Author: White Whale

http://news.yahoo.com/clerk-issue-gay-marriage-licenses-court-ruling-083217111.html

The clerk’s husband, Joe Davis, came by to check on his wife. He said she has received death threats but remains committed to her faith and is “standing for God.” As for himself, he said he believes in the Second Amendment: “I’m an old redneck hillbilly, that’s all I’ve got to say. Don’t come knocking on my door.”

He pointed to the gay rights protesters gathered on the courthouse lawn and said: “They want us to accept their beliefs and their ways. But they won’t accept our beliefs and our ways.”

My whole issue with this non-debate is not the content, but the violence and lack of empathy and effort at understanding.  A person’s religion is their sense of self, their shelter in a cold and often cruel world.  To point a gun at them and tell them to violate it is in some important sense to rape them.

Yes, I can and have condemned Christianity. But I also do not deny–because it would be foolish and wrong–that it has accomplished and continues to accomplish a lot of good in this world.

Nothing good comes from propaganda, and this whole thing has consisted entirely in propaganda.

When the Communists used to–and still do, unless I miss my mark badly–say “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet”, they are speaking, for all practical purposes, of human sacrifice, and ritual torture.

What is a Gulag, but a game played by sadistic psychopaths?

What is reeducation, but ritual torture?

Could there be any important distinction between a victim made to cry out Satan or Mao while in pain?

I myself am capable of inflicting pain.  I am no angel.  Where the protection of my children particularly is concerned, I am capable of anything you can imagine, and since I am more imaginative than most, likely much more.

But what I am willing to do is place my attention on this place, on taming it, on recognizing it, on allowing it to do the things which are appropriate, which are good.

I don’t ever want to lose my testicles.  I don’t ever want to be helpless coward.  I don’t ever want to give in to that very congenial lie that we can all get along if we just go along. I want to be a warrior who detests war, and does everything–everything–in his power to make it less likely, and its converse–a joyful peace–more likely.

This is what I think Life asks of me, and I try daily to show up and do my best. I can do no more.

I actually think it is more useful to tell people they are lovable than that they are loved.  If you love them, you may leave.  But the quality of being lovable becomes an attribute of THEM.  And people sometimes lie when they say “I love you”.  I’ve been lied to many times.

Much of my parenting has been intuitive, and largely based on doing the opposite of what was done with me, but it occurs to me this was the other side of a little ritual/game I played with my kids.  I”ve described it before, but perhaps not quite this way.

I would tell them “I love you”, then ask “do you know why I love you?”  And they were supposed to say “why” even though they knew what I was going to say.  And I would say “because you are my daughter and because you are lovable.”

So this creates a triple stability.  They are told they are loved.  They are told my fidelity is absolute even if they choose to act unlovable.  And they are reinforced in the traits which make them lovable, while hopefully internalizing as an on-going permanent sense of their self that they have worth and value.

Neither of my kids has acted out in the slightest, and I don’t think they will.  Their teenage years were as easy–actually easier, since I rarely see them–as their earlier years.

It all depends on the relationship you build, and build is the word.  Words do not matter at all.  What matters is who you are, and whether or not you actually care about them.

I’ve been feeling like there is something I need to do before I expand, and it hit me that I need to connect, as a gestalt, as a “that”, the quivering in my gut with an intellectual acknowledgement of the presence in this world of evil.

All of us are capable of evil.  But I think when we fear evil out there, we are really projecting out, really externalizing something still within us.

If I might perhaps add an appendage on to Jung’s work, the Shadow self layers nicely onto the gut energy centers and neurological centers, particularly the unmyelinated vagus nerve.

I don’t think anyone incapable or unwilling to see evil in the world can ever really tap into the personal power we were all meant to have.  We all live half lives (most of us: I like to think there are some people out there I would REALLY like to meet), compared to what is possible.

In sacrificial culture they had regular access to this part, and it likely felt like something transcendent when they touched the primal animal in themselves, with all the energy and vigor it released.  These Satanists–and we can speak with certainty when we posit their existence, since they are increasingly proud of it–no doubt find release in their rituals.  They do something.

I remember talking with a woman many years ago in Europe who had participated in a Satanic ritual, and it scared the shit out of her, because some very real, quite tangible stuff happened.  I don’t doubt this.  There is a barmaid in my town I think was into that sort of thing in her twenties.  I can still feel the stain on her.

But the point I wanted to make is that I have a merger I need to make.  I have long noticed that I will sometimes feel a compelling need to seek out the weird and anomalous on the internet.  Sometimes it is the Graham Hancock stuff, sometimes ghosts, sometimes UFO’s, sometimes serial killers, but all of it is “out there”.

Our animal instincts present themselves to us, initially, as something foreign, as something alien. And what I now realize is that some instinctual part of me, some intuitive part of me, was trying to tell me that all that WAS me.  It was not out there at all, and that I could find some really interesting experiences making the acquaintance of my shadow, of my gut, of my viscera, of my stolen rage,and my potential power.

Yes.

Sadism is a poor solution to a real problem.

In responding to a comment, I looked up and reread a letter on the Oklahoma City bombing by  General Partin. http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/OK/PARTIN/ok8.htm

His conclusion:

Based on my experience in weapons development and bomb damage analysis, and on my review of all evidence available, I can say, with a high level of confidence, that the damage pattern on the reinforced concrete superstructure could not possibly have been attained from the single truck bomb. The total incompatibility of this pattern of destruction with a single truck bomb lies in the simple, incontrovertible fact that some of the columns collapsed that should not have collapsed if the damage were caused solely by a truck bomb, and, conversely, some of the columns were left standing that should have collapsed if the damage had been caused solely by the truck bomb.

Here is what I wanted to comment on, though: “It is my observation that the effort required to bomb the A. P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City pales in comparison with the effort to cover up evidence in Oklahoma and the media’s withholding of vital information from the American people.”

The same, obviously, could be said of 9/11.

The question is often asked, and it is a logical question: how could a conspiracy that vast be so cohesive?  How could there be no leaks?  How has there been no one willing to step forward and say “I was there, and this is what I did, and this is what I saw.”

Even with regard to Benghazi, we are finally going to see both a documentary and a film based on the accounts of those who were silenced for so many years.  They may not tell the whole truth, but they will tell a lot of it.

It is impossible (for an honest, reflective person) to speak with confidence about such deep mysteries, but it seems to me the most logical conclusion is that all the people involved BELIEVE in the cause.  They are not betraying confidences because they are working with their friends and colleagues.

And what is that cause?  My gut tells me it is bringing about a global iteration of the Pharaonic project, and that the proximate bonding method is something most of us would call Satanism.

I read books like Deeply Odd and I can’t help but wonder if they contain truths.  Newtown, CT was the home of one of the only posted Satanic churches in the country.

As any regular readers I may have know, I often think out loud, and I often propose bold, slightly or completely crazy ideas.  This is OK.  Nobody depends on this blog for their safety and I don’t make a living at it.  I am not asserting what I am about to say is true, and I’m not even asserting I think it is true.  It is something to think about.

One clear way you could ensure someone’s loyalty would be first traumatizing them, or making sure they had trauma in them, and then regularly enacting sadistic rituals.  The enthusiasm of that person for that “work” would be obvious.  And if they ever started entertaining doubts, there would be a period where they started acting differently, where their previous zeal was diminished.  It would take many months, likely many years, for any stirring of conscience to bear fruit into genuine regret.  And it would be on prominent display the whole time, for the group to take what action it sees fit.

Our world could be so much better than it is.  Why isn’t it?  Who is at the center of the efforts to make it worse?  Human stupidity and cupidity, obviously, but there seems to be more than that.

https://video-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hvideo-xfl1/v/t42.1790-2/11943646_907071956047035_61393747_n.mp4?efg=eyJybHIiOjMyNCwicmxhIjo2MTgsInZlbmNvZGVfdGFnIjoicmVzXzQyNl9jcmZfMjNfbWFpbl8zLjBfc2QifQ%3D%3D&rl=324&vabr=180&oh=864141caf056805f624c8e85f7579f4f&oe=55E4AB56

I was thinking about this.

First, it seems that this amounts to a public outreach campaign.  You have one place anyone can go to get tickets, and a second location where, presumably, existing members of the Satanic Temple can go to meet their new members.  I wonder if some of those people might not have been prominent members of the community.  Certainly, they could have been.

Second, it seems the news media was being manipulated, in that the statue is not actually getting unveiled “in public”.  It was unveiled in a private location, but pictures were provided to the news media, which actually provided significant advertising for the cause and presumably caused a lot more people to show up.

Third, I find it interesting that they wanted to make the tie-in “controversy”, as if there were not something inherently wrong with Satanic pedophilia.  I can’t help but feel more and different feelings would have been on display fifty years ago.  The reporters seemed to have no reaction at all.  Our sensibilities have become jaundiced to all but those certain situations involving race, sex, or sexual orientation where we react like Pavlovian dogs to start salivating and barking at the usual targets.

Fourth, I GET these people, I think.  They have horrors in their lives, traumas in their lives.  They feel lost, isolated, alone, different. They feel weird, disconnected.  Some of the worst hurt of them have likely already lapsed into sadism, but all of them feel a need for connection through pain.  What Baphomet offers them is a release from loneliness and solitude.  That is why so many of them are smiling.  They are anticipating a community of like-minded people, and a ceremony where they are a part of something bigger.

As I have said, I think sacrifice speaks to the gut self, the animal self, the predator.  This is where trauma hides, and where it can be released, temporarily.  The “high” religions of antiquity turned sacrifice into a spectacle and contained it within cultural limits.  To this I would oppose the headhunters of the world, who when they felt rage or grief would simply go kill someone, and take a trophy to recollect that feeling of release.

As I have said before, too, I think serial killers are enacting on a personal level the same dynamic which sacrifice does on a social level.

It has been my sense since college that an understanding of sacrifice–again, an “act of the sacred”–is essential to understanding the human condition itself.

And what is the difference between human and animal sacrifice?  According to this analysis, the level of detachment, which is to say hurt.  The Carthaginians I mentioned in the previous post threw children live into an enormous fire, just as Elie Wiesel reported the Nazis did 2,000 years later.

I will remind you as well that the word Holocaust is a religious word, used to refer to an animal sacrifice which is entirely consumed by fire.

One of the effects of trauma is hypervigilance, which amounts to an instinctual sense that EVERYTHING MATTERS.  That sound, that glance, that unreturned phone call, that shadow: they all may signal danger.  It would not be wrong to call it a prolonged perceptual spasm.


But you cannot maintain a spasm forever.


In my own case I started reading what I would now term nihilistic literature–that of the Dada movement–in my late teens to try and kill this nagging sense that everything mattered.  In my own case, having been raised by outwardly pious and highly judgmental parents, I was afraid to lift a finger to do anything.  I could not remain a child, and I could not emerge into adulthood.  So I had what amounted to a mild mental breakdown, of the sort common enough among clever people in our conflicted and deeply confused age.


In order to counter the effects of the spasm, I took what amounted to an affective neurotoxin, the idea that NOTHING mattered.


But this of course leads directly to nowhere.


I ought of course logically–the logic of our time being of course highly illogical–to have begun reading socialist comic books (they are all, even Marx, comic books).


But I decided to pursue “spirituality”, which by and large has its own set of comic books, its own confusions masquerading as profundity, its own escapes from reality.  Most of the time, in my experience, if someone describes themselves as “spiritual” you should run away.  This is regrettable, but largely true. I am often separated from people with whom I ought to share a common label.


Then I discovered, decades later, the clinical uses of alcohol.  I have used it to anesthetize my inner child while I try and figure out a way forward.  It gets what it needs, and my mature self gets some freedom of action.


My task presently is to merge the two without alcohol, and the only way I can do that is to get the message to my traumatized self that some things matter and some don’t.  That alertness is sometimes useful, and sometimes superfluous or even counterproductive.


Deep in meditation yesterday I was speaking to this part, and it fully expected to be killed any day throughout childhood.  I assured it that I could guarantee it would make it to at least 46.  I can’t make any promises about tomorrow, but it never expected to get this far.


It occurred to me the other day that this blog is a bit of a boundary violation.  I overshare, and it comes from an emotionally underdeveloped place.  It is likely much or most of this should just go in my written journal.  Or, since physically writing slows me down terribly, I could type things up and print them.


But this is still somewhat comforting.  It is a type of sharing, even if I am sharing with persons unknown to me, some of whom presumably wish me ill.  None of us make it out of this world alive, or unscarred.  The deeper the cuts, the deeper the experience.  And we choose daily what to do with that experience.  Me, I use it as wind, or try to.


The point of this post, though, is I suppose to call Nihilism what it is: intellectualized trauma.  I may have said this, but I like to think that when I repeat myself, I do so in slightly different ways.  I can’t remember all I write.


And I was thinking yesterday about the movie “Pan’s Labyrinth”, and the cruelty of the fascist father.  And I was pondering how the rebels–the Stalin backed Communists–would have had similar people emerge if they had won.  As it was, they kept torture chambers, and I’m sure assassinated what enemies they could. 


Then I got to thinking that the Fasces itself was an emblem of the Romans, who for their part would at times obliterate cities and even civilizations.  They would slaughter hundreds of thousands of people, and raze their buildings.  If my math is correct, they killed some 450,000 Carthaginians.


And I read this interesting passage from there: 

A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,

And Priam and his people shall be slain.

I liked this article: http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2015/08/30/the-first-rule-of-news-coverage/?singlepage=true

Had a white straight man killed a black gay man, released first-person tape of the shooting, and then unleashed a manifesto about being victimized by affirmative action and anti-religious bigotry from homosexuals, the media would never stop covering the story. They’d be eager to report that shooter’s motives with all the attendant politically correct hullaballoo about the racism and homophobia of the United States more broadly. We would hear about white supremacy (reprehensible Black Lives Matter leader Deray McKesson actually jumped the gun, thinking the shooter was white, and tweeted, “Whiteness will explain away nearly anything”).

And:

I’m not a Donald Trump supporter because I don’t think he represents my beliefs, but the success of his loud-mouthery should send a message to the mainstream news media. The message is this: You lie to us every day and we hate you for it. I’d like to add, Your dishonest narrative isn’t fooling anybody, but I’m sure it is. But not all the people, and not all of the time. 

The sufi opens his hands to the universe
and gives away each instant, free.
Unlike someone who begs on the street for money to survive,
a dervish begs to give you his life.

This is my favorite line of his.  I will note that what he is describing here is enlightened selfishness.  We can all only be selfish.  Even masochism is a type of selfishness.  The universe is what it is, and we are what we are.
And this is fine.