Our errors define us, do they not, in the same way our way of moving in the world does?
My “Moral Code” revolves essentially around the development of emotional skill and self knowledge. If someone were to plug some sort of brain controller in to you, and force you to do “the right thing” all day long, would that make you a better person? Is being forced by social coercion and the threat of ostracism really that different?
I don’t even think one needs to posit that humans are “innately” good. What I would posit is that a free individual or social system in motion will find their points of equilibrium and balance in ways of being which are “good” as I define them. Chaos rarely is. Orders are simply hidden, and they are particularly hidden when free motion is encumbered or even prevented.
And the converse applies: confinement and restriction breed meanness and feed what is always potentially bad in human behavior.
Whatever the message Jesus taught, I think it was perverted by the emerging Church to help ensure the financial and political power of the elites.
What makes sense to me is that he taught that God is not a fucking imbecile, and of course you get multiple second chances. And I think notions of eternal Hell were entirely absent, even if relative hells were present. In point of fact, I believe those exist.
But think this through. Animal sacrifices were commanded by the Torah, and were to be done at the Temple of Jerusalem. That Temple was destroyed. This would have represented an existential thread to Judaism outright.
Christianity found almost all its early adherents in Jews, and they seem by and large to have preserved at least for a 100 years or so many Jewish practices.
Animal sacrifice is for the expiation of sin. Sins, after the destruction of the Temple, could not be atoned. So why not, one can see someone reasoning, make of Jesus the FINAL sacrifice?
But if there is only one sacrifice, there can only be one expiation, and that logically implies that a choice has to be made with permanent consequences, which in turn implies that you go one way or the other, your sins are expiated or they are not. If not, you don’t get another chance, which means that if you don’t go to Heaven, then you go to Hell, and if you go to Hell, and you don’t get another chance, then that sentence is eternal.
This is logical, even if wrong and even stupid to the point of being abusive. Certainly it could not have been better calculated to allow the inculcation of fear which could be harnessed to the cultivation of quite worldly ambitions.
I initially demurred, and found myself near the back of the pack rushing the fences. I couldn’t help but thinking “you are joking, right?” (as a side note, I normally know when I am in a dream, and have a fair amount of control–I choose where to go, and what to do, and can usually levitate, use psychokinesis, and sometimes even walk through walls–but have learned it seems to be best if I just watch things go and try and learn whatever lesson it is trying to teach me.)
But they weren’t. In this “game” people on both sides were killed. I participated on “my side”, those charging the defenses, but decided after a time to “recycle” the game, and it started again. I was supposed to lead the charge for my detachment, while banging a cowbell. I lost my gun, so I again demurred, but then decided I was being a coward, and jumped to the front, and directly confronted the “enemy” commander, who threw down a knife, initiating conflict again.
We fought for a while, and my side lost. I retreated, and had to rerun my retreat–I have a rewind button in my dreams, sometimes–a couple times, but I got away.
Several thoughts occurred on waking. One, that this reminds me a lot of the frequent internecine warfare between the Romans. In one battle in modern Hungary, some 56,000 legionaries died on the same day. You would have identically clad and armored and trained men who spoke the same language–albeit sometimes as a second or third language–killing one another in support of their man’s side in a dynastic dispute.
It is natural to run and hide from conflict. It was only training, and particularly tying a conditioned response to the word “coward”, which allowed such senseless slaughters, among men who should have been brothers. For their part, the “barbarians” also prized courage, and they had often the added motivation of fighting for their lands, although of course the frequent cause of conflict is that they, too, had stolen other peoples stuff and raped and enslaved them, and the Romans were just protecting a part of their Empire.
And I thought of the religious conflicts between the Homoousians and the Arians, the vapidity of the difference between their creeds, and the knives that were stabbed in the necks and hearts and livers of at least thousands of men, woman, and likely even children over this ridiculously, obscenely small difference. It would be no different than separating out a Boy Scout pack and waging war over the exact way to tie a particular knot, or the exact requirements to be an Eagle Scout. Surely it is a bad joke. But it happened.
Then of course in terms of deep psychodynamics I am realizing that both the actively conscious part of me, and my defended side are on the same side. There is no need to push it, contend with it, or do anything but welcome it. It FEELS like a problem, because it has caused me a lot of grief and pain. But on the other side, no it hasn’t: it has done its best, in its childlike but very watchful way, to protect me from existential assaults. It is to be befriended.
In some important respects, it is likely best never to be overly angry with ourselves, even when we “screw up” badly. That screw up happened because we never learned to relax and to interact with the world in an orderly way. You can suppress screw ups through discipline, but that way you never learn what they had to teach you. You kill off an important part of yourself.
Most of us fail to learn all the lessons we could have learned. We all fail. It is inevitable, and even if it isn’t, it should be treated that way. Because if you insist on learning ALL the lessons you can, you will learn less than if you took a patient, welcoming, kind approach, and let those timid sensations and feelings gradually crawl and flitter out into the light. When things organically expand, it has NOTHING to do with will, except in its absence.
At the same time, balance is a dynamic concept. There are types of balances, and the EXACT way you need to balance will always vary moment to moment, and people that are clumsy will fail to do it.
We all need an ego. We need healthy self respect. We need to have some sense of who we are, what we are capable of. We need to have a history and at least a plan for the future. We need to be located in time and space in some respect, even if not ROOTED in time and space.
I see so much silliness going on in the name of egolessness. Most often, it seems to be used to avoid personal responsibility, to avoid hard decisions, as a support for the basic idea that we are all just happy brothers and sisters on this pastoral and peaceful Earth, and that only people who feel the need to defend themselves from the predations of others cause actual violence. For example: such people gladly suffer the comforting lie that Communism was something other than a creed advanced by violence and subterfuge which appealed to and attracted the most mentally ill and power mongering wherever it went, and that it had and has as a goal the complete enslavement of the human race in a permanent regime of terror, despair, loneliness, cultural destruction, and impoverishment.
Look at history. You don’t need to go more than 50 years back. 1965 Cuban terrorists were shooting in the head or locking in little cages for months people who refused to cooperate. Vietnamese Communists were strapping explosives to the backs of 10 year old girls and sending them as suicide bombs on bicycles to kill other children on the playground. They were mortaring nightly civilian areas, and assassinating every person in a position of any influence. In 1968 the Soviets invaded Czechoslavakia. In the mid-1970’s millions of Cambodian children, many under the age of 18, were strapping people who had been caught with a book or wearing glasses to tables, and torturing them to death with electrodes, and doing this multiple times a day. Perhaps a third of the overall population was killed, all for nothing. That was 40 years ago.
To THIS VERY DAY you can be locked in one of those soft torture cells in Cuba for dissidence, or killed. TO THIS VERY DAY Islamists are decapitating Christians simply for being Christians, raping and enslaving their women and children, and continuing a path of conquest perfectly congruent with the original military conquests of the “great” Muhammad, who, too, loved treasure, sex slaves, the murder of innocents, and the destruction of entire civilizations.
What seems to be my task, and it is a difficult and unpleasant, but necessary task, is to square being open hearted and relaxed, with a very deep awareness of the human capacity for evil. I need to both be clear eyed and forgetful. Every moment I am not molested or hurt, or anyone I care about, I should relish and be grateful and enjoy myself. But I need to recall without fear what sort of world this is.
As I have said, there is great evil in the Christian doctrine of absolute and permanent damnation. Islam takes all the worst elements of Christianity and makes them worse and unchanging.
Trauma is on all sides. Your parents beat submission into you, because to do otherwise is to risk eternal damnation. As an adult, you are expected to exercise no freedom of individual conscience. There is no “exploring” in the creed whose very name comes from submission. You can expect violence if you do not do as others around you do.
And within such an environment, no moral growth is possible. You have to be free to explore, to be curious, to understand for yourself how and why moral codes come about. All of this is sternly rejected and punished (in theory: as I have said before, the only good Muslims are bad Muslims).
And in the relationship between the sexes, it is force, trauma, rape and violence. At age 50 or so Muhammad “married” Aisha. At age 53 or so he fucked her. This was almost certainly before puberty. He was fucking a child who in this country would have been in third grade, would have been reading “Ramona the Pest” and watching the Cartoon Network or Disney. Edit: I read farther down in that link that he, the Great Prophet, loved to watch his 9 year old bride, with whom he was sexually active, play with dolls.
Ponder that. Not all religions are created equal. There is no basis in historical fact or philosophy to assume this is the case, other than a sophistry very congenial to those who believe nothing is worth fighting for.
And this is at the CORE of their doctrine. I read within the past year about a Yemeni man marrying a 9 year old and causing so much internal bleeding from fucking her that she died from blood loss. No doubt, his heartstrings being so sensitive, and his love so deep, he was profoundly wounded by his loss, and his next marriage was to an eleven year old.
The root problem with pedophilia is that it inherently represents a failure of emotional development. The children you are attracted to are at roughly the age where you yourself lost your battle with trauma. In Muhammad’s case, that was apparently before age 10. Perhaps it was precisely that trauma–my guess would be getting sodomized by an older man, as indeed still happens in Afghanistan as an open part of their culture to this very day–which led him to the mountains. Whatever he brought back, it was anything but the creed of a loving, caring, welcoming, just God.
Islam asks of the modern world a very basic question: what do you believe? What is worth fighting for? Are ANY of your developments in the realm of political freedom, freedom of conscience, equal justice before the law worth anything? Are any of your cultural creations worth a pile of spit? How would anyone know, when you persist in shitting on them? Are your women worth defending? Your children? How openly can we spit in your faces and expect you to forgive us, not knowing that we meant it fully? How easily can a vastly more powerful economic and military world be undermined from within, and at that virtually openly?
How fucking stupid and decadent are you?
It’s an open question. We all need challenges in life. Islam is a challenge to the world. In its pristine form, it is absolutely incompatible with peace and anything like human decency, especially where women and children are concerned, but even where adult dissenters are concerned. Fear can be the only prevailing emotion among those who believe that their only choices are submission and eternal hell.
The only comforts are those of sacrifice and sadism, particularly in the de facto human sacrifice of unbelievers, who like animals of old are decapitated in public as spectacle and for religious edification. Or perhaps they are hung from trees like the Nordic captives of old, without the solace of having their suffering cut short through strangulation. They are denied even that infinitesimal kindness.
I have confessed this to a practitioner of this work, but it feels to me like the Holotropic Breathwork I did, while useful in some respects, as a system works to retraumatize people. In trauma work, you don’t want to, as powerlifters and throwers say, “go big or go home”. Low and slow and steady needs to be the motto.
The whole thing is potentially very useful, but only once it loses the drug culture machismo. Hunter S. Thompson’s motto may as well have been “go big or go home”, but what concrete good did it do him? He was on various drugs and large quantities of booze and cigarettes his whole life, and he killed himself long before he reached the terminal stage of anything.
I woke up in the middle of last night and was really feeling that the whole of human history is defined by unresolved trauma. Religious sacrifice is related to trauma. Religious war–a related phenomenon–is as well. Everywhere you go in history, every where you look, you see–at least I see–unresolved trauma. The best parents, with the best of intentions, can traumatize their children.
I was in a comic book store the other day, selling the remainder of my collection (less Nick Fury #1, Warlock #1, and Avengers King-Size Annual #7, which has always resonated with me on a deep level, since I have long identified with Warlock, who “dies” and is reunited with his people in that issue) and it hit me that what I was seeing on all the walls was not all that different in intent and use than what one would have seen on display in a Roman or Greek, or Chinese or Japanese temple.
Comics always gave me this feeling I could not quite define. It was a sort of escape, certainly, but also a certain empowerment through visualization. I could imagine some psychological part of me was more like, say, Captain Marvel, than me. I could access, in other words, feelings imaginatively that were utterly denied me in the real world. I could access power. The essence of surviving and transcending trauma and learned helplessness is resurrecting a sense of power.
And what did suppliants at altars do in the ancient worlds? They asked for favors. They asked for blessings. And sometimes, they would feel powerfully that they got them.
Then I got to wondering about an experience I got getting invited last week to watch football at someone’s house. I don’t get invited to those sorts of things often, because I don’t really belong. I understand football better, I think, than most, simply because I am intelligent, and have watched enough of it. I don’t know the players and coaches that well, although it does seem obvious Nick Sabin belongs in the pantheon–see what I did there–with Bear Bryant.
And I was watching them yell at the television, as if they had the power to get that runner that extra yard, as if they had the power to make that receiver hold on to the ball, or the ball to make it through the uprights. And it occurred to me that this was a sacred setting in some places, one where the ritual space enabled and even encouraged the expression of emotions, of excitement, elation, despair and defeat, that were not allowed at other places and times, at least for men in groups.
It met, in other words, an emotional need, a very real one, one which is otherwise poorly met in our modern world. It is RATIONAL for grown men to yell at the TV and paint their faces, just like the Picts did of old, and for the same reasons.
And I feel this deep, deep solitude sometimes. This is not my world. I don’t have a world that I have found yet. I like watching football, and I like cheering for my team, but it cannot be sacred for me in that way.
And I felt that in this vast void of human experience, there needs to be a spark thrown farther into the darkness than any other, to illuminate and explore it. There needs to be someone on this planet, here, watching, who can simultaneously look at it from the outside and the inside, and figure out how we move forward from here.
The question is this: how can humankind as a whole learn to process and harness trauma in ways which increase emotional well-being, cultural wealth, social connection, and ultimately enable us to move farther and farther away from our animal natures, into the realm of a different type of experience, a different type of emotion and sensation, and towards the light which hides within all existence? Towards God, in other words?
This, at root, is the question of my existence. My intent is to build concrete ideas, expressed through specific people in groups, and to evolve them through experimentation so as to solve these problems, heal these wounds, and enable a human future, where such a thing at present appears doubtful.
This of course is ridiculously ambitious. But my logic is sound. The work needs to be done, and I can do some of it, at least. You cannot but begin where you are with what you have, and do it as soon as it makes sense to begin. The councils of prudence do not demand all projects begin immediately, but rather in the seasons when they makes sense. That time is soon. I am preparing.
Meanwhile,
Batman pondered his rage and his disguise
and burned both
They passed one another the next day on the street
and smiled and kept walking.
The danger to America is not Barack Obama, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than
Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America . Blaming the prince of fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools, such as those who made him their President.
Has anything changed?