Moderates United

My current Kum Nye lesson has to do with the neutrality of feeling.  In some ways sadness is equal to anger is equal to regret is equal to fear.

And it is very interesting that on close analysis, what I can feel is a neutral energy like electricity providing power to what amount to different engines.  There is an “engine” of anger, another of sadness, another of regret, another of fear.  These apparatuses expand as we feed them images and cognitive contexts–both historical, and social. They shrink as we deny them food.

But underlying it all is the same power.

What preceded psychology, in much of what I will summarize as “Western Civilization”?  Sin, which is to say a choice between conformity with a system quite capable of violence, and expulsion, castigation, and perhaps even death.

Sin, in turn, might perhaps most usefully be defined as any species of outer non-conformity.  If one reads the history of the Church, it is filled to overflowing with greed, anger, violence, jealous rage, power-mongering, hypocrisy, hedonism, and so on.  This applies both to actual pontiffs, and to the kings and all their vassals and allies who professed the Christian faith.

One wonders if the “saints” often were merely people incapable of tolerating the “double-bind” of living within a system filled with such lies.  I wonder if many of them were dealing with severe traumas and had no way of avoiding insanity other than voluntarily leaving society and living in a cave, which in turn led to people assuming they were better because different.

I spoke poorly of what might be termed “psychodynamic” literature.  Perhaps it has been needed.  It is impossible, I feel, to properly individuate in a world with strong digital distinctions, coupled with violence.  The opposite of either/or is nuance, a spectrum of emotional and behavioral colors, which alternately flare and recede in most of us in the course of a day.

It does seem to me that some Eastern systems developed sound systems for mental health, but without knowing fully why they worked.  I think it is particularly important that we are finally beginning to grasp the importance of developmental traumas and PTSD, the importance of empathy, both felt and as a principle, and the very rich, interesting tapestry of human psychodynamic activity.

The transhumanists want infinite “knowledge”, but I wonder how much attention they pay to the nuances of feelings.  How important is consciousness, per se, to them?  And how important, really, can it be to understand the next seven stages of math describing the universe, when accessing it experientially can only be done through a soul, which we have all been born with, which naturally return home, and which do not lack thoughts, but the inner knowing best reached through inner feeling, healing, hope and the following generation of the peace and joy we all truly want, need, and seek?

Transhumanism is born both of the despair of mortality–itself founded on a demonstrable empirical error–but more importantly–since this error could be discovered–upon an unwillingness to feel.

I have been through many hells.  They have all been worth it.

It occurs to me too that the people who are actually “deep” are those who are able to love deeply, offer sincere loyalty, adhere to their own moral codes, and live lives of constancy, even when it is difficult.

What is the easiest game in the world–and I’ve played it–is mistaking an inability or unwillingness to assume adult responsibility for depth.   Simply because you read books we are told are deep does not mean you are.

In the end, what we call superficial necessarily includes a conception of what is deep, which is to say what “life” “really” “is”.

Plays like “Streetcar named Desire” are called deep because they deal with complex human conflicts.

Is conflict the necessary nature of human existence, or is it the result of emotional superficiality and incompetence?  I would argue the latter.  Does the “deep” not then consist in what shows us how to TRANSCEND the easy emotions of anger, resentment, lust, greed, jealousy, hate and the like?

I get the sense sometimes that writers in the latter part of the 19th, through roughly the mid 20th Century thought they discovered how nasty people can be.  How is this profound?  I doubt anyone who lived then had not seen it.  They didn’t talk about it, and they sure as hell wanted escape from it in their entertainment, because they lived it, but they were not the naive fools culturally disconnected fools seem to have thought they were.

That is my view, at any rate.

What is deep, in my own world, is expanding emotions and my sense of self to Space itself, to where I can make direct contact experientially with the energies which surround us in infinite varieties and ways, and which all come from one infinite source.  Violence and conflict are of no more intrinsic importance than human imbecility and physical deformity.  They are unfortunate, and it is appropriate both to care for and to not to pity them, but it is the height of idiocy to see them as profound in and of themselves.

It was Helen Keller’s triumphant expansion of self and joy which marks her as special, not the ways in which her physical senses were broken.  This should be obvious, but it seemingly is not.

As I think about it, none of the characters really ever figured out how to mourn the suicide of their friend.  Tom Berenger was trying, and what was ironic about him is he was on paper the most superficial of the group.

I feel that there are countless ways to avoid mourning the pains of life, and most of what we call culture, today, consists in them.  The magazines, the TV shows, everything on your phone, social media: they exist, and profit from the fact that you don’t want to “go there”.

And this group, which united in their radicalism at the University of Michigan–which I will recall to your awareness, if it was ever there, was the home of Tom Hayden, originator of Students for a Communist Society, the SCS–remains all these years later, after so much life experience, fundamentally superficial, although still searching for deeper feeling.

Yes, they say they love one another, and on some level this is true.  They are open with each other, to the extent they are able to be.  They can be themselves with each other.  But all of them at some point found refuge in intellectualism, and found companionship with those who sought the same comforts in the same way at the same time.

It is not different in principle than friendships founded on a mutual admiration for the Lord of the Rings.  It was founded on escapism.  It is easy to conceal escapism when claiming to care about the tragedies of the world, but if your activism makes them more and not less likely, avoiding them is not the true source of your caring and action.  Caring about the real world is not what truly motivates you.

I am of course a bit cynical.  I have been “betrayed”–I use the word loosely to try not to sound too much like a drama queen–many times.  It seems logically likely that I have often failed to perceive the very real words of genuine companionship and caring that have been offered me over the years, and I am perhaps overanalyzing this movie, which after all was not a great movie.  It had a big effect on me when I first saw it, though, some time in my teens, which is why I chose to watch it again now.

It is deeply comforting to make blanket statements about “the world”, but of course no such thing exists.  There are countless ways to be foolish.  I continue to discover new ways–both in myself and others–daily.

This treatment of techne is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techne

Techne is differentiated from episteme.  Roughly, they differentiate how to do things from “what is true”.  The first is for plebians, the second for the elite.  Plato was concerned with episteme.  His sandal maker with techne.  This is a rough distinction, the further differentiation of which does not interest me.

For my purposes, I would differentiate a telearchy, as I call it, which is an emergent order based upon shared common principles understood as ends, and ontology, which is a fabricated pseudo-reality created and extinguished with words.

In  my view, something is real, but it is in constant motion, making a full knowing impossible, and not worth the pursuit.  What we can know is what we can see, and what we can see are practical results, which would include the observation that having an internal moral compass in general makes people happier, and that living in a group of people with shared moral values also works to make the aggregate happier.

I cite principles, because as Orwell showed and subsequent reality has amply validated, it is quite possible to be a part of a group with mutable values.  What he suggested and what I will echo is that in such a situation, individuation is impossible, and so too is the happiness enabled by moral freedom and following consistent choice.

Practically, and this is the point of this post, episteme continues to be sought,but in the form of machines.  Machines are real.  Human inner consciousness is not.  It is not true to say that no techne with regard to improving the contents of human consciousness is being pursued–Positive Psychology as one obvious example seeks this–but it seems the overall thrust of our global social order has in general given up on the elevation of the human race through moral growth.  Our growth is to be through machines, and in particular through the consideration of society as one large machine, to be manipulated by “experts” using techne, but really feeling episteme, or perhaps, rather, the acute need for and lack of any sense of ontological grounding.

They feel lost, so they must fix the rest of us like butterflies on pins.  That is George Soros’s project, and as he recently revealed, even as good a mind as that of Bill Gates at least claims publicly to believe in this farce of global warming, and that we must be all pinned for our own good.

Pondering this a bit more, what I realize is that the basis of the friendships is a shared memory of shared passion.  They were brought together by Soviet propaganda which enabled them to form a tight emotional bond in what felt like the flames of conflict and principled effort.  Their main focus, politic, provided them with a sense of purpose, of meaning, and victory–unilateral US withdrawal from South Vietnam, enabling a North Vietnamese victory, and following massacres and enslavement of the South.–deprived them of that.

Their shared sense of self was based largely on the comaraderie which shared difficulty, shared apparent danger, shared uncertainty, shared desire, enables.  Such larger selves are always temporary constructs, when the cause itself is temporary. This is why they drifted apart.  The war ended.  They got straight.  The fog of war disappeared.  As William Hurt points out: they never really knew him at all.  They still don’t.  They don’t know each other, really.

What they love is a memory, of a time when everything felt fresh, when they felt alive and well, and open to whatever life brought.  We all need times like this.

But the residue of this era is precisely why sanity is impossible in our media.  Most of the people running our media either lived in that time, or wish they did.  They reference, in the process of ignoring the gaping holes in Obama’s story while intentionally misrepresenting the very talented history of Ben Carson, who actually DID grow up a poor black, this memory of purpose, of meaning, of living for something bigger than a paycheck.

It is very romantic, and then as now, quite morally wrong.  I cannot help but feel that if they had something else to cling to, they might be capable of telling the truth.  I don’t think most of them are bought. I don’t think they need to be bought.  They come up with the bias naturally.

And I don’t think Tom Berenger–who along with the husband whose wife cheated on him I found the most likeable characters in the movie–is going to see his lover ever again. which I suspect he knows, and knew.  I actually excuse this sin.  I do not think perfect monogamy is healthy for everyone, all the time.  I personally would make prostitutes legal everywhere, but in my dream world they would be in Temples consecrating them as holy, as in the ancient world.

One of the reasons so many white Americans got syphilus–which the Americas shared as their part of the Columbian exchange–is that Indians would often share their wives.

Sex is neither moral nor immoral.  It all depends on the context and the emotional maturity of those involved.

I think it’s 50/50 William Hurt imitates Alex in killing himself, likely even the same way, in the same house, with the same woman, probably AFTER he makes a fortune with Kevin Kline.  Absent his cause, and the inability to find a new one, he has nothing to live for.

I think the woman Kevin Kline slept with, if she gets pregnant, does in fact prove a loving, if neurotic, mother, but that her child always feels a sense of lack he or she would not have felt with a caring father in the house.

Jeff Goldblum, of course, continues to be an obnoxious womanizer, writing bad fiction for a time, then doing bad journalism again for the money, incapable of deep connection, unable to love any woman foolish enough to fall for him.

We do all need deep friendship, but one based on a stable foundation of mental wellness, which includes the ability to meet our own needs endogenously, as it were, to be emotionally open, and to be committed to firm and unchanging values.

http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/jeffrey-lord/2015/11/07/carly-carson-donald-and-media

You can call it what you want, but it is quite real and prevents sanity.  I will have more to say in my next post.

One of my most peculiar traits is a profound political conservatism combined with an absolute openness not to the politics of the 1960’s, but to the idealistic sense that the world could be changed for the better.  The hippies put poor Vietnamese in cages, broke their families apart, killed many of them in hunger and disease and outright execution, and reversed the land redistribution that had already been done in the South.  Their open embrace of Communist propaganda, which they framed idealism, made the world a much, much worse place.  To this day they refuse to admit this.

But the idea that society can be made less gray, that authenticity matters, that love is important, that all of us need to feel free to be ourselves, all of that I agree with.

The attractive thing about this set of friends is that they can argue, joke, and vent, and still be forgiven, still be a part of the whole thing.

This is what I want to create.  This is the feeling I want more people to have.  This is a feeling I want to have.  Part of my solitude is my recalcitrance and lack of trust.  In old pictures of me I looked suspicious when I was 3 years old.  Part of it is my uniqueness, or relative uniqueness.  All the people who embrace the same social radicalism I do also embrace the politics.  I can’t do that.  Hippy chicks and me don’t get along.

But part of it is our society.  We are atomized.  We live by clocks and routines, and thus social unnaturalness and dishonesty come easily too.  This can and should be changed.  Again, I am going to do what little I can do.  When I have some success, I will post it.  It seems at this exact moment I need to keep a focus on resolving my inner troubles.

I was feeling very lonely tonight.  I work from my home, and I spend huge amounts of time alone.  Sometimes too much even for me.  And I realized that this is actually progress.  To feel lonely is to accept that you have a need to be with people, which is something I have had a hard time doing consciously.  As I read about developmental trauma, a common feature is an inability either to recognize or consciously support ones emotional needs.  It is much easier to suppress them, and pretend they either don’t exist, or treat them as unwanted nuisances.

Tonight I was thinking I am not OK with being alone all the time, and this in turn implies, paradoxically, the possibility of not being alone.  It is hard to be with people when you have suppressed the need for their company deep in your psyche.

It is amazing how often you can open up new and really interesting vistas by embracing “negative” emotions, letting them in, letting them expand, giving them free reign, and LISTENING to what they have to say.

They have been outside the gate for a long time.  They have been waiting because they are couriers, and they have messages they have to deliver, and they will not leave until their work is done.  This whole process is utterly logical.

is an allowing, and not a doing.

I keep getting moments of happiness and some part of me keeps stamping them out because I can’t justify them. With the right allowing happiness is possible in nearly any circumstance, and with sufficient effort, impossible even in the best circumstances.

Another phrase I will offer, that I developed to help myself, is that positive feelings never need to be justified, and most negative emotions require regular feeding.

I will offer in this regard as well the differentiation made in Kum Nye between emotion and feeling.  Feeling is what is going on in your body.  Emotion is the result of how you think about a situation, and the feelings that flow from that.  A principle task in Kum Nye is decoupling the images and thoughts from the actual feelings.  Our body has prodigious wisdom, and can maintain equinimity in nearly all circumstances, IF ALLOWED TO, which for most of us most of the time it is not allowed to.  We react to our thoughts about the crimes and malfeasances of others, sometimes for a very long time.