Author: White Whale

No, not pouting and throwing tantrums in the street in a Halloween mask, playing make-believe revolutionary in one of the safest and certainly most prosperous countries in human history, while being largely protected by cops and a mob of fellow travelers.  This is mere farce.

No, I want to speak of acts of actual courage, and actual potential usefulness.

Psychological resistance is what I have in mind.

I would like to submit again that for many modern Americans, some of our most potent mythic symbols are comic book characters.  Certainly, that seems to be the case for me.  Growing up, my four favorite superheroes were Wolverine, the Beast, the Vision, and Warlock.  There are really two groups of two: one is animals, channeling aggression and “bestial” energy; and the second two are both artificial beings, above the fray in some ways.

The Wolverine particularly is the essence of resistance.  No attacks go around him.  Avoiding things is just not something he does.  He always heads straight into the middle of everything, and it always hurts him.  But his core is the hardest substance known to man, and he himself heals from everything.  But not without suffering.  Not without countless cuts and bruises.

As I have shared, I have had dreams of being the Wolverine, fighting everything and everyone.  Wolverine is also the symbol of the wounded man, the PTSD sufferer, the lone wolf, the misanthrope, who spends all his time licking internal scars that never fully heal, even if his body does.

Last night I was the Vision.  I could walk through walls, through people.  Whatever anybody threw at me went right through.  I could go into basements, and below basements.  I could see peoples lives, their secrets hidden in places no one else could get to. I could go forbidden places fearlessly.

And it was a very different feeling.  What you allow, you do not have to fight.  This is the essence of integration, which is allowing things to flow.  This is the essence of Kum Nye, which in important respects is about diluting the sense of self so that it blends with surrounding space, and exists not so much as a point, as a wheeling circle of energy in continuous motion, which objects to nothing and can be made to include everything.

I have not fully worked my way through all this.  I am going to do a Kum Nye session now, but my dreams of the past week or so have been very interesting.  Something that was dead is now in motion, after many years of effort.

I watched the movie Assassins Creed the other night and wanted to make a point: the idea that there is no truth is the flip side of the coin upon which is stamped “there is only one truth”. Both are what I might term Monoidealisms.

Likewise, “everything is allowed” is the flip side of Nothing is allowed. In a world where all is equal, it is impossible to value anything. Being given no means of identifying and building a self is as absolutistic as being coerced into a social role and place.  What could be worth doing, if all acts are equal to all other acts, and nobility a lie?

The deepest human needs are connection and a sense of meaning. We want to belong with others and we want to belong within ideas and shared words and images. This is how we balance our need for growth with our need for belonging.

Within the mythic universe of this game, the Assassins are more or less Satanists following the dictum “Do what thou will”, fighting an authoritarian Universal Church ( even if outwardly the Assassins are tacitly Islamic their creed clearly is not).

There are countless healthy ways to behave, countless solutions to the problems of meaning and belonging. The notion, though, that there is only one truth is very pernicious.

But, and here is my point, you have stayed in the same ideational and cultural space if you vehemently deny ALL truths. You become, actually, more stupid, and we see evidence of this everywhere.

Ideology in general, and Communism in particular, is a coping mechanism for wounded people.  The Communist states “because I belong nowhere everyone must belong everywhere.”  They want to attack in other people what they loathe, fear, and avoid in themselves.

They want a global devaluation of culture, of nesting, of belonging outside coercion, of identity, of honest friendship, of self, and in its place a global superstate where one cog fits as well in one place as another, where names may as well be dispensed with, along with families, because everything is a machine where things are put where they belong.  And they are put there, not by people, not by agentive entities, but by an abstraction called History or Science, made all the worse no one can posit with any plausibility at all “its'” actual existence.  It is a grinding horror film, an awful play, enacted by monsters who, in seeing only evil around them, do only evil.

They want horror, because they live in horror, and because one of the ways they protect themselves from consciousness of the horrors within themselves is using congenial, friendly sounding words, as if it were possible to murder and enslave people for their own good.

Where is it still common for people born American to grow up in an extended family?  The country.

Where is nearly everyone culturally and emotionally isolated?  Large cities.  There are no cultural givens in large cities. They make of this a virtue, but if no one belongs, it is hard to see how this fosters better human beings.  In fact, it seems to breed emotional dissociation, a fixation with abstraction–which is why intellectuals congregate in cities and long have–and thickened senses.  City dwellers are no longer in touch with the air, with the earth, with natural life.  Yes, it is present in confined areas, like zoos from plants, but not everywhere as it is out the country, where bonfires are common, hunting is common, and laying out at night looking at the stars is common.

No person who had retained an ounce of their God given sense could have contemplated ingesting whole and without vigorous objection the propaganda we were fed about the Clintons.  And fortunately, many American have not yet lost their God given sense, the best efforts of the media whores attacking them notwithstanding.

Deep problems require deep solutions.  What I am trying to provide here is perspective.

I spent this morning dreaming of protecting a defenseless baby, at times one as small as a bean, one I could barely see and was worried about stepping on.

When I don’t drink I face the night largely defenseless, and I often regress to infancy, when I was helpless and terrified.  I wake up shaking in terror often.

So of course finding and protecting “the bean” is a good sign. At one point my mother dropped it into 5′ of water, and I rescued it.

And I am of course intelligent enough to realize this is deep stuff, and psychosis not an impossible concomitant.  But if I were going to go crazy, it would have happened long ago.  You don’t go crazy when you contact deep realities: you go crazy because you cannot.

And it is odd to me to think that the whole Western world was obsessed with the ridiculous Freudian ideas of psychosocial development for so long, especially since he saw, then discarded, the only true part of it, which is that the sexual abuse of children and adolescents was common then as now.

What children need is warmth and understanding, and it is a trauma and crisis of our age that we have multiple generations of emotionally superficial, wounded people providing the care to the next generation.

What is natural for humankind, what is in our genetics as they have developed across at least hundreds of thousands of years, but which likely stem from much deeper roots, is for a child to be raised by multiple generations of women who are from his or her family.

I think generalized neuroses really began in this country at least when we became mobile, and women were separated from their mothers and aunts.  One woman, alone with an infant, is a herculean task.  I really believe this.  And this situation will amplify the fears and maladjustments of that woman in ways which no one is there to see or correct.   The husband is gone.  There is the child, housework, and TV.  There is the telephone, too, of course, and my mother make ample use of that.  She was lonely, and she was often angry at me, in no small measure, no doubt, because I was a rambunctious and nearly compulsively disobedient child.  For her part, she was obsessed with appearances, and obsessed with the horrifying idea that I might be, as they said, “a brat”.

I look at all this, and I look around me, and I see dead children everywhere.  They are the ones who use heroin, knowing it will kill them eventually.  They are the alcoholics, and the cruel.

My path forward is to forget about saving other people.  That has always been a distraction.  I think I might come back to it–I hope I do–but it will only be intelligent and useful when I have walked through my scars and inner landscape and returned to this very moment as a single human being.

It is hard, being someone working on these issues in a world which is manifestly frightened of deep emotion, but I have done it my whole life, and see no reason it won’t continue.  I feel, in fact, all this is slowly getting easier, as I let the largest things express themselves, and as I, in turn, mirror with attention my own inner experience.

Depth is not a place you get lost if you anchor it in your body.  Your body does not lie, and contains within it the seeds of everything you need.

Just within the last week I realized I have been suppressing positive emotions.  They come up, they show up at my door, and I tell them to go away.  I’m having a fucking pity party and I don’t need no fucking good cheer.

But why?  Oh, we are all ludicrous–perhaps not, actually–but I certainly am.  Habits run deep.

As is likely obvious, I have fairly strong misanthropic tendencies.  People suck, often.  Not all, not all the time, but this week, in one example of many, somebody is dicking me over because they can and because the normal human emotions of basic empathy and giving a shit are completely absent.

But I was sitting in a bar tonight pondering how much happier I would be if I saw the good in everyone, the Light in everyone, and rather than getting angry when they behave in ways which are hurtful, that I look deeper, and see that for some reason an important aspect of their divine inheritance–the Truth we are all born with–is unavailable to them.  They are like people eating cat food when they have a pile of uncashed winning Lottery tickets.

Disappointment on their behalf, and/or pity are better reactions.  Anger has its place, but it often accomplishes and heals nothing, and often makes things much worse.

And it seems to me that seeing the best–which is to be sure in pretty much all cases is the possibility, not the reality–makes it much easier to love myself.

Ponder: what is the psychological effect of imbibing an ideology which views all human beings as inherently depraved and wicked?  If you are human, you must loathe yourself, too, and loathing oneself it is impossible not to loathe others.  To be sure, if this misanthropy is welded onto a corresponding ideology of “love”, then compulsive actions with regard to love become possible too which mask the unhappiness inherent in this belief system.

Satanism is merely the Shadow of Christianity.  It shows what was present but hidden in church doctrine as it evolved.  There were countless acts of evil committed by the Catholic Church in the nominal name of Goodness, Piety, Truth, and Love.  This goes on even today.

Neither the forward Mass, nor the Black Mass, done backwards, make any sense to me as representations of important truths about God and humankind.

The Hindus, with their Namaste–this, “I salute the Divine in you”–are much wiser.  Yes, they had their Kali cults and Thuggees and some awful people, but they were shadows of humanity itself, not a necessary counterpoint to the highest beliefs they hold.

They do have their Dalits, too, so I don’t want to go too far in my admiration, but suffice it to say I am trying to evolve a world view and way of interacting with ugly people–who I will see along the way as long as I live–which either does not diminish my happiness, or which in fact increases it.

Generosity is generative for the giver.  As an old Sufi adage goes “The Sufi begs to give himself to you”.  He wants you to take everything, leaving nothing.  Because when nothing is left, there is nothing but Light.

It came to me just now that “there are no lies in this world”, and I felt and thought on it for a moment, and what I am tempted to say is some part of all of us sees the full truth all the time.  It is in the light.  It is not hidden.  We merely forget the way to the room with the windows to these insights, and we also pretend we have lost the key.

There are no lies: this is an interesting perspective.  I listen to my inner voice, and sometimes things come to me I don’t understand for a long time.  Deep insights are often like that, though.

But how liberating this idea is!!!  You already know what you need to know.  You know the path.  It is a question of bringing into your conscious awareness what you know, and have forgotten you know.

The origin of abstraction is feeling, and its proper purpose is a return to feeling.  I have spoken often, although not recently, of Perceptual Breathing, in and out.  You breathe in, and go up to the most condensed abstractions imaginable, like F=MA, then out, and you go out the limits of feeling and direct body perception.  In the middle, you are gathering and spreading facts, which are mini-abstractions.  A “fact”, if you think about it, is a symbol for a large reality, such as “most birds fly”.

But the reason someone built a motor car was for the feelings of accomplishment, of speed, of perhaps becoming wealthy and powerful, of safety.  There are many possibilities, but the only reason anybody does anything is to get a feeling.  The most uptight, cerebral, dissociated people you have ever met are seeking the feeling of having suppressed their feelings, of having escaped something really bad.  Usually, they are also seeking the feeling of power which the feeling of intellectual superiority gives them.  Many smart people become so because they are compelled by emotional conflicts to seek out knowledge, to thrive on abstraction and things that most people take no interest in.

I am meandering, and to some extent describing myself, but the point I wanted to make is that all abstractions are stepping stones, and if they become ends in themselves, this is inherently a sign of compromised and defective mental and emotional health.

In health, one decides what one wants to do, creates a plan based on abstract understandings and perhaps concrete observations, and then executes the plan.  The abstract becomes the concrete, and the concrete results then become the food for further and more accurate abstractions.  There is a corrective process in place, because there is a feedback process in place, and a firm clarity about the desired end result.

When one sees a phrase like “the consolation of philosophy”, it is stating directly that the goal in thinking a certain way is to feel a certain way.

Even when thoughts are made ends in themselves, they never can be.  You cannot divorce the process of thinking from the process of feeling.  You can merely tell bad lies by willing yourself to be stupid.

You cannot not feel.  You can only do it more wisely, or more foolishly.

I am, again, speaking to a part of myself which is unclear on all this.

I will add, I have a pile of diaries that is at least 8″ tall, filled with my scribblings.  I never go back and read them, and I realized the other day the reason I don’t  is that I fear that I will find there the same thoughts, the same struggles, the same lack of progress across decades.

And I likely would.  But these things take as long as they take.  Life is a school, and the curriculum lasts until the needed lessons are learned.  And I chew small things many times over.  I am like a cow with many stomachs.  But I also digest things deeply, or am in any event learning how to do so.

This will be my abstraction for the day.

I have had Spotify for some time.  It is wonderful, in that I can listen to anything from Beethoven to Neil Young (but not Bob Seger), but I understand, I think, why so many kids especially are listening to records.

It is possible to have too much.  Studies show too many types of ketchup make people LESS happy, not more.  It is possible to feel too many options.

A physical record is anchoring.  You can touch it and feel it.  It has weight.  There is an album sleeve, with large pictures on both sides and sometimes in the middle.  You will typically listen to one side, turn it over, then listen to the other side.

Digital media has no weight.  It is ineffable, like air.  As gratifying as some songs may be, it is hard to feel grateful for the whole.  It is impossible to imagine the whole, whereas it is very possible to look on an album collection with satisfaction.  Nothing will be added or subtracted during the night.

So many people worry that our greed has no limits, that our destiny as a species is to consume the resources of the Earth like a pack of locusts.  This seems as misguided as the concern that population growth is destined to be immense in all places forever.  In what we might call the developed Old Worlds–I include Japan in this–population has already started dropping.  I think a big part of this is pessimism about life itself, about its point and purpose, and a following sense of unwillingness to inflict it on children, and as far as that goes, to waste ones life on the pointless exercise of parenting.  It will all be gone soon, one can hear them say, even as they join the Chorus on the future terrors of Global Warming, in this massive global tragedy.

But I think humanity has within it the capacity for self correction, for moderation, for choosing satiety over rapine.

And I think, as small as the fact is that more vinyl was sold last year than digital music–or so I hear–it is relevant to the whole.  It represents a small self similarity to a much larger trend which is less obvious, a correction to the excesses of the Baby Boomers, who as a pack of locusts do still want to claim to have been responsible custodians, when they were nothing of the sort.

It hit me today that much of what I have called loneliness is really the pain of being alone with myself, my conflicts, the chronic sense of not belonging, of having no home and no possibility of a home, which I have avoided sensing my whole life.

And it hit me too that the parts of me which are at war with one another are both noble.  One part of me has always sought to accomplish great deeds, and think great thoughts, in the hope of winning love which was impossible so many years ago.  Another part of me knows this is futile, and is trying to point this out, that these are not my goals, or at least, not the energy underlying them.  And the two fight.  If the one loses, I live forever without love, and the other side cannot possibly win.  No amount of success could ever be enough.

And I was contemplating this tonight, drinking a beer, and a vision of myself walking shirtless in a snowstorm hit me.  I can handle the cold. I do not fear the wind.  But an enormous demon emerged from the snow and confronted me.  And it hit me that I could fight it, I could tear it down to nothing, but that what was really needed was harnessing it, and making it mine; not just facing it, but seeing my own face in it, and claiming that power.

And it seems to me that most of what we call wounds are really disorganized energies.  What was plain and given and obvious and flowing becomes stuck, hard, and confusing.  But there is never any path backwards.  There is no “healing”.  There is only transforming.

Yes, of course you can attempt to claim your saintly crown by turning yourself into a shadow of a human being, but that is not what this life is for.  We are meant to live with balls and fire.