I’ve made posts on some of these, but not most. There are a lot of typos, but hopefully the meanings are clear enough. I am going to focus on other things for the time being but wanted to get these out there.
Moon bow at the Cumberland Falls.
Whenever you allow an oppressive, space taking emotion to disappear, you will feel a strange gap. This gap is a gateway to something new, and perhaps the Void is the gateway to a fully new way of being. The metaphor is one of experience and naming it intended to encourage people to stay with it until they feel its value.
It is not really important, finally, to resolve the meaning or genesis of thoughts and images, although sometimes I find it does help. These are complex, multidimensionsl patterns, if they are deep, and in my experience psychodynamic thought and word has use. But sensations are the particles of experiience, and sllowing to expand and contract naturally is the most basic and most important form of healing.
I think the simplest and yet perhaps best miracle is finding magic in ordinary moments: ordinary work, ordinary interactions, ordinary silence and ordinary noise.
I think a useful compassion exercise that I do not remember seein is tobremember wveryone was born innocent. They had a time, however brief, where they had at least moments of excitement, of optimism, of enthusiasm, of spontaneous and purposeless joy. They were young and beautiful once.
Being trapped amd the feeling of being trapped are different. You can feel trapped while free and feel free while trapped.
There are really two types of learned helplessness. This was misunderstood since the original experiments were done on dogs. There is physical helplessness, being paralyzed by anxiety, but also a learned inability to manage emotions. Drinking, I think, for me, is often throwing my hands up in the air and giving up on managing my emotions. It woukd be vastly better to learn to live with the bad and to more reliably generate the good. Why are we so fond of Home? Ideally, it is safe and happy without effort. It is rest. I have to create a home in feeling, as the trxts describe over snd over.
Philosophy is often a scaffolding on top of a mountain that allows you to continue climbing.
I think there is a sort of aggressive giving and helping that seeks to hide. It is a shelter from scrutiny, and effectively a defense.
I think our highest task is to live beautifully and creatively. This will often lead to service but I cannot see service as the highest end.
Anxiety is just the instinct of avoidance. It is the perception of threat followed by a continual impukse to run or hide. And the only reliable means of doing this are intoxication and obsession.
Matriotism?
How fo we deal with relentless change? Superficiality. What affects that? Non mutable commitments, particularly to church and family.
PTSD could be called a non-organic neural or nervous system wound.
Fear and love are both blind: true? not true? Or is the precise differentyce that one flows from ignorance and one from knowing?
“Traitor is a term used by the Left because they know it matters to US.
The only time people of fear are NOT playing a role, ironically, is when they are wearing masks or concealing their faces in rituals of animalistic death, sex, and violence.
Equity comes from a felt sense that even if some are more equal than others, at root people of the fear ARE all equal as ash heaps, and the idea of moral or spiritual growth an abomination and thus anathema.
Privilege is a way of convicing yourself you aredifferent whenyou are completely banal and the same. Sade, in the end, viewed himself as earth, which is why he wanted his grave hidden. So the sole value of being a member of a social, political, or financial elite—or all three, as commonly happens—is that the ROLE you are allowed to occupy is seen by OTHERS as different and better. But this says NOTHING about the reality, even in most forms of meritocracy.
Role playing is work. Perhaps “narcissistic supply”, when someone sees you the way you want to be seen—but not how you are—makes life seem easier, even if it also means you are asking someone else to sacrifice their own instincts and perception for you. Logically then status is a source of narcissistic supply. Andcperhaps cruelty is to expose oneself to pain one cannot feel because one is inreal and nothing is authentic. Per
see we e rest are
haps thecrelief in, say, torture is a remembrance of the lost authentic self.
One of my most persistent disruptive thoughts is “you must be tired”. This clearly comes from my mother who more or less openly sabotaged X and me. I never really learned to FEEL fatigue or hunger, so I often work past my limits. More importantly it takes a lot of energy to combat this voice, so ironicallt being asked if I am tired makes me tired.
The answer is that I am a strong healthy man and will take regular breaks, but it is HEALTHY to put in s full hard days work.
Qiestion: how do transitioned transexuals have orgasms? Mens penises are cut off and womens vaginas are weirdly changed. The clit has been surgically enlarged but how is it stimulated? Is transgenderism an actual rejection of sexusl pleasure? I don’t know. Certainly it changes it.
What is the relation between roles we play and types or categories we recognize or think we recognize?
Meditation: after youve gotten drunk, snd/or sacrificed children and/or had a strong orgasm and IT IS ALL DONE. The person who confronts you THERE is close to your real self. And most people are addicted precisely because they don’t want to live there.
Dream: America is an infinished chirch. In town thst felt like Moxart do you want to see exhibit. 1776 dressed peolle then washington stairs then “frank loyd wright solved the problem then gorgrous chuch with mile long supports and person said they used to use windows for light. As I watched everything became buoyant and very colorful and I asked if it coukd fly. I could see brick walls, only built to a point.
The foundations are America. The large roof is the world. The light is God and freedom. America is only nation FOUNDED on truly liberal ideals. All other nations were reconciled tribalisms. Discuss tribalism.
Here is the big question: if we want global government what form should it take? Upon what idea or ideas or metaideas should it be founded, and by whom?
The choice is the steamroller or the stairs. Unaccountable psychopaths or authentic communities.
Submisdive narcissism and hierarchy. Natcissism is about how a felt sense of self is generated.
Reference culture. A nation has a sysyem of government but nationalism happens at the meaning level.
Transhumanism is an effort to reach an eternal Present or Now without openness.
China was raped by imperialists. Now its government is raping its own citizens.
More and more people know less and less about more and more.
A narcissist retains anxiety about how they are perceived. A sociopath worries only about concrete punishments. In both cases the healthy anxiety occasioned by a moral conscience is suppressed.
Abstraction exists solely to perceive, which is to say predict, the future, and to create it. It cannot connect you to the present, and abstraction about the past is at best learning better how to think about a future self or future reality. And of course it can help you understand the present but in general our only concern is where it is going. True? Not true? Partly true?
Logically, samsara, as it pertains to Earth, ends if life ends. There is no birth and rebirth if no life forms exist to be reborn into.
I think as an emotional mode Fascism might usefully be called anti-individualism.
To be happy you have to know how to be inhappy.
It would be fun to create Kum Nye video series with a fit model able to do all exercises perfectly and afatter older one who struggles. Could do Golden Heat thead full ten minutes. Massage, including chest massage for women.
Grief and anxiety manifest in physiologically similar waysZ
Communists never made the trains run on time. This is the difference: Communism is about generating a FEELING in an elite using lies. It is a radical elitism masquerading as a radical egalitarianism.
Many people grow old faithful to irrational commands given accidentally in a thoughtless moment, or given maliciously and stemming from bitterness.
true liberalism is legal equality of difference
If you can create a gray world, any color you allow becomes a tool of manipulation
What people want ftom travel is new feelings, mostly love and beauty and novelty. They see sights for this. Curiosity turns all of us into tourists daily, no matter where we are.
I was thinking of Pelosi. She is mechanically driven by past unresolved traumas and losses. Why would such a person not naturally feel they could bevaugmented by becoming an actual machine.
Battles and bottles, scars and scares. And the bottle is a symbol for seemingly unresolvable pain, nothing else, although certainly bad habits intrude.
I am tempted to speculate that feeling evil is the last step before becoming honestly good; and sadness precedes at least the possibility of happiness.
Sometimes I don’t know what sort of mood Im in until I talk with someone.
I felt momentarily this morning that the only honest way to help people is if you BEGIN neither fearing them nor needing or wanting anything from them.
What drugs do is build a bridge over the Hard Ground, but do little or nothing to dissolve it or teach you to find your way through.
If your life is a book the troubles are what make it worth reading. And your joys. But who would want to read about one joqqy followed by another?
Write political short stories like Encyclopedia Brown called Spot the Inconsistency.
The Boddhisattva ideal is based on the idea that Samsara can be emptied of sentient beings. This doesnt make sense to me. I think the ideal may have come about because nobody really understood what nirvana meantp
Theres no fast way to do something slowly; and there is no forcing the gradual.
There is a space of unknown size between pushing and allowing. There is continuous continuum. It feels empty, but not nevessarily in a bad way. I think this void feeling is where the interesting but usually invisible action is. Nearly all of us miss it, which is why the Buddhists and perhaps others gave it a name. Both allowing and pushing conscious ego driven actions.
The fact of double think drives fear because the inconscious is well aware of the problem. Fear breeds anger and violence.
Desire consists in lines. The solution is recognizing every moment is a pivot point.
Cesorship
fascism
cheating
White supremacy numbers hells angels
Sex is quite often a barrier to intomacy.
Mar a lago is like Nixon ordered the FBI to break into the Watergate hotel without a valid warrant.
Ifyou work for the FBI you are either a crook or you know crooks.
Your eyes being on fire means you see what you want to see—what you desire to see—and are blind to what you do not want to see. Both habits ensure avidya. And to be ignorant is to be on fire, in Duhkha.
From a pro-life perspective banning abortion is not about denying womens rights but creating them for unborn babies/ little puppy humans.
Maybe nirvana is giving up all rockness in the stream of life, extinguishing the flame of resistance. You can still swim and navigate in a current, as well as float, but both are better than trying to stop time and with it life.
Liberals, which is to say people who take the project of improving human society seriously, judge people by what they have done, and ideally in the process include context. Anti-Liberals judge people on who they ARE as assigned according to arbitrary and changing schemes, with no effort at context
Thought forms do not need to be filled with emotion, but in any engaged spirit they are the inevitable result of strong stimuli. Where they are not present—where thoughtlessness predominates—you are not dealing with an authentically spiritual person. The happy idiot has transcended thought, not banished it. There is a level above thought.
Healing amounts to learning to feel and then integrate previously unfelt and unintegrated experiences. As such, it amounts to learning a skill which carries forward. You cannot eradicate grief or fear from your life, but you can learn to carry, own, and work more smoothly and usefully with them.
For people with a certain background, when listing all the reasons for inhappiness, humiliation tends to be forgotten. Humiliation squeezes self awareness out. You just dissolve, disappear, and then of course remember only with difficulty what you were feeling. For me, I think I wake up every day with a feeling of shame, then fight it back down into submission and inconsciousness so I can function.
I will put it this way: shame is probably the hardest human emotion to feel consciously. Narcissism is the rejection of shame through insulation and isolation, but it retains a fear of shame. Sociopathy rejects both fear and shame and defaults to relentless acquisitive aggression.
The only real spiritual demand placed on us is that we throw our hat in the ring and try. This is the meaning of the parable of the talents. No matter how small or weak you are, you can try. Success is irrelevant. If the man with one talent had lost it, he would still have been praised.
Split consciousness is a more or less chosen then conditioned decision to live within an Alter, a bland personality denuded of spontaneity, authentic joy, and emotional freedom.
If you actually are inferior pereptually you cannot see it. But you can be conditioned to assume it.
Whatever you can feel you can heal.
You cannot go backwards in life. There is never any true return. Every moment will always have its own trxture and savor.
It is a truism, but much of what we learn to do to survive intolerable situations is to be selectively blind and more or less willfully forgetful.
I think there is a continuum between a shame based social order and a connection based social order. One is primitive, rigid, and latently based on fear and violence. Changing the target does not change the fact. The whole of the Left might be seen as an effort at imposing a moral order denuded of empathy, connection, and understanding. Connection allows play, evolution, and conscious change
The pleasures of privilege, one of the primary emotional goals of narcissists, derive primarily from the relative deprivation of others. This is perhaps a core factor in why Communism never works: the elite dont WANT equality. They simply use egalitarian rhetoric and varying targets of hate to in effect recreate the divine right of kings.
Burdens feel lifhter when you get stringer and heavier when get weaker.
You can only really value freedom if you have experienced contraction. Todays kids are freest group of humans ever, in many wYs, and yet many have convinced themselves they are oppressed. Children need an enemy, so with the help of psychopaths, they have created one.
I will wonder if true adulthood consists in embracing a stable sense of the sacred.
My take on environmentalism: lets solve the problems that actually exist. That is vastly better than ising a fabricated crisis to put in place a global incompetency.
I think the principle that “there is no loss” is useful. Just new realities. Anything that lessens fear almost automatically increases spiritual awareness.
We need a balance between the frontal cortex and limbic system. Sime feat and shame and anger are healthy. And I think it is a feature of conditioned partitioned awareness that the Left is closed to their own culture—even though all their. alues detive from it—and open to all the others WITHOUT RESERVATION.
Microcommunities
Proactive shame, manifested as hesitation and lack of assertiveness and confidence, is a nearly inevitable consequence of the loss of shared behavioral exprctations.
If you rehearse your story continually you will never get out of it.
Discuss how and why Clint Eastwood felt more comfortable with the Hmong than his own family. Most of the world is culturally conservative, and maturity involves learning to act within constrsints, particularly thise of self and other respect.
I think I get thoughts rather than pleasure.
Contrast Tibetan with East Asian meditative practice. Self study versus group effort. The Tibetan method is sort of a spiritual charter school. And I womder if IN PRINCIPLE we ought not to value self study and self pacing over groups.
Tramspersonal fear. Plato. Archetypes. Eric Baret page 86
I think there is a subtle difference between resisting an impulse and not indulging it.
Look up Gypsy Rose Lee and the G String murders
Reading books is qualitatively vastly different than reading a computer. It is much slower and calmer. The internet is virtually defined by speed, such that more dpeed is seen as almost intrinsically good.
Look up Cziskscenmily’s later work and consider reteading Flow.
The invisible journey is the only one that really matters.
Read up on Cleopatra and the riot of 1831 against notre dame
Censorship is the use of social violence to protect mediocrity and mendacity.
Antiliberalosm as emotional nomadism. Most of the world is conservative. Home is safe, understood, respected if not loved. You belong.
I think a latent assumption has quietly crept into our culture that life should be as easy as the internet and problems solved as quickly as ordering on the internet.
Yolu can push your way to the top but not the bottom. That consists in etting go, which is accepting loss. And the best place to look up is the bottom
The world says no often enough, so it is important not to say it too often to ourselves.
Feeling the passage of time with curious detachment IS, I think, being in the present moment. Impatience is feeling time but feing disconnected within it from another time you want to be in. Patience is remaining open and connected.
Shame is paralyzing. It saps energy. Fear makes you run. This is why chronic anger can feel liberating fir traumatized people.
I think chronic shame is the root malady of humanity. It is both why people seek power and a method for retaining it. And in our own time I think superficiality caused by a collapsing culture which creates a disconnection that feels like shameful exile and banishment. Organized evil is perhaps creating an etsatz community in the shade of shared shame.
I also think the thirsts for power and wisdom are inversely related. Power is telling people one thing, and wisdom consists in mulptyingbperceptions and perspectives.
Shame turns you into a stone over which the sensations of life wash without entering. Love is the best solution.
I think it is bery easy to spend many years holding the tale of a dragon. We are attached. We cant let go. but we cant face it and tame it either. And so we go on.
Whenever anything “bad” happens, it is a good policy to look around and see if it has caused you to notice something that you had been ignoring.
All radicals in the end are conservatives. All processes of logic lead to one form or another of conservatism and all rejections of logic are merely extremely regressive conservatisms.
Anger or outrage “bath”.
A truly Liberal order, to deserve the name, is ine in which EVERYONE agrees on certain basic principles, like fair election and the right to free speech. Another principle is that you are individuated to know and own coherent and logically consistent principles, which is the prime feature of adulthood. You cannot not have principles: they are literally “that which comes first”. You can merely have emotionally rooted, unconscious pronciples which always involve some degree of blindness, death, andcselfishness.
There is not one logic but multiple logics, like emotional, behavioral, philosophical and geometric logic. It is intuition, manifested through feeling, that connects them.
Phrasing: I need a hug. Would you like one too?
If it is true that we seek partners of roughly our individuation and maturity, then pedophilia is INHERENTLY a disorder of failed individuation; and same sex pedophilia lacks even a pretense of diffetentiation, making it narcissistic, amounting to masturbation, which to be sure much sex is.
If one of the effects of maturity is balance and nuance you can reliably infer that where they are absent—where disproportional and irrational extremes are present—some degree of immaturity is also present. And growing up is the purpose of life and allowing this to happen in many diverse ways is the POINT of Liberalism.
If taking things seriously—having principles you hold sacred—defines maturity, then any culture that lacks a sacred cannot produce adults. What the Left provides is an Ersatz sacred that is both easy and hard. Easy because no thought is involved. Hard be ause it is a demanding cult. But it is a path to a sort of maturity for lost people.
Might Anti-Liberalism not be seen as holding Fusion sacred? I think so.
Weight Lifting IS part of my meditative practice. So is the sauna.
As far as election integrity all we want is a special prosecutor and a hundred million dollar investigation and we will be satisfied. That makes ud less greedy.
Where personal growth is concerned hard work done slowly is better than hard work done fast. I have drugs in particular in mind.
Rather than praying for forgiveness most of is should pray to feel less shame for crimes we havenot committed. High shame cultures, like much of historical America, especially with ots work propaganda, are dfficient but maddening
The feeling of having committed a crime is not thr same as actually committing a crime. This is a basic differentiation neurotics need to make. And neuroticism is in most cases long term low grade traumatic activation. Everything relates back to trauma, I think, where rank immaturity and brain injury are absent.
I think a simple means by which people try and reject shame is by rejecting common standards and conventional morality. This stems from the spurious notion that the shame comes from “society”. it doesnt. It is an Attachment issue from babyhood. But this rejection leads not just to the bad habit of intentionally anti-social behavior but to the suppression of shame and empathy.
One of the more or less inevitable outcomes of immaturity—of failed individuation—is chronic fristration, which effectively is anger, and the anti-Liberal agenda seemingly exists both to provide expressive pathways for this anger, and to manipulate and channel it. And thrre are levels, but even at the Bill Gates level the need for hate anger and violence still flows from the same primitive place.
Is Anti-Infividualism not disguised Anti-Individuationism? Yes, I think so. Anti-Liberalism then becomes a structural opponent of Maturity. Fascism is a prima facie imposition of rigid immaturity on a society.
We need diversity of experience. Most of us view the idea of infailing and effortless happiness with some devree of skepticism. What we fear is not trouble but helplessness. Individuation might alsobe seen as anti-helplessness.
True/not true: the Void is where you savrifice unwanted emotions in a healthy way. All other sacrifices are ridding yourself of unwanted emotions in an unhealthy way.
A command economy is still formally complex—it is simply denuded of most intelligence. And asking how an undirected system could work is like asking how water runs downhill without a concrete embankment.
A house defended will never grow.
People with intact reality testing know the world rises and falls on countless tides. People addicted to ideas, which amounts to the reality of wmotional stasis and disordered, delusional and compulsive thinking, view chaange as an unwelcome intruder and fesperately want to “fix” the world to stabilize their delusions.
Identity politics is fusion politics
I am the star of my own horror film.
Dont amplufy bad feelings. Just remain aware of them, and let them be, like grazing animals.
To be self aware you need a sense of self. No self no self awareness.
Lao Tse said long ago that it is a blessing not to know what ypu dont have. Imaginehow onsanely jealous people would have been if someone had had a smart phone in the 1950’s. Yet we all have them now. Are we happier? Its the opposite I think: the iPhone INCREASES our awareness of what we dont have—of what traits we dont possess, what experiences we lack—and does so on a moment to moment basis. People have often and long looked for happiness outside thrmselves, but Consumerism consists in relentless indoctrination, reinforced continuously, not to look anywhere else.
Comment on kundalini seemingly deriving from word coil. Trauma resolution amounts to learning conscious uncoiling. And traumas include both birth and birth HERE.
I dont know if it is possible to rid oneself of fear, but I think one can get rid of the fear of fear.
Thinking for oneself is a form of study, and I would argue perhaps the most important one.
I will speculate that the difference between a healthy obsession and an unhealthy one is curiosity. The first demands the rejection of self pity and perseverence but not curiosity. Healthy SYSTEMS, then, both allow and encourage curiosity and exploration.
The purpose of spiritual study is to enable us to recognize what is important in our own experience. But it cannot create it, and taken too far it actively precludes learning the habits of thinking, feeling and perceiving. We should never let mediation get in the way of meditation.
Why is spiritual work so fucking hard? Because it is worth it.
Much modern philosophy is not different in intent or prsctice from crossword puzzles. It is autotelic. Proper philosophy impliez philopraxia.
As Extinction, Nirvana represents an rnd to lSamsara. A not unreasonable reading of this is that it is a successful spiritual suicide. Is Samsara really so bad? I think it more reasonable to see it as the dndvof resistance and following pain.
Philosophy ought to be simple enough that you csn explsin it to a plumber and he can benefit from it.
Dissociation is effectively emotional anesthesis.
Crisis of maturity.
The logic of rejecting gain and loss as capable of defining our quality of life is that all balance sheets equal zero.
The problem with trauma is that a key defense strategy is denying it even exists; if not verbally, perceptually.
You can “attach” to drugs and alcohol when no one in your world is reliable.
Its not who you are at the beginning: its who you are at the end.
Evil is unwanted change. True? Not true?
If you stay frightened then you cannot transition into fear. It is like sn enemy you keep close. Add to this a habit of dissociation and it is easy to cling to. The traumatized fear transitioing inho fear because they have the experience of fear on afterburners, of full traumatic shock.
The less obvious perhaps issue of avoiding problems is not that you cannot diminish pain: you can. The problem is that the opportunities for positive experience mainly present themselves while we are solving problems.
Self forgiveness is the ending of shame and I think ironically its easier to forgive ourselves if we forgive others. Easing shame means “I no longer need stand apart. My exile from myself and my people is over.” And love is a sort of proactive forgiveness.
I think a good way of thinking of healthy sex is that you are taking an affectionate hug to the next logical level.