Author: White Whale

I told someone today that Communism derives from an atavistic urge for imperialism and monarchy.

Pondering this, I think this is the reality and certainly as a filter in brings out latent patterns I have long described.

We have all experienced the impulse to take things we want. Why work, when you steal? Stealing has been most of history.  If you look at most remaining royal houses and take them back far enough, they stole somebody’s shit and kept it. And then as now since everyone was guilty the thieves looked out for themselves and crafted a narrative within which they were the heros.

To that minute extent, Gramscian critiques are valid. But obviously he took them vastly too far, as angry, weak people often do.

Nothing changed fundamentally with respect to human nature in the Enlightenment. Our IDEAS changed, but human greed, laziness, vanity all remained.

In PRINCIPLE, however, and in our public rhetoric and associated morality, white people changed. The idea of universal human rights emerged, and the rejection of slavery.  Imperialism was conducted not just because it could be, but under the rationalization of “improving” either the natives, or the world by granting superior people rhe stuff that had belonged to “ inferior” people.

All this was bullshit of course, or largely (Western imperialism in many nations did tend to raise at least the physical standard of living).

But Communism is not and never was an OPPOSING narrative. It was a parallel narrative, one origjnating in Europe and serving the same purpose: justifying theft and explotation, classist societies, and inherited prerogatives.

What did they do? Rather than use and abuse the rhetorics of Christianity and “civilization” they used and abused Enlightenment notions of universal rights, equality, and fairness.

Ask yourself, for example, what the USE of “equality” is, if everyone is poor. The use, clearly, is rationalizing an unequal system administered by those whose job it is to “prevent”inequality, even while prscticing and deepening it.  They are the nobility, who wamt to be praised for their generosity and sense of noblesse oblige.

I say again: human nature is what we need to change to build a better world. We need a world filled with empoweted, mature, emotionally intelligent people, building everywhere in creative ways; and the main “building” that interests me is cultural. It makes little difference if we live in grass huts if our emotional and spiritual needs are met; and conversely, OBVIOUSLY, great material wealth does not in itself make anyone happy.

But we need to dispense with the lie that it is “Utopianism” being discussed.  The Christian City on the Hill is mich realizable than an Earthly paradise built on greed, theft, brutality and lies.

This may be my new preferred term for Fascism. It is better in German but in English can be translated perhaps “Artificial Togetherness”, or “Artificial boundness”.

Here is what I want to assert: the urge to Ersatz Verbundenheit increases pari pasu with the decline in a society of a felt sense of place and meaning.  Hitler never intended to return to the old, but to create something new, call it new, wall it in, then herd everyone he could inside and kill or conquer everyone on the outside.

Same with the Communists, who added to this “new normal” the presence of continuous conflict, which created continual fear that one might accidentally be found on the wrong side, which led to people often herding themselves into enclosures with moving walls, but within which they felt relatively safe.

Self evidently there is a sickness at the core of this. It is the feeling of a herd animal left to stray, desperately seeking its pack and the relative safety therein.

Nothing is less natural to human beings than developing and seeking out our own individual moral code. Little is harder than facing, negotiating, and creatively integrating true difference.

Put another way, curiosity and openness are far from easy virtues. Within our own grouping both courage and compassion come relatively easy. They had and have evolutionary benefit, whatever you take that word to mean.  But moving tribe to tribe without feeling lost: this is hard.

Over the past century or two, our tribal affiliations have been hammered continually. We are told and have been shown that many of our most cherished beliefs are arbitrary and “unscientific”.  Efforts have been made to make science a tribe, but it is ill suited to this purpose. Tribalism in science leads to bad science, which itself undermines the core assumption, that we can “all come together” in science. This is bad science relying on worse philosophy.

But we need better answers to why the world is losing its mind. Why are smart, ostensibly “educated” people clinging in mobs to ideas,methods, and emotional gestalts which in history always lead to screams of terror and loss, to lifeless eyes in mass graves, to large masses of joyless, glazed facrs tramping indifferently to work they do only because the alternative is death or prison. Why?

Here is the core idea of Ersatz Verbundenheit: if I feel alone and lost, I will no longer feel alone and lost if I join a mob. And that mob, in turn, should have the power to force EVERYONE to join or die. And when that is done my existential anxiety and aloneness is palliated well enough that with low grade continual violence I can continue to not kill myself.

In Nationalistic Fascism the main vehicle of violence is war and conquest.

In Group based Fascism there is war, but to that is added tribal warfare, which is to say way between the artificially bound and arbitrary groupings which vary by time and place. The “bougeoisie”, certainly—which is thd middle class I will remind you many Leftists still disingenuously claim nowadays to care about—but whatever else may be needed from time to time to keep the water boiling into violence.

Ponder that “transphobe” was not a thing any of us had heard about when Obama was first elected. Government mandates that 14 year olds—or EIGHT YEAR OLDS— be allowed BY LAW to undergo irreversible surgeries more or less on a whim would have seemed preposterous. But here we are.

Creating enemies is the core action of a group which lacks a stable sense of place and purpose. The grouping itself is constituted amd furthered in induced tribal conflict. They can only be them in hating us.

There is no rest there and no peace. It is the “home” only of the manic, suicidal and delusional.

What the world needs is freedom and steadily increasing emotional intelligence, which allows difference to become good and useful and generative. In a perfect world all of us are simultaneously tribes of one and children of both God, humankind, and the Earth.

One last note: both the words Fasism and Religion refer to “binding”. The Latin “religio” literally means to bind together, making another translation of my German “Artificial or manufactured Religion.”

And the Fasces, of course, is a bound bundle of sticks with an axehead attached. The sticks symbolize the power of the mob, as directed by thr Dictator. The axe symbolizes the violence which is the nature of such as unnatural grouping.

I say let the dust fall where it may, and twigs and branches remain ungathered.

Let humankind learn to live in peace. So may we all pray, each in our own way.

Growth only happens in a space of consent.

Our personalities are dust which clouds God’s light. [God’s light=Buddha Nature]

Home is where the calm is.

I have found for some time that in most small towns in my region, nobody cares if you wear a mask.  Some people do, some don’t.  Personal preference, as it should be.

But I found a quantum leap the other day which made me happy, which was a fully stocked Chinese buffet.  They had everything, and all the tables were occupied.  The only concession to COVID they made was they asked you to wear a plastic glove when handling the ladles, which actually does make a bit of sense for ALL diseases (even if I’m not afraid of other diseases either).

Here is what I will say: one of the reasons we have a Columbus Day is not just because he discovered the New (to Europe) World, but because it took BALLS to sail off into the West when everyone was telling him he was doomed to sail off the edge of the world, or get eaten by dragons.

Fear of the unknown is one of the most powerful human emotions.  Not taking chances has a lot of evolutionary value, but in reality, TAKIKNG chances that pay off ALSO has a lot of value, and in point of fact that is how we evolved from cave people to skyscrapers and astronauts, with countless risks in the middle.

With every step forward someone was forecasting doom, and somebody else–almost invariably a man–was saying “fuck it”.

There was a time people thought going 50mph (or something like that) on a train would kill you.  They didn’t know what would happen if you broke the sound barrier.  Etc. Etc.

The thing with COVID is it is invisible.  But it not REALLY fully invisible.  Most of the time if someone is going to spread it, they are sick.  Yes, there is the very, very small group of presymptomatic people, but they are insignificant in my view.  I think it is masked people with mild symptoms doing all the spreading.

But here is my point: until you take the chance of TRYING something new, like Texas did, you never know how large the danger is.  I think it is really, really close to zero for healthy people who take Vitamin D and zinc.

Everyone is saying “you’ll sail off the edge of the Earth if you reopen now.  There are dragons.  It’s doomed, doomed, doomed.”

We need more people saying “fuck it”.  I am very, very sure all will work out fine.

And one last point: we are being told that HCQ is dangerous and the vaccines are safe.  Ponder that.  One drug that has been given to billions of people over the past 55 years, and one that was just invented somewhere around last July or August.

This whole thing is insanity.  I sigh every day seeing how fucking stupid the world is being.

This is the best documentary I can recall on the evidence for the survival of death.  It is reasonable in tone, filled with lots of examples, and does not make any wild swings that made me uncomfortable, as many of these sorts of movies do.  I will love 95%, but hesitate to share because of 5%.  This thing is good start to finish.

https://vimeo.com/101171248.

And I will comment that I literally think wealthy conservatives would do well to fund research into these areas.  Yes, I would love to see leftwing folks donate as well, but most of them seem to be atheists infected with technocratic Scientism.  Drug using atheists, perhaps, but atheists nonetheless.

I think in particular, as I have commented from time to time, that it is LONG past time that some mainstream Biology Department at a major university duplicated Cleve Backster’s experiments.  Yes, in the same way Hydroxychloroquine was made to seem dangerous Backster’s experiments were swept under the rug.  Dishonest people, who just wanted him to shut up, used bad science to create the illusion of good science long enough that the world moved on.  In any event, most of the “educated” world, infused as it is with unexamined biases, WANTED to move on.  They just needed an excuse, and they got it.

He tells the whole story in his book Primary Perception, which I see has gone out of print.  Basically, he told them how to replicate his experiments, and they failed to follow his instructions, seemingly with the express intent of NOT getting his results.  They succeeded in that.  But he showed his results to anyone who would watch for many years.  He would do the experiments in real time, and always get the same results.

His experiments were easy, readily replicable, and not explicable within existing biological paradigms.  That is the EXACT sort of thing which needs to be pursued.

Politically, bringing the spiritual into the mainstream would change everything.  Most people think they have to choose between “science”, religion, and just muddling along without thinking about all this too much.  But we could create a SCIENTIFIC spirituality, upon the basis of which we could build a global society living in peace and with purpose.  We could build a body of knowledge on other dimensions and realms not based on speculation but by the trained observation of skilled and dedicated minds.  Entire universities could be dedicated to this goal.

To my mind, it is a symptom of our stupidity and lack of imagination that this was not done long ago.  No more important question exists than the survival of death.  All life decisions are logically based on how we understand death.  And moralities built on the basis of survival are vastly more robust and reliable than those built on extinction and endless nothingness.

 

As I have said often, I do not believe that this disease is at all dangerous for those who are not Vitamin D and/or zinc deficient (as most elderly are in most countries).  The LOGICAL, obvious, first step was and remains to reduce deficiencies as close to zero as possible.  Finland, as one example, has a 1% D deficiency rate, presumably since as far north as they are D deficiency has long been a problem, and in consequence of which they add D to a lot of their foodstuffs, and educate people about its importance.  Finland also has a COVID death rate about 1/10th of ours, or lower.

Logical second step was prioritized trials of safe medications which were getting results per the reports of doctors in the field.  Obviously, Hydroxychloroquine and later Ivermectin were the obvious candidates.  Trials of the former were derailed in most of the developed world by what amounted to a deception operation, one which was CLEARLY endorsed and approved by the WHO and Anthony Fauci, who are both OBVIOUSLY corrupt.

Here is the thing: we could and should have attained Herd Immunity with no vaccines at all.  None.  Still five years out.  Still not ready for human testing.  Still not something a RESPONSIBLE public official can declare reasonably safe as a result of trials lasting at least two years, and on enough patients that the data could be compiled and analyzed by everyone with an interest.

From what I call, even though the governments of the world PAID for the R&D, some of the Big Pharma companies are basically posting bullshit for their clinical data.

Without exaggeration, as a matter of public policy, many of the governments of the world are demanding that untested, perhaps ineffective, perhaps dangerous experimental vaccines–which have NOT received FDA approval, merely emergency authorization for use–be the main element of  our anti-COVID campaign, without making even a token effort at obvious options 1 and 2.

Does that not stink to high heaven?  Can you not smell it?

There are a cascade of larcenous intentions comingled in all this, but the one I wanted to point to–over and above simple greed by Big Pharma, and the desire for Social Credit Scores and perfect surveillance by Big Abusive Government–is that the Left/Deep State/Foreign Actors/All these and others created a response to a pandemic of a disease which has clearly been getting less deadly, and which arguably never WAS more dangerous than the flu for healthy people.

IF people were to REALIZE that all this bullshit has been for NOTHING–that kids have been slitting their wrists, and elderly dying alone because their families were legally prevented from seeing them, and businesses by the tens of thousands forced out of business, the education of our children damaged horribly, our national and State budgets bleeding red, millions around the world going hungry and actually starving to death etc, etc.–then PEOPLE WOULD BE MAD.  At least, in a sane world, they would be mad.

So how to get us to the other side, with all the perks of suppressive, tyrannical government, without the “populist” (which formally means anti-elitist/anti-entrenched and monied special interests, for those keeping score) outrage?  Vaccinate enough people that they can PRETEND it was the vaccines and not time that did it.

Looked at in this way, mass mandated innoculations make a whole lot more sense.  They can’t have Texas reopening and seeing three weeks of dropping COVID tests with only a fraction of the population is vaccinated.  The optics are terrible.

THAT in my view is what is driving the seeming desperation to get us all poked in the arm by nobody actually knows quite what.  As I keep saying, you CANNOT DO TWO YEARS OF TESTING IN SIX MONTHS.

Anyone, right now, who gets poked is literally participating in a clinical trial.  Normally, this is voluntary.  Big Pharma, rolling out a new vaccine, asks for volunteers, who know perfectly well what they are doing.  They trust that in a Beta test, which is what such a thing is, that most of the major problems are gone, and what is left is minor and correctable.  And most of the time they are right.

But REQUIRING people to participate in biological experiments is contrary to the spirit and explicit wording of the Nuremburg Codes, which were developed after it was found how many experiments had been done by the Nazis on unwilling, captive subjects.

Here are a couple relevant elements (the full list is at the link):

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.

3. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.

Here is the thing: how can ANYONE say that these vaccines trials are necessary when no effort has been made to do honest testing on alternatives, such as the elimination of D and zinc deficiency, and the use of safe and proven drugs like HCQ and Ivermectin?

This whole thing is madness.  It was bad at the start, and seems to spin more out of control daily.  I myself proposed something like the Great Barrington Declaration some time in April or May or June.  Somewhere in there.  It was logically obvious: you look at who is at risk, keep them home, and tell everyone else to go get the illness as soon as possible.  I even proposed injecting the young and healthy WITH the disease to speed up the process and probably make it safer, since the conditions of the infection could be controlled.

And even now, I would MUCH prefer the option of being injected with SARS-CoV-2 than with ANY of these vaccines.  We don’t know what we don’t know.  They may be safe.  They may be fantastic (although I very much doubt, based on what I have seen thus far).  But they are UNNECESSARY for most of us.  And why incur an unnecessary risk?  It is stupid.

And it is criminal of governments to demand it of us.  They need to be sued as individuals and institutions for the PATENT violation of ethical codes passed to prevent Nazi style atrocities from recurring.

Walmart, if it implements a “vaccine passport” should be sued on a class action basis, and if any sanity remains in this nation, they should lose badly.  Among other things, I would argue it constitutes de facto discrimination.  No one has the right to demand we participate in medical trials, and no one has the right to deny us access to the right to shop if we refuse to obey illegal orders.

Same with airlines.  Same with universities.  Same with all corporations.

People’s fear has made them more stupid.  No one thinks better under stress, and our media and the Left in this country have done everything in their power to turn this molehill into a mountain.

Again, it is credible to claim EVEN NOW that this disease is no more dangerous for most people than the flu, and LESS dangerous for those under 35 or so.  This is an empirically defensible claim.

It is horrifying to watch all of this, to watch the world get played like a fiddle, to watch so many of our leaders kowtow to imbeciles and crooks.

And yes, Donald Trump was a big vaccine supporter.  I think he was wrong on this particular score, but he spent his entire four years getting surrounded by people controlling his information, and trying to box him in politically.  He had to drop the HCQ since his endorsement was making things worse; and he is no doctor, and the doctors around him were seemingly feeding him this vaccine story.  I don’t fault him.  But I don’t agree with him.

Until we get serious about eliminating what I have taken to calling Nutritional Immunodeficiency, and studying the patent successes in South Asia, Egypt, Sweden, and elsewhere, no one should be compelled to take one of these fucking jabs, for any reason, in any context, including the military.

Leftism is a psychopathology.  As I have commented, their basic model is to break everything they touch, then lie about it.  The hippies of the 60’s and 70’s, who are the professors now, are still lying about what happened in Vietnam.  They are still ignoring their many decade failure to do anything decent and meaningful for persons of color in this country, and their patent role in actually SUPPRESSING progress, which will continue today in most newspapers and news channels.

You will see it just by turning on your TV today, or looking at the internet.  They will call for one time lottery payments paid out for nothing, for no crime committed or suffered by anyone living, as a bribe for continued loyalty.  They will demand people speak in certain ways, as if speech were magical, and the discourse of wealthy white people put food on the table of hungry kids in the ghettos of this nation, brought their fathers home, calmed their mothers down, improved the quality of their education, or made their streets less violent.

Here is what I propose: the quest for purpose and dignity are inherently difficult for many of us–particularly those who have been humiliated as children, made to feel existential shame, and who have felt genuine, deep terror–but it is the main game of life, and must be pursued by each of us in our own individual way, albeit ideally with social support.

In psychology, long term pathologies are often assumed to continue their existence due to some hidden benefit they bring.  Yes, you are sick.  Yes, you are miserable.  But is there not something you LIKE, that is perhaps familiar?  Do your symptoms bring you some secret sense of power?  Often: yes.  This is called a Secondary Gain.

What I would suggest is that the Secondary Gain white people get from preventing black folks from advancing, by what amounts to over-mothering, is cheap morality.  And as with many moral crusaders, their work on the outside delays their work on the inside.  They get to justify avoiding doing their own inner work, finding their own inner dignity, articulating an honest and sincere morality.

And black folks, of course, likewise get an excuse to avoid doing THEIR inner work.  They are “oppressed”, even though most of Africa would give a finger from each hand to come here and be allowed access just to the opportunities black folks have in this country, to free education, to capital, to political freedom, to BOOKS (read this,) and perhaps weep a bit: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/dec/08/nobelprize.classics 

I myself am not innocent in all this.  I get secondary gains from blogging, from thinking, from abstracting.  I flatter myself that some of what I write (certainly not all of it) is intelligent, but it perhaps does not matter.

I can say I continue to try and do may work every day.  It hurts.  It hurts a lot.  But I continue.  That is what I do, and who I am: I go on.

Please read and share:  https://www.city-journal.org/death-and-lockdowns

Short summary: “Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School, summarized the impact: “Lockdowns have protected the laptop class of young low-risk journalists, scientists, teachers, politicians and lawyers, while throwing children, the working class and high-risk older people under the bus.”

I’m not blogging much because I am working a lot.  I have a long list of ideas noted down–I am, perhaps, afraid to stop–but it may be a while before I post them.

One positive to this new website is that it is not, yet, on the Google Shit List.  I had been unaware of this, but they have a Shit List and if you get on it, your website will not show in searches, and I think most social media incorporates it, so I have not been able to link to my blog on my Facebook profile for at least a couple of years.  For now, it is working.  It won’t break my heart if it stops, but if I understood the claims of the new host they work to keep you off the shit list.  That’s good.

The point I logged on to make today is that I think, I really think, that the essence of the Buddhist Shunyata is the sense of living in an ocean.

I was driving by some old high school today, and looking at the windows, and wondering what it was like for the students to look out those windows.  Then I was recollecting my many bored days in school, where I would struggle to stay awake, because I just needed a five minute lecture and I usually had whatever it was.  I went to an OK school, but it was not filled with bright students.

Then I had this strong sense of nostalgia, and sense of loss, and longing.  I am far, far from that place, and I have moved around so much I have no real home, no place.  And the way I have lived my life, I really have no major professional accomplishments.  I am a bright fellow.  I could have been a doctor or lawyer or academic or anything else.

But, it seems to me, I have tried to stay on the track of life, to pursue doggedly the nature and purpose of life, the nature of emotional health and well being, and have tried over and over and over to confront my pain and heal it, which has been difficult and slow.

Then it hit me: There IS no place.  If I were a successful, egotistical doctor or lawyer (trust me: my ego would be huge, uh, -er) all that could be stripped from me in an instant.  It has no permanance or reality.  No physical dwelling place, no city, no home: all are gone in an instant, cosmically speaking.

And I felt like the universe and me living in it is a huge ocean.  There is an up and a down, but there is nothing stable.  There is nothing to hang onto, nothing that you can grab for dear life and which will not dissolve in the holding.

We live in an infinite ocean.  But that doesn’t matter.  What matters is where you are relative to everything and everyone else.  You are a part of a dance which renews every moment.

This is the Buddhist ideal: to use change as an advisor.  To learn to live and laugh with the continual ups and downs of life.  What was is gone, and what is to be is not yet.  There is however a deep rhythm, or rhythms, which set a variety of times, which we can interact with and riff on.

To some great extent, no true spiritual progress is possible without becoming lost, after leaving the shore far behind.

Those, in any event, are my thoughts today.  I like to think of myself as creative, and what creativity I possess comes from being open, to never knowing what is next, and never forcing anything.  I never try to think thoughts: they just flood me when I am doing anything else.

But think of Shunyata not as an emptiness, but as a mass of motion and currents and events without any fixity, without dry land, with nothing to hold on to, where you can never return to the exact place you were before, or the person you were just a moment ago.

It’s tricky.  And with the terror comes also freedom.  Do you think any sea lion would ever consider living its whole life on dry land?  Not a chance.

So I finally watched this movie, which is on many critics top ten lists, and for many at number 1.  I read a few years ago it knocked off Citizen Kane in some poll or other.

After reading how confusing it was, I really don’t see it as that confusing at all.  It is an attempt to map out and paint the contours of madness, how it feels, what it is like to lose connection with reality.

It is a map of pain, of existential pain so deep it leads to suicide, to the “quietus of a bare bodkin”, and an empty stage–where nothing was real anyway–and to silence.

I feel this.  And you know, this story, in all its permutations, is being acted out in many places and many hearts the world over AT THIS MOMENT.  A moment ago someone ended their life.  I read that, on average, someone ends their live every 40 seconds somewhere on Earth.

You don’t think about this much, but this is an extraordinarily confusing planet.  We are born, often born to parents who love us incompletely, confusingly, and sometimes hurtfully because they don’t know any better, or don’t have the will or ability to do better.

Far too many of us are born to dismally poor, filthy places which cannot be escaped.  Sex is one of the only comforts which is free, and that leads to children, who repeat the process.

We breathe in our culture, whatever it is.  If it is one heavily influenced by modern American triviality, continual rush, mindless banter, and greed, you may find yourself on a conveyor belt to a life which will never nourish anything truly good in you.  You will find yourself lonely, surrounded by people, who also feel alone.

What a sight this is!!!  I am less alone by myself than I am with most people.  But it is because I am not afraid to hear stories of hell that over and over people tell their life stories to me, things they tell they have never told anyone else.  I don’t look away.

And to be clear, pain and suffering frighten me as much as anyone else.  I feel it more keenly, I think–both my own and particularly that of the world–than most, so if anything I simply have more familiarity with it, more time spent learning to live with it, and perhaps less fear of it than people who have suppressing it and lying about it.

Here is what I want to propose: the hero’s life consists in seeing the evil of the world–the pain, the cruelty, the confusion, the nausea, the self loathing, the unfairness–and learning to live with it, in the present.  To reject nothing.  To see everything.  To KNOW that you can’t fix most of it, or add anything lasting or meaningful.  To KNOW this world is broken.  But to remain present anyway, and still seek out light in all this, and try to bring it into this darkness.

This is heart wrenching, horrific, terrible, terrifying task.

I will often find myself watching movies and having to pause in some particularly painful or awkward scene.  I say to myself “I can’t take it”.  But of course I always do.  But I am keenly sensitive, to a fault.

How can you feel compassion and not be swept away?  This is the key question.  I think a lot of people who use this word don’t really understand it.  They use it, in my estimation, most of the time as a way of separating the world into the compassionate and those lacking compassion.  It is a tool of judgement and one of self importance.  And it is nearly always a lie.

Compassion for all is compassion for all, even the deluded and confused.  This is an awful thing to attempt to practice in reality.  If you do not feel the difficulty in this, then you are a better person than me, or you have not understood this at all.

Ponder the holocaust of the animals, which is the barbeque and cooking of the animals.  The countless pigs and chickens and goats and cows herded up, slaughtered, butchered, then cooked and eaten.

But is the ocean not full of the eating of fish by other fish?  Is the world outside your door not filled with birds eating insects, and larger birds eating smaller birds and their eggs?  If you look, you will often see hawks being attacked by smaller birds protecting their eggs or perhaps themselves.

We did not invent this world.  Its rules are not our rules, as far as I know, or as far as anyone, I think, knows.

One cannot live purely in this world.  One must compromise.  And I think trying too hard to be a saint actually lowers your spiritual level.  Saintliness is, if I may coin a word, RULE-liness.  It is calcifying your perception and behavior to create ruts within which you live your life.  If enough people live in these ruts, peace and harmony result, but this is not, in my view, the best result possible.

I will often lay in my bed after I awake and just feel my body, which is a sort of Kum Nye practice.  And I allow what thoughts will come to come, patiently, and without effort.

I read the other day that famous passage from Marcus Aurelius where he talks about how the birds and the bees are up early and about their work, so why shouldn’t he be?  The world has an order, and he too has his part to play, so why not up and at it every morning?

Perhaps ironically, perhaps even comically, I was laying in my bed pondering this this morning.  Should I be up and at ’em?  I feel most days I paint half of a beautiful canvas then give up.  I don’t really know why, but I think a big part of it is getting through this digestive hurdle, of accepting the world fully without any avoidable blindness.

And it hit me that people are not animals.  We have some unknown and unknowable degree of freedom, what I have for some time called “non-statistical coherence”.  We can go sideways.  We can cross all the ruts.  This is not forward movement, but it broadens the path of our possible progress.

I think our version of the bees and the birds is doing natural good, obvious good, doing the right thing by those immediately around you.  Enough good, but not too much.  Simple gestures, but not elaborate flourishes.  Private giving, without counting, because it is needed.

I think most deep evil can be traced ultimately back, somewhere along the line, to compulsive goodness, or rather, to compulsivity in the name of some principle whose life has been extinguished and stuffed into an outer form filled with sawdust and petty cruelty and ignorance.

A deep rut enables long movement, but only in one direction, and you are closed off from all around you.  Going sideways, and perhaps even in circles opens up perceptual pathways which would otherwise remain closed.

And these are ultimately energetic pathways.  It is a principle of Kum Nye that energy, when flowing properly, takes care of itself.  Your will has nothing to do with it, and after some while not even your conscious attention.

So right now I am looking at this pit of ghastliness, at the man behind the dumpster in Lynch’s vision, and trying to calm all fear, and all aversion, as well as all attachment.  It is not hard, you know, to become attached to pain and misery.  I see it every day, not least in myself.

To live safely is to live in peace with the knowledge that pain, loss and death are the lots of all of us; it is to look into hell without terror or greed.

Now, logically, there is a light, a Buddha-nature, which helps with all this.  When I find it, I will most likely record it here.  Perhaps that should not be true, but it most likely is true.  I have long found it hard to predict my own future behavior, not least because it is in an interactive loop with both my inner and outer environments.