Author: White Whale

I was dreaming today, as I do every day.  I wander in and out of wherever I am.  And I was dreaming of a world where the Church researches, and understands the psychodynamic roots of these “sins”, and rather than viewing them as moral or spiritual failings, sees them as what they are: predictable results across statistical populations with certain common psychological histories.

The farther I go, the more I see, the more I feel that morality, per se, is stupid.  Fucking stupid.  It is not that I don’t believe in doing the right thing.  It is not that human beings are not happier when the people around them behave in predictable and harmonious ways.

It is simply the case that water tends to flow downhill, and people tend to implement the patterns with which they were raised.  They tend to become what they see, and they tend to repeat what they become.

Now, for some, “virtue” is easy.  Virtue on my reading and rendering is simply enlightened common sense.  It is intelligent selfishness.  It is seeing the big picture, and being personally integrated enough to act on it.

For many others, and I would include myself here, we have large weights placed on us, and we are cut in a thousand places.  We want to get rid of the weight, and avoid being cut again.  For many, this means cutting others first, resisting others first, mistrusting them first.  It means in no case being open, or trusting anyone enough to hurt us again.

In Christianity we are told to love.  How can you love, when you are bleeding, and the people who cut you preached love?  Can you reconcile those wounds with charity and caring?  No. 

So my dream is that notions of “morality” coupled with judgment gradually give way to on-going efforts at understanding, remediation, and teaching.

To be clear, we need social and cultural codes.  We need to know what to expect from one another.  We need an internalized voice telling us what is right and what is wrong.  I do not dispute any of this.

I guess the question I want to ask, which needs answering, is “How do we make all the things we want more likely?”  How do we make what we call morality more likely?  How do we build empathy in people?  How do we build self knowledge?  How do we build perceptual capacity, such that they can see far down the road?

As for myself, I am still a sinner.  I still am often wracked with pain.  But I do have a vision.

When you see and feel this energy in its pure form, you want to avoid it.  I want to avoid it.  I want to do things where it does not come up.  I want to avoid activities, like Kum Nye, like prolonged periods of silence, like long sets of rolling and stretching, where it comes up.  It is unpleasant.  I want it to simply disappear, in one session.  I want to call out to it and tell it to go away.

But it is like a fog, liberated from one place, and now trying to envelop my life. I feel this. I feel it like the monologue at the beginning of the Lord of the Rings, where Cate Blanchett as Galadriel says something close to “The world has changed.  I can feel it in the air.  I can feel it in the water.  I can feel it in the Earth.  The world has changed.”

But I of course have not changed at all.  I am simply becoming more conscious of who I am.  This is a change, I suppose, but closer to an unmasking than a true change.  My possibilities have increased, but only in the perceptual realm.

This morning I found myself spontaneously imagining the world as a Ring Wraith, which terrified me when I first read those books in the 5th grade.  What would it be like to look at the little hobbits as prey?  To feel a continual and unquenchable hunger for death and destruction?

Well, now, perhaps, I know.  I felt it in me.

And I feel how arbitrary the lines we draw between ourselves are.  We need tribes to feel at home, and we need violence, quite often, to reinforce the value of the tribes.  And to get beyond these tribes, we must confront our own darkness, as individuals.  The need to belong, and the need to reject, arise from the same place.  Violence and evil arise from the same place that the need for home and hearth, and kith and kin arise from.

The man wandering the wilds as a beggar or solitary hunter can be free from such compulsions, but this, too, is not a properly human life.  The way forward is for all of us to become free from the need for social bonds, then to reengage humanity as a great joy and open source of pleasure.  We must all become enlightened, in important ways.

But to turn to what occasioned this post, or in any event turned me from my lit incense and candles to my computer to type this, it seems to me that historically most all violence has felt just.  You do it in the service of your cause and your people.  Both sides in most conflicts feel themselves to be in the right.  This is a truism.

But even people working from the position of true selfishness, who simply want things, or power, or wine and women, rape and pillage–who, to be clear, do ALL the things we are supposed to reject on our shadow side, and thus in some respects become heroes to people who feel constrained by our world, and afraid–work from lies.  They do not perceive, and thus do not pursue their true interest.

To frame this slightly differently, even people who do not proceed from motives of idealism and zeal fail.  Their idealism is their own subjective sense of well being.  Their zeal is to have and be everything possible in this world, to fuck who they want, eat what they want, experience what they want, go where they want, to never be told no.

Even this is a failure.  Even this is Duhkha.  I feel this.

Just as you can go decades never sitting on the ground, you can also go decades never being in silence.  People turn their TV’s on first thing in the morning, listen to the radio all day even at work, and of course in their cars, some home to TV, and fall asleep watching it.

Now, I think most people go for walks from time to time, but even there, they are with people.  They talk.

There is something about both sustained solitude and silence which is cathartic.  I think this is the word.  It brings up latent conflicts, pains, residual emotional scars, and what I have found is that in the feeling of them, they slowly diminish.  They resolve themselves.  They perhaps do not disappear, but become largely irrelevant to your life. You develop a solid, stable base, at the core of your personality, which is comforting.  “Life” becomes bearable.  You become philosophical in a good way.

The opposite is running from these things, which are simply asking to be completed, run through, checked off as done.  You can spend your life fearing the contents of your inner psyche.  And it will never grant you a moment of true inner peace if you do.

My core personal philosophical collection, though, consists in three books: the Tao Te Ching, the Wisdom of the Idiots (Idries Shah), and my Kum Nye books.

The Tao Te Ching has influenced me since I first read the first line “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao”.

Kum Nye, of course, I have spoken of often.  It is not a philosophy, but what I might term a means to the approximation of one.

But I wanted to comment on The Wisdom of the Idiots.  It is not the book itself which is so important, but what it represents to me.

I wanted to buy it for my daughter, but she said “no, I want to study philosophy”.  And this–like nearly everything I see every day–got me to thinking.

There is no philosophy in this book, not in a traditional sense.  It is a collection of stories, some of which are quite difficult to “unpack” and grasp, and “grok”. I am, I am quite certain, far from understanding most of them, even if I have from time to time talked about some of them.

What it is is a thousand shards of meaning, of contingent, partial perceptions.  It is a cloud of possibilities.  It is shimmering, moving, evolving, changing, both there, and not there.

The way of the Sufi, as I understand it, is breaking all our meanings into a thousand pieces, and allowing them to reassemble in a self organizing way directed by our deepest consciousness, our deepest intuitive awareness, on a level far, far deeper than anything possible for the conscious mind, but directly in connection with our spirit, our soul, our deepest possibilities.

Your way is your own way.  Far too few people want to grasp this.  They want to be told “do this, believe that, adhere to the teaching of this person or that person, and the way will be laid out in front of you.”  Even though the Buddha–or one of his disciples–said something like “if you meet me on the path, kill me”, far too few people are willing to do this.  There is a Buddha Dharma. There is a sangha.  There are doctrinal teachings.  There are mantras to be said obsessively across decades.

Philosophy is broken. As I have noted from time to time, one of my favorite saying from any book ever is the quote I wrote down when I was 18 from Moby Dick.  Here is the quote in full, which is worth reading:

“I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is–which was the only way he could get there–thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should no be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such and such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have ‘broken his digester.”

It is the last line I loved so much.  There is no path but the path you make.  Even the Existentialists teach this, but they wind up being Communists.  One extreme breeds the other, if no wisdom intervenes. 

There is no safe path, no path free from the continual risk of delusion, self deception, grandiosity, unwarranted self satisfaction, obsession.  My mind wants to add “freedom” to this list, where it does not seem to belong, but as I contemplate, yes, it does belong there.  Freedom, true freedom, is also a risk.  How can you go where no one has gone before, truly?  It is scary, frightening.  To go your own way, you do need to become accustomed to fear.  You must make it your friend.  You must learn to allow it to recede, even in the unknown, and unknowable.

I do not think it unreasonable to call myself a Sufi.  I admit I am an idiot.  I am an idealistic, stubborn idiot.  Fully grasping the extent of your own futility, the extent of your failures and imbecilities, the vast ocean of things you can’t begin to say you understand, the impossibility of ever reaching in this world anything approaching a complete understanding: all of these constitute the BEGINNING of the path.  It becomes possible then to BEGIN the process of learning, of seeing, of perceiving with your own eyes and ears, your own body, your own tongue and nose.  And it is a path which winds off into a horizon which never gets any closer.  The path is your home, here.  It can never be any more.  But that is the point of life.  It is the purpose for being here.  And it can be a home.  It can be happy and fulfilling, when you let go of all the things which seek to keep you rooted, frozen, immobile, hopeless, and lost.

I mentioned this some years ago, but I was in fact annointed a Sufi in a dream once.  I was told by a group of wise men that I was to be crowned a Sufi.  There was a majestic ceremony, fit for a king.  And when the great moment came to place the crown on my head, it was 6″ too big on every side, and fell immediately on my shoulders.  We all laughed.  It was the laughter that completed the ceremony.

Some months later, after some travelling, Nasruddin passes through that village, and stops by to check on the shopkeeper.  He is told something like, “it was HORRIBLE.  Everyone thought I was crazy.  I had to work twice as hard just to stay in business.  Now my business is good, but no thanks to you.

Nasruddin replies: “oh no, it worked PERFECTLY.”

I was contemplating this morning, staring out into the rain, that I think hated my mother by the time I was 3, and I think she hated me. She wanted to break me, and not unreasonably, I did not want to be broken.  I had, and I think have, in some respects, a very powerful will, although of course I was broken.  I remember the dream where it became clear to me, a dream I had over four decades ago.

And I feel this sense of having been hated–and having felt hate–is not something that will ever leave me.  It was early, primal, primordial, fundamental to who I am and have become.  And it was extraordinarily unpleasant.  My home was never a happy home.  I never felt truly safe at any time in my childhood.  Never.  Anywhere.

But this primal deficit is the source of my energy.  It is why I felt I had to save the world to prove myself.  It is what fed my relentless drive for self improvement, for knowledge, for wisdom.

And I felt “you can’t replace memory”.  Then it hit me “what if I could?”  What if I could eliminate all those feelings of anger, worthlessness, isolation, pain and fear? What if I could do a memory wipe, such that only whatever good there was–and of course there must have been–remained?

I would not do it.  Who I am is who I am.  All of us have to learn how to deal with negative emotions.  All of us have to learn how to transmute them, energize them, use them for good, for growth, for wisdom and learning.  I would be neutering myself, destroying myself, eradicating the foundation for everything I have built.

None of us are truly wise enough to finally distinguish good and bad in this world.

Here, though, is one heuristic. Given a free market–which is to say one in which the government has not been corrupted into protecting or actively supporting monopolies–a rough sequence of events can be stipulated. To create one free market billionaire you have to create, say, 10 people worth 100 million, 100 people worth 10 million, 1000 people worth a million, and ten thousand people making $100,000 or more. These are very roughly, say, Facebook, or Google numbers.

Now if resentment outweighs self interest, you can enact policy to ensure no billionaires emerge, at least through the natural operation of free markets (Communist regimes, obviously, create very big winners, which is not hard when you can take money from anyone you like and give it to anyone else). Logically, if you prevent the billionaire, you also prevent everything downstream. You create Venezuela. You create Zimbabwe. You create the Soviet Union. Nobody has anything. Everyone is poor. And you STILL have huge income disparities, because some pigs are more equal than others.

Base your life on a positive vision for yourself, not envious resentment of someone else.

In other news, white leftist commentators were astonished to learn that a house negro possessed the ability to form complete sentences, and every appearance of coherent thought.  They are still trying to decide what to make of this shocking development. If they all get like that, it’s only a matter of time before white “liberals” aren’t needed.