Moderates United

There’s a meme floating around that goes something like: “when a man says he’ll do something, he’ll do it.  No need to remind him every six months.”

What stands in the way of gradualism for most of us?  Is it not fear?  That little project is not something you’ve done before, and you’re not sure you can do it, so you distract yourself.  You look at other things.  That project disappears through a process of negative hallucination.

But that project represents your unprocessed Shadow.  It is by no means inconsequential, especially if its something that could be done in a few hours.

I think we could view the sum of our chosen Delays as the sum of our external Shadows. Each of them needs a ray of daylight.  It needs to get done: and not hastily, sloppily.  It needs to get done with affection and tenderness, and friendship.

What you offer the world is what you offer yourself. Therefore, what you offer yourself can be seen all around you.

Look around you.  I would encourage you to make decisions, if they are needed.  Do some one little thing, now.

It is one thing to live in a cave; and another to scamper out, tag a tree, and make it back alive.

I did that today: I replaced two toilet paper holders. Holy shit, you say, how fucking lame is that?  Are you kidding me?  Who says that kind of crap?

I do.  I was squeezed into a tiny little space long ago, and crushed.  For many years I have spent hours each day on the internet, and next to no time cleaning or organizing.  I have a good art collection on my walls, but beyond that, I have barely done anything.

The internet, I see, is one way I avoid life.  Drinking is another. Intellectualizing is another.  For many people this role is played by watching TV or playing video games.

Nobody really wants to be alone with themselves when they have a lot to deal with.  But before TV, you had a lot less distractions.  It was far less easy to escape, which meant that most people on some level had to come to grips with life and living.  Now, it can be postponed indefinitely.  If you get an Information Age job, you never, anywhere, have to encounter messy emotions. You can push them out there, and act childishly your whole life.  The only reckoning is death itself.

And what I am realizing is that life can be really good when you touch it, shake its hand, make friends with it.  There are so many fun things you can do.  Every day can be FILLED with accomplishments, each of which you can take pleasure in.  You cooked a meal: pride.  You organized everything: pride.  You worked out: pride.

And all of these things put together do in fact equal considerable actual, real accomplishment over time. They are how you get “switched on”.

I think that was John Wooden’s great secret: he derived pleasure from every exertion of every day.  Every movement he made in the direction of perfection filled him with joy, and even at times elation.  He was happy in every practice, and every game, and in PREPARING for the practice and the game, all by himself, often.

My current Kum Nye level has me looking for joy.  They say it is sometimes hidden at the bottom corner of your experience, or partially hidden behind a veil.  It is a blinking light you only slowly become aware of.  It is a faint melody or scent, almost too ephemeral and ethereal to catch, but which leaves a stronger impression for it.  It was there, dammit, I know it was there.

I have reached a point where I look at people differently, or at least I have.  I was driving down my main drag two or three days ago–a pleasant series of shops and trendy bars–and realizing that before I saw how everyone was suffering.  Now, I see that I actually may be in a position soon to help them do something about it.  It is not an innate human condition: it is a potentially temporary condition, brought on by ignorance.  There are tools and methods and ideas which can alter states at a fundamental, deep level, and do so permanently.

This, I think, is the essence of the Buddha’s insight.  He saw pain, but he also saw a way out.  

If you think about it, Quantitative Easing is actually a negative interest rate.  How do you get interest rates below zero?  You give money away.

Our nation is heavily indebted at all levels.  Our children start adulthood heavily indebted for school, and continue the process all their lives, most of them.  Our State and local and National governments: all heavily in debt.

Short of something like my proposal, we really have no means of absorbing and recovering from a major economic shock.  The Fed can’t do it.  The national government can’t do it.

And in large measure, WE can’t do it.  We owe too many people too much money.  It makes you clumsy, slow, unwieldy, inflexible.  When you have a large monthly nut you have to cover, then you can’t invest, and you have no savings.  Most Americans have no savings.

It continues to baffle me how the criminality of our system is not the subject of widespread outrage, at least among those who, in theory, ought to be able to render intelligent opinions on the topic.  Why am I the only one (as far as I know, and of course this is a large world with many voices) proposing the obvious?

Helpfully, I have had some major technical problems lately.  I bought a new iPhone, for example, and it took a good six hours of work to get it to synchronize (I said a while back I wouldn’t buy another Apple product, but eventually reached the conclusion that there really are no good guys in high tech, and I may as well use something that tends to work more than to not work.  Music is important to me.)

As I was wrestling with this and a couple other unanticipated problems, it occurred to me that there is machine time, and non-machine time.  There is interacting abstractly with an abstract environment, which is what I am doing here.  And there is sitting at my kitchen table, working on a model, or practicing Tai Chi, or finally putting up new toilet paper holders and fixing the coat rack.  They feel different.  Here, I am more comfortable, but I think precisely because it takes me out of ordinary time.

My Lumosity scores have been going down the past few days, and I am realizing it is because I am living less in my head.  This is a good thing.

I was reading comments on an article at Blue Nation Review–doesn’t matter the one—and they were uniformly ignorant and self righteous, like always.  I started to do my thing, to put together a coherent counter-argument, to state the facts they were assiduously ignoring, to say the things their groupthink was evolving out of their consciousness as possibilities, and then it hit me: stupid people are stupid because they can’t imagine any other way to be.  They cannot imagine anything else they could believe.

And they are very happy, having reached simple and clear certainties they never have to question.  Why would they look outside their circle for anything?

And by telling them they are stupid, I can only be attacking them as people, even if I justify my claims with enormous efforts at facts and reason.  None of that matters.  Logically, if there is only one possibility, and someone disagrees with it, then they are haters.  And there is no reason to listen to haters.

I often fear for the future obviously.  It is frustrating to me to see such–to my way of thinking, which I can justify at length, and which I have often exposed to criticism–idiotic and dangerous ideas proposed so often and so enthusiastically.

There is no reason 90% of the stores on Main Street might not be shuttered in 10 years if nothing changes.

There is no reason this nation, from coast to coast, might not be filled with the sighs of the hopeless and the dispirited, helpless in the face of an omnipotent government which alone provides salvation.

Everything is in place for a crash.  Fed policy cannot be made more easy, and they have been pumping $50 billion a month into the economy for most of Obama’s tenure.

But as tempting as it is to feel I am doing SOMETHING in engaging with these people, the fact is I am not. I am in important ways completely helpless in the face of stubborn and proud imbecility.

It is time for me to acknowledge this fully and finally.  There is no reason I can’t write a book, and no reason I can’t start doing presentations to people who will listen to me.  There is no reason I can’t continue sending emails to economists, and working on my other projects.

But I need to be realistic.  I have never been. I have more to say, but will say it in the next post.

I have had a productive day, in my terms.  I set up an internal process that is already bearing fruit.  I will likely post on that at some point.

But I wanted to comment on PTSD.  The way it works is you can only be traumatized once, no matter how many traumatic events you have in your life.  That one time, that first time, causes you to create a room within yourself that is not public, that is beyond the reach of intruding emotions.  It is a zone of relative safety.

But this room comes with rent. There is a psychic cost to maintaining it.  And the more trauma you have, the harder and harder the beating on the door.  If it ever breaks fully, then that is a psychotic breakdown.  It is taking you beyond the breaking point.

Short of that, though, there is a lot of psychic energy that has to go into keeping it closed.  All of this pulls energy out of your daily life. It makes you less energetic, less open emotionally, and often depressed.  Fear leaks out under the door that cannot be fully ignored.

I may or may not have posted this story before: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/what-the-war-did-to-andy-19691231

In my view, when he put that electrical cord in his mouth at age 4, he got PTSD.  It gave him access to emotional dissociation, and practice in performing despite lacking some common emotions.  It likely made him better as an operator, but also unable to process in any meaningful way what happened to him, which was the fatal chink in his armor.

In coming years, if we survive the efforts of the Left, the Globalists, and the Islamists to destroy everything decent in the world, we will, I think, come to realize that pre-verbal PTSD is much more common that we has supposed.  In my dreams, we develop ways to identify it and treat it effectively.

The struggle I have been through could have been much shorter, but the categories I needed did not exist in any of the many dozens–likely hundreds–of books I read, or in the minds of any of the “professionals” I paid to help me.

Everyone carries marks of childhood–and not infrequently adult experience–with them.  Your experience dictates how you move in space.  Everyone has their own posture, or acture, as Feldenkrais called it, which is precisely those modifications your experience compelled on you from normal, relaxed, optimized movement. In point of fact, and to make a brief turn to the negative, in additional to facial recognition, the people who are foolish enough to gladly participate in using the pretext of terrorism to build a perfect authoritarian state are working on gait analysis, so that even if your face is covered or altered, how you WALK can still be identified.  Hiding will become very, very difficult.  I have thought about this: even if you walk differently, use molds to change your face, and wear sunglasses, the technology will evolve to where, if they can identify everyone BUT you, then you stand out for that reason alone.  It is my considered view that a huge part of the value of “anti-terrorism” is that the EXACT same tools that can be used against people who are overwhelmingly not trying to attack us, can be used to build a perfect Orwellian state.  There will be no escape but death.

So, with that happy thought, not entirely irrelevant, it occurs to me that we all have a mix of emotions that can best be viewed as a solution.  They are dissolved in our everyday experience, and combine in ways which are constant and hard to see and define.  Fear, for example, can be inferred as much by what you feel, as in what you choose not to see. Its presence can be inferred by negative hallucinations, where people fail to see what is right in front of them.  Such a person may otherwise seem fear-free, but they are not.

A principle task in spiritual/emotional growth is isolating through precipitation those emotions which are not desired, which impede open and happy expression.  In my case, I have found that a primal fear underlies my tendencies towards anger, depression, and anxiety, all of which spring from a common root.

In my last post, what I was describing, I realize, is a precipitate of fear.  This is an unambiguously good thing, from a personal growth perspective.  I have isolated and concentrated it, and I can now deal with it on its own terms.  I have some terrible nights, but have noticed the past few days I have been quite calm during the day.

This whole process is as difficult as an analogous chemical reaction, but it is needed.  Alchemy was held in mystical reverence for a reason.

I realized this morning that I have nightmares without the content.  I taught myself to fight all evil creatures in my dreams.  Nothing chases me.  Nothing attacks me that I don’t attack back.

But I sometimes–and last night was an example–mainline fear.  It is like fear–really terror–was concentrated and injected into me.  And I have all the normal reactions.  I shout out, I shake.  I more or less literally fell out of bed twice last night and wound up shaking on the floor.  Not pleasant.  And I verbalize in weird ways I won’t try to describe, but this is the main feature that makes me think this is most likely PTSD, and not some other ailment, like heart trouble, or metabolic derangement, or sleep apnea.  I had some particularly odd experiences last night I won’t describe, but which were completely inconsistent with any of those diagnoses.  It is not something I have seen described anywhere.  I continue to most trust myself as my own therapist.

And you live with something long enough, you begin to show contempt for it.  And its source is changing.  It was in my legs, then my belly, now it is in my heart region.  There is an energy of panic and being startled/terrified just floating around there, somewhat randomly.  This dovetails with my current Kum Nye practice, which is oriented around releasing areas of holding.  This iteration I am again working on the belly, but now the face as well, and implicitly everything in between.

I am going to need to focus on positive things for a period of time.  I am going to need to focus on sleeping through the night, which will include eradicating blood sugar issues (not a big factor, but may be a factor), getting more consistent in my Kum Nye, and overall reducing for the time being the number of things I am worrying about.  I worry about global events that I can little affect, and certainly not control.  All that tension and anxiety adds up.  It accumulates, and there is some part of me that is the perfect place to receive it.

Google Chrome has an app called StayFocused.  I’m not a big fan of Google–after all, they were Obamas’s biggest campaign contributor and employ Ray Kurzweil–but if I want to use only politically and economically sane technology companies, I am pretty much SOL.  Anyway, I’m going to block all my political sites, and only allow 15 minutes a day on Facebook until I can sleep all night.

Edit: Stayfocused wasn’t doing shit–it was not counting down on the sites I blocked–and I then realized it allows Google to track me in even finer detail than before, and they have NO way of removing it from Chrome, once installed.  So I switched to Firefox, and am simply going to try and control myself.

Correction: you CAN remove this extension.  I still don’t like Google, but I try to tell the truth about things.

And I’m going to try and watch a comedy nightly.

I read through the list of attendees, and I have to say, I think there is another convention somewhere else that the actual power elite are going to.  The Prime Minister of Belgium?  Yes, Eric Schmidt is there, and some Goldman Sachs folks, but surely any good mind would have to grant that with the secrecy gone, with more protesters showing up every year, sooner or later they would convene a separate meeting somewhere else, in actual privacy, and actual secrecy?  They keep this show going, so no one is the wiser, but re-Bilderberg the Bilderberg conference.

Specifically, I’m wondering where Bill Gates is. And Jamie Dimon.

I think Jekyll Island would be quite appropriate.  It has a history of secret machinations.

I just finished watching Kieslowski’s Blue.  It is the best treatment of the process of grief and mourning I have ever seen.  It was hard to watch at times, but ultimately redemptive.  I don’t know who the composer was, but the music was quite beautiful.

And it occurs to me that a principal challenge I have faced is both the presence of grief, and the fact that it is linear.  A typical cycle of grieving is life-death-life.  I started with death.

I have done the thought-work of creating a complete world for myself, cognitively.  I have developed a moral code, and comprehensive worldview.  I have understood myself deeply, down to a very, very primitive level.  I know where I come from.

But it seems to me now that the only way forward is to allow myself to touch moving water and let it guide me into something new.  Will will not avail me in this process.  This is my truth, today.  Acceptance must be my truth today.