Moderates United

It is ironic that the sundry anti-Trump propagandas, which were intended to sway conservatives and moderates, seem to only have had effect on the precalculated political integers, whose loyalty was already absolute. But this effect exacerbated prodigiously the perceptual gap between the hard Left and most of America. There exist two radically different world views, which are equally radically incompatible.

What point is there in engaging in dialogue with someone who is a white supremacist, or, on the other hand, with anyone stupid enough to believe such lies?

Cultural divide? 100% the fault of the Left and its organs.

The first question any futurist should ask is: is individual moral progress possible? Implicitly, most of those I have read answer in the negative. They believe in technological progress and social progress–which is understood as the perfection of the social machine, as understood with an engineering spirit and mindset–but not a society of saints.

Star Trek implicitly asked us to choose between reason and emotion. Why? There is no conflict. The logics of the heart are as susceptible to progress as the best maths.

It occurred to me this morning that the way trauma is stored in the body, you could literally get knocked on the head, forget your own name, and still have these fucking memories.  This is one of the interesting things about the Wolverine character: he heals instantly from physical wounds, but he carries emotional baggage from things he can’t remember.

And what has been appearing for moments in past days is the feeling of being tortured.  It is an overwhelming feeling.  God has been merciful in creating the possibility of dissociation.  Dissociation is like becoming a seed with a hard shell, that can be blown from here to there, survive different climates, bouncing around, and stay intact for a very long time, with latent life within it, waiting for the moment to sprout.

And torture gets embedded on your nervous system not because of the physical pain, necessarily, but rather the realization that some other human being is CAPABLE of doing that to you.

In my own case, it is simply, I think, a feeling as a small child that I was both helpless and going to die.  Feel that ONCE, and the switch flips.  You might stop crying, you might seem calm, but it is because you went through a phase transition.  Your sense of self was radically altered in a moment, your capacities diminished.  You can deal after that.  It is like a permanent emotional anesthetic, but one which dulls the positive feelings as well, the sense of human contact and community, the sense of agency, of control, of a connection to the future of any sort.

I would stipulate as a general rule that anything you can feel, you can process.  In my own case, it will be letting that feeling through in small, small doses.  I already feel better.  I already seem to be working better. I can see what has always been there in the shadows, pushing me first this way, then that way, always in circles, always running and hiding, or fighting and raging.

And I look at who I used to be with some compassion.  I look at foolish things I’ve done, and they make more sense to me now. I see that I just didn’t know what to do, and there was no way I could.  I was never taught either what to do, or how to figure it out.  I have figured all this out on my own, with great difficulty, and over a long period of time.

And I do feel at times what would now be called an epigenetic component to all this, which I think the Buddhists, a bit more accurately, would call the karmic component.  I feel my mothers distress and unresolved emotions.  They were passed down to me, in her genes, but also in her spirit, and in her behavior towards me.  The children do inherit the sins of the parents, rather, the terrors and sufferings they felt.

But through all this I feel coeur-age.  Heart.  If I was going to break, it would have happened long ago. I have both the habit of surviving, and the ability.

There is a point where even in a healthy person–perhaps especially in a healthy person–pain ceases to smart, and it becomes simply one more texture of experience, of intrinsic interest, a proper subject for curiosity.  This is the moment when real growth can begin.

You reach a point with Kum Nye where you can feel various sensations, but they have no names and no boxes.  They are literally indescribable and often transitory.

And it occurs to me if my guess that both trauma and habit interact in unhelpful ways to tie the same–usually unseen, unfelt, and unacknowledged–sensations to the same flashes of an image that goes much too fast to be processed, to feelings which are often felt, to thoughts which occupy anxious minds, who then try to only think, to only be logical, to make them go away, then recognizing the various strands and shades of sensation ought to work to disentangle automatic patterns.

You say you feel sad.  Are there not many variants of sadness, and is not remaining stuck in the same sadness not ignoring them?  Most emotions come, if you watch carefully, with latent ancestors, friends, and nascent children.  They travel in families, in packs, and although it can simplify the thinking process pretending them come alone and undiluted, this is not the case, in my experience.

To remain stuck you have to blind yourself to all the motion all around you.

It does seem to me that the whole idea of Impermanence in Buddhism is not just an objective description of the world, but a call to use change as an impetus to positive feelings.  If you never resist change, you can adapt. If you adapt, you can stay positive, happy, and connected to most things and most people, despite bobbing up and down in the continual tide that is this world.  You are not disconnecting from everything and everyone.  No, you are disconnecting from the IDEA–the thought–that you are safe as one person, one feeling, one time, and one place.  That is a terribly dangerous idea, one guaranteed to cause misery not just in the long run, but every single day.

You don’t have to earn money you don’t spend.

It seems to me self hatred is really just a systemic sense of tension that cannot be easily resolved.

We are wired so that when we violate a social rule of some sort, we “punish” ourselves with a tension we call guilt or shame.  This flows naturally from the connection between our social brain, which allows meaningful connection to others, and very old instincts which protected us long ago.  Likewise, anyone who does not feel guilt can be assumed thereby to be separated from humanity in important and primitive ways.

Guilt might be the explanation and shame the reality.  Even animals feel shame.  We have all seen dogs express it.

Trauma in some respects is a primal expulsion.  It is being forced to detach from your social brain, and identify with feelings with exist in a much more primitive place.  There is a rough homology between this expulsion and the “guilt” or shame sense.  This manifests in many as self loathing.

This self loathing underlies, in my view, virtually all that is wrong with the human species.  I think tension leads to self loathing, which leads to rigidity, which leads to violence of all sorts.

Ponder the link between steps two and three.  If you hate yourself, you want to redeem yourself.  Since you cannot resolve the underlying and fundamentally irrational–as seen from its disconnection with any current observable reality–sense of shame, you invent something very difficult to accomplish, to help alleviate this feeling which would otherwise drive you mad.  I think this is the root of many manias, and all dogmatisms.

Being dogmatic is primarily an EMOTIONAL stance.  Being dogmatic is different from a strong sense of being right.  People who are dogmatic do not want to hear or consider alternative points of view.  People who feel like they are right, but willing to consider alternatives, are open to all feedback.

Logically, if unresolved tensions lead to dogmatism, then more agile, accurate, and useful thinking ought logically to proceed from relaxation.

It is literally my belief that we could achieve world peace in short order if all leaders of all nations were capable of regular deep relaxation, and of the pleasure that flows from it.

As things stand, I think the game, the ludetic system, favors strongly obsessive and rigid people, which is to say people incapable of seeing much of the world, and very capable of misunderstanding most of the rest.

I mentioned Sensation, Image, Feeling, Thought the other day, as a heuristic therapists use to help people become more familiar with their internal world, and more capable of useful introspection.

It seems to me this is also the order in which things happen.  Our body consists in large numbers of nerve endings, and a vast perceptual array which is mostly unconscious.  We are always hearing the background, even when focused on something else.  We are aware of smells, sights, tastes in our mouth, and all our skin, our gut, our heart, our hands and feet, all the muscles in our body.

When we tense up in response to an external stimulus or internal thought it amounts to the same thing.  Thoughts lead to feelings lead to a static image lead to sensations.  Traumatized people have fixed tension within their body, that lead to fixed images (of which they are mostly unaware), muted emotionality, and difficulty thinking clearly.

When we get distracted, it is because a feeling became too strong, intruded, and forced another focus.  This is how you get scatter brained.  And when meditation or yoga or some other discipline seeks to treat this, it optimally works backwards.  Yes, you want to reduce attachments to thoughts, but also to feelings, also to images, and work back to pure sensation, which is unlabeled.  I feel this is approximately correct, although I also feel something is incomplete here.

The other day I was laying in bed and I felt emotional wounds “load” in my consciousness, like computer programs in a computer which is booting up.  I felt one, then another.  Both hurt.  I felt the pain.  But it occurred to me I am slowing down, which is how you see these sorts of things.  You have to watch how you become you in slow motion to see the constituent parts.  We all become ourselves every morning when we wake up.  In sleep, our self is more mutable and latent.  This is why dreams can be so useful.

And I felt, just prior to writing this, so relaxed I didn’t want to write. I  just discovered an important and very helpful addition to my Somatic Elicitation program.

When I woke up this morning, my stomach was unusually awake, specifically the muscles of my abdomen.  They felt pregnant with feeling and considerable tension.  So I massaged them a while–this is a Kum Nye exercise iterated in several different ways in different exercises, since this is a major place where unresolved tensions reside–then it occurred to me that logically the most tension ought to reside in all the contracting muscles which lead to a fetal position, starting with the stomach muscles.

So I rolled my stomach 3 minutes on a Coregeous ball, then sat 3 minutes, then again, then sat, then a third time.  Then hip flexors.  I rolled one side three minutes, Couch Stretch 3 minutes, then 3 minutes sitting.  I learned long ago with Feldenkrais that it is sometimes good to do one side, feel what happened, then do the other.  You teach yourself to feel your tension that way.

Then I rolled and used a lacrosse ball on one butt cheek and side of my hip, then Pidgeon, then sit, then the other side.  Then I did two side stretches to stretch my lats–key in contracting–and sat three minutes.  Then I decided to just sit nine minutes, feeling.  About half way through it occurred to me that I used to do Feldenkrais movements very slowly in my head.  It was in fact a method I used to relax myself.

So I thought, why not imagine a very relaxed movement to each side, mimicking the stretch I had just done, but very slow, very loose, very pleasant, warm and open.

I’ll be damned if I did not get this deep, deep relaxation come over me.  So here is what I am going to try tomorrow: same routine, but in the 3 minutes rest, do the same movement in imagination, but so, so relaxed, easy, pleasant, warm and open. THEN sit 10 minutes and feel what is happening.

This system obviously can evolve depending on how you grow in flexibility or your perceived need to address areas of tightness, and self evidently can be tweaked to individual preference.

If I had been consistent–and I am rarely consistent–I would also have rolled my pectorals. But that was enough for today.  The butt would not be part of the fetal position, but being something of a hard ass–these words come from somewhere, like pain in the neck and stiff upper lip–it felt right for me today.

It is a Leftist myth, one universally cherished, that government as a CULTURAL form can somehow be superior to the people who constitute it.  Take all the people who work for the Federal Government, and put them to work in the private sector, and they are in the Leftist world diminished somehow, even granted the same morality, same competence, same jobs.

The Social Security Administration, in this peculiar and entirely unexamined way of thinking, is inherently more virtuous than those same people administering private pensions and personal retirement savings, EVEN IF in the latter case vastly more money would be available to the public, under their direct control, and not being made available only through an intergenerational Ponzi scheme, which is bound to crash sooner or later.

http://www.infowars.com/mainstream-fake-news-the-devious-limited-hangout/


http://www.progressive.org/0901/anth0498.html

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-27/erdogan-says-he-has-confirmed-evidence-us-supports-islamic-state

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-23/secret-pentagon-report-reveals-us-created-isis-tool-overthrow-syrias-president-assad

Net: we seem to have sold Saddam Hussein essentially ALL the WMD components which suddenly became a problem in 1991 when apparently, or perhaps intentionally, incompetent diplomacy led to his invasion of land he had long considered part of Iraq, and a strong response, which included the bombing of military facilities we KNEW had chemical and biological agents in them, and the exposure to sarin gas of up to 100,000 US troops, an exposure that I think up to this day has not been admitted.

We created ISIS as a tool to help the Qataris build their natural gas pipeline across a Syria now ruled by Islamic radicals.

I really hope the early indications that Trump scares the shit out of a lot of the power elite indicates that he is going to get our shit straight.

Add to all this government complicity at least in a cover up regarding 9/11, and we have Presidents and senior leaders who belong in jail or shot.  All the killing, the torture, the ruined lives and nations: they are worth something.  And much or all of it was unnecessary policy, pushed by psychopaths to further primitive emotional purposes.

I am listening to this book right now, and finding it quite amusing. The relationship between Patrolman Mancuso and his Sergeant is thus far my favorite part.

It did occur to me that Ignatius Reilly might well serve as a template for the modern snowflake: utterly cocksure about everything–and authoritarian in impulse because of it–hostile to alternative opinions, profoundly stupid and unobservant in every possible practical way, lazy, dependent but absolutely certain that he is owed a great deal for his very being and nobility.

Maybe we could call it “Reillyism”.  Ignatism?

We could also use this standard to anoint Trump a genius: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”