Author: White Whale

I feel my own personal life path is to figure how to make authentic love something more, rather than less, likely, and how to make it more common.

We are commanded in the Christian tradition to love, but ponder that. Love or die. Love or God will hate you. Love or you will be thrown into eternal darkness. I honestly cannot decide if Christianity is a net blessing or curse, although it is certainly both.

I think my most excruciating work is done. My struggles continue, but I have lost the need to drink, and this is a major advance.

I watch the news and it breaks my heart sometimes. How can the same poor islands that just endured a hurricane go through another. But people endure. It is what we do.

I continue to choose to believe that universal light is possible on this planet, and that humanity can survive the next 100 years with our freedoms and dignity intact. I can’t of course know this, but as Churchill put it, roughly, there is little damned use in negative thinking. Seeking and finding a condition of paralyzed helplessness is neither hard nor useful.

Many ideas continue to flood through me, but I am for now trying to stay with my primary experience, and my primary existential struggle, which I may describe more fully later.

Every moment is important, but none too important.

Love is what is most important, but sometimes we need to be selfish, and even cruel.

It is important to never waste time, but sometimes the most important thing IS to waste time.

You should dedicate yourself to helping others, but the first other is always you.

There are no absolutes, except when there are.

I have in recent days been trying, again, to puzzle out a life philosophy.  When I look out at the world, I see many solutions.  And I see many people driven mad by a felt need to conform to absolute dictates of one sort or another.

Life, it seems to me, is a tide: it comes in and it goes out.  What was becomes what is, becomes what will be.  There is no constant landscape, other than motion.

As a shelter from this, many humans have evolved inflexible rules, such as the Jewish and Islamic laws, or the Catholic liturgy.  Communism is little but an escape from freedom by assigning “law” to “history”.

Sometimes we need absolute rules.  But sometimes we don’t. 

And the philosopher–if I might style myself as such, my own reservations about that word and vocation notwithstanding–should see the big picture.  Sometimes, emotionally, you need to be firm, and obviously you must be firm in something.  This is rigidity.  This is Law.

But sometimes it is necessary to bend like the Taoist willow, allowing, without losing ones roots.

In some respects, I think I am trying to wrestle with my own tendency to be judgemental.  It was a functional adaptation at one time.  I needed it.  It was the only way I could make sense of the world.

But what I see is that it separates me from most of humanity.  All have fallen in some ways, but all have also risen in some ways, and found some light somewhere.  For me to be tense, to force a separation, is a violence to truth, and more than a little unfair to me myself.  When I push someone away emotionally, I lose what could have been an interesting interaction, potentially useful to both of us.

It is odd this word would mean two very different things. But they are not so different. To leave is to begin, and all doors are both exits and entrances.

One starts where one is, but few of us see all the places we can go.

Feeling a bit mystical today. It’s easy enough to use the language!!!!

It occurs to me most of us have one way of moving in the world, as our “posture”, or what Moshe Feldenkrais more comprehensively called our “acture”, and another posture hidden within our selves. Part of healing–really, I think most or all of it–is learning on a feeling level who you are, and part of that is connecting with your relationship with your body when you are not having to fool people so they dont attack you, or so it feels to some of us.

When I am not an inflated pufferfish, or activated porcupine, who am I? Where would I rest, if I could?

I heard on the radio that Norrh Korea gets 90% of its fuel from China. This means that without China they cannot survive. They certainly would not be in a position to develop and test nuclear missiles and warheads.

And they continue to support North Korea:https://www.infowars.com/china-warns-trump-we-will-back-north-korea-if-the-us-strikes-first/

Here is a simple idea: if and when North Korea launches an effective nuclear attack on the US mainland, we consider it an act of war by China itself, and react accordingly.

Obviously, a nuclear war is not the outcome we want, but it is not the outcome they want either. But given that China can shut them down any time they want, they are CLEARLY culpable.

If we add this to the table, along with the threat of a tiered trade war we can escalate gradually, perhaps they can be made to see reason.

China itself is not peaceful, and its leaders not secure in their power. They are corrupt, greedy, brutal, and indifferent to anything not directly related to an unearned national pride, or the internal violence needed to keep hundreds of millions of miserable people from committing mass slaughter of the dictators who call themselves liberators.

It is very possible to put real pressure on both these nations, or so it seems to me.

Sometimes you have to just watch those who have chosen death die.  There are countless seeds struggling to take root and sprout new life. Save your energy for them. None of us invented death. It is simply a factor in our existence.

Those who seek darkness will find it. Those who seek oblivion will find it.

Anger ends when the hurt ends, and I think the end of hurt is the same as forgiveness.  Forgiveness is when the thought of someone, or something which hurt you, no longer brings out strong emotions.  It is growth, though, which brings understanding.  Forgiveness makes it no longer matter.  Growth allows you to see.

I am still angry about a number of things, and I still hurt. For someone like me, being able to feel hurt in the first place is progress.  I never knew what was being done to me, because I checked out early on.

You can of course choose to forgive someone, but it seems to me this is simply a decision to consistently alter your focus.  This is likely helpful, likely healthy, and likely the only way to move on for some people.  But until you heal the hurt, you are papering it over, and it never fully goes away.

When I finish my inventory, I don’t want anything left.  What I want is consistently expressed creativity, focus, and pleasure in people and in work.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/09/new_yorker_writer_finds_the_cajun_navy_troubling.html#.Wa6kMYpBwT4.facebook

Socialism is a worldview, not a system for solving concrete, actually existing problems. It is a means without an end. 

In the past days I have felt clearly this sense that feelings are open.  There is no roof, even if there are walls, even if there is a “you” within which they arise.

What I mean by this, is that when bad feelings–sadness, fear, pain–arise, there is a tendency to fight them, to try to push them down.  This of course only makes them sneaky and in some ways more powerful.  They come out in irrational behavior.  That you can rationalize it does not change this fact.  Nobody ever does anything without a reason.  Ted Bundy and Chairman Mao had their logics.

But if you imagine yourself floating in a cistern, perhaps on a boat, there is no roof.  As the tide rises, you keep going up and up and up, then down and down, and as it goes down, you eventually reach dry land again.  The key is to contact, be conscious of, and to consciously allow the flow to happen.  When you do this, you do not avoid some unpleasant moments, but with faith, they fade, and you learn to deal with them, and over time you lose the fear of negative feelings.  Having lost this fear–which prevents much joy–you are then free to allow positive feelings easy access to your daily consciousness.

We spend so much time fearing what we will lose, who we will lose.  When you lose this fear, everything becomes interesting, fascinating.  Everywhere you look, there is something to make you smile, and there is something to investigate and learn from.  The world becomes a much more tender, inviting, and free space.

On behalf of Paul Krugman and his Broken Window-istas, I would like to thank God for this MASSIVE boost to the Houston and indeed the Texas economy.  No greater blessing could possibly be imagined.

If ONLY Obama had spent 5x what he did, imagine the wealth that could have been produced!!!!  But he didn’t listen to old Paul, did he?

So sorry, America, but Houston is getting the full Krugman red carpet.  Don’t be haters because they are so lucky.