Author: White Whale

I added superspeed to my list of dream superpowers last night.  That was kind of interesting.  I was already telekinetic, able to fly, and able to walk through solid objects. I can of course control my dreams when I want to, but any more I just let them go.  They are trying to tell me something, and consciously directing them prevents the flow of information, which I need, even if it is painful.  I know, even in the dreams, that the pain is illusory. I am sometimes trying to interpret the dreams even as they happen, which is likely something I need to stop.

Anyway, some things that came out that I can’t tell if they are deep or not.  I’m going to post them anyway.

1) Even with super-speed, you cannot recall words once you have spoken them.  Choose carefully.

2) Take the initials of your first and last name and make opposites using words starting with those letters.  For John I get Joy and jumpiness.  Now make a circle with them.  You alternate between them.  Sometimes you are joyous, sometimes nervous.

Now contemplate that this distinction is artificial, and that neither ever exists in pure form, and that by using words, you have already limited your experience.

Smith: Sonorous and Succinct. Are these opposites?  Well, I just made them opposites.  I alternate between pleasing, languid, flowing words, and terseness and a laconic spirit.  I make a circle, and move through both.  I choose to value being Sonorous, and regret lapsing into succinctness.  I speak and speak and speak and Oh how wonderful the words I have to say.

And some part of me says “fuck this.”

There is something interesting in this perceptual process.  There are countless tools for learning, and this seems to be one useful for subverting the tendency of mind to think dualistically. Maybe.

“Populism”,when used by people who have columns, is a code-word for “stupid white people”.  As such, it is a signification for people that person does not know, does not interact socially with, and does not understand.

That will not of course prevent such people, from the mainstream of either party, from presuming to speak on these people’s behalf, and not caring when their policies fail.  As I said, they don’t understand or know these people.  Why should their sufferings matter to them?

Me, I am educated.  I am intelligent.  And I support Trump for reasons I have articulated. Am I certain he will excel?  No. Am I certain he will make decisions based on a gut level love of this country?  Yes.  And as I have said, that is more than we can expect from anyone else running for office.

We have heard good stories before, but if you are not willing to go where no one else will go in election season, how much less will you be willing to rock the boat once you get into office, decide you like it, and want to be reelected?

In American history, the only person who can relatively make George W. Bush look frugal by comparison is Barack Obama. Bush had a Republican Congress for 6 of his 8 years, and he not only spent like a Democrat, he spent like a drunk Democrat.  As I was reminded by a meme recently, the drunk sailor analogy is inapt, because sailors only spend their own money, and I will add that they do not expect to get anything for it.  Politicians who spend our money expect to buy the support of a large section of us with it, thinking, accurately in most cases, that we are too fucking stupid to see the long term consequences of it.

So I’m in Eastern Tennessee somewhere, and they card everybody everywhere who wants to buy alcohol.  If you landed on D-Day and can prove it, they still want ID.

And I went to the grocery store–I forget the chain–and I looked at a parking lot full of empty spaces, and wondered how many were filled with Fundamentalist Christians who feel drinking is wrong.

I was annoyed at the stupidity of carding gray haired people–or me–and wondering if it might have roots in the fundamental antipathy of Christians to the means we heathens use to calm down and relax.  With no good means to reach a conclusion, that is my operative hypothesis.

So I’m sitting there in the lot thinking that a lot of the people I have defended–Christians–really are assholes.  I say this as someone raised as one, who knows well how they think, and how they interpret the Bible.
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And I’m sitting there, thinking:shit, I like to argue.  Then I’m sitting there thinking, shit, judging other people is hard work.  I have judged the judgers, and judged those who judge them.

And I think: simple split: consumer society/thoughtful society.  I of course am a thinker, and they of course are not.

Then: fuck.

Growth as a spiritual  being is expansion.  It is increased clarity of spirit, getting rid of all the clouds in your Ku, your being in space.

Every time I say I am this or that, I simultaneously say I am not that or this.  I bring a wall into the universe as I see it.  Oh, I go up to there, but then I stop.  It’s likely fucking dragons on the other side.

So I made the only logical conclusions I could, which were to buy a six pack of Mickey’s Big Mouth, which I got carded for, and then went and had a bean burrito, and some meaty something at Taco Bell.

And I’m in Taco Bell, thinking oh I am so superior to these people, but I really do like some of those hot sauce packs, and then: goddamn it, if I am here, and they are there, I have deluded myself again.  I fucking fell off the path of non-duality.

Spirituality is quiet, I think.  It is not having thoughts pushing in on you saying accept this and reject that.  You maybe feel reactions, but the world is not forcing itself on you, forcing you to swing one way then the other, forcing you to choose one way of being or the other, relative to freedom, which is the only honest, only good way to be.

And I think: how can there be words to express non-duality?  There can’t, of course.  Then I think: why is there so fucking much Buddhist “theology”/philosophy/words spilled on Dharma and related concepts?

And it seems to me that non-duality is a state you phase in to, and phase out of.  You can go there, but not live there, not stay there.  You visit, and it is a vacation from the troubles of life.  Enough is as good as a feast.

What the Dharma does, ideally, and I am not blind to the fact that much of Buddhism is corrupted by tradition and habit, is create a space in which what is valuable, is in fact valued, is in fact sought, is in fact made an ideal, and that ideal placed within a space where every intellect can find itself amused and occupied.

Perhaps self evidently, I drank all six Mickey’s, while watching 2 Person of Interest episodes.  I kind of like that show.

I will add, though, that this sort of drinking is foreign to me.  A six pack of beer is not even remotelyi close enough to get me drunk. By and large, I can’t get drunk on beer period.  It doesn’t take affect fast enough.

So this is a new phase.  A little something is enough.  I don’t have to kill my pain with alcohol.  I am increasingly able to access, and watch blow out in billows of smoke the rage within me while I do my Kum Nye.  This energy is so thick it is almost tangible.  I can almost see it.  I can certainly feel it strongly.  I feel my so-called Third Eye when it activates. I feel energy fields flowing out of my body.  I feel this Nye, as they call it, activate, and start to move energy within me.

Good things are happening.  I am getting more and more moments of absolute pleasure in existence.  This has long been the goal.  When I can conjure them often and sustain them, then I will be useful.

If I tell you a story about Zelda, who is different, do you agree that different is bad, and that regardless of how she is different, Zelda should be shamed until she conforms with those around her?

Or do you think that hating the different is only what Conservatives do?

Do you think that different is good, and that we should encourage Zelda in her individuality?  Is this what Liberals do?

What if I tell you that Zelda is a highly artistic Christian conservative going to school in San Francisco, where she is hated by nearly everyone?  Is different still good, or does she need to be a boy who wants to pretend he doesn’t have a penis?  Or black?  Or someone who wears a tutu, because we can reliably infer the politics of those who wear tutu’s to school?

It seems to me most leftists really are so deep into propagandistic indoctrination that they can’t see it.  They can’t see that calling Donald Trump a Hitler, or Fascist, or racist, or whatever, neither  accurately represents his position, nor creates the space for creative and integrative dialogue.  What it creates the space for is Hate Campaigns, for emotional  and perhaps physical violence.  What it creates the space for is Integration Propaganda aimed at solidifying the attachment of the propaganda targets to those who create the propaganda.

If you want good zombies, call all your enemies Fascists, and watch them bounce like bugs.

I have to say, I am really enjoying how much the Donald is pissing off the professionally pissed off.  Their experience is that when they say they are pissed off, this threat of being offended in public is enough to get people to understand the bullying implied by this threat, and back off.

Most people don’t want to seem ungenteel, even when speaking obvious truths, even when those who are offended are being something between hypersensitive and overtly manipulative, and even when the people opposing them see no need on their part for reciprocal courtesy, decency, fairness, or proportioned language.  They are free to call their opponents every name in the book, and if they respond in kind, OH THE HUMANITY.

Fuck all that, says Donald.

Here is the thing: all the people who have been called racist for the past eternity that this asshole has been President are PISSED OFF.  They KNOW they are not racist.  They know they are being unfairly slimed.  They know that the people saying these things hate them not for what they stand for, but simply because they are not part of the Borg yet.  They have not assimilated.  They retain the capacity for speaking truths which are not mediated by the complicit media.  This is unacceptable.

But you can only lie  to and about people so long before they get what I will call shame fatigue.  You just stop giving a shit.  In fact, anybody who can piss off the people who have been insulting your character, your intelligence, your ancestry, your  motivations, and your very existence, get a lot of points for that.  The Left has long assumed that even in a free society they can browbeat people into submission indefinitely.  Donald Trump is proving that is not true.

He can and should win the Republican nomination, and I think he can and should win the national election, particularly against Hillary.  I think all sane people understand that the ideas he is proposing, even if they may not agree with them in full, make sense.

I read roughly 25% of American Muslims support Jihad.  I read roughly one in four Syrians support Jihad.  And by jihad, I mean “killing American civilians”, just like the most recent jihadis did.

If we knew that within a given group one in four supported serial murder, and aspired to commit it, in what respect would it be anything but prudent to either stop offering guest rooms to those people, or at least ask for references?

No group in American history has had the demonstrated history of aggressive and completely unprovoked aggression against civilians that Islam does.  None.  I am not aware of one, ever.  You pick an immigrant group: Chinese, Japanese, Italians, Irish, Indians (Hindus), etc.  None of them have anything like Jihad.

And what is astonishing is that ISIS is SAYING that they not only want to commit acts of jihad, but saying they are planting their people in the refugees.

There are plenty of real refugees, plenty of people who can benefit from, and should be relocated here.  The Yazidis and Christians in Syria, for example, face a genuine holocaust.  But Obama, for reasons that have to do with him being a complete fucking asshole, has only let in one Christian in the past year.  I have no objection to 100,000 immigrants, but why not start with groups who do not contain large numbers of people who have sworn to kill us simply because we exist?

I  am reminded of Russell Peters excellent piece on why white people should beat their children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv-0Uil9Oao

I have the Ryan story in mind, which starts about 3:30.

I think most Americans really do not understand how different some cultures are in how they raise their children, and how those practices affect adult understandings.

In America–and in most of what might be called the intellectually bleached West–we have this compulsive need for niceness.  If we are nice and someone is not nice back, we have this codependent need to find out why.  Sometimes the why is that they are assholes.  Sometimes the why is that they hate us not for anything we have done, but simply because we are different, and they are radically intolerant.

I have said before that before I would even think about considering a Muslim a moderate, he or she would have be able to honestly answer yes to the following three questions:

1) do you accept the right of Israel to continue to exist as a Jewish nation?

2) Do you reject all use of terror and violence to further the cause of Islam?

3) Do you accept in principle and forever the primacy of the United States Constitution as the ultimate law of the land?

Returning to Ryan, we have Muslims more or less telling us to go fuck ourselves to our faces, and we somehow want to rationalize it.  For their part, they know if they tried that in their native lands, they would be arrested, tortured, and/or killed.  Here, they get to sing their sad songs to a largely sympathetic audience, which is temperamentally not capable of understanding people who hate as a matter of principle, as a matter of ideology, as a matter of culture.

We have gotten almost no help from Muslims since 9/11 http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/07/fmr-fbi-counterterrorism-agent-weve-received-nearly-zero-help-from-u-s-muslim-community-since-911/

Why would we, when their Holy Book condemns those who fail to condemn us?

We live in a Never Never Land, where adults who should know better allow people to insult them to their faces, to tell them they hate them and plan to kill them, and who STILL accept them for the insipid and imbecilic reason that they simply can’t believe them.

You know who said in advance everything he was going to do?  Hitler.

And speaking of those who want to compare Trump to Hitler, I wonder how many of those people are concerned about the plight of Jews in Europe?  Hitler hated Jews, and so do Muslims, who kill them every chance they get.  This is fact, not fancy.

And what was most shocking to the Jews in the Holocaust was that they had done everything in their power to get along with Europeans.  They worked hard, they kept their noses clean, the accepted restrictions on their employment and movements.

This is completely different with Muslims.  No large group has been better positioned since the Communists of the 1930’s to completely overwhelm our way of life through subversion within.  As I keep repeating, because it is astonishing to me that it, manifestly, NEEDS repeating: they are TELLING us they hate us.  Not all of them, but large numbers, and the apologies of those who want to claim terror is against Islam are very hard to believe when virtually all of them support Hamas’ violence against Israel, all of it directed against civilians, up to and including babies who have had their throats slit.

There is no more effective way to tell the lunatics and assholes to go fuck themselves than to support Donald Trump.  He is not calling for concentration camps, the vitiation of American law, or anything but commonsense responses to incipient and preventable crimes.  All but the most deluded understand this.  This is why I believe that if he is not assassinated–my major fear in this regard–he will and should be our next President.

Something has to give.  Something has to change in major way.  Business as usual is destroying this nation.

You know, this is a really good metaphor for addiction.  Who are you when you are fucked up on booze and drugs?

You are not “you”.  You inhabit a body, but your mouth does not form words, your mind does not think coherent thoughts.  You are not there.  You are a zombie, all primitive impulse.

And of course addicts willingly drink from the River Lethe.  Something is bouncing around them that stops for a time when they drink that water, that both anesthetizes their minds, detaches them from reality, and makes the pain fade away.

But they are zombies.  If you wake them from a comatose sleep, they are of no use to anyone.

For myself, my abuse of alcohol is slowly fading.  I am going more and more days not just not drinking, but not wanting it, and more and more days drinking a little, but not a lot.

I don’t want to be a zombie.  I want to be there for my life.

That pain was very real.  I understand it intimately.  It is hard to communicate the gut level nausea and unreality that attends connecting with an energy in which a caregiver willfully hurt you.  That is not supposed to happen.  But of course it does, regrettably often.

And we the wreckage are left to learn.  This is painful, but also beautiful.

Progress continues to be made, even if I am still externalizing some of it here.  I can type vastly faster than I can write, and if I”m going to type anyway, may as well post it here.  What the fuck.

So I was dreaming last night I walked into a sort of clinic and they were giving out a zombie vaccine.  This vaccine required a shot in the stomach and one in the arm, and then you would turn into a zombie.  This was understood at the outset.

I asked them if the effect was temporary, and they said no, it’s permanent.

And I asked them what it did, and they looked at each other a bit uncomfortably, as if that question was so stupid they weren’t sure how to answer it.

And I got it.  They shot me in the stomach in the same way you would a victim of rabies, but this was supposed to, more or less, CAUSE rabies.

I remembered this dream in my meditation this morning, and asked myself what it was all about.  Am I regressing?  Has my ability to say no somehow eroded?  Am I becoming a conformist, or giving up?

And it hit me that I took that shot many, many years ago.  I feel I had some sense of possibility up to about age 7, then it was all taken from me and existence became a quest for survival, one bought at the cost of conformity to generalized lunacy.

And it occurred to me growth requires remembering and seeing the cages you have lived in, grown accustomed to, accepted.  I have accepted cages. I do not want to admit it.  I don’t want to have to say that I gave in, that I accepted defeat, that I quit and embraced my captors.  But what else can you do as a child? The proposition made in my family was submit or die. I am still here, and some part of me likely believes that submission is necessary for survival.  Obviously, my rational mind, and my protective selves do not.

And then it occurred to me without exception all adult humans have accepted cages as the cost of maturing.  They have internalized artificial barriers, creating emotional “no go” places, and consequently, that all human beings on Earth would benefit from sustained and focused and methodical inner work. Not just the misfits.  Not just those of us with symptoms.

You can see the person having vigorous conversations with themselves in People’s Park in Berkeley and call those presenting symptoms.

But can the perceptive also not see the countless negative hallucinations which constitute mass delusion?  Can we not see the dialogues which SHOULD happen, but do not?

We cannot have universal peace until we have universal mental health, and we cannot have that until all people are willing to learn who they are, accept themselves, and become able to relax on a very deep level with grace and ease.

There are certainly signs that people in some ways have become more introspective, but it seems to me most on all sides of the political spectrum where most people live have little to say about the propagandas of efficiency, of pursuing happiness, of membership in an anomizing industrial and post-industrial order.

With regard to happiness, it occurred to me yesterday that natural life includes periodicity.  You cannot be happy all the time, but if you allow it, it will come regularly, like a wheel.  Only when you make an end of it, only when you pin it down and demand it fly, will it stop coming.

Happiness is something we are supposed to be able to produce, like Fig Newtons, and #2 pencils. And in an industrial economy, the answer to a consumer need is a manufactured product.  We have a Happiness Industry.

But I get the sense that most of the smiling faces at these retreats, most of the people who write the books, are acting.  They are playing a role.  They assume that because they did all the happy things they must be happy.  Certainly, they want to SEEM happy.  And we see these people who have visited, say, a castle in Armenia, and posted pictures, and think WOW, IF ONLY. . . .

I am certainly not well traveled, but I’ve spent time in many of the major cities in America, lived for at least months of time several times in Europe, and am even now often on the road seeing new things.   And my experience has been that no travel ever brings me more satisfaction than my daily Kum Nye session.  That is where the movement that matters happens, for me.

It is possible to imagine an emotionally organic order. It is possible to imagine a world where everyone takes the task of self knowledge and growth seriously.  We are merely opposed by ghouls who do not know that they took the zombie vaccine long ago, and see their incoherent and unprincipled rants as the essence of reason, the summit of virtue, the purity of truth.  Up is so often down that few seem willing to question it.

I am and hope to remain one of those few.  I will carry on with my project even if I get no more votes.

As some of you may know, it has long been my ambition to found a “church”.  Well, it turns out that name market tests horribly.  It repels people either because they figure they are going to get lectured about something, or because it is just plain weird.

The intent is to create standing groups of people who sit in circles and speak the truth. I would include something like “Authentic Relating” circles within the domain of what I want to do, but I intend much more.  I do have a philosophical basis I bring to it.  I do have specific practices and techniques I bring to it.

In no small measure all my explorations have been intended to help create my own readiness to launch this thing, which I literally intend as a supplement to, and in perhaps many cases, an alternative to, traditional families.  That structure is failing in many many cases in this country, and I think has always been limiting in some ways even where it remains robust.

This is something I intend for me. I am not complete. I have not vanquished all my demons, but I don’t think perfection should be the price for starting something; and those who ask for it ask, in my opinion, to be lied to.

Anyway, you can’t miss the survey.  Vote if you like.  You can select, I think, as many as you like.  If you have other names you’d like added to the list, put them in comments here, or there, if it takes them. This is a new feature for me, so I’m not entirely sure how, and how well, it works.

My intent is to pick a name, reserve a website using whatever contortions I need to perform to get something close, then fill it with the sort of commentary I have left littered all over the web, but expressed as clearly as I am today capable, which is better than yesterday, and much better than a few years ago, or so I hope.  I have put a lot of thought into my thing, and have not even come close to sharing all my ideas here.  I have separate files for that.

If we take the part of fear, then of course we look at a billion something Muslims, and wonder what percentage supports the killing of civilian non-combatants in peaceful places and calling it an act of justified religious war, even though the long term effect is likely going to the alienation of those populations from the alleged goal, and increasingly severe military and social responses.

But ponder this: do not ISIS militants, with their snuff films, sex slaves, and mass crucifixions not ask of ordinary Muslims–who have been acculturated to Western standards of fundamental decency, respect for others, and “civilized behavior” in the broadest sense–where they stand?  They are told in no uncertain terms that if they do not stand with them they stand against them.

Could all this sociopathic cruelty and violence not lead to a backlash in the other direction among most Muslims?  I like to think it possible.  If I were President, I would do all I could to feed that.  I would emulate the Soviets and spend huge amounts of money on propagandas of various sorts.  We live in an age where our main choice is whose propaganda we are consuming, not whether or not we consume it.  Only those able to make their decisions can hope to avoid it, and very few people know enough to be able to do this.  I like to think I can, but who really knows?  I can’t say this for sure.  I perhaps merely differ in the degree, not the fact, of my delusion.

In any event, I and others have been saying for some time that Islam needs some form of reformation, some sustained engagement with the history and theology of the religion which has as its aim the incorporation into pervasive belief and practice what most inhabitants of the world as it exists today consider to be decent, humane, and just.

God, it seems to me, has not stopped speaking to us.  We could view sacred scripture as a sort of epigenetic landscape, where many possibilities exist, but only those come into being which are invoked into being by use and attention.  A religion, like a life, becomes a combination of its innate possibilities, and the environments in which it is expressed and lived.

Is it wicked to reject the mass murder of people whose sole crime is not sharing your religious faith?  This is, I think, a good question.

Is it wicked to treat women as equal to men in their claims to dignity, education, and respect?

Is it wicked to consider rape as always wrong, even when done by Muslims to infidel women?  Is that a clear rejection of what God himself taught, and even if so, can verses emphasizing mercy and charity not also be invoked?  And if not, if rape is merely permitted but not commanded, then can it not easily be condemned by the pious as itself wicked?

Doing my Kum Nye practice I felt that my history has been one of reward and punishment. Operant conditioning is used in pretty much all societies, but is likely particularly intense in social groups, like Jews, Christians, and Muslims, where God Himself is seen as interacting with the world through rewards and punishments.

This appeals to a simple dichotomy which is wired in our brains, the yes/no operator, the good/bad operator, which exists even in the very primitive brain.  One can easily train animal behavior through operant conditioning.

But what happens is you get strong instinctual reactions on both sides, as you approach them, that reduce or even eradicate nuance, reason, proportion, and the capacity to use a continuum for perception.  Good is good.  We seek this feeling.  Bad is bad.  We seek to avoid this feeling.  And in both cases, most people are quite able and content to lie to themselves about both.  Where in the New Testament does Christ say to torture heretics, and wage aggressive wars in the pursuit of Christianizing the world?  But it has happened, often, and across large land masses and involving large numbers of people.

Is it good or bad?  This is a question based in fear.  What is it?  What is interesting about it?  How can I learn more about it?  These are the questions of a civilized mind.

The good/bad instinctual reaction is based in a biological history where quick decisions meant life or death.

It survives today through traumatized children, and the adults they become.  Even today, we have not evolved into a seeking and learning society.  It may be that good/bad operation has been expanded and refined, but anyone who says “science” is in inherent good or bad, fails to perceive with nuance.  We want so badly to simplify the processes of perception, and to simplify the signs of the tribes, to make clear who we belong to.  We want a unique, shared truth, that returns us to biologically primitive times.

When a leftist shouts “racist” with all the reflection of a knee reacting to a rubber mallet, that is a conditioned response.  They are rewarded for this behavior by their tribe.  They get what they want and need, and truth–lacking its own voice, and being forced to speak through people who are violently silenced–need be heard no more than the counsels of compassion were heard in the Spanish Inquisition.

I feel humanity is at the bottom of an immense, perhaps infinite well.  We are barely better than animals, and share a great deal with them.  I believe there are in fact angels, and angels above the angels.  Somewhere in there is genuine freedom.

Our task, at this level of existence, is to do what we can to stop reacting like squirrels, fishes, caterpillars, and grasshoppers.  We have a long way to go.