Moderates United

It occurs to me this morning that the notion that Christ died for our sins means that we have to die for our sins too.  Everybody dies.  And until you die, and are reborn within a conformist group, you live in sin, and you DESERVE to die.

Now, shame has many causes.  As I have said often, many of us inherit it from childhoods where we simply felt chronically unsafe.  Our mothers did not hold us enough.  They were emotionally incapable of MEANING “I love you”, if they said it at all (I don’t recall mine ever saying that when I was growing up, but my memory is perhaps deficient; I don’t remember much of my childhood).

But powers that want to control us learned long ago that shame is a powerful motivator.  It is something simply floating in the air they can grab, and use it to get to our balls and wills.  This is the core truth with respect to Christianity as it has been passed down to us.

No religion based on love has everlasting damnation as a consequence of individual choice, personality, and belief.  But if you already feel shame, and everyone is telling you you have to submit or face eternal flame, you will break sooner rather than later.

And as I’m sure I’ve discussed, ponder the power the Popes had over kings throughout their long dominance in Europe.  They could literally condemn kings to Hell, to everlasting damnation, and the only way out for kings was to reject the Christian faith, or in the case of Henry VIII–and no doubt some others I am too historically ignorant to know about, or recall at this moment–do some really creative theology.

When love is the focus, Christianity is a very life affirming, positive thing.  But as an explanation of how the world works, Hinduism and its many cousins is vastly less judgmental.  You get as many chances as you need, and it may be quite a few.

In my own case, I am attacked every night by a host of emotions.  I am trying to name them, to feel them, to process them, so that I can one day let them all go–or perhaps more accurately, allow them to go, since moving on is already in the nature of normally transient affect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrlVaiNzQaI

There is a documentary out there called “Root Cause”, which details how root canals cause all sorts of health problems which are very very hard to trace back to their, yes, root cause.  The way the surgery is done, the root is cut off from access to the immune system, and a high percentage of them become infected, but invisibly.

It can cause organ problems, body pains, even cancer.

The ADA, almost certainly, had the video taken down from all digital platforms, presumably under threat of lawsuit, which is sketchy as fuck.  They should publicly refute the findings.  But as the doctor in this video notes, they have a LONG history of being more or less fraudulent in their claims, and risk indifferent with respect to their patients.  The use of mercury, long after it was known to be a toxin, is one.  Their continuing claim that fluoridation is good for us is another (I’ve been using bottled water for years).

Don’t trust large groups.  Don’t trust people who say “trust me”.  Some of them are honest, and some of them are money grubbing amoral psychopaths.  And all of them are fucking arrogant.  They NEED, psychologically, to feel like they have all the answers.

This talk is what got me on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPDPrXEAe1s

This guy has sterling bona fides as an eye doctor, and everything he says in this video and the next makes a ton of sense.

I don’t know who is pulling the strings in this world.  There is no conspiracy needed, really, to do the math to generate mass stupidity.  All you need to do is add complacency to habit to arrogance.  C+H+A=Stupidity.  The scientific method really has no formal means of avoiding this, other than the ambition of individual scientists to discover something new, and which in general is opposed by all dominant orthodoxies and their priesthood.

I get my cynicism honestly.  I am a student of how things really work.

Are all conspiracy theories valid?  Self evidently, no.  Can you assume, though, that masses of people in power are capable of lying to you?  Mon Dieu: it happens every day.  This is why freedom of speech is so categorically important.  If those in power can get classes of information out of circulation, it makes the job of truth suppression vastly easier.  They can make it so we don’t even know what questions to ask.

Emotions which are buried alive never die.

Not sure on source.  It was quoted in passing in a video I’m watching.

Most Indian traditions speak of “sin” as avidya, ignorance, literally “not knowing”.

I think it might also be worth viewing “sin” as a sort of tragedy, as a case where someone, not knowing their way, got lost in the darkness.

It would be the role of a shepherd to find such people, and bring them back to the light.  There is nothing personal in any of this. 

To be clear, I feel something best called evil exists, and must be fought, but how it is framed, precisely, makes a huge difference.

In dark moonless night, some of the flock wandered off.  Now they have forgotten they are lost, or that they ever had a home.

Me, I’m lost too, but I know it, and that makes a large difference.

I think what most women who have been violated in one way or another by a man REALLY need is the energy of a man who is healthy and whole, and protective to his very soul.

I only vaguely meant that to rhyme.  My point is that the feminine is very important in human life.  In my considered view, more important than the masculine.  But so too is masculine, protective, I will die for you, you are safe now, energy.

Oh, the lies bounce off the walls and hit us twice.  To be sober and sane in this world is a feat currently beyond me.

But I’m making progress!!!

I just read that chewing and swallowing normally elicit a parasympathetic response, in and of themselves.  The process of eating tells the body to calm down.

I had never encountered this factoid before.  It explains a lot, even before one gets into the effect of fats and simple sugars on cortisol.

Put another way, if I might expand to a cultural comment, our bodies naturally want to enjoy meal times, and make them stress free and relaxed.

I’ve decided to think of myself as a spiritual adventurer.

There is this tacit conceit–or I would argue misconception–among New Agey sorts, who are usually the ones talking about spirituality, that spiritual growth is about becoming nicer, that it is cheap and easy in important respects, and that those who argue otherwise–those strange souls who wonder in from time to time from the outer cold and dark–are really just being mean.

No: it’s about loving the Dalai Lama, and chanting, and being a vegetarian, and doing yoga regularly, about being nice to everyone, smiling a lot, and generally making no waves at all.

This is part of it, perhaps, but diving deep is a scary animal, and there is no way to sugarcoat that fact.

The deeper you dive, the larger your reactive capacity, and the larger your reactive capacity–the more things you can digest–the greater your spiritual capacity.

To become large, you have to internalize and deal with the fact that this world is often cruel, violent, obscene, and disgusting.  You have to look and not look away.

For my part, my view is that any practicing (selling) “spiritual” person who finds the need to rationalize in pathological terms the success of Donald Trump is not really spiritual at all.  They can certainly disagree with his policies, and dislike him as a person, but to misunderstand why he felt necessary to 60 million of us signifies they fundamentally do not get how this world works at all, and there is nothing spiritual about that.

Oh, and before that shining soapbox appeared before and invited me to preach, I had intended to mention that inner journeys are, to me, vastly more interesting than outer journeys, although I do get wanderlust at regular intervals.  To journey inward you need nothing but curiosity and courage and focus.

Many people travel the world and return largely the same.  Me, I want to blossom in one place.  Then perhaps I may go experience what all is out there.

Suffice it to say, I keep sage around the house.  It’s something that may or may not help, but I like the smell and it can’t hurt anything.

This one was so in my face I could feel it’s forehead on mine.  I could smell its bad breath.  It told me to stop speaking, to cease what I am doing.  I was frightened for a moment, then thought about it and small submissions always become large ones, so I told him Fuck you.  All large things begin as microfractions of an inch.

Brainwashing begins by convincing yourself there is a 1/100th of an inch difference between two pencils.  The next thing you know–but of course you don’t really know, because you is now gone–you are cursing Capitalist Imperialists, and singing the praises of the Virgin King Emperor of North Korea and his utterly just war with the money hungry thieves of the Southern Regions.

Then I woke up a little bit, thought about it, then summoned him back and cursed him properly.  Real or psychic emanation, I am not going to be fucked with.

Then I woke up: shit, I’ve only been asleep a couple hours.  Well, I learned long ago their only tool is fear, and I am learning to manage my fear.  I’m learning to manage them.  I had two a couple nights ago I got rid of easily.  This is the weird thing about all this: all of them feel qualitatively different.  No two feel exactly the same.  It’s not a recurring thing: it happens in many different ways.

I will say, though, that my third eye is so active I can feel it strongly.  It is ringing like a bell.

In this strange place, we don’t know our destinies, but I know mine is to do the work I do.  It is what I am.  It is who I am.  It cannot stop.  I will not stop.  I have already thrown myself in the abyss countless times.  I have already faced death more times than I can count.  It does frighten me.  I suppose it always will.  But I cannot surrender who I am, will not surrender, and so I will be thrown against the cliffs until they break.

I don’t know if that is a good metaphor, but it’s how I feel.  Back to bed.

What I am slowly realizing is that it possible to keep the awareness of a need in my consciousness, while simultaneously recognizing it will take time to meet it.

I suppose one could with justice assert that ability as the primary functional attribute of adulthood, but be that as it may, I have not had it. The only things I have been able to trust are things which are readily available and which change my mood reliably over s short timeframe, principle food and booze.

The thing with trauma is the present is already a source of anxiety so intense it forces me into emotional shutdown to get anything done. This I am good at. This is why I feel confident that if the job was charging into gunfire, I could do it. But I would not have my instincts, my intuition, at my service, and that makes, I think, a huge difference.

And logically if you take the fears of today and project them into the future, they metastasize. They increase exponentially to the point no human nervous system could accommodate them.

So people like me live in the present, to the extent  we live anywhere at all outside our hiding place.

Our culture, too, consists largely in people selling things by grabbing our attention, in a continual parade of now, never later. This makes money, and both panders to and creates our short attention spans.  This, in turn, helps people hide from all the grave and important and unanswered questions deep in the cavern of our collective psyche.

I need your sympathy.

I deserve your sympathy and I expect to see it.

I deserve your sympathy but I can’t control it so I don’t think about it.

I don’t care if anyone feels sorry for me or not.

I dont need anyone’s sympathy.

I actively reject your sympathy, because it makes me feel like shit and I don’t like feeling like shit.

This is my party, man!!

Add to this mental calculation the claim often made by codependent people wherein they tell someone else “you deserve the worlds pity, and if you don’t get it you should feel righteous anger.”

Is that helpful on any level?

My take is that shit happens. There are true victims in this world, true infathomable horrors and countless mindless petty cruelties. These are valid claims.

But in the same sense you would not leave your front door wide open in a bad neighborhood, why would you allow your internal world to be dominated by what others do and say? It’s unhealthy, and largely unnecessary. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something, usually short term comfort at the cost of long term self esteem. And the profit they derive is the active avoidance of their own failures and shortcomings as human beings, combined with an unwarranted inflation in their subjective sense of self worth.