Author: White Whale

I am listening to Tom Jones on Audible.  I was very pleasantly surprised how FUNNY it is.

When I think of the English I think of tea, a nation of shop keepers, and a nation which engaged in global imperialism with more success than any nation in history.

And I think of wit.  It is their conspicuous grace, in my personal opinion, and I lived there 6 months (3 in Oxford, which is a story I won’t tell; interestingly, since I was there more than three months in the Mad Cow period I am prohibited from donating blood by the Red Cross).

Here is a definition of wit: the dexterous use of words to build space within a confined social prison.  Prison may be too strong, but wit makes the room lighter, larger, and everyone in it more beautiful and charming, simply because you are laughing.

Humor, as I have said before, roughly equals it.  It creates a middle area in which contentious issues–things that make us mad and uncomfortable–can be discussed in new ways.  This is why Cancel Culture, on balance, makes people emotionally imbecilic.  Chronic anger is infantile monosyllabism.  It is a one note tune, devoid of charm, grace, and SPACE.  It is a tight cage.

And I will comment, as I have somewhere before, that LISTENING to, particularly, British fiction is a fundamentally different experience that reading it.  The readers appropriate the accents, and are skilled actors in their own rights, and their performances very much become a part of the overall experience.

I noticed this with Shakespeare a long time ago.  By all means READ him, but listen to him at the same time.  I promise you that you will get more out of it, even if you have to often pause and reread certain passages.  That time is well spent, the effort eminently pleasurable.

This applied, for me, even to listening to the 127 hour Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  That took me six months.

But don’t just think of “books on tape” as an efficient use of time.  It is worth pouring a glass of wine, lighting a cigar, and listening at home.

Terror does not make you safer.

I have been having some strong experiences lately.  I got here, wanting to make a bunch of posts, then I was hit by an overwhelming fatigue, like all my systems were shutting down.  I took a nap, had a couple cups of coffee and lit a cigar, and I feel better.  But I can’t do those posts today.

I am not on entirely fictitious or unstable ground in feeling that I have some interesting contributions to make.  Everything that has ever needed saying has been said.  Nothing I will or could say is lacking in the human written record.

But truth, and truths, cycle.  They are known, and then forgotten.  And then remembered.  And every recollection, in every time, is unique in its own way.  Perhaps it needs saying in a slightly new way.  It is never a truly new message, but it is new TO US.  And we need our own language to internalize and learn them.  Adding that language is what I try to do.  In my own way, I like to think of myself as a sort of ideational artist.  My goal is to paint pictures with words, but not pictures which consist in perfect renderings of reality.  That is the job of science.  My aim is rendering them subjectively, in offering reality as transmuted within my own consciousness, in the hope that they spark something within the reader.

I feel strong flows within myself often.  My habit of Kum Nye has taught me to allow these flows.  I don’t know where they come from, or where they are going.  And it is hard living in them.  It is light and color and darkness and disease.  Everything.

Most of the time they feel like pressure on me.  They push on me, no doubt because I have not yet learned how to allow them fully, by tempering my fear, and embracing them.

But I am going to say this, today: within them are small sparks that are beautiful.  And it seems obvious to me that my job is to see them, feel them as long as I can, and to slowly fan them into something larger.

That’s all I can say today.  I may do politics later, but nothing more.

Tucker has been doing a lot of great work lately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32V-e7saq60

Rebellion is an emotionally healthy response to irrational authority, wherever it occurs.  It is healthy for the individual, and at least potentially healthy for the order which, unquestioned, could be sustained in many cases indefinitely.

People who have to learn to say no, No, NO, though, often develop the HABIT of rebellion.

Here is what I will suggest: not infrequently, self defeating behavior amounts to one part of the psyche rebelling against another.  One part–let us call it the Superego, even though I am no Freudian–says “You have to do this because x, y, and z.”  And it makes sense.  The voice is speaking reason.

But with respect to internal emotions, it SOUNDS like the voice of a hated adult voice, and some part of the wounded child rebels by rejecting it, by saying no, by trying to build space in a very foolish way, but only way it knows.

I think this is true, for some people, at some times.

These are large ideas and long posts, but I am going to shorten them.

One: For many of us–certainly for me–there is a voice saying continually, you are a a failure, you are nobody, no one loves you.

Yesterday, I decided to say “you know what?  You’re right.  No one does love me, not the way I need, and they never have.  And if I am a nobody, that means my time and life are free.  I don’t owe anyone anything.  And as far as failure, this IS the way forward, is it not?”

And it hit me that the path back into Eden goes through the cherubim with the flaming sword.

You have to live emotionally with those voices.  Why?  Because they are YOU, in important respects.  Rather, they are the way back to you.  That is the last place you would ever look.

But if “going home” means returning to, or feeling for the first time, a vivid sense of the Self, then does it not make sense that we feel exiled until we learn to look beyond what those voices represent, and cease to fear them?

I think this is true.

And I think the cherubim is on our side, but secretly, silently.

Oh, I could say more but I won’t.

My work continues.  I meditate most mornings (Kum Nye), and every other day I do what I have taken to calling Kum Nye 1, since I do it before Kum Nye 2.  It is really a bunch of static poses.  I have worked up to, today, 1 minute 7 second in each of them.  I do each three times a week, and add 2 seconds each time.  One amounts to a close grip push up position plank, another the Bear position, another an ass down squat.  All together, virtually every muscle in your body will be under tension at some point. I can only assume that, among other uses, this series–if it is actually historical, which is not entirely clear–would have helped full time meditators keep at least some physical strength.

But it is also a marvelous thing to lead into Shavasana and Autogenic relaxation.  I do that, too, most mornings.   Go through your body and feel everything, starting with your fingertips, then do an Autogenic progression (my arms are getting heavy, etc.)

What I noticed today is that in the longer, harder holds there is this panic that starts up.  I hear a voice say “you can’t do this.  This is too much.  It will last forever.  You will never make two minutes (the goal).”

This voice has a feeling tone.  Here is the first point I want to make: positive THINKING, if it is to be of any use, has to come with positive FEELING.  I read people talk about Positive Thinking.  Well, most people like me have tried it.  And people like Al Franken (the then Al Franken–I wonder what he is up to now?) of course mock this, with some justification.

But if you take a Michael Jordan, he has a large reservoir of successes.  When a negative thought occurs, he can use a positive thought to lead to a positive emotion. And we call this “positive thinking”.  But it really only works for people who have access to a reservoir of positive feelings.

For me, reframing helps a bit, but positive thinking is completely useless for me.  Just putting one foot in front of the other, thinking as little as possible–good or bad–is the only thing that reliably works for me.

But I think PRACTICING panicking within a controlled situation, letting that roll over me, and carrying on, is one of the ways you build reservoirs like that.  You learn to calm within the tension.  And you learn to take each moment as it comes without allowing yourself to become aware anything else exists.  This is a learned and learnable skill.

And what I am calling Kum Nye 2 of course comes out of what Tarthang Tulku (the Tulku of Tarthang Monastery) was taught in Tibet back in the 40’s and 50’s.  Apparently in the early days he would have his students hold their arms up for very long periods of time.  Two of the holds in Kum Nye 1 involve that too.

And in the second book one of the exercises is called Golden Heart Thread, where you hold your arms out at shoulder height for up to 25 minutes.  10 is what is suggested to start, and even that is a lot.  Try it: feet about shoulder width, arms extended, hands cupped down.  Maybe look up just a tiny bit.  See how long you last.

As you hold, tightly held patterns soften and release, and you get large splashes of primitive emotions.  That is the goal.

Curiosity, as any long term readers I may have (if any: it’s OK if you are not reading this) will know is one of my core values, along with persistence and the rejection of self pity.

As I think about it, the habit of curiosity really amounts to reframing virtually all experience away from “good” and “bad” and into “interesting”.

My own work at the moment consists in learning to surf experience openly, without trying to dictate the contents of my perception.  I often don’t know what I’m going to say or do until I do it.  I’m trying to deepen my perceptual field, and that involves touching recesses I don’t know much about.

All of us, we float up and down.  The ten thousand things and the ten thousand people rise and fall without ceasing.  We just lie about it.  We don’t FEEL the up and the down.  You can do this if you live in your head.  It’s not hard.

But some part of is feeling abandoned when you do that.  You are losing life.

Life is scary.  It really is.  Especially if you got the shit knocked out of you emotionally or physically or both when you were little, which a lot of us did.

But openness is the game.  More life is the prize.

All cinema and theater is latently voyeuristic.

True, not true?  Somewhat true?

And particularly if true, what further social consequences can we infer from this?

I will add, that I keep thinking about Blue Velvet.  Whenever I see a movie, my brain keeps processing it until I see the next movie.  But even then things keep popping in.

Here, I was thinking about Kyle MacLachlan in the closet.  That was voyeurism within voyeurism.  We watched him watching her.  What are the subtle effects of this sort of thing?

Hell.  Further thoughts.  MacLachlan finds the ear in an in-between zone. That is where his adventure begins.  A liminal zone, as I would say in an academic paper.  And he is throwing stones.   This is an Islamic practice, essential to the Hajj, where they reject evil.

And the evil he finds meets the innocence from where he came when the evil–the victim of evil, but still tainted–shows up naked.  And she says that he put his poison in her.

Life itself is a poison, too, isn’t it, in some ways?  Granting life is cursing a soul, from a certain perspective.

And even though she has been repeatedly abused–raped is probably the best word–she says it flowed from him.  One can say this is because he is a man.  And obviously something physical is meant.  But he hit her too, didn’t he?

And it occurred to me to wonder if those flowers at the beginning and end were roses, and if they had thorns.  It would a nice touch to leave them thornless in the beginning, and thorned at the end.  Or even vice versa, depending on the exact statement he wanted to make.

OK, that may do it.

As I think about it, perhaps I am underestimating the importance of comparing Trump to mass murderers in that Wisdom of Trauma movie.  The way it was done, it amounted to anchoring in feelings of revulsion, in some respects.  George Soros would have found his money well spent supporting that movie.  Sometimes the most lasting images are the most fleeting, and seemingly the most trivial.

Still, I think that movie is worth watching, but it amounts, for me, to one more betrayal by people who could and should know better.

I think the core problem with what I have termed the Sybaritic Left is that they lack the hardness to see the nastiness of the people in their midst.  In a confusing world, one filled with pain and suffering, they psychologically feel compelled to assume that SOMEONE means what they say, that their side, in using the rhetoric of compassion and caring, means at least SOME of it.  But at the top, the very top, they don’t.  They never have.  They are hard hearted bitches and bastards.  That in my view is the truth.

This is where I think my emotional pain tolerance comes in.  I certainly WANT to see positive things, but I am capable of foregoing false hopes.  I am capable of telling even truths I myself find horrific.  There is never any use in lying.

And to be honest I have NEVER really seen the Trump most people seem to see.  I don’t see the fake tan or tanning bed tan, or the hair, or the seeming arrogance and narcissism.  I don’t see any of that.  I see what I would argue is the reality, which is the ONE GUY in the whole fucking country who was willing to point out that Obama could not have gotten hired to work at Burger King with the birth certificate he provided.  This was obvious, indisputable.  But nobody had the balls to say it, other than Trump.

And I didn’t look at his speeches, or how he waved his hands, when he was in office.  I looked at what he DID, at the policies he enacted.  His record was not perfect, but he was also fighting corrupt RINO’s in Congress.  And his record was very good.

I look at Joe Biden, and in his case I can’t help but notice his mind is teetering on the brink of complete dissolution.  I notice he is actively importing people he does not know a fucking thing about and distributing them around the country.  He is not just tolerating people breaking into our country illegally, but more or less giving them chauffeured rides to States which don’t want them, to places where they are more likely to be a burden than a blessing.

And the Chinese bought him, obviously.  I think he is one of those rare creatures who owes damn near everybody something, but he owes them the most.  And why would he not be making provisions to share all of our best military technology with them?  Why could he not issues orders that military officers have to follow, in which Chinese agents are easily able to lay their hands on blueprints and computer models and even actual weapons?  Why not?  Ethically nothing would stop him, and he is the Commander in Chief.  If he is issuing orders to people like the Army Colonel I described in a previous post, they will RATIONALIZE it.  They will figure out how to make the unacceptable acceptable.  Because they themselves operate out of diligent and disciplined codes of ethics, it is easier for them to assume other people do as well, even though no one who dealt with the budding sociopath in kindergarten–and most of them have one–should be that naive.  Certainly not people entrusted with the safety of the United States.

So yes that hurt a bit seeing that in the midst of all that beautiful and healthy emotion they anchored an image of Trump as a dictator.

The truth is a jagged edge.  You have to be prepared to make rapid turns, and to be cut at any turn.

I still think that movie is worth watching, but my enthusiasm is a bit deflated.

I have, by the way, determined that I can’t go back to at least Holotropic Breathwork.  They went full in on Trump hatred, and I will never feel emotionally safe there again.  As I say, I have to ask myself what that dynamic is, and how real any of that ever was, if they are that emotionally blind.  Honest, open people, remain honest and open in all circumstances.

Here is the thing: if you look deeply, most would-be healers never REALLY complete their healing.  They just get a couple chapters ahead of the rest of us.  That’s all.

I have been, in my view, emotionally more intelligent than most of the therapists I’ve been to.  But I still carry that dull pain.  That pain is not one of unawareness, but it’s also not something I have been able to make go away.

But I am not going to position myself as an authority on anything until I do.  I will not sell anything, or offer anything in person, until I do.