Moderates United

It seems to me you have to first become fully conscious of who you are in order to begin to choose a path of growth.  Until you know yourself, that is your primary work

If you equate your mind with your self, it is easy to believe that it is easy to change.

But you are a pattern of energy flow, some of which is overtly emotional, some of which is something else which needs its own name.  I will call it “that”, as that is the least reductive.

People, and the world, are vastly more complex and interesting than is assumed by those who are compelled to conquer both.  You can get outer silence, clearly, and external order through violence, and call it peace.

But true calm and peace flow outward from the inside.  Nothing in the outer world can equal the peace and joy of what lies within all of us.

If you think about it, no matter where you go, or what you do, you will always be the center of your own life, even if that life is focused on others.  You are the middle.  Everything you will ever know and see and experience and learn and enjoy and fear will come to you here, where you are.  There is nowhere else, for you.

So often we seek something out there.  If it is to exist for us, it can never be anywhere but here, and now.  If it was, and is not now, then it is not.  If it is there, it is not here.

Perhaps this is gibberish.  Perhaps not.

I watched a trailer for a new horror movie called “The Boy” a few weeks ago when I saw the last Hunger Games with my kids.  The gist of it is that this doll is treated as human by his parents, even though the boy he is based on died some years earlier.  This doll has rules, and if you don’t follow them, the sorts of things happen that people go to horror movies to watch.

I can’t speak to other people’s experience, but it had a deep affective resonance with me.

In recent days, every night has brought new revelations, and every morning a coalescence–slow, but diligent; a learning, a stock taking, a measuring, and a movement of the marker, denoting progress.

Last night I first contacted the spirit of my shaking.  It is bird like, flighty.  Although I used to find it intimidating in itself, I see now that it is merely a bird leaving its branch when it detects a predator.

The predator is a baby doll.  This doll has rules which must be followed, or else bad things happen.  It cannot be satiated, only given away.  As long as it is your burden, it is a constant burden.  The feelings of this dream were the sort that sends literal chills up your spine, and makes you want to run in terror, but you can’t because you know it will pursue you. You must stay, captive, and pretend.

And I got to thinking about a frustrated baby.  It is completely helpless.  It is for all intents and purposes paralyzed in a way not that different than a toy baby.  Neither can choose to go from here to there to get needs met.

And when it cries too long, or hurts too much the result is RAGE: insatiate, omnidirectional, absolutely primal.

And what does it crave, if not solace?  Order.  At least order.  At least consistency.  Small children love routines.  They love knowing what is next.  And they hate randomness, especially random and to them incomprehensible emotions.

How many of us have a baby within us that screamed itself to sleep more than once?  The needs of this baby do not disappear, and what I think I saw is that they reappear in compulsive conformity.  This is a root, perhaps THE root of Fascism.  How often in history must small children have gone without, gone uncomforted?

And I was thinking too that modern thinkers want to find some sort of explanation for Fascism, while ignoring that violent imposition of conformity has been the rule for most human societies for most of human history.  War has been the rule.  Tribalism and taking other peoples stuff have been the rule.  The only thing surprising about Communo-fascism is the extent of the intellectual subterfuge needed to enable minds trained in reason and concepts of universal human rights to tolerate them.  Otherwise, they are merely new iterations of very old things.

And it occurred to me that science has often been the handmaiden of cultural atavism and tribalism.  It is merely a tool for rationalizing.  It allows people to appear to belong to this world, while dancing naked around fires in the wilderness.

And all this layered on a feeling I had the other day that each and every day is like a new jazz solo.  It may sound much the same day to day, but it is never exactly the same, and our true mission in life is come up with new melodies, new harmonies, new rhythms.

Of course Hitler had to find jazz degenerate.  It could not be heard by a trapped child who only wanted the same thing, day after day after day, and which was quite willing to commit psychological and even physical violence to whomever and whatever prevented this perfect repetition that was not there when it was most needed.

How to free yourself?  See.  Feel.  Understand.  When it feels the motion, it is already too late for everything built in the sand next to an ocean.  The work is the work of the universe.

It happens fairly regularly, I just noticed, that I sit calmly in my practice as primal terrors come up.  I am not connected to them, even though of course I am. I have learned they have a texture that is neither good nor bad.  It is THAT, and that can at times be very interesting.

Is a road connected to a car?  They are related, obviously, but the one will never be mistaken for the other.

What makes roads useful?  I will plagiarize Lao Tzu and say space.  If they are filled, they are useless or slow.

It seems to me an essential outward element of being a true Sufi is one must contradict oneself.  There is no other way.

Yes, immodest as it may sound, I do consider myself one, with the proviso, of course, that one cannot be one.

I was dreaming last night–I would say I had an odd dream, but aren’t they all?–and saw a sort of reverse Apocalypse.  Aliens had conquered Earth, and the bodies of the dead were everywhere, all turned blue.  A vortex had opened in the sky, and an alternate universe was engulfing this one.  Then–and it was made clear to me in the dream I had nothing whatever to do with this–it stopped.  The vortex closed and the normal sky returned.  And the dead started coming back to life.  People who had died in hospital beds, and even already been placed in coffins came back to life.  The feeling was very joyous, after a feeling of deep despair and loss.

And I got to thinking about it.  I have been seeing scenes of the dead, or near dead lately, in my dreams.  On one had, one could see that as a fixation with death. But that is not the case with me.  What I think it is is seeing FOR THE FIRST TIME the existing death in my own life.

As they say, when you are dead you do not know you are dead.  I do not remember most of my sleeping hours.  I do not remember what I could have seen while driving somewhere day dreaming.  I do not know what at this moment I could perceive, but am dead to.

To see a new life, you first have to see the old death.  To see death, you need life.  Death cannot see death.

And to see death from life is a resurrection of sorts, is it not? Is not the task of the spiritual worker to resurrect the dead, who fill the streets and homes of this Earth, after first resurrecting themselves, or, more probably, connecting with a Spirit capable of this task, and accepting it gratefully?

Healing is not something you can will.  I cannot will a wound to heal faster than it is going to, and I cannot force my spirit to bring to peace old scars and fears, deep shames, deep penetrations of evil, and the devastations they bring with them.  What I can do is feed a process which does this.  This is the Nye of Kum Nye, and what I have been carefully cultivating in most of my waking hours for the past several years.

There are four things, as I see it, you can do with deep psychic wounds.  You can seek our processes and people who comfort you when you need comforting, and challenge you when it is necessary for growth.  You can take the spiritual path, in other words.

You can rationalize the dysfunctional behavior that comes from these wounds.  This is not quite the same as lying, but also not quite telling the truth.

You can repress these wounds.  This can only be done at a very primitive psychological level, and I think typically only at a very young age.  The effect of this is that you get periodic eruptions, or consistent irrational behavior that you cannot explain to yourself or others.

You can embrace the evil.  You can say to yourself that it is good for you, and seek out more.  I think this is a combination of 2 and 3.  I think such people cannot truly access their pain existentially, but they know on some level  it is there, and rationalize evil as a means of dealing with it. I think most genuinely evil people still need to find reasons–specious as they may be–to justify their hatred and violence.  Hitler has reasons for everything he did.  So did Lenin, and so does Castro.  All monsters, but they could easily tell you with seemingly perfect sincerity why so much torture and murder was the only possible solution to unavoidable problems.

And here is what I think is a symptom of deep healing: being able to look at your wounds with interest.  That is the stage I am at.  I think the stage after that is compassion, but I am not there yet.

She was likely speaking with an adviser about strategy, was told what the time limit was, and simply chose to ignore it.  She thinks we are all peons, and that the world should conform to her convenience and desire.

As I climb out of my slumber I get more in more in touch with my absolutely irrepressible curiosity.  It is a defining trait for me.  Even as a small child I was always opening all the doctors cabinets and peaking under the bed, and doing as much investigating as my mother would let me.

And I have been doing some of the quizzes on Sporcle.com.  Some of them are really useful, like trying to find all the countries of Africa or Asia without any lines at all.  You have to start with easy ones like China or Japan, and work your way in, typically with lots of errors.  I still have major problems with Inner Asia.

And it hit me that it might be fun to have a Country of the Week, where I read a couple articles about its history, and make one of its dishes.  Every recipe you can imagine is on the internet.

This week is Bulgaria, and the dish is Ljutenitsa, which is a red pepper relish.  Good fun in my world.

Then I was like: why not listen to a play by Shakespeare every week too?  It’s about 3 hours, give or take, of audio.  Most people watch that much TV every night.  As I think I mentioned, I did “A Winter’s Tale” this week.  That was an odd play.  I underline the lines I recognize.  A merry heart goes all day was from there (I may have slightly misquoted it).

Then I thought: why not listen to some classic piece of music, too, like the major jazz records of the 20th century.  Devote 45 minutes to it.  45 minutes of listening to music never killed anyone, I don’t think.  So I listened to Dave Brubek’s “Time Out” twice.  Now I’m on John Coltrane’s “Blue Train”.  All this stuff is available free, with ads, and ad-free with only a minor cost from Apple or Spotify.

This is a nice hobby, one I expect to stick with for some time.  We live in an Information Age, I am told.  It seems to mostly get used to track our every move, but why not apply it to personal growth?  

It seems to me that it may be useful to think of grief as a planted seed, one inured by nature from all the hazards of surviving in hard soil, without water, wind and sun for long periods of time, which may with time blossom.

And what is that blossom?  A new self, one without what was lost, which may retain some hurt for this lifetime, but which has also been transformed by the process.  Such flowers grow in the winter, and are thus inherently beautiful, because they are always miraculous.

One of the bartenders at my bar is going through some intense grieving.  I have watched myself trying to counsel her, as I have tried to counsel others.

I have fucked this up often.

Here is what I have come to believe: people who are not grieving tend to think of grief as a problem to be solved, that there are words which help, actions which reliably help, things which can be done and thought and felt.  This is, speaking generally, not the case.  Quite the opposite.

Grief is not a problem to be solved.  It is a happening, like clouds crossing the sky.  You can observe, you can interact, you can witness, but by and large we are all helpless.

And there is dignity in grief, if we allow it.

So–and I intend to create a rulebook for dealing with grief in others, which I intend to run by people I know who have experienced recent and severe grief–by and large if your mouth is moving, you are probably screwing up.

If you are hugging them, that is likely good.

If they are talking and you are doing nothing but listening, that is likely good.

If you are helping the worst stricken with cooked food–delivered with few words–or chores done while they lie around and grieve, that is likely good.

Every grief, I feel, is a bit different.  They are not all the same, and none of them are problems.  All of them are existential opportunities both for failure and for growth, and which it is is ultimately up to those suffering.

This is a rough beginning.  At some point, I will do better.  It is a worthy topic.