Author: White Whale

I was walking in with the groceries just now and it hit me that the moment you complete a work of art it is dead.  All the glow disappears.

Any new work has manifold possibilities when it is still taking form.  It can go anywhere as long as you are still working on it, shaping matter–sound–to reflect something intangible.  But once you are done, it only has one possibility: what it is. It can be interpreted many ways, but can no longer add anything to the discussion.

In my understanding, this was why Socrates refused to write anything down.  In his view dialogues were living things, and once complete, they were dead and gone.  They were also all completely unique.

Specifically, I was thinking about my own ideas, and my own critical engagement with them.  Perhaps with a bit of vanity, I view them as my own “art”, in the sense that I am constantly endeavoring to perceive (and no doubt sometimes create) patterns which were hitherto unmanifest, latent.

And I was thinking that once they are out there, once I hit Publish, I have no more emotional attachment to them than if they were someone else’s.

The magic of art–any creative form which involves in part spontaneity and creative engagement with something or someone–is in ELICITATION.  You are trying to bring out inchoate patterns, and necessarily such patterns can only be those which can find a home within you.  Thus, you are eliciting some higher form of awareness.

This in my view is the proper purpose of art.  I have made this rough point many ways, many times.  The UTILITY of art is as a tool for personal growth by offering up a means, a pathway, for bringing up latent awareness, and for processing it–mourning it, accepting it, playing with it.

Van Gogh is dead.  So is his art EXCEPT to the extent that he offers other artists a chance to see their own worlds in a new way.  His work should not be fetishized in a manner quite similar to the tribal cults from which we get that word.

I have always liked, and spoken often of, the Tibetan practice of creating temporary art, art they invest an ENORMOUS amount of care and time in creating, which they value for a time, then destroy.  This is not just a lesson in impermanence and the rejection of attachment, but also in my view a wise understanding that what is dead should be buried–ceremoniously, of course–but buried.

If I extend this metaphor slightly farther, are the works of art in museums zombies?  Are they reflections of life past, but denuded of the creative spark which animated the PEOPLE whose lives were shaped by their creative output?

Frankly, I don’t know if the previous paragraph makes sense.  I don’t understand it.  I am operating symbolically in a fishing trip for something interesting.  If you can pull it out of the water, have at it.  Then throw it back.

If one recalls the parable of the talents, it seems to me that Tibet was given 5 talents, and dug them into the ground.  What I mean by this is that they have exquisite, highly developed spiritual technologies, which facilitate a sense of well-being, true spiritual growth, and social harmony.  But they remained for many centuries the Hermit Kingdom, and the only reason we see any diffusion of their science today is because the Chinese invaded them.  I think Tarthang Tulku is the best of them–at least that have published–and it seems a virtual certainty that had the Chinese not decided to subjugate the Tibetans in the name of freeing them, he would have lived his life anonymously (to us), and eventually died without leaving a trace.

Technologies like Kum Nye, knowledge like Kum Nye, once in the public domain, can spread.  The speed with which good ideas can propagate in our modern world is astonishing, and this technology or one like it may well save all of us.  Our would-be saviors–which is to say the ones who want to enslave the whole world to make it “free”–presumably retain some sense that they are doing good.  They have a moral sense.  No one who truly opens up their emotional worlds, though, can retain a fundamentally false understanding of themselves or their true purposes.  One can hope that somewhere one of these people steps into something truly useful, and comes out truly useful.

In Tibet, as I have mentioned, they spin prayer wheels.  They hang prayer flags, and burn prayers in fires (unless that is the Japanese).  Mostly, they pray for universal salvation, that all come to a knowledge of how to be truly happy, and how to be truly free of all the psychic constraints that bedevil the ignorant.

But is the spread of knowledge not a LOGISTICAL problem?  And is that problem best solved by wishful thinking, even if we do grant some ability to send energy out into the world, and some concreteness to thoughts, which can be transmitted?  I think not.  The most fervent wish is scarcely a match for a well constructed sales pitch delivered in a tone that is right for the audience.  It is direct transmission.

Compassion might in some sense be a feeling–it STARTS as a feeling–but if it is sincere it is interested in abstraction, because it is interested in EFFECTIVENESS.  It is interested in treating the problem of enlightening humanity with the same seriousness with which battlefield generals approach an aggressive campaign against their enemies.  The tone is different, of course–love can and should be a “weapon”–but surveying the terrain, assessing logistical requirements, taking the tone of situation and place, putting the right people in the right places, and trusting intuition are not that different than the problems Sun Tzu sought to solve several thousand years ago.

In our modern world we have made the manufacture of objects easy.  If the banking system had not diluted our wealth twentyfold or more, we would have no material wants of any sort in this or most other countries.

What we have not even come CLOSE to achieving is consistency with regard to spiritual growth.  We are not even CLOSE to having methods we can say with relative certainty will always lead down a long road, and carry people where they want to go. 

Hell, even asking the QUESTION “what makes people happy” has only been tolerated within the broader field of psychology perhaps a decade, and has only become popular in the last 5 years or so (or so I assume, based on the books I see on the shelves.)

It is much cheaper and easier to seek the ability to easily achieve satisfaction, contentment, satiety, peace first, then work backwards and figure out what you actually NEED materially.  You want to help the environment?  Let’s not institute a Fascist regime and get Al Gore the uniform and whip he has always wanted.  Let’s figure out how to end our obsession with consumption.  Let’s figure out how to earn time more easily, and with that time work on being happier and happier with less and less.

Here is a link to a discussion about Scientism.  Steven Pinker writes a piece, which I read. Leon Wieseltier writes a piece I really enjoyed.  Daniel Dennett sets himself the task of refuting Wieseltier.

For my part, I am not going to defend the current guardians of the humanities.  They are stupid and have been for some time.  I am going to say the two ways in which they ACTUALLY move forward.  If you read Wieseltier’s piece carefully, it is defensive, not offensive.  He is telling others to stay away, not where to go.

1. In  my view, the humanities should recognize the subjective element of the human experience–our subjectivity, our non-object-ness, but it should be as objective as possible in its measurement of outcomes.  For example, what is the effect of reading Herman Hesse when one is 15?  What lasting effects, if any, are achieved from exposure to art, and are they positive or negative?

Or to use my own proposal in my essay on Goodness, why not search for models of the rejection of self pity, perseverance, and a blossoming perceptual capacity, and see how, particularly in ritual, religious traditions, they are cultivated.  What is essential in ritual for actual, measurable outcomes useful to the modern Western world?  If I was still in Religious Studies, that is the direction I would likely try to take, and be denied. (which is why I am no longer at a university.)

Put another way, and I hate to say this, but I agree with Pinker that particularly psychology–current psychology, and particularly the psychology of optimal well being–should be incorporated into the academy.

Ultimately, we pay teachers to be USEFUL.  If they teach history, they need to teach the lessons of history.  If they teach English, or Philosophy, we need to teach people to THINK and to express themselves with felicity.  There is surely some means of measuring this.

To the extent literature or art is consumed for pleasure, it HAS NO BUSINESS in the university.  It can be consumed outside the university, and no pretence need be made that the activity is other than autotelic (to use Czikszertmily’s (sp definitely off) word from “Flow”).  Reading or other ways of the pursuing the arts are quite useful as recreation and for the processing of experience.

Studying HOW literature is good for the soul WOULD be the proper domain of academics.  One of my many projects is getting certified in the Tomatis method, which involves listening to a lot of Mozart and Bach through specialized headphones that as I understand it periodically block certain frequencies, so as to resensitize your ear to them.  The effects are supposedly salutary on many levels.

How much have you read about Tomatis?  Likely little.

2. In important ways, though, I side with Wieseltier’s root project, which is making our consciousness PRIMARY, our subjectivity PRIMARY, and recognizing that any effort to make of humans objects necessarily deducts from what is most important in our lives, which is our sense of self.  If Dennett truly acted daily like the machine he thinks he is, he would kill himself.  He enjoys things, such as what he is pleased to call science.  He probably likes walking his dog, and drinking good tea, even though within his own system his life is completely meaningless, and he is not different in principle from a cockroach scuttling along the sidewalk.

Again, to be clear, we are told that “consciousness” and “free will” are illusions with the same dogmatism and shitty thinking Dennett accuses Wieseltier of, but the simple fact is that AMPLE evidence exists showing that mind and brain are severable, and that the mind is not confined in its potential consciousness to its immediate domain. 

When we get to the level of what is “really real”, our best model for the root reality is that it doesn’t exist.  Everything we see and touch is the product of consciousness, it is CONTINGENT on consciousness.  This means that at the very heart, the soul of their project, proselytizing materialistic atheists stand not on shaky ground, but NONEXISTENT ground, at least according to “science” as it exists today.

General Relativity–which IS a materialistic model–was falsified by the Alain Aspect’s measurement of non-locality.  It is not true.  God DOES play dice with the universe.  Physicists have been trying without success to avoid this truth for 50 years.

People like Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker have done an excellent job of explaining human consciousness from  B to C, but the universe goes from A to G.  They do well within their domain, and thus never leave it.

This needs to be pointed out, as it is a terrible flaw.  Whatever merits they see in telling the “truth”–which leaves out mountains of available but contradictory empirical data–the sociological fact is that the notion that we are machines made out of meat, devoid of “mind” in a higher sense, and that our freedom is illusory, have pernicious effects.  No, it doesn’t floor people immediately.  They wear nice sweaters, and drink good coffee, and become ardent socialists or Objectivists.

But as Malcolm Gladwell noted in “Outliers”, over long periods of time small differences can have enormous effects.  All the problems we have in solving social issues, of finding meaning, devolve in my personal view into varying accounts of the nature of life.

My beef with these people is that they are failing to avail themselves of the very good data, as one example, in support of the theory that souls survive death.  Science CAN and SHOULD meet religion.  Christianity may be empirically untenable–that is my own view–but large segments of its core tenets may be salvageable.

Why argue about what sort of God would commit capricious acts?  Why not have the balls to look at ALL the data with an open–scientific, not scientistic–mind?

The cure for economically productive greed–which is the default in free market economy for all but banks–is wisdom. Work until you have enough, then stop.

The cure for Statist greed, which is intrinsically economically UNproductive and which leads to huge inequalities of outcome unrelated to performance, is more laws restricting the ativities of the State.

This is more or less the opposite of leftwing rhetoric. I want more laws to chain the State. They claim that granting power to the stae is inherently moral. No group or sociery can be moral, though, which is not composed of people who as individuals are moral.

The Left has created so much unnecessary confusion.

I think it would be useful to stipulate thst whenever you see a large ego, you are seeing an unusual amount of fear. Vanity is a type defense, I think agaist the fear of nonexistence.

Practically, if you can live happily on your own, as you are, you need not develop an unrealistic, exaggerated, and false sense of your own abilities and importance.

I would like to relink my two primary treatments of this topic: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2010/10/plausible-911-conspiracy-theory.html

and https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2010/11/tower-7-thoughts.html

Here is the crux of my argument: steel I-beams do not collapse as a result of anything but extremely high temperatures.  Jet fuel may reach the levels needed, but nothing in an office–no desk, not the carpet, not books (Fahrenheit 451), not computers, not cable, NOTHING–burns hot enough to come close to compromising an I-beam.

Yet, this is what is claimed in the official report on the collapse of Tower 7.  I have not read the report, but it seems likely no plausible means CAN be claimed for how the fires started, how a building full of flame retardant furniture, ceiling tiles, etc, was able to sustain a fire for 8 hours, why the sprinklers failed, or how even if one single I-beam collapsed the building would fall straight down at the pace of gravity as if it had been blown.

A friend of mine involved in counter-terrorism suggested that the bombs may have been placed by Islamic terrorists.  Since we don’t know who did it, all possibilities are on the table, but I have two principle objections to this:

1) the amount of sophistication and intelligence needed to pull this off would have been considerable, and if wreaking havoc and killing people in spectacular ways was their sole goal, they would have committed more attacks by now.

2) More importantly, the goal of Islamic terrorists–or so we have always been told–is mass death, the more the better.  If they got bombs into the buildings, why not collapse them without the planes?  Many, many more people would have died.

Thus, it seems most likely to me that the whole thing was staged theatrically, to generate as much raw emotion, as much horror and anger, as possible.  Why?  We can’t know, but it seems now likely to me that it was to create public support for the creation of a surveillance state, in which all communications are recorded, our genitals groped in public, and wars are staged that would otherwise have been unnecessary.

Some people want us always at war.  Some people want our freedoms subverted, and a pervasive command and control apparatus set up.  Some of these people have power and influence.

Certainly, I am a bit paranoid.  I have reasons for this which any regular readers of my blog can readily grasp. 

But the fact remains that many of these people put their thoughts on paper, and are taken very seriously.  As I tend to do, I will post as one small example the excellent essay on the environmental movement from the Claremont Institute: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1588/article_detail.asp

I will the oldie but goody Report from Iron Mountain.

As I have stated before, satire needs to be funny.  The claim that this book was intended to make people laugh is itself risible.

The thirst for power has existed forever.  It is not behind us.  The potential size and scope of consolidated power, quite to the contrary, has never been greater.  A world government ruled by a small junta or even individual is not inconceivable, and is routinely proposed by science fiction authors.

I’m in my forties, a time when I am supposed to be heavily focused on my career, the next promotion, earning prestige.   It would likely strike some as odd that someone my age would spend a considerable amount of time working on personal growth.

“Just get over it” is, I think, a common refrain.  The Eagles wrote a song with that as a title (interestingly, on at least their first reunion tour I read they had to pay someone to pass notes between one another because at least some of them refused to talk with one another.)

I like to work from first principles, though.  What is the purpose of life?  In my view, learning how to give unconditional love.  I am not good at this, ergo I need to do more work.  This is a simple and very short process of logic.

In practice, I think many people carry wounds, or unactivated potentialities, with them their entire lives.  The wounds are hidden in areas they simply don’t visit, but which are always PRESENT.

Ironically, the way to heal them is in my view to bring them consciously into the present, and accept both the hurt and the violent anger you felt in response.  You cannot get hurt without yourself feeling hate, even if you deny it consciously.  The purpose of anger is to protect you, and we are wired for it to do its job.

I get angry on occasion.  The task is not to prevent it from happening, but decreasing the number of things which cause that emotion to activate.  Logically, this involves an increase in a sense of control, such that anger is needed less for protection.

As I think I have said before, anger exists as a sort of watchdog, that will bark at anything it thinks looks threatening.

For myself, my Kum Nye practice currently involves activation of the Navel Center, and they warned that it might churn up some strong and unpleasant emotions.  This has in fact happened.  I spent almost all day yesterday in a foul mood.  Yesterday morning, in my practice, I felt FULLY the emotions that confronted me as a small child, and it felt like a blast of fire, hard to take.

But as I figuratively stood there in this hot wind, I realized that I can take this, and that if I take it long enough, it will diminish. I can see this.  And if it diminishes, it will leave room for all sorts of pleasant emotions.

A great many of my dreams are, as I think about it, about control.  I have developed, I guess, control over my worst emotions, but that is not at all the same as integrating them, and releasing the chronic bad ones.  It is keeping them in place.  I fear no monsters, and I can do everything in my dreams, including flying, walking through walls, levitating and moving objects.  But none of this is PARTICIPATION.

Last night I had a hint of what I hope to see more of, which was a sense of belonging and participating in a very pleasant scene.

The Buddhists have a series of virtues they believe are needed for achieving Nirvana.  I have had for some time several points I want to make about this, but one of them is Virya, which is related to our virile, and which translates roughly as courage or manliness.

It takes courage to face your inner demons, your inner darkness, the ways in which you are constrained.  It is in all respects more painful to be chained and know it, than to be chained and blind to the fact.  To become free, though, the first step is to recognize your constraints, knowing full well that you cannot fix them immediately, and recognizing consciously that deciding to bring this into awareness is going to entail a very long process of accommodation.

If you stand for nothing, you can’t ask others to stand with you.

Occurred to me just after I hung up on  an RNC solicitor.

As I get deeper into some very primal emotions, which seemingly come from perhaps before birth through about the 4th year of my life, I wonder where this ability to hate a small child comes from.  That is all I feel, is  hate.  I don’t remember ever feeling a sense of belonging, of being loved.  I had a dream once of raising my children, guiding my children, and there was a point where I literally walked on water to carry them across a river.  This is, I think, more or less what I did, because I had no analogue in my own life for the giving of love and nurturing.  The difference between me and my parents is that I am capable of empathy.

And it occurs to me that the motto of their generation is “spare the rod and spoil the child”.  According to my baby book, I got my first spanking at 12 months, for touching an electric plug.  I don’t know how hard I was hit, or how often, but as I dig deep into my affective memory, my kinesthetic memory, I feel this terrible fear of being punished, seemingly at random, and lacking the cognitive advancement to understand why I was being hit.  If you are going to use corporal punishment, it seems the child needs to at least be old enough to understand well enough why he is being punished to not do it again.  I wasn’t old enough.

But in their own minds, and this is the core point I want to make, my parents were doing me GOOD.  They were being good Christians.  They were doing their duty–this is what they told themselves–even as they took their resentments out on me, of my frequent crying, my neediness, of all the things ALL children do.  I well understand getting tired of little children.  I have been there. I  have often said that any parent who claims they don’t occasionally fantasize about killing their kid in the first couple years is lying.

At  the same time, most kids get through that period, because their parents exercise self restraint, and also learn to value all the countless HAPPY moments, JOYFUL moments that little kids also bring.

But think of all the evil committed in the name of the church, of Goodness, of God.  Sade could plausibly argue, as he did indirectly, that no God that was not evil could inflict on humanity anything like the Catholic Church, which for many centuries ROUTINELY tortured anyone who questioned them, and quite often murdered them in a very painful fashion. This church also routinely excused the worst crimes of kings and others, when it was to their benefit.  Even today the Vatican is, in my understanding, the richest nation per capita on the planet, because of all the gold in its vaults, gold stolen from many places, gold and other treasure with blood on it.

Thus I would argue that the fundamental mechanism of most evil on this planet is that of RATIONALIZATION, of having a mechanism whereby the basest impulses of greed, violence, lust and all the rest are made VIRTUOUS.  Islam is perhaps the most conspicuous example, in that men were encouraged directly from their holy book to go out and rape women and enslave them, to attack their men, kill them, and take all their possessions.  All of this was rationalized for them.

With regard to the Bible, nothing in the New Testament allows for violence.  Historically, that is what the Church was for, and the effects in many cases not all that different from those inspired by the Koran.

Few thoughts.

1. Given a non-zero velocity, all new money introduced into an economy dilutes the value of existing money.

2. Given the theoretical possibility of price stability at any given quantity of money, the sum purchasing power of all money in existence does not thereby diminish.

3. This means that those who create money take value–purchasing power–from those who previously had it.

4. Money has no inherent economic value.   

Conclusion: the process of creating money is parasitical.