Author: White Whale

I was trying to get a bad guy in a dream last night, but he got behind me.  I turned to confront him.  He crouched to attack me, and lo and behold, he got dropped and arrested by two cops.  I didn’t have to do anything.

Dream interpretation is notoriously subjective, but I think in my case, without expanding too much, I will say that this was a positive outcome.

The reason I post this, is, one, it is an interesting outcome to me, and may be for others.

More importantly, what I will submit is that with prolonged effort you can mobilize unconscious resources in the accomplishment of your conscious aims.  Usually, they are in some combination of support and antagonism.  Usually you are driving with one foot on the brake and one on the accelerator.  This is everyone, until they are scrubbed clean, however that happens, of undesirable unconscious crap.

My own goal is to unleash elements within my personality dedicated wholly to building all day every day.  What is love but a heartfelt desire to build up everyone around you?  To help them mobilize their own resources in the spirit of construction?  The goal is to build small things and big things, to build perceptions and things, art and houses.  There is a relentless spirit that can animate all of this, dedicated wholly to the Good.  I can feel it and want more of it.

I am slowly making progress. The night before I had the experience of what I will call “vomiting pain” all night long.  I was releasing sustained pain that did not stop all night.  But it was immensely useful, and I will do it again and again until I get this thing right.

Many years ago a psychiatrist told me my problem was unrealistic idealism that I refused to let go of.  To a great extent this was true: my misery results in no small measure with an immense impatience with the way things are, with the way I am, and an absolute refusal to assume the best is not possible.  You think like that, you are dumping a lot of weight on your shoulders, you are certain to endure many years of doubt, darkness, and difficulty, and you can NEVER be finally successful.  

Ah, but what a dream!!!!!

I have posted this before, but will share again a poem (song) I have on my wall:

To dream the
impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go
To right the
unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause

And I know if I’ll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I’m laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star.

I have come to the conclusion that Biden is a full blown sociopath.  They are common enough.  Obama cares about what people think of him, because he is a narcissist.  Biden doesn’t.  He just doesn’t give a shit, and if for some reason he ever became President he might well cause a massive catastrophe through a combination of his personality and lack of intelligence. 

Think the Martin Sheen as the presidential candidate in Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone“.  It’s that bad.

Here is what I think happened.  This is plausible, and accounts for the facts as known. The Embassy came under attack, but it was supposed to be defended by a local militia, the Febuary 17th Brigade. 

This was a feel-good policy, in which a sap-headed State Department took a major risk with the lives of our Embassy employees so that they could continue to nourish the delusion that facilitating the take-over of Libya by people whose loyalties we had no real way of assessing was good policy.

They wanted to believe the Libyans when they said that they could provide security.  They did NOT want to doubt, for a moment, that the good guys had won, and the bad guys lost. “We came, we saw and he died”.

I would encourage people to watch that video.  I think it is right to celebrate victory, to some extent, but the reality is that her personal involvement was little, and that regardless of what one thought of Gaddafi, I don’t think that it is dignified or appropriate to laugh about something like his brutal death.  It is very much like his death was an abstraction to her. She has likely never smelled fresh blood, seen dismembered bodies, or heard a gun fired in anger.  It’s like a board game to her, one with no consequences, except to her professional standing as a diplomat.  That attitude, here, is what is important.

Returning to Benghazi, it seems obvious that early on they had real time footage of a full scale, planned attack.  What did the State Dept. do?  They called the militia.  The militia likely said something along the lines of “we’re on the way”, so Hillary told other local assets to stand down.  She did not want to embarrass her local hosts, and wanted to give them a chance to show what they could do.

What she failed to calculate on was conscious betrayal.  As the hours dragged on, they kept saying they were on way, but in reality they were either participating, or standing back and watching.  They number several prominent Islamists in their ranks, and that area is radicalized.  There have been a number of attacks in that area, including a prior bombing of our Embassy itself, an attack on the British, and an attack on the Red Cross.

Anyone who studies Muslims needs to understand that their faith leads them to be tricky, manipulative, and treacherous, at least to non-Muslims; and if one studies their actual history, to one another, even though that is technically contrary to their faith.

I have thought long and hard about how to think of Islam.  Plainly, not all Muslims are bastards.  Many, likely most, are decent hard working honest people.  But here is how I would put it: they are decent IN SPITE OF their religion, not because of it.  The example of the Prophet himself allows pedophilia and rape.

A Muslim who rapes and murders a Christian child has not committed a crime, since non-Muslims have no rights, and really no standing for existence outright.  A Christian who murders a Muslim child, on the other hand, very simply cannot justify it. If this doesn’t make your blood boil, please go jump in front of a bus, because you are a detriment to the human race.

Long story short, Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty, in going to the Embassy to protect our personnel, were DISOBEYING ORDERS, and Hillary–seeing that her carefully laid plan of facilitating Libyan only protection was going to be disrupted–chose to let them die.

When the facts come out, I think that will be very close to the truth.

And as far as Obama, I don’t think he cared IN THE SLIGHTEST.  He was and is in campaign mode, and we have already established he is not a people person.  He is, on the contrary, a full blown narcissist who only, even now, cares about the murder of four Americans because of how it might affect him politically.

He likely heard “some kind of something in Libya, blah, blah, blah”, and chose to let Hillary deal with it, while he planned his next campaign stops.

Now, I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that he is President in the first place, or that nearly half of America thinks something other than disaster will come from reelecting him, so I can’t step outside of that perceptual frame enough to say what an appropriate punishment might be, but it is clear that he entrusted the lives of people who trusted him to someone who plainly was living in a world of delusion, which is to say patent incompetence.  Her inaction, based upon a horribly overoptimistic assessment of her own policy, created widows, grieving parents, and likely grieving children.

Fuck Hillary Clinton, Fuck Obama, and Fuck the American people who have STILL failed to see through this very thin veneer of illusion.

Postscript: In my pursuit of truth, I forgot to note that after Hillary’s indefensible fuckup, she LIED about it.  Like most, I assumed initially that there was simply confusion about what happened.  But we now know that they were watching a live feed virtually from the get-go.  They had had previous attacks, and they knew that the area was dangerous.  Stevens had repeatedly requested more guards.  In theory, host countries provide security, but in reality embassies in volatile places like Libya ALWAYS have to assume the worst, at least when the leadership is competent.

So Hillary, knowing full well that it was her decision–repeated three times, in response to three requests for help–to let the SEAL’s die, chose, consciously, in front of cameras, to LIE.

Honest people don’t understand how dishonest people can tell bald faced lies.  The simple reality is that some people have NO character, and exist in a constant fear that their vanity will be damaged, and their superficial appearance of being fully human caused to vanish or be compromised.  Some people will say and do anything to avoid people finding out who and how they really are.  Hillary is plainly such a person.  I don’t think Barack would have needed to tell her to lie.  She started testing stories the moment she realized the scale of the disaster.

This is contemptible.  This is a fraction of what Nixon did to get to the point where he was going to be impeached.  In Nixon’s case, he read about the break-in in the newspaper.  He did not authorize it.  He just did not admit, when he did start asking questions of his team, when they told him about it.  That’s all.

This is the equivalent of Nixon AUTHORIZING the break-in, then lying about it.  Congress needs to get Hillary under oath, and then Obama.  Obama had to have known early on as well what happened. 

They say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” (presumably Shakespeare, but I’m not going to look it up).  What we mean by this is that different people find different things and people beautiful.

I would like to suggest another meaning: when we feel beauty, what is happening is that something external to us is reacting to some latent part of our selves.  It is like a sympathetic vibration, like when one tuning fork transmits its vibration to another.  You have to have that receptive capacity.

I was walking out of the gym the other day, and the sun was shining brilliantly on an autumn yellow’d (why not?) tree, and it struck me that it was falling on some sensitive part of me that was reacting to it.

Would personal growth not consist in some measure in increasing our receptivity to beauty, to finding it often and in small things?  Would that not ease problems of access to optimal states?

The gist of the Positive Money proposal is to put all money, finally, in the Bank of England, even if people still think they have deposits at individuals banks.  This I will never agree with, as this has long been a Keynesian Fascist objective.  It is an unwarranted centralization of potential power.

Their second idea is that as loans are repaid, the banks keep the interest income, but extinguish the money they created to make the loan.  As I have pointed out, this will lead to monetary deflation, which will cause the real cost of all extant loans to rise steadily, and which will thereby force large numbers of both personal and business bankruptcies.

Their third idea is to have, effectively, an inflation commission, which dictates how much money the economy “needs”.  Now, I have long argued that inflation is theft.  There is no other credible way to look at it.

HOWEVER, I could make one exception.  What follows is, I think, clever, and has never been tried to my knowledge.  One could implement Ben Dyson’s idea for gradual extinction of bank created money, and use fiat money to erase the monetary pressure on those with extant loans.  Effectively, they could be paid a stipend to compensate them for the extra money they would have to pay back, since they would be paying in pounds or dollars that would be worth more than when they took the loan out.  This would eliminate the economic contraction that would otherwise inevitably attend the implementation of his ideas.

People who did not have loans would see steady increases in their buying power, and people with loans would, optimally (and measuring actual deflation or inflation is a notoriously difficulty process, not least because they are regional variations that are sometimes quite significant), simply pay back what they borrowed.

This is my gradualistic proposal.  I will send it to Ben Dyson, but I suspect I am now on his shit list.

In debating irrationalists like Sam Harris, it is not necessary to dispute ANY of their domain.  It is not necessary to rebut any of their understandings of how the brain works, what regions do what, how neural impulses are conducted, the effects of brain lesions in various parts of the brain, etc.  They own this domain, and it is properly theirs, to the extent they do their work honestly, which I have no reason to doubt that they do.  This is the domain, figuratively, between A and B.

Yet, there is a C.  The continuum does not stop with B.  There are demonstrable, repeatable, empirical observations that can be made which do not exist within their domain; which CANNOT exist within their domain, if in fact the operative paradigms are in fact accurate; if in fact mind is matter, and nothing else.

OF COURSE different drugs create experiences similar to, say, out of body experiences: for example with ketamine.  But does this imply that the experience is necessarily contained in the brain?  Might we not posit that something within ketamine facilitates the temporary separation of consciousness from the body?  Might we not, as an example, do experiments in which we put numbers or objects on top of objects the person could not see from where they are, and see if they could see them when in an altered state? That would be SCIENCE.

It would of course not be accurate to say that what neuroscientists do is not science, but it is categorically the case that what they do is science limited to a paradigm they never question, that of Materialism, which is an empirically invalidated and indefensible doctrine.  If one surveys the history of science, the really big breakthrough, the really useful stuff, comes not from more measurements, but from new understandings of existing measurements.  Quantum physics, as one example, has yielded more benefits, arguably, than any set of ideas since Newton’s Laws of Motion.  But WE DON’T UNDERSTAND IT.  We don’t know, really, what it means for light to be both particle and wave.  We don’t know what a “quantum leap” really is, and even though most people think electrons “exist” this is really not an accurate understanding.  They only exist if we ask them to.

“I don’t know” is perhaps the most useful phrase in science, as it permits progress.  What we have now is many “I do know”‘s that aren’t so.  We have false knowledge, that simply ignores all the paradigmatic challenges to it, that stamps it out, that forbids tenure to its apostles, that forbids publication of contrary opinions.

I would like to excerpt a part of the book “The First Psychic” to detail some of what “science” (really, Scientism) has ignored.  The setup is that a famous scientist, William Crookes (who was knighted for his work, was a member of the Royal Society, and would like have won a Nobel Prize in our own era, having discovered thallium, been the first to isolate helium, invented the first de facto vacuum tube, having done work with cathode rays and more), decided to test medium Daniel Home under laboratory conditions.  Home was famous for levitating heavy objects in clearly lit conditions, having hands mysteriously appear then disappear, having musical instruments play themselves, and the like.

Science, [Crookes] argued, could deal both with fraud and inadequate observation by providing properly controlled conditions and appropriate instruments of measurement.  And a scientific man did not require the extravagance of human levitation, he merely asked that a power ‘which will toss a heavy body up to the ceiling, shall also cause his delicately-poised balance to move under test conditions. In the testing of the existence of any new force it was the quality, rather than the quantity that mattered. [italics mine: note that as an actual scientist he is thinking paradigmatically, which is to say qualitatively]. ‘The Spiritualist tells of heavy articles of furniture moving’, he pointed out. ‘But the man of science. . . is justified in doubting the accuracy of the former observations if the same force is powerless to move the index of his instrument one degree.’ It was in this attitude of open minded skepticism, and with complete faith in the objectivity of experimental measurement, that Crookes announced his intention to examine the phenomena, ‘in order to confirm their genuineness, or to explain, if possible, the delusions of the honest and to expose the tricks of the deceivers’.

Nobody else had shown such willingness as Daniel to be tested, or been so successful under scrutiny. . . And two of the many phenomena reported in Daniel’s presence were particularly suitable for scientific experiment: the alteration of the weight of objects; and the playing of instruments, normally an accordion, without human contact. Both could be tested in controlled conditions that eliminated the possibility of fraud, and neither could be dismissed as hallucination in the way that, for example, spirit hands might be.  And so Crookes went about setting up a laboratory in his London home, and constructing foolproof test procedures that would rule out the possibility of lazy-tongs, self playing accordions, magic lanterns and such things.  And if these experiments led to positive results, they would confirm the reality of Daniel’s feats.

When Daniel arrived, Crookes was not alone.  With him were two men who would verify what was to happen, for Crookes did not want to be accused of inaccuracy, or lack of proper observation, or perhaps of having been mesmerized by Daniel.  The force he was investigating was so controversial that sceptical scientists would suggest any alternative explanation rather than accept its existence.  So in attendance was, firstly, William Huggins, a gentleman astronomer who had pioneered observation of celestial bodies. . .

Alongside Huggins was Edward Cox, a Serjeant-at-law [sic] and former MP who had a keen interest in the phenomena being tested.  Cox had attended many seances, and was considered by some a balanced observer.  He had denounced certain mediums as frauds, upsetting many spiritualists in the process, but he had no doubts that some of the extraordinary phenomena he had witnessed were genuine. . .

The somewhat strange apparatus for the first experiment was set up on one side of the room.  There was a table and chair, and beneath the table a steel cylindrical cage.  Inside the cage was a brand-new accordion that Crookes had bought himself, and which Daniel had neither handled nor seen before.  Daniel sat down, placed his hand within the cage, and held the accordion, keys downward, with thumb and middle finger at the other end.  From this position, with his every movement being watched by witnesses on either side, he was expected to have the accordion play.

‘Very soon’, Crookes reported, ‘the accordion was seen by those on each side to be waving about in somewhat curious manner; then sounds came from it, and finally several notes were played in succession.’  Crookes assistant went under the table and saw that Daniel’s hand ‘was quite still’, yet, ‘the accordion was expanding and contracting’.  It then began ‘oscillating and going round and round the cage, and playing at the same time’.  As the observers confirmed Daniel’s hands and feet had not moved, ‘a simple air was played’. Daniel then took the accordion out of the cage ‘and placed it in the hand of the person next to him.  The instrument then continued to play, no person touching it and no hand being near it’  Moments later, they ‘saw the accordion distinctly floating about inside the cage with no visible support.’

Next they moved over to the other side of the room, to the scent of the second experiment.  There was another table, and attached to its edge was the end of a thirty six inch mahogany board.  The board extended horizontally from the table, its far end being supported by a spring balance that hung from above.  Daniel placed his fingertips on the near end of the board, which was resting on a support at the end of the table.  In this position, rather like having a seesaw with the fulcrum at one end, no amount of pushing down at this end could move the other end.  Nevertheless, his task was to affect the weight of the board, which would be measured by they spring balance at the other end.  Crookes and Huggins stood on either side, ‘watching for any effect which might be produced. . .Almost immediately, the pointer of the balance was seen to descend.  After a few seconds it rose again.  This movement was repeated several times. . The [far] end of the board was seen to oscillate slowly up and down during the experiment.’  Daniel then placed two small objects, a card matchbook and a small hand bell, between his fingers and the board, to show he was not exerting any downward pressure. ‘The very slow oscillation of the spring balance became more marked,’ Crookes reported, and Huggins saw it gradually descend to an additional downward pull of three and a half pounds. To check that Daniel could not have done it by pushing, Crookes stood on top of the end of the board, but even when he ‘jerked up and down’, he could not move the index more than two pounds.

In July Crookes made the announcement.  It appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Science, of which he was also the editor.  It might have been published elsewhere had his fellow scientists allowed it, and it might not have appeared at all had Crookes not been the editor.  It went was follows: ‘These experiments appear conclusively to establish the existence of a new force, in some unknown manner connected with the human organization, which for convenience might be called the Psychic Force.

The term was certainly convenient: Cox had already suggested it.  ‘I venture to suggest’, he had written to Crookes the previous month, that the force be termed Psychic Force; [and] the person in whom it is manifested in extraordinary power , Psychics.”

Daniel Home was literally the first person to be called “Psychic”.

Now, can this testimony be doubted?  OF COURSE: by definition all scientific claims can be doubted. That is the point of experimental replication. We don’t believe in Cold Fusion because nobody could duplicate it.

But to the point here, any guesses how many other scientists sought out appointments with Home to see what he could do for themselves?  None, to the extent of my awareness.  That experimental setup was never replicated with Daniel, even though he always took all comers.  As one more example of scientific abdication of responsibility, Michael Farraday was invited to a seance with Daniel, but refused to go because no one could tell him in advance EXACTLY what would happen.

This attitude is not skepticism.  It is not scientific.  It is a fear-induced negative hallucination, in which things which are plainly there are ignored and made to vanish so that a previously established world view can continue without challenge or interruption.  Scientism, put another way, is no different in principle or practice from a religion premised on faith.

I have tried to make this post several times, and not quite pulled it off.  I think I can see clearly enough now to do it, though.

Think about what it means to submit to God, to surrender your will to His Will.  How is this idea communicated to you?  In most cultures, it is as a child, and in most cultures submission to GOD is submission to your PARENTS.  The will of God and the pleasure of your parents is conflated, usually for life.

And as an adult this pattern continues.  The more rigid the religious code, the more thoroughly you are taught to surrender your will to community leaders.  Islam, self evidently, as THE self-defined religion of submission–it is in the name–does this perhaps more rigidly than any other faith.

Plurality of opinion gives way to unity of opinion, and unity of action.  This is INHERENTLY unhealthy, uncreative, and works directly to prevent the emergence of individuality, and the individual moral judgment and GROWTH that happens in conditions of freedom.

Put simply, Islam as a creed is probably the least creative religion in the world, for the simple reason that its actual expression consists in rote conformity to rules expressed reasonably clearly in books no one is allowed to question or expand upon, and such conformity attends child raising in the cultures which take their faith seriously.

I would contrast this with Judaism, the members of whose traditions are arguably–I would say certainly–the most creative and productive of any group on Earth.  Jews are less than 1% of the world’s population, but have one some 40% of something (large number; I think that is close) of the world’s Nobel Prizes.  In its basic patriarchic tendency, and tribalistic certitudes, it is similar to Islam.

I have been wrestling with what differs in it. 

First, I would think that there is a life energy created by constant threat of violence, and a constant feeling of being an outsider. 

Secondly, I would submit that even though Judaism has mainly male prophets, it also has a number of very important women, like Esther.  It is also significant that whereas in Islam the FATHER dictates the religion of the child, in Judaism it is the mother.  This is of course much more logical, as there can be no doubt about the maternity of a child.  (and it is perhaps because of this that Islam is so harsh on women, and so protective of their virginity).  Cultures which value both the feminine and the masculine are in general more balanced.  This is a rough and unsubstantiable assertion.

Thirdly, though, I would submit that the sheer number of Judaic cultures as they have developed in the diaspora has more or less necessitated the inclusion of considerable diversity of action.  You can be eccentric and genuinely individualistic, yet retain your membership in the group.  This is important.

You have orienting beliefs.  For example, you have the Ten Commandments, and the whole of the Law (whose Hebrew name I am forgetting at the moment), which consists in roughly several hundred MORE commandments.

Yet, I would submit that the history of Judaism has forced upon it heterogeneity of opinion, individualism within family and small community groupings, and prevented the emergence of a clerical class as exists in Islam, a class which issues fatwas, and the like.

Christianity had such a class.  The Catholic Church WAS the government for long stretches of history, and until the very recent past all kings had to keep their respective church in mind when rendering decisions.  All of this worked to homogeneity of thought and action.

Could one perhaps say that today submission to authority–to the “experts”–is taught, but that this submission has no moral value unless and until one agrees to the incorporation of political views (socialism in all iterations always having claimed to better manage human life in the form of a better machine) within the larger submission to “science”?  Could one not further posit that such submission has psychological value, even as it corrupts the minds of people unfortunate enough to make this Faustian bargain?

I have long had a very interesting, instructive, and vivid dream life.  At various times, I have flown high in the sky, walked through walls, levitated objects, talked with animals, breathed underwater, used my hands as flashlights, died in my dreams, seen both heaven and hell, seen angels, and fought and defeated (and often run from, as well) all sorts of dark forces.  I have had lucid dreams every  bit as real and vivid as waking life.  I was once in a corn field at night, with the breeze blowing, the moon in the sky, and able to see my body in every way that one can in what we call “waking” life. Every pore on my body was awake and alive. It was very pleasant, and of course a bit strange.

The other night I had a very useful dream.  I have been trying to figure out how we internalize violence against ourselves, how abuse becomes self abuse, and how far it goes.  Can we not, for example, posit that everything we need for perfect happiness is ALREADY present, in as-yet unmanifest latency?

I was wandering in a forest, and came upon a train of people, seemingly pilgrims, who were traveling up a hill at night along an unpaved trail.  They seemed pleasant enough; the wagons were painted in a forest green, I think with some yellow, almost like circus wagons.  They felt like gypsies.

I began talking with one of them, who said they were on their way to a sacred ritual.  An aspiring initiate went through the catechism for me, in which he would swear an oath to God with certain gestures, then kneel and swear the same oath, at which point he would be decapitated.  Of course, I was horrified, but the procession continued; they got to their stopping point, and many were killed.  I managed to save one somewhat chubby, indecisive man, who came away, but kept looking back like he had missed something.  The executioners, of course, were not pleased, and fell on me.  Several grabbed me and tried to smother me.  I got away, then they started throwing very thin, very deadly spears at me. I created a weapon to block them with.  Finally, I saw a freeway, and began running as fast as the cars and escaped.

I analyze this on three levels, two of which I will share, and the third of which I will keep for myself after admitting I left one or two details out.  I would also in the process like to submit several techniques I use in dream analysis.

My immediate interpretation was that this is the rough mechanism of “zombification”.  These people were not dying outright.  They were dying to themselves, to their own judgement, to their own potentiality.  And there were those only too willing to play the role of executioner.  There are always executioners.

When I look at the left in this and other countries, when I contemplate the stomach turning atrocities done in the name of compassion, the mind reels.  But I cannot help but feel that many, many people in this world are lost, and there are those who say to them: come with me.  Let me protect you.  Let me remove from you all the worries and troubles of life.  Let me show you the compassion of submission, of admitting the futility of living your own life, of drawing your own breath, of choosing your own steps.  Let us do it for you.

And I look at all the people shilling for Barack Obama;  We have in recent days come to have strong evidence pointing to the conclusion that he has virtually no compassion, no regard for others, no benevolent plan for the future, and nothing to offer but sorrow.  People WANT the promise to be true, so desperately that they are willing to sacrifice their own minds on the altar of conformity; of virtue expressed by unceasingly doing and thinking as they are told.  This is a particularly awful crime when done by journalists, and those who would aspire to lead us.

I could go on, but will simply submit that in response to patent truths like “we can’t borrow a trillion dollars a year without consequence” get responses ranging from “Bullshit”, to (Daily Kos) “our goal here is not to discuss policy, but to make sure it gets implemented.”  How can you know that your ideas are sound if you never submit them to critical scrutiny?  You can’t of course, and this is how bad ideas have babies and metastasize.

This is, however, superficial analysis, and one fully encapsulated in my expression “Cultural Sadeism”.

It gets more interesting when you add the idea that all characters in all dreams are PARTS OF YOU.  Those demons you fight?  You created them. Every character in every dream is a part of you, and if you were flawless you would know only dreamless sleep, or visions of heaven.  I’m not, and I don’t.

Framed this way, I was sacrificing myself to myself, and watching the process.  This process felt eternal, and likely is on-going in me.  What does THIS mean?  That is a much more interesting question.

I have in recent days been thinking heavily about the nature of trauma, and trying to separate actual trauma from its after-math.  It is not getting hit, or enduring emotional cruelty that matters, but what you make of it, how it continues to reside in you, hidden.  How does it hide?  What is the mechanism that captures and prolongs it?

I look at the moment before I get hit, or before someone says something cruel that came from some unacknowledged part of themselves, such that they don’t even realize, consciously, that they are attacking me.  Integrated into ordinary life, over a long period of time, what becomes internalized is the pre-reaction, the protective flinch, the covering, the armor.  This is what endures.

But I think there is a second element, the punishing element.  Whenever you get TOO relaxed, long after being removed from the situation, there is a secondary protective element that ALSO attacks you, so you don’t lose your defenses, so you don’t allow yourself to be blindsided.  This is the part, in me at least (and I think for my own purposes at the moment, a bit more self revelation than normal is appropriate, since in part I am trying to provide something recognizable and useful for others) that hates that unprotected, unguarded child (OMG: am I at the “inner child”?  God don’t let me become whiny).

In order to survive, you have to sacrifice some part of yourself, the one that reacts outwardly with anger to things that should occasion anger, and which do in normally developed people. And on a deep level, I think there is this voice that says “don’t go out there.  They will get you.”  So when you “go out there”, you get attacked.  So you have these parts of your consciousness that are at war with one another.  Healing consists in integrating them, in developing sound reality testing on a DEEP level, such that you are neither meek nor cruel, but open to pain, and, thereby, open to pleasures of the most meaningful sort, those of affection given and received, and living life with a sense of purpose that goes from the tip of your head to the soles of your feet, and which is not rejected nor attacked anywhere in the middle.

Anyone who had read this blog for long has seen repeated meditations on the meaning of Horror films, and of violence in our media generally.  What is it?  What need does it serve?  This is of course a complex phenomena, and many answers are possible with respect to many sorts of people, but one I will suggest, that I may not have suggested before, is that those sorts of movies are the food that what I will call the aggressive self protective instincts feed on.  They induce fear, and by inducing fear justify continued emotional contraction, which both reduces emotional injury, and prevents emotional growth.

Here is an interesting statistic: “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago,” (from here).  If true, this has several interesting aspects to it.  First, if emotional empathy is down, then the RISKS of being open are up.  This follows inevitably.  And this would explain not just the normalization but the valorization (academese for “valuing of”) of psychopathy.  As I have pointed out, in the first “Silence of the Lambs” Hannibal Lector was a villain, albeit an interesting one.  In later iterations of the franchise, he was the HERO. 

Read that article.  Without quite saying so, he half wishes he were a sociopath/psychopath (synonyms: psychopathic is clinically insane; this is a different animal) because then he would be free from worries, from fear, from remorse, and thus more “free” to live his life.  This is the same thing Apollinaire (a radical leftist, it should go without saying) meant when he called Sade the “freest man who ever lived.”

Liberty breeds confusion, when people are stupid; and most of our modern intellectuals are stupid.  It is my sincere belief that if my own treatment of Goodness were taught at a college level, people would actually be liberated.  This is not, I don’t think, naked vanity, but a considered opinion based upon someone who is widely traveled, well read, and who has engaged in conversations on varying levels with people of all walks of life for decades.

In my own case, the story is that I got outside the cycle sufficiently to see it as it was.  The fat man was my weak sense of self, still driven in some regards to return.

Clearly, in some respects, we are unfree.  Anyone who denies it is in my view expressing unwarranted optimism.  At the same time, we not FULLY unfree.  There is room for what I have called “nonstatistical coherence”. We can choose where to direct our attention, and when done long enough, opportunities will open up spontaneously that would not have occurred had we not chosen where to direct our minds.

There is more to this that I am still working out, but I am getting close to the root of the thing. 

I will add, though, that the essence of “spiritual” development is achieving emotional wellness.  Meditating will achieve nothing if it does not integrate the emotions, if it does not access and release deep realities. In some respects, the highest attainment possible on this Earth is to be “normal”.  So few people ever aspire to this, and far fewer attain it.

Vanity, in most respects, is and always has been the coin of the realm, making the only sane ones those who cannot exist within its order.

This is the word, not legacy, drive-by, mainstream, or any other versions I see.  They are COMPLICIT.  They are an extension of a political agenda that can ONLY be furthered through a combination of active deception, and–more commonly–an active avoidance of unpleasant truths.  Only Fox and conservative websites are reporting on the seeming fact that Obama left our men to die in Benghazi, when he had options; and that he then LIED about it–blaming it on a “spontaneous” demonstration in reaction to a video released many months ago–plainly to avoid the political fallout that would attend both his patent failure to provide needed security on the front end, and patent failure to protect them when they were under attack.

And where the hell is the coverages of this story, that Obama has ALREADY granted the Iranians the right to produce nuclear weapons?  WTF?

It increasingly seems to me that even though we theoretically have access to news outliers, that the fact that most people their news from sources that are simply unwilling to do their jobs with anything approaching integrity or competence, means that we are ALREADY in an information-controlled state.  We are ALREADY halfway to Fascism, when principle no longer trumps policy objective; when truth telling is less important than getting political objectives implemented.

As Peter Bauer said in a link I posted a year or two ago, it is horrible that leftists, confronted with the constant and dismal and misery-inducing failures of their policies, choose not to find and pursue new policies, but to view the implementation of the policy, itself, as success.  This is indicative of a manic and compulsive mindset that is not different in practice from a cult.  I will deal with that in my next post.