Author: White Whale

But when it comes to abstract systems–like the economy–the connection between action and consequence can easily be obscured.  It is very possible to do something that makes you feel good which works on balance to hurt people you never see, never know, and whose fate you never learn.  And they never connect their misery with you.

The moral sense must be tied to learning, to a developed sense of responsibility to work diligently for understanding.

This is why my third sacred principle is Perceptual Movement.  I don’t tie it down too hard.  What I mean is continuing to learn on every level which presents itself, in every language it presents itself in.

Here is an alternative idea.  As I understand the matter, the problem with solar and wind is that they are intermittent.  And wind towers are ungodly expensive, kill a lot of birds, and are ugly as bear shit.  Being intermittent, they cannot be relied on as steady power sources, which means in practice that countries like Denmark, which have tried to adopt wind technology, have to “borrow” nuclear power on a regular basis from countries like Germany.  If Germany did the same thing, they would have regular blackout, which is not a very good solution to solve a problem–Anthropogenic Global Warming–which does not even exist.

Long ago I wondered about giant batteries, but this is apparently not feasible.

Here is an alternative: what if you built large underground reservoirs of some material like water, or something better yet to be invented, which takes in and holds heat.  Run pipes of it through the sun in places like Nevada, such that it absorbs the radiant heat, then put it back into its “thermos”.  This material–let’s say it is water–can then be evaporated at a steady rate.  It can HOLD the energy it takes in, and release it in controlled ways.

I am no expert in physics, but perhaps a system can be designed in which the heat itself creates the suction to pull it in and push it out.  This is another huge problem with alternative energy sources: wind in particular takes more in fossil fuels to create (i.e. physically building the turbines then shipping them on the back of a truck somewhere to be erected with cranes on sites cleared by bulldozers) than it will ever generate out on a wind swept prairie.  It does make tree hugging hippies (not that there is anything wrong with that) feel good, but if the goal is reducing dependence on fossil fuels, it is an abject failure even on that level.

It seems to me–and I concede in advance and openly that I am perhaps being ignorant and stupid–that the focus on converting energy to immediate use, like photovoltaic solar cells, obscures the fact that energy can be taken up and stored in many forms.

It may be that there is no difference in perceptual sophistication on this level between an unintelligent person who expresses trauma through recurring feelings and images, and a much more intelligent person who is able to dissociate the feelings entirely and instead think obsessively.

The former, actually, would be more advanced.  I am perhaps myself somewhere in them middle.  I remarked long ago that my thinking seems to be a way of running productively.

But if you NEED thought, it cannot have an end.  You do not work, say, the way you work to build a house.  Once a house is done, you stop building (unless you want an addition, and that, too, has an end).  With thinking as an aim, there is no limit to the number of words you can inflict on the world.  Trust me, I know.

And this linkage is interesting.  I wake up most days and the thought comes in my head “everyone hates you”.  I can and of course do dispute this cognitively, but that is not where it comes from.  What happens, I now realize, is that some primitive sensation in my gut gives rise to the feeling of disgust, and that in turn crystalizes as the thought.  Rather than interrogate the thought or the emotion, I am now focusing solely on bodily sensations, and it seems to be alleviating this problem greatly.  I am getting moments, and even hours, of honest calm.  It is a beautiful thing.

Certainly, there is survival value in this.  In the wild, or in combat, or in a hostile environment, constant vigilance is needed.

But I think the way to do it is how animals do it.  They are completely relaxed most of the time UNTIL some signal appears to them.  They are not waiting for the signal, but respond when it appears.

If you can’t relax effectively, you can’t work effectively.  This is what I have concluded.

Peter Levine, on a related note, talks about how fear and anger and sadness and every emotion we are capable of feeling actually FOLLOW kinesthetic sensations.  The knot in your stomach becomes what we call fear.  It happens first.

This opens up an extraordinarily interesting possibility: by attending to our bodily sensations, by listening to them, feeling them, opening them up, challenging them, investigating them, we gain control of emotions.  We become able to get all the good things emotions give us–fear, for example, being a signalling mechanism that something is wrong–without having to go into them fully.

Further, we become sensitive to and better able to feel those sensations that give rise to the feelings we want, like belonging, emotional satiety, contentment, happiness, pleasure.

I have been attending particularly to feelings in my solar plexus lately, and it is astonishing how quickly I am becoming more optimistic and sensitive to feelings of space.

And what I am realizing is that these sensations give rise not just to feelings but to thoughts.  Thoughts are the products of unprocessed, unaccepted, unrecognized physical sensations.

Ponder that most meditation seeks to attain a thought-less state.  How can this be done when the body is not fully integrated?  This is the genius of Kum Nye.  Peter Levine is the first mainstream author I have seen mention this system.  Kum Nye necessarily precedes meditation.  There have been a number of reports that meditation actually makes many people more agitated over time.  Why?

I would guess that the underlying body energy remains unmodified, but its expression in thought is eroded, so it has no outlet.  It gets bottled up.  To be clear, this energy is not positive, but until it is identified and “pulled in”, it remains.

And I think of a Sartre, who was compelled to write.  I think of intellectuals, compelled to think, even if everything they think turns to disaster, as happened with most French intellectuals of his period.

This is unidentified traumatic energy, unprocessed horror and sadness, which is remembered viscerally, and which comes out in both emotion and thought.

The most intimate sense we have of ourselves is through proprioception, kinesthesia, and visceral sensation.  Proprioception is afforded through special sensory receptors in the joints that signal the position of all the parts of the body with respect to gravity. Kinesthesia is the sense of the degree of tension in your muscles.  And the visceral sense arises from receptors in the gut that are integrated by the enteric nervous system (a neuronal system in our gut with more nerve cells and complexity than the entire brain of a cat has).  Without these internal senses and without an expanded “non-trance” perception of the external world, we simply are unable to know ourselves and realize it is YOU who is focusing on these events whether they are interesting, pleasant, beautiful, ugly, dangerous, dull and so on.  Without the unimpeded perceiving of these sensations, it simply is not possible to know WHO you are and what you want and need in life.  This is a strong statement, admittedly, but hopefully you will become convinced about its veracity through experiencing the following exercises yourselves. [he then goes on to describe exercises in Somatic Experiencing].

Ponder this.  Ponder a philosophy class on Existentialism in which people submit to tapping into their primal nervous system apparatus, in which they chant VOOOO until some of them start shaking or have other powerful visceral sensations.  Ponder a class where the answer to who you are is: THAT.  The teacher will at that point be fully superfluous and useless, as indeed most philosophy professors are in practice.

Who you are is not an intellectual question, or at least at best perhaps one third an intellectual question.  The felt sense of self has NOTHING to do with cognitive operation.  It has to do with the EXPLANATION, with the words you use, with the conceptions you offer, the contextualizing.  It ENDS there; it does not start there.

I have argued that much of “modernity” can be seen as a poor resolution of grieving, but I would add to that that the better word and concept is probably trauma.  The two are related, but different.  Bolshevism only truly came into its own following World War One.  Communism, likewise.  Fascism likewise.  Millions dead, for nothing, for fuck-all, for the vanity of kings and would-be kings.  For NOTHING.

Surely nothing would be a better master, since It is at least honest.

There is a lot to digest here. Chew on it.

Seriously: ponder the statement “Substantially everything you have been taught about how to live, and what to do and what matters is almost completely wrong.”

Do we not look often with sentimental attachment to primitives, to the “noble savage”?  From this perspective, is not their salient trait a continued attachment to the entirety of their selves, of their primal apparatus, and not an effort to paint over and wall off primitive instincts that gain in power because, having lost consciousness of them, we lose control over them, and they in turn begin to control us?

Food for thought.

If we return to the original French Revolutionary Assembly, who do we find on the right?  Monarchists.  If the National Socialist German Worker’s Party–which by the way got most of its support from the working class–had truly been a creature of the right, they would have been seeking to reimpose the monarchy, and return things to the way they used to be.  That was the furthest thing from Hitler’s mind, unless we consider that his actual goal was returning to an imagined glorious, pre-Christian past that clearly never existed as he imagined it.

There is no functional difference between a bright shiny future, or a bright shiny past, if both exist in radical difference from the actual present.

I don’t have time to read the whole thing, but will pass along the link, and a quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault