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This thing that just pissed me off, part of the trigger for me was the sheer banality of this individual.  I am better than that, some part of me said.

And I well remember back in my youth, in my teens, deciding that WHATEVER I did with my life, I was not going to be a generic suburban statistic, with 2.2 kids, a house with a 30 year mortgage I planned to trade up in a few years, a wife who was good enough, and a job that mostly didn’t suck.  Settling.

You know, a slightly better version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I9GqxDA4ac

But everyone who aspires to transcend our culture tends to wind up counter-cultural.  When they go up, you go down.  When they turn right, you turn left.  And the bigger a fuckup you are, the more bohemian respectability you have, if you live in the right city, with the right people.

And of course Jack Kerouac and his literal fellow travelers kind of set up the model for this, in the United States at least.  The rejection of bourgeois respectability and sensibilities.  No: he was going to go down in a flame, fighting.  Anything but the prison of normality.

Here is the thing: it is HEALTHY not to want to be a perfectly fitting cog in a machine which DOES NOT MEET YOUR EMOTIONAL NEEDS.  It is healthy not to want to be perfectly synchronized with a world which always leaves you feeling hungry, and a bit emptier every day, sensations which you only make go away by allowing your inner knowing and spirit to atrophy.

At the same time, being a screwup is not spiritual either.  Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.  I recently printed out a picture from the movie Leviathan to remind myself of this, and am looking for a poster, which I’m sure I can find when I have time.  You can beat the system in small ways as an individual, but not in large ways.  Masses of people can, but not any one of us.  It will crush you, as happened in that movie.  It doesn’t matter how mediocre and rotten it is, or how just your cause.

And I thought to myself: am I not living in a machine, too, albeit in my own way?  Am I REALLY better in any meaningful, lasting way, than this guy?  And it came to me that no, we are really much more alike than different, my vanity notwithstanding.

And if I style myself a “sage” someday, am I better?  Not really.  No, I think the main value of following a different path is the pleasure in it.  It is the fun.  The goodwill, the humor.  It is not saying FUCK YOU to THE MAN.  That is living in relation.  Deal with the Man.  Make deals with the Man.  The Man has his place, his role, and it’s not my job to tell him how to live, or how much better I think I am.  He is going to look down on me in any event.  His values differ from my own, and he will never judge me by my standards.  This whole process, of course, is why we live differently: we both pursue what matters to us.

And of course the ones following the paths less taken tend to have less money, and less stability.  This is an obvious and common cost.  If comfort and security are the measures, then this is a dumb path.

But here is the thing: my life is my life, and if I am living well, or poorly, it really doesn’t matter how anyone else is living.  I asked for freedom: I have freedom, within limits largely defined by my own capacity for ingenuity and work.

You can’t “beat” anyone in Life.  What you will die with is the sum total of your experiences, and you cannot possibly know those of anyone else, and have forgotten most of your own.

So I guess to forgive him for being conventional and banal, my task, really, is to live my own life better, while realizing we are both in the same maze, and if my life might in some way better, it is only because I have forgotten him in “following my own bliss”, which is a cliche I am permitting myself in honor of this post.

Flat things open, and reveal three dimensions.  Grey envelopes contain the rainbow.  If I am really dumb one day, I can always hope to do better in the next.

I just had someone piss me off, in a way which would have severely triggered me in the past.  But I had just done a Neurofeedback session, and I’m like “ah, it’s in the past.  It’s done.  Forget about it.”  And for a split second I DID.

And then I looked at that (it is called introSPECTION), and realized that holding on to wounds is something which happens mostly when there is already an underlying strata of hyperarousal.  I will be mad about one thing one day, then replace it with something else the next day, but the whole thing is glued together with an underlying emotional current which makes it easy for me to float the paper boats of wrath and hostility, both of which amount to unforgiveness.

I take that underlying energy and transform it now into this memory of this offense, now into the other.  And new ones spring out, more powerful, more palpable, more colorful, more charged, easily.

To forgive, phenomenologically, in terms of how it feels, how it presents itself to the consciousness, amounts to relaxing a tight knot of emotional dysregulation.  It is relaxing a tension.

And obviously, no specific forgiveness will help, if there remains an underlying current of energy.  Learning to calm the limbic system, to self regulate, amounts to the ability to forgive in advance.

We are animals, certainly.  We are spirits, I believe.  But our experience is where the two possibilities meet.

Forgiveness is the resolution of the fight or flight or shame response, from long ago.  Humiliation is a wound, too, isn’t it?  That wound triggers a chronic agitation, or emotional inflammation, that makes all future hurts easier to overreact to, and harder to let go of, which is to say forgive.  We fight old battles, again and again, until we let them go.  This we call forgiveness.

And you might say, well there was this one person, who hurt me long ago.  My fiancee ran off with my best man on our wedding day.  I will never forgive him.  Well, what happens every time you think about it?  You feel like breaking something.  You feel like strangling one or both of them.  You got into hyperarousal, in other words, in ways you can’t control, and this hyperarousal is liable to cause you to yell at someone you would not have yelled at, to drive too fast, to refuse to listen to your friends story.  All of this only hurts you.

Forgiveness is allowing this tender spot to relax.  Forgiveness is returning to a base of calm.  Forgiveness is reaching a point where when you see or hear their names, or even see them, that you are not triggered.

Almost everything in life, good and evil, wealth and poverty, has to do with trauma and relaxation.  I really believe this.  Nothing is more important than figuring out how to undo trauma, and teaching the traumatized to let go of their natural fear, pain, grief, anger and shame.

Read this last Wednesday or Thursday: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/haarp-firing-faa-issues-warning-about-electromagnetic-radiation

Today Portland is 112 degrees.  It NEVER gets that hot there.  Many places don’t even have air conditioning.  That is on the hot side for Phoenix.  Portland in general is cool and rainy, or so I read.

It would certainly be easy to invoke divine justice, but I think HAARP–the weapon, perhaps, of some of the demons–instead.

Can we expect a harangue and “demand for action” on Global Warming from the usual suits–some of them expensive pants suits, and one of them Joe Biden, the nominal President–tomorrow?  We will find out.

HAARP is one of those things where it is impossible to know how paranoid to be.  But it does seem like with technology like that, heating up spots in the atmosphere must be very easy.

In a sane, functioning society, where the government was held accountable to the people’s representatives, and to the law, we would know a lot more.  I would like to see Congress look into this and determine once and for all what all this thing is capable of, and as importantly, who is really in control of it, ultimately.

Is the Northwest being burned to affect the news cycle?  Early reports on the Arizona audit may begin dropping as early as tomorrow, and Michael Flynn said that the Uniparty would do SOMETHING to disrupt and distract.  This could do the trick, although lacking cable I don’t really know how hysterical they are at this point.

I have struggled over the years to define with reasonable clarity in my own mind what is “wrong” with sentimentality.

I have felt it and expressed it often enough when drinking.  That is one of the perils of drinking; you become maudlin.

At the same time, one of the problems with the world is its, to use Weber’s term, “rationalization”.  Most of us move around robotically, and seem to feel if anything much too little.  That is why “passion” became a virtue, rather than a sin, as it was for most of history, until perhaps the 19th century.

Passion, we are told, is  life.  Life, therefore, consists in feeling a lot of it.  But this is only half right.  Yes, emotional health will lead to a healthy emotional connection to the world, and contentment and even joy, but feelings in and of themselves are not and should not be to the goal.  The goal is connection.  It is reacting the right ways to the right things, to the right extent.  How can you know if you are doing that?  It feels right, if you are healthy.  That is the point and purpose of feeling: nuance, judgement, balance.

Contrast Sean Penn with whatever image you have of the Buddha or Christ.  Who do you think is healthier?

[And I will repeat a joke told about Larry Ellison: the difference between God and Sean Penn is that God doesn’t think he is Sean Penn.]

Here is what I want to say today: the issue with sentimentality is it is emotion which clouds our judgement, and which arises from within reactions we have to ideas within our own minds, rather than in reaction to the world itself.

There is a closed loop, in other words, making this a fundamentally narcissistic way of feeling.  And to be sure, narcissists CAN and often ARE sentimental.  AOC, to take one obvious example, is no doubt honestly often emotional.  But she is stupid and self absorbed, so what she is reacting to, by and large, exists only in her mind.

She is not seeing, to be clear, actual suffering “out there” and feeling compassion, so much as seeing the world and feeling what a pity it is that the world has so little of her.  If only the world would bow at her feet, what a grand thing that would be.  She would set all alright: and she wouldn’t even have to TRY.  She is that good.  Just ask her.

Healthy emotionality is organic.  It is soft and subtle, most of the time.  Most of our rages and depressions and great terrors spring out of trauma, when they are not healthy reactions to horrific situations.  If you feel horror in the face of war, that is one thing.  If you feel the need to kill outside of a war, though, that is another.  That is an unhealthy passion, springing from trauma, itself the product of trauma, going “all the way back”.

But people who feel SATISFIED, who are getting a steady current of emotional nourishment–which is the aim of healthy spirituality in my view, and certainly in my own Kum Nye practice–are not going to go on wild mood swings, and they are not going to project their own unmet emotional needs onto the world.

Actually, maybe that is it: sentimentality is projecting our own emotional needs onto the world.  If you need love, you cry because so many other people lack love.  If you hurt inside, you cry because so many other people hurt out there.

Oh, that may be close.  Have to think and feel on it.

And by the way, no thinking happens without feeling.  This is certainly now mainstream biology (tltafdnr: too little time and focus; did not read), but also something easily observable.  All of my thoughts have feelings tones for me, and I have often noted how feelings lead easily to certain sorts of thoughts.  If you are wondering why a certain sort of thought–fearful images for example, or sad ones–keeps occurring, look more carefully at how you are feeling.

Our vision becomes clearer by subtraction.  We have to identify and remove all the filters that prevent true clarity.  Merely being “intelligent”–particularly as measured by tests of various sorts–is not even remotely close enough.  There were plenty (dozens, in any event) of people as smart as Einstein.  What he brought was focus, imagination, and most of all a spirit of play and curiosity.  Those are all emotional characteristics.

And as I “heart” on this–what is the emotional equivalent to thinking, since “feeling” is so imprecise (we need a better word)?–this issue can be further simplified: honest emotion is accurate.  It reflects what is out there, or at least what you can perceive at a given moment.  Sentimentality is not.

Emotions become sentimentality, in other words, the moment they become delusional.  I’m not sure if I agree with the following statement, but I’m going to play with it nonetheless.  Discuss: Affection often becomes affectation.

Oh: and is affectation not often mistaken for affection?  I was listening to some teenage girl talking on the phone at the mall yesterday.  The snippet: “you know I love you and all. . .”

Life is a tragedy for those who think, and a comedy for those who feel.  Wait, flip that.  No move it back.  Shit.  Figure it out yourself.

Now, THAT I think is funny.  Judge me if you must.

 

Some people say that little white lies don’t hurt.  I tend to disagree.  As one concrete example, masks don’t do shit as far as viruses, and particularly anything BUT an N95 mask.

It MIGHT have made sense to mandate N95 masks, but they are expensive, in relatively short supply–or would have been for quite some time–and to be used properly need to be replaced after one or at most two uses.  That is my understanding.

You can argue, as the New England Journal of Medicine was in effect bullied into arguing, that they make people feel more safe.  They create greater peace of mind.

This feeling of safety is illusory.  It is social manipulation  And here is the thing: the lie is not without cost.

Here is an argument I will repeat, before moving on.  In my personal  view, masks INCREASE both infections and following deaths slightly.  They did this by creating a false sense of security, such that I have on many occasions seen three masked people huddled together closely talking, and doing because THEY COULD NOT UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER BECAUSE OF THE FUCKING MASKS.

Given that masks don’t stop aerosolized viruses, this made infection MORE, not less likely.  If they had been able to understand each other, they might have been farther apart.  It seems possible for the virus to spread 20-30′, but the largest concentration is going to be within 5′ or so of the infected person.  The 24″ spacing I saw often, obviously, is less than that.

And as I’ve said, masks gave mildly sick people an excuse to go out.  Maybe your only symptom was a headache.  Well, you otherwise feel fine, and in any event, the mask protects others from you.  Only it doesn’t.

So on the one side we have bad science being used to buttress what amounts to social policy.  And on the other, we have the consequences.  As said, increased infections are likely one outcome.

But there are others.  I think the psychological trauma of masks will last a LONG time, particularly in kids, who are more or less being trained to be hypochondriacs and germaphobes.  They are being trained to OCD in various forms.

And the RAGE that was directed by the Covidian Fundamentalists at heretics is not something I myself will forget any time soon.  There are businesses in my town I will never go to again.  I have a shit list, and I have a list of people who were cool.  And it is MADNESS to me to think this shit is STILL GOING ON in many places.  Batshit insanity.

And most experts think several billion masks will wind up in the oceans.

It took me a minute, but that brings me to my point: there are real, physical outcomes to lies chosen by our elites.  Those billion masks are physical things, that will directly affect living things, including human beings.  Those masks will ONLY be there because they LIED TO US.   That is an undeniable physical cost to their lies.

And more generally, global warming–as I argued at length in the very first post on this blog (just go back to the Beginning)–is bullshit.  The Earth may well be warming, and we may be affecting it SLIGHTLY (that is the WHOLE source of actually scientific, rather than political, controversy), but not much.  It is not an emergency.

We are being told Global Warming is an emergency, which all educated policy makers know is a lie, because it is a PRETEXT for a power grab by the elites.

But this lie has consequences too.  Here is what I would argue: plastics, in our water ways, oceans, estuaries, lakes, and streams, are a VASTLY more clear and present danger than global warming.  But precisely BECAUSE global warming (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, to be clear) is bullshit, they CAN’T ADMIT IT.  So they keep pushing this idiocy, when in fact GENUINE potential crises NEED TO BE ADDRESSED.

I don’t believe in absolute moral principles (other than my three), but the importance of honesty in the public domain is close to it.  Nothing good comes from lies, even when told with what was once benign intent.  One lies leads to another lie, and the people telling these things get so tangled up and eventually confused themselves that INTELLIGENCE BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE.

Never make intelligence impossible.  I will amend a post I made a while back that lies and censorship act as a sort of intellectual Gresham’s Law, and together drive out all good ideas, and eventually all good PEOPLE.

The more I think about this, the more I think kids need to be indoctrinated with small and planned amounts of shame to build basic socially desirable habits, like refusing to lie, refusing to steal, refusing to cheat, standing their ground when society for some reason needs them to, etc.

We are experimenting with children with no shame, and it is ugly.

But what I would suggest is that this shame should also have an end.  The brain is a pattern building organism, and ingrained patterns become habitual.  Once socially positive patterns become habitual–genuine tolerance would be another desirable end–then that person needs to have explained to them that all moral rules are relative, and they should, by some process, have their innate shame removed from them, as a sort of mark of full membership in society.

In other words, when you are a child, you should be taught habits, as reinforced by rewards and punishments.

When you become an adult, you should be taught to think and feel clearly, and your training wheels should be taken off.

Here is the thing: we have done it both ways.  Obviously, the more important of the two for the survival of society is bringing up kids who are not little psychopathic narcissistic, dishonest, cheating monsters.  I would hope the need for this is obvious.  And it seems obvious that this is what we–in far too many cases–are IN FACT DOING in the United States and elsewhere right now.  These kids have not only not been spanked, they haven’t even been yelled at or disciplined in any way.  In far too many cases, their parents have even kowtowed to them.  Let’s call these little shits Ryan’s.

Most traditional societies, as Peters points out, do not fail to socialize their children.

But at the same time, this shame also bleeds out in all sorts of bad ways.  It is not best in the LONG run.  And perhaps in important respects a large part of many spiritual traditions is undoing the socializing of the kids.  You beat them to prevent a societal train wreck, then they spend the rest of their lives trying to get unstuck.  Not an optimal system.

To my mind, trauma is really THE psychological topic.  Everything relates to it.  Everything returns to it.  It affects all aspects of “society” (a non-existent entity it still makes sense to talk about).  It informs our politics.  It informs our science.  It informs our universities.

And I will actually comment too that parents who beat their kids are still connected to them.  They are showing them a way forward.  Do this, and you will be fine; do that, and you will regret it.  But in traditional societies, if you perform your role, all is well and in relative balance.

So many kids in the computerized West spend ages maybe as young as five through their teenage years locked in their rooms, being socialized by images on flickering electric screens.  The parents are locked out, emotionally and almost physically.  This breeds, in my view, the trauma of inattention.  We all need emotional attunement.  We need people in our lives to recognize and react to what we are feeling.  Without that mirroring some part of the psyche fails to develop.  And we see this with these psychopathic kids, who, in any image that occurs to me over and over, are like bread that was baked before it had fully risen.  It is a doughy mess in the middle.  There is density where there should be light and air.

This makes them angry, frustrated, and searching, without knowing they are searching.  And it makes it VERY easy for them to form and find enemies, especially those given to them by people not as different from Emperor Palatine as they should be, in an open and formerly broadminded democracy.

Think about this phrase “molding character”.  You optimally put a kid into a certain shape, to begin with; and what they do with it after that is what makes it interesting watching their life unfold.  You give them a basic shape, then permission to alter it as they see fit.

It can’t be said too often that all our problems have solutions, but we need to be open in our discussions of them.

And all large problems start as small problems.  Global problems of consumption and greed and pollution all started in homes somewhere, with specific parents and care-givers, or care-withholders, as the case may be.  We all start as a sperm and an egg.  We are all helpless for the first 5-10 years of our lives.  All complexity begins as simplicity.  If you want to fix the complexity, then fix the simplicity.

I have from time to time pursued lists of “great movies” some way down.  I’m a bit of a cinephile–I rewatched Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” yesterday–but it takes me so long to digest movies, I’m also slow.  I’m a slow reader, too.  But I like to think that when I am done, I have taken more from the experience, doing it once, than most will in several passes through.

A movie whose fascination for Roger Ebert took me a minute to understand is Gates of Heaven.  It is one of those movies where certain images and commentaries reappear in my awareness years later.  I have the ability to remember little things from little movies twenty years later sometimes; and of course I’m good enough remembering plots that there is little use watching any movies twice that depend on plot twists.  The DVD’s on my shelf are by and large “rewatchers”, although I have also recently discovered that I can in most cases buy DVD’s for little more than it would cost to rent them from Amazon (who I–no doubt to Jeff Bezos’ considerable consternation–am trying to avoid as much as possible, while recognizing that he actually doesn’t care, and they are damned convenient sometimes).

Be that as it may, there is an awkward scene in the movie where a guy who runs a glue factory talks about how he helps the zoo dispose of dead zebras and elephants, and lions and tigers and bears.  Think about the logistics: what do you DO with a dead elephant?  Bury it?  How?  Does it get a coffin?  Is it a good idea just putting a giant animal in the hole that will decompose?  Actually, it just occurred to me one of the benefits of a coffin is the ground collapses less or at least more slowly.

In any event, the zoo in this case decided to let him have the dead animals, or have them at a reduced price, to render into glue.  Everything, presumably, from giraffes to anteaters wound up–unknown to the public–at the glue factory.

Is this not a metaphor for ideological leveling?  Universities are glue factories.  No matter how great a talent you may have possessed, certain elements of your mind will be seized, liquified, and rendered permanently sticky.  You will stick to everything that they put on you.  You can’t help it.  You are rendered emotionally and intellectually inert.  You are amorphous.  There is no clear line between you and your goose stepping neighbor.

The obvious corollary image is from the third season of Stranger Things, where all the “infected” people simply dissolve to become the larger monster.

Now, is this fundamentally different from what is done in the military?  No.  And think about the military from the standpoint of fight, flight or shame.  The point is to engage the amygdala strongly, then offer conformity as the only way out.  That is what basic training does.

What I would argue, though, is that in the military this conformity serves a purpose, at least ideally, and by and large most people who have served seem to carry with them both pride, and an improved self discipline that serves them well in the specific and idiosyncratic, individual purposes to which they put it.  You dissolve for a minute, but come back.

It is apparently a commonplace in the Marines particularly that for a few months after basic training you are considered a bit insane even by much longer serving Marines.  You have the zeal of the cult member.  But it fades over time with most, even if the basic structure does not.

But in universities the POINT of going is to build liberality of mind and character.  It is to cultivate openness, diversity, the ability to disagree without violence, the ability to entertain multiple ideas simultaneously without feeling compelled to embrace any of them.  It is to build curiosity, inquisitiveness, and ideally a spirit of play with ideas and concepts that is a source of delight for the newly minted public intellectual.

None of this is happening in most universities.  Prager U–which in my view has done yeoman work in the Guerilla War for Public Sanity (if they ever give campaign ribbons, I think that should be the name of the conflict)–had a student call the POLICE on them.  His complaint?  That by their PRESENCE they were–this is a quote, and a word he said multiple times–“terrorizing” the students.  Watch this video, and tell me this student does not have a mind boiled down to glue.  The COPS–not a profession known terribly well for liberality of mind and spirit–are vastly more principled and understanding than he is: https://www.prageru.com/video/student-calls-cops-on-prageru/

Again, should the professors not feel shame, that this student is apparently even unaware that the First Amendment applies PARTICULARLY on university campuses?  And, again, is this not where it becomes obvious that THEY DON’T FEEL SHAME.

I actually have another post on that.

Bukowski called this poem “Law”.

“Look,” he told me,
“all those little children dying in the trees.”
And I said, “What?”
He said, “look.”
And I went to the window and sure enough, there they were hanging in the trees,
dead and dying.
And I said, “What does it mean?”
He said, “I don’t know it’s authorized.”
The next day I got up and they had dogs in the trees,
hanging, dead, and dying.

I turned to my friend and I said, “What does it mean?”
And he said,
“Don’t worry about it, it’s the way of things. They took a vote. It was decided.”
The next day it was cats.
I don’t see how they caught all those cats so fast and hung them in the trees, but they did.
The next day it was horses,
and that wasn’t so good because many bad branches broke.
And after bacon and eggs the next day,
my friend pulled his pistol on me across the coffee
and said,

and we went outside.
And here were all these men and women in the trees,
most of them dead or dying.
And he got the rope ready and I said,
“What does it mean?”
And he said, “It’s authorized, constitutional, it passed the majority,”
And he tied my hands behind my back then opened the noose.
“I don’t know who’s going to hang me,” he said,
“When I get done with you.
I suppose when it finally works down
there will be just one left and he’ll have to hang himself.”
“Suppose he doesn’t,” I ask.
“He has to,” he said,
“It’s authorized.”
“Oh,” I said, “Well,
let’s get on with it.”

I was watching this video the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWSg1z0hzjs

(why did they call him a “class poet”?  The version I watched didn’t have that).

At some point he says he got into poetry because most of the poets he read who were contemporaries were “sissies”.  He asked, in effect–I forget the exact verbiage–how they would write about nasty fist fight?

And obviously, the guy is an asshole sometimes.  He is also sometimes brilliant.

I am going to say I try to do philosophy in roughly the same way he wrote poetry: straight forward, clear, in your face sometimes, and unapologetic.  And yes, I am definitely an asshole sometimes.  I’m working on it.  Seriously.

But one of the great problems of the moment is that nobody wants to ruffle feathers.  Nobody wants to risk offending anyone, much less being openly pugnacious and aggressive.  Here is the thing: THOUSANDS of qualified academics, the world over, HAVE KEPT THEIR MOUTHS SHUT EVEN THOUGH THEY KNOW THIS PANDEMIC RESPONSE IS AN ABSOLUTE CLUSTER FUCK AND COMPLETELY INDEFENSIBLE SCIENTIFICALLY.

It’s far better to go too far, especially when principles and human lives are concerned, than to hide in fear.  I would sooner forgive someone who goes too far in an honest cause than someone who chickens out and fails to do their job when their job needs doing.

This poem was written by a pugilist who DID NOT GIVE A FUCK.

If you’re going to try, go all the way.

Otherwise, don’t even start.

If you’re going to try, go all the way.

This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe even your mind.

It could mean not eating for three or four days.

It could mean freezing on a park bench.

It could mean jail.

It could mean derision, mockery, isolation.

Isolation is the gift.

All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it.

And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds.

And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.

If you’re going to try, go all the way.

There is no other feeling like that.

You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire.

DO IT. DO IT. DO IT. All the way

You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.

 

I have said this before, but I am watching an old film of Tarkovsky’s (There will be no leave today), and it occurred to me, not as a direct result, but as a trigger of the sort I look for in viewing both good and bad art, that conformity is a way out of inner conflict.  It is a path to peace, of a sort.

I have spoken of fight, flight and shame.  Most people only think of two.  Freeze is one qualitative level down, that of the reptilian brain.  But shame is an eminently mammalian response.  When we are trapped, and cannot escape, shame pushes us into either dissociation, or conformity.  That, or retaining a sense of fight or flight, which manifests as non-compliance and rebellion.

Anxiety, of the sort which people have been arguing since at least the 1950’s is a perhaps defining trait of modern humans, can be eradicated by conformity.

This is the emotional bulwark against which all truth tellers have to contend, in this moment, in this world.  Endless motion, endless noise, endless opinions, endless information that is overwhelming to the senses of nearly everyone, creates anxiety.  The Simple Answer alleviates this.  This is why masks were so important to certain sorts of people, even though they never made any logical or scientific sense whatsoever.

I’ve said this approximate thing many ways.  Here is one more.  And obviously it explains Stockholm Syndrome easily.

The thing about freedom is people have to be trained both to value it and to use it.  And when I say “trained” I mean parents and communities who have read deep wisdom, learned from it, and done their past to transmit it.

But this process is made more or less literal by Islam.  Islam means “submission”, and Muslims live within “the abode of peace”.  This, even though internecine and sectarian conflict has been nearly continuous since nearly the beginning.

Human cultures have reached countless ways to achieve relative stability, often at considerable cost to the spiritual growth of their members.  Our task, in this time, is to figure out how to evolve past all of this.  Where in the past we have had relative static peace, we all need to grow up, and able to endure and ultimately benefit from dynamic peace, or what I have tended to call Active Peace.

All of it, in my view, begins with state management, which BEGINS with the ability to achieve deep relaxation voluntarily and regularly.  No one who cannot do that will, in the end, be able to travel very far, or add much to useful human knowledge.

And this is the ultimate motivation, most likely, behind our present atavistic urges, to return to conformity enforced by unescapable power.  The power elites, themselves, are not free.  They are anxious, angry, fear ridden people.  They are greedy, depressed, and have the arrogance born of actual helplessness and uselessness.

This blog itself is an account of my own spiritual journeys, and consists, I think and hope and believe, in countless acts of small progress.  I might call this perceptual walking.

I wasn’t going to blog any more today, even though my mind is filled with ideas, but this one felt like I needed to write it immediately.