Author: White Whale

I would of course like to have such an experience, but my path is a slow one, a long one, but also one where I can take notes, find waymarkers, map out the route.  I can say “I have been there.  I have felt, I think, what you are feeling.  I understand terror, sleep disturbances, addiction, loneliness and isolation.  I have been there, and I have walked through it.”

And it occurs to me that most of human life is characterized by addictions–lies which conceal the whole truth–and that this is the essence of what the Buddha taught.  Tanha–craving–is what submerges us in unwholesome loops which make us unhappy.  As I have commented on occasion Duhkha–suffering–is best understood as anything less than complete contentment and happiness.

And at root, it is the insight that almost all of what we are taught to value arises as mutually reinforcing tanha.  To be different, you have to see differently.  To get out of the swamp, you have to see it is a swamp.

And addicts are well positioned to see, having known all-pervading craving, to see how common it is, how universal it is, and in giving up one addiction, giving up the rest of them, if they have stopped running.

But I had an extremely important insight, a critical insight, driving to work: all addiction is based on a self deception. It is based on the idea that whatever it is WORKS, that you can in fact avoid the pain, that you can in fact avoid the struggle, that it is an answer.  It is a shelter from the storm, it is a place you can run to and get warm.

This is a lie.  There will always be that brief moment where truth appears, and is then submerged in a web of deceit and oblivion.  And the truth is that the addict wants to run, but they don’t know where to run to.  It rests in a primal fear which cannot be resisted or avoided finally, but about which lies can be told; which can be redirected into rationalizations which can last a lifetime, particularly when supported by altered states which diminish consciousness.  Sex, for the sex addict, is an altered state.  Work, for the workaholic, is an altered state–one of focused and sustained attention on ANYTHING but what they are avoiding.  Gambling is an altered state.  And booze and drugs, of course, that is what they do.

So what is the solution?  An alternative.  What alternative?  An endogenous positive state.  The ability to generate feelings of pleasure and warmth and connection without feeling the need to run away.

People like me, we are constantly forced to choose from among many bad options.  Alcohol does not particularly make me feel good, so much as stop me from feeling bad by muting all my emotions, when taken in sufficient quantity.  It is a narcotizing agent.  It dulls pain.  It is a depressant, formally.  Nothing in it is intended to induce feelings of euphoria.  Those are different drugs, and even those drugs–I have in mind cocaine and Ecstacy–force most people into a crash landing when they are done.  They wind up feeling worse than when they started.

Kum Nye numbers the exercises, and Kum Nye 5, which I am presently working on, has you find in your memory, or create in your imagination, or find in your body somewhere, a positive feeling.  You then focus on this feeling, amplify it, and try to expand it.  I call this sort of work “extending the thread”.  You have this coil of compacted and largely useless energy, and you untangle it–or allow it to untangle and extend itself–and something becomes more free, more expansive, and more comfortable.  Over time–shorter times for the non-traumatized, perhaps very long times for those with knots–this becomes a refuge of sorts.

The logic is obvious, even if not often stated: if you want positive states, why not PRACTICE them?  If you want a better free throw, you shoot free throws, and/or imagine shooting perfect free throws.  And from what we know of mental imagery, if you can’t visualize perfection, you will have a very hard time doing it for real.  Logically, then, you develop stable sources of positive energy in the quiet of your home, then over time learn to bring it into the world.

Yesterday I went to a bar and had one beer.  I wanted to see how I reacted to it.  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  That drug won’t work for me any more.  My addiction is done.  I’m going to continue for the time being not drinking at all, since it is an expensive habit even recreationally, and I would like a bit more practice, but I think I am now the person who can regularly do one and done.  The craving is gone.  The self deception is gone.

And I was thinking too of Dean Martin’s line “I pity people who don’t drink: when they wake up in the morning that is as good as they are going to feel.”  This made sense to me for a very long time.  I thought the booze was making me feel better.  I thought I was missing out.  But all I have to do is picture Dean slurring his words, offering incoherent thoughts, tripping on his way to the bathroom, and the mirage disappears.  No: my feeling good will be health, and a disciplined pursuit of endogenous pleasurable feelings.

One other thing: I was thinking about AA.  They have a 95% failure rate, and I think I can now guess why.  When people come to them they are usually in despair.  They drink so much that their personal lives are suffering: their relationships, their health, their job.  They get handed the Blue Book, and buddied up, and invited to future meetings.  They get told they are helpless, and to let a higher power–as embodied in a concrete group of like-habited people–take over.

Put another way, they are given somewhere else to run to.  Alcoholics are enthusiasts because there is an enormous well of emotional energy that underlies the need to run.  They are not calm people.  They are not dispassionate people.  Quite the opposite: they are driven people.  There is a devil at their heels and their life is spent trying to avoid and outrun it.

So they jump into AA, if they are going to, with both feet.  They become AA enthusiasts.  But at the end of the day, the devil never disappeared.  He is still waiting in the darkness and they know it.  The urge and need to run never disappeared.  The fear never disappeared.

AA creates a sort of magical circle of light, where they feel relatively safe, if the thing is going to work.  And even if only 5% make it, I suspect strongly that number is not evenly dispersed.  There are probably groups where half or more of the people make it. And there are probably groups where virtually no one makes it.  I know for a fact that there are groups where half the people are still alcoholics, who drink on the way to and from the meetings, but keep going because they like it, or it is court ordered, or it’s a good place to hook up and indulge a side sex addiction.  My local group is like that. I’ve been twice, and felt no common bond at all.  Everyone who had actually quit drinking lamented the loss of a friend, seemingly, and the fact that they were forced into giving up the friend because he was killing them.

There is even a word for people who give up drinking, but not their passion for it: dry drunks.  Dry drunks are typically irritable, edgy, moody.  They have not “done their work”, as they say.

But what I would say is the opposite of the first Step: you are NOT helpless.  God is not going to save you.  What you are is someone who has had the shit beat out of you by life, who has been chewed up and spit out alone.  You are someone for whom drinking is a logical, if ultimately unhelpful, solution to a real problem.  The problem does exist.  People forget this, in acting like drinking is somehow something one is born with a genetic predisposition to, or some nonsense like that.

It is simply the case that we don’t have the diagnostic apparatus to recognize many traumas, particularly of the developmental variety.  But really, how many people have the emotional wherewithal and strength to recognize narcissism in their parents?  It is a subtle malady, but one with absolutely devastating consequences.  I know, well, since both of mine are.  We seem to have a sort of dysfunctional psychic connection, since our intervals of long silence are typically punctuated at the very moment when I undergo some major surge in personal growth.  I accept it as emotional weight training.  If I have to tow a car behind me everywhere I go, when I let that fucking thing loose, I will be the Hulk with reason.

But I would like to emphasize this phrase Endogenously generated positive emotion.  In my view, this is the future of effective addiction treatment.  You have to have a place to call home, and it has to be pleasant, desirable, and, to state the obvious, not terrifying, which is where most addicts live in some part of their consciousness.  It is ideally complemented with social connection, but for those of us for whom trust comes slowly and is lost quickly, having something in us, which is controlled by us, is the most secure foundation from which to proceed outward.  If it is in me, it cannot be lost.  That is very important.  If growth is seen as a series of circles, each larger than the last, the center one is the individual sitting alone, feeling good.

I feel I could call this my Sobriety Day, but alcohol was never the monster.  Alcohol was my ally in hiding under the covers and pretending the monster couldn’t see me.  Where I am now, I see the monster IS me, too.  I see my own evil, my own violence.  I feel like there are countless threads radiating from me, and I can see now that some of them are dark, and they are my own.  They are no one elses.

And there is something beautiful in all this.  Coming home is realizing I have always been my own enemy, but that I don’t need to be any more.  I can embrace my evil.  Our minds do so well creating inner/outer, here/there dichotomies, but our selves are never that simple.  They are made of cloth with many different strings.

The word Tantra seems to be related to this concept.  I am in that sense a Tantric.  It is all connected.   I will do my best to lie no more.

In the first, you want to get people upset.  All the nonsense about North Carolina passing a law saying the boys use the boys room and the girls use the girls room was agitation propaganda.  “They are evil.”  “They must be stopped.”  “This will not stand.”  “This is an outrage.”  Etc.  They want to get people upset and to take action of some sort, such as a boycott.

That this whole thing consisted entirely in propaganda is evidenced clearly by the fact that none of the States with similar laws were targeted, and none of the nations where homosexuality is a capital offense were even mentioned.  I think all thinking people should be able to look at this and see pervasive and incontrovertible evidence of a conditioned response that has been inserted into large masses of our population.  If you say “Jump” in the right way, they give it all they got.  They don’t bother asking how high.  If there is any question. they rightly assume they can just look at those around them.

The other sort is integration propaganda, which is intended to calm people down, and deter them from action.  This would be the sort of thing which says that NSA spying is perfectly OK, that it doesn’t matter where Obama was born or who his real father was.  It says “you are one of us now, and we will do the thinking.  What a relief that will be, right?  We are lightening the load of life.  We are your friends, and fellow soldiers, your family.  Everything will be fine, because we say it will.”

Which of course reminds me of the final scene in Fight Club, where somebody is saying how everything will be fine while we are watching buildings collapsing in the background.

But to get to my point–and I know this is something I say often, so this is somewhat redundant, but this is how I explore, by saying similar things in slightly different ways–we have reached a condition which was the end goal of this long term purpose specific propaganda, which is a large mass of people in this country who can be relied on never to think for themselves, to hate on command, and who value enormously their membership in this social grouping.

Who fights these people?  Can it be a limp wristed pussy?  Whoever it is can reliably assume they will be called every name in the book, some names that never occurred to them (like conserveretard toon, as I was called by a Vanderbilt professor who likely therein reached the acme of his potential and talent), and vilified on a 24/7 basis by nearly every alleged “information” outlet around the world.  You have to be able to take that, laugh at it, and dish it back.  Donald Trump does that.  We can ask no more, in this fallen world.

Such is the hope.  We have had a clown for a sheriff for too long, who has been actively conspiring with the men in black, from several different gangs.

And I will comment, too, how ODD it is that the Left really seems not to GET why people get mad at them.  When they call us racists and bigots, somehow they fail to grasp that we find it offensive because we, too, hate bigots and racists, but are completely innocent of the charge.

Somehow they don’t get that 8 years of relentless insults and name-calling are being remembered in this election cycle, that the silence they bought in some small measure through aggressive bullying has never been consent to their reckless schemes, relentless lying, and thirst for blood and destruction.

Here is an essay which seeks depth without even a rudimentary attempt at empathy: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

It seeks to find the consoling harmony of pattern in something which the author is plainly at a loss to understand.  I get the sense that this started as a letter to the beloved uncle in the Screwtape Letters, trying to fathom just why the days propaganda was somehow found unacceptable, as if lies were somehow objectionable, as if embracing national decline were somehow something to be rejected.

And it occurred to me that it very much feels like we are at war, because we are.  A well organized army of cultural subversives works each and every day to indoctrinate our students, to pollute our media, to confuse our political leaders.  Their goal is to undermine every shred of historical connection to our past identity, to past mores, to common sense ways of doing things, to fondness for what our ancestors did, to the capacity for the exercise of principle based reason.

The emotional basis of so-called Progressivism–what I tend to call Regressivism, as it is the more accurate term–is that we must change daily whatever was.  We do not need to do it intelligently, or collectively–and in fact it is better if the government forces it on us.  The daily goal is something other than what is, and what was.  The daily goal is to cease being who you were, and to mutate into something else on command.  Your very essence is to become mutable.  You must be whatever the Party or Cause, or Moment needs you to be.

Such a creed, such a practice, eliminates the possibility of a stable sense of self.

And the more I think about it, the most important virtue which Cultural Sadeism undermines is loyalty.  When I say loyalty, do not the words “old fashioned” come to mind,. as in “old fashioned virtues”?  You stick to you and yours, come thick or thin.  You adhere to your tribe, to your people.

And why is this virtue old fashioned?  Because it is NOT mutable.  Because it cannot be made to change on a dime, the way pseudo-virtues like compassion and tolerance–both very trendy–can.

But here is the thing: loyalty is absolutely essential for us as social beings.  We need to know somebody has our back, come what may, no matter what.  If we don’t, we languish.  We feel alienated, alone, uncertain, abandoned.  So what Leftist propaganda does is eliminate personal relationships–more correctly, it makes them contingent on circumstance and whim–and ask people to place their faith in a system of belief and practice which cannot feel anything for them because it is monolithic, regimented, and bureaucratic.

People love Bernie Sanders because for the first time in a long time, they feel like he cares about them.  But their nominee will be Hillary, because that is what the mass of unaccountable people we call the System wants.  Their loyalty is to a system that doesn’t give a shit if they live or die.  This is what systems do, of course, which is why personal loyalty is so important.

We have literally reached a point–in fact, we reached it some time ago–where Americans in large masses are simultaneously ignorant of their own history and that of the world, and have been conditioned to view with contempt all the very real, historically unique innovations of our forefathers.  They loathe themselves, and loathe all the rest of us who refuse to join them.

Persons of common sense, common decency, and possessed of a sense of responsibility are bewildered where all this self contempt comes from.  They read history, and understand that we are historically unique, that much of the world has ALWAYS looked up at us, and that even if like all other nations we have committed crimes, that our crimes pale in comparison to those committed everywhere else in the world and in history, and that virtually all criticisms of our nation stem directly from Soviet propaganda, which is to say from intentional misrepresentations, distortions, lies, and malice.

This is where Donald Trump comes in.  In a war you need a wartime leader, and in a war, the tendency to aggregate power is strong.  After all, there is existential risk.  It is never certain the nation will endure, and if it does, it is because of a collective effort.  This is hard-wired in all of us.

Thus, to make a long story long, the Left has itself to blame for Donald Trump.  If they want to wage a long term war against humanity, sooner or later the remaining humans are going to declare war back, and it will not be pretty.  People like me enjoy it when he speaks obvious truths in the face of congenital and habitual liars.  We enjoy the prospect of someone taking seriously not just the invasion of the United States by Mexicans–who are fleeing the wreckage of the nation they destroyed–but the concept of the nation state itself.  Someone who says: we are Americans, and that is something to be proud of.  America is worth defending.  Obama has been saying the opposite for 8 long years now; he has been waging war on our past, and us by proxy, for both terms.  Sooner or later, somebody has to tell the sons of bitches to stop, and that is why Donald Trump will be our next President.

He is no saint, but I don’t think he is the pick of the elite, and he has always seemed to me to have working class sensibilities, regardless of his actual past.  We need people who want to build.  We have had far too much of those who want to tear down, and call the rubble progress.

People are interesting.  Life is interesting.

I was confronted with a problem yesterday, and surprised myself in approaching it with interest, with curiosity.  If what I fear may materialize actually does, it will be a shitload of work for me.  But there is a beauty in not giving a fuck.  I touched that beauty, and appreciated it.

I felt this thing.  It was a confusion, and a turning, and caused me to view the world in a strange way.  And THEN, I felt like having a drink.

And it hit me that for all addicts this is likely the process.  The feeling hits, and so fast they can’t see it happen they say: I need drink, or a hit, or a fuck, or whatever their thing is.  Nobody craves being high, I don’t think.   They simply know from long experience that the anticipation of it, and the experience of it, is sufficient to silence whatever that initial, infinitesimally small, micro-feeling was, which of course is the root of the whole thing.  That is where it starts.  I felt this clearly tonight.  I certainly have within my consciousness the Buddhist notion of causal chains.

And yesterday, driving to a job site, I also felt an odd feeling.  It was fear, but it was wandering, uncertain, primal, primary.  It was a child seeking a breast.  It was a tentacle seeking something to grab.

And then some worry popped in my head, and the whole feeling vanished and was replaced by the thought.  And it hit me that thoughts, when they are not relevant, not needed for the task at hand, are really the crystalizations of sensory impressions which seek resolution.  These feelings don’t want to wander: they want to land, and the way they land is in a thought.

I felt all this.  I saw all this.  And it was instantly obvious to me that the people who meditate trying not to think, to let thoughts be, or to drive them from their minds, are existing at a level a layer or two abstracted from true reality, which is in the body.  If you want to stop thinking, then calm  the body, calm the sensations.  They are all children: let them rest, let them sleep.  And when they sleep, you know peace.

Do less and do more.  This has always been true, but I am seeing it with my own eyes, feeling it with my own heart.

Bill Clinton appears to be a serial woman abuser, a rapist, and a sex addict.  Based on his apparently close relationship with Mark Epstein, who liked underage girls, he is likely a pedophile, of the 13-14 year old sort, again not something uncommon among addicts.

Here is the thing: there is room for disagreement among people of good will about what is true and false.  But where the Clintons are concerned, there really isn’t.  Bill is an abuser of women, and Hillary is an accomplice, and not uncommonly his enforcer.  She abuses the women Bill has abused.  They are awful human beings, even if Bill–like many sociopaths I have known–has a talent for seeming likeable.  He has a goofy smile, a seemingly affable manner, courtesy, charm: all can be perfectly consistent with being a sick human being.  And nobody disagree that he is very, very smart in a formal analytical sense.

When one contemplates the erasure of his and her past, which has been executed with such diligence by a leftist press which in another circumstance would have these stories on the front page 24/7 until the ideological non-compliant was driven from the public sphere, one is FORCED to admit once again that the Left believes NOTHING.  All crimes are justified by the rhetoric used to defend them.  If it is “for the people”, “for the future”, “to oppose the evil Republicans”, then no crime is too far.  And if it is committed by the other side, no crime, and no lie to make it seem worse, is too small.

This is not ethical principled behavior, to state the blindingly obvious.  Jeff Bezos–whose Amazon I am going to boycott for his patent political advocacy in the Washington Post–seems to think he is doing some sort of good, but no one at any level, with regard to any topic, can claim to value the good who does not habitually treat lies as lies, and truth as truth.  Bezos fails on both scores, badly, and nearly daily.

How can it be that the Left says we are to “believe the woman”, but fails to listen to a score or more of Clinton women?   Granted, evidence has to be weighed in the balance, but the preponderance of evidence–not least the admission of receiving blow jobs in the Oval office and lying about it–implicates both Bill and Hillary in a web of deceit and wrong-doing which is frankly disgusting, and contrary to every genuine spirit of Liberalism.