Moderates United

I woke up feeling this morning that in a healthy world, there would be no need to talk about compassion.  In a healthy world there would be no need to speak of tolerance.  Everything would be negotiated between individuals on a case by case basis, coming from a place of emotional plenty, genuine empathy, and a shared understanding that the human condition is both tragic and glorious.  Tragic in that we will all suffer here.  It cannot be avoided.  Glorious, in that this suffering can be transcended.

I have had this song stuck in my head the past couple days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR-2ctCRukA

His girl (perhaps his boy) doesn’t love him any more.  Or perhaps he has realized that the love was never truly there, and they just didn’t know each other very well, which is more likely.  Sex makes people feel closer, for a time, even if they are both emotionally undeveloped and suffering the lack every day without knowing it.  It made me cry.  There is so much pain in this world, and this person may never reach a good resting place, a place of emotional safety, of warranted and rewarded trust, of belonging.  He may travel this world as a hungry ghost all the days of his life.  It happens often.  You reach the time to die, and you don’t quite know how you got there, but you know pain was barking at your heels the whole way.

I feel, often, the pain of the world.  I myself of course am covered in scars. I was cut emotionally to the bone with a razor often.  I don’t know why I am still alive emotionally.  Something in me seems very hard to kill.  There is a resurgent energy which keeps me going, even if I don’t know how I keep going.  Many years of my life were just trying to get through one more day, and just trying to get through one more hour of that day.

But I do feel something beautiful slowly opening up in me.  I find an acceptance of all this.  I find myself feeling, for split seconds, like I imagine “normal” people feel.

We live in a world of noise.  Everyone is competing for your attention.  Everyone, seemingly, wants something.

I made some effort years ago to “monetize” my ideas, but it felt wrong.  I don’t know if my ideas are any good, and I am quite uncomfortable in the role of emotional guru.  I have far too many problems of my own. I remain fucked up in important ways.

I like the purity of this blog.  There are no ads, no links, nothing.  I don’t even have my name on here.

I’m talking out loud.  Time to do my Kum Nye practice.  It is an odd thing, that it always feels like jumping on a boat floating down a river whose course I don’t know.  I never know what will come up, or where I will go.  This is part of the practice: just letting it happen.  The Nye, the massage, does itself.  And when it works well, it feels like going sideways emotionally, cutting across the deep ruts of my habitual patterns, and creating the possibility of something new.

I touched deeply the sadness I felt as a child today.  You would think if I had a sad childhood, I would know it by now.  Truthfully, what I remember is normal, but always being a bit emotionally disconnected.

But this is what I realizing about dissociation: the emotions continue.  You are not actually suppressing them; you are just suppressing AWARENESS of them.  Which means I have an entire emotional history which is foreign to me, some of which came back today.

And what hit me is that sadness hurts more than fear.  Fear is unpleasant, yes, but it out there.  Sadness is within you, and it is much deeper.  It is more absorptive.  It touches more of your core self.

And then it hit me that this is the simplest explanation for horror movies: fear pushes sadness away for a while.  You are swapping one emotional discomfort for another.

My work continues.  I’m watching Zootopia tonight. I don’t feel like dealing with anything serious.

I feel that the sense of self is best thought of as an Emergent Property of a long series of what might be called “ping and response events”.  You send a call out into the world, and an answer comes back. You do it again, and another answer comes back, reliably.

As time goes on, and you get older, the quality of the pings begins to matter more.  You send a specific sort of energy out into the world, and you get back an appropriate response, one which matches, or fits, your call.  You come to understand the quality of your calls as you, and the quality of the answers as others.  You realize you belong within a system.  You are both a self and a part of a larger whole.

Thus, in healthy individuation, one naturally learns to care both for oneself and for others.  Self nurturing and other nurturing are our genetic and evolutionary heritage.  They are, after all, life itself.  We are meant to sustain ourselves and to sustain one another.

Consider, again, what happens when this process breaks down, when individuation does not occur, when no healthy sense of self is possible, because the care-givers never respond appropriately, or perhaps at all.

The organism has an imperative to survive.  In some respects–and I certainly do not think this is a full explanation, but for its part I think it is accurate enough–we are stomachs which evolved bodies and brains to eat more and eat better. If the social brain does not develop properly, the appetites of the body do not disappear.  They come, rather, to seem to be all that matters.

Could we not locate in this mechanism irrational greed?  Sexual predation, made “necessary” by an inability (on some level) to conceive that a woman could consent?  A violence brought into being by an innate sense that the world is conspiring to kill you, a sense which is amplified by the reaction of the world to antisocial and aggressive behavior?

Could we not derive evil from a lack of good, the good of having been heard and seen, felt and nurtured, appropriately?  This point seems obvious, and I’m sure it is, but I am attempting to say old things in a slightly better way.

On another level, I am confronting my own evil, my own unmet needs, the stone wall I faced as a child in the way of contentment and a sense of safety.

And in the process, of course, I am trying to learn more about what it means to be human, to be here, in this body.

And I will add that in my previous post what I was alluding to was an interesting pendulation.  I cycle to abstraction–and speculating about ancient civilizations is abstraction–when I can’t stay with feelings.  Emotional health is being able to stay with feelings for a long time, which is to say, the ability to be relaxed and not on edge, not on alert, most of the time.

And I wonder, too, about the personlessness–the radical devaluation of the individual–in “utopian” schemes and the failures to individuate of the intellectuals who obsess about such schemes.  Communism feels right to them because it is a world, in theory, where they belong, because you don’t have to have any distinguishing traits.  Self evidently, such people often consider their politics to be their distinguishing trait, but at root I think many or most of them are sad children.

It is a psychopathology, and like all pathologies, worth explaining in as much detail as possible, at least when speaking in generalities.

http://www.hiddenmysteries.org/mysteries/terra/map-creator.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumapunku

I will from time to time intentionally go into “liminal” areas.  I will read about UFO’s (best evidence is that aliens exist, and visit us; I won’t justify this comment at length other than to say I put a lot of time and effort into reaching this conclusion, which is shared by a number of NASA astronauts, and one former Minister of Defense of Canada), or giants, or, as I am doing presently, revisiting the evidence for a lost but highly advanced, likely global, civilization which existed at least 12,000 years ago.

I chose to drink tonight.  I said to myself before my meditation today that if I went into overwhelm, I would allow it.  Well, fucking shit hit.  I can’t describe what hits me, but my past description of “mainlining fear” is close enough.  I’m somewhat used to it.  I am largely resistant to it.  I can allow massive amounts of fear to flow through me without fearing the fear.  But I have limits.  There is a point where I disappear.  And I did.

Returning to the topic, and attempting to make a circle of this, I continue to wonder what it is we don’t know.  I continue to think that a socially and psychologically advanced people would not need air conditioning, fancy food, indoor plumbing, or the light bulb.  What if the whole of their “technology” were oriented around maintaining an individual and thus social sense of harmony and health?  What else, in the end, do you need (besides music)?

Actually, I will go there.  There is a perception I wanted to share I hope I can put into words.

When I feel a bit lost and alone, I have a variety of coping tools, but one of them is to imagine that things worked, once, long ago.  By extension, they may work again, if we can rediscover what they knew then.

I feel, and this is an intuitive guess, that many Leftists have this exact same sense, this nostalgia, this Fernweh, this Saudade (if I might mix languages and linguistic intents), this sense that wherever you are, you want to be somewhere else.  When you do not love yourself, you want to be somewhere else, if you cannot be someone else.

So I read some Communist movie will be played here locally to the accompaniment of our orchestra.  Rich, well dressed people will go spend good money to watch a movie remembering the revolution with nostalgia.  What is it they really want?  They want a home.  They want a sense of belonging.

And these things, for most of them, are “out there”.  They are not present to their awareness.  They may be longings and aspirations they share with other people, but their connection to those other people is contingent on a shared delusion: that collectivism is something other than putting the rapists and murderers in charge of everything.

If you watch, there is an oscillation here, from here, to there, and back again.

I watch these things–I don’t know what I’m going to write until I write it, quite often–and find them instructive.  All of us have deep patterns within us, things which make sense, but which can only be viewed accurately from a distance.

I will leave this there.  Yes, I know I am talking out loud, but it is making sense to me, and I feel better.

My work continues.  I have many miles to go before I wake.

And it does not help that the road I travel I am inventing as I move.

Edit: I read this, and there is of course stunning logical consistency here.  Emotional logic, but logic nonetheless.  I always walk straight lines, even when I am swaying.

If you ever want to show me a full circle, I can stay there with you the whole way.  Not many people can say that.

http://www.royal-rife.com/

This story was new to me.  It appears well validated, and I have in fact read of recent work along these lines which purports to be “cutting edge”.

How much good, I wonder, has been erased from the world by dismal and unimaginative people who think power, wealth and prestige are worth a bucket of warm spit?  Who, in other words, are STUPID in the only ways that really matter?

I am going to consciously confront something publicly that is a little painful for me.  No, I have no confessions to make. I’ve been pretty open and honest.

What I am realizing is that what comes AFTER confronting evil, is the following realization that all sorts of human feelings and emotions are underdeveloped in me. I am stunted in some ways, which I compensate for intellectually.  I think there are many like me.  I think, in fact, that most “intellectuals” are like me, just much less honest, and much less willing–and, to be sure, able–to go doubtful and painful places.

They say a neurological basis of social connection is mirror neurons.  In a healthy and satisfying attachment process, the infant learns that what it feels, others feel–that there is an “out there” which speaks back and can be conversed with, even if of course the conversation will take several more years to do in words.  And this talking back, this reaction, this connection, teaches the infant that those emotions exist, that they are valid–in the sense that some reaction is appropriate.  For example, when an infant cries, in a healthy mother/child relationship it will reliably be comforted.  If it is hungry it will be fed.  If its stomach hurts it will be burped, etc.  If it is happy, the caregiver is happy back.

This process not only creates a loop between care giver and infant, but also WITHIN the infant in that its own feelings are validated.  It does not have to learn to reject its own feelings in order to meet the emotional needs of the care-giver, which is the case is bad bonding.

And turning to that process, unnurturing mothers view crying infants not as a helpless being in need of comfort, but a nuisance to shut up.  They view small children expressing natural curiosity as brats who need to be spanked.  They view children who are always asking questions as annoying and disrespectful.  Sooner or later, such children learn to internalize the undesirability of those emotions, and by extension, spontaneous expressions of any sort.

They learn, in other words, to view with mistrust and fear their own feelings.

This, here, is where I think the heart of addiction lies.  Emotions and feelings are how we navigate the world.  They are what tell us who we are, and what we want, and what is worth pursuing.  They tell us when we feel a special connection with someone.  They tell us when we feel a special connection with a certain kind of work or activity.

Imagine if you will living in a world where every last spontaneous impulse generates an immediate feeling of fear and even revulsion.  Imagine trying to individuate in such a world, to develop a core self and sense of agency.

You can’t not feel.  What you can do is reject all your feelings–which you have no hope of differentiating, since they were not differentiated effectively by the parent, and you have not yet learned that skill–then drink to numb the social isolation and internal pain that causes.

The evil is what pushes you out of your natural world, the one where things make sense, and being who you are is not a crime.  But where it pushes you to is a confusing world where all our natural, inherent, instinctual way-markers have been conditioned out of existence, or perhaps worse yet, reversed, so that anything good is seen as bad, and all bad seen as good; or perhaps most accurately: the whole fucking thing so muddles up it is hard to tell what is what.

This is what has driven me personally to develop my analytical faculty to the extent I have.  I don’t have a clue who I am on an experiential level, and I have had to treat the entire world as an extended practical joke, at least in theory.  I would guess it is what led Descartes to his effort to create a philosophy from first principles.  Knowing nothing else about him than that he separated body/mind, and that he loved to sleep in every morning, I would guess he had considerable trauma in him he was never able to name or express.

It seems likely many famous people had terrible things in them they could not live down, could not express, and could not escape.

But we are gradually developing a vocabulary for all this, a praxis, orienting ideas based in good science.  This is all to the good.

Neurologically, circulating sensations, which is the goal of Kum Nye, would seem ideally suited to the loosening up of what amount to mental spasms, and to recontacting instinctual knowledge that was suppressed through punishment or neglect.

My own sessions this week have been quite interesting.  I can sometimes feel a sense that “I” have merged with space, and am present to a circulation of the Ten Thousand Things within me, in what in all candor feels like a colorful circus.  It has circus energy, whatever that means.

And to return to the topic, if you think about it, a connection with another human being is really a circulation, isn’t it?  Isn’t that a better metaphor?  A connection is static, but a circulation is when I send a feeling, and you respond, then I respond, and the whole circularity of it, the appropriateness of responses on both sides, is how we know we are connecting and bonding.  They may be a conversation in words, which is also a sort of circulation, but the words are determined by what happens beneath the words.

Likewise, intrapsychically, a healthy person will feel something, recognize they feel something, then respond appropriately.  Not all feelings, obviously, can be acted on, but a mature person recognizes and accepts this.  This, itself, is a reaction.

What I would submit is that absent healthy intrapsychic flow, healthy inter-psychic flow, that between people, is necessarily stunted.  The messages are not properly sent or received.  There is poor communication, and poor communication means poor flow of connection.

And practically, this can and often does cause psychic contraction.  You feel some combination of “people just don’t get me”, and “I am weird and different”.

No, what has happened is that you do lack skill, but that it is a skill like any other, that with open practice, you will get better at.

In my own case, I am an outstanding faker.  But I am not going to do that any more, as much as I can help it (and this is no doubt a tide which comes in and out).  It is a stupid game, and if I aim for one thing in my life, it is to not be stupid.

Everyone has the right to speak their mind, but nobody has the right to demand people listen.

When Trump says the media is the enemy of our country, he is, OBVIOUSLY, not saying that we should not have a free press, or that news should not be reported.

What he is saying is that most media outlets have set as an agenda the eradication of our Constitutional protections from tyranny, the cessation of independent thought, and the disruption and eventual eradication of alternative viewpoints.  They work hand in glove with the radicals–which is the core–of the Democrat Party, Quisling Republicans, and very, very wealthy people who hope to use the new order for their own benefit.

CNN will not be banned.  It will simply become progressively less relevant, at least if the American people are not as stupid as CNN thinks they are.

How long would you be willing to work hard for nothing?  How long would you be willing to work AT ALL for nothing?  How about for CLOSE to nothing?

Legally, corporations are people.  I have talked about why this is one of the smartest legal innovations in human history, because it fosters innovation and risk which otherwise would not happen.

But think about it: if the government takes their money in the form of taxes, and regulatory burdens that amount to taxes, how long will they pursue what they do with enthusiasm?

How much sense does it make to say “the institutions that employ most Americans and provide them with income are the root cause of the problems in this country, and the solution is to put the people who take money from those job creating institutions in charge of everything, and make them larger and more difficult to deal with.”?

The iPhone was invented–or at least mass produced–for profit.  So was the telephone.  So was the power grid.  So was the automobile.

Socialism and its allegedly “scientific”, more perfect offspring Communism, is based upon the idea that if we eliminate all psychologically normal motivations and replace them with coercion, everyone will be happier.

It really is that dumb.  And that lunacy, and stupidity, and evil, is on display in the wreckage of the 20th century, and the hellholes which still employ this logic, like Cuba and North Korea.

For their parts, China and India finally granted that nobody wants to work for nothing.  That is what slaves do, and they only work because if they don’t they get whipped and starved.

Whipping and starving: these are the two cornerstones of modern “Liberalism”, as it is pleased to disingenuously call itself.

If you doubt it, attack Cuba in front of somebody claiming they “increased literacy” (so their propaganda would be more effective), and see how long the pretense of moderation and concern for the common good holds up.

Imagine we and everything we know exists as a holographic projection within an infinite space.  Is that space not what is most important?

We distract ourselves with minutiae.  But only if we see God within that minutiae, as Ramanujan did in numbers, can that be called worship, which is to say life.

I’m feeling unusually mystical for some reason.  The past week has been both exhausting and illuminating.  I am not drinking, still.  What I am watching for is an inability to manage the emotions which wash over me.  So far, I am staying present, and that is good.

I am, in fact, processing MORE emotions.  That is better yet.

Do you really want to grow old doing bad science in support of a political agenda you cannot control?

You are useful tools, nothing more.  What those who control you really want, you cannot know.

It is obvious, though, that anyone willing to tell one lie now, could be telling multiple lies now; and anyone willing to lie now, will also be willing to lie in the future.