Author: White Whale

It occurs to me that the only emotions which connect you from the inside out to the environment, which flow from you, are joy and love.  Positive emotions.  Creativity.

Hate, anger, grief: these separate you from the world as a whole, EXCEPT that if they are shared with others, they can bind you to them quite strongly.  But necessarily there is then a Us and a World.  There is a separation.

All of us need in my view to be principled concerned with our relation as in-dividuals, as undivided entities, as personalities and souls, with our relationship with God, with Pneuma, with spirit.  This is where deep, lasting connection and joy are found.  And sharing this connection does not create an us/world split, as God is everywhere, and the group mutable and spontaneously expressing this connection.

This occurred to me pondering Kum Nye Dancing versus Kum Nye itself.  The former is an EXPRESSION of emotion, and necessarily if it is you contacting the world spontaneously, these are positive emotions.  Kum Nye, is about contacting emotions and expanding them.  They can be anything, and they are localized to you.

I think of the Tibetans sitting in caves for three years, three months, and 3 days.  They are, ideally, in constant contact with soothing emotions, and primitive joys.

I had a lot of very spiritual dreams last night.  It was good.

Asking too much of someone is a species of cruelty; so, too, is asking too little.

This is the core problem with egalitarianism: they do not recognize the category better on an individual level, on the only level in which excellence can POSSIBLY be deployed.

The tyranny of low expectations is just one more flavor of the moral monster I aggregate as Leftism; it is just one more expression of concealed, vicious Sadism

Breathwork always frightens me.  I can face any fear, though.  On some level, everything frightens me, because fear is about all I felt when I was very young, and I function reasonably well in the world.  No one calmed or comforted me.  I state that as fact, not because I am feeling sorry for myself. [edit: I cannot resist pointing out how maudlin and untrue this is.  OF COURSE I was comforted.  My mother held me, read to me, and did many of the things mothers do.  She simply scared the living shit out of me a few times when I was very young–quite possibly literally–and as I grew, was unable to separate her personality from mine.]

The point I wanted to make is this, though: I said to one of my fellow participants that there really is no choice but to do inner work.  You have on one hand a lifetime of mild misery that never ends, and on the other a much shorter but harder period of concerted effort.  You get misery either way, but one does not have an ending point, and one does.  And what’s more, you become useful.

I have been to the mountaintop. I have felt what is possible for human beings to feel and express, and I want it.  Duhkha is anything short of exuberant happiness, and whatever comes after it, which the Buddhists label Nirvana.

My house is on fire.  So is yours.  There is no choice for the wise, for those who can see.  None.  And you should be grateful for this.

Emotions are the result of the interaction of our sense of self with the world, both the world as it is, and the world as we imagine it to be.

There is a deep truth here somewhere, that I do not have the time to contemplate.  I will say that I have always felt an intuitive connection with Tantra; and I was thinking about Zen this morning: it feels to me like the effort to interact with the world via mind, without the mind.  It is an attempt at pure experience, without emotions.  It has always felt hollow and superficial to me, a putative cure for intellectualism which actually feeds it.

But what do I know?

Wonder is one of the best emotions you can feel.  I have always loved glass art, and was looking at a piece in a museum yesterday, and was filled with this sense of awe and beauty.  The capacity for wonder can salve a great many wounds, injustices, and insults.

Straight lines do not appear in nature.  They come only from the math animal.

Ponder.

Fascism, from the inside, likely appears as nothing more or less than the right sorts of people FINALLY being in charge, and making needed and overdue changes that everyone would support if they were smart enough to understand how necessary they are.

Lois Lerner, we now read, thought “right-wingers” were crazy.  Within the Fascist mindset, the law is really intended for stupid people who are not gifted with the intrinsic wisdom and insight that guides the Statist.

Within their own minds they are right, and everyone else is wrong, and given that they are right, what moral or legal impediments should slow them down?

The Jews had to be purged, right, for the good of the human race?  Nazism was nothing if not social engineering of precisely the sort leftists have ALWAYS called for.

Dissidents have to be put in jail or killed–right?–because they are WRONG and risk screwing the perfect system up.

And it is hard to wake up from within this system, because it is self sealing.  You simply do not talk with or interact in any way with people who disagree with you.

I have a fierce temper.  It does not come out often, but both of my children have told me it scares the crap out of them when it does.

As with everything else, I am working on this.  It feels like an overreaction–there is clearly a place for anger in my world, but anger appropriate to the time and offense–comes from a place of perceived helplessness.

Peter Levine makes the case well that a principle therapeutic method is converting helplessness–freezing, or an actual helplessness–is “promoting” it through the nervous system hierarchy to the fight or flight response.  Both are acceptable, but need to be vigorous.

Anger, of course, is a fight response.  I can and have left dents in sheetrock walls with both my fists and head.

What I am realizing, though, is that anger has multiple sources.  There is of course the proximate cause.  I have been angry this week because the IRS apparently lost a tax return that I show as received and accepted, and which indicated a sizable refund.  Instead, they sent me a levy notice for money that I did not owe, and I had not paid because a large number minus a small number is still positive.  I tried to sort it out with them, but two people in a row hung up on me after conveying with their chosen words and tone of voice that they had no actual interest in helping me, and viewed what assistance they did offer as a favor to me, and not an ineluctable and important part of the responsibility inherent in being empowered to take people’s money by force.

Given Lois Lerner’s stunts, there is no reason not to believe there are people there capable of simply deleting returns to cause people like me trouble.  The IRS has no cause to view itself with anything but organizational contempt [I would like to propose here that the IRS be formally decimated, in the Roman Legion sense: fire every tenth person, without regard to level or status.  They are arrogant, and quite obviously believe themselves not just beyond the law, but even beyond the need to justify themselves.  For the Cincinnati office, where much of the Fascist activity took place (more on that in my next post), fire one in five.]

Be that as it may, though–even granted justified rage–I am in a cage when I cannot escape anger.  You have to let it go.

Here is the interesting point, to me, that I wanted to make: it is obvious that primal wounds are activated in situations like this, where you have a monolithic and indifferent, but abusive, entity; BUT ALSO anger can be the result of me enabling daily helplessness by not managing my affairs as diligently as I could, or could be reasonably expected to.  I get angry at myself, and direct it outward, and that anger is the result of devolving from a conscious, calm, and controlled place, where I direct my actions with reason, purpose, and willing acceptance.  I don’t know how to set limits yet–I don’t know when enough is enough–but I can clearly do better.

Tonight, I took the rage out on myself, and ate some food–calzones–that were not on my diet.  It calmed me down; that, and talking with some folks at the  bar that I’ve known for years about random stuff.  That is the activation of the social self Levine talks about.

Whenever you break your word with yourself, that is a type of violence.  You have done something to yourself that you would likely not have done to someone else.

It seems increasingly to me as well that much anxiety has deep seated anger as a root.  It is an expression in your mind of a somatic reality that you have not yet processed.  We are not meant to worry.  Animals don’t worry, as far as we can tell.  Some part of you keeps a tension in you to remind you it is there, but it cannot name itself, or bring itself fully into awareness without careful study and quiet.

I go everywhere.  I try my best never to lie to myself.  I see my flaws, and am trying to work on them.  That is all I can do.  I share this process with you in the hope it might provide you comfort or insight.

Courage is a creative use of fear.

How’s that?

I’m in an odd place.  I’m still processing last week.  I have odd times, with odd people, sometimes.  I like right angles, curves, and loopety loops.  And misspellins.

I feel like I connected my head with my heart.  This is an odd thing.  The mind is still there, and the heart is still there, but they are now talking.  It feels weird.  I think that was the source of yesterday’s odd post.  I like to think of my thinking as a hammer: hard, clear, fresh.

But clearly, I think a LOT.  How can I say I don’t like discussing ideas?  I just like discussing them with myself.  I find that even though I am an asshole sometimes, I tend to agree with most of what I say, and understand the bulk of my thinking, although some of this shit god only knows what the actual point is, if any.

To use a word new to me, I think I have tended to pendulate between states.  I feel until it gets too rough, then enter my head.  After a time, I head back into thiis feeling shit.

But the shit is getting easier.  I’m actually accessing moments of profound contentment and even joy, despite the fact that I have tapped into and am now in dialogue with some fairly serious trauma.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this somewhere, but if you write as much as me you can’t keep stuff straight: my “guru” is a guy named Jack Schwarz, who I have never met.  I had two dreams of him, both of which remain with me to this day.

In the first, he was skateboarding.  What he communicated to me was a deep sense of playfulness and fearlessness.  Life is not so serious.  Pain is not so serious.  Engage.  Interact. Play, wherever you are and whatever you are doing.

I feel like I have entered that energy somewhat this week.  My day job sees me driving many miles every day, interacting with people and environments that are completely foreign to me, solving problems with no help, then moving on.

The addon to the story is that the dream encouraged me to look up his website.  I had read about him, and I think had one of his books, but otherwise had no idea about him.  When I pulled it up, the very first image was of a kid skateboarding.  Experiences like that stay with you.

The second dream was of him–and he may have been dead at this point, as I don’t remember the exact date–showing me what absolutely unconditional love feels like.  I just saw him, and felt this radiant energy coming out of him, and knew that no matter who I was, what I had done, or where I came from, I was loved, absolutely.

The Hindus speak of Darshana, and the Jews and Arabs of Baraka (yes, same root), which is a qualitative energetic communication.  I believe I received Jack’s Darshana.

Now, he absolutely discouraged cultism, and personal devotion.  He always said you have to find your own way, although he offered ideas and practices which had been helpful to him.

To my mind, no book or teaching could ever even approach the gift of feeling these energies, such that I can aim at trying to manifest them in my own life.

Oh, I’m having some tequila again, but all alcohol has ever done for me is make me more honest.  I have love and respect in me.  I take my responsibilities very seriously.  I take my life seriously.  I work HARD at personal growth.  I have walked into Hell many, many times.  I know I can do it, and I am tempted to say it does not frighten me, but I have likely just numbed that part of myself.

I need to hit the sack.  8 hours of driving tomorrow, and I will not have a day off for at least three weeks.  It’s all good, though: it’s an adventure.  I am really, truly beginning to feel that excitement and enthusiasm.

The emotionally based need to discuss ideas is counter-productive.  It  becomes a distraction rather than a task in problem solving.

There is no passion in intellectualism.  It is a disease of emotional dwarfism.  Most college kids, certainly Humanities majors, succumb.

Yes, I saw Les Miserable.  Narcissism and grandiosity are not in my view desirable traits.  Yes, of course you have to love Jean Valjean, but the kids who set up the blockades, not so much.

Good tequila may have been involved in this post, which I may disagree with tomorrow, but not likely.

Honestly, I am just sitting here drinking after an odd day–an odd week, for that matter, with several more to come–and contemplating the stereotypical college night of sitting up discussing ideas: free will, God, death, politics.

I have always hated these discussions.  I have my own ideas, and by and large nobody ever presents me with anything I have not heard or seen.  I state this as clinical fact.  I cringe when certain “deep”topics come up.

My best interrogator is me.  I know my weak spots.  I know where I am ignorant.

But even then, there is a feeling, not an idea, that I am seeking.  It is the feeling of drilling somewhere, then watching and feeling something emerge, something new to me, something interesting, something alive.

My new mantra is Adventure.  I am feeling increasingly able to frame inconveniences, long days, human stupidity and chance in ways that are interesting and exciting.  To my mind, I am very lucky, but I still get my panties in a wad sometimes.  I’m trying to reduce that, turn it, with the goal of making every part of every day something that I am engaged in and connected to in natural, organic ways.

Random musings.   Do with them what you will.