Author: White Whale

I have said often that our Constitution is a nearly perfect document, with the exception that it makes no provision to reign in abuses by the Supreme Court.  Now, judicial review was not a part of the Constitution to begin with.  Nothing in there gives the Court the right to strike down laws seen as unconstitutional.  That right was simply asserted by John Marshall, and has gone largely unchallenged since.

I have proposed that a Constitutional amendment be passed allowing Congress to overrule any ruling of the Supreme Court–to insist that its will, which by design most directly expresses the will of the people, be considered ultimately paramount–by two thirds majorities on both houses of Congress.

Here is another idea: Congress could remove individual justices by the same process.

I am reading, again, and expectedly, about anti-legal biases entering discussions in our allegedly most refined, most logical, most ethical, most systematic body.  Specifically, the female justices, apparently not having read the law, and acting as if they are unfamiliar with the difference between a law and a regulation, and in principle unfamiliar with the concept of religious freedom, are objecting to the Hobby Lobby case: http://www.nysun.com/national/startling-rift-on-supreme-court-brsprings-from/88646/

What you will note is that they want laws to be “uniform”.  Why?  At what point ever, in human history, have diversity and uniformity been compatible?  At what point have freedom and unity been conflatable?  The point of our system, the point of liberty, is behavioral and ideological diversity.  No one is arguing women should not have access to abortions, as far as this law is concerned.  At issue is whether or not people who believe abortion is murder can be made accessories to this murder.

I spend a lot of time doing emotional processing.  The reason is that even the most intelligent people–and I have no reason to doubt all of our Supreme Court justices are intelligent–can be driven mad by what they don’t see.  I don’t want to be mad, which is why I am willing to enter into madness.  I need to know its limits, recognize it, acquaint myself with it, so that I can banish it.

I think any honest Supreme Court justice could only look back in horror at all the abuses their body has countenanced and enabled; how much it has diminished a great nation, and helped put us on  path to self ruin.  They were given all the tools they needed; they chose not to use them.

I must admit that at times I feel old and tired like Jean Valjean at the end of Les Miserable.  It is easy to imagine sitting in a comfortable chair in a warm room and just giving up the ghost.  I have done right by my children.

This is not to be maudlin, but at times that is how I feel.

Yet there is something which goes on, it always goes on. I can trust it to go on.    At some deep level I am simply congenitally, in my DNA, incapable of quitting.

And I look at my life thus far, and it seems obvious that it has consisted in reconnaissance, planning, and weapon building.  I have not yet begun to fight.

And to be clear, a “weapon” in the battle for clarity is a clear idea.  A weapon in the battle for emotional balance is a sound psychotherapy.  Weapons in the battle for a peaceful world are personal sanity and penetrating intelligence.

Perhaps six months to a year ago I downloaded a guided visualization meant to help me see my future.  I can’t remember who it was from, but we got to the end of the relaxation, and I saw a giant church, and that was it.  Nothing about career, relationships, where I’d be.  Nothing but a giant, gothic stone cathedral.

But as I imagine it, could we not one day reach a point where all the Christian churches are reappropriated, for a new type of spiritual work?  Could we not make them hum with activity, useful activity, joyful activity, communal activity?  Now, I have nothing against Christianity, but at this point all it can do is fight a defensive battle.  None of its claims can be entered into the empirical column in a scientific dialogue.  I have nothing against Christianity, but I also don’t think long term defensive battles can be won.  Offense is needed.  New ideas are needed.  Growth is needed.  My intent is not to stifle what is good in Christianity, but to augment it, expand it, beautify it, purity it.

As I think about it honestly, I think much of my hurt likely comes from other lives.  This one has certainly been a challenge, but I think there is other stuff piled in there too.  I think I have been killed many times, because–as in this life–I am willing to say the things that need to be said, and pay the price (hell, is it time for the lynching already?  I just got here.).  But I can always count on this whatever it is.  However much it hurts, I keep going, and I rebuild everything that has been broken, and then build something new.

I would like to incorporate more pleasure in my life, but my principle focus is and always will be learning how to do effective, useful, needed work.  Since our world is run by dunces, there is no shortage of such work.

I will say to anyone listening though that although success is far from certain, the battle for the future of Goodness in this world can be won.

I have a conflicted relationship with the work of Martin Seligman.  On the one had, Learned Optimism was one of the most useful books I ever read.  Learning to reframe things was and remains a very useful skill.  I use it with myself and my kids all the time.   If they say “I can’t do X”, I add “yet”.

Where I differ a bit, though, is that I think sometimes you need to tell the kid: you suck at that, and always will, but I still love you.

No, that’s not quite it either, because that, too, is a sort of framing. 

Here is the thing: in his so far very interesting and useful book “This is How” (I’m about a quarter through it), Augustan Burroughs points out that positive self talk only works for people who are already pretty positive.  Positive psychology describes what makes people happy, but it does not really seem to teach you how to become the sort of person who pursues those things organically, or who can pursue them consciously.

In my own evolving view of the therapeutic process–and I know my ideas have likely seemed a bit crazy, since they seem that way to me too, although I am fully 100% committed to seeing them through, since that’s the only way it works–virtually all emotional growth depends on developing the capacity for emotional motion, and for anyone with even a moderate degree of trauma, that is not a given.  It cannot be used as a starting point.  The trauma, or lack of emotional skill, has to be the starting point.

Being rational, in important respects, is an extremely advanced skill that only follows the ability to fully feel, understand, and process emotion.  Suppressed emotion, to borrow a great line from Edward de Bono, speaking of arrogance, is a “Mistake in the future.”

I had more to say, but find I have no more to say.

I drove by the headquarters of Eli Lilly yesterday.  It is an impressive structure.  I have done some limited business with them, but enough to have been through the doors a few times in some of their buildings.

Yesterday, though, I found myself thinking: You bastards.  The entire pharmaceutical complex exists to CREATE problems which can be addressed through their drugs.

Think this through: we KNOW how to prevent almost all diseases.  We know how to prevent, in particular, almost all degenerative diseases, through diet and exercise.  Fresh air, good food, regular exercise, social network (church adds ten years to your life or so: do you see anyone talking about that?).

Big Pharma spends HUGE money developing drugs because they can be PATENTED.  They are not trying to cure anything.  People who want to actually heal disease have almost no voice in this country.  Anyone proposing anything simple, which does not require an advanced degree, and which is inexpensive, will always be outspent and outshouted by those whose incomes depend upon complexity, informational superiority, and high costs and high profits.

With regard to ADHD, sales keep climbing steadily.  Do you not think this is at least in part because an army of pharmaceutical sales reps–the stereotype, of course, is an attractive woman between 25 and 35, driving a nice company car, although I don’t think this is quite as true as it used to be–are out encouraging doctors to write scrips?

Today, I was watching myself.  My work today was alone in a large room.  And I was watching unpleasant feelings coming up, and me getting distracted and wanting to shift focus.  Because I have, I think, convinced some latent part of myself that I can now handle more of these “bad” emotions, it is giving me more of them.  And I am staying in them longer, letting the waves crest a bit more; relaxing a bit more into it, accepting it, accepting Life, in important respects.

And I got to thinking about kids nowadays.  I have talked about this before, but I can’t remember exactly how.  We assume that because kids CAN distract themselves constantly, that they are simply forming this habit.  And this is, I think, part of the truth.

But think of the pervasive lack of authentic, open communication among people, and in this case, among families.  Do not many families watch TV during dinner?  Do kids early on not leave the common areas and hibernate with their electronics in their rooms?  Precisely because they never have to live with silence, I think many kids become alienated from their own inner feelings.  But as I have said, they don’t go away.  They intrude.  They pop up.  They let us know they are there.

And I am not even particularly or necessarily referring to unprocessed traumas.  Can we not speak, perhaps, of uncompleted connections?  Of warmth not given, and not consciously missed?

And would this, too, not cause kids to act out, and particularly boys since boys tend to express emotions through activity?

There are many factors in so-called ADHD.  Bad parenting is clearly one of them.  At root, we could perhaps call it cultural laziness and apathy.

Few thoughts.

http://www.malaysia-chronicle.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=252892%3Ais-this-proof-that-a-blow-torch-fire-struck-mh370-in-the-cockpit%3F&Itemid=2#axzz2xIlN8cMs

What if the fire both caused decompression AND cut oxygen to the pilots, or greatly reduced it? You go “Oh shit”, accidentally go up, then think about it, and go “oh shit”, and drop altitude as fast as you can, while turning back to land.  You die from lack of oxygen.  Your door is locked.  After thirty minutes, everyone else’s oxygen runs out and they die too.  The plane keeps flying and eventually crashes somewhere deep.

Now, I have no idea what the situation is as far as cell phone service.  If they could, presumably passengers would have called people.  Technically, and this is a question someone somewhere knows the answer to, could cell phones have shown active while people were unable to make calls?  I ask this as there is no reason to discount the many reports that cell phones were showing active long after they lost contact with the plane.  Depending on the fuel load, the plane could have flown for another 20 hours.

Or what if the fire cut oxygen to the WHOLE plane?  Everyone would have died quickly.

I continue to believe my first hunch–the ghost ship–best explains the available data.

Here’s another pilot saying more or less the same thing: http://www.hellou.com/2014/03/veteran-pilot-explains-theory-flight-mh370-makes-perfect-sense-3147/

I think my self psychoanalysis, which no doubt would look from the outside a whole lot like self absorbed laziness, is nearly complete.  I had a put-a-feeling-into-words moment today, that helped me understand my tendency towards self importance and entitlement.  I fight it, but not always successfully.  I really am an ugly human being at times.  I really am.  That is simply a statement of fact. I was this week.  My shugyo, of course, it not pulling out yellow bubbles and rainbows of happiness, and over and above that I had a fair amount of concentrated bad luck.  No, inevitable consequences of poor or non-existent planning on my part manifested at the same time.  That is the honest statement.  That they all happened on the same day was God laughing at me and asking me to get my shit together.  And part of getting my shit together was figuring out why I constantly have this feeling the rules don’t apply to me.

What that insight is, I will not share.  That was a journal moment.

This is what I wanted to say: Freud’s work shifted from useful to counterproductive when he transitioned from an effort to elicit FEELINGS, to MEMORIES.  Memories you think, but they do not heal.  ONLY if they elicit feelings do they heal, but that is not the principle focus of historical psychoanalysis, which is more or less founded on lies Freud had to tell about pedophilia in his time and town.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t understand the details, the transference, counter-transference blah blah blah.  I read about them some time ago, but at no point in my life have they made ANY sense.  I do know that psychiatrists have managed to erect and maintain the delusion that they are in some respect emotionally wiser and smarter because of their own in depth psychoanalyses.  Bullshit.  We all know this is bullshit.  And bullshit is a useful metaphor because we all instinctively are repulsed by the smell of shit, and bulls drop more of it.  The analogy is an obvious one.   Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes Freudian psychoanalysis is bullshit.

Here is the thing: I don’t remember most of my childhood. Only bits and pieces here and there.  And it doesn’t matter.  I don’t and can’t live in the past.  What the details are don’t matter.  What matters is what my dominant emotions were.  Those can be found, contacted, embraced, and released.  The rest can be inferred, to the extent I have any need at all to do so for psychological closure.

I was talking with a guy in the bar yesterday, who knew 6 heroin addicts, and it made me think of this song, which I have always thought was about heroin addiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvUI-s4Azw4#aid=P-0eGGOo_Qw

This song pulls a lot of things out.  It gets at the sadness and disconnection of modern life, and drug use as one poor way of coping with it.  It has often made me cry.  I understand the sentiments expressed deeply and intimately.

It seems to me my role in life is to develop a firm enough grip and a strong enough back to pull these people out of their hell holes, and enough vision to send them on their way to something better.

Actually, a better metaphor is holding the rope.  Everyone has to climb on their own, but it’s a hell of a lot easier when there is something to hold on to.

I will add something perhaps a bit odd (although you expect that here, no?  My, uh, ideosyncracies are on full display).  Some 4 or 5 months ago I had an intuitive and strong connection with a Tarot card called The Fool.  The details don’t matter, but it came to me in a meditation, and at the time I knew nothing about Tarot.

Last week I realized it would be a good time to begin establishing a relationship with the future.  I have always lived in present, because that is where severe trauma drops you.  You live in a moment.  I have always had the intellectual capacity for planning–I am intelligent–but imaginatively I have never been able to connect to the future.

So I thought I’d get a Tarot deck.  The one I pulled out was the 3 of Wands, which based on the description is probably the best single card in the 72 card deck to continue the work begun with The Fool.

Here is the description.  I could not imagine a more relevant or positive card for what I intend over the next year:

On the Three of Wands, we see a figure standing on a cliff looking out
over the sea to distant mountains. From this height, he sees all that
lies ahead. This is a card of vision and foresight. When we want to see
farther, we climb higher. By going up, we increase our range and remove
ourselves from the immediate situation. We detach and gain perspective.

In readings, the Three of Wands can tell you to take the long view.
Don’t react to the heat of the moment, but step back and reconsider. See
how the present fits into the greater picture. This card asks you to be
a visionary – to dream beyond current limitations. It can indicate
premonitions or other intuitions about what is to come.

Taking the long view is an aspect of leadership – another meaning of the
Three of Wands. When we see far, we have the knowledge to guide others
to their best future. Someone who knows the way can show it to those who
follow. When you see the Three of Wands, know that now is the time to
accept your vision and be confident that you can lead others to it. [emphasis mine]

A leader not only sees far, but he is willing to go there first, if
necessary. The Three of Wands is also a card of exploration. Compare
this figure to the Fool
who is also on a cliff edge. The Fool steps out in innocence, not
realizing he is going to fall to his fate. The adventurer on the Three
of Wands is also willing to step out, but with full awareness of what he
is doing. His courage is more informed, if less spontaneous. The Three
of Wands encourages you to move fearlessly into new areas. Let the ships
on your horizon take you far out into unknown seas.

I have not written in my journal for months.  Two reasons occur to me.

First, I was reading this website yesterday: http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/science-of-happiness/?gclid=CNzym6nTsr0CFbBj7AodvRIAkQ

Their first recommendation is to “express your heart”.  It occurs to me that is what I do here.  The fundamental difference between my journal and this blog is that I am making things public, and that feels to some part of me much more like an intimate conversation.  Yes, I likely share too much, but as I have said before, I also think our civilization is characterized by mass alienation, both from one another, and from our own feelings. I can claim to myself that I am setting an example, doing something useful.

And in any event the beauty of this is I have complete control.  I am never interrupted, and I can go as deep and as long as I want.  I do have friends I share things with, but no one who is willing to consistently go the places I go.  My emotional pain tolerance is, I think, quite extraordinary.  My practice–my Shugyo, to use the Japanese word for asceticism that I have always liked, and as I tend to call it for myself–would I think be much too much for many.  No one comforts me.  I have no one to run to with a complete expectation of openness. I am subject to constant psychological attack.  And yet I go on.

Sometimes I think of the Tibetan Buddhists who spend as I understand it 3 years, 3 months and 3 days in solitary meditation.  Think of all the things that come up: every fear, every worry, every imaginable demon.  And yet they go on, and are cleansed at the end.

I used to be completely and utterly serious all the time.  I had no sense of humor.  I never laughed.  I didn’t wear a trenchcoat and boots, but if I have felt more able to express myself, I might have. I felt no freedom to express anything.  I spent most of my time more or less wanting to shrink into a hole, EVEN THOUGH, and this is an interesting point, I never would have admitted it.  I had no idea WHAT I was feeling, because I was able to live in my head, in both ideas and fantasy.

I did learn to laugh, but it has felt like I have two houses.  I have the one I built for my children, which is well lit, orderly, happy, full of love; and another one, that is dark, filled with ruins, rain, wind, and dark clouds.  It is not, by and large, angry, and I feel grateful for that at least, although I am at times also prone to bouts of inappropriate anger.  I am trying to speak the truth, because I feel close to being able to do something about it.

The other idea which occurs to me is that writing and feeling are two different things.  Writing about feelings is not feeling feelings.  All art is like this.

Think of some angry art you have seen–Picasso, say, whose work in his best known period has always felt to me like a big Fuck You.  How do artists remains in similar emotional places all their lives, when the idea is self expression?  How is that H.R. Giger has apparently remained in much the same place for the last 30 years?  Why is no happy stuff coming out (that I know of)?

Here is the thing, you can approach a feeling, interrogate it, take pictures from all angles, sculpt it, paint it, sing it, write poems about it, act it out in a drama, and put it into countless forms, and never process it if you never ENTER it fully, if you never allow it to possess you fully, to burn its fire within you.

In my view, only “primitive” art can be cathartic.  My “poem” of the previous post was the level I am talking about.  Nothing refined, nothing sophisticated, nothing that takes a lot of craft.  Nothing, in short, that would get published or hung on a wall.

Can I perhaps redefine “good” art as that which promotes effective abreaction? 

No.  I would add a level of art that I will call “mythic”.  This is art which pulls things out of people. like Giger, either negative things, or sublime things, which allows people to feel feelings that were there, but unnoticed, of a positive nature.

These things are complicated, and I feel like I am wandering, so I’ll leave it at that.  I’m sure I will have more to say presently.

I woke up this morning and ate a tangerine.

It was good.

It occurs to me–and I will readily grant I am in some respects trying to pass off a truism as wisdom–that precisely to the extent you try to force a child into a box, into an inorganic restraint, onto a path they would not have chosen, you weaken permanently, perhaps, their capacity for honesty, creative expression, and true emotional resilience.

Think of your stereotypical Church Lady (SATAN!!!!, not Santa): was she not forced into an artificial box early on?  Has she not spent her life denying any number of emotions, well in excess of the merely sexual?  Does this not make people angry and frustrated, even if they cannot express these emotions CONSCIOUSLY?  Of course, and of course all this gets out, one way or another.  Think Westboro Baptist Church, which I will not even attempt to defend.

Think of Islam.  I cannot imagine a cultural order better suited to the suppression of individuality (other than  Communism, with which it seemingly has much in common).  Everybody–all the men, I should say, who at that still have more chance at self expression than the women locked up in their homes–has to do the same thing (prayer), the same way, at the same times, every day.  And if they don’t, they are condemned.

Heaven and Hell are absolute, irrevocable, eternal, and both contingent on conformity to the dominant cultural forms.

Is it any wonder so many are so eager to kill themselves?  Obviously, it is in their faith (actually, suicide in the pursuit of mass murder is not, but how can I quibble with the clergy who extol then excuse it?), but it seems to go deeper, to an actual social NEED, to something people want.

Now I have no issues with Christianity or Islam per se.  If I had to pick a “faith” it might well be Sufism.  But to extend this example, the Sufis have been and are persecuted for apostasy or heresy.  Many have been killed in Iran, at a minimum, in recent years, and that despite the brilliant Persian poetry of men like Hafez, Rumi, and Omar Khayyam.

There are countless ways to break people, and all of them are easier when they are young.  That so many continue to be practiced in the modern world shows how far culture has yet to progress.