Moderates United

Do you remember the chanted slogans the slobbering fools who run most media enterprises, and who occupy ideationally dark caves as grunting were-children on our college campuses, were unleashing on a world and a person which did not deserve them?  I do.

Do you remember why David Petraeus, arguably the hero of the Iraq War, which we won before we lost it, as in Vietnam, was forced to resign as CIA Director?

From Wikipedia:

On November 9, 2012, he resigned from his position as Director of the CIA, citing his extramarital affair, which was reportedly discovered in the course of an FBI investigation.^[20] In January 2015, officials reported the FBI and Justice Department prosecutors had recommended bringing felony charges against Petraeus for allegedly providing classified information to his biographer, Paula Broadwell (with whom he was having an affair), while serving as Director of the CIA.^[21] Eventually, Petraeus pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information.

We KNOW, from the outstanding work which Judicial Watch, among others, has done, that Hillary “mishandled”, on the low side, dozens of Classified emails.  She committed vastly more crimes that Petraeus, yet she retains to this very day, to my knowledge, her ability to access Classified information.

And although I have not studied the details, can we not wonder about this “FBI Investigation”?  Who launched it?  Why?  Perhaps there are good answers, but when I did read up on it back then, I saw nothing but a set up, by the Obama FBI run, I believe, by James Comey, who had not then entered my world as the corrupt narcissist he has since demonstrated himself over and over to be.  I am glad his five minutes of fame seem to have faded, and feel safe in assuming few saw any reason to buy, much less read, his self serving, disingenuous book.

[Edit: I looked it up: it was Robert Fucking Mueller who torpedoed Petraeus.]

Bottom Line: If you are not infuriated by all this, you are a fucking imbecile.  You have understood nothing, either about how things do work, or how they should work.

My hope, and it is a long shot, is that Trump is simply biding his time until Mueller finishes his attempt to depose Trump through devious, illegal, and extraordinarily unethical means, and until the mid-Terms, to launch his counter-strike.  Maybe Sessions is a robust and courageous warrior simply masquerading as Barney Fife.  One can hope.

Trump: you said “Because you’d be in jail”.  It was a great line.  When can we expect people to start getting arrested?  You don’t even have to start with Hillary.  I”m sure there are plenty of people who know what time it is who have not yet been given immunity by a corrupt FBI.

The nature of the human psyche is wholeness.  What splits it is the necessity of protecting lies.  And we protect lies to avoid pain.

Perhaps only by accepting, in principle, everything that is, can we loosen up our gatekeepers long enough to hear needed truths, and the reconciliation and reintegration which follow.

I have decided to go back to school and get a degree in Neuroscience.  This is where the cutting edge work on consciousness, on who we are, is being done.  One day, I will speak that language fluently.

And I will note there are people in that field who are very receptive to the notion that our brains are, in effect, radios, which are playing a portion of the larger frequency which is who we really are.  William James argued this over 100 years ago, arguing for what he called, if memory serves, a Transmissive capacity.

Eben Alexander is one example.

And I will emphasize for the umpteenth time that we don’t really know what “Reality” is.  Our best science seems to say that consciousness exists, but matter does not.  This is not a hippy dippy misrepresentation of the actual science.  This is the science.  This is John von Neumann–who wrote what was and perhaps still is the foundational text on Quantum Physics–concluding that only observation collapses a probability wave.

Your hand is not real without you.  Your brain is not real without a thought.  Anyone who reads about all this cannot but conclude that we are children, who have been playing in the sandbox, but that there is a LOT that we still need to learn; or perhaps more accurately, relearn, and integrate into our particular modality of thought, which we call scientific.

Miracles remain possible.  And these miracles can be pursued soberly, patiently, and successfully, but only when the intention is set, and the path begun.

There are many accounts, and I believe many of them, of spirits speaking through radios, through TV’s, and even through telephone calls.

What if, I am going to wonder out loud, Big Tech–and particularly Google, which employs Ray Kurzweil–spent, say, 10% of its Singularity budget on Electronic Voice Phenomena/Instrumental Transcommunication?

And specifically, what if there a way to make it relatively easy for a spirit trying to communicate to do so through some functional equivalent of the keyboard Stephen Hawking used, as rendered more able by a skillful use of AI as an interpretive algorithm?

To me, the keys to the future lie in meaning formation, and meaning, in turn, is contextual.  If you think the universe operates one way, then you perform logical operations on this understanding in creating your explicit or implied life philosophy, which is embodied in what you do and think and feel every day.  What you believe and who you are are two sides of the same coin.  It is by far the most important question.

And if we can establish scientifically that we are essences, spirits, packets of intelligent information embedded within a field of infinite information, then reasonable people who currently believe the contrary, will in short order change both their belief systems, and the way they live their lives based on those beliefs.

If you believe this is all there is, then the arguments against greed, pleasure and thrill seeking, and a perceptual horizon limited to your own life are not as compelling as they would be if you KNEW that some part of you carried on, consciously.

I’m not one of these people who say that atheists have no basis for their moralities, but I am very certainly one of those people who believes it is HARDER to take a long term view, to justify self sacrifice, to limit the one life you have for the sake of others.  Practically, via socialism, many make of the “Public Good” a religion, and a God of Society, but this in some respects is as related to wishful thinking as the notion that if you pray for something you will get it.

If we are simply evolved animals, and all our deepest impulses merely an expression of instincts which were once adaptive, then our very bodies lie to us continually.  And those of a philosophical bent–which is to say those who value ordered thinking and principled consistency–cannot with confidence posit any absolute principles.  They cannot even value an Earth populated with our species over one devoid of life, or one simply devoid of us–which outcome, indeed, is a wished-for outcome by some misanthropic environmentalists.

And why should they not hate themselves?  Why should they not rue waking up within a terrible dream, one which ends badly, and is filled with confusion, distraction, alienation, and frustration in the beginning and middle?

In all things, I try to go for the jugular.  I go for the core, the essence, the most important part.  The part which, when I understand it, causes all sorts of other consequences to flow freely.  Where is the beginning of the river?  Where does the water come from?  This is always an important question, even if answering it is difficult, and perhaps sometimes impossible.

If we might apply the analogies of physics and math to human culture, we might assert that cultural motion, once initiated, tends to remain in motion until acted on by an outside force. Typically that force is some rival claim to power, in some combination with very gradual, nearly impercible evolutions over time, of which might make the example of linguistic evolution stand for all such processes.

Christianity is dead among our elites. The concept of truth, seen philosophically, is dead in many minds and hearts, and only vigorously defended in the sciences, and by those our elites want to call regressive. By conservatives, to be clear, who are conserving the notions of truth and principle based morality.

How could anyone marinated in this post-truth philosophical imbecility NOT want to seize power and suppress dissent?

I personally see no way. If Alex Jones did not exist, we would need to invent. Somebody needs to be saying loudly that we can ASSUME people who believe nothing are capable of anything. This is my own view, and it is revalidated nearly daily.

Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, George Soros: their “moralities”, at least in many concrete specifics, are based in lies they tell continually. A “morality” based on lies which endures over time is nothing of the sort. It is something between an excuse and a cover.

Learn to appreciate new and unexpected problems. Old and expected problems yield readily to old and tested responses.  By and large, if you are competent in anything, you should learn to anticipate and avoid them.

But new problems offer opportunities.  It doesn’t feel like that.  It certainly feels like effort.  But don’t add the weight of resentment to the weight of consideration and action, of response, perhaps failure, and another response, and perhaps another failure, until a new pattern is established, and your unknown problem becomes a known problem, and your circle of “influence”, which is to say, of competent action, expands proportionately.

I do regularly encounter new problems.  I do not regularly embrace them.  I swear, mostly, then get pissed, then calm myself down, suck it up, and focus until I get a good enough resolution.  This is not the best way to play this game.  This is not the switched on, every day is beautiful, response.

I know I can do better.  You likely can too.  And if you never see new problems, try harder.  Do something you’ve never done before.  No reason not to spend your time until you die mid-sentence trying out new ways to screw up, and then recover from it.

So today was physically very tiring for me, and emotionally a bit so as well, although I think I worked out those particular issues.  All things being equal, it is better to read people well and to think clearly than the converse.

But I felt the need to visit my watering hole, where I know most of the people who work there.  This individual usually allows me to get the stronger beers in the larger glasses, which I appreciate, and which I tip for accordingly.  I had two 20 ounce beers, 8% alcohol, and felt much better, and listened to the Kings all the way home.

So I am always on.  I am always asking questions.  I am always dreaming.  And pace my post earlier today, I wondered what it would be like to have an “ashram”/spiritual group, where we meditated all week, then got drunk on the weekends, then discussed what we learned on Monday.

So Bill tell us about this prostitute you picked up.  What did she look like?  How did she make you feel?  What do you think you know about her? Speculate.  Did this advance your spirituality, degrade it, or is it unclear?  Were you kind to her?  Cruel?

To my mind morality and wisdom are synonyms.  If you can’t see why something is wrong, perhaps it it isn’t wrong for you, right now, or perhaps you need to grow a great deal.  This universe is not eager to judge you. There is no council of Elders waiting for your every last misstep.

This universe is rational.  I believe this. I choose to believe this, but it also feels correct to me.  Your job is to figure things out.  For yourself.  It is not my job to tell you what to do, and it is not your job to bow down to Authority, which itself is as likely to be imbecilic as wise, as likely to be corrupt as noble.

It’s funny: these ideas were so self evident in the “counter cultural” era that they were truisms.  What happened?  I’m a hard core “conservative”, and I remember.  I remember mistrust in the government, and authority generally.  I remember a mistrust of consumer society, of mindlessness, of pervasive superficiality.  If this makes me a hippy, then I am a hippy.  My job, then, is to finish the fucking job, which the hippies left undone.  Or at least do my part, if I abandon somewhat ludicrous grandiosity.

Returning to the point: some of my best meditations are the mornings after I get drunk.  The air is clear.  It is like the air after a massive storm front passes through, and leaves everything feeling clean, clear, and new.  Fresh.

We are all humans, and as humans we have certain needs.  If elephants like getting drunk, why shouldn’t we?  Now, to be clear, I could reasonably be described as an “alcoholic”.  I tend to overdo it.  But I also do it in pursuit of something deeper and higher.  Some part of me NEVER forgets.  I never forget. I  never stop striving.  I never stop trying to remember, to see, to learn, to piece all this fucking mess together, so that something intelligent can be said, something intelligent done, some order seized–by force as needed–from this chaos.  This feeling, this sense, is with me always, if my mind is sufficiently present to know where I am and what I am doing.

I am going to found a Church one day.  I don’t know when.  But it will be a place where people are happy, where they feel free, and where learning is as natural as flowers sprouting in the spring rains.

Are priests not idols?  Are churches not idols?  Are they not, by design, intermediaries, stripping you of your own power, your own perceptions, your own capacity to apprehend important truths directly?

Spirituality is about your relationship with the Void.  The Void contains everything.  It contains terror, and demons.  It also contains joy, light and love.  It is all of this.  And more.  Words do not suffice, ideas do not suffice, and I suspect even feelings do not suffice, although they point the way most reliably.

Could we call feelings the words of your deepest self?  I kind of think we can and should.

I was reading about a 3,100 mile marathon–really, set of marathons–that Sri Chinmoy encouraged his followers to do, around one block in Queens, New York.  They have to net out to over 50 miles a day for some two months to run the distance in the time allotted.  It is a life commitment, one not that different, really, than that of the Marathon Monk of Mount Hiei, with the difference that there is no communing with nature.

Then I read about Sri Chinmoy, who he was.  Who he was–to my mind, saliently, was someone who reacted like a jealous woman when Carlos Santana decided to leave him.

It had been in my mind that the very arduousness of this physical activity seems to imply a paucity of qualitatively interesting ideas.  Tapas–asceticism–is of course foundational to the Indian tradition, but among others the Buddha found it, in the end, unhelpful to the end of Enlightenment.  The Buddhas way is called the Middle Way–Madhyamarga in Sanskrit, if memory serves.

Then I got to thinking about all the gurus of the 60’s and 70’s, especially in light of what I just read about the Beats.  D.T. Suzuki was popular.  He apparently pissed off some of the Japanese community by letting the beaded Beatniks in.  It was, they felt, their religion.  I can understand how they would feel this way.

Chogyam Trungpa, of course, is likely the best known Tibetan Buddhist teacher outside of the Dalai Lama himself.  On Ram Dass’ (Richard Alpert, I believe, in his pre-hallucinogenic days) account, Trungpa had a terrible habit of showing up to public appearances late, drunk, and with a coed in each arm.  He only lived to 50 or so.  Allan Ginsberg was one of his disciples, and there was an Institute of Disembodied Poetics founded near his place in Colorado, in memory of Kerouac, or one or all of them.

I look at all this, and am reminded of the sundry risks in the guru/pupil (Shiksa, perhaps?) relationship.  There is the risk to the guru of believing his own press. There is the very, very real risk that whatever progress they have made to that point will come to a sudden stop the moment they dedicate to sharing what they know full time.  I have said in the past, in fact, that I think a key point in personal growth is reached the moment you feel a strong urge to dump it all and go tell people how to live their lives, to become a “life coach”, to give motivational seminars, to, in short, avoid the hardest part of your journey by pretending your work is done.  Adoring fans, of course, make this lie easier to tell, and easier to accept.

Add to this nubile females, money, fame, and the stage is set for, among other things, an early death.  Trungpa, at some point in his life, was likely sober and serious.  I do not want to trash his memory.  I have read one of his books, and enjoyed it, but found nothing practical to DO.  It was all theory.  And the moment he ordered two misbehaving “initiates” to be forcibly stripped naked seemingly still has the power to create reactions among those who remember it.

The other risk is that of idolotry.  You, the student, place your faith in someone else, in a power outside yourself, in perceptions which do not arise in your own breast, to a heart which is not your heart, a mind which is not your mind.  You END your progress, in my mind, in entrusting your own growth to someone else.

And competent, honest gurus know this.  They know that they do YOU a disservice by telling you what to do and how to do it.  It’s an ego game. On balance, it is bad for you, AND bad for them, since they are both moving away from honesty themselves, and hurting you in the process.

I recently watched a documentary called “The Great Transmission”.  What I found gratifying to see was that the single man, the single living man, at any rate, whose story the movie was telling, was nowhere to be seen in the movie. 

Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche dedicated himself early on to protecting the culture of his people.  Arguably, by printing and disseminating key texts to the Tibetan diaspora, mostly for free to them, he has done more to protect Tibetan culture than the Dalai Lama himself.  But nobody knows his name.  FEW, in any event, know his name.  And I have no doubt that is how he likes it.

But he is the creator of Kum Nye.  It is his books I read.  It is his practice I follow.  I have no need of him: the texts are clear, I am stupid, and I have many, many miles to go before I MIGHT formulate an intelligent question only he could answer.  But I am nowhere close now.

And Kum Nye, in my view, is the center of the whole thing.  All the hippies liked “Time, Space and Knowledge”, because it seemed to be describing in some way what they experienced on drugs.  Likewise, I suppose, with “Knowledge of Freedom”.  Both are no doubt excellent books. 

But for myself, I continue–DAILY–finding new insights with the Kum Nye.

Spirituality is not a drive-through hamburger.  It is not what is easy and simple.  You can’t lay your money down and expect anything without long term, patient, effort.

Getting a “guru”, back in the day, was no different than trying to buy enlightenment for cheap.  Of all of the people who came out of that era, he seems to me the only one with no stains on him, no blemishes, no blatant foolishness.

And he did that by staying away from the idiots.

His goal is to protect Tibetan culture.  OUR goal should be to protect traditional AMERICAN culture, not the racist and homophobic aspects of it–which incidentally have been nearly ubiquitous around the world, and across time–but the evolutionary, learning, genuinely LIBERAL aspects of it, the welcoming, the authentic tolerance, the kindness, the pluralism, the work ethic, the sober appreciation for the importance of impartial justice, and the precept that NO ONE is above the law.  We believe truth can come from anywhere, that there are no worthy kings, that no one is born with intrinsic authority, and that each of us matters in our way, but none of us too much.

This, too, is a heritage worth valuing,and protecting–and from the same savages, by the way, even now, even now–UNBELIEVABLY–that destroyed Tibet.

I would like to second that clever fellow who made the previous post.  It is amazing how often I find myself agreeing with myself.  (or is it more amazing how often I disagree with myself?  Fair question.  Foolish consistencies and all that).

Communist Devolution.  Socialist Devolution.  The Cultural Devolution.  A Devolution in how we pay for healthcare.  The Bolshevik Devolution. 

The Bernie Sanders Devolution.

With Communism, it is all about breaking what works, and substituting tyranny.  People ask for bread, you club them.  If they object to being clubbed, you jail them, perhaps in a place where they spend all day working, and all night learning about how all this work is good for them, and how much the government loves them and how if they weren’t such upstarts and idiots they would see how wonderful the whole system is.

I will reiterate that Complex orders–which is to say, free markets and free societies–are informationally vastly more rich than what we might call, in contrast, simple or simplistic orders, which is one place for decisions, then a propagating apparatus which causes everything to synch up in the same way at the same time.  Such orders are informationally poor.   This is a mathematically necessary conclusion.  There is no other possible conclusion, although one can debate the merits of each approach.

But if we posit that more information is always better, then it is mathematically necessary to always view an increase in centralized control as a devolution.

And I will note that most of the advantages of centralized control stem from increased coherence in war.  Economically, such control is disastrous.  It is only for war that most large complex governments have come into being.

War, perhaps, is the ultimate dissolution, the ultimate disorder.  It is not similar to a free market, free society.  It is the polar opposite, and Communism–which in large measure is defined by the war of the elites against anyone opposing them–exists on that continuum, right next to open warfare, into which, of course, Communism has often entered vigorously. There were few major wars in the 20th Century which did not involve Communists.  Even Hitler could not have come to power EXCEPT in opposition to Soviet Communism, and those agitating for it in Weimar Germany.