Moderates United

My core personal philosophical collection, though, consists in three books: the Tao Te Ching, the Wisdom of the Idiots (Idries Shah), and my Kum Nye books.

The Tao Te Ching has influenced me since I first read the first line “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao”.

Kum Nye, of course, I have spoken of often.  It is not a philosophy, but what I might term a means to the approximation of one.

But I wanted to comment on The Wisdom of the Idiots.  It is not the book itself which is so important, but what it represents to me.

I wanted to buy it for my daughter, but she said “no, I want to study philosophy”.  And this–like nearly everything I see every day–got me to thinking.

There is no philosophy in this book, not in a traditional sense.  It is a collection of stories, some of which are quite difficult to “unpack” and grasp, and “grok”. I am, I am quite certain, far from understanding most of them, even if I have from time to time talked about some of them.

What it is is a thousand shards of meaning, of contingent, partial perceptions.  It is a cloud of possibilities.  It is shimmering, moving, evolving, changing, both there, and not there.

The way of the Sufi, as I understand it, is breaking all our meanings into a thousand pieces, and allowing them to reassemble in a self organizing way directed by our deepest consciousness, our deepest intuitive awareness, on a level far, far deeper than anything possible for the conscious mind, but directly in connection with our spirit, our soul, our deepest possibilities.

Your way is your own way.  Far too few people want to grasp this.  They want to be told “do this, believe that, adhere to the teaching of this person or that person, and the way will be laid out in front of you.”  Even though the Buddha–or one of his disciples–said something like “if you meet me on the path, kill me”, far too few people are willing to do this.  There is a Buddha Dharma. There is a sangha.  There are doctrinal teachings.  There are mantras to be said obsessively across decades.

Philosophy is broken. As I have noted from time to time, one of my favorite saying from any book ever is the quote I wrote down when I was 18 from Moby Dick.  Here is the quote in full, which is worth reading:

“I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is–which was the only way he could get there–thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should no be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such and such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have ‘broken his digester.”

It is the last line I loved so much.  There is no path but the path you make.  Even the Existentialists teach this, but they wind up being Communists.  One extreme breeds the other, if no wisdom intervenes. 

There is no safe path, no path free from the continual risk of delusion, self deception, grandiosity, unwarranted self satisfaction, obsession.  My mind wants to add “freedom” to this list, where it does not seem to belong, but as I contemplate, yes, it does belong there.  Freedom, true freedom, is also a risk.  How can you go where no one has gone before, truly?  It is scary, frightening.  To go your own way, you do need to become accustomed to fear.  You must make it your friend.  You must learn to allow it to recede, even in the unknown, and unknowable.

I do not think it unreasonable to call myself a Sufi.  I admit I am an idiot.  I am an idealistic, stubborn idiot.  Fully grasping the extent of your own futility, the extent of your failures and imbecilities, the vast ocean of things you can’t begin to say you understand, the impossibility of ever reaching in this world anything approaching a complete understanding: all of these constitute the BEGINNING of the path.  It becomes possible then to BEGIN the process of learning, of seeing, of perceiving with your own eyes and ears, your own body, your own tongue and nose.  And it is a path which winds off into a horizon which never gets any closer.  The path is your home, here.  It can never be any more.  But that is the point of life.  It is the purpose for being here.  And it can be a home.  It can be happy and fulfilling, when you let go of all the things which seek to keep you rooted, frozen, immobile, hopeless, and lost.

I mentioned this some years ago, but I was in fact annointed a Sufi in a dream once.  I was told by a group of wise men that I was to be crowned a Sufi.  There was a majestic ceremony, fit for a king.  And when the great moment came to place the crown on my head, it was 6″ too big on every side, and fell immediately on my shoulders.  We all laughed.  It was the laughter that completed the ceremony.

Some months later, after some travelling, Nasruddin passes through that village, and stops by to check on the shopkeeper.  He is told something like, “it was HORRIBLE.  Everyone thought I was crazy.  I had to work twice as hard just to stay in business.  Now my business is good, but no thanks to you.

Nasruddin replies: “oh no, it worked PERFECTLY.”

I was contemplating this morning, staring out into the rain, that I think hated my mother by the time I was 3, and I think she hated me. She wanted to break me, and not unreasonably, I did not want to be broken.  I had, and I think have, in some respects, a very powerful will, although of course I was broken.  I remember the dream where it became clear to me, a dream I had over four decades ago.

And I feel this sense of having been hated–and having felt hate–is not something that will ever leave me.  It was early, primal, primordial, fundamental to who I am and have become.  And it was extraordinarily unpleasant.  My home was never a happy home.  I never felt truly safe at any time in my childhood.  Never.  Anywhere.

But this primal deficit is the source of my energy.  It is why I felt I had to save the world to prove myself.  It is what fed my relentless drive for self improvement, for knowledge, for wisdom.

And I felt “you can’t replace memory”.  Then it hit me “what if I could?”  What if I could eliminate all those feelings of anger, worthlessness, isolation, pain and fear? What if I could do a memory wipe, such that only whatever good there was–and of course there must have been–remained?

I would not do it.  Who I am is who I am.  All of us have to learn how to deal with negative emotions.  All of us have to learn how to transmute them, energize them, use them for good, for growth, for wisdom and learning.  I would be neutering myself, destroying myself, eradicating the foundation for everything I have built.

None of us are truly wise enough to finally distinguish good and bad in this world.

Here, though, is one heuristic. Given a free market–which is to say one in which the government has not been corrupted into protecting or actively supporting monopolies–a rough sequence of events can be stipulated. To create one free market billionaire you have to create, say, 10 people worth 100 million, 100 people worth 10 million, 1000 people worth a million, and ten thousand people making $100,000 or more. These are very roughly, say, Facebook, or Google numbers.

Now if resentment outweighs self interest, you can enact policy to ensure no billionaires emerge, at least through the natural operation of free markets (Communist regimes, obviously, create very big winners, which is not hard when you can take money from anyone you like and give it to anyone else). Logically, if you prevent the billionaire, you also prevent everything downstream. You create Venezuela. You create Zimbabwe. You create the Soviet Union. Nobody has anything. Everyone is poor. And you STILL have huge income disparities, because some pigs are more equal than others.

Base your life on a positive vision for yourself, not envious resentment of someone else.

In other news, white leftist commentators were astonished to learn that a house negro possessed the ability to form complete sentences, and every appearance of coherent thought.  They are still trying to decide what to make of this shocking development. If they all get like that, it’s only a matter of time before white “liberals” aren’t needed.

But we are rapidly reaching a point where not only has Mueller found nothing but an incoming National Security Advisor guilty of nothing but some combination of stupidity and hubris–complacency might be the word, since “wire-tapping” senior officials then releasing the transcript for political purposes, then cajoling a contradiction under oath, has not traditionally been a low our intelligence/counter-intelligence apparatus would stoop to–but has begun breaking the law himself.  He recently sought and received, seemingly illegally, thousands of emails he had no right to.

The thing about arcs is they can reverse.  All the cannons firing at Trump can one day, at the right time, be made to fire at the foundations of the Deep State.  Mueller himself can be investigated for his investigation.  He can be investigated for sundry blatant conflicts of interest, for overreach, for willfully overlooking blatant violations of the law by Democrats.  He can be investigated, and perhaps indicted, for failing to end the investigation outright the moment he realized that the entire thing was based on fabricated evidence created by a combination of Clinton operatives and law breaking members, and spouses of members, of the Deep State.

It is like the whole thing is on a bungy, that is getting ready to bounce back up.

Or, to use a metaphor that is a bit cliched (I did something like jiu jitsu for 7 some odd years): it is like judo, where in the classic iteration, you use the energy of your opponent against them.  When you are dealing with skilled opponents, though, this almost always needs to be through a feint.  You have to appear to give them an opening, something they want, to which they commit too much energy.  This energy then becomes your means of taking their balance and throwing them.

I have seen calls already for a Special Prosecutor to investigate Uranium One.  Since these people have no reasonable bounds, I would think Mueller himself, and everyone under him, could equally be objects of investigation.  Applying the same standards applied to Flynn, Mueller might even be an indictable criminal.

Unless I am missing something major, it would seem to me he himself would be prudent to give people reasons to stop asking about and digging into the Steele dossier that started the whole thing, and why he brought on board so many people who were hyperpartisan, and plainly guilty of serious derelictions of duty.

It has been perhaps an act of genius for Trump to let this whole thing play out, to distract and obsess the Democrats, and ultimately–after the smoke clears, after Mueller has done his best and found nothing–to provide a clear means of unmasking a vast mass of traitors in our midst.

It is perhaps the case that the “insurance policy” was a terrible idea, even if it was illegal, and indictable.

And it’s not hard to feel that previous generations–our “parents” in a general sense, that of those who created “this world”–have failed us.  Intellectually, it is hard to find anything useful in most universities in the “love of truth” departments.  You will need to look in the “study of the mind” department, and then only if they have chosen to focus on happiness, using antique “love of truth” ideas like Eudaemonia.

It is easy to think this is a terrible time to live.  We face the risk of nuclear war from North Korea, and nuclear attack from anyone who can get the materials.  Technology becomes steadily more intrusive, such that any tyranny enacted by the Federal government would be effectively impossible to combat.  We see many ludicrous movies where rebels plan and organize in secret, when such a thing would be in fact impossible, as Frank Church recognized long before the internet, the iPhone, and Facial Recognition technology.

The possible list is long, and my imagination–and knowledge of perils recognized in the public domain–is considerably larger than that of most.

But this morning I was doing my Heartmath, and it occurred to me that in the Buddhist and other traditions, ANY incarnation as a human being is a blessing.  Just showing up here, just being alive on this planet, is a blessing.

And we live in a time where all the best ideas of the entire history of mankind–the public part at least–are available everywhere all the time.  I have most of the primary texts of the forms of Buddhism which interest me.  I can and am using Neurofeedback to calm my brain, which will save me decades of patient and very, very slow effort.  It is not “40 years of Zen”, as one person with a talent for marketing, but seemingly little wisdom, put it, but it is a huge advantage.

I have my Heartmath.  I have time, precious time, time not contingent on membership in a monkish convent, time not devoted to backbreaking labor.

As Yogi Berra put it, “it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future”, but it is quite easy to make predictions about your own future states, if you develop the ability and capacity to choose them.  This is really the essence of the spiritual path: cultivating the ability to calm yourself, to choose happiness, and to choose communion and expansion.

I was contemplating yesterday that it takes a fair amount of wisdom to plumb the depths of your own stupidity.  Realizing how little you know is the beginning of the spiritual path.

And spirituality is absolutely compatible with ordinary happiness, with being in a good mood, with positive feelings, with enthusiasm, with enjoying your work, with enjoying an innocent good time, with smiling, with laughing, with being of good cheer.

It is so easy to confuse a permanent frown and furrowed brow with profundity.  My youngest–who in many ways takes after me the most–was recently sharing with me that her happiness and enthusiasm makes some of her friends uncomfortable, that she seems “ditzy”.

But the SCIENCE that has emerged clearly places a premium on happiness.  Happy people work harder.  They are more creative.  They are more fun.  They live longer.  They have better relationships (of course, having good relationships makes you happier too).  They do all the things our culture supposedly values better, as well as those things we don’t value sufficiently, like play.

In my own work, I think I have finally reached a complete summary of how I became how I am.  I won’t share all that here, but even though the past few days have been hard for me, I am glad to finally get there, to feel I have been to every major latent feeling within me.  What this means, now, is that I can begin focusing on the positive ones.

I will add a comment on that.  What I have found, is that I have long been able to access positive states, for a time, but there is always this dark cloud that smells them out, then shows up.  Clinically, I can be doing Neurofeedback, doing deep relaxation, and I am on track, exactly on target, then out of nowhere massive tension shows up.  It is like when you are having a good time, and somebody you don’t want there comes along, and the whole vibe of the thing changes. 

Put another way, I have never been able to trust fun, trust relaxation, or let down my guard for any length of time without regretting it.

But this tension, these angers, these traumas, they all arose long ago, and are now nothing but a conditioned association, a neurological habit.  As such, I can think of them as echoes of something once real, but now gone, and practically, I can practice merging them with relaxation.  I practice learning to see them come, then still revert back to where I was.  If I do this often enough, they will stop showing up.

And when this happens, the ache that has dogged me all my life will lift.

But I feel some guilt at the moment, for doubting in some respects the power of love, and communion.  Sex is also the perfection of an open soul, and the sharing of its contents.  It is a mystery, and a rite of beauty.

I have felt much pain in my life.  It has colored my vision.  But according to my own lights, my own principles, my own beliefs, my goal is to rise far above where I have been, and to do that I need to become a better good-finder.  There is no skill in repeating the past.

Leftists will sometimes say fascism is “corporatism”, which is to say, in the version their propagandists like to articulate to help differentiate their own delusions from those of the fascists.  But this gets things backwards.  It does not mean corporations rule the government.  That did not happen in Italy.  It did not happen in Germany.  It did not happen in Spain.

Rather, the government forms a partnership with the largest corporations to mutual benefit.  The corporations back the government and support it materially and politically; and in turn the leaders of the government award all the contracts to the Krupps and I.G. Farben’s of the world, which makes their owners enormous amounts of money.

Inherently, Fascism favors large corporations–which can be easily controlled by making sure those in charge support your cause–and denigrates and damages small business.

Inherently, therefore, and in my view this is a necessary conclusion, any policy which damages small business and rewards large business is tending towards fascism.

Obamacare damaged small business.  It was heavily supported by the largest insurance providers, who stood to destroy their competition, force industry consolidation, and provide very lucrative, secure business for many years to come.  It is not widely commented upon, but most Medicare plans are administered by the very corporations which the Left–in calling for “Medicare for everyone”–denigrates as for profit monsters.  Their OWN POLICIES are used to make the largest corporations richer.  If they got everything they wanted, we would have de facto Fascism in the insurance business.

But when and where have Leftists ever demonstrated the SLIGHTEST capacity for independent thought? 

Finally, and this is the actual point I had started to make, I wanted to note that Communists derive their identity from their PARTY.  Fascists get it from their nationalism, Communists from their Party, which their arrogance enables them to equate with the interests of people they don’t understand, which is to say “the workers.”

You have a small, inward-looking cabal in both cases.  And practically, of course, the Party equals the delusions and prejudices of narcissistic intellectuals.  What is actually referenced is a precise form of mental illness, and shattered reality testing.