Category: Uncategorized

OK.  My alcohol tolerance is stupid.  Truly stupid.  Thus, I can achieve some distance on what I wrote here, and keep my spelling up to my normal standards.

But I share this as something spontaneous, likely useless, utterly illogical, and most likely more than a little self indulgent.

Are you really so different?  If so, I want to know you.  I have questions.

For better or worse, this “literary output” made me laugh.  Laughing is a concrete and positive outcome most of the time, isn’t it?

 

I’M NOT LOVEABLE.

Of course you are.  Adolph Hitler is loveable.

Wolf spiders are loveable, and so are tarantulas.

Paper cuts are loveable and so is the dark of December.

I’M NOT LOVEABLE.

Of course you are.  Broken promises are loveable, and betrayed dreams.   Squirrels without tails are loveable, and so are small dogs that bark much too much.

Diarrhea is loveable, particularly when it was hot peppers that did it, and so too are sequels that are terrible.

I’m not loveable.

Love?  Do you think I felt love?  No, I like to wear a fancy fur coat that says I AM LOVEABLE, and I would like you to try it on.  No really.  It fits us both, doesn’t it?

Hangovers are not really loveable, are they?  Puking, wheezing, dizzying, getting to the thing, not feeling good.

But hangovers are loveable.  That is my position.

People who lie are lovable, and people who ask too much, and people who ask too little.

Yes, if the world is not quite loveable, I still have a choice, don’t I?

And if I am not quite loveable–mutatis mutandi and all that–then my doppelganger is.  Le Moi est mort.  Vive le MOI!!!

Oh, if my drunken laughter is not loveable, then my drunken typing must be.

QED.  I rest.

I was reading about Mandaeanism last night, after watching a Freddie Silva presentation on the Knights Templar.  He claimed they practiced a ritual like that described by Joan Grant in “The Winged Pharaoh”, as a sort of 3 day induced out of body experience, or NDE.  Could be.  Spiritually, that sort of thing, if any sort of control could be brought over it, would be extraordinarily useful.  It would be like a psychedelic drug experience, but better.  Much better.

Mandaeans believe in a dichotomy of light and darkness.  They believe that they predate Manicheanism, and perhaps strongly influenced it.  That is my recollection from some superficial reading last night.

Today, I would like to propose that that particular opposition might, perhaps, be better described as the force of expansion–light–being opposed to the force of contraction–which manifests to us as darkness, as lost potential.

In terms of what we think we understand about the universe, though, there is no darkness anywhere.  The universe is filled with latent energy, absolutely thick in all places.  As I have mentioned often, Richard Feynman, in the explanatory style for which he was justly famous, once said that one empty square meter of space–one chosen, say, about a light month outside our own solar system–contains enough energy to boil every ocean on Earth.  No  mind can possibly begin to imagine that, and that is mainstream physics.  That is the math for the Quantum Vacuum/Zero Point Field.

Could absolute darkness exist in such a universe?  I don’t think so.  Perhaps in a black hole?  I won’t speculate further.

But the Knights Templar seem to have embodied in their symbol of two knights on one horse the balancing of light and dark, of good and evil, of expansion and contraction.

And as the Tao Te Ching wrote long ago, there is a balance between masculine and feminine.  This difference is a source of energy and power.  It is a source of creativity and forward motion.  Small wonder that anyone wanting to control the world would want to dilute it and destroy it if possible.

And to be clear, I am very open to the idea of a sacred Femininity.  I think that not only are most men scared of women, but many women are too.  They know who they are and what they are capable of, but they don’t know who they are, and what they are capable of.  Yes, that felt right.  We can ponder what the hell I just said together.  The women will get it first, most likely.

But here is the one I want to introduce today, since I dreamed about it last night: the child and the adult.

We say “childish” as an insult.  And it is and should be.  A childish person is one who is selfish, peevish, irresponsible, moody and generally hard to get along with and impossible to depend on.  They are self indulgent and selfish.

But within the narcissism of children–and psychodynamically that is I think the correct word–there is also enthusiasm, a sense of wonder and engagement, a root sense of curiosity and play and fun and SPONTANEITY.

We need this energy, just as we need the ability to make plans, to meet commitments, and to pay bills.

Here is the dream I had: the police were looking for me, and I was hiding behind a bunch of meditation cushions like a little child, hoping they wouldn’t find me.  They found me.  But it was not unpleasant.  Nothing bad happened.  I was not arrested.  They found me, then sent me on my way.

The police, to me, represent adult authority.  As Law Enforcement Officers, they are literally the physical embodiment in some ways of the rules of society.  They are the violence visited on those who flout the rules of our social order.  They are not joking and they are not playing.

For me, I continue to have some childish ways about me.  They are not severe.  I am not flaky in general, and in fact have accomplished many hard tasks and won the trust of a lot of people.  But they are there.  I have avoidance in me.  Petulance sometimes.  Whininess.  Also spontaneity and good humor.  The good and the bad.

And I will comment that at a deep psychological level attacking the police IN PRINCIPLE, and attacking THE LAW in principle, amounts to a denigration of, and subversion of, healthy adulthood.  It is a prima facie endorsement of the bad aspects of childishness and churlishness.  It is the sort of move aspiring tyrants would make in on-going efforts to infantilize and disempower a target population.

Returning to the dream, though, the being found and being let go was a sort of union for me of the opposites, or complementarities, in what might be a better word.  It represents, I think, growth.

Lately I have been riding this edge pretty well.  Surfing my misery to enlightenment and growth.  I go to sleep, and shake.  I can’t stop it.  I feel this ambient anxiety in me, in the pit of my stomach, and I can’t make it go away.  It is going to have its way with me for the first hour or two of sleep.  It can’t be avoided.

But then I get some message in the early morning, almost every day.  Something interesting and useful.  Sleep, and dreaming, is probably my most important spiritual practice right now.

And if you think about it, dreaming itself is a lot like a psychedelic experience, or so I suppose, never having done psychedelics.  It’s a fountain of knowledge you can turn on with attention.

Copied without comment:

According to Shaktisamgama Tantra, the spouse of Mahakali is extremely frightening. Mahakala has four arms, three eyes and is of the brilliance of 10 million black fires of dissolution, dwells in the midst of eight cremation grounds. He is adorned with eight skulls, seated on five corpses, holds a trident, a drum, a sword and a scythe in his hands. He is adorned with ashes from the cremation ground and surrounded by numbers of loudly shrieking vultures and jackals. At his side is his consort symbolized as Kālī. Both Mahakala and Kālī represent the ultimate destructive power of Brahman and they are not bounded by any rules or regulations. They have the power to dissolve even time and space into themselves and exist as Void at the dissolution of the universe. They are responsible for the dissolution of the universe at the end of Kalpa. They are also responsible for annihilating great evils and great demons when other gods, Devas and even Trimurtis fail to do so. Mahakala and Kali annihilates men, women, children, animals, the world and the entire universe without mercy because they are Kala or Time in the personified form and Time is not bound by anything and Time does not show mercy, nor does it wait for anything or anyone.^[3][7] In some parts of Odisha, Jharkhand and Dooars, (that is, in northern Bengal), wild elephants are worshiped as Mahakala.^[4][5]

Mahakala is typically black in colour. Just as all colours are absorbed and dissolved into black, all names and forms are said to melt into those of Mahakala, symbolising his all-embracing, comprehensive nature. Black can also represent the total absence of colour, and again in this case it signifies the nature of Mahakala as ultimate or absolute reality. This principle is known in Sanskrit as “nirguna“, beyond all quality and form, and it is typified by both interpretations.^[8]

 

I have proposed as a potential moral heuristic–which really is to say a life heuristic, since even if you don’t have a conscious morality you have an habitual morality, because we all make decisions based on what makes sense to us, and conforms to our assumptions about what is possible and appropriate–that we seek to approach, to move towards, the Four Greats: Peace, Joy, Love and Compassion.

Thinking about my cathartic experience yesterday, it occurs to me that part of growing in peace is destroying all fixed emotional structures which contain indignation, regret, outrage, horror, and really ANY conditioned, spontaneous, uncontrollable reaction to anything that might happen outside that we cannot control.

To feel infinite peace, on a certain level you would need to be able to watch a baby being murdered and feel nothing.  And I think, of course, that it helps knowing there is a heaven, and for that matter a hell.

But you would need to feel peace knowing there IS a hell.  Previous generations, and for that matter many tens of millions of people living today, were and are seemingly perfectly content knowing that souls will be tortured forever.  This is odd, don’t you think, in a religion founded on Love?

Maybe our universal system of divine law is perfectly just.  Maybe everyone there made the same awful decisions over and over and over and over.  Maybe they were given a thousand lifetimes and fucked every single one of them up, with cruelty, malice, violence and sadism.

But in a sense even they are still God’s children, are they not?  And does any decent human being really want to see even people who deserve it to suffer?

I wrote perhaps ten years ago about an experience of hell I had, and I would not wish that on anyone.  Not Adolph Hitler.  Not Tamerlane.  Not Anthony Fauci. (you may think I’m being tongue in cheek there, but I’m really not; this is a mass murder event.  He knows what the fuck he’s doing, and has since the start).

So on some level, to some degree, the spiritual aspirant has to accept the fact of infinite crimes.  He can feel love and compassion and seek to alleviate that pain, but to feel peace he needs to ACCEPT them, and not be bothered by them.

In a deep sense, I think this was a core message of the Bhagavad Gita, which was inserted into the Mahabharata, and which used its characters, but which simply used those names and situations to speak a specific message, one of the main elements of which was that you need to accept in principle violating every one of your most deeply held principles, and accepting in advance and at the time that others inevitably will as well.

As happens often, there is a certain parallelism between high and low here, between the highest, most noble spiritual aspirations, and between that group of practices we might lump under Satanism, such as actual Satanism, and the Thuggee cult in India.  There are those who aim up, and those who aim down.

But in both cases, crimes must be accepted.  Perhaps in their dim way they feel that.  Certainly people like Aleister Crowley preach of “liberation” and freedom.  But he died a broken down heroin addict, didn’t he?  I looked up his biography just now.  That may be a slight exaggeration, but it certainly did not seem like a happy death, or that he was mourned by many.

Liberation is liberation from fear.  It is not liberation, particularly, from regret, although yes I am arguing that too.

People who are pushed into dark things are not free.  Anything compulsive, or which seeks to release latent tensions and hostilities, cannot in the end be moving towards freedom.  It is living in a jail, and merely opening the window occasionally, and calling that “freedom”.  It’s not.  It’s delusion.  Delusion can feel like freedom, but you cannot drive an imaginary car very far.

To put this succinctly: if you think about it, how could you ever know peace, knowing there is suffering everywhere, and that you cannot fix it easily or quickly, or most likely at ALL–since it serves some purpose in the Grand Scheme–if you don’t have the ability to accept it?  You don’t have to accept it all the time fully, but you need to accept it SOME of the time fully, and the movement to infinite peace is accepting ALL of it ALL the time fully.

And ideas help with this.  For example, the idea that nothing is an accident AND that the universe is benign help.  This is the essence of what Krishna taught Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, as he was about to kill people he would have loved in any other context and at any other time.

As the efficacy of these jabs becomes more open to question, I feel it is worth noting that where they seem headed is what amounts to a “COVID Variant specific immune system boost”.  They will help the immune system deal with a particular variant of COVID, and do it well for perhaps 1 to 3 months.

But this logically raises the question: WHAT ELSE boosts the immune system?  Why not START with a GENERALIZED immune system boost which lasts indefinitely, then add a specific one if it seems needed?  Would a long term solution which works on all diseases not be vastly better than a short term solution which only works on a very specific disease?

Pretend for the moment your main job is public health, and not protecting profits for Big Pharma or the politically and presumably financially motivated lies of Anthony Fauci the rest of his criminal crew.

Pretend you had no skin in the game.  You were just an alien observer.  And let’s assume for the sake of argument the two approaches are equal in safety, which they obviously aren’t.

General, long lasting, versus specific and requiring continual boosts.

For that matter, cheap and readily available, versus expensive, and subject to supply constraints.

Which wins?

Duh?

Then add back in that in the first case we are talking adding VITAMINS and minerals and other nutrients–the Zelenko Protocol, or something like it, obviously; and in the other literally tinkering with human cells by teaching them to mutate in ways which damage organs and the circulatory system, for we don’t really know how long, and in ways which affect growing children in ways we don’t understand and have no way of predicting.

I am gratified to see the phrase Mass Formation Psychosis becoming more popular.  Something of that nature and magnitude is the only possible means of explaining what is happening.

I woke up very early this morning, and doing my yoga, I had this intense wave of emotion wash over me.  I was a military commander from long ago, vaguely Greek, awake at 3:30 and already mourning the coming victory.  I could see the fires that would soon be lit on the horizon.  I knew my men would soon be raping and killing.  They would cut little children down where they stood, since they were of no use to them.  The woman would be herded into back rooms by groups and never leave again.  They would first kill, then rape, and then pillage.

And there was no stopping it.  You cannot ask men to fight and die and suffer and then stop that tide.  Not then.  Not by me.  Those crimes were the cost of preventing the same being done to my own homeland.  If I had tried to stop them I would have been removed as commander and the crimes would still have happened.

But it was horrifying.  Losing a war is the worst outcome.  But winning one is the second.  That was what I felt.  As I say, it was powerful.  I have a body which can take a lot.  That electricity does not destroy me.  As I keep saying, I don’t know why.

We are supposed to process our “shadow”, right?  What does this mean?  When the process is complete what happens?  All sunshine and rainbows?  A permanent loss of the ability or desire to lose your temper?  Utter and continual fearlessness?

Does this sound reasonable to you, FOR you?  Not for someone else.  For you.  Is there any continuity in this idea with life as you have lived it thus far?

Not for me.  It’s waves.  It’s ups and downs.  If you want to abstract, it’s averages but would you really want to determine mathematically the average color in all the paintings in the Louvre and draw some inference from it?

Here is what I feel at this moment: managed violence is like an enormous, wakeful, watchful dragon just sitting there in an emotional garage.  You are not feeding it or ignoring it, encouraging it or avoiding it.  You are simply allowing it to exist as a POTENTIAL aspect of your experience.

Seen like this, it is an emotional tool, at your disposal.  In my view, none of us should really want to eliminate the capacity for anger or violence.  What happens if you see someone hurting a woman, or a child, or for that matter the average male-ish checker at Target (actually, that one I will be dick enough to admit I might let play out for a minute, which itself is a chosen moment of latent brutality, that is a part of what is good in the whole)?  Or a man being attacked by a mob?

What if righting or preventing some act of cruelty requires violence?

I have on several occasions heard from the hippy dippy sorts “But what if you could have prevented Hitler by KILLING him?”  This is a source of confusion for dedicated non-violent vegans, but me, I’d cut his fucking head off in a heart beat.  Or I think I would.  That’s not a choice that’s ever been needed by me.

So this is a bit of a ramble.  I have anger in me.  I have hate in me.  I’m no saint.  But what I am is on the surface.  You can see it, and I can certainly see it.

To my mind, that is vastly healthier and better for all than the sort of deep deep delusion needed to, as one example, see what amounted to a channeled protest labeled an “insurrection”, and people rightly angry at the certification of a patently problem ridden election “traitors”.  Traitors are the ones who opened our voting systems to foreign nations, as OUR OWN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE SAID THEY DID.  At least 6 nations, I read, including China, North Korea, Iran and probably Venezuela and Cuba.

THAT IS TREASON.  Forming pacts with foreign nations to undermine US interests and sovereignty.

I won’t go into all that at length.  You either get it or you don’t.  If you have doubts, dig, but don’t dig at CNN.  Dig at Gateway Pundit and Epoch Times and places like that.

And I will note that the condemnation of Gateway Pundit is not that they are reporting false news.  It is that they are UNAPPROVED.  That is the gist of it.  “You are quoting an UPAPPROVED news source.  I can’t listen to that.  I might lose my–“.  Hmmm.  What WILL you lose, listening to voices the complicit media does not want you to hear?  Your naivete?  Your political virginity?  Your bad ideas, that on some level you have always known would fold at the first wind of honesty?

Yeah, so that is me being angry.  Some fire comes out of the dragon sometimes.  That dragon is in fact dangerous as fuck, but no, I never feed it.  It will stay in the garage.  There will simply be the smell of sulphur sometimes in what I write.

I have a very sharp Kukri I keep by my bed.  With a clear opening, I could kill anyone with one swing.  I don’t ever want to do that.  But I feel sure I would if I needed to.

This knife is a symbol to me.  It symbolizes the rejection of helplessness.  I know guns are better than knives, but I’m still a knife guy.

I really don’t think you can be a spiritual person and embrace helplessness fully.  I think you can embrace DEATH fully, the reality of it, the threat of it, and be spiritual.  That is more than I can manage at this time, and failing that, I think all of us need to make peace with our ability to wage war.

There is not truly any such thing as dispassionate analysis.  At the highest levels, intelligence is, in my view, deeply passionate.  It is a music.  You cannot go high or far without strong emotions.

I can feel this strongly even in such mundane things as Lumosity, which I’ve mentioned from time to time.  When my emotions are aligned I do better.  When I am conflicted, afflicted: I do worse.  I am slower.  The patterns appear to me more slowly.

The process of building intelligence from an IQ perspective, from a pattern formation, memory, information processing perspective–really, from a computational perspective–is neurologically not severable from the process of developing both emotional calm, as well as the capacity for deep passion, and intense emotional engagement.

I just hit 99.4 in my age group–and I will note this is among people who are paying members–which makes me prouder than it should.  I was wondering if a mature Sartre–I have some weird love/hate thing with him–would have ever cited test scores with pride.  Probably not, but maybe.  He and I are not that different.

And I like to think my own ideas are more useful.  You can be brilliant and stupid at the same time.  Beyond any possible doubt he was vastly more erudite than me.

But as I like to say, the guy who can tell you the bathroom is the third unmarked door on the right is more useful than the one capable of delivering a three hour disquisition on Marxism.  It’s not even close.  In the first case a small intelligence is being shared.  In the other, intelligence is being actively sucked out of the room.

Intrapsychically, I think resistance to change looks like violence.

Certainly, in most of us, externally, we get violent when people violate social rules, right?  If someone says something rude, or cuts you off in traffic, or steals from you, or is actually violent with you in speech or action, these are what trigger anger, are they not?  There is a way things are supposed to be, and when that “way” is violated, anger is the result.

Kun Zhi is the place of conflict.  It is the dark place, where there is anger on the horizon, fires lit, dim shadows fighting in the distance over you don’t know what.  It is your nasty self, the violence you may watch nightly on TV but refuse to feel in yourself.  It is the part that makes you watch “comedies” about assassins.  Ha, ha, ha.

I feel like a part of spiritual work is going through a meat grinder.  It is taking all the stable forms that you thought were you, and destroying them completely, and this is every bit as painful as it sounds.  It hurts like a sonofabitch.

You know, we look at pictures, or maybe have ourselves met, these yogis, say in India, who live by the Ganges and have the ashes of corpses on them.  We view them as some completely other sort of human being.  But they aren’t.  They are just willing to go farther than most of us.  They are blessed with a culture which encourages and supports this.  Imagine being smeared with ashes from a crematorium here.  You would be locked up quickly and gladly.

But it seems to me that if the main true deep spiritual task is learning to process all experience, then traumatic experience has to be a part of this, doesn’t it?  Trauma, if it has not happened yet, remains possible all the days of our lives.  If you are being systematic spiritually–Grundlich, in the inimitable German word–then you have to be prepared to process trauma too.  If it does not already exist in you, you have to induce it.

I would strongly encourage everyone to read Alexandra David Neel’s book “Magic and Mystery in Tibet”.  The scene where she comes across an acolyte practicing Chod in a charnel ground strewn with bones, and some fresh bodies, who is having something close to a nervous breakdown, but not quitting, is absolutely unforgettable.  Not by me any way.  She finds his “guru” in a cave not too far away, who is in deep meditation at perhaps 2am, and tells him about it.  She says “aren’t you going to do something?”  In effect, he says “he knew what he was signing up for.  He will be OK, or he won’t.  Either way, this is how it works.”

I myself am going through some strong energy.  All the hippy dippy types I read say the world is going through weird energy.  I don’t know how much credence I place in all this, but I definitely am.  But it’s a logical extension of a long term process.

I had a very violent dream last night which ended, in the dream, with me puking in a toilet.  So I wake up, and the first thing I have to do is realize that all the players in the dream are ME.  Parts of me.  And the violent one, the one no one would claim, that is me too.  That would be the energy behind my Garuda.

Do you not think the Sopranos was popular not least because some part of most people wants the freedom and excitement of being a gangster?  Living in a world where life and death moments and decisions are common?  Where many moments have immediate and severe consequences?

I will lay in bed some nights, just feeling pain.  It doesn’t go away.  It’s like my tinnitus–I just distract myself better and worse.  But that’s not good enough for me.  That’s not a solution.  I want a solution, and not that solution.

And the other night I had this dream.  I was in a Marine training group.  Part of our training was sitting in a freezing rain on a boat to New Orleans without jackets.  We just had to put up with it.

I don’t know if Marines do this, but cold immersion is definitely something the SEAL’s do, and in reality all soldiers have to be able to put up with cold.  In the dream, it felt easier when a bunch of other people were enduring it with me.

Part of spiritual training is like this, I think.  It is learning to tolerate and put up with discomfort, with feelings you want to push away and dissociate from.  It’s not truly harmful, and in the end it is beneficial.  We were, in the dream, on the way to New Orleans for some time off.  Good times were on the way.

This is a pandemic of the UNPROTECTED AND THE UNTREATED.

Not the unvaccinated . Obviously.

The beauty of talking points it that, as H.L Mencken pointed out, for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.  That’s an approximate quote.

Talking points distil this basic insight.  It is easy to be glib when all you have to do is repeat simple ideas, and this holds equally true if they are wrong.  Repeat a simple bad idea that SHOULD be true often enough–and this is really the sort of lie Goebbels meant–and what should be true eventually seems like it IS true.

The psychology of all this is not hard to understand.  Falling into error is easy.  But it was for some time the purpose of education to teach people to recognize and avoid such errors.  Now, it is seemingly the task of education to perpetuate them and the lazy mental habits which sustain them.

Give a person a fish, you feed them for a day.  Give them a fish every day, and they are your bitch for life.

Here is an analogy whose value is not fully clear to me but which I will offer anyway: what has been done is much like PROHIBITING people from wearing seat belts, then requiring ambulances to let them sit on the side of the road for an hour if and when they get in accidents.  You know, to see if they get better on their own.

The seat belt itself, the protection, the first line of protection, the thing that keeps you from getting thrown out of the car–from getting severe complications, to be clear–is an optimized immune system, if possible, and isolation from potentially infected people if not.

An optimized immune system, at a minimum, WAS KNOWN IN 2020 to include Vitamin D sufficiency, even if there was and remain valid questions about how to define that.  We knew and know how to define INsufficiency.  We’ve been doing that many years, as in you go in for a blood check, and the doctor says your Vitamin D levels are low and recommends a supplement.  I knew people this happened to long before all this COVID bullshit.

We knew zinc was important.  I don’t think “we”, certainly not me, knew about such a thing as a zinc ionophore.  But we knew that HCQ helped a LOT early on.  We still know that.  We will never stop knowing that, unless the Democrats get the demonic oligarchy they want, and memory hole all of the present era’s knowledge on the subject.

So, the seat belt, THEN, was at least Vitamin D sufficiency, a healthy weight, and being active.  Being fat: bad.  Unfastened safety belt.  Saying “don’t be fat” would not have made obese people skinny, but it would have provided them a de facto Informed Consent on the risks of carrying a lot of extra body fat around.  They would have known to take more Vitamin D, too, which would have made a huge difference.

Now of course the seat belt would be, in my view, daily Turmeric with Piperine (easiest as a supplement), 500 mg Quercetin, 20-25 mg zinc, 1,000 mg Vitamin C, D sufficiency, however you get there, which is probably at least 1,000 iu in the summer and 4,000 in the winter, and optimally Black Seed Oil, which has done well, even if it is understudied.  Get regular exercise, saunas can’t hurt, circulate with live human beings regularly, and talk to them, don’t be too fat, don’t eat shit, and try to keep your Zen about all this.

And the not treating is the decision the AMA and the nations doctors en masse made to just watch people get well or turn blue and wind up in a hospital where their incompetence killed them most of the time.

So, yes, you could ban seatbelts then want to reduce how many miles the average person drove because of the pandemic of traffic deaths, but this is idiocy of the sort Monty Python was created to mock.