Moderates United

Evil is the effort of a traumatized nervous system to recognize and remember itself.

I think this is very close to the core truth.

Logically, if shame, fear, and anger form a triumvirate which rules those with amygdala dysregulation, aka developmental trauma (or in any event, trauma of some sort), then self forgiveness, as the opposite of shame, as the down regulating of shame, is also an act working to calm fear and anger.  They are Janus, but with three faces.

And even though I am coming to believe neurofeedback is the only way to do this systematically and completely, there is a cognitive element which cannot but help when added to the mix.

Specifically, it seems to me that it useful to believe, and in almost all cases certainly true, that our most fucked up behaviors–our eating to the point of being fat, our inconsistencies, our drinking, pot smoking, overwork, sexual addictions, etc–are all in place because some part of our nervous system thinks they are vitally important to our survival.  They are absolutely necessary.  They cannot be ended or avoided, in the long run.  Our very lives depend on them.

Now, all of us dispute these subliminal claims.  We say “I want to be skinny”, we say “booze is not really my friend”, we say “this much work just isn’t necessary”.  But our insides think they know better.  They always manipulate us back into those addictions.

Anything which calms us, in other words, even for a short time, comes to be seen as the simultaneous event of forgiveness, running and hiding, and fighting well.  It is the aim for which our nervous system thinks it has been triggered to accomplish, and it will accomplish it over and over and over.  It is immune to reason.  It is much more primitive than that, phylogenetically.  We share it with reptiles, or so I understand.

Our very survival depends on our addictions.  This is what our nervous system is telling us.  I really think this is true.  I certainly think it is true in my own case.

Neurofeedback is a sort of magic wand which takes your fear away.  And what I am reading, and what I feel in myself, is that that fear exists in a complex network of associations, which are not just a felt sense of self, but a felt sense of context.

To fully heal, you have to learn to reach for new things, for new reasons.  Addiction was never about survival, but only about feeling survival was possible.  To thrive, you have to go somewhere new.

In the end, the temple that matters is in your soul, in your particular configuration of spirit, mind, emotion, and action.  Physical temples can only serve to remind us to build within, in the best cases by reminding us what has been accomplished by others.

It occurs to me that humility is a gift you give yourself.  It is a freedom.  It allows you to see that when people sling shit at you, they are really aiming elsewhere.  You are just a ghost who happens to be in the way.

It does not mean you cannot react when people attack you.  It simply means you don’t have to.  You are not pushed by pride, which is to say a deep seated sense that your critics–most notably your inner critic–are right. You are not fending off spider webs in the dark.

It is right and appropriate to feel pleasure and satisfaction in work that is well done, but another entirely to place your emotional health in the hands of others by demanding acceptance and recognition.

Most people are idiots.  I say this not to make myself feel superior, but to remember that their voices really don’t matter that much.

First off, I think it is as ludicrous that conservatives are condemning Mattis, as some are, as that the pathetic Leftists are now pretending to value his sage presence and deep wisdom, and to be fully behind war in Syria.  Because, you know, none of them stand any risk of dying, or hearing of the children of anyone they know dying.

Loyalty can admit differences.  You do not spit on someone just because he differs in some small way from someone you say you like more.  This whole process of turning people from heroes to villains overnight is the core process of left wing lunatic regimes populated by GroupThink and general imbecility.  Don’t be an imbecile.

Mattis is Mattis.  He disagrees with Trump, and for all we know he may be right.  I support the President, even as I opposed deploying more than a couple hundred Spec Op VOLUNTEERS to that theater.  We have no strategic interests in Syria.  It is a humanitarian mission, as I see it, to stop the mass rapes, crucifixions, and general murder and mayhem, all of it facilitated by Barack Hussein Obama, when he supplied training, money and arms to people everyone knew at the time were Islamic radicals.  Medicins Sans Frontieres was writing about this in 2012.  I remember it.  I probably blogged on it, and certainly commented on it on the internet.

The war in Syria was created by Obama, or, at least, made vastly more violent, costly, and lengthy than it would have been, if he had not used American resources illegally and covertly to fuck everything up.  We can’t know why, but my best guess is that his relationship with the Saudis was in reality what Trump’s relationship with Russia is in the opium dreams and wet dreams of the Left.

For my part, I didn’t even know “we” were “in” Syria.  I haven’t read shit about that conflict in months.  I haven’t read shit about ISIS in a very long time.  Have you?  Was the same Left that now values that war–which has less than a tenth the strategic importance Vietnam did, if even that–writing about this?  Were they writing about the courage of our troops?  The details of specific battles?  Eulogies for the fallen?  I haven’t seen it.  It seems likely that if Trump wanted it, they opposed it.  Again: these motherfuckers believe nothing.  They can switch their beliefs on a dime.  They are functional nihilists, not good people, not stand up people, not reliable people, not people working for any cause worthier other than the on-going medication of their chronic anxiety through the medicine of politically based anger and rage.

It does seem likely we are fucking the Kurds over, in particular.  If I were Trump, I would allow some proportion of the people serving there to end their enlistments, if they feel strongly, and go back as mercenaries, perhaps with American provided arms and money.  Or we could just send Blackwater, or whatever its current name is, back in there.  There is a moral value in what they are doing, but everyone there needs to be there only and solely because they want to be.  Risking and losing American lives for purposes which do not even approximate meeting the propaganda about “protecting freedom” is cruel and unnecessary.

Our nation is under attack from the southern border.  That is a true crisis, a true place where the “defense of freedom” might actually mean something.  The Democrats want to import and legalize sufficient people who have radically different beliefs that they can win elections forever.  This is treason, and it needs to be opposed both physically at the border, and legally at the ballot box.  Their cheating needs, also, to be punished much more severely than it has to date.  By and large, they have paid no price, even when caught.  There is no downside to doing their best to thwart the will of the voters.  There needs to be.

1. Self Sacrifice
2. Love
3. Being present
4. Useful work

This came to me this morning.  I will explain more, when I figure out the first.

I do want to found something most reasonably called a religion, but one without religiosity.  We are ready, are we not, for something like an open source religion?  A code, to used by all in varying ways, to varying but on balance beneficial ends?

Ideas have bits, but so too do emotions.  It all depends on picking the right bits, then adding motion.  This is the magic of spontaneous alchemy.

Many bits have been chosen over the past few centuries, but never the right ones, and most often the most disastrously wrong ones.

All my work is leading to this.

I was dreaming last night I was given control of a halftrack, and placed in a battle of some sort.  I didn’t know what side I was on, but I was supposed to shoot everything I saw.  I had a machine gun, but I didn’t use it effectively.  I had a cannon, but I couldn’t figure it out.  I fought poorly.  I kept crashing, and dropping down into lower levels, where eventually I was fighting in water.

It was supposedly a game, but people were dying.

When it came time to give out the awards, a male wisdom figure told me to go hide in the women’s bathroom, which I did.

I simultaneously watched the awards, and everyone, victor and defeated alike, had their tongues stapled, so they could not speak.

There are several levels of potential analysis, plus the ones that are not obvious to me, but which may be obvious to someone else.

First, I think most men who suffer trauma fight the world their whole lives.  And the reward and price for victory, for even staying in the battle, is losing the ability to describe the fight, to forget who the real enemy is, to forget what was hidden, to identify fighting with masculinity.

There is a kernel of truth, of course, to the phrase “toxic masculinity”, but if the people using this phrase were honest and healthy themselves, they would use the phrase unhealthy masculinity.  Wounded masculinity perhaps.

And I would suggest men and women tend to process these things differently.  Men are not as willing as women to live in shame.  They become aggressive, abusive.  Women, in turn, allow themselves to be abused.  It is not masochism, per se, but perhaps a conditioned organismic preference for surrender–shame–to fighting or running, since biologically they know they have always been the physically weaker (and in my view emotionally stronger, on balance) sex.  You’re not supposed to say that, but it is obviously true.

Military formations may be a way of harness shame en masse.  It is a culturally acceptable way for men to allow the feeling of shame–of subordination–to be sublimated (if I might pull a term from the work of a man I intensely disagree with on most topics) into pride.  The Marines, as one example, break you, but then you get to claim you are a real man because you were a Marine.  But the breaking might include wading through literal shit in the cesspools of Parris Island, as a friend of mine from long ago said he had to do, as a member of the Correctional Custody Platoon, which he got into because he couldn’t do 3 pullups when he showed up for Basic.  This is shame inducing.

For me, this dream might be a realization that the way I have been fighting has not been working, that I might need to contemplate some surrender, some compromise.  Some of the “know the way of the male but stick to the way of the female” of the Tao Te Ching.  When I stop devoting all my energy to suppressing feelings, they become available to me.

On a broader level, I would suggest that in some respects war IS a game.  Men look forward to it, as a way of testing themselves.  But it is an absurd, idiotic game, in some respects.  Without denigrating the virtues of physical courage, profound loyalty, the increase in the capacity to suffer without complaint and everything else that comes with it, I would say that war steals from all of us our souls.  And it does so in such a way that it prevents us from speaking of it.  Veterans who show up in veterans groups to tell the same stories over and over and over, are really trying to convince themselves of the value of their sacrifices.  And a great many who cannot convince themselves, cannot perform that quasi-magic trick, wind up killing themselves.

And I am not saying we should not have fought World War 2 (although I am quite sure we should not have intervened in World War 1), or even Korea or Vietnam.  I am saying that war is an insane institution we need to understand should only be engaged in for the very, very best of reasons, and that even then, it is evil, and needs to be understood as much.

As Lao Tzu wrote, a victory should be celebrated as a funeral.  Do not brag and boast, and do not tell lies about the glories of combat.  As that same friend said, who did eventually see combat, who did have friends die in his arms, “war is as romantic as a meat grinder”.

I am presently listening to the audiobook of “The Metaphysical Club”, and it has dealt in the main thus far with Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., who saw a LOT of action in the Civil War.  He was shot three times: in the chest, in the neck, and in the foot.  He also had dysentery.  The book is clearly leading to the philosophical conclusions he derived from all of this, which are highly topical now.

Given that we all believe what we believe, how do we peacefully coexist?  This is both a social and a political problem.  We have solved the political problem with our Constitution.  It is the social problem, a very, very old social problem, an atavistic social problem, which we are now seeing played out in our streets once again.  It will be interesting to see where all this goes.

Few thoughts.

There is no right answer, because the problem is in the brain.

For me, being still creates anxiety, and moving creates anxiety. I can mask it with a false confidence.  I can mask it with strong, obsessive, almost manic movement, but it does not make it go away.

All my life, I have gone in circles, and not known why.  It is because I am trying to escape a pain in my own head, and I carry that with me everywhere.  So what people like me learn to do is play games.  Like Charlie Brown and Lucy, we assume over and over and over and over, that the NEXT time will be the one.  The NEXT thing will be the one.  And it never is.  And we sedate ourselves with our poison of choice, which builds the faith and confidence to try again.

And they call this addiction.  Here is the thing: for someone like me, drinking is a mistake.  It makes me less productive, less reliable.  To some unknown extent it dulls my senses (although in my particular case, I can remember details of drunken conversations years later, even while sober, so it is not state dependent), and of course it’s not good for me.  As evidenced by the raging hard-ons I still get in my sleep if I go too long without taking care of business, my aorta is quite clear, as it is with most alcoholics, but my liver and other internal organs cannot be happy with me.

But NOT drinking is a mistake too.  It opens me to profound emotional upset, with no good means of dispelling it.  I’ve tried everything.

Well, nearly everything.  I will reveal my little secret here: I have purchased a Neurofeedback device, and am doing it daily, and as far as I can recall, I did not shake last night or the night before.  This is a new feeling.  This is THE solution for people like me.  I have not found anything else, and am not aware of anything else.

And what I am seeing clearly is that where drinking is concerned, there is operant conditioning involved.  When I get drunk, there has always been the reward of reduced anxiety and emotional pain.  Alternatively, there is the punishment by body delivers when I don’t give it that.

Physiological addiction, as I have commented before–and which is a commonplace among writers like Johan Hari and Gabor Mate–is a non-issue.  We have known how to deal with that for a long time.

But in the same way more healthy people are soothed by seeing an old friend, people like me greet our own “soothers” with a physiological bump, with happiness, with the sense of a long conditioned reward which cannot be removed by simply getting unaddicted physically.

People who do not heal their underlying wounds who stay sober have simply, in my view, taught their nervous system to regard substance use as an abuse, as a negative reinforcement, as perhaps even a crime, and they have surrounded themselves with similar people who say the same things, and perhaps help them believe it.  They come to view the punishment of not drinking as less than that of continuing.  This is a solution for some, but they are still miserable.  As I have said, I have been to AA meetings, and as a group, they are mostly miserable.  They miss their Rosebud, their lost friend.  They miss the hope of a happy childhood, which was taken from them so very long ago.

In my own work, I have three simultaneous challenges: healing my own wounds, figuring out what the fuck I am going to do with the rest of my life, both how and why, and–because I seem to be enmeshed at an emotional level with the world as a whole–how all of us survive this time, and build a society equal to the talents all of us as individuals possess.

It’s scary.  It’s confusing.  I have no help at all.  I don’t anyone who is remotely equal to the challenge of understanding me and feeding back new and helpful ideas.

But according to my own metaphysics, I must have asked for this.  This was the battle I wanted, long before I was actually fighting it.  I feel confused.  I feel deep pain.  But I don’t feel self pity.  A good battle is a gift.

I read this article the other day: https://www.out.com/positive-voices/2016/12/01/woman-who-cared-hundreds-abandoned-gay-men-dying-aids

It teared me up a bit.  For all she knew, she was dealing with a leper.  What she saw, though, was a problem that needed fixing.  She saw useful work in front of her.  She felt the terror of this young man and felt compassion for him, then had the balls to do something about it.  She was the only one in that mass of people seeing a human being in pain.

This, in a nutshell, is my ideal of a hero.  They are the ones who see what others don’t, and do what others cannot imagine.

And I was thinking I can have multiple ideas of gayness.  This is the beauty of freedom, of the capacity to change my mind, or to allow multiple simultaneous strands of opinion.

I can say I have met bitchy emotionally demanding gays, and I don’t like them.

I know, as an historical study, that gays into S&M played an important role in Hitler’s SS.  This is, or seems to be, a common feature where severe cruelty is involved.

I look at the use of an 11 year old boy as a sex object in a gay bar.  Can there be any doubt that, if he has not already lost his virginity, he will well before he is 15, most likely to a much older man?  Whatever “parental units” may be in play would presumably have no objection.

But then I think of this poor young man dying, forsaken by his mother for his alleged “sin”.  And I feel compassion.  My own cousin was disowned by my aunt and uncle for the same “crime”.  And he was and presumably still is (I am largely disconnected from my family) a Christian preacher.

There has to be a middle ground.  There has to be a place where I am able to say: “some of what you do is to me weird, even while I grant that much of what some heterosexuals do I also find weird.  Most people are weird, and I include myself in that.  I am not fully convinced you are not acting out a trauma of some sort that has become bonded with your sexuality.  I am not fully convinced you can or should be foster or adoptive parents.  But I recognize you as a fellow suffering human, one who, like me, is confused by all this, who is doing with their brief life what seems to make sense, while lacking all the clues to ultimately solve the puzzle.”

And I would be willing to listen to what they say in response.  Lord knows I have plenty of practice being yelled at, so that would not bother me.  It doesn’t even anger me much any more, no matter how extreme it is.

But this is how helpful, useful, peaceful, and ultimately harmonious cultural evolution happens.  Gays are not monolithic.  They obviously–like every other group–include many opinions.  I knew a gay man who was traumatized by his first and only trip to a gay bathhouse, which he found disgusting.  There are gays like Rupert Everett who have gone on record saying that most gay men should not be raising children, and paid a price for it.  He must have suspected that might be the reaction, so that was most likely an act of courage on his part, like his previous act of being flamboyantly and proudly gay in public long before it was really mainstream.

I use the example of gays here, but it could be expanded to blacks, women, transgender people, Hispanics and all the other categories the Left tried to make immutable, monolithically uniforn, and radically separate in their propaganda.  They don’t want “us”–different groups–talking, because were we to do so openly and honestly, in the spirit of the true American tradition, we would find we have vastly more in common than in difference.

I will append two comments.

One: the bad guy in the new Aquaman looks just like the Nordic/Aryan original blonde Aquaman. I don’t think any of the writers wanted us to forget that there was an ethnic tinge to the new Aquaman, and even though the script was a jumble–where they obviously at some point just said “fuck it, people will come see Momoa, and we have some great fight sequences–I think they simultaneously wanted an environmental message, and a message of white imperialism, with the other king having red hair.

Second: I was talking with a guy from Flint, Michigan, who told me he had been told by a cop that the main problem there was horrific leadership, and that the main factor there was placing race above competence.  Obviously, there are highly competent black people out there–Ben Carson, for example–but not all black people are competent.  Neither are all white people.  You have to look at individuals as individuals.  If the bar is the race of your birth, that bar is much too low.  We should not be surprised when thieves and scoundrels abuse such ridiculous trust.

Actually, I will parse the phrase Individual for a moment.  Can I write it out as Me/others?  Is the sum 1, or am I to be reduced by my group?  For a true Notdividable, they are not reduced in this process.  This is of course an ideal, since obviously all of us are highly influenced to a greater degree than we can likely see (as we might logically deduce) by others.  Still, the world works better when we get as many eyes and minds on it as possible. Not all are equal, but all are potentially useful.  All matter, at the most basic level of theory and law.  All citizens, to be clear.

This is the foundational idea of our political system.  We place our trust in a system of immutable (in theory, obviously not in practice) laws–which should in my view be seen as written in stone like the original Roman laws of their Res Publica–as administered by people whose offices depend on periodic votes of confidence by all Americans who take an interest in our system, and in the process of their own government.

A good defensive system is still a prison.  If you put up high fences, and barbed wire, and land mines, and dig a bunker keep underground, you keep “them” out, but you remain in one place.  That is the only choice.

I have dreamed of secure hiding places all my life.  I used to physically hide from my mother when I was very little, presumably until she so severely punished me for it that I stopped.  Notions of secure places still come to me both in waking and in sleep.

There are of course real enemies. There are emotional vampires, who will hurt you before you even realize they have latched on; there are people who will lie to you and cheat you; and there are people who will physically hurt you for a variety of reasons, but particularly if you are a woman.

But for people like me, the enemy is already in the gates.  The images arise because of clear and present and continual assaults from our own brains.  There can be no escape, outside of embracing freedom, light in the sky, and movement.  Those enemies are not real, and thus can be vanquished finally, and completely.

I continue to find new value in the Windhorse symbol of the Tibetans, the horse running across the plain, with speed, and radiating light from a beautiful jewel on its back.

We Americans tend to see cowboys as a symbol for freedom, but ultimately they were always going from one city to another.  I would submit that the best symbol for the freedom many Americans–and indeed people from all over the world–seek is that of the Plains Indians, or perhaps nomadic wanderers generally, who could sprint on their horses wherever and whenever they wanted.  And before horses, they still had the sky.

I am in the process of reworking some long held patterns, and it is working.