Author: White Whale

In some respects, it is a profound misfortune to encounter a spiritual teaching for which you are not ready.  All of us–there are no exceptions–can only proceed one step at a time.  It may happen that some proceed quickly, and it is usually the case that most of us proceed slowly, but there are no quantum leaps in spiritual development, or at least in spiritual readiness.

Life is somewhat like a cave which does open up suddenly sometimes.  We come through an opening and perceive a larger space, greater light, a vision of the path in the distance.  But we can only enter that cave one step at a time.

If there is perhaps one most ubiquitous and damaging fact about human thought and behavior patterns, it is the thought that we can skip steps, that outward forms are “more or less” the same as inner knowing, inner clarity, inner vision.  That if we act in a certain way, say certain thinks (sic; I intended things, but thinks also works), discipline ourselves to think certain thoughts, and pretend we are feeling the way we conceive we ought to feel, that some progress has been made.  Most of the time, this is actually regression, because the path forward has been foreclosed by a precipitous and fatal error.

This is Socialism, certainly–the Great Leap Forward in human well being–but it is also most other forms of religion, too.  Socialism is simply taking the spirit of error we see in, for example, Christianity, and implementing it aggressively in the secular, god-but-not-obsession-free domain.

Socrates was wise in not allowing himself to be misunderstood.  Everything he had to say, he said.  What he could not say to an individual, in a specific context, he did not say.  Nothing was written.

This is what I feel reading one of the foundational texts of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.  No doubt there were hidden teachings too, but it is one size fits all.  Small wonder that many Buddhists in all traditions found themselves reduced to reciting some of the foundational Sutras as mantras, which cannot have been the purpose at all.

The Sufis have a saying that when the student is ready, the teaching cannot be withheld, and when he or she is not ready, it cannot be given, by any means.

I do feel a kinship with their teaching method, as I understand it, which consists in stories which would have been in general tailored to specific groups and even individuals, which could only be understood as the result of real progress in perceptual acumen.

Now, it is of course interesting to speculate how much knowledge remains hidden, and with good reason.  We in the West are mostly fucking imbeciles on all levels.  We equate progress with increasing abstraction, increasing separation from the natural world, with the death of God and the gods, and with the amelioration of all negative physical conditions–hunger, thirst, cold, heat–which might cause people to inquire more deeply into the nature of life.

Can I perhaps stipulate that where no one is poor, everyone is stupid?  This is certainly not quite true, and certainly not necessarily true, but I do think it has a tinge of truth in it.

I was standing in the wind the other day, watching some bushes move in breeze, and it occurred to me that there are no physical preconditions for a the spiritual path.  I’m certainly not going to give my stuff away and become homeless, but it is a useful thought, I think.

I feel I should comment on the first set of stanzas, too.

The translator makes the point that both Essence and Existence are abstractions.  One can sequence them however one likes, but they remain ideas divorced from experience, from what he calls Being. 

Proceeding from this point, Kum Nye becomes an extraordinarily logical act of philosophy, since it offers a practical method for returning to experience, to Being.

God is Being.  And until we “speak” being with our selves, with our souls, God remains an abstraction.  The only reliable source of wisdom and comfort in this world relies in a return to what is, and that is not done with the mind.

I had meant to point this metaphor out a week or two ago, but don’t recall actually typing it.  If the goal is to get from A to D, logic can be B and C, but it cannot be A or D.  A is what we want, what our hearts desire.  It is the source of logical operations.  It is the source of the problem we are trying to solve.  D is the desired end state, which is also a feeling.  It is a change from A.  It is progress in a way which matters.

Logic can always be a means, but never a final end.  I can add to that, but it is close enough for my purposes.

Actually, I will add that the root problem we all face is separation, separation on many levels, but most pressingly from our own Source, from the light which animates us.  Logic–and the language which it necessarily uses–is always a means of making distinctions, of drawing out differences.  It, in important respects, IS the source of separation.

If you set this template on religion, and philosophy, one starts to see recurring patterns.  The whole of reality is constituted by what David Bohm called an Implicate Order, which is yet another word for what I am speaking of.

The most obvious example occurring to me at the moment: “Worueber man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen.”

I am reading Longchenpa’s “Kindly bent to ease us”, and just read the section on impermanence (the first, in any event: it will likely be a recurring theme).  And it occurs to me the intent is not to deprive people of everything which comforts them, now.  It is shock method of waking them up to focus on what is subtle, what is latent, and what is real and permanent.  In my own iteration, I would call this God, which modern science–which knows close to nothing about it–calls the Zero Point Field.  It is Space, the source and return of everything.

Who can see what is subtle when they focus on what is bright?  Who can see what is distant–perceptually–when their whole attention is focused on what is near and tangible?

This is the meaning of impermanence, in my view.  Although, obviously, empirically, this is merely stating clearly plain facts.

It just occurred to me that being involved with narcissists is in some vital way to be shunned.  As most will readily know, shunning–intentionally and blatantly avoiding social contact with specific people–once played an important role is social regulation.  It was an explicit punishment for some transgressions, and of course has always been a tacit one in response to perceived affronts of all sorts.  You don’t talk to people who piss you off in some way, or from whom you feel a need to socially distance yourself.

But the child of narcissists is shunned at a deep level continually.  Their real selves are not recognized.  They might talk with their parents, but there is no authentic connection, no sharing of self, no true recognition.

My process of thawing continues, and very old, very primitive, entirely forgotten feelings continue to emerge as the ice thins.  It is likely not true to say I was never healthy, that I never spontaneously exhibited honest childish exuberance and playfulness, but these feelings were not fed, and likely in most cases punished, explicitly, or tacitly, and this–added to an on-going inability of both parents to see me as a separate and different person–is what led to my crash some time between 5 and about 8.

You know, we call it a nervous breakdown when someone loses the ability to work due to “nerves”–large volumes of conflicting emotions they cannot process well enough even to function–but there is no difference between this and a broken spirit, other than that a shell of obedience remains.  The inner vitality is gone.  And perhaps “nervous breakdowns” are healthy, in that the person–forced to choose between surrendering their self and the social ignomy a period of helpless dependence compels–elects the former.

I’m rambling.  But there is something here.

What virtue would you universalize if you could? Love, I suppose, would be the best one. I don’t really understand it, though. It is an abstraction to me, as I feel it is to many people.

It would not be compassion, since compassion without wisdom easily becomes complicity in self indulgence and failure. Some people do need mercy, but some truly need a boot in the ass.

I think: this is the point I wanted to make. Until each of us has progressed VERY far down the road of wisdom, it is very difficult to know what people truly need.

Being “nice” is simply lazy, as I have said many times. It is good for social harmony, and do appreciate the many people I encounter every day who are nice, who are not assholes, even if they sometimes want to be.

I suppose we all project on the world, and I am no different. My own vote for the one universal virtue would be curiosity, because everything else can be built from it over time.

I was up early yesterday, looking at a full moon on a very cold morning, and it hit me that seeing and appreciating beauty and feeling good are very nearly the same thing. Everything is ugly when you are down, and the world itself is beautiful when you feel happy and content.

Logically, two things follow from this observation.

1) If you beautify your world, and you are not depressed, you will be happier. This applies on all social levels and in all ways, but obviously it is the personal level over which we have most control.

2) If you teach yourself to see more beauty, to find it in more contexts–more people, places, things, and ideas–you will be happier.

As I have said often, in my own view happiness is the source of space ntaneoya, non-compulsive goodness. As such, it and beauty are important intrinsically.

I will add that the sources of intellectualism–thought aestheticism–can be better understood through this rubric. If we trace the idea that ideas can be beautiful, can be works of art, can be faithful if diminished emanations of the ineffable, back to the Greeks, as seems proper to me, it becomes obvious what value this approach might have had. They were convulsed in frequent wars. Socrates fought in one if the Persian wars, and could likely fell the Peloponesdian War o its way. I think that history is correct.

If you place the most important source of beauty in your life beyond human hands, beyond the power of a torch to consume, beyond the power of enemies to carry off, then your achieve something like security. Ideas become something like cherished possessions.

But the source of this need, itself, asks more of them than they should be asked to provide. Ideas–reason–is a means to an end, and it is arguably the case that the Western obsession with ideas on themselves which has led to the dead ends, futility, and overt and aggressive stupidity one sees in our universities, which in concept owe so much to Greek models.

The RUSSIANS started the ruckus over the Steele dossier, to distract from Uranium One, where they actually did do illegal things.  Don’t ask me how: it’s a damn conspiracy theory, OK?

This is similar to my idea that Bill Clinton started the Ken Starr investigation, to prevent anyone looking into his ties with the Chinese and possible involvement in the leaking–and even granting, in the form of dual-use nuclear technology–of important government secrets, in exchange for campaign support.

The fun thing about conspiracy theories is that no proof is ever needed.  Possibility is quite sufficient.  It is important, however, to remember that speculation is not evidence.  Still, I–obviously–have long enjoyed the game.

I might mention, for no particular reason, a game I spontaneously invented once with my kids.  I think I’ve mentioned this, but fuck if I can remember everything I post.

We had lunch at Pizza Hut.  There was a man sleeping in his car when we went in, which was odd.  When we came out, he was gone.  I immediately started inventing causes of his disappearance.  Holes in the ground, space aliens, rogue polar bears, secret government operations, he was secretly Inspector Gadget, etc.  We played this game for weeks.  The goal was to come up with the most outlandish and creative ideas we could think of.  My intent was to help them learn to think non-linearly, and “out of the box”, as they say.  Quite often it is simply being in the habit of coming up with multiple possible explanations for everything you see, even when there is one most obvious explanation.  I’m pretty sure this guy just drove away.

But I will never know for sure.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/12/30/breaking-senator-lindsey-graham-just-confirmed-the-steele-dossier-was-used-for-2016-fisa-warrant/

Now, the actual evidence is unlikely to lead to his desk, but his DoJ and his FBI clearly used fabricated evidence to justify political wiretapping that was the sort of thing one would have expected in East Germany, or the old Soviet Union.

AND THEY STILL LOST!!!

This is the great part of all this.  But people need to go to jail.  As I have been saying for some time, anyone who cannot see how fucking serious this is is a fucking imbecile who should not be voting in local, much less national elections.  We are being turned into a totalitarian surveillance state, slowly, but surely. And if there is no punishment for people we know are guilty, then there is no reason all this will not continue until we reach a moment where everyone is afraid to speak anything that is not on the menu of the “Politically Acceptable”, which need not stop with the merely courteous.  It need not stop short of the need for the continual praise of some Great Leader, nor short of the development of reeducation gulags, mass executions, and cradle to grave mind control.

It is that serious.

What if the  Chinese at some point chose to value their own people?  The leaders, I mean–the dictator, to be more specific?  What if at some point they became an actual Republic, or series of republics, which to my mind would make more sense?

What if they actually came to value justice, peace, human dignity, and freedom from oppression?  Just to take one obvious example, the KKK never built psychological torture camps for blacks, and I have no doubt that there are far, far more people in such camps at the moment–in 2017, almost 2018– than were ever killed by the KKK.  The number might easily even be several million, which is roughly the total number of slaves at the end of the Civil War.  And as far as death tolls, there were years the Communists killed 10x the number of people who died on both sides in the Civil War.  There can be no comparison.

No Communist can accuse America of anything.  Their own crimes exist several qualitative leaps above our own, in their viciousness, systematic nature, and continuity over time.

China as a free nation: it’s a beautiful idea, even if unlikely for the foreseeable future.  One can always hope that sleeping consciences might awaken, at least where they are not made fully absent by psychopathy, or the equivalent as embodied in rigid ideology.

If it is true that China has been illegally helping to keep the dying North Korean regime alive, one has to wonder why.  Economically, China’s fortunes are tied to the United States, and the West more broadly.  A war, which is made more likely in the event sanctions and following mass immiseration fail, will STILL cause mass suffering in the North, much more suffering.  It will also cause much suffering in the South, and presumably enormous problems for the Chinese themselves in the form of refugees.  It is a lose/lose situation for all around. 

The only good solution is regime change.  It is my understanding that the few defectors there are have been waging a campaign to float balloons into North Korea with USB drives or something like that, with videos showing life here, and calling for resistance and true revolution.  The defectors who made it across the border were starving, their intestines filled with worms, and the most recent one apparently had anthrax antibodies in him.  I’m not sure what to make of that, other than that Kim seems to be telling the truth when he says he is trying to weaponize anthrax for delivery on warheads, which I will point out can obviously be projectile warheads too.  I don’t think I’m giving anyone ideas there.

So China would gain, economically, by not losing economically, if North Korea were to fall into the hands of the “people” it has always allegedly existed to serve.  As it exists today it is a Fascist oligarchy characterized by extreme disparities in privilege and wealth, with the vast mass of people living in conditions likely WORSE than those suffered by most serfs in the medieval period.  Not only do they face regular starvation, but they also face concentration camps I read are worse than those of the Nazis, and which have been a feature of life there for decades.  It is hard to imagine a more soul-killing, horrific regime.

And China itself is presumably still run by an enormously unpopular Fascist oligarchy, which is able to keep power mainly through allowing the very Capitalism/free trade to happen which its Communism would lead it to reject in principle. But they found they could not feed their people any other way.  They could not fund their military any other way.  They could not fund their internal Geheime Staatspolizei, and Schutzstaffel any other way, and who else could keep the oligarchs in power, when the people are rioting everywhere as often as they can (or were a few years ago)?

So one can, in a way, see the logic.  Even though economic logic and rational self interest should lead the Chinese to support what we are now calling “regime change” in North Korea, some combination of sentimentalism (some Chinese leaders may well have come out of the Cultural Revolution, and frankly likely did, and have somehow managed to avoid seeing the patent contradictions inherent in the wealth and privilege they enjoy compared to the brutal repression they visit on an often hungry and impoverished populace), and violent calculation that “as North Korea goes, so go we.” 

The fact is, “The People’s Republic of China” contains two lies.  It is China, certainly.  But it is a regime no different than that which Hitler would have operated if he had won all his wars.  There is the same censorship, the same relentless propagandizing, the same knocks in the middle of the night, the same concentration camps, the same elites drinking champagne and eating the Chinese equivalent of caviar.  There is no concern for the people.

And as I have said before, I actually respect the Nazis more than the  Communists, more than the Communist Chinese.  Hitler did, to all appearances, genuinely feel a sense of kinship and affection for the German Volk.  He was a psychopathic mass murderer, certainly, but there was at least some group he seems genuinely to have wanted, at least early on, to care for.

Had Hitler won the wars, there would have been slaughter on a scale never seen before.  Tens of millions of Russians and other Slavs would have been simply eradicated, as well as of course all Jews and other “undesirables”.  Large sections of the globe would have been enslaved.  But Germans, ordinary Germans, those who toed the line, would have lived like kings.  All of them.  It would not have been s small group, it would have been all of them.

This is the thing that gets me about Communism.  It is run by intellectuals, most of whom have never known true poverty.  I was reading, in fact, that Lenin lived on what amounted to an allowance from his mother–like a child–for some thirty years.  These people don’t understand the people they spout rhetoric for.  And they don’t care for them when they get power.  Then they seemingly act surprised that the repressive regimes they implement “for the sake of the people” somehow create vast relative privilege for themselves.

The whole thing is lunacy, top to bottom.  It is incomprehensible, outside of an emotional world inappropriate for any but the smallest, most immature child.  It is the covetousness of a 4 year old, inflicted on the world.

To make a long story short, it seems obvious to me that, if they are smart, the Chinese will help us end the North Korean regime peacefully.  That is in everyone’s interest, not least that of the tens of thousands, at a minimum, of North Koreans who will be killed in a futile war, the end of which is preordained.  The only question is how much pain they can inflict on the rest of the world, in dying.  Given that what hurts America hurts China–which I am going to go out on a limb and guess had an outstanding Christmas season–there can be no question what the intelligent course of action.  And that course is not violating sanctions and providing oil to North Korea.  Again, it is winter, and this is humanitarian aid, but everything gets much, much worse in the event of a war.   And Trump fully intends war, if no other solution can be reached to the problem of a lunatic using every resource he has to build nuclear missiles he keeps telling us he intends to launch at us at his earliest opportunity.