Stuff on my phone. My brain won’t stop sometimes. I’m over sharing again—I’ve left the diary entries in—but will say I dreamed of heaven again last night, for the first time in a while, and you cannot lie there. And mostly what I describe are wounds, some existential. Is admitting I am a scarred and often scared human being shameful? No, if anything I think it is brave. It gives permission to others to admit to THEMSELVES that they know exactly what I am talking about, and have always known, but could not ADMIT they knew, because it hurt too much.
I’m going to skip most of the editing. Im never going to be good with these little keypads with these large hands.
Notes 3
Be sure and comment on the importance of role playing in authitarian systems.
One could argue that the roles of history—say caste roles in India—made people more stoic and stronger and more accepting. This is likely somewhat true. But such coerced social roles also no doubt engendered the subterranean hate and anger which fueled the wars and atrocities of history; in India wars against women, the Dalits, and eventually Muslims.
Whatever its true source or more likely sources, Q took off because we all KNOW we are being lied to, and that big decisions are being made in the darkness. And hope depends in no small measure in having SOMEONE in the system who still cares about freedom, truth and dignity.
I think a key spiritual task is getting comfortable with discomfort. It is vastly safer and vastly more productive of happiness.
Sufficient unto the world is the violence we find. Ahimsa is perhaps most usefully not adding unnecessarily to it; and it is perhaps the most interesting insight of Ishmael that agriculture is unnecessarily violent, and more violent than hunting and gathering.
The value of psychological maturity is that it both frees you FROM unmanageable anger and shame and anxiety and frees you TO pursue worthwhile goals that build stable happiness and self respect. Maturity is the ONLY path to a happiness over which the individual has any control.
A hypocrite is really a traitor to virtue.
Its interesting that mid20th intellectuals lacked Attachment Theory, or any theory of trauma.
I would stipulate something I wil call the Law of Emotional Continuity, which states that when ideas change radically they tend to retain the same emotional tinge. De facto worship of the Tsar became worship of Communism. The Frenck killed a king but maintained a thirst for legal Absolutism.
In a culture worthy the name it is not laws that keep people from killing each other, but mutual regard and mature restraint. Laws only become needed when civility is breaking down.
You can’t win every fight but you can fight every fight to the end, if the cause is worth it.
Himan history is one of Collectivism. The different have always been punished when they transgressed the sacred, although few likely did so, since they needed the others to survive. What is new about Orwellian Collectivism is its scale, its retention of the pretension of scientific rationality, and its utter and complete repudiation in reality of all rationality, all reality testing, and even the flimsiest shard of an effort at consistency. Modern Collectivism is nothing more or less than a segment of humanity refusing to grow up.
I think it is useful to stipulate that psychology parallels but precedes spirituality.
A sense of shame and disgustingness can and often does lead to a high level of performance, but the only real satisfaction achieved is relief in avoiding failure. There is no self there where positive feelings could reside.
A shame based life is lived not to fail. It is lived to reduce negative experience, never to experience positive ones, even if positive experiences do accidentally happen from time to time. It is findamentally unfulfilling and I think particularly most mid-life suicides come from people simply tired of living with a continual critical gaze on them, and who lose, or feel themselves losing, the energy to fight for an impossible perfection.
Warriors live not to fail. Their only real positive is public recognition. Permanent warriorship is innatural, and it is worth noting the citizen soldiers of Athens were the equals of the Spartans. It is reasonable to don the mantle of “fight not to fail”, and then take it off and become a warrior in potential only, just as one is artist or jurist potentially.
Comment also on the black community being treated like supprresed children.
The sun shines on good and evil alike; on the living and the dead; on decaying life, on barren sand, and ice it will never melt, at least in any of our lives. But if it chose not to shine on death, decay and evil all life, and all possible goodness, would die too. An open life cannot really choose who receives the benefits, nor should it, as new life is often hidden in old death.
With the Boomers you have an entire generation that refused to grow up, and refused to learn to face the world in an honest and mature way, and they raised immature kids. The goal of their political engagement is creating narcissistic supply through the sacrifices of others. “You can’t afford a Tesla. Well I can. That makes me better.”
In the actual jungle the strongest predators need fear the least. In the human jungle this is true too, but strength often looks like ruthless sociopathy.
Ponder importance of celebrity and social media recognition in a world starved of attention and authentic relating.
The narcissism on the Left is not in caring for the poor and unlucky: it is not caring about actually doing something sustainable and good about their situations. It is confusing gesture for action, and verbal intention for careful thought and responsible attention.
Why do human problems go unsolved? Immaturity, of which both dishonesty and sloth are examples.
Hallucnigens would be vastly more effetive if done within an emotionally intimate and supportive community.
Totalitarianism is structural enmeshment. Authoritarianism is the strict parent—perhaps an irrational and even psychotic parent, but one who only wants your body, not your mind and soul.
I kept dreaming about being able to lay back on both my knees so Im ordering that book. OR, maybe just adding pilates leg thing to routine.
It is very hard to react appropriately to emotionally numb, humorless, uncontactable parents, because you are not reacting to what is emotionally there, but to what is absent. This morning I felt rage and the urge to strangle my mother. And I myself lapse easily into numbness out of habit, particularly in calibrating with her, as that is the only emotionsl response she can understand and which does not make her anxious, which of course I pick up on. Craziness.
This is the kind of weather for which ice WATER was intended. As I’ve noted, most soda cannot be drunk in quantity any other way.
Rejecting self pity really should be framed as acceptance, as in “accept what I cant or should not change”; and all virtues both positively and negatively: accept your lot without complaining in general/ reject self pity; don’t quit/ persevere; dont shut down emotionally/remain curious.
Persistence is not a virtue until you think about quitting. Acceptance—although on a continuum—only really comes consciously in play when you start rejecting.
All my life I think I have balanced the fear of failing if I do act with the fear of failing if I don’t. I think a more positive, proactive, mistake and forgiveness friendly mindset woukd be an improvement.
Ots an idd fact that one can be anxious about being made more anxious. It actually is common to fear fear.
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For my diet it might be worth planning a major fuckup so I can practice getting back on track.
It is not so much that the world has lost its mind so much as those who control the lens through which we see the world have.
Courage and work capacity are related.
The real problem with Authoritarian Enmeshment (are there other kinds?) is that all emotional growth first depends on consciously feeling what you are feeling, and that is imposdible when everyone is getting their feelings jumbled up with one anothet. It would seem a sense of confinement and following rage and panic would be the result. Emotionally it is asses and elbows with no end in sight, or possibility of planning an escape but through individuation.
For me, I need to let depression, despair, anger and fear alone, and just live within them until they diminish or, better yet, I learn to manage them. And managing happens at that level. If I have to invoke philosophy or psychology then I’ve already “escalated.”
Another way of putting it: I do want to live in a world where the dude in a skirt, or the men or women holding hands, do not feel fear of emotional or physical violence, but I also want to live in a world where they do not feel empowered to direct emotional or physical violence AT ME. You do your thing in peace. It stops there. This allows me to do my thing in peace also. The demand that I share your worldview amounts to an imposition of secular religion, which the first Amendment was specifically intended to prohibit. I would actually go so far as to say that, within the principled framework of the Constitution, discrimination based on political views amounts to a secular religious test, and a clear violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
Put another way, Political Correctness as a uniform and coercive creed, amounts to an Establishment of religion, where religion is defined as a set of practice and belief organizing and orienting the lives of a mass of people.
I need to focus on what is possible for me. Competent work is neither hasty nor desultory, and that would be a good place to start. I think I need to go through a period of conscious arrogance in order to expand my felt sense of what is possible for me. I would guess sustained confinement can generate grandiosity. I need to let this be. In any event it was almost certainly already there. I just suppressed my awareness of it. What us there, I need to see.
Listening to White Rabbit I kind of feel a chill and latent cruelty in it. And I think the mobs of the 60’s could easily and perhaps accurately be thought of as lynch mobs out for blood, based on bad information, and utterly unconcerned with the truth. Then or now.
I don’t think there is any point—and likely harm—in trying to get rid of any emotions, like jealousy, gluttony, lust, sloth, anger or whatever the others are. You CAN’T get rid of them: you either deny them, and in so doing give them the power invisible powers have over you; or you own them recognize them, process them, and leave them without hate or revulsion in a tool box, ready to serve you if they are needed, as in modified forms they sometimes are. Lust, for example, is not bad: obsessive and self indulgent lust is. All the sins are simply virtues—or at least natural feelings— taken too far.
Historically, Communism has been the act of imposing an aristocracy in the name of equality. I will note too that the pleasures—for those who feel them—of privilege are enhanced if you first immisserate the mass of people.
One of the things movies and TV do is allow you to live vicarious lives, sharing dangers and ncertainties with no real danger or end meaning to the uncertainty.
I think all times in human history contained both difficulties and opportunities (obviously in varying proportions). I think an intelligent approach is to identify the problems of our time, accept their presence and inevitability, then work patiently to do what is possible to ameliorate them—while recognizing no problems and excessive ease and easy sloth ARE ALSO problems. This, and personal growth are, I think, the two best aims of human life.
Logical reasoning is not usually that complicated. It is accepting the RESULTS of good reasoning where many people have trouble.
I think true meditation begins when we give p all hope of directing our experience and simply allow it.
Often our “chains” consist in something we are pulling or pushing.
I think I use the news as a sort of thermostat to turn my emotional temperature down.
I think children stop growing emotionally when they encounter premature sexual energy. Innocence enables later flourishing.
The Lefts true strategy is to go low then protest in the most strenuous terms when their targets do anything but go high. They then call their own road the high road and proclaim themselves morally superior. This is more or less the literal truth. Trumps undeniable virtue is that he understands this game. Nothing he did or said would have been exceptional or noteworthy in any way coming from the Cult. Just to take example from countless cases the CHILDREN of Supreme Court justices are being threatened and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are tacitly not just condoning this but ENCOURAGING this. How much lower can you get?
I think much pleasure in life comes from contrast. A cool day after many hot ones feels good. Likewise a warm one after many cold days. Rest after work, but also work after too much rest. And the enjoyment of privilege sought by elites is heightened by knowing most people are miserable. Non-duality is learning to grow beyond these responses, which are largely biological and conditioned.
Social media, for many, is a sort of mirror. You take selfie after selfie, trying to get it just right, just “casual” and unaffected enough, while of course feeling the opposite of casual. The Victorians likely actually were more casual. But was in not precisely a mirror which trapped Narcissus himself?
I think for many engineering an apolcalypse makes more sense than waiting for Godot. It promises an end to thrir anxiety and confusion.
The philosophical importance of psychology is that it posits there is a unitary human species, in which all humans share the same drives and same needs, and following similar moralities and claims to moral virtue. Psychology is inherently anti-exclusionary. There is only Us.
Logically, anyone who wants to avoid growing up—which amounts to an aversion to change, which can present challenges to the childish temperament—needs an intellectualized and ritualized “place” to live. Ideology fits this need perfectly, since all you have to do is conform, not think and grow; and you are surrounded by like minded and equally weak-spirited people with whom you perform ritual behaviors, like marches and protests. The whole thing acts like an insulating cocoon. If someone tells you to grow up, your “friends” (in quotes since all must obey the same master and getting out of synch will result in the ejection of anyone, so personal loyalty CANNOT be a value in this world) are yelling back in unison with you, and that feels good. It actually makes you relish that sort of conflict.
I think understanding someone who has never felt understood is close to rescuing them.
Electronic vehicles are easier to control. Its hard to stockpile batteries andcI suspect they are easier to turn off remotely.
Regarding “whiteness”, simple question: is it better to be born black in this country or any majority black country in Africa you want to choose? Any of them. Is the answer not obvious, that even though this nation was founded BY white people and FOR white people that the principles of science and political Liberality and Liberalism have worked to make all lives better? There is no mass exodus to Africa. In fact a great many of thrm want to come HERE for better lives. CRT is just a resurrected reverse racism, created by frustrated ideologues for whom emancipated and thriving blacks are just as frustrating as the bourgeoisie was for classic Marxists, and for the same reason: people who do not need them make them feel less important, as indeed they should. A life lived for conflict and scarcity cannot but feel the loss in peace and plenty. It ill suits their destructive rage and deep vanity and narcissism.
I think as a child I was too frightened to admit I was frightened. This has persisted into adulthood. Keeping that energy out of conscious awareness has been very tiring
Fear ebbs and flows. The fear of fear does not. That is why it is better to admit fear frankly. Sometimes it will disappear entirely.
The fear of fear is really a fear of triggering traumatic helplessness. I think playing with fear, edging into it, helps alleviate this fear, every time you allow yourself to feel and admit fear, but that complex does not activate.
It was in Elementary School where I really learned to lie about my fear. I read many books with heroes and buried myself in other worlds. That habit continued until today, perhaps. Its odd that even in D&D I never wanted to be a brave fighter. I always wanted to stand in the shadows or at a distance.
This whole COVID thing feels like Corporations have taken over the world. And the Left is fine with it. Supportive. Enthusiastic even. Turns out they dont oppose illicit profits but people who DIFFER. Left wing greedy corporations are not a problem at all. It is like the CDC has become the PR agency for Big Pharma and most TV a sort of intracorporate rolling ad campaign to keep people groomed and on the inside.
There is a strong connection between role playing and sentimentality, to the point that the entirety of their moral sentiment is better viewed as unconscious affectation.
Its likely my mother saw me shake in fear.
Diary: I saw a dance studio and had positive thoughts. Then it hit me I like the IDEA of dancing but not the work. Never the work. And my whole life is like that. I like cookbooks but not cooking; buying books but not reading. I am good at thinking but not doing. Some of this I guess is common enough, but I woukd like to learn to do better.
The preeminent act of freedom, both personal and political, is self assertion. And the core outcome of the transgender agenda is to engender a muted and confused sense of self, and one tied up in knots of triviality. This conscious and organized assault on the psyches of our children, in other words, is rxplicitly intended to make them politically, socially, and psychologically malleable. If you can be convinced to give up your birth gender—one of the most basic and primal units of identity—what then is not possible with thw slightest push? Hitler and others said “get them young”. Well they are getting them young.
There does not need to be a Satan for there to be Satsnism.
I think “being in the moment” is nothing more or less than living without fear, which translates nearly instantly, and certainlg easily, to a spirit of play.
AA line: choose your tomorrow but start today.
Politics—which is say the manipulation of perception and conscious alliance building—is only necessary in a reactive system. If elections are corrupted our politicians do not need to play politica with the elrctorate. Their only truly political considerations concern their standing with the Power Elite, which in this country is SUPPOSED to be the people, but which cannot be if their influence is eliminated by fixed elections. And this fact appllies to all. If Democrats are happy with the claimed direction of our country, by the time they want to raise objections, it will be much too late. The Beast will not bare its fangs fully until the cage is shut. And at that point “meaning well” is no better than greed or larceny, both of which it enabled.
I wonder if drinking baking soda before taking probiotics would help them get through the stomach. It seems likely.
There is a close connrction between the feelings of emotional confinement and that of being lost. When you lose your inside the outside world becomes incomprehensibly chaotic.
I think what narcissists—wmotionally immature and incomplete people—do is fail to respond on many channels. You feel something, express it, then get nothing. It is invisible to that person. It doesnt exist. Some part of YOU doesnt exist, and this creates existential doubt, emotional pain, incompleteness, and feels in some respects like a prison, because your emotional range of motion—your emotional freedom—has been curtailed. And often some part of us feels shame and self loathing for failing to get the love and understanding we needed. It blames itself. “YOU HAD SUCH A SIMPLE TASK. JUST GETTING YOUR OWN MOTHER TO LOVE YOU.”
I think there is a Principle of Traumatic Decay—and my comparison here is with particle “decay” of Particle Physic-/which I would state that as a long standing traumatic spasms loosen, one trauma will decay into 5 or more smaller imaginary traumas. You still have unpleasant, bad dreams, but nonetheless manageable ones, versus ones where you just shake, or awaken screaming with no memory of the dream.
I’ve long had an inner voice saying NO ONE LOVES YOU. I got the addendum today: AND I WILL MAKE SURE NO ONE EVER DOES.
In some resects atheism is a medicine intended to heal some types of wounds created by some forms of religion. This is the claim made by proselytising atheists in paticular. But it is a medicine given out indifferently to everyone thst creates a different sort of illness, and arguably a worse one. As individuals, atheists are about as likely to be good—healthy emotionally—people as the religious. The difference is that religion provides powerful contextual support to doing socially good, self sacrificing things, and the doctrine of eternal oblivion does not. Dogmatic atheism also causes its adherents in the end to reject SCIENCE if it fails to conform to their orienting assumptions, just as happens with the religious. In important respects, it is the identical disease.
If Everywhere is Here, and Everytime (a word we need) is Now, then you can never BE lost; you just FEEL lost, and you feel lost whdn you lose the emotional agility to br here and now because of fear and shame. You can fear fear, fear shame, be ashamed of fear and even ashamed of feeling ashamed. These are all traps that fisconnect us and make us FEEL lost.
I think two forms of human connection are possible are abstract and. ceremonial, with traditional culturres in important respects lresembling enmeshed families; and mature, Liberal individuated personal and specific connection. Violence is inherent to the first. Sacrifice, as actual animal and himan sacrifice, war, and emotional repressiveness, becomes needed to mediate undifferentiated people. And in this sense the “gods” of that group may usefully be seen as shared hallucinatory and socially mediated delusions, as Durkheim, ia, argued. There is only one real God, the source of everything.
I think to say we are wired to be tribal is pdifferent than wired for connection. Tribal, maybe, is wired NOT to individuate. It could be argued most human beings for most of human life have been enmeshed in some ways; and I think we cannot begin to fully inderstand the cruelties this has enabled.
I think the idea of meta-emotion is useful. This would be the fear of fear, shame of shame, guilt of guilt, etc., and perhaps any of them mixed. The method and aim of learning emotional digestion, which I would argue is the BEGINNING of honest spirituality, is getting back to primaries, and allowing all of them to flow as the dynamic information for which they are intended and as which they are most useful.
It may be that gentleness is strength, but it may not always be best to be strong.
Trauma works like this: your capacity to process emotions is like your RAM. If it is exceeded, that slice of experience is removed and stored for later pricessing. It continues to make subtle and not so subtle demands on attention. This reduced openness makes future overloads more likely and at some point numbness results. This is a loss of the capacity fir emotional processing and amounts to a loss of the felt sense of life. The likelihood of overwhelm, of overvoltage is of course tied on one side to what actually happens, and on the other to what may best be termed confidence, which I will define as anxiety less ability to self calm. High anxiety with no capacity to self calm is helplessness, which makes overwhelm almost mathematically inevitable. Some aituations are objectively helpless, like an artilleey barage, or prison. But feeling lucky or blessed—or feeling the presence of God—amount to self calming strategies, increasing perceived power and confidence.
Dealing with immature people, you can grant their behavior stems from their own homes, their genetica, and the like, but SOME PART of their behavior, of the percetions they allow themsrlves to see and ackniwledge, IS CONSCIOUS DECISION.
There is an adult equivalent to that baby experiment where the mother looks away. I tried and tried to get my mother in particular to feel me, to empathize with me, to connect with me, but like that mother in the video she refused. She continues to refuse. That is why it still hurts to talk with her. As an extremely precocious and sensitive child I was often very upset, and she never chose to understand. Some part of this is conscious, and I think rationalized by her Biblically based conceit that in effect I am her slave and owe her allegiance. She chooses not to see because she seea no ethical reason to do so, and is not authentically generous in any way. I went into hyperarousal, as a baby, infant, toddler, youth, and young man repeatedly. She never showed me any meaningful mercy. She no doubt threw me a few small crumbs I clung to, but carelessly, thoughtlessly, and never consistently. What has taken me SO LONG to realize is that I do have enormous unmet emotional needs. I knew this, but have been unable to stay present long enough to begin integrating them.
The Unconscious is that place where words are not the medium of movement.
As the individual psyche progresses in complexity, the need for complex mirroring increases too. Where a hug may have sufficed, and a look of familial reognition, more complex beings need more compmex “touch”. They need to talk about feelings, which cavemen likely never did.
The sactificial cult arises from a social order that is in principle static, and which assigns a role externally to all members. The Hindu caste system might in some ways be seen as a subcontinental tribe. The sacrifice arises from unspent, pent up energy that cannot be dispeled by individuated connection.
I dont know why but it is a strange thought to me that I may have known a book or poem in another life. With poetry especially, perhaps other feelings bleed through, as they would with anything truly mythic and deep.m
There is, I think, a tipping point with evil, where all paths forwardp contain pain, but where the comforts of cruelty come to be seen as offering more immediate and reliable relief.
Softening of the pain of betrayal or sin is perhaps equal to forgiveness. When the pangs of regret or rage diminish, the crime has lost its hold on your present consciousness. The knot is undone. That is about all any of us can ask.
Sadness is a dilution and dissipation of energy. It is grounding. It is energy melting down and out, perhaps like a cold candle. It can be a sustained calm emotional movement, and sometimes, perhaps always, one of emotional reorganization and reintegration. Perhaps sadness could be defined as the energy manifested in conscious but resisted change. Anger fear and shame all tend to concentrate and expand. This makes sadness in some respects their balancing counterpart. Humor also dissipates energy, and in most is probably connected in sime way to sadness.
Behind every enduring hardness within us is an unresolved softness, usually a sadness, one of loss, or a related and seemingly interminable regret or guilt.
Empaths with narcisstic parents I think get confused on a deep level as to which feelings are theirs and which their parents. They mirror their parents but their parents do not mirror and acknowledge as real and valid the feelings of children who have no experience in all this and no easy path to learning this distinction. This is me. I am literally finally learning, at my Age, which feelings are mine and which a sort of self sustaining residue of ambient strong currents from my early childhood. I find myself often physically disgusted at what was done to me emotionally, but feeling THAT is I think healthy.
Communion, as an interpersonal wave function, is not meant to be continuous. It is part of a rhthym between particle and wave. Both are needed for health. Mass Formation, or enmeshment, or being a headless one, is a sort of unnatural spasm.
I think I finally figured out my rescue fantasy: when I fail, my mother is eager to rescue me. She always tacitly encouraged me to fail—such as by obsessively saying “don’t work too hard”, and inducing anxiety in me whenwver sqhe could—and my father of course loved it, because he could both mock me and not have to fear me. So some part of me has LONGED for failure and FEARED SUCCESS, because on an unconscious level it meant I would never be loved, and not unreasonably I never wanted to give up that hope. Well, that dream was never possible, outside of me willingly becoming a pliable child again, and in any event my mother does not have long to live. It was always sick, always wrong, but i have needed something—a sense of safety? A challenge? Time and space?—to bring this deep latent splinter out.
So this ache and this resiatence and pain comes to this: every time I start something some part of me says “if you succeed you will never be loved”, and I can feel my mother looking on at my paralysis, confusion and pain with approval. Then another voice says “if you dont get this done you will feel shame.”. And I fight it out, always using vastly more emotional wnergy than this essentialky simple work requires. It is the same with mental work, but the advantage of physical work is it is easier to use will to force a body to move. That is why I gravitated to physical work. And my intellectual work is really my effort, ironically, to STOP feeling drunk, disoriented and confused. It is my effort to impose order on a spinning world.
This is all close to healing insight. Im close to some form of freedom, but I need to continye relaxing into my work, and not drinking, and trying to achieve comfort in behavioral consistency.
I think my mothers almost conscious plan was to keep peomising me love if I failed and if I diminished myself, but never giving it. I was either going to break down and die, in which case she wookd have been glad because she hated me; or shrunk to almoat nothing, moved in next to her as she specificallt told me she fantasiEd about, and allowed her to use me vampiriaclly as narcissistic supply the rest of her life. In neither case was I ever loved or understood. Some part of me felt this intuitively but I was so lonely, and in ao much emotional pain, that my orienting feelings were alien to me. I knew she hurt me but I did not knkw why.
These abortion protesta are making it obvious there are a lot of women out there who hate children. We like to assume all mothers love their children, but this is clearly not true. Hate is not uncommon, and I suspect bouts of resentment are nearly universal.
There are so many problems with the Uvalde response that, combined with a propped door I still do not get, I will wonder aloud if this TOO was a set up, designed for the use to which it was in the event put.
The Pro-Choice movement, or faction, is pro-abortion, obviously. This makes them effectively an Anti-Birth Movement, and its not hard to tie that back to an Anti-Life Movement by a pathway other than reversing Pro-Life. It is reasonable for women to assert the right to only give birth when they choose, but all this goes far beyond that; again, via a different pathway than anti-human radical environmentalism, it returns to a fundamental self loathing and following Misanthropy.
In dealing with money its all gain and loss. More is good less is bad. But in LIFE its all about buoyancy. What mskes you lighter (in both senses) and what heavier and darker? There is no real connection between the two processes. They are disconnrcted lines, OTHER than that struggling to hold on to wealth and achieve PERFECT security makes you heavier and darker, always. You can have money and be spiritual, but not CLING—the Bible says love—to money and be spiritual. Money is a pass through means, that is all. All useful work is latently work on yourself, which is to say building lightness. It would be worth working for no money, if gains are reliably achieved, and no amount of money can compensate destroying your soul, which is to say, your remembrance of what really matters.
Kum Nye is really creating acmild stress—an indrntation on your forearm by your thumb, sustained attention to your belly, a fast or vigil or hard work—that cause the underlying, latent system—which we call energy patterns—to react in a homeostatic effort to reassert themselves. This propcess, with attention, thus reveals them, and awareness ofvthem permits flow and self (re)organization.
The “bourgeois” type was hated by the Left—the new words are White supremacists, but it means the same thing, which is “non-communist” and nonparticipating member of the elite—because it was for them just that: a type. It was a role which felt to them banal, unreflective, uninspiring: in a word, boring, tedious, and through sheer torpor and mental and behavioral inertia inimical to the REALLY COOL STUFF THEY WANTED TO DO. But of course the Communist type is a type too, nest pas? And it a type that because it REQUIRES all members to view the world through the same narrow and distorting prism, is actually more tedious than the bourgeoisie. And on some level, no truth can be fully ellided, so they substitute rage fir passion, and willfully confuse destruction with creation. Both do, after all, alter the status quo. And because most of these people hate themselves and their lives, WHY NOT blame wveryone else and pretend that ALL THEUR LIVES NEED is the final victory of, well, whatever, as long as it isn’t bourgeois white supremacy. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE WANT, OK? BUT YOU ARE THE ENEMY. THAT IS ENOUGH FOR NOW.
All work is meditation, so do it with reverence an competence, but without greed or aversion.
Desire drives a crooked road.
Heaven is a place where David Byrne can spend the next thousand years listening to all the music ever created in human history, in the company of the people who created it, and have CONTINUED creating it.
You cannot lie to all of yourself. All you can do is allow cowardice to partition your conscious awareness.
A good aim is to make all work—ALL work—magical and entertaining. How do you do this? Cultivate a sense of the magical then slowly generalize it.
Adventure is really misery and uncertainty embraced, often after the fact, sometime long after the fact. But it is best embraced as vivid experience while it is happening, which is a skill requiring a lot of confidence. As such it is a sort of Hard Kum Nye, in that it makes STRONG indentaions on your patterns and not infrequently destroys them, both for good and worse. This time we are living through is an adventure. Its scary. None of us know how it will end. So be it. Amen not to what I want or what might be, but to what is, just as it is in this moment. One day your grandkids may be asking you: DID YOU REALLY LIVE THROUGH ALL THAT?
If I ever do a podcast the topic will not mainly be what is right, but how we return to the capacity to discuss our feelings snd views about what is right in peaceful, reverential and resprctful, thoughtful and productive ways. How do we grow up as a society and civilization, in other words? If I might amend slightly a great Thomas Sowell quote, the most important question is not what is right, but how we talk about what is right.