Moderates United

But I have been doing a “yoga”, a system of body relaxation, that is really working.  It’s roughly the system I’ve outlined in the past, combining myofascial release, stretching, and rest, with incense and relaxing music.  I may describe its current form at some point.  I may not.

But what I feel is that sufficiently deep relaxation feels like home too.  You value yourself. You feel safe.  There is a light in the air.

And it is an odd thing, but relaxation is scary for  a long time, at least for some of us.  I know, intellectually, that I need it, but it frightens me.  I get relaxed, but then traumatic intrusions start, and fuck the whole thing up.  You have to stay with it, until it feels good consistently.  When you get there, you are healing.

I think so many are addicted to stress.  If you look at Silicon Valley, which I would extend up the coast to Washington, so many of these techies are like Stanley Bing’s attempted, and failed–because it is too close to real life–parody of them. This really does read like an actual users manual.  Or did when I read it while working for one of the big Telecom companies back in the 1990’s.  It was psychotic, and required functional psychoses and obsessiveness to survive.  As Bing puts it, you wind up with a schedule of values of roughly 1) work; 2) weird sex; 3) golf; 4) family.  Maybe.

Are these the people we want lecturing us on the future?  On proper morality, or the point and purpose of life?  I don’t think so.

I’m wandering.  I had something else to say, but it disappeared.  C’est la vie.

I think most of us have done some version of this exercise.  Tim McGraw, for example, has his song “Live like you’re dying”.  As he points out, most of us have been thinking about something, thought it would be cool to do something, but just never made the time. None of us are getting any younger, are we?  It doesn’t work like that.  Time keeps passing, and eventually runs out, whether you are doing anything with it or not.

But it occurs to me to add a wrinkle to this well-worn but still highly important theme.  What if you couldn’t change ANYTHING about the next 48 hours?  What if you had to go to work?  What if you couldn’t tell anyone?  What if you still had to do the work (this is a thought exercise, yes I know you would not do the work)?  What if your Tuesday March 20th, and Wednesday March 21st were going to be EXACTLY the same, except that you got to think about them differently?  And that you died in the night of Wednesday the 21st in your sleep?

How would your approach change?   How would you deal with people?  Would you be kinder?  Would you look at them an extra moment, appreciating them, or feeling compassion for them?  How would you deal with your work?  Could you find joy in it, even if you are crunching numbers all day, or digging ditches, or otherwise doing something you would prefer not to do?

All of us have this choice every day.  You don’t have to go skydiving to live. You don’t have to ride the bull, or take that long delayed vacation. Inhabit your day.  Be there.  Don’t be somewhere else.  Value what you see and do, and appreciate who you are, and the unique contributions you make to this world.

And I’m tempted to say “don’t aim high”.  Aim low.  Aim to be present, not to fancy daydreams, not to fantastic visions, but to the mundane, the ordinary, the simple, the plain, the humble.

This is what I am feeling this morning.  I am growing. I can feel it.

Image: the Earth, this life, what we can see, the world we were all born into, is a structure with a roof and a floor.  People lacking in life are kept from floating downward by the floor.  People full of life are kept from floating up by the ceiling. Logically, if there is a structure to the realms above this room, there is a hierarchy, with more darkness, relatively, the closer to Earth, and the less, as they diminish in the distance.  Perhaps one reason to come here is to confront darkness in a more pure form, so as to see it, and discard it more mindfully, resulting in, ultimately, spiritual growth and a higher state of being.

Image: God is pure light, at the top.  At the bottom, there is nothing, not even (the visible appearance of) God.

Thought: light and dark are not objective, but rather conditions of awareness.  All aspects of the universe are lit by God equally, but this is God’s immanent, latent aspect.  In terms of what is accessible to consciousness, God is in some places, and is not in others.  There is light within darkness, and darkness within darkness, if I might reference the Tao Te Ching in my own way, and according to my own interpretation.

Idea: God, in turn, is a physical force, like physical light, or gravity.  God can be “used” for good and ill, just like the laws of physics, which do not change based on the intent.  And God’s use is that of the non-local transfer of information.  This is what prayer does.  Prayer (and cursing) does not always work, because the “user” is not always informationally coherent (i.e. the signal is weak or non-existent in the ways that matter), and because there are factors in play–as with any other physical force–which are variable and which we have not even begun to understand, except in those repositories of memory we call religions and spiritual practices, and whose collective wisdom we have not even begun to fathom or even investigate scientifically.

We have told each other our names several times over the years, but I keep forgetting, and I assume he does too.  We just say hello, and chat for 5-10 minutes every time we see each other.

But here is the thing: he has a particular energy.  He is that guy. I’m sure I do too.  Names really don’t matter.  Neither of us feels that.   What I read is that in the afterworld, in the realm of spirit, there is no need of names.  You can FEEL who people are by their energy.  Everyone is unique.  They are that person.  Their unique energetic quality is who they are.

Can you, in picturing people in your life, “name” them by their energetic gestalt?  What do you see in your mind’s eye?  I know some people claim to see auras–and I think this is likely true, although I am certainly not one of them–but that isn’t what I mean.  I mean some intangible constellation of information encoded in what you can fathom from how they speak, how they hold themselves, how they walk, what they say, what interests them, how often they laugh, what they laugh about, how they laugh, how energetic or sluggish they are, etc.

There is so much in this world telling us that everyone is equal to everyone else, that our role is that of political pawns to be used by amoral psychopaths who see us solely in terms of our value to their power ambitions. If you are black, or gay, or a woman: do you REALLY think Leftists want to better your lot?  They want to throw you enough crumbs to convince you to back them, but the last thing they want is you bettering yourself, realizing your own dreams, without their unique papal intercession.   They always want to be in the middle, and necessary.  This is the opposite of freedom.  They are like parents who don’t want you to move out of the house.

And I can’t honestly believe that anyone with a grade school education and an IQ above room temperature is still holding out hope that somehow Mueller is going to get him removed from office.

Getting Trump fired was his JOB.  It is why he was hired.  He wasn’t hired to investigate anything.  The Democrats CREATED the fucking dossier.  They knew their claims were bullshit before they made them.  And Trump, for his part, even if he did something wrong, was obviously not stupid enough to leave a trail, or to walk into any of their traps.

Can we just hope the screaming ends soon, and those who retain some semblance of intellectual sovereignty start to notice publicly and vocally that Trump is actually doing a pretty good job?  Certainly, he is making a much more honest attempt to keep his campaign promises than Obama or Bush, and doing so in the face of a continual hurricane force headwind.

And Trump gets a lot of style points for firing McCabe at the last minute.  How I would interpret this is that they have decided not to prosecute him for political reasons, but this says “fuck you, you traitorous, criminal piece of shit.  We’re letting you go, but we are not forgiving or forgetting.  And you might want to watch your six, because we might change our mind.”

I’ve been saying for some time Mother Teresa–who believed in private charity and presumably had orthodox Catholic views on abortion–would have been dragged through the mud if she had had the nerve to run as a Republican.  Why not up the ante?

And of course the logical path of confusion is false certainty.  That is how you break that spell.  Most human misery comes from an inability to tolerate confusion, which is to say, to neither say there is no truth, nor to say that many differing accounts cannot simultaneously have some, if not final, validity.

We could say that valid critiques of what might be termed the Western Project can be made of the notion of One Universal Truth.  At the same time, No Universal Truth, as a final answer, is even worse.  Much worse.

Time and place matter.  Concrete tasks require concrete ideas.  But most of us are operating from a sort of spasm most of the time.

It is odd to contemplate, but animals have vastly less capacity for suffering.  I say this because I am finding I cannot adopt vegetarianism.  I don’t know why.  It doesn’t feel right in my heart, for me, right now.

But think about it: if you lock an animal in a cage it clearly suffers.  It grunts and groans and wants out.  But it lacks the abstract ability to lament its situation abstractly.  And it lacks the ability to fear things which have not happened yet.

Humans, on the other hand, can suffer slings and arrows of their own making continually.  They can develop mental habits which make them sick with fear and worry.  They can live lifetimes filled with emotional suffering, without anything bad actually happening to them at all.  This opioid epidemic is happening in the middle of the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen.

1) We DEMAND that the world be simple.  If it isn’t simple, it needs to be made so as quickly as possible.

2) We DEMAND that all problems have simple solutions.

3) We DEMAND that the world respond immediately whenever we wake from a nap and require something.

If you fail to meet these demands, we will hold our breath, shout, and not talk to you.

These are not idle threats.

In all seriousness, this whole thing represents in microcosm nearly everything wrong with both our political and social world.  Well funded groups run by biological adults organized all this.  The intent is to prevent rational dialogue, and to demonize all dissenters.  The solutions proposed in no way address the underlying cultural issues which the Left is uniquely UNABLE to address to even the slightest, most superficial extent.

So what you have are well organized initiative intended to implement solutions which WILL NOT WORK; which increase social division; which make life less calm, less pleasant, and more nerve-wracking and mean; and which make the ACTUAL addressing of real problems nearly impossible.

All bad, no good.  Lather, rinse and repeat enough times–as the Left has–and you get a planned paralysis.  You get useful, good people afraid to speak up, useless, bad, ignorant people shouting from every rooftop, and considerable rancor between the groups which is not bridgeable by the means of genuinely Liberal tolerance and rational debate which have enabled our nation to incorporate peacefully so many different and disparate groups.

I was dreaming last night about how our kids are now being indoctrinated to be fascinated with death and murder.  Atavistic elements occur in their media, and fascinate them.  Their parents are no longer parents.  They say yes and no to them sometimes, but there is no true bond, in all too many cases, of genuine respect and affection.

Look at all these kids demanding gun control.  Why are so many adults so eager to kowtow to them?  It is a neurological FACT that brains don’t stop developing until some time in the 20’s.  They are literally, from a developmental perspective, half baked.

And actually, would it not make sense to raise the voting age to the approximate age where most developmental neurologists agree that most people are fully developed?  We could grant the right to vote early for everyone who serves in the military, because in any event such people are given a structure and sense of respect and honor, at least ideally, which emotionally make them fit to vote intelligently.

But we can’t let kids rule the roost.  What I think far too many fail to see is that this is a cultural failure.  It implies we see no real value in what is given in the air and water.  We see no value in our own history, in the values our parents imparted to us (if any).  It implies that it is smarter to start over and reinvent everything ex nihilo, generation after generation, than to listen to the combined wisdom of many thousands of years.  This is both stupid and suicidal.  Do you really want to place the future of humanity on a series of dice rolls, which will eventually come out ruinously?

We have a long history of brilliant minds.  We have a long history of cultural habits that work.  Children treating their parents with respect is one of the most important of these.

What I saw last night is that children who do not respect someone older and wiser than themselves can never fully mature into adults themselves.  There is no model.  They remain half baked.  It is one thing to offer respect for a long time, before eventually doing things one’s own way.  This respects the system itself, and we all need to live in systems.  It is another entirely to begin throwing down something one doesn’t understand to begin with, in order to build something one is making up as one goes along.  That is more of less what, in the purest form, the Khmer Rouge attempted.  If you are not a complete fucking imbecile, you recall what happened there.  It was filled with kids.  13,14,15 year old kids.  Middle and High School age kids.  Same thing with the Cultural Revolution, where kids were torturing and murdering their teachers, in a purely Satanic inversion of the social order.

It is certainly possible to posit, philosophically, many purposes and meanings for life.  But to my mind, one of the most obvious is psychological maturation.  This would apply whether you are “spiritual”, religious, or an atheist or agnostic.  Maturing means to develop emotional control, interpersonal skills, knowledge of ones self and emotions, and in the end the capacity both to realize dreams, and to develop contentment and inner peace in nearly all circumstances.  These are obviously desirable outcomes.  It is really not up to discussion if one can remain physically a child all one’s life, so it is equally not up for discussion if one can or should remain so emotionally.

But in our present world, all of this is confused.

I got my Trump vision last night, in a turbulent sleep, that was actually better than most nights when I don’t drink.

Here is the thing with him: he is slowly winning admirers even among his enemies.  People have been trying to lay traps for him literally since he walked in the White House, and he has not only avoided most of them, but laid counter-traps.

And what we call the Deep State has, until now, actually included many actual patriots who simply thought Trump was an idiot.  But he is schooling them.

Trump, with his demeanor, his hair, his history: he uses all this to his advantage.  He actually is as smart as he says he is, but people look at him and see bluster. He could actually say “I’m going to throw a right hook in 2.5 seconds to your temple” and still be able to do it, because they would think he was bluffing.  He can’t be serious, they think.

Trump’s salient characteristic actually is his intelligence.  No really.  No, REALLY.  I didn’t see this either.  I liked him because he had the balls to tell the truth that Barack Obama never produced a birth certificate that would have been allowed by any court of law in the country (or for that matter, most other countries with robust records systems).  This never implied he was born in Kenya. It simply was a CERTAINTY that he never complied with a most basic aspect of law.  He never even proved he was legally eligible to draw a paycheck in the United States.  His social security number was from a State he had literally no connection with.  Asking that of a President is not asking much.  It is farcical that that issue was made to disappear so completely and with such confidence.

But returning to Trump, this is his favorite game: watching people take him for an idiot, then beating them over and over and over, because THEY DON”T LEARN.  They don’t ever learn that his successes are not accidents, that it is not dumb luck.  It’s like Charlie Brown and the football.  All the information is there, but nobody WANTS to see it, nobody WANTS to admit that this blustering serial philanderer with inexplicable hair is smarter than them.

And for his part, he enjoys it thoroughly.  One can ask how someone could enjoy several years of being attacked by everyone–the press, his own party, the opposing party, then the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, and most of our government apparatus–and having fun.  Most people would find this a nightmare.  They would be aging rapidly.

But in a peculiar way, Trump is the BEST QUALIFIED President, for this moment in time, we have elected in a very, very long time.  It is not inapt for him to compare himself to George Washington.  On the one level, it feeds into people’s views that he is a narcissistic idiot, helping him play his favorite game; but on the other George Washington, too, was the man of the hour.  He was the perfect match for America at that moment in time.  He would be destroyed completely and forced to drop out in a political race today, but then, what he was best at–staying above partisan frays, wielding power with restraint, preserving a deserved reputation for absolute integrity–was absolutely necessary.  If we had had an Aaron Burr in there, or even an Alexander Hamilton, we would have failed.

Someone with Trumps long term practice dealing with countless enemies is exactly who we need right now.  Our nation is being slowly destroyed from within.  Most of our Federal agencies have been politicized, seemingly for some time.  The FBI lies to us and to those it reports to.  The CIA is treating governments it doesn’t like as enemy states to be overthrown, in an absolute vitiation of its mission, the law, and common moral decency.  The IRS has still faced no real consequences for an organized regimen of law breaking.  Europe is under attack by organized nihilists who want to overturn Western civilization itself.  The list goes on.

I recall with gratitude how terrified I was that Hillary would win.  I literally wanted to leave the country, not in a Hollywood movie star way, but in a securing a job overseas and getting a work visa kind of way.  Everything she needed to begin censoring opposing views, using the power of government to harass political opponents, and even to start ruinous wars, was in place.  It was put there by Obama, whose job it had been to push this process as far as he could.

Now, the future is up for grabs.  There is still a lot to be determined, countless ways things could get fucked up.  But at least we have a man who is not only determined to fix things, but who ENJOYS the process, and who is good at it.

After a year of facing one ambush after another, from all sides, it is amazing what Trump has STILL been able to accomplish, and at that with a smile.