Author: White Whale

I am currently playing Fallout 3.  It is set in a post-Apocalyptic Washington D.C./northern Virginia, with many of the ruins, I suspect, modeled with occasional fidelity on actually existing places they mapped out and included, like Arlington National Cemetery.

As an unknown intellectual–I will use that word here–I see no limits on where I can go.  I have no reputation at all, which is a clear blessing.

And I am finding that video games calm me.  It is a way of practicing persistence, and experiencing success in a very tightly controlled environment.  Some situations I have to go through 20-30-50 times to master, since I am not a quick learner.  I tend to want to do frontal assaults, and they usually fail.  I don’t use my brain, and this game requires the use of intelligence.

It is a way of harnessing aggressive and destructive energies in a controlled environment.  On the one hand we read that first person shooters are very similar to the way that the Army trains people to kill, which it has gotten very good at. David Grossman has written about this quite a bit.  I don’t doubt this.  All tools have their place, and this sort of “tool” is available to everyone at all times, and some people are made sick by this one, particularly those who use immersion in a fake world as real world acculturation.

At the same time, it is connecting me, personally, with energies that were already there.  Combined with a meditative practice it constitutes a sort of Tantric immersion in death.  I see the effects in my dreams, and I watch them, and learn from them.  On balance, I have learned needed lessons.  In my own case, it is making me more compassionate.

Traumatized individuals, particularly, have some part of themselves that is trapped in a subversive sweat, a sense of helplessness, within which is enfolded both life and expressive rage.  You cannot get the one without the other.

I am a very different sort of person.  I am unique in my experience.  I have not knowingly met anyone like me, although I look like a redneck construction worker, and have often been mistaken as such.  If I am invisible, then others like me must be too.

Be that as it may, my experience may differ from most.  But I suspect that the sheer volume of the video game business–about $100 billion or so–speaks to a variety of cultural needs that games meet.

Could we perhaps posit that anything anyone can get addicted to meets on some level, and in an appropriate proportion, an actual need?  Do not most people need at times a River Lethe, sex, work, risk, an immersive experience?

One of the deepest spiritual insights you can get to is that we are all born with an instinct to kill.  Our alimentary tract has equipped itself through evolutionary adaptation with a perceptual and locomotive apparatus that meets its imperative for survival.

On a “spiritual path” we are not supposed to speak of this.  We are supposed to cultivate compassion, and wisdom and grace; humility, kindness, self abnegation and service.

But as I grow I realize I need to know and befriend the part of me that sometimes wants to stick a knife in someone’s throat.  We all have it.  Let me repeat: we all have it.

So often growth is conceived as a falling away of undesired traits.  You lose anger, and you lose greed, and you lose self absorption.  This is a simple idea, one which does not require conquering the fear of what lies within us, our primal demons, our ancient decay, the atavistic desire for rapine we share with animals.

In recent days I have been meeting these parts.  They are terrifying.  Anyone who really knows, who really sees, who really contacts on an emotional level what they are actually capable of, must feel shock, and other emotions I don’t quite have words for. I do not want to shoehorn them into inadequate words.  Terror and horror, though, certainly belong in this mix.

Ponder the quasi-death cult which is the obsession with relics, with the bones of supposed holy men.

Ponder Saint Simeon the Elder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_Stylites

There are several interesting points here.  One, that he chose to leave the world, where he lived in the constant presence, according the iconography, of temptation, which he resisted through what would amount to physical torture if it were inflicted on someone unwilling.

What is this temptation?  His own anger and violence, which he merely avoided and did not process through his asceticism.  Sex–primal, animal passion–is merely a gateway drug to everything else.  A good solution allows one to live happily in the company of others, in peace, in communion and community, as we were meant to do.

Second, the fight over his “relics”, which are the pieces of his skeleton.  The Christians, certainly, but I believe also some Buddhists and some Muslims of some sects, revered a thumb of a saint, or a knuckle; a knee, or perhaps even a skull.  God lived in these.  God blessed the believers through these bones, or so it was believed.

We all know death waits for us.  It cannot be avoided, even if its fact can be pressed out of polite conversation, its existence made something which happens somewhere else until you reach an age where everyone you know is dying.  In our world, that is 60 years or more of avoiding most death. Pestilence and war are strangers to most of us.

But I think acceptance of death is tied to the acceptance of our own culpability in the violence of every era.  When I say culpability I do not think most of us are directly, physically guilty.  What I mean is that some part of us relates to the desires enacted by some for death, torture, and glorifying both.  None of us are innocent.  And none of us are truly absolved by the “blood of the lamb”, or by submission to the Koran or Torah.  Or by sacrifice, of animals, people, or our own comfort.

Walking through the valley of death is a necessary rite of passage for us all.  We need fear our evil, our own capacity for destruction, but only until we know them, and walk with them too, until they make themselves known and accessible.

I am getting to these places in recent days, and it is freeing me from bonds I did not know tied me down, prisons whose walls I could not see.

We all see the sky as the limit, but in truth we live in an infinite universe.  We need the sky as a limit, and use it as such.

Who would you be, if you were a ball of light, without arms, without legs, without an up and down?

It’s a reasonably well guarded fact–one at least that I only recently became aware of, despite what I think is a well earned self image of being reasonably knowledgeable–that only about 1 in 20 AA members achieves long term sobriety. Most no doubt achieve short bouts of being clean, likely often with the assistance of court orders and looming financial disasters, but not long term.

This means that the job of addiction counselor is likely one filled, also, with tales of chronic failure.

I was thinking about it today, and I think if I were doing that job the first thing I would do would be counter-intuitive: I would ask them to take their time and provide as comprehensive an inventory as possible of what that substance gives them.  I would ask them to write poems of praise, provide music that supports them in that habit, and really inhabit consciously what is in that world.

This is what addicts are really up against.  They understand conceptually that, logically, their poison will shorten their life, damage relationships, etc.  They have been through the list of negatives that naive people think should be enough to get them to quit.  These lists, from the perspective of non-addicts, should be enough to make ANYONE quit.

But they have never been addicted in the first place.  What drives addiction is a deep-seated emotional lack, and no one who has not experienced it can really understand it.

In own case, alcohol has helped protect my self from very vicious assaults from a deep place within my being.  But I got to that place, and my perception of need to drink has plummeted as a consequence.

I had many good times drinking.  I really like alcohol.  I think I always will.

But I am looking at the inventory of the needed things it did for me, and that list has been shortened near to zero.  Right now, it is a cure for boredom, insomnia, and confusion (read procrastination) , all of which I have strategies for dealing with.  It is not a solution for a deep wound.  It is not a solution for a failed sense of self.  It is not a balm for fear.  I no longer need shelter from the wind.  At one time, and recently, I did.  Absolutely.  I do not regret my drinking one bit.  

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out.  

The mind is in general the least interesting part of the self.  You might say “but oh the life of the mind is fascinating”.  Really?  Where does “fascination” happen?  Are naked women not also fascinating if you are a heterosexual man?  The “life of the mind” leads somewhere, and that somewhere is unquestionably interesting, but it is not in the mind.  As I have said repeatedly, the mind is a tool, and when used as a source of aesthetic pleasure it tends to be abused.  It is separated from the need for usefulness, which is its main value. Pleasure can and should be pursued elsewhere.  Where, elsewhere, is a proper task for thinking.  The enjoyment of elsewhere, is not.

I just did a forward bend for 21 minutes.  I have just discovered that very long stretches lead interesting places.  If you bring a quality of patient attention, of the sort used in Kum Nye, then a great deal of movement and motion happen in that 21 minutes.  Now, I move around.  I rock gently at the limit of my range of motion, as I read is useful.  I sit up and focus on my upper back.  I alternately push one leg then the other out a couple inches.

But I have found areas of tightness will over time release information. This is fascinating.  My next experiment is going to focus on my very tight hip flexors for an hour.  I am going to alternate myofascial release with stretching.  I’ll post results.  I suspect it will tell me something, something non-verbal, which means I can’t write about it, but something useful.

It seems to me that the cultural consequences of Leftist ideology are vastly more pernicious than most of us perceive.

I was thinking about babies 200 years ago.  Who calmed them?  We assume the mother, but in most homes was there not also an aunt or two or three, and a grandmother, whose energy was in most cases likely much more serene and patient than that of the young mother?

The cultural model in most of the world is not to create remote places to cast our unwanted old and abandon them to the care of the State, much as Rousseau envisioned for unwanted children (of which he personally fathered a couple).

No, the old live with the young and help out. They cook, and care for the home.  They exist in that cultural space and impart what they know of life, which I am hopefully not being too romantic in thinking once consisted in something more than how to invest in stocks and tips for playing golf.

Does it not seem that in casting off our old, we cast off both our past, and our connection to the future?  Can we not learn to live for more than the weekend, the sportsing and beer, the Cosmos and girl chat?

Here is what I wonder: does some of this hypersensitivity among the young come from the fact that their mothers went back to work a month or two after having them, and were never fully emotionally present to them because they worked all day and were tired?  Their care-givers varied at the daycare, and the grandmothers were in other States.

We are supposed to exist as productive economic atoms, able to move and merge with other atoms at will.  But we are born to live in webs: of connection, of  meaning, of history.

It is just one of the ironies, the intellectual hypocrisies, of Socialism that it presents itself as a giving, loving, compassionate creed, but that in actual fact it separates people from one another, from their past, from their people and creeds.

Yes, we can say tribalism leads to violence.  But Liberalism was intended to solve that problem.  And it still can, if we return to a genuinely Liberal ethos, as opposed to the overt Fascism which has overtaken our universities, and largely our news media, and political order.

Edit: You know, a big part of what enables nursing homes and full time skilled nursing, is economic progress.  Wealth.  People buy enormous homes and make no place for mom and dad.  And part of this is mutually desired.  What I am not noting is how much tension, how many fights, how much unwished unpleasantness must have attended, and must still attend, the care of the elderly.

What I had in mind was Social Security and Medicare, which pay for State run homes, but the progress (and regress) made possible by free markets and property rights (what is mistakenly called “Capitalism”, which was Marx’s term for a system he critiqued in so doing) is a big part of it too.

It seems to me you have to first become fully conscious of who you are in order to begin to choose a path of growth.  Until you know yourself, that is your primary work

If you equate your mind with your self, it is easy to believe that it is easy to change.

But you are a pattern of energy flow, some of which is overtly emotional, some of which is something else which needs its own name.  I will call it “that”, as that is the least reductive.

People, and the world, are vastly more complex and interesting than is assumed by those who are compelled to conquer both.  You can get outer silence, clearly, and external order through violence, and call it peace.

But true calm and peace flow outward from the inside.  Nothing in the outer world can equal the peace and joy of what lies within all of us.

If you think about it, no matter where you go, or what you do, you will always be the center of your own life, even if that life is focused on others.  You are the middle.  Everything you will ever know and see and experience and learn and enjoy and fear will come to you here, where you are.  There is nowhere else, for you.

So often we seek something out there.  If it is to exist for us, it can never be anywhere but here, and now.  If it was, and is not now, then it is not.  If it is there, it is not here.

Perhaps this is gibberish.  Perhaps not.

I watched a trailer for a new horror movie called “The Boy” a few weeks ago when I saw the last Hunger Games with my kids.  The gist of it is that this doll is treated as human by his parents, even though the boy he is based on died some years earlier.  This doll has rules, and if you don’t follow them, the sorts of things happen that people go to horror movies to watch.

I can’t speak to other people’s experience, but it had a deep affective resonance with me.

In recent days, every night has brought new revelations, and every morning a coalescence–slow, but diligent; a learning, a stock taking, a measuring, and a movement of the marker, denoting progress.

Last night I first contacted the spirit of my shaking.  It is bird like, flighty.  Although I used to find it intimidating in itself, I see now that it is merely a bird leaving its branch when it detects a predator.

The predator is a baby doll.  This doll has rules which must be followed, or else bad things happen.  It cannot be satiated, only given away.  As long as it is your burden, it is a constant burden.  The feelings of this dream were the sort that sends literal chills up your spine, and makes you want to run in terror, but you can’t because you know it will pursue you. You must stay, captive, and pretend.

And I got to thinking about a frustrated baby.  It is completely helpless.  It is for all intents and purposes paralyzed in a way not that different than a toy baby.  Neither can choose to go from here to there to get needs met.

And when it cries too long, or hurts too much the result is RAGE: insatiate, omnidirectional, absolutely primal.

And what does it crave, if not solace?  Order.  At least order.  At least consistency.  Small children love routines.  They love knowing what is next.  And they hate randomness, especially random and to them incomprehensible emotions.

How many of us have a baby within us that screamed itself to sleep more than once?  The needs of this baby do not disappear, and what I think I saw is that they reappear in compulsive conformity.  This is a root, perhaps THE root of Fascism.  How often in history must small children have gone without, gone uncomforted?

And I was thinking too that modern thinkers want to find some sort of explanation for Fascism, while ignoring that violent imposition of conformity has been the rule for most human societies for most of human history.  War has been the rule.  Tribalism and taking other peoples stuff have been the rule.  The only thing surprising about Communo-fascism is the extent of the intellectual subterfuge needed to enable minds trained in reason and concepts of universal human rights to tolerate them.  Otherwise, they are merely new iterations of very old things.

And it occurred to me that science has often been the handmaiden of cultural atavism and tribalism.  It is merely a tool for rationalizing.  It allows people to appear to belong to this world, while dancing naked around fires in the wilderness.

And all this layered on a feeling I had the other day that each and every day is like a new jazz solo.  It may sound much the same day to day, but it is never exactly the same, and our true mission in life is come up with new melodies, new harmonies, new rhythms.

Of course Hitler had to find jazz degenerate.  It could not be heard by a trapped child who only wanted the same thing, day after day after day, and which was quite willing to commit psychological and even physical violence to whomever and whatever prevented this perfect repetition that was not there when it was most needed.

How to free yourself?  See.  Feel.  Understand.  When it feels the motion, it is already too late for everything built in the sand next to an ocean.  The work is the work of the universe.

It happens fairly regularly, I just noticed, that I sit calmly in my practice as primal terrors come up.  I am not connected to them, even though of course I am. I have learned they have a texture that is neither good nor bad.  It is THAT, and that can at times be very interesting.

Is a road connected to a car?  They are related, obviously, but the one will never be mistaken for the other.

What makes roads useful?  I will plagiarize Lao Tzu and say space.  If they are filled, they are useless or slow.

It seems to me an essential outward element of being a true Sufi is one must contradict oneself.  There is no other way.

Yes, immodest as it may sound, I do consider myself one, with the proviso, of course, that one cannot be one.