Author: White Whale

Success begins locally and expands; only failure can be exported.

Don’t feel like explaining this at the moment.  I think it is clear enough.

Actually: interrogate.  Do you think this is true?  In what domains?  To what extent?  To what extent is this a coherent statement?  What would falsify it?  How many ways can it be true?  What alternative formulations would you suggest?  What is missing?

Concise, confident statements tend to have an allure that can lead to being blinded to their limitations.  A paradigmatic example is the opening to Anna Karenina, which I have never agreed with.  All human qualities, from happiness to sadness, from goodness to evil, have unique manifestations. 

Never treat the world as an abstraction, because that ends the conversation.

Was that an example?  To what extent can abstractions which counsel against abstraction be trusted?

We all sleepwalk, every day, most of the day.  Once in a while, we get that feeling when you wake briefly from a nap, and realize you were dozing.  But sleep is so much more pleasant, even if less instructive.

Should we deny one another the comforts of very incomplete knowing? Or are they comforts?  That is the question.  My answer is that much more is possible, if we just wade through the shit.

It seems to me need to distinguish the PURPOSE of life from the meaning. The first is a thought you think which, if you are congruent, orients your thought, then emotion, then behavior. The second is an affect, a present reality. It is what we REALLY want. We dont want a thought, even though intellectuals almost as a defining trait deal them.

Logically, if the purpose of life is learning to give and receive unconditional love, then the MEANING of life is the present reality of love.

I think many who search feverishly for “the meaning of life” are really suffering from a lack of love in their own lives. I look at my own childhood, and my mother really didnt know what to do with me. I was not severely abused or neglected. She did what she thought mothers did, but largely without enthusiasm, and without EVER connecting with me emotionally as an unique and interesting little human.

Without knowing the name of it–having no personal experience with it– I now realize I have been looking for love all my life. Only in the past day have I seen how my unhelpful behavior patterns, my self destructive patterns, have had that as a goal; it is now my responsibilty to internalize and accept that thatworld is long gone, and succes impossible, with the methods I have been using. I have to be my own parents, and give myself the nourishing they failed to I can see,now, how this done, and for once feel optimistic about my future.

Power springs from the barrel of a gun; therefore own all the guns.

My previous post no doubt seemed arrogant. Perhaps at times I am. One thing I always do, though, is subject my opinions to critical scrutiny, and I am always willing to defend them in depth; something mediocrities like David Brin are unwilling–and apparently UNABLE– to do.

Kipling poem If stipulates ” if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” That poem is on my wall, and I try to live up to it.

It takes a special something to stick to your guns when you are being universally condemned. In my own case, my sanity depended on it. My family is crazy, but as is so often the case I, as the sanest one, was labelled crazy. That was a determined and long term assault which worked ultimately to strengthen my will considerably. I became quite comfortable being the only one saying something, and dont fear being an outlier in the slightest.

No one likes to be preached to, least of all the guilty.

In viewing people as basically vain, stupid, and gullible, Dale Carnegie spoke considerable truth. Sometimes people are simply a means to an end, and in those cases it probably is best to feed their vanity, share their delusions, and promise them what they want to hear.

I say this because I told the truth to two people today, and will likely regret it.

Posted the following here.

Phrase just popped in my head, two beers in.

We imagine brains as stationary.  Contemporary philosophers often use the metaphor of a “brain in a vat”, or something close to that.  Brains do not have arms.  They do not have legs.  Thus we assume they do not move.

But this is stupid.  Outside of purely instinctive, reactive physical behaviors, substantially everything we ever do begins as a thought–perhaps a thought following an emotion, but the thought is what leads to actual action.

Thoughts have patterns, just as our bodies have patterns.  Moshe Feldenkrais said that every person has their own unique dysfunction.  Only those who move perfectly all move alike. (And the Police State has of course seized on this–as they seized on the Killing Joke–to develop software that recognizes distinctive motor patterns in people, as an adjunct to facial recognition software.)

Minds, likewise, move well only when spontaneous, only when not jumping from box to box.  Minds constrained may as well be suffering from paralysis.  In an ironic twist, the legs and arms move just fine: only the mind is paralyzed.

Again, fatigue and bubbles involved.  Use these ideas at your own risk.

The movie referenced is “The World’s End”.  That is the name of the bar.

I make mistakes sometimes.  Always keep that in mind.  I am not a professional.

What I wanted to add were some further thoughts on that movie, which seemingly got to me on a mythic level.  Let me ask this question: what is superficiality?  What is a superficial bar?  What is a superficial person?  What is a superficial life? 

Logically, to answer this question, do you not need some sense of what is true, what is behind (for walls) or below (for water)  the surface?  You have emotions that are “on the surface”, and this implies the possibility of emotions that are below the surface, and somehow more true.

Take greed: is it inherently a superficial emotion?  If you have enough, and want more, more, more, do we call this superficial?  Well, what is below the surface?  Is it not a sense of emotional disconnection from people–or at least some people; you can be greedy for your family, but feel no compunction in taking from others–and a deep underlying fear of some sort?

Indeed: could we not speak of “greeds” in the plural?  Can we not even consider both all vices and virtues as utterly unique both to individuals and moments?  Can I not express greed differently in different contexts?

The Buddhists split everything up: there is no unitary self, no unitary space, and no unitary time.  Everything consists of little bits with infinitesimal spaces between them.  Space, perhaps, is the primary reality on their account, Mahakasha if memory serves.  Certainly this has been mentioned in my Kum Nye series.  I don’t even know if they consider the bits–dharmas–to be actually in motion, or only apparently in motion.  This, itself, may vary from school to school.

So, back to the “Blanks” (British humor is certainly quite dry), the automatons with seeming personalities of “The World’s End”.  Are they happy?  Do we not need a sense of what happy is to answer this question?

Is it really good sex?  This is an answer we are given implicitly constantly.  We chase chicks, or are chased by dicks, and somehow bliss is supposed to follow. 

But it doesn’t.  You get to a certain age, and if you are growing emotionally, you realize that most of life is not about evanescent pleasures, which we can call superficial because we realize deeper pleasures are possible.

But is pleasure the purpose of life?  In my view, yes, it is.  But pleasure of a qualitatively rich variety, which ultimately transcends the very need for pleasure.

As I think out loud, though, it increasingly seems obvious to me that if you lack a sense of life being about other than procreating and dying–which is more or less the Freudian/Materialistic account–then becoming deeper as a person is difficult. 

Richard Dawkins seemingly thrives on aesthetics, particularly intellectual aesthetics.  But how in his world does a deep sense of connection to other humans beings, of love, arise?  Love is just an illusion, a manifestation of some genetically determined social impulse, with likely a good amount of the procreative instinct dominating it.

As I begin to climb a ladder out of my hole, my cell, I realize that any life lived without the cultivation of love as its primary purpose is largely wasted.  This is where we go when we want to get below the surface, or behind our own walls, and those we erect to defend from others.

To be deeper is to expand.  Perhaps, then, a better word than superficiality is “emotionally small”, or constricted, or dense–or, to put it properly, afraid.

Watched “The End of the World” tonight.  Very odd movie, which included a significant stab at the globalists, and their arrogant claim to know what is best for all of us.  Drunk and stupid, many of us are their moral superiors, precisely because we are not claiming to know all the answers.

It got me to thinking about the “Starbucksification” of the world, about plastic people, about superficiality, about not being real.  Here are a few thoughts.

Do we not drift in and out of being “real”?  Do we not drift in and out of emotional presence?  Are we not at times more plastic than others?

If I live less than I could have, if a given day has less purposive engagement than was possible, is that a partial suicide?  Did I not sacrifice part of my life to convenience, or laziness, or emotional or intellectual rigidity.

Flip side: if I spend my life obsessed with living well, obsessed with not missing a moment, not missing one opportunity to learn or grow, or feel joy and connection, does not this mindset ITSELF lead to rigidity and the loss of “moments” of various sorts?

I am using a good form of self growth, a good form of meditation.  But it is my strong belief–and this has been echoed by the head teacher–that it is quite possible to be diligent in sitting, diligent in following directions, and yet to spend DECADES substantially as you were.

I like this concept of Tao, of a way which is a bit foggy, which is imprecise, but quite real, and quite useful none the less.

It seems to me at times that the fetishization of efficiency in the industrial and business worlds has trickled down to interpersonal relations, in which other people’s use is our personal satisfaction, and we expect them to be efficient in that.  As a physical act, sex is somewhat efficient, but no amount of skill can substitute for true emotional openness, intimacy, and tenderness.

Ah, few attempts to record vaporous perceptual threads that flit into and out of my life.  Lines are inefficient.  So is time.

I saw today in my Kum Nye practice that religion, just like Leftism, can be both a way of disengaging from the real problems of the world–in which it is analogous to what I call Sybaritic Leftism–and a means of expressing cruelty in the name of love and goodness, in which case it is analogous to what I call Cultural Sadeism.

There can never be a substitute for open perception.  As I grow, I see that I have never in my life felt the possibility of spontaneous goodness.  Somewhere in a time I can’t remember, I adopted a mindset of “another day, another beating”.  I adopted a mindset of endurance, and put aside any tender feelings, any possible optimism, any sensitive, open engagement with the world.

Yet this is precisely not just where happiness happens, but Goodness.  I have defined Goodness as in part being able to be happy on your own.  Logically, this means that if you cannot be happy on your own, your capacity for Goodness is greatly diminished, and the likelihood you will periodically turn to cloaked cruelty to salve your own pain greatly increased.

Islam is more or less the direct analogue in the moral realm of Leftism, in the sense that it is in a very great many cases openly cruel, violent, insensitive, inflexible, and rooted somewhere other than the present moment.  It is a monstrous abstraction, in which cutting the arms off of children and decapitating women can somehow be made to seem good, just as it was made to seem good by Robespierre and Lenin and Hitler.