Author: White Whale

It makes me happy when I see “my” ideas out in the public domain.  Obviously, it is far from clear they are my ideas–that someone read something I wrote on the internet and repeated it in their own way–and in most, quite likely all, cases are not.  They are just someone else thinking the same thing.

But I am trying to build something good, and my name need not be attached.  I prefer it not be, in fact.  If I have influence, let it be silent, covert, hidden.

I remember reading about the church builders of the Middle Ages.  Their names, by and large–the masons at least–are nowhere.  But their work still stands.  They kept their eyes on the prize.

I place no restrictions on the use of the content I create here, or that I created on Goodness Movement, or which I create from time to time under my real name, other than I do not want to be sued for copyright infringement for stating my own ideas.  You can take them, but don’t try and take them away from me.  That is my only restriction, and it is a very small one.

Here is a nice and, I think, relevant poem from Mary Oliver:

I had an odd dream last night–odd in its complexity and in its clarity, although of course all dreams are odd.

I somehow found out some person had been accused of something, but was unclear what it was.  He was being universally condemned, and I found myself shouting “innocent until proven guilty”.  I found myself yelling at some young college coed “this is one of the most important principles of the Anglo-American tradition” (I will note, there are some countries where it is guilty until proven innocent; this is still a thing even today, even in our modern world).

Then I was with a group of people I knew and respected, friends, who were all looking at me somberly.  I realized something was wrong.  What did I miss, I asked them.  One of them, a black woman, started telling me about this terrible man–the man I had been defending, without knowing the details of the accusation–who was a serial killer who tried to strap her to a hospital bed and kidnap then kill her.  It was quite obviously a true story.

But my friends were still there.  They did not agree with me, but they stayed by me.  They supported me. And I realized that the point of loyalty is to help bring your friends around.  I was in the wrong, but they were willing to patiently explain to me how, without judgement.  Friends allow their friends to be wrong, to support them in being wrong, but to privately TELL them they are wrong.  If you cut people loose the first time they fuck up, you cannot influence them for the better.  You cannot create a safe emotional space for them to experiment, screw up, learn, and then do better.  None of us can.  Loyalty means you creating that for them, and them creating that for you.

Without loyalty, the first mistake means expulsion.  Without loyalty, you have to live in constant fear of exposure, of being cast out, of solitude.  Without loyalty, none of us can really trust one another, because all of us make mistakes.  Without loyal friends–or at least an internal capacity to value our selves, and to forgive ourselves–growth is impossible.

My mistake, there, and it is one I think I make often, is placing principle before people, of placing abstraction higher than concrete fact.  As I have been writing as long as this blog has existed, you have to have regular perceptual movement, which I have called Perceptual Breathing, from the abstract to the concrete, the specific, the small, the infinitely diffuse.

And I will point out again that the reason the Left is so monolithic is that they are without loyalty.  They will cut people loose on the smallest of pretexts.  If you don’t march in lockstep with them, you WILL be cast out.  For people who need people–which is most people (all people, if you believe Bruce Springsteen)–this prospect is terrifying.  This terror, in turn, gets channeled into anger.

I would actually draw a triangle: if you can’t handle your anger, it is introjected as shame.  If you can’t handle your shame it becomes fear/anxiety.  If you can’t handle your fear, it becomes anger.  Trauma survivors go through this loop all their lives, with all three present most of the time, but one nearly always presenting primarily.

In any event, this story felt like progress.  Within my own psyche, I need to be able to make, and forgive, mistakes.

In human life, there is an inherent dance/dichotomy between the need for rules, and the need to ignore the rules.  If you go too far in either direction you become an unhappy society filled with unhappy individuals.

I had a story I was going to tell, but it’s too personal.  Suffice it to say it is possible to be intellectually correct, correct fully and pragmatically within the realm of rules which exist for solid reasons, and still be wrong as far as specific people.

If rules can be broken, they are mutable.  If people can be taught over time to follow them, they too are mutable.  Somewhere in the sky is the meeting place of all good children.  Somewhere in hell is the meeting place of rules that would not bend and children who would not bend.

I don’t know what I’m saying, but I think there is something there somewhere.  When I joke that I agree with 90% of what I say, it is because I don’t always know why I write what I write, and because I literally am not sure I agree with what I find myself typing, although in those cases I try to make that clear.

Do we all want to worship as one people at one altar to one idea–think some ugly edifice along the lines of Nuremburg which is a distillation of everything bad all totalitarians ever have created, with a single or small number of triumphant men and/or women atop it–or do we want to gather at countless fires around the world, to seek shelter from the cold and darkness of life, in small groups where we can see everyone, and they can see us?

I see the altar.  I see the fires.

What I think the “diversity” people don’t GET is that the leaders want to destroy all distinctions, and all barriers between the individual conscience–or lack thereof–and state power.

Right now, destroying the notion of gender differences feels radical.  It feels chic.  It feels transformative, new, rebellious. 

But biologically, I don’t think the human species can be happy, can thrive like that.  These people want to destroy all religions, all tribes, all creeds but their own, all sensitivity to or pride in ethnic or national heritage.  They want to destroy EVERYTHING which anyone can cling to and say “this makes me me”.

They want, in other words, to induce and harness mass psychosis, as they have done on very large scales a number of times now in the past century, but on a global scale.  This is what I see.

I think Burning Man is going on now.  Around now.  I have not been there, and will likely never go there, but I have to think some of the best times are had in small groups around fires (or some functional equivalent) in the dark of the night.

Think of deep conversations you’ve had late at night, perhaps with a few drinks in you, or perhaps some weed.  All of this will vanish, disappear, if certain people who hold places of high power even now get their way.  They won’t SAY that.  They may not even be thinking that, but history is clear that if they don’t get immediate compliance with radical and ludicrous demands, the violence starts nearly immediately.

We live in a nearly perfect surveillance state now.  If they care, the NSA knows if most of us snore.  Imagine if the government pursued the thing to it’s logical end systematically.  Implanted cell phones would most likely do it.  Something you can’t turn off and can’t remove.  That technology is here today.

I continue to wonder at how blindly so many freedom loving people follow the lunatics on the Left.  I don’t think they get that those people may have room for them now, but that won’t last forever.  It never does.  Once in power, privilege is quickly removed from circulation and left for all but the most connected.  In other words, some concoction is brewed which contains the worst elements of theocracy, aristocracy, monarchy, and even abusive capitalism.

What I work for is the fires.  There is a different conversation around every one.  Differing conclusions are reached around every one.  The fires go out in the night at different times, and some burn all night.  This is civilization.  This is the dignity of humankind.

If you think about it, up is really out.  Down is really in.  This would be more obvious if we were not oriented vertically with respect to gravity.

I got to thinking about the qualities of motion in the universe.  We easily enough speak of color and shape and texture, but of things which are not in motion.

As lines, things can move away and toward, or in a circle.  A jagged, curvy line is still away or toward, and if it ultimately makes its way back it is a circle.  A triangular path is still a circle, conceptually.

Three dimensional shapes can expand and contract, or both at the same time, perhaps in some cases in lines.  The Sun sends its light and heat straight out, forever.  But solar flares go up and out, then come back.  Eventually, if memory serves, it is believed it will begin expanding in all directions, after which I assume some sort of contraction.  Perhaps to a very small mass which then again expands in a supernova.

And there is a time aspect.  There is continuous flow, there is intermittent, rhythmic flow, and there is randomly interrupted flow, all three in all directions.

And there is a quantitative aspect: sometimes things flow a LOT, sometimes less.  There can be rhymicity or jaggedness to this quality–quantity becomes a quality–as well.

I have no idea what possible use these musings might be, but pass them along as they came to me.

The longer I live, the more I feel the Tao Te Ching is the most perfect spiritual book ever written.

We only know warmth through cold, he does not say, but well could have, and in the event, did.

The pain of feeling emotional coldness, of feeling unfelt, of feeling radically alone, abandoned, unwanted, is, I feel, the true root of all human evil.

This feeling is sickening. It makes you dizzy, like trying to imagine infinity.  It is something normal people will—and do, every day, in every city and every village and everywhere in between—pay nearly any price to avoid, to keep hidden.

To be sure, in healthy cultures and healthy homes, this feeling is absent. People get, more or less, what they need. They get, to use the au courant phrase, “good enough” mothering.

And it IS mothering. Fathers and grandmothers, and grandfathers, can be “mothers”. But this energy is paradigmatically maternal. There is no humane reason to pretend otherwise.

As I’m sure I’ve shared, one of my daughters—my mini-me as we took to calling her—once told me “you look like my daddy but you are really my mommy”.

I’ve thought about all this, and come to the conclusion that I instinctively gave my children everything I lacked emotionally in my own childhood.

I gave but did not take. This is the firewall.

But it left me feeling cold, alone.  It was a necessary sacrificial process that was e traorinarily difficult.  I only had them on weekends for much of their childhoods, which was best, because it gave me time to recover, and to remain emotionally present most of the time they were with me.

Lao Tzu speaks of “darkness within darkness: the gateway to all mystery.”

I will speak of coldness within coldness: the gateway to love.

Until you can feel where you are, see and feel the water in which you swim and breathe, it will define you, condition you, limit you.

I feel the cold in me, which can only mean I am continuing to thaw.

I do t know where I get my pain tolerance (my “unnatural” pain tolerance as one therapist put it), but it is what allows me to continue my work, and for that I am grateful.

When dealing with narcissists, you have to give up their life, or your own. The only way you can pacify and satisfy them is by offering your own emotional life blood.

And this is hard, for perhaps damaged but mostly psychologically normal people. You can see their pain, feel their loneliness. But they cannot be helped. Not in this life. Not if they cannot feel what they do to others at the level of a deep underground stream.

Unless you pay close attention, the act of stealing can be hidden from your conscious awareness for a long time. But some people will just make you feel tired, will suck the joy out of your life, make you feel weary.  And while all this going on they may feel energized, good, enthusiastic, fun.

Narcissism is more or less equal to psychic vampirism. It is people who did not get enough love when they were tiny helpless little beings, crying for loving and getting none or—perhaps worse—too little.

Those of us who are sensitive can see all this. And there is nothing we can do, but watch, or be dragged down with them.

Cognitively I always try to choose optimism, but logically and experiential I know not everyone can be saved. Not by me, in any event, and not in this life. 

I think many Christians, when they die, find themselves begging for the love and mercy they denied others in this life.

I actually have two specific people in mind.

No Buddha’s can manifest as perfect at this level of reality, because this level of reality is inherently flawed and imperfect.

I would frame this “to attain Buddhahood you must on some level renounce the quest for Buddhahood.

Or, as Lao Tzu put it: renounce sainthood.

Put yet another way, obsession with small imperfections is more likely to lead people away from Spirit and Love than towards them.

I have on my shelf a set of books from Longchenpa, a Buddhist saint, and it is filled with all the reasons people go to hell, and how long, and what their hell is.  From this perspective, I would submit that Lingchrnpas imperfection consisted precisely in his obsession with perfection.

Anyone who is afraid and nervous and chronically angry with themselves reduces their spirit in this way. They become less.

Now, maybe the universe works precisely the way Ali gchenpa said it does, but I don’t think so. In any event, I think I become a lesser human being when obsessed with do’s and donts. Life is less fun. I am less fun.

This is not to say that fun is the purpose of life, but I think all of us feel more, and feel more deeply, when our skin is not crawling with self loathing and self rejection, which must attend the lives even of those who are outwardly blameless but still possessed by “wicked” thoughts.

Let go, and let go of letting go. Let the river flow.

And if you go around mirrors feed the good. Do t worry as much about starving the bad.

I’ve said this before but I don’t remember how, so this may be a slight improvement: humor is a method for defusing and deenergizing latent anger and resentment.

If you think about it, a good laugh is physiologically a full body spasm, a shaking off of tension the way a wet dog shakes off water.

If I mock, for example, someone’s accent, then yes, it is an aggression of sorts, but one which takes energy from a deeper aggression, which actually facilitates peace and connection if the person laughs with me. In effect, I am saying you, Italian/Chinaman/Arab/etc., make me uncomfortable, but if you laugh with me, I will begin to process you unconsciously as safe.

Ethnic or other something-centric “humor” can certainly be a means of channeling hate.  But used with some skill humor is a social necessity. Without it, anger has no outlet BUT violence of some sort, which begins in emotional violence or perhaps, pace Orwell, linguistic violence.

Political Correctness, in other words, as most of us sense intuitively, is an angry, stubborn, inflexible mindset which relies on emotional and social violence and which includes no social mechanism for incorporating spontaneous change, socially deep interconnection, or anything approaching an emotionally intelligent way of dealing with life and people in general.

It consists, I will add, primarily in the demand that we suppress utterly all honest, authentic, spontaneous impulses—impulses which come from our deep, true self—in favor of emotional constipation which cannot but make  people angry and dissatisfied.