Moderates United

I intend to say something else, but first off, it occurs to me that “Reflections” sounds deep, but literally it is by definition stopping at the surface.

Be that as it may, when insights–deep insights, about the past, about others, about Life–“intrude” on an average day, and square off, each in their own corner, against Time, who usually wins?    Is it not usually a knock-out of the insight by Time, within ten to thirty seconds?  Who has –what?–TIME to ponder the meaning and purpose and proper pursuit of life?  Things to do, places to go, deadlines to meet.

It’s very tempting to speculate that it is not Time which prevents deeper thought, but rather that most people are quite content with an arrangement which keeps them from thinking too deeply.  “Oh, I would explore those painful emotions, but I have a dentist’s appointment.”  “Oh, I would wonder if I’m living my life right, but who even knows how to answer fucking questions like that, and oh look I’m late for something or other.”

Now, I am not saying that condescendingly.  I may talk like I’m on the mountaintop, but I’m very much in the valley, often surrounded by fog.  I get how painful all this can be.  I get it personally, and daily.

I will say though that I have arranged my life precisely to support this sort of work.  Right now, this very moment, I”m not at work.  I have work to do this week, but it can be done at my own pace, on my own schedule.  Until someone lights a fire under my ass–which may happen next week, although I very much doubt it–I can take an hour and do my personal yoga routine, and take 15-20 minutes to write blog posts like this. 

My life is deeply uncomfortable at times, but I base it on a simple logic: if death is eternal, not much matters, but if we survive this life, then all we can bring with us is are the emotional riches we built across our lifetimes.  Nothing else.  As U2 put it, “all that you can’t leave behind”.  This makes work on personal growth the only way to build meaningful wealth.  This, then, means that economic “work” needs to be in support of finding time, and sufficient resources for whatever projects I may undertake, like Neurofeedback.  This is my logic.

And many nights find me shaking like a leaf, screaming, speaking in tongues (more or less: I don’t know what to call vocalizing in a words which don’t match any living or dead language, and which I think hearken back to my time as an infant trying and failing to communicate my distress in words), and feeling like I am dying.  And the demons of course.  Let’s not forget those.

All in all, not an attractive picture.  My life, as I have built it, is not easy.  But I find no faults in my logic, so I persist.  And as it happens, last night was free of everything but the vocalizing.  No demons, no shaking, no major conflicts (although I did meet up with a Tier 1 SoCom unit for some reason: but no bullets were fired by anyone).  This is progress.  I’ve been working a plan I will describe at some point.

But it seems to me this morning I have no people and no place, and on terms which do not require me to compromise, I never will, until I create them.  I have to create myself first.  I have to be a stable person.  To use the acronym, I need to be Flexible, Adaptable, Coherent, Energized and Stable.

Then I want to throw out seeds which will attract people I can bond with at a deep level.  In the end, as I have said often, I want to create a “religion” suitable for our time and place.  I have all the ideas.  It’s a question of me being the sort of person that perceptive people would trust.  I’m not there yet.

My work continues.  Every day is a small death, and every death a small victory, and every victory a small step up a tall mountain.  We live by dying, and we die more easily when we manage our fear of death.

In important respects, I think the Buddhist notion of Anatman amounts to this: if I am growing, then who I am today is not who I was yesterday, and who I am this morning will not be who I am tonight when I lay my head down.  And when I wake up, who that person is will not be who laid their head down.

There is some part of our brain which ALWAYS seeks homeostasis, which seeks the One Answer, answered once and forever.  At the ideational, philosophical, dogmatic level, you need a riposte to this impulse, to this voice, to this river of honest energy.

You have to be willing to lose your sense of safety, your ability to say, with seeming accuracy, I am “THIS”.  You have to lose yourself to gain the world.

Or to put perhaps a new spin on an old quote:


“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it”.


If you deduct the mumbo-jumbo presumably added by the early Church to increase their power, it’s not hard to put a Buddhist spin on Christ’s teachings.  They needed Jesus to be absolutely unique, but he wasn’t.  He was just another advanced soul doing his job.  And I will continue to wonder if that soul, on balance, found his work more useful than harmful.  There are lots of entries on both sides of the ledger.  But the notion of universal human rights is, I think, a notion which emanated from Christianity.  So too the disgust at animal sacrifice.


We would need to know how the next century plays out to make a final determination.  And that process, of course, can still be influenced for the better.

What doesn’t kill you, can help you learn to deal with the fear of death.

Surely there is some banker somewhere who would be willing to write a book titled more or less “How we rob you blind and why you should care”.  It seems very reasonable to suppose that most senior bankers understand the system well enough that, if they took a moment to consider what they do, they would realize that yes, of course they provide the “capital” to fund and continue economic growth, but that yes also, of course, they create the money ex nihilo–or some large part of it–and that by creating money you dilute, necessarily, the value of all existing money, and thereby steal, invisibly, some portion of the economic output of everyone who creates real goods and services.

I might perhaps profitably quote Keynes again, who in his first major work, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, told the truth:

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.” 

I will note there of course he is assuming the government controls the process of money creation. 

(Any other solution would be absurd, right?  You wouldn’t just hand the money over to the money people, the banks, would you?  That would create mass outrage, would it not? 

I’m being facetious of course.)

Moving on, I’ve long wondered: what is the actual reserve ratio for most banks?  People out there know what it is for particular banks.  As far as I can tell, individual banks can keep literally perhaps 1% of their alleged balances in physical cash and on the books, and reach the 10% or whatever it is required by the Fed through overnight loans, each and every night.  There may be billion dollar banks who in all their vaults have no more than a few million physical dollars.  With funny money, it’s all keystrokes and access.

Such a person would understand why we have business cycles, how excessive lending always leads eventually to a correction that may hurt banks in some places, but rarely hurts individual bankers, whose own fortunes are untouched.

There are millions of people out there who could write this book.  We really only need one, and at that there are plenty of ghost-writers–co-authors they are usually called–who could create from a basic first person narrative a compelling, and salable, story.

In my personal view, fixing our monetary system–giving their wealth back to the people–will need to be an intrinsic part of how we deal with automation, which is to say better and better robots, and smarter and smarter AI.

Over a hundred years ago, Oscar Wilde pointed out that one key outcome of increased economic productivity is the ability for there to be a leisure class which, for the first time in history, did not depend on slavery.  We make the machines our slaves, albeit at the risk of being overthrown and destroyed by them.

A cultural flourishing remains possible, even in the more or less immediate future of 10-20 years.  We can undo all our damage.  We can right all the wrongs.

But we need strong voices speaking strong and clear messages from the rooftops, messages of hope, of possibility, of goodness, and of beauty.

First off, I have decided I am going to log here every drink I have until I feel like the urge to get drunk is gone.  Last night, I had a bottle of red wine and a bottle of port.  That combination knocks me out but I can still function reasonably well the next day.  Still: I would like to see my grandchildren.  The pain is real, but so too is the opportunity given me every time the sun comes up.

I consciously avoided posting yesterday.  I am feeling, with greater clarity, the role this blog often plays for me in distracting me from, or allowing me to channel in sometimes nonoptimal ways, unpleasant feelings.

I watched 2 and a half movies yesterday.  I watched “Towards the Within”, a concert film from 1994 featuring Dead Can Dance (which was explained as a metaphor for making inanimate musical instruments “speak” or dance), Bohemian Rhapsody, and the second Harry Potter, during which I did my drinking.

I liked all three films.  Harry Potter of course I’ve seen many times.  I watched all those films many times with my kids.  Toward the Within felt like a spiritual experience.  Lisa Gerard has such a powerful and evocative voice.  I found it emotionally draining.  Much of that music would be highly suitable for Holotropic Breathwork.

Bohemian Rhapsody: what can you say?  Queen is fantastic.  Unique.  Nobody else like them.

And as always, when I sleep all the images and scenes flow through my brain.  It’s like I store them, then they go on spontaneous playback when I sleep.  Perhaps that is exactly what happens.

Be all that as it may, it occurred to me this morning, waking up in silence, the sun beaming through my windows, that all of our minds are filled with a lot of perceptual clutter, with countless images from countless movies we’ve seen, TV show’s we’ve watched, music we’ve heard.

There is a primary experience below all this, the one you get when you camp or go on a retreat and spend a week away from radios, cell phones and TV’s.  I wonder how many people walking on an average street in America today have had this experience: a week absent from all media.  I think the young, who were raised on phones, who had phones and other electronics in their cribs, would have particular difficulty.

But there is another speed possible, and at that one that is most likely more human in most ways.

Don’t fear silence.  Don’t fear inactivity.

And I will note that meditation is not really something you can plug into a life otherwise filled to overflowing.  You can’t “do” silence.  It is something you allow.  It is something you invite, and then wait, as long as it takes.

To reiterate the philosophy taught in Kum Nye, first you learn to relax, then become mindful–you become aware of what is there in totality, including deep within you–then, and only then, you focus on what is healthy and beautiful and good, and grow it.  That, properly, is meditation.  But meditation cannot be rushed.  It takes time, patience, and space.

Tarthang Tulku created Kum Nye as it exists in his books, as I understand it, to create a bridge between the average life of someone living in our hyperkinetic world, and the possibility of truly deep insight.  But that was in 1975 or so.  Our pace of life has, what, doubled since then?  How often do people stop by their friends houses uninvited and bring cake or cookies?  How many people feel they have the time to pursue meaningful hobbies?

There are of course underlying economic realities in play, too.  Our money supply has roughly quadrupled since 1980.  This means most of us are roughly one quarter as wealthy as we would have been had there been stable currency.  Ponder that.  Ponder how much time you would have if you could earn what you earn in one quarter the time.  You could double what you make in half the time you work currently.  Higher true incomes of course would affect demand and thus prices, but there is a core truth in this rough analysis.

The banks are driving all of us batshit insane.  Why, I can’t say, other than habitual greed for money they can’t spend, in pursuit of essentially meaningless lives.

This is my two cents–which should be worth 8 cents–for today.  Why economists are not up in arms about all this is a sociological problem I have not solved.  I emailed some 300 of them my argument.  Only one replied, and he misunderstood me.

They take the problem to be intelligent monetary policy.  I assert that having ANY monetary policy is stupid, and that it amounts to granting legal status to thieves to ply their trade with impunity.  The amount of money in circulation should be fixed, once, and never changed again.

Oi: you know, I had my astrological chart done, and one of the alignments, I forget which one, said I was destined to be a Cassandra of sorts.  Of course, another said that I had the spirit and relentlessness of Leonidas, whose name I had not heard until I looked it up.

No lives leave the world untouched.  Even the name Cassandra survives, and reminds us we should sometimes listen to the people telling us things we do not want to hear, or indeed are not even emotionally equipped to hear.  Truth can emerge from all places.  Watch for it.  This is in large measure the game of life.

I watched a very enjoyable, unpredictable play tonight.  I would share details, but I don’t share details.

Suffice it to say the postmodern ethos was well represented.  The play was often about the play, which eventually included a soliloquy by the putative playwright (actually an actor, although it would no doubt amuse the actual playwright to play an actor playing himself from time to time).

It was very funny, played with stereotypes in very interesting and both comical and cavalier ways (he managed to find black humor in drive by shootings, although we the audience were largely afraid to laugh).

The point I wanted to make, though, is that postmodernism as an ethos, as a worldview, is inherently and intrinsically emotionally rooted.  It is not an intellectual world view.  It is rooted in despair, confusion, and fear.

Both the comedy and the flirtation with nihilism were backed by biographical details which rang true, even if wrong in some important particulars.

And it occurred to me that so often in dealing with people’s defenses, we are dealing with a human shell game.  They are daring us to guess which self is the real one.  Often, I feel, they themselves don’t know.  Many comedians I think are like this.  Comedy is a sort of violence you can get away with for a long period of time.

It occurs to me to share my piece on Deconstruction, written some ten years ago or so, around the time I built that website.  All of these pieces still have value to me, but the discovery of the true pain within me, and its source,  is worth all of them ten times over.

You can say intelligent things without heart.  But those things will always lack the Way.  We need the Way in our lives.  It is the invisible Mother, the source of all things.

I can’t resist adding: I’m not a bad writer.  I likely would have made a decent if not great academic.  Probably a really good teacher.

But all my life I have tried to follow the path of discovery, and tried never to get too far away from “what’s next” on this journey.  I have never forgotten it, and I felt–and I think I made the right decision–that any number of choices I might have made, including academia or–believe it or not–law enforcement–would have pushed me backward in the long run.  I could not always see the way forward, but I never ever stopped looking.  I still look every day, but what I have found, what I am working with now, is very, very good.

First off, I am going to confess to drinking a 750ml of gin the night before last.  I have reached a point where I believe it is reasonable, and possible, to start holding myself accountable.  I had some work I mildly needed to do yesterday–nothing urgent, yet–and I didn’t do it.

Alcohol is a sort of reset button for me, but I think something better than normal happened.  I allowed some antique feelings out.  I am lonely, this is certainly true.  And I realized that feeling lonely is actually progress.  I normally just suppress that.  I write angry blog posts.  And I realized that I don’t like people very much, in actuality.  I like them in theory.  We’re supposed to do that.  But I don’t trust like people.  The ones I have trusted have hurt me much too deeply.

Hurt: that’s another feeling I have not allowed.

I got so drunk I apparently tried to eat a raw eggplant, and, realizing that was a bad idea, ate bundles of basil, cilantro and dill.  I don’t ever want to go there again.

Here is the thing: I am a demographic.  I am the middle aged white man who shoots himself in his mid-50’s.  You enter adulthood with a host of emotional pains, you try to make them go away, fail, and realize at some point your health will start heading south.  I was seriously depressed for a moment.

But I’m in a transition zone.  This is always a challenge.  I feel great this morning.  I continue dreaming, dreaming, dreaming about creating my “church”, about engineering through persuasion the mass creation of what would amount to second families for most people, families based on the shared pursuit of mental health, happiness, and generalized flourishing.  I have all the ideas.  I just need to get myself to an emotional place I have never been.

I have never truly FELT loved.  I’ve heard the words “I love you”.  They are easy enough to say.  But I have never felt that.  This is an odd thing, but I feel it is very common.  Very common.  Perhaps something approaching ubiquitous.  I don’t know.  I can’t feel inside other people’s hearts, but based on the suicide and addiction numbers, it’s a reasonable supposition.

Which brings me to this post.  We have, I think, a crisis of belonging.  Families are not as tight as they perhaps once were.  Certainly, maybe Italian and Mexican and–dare I say it?–Catholic families, but we Protestants, we move around.  We are ambitious.  You have to make your mark on the world, and you can’t do that sitting around in your home town.

Ambition: what does it REALLY get us?  If you gain a world of respect for your work, but lose track of the people in your life, lose your sane relationship with yourself?

When I look at, say, CNN, they are peddling belonging.  You watch them, you belong to a group.  You know what the other people in that group will be saying and thinking.  It makes life more predictable, because everyone is synchronizing on the same signal.

And in this world its easy to see the psychological and social value of victims.  If you can claim you are  a victim, you are special.  You get ATTENTION, and we all crave attention.  Very few of us feel listened to on a deep level, so a superficial, scripted, programmed level is perhaps the next best thing.

And for the people worshipping the victims, you get a feeling of importance.  You get to feel good.  You get to feel righteous.  And you get to channel the low grade depression you feel because life makes no sense to you and you have no place into self righteous anger.  You need this anger to deal with your sadness, with your feeling all alone and belonging nowhere to no one.  It is a simple, easy morality.  But not, ultimately, a sustainable or truly nourishing one. 

Looked at this way, the Daily Cause mentality makes a whole lot of sense emotionally.

These are complex problems, and I get confused myself often, but I think there is a core of truth here.

And I do think we are on this Earth to learn how to love one another.  It’s a cheap and easy word I rarely use, but this is I think the truth, the most important truth.

As I thaw, I expect volatility, but I am slowly putting into place things for me, which say to me, “you are valuable, and worth loving.”  You cannot accept the love of another until you feel like you are loveable, that the other person is not simply making a mistake, because if they knew how you REALLY are.  .  .

I think I was put on this Earth to do difficult work.  I think I’ve done it before.  I have the capacity to suffer inordinately, and make something good out of it.  I have a tremendous well of love and compassionate energy I am slowly learning to tap into.

Pray for me, if you are so inclined.  I will make my way to you when I can.

It occurs to me that self sabotage really is a form of self regulation.  It really is some unconscious or semi-conscious part of the personality trying to fashion order out of the confusion of life.

Anyone who has trauma in their past had moments where they had to adapt how they were thinking in order to go on.  You have to accept as normal what was highly abnormal.  You have to shrug your shoulders at things which should enrage you.  You have to learn to push things which bother you out of your mind.  You have to sequester parts of your consciousness, and do your best to pretend they don’t exist.

All of these things allow you to survive.  You become functional in a dysfunctional place.

I think self sabotage–and obviously this is highly relevant to me–is really a recursion to patterns which worked at one time.  It is, in some important respects, healthy, because it recalls things which were highly adaptive at one time.

For me, the ability to check out emotionally was absolutely critical.  I spent large chunks of time just not there, lost in fantasy, lost in my thoughts, somewhere else.  Drinking is, I think, for me a way of repeating that pattern, of not feeling, of just disappearing.

But my world is not that bad now.  It’s far from ideal, to be sure, but it’s really not that bad.  That pattern, that need, is something I can let go of.

I am perhaps reciting truisms here, but I’m trying to work my brain around all this.  Giving up drinking is giving up a last vestige of something that saved my life.  It’s necessary to take the next step, to grow into what I am meant to grow into, but it feels odd.

For people like me, self sabotage FEELS RIGHT.  I’ll get a healthy behavior set going, then a few days in, some overwhelming compulsion will come along, that FEELS RIGHT, that upsets the apple cart, again.  I need to describe this pattern, so I know to expect, know what it needs, and know how to feed it without losing myself again.

There are millions of people like me, too.  Probably hundreds of millions.  Life is an odd thing, but it seems to be getting easier for me.

Rahm is clearly on the Obama team, but I’ve always thought him to be much smarter than Obama.  Frankly, I’ve long thought nearly everyone around Obama to be much smarter than Obama. He’s a soap opera actor–not unlike Jussie Smollett, come to think  of it–who learned at some point to read his lines more or less presidentially.

Be that as it may, Rahm can’t be too upset about the abrogation of justice–these are his people after all–but I suspect he is astute enough to realize that this particular miscarriage of justice, right now, with klieg lights on it, right after Trump was vindicated and Creepy Porn Lawyer (thanks as always Tucker) was arrested, is really bad optics.  Bad optics is bad politics.

So it’s not an excessive reach to think it is POSSIBLE that this, too, helps Trump.  Justice was obviously subverted.  Smollett obviously used privilege to avoid punishment.  He obviously benefited from a two tiered justice system.  Place all this into a bag, shake it around with Trump’s acquittal and all we know about Hillary, and it’s not hard to pull out a profound loss of faith in our system of justice, going all the way to the top, to the top of the Justice Department, to the head of the FBI, and to, in the case of Obama, the President himself.

In 2016, so many people were thinking “this is not possible”, and “America does not work like that”.  Well, guess what?  It fucking DOES work like that.  We KNOW that.  Trump has thrown flares up in the dark so we can see all the traitors sowing their lies everywhere.  It’s an open secret.  It’s something everyone with the eyes to see should be able to see.

If you are not paranoid, you are stupid.  You can quote me on that, at least with respect to this topic.  I was recalling in a discussion with a guy today how I literally wanted to leave America if Hillary won.  He was telling me about how the Army now docks soldiers pay when they fuck up, rather than run them into the ground, or kick them, literally, in the ass.  It’s hard for me to have faith in the future, when the Army cannot figure out how to get its recruits to show up to things on time.  Rather, if I might speak more precisely, when the people who know EXACTLY how to get soldiers to show up on time are prohibited from using time honored and highly effective methods.

I still wonder where I would go.  I fantasize about Central Asia for some reason.  I would have to convert to Islam, probably, but this would not be such a burden as long as I could reference people like Hafiz and Saadi and Rumi.  They kill Sufis in some places, but perhaps not in others.  Anyway, perhaps that will not be needed.  And whatever I decide, my body will lie lifeless somewhere eventually. I’ve got that going for me.

What I don’t want to do is be surrounded the rest of my life by SJW’s, parading crap feelings, crap ideas, and an utter and complete lack of soul, courage, or life force. I’ll take “savages” over that.  But that decision is not yet needed.  But it may yet be.

It’s definitely not too late for this whole experiment in government of the people, by the people, for the people, to hit the shit heap of history, because far too many of us are far too fucking stupid.

Dear reader: don’t be a fucking complacent douchebag.  Think your own thoughts, and feel your own feelings.   I have a spot of gin in me, but not enough to do anything but encourage me to express what is on my mind.

In the same respect that I think we (by we I mean Americans who love our country and its system) needed to lose the House to win the White House again in 2020, it’s hard to say that this whole Mueller thing has not been on balance a good thing for the President, and the cause of truth generally.  It was a Big Lie, one repeated often, one investigated carefully–indeed, likely to the point of illegality–and shown false.  All the media outlets peddling it have been shown to be amoral, highly politicized hacks uninterested in reporting news, so much as in creating it.

And I will note as well, and recall, all my own histrionics about this.  All my worries, my guesses, my fears, my hopes.

There is a book called The Confidence Course which I read perhaps twenty years ago, when I was still in Sales and constantly trying to pump myself up for work I am really not a natural for.  Salespeople need to be on the golf course, not having anxiety dreams about abandoning the study of Sanskrit.

Be that as it may, what I recall as his first lesson is to keep a record of your worries for a week or more.  Write them down, as many as you can remember.  Will you make the mortgage, is somebody conspiring against you at work, will that prospect go with someone else, is that mild health thing vastly worse than it seems.  Etc.

Then–you know where this is going–you pull that list out a month or two down the road, and compare reality to worry.  What I think all of us find is that most of the time–the overwhelming bulk of the time–most of what we worry about does not come to pass, and even when it does, it’s usually not as bad as we feared.  It’s easy to fear a shot.  But they don’t really hurt that much, or that long.

So this whole thing ended up the right way.  The story had a happy ending.  And that ending may lead to further erosion of support for the DemoMedia complex, more support for Trump, and perhaps in 2020 we might get some real leadership in Congress.

Would it not be more appropriate to think of zombies as UnLiving, than as the UnDead? 

Zombies, in all iterations of this myth currently, are essentially human beings reduced to the animal level of appetite.  They are only hunger, only want, only aggression to feed.  But they are, for this purpose, very much alive.  They are animals who feed, in most cases, on human brains.  They are simply reduced humans.

What is missing is awareness, consciousness, memory of who they once were, of what they once valued beyond food.  They are UnLiving.

Self evidently, as far as I know zombies don’t exist, outside of, perhaps, the effects of some unholy drugs and herbal compounds.  But culturally they are HUGE.  They, along with vampires and werewolves, are everywhere.

To fail to affirm life, then, is to become a zombie, and life means independence of spirit, while remaining conscious of alternatives, other viewpoints, and the possibility at all times that views and ideas will need to change and evolve.  Life is the capacity to respond qualitatively to a wide variety of stimuli.  Death is being reduced to responding solely to hunger, and solely in response to prey.