I am going to reserve comment for the moment. This was a very long day.
It is so ODD, so stupid, so short-sighted, so ignorant, to feel either that increasing knowledge–an understanding of Relativity, the capitals of the world, the mechanics of nuclear fusion–is somehow equivalent to growth, which is the de facto belief of the Singularitians, who have somehow convinced themselves that an internalized Google would be other than a quantitative leap, if it were even possible, which I do not believe; or that a society can be improved in any way other than through the emotional and spiritual growth of all its members.
Why do, among others, Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg focus on externals, on the superficial? Why are they atheists? They are both smart enough to be smarter. The physics of metaphysics–the Zero Point Field and the retention of information–seems reasonably clear. The evidence in total is overwhelming for our energetic connection and survival of death, and evidence continues to flow in daily, all over the world, as it always has.
Why the unrepentant anger from people like Barbara Ehrenreich? I read this article and was reminded once again how emotionally and spiritually superficial the animating outrage of these people is.
Does she not know it is possible to live a very happy life in conditions of objective poverty and physical difficulty? She is the one stoking resentment, and denigrating dignity. She is one who fails to see that the non-material aspects of life are what make it heavenly or hellish. She is the emotionally callow one who fails to see that no one who does not have a good relationship with themselves–as she seems not to–can possible be loving to others. For her, yelling about pay constitutes love. But of course it is merely her vanity, her self importance, speaking. And it seemingly has a lot to say, which says something about her.
The path forward is the path inward,for all of us. It is the tragedy of our time that our idiotic and grossly unjust financial system has denied us the time and leisure to live genuinely contemplative lives, and that the systemic indolence and torpor of our universities has failed to embrace and integrate the vast quantity of non-conforming data indicating we are in fact spiritual beings and that while no religion can claim to have fully described God, that that concept is useful, and empirical.
Only on a very primitive level of development does one only behave because of fear. Morality, decency, goodness: all are their own rewards, rewards which multiply when expanded across a social order, and which deepen as they are understood.
God is not a parent. God is the soil within which we are rooted, and in which we are free to flourish or fail.
The metaphor of God as parent, however, has proven very congenial to authoritarians.
We are left to wish for better darkness and better confusion. Life is not easy or simple, but it is one grand game.
On the way to the theater I couldn’t help but remember how disappointing Hayden Christenson’s (name is close if not exact) transformation into Darth Vader was in the first three (second three, because as a meme has it “in charge Yoda was”.) As several reviewers I read noted, he didn’t get evil so much as pouty, peevish, and bratty.
Being me, what occurred to me is that it would have been much more intellectually satisfying if he had been corrupted by ideology more directly. It is difficult to get people to do things they consider evil, but easy to get good people to do or at least countenance evil they have been trained to view as good.
That would be a script I would find it interesting to write. How do you seduce a good person into views which conform with evil, all while calling them good? They did if memory serves invoke “safety”, but I seem to recall the Dark Side was always the Dark Side.
To do the thing properly, you have to call it the Bright Light, the connection with God, the right way, the path of righteousness.
This is certainly what Muslims do, and certainly what most other religions have done throughout history, including notably Judaism and Christianity.
Seriously: by what process of imbecility do you get militancy and war particularly out of Christianity and Buddhism?
The id is not sex. I don’t see this. It is not violence per se. It is unprocessed developmental trauma, to the extent it exists.
Annakin Skywalker would have had major developmental issues to work with, and buttons to be pushed, but the whole thing–and yes I admit I am a crotchety old (working on it) man who is reading too much into an escapist epic–was done poorly on a psychological level.
And the new bad guy just seems like an emotionally undeveloped brat.
I’ll have something to say about the psychopath Deadpool after a while. He is exactly what people need and want right now. I can say that with some confidence. Whether or not that is healthy is another issue.
We are sick, are we not? And do sick people not do what sick people do?
Yes, yes they do.
I remember reading about the deaths of people dying from cancer, who likewise cannot get a moments calm repose. Up, down, sideways, on their stomach: nothing is comfortable. There is no escape but death and the relative death of heavy sedation and pain-killers.
I find this in me. The pain within me seeks constant motion. I can escape it through my intellect, through distraction, through motion, and of course through intoxication. Wherever I am, whatever I am doing, I should be doing something else, somewhere else. Nowhere is home, and of course this was my primal experience.
What I am finding is that healing takes place by choosing to remain still, but simultaneously allowing this surge of restless energy to manifest, and to be present to it. To speak to it, to understand it, to sympathize with it, to recognize its purpose–to protect me–and to give it permission to do so.
The process of trauma healing is one of allowing antique processes of affect and behavior to complete. They were started oh so long ago, but had nowhere to go, nowhere to disperse, no way to release their energies. And so they remain, ghosts from the past, constantly seeking release from an endless circle with no exit.
You can tap into this, poke a hole in it, and watch the sudden release of energies.
I continue my Kum Nye, but am finding regularly that my EmWave2 will also facilitate this work. I can keep my heart calm and coherent, all while feeling manic energies flowing through me into the atmosphere. It is an odd juxtaposition, but not really I suppose, all things considered. We all “exist” on many layers, in many places, the connections between which are both robust and often obscure.
I watch and I learn. This is what I do. I often feel sadness, and often feel rage. Often I feel I don’t feel anything at all, which I pour words on to; but I increasingly recognize another possibility.
This is useful work, and I share it because sharing is therapeutic for me, but also because I recognize this world is filled with bullshit, and would likely benefit from a few people willing to struggle in public who do not want your money or recognition.
It seems to me that after a certain age–I would think for sure by age 30–you have developed a way of being in the world which has flaws–you have a limp you cannot see–but which on balance is functional. And the longer you use it, the more comfortable it becomes.
In beginning any sport a good coach will make sure you learn good habits, and do not pick up any bad habits. As one famous example, John Wooden always ensured that his players knew how to put on socks properly to avoid getting blisters.
Life is like this too, but our parents themselves all too often don’t know what the good habits are, and which the bad. They, too, were thrown out there and made whatever accommodations they had to to survive. To the extent they teach at all, they teach what they know. Most maps are flawed.
And so growing means losing old friends. It means saying good bye not just to what held us back, but what held us up. This is a formidable obstacle, and needs to be recognized as such.
People rarely physically conduct penance now, but how often every day do most of us limit who we can be through conditioned fear?
We see some teachers saying “stay in the moment, that is where life is”. This is of course true, but moments generally come in groupings. There are winds that flow through our lives, scents, textures. Feelings, of all sorts. Change is all around us if we but open ourselves to it.
It seems to me that most of the people who actually live in the moment are living in series of moments, who are swept away by things which fascinate them, and whose principal virtue consists in the openness required both to see and to be led by what comes by.
A kite is of course tethered, as we are by our physical bodies, and sense of self, but it is wildly free to roam about within those limits. Even when apparently stationary, it feels the flow of air underneath it, and the precariousness and exhilaration of its position.
I have been speaking of evil, the evil I find in me, and which I assume must exist in varying measures in others. I have perhaps been wounded more deeply than many, and carry deeper scars, but the principle of emotional death and resurrection is the same, I think, for all of us. We have all suffered deaths. And I think my own case is far more common that generally supposed. I think if anything is unique about me, it is simply that I have discovered it, contacted it, and am in the process of dissolving and dispersing it.
But of course you cannot be me, thinking about evil, VIEWING evil, feeling it course through me, and not think about Original Sin. Christ talked about sin. All the early Christians were obsessed with sin, with the “flesh”. Many of the most “saintly” of the Christians were those most willing to inflict pain upon themselves obsessively, through fasting, through whipping themselves, through wearing uncomfortable clothes, and living solitary lives for many years.
This all seems stupid to me. Edward Gibbon comments upon all this repeatedly, asking how someone who hates themselves can love humanity. They can’t, of course. It is solipsistic. It is one part of the evil.
Some atavistic part of you–I think in most cases relating to some unknown trauma endured as a baby–says you are unworthy, worthless, useless, a piece of shit. Some other part asserts, rightly, that no, you are worth something. But we are social animals, and it is hard to sustain an internal image that is not ratified in the eyes of others. So how do you reclaim your power? You take that self loathing rage out on your body and call it good, and this pronouncement is ratified in the eyes of others; if not in adoring laity, then at least in the eyes of fellow penitents, for whom you perform the same service.
Alternately, of course, you seek out power over others. You make others smaller that you might feel the bigger. Self abuse and other abuse is still causing pain, still unpleasant, still unnecessary.
And sex, sex, sex. Sex is expurgated. Evil. Wrong. When you have wet dreams or wake up with a hard-on as a man or dream of some man penetrating you or sucking on your nipples as a woman, you have “sinned”. You couldn’t help it, any more than a small child who wets his or her pants, but you are a “sinner”. How awful is this?
Small wonder that some take an equally extreme and opposite approach and make sex the focal point of religious practice, as Aleister Crowley seems to have.
I propose we rename “Original Sin” a “birthright of growth”. We are born as animals. We behave as animals. These are not in my view theoretical postulates, but obvious facts. Can we help the fact of needing comfort as infants? Can we help the fact of our biological needs for warmth, food, rest, and shelter? Is there anything the slightest bit moral about any of this? Can we help the genetic traits (and astrological traits, for those who believe in them; I view the two as part and parcel of the same issue) with which we were born? Can we as adults control the conditions under which we were raised as infants? When puberty sets in, is any part of this voluntary?
Can we help that some part of us is hard-wired to be voracious, aggressive, and concerned on a deep genetic level solely with survival and reproduction?
As I have mentioned, I am listening to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and it is a story of invasion after invasion, betrayal after betrayal, with humans behaving as ravaging beasts, as soulless monsters. It is the story that what is built up by one will be torn down by another.
And it is the story of the ascendancy of the Christian Church, which used this creed of the original worthlessness of all humankind to build a vast and powerful empire–what we cannot call a spiritual empire, but an empire of psychological coercion dependent upon terrors created through visions of hell conjured by those who benefited from fear–of people who benefited by providing an answer to it: redemption through the sacrifice of individual conscience to group norms; to rules enforced through violence; to conformity compelled under threat of death, torture, exile, and public execration.
Christ cannot have wanted or willed any of this. Assuming he was a real human being, someone who walked this Earth, he must have been up there thinking “I fucked up”. But what can he have done, but let this disease–this new disease, which contained within itself its cure–surge through the body of humanity, hoping one day it would run its course?
Can we not find within the notion of universal human rights–which is under attack by the egalitarians, who invoke an ancient tribalism in their false appeals to the universal–an origin in “love thy neighbor as thyself”? There was nothing in European history one could not find in Chinese history, or Indian history, or Aztec history. Conflict. Death. Famine. Tyranny. Compelled conformity. The thirst for power and glory. Structural separation from the actually Divine.
Marx was not wrong in seeing in religion an organized effort to coerce the masses. One of Constantine’s initial reasons for embracing Christianity–it seems to have been the primary reason, although his beliefs seem to have evolved over time–was that it encouraged passiveness and obedience to temporal authority. We might even wonder if Christ ever said “render unto Caesar what is Caesars”. Much blood attended the suppression of the various “heresies”. Tens of thousands at least, likely hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, died for failing to conform to the ascendant “Universal” faith. Such a creed of love!!! Nothing says love like rivers of blood, and tears which are not destined ever to be comforted in this life.
Gibbon seems to be misunderstood as blaming Christianity for the fall of the western Roman empire. As he points out, all the conquerers of Rome were themselves Christians. Attila was not, but he never conquered Rome itself, nor did he rule in Italy. The Goths were Christian. So were the Vandals.
So obviously being war-like and being Christian were not mutually exclusive. The Romans were decadent because they lived at the expense of others for many hundreds of years. They did not plow fields, or do useful work. They did not earn or deserve “paychecks”. They partied and they played, and let others do their fighting and working for them. They were provided food and entertainment, and as Gibbon also points out, what is interesting is not that they were conquered, but that it took so long.
Returning to my main point, we are bred and conditioned to easily feel rage and fear. Existing at this level is natural for us. As I see in myself, there is little difference between the two. Both remove from consideration the perceptions of space, of options, of flexibility, of patient pursuit of long-term ends reachable only through self restraint borne of a longer, more relaxed vision.
We are bred as conditioned animals. This is our birthright. Few see this. We all want to say we chose what we were compelled to accept. Our vanity demands it. But it is a lie.
The sine qua non of a spiritual life is to awaken to the power of choice. You must see in life what those around you do not see. You must be willing to submit to the risk of ostracism or worse in order to follow a road whose path you cannot see down more than the next moment, the next breath. You must cast yourself into a different sort of wind, and be willing to die to what you know–rather, what you think you know.
To understand Original Sin is to understand and feel the yoke you were born with, the pressure to act like all others, to be an animal like all others, to live and die with little purpose or progress.
We live in an exceptional time. All the old restraints have been loosened. Human societies are far freer in what they will tolerate than ever before. And this scares the living shit out of a lot of people. They want a return to chains, and are quite willing to tolerate the lie of freedom in the name of escaping it.
Who will win? Who will lose? I of course cannot say. I am limited to my own life, my own words, my own conduct, my own pursuit of excellence as I perceive it. There is much in here worth pondering, for those willing to expose their vanities to the possibility of loss without immediate gain.
The Anti-Tribalist ethos serves the cause of Tribalism quite well. You get to hate everyone who is not just like you, and feel morally superior in so doing, all while surrounded by people just like you.
The other side is in the middle. Blink twice, then look again. You are not actually seeing what you are actually seeing.