Author: White Whale

I have used this phrase from time to time.  The following quote from Thomas Merton expresses well what I intended (I cannot recall how well I myself expressed it):

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most
difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands
greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of
conscience.

I will add that he has a lot of good quotes, here: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/thomas_merton.html

As I see it, the point of a so-called “Peak Experience” is not the experience itself, but its effect on the whole of your being, which is expressed daily in how you love, work, and feel.  The point is not to “capture” or seize or otherwise rape and possess something beautiful.  The point is to remember, in ways overt and subtle, conscious and unconscious, something that enabled your qualitative gestalt to improve, just a bit.

People get addicted to experiences.  Let us say it is traveling.  If you go out and hitchhike across Asia, and if you left an asshole and came back an asshole, you did less of what matters than someone who patiently learned to work without distraction, or become just a bit less upset about pedestrian things.

People think you can collect experiences.  You can’t.  You either let them transform you, and then carry them with you as a part of your being; or you objectify them and use them to amplify your ego, never an attractive sight.

I want to add as well that as I think about it, there are many, many ways of creating altered states.  Extreme athletics, really good sex, working to exhaustion, being drunk or stoned, being in an artistic zone–even driving long distances.  The ones that are valuable are the ones you choose to allow to alter you in positive ways, such that you are less scared during the day, more willing to listen openly, more affectionate, more positive, more focused, and happier.

That’s the phrase that popped in my head this morning as an alternative to Cultural Sadeism.  There is a back story.

I travel often, and meet perhaps a dozen new people every week.  Yesterday, I walked into an office to do some work, and was met by a woman who was being subtly cruel to me, because she could.  She seemingly felt no remorse for it. I was just looking at her, and it hit me that somebody did something to her that she never got over.  There was something broken, unreal, ineffective, emotionally in her.  There was a part that should have worked, but didn’t.

When you look at sadists, it is tempting to focus on the evil, the brokenness within them.  Yet, and I feel I may have said this before, you can also look at the GAP between who they are, and who they could be.  You can see what that person, functioning well, would look like.  You can see how they would move if a strangling knot that suffocates them were to be loosened, and their lungs filled honest air.  You can see who they would be if they were actually happy.

It is our task on earth to rescue everyone.  No exceptions.  The method is to choose this end and be effective.  This heuristic is how you get as effective as you will get with broken people, many of whom will never heal in this lifetime. 

“Power sickness” both admits the malady, and recognizes it as such.  I’ll just have to wait and see how far I want to go with it.

Some of you likely know what it is like to be hit often as a child.  I got hit, but I don’t think that was the principle problem.  The principle problem was that I got a stick with no carrot.  It was never clear to me who I was supposed to be to not get hit.  I suppose these 1,000 plus posts may be attempts to answer that question, although of course the actual situation is much more complex.

Thinking back, all these years later, I feel this sense of cringing, that moment before you get hit, or, to the point I want to make here, before you THINK you’re going to get hit, but don’t.

When you get hit, you feel pain.  When you cringe, you tense your body up, in anticipation of pain, but the pain need never come.  You can cringe your whole life and never get hit again.  As Springsteen put it: “You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much/and spend half your life just covering up.”

I think the brave life is to learn how to “uncringe”, how to let your pains be actual. 

I did martial arts for six years or so, where I would leave with bruises more often than not several times a week.  The trick in my style–and I would suggest all effective styles that don’t incorporate outright cringing/flinching in to them–was to take a hit in a relaxed way, to always stay lose and relaxed, no matter what.  That is good training, and physically I’m largely able to do it.  I just need to figure out how to do it emotionally.

I don’t like sharing, but feel this may be useful for someone.

It occurs to me that we might as well refer to all emotional and even intellectual growth as healing.  My thought process in this is that, as evidenced by your expressed capacity to do better, you were in a suboptimal state before.  Even if you did not know it, even if you were already relatively better than those around you, you were hurt relative to where you could have been.  You were less rather than more.

This is a useful heuristic, especially if you a dd the following thought: growth comes to you; you do not go to it.  We have lines for learning.  You can memorize mathematical tables, and you have not really changed qualitatively when you can go up to 20×20, versus stopping at 12×12.  If you were a psychopath before, you will be a psychopath after.

The growth I am talking about is paradigmatic, it deals with your sense of self, your identity, how you move in the world, what you see (what you allow yourself to see), who you care about and why, and to what extent.  If you think of your current self as existing in a certain equilibrium, you cannot CHOOSE to grow.  You cannot feel feelings for which you are not ready . The best you can do is not reject new feelings because they are new.

As I look at my own healing/growth process, it seems to me that everything good comes to me, and in large measure because I am looking for it, I am waiting for it, I am alert to it.  I watch the fog carefully, tirelessly, to see what emerges.

I write a lot, and in my own self estimation some of what I write is very clear, very good, and very creative.  But I don’t feel myself as a creator, so much as a reporter.  The newsfeed comes from somewhere else. My talent is seeing what is in front of me honestly, which involves a high pain tolerance, and the ability to countenance ambiguity and lack of clarity in large doses for long periods of time.

It also involves accepting, emotionally, that I am incomplete and always will be.  There is no rest for the ready.  Yet, what comes along sometimes is astonishingly beautiful, and worth every ounce of effort.

I posted this here.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/9623863/IMFs-epic-plan-to-conjure-away-debt-and-dethrone-bankers.html

What we are unfortunately seeing is that the IMF and Fabian/Keynesian Fascist activists have seized on the idea of demonizing bankers so they can argue for complete control over the financial system. Fractional reserve banking is bad.  We can agree on that.  But their solutions are worse, MUCH worse.

Only with prior inflation to eradicate public and private debt can gradual deflation be anything but catastrophic.

Folks, you don’t know me from Adam, but I HAVE A PROPOSAL THAT ADDRESSES EVERYTHING. I post it often, but get little response. I am a University of Chicago Alumni, and have thought the damn thing through in a way none of these dumbass academic economists have. They can’t be creative because it is trained out of them in school.

Please read this: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

Read it all the way through. If you start with the fix, you likely won’t understand the problems it addresses. It uses plain English, basic facts, common sense analysis, and offers sweeping and unique proposals.

What the IMF is doing here, to be clear, is trying to draw support for a proposal which furthers the Keynesian/Fabian ends of bureaucratic control of all aspects of our lives; at least that is my assumption. What I have read thus far is big worded gobbledygook, which is ALWAYS trying to either hide an actual intention, or a lack of intellectual clarity.

In conditions of massive debt, though, I will submit that gradual deflation is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS a bad thing. It is what started the Great Depression.

Please, read my piece. It will enlighten you.

I would encourage any readers I may have to click on this link:

http://www.kiva.org/invitedby/barry5427

It will take you to a donations page for Kiva.org, which is a group which facilitates the bundling of business loans to very small groups–often individuals–so they can purchase supplies to build businesses and the economic self sufficiency that goes with it. For example, someone may want to buy dairy cows, or thread to make clothes, or money to pay the rent for a laundry.  Most global poverty happens due to the lack of access to capital by the poor.  This program addresses that.

What few people realize is that most foreign aid we have sent out over the last half century has neither supported democracy nor alleviated poverty, nor even supported our foreign policy aims (what is the point of giving money to Egypt and Pakistan, if it does not buy us the ability to tell them what to do, in at least some circumstances?). 

On the contrary, even when it was not our intent, it has generally supported tyranny, and made control of the government a principle means of personal enrichment, rather than actual long term economic development. This has led to many civil wars, much death, much misery, and much economic retrogression.  It has not only been wasted, but has made things WORSE, in yet one more example of leftist indifference to outcome making the world a more horrible place.

Kiva addresses that.  Please click on the link, then start spreading the word yourself.

 It is astonishing to me the moral depravity of those who are shilling for Obama.  They are People of the Lie. There is no end to their willingness to pervert truth and reason in the service of what can only be called a cult.


The following is a response to this article which, astonishingly, called ROMNEY the liar, when Candy Crowley herself had to back off her patent advocacy of Obama’s mendacity.

Is there any end to your capacity to lie for a man who broke every promise he made, and who is leading us into an economic wasteland that will hurt most the students, minorities, and working poor who voted for him?

OBAMA LIED.  HE LIED.  There is ZERO ambiguity about this.  He claimed for nearly two weeks, falsely–and we KNOW this, because his own State Dept. contradicted him–that the cause of the attack was a “spontaneous” riot caused by a film released six months ago.  The President of Libya himself called this ridiculous.

Stevens had asked for added security multiple times, because he wasn’t stupid.  Smaller scale attacks had been happening with increased frequency.  Obama, as always, was asleep at the wheel, and not even attending most of his national security meetings so he could focus on getting reelected and continuing the process of destroying this country.

Then, in front of a hundred million Americans, he claimed both to have called the attack a “terror” attack, when if you read his remarks he said nothing of the sort, and that he indicated he was resolved to hunt down those responsible.  He said nothing of the sort. 

You people at Yahoo realize, don’t you, that California is being abandoned by some 4,000 high net worth individuals a WEEK?  Who do you think pays the taxes, the taxes you NEED to balance your budget?  They would have, but policies of the sort you are advocating by effectively endorsing Obama, by twisting the truth in horrific abuses of journalistic integrity, are forcing their hand.  They are going to Texas, and Tennessee, and Arizona: anywhere but California.  Then when your State starts fully teetering into chaos, you will blame anyone but yourselves.

Pathetic, and horribly wrong.  You are the worst sort of people: capable of intelligence, but emotionally unwilling to tell yourselves hard truths, so you put your intelligence to the service of engineering our cultural and economic downfall, all while pretending to yourselves and others than you are benign.  You are ba$tards.

Fix for our financial system: check.

Fix for moral relativism: check.

Template for new church and psychotherapy: check.

Systematic treatment of political philosophy: check.

Evidence marshalled for the after-life: check (not by me,though).

Are there any generals out there willing to lead the troops I’ve marshalled?

We lack the ecstatic in our lives, the completely uncontrolled and uninhibited expression of deep latent emotional and spiritual realities, particularly the ecstatic as expressed within, and reinforced by, communcal connections.  We lack the drumming around the campfire, and the becoming truly, DEEPLY lost in trance, the non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Clubbing, especially with drugs, partially serves this role, but it is not integrative.  You become lost, but you do not come back better.  It is just “fun”.  It actually seems to fracture most people, since they now have to contrast the deep ecstasies they felt when dancing while high, with the pedestrian world they occupy most days of most weeks.  It actually makes them sad, on balance.

Sex, often combined with clubbing, partially serves this role, if you allow yourself to become fully lost.  But it is not integrative, and if the sex is random and conduced in an emotionally detached way, I would argue it actually is alienating for both parties.  You achieve connection that is immediately sundered, and thus you become progressively less willing to risk emotionally, less willing to commit emotionally, and thus in many ways more shallow.  Unable to risk pain, you feel only muted pleasure.

As I wrote some time ago, though, that if you use sex as a drug, like all drugs you have to go deeper and deeper to get the same effect.  BDSM is the logical ending place, as the most horrific and yet poignant and memorable iteration of it.  It makes people feel “alive”.  They know, intuitively, that they need pain to live, and their lives are comfortable and protected and free, so they have to go seek it out. 

What I would like to repeat, here, is that what they are trying to do is seek out deep, hidden emotional realities that have to be accessed SPECIFICALLY.  The analogy that occurred to me is that you could compare wounds to a Poker hand.  Let’s say a person holds 2 Kings, an 8, a 7, and a 2.  If you put up a 6 or a 3, you get nothing.  This is the equivalent of undergoing a masochistic experience, and feeling great emotions, and an emotional release, but one which accomplishes no long term result.  Nothing is really released on a deep level.

[And I would compare the sadist with the masochist this way: the sadist is less advanced since they feel pain through others;  the masochist wants to feel their own pain, but they don’t know how to do it effectively. I think masochism can also become a habit when one is punished often.  Cruelty can become the only connection a child has with its parents, and thus being hated and hurt the only sense of CONNECTION it has felt, and which it thus later seeks to replicate.]

Effective long term psychotherapy, of the sort described in the excellent book “Trauma and Recovery” , which I think all the Usual Suspects (you know who you are) should read, gradually establishes what those cards are, and what their effect has been.  It is a gradual process of connecting the conscious mind with what is hidden.  Things emerge first in a fog, then grow increasingly distinct, then at some point you have a more or less open conduit from the unconscious to the conscious, which is the therapeutic goal.

What I would submit (W)holotropic Breathwork does is facilitate the self emergence of each of those cards, in order of relative importance.  We might see in one session the King of Hearts emerge.  You say “oh, there it is.  I had forgotten that feeling or experience”.  Or maybe you don’t even name the experience, but just emit an emotion, perhaps one tied to long term emotional states you had suppressed.

Stan Grof has done many, many sessions, and he said there is usually one thing, one piece, that comes out.  It seems to be unitary that way.  You don’t get a lot of things, but one important thing, then another in the next session.

This is a strange connection, but what I would submit practitioners of BDSM REALLY want is the sort of release Holotropic Breathwork enables.  Certainly if you have misery in your past, and want to find it, it will get you there. 

Where the former is concerned, you really simply further life in a dark place, even if you get occasional respites from your obsessive normalcy.  Look at the covers of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books, (being sold in grocery stores, Target, and other places by the truckload, making this discussion timely and relevant).  Is that the sort of life you want?  No, it is the sort of life you choose ABSENT ALTERNATIVES, absent a sense that you can in some other way escape your mundane world, where nothing really different or exciting ever happens.