The prices of understanding may vary.
(This was what I wanted to title yesterdays post. Im waiting for a glacially slow breakfast and decided to indulge myself).
shame and disgust—self disgust—are related.
Almost no americans are happy to have enough to eat, a roof over their head and someone to love.
Being a leader is a skill conceptually no different than being a plumber, but your medium is dealing in uncertainty and the complexities of people and evolving situations. Those are the pipes and solder.
Reverse Scottish shower: start cold, finish warm
Dorje with breath, better than flowers
Listen to organs: splenetic, bileous. Why not specific holdings and specific intelligences for different organs?
There are three different wars: one people against another, one government against another and a government against a people, like the US government against the Indians, or the present US government against dissidents. Abstract conflict framed in “spiritual” terms often underlies this, but no true spirituality seeks conflict.
What is the alternative to war? Play, humor, creation, love and authentic spiritual practices and rituals of all sorts. Plenty to do, and pain is plentifully available as needed.
For all intents and purposes a life based on what you dont want is a life based on hate, and vice versa. If your purpose in life is rejecting something or someone, hate is your true love.
I think perhaps shame might be defined negatively as all the boundaries/limitations of thought, feeling and behavior that we cannot perceive. We just stop somewhere, dont know why, and perhaps dont even realize we have done so.
Post on “what do you see”. Effectively this is treating the mind as a sense. And seeing the trivial is a sort of openness.
I think political Liberalism might be asserted to consist in the political application of the economic principle of scarcity. Specifically, it is the study of the optimal utilization of the scarcity of human right. After a point my rights conflict with yours. How do we balance BEST all competing claims?
All addiction is emotionally logical. This is the best starting point for discussion.
The past slithers up to the present moment like a snake. A remembrance is being bit.
Intimology: science of intimacy. Look that word up.
What would a Mozart concerto sound like at 1/100th speed? I was imaging having an attention span 100x or more better.
I think self love looks like smoothness, grace, balance and pleasure/joy. It is precusely a LACK of self consciousness. It is easy flow. I think self love is perhaps also defined negatively as the absence of INAPPROPRIATE shame.
Cycling through the SIFT might be useful. And I wonder if FEELING is best defined as a reaction to sensation, image or thought. If you say “I am happy” that is a thought. But the REACTION of happiness is a feeling. Perhaps life as a skill consists in learning to slow and diminish automatic reactions, such that both stability and “control”, of a sort, become possible.
Shame is an invisible boundary or prison. This is why rebellion and crime feel so good: those walls disappear for a time.
Manias can only be replaced by new manias. The energy driving them is deflected traumatic current. A mania gives the person a place to hide and hold all the feelings and thoughts that keep coming out and which must bectransformed to avoid becoming conscious.
An honest passion is rooted in a progressive and abiding love and interest.
Even when tempered by religious or other virtue, our society is dominated by the thirsts for wealth and power, and not the pursuit of wisdom.
No moral order not rooted in wisdom can hope to endure without violence.
In group meetings we should start my name is X and I am a little bit nuts
Conformity to a specific group is a simple way to mute shame. Bravado and arrogance might even be seen as shames inverse
I look and wonder how most people mute shame. I feel like shame pushes people into fixed ideas. Fixed ideas become UTTERLY right by necessity, because doubt triggers shame. Only relatively happy people can put the right amount of weight into their ideas.
In designing a party space where everyone got drunk it would be good to avoid hard surfaces and make everything soft, including carpet.
I think any true spiritual tracher must be a CEO who came through the mailroom and did every job in the company, which is to say, who has fallen prey to literally every vice possible, indulged it, and felt regret from the inside. Only thus can true com-passion form on an honest and spontaneous basis.
I will add, though, that “spiritual work” almost seems to be what you do to become a teacher. This is silly. Its vain. And I think quite grnerslly the moment you position yourself—and that is the word—at the top of the pack or front of the herd, you stop growing and perhaps even insensibly become their creature. The possibility of the joys of spiritual growth are given to all of us. It is our most important life gift. And we do not owe God growth—the Tao is complete. We dont even OWE ourselves that. There is no debt. But there IS pain on a regular basis until we begin opening our gift.
Put grape leaves in with greens.
I think the worst sorts of theological disputes can be usefully laid next to and analogized with both Marxist and postmodern cant. I think in all cases the goal is to vent anxiety by creating artificial worry and conflict that can be extended infinitely, since no practical end is ever in sight.
Philosophy and religion tell us how we should act. History, science and literature tell us how we DO act.
Consider the need to learn to deal with all human emotions—contempt, sadness, disgust, fear, and even joy.
I think manipulation consists in directing free floating anxiety into fixed tension that manifests as on-going body tension, subtle or overt. Brainwashing is inducing anxiety through fear and pain that is likewise knotted into something solid. Fixity of all sorts is a “resting” place for unresolved tensions. It is rest because it is a KNOWN tension that can manifest as opposition to inevitable conflict.
People with diametrically opposed ideas held the same WAY would manifest them physiologically the same way. They are the same person neurologically and physiologically.
Only stupidity originating in fear can be called even remotely intentional. True? Not True?
You have to feel what you are feeling before you can hope to learn to channel, mute, and amplify it. To “control” it, in the way flowing water is controlled.
It is perhaps true that we renew our pain 100x a second, and could allow it to disappear at any moment.
I think to feel what one is feeling fully, without rejection or judgement, is simultaneously to enable an alternative. As long as there is rejection of experience there is division. This is the true duality of Dualism, and allowing it to cease the true point of Advaita. And allowing bad experience is like too much peanut butter without water. It hurts. It butns. But here is the thing: until allowed and thus cleared up, ITS THERE ANYWAY. This is Duhkha. This is desire, which is the wanting of this and avoiding of that.
Clouds are just a visible emergence of the water vapor that was always latent. It is a question of quantity not quality. This is not a bad metaphor for the Tao.
At its root philosophy is thinking about experience and this is only natural to do when experience is unpleasant. A perfectly happy people would have no need of philosophy. And thinking is work. Philosophy is constantly pointing and pushing. The only useful philosophy is that which enables progressive useful changes in your habitual state.
Patience is a constant, kind companion.
I think it is axiomatic that you cannot think your way into any new state. Positive (or for that matter negative) thinking can only take you to known places. Logic tells you where to look and where to go, but it cannot take you there. That is a different “system.”
Most of us spend most of our lives trying to minimize both our actual suffering and more importantly our AWARENESS of our suffering.
Actual science denying is dialogue refusing.
Ideas are description to aid in recognition, and reason a method for deciding what to look for. A description of a cat is not a cat, but having it enables you to recognize one. All spiritual work is learning state management in the directions of tranquility, joy, love and compassion.
Its more than a little insane that most of the rushing around Americans do is to get in front of a TV or computer.
Strong passions of all sorts are what people with unprocessed wounds substitute for simple and plentifully available delights. It is the fog which they call clarity, and by means of which they run continually in circles, never quiet, never at peace.
Pain tends to contribute to abstraction, and anstraction tends to be or seem to be, a resting place from pain, Ritual perhaps is a spasm of reality that enables the persistence of abstraction. Christianity, for most, is purely abstract. That is why it has been so violent.
The rejection of abstraction is also an abstraction. Postmodernism is an attempt to get the emotional benefits of abstraction without the clarity needed to be able to feel complicit in any crimes. If you say nothing at length and there is nothing to understand, no OBVIOUS evil can flow from it. But by eliminating the possibility of principle based thinking, defense from evil becomes impossible, and it is easy enough to see how those who have rendered themselves helpless would become obsessed with both trivia, and attracted to Apocalypse.
The benefits of hard work are twofold. One you unlearn (if you learned it, as many Americans do) the fear of hard work. Dealing with all fears is essential, and hard work is a resource that combats helplessness and childish dependence. Two, by pushing emotional boundaries, as with all Kum Nye, latent patterns manifest and can be inhabited, learned from, and integrated in a larger whole. Work itself is never a useful end, though, and exhaustive mediation seems unlikely to me to yield many benefits. Most of the time you are VASTLY better backing away from the edge. Anyone who has mastered hard work needs to then master leisure and moving slow.
Meaning is a felt sense. If thought cannot engender a felt of anything but certainty—which is not at all equal to meaning, belonging, or happiness, and this point should be underscored—then the service of logic is solely in determing where to look, which is somatic AND SOCIAL work, since human contact affects our capacity for state regulation directly
Having rejected reason based on the reason that reason was used to justify violence (along with instinct, greed and passion, which it metely cloaked) the modern Left is left with emotion. But their emotional range consists in yes/no operators. Conformity brings satisfaction and difference rage, with the two mixed in the middle places. Nowhere is there nuance or EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, which should be the ideal and lingua franca of a world based on feeling.
There is no rational reason I cannot judge a book which makes no clear logical arguments based on how it makes me feel. Without reason there is subjectivity. Rational claims can be made about “better” and worse subjectivities, in terms of their correllations with what we want, what our goals are. But pure subjectivity is solipsistic and unbridgeable. But in my view “philosophy” is the act of clear thinking. It can be poetic but never poetry, much less be valued as both incompetent poetry AND philosophy.
The thirst for global government is rooted in fears of various sorts.
Why have none of the many good books on philosophy and economics enabled global freedom and prosperity? This is a question any new book needs to answer. The answer is that thought does not lead to growth. A musical book or LSD laced book would be more logical if probably also counterproductive.
The real problem with consumerism is people lack a good alternative. Stupid politics is the best they can do, and it is pathetically inadequate and highly destructive.
You can think yourself back to a state you know, both of calm and panic. You cannot think your way into anything NEW, which is why positive thinking does not work for people largely lacking positive experience.
No doubt someone has said this, but I will wonder if Utopianism is Secular Messianism for Jews.
Getting a feeling of someones ideas is often enough, if that feeling matches what is present. You cannot respond to “logic” rooted in emotion using logic. It is sufficient to recognize the emotion as originating the real argument without dealing in depth with the superficial and essentially arbitrary logic coming from it.
The shadow is really just latent capabilities and tools—like aggressive violence and hate—which we have not integrated and added consciously to our tool chest.
Shadow, another take: the gateway to spiritual growth is located in the last place you WANT to look. It is overgrown, covered, painful, and decrepit.
Word: Hurtred.
It is an odd fact that Christians consider themselves superior because, in some ways. they have the humblest and most mortified founder.
It could be argued comic books are a contemporary form of Expressionism.
Impermanence simultaneously becomes Presence.
By definition, science is what you can question. Dogma is what you cannot. All provress from science has existed in turning dogma into “things you can question.”
The question to ask about shame is whether or not it is providing accurate information.
I think all spiritual practices that are real are begun in a spirit of play and experimentation. Sacred ideas in general are training wheels, to be abandoned by those capable of intrepid exploration. People CLING to their training wheels, and never know the land is free and in any event they can only find their own path, and no one elses. I think it is fear of this exploration that turns people into orthodox teachers, and explicators of other peoples words.
Gray represents all the things you see without seeing them. It is a cloak of invisibility. Much of our world is thus being rendered invisible by paint.
Its much easier for sinners to forgive sinners. I suppose this is one reason hypocrisy is worse than sin: it is two sins, one of which should have manifested as the virtue of forgiveness.
When you see someone struggling with an obvious delusion, its easy to assume you are different. But it may well be varying shades of delusion all the way down. We cannot posit solid ground anywhere. Perhaps that is the hidden meaning of processing Kun Zhi, which I always took to be fixed emotions.
What if our body size expanded and contracted with our capacity for attention? Would women be larger than men most of the time?
The pleasure of the freedom from worry is in general worth 100x whatever it is I might be fearing I might lose.
Shame from mistakes—or even excessive anxiety from fear of mistakes—is a sort of training wheel. It is a behavioral safety loop that keeps us from getting too far off track, ideally. But for the aware mistakes can also be fascinating and even pleasurable sources of learning. You get to see another side of things, and interact directly with heretofor unseen aspects of yourself and others. EVERYTHING is food for the soul, everything enlightening, everything useful and worth welcoming. Its of course a much bigger Life basket too. The more you can welcome, the less you have to fear.