Author: White Whale

But we are rapidly reaching a point where not only has Mueller found nothing but an incoming National Security Advisor guilty of nothing but some combination of stupidity and hubris–complacency might be the word, since “wire-tapping” senior officials then releasing the transcript for political purposes, then cajoling a contradiction under oath, has not traditionally been a low our intelligence/counter-intelligence apparatus would stoop to–but has begun breaking the law himself.  He recently sought and received, seemingly illegally, thousands of emails he had no right to.

The thing about arcs is they can reverse.  All the cannons firing at Trump can one day, at the right time, be made to fire at the foundations of the Deep State.  Mueller himself can be investigated for his investigation.  He can be investigated for sundry blatant conflicts of interest, for overreach, for willfully overlooking blatant violations of the law by Democrats.  He can be investigated, and perhaps indicted, for failing to end the investigation outright the moment he realized that the entire thing was based on fabricated evidence created by a combination of Clinton operatives and law breaking members, and spouses of members, of the Deep State.

It is like the whole thing is on a bungy, that is getting ready to bounce back up.

Or, to use a metaphor that is a bit cliched (I did something like jiu jitsu for 7 some odd years): it is like judo, where in the classic iteration, you use the energy of your opponent against them.  When you are dealing with skilled opponents, though, this almost always needs to be through a feint.  You have to appear to give them an opening, something they want, to which they commit too much energy.  This energy then becomes your means of taking their balance and throwing them.

I have seen calls already for a Special Prosecutor to investigate Uranium One.  Since these people have no reasonable bounds, I would think Mueller himself, and everyone under him, could equally be objects of investigation.  Applying the same standards applied to Flynn, Mueller might even be an indictable criminal.

Unless I am missing something major, it would seem to me he himself would be prudent to give people reasons to stop asking about and digging into the Steele dossier that started the whole thing, and why he brought on board so many people who were hyperpartisan, and plainly guilty of serious derelictions of duty.

It has been perhaps an act of genius for Trump to let this whole thing play out, to distract and obsess the Democrats, and ultimately–after the smoke clears, after Mueller has done his best and found nothing–to provide a clear means of unmasking a vast mass of traitors in our midst.

It is perhaps the case that the “insurance policy” was a terrible idea, even if it was illegal, and indictable.

And it’s not hard to feel that previous generations–our “parents” in a general sense, that of those who created “this world”–have failed us.  Intellectually, it is hard to find anything useful in most universities in the “love of truth” departments.  You will need to look in the “study of the mind” department, and then only if they have chosen to focus on happiness, using antique “love of truth” ideas like Eudaemonia.

It is easy to think this is a terrible time to live.  We face the risk of nuclear war from North Korea, and nuclear attack from anyone who can get the materials.  Technology becomes steadily more intrusive, such that any tyranny enacted by the Federal government would be effectively impossible to combat.  We see many ludicrous movies where rebels plan and organize in secret, when such a thing would be in fact impossible, as Frank Church recognized long before the internet, the iPhone, and Facial Recognition technology.

The possible list is long, and my imagination–and knowledge of perils recognized in the public domain–is considerably larger than that of most.

But this morning I was doing my Heartmath, and it occurred to me that in the Buddhist and other traditions, ANY incarnation as a human being is a blessing.  Just showing up here, just being alive on this planet, is a blessing.

And we live in a time where all the best ideas of the entire history of mankind–the public part at least–are available everywhere all the time.  I have most of the primary texts of the forms of Buddhism which interest me.  I can and am using Neurofeedback to calm my brain, which will save me decades of patient and very, very slow effort.  It is not “40 years of Zen”, as one person with a talent for marketing, but seemingly little wisdom, put it, but it is a huge advantage.

I have my Heartmath.  I have time, precious time, time not contingent on membership in a monkish convent, time not devoted to backbreaking labor.

As Yogi Berra put it, “it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future”, but it is quite easy to make predictions about your own future states, if you develop the ability and capacity to choose them.  This is really the essence of the spiritual path: cultivating the ability to calm yourself, to choose happiness, and to choose communion and expansion.

I was contemplating yesterday that it takes a fair amount of wisdom to plumb the depths of your own stupidity.  Realizing how little you know is the beginning of the spiritual path.

And spirituality is absolutely compatible with ordinary happiness, with being in a good mood, with positive feelings, with enthusiasm, with enjoying your work, with enjoying an innocent good time, with smiling, with laughing, with being of good cheer.

It is so easy to confuse a permanent frown and furrowed brow with profundity.  My youngest–who in many ways takes after me the most–was recently sharing with me that her happiness and enthusiasm makes some of her friends uncomfortable, that she seems “ditzy”.

But the SCIENCE that has emerged clearly places a premium on happiness.  Happy people work harder.  They are more creative.  They are more fun.  They live longer.  They have better relationships (of course, having good relationships makes you happier too).  They do all the things our culture supposedly values better, as well as those things we don’t value sufficiently, like play.

In my own work, I think I have finally reached a complete summary of how I became how I am.  I won’t share all that here, but even though the past few days have been hard for me, I am glad to finally get there, to feel I have been to every major latent feeling within me.  What this means, now, is that I can begin focusing on the positive ones.

I will add a comment on that.  What I have found, is that I have long been able to access positive states, for a time, but there is always this dark cloud that smells them out, then shows up.  Clinically, I can be doing Neurofeedback, doing deep relaxation, and I am on track, exactly on target, then out of nowhere massive tension shows up.  It is like when you are having a good time, and somebody you don’t want there comes along, and the whole vibe of the thing changes. 

Put another way, I have never been able to trust fun, trust relaxation, or let down my guard for any length of time without regretting it.

But this tension, these angers, these traumas, they all arose long ago, and are now nothing but a conditioned association, a neurological habit.  As such, I can think of them as echoes of something once real, but now gone, and practically, I can practice merging them with relaxation.  I practice learning to see them come, then still revert back to where I was.  If I do this often enough, they will stop showing up.

And when this happens, the ache that has dogged me all my life will lift.

But I feel some guilt at the moment, for doubting in some respects the power of love, and communion.  Sex is also the perfection of an open soul, and the sharing of its contents.  It is a mystery, and a rite of beauty.

I have felt much pain in my life.  It has colored my vision.  But according to my own lights, my own principles, my own beliefs, my goal is to rise far above where I have been, and to do that I need to become a better good-finder.  There is no skill in repeating the past.

Leftists will sometimes say fascism is “corporatism”, which is to say, in the version their propagandists like to articulate to help differentiate their own delusions from those of the fascists.  But this gets things backwards.  It does not mean corporations rule the government.  That did not happen in Italy.  It did not happen in Germany.  It did not happen in Spain.

Rather, the government forms a partnership with the largest corporations to mutual benefit.  The corporations back the government and support it materially and politically; and in turn the leaders of the government award all the contracts to the Krupps and I.G. Farben’s of the world, which makes their owners enormous amounts of money.

Inherently, Fascism favors large corporations–which can be easily controlled by making sure those in charge support your cause–and denigrates and damages small business.

Inherently, therefore, and in my view this is a necessary conclusion, any policy which damages small business and rewards large business is tending towards fascism.

Obamacare damaged small business.  It was heavily supported by the largest insurance providers, who stood to destroy their competition, force industry consolidation, and provide very lucrative, secure business for many years to come.  It is not widely commented upon, but most Medicare plans are administered by the very corporations which the Left–in calling for “Medicare for everyone”–denigrates as for profit monsters.  Their OWN POLICIES are used to make the largest corporations richer.  If they got everything they wanted, we would have de facto Fascism in the insurance business.

But when and where have Leftists ever demonstrated the SLIGHTEST capacity for independent thought? 

Finally, and this is the actual point I had started to make, I wanted to note that Communists derive their identity from their PARTY.  Fascists get it from their nationalism, Communists from their Party, which their arrogance enables them to equate with the interests of people they don’t understand, which is to say “the workers.”

You have a small, inward-looking cabal in both cases.  And practically, of course, the Party equals the delusions and prejudices of narcissistic intellectuals.  What is actually referenced is a precise form of mental illness, and shattered reality testing.

In some respects, could we not say that the obsession with sex in our culture is in some measure an obsession with tension, and with the need to release it?  Could we not say sex, at root, is about relaxation?  About a release from tension, more specifically (as opposed to a deepening of a preexisting tendency for calm and rest)?

I was reading Salma Hayek’s story today, and it occurred to me that the life of Harvey Weinstein has been a continual pendulum between tension, rage and anger, and their temporary cessation through sex, and through the abuse of power to get that sex.

As I have said before, we ask far too much of sex.  We ask far too much of single partners–of husbands, of wives, of lovers.  We ask that they “complete us”.  We have visions of a single person who will resolve all these tensions, all these confusions, all these inchoate rages (for many of us).  We ask that they make the world right, when in reality, how can they?  Confusion about the future is inherent in our time.  Far too much is going on, far too balls are bouncing around, for anyone to have any good guess about anything.

And to ask someone else to provide you the calm you need is to petition them to allow you to suck them dry.  And some people will allow this.  This is clearly true.  Most forms of this we call codependence.

I like looking at naked women.  It calms me down.  I have some old Playboys I will take out and look at from time to time.  And I do watch porn from time to time as well, although most of it I find gross.  I even hit a strip club once a year or so.

But I find if I don’t allow my mind to confuse me about what my body truly needs, then listening deeply to great music is vastly better than using my wiles to seduce women I don’t truly plan to love or cherish.  I used to be good at it, then I just stopped.  I can’t justify it.  And it never got me what I really needed.  It was, in important respects, not just abusive, but stupid.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  So many of us adopt behavior patterns that do nothing for us, but which we continue for lack of imagination, and lack of the courage to see the truth.

I have seen several commentators note the vast difference in sexual energy in India versus the United States.  I have not been to India, but most Indians I know are pretty relaxed people.  They invented yoga.  They invented many forms of meditation.  In the United States, on the other hand, we might not have invented obsessive work, but we certainly learned how to mass produce it.

Work and sex: could we not call those the idols of our present moment?   Tension, and release, and nary a whiff of wisdom or genuine insight in the middle.

It’s a bit longer.  How about “My name is Bob, and I feel emotional pain every day”?

When AA works–and it does work for some, although not for most over the long term–I feel it is because people find a communion they needed, among their own kind, among people like them, among people who have felt what they have felt, hurt like they have hurt.

It is painful to say you are an alcoholic, but perhaps even more painful–but more useful, possibly–to admit that you feel vast rivers of emotion you don’t know what to do with, how to deal with, and that a major part of your illness is having lost a sense of belonging, and of intrinsic self worth.

Then it hit me that I have perhaps–likely–reached the end of the road with alcohol.  It has proven a worthy friend, but this time may really be the end.

And then I felt a softness and a sadness.  Alcohol is not just alcohol.  It is the stand-in for, and symbol of, all the love I missed when I was growing up.  To give up alcohol is to trigger a process of mourning, not just of this reliable friend, but of all that it replaced, or did a poor job of trying to replace.  It was something, where there had been nothing.  To give it up is to look farther, to see and to feel the nothing, and feel all that I lost, all that is gone, all that was, all that was not, and all that can never be again, never will be again.  Everything I have to say good-bye to, in order to open up the present and the future.

And I feel mourning as a process of reassembly.  It is dealing with pieces that have been broken.  It is recognizing a whole that is no more, that never will be again, but that not all is lost.  There are pieces.  There are tools, and resources, fragments of a self, a coherent mind, a personality of sorts, and together all this can be put into a new form, resembling the old form, but hopefully wiser and larger.

And I feel that in our world coming across this need for mourning is a strange thing.  We Americans, particularly, tend to view life as an endless series of positive experiences, of things we can buy, of improvement in our lives, of progress of all sorts.  Progress, progress, progress.  Everything is always moving forward, in a dynamic tide of optimistic gain for all, all the time.

But loss is a cessation.  It is a halt.  I was looking at the clock on a funeral home yesterday, and even though it was 6pm, it showed midnight (or noon).  It is always midnight for the dead.  But it can be midnight for the living too.  We, too, can stop.

I am feeling increasingly like King Theodin in the Lord of the Rings, as he awakens from Sarumon’s spell.  Some part of him knew he had lost his son, but could not feel the loss, could not mourn the loss.  For my part, I am beginning to feel what I lost, and it is a strange thing.  These things happened 30 years ago or more.

But how many of us are like this?  I think of Tarkovsky’s postman, in the beginning of The Sacrifice, who tells his friend that he feels like he is just beginning to live, despite his advancing age.

Some flowers bloom in winter.  It is sometimes the only way, the only time.  And it is always good when what should be, is.

I do feel deep grief sometimes.  I grieve for myself, and I grieve for all of us.  Your problems are not my problems, and my path MUST go through healing myself before I can be the least reliable bit of good to anyone else.

We are all is such different places.  Humankind is a patchwork of countless colors and hues.  Some of us are dull and gray, or rust colored, some bright blue and orange and vermillion.  And all of us are in larger or smaller processes of continual refinement, expansion, contraction, love, hate, anger, sadness, grief, malice, generosity, envy and love again.  I can’t see it all.  It is as large as the stars.

But we do need to break this spell of pretending that life is all sunshine and apples.  Sometimes it is rotten.  This is an inherent feature of it, and the more we all see this together, the deeper our bond, the deeper our possible sharing, and the more profound our possible joys and loves.

If you think about it, the notion that machines are better than life, because they are replicable in an exact way, can be disassembled and reassembled reliably, and never do anything surprising, is inherent to the positivistic mindself.  If we are to make endless progress, then logically human beings, flawed as we are, must go.

But look at that idea.  What is the point and purpose of “progress”?  What do we really want, and is there anything shameful in wanting it?

Underlying this mania is sadness.  Sadness that we must all go.  Sadness that we are easily broken, easily damaged, weak, and profound in our ignorance.  There is so much we do not know.

I feel and I think understand this sadness.  I understand the drive towards both artificial intelligence–our replacement–and the Singularity, a world beyond death and stupidity.

These are deep feelings in our nation, in our people.  They may drive us to the extinction of humankind.

What most people need is a deep seated and honest sense that things will be alright.  A believe in the after-life helps with this immensely.  That is why I have often made the very obvious point that this topic is of VAST scientific importance, and that immense resources should be devoted to it.

My mind boggles at certain points.  This is why most spiritual traditions focus on the heart, on innate wisdom.

I hope one day to be able to say honestly that I love you and wish you well, no matter who you are.  I am not there yet.  I still live in a cold, confusing world, and I continue to try to be a little less of an asshole every day.

Results of the investigationEdit