Author: White Whale

I don’t know much about him, but he came up in this piece: http://vigilantcitizen.com/moviesandtv/the-hidden-and-not-so-hidden-messages-in-stanley-kubriks-eyes-wide-shut-pt-i/

This movie is extremely evocative, and gets at deep realities about what it means to be human, specifically to be sexual. Nicole Kidman’s performance was amazing, I thought.  It just seemed honest to me when she was simultaneously fantasizing about the naval officer, and feeling tender towards Bill.  Emotions get all mixed up like that, in both men and women, with the difference that most women spend far more time feeling and processing them.

Crowley, it seems to me, was an idiot.  He took what was a wonderful system for perfecting Goodness and all of the open joy that comes with it, and degraded it to sex and power.

Tantra means web, and I interpret this as meaning connection, that we are all connected with one another, and also that our experiences flow together, harmonize, congregate, cluster.  What it builds is an openness to ALL experience.  Everything good in it can be done without sex, and sex alone confers nothing.   It is neither necessary nor sufficient.

As far as power, it seems to me that there is far more resonant potential spending a pleasant afternoon with someone you love deeply, than in ruling the entire Earth.  There is nothing interesting there.  It is dull, boring, insipid.  Power mongers are inherently insipid.

What power mongering is, is a contraction of the soul, of experience, of mind.  It is a permanent spasm, one that never ends.  We see rituals like the one in Eyes Wide Shut as aberrant because they are the solution to this spasm.  They are the antidote to the steam brewing up in human beings tied in knots.

In the past week or two, I have provided all the ingredients for the so-called Left Handed Path.  Everything.

And being emotionally shallow, even if intellectually gifted, Crowley missed it all. One hopes it is not true that people of power and influence have mistaken his tricks for anything of substance.

What happened to the girl, Mandy?  Was she killed?

I’ve been pondering this all day.  The conclusion I’ve reached is that the explanation his friend gave was the best one.

When Tom Cruise showed up in a taxi, they knew he didn’t belong there.  But he knew the password, and they had no way of knowing what else he knew, so they decided both to show him what they were doing, and also to scare him into silence, as they presumably wanted the very existence of these events secret, and he did not know, then, how badly he had erred.  Between the gate and the time he pulled up, they looked at his picture, and realized who he was.

They decided to let Mandy warn him, because it was just possible he would recognize her by her breasts, which differ in details woman to woman.  He would also have reason to believe that she was sincerely trying to help him, as she would have a motive, since he had helped her.  They did their charade, and at the end of it she was so emotionally exhausted, she completed the suicide she had been half heartedly trying to commit for some time.

And his friend was quite sincere in saying they wanted to scare the shit out of him: hence the mask.

That movie is perhaps the best movie I have seen delving into the erotic instinct.  It is on display in many contexts, in many ways.  It drives so many people mad.  It is also holy.  Above all else, it is powerful, both in expression and repression.

are easy to understand/Do what you feel, feel until the end.”  Enigma

Watched “Eyes Wide Shut” last night.  Definitely plenty of material for Movie Yoga.

Few thoughts:

1) Being a man, this just occurred to me, but sex is not just about sexual feeling.  It is about all feelings.  It is about eliciting a non-ordinary state of consciousness, and going wherever it leads you.  It is not different in principle from Holotropic Breathwork, if you let your inner healer, inner guide, take you where you need to go. Every time can and should be different, if you open fully to the energies within you.

2) 50 Shades of Grey.  I don’t think I have asked a woman if she has read these books and been told no.  At least two married women have mentioned it to me with what I took to be a sparkle in their eye–one certainly, beyond any doubt.  I am an honest monk, so nothing happened.

But those books were written by a woman, and I think they take the logic of feeling to its natural conclusion: sex which is more or less purely feeling.  And as I have mentioned, being contracted–tied up, as I understand happens in those books–is followed by a release which need not stop where you started.  It can become a larger circle.  I am not saying that I think those sorts of things are healthy, but the emotional basis for them is becoming more clear to me.  I think over short term periods they could be liberating, but that anyone who does these things long term is simply “stuck in a moment.”, to borrow a phrase from U2.

3) The cult.  I think it worth noting that the orgy was not really about sex at all.  All of these men were presumably wealthy, and able to hire hookers, or find “spares” easily.  What it was about was creating group cohesion, community.  I am increasingly inclined to view the nature of what we call a church–a cult merely being an “odd” and/or secretive church–is altered states of consciousness and a group.  You come together, and you may listen to Plainchant/Gregorian chanting.  You may sing with others, and see an ocean of hymnals.  You may conduct a rite of initiation, and then have public sex while disguising your face.

I had the vague impression that I was supposed to be horrified by the idea that our power elite behaves like this.  I wasn’t.  In fact, I think such cults meet a cultural need.  The “math” in our modern society does not add up.  We do not have formal ways in which to contact non-ordinary states of consciousness.  I have argued this for years.  I have argued for temples with temple prostitutes.

Think about this: we all have a lovely vision of a man and a woman meeting, falling in love, and aging gracefully together.  But can anyone honestly say that neither of them does not have to fight off thoughts of being with someone else, likely in many cases for years?  Think Bridges of Madison County.  Yes, it is Hollywood, but there is, I think, truth in it.

Why not a holiday once or twice a year, or every other year, or every 5 years, or something, where both partners can be with someone else briefly?  If both can manage the jealousy, their wandering eye is stilled, and they can refocus on their love for one another.

And to this I would add the regular practice of emotional skill, of experiential enhancement, via something like Kum Nye.

4) Cult, part two. Obviously, the violence–the murder of that woman–was wrong.  But Tom Cruise was stupid.  Violence was not an innate or intended outcome. 

What is truly sinister, what bothers me much more, is that in daylight hours many of these men, now wearing expensive suits. collude with one another to defraud the rest of us, to damage our nation.   They provoke wars, cause famines, and impoverish people who otherwise could be well off.  Our entire world could and should be relatively wealthy, in my view, but our power elite does not pursue this as a primary objective.  Their daylight faces are what are evil.

Everyone who belongs to the Federal Reserve, every bank being given billions of dollars a month in printed money to do whatever it wants with it, knows that it is taking wealth away from ordinary Americans.  They know this.  But they keep doing it.  Money is addictive, and so presumably is power.

Update: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304914904579434653903086282?mod=e2fb


They are now saying it flew on for at least 4 hours.  That’s much less than the 24 or so I was thinking, but it would both allow people to call friends and family, have it ring, and yet go unanswered.

Actually, I will add this idea: what if as part of a default shut down program, the engines stopped sending data, even though they were still operational?  This would get us close to 24 hours, as these planes can stay aloft that long, perhaps longer on conservation mode.

Why not add my theory?  If it is true that 24 hours or so after it disappeared cell phones were still ringing, and Chat was still enabled–both of which would likely be impossible with phones resting on the bottom of the ocean, then my initial thought was that it was hijacked, taken to parts unknown, and the fate of everyone on board also unknown.

However, why not destroy the phones?

Here is another idea, which came to me following an interview on NPR, which I am proud to say I was able to listen to for almost 5 minutes without getting pissed off (probably because there is nothing to spin here): what if a structural flaw in the Boeing [edit: which the commentator said was something Boeing had warned about] caused a rapid decompression, and the pilots only had time to start turning around before getting overcome, or in which the pilots were overcome instantly, and passengers tried to make the turn themselves, before being overcome?

Picture this: a partial turn, then automatic overrides in the system shut down all communications, switch autopilot on, and await further instructions.  But no instructions are forthcoming, because everyone is dead.  Because the plane is intact, all phones are intact (as I understand it, they have satellite receivers, although it’s unclear if those would continue working).  They are just ringing next to people unable to answer.  A ghost plane flies on for a good 24 hours, apparently due West, and eventually the fuel runs out–it’s been on conservation mode, per presets, but can’t last forever–and the plane ditches somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean.  No one will ever find it.

Like everyone else, I have little data, but that is my guess at the moment.  It’s a haunting image.

I will add, that yes I understand it would likely have flown over Indonesia. Given the thus far much less than spectacular performance of the Malaysian air traffic controllers/military, should we expect better of the Indonesians?  Would they have had any NEED for elaborate air defense systems?  I don’t think so.

The life experience of most middle class kids growing up in modern industrialized democracies is that all their material needs will be cared for, and that peace is normal.  They have easy lives and assume that this is the way things are supposed to be.

Many, when they get to college, are exposed for the first time with full force to the quantity of pain and suffering in history.

What political stance is possible, other than what I call Sybaritic Leftism, if they start with the assumption that pain is aberrant and unnecessary?

How EASY it is for ideologues to pull these kids in, simply by promising them an end to human suffering.  Among other things, ease makes people stupid.  It takes a long, long time to get out of it.

Stan Grof coined this term, usually abbreviated “Coex”.  Being something of a vain pedant, I would like to propose for my own purposes the term “Resonant Constellation”.

The basic idea is this: within his psychological paradigm, we “consist” in experiences gathered in the transpersonal realm (Archetypal and/or past life experience and/or Collective Unconscious), the perinatal realm, and the biological/historical realm, and sometimes groups of things get stuck.

If we posit that the essence of living well is allowing experience of all sorts to flow through you without objection, without grasping and holding, effortlessly and smoothly, then anything which causes you to get stuck is bad.  Certain experiences create a textured surface on which other things get stuck.

As an example, an unusually bad birth can cause all sorts of life long predispositions to certain bad emotional states.  Being stuck in Matrix 2–that period in which contractions have started, but there is no escape–can create a life long tendency to assume being stuck is the nature of life; that nothing you do has any meaning, or ever can have any meaning.

You start with a predisposition, from birth, then as you live your life and process your experience, you have difficulty allowing things to flow through.  Your default assumption is that sustained movement of any sort is impossible, and your belief becomes reality.

I like the term Resonant Constellation, because I feel like if you touch any experience in this constellation, you trigger the whole group.  It is a sort of holograph, in which ever part contains the whole.

Likewise, if you can fully process any core element in this constellation, you weaken the whole thing, and then in goes swirling away, into Matrix 3 and then 4.

It is an interesting idea.  If mainstream psychiatry fully integrated Stan’s work, it would change our world in short order, I do believe, because the underlying paradigm is that we were MEANT for health, that in almost all cases, absent severe organic trauma or defect, we have all the tools we need not just to survive, but to thrive.  How many of you can honestly say you are thriving now?  I doubt 1 person in a 100 can, the world over.

Meditate on this phrase. See where it takes you.

What is the life denying opposite of a gentle rain? A subtle poison?

I felt clearly today that there is no path to spirit but through the senses, through the body.  If there is value in asceticism, it can only lie in sharpening and refining the senses, and specifically in eliminating barriers to experience.

On this topic I will add that an interesting thing about contraction and release–of various sorts–is that the expansion following a contraction need not stop with the previous form and boundaries.  The contraction creates the possibility of growth, which may seem paradoxical, but isn’t.  You change form in one way, making a following change easier.

I felt too that most of what is done in the name of religion is in almost all cases social and not spiritual technology.  Group ritual is no doubt comforting in many ways–people who go to church, for example, live considerably longer, making widespread failure to “prescribe” church all the more conspicuous–but it does not further inner growth.

It seems to me as well that you cannot do exactly the same thing for many years, and expect to continue growing.  Just as you have to vary your routine in physical training, so too must you in psychospiritual training.

I will add, that it is very hard to see where emotional growth ends and spiritual growth begins.  They are closely related.  Neither has anything to do with intellectual growth, whose sole purpose is to create structures within which psychospiritual growth is made possible and/or more likely.

May you fail better today.  May you find and travel a path which goes nowhere and remember those paths which do.  May you feel misery and pain, and remember with gratitude the possibilities of joy and contentment.  May you see ugliness and remember the importance of beauty.  May you hear noise and dissonance and realize, perhaps for the first time, the value of harmony.  May you smell something which disgusts you, and by contrast enter into the vital and omnipresent world of scent.  May you taste something which offends you, and recall with satisfaction the countless good meals you have received, and appreciate more those you have yet to receive.

May you realize that the world is open, and that only we are closed.

Simple question: what is the potential scope of the effect of the decision of any single person or body within a system? If it could affect everyone in a system, then that system is formally Anti-Liberal.

If it affects at most a handful of people–or if it must be combined with the decisions of dozens or hundreds of others–then that system is Liberal.

I will note that this includes within it the tyrannical potential of direct Democracy of the Athenian or French Revolutionary sort, in which a group of people, but ONE body, has the power over life and death for anyone it chooses.

Within our system, there are many bodies–two houses of Congress, 3 branches of government, 50 state governments, countless local governments, and a system of law which by design restricts Federal control of any number of things, including gun ownership, criminal justice, and speech. There are firewalls to block the effect of a decision, in answer to which relative unity of view must prevail for large scale policies.