From here: https://www.thebowencenter.org/societal-emotional-process

Each concept in Bowen theory applies to such nonfamily groups as work and social organizations. The concept of societal emotional process describes how the emotional system governs behavior in whole societies. Cultural forces are important in how a society functions but are insufficient to explain the ebb and flow in how well societies adapt to the challenges they face. Bowen’s first clue about parallels between familial and societal emotional functioning came from observing families with juvenile delinquents. The parents in such families give children the message, “We love you no matter what you do.” Despite impassioned lectures about responsibility and sometimes harsh punishments, parents give in to the child more than they hold the line. The child rebels against the parents and adeptly senses their uncertainty in their positions. The child feels controlled and lies to get around the parents. He is indifferent to their punishments. The parents are largely ineffectual in controlling the child.

 

Bowen saw that during the 1960s courts became more like the parents of delinquents. Many in the juvenile court system considered the delinquent a victim of bad parents. They tried to understand him and often reduced the consequences of his actions, hoping to effect change in his behavior. If the delinquent became a frequent offender, the legal system, much like the parents, expressed its disappointment and imposed harsh penalties. Recognition of a change in this societal institution led Bowen to notice similar changes in others, such as schools and governments. The downward spiral in families dealing with delinquency is an anxiety-driven regression in functioning. In a regression, people act to relieve the anxiety of the moment rather than acting on principle and taking a long-term view. A regressive pattern began unfolding in society after World War II. It worsened during the 1950s and rapidly intensified in the 1960s. The “symptoms” of societal regression include a growth of crime and violence, an increasing divorce rate, a more litigious attitude, a greater polarization between racial groups, less principled decision-making by leaders, increased drug abuse and bankruptcies, and a focus on rights over responsibilities.

 

Human societies undergo periods of regression and progression over their histories. The current regression seems to be fueled by anxiety related to such factors as exploding population, a sense of diminishing frontiers, and the depletion of natural resources. Bowen predicted humans would deal symptomatically with crises growing out of the regression until forced to address the anxiety feeding it. He predicted that a final major crisis would come as soon as the middle of the twenty-first century and that the type of human who survived would be one who could live in better harmony with nature.

After a brief, almost progression, we are running headlong back into thumb sucking and social decay.  None of this will end well.  It never does.

What will remain after the crack-up remains to be seen.

As I keep saying, the problem to me is not people like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.  The problem is people who cannot see what blatant liars and cynical-to-the-point-of-nihilism opportunists they are.  It’s not IQ stupidity.  It is emotional infantilism, which is a set of words I use often because I watched it throughout my childhood at close hand.

I have decided that I am strongly individuated, but at high cost.  It hurt, and continues to hurt.

I will fix me.  I continue to make progress.  But I can’t fix anyone else, particularly when so many people are actively antagonistic to what people like me have to say.

The claim I want to make is that Anti-Liberalism/Fascism is Fusionism, is what amounts to a social implementation of the dynamics of an enmeshed family, where you have an overactive government both enabling and compelling an underactive citizenry, whose agency it steals in the name of “helping” it.

The whole thing consists in naked mental illness, and this has long been obvious, but this is beginning to bridge the gap between politics and psychology.

Books like 1984, and We, and Brave New World describe different forms of this illness and its methods, but rarely reach the Why.  That some people are evil is clear, but why?  What is behind the why they offer, which is clearly not the real why?

https://michaelsamsel.com/Content/Couples/fusion.html

What he is describing amounts to failed individuation, which is to say maturity, which is to say retarded emotional growth that has lapsed into the pathological. In general, this is the clear fault of the parents and “system”, who have failed to set rational and clear boundaries, and to enforce basic standards of emotionally and socially integrated behavior.

“In a fused relationship, each participant believes they are compelled by the feelings (especially ‘negative ones’) and vulnerabilities of the other. This results first, in a great deal of compliant caretaking behavior that can’t be sustained, second in a great deal of repression of anger and resentment, and third, when the first two strategies become unbearable, the feelings of the others are disputed and invalidated. It doesn’t occur to participants that they can listen, acknowledge, but not ‘obey.'”

Think about this dynamic, and the INABILITY–not the unwillingness, mind you, but INABIILITY– to tolerate genuine diversity which we are seeing expressed across our political world, and particularly on what should be Liberal and tolerant college campuses. Is this not a highly descriptive and useful analysis?

Another: “It is considered a real ‘crime’ to do or say anything that upsets another member. The most anxious or constricted family member dictates the ceiling of freedom of action or freedom of expression.”

Can you not see the genesis of Acceptable Speech, speech as violence, and Safe Spaces here?

More: “Life is reaction-rich with very little real effective action. Said differently strong reactions are allowed but strong actions are not.”

Speech, for these people, constitutes action.  Genuine, meaningful, measurable, observable change for the better is something THEY DO NOT EVEN ATTEMPT.  I can’t see that blacks who have been voting for Democrats for 50 years have gotten any reward for their efforts; or that any elected Democrats have really tried to do anything but throw crumbs from the royal coach as it passes the unwashed masses. Once elected, they quickly notice the benefits of royalty, and quickly forget where they came from, if they ever cared at all.

And: “Difficulties and feelings are automatically projected outward. When asked to talk about themselves, participants talk about others–this is usually blame, which is rife in fused relationships. If one tries to redirect attention back onto the member of interest it only lasts only moments until the ‘other’ is being talked about. This ‘other-focus’ is far from a healthy interest in others. Despite talking about others, participants are trying to get their own needs met.”

Think about this: is politics not the perfect place for people to hide WHO DO NOT KNOW HOW TO MANAGE THEIR OWN LIVES? You get to be angry all the time, talking about other people all the time, and deflecting from your own real and obvious failures ALL THE TIME.

All of this is understandable. All of our problems have sources, trajectories, and solutions, if we somehow manage the will and intelligence to actually solve them.

If we know enough to “prescribe” or mandate COVID “vaccines”, how come we don’t know enough to list potential drug interactions, like we do WITH EVERY OTHER APPROVED DRUG.

Here is a link to an output from “flu vaccine drug interactions”: https://www.drugs.com/drug-interactions/influenza-virus-vaccine-inactivated.html

249 drugs interact with some form of the vaccine.

Here is a link discussing the COVID jab: https://www.goodrx.com/conditions/covid-19/covid-19-vaccine-drug-interactions

At this point, we don’t know if the COVID-19 vaccine can affect your medications. However, what we do know about how it works suggests that the chance of a negative reaction between the vaccine and any medication is extremely small. Taking medication is not a reason to delay getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

What’s for certain is that people with underlying medical conditions are at increased risk of having serious symptoms if they catch COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Keep in mind, these are FDA approved medical treatments.

Here is the Pfizer data sheet, where they admit myocarditis and pericarditis are known side effects, and which includes this language:

The vaccination provider is responsible for mandatory reporting of the
following to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS):
 vaccine administration errors whether or not associated with an
adverse event,
 serious adverse events* (irrespective of attribution to vaccination),
 cases of myocarditis,
 cases of pericarditis,
 cases of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (MIS) in adults and
children, and
 cases of COVID-19 that result in hospitalization or death

Now, I have commented on this before–as have numerous other people, which is the only reason I know about this–but you are not technically “fully vaccinated” until 14 days after you get your second jab.  If you die within that period FROM THE VACCINE the System is likely to write your death up to COVID, since it both adds to the COVID numbers, and detracts from vaccine related deaths.

But nowhere on this Pfizer data sheet do I see known drug interactions listed.  They simply say not to give them to anyone with known allergies to any of the ingredients.

Do you think people getting these shots are being told what the ingredients are, so they can tell the doctor if they are allergic to any of them?  Of course not.  This is a production line, not medicine.

And does it constitute malpractice for any doctor or nurse to administer one of these jabs to ANYONE without first going through that list of potential allergens?  Yes, I would argue it does.  Anyone who has a relative who died following a jab who can demonstrate a known allergy to one of the ingredients in the vaccine would likely be on solid ground in a lawsuit, as would anyone who could demonstrate that the Pfizer data sheets differ from the actual product in circulation.

I won’t ever let this issue drop.  Letting such massive crimes against peace and prosperity go is just not in my nature.  No sane person should let this thing drop until we have a bunch of arrogant psychopaths in cuffs crying about how they meant well and we have just misunderstood them.

This “project” is a propaganda project, created by the propaganda organ called the New York Times, whose motto is “All the news that undermines traditional American values and the possibility of coherent rational dialogue”.

1619 was the year the first slaves made it to America.  Now, I have not and will not make any effort to study it in depth, but from Wikipedia, the stated intent is to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States‘ national narrative.”

In other words, the whole history of the United States is to be retold from the perspective of people who played in actual fact very little role in it.  Yes, slavery was important in the South, but not in the North, and not important after 1865.

The patent objective is to create the impression that America is uniquely evil in countenancing slavery, and to facilitate anti-white racism, which is easily explainable as unhealthy self loathing in the (mainly) whites pushing this.

This is a ridiculous lie, that should be risible for any educated person, but our problem is that far too many people–which certainly includes most college graduates– are not and never become educated.

A few facts.  Again, I was reading National Geographic the other day, and they had an interesting graphic they must have assumed people like me would not look at.  It was about locating wrecked slave ships.

Here is a link to the graphic referenced.  Just scroll down a bit.  I can’t make the image work.  The paranoid part of me assumes they don’t want this graphic to get too much traction.  It was needed for their story, which had its political purpose, but seen by too many dilutes their story of American Exceptionalism, as in our purportedly exceptional guilt for slavery: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/a-divers-hunt-for-lost-slave-ships-led-to-an-incredible-journey

A total of 307,000 enslaved Africans (who by the way were in the main captured and sold by other black Africans) were transported to the English and then American colonies.

But 764,000 were transported to Cuba.  695,000 were transported to Haiti.  935,000 were transported to Jamaica.  1.5 million to other islands.  1.2 million to Bahia in Brazil.  1.4 million to Southeast Brazil.  430,000 to Pernambuco.

Brazil was actually the last nation to ban slavery in the Western Hemisphere (parts of Africa only did so in the past 20 years or so, and slavery is still practiced in Nigeria, Libya, and elsewhere).  Brazil did not ban slavery until 1888–over twenty years after the United States–and only after importing more than 4 million slaves, which is over TEN TIMES what we did.

And as this article points out, even when the Portuguese got there, the practice of slavery was endemic, with one tribe conquering and enslaving others.

And the Spanish and Portuguese both, in my understanding, enslaved first the INDIANS, the Native Americans, the people already there, which the English did not do.

The natives just died in large numbers, particularly from disease, which was what created the need for black slaves, as seen back then.  This happened all over Latin America, including Mexico and Brazil.

Why is no one talking about all this?  Where are the adults in the room?  Where are the responsible people, trying to present a balanced, complete, and reasonable picture of the whole?

Why are so many people so fucking nuts who have Ph.D’s and should KNOW BETTER?

Immaturity.  It’s a simple word, but it goes deep.  Here is another phrase: because of their Counter-Individuational Politics.  Because of their attachment to infantile rage and thinking.

And I will add too slavery in Ethiopia, whose Haile Selassie is held up at least by the Rastafarians–whose name derives from his formal title, and who are descendants of slaves brought over in the Transatlantic slave trade–seems to go back 3,500 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Ethiopia

It was under the pretense of abolishing slavery that the actual Fascists (remember: this group actually did exist) invaded Ethiopia:

Under the pretense of abolishing slavery (and a border incident), Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. Italy ignored international condemnation and demands by the League of Nations to depart. During Italian rule, the occupation government issued two laws in October 1935 and in April 1936 which abolished slavery and, freed 420,000 Ethiopian slaves. After the Italians were expelled, Emperor Haile Selassie returned to power and quickly abolished the actual practice in 1942.^[

Selassie himself reportedly owned slaves by the thousands, according to the article.

And I cannot find it right now–it seems to have been written out–but I recall the numbers when Mussolini invaded as roughly 12 million Ethiopians, of whom roughly 3 million were slaves, or roughly one in four.  That’s a lot, and much higher as a percentage than it ever was in the United States, particularly if you factor in that there were zero slaves in the North from relatively early on.

I just look out there every day and see mental illness, indefensible claims, arrogance, presumption, and latent violence.  I obviously have my own issues, but my personal history has made me intensely sensitive with regard to the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of others.  I see what others don’t, because there was a time when doing so meant my survival, or at least it felt that way, and once developed you never lose those habits.

I watched this yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9SD2TgiZTU

He says a lot of things I have been thinking and saying.  I noticed twenty or more years ago that people get stuck at certain ages.  To overshare, as I do, I think my father got stuck about 8 and my mother about 17.  He died without growing beyond that, and I suspect my mother will too.

Apparently Freud called this Fixation.  I didn’t know that.

But more generally, healthy individuation is healthy SOCIALIZATION.   It is internalizing the standards of your society and within broad limits accepting them.  Each of us does it in our own way–this is individuation–but we do it, which is socialization.

And to be socialized, acclimatized, to BELONG in a social order, is to be conservative.  Conservatism is simply about conserving.  It is about respect, which might be seen as a synonym for mature individuation.  It is NOT in my view about stasis, but about skepticism particularly with regard to radical, untried ideas that tear apart long standing patterns of largely healthy social interaction, which is obviously what Anti-Liberal ideas do.

I was reading a bunch of kids in paramilitary drag, showed up with AR-15’s to “defend” a “kid friendly drag show for kids in Texas, which included “partial nudity and sexualized minors.”

Ponder that.  Where on this planet would that be acceptable?  Anywhere in Latin America, outside large cities?  Anywhere in aboriginal Australia?  Anywhere in Asia, outside places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the show almost certainly would have included sex acts, since pedophilia is culturally condoned because of their weird fear of women?  Africa?  I don’t think so.

You have on the one side kids who have become more or less overt Fascists because of failed individuation and following fusion with an essentially irrational and indefensible cause, and who are increasingly willing to signal violence.  Such kids historically can be easily made to commit all acts of violence and sadistic cruelty.  This is simple fact.  Yes, even Germans (Cambodians, Chileans, Greeks, the list goes on), then, and even Americans, now.

To put it another way, these kids have all the reflective capacity of trained and conditioned dogs.  They feel nothing but fear, but are aware of nothing but self righteousness, all in the defense of a “worthy” cause. It’s always like that.  No actually evil group of people ever sees themselves that way.  The Nazis didn’t.  ISIS didn’t.  The Communists don’t.

What we face is a crisis of maturity.  Of individuation.

What we have historically had is reasonably mature and sober adults running this country; not perfectly, to be sure, and they made many mistakes, but they were serious and knew by and large who they were and what they believed and why.

We lack this now, more and more and more.  This is the real problem.  This will remain a problem even if actual conservatives get control of our government.  This is the actual problem which I myself am working hardest to solve.  Over and above its intrinsic benefit, this is one reason I put so much effort into my own growth.  I want to be able to say without words “THIS”.

I ran across this article in National Geographic the other day.  It was a Latin American women who had recently resettled from New Jersey to the Midwest.  She was struck by how similar the cultural patterns in the Midwest were to those with which she was familiar.  The name of the article in fact is “How the Midwest is Latin America”.

Author Daisy Hernandez writes:

The image of flight is so dominant that I had forgotten its opposite: people STAY in the Midwest.  They value having their grandparents close by, the cousins down the block or across town, the old high school friends nearby.  They have a relationship with the land and small towns and each other that is complicated and that those of us who are outsiders fail to appreciate.

These are the people who put Trump into office the first time, and whose votes were cast aside to prevent his reelection.  And they think and feel much like Latin Americans.  Or most Africans.  Or most Asians.

People are the same in many ways around the world.  We all need order.  We need ideas and people and practices and outward markers to cling to, to help us navigate this confusing world, where it does not matter a lot what sort of hat you wear, but a lot if other people join you, so that there becomes a visual Us.

These kids with the guns just want to belong somewhere.  They were not socialized into a coherent society, so they are creating their own; and being kids, they are not doing it with any wisdom, foresight, or common sense.

Here is the thing, though: you cannot socialize any kid into a society which does not exist.  If you set them no limits, if there is no yes/no operator, if there are no boundaries, then their natural behavioral avarice will grow indefinitely, such that no coherent self is ever formed.

And this is happening right now in large numbers of American kids. I would wager it is an absolute majority of them, once we factor in screens.  This is a real problem.  This cannot lead anywhere but Fascism.

Read the following, cut from here, and tell me you cannot easily derive GroupThink, continual hyperarousal, radical intolerance, completely unwarranted self congratulation, lack of self awareness, and the necessity of Safe Spaces.

If politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from the nuclear family and in particular the relationship of the mother with her children.

And I will add that I have long described the relationship between the black community and Democrats as codependent.  Within this framework, Democrats–who talk obsessively and continually about how much they love and care about the black community, but who rarely if ever actually DO anything genuinely and lastingly useful–are the overfunctioning ones.  The black community is underfunctioning.  In far too many cases, they are not shouldering the responsibility of educating their children, and socializing them for success in a complex world.  And the Democrats, of course, tell them they don’t have to and should not have to.  Because all they need to do is vote Democrat, right?  Codependence.

Fusion in Relationships

Fusion is a way of relating between people who do not have a strong sense of self. Largely unconscious, it avoids the anxiety of feeling separate. Fusion exists in families, both extended and nuclear, in groups, and in pairs (especially intensely in marital pairs or parent-child pairs.)

When optimal relational development has occurred, separation anxiety has been mostly resolved allowing flexible connection with moments of intense closeness and moments of secure separateness. This opposite of fusion has the name differentiation.

Fusion is strongly self-perpetuating–growing up in a fused family stunts differentiation and produces the tendency or need to seek fused relationships with everyone including one’s children. Fusion has far-reaching effects on the lives of those who must participate:

• Participants believe, and often are openly told by the others, that they are there to meet the needs of the others. While healthy human groups and families do care for individual members in need generally, turning it into a rule produces a distortion in which neediness becomes power.
• In a fused relationship, each participant believes they are compelled by the feelings (especially ‘negative ones’) and vulnerabilities of the other. This results first, in a great deal of compliant caretaking behavior that can’t be sustained, second in a great deal of repression of anger and resentment, and third, when the first two strategies become unbearable, the feelings of the others are disputed and invalidated. It doesn’t occur to participants that they can listen, acknowledge, but not ‘obey.’
• It is considered a real ‘crime’ to do or say anything that upsets another member. The most anxious or constricted family member dictates the ceiling of freedom of action or freedom of expression
• All thinking, feeling and acting is done with the other members potential feelings and reactions in mind. This results either into a cautious paralysis or strategic ‘gaming’
• It is considered a ‘deeper crime’ to broach something a member has already been upset by (“You meant to hurt me!) so reactions tend to turn into rigid rules. Unlike healthy relationships in which topics and conflicts become more comfortable from progressive exposure, an ‘allergy’ develops to certain reactive topics.
• Relationships devolve into pairs with an under-functioning participant and an over-functioning one. The over-functioning participant both enables the under-functioning one and becomes obsessed with changing him or her. The under-functioning one becomes obsessed with freedom from the constraints of the other but fails to act independently. No one can focus on themselves. This is especially common with parent-child and marriage relationships. The underfunctioning won’t change unless the overfunctioning changes first.
• In healthy relationships, there is an inverse relationship between autonomy and dependency. In fused relationships, the two are uncoupled. Often members divide up as having little dependency and little autonomy (codependent) and great dependency and great autonomy (counterdependent) See Addictive Relationships.
• Life is reaction-rich with very little real effective action. Said differently strong reactions are allowed but strong actions are not.
• Difficulties and feelings are automatically projected outward. When asked to talk about themselves, participants talk about others–this is usually blame, which is rife in fused relationships. If one tries to redirect attention back onto the member of interest it only lasts only moments until the ‘other’ is being talked about. This ‘other-focus’ is far from a healthy interest in others. Despite talking about others, participants are trying to get their own needs met.
• Fusion affects relationships globally. Strife arises from the attachment function, not, as members tend to believe, from the sensitivity or difficulty of the issues that face them. It is the fusion that makes the subjects or conflict unmanageable, not the other way around.
• There is a de facto line between insiders and outsiders. Members do not relate to outsiders the same way as insiders. Being a romantic interest however immediately makes one an insider. However, very differentiated people will not seem attractive to fusion-prone people.
• There is constant squabbling over what everyone ‘should’ do, even in minor issues. In healthy (differentiated) relationships, very few actions require consensus.
• Usually there is constant fighting but no resolution of issues. Alternately there is compulsive avoidance of any conflictual subject, the list of which grows longer in time. Life becomes stilted and boring. Sometimes there are stretches of the latter with cyclical explosions of the former.
• There is a ‘war’ against true autonomy. If any member acts truly differently, he or she is deemed crazy or bad, and strong united pressure is borne on him or her to change back.
• It is considered wrong for any member to thrive when others are not. While the most ‘symptomatic’ member doesn’t dictate a ceiling on achievement (achievement is often high among the over-functioning members) he or she does dictate a ceiling on enjoying success,
• No one trusts their own desires, motives or impulses, and no one trusts the desires, motives or impulses of the others.
• There is actual confusion about who is doing what. Participants, despite being obsessed with the traits and behaviors of the others, have a very difficult time actually describing what the others are actually like, or actually doing. Without the vantage point of a self, others cannot really be seen.
• If any member is a strong narcissist, fusion will be present but the relationship is probably better understood according to my page on pathological narcissism.

I’ve been thinking I probably overshared in the last post.  It would not be unreasonable to think I’m losing it.  My daily reality is not easy, and the truth is that if you dropped the weight I carry on someone else who was not long used to it, it would cripple them.  They would become catatonic or have a nervous breakdown.

But not me.  I’m used to this.  I deal with it in various ways, and work daily on it.  I’m eating a large elephant, and I think only today realized how large it is.

As my knots uncoil, and my tight spirals unwind, what I am realizing is that for all intents and purposes I was tortured as a child.  I was terrorized, physically abused, and had zero attunement from my mother.  I should be much worse off than I am.  I am lucky that I have a very robust physical constitution, a very good mind, and a seemingly innate passion for truth telling.  My best explanation for my emotional survival is that I brought a very strong spirit into the world.

Hope for me.  Good things are on the way.  It’s still hard times for now, but I am beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel.

I do some combination of AVE, Neurofeedback, Kum Nye, Yoga, myofascial release, Sauna, and weightlifting every day.  And when time permits I am going to try some drug that shows promise with PTSD, like ketamine or mushrooms.

I also take fish oil, gingko biloba, bacopa, Lion’s Mane Mushroom, and a few other things daily.  My physical health is excellent.  I just need to lose a few pounds!!!!

I was reading the other day about this yoga, and came across this:

The Sanskrit adjective kuṇḍala means “circular, annular”. It occurs as a noun for “a snake” (in the sense “coiled”, as in “forming ringlets”) in the 12th-century Rajatarangini chronicle (I.2). Kuṇḍa, a noun which means “bowl, water-pot”, is found as the name of a Naga in Mahabharata 1.4828. The Sanskrit feminine noun kuṇḍalī means “ring, bracelet, coil (of a rope)”, and is the name of a “serpent-like” Shakti in Tantrism as early as the 11th century, in the Śaradatilaka.

I looked it up because I remember reading that one of the features of “activated Kundalini energy” is shaking.

Here is a thought I will put on the table: “activated Kundalini energy” is actually something like the shaking and twitching and involuntary running Peter Levine describes in his Somatic Experiencing.  It is gut energy, which is to say most likely unmyelinated vagus nerve energy.  And that energy certainly does rise.

When I shake awake at night, which happens often, it always feels like a tightly bound coil of metal, released.  It spins quickly and expands.  The tension was latent; now it is manifest.  If I had simple trauma, I can’t help but feel it would have resolved by now.  But I don’t.

So Kundalini Yoga, which takes many forms, is basically learning to relax and transform traumatic energy.  That is why it takes many forms.  The basic intent is simple.

And I will reiterate, perhaps in a slightly new way, an old formula, after a contextualizing comment.  I am continuing to read, slowly, the collection of talks with Jean Klein published as “I am”.  He says to read them like poetry, which I am trying to do.  Every talk amounts to “everything you think you know is an illusion, and the only thing that matters is everywhere.  You just can’t feel it.  But it isn’t a thing.  It isn’t not a thing.  Well, shit, I guess you just had to be there, instead of here with me.”

That is only slight satire.  The recurring theme is he knows something we don’t, and he can’t communicate it.  I feel there is value there, which is why I keep reading, but also cannot help the feeling that a teacher without a method of some sort is a bit of an imbecile.  It’s a bit like writing a math formula on the board, and those who get it get it, and you did your part picking up the chalk.

Here is what I will propose as the backbone of all spiritual work.

First, you need to learn to relax.  And by relax, I mean to completely master all residual chronic fears COMPLETELY.  I don’t think you can (or should) get rid of fear itself completely, but CHRONIC fear, standing fear, continual fear–which I think normally amounts to trauma, which is the fear of fear–you CAN I think master and rid yourself of.  This means full bodily letting go, emotional letting go, and intellectual letting go.  Peace.

And this is a progressive process.  There is, since I mentioned it, Progressive Relaxation.  There is Autogenic Relaxation.  There is Muscle Control, Yogas of all sorts.  There are flotation tanks, Audio-Visual Entrainment devices.  There is, of course, meditation, which means “paying attention” in Sanskrit.

Any sitting still in silence long enough WILL release latent tensions.  If they are huge, they may come unwound very quickly in unpleasant ways, like a coiled snake striking, (although I don’t think that was the explicit image intended in the original use;  I am adapting it a bit for my own purposes.)

So, you first pay attention to tension, and learn to control it and release it.  You don’t rid yourself of fear, but of the fear of fear, of the voices that won’t leave you alone, and the emotional baggage that also won’t leave you alone, and of course the resting, continual physical tension that follows both.

At some point, what I feel happens is a spark flies by.  Something luminous and good.  Brief, instantaneous even, but very real.  The second stage of the process is sitting and waiting for it to happen again.  This is mindfulness, properly speaking, where you are attuned and waiting for what might be termed a cosmic accident, or a return, or something else.  Whatever you call it, it is the point of this work.

And if and when these miracles start happening with any regularity at all, you focus on them.  You concentrate on them.  That is the third phase of spiritual work.  You relax to invoke, pay attention to the results, then learn to control those results with long patient effort.

And I will say that I feel the Earth has within it a sort of ambient Fear.  A transpersonal fear.  A fear within the Collective Unconscious that unites–or in the event divides in violence–all humanity.

I felt this fear a few weeks ago.  My nights are filled with terrors.  I joked to myself the other day that I am the star of my own horror film.  Well, sometimes, in some of them, one of the heroes kills the villain.  That is the ending I am looking for.

And in this case it is that fear, which I will describe momentarily.  As I say, I have issues every night.  I would describe them as what happened to you in the worst nightmare you ever had, where you woke screaming, maybe shaking, completely terrified.  That happens to me several times most nights.  I’m used to it, but not used to it.  I will hazard a guess that most of my usefulness as a thinker comes from the extreme focus I have always required to survive.  I just compartmentalize things, and keep everything in its place with a very strong will.  I’m very, very good at that.

But a couple weeks ago it went next level.  There was this sort of creeping cold, as depicted for instance in the Harry Potter movies when the Dementors come close, that just came in the room, and it felt like just injected me with fear of the purity of pharmaceutical heroin.

That is where this idea comes from.  Transpersonal Fear, connected to this planet.  Fears and Fear are part of the scheme, the environment.  They are in the air and sea and earth.  They are part of being human, and perhaps part of the reason we are born on this planet is to master that energy; which, as I say, is the first step of spiritual evolution.

And I will append to all this one last thought, that of Walking Time.  I have recently realized–an insight brought from my efforts to relax–how out of the moment I am most of the time.  I think many of us live like this, outside the sensation of the passage of time.  We live in dreams, and ideas, and of course media, which are a sort of manufactured dream.

But I had a few moments where I was feeling the passage of time, and I realized this is a key spiritual task.  Feel yourself in time, as if floating on a river.  Now that I sort of hone in on it, the passage of time often feels frightening, doesn’t it?  Perhaps being bored is a hypoarousal–a powering down–brought on by fear of time.

I think this is the essence of being present in the moment.  I tend to think of Being Present as an abstraction, like you can Be Present once, and just stay there, being present endlessly.

But of course it is a dance, a give and take, a back and forth, a RELATIONSHIP.  That is the word.

I think this is part of what Klein described.  Following my own method, I have been and will continue to try to reconnect with that feeling.

And OK I will add one more comment.  A not implausible reading of Buddhist teaching is that Nirvana (extinguishing or snuffing out) is a successful spiritual suicide.  Samsara is horrible, and Samsara is all there is, so if you want out, you need to figure out how to kill yourself.

I have never seen it put that way, but I’m pretty sure I’m on solid doctrinal ground there.  In the original formulations heaven and hell are both part of the wheel.  Even going to heaven is not enough.  As I read it, Nirvana is essentially a negative, as in Not Samsara.  When asked, I don’t recall the Buddha giving a clear answer.  Perhaps I’m making all this up, but I don’t think so.  I probably need to reread some books on their ideas.

But the point I wanted to make, and I think I’ve said this somewhere before, is that plausibly what is extinguished is RESISTANCE to What Is.  I used to try to imagine living forever as a kid–never mind where, although I was raised Baptist–and always getting dizzy.  Infinity is a concept you cannot imagine.  I can’t in any event.  We simply created a word for it since the possibility is logically necessary.  You could for example start counting today and count the rest of your life without reaching the last number.  More simply appear as you travel and always will.

So what if your destiny is to live forever, both on Earth and on other planets?  Could that not be seen as scary, because that is impossible to conceive, and I now notice that I become frightened of things I cannot conceive? It is unknown and unknowable.  That frightens many of us.

But I think what I will call Living in Time is a useful practice.

That’s enough for today and much more than I intended.

Half of a conversation with the ghost of a Sixties radical.

“You keep saying insurrection like its a bad thing.  You got to give The Man the finger from time to time, right?”

“What?  We ARE The Man?  How the fuck did that happen?  The whole goal was to get rid of The Man, not put on his suit and tie and stick our own fingers down other people’s throats. ”

“God, I’m glad I didn’t live to see this.  I’m not going to lie: that guy with the hair would probably be a kick to smoke a doobie with.”

“No, I don’t give a fuck, you pastel, plastic, fake piece of shit.  We got Jerry on this side, so I’m out of here.”