This is why you should watch children struggle with things for a long time, and why you should not feel bad when difficulties enter the lives of complacent people. Or your life, for that matter.
Trouble is wind for wings that are ready for it. Let’s call that a bon mot.
I was listening to Gibbon talk about the Emperor Julian, how he had many altars and that he made animal sacrifices on them every morning and evening. Picture yourself doing that. Picture someone handing you a live chicken, you ritually offering it to that God–let us say Jupiter–then ritually slitting its throat, or cutting its head off. Then you offer the dead animal again. And you do this twice a day.
It seems to me it would pacify the violence and bloodlust which always exist as possibilities for all of us. It seems to me much of the violence on television, and in movies and in video games exists to feed this primitive, primal part of us, which never gets to break peoples jaws, or shoot anyone, scream at the top of its lungs, or even OFFEND anyone. My god, can you imagine anything more productive of rage, of Donald Trump, than making everyone keep their mouth shut about nearly everything? Those emotions, that need to assert self, and to be heard, do not disappear.
But this blood also becomes something you NEED, something you feed on. The spirit is that of a vampire.
No, wherever Goodness is, that is true worship. That is what I feel.
And I will repeat the point I made in my Grand Inquisitor piece, that Christ did not intend to be taken literally, to have ritual cannibalism enacted in his honor. Wherever wine is, love is, and there he is. Wherever bread is, where communion is, there he is.
We live in an era in which the stupid people vote for Obama, and even most of the smart people still believe in global warming. To even approach reason and truth you have to be willing to be castigated as an ideological dissident. How did we get to this place in a free society? How did we allow it?
I think for most of history parents believed that if they created children who did what they told them to do, and acted as they were taught, that they had succeeded. But history is a succession of violent scenes, scenes of grief, rapine, greed, vanity, and internecine violence (I would argue ALL violence is ultimately internecine), is it not?
Logically, if shame is the outcome of trauma, then a shame based society is a trauma based society. You beat obedience into your kids, do you not?
And if you think about it, if you do not like the feelings that occur daily for you, to change them you need new ones, more open ones, more empowering ones, and how could they not feel foreign at first?
There is metainformation in ANY new feeling, negative or positive: what it tells you is that something different is possible. The sense of the possibility of change is necessary to ever consciously embrace change. And I think if it is not sought, some part of our unconscious snaps us back to the same spot regularly. It brings us back to “who we are”.
Today, walking in the park on a very nice day, it hit me that what keeps us out of the present moment is past momentS. We carry simultaneously many moments, moments of terror, of joy, of loss, of gain.
If you think about it, you can likely quickly access many life-changing or defining moments. The moment your parents told you they were getting divorced. Many moments hearing them arguing, but maybe one moment you really don’t remember until you focus on it, when you started shutting down emotionally.
Perhaps you had something wonderful happen, and you said to yourself “I will never be happier than this”, and your unconscious heard that, and took it seriously.
If you are a soldier, you may remember when you heard you were going to be deployed. Or redeployed. Or reredeployed. You may have PTSD, and many, or certain, moments burned into your consciousness. I suspect your healing will begin with the realization that there are other moments like that in you too, which are simply not as intense. They passed away, and so too can these memories, even if it doesn’t feel that way.
Emotionally, we are aggregates of many moments of heightened sense, heightened emotion, heightened connection, for better or worse.
And I felt this surge of energy and thought that it is time for all my moments to begin to open their doors to one another, to open up a general connection of feeling and emotion, and it felt clear to me that that is how you learn to live in the present, actually.
When you are living in the moment, you don’t know it. You can’t will it, because in the act of observing it, you leave it. I think there are people who talk about “the moment” who sit there thinking: “here I am, living in moment. Fuck I’m awesome.”
Conscious presence is an emergent property of a well organized nervous system and psyche. It is then, in other words, an emergent property of emotional health, which makes psychological work–or let us say, more broadly, energetic release work–the path to it.
Kum Nye literally means to massage your subtle being, your intermediate part between your body and space itself. It is built for this sort of thing.
Here is a summary:
The USDJPY traded at 122.26 JPY on Friday August 21, according to interbank foreign exchange market quotes. The Japanese Yen averaged 154.56 from 1972 until 2015, reaching an all time high of 306.84 in December of 1975 and a record low of 75.74 in October of 2011.
One of the first things modern “economists” tell developing economies to do is deflate their currency so that they can export more. That makes their stuff more cheap for other countries, but also more expensive FOR THEM. And the money comes from somewhere, does it not? It doesn’t grow on trees.
It comes from banks, normally from central banks, but also possibly from the government, depending on how things are set up; and from the fractional reserve banking system.
When you see Keynesian economics, you see this same dynamic, this same desire to pump money “into the economy”, so that even though Japan was developed, it likely acted as if it weren’t. And when you see all this what you also need to see is a power elite making fortunes, by stepping on the necks of ordinary working men and women. The same thing is happening here, just to a lesser extent than there.
I read the Japanese even have a word for “death from overwork”. It need not be that way, given sane economic policies.
Some day someone will listen to me.
What nation can endure like that, in a world still containing many Morlocks, many cannibals from the deep?
Christina Hoff Sommers is an avowed feminist and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She’s spent a lifetime visiting college campuses. Recently, upon her arrival at Oberlin College, Georgetown University and other campuses, trigger warnings were issued asserting, in her words, that her “very presence on campus” was “a form of violence” and that she was threatening students’ mental health. At Oberlin, 30 students and the campus therapy dog retired to a “safe room” with soft music, crayons and coloring books to escape any uncomfortable facts raised by Sommers.
The problem for students and some professors is that Sommers challenges the narrative, with credible statistical facts, that women are living in a violent, paternalistic rape culture. As a result, she has been “excommunicated from the church of campus feminism” in order to protect women from her uncomfortable facts. This prompted Sommers to say, “There’s a move to get young women in combat, and yet on our campuses, they are so fragile they can’t handle a speaker with dissenting views.” I wonder whether there will be demands for the military to have therapy dogs and safe rooms in combat situations.
The University of New Hampshire published a “Bias-Free Language Guide,” which “is meant to invite inclusive excellence in (the) campus community.” Terms such as “American,” “homosexual,” “illegal alien,” “Caucasian,” “mothering,” “fathering” and “foreigners” are deemed “problematic.” Other problematic terms include “elders,” “senior citizen,” “overweight,” “speech impediment,” “dumb,” “sexual preference,” “manpower,” “freshmen,” “mailman” and “chairman.” For now, these terms are seen as problematic. If the political correctness police were permitted to get away with it, later they would bring disciplinary action against a student or faculty member who used the terms.
What I will submit is that Political Correctness is an ANTI-morality. It does not teach its adherents what constitutes a good life. It has no equivalent to Eudaemonia, and likely in most cases explicitly rejects “normative” moral systems.
But what is left? Attack. That is all that is left. If you cannot live your own life in peace because you believe nothing–you don’t believe in the ideals of “manliness” or “womanliness”, or fathering or mothering, or believe in America, or God, or Christ, or even Goodness of any sort–then all you can do is detract from the lives of others.
Egalitarianism is the creed that all people are equal, but it is not the creed that all CREEDS are equal. If it were, it would be tolerant. As it is, it is radically INtolerant. It reject and punishes anyone who believes in notions like the relative worth of one morality versus another. It rejects and punishes anyone who thinks moral and spiritual growth are possible, since that would necessarily imply that some people are morally better than others–which is obviously, plainly, blatantly the case, which is why the propaganda and violence, to hide this fact.
This is why Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor wanted to immolate Christ.
This is why, to take a vastly different, but relevant example, Dr. Frank N. Furter had to kill Eddie in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. It has been some time since I’ve seen this movie–25 years at least–but I remember Meatloaf projecting an unambiguously masculine energy, in a world where all such distinctions were erased. All of these things, all of these signs, are all around us, of moral decay masked as moral superiority.
I just yesterday saw some informational buttons which had Male, Female, and Other.
And one has to ask: who is helped? No one. Who do I help, really, refusing to use the word American? Homosexual? Mothering? Elder?
This is a system formulated by and for drooling, philosophically imbecilic children. There used to be a grandeur and respect that attended being an “elder”. “Mothering”, in a positive sense, was understood as one of the most important tasks possible.
We lose all the good that came with these words when we lose the words. And we gain nothing. This whole thing is a system whose sole function is to allow anti-social, emotionally disconnected nihilists to feel the thrill of moral superiority doing nothing but advancing violence into the world under the banner of peace.
Here is one link: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/11/obamas-america-the-view-from-prague.php
I do seem to swim to the beat of my own drummer, if I might mix metaphors in an appropriate manner. I can see why someone saw fit to attribute this to someone outside the system, capable of seeing it from a high level, from a distance.
But what I do is phase in and phase out. I can exist in the system, and outside it. I can and often am the only person on the planet saying certain things. My treatment of the financial system is a good example. And I think this makes me useful. It is a burden, a hardship, a heavy load sometimes doing the WORK of seeing things with fresh and untainted eyes, but it is my “terrible privilege”, to quote Tony Stark.
The background of this commentary should be obvious. In his first few years, and again when he was running for reelection, I often summarized the negatives of Obama.
There can be no question that the “Stimulus” was a political payment–with zero or even negative economic utility–and little question that large, multi-billion dollar sums were redirected to causes and people unknown.
There is no doubt that the IRS was used as a political weapon.
There is no doubt that Fast and Furious was a very cynical ploy to support gun control.
There is no doubt that Obamacare is intended over time to either force Single Payer, or create a system in which a small insurance oligarchy controls the market, and works in a fascistic fashion with the government to create complete bureaucratic control.
There is no doubt in my mind that Obama created ISIS, in the process of trying to overthrow the government of Syria in support of Saudi objectives.
There is little doubt in my mind that Obama, his supervisor Valerie Jarrett, and whoever his actual backers and handlers are, want the Iranians to get nuclear weapons.
To this small and very incomplete list can be added many things, which would include the secret things we still don’t know about, such as the possible intentional diffusion of chemical weapons to Al Quedists in Syria for a false flag operation. One happened. People died. Does anyone other than me remember this? Do you remember Obama wanted a war, with our soldiers fighting next to the rapists and murderers of women and children, in support of their supremacy?
I will say this: if you required all voters to describe the major candidates, their views on three specific issues, and the pros and cons of those views, you would reduce the electorate by at least 90%.
We have people who can’t say who we fought in the Revolutionary War. We have people who can’t name the century in which the Civil War started, or find France on a map.
In important respects, Donald Trump is the conservative–really, moderate–answer to Barack Obama. He appeals to the same needs, the same desires, the same avarices, but adds to this at least some REASON.
It has become problematic rooting for this country. It has become socially disadvantageous in many groups to root for white people, for working class people, for the people who founded, and run this country.
We KNOW what happens when you put Mexicans in charge of a country. They create Mexico. Do we want that? Do even they want that? The root problem with most Latin Americans is that they have no problems with the abuse of law and principle, as long as it is THEIR group in charge. Much of the world is like that. Only in the Western world have people risen above principal identification with their clan to look to the well being of the whole. And look at what we have created. The place everyone else wants to come to, take advantage of, and in their avarice, to tear down.
Things to do. I’m ranting. That’s enough for now.