Author: White Whale

I was thinking yesterday about chronic emotion. What is it? How can, for example, anger be an emotion that often emerges from your being? How do you stay angry? Expressed biologically, anger is presumably some raising of blood pressure, the release of certain hormones, and the tensing of muscles not needed for the activity at hand. This is tiring.

Perceptually, within the vortex of experiences we only contain by filtering most of them out, anger is an artifact of pain of some sort. Anger and sadness are quite clearly linked. Anger, in important respects, IS pain. It is a perceptual limitation.

I feel sometimes there is this light in us trying to get out, and that with inferior emotions we build stone walls that limit our worlds. When our light shines out, the light elsewhere in the world shines back at us, but instead we live like animals in cages. We live in darkness, when we have access to an infinite supply of illumination.

How does this process work, though, and how do you end it? This is a practical question.

As I have often viewed the matter, it seems to me that the essence of Buddhism is applied psychology, with the intent of building mental health. He starts with a problem–life is suffering, which can be construed both as actual pain, AND as less happiness than you are capable of–and comes up with a detailed plan of action, which works in his particular case.

Consider the Heart Sutra.

form is not different from emptiness, and emptiness is not different from form. Form itself is emptiness, and emptiness itself is form. Sensation, conception, synthesis, and discrimination are also such as this. Śāriputra, all phenomena are empty: they are neither created nor destroyed, neither defiled nor pure, and they neither increase nor diminish. This is because in emptiness there is no form, sensation, conception, synthesis, or discrimination. There are no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or thoughts. There are no forms, sounds, scents, tastes, sensations, or phenomena. There is no field of vision and there is no realm of thoughts. There is no ignorance nor elimination of ignorance, even up to and including no old age and death, nor elimination of old age and death. There is no suffering, its accumulation, its elimination, or a path. There is no understanding and no attaining.

What is he saying? How can form equal emptiness? Why are there no eyes, ears, etc? Why is there no ignorance and elimination of ignorance? What have you accomplished if you claim nothing exists? Why is this text revered, and not rejected as the rambling of some opium-addled fool?

Logically, several points can be made. First, that when he equates form with emptiness, that is his whole argument. The rest of it is just clarification. He (the author, who may not have been the Buddha) is simply being thorough.

Secondly, the universe works the way it works. Water flows downhill in a gravitational field. When we think, we use mental structures that are partly mechanical, and partly free. Since we have to live in bodies which come with some programming, we are all more or less already cyborgs.

The task of a spiritual teacher is to free people. It is not to tell them how he does it. It would be perfectly consistent to tell people something that was not true, if the end result was that they finally saw for themselves what IS true. You cannot ever see through someone else’s eyes. You cannot inhabit their worlds for them.

One of the features of our mind is dichotomous thinking. We are programmed to process things, in many ways, as binary. O’s and 1’s. Good and evil. Friend and foe. Group member and outsider. Acceptable and unacceptable.

Logically, how would a clever teacher prevent his teaching from being corrupted? By calling his teaching a non-teaching. By refuting his own first premises.

Why would he do that? Because to him the essence of thing is always beyond words. Your words therefore MUST be contradictory in some ways, lest this point be missed. This is the point of the Zen koan, although I would question how many people that process has actually enlightened.

Further, think of any form. To take an obvious example, let’s imagine a tree. This tree is in constant movement. It is constantly taking water and nutrients from the ground, absorbing sunlight to create food for itself, and growing. When it sleeps in the winter, it is simply breathing more slowly.

Take a rock. It is composed of trillions of atoms, each of which is in constant flux. Most of matter is in fact empty. If you imagine a football field, the nucleus of an atom would be roughly the size of a golf ball at center field, and that might even be exaggerating. The rest of the field: emptiness, surrounded by electrons the size of grains of sand, in constant motion. Actually, we are not even sure if visualizing electrons as things which “exist”, per se, is even accurate. I think most physicists think not. It is simply a useful heuristic in teaching chemistry. The “electron” more or less “exists” simultaneously throughout its valence shell.

So does a tree or a rock “exist” as a form? Yes and no.

Can I see? Can I hear? It would appear so, but can I see X-rays? Can I hear what dogs hear? Do I see when I sleep? Do I actually possess the mental processing power to see everything in front of me? Am I not forced by the limitations the mechanical structure I call my brain places on me to choose the objects of my attention, more or less consciously?

Do I feel what I feel? Does not the same problem arise? Can any of us say we operate our bodies without ever exerting unnecessary tension, that we are perfectly efficient? Do we not have many selves, competing for attention, as hypotic researchers seem to have shown? Who are we, in the end? This question is at the root of the Buddhist doctrine of No Self.

And if you do not exist, can you be ignorant? Can you grow old? Can you die? Can you be a Buddhist, following the 4-fold Path? Can you read the Heart Sutra? No.

Is he not saying “Not THIS: THAT, dummy!!!!”?

We do not exist in our minds. Our minds work on words, and words are needed for communication, but clever words lead to their own cessation. They extinguish themselves. The Buddha was trying to put out fires, and confronted with a herd of cattle who would not have needed him if they could see for themselves. His only possible way forward was facilitating a way of living and perceiving that made that more likely.

Here is what I believe: I believe that we are all eternal beings, all of whom are capable of reaching God–who I visualize as the root of the possibility of form, and a source of endless light–and of travelling anywhere in the universe. Yet, we forget that here on Earth. In an endless existence, this doesn’t really matter, but you have to do something, and teaching is one of those things. It doesn’t really help anything. Souls always get rescued. Nothing, really, can be done. But the process of moving is endlessly delightful.

The Buddhists have this idea of Bodhisattva’s, enlightened beings who have no need to return to Earth, but continue to do so. And why not? Once you realize that all pain is illusory because temporary, in and endless expanse of time and motion, then it doesn’t really matter where you are, or what you do. Any time and any life anywhere is acceptable. Love–what we call love, I should say, since if you are following me you realize that “love” doesn’t exist either–is the primary reality, and it is omnipresent.

Which brings me to the grain of sand and a metaphor I have used before. The task of oysters is to be useless. It is to exist at the bottom of a body of water, reproduce and die. Most oysters everywhere are able to accomplish this.

Within some, however, an accident happens. A grain of sand is introduced, causing them pain. Everywhere it moves it scratches. Every day, all day, the pain is there, and it won’t stop until they are able to create a barrier between their soft inner parts and this chafing intruder. So they build a wall around it, and day by day their burden lightens. They still have an intruder, but now it hurts less. Then one day they are harvested, killed, and their intruder taken and sold at a jewelry store.

This grain of sand, for us, is the desire to impose our wills on the world. It is grasping and clinging to one form and not another. It is clinging to an identity, to a place, to a way of living, to social standing, to success (or as far as that goes, to failure). If we consider things properly, within the manifest truth of impermanence, this is foolishness.

This is not to say we should not have a place and a time and a way of living. It is simply to accept that shit happens and that there is no use worrying about it. It is to view life with humor and good taste, regardless of what it holds in store.

This is the way to live. I sure as hell have not achieved it, but these musings help me better calibrate, I think, in that direction.

I hope somebody reads this, after all that work, or I will be mad as hell.

I have made this point before, but feel the need to make it again, slightly differently. Science is not a discipline which separates plausible–“ordinary”–claims from implausible, extraordinary claims. There quite simply is no room, formally, for deciding in advance what is possible and impossible. There can be no extraordinary truth claim. There can only be claims for which evidence exists, and claims for which no evidence exists. Empirical/non-empirical. This is the only divide.

That pictures, as an example, can be communicated from one mind to another is an empirical claim. It can and has been done, repeatedly, and in scientifically quantifiable ways. This is not an extraordinary claim. This is simply a fact.

To say, therefore, that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is to betray a FUNDAMENTAL misunderstanding of the NATURE of science. That this is possible is not extraordinary to me at all: I have experienced it. And whether or not this is the case, the only reason to ever try and sift one from the other is practical: finite amounts of funding exist, and it is not irrational to want to study things which are generally agreed to exist.

As I have said, though (I am sensitive to repeating myself, but find that I rarely if ever frame things exactly the same way twice, making some repetition useful, since new insights sometimes emerge), the most useful approach to increasing useful human knowledge is not investigating what is known, but rather finding and investigating all known outliers which have the potential to falsify general paradigms.

For example, evolution plainly cannot be explained by reference to Natural Selection, if we posit that mutations are random. The fossil record simply doesn’t support it. Nor do Gould’s contributions become scientific simply because he has layered a theory onto what we actually found.

Who, anywhere, has tried to measure evolution in response to environmental challenges? What I believe will be shown, if and when this happens, is that living organisms react as WHOLES, as conscious entities. This fact, when eventually shown as I believe it will be, will enable a useful understanding of the nature of life to emerge.

This is a small thought, but I figured I’d pass it along. The toughest Cold Warriors, as a group, were the Catholics. Catholics were the only group overrepresented in Vietnam demographically. Contrary to a popular myth which was presumably created to get votes for post-radicalization Democrats, blacks died there in the same ratios as they lived in America.

Kennedy was a social liberal, but he was Catholic. I have to wonder if he got elected by appealing to the Catholics, who otherwise would have put Nixon in office. As some will recall, the race was in any event roughly as close as that between Al Gore and George Bush, with the notable difference that Nixon wasn’t a crybaby, and who promptly conceded.

Kennedy, like FDR, was not very bright, but he had a talent for speeches. The damage he did this nation was largely as a result of enabling LBJ to get into the White House, and begin a “war” we are waging to this very day, and losing: the “War on Poverty”.

Here is the best quote on the topic I have seen, by Supreme Court Justice McReynolds:

I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. . . Can it be controverted that the great mass of the business of Government–that involved in social relations, the internal arrangements of the body politic, tne mental and moral culture of men, the development of local resources of wealth, the punishment of crimes in general, the preservation of order, the relief of the needy or otherwise unfortunate members of society–did in practice remain with the States; that none of these objects of local concern are by the Constitution expressly or impliedly prohibited to the States, and that none of them are by any express language of the Constitution transferred to the United States? Can it be claimed that any of these functions of local administration and legislation are vested in the Federal Government by any implication? I have never found anything in the Constitution which is susceptible of such a construction. No one of the enumerated powers touches the subject, or has even a remote analogy to it.

It is very literally the truth that we are not a Fascist nation because of the so-called “Four Horsemen” of the Supreme Court, who overturned FDR’s National Recovery Act, and Agricultural Adjustment Act, which combined gave Franklin Roosevelt the power to control substantially every aspect of our economy, and by extension our lives. He had the power to control production, dictate wages, and determine profit margins, as I understand the issue.

He lied when he claimed Social Security would be self funding. That possibility ended less than a decade after it was signed into law.

I have said before and will say again that our Constitution is the most brilliant political document ever devised by the mind of man. We are free today only because our Founding Fathers foresaw aspiring tyrants like FDR, who was a stupid, ignorant, unprincipled man whose only talents were his ability to convince people he cared about them, and his ability to perform political calculations and generate accurate results.

People ask about Jim Crow. Well, we got rid of Jim Crow, didn’t we? How are black people faring in this nation? You can’t put lipstick on a pig and call it beautiful, and you cannot call the interferences of the Federal Government in issues of State governance successful. If you fail to empower people because you want to empower government, you get a powerful government, and weak people.

[Edit: I want to be clear here. 60 years ago African Americans were in this nation a proud, hard working people who valued family, church, and civic responsibility. And they were shut out of the flow of much of our economic life. As one example, FDR’s pro-Union policies had the effect of making many of them unemployed, since most Unions were openly racist, and the closed shops they created meant that black people could not approach companies directly.

FDR nominated a former KKK member, Hugo Black, for his Supreme Court. Reason: Black was a reliable Democrat.

I want African Americans integrated into our cultural life. They have been fed vicious lies for 50-60 years, and taught to revere only the State, and the money that the Democrats can get for them. Their families are gone, church is largely irrelevant, and their models are killers, drug pushers, and men who abuse women. This needs to change.

I am doing nothing but speaking the truth here. I see no reason to posit innate differences, but that a cultural divide exists between inner city ghettoes and the suburban/exurban neighborhoods that white flight has created to avoid them, is to me self evident beyond the need for further comment. We don’t legislate this away: we negotiate it away, over as much time as we need to do the thing right.]

We have a mountain of debt we cannot hope to pay, which will saddle future generations with a burden that will make their lives darker, sadder, and harder.

Private pensions were working fine in the 1930’s. There were State social safety net programs as well, for those States that wanted them. Social Security did not write its first check until the Depression’s effects were masked by our mobilization for war, and associated IOU’s issued on behalf of Americans not yet born.

The extent of the fraud and idiocy FDR and his cronies visited on this nation are only now coming into general awareness, after 70 yearsor more. Let us hope We the People are able to wake up from the sopophorics leftists have so diligently planted in our milk, and that of our children, for all these many years.

I was thinking about the meaning of good food, and the hedonic pleasure associated with it. As you might imagine, I was contemplating the food culture of France.

It seems to me that food has no meaning, except to the extent that it is a communication between one human and another as to what is possible. It is possible to put a lot of love and qualitative information into a well prepared meal. To the extent it is affirmed, it represents a bond, a shared committment to elevation. It represents the triumph of work, and perception, and diligence over the commonplace, the easy, and the insipid.

To the extent, though, that it is valued for novelty or variety, it is decadent. There is no pattern or template, no qualitative richness in the movement. Meaning is about transcending self pity and difficulty, and if you are just sitting there as a figurative fat child waiting to be entertained, then the best meals in the world are wasted on you.

The devil can sing, but only for a short period of time.

The bad warrior faces real bullets.

As I think about it, Fascism is nothing but the application of the military model to society. Everyone is assigned a place, and it is expected that there be no friction and no competition between the parts. A Command economy is one based upon Generals who know what is best for all of us. They decree it, and it happens (even if a few lose fingers and toes in the machinery).

That this mindset would lead naturally to aggressive militarism seems obvious. You have everybody forcibly confined to little boxes, many of which are not suitable for them. This breeds anger, and you then need some sort of outlet for that. Go invade someone. Simple enough plan.

And as I have said often, Communism is just Fascism confined to a border. The aggressive militarism is directed at the population itself. Cuba has in fact more or less invaded other countries, but for some years now it has existed as a figurative as well as literal island. The secret police are everywhere, ready for action; but the people have learned to suffer in silence. What is left for them is decline: all the energy is gone.

Edit: I will add that we might usefully define Communism as “Fascism without hope”. Mussollini and Hitler found outlets for the aggressive energies of their nations. Even if you didn’t like your station in the order, you had the opportunity to go take other people’s stuff. In this respect, Napoleon–whose soldiers were in large measure always paid in booty, and the opportunity rape other men’s wives, mothers, and daughters–was clearly a Fascist. He kept the French busy for quite some time, while Emperor.

To be clear, when they invade other nations, Fascists don’t even try to pretend it is for their own good. They are simply Vikings on a raid, who intend never to leave, and to do like the Vikings did, and enslave anybody they want as slaves.

The paradigmatic Communist War, on the other hand, is that of internal subversion, in which they get Fifth Columnists in key posts, and desecrate and denigrate the cultural and political institutions by which that nation maintains itself. The lie is always that they are rescuing the nation from some evil supposedly superior to their own.

This applies even in the case of naked aggression, as in the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the invasions of Czechoslavakia and Hungary, the invasion of South Vietnam by their Communist neighbors, and many others. Such incursions were claimed to be for the good of all concerned.

Practically, though, they were still Fascist. The confiscated wealth of Eastern Europe was used to buoy the Soviets up long after the failure of their economic system became obvious; and of course Party bosses to this very day in China and Cuba are able to live much better than those they rule over, since they have legally protected access to the fruits of their labor, like plantation owners of old.

Again: Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme merde.

I’m still reading “FDR’s Folly”, which not only decisively demolishes any residual beliefs poorly informed people might have that FDR helped this nation economically–on the contrary, he nearly turned us into the Fascist State many of his top New Deal advisors wanted, and would have but for the Supreme Court–but also eerily prefigures what Obmama is trying to do now. What FDR did in the 1930’s–not let a good crisis go to waste–Obama and his Communist czars are trying to do now, using the same language, the same imbecilic economic and social theories, and which will end in the same result.

I will deal with this at length elsewhere. For now, let me make one point he made that I hadn’t considered.

Inflation is always wealth transfer. I make that point often, and did in my last post. If prices are going up, SOMEBODY is taking money from the people paying higher prices. If oil goes up, and the cascade effect causes anything that is moved by truck, train, plane or boat to go up, then either the oil companies are increasing profit margins, or the cost of oil exploration has gone up, which has created business and wealth for oil explorers. If, due to cartelization, the production of oil has simply been slowed intentionally, that is still effectively a profit margin increase, and the obvious solution is decartelization.

How would we break up OPEC? That is actually an interesting question I won’t address here.

Getting to my point, taxes increase the cost of business for employers. Take the Social Security Tax. We pay 6.2% of our income, but so do our employers. This cost has to be factored into the cost of doing business. Consequently, it necessitates, directly, an increase in prices charged. So our government takes money from us by force, supposedly for our own good, and thereby causes everything in America to cost more.

Self evidently, this inflation is a wealth transfer from the private sector to the public sector. All of the homes that public sector employees buy, all the cars they drive, all the 401K accounts, and pensions, and boats, and vacations, and anything they consume: we pay for it. Our wealth becomes their wealth.

With about 2.0 million civilian employees, the Federal Government, excluding the Postal Service, is the Nation’s largest employer.

The postal service–which in my understanding has to be constantly underwritten by taxpayers, but which does in fact provide a useful service, and which is clearly Constitutional–employs 596,000.

Consider this: Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation

Multiplying $123,000 by 2 million gets me 248,000,000,000. This is the amount of private wealth that is transferred from the private sector to the public sector every year.

The subtle point I want to make here is that every dollar in taxes paid to support these workers–some of whom we plainly need, like the military–is not only diverted from private investment and following sustinable job creation, but also causes the cost of services and products to rise correspondingly. Your net profits are sales less costs, and taxes, being a cost, necessitate higher sales prices.

This point is ineluctable, and worth pondering. There has been so much stupidity over the last 100 years. Maybe, just maybe, we can reverse it.

I think we need to keep some things clear in our minds with respect to inflation. Prices, the amount of money in existence, and the amount of money in circulation are all related but separate things, even though practically they get used interchangeably.

If oil costs go up, everything that gets transported–which is pretty much everything–will go up in cost. This is a means of wealth transfer to oil producing companies, if their costs have not gone up, and if their costs have gone up, then it transfers that wealth to those who are charging more. Perhaps they have to look longer, or dig deeper wells, or whatever. The people that do that, are doing well.

When the amount of money in existence goes up, then the people who create it and first spend it benefit most. This would be first and foremost people with first access to Central Banks, but also all banks generally, who create the money they loan.

When the amount of money in circulation goes up, it would seem to there is no net difference. To get the money out of the supply in the first place, people would have to buy dollars at then market value. When they then spend them, they get better deals, since the absence of the money on the market will have caused prices to drop, but on balance this seems to me not a big deal. China, for example, might exchange $10 billion Mao’s for $10 billion. If the yuan is devalued relative to the dollar, they don’t get a great deal.

Certainly, one could take advantage of the ebb and flow of currency exchange rates, like Keynes did personally, but the primary agent of true inflation is in my view related to number two, the banking system.

To cognize is to think. To recognize is to think twice, or so I would suppose, without confirming the etymology.

To think is to create or acknowledge a pattern. To re-think, is really to see that pattern again.

I recognize him. To do that, I must have seen him before.

How much of our perception is original, and how much recognition? If the world is constantly in flux, what is the proper role of recognition? It is difficult to imagine a world in which every pattern had to be created anew. It is equally difficult to imagine an interesting world which consisted ONLY recognition.