Moderates United

is the idea is that life is not something other than packing yourself an outstanding lunch every day and washing up in the evening.

When you reject experience, you create holes in your life.

What if the rest of your life consisted in nothing BUT doing the things you don’t consider “life”?

I don’t think we find enjoyment so much as release it.

These are public notes to myself.

I have long allowed myself to mumble when by myself.  It allows the less conscious to speak to the more conscious.  And I have long muttered to myself “so much death, so much death.”

I found myself able to look emotionally into this, and I feel like a soldier who has seen fields littered with dead bodies, dead bodies everywhere, like Antietam or Gettysburg must have looked.  You see this death, and you want to help, to do something, but there is nothing left.  There are no souls to be saved.  There is merely the burying or the burning.  There is silence, and it is not a living silence, but a gaping dark void.

And I feel too like I haunt myself.  I am a ghost to myself.  I am both parties in the film The Others.  I am the new tenants, and the ones who never left.  There is a split, but there is also a new communication, something which has not happened before, a possibility of ending the spell.

This is all right hemisphere stuff.  I could intellectualize it, but won’t at this point.  I am merely conveying feelings I should be writing in my journal, but for whatever reason feel like casting out into the Somewhere and Anywhere, the mists and vacuums of this global electronic thing, which would stop in a moment if it were ever unplugged, the Center we all look into without seeing anyone else, except sideways.

A big part of trauma is a part of your nervous system is saying NEVER AGAIN.  It is saying “I never want to feel that feeling again”.  This is the root of hypervigilence.  It is watching, scanning, looking for patterns, for anything unusual, anything out of the ordinary, and putting the worst possible interpretation on anything that is–or more commonly–is perceived as out of place.

To heal trauma, therefore, requires faith.  You have to go naked, or so it feels, into the world.  You have to go somewhat as a child, as someone who does not know what is possible.

Christ’s dictum to be as innocent as a dove and as cunning as a serpent is apposite.  You need to forget malice, forget grief, forget all the cares and worries of the world.  But not forget them, either.  It’s a dance, a difficult feat of emotional magic, but it is a worthy ideal.

You have to learn to love as if that is the only thing in the world, and when wounded, to go naked out again.

Oh, perhaps I am waxing rhapsodic in a vague parody of myself, and people like me.

Most of all, this voice needs to be reduced in volume.  It has a place.  It does not need to be silenced.  That is not the goal.  This is hyPOvigilence, which is a real risk for most trauma survivors.  It simply needs to learn, through contact with the real world (it had in reality been in an internal loop) how to function properly.

I am realizing that a big part of sanity is trusting in your own sanity.  This is one of the great comedic/tragic aspects of human existence: happiness in large measure does depend on some degree of complacency, that some questions are fundamentally answered.  Take their dogma from a Buddhist, and they are no longer a Buddhist, are they?

I can imagine many, many iterations of how this world may work.  We can’t of course trust entirely any texts we read.  There is too much fog everywhere.

But what I find it congenial to believe, and what I am going to choose believe, in a fashion a la William James, is that this world is basically benign.  Our punishments consist in the main from not realizing higher joys.  Even though there is evil, it does not prevail in all realms–there is a heaven, rather there are heavens–and there is an implicit and benign order none of us are clever enough to appreciate or grasp fully, or even in large measure.

There is no great pressure to DO, to make something of this ONE AND ONLY LIFE.  Such pressure, in the main, seems to drive people crazy, and away from their natural goodness.  Give people enough to eat, and time to enjoy life, and by and large they become healthy happy people on their own, without dogma.

I am going to release the frenzy within me.  I am going to quit doubting my own sanity.  I will trust myself when all men doubt me, but make allowance for their doubting too.

I am going to start posting my weight daily on here, too.  292 this morning.  I am shooting for 240, or probably better 230.  I’m a big guy, and will always be a big guy, but I’m carrying much too much fat.

On that note, I drank about 5 Angry Orchards, one bottle of red, and one bottle of port last night.  That’s not on any diets.  But I woke up feeling good this morning. I need to get to where I can have one or two at the bar, then not stop at the liquor store on the way home because I feel so good.  It’s doable.  Everything I dream is doable.

I am going to try and be more consciously positive too.  I’m obviously a fault finder.  A critic.  This can be a useful role, but it is an unhappy one, and I am going to try and make the next thirty years my best.

When dealing with the unseen, with heaven and hell, the potential for imaginative creation is endless. When you tie this with the need some have to control others, you have an inherent tendency towards punishment inflation.

The wages of sin is a headache.

A year long headache.

A lifetime of headaches.

A thousand years of headaches.

A million years of headaches.

An eternity of headaches.

There is no reason not to suppose these things evolve. The notion, once constituted, is enormously useful for social control and endlessly adaptable.

It seems to me it is more interesting to build a continuum based on how much of their true core self people are willing to share in all contexts.  Someone willing to share all in all contexts is socially open. Someone unwilling or unable to ever share is closed.

Talking a lot does not mean someone actually like people, or is interacting with them honestly.

Conversely, not feeling the need to speak does not betray timidity or “introversion.”

Many people we label introverts are simply uncomfortable both with being emotionally dishonest and superficial, on the one hand, and being reliably misunderstood by silly people on the other. This says nothing about their latent capacities, only what they learned from repeated experience.

I am realizing by all rights I should be psychotic.  Both of my parents, in their own ways, tried to break me, to squeeze me like a grape in a vise.

But I remain psychologically alive.  This is a miracle of sorts.  I don’t know it happened, other than that I was some combination of agile enough, and resilient enough.  And I am getting stronger.

The capacity to endure this level of pain, though, I think makes me able to see more than most people.

And what I see is that our society, itself, is slowly becoming psychotic.  At least, some large segment of our cultural order has fallen into ruin, and what remains has as a full time job fighting to preserve in any form what remains.

Our academics–on their account at least the best minds we have–have given up on the pursuit of truth, beauty and sanity.  They have more or less consigned themselves to ruin.  This is what Collectivism is: ruin.  It is the destruction of all human potential, all genuine flourishing, all genuine goodness.  It is a mass psychosis.  We have seen its fruits in Ethiopia, and Cuba, in China, and Vietnam.  It is a grey world, run by grey people, where 2″ equals 3″ if the rulers say so.

If you take a traditional group, say the Hmong of southeast Asia, they have been living in essentially the same ways for thousands of years (so I assume, hundreds I would think at a minimum).  As a group, they have certain customs, and within the group you no doubt have tribes, and within the tribes perhaps clans, and within the clans families.  Everyone is born with a place.  It is all organic.  No one is telling them this is how it has to be.  It is how they want it, in large measure, even in the modern era some of their young reject tradition.

Collectivism is Plastic Soul.  It is plastic culture.  It is wide eyed psychopaths saying “we can build a better culture.  We know how.  We know just what to do.  We have read all the books.  We just, you know, need to break a few eggs, again.  It will work this time.”

There is nothing even remotely organic about it. 

Here is the thing: humans are innately creative and adaptive, so we are quite capable of building new forms which ARE authentically organic.  But we need to stop being attacked by the psychopaths, and everyone top to bottom needs to realize that this is not something which CAN happen top down, much less something which SHOULD happen top down, as directed by well funded propagandists broadcasting their shit from every street corner and news stand.

Stand down, assholes, and all will be fine.  Your static, your incoherence, makes new forms impossible.  Just stop trying the save the world and go play checkers somewhere.  Hire hookers and snort coke.  I don’t care.  Just stop trying to help.  Your help is a toxin which is paralyzing all of our souls.

And the wages of betraying the Church is death.

In Catholic dogma, which prevailed at least until the schism with the Eastern church, and all over Europe until the Reformation, the church is the conduit to God.  The Church equals Jesus, equals the intermediator (apparently I just invented that word).

Here are a couple amended scriptures:

“For God so loved the world that he created his one and only universal Church, that whoever believes in it shall not perish but have eternal life.”


“The Pope answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Recall too the power the Pope exercised for a long time of condemning the souls of kings and heretics to eternal, or least long lasting, damnation.  That is a magical, magisterial power, if you think about it.  And you indoctrinate everyone from cradle to grave to believe in it.  The Pope as spell caster, as God’s magician, as a sorcerer who can curse both your present life and your afterlife.

Who created this dogma?  Popes, and those who benefited from their power, obviously.

Christ had nothing to do with any of this.

There are many small things which will not make much of a difference in your day, but a huge difference, over time, in your life.

I read a quote somewhere in the past few months that went something like: Life is nothing more or less than a large conglomeration of moments.

If you have an otherwise bland tapestry, regular sparks of orange and gold and saffron will change the quality of the whole thing, won’t they?  “Life”, this reification so many of us cannot resist referring to, is the same.