Author: White Whale

Oi, I can’t write what I have been feeling.  It is very much of “that”.  I am a thought worker, but thought workers must align their emotions, process their feelings, must do prep work before trying to think at all.

Ponder these pictures: http://www.giger.cz/1.html

Crazy Swiss, posted by crazy Czechs.

I had intended to make a post on abreaction.  This may be the point, despite the manhattans.

Freud, early in his career, both realized that most of the cases of hysteria he was treating were the result of childhood sexual trauma, and that the most therapeutic modality was facilitating an emotional expression of those deep feelings, which he called “abreaction”.

Being an asshole, he abandoned both correct ideas the moment it became inconvenient for his career. 

Stanislav Grof, who is justly well known for many reasons, amplified the work of Otto Rank in stipulating that the birth process was traumatic for almost all infants.  I recently had the chance to watch a speech of his, in which he noted how ludicrous it is that physicians place an emphasis on immediate nursing for newborns, immediate bonding for newborns, but fail to consider AT ALL the trauma of birth itself.  The dominant paradigm is that babies feel NOTHING until they take their first breath, and then at that point the attention paid them is critical to their psychological development.  Why?  Does it not seem stupid to stipulate that these little proto-humans, these fetuses attached by an umbilical cord destined to be severed, feel NOTHING until they first nurse after their umbilical cord is cut?

Grof, for his part, did a huge amount of LSD.  He was one of the first to “partake” after Albert Hoffman had his bicycle ride, and for him it was huge. Over time, he brought a LOT of people in with him, particularly at Esalen, for month-long sessions that created varying varieties of craziness.

Having seen a LOT, having done LSD psychotherapy, both in Czechoslavakia and the US, he came up with the idea that much of our imaginal experience comes not from early life traumas, but from traumas DURING our birth.  Specifically, he proposed the Perinatal Matrices, which is to say, the parts of our own births in which we become stuck.

Freud found early on that facilitating emotional reactions was healing.  It brought relief of symptoms.  He himself, though, was unwilling to accept what was likely the truth that most of upper class Vienna had parents who molested their children.  By extension, he refused to grant reality to their stories.  He had to insist it was all imagined to avoid being ostracized.  No doubt, he actually became an asset.  He corroborated lies.

But releasing stuck emotions is clearly healing.  Jung rejected abreaction of emotions whose origin he could not fathom, given particularly that he rejected birth trauma as significant.  But things continued to progress.

Atha: Giger.  These images are from Grof’s Matrix 2 and Matrix 3.  I look at them, and a hidden poison manifests, that I had not known was there.  I feel a sickness I had not known was there.

This is therapeutic.  Ah: how do I post while drinking?  Everything we need, every clarity we crave, is there.  It is all there.  You are complete.  I am complete.  Are we not both simply persistently stupid?

I wish you well.  If you reading this blog, you are crazy anyway.

This has two meanings; or, none.

I like circles, except when I hate them.

Ah: it will end well.  That is my feeling.  I wish you a good night, and a good day, repeated until done.

Watched this movie, largely starring Christian Bale, about a post-apocalyptic political order based upon a universal requirement for people to take something like Prozac at prescribed intervals, to stop feeling, and to eradicate all attachment to spirit, to beauty, to sincere human connection, and to all of those aspects of life I have called qualitative.

Without discussing this overly much, this in my view is the actual reality, the banal, ugly, repressive, evil reality of political orders like those in Cuba and North Korea, and what the Chinese have imposed on the objects of their imperialistic aggression, like Tibet.  The POINT of Communism is the suppression of joy, happiness, love, kindness, decency, ambition, culture, and human connection.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  This is why I created the term Cultural Sadeism.

I leave you with an image: listening to Fidel fucking Castro talk for 6 hours about how wonderful he is, how great Communism is, how evil Capitalism is, and doing so in a crowded hot room, knowing that the least hint of impatience, boredom, or God forbid disagreement, would be enough to get you locked into a dog kennel for a month in a hot room.  This was and is the reality.  You don’t get to go to the bathroom.  You don’t get to go to the drinking fountain.  You are watched carefully the whole time, and expected to shout enthusiastically even if your mother is sick and can’t get medical care, or if you have not had a good meal in three days.

And this is a trivial matter, compared to most Communist atrocities.  I feel, though, that sometimes the reality comes through better in the trivial instances.

If I ever set up a self improvement program (I’m still in the “healer heal thyself” stage), my slogan is going to be something like “let me help you be average”.

It’s counterintuitive.  I will grant that.

But it seems to me that in shooting for the moon we so often become unbalanced as individuals.  Are you driven, task-focused, perfectionistic?  You likely lack the ability to relax, and likely are somewhat stunted in your capacity for deep empathy.  Are you super-sensitive, giving, nurturing, loving?  Then you likely lack the stomach to truly grasp the extent of the capacity most humans have for evil.  Your entire political ideology likely rests on wishful thinking.

What we need are average people, well balanced people, people who have a good Go switch, and a good Stop switch, who care but not too much, who get things done, but stay in contact with their softer sides.

I think this might be usefully described as my version of conservatism.  It does not say you should not leap, but that bringing prudence and experience into the decision process is useful.

There is nothing new about government control of free enterprise.  There is nothing new about bread and circuses.  Every leftist initiative is in important respects a retrogression, counter-progressivism.  It relies on demagoguery, which was a term coined over several thousand years ago.  It relies on something for nothing, hand outs, promises to make life easy and happy.

It is not saturnine to insist that these policies have never and cannot work.  On the contrary, it is an optimism, founded an ideas which DO work, which DO elevate human consciousness.

I think it is true, and certainly useful to posit, that the calmest people are those who have been through the most storms.  There is no short cut to this state.

So every shitstorm you struggle through gets you closer to being the guy or gal that nothing bothers.  Every difficulty has its use, and sometimes that use is nothing more than developing endurance.

My two goals in raising my children were to develop resilience and empathy.  I figured the brains would take care of themselves, and were certainly no goal of intrinsic importance.  I am happy to report success in all areas, but did want to share what I just realized as to how to measure this.

Laughter.  If you can laugh at yourself sincerely, you are not self important, and if you are not self important you naturally have room for the emotional lives of others.  You can value them, share them, care about them.

And if you can laugh at pain, you are tough.  One of my favorite scenes in any book is a trivial scene in “Gates of Fire” where the Spartans are conducting a commando raid on the Persian emperor’s compound.  During some tough going, one of them breaks out laughing and says “Could we BE any more miserable?” 

That is beauty and poetry in my eyes.  It is what I have taught my children, to the best of my ability, and they have listened.  Frankly, I think they are both tougher than me, which is great.

Laughter is a salve and a lubricant.  It finds and loosens knots, heals wounds, and grants courage.

Any intelligence which considers itself superior to experience is no intelligence at all.

Failure to grasp this is perhaps at the root of most or even all large mistakes made by ostensibly intelligent people.

The example I would use is the rookie officer and the Been There Done That NCO.  It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how well educated you are, he still knows more than you do about the things that matter, at least until you get up to speed.

I will admit that one of my movie heroes is Staff Sergeant Nantz from Battle: Los Angeles.  That movie did not fare well critically, but fuck the critics.

I had intended to be more cryptic, but that is a game that only amuses me.  I will admit that too.  I know it.   I, too, am ridiculous.

The Sufis, at least of one or several schools, classified people by their Idiot Type.  I’m curious what sort of idiot they would have considered me.  Lots of possibilities!!!!

Do you not have a dominant tone?  A way of being, of moving through the world?  Can we not call this your paradigm, and insist with Kuhn that your way forward–IF you move forward, which most people do not, in important ways–is through paradigm shifts, or what I would tend to call qualitative progress?

Is there not phlogiston in your very being, right now?  I think there is.  Certainly, it courses in my veins.  I breathe it in, and watch it disappear.  I don’t know where it goes, or where and who I was just a moment ago.

To truly feel a global compassion, one must first mourn and process ones own wounds, but also mourn the fact that life itself, for all humanity, is for all of us sometimes painful. We put on a brave face, make the best of it, sometimes break down, often run, but this truth is there.

It is so much easier, more facile, to conflate niceness with compassion. Nice is an
outer ritual of sorts, an agreeable facade, but it often betrays cowardice and it must be said, confusion.

I have been reading about the “consciousness exploration” of the 1960′, and would echo a phrase from Chogyam Trungpa, that of “Spiritual Materialism”. I would add “experiential Materialism”. This is a topic I have visited before.

What difference is there between greed and
covetousness and social competition for the latest car out of Detroit, or a prime home in the best neighborhood, and those qualities applied to competition for the best guru, highest high, most far out experience, and most “exalted”state?

Can you not have competitions for most setene, or most compassionate?