Author: White Whale

I recently listened to a 12 hour treatment of Greek philosophy.  I had many reactions, of course, most of which I will likely never post here (that is another topic), but did want to find that I found Socrates’ thoughts on writing his ideas down interesting.  Effectively, his position was that ideas live, and that writing them down calcified them in some way, such that they could no longer interact with others in a living way once he was dead.  Dialogue was no longer possible, and he preferred being forgotten to being misunderstood. 

This is an interesting perspective.

Is not all writing dead, and resurrected by the reader?  I was wondering about some of my own writing, and how I would respond to questions about it.   I would have to rethink myself to the place where I wrote it, which I hope would be regressive, since I would hope I have grown since then (yesterday; five minutes ago).

Each resurrects writing in their own way, even the author.  I myself can’t remember what I believed 5 years ago, not in detail.

Can there be an honest writing of the future?  I don’t know.

Talking out loud again.  May make sense, maybe not.  Gibberish is sometimes the idiom of the open.

I would like to define Spirituality as I understand it as “The perfection of normality.”  Is it normal to feel desire when a heterosexual man sees an attractive woman?  Of course.  My spirituality simply offers him the choice of using that normal, natural desire to further his own spiritual growth by chasing her around, or to let it go immediately as not compatible with his current goals.

Anger, sadness, jealousy, greed: none of these are foreign.  None of these are abnormal.  What I would submit, though, is that it is certainly useful to believe that happiness is our natural state, and in point of fact I think this is actually true, in an absolute sense we will be able to see when we pass on.

Our task is to follow a path laid down for us to happiness, which travels through, and attains familiarity with ALL, the side routes of all the normally unhelpful emotions.

I have more to say, but I feel it won’t quite come out right at this time, so I’m going to go watch some more of the Lord of the Rings, and keep testing out my Movie Yoga.  If it works out, I’m going to compete in the Regional Serenity Contest next month.  I think I may even be able to make Nationals. (h/t to the Onion.  That link is pretty funny.)

I just finished a very interesting book called “Movie Yoga”, by Tav Sparks, who more or less runs the official Holotropic Breathwork training.  The premise is that movies can act as triggers for deep latent nexuses of emotional tension, which if accepted and acknowledged, if allowed to flow freely, will loosen deep knots within our psyches, and allow the normal and natural flow towards wholeness with which we are all born.

I think he is right, but that he does not go far enough.  It seems to me that we all crave direction, and in the moral sphere the only directions can be away from or towards our moral goals.  A personality based on a chosen goal is characterized by a deep qualitative order I have called “Telearchy” which provides a sense of relief and freedom in and of itself from the burdens of confusion, self pity, and an unstable sense of what to do in life.

Within (W)holotropic Breathwork, the goal is definitionally Wholeness, and the means of moving towards it the liberation of what they term the Inner Healer.  For those who are hurt–pretty much all of us–release from the prison of self defeating, deeply imbedded, generally unconscious behavioral and emotive patterns is wholesome, invigorating, and useful.

Doing my meditation this morning, though, it occurred to me that if a wound is concave emotionally–if it represents the intrusion of the outside world in such a way that a permanent change has been affected–then there ought to be the emotional equivalent of a convex curve as well.  We can in fact intrude into the world, from the inside out.

Joy, as an example, can be infectious.  Optimism, love, excitement: all can be spread.  What you need to do this is a superabundance of these traits, such that you are not only not deficient in them, but so profoundly filled with them that you cannot but spread your abundance.

In my view healing wounds is only half of what humans are capable of.  We are capable of becoming human dynamos, sources of light and healing energy.  I have at times felt strong currents flowing through me, and my goal is to build this flow as well as I can, which in my case will first consist in meeting my own emotional needs well enough that I am never an asshole (a counterfactual statement, regrettably, at the moment), and that I am able to achieve consistent congruence between thought, word and deed (also not currently a salient element in my own life).

I used the word guru in one sense a few posts ago. I will use it in another way.  Let us suppose that everyone is emotionally wounded, or at least incomplete in some way.  They are not sufficient unto themselves.  They cannot act as radiant lights without context, without emotional support, without people who understand them.

It seems to me there is a limit to what can be achieved within a mass of people, each of whom needs some section of the others for optimal functioning.  Do there not need to be those who are “self-born”, who regulate their own destinies, who can give without taking?  I feel there do, those who can move but not be moved.  We might follow Aristotle, and place their final reliance on God, however we define the referent of this word. I am fine with that.

Such people, though, I would also call “heavy” (guru), and certainly teachers.

I had a mild synchronicity with this word yesterday, which I will not discuss.  For reasons completely inscrutable even to me, I am sending it out here.

If I have any long time readers, you will have noticed I am sometimes almost completely self indulgent, as here.  It is needed sometimes, for all of us.

Somewhere in the Tao Te Ching it says, approximately, “the ten thousand things rise and fall without ceasing”.  This has long been my go-to quote for dealing with change, or really difficulty of any kind.  I recently taught it to my oldest, who found it interesting that something 2,500 years old would still be relevant, and in this case, helpful in dealing with constantly shifting high school social terrain.

I don’t know why, but I get this picture of this vast ocean, and countless things bobbing up and down.  In that vast space, my own ups and downs feel less important, and in any event it is in the nature of the world that what once was, will soon enough be no more, and what was not, will soon enough come into being.

You can shrink from this, or shine a bright light on it and welcome it.

I like this movement system.  It is a really good way to get going in the morning, and about the most efficient system I have found both for basic core work, and for stretching out the major muscle groups.

Here is one link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjtslbrFbLY

Here are verbal descriptions of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Tibetan_Rites

For the spinning, I have found that I can separate myself from the dizziness.  You pick a point you return to while spinning–like figure skaters do–and when you have done the 20 or 21 rotations, what I find is that the point keeps moving, like there is a wind moving, but that if you simply let the wind move, that eventually the dizziness disappears entirely.  I have gotten to where I can do 20 spins fast with almost no recovery time.

For the second, I like to raise my arms, too, to touch my toes.  That is not in there, but I like it.

This is my most basic exercise system.  If I do nothing else, I do this.

Here’s another video.  She is quite easy on the eyes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJElLrpBetc

I liked this column: http://townhall.com/columnists/starparker/2013/04/29/how-abortion-has-changed-america-n1579604

She says: “Let’s be clear that pro-aborts and pro-lifers differ on far more than
technicalities about when life begins. They differ about what life is.”  I agree.

She says: “It takes a certain deadening of the heart, of the soul to read the
description of the little baby clasping his fingers and toes as the
doctor jams his scissors into his skull , and still believe this should
be permitted.”  I agree.

We need to be clear about the logic of the “pro-choice” movement (quotes, because one half of the people involved gets no choice): there is no difference in principle between removing a woman’s gall bladder or kidney, and removing and killing a viable child.  This is the logic of “My body, my choice”.  This is the logic of Kermit Gosnell and those who defend him.

She says: “Since Roe v Wade, we’ve given birth to a new materialistic culture of
narcissism where reverence for life itself is gone. Life has become a
commodity and people use each other as cavalierly as they destroy
innocent young life.” I agree.

What was the logic of abortion choice?  That women would fare better when allowed not to have children they did not want, and which they somehow “contracted” from consensual sex that was done unintelligently.

What has been the effect?  Are women empowered?  Given that the most abortions are performed in poor black ghettos, it would seem not.  Can we say that killing thousands of little black babies every year is somehow improving our communal life?  Yes, the statistical likelihood is that they would have become de facto wards of the State, but this is only true because Democrats prevent all economic policies from being enacted which would likely generate economic growth in the ghettos.

I think Star Parker is right that tolerating abortion requires a coursening of the spirit, a hardening of the heart, a chosen violation of natural human instincts to protect and defend the defenseless.

In all my moral/ethical writings I talk about looking at the effects over time and across populations of certain types of behavior.  As I see it, this is the only wise, the only true way to get at the heart of morality, which is about elevating the human spirit, and increasing feelings of peace, joy, and belonging.

Abortion clearly does none of these things.  All one can say about it is that it provides economic advantages to irresponsible and frivolous people.  That is not a sufficient defense to warrant not opposing it, at least in most cases.

And to reiterate what should be patently obvious, there is no Constitutional right to abortion.  It is nowhere to be found, or even hinted at in the Bill of Rights.  Roe v. Wade in important respects paved the way for the patently unConstitutional Supreme Court defense of Obamacare.

Mediocrity creates mediocrity.   Stupidity and lack of principle can become habits, particularly when reinforced by vigorous propaganda.

Astonishingly, Obama has declared a proxy war on Christianity, in what is arguably one of the most religious groups in the country, the Armed Services.  Here is one link.

They hired themselves a bigot, who does nothing all day but hate on the religiously adherent.  What is the game? 

Obviously, in a general way, the goal of all Leftists (Cultural  Sadeists) is to destroy any coherent social structure outside the relationship of the isolated individual with the State.  Religion and tradition generally are both enemies to be destroyed.  As I have said, in my view the inner core of the gay marriage push is to denigrate and marginalize traditional family structures outright.  Gay marriage has NO history anywhere in recorded history, anywhere on the planet, and now we are supposed to consider it a fundamental right.  It is not.

Specifically, though, I think the Left has realized that for any coup to succeed you have to have the military on your side. There is no other way, and DHS cannot make up for this gap.  Logically, then, why not wage a war on religion, and by extension on all social conservatives?  By a process of gradual elimination, people more open to radical new political forms may take over the ranks.

I cannot say if this is an intelligent strategy, but it appears to be the one being pursued.  It would seem to me that a large backlash is quite possible among those who choose to stay in, particularly if ably led by senior command officers, who if capable of war-fighting, one would hope would also have the balls to defend the basic rights of their troops, which would include free social interaction, and the freedom to speak of religion, which has provided countless soldiers over millenia with much needed comfort.  Even the SERE books used to speak of the manifest and much tested value of a belief in God in surviving extreme situations.

Time will tell.

Buddhists posit three types of suffering–which as I have pointed out, consists both in actual felt pain, and unrealized, unsuspected, potential happiness/elevated experience.

The first type is what country singers and blues singers sing about.  It is poverty and following difficulty and resentment.  It is dishonesty in others.  It is being a double amputee.  It is hunger, both physical and emotional. It is all the felt sufferings of mind, body and spirit, which we call pain.

The second type is a sort of pooling of resistance and tension in response to change.  It is holding on to what is passing by.  It is disruptions in the smooth flow of breath because we want one thing to be true and not another.

The third type is the most subtle, what they call “conditioned existence”.  Put most simply, it is having a self that we want to retain, to hold on to.

I was listening to this series on Buddhism several weeks ago, and when he came to the part about conditioned existence, I inexplicably started sobbing, in a way I have not done in many years.  I was driving, and it was a bit inconvenient.  I nearly pulled over, but it passed.

Conditioned existence is feeling trapped by your history, unable to break free and fly.  It is in the very structure of your body, how you have learned to move in response to your particular psychosocial history. 

I watched a bird land on the very top branch of a tree last week.  Conditioned existence is that bird thinking that because it is on the top of the tree, that it has realized its full potential, and forgetting how to fly.
You can feel that shrinking, like plastic wrap in an oven.  Just because it is transparent, does not mean that it does not hold you.

We all live in cages.  We choose these cages because they provide our “four walls of freedom”, to paraphrase Merton.  But this is an illusion.  We were meant to roam open oceans, and fly in empty spaces.  It is fear that holds us back.  We create the walls. Those walls protect us from out there, from the knowledge of freedom.

I have been feeling like I am in a vast ocean lately, being tossed to and fro by waves.  We live in a world which even on the surface is in constant motion.  Often in my meditations, I find “memories” popping up of movies I have seen, which have the same or even greater emotive power than my own memories.  Who are we, if we consist even now in our inner core of someone else’s story?  Are we not, now, in large measure living someone else’s life?  And are those who create these stories, themselves, not living in world’s of fantasy?

The word guru, in Sanskrit, means “heavy”.  I have been feeling that I need to get deeper and deeper in this ocean, until I reach a point of rest, where the waves no longer move me here and there, often without me knowing, or even having any way of knowing, since there is no set comparison point.  Everything is in flux.  This is the experience of modernity, at least as they teach it in the universities.

What I have noticed, though, is that every time I do Kum Nye, something different happens, even with the same exercises.  Every time I start, I don’t know what is going to happen.  Sometimes it is very pleasant, and sometimes difficult emotions come out, like extreme anger. And it occurs to me it will ALWAYS be like this.

Part of the appeal of the Buddha in iconography (I will note in passing that the Buddha, in contradistinction to most Greek philosophers, is often, perhaps generally, pictured in his whole body, whereas the Greeks content themselves with busts; I will comment on this some other day) is his tranquility, the peacefulness and calm on his face.  We think to ourselves that he has passed beyond pain, to a state he can maintain without effort forever.  We think that you can finish the task of suffering on this earth.

I have decided this is an illusion.  The Buddha, rather than being in constant repose, was in fact in constant flux.  He accepted fully the vicissitudes of this life, and balanced himself relative to them a thousand times a second.  When he went deeply into meditation, what he saw was another beautiful realm in constant motion, and another realm even beyond that, beyond light, which itself is a form of gross matter.

The universe never stops.  Consciousness never stops.  Peace consists in accepting this.

The image I like is surfing.  A surfer can never master the ocean.  That is much too large.  What he or she CAN do is master the interaction, by consistently using to the fullest potential all the opportunities, the evanescent formations, granted them, in a skillful and diligent way.

I met the Devil again last night.  He tried to frighten me, tried to get me to join him, but I am far beyond that.  He does not scare me.  What I saw, though, is that he is the spirit of this world.  This Earth exists on a very primitive spiritual level, which exists as a proving ground for souls that need to learn basic lessons.  Just as a drill instructor has to be hard on his students, the Devil instills the possibility of all sorts of evils and temptations to humans.

I need him.  I need him as a goad to do better.  He is my ally, in important ways.  All that one can do in this world is offer an alternative to the status quo.  All one can do is offer an escape from the spirit of this world.  You cannot finally conquer evil, since it exists for a purpose.

Life is an adventure.  Every moment is an apocalypse and a new dawn.  Accept this, internalize it, then chase it like a child chases a kite.