Moderates United

You know, I am a very deeply emotional  person.  Dark and grotesque images come to me easily, and light and happy images not so much.  There are reasons for this, which I have documented, perhaps, ad nauseum.

But I feel good now.  I got my say out, and am now contemplating all the current improvements in the psychology of happiness, and all the decency of most of the developed world.  There are a nearly infinite number of things that are working quite well.

Self evidently, I don’t know what’s going to happen.  I know what I fear might happen, and I know why these fears exist.  At the same time, there is something to be said for following my own advice and limiting my recourse to abstraction, and doing more now, with what I have.

I haven’t done my Kum Nye in a few days.  It’s time.

Have a pleasant day!!!  We’re not dead yet (my jeremiads notwithstanding)!!!!

One of the things I have realized in the past week is that even sub-personalities have both good and bad attributes.  I have touched my much younger self–the part which was traumatized–and given it love and succor.  On the one hand, it presents itself as innocent and joyful.  As I get to know it, though, I realize that it also has a very primitive anger in it, a very primitive rage.  Even small children are capable of acts of violence, given the right circumstances.

It is good to discover such things.  The only way we can learn to trust ourselves is to know ourselves.  And only in trusting ourselves can we be sufficiently spontaneous to let good things flow through us into the world, and in so doing be regularly transformed and evolved.

Quite often, to touch some deep inner reality is to denude that self of its power.  It can only operate effectively in darkness.  Light is always an antiseptic and healer, even if the healing causes some discomfort.  I am used to discomfort.  This is a good thing.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.  Mother Teresa

The rhetoric of “oppression” is a method of propaganda used to make absurd ideas seem reasonable.  Every propaganda must fit the circumstances and beliefs and prejudices of the target culture. In America, we pride ourselves on our passionate commitment to justice and equality.  All that is needed to render these very real virtues the means of destruction is to pervert the meanings of these words.

Everyone gets an equal shot becomes everyone deserves an equal outcome.

Equality before the law becomes group guilt necessitating group punishment (raising no one).

Live and let live becomes conform or face social death.

Love becomes a symbol for using the pain of one group to gain power over another.  Van Jones uses the word love, but there is no love in collectivism.

We live in the most prosperous, free, and tolerant society the world has ever seen.  And large groups of people want to see “oppression” everywhere.

Here is what I would submit is the TRUE oppression: social isolation, metaphysical pessimism, superficiality, useless meaning systems, moral confusion, and fear for the future.

As an ideal, Socialism evokes the images of tribal solidarity.  But it delivers, as I have said over and over, the reality of the very alienation–Entfremdung–which Marx preached was solely a vice of the Capitalist order.

Everywhere everyone is talking.  But most of them are not saying anything useful, and most of them are making everything more confused.  The educational elites attending our best schools are moral and emotional children, who recite reflexively the most idiotic and damaging ideas imaginable.

Yes, I pulled out the White Dog, but the Garuda has not disappeared.  All this is stuff I’ve been sitting on for a while, and am letting out as a personal catharsis.

When our economy collapses in the Greek fashion because of our prodigious debt–or when we are exposed to an EMP we have done nothing to mitigate the effects of–what will we tell our children?

That we all fought to support Caitlyn Jenner?

That we all opposed the public display of a flag that has been on continuous display for 150 years?

That we fought to oppose Global Warming because we were told to do so?

That we religiously fought micro-aggressions, and punished severely all transgressions?

That we exulted when gays were delivered the right to marry in all 50 States?

That we opposed all “racist” acts and language, while complacently doing NOTHING to ease the actual plight of urban blacks? That we were quite content to substitute symbol for concrete and effective action?

We live in a world of carefully calculated delusion, of sophistry, of deliberate distraction and falsehood.

Who among you is ready to say this?  Certainly, the conservative backlash against Obama’s ridiculousness is large and will endure, but what can we the people do when led by cowards?

We have had ample warning.  But not enough people read history.  We have been conditioned to believe that what is important is on the evening news, and that no large and important issues remain unexplored; that we are being told the whole and important truths.

Nothing could be farther from the case.

Wake up.  I choose to believe it is not too late.

I was in a bookstore yesterday, and noticed that the Investing section was right next to the personal growth section, which they thoughtfully titled something like the “Living your ideal life” section.

Whenever I get a bit of extra money, I always invest it in personal growth, which I would assert is synonymous with learning to be happier with less.  Who is richer: the man with the house on the hill constantly fearful of losing it, and constantly desirous of getting more; or the person who has mastered his or her inner domain, and is able to live quite contentedly in a shack somewhere?

This is of course a commonplace, a truism, the sort of thing that pedants preach and rarely practice.  But could we not consider that the great avarice of our time, the great and frantic, overwhelming thirst to have more and more and more is symptomatic of spiritual emptiness?

This, too, of course, is a truism, but one that can have practical consequences.

What is wiser: taking an expensive vacation to relax, or learning to relax even while working?  What is wiser: amassing objects to enjoy, or learning to enjoy all the things which have been provided for free?

Where, in short, should you be spending your money?

The short circuit in all this, the great problem among ideas which are otherwise logically irreproachable, is that most people who claim they can provide happiness don’t.  Most self help courses are bullshit.  Most cynics are justified in their cynicism.  Your emotional need becomes merely a means for them to buy more trinkets and more praise for their worldly success.  As much good as Joel Osteen has done–and I don’t dispute him this, and only single him out to provide a specific example among countless others–he has still chosen to live in an enormous mansion.

People think of voluntary relative poverty as a punishment.  You wear the sack cloth to punish your body and all its sensations.  You seek misery in this life to attain happiness in another world.  This is stupid, in my view.  It is vanity and folly.

There is nothing wrong with happiness.  There is nothing wrong with living a life of pleasurable sensations of all sorts.  There is nothing wrong with pursuing the appreciation of beauty, of love, of taking pleasure in both work and rest.

What is needed is the capacity for digestion.  Gorillas are able to amass their great strength on a vegetarian diet.  They make the most of what they have.

My vision for a future world is one where people are able to digest experience sufficiently well that they can live extremely well, extremely happily, on very little.  This is my answer to those who want to depopulate the world to “save it”. What is needed is not violence, but meaning; not anger and brute force, but reasoning and methods of the soul.  This is the path forward.

My own work, of course, is oriented around finding things that actually do work, and eventually putting together a system which yields uniformly positive results.  Even if I am wildly successful, I don’t plan to ever pay myself more than $100,000 a year in today’s dollars.  That amount will purchase anything I could conceivably need, and one day even that may be excessive.  Money will not buy me love, or the esteem of others, or self respect, or the capacity to fully enjoy the days remaining to me.

I will add that some of the things that are not in my view bullshit are the Hoffman Process, Holotropic and Integrative Breathwork, Kum Nye, the EmWave2, Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Emotional Transformation Therapy, and seeking out and regularly enjoying beautiful art, particularly music.

As I may have mentioned, I am presently listening to Gibbon’s 127 hour “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” [which, by the way, provides quite early on example after example of why our Founding Fathers feared a powerful standing army.  I’m up to about 250 AD, and the last 15-20 Emperors were both made and in most cases killed by the army, in nearly all cases more or less because they were not able to extort enough money] and contemplating that even most of the Roman relics are lost to antiquity.  The temples were sacked, the sculptures and other pieces of art destroyed, and much of the writing and daily culture subjected to time.

The Romans were of course brilliant engineers.  And I think even a cursory reading of military history makes it clear that engineers tend also to be great warriors.  They build better weapons, develop better tactics, and better undertake the logistics which alone make warfare–especially at a distance–practicable.  Some of their aquaducts are still in use 2,000 years later.

But if we posit that the purpose of life on this Earth is to grow spiritually, we must ask what all of this means.  They amassed great material wealth, but they squandered it on sexual licentiousness, debaucheries of all sorts, and vicarious cruelties, as in the hunting of animals for public spectacle, and gladiatorial contests.  Of “Panem et Circenses” they had plenty.  Of genuine spiritual insights, there appears little.

He deals with the Germans (and other “babblers”, as we might translate the Greek “barbarian”) in very general fashion–necessarily, of course, due to the paucity of records, and the utter lack of a written language on their part–but being me I got to dreaming and wondering.

What if in 200 AD an enlightened tribal chief–say in present day Estonia–discovered a miraculous set of practices and beliefs which uniformly raised the spiritual level of all those who practiced them to great heights?  What if this great tradition reigned ascendant for 250 years until everyone in that tribe was slaughtered by a competing set of babblers?

There would be no record.  No stupas or temples.  No written record.  Nothing.  All this despite that fact that this was, in fact, “high culture” by what I would consider the only rational standard.

What if Indian culture in North America 1,000 years ago was suffused with the most brilliant, subtle, and effective spiritual beliefs and practices, but only among the nomads?  We would have no way to know.

How much of history is unwritten?  Can we not assume most of it?

As a general rule, what is called “high culture” by historians is nearly exactly synonymous with a culture which was militarily aggressive, successful, and ruled in an hierarchical fashion by a ruling elite, whose very existence is to my way of thinking antithetical to genuine spirituality.  No good person wants to rule or direct the activities of anyone else.  It is antithetical to personal growth, to spiritual growth, to coming closer to what I might term the great Generative Spirit.

Goodness is personal gradualism.  That may be a definition I want to retain.

To the extent I have a distinctive talent, I think it is being able to view large subjects with new eyes.  I feel very little emotional connection to Zen, so I will not call it Beginner’s Mind, but perhaps an open mind will work.  It is so very hard and so very unusual to see what is in front of you without first and only seeing it through the eyes of those who have come before and told you what to see, and how to see it, and implicitly threatened you with social exclusion for failing to comply.

I suppose that is my other talent: I really don’t care about the opinions of others.  I have Kiplings “If” on the wall of my bathroom, where I see it every morning, and I really do think I can listen to the opinions of others, but still go my own way.

I wish there were more like me.  What an interesting and genuinely diverse world it would be if everyone took the task of seeing as a matter of great importance, and a matter of personal not social responsibility.

Our great nation is being destroyed before our very eyes, and the masses seem to be preoccupied with boating and barbecues. But thus it has been before, many, many times.  There is nothing new under the sun.

I will offer a ludicrous and absurd idea I have of myself–of my personal craziness:  I feel I have been on this Earth many times, trying to do good, but this is the last time.  All patience must have an end.

Will we be spiritual beings or animals?  Will life or the machine prevail?  The question remains open.

In the Hoffman Process they teach you to think of your “self” in four pieces: your Spiritual Self, your Intellectual Self, your Emotional/Inner Child Self, and your body.

I wonder if I might rename these.  1) your Spiritual unconscious; 2) your emotionally dissociated self; 3) the part of you which holds the trauma and which expresses your joys; 4) where all these land physically, and express themselves.

The Process itself deals with issues that happen birth to age 12, or roughly puberty.  And it is interesting that they tend practically to conflate the emotional self with the inner child.  In inner work, it is really quite astonishing to note how much and how pervasively the past inhabits all of our presents.  Rosebuds live in us all, or so I think.

And if we think of our unconscious as a set of containers, then the task is to learn to move between them skillfully.  I think much of the delight in life comes from a sense of childlike wonder and enthusiasm and curiosity.  Yet, we must also dissociate sometimes from the present moment so as to plan, and think, and perceive with our minds.  Life cannot be all fun and games, even if it should also not be devoid of them.

But the biggest reality underlying all this is our lack of consciousness of our spirit.  It, too, exists in a sort of repressed box which some people never open at all.  We are dissociated from our spiritual selves, to some greater or lesser extent; divided from a source of life and vitality that floats in the very air.

I would posit that your knowledge of God is innate.  Your spiritual instincts are innate.  But like emotions, spiritual tasks must flow through us.  They do not manifest as abstractions.

It has been said we live in the age of abstraction (which I will note is quite different from an age of Reason).  If so, can we not posit from that fact alone that to the extent this ideal is pursued, emotional skill is reduced?  And is not abstraction a perfect refuge from emotional wounds and traumas of all sorts?

I have what I suppose I will call kinesthetic images present themselves to me from time to time.  I was pondering my own growth, and saw as an alternative the path of evil, which consists in placing a barrier roughly halfway down your life, and confining yourself to that.  It is a roof, placed at a low level, which forces people to crawl to move. It spreads out horizontally forever.  Only in crushing others can such people suit themselves to their space.

I am not entirely sure what that means, but suffice it to say Goodness is a movement of expansion, and its contrary one of confinement and contraction.  Their actions are therefore confined to reducing the movement of others, of tearing down, breaking, and defiling.

This evil consciousness is available to me.  It is in me.  That is the only reason I can see it.  It was one of my possible paths, should I have chosen to stay broken, had I chosen madness.

But I didn’t, and I now have space.  I have time.  I exist in a much larger world I am only beginning to connect with, only beginning to learn and love.

This post is a mess.  I will leave it to you to connect it all up, if you can.  And if you can’t, there may yet be some shiny fragments you can call into use in making your own way through this dangerous, confusing, interesting, beautiful world.

There is no substitute in life for gradualism.  John Wooden’s father taught him to “make each day your masterpiece”.  Add enough of those up, and you get what he got.

This is an obvious point, and I think I am posting it to remind myself, more than anything.  Going to walk the dog, then some other posts I’ve been waiting for time and a cigar to make.

You know, an enormous benefit of having what amounts to a public diary–which chronicles probably 95% of my inner work–is that I can be absolutely open and spontaneous.  I don’t have any huge inner secrets, demons I can’t name or mention, or anything to hide.  I am what I am, and I have spoken who I am, publicly.

In my view, this is the way to live.  If you think back to tribal times, when people lived in tents together, it really wasn’t possible to keep anything secret for long.  You were known to be the person you were.  I see no reason not to suppose this the case, and of course the quantity of distractions and allurements were a very, very small fraction of what they are today.

Today, you can live in a cave and nobody need know what you are doing on the internet, what private perversions and vices you have developed, and just how far off of normal and healthy you have drifted.  I look people in the eyes and I don’t know what they are going to home to that evening.

Still, and I am going to try and develop the habit of returning to the positive, we live in a very peaceful era, filled with people who are overwhelmingly honest and hard-working, and I remain grateful to be me.  I like the skin I live in.

I’m going to call it: my inner self is a white dog, my third spirit animal.  Left to myself, unobstructed by past and present terrors, I am very social, very enthusiastic, very curious, and I love to laugh.  Really, I am an overgrown kid.

My nearly infinite capacity for finding and focusing on negativity notwithstanding, and my clear and I think accurate understanding of our grave present dangers also notwithstanding, I have decided to do my best to enjoy every day and live happily.

Death takes all of us.  But does it take us in the middle of a moan or a belly laugh?

Fuck the odds.  I’m going to do my best to live until I die.