Author: White Whale

Does Donald Trump, and the support he has built in the Republican base, not in some respects validate EVERY suspicion the Left has inculcated in the conformists who toe their line, that the Right is racist, sexist, ist, ist, ist?  They have been trained to convict us in absentia on much less–indeed, frequently non-existent–evidence.

Can they not use him to inculcate the idea that we are bad people, and to vote straight ticket again when the time comes,  and leave the thinking up to the Democrat leadership, and don’t worry too much or pay too much attention if Democrats win the election–your part is done for now–it’s all dealt with and LOOK there is a new Thai place at 5th and Main.  I bet the Pad Thai is amazing.  Thanks for your support, and we’ll see you again in two years.  Okay?

Oi, I can feel my brain shrinking.  I think I need to listen to some Mozart or Haydn.

You know, whoever this Ishmael fellow is, he is pretty clever: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/dean%20rosengarten%20reply–modified.pdf

Seriously, I read my own work sometimes and am surprised at how many thoughts I have thunk. Yes, thunk.  I write so much, I forget what I have said, and can almost read some of this as if for the first time.

This paper was sent to the then Dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, who I was acquainted with as a very amiable, extremely intelligent, highly motivated and diligent person.  I had asked for feedback with respect to a book proposal, and found myself writing this, which I think pretty much screamed that I did not understand the concept of a book proposal.

I like the work I did, but it was not what he committed to review, and I never heard back from him.  He was and no doubt remains an extraordinarily busy man.  I was surprised, honestly, he agreed to look at it at all.

The cynical part of me, though–and it has no food to nourish it here, to be clear–has wondered if part of the problem was my assertion at the outset that the Humanities ought to be useful, and that philosophical progress is both possible and desirable. These sorts of ideas create the intellectual equivalent of the vapors in modern academic environments.  One can imagine women fainting and sensitive men hyperventilating in paper bags.

Humanistic Positivism?  Has anyone coined that term?  Google thinks not.  Plant that flag on my intellectual 40 acres.  We are plowing ahead with empirical Intuitionalism.  We will sort the details out as we go.  I have many ideas.

It is a good thing for my mental health that I spend most days surrounded by HVAC and data guys, carpet layers, drywallers, electricians.  Their ignorance and small-mindedness–actually I feel the need to point out most of these folks are much smarter than you might imagine, and much smarter than a lot of college graduates in every way that matters–I find quite tolerable.  The other kind–and I reiterate this is not directed at any individual–drive me up the fucking wall.   Far better to literally BE up the fucking wall.

Shit: I’m whining.  Breaking my own first rule.  But you know that is the value of rules: they serve as way finders in this vast expanse of trackless desert we call Life.  Something is true.  In my system, the truth is that if you are feeling sorry for yourself, you are fucking up.  Period.

Here is a question: do you want a Hitler or a Stalin or a Castro to tell you what to do, or are you willing to submit to the energy of your own sense of things, own sense of propriety?  You will be bounded.  As Bob Dylan put it in his Christian phase, you gotta serve somebody.  The question is, will this happen by chance, or through an honest process of thought and reflection?  Will you remain alive, or will you choose death?  You have both options, in every moment of your life.

When I compare a Buddhist or Hindu doctrine that we get an infinite number of chances, to the Christian and Islamic ideas that we get ONE CHANCE, and one chance only, the amount of tension the latter generates in comparison is unbelievable.

And I think, too, about what an awful doctrine it is that I was born fucked up–that the consequences of decisions made by someone thousands of years ago must be carried by me, that I was “born in sin”, which is to say that I was born convicted of a crime, born guilty of a crime–and that ONLY by full and voluntary submission to the ideas of those leading one church or another, through de facto submission to men, in the name of God, can I somehow be “washed clean”.  And for more than a thousand years, that submission was quite directly to men who profited from it. Yes, my baptism at birth would have saved my soul, but it only stayed saved through the surrender of personal autonomy of conscience and behavior.

Countless thousands perished in the literal fires built by men who claimed to serve God.  The Romans found Christians distasteful only because they rejected everything they believed, quite publicly.  They were otherwise completely tolerant to all beliefs and practices.  The Jews were less tolerant, but there is no record of anything like inquisitions and the mass killing of alleged heretics.

One does not find radical intolerance UNTIL Christianity, the creed allegedly based on love, but whose unique power rested on fear.

It is certainly possible to say that “the truth is the truth”, but on the face of it does this sound like a merciful God?  I cannot remotely accept their scientism, atheism, and belief in matter, but I understand quite well the theological objections of the Dawkins and Harris’s of the world.

Gibbon is really helping me contextualize Christianity.  He really seems quite partial to the Romans.  He knows the history well, and I am enjoying him tell it.  He deals with the grotesque hypocrisy of the Roman Universal Church, the kingdoms it formed, the lies it told, the wars it fought, and the immense wealth it amassed and keeps, all in the name of a poor, pious man who preached humility, service, and the rejection of earthly wealth.  No one can look at a Roman Pope and see anything but a grotesque mockery, a big “Fuck you” to Christ, whoever he was.  Whatever Jesus taught, it was not intended to serve the causes of pride, power and prejudice.  And like it or not, all Christianity comes through the Catholic Church.

What I am realizing is that the most important doctrine of Christianity is not the power of love, but rather the fear of eternal damnation.  Who can think calmly and rationally when the possibility is put on the table of going to Hell FOREVER?  You do not win converts through cultivating love in them, through expanding them, but rather by putting the literal fear of God–an ostensibly loving God, who nonetheless was “forced” to create Hell–into them.

Many early Christians were eager martyrs.  In his snarky style, Gibbon makes this quite clear.  The Romans, for their part, were quite confused. I think it was Marcus Antoninus who said something close to “Surely those who want to die cannot fail to find themselves rope or a precipice?”

Surely we can consider a religion which cultivates an eagerness for death one which is NOT life affirming?

The Catholic Church is not built on love.  Of course, there are charities–public charity actually being a key means of developing support in the early years, one which is used in the same manner and to the same effect by gangsters in New York, Italy and elsewhere, who hand out Christmas gifts to kids, and provide food to the hungry–but can it truly be said that the love of love outweighs the fear of eternal pain in most?  Once you have been “saved”, of course, it frees you to focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, but does not the power of the Pope to “excommunicate”, which is to say, to condemn to infinite pain, carry more weight?  Or did it not, for many centuries?

It seems, increasingly, that given a supposition of eternal hell, that Islam is actually a far more logical religion.  Rather than let people be condemned to hell, they go out and conquer them and convert them at the point of a sword.  They create an airtight society geared to public piety, and to the continual reinforcement of all the behaviors which will help a person avoid hell.

They avoid a rich, entrenched, politically powerful clergy by conflating temporal and religious power in a Caliph.  They avoid ambiguity through a clear text, with clear rules.  There can be, in theory, no question if someone is “saved” or not.

Ponder, if you will, the existential angst that must have attended, and continues to attend, the lives of those whose beliefs posit that only a certain number of people can be saved, or even worse that Divine Grace–what a word!!!–alone can save them from a pit that that same divine being created.

These ideas can and have driven countless millions–billions, certainly–mad.

We need to move past the religions of the past.  We cannot and will not reconstitute globally even the best religions, such as Buddhism.  We need a wedding of society and science, but a science which is honest, which includes the data about an after-life, about psi, about a cosmos which is conscious.

Increasingly, it is my honest belief that Christianity, as it has come to be expressed, has been a curse on humanity, not because of the value it places on love and service, and sacrifice, but because of the doctrine which it alone taught, of eternal suffering.

For their part, the Romans and Jews and many other polytheists didn’t really think about the after-life at all; and among the Asians there were heavens and hells, but none lasted forever.

You know, one might conclude from somewhere or other that I am a mighty reader.  I’m not.   I suck, frankly.  I’m going through “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” slowly, on Audible.com, but the one book I am reading, “Antifragility”, by Nassim Taleb, I am inching, snailing, turtling my way through.

But I will invoke one passage, where he critiques Steven Pinker for believing that the reduction in war and violence over the past 1,000 years, let’s say, somehow means the future will continue that way.  He says risk is in the future, never the past, and we are at a place where so many things could get so fucked so quick, that no sane person could say we are safe.

And I feel this.  We all have our demons, our past.  We all have emotions floating up from somewhere, if we listen to them, that take us here or there.

But there is the macropicture too.  Sane people, in my view, wonder how long we can borrow 40% of the Federal budget, mostly from the Fed.  Sane people look at Medicare particularly, and wonder how it can stay solvent, with the mass retirement of the mass Baby Boomers.

Sane people wonder who got Barack Hussein Obama elected.  Sane people wonder where he was in his twenties; who paid for it; whether or not he is gay (like Hillary); whether or not Frank Davis was his actual father, and his mother a porn “star”; what his actual birth certificate says; and who paid for his education.  And who wrote his books.  Michelle is apparently on record as saying Bill Ayers wrote them.

Then you have 9/11. Once you dig a certain amount, you start to question your sense of reality.

But I would say this: anyone who is serious has to add to their possible list of “mental health events” the wholesale collapse of American society.  No one can say it is impossible, and increasingly it even seems likely.

If telling the truth has become a revolutionary act, we need more revolutionaries.

It seems to me there is deep relationship between the two, and a deep relation between both and personal growth.

When people “fall in love” is it not in large measure because of curiosity about, interest in, the other person?  And when curiosity is gone, when all that was unknown is now known, do they not fall out of love?  Could we not call some romantic flings “curiosity induced relationships”?

Are people who are “intriguing” not so because they inspire curiosity, which is to say open engagement?

By its nature, curiosity is about change, isn’t it?  By its nature, it is searching out the new, it is seeking discoveries.  It is the opposite of complacency. It is going “out there”, and never content with staying “in here”, with “this”.

And is USEFUL love not a true curiosity about another human being, a desire to learn about them, to get to truly know them, to connect with them?

Could we not say that endless curiosity leads in short order to endless love?  I think so. The more I “think”–this is not quite the right word for what I do–about it, the more I think they are flip sides of the same coin, and worth considering as such.

I am realizing there are really three stages to psychospiritual growth.

1) you have to open up your psyche, your mental/emotional/physical body to hidden places, frozen zones, areas where movement has stopped and the birds been frozen in the sky.

2) having touched those feelings, and the thoughts which come from them, and the physical sensations which they give rise to, you have to learn to transform them into positive energy.  You have to reinvent yourself.

These two stages are psychological, and could be said to consist in healing, but healing is really just growth from a place of being incomplete, so I tend to prefer the term growth or a synonym.

3) you have to learn to do this with ALL experience, continually.  You have to both remain aware what is going on in you, and be able to transform it on an on-going basis.  You have to reinvent yourself continually, which means you cannot be too attached to any one form.  This is, as I think I have argued repeatedly, the basis of the Buddhist Anatta, or Anatman.

This process is spiritual, or at least I think that is the best term for it.

Most of the time, the obvious thing happens.  In a contest, the stronger, better prepared party wins.  The one with leverage wins.  The one who apparently has all the cards wins.

But not always.  This is why you have to play the game.  Sometimes strange things happen, sometimes all the pundits are wrong, sometimes the impossible happens.  Miracles happen.

I was in a situation today that felt quite bad, but I am in the habit of persisting and adapting, and what felt quite bad suddenly flipped into something strongly positive.  You just never know.

Do what you can, and let Fate (or chance, as you may see it) decide what the outcome will be.  You don’t need to, and never quit until the Universe speaks back to you.  Then retool, and go again.

I can’t begin to count the challenges I have faced stone cold alone.  Nobody has had my back most of my life, not even me.  But I kept going.  And there have been a number of situations, 3-4 come readily to mind, where if things had played out only slightly differently my body never would have been found or identified.

But I think there is something in me–in all of us–which we might call luck, but which is more of a species of intuitive intelligence, where a spontaneous decision completely changes a course of events.  When miracles happen, I think this intelligence is quite often behind it.  Some part of you knew.

It is the task of all of us to identify, befriend, and learn to listen to this part.  That part lives in the Tao, and partakes in the movement that underlies all that is, and all that is not, but could be.

You know, we are animals, in part.  It is our ability to think, to weigh options, to invoke principles and heuristics, to foresee, which makes us different.  Thus, it is only in making decisions, in choosing courses of action–for reasons, which are some combination of intellectual or emotional or intuitive–that we rise above our animal nature.

The reason I was saying this is that I in a phase of my life where I am having to make a lot of decisions, and I am thinking back to Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.  I can understand the impulse to surrender freedom, to become a part of a herd.  We speak of a “herd instinct”, but I wonder how often we realize the literalness of this metaphor?  To be in a herd is to feel safe, to feel protected.

And do you not instinctively want to be in the middle of the herd, and not exposed on the periphery?  That is the image, the feeling, that I get.

To be free it is necessary to learn how to feel calm and safe without a herd.  It is necessary to be able to make calm decisions, and to do so even when no one supports you, and even when everyone opposes you.  This is the essence of the learning that we need at this level of existence.

You know, Trump’s popularity should tell us a lot about the modern political scene.  In important respects, we already have CHOSEN to live in a Stalinist state, where truth is verboten.  Who, among ALL the Republicans, other than Trump, have pointed out the OBVIOUS fact that Obama has NEVER demonstrated that he was a natural born citizen?  That he has NEVER produced a valid birth certificate, and in fact when motivated to do so by, if memory serves Jerome Corsi’s book, foisted a blatant, indefensible forgery on all of us and GOT AWAY WITH IT?

Nobody can condemn Trump without first looking in a mirror and asking themselves how complicit they have been in the blatant lies, the naked, open, glaring in your face lies, of the Obama years.

Most of the Republican establishment has been craven.  If they want to call Trump crass and hypocritical, well, he is those things.  He is also at times capable of telling the truth, which differentiates him from the jackasses in theory providing an alternative to the swift and definitive failure as a nation the Democrats are ushering in.