Moderates United

Despite being only 12 pages, and free, I found myself skimming this after a close reading of the first 5 or so. He goes on and on about the importance of time–which is a useful topic–but fails to tell us what it is we should be doing.  He merely conveys the regrets of many, and the failures of the few who lived as he counsels.

This is a paradox of our own time.  We have, relative to at least our recent past, much leisure.  It is possible, for example, for someone to make a best seller of a book titled “The Four Hour Work Week”.  But we don’t know what to do with it.  That same author seems to find himself now working 60 hour weeks, not just because of money, but because he doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself.  He “meditates” daily for 20 minutes or so, because it “sharpens his mind”.  It is a best practice of high achievers.

I read many billionaires are now micro-dosing with LSD to make them more “creative”.  Creative to what purpose?  Amassing another billion?  A fifth billion?  Becoming the wealthiest man in the world?  Why?  What does this get, if not leisure?  I get that making money is a game to them, that it is autotelic, but on a deep level is such play an important part of life?  They could get the same satisfaction surfing, without needing to be cuthroat, as so many are.  There is not just a play element, but a power element, and the thirst for power is inherently sick.

Such people cannot be role models.  They have no idea what to do with life.  Whatever they are focused on, it is not learning how to love and be loved, how to relax deeply, and how to get at the deep and rich spirit of each and every day, which to my mind and heart are the points of life, and which I, in my own way, pursue each day.  I still ache everywhere, and I still have much work to do, but I am on the path much more than any billionaire, or even most millionaires you might read about.

What to do with time?  That it can be wasted is clear, but what constitutes the best and highest use is made no more clear by the current passion among many for the Stoics.

Socrates, for his part, considered “philosophy”–the love of Truth–the highest use of time.  And he ended his life only able to say he knew nothing.  Is this really the Summum Bonum upon which to base the edifice of our civilization?  That, or the deconstruction of the notion of truth, and a following obsession with material well being, or lunatic schemes of social engineering, in which men become at best herd animals?

The answer is in your body.  It is not in your mind, unless by mind we intend the integrated heart and mind conjured by such words as the Hindi “Mun”.

I continue to see stupid people.  It is my curse.  Perhaps I am stupid, too.  I am willing to consider that.  But my body tells me I am on the right, if difficult, path.

You can only see the future through the lens of the present.  Anything else is a lie.

Corollary: if you cannot see the present, you have no business speaking of the future.

Obviously, both of these are large problems at the moment, and have been for a long time.

I was looking out of the windows of an office building yesterday, pondering the mass murder in Las Vegas. It was raining, and there was mist everywhere, and what I saw was birds eating worms and bugs. Large birds eating smaller birds and rodents. Fish eating bugs, and large fish eating smaller fish. I saw animals dying of hunger and cold. I saw them fucking obsessively in the spring.

What I might assert as the Luciferian Principle argued that if God doesn’t care, why should we? CLEARLY, He does not prevent evil, does not prevent pain, does not obviously shelter and guide us.

What is remarkable is not that violence happens, but that we have evolved ways to make it less common.

Paddock clearly suffered from PTSD. He would lay in bed and moan and scream. I can relate.

Here is the point I want to make here, and I could say much more, but I lack time: at this moment in human history, given all the shelters and frameworks we have created, violence is almost intrinsically the result of trauma. If we, as human beings, want to evolve to the next phase of our cultural evolution, we MUST put trauma front row and center, and deploy ample resources so that where it is present, it can reliably be diminished.

My vision is a new cultural form I have been calling a “church”. I have spoken of this before, but I am approaching a point where I think I can take effective action. I have always been a bigger talker than doer, but what I have in mind is quite small. That is my source of relative confidence.

I think across a lifetime who we become is directly dependent on what we think is possible. For this reason I tend to think the best way of “defining” someone is by the sum total of what they think is possible, even if they are never able to manifest everything they see (I am of course speaking somewhat autobiographically there).

Most or all of us expand to the point beyond which we think “more” is impossible, at which point our lives become recursive.

Me, I see a massive fog, and I make no claim to know how far back it goes, but it speaks to me regularly. That is what this blog is.

I felt disgust with this blog the other day, and thought about discontinuing it. I am putting myself out there, to little seeming purpose. I have no followers, and few readers. But then it hit me that I ENJOY having ideas pass through me, and if the fog cannot plausibly see me as a conduit, then the ideas will stop, and I too will become a circle, or in any event more circular. Posting to no one is the price I pay to be me, and as fucking awful as it sometimes is to be me, I like being me. I would not change lives with anyone on this planet. This is my path, my choice, my destiny. This is beautiful.

Hete is a purpose of life: the spontaneous expression of complex order generated through regular moments of contact with the Transcendant.

I have spoken of Henomoralism, but what Henoreligiosity? What if one were to determine to take up a different religion, diligently, every decade of ones life?

Henotelearchy–differing organizing values and purposes at different times. Perhaps sometimes we should treat time as the ultimate object of value, as counseled by Seneca in “On the Shortness of Life”. https://tripinsurancestore.com/4/on-the-shortness-of-life.pdf (I’m only a third of the way through, so I may be missing his ultimate point).

But perhaps sometimes we need big fat gaps of time. Ponder the fact that “work”, and a productive life generally, consists mainly in meditation in the Buddhist tradition. Many monks scarcely leave their monasteries in long lifetimes, and never marry.

Life is a large ocean, and we are floating in it. Land emerged from time to time, for reasons we don’t understand. The sun, moon and stars are our constant companions, and the whole interface between here and there, between a small present and an infinite one, is fascinating.

I have no idea what I am saying, by the way. Maybe you can tell me how this makes any sense.

Like many, I am waiting eagerly for news on the Vegas shooter. Since I don’t personally deal well with recognized large gaps in my understanding, I am going to offer a provisional hypothesis I will amend or discard as new facts-/which may or may not be forthcoming–emerge.

I read Paddock had far more weapons than he could have hoped to use himself. I read they found Antifa (which I will henceforth refer to as Fascist) literature in his room. I read there is a police account and a different account as to when he checked in. I read he apparently had a guest https://www.infowars.com/receipt-shows-paddock-had-another-guest-in-his-room-before-shooting/

Put all this together, along with low simmering unresolved emotional trauma, and relentless left wing propaganda calling for violent  resistance to the expressed will of the American people, and a relatively high IQ, and what I get is this guy conceiving an excellent scheme for the mass murder of likely Trimp supporters. I see him inviting many people to join him, at least one of whom actually visited his room. I see him sharing Fascist literature with him or her, and showing off his gun collections, and all the windows looking down on the spot where the country show was going to be.

I see cops reaching this conclusion early and going on a hunt for people who knew of his plans to due to direct invitation, and who chose not to join him on his suicide mission, which was the part they objected to, not the murder part, for which they applauded him, as some leftists have had the audacity and cruelty to do publicly.

So a hunt begins, with little information to go on. Perhaps he effectively wiped all his devices. Perhaps he left few clues. Perhaps there were no cameras in his hall, leaving them to guess who, among tens of thousands of visitors–many of whom were not guests–might have come to see him. This would be a MASSIVE undertaking and until they can get a confession–unlikely even if they find someone who knew–they have nothing.

His girlfriend has a practiced alibi and nobody can prove she knew anything g.

So in the end, after tens of thousands of hours of work, they have to propose a possibly radicalized lone shooter as their best guess, not wanting the public to know their real best guess is that up to dozens of people may have gotten away with complicity to mass murder.

Does anyone remember this movie? It changed my world in some ways. Things are not always what they seem.

Something is screwy in this whole Paddock thing but he is dead, and we may never know who else to question.

What functional difference could there be between the Communist rejection of “bourgeois morality”  and Aleister Crowley dictum “Do what thou will”?

On the note of Communism, Paul Johnson makes the interesting argument that the obsession with the money-obsessed Capitalist by Marx is really just a metastasized anti-Semitism, and the abuse of groups of people based on collective crimes by Lenin and those who followed him–such as efforts to destroy Kulaks, and the bourgeoisie generally–were morphologically pogroms in a classic Russian sense. People were pulled from their homes, beaten, jailed and/or killed, and their possessions confiscated.

It is an interesting thesis.

Hate makes hate. Marx apparently asked Heine, with whom he was acquainted, “Why so much love, and not more of the lash?”  Heine, for his part, lamented the grotesque violence he saw in the future of socialism, even if he was in many respects sympathetic.

Why 2 windows shot out?

Could it be that many people were invited or even expected to show up? Could it be there were multiple shooters , who returned their guns to Paddocks room before the cops got there?

I can’t know. But one or two or three guns with plenty of ammo is all one needs for mass murder.

It would seem an obvious step to find and question everyone who rented a room on that side of the building. Maybe some chickened out.

Does anyone else remember Tom Cruise, before Tom Cruise was Tom Cruise, shooting a machine gun out a window in Taps?  As I recall, when Timothy Hutton confronted him, he said “It’s beautiful, man!!!” just before both of them were wiped out in a volley of automatic fire.

Can any serious human being really argue that continual–and continually increasing–violence in our media has no effect?  To my mind, it has the dual effect of making people more afraid and thus more emotionally restrained and superficial, and the following effect of making them feel more  lonely, since they have shut down the pathways to the outside.

Take this basic alienation, and the ability to nurse a grievance–real, or much more often perceived–and you get this sort of violence.

How is it people who appear continually in violent movies can tout gun control?  They are complicit in making violence seem to be an answer to many of life’s problems.  Do not many American men idolize as badasses men like Vito Corleone and Tony Montana?

This madman may or may not have bought his weapons legally, but even if we ban them, the possibility of such shootings does not disappear.  Whoever controls a monopoly on the effective use of force has accumulated power, and accumulated power is sooner or later always abused.  I wonder how the referendum in Catalonia would have played out if guns were allowed in Spain?  More violence, certainly, but also perhaps more circumspection in the use of force by the authoritarian regime in Madrid.  I read some 800 people were injured.  If that is not a species of fascism–and I will recall for you that Spain was formally Fascist until the mid-70’s–then I don’t know what would count.