Author: White Whale

Philosophy is the duck on the water.  Reality is the feet paddling furiously under the surface.

As I grow, I realize that useful philosophies are really more like myths.  They are simple, direct, and can easily be visualized symbolically.

My own creed was born of necessity. I was desperately depressed and angry and sad and confused.  The whole mess, mixed together; and alone.  It is seemingly my destiny to be fully misunderstood by many, largely misunderstood by most, and completely understood by none.

But: don’t feel sorry for yourself, never quit, keep learning.  It works.  I can attest to it.

But as I say from time to time, what we call philosphy–Kant, Hume, Nietzsche, Locke, etc–is largely useless.  POLITICAL philosophy is useful, but what I would argue is that by taking morality out of the realm of the visceral, the obvious–at least by fully detaching from sensation–what has happened is that it has self destructed, by becoming unhuman.

The games the deconstructionists/poststructuralists–and ponder those terms on their own merits, from a common sense perspective–play are purely cerebral.  Foucault apparently like being whipped, to feel alive.

The philosophy that is useful, the animals have.  Life lived is the love of truth, the love of the search for truth.

Perhaps that is true.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps both.  I will have to go and see.

I have really been using my EmWave2 seriously for a month or two, and what I have just realized in the past few days is that I can use it as a sort of auditing device, in the Scientology sense.  As I understand it, what they do is in effect hook people up to lie detectors, then read a series of words or phrases to them, and see where they react.  When they react, they are supposed to go into and experience those feelings.  That is my understanding.  Stan Grof speaks of this basic process with approval, although of course the rest of it is a mess.

I try to get to 200 twice a day on the High setting.  What I notice is that I will do fine for a while, I’ll get to the green, but then suddenly it will pop over to red.  What I have started doing is passing a baton in my imagination over to that part of me, the traumatized part, the part that wants to drag me down to prevent something worse happening to me.  I give it the baton to speak.  That alone is usually enough to flip it back to blue.

But recently it has been giving me memories, sensations, unpleasantnesses that I had suppressed.  I have a lot of unprocessed content, because I more or less never STARTED processing feelings.  I was traumatized before I could speak.

And this is a good thing.  It represents a method of house-cleaning.

Today, as an example, it gave me dinner-time.  Every evening was unpleasant, as my father would bully us, while pretending to be funny.  For many years, the compulsion to stand up and leave the table immediately after any meal was nearly overwhelming.  Numerous people I actually liked commented on it.  It was a strongly conditioned response that was very hard to suppress.

Well, I went into that feeling, and started shaking, per Peter Levine, and immediately felt something pop, and felt better.  I went right back into green.

It would be foolish to think that’s it, but it’s a good start.  In the grand scheme of things, that was a very mild trauma, but it has less hold on me now.

As I mention from time to time, I share too much. This is none of your business.  But at the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that it is POSSIBLE that sharing this might help someone.  Anyone reading this blog does so of their own free will, and can stop any time they like.  So you are used to me now, and if you keep coming back, there must be a reason.

Again as I mention from time to time, I also believe that in a higher sense, nothing we do is invisible to higher powers.  I can’t hide, and there is no point in learning to try.  Whatever light I have, I do my best to contact and show.

Consider this article: http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/rod-liddle/9286532/its-ok-to-mention-anti-semitic-attacks-but-not-who-commits-them/

Is it acceptable that in modern Britain Jews are forced to live in fear because the ruling elite–and don’t tell me Britain has not simply transitioned its aristocracy into a new ruling class, with socialism always and inevitably being characterized by a caste system far more abusive than anything a free market could generate–refuse to do the honorable thing and protect them?

I mention from time to time a scene a movie most seem to have forgotten, which has left a lifelong impression on me.  It is a scene near the end of the film “Judgement at Nuremburg”, on the trials of Nazis following the war, and Spencer Tracy, as what I recall as an American judge, is speaking with Burt Lancaster, who was a Nazi judge, who was accused and convicted of crimes against humanity.  Lancaster is asking Tracy “how could I have known it would lead to this, to mass murder, mass torture, so much death? [I am paraphrasing, as this dialogue appends another dialogue, in which a death camp guard calculates how many dead there might have been].  Tracy answers: “You knew, the very first time you sentenced an innocent man to prison.”

Edit: I looked it up:
 Ernst Janning: Judge Haywood… the reason I asked you to come: Those people, those millions of people… I never knew it would come to that. You *must* believe it, *You must* believe it!

British journalists KNOW what they are doing.  They just don’t want to admit it.  They don’t want to make hard choices.  They want the world to be this very nicey, nicey sort of place where all violence is simply misunderstanding, and that if they pretend blatant racism and bigotry are not being preached every day in substantially every mosque in the country, that somehow everything will just work out.

From where I am sitting, what is going to happen is British civilization is going to fail.  The rule of law, equality before the law, representative democracy, human rights, freedom of conscience and religion: all of it will be washed away because they are too weak to defend what is good about their country, and are too weak to admit that Islam is inherently opposed to universal human rights, to women’s rights, to democracy, to religious pluralism, to free speech, to nearly everything decent which Western civilization has created.  It wants to return to an age characterized by oppression, cruelty, violence, death, and misery.

Why countenance this, outside of cowardice?  I see no reason.

This is why I created the category of Sybaritic Leftism.  Not all leftists are bad people.  Some are kind, decent, skilled, capable, humane, empathetic, and all the good things.  Denmark works.  Sweden works.  But they are failing.  They are failing because they are unwilling and unable to defend what they have built, unwilling to stand up to those who oppose their order, oppose their way of life.

As I mentioned a few months ago, at current rates something like 1 in 4 Swedish women will be raped, in almost all cases by Muslims.  Why tolerate this?  Why be so inhumane as to subject your women to that?  Every immigrant there was born somewhere else.  They can and should be returned if they fail to assimilate.  This is not rocket science.

It is only once you dedicate yourself to the belief that life is supposed to be easy, that it can be made easy, that hard choices can be avoided, that violence is never necessary, that moral choices become hard.

Space and difference.  They want to be clumped together, and not in contact with anyone who is an ideological other.  They fear “alterity”, to use Academese.  Genuine alterity, of course.  Cross dressing transexual hermaphrodites they are fine with.  Anyone who THINKS differently, they are NOT OK with.

I just realized that HuffPo is deleting/censoring EVERYTHING I post.  I just had a post deleted that had nothing to do with politics, and was not even remotely offensive.  They fear anyone outside the realm of GroupThink.

You have to grasp that to live in fear is to live in anger.  Leftists of course accuse conservatives of this, and it is likely true of some, the Jesse Helms types, but my experience is that most of us just want a fair system that works to maximize opportunities for all, and a legal system that treats everyone as equal before the law, but no more than that.

What we categorically reject is an elite that uses the political system for personal enrichment, while using the labor of one group to buy the votes of another.

I value compassion.  I value empathy.  And conservatives–aka Liberals–best express these values, at least in principle, to my mind.

I am finishing up Peter Levine’s marvelous book “In an Unspoken Voice”, and have decided his basic thesis is absolutely correct: we are in most important respects animals who use math and language.

As he notes, this knocks us down a few notches from standard religious conceptions, but the USEFULNESS of his ideas make this a necessary conclusion.  I am still processing this.

What I will say for now is that even if one grants, as I do, that we are driven in large measure by primitive instincts that have NOTHING to do with reason, this does not mean that there is not a next evolutionary, and spiritual step we are meant to work on.

The evidence that the mind and brain are severable is to my mind conclusive, which means that some larger dimension is at play.

It is perhaps my confusion and vexation about needing to adapt to his thesis, though, that accounts for some of the aggression in my past few posts.  I have to reframe in important ways who I think I am, with I suspect very important qualitative gains to be had for so doing.

There is zero doubt in my mind that his ideas need to be multiplied and deployed.  Whatever is next, it goes through learning to process trauma intelligently, which is to say somatically and instinctually, which is to say as animals.

Trey Gowdy, in my view, is clearly “playing politics” with the Benghazi committee.  He is going to try and get as close to the election as possible before he starts releasing the really damning stuff.  This is how the game is played.  Democrats plainly play it better, and have for some time–this is how they keep a hold of people’s minds, even when everything they touch turns to failure, even if some of the failures, like the welfare state, have not yet become obvious–but by definition all politicians play it.

But ponder this: could “playing politics” work with intelligent, well informed people with memories longer than the latest news cycle?  Would image trump substance?  Would games work?

No, of course not.  Playing politics is for stupid people, uninformed people, impressionable people.

It is quite possible to have legitimate policy differences.  It is quite possible to reach differing solutions to complex problems, and it is appropriate and useful in a democracy to do so.  But only if the discussions that result are substantial, and focused on actual solutions to plainly existing problems.

Playing politics is the art of failing on a sustained basis to do what you were elected to do, and yet somehow keep the trust of the people you need to get elected.  It is the art of convincing imbeciles to do your bidding, and cashing the checks after all–most–eyes have moved on.

In the Tao Te Ching it says roughly that “those who know they are crazy are not crazy.”

I watch around me, and most people are not as qualitatively different from bugs or field mice as they might suppose.  They are governed, yes, by a combination of psychological programming and instincts, but they are on auto-pilot.  They never stop and ask what they really want, who they really are, and then set about getting these things–I would argue affects are what are worth the pursuing–and living out their own being as well as they can.

The free will discussion does not interest me, other than to comment that CLEARLY most people use only a fraction of the freedom that is plainly available to them on some level.

Our jobs on this Earth is to disrupt the patterns we were given, to divert our life energy from the trough into which we were thrown, and into something qualitatively better.  Few see this, and fewer still realize it.

This, at any rate, is my belief at the moment.

I have a plastic bin filled with ideas, papers covered with notes.  I opened it today for the first time in a number of years.  It is so much, it overwhelms me.  It is something on the order of this blog in terms of content, none of it published on the internet.  3-4 diaries, and huge stacks of paper.

I will have to decide what to do with it.  I will likely put it back, for now.

Here is one line from a poem I wrote that I thought I might share:

If we can see the darkness, does that mean light is near?

I think this is a good question.  To recognize the category dark, you must be capable of imagining an alternative, no?

Oh, good things are happening.  I am shredded daily, and I have learned I can take it.  My wounds will not kill me.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for the world is nothing.  Often this is the best thing you can for yourself, and the two are obviously related.

“I cannot give of myself anymore, when I have no self to give.”

Rightly or wrongly, I think I understand some of what he went through.  He obviously entered “adulthood” with major traumas embedded in his system from a childhood of what I recall he described as neglect, but which likely had other elements, such as parental narcissism, excessive demands, and loneliness.

He never processed these traumas.  He likely did extensive talk therapy, but talk therapy does nothing.  Done poorly, it can even make things worse.

His humor was a shield, clearly, but he likely also discovered early on that the positive feelings he could generate in others made him feel better.  Serving others made him feel better.

But here is the thing with trauma: until you untie the knots, until you loosen the grip it has on you, you cannot relax into the arms of others.  You cannot accept help and healing from others, no matter how often or eagerly or sincerely they offer it.

I myself am gradually unfreezing.  I will likely have to work tomorrow, after a lot of 6 and 7 day weeks, and I was able to actually imagine being happy about it, singing.

Here is an interesting little tool you should use carefully if you have some visceral trauma: say VOOOOOOOO, for a full outbreath.  Peter Levine developed it as a way of loosening literal visceral trauma.  You have an enormous quantity of nerve endings in your guts.  You more or less have a “gut brain”.  And often trauma resides there, as I understand the matter.

In my own case, I usually go into uncontrollable shaking.  But this is fantastic.  It has an end.  If the shaking never comes out, there is never an end.

It’s hard to say with suicides what will happen.  We speak of a next life, with most of us knowing nothing of it (we do of course have people who have died and come back to describe it, among us).

My felt sense, though, is that Robin Williams did what he could with what he had.  He gave what he had, then there was suddenly nothing left, no reserve, no way of replenishing.  He was never led to water.

I aim to be a leader, someday.  I aim to find this water, and help others drink from it.  All of humanities problems have answers.  We are not helpless, and there is no reason for any of us to be alone together.

End Note: I have this vision of Robin Williams in heaven, tremendously relieved that he does not have to pick up and carry his burden of humor and goodwill every day.  No one is asking him to, and he does not need to.  He can take a walk in a beautiful park, and lose himself, without a care in the world.