Moderates United

I continue to be attacked at night by demons from time to time. I experimented a good long while with one last night and they really dont like the word love.  Love is their krytonite.

 I say this as a practical observation. I am still not particularly loving myself, outside of my children. I aspire to it, but I intend something more substantial than the plastic substitute usually intended (so it seems to me) by the people who use this word nearly reflexively.  True love is the perfection of self. It is the result of complete maturation.

In important respects, it is the final conquering of chronic fear.

It is your worries which are on shaky ground, not your sense of safety.

because the past was practice and preparation, for your next bold move, and your next daring escape.

Everything you have ever done, felt, thought, and experienced has made you who you are, this very moment.  What will you do with that knowledge?

I am speaking to myself, but you can listen in.

I’m in an odd place.  I have to jump into the dark water with both feet.  It frightens me, but the thing is, I have a LOT of experience dealing with fear.  I don’t like fear, but fear does not frighten me.  I’ve lived with it so long.

My old world is slowly dissolving.  It is a staggering, maddening feeling.  But it is the only way.  My commitment is total.

Epstein, in my view, was attacked to make it clear “they” could get to him anywhere, any time.

But he wasn’t killed.  They apparently decided that a full suicide was likely to bring more light on their activities, and the goal must have been to scare the living shit out of him.

But game this out.  If he keeps his mouth shut, he’s most likely looking at a life sentence.  He will never leave prison, and may well be killed for the sake of safety once he’s safely behind bars forever.  Why not?  He may do five years then spring a leak.

If he talks, he does five years, but again he’s looking at a continual risk of murder.  No really good options.

The ONLY way he might be able to live and breathe as a free man again in this lifetime is if he takes down the WHOLE NETWORK.  If the people who can get to his cell mate get arrested, then give up the people giving them orders, on up to the Clintons and who knows who else.  Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, the Bush’s.  Who can guess?

His only good play is ALL the names, all the dirt, and a prayer that Trump and Co. can push through something which will shake our nation to its foundations, in an utterly good and cleansing way.

That’s my take.  His take may be a renewed love of oxygen and desire to avoid risk.  Hard to say.  I am praying he breaks, though.

I have from time to time wondered why such a wonderful system of emotional awakening is not better known after so many years. And it occurred to me that one key attribute it possesses is that it cannot be made into an obsession. It cannot be repurposed into a drug, an anesthetic. It is the opposite of an agent of dissociation.

Yoga can be used that way. Many yoga practioners are obsessive. “Meditation” in all its many forms can be used that way. And of course “compassion” and “kindness” are the closest thing to a religion many Westerners have. They NEED them.

The fruit of Kum Nye is enriched experience, nothing more. The goal is to spark a self sustaining reaction with no obvious outward signs. Even though it is precisely the medicine most people need, precisely for that reason it has no obvious appeal.

I think this is close to the truth. It has also been marketed poorly. It is hard to see where it has been marketed at all, anywhere, in any sustained, serious way.

When I am ready, I will do my part.

In my understanding, Alan Watts, Chogyam Trungpa, and Carlos Castenada all died young of alcoholism. Trungpa was around fifty, Watts 60 and Castenada 70.

Infer from this the obvious.

The goal, as  I understand it—and some of this comes from flashes I have had from time to time—is to feel more like yourself. It is to feel larger, more connected, more natural, more calm and ready.

I think this notion is often confused with emotional dissociation and obsessions of all sorts, such as those with goodness, with compassion, with “empathy” (a badly abused word at present in my estimation), with “justice”, however you may define it.

Much of my own work has been to create a conceptual world for ME to occupy, and much of that has been to make hard things soft to the point of being dissolvable, even vaporous. We all know what s cloud is, even if the lines don’t exist.

There is much confusion in this world. Sometimes, though, confusion is a good thing, perhaps even wisdom.

I am tempted, without for the moment dealing methodologically with the problem of how to define them, to assert that the principle psychosocial root of cultish behavior is the enmeshed family, which is to say a family where roles and places are unclearly defined.

And it occurs to me to comment that, while sexual energy can be highly destructive outside the family—obviously in the form infidelity, and following marital trauma, conflict, and in our culture divorce—it is vastly more destructive within the family.  I don’t think we have yet begun to fully grasp the inter generational, long term effects of incest. And in global culture, I don’t think we have a clue even now how prevalent it is, and has perhaps always been. As open as the United States is, it has only been “on the table” for perhaps 40 years, since the early 1980’s.

Freud, remember, saw it in Vienna, and realized he had to choose between his career (and sense of self importance) and the truth. He chose, obviously, his career.

But can we plausibly believe we understand it’s extent in Islamic countries? In India? In China? In Japan? Everywhere else? I don’t think so.

I would stipulate that the core psychological task which alone can guarantee a healthy, adaptive, fair, prosperous, peaceful and happy society is psychological individuation, and I would assert this process is inherently the antithesis of cultish behavior.

The context of these comments, as is likely obvious, is the rise of what might be termed “political cultishness”, in our own, and many Westen societies. We are prosperous. We are free. And that is plainly not enough for far too many people. They feel lost, atomized, alone, and personally deficient.

When technology raises a child, can it truly be said the father was a father, and the mother a mother, even if both are present? I don’t think so.

I would assert as a general principle that the clear use of language is always inherently anti-authoritarian.  It is anti-Fascistic and anti-Communistic, both of these -isms–and perhaps the -ism of Islamism as well, since what is done in its name bears little resemblance to the practice and example of Muhammad as I understand it, and as its regrettably few moderate exponents express it–being defined by the abuse of thought made possible only by the abuse of language.

That last sentence might understandably not be viewed by all readers as itself a clear use of language.  Duly, noted.

But I wanted to state clearly the ideas underlying the on-going, continual, looped accusations of racism by Democrats.

The logic is this: the future and prosperity and overall well being of African Americans is so inextricably linked to the Democrat Party that opposition to any Democrat, or support for any Republican, is exactly equal to wishing for the failure of blacks in this country.

Ponder that, particularly given the state of most ghettos in this country–all of which have been presided over by Democrats since at least the early 1970’s, and in most cases well back into the 1960’s.

Ponder that, considering that a black Democrat was elected President twice, and nothing changed in the black “community”. In fact, violence and reliance on government assistance both increased.

Ponder that, considering that when black unemployment is at an all time low, this is viewed by most Democrats as a disaster, because it makes them less attractive.  They don’t want to talk about it.  They don’t want to discuss how it was achieved, other than to implausibly claim that the job killing policies of Barack Obama somehow kicked in instantly when Trump took office.  I don’t think anyone is stupid enough to believe that.  Obama was in office 8 years.

And logically, if black success is bad, then can black success be plausibly claimed to be the actual goal?  Would it not be more reasonable to suppose black VOTES were the goal, and black well being something no senior Democrat cared or cares about in the slightest, perception–which they devote all their actual energy to–being everything?

In my view, this is the only reasonable, supportable conclusion, based on the totality of evidence.

And as the saying goes, with friends like these, who need enemies?

It’s an odd fact of our present era that we are literally seeing that people are willing to abandon family members rather than abandon their hatred of Donald Trump.

For his part, Trump is sometimes tacky, certainly a womanizer, but the farthest thing from the embodiment of evil that he is made out to be, somehow.

And it occurred to me this morning that in the same way physical diseases can be modified and made more virulent in the lab, so too can mental illness.  It can be fostered, developed, and perfected, such that the target ONLY believes what the operator wants them to believe.  That such a thing could be obtained in a free country is really a “triumph”–if we want to use this word for a fundamentally evil process–of science.

Mental illness can be induced and controlled.  This is the fundamental insight of propagandists.