Author: White Whale

I think it is useful to postulate that we all grow up with dominant social “frequencies”, by which I mean sorts of behavior, and tones of behavior, emotional temperatures and flavors–it is a complex mix–which feels normal to us.  We synchronize as children with this frequency, or perhaps frequencies, as is often the case with children who split their time between two homes, as mine did.

This frequency represents not just specific people, but the feeling of normal.  It continues even when those people are absent.  It defines what you can see and feel in others.  If you have no way to receive what they are sending, because you were never exposed to this frequency, then you will have no way of truly understanding them and connecting with them.

It is a truism that if you want to change your life you need to change the people in your life.  When this is actually good advice is when you grew up at a dysfunctional frequency, and have surrounded yourself with people who respond to it as well, in the same ways.

And to evolve, to change, to grow, you have at some point to surrender that frequency, to go somewhere else.  And what is frightening about this is the lack of givenness.  What you grew up with is there even when all the people are gone.  When you change frequencies, nobody is there at all.  You are in terra incognita.

And obviously, people can be good influences on each other, teachers of one another.  One person can gradually teach another to see and feel in a different, better (or for that matter, worse) way.

But I think this is an important point.  The specific people come and go, but the memory of what being in that place felt like does not.  This is not, by and large, a  primarily conscious thing.  It goes deep into how “life” feels to us.

People need to have reasons to do what they do. The essence of free markets and democratic methods is that the most reliable, least rotten reason is self interest. Johnson observed several centuries ago that people are rarely less harmlessly applied than in the getting of honest money.

Socialists, for their part, think we should all be idealists, that we should look not to our own good, but the common good. And who defines “the common good”? People who stand to benefit from changes in how it is pursued.

And for ideals to mean anything, they must be embraced by all. If you force people into behaviors not of their own choosing, you not only do not improve”society”, but on the contrary make it more brutal and unpleasant.

If you study the private correspondence, and public arguments, as in the Federalist Papers—it’s hard not to think that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to make armed insurrection easier, and government—out of fear of this threat—less likely to be abusive.

Think about this carefully. I believe it to be true.

If you think about it, Brexit is really a secession of sorts. The UK, within the EU as currently constituted, is much like a State within the Republic of the United States, with an important difference that they have no real Constitution, as far as I know, and certainly no bill of rights.

No reasonable person, it seems to me, could or should accept being ruled so absolutely by others so far away.

I think World War 2 really was the war to end all large European wars. If there is another one, it will be a civil war waged against the EU apparatus itself.

I’ve only had two cavities in my life, one as a child, one as an adult.  My dentist does not like my practice, but every time I go in there she has to admit there is nothing to complain about.

My thing is to clean my teeth thoroughly once a day, in the morning, after using a prebrushing rinse.  I use an electric toothbrush, use it mindfully, then use a tongue scraper, then floss.  My thought is that it takes 24 hours for plaque to solidify, and if I treat it with a rinse first, perhaps 12 hours more, which I never give it.

I think brushing twice daily, thoroughly, is too much.  That’s my own gut feeling.

I’ve recently realized, though, that a mouth rinse with baking soda at bedtime is not a bad idea.  That reduces acid while I sleep.  There’s no downside I can see.  I add it to my nasal irrigation, throat cleansing device.

My two cents.  I will remind you, though, that there seems to be a link between root canals and cancer: https://rootcausemovie.com/

I haven’t watched the movie–as I commented at the time, the ADA got it pulled from Netflix–but the gist of it sounds right to me.  This is actually a decent link.  It may be worth seven dollars.  I’ll see how the week goes.

For me, though: zero root canals, few cavities.  My dentist says whatever I’m doing, keep doing it.  I’m there like clockwork every six months, and never anything to report.

Take care of your teeth. I think this is vastly more important than it might seem at first glance.

I really believe I have extraordinarily powerful ideas on a variety of topics.  But I don’t know how to get people to listen to me.  As Calvin Coolidge pointed out, “unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.”

His solution: persistence.  It is the correct prescription.

But persistence in what?  This is my question.  Should I dedicate my energies to writing a book?  Would anyone listen?

I have made some efforts to spread my ideas, but they have largely fallen on deaf ears.  Very few people, it seems, take anything seriously any more, and those who do generally find themselves occupying what I would argue are congenial illusions by the time they might even begin to think about reading anything I might write.

In the end, my responsibility, first and foremost, is my own spiritual development.  I must dedicate myself to becoming whole.  My relationship, first and foremost, is with God, with the Deeper Order.

Thus I have shelved, rightly or wrongly, any notion of writing beyond what is already on the internet, and readily available to anyone who finds their way there.

My life has largely lacked positive energy.  I grew up without much love, and I am not very good at feeling it.  I have a hard time loving myself, and a hard time loving others, the way I would like to.  Even though I have much to offer intellectually, what seems most needed, for me, right now, is to be able to bring the scent of a rose to every room I enter, and to remember that when I disappear I will not be gone at all.

There is a need for Mind, for intelligence, for the ability to see and describe deep orders.  But there is something much larger, and much more useful.  For want of a better word, call it the Way.

I watched the ship sail
  Away
     In the night.

Her plan to greet the
   Day
      With land far from sight.

Her plan to greet the
   Day
      With songs of hope and delight.

On the shore I slept under the
   Sway
      of tide and moonlight.

When I woke there was no sign in the
  Bay
    Of what had just gone last night.

We wish powerfully to be gone
  Far Away
   And yet to remain within sight.

I may have invented a new rhyme scheme there, although all that is new now has been new before, and known.

I might add that all becoming starts under your feet.  It cannot start anywhere else.  If you have sailed away in your mind, you are lost.  Come home, as soon as you can.

Beyond that,  I have no idea what my point was.  The images and words just came to me, smoking a cigar on my couch, dreaming.  As should be obvious, I dream a lot.  I spend hours and day sometimes, doing very little.  But I do a lot.

Here is a question: am I on a ship, bound for somewhere; waiting for a ship to come take me home; or looking at a ship already in port, which I can board any time I like, for any destination I like?

Being where you are, how you are, is a very hard thing.  It takes a lifetime, I think, to even remember to remember that that is the entry and disembarkation point of everything that matters.

Jesus wants you to invite him into your heart, so he can supplement your goodness, strengthen you in love, but all in your own way, in your own time, according to who you are.

The Devil wants to bring you into his heart, in his way, on his time, and so that you will disappear forever.  I think the metaphor in the most recent Stranger Things is good.  Initially you retain some semblance of outer form, even though you are gone.  Eventually, the husk falls off.

This is a strange and infinite universe.  Do not discount too easily what is possible.  Our science does not exist, at the moment, primarily to extend the range of what we know, but rather to draw curtains around the areas of what we do know, or think we know, so as to conceal the darkness beyond.

Beyond what they can speak of with confidence, they do not want to speak at all.  This is a psychological problem, brought on by a valid fear that our ignorance may yet prove to be infinite.  All of the smarter ones sense this intuitively.  Atheism is their answer, but it is not a very good answer.  They want to make everything knowable, because small.  I don’t think the universe works like that, and in any event the universe works the way it works.  It does not exist to humor our anxieties, and has no need to offer clear answers.

Certainly that it has already so many good answers, so many seeming natural laws would seem to point to some order, but as David Hume pointed out, we cannot infer with absolute certainty that if one billiard ball hits another, that the second one will move, even if it has 10,000 times before.  We assert the word “law” merely because we have not yet found the exception.

This sort of thinking scares people.  It is perhaps right to be scared . But I would assert that if anything is clear in this life, it is that one of our main tasks is conquering fear.

And speaking personally, I have long found a certain beauty in fuzziness.  Certainly, I like to draw clear lines.  But this is only possible in the abstract.  In the real world, I build these beautiful thought structures, then have to watch them swirl and fade into colored mist the moment they touch the light of practical reality.  Still, if you start with good lines, something remains.  You simply have to remember that most of the time the straightest lines are curved, as Chuang Tzu noted a long time ago.

Much of this is replacing psychology with political dogma.  It replaces individuals–with specific histories, who have moods, who have psychological conflicts, who want to be happy–with types.

With regards to, say, transgenderism, we are expected to assume that such people are necessarily benefiting from every last aspect of it.  Why?  Because we are EXPECTED TO.

It doesn’t matter if nuance is involved, as it always is in human affairs. It doesn’t matter if gender reassignment surgery, so called, actually causes lasting psychological damage.  The political points will have already been scored.

It is a core question, with regard to all this: what is the point of human life?  You are not building sound characters, and happy people.  You have no mechanism for personal betterment.  You are not teaching anyone how to live.

The whole thing is based on a violent obsessiveness which itself stems from mental illness. I’ve said this many times.  I will say it now this way.

I had a dream where I was shown a Democrats volunteer for something, and a Republican volunteer.  They looked identical.

We are our best selves when out in the world, doing concrete good things for actual people.  Helping with cross country meets, church picnics, community clean up, whatever.  Americans are helpers by nature.  We are volunteers.

It’s really hard to hate someone who is right in front of you.  It takes practice and determination for otherwise psychologically normal people.

It would not be right to say Republicans are innocent in all this hyperpartisanship.  It always takes two to tango.  But we are not the ones going into clinical hyperarousal every time someone disagrees with us.  We are not the ones who throw ridiculous and completely unwarranted names at people.  This is a fact.

Still, the two groups spending time together, mixed, focused on a shared objective: all good.

What use anyone can make of this observation, I don’t know.  But here it is.