Moderates United

It is gradually occurring to me both that there is nothing to hold on to, and that this is OK.  Life is an enormous ocean, with waves and tides, angry moods and pacific moods.

It is both true that there is no one and no thing to which I can cling, and that I am connected to everyone and everything, just not in a fixed way.

The tide comes and the tide goes, and people will invest entire lifetimes trying to prevent one inch of sway, holding, straining with all their might, when all they needed to do was accept and wait.  It will come back, in some form, but you will fail to see it if you first blind yourself.

To be clear, I was not accusing Trump of exaggerating things, although no doubt he does do some of that.

No, I am talking about the comparisons with Hitler, and the “darkening” of America, and all the other ludicrous propagandistic, hysterical pap out there.

This is LITERALLY the most hyperbolic moment in human HISTORY!!!  All of it!!!  By a LOT!!!!

I really like bread, but it seems virtually all grains sold in this country have Roundup (Glyphosphate) on them, even the “organic” ones.  I was reading this website, then came across this interesting entry: https://healthytraditions.com/healthytraditions/traditional-food/fermented-foods/atchara.html

Here is what caught my eye:

Many Filipinos are not wealthy enough to eat meat regularly outside of these special events. Add that to the fact that most people living in the rural areas do not have refrigeration, and therefore consume meat in larger quantities during these holiday and festive gatherings (such as “lechon” – a roasted whole pig), atchara became a strong tradition at the meals of these events, as their digestive systems were not naturally used to digesting large amounts of meats on a regular basis.

And it occurred to me that EVERY day is feast day for most Americans.  There is nothing special in it.  I love Christmas cookies as much as the next person, but there is no reason I could not eat them every day of the year.  I can and do eat meat every day.  I take on faith that the Buddha was no idiot, and did not suggest vegetarianism idly, but for myself I was a vegetarian in my youth for two years, and found I did not function well, physically or emotionally.  There is something grounding for me in meat that keeps me from drifting away.

Be that as it may, what it occurs to me is that the poverty which is very real with us is spiritual poverty. We can eat anything we want, any time we want (most of us: there is real hunger, too), but how often do we have access to the feeling of belonging, of participating in a vital and real community?

It seems obvious to me that all this experimentation with sexual identity, with racial identity, with using opposition to everything which is, to fashion an identity BUILT on tearing down, is short sighted, and characterized mainly by emotional emptiness and following desperation.  We burn what we hate, and we hate what does not grant us the love we need.  And our society certainly does not create and distribute love well.  We do not do it well in the homes, and what we fail to find there, we can scarcely be expected to build well elsewhere.  We look to others suffering from the same illness to relieve our own.  This must lead to madness, unless it can be palliated by distractions, illusions, useless activity and emotional superficiality.

Our wealth is not our problem.  “Capitalism” is not to blame.  It has always been lunacy to suggest that tearing down can create.  Only creation can create.  And creation is gradual, and always operative within smooth, peaceful times.  It has no place in disaster, which can only breed fear of the new, rigidity, and the violence which follows.

Culture is that which connects us.  It is what allows us as individuals to face collectively our shared fate of decay and death.  Countless brilliant people have created countless useful solaces.  They do not do so through the use of reason.  Such was the conceit of the French Revolutionaries and their progeny, who now inhabit so many high places in so many public places.

No, cultural creation is intuitive; it is spiritually driven.

Listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvcZf7NHMUQ

Is it not quite possible that they are weeping on the way back from the grave?  Is it not equally possible that this music gives them the emotional courage to continue their lives with emotional openness and the joy which this makes possible, in spite of “everything”?

I feel this darkness in the air, and I wonder how we clear it, how we take the next step.  So many people seem to think that by impoverishing the world, we can return to a different, better time.  This is ludicrous.  The task is understanding, on a wisdom level, what it is to be human.

To take as but one example the current cultural offensive on the sexual front, which seeks to destroy all the  evolved wisdom of the human species, what lasting joy can come from the “freedom” to change ones gender like one changes clothes?  What underlies identity?  What is deeper?  Sex, as used today, is nothing a dissimulation, a drug, a lie told to keep the wolves of confusion and despair at bay.

I have nothing against such people.  There have always been people who felt they were born in the wrong body.  But this is something different.  This is an attack on the very few givens remaining in our world, and can only operate to alienate all of us from one another yet further.  There is no end game, other than the childish demand to be allowed to do and say whatever one wants, whenever one wants, and to demand others acquiesce in whatever the delusion of the day is.

We fail at our great peril to value what the past has to teach.  Yes, not all of it is beautiful.  Some of it is ugly.  But without understanding, you see, we REPEAT what has been so many times before.  There is nothing new in tyranny, nothing new in radical intolerance, nothing new in shouting, yelling, hurting, killing, and falling, again, into the pit.

We exist, as I continue to say, in a time when global peace and harmony is possible.  But not through destruction, which has become the dominant mania of most of those entrusted with our “progress”.

We are resurrecting Moloch in the name of progress.  I do not need to read the stories.  I can feel it.

I am one man, living in a small world.  I do have and have shared many ideas, but I think the most important thing right now is for more and more people to stop and ask “what are we doing?  Why are we doing it?  Where is it all leading?  What baseless assumptions, and emotionally driven manias are pushing us?”

How, to put it simply, do we reconcile political freedom with the need all of us have for belonging?  Surely it is obvious an ubiquitous and omnipotent government cannot grant us anything but death in all its forms?

At the beginning of The Sacrifice, by Andrei Tarkovsky, the father is speaking to the son about the miraculous power of consistency, telling him a story of a monk who watered a dead tree daily for two years, at which point it came to life, and they do this while planting a dead tree. At the end, after the fathers seeming madness, the boy waters the tree.

All my life I have admired people who get up every morning and do without fail what they set out to do.  I have never been like this.  I will be good for a time, but then I find myself dreaming, as I did this morning.  I lay around, or sit and drink coffee, and watch images and ideas, and wonder where the time is going.

And it occurs to me that as with many things, there are WAYS of being disciplined.  One way is to lack the imagination to do otherwise.  One way is to be compulsive and really asleep in some ways.  One way is a deep seated fear of failure, of the sort that the military breeds into people.  None of these really apply to me, although I did use fear for a very long time. I whipped and beat myself without mercy.  I am no longer like that, thankfully.

And one way is love: love of an activity, love of oneself and ones health and emotional well being.  This is the healthiest of them all.

The longer I live, the more I feel that it is not what you do, but how you do it.  All of us are set the task when we are born of waking up, of becoming consciously alive, consciously human, and of consciously pursuing the angelic, the higher.  All of us have large dark regions within us, parts which are cut off, which we cannot feel, and which thus cannot provide us needed wisdom.  Finding all of them, inventorying all of them, requires periodic variation, changes in action, changes in perspective.  Within Kum Nye, there are hundreds of different activities, and the practice consists in varying them regularly.  There is no recitation of 100,000 mantras, or decades spent on the exact same meditation.

And here is as good a place as any to post a phrase that came to me the other day: When we own our demons, we amplify our angels.

Two other phrases that kept popping in my head last night: there is no place to start but the middle.

And: if you can see through to the end, the middle is clear.

They are a bit contradictory on the outside, but what I think my unconscious meant was that you have to start with the heart in important things.  The heart, the feeling sense, the connecting sense, the sense of affection, of wanting, of knowing intutitively–is where honest activity flows from.  You cannot force heart from the head.  The head exists to serve the heart, in important ways.  This is something I am still learning to accept.  Intellectualism is such a comfort and shelter, and armor.  It is also, of course, a cage and a stupefying and blinding tranquilizer.

And as far as contemplating an activity, if your heart is in it, you can see yourself doing it.  There are no blocks on the way, no part of you which will throw stumbling blocks in the way.  You can reach areas of objective difficulty, and visualize yourself finding ways to push through.

From my perspective, the fact the a sitting FBI Director broke laws HE WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR ENFORCING in order to support a political agenda and party at the expense of another is by far the most obvious crime on the table, and the one most worthy of a criminal investigation.  He intentionally leaked classified information to damage Trump. Then a friend of his was appointed to investigate his firing, and to look into a dossier which seems to have been created by s Clintin ally at their behest.

Why, given this, should Comey not be accused of Obstucting Justice in the Hillary Clinton investigation? None of the usual protocols were followed, seemingly at his direction.

And why, given that Hillary Clinton and her agent, James Comey, are the only ones who clearly committed crimes, should Comey’s friend Muellef not recuse himself, or admit the plain fact that the whole independent counsel idea was a planned sabotage from the get-go, one aided and abetted by illegal activity on the part of the FBI’s top man?

We have not left la-la land. Other than that we have shrewd and seemingly honest man at the helm, we might still be living in the realm of Barack Marshall Davis.

One thing Trump has that I do not have is an instinct for timing. Perhaps he is simply waiting for the time to turn the firing of Mueller not just into a risk, but s positive asset in the court of non-lunatic public opinion.

In “My dinner with Andre”, he mildly chastises Wally for loving the comfort of an electric blanket, feeling that it separates him from whatever residual connection there may remain between “man in city” and “man in nature”.  Feeling the cold is good.  It can make one feel alive.  Comfort, in contrast, is soporific, not just in the benign sense of a good nights’ sleep, but as something which dulls and deadens the animals senses.

Ones sees this impatience with excessive comfort in things like CrossFit, Spartan Races, commando training for civilians, adventure races, and the like.

But ponder the next step: Virtual Reality.  Ponder children growing up in climate controlled homes, lathered in sun screen when they venture out (never too far, and in most cases never out of the sight of the nervous mother), and surrounded by mind deadening electronics almost from birth.  I will leave that thought there.

The other thing I wanted to share was a thought about the health of Americans.  What if, as a thought experiment, all chairs and bed frames were banned, and all toilets converted to squat toilets, such that people had to eat sitting on the floor, shit squatting, and sleep on the floor, as they do in much of the world?  How long would it take the balloon people to figure out how to not be absurdly obese?

So many people think that lines constitute intelligence, that logic flows in the real world the way it does in thought.  This has always been ridiculous, but it is reinforced by an educational system divorced from animal realities, from cold and heat and hunger and thirst, and the following needs to be functionally intelligent to survive.

I am not one of those people who assumes that because things are flowing in one direction that they cannot reverse course.  We can never know what will happen, can never know when a simple idea will take hold, can never know when the light will dawn again in long vacant eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dfE5DDBUR4

“Wait, what was that?  I thought I heard something.”

Yes, you did.  It was my lack of commentary.  Silence is loud when I do it.

Still, watch this.  Ponder.  Worth your time, unless you are living a self realized fully conscious life, in which case by all means carry on.

The Left, being inherently irrational, dogmatic, and emotionally obsessive, has often tried to impose its will directly on the people it claims to want to “liberate”.  “Revolution” was in the air in the era of FDR.  It was in the air in the 1960’s, where the pot addled Weathermen plotted the wholesale murder of millions of Americans.

But as George Bernard Shaw and his ilk realized early on, normal people will not accept lunatic ideas right out of the bottle.  They have to be diluted, and added to the water supply, such that the end of achieving them can be pursued in open sight, and be welcomed by people who would be infuriated by and sickened by the actual end plan.

Even in the Soviet Union, before it was the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks found it necessary to promise farmers more land, independence to various nations captured through Russian imperialism, relief to workers, fair elections for all, and similar folderol, of which they meant none of it.

Only once they had complete power did they ban unions, start collectivizing farms, faking elections, and over the course of the 1920’s, reconquering all the nations to which they had initially promised freedom.  They rebuilt the allegedly immoral Russian Empire, then worked diligently on expanding it–to repeat myself–imperialistically.

Logically, the push in the OTHER direction has to be subtle, long term, and filled with compromises in the interest of pragmatism.

One sees these silly Never-Trumpers acting as if the only options are complete rigidity and complete submission.  If politics is the art of the possible, then honest, serious people have to become politicians.

And the great advantage of Conservatism–which I call true Liberalism–is that WE DON”T HAVE TO LIE.  We win by getting our truths out.

But we have to be gradual.  We have to be pragmatic.  We have to remember our ideals, but like the Left–which has so effectively conquered over time our cultural and political landscape–we have to always be looking for small steps, small moves, small victories.  Enough of them, and we turn back the tide.

Conversely, for those who will not bend under any circumstances, I would suggest they are ideologically identical to True Believers, who are useless, and quickly cast aside by everyone, as has indeed happened under Trump.

The question is always: in this cultural tug of war, in which direction is the ball going?  If it is going our way, and we can keep it going our way, at any speed, then eventually we will win.

Yes, The National Socialist German Workers Party, which found support mainly among the so-called proletariat and among intellectuals, was socialism.

Watch this.  From a Leftist perspective, there was nothing to object to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJtLx19kQ24

It is true that the Communists and the Nazis fought in the streets.  It is true Hitler used the rise of the Soviet Union to create his own party.  But it is equally true that Nazism is to Communism roughly what Episcopalianism is to Catholicism. For those who are historically ignorant, large wars were fought for centuries over fine points of dogma.  This did not make all sects not fundamentally Christian.

Surely Trotsky was closer to Stalin than to Hitler, but even he was killed for not being close enough to orthodoxy.

All Left wing ideologies–among which National Socialism is but one variant–are most usefully described as life destroying Fascist cults.

As the editor of the German periodical Die Welt recently noted, these violent lunatics even share the black shirts of the ORIGINAL Italian Fascists.