Moderates United

I feel this great cave at the center of human existence.  We all have an entrance to it, one usually hidden in the back of a dusty closet filled with unused things, and the refuse of the long ago.

One can go there, and feel the origin of all that floats in our world, our dreams, our shapes, what we feel: all the answers are there, but long before words.  There begins the possibility of words, but their flowering happens outside of the cave.

I am indulging myself here.  I talk too much.  It is a pendulation away from what I have taken to calling–somewhat technically inaccurately–Primary Process work.  For me, the primary process is what is fundamentally true.  It is the beginning of true spiritual work.

My dreams have been unusually deep lately.  I am seeing things long hidden, and it is freeing me.  I think I stand a good chance of becoming human in the not too distant future.

Change which is resisted feels like violence: violence to the past, and violence to the past as it continues to be expressed in the present.  And violence is inconsistent with qualitative growth.

To grow, you must not say “I am growing”, without feeling it as welcome.  Better yet, is simply allowing curiosity to express itself, to wonder what comes next, and to find it interesting and challenging in a good, even fun way.

Ideal growth, I might say, is wonder combined with distraction and movement.

This may be true, or true-ish.  It is what I feel like saying at the moment.

This Christian woman in Pakistan–this heroic Christian woman–is being persecuted for drinking from what was considered a Muslim water source.  That is my understanding. 

She is being persecuted, in other words, for the same reason a black woman might have been in the South for drinking from a “Whites Only” drinking fountain in, say, 1920.

But as bad as segregation was, by and large death was not pronounced, and certainly not pronounced publicly by civic leaders.  At their worst, they would don hoods and do their dirty work in the dead of night.

I read today Theresa May, in perhaps the most blatant signalizing of what a weak, cowardly nation the UK has become, refused to grant this woman refuge out of a fear of Islamic disapproval.  Put another way, the bullies won.  The bullies always win, if you allow them to dictate the rules of the game by being a coward.

The political Left will in one moment scream about past racism, about poll taxes and Jim Crow, and in the next grant such policies full approval, when practiced by the same sorts of people, and for the same reasons, if they do not speak English.

Put another way, they believe NOTHING.  It is an intellectually empty creed, with nothing to excuse its abuses of logic and common decency.  Conservatives fail sometimes.  This can be said because 1) we believe something; and 2) we can compare what we believe with what we do. 

The same cannot be said of the Left.  They cannot fail, because they never submit to the rule of intellectual coherence.  They merely shout one thing one day, and something else the next.  It is the perfect morality for people with fundamentally unstable personalities.

Orwell, in describing the sort of dystopian society that many public intellectuals were trying to bring about then, and continue to try and bring about now, was describing a society which bred Borderline Personality Disordered people.  Such people crave both strong emotions, and social conformity.  They are bred for authoritarian rule.

And such rule suits people “with” Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and Anti-Social Personality Disorder.  And when the society is thoroughly fucked up, these sorts will be everywhere.  Love is a fiction to them, which they nonetheless love to invoke, since it retains some value as a tool to cover up their crimes.

I saw the latest Harry Potter, the “Crimes of Grindelwald”, and thought it appropriate that Johnny Depp told his companions that they were never to talk of murder, punishment or retribution, but only of justice and truth and  liberty.  Something like that.  It is the leftist creed.

And on that score, I think it safe to assume Joanne Rowling has some degree of Developmental Trauma Disorder.  She understands it well.  She understands the authoritarian personality well.  But she fails, even now, to draw the logical line between her understanding of human psychology, and the necessity of political conservatism, or at least Libertarianism of some sort.

You know, the 20th anniversary of the Kyoto accords came and went last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol

I remember the heated rhetoric.  I remember Al Gore and James Hanson telling us all the horrible things that were going to happen if we didn’t do something IMMEDIATELY, back then.

Hell, I will admit to voting for Al Gore in 2000 because I still believed in global warming then.  We didn’t have another 20 years of evidence then, which we do now.

The simple truth is that there is nothing going on anywhere on the planet which is not easily and best explained as weather.  Some years the glaciation is larger, some smaller, but it is staying within a range.  And as I have said many times, natural climatic variation on Earth can and has extended to the melting of all the ice at both glaciers.  That has already happened.  Much of Earth’s history had no ice on the poles at all.

NASA uses land based measurements to make their pronouncements, and they do this for the cynical reason that such data is easily modified to say what they want it to say.  Longer term satellite data shows absolutely nothing remarkable, and in particular no significant events in the layer where CO2 has most of its effect.

And logically, why would there be?  The atmosphere is already saturated with enough CO2 to absorb nearly all the heat it is capable of absorbing, which is only about 10% of the spectrum (a fact not emphasized by any of the true believers or their handlers). 

If and when this collectivist fever breaks, we should see this as one of the biggest and best funded hoaxes in human history.  “Science”, per se, should have broken it into small pieces a long time ago.

At root, Meaning is a felt sense. It is an emotional state, one of relative balance and organization in the central nervous system. Finding a meaning of life intellectually is not hard: FEELING like your life and action are meaningful is much harder.

People find what they are prepared to find, what they want to find. And what they do not want is, or can easily be made, invisible.

The problem of the meaning or meanings of life, then, can only be solved adequately with better CNS integration, aka relaxation.

“Empathy and its absence is a hallmark issue for children and adults with history of developmental trauma.  Two kinds of problems arise: an impaired capacity to feel for the other and/or feeling for the other without end.  The latter may not be true empathy as much as a truncated ability to see the other as the other, and as a result, feeling the pain of other’s as one’s own.”

Sebern Fisher, pg. 19

On the one hand, these children are utterly unable to relate to conservatives as human beings, as an extension of their inability to relate to ANYONE as a human being, and on the other, the entirety of their moral world relates what amounts to an inability to form emotional boundaries, such that they ARE the people they speak for.  They truly believe they feel their pain, when in reality there is no true emotional understanding/empathy whatever.

There were consequences of women going to work en masse, and of the sexual revolution.  There are consequences of TV’s in every home, and in some cases, every room (We only had one TV in our home.  To this day, my kids don’t have TV’s in their rooms.  They do have piles and piles of books).  There are consequences of mobility and the loss of the extended family, because even if one mother could not do her job, perhaps her mother, or an aunt, or the other grandmother, could.  And when you have a single parent home, that mother is enormously stressed all the time, and needs to be a virtual saint to even perform adequately, especially where small children are concerned, and in a great many cases, that mother herself grew up with various developmental and other traumas.

In essence, I really think this is the primary drama and trauma and problem of black ghettos in this country.  I would hazard a guess that, if an honest study could be done, 80% of the kids in, say, South Chicago, suffer from some degree of DTD.  Most of them will never be diagnosed, and will never receive treatment.  Most of them will pass it along to their kids.  Poverty makes everything worse, but it is not the primary culprit.

Does putting a screen in front of your small child, or your small child in front of a screen, constitute neglect?

When my children were young, I always, when I could, watched all their TV with them.  I’ve watched more Barney, Clifford and the like than I could possibly calculate.  I’ve seen Mary Poppins at least 30 times.  The way I did it, it was social.  We talked.  We reacted to the screen together.

And I pretty much banned the whole Cartoon Network.  They were not allowed to watch Sponge Bob, or Rug Rats, or any of those shows.  I could feel how pernicious to the affects and intellect they were and remain.  As young adults now, both support me in that decision. 

Neither got a screen of any sort, other than a Tomagochi for my oldest around 4th grade, because I thought it built responsibility, until they were 12.  12 or so is the end of childhood, at least, and the beginning of the next phase.  We figured there were both social and practical reasons at that age for them to get screens.

But I will say that, if I am right, we are breeding a generation of children where Borderline Personality Disorder will become something like the default.

And I will comment on that, that I am reading an excellent book, “Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: Calming the Fear Driven Brain”, by Sebern Fisher.  In a section I just read, which made me think of this, she said that one of the researchers who wrote one of the more important books on BPD said that if she had her druthers, she would rename it “Emotion Regulation Disorder”.

And in my own mind, I have been thinking of all the Personality Disorders as varying forms of Developmental Trauma Disorder.  BPD is simply the basket which catches all the presentations that don’t neatly fit elsewhere.  They all share the same roots, though.

The good news is that treatments are being evolved for the worst childhoods imaginable. 

All of our problems are solvable.  We just need time, and we need people to stop sleep walking.

I have long wrestled with the difference between healthy emotion and sentimentality.  The latter has long seemed to me more shallow, less useful, more an end in itself versus a natural and spontaneous self organizing reaction to something real happening in the world.

And tonight, it seems to me that sentimentality consists in the main in pity: either maudlin self pity, or grandiose pity for “the world” or some reduced representation of it.  Sentimentality is a feeling which does not lead to a felt need for effective action.  It might and often does lead to a felt need for symbolic action, but that is a trifle.  This does no one any real good, and when substituted for actually effective action, it indirectly makes things worse.

If all particles which have once been entangled remain connected, then if we accept the idea of a Big Bang (the long term viability of which as a final explanation of the creation of the universe is far from clear) then all particles in the universe must have been once entangled.  They were in the same infinite mass from which everything comes.

I don’t know what ideas of physics I might be violating or not knowing here, but I thought I would put the idea out into space.

In my dreams last night I met a being that called itself Azazel.  It had the morphology of a demon–all chaotic and formless–but it also had the ability to create a form.  I asked it to form a body, and it was 20′ tall.  I wasn’t comfortable with it, but it was not as unpleasant as demons are either.

I looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azazel

Fallen angel seems reasonable.  Now, I had seen this name before, so perhaps this is some deep unconscious process I don’t really understand.

It does feel like I see the demons when I release held energy.  This was a higher grade held energy, so perhaps that is progress.

And I woke up after this dream, then went back to sleep, and my psychokinesis in my dreams was much better than usual.  I could move things from long distances, and of course fly like usual.  I have long been able to jump off any building or height.  I long ago dispensed with nightmares of the sort I had as a child.