Moderates United

Wow, I got jolted by some powerful dark energies last night.  I seem to have a particular problem with the direction north.  Some nights, I will literally get up and burn sage.  I don’t know if I believe in sage, but I believe in belief, and having a physical connection to an emotional/spiritual intention cannot be a bad thing.  I read some thing about putting salt in a jar with water and vinegar, too.  I have no idea if it helps, but if it provides a tangible anchor for a believing thought, then likely yes.  It is not the thing: it is my interaction with, and elevation of the thing, through belief.

Let me put last nights thought this way: the idea that life has meaning and purpose is a conspiracy theory, in large measure.  Our dominant culture tells us our purpose in life is to work, have sex, buy and use and throw away lots of things, engage in superficial sentimentality–not infrequently through ridiculous political ideas and following actions–think as little as possible, and to die.  If this is dominant, if this is the latent and in many cases explicit message of our “leaders”, then any alternative is by definition “conspiracy”.  It is out of the mainstream.  It is “dangerous”.  It is TRULY counter-cultural.

And on that last term, I would submit the goal is not to create an alternative culture, but to create new ideas and practices WITHIN our culture, to evolve.

A metaphor I used some time ago is that the hippies, and Beats before them (about whom some things later today) were like a pack of bikers in a long race who tried to get ahead of the pack to try and “win” the race of life.  To be better than the rest of us.  To live more useful, more meaningful, more exciting lives.  By and large, in my view, most of them failed terribly.  They lived selfish, narcissistic, futile, and ultimately somewhat pathetic if not outright contemptible lives.  To the extent they lived good lives, they returned to values which were already latent in our culture, like compassion. 

Ram Dass, to take one example, seems to not be the fuckup he once was.  In my curmudgeonly world, that is high praise, and sincere.  But he is not “counterculture” in my view.  He has learned to express the best that was already IN our culture.  In his work, he might appeal to Hindu ideals, but ideals of compassion are also very Christian. He would no doubt disagree, but in my view he could have reached his current station in life without going to India.  It may well be the case that all his drugs helped him.  Well, let’s mainstream drugs.  Let’s integrate them, so you don’t have to leave our culture at all in order to experience induced transcendental states. Let’s build public temples to them.  Maybe we can use city money to buy up all the Masonic lodges in every major city in America and convert them to Ayahuasca or mushroom temples. 

I think one of my jobs–I continue to think of myself roughly as an irritable senior NCO with a spear and a job–is to open up holes in GroupThink, in the collective hypnosis which lies over so much of humankind.  And “conspiracy theories” are the way.  It was a conspiracy theory in the Matrix that they were all living in pods.  But they were all living in pods.  My job is Red Pills.  Everyone else, the whole system by and large, is dishing out Blue Pills.  The Democrats as they exist today, cannot BUT consist entirely in people consuming and enjoying Blue Pills.  They have made Hitler of JFK, in public view, simply through constant repetition of the Big Lie. It’s obscene.  It’s unbelievable.

If you have been thinking about thinking, now is a good time.  If you are a Muslim, Christianity is a conspiracy theory. If you are a Christian, Buddhism is conspiracy theory.  If you are an atheist, any form of theism is conspiracy theory.  And if you are a socialist, the POSSIBILITY that conservatives are not evil is also conspiracy theory.

Sometimes, when you are in the darkness, the truth seems even darker.  This is because it seems impossible, unappealing.  But on the other side is the light.  And those who would keep you in darkness can be counted on pointing out that life is dimmer “over there”, so even if you are miserable here, it MUST be much worse over there.  They themselves fear all of that.

The world we see is covered in varying degrees of shadow.  It is fascinating to contemplate.

“Darkness within darkness: the gateway to all mystery”.  (Lao Tzu)

I am working my way slowly through a book on “Psychosynthesis”.  One exercise is imagination.  Imagine your hand signing your name slowly.  Imagine a set of digits, as large as you can hold, and hold it in your inner vision for two minutes.  Imagine the smell of peppermint, the sound of crackling paper, the entirety of sense, smell, taste, sound, sight of eating bowl of yogurt with oatmeal.  Etc.

I’m pretty good with smells.  I can imagine Juniper versus Cedar versus Pine, etc.  I use essential oils most days.

But this popped in my head: Imagine your parents, as carefully as you can, without judgement.  Watch how they hold themselves, how they walk, how they smell, how they eat.  And more importantly, what is/are the dominant affect(s) or sensation(s) which you feel?  What is the feeling of this relationship like?  Do not name it.  Do not reduce it.  Feel it exactly as it is in your mind, today, which may not be truly as it was, then.

This feeling, if you can capture it pristinely, will I think be also found in your personality.  If you want to change, to move away from the patterns of your home, then identifying who and how they are in you is an important starting point.

If you invert “never listen to ‘conspiracy theorists’ because they are crazy”, what do you get?

Think about it.  What do you get?

You get TRUST THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND ITS APPOINTED EXPERTS ONLY.

Trust the Man.  Trust the system.  Trust that you are being told the whole truth by everyone in power, and that no one is lying to you.  Trust that no one would abuse the system, and that if they did, they would be caught and prosecuted, because our system ALWAYS works. 

Do you think this is a reasonable thing to request, much less demand? 

And if you really think about it, every Christian church is engaging in “conspiracy theory”.  They believe in an invisible God, and an absolute Hell and absolute Heaven which ALL OF US go to.  There is a whole world, an entire order, beyond what we can see, and it is vastly more important than what we CAN see.  Is this not a conspiracy theory?  Is this not called lunacy by the mainstream “experts” who are willing to speak the truth as they see it?

And you multiple conspiracies with the Pope. First you have to believe all the Christian stuff about heaven and hell and the resurrection of Christ, then that God really did appoint the Pope his vicar, then that he is telling the truth about the men in his immediate circle who have been clearly and without much doubt implicated in horrible sexual crimes against children.

That’s a whole lot of believing.

I think intelligent people, watching even their immediate circle, even the people at work, quickly come to realize that the whole truth is not only not always told, it is rare when it is.  Most of the time, somebody is lying about something, withholding information, misleading people, for a variety of reasons.

Conspiracies to conceal truths are not rare: they are continuous.  They can be small and they can be enormous.

And psychologically, I think all of us NATURALLY gravitate to the belief there is some deeper order we cannot see.  It’s something you have to fight. 

And of course the “rationalists” say we MUST fight this tendency.  But I would ask: if we lack sufficient information to form a final conclusion, as is nearly always the case, what is the benefit to jettisoning the POSSIBILITY that something really weird, really underhanded, or even really evil is in play?  Saying it is possible is not the same as saying it is happening, and intelligent people always formulate as many hypotheses as possible so as to best match the evidence as it emerges.

I think all thinking, feeling people have seen in the attacks on “conspiracy theory” a concerted propagandistic attack on unwanted truths.  Obama wanted to make his complicity in the preventable murders of Americans in Benghazi disappear by calling anyone questioning him about it a nut.  But the facts have emerged, and with the exception of Hillary Clinton, no one person shares more blame for the death of Ambassador Stephens and others than Barack Hussein Obama, who lied in the beginning, lied in the middle, and is trying to lie through distraction even now.

Ponder a population so docile, so imbecilic, that it trusts its leaders when they promise they will never lie or mislead them.

I just came across this video today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q__bSi5rBlw

It was posted by a conservative friend, and my initial read was it was black humor in keeping with the rage many of us feel at the violence, duplicity, continual attack, and continual interference Trump and his supporters have had to deal with for many months now.

But I thought about it, and realized that this is much too well funded for home bloggers, and, more importantly, that nobody–certainly not Trump–is calling for the deportation of people here legally, which is what a green card means.

It is creative and clever, but ultimately intended to demean Trump through humor, and to insinuate manifestly wrong ideas–again, such as the idea that he opposes either legal immigration, or people who are here legally–into people’s consciousnesses.

But then I kept thinking about it, and it hit me that anger IS an appropriate response to what the Mexicans have done to us.  Let us say it is 10 million people here illegally.  Is it not perfectly reasonable for ordinary Americans to find this infuriating, the same way we would find it infuriating if we woke up one morning and a stranger, having broken in in the night, were sleeping on our couch? 

We have become so used to being attacked and demeaned for ordinary, healthy, reasonable reactions to provocations that  many of us have become emotionally numb, and been rendered helpless to respond according to righteous and reasonable instincts.

We are not only supposed to feel no anger that our hospitality has been so abused, but to welcome a nearly unlimited amount of it, which is what the No Borders crowd are calling for.  This is insanity.

As I keep saying, JFK could have been, and in large measure WAS, elected on the platform Trump ran on.  From this, we get accusations of being “literally Hitler”. 

And my GOD, if you want to talk abuse of women, Trump does not hold a candle to Kennedy.

How is it so many people are so fucking insane? 

It’s our TV culture, where people consume opinions, internalize them, own them, then flaunt them as their own. 

It’s mass society, where belonging trumps thinking, and conforming trumps trusting your own instincts. 

Its conditioned herd responses.

It is a failed educational system, which breeds inbreds as a matter of policy, fails to teach any form of adult responsibility and accountability, and encourages infantile rage, fatuous thinking when combined with strong emotion, and places the kids in charge of the madhouse.

Forget what is unimportant, and forget that you have forgotten it.

Remember what IS important, and remember to remember it.

Your mind is your tool.  But it will only build beautiful things if you use it with skill, and with intent.

When I was in 2nd and 3rd grade, we had recess on an asphalt playground, which had a merry go round we used to try and knock each other off of, see saws we also used to try and knock each other off of (the boys, self evidently), monkey bars, swings we jumped off of, and other things I have forgotten because I didn’t use them.

Our favorite game, though, was Smear the Queer, which was giving a football to someone, then everyone else–6-10 of us–trying to tackle the person with the football.  Once they were down, they released it, and the game repeated.  I had strong legs even then, and they called me “Big Bad”, which is quite comical considering I was 8 or so. I have always been physically stubborn in some circumstances though.  There are time I will not quit.  Over the long haul, bet on me quitting.  Over the short haul, my pain tolerance is staggering.

But I wanted to comment on the obvious facts that, by now, 1) this game is no longer allowed on most playgrounds, even among the schools which have them; 2) most schools no longer have staff nurses, as we did, for the mostly boys who would get injured just about every day at recess; 3) The NAME for this is verboten.  I have heard this game called Bag the Fag too.

Now, at that age, in that world, I did not have the slightest idea what a homosexual was.  At that time, where I grew up, I would sometimes read in the newspaper about them busting a “bathhouse” and arresting people–sometimes cops, sometimes local government officials, all a scandal.  But this whole in-door, out-door thing was a mystery for me for a very long time.

The point I would like to make here on this topic is that OF COURSE it is a good thing that kids no longer call that game by that name.  I think it is bad, if it is true, that they no longer play something like it, but that we have stopped equating gay with bad is good.  This IS progress.  That gay sex is no longer illegal, such that bathhouses are raided and everyone caught naked in the shower arrested for “sodomy”, is good.

In my less angry moments, in my less defensive moments, I have to concede progress has indeed been made.  So called “Progressives” have engendered progress, real progress.

But what I have to insist on is that emotionally, I never feel that helping actual, real human beings is the goal.  Because whenever they win one victory, they go for another.  Whenever they have undermined one bad underpinning assumption of our society they go for another, one which might well be good.  Witness, as an example, the ruckus over the claim that “bourgeois”values have some merit.

Here is the thing: we need to be able to adjust our outrage, temper it proportionately.  Be mildly angry at mild insults, and greatly angry at great insults.  But given how craven and beaten most people are in most segments of society, very few dare great insults, so the people who NEED rage to justify their existences visit rage on them anyway.

In such an atmosphere, no rational proportionality is possible.  No reconciliation and negotiation of opposing or at least differing views is possible.

The all or nothing tactics and viewpoints of the Left make emotional intelligence impossible.  They make understanding impossible. They make it impossible to be meek when needed, and tough when needed. 

Conservatives–Liberals, to be clear, who retain some fondness for rational discourse, civic mindedness, principle, and civility–are forced into pitched battles or silence.  Silence has largely failed, so they show up at the “discussion” armed for bear, and quite prepared to deal out the same viciousness they expect will be the opening parley by the Left.

All of this is stupid.  Preventing this outcome should be the POINT of a college education, even a high school education, even a grade school education.

It is good that we no longer tolerate open bashing of homosexuals.  It is not good that questioning, say, the appropriateness of Christians being forced, at the point of bankruptcy, to bake cakes for gays who simply want to make them squirm, has become something which itself carries vast social penalties.

I want freedom.  My feeling is that if somebody is not bothering you, then you have no right to bother them.  If gays want to have huge orgies in bath houses, how is that your problem?  If someone wants to cross dress, how is that your problem, unless and until they want to use the women’s bathroom?  Etc.

Stating a Randian principle roughly, because I am not one of her cult members: if someone uses no force against you, you have no right to use force against them.  Period.  Full Stop.  This is a truly Liberal politics, as I see it.

We can all get along.  This is absolutely true.  Ask yourself, then: Cui bono when we argue?

Then look around.  Then look at me.  Then decide who the real criminals are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_and_commitment_therapy

“While Western psychology has typically operated under the “healthy normality” assumption which states that by their nature, humans are psychologically healthy, ACT assumes, rather, that psychological processes of a normal human mind are often destructive.^[9] The core conception of ACT is that psychological suffering is usually caused by experiential avoidance, cognitive entanglement, and resulting psychological rigidity that leads to a failure to take needed behavioral steps in accord with core values. As a simple way to summarize the model, ACT views the core of many problems to be due to the concepts represented in the acronym, FEAR:^{[citation needed]}

• Fusion with your thoughts

• Evaluation of experience

• Avoidance of your experience

• Reason-giving for your behavior

And the healthy alternative is to ACT:

• Accept your reactions and be present

• Choose a valued direction

• Take action

Core principles[edit]ACT commonly employs six core principles to help clients develop psychological flexibility:^[9]

1. Cognitive defusion: Learning methods to reduce the tendency to reify thoughts, images, emotions, and memories.

1. Acceptance: Allowing unwanted private experiences (thoughts, feelings and urges) to come and go without struggling with them.

1. Contact with the present moment: Awareness of the here and now, experienced with openness, interest, and receptiveness. (e.g., mindfulness)

1. The observing self: Accessing a transcendent sense of self, a continuity of consciousness which is unchanging.

1. Values: Discovering what is most important to oneself.^[10]

1. Committed action: Setting goals according to values and carrying them out responsibly, in the service of a meaningful life.”

Loving, concretely, usefully, more than a handful of people is in my view completely impossible.  None of us have the emotional energy to be fully present for more than 5-10 people.  I really believe this.

You can TRY, and you can convince yourself that you are successful, but in my considered view the only way to do this is to become more superficial.

Here is the thing, here is the difference between “everything flows from the center”, and “everything exists in local webs which are interconnected in interesting ways”: if every person on the planet made a conscious effort to love 5 people, no one would go missing.

This is something, I think, most of us can do.  To claim otherwise is, as I see it, for most of us, a lie.

Wishing others well in the abstract is certainly possible, and rejoicing in others success is certainly possible.

But I can’t help but think those who want to try and love everyone in truth love no one.  They don’t even know what they are lacking.

Better to aim small and succeed than to aim high and fail because you were never serious in the first place.

https://upliftconnect.com/spiritual-bypassing/

Some quotes, then commentary:

Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated
 detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, 
anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous 
boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead
 of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one’s
 negativity or shadow side, devaluation of the personal relative to the
 spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being. . .

Part of the reason for [spiritual bypassing] is that we
 tend not to have very much tolerance, either personally or collectively, for 
facing, entering, and working through our pain, strongly preferring 
pain-numbing “solutions,” regardless of how much suffering such “remedies” may 
catalyze. Because this preference has so deeply and thoroughly infiltrated our
 culture that it has become all but normalized, spiritual bypassing fits almost
 seamlessly into our collective habit of turning away from what is painful, as a 
kind of higher analgesic with seemingly minimal side effects. It is a 
spiritualized strategy not only for avoiding pain but also for legitimizing
 such avoidance, in ways ranging from the blatantly obvious to the extremely 
subtle. .  .

Although the defense looks a lot prettier than other defenses, it serves the same purpose. Spiritual bypass shields us from truth, it disconnects us from our feelings, and helps us avoid the big picture. It is more about checking out than checking in — and the difference is so subtle that we usually don’t even know we are doing it. 

Actually, I’m going to avoid extended commentary, other than to say that I think this basic mindset underlies what I call Sybaritic Leftism.  And given that an equilibrium has been reached with such people in a very precarious position of self delusion coupled with vast waters of dark rage and fear, it tips easily, quickly, and naturally into violence of emotion, violence of thought, and grotesquely exaggerated defensiveness, tribalism, and radical intolerance.

These people were there.  Trump set them off.  Watch MSNBC to see the result.

Such people had made peace with a conception of the world where everything is perfect.  Anything less than perfection–any REALITY, to be clear–turns them upside down.  They pout, they shout, they try to muffle others, and in general they panic and vibrate at the level of frightened mice. 

All of this is ugly.  And there is nothing at all spiritual about it.  Give me an honest asshole any day over someone who chants mantras obsessively.  The asshole has nothing to hide.  The inward-sucking introvert has everything to hide.

Difficulty is multiplied by complexity.

I am cognizant that it is certainly possible that some of my best phrases might be something I read years ago.  So be it.  If I can’t remember where or when, fuck it.  I don’t make money on this blog.

I have to say, I think this is pretty good.