Author: White Whale

It is a commonplace on the Left that the Right deals in FEAR.  Fox deals FEAR.  Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and etc and the other one deal in FEAR.

But who owns the Global Warming scam, now?  Who fears second hand smoke so much they act like little children when people light up in public?  Who is terrified of mercury poisoning, and overall environmental catastrophe?  Who panics when they find out there is aluminum in their deodorant?  Who fears families and overpopulation?  Who needs there to be racists so badly that they manufacture them out of whole cloth when needed ?  Who needs there to be a conspiracy of the rich to keep the poor down?  Who invokes fear CONSTANTLY?  Well, among others, the Left.

Fear propaganda is easy.  It is used on both sides.  Where and when it is appropriate really depends on the context–some of it is justified, on both sides; some not, again on both sides.  But to say that the Right has a monopoly on it is, like ALL left wing propaganda, very intentionally misleading, and injurious to sane, rational, goal oriented discussion.

And obviously the Left invokes “Science”, as if that were a thing, an oracle, a sort of All Knowing Being, and as if the manufacture of alleged consensus constitutes fact, when it obviously doesn’t: not in theory, not in practice.  Phrenology anyone?  Do you remember that the German universities were the best in the world (the American Ph.D system is taken from their model) when the Fascists took over, and that their BEST biologists by and large bought into Hitler’s use of Darwinian Natural Selection to justify and amplify his racism?

The Right invokes History, which is the same thing. It is the science of human behavior, which has to be understood as a matter of probabilities, and interests, both conflicting and aligned. One can see patterns happening, over and over, and can explain how and why reasonably accurately, if one is not trying to shoehorn data into a predefined conclusion.

Both Science and History can and have been perverted.  Both have uses.  Their utility depends on the goodwill and honesty of those using them.

I was laying in bed, pondering what to do. I am currently blessed with time, which is a luxury I would gladly pay good money for (and I suppose I am, in foregone business opportunities).  A voice came in my head saying “Get up and go run 26 miles”.  Now, I am not in any shape at the moment to run 5 miles, much less 26.

So, I ran it through my head, and watched a beginning and a failure, and a self recrimination, and a distancing.  And I asked that voice: what is this?  And it said: a disengagement.

And it occurred to me that this is how many people go about setting goals.  It is how I have gone about setting goals.  You SEE it in your mind, but it doesn’t have any life to it, any texture, any inherent vigor.  And it occurred to me that for me at least I need to feel a connection with the goal, that it has a life, that it is a child of sorts, needing nurturing.  I need to feel the growth inherent in it.  I need to feel a stewardship and responsibility.

I do not think it is overestimating the case to say that the points of life are love and goal achievement, which is to say purposive and effective work.  Freud got that at least right.

I have of course studied NLP.  I know the sensory modalities.  This sense, I think, goes beyond that, although I am clearly a Kinesthetic in most cases, and yes I know the words.

I really think sleep is the on/off of the human psyche.  If we posit that we regularly need “updates” and upgrades in our deepest emotional recesses, sleep is where it happens.  There will come a time when people do not remember this, but I remember when the first thing tech support asked you to do when your computer crashed was turn it on and off.

If you want to grow, if you want to prosper, sometimes you need long, languorous, outwardly useless sleep. You need it sometimes in large quantities, especially in the winter.  We need to be more like animals, because in large measure we still are.  Animals don’t live by clocks outside their bodies.

It is not true, as some say, that the worst is being alone with others.  The worst is being alone by yourself.  It is being with a voice within you that tells you negative things, which resolutely fails to give you support and comfort, which dislikes you.  This is the worst thing.

And if you fix this, everything else sorts itself out.  You CANNOT be alone with others, because you are never alone.  And you are much better able to find people with whom to connect.

I have odd and very abstract ways of expressing self pity.  I am this way, because I fight it constantly.  My principle is not “Be Happy”, but REJECT self pity.  This in no way assumes it doesn’t continue to come up.  It merely means you give it no space, no breathing room.

And persevering is both a negative and positive formulation.  It is positive in that you continue, but having begun, it really consists in not quitting, which also is a negative formulation.  It is what you do NOT do.

Only curiosity is truly positive.  Two Don’ts, and one Do.

In my life I have experienced many failures, many rejections, not least because I have tried and done so much.  I have ventured often, and as greatly as I could.  This has given me skin like leather, and I realize now my life has been a sort of “wax on/wax off” preparation for journeys I need to undertake.  It has been a kindness, a boon, a tonic.

Nothing is so, but our imaginings make it so.  There is not and never has been a NECESSARY linear relation between stimulus and response, other than in the most gross motor sense.

“Life is what you make it.  Always has been.  Always will be.”  Grandma Moses.

It continues to be a source of amazement to me how even groups existing in radical discontinuity with “mainstream” society can become profoundly conservative.  You have thousands of Buddhists out there saying regularly “if you see the Buddha on the road kill him”, who punish those who take this idea seriously.  Ayn Rand preached radical individualism, but exiled all those who thought differently from her.

The theoretical need for innovation and dramatically personal experience, radical honesty, is subsumed within a larger emotional need for conformity.  Courage is swallowed whole, digested, and dies in the process.  No one sees or says a word.  This happens every day.

We exist in fields.  I believe these fields are certainly psycho-social, and reach into the realms of evolution and biology.  In my view, they also exist in a much more “spooky” ways spoken of by Jung, Sheldrake and others.  We need these fields on a very primitive level.

But fields have levels too.  In order to reach higher, you must leave something behind. You cannot bring the bottom of the hill with you for comfort.  You must understand the need for the Middle, the “having begun, but not arrived”.  And this takes courage.  Very few have the ability to resist the siren songs of being sucked from one field into another.  You might trade one for another better one, but very few have the meta-skill of avoiding these entanglements.  First and foremost, it requires a capacity for solitude, for walking alone, with no reasonable prospect of being truly seen or understood, because in many cases I (changing voice) cannot yet see where I am going, or why I am doing what I am doing.  I trust, only. I have faith, only.  I feel a sense of duty.  I have the soul of a soldier, and this is my job, even though I cannot know what its cost may be.

Another meme one sees is that you should go where there are no footprints, and leave them.  This is a theoretical ideal.  But how many people merely mouth this truism, and consider saying it–repeating it–to be the same as having set out alone?

Radically original people are misfits because they cannot be categorized.  You are not an Is, but a Becoming, and most people fear beginnings whose ends they cannot see.

I would say this, though: virtually every large accomplishment in human history was accomplished one step at a time by people who had no way of knowing where their beginning would truly lead.  They simply saw a need, and set out to find an answer.

Several studies have probed the emotions of people along the political spectrum, and found that disgust in particular is tightly linked to political orientation. People who react strongly to disgusting images are more likely to sit on the political right and show concern for what they see as bodily and spiritual purity. They tend to oppose abortion and gay marriage, for example. But how ingrained is it?

Montague says they can predict with 95 per cent accuracy where a person is on the liberal-conservative spectrum just by showing them one picture.

Any regular readers I may have will recall that one of my preoccupations over the past six months or so has been integrating gut instincts–the knowledge of the gut, which is often hidden or redirected by trauma–into useful avenues of knowledge.

The way I read this study–and it warrants pondering–is that conservatives, in retaining the capacity for innate, instinctual, disgust, also retain a capacity for gut level decision making, and the reconciliation of instinct with reason, by which I mean the capacity, ideally, to listen to both.

If you have no response, obviously, you cannot integrate that response over any period of time.

It is a commonplace that sociopaths show little or no empathy with regard to the suffering of others.  It is, to me, a commonplace that the political left has overlooked and excused the most DISGUSTING crimes imaginable.  They do this BOTH by an aptitude for distraction, and, apparently, because they have lost the capacity to listen to their bodies wisdom.  This is how moral imbeciles like Van Jones and Cass Sunstein can continue to look at the history of totalitarian regimes and see anything but horror.

Or ponder being unable to react in any way to the image of unborn fetuses being ground up for useless medical treatments?  As far as I have been able to determine, fetal stem cells are in almost all cases rejected by all but very close family members.  Only ADULT stem cells seem to do any good, and those seem to do a great deal of good.

I have often said that politics can for many be seen as a SUBSTITUTE for a conscience.  Left wing politics in no small measure exist to reassure people incapable of normal–for our species, seen purely biologically–reactions to scenes of primitive psychological importance.

And what do you do when you lack something?  You overcompensate.  I will posit that left wing politics are the Monster Trucks of people with tiny moral capacities.

Obviously, European thought has evolved past ACTING on primitive impulses.  We did after all come up with the idea of enshrining the notion of universal human rights in a founding document.  But there is nothing in granting equality before the law–and PRACTICING equality before the law–which requires us to abdicate our more primitive instinctual drives, and using them as way-finders for our own individual moral integration.

As Peter Levine says over and over in his books, the loss of the gut leads to a loss of a sense of self.  We could perhaps even posit the loss of disgust as a defining attribute of the worst aspects of modernity.  Seen in this light, the atrocities of the National Socialists and their Communist brethren make perfect sense: their sense of  “disgust” was abstract, and thus functionally useless in directing them morally, or providing countervailing individualisms.

They claim disgust so vehemently, they clamor so loudly for the rectification of injustices, precisely because these emotions are LACKING.  They make up in drama what they lack intrapsychically.  This is the reason they feel no emotional connection with concrete outcomes, why they feel no need to learn from their mistakes and change their behavior to help the people they claim to care about: they don’t in fact care about anything but generating strong feelings to mask their inner incapacity to be fully human.

This is a rich mine.  

Saw “The Hobbit”, part 3.  I don’t like the Hobbit movies.  I like the Tolkien universe, but the Hobbit was a modest little book, intended more or less as an appetizer.  It had, by my recollection, far less drama, and far more fun.  I won’t be buying any of them, because they simply dilute my respect for the substantial accomplishments of the Lord of the Rings, which I do own and watch periodically.

I will offer this: dragons will not give up their gold without a fight; and always remember that even when you win what you thought was so important, it may turn out to have been of little value after all.  The Way requires both commitment and agility.

Theory of Everything: Atheism virtually from the first sentence.  “Cosmology is a religion for those who don’t believe in God.”  And quantum physics SUPPORTS God better than General Relativity Theory did (it has been cast on the waste bin of intellectual history as a final explanation of what is “really real”).

Then they go and insert liberal socialism in there.  Oi.

Being a somewhat proud contrarian, I will conclude by posting a paper posted some years ago doubting the Big Bang Theory.  I have not studied up on this topic in detail–cosmology is not one of my topics, other than a basic familiarity with the ideas and problems–but it is my HUNCH that something closer to Thomas Gold’s Steady State Theory will win in the end, if intellectual diversity prevails over dogma.

I was reading another article the other day with yet ONE MORE way to finesse a materialistic universe out of the math of quantum physics, but I fail to see how being a clever mathematician merely making internally consistent but unverifiable faith claims constitutes science at all.  String Theory is not science, and neither is the new version of it.

At the end of the day, people operate within the context of cultural paradigms.  “Science” is both a theoretical ideal for work, AND, more practically, a concrete set of personal relations which can color everything with unperceived subjectivity and error.  Scientists astray are fish who do not believe in water.

One other note on the Hoffman Process.  You are often asked how you feel.  Since most of us are emotionally constipated–at least in terms of our ability to consciously name varying and often complex feelings and even sensations–they give you a list of perhaps 100 different feelings, such as shy, shame, happy, focused, content, worried, anxious, etc.  This is a cheat sheet, so you can start naming and owning your emotional life.  Even people who think they are completely logical are in fact feeling often.  Those feelings may simply be condescension, a sense of superiority, anxiety at being wrong about something, etc.

Anyway, several times I was–I actually think startled is the right word–to find nothing, no feeling to name.  Then I realized CALM is one of the possibilities.  Calmness is an absence of negative or positive emotions, but it IS a feeling.

It’s odd to contemplate, but I think as a modern American I have become addicted to sensations, and forgotten that simply being is not just an option, but an eminently good one.

I have been doing what I am calling Chrysalis work, which is deep unconscious work.  You do this with guided visualizations, and also through allowing deep content to come up. I recently completed something called the Hoffman Process, which I just have not felt like discussing, because I continue to experience it, and am wanting it all to flow before I try and capture it intellectually.  It is more or less open source, though, and it is my understanding that you can share any and all of what is done.  It is and will always be much more useful and effective done in a focused, intensive setting.

One tool I thought I might share because it seems both powerful and simple is the Elevator.  Take some difficulty you are having (what they would call a pattern), such as procrastination, and form a question, such as “why do I procrastinate so often?”  Then imagine you are standing before elevator doors, which open.  You go in, and your question is written on an enormous button, which you push.  The doors close and you go down for a while.  Then the elevator stops, the doors open, and a scene is presented to you.  Make a note of what that scene is.  It is quite likely it will be from your childhood.

Do this 3 or so times, and then interact with the images intuitively and intellectually, and see what they are telling you.  In my own experience, simply calling this content up helps relieve some of the behavior.

They teach other tools as well, but I thought I would share that one.

Lumosity tells me my brain is best suited to be a mathematician.   I like this.  I am in actual fact a very poor mathematician–I never even got through Calculus, although it remains on my list of things to do–but ever since taking Geometry my freshman year in high school with Mrs.  Edwards I have loved the notion of building logical structures with terms I get to define.  An absolute bedrock principle with me is that any thought system that is worthwhile can be shrunk to a series of short bullet points, and expanded virtually indefinitely.  And the mathematical formula encapsulates this principle.  Think of the domain of F=MA.  It is all of visible reality, or all reality consisting in what we call “matter” or “mass” for simplicity.

Goodness is “sharing happiness gladly”.  Three words, but large possibilities.

I would, for example, differentiate goodness from duty.  Duty, in my view and experience, largely stems from a generally unconscious fear of negative consequences.  Duty is often beat into us, verbally and/or physically.  We do the right thing not because we instinctively empathize with or feel compassion for someone, but out of some combination of habit and fear.

And obviously you cannot SHARE happiness if you cannot feel it.  Happiness is the essence of love and connection.  Where they are present, happiness is present.  And where they are absent, happiness is absent.  Now, it may be me, alone, feeling love and connection with my higher self, with God, with the universe, and sharing that.  This is what holy men, when they actually warrant the term, do.  The grade of the holy man is the grade of happiness they can share.

Fanaticism in the NAME of some alleged higher good, obviously, cannot qualify here, because I have put consequences, concrete outcomes, into the definition.  If you say you want “social justice”, but everything you touches turns to shit, if people become disempowered, poorer, more disconnected, more violent, more resentful, less loving, less beautiful, then you have shared nothing.  You have in fact impressed upon the world your own LACK of love, lack of true happiness, lack of true purpose, lack of goodness.  This is the path of the left wing radical.

And I want to alter the fairly abstract “Perceptual Breathing” in favor of simply calling it curiosity.  I will remind you that neurologically, curiosity is the literal opposite of trauma.

My system, then:

Axiom: The purpose of life is to pursue Goodness.

Definition: Goodness is sharing happiness gladly (I should of course define happiness, but that will have to wait for another day).

Postulates: Three daily decisions most support this purpose:

1) Reject Self Pity
2) Persevere
3) Be curious

Geometrically, this may not be quite right.  It’s been many years since Freshman Geometry.  Still, I think what I am trying to do is obvious enough.