Moderates United

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.

From here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2006372?fbclid=IwAR0B5-8ux-MLcrA00tHlvrf3NIDNnsRyezr7WgCqSK4_voyKSRpzw-76cK0 

might be translated as “omnipresence”.

What sparked this comment is I was contemplating that every step towards Collectivism is a step away from personhood, from conscience, from personal agency, and ultimately away from the possibility of authentic spirituality.  It is a journey in the direction of true nothingness, where the Buddhists “Void” might as easily be seen as the ultimate somethingness, merely one without defining marks.

And on this account it is certainly true that many religions have served as de facto collectivisms.  Probably all of them, to some extent or other, here or there.

But a blind and dehumanizing commitment to political ideology today is no different than an all encompassing religious fanaticism in any other era.

And to my mind, the salient feature of both is not the atheism of the former, or the supposed theism of the latter, but the obtuse blindness of both.  Reality works the way it works.  Changing fads do nothing to alter this.

A criticism made of “capitalism” by its critics is that “everyone is selling something. Everything is for sale.”

And of course we think of dumb people in bad suits pushing infomercials.

But, really, what is the alternative?  NOT selling something, because you have nothing to sell? That is penury, if you cannot even sell your labor.

Or not being ABLE to sell something, because it is prohibited? This is slavery, is it not, if your needs are met by those doing the prohibiting?

One can produce and not be greedy. One can sell and not be crass.

We are surrounded by voluble fools, many of them educated in the process of learned and earned ignorance, and not of the good sort.

I am bombarded on all sides by claims and counter-claims.  I listen to everyone, up to a point, so it is all very confusing.  I can see clearly the appeal of an All-Encompassing Heuristic–like religious or political dogma–in order to make sense of it all.

But really, we have to consider that NOT ONE PERSON ON THE PLANET has it all figured out.  None of them.  None in history, none writing today.

But a great many of them have parts and pieces figured out. 

This sort of approach both requires and develops the Fundamental Openness the Buddhists talk about, which in the Zen iteration often gets called Beginner’s Mind.

In Signal Theory terms, in order to make sure you don’t miss any of the actual signal, you have to allow all the noise.

If time is money, what is money?

I was doing my Wim Hof breathing (more on that in a moment) just now, and it occurred to me it is really a momentous insight that not feeling felt can trigger traumatic reactions, particularly chronic low level amygdala activation.

A social environment can feel dangerous too, can’t it?  We get triggered by fear all the time when facing new people or hostile people, don’t we, most of us?

THE AMYGDALA IS SOCIAL.  That just hit me.

Now, I’m a dabbler in all this, in many ways.  I’ve read a couple books, which I’m not even sure makes me a credible Ama-teur, lover of something.  I would like over time to do much better.

But ALIENATION EQUALS CLINICAL TRAUMA.  I personally was physically abused (hit) and emotionally neglected (by and large not on purpose, but through lack of capacity on the part of both parents).  Those are traumatic, and happening before age 4 or so, also things which constitute Developmental Trauma.

But if you are an average American from an average family, where everyone had a computer and TV in their room, and where your parents were working most of the time, and where your friends grew up likewise mistaking social media for emotional connection, then you are chronically traumatized by every day and every contact even with your “friends”.  They don’t know what they are missing, and neither do you.  But you are unhappy and anxious.

No wonder rates of depression are through the roof, despite this being the easiest and most decadent way of living ever seen on Earth.

Specifically, I was thinking about how easy hate is.  Hate, as I see it, is a mixture of anger and shame.  It is the flip side of a felt need for hyperconformity.  One sees both, of course, in totalitarian regimes.  Nazis hated the Jews (and gays and Gypsies, and by and large Slav, etc.).  Communists hate the rich, “class traitors”, the middle class, and all genuine Republicans in the old sense of the word of anyone valuing freedom and a government confined by effective law.  They USE both the words Republic and Democratic, but they are lies.  Obviously.

Slavish conformity is an internal turning of distress.  Hate is an externalization and projection of it.  And this, really, has to be the sociological roots of Trump Derangement Syndrome.  It would be one thing to roll your eyes at him, or to disagree with his policies.  But they take it so much farther than it is really not unreasonable to see it as a sort of publicly (and no doubt privately) expressed mental illness.

Literally, at this moment, large segments of the people triggered by Trump would support the institution of a national Fascist government, to “stop” him from, I don’t really know what.  The whole thing makes zero sense rationally.  It is pure emotion, and to the point, pure trauma driven by emotional superficiality and the extent to which people have forgotten how to connect honestly at a deep emotional level.  It’s a lost skill, among so many.  We–and I’m guilty of this too–grow up playing roles, wearing masks, becoming who we think we need to be in a given social context.  If everyone else does that, it is lies top to bottom.

A comment on Wim Hof.  I really like the breathing (which basically consists in multiple rounds of hyperventilation alternated with breath holding).  It gets me high.  Interesting insights will often pop in my head, and it is very relaxing.  Functionally, hyperventilation is the primary tool of Holotropic Breathwork, as combined with vivid and excitatory and then calming music (and occasionally some human touch, framed as bodywork).

The cold, though, I have mixed feelings about.  Now, I grew up in a physically cold place.  I have body memories of standing at a bus stop when it was still dark and ten degrees below zero.  When it is that cold the air has a feel.  Sounds carry more easily, but it feels like there is a steam of silence flowing up from the ground.  I remember it well.

When you face that sort of cold daily for long periods of time, you pull inside a bit.  You become more emotionally reserved.  You have to.  It’s a truism that people up North are less warm than people down South, the world over.  They are less expressive, more intellectual.  This varies widely by person, obviously, but by and large the dominant climate does affect peoples emotional tone and sensibility in what seem to me clear ways.

I don’t have any doubt that cold exposure is good for most people.  I think it constitutes a de facto assault on the vagus nerve, which wants things neat and orderly and regular.  When you first do cold exposure, you lose the ability to breath for a moment.  But over time your body learns this is not the danger it thought it was, and reacts less.  This is the calming effect of cold exposure.

But it feels to me there is something cold about this emotionally.  We all want to feel warm, wanted, no matter where we are from.  Russians want to feel warm and wanted, but they often settle for the warmth of drunkenness.

Cold exposure is a way of muting your natural need for emotional warmth.  I read somewhere (here is one link) that people who feel lonely take more warm showers, since physical warmth seems to serve, emotionally, as a poor substitute for human warmth, of which the most obvious example is physically being in someone else’s arms, as in hugs, sex, and sleep.

Now, I did Wim Hof’s latest course.  He is a goof.  He is not someone whose social presence and emotional skill are conspicuous, to say the least.  Having said that, I think there is ZERO doubt, none, that he has saved a lot of lives.  His methods have prevented we will never know how many people from killing themselves.

But what he helps people do is reach an accommodation, a healthy addiction, something to get them through.  They mute their loneliness through cold exposure, which is a sort of insulating tonic.  But it is not a cure.  And of course the Wim Hof Community, seen broadly, IS a help.  It DOES breed human contact, which is good.

But I continue to believe we can do much better.  We are social animals.  Cave men and women lived in caves with each other.  Now we live in caves alone, with the flickering fires of TV’s and computers which lend precious little warmth.

I still have my plans, but the more I grow, the more mistakes I see, the more wounds I see, the more blind I realize I have been.  I don’t want to do anything until I have crossed the river myself.  And to be clear, that means figuring out how to calm myself without vampirically sucking someone else dry through my sheer need.

I have the tools.  I am perceptive–God has given me a good mind, and I’ve done what I could to develop it.  And I am making progress.  And part of my progress, I think, it realizing that not only can’t I save everyone, I can’t even save one person, if they are not willing and active participants.  It is not really my fault if I see countless people making, daily, what I see as stupid decisions.  The creation and maintenance of boundaries is a big part of my task.  Compassion must have limits defined by wisdom.

As individuals or societies transition to more abstract ways of “viewing” the world, anxiety is bound to increase, since there is no end to possible, abstract, theoretical dangers, which our physiology can and does react to in much the same way it would to actually present danger.

This is the main difference between us and animals.  Animals only react to what is actually there, or to what they reasonably suspect to be actually there.  The same with people whose lives do not demand large amounts of daily abstract thinking.

And of course if you take someone given to abstract speculation, and give them an internet, which is in the main filled with bad news, at least where reporting is concerned, it’s no wonder so many of us have de facto anxiety and other affective disorders.

I’m reading a book called Fearvana.  So far, it is not knocking me off my feet, but it is always good to hear the old in new ways.

And it precipitated the realization in me that I have a deep seated fear that if I’m not out fighting on the internet every day, the bastards will win.

Don’t laugh.  You are ridiculous too, in your own way.

Arguing on the internet feels like a way of exerting control.  It feels that way.  But the claim that I make a difference really doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.

And in any event, taking a break for a month or two, or even a year or two, can’t be all that bad. It’s important to me that Trump get reelected, so I’m sure I’ll be doing my thing in my neck of the woods, but whatever happens, I need to back off all this, and let this fear and this driven compulsive behavior go.

And I think neurologically, I am triggered all the time.  The fight or flight or shame is triggered when I wake up, and shuts down only reluctantly and after attacking me several times when I go to sleep.  Fighting on the internet gives me a way to ground it.  The fight comes first, and the reasons only after.

I continue to make slow progress.  A turtle’s progress.  But daily, step by step.  It’s the best I can do.  I am very sure of that, and doing much less would be much less difficult.  I hope to find the light one day.  But it is many many miles down the road for me.  So be it.

An “age of partial attention” is almost by definition an age of neuroticism and anxiety.

Partial attention breeds superficiality.  Superficiality breeds anxiety and fear and alienation.  Anxiety makes attention even more difficult, making this a vicious circle.

It remains an open question how and why we are so stupid when surrounded by so much potential information.  The answers are sundry, but relate to how we relate emotionally to the world, not intellectually.  Our ideas, in the main, are what rise up after all the other action has already taken place.

Since I’m writing about dreams, I thought I might share one more I had a month or two ago.

Somehow (most dream stories start like that, don’t they?) I was a soldier.  I came on a group of other soldiers.  Somehow we had split a city block off and were on top of it, charging into a battle.

I asked one of the soldiers who was in charge, and they said “you are”.  It took me a second, but I processed this.  Then I looked at where we were going, and realized most of us would die, so I sorted out the chain of command.  I asked “when I die, who is in charge?”, then “when he dies who is in charge?”

And when I said “when I die” I felt no fear at all.  There was no emotional charge at all.  I had a job I was going to do, period, and my dying simply was the cost of it.

This was a sort of courage I have never felt.  Normally I’m adrenalized.  Normally I am excited when I do something scary.  That wasn’t present with this.  It was absolute calm clarity and focus.

I take it as a sign of growth.  You can’t be scared of everything forever.

As I share from time to time, I have dreams sometimes which seem larger than me.  My thought is that they always INCLUDE me, that some element is best and most usefully seen as representing some psychic process only occurring in me; but I also think sometimes they touch larger realities too.

I will share one which I think was mainly me, and one that I think was larger.

As context, I will comment that I realized Saturday that there are always two stories in me, always two ways of representing everything that I do and which happens to me.  One views work and change as unwelcome intrusions, and interprets them as such; and the other is the counter to that. It is a sort of Emergence created in response to the emotional torpor which characterized my home, and which I have carried with me all these years.  It’s the alarm clock, the wake up bell.

Somewhere between these two stories is an unformed, inchoate me.  That I am inconsistent is obvious.  Why is now more clear to me.

And I will comment that in the few original Buddhist Sutras I have read, like the Heart Suttra, they don’t say “there is no self”.  What they say is that everything we see and feel is interconnected in space.  There is no Self, and there is also no Not Self.  There is a cloud, with whispy tendrils, which changes form and evolves continually.  We are those clouds.  And somewhere in there is the release of the “Tight-Holding”.  I will call that my translation of the Pali “Tanha”.  The monkey trapped by the monkey trap.

Be all that as it may, I was a new servant at a hotel, waiting on a very, very demanding guest.  Everyone was terrified.  You had to do this, say that, then do this, and it was all very precise, all absolutely necessary, or he would be furious.

This energy is in me.  The salient part is the anger and rigidity of the guest, but the rest of me has to deal with it.

I said two stories: I suppose it would be closer to say two story-lines.  The stories are told daily in continuously varying ways, with differing energies, differing purposes, and no doubt take one another into account.

FEELING this energy, though, was good for me.  Feeling tension is the first step to resolving it.  Most of us don’t feel most of the tension that is manifestly there.  It just feels like us.  It feels like the water we can’t feel all around us, as fish.  It is “life”.  It is how life “is”, and absent substantial reflection and meditation, most people will cross life in that state.  This, too, is Duhkha.

The other dream, a lot of people were living in ice water.  Rock and roll was referenced.  I saw leather pants and the Rolling Stones, or at least the vibe of the Rolling Stones.  Then a giant wave came crashing in, and drowned many of the people.

Here is my interpretation: much of this country–and no doubt other countries–is sustained by what might be termed the Rock and Roll ethos, which might more broadly be called the Pop or even Consumer ethos.  Ironically, some of the most vocal opponents of physical consumerism are animated culturally by its superficial priorities.

Broadly speaking, beginning perhaps in the late 40’s through the 1970’s, some portion of our society cast off all the historical anchors that held us together, and which provided protection in times of true need and true difficulty.  This was made possible by historically unique and unprecedented improvements in the physical ease of our lives, through technology and simple abundance.

Put simply: life was not that hard, so no firm foundations were needed.  In such a soil, hedonism takes root easily.  Ask yourself, though: do you think Mick Jagger has led the ideal life?  He is more or less the poster child for the sexualizing of life, and the rock and roll lifestyle.  He has grown old.  He is perhaps 75 now.  What does he have, really?  Do you think he has the loyalty and love of children and grandchildren?  Maybe, maybe not.  That would not have been a large part of his calculations back then.

It seems to me he has spent most of his life chasing highs.  New music, performing old music, parties, sex and sex and sex and look at him.  All the highs fade.  The bright lights dim.  Sooner rather than later he will have played his last concert.  Then what?  Who is he?  What is left?

Much of our nation occupies that rough cultural space.  It rejected patriotism, Christianity, tradition.  Marriage–or at least uncomplicated, lifelong marriage.  Children.  All the boring things that boring people do that makes them stable and measurably happier than the hedonists.

I was reading that in San Francisco–and this is just the people commenting publicly, although it seems reasonable to think this is a national and even global problem–that the suicide rate is through the roof.  People who used to just put out a “cry for help” are going after it seriously now.  Not all are succeeding, but many are.  They saw, in their words, a “years worth of suicides” in the last month.

What do you cling to, when everything you have chosen was superficial and designed for a world which is easy?  Who do you cling to, when you have rejected loyalty as an arduous and inconvenient virtue?  What do you cling to when you have largely rejected the concept of virtue itself, which includes courage, true love, the pursuit of wisdom and learning, and honest compassion?

The ice wave gets you.  You were, in reality, living in a cold place–made warm solely by the illusions facilitated by your vanity and lack of self awareness–and when all the bad came, you had nothing.

As to how this relates to me, I survived.  But I lived there.  I belonged there, or at least part of me did.

I’ve been watching the show “The Good Place”.  I have been ambivalent about it.  On the one hand, it is really funny sometimes, and it has caused me to think more about the after-life.  But on the other, they make a mockery of things they probably should not make a mockery of.  Heavens and hells exist.  To the extent they were exploring the subtle craziness behind the concept of eternal salvation or eternal damnation after a single lifetime–one conditioned by many factors beyond the individuals control–I liked it.

But at root, it partook of what I will call “Rock and Roll” culture.  It was deeply superficial, in meaningful and important ways.

So by coincidence, fate, or divine intervention, when I went to Netflix to watch it last night, it had reset to the first episode.  It couldn’t figure out how to easily get where I was, which was about episode 38, so I decided to watch a short documentary on Islamic dervishes.

[I will note that I play the didgeridoo 30 minutes a day, mostly to clear my sinuses–which it does fantastically well, especially once I learned Circular Breathing–but I have also read that humming helps tone down the Vagus Nerve.  I do literally everything I can think of and/or know about to calm down.]

It is striking how much more seriously people in other countries take religion.  It is not a joke to them.  They see life and death every day.  You NEED religion to keep your sanity and to live happily.  No doubt watching that influenced me in my dreams.