Author: White Whale

I have just put up a Paypal link on my other website. If you have benefited from any of my creative work, I would really appreciate if you could donate something; or better yet, point me at a foundation or other group that might be willing to offer some grant money (or employment doing what I do).

Likewise, if your firm or group would like to book me for a speech, let me know. I’ve done trainings on many topics, including creative thinking, structured thinking, emotional intelligence, and all aspects of Sales, which is my current career field, more or less.

Here is the link.

I was talking with some electricians the other day, and somehow we got on Arc Flashes. This is a potentially fatal, more or less explosion that can happen when working hot on high voltage panels. You can Google it.

For my part, I Googled it, and watched a few videos. Here is one example.

As I watched these videos, I did so with a simultaneous trepidation and excitement. I watched that excitement, and wondered about it. Somebody was getting ready to get zapped–fatally, for all I knew–and here I was looking forward to it, as a sort of thrill.

Don’t most of us feel that when we see a car accident? Do you sometimes see people working high on buildings, and think about how it would be interesting if you saw them fall? I don’t feel this often, but I do. I’m no saint. This effect is especially pronounced when I am under a lot of stress and/or very tired.

This is the basic idea of most violent movies. People want to see people hurt, but they have to be set up first as bad guys so that we can sanction our pleasure in their frequently painful demises.

This is Schadenfreude, which is a German word meaning roughly “pleasure in the misfortunes of others”. We like to think it is just when people who deserve it get their comeuppance, but in reality most people are just jealous sometimes, and like to see the mighty hurt.

I heard Bono compare Ireland the United States once thus: [roughly] “In the United States, you look at the man on the hill, and think ‘someday that will be me’. In Ireland they look at him and think ‘someday I’m going to get that bastard'”.

A truly Good person will always want what is best for those around them (and for themselves). Me, I have not achieved that. I still get angry, frustrated, and sometimes want to strike out. I know I am not alone in this. I think the cure starts with being honest about this, and proceeds with trying to open that part of yourself that is in instinctive communion with others, and which already wants what is best both for you and for them. It’s already there, but it gets perverted and lost, in my view.

Signed,

Grumpy the Dwarf

On exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum is a panel featuring 16 purportedly spiritually advanced beings, called “luohan” (“arhat”, in the Sanskrit). Every damn one of them looks like a caricature of an actually happy human being. I only saw one that looked even remotely pleased with his life. They were as ugly as sin. The little sign thing they have suggested that maybe the intent was to show that Enlightenment can take many faces. This may be true.

It may also be true that they were simply miserable human beings who happened to live alone in remote places, subsist on bugs, and speak in terms so vague no one could question them (What is the meaning of life, oh Arhat? That my dear one must find out for oneself; Why am I so miserable, Enlightened one? That is because you have not yet found the source of happiness.)

In short, this may have been conscious satire, that nonetheless oonformed, closely enough, to the social conventions of the age.

Was John the Baptist mentally well? Maybe, maybe not. In some times and cultures, the people who lived in radically different ways were considered enlightened, if they attached a religious exterior to their actions. In truth, they may well have been psychotic. Plainly, many, many, many psychoses manifest with religious imagery. There are probably hundreds and maybe thousands of Jesus’s out there (“Two men claim they are Jesus/one of them must be wrong” Mark Knopfler).

To my mind, enlightenment that is useful is invisible. It is achieving mental health that is so robust that it can be shared. It is matching people where they live, so that the distance between you is as little as possible. It is retaining humility with kings, and dignity with “the people”. Hell, dignity with kings and humility with “the people”. It is conforming behavior to a fundamental desire to ease people’s loads, strengthen them, and reinforce good ideas.

Lao Tzu defined a good man as the teacher of a bad man, and a bad man as a good man’s charge. This is nice, in that it permits of endless contexual variations. The most advanced being will be the teacher in the most places and times. To my mind, the good teacher is standing next to the student, never in front of him. There is, in the end, nothing to give, and nothing to learn.

Hey, did you know Hank Williams wrote “I saw the light”. Just popped up on my iPod.

There is some method in my madness.

Logically, if the connection of masculine and feminine creates a circle–and one sees this duality in almost all religious and cultural traditions, for the simple reason that women and men are inherently, physically different, morphologically and hormonally and thus socially–then the connection of the masculine and masculine, or feminine and feminine constitutes an undesirable alteration of this dynamic. It is a flat wheel, that turns in strange ways.

For homosexual men, it seems to spark either excessive femininity or excessive masculinity. Most of course are familiar with the former, but less familiar with the fact that the SS was filled with homosexuals, or that the Spartans practiced homosexuality–one might even say pedophilia–or that the group which finally beat the Spartans had as their vanguard some 100-200 pairs of homosexual lovers, who fought harder for one another, defending one another. Some of the best soldiers in world history were homosexuals.

To my point, though, both are anomalies. It is for this reason that homosexuality has often been considered abnormal and wrong. It is also unproductive in terms of creating new life.

There are many ways to live. In the end, I feel we are all asexual spirits, and that in aggreggate sexuality is more of a curse than a blessing for most. There may come a time in our spiritual development where we connect with other spirits in deeply harmonious ways, all of whom–including ourselves–can remember having been both men and women, and all of whom see it doesn’t matter.

For now, though, that is the way I see it.

To be clear, I do not see homosexuality as a sin. I believe they should be offered neither fewer nor more rights than anyone else. With regard to the latter condition, it is my view that their efforts to get homosexual unions granted the status “marriage” is plainly an effort to stigmatize and denigrate religious faith. This means they want MORE rights than they are willing to grant to religious believers. This is wrong.

More importantly, I see the willful cultivation of homosexuality for the political purpose of eradicating difference as a horrible idea, and one concocted by broken and malignant spirits. I have here in mind Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group, but one could certainly add many more, including some Czars within Obama’s administration. The task is not to corrupt a given reality, but to accept what is, and improve it. None of the leftists are doing that. Theirs is a purely destructive activity, and must be stopped.

I mentioned a dream several posts ago, which could easily be interpreted as a desire to return to the womb. Or perhaps as a recreation of my birth. Whatever.

Once you have analyzed, in psychoanalytic fashion, some myth or dream, what then? For Freud, the process always devolved down to sex. Whatever elevated ideas you thought you had, were really just sex. Everything is sex. This is an extraordinarily destructive doctrine. Nothing means anything, then we die. This is what is being taught in colleges around the country.

“Life as sex” is what I term a tubaform. It is a prism through which you can break down the world. To my mind, the question is not “is it true”, but “is it useful”? Plainly, we do not have, and never will have the eyes of God, but empirically we can and should ask questions like “was Freud’s materialistic atheism an empirically defensible doctrine”, and “are our higher sentiments not unconnected with sex in any visible way, and can we not therefore discard his experimentally unanchored dilettantish suppositions in favor of ideas we like better?”

We are told that open expression of sexuality is “honest”, and pretending otherwise is “dishonest”. But look at San Franscisco. Are they happy? They are all divorced, leading lives where no one trusts anyone, and they are, in the end, alone. Why is kink.com located there? Because that is where they belong. The end result of emotionally detached sex is the recognition that detachment is in fact the primary reality of the relationship. All that happens when you tie someone up and hit them is you physicalize an already existing reality. You actually make it more bearable, by diluting the emotional pain. BDSM has its place, for people living in a certain unhealthy way. It is simply preferable to the alternative, which in modern days is often suicide from the grief of unanchored solitude.

Let me return to the myth, though. Take my dream, of descending through a birth canal, a constricting space, into an open space, that progressively reveals qualitatively richness and light to me. This is also death and rebirth, is it not, that combines the physical experience of discomfort and anxiety, with a relief that is tied to long-extant cultural traditions?

Your personality is characterized by a qualitative gestalt. It is a whole, stitched together from many parts. To change in fundamental ways, you have to “power down”, then power back up. You have to die, then be reborn.

If I could be said to have a “heavy”, an anchor, a guru (heavy is the literal meaning of guru, and I have long seen this as symbolizing a stone at the bottom of an oceans currents, to which I can tie myself to achieve some stability) it is Jack Schwarz. I had two interesting dreams of him, in which I do believe he conveyed needed information, which in my case was modeling emotional/spiritual states which I needed the capacity to feel.

Be that as it may, he spoke often of the need to die daily, through meditation. When you really relax, you let go, you die in a sense. In Yoga, the relaxation pose is called the “corpse posture”.

In our modern day, the single thing we lack most is the capacity for deep, deep relaxation. We hold on so tight to who we are, and what we do, that we actually stiffen and die in our capacity for experience.

Oi: need to go. I’m lucky to set my own hours, but I have things that need to get done.

In the Chicago Art Museum, I saw some Tibetan iconography where religious figures of some importance are making love, more or less obviously. Yab means “father”, and yum “mother”. In Hinduism generally, the male deities are normally paired with female deities [as an unrelated but interesting side note, Gods are normally also paired with their mounts: Kartikeya, the god of war, rides a peacock; and Ganesha, the elephant headed “remover of obstacles” rides a rat],but they are not always obviously locked in a coital position.

In the iconography of Siva, he is often worshipped as the lingam, which is plainly an erect phallus, and understood as such. It is paired with a Yoni, which is that empty space where the lingam goes. The lingam is often worshipped by pouring milk over it.

I would like to offer several thoughts on this. The one that appears to me most important at the moment is this insight I had the other day. There is a circularity to male-female relationships that occurs on a physical level, but which transcends that.

What a man gives a woman is hard and tangible. On a physical level, his member is hard, and he emits something physical, that can lead to new life. Generally, he will also provide physical security for the woman, and often a source of sustenance. On an emotional level, he is generally less susceptible to ups and downs, and thus acts as a steadying force. This is all clear enough.

What a woman gives a man, though, is intangible. She gives him space–literally in the case of her body–but figuratively in the sense of softening him up, helping him feel more, be more sensitive and kind. If you think of a hard substance diluted by air–say whipped cream, which is perhaps an infelicitous metaphor, but let’s go with it–it is less dense. Men benefit from women in ways which I think they often cannot see. I visualized the whole relationship like this:

O
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!

You can visualize a man and woman in coital position, and from the bottom flows something hard, that then circulates up the woman, and reenters the man as space. It is a process of contraction and expansion, continued endlessly.

As far as that goes, consider the conception of a child. Its source is a tiny egg, and a tablespoon or two of generative substance, of which only a single microscopic bit will make any difference. From that, though, grows a baby, within the woman.

In my own terms, I would call this the quantitative/qualitative distinction. Quantity exists in space; it has extent and duration; quality exists as the form of that space, and has neither extent nor duration. This is the old li and chi distinction I talked about many posts ago.

In our own day and time, this basic mechanism has eroded. What the socialists (who I use more or less interchangeably with “those who want to destroy all cultures”) want is the sexual masculinisation of women, and the pacification/feminization of men, which is to say the erosion of their protective instincts, as expressed in the principled defense of their homes and ways of living.

I was in a bar the other day, talking to a very attractive Canadian woman, and she said of some other group of Canadians that they “can suck my dick”. Now, I’ve never heard a woman day that before, for the obvious reason that that isn’t logistically possible (absent a strap-on, which may be what she had in mind; I will add that this is intended as an adult blog, dedicated to solving real problems facing real people; prudishness is not something I practice or believe in,and feel it is silly and counterproductive).

On a deeper level, though, the BJ has entered our culture as a primary sexual element, and not as an occasional treat for the man. Many men expect one on the second or third date. It has come to be a synonym, as with this woman, for domination.

This is a world purely characterized by physicality. I even once heard a man say that it really didn’t matter if it was a man or woman delivering it. There is no emotional connection at all. It is purely sensation, and as such utterly devoid of quality, and of the feminine.

It is the lingam without the yoni. It negates the “father” aspect entirely, since it is not procreative, and need not involve a woman at all.

More generally, even in “normal” sex, I feel that this return of space is absent in most relationships. Men look to “sex” early in life, and rarely are able to turn to love with the ease that would be the case if sex per se were not so prominant. I have long felt this preoccupation with “getting laid” was a curse. Yes, you can do it. You can find a willing woman. I did, and so do most young men. But you have left behind the possibility of LEARNING from it, of taking away from that woman what she actually has to give you besides her body. And for her part, as I have often said, she forgets who she was over time.

We need to return to the circle. It is the path of health and fulfillment. The way to do this is for men in particular–but to a lesser extent woman as well who have been masculinized in their sexual habits–to increase their capacity for feeling, and decrease their focus purely on the physical. As I have said a number of times, I feel Kum Nye is a good means for doing this. So is consciously valuing the women in your life, and realizing that they are giving to you even when you don’t consciously see it.

Hit the art museums in Milwaukee and Chicago over two days. The way I do art museums, any museum, is I look at everything. I am tired when I am done. I am definitely arted out. It was useful though.

I had many thoughts, but will only share one tonight, as I am tired. Walking through the South Asian section of the Chicago museum, it hit me that “Art is that which organizes culture”. It does not create it, per se, but it organizes it.

Medieval churches were artworks, as they organized culture. City planning, on this rendering, becomes a type of art, since it organizes culture.

I once dreamed of living in Tibet in an endless winter. We had a shrine (my wife and I) where we had to go down a very narrow, chimney like tunnel, then crawl through a very narrow tunnel, at which point the room appeared, underground, that was spacious. You had to have that sense of contraction to fully appreciate the release. It was dark, too, now that I remember, and only slowly lit by those already there, and of course filled with iconographic images. First time, the tunnel filled you with fear, but the whole gestalt worked at cultivating a state of mind, which is to say a state of culture. It was an artwork.

Speaking and writing, on this rendering, are also acts of art. They organize how we think about ourselves, who we are, what we believe together, and what we want to do and why.

I will offer this as an open question: what has been the organizational effect of most modern art, say since the Cubists?

What is goodness? As I have argued, it is a contextualized tendency, in which you pursue your own happiness and that of others with equal vigor.

The problem in modern philosophy is that Plato said it was, in effect, a thing, more real than real. It emitted a shadow, but we could not see it directly.

Plato may have been right, but he was impractical. Practically, it doesn’t matter if Goodness “exists” or not. We have decisions to make. Do we make them more intelligently, or less? Do we take the fact of our existence and make the best of it, or do we decide to give up and take “angst” as somehow emblematic of something other than being fucked up in the head, normally as a result of ingesting stupid ideas emitted by evil, confused people?

I have defined Goodness as a “volitional character disposition in which you are capable of living happily on your own, and in which you take pleasure from the happiness of others.”

This has endless possible contexual implementations, doesn’t it? Imagine, as an example, being a German soldier drafted against your will, and assigned to an SS unit running a death camp. You feel genuine sympathy for the people being murdered, but if you show it, you risk murder yourself, and you know that your wife and children will need you there after the war. What do you do? Do you perform some foolishly romantic but pointless act, like releasing a roomful of prisoners, who enjoy freedom for about 1 minute, prior to getting gunned down in a courtyard somewhere? What can you do?

Surrepetitiously, can you not look some of them in the eye, letting them know you see them as human beings? When you deal with their bodies, can you not do so with some measure of respect? Can you not, above all, remember who you are, and not surrender to the horror, not accept it as acceptable? Can you not then go home and live life with increased energy, love your wife and family with greater gratitude, and pray for those who were killed?

What is the proper level for the ocean? As I understand the matter, it has been some 40′ higher than it is at present in the remote past, and some similar number lower in ice ages, when all the water is sucked up into vast ice flows. Which was the exact correct level?

As far as that goes, is the ocean level? To get something level, you have to freeze it, don’t you? And then it isn’t level: it just isn’t moving. Wave bob up, and they bob down.

Goodness is like this. It is always trying to do good where you can, when you can. Sometimes, the water is frozen, and there is little you can do. You soldier on. Sometimes, there is a lot you can do: but still you float like a small boat on the waves, going up and down, moving in and out, doing what you can.

A formulation I like is that all moral decisions should be local, imperfect, and necessary. Goodness is the same, but I would say it is local, imperfect, and organic. It is based on a connection with your circumstances, and with the people in those circumstances, that is non-compulsive, and sincere. It is relaxed, but not apathetic, and capable of great diligence.

As it must be practiced to succeed, Leftism uses a combination of deception, character assassination, and fear-mongering to implement its goals. As an example, the Great Depression was clearly lengthened by people more concerned–in their own words at the time–with “reform” than with recovery. Social Security had nothing to do with recovery. Neither did their fascist price controls, granting the right to labor to form legally protected, monopolistic labor cartels, or the decision to legalize labor violence. All of these things helped a few people, and hurt far more. But they were implemented because people were scared, and FDR said they would help. When people are panicked, they are susceptible to stupid ideas.

But that wasn’t the point of this post. The point was that the essence of leftist political strategy has come to be dominated by the Alinskyan tactic of personalizing and defaming. You can attack figures like Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush without too much trouble. It is much harder to personalize and attack a broad-based movement based upon principles and a rational understanding of the facts of the issues at hand. You can demonize people for wanting to take dog food away from starving old blind ladies living in cans, but you can’t demonize them for pointing out that if you spend more than you have on a long term basis, you have nothing. There will be NO money for the little old ladies in the shoes.

This is obvious to many people, and these people are now politically active. They are not just voting, but they are educating themselves, taking to the streets, and organizing.

If you demonize a large-scale, heterogeneous movement with no clear leaders–we have de facto spokespeople, but not leaders–you necessarily demonize the individuals within that movement. And to the extent that you are telling patent lies about those people–the most obvious example being that racism somehow underlies a desire to avoid financial Armageddon–you permanently alienate them.

It is one thing to tell lies about Ronald Reagan. Most people never met him, and had no prospect of ever meeting him. He was an abstraction, outside of his public speeches, which of course the media covered selectively to control the narrative.

But when you start attacking normal Americans, that is an entirely different animal. To be effective, propaganda has to keep people within its informational space. Good propagandists understand they have to back down at times–they have to control the boil–so that when they need the outrage, and when they need to tell the large lies, they have an open conduit. Often, this will mean telling the actual truth 95% of the time.

Calling normal Americans racists who are not even remotely racist violates this principle. It is bad propaganda, but the Left really has no choice. This really is a broad-based, grassroots movement that has set as its task the destruction of all the destructions the Left had planned for America, many of which are already in place, such as broad-based control of our retirement system in the form of Social Security.

So what to do? Attack people who will in that very process wake up decisively and permanently; or let the movement grow, foster actual debate, and pursue ends which are inimical to the tyranny that is the end goal of all radicals on the Left?

This is an interesting year, and this will be an interesting election. Bachman can be demonized, as of course have been Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, Horowitz and others. But you can’t attack the people whose support you need. All you can do is protect your base, which in my view is at best a third of the electorate.

Been logging some miles. Was in a very well done, very thorough art museum today, and walking out I was thinking about modernity. You know, the Renaissance preoccupation with antiquity was already a sort of identity crisis. Look at our Capital: Greek and Roman ideas.

It seems to me that the orienting idea that has led to the eruption of economic wealth and accompanying political liberty in the modern era is the notion of progress. People have always made things. The Industrial Revolution did not change this. What changed was the idea that the process itself of making things could be improved. Pari pasu with this came–predictably–the notion of applying that same engineering mindset to SOCIAL progress.

When I look at modern art, the dominant emotion is confusion. What are they trying to do? Why? They don’t know either. They are searching furiously for the Big Idea. Normally they settle for the banality of cultural erosion and resulting compulsory moral and economic egalitarianism. This is a stupid idea, but they can’t do better.

My own Big Idea is that there is no need for a Big Idea. Humanity has survived to this point with many different Big Ideas, and can continue to do so if only those without ideas do not insist on imposing their nihilism on the rest of us, to our detriment, and to their only short term benefit.

I want to be clear: Evil works, over short periods of time. You eradicate anxiety, anger, sadness, and all the other emotions that seem to plague the very wealthy and the overly educated (not infrequently the same people) through cruelty. It is my considered opinion that places like that pictured in Hostel actually exist. I have more than once wondered if the hundreds of murders that plagued Juarez were not in fact arranged by, shall we say, evil “cultural entrepreneurs”.

But this effect fades, the pain becomes all the more the farther down this road people go. No amount of cocaine, booze, money, women/men, possessions, or anything else can ease this. Only choosing to do the right thing, locally, imperfectly, can do that.

Few thoughts. Back to my Old Fashioned.