Author: White Whale

You can only really understand in others what you can find and understand in yourself.  Self knowledge is a prerequisite, in my understanding, to empathy.  If you cannot feel compassion for yourself, there is no use trying to send it out into the world.  Whatever you are sending is generic, non-targeted, impersonal, and in most cases often wrong.

Now, it is obviously possible for people who know nothing about themselves to develop an understanding of the signs indicating different patterns in other people, which they can then manipulate, sometimes by simulating feelings in themselves they do not actually feel, like compassion and understanding.

Things I think I personally understand are why people are consciously cruel, why they kill themselves, why they pick unnecessary fights, why they cut themselves, why they self sabotage, why they feel depression, why they get confused, why they become addicts, and why they lie.  This is a short list.  I have found every vice imaginable in myself.

With regard to evil specifically, what I think happens is that the lack of love–and associated emotional pain and social disconnection–is so intense, that a sort of sub-personality takes over.  The role of this personality is to hide them from their pain.  They in turn CAUSE pain, so they can retain some relationship with it.

It can be and often is useless reasoning with people in this state, since the entire PURPOSE of this way of being is to tell themselves important lies about who they truly are: helpless children, feeling spit on and hated by the world.  To ask such a person to truly understand themselves is to open up a world of pain those who have not felt it can scarcely imagine.

For myself, I think I have been to the brink of what is endurable.  Much more pain than I have felt is certainly possible, but not, I don’t think, without pushing someone over into this other world.  We all have built in circuit breakers, where beyond a certain point, that emotion simply disappears into a hidden folder, beyond our conscious awareness.  It doesn’t disappear, but the immediate sensation of hell diminishes.  This, in turn, conditions people to avoid this place.  To do otherwise is to walk back into the flames, and very few are willing to do that.

The reason I have done it is I can feel the pain of internal division. I can feel my separation from the world, and have long been willing to pay any price to find my way home.  Not back home, but to a new one, which I am both finding and building.

I would be a terrible foot soldier, and worse tactical leader. I can remain in touch with obvious common sense realities, sometimes, for long periods of time. But sometimes, I am just in my own world. What everyone else sees clearly is invisible to me, and what I see is invisible to everyone else. This can be great for theoreticians, but would likely be deadly where accurate, fast, and consistently good assessments need to be made.

Pondering, though, I do think I would be a good advisor to someone with their feet on the ground, but capable of looking up.

And it occurs to me, thinking through my Sun Tzu, that the greatest victories are the least glorious. An effective strategy demand little heroism, little death, little fighting. If you attack your enemies plans, no blows are dealt ( speaking abstractly, although this might involve strategic attacks on provisions, money, supply routes, or physical violence aimed at morale), but you might still win.

The North Vietnamese lost every major battle they fought with America, some–like the first Tet–grievously.  But their intent was merely to remain apparently viable until they could get the Jane Fonda’s and John Kerry’s of our world to help them win the propaganda war. Once they did that, the tank led march into the South was relatively easy. The South knew it had been abandoned by its closest ally, and felt little taste for sustained battle. So I recall the history, although I have not studied the last phase of the war: our ignominious and disastrous retreat after having secured military victory.

What can Trump do to attack Kim Jung IL’s will to fight? I dont know, but it is a great question.

I keep having demons visit me in my sleep.  They are tangled, twisted bundles of nervous energy, utterly unable to relax even for a moment.  They enter when I am in my room, but a dream version of my room.  They prowl around, hover over me, wait at the head of my bed.

Writing this, I get a shiver down my spine, but within the dreams I am getting used to it.  I don’t like it, but it does not terrify me any more.  I can look directly at them–they are invisible, but the energy is unmistakably clear, consisting in malice, nervous tension, and continual rage–and speak to them.  This would have been impossible in the past.

Now, I am psychoanalytically astute enough to consider these may be manifestations of a complex or even latent psychosis.  As I calm, I see how much I have missed.  As I have split seconds of truly being in the present, I feel how frightening it is to let go of EVERYTHING.  My tension, itself, has been my constant companion for many years.  It was always there, so I could make some predictions about the future: this, at least, I knew, would be there, no matter what I did or where I went.

In a waking state, it seems to me that both ideas are most likely true.  I do believe in demons and angels.  I also believe I have had much of the demonic in me all my life.  When you cannot calm yourself, that is their feeding ground.  No one taught me to calm myself, and all my life I have been prone to fits of rage, subtle cruelties I would only notice after I had already hurt someone, and relentless disquiet.

In speaking of true resilience, which is the ability not just to keep going, but to process the experience and expand in the process, it seems to me that it is VERY important that, just once in their life, and of course ideally often, a child experience an adult presence which comforts and calms them.  My particular malady–and there are many like me–is that my mother terrified me more than anyone else in the world.

To put it mildly, this has created problems

But I am healing, slowly.  It frightens me.  I don’t know what to expect.  Pain which had been frozen comes gushing in at me.

But I do believe this is what I signed up for.  This all has a purpose, and it seems most likely that purpose is, as I have said before, fully experiencing hell, and finding a way out in spite of it all.  I have the tools.  I have the balls.  And I have the intention.  It will all be fine in the end.

Look at this: https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-only-knows-what-its-doing-to-our-childrens-brains-2508036343.html

On first pass, I thought that, for me, the benefits of social media outweigh any potential risks of addiction.  I do check Facebook more than I should, but usually because I am bored or procrastinating, and because I find all kinds of interesting stuff posted.  I enjoy it.

But as I ponder it a bit more, what he is describing, without using the words, is perhaps the most powerful system ever fashioned for turning young minds into Other Directed personalities, the sort most fit for fascistic political governance.

Think about it: from the earliest age, kids are trained to solicit social rewards, and to tie their sense of self to continual external reinforcement, in a place completely disconnected from parental authority.

It was bad enough when the dilution of our money forced mothers into the workplace, and turned TV’s into ersatz parents.  Now, they are socialized in a world completely disconnected with the physical circumstances of their lives.  It is a virtual world, with virtual rules.

Our would-be rulers–and Mark Zuckerberg, among others, seems to see himself in this role–could not ask for a more effective means of making their propaganda more targeted and effective.

On a somewhat related note, I saw the new Thor movie yesterday, and, among other thoughts, some of which I may share tomorrow, it occurred to me that reality, by contrast with the movies we immerse ourselves in, must come to seem banal and uninteresting.  People–kids most notably–can be addicted to continual spectacle.  We have the bread, and are coming to need the circuses.

It is impossible to be optimistic about our future when, in the midst of unprecedented plenty, our best minds are preoccupied with sophomoric sophistries, petty emotional grudges, and a complete lack of vision for anything but turning the keys to the engine over to anyone who happens to present themselves.

At the same time, for me, struggle is my destiny.  It is what I was put on this planet to do.  There is always hope until you are dead, and in my version of things, death is just a time to rethink and retool, then go again.

I am making rapid progress in my own inner work.  I have connected with, and made contingent within my present, all the longings, pains, confusions, and ass whippings I endured as a child.

Humanity has no problems which cannot be solved using reason, intelligence, and flexible and accurate perception.

Our largest problem is that so many have given up.  They see no path forward, so they are working hard towards our collective collapse into mules, the dead, and the elite, who will truly have nothing to celebrate.

One final note: it occurs to me that evil, in the end, is nothing more, and nothing less, than the absence of love.  Where love is truly present, there is goodness.  Where it is absent, there is harm, no matter the words, no matter the creed, no matter the alleged intention.

No one who does not know themselves can do good, in the end.  This is my firm view.

Think about it: this creed, created by white Europeans, has been sold as a solution to white imperialism.  What it substitutes is abusive authority vastly worse than that of white imperialism, since it runs on ideology, not simple greed.  It has no limits.  What the British East India Company did in a two hundred year period, Mao exceeded in a decade ten-fold.

But is the surface rhetoric not salvational?  Is it not oriented around the words “justice”, “peace”, and “equality”?  Is the promise of this religion not heaven on Earth?

It is no different from any other white imperialism, other than that it is vastly worse, and incapable of self correction from a moral perspective.  It breeds and consumes human beings like a vast cancer, and exists to exist.  Survival is its only real aim.  It is like a demonic spirit with countless hosts.

If you think about it, Das Kapital was ALSO the work of a dead white male.  Soviet Russia was run by white males.  And it played a decisive role in fashioning autocratic, abusive rule in many brown skinned countries, just like “Capitalism”, so called, supposedly did.

There are no ideas–or very few–ideas floating around universities, including that of dead white males, which were not originated by dead white males, with some dead white females. Self revulsion is certainly not a new thing, but intelligent people making a virtue of it–perhaps I should call it a religious fetish ( or sexual fetish, even, for some)–can scarcely be called a practice consistent with mental health and wellness.

The sum of the wisdom of the man who on most accounts founded Western philosophy was that he knew nothing. This is a useful statement IF YOU ACT ON IT. What is extraordinarily stupid is to use the mans own method to reach different conclusions. Think about it. Was Socrates stupid? Should it be seen as surprising that the intellectual superstructure of the Western cultural project has collapsed, and that our modern “philosophers” are again saying ” we know nothing”?

A fundamental distinction needs to be made between a communicable science of objects–Techne–which we have excelled at to a miraculous degree; and the path of people, of souls.

No one can truly speak who they are, at the deepest level, and trying to do so is to denigrate, diminish, and to kill.

The Sophia we speak of is rationalistic, and reached by endless sputtering, and consists, at the bottom of the mine, in a flagstone saying “Seek elsewhere.”

Here, I give you a word for valuing deep experience for its own sake. Call it mysticism if you like.

I am about to go into my Kum Nye practice. Who knows what will emerge? Wherever it comes from, it is what is real. Words can build peace ( and war), but they cannot build direct understanding of what is most important in human life.

I will add, my initial impulse was to seek ” love of awareness” or “love of consciousness”, but don’t have time to do the research.

The best condiments are tranquility and gratitude.

I wanted to call this a bon mot, but I can’t see how I haven’t seen this expressed somewhere in many forms.  Because it is true.

Pausing to give thanks, pausing to calm down and focus on the task of eating, digesting, and putting the nutrients to good use? Solid, and largely forgotten wisdom.

I eat like a wolf, too often. Food, of course, has always been one form of self medication for me. As I calm, though, I am seeing better ways of interacting with it. Thanking it, and God, and fate and chance, all more or less literally, seems like a great idea to me.

Communist governments ALONE caused some 100 million unnatural deaths in the 20th century. Being a 1 with six zeroes this number represents 10,000 x 10,000. This means it would take some thirty years, killing 10,000 people a day, to equal this number. At the height of the Holodomor, some 20,000 people were dying a day, which is more than 4 times the ENTIRE number of blacks lynched by the KKK in its 100+ year history.

These numbers don’t count Hitler, Suharto, Pinochet, Franco and others.  GOVERNMENTS, more than anything, are what do most killing. We need to fear our government more than each other.

The gun in Texas was bought illegally or stolen. A crime had already been commuted when he took possession of the gun. We have 275 million guns in this country, a large percentage unregistered, and which would not BE registered if those who want to grant the government a monopoly on the effective use of force ever get their legislation passed and enforced.

The true issue is one of mental health. Why did this guy think dying as a mass murderer was the best, or only, path for him?  Well meaning people need to ask the question: how can we better build and protect social inclusion and coherent culture?

Archy/anarchy

This is clinically accurate. Our country has been “slouching”, not really towards Gomorrah, but fascism. Trump opposes this. Those who voted for him oppose this. And this, in turn, has created a precipitation of latent madness.

On a marginally related note, I see no reason Jeff Sessions should not be fired. He helped and supported Trump. He had a good record in Alabama. Trump did, I think, the right thing in giving him a second and third chance. But his second in command is an Obama-ite, clearly dedicated to making Trumps Presidency difficult and as close to a failure as he can manage. Sessions turning Uranium One over to Rosenstein should be the last straw. He can no longer claim to be doing the right thing: he is simply avoiding responsibility for potentially explosive investigations of precisely the sort we ELECTED Trump to do, to help restore faith in our process, in our judiciary, in the FBI, and in our democracy itself.