Author: White Whale

Masks are a disease vector for panic and probably depressive disorders.

Sometimes you are doing people a favor when you let them do a favor for you.  Sometimes allowing others to fuss over you is ingratiating to them, and a source of pleasure, and this extends far beyond mothers mothering.

This can be healthy, if the process is clear and boundaries drawn.  The unhealthy variant, of course, is codependence, which is the need to be needed to the point that you will hurt people to then help them “heal”.

As I say often, but will repeat slightly differently here, the Left is really characterized by three separate Personality Disorders: Sociopathy, Narcissism, and Borderline Personality Disorder.  For the first–of which both Hillary and Joe Biden are good examples–the methods of the Left allow them to gather to themselves power, money, and attention.

For the BPD folks, the Left serves as a tribal cult which provides them with a stable-ish identity.

And what the Left provides Narcissists is the self gratification of feeling important, immortal, and morally virtuous.  This is the essence of the codependent “ethos”.  They will burn a city down, in order to be seen to demand its rebuilding.  Not to actually HELP, of course: that is plebian work, which is much less important than striking a pose and saying virtuous words expressing noble sentiments.

I continue to hope that the water is flowing out on all these creeps, imbeciles, villains, and sadists.  It is a profoundly ugly scene, when viewed without the rose colored glasses of stupidity, ignorance, and naivete.

Doing something silently and doing it without stress, pain and confusion, are two different thing.

I think sometimes the key to being perceived as a master of life is simply keeping your mouth shut.

#beingthere

That is my first hashtag, btw.

Fear is always a gift to the darkness.

Back story: I continue to be attacked by demons in my sleep from time to time. Its not uncommon.

A couple nights ago it was a giant floating snake that came slithering into my room. And it hit me: the whole goal of this exercise is to create fear then feed on it, and instantly I felt no fear. I projected light from my forehead and then heart and at peace.

In the end faith and relaxation are the antidotes. These are learned and learnable skills, which more or less comprise the spiritual path, at least at some stage in it. I don’t know where I am between A and B. I don’t know what or where A is or B. But that is the part I am traversing now, as well as I can.

There is a secondary context I will share later.

Nuff’ said.  I didn’t come up with it, just sharing.

https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/the-wars-of-wars-part-i

He is a clever fellow, and although I have only been reading his highly informed and highly critical commentary on the abuse of the scientific method in the United States (and elsewhere) to marginalize Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, I think it highly likely his commentary on other topics equally worth your (and my) time.

I have had several dreams in recent days of dancing in the dark, once in the remote halls of a large corporation I have often worked for, and last night in a swirl of flowers, floating above the graves of the esteemed elders of a great university, in swirl of flowers.

It was not disrespect: it is life in the face of death.  Dancing is coherence out of chaos, is it not?  Rhythm from the possibility of randomness?  Dancing is, perhaps, to emotions, what logic is to thinking.

I was once told by a Brazilian friend that I am a good dancer.  He asked his housemate what she thought.  She scowled a bit–she did not like me much for some reason–and said, “well, he has good RHYTHM”.

That’s enough I suppose. I continue to try and loosen the chains–much tighter them–which detract from my freedom.

I can’t justify it rationally, but I feel good things in the air.  Our politics and culture is a shit show, and there is little cause for optimism.  But even in the darkness, sometimes there is a way, and one’s feet find it.

We very much live in a 25 brands of Ketchup world, even if that particular decision is easy enough for most.

I sometimes feel like getting rid of 95% of the stuff I own and living “lighter”.  But my mind would not really change, and I would soon enough start accumulating stuff, which in my case is mostly books and cooking tools of various sorts.  I can feel that.  I am an American, and we buy things.  That’s what we do.  That’s who we are.  We are all a bit absurd, but not really different from any wealthy elite in any bygone era.  Columbus sailed West to find a better route for the stuff the rich of his day wanted.

It seems to me that the smartest route to simplicity is to treat every decision you make as standing in for ALL OTHER POSSIBLE DECISIONS.  If you go on vacation to X, it stands in for every other option you considered.  Every emotion is possible.  All the pleasure is already there, if you can just seek it out by going through the feelings.

If you have ten things to do, you do EACH ONE OF THEM every time you do one of them.  If you can’t focus on the first, logically, then you can’t focus on the second.  This means they all get short changed.

But if your whole world is the first, then your whole world will also be the second, and some part of you in the back of your brain will record and notice this.

It is in some respects rational to feel anxiety.  Most of us are forgetting something most of the time, and complex problems often benefit from rumination. I am not saying to forego all that.  It has value.  Within the OODA loop, that would still be orienting.

But I think all people capable of achieving tranquility let all that go when they make their decision.  Yes, by all means assess the outcomes, but in the meantime let that decision stand in for the other possible decision.  It is everything.  There is nothing else.  Do one thing, then the next thing.

This is common sense, in some respects, of course.  I am, to use a now dated term, a bit neurotic, for reasons I have overshared often, so this is good information for me too.

It’s so easy to get distracted by trivialities.  I do it daily, and so most likely do you.

You know, most of human history is littered with cruelty, both truly vile and much more commonly petty.  In 1950 blacks were still banned from many places even in the North, and gays risked being beaten to death, and the certainty of social exclusion if discovered.  Sexual harassment and child abuse in many forms were more or less tolerated.

Life was harder back then, objectively.  Hunger–real hunger–was vastly more common.  And even guys with good Union jobs in big cities scarcely lived better than our present urban poor, seen objectively.  It was a big deal to have a car and TV.

But what they did have is a much more social nature, music intended to lift them up, and habituation from childhood on that life WAS hard, and that there is no use complaining about it.  Resentment and the sense of innate privilege was not bred into them from earliest childhood, as it is now.

I find for myself most of my “difficulties” really amount to self pity.  Yes, my first rule is the rejection of self pity, but I created the rule because I tend to wallow in it, sometimes with some justification–I do have some epically awful weeks sometimes, as I think most people in our soft America would see it–but most of the time, objectively, I’m fine.

And there is a dialectic here.  People who just accept injustice as part of life are never going to change it.  But people who find themselves CREATING “injustices” to justify a resentment which preceded the searching expedition WILL NEVER BE HAPPY.  Not going to happen.  Ever.

It is a flaw of our time that as we have become more and more prosperous our greed and resentment have pulled ahead, so that no matter how much people have, it is still not enough.

And no matter how objectively easy people’s lives are–it was not possible to be as fat as many of our poor are now in recent history and survive–they still complain.

I’m rambling a bit.  What sparked this was listening to this wonderful music, and contemplating that this music gives energy to the tired, and hope to those suffering.  It helps me, in any event.

Sidney Bechet, 1952: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REYLNs0rh-g

No doubt when he visited Memphis he had to stay in the Lorraine Hotel, as did all the other black folks visiting.

Did that hurt him emotionally?  No doubt.  This music, though–his music–is a rebellion against injustice, and a celebration of life.

I complain a lot.  Complaining has some value.  The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the person unwilling to be rolled over rarely is.

But it unquestionably also true that sometimes you have to just look at the world as it is, and see what is good and needs no fixing, no attention.

It is the same with personal growth.  Self acceptance cannot be predicated on perfection, or no person will ever even set foot on the path.

I have recently been thinking of it as climbing a mountain.  When you look up, you see the whole mountain, but the beginning is a trail or path, and in climbing you have to focus on each step.  Often, in switchbacks, you can’t see much.  But periodically you will emerge on a new vista, and better view.

This is the RECOGNITION of a quantum shift which has been happening silently, and which is the result of patient daily effort over a period of time.  Often we cannot see how we have changed until some familiar situation occurs, and we realize that we are responding in new and better ways.

Anyway, my two cents for today.

is an amplifier. The intentions you put into it become larger. It will help save massive numbers of lives and to destroy them. It frees people from drudgery and condemns them to it.

To my mind the most pressing human task is cultivating the maturity and wisdom to use all these amplifiers, but most of humanity seems blind and lost to the most basic moral insights.

With respect to Silicon Valley specifically, it is literally like adding leftwing politics to their to-do allows them to check as done the life task of “Develop moral coherence”.

Introspection and honest sustained silence are foreign to them. No doubt they go on retreats and listen to the usual suspects saying the usual things, but these are more or less ideational objevts they add to their collection.

Two Marvel moments that come to mind: in Ant Man the bad guy meditated. Why not? It might give him an idea that made him money and/or got him more power. As I have noted greed and competitiveness seem to be the main reasons so many Tech executives are microdosing acid.

And Robert Redford, in The Winter Soldier, had a Buddha statue, one we saw shortly before he killed his maid.

As I have said before, most gold does not glitter. Not at least until it is found and purified and polished.