need a high pain tolerance.  But what else is there?  Between this moment, and the next corner of life, nothing is pushing me.  I can choose what I want, and my existential pain is slowly receding.

You know, in some respects I am quite open to the charge of being a dilettante, an amateur, of pretending to vastly more knowledge than I actually possess.  Clearly, I don’t know about economics what a professional does.  I don’t know the philosophy that a Ph.D in the subject knows.  I don’t have advanced degrees in psychology, or anthropology, or any of a host of other topics I still don’t hesitate to render opinions on, some of them firm.

So let me do it again.

It seems to me that, broadly speaking, when one is discussing Western Philosophy, as it has come down to us in the Greek word for the activity, based on the Greek conceptions of the activity, it is oriented around thinking.  To be a philosopher is to think.  Your “philosophy” consists in the thoughts you regularly think, those you emphasize.  Even, say, the Stoics, offer “meditations”, but these meditations consist in structured thinking, albeit perhaps with some structured visualization.

Broadly speaking, in the 20th century prominent philosophers pointed out that words are not and cannot be truth.  They then posited that words have been used to CREATE truth, and can thus be used to create any truth anyone wants, which means that all truths are contingent.  This means, practically, that philosophy, as the process of thinking about truth using words, is empty and useless, except as a vehicle for the acquisition and maintenance of political power.  We continue to see the results of this process.  We have men saying they are women, and using this exact argument to claim their “personal” truth is irrefutable. It is as absurd as it is logical, within this paradigm.

I have always been a bit fuzzy on Sartre and Heidegger, since although I have read summaries of their work, listened to a lecture series on Existentialism, and read the comic books about them, I have never actually read their work.  I have not read Sein und Zeit, or L’Etre et le Rien.  They are thick, difficult books, and I already know I disagree with their conclusions.  Why allocate that time?  I haven’t read William James to my satisfaction either, and I know I like his ideas.

But this concept of Being is the logical antidote to the “malady” of language.  What you cannot say, you can still be.  This is reasonable enough.  It leads away from philosophy, but towards something other than functional nihilism (although not far enough, from what I can tell).

What is missing in all this, and this is my point, is a “technology of Being”.  Most Eastern meditative practices focus on wordlessness, of growing beyond concept.  They are able to do this because they have a METHOD.  They have many methods.  There are hundreds of ways to “meditate”.  In the Sanskrit, the phrase usually translated as meditation means literally “To give attention”.

And I can’t help but feel the inherent, latent elitism in all this, from a Western perspective.  Philosophy was the domain of the leisured gentleman, who at some point became the leisured intellectual.  It was what smart people with time on their hands did to convince one another of their genius, to pass the time, and to enjoy the delights of elaborate intellectual artifice.  Thinking can be a type of artwork.  I myself, skeptical as I am of the orthodox Darwinian ideas regarding speciation through Natural Selection, share an aesthetic appreciation for the simplicity and grandeur of his scheme.  But science, of course–TECHNOLOGY–does not deal in aesthetics as a primary concern.

I see people talking about “mindfulness” as some sort of cure-all.  Then the next minute I read that meditation doesn’t help people be much less pissed off at all.

I think it is hard to embrace spiritual technology when you refuse to accept a role for the spirit.  I have more to say, but it hasn’t formed into words yet.

“I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being – not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.”Ingmar Bergman

Without examining it too closely, without commenting that the whole POINT of Buddhist meditation is Being (rather, without extending my commentary), I simply wanted to say that on my reading of this he is referencing the Existentialist theme of Authenticity.

This thirst, this honest and sincere sense that something is lacking when one is inauthentic, seems to me to have largely disappeared.  I look at all these ghouls hating Trump in unison, who could be, and largely have been, trained to chant in unison “I am an individual.  I think for myself.  I hate inauthentic people.  I value life and justice.” And similar folderol.

Who is Donald Trump?  It’s really not a hard question because, whatever else he is, he is authentic.  He says what he feels.  There is really no inside and outside.  He clearly doesn’t say everything he thinks, but he says a large portion of it.  He is someone who loves attention, money, beautiful women, and winning.  Winning is playing competitive games, putting together great teams, and outworking and outfoxing everyone else.  This is his greatest passion.  None of this is complicated.  You can judge him for his values, but you can’t judge him for failing to live his life his way without apology.  He should be an Existentialist hero.

Inherently, when understood sincerely, authenticity is individualistic.  No one can tell you who you are.  You have to figure it out for yourself.

And I have to wonder if his very brazenness, his AUTHENTICITY, is why so many people hate him.  They are too afraid to be who they are, to think independently, to risk censure, to risk being separated from the ghouls on their right and the ghouls on their left.

It’s not just his policies which make the Left so afraid and infuriated: it is his PANACHE.  He is a relic of an age when people still sought to stand for something, and to be somebody, and when this was perfectly OK.

I hesitate to say this, but would it not be in some respects accurate to call Trump’s style Gallic?  He is a womanizer with a big ego, who loves the good life.

And for those who want to claim Trump has no substance, what recent President has been more consistent in pursuing his campaign promises?

I am inclined, at this exact moment in time, to say that the most reasonable aim of life is to get from one side to the other with one’s dignity approximately intact.  This means you have not sold your soul either to convenience, nor to any of the manias hanging low off of the tree of life, including that of religious zeal.

Meaning is a quality of feeling.  It is not a thing, and it cannot be had.  Felt, it cannot be held.  It is nothing more or less than what guides our decisions on the path of life, which we can never see very far down.  It is always the next turn.  After that, we are clueless.  But habits accrue, and good habits are very useful indeed.

I am very fond of Buddhism and Sufism, but the spirit to which I return again and again is that of the Tao Te Ching.  Renounce sainthood.  And sometimes all the world asks is nothing.  Do something, then, and you are off the path.  Sometimes it asks something.  Then, do something.

My work continues. As does my laughter at my own foolishness and, indeed, that of all of us.

Be well: this is perhaps the shortest version you will see.

As my perception evolves, it is becoming clear to me that the path is never to discard anything, but rather to grow beyond it.  In my view, no person can claim to be spiritual who does not understand nihilists, Satanists, hedonists, cynics, and everyone else who cannot make this world make sense for them within anything approaching a healthy paradigm.  There is so much that all of us cannot see.  Learning is a process of seeing blindness.  We live within layer upon layer of not-seeing.

If I might paraphrase and mildly amend the Tao Te Ching, though, those who know they can’t see are not quite as blind.  Or, as some Sufis put it, learning begins with learning how to learn.

I was wondering, again, as I do every four years, why nations like Norway, with a population of about 5 million, can outperform America, with a population of 350 million or so.  Are we that much more decadent and lazy?  This was my question.

But as I ponder more, it occurs to me our cultural sports priorities are completely different.  It is quite likely there are more competitive cross country skiiers in Norway than there are here.  It is a certainty there are more biathletes.  Same with Nordic Combined, ski jumping, and frankly most of the sports in the Olympics.  Have you ever seen a luge track?  I haven’t.

This thought makes me feel a bit better about the whole thing.

I would add that more generally Americans value a small number of sports, where we put the overwhelming bulk of our effort, where we spend our money, and which attract our best athletes.  I mean football, baseball, and basketball.  Even track and field, which we don’t ignore, is vastly more important and valued in other countries.

I’m watching the Olympics, and the top Ice Dancers, a pair of Canadians, selected for their music “Sympathy for the Devil”, “Hotel California”–which has long been rumored to be about the Satanic Church, and which certainly seems to feature Anton Lavey on the balcony when you open the album, which I used to own–and, if I’m not mistaken, “Black Magic Woman”, from the album Abraxas (“ The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jungtranscribed a short Gnostic treatise in 1916, attributed to Basilides in Alexandria called The Seven Sermons to the Dead, which called Abraxas the supreme power of being transcending both God and the Devil and unites all opposites into one Being“), by Santana.  Not hard to see a pattern there.  They wore black of course.

And I look at that, and it might well be their version of an inside joke.  Most Canadians are socialized to be atheists, like most Europeans.  Within such a world view, Satan is as irrelevant as God, with the difference that talking about Satan pisses people off who atheists see as enemies.

I will append to this an article I read about an overtly Satanic ice cream chain out of Canada: https://www.infowars.com/satanic-themed-ice-cream-shop-trashes-jesus-in-bizarre-marketing-scheme/

Again, might well be their version of an inside joke.   For everyone who laughs at Christians, why not make of sacrilege a political act indicating solidarity with the forces opposing, as they see it, reaction?

But as I have said over and over, there is something deeper in the appeal evil makes to people who lack a moral compass.  If you make a religion of being nice–if it is never acceptable to demand people respect non-negotiable, firm, unchanging boundaries–then the anger builds up.  It has nowhere to go.  The ego has no way of asserting itself, and thus firm individuation becomes impossible psychologically.  If you cannot be yourself, you have no home.  You belong nowhere, to no one.  And this is immensely frustrating, infuriating even.  This of course is why we see all this irrational and frankly stupid rage being directed at Trump.  But it is a very, very deep current of closely held emotion within people who are outwardly “progressive”, as they see it, nice, socially conscious, “good” people, like Justin Trudeau (who shows every sign of being Castro’s bastard son: look it up, the resemblance is textbook).  Rage can be redirected in many ways, and one of them is in structured, serious, long term destructiveness masquerading as niceness.  

It seems to me that there are spheres of fear.  There is immediate fear, chronic fear, anxiety, then what might be termed existential fear, the fear of being alive.  These fears have differing qualities, but the outermost–well, so far, from what I can tell, but I am wrong continually–is very subtle.  It is the root of clinging, the root of rejecting.  What I see is that to get beyond it, I have to expand beyond its reaches.  To overcome fear, you have to become very large indeed.

While on this note, it occurred to me this morning to wonder who exactly is asking for safe spaces for our kids.  I actually don’t think it is the kids, although they are being taught to demand them.  I think it is the “adults” in these colleges and schools, who themselves never differentiated, never individuated, never completed the psychological task of maturing in our admittedly complex and frightening world.

What more obvious, of people who fear the world, to project their own fear onto largely helpless children we have entrusted them to teach and lead, and to feel that if they can just keep them infantile and helpless, the existential crisis of realizing their massive life failure will never occur. In large measure, these “adults” are, if I am right, demanding safe spaces for themselves since, in their narcissism, they cannot properly differentiate their own needs from those of the kids in their care.

Something to ponder.  As with all complex things, the exact realities differ no doubt considerably from place to place and even time to time and person to person.  This never negates the possible utility, though, of speaking in the abstract.