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Friendship Cafes

What if there were restaurants where they provided a dining companion to people who were dining alone? If they wanted them, of course.

I would like to suggest as well that men use bars and strangers in much the same way that women use their support networks. Men who hate to broach certain subjects even with their friends will often do so with strangers after a few beers.  I have seen this often.
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Mark of the Beast

Perhaps the Mark of the Beast is having no personally distinguishing characteristics or beliefs whatsoever.  You are marked by belonging to an undifferentiated herd.

There is no diversity in 666 either, is there?

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A world gone crazy

https://100percentfedup.com/wow-top-sponsors-nfl-issue-statements-national-anthem-protests/

No one can deny Donald Trump is a bit of a clown.  His hair, his bad spray on tan, and his serial marriages, among other things, count against him.

But his undeniable, categorical, CLEAR virtue is a willingness to speak obvious truths, knowing in advance that he will be pilloried by most of the media, who are SHOCKED, OUTRAGED, that anyone would defend common sense patriotism.

What do we have left, if we do not believe in the promise of our nation?  We have always believed in progress, but progress within the system.  Trump would be called courageous, if so many people were not trying to make him into a gargantuan, Godzilla-like monster.  He is speaking obvious truths, when speaking the truth makes him an outlaw, an outsider, since the world otherwise is filled with lies, half truths, and misdirection.

I really feel that Communism is really nothing more, and nothing less, than the final failure of an individual to find a personal purpose in their lives.  It is the final expression of despair and pessimism.  It is reaching the bottom of life, finding nothing, then grasping at the only straw left to grasp.  It is willing a superior power–the State–to create law for you, so that you can be free from freedom, so that you no longer need to control your own life, so that someone forces you into something like life.  It is willing oneself to be a robot.  It is taking a potion which makes you a zombie, because you have nothing else.

This really is a critically important question: how do you psychologically normal people become Communists?  Answer: they don’t.  You have to already be fucked up in the head, and then it is a salve, a balm, a sunny day in a cold winter.  It is warmth, intoxicating.  And it is so SIMPLE.  Just give your freedom away, and you find peace.  That it is cultish is obvious.  That some people need cults is equally obvious.

Culturally, everything which breeds a taste for ugliness, which damages the sacred, which nurtures moral and existential pessimism, anger, and depression, works to support the Communist ethos, which is concrete blocks, hunger, colorful banners, and hidden torture and execution chambers.  It is also psychological torture camps they call ” re-education” camps, where people are taught to all think the same things, say the same things, and reject FULLY any pretension to individual moral thought, to any personal destiny, to anything like a loving God, and to hope in any form. 

It is, in other words, a massive coffin, the land of the undead, and a vampires paradise.

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The Sacred

I think we are biologically–and spiritually–driven to consider some things sacred.  There is ordinary and there is special.  There is this-world, and something beyond it.  We need this sense of transcendance, which can be represented with physical objects, rituals, or sacred texts.  As I say, I am listening to a history of the Jews, and some apparently meditate on the Hebrew alphabet, which they consider sacred.

All of us, put another way, need some deep order.  Even early Buddhist monks carried the dharma with them.  Wandering, with no creed, they would have simply been lost.  Having something to hold enabled them to mutate and grow within an ordered internal world.

I have been in fact contemplating the idea in recent days that Judaism’s main accomplishment was creating a stable social organism capable of learning and retaining secular ideas, which became old and wise.

In America, we are a highly diverse people.  We offer freedom, and ask very little for it.  You can live your life as you see fit.  Except in some small towns, nobody cares if you go to church, and we are even willing to tolerate people who call publicly for authoritarian government, as Antifa for example does continually.

Thus, publicly well known people attacking the National Anthem and flag symbolically is not a minor thing.  It is one of the only things left that binds us together.  It is a ceremony, a ritual, in which we all say symbolically that, our differences notwithstanding, we are all in this together.  The differences are very obvious and literal in the case of the fans of two opposing teams sitting intermingled with one another.

That football–or any other player, as this may or may not stop with the NFL–have the RIGHT to publicly shit on their American heritage is unquestioned.  Nobody, certainly not me, should be calling for legal sanctions on publicly expressed opinions, no matter how stupid and counter-productive they may be.

But what is the appropriate reaction to someone attempting to spit in your face and missing?  That they tried to insult you is clear, and that no concrete, real harm was done is equally clear. 

For my part, I don’t even understand what it is they think they are protesting.  Should the deaths by homicide of several thousand blacks every year not factor into the equation?  Should the fact that even when cops kill people, a lot of the time the cops themselves are black not count?

And what do they want done?  To “raise awareness”?  How could anyone have failed to see the leftist narratives that have been on continuous display at least since Obama first took office?

What black kids need are good schools, the good jobs that come with them, and intact families.  Virtually all criminality comes from kids raised in one parent homes, white, black, and presumably every other race too.

Attacking symbols is attacking deep structure.  Americans hold so few things sacred that this point is not obvious.  But for fuck’s sake, the Steelers, led by their coach?  And again, for what?  What is the point?  What is the end game?  As football players, they are trained to have plans.  What is the fucking plan?  Piss on the flag, laugh about it, then go about their millionaire lives?

America is a voluntary association.  We restrict to some extent who can come here, but we don’t keep anyone here by force.  Anyone who doesn’t like it is literally free to leave, which is not the case in North Korea, Cuba, and probably to a great extent China.

As a voluntary association, we don’t make people do things they don’t want to do, but as something which aims at the transcendent, which aims to rectify the countless crimes of history, asking for a little respect is not unreasonable, and publicly denying that respect is in my judgement ample warrant for contempt.

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Innovation

I am listening to Paul Johnsons “A History of the Jews.” He just made a point I wanted to note. He argues that innovation is often driven by forced relocation, and that much of that spirit which became the economic dynamism Marx called Capitalusm, and which I would call sane economics, derived not intrinsically from the religious zealotry posited by Weber and others, but from the process of groups being forced to create new lives. He does recognize that this movement, such as that of various congregationalist Protestant sects to America, was often driven by an unwillingness to tolerate Clericalism in any form, but asserts that it was the world changes themselves which spurred creation.

I have been thinking in recent days about early Buddhists, sent out to wander alone and hungry, spirits drifting on the wind. The Buddha must have known monasticism was inevitable, but gave a few generations of monks the chance to destroy all they had known, and to thus find what was still alive when all else is dead.

He must have also known that Anatta would fuck with peoples minds forever.

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Death is very near

Sharon Stone had a Near Death Experience some years ago, and had this to say:  “Death is . . . very near and very safe… and loving, and gentle, and OK, and there’s nothing to be afraid of.'”


In my more spiritual moments in recent days I have been feeling this. It could be a premonition of my own death, but it seems more likely this is what authentic spirituality feels like: you feel this world suffused perfectly with a better one. You can feel the colors the flowers and sky would be capable of, if they could only be released. I feel peace, safety and freedom. Heaven is already here. It is just a half step to get there, and all our pain melts away.


As I say, my work continues, but after many long and hopeless years it finally seems to.be bearing fruit.


I think the first phase of my life is slowly ending, and something new and better taking its place.
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God and sin

I was pondering today that God must be vastly more interested in our potential, than in any mistakes we might make.

Then I thought that loving parents are disappointed in kids who do not realize their potential, but they never hate them. If we are anthropomorphism God, this is simply bad psychology, the entirety of which can be laid at the feet of religiously hypocritical power-mangers, who used with skill the threat of eternal damnation to build a very earthly thousand year Reich. Vatican City still is, I suspect, per capita the wealthiest nation on Earth.

But this idea occurred, which is somewhat interesting: God as parent makes no sense to me. He letsenty of people slip through the cracks.

But what about meta-parent? The ground of nurturing? The principle channeled by good parents, and a principle we can use to guide and comfort ourselves?  What if any signs we might see arise through the operation of an ordering and calming spirit, which is there only if we look for it?

I’m not quite sure what I am saying. This is very abstract, but I feel it as the light behind what is presented to me in life. This is perhaps really deep, and perhaps not. Do with it what you will.

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Alt right

From my perspective, Alt-Right is normal political conservatism, plus drugs, Milo, and a healthy dash of Ron Paul (but not too much).

It is, in other words, principled political Liberalism, which would have been far too tolerant for Reagan era conservatives, and which presents a major problem to the Commissars of the Left, because it is socially tolerant where they are not, and politically principled, where they also are not.

Unchecked, it could lead to mass escapes from their carefully pruned and greened gulags, especially among the young.

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Life has no purpose

One of the main reasons I took the trouble and spent the money to get authorized to teach Kum Nye is that it is much deeper and more subtle than any other practices of which I am aware, and I am aware of s great many of them.

Yesterday I was contemplating how I fear relaxation, and feeling that this is a general problem. We stay busy because the notion of spending an afternoon on a porch watching the grass grow is anathema, scary.  Why?

Within Kum Nye there are three levels of relaxation. The first is what you get with a good massage, as one possibility. But underneath this is Kun Zhi, which is that swirling torrent of unresolved emotions, everything running wild, and which you run from daily. It is all of your truths, your real truths. It is the ugly, but also the possibility of the beautiful. It is the temporarily painful, but also the germ of perennial happiness. It is all mixed together.

Within this mix is the feeling I think most of us have had, and certainly those of us who did not get “good enough” parenting, as psychologists put it, which is that life has no point. Living is useless. “Life is just to die”, as Lou Reed put it.

This feeling came on me strongly yesterday, and it felt familiar. Part of growing is remembering who we once were, and who we have always been, but not consciously.

This pessimism is corrosive, obviously, and especially in precocious children of the sort I once was. What is the superficial antidote? Burying the idea, and countering it with, in my case, a felt need to save the world. I want to save the world precisely because I have not known how to save myself. I feel there are many like me, and as a group we likely do much more harm than good.

Positive thinking manias are rooted in core pessimism. Positive thinking as a practice in high achieving people is of course useful. As an ideology, it is not.

I continue to be surprised by myself. Every day is a unpredictable adventure. Often it is scary, but I have known true horror, and I kept going. Slowly things are coming into place. Soon I will be good, I feel, and happy, after a long, long nightmare.

Edit: I meant to add that the statement “Life has no purpose” is silly to me. Life, per se, is an abstraction, a verbal reification of our experience, itself amenable to the process of decision, of which defining any number of purposes is a primary process. We can give any purpose to life we choose, and if we do t choose that is not “Life’s ” fault.

Practically, psychologically honestly speaking, this a FEELING of disconnection from wholes, from belonging to some process and some people. The thought arises naturally from a primitive but real and honest feeling.

Kum Nye, to me, is the emotional equivalent to reasoning. It is learning about chains of logical emotive causation at the level of primary experience. It is seeing how human emotional life is constituted for oneself, versus the abstractions one finds in books which, if they accurate, can only themselves have come from this process of inner work.

Self evidently, logical answers to emotional questions are found in the emotions. The words you say to yourself, or to anyone else for that matter, don’t matter one damn bit.

I try to say things which mean something. Perhaps sometimes I succeed.

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Note to self

Our insane monetary system has the effect of squeezing innovation out of society, but at the cost of emotional and social well being. We need each other far more than we need new stuff.

And it continues to be the case that greed and bad management keep getting conflated with “Capitsalism” by propagandists–who dish this pabulum out to eagerly receptive resentful minds–when in fact it is obviously and patently absurd.  If you hate your boss, start your own business. If the government has made it hard, blame socialism, not “capitalism”.

Do human greed and stupidity disappear when the government has a monopoly on them?  Of course not: they CONCENTRATE. All the abuses of Communism and its socialist cousins–for example in Venezuela and Zimbabwe, and India before it changed its ways–should seen as distillations of the essence of the abuses the people thought they were protesting, and which the very same sorts of people used to get coercive power over them.

As long as there are bad people, no system is safe from them. But what our system offers is alternatives. In the system created by our Constitution, each State was supposed to be an alternative to each other, and the Federal government something far away that mainly mattered in times of war.

We’ve had wars a’plenty, and look at our government now.