Moderates United

I wrote this over ten years ago.  It would have been 2009-10, somewhere in there, while the Occupy Wall Street nonsense was going on and the 1% meme was rolled, after going through focus group testing to validate its manipulative potential.

The irony, of course, is that the 1% meme may well have been created by people connected to Black Rock and Vanguard and State Street, whose existence and ubiquitous relevance I intuited, without being able then to put names on it.  But I spoke of de facto trillionaires, and that is what some of them are, and indeed most likely were back then.

I would change some of this, but not the basic thrust of it.  It seems to me that cryptocurrencies backed by blockchain (which I honestly really, really don’t understand, although it’s been explained to me over beers in a few places) would meet my standard of an alternative currency, optimally one backed by gold or some other rare commodity; which one does not matter.   And even the gold is not necessary: the key element is that the quantity of currency DOES NOT CHANGE.  Ever.  It can diminish without problems, but not increase.  Increase is always counterfeiting and theft.

Anyway, if you want a permanent solution to inflation, here you go.  The people who benefit from the system OBVIOUSLY can and will oppose ideas like this with every penny they have.  I see no practical way to get any of this done, but suggesting it has to be the first step.

https://goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

And to be clear, you click on the clock for the actual treatise.  It’s obvious enough for most, I would assume, and I’m not posting for idiots, but I still felt a compulsive need to point that out.

Cancer cells are normal cells which, for reasons we dont really understand, begin growing without restraint or intelligence. Cancer will kill you, but it uses what inside you already to do it. In some respects it is a parasite but in othets it is YOU, but you without intelligence, amplified.

Likewise I would like to argue here, today, that emotional “illnesses” of all sorts originate in the unwanted and often unintentional amplification of emotional potentials that exist within all of us.

The capacity for being remorseless and reckless that characterizes sociopaths, for example, exists in all of us. It is merely amplified unintelligently in those who come to be defined—by others, or even by themselves—by this trait.

We are all the same in some level, but all of us are fed differently.

There is more I want to say, but not this monent.

I will add that this is obviously a REAL meme, not an astroturf meme, because all REAL memes have grammatical or spelling errors.

Everything Baret describes is in Kum Nye, with the difference that the resources offered by Kum Nye are VASTLY more comprehensive.

But having said that, it was useful for me personally to hear a different sort of voice.

Both come from non-dualist perspective. The Sanskrit is Advaita and in my understanding the Tibetan Dzogchen.

Sit and feel your body: this is I think literally the first exercise after a few oriented around sitting properly.

Learn to feel joy without an object: this is, if memory serves, two exercises later.

Feel your shoulders, your feet: THIS IS THE WHOLE SYSTEM, which amounts to intentional evocation and then listening to the following resonance.

You have breathing exercises of various sorts, which include mantra meditations, then you have massage, which is an EXCELLENT way to get to know your body in detail, inch by inch.

Finally, in the first set of books, you have well over 100 specific ways of awakening attention and following energy.

In Joy of Being you are working more with the energy and space around you. The exercises are more advanced. They are in general physically easier, but depend for their effect on more refined attrntion.

And Kum Nye Dancing, if I am honest, I dont really understand, physically or conceptually.

If I had to guess—and I don’t but I will anyway—I would suspect that the first two books concern Space and the Dancing is creating Space within Time.

I don’t know what that might mean, but I sure think it looks smart.

I was thinking about a word association in the shower today to fish.  My answers were fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish and fish.

Why?  I often say things then explain them to myself.

My guess: a tranquil mind, thinking of an object, need only think of that object.  What word association does it catch a mind in motion, and attempt to map out the circle it is traversing.  And I would add that it MUST be a circle if there is movement but you are still stuck, right?

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Further thought on Baret.  There may be many of these.  He was thought provoking, so he provoked thought, in me. Or in my space.  Or thought Out There, as it seems to exist in me.’

OBVIOUSLY, the theory that you should dispense with theory amounts to a mild or perhaps major hypocrisy.  Silence would be the best answer, probably, and Yes to every question a close second, given his non-systemic system.

But he IS French, after all, and they are good at their sort of word play.

Here is the thing, though: it is impossible for me to know how directly he knows what he knows–if we use that word, as I just did–but if you call this sort of talking his dance, his painting, then it is just a natural outgrowth of needing to do something on Earth.  Your body does have its own built in need for movement of some sort.

This is a more or less perfect rationalization of his giving talks, or perhaps giving words.  Honest compassion for us many idiots is another.

More likely, he is still in the grips of some fear himself.  More likely, he still enjoys the slight possession of the role in which he is a dispenser of non-wisdom and non-awakening, along with wisdom and awakening, such that both are extinguished, like anti-matter and matter, in an explosion of invisible energy somewhere we cannot name or describe or think.

This would be the theory, that we can’t call a theory, but which I just did.

You see, there is no violence not possible with words.  I will wonder aloud if similar violence is impossible in silence.  Less likely, I feel certain.

And I will add that if you understand him, I think, you would never want to attend one of his lectures.  It reminds me of the story about Nasruddin, in which he was such a bad teacher on purpose that only the worst students stayed with him.

Here is the thought I will leave you with: Gap is a word which describes something which does not exist.  Holes do not exist.  Space does not exist.  But we have words for them, because they are useful.

All of this teaching, as I understand it, exists in that space between the one thing and the other.  It is the moment your foot is in the air, but not yet touching the ground.  It is the moment when you feel the inbreathe before you speak and sing.  It is the pauses in music.  It is the tip of the shadow you see before the person walks around the corner.  It is a quiet meadow, before the birds start chirping.  It is the first hint  of sunlight in the earliest dawn.

It is, in other words, what is unremarkable, and unremarked upon.  It is the stillness which does not exist in contrast to motion, but which finds an invisible home there.

OK.  That satisfies the pedant in me.  That will conclude today’s lecture about why you should not give lectures.

I watched Tucker Carlson’s one hour interview with Johann Hari concerning his book “Stolen Focus”.  It was interesting, in that specific context, contrasting his interview style–which he had created in order to be able to go into greater depth–with the five minutes of Bill Maher I was able to watch, in which Maher interrupted Hari every five seconds, making any sustained point or focus impossible.

We obviously have a huge problem with focus and attention.  And here is what I would suggest: the capacity for attention and focus is more or less equal to emotional maturity.  It is a basic building block.  If you cannot focus, you cannot “adult”.  You are functionally retarded.  Stupid.

And we see this every day on the internet, don’t we?  Social media posts are greeted with what could be called an Ideological Scan, which is basic pattern matching, and which can be done in ten seconds.  If there is a match, you agree.  If a mismatch, people become angry and combative.  And they may go back and forth in thirty second sound bites for hours, without ever taking five minutes to develop anything like a deeper understanding.

Self evidently, this dynamic does not bode well for the future.

I merely record what I see.  You and I do not need to participate in this dissipation of our dignity.  That is the minimum we can offer as our payment for the privilege and miracle of human life.  Not being willfully stupid is a service too.  It starts by realizing you ARE being willfully stupid. And no matter your beliefs, if they consist in thirty second cartoons, you ARE being willfully stupid.  This holds even if I would find your ideas congenial.

And I will suggest this: what free will we have originates in attention.  If you think about it, you have ZERO free will about your emotional reactions.  A rubber mallet hits your knee, and you react.  Something happens in your life and you feel sad, happy, angry.

Now, obviously you can SUPPRESS that reaction.  You can control what your body does.  An insult does not force you into violence, even if that is your first impulse.  You can CHOOSE, first, to not feel, then to THINK.  This requires will, though.  You choose the will, but not the reaction.

And will is finite and expendable.  So, in a long series of emotional reactions, sooner or later the involuntary reaction will win out.

The way to control all this in the long run is staying present with your emotions, with your body, and gradually and patiently denuding them of their power.  The long term goal is to so calm your tension and fear that you begin to feel this ocean of joy in which we all swim without realizing it.  You then allow that water to slowly permeate your consciousness, such that little or nothing can divert you from feeling good.  This is how you “win” at life, in my view.

But this winning requires attention.  Sustained attention.  The ability to sit quietly, ultimately, for hours, without distraction.

What we are raising is an Earth filled with arrogant morons, who are physically weak and soft, utterly contemptuous of cultural and moral difference, and empowered by technology to acts of violence.  Indeed, many of them practice very realistic violence daily in video games which are slowly becoming difficult to distinguish from real life.

But I liked the basic spirit Eric Baret, as the recipient of a long tradition of certain kinds of words, and a certain sort of energy, conveyed in saying that if we needed to be alive in another time, we would be.  If we needed to be somewhere else, we would be.

You are I are right where we need to be, right now.  There is nothing that HAS to be done, but what will be done is what you do.  Do it without believing you can perfect the universe.  Do it with awareness, with breath, with intention freed of compulsion.

As many have said, it takes a life to learn how to live.  But if the point of life is learning how to live, then then makes sense.  You graduate from this school when you die.

Can you imagine the fury of the Left if black folks, in black ghettos, conducted mass protests against the Democrat Party?  They would be FURIOUS.  They would scream, WE, not YOU, WE ARE THE BLACKS.  WE KNOW WHAT IS BEST.

Likewise, it is no doubt particularly galling for the Left in Canada that the people resisting their patent and indefensible tyranny are working class, beer drinking Joes and Janes.

I personally think a comparison with the heroic Polish Solidarity movement is in order.  Or, in this country, perhaps we should start calling the Left Tories.  After all, they respond to reasonable protests in response to genuine grievances with oppression, violence, and by calling people asking reasonable questions traitors.

If it was worth conducting a Revolution based on the principle “No Taxation without Representation”, how much more “No arbitrary laws or taxation without honest elections?”

And as I have said often guns won’t get us out of this.  The tech our military has, if used against us, would not allow an armed rebellion to last long, and obviously the people running Biden as a more or less literal animatronic puppet would LOVE to be able to point to such violence as evidence of the necessity of an authoritarian response.  They want tyranny.  They want fascism.  But they need some sort of threat to get people stupid, supine and afraid enough to accept it long enough for the prison door to be closed, and the shackles locked.  Shots fired in our streets would easily do that.  Look at the mileage they got out of Jan. 6th, where the only REAL violence was committed by the police, and which went uninvestigated, much less punished.

No, peaceful, principled, vocal protests scare the living shit out both the Canadian and American governments.  I have been banned from my local media for some combination of supporting the truckers and pointing to the obvious fact that censorship is the ONLY thing enabling anyone to believe that these injections are safe.

Thus, for pointing out censorship as a key element in a Big Lie, I was censored.

And Facebook just dinged me today.  I am “lowered in the news feed” for 90 days for “persisting sharing unwanted truths”.  That’s not how they put it.  The game is to tag everything they can with “fact checks”, which occasionally contain some truth, but which mostly consist in a repetition of the Party Line, along with admonitions not to stray from official orthodoxy.  “These vaccines are perfectly safe”.  “There is no evidence natural immunity is better”.  “Australia’s response is in proportion to the problem and animated by concern and caring for the Australian people”.  Etc.

The basic pattern is all too obvious.  If we get a social credit score system in place here, you can be dinged continually for anything the censors and tyrants don’t like, and your life altered in all ways.  You can lose your bank account, job, right to post on the internet, your home, your car, your friends.

What sane person, seeing this, could possibly support any of this?  None.  No sane person.  We are dealing with ghouls who are crazed with mindless fear, who have lost contact with their souls and humanity, and who in their continual daily terror are very much capable of the same crimes Leftists commit in all places and times, when they gain power.

But the truckers have hit on a winning strategy.  They have hit a nerve.  If you study the history of Leftism, they ALWAYS want to be able to be seen as the Good Guys.  They spend a lot of time and effort concocting and supporting lies that really are not necessary.  As I havee noted, they spent a long while concocting a story for George Faludy, which they insisted he actually sign, on pain of torture.

And he in effect asked them what the point of the game was, when they knew he was lying, and when his signature meant nothing.  They had no answer.  But for whatever reason it was important to them.

Likewise, it is important to the Left to believe good things about themselves.  Unearned, easy access to moral hauteur is the primary benefit of membership in this cult.  Narcissists hate anything which conflicts with their vanity, and working class Joes and Janes publicly objecting to their malignant and insincere “noblesse oblige” is just a very hard blow to bear.  Such people have to be disappeared, but it is very hard, when you cannot disappear all the cameras, and all the means of sharing what they photograph.

Such a convoy in America would be beautiful.  Since I have pointed out many times before that ALL MEDICINES HAVE SIDE EFFECTS, and since I have pointed out that if the jabs neither prevent COVID nor prevent its spread–or even slow it to any measurable extent–that taking this medicine is no longer a public health issue, that the main reason I was suppressed locally must be my support for the Canadian truckers, and my expressed hope something like that might happen here.

I truly think this possibility terrifies the assholes in Washington.  If so, then we should pursue it aggressively.  The cost to me is nothing.  I offer words only, and I get that.  But if my armchair strategizing is worth anything, that is my two cents.

Not writing this post would be “better” than making it, but I still live in fear, which I cannot yet help.

So: conceptually, what matters most in my life is the space between a “stimulus”, and my emotional reaction to it, or—worse—my “understanding” and contextualizing of it.

Its interesting: I had reached many of the same perceptions on my own. I feel proud of this, which is a possession I do not own, which is a fact I need to listen carefully, or openly, to.

I will say this: I have yet to read a better commentary on the Tao Te Ching, even though he does not mention it once.

A physically rotating Ouroboros. The artwork would called “Finding Yourself.”

Yes, a bit of ironic humor is intended.

Perhaps the whole thing could be set upon a white background, and the word Self written in the middle of the circle.

I may create this one day, along with my jade fountain I described perhaps ten years ago, based on a dream.

It is the unhappiest people who are most concerned with how the rest of us are living. They claim they want to help us, but they really just want more company in their misery.

Most of this is unconscious.

And I will add that Christian doctrine, as typically iterated particularly by Protestants, places a dual and terrible burden on its sincere adherents: not only do they have to walk a narrow path themselves, but in some measure the duty is placed on them to help others avoid eternal damnation.

This breeds terror quite naturally, and frightened people are productive people and honest people, but not spontaneous and authentically good people. And they are more or less BOUND to be in the business of the rest of us, even if it is contrary to the natural inclination of the better souls among them.

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In sports, as in life, there is no other team. The Bengals will play the Bengals today and the Rams will play the Rams.

This was John Woodens key insight. If the Bengals achieve perfection, they cannot be beaten. Same with the Rams.

The service each team will perform for the other is work hard to reveal any and all latent flaws. The goal is not to win, but to exceed all previous performances, and come as close to ideal action as possible in a highly circumscribed and essentially arbitrary environment. This is why we call it a game, and why we call it play.