I will again encourage people to watch Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil. Of all the dystopias, his seems to have come closest to reality as it exists today.
But over and above that what seems obvious to me is that if I am not complete, then I am asking someone else to do the work of completing me. Practically, for men seeking women, they are looking for mothers, or at least cheer-leaders. They want someone else to put out effort they could and should be putting into themselves. Many women are happy to do this, since care-taking comes naturally to them, even to the point of being harmful to themselves and their own happiness.
You cannot expand until you exist as a unit of consciousness. Until then, you are getting into various muddles of confused emotions, codependence, emotional life-sucking, and unhealthiness. You can mislabel all this and call it “spirituality” by talking continually about love and compassion, and how much you care about others. Many do. Many spend their lives as articulate imbeciles.
But spirit, true spirit, true Truth, doesn’t give a flying fuck about who you pretend to yourself and others to be.
The world has rules. This seems clear enough. Step one is learning them. I’m still working on it.
My father was and remains a bully. I suppose I have dealt with my mothers energy, now it is time for his.
And in what does bullying–power seeking, evil–consist? It is the opposite of love: where love builds, it tears down; where love values, it denigrates; where love brings peace and happiness, it brings obsession, anxiety, self loathing and chronic anger.
The essence of power seeking is to make others smaller by making oneself relatively bigger. Since you have forsworn actual emotional growth, this consists practically in remaining exactly who you were, and making everyone else cringe and shrink. All sadisms exists on a continuum, but at root consist in making others feel small, however that is done.
And sadism and so-called masochism are related. Sade himself was a masochist. He liked being whipped, too, in my understanding. This is not necessarily what he wrote–I am hardly a Sade scholar, or desirous of becoming so–but what he did.
And why not? He was cruel because he was small. Allowing a full circle, allowing others to denigrate him, simply validated his own self perception. He wanted his grave to disappear from human sight.
The essence of love is to make oneself actually bigger by making others bigger.
What I am going through currently is a very non-linear, cloud-like expansion. I do not feel love, but rather see billowing waves of what was small within me expanding into my sight and perception.
It is not pleasant. I sat down to a meditation last night and it felt like I was sitting with evil, like I was drinking tea with the eminently mythic (in a formal psychological sense) Lord Voldemort, and imbibing all his energy.
But what I feel is that these heat waves, these shimmering clouds, also want to expand. They were trapped, and it is the nature of all coiled up emotional energies to blend with life, with motion, with air, and to lose their immediate power in rejoining the universe, which of course retains its power always.
I will add as well that I vowed to give this blog up as a crutch. Well, seemingly I still need this crutch. A soldier uses every tool at his disposal, however ridiculous or inappropriate it may seem. The goal is victory, not victory in a specific way.
I’m going to leave this a bit cryptic, not least because I’m not fully sure myself what I mean by it. Do ponder this, though: what inferences must be made based upon the principle that “the truth is somewhere in the middle”? If we take this “truth” at its word, must the truth not be found somewhere other than the middle?
Empirically, of course, many people repeat stupid, illogical and empirically false arguments for decades, even when they are allegedly “educated”, allegedly “intelligent”, and allegedly concerned for the common welfare.
I will offer as well something of a non sequitur, that when we walk in darkness, it is always our own darkness. And it is the perception alone of our own darkness that creates the possibility of light. It is like the darkness hides within, and only when you have grown to such an extent that it can hide no more does it reveal itself, and create a seemingly dark day. What seemed bright becomes dark. But this is progress. I was pondering last night if the night–literally and figuratively speaking–is perhaps more honest, in offering us no false lights.
I am learning that negatives, cast out from within, mean that I am slowly learning to deny them residence in my psyche.
The task is to function and persevere anyway. I think of jet pilots, who cannot spend too much time worrying about which way is up and which down, who endure multiple “g’s” in their work, and who nonetheless do it well. The method is focus and intention, and not clinging to one way of being, one way of moving, one fixed target. The race is with ourselves, with our quality of energy, with our own evolution, which always takes place by going inside.
I was thinking yesterday, too, walking in the rain, that having a code can be both simplifying and confining. Take Bushido. It makes light of death and fear. It makes life into something clear and simple. But it also means that you inflexible in some ways. You buy one freedom for one confinement. It is clearly better than cowardice, but it is only appropriate at the level of development which feels and wants to embrace cowardice.
What code is mutable in the right way? Growth. Growth is ordered motion, but it can go in any way it needs, on the way home.
And what does growth MEAN? You tell me.
But if you ignore the signs, and march on in, then on the other side is a truly interesting landscape, one denied those who were not pushed over the edge into the abyss, and forced into creative adaptation.
This landscape, believe it or not, is warm. And it is peaceful. And it is richly textured. It is a good basis for a different sort of life.
And do we really want it all? I think most of us just want a few things that are really good: a good partner, good friends, simple pleasures, and useful work. These can be had. They are quite possible.
Couple notes.
1) there is an obvious, to me, comparison with 9/11. Ponder, if you have not, how that date was obviously chosen for symbolic effect. Can you think of any other combination of digits which would so conjure emergency and fear? 4/11? 3/3?
I am not entirely willing to say I feel sure 9/11 was perpetrated by high elements in our government, but it seems absolutely clear that the investigation was botched from the outset by the destruction of evidence, and that wrong and empirically indefensible conclusions were reached by an official body after what could and should have been a thorough, honest, and professional investigation. These points are in my view beyond dispute.
Neither is it in dispute that the conspiracy extended at a minimum to pre-planted explosives/cutting charges in Tower 7, and almost certainly to all three towers.
2) The malefactors were shown to be hypocritical Christians. Particularly in Britain this was then, and is even more so today, ridiculous. It was an attempt to villify Bush, obviously, but as such constituted itself a propaganda. Many Occupy Wall Street protesters seem to have failed to grasp that totalitarians use many rhetorics, but that the rhetoric of the Left has most often been used to build the social order that film portrayed. Hitler and his National Socialists found their support among working class Germans, and it was not his universal healthcare, education and other State-funded perks that Leftists objected to, or to his de facto control of the German economy and habit of expropriating the private property of citizens deemed undesirable, but rather his nationalism, and particularly his opposition to the Soviet state.
But Hitler was to Stalin roughly what Trotsky was: a disavowed brother. Nothing more. Nothing less. And self evidently, they were close brothers for a time. They each viewed the other as seeing the world in the same way. That was part of the reason Stalin found it so hard to believe Hitler has betrayed him, which caused his military enormous tactical and strategic difficulties in the early stage of the invasion.
3) And by what process of logic does a group which fears a totalitarian government want to abjure the right to gun ownership? As the police commissioner said, in response to the question “what do you think will happen?”: “what usually happens when unarmed people face people with guns”. Those masses would have broken and fled in the first volley, had those soldiers fired. The tactical situation would have been much different if there had been a gun under every cloak.
It is so hard not to see Leftists as unprincipled imbeciles who munch propaganda happily all their lives, that I have ceased making the effort. Obviously. They are stupid, do not understand history, do not think deeply, and live their lives in a muddle of sentiment, vacuous pipe dreams, and the very real if unconscious acceptance of despotic violence as a means to the end of their moral confusions, but not an end to human suffering. They know utopias are not born at gunpoint, but being weak they have ceased to care.
4) And finally, V never would have gotten away with anything in the modern surveillance state. He walks out the door, and then disappears to the authorities. How? There would be cameras on every street corner, informers on every block. There would be satellites and even drones watching every street, every alley. If there were sewers they would be covered with cameras too. Just put yourself in the seat of a competent authoritarian, particularly one facing one person. How hard would it be to catch this guy when you can call curfew and detain anyone you want at any time?
I see this fallacy often. I saw it in the last Hunger Games movie. People seem to fail to grasp that cameras everywhere means an ubiquitous eye. American movies are filled with miraculous escapes which are not recognized as such merely because they cut to the next scene. In the real world, the people with resources and planning and the upper hand pretty much always win.
I wonder sometimes if these are not mere plot devices, but an unconscious effort to avoid awareness of just how tight the noose has become.
My sense is that an acceptance of death itself is a prerequisite to the acceptance of the modern world. It is giving my some difficulty–this is indeed an audacious project, to remain consciously awake but cultivate inner calm–but I am making progress. My world is an odd one, but the one I choose.
This problem is easily resolved: make student loan debt like any other form of debt, dischargable in Chapter 7, and reorganizable in Chapter 13. This would force banks to make intelligent loans, and force universities to stop their fucking feeding frenzy and rationalize tuition costs within the constraints of the actual value of their product. As things stand, market forces have been eliminated entirely. There is nothing to hold any of these bastards accountable, on the university side or the banking side. This applies even if it is “the government”–which is to say that monstrosity that takes taxes in from one group, and feeds them out to another, often borrowing from our grandchildren to do so–making the loans.
I will submit as well, as a public minded citizen who detests most banks and our banking system in general, for reasons I have articulated at great length, that you can pay off student loans with other loans which CAN be discharged in bankruptcy. If you are willing to sacrifice a house, you can use a second or third mortgage. You can use credit cards and lines of credit.
This is a poor solution, and yet, remarkably, still better than a Terminator-like debt that follows you to the very edge of the grave. Ethically, you can assume not one of the entities making these loans wants you anywhere but on your knees.
An actually Liberal Democrat Party would recognize this. But of course the Democrats have become an elitist anti-Populist Party which actually serves the interests only of a power hungry elite who are quite willing to use any rhetoric, to pander to anyone who will listen, in the full confidence that no one will ever hold them accountable for servicing the constituencies–blacks, the poor and working classes, the cause of peace–which they claim to value.
How else to explain their enthusiasm for importing millions of competitors for scarce jobs, which can only make them harder to find for native-born Americans, and make them pay less?
How else to explain the wars Obama and Hillary have started, which have only damaged our national security?
Who will I need to be tomorrow? I have no fucking clue. My line is not straight in any visible sense. It is always the next step, but how can I know where that will be?
Trying too hard to be smart will always make you stupid. I see it every goddamned day. I have learned, more or less, though, to keep my mouth shut.
There is possibility in silence. When you are speaking, you are telling the world who you cannot be. Why?