Author: White Whale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pv-2zCbeU

http://www.rense.com/general77/acrow.htm

Both of these links, the first a video, the second textual, claim that Barbara Bush’s mother gave birth to her eight months after an overseas trip in which she stayed in a house with Aleister Crowley while he was performing a sexual ritual that lasted some time.

I have to say, it is really hard to imagine a massive cover-up of 9/11 that did not involve George W. Bush.  And you take that step, it gets really deep, really fast.

Very rich people very often go more than a little bit crazy.  And the modern world is starving for precisely the sorts of stimuli–symbolic, ritual, mythic–that occultism is well positioned to supply.

On a semi-related note, I will make a post on something I noticed the other day, that there is now something called a “kink aware professional”.  I thought it only related to psychotherapists, but look at this: https://ncsfreedom.org/resources/kink-aware-professionals-directory/kap-directory-homepage.html

What, one wonders, is the need for an Accountant who is sympathetic to BDSM?

Here is a link to kink friendly therapy: http://kinkfriendlytherapy.com/

Can any honest human being truly claim that the overall thrust of our shared cultural life as it exists today is towards greater emotional intimacy, connection, sense of purpose, and goodness?

I do what I can.  It is all I can do.  It is a large world, and it is my sense that everyone is born with the ability to save themselves. Some of us try to do more than save ourselves, but in the end free will must be present for moral growth to happen, and the possibility of back sliding and failure must be present for success and progress to mean anything.

To state the obvious, those who choose darkness, choose darkness.  They cannot blame anyone, even if others played a role.  All bad choices lead to knowledge, so even the lost will one day–perhaps a very long time from now–also be saved.

It felt to me today like some small wounded part of myself occupies itself projecting fears onto large screens, and/or feeding me intellectual leads which will push me into my head.  This is a useful and needed task, but like the Wizard behind the curtain it needs to be seen for what it is.

I’m really trying to get away from intellectualism and arguing.  Both arise from a felt sense of danger in the world.  The world can certainly be dangerous, but it isn’t most of the time, in most places.  No, this sense is an echo from long, long ago.  Most of us have it to some degree or other, I suspect, even if mine is perhaps a bit more active–or MUCH more active–than most.

It seems to me it would be more useful to speak of archetypal RELATIONS than images. Take the Old Woman, perhaps the Hag, perhaps the voice of wisdom. Is it not her latent capacity to relate to us in one way or another, and not her vague and abstract idealization Out There which is of primary importance?

One must always differentiate between what psychologists find interesting to contemplate, and what is actually important in moral and spiritual growth, if we are to be useful.

it occurs to me that the principal  problem with Buddhism as a concrete set of practices and beliefs followed by many people in many ways is that Buddhists are addicted to Buddhism. You have to both  enter into and regularly exit the meditative space and mode of being. You have to bring wrinkles with you, iron them out, then get all wrinkled again.

During my Kum Nye practice–I don’t want to call it my meditation, because that really isn’t what it is; it is in a category by itself as far as I am concerned–a few days ago it really hit me that the world is filled to the brim with addictions.

We speak of “bad” addictions, like alcoholism or heroin addiction, but what if the same relief that these things provide could be had with a little pill which was cheap, not physiologically addictive, and that you never missed work, or did anything unpredictable while under its influence.  It caused you no physical ailments, and in fact was GOOD for you.

If you took it every day, would this not still be an addiction of sorts, merely a socially, legally, and physically benign one?

I did not really do this consciously, but it occurs to me I taught my kids to feel gratitude.  I have often pointed out things that were working.  We all love watching clouds, and unusual cloud formations and sunrises and sunsets.  We all enjoy the sound of dry leaves clattering in trees in the fall, and quality of the air.  We enjoy the flowers and tree buds in the spring.  We all thoroughly enjoy eating nice meals together, and feeling happy about it.

I have often told them this is a good place to be from, and that they can leave, but they can always come back.  We have discussed how their childhood was basically happy, even if it had some difficulties in it.  We talk about opportunities, and all the things one can do in life.

It’s odd to contemplate, but it seems that for people like me part of parenting is doing for others what I wish had been done for me.  I do not get the full benefit, of course, but do get the pleasure of watching seeds I have planted blossom.

You have to live with courage, and live forward.

The first trauma is like a rupture, like a membrane of some sort–a protective barrier of some sort–has been penetrated.  Every trauma after that aggregates around it, but the same techniques–principally dissociation and continuous activity–which work to manage one trauma will work for all of them.  As I have said, I suspect many soldiers ENTER the military with PTSD.  It is one place where their hypervigilence and emotional disconnection become virtues.

You cannot retraumatize someone who has already been traumatized.  You can merely push them farther into their defenses.

But what I am realizing is that you only need to undergo the process of healing once as well.  Once you know the way out, you cannot be trapped again.

Healing is a very odd thing.  You must have the intrepidity to enter an unknown land alone.  No one can go with you, at least no one who has not traveled that exact road themselves, which is very few people.  Most traumas go unhealed.  Healing is not returning to a place previously known.  It is not a reset.  It is a transformation.  That is the only way forward.  You have to sacrifice everything you are to become who you are meant to be. It takes balls.

But God fucking dammit I am going to do it.  I am doing it.  Soon I will be able to say I have done it.

You cannot imagine what a sunrise or sunset looks like to a newly freed captive.

Just watched this movie.  Expected it to be painful, but unexpectedly I found it amazingly inspirational.  I realized that the best kind of courage is exactly equal to calm, faith, trust, and acceptance.

She dies, of course, but she dies well.  It’s worth the watch, in my view.

We need to be able to use these terms to describe both people and cultures.  They do not disappear when they are banned from public speech: they merely become disfigured, ugly and wrongly used.

Can we perhaps compare a man who works hard, is scrupulously honest, a wonderful father and husband, to a man who gets drunk every day, lies constantly, borrow money he never pays back, has a fondness for 12 year old boys, who beats prostitutes, and–to add something genuinely objectionable–calls Obama “that nigger”.

If we cannot call one a better person than the other, then moral order is impossible.

My entire system is oriented around approximate orders, general orders, ones both subject to change, and recognized as in constant motion.

But the human mind works by creating distinctions.  If we do not create coherent ones, it will create incoherent ones.  Communists, for example, reject “bourgeois” morality, but substitute instead a morality based upon purely abstract and generally non-existent class distinctions.  Within their system, the latter man above would be vastly superior to the first man, if the drunk were labeled Proletarian, and the honest man bourgeois or Capitalist.  And in practice, many good people had their heads chopped off in the inauguration of the Communist era, the French Revolution, and many evil people made fortunes.

Ponder the smallness of the division now between those who commit microaggressions and those whose lives seemingly orient around punishing them.  This is an anti-morality, whose whole goal is to prevent honest speech, honest communication, honest CONNECTION between differing human beings.  No gap is bridged with histrionic shouting. Nothing is negotiated.  No empathic skills are actually learned.  No emotional intelligence is cultivated.

Ultimately, the core of morality is understanding. It is not external behavior, but what motivates that behavior.  This cannot be seen or reliably diagnosed.  Our drunk, above, may have secret virtues, and our saint may have secret lusts and angers and vices. These are both possibilities.  It is not appropriate to judge people as people.  But it is absolutely necessary to have ideals, and to recognize who is moving toward them and who away.  Some systems in motion are in fact inherently superior to others.  This must be admitted in principle, even if we choose not to spend time labeling people.

I am increasingly inclined to make of my third virtue two levels.  Level 1 is simple curiosity.  Level 2 is the regular use of the OODA loop.

What is the enemy?  Stupidity and following ineffectiveness, or even unintentional damage.